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Bitcoin will fail because it is a lie, a tool claiming to be a truth. And the lie starts by asking you to imagine living in a world where nobody is your friend. Bitcoin is for enemies. They say this seriously look it up. Bitcoin is a lie because it claims truths that cannot be, that trust is defect, that property is virtue, that law shared meaning should not supervene that fuck off and leave me alone is the sacred right of the free person. I used to see value. Now I see a void, an emptiness where meaning should be the best in bitcoin made. Audible I am Guy Swan and this is bitcoin. Audible. What is up guys? Welcome back to bitcoin. Audible I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else you know. This show is brought to you by Leaden IO for bitcoin backed loans. This is a great way to borrow against your bitcoin without selling it. Then we have pub key app that's P u b k y just take out the e. They've literally built a protocol stack to re decentralize the web to separate the platforms from the users and the network. They and pubkey app is just kind of a look what we can do with this. Especially if you're a builder, you gotta check it out. Then we've got git chroma. These guys are all about light health, about red light therapy, about protecting your circadian rhythm. I'm wearing my nightshades right now actually. Keeping your hormones balanced in an age where we're constantly staring at screens. And then the human rights foundation and their incredible work fighting for freedom around the world and their financial freedom report newsletter which is literally an irreplaceable resource. Links and details for all of these guys right down in the show notes. So we are hitting some FUD today. Some. And you know, I want to be fair, I do kind of get like a little bit heated just because I get talking about counterfeiting and inflation and stuff kind of towards the end of the guys take. But the extended olive branch here. I actually would like it if Mike Brock listened to this because you know, I've done this a bunch of times on the show where somebody will write some lengthy thing detracting bitcoin or distract detracting, I don't know, Austrian theory or I don't know, just whatever, you know, something that supposedly paints bitcoin in some sort of light and then, you know, that's what we do, we break it down. What's the premise here? How does the argument follow from the supposed claim at the base of this and does it actually follow or are there, you know, a lengthy list of assumptions among this set of thought processes that don't actually line up and where might that misalignment be? You know, we address it and it's always fun to read stuff that's pro bitcoin, but honestly, it's a little bit more fun to read stuff where people poo poo on bitcoin. I don't know, it's. It's more interesting. And most pro bitcoin stuff is just kind of circle jerky. You know, it's like, okay, yeah, hard money's great. You know, how many times can you say that? I like answering the people who say it's bad and to break down why they say it's bad and where the self contradiction is. I mean, I like to read all of it and that's what we do on the show. But this one was kind of fun and I hope I do it justice. You know, I like to read with the tone that I think the author is giving. You know, I'm not gonna like mock it or anything. In fact, if he wants to snatch this audio out and post it with the article so people can listen to the article, I think I do. I think I'm a great narrator. I think I did a fantastic job and did it. Just hope he appreciates that. If nothing else, he likely won't agree with my assessment, but hey, maybe he actually listens to it with an open mind and, you know, assumes that maybe there is an error in his thinking. Maybe not. Maybe yes. I don't know. We'll find out. So let's go ahead and get into the article with a guy's take to follow. And it's titled Bitcoin is a Lie by Mike Brock. A confession and a moral charge. Bitcoin will fail because it is a lie, a tool claiming to be a truth. And the lie starts by asking you to imagine living in a world where nobody is your friend. Bitcoin is for enemies. They say this seriously, look it up. Bitcoin is a lie because it claims truths that cannot be, that trust is defect, that property is virtue, that law shared meaning should not supervene. That fuck off and leave me alone is the sacred right of the free person. I used to see value. Now I see a void, an emptiness where meaning should be a reason. Human rights activists have used bitcoin for good, but I fear that this good is being propagandized for the cynical Ends of those hostile to those causes. And even more damningly, I worry that those cynical people know it. And my worry is informed because I know some of them personally used to call some of them my friends. Have fun staying poor, they say. Seriously, look it up. They will insist it's irony. I'm not so sure. The same defense that all the other crypto fascists hide behind. These are statements in wryness. Why so serious? Oh, but I am serious. That is angry too. I'm pretty angry. Not in the sense that my emotions control me here, but I do feel them and let them show for you. Now. This is how cruelty operates. In the age of ironic detachment, every vicious statement, every expression of contempt, every celebration of others suffering gets wrapped in layers of it's just a joke and why so serious? And you're being too literal. But the cruelty is real. The contempt is real. The harm is real. They just learned they could inflict it while maintaining plausible deniability, could mock the poor while pretending it was just memes, could celebrate human suffering while claiming it was ironic performance, could build systems designed to extract and exclude while insisting it was all just disruption, just innovation, just the market working as intended. The irony isn't a shield from moral judgment. It's a confession that they know what they're doing is indefensible. So they hide behind the pretense of not meaning it. Bitcoin is for enemies. This is Carl Schmitt. This is fascism. Although they'll insist it's game theory. Game theory. The mathematicization of mistrust, the formalization of the assumption that every interaction is fundamentally adversarial, that cooperation is just delayed defection, that trust is weakness waiting to be exploited. They dress it in equations and Nash equilibria and Prisoner's dilemmas, as if mathematical notation makes antisocial premises scientific rather than ideological. But here's the trick. If you build systems premised