Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] The stakes are openly stated. If the central banks lose, then wealth will be redistributed to the detriment of the current beneficiaries of the Cantillon effect. And this again, assuming that Bitcoin will bring no value to humanity. Bitcoin may reverse the distributional consequences of the euro. And the ECB doesn't like it. Panic is rising. Bitcoin, the way out of their giant Ponzi scheme, does not want to die. But the survival of the fiat system depends on the lack of an alternative. The entire system is therefore in danger.
[00:00:44] The best in Bitcoin made Audible I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Audible.
[00:01:07] 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. And this is the show where we read and explore all about Bitcoin, open source and the technology of liberty. We break it all down here for you at Bitcoin audible. Six, seven years running now. 1300 some odd episodes or something like that. I don't even know. Crazy. Just a long time we have been running. Welcome. And we've got a great show today. We got a great read. Actually. We are jumping into an article called the Great Capitulation. So I read the. I actually intended to read the audio of the entire ECB paper about the redistributional consequences of bitcoin, but holy crap, I could. I literally barely got through it, not recording, because recording is a very slow way to read something, but I couldn't even. I couldn't even really read the whole thing. And then in the midst of this, I happen to find a couple of different articles that were responding to the paper. And I thought this was the most interesting one. This was the one that hit rather than like really kind of going point by point because we've done that before with I think one or both of their previous papers about bitcoin we would go through, I think Nick Carter had a really good point by point breakdown of I think their first ECB paper. If I'm not mistaken, it may have been a different one. It was another Central banking paper about bitcoin though. But I didn't really feel like I wanted to do that again. It just felt so tedious to go through this whole dance again and have to respond to a whole bunch of points that are all so weak to begin with. Like, it's like the whole paper is really pathetic. And I loved. I was very short. There's like hardly anything into this article. It's like the third paragraph. But he started, he opened this saying, quote, I could question the need to write 20 pages of quote research to establish that when the price of an asset rises, those who held it gain more purchasing power than those who do not. And that I was just, I laughed, I had to stop and laugh because that's exactly what this whole thing is. The entire ECB paper on the redistributional consequences of Bitcoin is literally 20 pages of quote, unquote research that essentially says if the price of an asset rises, the people who buy it will benefit and the people who don't are quote, unquote, unfairly punished. That's the whole thing. But there are some really interesting caveats out of this article especially, or out of this paper especially it being their third one, because the tone has changed, the framing has changed. And I know if you've listened to the show for any length of time that I talk a lot about mental framing and how to position an argument and how to think about the presumption or the premise on which you are standing when having a conversation. And to not give the premise, not to give the presumption to their framing, to not allow them to frame it in their way. And one of the interesting what I loved about this article is the recognition that the framing has changed. And so I don't want to lead too much. And we're just going to go ahead and get into this article. I will say I have my Fold Referral link, I have my river referral, a bunch of different links available for services, products and tools that I use in bitcoin all the time. I just kind of went to a bunch of them that I really like and that I know of. And I try to find an affiliate link. Some of them aren't affiliate links, but regardless they're just there for really great resources. And also they are ways that you can support the show if you use my link as opposed to just going to it. And that really helps me out and it makes me love you even more. So thank you guys to everyone who does. Because this show is brought to you by you guys and you can zap me on Fountain or Boost on Fountain, you can zap me on Nostr. All of those details and where you can follow me and find more of my work are right there. And with that, let's go ahead and get into today's article and it's titled the Great Capitulation by Alexandra Statchenko.
[00:05:50] Bitcoin may very well reverse the Distributional Consequences of the Euro in one of the biggest transfers of wealth of the last decades.
[00:06:02] They are back. Orek Ben Seal, Director General of Market Infrastructure and Payments at the European Central bank, and Jurgen Schaff, advisor in the same department, published a new article on Bitcoin on October 12, 2024, an obsession for these European Central bank collaborators, who are already in less than two years, on their third attempt to break the momentum of the direct competitor of the euro. In this new article, the author's challenge is to demonstrate the redistributive consequences of Bitcoin in a Bitcoin positive scenario. In other words, to prove that even if Bitcoin does not collapse like the absurd 15 year old bubble that it is supposed to be, it has redistributional consequences on the wealth of society in general, which they consider deleterious.
