How Bitcoin Was Hijacked w/ Roger Ver & Steve Patterson

Welcome to Keith Knight. Don't tread on anyone in the Libertarian Institute. Today we will be discussing hijacking Bitcoin, the hidden history of BTC with the author, Roger Fear. He is the founder of bitcoin.com and the Co writer Steve Patterson, founder of the Natural Philosophy Institute and host of Patterson in Pursuit. Gentlemen, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. We're.

Both glad to be here. Roger, I want to give a little introduction to economics, Why it matters, then move into crypto, and then go into why this book is important. You frequently promote a book, Lessons, Economics in One Lesson by Henry Haslett. What are the major takeaways from this book, and why do you feel it's so important? I think, and there's so many things in in the world that people just assume are correct and just assume take for

granted. But when you go and look into it and dive into it a little bit deeper, oh, a lot of times the opposite is true. And it's like one example of that is like minimum wage laws. You think, oh, that's going to help people, That's great. But if you actually look at what it does like, there's no guarantee that anybody will have a job. All minimum wage laws do is guarantee that, like, if your time is worth less than whatever the minimum wage is, you won't have any job at all.

And so, like, it doesn't actually help people. It hurts people. And that's very counterintuitive to the way most people just assume most things with government's work. And so, like that book was a real eye opener for me as a young man before I was, you know, a hardcore libertarian and cap. It just kind of got me thinking. And same with like a number of books by Milton Friedman as well.

They're a bit more soft and gentle and subtle, but it really made me start to to think about things a bit more differently. And then suddenly I came across Murray Rothbard and my entire view of the world was turned upside down. But I I think I see the world clearly now and it was the view of the world I had before that was wrong and and and and you know, clouded by by the world I had lived in up to that point.

Just like little kids all believe in Santa Claus because every adult around them tells them Santa Claus is real, and then suddenly one day they find out it's not real. The same is really true about the government's role in society. Like everybody's taught from a very young age that government is this wonderful thing that benefits everybody. Without, you know, government,

the society would fall apart. But actually I I think it's kind of the the opposite is the the truth for the most part in most situations. Yeah. And one of the things that I appreciated from Roger early on, I've been following him for a long time was when he was talking about Bitcoin. It was very much in an from the economic perspective. And I appreciated that because I was, I think I was working at the Foundation for Economic Education at the time. It was around that general area.

I was an intern and then I was working at the organization and I realized that economics is an incredibly powerful tool for understanding how the world works. I was kind of coming in at from a political angle. I was interested in politics. And then I realized and I heard Ron Paul talk and he made a lot of sense. And I was like, who's this Ron Paul guy? And he then he started referencing Austrian economists. He started talking about economics all the time.

And I thought, wow, this is really interesting. And so I kind of went down the rabbit hole of economics and I found that a much more powerful way of understanding the world than kind of superficial political analysis. So then when he, he was Roger Veer coming along talking about Bitcoin and Austrian economics at the same time, I thought, OK, wow, there's something special here. This is very this is the stumbled onto something very powerful. It's so funny you mentioned the

minimum wage example. I remember even when I was interested in libertarianism, I thought, well, you gotta have a minimum wage. Obviously every sane person knows this and to my surprise both Doug McMullen and H Lee Scott, the to the current and former CEO of Walmart, came out in favor of the minimum wage and raising it. And I said, well this makes no sense.

Here I am thinking I'm taking on the big CE OS and the big business by supporting the minimum wage and they supported it. Do you guys have a general theory as to how it is that so many people can believe something that there is so little evidence for If you raise the price, you get less of something. Obviously the minimum wage hurts people with the amount of skills and experience. How is it that so many people can believe something where there's such little evidence?

Not just so many people, so many experts. Well, maybe those CE OS don't think that they're helping poor people or unskilled people. They're hurting their competition, right? And I think that that's why they're most likely to support those laws, because it hurts their competition more than it hurts the businesses that they're the CE OS of. So it's a way for them to force out competition in the market. So I I think that's probably

their motivation. It's not some altruistic desire to help poor people or help unskilled workers in the marketplace. Yeah. And unfortunately, you know, that might be true for the CEOs and the people that are making big decisions that they're it's kind of a pessimistic or callous way of analyzing things where they know exactly what they're doing. And I think that's true. But there's a whole lot of other people who aren't in those positions that still think the

minimum wage is helpful. And it's a fascinating question. How can so many people believe these ideas that are pretty thoroughly refuted? I mean, there are some, you know, complex ideas in economics that are open questions, and they're, you know, really interesting people disagree. But the effects of the minimum wage, it's pretty, it's pretty clear that on net, this is harming the people that it's supposed to be designed to help. And then, you know, how does an

idea like that stick around? Oh boy, that is a really difficult one We saw in Bitcoin. You know, just to bring it to Bitcoin. Eventually a whole bunch of really bad ideas, even worse ideas, frankly, became very popular over the period of, let's say, from 2013 to 2017. And one, at least one way that those bad ideas became popular is through mass censorship and propaganda.

So I think it's very possible that maybe something like that is going on with ideas like the minimum wage or other other basic economic concepts where the the better ideas are sort of hounded out of the market. You know, I don't know if there's censorship propaganda going on at the government schools or public schools, but perhaps that's the reason they stick around, I'm not sure. Yeah, or or third possibility

with these CEOs as well. Maybe they know that the general public's been fooled about the minimum wage and rather than have to deal with the mob of angry people out there in the world, they just say, Oh yeah, I support the minimum wage too. And that way they don't get attacked, you know, incessantly on social media for not having supported the minimum wage, even maybe, though, even though perhaps they already know that it's actually a bad deal and it actually hurts people.

They just don't want to deal with the, you know, mob of angry misguided people saying why are you supporting the minimum wage so? One of the things I've been surprised to see is that the word inflation has been used more in the last couple months. That happened to be, you know, right after Biden's Inflation reduction Act, where people are actually using this word to describe a rise in prices, not differentiating it from a change in supply and demand.

They just say prices go up and that is inflation. Anything jump out to you as wrong with that analysis or missing in the big picture? Yeah. The big picture is that everything's competing for usefulness as money in the marketplace and when and the the price of money is set by supply and demand, right. So if they increase the supply of dollars out there floating around in the marketplace and of course the the everything else priced in those dollars goes up because now there's a bigger

supply of dollars. So the price of everything is going to go up. And so like, I forget who said it, maybe Murray Rothbard or Milton Friedman, but somebody said something along the lines of like every time, everywhere, inflation is purely caused by an increase in the money supply.

And so many people just view it as something like, you know, the weather or something that's just beyond our control and something that just happens all on it. So no, it's when government prints more money, that's what causes inflation. And so, like, the people that get the money first get the benefit from it first, right, Because they spend it before the rest of the people have figured out, oh, there's more dollars out there in the market chasing the same number of goods.

But if you know if if printing money could solve poverty, you know printing diplomas would cause cure stupidity, right? It's it's not. Neither of those things work, and you're just you're just you're just fooling yourself if you think it does. How would you respond to the claim that inflation is the result of capitalism and private enterprise choosing to be greedy and not having the proper regulations to keep prices low for consumers?

First, I might roll my eyes and take a deep breath like you just saw me do. And then second, I would explain that entrepreneurs and capitalists are always greedy. That didn't just change in the last couple of years, right?

But the fact that they're greedy, like the way these businesses, when they're not using government to stifle their competition, the way businesses earn a bunch of money and businessmen earn a bunch of money is by giving their customers the things that they want, right. So as Adam Smith said, it's not from the benevolence of the butcher or Baker that we expect Our Daily Bread, but from their own regards, for their own self-interest. And so it was the same of the for the butcher and Baker

hundreds of years ago. And it's the same for, you know, Apple computer today and and and everybody else, right. They give everybody iPhones because the people value the iPhones more than they value the dollars they give Apple. And so the same is true of all these businesses out there. They're getting rich and they're the the people working there and the shareholders, they're all greedy and they all want more money, but the way they get more money is by giving people the

things that they want. And it's like that didn't change just recently. That's not what caused inflation. Like that's been true for since, you know, the beginning of of humankind, like people been trading with each other to to get what they want from their neighbor. And they're, they've been greedy the entire time, right. They want to trade and get what as much as they can possibly can from their neighbor. And hopefully most people most of the time continue to do that

without without force or fraud. And if you look at it like the government does a horrible job of preventing that force and fraud anyhow, things like consumer reviews and online ratings online do a much better job of you know, cautioning people about scams or or faulty products or that sort of thing. So like, I don't know, I'm just kind of a disappointed that so many people have have been fooled.

