← The Peter McCormack Show
The Peter McCormack Show
Bitcoin: A View From The Left with Ben Arc - WBD453
01:35:26
Location: London Date: Thursday 13th January Project: LNbits, NOSTR Role: Bitcoin and free open source software advocate What are the politics of Bitcoin? Satoshi in a post in 2008 said “It's very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can...
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- [00:05]
Ben Arc
Bitcoin is a commons. It's a monetary commons, a value transfer commons, a shared resource which people can use and then it's within their interest to keep that resource going and then and nurture that resource and help it grow. And that's what Bitcoin is. And if anyone tried any private interests tried to co opt Bitcoin like Bitcoiners, attack it.
- [00:25]
Peter McCormack
Hello there, how are you all doing? Welcome to the what Bitcoin did podcast which is brought to you by Gemini, the only place I am using for buying Bitcoin Bitcoin. I'm your host Peter McCormack and before we get into the interview today, I have a quick message from my show sponsors and this show is brought to you by casa. The safest way to store your Bitcoin now. Forgotten passwords, SIM swaps, phishing attacks. There are just too many ways to have your Bitcoin lost or stolen. But with CASA you never have to worry about your Bitcoin again. Because with a CASA Multi Sig wallet you get to take custody of your Bitcoin. But you only move Bitcoin by signing transactions from multiple wallets, ones which you get to distribute into different locations. And this is going to protect you from a range of mistakes, errors and vulnerabilities. Now if you want to find out more about this, I have been a customer for over a year. You can hit me up in my DMs or drop me an email. Happy to answer your questions. There is no better time to upgrade your Bitcoin security and get total peace of mind. You can find out more at Keys Casa which is K E Y S CA S A. Next up we have my new sponsor to the show which is BCB Group who provide online business banking for companies in the Bitcoin industry. And yes, I am now a customer of BCB2. They heard about my difficulty with finding a bank, a reliable one, that understands Bitcoin and they reached out to me. So I've moved all my business banking across to bcb. And you know what? I could not be happier. It is so nice to finally be dealing with a bank which understands my business and and understands Bitcoin and isn't putting hurdles in my way. BCB's clients include major exchanges, market makers, funds and miners active in the UK and Europe. But they are now expanding globally and they also have this amazing fiat network called Blink which facilitates instant free payments between BCB clients for all supported currencies. Now listen, I know some of you have had some trouble with this. If you are looking for a banking provider who understands and supports bitcoin companies rather than creating hurdles. Then like me, you want to become a BCB customer. If you want to find out, then please head over to bcbgroup.com Peter which is B C B G R O U P.com Peter next up we've got Ledger, the world's most popular hardware wallet. Now a hardware wallet allows you as a bitcoiner to take custody of your bitcoin. And I have been a Ledger customer since early 2017. It's over four years now and I'm still using that same Nano S I bought back then. Ledger makes it easy for you to safely manage your Bitcoin using their Ledger Ledger Live software which interfaces with your device and you can even connect your nano S to your Android phone to manage your bitcoin on the go. If you want to find out more, please head over to ledger.com which is L E D G-E-R.com Next up is Blockfi. Now you can get up to $250 in Bitcoin when you join Blockfi. They've launched their Blockfi Rewards Visa Signature Card. And for people in the US who own or are interested in owning bitcoin or stacking more sats then the BlockFi Rewards credit card provides the easiest way for you to earn more bitcoin. Bitcoin. Because you get 1.5% back in Bitcoin on every purchase with no annual fee. It is the smartest way to stack sats with bitcoin rewards and every purchase. But if you're interested in finding out more and you do want to take out that bonus, you want to get that $250 in Bitcoin, then please head over to blockfi.com forward/peter which is B L O c k f I.com forward slash pet.
- [03:56]
Unknown
Morning Ben.
- [03:57]
Ben Arc
Morning. How's it going?
- [03:58]
Unknown
Good mate, how are you?
- [03:59]
Ben Arc
Very good, yeah, very good. Rested.
- [04:01]
Unknown
Good. Well, thanks for coming down.
- [04:03]
Ben Arc
Well, thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure.
- [04:05]
Unknown
Well listen, this was requested in two ways. You directly but a few requests recently that I've had too many guests maybe who are politically on the right, libertarian and capitalist, but not hearing too much from the left. And obviously when this show comes out there will be some people triggered because I've had left leaning people on the show before and the YouTube comments, yeah they go crazy because people like why are you giving these psychopaths?
- [04:33]
Ben Arc
Why are you giving them airtime?
- [04:34]
Unknown
Giving them airtime, why are you giving them a platform for context, I was definitely somebody who would lean on the left as a youngster. I would say bitcoin pushed me more to the right. And now I'm just kind of like all over the place. I don't really care what the issue is. I'm happy to discuss various issues.
- [04:53]
Ben Arc
I think that that's kind of the problem is the fear that if you have a political viewpoint which is different to the prescribed one, which is currently part of the sort of cultural ideology of the outspoken bitcoin which people are exposed to, then there's the fear that there's going to be kickback from it. And I personally, I work on a bunch of projects and I've had to kind of like distance my political thoughts away from my projects because I get muted and blocked on Twitter and then it doesn't do. If I'm promoting something I've done in one of our free and open source projects which I'm working on, then it limits its reach if I'm being blocked and muted by people on Twitter. So what I would say though is quite early on in bitcoin, when it was magic Internet money, there was a very diverse range of political thoughts within bitcoin, within the bitcoin quote, unquote community. And I'll trigger some people just calling it a community.
- [05:55]
Unknown
There is no community there.
- [05:56]
Ben Arc
There's only individuals in a community. Yeah. So at some point, maybe it was around sort of 2016, 17, because obviously, I mean, libertarian right, libertarians in the US, the Austrian economics, the ANCAPs, those sorts, there's immense value in bitcoin, of course, you can't deny that it makes markets more efficient. You're using the cryptographic laws of the universe to secure your private property. How can it not appeal to that type of person politically or with that political leaning? But then to say that's where it ends and its scope is only limited to those group of people and other people with other political ideologies can't see value in Bitcoin, I think just limits its scope and reach. So I mean, bitcoin itself, it wouldn't exist without the free and open source software which is built on the copy left. Free and open source software, which is itself a result of private capital failing to meet the needs of certain software requirements. And as well as that, you have consensus, consensus, decentralized decision making, something like consensus has been explored in left circle socialist circles for hundreds of years. And how to do consensus well has been explored for a very long time. So of course people on the left can Also see value in bitcoin. I think the common enemy which those on the left, those on the right should probably are targeting by using something like Bitcoin is state power, state control. And that will trigger your audience because I said, well this guy associating himself as a socialist and now he's saying that bitcoin is good, that bitcoin attacks state control. If you look historically at socialism, the history of socialism, it wasn't until Lenin brought back the vanguard and thought that he could take the power of state to bring about a socialist society, that the statist socialist side, the side of socialism which is statist, became more prominent. Before that it was always very anti state. Look at Rosa Luxembourg. She was killed by state for being antisocialist, anti state socialist. And then if we go back to the First International Working Men's Club, which was where Marx and Bakunin fought out, Marx was very much on the side of this idea of a worker revolution where people working would seize control of production and then you would bring about this socialist society. And Bakuna said, well no, actually he was also a socialist, but socialist, anarchist, lefty. He said that if you did that then you would bring about a red bureaucracy. And what was the phrase he used? That people would be beaten with the people stick. Which is what happened in the ussr. He predicted it all very insightfully. But then to having these incredibly bad examples where people have tried to bring about socialist society. Well, I mean have they tried to bring about a socialist society? Where have they just actually just empowered themselves having these incredibly bad examples and then saying that that is socialism. It's like saying, it's like looking at capitalism through state capitalism and saying, well this fails because interpreting the whole of capitalism is state capitalism. And the capitalists will say well that isn't capitalism, that's not a true form of capitalism. And they've got a good argument in saying that. And similarly, if you have something like state socialism and someone like me would say, well that isn't socialism. Look, you can't tarnish a cooperative with the same brush as the thing which brought about things like Gulags and Mao in North Korea. They're not the same. Decentralizing something like production, for example, production of software, production of real life goods, that's not the same as giving state power so they can beat people with the people stick.
- [09:57]
Unknown
There's a lot to unpack here. As I said, I've definitely since I discovered bitcoin, gone more to the right and more towards libertarian ideas. And I'm very interested in them. But I'm interested in listening to everyone. Even if you're a socialist, I want to hear from you, I want to hear your ideas. And I always wonder what in there is any value?
- [10:16]
Ben Arc
Well again, I mean libertarianism was always a leftist tradition. So it comes from Libertarie, which was a French pamphlet, political pamphlet, which is libertarian socialism. That's where libertarian socialism started. And then over time that was, I think that was co opted by Milton Friedman or Randall, someone like that, who then started using the term as well as the term anarchist as well to describe their right leaning political ideologies. But you know, as on the left we would say that although the intentions are there to empower the individual and the self, which is very worthwhile intentions, it often ends up becoming a form of kind of neoliberalism where you're actually just empowering a new master, a corporate overlord, or you're empowering state, because we do have state capitalism now where it's being co opted by big corporation and corporate interest. So I think the main thing is that people, maybe on the right, they will say that the best form of production for general liberty for people has already been invented, already exists. And that's just capitalism, free market capitalism, laissez faire capitalism, just let it do its thing. And then people on the left would say, well actually without regulation, capitalism can kind of run amok. And is there anything we can do to, is there any other forms of production which would give people greater liberty, A general grace of greater liberty. But then at this point I think it's very important that I must note that there's a big difference in property and in different types of capital. So I'm talking about big corporate faceless capital, the sort of which was brought about with the East India Company. And there's a great quote actually from the impeachment of the East India Company, which is a corporation has neither a soul to be condemned or a body to be punished. Therefore it does as it likes. And that was during the impeachment of the East India company back in 1790. So it's long been recognized that corporate capital is different to other forms of private capital. So when you look at the wealth of nations and Adam Smith and he talks about this concept of the invisible hand. So the merchants of England, they would have some sort of vested interest in benefiting their community and they wouldn't want to create horrible division of labor and turn man to beast, as Adam Smith said, because they would feel that some connection to England, but then with multinational Corporations, that kind of invisible hand which guides private capital so it doesn't screw people over too much, then just gets eroded away. And I do think that corporations, when they get to a certain size, could be replaced by some sort of, you know, utility commons. And that's the sort of thing which I'm kind of interested in exploring. And then, I mean, that's kind of like ideological where could production go in the future kind of concept. But if you're just talking about Bitcoin, I would say that bitcoin is a commons, it's a monetary commons, a value transfer commons. What is a commons? So a commons is a shared resource which people can use. And then it's within their interest to keep that resource going and then nurture that resource and help it grow. And that's what Bitcoin is. And if anyone tried any private interests tried to co opt Bitcoin like Roger Bird did with the bitcoiners, attack it because they realize that that's a centralizing point of failure, that we don't want the corporate interest to take control of Bitcoin, the network. We want it to be a commons, we want it to be publicly accessible. Freedom of association. And then going back, I'll go back to Marx and Marx's summarization of communism. Full communism was that each to their own need, each to their own ability. So the idea being that whatever you need, you can use the system, it's fine, it's free, and then you contribute where in which you can. And that's kind of like the utopian, ideological where communism would end up in the future. But I think that just that phrase itself is very much like Bitcoin. It's each to your need, use the system, it's fine, use it, make use of it. And then after a while you kind of feel like you need to contribute back and you have this urge to help kind of build and make the system better. And it's. Some people will say, well, that's just for individual interest. And that's fine if that's what you want to think. But I think there is also, I mean, we can't hide the fact that there is an egalitarian aspect to it where you actually want to help other people who want to access that system and use that system to give them more liberty and freedom.
