← The Peter McCormack Show
The Peter McCormack Show
Bitcoin is Reshaping the World with Robert Breedlove - WBD220
01:21:05
Location: Zoom Date: Monday 4th May Project: Parallax Digital Role: Founder & CEO The properties for measuring the soundness of money include divisibility, durability, portability, recognisability and scarcity. Current government-issued and...
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- [00:01]
Robert Breedlove
Bitcoin as the truest form of monetary capitalism is going to out compete monetary socialism which is central banking.
- [00:09]
Peter McCormack
Hello there, how are you all? Welcome to the what Bitcoin did podcast which is brought to you by the mighty Kraken. The best place to buy, sell and trade bitcoin. I'm your host Peter McCormack and today I've got an interview with Robert Breedlove discussing how bitcoin is reshaping the world.
- [00:23]
Robert Breedlove
But before that, I have a message.
- [00:25]
Peter McCormack
From my amazing sponsors. So first up, we've got Crypto Mining Tools back on the show and with the halving only days away, Scott is back. You know the bitcoin halving has a big impact on mining profitability and Scott from Crypto Mining Tools has a solution for bitcoin mining equipment owners looking to get a little bit more out of their machines. Now I've told you about Scott's bitcoin mining calculator in the past or Scott has recently launched a Bitcoin miner hosting directory. If you need to move your bitcoin miners to a more cost effective location due to the halving, go to Cryptomining Tools to research hosting options available in your country and around the world. Scott is also looking to add more hosting and colocation providers to his hosting directory. So if you own a mining farm and you've got extra space, you'd like to get it filled. Reach out to Scott's hosting partnership development guy, Shannon Squires. He's on Telegram and can be reached at the username Squires, which is S Q U I R E S. Also you can use a contact form on Cryptomining tools. Also, have you checked out sportsbet IO yet? The best place for online gaming and they accept bitcoin. And now we've got the football season hopefully coming back soon. Hopefully we're going to finish off this season, see Liverpool win the title and then we can get back on with next season. I cannot wait to put down some bets to have a wager on Tottenham losing. I will be doing that most weeks because I see that as an easy win. But they don't just have a sports book, they have recently seen a massive growth in esports and Sportsbet IO now has 11 esports markets including E, FIFA, Enba and ENHL. Not only this, but they have their bitcoin casino and my favorite, the poker rooms. And hopefully we'll be getting another poker tournament with sportsbet IO soon. So if you want to find out more, please head over to sportsbet IO which is S P O R T S B E T IO and if you want to find out about many of their promotions they have for signing up, just head over to SportsBet IO promotions and also my newest sponsor, Least Authority. Let's welcome them to the show. Now this is for all you techies out there, the builders, those people creating the applications. Least Authority is a security consulting company pushing the limits on how to build privacy respecting solutions. They specialize in security audits, design specification reviews and security by design, while also making regular contributions to the open source and decentralized space. Now they can help you improve the security of your wallet, application key management solution layer 2, protocol, P2P, network design, use of cryptography, and so much more. If you would like to get a boost in your security strategy, well, you can arrange a no obligation call to find out how lease Authority can help you on your next project. Just head over to their website and hit the schedule a call button. At least authority.com which is L E A S T HT A U T H O R-I-T Y.com okay, so onto the show and today I am joined by Robert Breedlove. Now, not all of you will know who Robert is, but he is the founder and CEO of Parallax Capital. He's also an established writer who's published many amazing articles on Medium. I recommend you go checking them out. Look, some of them, they're pretty much a book. They're like a mini book. The level of detail he goes into is absolutely incredible. Now I originally wanted to have Robert on the show to discuss a recent article he wrote, the number 0 and Bitcoin. But while I was doing my prep, I read an older article from November last year titled An Open Letter to Ray Dalio. Now this was a response to the billionaire hedge fund manager who had criticized bitcoin, calling it a speculative bubble and writing off as a store of wealth. And whilst I wanted to cover his other article, this was right on the money for me right now, right on a number of things I'm thinking about.
- [04:14]
Robert Breedlove
So as we were about to do the call, I switched up and said.
- [04:17]
Peter McCormack
Robert, I'm sorry, man. With changing the show topic Now, Robert's article really appealed to me and the way he talks about bitcoin reshaping the world was incredibly interesting and so I just wanted to get in the weeds with him. I really enjoyed this show. It was totally unprepared, but I really enjoyed what we got into. I do recommend you go into the show Notes and you go and check out Robert's work. It really is fascinating stuff and if you've got any questions, you can hit me up. My email address is hello@whatbitcoindid.com Lots of you have been doing that recently. Also, if you want to check out some of my other work, please head over to Defiance News. My latest film in Up There, where I headed to the Turkish border with Greece and looked at the migrant crisis there. Please go and check that out. Let me know what you think. Also, loads of shows going up on Defiance. News of my recent show looking at Iran's religious dictatorship is up there as well. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed. As I said, if you want to reach out to me, it's hello, what bitcoin did calm.
- [05:11]
Robert Breedlove
Robert how are you man?
- [05:13]
Good, Peter, how are you?
- [05:15]
I'm good, man. I'm about to about to piss you off because we had a plan to do a show all about the zero and then you decided to write this big letter to Ray Dalio, which I stumbled across and I was like, I want to talk about that.
- [05:34]
Let's talk about it.
- [05:35]
It's a long letter, man.
- [05:37]
It's a really long letter. And I did prepare to talk about zero, but I will do my damnedest to talk about Mr. Ray Dalio.
- [05:45]
Well, do you know what, they're both fascinating subjects and I want to get you back on to talk about zero, but I was gripped reading your letter. I had to skip through some of it because there's so much to it to get to get to this point. Do you know if he read it?
- [05:59]
If I've read it?
- [06:01]
No. Do you know if he's read it?
- [06:02]
Oh, Ray's read it. No, I. So I finished right the day before, I went to a conference in LA called Summit and it's basically an entrepreneurial festival and Ray was speaking at the event. So Ray spoke for 30, 40 minutes and I got up for Q and A after and asked him the first question and basically in a long winded fashion and I put this on YouTube as well. Me asking him the question and his response, how does he see the absolute scarcity of bitcoin playing into a world where the scarcity of money has totally been compromised? And he gave this very educated macroeconomic response. But then on the bitcoin piece he gave this very ill informed response, it's too volatile to be a medium of exchange or a store of value. And he just kind of wrote it off. I just don't think he's looked at it deeply. And that's kind of the conclusion I reach in the letter.
- [07:04]
Well, it's a fascinating article. Not just because it's. You've written it to write, but actually it's like a. It's almost like a university dissertation. How long did it take you to write?
- [07:20]
I spent a while because I started reading his book Principles in, I guess, March of that year. And I think I published it in October, November. Basically, the whole time, I mean, I read his book and then I was like, every principle that came out of him was like, it's positively embodied in bitcoin. And then he kept writing these pieces that are. The system's falling apart. You need to be in gold. It's a crisis hedge. He's very bullish on gold, as we bitcoiners know. If you understand the value proposition of gold and how it became money, you're 2/3 of the way to understanding bitcoin. It's just superior across all dimensions of money, essentially. So it was interesting to see Ray consistently write pieces that were bullish bitcoin, but never say the word bitcoin. And then, in fact, he published a little snippet of a video saying the opposite, saying he was bearish on bitcoin and he's more bullish on blockchain technology, more bullish on library, these other silly concepts. So I decided just to compile it all, all my thoughts into a very long letter. I think on medium, it says a 104 minute read. So it's. It's not for the faint of heart.