But that's why we have this wonderful platform to help try and get the word out even though there's massive amounts of of censorship now on the big platforms like YouTube and and Facebook and and others there. But you know, let's make sure we share these this content on the other less censorship prone platforms as well. Yeah, and inflation is a particularly relevant topic to cryptocurrency and Bitcoin.

I know a lot of people, myself included, were drawn to the monetary side of Bitcoin that had a promise of being an inflation proof digital currency, which sounds amazing. The the deeper you go down the rabbit hole of monetary economics and political theory, you learn that the ability to print new money is one of the most powerful things in the world. So. Powerful. Not necessarily in a good way to be clear. True, yes, Right, right.

Not very much. If you don't like governments having a bunch of power, then you're not going to like them being able to print currency at will, because that empowers them to do all kinds of things that a lot of people think are evil and and make us all worse off. It's effectively theft. They're stealing value from other people's savings by

printing more currency. So related to Bitcoin, that's what a lot of people were drawn into cryptocurrency just for this angle, this promise of maybe we can get away from government issued money, government controlled money. And I still, I still think it's a beautiful idea. You know, unfortunately we have an uphill battle to climb there. But and I'm sure that's still something that that motivates Rodger and and myself still is like that.

The promise of being able to take this one power away from the state and the government is very tantalizing. And it's amazing more people don't agree with us. All I heard about since elementary school is we need a state to enforce antitrust laws because monopolies are bad. Also the state needs to monopolize the money supply, monopolize legislation, monopolize guns, monopolize taxation. I could have sworn monopolies were just totally horrible 2 minutes ago before we get into

BTC specifically. Steve, you said in a article, a seed of doubt to experts and incompetence, that Austrian economics specifically is what sort of radicalized you. What is it specifically about Austrian economics that you thought was important as opposed to classical economics or the Chicago School? Well, the true answer to that question is going to be too boring for this talk and it has to do with the methodology of economics and the methodology of

Austrian economics. But I can summarize it in in a more interesting way. So something that happens not just in economics but in from what I can tell, all domains of thought is you go up levels of let's say let's call it an abstraction hierarchy where people as they're trying to learn something, they learned principles that tend to be more abstract and they go higher and higher than abstraction.

And this often crosses into the domain of mathematics, which is a kind of a very high level abstract way of trying to understand something. And after learning about or seeing the attempts to mathematize economics, I became very skeptical that this is a good way of doing economics. And the Austrians historically have been very skeptical of the application of mathematics in economics 'cause they think there are in my language, I would say there are abstraction

errors everywhere. So even basic concepts like GDP, which seems like something that's like a sort of a mathy idea, C + I + G -, X, -, M, right? That is a very you have to be very careful when you use that concept or you can be misled. You can think it's telling you something about productivity and it it might not actually that

might not be the case. So there are many, many, many cases where I think the Austrians have kind of a micro economic view that's pretty sceptical of really big high level abstractions for understanding economics and I'm very drawn to that. So just one more concrete analogy on that. It's kind of common in mainstream economics to talk, to make analogies to like a car, right? They go, oh, inflation is revving up and so that means the economy is overheating as if

it's like an engine. And like, there are these drivers of the economy press on the gas pedal. Oh, that these guys press too hard now they got to press on the brakes. That whole way of thinking about economics I think is very bad. It's an abstraction error. So I really like the Austrians approach here. They have a much more, much more pleasing methodology to to my mind. Rodger What's so special about Austrian economics, And what's wrong with the Keynesian world

view in general? Yeah, I I, so I I guess I'd like to clarify and I in the zeitgeist of the world, they talk about, you know, Austrian economics and the Chicago School and classicalists and Neo classicalists and Keynesians. But like there's just economics, right? There's just physics, there's just economics and the Austrians are the ones who have it right? So Austrian economics is real economics. The other ones are just, you know, confused witchcraft type stuff.

And so, like, I remember there was one Bitcoin maximalist. I'm pretty sure it was a man named Jimmy Song. He wrote some essay calling me like a Bitcoin Keynesians and how the small blockers are Bitcoin Austrians. And and they're like, I called them out and I said, have you even read John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Money and Credit? And he didn't want to admit it directly, but I pushed me a minute. He hadn't even read it. So I read the book cover to

cover. Basically all he's saying is that government should print more money to trick people into thinking that they have more money. And then they'll go think they have more money and they'll go out and spend more money on things that they wouldn't have otherwise bought. And then that'll like induce more people to go and spend on things, but like spending money on consumption goods doesn't make the world a a richer place.

Maybe you'll have a little bit something in the short term, but where like if you really want to grow the world's economy, people need to spend the money on things that are going to produce more goods and services in the future. So like not spend your money on buying a new car, but spend your money on investing in a new car factory. And the new car factory will then produce more cars. So there will now be more cars in the world for everybody to

enjoy. And it's like all John Maynard Keynes's whole theory is, is to have the government print more money to trick people into spending more of their money on on, you know, things that don't make the world a richer place overall. And it's like, that's just dishonest and stupid on so many different levels. One, you shouldn't be trying to trick people, and two, the thing he's trying to trick people into doing doesn't make the world a

better place in the long term. And another, you know, my favorite economist, I guess Murray Rothbard and anybody I I'd recommend pick up anything by Murray Rothbard and read it. But somebody asked him at some point. He said, well, what do you think about, you know, John Maynard Keynes? Like, I'm sorry, they asked John Maynard Keynes. Well, isn't what you're advocating. Won't that cause, like inflation in the long run? And Keynes said in the long run

we're all dead. And Murray Rothbard, after Keynes had already died, and this was in like the late 1970s when we had, you know, super high inflation and like a stagnant economy. Murray Rothbard said, well, now Keynes is dead and we're all living in his long run. And so like, I think that's really, really important to like the the time preference that people have. You should look at the bigger picture.

You know, maybe if I had, you know, took a whole bunch of coke and hung out with a bunch of hookers, say I'd feel great today. Maybe I wouldn't actually, but like some people might, but that's not good for your long term future. And so printing a whole bunch of money right now today, maybe it'll feel good for the next, you know, couple of weeks or months even or maybe even a

whole year. But in the long run, it's incredibly destructive to human society and it's a power that really, really needs to be taken away from government. And that's why peer-to-peer electronic cash that people are actually using in payments for commerce outside of the, you know, the role of of government or outside of the government's ability to control is such an incredibly powerful, wonderful tool for the entire world. And if I can harp on, you know,

attack kings one more time too. Like what do you advocates causes all sorts of inflation but governments love inflation and. And I'm sorry, Friedman, Milton Friedman pointed this out to me too. And it just was such an eye opener for me as a young man, a thing called bracket creep. And what bracket creep is, is like, you know, in in America and Japan and most countries around the world, they have what's called a graduated income

tax scale. And the more, you know, dollars or yen or EUR you earn, the higher percentage of your income you pay in taxes. Well, I'm, I'm 45 years old today. When I was a young man earning $100,000 a year was a really, really big salary that would put you like in, you know, by far the highest, you know, tax bracket rate Now in Silicon Valley, I don't know, $100,000 is somewhere close to, like, the starting wage for a lot of these

engineering jobs. And that's not because like there's so much more, you know, productive. It's because government has inflated the money over the last, however many decades there. And so like $100,000 today is maybe like, I don't know, you know, 20 or $30,000 was when I was a young man. And So what that does by causing the inflation. Somebody, if you start, you know, $20,000 a year, maybe you're in a, you know, 12% income tax bracket.

But now if you're earning $100,000 a year, that doesn't buy anything more than, you know, 20,000 or $30,000 did a couple decades ago. Now suddenly instead of paying 12% of your income in taxes, you're paying 35% of your income in taxes. So you're paying a much higher percentage of your income in taxes even though you don't have any more buying power than people did historically.