- [14:44]
Unknown
You're giving me a lot to unpack here. There's a lot to get through. Okay, Ben? So when I first discovered bitcoin, somebody introduced it, the silk wrote to me and I was like, this is Cool. This is money that I can use to buy drugs on the Internet. Badass. And obviously I discovered censorship, resistance, and that was cool. It wasn't until years later where I started to dive into the more political side of it. But at the same time, people were saying to me, bitcoin's apolitical. It doesn't matter who you are. Bitcoin is for anyone.
- [15:14]
Ben Arc
Fantastic.
- [15:15]
Unknown
But the voices of the political side of bitcoin have been growing, and there is definitely a louder voice for libertarians. There's a louder voice on the right. The. The voice on the left seems to get shot down. And a lot of the conversations that I've had usually come privately because people don't. They don't want to be shouted at, holding their certain views. So I think there's a lot to unpack here. And what I'm trying. What I'm interested in doing is speaking to as many people as possible, because what I care about is how does society coordinate itself? I get called a status cuck all the time. I'm a reluctant status. But I do believe democracy is the best thing we have right now.
- [15:58]
Ben Arc
Absolutely. I agree with you completely. This attack on democracy, I think, where in history have you had peaceful transitions of power where it hasn't ended up in war and suffering and society being pulled back decades or hundreds of years? And democracy is the best thing we have. And currently representative democracy is the best thing we have. Again, it's a bit like attack. An attack on the left attacking capitalism by looking at state capitalism, or the right attacking socialism by looking at state socialism. You're looking at representative democracy and you're saying, well, all democracy is a failure and it's terrible and it's not fit for purpose. And it's like, well, hold on here. A democracy is an umbrella term. There's lots of different types of democracy. There's direct democracies, edemocracies. There's a whole different range of democracies. Go and look at the democracy Wikipedia and then pick a democracy which you think is better. Yes, the way in which we vote for things could be better. I mean, we have all this incredible technology now which allows us to access the Internet through a device in our pockets, which we have on us at all times. We have better tooling now for creating better forms of democracy. It's just a case of all those legacy institutions having to catch up with the technology, which has just grown so fast and so exponentially. But tooling is one of the most interesting parts of all of this technological Advancement is, you look at democracy itself, that was brought about and made possible by the printing press because people could then have access to information. They could read political pamphlets, and then more people had access to education and reading. But before the right tooling, something like democracy would fire up every now and then. You had. In the ancient Greece, you had democracy, you had these little pockets in history where democracy would flare up. But then if anyone looked at it, be like, well, that practically isn't going to work. Something like feudalism is much better, it makes much more sense. Or slavery makes much more sense for society to be able to produce things. And then we had democracy, we had the tooling in order to make democracy possible. And I'm saying that when you have this technological revolution, you have people accessing the Internet and accessing all these suites of tools, then different forms of prediction do become possible and different forms of democracy do become possible. And society will get better. You don't throw the baby out with a bathwater. Get rid of democracy altogether and then return to a king and a queen because democracy failed. And it's like, no, wait there, we can just improve the buggy system which exists right now.
- [18:18]
Unknown
Yeah. And one of the interesting things about this is rather than wanting the big red button to destroy democracy and we all become sovereign, independent individuals with private arrangements and insurances to back everything up, which I think on paper sells very well. I think on paper, I think the libertarians define the way society should operate in probably one of the best ways possible. I just don't have the belief it would be that way. What I like about democracy is that there is this always push and pull from the left and the right. Here in the UK at the moment, we have a conservative government and let's be quite frank, they've done a terrible fucking job. They've done a terrible job. And now we're seeing this push to the left, that push and pull to the left, I think create some balance. What I wish is, I wish the libertarians would engage more in politics to have that push and pull from the size of the state. So we have the push and pull from the left and the right, which is super helpful. But the state always grows, it's always increasing in size. And it was one of the things that Eric Voorhees said to me a long time ago, really stuck with me. He said, I don't want to get rid of the state right now. That's not. I mean, he does, but he said, I'd like to start simpler. Let's just say let's make government smaller. Start with 5%, even 1%. Let's just make the state smaller. And I would like the idea of some form of representative democracy which allows the libertarians to have an influence to make the state smaller. Now some libertarians do engage in politics and some don't and that's a conflict with libertarians. I understand that, but I do like that idea. I do like the push and the pull. I accept every criticism of democracy that's pretty much out there. It is shit.
- [19:57]
Ben Arc
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
- [19:58]
Unknown
But I think a society without it could be much worse. I mean look at the places in the world where you don't have functioning democracies. They're usually places which have worse access to health care. They usually have more deprivation, they usually have lower standards of education. Not everywhere. I know some people say, well, point to some authoritarian places, but generally speaking, and I do like some of the parts of the democracy we have, the democratic process we have in the uk, but I also like some of the way that I like the structure of the US system, the state based system. I think there's lots of bits and pieces we like.
- [20:35]
Ben Arc
I think checks and balances on power are always good in any healthy democratic system.
- [20:40]
Unknown
And that's what bitcoin does.
- [20:41]
Ben Arc
They've realized that they need lots of checks on power and it could be anything. I mean we, Christ, we have the Queen, but it could just be some bloke down the street. Like it could be a check on power. Like checks and balances on power are very healthy and very good. But no, I agree completely that obviously it's not perfect and it's very much broken and it often empowers the wrong people and can be easily co opted. But I mean like you say to reduce state. I think the best way to reduce state is bitcoin.
- [21:07]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [21:08]
Ben Arc
You know, you take the power of money production away from, away from state and then suddenly you've chopped off their arms. Their power is very limited, what they can actually do.
- [21:17]
Unknown
And Ben, do you know what the timing is right for this? Because if you look back at the history of government, state budgeting and running a surplus in a deficit, we have these cyclical economic times. Sometimes it's a surplus, sometimes it's a budget for some reason, whatever it is, maybe it's due to globalization, maybe it's due to technology, but we're now at a stage where governments don't run a surplus and the deficit just gets bigger and the money printers got out of hand and it's at that point Where? Where in the US when they formed the United States, they realized we had to separate church and state. We're now at that point separating money and state because the money printer goes br. Whatever happens, it goes brr. And we're seeing the impact that that's having on people. If we have Bitcoin as a check and balance, that to me is a way of improving democracy rather than destroying it.
- [22:10]
Ben Arc
See, I think it'd be more complicated than that. I don't think, I can't imagine a, a bitcoin based. Well, maybe eventually we'll get to a bitcoin based world, but I think in the meantime, look, in El Salvador for example, Sorry, bear with me.
- [22:22]
Unknown
I'm not saying I want bitcoin to replace fiat currency. Now I see it as we have both fiat currency as our day to day. It's our spend, it's our liquid cash.
- [22:34]
Ben Arc
But then here becomes Bitcoin is my savings technology now. But here's the question, right? Rather than just focus on the bitcoin stuff, can we in fact make fiat better? Could fiat be something which is like a sidechain off bitcoin paid to bitcoin and is federated so it isn't within the control of just a small handful of people in the bank of England? Could we make fiat better? I think we probably could. And I think again it would make society bad and would limit government's power. So if you think in El Salvador, for example, they're trying to use Bitcoin and it's great for paying for your coffee. And McDonald's is fast. The digital payments technology is amazing. Some fruit seller can sell some fruit on the street. They can have access to a digital currency which then they go spend in a big corporation, which they were never able to do. They didn't have a bank account. Huge percentage of El Salvadorians don't have bank accounts. So they didn't have access to digital payments. Now they have access to digital payments. However, if you're on a surplus income and then Elon Musk tweaks some crap out and then bitcoin halves in price and then you've gone from $200 in your monthly budget to $100, that's a huge problem. That's a bug in the system. But I do think that. So if you look at liquid, I know that we were talking before our fair, I can say you're talking about the idea of tokenizing your football club.
- [23:49]
Unknown
So hold on, let me put some context because people.
- [23:52]
Ben Arc
Oh yeah, yeah, not in the shitcoin Ethereum.
- [23:54]
Unknown
Yeah, let me do the context just so people don't think, oh God, he's going to do a shitcoin.
- [23:59]
Ben Arc
One of the liquid assets.
- [24:00]
Unknown
Yeah. So one of the things I was explaining to Ben before we started is that I would like to give fan ownership, the opportunity fans to own part of the football club and globally. There are people around the world who own bitcoin who might want to own part of the football club. One of the ideas is that you could tokenize the equity, but you tokenize it so it's on liquid. You tokenize it so it's actual security. So rather than some shitcoin that has no claim to anything, this is actually a claim to part ownership of the equity of the club that would be issued on liquid, traded on something like the Bitfinex Exchange. And I haven't made the decision because I even think some of those people have got questions. I only want to do it if it's a way of making you have a claim to ownership of the equity, of the club, therefore claim to ownership of the upside.