on the assumption that everyone is your enemy, you create the very conditions where everyone becomes your enemy. The prophecy fulfills itself. Trust becomes impossible. Not because humans are inherently untrustworthy, but because you've built an architecture that punishes trust and rewards defection. And then you point to the wreckage and say, see, I told you humans can't cooperate. Good thing we have Bitcoin. This is Austrian economics, the fever dream that animated Mises and Rothbard, that Ron Paul spread like gospel, that the crypto faithful have absorbed as metaphysical truth the claim that inflation is theft, that fiat currency is government tyranny, that hard money restores natural Order that the market, if just left alone, would produce spontaneous harmony. But strip away the economic mysticism and here's what hard money actually means. It systematically advantages existing wealth holders and disadvantages workers and debtors. It makes wealth accumulation easier and wage earning harder. It turns the economy into a game where those who already have capital watch it appreciate, while those who work for wages watch their purchasing power erode. This isn't accidental. This is the point. Hard money is oligarchy with a white paper. Bitcoin is for the war of all against all. The friend, enemy, distinction, the iron law of oligarchy. Bitcoin is for fascists. So here we are. It's not surprising you threw in with these monsters in the White House, is it? You'll insist it's a lesser evil, the greater being that the other side would have regulated you, constrained you, pushed easement on your dominion. What tyranny that would have been for you. Anyway, what do you care? You're living in the Caribbean or Central America. You've got your apocalypse money. The coming days will bring the shattering of many illusions. One of them will be that most people are not as selfish and paranoid as you imagined them. And that's why resistance is possible. That's why the city still stands, despite the barbarians inside the gate. That's why the defenders fight street by street when your game theory says they should have defected, should have optimized their individual positions, should have accepted the inevitable consolidation of power. But they don't. Because humans aren't the atomized self interested utility maximizers your models assume. They're capable of solidarity, of courage, of choosing meaning over optimization, of bringing light, even when the rational calculation says to save themselves. You built bitcoin for a world of enemies, but most people still choose to be friends. So hold on for dear life or sell all before it's too late. Which way, human? Go live your answer and contribute your verse. Well, okay then, let's take a minute and actually try to find a premise in this article that he's basing off of this on. And then go piece by piece and actually apply it so we can see what his arguments are based off of and what actually is being said in this article. Shout out to Leden IO for bitcoin backed loans. This is a great tool for those who want to get a little bit of access to their bitcoin without actually selling it. I've been a customer of theirs specifically because they made it through a very vicious bear market, especially when a ton of the crypto space actually liquidated and lots of these companies were invested in each other and they were doing really stupid things, led in, was boring and out of the news cycle the entire time. They do proof of reserves twice a year, they publish open books every month. And the final straw that got me to actually try them out was when they got rid of like three other little features and like a savings account that paid interest and all of this stuff. And they were like, we don't need any of this. We just want to do bitcoin backed loans. Simple, easy to use, boring, transparent. That's a recipe for a company that I'm willing to work with. Check them out. We have a special link for you and a discount right in the show notes. So as I can kind of pick out of this, there's basically two premises and they're both very poor understandings and extrapolations from just Twitter slogans. So the first is bitcoin is for enemies. And he is suggesting that what that means is that you're supposed to imagine living in a world where nobody is your friend and, and every single interaction is adversarial, that trust is a defect, that it's just a weakness waiting to be exploited and therefore any sense of cooperation is just, quote, delayed defection. Now, we've talked a lot about trust and the various game theory and everything around this whole concept and how you build trust and cooperation in a society on this show. And I would argue that I have a, that this show, which we're, I don't know, 1400 episodes deep in and has been running for eight years, ought to have a pretty decent map to go by what a lot of other bitcoiners think and what people generally think about bitcoin and what the arguments and theories behind bitcoin and what its purpose is and what the meaning of lines like bitcoin is for enemies actually is. And I don't think you could find. And I say that because this is bitcoin. Audible. This is not just me, right? Like I, I read, I've read almost a thousand works of other people making these explanations and people arguing against it and all of that stuff. So I'd say it's a pretty well rounded scope of the theories and the ideas and the reasons behind bitcoin. And I have never heard this, I have never explained this. This is not what bitcoin is for enemies means. I don't know of a single piece. I don't know of a single piece. I am, I claim to be and believe I have good reason to say I am the Most well read bitcoiner in the space or at least I'm at least in the top 10. I have never heard that argument made. So we'll start with that. But let's just unpack. What does bitcoin is for enemies mean? And you know, since he brought up, you know, Nash Equilibria and the prisoner's dilemma, like if you actually look at the game theory, like this is, this is basic kind of systems engineering and game theory, like how do you think about the, what these, how these things apply is these are literally games that are designed explicitly to create a situation where, where you are rewarded for defecting and punished for cooperating. And so what happens in that scenario? Like he literally like this is what you can just go read what we mean. Like what, what is the, what is the prisoner's dilemma? It is specifically about when incentives are misaligned because it's not about do two thieves always stab each other in the back. It's about