Sure. Absolutely. So, you know, I've been a reporter for The Intercept for about almost eight years now. And, prior to that, I wrote for other outlets mainly focused on US foreign policy and geopolitical conflict in The Middle East and beyond. And, you know, one thing I came to realize over the years is that, you know, economic warfare is such a integral part of what we consider war as a totality. And in The United States has used sanctions and other forms of economic coercion to pursue foreign policy, in The Middle East, in Latin America, in East Asia for many, many decades now. In many cases, the humanitarian impacts of that have been as bad or worse of other forms of, you know, direct military intervention in these societies. Now, you know, that's one thing I I also have in the back of mind, the sanction campaign on Iraq and now today Iran and Cuba and other countries and the impact it's had over the years. But, secondly, you know, I'm also very much a believer in the Internet in the sense that Internet is very important. It's a very important force for decentralizing power and information generally. And, you know, a lot of my, you know, with the connections I've gained over the years being a journalist have been the flattening of hierarchies that allowed me to make those connections was because of the advent of social media. And, you know, about you know, so some time ago, I started learning about blockchain and cryptocurrency and just what it is exactly and, you know, how it, it affects or how how it could potentially have the same flattening impact on economic life that social media did on political and cultural life. And it struck me as quite almost inevitable that, you know, there'll be bumps around along the road, but this is gonna have this technology is gonna have as big an impact as the advent of the Internet did in the in the first place. And it's gonna be in many ways the next stage of the Internet, And it may actually level the playing field politically, domestically in The US and in Western countries, but also between countries. Because as I said earlier, economic coercion is such an important part of how states exercise power over smaller states. And if that global economic system can be decentralized further, that sort of, you know, those sort of campaigns will be less effective or less possible in the future. And as you mentioned, there are already countries in the very early phases of blockchain and crypto are which are using these tools to escape from under the dragnet of US control over swift and other means of choking their access off to global finance. Could you give, like,

Dude, it's it's amazing. I have access have had access to people who are, like, super smart and super connected, who I never in a million years, like, without the Internet would have ever, you know, had touch with or been able to learn from or been able to, you know, develop, networks with. Now I just find the smartest person on Twitter or every website that try and, like, I read their stuff and I learn from them and maybe I can develop a relationship with them. So, you know, you said, like, you know, we get, like, this is just an unbelievable flattening of hierarchies and collapsing of geographic boundaries and class boundaries as well, which is possible online, which is not to say that you're not to, like, paper over the negative impacts of, you know, tech companies' control over so much information or sort of, like, the profiling other things which are possible. We should also you know, it's an amazing thing. It's just unbelievable. And if this technology existed in generations past, I think a lot of human potential would not have been wasted, as it has been, especially in the developing world or people who are poor in Western countries who just lack access to, you know, social capital. It the Internet, if you use it properly, it's just incredible tool for that. That's for may have those connections and the novelty of being retweeted by somebody who's really big, like, you know, like a tech CEO or a very famous journalist or, you know, inventor or a politician or something like that. It's something we take for granted at at times now, but it is quite remarkable

Dude, you know, before this, if you wanted to criticize something in the newspaper, like, by a very ivory tower newspaper columnist or something, what your options are writing a letter to the editor and hoping they print it one day, which it probably won't if it's depending how scathing it is and damning it is a publication. Now you mean you have a lot more control. You can, like, tell David from whoever else that they're wrong about x y and z, and they can't unless you're banned from the platform for violating some red line. Like, you know, they can't really like, it's free speech. It's like you did the gatekeeping capacity is gone. So that was just amazing to me when I realized, like, what how that had happened. And, you know, blockchain, like, you know very well, and I'm in the process of learning, educating myself about this as well too. Blockchain, I think, is another way of removing the gatekeeping function of other old institutions. And in the old industrial society had very centralized institutions for media, for politics, and for, you know, economic activity. And the first two of those, I think, have been thoroughly decentralized or in the process of throw decentralization and the removing of gatekeepers. Like, media is very permeable as a field. Now anyone can be anyone produces content or, you know, everyone has a power of CNN in their pocket, basically. We've seen it only had twenty years ago broadcast and things like that. Politics, like, because of the fact that this change of the information environment, we see lots of, political candidates who may have been not possible into the old model. They would have been gatekept out, and some of them are good, some of them are bad, but they're all have more access than before. The economics and finance is still as gatekept as it was ever by these gigantic, lumbering financial financial institutions, both domestically in The US, internationally. But, you know, we can have our own permissionless money of various sorts with various programmability or, you know, it's decentralized, it's maintained collectively by us, then that gatekeeping power will inevitably, in my view, start to erode, and we'll see the last pillar of the old industrial society. The banks and, the foreign branches start to lose its stranglehold over all of us. No. Which is a potentially, like, scary thought considering