- [24:44]
Ben Arc
And from speaking to you as well, it very much seems like you're in the R and D phase where you're trying to find the best, the best solution for that. And for the fans of the football club, it'd be absolutely amazing for them as a birthday, Christmas gift or whatever to be able to buy this thing which then actually gives them, it's like a share in the, in the club. It's a really interesting concept and a great use case for liquid. But going back to liquid, it's possible the technology exists that El Salvador could have some sort of stablecoin, the El Salvadorian dollar pegged to some fiat currencies or some assets, asset basket, whatever. It could have a stablecoin, but it could utilize, if it's built on something like liquid, it could utilize the lightning network. So for the El Salvadorians, in their wallet they just have bitcoin and then they have El Salvadorian dollar. The El Salvadorian dollar exists on top of bitcoin. It's completely stable or pegged to something which is relatively stable. But they will use it in the exact same way. They'll scan a lightning invoice and they'll pay a lightning invoice and it'll be used in the same way. And the technology exists to build that. Right now some very capable people in somewhere like Blockstream could make that. And I do hope that the El Salvadorian government is in talks about making stuff because it's desperately what they need. The bitcoin experiment is great, but the price fluctuation sucks and it makes it unusable as actual money. And I do think that this will be. If you think about the Central bank of China, if you think about the European Central bank, bank of England, bank of England, by the way, not bank of Britain, which you should be bank of England. And then if you think about the Fed as well, they're all exploring digitally native currencies because they understand the value of digital native currencies and sending microtransactions through a network. All these countries which don't have central banks, are they not going to look at the tool set which exists to build these things in a decentralized way? I think they are like what are they going to do? Are they going to build a central bank and then that central bank is going to try and build a digital native currency in a centralized way? No, they're going to make use of these decentralized technologies. And as bitcoiners and maximalist bitcoiners who want this idea of a whole bitcoin standard where the world runs on bitcoin, I think we can get there, but I think the way in which we get there is by improving these fiat currencies using these decentralized technologies, but basing them on top of bitcoin and then maybe having some fancy schmancy bitcoin vault or something with arbitrage to be able to keep the pet. I don't know. There's also interesting technologies you can do in order to roll these things out. If you look in the UK we had the Bristol pound that was incredibly popular. And part of the reason it's incredibly popular is because people like a local currency. They feel like they just feel some association with it because they're from Bristol. For example, if Wales were to create a Welsh pound and there are some people within the Escumri Welsh Nationalist movement who want to build something like this, like a stable currency, which is. It's so censorship resistant that the bank of England or Britain couldn't stamp down on it. People could still use it in a censorship resistant way, but it would be stable and it would be federated and the control would rest in the hands of the Bosch people or the controlled rest in the hands of the El Salvadorian people. I think that's the direction in which it'll probably go in.
- [27:51]
Unknown
Does Wales have its own banknotes like Scotland and Northern Ireland?
- [27:54]
Ben Arc
No, no, no, no, it doesn't.
- [27:57]
Unknown
It's a bit unfair.
- [27:58]
Ben Arc
It is a bit Unfair, isn't it? I'll bring it up in our next meeting.
- [28:00]
Unknown
Although it's fucking annoying when you get like a Scottish 20 pound note and.
- [28:03]
Ben Arc
Then no one accepts. You get to do your little this is legal tender rant, don't you?
- [28:07]
Unknown
Yeah, legal tender. Because it's worth £19.
- [28:09]
Ben Arc
It's one of my favorite generic rants you can have at people.
- [28:12]
Unknown
Well, it's like my kids always get. My mum, bless her. She. She actually, it's five years yesterday, she died. Big shout out to my mom because she's the person who got me. She's the reason I do this.
- [28:22]
Ben Arc
Oh, yeah, I heard that story. You were trying to get medical treatment for her.
- [28:26]
Unknown
Yeah, it's getting cannabis oil. Because she was. Yeah, she was dying from cancer and we wanted to get to treat her. We got it too late, but that was.
- [28:33]
Ben Arc
God, that's incredible. Isn't cannabis or something, which is so abundant and should be easy to access, banned?
- [28:40]
Unknown
So, yeah, so my dad was like, oh, Pete, how are we going to do this? I was like, oh, you remember that I used to buy cocaine on the Internet, had that properly. He's like, yeah. So it was the same thing. So we bought the bitcoin. And then sadly, Mum passed. But, yeah, it was five years ago yesterday, so that's amazing. It's gone so quick. But thanks, Mom. But she used to give my kids their Christmas presents or their birthday presents and it was always like Northern Irish 20 pound notes. And then the kids were like, dad, I don't want this. Can you give me, like. So I'd have to swap them and then I'd go. And people wouldn't accept it or they'd give it that weird fucking look.
- [29:11]
Ben Arc
I used to love getting the Scottish banknotes because you get the £1 notes, you can feel like a gazillion. How old are you, big wedge of money. Nearing 40.
- [29:21]
Unknown
Right, so I'm 43. So you remember the pound note?
- [29:23]
Ben Arc
Yeah, In Scotland. Yeah, yeah, they've got. They got rid of that.
- [29:26]
Unknown
There's no pound note anymore.
- [29:27]
Ben Arc
Oh, man, that was so much fun.
- [29:29]
Unknown
We haven't had pound notes for years. I don't know if this. They might still have Scotland because. But we don't have it here.
- [29:33]
Ben Arc
No, in Scotland, do you have the.
- [29:35]
Unknown
You old enough to remember the half penny?
- [29:38]
Ben Arc
Maybe I'm old enough to remember finding them in the house, like under sofas and things and being like, what is this?
- [29:43]
Unknown
So when I was about five, we used to go swimming at the local pool and, you know, the penny Sweets, they used to have the ones that were half penny. So we used to have that half penny coin. I mean, you know, at that stage. Now the certain place, I think it's in Canada, they've got rid of everything under, I think it's Canada. Everything under five cents. And they just kind of round it. Yeah, because it costs more than a penny to make a penny.
- [30:01]
Ben Arc
Well, this is another interesting topic we should probably go into is just that physical currency is being used less and less, but then there are still services which are reliant upon physical currency, such as the suite machine and the arcade machine.
- [30:16]
Unknown
Well, you're replacing those with cards.
- [30:18]
Ben Arc
Well, yeah, but I mean you can't. Can I go and buy some sweets in a suite machine with a card? Can I go buy some? I mean you can, but then you have to have this thing which is online all the time and there's always been connected the Internet.
- [30:30]
Unknown
Do you know, I think one of the biggest losses will be for removing physical currency is buskers. Buskers and beggars.
- [30:36]
Ben Arc
Beggars and buskers. I know, I feel terrible. And every time you walk past you're like, have you got a card machine? Like, did you accept that?
- [30:42]
Unknown
Well, I always carry cash.
- [30:44]
Ben Arc
I need to start doing that.
- [30:45]
Unknown
Yeah, I just keep a small amount, a bit like, you know, Bitcoin cold storage. You have a small amount of lightning on your phone. I always have, you know, about £100 in the house. And so I've always got cash just for the times when you want cash, you want to give someone cash. Plus you don't want to be tracked on everything.
- [31:02]
Ben Arc
No, but I think again this is why all these big central banks are exploring digitally native currencies is they understand you need cash like functions for a digital currency. And we can't be using this legacy Visa network system. It's just unfit for purpose in the modern age. So yeah, I, I mean when it happens I'll probably use the digital pound. But I do hope, and I think it's a good way as well for countries which are under something like USD hegemony, where you're empowering. I mean actually Bukele had a really good point on this about the dollar in particular, which was if they do some sort of fiscal stimulus where they create some quantitative easing and then they create some bolster industry or something within the US they have the benefits of that. They have the new motorway, they have the new dam, whatever. But then all these countries which are reliant upon their currency, they don't see any of Those benefits.
- [32:01]
Unknown
It was Jack Mallards who said to me when we were in El Salvador, he said, when they're issuing stimulus checks, none of those are reaching El Salvador.
- [32:08]
Ben Arc
No, exactly. None of them are reaching El Salvador. It's a really interesting point. So it's while within the interest they incentivize these countries, particularly with using other. Other countries, currencies are incentivized to wiggle out of it and build their own currencies. And if it's easy enough to do, I think it will happen and that will be the next sort of step in bitcoin domination.
- [32:33]
Unknown
Well, listen, I can't let you off the hook that quickly on the political stuff because I still got a bit more.
- [32:38]
Ben Arc
Yeah, that was an interesting. Let's go back to the political stuff. So you said something about you don't want a overnight revolution. I agree with you completely. A thing's terrible. Overnight revolution. And there was a problem with, particularly on the left side where they had this historical materialism. So they looked at how in which the society changes and they would look at something like the French Revolution. It was bloody and it was, you know, sudden. And then you had this society changed or I mean, didn't change very long. You had some other Napoleon take control or whatever. But anyway, you have society change in these big bloodbaths. And there was always this assumption that that's how society would go from like a capitalist for profit production system to something like a socialist, full socialist system is. It would be something which was bloody. And then it's like, well, let's bring about that bloody event. Let's create that overnight revolution. And Gramsci, who was the leader of the Italian Communist Party, he believed in something called a slow revolution. He had this thing called, what's it called, Cultural hegemony, which is basically kind of common sense. Like what's the common sense of the age? Okay. And then you've always got to kind of challenge the common sense of the age. So when slavery existed, it's like, well, it's okay to do slavery because they're not real people, you know, they're like worth half a person or something. And that was the common sense of the age. Or when child labor existed. Well, it's fine for that five year old to climb up that chimney because they need to be able to provide for their family or something. And that's kind of the common sense of the. And now we look back at those things and we think that's horrible. And we understand that they're bad things. And then similarly when you look at working environments like worker rights and whether people are exploited in workplace or not, obviously some people have incredibly fulfilling jobs, but a lot of people are exploited in the workplace.
- [34:22]
Unknown
We can talk about that because I was listening to a podcast about Amazon on the way here, which really struck a chord with me in how Amazon operates.
- [34:31]
Ben Arc
It's business where all the employees really.
- [34:33]
Unknown
Happy and well, they pretend that, but they have phones on them that track them. If they don't pick something up at a certain speed, a certain time, they're deeper. Yeah. Then they can be fired. That the delivery drivers are on such tight timescales that they're basically pissing in bottles to get to the next level.
- [34:50]
Ben Arc
This is what Adam Smith talked about in wealth of nations, the division of labor. So if you make the workplace efficient, so this is the overarching problem with for profit private capital is that eventually, when your capital could only grow so far, you need to start putting downward pressure on workers. So you need to reduce their wages, you need to increase their efficiency and how much they can produce in the period in which they're employed for and in order to increase your profits. And that's a lot easier. It's hard to do as going back to before about different forms of capital. If you've got the big corporation, it's easy to incorporation because you're disconnected from everything. Can't you? In a small to medium sized enterprise, which I love by the way, I love the local coffee shop and the entrepreneur who has a bunch of businesses in his local community and he has a connection with the people, the employees who work there, he understands that one of them may have a kid going off to university and slip them some more hours or increase their wage. There's a human bond and human connection within that working environment and that form of private capital, which is great. All too often that gets stamped out by more efficient private capital. And this is the problem with monopoly in division of labor. But that then becomes this was. I was just listening to your Austin Hill podcast.
- [36:03]
Unknown
How fucking good is Austin Hill?
- [36:04]
Ben Arc
He's great, isn't he?
- [36:05]
Unknown
Isn't he amazing?
- [36:05]
Ben Arc
But he was talking about the singularity and he's talking about. And this is another contradiction is a. You have all this downward pressure on workers and wages as well. So then eventually people are going to struggle to buy the things in which you're producing. So he talked about that singularity, which I think he said was like 2040 or something is going to happen.