[00:06:58] I could question the need to write 20 pages of research to establish that when the price of an asset rises, those who held it gain more purchasing power than those who did not. I could dwell on the dripping intellectual dishonesty of this paper, whose arbitrary hypotheses are numerous and biased in order to obtain the desired conclusion. In this regard, let us innocently note, the word assume is present more than once per page throughout the document, 28 times for 21 pages of text.
[00:07:35] I could dwell on the vocabulary and the contemptible biases of the authors who attribute the gains of Bitcoin holders to Lambos and Rolexes and other villas, demonstrating their inability to do real research work beyond Twitter and its memes.
[00:07:52] I could dwell on the incongruity of ECB employees, including a senior official using their time paid with taxpayers money to write a new rag every year on an asset that they consider not to be a currency? Isn't there enough to do on their own price stability mandate? Does the ECB offer enlightening analyses of copper, wood or even specific companies?
[00:08:17] I could dwell on the departure from neutrality of two ECB employees who make political remarks that are forbidden to them by European treaties and violate the independence of their institution by recommending supporting politicians according to their opinions and in particular that of fighting Bitcoin. I could also dwell on the arrogance of the authors in persisting and writing on a subject that they clearly do not master, having twice already demonstrated the abysmal vacuity of their analysis, in particular by announcing that the fall of FTX would lead to Bitcoin's last gasp before irrelevance.
[00:08:54] I could dwell on the willful blindness that leads to analysts to turn a blind eye to the immense amount of evidence that contradicts what they write on their rejection of credible sources from Cornell University to North Carolina University via ucl when they claim that Bitcoin destroys the environment, going against the scientific consensus on their silence tinged with rejection when human rights activists offer to meet them to testify the primordial usefulness of Bitcoin for them in contrast to the uselessness that they assert as an unquestionable hypothesis.
[00:09:29] But I have already done all of this for their previous article. Intellectual honesty and rigor do not interest them. It was already the case before. It is still the case today, and most likely it will still be the case tomorrow. As long as the media don't point out the incoherence and the indignity of their remarks each time they speak on this subject, they will continue.
[00:09:53] I would rather focus on the substance of this article and how it reveals a moral capitulation on the part of the authors and probably of the ecb. Although it has refrained from publishing the article on its website, this time a conceptual Bitcoin has won.
[00:10:15] Let us simply note to begin that the authors admit that Bitcoin may not die. It is their working hypothesis. Symbolically, this is the first capitulation. When a journalist asks a candidate in an election what he plans to do if they lose, the candidate knows that they must dismiss the question and state unequivocally that this possibility is excluded because if they answer the question, they have already lost. By allowing the possibility that they will lose to linger even among their supporters, they instill doubt and sow the seeds of defeat themselves.
[00:10:57] So far the ECB has maintained its position. Bitcoin is not a currency. It is a speculative bubble without interest. Any question about the role of the ECB with regard to Bitcoin is stupid, because Bitcoin will die soon. Thus it does not have to respond on the substance and to possible criticisms of the euro or fiat currency in general by writing a scenario in which Bitcoin does not die. Despite the enormous caution taken by the authors, the ECB is instilling doubt. Is it that Bitcoin may not die? Of course it is improbable. Bitcoin's detractors still think, but it is possible.
[00:11:39] It is no longer a matter of discussing a funny project of libertarian geeks doomed to failure. It is a matter of preparing for a scenario that can actually happen. The debate changes in nature and substantive questions are allowed the confession of guilt the Redistributional Consequences of the Euro Let us now focus on the heart of the paper's argument.
