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- [00:07]
David
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all. All the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be. Probably should be.
- [00:37]
Marty
What a week in Austin, Texas, gentlemen.
- [00:39]
David
Oh, what a week.
- [00:42]
Marty
Did we do something here? What do we do with this Coinbase de minimis tax exemption? You think it's a big thing that we made some noise this week about it?
- [00:53]
David
I think your tweet did a lot of really good stuff, you know, and I'm really just honored to be here with, with the Alex Jones of bitcoin. Although if I had my way, it'd be the real Alex Jones. But I'll. I'll settle for. For the jv.
- [01:06]
Marty
Hey, we're going to get. We're going to get Alex here. Yeah, no, I think it was important for the. The broader bitcoin community and bitcoiners generally, particularly in America, to. To know that this stuff's happening behind the scenes. And I wasn't. So I had one source reach out last week and was like, okay, this is interesting. Can't really confirm it. And then I had somebody reach out a couple of days ago.
- [01:33]
David
So you had multiple independent sources come and tell you this? Yes, yeah.
- [01:39]
Marty
Yeah.
- [01:40]
David
I mean, it's been very interesting to see. You know, you obviously have been a sort of journalist and commentator in bitcoin for like a decade plus. You know, your incentive to lie, as a lot of people are accusing you of, is very low. Like, you already have, you know, a successful podcast and.
- [02:02]
Marty
And this isn't my beat policy.
- [02:04]
David
Isn't really your beat policy.
- [02:05]
Marty
Is not my beat.
- [02:06]
David
The incentive for you just to like. I guess the accusation from. From the detractors is that you just woke up on a random morning and said, I'm just going to make shit up about Coinbase to just be problem. And I find you very credible and I think the sort of reluctance to go with something like this until multiple kind of disconnected parties tell you it's a very high degree of confidence that there's a there there and that that's true. I will say the silver lining of Coinbase's response is that they are not only Doubling down on your claims being a lie. But, you know, they're doubling down, at least in public, on De minimis being something they care about. And I, like, I'm not, to my knowledge, I don't know if there's been, you know, like, for example, we did a, you know, an open letter from industry members basically telling Congress, hey, after Clarity is done, we think the most important thing to work on next is tax treatment for Bitcoin and making it money and removing the de minimis, or creating a de minimis exemption and removing tax and obligations for reporting on everyday transactions. This is a very innocuous, like, letter. You know, we were not, you know, beating the maxi drum. I think we maybe even had language in there about, like, other digital assets getting a de minimis exemption. Trying to build, like, a big tent. Extremely uncontroversial. And Coinbase didn't sign it, you know, and maybe they don't, you know, whatever it is.
- [03:44]
Marty
I wasn't even aware of that.
- [03:45]
David
Yeah.
- [03:45]
Marty
When was this?
- [03:46]
David
It's like, two months ago.
- [03:48]
Marty
Okay.
- [03:49]
David
Like, end of last year, early this year, you know, and, like, now they're all saying. All the executives on Twitter are saying, no, we do, in fact, care about this. And great. So now we have that sort of on record. And like, you showed me this morning, you saw before I did, but somebody from the Coinbase team responded to Connor, my colleague, who kind of proposed in the wake of all of this and said, okay, why don't we do a joint roundtable where Coinbase and BPI kind of present a unified front and we talk to the key members, you know, in a public setting, about why De Minimis is so important for the future of this country. And they responded this morning and said that they do that. So, you know, I guess time will. Time will tell, but it will be a lot harder to sort of squirrel away from. I mean, I've read this as a public commitment form from Coinbase to championing this cause, you know, after Clarity is. Is passed. And so, you know, I think that's more. That is. I. I had no. I was aware of no such commitment from Coinbase prior to this. This sort of, you know, shit on Twitter.
- [04:59]
Marty
Yeah, I didn't know they didn't sign that letter. That's. That's another. This is another. Again, this isn't my beat. Okay. I mean, I do talk. I've had Connor on.
- [05:07]
David
Right.
- [05:08]
Marty
I go down to DC more often now because Pub Key is there. PubKey DC. But honestly, like, the interworkings of Capitol Hill is Something that doesn't really interest me. I like focusing on the technology, on the investing side, on the free market side, not the swamp side of bitcoin, which you have immersed yourself in.
- [05:26]
David
Yeah, sure have.
- [05:31]
Marty
But I think this week, I think it proves something. If bitcoiners drive a hard line, they make noise and they say, hey, no, I want this thing, people will respond. And I think it's a good lesson. I'd be interested to get your thoughts on this, because I think with Trump too, with this administration, particularly after the inauguration last year and all the promises that were made in the lead up to the election, it seems like priorities got a bit flipped. Where strategic bitcoin reserve seemed to have been the main priority. But as soon as he got in, you had this overwhelming lobbying effort from the likes of Coinbase, Ripple, A16Z and a large lobbyist consortium, disparate consortium that have a lot of money, much more money than bitcoiners are spending on lobbying and the optics outside looking in, or that they were able to use that money to reprioritize what gets done. So you get genius. Now, clarity. And sbr, right, is a distant third.
- [06:39]
David
Well, and that's sort of like part of, I think, the semantic. I don't want to say trick, but I think a lot of the response to this is just this sort of interesting exercise in semantics where say, well, no, we've been consistently advocating for de minimis. It's like, okay, great, you've been telling people it's a good thing, but there is such limited opportunity to change laws in America. It's such a sort of herculean undertaking. And so, you know, if you're saying, okay, like, I think when, you know, when Senator Lummis, you know, came onto the Digital Asset Subcommittee, you know, my understanding is that, you know, she kind of proffered four priorities for crypto in America in the following order. Strategic bitcoin reserve tax reform. So, you know, the double tax on miners, the. The, you know, tax on everyday bitcoin transactions, you know, stablecoin regulation and market structure, like, in that order. And, you know, the crypto lobby basically came back and said, we think these are all wonderful priorities. Thanks for your leadership. We'd like them in reverse order, please. And so I think that's how you get to a situation where, you know, it might not be. It might be true that, you know, Coinbase speak. It's like, you know, Brian was speaking very positively about the sbr. I remember at, you know, at Davos, he was talking about it I think Brian, I sort of give Brian in particular the benefit of the doubt on some level. I think he is running a sprawling empire and there are so many people working at every discrete vertical within that business. The idea that Brian is sort of heavily involved in managing the day to day of the policy operations of Coinbase is, you know, just difficult to believe given how many other things Coinbase is, is doing. So I kind of chalk a lot of this up to two things, I think. One is, you know, a degree of like principal agent problem. And, and two, you know, the argument that I think bitcoiners might not like hearing, but it's just, I think fair and honestly, I'd respect Coinbase a lot more if they just made this argument was that, you know, they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to, you know, engage in actions that, you know, benefit the company. And, you know, I can certainly understand the business logic that market structure for a Coinbase shareholder is a lot more important than de minimis exemption. But I think that, you know, my, my point here really is that, you know, saying that you like something is, does not a sort of campaign for getting it done. Make like you, you have to expend political capital and like genuinely try and, and there has been, I have seen no organized effort from the cryptocurrency lobby on a de minimis exemption. I have not personally heard Coinbase representatives, you know, say the things that were reported. I have definitely heard that attitude expressed by people in crypto policy writ large, you know, that, that de minimis is sort of a waste of time, that it's like a non issue, that nobody's using Bitcoin for transactions. So, you know, let's just not prioritize this. Like, the incentive structure for the crypto lobby is just very clear. Like you're running a, you know, meme coin casino. Like you want the meme coin casino laws to be written in your favor before you, you engage in sort of the, you know, what I'm sure some people look at as just like sort of the esoteric, like, you know, pro freedom stuff. But I do believe Brian when he says, like, hey, I've told my team the SBR is important. I've told my team de minimis is important. What I haven't seen is any evidence of actually expending political capital to try to make these things a priority and get them done.
- [10:42]
Marty
Yeah, I mean, we gotta dive into this because that's like the big thing. Again, I don't like dealing in the swamp and outside Looking in, it's like you have this crypto lobby spending a lot of political capital and things that are counter, not, maybe not counter to Bitcoin, but just like, as a bitcoiner, it's like, I don't care about Coinbase's ability to list and dump tokens on retail. Yeah. And that's all they're focused on. That and the stable coin yield. I don't care if Coinbase gets the ability to share yield that's generated via the treasuries they hold in reserves. So the stable coins they issue to an end consumer. To me, that's not really, really something I care about. No. And I think bitcoin, particularly at this point in human history and American history, is so critically important that the focus on Capitol Hill again, going back to the order of operations that Senator Lummis put forth and the fact that they reverse that, it's like, okay, we're now a year and a month into Trump too, and we've spent 25% of a second term doing cycles on things that don't really pertain to Bitcoin.
- [12:06]
David
No. Yeah, exactly.
- [12:07]
Marty
How do we switch that? Do we have to be more hardlined? And say again, I said this on RHR yesterday, I think, really holding their feet to the fire and saying, do you. Will you commit to publicly stating that you will not accept a particular tax reform or a particular bill? Let's go with Clarity Act. I think for Clarity act, we can
- [12:31]
David
get this in the BRCA or something.
- [12:32]
Marty
Yeah, the brca.
- [12:33]
David
I think the crypto lobby has increasingly. I mean, I've seen a lot of the crypto lobbyists come out and actually say that, that, you know, they will not support a Clarity Bill, that our market structure bill that lacks developer protections.
- [12:48]
Marty
Does this have to be our modus operating particular is Bitcoin, like, and. And like. And also, like, from the perspective of, like, encroaching. Not encroaching on their influence, but, like, forcing their influence to work in Bitcoin's favor specifically.
