Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] The broad point is that only the strong Survive was correct. We are entering the end game of crypto having any reason to exist.
[00:00:10] My thesis as to why it exists at all is a combination of a novel vector for gambling and an affinity scam. Bitcoin is extremely difficult to even begin to understand.
[00:00:21] And even though what it fundamentally fixes is money printing, its novelty ironically lends itself to confusing the uninitiated and impatient with meaningless appeal. Appeals to blockchain technology that manifest as attempts to print money.
[00:00:38] The best in Bitcoin made Audible I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin. Audible.
[00:01:01] 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, we've got a great episode today. We've got a read another one from Alan Farrington. It's short, this one's actually, actually was on LinkedIn and it's kind of a follow up to Only the Strong Survive, which if you have not listened or read that one, you definitely need to. I have the link down in the show notes. It's a fantastic piece breaking down conceptually everything fundamentally wrong with defi and the concept of crypto in general. Basically laying out the theory of why money tends toward one, why the value of this is trust and its assurances, where crypto has fundamentally made a mistake in its entire thinking of what to build and how to build it, and then explicitly breaking down where and why that theory is aligning perfectly with the reality. And this is essentially a follow up doubling down on that showing yet again.
[00:02:06] No, I was right. And this is this. These are so many different examples of exactly why and how I was right. We have found ourselves in exactly the future he had predicted, still headed in the same direction.
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[00:02:51] You can get a simple loan extremely quickly and you don't have to sell your bitcoin, you can live off it. Check them out. There is actually a discount at the link right down in the show Notes Also a shout out to Pub key P U B K Y app. They have developed an entire entire protocol stack for the web to re decentralize. Put the user back in control of their content, their networks, their connections, their DNS, you name it. And they are easy to build with if you're a builder. If you're building an app and you want to build a decentralized version one where the user is in control. Do not sleep on what the pub key guys have built. And if you are working with screens all of the time, you have got to get your light health right. It's probably doing you more damage than you think, especially if you have have you know you're wired at the very end of the night. It's 11 o' clock at night and now it feels like the only time that you can actually get something done and it takes five hours to actually get the day started. Your problem might have nothing to do with your tendency, your DNA or anything like that. You might have a light and hormone problem. The number one thing I think you could do to help this and has helped me is get some night shades from Chroma. There's a 10% discount. These are blue and green light blocking glasses that I just put on at sundown every night. Link and discount codes right down in the show notes. And then lastly the hrf they have the Oslo Freedom Forum which tickets are on sale. There's a beginning of June this year and or next year. Excuse me. And their amazing newsletter, the Financial Freedom Report. All of which you will find right down in the description of this podcast. All right, big thanks to our sponsors and to the audionauts for supporting my work and for always having some great. TK has had some really great article suggestions actually that will be coming up on the show. Shout out to him and all of you guys. I've actually got some exclusive clips coming to the audionauts of last few chat episodes that we've had because I've I've kept the guys on for either a pre show or post show conversation and that will be exclusive to the audionauts. So I just wanted you guys to know that that is coming. Stay tuned. And with that let's get into today's article and it's titled Arcade Crypto and Only the Strong Surviving by Alan Farrington.
[00:05:09] In 2021 I co wrote Only the Strong Survive making the argument that the contemporary furore over defi was almost entirely delusional, self referential and economically illiterate. That the yields had no basis in economic reality and instead followed from unbacked leverage, rehypothecation and securitization, and that it would inevitably collapse when it ran out of greater fools.
[00:05:36] The paper built on classics by John Pfeffer, an institutional investor's take on crypto assets link provided and even as far back as Andrew Polstra's Distributed consensus from Proof of Stake is Impossible link also available immediately retweeted by virtually every prominent bitcoiner, but really amplified by Jack Dorsey and Mike Novogratz. I am proud to say the paper is still referred to as a canonical piece of shitcoin debunkery, and for what it's worth, holds up pretty well. The silver lining which hardly anybody remembers given the insanity of what was being debunked and the fact that it all collapsed almost exactly as predicted, was the section arguing that in due course all the same capabilities being touted as revolutionary in crypto would eventually become possible on Bitcoin too.