- [36:21]
Unknown
Is the singularity where Amazon runs everything?
- [36:23]
Ben Arc
Well, no, it can't, because there's no for profit. Because if you're not employing anyone, the robots literally do everything. So the robots, the teachers, the doctors, the Amazon driver, the farmer, all human beings, human labor, can be replaced by much more efficient robots. And this is what I quite like about bitcoin is actually bitcoiners. They're quite good at being futurists and they understand that how technology will advance and they appreciate something like robots doing pretty much everything which humans can do better will probably happen. And it will probably happen quite soon. This Austin Hill, you mentioned this in your podcast and then it's a case of, well then how are the robots incentivized to make the things to pick the food? Why are they going to exist? Who's going to own them? Because Amazon can't exist. There's no for profit, there's no for profit functions there. Are they going to be controlled by state? I mean, I don't think that's going to happen. I think the best scenario in that, because I was thinking about this listening to your Austin Hill thing, the best scenario in that circumstance would be that they're owned as commons, as productive commons, because this is a moment where humans have ultimate abundance.
- [37:39]
Unknown
Explain productive commons.
- [37:41]
Ben Arc
So when you first had property rights in something like the Magna Carta, there's also the charter of the forest which was drawn up, which was that the people of England could access the forest and they could forage. And they were very good actually with those rights at maintaining that commons because it was within their interest. If someone went in and start chopping down loads of trees and then destroying the natural harvest which exists within the forest, then the rest of the community would kind of attack them for it because that would mean that they couldn't draw as much from the, from foraging from the forest. And that's a commons. Okay. And my argument would be that bitcoin is in fact a commons. If you start attacking it, then people are going to. The users are going to attack you for attacking it. Interesting enough actually, the charter of the forest that was encapsulated in the Robin Hood mythology, by the way, steal from the rich to give to the poor and all that sort of stuff. So the. Where was it going? Oh yeah, chart of the forest commons commons there. What are we talking about with the. Oh, right, okay. Yeah, so they. So yeah, so that's the idea, isn't it? So I actually think that obviously a lot of bitcoiners refuse to admit that there is any sort of climate problem and that human access to they think that there's an unlimited amount of resources on the planet and we can't damage the planet by producing too much stuff. I'm kind of on the other side of the argument.
- [39:03]
Unknown
I'm with you on that.
- [39:03]
Ben Arc
We can damage the planet, we are screwing the palate is quite scary and we need to have a better ecological relationship with the planet. And I actually think that the robots being able to do everything and being able to harvest, for example, will be a good thing. So if you look at farming, for example, now it's two dimensional, you have a field, you got to get a plow and you plow through it and you get all the corn, the wheat, whatever from the field. But the actual most efficient yield wise when it comes to farming is something like permaculture where you have like a forest, you know, and you have like things growing on the floor, you have things growing in the tree, in the bush and you have like three dimensional farming and you have much greater yield per square meter. The only problem is with that type of farming is it's incredibly hard to, to harvest. Whereas if you have like these little bots which can fly around harvesting, like it makes sense to reforest the planet. So I do think that when you get to that point, instead of having like two dimensional farming, suddenly all these fields be filled with forests and we'll reforest. But the trees are the best technology to be able to lock up carbon, which there's too much of in the atmosphere.
- [40:07]
Unknown
We're going on tangents here. I don't mind discussing climate. I want to get back to the Amazon and companies as a commons.
- [40:13]
Ben Arc
Yes. So this was kind of my point.
- [40:16]
Unknown
Because I think I'm going to disagree with you here.
- [40:18]
Ben Arc
This was kind of my point was, I mean, who owns the robots? Like who? And it's kind of a scary thought to think of a.
- [40:25]
Unknown
Well, Amazon owns the robots.
- [40:27]
Ben Arc
How are they going to own the robots? Because there's no one to sell anything to. Because nobody works anywhere. Because no one works.
- [40:33]
Unknown
Oh, so you're going so far down the line.
- [40:35]
Ben Arc
I mean, is that far down the line or do you think humans will get to a point where everything we can do can be replaced by technology?
- [40:43]
Unknown
More or less, yes and no. I don't think so, and probably not in my lifetime. But I certainly see the trajectory, that's.
- [40:50]
Ben Arc
What the singularity is.
- [40:51]
Unknown
And I see the trajectory, you know, I see the trajectory of maybe lorry drivers being replaced by autonomous lorries, but for a period of time you're Going to have to have a driver in the autonomous, autonomous lorry, checking that it doesn't go and crash into a bunch of school children. And we're going to have incidents where shit like that happens and people question it. So the trajectory is there. But I'm interested in where we are right now because my issue with Amazon, which I've got so many things I want to talk about with Amazon, but my issue with Amazon is that they're treating the employees like shit. Their only goal is to make money and they're destroying businesses. I mean, our high street in Bedford's dead. Our Waterstones doesn't exist anymore. And I used to like taking my kids there and we would browse the books and buy a couple of books, that experience.
- [41:43]
Ben Arc
But we destroyed it though, didn't we, as consumers?
- [41:44]
Unknown
We have. And you know, and I'm part of the.
- [41:46]
Ben Arc
I buy things from Amazon. You buy things, everyone buys things from Amazon.
- [41:48]
Unknown
I'm part of the problem. Yeah. But you know what I do want to someone to do? I want someone to fork Amazon and create, not Amazon.com, give every company the access to the platform to list their products. But you can order from them and you can compare the price and say, if you buy from Amazon, it's X. Okay, I'm going to pay two pound more from this, but the delivery driver is not going to have to piss.
- [42:07]
Ben Arc
This is a very interesting. I got an interesting thought experiment for you. So you have Amazon, which exists right now. And then we create using all this crazy decentralized technology. We realize that Jeff Bezos is a bug. Leeching.
- [42:18]
Unknown
He's a cunt. Let's be honest.
- [42:19]
Ben Arc
He's leeching a hell of a lot of value out of that system. So, I mean, you can't say that a more efficient system can exist. Can't exist. You get with Jeff Bezos and then reinvest that money back into Amazon. There we are. It's a better system. So you have Amazon and you have decentralized. Amazon.com?
- [42:35]
Unknown
Not Amazon.com?
- [42:36]
Ben Arc
Yeah, well, not Amazon.com right? The products. I mean, I'm going to go a step further. I'm going to say the products on both of these pages or both these websites, right? They're exactly the same. They cost exactly the same. Same suppliers, doesn't even matter, Right? They're exactly the same product. You go on both. And this is a hypothetical thought experiment and it's for the listeners as well, and they have to be honest with themselves. Okay, now you have A choice. Are you going to go to the Amazon where, you know, people have the beep thing and this is utopian hypothetical, could probably never exist? Or do you go to the decentralized Amazon where the producers get more or less like 99.9% of the value and then 0.01% goes towards bounties for the decentralized Amazon software or something. So instead of the people working in the regular normal Amazon getting 70% of the value of their labor and 30% going to Jeff Bezos, the people working with the cooperative, decentralized, not Amazon, whatever it is, or maybe it's just like a direct marketplace, kind of like an ebay type thing, but it's really good if you've got the exact same products, they cost the exact same amount as a human being. Which one are you going to go to?
- [43:48]
Unknown
Well, it's kind of obvious.
- [43:49]
Ben Arc
It's an obvious answer, but you're not.
- [43:50]
Unknown
Going to get that. You're not going to get that. The efficiency will come from the centralized Amazon. You always will get a better service in terms of packing, picking delivery from that. But the decentralized one, I think the way the decentralized one wins is that, you know, more is going to the producer. You know, the people delivering it aren't pissing in bottles. You know, people aren't getting sacked by a beeper. And by the way, if people want to listen to this one, I listen to. It was Rogan interviewing the. I can't remember the names. The two people who left the Hill saga and the. Anyway, they've set their own podcast up. Like this is what they're talking about. I was listening to that on the way up, but. But, yeah, I just. Yeah, but it's not even that bad right now. I want someone to make. Not Amazon, which is just the listing. Do you know what I'm going to do? You know what I do from this show? I'm going to look at a little experiment. What's the date?
- [44:35]
Ben Arc
I mean, I didn't want to talk about the technology stuff, but I could talk to you about Diagonally, which is basically what you're saying.
- [44:40]
Unknown
What's the date today? What's the day?
- [44:41]
Ben Arc
It's the 13th.
- [44:42]
Unknown
Right, interesting. Okay, I'm going to go for a month without Amazon and I'm going to document my experience and just see what it's like. Because I've probably got an average of package a day probably coming because of equipment. I'm going to do a month without it and go through the experience, see what it's like. And just because I want to get away from Amazon.
- [45:01]
Ben Arc
Do you think. Do you think. So you say that it's never going to happen, that a hierarchical feudalist corporate structure is far more efficient than something of a decentralized nature when it comes to producing things. Again, it depends on tooling, in my opinion. But do you think that it's worth exploring building something like a decentralized Amazon?
- [45:22]
Unknown
Absolutely.
- [45:23]
Ben Arc
Even if you know that it's probably not going to work.
- [45:28]
Peter McCormack
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- [48:50]
Ben Arc
Because this is Sophie. Sophie Sakes. So going back to, I mean for any of the listeners who are still hanging on going back to that concept of something like socialism being a collection of different. The anti state socialists, the state socialists, the libertarian socialists, et cetera. Okay, so socialism itself, if you just define socialism, what it is, okay, so it's the means advocating that the means of production, distribution and exchange be owned or regulated by the community as a whole. Just advocating. So it's literally just saying, I think that the decentralized Amazon is better and I would like to try and build that thing because I think it'd be better for human beings. I agree, because they have Some ownership of the company, they have more value to take home because they don't have the exploitative wage. Downward pressure on wages, even though that may be a complete impossibility. I mean, people said the same things about getting rid of slavery. By the way, just to put into context, going back to the idea of Gramsci and the cultural hegemony of the time and the common sense of the time, slavery was the most efficient way to produce things. Now we understand it's not. It's more efficient if you have workers, you have employed and they have families and they have homes and they can have private property.
- [50:01]
Unknown
That's why I was in these unions.
- [50:04]
Ben Arc
I mean, the unions, they can only go so far and they often get. I'm a big union person. I'm still a member of my teaching union from when I was a teacher, and I'm not a teacher anymore. So, you know, I very much like unions. I think there needs to be upward pressure on that, downward pressure which comes down. And one of those, one of those mechanisms, one of the best mechanisms for that is things like unions currently. But I do think that in a free market, if you have a completely free market, what's to stop? I mean, again, like a laissez faire free market capitalist, they have to accept this as part of the doctrine that a cooperative could join that free market and could potentially, theoretically, hypothetically, in the utopian world, out compete the private capital. And then if it does, is that worth advocating? Is that worth exploring, pushing, helping develop, nurture, nurturing? And it goes back to just that natural innate ability humans have to be able to empathize with other human beings, that the human beings working in decentralized Amazon are much happier than the human beings working in the centralized Amazon. And although decentralized Amazon may be impossible, it's still worth advocating for and actually building towards. And that's a socialist ideology right there.
