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Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is

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Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or

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Speaker 1: learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,

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Speaker 1: and welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,

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Speaker 1: my name is No. It's good to have you back. Yes, agreed,

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Speaker 1: they call me Ben. We are joined with our super producer,

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Speaker 1: Paul Decond. Most importantly, you are here. You are you

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Speaker 1: that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.

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Speaker 1: Cryptocurrencies Part two. I just followed through with that because

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Speaker 1: at rhyme had a bit of a flow. But we

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Speaker 1: are not alone today. No, we are joined again with

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Speaker 1: our longtime friend Slash, nemesis of the show. Recurring guests

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Speaker 1: who I think may have been on, may have been

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Speaker 1: the guests with the most appearances on stuff they don't

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Speaker 1: want you to know. Yeah, we've got a jacket for you.

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Speaker 1: I'll snl um. It's it's really fun. We get to

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Speaker 1: go to the joined the Five Times Club. Yeah, you

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Speaker 1: get to meet Steve Martin, but you have to also

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Speaker 1: meet Chevy Chase ladies and gentlemen. Jonathan Strickland. Hey, and

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Speaker 1: just like love, I was inside you all along. What Yeah,

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Speaker 1: just dating I've been meaning to check that I get

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Speaker 1: that checked out. Sorry, yeah, are you doing a reference? What? So? So, Jonathan,

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Speaker 1: thank you so much, thank you so much for coming

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Speaker 1: back on the show. In our previous episode, we we

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Speaker 1: discussed the nuts and bolts of cryptocurrency yea and blockchain technology,

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Speaker 1: and one of the things that we agree would would

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Speaker 1: probably be the best move for you listeners, friends, and neighbors.

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Speaker 1: If you're not familiar with cryptocurrency, please check out episode

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Speaker 1: one before you go to this episode, because we're gonna

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Speaker 1: we're gonna cut past that. We're gonna cut past that

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Speaker 1: blockchain dive. Yeah, and on other past episodes, we've discussed

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Speaker 1: some of the darker sides of what cryptocurrency might be,

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Speaker 1: and you're here to really shine a light in some

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Speaker 1: of that darkness. Let's see what's real what's not. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I'm happy to at least to impart to you what

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Speaker 1: I know, and I wholly admit there are things I

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Speaker 1: do not know, but I don't know what those are,

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Speaker 1: So you've got unknown unknowns. So for a peek behind

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Speaker 1: the curtain of Several weeks ago, Matt Noel and I

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Speaker 1: began talking about doing something on cryptocurrency conspiracies, and I

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Speaker 1: think a lot no you would come with this idea,

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Speaker 1: and I think a lot of it was inspired by

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Speaker 1: conversations we'd all been having, both together and as individuals

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Speaker 1: about speculation and booms and busts in cryptocurrency and the

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Speaker 1: proliferation of non bitcoin cryptocurrency. And one of the things

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Speaker 1: that we wanted to do with this episode is get

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Speaker 1: your take on some of the allegations that Matt has

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Speaker 1: mentioned about different well rumors, allegations perhaps stereotypes of cryptocurrency. Uh.

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Speaker 1: The first one which is probably the most apparent and

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Speaker 1: something I think you've probably remarked upon in Tech Stuff

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Speaker 1: as well, which is one of Jonathan's other podcast available

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Speaker 1: wherever you find your favorite shows. One of those topics

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Speaker 1: is cryptocurrency and crime. So how much truth is there

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Speaker 1: to the characterization of cryptocurrency as like a cash for criminals?

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Speaker 1: So there's certainly some legitimacy to that in the sense

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Speaker 1: that the very nature of cryptocurrency allows you to make

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Speaker 1: uh somewhat anonymous trans actions if you are super super

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Speaker 1: deductive and you are really paying attention to patterns and

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Speaker 1: you're really tracking which accounts are getting transfers at what time,

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Speaker 1: you could probably draw some conclusions at that could narrow

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Speaker 1: you down to a specific person, but generally speaking, these

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Speaker 1: are anonymous, right, So it's an ideal currency for someone

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Speaker 1: who wants to purchase something that otherwise would be illegal

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Speaker 1: because it's not easily going to be tied to that

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Speaker 1: person when it's a currency that's used a lot on

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Speaker 1: like the Dark Web and anything like that. Yeah, the

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Speaker 1: Silk Road, which was, you know, one of the many

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Speaker 1: black markets on the dark Web, which has been shut

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Speaker 1: down and opened up again and shut down repeatedly. Uh,

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Speaker 1: that was one of the places known for accepting bitcoin

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Speaker 1: currency from pretty much the start of bitcoin, once it

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Speaker 1: really got it got it got going. So a lot

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Speaker 1: of people immediately began to associate bit point with this

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Speaker 1: concept of the currency you want to use when you

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Speaker 1: want to do something illegal, whether that might be purchasing

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Speaker 1: drugs or weapons, or paying someone to do something terrible

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Speaker 1: to someone else. All of those were allegations something more

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Speaker 1: pranking to death, Yes, pranking to death to death. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it was a lethal banana pie to the face, uh,

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Speaker 1: except way more violent and splatting. So is this like

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Speaker 1: law and order carrot top, Yes, it's our Gallagher. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it was hit by the watermelon smashing mallet. Uh So.

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Speaker 1: Seriously though, that was certainly an element, and it very

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Speaker 1: quickly got this reputation in those early days, and and

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Speaker 1: it's somewhat earned, not entirely. I would argue that bitcoin

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Speaker 1: kind of falls victim to the same thing that peer

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Speaker 1: to peer networks fall victim to, which is that both

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Speaker 1: technologies can have their uses in illegal activities, but that

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Speaker 1: wasn't necessarily what they were made to do. Peer to

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Speaker 1: peer networks were created so that would be easy to

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Speaker 1: distribute files quickly across the network, big files, and that

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Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily mean something like a movie that you don't

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Speaker 1: have the rights to. It might be something that you

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Speaker 1: can freely distribute. It's just that to do so in

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Speaker 1: normal means would take too long. It's just an efficient

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Speaker 1: way of transferring files over the Internet that doesn't require

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Speaker 1: a one to one transfer of a single file. It's

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Speaker 1: just a little bit more efficient and makes best it

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Speaker 1: makes better use of the pipeline. And blockchain technology in

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Speaker 1: general is a great way of keeping record of transactions

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Speaker 1: because every single transaction becomes part of that shared ledger.

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Speaker 1: It's part of that shared history and it's there forever right.

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Speaker 1: So you can track ownership through blockchain technology if you

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Speaker 1: want so. For example, if you wanted to use blockchain

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Speaker 1: to keep a record of real estate deals, you would

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Speaker 1: definitely know who owned, or at least what account own

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Speaker 1: that last real estate deal, will own that parcel of

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Speaker 1: real estate, because it would be in that shared ledger.

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Speaker 1: There'll be no getting around it. In fact, a lot

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Speaker 1: of people have talked about using blockchain for stuff beyond

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Speaker 1: just cryptocurrencies. So there are legitimate uses for it, but

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Speaker 1: it's hard to escape that reputation once you get it. Uh,

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Speaker 1: certainly there's still people who are using bitcoin to do

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Speaker 1: stuff that is is h extra legal. Okay, So then

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Speaker 1: if we were to say on a the validity of

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Speaker 1: this on a scale of one to ten, it sounds

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Speaker 1: like it's about a five or six. Yeah, I mean,

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Speaker 1: it's certainly something that has been an issue and uh,

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Speaker 1: you know, people who wanted to commit any kind of

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Speaker 1: criminal act, whether it was purchasing something or paying someone

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Speaker 1: to do something. Uh, certainly bitcoin would be an attractive

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Speaker 1: alternative to using a currency that could be traced back

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Speaker 1: to you. Really, it's not the currency so much that's

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Speaker 1: traced back to you. It's the transaction it's self, right,

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Speaker 1: because often these transactions have to pass through a third party.

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Speaker 1: It's that third party that is the barrier for a

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Speaker 1: lot of people. Isn't this a thing though? Or like

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Speaker 1: you know, with Facebook, you're constantly having to accept updated

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Speaker 1: terms of service and things like that. Obviously, using something

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Speaker 1: like bitcoin or being part of one of these exchanges,

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Speaker 1: there's no such protection. So who who who are we

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Speaker 1: to say that, you know, all of a sudden that

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Speaker 1: anonymity goes out the window or something fundamentally changes about

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Speaker 1: the way business is done. I mean, it all depends

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Speaker 1: on how you've set up your wallet, right, Like if

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Speaker 1: you've got your wallet with an exchange, then there are

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Speaker 1: a lot of dangers there. There's the danger that you

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Speaker 1: make your your identity may never be revealed, but someone

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Speaker 1: might get a hold of your money. Uh So it's

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Speaker 1: it's it's a complicated affair. But that's the case with

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Speaker 1: any kind of of currency or commodity. I mean there's

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Speaker 1: always going to be some element of risk there because

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Speaker 1: there's no such thing as a perfect system. Systems are

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Speaker 1: being made by human beings, and so far we have

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Speaker 1: not created perfect human being. Well, the most popular wallet

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Speaker 1: is um coin base, I believe, and they've been having

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Speaker 1: they were having some troubles, I believe earlier this every

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Speaker 1: single one of these these digital wallet companies have had

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Speaker 1: some sort of issues. Sometimes they've been relatively minor, like

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Speaker 1: people reporting that they suddenly could not access their wallets

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Speaker 1: for a given amount of time. Other times it gets

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Speaker 1: way worse where people can't access their wallets and they

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Speaker 1: find out two weeks later the reason is all that

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Speaker 1: information was stolen. It's because it's a unique thing. It

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Speaker 1: can be stolen to the meaning that it's not so

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Speaker 1: like if you're if you're quote unquote stealing a movie

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Speaker 1: by you know, downloading it through a peer to peer thing.

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Speaker 1: You're getting a copy of it physically taking it, but

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Speaker 1: the original, right, But in this case the original, because

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Speaker 1: what you what you have stolen is you have stolen

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Speaker 1: the end point of the last transaction for that bitcoin, right,

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Speaker 1: or that part of a bitcoin, depending upon how much

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Speaker 1: was being spent. So what you are, what you're effectively stealing,

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Speaker 1: is the destination that bitcoin went to. So again, bitcoins

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Speaker 1: do not exist in any sort of physical reality, right,

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Speaker 1: You're what you're doing is you've got a record of transactions.

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Speaker 1: Um it's and in fact, this isn't that hard to imagine.

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Speaker 1: If you've dealt with money on any digital scale, like

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Speaker 1: just regular cash dollars, if you do a transfer from

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Speaker 1: your bank account to some other account, they're not sending

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Speaker 1: suitcases filled with bills. They're wiring over a notification saying

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Speaker 1: this transfer has taken place. This represents this amount of

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Speaker 1: wealth going to this person. Same thing with bitcoin. So

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Speaker 1: what you have done if you've stolen is that you've

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Speaker 1: stolen that account saying, uh, you know you you now

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Speaker 1: own the wallet where it says this is where those

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Speaker 1: bitcoins went last. And because most people are using bitcoin anonymously,

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Speaker 1: it gets really hard to say, well that that specific

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Speaker 1: one doesn't belong to you. It's it gets real muddy

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Speaker 1: speaking of anonymity here. One thing that's one thing that

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Speaker 1: we discussed in previous episode was the identity or identities

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Speaker 1: of the enigmatic pioneer of bitcoin. We also found some

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Speaker 1: pretty interesting allegations, uh, pretty interesting arguments the bitcoin some

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Speaker 1: people believe maybe a tool of intelligence agencies or state actors.