when they are rewarded for stabbing each other in the back and we a specific scenario in which they are at odds even though they don't want to stab each other in the back. How do we fix that problem? It's, it's literally designed that way. It's a thought experiment because these disincentives and things do exist at places in the world. These principal agent problems exist all over the place. They're not the norm of human society, but they exist. It's like saying that, it's like saying that like, oh well, you know, we can cure diseases and then talking about how people get sick and bringing up scenarios in which people could get sick. And it's like, okay, well how do we defend against this? It's like, well, we should wash our hands and we should take vitamin C and we create this environment. And then somebody coming in and said like this is all just a lie. People aren't sick all the time, health is normal. Or if you create a better way to engineer a house because it stands up to stronger winds and it's like, oh well, if a hurricane was this bad and this was the situation we're going to, we're going to create this, this hypothetical situation is like, oh wow, this new type of construction would not only be cost effective, but it would stand up to even worse wins and somebody comes in, it's like this new engineering is a lie. There's not hurricanes every day. They would have you believe that, that a hurricane comes through three times every morning and just destroys society. No, we're literally saying that in the situation where you can't trust, in the situation where the hurricane does come, in the situation where the disease does arise, because all of those things actually fucking exist in the world, what do you do? And how do you create a system that continues to work or a building structure or a health environment to allow prosperity and cooperation to persist through those situations? The comment or the slogan, Bitcoin is for enemies is. Has nothing to do with suggesting that everybody is everybody else's enemy and there is no cooperation. It's got to do with the fact that there are times when you cannot trust somebody and how unbelievably dangerous it is for that person, for someone that you cannot trust, to have control over a system that you are using to interact with them. And again, a game is the perfect way to actually illustrate this, is when you have, you know, you have a team, you're on a football team, right? Is you cooperate and you work together with everybody on your team, and then everybody on the opposing team cooperates and they all work together. Well, then you can play a game. You can have good sportsmanship. But what if the referee is on the other team? They are both in the game and they are judging and altering the outcome of the game without actually playing within the realm of gameplay? How do you create a system where the referee can actually be an independent party or where if the referee is on the other team, you can check their work and know for a fact that you can trust them and therefore you can have good sportsmanship and you can trust that the game was played fairly regardless of the outcome. That is what it means for Bitcoin is for enemies. And I find it funny that he brought up, you know, this administration and how terrible it is. And that was one of the things. I scrolled through his Twitter feed just a little bit because I didn't remember who Mike Brock was. Or I don't know, maybe I'm not sure if I've ever interacted with him or knew of him. I immediately thought he was the other Brock, but apparently this guy doesn't like the Trump administration and he kind of mentions it in this article. And I was like, oh, okay, well, that makes sense. And it's really funny. So you're saying that you can't cooperate with the Trump administration, that you don't trust them. Well, what do you do? You're going to keep using dollars that they're printing by the trillions every single year? Well, you. Here you have a situation that you say doesn't exist or that, you know, you can just get along with everybody. But then you, here's your Twitter feed with all this stuff about these evil fascists and these terrible people and this corrupt administration that's plotting to destroy America. Okay, well what could you use that you could know and you could even interact with them and you just knew that they had no control over it. You knew that they could not alter the rules without your consent. It's not the dollar. They run it. They're printing trillions of dollars every single year. They're putting it into all of their programs. They're literally taking your actual resources and diverting it away by effing with the record keeping system so that they are the ones that are diverting your time and energy to whatever service or plan or vision they have to implement in the world. That's what money printing does. It messes with the record keeping system of who has actually provided something to another person. And it's, it's a means to shift the actual resources, the houses, the land, the ownership of the companies into the hands of people who had nothing to do with actually creating it so that they can spend it, so that they can actually use up those resources for what they seek to achieve in the world. The only money he can use where he knows they can't do that is Bitcoin. Thus Bitcoin is for him and his enemies. The idea that Bitcoin is for enemies does not imply in any way that everybody in the world is your enemy. It is, it means exactly what it says. It means that if someone is your enemy, Bitcoin is a thing where you can both independently trust it and therefore the potential for cooperation actually exists even among you and your enemies. And specifically somebody that you hate or somebody that hates you can't do anything about the fact that Bitcoin works for them exactly the same way as it does for you. It is not about centralized, literally the opposite of centralized power or fascism. It's about a provable fair playing ground where everyone is explicitly and verifiably equal before the rules of the system so that we can actually establish market trust and cooperation in long term arrangements that don't have this prisoner's dilemma to prevent disincentives from arising. Now, most of the article is actually based on this single line and this, I mean, frankly, kind of ridiculous interpretation of it. But the other one is, have fun staying poor. This is the only other real premise that he brings up. And in both situations he says, seriously, look it up. They say this, and that kind of cracks me up because it's like one of