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The "What is Money?" Show
Money: The Most Beautiful Lie? with Santiago Velez (WiM090)
01:59:32
Santiago Velez joins me for a fascinating dialogue on the nature, philosophy, and physics of money, markets, and human action.
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- [00:00]
Santiago Velez
Foreign.
- [00:08]
Robert Breedlove
Okay. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the what is Money? Show. I'm sitting down today with Mr. Santiago Velez, who is the co founder of Block Digital. And this has been a long time coming, so I appreciate you coming on.
- [00:27]
Santiago Velez
The show today, Robert. As I told you off camera, you're one of my idols, a big shaper of my thought process. So I'm super excited to be here. Thanks.
- [00:39]
Robert Breedlove
I'm honored to have you here as well. And thank you so much for that. Let's just jump in the deep end. What is money to you, Santiago?
- [00:55]
Santiago Velez
Like the most convenient and beautiful lie we could ever tell each other. That's how I would phrase it. Money, I think, is just a super interesting social contract. It's like a abstraction that just facilitates so many things for us, makes life efficient. And it does mean purchasing power, which is kind of one of the things that I've taken from so many of your talks. And I think it's a huge responsibility for who the caretaker of that of money is in a society. And I think that it's one of the things that's been abused in that role. So to me listening to a lot of your interviews, what's become apparent is, is how desperate we are. In need of a better lie, if you will, a better abstraction to a more responsible one and one that creates more opportunity. So that's money for me. And honestly, I didn't have a sense of money until my early 40s. I thought of money as something to just go and make so that I could buy stuff and maybe retire with. But it was a very superficial understanding of it. And I think I would call it value. And for me, value is something that was denied me as a child. Not necessarily maliciously, but just you grow up in a society and you're conditioned to express value in a certain way, and you take it for granted as something that's always been true, always existed, and there is no alternative. But my eyes are open. Sorry for the long expression, but that's how I see it.
- [02:53]
Robert Breedlove
No, that's great. That's great. That's the idea of money. I like how you put that actually as a lie. Right. Because it is. It's a useful fiction. And at the surface level, this may sound like something that's bad in some way, but indeed, as I've touched on a few times in the show, our ability to construct these useful fictions and organize ourselves within them is what separates human from animal and what makes human, or homo sapien, if you will, dominant in the world. I say sapiens specifically because that's actually the thesis of the book Sapiens by Yuval Harari. It's like we can cooperate flexibly in large numbers the way no other species can, through this telling and believing of stories or useful fictions. And that's why we run the world. We're at the top of the food chain for that very reason. You touched on something interesting, though. So clearly the name of the show, what is Money? It opens this. I consider this kind of like the gateway to the rabbit hole. But you went straight to one of the next questions, which I think is equally, if not more important, which is value. This is a very nebulous term for a lot of people. So if you don't mind going further into the deep end. How would you define value?
- [04:21]
Santiago Velez
Value to me is something that allows me to express my will into the world, both geographically and over time, beyond my own physical body. So I might value, you know, my car. Okay, why? Because my car allows me to go to wherever I want. So geographically, it gives me a power to drive around and see things or do things that I might not otherwise if I had to walk. So I assign it a value. If I have a different model car, it might be more than transportation value. Maybe I'm socially signaling because I'm driving a nice fancy car. So to me, value starts with what does it give me the ability to do and express out into the world beyond my physical body and geographically, like I said, and through time. So purchasing power is one kind of attribute of value, but also the ability to see my will exerted into the universe. So it can take so many different forms. Now, how would you distill that down to the value I see in relationships, maybe with family members? That's much more difficult to quantify. But obviously we all seek some of these other values to express them with our families, for example, maybe security, love, relationships, whatever that is. We seek value in the real world so that we can increase our value and that of our family. And then I think that extends out into our community, our nation, and then ultimately the world. And so I look for things that connect those things.
- [06:12]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, well said. One of the kind of rough definitions, because this is another one of those terms that has a ton of meaning and definitions and angles. But one of the short definitions I give for value is that its relevance to your goal, directed action. So whatever goal you're in pursuit of, if something accelerates you toward achieving that goal or that aim, it's valuable. And if it's not relevant to that course of goal, Directed action. It's valueless. It doesn't have any value to you. And if it blocks you, then it's actually destructive to value. It's an impediment of some kind. So I think that's a great example you gave there with the car. But to your further point, it's not siloed to one domain. It's not just this thing gets me faster across space or this thing does something for me across time. There's also the sentimental dimension with family and love and all of these things. So that's a whole rabbit hole too. I love that one. I do want to drill into something you said there though. The power to express your willpower. Well, okay. The ability to express your willpower into the world. We'd say that's kind of a rough approximation of value, which I really like. And I've been thinking about this a lot lately because clearly physical power is very important. Like the case of the car giving you this physical power to move across space faster than you otherwise could. But there's this. So that's important. That's like what the reason we have economics to a large extent is to increase our productivity, I guess you could say, which is the ability to convert our willpower into physical power of some kind. But the problem with this is that we also simultaneously have to check ourselves or defend ourselves against the unwanted imposition of others willpower onto us. Right. This is like the reason you would hold gold, for instance, historically, is because no one could inflate it, right? No one could increase the supply. So this was a defense mechanism against the willpower of others. So there's like this balancing act we're trying to maintain. It's like how do we manifest more of our willpower into physical power in the world? Through capital and things like that, capital and trade. But simultaneously how do we protect ourselves from the arbitrary willpower of others? So what I mean, that's interesting. I'm just thinking out loud, but I'd love to hear.
- [09:02]
Santiago Velez
Yeah, that's the root of the social contract. That's the root of all of our human endeavors is the trade off between self and other. Is that at what level do you have to accept or compromise your will to somebody else's will? What are the trade offs? I think it's not a static answer. It's depending on the context, there's always trade offs. In some cases I may defer to the will of others. For example, if I entered into a contractual arrangement with someone and I was in the wrong, a judge would would decide that I was in the wrong and I may have to pay compensation to that party. In that case, I would default to someone else's will, which is the judge, which is imbued, supposedly by the state. If I didn't think that was fair, I could exit out. You can commit suicide, you can leave to another country, you can go into exile. There are things that you can do that are drastic, but at some point, at the end of the day, all you really have true power over, I guess, is yourself. If you have to exist in a context of a disbalance between your will and other people's will, then you have to entertain the idea of a common set of law, maybe, or the state or some agreement of consensus rules. For example, in Bitcoin, you have to accept something other than maybe what you personally conceptualized. So the reason I like things like Bitcoin is because I have the power to choose which set of rules I want to participate in. It's not compelled. And as I said earlier in the discussion, I felt like something was denied me as a child by that value expression being imposed on me in the sense of currency. And that violation didn't become apparent to me until I started learning about how money is instantiated and how it's used in the economy, that that's a violation. Right. So now to me, it's more about how do I opt into networks or forms of value expression that are more beneficial to me. Allow me to exert more of my will into the world, as you said, but without necessarily violating someone else's. Your will. And that's where I think markets have such an important role to play, because markets to me are the efficient distillation of that process, that ongoing process between my will and everyone else's. For example, I could go instantiate a fork of Bitcoin tomorrow. Doesn't matter. My will is completely irrelevant that I did that because nobody else would recognize that fork. It's not the original, and maybe mine has 60 million supply in it. Nobody would adopt that. I can't force anyone else to accept those rules of consensus. Maybe I could convince a few and trick them into it, but there's just no way that would happen. And so that's just kind of this programmatic way of this balance between my will and the will of everyone else. So that's one of the things that compelled me to. To this space.
- [12:30]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, no, it's well said. I have said, and I mean, I heard this somewhere, so I don't take original claim on any of These ideas that I'm purveying. But this sole human right is choice ultimately, right? And this kind of gets to that. There's the book Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. He talks about the final human freedom being that gap between our external circumstances and our internal response. Like we always get to choose our response. And that's one maybe framing for this term responsibility, right? That you actually have the ability to respond and no one can take that away from you. Right. You can be tortured, you can be fear induced or threatened and all of these things. But ultimately you do have a choice in how you're going to respond to those circumstances, no matter what they are. But I really like this. This is kind of a new connection I'm drawing here, thinking out loud with you is that the purchasing power of money then is we're all trading in the world, we're becoming more productive by being interdependent instead of operating in isolation. And then money kind of emerges to the surface. And what defines money is, as you said, purchasing power. But it's like, okay, what is purchasing power? It's really just like a call option on the willpower of others. So if you in a hard, let's say an honest money world free of central banking, then you would basically be rendering services to the market. So you'd be applying your willpower to satisfy the wants of others based on their buying and selling patterns. And then you would be rewarded for successful ventures in purchasing power. You would accumulate more purchasing power and money, which then lets you turn around and use that purchasing power to claim to call on the willpower of others. And that is the crux of it. That is, this is great because this blows apart statism. This blows apart democracy. It's all about the marketplace. Ultimately. That's how we reconcile this ineradicable tension between the individual and group, the individual's willpower and the configuration of the group. Willpower, if you will.
