Guy Swann traces his journey from film school to libertarian Bitcoin advocacy, arguing that decentralized digital currency undermines fractional reserve banking fraud and state control. He details how Bitcoin's censorship-resistant ledger allows individuals to audit money without institutions like the Federal Reserve, citing Nigeria's $2 billion shift to peer-to-peer transactions despite government bans. By enabling instant cross-border payments in sanctioned regions like Cuba and Afghanistan, this parallel system renders centralized monetary power obsolete, offering an anti-fragile alternative to debased fiat currency and negative-yielding sovereign debt. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Fans Request Bitcoin Episodes00:02:36
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am excited for this one, and I think a lot of people are going to be pleased that I am doing this.
I have on the program Guy Swan.
He is the host of the Bitcoin Audible podcast, as well as the Shitcoin Insider podcast.
Definitely check those out.
We are going to talk Bitcoin.
I've floated out the idea of doing some episodes about Bitcoin.
Guy, you were one of the names that was requested a lot by the fans, and I value my fans' opinions.
And then good fans.
Good fans.
And then Robbie the Fire Bernstein was like, you got to talk to this guy.
So that took you down a few points.
I was like, I like what the fans have to say, but Rob is not very trustworthy.
Totally understandable.
But I'm really glad those fans were there for me.
And I'm sorry about Robin Judge.
I decided to still go with the will of the people because we're democracy first here on this show.
Obviously.
Obviously.
Now, you may have noticed in the Bitcoin community, there have been some people who have been critical of me, but always in the most respectful manner, always in the most 100% politeness top to bottom.
We appreciate what you do.
Here is something that could be another tool in the advancement of liberty.
It's not the only solution, but it's something we could offer.
No, Dave, it's the only one.
It's the only one.
That is what I listen.
You guys are an odd group, but who the heck is it?
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
Who the heck is any libertarian to judge an odd group?
You know what I mean?
So maybe we'll just start here.
How did you become this well-known Bitcoin expert?
What was your kind of Bitcoin origin story?
Okay, yeah.
Down The Libertarian Rabbit Hole00:03:44
So I kind of actually started in film school.
And so I had always been like really big into media, but I was always like really the tech side of it was the thing that I loved.
And after years of not figuring out how to make any money in film, because it was just kind of a nowhere job that I wanted to work on my projects, I went really hard into tech and all of the internet.
I was kind of finding libertarianism and stuff at the exact same time.
I was pretty heavy conservative, like kind of in college years and stuff.
And then I kind of had these huge shifts where suddenly I could not believe how much I had like some of my statements on like, you know, yeah, the Iraq war and stuff.
Like I just started finding these things and I was just ungodly, like embarrassed at like my stance on just killing innocent people in a country, you know, 5,000 miles away that I didn't know anything.
I just genuinely didn't know the first damn thing about.
And And so like while I'm kind of going down this rabbit hole and having my whole world kind of shook up really, and my brother is Agoris View, he's taking, he was doing economics in college.
So and we were living together.
So he would come home and we would kind of debate about what he was learning.
And because it didn't make a whole lot of sense, like he would, he would learn some major economic principle, but then like three days later, like in, you know, in macroeconomics, but then like three days later in microeconomics, he would learn exactly the opposite.
And it'd be like, you know, just because you made it bigger doesn't mean it's, you know, the law doesn't change.
Like gravity isn't like different when you drop a glass versus when you drop a plane.
Like it's the same principle.
And so he would debate with his professors and then come home and we would debate.
And lo and behold, two years of this, we find Austrian economics because the Keynesian story just made no sense to us.
And so my excitement and digging into BitTorrent and the internet and libertarianism with him and then finding Austrian economics and out of nowhere, he's debating with somebody on Facebook and somebody mentions, you should check out this Bitcoin thing.
And this was back in 2011.
So it's like 10, 10 years ago now.
And we were just like straight down the rabbit hole.
Like it's the codification of Austrian economics into a program running in a BitTorrent distributed fashion.
So it can't be shut down in the same way that, you know, like the copyright giants couldn't shut down file sharing.
This is a money that can't be shut down on the internet that is native to the internet, that has no jurisdictions, that has no borders, that even if a judge says or some jackass president writes on some piece of paper and signs it, says, you don't own this Bitcoin.
It's like, fuck you.
Yeah, dude.
Like where unsigned my keys.
Like go to go to town.
Good luck.
Like there's actually a dude who ran like a something for the darknet market or whatever.
And he had $60 million in Bitcoin in Germany.
And they stole all his wallets and everything, but they couldn't get his Bitcoin.
He went to prison, served his time and exited with $60 million.
They confiscated all of his stuff, but they didn't get his Bitcoin.
And he's just like, they were just like, give us your password.
He's like, nah, nah.
And that was that.
And so we were down the rabbit hole.
Building An Incorruptible Monetary Unit00:15:11
I mean, we were just like, it fascinated us from the very beginning.
And so we, you know, we invested like at the peak of one of the earliest bubbles.
And then I proceeded to just get clobbered for 98%.
I mean, just like absolutely wiped out.
And I was like, oh, well, great.
I'm an idiot.
And I don't really know what I'm doing here.
And so after throwing up and getting over the fact that I had just made the dumbest decision of my life, I had no idea what I was really talking about.
And I just invested in some utopian dream that I stumbled upon on a website.
I said, okay, well, I'm at least not going to exit with my $3 that I've got left in this thing unless I understand it, unless I can explain why it won't work.
And I started reading.
I read and read.
I looked for every single thing I could get my hands on.
And 10 years later, I couldn't find a way in which it wouldn't work.
It continued to grow.