[00:12:10] In this paper we show that even A bitcoin positive scenario is problematic from a social perspective as all the wealth effects enjoyed by the early adopters through the rising prices would be at the expense of the late comers or non holders who are impoverished previously. According to the authors, the scenarios envisaged by the Economist they are used to frequenting focused rather on the dangers of the bursting of the bitcoin bubble. The originality of the paper, according to them, is to show that even without a bursting bubble, bitcoin impoverishes society and leads to a redistribution of wealth from late comers or non holders to early birds or early bitcoin holders.
[00:12:55] It's like filling one bucket by draining water from another. The late comers have to give up for the benefit of the early holders, they say. According to them, this is very serious for society as a whole because it endangers cohesion, stability and ultimately democracy, nothing less. The authors seem to linger particularly on the fate of latecomers who would be cheated.
[00:13:19] This redistribution of wealth and purchasing power is unlikely to occur without detrimental consequences for society. Even if the latecomers cannot attribute their loss of purchasing power, they will feel a malaise and frustration that will contribute further to an ever more divided society.
[00:13:36] But let's play along with the authors and suppose that even their absurd zero sum game hypothesis is true, that is that bitcoin in itself produces no wealth for society anywhere in the world. Who are the early lucky birds suspected of plotting to take over all the world's Lamborghinis?
[00:13:56] Regardless of the country, the number one discriminating variable in crypto holding is youth. In France, according to the KPMG Ipsos 2024 survey, more than half of crypto holders are between 18 and 35 years old. While this age group only represents a quarter of the population, modest individuals are also vastly overrepresented. A third of holders are in a household earning less than €18,000 per year.
[00:14:26] In the United States. According to the Paradigm survey, the result is similar with 29% of 18 to 34 year olds owning cryptos, comparing to 19% for the general population. Since ethnic surveys are allowed there and forbidden in France, we also discover that ethnic minorities are particularly over represented with 31% of holders. Even Kamala Harris has noted this and explicitly mentions the topic of cryptos in her agenda revealed in October 2024 and intended for African Americans.
[00:15:01] These statistics are found globally in all countries in which surveys are conducted, so much so that these disparities are also found between countries according to the same criteria. According to the latest global Adoption index from Chainalysis. The podium of countries where adoption is the strongest is made up of India, Nigeria and Indonesia, countries full of young people outside the OECD and where financial inclusion is lacking.
[00:15:34] And all this should not make us forget the countless stories, unfortunately difficult to objectify by statistics, but which are so obvious to anyone who has understood Bitcoin and its usefulness. The story of Snowden or Assange, who used it to guarantee the right to inform or reveal state scandals. The second has just been recognized as a political prisoner by Europe and owes his survival in 2011 to the existence of Bitcoin. The story of Roya Maboob, an Afghan entrepreneur using Bitcoin to pay women deprived of financial independence and allow her compatriots to flee the Taliban regime, who in this regard banned Bitcoin shortly after their return.
[00:16:16] The story of Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corinna Machado, for whom, quote, bitcoin has evolved from a humanitarian tool to a vital means of resistance, making Bitcoin a lifeline as the country sinks deeper into dictatorship and humanitarian crisis. The story of Emmanuel de Marox in the Virungas park in Congo, whose survival also depended on Bitcoin in order to protect the last mountain gorillas.
[00:16:45] So many people whose only ambition in life would be to acquire a Lambo and a Rolex. If we are to believe the authors, on the other hand, if it is the facts, the statistics and the field that are to be believed, the early birds are young people, people of modest means, minorities, the underprivileged, those banned from banking, excluded from the financial system, human rights, and even whistleblowers. And who are the poor latecomers struck by Providence who have not yet acquired bitcoins, the elderly, the boomers, the retired, the professionals of traditional finance, the holders of financial assets and the bulimic states.
[00:17:28] All the people who do not see the interest of Bitcoin and who are magnificently embodied by the authors the personification of the Cantillon Effect, this redistribution of wealth that favors economic agents according to their proximity to the source of money.
[00:17:47] Why be interested in Bitcoin when you yourself are the monetary tap at the heart of the decision making apparatus of the ecb?
