Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy remember the
Speaker 1: episode we did a few weeks ago with David Chalum.
Speaker 1: I certainly do. That was a great episode. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: love that episode, and in part because you know, I
Speaker 1: feel like all this you know, talk about bitcoin and
Speaker 1: cryptocurrencies these days, and really over the last couple of years, well,
Speaker 1: a lot of the conversation is very forward looking, people
Speaker 1: trying to figure out where it's going to go next,
Speaker 1: what the technology could be used for, how big things
Speaker 1: could get. I find it very fruitful to actually look
Speaker 1: backwards and before even figuring out where it's going to
Speaker 1: go next, trying to think about where it came from
Speaker 1: and some of the problems that the early people in
Speaker 1: alved into space we're trying to solve. Oh. Absolutely, And
Speaker 1: I think whenever you're talking about new technologies, there's obviously,
Speaker 1: for for very clear reasons, a tendency to focus on
Speaker 1: what's happening next and the future, and just trying to
Speaker 1: refocus a little bit of attention on the problems of
Speaker 1: the past is really useful and and often you know,
Speaker 1: there there's a reason that things have happened um the
Speaker 1: way they did in the past, and it tells you
Speaker 1: something instructive about the future as well. Right, So bitcoin
Speaker 1: has basically been around ten years, and you know, it's
Speaker 1: been obviously extraordinary run. But the people who are involved,
Speaker 1: we don't really know who exactly invented bitcoin. Obviously there's
Speaker 1: a pseudonymous creator, but people were working on bitcoin like
Speaker 1: problems for years before bitcoin came, about how to develop
Speaker 1: sort of digital internet money in one way or another.
Speaker 1: David Chaum was one of them. Anyway, part of the
Speaker 1: reason we booked David is I was inspired from having
Speaker 1: read a book earlier in the year about this entire
Speaker 1: prehistory and I thought it was so fascinating. And today
Speaker 1: I'm excited because we're going to be talking to the
Speaker 1: author of the book, and it's really all about the
Speaker 1: long period leading up to bitcoin, the different ways people
Speaker 1: are working on it. I must admit I haven't been
Speaker 1: able to read the entire book. I'm still in my
Speaker 1: Korean reading phase and I'm now reading a very long
Speaker 1: history of the Korean War, but I have skimmed it.
Speaker 1: It looks really interesting and I think one of the
Speaker 1: things that comes through is that the idea of cryptocurrencies
Speaker 1: has always been sort of inextricably linked to a particular
Speaker 1: system of either values or sort of hopes and dreams
Speaker 1: for the future. Yeah, that's exactly right. So on the
Speaker 1: one hand, it's kind of a technological breakthrough, and the
Speaker 1: technology is important, but really it's about values in politics
Speaker 1: and morals and sort of the relationship that we have
Speaker 1: with big technology companies or big government things like that.
Speaker 1: And so, without further ado, I want to bring in
Speaker 1: our guests. We're going to be speaking with Finn Brunton.
Speaker 1: He has an n y U professor and the author
Speaker 1: of the newly released book Digital Cash, The Unknown History
Speaker 1: of the Anarchists, utopians, and Technologists who created Cryptocurrency. Fascinating book.
Speaker 1: Very excited to have the author, Finn Brunton. Thank you
Speaker 1: very much for joining us. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: So I just want to say I loved this book
Speaker 1: and I I'm trying to get as many people to
Speaker 1: read it, and I've tweeted about it a few times
Speaker 1: and advocate I think it's going to be one of
Speaker 1: the reads of the year. But I'm curious why you
Speaker 1: wrote the book. How did you get started on trying
Speaker 1: to really uncover the uh the prehistory of digital currency.
Speaker 1: I was originally trained as a historian of science and technology,
Speaker 1: and one of the things that you learn when you
Speaker 1: work on that subject is how much the technologies around us,
Speaker 1: the things that made our built world, the things we
Speaker 1: use every day, both are there because of what they
Speaker 1: can do, but also because of what they can mean,
Speaker 1: often because of the hopes and promises and fears and
Speaker 1: visions and histories that are wrapped up in them. So
Speaker 1: with that in mind, years ago, I was working on
Speaker 1: a project about spam and I noticed how spammers were
Speaker 1: starting to adopt a lot of new, weird currencies that
Speaker 1: I had never heard of before. Um this is even
Speaker 1: in the pre bitcoin days. But they were looking at
Speaker 1: currencies that were things like digital gold, currencies in the
Speaker 1: nine nine, other ways to move money around that could
Speaker 1: protect them from the eyes of the law and various
Speaker 1: other forms of reprisal. And I just started to feel
Speaker 1: like there's something really rich here. And as soon as
Speaker 1: Bitcoin appeared, it all jelled for me, like this is
Speaker 1: something where we can see in real time in the present,
Speaker 1: the evolution of a new set of technology of gees
Speaker 1: both in terms of what they can do, but also
Speaker 1: in terms of all of the stories, the visions, the
Speaker 1: fantasies that are wrapped up in them. So then you
Speaker 1: mentioned the notion that we often have values or hopes
Speaker 1: attached to technology, But I'm wondering when it comes to
Speaker 1: cryptocurrency or digital cash in particular, it feels like, because
Speaker 1: we're talking about money, which traditionally has been wrapped up
Speaker 1: in you know, power and government and various other forms
Speaker 1: of authority, it feels like with money there there's even
Speaker 1: more values or hopes or dreams pin to this particular project.
