What does psychological research reveal about people's perception of money and value? What mental barriers do Bitcoin adoptees need to overcome to help others welcome the new paradigm? Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, brings the latest scientific insights into the psychology of money and value to bear on the challenges of evangelizing Bitcoin to the masses!
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Good morning, good morning. | |
| So just so I can get a sense of who I'm talking to, how many people would self-describe themselves as libertarians or voluntarists or whatever? | |
| Let me see. | |
| One, two, three. | |
| Okay. | |
| That's good. | |
| That's good. | |
| Well, it's good to know. | |
| Okay. | |
| So I don't need to go over the basics of that kind of stuff. | |
| So I'd like to talk about some of the challenges in getting people to accept Bitcoin. | |
| Do we have any evangelists in the crowd? | |
| You all trying to get grandma to understand Bitcoin while she's still struggling with email? | |
| Okay. | |
| All right. | |
| So it's a challenge, right? | |
| It's a challenge to get people to Change their conception of money. | |
| And I think there's a lot of good research out there that can help us understand why that is the case and how maybe to overcome some of the resistances. | |
| All right. | |
| Given that I'm supposed to be teaching an aerobics class as well, how many people have more than three or four days food in their house? | |
| Well, it's Texas. | |
| You always have to be ready to withstand a federal siege at any time, right? | |
| So that makes sense. | |
| Most people don't, as you know. | |
| Most people, of course, live in cities, right? | |
| 100 years ago, 90% of people were involved in agriculture. | |
| Anyone know what the percentage is now? | |
| Two, maybe three. | |
| And if you live on a farm and you're growing your own food, you've got your cattle, then you're all set if something goes wrong with currency. | |
| You just eat what you grow, right? | |
| If you live in a city, as the vast majority of people in the West do, what happens if there's a problem With currency. | |
| Zombie apocalypse, that is correct. | |
| You say that with some relish. | |
| Are you well prepared for that as well? | |
| Excellent. | |
| I've been watching Walking Dead for research purposes. | |
| Zombie apocalypse, or as we call it, 2016. | |
| It's an election year. | |
| Is that too subtle? | |
| Yeah, probably. | |
| So, in cities, when currency goes AWOL, right, when it hyperinflates or there's significant problems with currencies, people die. | |
| And they don't just die like a little bit, they die a whole lot because the food source stops going into the city, right? | |
| The farmer sends food to get money. | |
| If the money is worthless or is hyperinflating or there's huge uncertainty, then food does not flow into the cities and people start to get hungry. | |
| And if you can't pay the sanitation workers, then the water gets shut down, the sewage gets shut down. | |
| There's this horrible situation that occurs in cities when money It goes really haywire. | |
| And so whenever you talk about messing with money for people, and a lot of people hear Bitcoin as messing with money, then what happens is they view this terrifying scenario because they know how fragile the entire monetary ecosystem is that keeps them literally alive. | |
| Electricity, like we had a power outage in Canada in December with a big ice storm and we had no power for eight days. | |
| It was like minus 20. | |
| And you get a very strong sense of how hyper-specialized we've become as a species. | |
| I was trying to remember, I was a Boy Scout, how do I make a fire with ice? | |
| I think I saw that in a movie. | |
| You really remember just how fragile. | |
| And so when Bitcoin comes along and says, this could replace currency, I think people deep down in their monkey brains are like, oh really? | |
| But I need that to buy food and they don't really understand it. | |
| And historically this has happened over and over again. | |
| It's been a long time since it happened in the West, but, you know, Khmer Rouge took over in Cambodia, eliminated some aspects of the monetary system, and people just, you know, then they forced people out of the cities, and people died by the millions. | |
| In the Russian Revolution in 1917, money was abolished in many ways, and people starve very quickly. | |
| So I'm not saying don't evangelize, but recognize it's more than You know, paper versus bits. | |
| For a lot of people, they internalize the dialogue around money as life versus death. | |
| And because, you know, we get the benefit of specialization, but we have the vulnerability of specialization as well, which is if the infrastructure that keeps us alive is threatened, and the infrastructure is money. | |
| Right? | |
| The older I get, and it's weird to be old enough to say, the older I get, but the older I get, the more I realize, you know, The Matrix, the movie The Matrix, everyone's seen it, right? | |
| The Matrix is money. | |
| The matrix is money. | |
| Money is what keeps the rich rich. | |
| Money is often what keeps the poor poor. | |
| Money is what drives the political process. | |
| Lobbying, donating in return for favors from the state. | |
| And money is what drives war. | |
| Because patriotism and war fever is subsidized by debt. | |
| Right in 2003 when everybody was gung-ho to invade Iraq, they were gung-ho because they weren't going to see the bill. | |
| The bill was diluted. | |
| The bill was deferred. | |
| People can afford a lot of immoral indulgences in their emotional life because the government controls the money. | |