[00:17:56] And besides, the authors strive to show in their section two that Satoshi Nakamoto has understood nothing about payments and does not solve any problem. According to them, proof of work is highly impractical itself, as it is costly and inefficient compared to alternative ways to secure the safety and prevent double spending of a payment instrument. But what alternative Are they talking about the use of trusted third parties? Of course they do not realize the absurdity of the statement they are making, blaming Satoshi Nakamoto for solving a problem that does not exist in their world in a perfectly coherent and rational way. The late comers are therefore those who benefit the most from the current monetary situation.
[00:18:43] By deploring the transfer of wealth from the rich, retired boomers and traditional financial professionals to the young, disadvantaged, modest people excluded from the financial system, the authors score an own goal. They reveal the distributional consequences of of fiat currencies. A second defeat, a declaration of war with a taste of panic from this confession arises a clear current Non holders should realize that they have compelling reasons to oppose Bitcoin and advocate for legislation against it, aiming to prevent Bitcoin prices from rising or to see Bitcoin disappear altogether. Latecomers and non holders and their political representatives should emphasize that the idea of Bitcoin as an investment relates to redistribution distribution at their expense.
[00:19:35] According to the authors, the laggards and their political representatives must therefore unite to fight against Bitcoin, because in the unlikely event that it does not die on its own, it will be at their expense. In short, war has been declared.
[00:19:51] But by declaring war, the authors give credibility to their target. Bitcoin is therefore dangerous enough to be designated as the enemy to be defeated. The stakes are openly stated. If the central banks lose, then wealth will be redistributed to the detriment of the current beneficiaries of the Kantian effect. And this again assuming that Bitcoin will bring no value to humanity. Bitcoin may reverse the distributional consequences of the euro. And the ECB doesn't like it. Panic is rising. Bitcoin, the way out of their giant Ponzi scheme, does not want to die. But the survival of the fiat system depends on the lack of an alternative. The entire system is therefore in danger.
[00:20:41] Conceptually, this text is the first nail in the coffin of the euro and a moral capitulation of the ecb, although not an open one because not published on the blog, an unworthy paper riddled with errors and lies, filthy with intellectual dishonesty, whose hypotheses were established in order to obtain a existing conclusion. My favorite sentence being the to refrain from an explicit judgment that Bitcoin is a speculative bubble which would inevitably burst. We replace the term bubble in the remainders of this paper by price exuberance.
[00:21:18] These gentlemen are too generous and grant us the term price exuberance rather than bubble so as not to Be biased. It's an absolute joke in a well made world. This paper should be unilaterally decried by the entire press and by all citizens, paragons and detractors alike. Why is the ECB diverting so many resources from its real missions to focus on it? Either Bitcoin is not the joke with no future that they care to present, or it is a conscious waste of public money. In both cases, it is problematic. The challenge is to take down Bitcoin to install the digital euro. But Bitcoin has already survived much worse and should survive again in any case. Bitcoin surviving is now the main working hypothesis, including of the ecb. And that is priceless.
