This is the 94th episode of Patterson in Pursuit, a very, very special Bitcoin edition. So like everybody else for the past many years as a Bitcoiner, I've been fascinated by stories of Bitcoin's origins.  And how was he able to keep private for so many years after developing this world-changing technology we still don't know who he is? Well recently I hadn't found a story that was overwhelmingly convincing. There's little bits and pieces there out there online. I thought maybe this is the case, maybe that's the case. But now over the past few months that's changed. I feel much more confident in saying, hmm, we might be getting down to the real truth with regards to the creation of Bitcoin and the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. It sounds funny after having been in this space for several years. I wrote my first book about Bitcoin back in 2014. Everybody knows you can't claim you've discovered who Satoshi Nakamoto is, that's a recipe for a disaster. But all right, I'm putting my hat in the ring. I think I actually feel pretty confident. And after this interview you might as well. So all of this started when I stumbled across an article online called Bitcoin Origins and I'll have a link to that article in the description of this video. And it lays out a remarkable story. Maybe it's fan fiction, maybe not. The story is not just of the historical origins of Bitcoin. Anybody could come up with that type of story, just random historical facts. No, what I found very unique about this story is that it was not documenting the history as much as the thought process that went into creating the Bitcoin technology. The thought process that's required to make a breakthrough discovery. That's not something you can easily fake. And the way that the author described it sounded very compelling. It included things like challenging everybody's assumptions that had been made in that industry forever. And trying to reconstruct your own belief system from scratch and see if you could solve these problems that nobody else has been able to solve. Things that sound very compelling to me. And he wrote about it in a way that I thought this story has legs. Who the heck wrote this?  And I reached out to Phil to talk to him to explore these ideas.  After these interviews, I guess I'll give you my conclusion. I think that Phil Wilson is the real Satoshi Nakamoto, the one that comes to mind when most people think about Satoshi. And there's a few reasons why I say that. Before I tell you exactly why, I want to preface what you're about to listen to. So Phil and I have had many hours of conversation over the past couple of months. You're about to listen to seven hours worth of recorded conversation on Skype. This is only from two sessions of talking with him because he and I got going talking about quite a lot of different things. So we had very long conversations. But I was going to release this as a series of interviews, long story short. That's not going to happen. It's all going to be one monolithic seven-hour block that you guys can sort through and listen to and hopefully enjoy. Even if this is fan fiction, I think you guys will at least enjoy incredible storytelling. If you're somewhat familiar with the drama around the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, you undoubtedly know one of the great enigmas in the current space is the existence of Craig Wright.  And how is it possible that people like Gavin Andresen were convinced, and maybe still are convinced, that Craig is Satoshi Nakamoto? Craig seems to say a lot of things that are crazy, that are wrong, that are poorly written and poorly articulated, seems like kind of a dickhead. Is that really Satoshi Nakamoto? How could he have fooled somebody so prominent like Gavin Andresen? Well, that is explained with perfect satisfaction within Phil Wilson's story. In fact, I think even Gavin Andresen and maybe people like Ian Grig, who have for good reason thought that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, may actually be persuaded by Phil's story because it accords with their experiences. So if you remember, Gavin Andresen claimed that Craig Wright signed a message in front of him using the Satoshi Keys to do so. It's a very reasonable conclusion to think, well, if somebody signs with the Satoshi Keys, they are Satoshi. Of course, that's very natural. Even if it's the case that the public drama and public proofs that this individual has given are terrible, that might be very confusing, but if somebody does something in front of you in private, you're going to say, well, I still think this person's Satoshi because they gave me cryptographic proof. Well, what if it's the case that Craig Wright actually does have the keys of Satoshi Nakamoto and is not the real Satoshi Nakamoto? What if people like Calvin Ayer, who I presume have also had a personal demonstration that the Satoshi Keys are in the possession of Craig Wright? What if Calvin's telling the truth? What if Gavin's telling the truth? What if people like Ian Grig actually were in communication with Craig Wright? Craig Wright talking about the project that he's working on, it comes out when he says it's going to come out, and naturally Ian thinks, well, this person is actually Satoshi Nakamoto. What if all of those people's stories are correct and it's still the case that Craig Wright is not the real Satoshi and may not even fundamentally grasp the concepts involved in the Bitcoin system? How's that possible? Well, that is part of the story that Phil Wilson tells. Reason is because Craig Wright is a part of Satoshi Nakamoto. He's one part, but he's not the most important part. Phil Wilson, I believe, is the brains of the Satoshi Nakamoto team. This answers a number of questions. For example, Satoshi Nakamoto had universal admiration for his operational security. Somehow he disappeared. How is it possible that somebody could create something so massive and successfully disappear? His operational security was 10 out of 10. Maybe that was possible because Satoshi Nakamoto was working through surrogates. Some of the surrogates might not have even known who he was. If Craig Wright was in fact a surrogate of Satoshi Nakamoto, Craig is going to have both access to Satoshi's keys, Genesis block keys. He's going to have inside information about the creation of Bitcoin. He's going to be able to personally persuade and convince those who are around at the time because he also was around at the time. And yet he might simply be one part trying to claim credit for an invention that he did not create. If Satoshi Nakamoto left the Bitcoin project, and if Craig didn't know that he was still alive or still existed, it might be that that is an explanation for why Craig found the opportunity to pass himself off as Satoshi Nakamoto. Again, this is speculation. I don't know. This is a story that you're about to hear. But it sure sows up a lot of loose ends. Now, a few things to note before the interview begins. First of all, it's very tempting to project your own political bias onto the mythology of Satoshi Nakamoto. If you guys have consumed my content for a bit, you know I'm a very radical libertarian. A lot of us radical libertarians latched onto Bitcoin very early on and we have mythologized the character of Satoshi Nakamoto as essentially a radical anarchist. And maybe he wasn't. Maybe there was not an information to make that conclusion. I'm not saying Phil Wilson is not a libertarian. He certainly has some of those tendencies. But he's definitely not a purist. And that might strike some people as odd because you start believing the mythology rather than perhaps what was reality. Second, you'll notice that these are two interviews. I believe it was about a month apart. So some of the content is repetitive. I'm sure he's been talking with many people and I didn't remember all the details of our conversation as soon as we had the next one. So there is some repetition between them. What you'll hear is that Phil Wilson, if he has Satoshi Nakamoto, is a systems thinker. He was not thinking of Bitcoin in terms of I'm just going to create digital cash. Phil, in Phil's mind, he's creating a kind of planetary civilization or the foundations for planetary civilization, one piece of which is digital cash. So if you believe this story, the way that Satoshi Nakamoto was actually thinking about Bitcoin is Bitcoin is one piece of the puzzle. The puzzle being planetary civilization and beyond. That is the scope, the big picture thinking of somebody that I find very plausibly could be Satoshi Nakamoto. Not just myopically focused, but he's the very, very, very big picture. In this conversation, you'll find we're kind of all over the place throughout it. There are incredible interesting details about Bitcoin itself, about the actual creation of Bitcoin, the idea of Bitcoin, which there's probably a hundred nuggets of information you can get from this interview, literally. If you want, take this video, clip out 20 seconds at a time, 10 minutes at a time, and you'll be able to have really fascinating claims being made by this Phil Wilson character. But we also don't just talk about Bitcoin because he's got a very active mind. We talk about a whole bunch of topics, kind of talk about the world view of Phil Wilson, which is what I love to do on the show. We talk about everything from philosophy to politics and political theory to economics to psychology and religion. It's all part of the package when you're trying to solve the Bitcoin problem. You have to bring all of your mental resources to the table. This is of course what I found very, one of the many things that I find persuasive about Phil is that he's a big picture guy. He's not an academic, the man doesn't have a degree, he has very correct and sharp things to say about the academy and those who are within the academy. And he has created a system that incorporates not just graphic knowledge, not just mathematical knowledge, but knowledge about human psychology, knowledge about economic systems, knowledge about human incentives, the multiple levels of understanding, systemic level understanding in order to create the Bitcoin system. That is at least how I mythologize Satoshi Nakamoto as he must have understood humans at a very deep level. You'll also hear why the mythology of Satoshi is deliberately crafted. What sort of fills effectiveness is the ability to, let's say, be a part of a community and help direct a community along certain lines. You might call it cloak and dagger stuff, but it's probably more accurately understood as maybe a little bit of social media engineering, which when you hear just makes a whole bunch of sense about how that was necessary at the beginning of the project. Also unfortunately, you're going to have to put up with a poor internet connection. Occasionally some of our conversation got dropped, it's been lost in Skype translation, I'm sorry I couldn't do anything about it, that's just the name of the game. So it's not a hundred percent a smooth conversation all the way through, and in listening to it myself I thought, oh man, I wish that little part didn't get dropped. Lastly, there are three big sticking points that everybody is going to have and should have with regard to Phil's Satoshi story. One of them is that Phil has said that for many years his brain has essentially kept information from him. So why didn't he come out earlier? Well, because he didn't remember quite a lot of information, which sounds very fishy. Oh well, you had amnesia really. Maybe it's the case that this is just a cheap excuse for Phil to be able to say this is why I wasn't done the forums for several years, but there is a potential explanation which I find perfectly plausible, which is that Phil has a rather unique brain and mind, which we get into a little bit in this conversation, and from the very beginning of the project, the very beginning, before he even started, he considered this to be his first and only black project that he thought essentially this is, it could bring down nation states, I guess, it could fundamentally restructure civilization, it could result in rich and powerful people losing a lot of their wealth and influence, which of course would make him a target from the beginning he was thinking this as the so this is why he had such incredible operational security because he thought at any point I may have to abandon this project, leave or I might my life might be at risk. Well, what happened as the story gets into is just before he left the project, he thought that he might his life might be in peril, partly because if you know the story, one of his teammates went and spoke with people from a three later agency. Also, people in the Bitcoin community were boasting about hiring private investigators to try to figure out who Satoshi Nakamoto was. He said to the point where he would when he would answer the phone when he would answer the door, he would have a knife behind his back, ready to stab somebody depending on who was at the door, because he was convinced that he was about to be in serious threat. So if that's the case, and if that is partially the explanation for why he disappeared the way that he did without a trace, it is not a stretch of the imagination to say that once he left the project, his reptilian brain kicked in and said, you no longer have access to this information. You had nothing to do with Bitcoin. You know nothing about Bitcoin, and you will not be able to even know what the project is until the brain decides it's safe to come out. Is that true? Is that just a convenient story? I'm not sure, but I find it plausible that if somebody is extremely paranoid to have the level of operational security that Satoshi had, and they have reason for their paranoia, and they think shit's about to hit the fan that their defensive brain mechanism would kick in and actually prevent them from having information for some period of time until it calms down. That's just, maybe it's not true, but maybe it is true. And if that's one of the obstacles for, you know, if you're viewing the story as a whole picture, that is one of the cons to be weighed against the many pros. One of the other difficult things, perhaps the most difficult thing that people are going to have with this is that Phil has no cryptographic proof that he is Satoshi Nakamoto. Now, again, maybe this is, well, that's a convenient excuse. Oh, sorry, I don't have a memory and I don't have any proof that I'm actually Satoshi Nakamoto. Yeah, OK, nice story. But I actually think there's a pretty good explanation for this. Again, Satoshi Nakamoto had 10 out of 10 on operational security. The way that you get 10 out of 10 operational security is by literally destroying all the data that you have and any connection whatsoever that you have to a project that you don't want to have any record of being attached to. Again, this is, we go into a little bit of detail over the course of this interview. So, yeah, he doesn't have any cryptographic proof and there might be a very good explanation for why that's the case. What's what's kind of funny to think about is if it's the case, the Phil is actually Satoshi. He may have had such good operational security that in fact many years after the fact might not be able to prove that he was. He might not even be able to prove that he was the one in the project, at least cryptographically. What he could do and he does is talk about Bitcoin in a way that only Satoshi Nakamoto can talk about it. He can demonstrate a deep conceptual understanding of the system. Even if he doesn't have cryptographic proof, you would expect Satoshi Nakamoto to have a deep, profound, and thorough understanding of the system, which in fact he demonstrates, at least to my satisfaction and probably to yours over the course of this interview. The last thing to note is that