- [15:09]
Santiago Velez
100% agree. 100% agree. It's the best kept secret in it's the best kept secret that governments have is that they are the facilitators of that liquidity that allows us all to transact with one another. And as custodians of that responsibility, they should be representing us so that balance is respected. And unfortunately though, in hindsight it looks like that they have not been doing that. And I think that's because when you give a small group of individuals, regardless of who they are, a disproportionate amount of power over others, eventually the Behavioral incentives misalign, and so you get bad behaviors, and those bad behaviors ultimately lead to the detriment of those that are not properly represented. So I think what we have is the outcome of a lot of misaligned incentives where too few have been imbued with too much power and responsibility and they're no longer capable of even representing the majority. And so it's painfully apparent, whereas in a free market system, like you pointed out, they're bound by it. There's only so much they could do without this alternative existing. It's one of the reasons why bitcoin is so compelling to so many people, because it's an opt out of either their local jurisdictional abuses or writ large, the dollar. It's a way to put handcuffs or at least restraints on monetary power, because ultimately those excesses mean more growth for the bitcoin network. I actually look at digital asset networks in general just like I do fiat networks. I feel fiat is a natural consensus of a geographically derived consensus. You got a nation and they have their currency, or these are euro, but they geographically determine consensus rules. And they're just networks. And their networks have to compete. Now their abstractions have to compete on the Internet. The Internet is the general agnostic network to all subnetworks, including fiat money, including tokenized items like NFTs, including cryptocurrencies. So they now have to compete on this level playing field where if they are not aligned with the benefits of their constituents, be they geographically or by participation, that value and purchasing power will flow somewhere else. So the Internet becomes a natural place for this competitive framework to instill discipline. That discipline hasn't existed prior to, because we didn't have a way. Like if I was born in Colombia and we don't have a world's reserve currency in Colombia. So purchasing power. I used to send a remittance to family years ago that for every dollar they might get 2,000 pesos. Now I send it and they may get 4,000 because their purchasing power compared to the dollar has gone down. It's very hard for them. All of a sudden now you have a way where they can opt out if they don't like how managing their purchasing power, which is what they do, they have a way through the Internet to opt out to a completely different currency. And that is the most amazing superpower I think I could have ever discovered because it was denied to me. But now that it's out, there's no putting that genie back in the bottle. It's out there and the marketplace is on and competition, it's game on, you know. So that's why I find it so exciting.
- [19:11]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, no, there's a lot of great points there. This geographic consensus you describe. Have you seen Jason P. Lowrey on Twitter yet? No, he's mit. He's a graduate student, so he's a young guy, but he's in the mit. I hope I'm saying this right. He's in Space Force. U.S. space Force, and he's attending MIT. But he has expanded the thesis of Bitcoin a bit and he's saying that we've always had to project force across distance, which. That's power. I believe that's the physics definition of power to establish consensus. And he takes this really deep down. He says this is Darwinian, it's biological that animals need to do this, but that at the nation state level we've used basically war as the property consensus protocol. It's like which aggregation of human willpower can bring the most force to bear, which today is the United States, and therefore we get to determine the distribution of property rights through that same lens. He's analogized bitcoin as being kind of this bloodless property distribution protocol where you're still projecting force across space and time, right through the mining network or projecting energy, but it's done in a nonviolent way, so I can't help. And the way you describe the Internet being this kind of like theater for pure capitalism, right, where you just have the uninhibited competition of ideas competing and dying by their own merits versus this mode of statism we have specifically with a central bank that just is the opposite. There's not merit anymore. It's being sucked out of the marketplace. Actually, as more currency is produced and we put more zombie companies on life support, were interrupting this Darwinian impulse of the marketplace. And it seems intuitive almost that the outcome of that, it's destructive to capital, destructive to wealth, destructive to human cooperation. So I take it you're probably bullish on the digital age overall.
- [21:46]
Santiago Velez
Oh yeah. I mean, on your point about communities, geographic communities, projecting force, I absolutely think that's Darwinian. I think it's innate to the human condition. In other words, the societies we have now are the outcome of a lot of circumstance, historical circumstance, but our ability to self organize in individual groups through that competition, meaning that there are dominant groups. I'm not passing any judgment on any political system or, or economic system, frankly. It's just this group of humans in this area decided to organize themselves in this way. And at this particular moment in time, they happen to be more successful than this other group. And so they are able to project your will, like you said. And I think that the primary way, I agree with you, that that's been expressed is through violence. And I think that culminated with kind of the nuclear age. Right. That we have nuclear weapons. And we've gotten to the point where it's an existential expression at this point. If you were to extrapolate that to China and the US projecting their respective societies upon one another, it could mean annihilation of the species. We've gotten to a physical limitation on that being the way in which successful societies can continue to test each other, if you will, in their effectiveness. Because then it means the end of humanity. And I think that's obvious now to political establishment. So it's now a point where the only way they can do that is through financialization that you express your dominance to other groups of organizations of humans through money, through financing, through purchasing power, through the dollar. I think the dollar has been the most weaponized instrument maybe in human history, more than the bullet. So I think now that we have these alternatives and they're super national and they exist in abstraction space, the bullet is irrelevant. And now the dollar. I still think the dollar is actually going to continue to get stronger as it eats its way through other fiat currencies. And I think that the military of the United States is so powerful yet still, and we have nuclear weapons and all that, there's still some momentum, I gu that old way of expressing power and will. But I do think that we're seeing that's this beginning of the end. And what we need to work on now is an alternative to that. Because when that system eventually disintegrates, we're all going to be so dependent on it as humans on this planet that it could have equally catastrophic consequences as a nuclear war. Right. We could devolve into mass property confiscation at nation levels and individual levels, violence. I'm a strong believer that we need to build systems on the Internet that can take the role from the dollar and take that role in a mutually responsible way where we don't continue to perpetuate the injustices of the past and impose on one another's will and like you said, use the power of the marketplace and competition to determine what's going to happen.
- [25:18]
Robert Breedlove
Yes. There's this old saying that every tool is a weapon if you hold it right. So this is kind of the way I think about fiat currency. It's like, okay, gold was money. As a result of free market selection for a number of reasons we've talked about a lot on the show, but it didn't scale because gold's not very portable. So you need to abstract it in currency and make it globally transactable for globalizing society. So that's a great tool. But when you break the peg to gold, then you just give all of that. You give this unlimited capacity to the currency issuer to basically confiscate the property of everyone else. And that's all it's good for. By the way. It's kind of like that tool of currency that was useful to scale. Gold is being held in a way that enables us to weaponize the dollar. And that is exactly. I agree with you that the dollar is perhaps the greatest weapon of all time. I mean, I don't know if there's a way to quantify this per se, but if you look, maybe in terms of how much wealth or willpower has been siphoned away through currency issuance, it's the number one export in the U.S. i don't know what we think we export these days, finance whatever else, but it's inflation we're exporting inflation mostly.
- [26:56]
Santiago Velez
You know, I think we export servitude. We export the dollar having its properties as being very fungible globally and using the merits of the government, which, look, as a US citizen, I take responsibility for that in that I've been a beneficiary of that. And there's a guilt associated with that because I know that my currency is being used in some part through my benefit and I benefit from a very high standard of living because of that. But I know that it's causing a significant damage to everyone globally and eventually it's going to lead to real problems at home. We've talked about Triffin Dilemma and I know you know about the Triffin Dilemma. I think that because of the irresponsibility of the management of that currency, it's going to end up being a net negative, not a net positive, even though in the short term I'm a beneficiary of it. So I can just take those two things apart. I can see them separately. But the thing with the dollar as a weapon is that we export servitude, we export debt. And that debt through our force means that it's compelled to be paid back. What the dollar does is it instantiates debt into creation of others, which means that eventually their will is bent to mine, or mine being the U.S. right? Meaning I issue this debt into the world And I'm buying time, future time with that debt, because you have to pay it back. And not only that, you have to pay it back with interest. If you can't source those additional dollars, well, that's just too bad. You need to pay up in time. And if it happens to cripple your economy and I can buy more bananas or more livestock for cheaper, well, that's kind of your problem. I have a deep moral problem with that approach. And that's why I'm so compelled by decentralized networks, because it's an alternative to that. I can't compel anyone to buy them or use them, but they have properties that if they do decide to buy or use them, we can transact fairly, we can compete on our merits. And just as much as I can't compel them, they can't compel me. So I feel it's a more moral framework to start from, and it precludes the abuse and exporting of servitude and debt.
- [29:40]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, there's the. I think it was John Adams said, there's two ways to conquer and enslave a country. One is by the sword, one is by debt. So this, you know, we're calling the US Dollar a weapon. It's not even an analogy, really. It's like actually a weapon.
- [29:59]
Santiago Velez
It's. And we know that through, like the swift system and through sanctions, we know that the US Government and the international community to a large extent has weaponized the dollar to impose its will on governments or jurisdictions. That doesn't. Like, sometimes I agree with that, sometimes I don't. The point, though is that they certainly never agree to it. Wherever those people live. And if we are not actively at war with them, I feel that's an unjust kind of negotiation. That by currency, I'm forcing some state that I don't live there, I have no problem with their people, but we're forcing that state to bend to our will. And that can only lead to a bad place. I think ultimately that ends up coming back on you. It's no surprise that those same jurisdictions and emerging markets economies are the ones most desperately looking for alternatives because they feel this oppression firsthand. So I worry as a US Citizen that if we don't find an alternative and develop a more equitable structure, eventually all these emerging markets and all the people that are being abused by this system are going to turn right around and find an alternative, and then it's a collapse. And that I don't want.