| And I know that sounds like a long distance to travel, but I think it's really true. | |
| People can afford to say, well, I care about the poor, therefore welfare. | |
| I care about the old, therefore social security, because they don't see the bill. | |
| Anyone know how much the war on drugs costs a year? | |
| Yeah, 20, 40 billion, it's hard to quantify because there's so many opportunity costs of people thrown in jail. | |
| So, you can be all morally righteous about the war on drugs because the cost of the war on drugs is borne by others and the future. | |
| But if you say, I'd love for people to say, I'm for the war on drugs, great, you get a bill! | |
| I bet you the, oh, really? | |
| I was just stretching. | |
| Drugs? | |
| I'm down with Pink Floyd, Sgt. | |
| Pepper, this is a great album. | |
| I don't want to... | |
| Are there any other bills coming? | |
| I'm for war! | |
| Really? | |
| Can I have your address? | |
| We got a little bill. | |
| Oh, actually, just that kink again. | |
| So, money is extremely powerful. | |
| Control of the money is basically control of people's emotions and people's psychology. | |
| And that's what Bitcoin adoptees are facing, emotional stuff. | |
| The rich. | |
| So, of course, there's two kinds of rich people. | |
| The rich people who've earned it and most of the rest, right? | |
| The people who get it through political favors or connections or being born into money. | |
| Now, there's nothing wrong with being born into money. | |
| Do you know they've done a great study on a game, Monopoly, we all know that game, right? | |
| So, in the game of Monopoly, they set up about 100 people and they gave one guy a huge advantage. | |
| He got twice the money at the beginning and he got to roll two dice instead of one. | |
| They knew this. | |
| They're like, how much money do you have? | |
| Oh my god, I got twice as much. | |
| Oh, I get to roll two dice, not one. | |
| So they knew the game was rigged. | |
| And how long do you think it took for the people who had the unfair advantage in Monopoly to feel that they were a truly excellent Monopoly player? | |
| It took about four to five minutes for the cognitive dissonance of it's unfair to be translated into, man, I rock at Monopoly. | |
| I'm like the best Monopoly player ever. | |
| And the amazing thing is when they interview people afterwards, the game is like half an hour because, you know, Monopoly only goes on forever if it's even, right? | |
| I mean, if it's uneven, it's over pretty quickly. | |
| Afterwards, they interviewed these guys and they said, what was your experience of playing the game? | |
| He's like, you know, I'm good at that. | |
| I mean, they don't ascribe their victory to the unfair advantage they had. | |
| They said, I had superior strategies. | |
| And I was really good at buying properties. | |
| And I think I outmaneuvered. | |
| Like, they literally would say this. | |
| And this is a half-hour game where it's obviously rigged from right up front. | |
| Now, one of the great things about Bitcoin is that it really doesn't give much of a rat's ass about political connections. | |
| You don't get more Bitcoins if you know the Vice President, right? | |
| So what happens with rich people, in general, is they become rich, let's say, through hard work, and then they're like, ooh, okay, so now I'm rich. | |
| I really want to stay rich. | |
| But it's hard to stay rich, you know, because the poor kids are hungry. | |
| They want stuff, and they'll work for cheap because their overheads are much lower. | |
| So they turn to the state to maintain their wealth, right? | |
| So as the state has gotten bigger income disparity, Has gotten bigger. | |
| Of course, the whole point of the state was to close that down. | |
| Naturally, it's got, you know, violence achieving the opposite of its stated goal. | |
| Who'd have thought? | |
| So the rich will turn to the government to maintain their privilege, and wealth has been shown in repeated psychological studies to decrease empathy, right? | |
| So they had this study where they put a bunch of people in a room and said, you have to wait for another experiment in this room. | |
| There's a bowl of candy here. | |
| It's for the kids. | |
| It's for children in a developmental study. | |
| Please don't eat it. | |
| Twice as many rich people ate the candy as poor people. | |
| They did another study where they had a guy pretend to cross at a crosswalk. | |
| Is it in Texas that you have to stop at the crosswalk, right? | |
| No, nobody knows. | |
| A bunch of libertarians, what do you care about the law? | |
| I don't know. | |
| If it's a politician... | |
| In California, by the study, you have to stop for the crosswalk. | |
| So the people in the rich cars were four times more likely not to stop, and all the people in the beaters stopped. | |
| Poor people have been shown repeatedly to have a greater capacity to read people's facial expressions, a greater empathy. | |
| I don't mean by this that the poor are necessarily more moral or better people. | |
| I mean, I grew up poor, and I can tell you they were not overburdened with an excess of ethics. | |
| But when you're poor, you need your social contacts a lot more than when you're rich, right? | |
| You're rich, you hire a nanny. | |
| If you're poor, you need people to watch your kids, so you gotta, you know, poor people are more likely to be generous with found money than rich people and so on. | |
| They have less empathy, they tend to be more selfish, and so on. | |
| And there's ways to combat that, but that's a pretty important finding because Bitcoin is going to challenge all of that. | |