Phil's story has holes in it. He has explicitly said his story has holes in it. I know his story has holes in it. You will know that his story has holes in it if you do some research. He's open about it. Again, he's trying to reconstruct information from a project he was involved in a decade ago, a black project that he essentially suffered PTSD from, from fleeing it when he thought it turned sour. It is not surprising in the slightest that he has some errors in his story. And he says it at the very beginning of his post. The Bitcoin origin story that this is I think he said he estimates it's about 50% accurate, but he is surprised that there's actually been less pushback for many of the claims that he's been making, which makes him think perhaps his story is even more accurate than 50%. So keep that in mind. Don't, Phil is not hiding from it. I'm not hiding from it, even though I'm willing to say I think he's actually Satoshi Nakamoto. What you can do is identify every single error that you think doesn't jive, that's wrong, that's incorrect, whether it's about multi-sig addresses or it's about in lock time or whatever the heck it is, identify it, write about it. And I bet Phil will respond to it. Of course, he's under no obligation. If it's reasonable objection, if there's some mistake that he's actually made, the goal is not to go out and convince everybody that he's Satoshi Nakamoto. In fact, as you'll hear, he kind of explicitly is not doing that. He's just saying, I'm telling a story. I'm just telling an interesting story. That's all he's got in that proof. But if you spot a mistake in his story, write about it and we'll see what the response is. So far, I've had a few questions about some things. I thought, maybe this is a little fishy, maybe this is a little bit off. And the response has been very satisfying. So I'm not holding the man because the man is real. Satoshi, the mythology of Satoshi is not the actual Satoshi. There's a man somewhere or men somewhere that are behind this project, which means they're very much flawed. Their memories are going to be flawed. They're not going to share your political biases. They might be dickheads. So you have to be open to that. You have to be adjusting open to that and think, well, maybe maybe the creator of it actually does have these weird mental characteristics. And maybe they was wrong about some some fact. So if you want to play gotcha fill and say, I was wrong about this fact, therefore everything he says is wrong, you're free to do that. I don't think that's the most sophisticated way to approach this story. Over the coming weeks and months and whenever I get time, I do intend to do something like a breakdown of these interviews. I'm probably going to do some write ups to fully explain just many reasons why I think Phil Wilson is actually Satoshi Nakamoto. There's a level of intelligence that Phil has demonstrated, which is an extremely high level, his ability to communicate in a way that people can understand is extremely high level. If you read his writing, especially if you are fortunate enough to have any personal conversation with him, the man writes in the identical style as Satoshi Nakamoto. If you go back and read the Mike Hearn Satoshi emails, you'll see a writing style that's identical. And it's not just the fact that Phil's writing style is identical. It's that it is an extremely high level of intelligence packed into his writing because he writes in a way that everybody can understand, which you can only do if you understand what you're talking about. All right, so that's enough preface for me. Again, this may be fanfiction. This may just be a story with a bunch of remarkable coincidences written by a guy who happens to have fantastically deep knowledge of the Bitcoin system. It's, of course, possible. I'm not claiming certainty. Phil's not claiming certainty. You're going to have to use your own noggin on this one. But I do hope that you enjoy my conversation with Phil Wilson, a.k.a. Scranti, the man who, if I had to bet, I would say is in fact the real Satoshi Nakamoto. Hi there, Phil. How are you? Fine. Very nice to meet you. You're in Charleston, are you? I am in Charleston at the moment. Yes, you said you're in Australia, right? No, I was out in Sydney.  Well, I used to tell people I'm from Tasmania because no one knows our Tasmanian accent. Are you really from Tasmania? No, no, but most Aussies don't know what a Tasmanian accent is. So it works quite well. OK, yeah, I read your article, the Bitcoin origins, and I thought it was fantastic. There's so many. I was going through in preparation for this, like trying to highlight. Oh, I want to ask about this. I want to have you explain this, what do you mean by this? But it was like the list was way too large. So I've just got the actual article up that I'll I'll ask you some things as we're going along. But well, that's one of the purposes of it. Since there's I've got no data or anything like that. The best way to hide yourself is is not having any information whatsoever. But if I have enough details in there, it's like the Elmuth Busters here, you can either have confirmed or busted or plausible. Can't be confirmed without the actual data or keys or whatever. It can't be busted unless someone else has also got the same data, which is at the moment, there's only one other person that would actually have information and be able to make fake emails. So the only way is to have enough details that makes it plausible. But I think it's got that way because it's been hardly any mention about it whatsoever. Yeah, it's really remarkable. I actually you go ahead. No, no, no, well, well, yeah, that's what I find so interesting is that you expect at least to be a lot of negativity. Yeah, there's been a few nasty comments and a few positive comments, but that's it. It's almost like a flat line. Whenever it does pop, pops its head up. So it's quite strange that it is holding back just. They don't want to say it's it's it's false or fraud or wrong. In case it's proof does come forward. And they don't want to say it's it's true, just in case it's proved to be a scam or a fraud. Well, it's like it's like nothing else that's out there in terms of people claiming to be Satoshi. There's no there's no pomp and circumstance. It's just ideas. And it's originally I stumbled across this article a long time ago. It must have been right when you wrote it. I probably saw it on the subreddit and I skimmed over it. And I thought the way that it was written, you know, with quotes and stuff, I thought there's no way this dude remembers all these conversations that clearly. And so I dismissed it. I didn't realize because I didn't read it carefully. You say at the very beginning, this is a way to recall memories. This is not literally verbatim what happened. And then I went, oh, obviously this this actually makes a great deal of sense that this would be a way that you would reconstruct it in your mind after the fact that I read it carefully.  Well, yeah, there's been quite a few people that have skipped over that the first few paragraphs, basically the disclaimer. So I've had to adjust it and make it even more clear that if I actually had the original development emails, there'd be a lot more details involved, more accurate, more timing. Plus, all I have to do is actually post the entire emails, including the the raw headers. And people will be able to establish whether or not this fake screenshot emails that someone else has been throwing around. Actually, the raw headers are going to analyze whether they've actually gone through different mail servers. Plus, also, what people don't realize is that what was ended up being released was a cut down version of what was figured out, designs even implemented. And so there's if the emails were accessible, the amount of stuff that that is big, when it's like, you know, a small amount, I'd say about 25 percent compared to what was designed to be implemented later on, which we found are more important, which I've hinted at in that Bitcoin origin story. But of course, I cannot give any details because I do not have them. And it's something that happened over half a decade ago. And if you recall something that happened half a decade ago, you don't pull in too many details, some of them you can, but not every single thing. You know, also, it's more like a photo album. You know, when you someone says you did something like five, ten years ago, I think, well, I can't remember that. And they show you a photo album with you. Yeah, there's you and a few others. And I remember, and then you remember some of the peripheral details that aren't actually captured by that photo. I think what's been happening the last year and a half. I think what's going on, too, for a lot of people is they see the creation of Bitcoin as such a an intellectual accomplishment, like such a paradigm shifting accomplishment that the idea that that the creator of it didn't really recall all the details after the fact to kind of left the project. I think they think is like, oh, that's that's silly. That's not the way the world works. Or like somebody with that level of knowledge couldn't abandon the project or like this information will come out. A lot of it comes down to the way some people's brains think. We know that school, right? I school with six, seven hundred people in that. And I'd see everyone walking one direction. And I'd be saying, where's everyone going? And everyone know the instructions given out the last couple of weeks, except me, every single, even the thick people would know where they're supposed to go and all rest. And I'm standing there going, I don't remember any message being sent up to anybody. Yeah, so that's always been my case, is that that I just recall. So it's like the brain is like separate to me. Only if my brain decides to give me information, it will give me the information, otherwise it just locks it away. The big cases when I was in the RNZEF doing avionics technician course. And I'd learned about like valve technology that so well in the graphs and everything else, that the instructor was putting me in front of the class to show them and instruct them how the anodes and cathodes and everything else works about them and all the calculations. And so we go to the courses and trying to pass mark was like 70 percent. But if you got below 80 percent, you were frowned upon. And I was part of the group with them trying to get above like 98, 99 percent. I got one of the tests and my mind would be completely blank. It would not give me any information whatsoever. Here I am thinking, hang on, these other people are passing these these this course based upon information I taught them. So I clearly know this, but my brain just just nothing at all. Wouldn't retain anything. So this is maybe not a normal human trait, but it's a my trait type thing. That's fascinating. I found I don't I don't have it in that extreme, but I find details that completely escape me. It's like like citations, for example, like I consume a great amount of content, synthesize a great amount of content. But if you were to ask me, where did you get that piece of information? Where did you get that statistic? There's not a chance in hell that I could recall anything. It's like I consider that metadata and it just gets eliminated. And I have no purpose for it, which is not good. If you're trying to, you know, persuade somebody of your perspective to not recall the metadata, it's just my my brain doesn't find it interesting. It's like putting references at the end of a white paper and your brain say, well, I need these references or citations to show people what I looked at to actually come to this conclusion. And without that, no one's going to believe anything you say.  Your brains focus on one goal and its goal is not making a list of citations and references. So you can show to other academics and go, look at these references, citations, I must be important. Oh, I've referenced you. So you must be important. And you must like my document and my conclusion. Exactly. I've referenced you. Well, well, well, well, well, for a start, as long as you realize that I'm not making any claims, right? I've put the information out there, right? But I'm not going around making claims, right? I like to know the people. But but people could think that claims are being made. But it's it's it's more important that the but the thinking process gets put out there. Right. Because I even come across someone that's actually described the thinking process of being able to do something that's actually fundamentally impossible. Even when Bitcoin itself was released, so January 2009, at that time, it was not currency. Right. It was not money. All these ideas of this is what money is. If you looked at Bitcoin at that time, it was not money. You had to go to something that's not money. And have a process in place that will transform into money, which itself is impossible. So forget about the conventional rest. Just get the currency working. I'm talking about things like, like it's got to be a store of value, a medium of exchange and it kind of stuff. Well, it was none of those things. You could not use it as a medium of exchange because you could transfer it just like a file. That's not if I see you a file, that's not a medium of exchange. All right. I'll try using FTP or something. That's not a medium of exchange in a monetary sense. Yeah. So all the all the value things that that state that money is this, blah, blah, blah, blah, Bitcoin just wasn't. It became that it was bootstrapped to do that over a year or two. So how all these ICOs are doing this? I don't think they are. Are they ever zero of them? Because they haven't even thought of that. This information was never made public in the first place. So. For at least someone else has also come along with these thoughts saying, OK, we've got to start with something that's not money and make it money. And this is the process. None of them are thinking that they're all thinking you'll get rich quick. I talk to people over the last, you know, for months. And then if you really want to, you could throw out an ICO every week and make a million of water in glass every single week. Yeah, you could generate or do exist websites which will auto generate the buzzword abstracts for the white pack. That's brilliant. And just pop it automatically and it just becomes a numbers game. Yeah. All right.  Right.   Well, when I that's actually interesting. And I've learned honestly in the past few years, I've learned more about how the world works through watching what's happened in Bitcoin than pretty much any other point in my life. Like what happened with the I don't know how closely you follow the BTC versus BCH stuff and like the development process. It's crazy. The politics is crazy. Humans are totally crazy. But I literally have learned life lessons from this. And my brother as well, we're both like, hang on a second.  