- [31:27]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, we run the risk. And this is true. Generally of statism in my estimation is that state revenue model is taxation and inflation. Basically these are both coercive means of revenue. So it's extraction, it's theft. There's no really other way to look at. Sounds like a bitter pill to swallow. People like, what do you mean? Taxes, theft. I don't, I thought tax is like government's got to make money somehow. The problem is again back to that sole human right of choice. Is it a consensually negotiated transaction, is it a free market transaction or not? In the case of taxation and inflation, it's simply not. You just get a bill or they just print money. There's no approval process, there's no negotiation, frankly. So I really like this, this is starting to just kind of crystallize in my mind here, is that we could maybe one way to define a weapon actually is that it's something that allows you to impose your willpower on another. And again could be the dollar, right, where you're just sort of printing dollars so you're confiscating purchasing power. Could be a gun, right? When you go to war, the reason the two sides are shooting each other is so they can eventually get the other side to bend to their will, right? Sign the armistice, pay tribute, give up the territory, whatever it is. So that's really interesting. That's a useful framing, I think that connects something that's clearly a weapon like a gun to something that people don't understand as a weapon, which is the dollar. I want to ask you this.
- [33:18]
Santiago Velez
It's perfect in its simplicity. It's just perfect how effective it is as a weapon because it's nonviolent, but it perpetuates incredible amount of will throughout the disproportionate will throughout the world. Can I just mention one thing you said about taxes? Ideally in a well functioning society, the taxes you would want to be taxed if that taxation represented you and devices that maybe the market didn't supply. But I think the problem is that the people who decide taxes, again very few in number, can never properly align with the people they're representing, ultimately are subverted by that power. So you get the obviously expected consequence that they pass policies which no longer represent you as a citizen, they start spending irresponsibly or they don't help you or your family or your community's lives in any meaningful way and it starts to fulfill their own agenda. And I think that's why confidence in government is kind of at an all time low because just like the central bank has irresponsibly managed the dollar. I believe governments have also irresponsibly managed our votes and our willpower. They're supposed to be there to express and amplify our willpower and instead they've taken that opportunity to amplify their own. And it's fairly obvious. So people are apathetic, I think. And so those are two intermingled problems, I believe.
- [35:01]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, this is an important distinction actually the term taxation. I used to think, and I still do think by the way, that a type of state or governance model or protection producing enterprise is likely necessary because we need property rights in the physical world. Bitcoin is great, that it's a property right independent of the state and it's the most important property. Right. It's money. But everything else, like your home, your car, your house, you need some protection producing agency. I still think that will be a valid, not just valid, that will be a real useful industry even if bitcoin succeeds. But the difference I think is that they will charge a market rate for those services. So they will have to actually compete for customers just like every other business in the world because they can't steal. It's going to be so much harder. Inflation would be closed as a revenue opportunity on a bitcoin denominated world and taxation would be much more symmetrical and that it would be harder to impose it because if you try to impose it on somebody and you don't give them adequate services for the fees you're charging them in taxation, then they have hyper mobile capital in bitcoin, they'll leave your country and go somewhere else that will serve them better. So I agree with you on that. I guess the term, and I've read Rothbard recently, so now when I say the term taxation I think I'm using more the Rothbardian definition where he's saying taxation means it's non consensual state extraction. But I agree there'll be some form of consensual taxation. I don't know what you call that. It's just service fee revenue at that point.
- [36:57]
Santiago Velez
Yeah, I mean we're put into a common pool because there's economies of scale to do so to get some kind of service that we all can derive value from. It's just more of an efficiency that we not being compelled, we choose to put into that common pool because we want to see that benefit rather than just going out alone. Like I could have my own police force, I could have my own army, but that would be very expensive to me if I Pool that with others and we decide we want a police force or an army or whatever it is to protect physical things. It just could be more efficient. The problem is that that's lost in our political process because it's no longer aligned with being efficient because they're a monopoly on it. They don't have any competitive pressure. There's really no reason to be efficient. If they did have competitive pressure, then I could get those same services theoretically for a lot less and maybe higher quality. They couldn't be used against me. Also, again, another reason I'm so bullish, these decentralized systems, because they offer that as a future promise.
- [38:07]
Robert Breedlove
Yes, Agreed. So I want to circle back to something we talked about earlier. This exorbitant privilege of being the global reserve currency. Many people have agreed with me. I think it's pretty hard actually to argue against that. It's become almost a trope at this point to talk about the exorbitant privilege. We understand it's asymmetrically in favor of the United States. But even those that agree with me on that point will disagree that it was done intentionally. They think the system was not. Whether it's central banking or Bretton woods conference. No, we were just trying to scale global commerce and it just happened to end up like this. Where do you fall in that camp? How do you see intentionality? How do you see intentionality? The role of intentionality in the current structure of global central banking with the.
- [39:11]
Santiago Velez
Fed at the center, I don't even think it needs to be that conspiratorial that they sat in a room together and hash this all out for their own benefit, which could have happened. I'm not saying that didn't. What I believe is that all behavior follows incentives. And I think that eventually the incentive was for biased in favor of the U.S. so you know, year after year, day after day in the implementation of how you execute on that which is time based. It's not just a static event like this happened and then everything follows. It's a everyday continuous migration in its particular direction. I think that if the incentives are misaligned, then the behaviors will follow and eventually you get to the wrong outcomes. You don't even need vast amounts of conspiracy. You can have little spouts of conspiracy here and there, but eventually just those incentives just naturally get to the outcome we have now. And that's a more difficult thing to fix because you really have to get to the root of those incentives and fix and address them. And our financial system globally is so dependent on the dollar and the way that those incentives have been set up that it's going to take a massive effort to unwind that and realign it so it's beneficial to people. So do I think a bunch of people conspired to self serve? Of course. But theoretically, right after they died, maybe another set of group could have come along and fixed that, but they chose not to. Why didn't they choose to? It's because they continue to have some incentive that's driving that behavior and there's no reason to rectify it. It's like if you continue to benefit from it, why change it?
- [41:03]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, of course, yeah. And again, incentives being kind of the prime mover of human action, they also blind you to things. Right. If you're profiting from some activity, you're going to be willfully blind to any externalities or negative aspects to that activity. And I agree with you that when people talk about this topic of intentionality, it seems like they're thinking black or white. Either it was a conspiracy on Jekyll island and it all flowed from there, or it just kind of accidentally happened. But I actually agree with you completely that there's this element of gradualism to it. It's just like what decision makers are coming into, what position, what are their incentives and then what is the direction or trajectory that takes the system? And it appears to be pretty obvious when you consider that government via the central bank is monopolizing money. That becomes a pool of unlimited revenue for them. It's just whatever problem, bad decision you make, just print more money and keep going.
- [42:11]
Santiago Velez
It's the nature of corruption. It's much more insidious and time lagged than people appreciate. I don't think a central banker, I don't think anyone's born saying, when I grow up I want to become a central banker and be an insider feeding off the spigot. It happens through a long gradual process and you can get lost in that process and you can even go through the mental gymnastics of justifying, even on an ongoing basis, those externalities. So even if you're fully aware that those externalities are happening to other people, you can find ways of morally justifying it to yourself and to others. And as long as you have enough others who support you, you're going to continue to justify it and you won't change your behaviors, so you'll just overlook it. And that's the nature of corruption. That's part of the human condition. And I think that's. I say it a lot on Twitter, but I kind of welcome our robotic overlords. Meaning I look forward to a time where we can offload some of these things to algorithms rather than humans. Not everything. I think we need agency. But some of these more important things that shouldn't be corruptible, we have to start figuring out ways of delegating that to them. That's one of the things I saw with decentralized networks like Bitcoin is that, wow, look, we have a set of consensus rules that we can start delegating this responsibility of purchasing power value to rather than individuals that are corruptible.
- [43:49]
Robert Breedlove
Yes, yes. Yeah, A couple things. One, when you voluntarily adopt rules versus having them shoved down your throat like it creates peace, right? Like everyone's there, there's no externality, right? If we're all coming to the table to play the same game, we all know the rules, the rules don't change, then we're all going to play by the rules, right? There's no, there's no opportunity to bend the rules to my favor. Like that's the ideal situation. If I can sit down at a poker table and I can somehow get the ability to change hand rankings every hand, that I can just twist the rules basically and always win. And that's effectively what a central bank is doing. They're just twisting the rules of money such that their shareholders always win.
- [44:42]
Santiago Velez
Maybe I should have become a central banker when I was a kid. I became an engineer. What a mistake.
- [44:48]
Robert Breedlove
I don't think it's worth it though. Even if you're in that position. You look at these people and they're just, I mean, look at the head of the BIS bank of International Settlements guy. It's like, okay, he's rich, he's very wealthy and he's in a position of probably profiting in perpetuity, but doesn't look like somebody I'd want to be. I agree and I like this point that you make on this post hoc rationalization because we do that too, right? Human beings do that. So you can rationalize anything. You can go and do anything and rationalize it to yourself. You can tell yourself a story to justify it. And that is how we self deceive, that is how we engage in self deception. So one thing I've been arguing is that fiat currency is self deception at scale. We've gradually created these little rationalizations like, oh, we need to print just a little more money to give the government a little more stimulus to get the economy doing and it's just this complex layering of lies. And now we have the culmination of that is Jerome Powell in 2021 on television saying monetary policy and wealth disparity are completely unrelated. The printing of money has nothing to do with dispossessing people economically. And it's like, do you believe that? Does he actually believe that? Because it's. I mean, it doesn't take that long. I mean, I guess it does. There's a lot. I might be a little biased here because we've been studying this for years and not everyone thinks like you and I, but how can you rationalize in your mind that the printing of money is not dispossessing people? It's like, you know, you're violating the value of that dollar. You know, you're giving those dollars out to large players first and people living on fixed income or living paycheck to paycheck are getting it last. How in the hell do you rationalize that that's not creating wealth disparity?