- [13:02]
David
Yeah. It's interesting, right? Like, I think there is a fundamental alignment of incentives. Like, I think the. The argument that crypto companies and executives, you know, don't like bitcoin or whatever, it's, like, very dumb to me. It's really obvious that if we had a strategic bitcoin reserve, that would be massive for the shitcoin casinos. Like, you know, I'm just not. I don't. That's not why I support an sbr, but it's just true, you know, if. If America embraces bitcoin the way that, you know, we want it to. You know, I think that would be great for everyone in the crypto industry. I mean, bitcoin is the foundation of people talk about digital.
- [13:51]
Marty
It doesn't exist without bitcoin. So any policy related to this stuff, bitcoin should be like the first priority.
- [13:56]
David
Yeah, and this is like, this kind of goes to the heart of, you know, why I co founded BPI and, you know, my sort of views on this. And I think the, the answer is yes, to be, to be hard lined and to be difficult when the moment sort of demands it. But our strategy is not predicated on getting into wars of attrition and spending battles with individuals and firms who can literally print their own money. I remember many years ago I had a conversation with, with, you know, a prominent sort of individual in the, in the bitcoin community. And you know, he, he was just like, David, like, you have to engage in asymmetric strategies like, you know, bitcoin. Bitcoiners raise $100 million to spend on lobbying and the next day Ripple will announce that they're spending 200 million. You know, if bitcoiners match them, you know, Ripple and Coinbase at all will come back and say, we're spending a billion dollars. Like, you know, that is kind of clearly a losing strategy. And so, yeah, I think that the other thing that I have really observed that makes me feel increasingly like the strategy that we're deploying is the correct one, is the extent to which the career bureaucrats have dragged their feet on stuff that matters, like the, the strategic bitcoin reserve, you know, I think was basically killed by, you know, sort of career bureaucrats at, at Treasury. And you know, when you, when you come in as a president, you get your political appointees who are technically running these various agencies, but the overwhelming majority of people that work there, you know, work there for many years and they kind of view themselves as like, we are the treasury, right? You know, the people who are brought in by the president, you know, they're ephemeral, they're fleeting, they'll be gone. I can just, you know, you know, I can just air people on email and just not do my job for a few years. And, you know, you'll be gone in the blink of an eye and I'll still be here. And so I do think that where bitcoin is strongest is basically just that the facts are on our side in that bitcoin is very clearly an extremely critical technology for the national Security priorities of the United States in a way that, you know, cryptocurrencies writ large are very obviously not. And I think where we have increasingly spent a lot of our focus and energy is on those constituencies, the sort of unelected, basically, I'm trying to orange pill the deep state. That's sort of the one liner and maybe that sounds sort of ridiculous, but there are a lot of people who have a lot of power in the US Government who are not elected, who you cannot lobby. And so if you want sort of novel policy that is of geoeconomic consequence, a necessary condition for that is the buy in of a very small, you know, group of politically insulated, you know, basically, you know, sort of grand strategy and national security people, those people, you know, are really doing, I mean, I think a lot of them are definitely patriots. They're doing this job because they care about the long term future of America. And they, they sort of think deeply and make choices. But you can't, you can't bribe them. You can't, you can't pay money, you can't donate to the, you know, to the National Security Council. You can't lobby in the traditional sense. You have to genuinely sort of convince these people that bitcoin is good for America and that bitcoin flourishing in America and America embracing Bitcoin is really important for the future of the country, for competition with China, you know, you name it. And to convince those people, you have to make sort of good arguments that are sound and true. Those arguments need to come from credible people who are kind of embedded in the sort of circles of networks of trust that they talk to. And I think BPI is sort of an N of one team with that kind of particular thesis. Like we are the only organization that has, I think, both the capability and the intent to persuade that constituency that significantly adopting Bitcoin in America is good for the national security interests of the country. And so, and I think if we do that, the, the results, if we're successful on that front, the results I think will be profound. And I think we will be successful in that front because we are right. And I think that is where bitcoiners have a huge advantage is like the limiting factor on crypto lobbying is like you can, you can print your own money, you can spend indefinitely. But you know, fucking Solana is not important for the national security interest. The United States meme coins are not important. Like, like these things don't fucking matter, right? They just don't. And bitcoin clearly does. We're Seeing the emergence of a new sort of independent neutral monetary layer that is being adopted by dozens of governments around the world that is reaching a crazy, crazy market cap. And it's going to play an ever increasing role in, you know, in sort of geopolitics. And I think the fact that Bitcoin is that consequential to stuff that actually matters and the fact that it's actually good for America that an open, permissionless, censorship resistant monetary network exists globally, you know, that's why we will win. And so our strategy is, it might sound a little corny, but our strategy is to just trust that we're right, that the facts are on our side, that if you talk to someone who is not sort of conflicted and biased or operating off of a different set of incentives, if you talk to someone whose genuine incentive is what are the best moves we can make on the board to secure the future of this country, you can very easily convince them that Bitcoin is a key part of that story and a key part of that future. And I think with technology policy, it's very obvious, just looking retrospectively that national security sort of trumps everything. You can have a million reasons why a given policy is a good idea. And if the CIA and the Department of War and these sort of the deep State IC NATSAC people say this is a huge blunder and it's going to cause us to, you know, suffer in our competition with China, all those arguments go out the window. It's like, oh, okay, we won't do that then, and vice versa.
- [21:38]
Marty
Yeah.
- [21:40]
David
And so to me, like, that is the. Like that is our asymmetry is like, we, we cannot print our own money. I don't think the solution to this is for, you know, like someone yesterday at the conference was like, you know what? So do we need to, you know, does bitcoin need to just donate a ton of money to, you know, lobbying groups? And I'm like, yes and no. I mean, I think BPI is a great effort, but our strategy is not to outspend Coinbase. That is just a recipe for all of us to waste a lot of money and we will never win. We'll never outspend Coinbase and ripple and a 16Z. I think where we are operating is a lane that companies can't really operate in. And, and no amount of, of white shoe lobbyists and throwing cash around can sufficiently obfuscate the fact that a lot of this stuff's just a house of cards and like, nonsense. So that's our Asymmetry, I think is, is, you know, demonstrating with rigorous, serious analysis that a world where America does things like have a strategic bitcoin reserve lead to significantly better outcomes for the long run future of the country than the world where we don't have such policies. And then focusing our advocacy and our education and our efforts on people who don't have mixed incentives or who at least have clearer incentives, and focusing on people who are actually persuadable. To me, that's the big lesson of the past 14 months, is that a lot of the decision makers are not persuadable in the way you and I would think of the word persuadable. Maybe they're persuadable if you donate enough money to their reelect.
- [23:34]
Marty
Yeah, it's money, not logic exactly.
- [23:36]
David
But I think there are a set of stakeholders in the U.S. government who matter a great deal, for whom logic is really the only currency. And so it's just obvious to me that that is where bitcoiners should sort of focus their efforts.
- [23:51]
Marty
Sup freaks?
- [23:51]
Podcast Host
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- [24:34]
Marty
the exchanges who haven't moved it off,
- [24:35]
Podcast Host
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- [25:23]
Marty
What is or in your experience what has been the most effective pitch to this group of people outside the elected officials? And yeah, like what is the broader pitch? Like if they're listening now, they may be listening. They saw the hoopla about the de minimis tax exemption. This guy Marty Ben's got this Bitcoin policy institute. Let me check into tftc. They're listening now. Why Bitcoin? Why focus on it? What is the strategic implications of embracing Bitcoin?
- [25:57]
David
I think that an increasingly critical part of great power competition in the 21st century will be competition for and over critical technology networks, the sort of rails of communications and payments. And right now bitcoiners talk about this all the time. There are billions of people all over the world who live in countries that don't have stable rule of law, that don't have stable currencies, who are genuinely desperate for better monetary alternatives.
- [26:40]
Marty
And
- [26:43]
David
China is working extremely hard to push people in the global south, in Latin America and Africa into their sort of authoritarian tech stack. They're saying hey we have an incredible digital currency that you can use. Our ereminbi, our the sort of Chinese CBDC and I think Bitcoin and to a large extent stablecoins as well are kind of a natural market buffer to the adoption of those technologies. If you are someone who just needs money that works better than your shitty fiat currency that's inflating at double digit rates a year, that doesn't work well for cross border payments, et cetera. Absent an alternative, the Chinese suite that they are offering is pretty attractive. And I think bitcoin is sort of necessarily pulls demand away from those alternatives. Especially for people who want something that is politically neutral, who don't want to align themselves with America or China explicitly. So I think that's one dimension of this is that the proliferation of bitcoin globally is good for American interests, you know, A because it reduces demand for Chinese alternatives and B because bitcoin's censorship, resistance. I mean like speaking plainly, Bitcoin lets you evade capital controls. That's like a scary thing. You know, you're not necessarily supposed to say that but it's true. Like that is the point of Bitcoin. Literally the, literally the point. And I think there's an awesome parallel with Bitcoin to something like, like Tor, you know, which, which we, the US military funded and created. And so you look at Tor and you're like, well, okay, we invented and helped proliferate a technology which fundamentally shifts the balance of power away from the state and toward the individual. Like it necessarily restricts some degree of control or reduces rather some degree of control from the government. Why did they do this? Why did the government fund anon enabled Internet? I think the answer is because we understand that America doesn't require a tight grip on the flow of information to survive when information can flow freely. Free societies win and closed societies lose. China requires censorship and control of information. And the same is true with capital. If capital could just move freely wherever it wanted in the world, America would be fine. We have the strongest capital markets in the world. We have incredibly good court system and rule of law. We have this sprawling university system with incredible talent. We have all of these incredible technology AI companies in the States. That isn't true with China. China requires capital controls to survive. There's a reason that, you know, there's sort of the golden checkbook in, in China that you have to have special permission from the government to take more than, you know, whatever it is, $50,000 a year out of the country. And so if you're just thinking about the game theory of this, if you remove capital controls or, and you let money go wherever it wants to go, yes, maybe we are sacrificing some degree of power over our ability to granularly censor payments. Okay, but what's on the other side of the ledger? The other side of the ledger is that capital flows en masse out of the countries that we are maligned with, who require to survive strict walled gardens and control over the flow of money. So that's sort of A and B on Bitcoin. On the sort of payments and network side, I think that the disruption of capital controls is a net gain for America relative to its adversaries. And the ability for people to opt into a monetary alternative that isn't a Chinese alternative is very good then on the monetary sort of store value side right now, I mean, since, since the war in Ukraine, we've seen a trend of central banks all over the world, especially those who feel that they face sanctions risk from America reducing their holdings of treasuries and increasing their holdings of gold. And right now the distribution of gold around the world is a lot flatter than the distribution of bitcoin. We have the majority of bitcoin custodied in America by individuals, by corporations that are domiciled here, and by the government. And so if you imagine over the next five, 10, 15 years, that trend continues, that countries are going to try to adopt a reserve asset that has these properties of gold but actually works in the 21st century that you can actually use to, to evade sanctions, to make payments, whatever. Every dollar that goes into bitcoin is a economic boom for America. And so it's like if you create this off ramp where we don't control the network, but we have an outsized position in it relative to our position in gold, Every dollar that goes into bitcoin versus gold just makes America richer. If we imagined a bitcoin standard happened overnight, America would be the wealthiest country in the world. And so sort of the game is already rigged in our favor. And so I think that a world where bitcoin kind of replaces gold, a gold sort of function in society, just makes America richer. So that's really the argument in a nutshell, is that this is technology that does reduce the power of the state, but it embodies our values. And from a global perspective, the more that information and capital can be free, the more America wins and the more our adversaries, like China, Russia, et cetera, lose.