It's been taken over and overpopulated by people. It's a it's a get rich quick scheme. The development has totally changed that a lot of these people do not have the same fundamental principles. And I don't I don't know if I'd say it's a conspiracy, but people there's a lot of people who are very suspicious of like big business and big corporations. And as things get more popular, they kind of get watered down. I see it firsthand. And I imagine from your perspective, if you've been watching it, it's probably frustrating or heartbreaking, or maybe you had the expectation that this was going to happen. And like this is going to turn into a 90 percent of the crypto people are kind of scammers who are just trying to make a quick buck. But I didn't I was naive prior to following Bitcoin into seeing how the world works like this. Oh, yeah, it's interesting. From my perspective, I think it should have fought five years ago. Yeah. All right. Here's one reason why they most and others were put in charge of major social. Um, points of interest. Just take my sister as well. For my perspective, an unpleasant person. Um, he came to come in front of the scammers and multi-level marketing arena and career. Oh, do you know him then? No, no, no, no. Only this sense of online communications. He started coming. He got involved in 2009 or something like that. But he was this influx of Craig was supposed to go to the programming sites, the development sites, the game developments are more specifically the hacking and the cracking sites in the ISE channels and get folks involved from there. And I don't think he ever did. And they end up getting all these things like people that are interested in scamming and multi-level marketing, his type of people, which is where they must come from. The thing is, I remember some of the early messages he had in a source forage form. He was talking about telling people to if they get their family members involved and their friends involved and actually, you know, make real, real exchanges of stuff would actually give the real value to this item, then pump it up, pump it up, and then we can sell it, right? Make money. So he was only interested in making money of friends and family right from the start. He might have changed his attitude over.  People would choose to go to another message board. It's the reason why Bitcoin Talk was actually replaced the source forage forums on Bitcoin.org. But it was split off to its own domain, specifically so that people could actually stop going to it and choose their own one that they want to go to. So if one was being censored, the go-to one that was uncensored. Now, that was supposed to happen like five years ago, not in the last year or two. You knew then that there were going to be people involved in the project that just wanted to kind of a get rich quick scheme. Did you see from an early point that this could be something that had even dramatic political implications? There's a lot of libertarian theorists who have taken the Bitcoin technology and run with it and they go, this is going to bring down nation states. Like this is going to be an end to war. And they kind of really run off to the extreme. I think there's some truth to that. I think that it definitely has political implications. But was that something that you thought to yourself, oh man, this is going to be a world changer? There's different aspects to it. If you read the story, you'll see that there's different parts of the timeline. Like for the start, when I first got involved, I'm just finishing off the wasn't. It was actually to involve Dave and Greg. Just so I could be on the sidelines viewing the development of Craig's electronic cash thing. He was trying to do part time for five years and full time for one and a half years. Just like a few years before in late 90s, I was involved in the uncompusive. And I was on the sidelines watching how people develop the PNG file format to replace the GIF file format. So I was in the comprehensive forms, actually reading the message back there, adding my own every now and then, as they figured out how this thing's going to actually exist to what the file format is going to do, should it have animation or not, and they decided to have a separate MNG file format for the animation side of it. Well, just files can do both static and animations. And so I'll do the same thing again, be on the sidelines, reviewing really intelligent crypto type people, figure this electronic cash thing out. And it turned out that nobody really wanted to help at all. So I end up saying, well, I'll try and give you a help by learning this stuff and see if I can help you out. And in the end, find out that you can't solve it at all. If you study every single type of electronic cash attempt in the past, last 20 years or so, they always failed because they always trusted a computer that could be shut down. The last, the biggest one, it was not shut down by the computer, but they called them by saying they were money transmitters or they needed a license or financial license, and they got them shut down because of that. But that didn't work, they just kept those, better switched off. And some try to mitigate that by having multiple computers running. There's only six computers that need to be shut down. The only way to do it is so that the amount of funds needed to shut down the system is greater than to be applied in the first place.  So this sort of thing, it was impossible. You can't do it. And so that's why I left this project and said, well, good luck, not gonna happen, right? And that's when I decided to start my own project up. Because I was thinking about it for a few weeks and I was thinking, if you could solve this business time generous problem in a practical sense, right? Not in an academic sense. Forget about the cash side of it. That will actually solve one of the great problems in the computer industry at the moment that you cannot have a digital file that only exists one location. Or at least the ownership of it. As soon as you transmit it to someone else, you're not sending it to someone else. You're making a copy and sending it, right? And you're not even sending it. You're not even sending that copy. All you're doing is making copy, you're sending it and it's being distributed in every hop along the way. It's pausing and another copy's made and it's gone to the next hop and next hop until it gets to its destination. And so multiple copies are being made on the hops towards its destination. They're deleted, of course, because those ISPs and RORs cannot afford to store everything. Well, I'll let you in and say. But yeah, so to say, how on earth can you make it so that there's only one copy in the digital world? So how entire societies are based upon Well, they say about scarcity and you're talking about gold. It's not scarcity of everything. Scarcity of a property, only one person can own a property at a time. Well, that was a digital property. Well, you just make copies and copies and copies and say multiple people own it. But how can you prove that only one person does? Well, you need a physical record in a physical office at the local council or county office. Well, if that's the only way to do it, then we're not going to progress ever. There's a line now of progress as far we can never go forward. However, if you can solve the problem of these additional documents being recorded, not being able to be changed, then all these systems, the base of our societies can be transferred into this digital realm finally and we can progress further. So you knew that that early on before you even developed it. You knew that that was No, not for making the attempt to try to see if I make it. So I've already finished giving up on Craig's attempt because it was not all the rest other attempts going to fail. And so thinking this through, it would fundamentally change it because at the moment, while we are tied, say your local house is tied to the local county office or council office, we're going to have cities and provinces and states and countries and nations and regions, lots in the area. If we're going to actually be a global village, which has been talked about since the mid 90s, that means that information should be able to be stored anywhere. Not just local. If it has to be local only, then you'll only ever stay local. Yeah, and you got to remember that all the solution to the solution did not come by at one go. You had to start somewhere and just trust the process that if there is a solution, if the facts want you to figure it out, they'll let you figure it out.  Otherwise, it's worth all taking the chance anyway. Because I've seen the last few months that some folks back then were saying that there was some talking about electronic cash and digital assets and stuff in the early 2000s. But from what I saw, no, they weren't actually, they were already given up. So there wasn't this great big bad cash back. There were some that made a paper in the mid 90s, the late 90s, the early 2000s, the mid 2000s. But there wasn't a group, like a little gang or talking about this thing. From my perspective, though, the idea is not to go around and make it as if saying, this is the guy that invented the technology and set it up and was projecting all the rest because that, in itself, the first thing people would do, even myself, would go, OK, that's a hell of a claim. Where's the proof of that? There is no proof. OK. We can ignore everything else that's mentioned. I thought about just a random person off the internet just having an interesting discussion. That's all right. So there's a lot of people who are looking at Craig and are thinking, OK, this guy has really deep knowledge about Bitcoin origins and they don't have enough. They don't know enough to see that there's quite a lot of bluster with Craig. It's a very weird mix of saying what appears to be very deep and correct and insightful claims mixed with a horse shit, quite frankly. Part of that's my fault, I reckon. I told me I said one of the tricks to communication is that I got an echo from my father.  And and and that works quite well, right? Yeah. But he should have combined them both. Right. So so this is this is one of the other. It's got a really great photographic memory top thing. He is like as a personal assistant, he's like the best Google you could ever have. You Google for something and you have to go through 10 page and you still don't find it.  About 50 seconds later, he's come back. He's got all these different references that are related to what you were just talking about. Yeah, better than good. And so that's one of that's honestly one of the other pieces of the puzzle that that make a very compelling case to me. And one of my friends who I think you had conversation with, we were talking about this and we said, well, look, this this Phil story is the only one that actually allows both sides of the Craig drama to be correct because there's some people who say Craig is Satoshi because he's got all this inside information. And there's some people to say, Craig is obviously a scammer who may be even technically incompetent. Well, both of them can be correct in this scenario because he is a scammer and he has information that only Satoshi would have. Yeah, so both the both parties are satisfied there. Yeah, but no, no, no. If you think of those two scenarios like, OK, you try and figure out a story where both of those are actually true and give them to 20 people, 100 people, a thousand people or put a $10,000 value on a story that would link to those two types of parts of Craig and make them both true. They'll have a very difficult time. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Mixed with the the writing that that the reason that I contacted you and the reason I was compelled is because of the way you were talking about the thought process. So it's like that's what I was talking to my wife about as well, because she's also a bit of a bit coiner. She was working at BitPay for a while where we've been involved in Bitcoin for a bit. She was saying, because she works with me, I do a lot of independent work outside the academy. And she said, Steve, that here we have a guy who is writing from a perspective of doing something that the experts considered was impossible, demonstrating deep knowledge of the actual concepts involved, put the pieces together with Craig. And it's either the case that the story is roughly correct or you now have to explain the existence of this fill guy and his incredible storytelling ability to put all the pieces of the puzzle together and tie them in with like deep theoretical knowledge of Bitcoin. Like, I mean, that's pretty impressive. If that's what you've done is if you even if it's just like not anything like fan fiction or fan fiction or a story, it's still pretty impressive. Pretty impressive. It's pretty impressive. So I should be getting a pat on the back for that. But even that has not happened, which is very, very odd. You get people posting like crack posts on Reddit and stuff and they get like a thousand upvotes or a thousand downvotes and stuff. There was action. My stuff, if you actually look at my Reddit post I made, it's only like 10 or 30 people actually upvoting or downvoting or even like only a dozen or less commenting. I just like no, no, just everyone's afraid of saying yes or no. Honestly, I think it's because it's on a different level. So to think with a lot of scammers and the people that have been promoting their satoshiness is because they have self-interest involved and it comes through in their writing. So they're operating at a certain level. They're saying things that one, like if you were role playing satoshi, you would say if you were trying to like build your status and ethos in the community. But the stuff that I've seen you write is not from that perspective at all. It's it's coming from a perspective which I don't think people know how to engage with at all. Like with Craig, he's got reasons to lie. You know, and he's writing stuff on yours.org like this poorly written emotional like we're going to we're going to go and change the world, guys. And it's like, OK, he definitely is trying to capitalize on. There's quite a lot of people who believe that that he is the creator of it, who I don't think have seen this other side of the story. We can kind of have your cake and eat it, too, that, yes, Craig was an integral part and was there at the beginning.  