[00:22:17] You know, one of the funniest things about the paper, the ECB paper, is the sheer amount. Like, and he points this out because I didn't think about it in my mind as this, but I love the fact that he specifically counted the number of times they use the word assume. But the entire paper just sounds like it. It's the most clearly subjective, like just the most blatant dumping of opinion into something that they call a research paper. That is the most unscientific nonsense. Like, as someone who calls themselves an intellectual, these people should be embarrassed for the sheer stupidity and total lack of anything resembling research or actually looking at the statistics or trying to do some sort of legitimate analysis on this thing. And it's specifically unreadable because of how bad it is at this, because it so clearly has a. It's not. Bias isn't the word. They have a conclusion and they're just trying to find or come up with any argument they can in order to make it appear as if that conclusion holds any water at all. And the argument is so thin that the vast majority of what they are even saying is a series of assumptions about what a thing means from their like, stupid, shallow opinion. Like their talk about like Lambos. Like, this entire paper literally just feels like an embarrassing attempt to try to turn an angry Twitter post into something that sounds scientific and stretch the argument that could have literally been covered in 128 characters and basically boils down to everyone in Bitcoin is only there for Lambos and Rolexes. And if Bitcoin actually keeps growing, well, they're going to make money and everyone else will be poor forever. So it's time to make it illegal. That's literally the entire paper summed up. But because they want to paint it sophisticated and don't know how to do anything without wasting enormous amounts of taxpayer Money for no reason. They decided to draw out this rather pathetic argument into 20 pages of pseudoscience that goes out of its way to not get any real data or references and just hunts for anything that might appear to reinforce the opinion that actually originated while one of the authors was sitting on the crapper for 45 minutes having a completely imaginary argument which he was so winning with that dude who had laser eyes on Twitter and told him to have fun staying poor. Trust me, if you didn't read the ECB paper on the redistributional consequences of Bitcoin, you already know everything you need to know. That's basically the level of substance.
[00:25:11] But what's really funny about them getting people to think about the redistributional consequences of the money and how the money works. It's so funny because it reveals just how terrible the euro and the dollar is, how terrible fiat is. If you actually expand on the concept, if you actually take it to its logical conclusion and look at how the euro actually works. It's funny. Bitcoin is not zero sum because the society is not zero sum. But printing money literally is zero sum. It actually is an unfair advantage that creates explicit poverty because it is genuinely taking resource. Nobody who quote unquote buys bitcoin and holds it is taking resources from anyone. Money is not a resource. Money is not a resource. You don't eat it, you don't stick it in a furnace to burn to melt steel. You don't use it to build buildings, you don't use it to make clothes. Money is nothing but a record keeping system. To save money is an act of providing resources to the economy. It is saying, I will work and give stuff to you and I will hold on this receipt, which is nothing but my trust that society will one day pay it back. Savings is literally an investment in society itself. It's a skin in the game testimony, a declaration that says, I will put my value into the economy for other people to use. And in exchange I will hold this receipt. I will hold this promise from society and I will trust that society will grow. Society will know and believe that this promise is better than all other promises. And I will defer my consumption explicitly to the benefit of everyone else. And I will take the risk. I will take the risk that society will be better in the future and I will leave my resources in the economy to ensure that that is what I am putting my value you toward. It is literally saying, I leave my resources. I give them to you because I trust that you will make society better. And I will wait. I will wait. I will not eat today. I will not buy the house that I want to buy. I will not live the life that I want to live. Because I believe society will be better if you have the resources that I made today. And here's the really funny thing. You can't get any value out of it if there aren't latecomers. In other words, someone has to voluntarily say at a later date that they want to give up their resources in order to have bitcoin. Because bitcoin is the superior promise. It's the better trust in the society's record keeping and ability to grow. And so if that's not true and nobody trusts it, nobody gets any value out of it. Like my buying of bitcoin is just me donating to society. If bitcoin is nothing, I lose everything. Literally everything. All the things that all the financial and economic value that we have, we put into bitcoin. Now obviously I don't lose my real value. I don't lose my. Well, I might lose my house, I don't lose my family and my health and all of that good stuff. But from a purely financial standpoint, we would be ruined. And it's so funny that if you actually look at the distributional consequences of resources in the transfer of that value from dollars to bitcoin, the holding of bitcoin is actually the. Not even the leaving of your own resources, but the leaving of the resources. Like, you know, for example. So let's say I, you know, take an extreme example and say you got into bitcoin when it was $2 and you sold a car or something like a thousand dollar car, a very low cost, like not, not like a ton of value or whatever.