[00:06:24] For a long time this has been little more than an argument, a hope even from the crypto perspective. I even understand interpreting this as cope on the part of toxic maximalists. But last week it became a reality.
[00:06:37] On Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025 in Lugano, Switzerland, Ark Labs launched Arcade on Bitcoin Mainnet, the first true layer two on Bitcoin since the Lightning Network and the first ever tool to make Bitcoin truly programmable. I was honored to speak at the launch event and say many of the things I am saying in this article.
[00:07:00] In the wings, Alpin Labs and Chainway Labs are due to launch the Alpin and Citria Zero Knowledge rollups in the coming months, bringing the EVM to Bitcoin as an interesting contrast to Arcade's UTXO centric model. And finally, given the only real use case of crypto has turned out to be stablecoins, it is worth noting that Tether, the only stablecoin issuer worth paying attention to, at least so far, has committed to issuing on Taproot assets and rgb, both of which interoperate seamlessly and atomically with lightning and ark. ARK Labs created a demo of this use case available here. If you are interested, you can separately read my thesis on why stablecoins moving to lightning is inevitable in the very long run. Anyway, I say all this to make two points, one narrow and one broad.
[00:07:52] The narrow point is that Axiom is an investor in all of ARK Labs, Alpin and Chainway, as well as infrastructure companies such as voltage, ibex, neutron, getbit.in, musket and coincorner and blockspaces, all of whom stand to benefit enormously from enabling an inevitable stablecoin rollout on lightning. Given our focus on foundational innovation and deep technical understanding, we've never been interested in short term token pump and dumps or new L1s or whatever the scam du jour happens to be.
[00:08:29] Rather, we have been patiently awaiting this moment for years. If you would like to discuss our approach to the space and our thoughts on Bitcoin layer 2s, please reach out. The broad point is that only the strong survive was correct. We are entering the end game of crypto having any reason to exist.
[00:08:47] My thesis as to why it exists at all is as a combination of a novel vector for gambling and an affinity scam.
[00:08:55] Bitcoin is extremely difficult to even begin to understand. And even though what it fundamentally fixes is money printing, its novelty ironically lends itself to confusing the uninitiated and impatient with meaningless appeals to blockchain technology that manifest as attempts to print money. That is not to say that everybody involved has been in on the scam, so to speak. I have thought for a long time that the participation of most developers and academics has been on tragically exploitative terms at the behest of unscrupulous financiers. After all, it has been true for a long time that programmability has been limited in bitcoin for a good reason and coveted and embraced in crypto for no reason.
[00:09:40] A great deal of breakthrough cryptography research has emerged from the crypto space, yet has achieved little more than making scams more efficient and giving them shinier wrappers.
[00:09:51] But it is to say that the technology now exists for these people to leave crypto behind, stop inadvertently contributing to gambling at best and scams at worst, and contribute instead to the most important technological revolution of our lifetime. Stop spinning up layer 1s. Bitcoin is the layer 1. Stop issuing tokens. Bitcoin is the token. There are no longer any grounds to pretend this is not the case. Arcade is real. It is not an idea or a white paper or vaporware to be decentralized later. You can use it today.
[00:10:29] Arcade os.com for those capital allocators hoodwinked by the rhetoric of crypto financiers, watching the narrative constantly change as to what the point of any of this even is, putting up with either the comical losses or returns that can only conceivably have come from dumping on retail, given zero useful technology has been created.
[00:10:51] Stop and ask these people why.
[00:10:55] Why aren't you using Arcade. Why are you issuing tokens? Why are you trying to print money when that is precisely the problem this technology solves? Why do you even exist?
[00:11:07] Why am I paying you? And what am I buying?
[00:11:12] The clock is ticking and only the strong will survive.
[00:11:18] Okay, so in. I believe it was the previous episode, I don't know, one of, one of the recent episodes I mentioned that I thought I had misunderstand Arcade and that it wasn't ARC related.
