What's up peers and welcome to join the Wasabikas, a Bitcoin privacy podcast. And today we deviate from the bit more technical side and into the philosophical and praxeological domain. I am joined by the one and only Stefan Kinsella, who has been one of the most influential people on my understanding of the beauty of Bitcoin especially. Actually here is great in articulating the difference between scarce and non-scarce goods, meaning scarcity being a potential conflict over who can control these resources. And there are many scarce goods like wood or food or oil, and there are also infinite non-scarce goods like ideas or numbers, right, where anyone can use a number without anyone else needing to sacrifice the use of those. And this already leads us down an interesting discussion of can you even own information and do things like patents or copyrights even make sense? Well, spoiler, no, they don't, that's why we love free software. But we can strive this way of thinking even further and I think this conversation here today shows exactly that because we get into the nitty gritty of what it actually means for Bitcoin to exist. What is the actual problem that it solves? And how unspeakably beautiful is the solution that it comes up with? It is crazy complex and very scary to think about and it could go wrong and break in a thousand and one pieces, but nevertheless Bitcoin continues to function and it continues to amaze me. And I hope that these conversations here will continue to amaze you too. So catch this latest episode on a new podcast app.com with the podcasting 2.80 features enabled and send some sats to all the amazing contributors in the Bitcoin podcasting space. And now without any further ado, let's get into this conversation about the crazy beautiful magic of non-scarce cyberspace. So, Stefan, very welcome to join the Vazobica. So how are you today? I'm very well. Thanks, Max. How you doing? Always good to talk to you and I'm eager to expand on our past conversations that we had and not talk a bit about the nuances of intellectual property and how cyberspace actually comes to work in the realm of human action and how privacy is an essential part to this. So at first I'm very curious about your background and when you especially got interested in delving down this realm of intellectual ideas and non-scarce items. Probably right around the time I started practicing patent law around 93. I was a brand new lawyer and I was doing oil and gas law at first and I started doing patent law because that's the way my career developed. And I was also a libertarian at the time and writing on various things about libertarian theory, property rights and individual rights and contract law, legislation, things like that. And the IP thing puzzled me because the arguments I had heard for it seemed to be all over the map and really were unprincipled or made no sense. So I tried to figure it out on my own. I tried to justify IP because I was doing it as a living. I was doing copyright and patent and still am. So I was always interested in libertarian theory and economics and Austrian economics as a lawyer and law student and college student and when I started practicing law I was also at the time heavily involved in the Mises Institute and in writing sort of scholarly arguments or articles about different aspects of libertarian state legal theory. And because I started practicing in IP law I turned my attention to that. And I thought I would be the one that would solve the issue and I would show why patent and copyright law are valid types of property rights. And after a few years of struggling I finally reversed my efforts and well because I realized that I kept failing because it's totally incompatible with property rights. So that's how I came to it. But I've kept studying it over the years and because I wrote something on it. I wrote something in 2000 about IP and I really did it to get it out of the way and to turn my attention back to the things I'm really interested in, which I have done. But that was the beginning of the internet era and so more and more attention got paid to that article and so over the years I keep getting invited to speak on that topic. And so over the years I kept refining my arguments because I keep running into different objections. You come up with a good argument for what property rights should be and why they cannot include rights in immaterial intangible things like ideas or knowledge. And so people keep objecting and if you shoot down one objection they'll come up with another. And if you shoot that one down they'll come up with another. So over the years I've come up with a host of reasons to address the different arguments. But the reasons are all the same basically. And usually the arguments for IP are a retread of the other ones. And there's about 10 of them. And when you get to the 10th one and you finally rebut that one then they start over again with number one. So I keep having to rebut the same old fallacious ideas over and over and over again. So that's how I got interested in it. And I got more and more interested as I realized it was a more and more significant problem. Like I've come to believe that intellectual property is not only like a theoretical technical thing that specialists have to worry about, but it is extremely damaging to the human race and prosperity, freedom, innovation, internet freedom, all these things. And it's one of the most harmful things the government does. So I put it up there with big state evils like taxation and government schools and the Federal Reserve, central banking, war, the drug war. It's up there with those. So it's one of the things we really have to focus on and work to abolish because it's extremely harmful in every way. There are no good arguments for intellectual property I've come to believe. And we would just be better off in every respect without it. Yeah, that's, this for sure sets the scene adequately, right? With emphasizing the importance of understanding what cyberspace and the realm of ideas is actually about and why it is so fundamentally different to material scarce resources. So let's scale down that path. Like why do we need property rights in the scarce resources? What problems does this concept solve? So you can go back to fundamentals. And I always invoke a concept that Ludwig von Mises, the kind of preeminent Austrian economist used, it's called praxeology. And the word sounds daunting, but it's really not that complicated. Praxeology is just the word he came up with, which means the logic of human action. So it was how he analyzed what we do. And he did that in order to analyze the consequences of our action, which is really what economics studies, the consequences of human action in a world where we interact with other people, where we have trade and interactions with them, and where we live in a world of scarcity. So that's the fundamental backdrop. And that's the backdrop of all, all economics is recognizing that we live in a certain type of world of scarcity. And scarcity means that we don't live automatically and for free. We have to do things to achieve what we want. So we don't live in a magical place where you can just get something by wishing for it. And we don't live in a world of infinite plenty like the Garden of Eden. So there's shortages and scarcity and there's the need to do things to achieve things. And to do that, we have to use means. Means is called the means. We have to use scarce resources or tools, things in the world that we can use to achieve what we want. And these things are the type of things that includes our bodies and land and food and other resources like, you know, wood and metal. All the things that we use in life to achieve things, these things are called scarce resources because their nature is such that only one person can use them at a time. And two people can't use them at the same time to achieve the same thing. If I'm using my fishing pole to catch fish, if you take the fishing pole for me, I can't use it anymore to catch fish. So there's because of the way the world is, there's always the possibility of conflict among people. That is the struggle over the use of these resources. Now, we would prefer to use them peacefully and productively so that we can get more things done instead of fighting with each other. So we prefer to like each be able to use the things that we need to use. And if we need to use someone else's thing, we need to get the permission. We need to pay them to use it or ask them permission or trade with them. So that's what property rights are. Property rights are the rules that in society that we agree upon that determine who owns which one of these resources that otherwise would be subject to conflict. So that's really what law is and what what property rights are. They are the assignment of an owner to everything that could be contested or have a conflict over. And traditionally in the private law of the Western world, like in the common law and the Roman law and the civil law of Europe, these systems and other systems too. They tend to follow certain basic principles. Like, you know, so most people are against murder and theft, but you can think of those as just the consequences of having a property right in people's bodies and in other things in the world.  Right. And you're the one who gets to decide if you first use a resource that was unowned, like you pluck it out of the state of nature and start using it. That's called homesteading or original appropriation. And you have the ownership of that thing because you were the first to use it. Unless you give it to someone else by contract, in which case they have the better title. So these very simple rules that you own your body and you own a resource, if you were the first to use it, or if you got it by contract from a previous owner, like those three rules are the basis of all private law. And if you apply them very consistently, that's, that's when you get the libertarian conception of these rules. Like we just don't make exceptions. The conventional legal systems of the world follow these rules in a rough way, but they make lots of exceptions. Like, you know, you own your property, usually unless the government needs to take some of it in the form of taxes to fund their army, something like that. So normally you're the owner of your property, your crops, let's say, unless the government takes some of it, which we would call theft in a private setting, you know, so that's the basic background. Now, if you understand property rights in this way, then you will understand why the attempt to assign ownership to ideas or knowledge, which is what intellectual property does patent and copyright law. You will understand that it's in conflict with these basic principles because a patent, for example, gives the owner of the patent the right to stop another person from using his factory to make or to make a product. So it's telling him what to do with his own property when he was supposed to be the one that had the right to do that because that's what property rights and ownership means. And copyright is very similar. The copyright holder can prevent someone from using their printing press to print a book, right? Because it has a certain pattern on it that's similar to the pattern you put into your book. That's the argument there. So the copyright gives the copyright holder a partial ownership right in your printing press and even in your body if it can prevent you from saying something or singing a song or performing a play or something like that. So the problem with these rights is ultimately that they take away, they redistribute property rights that are assigned