- [08:44]
Yeah. So I did about 40 minutes on it. I skipped through some bits just to be prepared for this, because I was preparing for talking about the zero and it just popped up and I opened it in a separate tab and I was like, I'm just gonna have a quick look at this because I hadn't seen it before. And I was like, fucking grip, man. I was like, oh, no. And because it's. Because the thing is, it's right for me, timing wise, it's kind of perfect. I've. I did this. I don't know if you saw. I did this beginner's guide, like 17 episodes, beginner's guide to Bitcoin. And I'm trying to turn those 17 episodes into one. Into one one hour show. I'm trying to condense it all down into one show to get out to people so they can just go, right, I haven't got time for 17 episodes. I'm going, well, look, here's one. Just start here. And so a number of the things you're talking about in there Like a hitting on me. And like. And also there's things that I've got, like, questions about that. And I was like, right, now we're gonna do this, we'll do zero later, we'll come back to zero. And I know it's annoying because you prepare for zero. And I know it's annoying because this was back from November and zeros from March, but it's. I gotta talk about this one, Rob. I'm really sorry, man.
- [09:48]
This is what the free market's all about, right? Spontaneity.
- [09:50]
Let's do it. Yeah. Free market. Yeah. All right, so listen, look, I think you need to do a shorter version of the letter from maybe like side of a four.
- [10:00]
Yeah. There's a guy on Twitter, Mr. Friar has. He actually wrote a short introductory letter to the letter. That's maybe 10 minutes. So that's a good start. But I don't know, it's hard. You know, he wrote, I think it's a 600 page book, principles. So it's kind of hard to condense that into, you know, a worldview that explains bitcoin in any less space. But. But it is comprehensive. You know, as you probably saw, I address it from all angles. But yeah, I do. That is my general weakness in writing is I tend to be a little long winded, but also dense. I think people are like, it's very long, but also very dense. Like, it's a lot to chew on.
- [10:46]
Yeah.
- [10:46]
So I, you know, I do it to sharpen my own understanding and people seem to like it. So I'm just going to keep doing it, but I will try to make it. That's 10 minutes or less next, I promise.
- [10:57]
Well, listen, look, you shouldn't change the way you work. It is dense. It's actually, when it's one of those things, I almost felt like, God, I wanted this printed out and I want to sit there with a pen and like highlight bits and go. Because you can't. It's not one of those things you can just like half do and then quickly check Twitter. Halfway through, you're like, you need to focus, you need to concentrate. But no, it's good. So let's go through it like. And we don't really need to address Ray anyway. I mean, it's a. This is just a bitcoin thesis. Right. In some ways. So we don't really need to address him. I mean, his criticisms, to be honest, is the same stuff that people like you or I have been smashing away for ages. The blockchain, not bitcoin it can't be a store of value because it's too volatile. It can't be a mean of exchange because not enough places, et cetera, blah, blah, blah, without the patience that, like this is a new paradigm in money, and we need a little bit of patience for it to build out. But they're the same criticisms that kind of go everywhere. But let's start with your primer on money, man. Give me your primer on money, but give me the shorter version, shorter version.
- [11:59]
Of the primer on money. So in any trading society, people steadily seek to trade things for things that are more tradable or exchangeable or saleable, to use an Austrian term. And in that process, and they're basically trying to get to the thing they ultimately want, right? If I have. If I'm a telescope maker and I'm trying to trade for cars, I would like to trade my telescopes for water, you know, because the guy that makes cars is more likely to need water than he has telescopes, something like that. So in that entire process, something necessarily becomes most tradable or most exchangeable or most saleable. And that thing is money. That's. It has nothing to do with government. It's a free market phenomenon. And something rises to the surface to become the most exchangeable thing that is money. The characteristics that determine what becomes money, people lay out a lot of them. I like to narrow it down to five. I say money has to be divisible, durable, portable, recognizable, and very importantly, scarce. I'll try to go through each one of those. So divisible just means it can be subdivided and recombined at varying scales so you can price things. Durable means it persists across time. Portable means you can move it across space very easily and at low cost. Recognizable means it's verifiable, it's counterfeit resistant. It can be instantly or quickly assayed to be authentic. And scarce is what protects it from human greed and allows it to maintain its value across time. And so of those characteristics, the technology that historically best fulfilled them were the monetary metals. Metals can be. They're very divisible, relatively divisible. They hold. They're very durable. It's a big deal, right? They last for a long time, which in ancient societies was a big deal. When you're trading fruit and things like this that deteriorate, they're also very recognizable and somewhat portable. They're pretty heavy and hard to move, but they are very importantly scarce. They're very hard to get out of the ground, very hard to Extract. And of the monetary metals, gold was the most scarce. So gold out competed to become money. And that's, I guess, my short primer on money. And then from gold you get into what government did to it.
- [14:37]
Yeah. So Vijay Boyupati, I had on and his bullish case of bitcoin, he grades them and he fairly grades them across a number of factors. I think he might have a couple more than you. And one of the things about gold, which I kind of came to understand is that I guess with international global trade, gold became more of a problem in the Internet age than when people were sailing around on ships. You could store gold on your ships, you could go around and buy things. But in this kind of international world, we needed something else. We needed something that'd be a bit more suitable, which is why fiat money worked. Right. But that whole system has been abused, abused by governments, abused by central banks, which is why we get bitcoin. Right?
- [15:21]
Yeah. So the way I like to put that is government stepped in to resolve the portability and recognizability issues of gold. Right. So gold, very high value to weight, it's hard to move, expensive to safeguard, store all these things. And then recognizability was because even though gold is recognizable and there are methods to assay it, its authenticity, it can also be subject to counterfeit. People have done weird things like paint, lead, gold and things like that. So government essentially stepped in to provide. You know, first it was coinage. So they're minting coins and actual gold. And it was the smug emperor's face that was stamped onto the coin, that was shifting the trust function from the individual merchants to where they don't need to trust one another as much, they can just trust that it was minted at the government's coinage dispensary. And that basically shifted the trust, or needing to trust the merchant and money to trusting the government. And it also added to the divisibility too, because coinage clearly makes it much more divisible and easier to use. But the problem that came with that is that they abused the trust function. Right. All of a sudden, government now, instead of trusting the gold and the merchant, you're now trusting the government instead. That these tokens, whether they're gold coins, which were later paper currencies backed by gold, that they always had a one to one peg, that this dollar was always fully redeemable for gold. And essentially it was that abuse of the trust function, which started out as 1 to 1, became 1 to 2, 1 to 10, before it culminated in this 1971 thing where it's irredeemable, cannot be redeemed for gold. And I'm glossing over a lot of history here, but that's generally the path that it took. What I like to call it is there's essentially fiat currency is a pyramid scheme that's been constructed on top of gold. So gold was determined by the free market to be money. Government stepped into warehouse and satisfy some of these shortcomings of gold. It's recognizability and divisibility. And they built this pyramid scheme on top of it that we all use today called fiat currency. It's kind of brilliant in that everyone thinks the paper in their pocket is money, when in fact it's not money at all. It's just a form of tokenized debt. You're essentially taking full counterparty risk of the issuer, which is the central bank and the government, we see that being abused more heavily today than ever.