[00:11:32] And then I went digging and reading and I was like, oh no, it definitely is ARK related. And then obviously Alan Farrington also makes that point in this article.
[00:11:41] But this actually relates back to the intermediate, well, intermediaries article that we just covered on the show or the role of intermediaries.
[00:11:52] And one thing that I brought up and I really think is super powerful about what we're seeing with the combination of ark, Lightning, E Cash, these sorts of kind of aggregate and service and LSPs, these like service provider style models, is that it gets the. It's about finding the best of all the various worlds. Like centralization.
[00:12:22] The, the major problem that we have always had with centralization is that it comes with total control, is that centralization has always meant, especially in the fiat sense when, when you're looking at middleman or you're looking at middlemen or intermediaries in physical space or in a trusted setup with intermediaries in a fiat holding fiat assets, some, some sort of trusted token that someone has to redeem is that the role of being a facilitator ends up also creating or becomes fundamentally attached to the actual control of the resource itself.
[00:13:04] You can't have a financial intermediary that isn't also able to screw you. You can't have someone that ships your package from A to B who can't also destroy your package or steal it. You can't ship the same package with two different intermediaries and then just accept the one that does the job better. You can't have some service or entity in the fiat financial world that facilitates a transaction between two people or enables it and moves the funds from A to B without them actually owning like, like without giving them explicitly all of your funds. And so when you say the word centralization immediately or, or a central provider or a server, everybody always. And you know this is the same thing with social media, right? You can't, you can't have a social media service or provider that doesn't control your network, that doesn't decide who your follow.
[00:14:03] It doesn't have the ability to censor or manipulate or delete your messages or your posts or your DMs to prevent you from actually communicating or connecting to someone who on both sides you may want to connect and communicate. Here is a middleman who is not even part of your conversation, who is just there supposedly to make it so I can find you, and you and I want to talk to each other and someone else external to the conversation that's not relevant to it, that shouldn't even have any say at all, is saying is deciding whether or not we can have a conversation or more importantly, whether or not we even see each other in this space.
[00:14:43] And so when you hear the word server, when you hear the word centralization or provider or something, or operator, you immediately, it immediately comes attached to those ideas because that's simply what we've always had in the past. And if we wanted to avoid that, it was always because we wanted something quote unquote decentralized or private that was always clunky, that sucked, that came with a dozen other trade offs, had a horrible UX, required some technical or elaborate, you know, roundabout way. It was always the aggressively more inconvenient option. Like there was no, there was never really any real comparison.
[00:15:26] The quote unquote decentralized option just never worked. Like it was never a realistic option for the overwhelming majority of people. Like there was the version that worked and then there was the version that was safe or good. And usually still that one still came with a handful of trade offs. Like it doesn't, it didn't even solve the problem. It was just kind of like slightly better, way more painful. And so we came to associate these two terms.
[00:15:53] We came to believe out of extensive experience that these things, these two things were necessarily attached to each other.
[00:16:02] Then bitcoin comes along and the lightning network and suddenly you can route a payment through other people, other people can facilitate the payment, can provide liquidity, that can be a partner in the route of money from you to someone else without ever having control of the funds, without ever being a risk as to whether or not the funds exist in the first place, without ever compromising the fact that you can take your money and leave and nobody else can tell you otherwise.