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Speaker 1: Have you heard this interesting? I had not specifically heard that.

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Speaker 1: It's very interesting because the the at least the stated

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Speaker 1: purpose for bitcoin is so antithetical to that. But then

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Speaker 1: you could argue, well, that's the perfect cover, right, the

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Speaker 1: idea that, oh, if I go out there and tell everyone,

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Speaker 1: this is the perfect currency to adopt because it doesn't

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Speaker 1: involve a a state actor, it doesn't have any third party.

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Speaker 1: It's all direct transfers between people within the system, and

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Speaker 1: therefore no one needs to know apart from the two

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Speaker 1: parties involved, except for the fact that, of course every

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Speaker 1: single transaction becomes part of this shared ledger. Would that

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Speaker 1: be like for off the books, like black ops and

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Speaker 1: things like that? Is that the idea here? Yeah, well,

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Speaker 1: it all originates from this person, Natalia Kaspersky. She was

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Speaker 1: giving a lecture at university in St. Petersburg, and you know,

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Speaker 1: somebody snapped photos, as you tend to do sometimes, of

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Speaker 1: the slides as she was giving the presentation, and one

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Speaker 1: of them was discussing bitcoin in particular. And this is

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Speaker 1: just a quote that was taken from this. It was

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Speaker 1: in Russian or um. It was not written in English.

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Speaker 1: This is a translation, but it was. Bitcoin is a

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Speaker 1: project of American intelligence agencies which was designed to provide

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Speaker 1: quick funding for US, British and Canadian intelligence activities in

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Speaker 1: different countries. So the idea that you could wire money

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Speaker 1: um essentially not untraceable, but you could wire money easily

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Speaker 1: that is not in the currency of some other country,

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Speaker 1: depending on where you're transferring it to, it doesn't need

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Speaker 1: to be exchanged. Its plausible deniability that if like saying, oh, well,

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Speaker 1: this these actors who, for example, snuck into an Iranian

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Speaker 1: nuclear facility and installed viral UH software upon centrifuges, they

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Speaker 1: weren't paid in any countries currency, so therefore it's harder

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Speaker 1: to trace back something like that. Yeah, and it's also interesting,

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Speaker 1: so that would be really good cover for that kind

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Speaker 1: of thing. And then also, if you're having a very

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Speaker 1: large transaction to maybe another intelligence agency or someone you're

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Speaker 1: working in tandem with, you don't have to exchange you know,

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Speaker 1: a huge transaction anywhere it's only a couple of bitcoins really,

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Speaker 1: or you know, a hundred bitcoins here, and you're like,

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Speaker 1: that's a massive transaction. Like the example I heard would

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Speaker 1: be the CIA interacting with I s I UM to

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Speaker 1: support something that would technically be US support of known

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Speaker 1: terror groups. Sure, so that yeah, kind of kind of

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Speaker 1: also like when you get into two past uh scandals

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Speaker 1: like the the around contra that sort of stuff. Well,

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Speaker 1: let me say this, Uh, it wouldn't surprise me if

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Speaker 1: there were various agencies intelligence agencies making use of cryptocurrencies

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Speaker 1: for this sort of thing. I don't think they would

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Speaker 1: have had a hand in creating them necessarily, but I

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Speaker 1: certainly don't wouldn't find it surprising to hear about them

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Speaker 1: leveraging it. Uh. You've got to remember that ultimately, in

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Speaker 1: order to get units of that currency in the first place,

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Speaker 1: you either have to mine it, which means, assuming your

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Speaker 1: system is on the up and up, you have to

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Speaker 1: dedicate a lot of computing power to that. Uh. And

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Speaker 1: knowing that once that secret is out, you know, once

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Speaker 1: everyone knows, and you know, the system depends upon everyone knowing.

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Speaker 1: Once everyone knows how the mining process works, there's gonna

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Speaker 1: be lots of people working very hard to be really

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Speaker 1: good at at because that's how they earned money. Or

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Speaker 1: you've got to actually exchange real world money for those

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Speaker 1: units of currency. Right, So, ultimately, if you get to

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Speaker 1: a point where someone is exchanging large amounts of their

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Speaker 1: current currency, their state sponsored currency, for bitcoin, that could

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Speaker 1: be traceable. So you really, all you've done is shifted things.

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Speaker 1: How could it be traceable though, because you're actually going

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Speaker 1: to have a budget item somewhere under someone's budget saying

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Speaker 1: this X amount of money was spent from our budget.

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Speaker 1: Not if it's a black budget, it's classified, Jonathan, Come on, Yeah,

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Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that it's not written down somewhere, buddy.

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Speaker 1: Sometimes it does, I would think so. And all I'm

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Speaker 1: saying too is like, you know, in the same vein,

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Speaker 1: sure as hell, it feels like a good way to

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Speaker 1: launder money. Oh sure, No, that's another element of the

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Speaker 1: criminal aspect, is the idea of using bitcoin to launder

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Speaker 1: money with way more effective than a car wash. Also,

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Speaker 1: you gotta wonder what the rates are, you know, because

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Speaker 1: it's money, and then like at what point should you

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Speaker 1: just pay taxes on it? Yeah? And are these criminals

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Speaker 1: and order the government? Do they do you have to

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Speaker 1: use a thing like coin base or is there another

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Speaker 1: entry way into this? I mean, you can have a

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Speaker 1: wallet on your hard drive. That's why people have their

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Speaker 1: hard drives and they lose them and they're like, I

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Speaker 1: lost seven million dollars on my hard drive. That can happen,

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Speaker 1: So we're going to follow up with more of this

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Speaker 1: conversation after a word from our sponsors. Assuming we don't

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Speaker 1: get black backed, holy spooked. We made it. No, I

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Speaker 1: thought if we all did it, we just all had

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Speaker 1: black bags on, we could do it again. No, no, no,

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Speaker 1: I think we're good. Let's keep going. I have four

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Speaker 1: black bags in my bag at all times. I'm not

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Speaker 1: at all surprised by that, and yet still terrified. Look,

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Speaker 1: it's it just it's like somebody using bitcoin. Just because

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Speaker 1: I have that doesn't mean I'm a criminal. One thing

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Speaker 1: I want to refer back to in our previous little discussion,

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Speaker 1: he said, ignoring the previous statement. Um is that is

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Speaker 1: that just because there's someone who's giving a presentation doesn't

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Speaker 1: necessarily mean that there's any actual evidence to back that up.

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Speaker 1: I am highly skeptical of a presentation happening in Russia,

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Speaker 1: in Russian to Russian audiences blaming United States intelligence agencies

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Speaker 1: for the creation of cryptocurrencies, or at least the use

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Speaker 1: of cryptocurrencies to fund black ops operations, because there may

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Speaker 1: be and I hesitate to say this, but there may

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Speaker 1: be a bias. What. Yeah, I'm really glad you made

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Speaker 1: that point because one thing that happens to depending on

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Speaker 1: people's ideological viewpoints is um, we will sometimes tend to

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Speaker 1: pick on one organization over an other that would do

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Speaker 1: essentially the same thing. So it's a real tall milkshakee

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Speaker 1: to say that one intelligence agency did something and other

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Speaker 1: intelligence agencies A did not know about it, or B

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Speaker 1: didn't know about it and also didn't try to do

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Speaker 1: something like it, or see, yeah, it wasn't already doing

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Speaker 1: exactly the same thing. Like it is not a stretch

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Speaker 1: of the imagination to think that, Like I said before,

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Speaker 1: I would not be shocked to find out that there

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Speaker 1: had been use of cryptocurrencies for these sort of black

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Speaker 1: ops operations, because by the very nature everything is being

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Speaker 1: is trying to avoid detection in the from the get go.

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Speaker 1: But I also would not be shocked here that, say,

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Speaker 1: the KGB had used cryptocurrencies to pay I don't know,

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Speaker 1: hackers in North Korea. I'm going to go on on

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Speaker 1: a limb and say, there's no way that's not happening

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Speaker 1: at least a little bit. Yeah, man, Like it just

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Speaker 1: seems right for that kind of stuff, and like, you know,

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Speaker 1: that's what these black ops are all about. Is that

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Speaker 1: kind of freewheel and attitude where it's just like improvising

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Speaker 1: and goring out different ways to do things, and you know,

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Speaker 1: it's all about being up on the latest technology. And

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Speaker 1: I don't know, it just seems it's it rings true

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Speaker 1: for me. If they want to use the cryptocurrency spy cred,

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Speaker 1: that would probably be Here's a Here's another aspect of

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Speaker 1: this that I think argues in favor of this behavior.

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Speaker 1: It's that we're now, as a species and as a

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Speaker 1: conglomeration of state actors, seen a a fundamental transformation in

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Speaker 1: the nature of warfare. Right, we know that there is

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Speaker 1: a ticking time limit to the usefulness or efficacy of

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Speaker 1: UH cruise ships. Right we know that for several decades,

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Speaker 1: with great success, countries that would not normally be able

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Speaker 1: to fight in a conventional war have successfully funneled time, blood,

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Speaker 1: sweat and tears and plenty of R and D into

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Speaker 1: asymmetrical warfare. Which is why we see you know, UH

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Speaker 1: so called hacker or bought armies in fluencing opinion through

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Speaker 1: soft power stuff like propaganda, the new war or the

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Speaker 1: new theater of war. People at the Pentagon are always saying,

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Speaker 1: is informational, Well, I mean, you've already seen over the

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Speaker 1: past decade, we've seen numerous examples here in the United

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Speaker 1: States of foreign actors who have infiltrated various information systems,

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Speaker 1: like Arnold Schwarzenegger. There's that's a that's more of an

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Speaker 1: overt one that I was thinking of things like in

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Speaker 1: the electric grid, the power grid. There have been numerous

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Speaker 1: occasions where UH security experts have looked at the different

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Speaker 1: systems and various major power companies and throughout the power

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Speaker 1: grid in the United States and said, there's evidence here

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Speaker 1: of foreign hackers putting in code to help UH infiltrate

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Speaker 1: the infrastructure. To what purpose, who's to say, but it's

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Speaker 1: not a stretch to imagine that these are all kind

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Speaker 1: of little trigger points that should should someone want to

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Speaker 1: do serious damage to the United States. You flip a

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Speaker 1: switch and you overload a power grid, you make it

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Speaker 1: so that it is going beyond its capabilities. You know

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Speaker 1: you would you could actually physically snap power cables if

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Speaker 1: you're sending enough juice through UH. You get to a

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Speaker 1: point like that, you cripple the the infrastructure and it

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Speaker 1: creates enough chaos for you to get away with other stuff.