Speaker 1: Is that what you learned? Oh? Absolutely, Yeah, money is
Speaker 1: always meaningful and it's always a relationship right in a
Speaker 1: way that is. Yes, it's radically distinct from a lot
Speaker 1: of other kinds of technologies, and I love to think
Speaker 1: of money as being you know, different scholars of money
Speaker 1: have come up with wonderful ways to try to describe
Speaker 1: what it is. Some people call it like, you know,
Speaker 1: a social micro technology, or a kind of diffused community powers,
Speaker 1: like an enormous variety of different ways to try to
Speaker 1: get at what this thing is. But the heart of it,
Speaker 1: the essence of it, was defined for me by Himan Minsky,
Speaker 1: the wonderful monetary economist, who said, um that anyone can
Speaker 1: make money, like literally anyone can make money. The challenges
Speaker 1: to get other people to accept it, and the process
Speaker 1: of getting money accepted, of getting money to pass, that's
Speaker 1: the process that's kind of the moment where you see
Speaker 1: this thing really emerges, something that is like uniquely bound
Speaker 1: into our social and political structures. So whether that's in
Speaker 1: the form of a government being able to specify as
Speaker 1: for example, the US dollar does this is legal tender
Speaker 1: for all debts, public and private, meaning that you know,
Speaker 1: if you owe me a debt, like you can't pay
Speaker 1: it back in detergent you know, or euros or whatever
Speaker 1: like I can. I can demand dollars in exactly the
Speaker 1: same way that the government can do man payment of
Speaker 1: taxes in dollars, and that becomes a way of establishing
Speaker 1: not just the value of money, but also money. The
Speaker 1: US dollar in this case as an act of allegiance,
Speaker 1: as something where we accepted and pass it by and
Speaker 1: large completely unconsciously because of a particular territorial political allegiance
Speaker 1: that we have, and the same is true of the many,
Speaker 1: many other diverse forms of money that flourish and exist
Speaker 1: around the world today and also back through history. These
Speaker 1: are things that we accept because we believe that in
Speaker 1: the future they will be accepted from us, we will
Speaker 1: be able to pass them on in turn, and perhaps
Speaker 1: are passing them on is going to be because we
Speaker 1: want to participate in some specific community, as with a
Speaker 1: local currency. Perhaps it's because it reflects our bonds with
Speaker 1: a larger kinship group, as with a lot of not
Speaker 1: necessarily currencies alone, but a lot of different kinds of
Speaker 1: money that we see that have to do with exchanges
Speaker 1: within a particular tribe, within a particular culture, within a
Speaker 1: particular family, or even things that we accept because we
Speaker 1: think they will be worth something in the future because
Speaker 1: something bad is going to happen, because they will be
Speaker 1: worth more because of a crisis. I love that you
Speaker 1: brought in that Minsky quote because that's always been one
Speaker 1: of my favorites. So the book, I mean, not surprisingly,
Speaker 1: the people who are working on this problem or digital
Speaker 1: currency or new forms of money and the pre Bitcoin
Speaker 1: era people came at it from all different kinds of backgrounds,
Speaker 1: as you really nicely portray in your book. Obviously, there's
Speaker 1: anarchists or people who may be doing something that's illegal,
Speaker 1: like spammers trying to figure out a way to skirt
Speaker 1: banking regulations, or sort of Austrian economics types who hated
Speaker 1: the FED and wanted some sound money. Whatever it is,
Speaker 1: I have to say, and I the most surprising thing
Speaker 1: to me in the book, which I had no realization before,
Speaker 1: and I've you know, I've read a fair amount about cryptocurrencies,
Speaker 1: was the connection between queen cryptocurrencies and extropians or people
Speaker 1: who were really into like cryogenics and life extension. I
Speaker 1: would never have made that connection before, but it was
Speaker 1: probably one of the most fascinating revelations. Let's talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about that. Who were the extropians and why
Speaker 1: were they interested in this uh in digital currency back then? Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were absolutely the fine for me and working on
Speaker 1: this project. There are a lot of things I discovered,
Speaker 1: but they took the cake partially because they were, you know,
Speaker 1: just about as as visionaries it's possible to be, in
Speaker 1: terms of the scale of their hopes and aspirations that
Speaker 1: they were putting into working on digital cash. So the
Speaker 1: extropians were a fairly small network of kind of a
Speaker 1: loose mix of of philosophers, technologists of various kinds, you know, engineers,
Speaker 1: computer scientists, software developers, um, you know Hi fi readers,
Speaker 1: and some interested fellow travelers who are all kind of
Speaker 1: mixed together, mostly in the Bay Area, but with kind
Speaker 1: of scattered scattered others around the country and around the world.