[00:29:15] You saved $1,000 car, or excuse me, sold a thousand dollar car and you put it all into bitcoin. So you had a ton of bitcoin and then you held it until today and now you have $30 million or something like that. I don't know what the conversion would be. Wait, no. If you had $1,000, it's 500 Bitcoin. So it's 50 million because Bitcoin's at 100,000. Wow. Math is really easy when you just have whole numbers. Okay, since bitcoin's right around 100,000, it'd be $50 million. Now here's the funny thing, is that holding bitcoin actually means and. Or buying lambos, which is actually really funny because buying lambos is the dumbest thing that you can do with bitcoin. It's so unbelievably stupid. But the really good thing about a bunch of crypto or bitcoiners who don't know anything about bitcoin, selling their returns and buying a Lambo is that that's the, that's the crappiest thing that they can do with it. And it's the least important resource that they could take off of the economy. So if they buy, you know, spend half a million dollars buying a Lamborghini, that's actually great because who the hell needs a Lamborghini? Go ahead and take those off the market, who even cares? But here's the funny thing is if they're lit, if they're holding their bitcoin and they're living modestly and they just have like a small house, a $200,000 house or 300,000, which that's not even much of a house, they had the median house, which like $350,000. Yeah, $350,000 ish. Now if I'm not mistaken, they live modestly and they don't spend their money well. Think about what they're doing. Like it's not just that they provided a thousand dollar car to the economy and then now they have unspoken unfair returns. What they actually did is they made a floor. They propped up the benefit or excuse me, they propped up the value of a better system of trade when it was insanely risky and insanely vulnerable to its demise, to the fact that it might not survive, when people were still unsure if it did have a future. They were actually the ones that held it up. And that, that conviction is exactly why that new system, that far superior system of trade could potentially exist in the future. They're the ones that provided the liquidity early on to give it a market and to prove that it can do exactly what it does. But they also aren't buying up. They're $50 million. You could buy what, 150 houses.
[00:31:44] You could just buy and own all of that, take it off the market, jack up the prices in your, let's say you wanted to do that in your city, you could just totally jack up the prices, take all of these things off the market so they're not available for other people now. They're more expensive. Now the price person who thought they could get a loan at this interest rate and at this amount and handle at this monthly cost, now they can't do it because you just bought up literally 150. You bought up all of the houses that are available in their area right now. Now the only way to get is they have to outbid you, which means they have to spend more on a house that they otherwise would have gotten for lower cost. It would have been more affordable, but now it's not because you just wasted all of your bitcoin on a bunch of houses. But that's stupid. You wouldn't do that because houses aren't an investment. Houses are a liability. Houses degrade. They barely. They don't. They actually do not keep up with inflation. If you just compare them to the M2, they have degraded in value. And anyone who understands money will just hold Bitcoin because they. It's not good, it is a detrimental thing. It is bad for you to buy a bunch of resources that will just lose money, that will lose value and that explicitly take that ownership from other people. Consumption should be done if it's a valuable and useful thing, if it's worth it to you in order to maybe even lose all the money because you believe the thing that you are risking it all on is worth it because it makes society better, because it makes you better, because it has the potential to profit massively because of the unbelievable opportunity and the problem that this thing could solve, well then it makes sense for you to do it. But if you're just parking money in a bunch of houses that other people actually need and that you don't need, but all you want to do is just suck them up off the market and then get. Essentially never have to pay them back because you're going to buy them with debt and that debt's going to be devalued because of inflation. And the housing, your interest rate is not going to match inflation at all because it's all manipulated bullshit by the central bank. Saving in Bitcoin is actually the good thing to do. It is good for society, it is good for the economy because it explicitly makes things that people need affordable. Because you're not wasting all of that value buying it all up. Instead, you're just holding on to Bitcoin. You're just holding on to the trust, the unit of trust in that society that you believe resources will be there when they, when you need them to better your life, or when you think you have found an idea or some sort of an investment or some sort of a project that gives enough value in order for you to risk on that. And it reinforces the very opinions, the very conviction and the very knowledge that led to people adopting a better trading system rather than the ideology that literally, parasitically uses taxpayer money, stolen money, to waste time turning their tweet level opinion into 20 pages of pseudoscience. Garbage. Garbage. The paper itself. The redistributional consequences of bitcoin has caused more direct poverty than bitcoin and any holders ever will they get paid with taxed money. No bitcoin holder stole anything from you, you idiot. But going back to the fact that it reveals the euro and it reveals what's happening with fiat, think about it is that if you benefit from being near the money printer and you, or you get debt and you buy a house or you buy a stock, you invest in anything that's going to quote unquote outpace inflation and specifically you do it with newly printed money, then you are literally doing the opposite of what the bitcoin saver is doing. You are taking resources out of the economy that you haven't even put in. You're taking value and things that other people need completely unfairly simply because you are near the machine. That's just arbitrarily printing these favor receipts that are, that are totally fake. They're not real, they're not receipts for any real favors. Nobody made a skin in the game decision to give you that value. You're just defrauding them. Money works as a means to organize and coordinate society. Specifically. Specifically, because every decision that happens with money with value that is actually earned. Skin in the game opinions. Excuse me, skin in the game decisions are night and day difference from some social or verbal or Twitter opinion. People will say I want this or you should do this and all. There's a never ending onslaught of cheap BS opinions.