[00:16:41] I don't think people respect because it's just like, oh, it just is. It's really easy to forget how utterly profound that innovation is. Like I talk about, I just made a post the other day, right? I just made a video on proof of Reserves, if you haven't seen it. And in that case I'm talking specifically about Things where you have a trusted relationship where somebody else has to hold Bitcoin on your behalf. But we don't have to have proof of reserves for ARK or for Lightning Network because the structure of it is a proof of reserves. Like it, it's just, it relies on Bitcoin to know that the reserves are the reserves because the transaction is just valid or not. Like it, it, it's as tightly adherent to the rules of Bitcoin as Bitcoin itself. Because everything that actually happens on the Lightning network is a real Bitcoin transaction. They are all pre signed transactions. Like if you can't, I mean obviously I could pre sign a transaction with a billion Bitcoin in it and that would do me no good. But then it literally, it just wouldn't be valid. Like, like I'm choosing, I'm literally deciding, it would just be, I could do that. The same as just with my Bitcoin node is I could have someone send me a Bitcoin transaction to send me a billion Bitcoin and then I could just modify my node to say oh no, no, yeah, this is, this is going to work and I'll accept it. But that would just be like, I would just be retarded. I would just stop. I would not be using Bitcoin at that point because I've explicitly modified my software to not work with Bitcoin. You are just checking Bitcoin and knowing exactly whether or not the transaction is valid and the amount is valid and everything in every single way. With the Lightning Network as you are with Bitcoin there's literally no distinguishing between the two at all from the context of what is valid and what is not. ARK is the exact same way. You can only sign, you can only receive Bitcoin that actually exists. And even crazier is that it is non custodial.
[00:18:47] They do not control the funds.
[00:18:49] You have the data to post to the chain at all times to take your money and leave. This is the future of banking.
[00:18:59] Like this is the revolution. This already can scale essentially as far as we need it to think about it. So Bitcoin can do like you know, 600,000 transaction a day, something like that. Maybe, maybe upwards to a million depending on exactly how packed we can, we can make this thing. I think there's been rough estimate, like I think when I was talking to Merch he mentioned like 14 transactions per second. Like that goes up to like 8,000 a block or something like that, 8,000 transactions. But regardless, let's just call it, let's just call it half a million for the sake of simplicity. You got 7 billion people on Earth. Let's say they're all being provided by an ARK that has channels into the network of all of the various arcs. That's essentially what the lightning network is, is a web of interconnected a uniparty or excuse me, a unicast network where ARK is basically the quote unquote lightning service provider model. And everybody has a balance inside the ark, which is actually a channel. And ARK essentially provides the, the banking services. It becomes the bank and everyone connects through these banks or they can literally run their own bank and create their own lightning channels. They can still do all of the other options because this is all just an open network and connects to and pay anyone in the world from anywhere in this giant decentralized network.
[00:20:22] Well, if the ARK is the default way to interact, well then every ARK only really has to provide services for like an average of 15,000, 20,000 people for all of them to be able to resettle or rebalance between themselves, not on lightning, but on chain once a day at virtually zero fees. Because that's just the def, that's the base capacity of Bitcoin. And if one of these arc, one of these arcs fail and let's say 20,000 people have to immediately go to chain, takes like five blocks to clear, getting them into a new ark or you know, rolling out. Let's say, let's say they have, you have multi path options where you could literally have it so that like oh, I could send it to my own cold storage or I could send it to this quote unquote insurance ARC that is going to batch to get me into the next arc. And so I, so I'm paying, I'm splitting fees with other people inside this arc. And of course you're going to have service providers that are actually wildly successful, right? You're going to have service providers that maybe have 10 million users, 100 million users, who even knows? But operating with any of them at any scale is largely going to be indistinguishable because they can all communicate with each other over the Lightning network and everybody just pays and receives Lightning invoices. But add to this a really interesting element is that because the operator is essentially a, an adjudicator of sorts of the movement of funds from one place to another without actually giving up custody. And actually the ARK provider is actually offering up liquidity, they are actually taking the risk when they sign over because they are providing Bitcoin on the back end for the transaction to actually be secured. But because they're in this kind of facilitator position, they can essentially operate on a broader range of conditions that can be put. So there's this. The Arcade script has made use of a number of different things. So one of the things that, and they don't actually break it down in the, in the documentation explicitly like what every individual piece does, but they have something in Arcade scripts that allows introspection, which allows the transaction to actually refer to something in the transaction, which is exactly what enables things like covenants and conditions that are built on the prior.