| Rich people want to stay rich. | |
| They like the state in general. | |
| And if you run a corporation, I was on a board in a corporation and I co-founded, you have a legal responsibility to maximize profits, which means you have to take government contracts, government tax breaks. | |
| If you don't, you actually are not just going to get fired, but you could be sued for not pursuing your fiduciary responsibility. | |
| So the fact that there is a state is very beneficial for the rich. | |
| Now, the rich are going to need to get into Bitcoin for it to grow as fast as possible, but it challenges. | |
| Wealthy people's sense of entitlement and virtue. | |
| So the monopoly player thinks he's a great player. | |
| Rich people think that they work harder than poor people, that they've applied themselves better, that they've made better decisions, and that maybe the poor people are just lazy and so on. | |
| But Bitcoin resets all of that. | |
| Bitcoin says, okay, let's play that monopoly game again. | |
| No stinking advantages for you people, right? | |
| No political connections, no donate to this politician and get a tax break, no Obamacare exemptions because you know Nancy Pelosi's Gardner, none of that stuff. | |
| Bitcoin resets and evens out the playing field. | |
| That is a great challenge to wealthy people who believe that they're wealthy because of their virtues and don't want to play that monopoly game again without the advantages of state power on their side. | |
| Does that make sense? | |
| I think that's one of the challenges that you're going to face. | |
| You can appeal to the greed of rich people. | |
| You know, it's also well established economically that when income disparities increase, So do a wide variety of negative social outcomes. | |
| Everything from poverty to obesity to illiteracy to crime. | |
| As these gaps increase, so do negative outcomes, even for the rich. | |
| The rich are about 30-35% more likely to drink alcohol to excess than the poor and so on. | |
| Although it's challenging in the short run, in the long run, it is beneficial for the rich to have a more even playing field. | |
| Of course, it also, Bitcoin will help unleash the entrepreneurial energies of people who have less money. | |
| You know, I've gone through an IPO and it's horrible. | |
| I mean, you pay three, three and a half million dollars for an IPO. Whereas, you know, with the right technology in Bitcoin, it's... | |
| Virtually nothing. | |
| I mean, it's as close to nothing as you could possibly imagine. | |
| There is lots of ways to appeal to the greed of rich people, but I think it's important to understand that people are kind of irrational about money, and they will so often view personal accomplishments, even when it's in an engineered and lopsided system, as solely the result of personal virtue, energy, dedication, whatever, right? | |
| Everybody wants to be the Protestant superhero of hard-working capitalism, but a lot of times people get rich because of politics and government. | |
| Bitcoin has nothing to do with that. | |
| So it is, let's play Monopoly again, but you don't get extra money at the beginning and you don't get double the rolls. | |
| You know, some people are up for that challenge and some people are not. | |
| Money is also used to self-medicate. | |
| They've done studies where they give people negative feedback that's harsh, critical. | |
| And then they give people negative feedback that's gentle and positive and encouraging. | |
| And they found that the people who received the negative feedback are like 60% more likely, right afterwards, I can't remember how the experiment was set up, about 60% more likely to buy expensive jeans rather than cheap jeans. | |
| 60% more likely to overspend on something after they've received negative feedback, right? | |
| So it's like, I feel down. | |
| I'm going to go buy myself something, and for men it's electronics, and for women it's everything that's not electronics, if I understand that correctly. | |
| No, come on. | |
| Men rule the world. | |
| Have you been to a mall lately? | |
| There's one little electronics store at the back where the husbands go to wait while the women clean out everything else. | |
| So people use it as a drug to make themselves feel better. | |
| What is it? | |
| Retail therapy, some people call it, right? | |
| I will feel better if I buy something. | |
| So, again, it's like you want to take my drug away. | |
| You want to take that which I use to make myself feel better, that which I use to soothe myself. | |
| I mean, it's mother's milk for wounded vanity sometimes to go shopping. | |
| And I know you can shop at Bitcoin, but what I'm talking about is people think of money as statism, as the Fed, as paper. | |
| They don't think of money as a neutral arbiter for the exchange of disparate values. | |
| Boy, that's a great name for a Bitcoin company. | |
| It's taken. | |
| No, it's not. | |
| But they think of money as the government. | |
| The government has slowly taken over so much in society that now people think of education as public schools. | |
| They think of charity as the welfare state. | |
| They think of defense as the army. | |
| And they really can't think of things outside of that paradigm. | |
| And this is why, you know, you get this argument all the time, like, I want to get rid of the welfare state. | |
| You must hate the poor, you know. | |
| I don't like Obamacare. | |
| You must hate the sick. | |
| You know, because they can't think of something that is not government that does those things. | |