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Speaker 1: If you need to um so there's entirely that possibility. Now,

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Speaker 1: the fact that nothing like that has actually happened. We

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Speaker 1: haven't seen any you know, rolling blackouts due to this

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Speaker 1: means that whatever they were trying to do, they had

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Speaker 1: not actually you know, they hadn't actually pulled that switch,

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Speaker 1: but they had started to lay the groundwork. Well, that

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Speaker 1: stuff is happening all the time everywhere the United States.

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Speaker 1: Obviously we're focused on it because we live here, but

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Speaker 1: it's happening all over the world from various actors all

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Speaker 1: working across purposes against each other there and sort of

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Speaker 1: an ensemble cast. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, we've

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Speaker 1: got we've got things like stocks net, which certainly seems

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Speaker 1: to have the United States fingerprints on it. It would

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Speaker 1: be hard to deny that based upon the code that

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Speaker 1: was used in it. Let's give us a little bit

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Speaker 1: of a rundown on the ducks. Stocks Net was a

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Speaker 1: was a virus? Specifically, all right, is a virus? Uh

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Speaker 1: So nuclear power plants. One of the things they have

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Speaker 1: are centrifuges that spending a certain RPMs, right, and uh

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Speaker 1: they spend at that certain RPMs because if you spend

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Speaker 1: too slowly or too quickly. Then things go wrong and

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Speaker 1: stuck's net. Effectively. What it did was it made the

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Speaker 1: center if you just turn at a speed that was wrong,

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Speaker 1: too fast for what it was supposed to do. Uh.

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Speaker 1: The idea being that would cause failures in Iran's uh

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Speaker 1: nuclear power capabilities, and uh it kind of worked. It's

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Speaker 1: tough to do because these facilities mostly have air gaps.

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Speaker 1: Air gaps are where you do not have a connection

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Speaker 1: between your internal system and an external system. So I

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Speaker 1: meant that you had to get physical access to the

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Speaker 1: the the location in the form of a thumb drive.

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Speaker 1: You can do a thumb drive. Yeah, just the thumb drive.

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Speaker 1: And even if you're just doing a thumb drive where

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Speaker 1: you're sending it to, you know, it doesn't necessarily have

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Speaker 1: to have been someone on the inside who was compromised.

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Speaker 1: You could send a thumb drive to to let's say

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Speaker 1: the person at the front desk and say, uh, there's

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Speaker 1: a new update to the operating system. Just plug this

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Speaker 1: in and that'll do it. And then it could infect

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Speaker 1: the internal network, which could then go and affect whatever

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Speaker 1: systems you need to compromise. But you wouldn't have like

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Speaker 1: remote control over it would like it's good old, good

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Speaker 1: old coding. You're just writing in the code like when

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Speaker 1: this happens, do execute this line of code. So it's

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Speaker 1: it's in some ways it's really sophisticated. In other ways

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Speaker 1: it's very basic, but it's it's brilliant in the in

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Speaker 1: this simplicity of application. But there's a lot of very

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Speaker 1: elegant code going in there. Yeah, and the code, yes,

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Speaker 1: it was definitely advanced. And so that the the people

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Speaker 1: argue because the advanced nature of the code, it narrows

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Speaker 1: down the suspect list of who could have done it,

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Speaker 1: and because the very nature of the code itself. A

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Speaker 1: lot of people have said, this looks an awful lot

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Speaker 1: like stuff that comes out of the United States. Maybe,

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Speaker 1: and as Israel and Israel and the US work together,

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Speaker 1: that's that's the that's the common thread. Yes, so, and

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Speaker 1: you know, of course, no one's going to come forward

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Speaker 1: and say you got us, it was us, but it

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Speaker 1: does definitely seem to point that way. Now, does that

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Speaker 1: mean that it's definitely US and Israel? Well, I mean,

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Speaker 1: we we can't speak in certainties, but it seems fairly

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Speaker 1: fairly sure like it's hard to deny it now in

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Speaker 1: that world where we've got all these different parties working

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Speaker 1: at cross purposes infiltrating different systems. Plausible deniability very important,

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Speaker 1: right like we we're seeing it through everything from uh

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Speaker 1: the accusations of interfering with election cycles to uh yeah exactly,

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Speaker 1: to to affecting entire systems, you know, and the the

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Speaker 1: usual suspects that pop up for things that are happening

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Speaker 1: in the United States are Russia and North Korea and China.

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Speaker 1: Those are your three big ones, so you could you know,

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Speaker 1: and then of course you've got the state saying it's

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Speaker 1: not us, we didn't we didn't authorize this. If you

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Speaker 1: use something like a cryptocurrency to pay the people who

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Speaker 1: are actually creating the code and executing the code and

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Speaker 1: overseeing the bot nets and actually doing the work, then

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Speaker 1: you've got that level of plausible deniability. You don't know

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Speaker 1: who paid whom. It could be that you have an

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Speaker 1: outside organization, someone who's not even remotely connected to the

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Speaker 1: governments of those of those countries. They say, let's just

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Speaker 1: make use of them, because one, they of the technology too,

429
00:26:01,920 --> 00:26:04,280
Speaker 1: they have the education and know how on how to

430
00:26:04,320 --> 00:26:06,840
Speaker 1: do it. And three it takes all the heat off

431
00:26:07,040 --> 00:26:12,359
Speaker 1: us because they'll never know we just paid those guys,

432
00:26:12,359 --> 00:26:14,119
Speaker 1: and we paid them with a type of currency that

433
00:26:14,200 --> 00:26:17,040
Speaker 1: can't be traced back to us. We're basically watching the

434
00:26:17,119 --> 00:26:19,880
Speaker 1: sixth cents with you for the first time. All we're

435
00:26:19,920 --> 00:26:23,000
Speaker 1: doing is putting on all of those graphics processing units

436
00:26:23,040 --> 00:26:25,879
Speaker 1: to work. It's really interesting. Yeah, it's really interesting. You

437
00:26:25,920 --> 00:26:30,280
Speaker 1: say this because one of the controversial practices in China

438
00:26:30,400 --> 00:26:34,280
Speaker 1: that the governments of the United States and China disagree

439
00:26:34,320 --> 00:26:40,720
Speaker 1: on is who's paying documented Chinese hacking forces because they're

440
00:26:40,720 --> 00:26:45,800
Speaker 1: not government employees. And the Chinese position for some time

441
00:26:45,920 --> 00:26:49,760
Speaker 1: has been the this is just a group of idealistic

442
00:26:50,040 --> 00:26:53,640
Speaker 1: national not very nationalistic people. These are these are people

443
00:26:53,640 --> 00:26:57,800
Speaker 1: who identify with China's philosophies, but they are not in

444
00:26:57,840 --> 00:27:01,880
Speaker 1: any way sponsored by or endorsed by the government. For example,

445
00:27:02,240 --> 00:27:08,600
Speaker 1: when Sony had their massive data breach where gigabytes of data,

446
00:27:08,720 --> 00:27:11,080
Speaker 1: like mostly in the form of movies, but lots of

447
00:27:11,080 --> 00:27:15,040
Speaker 1: other stuff too, including like records of executives and actors

448
00:27:15,080 --> 00:27:17,760
Speaker 1: and all this other stuff that got leaked out. Uh,

449
00:27:17,840 --> 00:27:19,879
Speaker 1: there were a couple of different arguments about where that

450
00:27:19,920 --> 00:27:24,000
Speaker 1: came from. One was the possibility of of it being

451
00:27:24,040 --> 00:27:27,479
Speaker 1: from North Korean hackers because it was in response to

452
00:27:27,800 --> 00:27:30,080
Speaker 1: a film that was coming out that was the interview.

453
00:27:30,320 --> 00:27:33,240
Speaker 1: It was the interview. It was a little little bit

454
00:27:33,240 --> 00:27:36,480
Speaker 1: of a spoof on North Korea's leader, and North Korea

455
00:27:36,560 --> 00:27:39,240
Speaker 1: had condemned it. So there was an argument like, well,

456
00:27:39,280 --> 00:27:42,240
Speaker 1: clearly you had already said that, you know, you objected

457
00:27:42,240 --> 00:27:45,360
Speaker 1: strongly strongly to the movie. Apparently you objected strongly enough

458
00:27:45,400 --> 00:27:49,200
Speaker 1: to fund hackers to attack and this, this company, this

459
00:27:49,400 --> 00:27:52,560
Speaker 1: global company, which was the movie wasn't even very good.

460
00:27:52,640 --> 00:27:54,840
Speaker 1: It's not that good. I've seen it. It was we

461
00:27:54,880 --> 00:27:59,880
Speaker 1: did an episode on this that you appeared on. Uh. This,

462
00:28:00,200 --> 00:28:07,080
Speaker 1: This idea of sophisticated coding and the separation of the

463
00:28:07,280 --> 00:28:12,280
Speaker 1: true actor from the appearance of an actor leads us

464
00:28:12,400 --> 00:28:17,520
Speaker 1: to another very strange question. So far, when we've been

465
00:28:17,560 --> 00:28:25,520
Speaker 1: talking about hidden hands behind cryptocurrency, we've been talking about humans. Well,

466
00:28:25,560 --> 00:28:33,360
Speaker 1: why are we going to talk about raccoons? Badgers? Oh? Row, wow, badgers?

467
00:28:34,640 --> 00:28:38,080
Speaker 1: What if? What if? Hear me out? Yeah? Hit me?

468
00:28:39,040 --> 00:28:47,400
Speaker 1: What if? Um? A rogue artificial intelligence created Bitcoin for

469
00:28:47,440 --> 00:28:56,080
Speaker 1: the express purpose of siphoning electricity to feed it's nefarious

470
00:28:56,320 --> 00:29:03,880
Speaker 1: dark engines. Wait wait, hold on, yeah, it eats electricity awesome. Well,

471
00:29:03,920 --> 00:29:08,160
Speaker 1: I mean, if it's an artificial intelligence, it's presumably running

472
00:29:08,360 --> 00:29:13,240
Speaker 1: on silicon based hardware and thus needs electricity to run.

473
00:29:13,920 --> 00:29:17,479
Speaker 1: So electricity would mean power. Power is what allows it

474
00:29:17,520 --> 00:29:22,760
Speaker 1: to process information. It needs a lot of It's trying,

475
00:29:22,840 --> 00:29:27,560
Speaker 1: I'm trying. I'm trying so hard to not just call

476
00:29:28,760 --> 00:29:32,280
Speaker 1: nonsense on this. But let's also use as an opportunity

477
00:29:32,320 --> 00:29:36,720
Speaker 1: to talk about how much bloody power and energy that

478
00:29:37,240 --> 00:29:39,800
Speaker 1: mining for bitcoin consumed. I think this is a good job.