Speaker 1: And two crucial things to know about the Estropians going
Speaker 1: in is that they overlapped incredibly like closely with the
Speaker 1: cipher punk movement that had preceded them, which is somewhat
Speaker 1: more widely known, the community of again mostly software developers
Speaker 1: and computer scientists who wanted to bring strong encryption to
Speaker 1: the civilian world and start building new technologies on top
Speaker 1: of that, like censorship resistant, privacy, preserving digital money. But
Speaker 1: the Estropians also overlapped very very tightly with a lot
Speaker 1: of the community around the initial appearance of bitcoin. A
Speaker 1: lot of the same people who are part of the
Speaker 1: Estropian movement are on that mailing list. One of them
Speaker 1: runs the mailing list on which the Bitcoin white paper appears.
Speaker 1: A lot of them are in the very earliest days
Speaker 1: of sort of kicking the Bitcoin project around and testing
Speaker 1: out the initial code um and a number of them
Speaker 1: have even been proposed as candidates for the real identity
Speaker 1: of Satoshi Nakamoto. So when you see that set of connections,
Speaker 1: you start to think, who are these people? Who is
Speaker 1: this movement? And the essence of the Extropian movement, as
Speaker 1: their name would suggest, is they are the anti entropy movement.
Speaker 1: They want to use technological innovation and scientific discovery to
Speaker 1: produce a future of radical abundance um. They have the
Speaker 1: set of key tenants which really kind of captures that
Speaker 1: the spirit of the movement back in the eighties and
Speaker 1: nineties boundless expansion, dynamic optimism, self transformation, intelligent technology, and
Speaker 1: spontaneous order. And when you combine all of those different
Speaker 1: aspects together, what you get is a story about the
Speaker 1: use of new forms of technology that will be able
Speaker 1: to spontaneously generate new ways to live, new sources of prosperity, energy, time,
Speaker 1: and space, that will create new forms of intelligence. They're
Speaker 1: especially interested in these kinds of singularity style breakthroughs in
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence that will then be able to produce a
Speaker 1: future in which we can overcome a lot of the
Speaker 1: limits of the human condition and expand out into space
Speaker 1: and create some kind of radically new order of being so,
Speaker 1: now you ask, like, how does money have to do
Speaker 1: with this? And the marvelous answer is that for them,
Speaker 1: digital cash was not just a way to you know,
Speaker 1: protect the value of their assets from their fears for
Speaker 1: the future for instance, even though that does play into
Speaker 1: it a little bit, but also a way to produce
Speaker 1: new kinds of markets and new forms of economic incentives
Speaker 1: for innovation that will so accelerate the progress of technology
Speaker 1: that it will be able to lead to this series
Speaker 1: of breakthroughs that will make them effectively immortal, that will
Speaker 1: that will create the society that they envision in which
Speaker 1: they will be able to live forever. So how's that
Speaker 1: for an economic agenda? So, Finn can you walk us
Speaker 1: through that that theory a little bit, because I guess
Speaker 1: when it comes to incentivizing innovation in cryonics, a lot
Speaker 1: of people would say, well, why not just use existing
Speaker 1: normal money. Why do you need a particular form of
Speaker 1: digital or cryptocurrency. That's a really excellent question, actually, and
Speaker 1: part of the answer has to do with with a
Speaker 1: deeper part of the heritage of cryptocurrencies, which we still
Speaker 1: see having a strong influence, especially over early form like
Speaker 1: the early stages of bitcoin, which is Austrian economics, um,
Speaker 1: the sort of Austrian school of economic theory. The Estropians
Speaker 1: did something really unique in some ways, which is that
Speaker 1: they fused the sort of Austrian economic theories, especially the
Speaker 1: work of Friedrich Hyak, with a whole kind of for
Speaker 1: lack of a better way of describing a very Californian,
Speaker 1: very science fiction influenced sensibility to say that we want
Speaker 1: to produce a future that is not shaped by the
Speaker 1: existing ways that money moves around, because those are too
Speaker 1: slow and too limited in terms of how, for example,
Speaker 1: investment vehicles work, in terms of how those things are reviewed, um,
Speaker 1: in terms of how people can accumulate assets they could
Speaker 1: put towards, for example, Extropian goals that they could use
Speaker 1: to fund, you know, nanotechnology and singularity experiments and so on.