[00:22:59] The prior transaction. And then they use this in combination with Taproot, which has the possibility for far deeper and more complex scripting. Conditions can actually be private obviously as well. And then also key tweaking, which I don't. Again, I don't know the deep specifics on exactly how they do each one of these pieces and how it puts together that I'm sure it would require its own episode to kind of dig into exactly how it works. But we have talked about key tweaking. It's. It's kind of a way to, to, to put in. It's. It's almost a way to put in a condition based on something that has nothing to do with the script. The, the key itself isn't valid without some other computation or piece of data or I guess more importantly proves that you know, some piece of information that you would have to know. And it does so without actually revealing that thing. It's a little bit like a hash in conceptually, in that way, I guess is that you've kind of got like a fingerprint of the information.
[00:24:03] And, and because of that you can prove that you had the information at that time if somebody presents it later and you, you match it to the hash. Well, key tweaking is a little bit like that from, from kind of like my kind of high level understanding of it is that you're tweaking the key with a piece of information that you can then essentially commit to. So you can commit to like an additional contract or you commit to like some software, like some script that you're actually going to run. And as I understand it, this is a major part of exactly how you can have all of this complexity and a lot of script behind a transaction that actually just looks like a single sig. Spend a single signature transaction on chain. But by revealing the underlying script conditions, some other completely. In a non cooperative case, some other completely different script or path can actually be taken to unlock and Spend those coins. But basically with a handful of these different things is the is Arcade is able to create essentially a stateful, a state transition style quote unquote account.
[00:25:18] And so it enables things that need a persistent state to be implemented like a decentralized exchange payment channels.
[00:25:30] I can't remember the other examples they had like a lending lending system, that sort of thing. Essentially in essence basically a finance system on top of the Bitcoin, the general Bitcoin system. But like lightning is essentially that. So. So this isn't actually as complex or different as it may seem. This is just a much a really interesting instantiation of essentially what Lightning does. Lightning is a how do we create a state machine on top of Bitcoin's UTXO model and its commit and redeem sort of structure by having the punishments and current state like updating the current state and having the pre image and everything. Like how do you. How do you create it so that this Lightning channel essentially has two different accounts that each quote unquote user has and they continue to update on an ongoing basis without actually going to chain. So as I understand it, unless somebody wants to correct me or I'm I'm getting some piece of it wrong, is that basically Arcade script and the way that they use something we've covered in the past, something called a connector, which essentially mimics what a Covenant does in a sense. And then because they have the VTXO model that they're able to update UTXOs offline and they have the quote unquote central coordinator, the operator of the Ark. You kind of get the benefit, some of the benefits of a centralized operator and how they can actually provide some other type of facilitation, a deeper level of facilitation.
[00:27:10] But you're never actually giving up control of the coins. You always have the ability to essentially stamp and your guaranteed ability to capacity to redeem those coins without anybody else's permission. So his literally like being able to create a bank without custody. And this is why I genuinely think this is the type of scaling that is actually going to work because it gets the best of both worlds. It gets the benefit of centralization with the benefits of decentralization.
[00:27:44] And for everything that I've learned about the Internet and dug into history and monetary systems, there was always a quote unquote more decentralized or more fundamentally, you know, independent way or sovereign way to implement something. But it always came with trade offs. And every era always seemed to coalesce around the idea that or the structure that gave Enough to solve the major problems, the fundamental errors of the, of the last era. But it always seems to land on what's the one that does this job well enough rather than the one that does this job perfectly. Because the one that does it perfectly almost never really exists. Or it actually only solves one specific problem and has such a huge trade off in some other area that, that it just becomes so inconvenient as to be impractical for the, for the thing that it needs to solve. In fact, Bitcoin itself is kind of an interesting example of this. Because Bitcoin doesn't really solve the Byzantine General's problem.
[00:28:53] It does in practice, but it doesn't in theory, because all it does is align economic incentives to prevent abuse of the Byzantine General's problems.
[00:29:06] It, it makes the, it makes the friction of being cooperative lower than the friction of cheating. And the reason one cheats in a system is because it's easier to win the game by cheating than it is to cooperate or play within the rules. The only benefit of cheating is that you get the reward without the work, without actually having to compete or succeed at the game.