- [51:10]
Unknown
But I think you can build a better centralized Amazon. So great example. Everyone's pissed off with YouTube at the moment. They're censoring the fuck out of people. Might even happen with this show. We're seeing people being deplatformed. Some are getting it back, some not. Brett Weinstein lost his channel. Pump losses for a day. Bitcoin magazine the other day. That's that fear that you might lose that channel. Matt O'Dell's created Bitcoin TV.
- [51:34]
Ben Arc
Very good.
- [51:34]
Unknown
Yeah. In preparation for that. And you know what? That's centralized. But it's an Optel. But it is centralized to an extent. It's Run by that team that run Bitcoin tv. And I'm cool with that. I would be cool with somebody coming out and saying, I'm going to build centralized, not Amazon. And everybody can list their products. This is the way we operate. And maybe centralized, not Amazon starts centralized and has a roadmap to become decentralized. I don't know all the answers. I think some things are hard to build, decentralized. And I don't mind an incentive structure for someone to build a better Amazon, an ethical Amazon. I ordered some things yesterday. It's funny as fuck we're having this conversation. Look, I just got a fucking text message from Amazon, delivered your package. Fucking. Because I'd order a bunch of things, my football clubs and balls and bibs and shit. And I just got it on Amazon because that's the way you do it. It's just easy, it's done, it comes the next day. But if not Amazon existed. And it's like, I want to see the comparison. You order on Amazon and you order on not Amazon. This is the delivery time of both. This is the cost. It might be like, oh, it's going to be another day and you're going to pay two pound more. But this is what the drivers are paid. These drivers are not under pressure. People aren't being sacked. I think that marginal increase in cost, I'm always going to be happy to pay that. Not to service a basic scumbag slave system.
- [52:59]
Ben Arc
Let's think about the tooling. So, I mean, I didn't want to. I mean, so a big disclaimer on my political views. They've got no association with any of the free and open source projects I work on. I mean, this is what's great about some of the projects which I'm working on, that we have very diverse political opinions and some of them are completely the opposite side of the political spectrum to me. And we still get on great and we still create great cool software. Okay? So one of the things we became excited in Alembits was payment splitting.
- [53:27]
Unknown
So we had this explain LNBits to people.
- [53:28]
Ben Arc
So they know lmbits is basically like a WordPress for your lightning node. So if you've got a lightning node, you want it to serve different purposes. If you're a content creator, you might want it to, you know, might want to be able to throw up a QR code on your YouTube video, for example, or whatever. So you have all these different extensions and you can develop, you can extend bits in any direction you want to extend it. And if You're a merchant, then you can have like a point of sale or a product management or something or some sort of front facing shop. So you have all these different extensions. So if you think about what was successful about WordPress is it's a very simple blogging website development tool. You install it and then you build in the direction you want to build it in and you can customize it. And Elenbit is essentially that it's a Lightning wallets account system which sits on top of your node, but you have all these extensions so you can develop in any which way you want. So one of the extensions which was created by VHF was for Cryptographiti, did a set at the San Francisco old Fed thing, I think it was the old Federal Reserve, a DJ set during the lockdown. Covid stuff. One of the cool things about he put an lnur pay on the screen. So basically a static QR code. You can use lightning to pay. Now if you paid enough you would then get as a receipt a download link for the song which he's playing. One of the functions in the software, which actually cryptography didn't immediately pick up on us being super cool, but people in the Alan Bitts chat really liked is the fact that when you made a payment, 10% went to the DJ, 90% went to the producer. So at point of sale the payment was split. So we all became excited about that and now we've created like a dedicated split payments extension. So you can say, well when money comes into this wallet, I want it to go X amount to go to this wallet, this wallet, this wallet. So then you think about how that could impact a micro venture. Like we're going to go sell coffee on the street. Okay, I'm going to be working, making the coffees, you're going to be front of house. We're going to have some of the people working there, they're going to be doing this, that and then we decide how much of at point of sale, like how much percentage do we each get? Who's working the hardest, who's got the most responsibility?
- [55:28]
Unknown
How do you figure out who's working the hardest?
- [55:29]
Ben Arc
I don't know, maybe they have phones.
- [55:30]
Unknown
To track you, how long you take.
- [55:32]
Ben Arc
To make the coffee. This is a very interesting question. So you have that again, hypothetically utopian. You have that small scale production of coffee. Now you think, well maybe if I buy a laptop in the shop at point of sale, then maybe X percent could go to distribution, X percent could go to sales, X percent could go to Manufacturing. And then when it hits those wallets, it could split again. And we could do this because we have microtransactions. This is one of the cool things about microtransactions. So the cleaner in the factory, on the factory floor, looks at their wallet and they're getting these sats just rolling in. Sometimes the sats start to slow down, they start to get less sats and they're like, well, why is that? And there starts to be some discussion on the shop floor, why am I getting less SATs now? It's because we made the percentage smaller for sales. Because distribution, they needed more money for this, that and other. And then the people on the shop floor like, well, that's not actually we need more sales to be able to sell. And they're like, more. And it becomes this discussion. And this is kind of like when you talk about the failure of something like daos. People are incentivized to discuss and to actively engage and vote on decision making. Whereas if it actively affects the amount of sats they can see pouring into their wallet, I think that kind of changes. This is utopian sort of science fiction now when it comes to tax collection. So bitcoin makes tax collection infinitely harder. Okay. One of the best forms of tax collection and it's also quite fair, I think, as well as VAT value added tax, rich people buy loads of stuff so they pay more tax if we've got payment splitting and if we have ultimate privacy, of course, as users, and this is my utopia and government shrunken bitcoin dominated government, we have ultimate transparency because we have their read keys and we can have their public keys. We can see where all the money's going. When I pay for that coffee, my 20% tax or my 10% tax can go directly at point of sale to government. So now that coffee shop doesn't have to worry about doing tax returns and stuff. Maybe you could extend that further. Maybe in my wallet I can say this is a very progressive, you know, bitcoin government, shrunken government. Now maybe I can say, well, I want, you know, 50% to go to education, 40% to go to healthcare, 5% to go to the roads, 5% to go to 5% to go to military. And then at point of sale, I'm making a democratic decision. I'm saying this is where I want my tax money to go. I'm spending this money, I'm investing this money in my government.
- [57:58]
Unknown
But is it voluntary or you have to spend a certain amount.
- [58:01]
Ben Arc
So basically, if you're A government. And you're trying to tax, tax businesses, physical, real world, brick and mortar businesses, then. And this is in a bitcoin world where people are using Lightning network and Bitcoin, it's very easy to kind of hide money. One of the best ways to tax people is to say, look, you got to have this point of sale. And at point of sale, tax has to come to us. The X percent has to come to us. This is the medium term. This is far away from our robot utopia, whatever. So what I'm saying is that when you have different tooling, like we have payment splitting, microtransaction, payment splitting, then different ways of money flowing through the system, we don't need the money managers, which you would have. So now when you're talking about how centralized, feudal Amazon will always outcompete decentralized Amazon, centralized, feudal Amazon, part of their power is just like State. Part of their power is in the money management. If you could take away the money management and then if you can somehow use this new tooling and it's that thing, because you're breaking new ground and you're working with tools which haven't existed before, you've got to think of use cases for them which aren't immediately apparent, which is very hard to do. And it becomes obvious, as when you look back with retrospect, after six months later, you think, oh yeah, of course, why wouldn't we have payment splitting? And then someone in the kitchen receiving the sats directly when a point of sale is made with the coffee. But it kind of takes a while to experiment with this technology and with this tooling. But I do think that the technology and the tooling we're building is going to build fairer forms of production like that, for example. It's going to work towards the decentralized Amazon thing. So when you were talking before as well. So I don't want to talk too much about the projects which I'm involved in because I don't want to associate my ridiculous political ideology with that.
- [59:50]
Unknown
Yeah, but like, people listening who do that need to shut the fuck up. Like, you just need to shut the fuck up and allow everyone to talk and be heard.
- [59:57]
Ben Arc
Because if you.
- [59:58]
Unknown
Sorry, I just ran here. Is that if, if we scare people off from having even opinions or having conversations, we're rebuilding the shit that we don't like. And that's one of the things that really fucking pisses me off. Like about some of these morons on Twitter who literally dogpile in and shout people down to the Point that they're scared to actually say what they want to think. They're creating a new form of self censorship where people are like, I don't want to share, I don't want to share my opinions. I get shouted at. And then the marketplace for ideas is being destroyed. So I'm just going to rant if anyone fucking goes at the work that Ben's being done or his colleagues, because Ben's idea is you're a fucking idiot. You need to shut the fuck up. Sorry, rant over.
- [60:38]
Ben Arc
I feel like my big brother just waded in.
- [60:40]
Unknown
No, but it's just, it just does my, it does my head. Because what we do is. What we're doing is we're killing the conversation.
- [60:46]
Ben Arc
Well, this is an important point. So this is the difference between groupthink, it's bullshit rhetoric and dialectic. Okay, so the dialectic is thesis, anti thesis synthesis. Right. So how do you come up with better ideas? Well, you have your ideas challenged and then you incorporate, you know, so like when you were younger and you were like getting full lefty and then you had your ideas challenged and you sort of start to realize that actually, you know, the capitalism stuff, it's not all evil like it's made out to be. And actually if you have better free markets, then maybe it's not as bad. You change your opinion and you lean in a different way. And then with. Quite often with people with extreme viewpoints on either side of the spectrum, it's rhetoric, they just, they shout opinions. And then if anyone challenges those opinions, then they, like you say, they go after them, they mute them, they block them, whatever. Bitcoin, I mean, like you say like a lot of these conversations to originally just to. Because I saw in 2016, 17, I think it was probably around then that there was this real co option and this real idea that bitcoin was exclusively for an ancap, Austrian economics, whatever. And I thought, hold on, that doesn't make any sense. I don't think that way. I don't believe in those things. I mean, I see value in them, but I'm much more left leaning, socialist, anarchist, socialist, libertarian type. I changed my handle on Twitter to the Bitcoin socialist. And that really, uh. Oh, and I was there for years, man, and I was flying that lefty flag and people blocked and muted me to hell. But I had lots of people when I went to real world events, conferences and things. I mean even people with, you know, I would say that people actually working on stuff in bitcoin, like actually developing things a Lot of them are very apolitical and pragmatic like yourself and believe that the world's nuanced and complicated. Right. But I would also have a lot of people who would come up to me and say, oh, you know, I'm so glad you kind of wave the flag because, you know, I agree with you. And I said, I do think it's these free open source software, it's copy left, it's decentralized decision making. And we have all these conversations and people start to admit that actually now there are some good telegram groups, people now being more outspoken. And I think it's in direct response to this kind of co option and this idea of rhetoric, of just saying this is bitcoin, this is how it works and this is what sort of society it will build. It'll be citadels and it'll be. And it's like, hold on, will it be all that stuff?