Speaker 1: They say, to produce the kind of spontaneous technological order
Speaker 1: that we want to produce, to produce the society of innovation,
Speaker 1: we want to adopt the model that High develops, which
Speaker 1: is based on the idea of proliferating other kinds of currencies,
Speaker 1: of essentially proliferating a free banking system in which new
Speaker 1: kinds of technologies can generate their own banks, their own
Speaker 1: transaction platforms, their own kinds of money, and produce a
Speaker 1: sort of highly chaotic economic brew which will be able
Speaker 1: to break the deadlock of how economic prosperity and funding
Speaker 1: are normally produced. And I'm not necessarily when we say
Speaker 1: all these things, not as like advocating for this as
Speaker 1: a theory that I think holds water, but to sort
Speaker 1: of explain part of their their ethos and by kind
Speaker 1: of breaking the normal ways that funding is allocated for innovation,
Speaker 1: that major firms and institutions and governments and courage technological invention,
Speaker 1: they will be able to create something that we could
Speaker 1: think of as like wildcat innovation in the spirit of
Speaker 1: wildcat banking, right, like you know, unchartered banks that exist
Speaker 1: outside the normal apparatus of banking, that are very well
Speaker 1: suited to functioning in terms of things like black markets,
Speaker 1: gray markets, intellectual piracy, you know, all kinds of overseas
Speaker 1: economic systems which from their perspective, from the extropian perspective,
Speaker 1: all feed into being able to fund and generate and
Speaker 1: germanate new technologies and new dis discoveries that would be
Speaker 1: otherwise being produced too slowly if they were produced at all. So,
Speaker 1: just on that note, it feels like, so cryptocurrency is
Speaker 1: supposed to be this agent of extreme change, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of fostering new types of systems that thereby foster
Speaker 1: new technology. But at the same time, presumably people who
Speaker 1: are willing to freeze their own bodies in order to
Speaker 1: wake up in the future, they want their digital investments
Speaker 1: to also be a store of value. Right, You're talking
Speaker 1: about a really long term investment horizon. So how are
Speaker 1: they squaring, to put it mildly, um, how are they
Speaker 1: squaring the notion of cryptocurrency as an agent of radical
Speaker 1: change and the notion that it's also supposed to be
Speaker 1: a you know, fairly boring store of value. That really
Speaker 1: cuts to the heart of the challenge that the extropians
Speaker 1: faced and of the kind of trade offs that were
Speaker 1: embedded in a lot of these very early experiments with
Speaker 1: digital cash, um, including the trade off that we can
Speaker 1: see being made on one side very strongly when we
Speaker 1: get to bitcoin. Right. So, the way we tried to
Speaker 1: to walk that line was by producing a currency that
Speaker 1: would be able to be extremely reliable as a store
Speaker 1: of value. UM. And you might ask, obviously, like on
Speaker 1: what grounds could that be reliable. But one of the
Speaker 1: sort of crucial ideas, we will make this reliable by
Speaker 1: having something like a Ledger system, by having some kind
Speaker 1: of mechanism whereby everyone that holds the currency can collectively
Speaker 1: agree on how much of it is going to be produced,
Speaker 1: on how much of it is going to be available,
Speaker 1: and that will make it so that you can hold
Speaker 1: these assets while you are you know, technically dead or
Speaker 1: d animated in metabolic coma as they put it. You
Speaker 1: can hold these assets and know that everyone else who
Speaker 1: holds them is going to be working with you to
Speaker 1: keep their value over the long term in a way
Speaker 1: that will save you from having to sort of worry
Speaker 1: about the idea that some other agenda for example, you know,
Speaker 1: quantitative easing or you know, pump criming or whatever, is
Speaker 1: going to dramatically change the value of this this money
Speaker 1: that you have access to. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: you also want this money to have that kind of
Speaker 1: um wild boom and bust capacity to be able to
Speaker 1: generate the sorts of frenzies of investment that they think
Speaker 1: are are most likely to be able to generate these
Speaker 1: sorts of wild technological breakthroughs. So the they never quite
Speaker 1: resolve that dichotomy, and you can see them developing different
Speaker 1: kinds of money that work in both ways. From the
Speaker 1: people who are trying to develop like very very stable,
Speaker 1: solid investment structures like dynastic trusts that would be able
Speaker 1: to hold and invest capital during your sort of posthumous