And one day I just decided that, you know, like there's so much to cover.
Like we just talked about this is a thousand hour topic.
And so I said, all right, well, you know, I wished for years and years, because I'm a huge podcast listener, you're listening to your show, listening to all sorts of stuff.
And I said, I wish somebody would actually read these articles out loud so that I could consume them at like 30 times the rate.
Right.
And one day I was just like, nobody did it for four years while I just wish somebody else would.
And so I sat down on my bed one day with my iPhone and I just read an article into my iPhone and then published it on a podcast.
And I got like 40 downloads or 50 downloads.
And I was like, hey, that's kind of cool.
And I did it again the next day and the next day after I got home from work.
And 700 episodes later, quit my job year and two, two, two years ago with the idiot idea that I was going to do this by itself.
But sure enough, it seems to be working.
And I've tried to explain Bitcoin from every possible perspective, philosophy, the engineering, the cryptographic, the monetary history.
And I've read so many like Mises and Hayek pieces and stuff on the show.
I got an audio of Anatomy of the State, you know, precious origins of cypherpunk, anti-government mentality.
And yeah, so here I am.
I guess that's the short-ish version.
Well, that's awesome.
And there's certainly, there's a lot I can relate to in that in that story.
I mean, without the deep dive into Bitcoin, but I certainly can relate to even just like hearing about that, you know, when you're starting a podcast and when you have, you know, 40, 50 downloads or something like that.
But when you're starting something, he's like, who are those 40 people?
There's 40 people listening to me doing this.
That's pretty neat.
And there's something that's the, that's like one of the pieces of advice that I give young podcasters when they start is that it's like, whatever little audience you have there, like really respect that.
Respect the fact that there's people who want to listen to you.
Like that's, that really means something.
And, you know, and as you've demonstrated, you can, you can turn that into something.
And lots of people have done that.
I also can really relate to the kind of for the curious mind, just being immensely frustrated by the inconsistencies in the prevailing, you know, economic and philosophical worldviews.
I was talking to this one kid once who was like a Wall Street guy who got really interested in Austrian economics.
And he told me this story about being, he was taking his, I guess he was like taking one of the license tests, like Series 7 or Series 6 or something like that.
And he was, he said, the professor who was instructing the license, you know, they're going over all this test material.
And he was basically explaining, I guess, this Keynesian idea that you can either have high unemployment or high inflation, or you can either have unemployment or inflation, but you can't have both.
And he, this was like in 2009 or 2010.
And so he was like, but we have both right now.
Like we have both high.
And he said the professor goes to him.
He goes, look, there's real world and there's textbook.
And then he started arguing with him.
And the guy was basically like, look, you want to pass this test or not?
And it hurts me so much.
It hurts me so much.
Exactly.
That response is something that's the true like libertarian response is you go like, it's just like, but that's fucking bullshit, man.
Then change the textbook.
Right.
Because if the textbook is like, why is your textbook worth anything?
Then this is stupid.
Like this is, then, then basically, you're a communist, just on different levels.
Like you're just going like, well, if man were a different creature than man is, then all of our plans here would work.
And it's like, maybe.
I mean, if gravity was different, this ridiculous looking plane would fly.
Yeah, like possibly.
Yeah.
If we all thought like bees or something, maybe communism would work, but we don't.
And so it doesn't.
And here's a real, so that's very interesting.
And that's, okay, so I think that's a, that's a good place to start.
So while I've never really dove too deep into Bitcoin and other, which by the way, for the record, I did do an episode on Bitcoin once.
Wait, man, how did I, I missed that?
It was one of the Porkfest episodes.
I had Naomi Brockwell.
Brockwell.
And she told me she talked to me about it.
Yeah.
So yes, it was quite a while ago.
But one of the things I've always been really interested in is banking, the Federal Reserve, Austrian economics, business cycle theory, all of this stuff.
So that is probably the thing that I find most exciting about Bitcoin.
And this is, I guess, what most of the people who criticize me for not discussing it more are arguing, that this really is, unlike all of this kind of like spreading ideas and all of this stuff, that this is really something that has the potential.
I think I might be understating what they would say, but has the potential to truly undermine government currency.
So do you think that's true?
Is it that it has the potential to do that?
That it inevitably will?
Where do you fall on that?
No, it will.
It will.
So when you kind of start to unravel monetary history, if you take like a really big step back, anytime a harder money, anytime a more sound money existed in the presence of a soft money environment, it didn't matter how strong the cultural ties were.
It did not matter how strong the violence around implementing that soft money was.
Eventually, it simply collapsed.
Gresham's law and Their Law, like, you know, whatever, played out and the value of the softer money always died.
And we could not be in a better environment for that because these soft monies are getting as soft as they possibly can as fast as they possibly can.
And here in that same environment, the reason gold doesn't work is because it falls victim to the centralization problem.
It's because we live in a digital age.
We've literally, we've lived in a virtual, quote unquote, a virtual monetary system since like the mid-1600s when kind of like the Amsterdam bursts, like in the first stock markets and paper notes representing real value started to become the main really, really great book on this is Nick Bhattia's Layered Money, actually.
That's one I would highly recommend.
But it's about the history of our monetary system that went from when we went from physical to quote unquote virtual.
So you mean like notes or paper money?
Virtual as in represented value representations and basically that whole that whole arc.
But essentially, there was a very prof it was a subtle, but a very profound flaw.
It was a bug in the system that in order to actually trans like to move to this new state of a monetary system, we had to give up the decentralization and the individual verification of the money.
It suddenly turned into a game of trust where we had to have some other institution that obviously gained an astronomical amount of power from being this central institution that was going to hold the real money and then tell us how much there was and who owned it.