according to the natural way and they reassign them to someone else. So they're tantamount to theft. Now the consequences of this is that although patents are granted, the system is justified based upon the idea that it encourages innovation, it actually does not. It actually impedes innovation because it makes it illegal for someone to use their property in a way to compete with someone who has a patented product. So they don't bother to innovate in saying trying to improve the product because it would be illegal to sell that product because it's patented. So they don't bother to innovate. And likewise the person that gets the patent on their innovative product slows down on their innovating because they don't need to innovate anymore to keep customers because they have a monopoly for about 17 years where they're free from competition. So they don't innovate as much and their competitors don't bother to innovate because it wouldn't do them any good. So patents actually impede innovation. Not that the purpose of law is to encourage innovation in the first place. The purpose of law is to set these rules down to assign ownership to scarce resources so that we can live in peace with each other and cooperatively and we can trade. So the purpose of law was never to encourage innovation because people that tinker with the law to achieve their pet social goals, they always make exceptions to the basic law. And they say, well, one purpose of the law is to make sure we have enough, make sure we have a spaceship landing on the moon. So let's tax people, take their property from them and use it to fund NASA, right? Or I want to make sure people don't starve so I'm going to have a welfare system and I need to take people's property from them to fund that. Or we need basic education for free for the public so we're going to take people's property and pay for education. So if you come up with a pet project, you can always use that as an excuse to steal people's property. But the purpose of law is to protect property, not to invade it in the service of some artificial goal that you happen to have. Yes, there's a lot to unpack in this eloquent and quite holistic approach to the problem matter. And one thing I would like to highlight is on the actual definition of scarcity. Because this is so important in our analysis that it's very deep in the logical foundation of it. So scarcity is about having potential conflict over who can use this resource. Right, so only one person at a time can use this good for only one specific task. And there are literally endless amounts of opportunity costs where this good can no longer be used because it has been used up. Right, so, but one of my questions here is that it's, does this potential conflict of ownership only arise if there is not a abundance of the good? Or how closely is the abundance, the quantity of the goods tied to its actual scarcity? Yeah, this is one of the issues that where it's important to think a little bit more carefully about it to be very careful with the use of words because this issue does trick up a lot of people who are new to the issue because they think of scarcity as just relative lack of abundance. And so they'll say something like, well, good ideas are scarce. So why can't they be subject to property, something like that. Just to keep in mind that the term scarcity kind of has two meanings in economics. It has more of a technical meaning, which does not just mean lack of abundance. It really means lack of super abundance, you could call it. So in the limit, abundance goes to super abundance, which means so plentiful that it's infinitely possible, but that doesn't exist in the real world. So the way we use the word scarcity has a technical meaning that's more akin to the economic idea of rivalry or rivalrousness or a term I've been using conflictibility. So really it's about things that there can be conflict over. So even if we lived in a world, let's say bananas are a useful thing, people like to eat bananas and we lived in a jungle where there's just banana trees everywhere. Now, they're still not super abundant in the sense that they're infinitely provided, but they're so abundant that it's the same to any human actor whether they're infinitely abundant or not sort of like air is right now. Right. We can treat the air as if it's super abundant, because we don't have to economize on its use. And that's the whole function of economics is to study how we produce things that are not super abundant because or not abundant enough that we need to produce them. Right. So we have we have to produce some things. And when we produce things we have to use resources to do that and we have to choose the most efficient way to do that. That's what economizing means. And that's what economics arose to study. How do we react to a world where we have to make some effort to achieve these things and to produce these things that are not just there for the grabbing. But if you imagine if we lived in a jungle with a virtually infinite supply of bananas, each individual banana is still scarce in our sense is still conflictible because that particular banana still can't be used by more than one person at a time. So if I plucked a banana out of the tree and was about to eat it and someone took it from me, they would be taking my property or a resource that I own. Now, the thing is in such an unreal construct. The question is, why would anyone take my banana because they don't need to write because they could just grab their own banana. And furthermore, why would I care if they took my banana if someone takes my banana I could just grab another from the tree. So the more plentiful things get though the less we really need property rights and the less people care about them the less the less relevant would be the concept of the stealing or property rights because people just wouldn't care. Because it would be so plentiful. But when it comes to the point where people do care, and that happens when things are scarce enough that it matters. That's when property rights apply and that's when theft has a meaning. And that's when I would, I would, it would matter to me if someone took my thing like if someone takes my car from me or my home, or my crops in my field or my animals, or my car or my iPhone, I do care because I no longer have that thing anymore. So really it's about anything that there can be a contest or conflict over where there could be a dispute. So the idea is that when two or more actors desire to use the same thing. And that's impossible. They have a dispute. And if they care about peace and society and civilization at all, they would prefer to have a civilized peaceful dispute resolution process, which is why they go to a legal system to decide who gets to use the thing. And hopefully they respect the outcome of that and they go about their business and then they can trade. So when the case when the judge or whoever decides or the legal system decides which one of the two contestants has the proper right in that thing or the property right in that thing. Then the other guy, if he wants it now he can buy it or he can make a deal. That's so that's how the system ideally would work and how it does work to some degree even now. Yes, and it is, it is somewhat of a of a social construct rights to for the victim to be able to get help from other people to defend off against the thief and bully. Right. So, basically this court system is a way for other humans to decide how they want to act towards that victim and the aggressor. And first of all find out who is who right and who has actually stolen someone else's property against his consent. So to then, for example, punish him right and apply defensive force against the aggressor. Right. So you can think of, you can imagine a few different ways of looking at it so every human actor needs to employ scarce resource that means they need to possess or use them they need to have access or control over them to survive. So if you imagine Roberts and Crusoe alone on a desert island. He doesn't have any conflict with anyone else. So he just uses these things. He doesn't really own them because there's no one to own them with respect to he possesses and uses them. So one way to avoid this conflict would be to live as a hermit or a hermit away from society. But then you don't get the benefits of living in society, which is the comfort and community communion with other people. You know their company intercourse with other people trade division of labor, all these things. So once you live in society with other people, you get benefits from that which is trade and the other benefits of living with people. But now the danger is that someone could steal or harm you or harm your things. And so if we live in a society with no law and no morals and no rules, we live in a war of all against all, like where your life is precarious is that the whim of other people. But it so happens that humans have a social aspect and they do, by and large, prefer peace. And they're also somewhat empathetic. Not everyone is 100% atomistically selfish and cares only about their own well being. They care about other people too. We're an empathetic social species. And because of this, we tend to favor most of us favor rules that promote peace and mutual prosperity. So this is why there tends to be a mutual society wide recognition of these property rights. And it has to be recognized widely enough to be of any use to you because you can use technical means to defend your property. You can just use locks and guns and self help. But that's very inefficient. It'd be better if you can also appeal to norms. That is, you can appeal to the person trying to harm you. You can say, listen, this is wrong. Please don't do this. And that has some effect. Or you can appeal to your neighbors or the legal system. You can say, listen, everyone else help me out. There's one guy that's an outlaw. And these people tend to be shunned and punished because every 90% of society or more agrees with the civilized rules. And because they do, you can appeal to these norms for assistance. And this is how society has developed. This is why we have society. And we have the immense progress and prosperity that we have now is because we have had some degree of this among most people over the centuries. Yes, and it's quite a, like a marvelous achievement to come to such a conclusion on the large scale, right? Because it's so tempting to just go out and take the stuff of others that you haven't worked for, that you can just pick up all the fruits of their labor. And that's, you know, it seems to be a good game to play, a good strategy, but it does break down in the long run, right? Especially when considering the retribution of the victim, right, where that resentment of the victim will boil up and eventually come back to haunt you on multiple levels. I tend to think, and again, I'm not really an expert on the psychological or social aspects of why people do this, but my own personal opinion is that it's part of human nature, number one, because we did evolve as social creatures. I mean, just the way that women have children, but because we evolved bigger brains because intelligence started giving us a survival advantage, we started developing bigger brains.  