You know, I I think all the changes that have happened in the last twenty years have been, like, quite unnerving. Like, some of them are good, in my opinion. The benefit is, like, the little people, but they're unnerving. Like, they've like, you told me Donald Trump was gonna be president in 2016 and told me that in 2008 or anytime before that, I would have been like, you know, that would be a very unnerving thought. It did happen. And I think we're gonna see many more disruptions as a result of Internet information chaos, but, you know, the disruption of decentralization, economic decentralization could dwarf that potentially. That's why I think we should prepare for it. We should learn about it, and we should try to shape it in a way which reflects our values as opposed to, in my opinion, futilely hoping that it just goes away or can be regulated out of existence. And if we don't use all the tools at our disposal, we're gonna find that people who with different visions in society monopolize those tools and perhaps use them to enact a social order we don't find desirable. You know, if if only especially, you know, when the Arab Spring first started, it was very interesting. There was a lot of discourse about it was very optimistic, a techno optimist time still in 2011. And it's the people who mobilized Egypt and a few other countries, Tunisia, using social media first, they were more a very liberal slant. There were liberal activists who were using it, and it sort of, like, gave a suggestion which already seemed to be latent in US that these technologies had inherently liberal bias to them. And what we found actually is, like, you know, later, like, things change and, like, other sectors society got online, started using it. And then, you know, the narrative flip of these technologies maybe have a inherently right wing bias to them. I think neither of those things is true. It's just that, you know, they're sort of neutrally politically neutral in a sense, but you can use them for different, different, ends. And, you know, what would happen if, you know, blockchain becomes very important, like, social media has undeniably become now? But left wing people just decide we're not gonna use it. Like, right wing people can get all educated about it. They can build, you know, their own networks. They can build, tools and protocols. But where do they get against it? We're not gonna use it, and we're gonna forfeit this effectively forfeit this technology to other people. Like, if the left had just forfeit social media or did forfeit social media going to the right or vice versa, the right to the left, you know, there would be a huge power discrepancy that accrued over time because of that. Thankfully, that didn't happen, and, you know, there's, like, a battle going on, an ongoing, but, you know, we cannot, neglect to look ahead to what the next likely sphere of, political disputation is gonna be technologically.

took up Bitcoin, were very libertarian leaning. And, you know, they Bitcoin is the original blockchain and so forth. So, you know, it gave a characterization just like the Arab Spring initially gave a characterization that social media was initially originally, like, inherently left leaning. But, you know, though that's just like a mischaracterization based on the sector of society which adopted first. So I kinda understand why people have that view, and I also had that view. Like, I also when I didn't know much about it, that was my initial take that this must be, like, a very inherently right wing or libertarian thing. And, you know, you have big personas like Elon Musk and things like that who people are skeptical of, one on the more progressive side who seem to be enamored with it, Peter Thiel. But, you know, I don't think that's the case. I think it's just, like, something that it's I wouldn't say it's completely neutral technology, but it's technology that structures the world in a certain way and it can be structured in different ways or programmed different ways in ways that reflect your values. But the important thing is a vessel for power and for the wielding and maintenance of power and to shape the world a certain way. And, you know, we cannot neglect all the tools which are available to us if we wanna have a chance in the twenty first century.