And of course, of course that gets abused.
Like there is, there is no greater power in the world than the power to print and control the money because it is the power to consume all of the resources without ever giving anything back.
While everybody else has to work their ass off to make chump change, somebody else can just print a trillion dollars into existence and just confiscate millions of lives worth of stuff.
Like just soak it up out of the economy.
And then while everybody else is spinning on the hamster wheel and life is getting harder, and it's like, I've just made all this stuff my whole life and it feels like there's just not that much more there.
Why is it that stuff is still hard?
Stuff is still difficult to acquire.
Well, it's because there's an entire subset of the society that's just a parasite.
It's just eating up and consuming all the resources and corporate fund, you know, corporate subsidies and bailing out their buddies that are using up all the resources and they're actually net consumers.
And everybody else is just propping them up.
Bitcoin is a digital money that solves the trust problem.
It says we're actually going to use a unit that no one can counterfeit.
It is 100% counterfeit proof.
And it's literally all of the benefits of gold, except better and none of the drawbacks.
It's a far more scarce and more perfect schedule for the monetary, the monetary element than gold is.
It has none of the centralization problems.
The cost to verify a gold coin is like a huge spectrometer that costs tens of thousands of dollars.
It's massive and you have to drill into every single coin and you're just trusting somebody else to do it, right?
That's where the stamp came from.
You have to trust the stamp because ain't nobody going to do that shit.
I verify, like while we are sitting here right now, my computer is verifying the entirety of the Bitcoin system.
It would be as if you could run software right now that was auditing the entire Federal Reserve and that the Federal Reserve could not change it.
If because you were running the software, the Federal Reserve couldn't add any new dollars.
That's essentially what Bitcoin does in a BitTorrent sort of way, in a distributed way.
Every single participant on the network that runs the software is checking the entire thing top to bottom from the beginning, from the Genesis block back in 2009 to today and knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no accounting error anywhere down to the 100 millionth of a unit.
And anybody who does cheat, anybody who does attempt to steal the coins, because it's a digital ledger, I can edit it on my computer if I wanted, but I'm evicted from the network because everybody else is checking my work.
So I can verify essentially for free.
I mean, it costs me a computer, but it's doing other shit for me.
I was going to buy a computer anyway, right?
Yeah.
And I am participating in a system where I am the referee in the exact game that I am playing.
And so is everybody else.
And because everybody else is watching and verifying everybody else, nobody can cheat and get away with it.
Right.
And it's in doing so, it creates a monetary unit that's essentially incorruptible.
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All right, let's get back in the show.
Okay, so I want to ask a little bit more about this stuff.
And I will apologize in advance that I know in this episode I'm going to ask at least a few of the who will build the roads type questions that the Bitcoiners will be angry at.
The more the merrier.
At least they'll be less angry at me than they were before this episode.
Vake will still be angry.
Yeah, there's, listen, I can only win so many.
It's okay.
I love you all.
Unbelievable Banking Schemes Exposed00:03:36
You're my people, Bitcoin people.
I insist.
But to your point, because this is the stuff that I'm a little bit more familiar with, that Murray Rothbard, of course, the greatest libertarian thinker who ever lived, I mean, he said that in an anarcho-libertarian society, the law should be 100% reserve requirements.
And so he was basically with you that the whole scheme.
And now, of course, Bitcoin wasn't invented until decades after, a couple decades after Rothbard died.
But he, I mean, he basically said that that whole, and this was a very controversial take within libertarian economists and even amongst Austrian economists.
But he was basically like, look, the idea that you're parking your money at what is called a bank and everyone believes that their money is being held there and your money isn't held there.
He was like, that is fraud on its face.
And I tend to agree with him.
I mean, I do think in free market conditions, I think as long as you're transparent with it, probably the market would, you know, tend toward 100% reserves.
And so this wouldn't really be an issue that needed to be backed by law.
But yeah, it is a pretty unbelievable scheme if you think about it.
That even today, you know, it's funny when people, when you open a bank account, people, no one reads through the fine print of the contracts that they sign.
But it's a pretty fascinating thing that I really wonder what percentage of people know this, but your money is not sitting in the bank.
And more than that, they don't have to give it to you.
There is no...
No, you're a part owner.
Like your liabilities, you've loaned it to the bank.
You have given it to them.
Yes.
So in theory, they owe you the money, but there is absolutely no obligation for your bank.
If you go into Bank of America or Chase or wherever you have your checking account and you say, I'd like to withdraw $200 and they could say, fuck you.
And you'd be like, but I have $20,000 in my checking account.
And they go, yeah, we don't feel like giving it to you.
Like, they're not going to do that.
It's our state.
Unless there's a run on the banks or some type of bad situation for Cyprus.
Yes.
Right.
Yes, but it is really something to see that, you know, like that no one knows this.
It really is this kind of like.
And it slowly happened too.
It was like a whole series of like legal changes and stuff.
I think it was really cemented after 2008.
Yeah.
The banks are, the depositors are on the hook for the bank's insolvency.
And then the banks are systemically insolvent.
Like they are designed to be insolvent from the beginning.
And so it basically just said, we are creating credit expansion by default.
And when the expansion inevitably turns into contraction, all of our depositors or depositors are on the hook in order to save the bank.
So you're all screwed, but nice words in the fine print.
We'll say it really kindly.
Right, right.
So, okay.
So Bitcoin, is there, in your opinion, is there, if you put yourself in the position of an evil oligarch who wants to shut down Bitcoin, where is the, is there any vulnerability that you would see?
I mean, look, for example, the guy you gave in Germany, I mean, the only vulnerability I could see there is like, yeah, look, they could try to torture you for your for your codes.