But a baby is helpless. And the reason the baby is helpless is because he has to be born before he's ready, because otherwise his head would be too big to be passed without killing the mother. So because of that, mothers and families and tribes that had this empathetic or social aspect, and they tended to care for other people, or the ones that cared for the babies, and they survived and they passed those genes and those habits down. So I think we developed empathy because of our nature as an intelligent species, which needed empathy to be a social species. Now I'm not a sociologist or a psychologist, but this is roughly what I think. So it just is a fact that most people tend to have this empathy. So their character is that what makes us psychologically happy in life is being part of a community and having empathy for others. There are outliers, there are psychopaths and sociopaths, but they're a minority so that they can be treated by the majority who is also wealthier because we trade with each other, right? So people that participate in this division of labor tend to be more successful and wealthier, so we have more resources at our disposal to fight off the outlaws and the sociopaths. Now I do believe that even if you imagine a future society, which is far richer than we are now and far more peaceful and far more advanced, more libertarian in a sense, where crime has diminished to such a small point, I do think that even then crime is impossible to totally eradicate because of this economic incentive thing where let's imagine a world of immense wealth and no one even locks their doors anymore because they don't need to because crime is so rare. In such a world, the temptation for one guy to break it would be so immense because it would be so easy to steal, you get away with it and there'd be so much to steal. So on occasion, you're still going to have crime. Of course, in such a rich world, people might not even care that much because they have so much, you know, if a guy takes a little bit here and there, they can afford it. And they also can afford to just regard these guys as like little waivered children who won't do much harm to the species, but I think that just the way economics works, we can never totally eradicate crime. And I don't think we want to live in a fortress society if we don't need to to stop the occasional act of theft. Yes, I would agree. I think that there's a form of entropy in nature alone that just things start to decay and fall apart. And there's also a sort of the ability for the individual to manifest chaos as well. So eventually you will go crazy and just start breaking things for the sake of having them broken. There's sort of two, I've thought in my mind, there's sort of two competing tendencies in human society. Because we live in a world of entropy, as you say, creation is more difficult than destruction.  It took immense ingenuity, effort, resources and civilization to build those towers, but it just took a small act of 11 savages to knock it down, right? So in a sense, it's always an uphill battle to survive and to produce and to achieve civilization and society because destruction is so easy.  Because, you know, if you're going to attack someone's homeland, they're going to fight to the utmost to defend it. So you need overwhelming forces to defeat someone in war. So on the one hand, destruction is easier than creation, but on the other hand, defense is easier than offense. Yes, that's that's very interesting point too. And one way also to spin this is about somewhat preemptive defense, right? You brought up the earlier analogy of a lock, right? The lock being very efficient to keep people out of a certain room or a box and therefore to not give them access to the contents inside of that box. Right? It's preemptively preventing the theft just because the good is... I said it's a Bitcoin question coming up, but go ahead. Yeah, exactly. That's why I want to take this here. What do you think about the qualitative difference between that kind of preemptive defense and a retribution against theft after it has happened? That's a libertarian thinking about the tangible material world and property rights and the idea of force, like force. I mean, the way libertarians put our rules that I described in property terms earlier is we call it the non-aggression principle, which is the idea that the use of force against other people is permissible only in response to force. So initiated force is wrong. We call that aggression, right? So that's sort of how we think about that. And in a strict set of libertarian analysis based upon that, strictly speaking, it is just if you use force to punish someone, right? I mean, obviously it's better to use means, institutions, locks, measures to prevent crime in the first place. So that would be the most optimal way to deal with crime is to prevent it. But once it's happened, justice has to come into play. We have to decide what are we entitled to do now. This is a suboptimal response because you can never undo the crime at this point. You can only hope to achieve some measure of justice, maybe some restitution. So theoretically you could punish people, which means you could theoretically even execute people that have done a severe enough crime. But I do believe that those types of systems are very undesirable and unlikely in a free society for a number of reasons. Number one, having a punitive or retributive based system just doesn't do very much because it's after the fact and what does it do? It doesn't really rehabilitate the criminal. It doesn't really give you restitution back. It might give you some measure of retribution. Like it might give you some pleasure in knowing that the guy that hurt you is being hurt himself. But that's also costly because it takes a big costly legal system and enforcement system to do this, especially because there's a possibility of mistake. And if you end up punishing someone who is who is innocent, then now you're liable for that. And so you have to pay a lot of money just like war is expensive, punishing people is also expensive. So I think that in a free society, we would tend to gravitate towards a restitution based system, not because it violates the rights of an actual criminal to be punished. I do think that it doesn't violate the rights. So I think it's just for the victim of a violent crime to use proportionate force to harm the guy. And then you could use that threat or that right to use force to bargain with him for some kind of monetary payment. So you could use it to extract restitution. So there's all kinds of ways that the use of force is useful or the right to use force is useful. You can use it for self-defense and you can use it for retribution. And then you can use that just to get vengeance or you can use that to bargain for restitution. But I do think that in any system, it's hard to imagine a working institutionalized penal system. The only reason we have one now is because the state does it and the state doesn't really care much about morals, right? Or the cost either because they pass the cost on to the victims, which doubly victimizes them. Like the victim is victimized by the crime and now they're taxed to pay for the jail for the guy. So they don't really get any good out of that in most cases. So I think that we would tend to have a restitution-based system. But what you can think of is like Mises makes this point that there's a difference between what he calls a juristic or legal ownership and catalactic or sociological or economic ownership. What he really means is possession. And you can think of that almost like this abundance and superabundance distinction, right? Like one being the limit of the other. So the reason that we as human actors need to use things is because we can possess or use them. And the more effectively we can use them, the better, the more efficient we are in our economic actions. And so if we have a widespread norm or legal rule in society that people respect and help us to enforce, that sort of like adds on to this ability to use a thing. So the right to use a thing or ownership complements and buttresses and supports the ability to use. But the whole purpose of a right to use a resource is to be able to use it actually. So if we could have a system which is self-enforcing in a sense, like the ability to use it simply can't be taken away by anyone else, then you don't really need the right to use it. And this is where we get into Bitcoin. But to make one more analogy, imagine that we were all, we had this hyper technology where we all were infinitely wealthy or super wealthy and had these robotic and high technology things where we basically are all walking around in a suit of armor that's impenetrable. Like crime becomes impossible. If crime became impossible because we just had technological measures to prevent anyone from being able to harm us, then the notion of rights might fall away because they would just be useless. You wouldn't need a norm respected by people in society to prevent them from taking your stuff. Your technology would prevent them from taking your stuff. So that's all you need is the ability to use your stuff. And in Bitcoin, I think we have something like that, which is why when I say you don't own Bitcoin, people get upset because they've equated ownership with the right to control. Just like in economics and in law, the right to control, which is ownership, complements and protects the ability to control, which is possession. So when you criticize ownership, you're just talking about the right to control. Yes, and this is such a beautiful thing to contemplate that it's worth stabbing it at it at multiple levels. And I think, first of all, they said like you, you don't own the Bitcoin and maybe to start unpacking this, because you mentioned about control, right? And what the person actually does control is a private key. But you would probably still argue that you do not own a private key. Why is that? Well, in the real world, a real key would be a physical object that you actually own, because it's a piece of metal, let's say that you own. But the purpose of the key, the reason it's valuable to you is it allows you to, you know, unlock a door or a safe or something like that. And in Bitcoin, we call it a key like as a metaphor and analogy, because it simply lets you use this network in a certain way. But it's not physically a key. It's just a string of data. It's just a number that you only you know. And so the critique of intellectual property is basically based upon the recognition that you can't own information. And the reason you can't own information is not only because it's not a scarce thing, but because information is not an independently existing thing. Information is just and knowledge will say information is always the in patterning of an underlying thing because information can't exist in the world without a carrier or a medium or a substrate. So a novel is just the way that ink is in is in patterned on the pages of a book, let's say. If the book disappeared and the disappeared, the novel couldn't exist anywhere unless it's stored in a memory somewhere, someone's mind or somewhere. So the thing is that those underlying media or carriers are always physical things that have an owner. And so information is just the feature of an owned thing is that it's sort of like if you have a red car, the redness is one aspect or characteristic of that car that you own, but you don't own redness. You happen to own a car that happens to be red. And likewise, if you own a piece of paper, which has, which is in patterned in a certain way, you own a book that has a certain configuration, but you don't own its configuration separately. That's just a feature or characteristic of the thing. Or if you own a machine shaped, which is just materials shaped in a certain way, you own those resources, those materials, but you don't own the way in which they're shaped, which would be the invention, right, as abstracted. So that's why you can't own knowledge or information. And if you did own it, you really can't own it because force ownership is an enforceable right and forces a physical thing that's applied against physical things. So ownership can only be applied against physical things. So when the law decrees ownership of an informational pattern, it's really not the information that you own. It's just a disguised way of transferring ownership to physical things like in the examples I gave earlier about the printing press and the factory. That's why really a patent is not an ownership of an invention. It's really an ownership of someone else's factory based upon the excuse of ownership of an invention. It's sort of like the religion idea. People say we fight over religion, but that's really just a shorthand explanation of a physical fight over physical things. And religion is the reason why we fight, like the motivation to fight. But you can't really fight over religion because religion is not a physical thing that people can own. But when people disagree over religion, they use that as an excuse or as a motivation or as a fake justification for harming other people's land and cows and women and bodies. So really it's still a fight over ownable things, like people's bodies and their land. Religion is the reason. So likewise, the nominal legal classification that you own an idea is not really true. It's the excuse that the law gives to let you own someone else's factory or something like that. So because you can't own information and because the key in Bitcoin is just knowledge that you have, which allows you to participate in this distributed game in a sense.  