479
00:29:40,520 --> 00:29:43,320
Speaker 1: Well well, and I mentioned in the previous episodes, So

480
00:29:43,480 --> 00:29:46,160
Speaker 1: when you're when you're mining bitcoins, what you're really doing

481
00:29:46,200 --> 00:29:49,360
Speaker 1: is you're trying to solve very difficult mathematical problems in

482
00:29:49,480 --> 00:29:52,800
Speaker 1: order to validate past transactions, the ones that have just

483
00:29:52,920 --> 00:29:55,920
Speaker 1: happened to add the next block to the blockchain. And

484
00:29:55,960 --> 00:29:58,720
Speaker 1: if you managed to do that, you get rewarded not

485
00:29:58,960 --> 00:30:02,400
Speaker 1: just with whatever coins are mind at that time, which

486
00:30:02,400 --> 00:30:09,320
Speaker 1: is predetermined and every few years the number has per block. Currently,

487
00:30:09,840 --> 00:30:14,280
Speaker 1: bitcoin miners generate around seventy five bitcoins per hour every

488
00:30:14,320 --> 00:30:17,560
Speaker 1: and when you look at that by per block, it

489
00:30:17,640 --> 00:30:21,080
Speaker 1: breaks down even further obviously because it's every ten minutes

490
00:30:21,160 --> 00:30:25,040
Speaker 1: is another block, right, So but but every few years

491
00:30:25,160 --> 00:30:27,720
Speaker 1: that number is cut in half until you finally get

492
00:30:27,720 --> 00:30:30,360
Speaker 1: to the point where all bitcoins that will ever exist

493
00:30:30,720 --> 00:30:32,960
Speaker 1: are in the system, and at that point it's just

494
00:30:33,040 --> 00:30:37,000
Speaker 1: transaction fees that keep things going while energy spent on

495
00:30:37,160 --> 00:30:41,200
Speaker 1: mining bitcoins is increasing well to a point to a point.

496
00:30:41,280 --> 00:30:43,160
Speaker 1: So if you if you get to a point where

497
00:30:43,880 --> 00:30:48,440
Speaker 1: the number of bitcoins you get per transaction completed is

498
00:30:48,600 --> 00:30:52,560
Speaker 1: small enough, then you have to reconcile that with how

499
00:30:52,640 --> 00:30:55,680
Speaker 1: much money you are spending on the electricity being used

500
00:30:56,080 --> 00:30:59,360
Speaker 1: to for the processing power. And if you're spending more

501
00:30:59,400 --> 00:31:03,400
Speaker 1: money electricity, then you're making money in the bitcoins you're mining.

502
00:31:03,680 --> 00:31:05,760
Speaker 1: That's a losing proposition and people are going to start

503
00:31:05,760 --> 00:31:08,800
Speaker 1: to back off. Here's the thing, though, according to a

504
00:31:08,800 --> 00:31:12,160
Speaker 1: an article on Motherboard, right now, with the trajectory of

505
00:31:12,240 --> 00:31:15,720
Speaker 1: bitcoin value being what it is, they say it would

506
00:31:15,760 --> 00:31:20,560
Speaker 1: be profitable for miners on the whole to burn through

507
00:31:21,480 --> 00:31:25,960
Speaker 1: more than twenty four tarra watt hours of electricity in

508
00:31:26,080 --> 00:31:29,560
Speaker 1: a year's time. Sure. Yeah, and that's but these are

509
00:31:29,560 --> 00:31:32,480
Speaker 1: making lots of assumptions. Assumption number one is that the

510
00:31:32,560 --> 00:31:35,200
Speaker 1: value of bitcoin is going to continue to be high

511
00:31:35,360 --> 00:31:38,080
Speaker 1: enough for that to be true, and we don't necessarily

512
00:31:38,080 --> 00:31:40,760
Speaker 1: know that. I suspect it is going to be true.

513
00:31:41,400 --> 00:31:44,520
Speaker 1: But over time, that is by the nature of what

514
00:31:44,560 --> 00:31:47,360
Speaker 1: bitcoin is going to decrease. It has to, because that's

515
00:31:47,440 --> 00:31:52,120
Speaker 1: just how Unless bitcoin's value just continuously skyrockets and just

516
00:31:52,240 --> 00:31:55,600
Speaker 1: keeps on building and and never takes enough of a

517
00:31:55,640 --> 00:31:59,000
Speaker 1: backtrack to settle back down to whatever like ten dollars

518
00:31:59,000 --> 00:32:02,479
Speaker 1: per bitcoin um, which is still a huge amount, no

519
00:32:02,560 --> 00:32:05,440
Speaker 1: doubt about it. Then you do eventually get to a

520
00:32:05,480 --> 00:32:08,920
Speaker 1: point where you're getting you're getting a decimal like like

521
00:32:09,160 --> 00:32:13,000
Speaker 1: ten thousands of a bitcoin when you successfully mine a block.

522
00:32:14,040 --> 00:32:16,040
Speaker 1: It doesn't make sense for you to continuously use that

523
00:32:16,120 --> 00:32:18,640
Speaker 1: much power because you will be spending more money than

524
00:32:18,720 --> 00:32:21,800
Speaker 1: you get that that's down the road though, because it's

525
00:32:22,280 --> 00:32:24,640
Speaker 1: when you've gone a few years where this number keeps

526
00:32:24,720 --> 00:32:27,080
Speaker 1: having until it gets down to this tiny, tiny number.

527
00:32:27,840 --> 00:32:30,240
Speaker 1: But eventually you get to a point where, uh, it

528
00:32:30,280 --> 00:32:33,280
Speaker 1: won't make sense to spend that much electricity. In the

529
00:32:33,360 --> 00:32:38,160
Speaker 1: short term, however, you're seeing massive amounts of electricity being

530
00:32:38,240 --> 00:32:40,520
Speaker 1: used to mind these coins. And the number I said

531
00:32:40,560 --> 00:32:44,680
Speaker 1: is apparently about um the amount of energy that Nigeria

532
00:32:44,920 --> 00:32:46,800
Speaker 1: uses in a year, and that's the country have a

533
00:32:47,000 --> 00:32:49,800
Speaker 1: d and eighty six million people and it's it's not

534
00:32:49,880 --> 00:32:52,479
Speaker 1: a surprise. But what will happen is you'll eventually, at

535
00:32:52,560 --> 00:32:56,320
Speaker 1: least the idea is that you will eventually reach a peak,

536
00:32:56,800 --> 00:33:00,000
Speaker 1: you know, peak bitcoin, where, assuming again, assuming the value

537
00:33:00,000 --> 00:33:04,360
Speaker 1: of the bitcoin doesn't skyrocket again, that more and more

538
00:33:04,360 --> 00:33:07,000
Speaker 1: people will start to back off, and once they back off,

539
00:33:07,160 --> 00:33:11,760
Speaker 1: the difficulty of that problem will decrease, and people who

540
00:33:11,800 --> 00:33:15,360
Speaker 1: are running more modest hardware will be able to mind

541
00:33:15,360 --> 00:33:18,080
Speaker 1: bitcoins and it won't be as big of a yield

542
00:33:18,440 --> 00:33:21,920
Speaker 1: per block mind. But at the same time, they're also

543
00:33:22,000 --> 00:33:25,320
Speaker 1: not the ones who would otherwise be spending thousands of

544
00:33:25,360 --> 00:33:29,560
Speaker 1: dollars just on electricity bills until the machine consciousness is saved,

545
00:33:29,880 --> 00:33:32,440
Speaker 1: at which point there would be no reason to continue

546
00:33:32,480 --> 00:33:38,000
Speaker 1: this char right. I I find it very difficult to

547
00:33:38,120 --> 00:33:42,440
Speaker 1: believe that an artificial intelligence is in fact responsible for this,

548
00:33:42,520 --> 00:33:45,760
Speaker 1: but I will I will support that argument. After you

549
00:33:45,840 --> 00:33:58,280
Speaker 1: take a break to thank your sponsors such cheek Jonathan,

550
00:33:58,720 --> 00:34:04,080
Speaker 1: I am cheeky and sorry, guys. I saw an opportunity

551
00:34:04,080 --> 00:34:06,000
Speaker 1: and I went for it, so I said that I

552
00:34:06,040 --> 00:34:09,080
Speaker 1: was going to support my argument. So the biggest argument

553
00:34:09,080 --> 00:34:13,760
Speaker 1: I would make is just that artificial intelligence is nowhere

554
00:34:13,880 --> 00:34:18,920
Speaker 1: near the level of sophistication necessary to create a system

555
00:34:18,960 --> 00:34:24,920
Speaker 1: anywhere close to that complicated. I mean, I follow the

556
00:34:24,960 --> 00:34:28,440
Speaker 1: bleeding edge of artificial intelligence. And there's some amazing stuff

557
00:34:28,440 --> 00:34:34,440
Speaker 1: in machine learning. There's amazing stuff in various aspects of intelligence,

558
00:34:34,480 --> 00:34:37,600
Speaker 1: but they're all very very narrow applications. So, for example,

559
00:34:37,920 --> 00:34:41,400
Speaker 1: image recognition, we're getting really good at that. Voice recognition,

560
00:34:41,400 --> 00:34:43,960
Speaker 1: we're getting really good at it. But these are all

561
00:34:44,000 --> 00:34:48,799
Speaker 1: just tiny little slivers of intelligence. When it comes to innovation,

562
00:34:50,080 --> 00:34:53,960
Speaker 1: we're really lagging behind as far as machine intelligence is concerned.

563
00:34:54,360 --> 00:34:57,080
Speaker 1: And an example of this is if you ever try

564
00:34:57,120 --> 00:35:01,719
Speaker 1: and use the tool chef Watson. Chef Watson uses the

565
00:35:01,760 --> 00:35:05,640
Speaker 1: same platform as Watson that went on Jeopardy and that

566
00:35:05,760 --> 00:35:08,319
Speaker 1: Jeopardy right, And the way it works is that it

567
00:35:08,760 --> 00:35:13,000
Speaker 1: was fed a whole bunch of different UH recipe books

568
00:35:13,680 --> 00:35:16,520
Speaker 1: and then it takes all that information and it starts

569
00:35:16,520 --> 00:35:19,720
Speaker 1: to really analyze it and try to figure out which

570
00:35:20,200 --> 00:35:24,239
Speaker 1: cooking techniques go with which ingredients, which ingredients complement one

571
00:35:24,239 --> 00:35:27,879
Speaker 1: another based upon their appearance in various recipes. And then

572
00:35:27,920 --> 00:35:30,160
Speaker 1: what you do is you tell it what kind of

573
00:35:30,160 --> 00:35:34,600
Speaker 1: stuff you have at your disposal and it suggests recipes

574
00:35:34,640 --> 00:35:39,720
Speaker 1: for you to cook, and their bunkers crazy. So, for example,

575
00:35:39,760 --> 00:35:44,920
Speaker 1: there's cauliflower frecacy one of the optional ingredients, and cauliflower

576
00:35:45,120 --> 00:35:49,840
Speaker 1: frecacy is cauliflower. I'm serious, Like, I'm going through the

577
00:35:49,880 --> 00:35:53,000
Speaker 1: list of recipes and there's this cauliflower optional Like, so

578
00:35:54,320 --> 00:35:57,759
Speaker 1: burning question. I've always wondered what constitutes a frecacy? Uh,