- [62:57]
Unknown
This is why I feel a sense of responsibility to. When people were saying, pete, you need to get some more left leaning people on the show and people, you know, you were tagged and get Ben in, talk to Ben. I was like, yeah, I'm going to do it. I mean, I, you know, the incentive structure for running a podcast is don't stuff your audience. No, it's audience capture, okay? If you have an audience, capture it, speak, speak in their language, grow your downloads, create your loyalty and then advertise your downloads to your sponsors and your sponsors will spend more money, okay? That's the incentive structure. But I talk about this with Danny, my producer. It's a shame he's not here. I wish you could have met him. But we talk about this a lot and we always say, I mean, I was literally on the phone to him on the way down, said, we are never ever not going to make a show because we worried about what the audience thinks. We always want to be known as a show that will talk to anyone. And we had it recently, right? Go back a few weeks. I did this on purpose. In the same week I had, I think it was me being consecutive shows, I had Laura Looma, you know who I think her ideas are fucking mad. And I fundamentally disagree with her. I think she's antagonistic, I think she discriminates against people. I think she has siloed her own opinions. And I fundamentally disagree with, I told her, I said, I disagree with your ideas. And I got a whole bunch of people like on YouTube complaining about having her on, other people saying, well done, have her on. And other people saying, you're an idiot. The next show, I think it was the next show I had Anita Posh on. Yeah. And we had a. Anita's very much on the left. And we had a conversation which was about the financial patriarchy. And the title alone was triggering people like, what's this bullshit? What are you on about? It's like, there is a financial patriarchy.
- [64:46]
Ben Arc
Yeah, there is. Like if you. You're in complete fucking white men control, that still exists.
- [64:51]
Unknown
Yeah, it does. And in certain parts of society, in certain countries, there's absolutely a patriarchy that controls and presses women. And that. That does come through money. To deny that is. Well, it's fucking ludicrous. But what I'm saying is, in that week, I've had polar extremes on the show because you can listen to people and get ideas, and that's what we should have. So I'm always going to have. I do. I want to talk to the people people want me not to talk to. That's actually what I want to do. Because I want to learn from everybody. And I think if we can all listen to each other, we can take things forward. We can. You know, I'm not a socialist. I like the nhs. And I think I can learn from you. Well, I'm going to learn from you because your recall, history is incredible and I can learn from everyone. And that's what we should do. Not this fucking yelling and giving each other shit. Because actually it becomes very authoritarian.
- [65:40]
Ben Arc
It's much more comfortable if you think that you have the answers to. To society and to the world, the material world, and that you're on the right side of history. It's much harder to think, to question your own cultural hegemony and to think, well, am I on the right side of history? Am I doing the right things? Could things be better? Can things improve? That's more difficult and harder to do. It's much easier to be just sort of black and white. Okay, Binary. And this is what you get a lot of within. I don't know, I mean, maybe all.
- [66:08]
Unknown
This stuff, all circles, it's not just.
- [66:10]
Ben Arc
Bitcoin, all circles, but maybe a lot of this stuff is surveillance capitalism. Maybe the incentive structures and things like Twitter and Facebook and things. Maybe they propagate this way of thinking.
- [66:21]
Unknown
They certainly do. Algorithms have fucked humans. Algorithms have fucked the people who refuse to step back and realize algorithms just fuck them. Once you recognize the algorithms are fucking you, you can step back. You can step back. And one of the most important things I think some people can do is question themselves. Could I Be wrong. I do all the time.
- [66:41]
Ben Arc
Oh, yeah.
- [66:41]
Unknown
You know, I came out with the most ridiculous statement sometimes. I came out one at the start of the pandemic. I was like, yeah, we should lock down everyone. And I realized I was wrong.
- [66:49]
Ben Arc
Did you ever see that Mitchell and Webb sketch where they're dressed as Nazis?
- [66:54]
Unknown
No.
- [66:54]
Ben Arc
And then David Mitchell is like, stood there and he's sort of looking quizzically in the air and he just goes. He turns around to Robert Webb and he says, are we the baddies? And I think it's. I think the whole sketch is that, is these two Nazis. And then at one point they're like, well, we actually have skull and crossbones on our uniform, so we probably are the baddies.
- [67:11]
Unknown
Oh, fuck, I've got skull and crossbones on my football team.
- [67:13]
Ben Arc
Are you the baddies?
- [67:14]
Unknown
No, you know, we're the goodies.
- [67:16]
Ben Arc
You're the goodies. But I mean, so going back to surveillance capitalism, going back to things before use, like Twitter and Facebook, for example, has private capital failed there? Can it be. Should it be done in a way which isn't in the hands of private capital? I think it probably should. So I don't know if you're aware, I'm going to give a big shout out now to an absolutely phenomenal project which could solve a lot of these problems. And a lot of us Bitcoin is incredibly excited about, even though it has nothing to do with Bitcoin, apart from the use of Schnorr public key crypto, which is pretty cool. It's Nostar. So notes and other stuff, relays. Tell me about that for Nostar. So it's a very simple concept which is that you have client software and then you have these relays which just relay notes which you send to the relay using websockets. The simple example I did was make a kind of Twitter platform. So you have a public key, private key. I have a public key, private key. I subscribe to your public key and anything you sign as a message and send up to one of these relays, I can then pull down because I'm subscribed to your public key and I can verify that it's you who sent that message. So I made a very simple Nostar Twitter client, okay. Vhf very recently, actually, like fully, like, upgraded it. And if you go on, crikey, if you go. It's called I've got it on nostar.com but that's a fork of his new Twitter client. So actually go on his repo and check out the actual Nostar client, he's the Twitter client he's made. But if you go on nostar.com, i was like, Roger Ver, I like bagged the protocol as a domain. If you go on nostar.com, you'll see there that you can do a lot of stuff you can do on Twitter and it's not that much more work which needs to go into it in order to make it a competing system with Twitter. And it's quite interesting as well because these relays can kind of serve different purposes. Like if you're like me and you want kind of quite a vanilla experience when you go on Twitter, I don't want to see anything gross and extreme. Then I could subscribe to relays. I could connect to these relays which only have that type of content and do filter out horrible content. But if you're, you know, horrible stuff. So it depends on the relays, the relay, whoever's running the relay. But there are relays which people won't filter anything, you know, so relays would be reputation based. And these relays, no, I mean these relays are, I mean that could be a separate relay on its own, just verifying reputation and stuff. But these relay, the point is that they're really easy to spin up. And if you take a relay down, it's not, it's kind of inconsequential because you can just spin up another one and people can just connect to that instead and start communicating over that relay. So kind of the roots to this concept, and this is quite interesting, was when I first made Alan Bits, I wanted to show that because we've got these extensions and they're quite easy to make on Alan Bits, I wanted to show that you can make like a proof of concept extension. So my proof of concept extension was something called Diagon Alley. So thinking about dark markets, I'm not a big fan of dark markets, but I appreciate the sort of software challenge, as it were. And the problem with dark markets now is if a dark market gets taken out, it sucks for everybody involved. Like people lose their reputation, people lose their money and then they have to go to another service and build up all their reputation and have to try and prove somehow that they who they say they are. So I made this thing called Diagon Alley. And the concept of Diagon Alley was that you would have a market stall and you'd have your products on your market stall and then you could point those products as kind of front end indexer, which will just index the products. So for the user, you go to the indexer. It's like ebay or Amazon, you pick the products you want. All the communication is being relayed through to the client software, to the person who's actually got the market stall. And you're able to prove that you're you using a key. So you're signing, you know, notes to say that you're. These are your products and this is your reputation, right? And you build up that reputation. You have all these products on which you've got listed. Then the indexer gets attacked, it gets taken down, it doesn't matter. Because that person who has that market stall, they control all the data. They can just point at a different front end indexer. And this indexer is free and open source software. It's easy to spin up anywhere. It's like PiratePay, you can spin them up anywhere. So it becomes kind of censorship resistant in that. Not because it's decentralized. I mean it's just very easy to spin up and very easy to. It doesn't matter if it kind of gets taken out. Well, when I made that proof of concept extension diagonally, so the extension was literally just to list some products and then throw them at this indexer. No one really saw value in it apart from Fiat Jaf who got involved in the project very early on and he kept saying, we need to make something of this, we need to make something of this. And I didn't really get around to it. And then he extrapolated out just you using it for a marketplace thing and he generalized it more into a whole protocol which is like this Nostar protocol.
- [71:53]
Unknown
Can you use it for not Amazon?
- [71:54]
Ben Arc
Yeah, you could use it for not Amazon. Yeah, absolutely. So we keep saying to each other, we keep saying we need to build diagonally. We need to build diagonally. At the moment, everyone's very excited about the North Star Twitter thing because you can see that it works. And also you can do things like. So because you're using Schnorr signatures, this is also quite cool as well, because we're using Schnorr signatures, we're experimenting with all the libraries which have been written for Bitcoin, which haven't really been tested very well. So it's kind of cool to kind of have somewhere which doesn't involve value, really where we can use those libraries and help improve those libraries. So everyone's very excited about the Northstar Twitter thing because when you use is it decentralized? I mean, it just doesn't. So I can Have a client on my phone I can access, I can access my messages, I can post a tweet, people who are following my public key. Although in the new update, it's not public key, it's like a name. So Ben Arc. People who follow Ben Arc, they can pull down that tweet and they can verify that it's from me. But because we're using store signatures, you could use things something like a hardware wallet. So if you think about, you know, Nike or something or some big corporation, McDonald's or Donald Trump, like, if you think about like a president or a corporation, it would be quite nice to have like multi sig and then also have like a hardware wallet which you have. So you have to like take the note off, sign it, multi sig it, and then, you know, blast out into the world as something you've. You've produced, rather than that control just being in somebody's hand, which could be corrupt, or it's more secure as well. So we can do a whole bunch of. Make use of a whole bunch of bitcoin things with it. Public key crypto, I mean, it's the answer to a lot of the world's problems. And I like the fact that bitcoin gives a lot more exposure to people. And then hopefully Nostar will do that as well. It will give people a lot more exposure. So direct messaging, for example, on a Nostar Twitter, we have direct messaging where we can create a shared key using public key crypto. And then we can encrypt a message and I can send it to you. And if you send it through the network, it's completely encrypted and you can read it.