those things that, I mean, listen, if you're getting your interpretation of what, of what a tool is based on the lowest common denominator of the random crap that you see people saying on Twitter, on social media. You know, if you, if you interpreted the, the purpose of the Internet that way in 1990s, what would, what would you assume? If you just went to the Internet and interacted with a bunch of the people and the systems that were there, and specifically you just kind of went to the shallowest version of it, you're drowned in spam pornography. And then scammers who were just buying domains and sitting on them and then turning around and selling them for millions of dollars during the bubble. I could easily have written a equally shallow article about this is what the Internet is. Seriously, go look it up now. I would say it's rather telling that there is nothing of real consequence said about Bitcoin in this article. I mean, like I said, essentially the two premises are very bad misinterpretations of two mottos that are shared around on Twitter. And he just kind of hand waves away Nash, Equilibria and Prisoner's Dilemma as if, as if this is all explained. The only reason that any of that is even part of the conversation is because people say Bitcoin is for enemies. But let's actually address the have fun staying poor based off the premise that he, that he gives. Let's, let's take him at his word and then just look at have fun staying poor where it came from and why it arose. And I think the best way to illustrate this is with a story. So you have a friend and he's complaining about how he's sick all the time and he constantly throws up and he doesn't feel any better. And like, you know, he'll have very short term success. He does the. He tries these like crazy things like drinking. He drinks a lot of water in the afternoons or whatever and tries to get a good night's sleep. And that seems to work for a little bit. But then he wakes up again and, and it just seems to start back over after, after breakfast he starts feeling terrible again. And there's nothing, there's nothing that ever seems to make it better. In fact, it seems to slowly and continuously progress to being worse and worse and worse. And he feels like there's nothing that can be done about it. And he complains all the time and he talks about it with all his friends. They all have the exact same problem and it's just prevalent and it's just awful. And he can't take it anymore. And so you do a little investigation, and you look into it, and you find out that the drink. He has, like, a favorite drink that he drinks every morning, and it's got Clorox in it. And you're like, wait. Oh, God. You're literally drinking this horrible chemical. And you look. And all their friends are also drinking the same drink every morning. And they, you know, put on the label, man, this is great for breakfast. It's the perfect breakfast drink. And so you go to him with this very happy news that all he has to do is quit drinking Clorox in the morning, and he will likely get a lot better. In fact, he may stop throwing up and feeling like this entirely. And he just doesn't believe you. He doesn't believe you at all. He says, that's insane. And he goes and tells his friends. And all his friends are like, oh, my God. That's so ridiculous. Ridiculous. This is. This drink is literally good for breakfast. It says so on the can. And you're trying to explain it. Like, listen, guys, it's. I mean, look at the ingredients. It says so right on the bottle. This has Clorox in it. I mean, what. What are the symptoms of drinking too much Clorox? It's throwing up. It's feeling fatigued. It's this, that, and the other. And you, you know, explain all of the symptoms, and they're like, you're an idiot. You have no clue what you're talking about. I cannot believe that you're even suggesting this. This. You're literally an anti breakfast drinker, and you just shrug it off. You're like, okay, whatever. I don't. I. Jesus Christ, man. And then you're hanging out with him again a couple of days later, and it's in the afternoon, and he's like, man, I'm starting to feel a lot better. And, you know, I have to think. I think things are looking up. And you're like, well, have you stopped drinking the drink? He's like, no, but I've had a lot of water today. I really think the secret is drinking a lot of water. It's like, well, that's probably because you're diluting the Clorox and you're, you know, getting some of it out of your system. But likely you're. You're gonna feel bad again tomorrow morning because you're gonna still drink the Clorox, right? He's like, I swear to God, you have gotta stop harping on this. Stupid thing or what is it you would just believe that all food is evil and everything I drink and eat is the worst thing ever and there's no such thing as health. It's like, no, I don't believe that. I think that you're drinking Clorox and you should stop drinking Clorox because you. You keep coming over to my house and complaining that you're sick and you just threw up in my toilet again, and I have to clean it up. And this goes on for weeks and weeks and months and months until he doesn't want to be your friend anymore. Until he and his friends get together and they start posting about you on social media and they say you're a fascist and you're an idiot and you have no idea what you're talking about. And you literally can't think clearly about what is obvious that. That these cans say, look, look at the data. It's right there on the back of the can. It says, this is good for breakfast. And how dangerous these stupid ideas are that you're spreading around and it's going to boil the oceans. Why? I don't know. But that's just. What if you believe something wrong, you're going to destroy the whole planet. And you put up with this shit for months and months and months until you send him a message one day and you're asking how he's doing and he says, don't talk to me, you monster of a human being, you sick, awful person. And then finally you say, you know what? Have fun throwing up your guts every morning for the rest of your life, you stupid piece of shit. That's the story of have fun staying poor. And anybody who has ever tried to explain bitcoin to somebody else knows exactly what I am talking about. And notice when that phrase actually arose on Twitter, it was not. It was not used for normal people asking normal questions. It was used in response to people saying hard money is going to destroy the world. It was used in response to the Chinese central bank bureaucrat who came out and said bitcoin was literally going to