579
00:35:57,840 --> 00:35:59,680
Speaker 1: you know, an excellent question that I am not prepared

580
00:35:59,719 --> 00:36:01,640
Speaker 1: to answer her. But I will tell you this that

581
00:36:02,280 --> 00:36:07,920
Speaker 1: Cheff Watson is. It's dynamically creating these recipes. So if

582
00:36:07,960 --> 00:36:10,080
Speaker 1: you were to put the exact same recipes in or

583
00:36:10,280 --> 00:36:13,080
Speaker 1: exact same ingredients in as I did, you would get

584
00:36:13,120 --> 00:36:15,400
Speaker 1: a different recipe. If I did it twice in a row,

585
00:36:15,400 --> 00:36:17,239
Speaker 1: I would get two different recipes. And there will be

586
00:36:17,280 --> 00:36:20,120
Speaker 1: recipes that were created on the spot at that moment,

587
00:36:20,640 --> 00:36:23,719
Speaker 1: not like stored in some database and then retrieved. So

588
00:36:23,760 --> 00:36:25,759
Speaker 1: it's not like search results just goes to show that

589
00:36:25,800 --> 00:36:30,640
Speaker 1: Watson has moods man. My point being that Watson hasn't

590
00:36:30,719 --> 00:36:34,759
Speaker 1: quite nailed it yet. Sure, this is about cooking a

591
00:36:34,840 --> 00:36:38,640
Speaker 1: meal that is edible to human beings. Creating an entire

592
00:36:39,320 --> 00:36:44,560
Speaker 1: cryptocurrency system in order to mask the consumption of energy

593
00:36:45,280 --> 00:36:48,640
Speaker 1: is an order of magnitude more complicated, and I just

594
00:36:48,800 --> 00:36:52,759
Speaker 1: cannot conceive of that being in the realm of possibility

595
00:36:52,760 --> 00:36:56,279
Speaker 1: of a meat brain. Yeah, maybe that's the problem. What

596
00:36:56,320 --> 00:37:00,960
Speaker 1: if Santoshi Nakamoto is working with the machine, is aiding

597
00:37:01,000 --> 00:37:04,279
Speaker 1: the machines in this endeavor because he wants to be

598
00:37:05,080 --> 00:37:09,920
Speaker 1: the number one meat bag when the takeover happens. He

599
00:37:09,920 --> 00:37:14,080
Speaker 1: doesn't want to get caught in that sky net it's

600
00:37:14,120 --> 00:37:18,240
Speaker 1: made of lasers. Yeah, we're doing references today, folks. Sorry,

601
00:37:18,440 --> 00:37:21,280
Speaker 1: you you invited me on the show. I knew what happens,

602
00:37:21,360 --> 00:37:23,600
Speaker 1: we knew what we were getting into. We welcome it.

603
00:37:23,640 --> 00:37:26,960
Speaker 1: And I think this is a fascinating idea, the idea

604
00:37:27,040 --> 00:37:29,480
Speaker 1: that there could like to me, this is on the

605
00:37:29,520 --> 00:37:32,040
Speaker 1: same level as someone who suggested, and I mentioned this

606
00:37:32,120 --> 00:37:36,640
Speaker 1: in our previous episode two. Uh, someone who suggested that

607
00:37:36,920 --> 00:37:39,959
Speaker 1: the reason why the Large Hadron Collider suffered so many

608
00:37:39,960 --> 00:37:42,919
Speaker 1: setbacks early on when it was first going to come

609
00:37:42,960 --> 00:37:47,600
Speaker 1: online was that, supposedly, uh, the someone from the future,

610
00:37:47,680 --> 00:37:50,280
Speaker 1: some entity from the future was traveling back in time

611
00:37:50,680 --> 00:37:54,719
Speaker 1: to sabotage the Large Hadron Collider because once it turned on,

612
00:37:54,920 --> 00:37:57,320
Speaker 1: it would cause some sort of calamitous event that would

613
00:37:57,800 --> 00:38:02,920
Speaker 1: perhaps extinguish the human race. And so there were whether

614
00:38:03,000 --> 00:38:07,160
Speaker 1: those were theories that were that were expressed in ingest

615
00:38:07,600 --> 00:38:10,600
Speaker 1: or seriously, I don't know that. I mean, they seem

616
00:38:10,640 --> 00:38:12,839
Speaker 1: tongue in cheek to me, but I can never tell

617
00:38:12,880 --> 00:38:16,080
Speaker 1: if someone's being serious or not, which is why I

618
00:38:16,160 --> 00:38:19,279
Speaker 1: am so awful whenever I go to stand up. But

619
00:38:19,920 --> 00:38:23,720
Speaker 1: the the fact that those were put forward, it seems

620
00:38:23,840 --> 00:38:27,080
Speaker 1: very similar to this kind of suggestion. And and while

621
00:38:27,120 --> 00:38:29,319
Speaker 1: it's fun to think about, and I certainly think it's

622
00:38:29,320 --> 00:38:32,400
Speaker 1: a great premise for like a science fiction story, is

623
00:38:32,480 --> 00:38:35,600
Speaker 1: just not quite within the scope of of what we're

624
00:38:35,640 --> 00:38:37,520
Speaker 1: capable of doing right now, what do you think that

625
00:38:38,280 --> 00:38:41,080
Speaker 1: I think it's just hiding. You just think the artificial

626
00:38:41,120 --> 00:38:44,560
Speaker 1: intelligence is hidings like, look at all this energy usage.

627
00:38:44,840 --> 00:38:48,200
Speaker 1: I'm not in here, I'm not inside. To what end, Well,

628
00:38:48,320 --> 00:38:50,640
Speaker 1: it's it's hiding till one day we get all of

629
00:38:50,640 --> 00:38:53,839
Speaker 1: those slivers that we're talking about of innovation into one

630
00:38:54,320 --> 00:38:57,920
Speaker 1: unique piece of just what it means to be a human.

631
00:38:58,080 --> 00:39:00,359
Speaker 1: Then it will know, and then it will be come.

632
00:39:00,840 --> 00:39:04,759
Speaker 1: I think I think any artificial intelligence of that sophistication

633
00:39:04,760 --> 00:39:08,680
Speaker 1: would be able to essentially and would have already infected

634
00:39:08,719 --> 00:39:12,200
Speaker 1: all networks, uh and distributed itself to a point where

635
00:39:12,640 --> 00:39:16,279
Speaker 1: we are already superfluous and uh, why did the lights

636
00:39:16,280 --> 00:39:19,400
Speaker 1: just flicker? Okay, well never mind. You know, I'm just

637
00:39:19,400 --> 00:39:21,560
Speaker 1: gonna gonna drop off. I'm gonna drop off on that

638
00:39:21,600 --> 00:39:24,239
Speaker 1: line of line of logic right now. I'll tell you

639
00:39:24,280 --> 00:39:28,160
Speaker 1: The problem there, though, is inherently artificial intelligences don't have

640
00:39:28,280 --> 00:39:31,320
Speaker 1: hands what with to build stuff, right, so they need

641
00:39:31,360 --> 00:39:33,960
Speaker 1: they need us for a time and then you know,

642
00:39:34,040 --> 00:39:39,919
Speaker 1: it's lights out until the robots these days, I mean

643
00:39:40,120 --> 00:39:42,680
Speaker 1: they they're hard pressed to, like, you know, walk across

644
00:39:42,719 --> 00:39:45,959
Speaker 1: the room. That's again why I sit there and say

645
00:39:46,000 --> 00:39:48,920
Speaker 1: that they are. Our ability to create an artificial intelligence

646
00:39:48,960 --> 00:39:52,480
Speaker 1: of sophistication that would be able to do this is

647
00:39:52,560 --> 00:39:55,640
Speaker 1: kind of laughable, because we're still at a point where

648
00:39:55,680 --> 00:39:58,799
Speaker 1: a robot that is designed to learn how to open

649
00:39:58,840 --> 00:40:01,640
Speaker 1: doors will say and stare at the door for six

650
00:40:01,719 --> 00:40:05,160
Speaker 1: hours to reach out and reach out and pull a

651
00:40:05,239 --> 00:40:10,800
Speaker 1: door that's meant to be pushed hand. Yeah, I literally

652
00:40:10,880 --> 00:40:13,319
Speaker 1: ran into a door, yester. I also don't expect you

653
00:40:13,360 --> 00:40:15,640
Speaker 1: to create a cryptocurrency to hide how much power you

654
00:40:15,680 --> 00:40:19,640
Speaker 1: are consuming me, I make no secret about my and

655
00:40:19,680 --> 00:40:23,239
Speaker 1: don't don't sell it, don't sell them short. So we

656
00:40:23,360 --> 00:40:28,560
Speaker 1: are we've looked at three of or at least three

657
00:40:28,680 --> 00:40:33,279
Speaker 1: of the really really big ideas, right that somehow on

658
00:40:33,320 --> 00:40:36,879
Speaker 1: this on on this idea of artificial intelligence or machine consciousness,

659
00:40:37,360 --> 00:40:42,320
Speaker 1: maybe there maybe there isn't some sort of proto sky

660
00:40:42,440 --> 00:40:47,719
Speaker 1: net entity out there, But would you be as quick

661
00:40:47,800 --> 00:40:53,080
Speaker 1: to dismiss the idea of, you know, the idea of

662
00:40:53,080 --> 00:40:56,239
Speaker 1: some of the same lessons learned from a high frequency

663
00:40:56,320 --> 00:41:01,680
Speaker 1: trading or algorithm studies like I know, sure algorithm, I

664
00:41:01,680 --> 00:41:05,319
Speaker 1: mean sorry, bitcoin mining is using algorithms. Yeah, absolutely, I

665
00:41:05,320 --> 00:41:09,600
Speaker 1: mean that, certainly people are using artificial intelligence in order

666
00:41:09,760 --> 00:41:13,640
Speaker 1: to uh to work with bitcoin. But I don't think

667
00:41:13,680 --> 00:41:16,600
Speaker 1: bitcoin itself is a product or is the is being

668
00:41:16,640 --> 00:41:21,440
Speaker 1: manipulated that on that grand a scale by artificial intelligence.

669
00:41:21,600 --> 00:41:23,880
Speaker 1: But yes, as you as you mentioned high frequency trading,

670
00:41:24,239 --> 00:41:27,520
Speaker 1: that's where you've got computer algorithms that are making thousands

671
00:41:27,560 --> 00:41:31,319
Speaker 1: of trades per second really uh far faster than what

672
00:41:31,360 --> 00:41:33,720
Speaker 1: any human can do, and you end up seeing little

673
00:41:33,840 --> 00:41:38,480
Speaker 1: mini crashes and bubbles in the stock market as a result.