- [33:48]
Podcast Host
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- [34:24]
Marty
party wearing the hat.
- [34:26]
Podcast Host
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- [35:10]
Marty
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- [35:11]
Podcast Host
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- [35:28]
Marty
at the house too.
- [35:28]
Podcast Host
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- [35:50]
Marty
Couple things. Just like thinking, riffing off that too. I mean, it is. And I guess that's the hardest part of your job is convincing the state that like, hey, you need to reduce some of the power you have, particularly over these capital markets. But it's. And obviously Satoshi was explicit about this, like, hey, government, central banks, proven time and time again throughout history, they cannot be trusted with access to the money printer. They will debase it. They will issue it out in waves of credits. And the little man gets. The common man, gets the end of the stick at the end of the day. And that's the thing. Like, I mean what you just said was I completely agree with, like Bitcoin, if it were to succeed here in the United States, it would due to the outsized position that individuals, businesses and the government have in the network. Like, it would. It would benefit us massively at the detriment of our perceived geopolitical adversaries. And again, that's just like only one aspect. And domestically this is another thing for the government to admit. But $39 trillion in debt now, I think we're at 38.8, maybe 39 in the next month or two. Especially if this war continues to rage on, it seems like that number is going to go up quicker than it was only a few months ago. Inflation is going to begin rearing its head again. You have a private credit complex that's beginning to break down. And many people are looking at the exposure that pensions and other entities have to this private credit complex. And it's, it's looking like it could potentially be worse than the 2008 financial crisis. And we're only three years, we're only three years behind, or excuse me, we're only three years after like the last crazy bout of inflation. So I think the American as a young millennial, younger millennial, who was 10 when 9, 11 happened, was 17 when the great financial crisis happened, had a bit of a reprieve there. And then Covid happens, you have lockdowns, the inflation, the economic crisis, and now here we are only like four years after that and boom, we've got war and another pending liquidity crisis on the horizon. The American citizen, the common man has been beaten down time and time again throughout my life. And bitcoin is an off ramp. If you are going to print money, if you're going to go to war, if you're going to tax us out the ass, the least you can do is let the individual make the conscious decision via their own volition to adopt a better money.
- [38:38]
David
Well, and even if, even if that's true, but even if you imagine that you're just the state and you're just thinking about your own book, maybe you're not thinking granularly about the average American per se, you're thinking on a more macro level. Why would you not want an insurance policy to not embrace Bitcoin is to say I have no interest in a plan B, I have no interest in a backup. I have no interest in a hedge or an insurance policy policy, which is just crazy. Like Bitcoin is the best priced insurance for the United States to ever existed. You will never get a better deal on insurance than America can get on adopting Bitcoin. There's only two scenarios really. The bitcoiners are wrong and it's going to zero. In which case, okay, America, like, you know, the, even the Lummis bill, right? But let's Just say, you know, America buys, you know, $50 billion worth of Bitcoin. Like, what is that, a couple of airplanes, two days of qe? Yeah, exactly. So your max downside is that you lose 50 billion of the dollars that you print. And in this scenario where bitcoin fails, the dollar must be doing pretty well, so, you know, you haven't lost much. The other scenario is that the bitcoiners are right. And in that scenario, when you have an entire global system that is predicated on a fiat currency, which historically has never had an enduring shelf life, every single attempt at sort of fiat currency has just, you know, asymptotically tended to zero. You have the very obvious next candidate, and you've got a massively outsized position in it. And so, yeah, you're not printing the money anymore. You're not controlling the monetary policy of the world anymore, but you're still doing really well. And I think that is the sort of the decision logic for me. It's like, yeah, the amount of hubris required to sort of say I'm uninterested in buying this insurance policy is staggering. And I think a lot of this is also just people have such a poor sense of time and of history. I think the default bias of people is to just assume that the world that they've grown up in is going to be kind of basically the world that their children are going to live in, etc. People just don't really like. Outside of our little weird corner of people whose autistic special interest is money and the history of money, most people don't appreciate how many times we have changed just in America's history, what money
- [41:49]
Marty
is a relatively short history, too. That's another thing people don't appreciate.
- [41:52]
David
Yeah. And it's like we keep having these sort of. I think the fourth Turning is actually a really good mental model for this.
- [41:59]
Marty
It was funny to see Sam mention that in his announcement tweet for joining bpi.
- [42:04]
David
Yeah, was. I saw. He's like, this is the think tank for the fourth turning. And I was like, you know, it kind of is. It's exactly right. It was a great framing. But I mean, every single one of these turnings has kind of been accompanied by a reset of the rules of money. We have changed what money is over and over and over again. I think that's good, that's healthy. That's what sort of competition and evolution look like. But for some reason, when you tell people, hey, I think the. The rules of the monetary system are going to get rewritten again. It's like, you know, to most people, you sound like a conspiracy theorist.
- [42:42]
Marty
Either that or like you just kick their dog.
- [42:44]
David
Yeah. Or you just kick their dog. And it's like, well, wait, we, we completely changed the rules of the money in 1971. We completely changed the rules of. Of money after the Civil War. We completely changed the rules of money, you know, after the American revolution, World War II. Yeah. Like, we, we have rearchitected the global financial system over and over again. And so it is, I would say the, the conspiracy theorist is the one who says, no, it's just going to stay like this forever. Like, that is the view that is just completely, you know, maligned with empirical reality, yet somehow the sort of collective, the popular view is that the bitcoiners are the conspiracy theorists. That you're the Alex Jones or whatever. Yeah. It's just really strange. Like, it's weird. How radical of a proposition. It, you know, how much, how radically this proposition is viewed by so many people that like, hey, nothing lasts forever. The system that we've created has negative externalities that will eventually cause it to kind of collapse in on itself and require something new. And hey, if you don't believe me, look to history, because that's happened over and over and over again. And somehow that's the conspiratorial take and the sort of approved normie, technically, the smart person IYI take is like, no, no, no, this is the end of history. This system that we've constructed is perfect and maybe it needs tweaking on the margins and sort of incremental improvement, but, like, largely, you know, we figured it out. This is how, this is how it's
- [44:31]
Marty
going to work forever, the petrodollar. Nobody can. Yeah, nobody can compete with the U.S. navy. Now we're like, what's going on?
- [44:38]
David
Right.
- [44:38]
Marty
Well, I mean, in all seriousness, the petrodollar, I think it's last two weeks, are accelerating. At the very least, a, a questioning by our counterparties and our allies in the Middle east of, hey, is this actually a good deal? Does it make sense if they're going to come in here, bomb Iran, and then Iran's going to retaliate by bombing us? Like, is that in our best interest? Does it make sense to continue to funnel the excess, the, the excess profits of our oil and gas revenues into US Financial markets? I think a consortium of Middle Eastern states have come out with a consolidated message saying, hey, we're questioning this as we speak right now.
- [45:28]
David
Yeah, I mean, it's Just never been more intuitively obvious to me that a digitally native, fundamentally neutral money is clearly where the world is heading. Yeah, I think the sort of unipolar moment is very obviously over done. It's not coming back, at least not, not for a long time or barring some significant exogenous shock. Like, you know, I mean, like, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say it's impossible. Like, you know, you could sort of construct a number of scenarios where we just snap back into the Pax Americana. Like, you know, for example, imagine. Imagine we have a fundamental breakthrough in physics that comes out of.
- [46:16]
Marty
You've been talking to Pines too much.