They're all participating in this network, which runs according to these distributed rules, which are distributed in the sense that they're rules that are embodied in the code running on thousands of independent servers, which are all compatible enough to network together. So your key is the key that will let you plug into that network and cause Bitcoin to be moved from one location to the other. But that again is just a metaphor. Bitcoins don't really exist as a physical thing. That's just how we describe the operation of this network, like the rearranging of these electrons that change the digital configuration of entries in this large spreadsheet called the blockchain, right? So your key allows you to participate in this network, but it's not an ownable thing and the information in there is not ownable. If you were to own your Bitcoin, it really means you own the configuration of all these thousands of hard drives, memory devices around the world, the way that they're arranged. Like everyone's copy of the blockchain right now, there are tens of thousands of copies, I believe, on different nodes. Each mirrors each other and they all reflect a certain distribution of Bitcoins or Satoshis to different address spaces, each of which can be unlocked by a given private key, right? So that's why you can't own the Bitcoin either. If you were to own a Bitcoin, it would mean you have a property right in other people's computers. So you would be able to get a court order to tell them to change how their computer memory devices are arranged to reflect a certain ownership of Bitcoin, which is, by the way, what some people are trying to do. Like some of these lawsuits by Craig Wright and others that fought the, I believe they fought the split when Bitcoin cash, the Bitcoin cash, Bitcoin SV split happened, or maybe it was the BCH Bitcoin split. I can't remember which one. Maybe it was both. But the idea was that when the split happened, the smaller one was supposed to become dominant, but it lost the fight, right? So now they're arguing that they should have won the fight. It was unfair use of, it was unfair collective action like an antitrust violation or something like that for the miners and others to follow the main chain. So they want a court order to all the main node operators to unwind it to give the Bitcoins back to the guys that think they own it. So that would be taking ownership of the computers owned by people, but they own their computers, not Craig Wright. Yes. And this, this whole conundrum is really a big, both a big opportunity and a big problem, right, that we have non scarcity in cyberspace that nobody owns the number four because nobody needs to sacrifice his own use of the number four, just if someone else uses the number four. That's nonsensical. And the same with a private key, right? The private key is just a large random number, right? It's after all just a number. You knowing that number does not prevent anyone else from knowing that number. Correct. So I think the first genius of cryptography is to have a potential like number space, a list of numbers basically that is just gigantically huge, like, infatimably huge, and then randomly, like finding out a way to randomly pick one of those in a way that it is just unbelievably unlikely, not impossible, but unlikely that someone else will ever come like consciously think about this incredibly large random number. Yeah, I mean, an analogy could be if you have a home, which is secured by a extremely good lock system, such that no one practically can get into your home unless they can open the lock. And the lock is just a numerical keypad, let's say. And you just have a code in there that is so large that it's so unlikely anyone can guess what it is they can't get into your home. So it works as it works practically as a way to keep out everyone who you don't want in your home. And even though it's not 100% guaranteed. And so I think Bitcoin is analogous to that. I would say it goes, it goes even earlier than Bitcoin, right, because this is just basic cryptography and we can use cryptography to enforce access rights very well, right, that might be a pin code to a lock on your door. And it might be an encryption with a PGP key, right, and you have ciphertext, and it's just only possible to decrypt the ciphertext if you know the private key, and there's just no other way around it. So, but I think that the problem here still is that, especially for a monetary network where we want to achieve scarcity, right, this, this is a core aspect of money is that it is scarce. And that it is rivalrous and that there is a potential conflict over who can spend the money on what, right. And in order to figure out this, who has sacrificed what, because it is not self evident, because there is no scarcity in cyberspace. It's kind of that like everyone needs to agree here that this is what it is. I think this is a really interesting and difficult to sort out issue. Because like the word scarcity, when people in Bitcoin say, well, we've achieved digital scarcity, I think they're using it in a slightly different way than I would use to mean, say, conflictibility or rivalrousness. It's analogous because it works similar to that, right, within this realm. But so let's say, let's say take the digits zero to nine, you can say it's scarce because there's only, there's only 10 digits. But like you said, everyone can use the number fourth same time. But in fact, in Bitcoin, the entire blockchain could be copied and it has been right. So the entire blockchain could be copied. So there could be an infinite number of copies of the entire blockchain. It's just that the way money works, money has a network effect. So there's only going to be one network of people using this particular instantiation of the blockchain that the money is going to center on because you're going to have this network effect. So people can copy Bitcoin, but no one would use it or very few people would use it and it wouldn't harm the holders of private keys on the original network. So I would think that that Bitcoin works and it mimics a type of scarcity in the like of the real world on purpose because because of the unique nature of what money is. So once you understand that money, according to like the Misesians, money is not a good like other things. It usually arises in a rivalrous scarce commodity like gold or something else because that's the way that the pre digital world worked. Right. But the nature of money is that it's not a good like other goods. So you have consumer goods and capital goods, right, producers goods and consumption goods. The nature of a good in that sense is something that the more of it we have the better we all the better off we are because the good is correlated with wealth. So if food is good if we have more food that's better if fuel is a good the more fuel we have the better you know if a home is good the more homes we have the same thing with air conditioners and things like that. Or for producers goods if tractors are good and factories are good if we have more of those were made wealthier. Now the next one might not be as valuable as the first one because of marginal utility but still the more of a good the better off we are. But that's not true of money because money the purpose of money is simply as a medium to go between producers and consumer goods and over time and between people is to solve two problems. Right. The purpose of money is to solve the problem of barter see barter emerges because it's better to specialize into trade with people we take advantage of the specialization and division of labor. So that's one advantage of being society we can trade with each other but one problem of barter is the double coincidence of wants finding someone who wants what you make. So the medium of exchange arises so that we can have trade without having this double coincidence of wants problem. So money solves that problem okay but having more money doesn't solve that problem anymore. Any supply of money will do so it's unlike other goods okay and the second problem it solves is is economic calculation. Once you have things stated in money prices everything on the market can be reduced down to a common comparable price in terms of arithmetic. That is heterogeneous or different goods that are incomparable normally which make it difficult to plan and to choose projects. So if we're trading on a barter system and I want to use resources to build a bridge or to build a boat to cross a river. It's hard to know which one is the most efficient use of resources because we're comparing so many different types of things that go into these different alternative ways of doing something. But if you have money arise you can compare them in terms of their money cost. So if one cost a million dollars and one cost two million dollars you go with a cheaper one. So money helps you have more efficient use of resources by enabling economic calculation. So basically the purpose of money is to overcome the problem of barter and to enable economic calculation. But neither one of these functions is aided by producing more money. So that's why money can work as a digital good that is not a rivalrous good as long as it's even artificially scarce within a network because it still serves the same function. Yes, as long as the abundance of the monetary is basically limited. This is what you're pointing out but I would still like to say that there needs to be absolute scarcity in the monetary unit just as a fact that it is a medium of exchange. And in exchange does imply sacrifice of the use of a given good to another party in exchange for him sacrificing the use of a different good to you. So in any monetary transaction there must be scarcity of the money in the sense that when I have money and you have pizza and you give me the pizza then I give you the money then you expect that I no longer have the money. Correct. And not only as I said earlier, is it not beneficial to create more money because it's not a good like a capital good or consumer good it's what means is called a sui generis good or