Sure. Let let me give you two illustrative examples. Like, there are so many examples throughout The US history in twentieth century, but two of the most resonant and particularly relevant to our generation are Iraq and then after that, Iran. So Iraq, you know, at one time, it was ruled by Saddam Hussein, who was a very cruel dictator and was very authoritarian, state. It was during that time, you know, there was a level of economic warfare waged not just against the government of Iraq, but his entire society of Iraq, but United States, which approach, you know, catastrophic levels of harm to the Iraqi society, which at one time was very relatively middle class society with good health care and education. It was also the most secular society in the Middle East. It was known after that long time, which ironically now, I think is a relationship to the fact that's also produced ISIS later on after all this clammy's occurred there. But, you know, effectively, it was reduced from a middle class society into a very poor society. And, you know, there was so much political legitimacy that time to this sort of use of indiscriminate sanctions. People did not food. They have access to medicine. It was a very vindictive campaign of sanctions in the end. And the Iraqis really had the Iraqi people really had no recourse to how to defend themselves against this. On one hand, there was a government which was known to be quite corrupt and exploitative. On the other hand, there was international community and a global financial system, which was completely under the hegemony of The United States, which did not care for the well-being of Iraqis as evidenced by its actions. And, you know, there are studies, UN, others that estimates huge, huge numbers of excess deaths in the in Iraq as a result of these sanctions. Some of those studies have been called to question in later years, but undeniably, there was very significant and severe, suffering and, you know, deprivation and the denial of opportunity to innocent people in Iraq as a result of a foreign country which did not like their government and seem to be laying down ultimatum that you can either either overthrow this government, which we acknowledge is very violent and brutal, yourselves somehow. And we won't help you with that as a what happened when the nineteen ninety one uprising in Iraq. Or you can just continue to live under increasingly harsh deprivation to the point of medicine and, you know, very, necessary, goods needed for daily life were very hard to get into Iraq. So we saw this play out over the course of many, many years and culminated with a two thousand three US invasion of Iraq, which further the destruction of the country, did not rectify the harms of the previous era, and, you know, we see what Iraq is saying. Now another example is Iran. So Iran, like Iraq, was oil producing state or is an oil producing state. They've been under various degree of sanctions by The US for many, many years. It also is a very repressive government and unpopular government in Iran. But in under the Obama administration, there was a progression of this halting attempt to reach some sort of detente in The US. And the first effort of that was in 2003, when The US rejected, the first, entrees from Iran and deemed it part of the axis of evil. There was attempt to sort out the nuclear issue and sort of make it a stepping stone to further negotiations about US Iranian relations and Iran's position in the Middle East. The deal was signed. It was quite a successful multilateral effort when European, American, and Iranian negotiators in Russia and China involved as well too. And The US, after it signed this deal, they elected Donald Trump. It was very surprising. It's very it's a black swan event in, US political life, Some would say at the time, I think that more disruption like that are possible or likely in the future, but it's something unexpected. And The US decided to completely renege on the agreement that it just signed and reimpose the harshest sanctions ever possible on Iran. And now Iran ended up, you know, deprived of many of the same things the Iraqis were. But then Iran also became one of the first countries to be hard hit by the COVID nineteen pandemic. And during that time, The US refused to waive humanitarian or allow humanitarian medical supplies and goods to reach Iran. They continued to step up their sanctions campaign during this time. COVID became reached epidemic levels in Iran or some pandemic critical pandemic levels in Iran. And tens of thousands people died directly from the disease. The disease metastasized and spread throughout the world because we're all in it together in some sense when we're dealing with pathogen. And there was never any accountability behind this. There's never any real accounting for it. And, you know, now the new administration's coming. They may temporarily, for a few years until the next Donald Trump is elected, remove these sanctions. But if you're a country which is on bat terms with The US or you have disputes with The US, you always have, the anvil over your head that, you know, this gigantic mechanism of financial deprivation could be dropped upon you. And I just use Iran and Iraq as two very resonant examples, but there are other examples in Latin America and elsewhere. And regardless of what one thinks about US foreign policy or the foreign policies of countries that are at odds with The US, it's not really fair, the system. It's a system which is created after World War two when The US was at the apex of its power. They sort of embedded themselves into the global financial system as the US dollar is the preeminent currency for its administration and all its infrastructure going along with that. And, you know, if The US elects some crazy person, which they do periodically and they seem to be likely to do in the future, you could have a whole country which is just cut off from the most basic access to economic goods. And I do not think that other countries in the world will accept this indefinitely. It's a great task to sort of get away from the dollar because this is all this dead weight and inertia in the system as it exists. But the more that the dollar is used as an economic weapon in The Middle East or elsewhere, Russia or other countries, I just think other countries will inevitably find ways to innovate themselves out from under that. And I do think that we're seeing today you know, there's some reports that 4% of all Bitcoin mining is done in Iran at the moment. I think that this is a early sign that there are other countries, the way that they get away from that post World War two, US superpower system is to innovate out from under it. And blockchain is likely to be an integral tool