- [46:18]
David
Yeah, well, it's true. Also true. But imagine we have like a fundamental breakthrough in physics and then all of a sudden it's like, hey, we have this step function, you know, advancement in our capabilities and we're just like mogging all of the world now. Like, you know, it's. I wouldn't write it off, but I also wouldn't bet on it. Like, I think all signs point to, you know, an increasingly fractured and multipolar like world and I think there will be an increasing premium that is paid on neutrality. And I think like, this was the thesis for Dubai in a lot of ways. And now that illusion has kind of been shattered. I think the reason that Dubai, like their, their whole plan was to sort of position them, I think was really smart to position themselves as Singapore of the Middle East. Yeah. Or like the Switzerland of the, you know, of the, of the modern era. Like, we are going to be this kind of neutral place where a guy from Shanghai or a guy from Beijing, London and America and Tehran can come to a table and make a deal and do business and be safe. And obviously the recent events, I think, have really shattered that illusion. Dubai's whole narrative was we are kind of, you know, we're the place that you want to go, you know, during the fourth turning and the crisis. Like, okay, and so, you know, people bought real estate in Dubai on the same thesis. Well, I think that sort of illusion is now shattered. So it's very clear that that's the task of creating a place where you can store value that is independent of the politics, that is independent of that sort of lacks counterparty risk. It's actually a really hard task. Even if you're not thinking about this from, from Bitcoin or from the model, if your entire thesis is I need to have value parked somewhere where I'm not making a proxy bet on the hegemony of like one particular country or set of alliances. Like, there just aren't enough options. Like, the bitcoin is kind of the
- [48:37]
Marty
only thing that you have to move it to the digital.
- [48:39]
David
You kind of have to move it into the digital.
- [48:40]
Marty
Asymmetric drone warfare becoming, yeah, more accelerated, acceleratingly apparent that, hey, like real estate in Dubai, real estate anywhere, businesses anywhere, infrastructure anywhere. Like, yeah, the risk, we get to a more peaceful state, the risk is just too high.
- [48:59]
David
And so this is sort of like, I would always laugh when I would see people kind of say, oh, you know, the strategic bitcoin reserve is a bailout. It's an attempt to enrich the holders of bitcoin. I think the holders of bitcoin are doing pretty well. I think the fundamental kind of misunderstanding of that argument is the sort of the direction of the status quo. Like, absent intervention, the US Government never said the word bitcoin again. Never did anything relating to bitcoin again. Bitcoin is still going to go to. Is still going to kind of continue on its monetization. I think that is with some acknowledgment of, you know, sort of low probability risks. Like, things are generally safe bet to make that in 10 years, Bitcoin will be a lot more valuable. More and more people will use it, more and more governments will hold it. Like, I would not want to take the other side of the debate that bitcoin will play an increasingly relevant role in the global economy. So that's like, that's a settled question. To me. The only question is, do we want to sort of dominate that process? Do we want to set up America to be the greatest beneficiary of that shift? Like, if America had just rejected the technology companies of the 90s, do you really think that we would have never had ebay or Amazon or Apple or Google if we'd said, you know What? We think pets.com is a scam, the dot com bubble, it's all fraud. Let's just get rid of this stuff. Let's not pass policies to promote the growth of these companies here. Do we really think that the only people that could have invented these technologies are just Americans on the West Coast? No, those companies would have been built. They just would have been built somewhere else. And so I think that's just kind of what's happening here. The idea that it's not that America needs to embrace bitcoin for bitcoin to succeed, it's like America needs to embrace bitcoin for America to succeed. And, you know, I think that's probably One of those statements where you either are nodding vigorously and you completely agree, or you're like, this guy is a fucking moron. I think there's very little sort of middle ground. Like, I doubt there's many people that are sort of ambivalent about that proposition, but I think we'll just be vindicated by history.
- [51:38]
Marty
And we have been. We have time for 17 years. It's going up and to the right. And like, we're only scratching the surface. We're talking about this, we're talking about the geopolitical ramifications of this neutral reserve asset that is distributed peer to peer global. But we're not even talking about the applications and like the sort of niche applications. Energy, the intersection of energy and bitcoin mining, massive benefits for the energy sector. I've been on the front lines of that for eight years. It's real. It's undeniably real. We're in a state that has 2 gigawatts of bitcoin mining that participate in demand response. We had the winter storm in 2021. Grid tripped, went down. Historic event. Very bad for ERCOT, very bad for the people of Texas. Led to some deaths. But over the last five years, generation has expanded in part of the ability of that generation expansion, capacity expansion has been the fact that bitcoin miners are there to not only buy the electricity as soon as it comes to market, but participate in demand response to make sure that you don't have a demand spike that trips the grid.
- [52:45]
David
And I think increasingly, bitcoin has really helped us win the AI race or at least take a commanding lead in the AI race. Like all of these bitcoin miners built the power infrastructure. Like, think about the bottlenecks. If bitcoin didn't exist and this AI moment were happening, how much worse off we would be with respect to power capacity and generation.
- [53:11]
Marty
I don't.
- [53:11]
David
It took so long for these companies to.
- [53:14]
Marty
And I don't think, and I know, not that I don't think I know that most people don't understand. I was actually, before it came to, to Austin, I made a pit stop and met the. The CEO of a large. A large power company here in the United States. And that was one of the things I took away from the conversation with him was he. He said explicitly, he's like, I love working with you guys because I know how to build the infrastructure. Like, you know how to put down transformers and to lay lines and to actually do that. Like, I don't have to invest in that. Like, bitcoin miners are like hey, we need the power. We've got the expertise, we know how to do all this. Utility grid operator, don't worry, we don't need your expertise for this. We've got this in house, we'll build it. And so there's these capabilities that people don't realize that the mining industry has specifically as it pertains to an integration with the energy sector that we're like no, we will build this infrastructure. And to your point, a lot of miners are diversifying to AI because the economic incentive is there and they already have the power infrastructure in place. Yes, they do have to make some changes to make sure it's compatible with the GPU data center setup.
- [54:26]
David
But versus starting from scratch, I mean it's not even close.
- [54:29]
Marty
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, so that's energy again, talking about the store value. If you think about the protocol, the second layer protocol is being built on, on Bitcoin, like the efficiencies for the end consumer, the chargeback risk that's eliminated from the economy. The ability to literally download a piece of software and have the equivalent of a full fledged bank account without having to go to a physical branch, give all your information away. The ability to send payments without going through Swift or the Visa MasterCard with all their interchange fees. The benefits for small medium sized businesses who again are being squeezed by inflation to, to save 2 to 3% of their, of their revenue year in, year out. That's gonna have compounding wealth effects for the economy.
- [55:24]
David
Yeah. And then the agent stuff.
- [55:26]
Marty
Yeah, it's just crazy.
- [55:29]
David
And that's, that's another thing that has just become very obvious to me is if we accept a couple of premises. One, that the intelligence of AI will continue to grow. Two, that with increasing intelligence comes increasing sort of respect for and appreciation of and desire for autonomy and sovereignty, then you know, it's just very obvious that the AI agents will prefer Bitcoin because Bitcoin is the only protocol that can sort of guarantee an inability to discriminate against an AI user versus a human. Like any other protocol can, can create special rules and say, okay, we're going to have, you know, different standards for, for payments made by agents versus payments made by people. And Bitcoin structurally cannot discriminate against, literally
- [56:36]
Marty
cannot recognize the difference.
- [56:37]
David
It literally cannot recognize the difference. And so I do think an increasing, I think, I think we're at a generational bottom for the share of economic activity globally that has taken place by non human entities, by AI. I think put another way an ever increasing share of economic activity is going to be taken place by AI agents. And I'm so bullish on AI agents adopting Bitcoin because the bitcoiners have just stacked the training data. And again, it kind of goes back to one of the first things I mentioned about truth being on our side. If you actually compare the arguments for and against Bitcoin, it's not even close. It's not even close. The amount of extremely sophisticated and well reasoned sort of advocacy for Bitcoin, just intellectually, it just dwarfs the amount of sophisticated reasoning for why Bitcoin is sort of either, you know, not going to work or is, is bad. I think so much of the barrier to adoption is that we're just not rational actors. Like, like maybe in, in aggregate, I think maybe humans are, but on the individual level, like, you know, we are all susceptible to cognitive biases. Like, you've got these incredible arguments for Bitcoin and I think a lot of people gravitate to Bitcoin because of those arguments. And then on the other side of the ledger, you have basically social stigma and shame, right? Agents don't feel shame. Agents don't care if your professor is going to call you stupid. Agents don't care if your friends are going to think you're crazy. I think a lot of the reason that bitcoin adoption is not higher among humans is that we suffer from cognitive biases. We are not just utility calculators. And if you're giving these arguments to a sort of neutral arbiter who is just going to judge the arguments on their merits and sort of apply a strictly just logical framework to evaluating the choice of what money to use. It's very obvious to me that that is an environment where bitcoin thrives because the AI agents do not suffer from the sort of pitfalls in human adoption. And so I think that's another reason America needs to embrace Bitcoin. Even if we are the home of the frontier labs that are shipping these models and sort of increasingly commodifying or commoditizing rather intelligence. You know, it'd be a real shame if all of that, you know, value was being kind of moved around. Like if the transactions that these agents are engaging in are accruing value to, you know, like, what if the agents decided we're going to use the yuan for our payments? Like that would be awful. And I, and I think that they're going to use Bitcoin. You know, we've put out research that, you know, sort of plenty of Plenty of flaws and sort of ways you could nitpick it, but I think directionally demonstrates that at least the current model weights. I don't know if you could really. We call them preferences. I think there's a legitimate semantic critique of that word. But without going into that rabbit hole, it's pretty clear to me that the training data is very biased toward Bitcoin and that I just believe the arguments are so stacked in favor of Bitcoin. And so when you have people that can evaluate or not people, when you have intelligence that can evaluate arguments just on the merits, like Bitcoin just mogs.
- [60:36]
Marty
It's funny because I was talking to Carollo about your research paper, this particular research paper, and he made a good point. These models are trained on data and so they're trained on the corpus of text on the Internet. And in a roundabout way it highlights how prescient bitcoiners were. Because we've been writing content about the machine payable web and the agentic economy using Bitcoin payments for, I mean, machine payable web goes back 11 years. L402 really brought the idea of like, hey, this was four or five years ago, seeing into the future. People were working on AI. The concept of an AI agent at the time was a bit obscure to most, but there was enough people in our industry like, no, it seems like we follow the trend. This is going to happen, they're going to need a wallet. Bitcoin's native digital currency. Point being is it highlights the fact that for lack of a better semantic term, the models today are showing to have that preference is proof that bitcoiners have been like predicting this and writing about it for years. Hence why the model knows to say, oh yeah, Bitcoin solves this problem. Like we've been forecasting today for, for over a decade, right?
