Read_850 - Three Doors, Which Will Bitcoin Choose?

[00:00:00] A victory in revolution doesn't come free or easy for bitcoin to really do what many of us hope it can. It's really necessary at the end of the day to walk the painful path and that means people have to choose to walk it. Many people in this space think that governments will simply roll over and let bitcoin win. But that is just a feint to move in and capture it. We need to push to build around them, build in parallel and force their hand. If they dont actively fight it then there is something else going on that isnt good for us. [00:00:43] The best in bitcoin made audible I am Guy swan and this is bitcoin audible. [00:01:06] What is up guys? Welcome back to bitcoin Audible. I am guy Swan. The guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else. You know. This is Reed 850. We are like 1200 episodes into this, man. I have been doing this for a long time and I also, I also have some really cool stuff I want to share some refocusing of my efforts and, you know, we've created since I brought a team on in the past year and a half or so, which has slowly expanded and also contracted a little bit. And I'm, I'm really kind of streamlining and seeing what I really need. We also created a lot of different branches. We, you know, this was always just one foundation. This was bitcoin audible. And I wanted to turn this into a production company. I wanted to be able to expand into a lot more projects around this idea and around all of the things that I find fascinating and that I spend my time diving into so that I could share it with you guys. And I ended up creating way too many branches. We'll talk about this in a guy's take pretty soon because I want to finalize the decisions and how we are thinking about moving forward. [00:02:23] But I definitely created, we definitely grew too many branches. [00:02:29] We definitely expanded in too large and too fast in a way that I simply personally could not keep up with, even with taking so much of the work off of me. And I realized that, you know, as Ron Swanson says, don't half ass a bunch of things, whole ass one thing. And I feel like it's time to kind of take stock of what each of those branches has given back to us. [00:03:01] Which ones have really seemed to spur the excitement and also which ones need to be there, which ones are actually foundational to what I do and really just make me love what I do. So I'll explain more in a future episode, but I just want to kind of give you guys a heads up that this is where I'm thinking, and I met with a number of people on my team already to kind of discuss what this. This new framework looks like, so that, a, we can get the highest quality content out, and also, b, we can stay focused, we can stay on point to what the most important thing to talk about is and the. The best content that seems to get the most feedback and excitement from you guys as well. So that's a long way of saying, stay tuned. Some changes are coming, and I think they are very healthy and necessary changes we've needed to prune for. For a good little bit. Now, all of that aside, we have a really good read today. This is a. Bitcoin magazine calls this a take, which looks like this is actually a pretty recent, uh, manifestation that they're calling their opinion pieces takes, which I have no idea if it has anything to do with my show at all, but I'm gonna take credit for it because I love it, and I think takes are a great name. So I just wanted to shout that out. I thought it was funny, and I think everybody should call their. Their takes takes. And then, of course, you should just come to bitcoin audible for guys takes, because they're the only. They're the only takes that really matter. And if any of the other takes are any good, I'll read them on the show like we're about to do with Shinobi. So this is a. This is a dig into Mircha Popescu, which we have not talked about in a while, but, man, that guy was a character, and back in the olden days of bitcoin. And this is. It's funny. I think there's so much great. There's. There's a really strong and prescient perspective to pull from this post that Shinobi is referring to. He. That he's based the article on. And so I think it's really important to highlight, and I really like the way that Shinobi took this article, but I also kind of want to disagree with the fundamental argument of the entire thing, or not really the argument, but the perspective as to how the conclusion will be drawn. And it'll make a lot more sense in the guy's take after the article. But let's go ahead and just dive into the article. We'll get this one, get this one read, and then we'll talk about it in the commentary. All right, so this is from Bitcoin magazine. This is a take from Shinobi. And it is titled there's three doors. Which one will bitcoin step through? [00:05:53] By Shinobi a look at a prolific post by the infamous Mircha Popescu positing with a rare clairvoyance the possible paths that bitcoin could take in its road into the future. [00:06:10] Mircha Popescu is a mostly forgotten figure in this space, but he was once a very impactful cultural figure early on, before he slowly faded out of the wider public sphere to eventually accidentally drown off the coast of Costa Rica. He was quite insane and an eccentric, but he has left a lasting impact on this space. I would argue he is essentially the godfather of what people these days consider toxic maximalism, although compared to people who claim that label today, he would make them seem like overly sensitive and whiny children. [00:06:50] One of his most prolific posts, in my mind, was his consideration of the price of bitcoin and the market dynamics that entails in the long term. From 2013, he was discussing the dynamics of supply and demand interacting with each other, and specifically the mentality of current bitcoin holders in contrast with average consumers that may or may not have an incentive to attempt to accumulate bitcoin in response to the deterioration of the fiat system. He framed the posited friction between these two groups as an impasse where current holders have no great incentive to part with their bitcoin and people trying to get rid of their devaluing fiat have no real recourse if holders of bitcoin act in that way. [00:07:38] He proposed three possible solutions to that impasse. [00:07:45] One of them is that consumers yield and submit. Bitcoin goes to somewhere in the range, and there's a rush to move society away from the dysfunctional standardization. Banks start taking bitcoin deposits, bitcoin hedge funds pop up everywhere. The Fed chairman, ECB chairman, and everyone else come to Timmyshuara whenever they want to make a move to obtain my blessing, and so forth. [00:08:09] This is the path we are seemingly on right now, capitulation of the existing system, integration into the legacy financial system, the veneration of early adopters and bitcoin as a solution to the systemic problems of fiat. This is what bitcoiners currently cheer on in terms of our path forward. Citing every tiny piece of news from a banking institution, an ETF and investment fund as proof that they are capitulating. We have won. [00:08:40] This is pure and utter delusion. Trump pandering to bitcoiners seeking campaign financing does nothing to truly benefit bitcoin. He is and will always be a fan of the dollar. His mentality is based around the idea of the money printer and exporting our inflation globally being a massively positive thing for american interests. The Democrats overwhelmingly are antagonistic towards the space for similar reasons. Even if such a future was to truly come to pass in actuality and not just in name, it would be a very dire and depressing future for anyone who looks to bitcoin as a tool for freedom and sovereignty. Using bitcoin would provide that to almost no one. Hedge funds, banks, ETF's would all be the key holders for the vast majority of people, no one would truly have any degree of freedom. It would be the same financial system we exist in now, where nothing can be done without seeking the permission of some overlord who truly has control of your funds. Regulations would not enable more competition in this sphere. The existing players would take advantage of their revolving doors to encourage capture and high walls around their privileged position in this role. This path would essentially mean failure of bitcoin as a tool for freedom and the same game we see being played right now with slightly stricter rules for the privileged few who can get a seat at the table. [00:10:11] Another one of them is that consumers revolt. Governments intervene. We all spend the remainder of this decade fighting with each other. Bitcoin also goes to thousands of dollars per but the energy, effort and resources which could have been expended on comfortably yielding and productively submitting are wasted in an ultimately doomed effort to play tough on a weak hand. Neutral and unengaged governments win. And as the dust settles, the balance of macroeconomic power has shifted from the western world to whatever China, Iran, Brazil, what have you. [00:10:43] This is the path of them fighting bitcoin overtly, people actually start switching to bitcoin en masse, and governments react in a reflexive manner to try to prevent this. Things domino from here as bitcoin begins to become a more important aspect of global finance, outside of the purview of the legacy financial system. And countries that fight and refuse to let it happen wind up just screwing themselves over as smaller and more adaptive jurisdictions who stay out of it or embrace this change wind up benefiting enormously in this world. Western governments make using bitcoin an enormously difficult task, but people persevere anyway. The rest of the world with a brain stays out of the way or proactively embraces it. While the west spends all of its effort and resources futilely fighting the inevitable, the