| And currency Has been around in the government's pocket, so to speak, for so long. | |
| We've passed that 1984 threshold, you know, where you can't remember what it was like before. | |
| Like, we almost got there with the war on drugs, where people couldn't remember what it was before. | |
| That's why one of the reasons prohibition ended after only 13 years is people could remember what it was like before prohibition. | |
| Like, well, this sucks, you know, but the war on drugs is ending. | |
| People, I think, can vaguely remember what it was like beforehand. | |
| But people can't remember what it was like when government didn't run the money. | |
| People can't remember, and it's hard even for me to imagine, money gaining value. | |
| That is such a fundamental sea change in everything that is, not just the economy, everything that is. | |
| That money can gain value. | |
| I mean, we all have to have these defensive strategies because the inflation elves keep eating our money. | |
| You can't just stick it under a mattress and retire on it because it's going to be worth nothing when you retire. | |
| So many financial decisions, so much of our defensive investment strategy, so much of what we buy in terms of hedging against inflation is, of course, driven by the loss of value of money. | |
| I mean, that's why we have For the most part, financial advisors. | |
| You don't need a lot of financial advisors with Bitcoin, right? | |
| Don't spend it and it will make money. | |
| You know, it's easy. | |
| Alright, that's my advice. | |
| That'll be 500 bucks. | |
| Don't spend it. | |
| Got it? | |
| Okay, I got to take another call. | |
| Make another 500 bucks. | |
| Don't spend it. | |
| It'll make money. | |
| Don't spend it. | |
| Whereas, you know, you got an inflation-based economy and you get these, like, I mean, we're doing some crazy stuff up in Canada where you buy stuff and it's a tax write-off and then if you run it through a unicorn's ass, it then perhaps use some capital losses. | |
| I mean, just crazy stuff that you have to go through. | |
| Anyone has any questions about that? | |
| I'm available afterwards for consultations. | |
| I am, in fact, the unicorn. | |
| Anyway. | |
| And the walrus, I believe. | |
| But we can't imagine what it's like. | |
| But what an amazing thing it is that you can have, even when Bitcoin stabilizes, let's just say it gains a couple of points a year. | |
| Or let's say it doesn't gain or lose, but you got a million bucks, you can put it under your mattress. | |
| I know it's Bitcoin, it's virtual. | |
| And it's there when you need it. | |
| It's not evaporated. | |
| It's not dissolved. | |
| People can't comprehend that. | |
| And they can't comprehend how much of their lives is spent trying to fight inflation. | |
| You know, I don't sit there and say, gravity, you suck. | |
| I really want to, like every day, I want to fly. | |
| I just get used to it. | |
| It sucks. | |
| I wish I could fly. | |
| My daughter continually reminds me of how great it would be to fly by flapping around the house. | |
| But I don't get annoyed at gravity every day because it's just a fact of life. | |
| But we're talking about changing the physics of people's entire universes. | |
| Why do people fight hard for raises? | |
| Because of inflation. | |
| So much conflict in the workplace between employers and employees is because of inflation. | |
| I mean, trying to get unions to do cost of living increases plus versus, you know, they know that the retirements have to be super high because of inflation. | |
| So much conflict and Mass is created in life because fiat currency is continually deflating. | |
| The idea that this would not be the case, that you just... | |
| Or as I say to people, imagine if everything you bought was a computer. | |
| Right? | |
| Because computers are constantly gaining in value relative to money. | |
| In other words, your money is becoming more valuable with computers all the time. | |
| If you don't buy... | |
| If you take the thousand bucks you're going to spend on a computer now and spend it next year, you will literally get twice the computer. | |
| So what if everything was computers? | |
| People can't really understand that. | |
| But it's painful how much of life we have to devote to protecting ourselves from the invisible thieves of the Federal Reserve. | |
| And changing that for people is really hard. | |
| So, because I only have 20 minutes, I've got lots more to say, but I'm sure I'll save it for a show. | |
| You know, this is the conference. | |
| You can see this on a video. | |
| So if you've got questions that vaguely relate to what I'm saying or don't, then how are we doing questions? | |
| Have we given mics? | |
| Yeah? | |
| So if you've got a question or a comment or something you want to share, you know, just stick your hand up and get ready to catch. | |
| He's got this boomerang thing he's been working on. | |
| Good afternoon, staff. | |
| Thank you very much for running Free Domain Radio. | |
| You've changed my life and the life of the people that I love. | |
| Thank you. | |
| I want you to know that when I'm thinking about Bitcoin and I'm thinking about how my savings are safer than what they would do in the stock market or they would do as bonds or even in cash, especially in cash. | |
| I think that the game changer is not just the fact that Bitcoin allows you to protect yourself against inflation, but it also allows you, it allows everyone in this room and everyone who uses Bitcoin, allows us to protect ourselves against direct aggression and theft. | |
| The people who would take your money And would decide to use that money to, you know, bomb other people. | |