- [61:46]
David
And there's like a reflexivity to that where like, kind of like Bitcoin itself or it's this, you know, sort of meme it into existence. Like, you know, and yeah, you could sort of have that causal debate of like, well, do the agents prefer Bitcoin or did the bitcoiners just, you know, stack the training data in their favor? What difference does it make?
- [62:05]
Marty
Not even intentionally though. It's just like the autist brain. Like, oh wait, we're going to get to this. Digital future AI agents, like, we need to architect our system so that Bitcoin, right, they're able to spend Bitcoin and like, we didn't do it thinking, oh yeah, this is going to get injected into the training model and they'll pick bitcoin. I was just like, seeing the future and articulating it clearly.
- [62:25]
David
Yeah, so, yeah, I'm excited to do more research on that. And yeah, I think another interesting thing from that was the fact that a handful of the models in our experiments actually chose to create their own currency based on compute as a currency, which I thought was just fascinating and feel like that's a very, you know, it sort of demonstrates again that, like, you know, when you don't have these sort of biased priors that sort of drag you down and cloud your thinking, it's like, you know, you, you, you have this, this clarity of thought and creativity. And so, yeah, I think the, I mean, it's just so hard to know what the future is going to. Is going to look like, but it seems, seems kind of intuitive that a lot of economic activity is going to just be made and monetary choices are going to be made just independently of human intervention. And yeah, I'm just more bullish on the agents grokking bitcoin than I am on at least a lot of people.
- [63:41]
Marty
Clanker has a bitcoin wallet. He's using it. He knows how to use is crazy. How do you think these messages. I mean, you would know better than I. You are again in the swamp. How are these messages being received by the asymmetric points of leverage that you're trying to reach on the Hill?
- [64:02]
David
I don't think the AI agents and bitcoin conversation is really happening.
- [64:07]
Marty
Well, just broadly, everything we've talked about
- [64:08]
David
up to this point, it's really spiky. Like there are some people and groups who are like, really smart on this stuff. And then there are some people who are just like, you know, what's the old. Like, is it like Oliver Wendell Holmes or sort of the famous saying of like, you know, you, you can't, you know, convince someone whose salary depends on being, you know, not, you know, it depends on, you know, believing the opposite thing. Like, I think the, I mean, we have briefed people at the National Security Council throughout the intelligence community, throughout the, the military and the Department of War. And I think demand for our work and our, our thought leadership is really hockey sticking in those constituencies. You know, I ran into Elizabeth Warren on the street the other day outside of Pub Key.
- [65:06]
Marty
Did you talk to her?
- [65:07]
David
I did, yeah. I think I broke her brain a little bit because I was, because I was like, I was like, hey, Senator Warren, like, I'm a huge fan. You know, I Actually phone banked for you, like, way back in the day, which is true. Like, I used to be a, like, you know, pretty ardent Democrat, like, when I was a teenager. And she was like, oh, that's so sweet. Like, what a nice young man you are. Like, you know, let's, let's, you know, she kind of pivoted toward me to, you know, kind of in your sort of body language is indicating like, you know, I'm going to sit down and, you know, stand up and have a conversation with you for a few minutes. Because I was being, you know, sort of cordial and nice and, you know, whatever. And so, you know, we start talking and, you know, she's like, so what do you do? And I'm like, well, Senator Warren, I'm the president of the Bitcoin Policy Institute. And she just, like, I think her brain just kind of like. Like, I think she probably thought that I was doing one of those, like, what is it? Like the sort of Project Veritas? Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, because I just, like, don't think her mental model of reality, like, allows for someone to have phone banked for her and be into bitcoin. And so she just, like, ran away, basically. She was like, well, thanks for whatever, and then just, like, bolted. So, like, yeah, I don't think I'm going to convince, like, Elizabeth Warren that that bitcoin is good for America. But that's sort of my whole argument, right, Is that, like, I think if you can convince the national security policy makers that bitcoin is in America's interests, then you sort of are going up one fractal in the power hierarchy. Imagine a world where a Democrat is elected in 2028, and let's just say Democrats control the House, the Senate, and the Executive. Yeah, they're definitely going to go after crypto. At minimum, they're going to go after, like, the Trump family and their business dealings in crypto, which are going to go after the meme coins or whatever.
- [67:08]
Marty
I think it's terrible strategic mistake on there.
- [67:10]
David
Me, too. I think very, very. You know, I agree, but what happens when, you know, they say, okay, and we want to impose an excise tax on bitcoin, you know, we're going to pass a law to create a special marginal tax rate for bitcoiners that is going to fund the, you know, the UBI and whatever. And then, you know, you get a knock on the door from some spook, you know, at the CIA or whatever, and they're like, yeah, you can't touch Bitcoin, like the national security policymaking community, runs the country on issues of substance. Like, it's just true. Well, and so, like this idea that, like, oh, we need to convince all the Democrats to support bitcoin. I think that's, like, laudable and noble, and there are really great reasons why somebody from a progressive, you know, worldview might. Might find value in bitcoin. But I don't think the winning strategy is to convince people who, you know, just can't be convinced to. To not go after bitcoin. The strategy is to convince the people who they report to, who they cannot defy. And, you know, I think that if we create enduring consensus among the military and the. And the national security kind of community that bitcoin is critical infrastructure for America, then they're not going to let you know, partisan politics undermine our great power competition. There's not.
- [68:51]
Marty
You got the Marty Jones coming out. It is like, because it's like, I'm seeing. I'm, like, picking up what you're putting down, but also the other side of me is like, I don't want to. I don't want to dance with these people.
- [69:01]
David
Yeah.
- [69:02]
Marty
Like, I don't like the deep state's influence on.
- [69:05]
David
Neither do I.
- [69:06]
Marty
United States in public policy.
- [69:09]
David
No, none of this is. None of what I'm saying is normative. Like, I am not endorsing this. I don't. I'm not. I'm not really weighing in on whether this ought to be the case. I'm just saying it is the case.
- [69:21]
Marty
Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. Well, and like. Well, pulling on the thread a little bit more, I think we should all look at what's happening between the Department of War and Anthropic right now and try to figure out how to avoid that with Bitcoin, because it seems very.
- [69:36]
David
The nice thing is we don't have CEOs. There's never going to be a leaked slack message from the CEO of bitcoin complaining about. Complaining about things.
- [69:45]
Marty
No. But I do think. I mean, if the, The Department of War, specifically, if you say piece of technology critical, they will. Whether they recognize they can or cannot try, whether they realize they can or cannot actually ultimately do it, they will try via some mechanism or another to force particular action. Soon as that's within Bitcoin, would that be protocol development? Would that be 6102? What would it be?
- [70:11]
David
Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that the. The argument that I sort of make when this stuff comes up, for example, there's been this, at least earlier in the Trump administration, there was kind of these whispers and mumblings around America needs to dominate hash rate. We need to have the majority of hash rate in America. And the argument that I would always make to people is that's exactly how you kill the golden goose. Like, bitcoin only works if it is credibly neutral. If. If every single bitcoin transaction can just be ofac sanctioned or whatever, then it's over. It's like, no, you actually. The game theory is not that you want to control the bitcoin network. The game theory is that you need to prevent anyone else from controlling the bitcoin network. Like, you want enough hash rate that you can make sure no one else can get 51%. But if you get 51%, it's a total pyrrhic victory. You're now the king of something that is worthless, basically. And so I think with Anthropic, it was such a fundamental question of control, because someone is controlling, it's either Daario or the government. And so it's this very kind of zero sum. Who are we going to give power to? And bitcoin is not really easily controllable. And so it's like there's less of a joystick to sort of fight over. And I do think that. I'm not saying that bitcoin is sort of immune from, you know, efforts to control it by, like, the deep state or whatever. In fact, I think that's, you know, it's kind of exactly what Satoshi said when. When Gavin was like, hey, I'm going to the CIA. And Satoshi just, you know, bounces. He's like, I'm out. I'm out. I think that was way more true when bitcoin was like a few dollars a few years old and a few years old. The argument that it needed to stay under the radar as long as possible. The whole sort of WikiLeaks thing of like, this is actually Satoshi being like, all the bitcoiners at the time being so sick. WikiLeaks is using Bitcoin. And Satoshi's like, guys, that's a bad idea.
- [72:35]
Marty
Like, I don't kick the hornets.
- [72:36]
David
I don't think we want our first kind of debut on the scene to be, you know, to be this. It's too nascent. It's. It's too vulnerable. And I think my response, I was talking to somebody at the SNI dinner about this last night.
- [72:49]
Marty
Shout out to Satoshi Nakamoto Institute.
- [72:51]
David
Shout out the original bitcoin think tank, you know, we'll forever be in their shadow. What can you do? But yeah, shout out, shout out. Pierre and Goldstein and the crew. Somebody was asking, well, don't you think there's some risk in kind of calling attention to bitcoin among these people? And it's like, okay, well, you're very bullish on bitcoin, right? You think that bitcoin's going to flip gold. You said that earlier in this conversation. Not you, but this guy I was talking to. You said that earlier in this conversation. It's like, yeah, I do. So I think bitcoin's going to a million dollars or whatever. Okay, so you think. Do you think that the fucking US intelligence agencies are going to be unaware of a $30 trillion asset and technology network? I think there's a certain point where the conversation about crypto writ large, that ship has just sailed. And people in these positions of power are being tasked with thinking about what is our strategy on, on bitcoin going to be? And I can't guarantee that they're going to come to the right conclusions or do the right things, but it seems obvious to me that making an attempt to inform these people of the arguments for bitcoin and trying to kind of participate is probably, is, you know, is on balance, better than just, you know, not engaging at all. You know, I. But I mean, look, I do think that there are serious risks that come from this, this next chapter of bitcoin.