So government loves to create inflation because year after year it bumps people into higher income tax brackets and so the government can collect more of their money that way as well. So just like really detrimental to society, you know, every which way and every which direction.

And Keynes really was a did a horrible disservice to the world by trying to intellectually authorize governments to, you know, engage in all this manipulation of the economy for the things that governments want to do. It's it's damaging. It's been damaging to all of human society. Exactly. And the General Theory is the book that Paul Krugman said was even more important than Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.

Yes, he actually did say that. Rodger, you said, yeah, I could be sipping a martini on a beach somewhere, but that's not nearly as fun as promoting making the entire world a better place. And that's about what cryptocurrencies have the ability to do. How is that the case that cryptocurrencies really have the ability to make the entire world a better place? So it's it's kind of a lot of people are familiar with the miracle of compound interest,

right? And it's like if you compound your interest over a long enough period of time, after, you know, a few decades, you're going to really have a lot of money and the income's really going to be huge just from, you know, the simple compounding of interest and the the rate of comp of interest really makes a huge difference, right? If you're earning, the difference between earning, you know, 5% per year and 6% per year, from one year to the next

isn't that big of a difference. But from 1 decade to the next or one century to next, it's a huge difference. And so the same is true with the rate of economic growth around the world, right? The difference of having, you know, a 1% rate of economic growth from this year to the next. Versus a 2% rate of economic growth, isn't that big a difference from one single year? So you earn $100,000 this year versus 101,000 next year if 1% economic growth or or two, $102,000 if you had 2% economic

growth. But if you extend that over a couple of decades or centuries for, you know, human civilization, it makes a huge, huge, huge difference. And so let's say government intervention in the economy has only been retarding the rate of economic growth by a single percent, which I think it's it's been significantly more than that. But even if it's just a single percent compound, that over the last couple of 100 years, we'd already have colonies on Mars. We would have already cured all

sorts of diseases. We'd already have, you know, solved, you know, world hunger. We'd we'd have solved so many problems. Everybody's life would be so much better off. It would be, you know, so much more akin to, like, you know, what we saw in The Jetsons when we were a kid in terms of the way people are living. And instead, we have a lot of cool stuff, but we're nowhere near where we would have been if we had just even a single additional percentage point of economic growth over the last

couple of decades. So. Steve, anything to add to that? How crypto currencies can make the world a better place? Yeah. Well, I agree with Roger that, you know, the more freedom of choice that individuals have, the better off we all are at. The freedom of choice is deeply related to economic growth. So I I think cryptocurrencies offering us, offering everybody on alternative currency that they can use to state money could potentially make the world a radically better place.

I mean if you were to theorize about the most like powerful inventions that you could possibly make to make people wealthier off, that isn't like, you know the what do they call that thing from Star Trek where you push the button and you get whatever you want out, right? That might be the most yeah, something like that. Right up there and near the top of the list would be sound stable digital money for the Internet that the government can't confiscate and maybe give

you privacy. I think you're you're you're talking about one of the most potentially could be one of the most powerful tools for making the world better. Now. Ever. Yeah, truly ever. The flip side of this though is a little bit scary and it's relevant to the book, which is one of the most terrifying inventions ever. Could also be unsound digital currency that is issued by the state and you have, you know, central bank digital currencies where every transaction is monitored.

You don't have privacy that it's they can inflate the money supply at will. That is very dystopian. So like we were saying before, you know the the power of this technology is great and it could be very, very good or very, very bad. Roger, what are blocks and what are the block size wars? The story of my the last decade of my life there. So basically there's this word everybody's heard of called the blockchain.

And a blockchain is just a real fancy name for an accounting Ledger or a Ledger that keeps track of who owns what bitcoins or what Bitcoin cash or whatever cryptocurrency, right? And so on this block, this Ledger, right. And a normal Ledger you have, you know, if you're running QuickBooks or or whatever accounting software, you have a copy of that Ledger on your computer.

And maybe you have, you know, one backup in in Dropbox or or iCloud or whatever the the amazing invention of Bitcoin there was instead of that Ledger being on one person's computer that controls it, it's on everybody's computer that's running the Bitcoin software. So now instead, they're just being one copy and maybe one backup.

It's on thousands or 10s of thousands or even 100,000 plus, you know, computers around the world have a full copy of this Ledger and everybody's Ledger updates together exactly at the same time In Sync with everybody's else's Ledger. And that update to the Ledger that happens to everybody else is called a new block on the blockchain and it's a new block of data. It's just a new update to the status of that Ledger, to who owns what and everything.

And when a Bitcoin initially launched, there was no limit to the size of that update. The updates happened on average every 10 minutes. But any amount of transactions could be included in that new block on the blockchain. So you could have, you know, a million people make a transaction in 10 minutes. Boom. That's now updated across everybody's copy of the the, the accounting software called the blockchain for Bitcoin all over

the world. And then, I don't know a little ways in, they realized, oh, you know, Bitcoin. Bitcoin wasn't really worth anything. Like like less than a penny. Maybe At this point, I'd have to go back and check. Exactly. And there wasn't really even a clear price at at that point, to

be honest. But they decided, oh, this could potentially be a way where people could attack Bitcoin in the short term if they just made a whole bunch of transactions and there wasn't like any way to like not let them, you know, flood everybody's computer hard drives for that. So they decided to put in a temporary one MB limit just so that people couldn't spam the network that way.

And then later on, what happened is that through censorship and propaganda, that one MB block size limit that was always intended to be removed. If Bitcoin ever became more popular, more people started using it. And that one MB limited Bitcoin to having about 2000 something

transactions every 10 minutes. They weaponized that into a tool to trap Bitcoin. It's not being usable for payments where you had to use a custodian, You had to get, you know, permission from that custodian to do what you want with your own money. And they tricked the entire world into thinking that that one MB limit was a good thing.

And my background before I got involved in cryptocurrencies, I was literally selling networking equipment that would be transmitting the data for these, you know, block chains and for, you know, everything on the Internet. And I watched, you know, some of the, the first things I was selling, you know, were like, you know, 2400 Baht modems was my first modem. And that's that's so incredibly slow. I don't know, I I I'd have to get out of the, you know, calculator and do the math.

It would take something like an hour to download a single MB with a 2400 baht connection and then you know today you know the connection. I'm talking to you right now here, I have a 10 Gigabit connection on the Internet here and it costs like $30.00 a month to do that. But I was telling you all the networking equipment to support that and now you can get, you know, 100 Gigabit, you know, hardware and even more. And I watched the prices for this just plummet year after year after year.

And so for people to be fooled into thinking that one MB every 10 minutes is the right amount for for bitcoins block size to be allowed to increase is just absolutely like it's it's just like the Luddites in in England that were mad about the the you know, weaving machines taking their jobs and breaking them and saying, oh, we we don't, we don't want that sort of thing.

These people are literally destroying the tools that push human civilization forward by limiting the block size to one MB per block on Bitcoin, forcing everybody to have to use a custodian, telling people it's not supposed to be used as a medium of exchange. They're literally destroying the things that are going to push all of human society forward in in a in a faster, better direction.

And they don't realize it. Just like the people that are out there advocating in favor of the minimum wage. They're damaging and hurting the poorest people in society and society as a whole. And you know some of them are doing it on purpose, but others are just absolutely, you know, just useful idiots that are, you know, drank the the the censorship induced propaganda Kool-aid and they're out there, you know, told the party line because that's what they've been

brainwashed into doing. And it's really sad and frustrating to see that that's the case. But that's why it's important for people to continue to speak out and point out the minimum wage hurts poor people and hurts

society as a whole. And limiting the Bitcoin block size to one MB hurt Bitcoin specifically, hurt the entire Bitcoin ecosystem as a whole cryptocurrency ecosystem as a whole, and hurt all of human civilization as a whole to the point where and the Bitcoin maximus have loved to mock me for this quote, but like, literally, babies are dying because of this. And the people that mock me for that are the ones that don't understand the economics, right?