| Well, let me just follow that up for a sec, too, because if I had more time, one topic I wanted to get into was, you know, we say, well, you know, Bitcoin is harder to tax, right? | |
| Or whatever, right? | |
| But we're not all the same. | |
| We're all like, less taxation, great. | |
| You know, if you're a public sector worker about to retire, You want more taxation because you know that's where you... | |
| We're not all on the same page. | |
| When you start saying, well, you know, Bitcoin is this and Bitcoin is that, most people are like, wait a minute, I need the taxes. | |
| I need people to work in fiat currency. | |
| My pension is in fiat currency. | |
| I don't have a pension in Bitcoin, so I need people to stay off Bitcoin, pay their taxes so I can get my goddamn money because I worked for 20 years in some stupid ass bureaucratic nightmare just to get this edge of the rainbow leprechaun pot of gold and now you're going to take it away for digital crap? | |
| Give me a break! | |
| So you're going to get a lot of hostility from people who need that money. | |
| That's so true. | |
| I've gotten hostility, especially from people who know that what they're getting with Bitcoin is a raw deal because they're going to be losers. | |
| Look, parasitism sucks sometimes. | |
| Sorry. | |
| I'm sorry you don't get your pension, but I've got to rip the leech off my neck. | |
| I'd like to get a walk-in. | |
| So my question is, do you think it's going to be a catalyst in making sure that people at some point decide to say, well, I'm not paying for that anymore. | |
| Sorry, you're stuck with the bill. | |
| Yeah, look, Bitcoin makes barter. | |
| I view it as a barter. | |
| I don't even like to call it currency because it... | |
| It focuses too much people's attention on what they think currency is right now. | |
| It's one of the challenges with the word anarchism. | |
| People think I'm supposed to be driving some flame-engulfed motorcycle with Mel Gibson screaming anti-Semitic slurs at officers or something, right? | |
| To me, it's a medium of valuing barter. | |
| Now, barter you can't tax, right? | |
| But we're going to have a hell of a fight because 40% of Americans get significant portions of their income in Federal Reserve notes as a result of the productivity of the unborn that's been sold to foreign banksters for 40 years and as a result of taxation in the here and now. | |
| And those people are going to hate Bitcoin because it's setting the cattle free. | |
| Farmers don't like that. | |
| Hello Stefan, I'm Hector and I have something that keeps me up at Wake and it's particularly what you're talking about, the conditioning of people and I frequent sometimes my old hometown of San Luis Potosi and I do see it. | |
| It's like a tremendous conditioning that they cannot break through and I wanted to know what is the simplest most useful way of breaking that conditioning in your opinion? | |
| It's a great question. | |
| I just wanted to mention who's the guy. | |
| Yeah, by the way, you changed your life, not me. | |
| I just wanted to point that out, right? | |
| Let's say I write a diet book, you're the one who has to put down the cheesecake, not me. | |
| So how do you break through the conditioning? | |
| Breaking through people's defenses is a lot like listening. | |
| In fact, it's mostly listening. | |
| There's a great fable I read as a kid that is conditioned just about every time I communicate. | |
| And the fable is that there's a guy walking down the road with a big cloak on him and the wind and the sun get into a debate and the wind says, well, I can get that cloak off his back. | |
| And the sun says, well, I can get that cloak off his back. | |
| And they make a bet. | |
| I don't know what they bet. | |
| I mean, they're... | |
| Elements. | |
| And so the wind goes howling down and tries to get its windy fingers in the guy and rip the cloak off. | |
| And the guy, what does he do? | |
| Tighter and tighter and tighter. | |
| Right? | |
| And then the wind gets exhausted and then goes and decides to blow down houses in Canada for the last six months. | |
| And then the sun says, okay, I got this man. | |
| And what does he do? | |
| It's stronger and harder and harder and harder. | |
| And what does the guy do? | |
| He's like, damn, this is hot. | |
| Takes off his cloak. | |
| That is breaking through people's defenses. | |
| If you go for the kill, all you get is the shield, right? | |
| If you listen to people, what's your relationship with money? | |
| Tell me what you think of money. | |
| I mean, money is one of these great taboo topics that we really should talk about more. | |
| I'm very invasive with people. | |
| What do you live on and how do you get your money? | |
| I'm curious and I share it myself too. | |
| My blockchain is public. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| If you have any questions about liberty, you can just ask the sun. | |
| That's right. | |
| Yeah, my question is more around, like, what are your thoughts on what governments start to look like if they can't control money? | |
| Like, if they can't enforce tax? | |
| No, nothing like right now. | |
| The basic deal in democracy is I will tax you $500 and I will pay you $1,000. | |
| Now, mathematically, that's impossible. | |
| The reality is, to pay you $500, I need to tax you $1,000, because I've got to pay for all the tax collectors and the bureaucrats and the blah, blah, blahs, right? | |
| And so how do governments make this deal that makes them seem legitimate in the here and now, or valuable or useful, where they give you $1,000 back for taxing you $500? | |
| Through debt and inflation. | |