a unique good. It actually is better for it not to increase in supply. And I mean so I think what tended to be chosen as money were products that have a relatively low supply and also a low stock to flow ratio so that it's hard to produce more of it. And ideally you would have a fixed supply so gold was not even ideal because gold still expands and you can mine more but at least it's hard so the stock to flow ratio is high. So it's more ideally suited it's more suited to be money is closer to the ideal than other things that's why it was selected over other things like seashells or or copper or something like that. So money tends to be selected from things that have characteristics that make it more suitable as money that is they they approach the ideal so it's divisible. It's durable. It's recognizable and verifiable. It's not too abundant so that you don't need too much of it like you know if you use copper you'd have to carry too much around so gold is just rare enough. We can carry it around but gold has some disadvantages it can be mined. It also has non monetary uses so you're you're diverting the productive non monetary uses of gold for the money purposes and also it's so rare that it's not that suitable for small transactions. So you have to have silver or something like that so you have to have buy metallic or whatever standards. So the benefit of Bitcoin is that it solves it's like gold except it's even better in most of those respects so it's like an improved version of of money that that approaches the ideal of what money should be even even more closely. I would say though that the aspect of bitcoins 21 million is not the main part of interest because this is the relative abundance of a good. Right then we said that this is part of scarcity but it's not about the absolute scarcity right the absolute scarcity is about that conflict of potential conflict of ownership, but I do think that it exists in Bitcoin. In the sense that so so we said before that cryptography is kind of this lock, right that it's a preemptive measure towards control but we have this other problem in Bitcoin that in the past centralized systems of cryptographic tokens failed due to basically censorship that there was only one party who could write to the ledger of who has how many tokens and who has spent them. And the beauty of Bitcoin is that it creates a data structure where literally anyone can write to this data structure of who has sacrificed which tokens which who has destroyed which coins and which new coins were generated. I totally agree with that. So yeah Bitcoin has other advantages that gold doesn't even approach. So if we go back to let's take an ideal gold standard system without without government intervention in central banks, where everyone just carries gold coins around and uses them. Okay, so in that case you I think you would solve this you don't have a centralization problem because people just go peer to peer they trade their gold coins and they can verify what it is. You don't have a centralization problem there and you also don't have a double spending problem right because the gold is the gold and it's only held by one person at a time. But when we move to banks for various reasons right to enable for safety and security and storage and for convenience. At that point in time, then you have to have the double spending problem avoided by having centralized control right so the bank has a checking account or a savings account with your name on it. And you can write checks on it and the bank ensures that you don't double spend right but that's centralization. So Bitcoin goes back to sort of the daily physical peer to peer decentralized nature of a gold exchange system, but without the drawbacks of that which is that you're carrying too much around. And by the way on this maximum or absolute scarcity thing I would say that the absolute supply of gold matters for its suitability for money, because it's a physical commodity and if it was if there's too much gold, you would have to carry too much around physically to use it. And if there's too little gold it would be so rare that you would have tiny tiny specs which would be worth too much. But for Bitcoin, the 21 million number is totally irrelevant. I agree because it's digital so it doesn't matter because you don't carry it around. And as long as there's enough decimal places, you can just subdivide it as much as you want. So it avoids that problem too, which, which makes it even more suitable to being a fixed money supply. If gold was fixed, then over time, if the if the world economy got bigger and bigger and bigger, the value of gold would get so immense that it would become too rare to be used as as money in a physical sense to be to be transacted. So you might need more money print a mind more gold mind just to keep the supply big enough for it to be usable. But you don't even have that problem, as I understand it with the digital currency like like Bitcoin. I think here again the analogy to gold, which is a very useful one, starts to break down in the sense of what defines the absolute scarcity of gold. And well, it's difficult to say that but well basically it's it's just nature or God like there is just clearly I think 72 atoms, you know, in in a chunk together define a gold coin. And, you know, either that chunk of like either the chunk of atoms, or sorry, the chunk of protons in one atom is, you know, is gold or it's not. And either it's, you know, on the table or it's it's underneath the table. So there's this already this conflict of where this atom is. And this chunk of gold is is kind of intrinsically and non men made, importantly, right. So therefore it cannot be changed by men, men cannot all of a sudden say that only 40 protons together in a bunch make a gold atom. That's just not the definition of what a gold atom is right. So, but with with Bitcoin, the, the absolute scarcity in the sense of who can write to the Bitcoin blockchain. Under which rules is a writing to the Bitcoin blockchain considered valid. Right. For example, only if it spends a previously existing coin stuff like this, like all these consensus rules right. That is man made, like man made men defined, verified and enforced. And this is a very dangerous thing, right, because, again, if it's man made it can be changed, meaning that the actual scarcity can be messed with based on further human action. I don't know if I follow all that it does. I don't see anything to disagree with. I do like, I do think there has to be some connection because we have to have an explanation as to say why gold became money and why Bitcoin can become money so they both are similar enough in that they, they both, there's reasons why they both can become money they have certain features right doesn't mean they're the same. And in my earlier almost idealized case of people trading gold I'm assuming verifiability of course you can't assume verifiability is it's because how do you know that that's really gold, you know, ultimately. And also, you could imagine technology that we could just use energy to create gold. I assume it's possible now it's just expensive but there's no reason why it couldn't be created someday, not just mine but actually created. But the Bitcoin system, yeah, I mean I'm a Bitcoin supporter partly because of this it has advantages over gold in lots of ways and I think the ways you're pointing out seem correct to me. There are ways I hadn't even thought of maybe another interesting way to look at this is that in a sense when you want to get paid in Bitcoin, then you need to verify that your address basically your public key is inside the Bitcoin blockchain that, well, that at least you consider to be valid. Right, so that you define for yourself which monetary rules to follow. And then you prove for yourself if a customer proposes a payment transaction to you. If this transaction is valid according to your own rules. So and if you don't do that, then the definition of what that Bitcoin is to you is is shattered like if you do not verify it then for all the chances of purposes that the Bitcoin does not exist as a scarce. Good, because the scarcity is intrinsic to that to that model of rule set of which is valid and which is not valid, only within that strict rules that can the scarcity come about, which is contrary to gold. You might not even need to verify that that gold itself is is is accurate. As soon as you have a chunk of metal with you. Well, that's yours right and that is in it of itself already enough. I don't see anything disagree with there and I don't know if I have anything to add but I think that's, I think that's brilliant and provocative. I mean, I agree. I think if I understand what you're saying. I think that's one part of the genius of Bitcoin that you can verify the sacrifice of someone else. And even more so that there is a beautiful game theoretical concept that other people come to follow the same rules as you are and then reach the same conclusions as you do. And this is expressed in this decentralized network right that there's not just one person verifying, but that everyone is verifying the transactions of everyone else. And if everyone is following the same rules, and if everyone sees the same transactions, then they will inevitably reach the same conclusions, meaning who has sacrificed which transaction of the scarce Bitcoin in the one non scarce blockchain. I see that. I mean, this is a little bit off the abstract plane we're on right now but one kind of concern or question or I have is, it does seem to me that unless we rely upon side chains for divisibility that the divisibility of Bitcoin right now defined by the eight decimal places. Could at some point in the future become a problem, because not only is the supply of Bitcoin fixed I think it's it's it's reducing is going to reduce all the time once it once it reaches a certain point, it reaches a certain a peak, certainly 21 million. Bitcoin will on occasion be lost by friction, I would think so the supply will actually reduce over time, which again is not a problem in in monetary or deflationary terms, but you could reach a point where a Satoshi is worth, you know, $1,000. So how do you make small change beyond that unless you unless you have a consensus to have a fork and expand the decimal places or if you use some kind of side chain technology. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that but I'm curious. Yes, it is as far as I understand it, not possible on the Bitcoin base layer blockchain to send less than one Satoshi. So to create an output that has less than one Satoshi. Like that is not possible that it would be zero Satoshi or not actually you can have zero Satoshis but what I'm saying is you cannot have 0.5 Satoshis. The the atomic unit is 100 millionth of a Bitcoin one Satoshi. However, you can make, as you say off chain payments already right now that are not on the parent layer blockchain where you can in fact, send less than one Satoshi with some weird trust trade off so it is still a problem and it's not solved. Now can this be changed. And, well, that kind of goes back to the crux of the previous issue, right. Bitcoin is is kind of defined by the people who run software. And this is free software they can run whatever they want and they can change the code to whatever they want. So yes, we can change this thing of Bitcoin easily. The same as we can change anything else in Bitcoin easily. The question is, can we find a global consensus coordination for that change, so that the people who previously all agreed on the same rules will in the future still agree on this new set of rules. I mean, in a sense, if it's something like like something quote unquote non controversial, like reducing the decimal point further. Correct. Yeah. But you know, non controversial to whom. And what if all of a sudden a bunch of Keynesians start chilling Bitcoin really hard and change the mindsets to Oh, it's very non controversial to, you know, have an infinite supply of money. What concerns me is that the immutability is such an important part of it, which, which leads me to think that you can never have a change that requires a fork because in fact that that's what seemed to happen with the Bitcoin cash attempt. The hard fork was defeated. Because if you ever had a hard fork to make one change and people are going to lobby for other changes too. So it seems to me you have to basically live with it. And if you have to live with it, I wonder if that could grow into a problem, or if it could be dealt with in other ways, like, like you say. Now we're talking 100 years down the road, maybe 30 years down the road, something when when Satoshi is worth more than a penny, but that could come. Yes, very much. And yeah, the way that the users will act in this new circumstance is incredibly important because literally the existence of Bitcoin depends on it. And that's so contradictory to gold, right in gold, the existence of base layer gold does not care about human perceivance or the human agreement to rules. But in Bitcoin, it does. And I think that's why maybe even calling Bitcoin the digital gold is very scary because that's one so important property of gold that Bitcoin obviously does not have. I see. So you think the digital gold metaphor is misleading and we should avoid it? I think it's like all metaphors. It tells a very nice story in a beautiful picture that is very accurate on many levels, but it is not perfect. And it falls short in many areas and some of them can be quite catastrophic if misunderstood. Well, you know, one Bitcoin maximalist narrative is that the price can reach a certain amount because people envision that it supplants the role of gold right now. So if you can't call it a digital gold or an improved digital reserve currency that adopts some of the features that gold could have or used to have, then you can't even make that argument.  Why would we say the future value is 10 trillion because gold has a 10 trillion dollar value now if it's not a digital replacement for gold? You see, it seems to me these things are all bound up together. If you say that it's just totally different than gold so you can't even call it digital gold, then you have very little basis for saying, well, that its potential value in the future is the value of gold right now. Yeah, that's very true. I mean, it's kind of presumptuous to say that this crazy idea that we have in cyberspace is as solid and as unbreakable and undecayable as gold is. I hope we can live up to the claim. As of right now, it certainly seems that we can, but yeah, it's a big claim. It's a little presumptuous, but Bitcoiners don't have any shortage of confidence, do they? Yeah, that's very true. Bitcoin really seems to be a system bordering chaos and complete collapse, but it's thriving at that level. So what's interesting is to listen to talks from 2013, 2015, and the narrative, even of the guys that are still around now is different than what you hear now because we learned something, right? We learned that no, it's not a PayPal. It's not a payment mechanism. So maybe the fact that we've learned something over the years about economics and the economics of digital money and the way Bitcoin works should give us a little humility in predicting what's going to happen in five years or 50 years. Yes, and I find it also a bit of an interesting exercise to imagine being one of the founding fathers of America and trying to come up with this new consensus rule set that everyone should agree with and to formulate it in a way that, well, it protects theft fundamentally. But protecting theft is one way, and arguably Bitcoin does that perfectly. There has never been a single Bitcoin transaction in the current most proof-of-work blockchain that is invalid. Every single transaction is valid. Every single transaction provides a signature script to its script, right? So there's not been a single theft, not a single breaking of the rules within the Bitcoin construct. And this is another reason why I say that Bitcoin's not ownable is because the concept of theft is a correlative of ownership. So if you say something was stolen, that means it was owned. And by the same token, if something's ownable, it could be stolen. But the way the Bitcoin system works, it does not have a, this is a legal point, but there's no term of service.   Or if you're a member of a private club and you agree to certain things, right, you've agreed to them. But Bitcoin being pseudonymous and just by the nature of the rules, a valid transaction, as you describe it, only has to fulfill certain criteria. There has to be a valid, private key provided. That's it. So if I somehow do guess your key, now if I get your key by breaking into your home and hacking into your computer, I have violated, I've committed an act of trespass, I violated your property rights to do that. So if I take your Bitcoin using the key that I got from you with those illicit means, the theft is in the original trespass. Okay, so there's a theft there. But if I just guess your key, I haven't violated your rights to guess the key and the Bitcoin rules permit that. They permit you to use a key that you guessed the transaction would still be valid if I use the guest key to transfer some Bitcoins. It's just that it's so unlikely people aren't worried about that eventuality. Yeah, and this is again the beauty of preemptive protection by cryptography that we can be calm with having rules that basically say anyone anonymously can change the ownership structure of Bitcoin. Like anyone can do it, right? This is anyone can write to this list that we all consider valid. It's kind of a crazy idea. And you would only agree to that if despite that openness, you can still carve out for yourself a space in this open letter where you have complete control over it, where you have the choice of when and how to sacrifice this scarce resource. Well, and what's interesting about that is so in the tangible physical world, in the meat world, people that have a lot of money and resources, they're worried about being stolen from them by thieves or by the government or something like that, right? They're not worried that they're going to accidentally lose it. They're worried that someone will take it. Whereas in Bitcoin is the other way around, a lot of newbies are afraid of Bitcoin because they're afraid they will lose their keys or something like that. So their their attention has been focused on the external world and external threats to themselves. But for the Bitcoin enthusiasts, that's one of the features, right? We're glad that that's why we say, not your keys, not your coins. All you have to do is keep your keys secure, and then no one can take your coins. But people, some people are afraid of that. They've been so used to being coddled and having an institutional system or the bank or whatever, protect them from their own mistakes that now, even though Bitcoin protects them from anyone else taking their stuff, they're worried about being responsible themselves. Yes, exactly. And it's so fascinating. Bitcoin is just utterly mind blowing. I'm baffled by it the more I think about it. Yeah, me too.   Okay, that's what you would do. I actually think what you brought up earlier, side chains are an interesting way to solve this. Because you can have side chains, even with two way packs, so that you can send Bitcoin from one chain to the other. And you do that with a long pack out. So it takes months for a pack out transaction from the one chain to the other chain to confirm. And because it takes months, months, the high latency of communications of locks and unconfirmed transactions is all right. I suppose in theory, you could have side chain upon side chain upon side chain like turtles all the way down. So theoretically in the future, you could have the next side chain would actually itself be an immutable side chain like Bitcoin that was expensive and slow and all that. And then beneath that, there'd be another side chain that was less secure and quick and I don't know. This is just an architectural question. But that is for sure possible. And one other point to the intergalactic mining is that so mining is basically, you know, having hardware. So computers, internet connectivity and energy, right and energy is kind of the kicker that I want to focus on here. So you are more profit or a more, you're a better minor, a more profitable minor, if you have more energy at your disposal. And having it cheaply abundantly right with low opportunity costs. So therefore, wherever in the galaxy basically, we have the most efficient energy production, we will have an incentive for minors to go there to produce the energy to create a Bitcoin blocks. But of course, as you say, right, there's, there's a latency problem. Right, if we go to a distant sun that has like 10 minutes or 20 minutes, light, light minutes just to travel from a to B. And if only one minor goes out to that distant star, he will be completely unprofitable. Right, because he has like he's, he has very high latency, even though he has a lot of energy, so he will not be a profitable minor. The more miners go over there, the more blocks are going to be produced in that area of the universe, meaning that the latency for those miners decreases. Right, if, if someone at this distance sign finds a block, then the other miners at the distant sun will know about that block much earlier than the miners here back on earth. So we will eventually have a somewhat of a map of the gravity of Bitcoin miners. Right. And the larger that gravitational pull of one geographical area is the more the tendency for miners to move there for the reason of latency. So it's sort of like right now on the, on the, on the, on the earth context, we're talking about how Bitcoin can help populate the world with energy because they will go to remote places where energy is relatively cheap and they will, they will, they will produce energy. And that will attract populations to move there. Right. And then so they will help colonize the world with energy. But when people move there, the energy cost goes up so the Bitcoin miners will move somewhere else. So they'll help, they'll help colonize the entire world with power and energy. And you're imagining that even on a more global scale, partly because of the latency issue on top of that. Yes, and I'm not sure if this is a causation or a correlation, probably a bit of both. But there's for sure a link between civilizations and efficient energy usage. Of course. So the more efficiently and with the larger abundance energy can be channeled and used the more prolific and profound the civilization. Now again, which comes first is a question but with Bitcoin again we have that gigantic economical incentive to to produce efficient energy or to channel it. And that will hopefully lead to a general increase in the civilization. Well, you know, I, I've always been a nuclear advocate and the governments are in the way of that.  