- [18:04]
So this is the interesting thing, right? If we had a bunch of aliens come and land on our planet today and we had to explain them the different types of money and the properties, like, it's very clear that bitcoin is the best form of money we have, right? It's obvious to you, it's obvious to me. But there's still many people who just don't get it. We talk about mass adoption. I always say we have mass awareness. I rarely meet somebody today who's not heard of bitcoin, but we don't have mass adoption. All my friends heard of bitcoin. And out of my good group of like my 10 best buddies, one of them owns a very small amount. They know what I do, They've heard me talk about it. And they can't make that leap. And it's same with the gold bugs.
- [18:44]
Peter McCormack
The gold bugs, they love gold.
- [18:46]
Robert Breedlove
They absolutely love gold. You explain them all the properties of bitcoin. Objectively speaking, it's better than bitcoin on. It's better than gold on nearly every measure. But it's almost like I talked about this in a show previously. It was almost like that time where I was buying CDs and MP3s came along, but I still had to buy that CD, man. I could. I couldn't buy the MP3, I couldn't buy the digital version because I didn't have that thing. And now I've got a cupboard full of CDs I don't do anything with. And I have a subscription to Spotify. I couldn't make that leap. And it's almost like some people just cannot make that leap from a. Something physical having value to something digital having value.
- [19:23]
Absolutely. And it's, that's a difficult leap to make. Right. If you've spent your entire life under the belief that the physical object is money. Right. Which for a gold bug, that's very reasonable. You have 5,000 years of history of historical inertia sort of providing that, supporting that belief system, if you will. But when you get just a little deeper and you look at what brought why did gold rise to the surface to become money? That's when I think you see the value prop of Bitcoin. And the way I see it, I tweeted about this before, is that I see the market cap of gold as essentially pent up demand for bitcoin. It's like there's a bunch of demand for bitcoin there that haven't realized that it's superior in terms of all the five monetary traits we've laid out. And there seems to be this tension between the Lindy effect of gold, which is basically it's been around for so long you expect it to be around for that much longer, versus the superior characteristics offered by bitcoin. But bitcoin has a very limited Lindy effect. It's only been around for 11 years. But the analogy I like to make there is if you polled people in the 90s and said, hey, do you think the Internet is going to be a permanent feature of your life? You'd probably get a mixed response, right? Maybe 50% of people say yeah, it's a big deal, 50% of people say no, it's not a big deal. If you did that same poll today, I think it's virtually unanimous that everyone would agree the Internet is here to stay, it is a permanent future of life and bitcoins is following that same path. We're 11 years in to this Internet of value. In another 10 or 20 years it's going to be perceived with as much permanence as the Internet and then it's just competing against gold based on its characteristics and then it out competes and again every fiat currency in the world is just a regional monopoly built on top of gold. Essentially those things don't hold any value if the central bank doesn't hold gold. So yeah, easy to get lost in the bitcoin rabbit hole and seeing it sort of out competing the whole thing.
- [21:42]
Yeah, that Lindy effect thing is funny as well because people like I, I pull people up on it. Now if someone turns around and says, you know, if Bitcoin succeeds. I'm like, what do you mean if it succeeds? Like it's already succeeded, right? The fact that it's still here 11 years later, the fact that people are using it, like I use it for work, I will pay people in bitcoin. I get paid in bitcoin. I don't sit there thinking, oh wow, this is neat, I'm going to use. I just do it. It's just like a natural part of what I do because it's, it makes life a little bit easier in some ways. And not everything has a permanent life, like permanent life cycle. I can't remember how long we had a, like a cord telephone at home.
- [22:22]
Right?
- [22:23]
But we don't have those anymore. We don't even have a home phone anymore. I think my dad has one. Right. But they're dead. That's a technology. Things come and go. Who knows what the life cycle of bitcoin will be? But I really like it irks me when even bitcoiners are like, yeah, well, if bitcoin succeeds, it's like, no, it's already succeeded. It's like, how far can it go now? And that's where I tend to think. And then when we talk about like the people who can't get their head around bitcoin because it's not physical, whereas they have like physical gold. But at the same time they're happy to use a digital form of money because fiat money itself is really digital. Yes, we have these paper token representations, but it really is just a number. And it's just a number in a database, right?
- [23:04]
Yeah, absolutely.
- [23:07]
So I'm like, how do we get people past that? How do we get them over that step? Why is it so difficult? Why do you think there are these barriers for people?
- [23:14]
Well, I think to the point of success, it is the fastest growing asset in human history. That's an empirical truth today. And for people to argue with that, I mean, at some point it becomes very self defeating, right? You're just, you're fighting the tide, so to speak. And I actually you touched on telecommunications and I think I mentioned that in the Primer for money. But that's a great analogy for money in my opinion, in that the purpose for telecommunications always remains the same and it's to move information across time and space. But the technology we have used to fulfill that function has changed and adapted over time. We used to use cave paintings, smoke signals, carrier pigeons, telegraph. Now we use mostly digital technology like the zoom call we're on today. The same is true of money. Money's entire purpose is to just move value across space and time. And we've used many different things to fulfill that function over time, whether seashells, salt, cattle, gold, government paper, and now bitcoin. So I think the general thesis is that for the same reason, like voiceover Internet protocol and things like zoom have out competed the landline. Digital absolutely scarce money like bitcoin out competes analog money, analog gold, government paper. But I think the barrier to conception is much bigger because money is so intimately connected to your nationality, a bit of your religious precepts. This is a very deeply rooted concept. So I actually like to look at. Digital tech has been so disruptive and so transformative to our lives. I think this is just kind of the latest market test for how profound the digital age really is. If bitcoin out competes gold, then this is going to be regarded historically as a neo renaissance or the great awakening some people are calling it. It's a really big deal, this digital landscape that we're moving into.
- [25:25]
But you're saying if man. But your article said that people will coalesce around the hardest form of money, the best form of money. And bitcoin is the best form of money. So why is there even an if in there? Shouldn't it be when I view it that way, clearly.
- [25:44]
But no one can say the future, right? And that's the definition of a black swan. The unknown unknowns. We don't know what we don't know. There could be something that clobbers bitcoin that we can't foresee. All we can do, and this applies to anything, is look at history and see the trends that have manifested up until this present moment and try to extrapolate them forward. And that's what bitcoin is. It's a bet that the competitive dynamics that have shaped money throughout all of human history will continue to play out. We're going to continue to coalesce around the scarcest money that's most divisible, durable, portable and recognizable. And what's amazing about bitcoin is that it maximizes all those functions and it is absolutely scarce. You cannot get less scarce than bitcoin, or I guess you should say more scarce than bitcoin. And that's the zero piece. It compares the discovery of zero to the discovery of absolute scarcity for money.
- [26:43]
Joe. It's funny also, when you were talking then about the evolution of telephony, it made me think of Plan B's new updated stock to flow cross asset model, because so I like the original stock to flow.
- [26:59]
Peter McCormack
But I always had this doubt.
- [27:00]
Robert Breedlove
I was like, yeah, all right, I get it. But what if there aren't enough new buyers coming into the market? Just what if it doesn't happen? Then if we don't have enough demand, it doesn't matter the supply choice. You don't have enough demand. There's no guarantee in that. But when he, when he brought in his phase transitions and talked about the life cycle of bitcoin and how it went from kind of like this nerd toy to bim, like cash, like, like for, as a medium exchange, and then it became like digital gold and then it's become a financial asset. I was like, okay, this really starts to make sense because I can, I can see that life cycle and I understand that. And it's, it's been making me therefore think like, what is that? What is that fifth phase? Have you been through that?