| Debt and inflation, you cannot do through Bitcoin. | |
| You cannot do debt and inflation. | |
| There's no Bitcoin protocol, say, sell off five million fetuses on the block. | |
| Here we go. | |
| Let's go, right? | |
| And so, because of that, the entire structure, that's what I mean to say, the state is in effect of the control of money. | |
| Money is the matrix. | |
| And when you change money, you are unplugging people in very disorienting ways. | |
| So you cannot have our existing political system or anything that even remotely resembles it without. | |
| And you cannot have war and so on. | |
| The injustice of kids being born, what, $300,000 in debt? | |
| You can't have that with Bitcoin. | |
| So you can't bribe people with other people's money in a Bitcoin-based society. | |
| You can't have a state in any way that we understand it now, which is one of the reasons I'm very enthusiastic about it. | |
| Well, thank you very much, Steph. | |
| My name's Morpheus, and I don't really have a question, but a couple of comments is... | |
| Morpheus never had any questions, did he? | |
| Just things that blow your mind. | |
| Well, you know, it's always good to bat things around, but the concept is, like, we have this social security system that we have to pay for people in the future for the work they did today. | |
| Well, The reason why we have to have this is because we have this inflationary money system that we have to come up with all these wonderful schemes to combat the effects of the inflationary money system to protect some of the people. | |
| And the other comment is I also see that because of Bitcoin we're moving into a world where Things are done because of persuasion, because now, with Bitcoin, they can't steal your money. | |
| They can't go, hey, that's our money in your bank account, thank you very much, and have a nice day. | |
| So we're moving more towards, I see Bitcoin as being a catalyst to move into the kind of world that a god of my understanding would want to have. | |
| Yeah, I hope so. | |
| And some libertarians insult The criminal free market by comparing Social Security to a Ponzi scheme. | |
| What a ridiculous insult to Ponzi schemes that is. | |
| No, Ponzi schemes are voluntary. | |
| Anyway, next. | |
| So this is a little more closer time frame and a little more specific of a question. | |
| And one of the things that I've been seeing, and I take it that Bitcoin is not the end-all be-all of society in a hundred years, but I think it would be kind of interesting if the world's first trillionaire was the person who hacked and stole money from Mt. | |
| Gox. | |
| You talk about playing fields that are not fair. | |
| How do you see that playing out? | |
| No, this I think goes to risk too, right? | |
| So since FDIC, this insurance stuff from the government that covers your bank account, since all that came in, people have forgotten about the risk of the monetary system. | |
| I was on Alex Jones yesterday and another interviewer was like, well, it's really bad, all of these companies going, no, it's great. | |
| I'm sorry for the people who lost money, but by God, it's fantastic. | |
| You know what Bitcoin organizations don't get? | |
| Massive government bailouts. | |
| Oh my God, that's fantastic. | |
| Go back to any computer magazine in 1980 and see how many of those companies are still around. | |
| You'll find maybe one if you're lucky. | |
| The failure of those companies moved resources to people who were better at doing what they're doing. | |
| The whole point of a free market is for things to fail to release the resources back into people who can handle them more competently. | |
| The failures of the Bitcoin organizations are the surest sign that it's going to succeed and win because idiots are getting weeded out. | |
| It's like having an Olympics where everyone gets a gold. | |
| nobody's gonna show up. | |
| Yeah, let's remember it's buyer beware time again because we've got some freedom. | |
| Hi, this is Jose. | |
| I'm from Mexico. | |
| I actually handle investments in fiat and in altcoins. | |
| I have investors. | |
| So actually I see it as a compliment because I see many people that really love Bitcoin, want to see it like a confrontation between actual financial system and this financial system. | |
| Well, it is an opportunity to make a better economic, financial, political and social Live and complement each other, not to confront each other because actually the innovation, for example, is open code. | |
| Well, for financial transactions, it's a closed code, but it exists. | |
| I've seen it working under the hood for many years. | |
| You know, I'm sorry to interrupt, and you're the financial expert, so I'm just speaking out of my armpit here, but I view it as a win-lose situation. | |
| Good money drives out bad, bad money drives out good. | |
| Bitcoin is what money Should always have been, but technologically was not able to become. | |
| Fiat money is slavery. | |
| Fiat money is debt. | |
| It is slavery. | |
| It is immoral. | |
| It is predatory. | |
| It is warmongering. | |
| It is evil. | |
| It is monstrous. | |
| It cripples the poor. | |
| It destroys human lives. | |
| It sells off the innocent. | |
| It is a monstrous, vampiric, predatory, evil, disgusting system. | |
| And I do not want to see it coexisting with the free market currency. | |
| Well, that is not actually money, but what people do with money. | |
| And that can come to either of the two worlds. | |
| It depends on what you want to do with it. | |
| I think that it's a better way to make things better future for the economics. | |