Sure. So the US dollar is the currency of international trade, and The US has what French foreign minister called once the exorbitant privilege of being able to print currency, which other countries all over the world need to compete with goods and services to obtain to use as their currency of international trade for actually, it's the reserve currency of the world,

Yeah. So, you know, it the the the process kinda started post World War one, but it, of course, accelerated World War two when European countries, which at that time were the preeminent powers in the world, were completely at the mercy of The US. Or they're laid waste by the World War two, but they became very, very dependent on The US thereafter. The previous global reserve currency was actually the pound sterling, The UK pound sterling, and the dollar replaced that. So, you know, what happened is that, you know, you have a currency which is backed by the force. Like, what what like, people ask what backs Bitcoin? And what backs Bitcoin is the energy expenditure of the network and the energy which is expanded to, you know, maintain it, to verify transactions, to validate blocks. The US dollar is a competing global reserve currency where the is the global reserve currency, and it's backed by force. So you can say that what's people why won't people stop using US dollars or use anything else? Well, there's, like, armed military bases and, you know, tanks, aircraft carriers, and the nuclear weapons, which are all backing to continue people continue using this as a global reserve currency. Of course, it's on faith that's stable and The US will not devalue. It's such a point that it impacts others around the world. But, you know, it's it's ultimately, it's at the bottom of the social order stands a hangman. That's sort of like the saying about, you know, society on domestic scale. It's also true on an international scale. At the bottom of it is the US army and the air force and navy. So post World War two, the strongest power in the world was The US. It had the ability to compel other countries to use its currency as a global reserve currency, the currency of international trade, and that situation still obtains today. So if in The US, if you wanted to create if you wanna get more dollars, you can just print more dollars. The US government can print more dollars, but other countries cannot print more dollars. They they need dollars to settle international trade for their, deficits. US can run permanent deficits in its full international trade. They just keep printing more money to get out of it. And, you know, if other countries need that, they need to actually sell goods to The US to get this thing that The US can make out of thin air. And it this obviously affords an unbelievable amount of power to The US. Some say that the level of power is exaggerated because, you know, it's incentivized a lot of, you know, hot air in The US economy or, you know, financialization of The US economy because people do not have to make things anymore. They can just slough, like, fluff going around. There is some truth to that, but, ultimately, you know, for US elites, it's a great power. It's an unbelievable power to be able to do this, and they benefit from this accordingly. But, you know, it's a very politicized when a country like, you know, and Sudan wants to trade with Argentina, some they wanna make some transaction. US has nothing to do with this. They have to use the US currency and US, you know, structures which are susceptible to vulnerable vulnerable of US political pressure. They don't like that. So they didn't want them to transact. You know, it's a very politicized system which puts a certain circle of US elites at the center of it. Now I don't think that other countries, now that the World War two and the post cold war superpower moment is waning more and more, I don't see other countries accepting this. Why would they accept this permanently as well? Their relative power rises inevitably in The US relative power decreases. They're gonna find other ways of doing it. And I don't think necessarily that you know, I'm not saying that Bitcoin is gonna be the tool of international trade, although some banks are speculating that could be, something possible in the future. But, you know, something is gonna be it. I think that there's gonna be a replacement. And I also don't think it's gonna be the yuan. I don't think it's gonna certainly gonna be that it's not gonna be another superpower replacing them. I think it could be and I would desire it to be a politically neutral currency for the conducting of international trade. Again, it could be a different one. It could be some other currency developed for that purpose, but the idea that the US dollar is gonna continue being the global reserve currency of the entire world, it definitely strikes me as unlikely, and I think it's an area of