And he has access to information that only Satoshi would have. Just all. Yeah. Well, just just one one pull out one thing that you're just saying about technically incompetent, I wouldn't say it's like I think everything is a sliding scale of some sort. Right. So there's some things he's technically very competent in. Other bits, it's just a mess. And other things he's learned like early on, he could not understand or comprehend the private public keys. He understood the mathematics far better than me of how the calculations done. But he could not understand the concept of what private means and what public means. Because some other paper that he read, they talked about giving out the private key and then sign the stuff with the public key and the people with your private key were. And so he was wanting to use that. And I can say, no, no, no, that paper is wrong. It's called private because you keep it private, you know, secret. And it's called public because that's the key you give out to the public. And it is public. He says, but when you when you generate it, you know, some of the command line, you know, it gives out two keys, right? It says one's public, one's private. And it goes by the the calculation itself. It does not matter which one you use, because a synchronous. You encrypt with one and only the other one can actually decrypt it. And vice versa. Right. I think, yeah, yeah. But it uses has the word private public to help you. So you can choose one and make sure you don't swap around. If you choose the one that stays private and you want to use a public, you now have to call it public, right? Because it's there was a huge email list of just covering that. Over three days to finally make him understand the key that giving out to the public is called public. And don't try and screw things on. So so when you go to a tender for competence, yeah, some things he's exceptional on some other things he's absolutely hopeless. Yeah, fair enough. And that's what works good as a team as well, because you you had me on one side, you had him on the other. And you also had Dave trying to calm our our, you know, personalities down. So it was actually clear in the in that origin story, what was Dave's role? Was he actually contributing to the code? Or was it kind of like you say, the the the moderation role between the two of you? No, those bits of both, for instance, for the. For when we're building the client, right? So you say, what was it September, October, November? We we use something called WX widgets or something like that, some sort of widget type type user interface system. And it was we use that because Dave had done some programming but not much, right? And that's what he'd used. And so it's a system we use that, which annoyed me because I wanted to use the interface to be like space age. So awesomeness, right? Because I come from assembly background and not just assembly, just the language, but the Win32 assembly group, which is making Windows programs, but from the assembly using assembly language to call in the the Windows libraries. And we'd use normal resource files. And one of the examples I had was to have custom windows instead of normal rectangle windows, you're going to actually get an image and have it any shape you want. All right, you might have seen like Win app and a few of the audio players, you can select it to custom mode and it'll be a funny shape. Yeah, I do remember that. Right, it was that type of stuff. And so I actually made an example for a, this is like 2002, 2003, an example, how to use the, in Windows back then, like XP, Windows XP, you had the card games, like Free Cell and all rest. And they had a special DLL, the Navig Library, that had the cards in it. That's why they're always off the same. And I came up with a Win32 assembly example of how to access this library and display the cards on the screen. So the other people would go and make their own card games. Now, but to do that, I decided to make a one of these custom user interfaces. So it's a nice show. I changed the interface to two giant grabbing buttons, one to make it all display all the cards in their suits and other ones to shuffle them. Not an actual game, but to show the how to technically use the stuff. And I wanted this to be part of the user interface for Bitcoin. Interesting. Now it's supposed to be this boring old box type thing. It was going to be a specific user interface. It's going to look like this thing for the poker table. This is what we're going to use or something very, very similar to it. As well as supposed to be a marketplace and the idea is no, these square boxes anymore, we'll actually have custom, right? For him to help us a little bit, he needed to use this WX widget using the face system. So we use that later on into the normally, it was changed to QT because people wanted to to put it onto other operating systems and this widget thing, whatever it couldn't be ported to other operating systems. QT was a system to have user interface that can be compiled to run on. It was even more, well, it's the direction that was had to go down, but it was still a way. I wanted the core Daemon or REST to be the same on all systems that used the interface should be specific. Yeah. So Windows should have the RSRC files that are making the user interface and Unix, whatever GTK, whatever it is, the use for that. And OSX should have a Nib files and have them specific for those platforms and have the core interface encode could be the same. But that's history now. I'm gonna always change it and she start making these awesome user interfaces again. Yeah, I think actually there's, I was just listening to an interview with Johannes Varemoll, I think is his name. He's like a systems designer from France who was big on Bitcoin Cash now and he was saying kind of a similar idea not having one monolithic software program that is Bitcoin Core that does all of it. He was saying it needs to be broken up across industry. So like why not just have specific software that runs for supply chain stuff? Why don't you gotta have specific software that runs just the mining stuff? Specific software for user interface for point of sale technology that actually makes a lot of sense. Why would the idea of glumping it all into one box literally that you gotta use the terminal to make work is not a good way of doing it. And then people turn around saying they're the best engineers in the world. Well, if you actually talk to the best engineers in the world you find out no they're not. You remember if you go and push back to, oh well that's how the client reference was, only what half a dozen files when it first came out. Yeah, because it was a pre-file concept. We did not know that within two weeks it would fall over something obvious sort of fault that we just could not see. No, we had the blinkers on and we just could not see this great big problem over here. It would fall over two weeks or six, seven weeks down the line after the word had got out in some academics they have real expertise come in and say, well, you got this problem, this problem, this is that factor that you didn't think of it's not gonna work, all right? Teens of amount of effort but it was worth while making it and taking the risk but yeah, it was cut down just to see if it works. And if it worked, okay, then we can bring in the other ideas of planetary civilization, geodesic threads, data and all that, okay? As I start dividing up the world into regions and stuff based on where the human beings actually are, okay? Get rid of the idea. You'd have flags for your own sports teams and all that but the idea of having a nation using a flag to be able to murder other people, get rid of that system completely by transferring the wealth away from those, okay? And then the whole system would be broken apart into just the code for the protocol side of things, other code for doing this and now that, okay? All these ideas are already figured out or practically all of them. But as soon as it was working as a, it could be used as an online gambling token type thing, it's stagnated at that point ever since because that's what Craig wanted was, he's coming from a scamming or a little marketing, online gambling, casino, that around. As soon as you got a token that could work in that environment, he was not interested in putting the other stuff in. So it was a talk discussion when mining pools first started up in 2010, I think it was.   Someone started a mining pool, which is gonna take a large percentage of the hashing power type thing. And so one person's got a large amount of the hashing power and certainly being decentralized over Australia, 1,000 people and 1,000 people were having a little bit from the computers. You have one and all these people were putting their machines towards this one pool. It's a failure of decentralization, doesn't work. And part of it was that, well, if you draw a line, it's all gonna go end up being these pools. And what's the difference between one person having 1,000 machines in one location or 1,000 people with one machine spread around the world, all aiming it towards one pool? From the network perspective, it looks the same. So visually from the network perspective, it's going to a node and there's like 1,000 machines behind that node. It doesn't matter whether it's a pool or not. Or one person with 1,000 machines at one location or a pool. If anything come down to decentralization, far better to have a pool with 1,000 machines spread across the planet than having one person that's got 1,000 machines in one location. That's decentralization. That takes one missile to destroy that amount of hashing power while one pool with 1,000 nodes spread around the planet, take 1,000 missiles. So I told you before about a trillion dollars aimed towards you. You've got to actually make it so that it costs more than that to destroy it. That's the idea of decentralization. The machines be decentralized. Doesn't care about the people. It could be one person. Now this is how extreme it can be. It could be one person. If you take the line to the most extreme, unlikely, but to the most extreme to one person, one pool. So there was one pool and you're always miners around the whole planet all going towards there for this one. How many, what, 40 exahashes or whatever it is. That's decentralized. The machines themselves are decentralized. And it will take, say there's 10,000, 100,000, however many machines there are around, how many machines would there be now? Hundreds of thousands of them. Probably, yeah. So there are hundreds of thousands of missiles we need to take out that network even if we only had one pool, right? That decentralization is not the number of nodes that are showing on the network itself. Where the machines are and how many missiles are needed to destroy the network. So what do you think then about when people are talking about the actual geographic centralization of mining based on differences in electricity in countries?  So you do worry about geographic centralization. Oh yeah, especially subsidization.  Some of them say that if you're a manufacturing industry, we will subsidize your electricity so that you can be competitive with other countries that we've got cheaper electricity. But everyone else doesn't get their electricity subsidized. If you look at most places, it ends up being that the retail electricity users, which means all of us falls in our homes, trying to get warm in winter, we're actually subsidizing the manufacturers. All right, they're getting their electricity so much cheaper. But there is a problem if it only comes to one, but the idea is that it's all competition. So that if it ends up being available to the planet, and it's all being subsidized by, say, Chinese government subsidizing electricity and it's a lot of mining equipment. Remember again, there's definitely mining pool, which some of them might be in China, and then mining equipment, physically being in that location. If there's a bit more of that mining equipment in that location, that's valuable, the world, you'll get the US government saying, right, we're gonna subsidize electricity for miners in our country. You cannot afford it at the moment because it's like five to 10 cents per kilowatt hour while in China it's two cents. Okay, we're gonna subsidize, if you're a mining company, not these other companies, if you're a mining company, we'll do that, Russia do the same. So all these big countries will end up doing the same thing, if they find it's valuable. Okay, they might of course have a pain that they want it will be concentrated in China, so it becomes worthless. Or some, they might be paying their other gains. So you see competition among governments essentially. Well, see, this is really interesting because I know, so I consider myself like a big blocker, like I think it's, you gotta increase the block size that just makes sense for how the system scales. But one of the arguments that the small block side, one megabyte forever side uses, they say, well look, you're gonna get data centers that are the only ones that are able to be Bitcoin miners and those data centers that are gonna geographically isolate in those areas with the cheapest electricity and that's a real concern. And you think that, I mean, I think I agree with you, but you're saying that there's gonna be enough competition around the globe where that's not a realistic concern. It's also, if you focus on one little area of it, you can create this example of how bad it'll be and that's with all cases. But with this use, there's other games of foot in this entire system. One is, well, for a start, say across of electricity, okay? Well, before I go into that, part of this concentration comes from Isaac Osumoff. Isaac Osumoff is a science fiction writer. He also wrote some proper scientific books, but he's more well known for the robot series as well as foundation books. And in the foundation books, in the prelude to foundation, it mentions about how certain provinces end up being specialized. All right, so for one thing, when the tops of food is like some sort of fungus or fungi type flavored stuff that's used for either to eat completely or as a dessert or as a almost like hoops and spices that are used across the galaxy. And different areas grow this stuff, but the best place was well known on the planet of Trent or one location. And so the best place is that location. And you see that again and again all over the planet, depending on what need to be manufactured or developed, the tops of people themselves or their culture or just their ability becomes focused. And so when it comes to electricity on this planet, if there's some areas which are more beneficial for the generation of electricity, then that should be where it should be focused. They're more efficient. If it's better to have it generating in the equatorial type nations because that's where they hit the most sunlight. So you have solar and that's where they'll focus. There's an area that's more windy. That's where the wind farms when it being. So again and again and again, you should be able to see these concentrations anyway. That's natural. If you try this sort of idea of social equality of everyone's equal and so it should be spread evenly across the planet. Well, the solar panels trying to generate power up in the far North Arctic Sea area or Antarctic, not gonna be exactly the same as those in equatorial nations. And so one's more efficient, one's less efficient. And to create those solar panels in the first place is usually more toxic than digging coal out of the ground and burning it. This joke, you don't wanna actually notice that there's actually more toxic waste and from generating this clean solar panels than it is to actually just burn coal. Sorry, but don't talk to you about that. So again, you gotta take into the whole thing, not just the nice market that's in a glossy magazine. So there might be concentration. Sure, if it was all concentrated there, well, that'd be dangerous. Again, how many missiles does it take to destroy the system? With electricity, it'll be different though. If you go through human species evolution and change development over tens of thousands of years, that the nation states, not even before, even for this nation states, that the city states, even before they're at the townships and the ones that succeeded for the longest time are usually those that had the most advanced weaponry. They're the best tools at the time. Sticks and stones, and then you had bronze and copper, bronze and then iron. The last few hundred years, things have ramped up immensely.  