They could never let you out of jail.
I mean, I'm just saying in the most important thing.
Bitcoin As A Global Reserve Currency00:12:17
$5 wrench attack is always a possibility, but that's because the security is at the edge.
The security rests with the individual.
The system itself, the network itself is shockingly resilient.
Now, there are plenty of places in which a government can attack it and they can cause really serious problems.
They can slow things down.
They can make it difficult to connect.
But literally everything about its design is to survive in the face of all of that, is to still be accessible.
It's to still remain in consensus at a global scale.
And everything around what the developers do and the cypherpunks thought about for decades and decades before Bitcoin existed and since is how to make sure that that cannot be a problem.
I mean, there's the number of things like I'll read the, I'm not a programmer, like really, like I can, I can break out some terminal and write some commands and feel smart and do a script here and there, but that's basically it.
But I do try to like read through the actual developer groups and conversations and make sense of what the hell they're doing.
But I can't believe how much I have found out about how the internet architecture actually works through them updating just stuff client side to the nodes on the Bitcoin network to get around something that could potentially be a problem.
Like the fact that we sync all of our clocks from central servers that are like regional.
Like there was an update like, cause I had no idea that this was even a thing, but it made perfect sense after finding it out that we have a centralized idea of what time it is.
Like we use central servers.
And because Bitcoin actually relies on one of its mechanisms of judging like how long it's been since a block is to have nodes have their own version of what time like of their own like time code and then basically make sure that the gaps aren't too big.
But it would allow something referred to as a time warp attack, which isn't like a huge problem, but it would be really annoying if everybody was on the same time and then they decided to centrally attack the reality of that time and they could screw up with the block synchronization and stuff.
Everything would still work and it would basically work itself out over an extended period of time, but it would be a real pain in the ass.
And so in one of the updates, like back in 2014 or 2015, is they made sure that literally the nodes actually randomize where they make a request for what time it is so that even in a single region, all the nodes in a particular region aren't using the local internet region to decide what time it is.
They're still grabbing stuff from like all over the world.
And it's like things like that.
Like the adversarial thinking and the development behind Bitcoin is mind-blowing to think that like Bitcoin itself, it is a system that has to operate more reliably than the operating system it is running on.
Like we are talking about...
Yeah, this might be a dumb question.
Sure.
Who made that update?
Like who's who everybody updates?
So it's just individual Bitcoin owners.
I updated my network.
It's open source, so anybody can contribute.
But because it's not part of the quote unquote consensus rules, like there are probably plenty of clients that actually don't have that update because it doesn't conflict.
It's not a monetary policy update.
So my rules and their rules still line up.
But my client, if the U.S. tries to lock down their servers or whatever and shuts down their central time servers, somebody else's node might not know what time it is and have to fish for something else, whereas mine might because I updated that version.
But because it's a giant distributed network, everybody just has to upgrade as they upgrade.
It's a really difficult thing to coordinate.
That's why something like a consensus rule, monetary policy, is essentially impossible to update because if everybody does an update, it doesn't get changed.
Right, right.
Okay.
Interesting.
So truly decentralized kind of even down to the updating features.
So you mentioned earlier the idea that hard money always wins out.
And I'm certainly in the face of non-arbitrary boundaries.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
So I certainly agree that in the marketplace, harder money will always win out.
But the marketplace isn't exactly what we're dealing with.
And we're also dealing with a currency environment that really is, and I think this is very unappreciated, how profoundly unique the moment, the current state of money is.
And it's not just what the Federal Reserve has been doing.
I mean, you could, you know, like you, you could basically make comparisons between what like the Greeks and the Romans, you know, what's it called?
You know, diluting their coins and basically say, okay, that's just another version of what quantitative easing or something like that.
Yeah, like that and Solidus.
Right.
So, okay, but to have worldwide central banks coordinating around what is almost entirely a global reserve currency is a very unique situation.
That would be much harder to find another, you know, example in history.
And of course, this is part of the American Empire really is the most sophisticated and advanced empire in the world.
So in this environment where you're up against, now I understand you can make the argument that this is a better opportunity for Bitcoin, that much more demand for a solid currency.
But do you think that if the prediction is that Bitcoin is going to overtake all these other phony monies, are we seeing that happen already?
Do you think it's in the process?
I mean, certainly Bitcoin's a much bigger deal than it used to be.
It's much more well-known.
But it strikes me that it's still primarily an investment tool and not primarily money.
Now, not to say that there aren't where you are, but sure, right?
It does depend on where you are.
And there certainly are a lot more services available in Bitcoin.
But what do you see happening there?
Do you think just more and more people are going to be accepting Bitcoin?
Take me through this, the path or a likely path of how Bitcoin becomes something that people are using more than US dollars.
Because the investment idea aside, I mean, I know a lot of people have gotten rich off Bitcoin, but in terms of it being the money that kind of wins out, how do you see that going down?
So monetization, and if you look at this throughout history, it's funny.
I think this is actually where Mises' regression theorem was misinterpreted, or maybe even Mises made an assumption about why.
Don't you dare.
Don't you dare.
Let's go there.
Let's go there.
Why money had to have some other utility?
Because the first stage of money is always a store of value.
It's the ability to actually hold value across time and hold that securely.
Then as it becomes a reliable store of value, when it develops the monetary premium, that value that is solely in the fact that it is a good monetary unit and above and beyond any utility, right?
Like gold is not, if we were just making swords and electronics out of it, it'd be like 10% of its price at best.
90% of it is monetary premium.
That is because it remains sound and scarce and incredibly difficult to create, even though it gained value beyond what we actually use it for.
That's what made it become slowly a monetary good.