rest of the world experiences a financial renaissance while the western world stagnates, its citizens forced to fight uphill. The entire time to retain any degree of economic success or even just staying afloat. As brutal as it sounds, this is the world I want to see. One where the Wests domination and coercive control over the rest of the world erodes. We have no special right to lord over the rest of the world in the manner that we do, and this path forward would strip us slowly over time of the ability to continue doing so. Citizens of the west can embrace bitcoin and stand up for our individual freedoms and sovereignty, and in doing so, cushion ourselves from the collapse of our corrupt institutions. [00:12:23] A victory in revolution doesn't come free or easy for bitcoin to really do what many of us hope it can. It's really necessary at the end of the day to walk a painful path, and that means people have to choose to walk it. Many people in this space think that governments will simply roll over and let bitcoin win, but that is just a feint to move in and capture it. We need to push to build around them, build in parallel, and force their hand. If they don't actively fight it, then there is something else going on that isn't good for us. [00:13:03] Yet another one of them is that consumers revolt. Entrepreneurs intervene. Before the end of 2015. There's about 1000 to a million different bitcoin forks, each with its 10 million ish monetary base worth about a dollar on global average. The size of the inter bitcoins market. The complexity and confusion ensuing makes pretty much everything unmanageable for the ordinary person. Hedge funds and banks, the ones a little ahead of using Excel, that trade in this murky complexity make a killing, become the principal driver of economic growth worldwide. Not only is the consumer about as screwed as is currently the case, but to everyone's benefit. He has just been clearly proven yet again that revolt equals being f ed in the a harder, longer, and with a thicker implement with sharper barbs on it. Also, conveniently, the thing to revolt at has become much more vague and intangible. On the balance of probabilities, this would seem the most likely outcome, strictly because history unerringly flows in that direction, which most cruelly rapes the average person. [00:14:07] Popescu rated this as the most likely outcome. Constant fragmentation, bitcoin shattering into an innumerable number of forks from the original each region or group of people with a different idea breaking off into their own different networks. Erosion of the network effect until it localizes with more subfragments than people can keep track of. [00:14:32] Everyone assumes that this is over, that this door was simply a phase we passed through during and in the immediate aftermath of the block size wars, and it is closed forever. That is delusional. Nation states are adopting bitcoin. Major financial institutions that essentially write government policy are stepping on stage and integrating it into their systems. The world is a game of coercion and extortion politics. The US invades countries and slaughters hundreds of thousands of people simply to keep the flow of commodities moving in the direction that it wants to. To imagine they and other interests wouldn't fork bitcoin for their own self interest at a global scale is naive. I would even go so far as to say that opening the first door, the capitulation and capture of bitcoin quickly by these people would almost guarantee that this last door eventually opens. This is a failure of the utmost degree fragmentation, no singular network effect that ensures a true scarcity of supply and more importantly, rules on economic players globally. A brief respite and then immediate return to the game we know now. Complete and utter failure of any form of revolution. [00:15:55] All three of these doors are still sitting there. We haven't walked through any of them yet. It's anyone's guess which one we eventually do. Bitcoiners could do with a little humility and recognition of the fact that not only have we not even come close to winning, but failure is absolutely still on the table in multiple ways. [00:16:21] This article is a take. Opinions expressed are entirely the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. Or Bitcoin magazine. If you guys are looking for a place to buy bitcoin, I have links to my two currently highest used and favorite services for doing so. River and Swan bitcoin. They are both bitcoin only they make it stupid easy. There are no distractions. They're not going to put a bunch of trading charts in front of you because that is the road to hell, I promise you. Please don't do it literally. Just buy. You can set up auto purchases on both. Just buy bitcoin and get it into your self custody and if you need help with that, both of them have great resources for any sort of setup that you would like. And like I said, my affiliate links are right down there in the description. Please. I have heard too many horror stories and just sad stories of people that I know that I've personally told. When they wanted to go buy bitcoin, they went to coinbase or binance or something because it came up in a Google search. Do not use these services. They will just lead you to pain and confusion, I promise. River and Swan is all you need. You can use the links right down in the show notes and they are affiliate links that will support this show and my work. But you are happy if that bothers you for reason, cut the affiliate part off and just go to river.com or swan.com dot. Trust me, I've been here for 13 years. I have seen it all. I have listened to all the gurus. Keep it simple. Just buy bitcoin at river and Swan and ignore everything else and you will have from the start avoided 99% of the problems in this space. Check them out right in the description of this podcast. Oh, and if you need a hardware wallet to keep your bitcoin safe, you got a coin kite link and a discount as well. All right, so great short little article on that kind of early perspective, and I think there's a, there's a couple of really funny things to point out here is one that Mircha Popescu basically posited that bitcoin in the thousands of dollars was the success of bitcoin. And I don't mean that to diminishe the framing or diminish the argument, because I don't think that's the case. I think it's just hilarious to think about it from the context of 2013, because it's important to realize how crazy that seemed at the time for bitcoin to be $15,000 or $30,000, when kind of in the perspective of today, it seems rather obvious that it's going to be in the hundreds, 300, upwards of $500,000, maybe even in just this cycle or the next, which lends itself to a couple of different things to point out. One is just how much more money there is, how much more fiat there is in the world in 2013. And also the second, which I've talked about numerous times on this show, is the fact that bitcoin is just going to go up forever, like it's never going to end. Because the suggestion is that fiat will just stop printing at some point, and it won't. The question is whether or not does bitcoin remain scarce and does fiat stop printing. These are the only two important factors, I think, in the discussion of what the future value of bitcoin will be. Fiat cannot. The fiat system cannot stop printing. The debt burden that they have loaded themselves with is simply insurmountable. There is no clearing of the debt without a massive, massive war, revolution, or a total default, which probably ends up in one of the first two anyway. But understand, we cannot pay our interest payments on the manipulated low interest debt that we have issued for ourselves. [00:20:15] Like, there is no path forward, there is no tightening that can actually manage this. There is no tax policy that could possibly pay for it. And there is clearly, clearly not even a ghost of a chance from either party in either ticket on any possible political future in which the us government decides that, oh, our printing money and incessant spending of the last 50 years was actually unsustainable. We've made a horrible mistake and we should actually only spend what we tax or less and run a surplus. And people don't realize that because of the disaster scenario they have built already, even that would cause an economic collapse. Not because that would be bad for the economy, because that pain is exactly what our economy needs to make the corrections for the staggering many decatrillions of dollars worth of misallocated resources into bad investments in corporations that have never been profitable to begin with. But that would cause massive pain, which means the political winds would immediately shift back in the other direction. So if it's not completely clear the path of fiat money being printed less doesn't exist, it's not on the table. There is only one thing that fiat will do, and it will be printed more and issued more. That is until something really seriously breaks. And it's funny how fragile the whole system actually is when you think about it, because something very small could cause it to break. Like if China truly finished their divestment of the dollar and then basically just sold off their bonds, it would not take a outright contesting and economic exit of a country. It wouldn't have to be a very strong position if you just made a formal we're out of here, and then dumped it on the market. It could cause a ripple effect, a cascade effect that basically just didn't stop until it was over. I don't think people realize how bad the position is and how quickly it could get out of control. Doesn't mean that it will. It could. The can could be kicked for a lot longer than we think. Also, because the massive deflationary pressures of technology have kept this thing running for a really long time. Granted, I think there's also an element and or an argument to be made that the