Speaker 1: period um that would be able to eventually fund your revival,
Speaker 1: and the people we're trying to generate these very unusual
Speaker 1: experimental currencies that would be much more productive of wild
Speaker 1: and disruptive including economically disruptive breakthroughs. And a really interesting
Speaker 1: example of the latter kind of thing is an idea
Speaker 1: that the Xtropians worked on a lot called idea coupons,
Speaker 1: which were essentially a currency that would be issued against
Speaker 1: the likelihood of a future event happening, which you could
Speaker 1: both use, so a future event on the level of
Speaker 1: like this number of people living on Mars by such
Speaker 1: and such a date, or a computer of the following
Speaker 1: like sort of metrics being in existence by such and
Speaker 1: such a date, which you could use to both fund
Speaker 1: that but also transform it into kind of an investment
Speaker 1: mechanism for things that you otherwise will not easily be
Speaker 1: able to find a way to invest in that you
Speaker 1: want to see exist. So when we actually see bitcoin
Speaker 1: come into being, one of the interesting choices that we
Speaker 1: see being made with that is that the decision has
Speaker 1: been made to shift over to the first aspect of
Speaker 1: what they want that currency to be, something that is
Speaker 1: notionally all about solidity, something that is all about being
Speaker 1: an extremely reliable, deflationary store of value, rather than something
Speaker 1: that's going to produce this kind of frenzy of innovation
Speaker 1: which will hopefully bring these changes about. What I really
Speaker 1: love about this is that if you think about just
Speaker 1: sort of traditional finance, or even just traditional money, this
Speaker 1: idea of porting value from time a to some unspecified
Speaker 1: point in the future, maybe a year from now, maybe
Speaker 1: when you retire in thirty years. Already money is currently
Speaker 1: exists to sort of fulfill this time travel function that
Speaker 1: we're talking about, So how do you preserve purchasing power
Speaker 1: from a you know, one point to another point. Currency
Speaker 1: itself is designed to hold value that you know, it
Speaker 1: obviously leaks over time, investments, other structures. So what essentially
Speaker 1: they're doing is trying to solve the problem that finance
Speaker 1: currently solved, but just over much extreme time horizon. So
Speaker 1: you know, you might go into a cryogenically preserved chamber
Speaker 1: and you might not wake up for a thousand years,
Speaker 1: because nobody knows when the technology will come to unthought people.
Speaker 1: So in a way, and you know, there's a pretty
Speaker 1: good chance that over a thousand years, your U S
Speaker 1: Dollar bank accounts, there's a good chance that that's gone.
Speaker 1: But it's essentially a way to just sort of radically
Speaker 1: alter the time horizons or the time scales that money
Speaker 1: and finance is already used for. Oh yeah, absolutely, And
Speaker 1: that's part of what is so kind of fascinating about
Speaker 1: it for me and I hope for for people at large,
Speaker 1: is this is like a thought experiment, except that people
Speaker 1: are actually trying to carry it out in practice. For
Speaker 1: how you think about how money is embedded in time, right, So,
Speaker 1: just as you say, like whether we're talking about like
Speaker 1: depreciation schedules or like the discount rate, or the way
Speaker 1: that we like allocate money in our personal lives into
Speaker 1: college funds and four oh one case and yeah, all
Speaker 1: that stuff, we're always you know, sort of juggling and
Speaker 1: balancing different kinds of monetary time against each other. So
Speaker 1: here's a group who's thinking about this in the real
Speaker 1: long term, and it was also trying to understand the
Speaker 1: ways that money will transform in over time in relation
Speaker 1: to technological disruption. And they're doing that not just as
Speaker 1: like you know, venture capitalists trying to kind of project
Speaker 1: different disruptive transformations into the future, but also as people
Speaker 1: who are trying to understand its consequences for their own lives.
Speaker 1: How will what money is be altered by these various
Speaker 1: new technologies that they're envisioning. How can they, as it were,
Speaker 1: a bank on that to create these particular kinds of
Speaker 1: currency that will be able to either fund those dramatic
Speaker 1: transformations that will bring them back from the dead or
Speaker 1: create the kinds of money that will enable their prosperity
Speaker 1: when they are brought back from the dead. So, finn
Speaker 1: I wanted to pick up on this point. Actually, and
Speaker 1: I'm about to utter a sentence that I never thought
Speaker 1: I would utter on odd lots, But you know, cryonics.