Fewer babies die today at childbirth than 100 years ago. The reason fewer babies die at childbirth today than 100 years ago is because we have better technology today and more money to spend on healthcare and more money to spend on doctors and more money to spend on all of these things because civilization has progressed and the rate of economic growth has

continued. Well, Bitcoin that works as peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world is the best tool we have to create more economic growth. So if we have 1% economic growth this year versus 5% economic growth this year, if we have 5% economic growth, fewer babies are going to die next year because we'll have more resources to devote to saving them at childbirth. And so the people out there that mock the idea of babies are

dying because of this. They're just showing their economic ignorance to the entire world for anybody who's paying attention. And that's why cryptocurrencies are so incredibly important, because it's literally the tool to create more economic growth for the entire world, which raises everybody up out of poverty and allows fewer babies to die at childbirth, fewer people to die of starvation. Everybody literally on the entire planet, from rich to poor

to young to old. Everybody has a better standard of living because of more economic growth, and cryptocurrencies that aren't crippled are the best tool we have to enable that for the world. Plus, shout out to AI as well, because that's really gonna be an amazing multiplier of human ingenuity as well. So I wanna say a couple things on that, just so people understand when your questions about blocks and we're talking about the size of the blocks being one MB. No. No, that's fine.

That's that's fine. That was that was good and important things to say. I just want to put in context for people if they're unfamiliar. This is the, the size of blocks is not within multiple orders of magnitude reasonable for on Bitcoin. So we're saying that, you know, the transactions get bundled into blocks and then the Ledger gets updated with these blocks. OK. If people are familiar with like computers, one MB is itty, itty, bitty.

That is a fraction of what a picture of your phone on your phone is in terms of size. Like if you take take your average smartphone, it's going to be at least 4 megabytes a photo all the way up to like, you know, way, way, way, way larger than that. OK. This, this, that that is, you know, one MB roughly of data every 10 minutes produced on the Bitcoin network. That is insane. That's not a little bit off. That is crazy. It OK, so, so I want to get an

analogy. OK, so imagine we're talking about cars and we're talking about like somebody's building a new car and they're working on the gas tank. And while they're working on the car, they don't want there to be too much gas in the gas tank because maybe there will be a spark and there will be an explosion. And so they say, OK, here's the rule, While we're working on the car, we can only put One Cup of gasoline in the tank. That's it. No more.

OK, great. The agreement, the understanding is, and when we're done working on the car, then you can fill the gas tank up and it can go far. So the analogy to Bitcoin is imagine now the they're done working on the car and they say you can no longer you. You cannot put more than One Cup of gas in the gas tank. You'd say ever. You'd say, well, that's insane. What do you mean a cup? That's nothing like we can't, it can't go anywhere. We could barely even start this

thing with a cup of gas. That's crazy. But that's effectively what happened to Bitcoin by capping it at one MB blocks. It's like having a cup of gas in your gas tank and and it's it. And the the creator of Bitcoin could not have been clearer that the system was designed for those blocks to be very large, arbitrarily large really as it

scales over time. So that would be an analogy to just put in perspective, this isn't like a this isn't like maybe it could be one MB or 8 megabytes like we are multiple or you know it can easily be a GB. There's already been blocks that have been produced on the what's called the test net for Bitcoin cache, which is where people do

experiments. They've already successfully produced GB blocks, which is 1000 times larger than one MB blocks, so I figured that would be an important thing to add. Yes, I know in the book I don't remember the exact numbers. You actually use Visa and MasterCard as references for if we want this free money, not free.

If we want something like a cryptocurrency that everyone can use, well, we got to actually look at what people like Visa, MasterCard, American Express are actually dealing with. So if many people are expecting A1 MB block, do we have any reference as to what American Express, Visa and MasterCard, the amount of space that they use for transactions or PayPal?

Yeah, it it's increased over the years, but when Bitcoin first came out, I believe that the average transaction throughput through like Visa, MasterCard was something like 15,000 transactions a a second I think was the peak I I'd have to and this is kind of old history at the moment. I wasn't prepared with the exact data in front of me, but totally

doable right now. Today on Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash for a bunch of block chains, all they have to do is allow it to do so. And the arguments, I guess it's like a lot of these false arguments like in economics too, where people say, oh, we need the minimum wage to to help poor people. The result is the exact opposite. It hurts the unskilled people in

the workplace. People told everybody, oh, we need to limit the block size on Bitcoin to keep it censorship resistant when the exact opposite is what wound up happening. Now we have, you know, 10 years of history to look back on. By limiting the block size on Bitcoin, it forced everybody into using custodial platforms where you have to do KYC for everything. They can close your account, they can freeze your funds.

It made Bitcoin far, far more sensible, which is the exact opposite of what they were claiming they were trying to achieve. And so, like, as Milton Friedman said, again too, we have to judge government programs by their results, not their intentions. And the same is true with limiting the block size on Bitcoin. We have to judge it by its results, not their intentions. Maybe their intention was to keep Bitcoin decentralized and everybody would be able to be

able to do whatever they want. But the results were that it made Bitcoin more sensible, more centralized, and easier for the government to control. It looks like Steve may have some some data. Ready for it? Yes. I got my bike book in the mail today. So to answer your question, the running the back of the envelope calculations has been done by Satoshi himself and by the other early developers and entrepreneurs in the space. So So these are just back of the

envelope calculations here. But on page 58 it says if Bitcoin processes roughly 4 transactions per second per MB block, then that would mean 800 megabyte blocks equals around 3200 transactions per second, which ends up being 100 billion transactions per year. So 100 there's your and it can go up from there. But 800 megabyte blocks to get 100 billion transactions is not, remember 800 megabyte blocks on

average every 10 minutes. There are other other calculations later in the chapter where that's literally less data than streaming, like an HD video from Netflix. So when the calculations were run, a lot of these calculations

were run. We're talking like 20/10/2011 where you didn't even have Google Fiber, hadn't been rolled out anywhere, nobody was streaming HD videos over the Internet. So just not only did the calculations even make sense back then, but in today's terms it's it's very clear it can we can scale on chain you know more than 1000 fold without really any issue. Rodger What was the Bitcoin fork of 2017?

So there have been you know this brewing disagreement within Bitcoin and and initially I, I I was on the fence and the the disagreement was like small blocks versus big blocks.

Do we continue on the path that Bitcoin was laid out by Satoshi which was just let the blocks get as big as they need to be so they can become peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world or should we limit the block size of Bitcoin to try and keep it more You know, censorship resistant was was the claim from the other side and my heart was on the big block side because that seemed to make the most sense to me.

But I also wanted to keep an open mind and maybe I would learn something new and and and and you know I I'm always trying to learn new things every single day. And so, like, I just wanted to listen to the arguments from both sides and and hear what everybody wanted to, you know, what what the arguments were on both sides.

And I would decide for myself. And then I saw that almost, you know, the, the vast majority of the people on the small block side suddenly started doing everything they possibly could not to argue. Their positions went to censor the people on the big block side and they would delete their posts and and do everything they could. It was, you know, kind of a a precursor to the a lot of the cancel culture we have today. They did everything they could to censor the other side of the debate.

And that was what made me make up my mind and say, OK, well, I already thought that big blocks made more sense. And now I see the small block people trying to censor free speech on the big block side. Well, of course I'm a big blocker now. And of course I, of course I support free speech. So of course I'm going to go and speak out now. And so I did, you know, I had, I bought bitcoin.com early on. I, you know, I had was the first person in the world to start investing in this ecosystem.

I had a big number of bitcoins. Of course, it made sense to support the side that supported free speech because it was also the same side that was supporting, you know, using Bitcoin as in commerce because it would increase the rate of economic growth around the world. It was the IT was the side that made sense. And if you support free speech, you kind of had to be a big

blocker. And if you support free speech and you're a small blocker, you're you're kind of a hypocrite at at this point because they've done, to this very day, they're, you know, still trying to cancel anybody they possibly can in regards to, you know, advocating for just even being able to talk about these ideas in Bitcoin. So if you're opposed to people being able to even talk about ideas, you're an enemy of the progress of human civilization, right? Like here, here with without,

without exaggeration. You really are. You're an enemy to the progress of human civilization if you're opposed to free speech. So another few points to add here. The fork occurred in 2017 and it was actually a backup plan. So what the biggest miner in the world at the time was planning on having was how how to summarize without going in too much to the weeds here, they were trying to upgrade the network in a non dramatic way.