Then it becomes suddenly you start to see it turn into a medium of exchange.
That's where we are right now in Bitcoin.
Unit of account is a distant third.
It has to be ubiquitous and it has to be a global, essentially medium of exchange, or it has to reach market saturation, whatever that market size is.
Right now, though, we are moving full blast into medium of exchange.
The biggest use cases right now is like in the U.S., it is considered an investment vehicle largely.
Like everybody's just like, oh, save and buy Bitcoin and it'll go up in price.
But if you look everywhere else in the world, like Alex Gladstone, you know Alex Gladstein, right?
I think he's probably been on the show, right?
Human Rights Foundation?
I don't believe I've had him on the show, but I believe I follow him.
Oh, God, you should.
You should have Alex Gladstein on.
He's amazing.
But he has this entire article series that he's done on Bitcoin magazine.
I had him on the show.
Now I feel like a real dick.
I've done TV shows.
Alex Gladstein's listening to this is like, you son of a bitch.
But he has this amazing article series where he's just going to like people in El Salvador, people in Nigeria and throughout Africa.
He just dropped one that I did on the show.
I published on the show a couple hours ago.
finished recording in Cuba and the Cuban Bitcoin revolution of people in Lebanon, Argentina, like everybody who are under these like incredibly controlling sanctioned monetary regimes are finding an out.
They're finding a way out through Bitcoin because they can actually like right now, people in Cuba are shut off from Western Union.
They're completely shut off from PayPal.
Any and all, quote unquote, fintech has just shut down.
Afghanistan today in Afghanistan, Western Union said, sorry, we're bailing.
Like when they need them most, their ability to use and transmit capital and actually trade is being stolen from them.
And at the exact same time, Bitcoin is just flooding across that border.
There are no borders.
I can send it.
My Bitcoin exists in Afghanistan and here at the exact same time.
It just is.
It doesn't know or give a shit.
It can't know that there are even borders.
And I can just as easily send Bitcoin to you as I can to somebody in Afghanistan.
And in the article, there's a guy named Jorge, he's like a big YouTube influencer in Cuba who has been promoting and teaching Bitcoin.
And he is living off of Bitcoin.
And where remittances right now have to come across the border by someone buying them MLC, which is their like new dollar currency.
Well, it's at the official rate of 24 pesos to $1.
And the actual rate is 70 pesos to $1.
So you basically get like a 60 to 70% haircut that the government pockets every time you get a remittance.
And he is doing it with Bitcoin instantly, essentially for free and getting no haircut at all.
And he can turn it in a peer-to-peer market on his side.
He can even, he even uses like BitRefill, which is a service I use.
I just bought an Apple, I mean, not Apple, Amazon gift card today to buy some groceries.
He uses BitRefill to pay for his cell phone minutes to like it's exploding exactly where it needs to be used for exactly those purposes.
It is a censorship resistant, unconfiscatable money that does not know there are borders.
Avoiding Government Remittance Haircuts00:02:38
It blows up when you have capital controls, when you have currency collapse, and people begin to realize and see just how powerful this thing is.
You should check out a company called Strike by see their founder, whatever, is Jack Malors.
The man is absolute boss.
He just released Strike in Ghana and, oh, shit, what was the other country?
Oh, Nigeria, Nigeria.
And so now you can send $10 instantly to somebody in Nigeria.
And he does it in like a little video on his on his Twitter account.
He sent $10 instantly to a guy in Nigeria who immediately put in his bank account and he just could spend it as Nair or whatever the Nigerian currency is.
Right.
But so ultimately, if the goal is to replace the, by the way, all of that is like incredible.
That's really, that's really, really fascinating.
I hadn't ever thought of it in those terms.
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If the goal is ultimately to replace these currencies, then ultimately, would the goal or the preferred outcome be that essentially you could just cut out the middleman of their currencies and be spending Bitcoin at stores, essentially.
Finding Workarounds For Central Banks00:10:22
I mean, I know that, you know, just like things like paying with your phone with like Apple Pay and a bunch of their other things become much more normal.
A lot more people do that.
And also, I actually think with COVID, a lot more people were doing that when they were weirdly thought that hand-to-hand transactions were how you got COVID for a little bit.
Danger.
Danger, danger paper money.
Yeah, but I did, dude, when I was in Austin and I lost my wallet on the plane, which because I'm retarded.
And so I lost my wallet on the plane.
I took it out to buy internet on the plane and then lost it.
And it was this is just completely uncrypto or Bitcoin related, but just the technology of pay.
I've never used any of this.
It's the first time you use it, right?
Yeah.
And then I'm just there stranded without a wallet, which is a weird feeling, you know, and just being halfway across the country when you don't have your wallet or any of your shit.
And then I'm just realizing, like, I'm texting with my wife, like, ah, shit, what am I going to do?
And she's like, oh, well, you know, you can just like download all these apps and then go.
And I've never done it before.
And it was this like amazing feeling of just being like, here?
Really?
I can have stuff now?
Do I just stick it?
Do I point it at you?
Yeah, literally all of that.
But so there is, if people are already getting used to that, would the hope be that eventually you're just going to be basically doing that?
Not even going into foreign currency is just straight up from the Bitcoin to let me purchase what I want to.
Is that being done already?
It depends, but you got to remember too that this is also a technology and also a network.
You know, when everybody is on Facebook and you and like 100 friends are on Twitter, if you want your Facebook friends to see it, you still need somebody to copy it from Twitter and go to Facebook.
So like the monetary networks of Fiat are massive and entrenched.
The Bitcoin network is like 2% of the whole world.
So it's like this weird little corner of everywhere.
And because of that, you basically have to find workarounds.