[00:29:31] If cheating is more work than actually beating the game inside the rules. And it's even dumber to cheat. Like if you could pass a test with a hundred, if you could just make 100 on the test and get every single answer right with 30 minutes of studying, no one would ever spend 8 hours developing or creating some structure to cheat on that test that still only worked for that one test is not applicable to any other situation when they could just learn the answers. And Bitcoin takes advantage, advantage of this asymmetry in a good enough sort of fashion. It's just so unbelievably hard to change the history. And because it gets harder over time to change the history, it simply isn't done. But it doesn't have to perfectly solve the problem. It doesn't have to solve the problem in a universally complete fashion in a way that like, genuinely, there is no. Absolutely impossible to reverse. It doesn't have to do that, because that likely isn't possible anyway. But it is able to achieve irreversibility in a way that's cumulative and makes it so impractical to attempt to reverse the transaction that we can, that it's simply trustworthy enough to engage in financial activity, to want to own Bitcoin, to want to use this system for settlement, and importantly, in a way that's better than every other alternative. And I think this is exactly what we're Kind of looking at, with things like Lightning, with things like ARK with ecash is we're trying to figure out, okay, what is the absolute best way to achieve some subset of results or to solve some core problem that is good enough that it can work for essentially everybody and be so much comparably better than the alternatives, than the systems that we have today, that there's a 10x leap forward in the structure and the resiliency of society without having to wait for some utterly perfect, likely impossible solution to arise.
[00:31:44] And if you compare a world that has Arkansas and Lightning Network as the main concept or the main infrastructure in the world for payment systems, you have Bitcoin as the main monetary system, you have ARK and ECASH as the major user facing structures and service providers and financial entities and banking entities.
[00:32:12] And you put everyone in the world into this system.
[00:32:17] I would argue you don't have something that's 10 times better. You have something that's a hundred times better, like there, that almost is incomparably better in many contexts.
[00:32:29] Something where before it wasn't simply a, oh, you could get, you know, 2% of this service or 2% of this degree of sovereignty, and now you get 50% of this sovereignty or something like that. It's not even, it's not even a situation where there's a good comparison.
[00:32:47] We're talking about where so much of what would now be possible was literally impossible before. Like, there just wasn't a world. There was nothing they could do. There wasn't even a place that they could be in which you could achieve the degree of sovereignty or the control or the decentralization or the pushback against power or the control against capital or censorship or surveillance.
[00:33:12] It just. There was no world in which the capacity to achieve those things could ever even exist. And keep in mind, this is all on a Bitcoin that still has one megabyte blocks.
[00:33:24] And I think this model works for the whole world. It does mean there will be quote, unquote weather on the chain. There will be, there will be periods of extremely high demand, there will be periods of low demand still. There will be relative disasters and times in which there is such a flood. Just, I mean, just like the other day, Twitter went down, Google went down, you have these major services that got ddosed and. Or Cloudflare went down. Why? Because there are times when there is a lot going on or where there are attacks or where there are strains, or there is insanely high volume and all of the service providers and the infrastructure providers have to make adjustments and they have to repair and they have to change things. And this is exactly what we'll see with lightning. This is exactly what we'll see with Bitcoin. This is exactly what we'll see with ark. You'll have a major ARK implement or encounter a bug and there will be massive amounts of shifting or there might have to be trust involved in the shift from one set of batching to a new set of batching, or literally everyone will freak out and the keys will be lost and everyone will have to actually take it to the chain and there will be horrible, horrible load. It will be like Bitcoin is under DDoS as we try to clear through a million transactions. And when that happens, people will not make transactions. They will, they will hold back and they will say fees are way too high. I'm actually going to wait on this for a little bit, you know, because that's how prices work in a market. And it'll take two or three days to clear the backlog. But I think the set of models that we have today, the structures that we have already put in place, the designs that have already been built and now even implemented that are on chain and ready to be used, actually give us a rough scale to a global system.
[00:35:15] And it's all going to keep getting better, it's all going to keep improving.
[00:35:20] And so explain to me again why I need some other shitty proof of stake crypto that has almost no trust and whose entire selling point is a bunch of stupid hype around some piece of software or some widget or NFT or defi.