destroy the planet. It was used in response to the articles that said bitcoin was going to boil the oceans. It was used in response to the universal study that literally said in 2020, Bitcoin was going to use more energy than the entire world can produce. It's used in response to morons who say stupid shit like bitcoin is for fascists. To be perfectly honest. Now, there are plenty of idiots on Twitter who just use it when somebody's like, so what is this bitcoin really thing, really? I don't know if I want to invest in it. And then I'll go in and I'll scroll through and eventually there will be somebody say, have fun staying poor. And it's like, you, you moron, this person's asking legitimate question. They're actually interested and. Or just simply skeptical, which doesn't. Everybody was skeptical. You ought to be. If you're not a little bit skeptical of bitcoin the first time you hear about it, honestly, there's something wrong with you. There are plenty of literal retards who have no idea what they're doing. Also couldn't explain it, which is probably why they say have fun staying poor instead of because they don't know what else to say. But none of that had anything to do with where the word, where the phrase came from and why it was used. It was used in the face of utter idiocy and absolute blind belligerence, which at that point, what else do you do? You just say, have fun staying poor, because ain't nobody got time for that. But I also find it interesting that he's bringing up having fun or have fun staying poor today day when I haven't even seen anybody post it in I don't know, a long time like this was have fun staying poor was like 2020 and 2021. Kind of felt like it died out pretty quick, to be perfectly honest. Granted, I'm sure it'll come back in, you know, another hype cycle. But Brock here has like four paragraphs on this whole. It's all cruelty and it's all, oh, they're hiding behind a joke. And what they really want is for everybody to suffer and die and notice yet again that this is just some personification of the system that is bitcoin based on what someone said on social media. Again, going back, there's really not anything of concrete argument to unpack here when it comes as it comes to bitcoin. The. The premise of all of this is this was said on Twitter, or look it up, they say this and then where he fills in the gap of what this means and he proceeds to not know what those things actually mean. I do find something interesting because he does. This is the closest thing I think you can get to claiming a nature of the system. So here's the. Here's the paragraph. And for the sake of trying to unpack the clearest thing to an argument here, we will actually argue on the nature of the premise. So, quote. But here's the trick. If you build systems premised on the assumption that everyone is your enemy, you create the very conditions where everyone becomes your enemy. The prophecy fulfills itself. Trust becomes impossible. Not because humans are inherently untrustworthy, but because you've built an architecture that punishes trust and rewards defection. And then you point to the wreckage and say, see, I told you humans can't cooperate. Good thing we have Bitcoin. So this is the closest thing I think we can say is a concrete statement about the nature of Bitcoin, about something that Bitcoin does, is that you've built an architecture that punishes trust and rewards defection. And on this case, he cannot more objectively have gotten it perfectly backwards. Because the entire purpose and design of Bitcoin is to get around an architecture that punishes trust and rewards defection by rewarding trust and punishing defection. Like that's literally what the system itself is designed to do. From an economic perspective, that's the only reason blocks keep coming in, is because it, it literally objectively is the exact opposite of that line. Otherwise there is no reason miners would keep actually being honest. There's zero reason. You can have a whole bunch of people that you don't know that may be your enemies that live in completely different countries and completely different political jurisdictions and that they could mine for bitcoin and that you could know that they're probably not going to try to undo your transaction or censor anybody. Because the system literally rewards cooperation among the rules and punishes defectors with an enormous cost. That if there is any other thing to, to take away from this, that is the literal raison d' etre of every design choice in Bitcoin, whereas fiat is literally the opposite, is that even if you want to cooperate, even if you can get a group big enough together to share a cultural and political dream to, to try to keep everything incentives aligned so that people want to cooperate and they, they actually have the potential to cooperate with each other. Is that you've created an architecture where it's really, really easy to just print and indebted the country to trillions of dollars and nobody really feels it until kind of like one or two years down the road. And that's long enough to just tell them that no, it wasn't my fault. And that will continue on an exponential trend until the society dies in about 80 years. If you give people the power to literally, to manipulate the record keeping system, to manipulate the apparent history of the economic trust and arrangements and cooperations that actually occurred in the market because they do naturally emerge, because people do naturally work together. They are courageous, they do want to do The. The natural state of humanity and of basic game theory is that cooperation is a much, much greater reward than conflict. All the systems of big governance and monetary and agreements of property rights, all of it is about absolving conflict, resolving conflict before it emerges, preventing conflict from actually taking place. Because on a small scale, on a local scale, cooperation is the more optimal scenario. This is why tribes exist, this is why families exist. This is why humanity has only and ever survived all of this chaos. It's always been a question from an architectural standpoint is, does it scale? Can you scale it past 200 or 300 people where you get these impressions? Actually, Mike Brock's impersonation or personification of, you know, people, quote, unquote, people in Bitcoin who are this person in his head who, who laugh at people being poor and dying and think that everyone don't ever want to have friends or cooperate with anybody and think the whole world is their enemies. This is a perfect example. Example because he doesn't know he. This. There's