Like I essentially, for the most part, majority, I live off of Bitcoin.
And I try to make it, I try to use Bitcoin anywhere that I can.
And I pay people back in Bitcoin.
People pay me in Bitcoin.
And you can do it, but I'm usually finding some little quirk or workaround.
I'm using Fold Card to buy or BitRefill to buy gift cards and stuff to pay for things.
But the good thing, the great thing about that is that I'm getting discounts.
So I can get like a 5% discount on Amazon by using Bitcoin instead of something else.
And then I use something like Strike.
So it doesn't cost me anything to get my Bitcoin.
So I'm actually getting a whole lot of great benefits and stacking a whole lot of extra Bitcoin in the process.
But people have to know that these services exist, right?
And the merchants aren't yet taking them directly in a lot of different cases.
But I think that's changing.
Fundamentally, the Bitcoin system is infrastructure that is trying to create a monetary base.
There is a new protocol on top of Bitcoin called Lightning that is creating the payments layer.
And that's what we are in full-fledged to seeing this expand.
And that's where the vast majority of what I do now is on quote-unquote Lightning.
Think of it like the web is HTTP.
Like that's the hypertext protocol is the web.
TCPIP is the internet.
Like TCPIP is the connection layer.
HTTP is the media and this.
That's what this is running over.
Bitcoin is TCPIP.
Lightning is HTTP.
It's the payment and applications layer built on top of Bitcoin.
So you're seeing essentially a mimicry of the process of the internet coming to fruition over 20, 30 years.
I think we're seeing that same thing in Bitcoin.
And Bitcoin is actually a little bit ahead of it.
In 10 years after the internet was created, I think it was estimated that it was like 120, 130 million users.
And Bitcoin is somewhere between estimated 150 to 200 million.
So it's going a little bit faster than the internet was.
And that kind of makes sense.
It has the internet.
You know, the internet didn't have the internet spreading.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I think it will be more important than the internet, genuinely.
I think this will be embedded in our lives as deeply as the internet is today.
I think Bitcoin will be, if we are still using fiat money in the future, it will only move because it runs on Bitcoin.
Okay.
So the Lightning thing is very interesting because essentially that's really what you need to kind of take this to the next level.
To take it to a medium of exchange.
Well, right.
Because like as you compare it to the HTTP thing, like that's all anyone knows about.
Like that's all like nobody has a manual TCP connection.
Yeah, like it's it's important that that's there, but like I have no idea about it and neither do 99.
It's in my router and I plug it in.
That's what I yeah, exactly.
Like, right.
So that's, that's an interesting way to say.
So obviously, so like my biggest interest in this and what's getting me kind of excited, you know, about the potential of Bitcoin is that, you know, look, like everything that I talk about on this show is all the evil shit is all done through the monopoly on currency.
I mean, that this is like which is why every, and this is why Ron Paul was, you know, the greatest political figure in the history of the world, because he was the guy who really focused on that.
And for years, people were like, well, what are you talking about?
Like, why do you care about the Federal Reserve so much?
And it's like, oh, because they're responsible for everything.
Like, do you hate the warfare state?
Then you hate the Federal Reserve.
Do you hate the welfare state?
Then you hate the Federal Reserve.
Do you hate billionaires having the economy completely rigged for them?
Then you hate the Federal Reserve.
It all comes back to literally the lifeblood of the empire.
So anything that could undermine that is exciting.
Now, what is it that you think?
And this, I almost want to get to the heart of people in the Bitcoin community being frustrated by me, because I guess what I saw for a while was a lot of people being like...
I hate you so much.
Well, no, no, listen.
I want to be fair about this.
Yeah, some people have been addicted to me on Twitter, but I've been addicted to some people on Twitter too.
So who am I to judge?
Twitter.
It really is unbelievable how just having 280 characters.
You stupid bitch, it fits right in there.
Well, it's just like, it's like, well, listen, I can't win a nuanced argument because this is not what this is for.
So let me just slam as hard as I can slam in this tweet.
Believe me, I'm guilty of it too.
But so they'll be like, kind of like, well, you're wasting your time with all this stuff.
Bitcoin's going to solve this anyway.
It's inevitable.
But then they're also very frustrated at me for not talking about Bitcoin more.
So I'm kind of like, well, if it's inevitable and it's going to solve all of these problems, what difference does it make if I tell you?
Well, we want the libertarians to be there first.
Well, I think you're bridging that gap a little bit here.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that what Bitcoin needs is more awareness, essentially, that more people need to understand how important this thing is.
And this is what's going to kind of like help speed it along.
The whole game is education.
And I actually love that you brought up Ron Paul because, I mean, Ron Paul is a freaking hero of mine, obviously.
But I had this thought the other day.
You know, like looking back on the Ron Paul movement, like from a political standpoint, he, he, there was so much passion around the problem of money.
Never before had more attention been brought to that.
You know, I still will just, one day, like, I'll get pissed off and like get sick of this COVID shit.
And I'll go on YouTube and I'll just like watch like one of those old Ron Paul talks and people just screaming like when he, you know, it goes off and like, he's explaining some Austrian economic principle.
And people are like, oh my God, I love you.
You know, like it was amazing the amount of passion and the amount of like heart there was in that.
But, you know, the whole audience is chanting in the Fed, in the Fed.
Did we even get an audit?
Did what's where's the Fed?
It's right.
It's right in the same lot that it was, you know, like with all that passion and all the hours that people spent, relov Lucian, it's like things and like the everything that everybody poured into that.
I just don't think there's a centralized solution to a centralized problem, to a problem of centralization of money.
And what Ron Paul did was bring awareness to it, was bring passion to it.