Speaker 1: Cryonics is predicated on technology getting better. Right, Like, no
Speaker 1: one at the moment is able to revive a body
Speaker 1: that's been put in deep freeze. So you're making a
Speaker 1: bet that scientists will at some point figure that out
Speaker 1: and be able to bring you back from the dead.
Speaker 1: So why is there not a simultaneous belief that money
Speaker 1: will also get better and change. Why is there a
Speaker 1: belief that the digital money system that's invented now will
Speaker 1: endure for hundreds and hundreds of years. That's a really
Speaker 1: profound question, I think, because it also speaks to some
Speaker 1: of the and I don't mean to be too critical,
Speaker 1: like I really found this such a marvelous community to
Speaker 1: work on, but to some of the blind spots in
Speaker 1: the Extropian model, and some of the blind spots that
Speaker 1: we might be able to discern more generally in how
Speaker 1: we think about economics and money in the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: Because absolutely, like what cryonics is in essence, what what
Speaker 1: one of those doers, those vats that hold the you know,
Speaker 1: frozen human heads and them really is is a kind
Speaker 1: of broken time machine, right with the expectation that the
Speaker 1: future will be able to produce the engineers who will
Speaker 1: get the time machine fixed so that your intelligence can
Speaker 1: step out of it at some point, you know, a
Speaker 1: hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, what
Speaker 1: have you. However, there are two aspects of this idea
Speaker 1: that are not necessarily clear until you've kind of gotten
Speaker 1: deep into this literature that may explain this paradox that
Speaker 1: you've identified. The first aspect is that for a lot
Speaker 1: of the Estropians, especially in the mid ninety nineties, you know,
Speaker 1: as we start saying kind of seeing the ramp up
Speaker 1: to the great bubble of excitement around the dot com world,
Speaker 1: they thought that this was going to happen in the
Speaker 1: very near term. You know, like the reason for going
Speaker 1: into cryonic deep freeze was not to be preserved for
Speaker 1: a thousand years, but just to gap your own death
Speaker 1: to be preserved for like thirty years, you know, to
Speaker 1: not have the horrible irony of laying the groundwork to
Speaker 1: be the last generation that dies, you know, to just
Speaker 1: kind of leap frog that brief interval. So in that respect,
Speaker 1: in that kind of um tremendously foreshortened techno optimism, you
Speaker 1: can see part of this, right, this idea that like, well,
Speaker 1: presumably the any system as we know will more or
Speaker 1: lesbian existence on like say a twenty five year or
Speaker 1: thirty year time horizon. But there's also a deeper aspect
Speaker 1: to this, which is that even if you set aside
Speaker 1: the conviction that our monetary technology is going to stay
Speaker 1: this way for a very long time, right that, Like,
Speaker 1: if you put your your cash into cryptocurrencies or into
Speaker 1: various other sort of early Estropian ideas, then that is
Speaker 1: now going to remain the state of the art, you know,
Speaker 1: for the centuries to come. But an even larger question,
Speaker 1: which is whether or not this sort of model of
Speaker 1: money that we're working with is going to persist. Like
Speaker 1: if you think about chronics on you know, a thousand
Speaker 1: year time horizon, then you start to think, like how
Speaker 1: many of us, Like if I showed up, you know,
Speaker 1: to try to like buy a house with let's say,
Speaker 1: like a letter of mark that I received from a
Speaker 1: monarch thousand years ago, that's probably not going to get
Speaker 1: me anywhere. You know, if we look back at the
Speaker 1: classes of money that we're around, even before the Civil
Speaker 1: War in the United States, even before the development of
Speaker 1: the kind of territorial currency structure that we're now used to,
Speaker 1: it was radically different. So I think this reflects a
Speaker 1: weird mix and an interesting makes to think about in
Speaker 1: the cryptocurrency world of simultaneously being incredibly far sighted, right,
Speaker 1: like trying to think about the future of humans as
Speaker 1: technological creatures over the coming decades, the centuries, even the millennia,
Speaker 1: and also incredibly shortsighted, incredibly predicated on the idea that
Speaker 1: the way that we think about how money works and
Speaker 1: the way that we think about how economics works is
Speaker 1: going to stay more or less exactly the same for
Speaker 1: all of that time. And I think that that paradox
Speaker 1: is something that you can see even now in the
Speaker 1: way that people talk about and try to figure out
Speaker 1: what to do with cryptocurrency. I love this conversation uh
Speaker 1: so much. I'm there's so many facets we could explore
Speaker 1: that we only have just a little bit of time left.