millions of people that he doesn't know. He doesn't know anything about me, but this is his impression of me. This is the picture that he has in his head and a perfect example of how do you create a system in which me and him can live in the same world? And that he doesn't come and kill me because he thinks I'm a fascist, that he can't manipulate the system to his benefit because he thinks fascists shouldn't have money or fascist fascists should, you know, have to do this or they should be constrained to spend money they can't invest in Bitcoin. I am outside of the scope of Dunbar's number. For him to be able to actually have any meaningful relationship with me or to understand me or the reasons I just do things, or the reasons I make decisions. And thus we need a system or some sort of a system, a culture, a religion, a governance system, a monetary system that will work in spite of our. Our differences, in spite of our incapacity to correctly understand each other. Because I live in a different world where I see things from a very fundamental, fundamentally different viewpoint and he sees from a completely different viewpoint. It's such a perfect example. I mean, like, you just read his comments. He's. He says, oh, people aren't in conflict and people just naturally want to cooperate. But you read the whole comment thread underneath this thing and he's Just arguing with, with people. It's like, okay, okay, well let's say, let's assume these arguments are real things and there are conflicts in the world. Now what do you do? But there's a lot of kind of like subtle unpacking of the worldview because it's perfect example, right Is clearly he and I have a very different worldview and fundamental premises. Like he, he says multiple times in this that you know, the people who have capital are going to be the rich ones and they're going to get even more capital. And it's like, no, you're mistaking. This goes all the way back to the fundamental argument about what money is. And clearly he has, he has what I consider the deeply, deeply backwards view of what money is and how it works. Money is a record keeping system. In fact, if you have a lot of money, you don't have any capital. You've done just the opposite of that is you have provably created capital for other people. Like, I mean just think about If I build 20 lawnmowers and then sell them and then I have money. All I have is a record of the value of those lawnmowers according to the genuine cooperation and the voluntary agreement of 10 people who made them. But I have no lawnmowers. I have no capital generate, I have no income generating assets here. To the contrary, I have lowered the price of lawnmowers in the market because I have added to the supply. It is exactly when I do the opposite. It's when I take that money and then go buy up the capital that I am actually doing harm or not, not necessarily doing harm, but that I am taking resources from the economy. This is exactly why you want hard money, is because you want the money to do as good as it possibly can all by itself when it comes to holding its, its relative value, its proportional value to the economy so that people don't waste the resources. You know, like if my money's going to make me, quote, unquote, 5% more in purchasing power every year because other people are doing things, then it's really stupid for me to go waste a bunch of lawnmowers or to go buy up a lot of land for no good reason at all, I better have a very, really good reason to get rid of my hard money and use up actual resources to take a house off the market that somebody else wants for their home. I mean, that's literally what BlackRock and all of these huge financial institutions do, is they take the stuff out of the economy. And then own it and then rent it back to everybody. Not because they're productive assets, but just because they want to park their wealth. And to do so, they can't use money. Money, they literally have to take the stuff, the capital of society, and they get rewarded for that for no reason at all. Because the price of those things constantly go up faster than the actual productive capacity of the country. Like, if you want to know which system is destroying people who work on wages and destroying the poor and causing bigger gaps between the rich and the poor. There's no question. There's no ambiguity. We've looked at what we've got. The results. You've got the fucking chart. For 50 years, this is exactly what's been going on. It's been harder for everybody indefinitely. There is one thing, that one type of money that causes things to get infinitely more expensive. Even though all of us work our ass off every single day to make things better, to produce things faster, and to make things cheaper to make, yet it never produces more affordable stuff. And the people on wages, the people on retirement, get destroyed. How easy is it to get a house today versus getting a house 40 or 50 years ago? What's the average age? Oh, it's like twice the average age of what it used to be. Well, there you go. That's exactly what fiat does. We're trying to fix it. Stupid. I also find it funny that he constantly brings up, like, cooperation and trust, and then he says, like. Mark remarks that, like the implication here says Bitcoin is a lie because it claims truths that cannot be. That trust is defect, that property is virtue. Buddy. You can't cooperate or share stuff unless you have property. It's not sharing if it's not mine. It's like, it's like being nice when you don't actually mean it. Mean it. That's not being nice. That's just lying. Like, if I say I love you, but I literally despise you, like I actually despise you, that's lying. That's not showing love. And in the exact same way, quote, unquote, sharing by letting you have something that isn't a cost to me, that isn't something that belongs to me. I can't. I can't share something that isn't mine. I cannot cooperate with someone else's time or energy or life. If I say, here, you can have this, but it doesn't belong to me. I'm not sharing it because it doesn't belong to me. And if nobody owns anything, it's completely Meaningless that somebody is offering it to somebody else. Cooperation requires property, requires self ownership as a prerequisite to the concept of cooperation and sharing. So, yeah, property is a virtue because cooperation and sharing and trusting each other is a virtue. And you can't do those things unless you own yourself and the things that sustain your own life. And then he reveals again his bias, which I don't understand how he was ever a bitcoiner. He comes down, like, mocking