And then that will develop technology and spread that across the world and provide the world with clean, cheap, safe energy, way better than the soft solar green stuff. Yes, I'm quite happy that right, right now the eco fascists and social injustice wars are screaming that Bitcoin is boiling the oceans and has a carbon footprint of whichever small nation. Right. Yeah, I'm and right, right now, right, the Bitcoiners are just burning diesel to run great electricity to mine Bitcoin. And yes, in the future, probably a nuclear reactors too. And yeah, well, what are the eco fascists going to do about it? Because again, Bitcoin is that permissionless system where anyone can write the data to the blockchain. So it's, it's very difficult to stop but again, not, not impossible. Right. So this has many implications. And again, specifically because if the, if the overarching moral standards of society are, are not in line with those of Bitcoin, then again, Bitcoin effectively ceases to function if nobody upholds its values and defines and verifies and enforces the rules that make up what Bitcoin means. Maybe get your thoughts on this. One thing I've wondered, you know, people always say, Well, what if a better one comes along and all this kind of stuff, right? It's hard for me to imagine a digital reserve currency. I mean, it seems to me that Bitcoin has the features that you need to have an almost ideal reserve currency. So even if it could have been tweaked slightly differently, had a slightly different block size or something like that, it's, it's so close to being perfectly ideal that once the network effect is in place, there's no sense in replacing it. But I've always imagined that in the future, most Bitcoiners seem to imagine that you don't need to put your, your wealth in the stock market or in real estate like we do now to avoid the ravages of inflation, price inflation by holding your wealth and money. You could just keep most of your wealth and money. I always imagine that in the future of the Bitcoin world, most people would still only have a small percentage of their wealth in cash that is in Bitcoin, say 10%, 5%. And the rest would be in more productive investments so that if a new digital currency did want to emerge, it wouldn't be like everyone would be wiped out of their savings because you would just switch to the better network. Maybe. I don't know. This is just one of my thoughts. And not only that, the transition would be gradual enough where people could gradually transition away from one to the other. You just don't want to be holding all your wealth in Bitcoin and have it replaced by Bitcoin 2 and everyone's wiped out, who's previously a billionaire, you know. Yes. And again, I find it very presumptuous to say that Bitcoin is, you know, the best money that humans will ever experience. Right. Because, I mean, who are you to make that statement? It's for sure a very beautiful solution to it, but it's never going to be perfect on many levels, right? It's not elegant on many technical details, like stuff like a limited decimal point and things like this. Like latency issue is many things that could potentially be done better already in our current paradigm. And who knows, maybe someone will come up with a exponentially different and exponentially better newer paradigm that has better assumptions and better reasoning than Bitcoin has. I think it's absolutely possible. And I have the hope that if such a better technology comes up, that free individuals will gravitate towards that better, more optimal technology. Now, but still, I'm extremely bullish on Bitcoin, even maybe negatively bullish in the sense that I feel that the Bitcoin incentives are set up in such a way that they are just damn near perfect, like as good as it gets for sure. So I do believe that Bitcoin will succeed even though it has all these many downsides. And the issue is that if we set the premise that it does succeed, regardless of having downsides, then we will have serious consequences of having bad downsides in the protocol. Like, for example, the lack of privacy. If Bitcoin succeeds, then we live in a very different world if that Bitcoin has good privacy for its users, or if it has not good privacy for its users. I agree. I agree totally. So this is somewhat of my motivation of why I do what I do because Bitcoin is basically unstoppable. And hopefully we can fix some of the broken things while the plane is flying. So to make the future even better than it could be. I think you're a libertarian too, right? Very much, yes. Yeah, as a libertarian, I mean to me this gives me so much hope because I always thought that I mean libertarianism is great, but it's just it's not going to work just by running around being activists trying to persuade people. It's never going to work. There's just too many reasons why that won't work. That's why it hasn't worked. That's not how democracy works. That's not how politics works. That's not how economic incentives work. So I always thought liberty was going to be a long time in coming because it had to arise naturally and that was going to take all kind of revolutions in society. And I guess actually this is correct. I just didn't envision what it was going to be. I think it could be the money. It could be the Bitcoin revolution and money is what's going to actually achieve liberty on top of all the, well, I guess the main advantage of Bitcoin as money is in terms of prosperity. It will help promote prosperity. But one way it will do that is by helping us to achieve liberty by basically strangling the state because the state's control over money is its main way of surviving and throttling progress. And when we starve it of its main source of funding, it will necessarily be limited to a much more like a rump role and then wither away. I mean that's my utopian Bitcoin libertarian anarchist hope. Yes. And I share that hope. And I think that the Bitcoin in its current conception has a very high potential or prospect to succeed on that mission. But where I am more and more uncertain is about whether the society of Bitcoin, let's say, will will will change in a way that will become more evil and and leaching. Right. What if somehow the Bitcoin community finds consensus on a new change of rules that gives universal basic income to every address. A rule change like this is conceptually perceivable. Right. And it might happen very well. And at that point, well, question is, is it then still Bitcoin? Correct. I think if that happens, it shows that it's just not it's not workable. So we'll see. It seems to me that the incentive nature of it is so maybe unintentionally beautiful that it just it's hard to imagine that happening because so many people would be so invested in it, even though they have the wrong ideas, they ultimately they don't want to, you know, shoot themselves in the foot. Mm hmm. Yeah. And on top of that comes just the complexity of code. And then we're having already trouble to express our thoughts about Bitcoin just in verbal language and writing it as precisely as code and mathematics does is even more complex. So just, you know, code failures are another thing to consider. Correct. Yeah. So there is a lot of things where Bitcoin might actually or where Bitcoin is very different than gold. And it might be both the strength and the weakness. But it is what it is. And we will have to see if it works in the long run. We need someone to die and have a near death experience and come back and tell us how they do it in heaven because you know God, you know, they use they use a type of perfect Bitcoin up in heaven. We need to see what we how we need to tweak ours to emulate that there's Yes, yes. Well, it's the fun. It was it was an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Really amazing to spitball and to expand our minds in all these areas. I think it was a very fruitful conversation. It was fun. I enjoyed it. Thanks for, thanks for suggesting this. And keep up your great work. Where can the people find you? And what are you thinking right now? It's stephanconcella.com and I'll look on the IP related stuff. My website C for the number four C for sif.org, which means center for the study of innovative freedom. I'm working on collecting my essays together into a book on libertarian theory. And I'm also working right now on the side on drafting my own. I don't want to call it libertarian constitution because I don't like the concept of constitution, but I'm going to draft my own statement of principles like of libertarianism like from the from the ground up. And in the systematic fashion, it'll take me a year or so, maybe, but I'm just going to do it myself because I've been part of lots of projects where like Liberland and these others and I'm on a committee and there's all these compromises. I'm just going to do it myself. I'm just going to call it consolas libertarian precy or constitution creed credo the libertarian credo. You know, something like that. Oh, that sounds very interesting. Both book proctorates very eager to to read them. Well, thanks a lot again. Thank you.


In fact, we're here live, we're in Silicon Valley, heart of Silicon Valley, this is the San Jose Convention Center. This is day two of exclusive coverage from SiliconANGLE and wikibond.org for Hadoop Summit, the hashtag is Hadoop Summit. Go to the hashtag tweet, we're following every tweet, we're watching every tweet, we want to hear from you. If you have any comments, concerns, you don't like that Dave's not wearing a jacket today? No problem, just tweet us, we'll make some changes and we'll ask the guests some questions. This is theCUBE, our flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante at wikibond.org. Mark Taranzoni is here, he's the CEO of Squirrel. Mark, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks Dave. So we've been hearing about security all week.  You know, John and I have been following this space since the very early days, you didn't really hear much about security, you didn't really hear anything about security. Charles from Cloudera was just on, he said, security today is too chunky, we need more fine-grain security. And I said, oh, that's a great lead-in to Squirrel. So, what are you seeing out there? Yeah, absolutely. Well, a couple things I'll say is that security, security's not a bolt-on.  