| From a practical standpoint, diversifying your portfolio, I understand that. | |
| But there is going to be a confrontation between freedom and tyranny. | |
| And I sure know which slide I want to win. | |
| Can we get the next question? | |
| Because I think we're a little low on time. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Something that may go along with your answer just there. | |
| I feel like a common criticism of libertarian thought is that it's more of a thought experiment. | |
| We can't apply it in the real world. | |
| You know, get out of your bubble. | |
| And I feel like that's also a common criticism of Bitcoin that we're all just early adopters on some big speculative bubble. | |
| And I see all of, there's huge merchants that are accepting it, so I think that there's already some answers to that, but it still is a persistent perception about that We still need to apply it better. | |
| Yeah, well, so, I mean, to the uninformed, everything which gains value quickly is a bubble. | |
| Just using the word bubble is not an indication of any knowledge. | |
| And people who compare Bitcoin to tulips, I know where I'd like to put those tulips, I mean, tulips were so obviously a fad. | |
| It's a goddamn plant. | |
| You can't even smoke it. | |
| So, of course that was a fad. | |
| This is different. | |
| This is friction-free money. | |
| This is the exchange of value with no overhead. | |
| This is bypassing the entire financial parasite class. | |
| I mean, I think traditional libertarians have been saying, education, politics, education, politics, education, politics. | |
| That's how we'll take down the state from the inside. | |
| We'll win. | |
| We'll take it over. | |
| And the Bitcoin people are like... | |
| Hey, look, I just bypassed the whole damn thing. | |
| You don't need to do any of that stuff. | |
| And they're like, oh, man! | |
| It's like me going into a fight with Muhammad Ali with a blow dart. | |
| I mean, it's annoying. | |
| Muhammad Ali trains and I've just got a little poison dart with some frog poison on it. | |
| So, yeah, I mean, it's a way to just bypass the whole fight. | |
| You know, just live like the state's not there and you're as close to freedom as you're going to get in this lifetime. | |
| You had mentioned your monopoly example where one person starts out with a lot more money, but isn't that how Bitcoin is today? | |
| Because something like a hundred addresses own half the Bitcoins out there right now, so if this is the future of money, we're going to have a small number of people controlling Most of the money. | |
| But first of all, they can only maintain the value of that by diluting it at some point, right? | |
| In other words, they have to spend them in order for them to have any value. | |
| But they'll simply transfer those assets like Bitcoin to real assets like houses, cars, you know, productive... | |
| You're saying Bitcoin is not a real asset. | |
| Well, no, no. | |
| When I mean real asset, I mean like hard assets... | |
| It's like saying email is not a real letter. | |
| Let me rephrase that. | |
| They could start buying out companies. | |
| My issue is not with wealth. | |
| My issue is not with wealth. | |
| And the fact that half the bitcoins are owned by Yakamoto and his dog or whatever it is, I don't care. | |
| But what is important is that right now, money buys you political power which buys you privilege in the market, which means it's no longer a market but some fascist oligopoly, right? | |
| So my issue is not with people's aggregation of money, but the degree to which that aggregation of money is used to buy political privilege. | |
| Will Bitcoin be accepted for political donations at some point? | |
| It certainly is possible, but those people can be pretty easily identified and ostracized if we don't like what they're doing. | |
| So it's not the concentration of wealth. | |
| That will dilute over time. | |
| Of course the early adopters should make a fortune. | |
| Of course they should because they're early adopters. | |
| Good for them, right? | |
| I mean, but it will dilute over time. | |
| It has to. | |
| I've just... | |
| No, I've just forgotten what I saw. | |
| Hi, my name is Blake Anderson. | |
| I'm an anarchist. | |
| Oh, sorry, that lady was a psychic, so we just did. | |
| You don't need the mic if we're psychic. | |
| Sorry, go ahead. | |
| My ESP is broken, unfortunately, right now, so I have to get it repaired. | |
| I am an anarchist and I am right now engaged in local politics in Minnesota to try to help get people elected that will be easier on the regulatory environment locally of Bitcoin. | |
| And I wanted to know how you feel about that kind of conflict of interest as I don't believe in governance and I'm involved in it. | |
| You know, for all grand experiments, you start with something local, right? | |
| I mean, if you want to lift 500 pounds, you start with 5 pounds, right? | |
| So, if you believe that you have the ability to infiltrate an evil organization and turn it to virtue, don't start with government. | |
| Don't start with the biggest and most evil organizations. | |
| Just start with something local. | |
| So, like infiltrate your local mafia and turn it into a charity, right? | |
| And if you can do that, you know, and if that's too scary for you because They're the mafia. | |
| You could say infiltrate a local gay rights group and try to turn them into homophobes. | |
| Or you could infiltrate some local Spanish group and try to make them anti-Spanish, right? | |
| So if you feel that you have the capacity to infiltrate a group and turn it against its core purpose, don't start with something as huge as the government. | |