[00:36:29] But when they are required to use their money, those decisions change very, very quickly. There's a lot of people who want the war with Ukraine to escalate. There's a lot of people who say Russia's the evil devil. But if they had to sign an explicit check every single month for the thousand dollars that they have to contribute to it, I guarantee you 99% of its support would vanish like that. The only reason they can spout their vapid opinion is because they literally think that they are getting it for free. And the only people that even keep would even keep pushing it are the people who sit next to the money printer and think that the cost of things doesn't matter and we can just print a bajillion dollary dues out of thin air and fund or create or do whatever the hell we want. Because the money printer is a magic wand that just makes resources appear out of nothing when oh what's actually happening? They're stealing all of these resources from society. They are deliberately, explicitly making all of us poorer, leaving fewer houses for us. They're buying up all of the assets, they're owning all of the stocks. They're controlling all of the businesses while we get poorer and poorer. Prices keep getting higher and higher. Everything keeps getting more expensive. The lives, our lives and our standard of living and our health keep getting further and further away from what we want. We have less and less time. We own less and less of the literal country that we occupy. We rent all of the important things of our lives that can be taken from us, that can be used to control us. And suddenly our lives come with strings attached. And the pathetic wannabe tyrants at the ECB literally tell us we're going to go into a future where we will own nothing. But it's okay because you'll be happy. And don't worry if you're not happy. They're gonna make it illegal, so it doesn't matter. You'll have to be happy or you'll go to the gulags. That way they can reeducate you on how great everything really is.
[00:38:35] But the funniest thing about this whole paper is what a self own. It is their whole. The whole premise of this ECB paper is that bitcoin won't die. After years of them saying bitcoin was complete nonsense and it was going to bust and all, of course they had their long sophisticated research papers about how dangerous it was for the economy for the bitcoin bubble to burst. But now, now that's not the conversation.
[00:39:12] Now that's not the frame.
[00:39:15] The frame is, well, how terrible will it be if bitcoin doesn't die? Here's why you should fight it. Here's why you should make sure it's outlawed. Because if you don't buy bitcoin, all of the people who do buy bitcoin will get super rich and, and everyone else will be poor. And it's hilarious because it's kind of an argument that you should buy bitcoin now rather than later. Alexandra brings up a really good point, is that you don't. You don't. They. They just admitted that bitcoin might not die. They just admitted that. Okay, what if it just keeps going like this? And that's, that's the capitulation, and I love the framing or the one of the last sections or whatever could capitulation with a touch of panic.
[00:40:04] It is no longer a matter of discussing a funny project of libertarian geeks doomed to failure. It is a Matter of preparing for a scenario that can actually happen. The debate changes in nature and substantive questions are allowed.