- [27:48]
Yeah, it's, you know what it makes me think of? And my real breakthrough with Bitcoin is when you start to understand the game theory of money and how these competing spheres of interpersonal interest, they center on one thing and that is the most scarce money. That's the shelling point. So if you say in game theory, they say a game is any situation where there can be winners or losers. A strategy is just a decision making framework. And the shelling point is the default strategy where you can't trust one another in games where you can't trust other players. So that's why people coalesce around the hardest money, because it's what allows us to facilitate trade across space and time in the most trust minimized manner with the least need to trust other players. We can just trust the monetary substrate instead of trusting one another. And I see, yeah, bitcoin starts out, it's like this little kernel of game theory that was just fun money between a couple of cypherpunks. Then it gets a market exchange value roughly at its marginal cost of production. And then that was the miracle moment, by the way, once it gained a monetary premium initially everything from there has just been a step function of its increasing scarcity. Because every time you constrict the new supply flow. The way the economics of money work, and this works with gold, is that the market price will converge to the marginal cost of production because anyone that can go out and mine an ounce of gold will have an incentive to do that at a cost up to its market price. So you have this dynamic tension between market price and production costs. Bitcoin, that's the beauty of it is the halving keeps forcing its production cost higher and higher. So it's almost like putting a floor under its market value. And that's pushing it through these, I guess you could call them, levels of phase transition that plan B is alluding to. Where at first it's a toy for cypherpunks, then it's a monetary asset being used for payments. And I guess the ultimate evolution of that would be a global reserve asset of some sort. And who knows, who knows how far that goes because again, you follow that. People talk about the bitcoin rabbit hole. And for me, the rabbit that you follow down the rabbit hole is the question, what is money? And if you just keep asking that question, you get led down a path that makes you question everything like, what is government, what is sovereignty, what are personal property rights? All these things. And Bitcoin is disruptive to that whole foundation. So it really does feel like we're at the dawn of something really big.
- [30:51]
Yeah. More than just money, right?
- [30:54]
Yeah, it's. And I, for this, I always point people to that book the Sovereign Individual, because it was written in the 90s and it predicted things like social media instead of broadcasting. It called it narrow casting, which I thought was cool. It predicted anonymous digital cash, that is Bitcoin. It also predicted digital, the digitization of securities, so real estate, other things like that. But the thesis of the book was that the microprocessor would subvert the power of the nation state. And it equated digital space or cyberspace to being sort of like international waters, that it's a place where no authority can cast dominion, essentially due to the privacy, due to cryptography and privacy and all these things that we can basically enforce our own self sovereign management of our resources and assets and information that no government authority would be able to impose itself. So it's a very interesting book and it's hard to see where this goes. Like if you talk about this is like a once in a 500 year type of change. If we evolve past the concept of the nation state, that really shakes our identities to the core. Right. Like, oh, I'm an American, I'm like, it's, it makes you rethink the whole world and it's hard to see past that. But I think that book did a really good job of just pointing towards what the world could be like in the wake of a change that profound.
- [32:27]
Yeah. And the timing of some of this is kind of insane. Okay, so the white paper comes out, actually came out on my birthday my birthday is October 31st, but October 31st, 2008. And then we have the protocol drop in 2009. I don't find it for years later, but it was, it was born during the financial crisis and it alludes to the financial crisis. Some people will say, look, that was just a, that was just a way of timestamping it's coincidence. But either way, I think it's too much of a coincidence. Right?
- [32:58]
Peter McCormack
But this weird world that we're living.
- [33:01]
Robert Breedlove
In right now, that this kind of strange coronavirus thing going on, like whatever you believe about coronavirus, it's, it's almost put a, like a, like a microscope on everything. All our belief systems, the state, money, freedom, civil liberties, civil liberties, science, centralized planning. Like every one of those things that Bitcoin forces us to question right now is kind of like it's been accelerated into our kind of decision making process. Like my world's been turned upside down. It's not about yours. I've never been this full anarcho capitalists. I've still been that kind of person who's a little bit like, oh yeah, but if we didn't have this from the state then this wouldn't work, blah, blah, blah. But even during this process, I'm becoming more anarchist through it and I'm having or even more of my own personal thesis about the state being proven completely incorrect. And it's the timing of it is just kind of funny that it's happening right now.
- [34:06]
Yeah, it's important to understand what anarchy means. That's a really bad rap. So anarchy means the word archon means ruler essentially. So anarchy means no rulers. It does not mean no rules. It means like there are still rules in an anarchic society. They are just negotiated and adaptable boundaries that freely acting economic actors agree upon. Whereas in the world we live in today, and I call central banking and fiat currency, I refer to it as monetary socialism because they've completely inhibited the market function. In money, essentially there is no supply and demand do not determine the interest rate. There is no competitive innovation allowed to occur. Right. So for the past 100 years, if you tried to start a business that made money or competed with a bank in any way, you were going to be shut down. All of these things really inhibit the adaptive function of an economy, which we're just constantly trying to figure out better ways of doing things. That's the whole purpose of it. And yeah, this latest coronavirus situation has just been, from my perspective, a highlight of the failings of the state. Right. So this is important too. The reason we have a global pandemic is because of the state. What happened in Wuhan when this outbreak happened started, China suppressed the story. They tried to downplay it, tried to paper it over, make it look like it wasn't a big deal. They continued to allow flights in and out of Wuhan. I think the number was like 6 or 7 million people continued to fly in and out of Wuhan while this virus is manifesting itself. And that's what. So the state suppressing the story in Wuhan gave the virus its incubation period, which allowed it to turn into a global pandemic. So that's first really important to understand. The reason we're in this situation is because of the centralized police state. And then secondarily, it's like the response, it just doesn't make sense. This top down response, it doesn't efficiently allocate resources because they're muting the profit motive. I saw a thing in New York, a guy had hoarded a bunch of masks and was selling them at a huge premium. And that sounds really bad on the surface. If you don't understand economics, which most people don't, you're like, oh, that sounds terrible, how could anyone do that? But in reality, that's what actually solves the problem. It's like people individually guided by their profit motive to go in and satisfy the demands of customers is what allows this thing to heal itself as quickly as possible. That's what the free market dynamic is. But instead, what do we see from the centralized state is they're printing money, right? They're closing borders. All these things that don't help solve the problem, they're just sort of adding to the pile of government debt and sowing the seeds of their own demise, I think in the grand scheme of things. But my silver lining to all of it is I feel like other people are starting to see the shortcomings of government as well as a result of this entire process. Most people I know, they've never been. I don't know anyone. And I live in the us, I live in la. No one's like, oh yeah, the federal government's great. I've never heard anyone that's pro federal government. But this process has really drawn a critical eye and it's pushed people to be much more aware, I think, of, of everything they're doing wrong in the world.
- [37:59]
Yeah, I agree, but I don't think, see, I mean, we've got it here in the uk. I mean, the government response has been almost Universally crap on every possible decision they've made. But even though my friends are critical, but my friends will always think, well, the solution is another election in four years and we'll vote a better government in. Like, there's very few people amongst my friends who think there is an option to go, well, actually we would be better off with no government. I mean, even, it's even tough to get people to the point of thinking, well, you'd just be better off having local government. You would just be better off having regional governments competing. Even getting them to think like that is too fun. I think that's one of the problems. It's not getting them to be pissed or question the government to get them to think there's a different way of doing things. And that's a huge step. It's a huge step for me, Robert. Honestly, I buy every part of the theory behind free market markets and a free market for money. But I also have bits that I'm not like fully there on, things that I still question, things I try and imagine sometimes what a, what a, what a stateless existence would be like. Would it be like without a state? What, what would be better?