massive deflationary pressures of the, of Silicon Valley, of the, the products of the corporate tech world in the west are hitting roadblocks really hard there. There actually is not good massive scaling technology like stuff that works at scale, that can actually prop up the tech giants. There's a lot of downward pressure in that, or pressure to them actually not being able to sustain the models that they have had during this huge transitionary period. And I kind of think things are going to start breaking apart. It kind of looks like to me that AI is going to kind is, is potentially going to cascade or begin that breaking apart of the huge tech giants, or at least the ones that have made significant investments into this, because that doesn't look like it has as great of a Runway as people. [00:23:47] It looks like a lot of hype, but it's very much setting up to be another crypto and that could really sour the position from a vc perspective and also just cause an enormous amount of financial pain that will just cause people to look for another way out. But anyway, don't quote me on that. It's just kind of what the picture looks like to me from my perspective right now. I mean, you can quote me on it, but I don't have some like 99%. It's definitely going to happen this way sort of perspective on it. It just kind of seems to be leaning that way. AI does not look like a healthy look healthy from the big giant corporate perspective. It does actually look healthy from the sovereign small model. How do I integrate this into my workflow perspective? And also, I think we're reaching this point where the fiat regime is having a really hard time covering up the consequences of the debt, of the infinite, regurgitated, refinanced debt machine that just grows exponentially. It seems to me that the problems and the consequences of that resource misallocation are starting to show up at faster and faster in shorter and shorter time periods. The cycles are quickening, and I suspect as that continues to play out, is the giant corporate environment that is basically only sustained by the fake prices on all of this, you know, trillions of dollars in new capital that floods through the banking system and into giant corporate coffers. The real price starts to come through at the edges. It begins to make itself known. And the real cost of capital and using up resources starts to manifest a little bit faster and in more areas and in more ways than can be covered up. And we've seen this so many times throughout history. When you try to lie about the market, it will find its way through, because the market is not, it's not something that can be manipulated or dictated. It is a natural consequence. The market price is a natural consequence of the actual scarcity and the actual need of real resources on the ground. And you cannot defraud your way into infinite wealth. And that is what counterfeiting is. That is what issuing debt out of nothing is. It's just pretend wealth being used to pad nominal measurements that make no difference whatsoever. It is the exact same thing as changing the metrics on your tape measure so that inches are smaller, so that you can measure the same house and make it look bigger. It's a lie. It is just fraud. There's nothing else to it. It is simply has. It has simply become normalized. And eventually people will just be using resources based off of what the genuine metric is. It will become apparent with enough time. The Soviet Union tried to play this game. They were one of the most powerful governments in the world, and they died because the market eventually made reality appear and slapped the Soviet Union in the face for all of their attempts at a centralized, planned economy. And the whole thing went up in smoke. We're playing the same game. We're just calling it by a different name. So anyway, really long way of saying fiat has no exit here. There is going to be more fiat. Thus, if bitcoin remains 21 million, then the idea of thousands and tens of tens of thousands of dollars per bitcoin as being the price is also just going to be a temporary phenomenon and it will be hundreds of thousands and then it will be millions, because that is the only course that is. That's the course that we are going to be moving forward on. If bitcoin stays the same, if the bitcoin network doesn't even hugely grow, and there's no new popularity or new interest in the idea of sound money, that will all happen as nothing more than the mirror image, the flip side of the fiat coin. And for no other reason but the fact that bitcoin will have more interest, it will get more people asking about what the hell sound money is and what fiat money is actually doing to the world. Bitcoin will grow in massive interest and it will probably add an additional zero, or at least a multiple to the actual fiat price because you'll get a. You'll get an outsized impact on the growth of bitcoin in a. It'll basically be an exaggerated metric like, like I said in the whole. In the article we read with Sam Callahan and posted and commissioned by Lynn Alden, is that bitcoin is the best barometer over long term span for global liquidity metrics for debt, the available debt and just money. Just global m two available liquid capital in the markets. And as the central banks go on a printing spree when, you know, they increase the global money supply by 20, this is just numbers pulled out of my butt here. But when they increase the global money supply by, like, 20%, bitcoin will probably have a two x in price. It will. It will grow five times more than the actual money supply because bitcoin still remains so small in respect to it or in relationship to the size of global fiat environment. Now, one more point about price and about this kind of the framing of this impasse, because I said at the beginning of this that I wanted to actually contest the framing, that there are three doors and that we kind of have to choose one, and that there is some explicit type of outcome or there will be some actual, you know, one course will essentially make its play. [00:29:44] And I think, you know, Shinobi probably doesn't mean it this simplistically. And, you know, it's one thing to take the article. [00:29:52] Like, if you just take the article for what it is, I think it's got a lot of great points and a lot of great framing. But what I want to contest about that perspective specifically is that I don't think we will. I think we will walk through all three doors. I think it is necessarily the case that we walk through all three doors because we're talking about a global economy. The question really, if we want to be nuanced about it, which, again, Shinobi might completely understand as well. So I'm not. I'm not trying to project a more complete argument onto this short take from Shinobi, but I think if you want to take a more realistic approach to the whole thing, is the question should be, or the, the framing ought to be, which one will be the largest market? Because I think all three of these things exist now and will continue to exist moving forward. The question is how much of each is embraced, how many governments take, you know, the first course or the first door versus the second door. And if one western government takes the first door, and then five western governments take the second door, what does that mean for the global environment of bitcoin? But I also think it's important to remember that we are talking about a global, permissionless market, one that has no real edges and one that is infinitely complex. It is so, so, so easy to oversimplify. In fact, it necessitates any discussion of a system as large, as vast, and as complex as a global economy. It necessitates that we grossly, grossly oversimplify what is happening and how things will play out. This is the same for describing a forest. It's the same for describing the processes inside of a cell or the human body. Like we are vastly, vastly, vastly more complex than we could ever possibly explain or understand. All we have are models that just kind of work most of the time. And even then, a lot of it is just by happenstance. There are so many different factors at play, and there are so many different relationships and cycles and things that react to each other. It's, it's like trying to, you know, it's like blowing in a room and then trying to predict where every single molecule is going to end up. You have just no idea what type of interaction, the sheer level of computation necessary to even begin to predict any movement from one molecule and how it will affect the next molecule. And the fact that there are so many different little forces, intermolecular, atomic, whatever forces that pressures, temperatures, everything that are at play in this environment, that even if you're the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest bit off at any stage in the calculation, the butterfly effect dictates and makes it perfectly clear that in a matter of seconds, minutes, you're so off by the actual of the actual conclusion that it was meaningless to have done the calculation to begin with. So all of this is to say, we will have all three doors. [00:33:30] There will be certain governments that take door one. There will be governments that take door two. There will be people that celebrate door one. There will be people that denounce door one. By the way, just for reference. Door one is governments embracing it and doing the ETF's and everything. Door two is governments attacking it and the people basically revolting or building their external or alternative networks and systems that they work with themselves. [00:34:02] Essentially, the people exit and the west dies in its fight to prevent the loss of their monetary authority. People just don't, people really don't comprehend. I think the average person doesn't realize that the major power of the western countries is their monetary dominance and their military dominance is to defend the monetary