But the Bitcoin Core developers had acted in bad faith many, many times and so this these miners had a backup plan and they said OK, if the developers don't come through again, then we have to scale Bitcoin somehow. So we're going to fork off and make a chain, a secondary chain, just in case they don't follow through. And that secondary chain is called Bitcoin Cash. That's where Bitcoin Cash comes from.

It was, it was made as a backup plan in case the core developers didn't come through, which they didn't. So after that the attempted non dramatic upgrade failed, a whole bunch of people switched over to Bitcoin Cash. A lot of the old entrepreneurs and some of the biggest businesses said OK, well this the Bitcoin Core chain is no longer promising because they're going to have this one MB block size seems forever and that doesn't make any sense.

And so the other, the other best option at the time seemed like Bitcoin Cash because that was scaling according to the original design of Satoshi Nakamoto and and Roger, I mean, you're obviously maybe the most connected person in Bitcoin ever. When you were talking to different companies and businesses, what percentage of, let's say, the CE OS that you would talk with were in support

of bigger blocks? And what percentage were, what percentage were expressing frustration to you at the core developers that they really were failing at their jobs? Almost all of them, with the only exceptions being the businesses that didn't really have any traction, so they didn't have any customers that were trying to transact on chain. So like certainly Coinbase, certainly BitPay, certainly blockchain.com, certainly you

know, bitco.com. And at that point too, like those businesses and zappo.com at the time those businesses probably accounted for, you know, combined, I don't know 90 plus percent of the the transactions on Bitcoin at that point, like I'm overwhelming support for that. And I I want to thank you for for two things there, Steve, actually like or one was like thank you for answering the question that Keith asked me because I got sidetracked and and didn't answer it. So I apologize.

I'm so glad I have you here to answer the questions. And two, I want to point out to the world because it just gets misreported over and over and over again. I love Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash is great, but I had absolutely zero to do with the creation of Bitcoin Cash. I had nothing to do with it. It's reported over and over and over again that I'm the creator and the founder of Bitcoin Cash.

I had nothing to do with it. Bitcoin Cash forked off and I still had nothing to do with it for months and months and months. It wasn't told the very final last straw, that these Bitcoin Core developers reneged on their promise to the entire Bitcoin industry to allow Bitcoin to scale to be money for the world. And they reneged on this thing that was called the SegWit 2X agreement.

And when they reneged on that one again, you know, because they had reneged over and over and over up to that point, that was the final straw for myself and a bunch of different people. And so I looked at all the other block chains that were out there and I thought, OK, which one has the best chance of becoming peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world? That's outside of the ability of governance to control?

And I I think that there were probably three 3 1/2 contenders on my radar at that point for that. There was Ethereum was interesting, Monero was interesting, and Bitcoin Cash was interesting, and I think that they were all pretty good contenders. I was scared of Monero being that role because Monero is so incredibly good right out of the gate that, like, governments have been opposed to it right out of the gate. So I'm recording this from here in Japan.

Monero and other privacy coins are not allowed to be listed on any Japanese exchange. They're not allowed on any Korean exchange. They're not allowed on any Singaporean exchange. There's all sorts of countries all over the world that'll let people trade Bitcoin all day long, or Bitcoin Cash and a number of other coins, but not Monero or other privacy coins because they're so good. And so that made it seem like Monero would be an uphill battle

to become money for the world. Even though Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin with bigger blocks, you can have awesome privacy available to you on it without scaring governments right out of the gate. And Ethereum also, you know, seemed very interesting and lots has happened there. But in addition that I owned bitcoin.com, it seemed like a really powerful tool to use because that Bitcoin brand is

incredibly powerful there. And so again, I just want to clarify, I had nothing to do with the creation of Bitcoin Cash, yet everybody today says that I did. And the reality is I probably did a heck of a lot more spreading Bitcoin BTC to the world early on than I did with with Bitcoin Cash later on. So just want to clarify that and thank you Steve for answering the questions earlier And I I got distracted and went off on an well.

It's also worth noting to the the small blockers or the BTC guys are are actually explicit in wanting to rewrite history. There's a part, I don't know if you've got a chance to read the book yet, Keith, but there's a part in the book that's literally shocking. Where some of the biggest names in BTC, the most influential people, are pseudonymous. There's this guy named Themos and this other guy named Cobra,

and I don't know who they are. I don't know what their personal identities are, but they between the two of them they end up owning the most important discussion platforms in the world. There's a website calledbitcointalk.org which is the I think that is the the most popular and also the R slash Bitcoin subreddit as well as the Bitcoin wiki Bitcoin dot IT. So there's just two people that own the most important discussion platforms in the world and have for a very long time.

And they what, there's some explicit exchanges they have with one another where they say, and I'm, I'm only roughly paraphrasing, you know, I've noticed a lot of newcomers in Bitcoin are confused about the purpose of Bitcoin. And I think the reason for this confusion is the white paper that Satoshi Nakamoto wrote. So I think what we need to do is make a new white paper, call that the Bitcoin white paper and update it so people aren't confused.

So these are, this is an explicit conversation that they had. It's like recorded there's a citation you can go, you can look at this exchange. So I I bring that up to say they are open about their information management, their information control and they are good at rewriting history and smear campaigns. So Roger has been for a long time the subject of a lot of smear campaigns, some of which are particularly nasty, that I'm sure you can talk about if you want to.

You know, there's this idea that he's a Bitcoin Judas, he betrayed Bitcoin, or he was trying to pass off BTC as or passive BCH, just the real Bitcoin. And it's only BTC that's so awful. Well, people don't realize, especially if didn't live through it, there was a period of time where it was not clear what would be called Bitcoin, and for very good reasons. We go into it in the book, we explain some of the reasons why

this makes a lot of sense. You don't want to just say whatever the Bitcoin Core software produces is Bitcoin because that means the Bitcoin Core developers have captured Bitcoin. So at the time when we were talking 2017 around this, the time of the split, it was not clear I think to anybody who was going to win. Was it going to be the Bitcoin Cash fork or was it going to be

what people call Bitcoin now? BTC and notable, we had a couple of prominent people like Gavin Andreessen, who was the the heir of Satoshi, the person managing the Bitcoin software project. After Satoshi left, he said that again, it's a quote in the book, something like Bitcoin Cash is what I is the project that I got involved with at the beginning. It's a store of value and a medium of exchange. There's a quote from Metallic

Buter and also saying he can. At the time he considered Bitcoin Cash a legitimate contender for the name Bitcoin. So despite what the history rewriters want to say, it was actually very much on the table who was going to win this fight between the small blockers and the big blockers. Roger, do you want to bring any more? Yeah, there was actually a time where it looked like the big

block side was going to win. Actually, there were more minor signaling for the big block side of Bitcoin, and it looked like what is called Bitcoin Cash today would wind up becoming Bitcoin. And then unfortunately, one software bug was found in one of the main node implementations for the big block version. And that caused a bunch more drama and gave like a, you know, a wedge that the small blockers could use to attack and say, oh, the Bitcoin and the big block

developers aren't as competent. And look at this mistake they made. And then never mind the fact that a bit later one of the big block developers literally found an inflation bug in the BTC one MB version of the the software code. And that's about the most catastrophic type of bug you could possibly have. Meaning that anybody could have produced a a trillion bitcoins

on the network. And the really interesting part about it too is that the guy that wrote the the bug and I use that in air quotes, the guy that introduced the bug into the Bitcoin software there that could allow anybody to create any number of bitcoins is literally a guy that was calling for the US government to like you know ban Bitcoin cash and ban big block Bitcoin. He sent a letter to I think it was the Federal Trade Commission or something saying that you

have to make Bitcoin cash illegal. So this is absolutely the opposite of somebody who supports free markets. It's a guy with blue hair and lives in San Francisco like about the the most stereotypical, like non libertarian free market type of guy you can get who's calling for the federal government to ban Bitcoin cash. That's the guy who implemented this, the most serious type of bug you could have in Bitcoin.