- [39:15]
Peter McCormack
What would be worse?
- [39:16]
Robert Breedlove
Will we, will, you know, will we live in a better society or will we live in a more dangerous society? I, I'm still never like 100 fully convinced. And I always feel like, if anything, it's like we need to wean ourselves off the state rather than push the big red button.
- [39:30]
Agreed. I think it's important to understand what government is. The function that it actually fulfills is that it is essentially a protection racket.
- [39:43]
So the government is there protecting who though, are they? Themselves and their buddies.
- [39:48]
Yeah. So a government is a monopoly on violence, essentially to prevent violence. Right. And it's intended to be a space where, within which the boundaries of which all property rights are respected. And that space is defended by the army and police internally to, you know, resolve disputes and things like this. The only. So government is a localized affair historically, but the reason we have this huge bloated federal government today, where you have people, and for us, it's Washington, D.C. making decisions that affect everyone in the country and everyone in the world for that matter. People that are isolated from the consequences of their own decisions, lacking skin in the game is because they have a monopoly on money. They can print money to fulfill and enrich. To enrich themselves to fulfill their own desires by taxing everyone. So you have a few hundred people in Washington able to tax 300 million people behind their backs. Through inflation, to then fund these schemes, political schemes that are close to them, and it perverts the whole system of governance. So it's crazy. It's hard to talk about because we've all lived under this, right? We're all born into a nation that we're essentially. That's it. It's your nationality. It's a core part of your identity. You don't even look at it as like a business arrangement. It's not like the government. You're a customer of the government. You're almost like a slave to the government. You're just born into it. You pay them whatever they tell you. You pay them and you're happy with whatever they give you. You don't have a lot of say in the process. You could argue that democracy, you get a vote, but it just, it gets. The intention of the voting process gets very muted largely by the lobbying mechanism. Right. Which is again, a fiat currency issue. So it's, I think in this world we're going into, it's going to be. It's going to force people to take much more responsibility for themselves. Right? And that includes financial responsibility, physical security, just being aware of your surroundings and being prepared for any eventuality. Because there's not a nation, a nanny nation state that's going to be there to take care of you all the time. And if you, you know, if you don't see that, it's like, just look at their actions. They're pursuing their own individualized ends and extorting you in the process via inflation and taxation. So, and that's everywhere. That's not just any one country. That's all countries, all the federalized, the federalized nation state model is that. And I just think that the promise of Bitcoin is to take us back to a freer market dynamic in life where government's more localized, the tax rates are consensual. You're actually saying the government starts to solicit us for our citizenship versus us just being born into it and having to accept it. And again, this is all like, it's a very long game in a distant future, but it's happening right now. So the more people we can wake up to this, it's kind of like the more lives we can save, I think, in the process.
- [43:15]
So you're not in the headspace of let's completely get rid of the state. Your headspace is more, let's have a small estate, let's have a more accountable state, a more local state. Or is that just a stepping stone?
- [43:27]
You privatize the state. We know, like economics 101, monopoly is bad. Monopoly is always bad. It comes at great expense to everyone that's subjected to it to the benefit of the monopolist. Right? So let's just get rid of monopoly. Let's just get rid of monopolies and have governments be a private affair. It's a private business. Right. So I actually was joking about this the other day. Like someone was like, oh, you should do political office. I'm like, that goes against everything that I believe in. But if I had to do it, I would run on a platform of dismantling the government. I'm going to privatize all the functions of the government. Thinking about it a little more deeply is that you could actually sell it to private entrepreneurs. Like sell a license to the post office or police, whatever the functions that government provides today. You could sell it to entrepreneurs, use the license fees to actually pay for the people that are being hurt during the transition. Because it would be very messy. Right. People would be having a hard time with the transition. So anyways, I just, yeah, the state is a business. It's not going away. We're always going to need someone to provide that protection service and to preserve private property rights. But it does not need to be one ape to rule 300 million like we have in the U.S. right. It should be much more localized. Should have very localized government. And they should all be competitive between one another because that's what keeps them honest. It's the competitive frictions that keep market actors honest. Right. Keeps prices low, keeps innovation high. And it maintains that incentive for us to constantly prove one another wrong in the marketplace in doing so, create an innovation that everyone benefits. That is the wellspring that the free market is and that we're muting with the federalized state and central banking.
- [45:23]
But the starting point is fixing the money.
- [45:25]
The starting point is a money that cannot be confiscated, inflated or stopped. And that's what bitcoin is. I call it a zero fucks money.
- [45:36]
Peter McCormack
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- [47:27]
Robert Breedlove
So I told you earlier I was putting together this like one hour version of my beginner's guide and the show I'm on at the moment, the one I'm reviewing is the one with Dan Held where we talked about Bitcoin's monetary policy and we actually came. What we came to is like the beautiful simplicity of it. So fixed 21 million where the issuance halves every four years. So you have this predictable and predictable issuance against a ultimate hard cap and that's pretty much it. But the thing that I came to the realization even during that session with Dan, I'd never actually really thought about it. During my own. But the realization I came to with Dan is that what we have now is money, which is managed by like a few guys in a room. You know, it'd be in London, here in Washington, in the US they're trying to make decisions that ultimately fix problems for millions of people in millions of different situations, which you can't do. Somebody's always going to be left out. But the alternative is you have this known simple monetary policy that everyone else themselves has to adapt to. Like, it's down to you, you know, the issuance, you know, the supply. You've got a free market. It's up to you to go out there and. And adapt yourself to it, which ultimately becomes a fairer and more honest system.
- [48:48]
Absolutely. This has actually been quantified that the human attention span is only, I forget the exact number of bandwidth. Let's say it's like four bits, right? We can only absorb four bits of information at a time, any one of us, through our eyes. And in that sense, you can think of the free market as a distributed computing system, right, where it has all the eyes of all the world looking at economic reality and assimilating feedback into prices and innovations. So it's like in the central banking model, you have the wisdom of the boardroom, right? 10, 20, 50, 100, doesn't matter. 1,000 guys looking at monetary policy trying to make a decision versus a free market, which would be 7 billion people deciding for themselves, pursuing their own interest, culminating in the best approximation of truth that we could arrive at in the form of technology and price. What would that be? If we look at that, the free market function, historically, it was as if it was trying to zero in on absolute scarcity which Bitcoin represents. It arrived at gold as money because again, it satisfied those characteristics and was the most scarce monetary metal that satisfied those other four characteristics. So Bitcoin, which is just an amazing breakthrough in that it is being pure information, it better satisfies the visibility, durability, recognizability and portability, and introduces the ability for us to have absolutely scarce money, because you cannot guarantee a fixed supply of anything physical. And the example I give there is if we could flip a switch right now and make everyone's occupation in the world gold mining, the supply of gold would soon soar. So we can't actually limit a supply of anything that's not digital. So we discovered absolute scarcity for money in Bitcoin. And that's how I like to look at it, is we're moving from this centralized compute Model where it was, you know, we had socialism in Soviet Russia by the way, which failed. News to everyone. And what did they do? They tried it. They, I think in Solzhenitsky's book he said the Soviet there was a committee that was responsible for 10,000 pricing decisions per day. They had to decide price of food, price of gifts, price of that like per day. This small group of guys is trying to decide 10, making 10,000 pricing decisions for the economy per day. And well, socialism got out competed by capitalism because we had the whole population making those pricing decisions for themselves in every single market except for money. And so the way I look at it now is we have our version of capitalism out competed socialism and now bitcoin as the truest form of monetary capitalism is going to out compete monetary socialism, which is central banking and it's just a matter of energy efficiency. It's not like this all sounds like we're kind of freedom fighters or rah rah, power to the people. Which it is in a way. But it's also pragmatic because we're just saying this system out competes that system. And we've seen it historically and we're seeing it again. So that's where I'm putting my chips and that's where I'm writing and talking about.