[00:40:21] And probably my favorite part of it, where they just talk about how Satoshi Nakamoto didn't solve anything, when literally the problem they solve is the ECBs is the problem that Bitcoin solves. This quote, this is from the article, not the research paper says. And besides, the authors strive to show in their section two that Satoshi Nakamoto has understood nothing about payments and does not solve any problem. According to them, proof of work is highly impractical itself, as it is costly and inefficient compared to alternative ways to secure the safety and prevent double spending of a payment instrument. But what alternative are they talking about? The use of trusted third parties. Of course, they do not realize the absurdity of the statement that they are making blaming Satoshi Nakamoto for solving a problem that does not exist in their world. And I would actually word it a little bit differently than that. It's not that the problem doesn't exist in their world, it's that having to trust them is the solution that they claim is already perfect. They are literally the third party that we are forced to trust. And so from their viewpoint, Bitcoin doesn't solve any problem except that if you actually ask a bitcoiner, they are the problem. The ECB is the problem. We are sick of being stolen from. We are sick of being the puppets in their giant system of just controlling everything that we own when they literally, literally, openly talk about a future where nobody will own anything except for them and everyone will be happy about it because you don't have a choice. You are the problem, you arrogant idiot. Everyone is sick of trusting you because you have destroyed the Western world. They've gutted the modern world of its integrity, of its value base, of its culture, of its diversity. And they've suffocated it in this shallow, arbitrary financial facade where the people who actually do the work of society, who keep the pipes running, who pave the roads, who build the houses, who do the actual things that make society exist and keep food on their plates, are completely overrun and completely dominated by people who just trade a bunch of financial derivatives, who think the whole world is just a bunch of numbers in a computer screen and that power is distributed through the hierarchy of how close you are to the giant defrauding monetary mechanism, while they literally waste taxpayer money, stolen funds, waxing sophisticated in 20 pages of nonsense where they literally tell people that because they're in charge, there's no problem. And everyone should just do whatever they say. Payments work great because we're the ones who control the ledger. There's not even a problem to solve. Guys, you are the problem that bitcoin solves. And it's not theoretical. It's not like maybe a little bit. And no, we're not trying to be diplomatic about it. We are solving you. We are trying to put you out of business forever. We are trying to destroy the industry of money, printers and political power via fraud. And you are at its center. You are its core. Write as many research papers as you want, please print as many euros as you can and fund all of the research, because it will only make bitcoin go up even more. And you will keep having to capitulate over and over the framing more and more because every year that goes by and bitcoin doesn't die and it doesn't blow up and people actually have their lives improve and they stop getting destroyed and stolen from because their whole your cheap shitty paper promises that are just the tokens of your unearned opulence, you only make yourself look more and more pathetic. And I hope you take as long as you possibly can to buy bitcoin. I hope you are the very last one who does it. And it almost upsets me. The most frustrating thing about bitcoin is that in the end your life will still be made better by bitcoin because it will put the entire society into a set of cooperative incentives where if everyone else succeeds, it makes the value in the life of the other people, of the people who did not contribute better just because they all they get to benefit from everyone else's success. Everything always gets more affordable. And because they'll actually have to do some sort of contribution to it, they might actually be made into better people rather than the empty, soulless counterfeiters that they are today. So please double down, write another paper next year. I can't wait to cover it on the show. And with that, we'll close this one out. A huge thanks to Alexander, who I have never actually read a piece by on this show. I don't believe this is the first one. So shout out to him. Don't forget to follow him on medium. I will have the link to the article right there in the show notes, as well as the other products and services and the affiliates and all the great things that you can do to support this show or of course just to support yourself. Get some bitcoin, keep it safe with your cold storage. All of those great things. These are my top recommendations. And with that, I'm out. Thank you guys so much for listening. Thank you guys for boosting. Thank you guys for streaming sats, for zapping on nostr. I am Guy Swann. This is bitcoin audible. And until next time, everybody. Take it easy, guys.
[00:46:35] He was giving me enough rope to hang myself with. Apparently he didn't realize that once a noose is tied, it will fit one neck as easily as another.
[00:46:45] Kvothe from the Name of the wind.