Speaker 1: Oh before I forgot. I love that characterization of a
Speaker 1: cryonics machine or whatever it is as a broken time machine.
Speaker 1: I remember you used that term in your book, and
Speaker 1: that really stood out to be because basically this idea
Speaker 1: of like, all right, here's the time machine. It doesn't
Speaker 1: work yet because we don't know how to unthaw the body,
Speaker 1: but at some point someone is going to come along
Speaker 1: and fix it. I thought that was just It's perfect.
Speaker 1: Before we wrap up, though, I was just curious, um
Speaker 1: some of the names that you mentioned, you know, the
Speaker 1: overlap between the Estropians and the cipher punks, who are
Speaker 1: some of the key individuals. I think the first person
Speaker 1: on Twitter to ever use the term bitcoin was hell Finny.
Speaker 1: Was he an extropian. He was UM and in fact
Speaker 1: he is chronically preserved. UM. He tragically passed away, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, fairly young from a l s and yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he's he's cryo preserved and he has actually I
Speaker 1: think a really good example of the kinds of characters
Speaker 1: that I discovered and working on the book, because Phiny
Speaker 1: is someone who turns up in so many different contexts,
Speaker 1: like he's in the world of the cipher punks. He
Speaker 1: writes a wonderful description of David Chaum's digi cash, explaining
Speaker 1: the whole technology, the model, everything for extrop the journal
Speaker 1: of the Extropian Movement UM, he's on their mailing lists,
Speaker 1: and then of course in two thousand and eight he
Speaker 1: is the sort of primary correspondent for Nakamoto. He provides
Speaker 1: a lot of key suggestions about how to refine the technology. UM.
Speaker 1: He like you know, puts in a huge amount of
Speaker 1: work on early versions of the software. UM. So he's
Speaker 1: one of the threads that really kind of ties this
Speaker 1: whole story together. Some people think he was right. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's a whole theory that he was Satoshi, which
Speaker 1: I don't think is is true for a bunch of
Speaker 1: different reasons. But but he was definitely someone who is
Speaker 1: like right at the center of that of then, and
Speaker 1: it's actually really delightful, Like you can go back and
Speaker 1: and read through these archives of the mailing list where
Speaker 1: for a while Phinny's kind of the only guy who
Speaker 1: believes that bitcoin could actually be a thing. But he's
Speaker 1: also still very critical in a really you know, respectful way.
Speaker 1: But he's like looking at the software and it's great
Speaker 1: to read knowing everything that happened to it. Afterwards, he's
Speaker 1: looking at these early technologies and being like, yeah, but
Speaker 1: I think, you know, you haven't really thought through this part,
Speaker 1: you know, Or I think you need to really pin
Speaker 1: down this number before we go ahead. None of them
Speaker 1: knew quite what they were about to unleash on the world,
Speaker 1: I don't think. But we also can follow people like
Speaker 1: Nick Sabo, who has also been proposed as a candidate
Speaker 1: for the real identity of Nakamoto um and Ssabo is
Speaker 1: someone who likewise turns up in the cipher punk world
Speaker 1: turns up in the Estropian world, where he's making predictions
Speaker 1: about like with varying levels of confidence about future like
Speaker 1: digital cash enabled online market places back in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties. Um And then creates a model for what
Speaker 1: a new currency could look like, called bit gold, that
Speaker 1: actually involves like mechanisms with the chain of digital signatures
Speaker 1: linked together into a ledger of transactions, which is very,
Speaker 1: very kind of Bitcoin esque. We can follow people like
Speaker 1: Tim May, who by and large created key aspects of
Speaker 1: the psypherpunk movement, developed the model of crypto anarchy. Um
Speaker 1: And was also someone who spent a lot of time
Speaker 1: hanging out in the Estropian list and was very interested
Speaker 1: in enabling various kinds of informational black markets using digital cash,
Speaker 1: one of which became a direct inspiration for the Silk Road.
Speaker 1: So we see, like one after another, that when Bitcoin
Speaker 1: comes into being, when the cryptocurrency revolution really starts, almost
Speaker 1: everyone who is at that moment of inception has been
Speaker 1: thinking about this kind of thing for decades, and has
Speaker 1: been thinking about it for a huge variety of different
Speaker 1: utopian and political visionary reasons. Finn Brenton, this is a
Speaker 1: fascinating conversation. I can't recommend enough to people that if
Speaker 1: you're interested in this, you should go read the book
Speaker 1: because it's just completely mind expanding and eye opening. And
Speaker 1: really appreciate you coming on outline. Thank you so much
Speaker 1: for having me. This has been a delight Thanks Ben.