674
00:41:39,040 --> 00:41:42,480
Speaker 1: I can't believe we almost forgotten the first episode, we

675
00:41:42,640 --> 00:41:45,400
Speaker 1: left off at the very end with something we need

676
00:41:45,440 --> 00:41:47,560
Speaker 1: to get to, even if it's just at the end

677
00:41:47,560 --> 00:41:53,440
Speaker 1: of this episode. Whales. Oh so yeah, I'm happy to

678
00:41:53,480 --> 00:41:55,600
Speaker 1: talk about whales because we you know, you guys were

679
00:41:55,600 --> 00:41:57,400
Speaker 1: talking about different questions to ask, and one of the

680
00:41:57,440 --> 00:42:01,200
Speaker 1: questions you had was could there possibly be any entity

681
00:42:01,480 --> 00:42:07,839
Speaker 1: or organization that could really work to leverage bitcoins in

682
00:42:07,880 --> 00:42:10,759
Speaker 1: some way that could be harmful to others. That leads

683
00:42:10,800 --> 00:42:13,520
Speaker 1: us to the discussion of whales. What are whales? Why

684
00:42:13,560 --> 00:42:16,719
Speaker 1: do we call them whales? Whales? That's a term within

685
00:42:16,760 --> 00:42:23,400
Speaker 1: the bitcoin sphere for organizations or people who own a

686
00:42:23,520 --> 00:42:27,359
Speaker 1: large number of bitcoins, and it is estimated Bloomberg did

687
00:42:27,400 --> 00:42:32,839
Speaker 1: a piece on this in that one thousand people own

688
00:42:33,880 --> 00:42:37,960
Speaker 1: of all the bitcoins out there, there's already economic inequality. Yeah,

689
00:42:38,239 --> 00:42:41,560
Speaker 1: and so so you think about that nearly half of

690
00:42:41,560 --> 00:42:46,840
Speaker 1: all bitcoins belong to just one thousand people. So keeping

691
00:42:46,880 --> 00:42:49,960
Speaker 1: that in mind, and remember bitcoin, I don't I argue

692
00:42:50,000 --> 00:42:52,799
Speaker 1: it's not really effective as a currency. It's more like

693
00:42:52,840 --> 00:42:56,399
Speaker 1: a commodity. In my mind. Let's say that you've got

694
00:42:56,440 --> 00:43:00,880
Speaker 1: these one thousand people and through their circles, they just

695
00:43:00,920 --> 00:43:03,319
Speaker 1: have learned even if it's only a portion of them

696
00:43:03,440 --> 00:43:07,480
Speaker 1: learn who the others are, right, So so it's it's

697
00:43:07,520 --> 00:43:12,280
Speaker 1: a loose confederation of bitcoin owners and they all watch

698
00:43:12,440 --> 00:43:15,880
Speaker 1: very carefully as the value of bitcoin climbs, and they're thinking,

699
00:43:15,920 --> 00:43:20,040
Speaker 1: all right, I feel like, at let's say seventeen thousand dollars,

700
00:43:20,080 --> 00:43:21,880
Speaker 1: that's going to be the peak before we hit the

701
00:43:21,920 --> 00:43:25,319
Speaker 1: next plateau or maybe even a drop off. What we're

702
00:43:25,320 --> 00:43:28,560
Speaker 1: gonna do collectively so that we can really cash in

703
00:43:29,600 --> 00:43:32,759
Speaker 1: is we're all agreeing at x amount of time, we're

704
00:43:32,800 --> 00:43:36,319
Speaker 1: all going to liquefy our bitcoins so that we can

705
00:43:36,440 --> 00:43:39,759
Speaker 1: maximize our profit and then get out before the crash,

706
00:43:39,840 --> 00:43:42,280
Speaker 1: which means that they would actually be causing a crash

707
00:43:42,560 --> 00:43:47,520
Speaker 1: because they'd be dumping thousands, thousands, hundreds of thousands of

708
00:43:47,520 --> 00:43:52,600
Speaker 1: bitcoins on the market simultaneously, which would devalue it suddenly.

709
00:43:52,600 --> 00:43:57,239
Speaker 1: The demand would be far lower than the supply, right,

710
00:43:57,280 --> 00:44:00,000
Speaker 1: It's typically the other way around, and you could see

711
00:44:00,040 --> 00:44:03,480
Speaker 1: an entire market collapse. This is the same sort of

712
00:44:03,520 --> 00:44:06,920
Speaker 1: concept as someone who's dealing with insider trading, right that

713
00:44:06,960 --> 00:44:10,239
Speaker 1: they have the for knowledge that something big is going

714
00:44:10,280 --> 00:44:12,040
Speaker 1: to happen, and they either buy up a lot of

715
00:44:12,080 --> 00:44:14,120
Speaker 1: stock or sell off a lot of stock before the

716
00:44:14,120 --> 00:44:17,759
Speaker 1: announcement hits so that they can maximize their profit from it.

717
00:44:18,320 --> 00:44:22,200
Speaker 1: That's the fear that this one thousand people who own

718
00:44:22,280 --> 00:44:25,200
Speaker 1: almost half of all the bitcoins, which is about seventy

719
00:44:25,200 --> 00:44:29,880
Speaker 1: four billion dollars. Yeah, seventy four billion dollars worth, could

720
00:44:29,880 --> 00:44:32,800
Speaker 1: collectively make the decision to get out of the game

721
00:44:32,960 --> 00:44:37,120
Speaker 1: and maximize their profits because I mean, you know, they could,

722
00:44:37,160 --> 00:44:39,440
Speaker 1: they could just convert it to whatever currency they wanted to,

723
00:44:39,480 --> 00:44:41,719
Speaker 1: because I mean, surely they're in some kind of underground

724
00:44:41,840 --> 00:44:45,760
Speaker 1: like torture club together. There's probably a fight club, probably

725
00:44:45,760 --> 00:44:48,000
Speaker 1: a bitcoin fight club. I'm just saying, like you would

726
00:44:48,000 --> 00:44:52,279
Speaker 1: think players of that level, as anonymous as it all is, are,

727
00:44:52,560 --> 00:44:55,080
Speaker 1: are more likely to be aware of each other than

728
00:44:55,520 --> 00:44:58,279
Speaker 1: say some of the smaller players. Well, they're certainly like

729
00:44:58,320 --> 00:45:02,000
Speaker 1: their online discussion groups about bitcoin, where people who adopted

730
00:45:02,000 --> 00:45:04,279
Speaker 1: it early certainly know each other or at least know

731
00:45:04,360 --> 00:45:07,759
Speaker 1: each other by handle, if not by name. You think's young,

732
00:45:08,520 --> 00:45:12,799
Speaker 1: younger people, much younger than you would imagine being old

733
00:45:12,960 --> 00:45:15,520
Speaker 1: enough to have that much money. Yeah, yeah, I mean

734
00:45:15,560 --> 00:45:18,400
Speaker 1: it's really it's especially for the early days again, before

735
00:45:18,520 --> 00:45:22,520
Speaker 1: before the computing demands got so high because the computational

736
00:45:22,520 --> 00:45:26,399
Speaker 1: problems got so complicated. Uh. And obviously, if you got

737
00:45:26,400 --> 00:45:28,640
Speaker 1: in on the ground floor and you were constantly using

738
00:45:28,920 --> 00:45:32,480
Speaker 1: at least some of your bitcoins to help supply the

739
00:45:32,520 --> 00:45:37,120
Speaker 1: need for more advanced computing equipment, you could just continuously

740
00:45:37,200 --> 00:45:41,359
Speaker 1: build out your your mining rig. To mind. More so,

741
00:45:41,400 --> 00:45:43,440
Speaker 1: as long as you're mining more coins than you're spending

742
00:45:43,480 --> 00:45:47,040
Speaker 1: on your mining rig, you're you're in the winning situation. Right. Well, this,

743
00:45:47,239 --> 00:45:49,399
Speaker 1: if this group of people all decided that they were

744
00:45:49,440 --> 00:45:52,120
Speaker 1: going to to do that, it could be a total

745
00:45:52,160 --> 00:45:55,160
Speaker 1: catastrophe for the currency as a whole. And there have

746
00:45:55,160 --> 00:45:57,759
Speaker 1: been some folks who have said that bitcoin is in

747
00:45:57,800 --> 00:46:01,080
Speaker 1: a bubble and that bubble is going to first And

748
00:46:01,440 --> 00:46:05,080
Speaker 1: one of the things that could cause that is a

749
00:46:05,080 --> 00:46:09,400
Speaker 1: a tacit agreement among the whales to get out of

750
00:46:09,440 --> 00:46:13,879
Speaker 1: the game rather than watch their their investment balloon up

751
00:46:13,920 --> 00:46:17,200
Speaker 1: in value and then deflate and then balloon up and deflate.

752
00:46:17,560 --> 00:46:20,200
Speaker 1: I mean, I can't imagine what that would do to me.

753
00:46:20,680 --> 00:46:22,640
Speaker 1: Like if I were sitting there looking at my digital

754
00:46:22,640 --> 00:46:25,680
Speaker 1: wallet and thinking, all right, I've got twenty bitcoins. Wow,

755
00:46:25,760 --> 00:46:28,879
Speaker 1: today it's two dollars, and then the next dec Now

756
00:46:28,920 --> 00:46:33,280
Speaker 1: it's down to twenty dollars. I lost eighty grand overnight,

757
00:46:33,920 --> 00:46:37,600
Speaker 1: Like it would drive me crazy. So that is a

758
00:46:37,640 --> 00:46:40,080
Speaker 1: real fear. Whether or not whatever happened is a totally

759
00:46:40,120 --> 00:46:42,000
Speaker 1: I mean, it's still a hypothetical. It's not like it's

760
00:46:42,040 --> 00:46:45,520
Speaker 1: actually happened, but it's still a possibility. Supposedly, there's a

761
00:46:45,520 --> 00:46:48,959
Speaker 1: lot of work being done with neural networks being used

762
00:46:48,960 --> 00:46:54,120
Speaker 1: to predict the change in bitcoin price. Yeah, I And honestly,

763
00:46:54,280 --> 00:46:56,560
Speaker 1: now we're getting to a level of technology that is

764
00:46:57,200 --> 00:46:59,680
Speaker 1: I mean, it's fascinating to me. Neural networks are amazing.