dominance. And I think that's really the massive educational failure. Well, not failure, I guess it's a success because the us government certainly doesn't want the average person to know that their greatest power is their monopoly control over money. They want people to think that they print money for us and this is good for us, and that all their military conquests aren't a racket and a way to just maintain and extend political power across the world. It's actually about democracy and freedom for these particular people over in this specific area that happen to have a lot of oil, that of course they're only going to sell for dollars, even though they're a middle eastern country surrounded by a bunch of countries that don't use dollars. And that kind of doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But our tanks and the central banks that we set up for them and run for them will ensure that that's the way it is. Don't ask any questions. We are bringing freedom to the world. Anywho, going back to Pepescu's first door of governments and ETF's and, you know, everybody integrating bitcoin and quote, unquote, capitulating, when they're not really capitulating, they're just trying to profit from this, this new, very profitable asset and player that is introduced into the global markets and at the same time retain their control and or power over the structure of those markets and the capital flow. [00:35:54] I do not think it is so clear cut that we end up back in the same world that we are today when it comes to fiat and the inability for gold to actually create some sort of a backstop or a backstop. That's not the word for an exit for the average person or for anybody who chooses to make an exit from the fiat system. And the reason is this goes back to an episode I did. I think this was a guy's take about gold and bitcoin and where they are, where they could end up being similar outcomes and where and why certain things could not, are extremely unlikely to occur as the outcome. [00:36:43] And I think it is critically important to remember that gold is, remains a permissioned system. [00:36:54] And I don't mean that in the sense that, oh, you have to have permission to own gold, because you don't. I mean it in the sense of a system. If you are trying to create some sort of a payment system or you are trying to create a, some sort of a market in using gold, you have no way to do it independently. There is no realistic path to somebody creating a gold app, gold payments app, that isn't entirely subject and easily preventable, easily censorable by the current monetary regime, especially at scale. [00:37:32] This is not the case for bitcoin. [00:37:35] This is the case for the fiat side of the bitcoin puzzle, but it is not the case for actual bitcoin. Bitcoin remains a global permissionless system. And I think that's, and that's not a given either. So I will caveat that there is a path to bitcoin mining becoming so centralized that, and that's, that's really where I think the problem is. It's less about ETF's and money market funds and hedge funds like I think any of that stuff matters at all. They are completely inevitable. If this was ever going to be a success. Of course mainstream funds were going to get involved and they were going to make their ETF's and they were going to put bitcoin in their. Their coffers. The bigger concern by far, is the centralization and regulation of mining. And this is why we specifically talk about this quite a bit and have on both of the roundtable guys, roundtable episodes with a mechanic, Steve and my brother. So I'm not saying there is, there isn't a path to this, but I'm saying the simple introduction or the adoption of governments and western financial system, the western financial system and institutions, does not mean going down that path. And if we see continued and truly global adoption of bitcoin, I think their position will continue to be contested. What we need is mining in as many unfriendly, unfriendly to the west countries as we can achieve, because we specifically want it to be an adversarial environment in mining, that there is enough mining power such that no supposed conglomerate or allegiance actually has power over the bitcoin system. Specifically, because as long as bitcoin remains an open, permissionless digital network, the attempts to control the flow of capital will basically have to rely on their introduction or the on and off ramps to fiat, because bitcoin will exist the same in every place on earth and in every country, and anybody can plug into it and build something. And as I've said before, I do not think there is any limit to human innovation. It's just a matter of time and pressures and incentives for us to build and accomplish whatever it is that we seek to, it just often doesn't happen the way anybody actually thought it might or wanted it to. But it does end up being possible. And if the west remains dominant because of their control or their adoption, and thus massive profiting off of the explosion of the bitcoin, the new global bitcoin financial system and monetary experiment. It's also very likely that the pressures and incentives for smaller countries that have continuously been berated, controlled and subject to the policies and controls of us capital flow and financial decisions, there will be strong incentives and actually the technology available for them to build the systems to escape themselves from that control and subjugation. And it's important to remember that when someone builds something for bitcoin and on the Internet, just in the digital world, somebody builds something in some third world country or developing country in Central America or something, everybody else in the world can use it. And when the incentives and pressures align, it can and likely will still be adopted. You know, a good example, I think, for how I see a lot of the evolution of this stuff. Like I do expect a we may already be in the one step back, the two steps forward, one step back, progress of or walk of progress. And I think we've seen the same thing with social media. But I do also think that we are headed in the right direction because incentives and pressures are building massively for an escape. And I think it's just, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. You don't build the solution until you need the solution. You. I mean, how many times, just in normal daily life, do you make a band aid fix? Or you just kind of get around the problem, or you procrastinate on something and you use a half solution, and then you end up finding out that you've become entirely dependent on that half solution, and it manifests itself in a completely different problem because you never really solved the original problem. You just kind of pushed it off to the side and said, I'll deal with it later. And then finally something breaks or something disaster happens, and you have no choice, and you have to actually solve the problem the way you had intended and wished you had solved the problem to begin with. And finally you stop procrastinating and actually get off your ass and do it. Well, guess what? That's how humanity at scale works, too. We band aid an issue, we build it or solve it in the most naive and kind of elementary way that comes with a whole bunch of other problems and consequences that were like, well, we'll just deal with the next year. We'll deal with it down the road, and then it grows too fast and we become way too dependent on it. And then pressures build, and then suddenly all of those problems manifest. Like, maybe we could say, giant, centralized, completely censored and controlled corporate social media, perhaps. But then all of the awful political and terrible psychological consequences of that mess start to manifest, and it creates a mass awareness and a very heated and awful, angry, disgusting conversation about what to do about it and how bad it is, until finally there is an exodus and enough people either leave, build an alternative, or find some sort of a solution. And maybe along the way, a lot of fragmentation happens because people recognize that it's such a massive problem that something has to be done about it, but the only thing they actually know how to do is build another band aid solution in the exact same way and just try to fragment the network so that the bigger more centralizing and censoring platform doesn't have the same amount of power, and you can just kind of divide up the conversation into a bunch of small pieces. I would say that the social media and communication environment looks a lot like what we could possibly see in bitcoin, what we could possibly see in any sort. I mean, you can arguably say we've seen all three doors. We've seen all three doors when it comes to the corporate social media environment and the corporate broadcast environment, and thus the many, many different consequences, and the vast, complex, you know, multifaceted network of tools and small networks and conversations and telegram and I Twitter and WhatsApp and TikTok and Keat and simplex and signal and everything under the sun that is being built as an alternative and a new mode of communication to get information out and basically just expand the bandwidth to get around these giant central filters. Because the simple fact is that we built it wrong because there was an easy way to build it, and we just kind of ignored what the obvious inevitable consequences of that method, of that structure was until those problems have become clear and present dangers. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. [00:45:16] We have attempting probably a thousand different, a hundred thousand different solutions to the social media problem. [00:45:26] And we have noster, which I don't even remember if Shinobi is a noster hater or thinks is great, but irrelevant. [00:45:37] I genuinely think Noster and keat in the pair stack are both massively valuable tools in the arsenal to repair or begin to correct this massive problem. But whether or not you believe those are explicitly the answers is kind of irrelevant, because we have more people building and more people attempting to find the correction to this problem, the solution to it, than we ever have. And here's the kicker. We have a open, permissionless, completely global network with a total and insurmountable network effect in order to build on. And this is exactly why I think we will have our next two steps forward, because we are currently living through the one step back of the Internet revolution. But in the collapse of the once the, and the manifestation of all the problems of the one step back is exactly where the seeds of all of the new two steps forward are germinating. Now, the question about what the path forward is for bitcoin, I think, likens it to the state or the situation of social media around the globe, which, if you look at it now, it's clearly massively dominated by enormous centralized surveillance and censored or manipulated platforms. But I would argue that this is exactly what is leading to such a huge movement and so much capital, resources and time and I energy, personal energy, being devoted to building a decentralized alternative that will actually work and scale. And because we have the permissionless system of the Internet in order to do this on, there's nothing that those giant centralized platforms can really do to stop it from happening. And going back to the analogy, the capital markets, the financial institutions, the banks, the payment networks, these are analogous to the giant social media platforms to the Facebooks, the TikToks, the Twitter, the Instagrams of the world. But in this analogy, bitcoin is the Internet. [00:48:11] It remains open and permissionless despite the amount of supposed control and centralization that occurs on top of it. As long as we keep its foundation safe, as long as. And I don't think there is any real way that this doesn't happen, honestly, a bunch of non United States countries adopt and get involved in bitcoin mining. And I think probably this cycle is where we will see exactly to what degree that happens. Because of the kingdom of Bataan, because of El Salvador, because of kind of what we've seen in the experiment in Nigeria, the potential shift of the political winds in Argentina. There is a lot happening that I think that could suggest the kind of. [00:49:01] I don't. I don't even know if there's second world countries, it's even a term, but kind of second and third world countries begin to start to make a bitcoin play. And I think simply that alone can actually cause a lot of threat and a lot of division in the quote, unquote, western dominance of the world, even with the west embracing it and trying to ride the bitcoin wave. And I think if that happens, the more non like totally on the western train, countries that adopt and embrace bitcoin, the better. I, by far, I think. I think a adversarial political environment. [00:49:43] Getting bitcoin on both sides, I think is one of the strongest plays for bitcoin security, in my opinion, because it means that the biggest players are. Are not on the same team, the biggest players are not on the same team, and they are explicitly, they will use mining defensively. And this is a way that I think a combo of kind of door one and door two, depending on where you are in the world, could actually manifest in a lot of innovation and a lot of tools which could filter into and end up being integrated into certain communities in the west. But I think there will be. I think there's a very strong point, especially from a cultural perspective, that the west could just become super dumbed down, like, just kind of like, you know, all soft corners and everything on the playground. Kind of like we're weak and don't have to stand up to anything. There's no actual pressure, sort of economic environment and potentially a bitcoin environment as well. And we have very, very few people kind of keeping the cypherpunk spirit alive. But I don't think that's the case, and I think it's simply not the case, because weak men create hard times and hard times create strong men. I think we are pretty deep into the beginnings of and rumblings of the very hard times. And I just think that's where we are in the much larger generational cycle. And I think that means we have a fight. And I don't think that ETF's adopting it. And I think there will be a constant mix of, you know, kind of like Soviet Russia was on, quote unquote, the allies side in the war against Nazi Germany. There will be a lot of frenemies fighting in this war who don't really like each other and don't actually align on basically anything else but that bitcoin has them, quote unquote, fighting for the same thing. Because I genuinely think the ultimate battle, the battle of the next decade, really is an economic one. It is a monetary battle. And I will absolutely agree with Shinobi and the premise of this article, that the doors haven't been like, everything is still on the table. Now, another point that was made about the fragmentation of creating a million bitcoin forks. It's really funny because it was in, I think 2015 was his timeline for that. Where is this? [00:52:24] Yet another one of them is that consumers revolt. Entrepreneurs intervene before the end of 2015. There's about a thousand to a million, excuse me, different bitcoin forks, each with its 10 million ish monetary base worth about a dollar and global average. The size they enter, bitcoin's market complexity and confusion ensuing makes pretty much everything unmanageable for the ordinary person. Hedge funds and banks, one's a little ahead of using Excel, that trade in this murky complexity make a killing and become the principal driver of economic growth. Not only is the consumer about as screwed as is the current, as is currently the case, but everyone's benefit has just been clearly proven yet again that revolt equals being f'ed in the a harder, longer, and with a thicker implement with sharper barbs on it. That sentence also conveniently the thing to revolt at, has become much more vague and intangible. And on the balance of probabilities, this would seem the most likely outcome, strictly because history unerringly flows in that direction, which most cruelly rapes the average person. Now, I would. What I would say about this ignoring the timeline and, you know, price stuff, because I think it's just the perspective from 2013. You have no idea where and how all of these things are going to happen and when. [00:53:37] But ignoring that, I think we actually saw that. That was crypto, that was every fork under the sun and a million bitcoin copycats. [00:53:50] And I think it's really important to understand network effects, because Shinobi specifically says Pepescu rated this as the most likely outcome. Constant fragmentation, bitcoin shattering into an innumerable number of forks from the original. Each region or group of people with a different idea breaking off into their own different networks. Erosion of the network effect until it localizes with more sub fragments than people can keep track of. [00:54:22] I would specifically just say that this. This is not how the network effect works. Like, I don't think that's even a possible outcome, at least in the sense from a global perspective, because if you do not have a global monetary standard to lean on, you don't have a global market. And it would literally mean. I mean, I genuinely think it would mean the dark ages. [00:54:52] Money is the ultimate scaling technology. And I know most people don't recognize this or have that as their framing for the world. But without a global money, you do not have a global economy. And without a global economy, you do not have any of the crap that we think that we have now. It would genuinely mean a dark age, which means that the constant sub fragmentation actually kills itself. If you have a million bitcoin forks, none of which can actually maintain a dominant network effect and actually be an economic tool of cohesion, that actually pools economic networks together, and instead it separates economic networks. Well, then, any subset of those economic networks that use something that pulls them together in any sort of atomic network form, any critical mass that can actually self sustain itself, will simply outcompete everything else. This is why I think out of the 2017 crypto markets of a million bitcoin forks and copycats, you have bitcoin, and everything else has trended towards zero in the terms of the bitcoin price. I think this is a natural part of the process. Like, I think that was always something that had to happen. And I think anytime that even if we do have stages of this, again, as we break into larger and larger networks, I think it actually just plays out faster and faster with one dominant outcome. Like, I think the market gets better at understanding where and why. [00:56:29] There is only one thing to focus on, or there is only one thing to. [00:56:34] There is one shelling point, rather than getting less sure about the shelling point and more fragmented. And I think there is something to say for Shinobi's distaste, being an American and myself as well. Or at least I think. I'm pretty sure. I mean, he said we. He said we. So I'm pretty sure Chenoba is an American. But regardless, actually, foreigner or not, doesn't really matter. It's the thesis stands. Especially since I share his opinion about America, about us dominance and how corrupt the regime is and how much they have used their power in an incredibly abusive way to keep the third world a third world. Now, for anybody who doesn't understand this argument and hasn't really dug into the, you know, thousands of pages on it, I highly recommend digging into. Actually, you know what? I will recommend an exact episode, structural adjustment by Alex Gladstein and how the IMF has actually extracted on net. If