- [52:18]
Yeah, look, I'm there 90 of the time, most of the time. And there are things I think about, I think about. Yeah, but what about the safety net for those less fortunate? Like what happens in situations like that? I do. That is like the last relics of my own socialist beliefs. Right. I think about that or I, I think about how do we, how do we get people to understand and even consider becoming self sovereign? Like it's, it's a beautiful idea. Right. I've got it down here because you talk about, in your article, you talk about the US dollar. Your critique is that you're exposed to the risk of payments being censored, reversed and surveilled. All important points. But also realistically, I mean someone like my dad, the benefits of the fiat money is that reversals exist. And the benefit of fiat money is that it is insured by the bank. And like if there is a mistake, it's stolen. They just repair that shit for him. Someone like him could, he couldn't be self soft. I mean this is a guy spent 30 minutes teaching copy and paste the other day, right? So it's that like transition to this new world, does it add complexities for some people? Does it make it too difficult for other people? And that's one of the things I think about.
- [53:28]
Yeah. So the safety net that, the reality of a safety net, it is always necessary, right? We're always going to have the more helpless among us. But again, it occurs at a local level. And if you're in a world where wealth can't be perpetually confiscated via inflation and people are operating on a monetary standard that appreciates year over year, like if you hold gold, it gets more valuable every year on average. As the productivity of the world grows relative to the fixed supply of gold or bitcoin, it becomes more valuable. So this incentivizes people to save. Right. Because everything's getting cheaper year over year. So why buy the car today if I can buy it next year? I know it's going to be cheaper. And incentivizes communities and individuals to have savings, which as we all know, if you're in a good position and your neighbor's hurting, right, that's who you're going to help. You're going to help your neighbor should you have the means to do it. But when you abstract it away, like you're paying money into a federalized state that then pays you back in Social Security and there's all these layers of bureaucracy in between where the wealth's getting confiscated, that's where it just the concept of a safety net falls apart. And for guys like your dad, banking. This isn't the end of banking, by the way. I know bitcoin. It's the gold layer. Bitcoin is gold is kind of the best analogy we have. What it is the end of is centralized banking where they centrally control the money supply. Free banking will always be a necessary business function where people don't want to custody their own assets. There will always be a need to match maturity of deposits with demand for loans. Like people always have savings and people always have a demand for loans to do projects and such. So there's a necessary free market function that banking provides that's not going anywhere. But I agree that in the process, like where we are today, to get guys like your dad on board, it it's hard, right? Because not your keys, not your coins, all these things, it's hard to sell to someone, especially if they didn't grow up with digital technology. Right. I know when I'm talking to baby boomers plus about anything tech, there's a very discernible difference between both of our mindsets. They look at it like a mystery box. And whereas us digital natives, it's just much more intuitive. So I don't Know, it's. It just takes a while, I guess.
- [56:28]
I mean, it could be a generational shift anyway. Like, I don't see in the short term US losing our government as it is. I just don't see it over the next, say, even decade. So this could be a multi decade. This could be outside of our lifetime, even yours and ours. But if for me it's more about are we heading directionally in the right way? And I think right now we're not. I think the state is getting bigger, it's getting worse. I think that's almost certainly true. But I do think people are waking up to some of these problems, like you alluded to earlier. And also people have got options now. People have the options. Not everywhere. In Saudi Arabia you have less options. In Iran you have less options. In Turkey you're losing options. In Hungary you're losing options. But like here in the uk, certainly you have more options. In the us you have options. You have a vote out with bitcoin, but you have the ability to stand up and say, I've kind of, I've had enough of this. And I think we're starting to see that it's whether it's. Whether this is used as people use the opportunity, opportunity to have now to really question everything and push back, or are we going to come out the end of this stuff with a bunch more.
- [57:42]
Peter McCormack
Robert?
- [57:42]
Robert Breedlove
I mean, I got it today. Look here, show you my phone. Yeah, Like I'll talk it through to. People are listening but like Sky News app, because I got the alert that came through, number one thing. You see what that is?
- [57:55]
I can't read it.
- [57:57]
So it says public, public urge to download NHS contract contact tracing app. So we're getting all this other kind of things coming in, these kind of invasion on our privacy, this kind of tracking stuff, this one step from two steps perhaps from China, social credit scores. So whilst I feel like more people are waking up to the problems, I also feel like we're heading into a worse situation. It's like, and I'm wondering, like, what's the breakout when. What's the tipping point for some of this stuff? Like, we really see a change because it's taken me kind of three years within Bitcoin to even get to where I am. And I'm nowhere near as hardened as someone like you. I'm way off. Someone like a Matt O'Dell or Marty Ben. How do we get people who are totally conditioned to the state, how do we just get them across? And it's hard, man, It Is hard.
- [58:50]
And yeah, there's the saying, like, it's darkest before the dawn, right? Or even in the phase transitions that maybe plan B alluded to before water freezes, right? It has this energetic freakout. You see this spike in its entropy, then it. Boom. It crystallizes into ice. So there's always these storming things right before major phase transitions. And I think that's what we're on the cusp of. And for people like perceiving the state, the one thing that you have to be absolute, have zero, zero tolerance for is any incursion on your freedom of speech. Like, we have to be able to speak freely so that we can have public debate and public forums so that our ideas can go to war, so that our bodies don't have to. That's what the bedrock of Western civilization is built upon. And anything that tries to inhibit that. Like, I saw there was an article in the Atlantic recently where they were talking about the government's need to regulate speech on the Internet. Fuck that. You, like, you can never let anyone impinge on your freedom of speech or we will slide into totalitarianism. And this is not hyperbolic. This is quickly study history. The first thing that goes is speech. And then goes everything else.
- [60:18]
Dude, we have this in the uk. Like, you know I'm being sued for saying words right now. No, I didn't know. You know Craig Wright. The Craig Wright thing.
- [60:26]
Yeah, yeah, you know.
- [60:29]
You know Craig Wright. You don't know. Yeah, you don't know. He's suing me.
- [60:32]
I did not know that.