the idea that inflation is theft. Of course it is. Of course it is. Like, what is counterfeit? What is counterfeit? Why do you call it counterfeit? Is counterfeit a good word or a bad word? What does it mean when somebody prints money while everybody else works for money? Like, this is basic shit. Like how? Like, I find it really hard to believe. I really don't quite believe the story that he's a quote unquote reformed bitcoiner. If he literally thinks that counterfeiting is good as long as only a certain few people do it. And then to literally say that the people who right now have the capacity to counterfeit by subject, by mere coincidence, of the stupid system we have where certain people are allowed to counterfeit and certain people aren't. He talks about hating them, how he doesn't trust them and our current government is corrupt, but then turns around and mocks the idea that there's government tyranny. In the very next line in his article. Whenever you scroll down in his articles, just like four or five down, he's talking about the end of democracy and the revenge of the technocrats and not being able to trust and how they're destroying the system and they're running the government. It's like, okay, well, how could we have a money that didn't Money, the systemic, the base layer of societal cooperation and the ability to distribute and keep records on who is earning, who is creating and who is destroying resources. How could we keep that system from being corrupted by the evil technocrats and the people trying to destroy democracy and the fascists taking over the government? Well, it would be as if we would need something like a money for enemies, where it was still the same rules, no matter who was running any other particular part of society. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe you'd need something like bitcoin. Because I wake up in the morning and I don't have to think about what they're doing with the money printer. In fact, when they get worse with the money printer, I wake up encouraged to work harder and earn more money so that I can save More literally produce more useful stuff for society and defer my consumption. So I'm not wasting stuff that other people need because I know the value of dollars are going to fall in respect to the value of the bitcoin I'm able to save today. That sounds like a pretty aligned incentive for me and society to be on the same page about what's good for everybody. And the real kind of like piece de resistance of completely understanding, of completely misunderstanding what money is and resources and everything, like the foundation of simple economics is quote, so this is. I'll actually read the whole paragraph, but strip away the economic mysticism and here's what quote hard money actually means. It systematically advantages existing wealth holders and and disadvantages workers and debtors. It makes wealth accumulation easier and wage earning harder. It turns the economy into a game where those who already have capital watch it appreciate while those who work for wages watch their purchasing power erode. Okay, there's a lot to unpack in this because this is self contradictory, like multiple times. First, workers and debtors are opposites. A worker is somebody who is producing something. A debtor is somebody who has consumed and hasn't produced yet. It is bad for debtors, but it is explicitly good for workers. The dynamics of money are the opposite for those two people. If you consume now and you're going to work for it later, which means you're wasting capital and you have to pay it back. You owe somebody something. You took, somebody took your lawnmower and they're not going to give it back to you. And they haven't literally, they literally haven't even paid for your lawnmower yet. You're just out a lawnmower and somebody's promising to pay it back later. That's a destroyer of resources. That is a destroyer of capital. Yeah, they have to pay it back. Yeah, hard money is bad for them because society gets more valuable over time, naturally. Because we build stuff and we make stuff better. And that lawnmower was really important. That lawnmower was useful capital and you wasted it. You better have a damn good reason why you took it from other people. Yes, you can't have a society that goes infinitely into debt and where everybody's in debt permanently and at all times for seemingly no reason at all, and at costs that make absolutely no sense in a hard money society. Why? Because that destroys society and it's a really stupid idea. But workers, quite to the contrary, are extraordinarily benefited by this system because stuff gets cheaper over time. Exactly to the opposite of quote, unquote they already have capital and watch it appreciate, while those who work for wages watch their purchasing power erode. What the. Do you know what hard money is? We're literally talking about the opposite. Please. Somebody who in Bitcoin for the last five or six years has seen their purchasing power erode over time. And how does this. This is. You're literally talking about a problem of fiat money, something where people on wages get destroyed. You're right. When purchasing power erodes over time, indefinitely and for the entirety of the monetary system, like systematically, they get inflated out of being able to afford stuff. Yeah, it's terrible for wages, yes, it's terrible for workers. But that's literally not what hard money does. The reality of society, of a market economy is that things get cheaper to make over time. And all you have to do is count the number of hours. Just measure everything, ignore money, measure in the number of hours what it takes to produce or accomplish a random task or produce an amount of food, anything over time. How like to solve a problem or to provide something for someone. Does it take more time or less time today than it did 30 years ago? Virtually nothing. Nothing takes more time today than it did 30 years ago. Nothing. That's the whole point of the economy. So everything is actually cheaper when it comes to the amount of time and capital it takes to produce. Because that's literally all we do any day in and day out is we go to work to make things better, to make things more productive and to produce, produce more, more efficiently. That's the whole purpose of accomplishing any and all tasks and doing anything. Nobody wants to unsolve a problem. Nobody gets paid to go burn down a house that the person lives in because the person wants the house. They pay to build the house, they pay to repair the house. Nobody goes to work to break the alternator on their