you just do the accounting, just the accounting, you. They have explicitly extracted $64 trillion from third world countries into the west since I think the early seventies. Now, I will say that number again, just so that you can understand. This is what the accounting says for where resources have gone of the actual IMF. And this is why you should understand third world foreign aid. And the loans that the IMF and World bank, quote unquote, give to all of these developing countries are for the IMF and World Bank's benefit. It is a way to control third world countries and to profit from them. It is not aid, it is not helping them. It is the regimes of those countries trying to get power in the western sphere by taking money, being subject to them and dependent on them so that they can control the people in their country. Again, like everything in politics, it's a racket. And all you have to do is know how it works. And it is shockingly open how and why resources are moving in one direction or the other. And the blanket accounting of what has happened with the IMF and the World bank over that 50, 60 year time period, whatever it is, is the extraction of $64 trillion worth of resources from those areas to western nations. If you want to read a pretty thorough introduction to the concept with a lot of links to do some really deep diving, I have it available in audio on this show, and there is a link in the description of that episode so that you can read it for yourself. And follow all of those links. I will have that right down in the description. You can just scroll up from this episode and you will see it and you can click on it and you can listen and or read it. So all of that is to say that I agree with Shinobi's take on why I believe the west should lose power, especially from the context of a monetary regime. The results of that dominance are very clear to anyone who has a strong understanding of the monetary systems of our world and what the consequences of those things are. So here's the thing, going back to the idea of door one happening, we become complacent. The US gains an enormous amount. And I guess I'm projecting or presuming a lot of the outcome of this door, but let's just go with it for now. Assuming we go through that door and this leads to western governments and ETF's and funds and all, you know, moving the price up a lot and, you know, potentially integrating and then thinking that they have control over it and then attempting to have some sort of a fork or conflict in the network specifically that creates compliance. Bitcoin. Here's the thing. I don't think that works. I do completely agree that that would be an utter mess. It would be a disaster. But I also think it's potentially a necessary course. Well, not necessary, but I think likely. [01:00:54] But I think it would also show or demonstrate just how much distrust and disrespect that people have for the United States regime around the world. And I think that trust is being lost. All of that is being their power. The United States military and economic system is. [01:01:19] Economic isn't the word. Monetary system is losing power and losing legitimacy at a pretty, pretty incredible pace. And that's not being manifested in every single metric or statistic or whatever. There is a lot of nominal increases and there is a lot of shifting going on in the world monetary regimes. And I also think stable coins and things like tether are actually a really interesting dynamic being thrown into this mix because of its ability to actually expand the network, the, the network of the dollar outside of explicit dollar institutions and the dollar banking system specifically, so that it can expose, expose the dollar to the unbanked across the world. But regardless, Iran, China, India, Brazil, Russia, all of the BrICS nations will not recognize the us financial elite. Bitcoin fork. There will be plenty of Americans who do not recognize the fed coin fork. The memes for this fork will be glorious. And if it is seen as the fork of the western governments and the western western banking system. I do not think it takes over the shelling point for two main reasons. I think there is an enormous amount of international adoption for bitcoin specifically because it isn't controlled by the west, it isn't a western currency example. I do not think Bhutan, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, Argentina, El Salvador will be going to the western bitcoin, whatever it's going to be, whatever fork. And we're assuming here, by the way, a hard fork that kills the 21 million supply or infrastructure, explicitly banking infrastructure that issues paper bitcoin and traps people in it like this will. The more capital controls and the more strict and permissioned the system is, the less it will actually extend past those western borders and actually be adopted, especially in an environment where there is more monetary conflict and fighting about what the monetary regime will be. Because we are clearly in the end stages of the fiat collapse, excuse me, not the end stages of the collapse, but the end stages of the fiat monetary cycle. So in that vein, the dollar is the representative system of the western nations. The dollar is the United States. [01:04:04] They break their own network effect by basically making a play for controlling bitcoin and trying to then hard fork bitcoin. They already have the shelling point in the fiat world. I think a big part of them trying to make the play and make the fight to then quote unquote own bitcoin is actually a bigger concern for them. [01:04:30] Breaking the shelling point of the dollar as their representative currency. If somebody wants to align with the west, they are going to use the dollar. If they do not want to align with the west, they are going to either have their own local currency or do Brics or do bitcoin. And if the west attempts to fork and make their own, a quote unquote official bitcoin that tries to diminish the real bitcoin, I think it actually confuses the network that actually does want to be aligned with the west, the dollar network, by basically dividing up their impact, whereas everyone who is not aligned with the west and adopted bitcoin because of that, any country or population is not going to recognize Fedcoin. They're not even. It probably isn't even going to be on their radar. And if some sort of course like that takes place or some event like that takes place, I actually suspect it will be, it will be similar to the block size war in kind of playing itself or in how a lot of the dynamics will be just. It will be way, way more vicious. People will probably be killed. Like, there will be way, way, way more money on the table with way, way, way worse, awful people who are used to doing worse and more awful things. So I'm not saying that, oh, we've already done this with the block size war, but what I mean to say is, in the outcome of the network effect, I think it kind of looks like a combo of bitcoin cash and ethereum. It will be the West's new coin. It could even have a dominant market for some time, mostly out of absolute fear and the uncertainty as what is about what is going to happen, and whether or not the west will continue to be the dominant monetary force in the world. But ultimately, I think there's too much pressure going against that narrative, that that story of western dominance and the United States can just do whatever it wants to do. I think that is being contested at too great a degree. And I think things will slowly shift like they will. They will flow back in the other direction, because people don't want that. [01:06:43] The state of things as they are is not sustainable and nobody wants it to continue enough. People don't want it to continue and no longer hold the powerful legitimacy and respect in regards to that system anymore. That I think a lot of the decision will actually be a political one. And I do not think. And because I do not think there is a clear political outcome, instead, I see division, division, conflict, and rising competition in the political sphere at all, literally at all scales and all layers. I do not. I also do not think there would be a clear outcome in either way for a short span. And then I think the shelling point would land on just bitcoin being bitcoin, and the other would get memed into to O West coin, bitdollar coin fed coin, actually probably blackrock coin. And it's also important to remember that everybody who is actually holding their own keys and or running their own node will have both coins. [01:07:52] Simply put, the dynamics of a battle in that way are not clear cut. And I do not think, because a political outcome does not mean that the other network just disappears. [01:08:06] There's a really, really fascinating set of dynamics and choices and a lot of different players in that game. And I think people give way too much power to the old guard in the context of being able to control the narrative. And I think ultimately that is a power, that that is the outcome, that will be the outcome for bitcoin in a situation like that will be a narrative one. I'm also not trying to be naive or hand wave your dismissal about this like none of this matters, or it'll be no big deal. We'll just have another block size war and everything will work out great. I just mean that even if this does happen in the kind of apparent worst case scenario of them adopting it and then it becoming integrated into a bunch of the western financial infrastructure, and then a bunch of other countries and third world and second world and BRICS nations adopted it just becomes legitimized. But then the west has an outsized impact and outsized control, and they attempt to fork their own. I do not think that this is any sort of clear cut. Yes, now the west dominates and we're all using Fedcoin. I think all it does is reflect the enormous monetary conflicts that are happening in the world today and in a, in a system