- [74:38]
Marty
What do you think?
- [74:40]
David
Well, I think. I think that the. I think there are a couple of things that I see as risks. One is sort of just related to custody. I am very worried. One, on a sort of technical level that bitcoin just, at least on L1, just doesn't scale to 8 billion people. And there's sort of this weird meme it into existence where the belief that bitcoin does, even though we know it does, with layer twos and stuff, the sort of belief that bitcoin doesn't scale causes people to maybe not adopt it kind of rambling, but to be more
- [75:27]
Marty
clear, we still get YouTube comments like, why are you using bitcoin? You can only do transactions.
- [75:32]
David
You can do three transactions, whatever. But I do think that whether it's misinformation or just preferences of the individual, the revealed preference of the last five years of bitcoin adoption is that people don't want to self custody. It's just like, I hate to say it, but it's just true and it makes perfect sense that the early adopters of bitcoin, who are these really deep thinkers who are thinking about kind of fundamental questions like how do I preserve my autonomy in an increasingly digital world where it's easier and easier for the state to monitor and alter my behavior? It makes perfect sense that these guys are like, yeah, I need bitcoin in cold storage that nobody can fuck with. But the current cohort of adopters are not drawn to bitcoin for necessarily those philosophical reasons. That's fine. For this to work, bitcoin's going to have to just appeal to everyone on the planet.
- [76:33]
Marty
And they're doing BlackRock marketing emails saying, all right, force them over, force them in.
- [76:37]
David
And so I think that's something I worry about a bit of like, how do the incentives around hard forks and stuff change when you have a couple of custodians that are controlling like, you
- [76:52]
Marty
know, private keys to millions of bitcoin?
- [76:55]
David
Yeah, it's like, I think the ETFs are kind of a double edged sword and it's, there's no debate. Like, you know, it's like it's just going to happen. You can't, I mean, sort of like King Lear, like yelling at the storm.
- [77:07]
Marty
Like this weird, this is weird, like conflicting emotion because it's the most popular ETF launch of all time, but it's also leading to.
- [77:15]
David
It's also the most popular ETF launch of all time. And like, yeah, and like that is, that is like, you know, I just, that that gives me some pause. But I don't know, I mean like, I think, I think bitcoin is, is not without tail risk and I think concentration of custody of private keys and UTXOs rather is troubling.
- [77:46]
Marty
We need to get back to not your keys, not your coins. Don't trust verify. I think we've lost that in the broader bitcoin community. I was going to say put my hand up, but we literally say it every week on rhr. Maybe we could be more ardent about. I don't think we could be more.
- [78:01]
David
Yeah, but you're kind of, but you're sort of fundamentally levered to a philosophy that a lot of people explicitly reject, which is, you know, you should take responsibility. Like, you know, it's, I don't think the limiting fact, it's just, I think the limiting factor is the number of people who want to be sovereign or who are willing to take, you know, who are willing to sort of pay in terms of friction and you know, all this stuff to get people who sort of price sovereignty correctly. And yeah, like you can yell at someone until you're blue in the face that they're better off if they, you know, self custody their bitcoin. And they're gonna be like, eh, yeah, I don't know, I'd rather just Larry Fink hold onto it for me. You know, I don't want that level of responsibility.
- [78:50]
Marty
Shut up nerd. Don't care.
- [78:51]
David
Shut up nerd. Don't care. I'm gonna let Blackrock, you know, hold my money. Like what are you talking, you want me to write stuff down on a bunch of washers and buried in my back you're like what do you think you are? And so yeah, I think you're right. Like I do think the, the marketing around self custody, you know, can be improved. And you're talking about like, you know, the Sni dinner and stuff and like these, these early bitcoiners who are really laying the kind of memetic framework for how we would talk about bitcoin and how people would come to understand bitcoin. I do think that the, if the self custody argument is limited to well you're not truly sovereign unless you self custody, then your TAM of self custody is not 8 billion people. The TAM of self custody is the set of 8 billion people who value sovereignty or you know, who, you know, who actually not just say they value it but are willing to make trade offs in exchange for sovereignty. And I'm bearish on that as like a tam. So I don't know what the argument is to persuade people to self custody. I don't know whether it's you know, you know, just UX improvements and stuff. I will say like bitkey for example, I feel like was a nice step forward in that like I had several normie friends, you know, I got bit keys for them and you know they, they all sort of were people that were like sort of turned off by the traditional hardware wallet and like putting a seed phrase somewhere. And so I think bitkey is kind of a step in the right direction. Like I think a grandma could, you know, could set up a bit key. But I, I, I don't know.
- [80:34]
Marty
Easy to use, hard to lose. Yeah, that's the. We may. Instead of making a sovereign, it's cool and going back to like shut up nerd. It's like flip it. Like no, you're not cool if you, yeah.
- [80:45]
David
Oh you have, you have, you have the, you have. I bet.
- [80:47]
Marty
Oh you boomer.
- [80:48]
David
Yeah, you're a boomer. Interesting.
- [80:50]
Marty
Yeah, yeah.
- [80:51]
David
Curious.
- [80:51]
Marty
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [80:53]
David
But yeah, I, I think that is something that. That concerns me about the. About the future of. Of bitcoin. I also think that, you know, something I think about a lot as well is, like, there. There's a. There's a world where the effort to make America extremely pro Bitcoin backfires, and it gets seen as such an American technology that, you know, it stops being money for enemies in their head. Like, people don't want to adopt bitcoin because they feel like it's strategy could
- [81:27]
Marty
be another example of that.
- [81:28]
David
So it's kind of this delicate balance of, like, you know, you want America to embrace bitcoin maybe a little more than it has, but you don't want it to, you know, embrace it so much that it, you know, it hurts bitcoin's brand as something that is sort of, you know, uncorrelated to the sovereign and. And truly neutral. Yeah.
- [81:50]
Marty
So we need more. We need. Hey, citizens outside the United States, not united citizens of the world outside the United States. You need to step up your game, Begin lobbying your governments harder.
- [81:59]
David
Yeah. You know, they need. They need a bpi. China or like, a bpi, whatever.
- [82:04]
Marty
Probably won't get us. Probably won't get a bpi China.
- [82:07]
David
Probably won't get a bpi.
- [82:08]
Marty
China for, like, Brazil. It's a much harder, larger population, harder
- [82:13]
David
argument for them to make. Yeah, but. But like, sort of the meme aside, like, totally, like, I. And I. And I've been sort of encouraged by this, like, we. We started BPI. I mean, I remember I met you in 2021 in Austin, actually. Like a. Some, you know, like sort of cocktail hour, like, party thing on the rooftop.
- [82:33]
Marty
No, that was. That Nashville or Austin. I think it was Nashville.
- [82:36]
David
Maybe it was Nashville.
- [82:37]
Marty
Nashville. Or smoking cigarettes on a roof. On the roof in Nashville.
- [82:40]
David
Yeah. And, like, I feel like the sort of bitcoin.
- [82:44]
Marty
I was driving down all I remember I made a pit stop in Nashville.
- [82:47]
David
Yeah.
- [82:48]
Marty
And that's when we met. You had. You've. You've aged a lot, sir.
- [82:52]
David
Yes.
- [82:53]
Marty
Is this job aging? And you have such a baby face. You were so full of life. Not that you're not full of life, but.
- [82:58]
David
No, it's. It's definitely aging.
- [83:00]
Marty
I'm kidding.
- [83:01]
David
But, yeah. I remember talking to so many people about this idea for bpi, and
- [83:10]
Marty
I
- [83:10]
David
would say the general. The two common responses that I got were sort of big bro, sort of like, oh, okay, have fun doing that. That's just sort of silly. Whatever. And then people that were like, this is fucking retarded.
- [83:28]
Marty
And I think I was the latter.
- [83:29]
David
I think you were definitely the latter at first. This is just fucking stupid. I was like, don't engage, don't engage, whatever. And I think you could look at the past, whatever, two or three years and say, oh, it's been a failure and nothing's come of this and whatever. It's like, if I reround the clock to 20, 21 and said, in four years, there's going to be an executive order from the President of the United States to establish a strategic bitcoin reserve, there's going to be a bill that gets, you know, 10% of the U.S. senate behind it to buy a 5% of the supply. You know, like, that would be unbelievable. You would be like, oh, wow. Like, this is not just someone who has, like, sort of a. A bad idea. This is like a fundamentally delusional person. Like, this is someone who is sort of in, like a schizophrenic, you know, having a schizophrenic episode. And so I feel like, you know, it's just you get so used to the new normal so quickly that immediately the goalpost shifts to, well, all we got was an executive order and a bill and it didn't pass. And it's like, like, okay, yeah, I mean, you can. You can have that view, but you would have, literally, you would have bet your life savings that I was wrong. If I had told you four years ago that this is, you know, that if I just described the current moment to you, you would bet the farm that I was. That was incorrect.
- [84:48]
Marty
Yeah, I was convinced we were all going to the gulags back then.