Before then, say you go back 300, 400 years ago, there'd always be a creature on this planet that did something better than us, all right? Which is faster. Cheetahs would run 60Ks an hour until we got steam engines, all right? And put them on wheels and tracks, and then we had steam locomotives. Then we could actually go faster than these creatures. It would finally go further. Before we had aircraft, we couldn't fly like the albatrosses and eagles. So with flight in this last century, we are now superior to all the birds. And now in the last few decades, we've done something even astronomically crazier. We've actually gone to orbit around this planet and even gone to, physically, the human being has gone to the local satellite and back again, all right? So we're now in the last century, even far, far above any other creature on the planet, but it's only been recent. It's only the last couple of hundred years, or the last hundred years, this has happened. Before that, there was always some creature on this planet that's superior to us in some way, all right? So you go back these tools, and as far as I'm concerned, we're the greatest tool using creature on the planet. And whoever was the top dog in an area had the best tools, had the best weapons, had the best way of transporting our water into their townships, put out their villages into towns into cities. Without a viaduct, you'd never have the mass of cities that Romans had, as well as supply lines for digging iron ore out of the ground and smelting it and then building weapons to actually defend the borders and each others. At the moment, what's the greatest tool the humans have right now? We've got electricity. Those without electricity, they're tiny, they're little, they're nothing. Those that make the best use of electricity, which you're talking about electronics, the machines that we're talking through right now, the machines that are powering the communication systems right now, and the banking system right now, the finance system right now, everything. That is the number one tool. So whoever has control over the electricity, if you didn't have that, all of a sudden, power gets blacked up, now what? It was screwed. Even if the servers go down, you're stuffed. Can we go back to paperwork? Well, no, the entire system get up now. It's not like it was 20, 30 years ago. When computers were a new system, but they were still used the older system as a backup. Now, everything is online. There is no paper backup and the power goes down, it was stuffed, which means the electrical lines in a city and a nation is very, very important. Okay, it has to be defended against. And so if all the electricity in the world was getting generated in China and then microwave beams around the planet, back up into satellites and then through to other satellites and back down again, because it's so efficient there. Even through that incredible extreme case, which will never happen, it would be in the entire world's interest to defend that power generation, even if they hate the people. If one nation hate the other, but that's where all the electricity coming from, you would have your forces in that country to defend the generation of that electricity. Well, defend against others that would break that cycle or harm. Okay? So it'll work out as far as I'm concerned. A typical human self-interest will work out. Because if it didn't, we would have already become extinct long ago.  Dancing in a little circle, holding hands, that's nice for fairy tales, but when the children grow up and became adults, they're going to get their hands up for adults. You just don't say that. Hey, I love competition, but really you want to bury them. Right. I mean, that's a point that I do feel like is missed when people are looking at the Bitcoin system. A lot of them are actually thinking that things like greed are a flaw in the system. Like, oh, miners are going to be so greedy. People are arguing, what happens if the miners get together and inflate the monetary supply so that they just could give themselves more money?  You hear what you just said then, inflate the monetary supply. What does that monetary supply mean? Use its value. So what they could buy with, say, 100 items, they'll actually need 120 of those items to buy the same item, that same thing. And probably less than that because they're going to be destroying the value and the faith of that currency. So it's a double whammy, not only... Yeah, it's actually a fine balance. If they're smart, they'll actually devalue it by actually giving themselves less coin, which means there's going to be less than that item. It means the value of it's going to go up for what they've actually currently got. But the others that are new to the system want more. And so it's a fine balance anyway. Let's talk about before and about these fake toshies and stuff like that. Well, if you're going to tell a lie, you've got to be confident, right? Which is great. I practice that often. I was even at a meeting some sort of course yesterday. And the person asked me, what's your name? And without skipping a beat, what's your name? Steve. Right? Not because of you, but I use that quite often. You go to one of the... The direct name, I know. The juice places and they say, what's your name? And people will give their real name. For one thing, that's your private information. Why do they need your private information? They just need to call it a noise. And so it's uniquely you or something like Fred and things like that, right? I've got to say something, even my boys saying, oh, I'm Ann Chovey, right? I'm still not sure whether or not your name is Phil Wilson, but I'm not going to push it. Well, there she had someone in red that actually asked me, I said, yeah, can you actually prove you are Phil Wilson? Right? So, yeah. But the idea is to be confident, but some of the other guys that I'll talk to after the Santoshi Roundtable, they can fib. Because I was in Cancun in Mexico, so there was a lot of tequilas, right? But I was going to say the same type of thing that I've been talking to you about, no matter how many tequilas I had up until like one o'clock in the morning. And I said to some of these guys, one of these guys later on, about a week or two later, right? Oh, even a month or two later after Craig had said a few odd things. I said, well, let's wait. I said this and this and this, whatever. And I was off my face with tequilas, right? Right? I mean, my story is still consistent, you know, whether I'm sober or half-cat or off my face, which a person that was trying to adjust and make things up or whatever, would not be able to do even if they're sober the entire time. Right. Right? Little I know had a few drinks. Well, on that note, so you were at the conference in Cancun. Are you still, are you working with anybody in the BCH community? Because I mean, people, even if they don't know who you are, you're going to have ideas that people would be really, really excited about.  No, no, no. I'm not doing the old Puppet Master thing that I was doing in 2009, 2010. In the new message board, there's been Bitcoin talk, we're still on the Bitcoin.org site. We were actually running multiple handles. Right? It's like I come from winter tourism as a moderator there, not just a member, but one of the main moderators. And I just try and manipulate the environment of the community so that it's encouraging to newbies. Because with assembly and crypto and Norris, you've got all these people with a huge, at least, not any other thing, programming as well, I suppose, computer science. Everyone's got these elitist EOs and stuff, right? Me just as much as anyone else. However, I can say that for things to progress, we've got to have an environment where newbies are okay asking questions, which people think are stupid. Because we all start that level, right? And so we're using different multiple handles on the message board. So you can have one of our handles ask a silly question, a newbie question, then another will come in and give an answer and apply it to other members, long-time members, the ones at least, can actually see what's the appropriate type of language to use against someone asking that question. And change the behavior. Some of the ones that skipped over that were a bit harsh. I'll communicate with them privately and say, no, this is why we're doing this. You delete that message, or you adjust it and stuff. And so if you read all the, if you go through the message board right the first few months, first two or three months or whatever, say, December, January, February, March, you will see it a very different looking top of community than it is now. Or in red or anything. Because we remain lippin' in the hell of it. You've got foundation, right? You've got foundation one, which is Bitcoin, right? Or sorry, not just Bitcoin, but the planetary civilization and that's foundation one. It's meant to take over from the old broken empire, the current currency and United Nations and all these different nation states we've got now. It's gonna be replaced by this second foundation. I'm sorry, sorry. By this new foundation. And the idea is to have a second foundation that manipulates and controls that in the background. So I was using the message board to learn manipulation techniques.  No, no, no, there's deception and lies and manipulation is filled with it. But you don't know about it, right? That is the most altruistic social engineering I've ever heard of. That's so funny because you see it in reverse on the Bitcoin subreddit, the R Bitcoin subreddit. The social media engineering is just overdrive the amount of censorship and chills that are trying to create the narratives. It's so transparent, but it's funny that it was done kind of in reverse to help people and bootstrap the project back in the day. It needed to be because without a community being built on a technology it would go nowhere. I said before it wasn't money until you had a process to have people make it money. Now, how did you figure out that piece of the puzzle? Because for me, I did not realize let's say I didn't realize how manipulatable the public is and how empty-headed and just yeah, that's a nice way to put it. How did you realize, okay, what we need is community and it needs to be engineered in this way? Just experience. How's that president of yours going? Great. How was George Bush back in the early 2000s? Yeah? It's obvious in every nation that the people can be manipulated. The reason why government voting is three to four years also why the halving for Bitcoin in every four years is because within two years you'll still remember all the lies and promises that are broken and lies that are told. After six to eight years you'd even forget what type of government system you've got.  They might have these great big fights democracy and democratic nations get this since you can say Vietnam and all the rest because of the communists going, who cares? To the rest of us, it doesn't really matter as long as we can buy toilet paper and food and stuff. It doesn't matter what the political nature is so anything longer than four years and people forget what nation are we in? Monarchy still? We don't know. So soon enough so that people won't forget what type of political power is in control and not too soon that people will remember the lies they told at the last election and why it didn't come through. And three to four years the idea of the harbour every four years is in a planetary civilisation you still need governance you still need the decision makers we might take the power of stealing our funds the 30% of our funds away however we still need things built. We need a weaponry to defend ourselves against other people that will do us harm.  See not going to have private entities paying for the policing force because they will just be using them to defend their own interests. So let's go that way anyway. Sorry you cut out a little bit in the middle but I think I pieced together what you were saying. So for you when you were doing this is this just knowledge that you picked up you observed the world and how empty headed people are and thought this needs to be a part of the bootstrapping because that's project management for Bitcoin that is not something that an academic is going to bring to the table. That's a very concrete practical like the world is broken and confused and we need to manipulate people to get this thing bootstrapped. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah I've said beforehand that the existence of Bitcoin is impossible. Not just the economy every aspect of it it should not exist. It does of course but that's why it's so important to write a process of how this was developed. So people will understand. It's not just Merkle trades existed beforehand and someone wrote about this little one beforehand and they just put together and just magically worked. No, that's exactly the opposite of what happened. You pull things from everywhere. So when it comes to manipulations and stuff I told you about the Win32 assembly community 2000s and and every now and then we made sure that that message board we had rules for that. It'll only be like grey area to white area topics. It's assembly group. So you're looking about the hackers and the crackers type the top of people. So anything greater to dark is not public because all the assembly other assembly groups those that went and talked about how this how you can crack this game this how you crack this software were brought down and closed and those people would be dispersed among whatever assembly groups left over or they make new ones up so every time one of these groups claps we'd have an influx of these elitist egotistical people and to make sure our community did not get pulled down like this just that we had to make sure as soon as they started talking about dark type topics like how to hook processes there are legitimate reasons for doing that but we don't say I started a process of saying you give me an example why you want to be able to hook a process and read the keys typed in and if it's a grey to white area top of reason we'll allow this thread to continue and talk about it we'll put in the ideas of how to do this stuff stuff you can use for hacking and cracking and everything else but it could not give that then obviously you only want to do the dark type usage of people's keyboard strokes and stuff then the thread would be closed down and would leave it up there so that any other 3-letter agencies that are going into these assembly forms and hacking sites and cracking sites could actually see we're stopping that stop it not only the information not being there but we're actively stopping that type of discussion in public it's still happening in private of course that really is brilliant that is brilliant and I would not have understood just a few years ago why something like that is necessary but now I see it just to give you a little bit of background on myself I don't know if you care but you're going to hear a little bit of it now so I do philosophy I wanted to say when you were talking about the Byzantine Generals Problem I'll just tell you this I'll just give you a little monologue here I'll have another lesson while you're talking so if you can solve the Byzantine Generals Problem well then if you can do that you get all these possibilities open up but people have said this is impossible and so they're looking elsewhere there's a great corollary that I'm very excited about which is in the philosophy of mind there's a problem of interaction if it's the case that mind and body are two fundamentally separate things how could they interact what is the mechanism of interaction that was posited since Descartes nobody's been able to solve it and people go well therefore it's unsolvable so they'll say dualism the idea that there's mind body problem are two separate things it sounds great it accords with all of our experiences and all of our theories and wow wouldn't it be great if it were true to the mind body problem that answers the interaction problem and still keeps the distinction between mind and body and it's not even that complex that's something that I'm working on right now anyway it's tangentially related because when talking to my wife she's also doing independent research about some of these things and she's getting into the health community and what she's found in the alternative health community our minds have collectively been blown the people that are the the problems in the community are those who think they know what the heck they're talking about they're the people on those forums in the crypto communities saying the Byzantine general problem is it's impossible to solve and you're wasting your time trying to solve it it's the people in the threat in the forums that you're talking about now that are arrogant pricks that think they know what's going on they're going to disparage anybody else for getting involved in crypto so now I see it I see it first hand and the stuff that I'm doing and stuff my wife's doing and now you say oh you let's say you weeded the garden the social garden at the beginning to get those out of there that's a nice analogy monologue this is a very good analogy because usually when the weeds consume enough nutrients so that the seeds from the flowers can't come through you've got to weed them doesn't have to be all the weeds