car with a screwdriver. They want their car to work. So they replace alternators, they fix tires, they build new machines that do these jobs quicker. Then when a problem seems to kind of get solved, they move on to another more advanced or more complex problem to build solutions for. That is what society does. Fundamentally, we cooperate to make things better. And this would, if you had hard money, naturally and forever make things easier to afford, you could not have more beautifully and ridiculously missed the whole point of all of this. If you somehow think hard money is the way that purchasing power is eroded and that Somehow the last 70 years, the last 120 years of Fiat isn't an example of eroding Purchasing power. Because we have examples of, of both of those sitting right next to each other. And it could not be more perfect. Like there's no, there's no realm of existence in which you could objectively look at the data and the reality of this and think that fiat money is the one that helps your purchasing power and hard money is the one that erodes it. That, that particular. I was just like what. That one was just wild. Like I think every sentence in this has, has a literal self contradiction. It makes wealth accumulation easier and wage earning harder. No, wage earning is the only is the wealth accumulation. Like you're not, you can't just like buy capital. You can't just like buy a house. And the house is going to be worth twice as much in four years. And you did jack all for it and you got it for a, for debt. You're literally a debtor. You've never even produced the value of a house in the economy. You just took a house from the economy and you only paid 5% interest on the mortgage and now it's worth twice as much. And now you just have like $200,000 in equity for no fucking reason at all. You didn't do shit. In fact the house is in worse condition. Things are rotting, the shower's broken or it's like leaking a little bit. Like literally the house. You used the house and it got worse over that time. That literally only happens on an inflation standard. On a fiat standard, on a hard money standard. Literally the exact opposite is the case is the wage earner who doesn't blindly go into debt and use up a bunch of resources that he doesn't need or that he hasn't actually earned. He profits massively because he's the one producing stuff for society. And hard money rewards that. The simple fact of the matter is that fiat rewards the using of resources without actually needing to produce something positive with it to have a net return on, on those resources. Which means it, it actually pays for the blanket destruction and non replacement of resources that are needed for society. Whereas hard money is literally. It's not even an incentive to the opposite. It's just that society has a natural incentive to the opposite of not destroying resources. And hard money correctly prices it. So contrary to hard money being an oligarchy in a white paper, it's literally a no garchy. This is actually the point of the system is that nobody is in charge and the rules of the money are the rules of the money. No matter whether you're the President, you're a 13 year old kid from Ghana. You're a worker, you're a debtor, you're a capital accumulator, you're an investor, you're an entrepreneur. Doesn't matter. The rules of the money are the money and everyone plays the game. And the game of society is the game of cooperating is more valuable than defecting. The game of society is a game of trusting people. And it is explicitly because you have honest and predictable and verifiable rules, you actually have the rule of law that cooperation is able to emerge specifically among people who otherwise wouldn't trust each other or might be enemies. He denigrates Bitcoin multiple times immediately after complaining about a problem that bitcoin literally fixes. Gotta say, it feels a little bit like I told you not to drink the Clorox and you keep drinking it and then you call me a fascist. My man, if you never understood any of the basics, like any of the simple understandings of why a money that someone else cannot counterfeit is a positive thing or what even money does and what the economy is and where, like what wealth accumulation and capital is, then I guess it makes sense that the article about Bitcoin as a lie is just the entire premise is based on a couple of shallow slogans that he found on Twitter and then proceeded to build some sort of a weird ideology around it and doesn't actually have anything to say about Bitcoin itself in any concrete or objective sense at all. Basically, you can read this entire article and you'll learn exactly nothing about Bitcoin. You'll have no non contradictory viewpoints on any particular piece of any of this and all you'll come away with is this is how bitcoiners are and therefore Bitcoin is bad that he's angry about it and that you can find people who say these things on Twitter. Yep. Well that's a revelation. You can find stupid people on Twitter. Or of course you can find a thing that people say and completely not understand it and then not like them. Yeah, well tell me what else is new? Anyhoo, that was Bitcoin is a Lie by a Mike Brock A shout out to Leden IO to PubKey app p u b k y app to the HRF and their amazing work in fighting for freedom around the world and chroma for light health and for reminding me that I need to put all my nightshades because I'm staring at a screen and it just got dark. Details, discounts and goodies are in the show notes. We will continue our search for better FUD and new and fresh arguments against bitcoin and if you find any that are novel or fun, you send them my way. I would love to read it. I am the best read bitcoiner and I'd like to keep it that way. And as for Mike Brock, since he seems to be really enjoying his his anger at bitcoin and thinking that fiat is a solution and inflation is good, I guess he can have fun. I guess he can have fun and he will also stay poor, unfortunately. And that's not a joke, it's actually true and it's kind of sad. But I genuinely wish him the best. I hope for his own sake that he actually accumulates a bunch of capital that he doesn't need like businesses and things to keep his purchasing power instead of saving in fiat, even though it explicitly misaligns his goals and society's needs and makes him a consumer for no reason, wasting resources. I still hope he does it to protect himself, but for me I'd rather just save in bitcoin. Till next time guys. I am Guy Swan and that's my two SATs. Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right. Isaac Asimov.