[00:35:41] Explain to me why again this global economy is going to try to use two or three different monies, when this is so horrifically inefficient, that even under a fiat system where you're forced to trust, where you're literally at the behest of, of the monetary owner, everybody still basically uses one dominant currency. Like the trade offs of that could not be greater. The trade offs of that are massive. You're basically subjugating yourself to the dominant monetary power. And yet every country, most of the entire planet still does this because of the unbelievably strong forces to coalesce around a single monetary standard.
[00:36:25] The exact same reason we use the same clock.
[00:36:28] And what can Bitcoin not do?
[00:36:31] What can Bitcoin not do?
[00:36:34] I think we're all going to end up on a Bitcoin standard for the exact same reason why no matter where you are in the world, no matter what country you're in, no matter what jurisdiction?
[00:36:45] The side of any mountain range. Doesn't matter. If you listen to this podcast that my 10 seconds and your 10 seconds are exactly the same. In fact, no device on the Internet can speak to another one on the Internet properly without our seconds being the same.
[00:37:04] I think the same thing is going to be true of money. I think the same thing is going to be true of monetary protocols. And I think we're all going to be on Bitcoin. And I don't see how we don't make this doesn't get built on Bitcoin. Like, I don't see what the alternative is. Like, think about, think about where what will be an what will be possible in the future, how broad and interconnected the network the Internet itself will be, and how money will be tied to everything that we do and how billions of people will go from unbanked to banked. If of course, we even I even like that framing. But they will. They will go from no digital finance to a form of digital finance.
[00:37:48] How. How is that going to happen otherwise?
[00:37:52] Is it really going to happen without friction and without the destruction of literally everything about free society through centralized platforms and a fiat environment and we're all just going to stay on the dollar?
[00:38:05] Mean, does anybody really think that that's how it's going to happen? Like, I don't even think that's structurally sustainable. Not only politically, but like structurally sustainable. It's kind of like one of those things like, you know, the Roman Empire, like you spread yourself so thin that at some point you collapse under your own weight because it just doesn't scale to that size. But then think about the political difficulties and the cultural and trust issues and the inability to maintain global networks, especially at a time when there's insane, insane political turmoil and we literally have. The entire Western world is under an astronomical debt crisis, a debt crisis that is literally incomparable in all of human history for the scope of how big this problem is. And not only is inflation bad in the best currencies that we have available to us, it's getting worse with all of them.
[00:39:06] I simply think it's inevitable, is that we simply don't achieve that future until we have a native digital money. And considering we have a trusted native digital money, one that has built more trust and higher assurances than anything in history, anything that could possibly compare to it. And is 10x the second best, the next best thing, which doesn't even compare when we're talking about what actually digital money provides, Independent digital money actually provides, rather than some frivolous or technical complexity style sense in the like I have cooler toys than you sense. Literally nothing even comes close.
[00:39:51] Nothing comes close.
[00:39:53] And we can even have all of these systems with privacy. In fact, privacy that is better and more versatile, more adaptable than what something like Monero or zcash offers.
[00:40:07] So that's what I think.
[00:40:09] Quick shout out to Leden IO for Bitcoin backed loans to Synonym and the Pub key stack for for building tools to redecentralize the web which is so important to this discussion. To Chroma for my blue light blocking glasses. The There are many different Lighthealth products. 10% discount with code Bitcoin audible plus some really good holiday discounts and then lastly the HRF and their Financial Freedom Report newsletter. Check them out. Subscribe, Go to the links. Don't forget the discount codes. All right down in the show Notes Bitcoin isn't just going to become the money of the Internet. Bitcoin is the money of the Internet. And crypto has generally been nothing but a casino to sell cheap technical tricks. And at best it has been a test ground for building things that are just going to be done on top of bitcoin. But I guess we'll find out. This is Bitcoin Audible I am Guy Swan and until next time Everybody. That's my two SATs.
[00:41:27] People would learn to trust the new money only if they were confident it was completely exempt from any government control.
[00:41:37] Friedrich Hayek Shout out to Economista Austriaco on Noster for that quote.