just the biggest ones causing the biggest problems they'll allow the flowers to come through what we've found is it some of the most active members are not those that have been there three years, four years as members they might be only there for a few weeks or just a few months and some people have been there they started as a newbie three months ago they had a huge learning curve and that because they were helped even three months themselves were become a moderator because they were that active in the community compared to these people that have been there and their leaders attitudes and stuff they've got a great amount of knowledge that's great but they're not moving the community forward they could actually if they're not going to help they might cease to exist non-peers doesn't matter how elitist you are if you're not going to actually add to the community right well your piece starts off with a line you know there's a great difference between knowledge and understanding that's correct and you have those people who have great amounts of knowledge academics like part of what I do my show is I go around and talk to academics about different idea academics and other people like yourself beyond other people and what you find is a lot of these prestigious academics have incredible knowledge no synthesis of the knowledge no understanding of the knowledge and often times even little challenge about their beliefs in their knowledge set so like for example there's just a philosopher named Timothy Williamson he's known as probably the most prominent logician in the world and I got to talk to him everybody knows Timothy Williamson he's a classical logician but anyway I got to meet him in person and talk to him when we sat we talked over lunch we talked about some logic principles and I know that some very elementary basic questions about logic and the metaphysics of logic and what it is he'd not even thought about he'd never been exposed to the man has a massive amount of knowledge but he'd never been exposed to those particular ways of thinking because all the people around him already had their PhDs they already had their thought processes set in stone and they refused to engage with the newcomer or the person that has these fresh questions these fresh perspectives that they've literally never even heard before yeah also I'm going to degrade myself I went to university for a couple of years and was very disappointed in the educational institute I found that I was 2% for this assignment, 2% for that assignment do the very minimal to get that 2% not to actually learn the subject and try and push it further just do the minimal so at the end they got a degree but they got minimal knowledge or even understanding and they might go on to get a PhD and their PhD it's nothing special either it used to be supposed to do something very outstanding to get a PhD anyone seems to be able to get one but I'm not that type of person whatsoever is it the case though that it used to be that you need to do something outstanding to get a PhD because I thought that was the case as well but I treated it as an empirical question I'm open to the idea that actually you've just had people with the illusion of knowledge getting certification while actually not being knowledgeable do you know if the system was different back in the day? I've heard things like some people have said that they've had their papers sent back saying it's not academic wordy enough or whatever the vocabularies of how you know if you're not reaching for a dictionary or a the source every paragraph then you can't say that word use a word that's not usually used except for other people in the academic community so when we're communicating we can say oh yes, yes, yes and nobody else can understand it because we're much more knowledgeable because we know these words that are hardly ever used and then you've actually done it poorly you've actually failed that's actually a failure in my mind I agree and much of the stuff they don't know they're failing I think that's the setting this is again the reason you're writing very compelling is because that is true and in almost all circumstances, not all of them in almost all circumstances if you're using the big word the big fancy word it's probably a little bit less precise and if you use normal common language you're going to be a little bit more a little bit more sharp not only are people going to read and understand you but your actual concepts that much more precise you also got to take into account who's going to be reading your item right and this is going to be other academics and you know they're going to be judging you based upon how many large polysyllabic words you use then you're going to use large polysyllabic words the thing to say with the big one say the white paper itself all the emails were gathered to make this thing and one of the things that Dave said he actually said are you sure you want it worded like this when they're putting the ideas together for white paper I wanted to wait another six months because there's a lot more stuff to figure out but Craig had been promising someone about you know Craig was doing his own electronic cash and whoever he was talking to so there would be people know who was doing it he'd been telling people that in 2008 he'd come out with a white paper on what kind of cash he'd been working on and so since he'd been promising people of this and his one already failed he wanted me to put out my one and he'd be up there as a co-author it was supposed to be a co-author and I wanted Dave as an assistant he insisted Dave not being up there as an assistant on the white paper as an author so I thought my stuff would be about this long about a third of it and his stuff would be like two thirds of it he'd be a prototype material from his previous white paper he'd be adding to it I did not realise there were about 95% of it which is going to be my stuff yeah which is really really annoying it was really annoying so as I said we're going to write out how this thing works I said just copy and paste my descriptions from our emails and just put them in just reword it in your own words and and and then Craig didn't even do that so he actually asked me so I went and got through the emails and extracted stuff there was a lot more than what was in the white paper he actually cut himself out or Dave did and there was some I only gave them over about two thirds the three quarters of what was discussed one to go through as the first we left that completely because I thought well if he really wants a white paper he'll actually go through our emails and take a look which he never did so even if there's some fundamental stuff with Bitcoin that was never put into the white paper at all just because do you remember what it was it's hard obviously I record things about the geodesic sphere the initial data for it the data points the geodesic sphere is like one of those spheres made up of all triangles imagine a soccer ball but instead of being octagons and hexagons or pendergons they're all triangles the guy Buckminster Filler figured out and it's like a stronger structure the idea is to have that across the planet and all these the intersections they're actually GPS coordinates all right and that'll be the new regions in the planet and with tessellation any triangle you can put a a point along each line and make every triangle make into four triangles so you can tessellate this thing into different areas if you're based upon how many transactions are taking place per second or per minute or per month or whatever then you will see that that's where the tessellation of humanity is so if you've got four million people in a city or whatever then you will see four million transactions or if in the middle of Dakota or something like that you've only got one person to make a transaction there'll be one giant triangle taking over the large section of say the area but New York they'll be tessellated down to a strict level or even house level and the idea is every transaction is supposed to have GPS coordinates embedded in it it was never supposed to be this thing of criminals can use it it's supposed to be the exact opposite of what it turned out to be everything is supposed to be tracked so that if you know some funds were used in undesirable ways you can actually just not accept it it'll still be in the system and be used in the system if you personally can decide I want a transaction but I don't want a coin from that or from that so if you know some coin was stolen you can just this is stolen okay so that those funds can be transferred to me and if anyone else accepts them and then try to get it to me I'll say no sorry those funds I don't accept any funds coming from those stolen coins also criminals will find out that they can't move their funds wow that is fascinating there was supposed to be part of Bitcoin at the start but of course Craig only wanted an online gambling scammers like and that was left out that's so interesting because that part flatters my own political bias like I'm a radical libertarian I like the idea of not having all that stuff tracked because I think well then government's going to get access to all that data they're going to use it in nefarious ways they're going to say oh you can and can spend your Bitcoin on this product and not on that product so I kind of like the idea that that's not part of the system well it swings around about something okay the idea though is if we can make a system where the criminals and the social undesirables are forced to stay within the currency system so wow that's such an interesting idea right so say you got two companies right you got employees you got three types of employees you got two companies one is your company one is your competitors company one person is a really great guy he's proactive and he does really know stuff whatever now which company would you want them to be in yours you'd actually pay them extra or bend over backwards or give more time off or whatever for them to be in your company you got a mid-range person, an average person that's the work they do is just it's not mediocre but it's average which company should you be in or should you be in whatever doesn't matter because it's not going to change how successful the company is remember which they're in the other person that's really mediocre they do really report when they actually do do something they do it very poorly and waste funds or lose clients but you want them to be in your competitors company so you'll do anything you can to make the other life in the company undesirable to encourage them to go to your competitor in fact telling people in your company you should hire them so you want the social unsurables in your competitor and the awesome folks in yours now the same thing can be applied to Bitcoin or planetary civilization it's a transition right you want to transition from friends from my space to Facebook to Bebo well you want to be able to transition and they've got a trillion dollars with the weaponry and stuff you can't go blunt force you've got to be tricky and so you want the social undesirables to be in that company or that system and you want the best ones the one the most energetic in the minds and the capability in that to be and forward looking at to be in yours the average people does not matter which one they're in but you need this change and to do that you need to be able to track the funds so the criminals stay in the fair currency system we want to kick the criminals out of the Bitcoin or crypto community everyone's on the bus oh privacy through you privacy I want a planetary civilization and that's not going to work if it's all open for criminals to use at the moment that's the number one use case is criminal usage not normal people usage is day one Bitcoin has always been enough that is such a an attractive idea in theory so I got to think through this so I love it because what you're doing is rewarding the good guys which is great that's what needs to be done you need to have the incentive to reward the good guys and punish the bad guys but what do you do about the threat of governments regulating everybody's commerce let's say the governments don't have just laws aren't you then just giving a massive amount of data to governments to say hey look this person's a criminal according to your crappy laws ah well that's it what person you're pointing at you don't have a person you just have the coin you don't know who the person is you're just blocking the coin years and years ago right this is back in the mid 90s my wife and I this is part time thing we mucked around this from New Zealand there was a Maori centre in Palmerston North and they taught people how to weave flax alright so you know the flax plant and you make little strips out of it and you weave baskets and stuff out of it and I actually learned how to do that as well as I learned how to do flowers which is get one strip and you actually weave it up and down and around and around and then you go around and towards actually a flower and I actually made bouquets and other stuff like that but anyway they did for funding so it's non profit they would put on like the equivalent of bingo or raffles or raffles or something like that to click down like 1500 dollars in profit so they can put towards the community and it went it was stolen alright however my wife collected the fun together and her family in the past have set up successful raffle top things back in on the east coast of the North Island and one of the things they learnt to do is grab at random some of these are the notes 5 dollar notes 2 and 1 dollar notes when they were notes before they changed the coin and every single note as you might realise has a serial number on it and she'd write out of dozens and dozens of notes she'd grab 1 every 3 or 1 every 5 and write down the serial numbers alright and so these things were stolen and she gave the serial numbers to the police and about 2 months later the police came back and said we found them got them those notes they put a alert out and whenever they get fed back into the banks the banks themselves process all the serial numbers so anything on the alert pops up you see in the Batman movies with the radioactive tags on some of the notes in the Batman movie almost like that and it turns out this person went to Auckland went to one of the fares there and she'd got other kids from broken homes or whatever to go out and actually basically laundered the money by going to that $10 note going by a hot dog for $1 and get $9 change it's laundered money and then you got clean $9 but some of these notes come in so they found out that this is fair they went to the fairground and looked at the video footage and actually found the person that was actually giving the money out to the kids and all the rest and we actually know the person from this community and she was all rested so this idea of tracking money the idea of it was odd as after all the months before that going to houses and steal people's stuff as entertainment they don't do it because they're bad bad people or anything like that they do it just like someone would watch a movie sit down and watch a movie on TV or watch a sports program or play Xboxes or PlayStation and it makes going break into places as a form of entertainment still cars not because they want to get somewhere but as a form of entertainment as a cultural disconnect well they're social and desirable so you don't want those type of people now but wouldn't that example be a demonstration that if you had some kind of geographic tracking on the bitcoin that a law enforcement agency could still track you down even if they only you know I don't know the geo thing is not to do with tracking that was to generate a geotech so that every transaction 0.001% ends up going into a geotech