- [73:54]
Unknown
It can be decentralized. Twitter and signal at the same time.
- [73:56]
Ben Arc
Yeah, it can be. I mean, it's not. I mean, it's not really decentralized as per se. I mean, it is.
- [74:00]
Unknown
It is kind of is.
- [74:01]
Ben Arc
It kind of is. Yeah, it kind of is. It's very censorship resistant, but it can be a whole load of things. And again, it's like a new concept tool, very simple concept, seems, you know, common. Like why, why, why wasn't this made before? If you go on the Nostar protocol, if you Google Mostar protocol and then you look at the protocol repo, there's a good breakdown of things like Mastodon and things. And then there is a question like, why hasn't this been made before? And then it's like, well, we don't really know.
- [74:29]
Unknown
Well, it just hasn't.
- [74:31]
Ben Arc
But it's pretty simple. And it Works well.
- [74:33]
Unknown
The problem is network effects.
- [74:34]
Ben Arc
Yeah. I mean there's a lot of Bitcoiner Twitter types. When they stumble across it, they do go and make an account on the Nostar Twitter thing and then they start tweeting and they start Dming each other and they're experimenting with the software and you have to download anything you can run. This is the cool thing. You could run the client yourself if you wanted to locally and verify all the code and everything. Or you can just use somebody else's client online. It's basically all browser based. So you're not, you're not. You know, there's only so much we can go wrong really.
- [74:59]
Unknown
Where do you stand on moderation? Things like this?
- [75:02]
Ben Arc
Well, this is very interesting concept. So you think, well, how you don't want people being exposed, you don't want your kids being exposed to horrible stuff to get basically.
- [75:10]
Unknown
Well, it's a bit more than that. So let's look at the anti censorship products that exist out there. I checked out Gab. It's just full of. You have your 4chan and then your 8channel, which to me has just created a generation of absolute idiots who just, just fucking idiots. And I just, it's. And like I would never want my kids exposed and that's my responsibility to stop them being exposed to that. And great. But I will do. But Twitter with zero moderation for me would be a problem. Twitter with its current levels of moderation is also a problem. I think things are being said, the.
- [75:50]
Ben Arc
Decisions are being made by a centralized authority which comes under the control of US Government ultimately. And so they need to second guess what US government wouldn't want them to say or would want them to say.
- [76:02]
Unknown
And also it's got worse ever since Trump has got worse.
- [76:05]
Ben Arc
Yeah. Also as well. I mean they're in very liberal part of the US and they're kind of liberal young people working on it. So there's lots of things which will be said which is both from the far right and then they'll ban.
- [76:17]
Unknown
Not even the far right. I think that's just from the right.
- [76:21]
Ben Arc
In Nostar Twitter because you can connect to multiple relays. You just connect to the relays which you want to be exposed to. So like I said, there'll be some relays which don't censor content. There'll be some radios which do sense the content. If there's a relay which you feel is censoring content in where you don't like just connect to a different relay.
- [76:41]
Unknown
But you need the network effect to Build it up so there's a better service there.
- [76:46]
Ben Arc
You'd be surprised. I mean, in a telegram group, for example, if you have 10 people in a telegram group, you have nice discussions, you check it daily. You can have a chat. Chat with people. Similar with Nostar Twitter. Say Nostar Twitter, for example. If you've got 10 friends on there and you're connected to the same relay and you're dropping messages on there every day and chatting to each other, it's a useful tool.
- [77:09]
Unknown
But then is it really like an alternative to Telegram rather than Twitter? Because what I'm interested in is Twitter being better or a better Twitter.
- [77:17]
Ben Arc
I mean, so Twitter have this thing called bluesky.
- [77:20]
Unknown
Does Twitter have it or is it separate from Twitter?
- [77:22]
Ben Arc
It's Jack. Well, Jack, that's the point. Jack Dorsey has funded this thing called bluesky, which nothing has come out of. And they should really look at Nostar.
- [77:32]
Unknown
Come on, Jack.
- [77:33]
Ben Arc
Yeah, exactly. They should really look at Nasdaq and start making some commits. Because I really think this is the best option for people. Check it out and the audience can check it out and see what they think. But yeah, no, it's desperately needed in society and you do need censorship. What's cool about this is you're kind of censoring yourself almost. You can build a whole range of things, by the way. So I did like a little paper on a decentralized Uber, which I remember Andreas and Topazole used to talk about. So you have different note kinds. So I said, well, we could have a note kind for your geographical location. So I go on this client software, I go on an app, I say, I'm a customer, I want to get taxi. So now I've got a public key and a private key and I can say, this is my location, I need a taxi. And then all the people who are sharing the location, all the taxi drivers, they just sign a note and say, this is my location. I can then go look at their reputation, which is attached to their keys, and you could have some verification service. So this is verified by, you know, super verificationservice.com or whatever. So you could have a verification service to prove that they who they are. And you could look through the reviews and see they look like legitimate reviews or not. And then I could say, look, I need a taxi. And then the taxi driver might be like, oh, well, actually you haven't got any reviews just to set up this account. So it'll take a bit of a gamble and I'll go and pick you up anyway. Pick you up, take you somewhere, pay however you want. It'd be cool if you paid on Bitcoin Lightning Network or something. But you pay however you want and then both leave a review for each other so you have reciprocal reviews. I wrote a paper about how you could do that on. Not paper, just like a repo thing. How you could do that on Nostar. Very easily, actually. It'd be an easy thing to make and it would work as well. Like you say, you kind of need the network effect for it to work. But anybody could be a taxi driver. So it's kind of the promise of Uber. I could get in my car and I could set up a. I'm a taxi driver and now and I could advertise and then probably charge people less because I haven't got any reputation, but then build up my reputation and then maybe charge more because I've got really good reputation. Thousands of reviews or whatever. Things like Stockpile and Sybil attacks, they're kind of like something which needs to be worked out. But you could do that with verification services and verification relays. I actually thought about this and.
- [79:47]
Unknown
I.
- [79:48]
Ben Arc
Was thinking, what other services do people need to meet at in geographical location and then also have like a rating review system?
- [79:55]
Unknown
Sex.
- [79:56]
Ben Arc
Yeah, man, you did it. It did the same thing for me. It popped into my head and I was like. I said to my girlfriend, I said, look, right, I'm sorry, but I think this would be really good for like, for prostitution. Like, if you think about. Because you've got client reputation and also prostitution reputation as well, it would be much safer because they could say, well, okay, you haven't got good rich, you haven't got any reputation. So I'm going to take a gamble on you or I'm not going to take a gamble on you. So I think as a tool, because I call it Booba because it was bitcoin Uber, but Boober, that was a bitcoin Uber. But then it sort of made sense then maybe that's why I thought of the sex thing. I was like, well, because then I was trying to think of other services and that was the one which really just stood out there, actually. That could be a really useful tool for sex workers. Yeah, for sex work.
- [80:41]
Unknown
Absolutely.
- [80:42]
Ben Arc
And it could be. Makes women safer as well, like by the reputation system which exists within it. There's a lot of things which need to be built on it. If you're interested people, it's nostarprotocol on Telegram. And if you go to Google, Nostar Protocol, have a little look at that. There's lots of good bitcoiners involved in it. The Cooks and Rockstar Dev are involved in it and vhf and there's a whole load of great people working on it.
- [81:05]
Unknown
Well, definitely check that out.
- [81:06]
Ben Arc
A lot of software which needs to be built to make it, you know, work. Realistically, what's cool about it as well is it really had nothing to do with bitcoin because a lot of these solutions, they involve having to use bitcoin in some way, like having to have used a lightning network to send censorship resistant messages. And they're all kind of cool and interesting, but it shouldn't be like a prerequisite to censorship resistance for sending a message from one person to another. Having to also have a lightning node which is like a big pain in the ass.
- [81:32]
Unknown
Well, this is the problem with shitcoins is that and the Web3 crap coming out of Chris Dixon that everything needs a token and not everything does need a token.
- [81:39]
Ben Arc
Public key crypto stuff solves a lot of problems and you can just use that.
- [81:43]
Unknown
Yeah, I mean, look, that is super interesting. It's nice to see other projects like that which don't require bitcoin. I mean it feels like a bitcoin project.
- [81:51]
Ben Arc
It's all made by bitcoin.
- [81:52]
Unknown
Yeah. But also that kind of like those kind of ideas of getting away from centralized services is super cool and like that's commendable. I'm definitely going to check that out. I'm thinking we should bring this full circle.
- [82:02]
Ben Arc
Yeah. All right. Yeah. Okay. Well again, let me put in that disclaimer that I have. That project obviously has nothing to do my, my ridiculous political views.
- [82:10]
Unknown
Hold on, but why say they're ridiculous? Because you're always.
- [82:13]
Ben Arc
I'm being self deprecating just to kind of like, you know, fluff the far right audience members. You're like, you are ridiculous.
- [82:20]
Unknown
It's a difference of opinion.
- [82:22]
Ben Arc
The dialectic, if you want. I mean if discussion is very important. The world's nuanced and complicated. It's far more comfortable to exist in a world where you're on the right side of everything. And it's black and white. You know, this pre market's good, like socialism bad, but actually it's, we need some pragmatism and nuance in there. I can see all these amazing wonderful things which exist in free markets. I love small to medium sized enterprises. I think they're incredibly efficient, good for people. I don't like things like corporations. And then similarly, if you're on the other side, you could say, well, I can see that cooperatives, if you can build them and they work, that they're better for the workers who work in that working environment, producing that thing. And that's better than something like a big corporation. And corporation is a kind of bad form of capital which we need to somehow move away from. How do you move away from it? Well, you could regulate out of existence. Well, that kind of sucks because then you're empowering state more. Or do you create some better way of doing it within the free market system which can outcompete it in a free market kind of way. So yeah, absolutely, you need the dialectic, you need to reach synthesis by exchanging ideas.
- [83:26]
Unknown
There will be some negative comments coming in. Yeah, because you mentioned Marx.
- [83:31]
Ben Arc
I mean, this is the problem with Marx. So people read like the Communist Manifesto and they think, well, this is actually again like he basically did what I did. He praises capitalism, the first part of the Communist Manifesto, its ability to string the world together with all these trade routes and produce or bring all these people out of poverty, blah, blah, blah. And then he says, however, it will result in this revolution. Right, but then if you read capital, capital is about just private capital. I mean, it's actually the introduction to what was going to be a range of six books, but that's capital. It's a very complicated economic analysis of capitalism. Not negative, it's just an analysis of capitalism using what he called historical materialism, which is. So as an economist, this is another thing which frustrates me. Mises, he's a genius. Absolutely. Hayek, genius. So was Keynes. These are the economists with two brains, had some incredible ideas, fought really hard to prevent another war, predicted the second World War after the first World War and the reparations against the Germans. Genius, Marx, genius. Great economic.