in negotiating, they were very happy about this deal. It was a view as a triumph of European diplomacy. And suddenly Donald Trump was elected, and The US decided no. Like, you know, if you were tossing out of the window, we're just gonna you can't do it x y z. The Europeans were very antagonized by this. And, unfortunately, there's not that not much they could do about it. It was like a slap in the face because The US very much threatened to sanction European companies, which continue to try to do business with Iran, you know, and very heavy possible fines and penalties they find, but $2,200 billions of dollars, European countries the companies in the past for doing business with Iran. I believe UK Standard Chartered Bank was one of those. And, effectively, you know, it was it was a show of brute force on the part of the Americans that they you know, any crazy thing that happens in US domestic politics, completely bizarre random candidates come about, they can totally throw off any other country's ability to do diplomacy. Europeans are very afraid, you know, for a number of reasons. The Middle East for the Europe is like what Latin America is to United States in the sense that it's their near abroad. So if there's massive destabilization in The Middle East, it's gonna affect Europe in a very tangible way. It doesn't affect America that much. They're buffeted by these giant oceans, something they seem to take an interest in. They may be interested in Israel, but they're not it's not like a, you know, zero hour emergency if Iran or Iraq blows up for the average American. For European, if Iran collapses, if, you know, it could have a devastating effects on Europe. We saw what happened in Syria led to a gigantic, refugee crisis in Europe, which had significant political impacts on European societies. So, you know, they're very interested in avoiding anything like that and just having some sort of possible sustainable order. Would that say Iran deal or not? It's a question for debate, but they believe it is. So when The US just showed that it has this economic trump card because of its ability to sanction others countries which use the US dollar for transactions. It was a very humbling moment. And The U Europeans tried to develop this other alternative mechanisms to try to, like, engage in secret trade with the Iranians. Instax is one of them. But, you know, it was like the success of those endeavors is sort of up for debate. What it what was demonstrated is that, you know, The US has completely the kingpin of international trade, and, everyone is subject to presently is subject to, you know, consequences as a result of US domestic political outcomes. Now to bring it back to Bitcoin, just to use an example, the most famous and preeminent cryptocurrency with the largest network effect at present, if, you know, someone want to sanction other people to use a Bitcoin, they can do that. If Bitcoin was a currency international trade, you know, you can't really stop people from using it the way you can stop people from using the US dollar. You can try. You can sanction individual wallet addresses. You can try to track down individual users. You can try to, you know, you know, shut down the hash rate in certain areas, but it's very difficult. It's much, much harder than it is US dollar, which you have total control over. And I think it's not even possible really in the end to when there's a will to use Bitcoin, then you can you can do it. So I think that's a superior it's a fair form of economic exchange. And it's not dependent upon, first of all, the use of force by the US military at the bottom of the structure. It's bit dependent on the energy expenditure, and it's not subject to there's no, like, president of Bitcoin. There's no Bitcoin, you know, senate or congress that some people control and they can use to melt bend to their own political will. It's a very neutral technology. It's a neutral currency, and we've never had permissionless neutral currency, which is also international and accessible to anyone in the world with a phone before. And, again, I'm gonna apologize for Bitcoin. Like, I think that there are criticisms of it which are valid, and I don't think it's impossible that, you know, another blockchain based cryptocurrency potentially could play the same role. I do think that the underlying technology is brilliant, and it is it does actually solve that problem.

needs to be capitalized on. Yeah. You know, a lot of the, the perception that Bitcoin is right wing, it comes because the fact that a lot of the proponents of Bitcoin on the economic side are like, they're enamored with the gold standard and, you know, these sort of, like, deflationary currencies. And you know what I realized, like, about economic economists is that they don't all agree. Like, they don't agree. Like

Yeah. Exactly. I studied economics and, like, that was my, like, educational background. I just, like, this is, like this is this is very political, basically. Yeah. So I and the the questions are not, like, mathematically provable or settleable. It matters opinion and things like that. That's good. And, like, some of the people who make, like, interesting points, the pro Bitcoin people who are more of that of that view. Like, I think, Sethi and Ammus wrote the book, The Bitcoin Standard, which is very influential, and it does have a kind of, like, a Austrian school economics sort of For sure. Brain to it. I think that there is, like, you know, that that is a legitimate, like I see why left wing people would be, like, you know, not attracted to that. But I think that, you know, that doesn't detract from the, like, the accessibility argument of blockchain based cryptocurrencies, which Sure. Yeah. Could be programmed in different different ways. They could have different economic theories embed underlying them. And secondly, you know, we don't have to be maximalist. So you don't have to be like, there's only one currency in the world. Everyone sees Bitcoin, and that's it. You know, we we'll likely live in a world with multiple currencies. The US dollar will not go away, and, you know, Bitcoin probably won't go away. There could be other currencies that reflect, you know, different sort of economic theories and values which exist alongside it to preserve the the good things we like about the accessibility and the freedom of access and the political neutrality, of Bitcoin, for instance. I think that would be a fruitful avenue for people who are more left leaning and progressive minded to explore even if they don't like Bitcoin. If they don't think Bitcoin itself is not a superior like, if you told me tomorrow we're gonna get rid of you, federal reserve, and US bank, US dollar, and then I'll use Bitcoin for our daily transactions, I would I'm not like a maniac. I would, like, you know, pause and be like, that's I mean, it's a good idea. But I I I I do think that, you know, it's not like the technology is interesting. It's not not useful, interesting, and we have to have creative and, heterodox