- [46:54]
Santiago Velez
I think the people you surround yourself with, in other words, there's an infrastructure that supports those decision makers and that infrastructure is continuously reinforcing the lie, telling them that what they're doing is necessary, just. And so you can lie to yourself all day long. But when you have other people telling you the same lie, then you really believe it because you must be on the right track. And not only is it just any Joe Schmo six pack off the street, it's the politicians telling you, it's the head of banks telling you, it's the head of corporates telling you, it's the most important people in the society telling you that of course you're going to believe your own lie because you have all these people reinforcing that day after day. So that's the ultimate promise to me, is that these systems make it so that you can tell your lie all day long. If you all want to get together in a room, 100 of you, 1,000 of you, and tell these lies to each other, fine, you can believe what you want. But what people will choose is their own lie or their own consensus. What they agree to is having value. And there's nothing you'll be able to do that. And I think this is going to get to a point where they're going to try to enforce their lie on everyone else. And that's the battle that's going to happen, I think, and it's starting to happen, is that they'll get to a point where they want to compel everyone to believe what they believe. And I view value expression as important as freedom of expression. I think it's just as fundamental to be able to write something or have free speech as it is to express value in the way I so choose. If I want to encapsulate my purchasing power in something other than the dollar, why do I have to be compelled to do that? Right now I think it's compelled through loans. I have a loan on my house or my car. It's compelled through taxes. I have to get dollars to pay my taxes. I think that over time, especially as a switching cost between these networks continue to go down, it'll be more difficult to compel the lie because people will be able to opt out and the switching costs to go from one network to the other will go to zero. So I can maintain all my wealth in bitcoin if I want. And when it comes time to pay my taxes, the switching costs will be near zero to go to dollars. But like you said, maybe by then we'll have a competitive framework for those same services and I won't be compelled to pick that particular tax. I think that the end game is maybe not near, but it's insight which never before in human history, I think, would we even be in a position where we could say that the end game for this compelled government and economic behavior will be in sight. And I can see it, and I know you see it. I think a lot of your viewers see that. And that's what's so exciting. It's scary, I have to say. It's kind of scary.
- [50:02]
Robert Breedlove
It is because there's no historic precedent. Right? We're really leaving one way to think about this maybe. Is it, you know, Peterson said this, well one time, there's stability in tyranny or stability in the hierarchy. There are a lot of benefits actually in terms of stability that we've had through this model of the nation state and taxation. Now it goes too far, clearly, and it starts to self destruct. That's what hyperinflation is. There was a functional currency regime for X number of decades, but they took it too far. And then the whole thing implodes in hyperinflation.
- [50:47]
Santiago Velez
A lapse of contestants.
- [50:49]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, but so the scary part is, okay, we're exiting that type of stability permanently. So what does anarcho capitalism really look like? There's a lot of libertarian philosophy out there about it, but we don't have any real world examples of it. So that, you know, I guess it's kind of like a fear of the unknown. We just don't know exactly what this, this new world looks Like.
- [51:24]
Santiago Velez
I think humans on their Maslow's hierarchy, they really value security a lot, oftentimes more than freedom.
- [51:32]
Robert Breedlove
Right.
- [51:33]
Santiago Velez
And Benjamin Franklin said it well, right. That need for being secure and safe. This is not a judgment on the Chinese system, but the Chinese population, like for large part the way that the CCP runs their government because it provides security and economic promise, et cetera. They value that a lot more than maybe Americans might value freedom of speech or other things that are more western. So I'm not making judgment on that. I'm simply saying that security definitely commands a massive premium. Which is why I think it's interesting that we see, you know, a lot of billionaires going into space because into space, it's their first opportunity to experiment with an capitalism. Right. You could build a colony, you could build a space station, whatever. And those rules are completely distinct from the government, from the Earth, for example. And that's very compelling because then you can experiment with all these different alternatives and see are they going to work or not. And there's no guarantee they'll work, but at least you can experiment, you can try them. Whereas before we never even had that choice. This is the first time.
- [52:41]
Robert Breedlove
Yes. You're back to the element of violence and coercion in the world, preventing experimentation. So it's anti capitalistic. I love this. So this idea of central bankers, bureaucrats, self deceiving. What's coming to mind here is that because as we opened up, money is a lie, effectively, it's a useful fiction, it's a useful lie, it's an imaginary construction. And maybe some of this is we're getting a little bit muddied in the definitions of truth and lie. But what we mean is money is an imagined order, just like the nation state, just like civil rights, anything else. But it seems to me that, and as we said as well, incentives are the prime mover of human action. So people will come to support the lies that pay or the useful fictions that pay. And through that framing, Bitcoin is the most truthful fiction we've ever had. If money is a useful fiction. But money is supposed to be just an emblem for time and energy and Bitcoin maps directly onto that. And the fascinating thing about this is that as more people understand that there's more fairness in this game, they're going to naturally migrate towards it. You're changing the behavior in the old system because those lies, like the lie of fiat currency and statism, doesn't pay as much anymore. Inflation and taxation is declining. So is that what's the big. I mean, is that the big transformation here in the digital age? Is it. There's just more. I don't know if it's transparency or sunlight or maybe I've called the liquidity of ideas, where people are just exchanging information more seamlessly. So we're zeroing in on more truthful fictions under which to orient ourselves.
- [54:46]
Santiago Velez
Yeah, I think, well, the market will naturally converge on those fictions that are most beneficial to the individual. Meaning that the alignment of the incentives of whatever that currency is, if the incentives are aligned in such a way that its constituents benefit the most, will naturally attract more inflows. So if you compare the fiat network with the bitcoin network, if the bitcoin network has rules of consensus that are superior to the fiat network, then you'll get flows into the bitcoin network. And we're seeing that. That the price is a manifestation of those flows from individuals leaving the fiat network into the bitcoin network. And so the bitcoin network, as it compounds on itself, as the people who leave the fiat network go into the bitcoin network, they become the natural promoters of that, because they're going to say, hey, guys, we've crossed the fence here. It's way better over here. The grass really is greener. Why don't you come along? It's in your benefit and best interest to do so. The network effects compound and it continues to grow. Eventually, the people in the old network start to question their own lies and say, well, maybe our consensus system is not so great. Maybe we need to change something here because, well, first they'll try to stop the bitcoin network. And you know that they'll do as much as they can to preclude those flows from accelerating. And I think they're accelerating, and we can see that through the exponential appreciation. But the first thing they'll try to do is just stop the flows, and then they'll try to slowly reduce the rate of flow. And then eventually, like you said, they'll realize, okay, we need to do something here to reverse the flow. What can we do to compel people to go in the other direction? And that's why I think things like bitcoin are unstoppable, because you can go through any manner of violence or whatnot, but just try and stop it. But at the end of the day, it's an abstraction. You cannot put a genie back in the bottle. It's an idea that can't be stopped. You can slow it down. You can make it shrink for A while. But you will never make it disappear. As long as there's an Internet. And even to some extent, as long as humans can continue to communicate and now have that as a concept, you can never make it go away. So I think Bitcoin is an unstoppable meme. I think that decentralized ledger technology is an unstoppable meme. By its very design, nature and networks, or traditional consensus networks like a government or geography, there's nothing that can be done because they're supernational. You would have to shut down the whole world. You have to shut down the Internet, shut down the power grids, literally shut down the very things that your own consensus networks relies on for commerce and taxation. I don't want to call it an infection, but it is very much like a virus. Right? It lives in the host body. These, these supernatural currencies live in the host body. You can't get rid of them without killing the body. Yeah, that makes any sense.
- [58:00]
Robert Breedlove
No, it's, that's an excellent point. And for the state to really stop it, to your point, it's like you'd have to shut down Internet, power grid, all these systems basically forever because it's not even enough to just turn them off. They have to be turned off forever. And then at that point the state would be cutting off its nose to spite its face because that would destroy its tax base. That would destroy the global division of labor. There'd be no wealth to tax. It would just be net destructive for everyone. So it seems like if we follow self interest, that the path of least resistance and the optimal strategy if you own a monopoly on money is to just produce currency and buy the thing that no one can stop. And I love that you said that. There's that quote from Victor Hugo that nothing is more unstoppable than an idea whose time has come. And I've analogized Bitcoin to the number zero actually, because it was like an idea. It emerged, governments resisted it, the church resisted it. But ultimately zero is just way more useful. A zero based numeral system was way more useful than Roman numerals and other forms. So today we all use zero based numeral system. I like your point too, where this visualization of competing consensus networks and more people are going to identify the stability of rules in the Bitcoin network, which is equivalent to fairness. I know I can go here with fixed rules. I, as an inhabitant of the Bitcoin network, am no longer exposed to asymmetric projections of willpower of others. No one's opinion can affect me. And so as more people move into the bitcoin network, the other result I see here is that the laggards in the fiat network are going to be taxed harder and harder. The state's revenue base in terms of number of people is just contracting, but the costs don't contract for the state. They keep growing. They just keep spending, spending, growing, growing. So they're going to tax the individuals that remain harder and harder, which does what? That increases the pressure of outflows from fiat consensus network to bitcoin consensus network because they're being taxed harder and harder through inflation.