for that region so whoever is the authority in that region has the authority to move those funds on projects and resources and stuff that was to do with how to replace the taxation system so there's no personal tax business tax property tax value added tax service tax replaced by one transaction tax as a geotech so that if there's 100,000 people in one geolocation right the other ones that will have the most trucks on the road right and the weight of trucks on the road the weight of a vehicle on the road is like exponential so that bicycles make no damage whatsoever but a car makes a medium a truck a lot of damage and so that's why the cost of registration of vehicles on the road the bigger the heavy the machine the more they've got to pay because the damage in the roads the idea of having bicycles should be registered no no they're doing no damage you guys are vehicles are so the idea is how do you replace the taxation system because this idea of having a tax service or revenue office you've got the treasury department of all these nations and they need some funds for running the country and doing stuff and so they've got a taxation service and it's a huge mess and it still allows the rich companies and the rich individuals to send funds overseas and all this offshoring of accounts and things and Google have done it and the US has just changed the taxation system the last few months that allows them to not be taxed as much and so now they're transferring their funds back to the US all this system there is there is no offshore there is literally no offshore there's no because it exists everywhere Bitcoin and so the taxation system the geo tax goes in New York so all the people that are sending transactions in New York City will actually be generating geo tax for New York City and whoever is the authority in New York City will have those funds available to spend in New York City that has got approved in their transaction the system the authority in the general political area that still haven't been worked out on exactly how to do that how to put a GPS coordinate in the system without relying on the third party to for generating that coordinate and confirming it so that's why the first release of Bitcoin did not have this everything that relied on the third party system or what they called Oracle nowadays and just have the pure peer-to-peer cash part of it without trusting any third parties and this other stuff is supposed to be brought back in and experimented on to see if we can get this going because this is the whole purpose of it if you're not going to take over the world why do we need this? well so I like to imagine so I'll just reveal my political bias I am a market anarchist so I'm somebody that you know I want everything to be I want all the services of government to be provided by markets I don't think monopolies should be in anything the system absent the geotexting thing I'm saying oh this is great when you look at it and think this can be something that's used by taxation agencies to be more efficient essentially where does the trust in government come from because what if you have it seems like that can just be abused easily by crummy governments what do you mean I'm aware all governments are being abusive in their positions every single one so wouldn't it be better than to not even have that part of the package the geotagging thing um it's still come down to the idea of how things how's a pot hole in the road going to be fixed and people say oh well it was done in the past well no in the past you had industrial ownership which means people that owned the industries the factories and stuff they would pay to have the road maintained between the factory and the ports but all the roads in the residential area they were still dirt and stone that's where we'll go to if you want all the ash felt to be pulled up and go back to dirt and stone fine you go with your liberal anarchist ideas but in reality ash felt it's expensive and it's got to be coordinated to be more efficient the problem at the moment is it's already abused at the moment with with once someone's got a government contract the price doubles and triples and quadruples alright that's what you are probably you're going by it'd be more efficient meaning not so wastage if it's more market driven so that alright well it depends on what's needed if you're going to maintain roads strip the layers off and lay a new layer on top the machines to do that are very very costly right the expertise to use those machines and do it's costly so usually it's specialization when it comes to specialization you don't have a market of saying I can choose that person you want to get that person or that person and if you choose whatever one you choose the other one will go out of business or have to move away from the region and get contracted elsewhere other things like right can be more flexible but again there's scales everywhere and the stuff that can be switched or just like this so you're going to have you're going to have say a dozen companies that will do their rubbish collection on the side of the road machine comes along model companies in one city that are doing different suburbs not just one covering the whole district so things like that would be okay doing roads maybe not so much because it's more specialized that's a reasonable objection it makes me think there's some work by Mr. Block who's a kind of extreme economist but he covers roads a bit and I'm okay with the idea of going back to like business ownership the idea well the business has an incentive to keep maintaining the roads because they have an incentive for me to drive there so that would be one even the transition to go from public ownership to private ownership of roads would be very bumpy this is just kind of theoretical it's fascinating to me because the Bitcoin without the taxation part flatters my own political bias so it's so interesting to hear that that wasn't even part of it because the main part was to make a planetary civilization and for that you need to be able to get the social undesirables to stay in the old system it'll actually accelerate if the percentage of undesirables increases in the fair currency system it's failure will be accelerated so if you look at if you look at Isaac Asimov's foundation the idea is the current system is going to collapse within a thousand years and there'll be anarchy for like 30,000 years right and they couldn't figure out they couldn't stop it from collapsing but what they could do is create this foundation which will end up within a thousand years superseding or taking over and so within a thousand years a new empire will be formed from this foundation and so there won't be a thousand years of collapse in anarchy instead of 30,000 well this idea is and it's been on which what happens it could accelerate this person was killed it'll accelerate within 50 years instead of 500 years and all this other stuff the same thing if you can make it so that the undesirables can because I was not necessarily criminals because you're going to have a whole discussion of what's a criminal if you really look at the criminal books are all criminals at some stage it all depends on which ones are going to be enforced right and who's doing the enforcing and everything else but that's why it's the same criminals I prefer to say social undesirables right social undesirables to stay within the fair currency system you accelerate its collapse which is going to happen inevitably so do you think of your when you step back and do meta analysis do you think of yourself as like like a political theorist is not quite the right term but something like a big picture social theorist I don't categorization that's up to other people to decide they have their own fights of what I'd be categorized under because the idea is to focus on the worker of what you want to do okay I want to be put into this category this is the type of stuff I want to do so I can put into this category one thing follows the other and so be other people from the outside that will be putting the finger and putting your little boxes it sounds like a problem because then all of a sudden you say but hang on but he's doing this that's outside my little box right right he's doing it wrong because it's outside my box he's not being libertarian he's doing something that's actually very capitalist in fact that movie with Gordon Gekko he says that thing about greed for lack of a bit of a word is good right there's so many people that are against that I think that's great I give it two thumbs up greed is absolutely fantastic without greed Bitcoin would not work the thing that glues it all together is if you go through the deadly sins and this is actually I went through the deadly sins I'll just type it up here the idea is if you can use the about manipulation control and stuff like that and how people in authority tell you what to do how to behave that how to come into all this time and time again and about the control over the masses and everything else and I've mentioned something about if this is how a human being acts staturally without being swarmed or told or anything but you made laws saying you've got to behave like this the exact opposite of being a human being but if you were to be a human being you had to act like this you're going against your natural human instincts and abilities they don't want you to be a human being they want you to be a character as part of it coming out of the seven deadly sins I remember telling someone I said it's all bullshit because if you go through the seven deadly sins if you commit all of those so-called sins that makes you a human they're saying that you shouldn't go there they don't want a human so I've got to listen to those lust, gluttony, greed, sloth wrath, envy, pride the idea is you apply those and look at how Bitcoin is set up and you should see most of those actually used or at least they've gone through to see which one was as strong as we found greed was great lust what other people are in envy like the fear of missing out all that type of stuff is and so the idea is if you use that the seven deadly sins gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath envy, pride don't look at that as something you should not do you should use it as a list like a bucket list I'm going to do something this month that will tick off lust that you should do if you were going to be a human being and so the idea is the creator system that uses that because what other people tell you don't do that you're going to do it anyway that's a normal trait so are you thinking about that so I guess a better way of saying are you a social theorist is to say when you're thinking about Bitcoin are you actually incorporating thoughts about the seven deadly sins and social theory into your creation or is it hey I'm thinking about making this monetary thing and it's going to have all these other properties that just accord with the social analysis a little bit of both a small light so when I started the project after getting up craigs one two weeks I was thinking about all this other stuff I've done and literally looked at my old stuff and I thought wow this guy really needs some really weird stuff and complicated stuff I look at my own stuff after five years I'm looking at you think wow I'm going to do that now this guy must be in the office he's faced to be able to do this pretty a pick micro controller assembler and making out of x86 assembler and a program that will assemble that other assembly language which is just the nerds and geeks don't do that so it's too stupid but yeah so it started like 1st of June around there 2008 and the ideas if things like the business owner general's problem were solved or in a practical manner and there's other things you will get these benefits of being able to move digital assets and stuff like that and be able to lock it in so that only one person owns that digital assets and prove that only that person owns it and you can't make copies and stuff and so all the other benefits well what else you can do you can do it for listing and use for property ownership you could use it for taxation you could do it so all this stuff building up and things well after two weeks thought the benefits are so great you could actually create a planetary civilization if this thing was solved for you at the cash side you could actually create a whole new way of human existence change the whole future course of the human species so that's great so it's worth an attempt anyway and so I wasn't just trying to cash but then I thought okay well I need some assistance in this because I learned a bit about crypto and stuff I wasn't a highly expert level of it so I need someone to bounce ideas off and I started looking at some of the people in the current mainly listed crypto communities and looking at what they were writing about and see if they would actually be open to answering my questions and communicating and I found out that most of them would not but I also thought well I'm already communicating I didn't want anything to do with Craig or Dave at that point and I thought there's only two other people I know that would be useful and that's Craig and Dave but always I come in to help them with their little thing and said yeah it's a waste of time not going to work so he pissed if I came in and said well I'm going to give it a go myself but I want you to assist me this time I thought they're going to say no anyway but here's a guy this is Thomas Craig I bumped into Dave in the crypto IRC channel type thing asking for help with his mates electronic cash program I just listened on the sidelines and then actually helped them out but even before communicating with Craig they get Craig to make him a fake email account so that it's the black project obviously the only real black project I've done and so right from the start I'll have a disconnect between myself and any other online persona and any communication there so I actually said to him Craig create email address email accounts and I'll use that to communicate with them so I was using a fake email account with Craig the entire time he didn't even know my real name the entire time and so when I was looking for someone else to help me with my project I thought would any of these academic people go and create a fake account and for us to communicate I thought no none of them would but Craig would would any of them anything we talk about would they go ahead look at their references and every references get those documents try and contact the author to see if that's the latest update of information for that white paper document and then look at those references and get those ones and read them and then try and contact their authors none of them there's only one person I know on the planet that had that type of mind that's Craig when it comes to personal assistance driven to research it's like it's not author charts it's not the chart that doesn't exist for someone like him so he was even in the assembly community I never heard of anyone getting a white paper about something and then having them go and try and communicate with the author to see if that document that was written say 10 years before has had more new information come to light that improved it and then go through the references for that and contact those read those documents and contact those authors and again and again I've only ever met Craig that does that so you can't just put him down and drive him down and they're like oh the force came out no no he's got some attributes beyond anyone else I know about I'd still put him one side and everyone else on the other alright for some things and so I decided well I'll go back to them and say well I'm going to give it a go anyway I'm going to try and do this handkerchief civilization thing part of it needs to be solved