And the guy that discovered it said, you know I don't have any proof, but I can't help but feel the way that this was introduced and integrated into into the code there. I can't help but feel like it was done on purpose, right? He doesn't have proof, but like, this is the the guy that discovered it says he really feels like it was introduced,

you know, on purpose. And it's like that would have been almost the end of Bitcoin. It would have been, you know, a huge, huge, huge set back for cryptocurrency in general about years and years and years if an infinite inflation bug had been exploited. And the big blocker who found that dagger, I believe was his screen name, rather than exploit it and use it to attack BTC and and weaponize it against the small blockers, he told them quietly and secretly said, hey,

you guys better fix this. And they did. And I don't have proof, but I'm, I'm very confident in my heart of hearts, if the bug had been on the big block side and the small blockers had noticed it, they would have exploited it and used it to destroy the entire big block chain of Bitcoin and destroy this, you know, tool to bring more economic freedom to the world. I'm. I'm very confident that they would have.

So something very relevant to a libertarian podcast here is again, there's more quotes in the book. If you want to lose respect, if you're a libertarian and you're listening and you want to lose respect for the BTC people, you got to look at some of the quotes in the book of when this fork happened. They were. It wasn't just this one Matt Corallo guy.

It was other people from the affiliated companies, Block Stream being primary among them, the small blockers who are like tagging the F at the SEC on Twitter saying hey is did you did, did they get prior written permission from you to do this fork. There's there's multiple quotes in there of them tagging multiple government agencies to try to get them to effectively regulate BCH out of existence. That was the that was The Dirty tactic that they were playing.

One of many dirty tactics. Unbelievable, especially after what the SEC did to Jeremy Kaufman and Library. Not to mention even people like Ian Friedman getting kidnapped by the state for daring to use a ATM without the mass murdering government's permission. And actually I want to add to that, very brief, if you don't mind. So like Ian Freeman's the person that I heard about Bitcoin from, I had been listening to Freetalk Live for years and years and

years. Ian Freeman, for those who know, was the radio host on a radio program called Freetalk Live on more than 100 radio stations across the the country. Gavin Andreessen, the intellectual heir to to Satoshi, the guy that Satoshi turned the project over to, contacted Ian and said, hey, you guys need to learn about this Bitcoin thing. They had lunch with with Gavin. Gavin told them all about it and then they started talking about on their radio show.

That's where I heard about it. And I was already sponsoring them with my other company just because I wanted to support giving, you know, these libertarian ideas out. And I said, OK, we're, I was paying them dollars at that point. So we're going to pay you in Bitcoin at this point. We're going to change all of my ads from my company to promoting Bitcoin to the world. That was the start of of Bitcoin getting promoted to the world.

And this guy, I believe he got sentenced to 8 years in federal prison for running a Bitcoin, you know, cryptocurrency ATM machine there in New Hampshire. And he didn't get the, you know, whatever money transmitter license these people that he's never met and that know nothing about him. Like absolute stranger said he has to get their permission to run a Bitcoin ATM machine in New Hampshire.

And so now they've passed him in jail for eight years for simply, you know, making the world a better place. And it's just a absolute shame. So, you know, I, I wish more people would speak out for Ian Freeman because you know, a lot of people over the years called me, you know, Bitcoin. Jesus, I don't know. I I heard about it from Ian Freeman. So Ian, you know, thank you, Ian. And and the world appreciates you and it's an absolute shame what the government's done to you. But who is it?

Some dictator said one man's injustice is a travesty, but 100 million is just a statistic or something like that. Well. I think that was Tony Fauci. Well, the same is true with Ian Freeman. But the US government, they're doing this to millions of people, right? It's not just the end and it's just really needs to come to a stop. And people don't realize cryptocurrency is such a powerful, powerful tool to put an end to that sort of thing.

And that's why, you know, here I am coming up on 15 years later after having first gotten involved still, you know, shouting from the rooftops about cryptocurrencies being this tool to promote more economic freedom to the world and strip away government's power and. Also, people don't realize the the cryptocurrency world as it is today, actually in many, many ways, is a worse experience than it was in 2013.

Not just because the transaction fees are higher, but also the government hounded a bunch of entrepreneurs out of the space. I remember my wife was working at BitPay early on, and so I was talking to the people there. This is the biggest Bitcoin payment processor in the world. And they were, you know, they were very ideologically aligned as well, very like hardcore

libertarians, many of them. And they had a bunch of amazing ideas that could have been, that could have taken over the world, you know, in 2013 or 2014, but they couldn't implement them because of the state. And, you know, banking, getting involved in the banking system is incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive. And so, you know, the crypt.

The whole cryptocurrency world, not just Bitcoin, is a tiny little fraction of as awesome as it could be if we didn't have, you know, massive state intervention in this industry. I mentioned that. This was actually a decision to keep the block small. Who are the people making this

decision? So I I think, I don't know if I had to choose one single person that probably had the biggest impact there was the John Dilly guy that was contacting Peter Peter Todd and paying him to put out the small block propaganda. Do you want, if you had to choose a single person would be him or Adam back or Greg Maxwell. Who who would you choose? Steve, I'm here, so for me, I

would choose. Greg Maxwell, I think he had the most influence over the people that were making the the the developer culture I feel like was set by Greg Maxwell. A lot of the ideas were set by Greg Maxwell. Or maybe And what is? And what is their? Incentive. What is their incentive? To keep the block small, so in the in the case. Of block stream. They were literally selling a product that would compete directly with Bitcoin. So you you gotta explain what block Stream is, yeah?

I'm sorry. So Blockstream was a company that? Raised a bunch of venture capital and then hired up a bunch of the Bitcoin developers, most of which or many of which previously were in favor of raising the block size. They then came out with this product called Liquid, which is basically like a competing blockchain with Bitcoin, but it's permissioned and not censorship resistant and doesn't have any of these like same sort of wonderful characteristics that Bitcoin did.

And then they intentionally strangled the transactions on bitcoins that Bitcoin transactions by their intentional design and their open admission. Like it sounds so crazy but I've been, you know, you you can go and listen in their very own words, they intentionally made Bitcoin transactions slow, expensive and unreliable and then told everybody, oh, you think Bitcoin transactions are slow, expensive and unreliable. They were always supposed to be

that way. So as a solution, you should use our product that we'll charge you to use and we collect all the fees for everybody that uses it. So it would be like if I, you know, owned a a factory that made wheelchairs and I took my baseball bat and went out there and started whacking people in the legs right and left so they can't walk anymore and say, hey, I have these wheelchairs for sale, Look at what a great guy I am. If it wasn't for me, you wouldn't be able to get around.

Good thing I made this wheelchair for you to use. That's exactly what these guys did to Bitcoin. Without exaggeration, yes. And then you said and don't. Worry, I'm. Working on a lightning wheelchair that will eventually get you everywhere in no time at all. It'll be out in 18 months. In 18 months, exactly. So, so I want to use a term I I, I recently did an interview on the Todd Woods show and he he had a turn of phrase I thought was really good and it's very

relevant to this. We were talking about nutrition science. And he, he had previously spoken with somebody who had said that essentially like cereal companies were paying to produce research that was saying breakfast is the most important meal of the day so that they could, like, sell more cereal, which is funny. But he used the term he said it's like it. They're cartoonish. It's like a cartoon villain to think it sounds, it sounds like a cartoon.

Oh, you're telling me Big cereal is financing the scientists to produce this information that says breakfast is the most important meal of the day so they can sell more bran flakes? Like, it sounds silly, but that's actually true.

And that's that is the level of conflict of interest that we have in Bitcoin. It sounds cartoonish The the this company Blockstream hired the most important Bitcoin Core developers at the most important time in Bitcoin's history and they are the reason that blocks were capped at one MB and they are the reason why fees shot up to two dollars $5.10 dollars $100 and they $1000 sometimes. Depending if they're complex.