- [60:31]
Santiago Velez
It's like squeezing a bar of soap. How do you squeeze it? The faster it slips out. I 100% agree with that. I think that's going to happen and it'll be a game of whack a mole for a while. What I don't know is the rate, the rate at which these flows will occur. And I think that's what everybody wonders. You know, if I had a pool and there was a big hole in my pool, as long as I can fill that pool at the same rate that that water flows out, it will appear like the pool isn't damaged or draining. But as long as. But once I can't fill that water as fast as what's pouring out, it will become very apparent that that pool is draining. And I think that's where the end game's coming for fiat. And I'm not so sure it'll happen like next year or anything like that. But what you can see, first of all, that the pool has a big hole in it and that there's a ton of water flowing out of it. And some of that water is being collected by other pools like bitcoin. And all they do by adding more water to it is fill all these other pools and eventually there'll be no more water left in the pool, especially if they send people in to try and squeeze more out of it. So I definitely think that the first reaction is going to be to try and stop it, try to slow it down. What I'm curious is if they'll ever try and tax bitcoin. And I don't see how they would necessarily do that. I know that virtual asset service providers are now being compelled to divulge as much information about their customers and FATF and KYC and AML compliance, all those regulatory standards are really very heavy. The travel rules, very heavy in an attempt to get their arms around this explosion. And I think it's the first Approach, how do we stop these outflows? Because once it starts bleeding, it's going to bleed rapidly. And the more the Fed prints, the worse the patient is going to bleed. And so these rules are now attempts to track it, see who's getting it eventually with the end game of somehow taxing it and reversing the flow.
- [62:46]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, no, well said. I wonder if it may just get to the point where they're not even concerned with reversing the flow anymore and they're just trying to track the flow and tax it. Almost like there's been some theory about this. Bitcoin could. We could have black market bitcoin and white market bitcoin. Like white market that's been KYC, AML'd washed. It's on a federal regulated exchange. They're fully tracking it and tracing it versus black market bitcoin, which would be transcendent of global jurisdictions. You could move it in and out of jurisdictions. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. Hey everybody. As you've no doubt learned by watching this show, Bitcoin is the single most important asset you can own in the 21st century. And one of the most important companies in Bitcoin today is NYDIG. NYDIG's mission is to get Bitcoin into the hands of as many people as possible. One of the ways they are accomplishing this mission is by empowering banks and financial technology companies to offer their own bitcoin products and services. As a true game changer in the industry, NYDIG is safely unlocking the power of Bitcoin for forward thinking individuals and institutions alike. Led by Robbie Gutman, Yin Zhao and Ross Stevens, NYDIG has absolutely exploded onto the bitcoin scene recently and has quickly become a leader in this space. So whether you are a professional investor looking for asset management services or a company looking to white label your own bitcoin product or service, consider Nydig, your single source solution for everything bitcoin. I love this view of willpower we're talking about how do humans manifest their willpower into physical power? That's kind of the point of all this economic stuff we're doing. But we also. The flip side of that is we have to be protected from the willpower of one another. These are the systems we've been building, right? This is English common law, this is habeas corpus, all of these things. Fair rules, right? Fair play. Essentially. The thing I'm thinking about though is so we have the state itself is this force amplifier of Willpower, whoever is in that position can project their will on others. That's what a politician, also a political consensus in the modern sense, is doing. And historically, gold was kind of a regulator on that. If a government was being tyrannical or irresponsible with a money printer, people would take their gold and leave the country. And the gold could be used elsewhere because it was a free market money, that option's been largely closed for people because the market's been cornered to some extent. It's harder to move gold, secure gold, conceal gold, all these things. So Bitcoin, I guess, at least promises to maybe fill that void, is that it can be a regulator on statism, that if a state gets tyrannical or abusive, people have an exit option, effectively. What I want to ask you about is how do we know at what point is a state overstepping its bounds? And the thought I had here was kind of the rate at which property is being violated. So this could be inflation, could be taxation, could be the specter of jab mandates. That's property violation as well. So how do you think about that? How do you think about statism and where it falls on the spectrum between a good useful fiction and an abusive useful fiction or an abusive fiction?
- [67:13]
Santiago Velez
That's a great question. I look at every. Being an engineer, I come from a tradition of looking at things in rates, how fast things change with respect to other things. You mentioned earlier you've got this goal that you value and your purchasing powers might be one way to achieve that. I look at governments and I look at these consensus systems as trains, and they're all going to some fictional city far into the future, and the trains are moving at different rates, and you might hop from one train to the other, depending on which one you think is going to bring you there fastest. I think that governments that in terms of statism, all they really do is put the brakes on that train. So they provide an incentive for you to just hop onto the other train. So the more they accelerate that process, which is really deceleration in this sense, the more they preclude you from reaching that golden city in the distance, the faster you're going to realize that it's better to go to another trainer because it'll get you there faster. So if it starts off with a slow imposition of your property rights, which is what I think has been very clever by the Fed, is that it has been able to do it in a very slow and innocuous way, and I think it's been able to do it in the context of other really big time changing factors like globalization. So for example, if you look at post1971, the monetary policy obviously has been reckless and unpredictable and in favor of a few. But it's also been under the context of mass globalization, technological expansion. And so it's been very easy to hide behind these other factors to not be the sole, to not get all the blame. It's perfect in that scenario to do the slow boil and not be the one that, oh, it's not that our train is slower, it's that all these other things are going on and there's nothing we can do about that. So you just have to continue to accept the situation. So my roundabout answer to your question is that I think the rate of application of oppression is important. If you do it slowly and innocuously over time, you can get people to accept more and more of it until it becomes either it hits a breaking point or until it becomes so obvious that there's no way to hide it anymore. And that's where I think we are now. Is that the reason that it's been so successful and the reason it's occurred over such a long period of time relative to like my lifespan, which effectively my whole life, is that this is just what I thought was normal. We've normalized abuse, normalized deviation. And so it's the expectation you think this is healthy and normal when it's not. And it's that realization that I didn't come to until late into adulthood. And it's the most frustrating part about that. That's the part that I told you earlier. I feel like I was denied that until my adulthood. And that's unfortunate because had I realized that that early on, I never would have made some of the decisions I made. So it's feel a little bit of life denied there. But at least my children will have the benefit of that insight, that this is something I tell them regularly, and I'm sure you do with your family, that you have this choice and this is what's really going on and you need to be aware of it and act accordingly to your best interest. So, so to me, it's about the rate at which these policies are applied. And I think that they're accelerating. And we can see that acceleration in monetary policy, in QE and in fiscal policy, in terms of stimulus and in terms of government policy, and I think the pandemic kind of accelerated a lot of that. They were already occurring, that acceleration was already occurring. But now it's like supercharged it because there was no alternative. So there might be a great awakening where a large percent of the population awakens to the realizations you and I are having. And that could lead to a political manifestation. We see politicians now being elected that are pro Bitcoin, for example, or in cities, in senates, in states. So we could see a great awakening there. And that's encouraging because maybe that means that they won't take the violent approach. If there's enough that do awaken in that manner, then they won't try to change the outflows using coercive tactics. Maybe they will just skip that step, being optimistic here, but maybe they'll skip that step and embrace it and understand that it could be, at least in the United States perspective, an economic advantage to embrace it and accept it. Similar to we've seen this migration with the miners to Texas and other places. Low energy. I think that's a form of, hey, there's an opportunity here. If we embrace it, we could benefit in the long run. I'm cautiously optimistic. I think the oppression will continue until morale improves. But I'm cautiously optimistic that maybe enough people will awaken and that Covid could be this blessing in disguise that accelerates this process.
- [72:54]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, I too am optimistic seeing people like Senator Loomis. I think Rand Paul recently said that bitcoin could really succeed in a meaningful way. And in my mind, it's really getting back to the roots of America, frankly. It's like the reason America succeeded originally is because we had low and all the things we've been saying today, low and predictable taxes, free trade, this ethos of laissez faire, free market capitalism. Bitcoin is basically the ultimate implementation of those principles. It's got rule of law, it is sound money. It's an inviolable property. Right, if it's done properly. But I think this is a really useful way to think about that. Progression is in rate of change terms, as you're saying. And this is how this is the engineering mindset. It's like we're dealing with complex systems. There's stocks and flows everywhere. You have to see where are the connection points, what are the rates of change between systems to project forward, what's going to happen. You can think about this in a couple of ways. One is that's how we've maintained the fiat illusion. Historically, it's because all the currencies are being depreciated against one another. So long as no one did it too fast, then no one could tell the difference. It was like you just have to.
- [74:25]
Santiago Velez
That's what I think the move off the gold standard was really about, was creating FX markets that allowed for that process to unfold globally rather than slowly at individual flare up points. You could have an Argentino or Turkey if you just made everybody fiat, then we could all slowly debase the currency worldwide. Oh, and by the way, our currency will happen to take the market share while we do that too. Again, I don't think it was a planned thing but it was definitely a behavior that was incentivized and continues to be incentivized. We see share of dollar denominated global transactions continue to rise as the dollar becomes supreme as it eats all the other fiat. And we see stablecoins even in the crypto space proliferate because again the demand there from all these countries which the Fed can't meet because of the Triffin dilemma, stablecoins are meeting this global demand that the Fed can't even control. How long is that going to be sustainable and when does that collapse? We've already seen systemic collapses in the crypto market because of it, or at least insinuations. I think that dollarization is the end game that's going to lead to the next phase. All the other fiats will fall to the dollar and then the dollar will fall to digital assets. That's my view.