You have to architect it in, it has to be part of the premise of the design and the architecture of your system from the get-go. And fortunately, with the product that we've developed, Squirrel Enterprise, based on a core technology called Accumulo, that was developed by the NSA, has that fine-grain access control secure system, and we've built the ecosystem to enable it to interface and work within an enterprise environment. Yeah, we had Adam Fuchsia, actually at the Wikibon headquarters, John, I think you saw it as well, did a little shock talk, sent a lesson to learn from the NSA, and you know, 10 years basically, better part of a decade he had spent there. And basically what he helped our audience do is just understand how to architect security. And of course there's been a lot of talk lately about the NSA and how they're using data, but we reported, I know you can't comment, we reported that actually behind all that is Accumulo. And so we're starting to see just a much greater awareness in this community of security. It's a top two or three check-off item on the roadmaps of all the players here, but to your point, it can't just be a bolt-on, it can't just be a check-off. So what are you seeing in terms of adoption of Accumulo and how are people applying it in a way that they couldn't, for instance, with a bolt-on? Yeah, absolutely. So there's a couple of things that come to mind, Dave. So one is that Accumulo has that fine-grained control. What we've built with Squirrel is the integration into the identity access management system. We've also built a very robust policy engine that takes the requirements of the enterprise, applies it to the user, and applies it to the data that's in the system. So that policy engine's critical, we've patented technology around that. Additionally, we've added some encryption capabilities within the system. So it's really an ecosystem around security. And when we talk to customers, one of the first questions is, they all see the economic value of Hadoop and HDFS. There's no question about it. They've built solutions around it in the lab environment and if they're a large-scale enterprise, typically what happens is they go from that lab and try to bring it into production and they run into the CSO. And the CSO says, okay, I'm going to bring lots of information together. A lot of it is sensitive. Maybe the combination of data sets even creates additional sensitivity. How are we going to manage that in our environment? And that's usually when we have a very good discussion and leads to a POC and we're solving customers' real problems. So you guys just made your big announcement, Squirrel Analytics, sorry, Squirrel Enterprise. And essentially it provides a series of development capabilities, analytics capabilities on top of Accumulo, kind of closing the gap between what I'm sure the guys had to do with the previous lives and what a developer wants to do now. So talk about Squirrel Enterprise, what the objectives are, where you're at with that, when it hits the marketplace and all that other good stuff. Absolutely, well, we're open for business, Dave. So we're in revenue now, we're selling that product to customers. We're on version 1.1 of the product, so it's been out for about three months now and we're seeing a tremendous amount of interest in the customer base. We're targeting, certainly the Fed space is a good opportunity for us. We're targeting areas in the Fed, banking and finance, telecommunications and healthcare are areas of the verticals that are absolutely resonating. What we've built, to answer your question on the analytics layer, what we've built is a solution for developers to build real-time big data applications very easily and very quickly. So at the core, we've got the security and we've built the ecosystem around that security. We've also built the capability index information as it streams into our platform. So once it's ingested, it's readily available to the application of the user to start consuming immediately. Very real-time focused. Additionally on top, we've built a layer of discovery analytics that are really building blocks for building those big data applications. Whether you're building something around the areas of fraud or anomaly detection, this layer of analytics allows our customers to work at a higher level than just at the accumulo level. So some examples are, we have SQL functions in there, we have Lucene capabilities, we convert the information to JSON so very Mongo-like, it's easier to program on a JSON-type document versus a key-value store, and we've also built graph capabilities. So we almost think of our database in the no-seq world as a three-on-one. Cumulo gives us a column store, we've added document store and graph store capabilities onto the system. What are some of the conversations that you're hearing? We've obviously been monitoring the Twitter sphere on the security conversation and you've got a variety of different projects within Apache that are getting some traction, and also you've got different perspectives. And there's also a talent crunch out there. There's really not a lot of talent that can come in and just start rolling out security. I mean, it's like the perfect storm. So I want to get your take on what you think about some of the security conversations that are being proposed or discussed here and what you guys think of those vis-a-vis what you're offering. Yeah, absolutely. So what we're hearing is security's top of mind. There's no question about it and there are a lot of different angles around it. My view is that it can't be a pointed solution, it can't address one piece of the ecosystem. It's a stack. You've got to try to cover the whole stack when you're talking about security and with our solution, we're attempting to do that. And the feedback we've got from our customers is clearly around our ecosystem and security. The other thing that I've noticed just at the show which has been very unique and interesting, customers are coming to us, prospects are coming to us and they're actually being pointed to us from other ecosystem partners that are at the show because they have a security need and they say go talk to the squirrel guys. So talk about Apache Falcon and Apache and Knox, these projects are being kicked around. What do they mean vis-a-vis some of the things that you guys are doing? Yeah, you know, I don't know the details of those specific projects, John, but what I think, what it means to us is that this continued demand and requirements around security. We heard it in the keynote speak yesterday. That seems to be the whole. I think additional projects that provide a more secure system will enable this HDFS and Hadoop and the systems on top to roll out more readily into customers and I think it's all good. Absolutely. Mark, you got to hear a hard charge in operations guy, you've had a big company, small company, startups and the like. You have a unique challenge now. You got to start up, you're building a team, you're selling into places like you said, financial services, healthcare, government and at the same time you're appealing to a developer audience. So talk about how you're approaching the developer community specifically and what you're going to do there and are doing there to attract those guys. Yeah, so you're absolutely right. I mean talent is critical. We're a technology company. We need to continue to influx more talent into the company. From my perspective is you build challenging products and solve hard problems. The development community wants to be involved. We'll continue to support CUMULO and continue to contribute to that and we've built an ecosystem around that. We don't have a CUMULO show yet but you have my word that in 2014 you'll start to see a bigger community built around that and Squirrel will be the leaders in helping to develop that community. Yeah, what about that? I mean you see it around HBaseCon and certainly Mongo and Cassandra and so you feel like it's time now for CUMULO to break out. Absolutely, you need a driver for that and Squirrel will be the driver. I think maybe we'll coin the phrase, Accumulonation. Well we're certainly big fans of what you guys are doing. Eli and the team there, we saw you guys one of the hot startups. Your approach and method is different than some of the other approaches but again, that's not a bad thing and what we like about what you guys are doing is you bring in the relevant solutions secured to the table and it's not just early, the tech's there and I think we think your success will be realized if you guys can navigate in the ecosystem. So my final question to you is how are you going to navigate the sandbox that is the big data ecosystem from open source to commercial that those dynamics are in play? We're an open core company so we'll continue to use Accumulos, a patchy version that's released as part of our core. We're selling to the fed space which is a natural given Accumulos heritage from that space and our team's heritage from that space. One of the things that we hear a lot from our commercial customers and they like a lot from us is that that core technology has been running in very large scale environments within the federal government for the last five years. It's very robust, it's very resilient and as a startup, a lot of times you have to go try to sell to these enterprise customers the fact that you'll be a robust solution. We have that almost as a given given where that Apache Accumul came from. So that's a tremendous benefit in that and as far as the ecosystem goes we're very partner friendly John so it's a great question. We sit on top of, we're agnostic to the distribution below us. We sit on top of all of them. We have formalized partnerships with a few of them that we've released and we're working on collaborating and announcing a few more. So what should we be watching? What should observers be watching for? Milestones that you personally want to hit? What do you drive in the team toward? What should we be looking for? Yeah, absolutely. So we're going to continue to add from the technology standpoint to the product so we've got a very aggressive and robust roadmap ahead of us so that the engineering team will have their heads down. I think what you'll start to hear is more discussions around who our customers are and I look forward to coming here next year and having one of my customers deliver a use case keynote presentation. Or maybe at a cumulonation. Absolutely, absolutely. There's a conference in there somewhere. And if there is, we'll be there at theCUBE. And theCUBE will be there. Thanks Mark, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Again, hot startup. You guys are doing some great work. This is theCUBE. We talk to all the folks who have the signal and will extract it from the noise and with the CEO startups, developers, we'll bring that to you. This is theCUBE on SiliconANGLE.tv. We'll be right back with our next guest after the short break, Hadoop Summit Live, day two coverage continuing after the short break.


Welcome folks, we have the Dow Industries right now trading down $164, Nasdaq off $179, S&Ps off $40. Gold. Gold contract trading up $3.90, $18.88 an ounce. We have silver up $17.22, $35 an ounce, LightSuite crude up $1.37, $78.51 a barrel, notes and bonds. The 10-year note, up 6 ticks, trading $113.13, a 30-year down one at $128.12, and $King Dollar down $266, trading $106.400, the Euro is at $107, the Yen is at $131, the British Pound is at $120 to $1.00. We're going to take a look at the spy, bottom line, it's going to get so intriguing here because we haven't had volume either down or up at these levels. So what you had out here yesterday, bottom line, you go up with $90 million today, you get $51 million on the way down. Now the kicker is, the number that you got to keep this eye on here is the 410, 410.49, that gets you in the lower range. We're not in the lower range yet, once it pops in this higher range, bottom line, you are in a higher range. And the X100, we take a look at the NDX, what do we have inside the three Qs? Three Qs there, broke a few days ago, top side. We take a look at the three Qs, this will be interesting. So the Qs, you might get an expansion of volume in the Qs, we're at $44 million, now the last low we only had $49 million. So I think the Qs are going to give us the key, we'll see what happens here, but that's what it looks like. Because the low that was established out here on Monday, there weren't sellers, and there's sellers today, because we're going to end up doing like 64 million shares. And we're going to get right over to Kingdala, because what you're going to see, like with the S&Ps down at 40 folks, okay, it's amazing that, you know, Kingdala this morning was down 216 ticks, all that got back was a couple hundred ticks, and still in the negative.  We go to the gold contract, we take a look at the gold contract, it looks to me like the gold contract is setting up a large ABC structure down, 1798 in number, and it, this setup, yeah, this is an ABC down set up, well, it has the makings of an ABC down set up. Down with big volume, you've bounced around, I mean you can take a look at this, we went down with volume of 311,000 contracts, Monday you went up with 165, Tuesday we had 180, and today 123, and it has a whole price, bingo, 795 is coming at you, stay right there folks, come right back.