Transactions and the CEO of that company that employs the Bitcoin Core developers literally are selling their own proprietary side chain as a solution to high fees on Bitcoin. You can't make it up. I mean, they're explicit about it, and it just it feels cartoonish to even say, but it's documented in the book well, I can't help but think of. Tony Fauci using the Eco Health Alliance to fund gain of function research at the Wuhan lab of Virology and then coming

out with a vaccine. It's so ridiculous. Or just as the military industrial complex, it's widely accepted that they will actively advocate for something that is terrible for so many people because they have a vested interest and they can benefit at the expense of so many other people. All right, so we got through why the blocks are intentionally small. The incentive is to increase transaction fees so they can make more money. I love what you guys did in the

book. Where you actually listed. Here is what we Here are the five criteria that will know something is Bitcoin and when it's not. Just like calling something the Patriot Act doesn't make it patriotic. Calling it Bitcoin doesn't make it that when you lose all of its, you know, vitally important aspects. So you start with the fact that it's the white papers titled A peer-to-peer cash system. What's the type of peer-to-peer electronic cash system? A peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

I've heard about Bitcoin so many times and it was never described to me as that. It was always described to me as a store of value for you to invest funds in. And I watched a lot of, say, Michael Saylor videos. I don't mean to throw anyone under, but it seems like this is just, it seemed like it was just an investment strategy. It never occurred to me to actually look at the origin and

see that it was peer-to-peer. So Rodger, please walk me through what does Bitcoin Cash have that Bitcoin does not and why people should go to Bitcoin Cash as opposed to what you call Bitcoin Core. Well, first of all, maybe we should cover the. Things that Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin both share, right? They both share the same genesis block in the beginning of the blockchain. They both share that, You know, they were both created by Satoshi Nakamoto originally. But what they don't share is

this. And they used to share it right the same everything up until the split happened, right? What they don't share any longer is the fast, cheap, reliable payments for anybody to use anywhere, anytime, for any amount, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin had that back from its founding up until 2015 ish, and then they both lost it for a

bit. And then in 2017, when that one single version of Bitcoin split back into into two versions, the Bitcoin Cash version then restored those fast, cheap, reliable payments for the entire world. And they also both have the same limited supply. They're both limited to 21 million coins. So Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are both equally scarce. They have the exact same scarcity.

Bitcoin Cash, you can argue, is more decentralized than Bitcoin at this point and has more censorship resistance than Bitcoin. And it works for payments. So the only thing that Bitcoin has is that Bitcoin Cash doesn't is the cool Bitcoin name and the cool BTC ticker symbol. And so the only reason Bitcoin BTC is still number one in the world today is because of incumbency, not because of any

inherent merit in itself. And like, that's a quote from the book there, but it's so. It's so true, right? Bitcoin is still #1 because it has the cool name, not because it does anything actually cool or useful for the world at this point. And the Michael Sailors of the world, like, wow, you know, he's a black belt in techno Babble. He talks about an, you know, encrypted cyber Hornets of pure energy traveling at the speed of light and like, OK, that sounds cool, but what does it even mean?

And I I'd love to ask him at some point, like, I think he's scared to ever even have a discussion with me about this. Why didn't you believe in Bitcoin early on? You knew about it for years and years and years and you mocked people that believed in it And then suddenly now you know, Johnny, come lately, now you're interested in it while you're promoting something that wasn't even the original peer-to-peer electronic cash version of Bitcoin to begin with.

And you're saying, oh, there's never going to be 21 million Bitcoin more than that. And it's the only one. There is no #2 this and that. Like, well, I'm sure Myspace could have said there is no #2 social network where we have everybody. Everybody's right here. Well, when the user experience gets bad enough, people leave. And so like Bitcoin still has a big network effect. It has the cool name, but the user experience is horrible. It's censorable. Everybody's busy using a

custodian platform. I think maybe when the big giant government seizure of everybody using a custodian, you know, platform account somewhere comes maybe that'll be the really big wake up call for people to realize, oh, Bitcoin isn't this tool for economic freedom after all, Bitcoin got turned upside down into a tool for economic oppression. And. And that's why I'm really a big fan of things. I like Bitcoin Cash.

But again, I had nothing to do with the creation of Bitcoin Cash. But I'll tell you what, I did have something to do with the creation of one, you know, kicking off Bitcoin into the entire world. I absolutely was a Co creator of Ripple. I was a Co creator of what Z Coin was just now called the Furo. I helped put up the seed money for Z Cash. I helped put up the seed money for a whole bunch of coins and helped kick off a whole bunch of other things. But Bitcoin Cash was not one of

them. And so I've never, ever, ever been a Bitcoin Cash maximalist. I was never a Bitcoin maximalist. I was never anything other than a tools to bring more economic freedom to the entire world and empower individuals to have more control over their own lives. Maximalist. And so any tool that enables that, I'm going to be out there supporting and cheering for it.

And anything that's been morphed into a tool for economic oppression, like I really fear BTC is being morphed into at this point with everyone having to use a custodian. I'm going to be cautioning people about that as well.

So don't use the US dollar. And don't use cryptocurrencies that force you to use a custodian because you can't transact for them directly because of the slow, expensive, unreliable transactions that were intentionally introduced by a bunch of, you know, software engineers that get paid to cripple Bitcoin. Yeah, and you know, coming back to. Economic concepts Here, there's a There's a critical relationship between information and prices, and so I think people would be people look at

the price of BTC and they go, there's no way it's that bad. Surely we're exaggerating. Surely the experts have figured this out like it can scale in some other way. And I think people would be will be utterly floored to learn just how bad many of the ideas in BTC are because the price is is so high they just assume it was settled. And so my, I mean I'm not going to make, I'm not going to dare make any you know price predictions in the future because that's not what you do in crypto.

All I can say is this as information changes prices will adjust. And I know from talking with people I know Roger knows this and it sounds like you have some experience with this keep. People really don't have good information about what's going on in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies right now. Lots of people are talking about crypto and they're excited. They're talking about Bitcoin

and they're excited. But the average understanding is abysmal about the basics, about the absolute fundamentals. What is the purpose of this technology? What is the basic structure of how this thing works? You know is there any realistic way to get transaction fees down? Like can this be a store of value without being a medium of exchange?

There's no there's almost no understanding of this, even by people like Michael Saylor. When I. When I when I plug my ears and I, you know, hold my nose and try to listen to him, I don't think he understands the basics. We in the book, we have many quotes by Saifa, Dean and Moose who wrote the Bitcoin Standard, and I don't think he understands the basics, right. This is a guy who's written the most popular Bitcoin book out there so far, so far.

Go ahead on over to. Hijackingbitcoin.com right now you can help change that. Buy a copy. Well, exactly. He, and you know, he travels all over the world talking to people. This is surely the expert. Chapter 7 is a refutation of Seifidine's perspective. He makes simply, frankly, basic blunders about the scaling capacity of this technology and basic blunders about, you know, Bitcoin Cash, which he criticizes. He he does not understand the

basics. So, so my I I say, I say that because prices and information have a very tight link and it is definitely the case that the information quality in cryptocurrency is abysmal right now and hopefully this book will help correct that a bit. Awesome. So of. Course everyone should check out Hijacking Bitcoin, The Hidden History of BTC. But also assume that you have completely convinced people that All right, I was wrong about Bitcoin.

I shouldn't have watched so many of those sailor videos. And I want to get into Bitcoin cash cuz I actually want a peer-to-peer electronic cash system as opposed to a store of value. Roger. Where? Where do I get started? Yeah, of course bitcoin.com is. A fantastic place to get started, you know, started and founded by by Anarcho Capitalist right from day one. Sorry for the call. Coming in. Another place though you can go would be blockchain.com, right? Another company I Co founded.

Let me hang up on this guy. So sorry, people are persistent in calling me when I'm here. Another place you can go would be coinbase.com, also founded by somebody with a profound respect and admiration for the free market and the benefits brought by economic freedom. So basically, any place you're already using crypto currencies with will already support Bitcoin Cash, right? It was right there from day one.

And the reason they all support Bitcoin Cash already is because almost everybody in the entire ecosystem in the split happened philosophically. They were on the big block side because they knew that's what this we need to do in order for this to scale to be money for the entire world. So a lot of people then started focusing more on you know, Ethereum or or or somewhere Bitcoin Cash or some other chains out there. A lot of people don't know this.