of, or in the breakdown of networks and the breakdown of economic exchange and economic consensus. This is where bitcoins most powerful role is, which, I mean, which I think means its shelling point is just that, that much stronger when it just happens at that scale. Now, again, plenty of other factors could come into play. I mean, quantum computing could come into the, the equation at some point. We don't, we really don't know. I'm not saying there aren't an endless number of unknowns or that this is predetermined in some way or not. I mean, all else held equal. I think the network effect wins the need, like, not, not like the want. The absolute need of some sort of economic consensus for a global economy to actually sustain the state of any of the modern world. If you do not have global resources and trade and minerals and goods and services moving globally between all of the nations, then every nation collapses. None of what we have built is sustainable without a global market, which means the pressures of actually having a global network of trade is excruciatingly high, because it means either dark ages or we stay in our modern tech, you know, robust wealth and growing environment and fiat aside, and massive racketeering, governments and corruption and counterfeiting aside, we have seen the largest growth and growth of wealth and decline of poverty in the last 120 years as we have ever seen in the history of, of humanity. It's incredible what the technological world has done. And to reverse all of that, like, even the periods in which we have had disasters, world War two, World War one, these awful periods, the Great Depression, you can see these, this data in the chart, but it's noise, it's a blip down and then return to the mean while it is happening. It may seem like the end of the world, but I think most of it is largely pressures and pressures that build and just have to escape in these massive shifts that happen locally. And this one just happens to be bigger than a lot of them, which, going back to the World War one, World War two era, is kind of not only the allegory, but also the mirror image of the four generations theory. We are going through that part of the cycle again. But again, looking at it previously, it was a blip on the trend. And what I think that means in a general sense, is that we, we will have a dominant monetary consensus on the other, on the other side of this thing, like necessarily so, because either we have, either society continues or it breaks down. I think really we have to get hit by an asteroid for it to be that bad. Like, we have to lose 20%, 30% of the population globally in some truly horrific disaster, or like chaotic, massive nuclear war, because we would have to reach the point in which the specialization of the economy has gotten so severe or so damaging that it cannot, we actually cannot sustain ourselves. That's one of the things I've talked about in some other episodes for I think maybe on the AI show or something, is that specialization actually has a consequence, or it has a negative consequence. Not only does it allow us to be massively more productive and more integrated and together be so much more innovative and adaptive to the economy or just to the world and the state of things, it also leads us to a massive vulnerability. So think about it. If 50% of the population is doing engineering stuff and 50% is doing farming, well, you could lose any 20% of the population, and you wouldn't lose the ability to farm or the knowledge of farming, and same with engineering. But if you get so specialized into so many different areas that are all mission critical to the survival and the maintaining of our economic and our lifeblood, our, the systems of the economy, to where there are multiple critical industries that everything else depends on, that only 3% of the population are actually maintaining and actually have the knowledge of, and we have too much ignorance between them, well, then if you lost the wrong, or I guess maybe the right 3% of the population in some sort of a disaster, that where we lost 10% of the population, you could actually have an unrecoverable loss, where the damage dealt to the infrastructure itself, into the economic systems of the world, then causes another loss of 5% of 10% because the freaking power goes out because we cannot deliver stuff in ships anymore. We've lost some critical piece of the massive specialization of all of our systems. And this actually results in a cascade, a domino effect of too much loss, resulting in continued loss of new and additional critical parts of our systems. The best analogy, and I think also the accurate one, for understanding civilization, is that we are an organism. And so this would be the equivalent of the loss of an entire organ. Like if you took a liver out of the organism, you didn't destroy 99% of the organism, but you did kill the organism because of too great a loss in one specialized industry that allows that organism to survive. And I think civilization is the same thing as we've created these vast, multi layered, complex networks and systems and industries. And when it isn't excruciatingly complex, it can, even though it isn't nearly as productive and cannot grow, and it isn't, isn't efficient, and it can't sustain as many people, it also does have a degree of robustness in its ability to survive massive catastrophes. So all of that is going back to say how vulnerable and fragile our global markets are, and what the damage, the loss of global monetary consensus could truly mean if it genuinely hit, which it has not right now. The basically, we have market conflicts over the price of all of these things, and it still hasn't even turned into full blown war. It's basically like a series of peppered proxy wars that continue and keep accelerating, but it could very likely end up as full blown war. And tensions certainly are not good, but we literally have not seen a full blown war between major economic powers in the world since world War two. [01:16:45] We haven't seen one. So I do not want to downplay how horrible the consequences of that could be if it comes to that. And it will be because of our corrupt, incompetent, and totally irresponsible and selfish politicians and systems of power that this would happen. And I certainly have no disillusions about them not being bad or irresponsible enough to let it go there. But there will have to be a global monetary consensus of some sort in order to maintain a global economy and in order to maintain all of the things that we think of as the modern world. And because of that, I think the fragmentation and the sub fragmentation is self defeating. [01:17:37] It's just a. It's not even a loss or a failure of the bitcoin revolution. It is a failure of global systems. It's a failure of society. That means the loss of a staggering amount of humanity life, in my opinion. Unless, of course, you still have a dollar regime, where you have a BRICS regime, whatever it is. And if that's the case, I don't think there's any economic and strong economic incentive for the constant fragmentation of bitcoin into a million different paths. But I think the. The endless fragmentation of bitcoin is a solution to its own problem in the exact same way as if everybody tried to fragment the Internet and isolate and use incompatible protocols, well, then it would just solve itself, and we would all just end up back on the Internet, because essentially, the network is of no value without the connection. The network itself is its own value. The consensus of everybody being on the same thing is the entirety of what makes it useful. The protocol itself is largely arbitrary. It's about whether or not it establishes consensus and a large enough network. So going back to my main view, or point on this one, is that I think if something like that occurs, is that it's as equal a problem to the dollar network in the sense of the United States and Blackrock fully embracing bitcoin and then trying to make a fed coin hard fork is, I think, that creates uncertainty for the dollar network at the same time that it causes problems in the bitcoin network, and that all the political conflicts and monetary conflicts will lead to an enormous amount of support for the non western bitcoin. Again, presupposing the adoption and legitimacy by a bunch of different governments. And what I think that ends up looking like is a very clear shelling point that has been established a lot longer than Fedcoin would have been established. And that does not get the benefit of being just the dollar, which has the dominant regime right now. It's just some confusing. I think it ends up looking like spiders, like the. The spider Trust thing or the bank or. It's just like they're trying to do it again. What the. I think their only play is to embrace stable coins is to expand the dollar network as fast as they can. And maybe their point is to just have blackrock cause a fork just to cause trouble, or slow bitcoin down as it gains adoption or legitimacy. But I largely think that would just look like the. The whole crypto debacle of 2017, except way bigger, way more vicious, and a lot more violent. But I still just tend to think that the world doesn't want to pay for western debt, and that's the only way that. But the dollar remains the global reserve currency and remains the dominant power, is if everybody in the world pays for the us debt, because otherwise, none of this is sustainable and it's going to kill itself, it's going to implode. And then to go back to my analogy, on the social media stuff is I do think we're very likely going to have one step back and very potentially end up in a social media platform, centralized sort of environment in the bitcoin space, from the context of western capital, of banking institutions and ETF's and people's retirements. And I think the consequences of that would be unbelievably messy and destructive of a lot of the things that