there's, like, information effect whereby, you know, we just take the most insane argument of the other side. Everyone does this. Yeah. It's not, like, uniquely progressive. It's every writing people do it. Everyone does it. But take the most craziest argument from the people on the other side. Nothing that's crazy. It's just like most extreme arguments from, you know, Bitcoin, Twitter, or the Bitcoin pro Bitcoin writers or activists and, you know, complete that with the totality of what the thing is. Not bother to understand the technology or anything like that, just sort of, like, do that. And others do that too. The people, like, degrade denigrating, like, fiat, quote, unquote, as a bad thing and, you know, talking about fiat, me media, and things like this. It's a little, like, there's a lot of, extremism. There's sort of moments about it. Mhmm. The thing that I find, you know, I'd wanna, like, tell people about, though, is that, you know, let's not think about Bitcoin as a currency primarily. It is the currency which runs on the blockchain. But let's think about it as a technology platform that you can build different things on. Ethereum is a technology platform you can build different things on. The price of these currencies actually doesn't really matter that much. It's not really that important, beyond the fact that it attracts attention. What's interesting is what you can do with it. Like, what can you actually build on these things? Yeah. And you can build different things which reflect different people's values. Like, the Bitcoin blockchain, a currency you can build upon it, which is finite deflationary, and it reflected the values of Satoshi and the people who liked it originally and who continue to adopt it. We can build different currencies on the blockchain. We can build all time. We can build organizations on the blockchain and build, like, decentralized autonomous organizations. We can build ways of cooperating and sharing resources or, transparently sharing and preserving information on the blockchain, that are not beholden to certain centralized corporate oligarchs or governments, things like that. It's actually a possibility for very radical change in organization using this tool. So, you know, it's so interesting. It's like because it seems like all like, Liz Warren has a very, you know, negative comments about crypto generally a few days ago, and some right wing governors in The US have been sort of, like, encouraging adoption of Bitcoin. They've been trying to, like They're they're joining they're joining the politicization

There's, like, one exception, which I think is Ro Khanna, who's, like, very knowledgeable about tech more so because where he's based. Yeah. But, you know, I I think that this is actually concerning to me a little bit as somebody who political sympathies are more left of center is because if it becomes that way and we just decide that this technology, one people good people likes it, the other people don't and just attracts our, you know, a reflexive polarization of US domestic politics, then we're just gonna hand a powerful tool to other people and, like, refuse to use the tools, the tools, like, see as right wing, and those people are gonna get a lot of power. They're gonna gain a lot of power and ability to organize. They're gonna have, you know, a lot more dexterity in dealing with the future. And we I think that left wing people, they will ignore it or fight it for amount of time, and then eventually, they'll have to, you know, adopt it, like the Internet generally, and they'll be at a disadvantage. They'll be set back Yeah. In their ability to wield it effectively.