- [76:02]
Robert Breedlove
I agree with that completely. This speaks to the way I view this, is that. Well, there's a couple of ways to view it I guess on the free market we selected for one money gold became dominant. Why? Well, because money, as we've said, it's a network. But it's a network that only serves one purpose. So it's actually we're just moving economic value across space and time. The larger the network, the more liquidity that network provides, the more it satisfies that end of moving value, giving you maximum optionality across the maximum number of trading partners. That to me is intuitive to why it coalesces to one network. So we see that pressure towards dollarization and I think that will continue. I agree that currencies will over the next 15 years we're going to see especially starting with the weaker international currencies first working its way up the spectrum, we'll see them collapse and I think it will initially be mostly into the dollar. But I think as Bitcoin continues to monetize and succeed, you could see a tipping away from dollarization toward Bitcoinization. And thinking in those rate of change terms is another useful framing for why bitcoin succeeds, you've got continued acceleration, even exponential acceleration of dollar production, and you have exponential decay of Bitcoin production. It's going the other quantitative expansion on the dollar, quantitative tightening on Bitcoin. And when you think in terms of dynamic adaptive systems, it's like, of course, this one that is more predictable, perfectly predictable in fact, and is inflating less and less and less is going to devour the monetary premium from the one that's increasingly unpredictable and increasingly inflating. Your earlier point I want to highlight, that was brilliant too, that it was genius, that the Federal Reserve, whatever the nation state, did this. Slowly, they've boiled the frog slowly. This is why again, that book, the Sovereign Individual, they make the case that this is why US Capitalism out competed Soviet communism, because Soviet communism just went straight for the jugular. We're just going to command and control everything. So they didn't give market actors really any property rights to accumulate any wealth at all. They just took over the whole economy. Whereas in the US we just monopolize money, really. And then we let market actors have private property rights, create wealth. And so the economic surplus exploded, which now gives the Fed and the government a larger reservoir of wealth from which to confiscate. So it's a very dollars and cents economic formula here of why the US outcompetes the Soviet Union. But I think by that same formula, you see why bitcoin outcompetes statism in general. It's like because people or groups denominating themselves in bitcoin are just going to get richer than those that are not. So that will attract the best and the brightest and just lead to this migration we're discussing.
- [79:43]
Santiago Velez
I think like everything in nature, it's driven by gradients. So if you want faster flows in a river, you know, you start the flow at the top of a mountain and you watch it go down. Or if you want to heat up a room that's cold, you put your fire as intense as you can get. And that heat gradient drives the flow, so it warms up the room. So I think the stronger the gradients, which is what you're pointing out with respect to fiat consensus networks. And bitcoin as a consensus network has an incredibly steep gradient. And in fact, that gradient continues to steepen because one endpoint is rising in terms of inflation, in terms of money printing, and then the other endpoint is deflationary, the supply and that stock to flow is decreasing. So you're making this steeper and steeper gradient which drives the Exponential. And then the human network effect, where the people who do cross that chasm, that gradient, almost automatically become an army of promoters because they're saying this network has these properties which are so much better than your own network. Why would you stay there? And it's a black hole. It's something that is so steep nothing can escape. Because once it goes in, the switching cost to go back. Almost impossible. If you see something with that steep a gradient, if you spend your Bitcoin, you know you've made an error. Because in a very short order, as that gradient continues to steepen, you'll see how much of a purchasing power and how much of your will, future will you gave up for that. And at some point, it becomes an event horizon where you're not even just giving up your future will, but you're giving up the ability to project will from your family, your descendants. That realization hits you. It's like, okay, if I let go of this now for some, and you may have to, you're compelled to because of these other things in the world, but if I let go of it now, I'm not just precluding myself, but my family. That's. That's a profound revelation. And the thing is that that's just one gradient, right? We have all these other gradients that exist, like differences in power prices around the world, which incentivize people to migrate. Miners, for example, we've got differences in. If you can imagine how steep that gradient is with the dollar, can you imagine how steep that gradient is with the lira or the Brazilian real or whatever? It's painfully steep. That it's compelling to the point where even if in the past you might have said, okay, I'm going to jump off the Argentinian train and I'm going to go to the dollar train now, there's a whole new train here which isn't not even politically misaligned. It is global. And so you don't even run the risk of political misalignment by going on that particular train. I think as the switching costs continue to lower between those gradient points, the flows will rise. That's what I think the proliferation of exchanges has done is globally. As more and more exchanges pop up that service digital assets in their respective geography, it's just another outlet for that gradient to express itself, and it's just another opportunity for outflows. Now, there could be a very savvy local government that says, whoa, we need to change our behavior to change the flows, and we're going to completely reinvent Policy locally we're seeing maybe some examples of that. Otherwise it's inevitable. Back to that thing about expressing will over space and time. I think by the Federal Reserve slowly and gradually implementing its policies the way it has in the last 40 plus years, it's expressed the ability to, well, it circumvented your chronological power. Maybe geographically you had more power. Maybe as an American I could take my dollars and buy around the world globally at any given point in time, but chronologically it's diminished my power over time. Where as an individual I could support my family with a high school education in the 1950s and 60s, now dual income, both college educated, post, you know, whatever, that's the bare minimum just to have a decent middle class life. That's the problem is that it's expressing chronologically through this slow boil, the ability to raise a family, express your values as a human being. And I think that's where it's going to get to the breaking point. And we're seeing that already. And the only thing that's kind of facilitating the continuation of that process is credit, is indebtedness. And indebtedness is going to get to a breaking point where it's no longer serviceable. And so that will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Both government and at the individual level, it just won't be serviceable anymore.
- [84:52]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, I would say arguably we're probably already there in aggregate, 350% global debt to GDP. I don't know if that includes all the entitlement programs either, but no, yeah, excellent points there. And then this idea of comparing gradients and choosing the one that's more favorable to oneself in a world where switching costs are very low, the practicality pushes you into something like Bitcoin. But then, I mean those that really start to study gets even deeper when you get into the morality of it, right. You're like, okay, not only is this better, pragmatically I'm in a better position, I'm safer. But I now see how the game is being played. And at least for me and I think others too. I'm thinking of Alex Gladstein and Nick Carter. They've come out and written very trenchant pieces against the state and its abuses. You get this deeper impetus to want to evangelize Bitcoin. It's like it's not just about protecting yourself and protecting others. Guys, we're destroying our own moral fiber as a civilization by preying on one another's property.
- [86:14]
Santiago Velez
Well, I mean, that's what Jesus Christ did with the Romans. And there was an existing system that as a rebel conceptually came across and said, there is a better system here that is more morally compelling. And at first they were prosecuted and drawn to the lines literally. And it took hundreds of years for it to eventually subvert that system. But it did because the power of those ideas persisted. It was a more powerful, I hate to use the word meme, but it was a more compelling narrative that people could form complex societies around because it delivered more value to individuals. And therefore you could build these constructions that were more sophisticated. Eventually the Catholic Church in itself fragmented. Right. The Reformation. And you had an evolution of that meaning process. And that led to even more choice and more diversity. And it led to where we are today. I think that same process is occurring in this space is that, like you said, there is a morally compelling reason why you would make that choice and that appeals to a lot of people. That is a very important value that will keep them in that ecosystem. So that's the thing is when you get into these consensus based networks, you have to first make a choice. Am I going to leave it or am I going to stay in it? And if I have a reason to stay in it besides just the obvious gradient, you will, because it aligns with your personal values. And not only will you stay and live in it, you will promote it. You'll spread the word. And that's why I see, I, you know, around my house we don't talk blockchain because I'm such an evangelist. My wife is kind of like sick of hearing about it, but I think.
- [88:17]
Robert Breedlove
All the wives of bitcoiners and blockchainers are definitely sick of hearing about it.
- [88:22]
Santiago Velez
But they see our, I love us for our passion for it and appreciate it because we want to spread the word and we want to show people what we've seen. And I didn't want to make the parallel to religion, but I just feel that it's the same kind of narrative process in us as humans that first drive us to leave the old way and then to stay in it and then to help others come along.
- [88:51]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, I'm increasingly convinced that all of these useful fictions or imagined orders, they're religious in nature, actually. And I've had conversations with several people. Yeah, that's just where I'm at currently. I don't think the modern conception of religion is some kind of archaic institution that we're evolving past. I don't think that's accurate. I think humans are inherently religious. So even, even an atheist is like you're religious about your beliefs, right? You have faith in these beliefs. So that's a whole nother rabbit hole. But I agree with you that there's a religious quality to these useful fictions. I do want to highlight a point you said earlier, I thought was just great that inflation. So one way to think about inflation is that when I say this term, I mean specifically the arbitrary expansion of the money supply. It's effectively just harvesting the productive surplus of the economy. So people are trading and innovating, producing wealth and capital, but then the call options on that capital, which is a definition of money, are just being created by one institution that preserves that privilege violently and deceptively. So they're literally just harvesting. It's just taxation. They're just taxing the productive economic organism. But globalization and digitization radically increase the productivity of the market over the past 50 years. Right? Kind of one led into the other, really. And so I think this is maybe a perverse consequence I've been thinking of is for all the potential liberty afforded by the digital age and Bitcoin, I think maybe early on it actually benefited the central bank complex by giving it more Runway. There was just more economic surplus to harvest so they could hide this scheme more easily versus had economic growth been very low, people would have felt it a lot more.