Avalanche for example, the avalanche chain and the avalanche that was born out of the Bitcoin Cash community, those were all big block Bitcoin supporters that then went and created avalanche as well. Another one, I think it's a top ten coin or certainly top 20 coin at the moment as well. So there's all sorts of these things that spun off when Bitcoin that had such amazing first mover advantage and had a

great user experience. Nowadays, when it was intentionally crippled and destroyed, people forked off these other chains. So of course, you know basically anywhere is a great place to get started with Bitcoin Cash if you already have a wall. But the bitcoin.com wallet? I'm I'm Tooting my own horn here a little bit, but for sending and receiving transactions, not just Bitcoin Cash but for anything, I think it's the best wallet out there.

It is so smooth and so slick and so easy to use and you can send Bitcoin cash to all your friends even if they don't have a bitcoin.com wallet yet. There's this feature called Send a shareable link and send feature there for Bitcoin Cash where you can send anywhere that you can share a link. So Facebook, Instagram, you know, Telegram, e-mail, text message to someone's phone number and if they don't already have the wallet, it doesn't matter.

It automatically downloads it from the App Store for them and the money will be right there in their wallet when the app is done downloading. It's really an amazing, powerful tool. And if you really want to trigger a ABTC Maxima small blocker at this point, ask them Hey, how could you send me $5 worth of of Bitcoin on Lightning Network without me having to be online, right? Without me having to have my computer or my phone be online? Can you do that? Of course with Bitcoin Cash you

can do that. The person doesn't have to come online for the next couple of years and it's not a problem with Bitcoin BTC, Lightning Network? Impossible. There is no way for them to receive payments without being online unless they use a custodian platform. And if they're using a custodian platform, the person's not receiving Bitcoin, their custodians receiving the Bitcoin for them, which means it's

completely sensible. Means you have a third party, which defeats the entire point that was pointed out in the Bitcoin white papers. peer-to-peer Electronic Cash Transactions without Requiring a Third party. Lightning requires a third party to receive transactions if you're not online yourself, no if ands or buts about it. So it cannot compete with a Bitcoin point cash in that that

that manner at all. So if you really want to push a a Lightning Fanboys button, say hey, how can I receive a payment without using a custodian if my if my phone's not online or if my phone's out of battery or if I didn't even you know? In any case, if you're not online, you can't receive a Lightning payment without using and it should be noted that. If you're using Lightning and you lose your Internet connection, there is a risk that you could lose funds which has

happened, not just move funds. You could have your funds stolen and. And sent back to somebody else. Yeah, that's what that's Yeah, right. That's a better way of putting. It and there is a whole chapter. Oh sorry, just let me complete that thought. There is a whole chapter, Chapter 9 in Hijacking Bitcoin where we talk about the Lightning Network and it's very deep problems. Yeah, I love the.

Interface on this every other time that I have been asked to get into Bitcoin. It seems so complicated and I got the the first time I saw that long address. I go, all right, I'll, I'll, I'll write that down eventually and I I don't know what to do. But it took like 30 seconds for me to download this wallet from bitcoin.com. Put my e-mail in now. OK, so say that I get money here. Why is this safer than PayPal? Or what are the main things I need to know once I've

downloaded the wallet? So I I think that's one of the biggest. Problems, I guess in cryptocurrency there too. Or, or I don't maybe lies. Like there's so many apps out there that call themselves wallets that aren't. And it's like one example of this, like Wallet of Satoshi. Satoshi, if he had a shotgun, he'd probably be ready to shoot the person that's doing that disservice out there. Like Wallet of Satoshi is not made by Satoshi. That's a new Satoshi and it's

not a wallet. It's an account, right? Somebody else is holding the funds for you. Just like with PayPal. PayPal is not a wallet, it's an account, right? So like I, I don't have a physical wallet near me or I'd show you, but it's like the difference between having a physical wallet with pieces of paper in your pocket where you have those bills and you're in

control. Or it's like when you deposit an account is when you deposit those pieces of paper with Bank of America or you know, PayPal or somebody else and they're holding it for you. If it's deposited in the bank, the bank at any time can go out of business. They can refuse to give you your money. The government can tell them to give the government your money. You know it's not your money anymore. You're trusting somebody else with the bitcoin.com wallet or

any other real wallet out there. You have control, and there's not a single person in the entire world that can freeze your account or block you from moving your funds. And so that's a really, really, really important difference. And that's the big problem with these small blocks on bitcoins that forced everybody to use accounts. And even though they're still calling those accounts wallets, they're not wallets. They're accounts. And that's a very big, big, big, big difference.

And the bitcoin.com wallet is a real wallet where you're in control. And even if the US government or anybody else came to bitcoin.com and said, hey, I want you to freeze Keith's, you know, cryptocurrency in this bitcoin.com wallet or send it to us or whatever, we don't have the ability to, we can't even do it because it's not an account, It's a wallet. So make sure you understand the difference between a wallet and an account. But actually, with that, you know, great freedom comes great

responsibility. Make sure you've securely backed up your wallet. In fact, the guy that was just calling me a moment ago and I had to turn off that app altogether, he's calling me because he lost his wallet. He's still, he needs some help restoring a really old wallet with a he has a seat. And like, the really funny part is people like to joke about, oh, I lost my cryptocurrency in a boating accident. No joke.

This guy dropped his phone off the side of the boat in the ocean while he was fishing and lost his wallet. He really didn't. He had quite a bit of crypto. So he needs my help to get it back there. So with that great freedom comes great responsibility. Make a backup of your wallet, the backups, really easy. It's just 12 words you can write down with a pen and paper and put somewhere, put in a safety deposit box. But anybody that gets access to those 12 words can then access

your money. So it's important though that you have that put somewhere safe and then nobody in the entire world can mess with your money. It's really a a powerful tool. And again, the bitcoin.com was founded by an analytical capitalist Murray Rothbard fan, and the current CEO bitcoin.com and other, you know, he calls himself an ancap as well. So we haven't taken a single penny of outside venture capital

money at all. Like, we're still there day in and day out, building the tools to enable more economic freedom for the world. And so I invite everybody to go and give that to app a try. It really is the best app for sending and receiving cryptocurrency. It's not the best app for buying or selling cryptocurrency yet, but we're working on that part of it. But it's certainly the best for sending and receiving. All right, so can I get the instructions on?

Here on how to back it up. Yeah, it's as you download it'll start. Nagging you gently to to make a backup and it'll show you your 12 words. It'll let you back it up to iCloud with a password or to your Google Drive with a password. It it's a pretty smooth app, so give it a try. And that's why we have more than 20 million installs of that app at this point and more than a million monthly active users.

So that's some real numbers. We've moved the needle in terms of people that now have access to tools that give them more economic freedom in the world. And it's also interesting to see like we've done zero marketing and 0 promotion in Nigeria. But Nigeria is one of the countries that we really have just so many users of this app. It's really incredible and clearly they they like and appreciate and are enjoying it. All right, awesome. Check out. Hijackingbitcoin.com for the book.

Once that convinces you, check out bitcoin.com as well. What I love about Roger's style is just how empirical he is. So when he's having a conversation, he'll be like, Oh well, you know, it doesn't cost that much. He goes, OK, well let's look it up. In fact, send me $5 in Bitcoin right now. Let's see how long it takes. If it if the payment comes in today, I'll give $10,000 to your favorite charity. So when you see someone just putting so much skin in the

game, giving us bitcoin.com. You spoke with my friend John Bush and you just showed him how to get the wallet and how to send money immediately. It was so user friendly that it's not like, well, people first have to read man, economy and state and then they'll eventually, you know, get a Bitcoin wallet. It's so user friendly. I just did it immediately after seeing that. So awesome stuff you guys are doing.

I'm so appreciative of it. Steve Patterson, where is the best place for people to find your work at the Natural Philosophy Institute? Yeah. So you can go to Steve Dash. Patterson.com I've got a bunch of writing and content produced there. I've also in the middle of starting a Research Institute called the Natural Philosophy Institute. You can sign up for the e-mail list at Nat phi.org. Doing a lot of interesting research. You know, we were talking a little bit about a little bit

about it beforehand. You know, people are familiar with this idea of fake news. Now people are finally accepting that maybe a lot of the news is fake. The next fake news is fake science, because the government has intervened in the production of scientific knowledge for a long time and there's a big mess to sort out. So that's what I'm trying to do at Nat Fi. All right, Roger. First, Steve Patterson. Thank you so much for your time, gentlemen. Thanks, Keith. Thank, Keith.