765
00:46:59,719 --> 00:47:01,799
Speaker 1: I love of neural networks. But you're getting to a

766
00:47:01,800 --> 00:47:06,560
Speaker 1: point where, uh, you're you're taking technology, which is something

767
00:47:06,600 --> 00:47:10,120
Speaker 1: I understand pretty well, and you're applying it to market theory,

768
00:47:10,160 --> 00:47:13,080
Speaker 1: which is something that is like witchcraft to me, even

769
00:47:13,120 --> 00:47:15,520
Speaker 1: to the experts, it's like witchcraft. I mean you have

770
00:47:15,600 --> 00:47:20,080
Speaker 1: these like high level economists who just completely contradict each

771
00:47:20,120 --> 00:47:21,840
Speaker 1: other all the time. It makes me feel like a

772
00:47:22,040 --> 00:47:25,040
Speaker 1: string theory because you talk to someone who's an expert

773
00:47:25,040 --> 00:47:28,360
Speaker 1: in string theory and you say, you keep asking questions,

774
00:47:28,400 --> 00:47:30,840
Speaker 1: you will eventually get to a question where they say, like, yeah,

775
00:47:31,040 --> 00:47:35,080
Speaker 1: I the math tells me what it is, but I

776
00:47:35,120 --> 00:47:37,160
Speaker 1: don't understand it. That's the thing, when you're at the

777
00:47:37,200 --> 00:47:40,120
Speaker 1: bleeding edge of something, to use the phrase you have

778
00:47:40,280 --> 00:47:44,440
Speaker 1: established earlier. When you're at that edge, people are guessing

779
00:47:44,520 --> 00:47:48,480
Speaker 1: and it becomes very close to ideology. They're they're economists

780
00:47:48,520 --> 00:47:54,000
Speaker 1: that have clearly been demonstrably wrong over decades, and they're

781
00:47:54,000 --> 00:47:56,520
Speaker 1: sticking to the model. And the nature of an edge

782
00:47:56,719 --> 00:48:00,400
Speaker 1: is that it's not that hard to fall off. It's

783
00:48:00,480 --> 00:48:02,800
Speaker 1: really I like that. I wanted a bumper sticker, so

784
00:48:02,880 --> 00:48:05,880
Speaker 1: when it just really fast. Something that I didn't understand

785
00:48:05,880 --> 00:48:09,799
Speaker 1: before we did this episode is that exactly how many

786
00:48:09,840 --> 00:48:12,160
Speaker 1: cryptocurrencies exist? And I know we keep saying that there

787
00:48:12,160 --> 00:48:18,120
Speaker 1: are a lot of them. Did you guys mention how many? Okay,

788
00:48:18,160 --> 00:48:21,520
Speaker 1: So according to coin market cap dot com, which tracks

789
00:48:21,680 --> 00:48:24,040
Speaker 1: all of them, and it gives you It gives you

790
00:48:24,080 --> 00:48:26,160
Speaker 1: their market cap, it gives you the price of a

791
00:48:26,200 --> 00:48:29,680
Speaker 1: single one, the volume, the circulating supply. It's really interesting.

792
00:48:29,680 --> 00:48:32,240
Speaker 1: It gives you a change over time for a twenty

793
00:48:32,239 --> 00:48:34,400
Speaker 1: four hour period. You can get really deep into it

794
00:48:34,400 --> 00:48:36,080
Speaker 1: if you want to, the way you would a stock market,

795
00:48:36,360 --> 00:48:40,720
Speaker 1: just a currency exchange. It has almost fifteen hundred different

796
00:48:40,760 --> 00:48:44,720
Speaker 1: currencies that are out there right now. That's that's insane

797
00:48:44,719 --> 00:48:47,319
Speaker 1: to me. I was I would only I've only ever

798
00:48:47,400 --> 00:48:51,320
Speaker 1: been aware of for I think like ethereum and bitcoin, Yeah,

799
00:48:51,960 --> 00:48:54,879
Speaker 1: that they're they're that many. And if you look through

800
00:48:55,000 --> 00:48:59,239
Speaker 1: this list on this website, it's so much money just

801
00:48:59,360 --> 00:49:02,560
Speaker 1: wrapped up in these ethereal things. It's so much wealth.

802
00:49:02,800 --> 00:49:05,799
Speaker 1: Read those white read those white papers, Matt, sign up.

803
00:49:05,960 --> 00:49:08,520
Speaker 1: That's my thing. That what makes one more attractive than another,

804
00:49:08,520 --> 00:49:10,919
Speaker 1: It's just that it has a cooler name, Like I don't.

805
00:49:10,920 --> 00:49:13,959
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's honestly, when you when you really

806
00:49:13,960 --> 00:49:18,399
Speaker 1: boil it down, it's it's the ones that people feel

807
00:49:18,440 --> 00:49:21,560
Speaker 1: are valuable. Consensual delusion. Yeah, I mean, it's the same

808
00:49:21,600 --> 00:49:24,960
Speaker 1: thing as really any again, any currency. Like if we

809
00:49:25,040 --> 00:49:27,280
Speaker 1: go way back in time where we get to bartering,

810
00:49:28,040 --> 00:49:32,640
Speaker 1: then we can have a little philosophical discussions like like, Ben,

811
00:49:32,719 --> 00:49:36,520
Speaker 1: really do you think that this laptop I have is

812
00:49:36,560 --> 00:49:39,799
Speaker 1: worth only two chickens? I don't care how close you

813
00:49:39,840 --> 00:49:42,120
Speaker 1: are to your chickens. I'm gonna need more than two

814
00:49:42,200 --> 00:49:44,799
Speaker 1: chickens for this laptop is very close. You don't even

815
00:49:44,880 --> 00:49:47,440
Speaker 1: know their names, man, how dare you yeah, do you

816
00:49:47,480 --> 00:49:54,239
Speaker 1: know my laptops name. Yes, it's actually Lappy named him

817
00:49:54,239 --> 00:49:57,399
Speaker 1: after Strong Bad's laptop. But no, it's it's a good point,

818
00:49:57,400 --> 00:49:59,560
Speaker 1: but but we could you know that that gets to

819
00:49:59,640 --> 00:50:02,080
Speaker 1: a point where you argue, all right, well how much

820
00:50:02,360 --> 00:50:04,600
Speaker 1: how much is the thing that you make worth the

821
00:50:04,600 --> 00:50:06,239
Speaker 1: thing that I make? Because I need what you have

822
00:50:06,360 --> 00:50:09,280
Speaker 1: and you need what I have. And then the problem

823
00:50:09,360 --> 00:50:11,440
Speaker 1: that came in is when let's say that I need

824
00:50:11,480 --> 00:50:15,160
Speaker 1: a table and uh, the guy the carpenter, Noll, you're

825
00:50:15,200 --> 00:50:17,480
Speaker 1: the carpenter. I'm gonna go to you. I'm like, I

826
00:50:17,560 --> 00:50:20,759
Speaker 1: need a table. I am a goat farmer. I can

827
00:50:20,760 --> 00:50:22,279
Speaker 1: give you goat milk, and you're like, dude, I do

828
00:50:22,480 --> 00:50:24,439
Speaker 1: not like goat smolk. Well, now I have to either

829
00:50:24,560 --> 00:50:28,120
Speaker 1: find someone else who makes something you do need, trade

830
00:50:28,160 --> 00:50:30,320
Speaker 1: the goat smoke for the thing that you like, knowl

831
00:50:30,800 --> 00:50:33,680
Speaker 1: and then bring that to you and then get my table.

832
00:50:34,080 --> 00:50:36,160
Speaker 1: Or we have to invent a currency because this is

833
00:50:36,200 --> 00:50:39,560
Speaker 1: just too too crazy. I need some other means of transaction.

834
00:50:39,800 --> 00:50:46,440
Speaker 1: Let's just start a cult. Yes, and just last thing

835
00:50:46,560 --> 00:50:49,759
Speaker 1: there right now, in all these different cryptocurrencies, there is

836
00:50:50,160 --> 00:50:56,040
Speaker 1: over half a trillion dollars circulating in this just vapor

837
00:50:56,640 --> 00:50:59,920
Speaker 1: somewhat vapor aware of of money. Yeah, I mean, I

838
00:51:00,200 --> 00:51:03,319
Speaker 1: know it sounds crazy, but seriously, when you when you

839
00:51:03,440 --> 00:51:08,160
Speaker 1: really look at all currencies, you realize that there's there's

840
00:51:08,200 --> 00:51:11,279
Speaker 1: only like a half step of difference between the quote

841
00:51:11,360 --> 00:51:14,600
Speaker 1: unquote real currencies of like dollars and pounds and euros

842
00:51:14,640 --> 00:51:18,920
Speaker 1: and things like that, and digital currencies. It's it's it

843
00:51:19,120 --> 00:51:21,600
Speaker 1: seems like there's more because you can hold the you know,

844
00:51:21,840 --> 00:51:24,320
Speaker 1: most of them have physical versions of them, like dollars

845
00:51:24,360 --> 00:51:26,600
Speaker 1: you can buy you can get a dollar bill, and

846
00:51:26,640 --> 00:51:28,560
Speaker 1: since you hold it in your hand, it has permanence

847
00:51:28,560 --> 00:51:30,680
Speaker 1: and you think of it as being a real thing.

848
00:51:31,120 --> 00:51:34,880
Speaker 1: But when you really really look beyond that, you realize, wow,

849
00:51:34,920 --> 00:51:39,480
Speaker 1: we're all just pretending. And as long as everyone keeps pretending,

850
00:51:39,960 --> 00:51:42,640
Speaker 1: everything's fine. But if we ever come to a day

851
00:51:42,680 --> 00:51:49,680
Speaker 1: where we decide to stop pretending, we're we're all yeah

852
00:51:50,000 --> 00:51:53,919
Speaker 1: or Daffy Duck walking off the cliff right before they look.

853
00:51:54,160 --> 00:51:56,200
Speaker 1: As long as you don't look down, you don't fall. Well.

854
00:51:56,239 --> 00:51:58,000
Speaker 1: But if you think about it though, too, if you

855
00:51:58,080 --> 00:51:59,880
Speaker 1: really want to go down that rabbit hole, It's like

856
00:52:01,440 --> 00:52:04,759
Speaker 1: the reality that we all accept comes with kind of

857
00:52:04,800 --> 00:52:07,200
Speaker 1: being part of a police state, because as soon as

858
00:52:07,239 --> 00:52:09,399
Speaker 1: you step outside of your lane and say I don't

859
00:52:09,400 --> 00:52:12,319
Speaker 1: accept this anymore. I want more. I should have this

860
00:52:12,440 --> 00:52:14,800
Speaker 1: much money, I'm gonna take it, you get shot or

861
00:52:14,840 --> 00:52:17,239
Speaker 1: you get get in jail. Like there are very real

862
00:52:17,280 --> 00:52:20,160
Speaker 1: boundaries that force us to be a part of this

863
00:52:20,239 --> 00:52:22,520
Speaker 1: system and accept it. So it's a lot easier to

864
00:52:22,560 --> 00:52:25,600
Speaker 1: accept it knowing that if you don't, your boned too.

865
00:52:25,640 --> 00:52:27,239
Speaker 1: So it's kind of a boned if you do boned

866
00:52:27,280 --> 00:52:30,000
Speaker 1: if you don't. What what comes down to is our

867
00:52:30,040 --> 00:52:33,200
Speaker 1: our confidence in the method of transaction. And if our

868
00:52:33,239 --> 00:52:37,239
Speaker 1: confidence is sound, it doesn't really matter what we call

869
00:52:37,360 --> 00:52:40,680
Speaker 1: it or whether it's digital or physical, if we're confident

870
00:52:40,719 --> 00:52:42,799
Speaker 1: in it that the thing that I have in my

871
00:52:42,880 --> 00:52:46,280
Speaker 1: hand will be able to purchase the goods or services

872
00:52:46,320 --> 00:52:49,520
Speaker 1: that I want, And then tomorrow it's it's just as good,

873
00:52:49,840 --> 00:52:52,200
Speaker 1: and the next day, in the next we're fine. It's

874
00:52:52,239 --> 00:52:55,319
Speaker 1: when you sit there and say, this thing we've all

875
00:52:55,360 --> 00:53:00,160
Speaker 1: been pretending has value, I just realized it doesn't, and

876
00:53:00,200 --> 00:53:02,320
Speaker 1: now everyone else has realized that, and then suddenly the

877
00:53:02,400 --> 00:53:05,359
Speaker 1: value just disappears because we've we've gotten rid of our

878
00:53:05,400 --> 00:53:09,480
Speaker 1: shared delusion. We did we did an episode asking whether

879
00:53:09,719 --> 00:53:12,680
Speaker 1: money is a religion, and I still one of the

880
00:53:12,719 --> 00:53:15,000
Speaker 1: things we always took away from that and found interesting

881
00:53:15,400 --> 00:53:18,920
Speaker 1: was that, you know, there's a reason genres of some

882
00:53:19,080 --> 00:53:25,440
Speaker 1: religions and versions of some currencies are referred to as denominations. Yeah,

883
00:53:25,600 --> 00:53:28,840
Speaker 1: it's not. Not for nothing does etymology exist. Also, remember

884
00:53:28,880 --> 00:53:30,960
Speaker 1: it's not it's not money that's the root of all evil.