- [84:34]
Unknown
Can we talk about Marx for a second? Is the issue with Marx in that when you mention Karl Marx, then people jump to, well, Marxism has led to the deaths of 100 million people.
- [84:44]
Ben Arc
Exactly, exactly. And obviously you've got the blood on your hands.
- [84:46]
Unknown
Yeah, you've got the blood on your hands. But actually there's a difference between Marx being accurate in his observations and then the interpretation of Marxism by others as a way of organizing society, which are two different things.
- [85:00]
Ben Arc
It was that assumption that a revolution would happen in a kind of bloody way which then brought people to try and push this revolution to happen. Marx said it would happen in the most advanced capitalist society, would then transition to socialism, but it was pushed on of the poorest nations on earth, Russia, with these largely Sort of agricultural feudalist society. It was pushed on them.
- [85:25]
Unknown
Well, this is this push and pause, like when I was at an incentive.
- [85:28]
Ben Arc
But yeah, Marx, Marx, if you were to look at any of that stuff, it would be an atrocity. He rolled in his grave over what happened, over his theories. He had. Him and Engels had this concept called withering of state, which is very interesting. Withering of state. I'm glad I remembered to mention it just before the end here. And it's that when in a socialist society of exchange, that state will become superfluous and cease to exist. So the concept is that when you minimize state institutions and replace them with self governing, cooperative structures, that you will no longer need state. And I think that's basically what a lot of bitcoiners want as well. We want to replaced state with bitcoin and with some of the systems we can build on top of bitcoin as well. There's a great quote by San Simone as well, which was that soon the art of governing men will come to an end. It will be replaced by a new art, the art of administration, which is that when you're able to replace. Actually Nick Szabo, one of our own boys, he has this concept of social scalability, which is basically that. Which is basically. Basically that you can use the tools which we're building to replace all these institutions which need to exist currently in order for society to work the way it works. But you can replace them with the tools we're building and it will be a better, more freer society. And you can also use those same tools, like we said, within the private capital. We're talking about payment splitting and things. You can replace a lot of the. The structures which exist just with just some software, basically. And it's. Yeah, so I mean, so for those who say that Marx was a statist, go read withering of state. Google it.
- [87:16]
Unknown
Your critics, did they misunderstand you or do they disagree with you?
- [87:21]
Ben Arc
I think a lot of it is if you're on, if you have a binary viewpoint of the world and then you get. So basically, if you ever have an amygdala response to something, you have to question whether that you're being rational and whether you've just hit an opinion which is flying in the face of your material reality.
- [87:39]
Unknown
Are you shooting from the hip or are you considering your response?
- [87:42]
Ben Arc
Yeah, are you considering your response if that amygdala kicks in? And I think quite often when you have an extreme viewpoint, this is either side of the spectrum and then something challenges it but then I think it's. It kicks in that amygdala response. But like you say, discussions, just how we improve, how people get more liberty eventually. The slow revolution.
- [88:05]
Unknown
Yeah, man. Well listen, I really appreciate you coming down.
- [88:08]
Ben Arc
Thanks for having me, man.
- [88:09]
Unknown
I'm going to want to do a follow up actually at some point because there's a whole bunch of stuff we didn't get into that I want to dive into with you.
- [88:14]
Ben Arc
And we should do a separate software one actually.
- [88:16]
Unknown
Well, I mean, yeah, but I don't add much value there because I got no fucking idea what I'm talking about.
- [88:20]
Ben Arc
About.
- [88:21]
Unknown
And I'd rather listen to Stefan Navarro interview you about software.
- [88:25]
Ben Arc
Oh no, I mean I'm on a sort of like heady protocol level and terrible. Like I'm more of a front end, you know, all this is cool, what we can do with this software, let's experiment with it kind of way.
- [88:36]
Unknown
So I think if we'd have dived a little bit deeper, there were some other areas I might have disagreed with you on, but I'd like to have gone into them. There will be a range of responses from this, I can guarantee you. Now go and read the YouTube comments. They're going to be yes, thank you for getting somebody on who I agree with or yes, thank you for getting an alternative viewpoint on. And there's going to be like a fuck you, status quo, socialist fuck you and we just let them bounce off us. Nobody's harmed by us having this conversation.
- [89:05]
Ben Arc
What's that great quote by Proudhon? Property is theft, Property is liberty. So going back to basically what we're saying, that it's nuanced, it's complicated. Yes, property is great, but not all property is great and it can be exploitative. Me owning another person in slavery, that's a bad form of property. Capitalism is a bad form of property. It's nuanced, it's a spectrum. There's good private property, there's bad private property, there's good capital, there's bad capital, there's good this and that. We've got to find the least buggy, best part of that, whatever we're looking at.
- [89:39]
Unknown
Well listen, like I said, I appreciate, appreciate you coming on, you know this. No, no, we don't. I mean, carry on. Is there anything we've not touched on, you want to touch on?
- [89:46]
Ben Arc
No, it's good, it's fine.
- [89:47]
Unknown
I mean, I just feel like we've come full circle. I want to go and consider it, listen to responses and think about when.
- [89:54]
Ben Arc
We can dive back In Can I Connect? There's another quote actually, which I want to get in there because there's some. I just think there's some great quote from the anarchist. So Proudhon was an anarchist. The first anarchist, by the way, referred to himself as an anarchist. And that was the Property is theft, property is liberty. There's another one by a guy called Murray Bookchin. If you're an ecologist, if you believe in, you know, humans, Shabbat and relationship with the environment, and also your anarchist leaving. Murray Bookchin's fantastic. Just go read him. It's brilliant. But he has a quote which is that technology increases potentiality for freedom, but bourgeois control over technology empowers their hierarchy and control over people, which is if human beings. And it's having control over technology. It's a bit like the Hal Finney quote, isn't it? I realized that we could use these tools for liberation. Us having control over the technology is good for people. But then if it's controlled by state, 1984 style state, or if it's controlled by some big horrible corporation using surveillance capitalism, then that's bad. So, yeah, Mauric Butchin, he wrote that in the seventies. It's quite insightful.
- [90:58]
Unknown
I think we'll have a good set of show notes for this one. No, I appreciate you coming on, man. Like I say, look, I think being holding the views you have and coming to talk about them on my show is. It's kind of a brave thing to do because you know there's going to be. There's going to be a reaction. I don't agree with you on everything, but I really enjoy talking to you and I'm going to want to do this again. Fortunate that you're not too far away. So if I'm. Yeah, it's quite easy to organize a show in here in the uk, which I don't get to do as many as I'd like, which leads a lot of the conversation because I think there's definitely a US bias to my guess, and therefore US bias to the conversation. We are very different in Europe from America. We are naturally a little bit more socialist. And I don't think that's been entirely bad.
- [91:44]
Ben Arc
No, I mean, you can look at. If you look. I'm always fascinated with the bitcoin conferences. When you go to bitcoin conferences, you go to European one, there's a heavy emphasis on the free and open source side of bitcoin. And then when you go to kind of a US one, it's much more about kind of the business sector of, of bitcoin and there's less free and open source projects there. And I just kind of think there's two kind of different approaches. Like, and like say in. If you look at the node map, for example, most of the nodes in the world are in Germany and a lot of the German hackers, they're sort of anarchist left types, you know. So, yeah, no, there are kind of two different approaches and ways of thinking about Bitcoin and neither of them are. Both of them have good points and they should engage each other and I'm actually seeing more and more. So I know in Miami now for the new Bitcoin conference, they're going to have this absolutely ginormous, which Matt Odell's helping organize. So big shout out for him for doing it. But they're going to have this huge hack space now encouraging free and open source and giving free tickets as well away to free and open source projects. So it's great to see kind of the US conferences now because I mean back in 2019 the hack space was me putting two tables together and saying this is the hack space because it didn't exist. And now it's like a full auditorium. So credit where credit's due. They are starting to encourage all this free and open source kind of thinking rather than just thinking about bitcoin as business.
- [93:05]
Unknown
Awesome, man.
- [93:06]
Ben Arc
Anyway, yeah, let's end it. Thank you very much.
- [93:07]
Unknown
No, dude, where do people find you?
- [93:09]
Ben Arc
So if you go Ben Ark on Twitter and then I think arkbtc on GitHub or it's Ben Arc that's got all my projects on. I make a lot of hardware projects like points of sale, vending machines, arcade machines, and then also work on Alan Bits as well, which kind of came out of the hardware projects. But that's kind of quite a popular piece of software right now and it's very exciting to work on still beta and then also the Nostar stuff when I get a chance. I always feel really bad because we've got some incredibly productive people in the community, constantly pump out software and code. But I'd. I'm not nearly contributing as much as I should be. But yeah, so Google those things. Alan Bits, Nostar. And then also, oh, I've got like a series of hardware tutorials, BTC IoT. If you Google that, it's on World Crypto network on the YouTube channel and you'll see the.
- [93:59]
Unknown
Yeah, World Crypto Network was that Vortex. World Crypto Network.
- [94:03]
Ben Arc
It was, it was, it was. But then he forked to like the Bitcoin network crypto or something. It's a very similar sounding name.
- [94:10]
Unknown
I love Vortex. He messaged me the other day.
- [94:11]
Ben Arc
He had great branding on his channel and then he stopped making videos and I was quite sad actually.
- [94:15]
Unknown
He's such a great guy. I mean, I just think he, you know, he did his tour of duty and bitcoin and wanted to move on to other things, but he messaged me the other day. I'm spoke to him ages. I want to see him again. I think he's such a fucking great.
- [94:24]
Ben Arc
Guy, such an eloquent speaker.
- [94:26]
Unknown
Just a nice, good person, a really good human.
- [94:29]
Ben Arc
I'm good to see if he gets back into the fray.
- [94:31]
Unknown
I'd love him to. Well, listen, look, thanks for coming on. We'll share all of that in the show notes. Stay in touch. If you ever got something you want to come and talk about, please do come back to me. You know, got my details, you got Danny's and. Yeah, good luck, man, and take care.
- [94:43]
Ben Arc
Good luck with the football club and I look forward to seeing how you do this sort of future sci fi tokenization.
- [94:50]
Unknown
Yeah, let's see, let's see how that plays out. I'll be putting that out to consultation and see what people think. Just get their opinions and I expect there will be a range of opinions. But like, let's see what we can do there.
- [94:59]
Ben Arc
Yeah, it's exciting. Breaking new ground. Well done.
- [95:01]
Unknown
Yeah, peace out, man.
- [95:02]
Ben Arc
Cheers.
- [95:05]
Peter McCormack
All right, thanks for listening to what Bitcoin did. If you want to get in touch, the best thing you can do is head over to my telegram channel or you can hit me up on my email, which is hellohatbitcoindid.com.