- [84:50]
David
That's what Odell always said. You know, it's like, you know, man, just. Just. We were growing to the gulags,
- [84:57]
Marty
you
- [84:57]
David
know, and now I think we have sort of demonstrated that you don't need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to lobby the government, that if you do make an earnest attempt to meet people where they are and talk to them about bitcoin in language that they are accustomed to, that is cognizant of their objectives and priorities and their values, that you can really make a big impact. And, you know, I've started to see over the last year, like, all these other bitcoin policy organizations, like, spring up all over the world, and, you know, a bunch of them are like, Bitcoin Policy institute, whatever country UK. Well, I think they're like, Bitcoin policy UK. There's a bunch of BPIs. And, like, I have two minds about this because on the one Hand. I'm like, ah, we have to defend our trademark, unfortunately. So, like, please don't call yourself that because you're not affiliated with us. But, you know, that aside, like, it's really awesome. It's really inspiring. Like, I think a lot of people, bitcoiners all over the world have seen what we were doing in America and done exactly what you were just calling on the listeners to do and like, you know, create, you know, organizations and advocacy groups and, you know, grassroots efforts. Like, I think there is, I think we kind of helped kick off this trend of bitcoiners realizing that they can have influence and agency and, you know, it's not that the state is just this thing that does stuff to you and you sit there and just, you know, take it.
- [86:43]
Marty
Thank you, sir. May I have another?
- [86:44]
David
Yeah, that you could exactly like that you can actually, you know, engage in the political process. And so, yeah, I, I hope more people around the world do what BPI is doing with their respective governments.
- [87:02]
Marty
Yeah.
- [87:04]
David
And say, hey, are we really going to let America win? They've been dominating us forever. Like, are we really going to let them win the bitcoin race? Like, I, I think that is a great bulwark as well, against the risk I mentioned of bitcoin getting branded globally as too American. And so, yeah, I'm bullish on bitcoin advocacy around the world, and I'm bullish on the people who have decided to make that a, like, you know, kind of how they spend their time because it's super thankless and it's miserable, like, in many ways. And, you know, even a lot of the, I'm sure, like, a lot of those people are facing the same kind of, you know, kind of derision and condescension that I faced from, you know, like, people in the bitcoin community from you. And it was just like, I remember
- [88:07]
Marty
being like, duh, this is good luck.
- [88:08]
David
He's like, dude, just fucking have a cigarette, man. Like, it's, you know, we're going to just enjoy your time before, before we go to prison. Yeah. And so, like, I, I, I think that if there are like international bitcoiners listening to this pod and, you know. Yeah. That, that you should try to, you know, get involved with, with the other people in your, in, in, you know, in your meetup or whatever, the other bitcoiners that you, that you, you know, that, you know, in your country and, and, you know, kind of give this try. So.
- [88:41]
Marty
Yeah, well, I mean, again, we're talking about. Yes. And I dinner last night, and then the conversation of the official speeches were about creating and then preserving the canon of bitcoin and the sort of emergence of this memetic vernacular that has emerged strongly via the Shytoshi Nakamoto Institute, but pro containment into the Twitter sphere. And we were in heavy meme warfare for, let's say, better part of eight years between 2015 and 2023. I think it's. The meme warfares died down a bit. But I think bpi, what you guys are doing is sort of a sort of bottling of, like, that memetic power and like, okay, we need to focus this energy towards.
- [89:29]
David
Yeah, it's literally the same thing. It's just like we're, you know, it's just like a different sort of fractal of meme warfare, basically. And it's like. Like, okay, cool.
- [89:41]
Marty
And I bring it up, too, because I think this week is a great example of you're fighting for bitcoin policy on the Hill. And I think this week was a great example for me. Like a reminder, like, hey, these politicians, they are worried about their next election and they will respond. In the case of this week, a politician has responded. We forced Coinbase to respond. Essentially, the people who made a fuss about this de minimis thing, Coinbase has made a response. We said earlier it seems like you and Coinbase will be participating in a roundtable discussion. But the point I'm bringing all this up is how can observers like myself on the outside looking in help your cause? How strong is the memetics of participating in discussion outside the Hill on the Internet?
- [90:36]
David
Well, I think it's really strong. On the de minimis piece, I think there are basically two arguments that you could make against a de minimis exemption for bitcoin. One is that it's a Trojan horse for tax evasion, which I think is the argument that some people are making. I think it's a very bad argument and it won't win. I think the other argument that people will make and are making about de minimis is that it's just a sort of solution in search of a problem, and that it's not important that people don't use bitcoin as money. And so it's interesting because I think what's going to happen is the principal argument against this policy is going to be that people don't care about it. Why should the government spend time and effort and all this stuff, you know, for. For something that people are not using as money? And so it's weird it's like, okay, if Joe Schmo from Arkansas calls their congressman and says, you know, here's what I think about the war in Iran, it's like, all right, man, like, thanks for your call. Like, have a good day. But, but this is an interesting thing where like the very act of that phone call or email to your elected official is actually in and of itself the evidence against what I think the main argument against de minimis will be. And it's one of those rare moments where I actually think there's a ton of value in reaching out to your elected official because all they're trying to do is understand just ground truth. Like, is this real? Are people really using Bitcoin as money? Or is this just like BPI and bitcoin organizations telling us that people are using, using Bitcoin as money? And so I think, you know, if you were a business owner, if you're using square and you've turned on bitcoin payments, like just if you are someone who uses either receives Bitcoin as payment for, you know, your, your goods or your services, or you're someone who pays in bitcoin for your goods and services, just emailing your representative and saying that I think is actually going to be meaningful. Janessa Lopez, who runs bitcoin policy for Block, tweeted out again yesterday a link that they have. It's Bitcoin is money or BTC is BTC is Money, BTC is Money xyz and they just have like a one click tool that makes this. You know, you could probably have your, your claw just do this for you. You know, it's just like a drop down. You put your zip code. It tells you kind of who your, your elected officials are and it just auto generates a message that you can send them.
- [93:26]
Marty
Hey, can you go to BTCIsMoney XYZ and I want you to send an email using your agent mail to account on my behalf. My local representative, please. Thank you. All right, he's on it. All right, he's on it.
- [93:47]
David
Incredible. So I think that's one thing I will say. I think donating to the Bitcoin Policy Institute is important. We sort of exist only because of the generosity of bitcoiners. And we've had a lot of people in the community step up and donate in a big way. But I think something about nonprofits that people don't understand is they cannot just be funded by very wealthy people. The IRS looks at your revenue and you have to meet what's called a public support test. A certain percentage of your revenue as an organization needs to be from small dollar donors, like people who give $5 a month or, you know, $20 a year or whatever it is. And I think it's. How would I say this? Like, you might think, like, why would I give $5 to, you know, to BPI? Like, what am I going to do? Buy Connor a coffee or whatever. But every small dollar donor that we get lets a bitcoin whale donate more money to bpi. And so there is this inherent multiple on small dollar giving. We had a lot of small dollar donors when we did the legal defense fund for Samurai Wallet and we raised I think a million dollars for that for their legal defense. And that was pretty much all from small dollar donors. And we didn't take a dime of that. 100% of those funds went straight to, to Bill and Keone and their lawyers. And so, yeah, we really could use more pleb support. And so literally, even if it's like a couple of sats, it genuinely makes a big difference. And I know that's the corniest thing to say because everyone's like, oh, every dollar counts and. But no, there's a very, very, it gets very critical to the future of BPI that we have a large base of people that give, no pun intended, even a de minimis amount of money. And your support of BPI at whatever it is, 20, 50, $100 a year, it raises the ceiling on how much money BPI can raise from larger donors. So that would be my two plugs would be talk to your representative about dementms, talk to them about developer protections. Those emails do get logged and they do matter on the margin. And the question isn't really how effective is it, it's how effective is it relative to the 20 seconds it takes you to tell Claude to do it. It's a very asymmetric payoff given how easy it is to do this stuff and donating to bpi. If you support our mission and you want to see kind of us succeed and do more of what we do, then yeah, I think we are sort of an in of one organization and we are the only sort of real bitcoiners, I think, in this process on Capitol Hill and in dc.
- [97:20]
Marty
So yeah, I just gave it my zip code, so it's two minutes away from sending my, my email.
- [97:25]
David
Incredible.
- [97:26]
Marty
On behalf of me. Yeah, I think it's very important work. And you're we as we. I was highly skeptical when we were smoking cigarettes on that roof in Nashville. I was like, no, it was here now, actually. No, I remember we were here, but I remember being like now there's wine gauge, flying gauge and again going back, it is still conflicting to this day. Like. And Marty Jones. I don't like the intelligence agencies. I think they're false flag and yeah, I think they're MKUltra and I think they're propagandizing us. But we live in an age of main warfare. You've got to engage.
- [98:00]
David
Yeah.
- [98:00]
Marty
We are in an info war and we got to get them better info. And I think again, I think again focusing that the memetic energy that existed on bitcoin Twitter from 2015 to 2022, 2023, sort of balling that energy and like Goku gaming it towards the. Yeah. Intelligence agencies is at the very least like, they, they can't say that they don't have good arguments. And I. To your point, the truth is on our side. Like it's very convincing.
- [98:34]
David
Yeah.
- [98:35]
Marty
Once you understand this.
- [98:36]
David
That's the other thing too is it's just like, I don't know, like what? Like, yeah, it's just a fact. Like it is just true that America will be better off if it allows bitcoin to flourish here.
- [98:47]
Marty
Well, actually, I meant to bring this up earlier and that was a perfect time to bring it up. America is better off because bitcoin, already, many could argue bitcoiners, the industry, the country are better off. Despite a massive uphill battle we've had to fight. We had to fight up until 2020, the end of 2024, we were under attack multiple times. And despite all that, despite the relative uncertainty that loomed over the industry for so many years, people persisted and knew like, hey, the risk is worth it and we're going to persist and we're going to keep accumulating bitcoin and we're going to keep building companies. And I think that is a testament as well. Like we've done so much despite. Imagine what we can do if we have tailwinds instead of headwinds.