| Start with something local. | |
| But of course, everyone laughs because they know that's never going to happen. | |
| You're never going to infiltrate the mafia and turn it into a whole bunch of Mother Teresa wannabes. | |
| You're probably just going to get They're axed on a garage floor somewhere, right? | |
| And so, if we can't lift the five pounds of turning criminal organizations to virtue, forget about the state. | |
| I mean, they're much bigger, much more powerful, and they have legitimacy in the eyes of the common person. | |
| No, no. | |
| I mean, or, you know, show me with the mafia, and then I'll listen to you about the state, but... | |
| Finally figured out what it was. | |
| I liked your little quantum jump, you know, like, just jump out. | |
| And the thing that we need to realize, and I can't remember if somebody was talking about it, is the passive revolution, right? | |
| If you really want to take down those in power, you take away what gives them power, which is their money, right? | |
| If we move, and the thing is, is that the only reason they have power is because we gave it to them. | |
| But we've forgotten that. | |
| Well, it's the Al-Qaeda strategy, right? | |
| How do you take down an empire? | |
| You provoke that empire into fighting unwinnable wars, draining the treasury, and destroying the military. | |
| Good thing we all stepped that one out of the way, right? | |
| Ooh, that was a close one. | |
| Yes, of course. | |
| I mean, this is how you take down giant empires is you destroy them through unwinnable wars, and you get them to fight something like regulating Bitcoin, which is going to be about as easy as bringing democracy to Iraq and will never be achieved, but go ahead. | |
| Howdy. | |
| I have a tough question for you. | |
| Big VC money is coming into the Bitcoin space, and VCs are going to be buying up through Angel and large investments into all the transaction processing, which will be the industrial miners, all the applications, all the software, all the layers that go on top. | |
| And if you look at VC money, historically, there is always an exit out. | |
| And if you look at some of the videos, like the one James did on the hockey stick at the five or six-year point on all the dot-coms and technology companies, we're going to have the same hockey stick with Bitcoin companies, Bitcoin itself, and mining. | |
| And when that hockey stick hits, and we hit a billion users with Bitcoin, and there's just unbelievable exit plan, it should be the big banks probably that will buy the transaction houses and a lot of these companies right now that were funded by VCs, For the exit. | |
| So what's going to prevent Bitcoin and all the things around the Bitcoin infrastructure from turning into establishment? | |
| Well, it's because I think of the Bitcoin architecture like physics, right? | |
| So there are engineering companies that will all offer to build you a bridge, but none of them can redesign physics itself, right? | |
| None of them can say, well, I'll build you a bridge out of balsa, but don't worry, I'm turning gravity down to 5%. | |
| They all have to compete within the same physics. | |
| Some of them will be better and some of them will be worse. | |
| Now, people can come in and say, well, I'm going to add value to Bitcoin and so on, but it's like ISPs and TCPIP. Nobody's really making money off TCPIP. The universalization, the network effect of TCPIP is what gives it its value. | |
| So the fact that venture capitalists are going to come in is great. | |
| The danger from venture capitalists is they're going to try and hedge their bets as non-libertarians by appealing to regulatory agencies to socialize the cost of validating so MT Gox doesn't happen again, right? | |
| So they're going to try and offload regulations so they don't have to pay for it onto the taxpayers, because that's what we talked about, rich people. | |
| I mean, economically, if you take ethics and set fire to them, economically it makes sense. | |
| You socialize the cost, you privatize the profits. | |
| So my concern is that venture capitalists are going to come in and they're going to start using their Washington contacts to say, if you regulate this, great. | |
| It gains legitimacy for my investor community and I get to offload the costs of validating this security and validating the business viability of these companies and so on. | |
| And then they're going to say, well, if you regulate me, you're not going to ban me. | |
| And of course they're concerned about that perception. | |
| Because Bitcoin, of course, is testing, you know, that old maxim, there's no such thing as bad publicity. | |
| I mean, what do you hear about Bitcoin these days? | |
| Thefts, fire sales, murders, suicide. | |
| I mean, I've been waiting for the Bitcoin Godzilla to take Tokyo, for God's sakes, right? | |
| So we really are testing the limits of there's no such thing as bad publicity. | |
| If you're an entrepreneur with a conservative investor base, you're going to want something that's less scary for them, and the best way to get that in the short run is not wait for the market to come up with a Bitcoin seal of approval to avoid getting goxed again, but to get regulators involved, and then you can say to your constituents, oh yes, it's been regulated by the government, it's safe, and then, oh, it's safe, you know, because the government... | |
| So that's my concern, that they're going to try and get the government involved to make better profits in the short term. | |
| I think we're out of time, right? | |
| Thank you, everybody, so much. | |
| Always a pleasure. | |
| I'll be around all day. |