- [91:00]
Santiago Velez
100% agree. Especially for US citizens because you can harvest it globally for the exportation of the dollar. You could spread out the pain, if you will. It's a lot easier to spread out the pain over 8 billion people than it is 400 million. Especially if you can deliver those 400 million, the fruits of the purchasing power of 8 billion. It's perfect. Technology is just a compounder of that because it allows you to couple the global markets through supply chains just in time. That's my pinned tweet on Twitter is what I see is a view of how aggregation at the central bank and aggregation of technology providers has led to this wealth inequality and increasing lack of power in the individual robbing of people's power. I firmly believe that just based on the data, not even just a kind of anecdotal observation or sentiment, it's just what the data says. It just, just simply, you look at standard of living life expectancies, gradients, global gradients, you look at all these factors and it's, you just, you can see it. It's not, it's not debatable. I think what people debate is at this point is the rate at which that's occurring. You see a lot of People on Twitter talking about whether we have inflation, hyperinflation, deflation, they're really just talking, talking about is the rate at which this pain is being spread around. I find that ironic because okay, it doesn't really matter who's right at the end of the day, the pain is still being spread around and there's no remediation in sight. I don't see any policy being advocated by either central banks or governments to ameliorate that. I don't see how they're going to turn around debt to gdp. I don't see how. I guess maybe they're expecting some massively deflationary technology innovations to somehow fix it, or a debt jubilee, some kind of negotiated agreement globally by all governments that we're just going to forgive a lot of this burden. That could happen, it happened in ancient Rome. But I just don't think it's likely for the foreseeable future, certainly not in the timeframe of, of what's important for me and my family. For now. I have to, and I would advise your viewers to seek out these alternatives and do what's best for you and your family. And that could percolate up to society level. If we all individually choose what's best in this scenario and identify these rates, then that could end up having an awakening effect like we talked about earlier.
- [94:04]
Robert Breedlove
Yes. Agree that the level of indebtedness of the existing system is essentially too far gone, barring some economic miracle. Right. Like I don't know what it would be, cold fusion or something like free energy. Again, like we just said, some free market catalyzed explosion like globalization or digitization that that causes the economic surplus to boom from which central banks could draw, could siphon and harvest wealth from. Barring that, I don't know, call it cold fusion. I don't know what else it could really be. This thing is done. It's going to implode. There has to be a day of reckoning, let's say that. So you mentioned this conversation has been great so far. So we initially started saying we'd talk about your pinned Twitter thread and we haven't even talked about it yet. Maybe you could just give us high level broad strokes what that is about because I think it captures at least part of your current macro thesis.
- [95:20]
Santiago Velez
Well, it starts with the premise that central banks. First of all, I don't view banks as a monolithic thing. Banks are, you know, there's multiple tiers. Of course, you've got your central bank and you've got tier one banks. Tier two, Tier three, down to an individual local bank like a credit union or a small bank. What we've seen in the United States in particular is a consolidation of banking across the board for several reasons. You know, the gfc, the need for capital requirements, economies of scale. Basically there's been this massive consolidation or aggregation of banking which is who is the decider of credit issuance, who's the decider of how you're going to give out loans for small businesses and homes, et cetera. That consolidation, at least to the same kind of corruption as we talked about earlier, that you have misaligned incentives, that fewer and fewer people are incentivized to provide a service for the majority of the people that they're supposed to be servicing. The consequence of that then is you don't have any more local risk assessment. Everything naturally funnels itself into large aggregated business. It could be aggregated farming, aggregated data centers like AWS, aggregated social networks like Facebook or YouTube. It naturally biases towards non competitive frameworks. Eventually you get kind of winner take all aggregators in each category class. And obviously that's not good for competition, for choice, for the consumer. And it's not a way to express monetary fairness. One of the things we see is that individuals are completely apathetic. They're disconnected because they don't see any political solution to that. The very same politicians who's supposed to represent them are not making this competition fair. They're not doing anything to address global arbitrary. When you have some kind of global gradient like a labor or environmental standard, people make entire businesses off of just taking advantage over that gradient, right? So if you can build a factory in Southeast Asia and pollute into the air without pricing any externalities, well then you can ship a plastic toy to the United States for 10 cents, right? There is no pricing of that, of those externalities. And part of that is because aggregators are consolidating more and more power and more in fewer and fewer verticals. And that is driven largely by the way banking, lending, all of these things are structured and continue to concentrate. And I think that like you've pointed out many times on your channel, the ones closest to the spigot are the ones who are going to get to drink and the ones with quote unquote, the more credit worthiness or in the judgment the risk assessment of the banks can service their debts, the ones that are going to get the lowest rate loans. And so through that rate process they will continue to compound a competitive advantage. And the small farmer, the Small business, the small anything will just completely get wiped out. I think that's compounded by globalization factors. Again, because with the Internet we can create global forms of arbitrage for environmental reasons, for labor standard reasons, for a whole host of reasons. And it's one of the reasons, I think we have a lot of populism in the United States. There's been very strong expressions of populism because this is. People understand this intuitively. They feel it, they see it at the cash register. They see it with who their employers are. Like what options? Like it used to be you could work for a small business in a small town. Now there's a Walmart and that's it. So people feel it and see it, and that's expressing itself as political frustration. To me, the central problem is aggregation. And to me, the logical solution to aggregation is decentralization. And when you talk about decentralization, you get right to the technology we've been talking about this whole time. So to me, bitcoin is the decentralization of monetary power. I think that there are other networks that are going to grow, that are going to decentralize a lot of other economics economic activities. And that's kind of what I'm most passionate about, is seeing de aggregation. And I believe in empowering the individual, that the individual has more capability, more the ability to exert their will fairly into the world in greater measure, and that their systems are a level playing field where we can compete on our merits. So that's what I'm most passionate about. That's why I got into the space, because I believe that it's just like freedom of expression. It's freedom of value expression.
- [100:30]
Robert Breedlove
Interesting. Yeah. So tell me, is this the fundamental incentive schematic here is that we throw this term around fiat a lot, but it's actually right to the heart of everything. We've been talking about a decree. I can just verbalize my will and make it manifest in the world. And that's done through threat of force. Largely either threat or threat of force or actual use of force. That is how fiat works. So is the underlying dynamic here that fiat drives centralization? Because we know it does it with wealth distribution, as we've said, those closest to the spigot benefit most. That's clearly also reflected in corporate market capitalizations. Bigger companies get access to cheaper money, they buy back their own shares, while smaller competitors suffer the fixed cost of regulation more intensely than larger competitors, let's say. And then I think we see it reflected in political or even geopolitical power as well. That's what the US is. They sit at the top of that, that hierarchy. Is that the golden thread connecting all of this problem? Is it just fiat drive centralization and aggregation?
- [101:54]
Santiago Velez
Absolutely, I think so, because we've already kind of established in this conversation that it is the how you express will into the world. And so if you can control the mechanism upon how you express will into the world, then you can will anything, you can will success into the world. And you can pick winners and losers and you can pick your side to be the winner above all else to the detriment of everyone else, and not have a level playing field. You don't need to compete if you can pick the winner. So absolutely, yeah, I think that. I mean, I don't think money is the root of all evil, but I think money is the incentive upon which evil men or women instantiate their will on others. And if we're going to have less evil, less unfair extensions of will, I'll define that as evil, then we need to have money that is immune to that, that does not have a common spigot, and that people are not compelled to use because it's that compelling, that gives the people who are printing it the power. It's that threat of force that if you don't use it, I'll be able to do something to you that affects some evil on you.
- [103:14]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah. Bitcoin as the decentralization of monetary power lets the individual immunize him or herself from the opinions of others, which is fucking great. I mean, that's the whole point, right? Again, you want to maximize your ability to project willpower, but defend yourself against the willpower of others. That's the whole purpose of human cooperation, really. So that makes a ton of sense to me. This has been some really useful framing. I want to ask you about one last area here. Clearly we're both bullish on bitcoin. I reserve an opinion on other crypto assets, like I hold 100% Bitcoin currently, because I just. And here's the reason is I haven't seen seen an asset credibly cross the chasm to decentralization. Now that is a real chasm, because even bitcoin started out as just an idea in a guy's mind, presumably a guy we don't know, team, whatever. So it was centralized in the mind of Satoshi before it became what it is today, this trillion dollar globally decentralized money. How do other crypto assets, or it doesn't have to be a crypto asset. How does Any project. How do they cross that chasm and how do you. Are there quantifiable metrics that you consider in that analysis? Is it qualitative? Is it both? How do you see that?