Speaker 1: That was really great, Tracy. I love that conversation. I
Speaker 1: find this topic. You know, what I was thinking about
Speaker 1: the whole time is that the Extropians and the cipher
Speaker 1: punks and all the people that were involved in this,
Speaker 1: it feels like a situation in which they've willed science
Speaker 1: fiction to some extent it's reality. Like, obviously we don't
Speaker 1: have cryonic technology fully developed yet, people can't on thought themselves.
Speaker 1: But it seems like a sort of weird example of
Speaker 1: people just sort of by sheer effort creating a new
Speaker 1: world on their own, essentially willing something that feels like
Speaker 1: science fiction into some sort of close existence and starting
Speaker 1: with money. Yeah. So I enjoyed that conversation too, and
Speaker 1: I'm actually really excited to sit down and properly read
Speaker 1: this book at some point. The thing that I find
Speaker 1: really interesting is, you know, you rightly point out they're
Speaker 1: sort of willing a sci fi scenario into existence, but
Speaker 1: it's a sci fi scenario that they themselves are choosing
Speaker 1: to focus on. And as we alluded to in the intro,
Speaker 1: there are all these values attached to it. And I'm
Speaker 1: sure there's a bigger debate to be had about whether
Speaker 1: or not we should be expending a lot of energy
Speaker 1: and resources and time on making sure that, you know,
Speaker 1: a select few elite individuals can be brought back to
Speaker 1: life the future, or whether we should, I don't know,
Speaker 1: be trying to incentivize a solution to a broader problem
Speaker 1: like world hunger or climate change or or something like that.
Speaker 1: There's a value judgment that has been made in focusing
Speaker 1: on cryonics. Again, another sentence I thought. I never thought
Speaker 1: I would say in all thoughts, No, you're You're absolutely right, Tracy.
Speaker 1: It's also interesting because after I read this book, I
Speaker 1: got super interested in just sort of cryonics and people
Speaker 1: who hacked their bodies or other sort of people who
Speaker 1: are into AI like long future stuff. And what struck
Speaker 1: me is exactly what you say, You're like, Well, there's
Speaker 1: all these other problems in the world, like global warming
Speaker 1: or poverty and so on, why are we spending so
Speaker 1: much effort on this, And what's interesting is that I
Speaker 1: think for a lot of them, it's almost impossible to
Speaker 1: worry about the stuff that most people worry about as
Speaker 1: long as death exists in the world. Like, oh, you're
Speaker 1: trying to worry about solving global warming. Meanwhile, we haven't
Speaker 1: even solved death yet. So there's almost like this this flip.
Speaker 1: There's flip view, which is, until we solve the number
Speaker 1: one cause of suffering, which is the fact that people die,
Speaker 1: how could we worry about anything else. So it's almost
Speaker 1: like completely the reverse of how people think about these problems. Right,
Speaker 1: So I guess in some ways they are tackling the
Speaker 1: problem of human existence, so so we can congratulate them
Speaker 1: for that. But I do also think to that point,
Speaker 1: like there is a weird sort of mix, as Finn
Speaker 1: put it, of of longsidedness and short sidedness and decisions
Speaker 1: being made to focus on particular problems and ignore other ones. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, when you talk to a lot of people
Speaker 1: who are either into cryptocurrency or cryonics or futurism of
Speaker 1: one sort or another, they're usually really down on you know,
Speaker 1: politicians and existing authority structures. And yet They're incredibly confident that,
Speaker 1: you know, a group of independent technologists are going to
Speaker 1: be able to change the world for the better. Now.
Speaker 1: It is, uh, the the contradictions and these sort of
Speaker 1: a mix between incredibly far looking into the future vision
Speaker 1: but also very tunnel vision at the same time as
Speaker 1: I think part of what makes this whole space so interesting.
Speaker 1: So this concludes the time travel slash Cryonics All Thoughts episode. Uh.
Speaker 1: You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe Why Isn't All? You could follow me on
Speaker 1: Twitter at the Stalwarts and you should definitely read the
Speaker 1: book Digital Cash from our guest today, Finn Brunton, and
Speaker 1: be sure to follow our producer on Twitter, Laura Carlson.
Speaker 1: She's at Laura M. Carlson, as well as the Bloomberg
Speaker 1: head of podcast, Francesca Levie at Francesca Today. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Three year to