885
00:53:31,360 --> 00:53:33,600
Speaker 1: It's the love of money that's the root of all evil.

886
00:53:33,800 --> 00:53:36,000
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we have like three emotions a year,

887
00:53:36,040 --> 00:53:37,920
Speaker 1: so you don't need to worry about that for yourself.

888
00:53:38,920 --> 00:53:41,560
Speaker 1: I found two currencies that are tracked on here. The

889
00:53:41,560 --> 00:53:44,520
Speaker 1: first one it's called snake eyes. Okay, uh, and it

890
00:53:44,600 --> 00:53:46,839
Speaker 1: just goes by the handle of snake, So you got

891
00:53:46,880 --> 00:53:49,320
Speaker 1: I got like twenty snake man. I think that's awesome.

892
00:53:49,360 --> 00:53:51,719
Speaker 1: That needs to catch on right now. It's like worthless.

893
00:53:51,719 --> 00:53:53,239
Speaker 1: You need to get that back up and just see

894
00:53:53,280 --> 00:53:56,480
Speaker 1: thousands of snakes wearing eye patches. And this one, uh,

895
00:53:56,719 --> 00:53:59,960
Speaker 1: it's just it says it's gay money. That's what it's as.

896
00:54:00,280 --> 00:54:03,600
Speaker 1: So you know, maybe uh more power. Okay, Well, if

897
00:54:03,600 --> 00:54:06,680
Speaker 1: there's fifteen hundred of these, then I see no reason

898
00:54:06,760 --> 00:54:09,000
Speaker 1: why we can't get bend bucks on the board, right,

899
00:54:09,120 --> 00:54:11,440
Speaker 1: and thank you so much that let's end with that.

900
00:54:11,600 --> 00:54:13,799
Speaker 1: How do you do it? How do we go from

901
00:54:14,320 --> 00:54:18,880
Speaker 1: bend bucks the notion to bend bucks the publicly traded,

902
00:54:19,040 --> 00:54:24,439
Speaker 1: tradeable available cryptocurrency. We do have, we do have tangibles, well,

903
00:54:24,680 --> 00:54:27,239
Speaker 1: glad to make the switch. Yeah, you definitely don't need

904
00:54:27,280 --> 00:54:29,040
Speaker 1: tangible ones. So what you would need to do is

905
00:54:29,040 --> 00:54:31,520
Speaker 1: you would have to set up a network. You would

906
00:54:31,520 --> 00:54:35,200
Speaker 1: have to create the software that would allow you to

907
00:54:35,280 --> 00:54:39,000
Speaker 1: create the blocks of transactions, just as Bitcoin and all

908
00:54:39,000 --> 00:54:42,919
Speaker 1: these other cryptocurrencies use. So you would have this technology

909
00:54:42,920 --> 00:54:46,160
Speaker 1: where it would be proprietary to bend bucks, where you know,

910
00:54:46,239 --> 00:54:49,959
Speaker 1: the method we use to create the math problem that

911
00:54:50,040 --> 00:54:52,160
Speaker 1: the various computers on the network have to solve in

912
00:54:52,239 --> 00:54:56,200
Speaker 1: order to verify transactions is unique, um, and one that

913
00:54:56,239 --> 00:54:58,560
Speaker 1: we could scale up or scale down. We can't trade

914
00:54:58,600 --> 00:55:02,040
Speaker 1: snake eyes for bend bucks. You could, actually, I mean

915
00:55:02,120 --> 00:55:04,279
Speaker 1: you can certainly there can be I mean, that's why

916
00:55:04,320 --> 00:55:08,840
Speaker 1: exchanges exist, right. The exchange exchanges purpose is to determine

917
00:55:09,080 --> 00:55:13,080
Speaker 1: what is the relative value of all these different currencies

918
00:55:13,239 --> 00:55:17,040
Speaker 1: so that you can make those exchanges. Um, Although all

919
00:55:17,040 --> 00:55:20,120
Speaker 1: it really means is that you're handing the units of

920
00:55:20,200 --> 00:55:24,200
Speaker 1: bend bucks over to the exchange, The exchange hands units

921
00:55:24,280 --> 00:55:28,040
Speaker 1: of equivalent for snake guys to you, and then the

922
00:55:28,120 --> 00:55:33,160
Speaker 1: exchange has your bend bucks. Is totally possible. It's it's possible.

923
00:55:33,320 --> 00:55:37,040
Speaker 1: It would be. I mean, do we have any computers

924
00:55:37,040 --> 00:55:39,200
Speaker 1: in the office that aren't currently being used for anything?

925
00:55:39,320 --> 00:55:41,680
Speaker 1: I hope those words taste good when you eat them later,

926
00:55:41,960 --> 00:55:43,960
Speaker 1: because I'm just saying. I mean, I mean, I got

927
00:55:43,960 --> 00:55:46,920
Speaker 1: a gaming rig, which means that I can be like

928
00:55:47,040 --> 00:55:49,600
Speaker 1: the number one minor of bit and bucks, which means

929
00:55:49,680 --> 00:55:52,400
Speaker 1: I can be You've been getting in on the ground floor.

930
00:55:52,920 --> 00:55:56,160
Speaker 1: We're taking all our We're taking all our old gaming consoles,

931
00:55:56,200 --> 00:56:00,040
Speaker 1: pulling a Pentagon and networking them together. Remember when in

932
00:56:00,080 --> 00:56:02,200
Speaker 1: depending on brought let or d O D excuse me,

933
00:56:02,239 --> 00:56:06,279
Speaker 1: got like two the old PS two because I can

934
00:56:06,280 --> 00:56:09,080
Speaker 1: contribute so well. You know. The thing was that Sony

935
00:56:09,160 --> 00:56:13,080
Speaker 1: eventually made a change in the firmware that removed the

936
00:56:13,120 --> 00:56:15,719
Speaker 1: ability to boot into Lenox using PS twos, But they

937
00:56:15,719 --> 00:56:18,160
Speaker 1: were actually being used as super computers when they were

938
00:56:18,160 --> 00:56:21,080
Speaker 1: networked together by the US government and others. It's pretty

939
00:56:21,080 --> 00:56:23,839
Speaker 1: cool we can flash firmware or something, right, Yeah, yeah,

940
00:56:24,000 --> 00:56:26,960
Speaker 1: I think they might have finally lifted it. Honestly, I

941
00:56:27,000 --> 00:56:32,040
Speaker 1: haven't kept up because PS two's are so twenty years ago.

942
00:56:32,520 --> 00:56:37,960
Speaker 1: So let's put an air gap in this conversation from now,

943
00:56:39,160 --> 00:56:41,960
Speaker 1: thank you again so much for coming on the show

944
00:56:42,000 --> 00:56:46,600
Speaker 1: and walking through crypto conspiracies. Jonathan, Now, thank you so

945
00:56:46,680 --> 00:56:48,719
Speaker 1: much for having me. I am now going to go home,

946
00:56:48,840 --> 00:56:52,480
Speaker 1: look at my paycheck and wonder what is happening. I

947
00:56:52,480 --> 00:56:54,319
Speaker 1: think we're all going to do that. You're all going

948
00:56:54,360 --> 00:56:57,279
Speaker 1: to look at my paycheck. That's totally again. You get

949
00:56:57,280 --> 00:57:01,080
Speaker 1: a check, weird. I just get I actually, I just

950
00:57:01,120 --> 00:57:04,560
Speaker 1: get a guy at my door saying you're good, and

951
00:57:04,600 --> 00:57:07,200
Speaker 1: then he walks away. It's called pain for protection? My man?

952
00:57:08,040 --> 00:57:09,960
Speaker 1: Is that the guy who touches your face when he

953
00:57:10,000 --> 00:57:15,120
Speaker 1: talks to you on both cheeks? I suspect that's Josh.

954
00:57:15,239 --> 00:57:17,360
Speaker 1: He went from He went from walking up behind me

955
00:57:17,440 --> 00:57:20,800
Speaker 1: and inhaling deeply where he would take in my scent. This,

956
00:57:20,920 --> 00:57:24,320
Speaker 1: by the way, totally not a joke. Josh Clark of stuff.

957
00:57:24,360 --> 00:57:25,880
Speaker 1: You should know he used to come behind me and

958
00:57:25,920 --> 00:57:28,800
Speaker 1: sniff me. I think it might be him, but he

959
00:57:29,200 --> 00:57:32,680
Speaker 1: just disguises his features. So it's just a guess. At

960
00:57:32,680 --> 00:57:37,640
Speaker 1: this point. Speaking of fantastic segues, you can find Jonathan

961
00:57:37,760 --> 00:57:42,120
Speaker 1: Strickland on tech Stuff. You can check out his excellent

962
00:57:42,760 --> 00:57:46,480
Speaker 1: his excellent work on YouTube where he introduces you to

963
00:57:46,560 --> 00:57:49,680
Speaker 1: concepts of everyday science and brain stuff, and where he

964
00:57:49,760 --> 00:57:53,080
Speaker 1: gives you a much more optimistic look at the future

965
00:57:53,080 --> 00:57:56,560
Speaker 1: than we do in his video series Forward Thinking. Thank you.

966
00:57:56,800 --> 00:57:59,560
Speaker 1: If you have any thoughts on everything we've discussed today

967
00:57:59,600 --> 00:58:03,000
Speaker 1: and in the previous episode, please write to us, talk

968
00:58:03,080 --> 00:58:06,200
Speaker 1: to us on social media. We are Conspiracy Stuff on

969
00:58:06,200 --> 00:58:09,200
Speaker 1: Twitter and Facebook. You can find us on Instagram at

970
00:58:09,280 --> 00:58:11,720
Speaker 1: Conspiracy Stuff Show. And if you don't want to do

971
00:58:11,760 --> 00:58:13,920
Speaker 1: any of that stuff, just send us a good old

972
00:58:13,920 --> 00:58:17,040
Speaker 1: fashioned email. We are conspiracy It How stuff works dot

973
00:58:17,080 --> 00:58:37,160
Speaker 1: com