- [104:49]
Santiago Velez
Good question. So I'm someone who, I consider myself currency agnostic only because I understand that I don't know everything and therefore there's a possibility I could be wrong on any particular choice that I might make. It's like that analogy I gave you with the trains moving to this final destination. They're all moving at different rates, and the rate at which they're going to that destination, that golden city, changes over time. So what I focus on is, like you said, is a purchasing power. I look at the value as what is my purchasing power. I can take a short view or I can take a long view. If I take a long view, then I'll ascribe more weight towards certain properties of a network. Like we talked about, the issuance rate, the inflationary rate, if at all. The rules of consensus for that network is that compelling from a long term standpoint. But from a short term standpoint, as an opportunist, I might say, well, this network, for whatever reason, has a stronger narrative and that might see more inflows of purchasing power. I'm going to participate in this network and the fact that I have the ability to switch between networks near zero switching costs means that I can play the game. If I make a mistake, that's on me and the error is mine only. In other words, I chose this network. I decided to participate in it. It could be the dollar, if we get a risk off situation like we saw in March of 2020 with Bitcoin, the right move would be to have, if you can time it, keyword. The right move would have been, hey, sell all your bitcoin and then buy at the bottom to double it. With altcoins, the right move might be, if you have a long view on bitcoin, is if altcoins outperform bitcoin in the short term, you can play with fire and get into altcoins and ride that train for as long as it's going to ride at that rate to accumulate more Bitcoin. And a lot of people who've been in the space long enough know that over time, only the biggest, healthiest networks continue to grow. And all these small ones kind of fizzle, you know, rise up. They're almost like fireflies. They, they rise up, they burn bright, and then they fizzle and die. So that's a game that you can play because the switching costs are so low and it's so easy to move in and out of positions. And a lot of pragmatic people, they do that and they get a lot of heat from it because they're prioritizing, maybe a shorter timeframe than a longer timeframe. I'm currency agnostic because like I said earlier, I don't know who the winner might be, but I respect Bitcoin's ability to aggregate value over the long term. It's the longest, most proven asset in the digital asset space. There is no question that it's seeing the most institutional adoption, nation state adoption. It is clearly it's never going to go away. I think we've established that. Therefore, as a pragmatist, I would say if I really want to maximize my, my, both my and my family's purchasing power and ability to exert their will into the world, that needs to be a meaningful consideration. I need to think, okay, how do I accumulate as much Bitcoin as I can over time? But that doesn't preclude me from saying right now, this is the fastest train. I might be in dollars, I might be in some other digital asset. And what I do to evaluate that, and I don't recommend this for, for everybody because most people will get burned playing that game. But if you are going to play that game, you need to be paying very close attention to the narratives that drive those flows. Those gradients that we talk about, those gradients are driven by a lot of narratives. And the narratives are what convince people to take action and say, you know what, I'm going to get into this. And we saw some crazy action this week. We're talk filming here in October of 2021 with things like Doge and Shiba Coin and insane kind of appreciations. Those send out these narrative signals to the world that, oh, wow, this is the fastest train. People who've been in this space for a while realize that that's typically a rug pull and you're going to go in there and someone's just going to pull the rug out. So Bitcoin has a lot of properties that I think other digital assets to bridge that chasm don't have and won't have for probably a long time. Liquidity time in market. The properties of the network that we talked about that compel people to stay in it, all of these things are so powerful narrative wise. The best story or the convenient lie we tell, it's so compelling. You would be remiss to ignore that and not Pay. And I think that's what we're seeing with the biggest investors now is they understand that. They understand that probably better than anyone. And they're probably getting into these positions a lot bigger than they're even telling anybody. Because why would you tell somebody you're going to take a big position before you take your position first?
- [110:06]
Robert Breedlove
Right.
- [110:08]
Santiago Velez
I think there's a lot more activity under the hood than what's being seen.
- [110:12]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, agreed. Because the incentive is to build your position before you announce if you're, you know, if you think that would have an impact on market cap. So that's all right. That's. That's interesting. So you're. I mean, this active, managed. This is a very actively managed strategy, clearly. And there's all these elements of timing and even luck to some extent. So I agree with you on that. It can be done, but it's not appropriate. Appropriate for like 99% of people.
- [110:42]
Santiago Velez
Absolutely agree. So I hope that's the message people don't take, is, yeah, please don't. Don't think that you're going to hop back and forth and optimize. There are algorithms out there doing that a thousand times faster than you measuring sentiment and all these very complicated factors. You have no chance if you think you know something the market doesn't know. So, yeah, definitely not advocating that, but that's how I view my position pragmatically. And I look at it more from an investment standpoint than from a speculator standpoint. I try not to speculate, but I do try to invest, to outperform. So you're absolutely right. It's more of an active management strategy.
- [111:21]
Robert Breedlove
Yes, yes. And key wisdom there always be humble in the face of the market because over the long run, the market's always going to be right more than you are.
- [111:35]
Santiago Velez
By definition.
- [111:36]
Robert Breedlove
That's what it is. Yes, exactly. It's collective intelligence. So then, do you think in general also in the long run, I guess, that crypto asset, an individual crypto assets market cap would more or less track to its decentralization over time?
- [111:54]
Santiago Velez
No, no, because we see a lot of centralized assets acquire a lot of liquidity and grow with respect to its network effects and not decentralization. And it's a frustrating property. I find that particularly frustrating because I feel if it were based on the values I hold, it should track with decentralization because I put a lot of value on that property. But a lot of people don't seem to care, probably because the way they entered the space wasn't maybe the Way you and I entered the space, it wasn't through a realization of the failures of centralization, it was through some speculative function. They saw money and they're like, oh wow, this is a great way to get in. And admittedly that's how I came into the space. I saw, oh my goodness, I can make a lot of money buying these things. But as I went down the rabbit hole, what I really latched onto were these values of decentralization as being one of the ways that we could ameliorate some of these evils, some of these aggregating powers. But unfortunately I just don't think most people assign as much value to that as I do. And that's frustrating to me. So the best I can do is communicate that to as many people as I can in the hopes that they do assign that value to that property and the flows between the networks going the right way, that's the best we can do.
- [113:20]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, yeah, I agreed. And this is just a big open question in my mind is like will distributed consensus technology, if that's the rubric we're putting all this under, it's got a lot of different names. Will it have another market proven use case besides cash, besides money, which Bitcoin. I would argue it has proven itself given its history, its size. It's the most compelling narrative by far, in my opinion. The separation of money and state, which I think is one of the most compelling narratives in human history actually. But I don't want. There's this old saying that a free mind never concludes. I also don't agree with this absolute dogmatic view of toxic Bitcoin maximalists. That said, this is it, the answer. It's all there ever will be, the end. I think it's a close mindedness, frankly, I don't know. I don't know enough to say if something else will succeed or not. That's why I'm asking how do we quantify this? How do we measure this? How do we determine Balaji? I've been talking to Balaji, he's got a lot of great thoughts on it. He wrote a piece in 2017 about quantifying decentralization using a model that's similar to the Gini coefficient, which is interesting.
- [114:49]
Santiago Velez
That's a brilliant, brilliant writing. One of my favorite of his. It's fantastic.
- [114:55]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah.
- [114:55]
Santiago Velez
Because it is. Decentralization as a word is very ambiguous. And he tried to provide some clarity to it and break it down into different categories of decentralization. And I think different people value different kinds of decentralization maybe decentralization of who owns the assets, decentralization of how consensus is arrived at, decentralization of shared state like nodes. If you pull the historical record, there's so many aspects that are super important and it's funny because a lot of these alternative networks tend to bias one versus the other. So either the distribution mechanism is highly concentrated or the consensus mechanism is highly concentrated in favor of high throughput. But there's a lot of properties that they'll kind of take away from one to give to the other because there's this security triangle. And I think that that's what people are trying to figure out is what is the optimum. And I'll just wait for the market to sort that out and it could be a while. I think we're really early. It could be a long time. I think to answer your question on what other maybe big use case versus just money. I think property rights is a huge, huge use case. I think. I don't like NFTs, I don't like the idea of a JPEG and assigning. But what I do recognize is that property rights in the physical world expressed through a blockchain or a decentralized consensus is very powerful precisely because it's no longer subject to a government. In other words, if I sell my house, I got to take, I got to get the title transferred from me to the new owner through my town. I mean listeningly, relying on the government and if I owe some taxes, guess what? That transaction is not going through. So that's just is equally compulsory through the threat of violence. I would like to see property rights themselves expressed on chain for physical things. I don't know how we get there from here, but that's what I see is the long view as maybe something that's possible.
- [117:09]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, I too am a huge proponent of that. Just removing the arbitrariness from property rights, frankly, that's a huge benefit to everyone. But to your point, it's like how the hell do we get there? Because the state will not give that up willingly. So my general view on this right now is that Bitcoin needs to really cement itself. And I don't know where this number is. Maybe it's a 10 trillion, $20 trillion market cap where it's really again, these flows out of fiat complex into Bitcoin are significant enough to where the state is shedding functions, it's privatizing lands, privatizing property rights, things like this. Then it will be opened up to experimentation with technologies of this variety that could be a long time. I don't know how long that takes.
- [118:00]
Santiago Velez
I agree. I agree. I do have to run. I apologize. Yeah, yeah.
- [118:05]
Robert Breedlove
If you just tell my audience where they can find you. I appreciate you doing this.
- [118:10]
Santiago Velez
Yeah. So where can you find me? I do a lot of interviews on Real Vision. I encourage you to check that out on my Twitter. I don't know what my Twitter account is. Let's see.
- [118:23]
Robert Breedlove
I think I've got it right.
- [118:24]
Santiago Velez
It's some strange.
- [118:26]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, go ahead. Santiag 787-58327 I should turn that into.
- [118:39]
Santiago Velez
A hash or something because it's like I don't even know my own Twitter handle. I was assigned that by Twitter long ago. I don't really know how to change it, and it's too late now. But, yes, I love engaging people on Twitter and on Real Vision and anyone can reach out to me. I love to talk to people online over DM or publicly. And Robert, thank you so much for having me on. I love this conversation. You're one of my thought leaders, so I appreciate it.
- [119:13]
Robert Breedlove
This is an awesome conversation. I think you've just become one of my thought leaders as well, so thank you so much. I'll link to everything in the show notes so people don't have to memorize your complicated Twitter handle.