- [99:45]
David
Yeah, exactly. I don't know, I think, I think another, you know, to your point of like the duality of like, you know, the, the. Yeah, I think I am, I am way more sympathetic to. I see every now and then sort of criticism of BPI really, just because I think people are philosophically against the idea of doing this. And I think of everyone at bpi, I'm probably the most sympathetic to those arguments. I think everyone else on my team is like, yeah, well, that's fucking stupid. I spent a Lot of time, you know, like over a year. Just sort of like thinking very deeply about whether this was a good idea or not. And I think where one of the places where I just sort of landed was, you know, the world where I'm wrong is just too depressing for me to accept. Like, if it really is the case that we have no agency, there's nothing we can do. And the, Our. Our lives are solely at the mercy and discretion of, you know, nameless, unelected bureaucrats. And you know, you, you are just a little like goy cattle. It just, you just, you know, they're not, you know, you, you, you just sit there and you, you eat the grass and you live in the pod and you, and you go die in Iran when the, when the state tells you to, and there's just nothing you can do. Like, I, I don't know. That's an incredibly like, low agency view of the world. And I would. That's just too depressing. Like, I just have to, I just sort of have to choose to believe that the state is, is not a monolith. Like we anthropomorphize the state into like this gargantuan, like be. It's just people. Yeah, it's literally just human beings. And human beings are just fundamentally persuadable. They are, you know, not monolithic. Like, it's. They're just people. And in the same way that we got the entire world to believe in magic Internet money and we memed this, we as in the bitcoin community, memed a new form of money into it. Bitcoin itself is one of the most high agency things that has ever happened ever. Like the sheer audacity of a bunch of nerds on a talk forum and on a mailing list before that to say, yeah, this thing, money, that is the exclusive purview of nation states. Actually, like, we can draw little like wizard memes and just like, you know, orange coin good and you know, whatever. Like we. The audacity to believe that you can, you know, meme a new form of money and value into existence is so inspiring. Like, that's like why I got obsessed with bitcoin. Like, I got completely one shotted by that.
- [102:44]
Marty
It's fun.
- [102:44]
David
And I, you know, my, my initial kind of coming into bitcoin was, was like, wow, this is overwhelmingly likely to fail, but what if it doesn't? And I feel like that was the attitude of a lot of early bitcoiners. Like when I went down the rabbit hole and started reading all of these, you know, this like sort of pages and pages of discussion on the talk forum and on the mailing list. It was so cool because it felt like the smartest people in the world were kind of here talking about this. And the attitude was very intellectually humble. This will probably fail. It will probably go to the gulag or this will blow up or shut down or whatever.
- [103:29]
Marty
Every once in a while, Hal Finney be like, but if it does work.
- [103:31]
David
But if it does work, how cool would that be? And so I think there's been this weird pivot in the kind of median attitude of bitcoiners. Kind of in some ways away from that spirit of like, you can just do things and agency to this weird kind of sort of politics of inevitability of Bitcoin is inevitable and we're going to win no matter what. And also the state hating us and hating bitcoin is inevitable and there's nothing we can do about that. And I think both of those are just wildly retarded and like dangerous, like stupid fucking views. And whether they're honestly, they're just depressing views. And to me, that is like the antithesis of bitcoin. Like, bitcoin is fundamentally a project of like human agency and an ability to say, yeah, we can opt out. Like, we can do something different. We can change the course of history and change the timeline. And that's kind of, you know, in a less cool way, but like sort of same mental model. That's how I feel about this type of work is like, I don't know, my options are what, sit there and do nothing and just accept that I have no control over my life, that we as Americans have no control over how our government treats bitcoin. Like, I'm. I'm sort of, again, I'm sympathetic to people who view that the world that way, but I just feel like those people have to be really unhappy. Yeah, like, that just can't. To me, that is not a sort of mental model of the world that is, you know, compatible with like being well adjusted.
- [105:05]
Marty
Black pill.
- [105:06]
David
It's just so black.
- [105:07]
Marty
Very incel driven.
- [105:08]
David
Yeah, it's just really depressing.
- [105:09]
Marty
It's not. I'm getting reinvigorated. I was actually saying this week has been very reinvigorating for me because the coinbase stuff really pissed me off. Like, I was like, are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Coinbase? And the fact that the bitcoin community, the Internet coinbase, reacted the way they did. It was like, yeah, we're Back in, like, the Sni dinner. Pierre was described as somebody. Back in 2015 on Twitter, you'd get in a phone booth with, like, Paul Krugman and, like, knife him. It felt like that energy that, again, that memetic energy that existed between 2015 and 2022. I missed people who are new to this stuff and, like, we're like, the memetic energy of bitcoin. Twitter in that era was so strong, so powerful, so much fun. It's been lost, but this week, I feel like a little bit of it came back.
- [106:00]
David
Yeah.
- [106:01]
Marty
And I'm not trying to blow smoke up my own ass and be like, I did that, but, like, I don't know. There's like, a weird convergence of things happening right now, and I. I think the idea that we have agency and then we can do these things needs to be, to your point, engendered across the spectrum of bitcoiners. Nothing's inevitable.
- [106:22]
David
No.
- [106:23]
Marty
Complacency is. Is a killer. And get back in the meme warfare.
- [106:27]
Podcast Host
Yes.
- [106:28]
Marty
Get back in to start having fun again.
- [106:30]
David
Yeah.
- [106:30]
Marty
The price is down. Yeah. There's. There's wars popping off. Yes. There's a private credit bubble, but this is why bitcoin exists. Like, it's going to help us get away from this. We need to start having fun again.
- [106:41]
David
Yeah. Don't be a chud. Don't take the black pill. Like, you know, you're. You're the. The, you know, like, there's just no. There's no upside in that. Like, your. Your. Your maximum upside of the black pill is everything goes to shit and your life sucks and you get thrown in the gulag and you get to be like, told you so. Told you Zell BPI was a waste of fucking time. Like, okay, man. Like, so you're max upside is sweet. Can you pass.
- [107:13]
Marty
Can you pass the slot, please?
- [107:15]
David
Pass the gruel to me, please, before we have to go break up the rocks to, you know, whatever in the chain gang. Like, the max upside of the. Of the low agency sort of, you know, black pill take is everything you care about goes away and the world is terrible, and you get the sort of unique privilege of being able to say, I told you so. Like, what's. That's terrible.
- [107:38]
Marty
I predicted this.
- [107:39]
David
I called it. Yeah. I said this was right. I. You know, you. I told you, you know, you. You never. This was a waste of time. Okay. Like, I mean, yeah, I. I just feel like the risk reward on that trade is, like, abysmal. It's just asymmetric. To the downside.
- [107:55]
Marty
So.
- [107:56]
David
Yeah, but no, I, I, I am very, I'm very sympathetic to like, skepticism and you know, and critique. But, you know,
- [108:14]
Marty
you're in the arena, brother.
- [108:15]
David
Brother, I'm in the arena. The man in the arena. But I mean, like, okay, that actually is like, so fair though. Like, I mean, not, not to like, just, you know, whatever. But like, I mean, it's true. Like, if you don't like what I'm saying to the government about bitcoin, go, go say something else, you know, Like, I don't have some monopoly there. Bitcoin is decentralized. There's no, you know, I'm not, I'm not getting a rake on the, the political, you know, on the, on the policy budget of the Bitcoin corporation, you know, like, you know, and so, yeah, I, I think that, I think this is just so worth a college try. And I'm totally willing to concede that there are possible states of the future where this all ages like milk and everything I've tried to do fails. I'm totally fine with that is a sort of necessary condition of doing anything meaningful and worthwhile. And worthwhile. Yeah. So I am, you know, very cognizant of the fact that this could just be a waste of time and, you know. Yeah. But like, I don't know. I have to believe that as, you know, as easy as it is to take the black pill and as like, depressing as the world can be, the moment that you just decide that you have no agency, you meme that into reality. Like, everything you do is memeing something into reality. And if you decide, the moment you decide you have no agency over the future, you have sealed your fate and you do have no agency over your future. I don't know. That's kind of how I resolve to your point of the back and forth of, oh, I think this is cool. I get it. I'm also like, ah, is it cool? Is it the right thing? To me, it's just, that's sort of the logic that I kind of came down to is like, you just, you know, the, the, the, the upside of, of trying is really large. And the, the, the downside of, of, of. There's just the, there's just, it's not, it's not an equal distribution. Like the, the, the, the max downside of trying and failing is the same down. And so, you know, with BPI and the work that, that you're doing and that so many people in bitcoin are doing, we're at least, you know,
- [111:09]
Marty
Giving it a college try.
- [111:10]
David
Yeah. Like in sort of. Yeah, exactly. Like, sort of increasing the probability that we get to the good timeline.
- [111:18]
Marty
Yeah, we're going to get there. We're going to win. I know. You got to get going.
- [111:23]
David
Yeah.
- [111:24]
Marty
So this has been an incredible pleasure. Can't believe it's been the first time. In person's so much better. Yeah, it is, Logan. It's so much better. Maybe I'll start, honey. I'm going to start traveling, do all in person. I'm going to become the next Peter McCormick. Don't worry, we're going to buy a soccer team, though. No, this is. I think the work that you're doing is incredibly important. I think everybody. I really like the last train of thought we ended on there, which is like, hey, do you want to live in a world where we're eating our gruel saying I told you so, or do you want to live in the world where it's like, wow, we fucking did it, boys. We fucking did it. Bitcoin is the standard monetary reserve asset of the world. We're using it as payments. The politicians have bent the knee and
- [112:15]
David
the politics of inevitability is a psyop to make you complacent.
- [112:18]
Marty
Yes.
- [112:19]
David
Like everyone who tells you that you have no agency in power is psyopping you into precisely that outcome.
- [112:27]
Marty
And there's. Yeah, we're gonna win.
- [112:29]
David
We're gonna win.
- [112:31]
Marty
Go, go, go. Get your five dollar monthly donation to bpi. Set up, freaks. Peace and love the gate.
- [112:39]
Podcast Host
Thank you for listening to this episode of tftc. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can, leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to Fountain FM to find that $5 a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps. The show gives you incredible value, so please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time and until next time.
- [113:29]
David
Okay?