And I think that's what you do.
Like the, you know, you're running for freaking president here.
Like you could be the next one to call attention to this in a massive way.
Now, what, think about what if you could get an audience yelling in the Fed, in the Fed, and then they could all go home and individually exit themselves from the monetary system.
One at a time.
Then does it matter that we audited the Fed?
Who gives a shit?
I audit Bitcoin.
Right.
Bitcoin's my money.
I audit it right now.
I should do it again.
What if every, like, what if individually we can all just, you know, get off the fucking Titanic or, you know, get out of this plane that's about to crash into the ground.
Everybody just pull their parachute.
You know, if everybody wants to, everybody else wants to go down with it, who gives a shit?
Like, okay.
Like, but tell them, be like, guys, guys, there's a parachute right here.
Just put it on.
Just strap it on.
There's a buckle.
There's a buckle.
I know you don't know how to use a buckle.
You got to tie it a little weird.
Okay.
But teach them how to do it and get off the damn plane.
What if we could take that passion and we could build decentralized marketplaces?
Everyone Needs Their Own Parachute00:02:57
We could solve, you know, when Cuba goes on lockdown and gets hit by sanctions, we could specifically just think about, all right, how do you, how do we get nodes in Cuba?
Like how at every single state, what if we all devoted all of that time and energy to just creating a parallel monetary system that they couldn't fuck with and was just this awful thorn in their side every time they're in a boardroom being like, oh, we're going to do this monetary policy.
Let's not talk about the fact that everybody can just walk away from this.
You know, like it's going to be the elephant in the room in every boardroom or every, you know, monetary policy discussion.
And they're going to not, they're going to do everything they can to not bring it up because it really fucks with all of their plans.
And I just think, like, what could be more powerful than saying, we don't have to audit the Fed.
We can just stop using the Fed.
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Is there anything like policy-wise that you think Bitcoin could really use to help, you know, like increase like, you know, repealing legal tender laws or something like that?
Like, you know, Ron Paul always said, I mean, obviously, again, I see it falling into your same problem.
Real Problems Bitcoin Solves00:12:30
We're probably not going to be able to take over the federal government and institute these policies.
We're all in the game of raising awareness.
And I think your question is, where's the most practical way to channel that awareness?
But theoretically, would something like that, do you think just really be a game changer if legal tender laws were repealed tomorrow?
Would that allow Bitcoin to really become commonly used money more immediately?
Maybe, but I think I really think that the thing that makes Bitcoin awareness that much more obvious, I guess, are the problems that Bitcoin solves.
It's when you're under capital controls that you're like, what's the only way to get across this border with money?
What's the only way to get remittances from the U.S. now that not a single bank will take the dollar?
So like, I actually think, and there's, you know, there's this other, there's this other thought to it.
Like, certainly, you know, a happy regulatory environment would be great in a lot of the way, in a lot of ways.
Repealing legal tender laws would be great just because they're shit.
There's a lot of things that would be great.
But then there's also this other point that we don't really want a free market in money because if we did, then we might end up with a money that can't survive in the absence of a free market.
What we actually want, like Bitcoin is an anti-fragile system.
We kind of want, we want friendly jurisdictions so that like everybody's just not in horrible turmoil and everybody's not having to fight all the time.
But at the same time, we also want governments to attack Bitcoin to know that it survives the attack.
Because if it can't, it's just going to be centralized again.
Right, right.
Okay.
I see what you're saying.
It's important that it can exist in the presence of massive government adversaries.
Yeah.
And we kind of have to test that.
Luckily, we are.
Luckily, everybody hates it.
Like Nigeria, and Nigeria is such a great example.
The Nigerian government banned it two years ago, something like that.
And what's hilarious is they're having so much, so many capital control problems and they're so highly dependent.
I think it's like 30% of their freaking economy, their GDP is remittances, that it was so highly dependent on it.
They actually outright banned it.
And they have the largest per capita adoption of Bitcoin in the world since.
That's exciting.
And they've had to kind of walk it back in a year.
This just this statistic blew my mind.
The guy who runs Paxful, Ray Youssef, I think, has a really great talk at Bitcoin 2021 this past year, or he was on a panel, but he dropped this statistic that just blew my mind.
I knew it was high, but I just had no fucking clue.
There were over $2 billion in remittances across into Nigeria and that that fell within the banking system.
As Bitcoin skyrocketed, that fell to 55 million.
55 million from 2 billion.
And it is because of the peer-to-peer Bitcoin market.
So it's just the government losing, not being able to get their hands on it.
There are banks freaking out right now over there being like, what in the hell is happening?
Like people are just plugging into this open source global system that, you know, where you used to have a banking license and $100 million in insurance funds and you had to know, you had to suck at least two politicians' dicks to become a bank.
And now some 14-year-old kid is writing 50 lines of code and just ruining us.
Like it's the disruption of the internet all over again.
It's just happening in money and banking.
Yeah, that is really beautiful to think about what those boardroom meetings must be like.
Well, I think that one of the things that's really exciting about the prospect of spreading awareness of Bitcoin in the United States right now.
And obviously these are really important examples that you're giving and places like Nigeria sure need it.
But, you know, the truth is that we are right now, listen, forget the potential of a currency collapse, which is very real.
I mean, very real in this country.
And we're playing.
We're playing around with this currency in a way that I don't think you could find an example of a country playing around with their currency the way we are where it doesn't collapse.
So I would still stick with the Ron Paul position that it is a matter of when, not if.
But people are really, people are really living through real price inflation right now.
And, you know, Scott Horton got it.
It was great.
He was on Kennedy last night and he made this point that, you know, they were.
I haven't seen it.