- [60:34]
Yeah, so he's suing me in the High Court right now. Now for words. Because I said he's a fraud. Look, the cost. The costs of a case like this, it's not cheap. We're talking big money. Like, I don't even know if I can publicly say the numbers, but we're talking a lot of money, the kind of money I can't afford. Luckily, I've got Tether helping me out with this, but. But it's for words. It's because I've called him a fraud. I said he's fraudulent. And the point being is that where this became really a lot. This has, like, been a real lens for me on free speech. We don't have free speech in the uk. But where it became. Where I realized this is a problem isn't. It's not so much that I worry that I can't say something. I worry that I cannot afford to now even defend it because the cost of litigation around speech is so high that usually the people who are, who are the ones who want to sue you for it, the people got the money, the people who can't afford to defend themselves, who need to be saying something they don't have, they're not afforded the protection like you have with your First Amendment rights. We don't have that. And therefore you can't afford like after this case I have to think, shit, I have to be very careful what I say because I know I can't afford to defend myself. I can't afford the litigation of another case like this. And that's where that's, that's a real problem. So I'm with you on absolutely. We need free speech, but we don't have that here in the UK and that is a problem. And now what we see in the UK is we see this growth in surveillance now we've got these cameras in London whereby the anti crime cameras whereby they can use facial recognition technology and they're scanning all day, every day and they spot somebody who's committed a crime. It's got like 80%, 7% accuracy. It can alert the police to go find them and arrest them. Right. Which you. The logic, the logic to anyone who's conditioned to the States, well that's great, that's catching criminals. But it's always where, where will this, where's the next step where they will use this? Could they use this? Could we be at a stage whereby, well, this is somebody who doesn't have the contact tracing app on yet. We know they've bumped into this person and we've seen them at this location. Do we go and arrest them for this? Like where does it always go too far? And it always feels like we're going down this fucking slippery slope.
- [62:57]
It's, there are so many problems with, you know the old saying, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Well, fiat currency is what enables us to channel and concentrate power into the hands of a very select few people. Whereas in a world of unconfiscatable, uninflatable money, you wouldn't have that. You'd have power much more distributed in the hands of much larger number of people having control over much smaller states, if you will, or companies or anything else, any form of human organization. And you know, Hayek talked about this too, an old Austrian economist who's, he's got a great book called the Road to Serfdom. But he described when power becomes concentrated such that the, the decisions of a few people govern the lives of millions, it not only corrupts the individual but it Actually changes the nature of the power. Like, it's. It's intoxicating. So if you or I were placed in that situation, like, we couldn't even necessarily trust ourselves. Like, it would corrupt our own character if we were responsible for that. It's just an inhuman task. And it's not to say that it's been done intentionally. Like, there's some grand design that the government's here to, you know, take away your liberties and empower itself. But it has happened, like, by these incremental steps, these incremental encroachments over time. Like, oh, just do this. Oh, just do that. And there's a great book on this. I can't remember the name of it, but I think it's called Honorable Men maybe. But he. The author is describing the progression of some 1930s German citizens that were just teachers, you know, factory workers, whatever, and he's documenting their journey into the German army, basically. Or at first it's like, okay, they sit him down, say, look, we're gonna go do these things today. But you have totally free will. If you don't like it, you can go home. And the guys decide, like, oh, I'm gonna stay for my comrades. Like, they're my colleagues, that. Because I don't want them to have to go do these unthinkable things alone. So they go out and they round people up. You know, first they put them in arenas. Then when it gets too crowded, like, oh, we need to go out and, you know, shoot the old people. And then, you know, by the end of it, they're full. They're full on killing, you know, pregnant women and kids and all this. So it's this steady encroachment of corruption that really fucks things up for humanity. And we just need, like, the promise of Bitcoin is to have a system that is incorruptible, a thing that can't be confiscated, a thing that can't be fought over. All the wars in the world have been. Money has been the means and the ends of all war. When Germany would invade a country in Europe, they would go straight to the central bank and hoard their gold reserves. That's also the reason most of the gold ended up in North America. It was a geographic safe haven from Nazi plundering, which then America steps in after the end of World War II. Kicks ass, does Bretton woods agreement. Now we're the central bank of the world. Now we wear the crown. It's always fighting over the gold. If you just watch history, it's like fighting over the money, fighting over the gold. And bitcoin is just this money that you can't forcibly confiscate. You can't. It's not worth fighting over because.
- [66:48]
It.
- [66:49]
Removes the carrot, I guess, from warfare a little bit.
- [66:54]
Do you think as bitcoiners, we have any blind spots with regards to all this?
- [66:58]
Yeah, of course. I mean, everyone has blind spots. The state's going to fight hard against us. And I think what we're seeing now is the beginnings of that. They probably realize they're losing control in the digital age. And it's one thing to have Twitter starting a little bit of an uprising like the Arab Springs and things like this, but it's an entirely another thing to have a digital technology threatening your monopoly on money. They're going to fight to hold on to this. And again, that's where we must be diligent in our freedom of speech, because it's never done as an explicit measure. It doesn't just. You wake up tomorrow and we have a world dictator. Like, it slides there slowly and gradually, and it starts with violations of speech.
- [67:52]
Do you think that's happened in the US Right now? Like, I've been following Trump with interest. There's been the times where I've thought, nah, he's done some interesting stuff. And then other times, I. I'm, like, not sure on this guy, but, like, his constant criticism of the press and his branding everything that isn't pro Trump as fake news. It feels like as he's pushing the. He's pushing the bar as much as he can for what you can do as a president. I feel like if he was maybe a president in a different country, he would. Perhaps someone like, like Erdogan has done in Turkey is that he would just dismantle the press because he's pissed off with it. You know, Erdogan is jailed, he's fined, he's had people fired for writing critical pieces of his leadership. I kind of feel like perhaps Trump would do the same in. In other countries. Now, if a Trump supporters listen to us, they're going to immediately jump to his defense. And I get that. Like, you know, I'm. I'm exiting politics in some way. But do you feel like this is like a. Do you see what I'm getting at?
- [68:52]
Yeah, I do. And it's. I don't like to zero in on individuals because I think that sort of facilitates the problem a little bit, because it doesn't matter if it's Trump or Erdogan, as long as that system exists. It is a. The most corrupt and unscrupulous among us will find a way to sit in that seat. Right. So long as there, there are the reins, basically over 300 million people for one guy to hold. The worst guy is going to get there and hold them. So it's a matter of changing the system instead. But I speak to Trump specifically. All of this talk, fake news, right? It's any. It's all an incursion on speech and, you know, it may be being used against him as well. I'm not trying to single him out and say he's just a bad guy going one way. People can also, like the other side of the aisle. The liberals can use that against them too. Right? They can manipulate.
- [69:50]
No, I agree.
- [69:51]
But at the end of the day, it just. We can't put one guy in charge of 300 million. Like, that's just the systematic truth. And again, I think if any politician is speaking honestly on behalf of the people, the only thing they can say is, this thing has gone too far. We need to get back to our roots. This system, it centralizes and corrupts, and I don't think anyone would argue with that.
- [70:23]
So what's the playbook, then? What's the playbook for the fight back?
- [70:28]
Well, what's amazing about Bitcoin is that by buying and holding it, you're actually participating in a peaceful revolt. Every incremental unit of demand for Bitcoin is an incremental unit of demand taken away from fiat currency, which is the mechanism that, that perpetuates all of these schemes, all of these problems of the state. Everything you don't like about government, it is funded through fiat currency. So if you choose to hold Bitcoin and save and get Bitcoin, I don't, by the way, I'm under no delusions that it's possible to just flip the switch and go, I don't use. I still use dollars every day. But you can make a gradual shift out of the fiat currency complex into Bitcoin. And just by doing that, you're voicing your opinion to the world, saying, this system doesn't work, it is unfair, it is corrupt, it is violated millions of people's livelihoods, it's been used to plunder commonwealths, it's been the funding mechanism for perpetual warfare. The 20th century was the century of total war, I think it was. Ron Paul said that there's no coincidence that the century of total war and the century of central banking were the same century. If you don't like War, then you don't like fiat currency. And if you don't like fiat currency, then the only free market alternative that can't be confiscated or violated is bitcoin. I guess arguments can be made for gold as well. If you choose to hold gold and opt out, maybe that's a method. But gold's been confiscated in the past and has all these other shortcomings without lying. So bitcoin's kind of a revolution in that regards.