solved and if it does solve it means technically we should be able to use this for creating an electronic cache that actually works alright but there's at the moment the only absolute guarantee is that we can fail anyway because it's impossible alright there's a little 100,000 academics and mathematicians and good scientists with a million years of expertise saying this is impossible how arrogant would be to say I'll give it a go anyway not at all and so yeah so yeah Craig was really really pissed off and Dave had to calm him down because he could understand my perspective so after a week or a few days I decided to go back and we are but one of the discussions was you ask about at what point we were discussing this right at the beginning I was talking about I always had a problem with James Bond movies the James Bond movies and the villains that have gotten there all these villains for James Bond they're always trying to take over the current world and always failed and I had discussions with Craig and I said why are they trying to take over the current world if they're taking over these nations with a trillion dollars worth of weaponry have they got a trillion dollars weaponry how are they going to take over the world the best way was to take over the world of tomorrow something else is even more impossible and and weaponry and part of this transition disappears it becomes ineffective that power gets taken away there's a transfer of power transfer of wealth then as a Bond villain you could actually take over the world of tomorrow and succeed right and so that was part of it right from the beginning now with that though you've got this the Bond villain idea taken over the world but it seems like from what you communicated maybe this is the little agent or the thing going on here but it seems like this is for the benefit of planetary civilization this is not to to extort people and make money it seems like you've got this idea hey I solved this problem we found a planetary civilization around this principle and the ones that benefit are the good actors yeah that's what I think one of the other discussions I had yeah yeah yeah another one was something like Darth Vader villain type things right some of that that's at least written down or written as it's supposed to be the real evil bad person what if you've got some real bad actors in the world real bad ones that they've got access to lots of phones and weaponry now what if the only way to take them out is to be like them to be an evil bastard the only way to take them out it's like the only way to take out a drug den is to be a drug dealer yourself right the only way to take out a dictatorship a murderous dictatorship in a nation is to be a murderous dictator yourself none of this white hat cowboy the top of movies that you have in Hollywood where the good guy always wins bullshit, the bad guy always wins but marketing PR says we're good guys right so if that's the case then it may be a case that okay so you want to make a planetary civilization that's good and uplifting that because if we need to expand out to other planets and take over the star system and go out to other star systems we've got to be an environment where it's driving the entire society to be active in a positive way innovative, creative and all the rest not just sitting down with the beard drinking and if all the people that are in power with all the funding or the weaponry or the star are evil bastards how can you possibly go against that unless you are also like that which means you've got to build a society which is exactly it's for the opposite of who you have to be to go against the other guys and so that was one of the ideas is whatever it's like super villain that also had a Robin Hood complex some that could be manipulative and deceptive to actually have a big transfer of wealth but also doing so is making it for the benefit of the current poor take away from rich be a rich person to be able to transfer the wealth from the rich to the poor so yeah these discussions took place again it's impossible to do any of this what are the problems when it comes to centralization or at least the concentration of funds saying like is it like just a number of 95% of the funds are owned by about 100 people or 100 watts in Bitcoin or something like that yeah but who owns them if the transfer of wealth isn't to a bunch of people that are nerds and geeks and stuff they'll use those funds that they want to see happen things like well it comes back to electricity which we were talking about ages ago you got the prefer work that's actually quite an amazing thing not hash cash prefer work right that generates it makes you generate use up a lot of electricity and trends the old thermal dynamics of transfer that energy into coin now at the moment it's consuming as much electricity as Denmark or something or Ireland or all of New Zealand right so how much that nation consumes within a day how much it takes in a year and something we'll make predictions that by 2021 it'll consume as much electricity as the entire planet or what would generate right now now it comes back down to say crazy it's one thing to think oh this could happen it should like this and then actually it's actually happening there's other stuff in place yet so it might actually be the end of it all because these other things that's taking the pace have not been done yet and so I might have killed it killed it all I told someone, they said I'm placing it with my stake and all these other ideas all those other ideas existed before bitcoin and they always thought through it prefer work is the best one of the benefits is that it will kill us all it will kill us all one of the benefits is that it will kill us all yeah that requires a bit of explanation right so if you're going to use any of this your editing skills will be amazing because if you ask a question here and then I'll go there and I'll go for tangent and then at some stage like two conversations further down I finally get back to it again so you're going to be I'm probably not going to this is still the preface this is still being introduced to one another yeah alright okay this is one of the reasons why I'm writing this stuff down what I do remember is it comes back because it's important even if it's it's important isn't it even if it's just an interesting thing alright we've got Bitcoin we're going to if that stuff happened we would be really stuffed thank goodness he actually failed to do what he tried to implement right yeah this was bad to actually improve Bitcoin and get rid of prefer work and change it to prefer a stake or some other nonsense or even to lock it down to one megabyte so it restricts how much I that's not going to actually affect it shouldn't affect how much machines come online anyway even if with BTC locking it down one megabyte and the amount of transactions is fixed now you can handle it per second the security part of it when it comes to mining is decoupled totally decoupled you can actually now if all these companies in the world they can actually outsource the security for their company because of this technology at the moment the greatest attack vector I've got sidetracked from what I was going to say just a second the greatest attack vector in any company or system the great big white elephant in the room is the developers and the administrators the ones that are supposed to be secure in the network they are actually the greatest threat to that network Bitcoin one of the ideas behind it is that you can now outsource that security in the sense of there's a thing about software I even pre-tweeted it a few months ago where for our system to be the most secure possible you should be able to have everything exposed except for the actual key itself the private key everything else about the system should be exposed to the public and accessible to make the most secure and as far as I'm aware only one system on the planet does that Bitcoin all right other system I've tried to follow afterwards why I'm making their projects open source but they think it's open source because of some sort of libertarian ideal or something nothing of the sort I'm actually against open source software I think that always always going to be rubbish software that people involved in open source software are driven for having something on their resume to make them look themselves up in the community they're involved and think look at me I made this thing everyone uses aren't I great they're not driven to make that software the best in the world while companies they've got their wages on the line they've got the house that they're paying off or the rent that they're paying for the software to be better than anyone else's software they're driven so you're saying that so I'm against I'm actually against open source software on a driven sense of how good it is I think it's rubbish for Bitcoin to for Bitcoin to succeed everything had to be open for the security model part of it if any part of it could be hidden away that's not secure the system for say firing off missiles of an F-16 fighter this is military grade military grade software really do we have access to that software no it's not so good then if you've got to hide it away from the public the software ain't too good when you're securing stuff for your company you keep going any data that gets put somewhere that's encrypted with it right encrypted with the public key so only you can decrypt it that data can be sent into a block block chain does not necessarily have to be cash it doesn't have to be a currency it's only data we just treat this data as cash we treat this data as ownership of a property we treat this data as something else so the most important data into a block chain is the miners lock it away only the people that have got the private key can actually read it decrypt it and read it and so the most important data in a company instead of having storing stuff on a disc tape whatever and then making two copies and one stored in a safe on site and no one stored at someone's administrator's home and no one stored somewhere else so if there's any failure you've got these tapes you've got to rewind the last days with the work well the most important data can be encrypted and miners got nothing to do with your company can really be betting it into a block chain fascinating outsourcing the the greatest things and it's not like any security it's the most important parts of your security so that if something really happened there's going to be 5 nuclear war if you're going to build up a planetary civilization it's not going to be switching on like this it's going to be built up in different sections the poorer nations will come on board first because they need the funding and they've got sanctions against them or something and the rich countries were the very last the US and Russia and China have difficulties they've been exploited by the western nations the resources of the lands have been suppressed by the world trade world military organization giving them loans so that western nations can come in and dig the resources out of the ground and process them and give them pittance or these are the ones that need to be helped out right alright so yeah well so saying that brought up a couple of questions one question we'll have to you said two or three questions and I think I'll totally rule them one of them I remembered because you were saying we're all going to die so I'm not going to forget that one but before we do that one I do want to ask because in that answer you're revealing a certain ethics I look at this as a philosopher so I'm interested in your world view and how you're piecing things together so your ethics informs your political theory so where do you fall then I know you're not a big fan of labels but you think there's obviously some role for government that some redistribution of wealth is okay the bad you got to pretend somewhat to be the bad guy for a little bit in order to make things better in the future if there was a label that is closest to your own political philosophy what do you think it is I don't know again there'll be other people to see what I do to decide that myself one of the things I used to do as a kid is I'm from Christchurch in New Zealand it's a totally flat city and so you can cycle everywhere you know the kid always does cycle all the way to the place and I see people on the side of the road and in my mind I try and go through the story of why that person is physically there at this time of day on this day what's the backstory this happened at home or they happened on the way to this location and come up with dozens of stories just to cycle and see the person and every now and then I'd stop and actually talk to a person and whatever they gave me that would be completely different from an era I could think of I used to do this over and over again it's just like learning how to mass at school it's not so that you can use it in real life it's so that you can train your brain to think in a certain particular manner so I was training myself to figure things out that just by glancing I'd be able to try and figure out a solution that led to that answer and of course failed again and again and again but it's trained my mind to look at something and instantly try and figure out so that's the goal what's the process to lead up to that goal which means that led me into doing electronics and programming and computers when you're programming or designing application of programs one of the main things you need to do is be able to think this is where we are this is where I'm going to be these are the steps to take methodology that's so critically important but it could be not just training myself to be like that so it could be a case of that's just the way my brain was anyway and when I was programming like BBC Micros practice games and Comma 64 I was just somehow for some reason I just happened to start applying it to what I saw around me with people and other things when most people would only be using it for programming on the computer and that's all they did and they had interaction with anything else I was actually applying that into what I saw around the world I'd see something on the news accepting it like most people I'd say why are they about saying okay how did they come to blows like that why are they doing that what was involved none of it would be correct though but it's the thinking process that did it all so when it comes to what group will I be in well it means it means I was able to you know people got empathy you empathize with other people usually because something that's happened to you is similar to what's happened to them so you can feel sad for them or happy for them that type of stuff but very rarely can people actually take on the perspective of another person they really cannot take on the perspective of the other person as if they really were in that person's shoes taking out of that person's eyes hearing what that person's hearing but I've been practicing that I've been practicing if I was that person what would I be doing if I'm walking like that I must have a sore foot I guess I've got a sore foot and that type of stuff I've got my pants are shabby so I've probably got an older sibling and there's a hand me down so I'm not looking happy because here my sibling's getting the new clothes and they haven't got the old so when it comes to what category I buy myself and probably say I'm in all of them what can be placed in all of them but you can do the Myers-Briggs test and try and categories well that depends on whether I've had a coffee that morning or not whether I'm hungry or not I switch and change anyway some people hardly ever change and can be categories they'll always love making lists about stuff and telling people to go through these lists and they never change the decades you ca