we have wanted to achieve with bitcoin and the reason for bitcoin's existence. [01:21:33] But I think it will also look a lot like the situation with the Internet. It will still be possible and people will still be building it continuously because the underlying system is open and truly permissionless. And I do not think there's a way to put that genie back in the bottle. And the reason I don't think bitcoin failing or quantum computing fall into this is because that would be a black swan of the entire argument. All three of these doors would basically be closed to us in the event of a bitcoin just not doing its job and not being able to achieve consensus, because it's not a. It's not a robust enough global consensus system. So that's why I think that part of the conversation is irrelevant, because if it can simply be killed or destroyed, or everyone's cryptographic keys be made irrelevant, then the whole discussion is basically moot. So essentially a critical framing or a presumption of the entire discussion is that bitcoin succeeds. And we are, we are asking, what is that consensus? And what does the culture look like after, you know, decades of success, success in the adoption and legitimacy of it, not necessarily in success in the philosophy and goals that everyone who participates in bitcoin and built bitcoin for are actually achieved. [01:23:04] So all of that is to say, I think we go through all three doors, and the real question is, which one becomes dominant? Which one has the most outsized influence? And part of my assumption or perspective is to say that the western power in the western capital will have, and the quote unquote legitimate, and ETF's will have the dominant, at least for an era, at least for some period of this, will have the dominant narrative and the dominant cultural impact. And it will be a lot of people who just all the ETF's bank blackrock has capitulated. But I think that is largely just a consequence of the power of the capital being in the western world, still, the capital itself being in the dollar. I think that's just a reflection of the power and dominance of the dollar. But I also think the second and third doors will be happening at the exact same time. And importantly, I think a lot of this, I think the quote unquote revolt, the rejection of the western control in the western financial system, will also be bigger than the general rejection of it has been in previous eras for previous technologies. Because I think it is continuously stepping its way up with the growth of the monetary conflict around the world. Because we are getting towards the end of the current monetary regime of the last 90 year cycle of monetary dominance. Actually, I guess more like 75, 75 years. Meaning that I do not think there is one outcome. I think there will be a dominant outcome or a dominant course for certain period, for a certain point of time during this transition. But that the quote unquote success or the growth and movement toward that door toward that outcome is exactly what builds the pressure for it to flow back in the opposite direction, in the same way that the growth of centralized social media is exactly what's creating the pressure, the desire, and the resources that are being devoted to building a solution to that. So maybe if you wanted to take this hour and ten minute guys take, and sum it up into a very simple and kind of elementary statement as to why I don't think any course is really, quote unquote, the end or the conclusion to this and that bitcoin will continue to survive, is that time doesn't end. And if we end up going one direction, we will only manifest the problems of those directions. And as long as bitcoin simply survives, we can always go back into another direction. I think. And I also think the pressures for progress and for actually having a consensus around the world and maintaining a global, peaceful economy where we trade, because all of our livelihoods are dependent on, like, everybody's livelihood is genuinely dependent on it, I think those pressures are too great. And we will find some way to keep trade networks opened, because otherwise the pain will just be so severe. And it may be very well that we have to taste that pain in order to find solution to keep those trade networks open. But doing so requires some sort of monetary consensus. And I think the burden, the sheer scope and scale of the burden of western debt means that that consensus remaining on western fiat has a timeline, it has a deadline. It just won't be that forever, because I don't see them changing course. And the bill is just getting bigger and bigger, and the people who are beginning to realize they are paying for it will want to, will refuse to pay for it, will increasingly refuse to pay for it. So we will close this out now that it got incredibly long. And shout out to Shinobi for really cool article, really good take on this one. And also want to second his thoughts on how crazy prescient this conversation was and how Mircha posed the potential future, how he framed the future and what potential outcomes there were, and courses for the path to, you know, a bitcoin world. It is kind of wild how much you can actually say, we've already. We've already seen all three of these doors occur in different mic, in different small forms of, through bitcoin's history already. And I think that's also something to suggest or to think about in this, is that a lot of this is the bitcoin is the process of bitcoin maturing into higher and higher layers of society. We have been so, you know, he says at the end that we haven't been through the door, or actually, I will. I will just read the quote because I think it's really good anyway and I want to get it exactly right. Says everyone assumes that this is over, that this door was simply a phase we passed through during and in the immediate aftermath of the block size wars, and it is closed forever. That is delusional. Nation states are adopting bitcoin. Major financial institutions that essentially write government policy are stepping on stage and integrating it into their systems. The world is a game of coercion and extortion politics. The US invades countries and slaughters hundreds of thousands of people simply to keep the flow of commodities moving in the direction it wants to. To imagine they and other interests wouldn't fork bitcoin for their own self interest at a global scale is naive. I would even go so far as to say that opening the first door, the capitulation and capture of bitcoin quickly by these people would almost guarantee that this last door eventually opens. This is a failure of the utmost degree. Fragmentation. No singular network effect that enforces a true scarcity of supply and more importantly, rules on economic players globally. A brief respite and an immediate return to the game we know now. Complete and utter failure of any form of revolution. [01:29:49] All three of these doors are still sitting there. We haven't walked through any of them yet. [01:29:56] I think he's right, but I think he's also wrong in the sense that we've had to go through these doors possibly twice already. The block size war was really the first major generational shift, or the really massive first test of which door bitcoin goes through. And now we have to go through those doors again. [01:30:21] We will be tested in the exact same way at a far larger scale. We are now about to go through those doors at the major financial institution and nation state level. So it's not that we haven't been through the doors, it's that I think we are going to have a series of larger and larger doors to go through with the same rough, the roughly the same three types of paths as our options. And the doors ahead of us are a hell of a lot bigger than the doors behind us. So I will reiterate what he says at the end. One, it's anyone's guess which one we eventually go through. But bitcoiners could do with a little humility and recognition of the fact that not only have we not even come close to winning, but failure is absolutely still on the table in multiple ways. And I will say humility is absolutely called for, especially in the context of seeing financial institutions integrate, adopt, and become, quote unquote, authorities in bitcoin and the holding of bitcoin capital and keys. [01:31:32] But I will say precedence matters. [01:31:37] We have been through these doors before and I think there is no reason why we cannot win again. And the more times we go through these doors and manage to actually come out ahead, the more likely we will win again the next time we meet the challenge. That's not even because people are different or we're way better than the people who went through the last one or anything like that. It's literally just the power of the default, the power of what people would expect to happen. It's essentially the Lindy effect and the shelling point of what people think the outcome is likely to be. Because of historical precedent that will have an enormous impact, which means that this next fight is potentially going to be the hardest, worst, but most important one. And while failure is certainly still on the table, I think it's also important to remember that we can win. And quite possibly for the first time ever, there is the possibility of winning. And that's why we don't stop. That's why I'm not going to stop. Bitcoin audible because I think bitcoins, the craziness of the bitcoin world is still ahead of us, not behind us. The biggest challenge of education and understanding and the cultural narrative of bitcoin is still ahead of us. And what we need to do, the way we win, is to, as Shinobi says, have a little bit of humility and realize theres a lot to do. And then two, we get to work and ill catch you on the next episode of bitcoin. Audible Im Guy Swan. And until then, everybody take it easy. Guys. [01:33:40] Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. [01:33:51] Margaret Meadow.