- [72:26]
But I think we need some things alongside it, right? We need better journalism, I think we need better education. I think we need like as part of that revolution, like with my kids, right. I'm trying to teach them things they're not being taught at school. I'm sure every bitcoin, I'm doing this similar stuff, you know, I'm not just talking about bitcoin, but I'm talking about the government, I'm talking about the state, I'm talking about the decisions they make. I'm going through that process with them. The stuff they're not getting at school, right. They're not being taught about money. When they're taught about politics or economics, they're talking about the state version of these. So I think that's the important part. But I, I think journalism is really important here. And perhaps as similar, I think you alluded to it earlier as we have a, like a decentralized form of money, perhaps it is this growth in citizen journalism and people figuring stuff out Twitter themselves is going to become much more important than the bullshit we've had from mainstream media.
- [73:29]
Yeah, like, you know, journalism and education are two other areas that government seeks to exert its monopoly. Right. And I think that is the big promise of the digital age is that we now have these channels for freedom of speech, which the ancient Greeks called the logos, which is like our divine power as human beings. It is our ability to tell and believe and interpret stories effectively. Now that we have channels that can't be centrally managed or manipulated, it's led to the creation of all these other things, all these little communities. Like homeschooling is now a big deal, Right. People are calling government education a fiat education. So here in the US, I don't know about UK's model, but in the US we imported our educational model from 1880s Prussia, where they had an educational system that was designed to provide childcare for their factory workers and create future factory workers or create future soldiers. So it's very state propaganda. First say the pledge of allegiance in the morning to the flag of the United States of America and you're memorizing state capitals, you're like, it's all, there's a whole programming to it, right. That I think the digital age is sort of pulling the rug out from under a little bit. But it's really important that people see that, you know, people see that this process is being continued through our children. So where are you putting your children? What are you feeding your children? What are they listening to, what are they learning? Who's instructing them, who's guiding them? Just take a more active role in that. I have a 16 month old daughter and I think that's everything to me is thinking about what she is going to be taking in through her eyes and ears and how she's going to see the world. I don't want to abdicate that to some authority that's going to program her in a way that fulfills its needs. I want her to be critical thinking and an individual. So. And then, you know too, it's, it's. So that's education then media. Governments have always sought to control media, right? And the Internet, I think the great thing we did in the US is take this do not harm approach. When the Internet started to really proliferate, the government basically passed, you know, a decision saying we're just going to let it happen, let it evolve, see where it takes us. And I think it just, that decision was critical because they could have probably squashed it in its infancy, but now it's become such a worldwide phenomenon that it's sparking this great awakening in a lot of ways again, because we have these, these new and adaptive rails to connect our consciousness with one another, to express our logos in ways that can't be stopped or manipulated. You know, this very call we're having right here, this is not possible 20 years ago @ all. Podcasting in general, it's an innovation on par with the printing press. Because now people who, you know, we've only been reading quietly to ourselves for like 100 years, we've been listening to stories for a hundred thousand. So now people with all their excess time, you know, they're spending an hour or two a day doing monotonous whatever, doing the dishes, driving to work, you can now tune into things like this and listen to these perspectives that aren't state programming, right? You're not, you're not listening to some soap opera on the radio or whatever it is, you can actually choose your area of interest and concern and go down your own rabbit hole and find people that are talking about it. Like us. So all this digital tech is, you know, we're just going. The digital age is the right moniker for it. You know, like industrial age, information age. Now digital age is just a really big deal.
- [77:28]
I feel like you've been hiding under the radar a little bit, Robert.
- [77:31]
Isn't that what Cypher.
- [77:33]
I don't know, man. I think you're. I think the stuff you write is excellent. Really, really, really good. I think you've got a book in you there. You probably are working on something.
- [77:44]
Yeah, yeah.
- [77:47]
But I really enjoyed this. I hope you understand why, like I wanted to have this conversation. The zero stuff is amazing. We'll revisit that. Give me a month, we'll come back and we'll do that. But like this was right. This was the right time for this show, for this content. This is the right time to discuss it. I always look up to and appreciate talking to somebody who's a little bit further into it than me, than I am because I always personally need that.
- [78:11]
Peter McCormack
Kind of like I need that kick.
- [78:12]
Robert Breedlove
Up the ass to just to deal with my own personal blind spots. So I like, this is why I had to make this show today. But like, I really appreciate you especially as I. I changed the topic of our conversation 10 minutes before we did it. But I appreciate you doing that. Listen, look, people, I'm gonna put it in the show notes. People need to go and read this shit of yours. But look, tell people where they can find you.
- [78:32]
Sure. So I'm on Twitter. My last name is Breedlove. That's B R double E D L O V E. My Twitter handle, by the way. Thank you very much. My mom gave it to me. Thanks, mom. My Twitter handle is breedlove22. And then I post pretty much everything there and I post a lot of my writings on Medium and then just started posting them on Dig as Well, which is digg.com and that's it. Yeah, Speaking at a lot of events and whatnot this year and always happy to talk bitcoin.
- [79:07]
Well, listen, keep up the amazing work. Let's do this again in a few weeks. Let's cover that other show. And I wish you all the best and really appreciate you giving me your time here.
- [79:14]
Yeah, man, thank you.
- [79:17]
Peter McCormack
Come on. How good was that? How good is Robert? I really, really enjoyed the show. Really enjoyed having Robert on the show. I love his articles. They're a bit of a Read one of them. I'm gonna have to go back. It's more like, it's like a commitment to reading a book. I'm probably gonna have to print it out and sit in bed up at night and go through it with a highlighter pen and ping the questions I have back at him. But the work is incredible.
- [79:37]
Robert Breedlove
It's.
- [79:37]
Peter McCormack
It's such a high level of detail that it really does deserve more eyeballs on it. Now this is all linked in the show notes, so please go and check them out there. Also, I originally wanted to get Robert on to discuss his other article, the number 0 and Bitcoin. And after this piece of a show, I will be definitely getting him on back very soon to do that because that's a show I planned for. And that's one he planned for too. Anyway, as ever, thanks for listening to what Bitcoin did. If you've got any questions you can reach out to me. It's hello or what Bitcoin did did calm. I do pretty much reply to everyone and I've had a whole bunch of people write into me recently. It's really cool. Good feedback, bad feedback, whatever you want to send me. I do appreciate all of this. If you do want to support the show, there's a load of things you can do. It's up on my website. Just head over to what bitcoindid.com click on the support section. Also, if you want to check out any of my other work, I do have another show called Defiance. If you head over to Defiance News, there's podcasts there looking at subjects outside of bitcoin. But also I've got my films up there. I just did a recent film out in Turkey at the Greece border looking.
- [80:33]
Robert Breedlove
At the migrant crisis there and I've.
- [80:34]
Peter McCormack
Also got my films from in Colombia and Venezuela. Take a look, let me know what you think and if you got any questions you can reach out to me. It's hello, what bitcoindid.com.
- [80:54]
Robert Breedlove
Sa.