Is the video available yet?
Yeah, he posted it.
If you look on his Twitter, you can find it.
He posted it.
But he made the point at one point where they're talking about how Joe Biden's approval ratings are going down and they're all blaming it on the Afghanistan thing.
And he's like, listen, this probably has very little to do with Afghanistan.
He goes, this is about the price inflation, which is a result of the monetary inflation, which is coming off an already bad economy because of the lockdowns.
And people are noticing that the prices of housing and food and gas and all of these things are skyrocketing.
And the more that you're in that situation where people are made aware of how, you know, how weak their money is, that's when you're going to get a more fertile environment for these type of ideas to spread.
So there's something very exciting about that.
And look, I mean, obviously, to be a selfish American here, my number one concern is like what could save our country in the event of a currency collapse and in the event of more naked authoritarianism, which we're certainly moving.
Get as many Americans on Bitcoin as possible.
Yeah.
But I actually think Bitcoin is a potential resurgence of the American dream, of the mentality and the philosophy of just that wild west of, all right, we're just going to replace everything.
It's not working.
There's no hope of these old assholes fixing it for us.
So we're just going to do it.
We're just going to do it ourselves.
We're going to build it ourselves.
And we're going to build it on top of the internet because that's what we know.
And I think it's by far the best hope.
And you think about in the context of the monetary brand, I'm like, oh, God, the price of wood, I've come up with the terrible idea of remodeling my house in the last, you know, five months and could not be worse timing as far as price wise.
But like as people are more aware of just how like what people haven't even thought about like, what does it mean for money to lose value?
It's just never even been a thing in their minds.
But it's going to be front and center.
They're going to have to deal with this.
And the best thing you can do over a long timeframe is to just save in hard money.
And the only thing that's actually, I think, has actually has any real future in that context is Bitcoin.
But look at the bond yields.
The base money right now is essentially bonds.
It's sovereign debt.
But there's not even like a good market for that.
You know, the Fed's having to buy it themselves because nobody else will buy it.
It's negative yielding, essentially.
Negative yield reel.
The reality of inflation into account.
Yes, absolutely.
Negative yields that the government is buying itself because we can't even sell them to any suckers anymore.
Yeah, it's right.
It's a real fucking crazy time.
It's scary, scary shit.
But at the same time, what happens when those people find out when the corporate balance sheets and the people who, you know, when you're moving $30 billion, you just can't do it without any, with anything else, right?
Like you can only like, that's why bonds are the base money.
But you can.
Like somebody did it, just did you could just do a transaction, a single transaction.
It costs you a nickel to move $30 billion on Bitcoin.
When the people in the corporate environment, when they realize that they don't have to fight to turn their negative 5% yield into a negative 1% yield, and that they actually have a liquid monetary base that they could take anywhere in the world that works on Saturday night on a banking holiday, and they can do it in Lebanon or the U.S. at the exact same time.
People like Michael Saylor and these people who used to have to put all their money in bonds, they're going to put it in Bitcoin.
And they're going to realize that that's the only thing that's actually liquid for a $50 billion purchase.
And they hold it themselves.
It benefits everyone equally.
Everyone is on the exact same playing field.
You could be the president of the United States, the head of the empire, the czar, or a 12-year-old kid in Ghana.
If you got your keys, you got your coins.
You know, you own it.
That's pretty incredible.
All right, listen, I honestly would, I would be down to keep going for another hour, but it is late at night and I have to wake up crazy early to travel tomorrow.
You know, kids or family or anything like that.
What are you talking about?
I kind of feel like I might trade them in for Bitcoin after this episode, but I don't know.
Can you do that?
They go for good prices.
They go for good prices, man.
I'm telling you.
I'm telling you.
She's a nice lady.
Good luck.
I had a wife, and I'm telling you.
Well, listen, like I said at the beginning of this, I think this is going to be a multi-part episode thing.
So I want to thank you.
This is all I do.
Guy record Swan Talk Bitcoin.
What's the term that's at you?
Coin pilling?
Coin pill.
Pilled me?
Oh, orange pill.
Orange pills.
You've orange-pilled me.
Orange coin good.
I appreciate that.
Let me ask you, and I'm really looking forward to doing this again.
I want to do one with me, you, and Rob as well.
Yeah, get Rob on.
I haven't talked to Rob in a while.
Yeah, and he's good on this stuff, and he knows a little bit more about it than I do.
So that would be cool.
But let me ask you, just before we get out of here, what would you recommend for me before the next time we talk or for my listeners?
What would you recommend?
Like if you were a couple things like, okay, this is what you should read.
This is what you should watch.
What's the best thing to check out to kind of like learn more about this stuff?
Ooh.
I don't want to be an ass and say my show, but guys take 48.
I try to wrap a lot of like really major principles into that.
It's what is Bitcoin?
And I cover a lot of like the social scalability and stuff, like a lot of the key principles of networks and language and kind of what Bitcoin is in that context.
I've gotten a lot of great feedback from that one.
So I think that's a pretty decent intro.
But then I would say The Bullish Case for Bitcoin and or The Bitcoin Standard, both excellent books.
Bullish Case doesn't have an audio book yet.
But oh no, well, we've got a short version on the podcast, actually.
But Seifodine writes the Bitcoin standard.
And then I also mentioned Layered Money by Nick Bhattia.
It's a slightly different perspective because it's the history of the history of the monetary system compared to like kind of overlapping it onto the Bitcoin system.
But it's brilliant.
There's so many good things in it.
So maybe kind of start with one of those and kind of build from there.
All right.
Feel free to hit me a DM if you got questions or something else you want to dive into.
All right.
I have a feeling I'm going to take you up on that.