question. Yeah. Who gives a shit about the price of Bitcoin or the price of Dogecoin or the existence of Dogecoin or any of the things? The price does not matter. Like, that's not what's important here. Like I said earlier, it's what you can build on, what you can do with it. You know, there was an article in Current Affairs, which is, like, a left leaning publication in The US, and Yeah. It was about Bitcoin, and it's sort of like just it said that cryptocurrency is a giant fraud. That was the title of it. Yeah. And it kind of only about Bitcoin and, like, it made, like, you know, very surface other arguments about it and didn't really engage with the technology itself. And, you know, the author is very talented, like, very good, like, at making arguments and so forth, but I fear that it's sort of like these very sweeping, categorizations or determinations and publications people find influential will dissuade people from curiosity about it. And then, you know, they'll miss out on a lot or they miss out on a lot as possible. You know, if you talk about the Internet in 1993, you can make a plausible argument. This is just like, you know, Internet's a scam. The Internet's just for porn, and it's for a lot of scam artists and people stealing money and things like that. The the I mean, that was made. Those claims were made. Absolutely. Yeah. People were making those. And, eventually, like, you know, time passed, and they had to just you know, you adopt it early, you adopt it late, but you end up adopting it because it just is a pure technology, or is it technology which had great power inherent to it? Yeah. So, I mean, it's just a matter of time. And, like, the the sooner that you get your head around it, the more you'll be able to use it for productive ends. Like, look, I'm not a coder. I'm not like I don't have I don't know Solidity and these other, like, languages to effectively do this. But I know a lot of people on the left are, and, like, they are very adept with the intimate, how to program technology and how to code in a way which is very effective. And I can tell you why I see this being important in a macro political sense, in a way of a tool for potentially reaching economic justice for people in The United States and also in the developing world. But, you know, I can't actually I'm only one cog in a giant machine of people, and, like, everyone has to do to each of their, you know, ability to their need. You know? Like, that's what that's phrase. It's actually kinda it's actually kinda true. Like, there are people like, a lot of people who have good intentions, egalitarian intentions for society, they need to, use the technological tools that are available to them in twenty first century, and we need to also get over the nostalgia for the twentieth century and forms the political forms of nineteenth century, the political forms which, and the tools which characterize those periods because there's a lot of nostalgia. Like, you know, how is a left wing goal? How are left wing politics to be achieved in Europe or United States? You know, are we all gonna form, like, a mass party bureaucracy and, you know, rush to the town square and, like, declare the end of history or something like that? I mean, maybe you, like, I just don't really think that's necessarily like, there was a certain information environment which led to those sort of like, the stage it was set that led to that kind of, those kind of behaviors and the information and technological environment of the 2021 is very different today. It's completely different. We're not in a newspaper world anymore. We're in the Internet world, which produces different political outcomes, and it offers a lot of opportunities. So let's, let's let's be forward looking. And we took us the word progressive, but the word progressive, you know, it also says something about technological progress. And the word conservative, I find that to reject this is very conservative in a way. You're trying to hold on to the forms and beliefs of the past, and I think that ultimately it's not sustainable.

yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. It was very, like, especially simplistic. It's hard to make these sweeping statements. I'm not saying it's a panacea either. I'm not saying, like Yeah. But I also say it's all fraud. Like Nobody's saying it. Like, you know, very it's a very extreme statement. And look. I mean, you know, I I'd say another thing too about banks in The United States. Like, people like, I my political formative political moments in my life were, like, the Iraq war, bailouts, and then occupy. Those were the things that really resonated with me. So I really, like, you know, I have a deep sense of the corruption of the institutions and the, you know, the an unjust sort of act power and access that they wield over the rest of us. So, you know, Satoshi Nakamoto in the genesis block of Bitcoin, he actually quoted reference to the bailouts. So I don't necessarily agree with all the economic, theories underlying Bitcoin, but I do understand the impetus behind that action. And Bitcoin's created in response to the bailouts in the end, you know, how angry people were at the absolute criminality, the banks, and what they did and how they got away with it without consequence. So, you know, are we still against those institutions, or are we basically supportive indirectly of the status quo in which they benefit? And I think that if you are, then, you know, we should shut down every technological advance, which even theoretically threatens them. And if you're not, we should, you know, we should, you know, explore and keep an open mind about those things, and that's why I'm trying to do that. And, you know, if we close off lines of inquiry or just dismiss it, just perfunctorily like that, you know, we're not gonna be able to really effectuate any change. We're gonna be very parasitic on liberalism, which at the same time we're denouncing. We're sort of to say extent, but Yeah. A more edgy version of liberalism. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, you know, that's a that's a dead end.

Someone who someone who's lived to the bailouts and, you know, occupies unbelievable level of conformism conformism and, deference to power, which is ev evinced by these statements. Look. And I'll say something, like, culturally, maybe Americans are just too conservative, like, you know, inherently, like like, all all leftist liberals, people on the right, they're all actually conservative in a way. They're attached to, you know, the American way of life, which, you know, you are the bank. You talk to the get the mortgage from the banker, and, like, he does whatever he wants to do behind the scenes and then comes back to you, that type of thing, credit cards, stuff like that. This is, like, you know, they like it, actually. They're used to it. And okay. Let let's let's just take that as a given. I think it's, like, hopefully, it's not the case, but let's just say that's a given. In most of the world, most of the developing world, people never had access and do not have access today to that financial infrastructure. There's no banks. They have no, you know, way of getting loans. They have no way of storing the, value of their labor. Like, billions of people live in societies like this. People are very smart. They have, like, you know, they're very, industrious. They have a lot of ambition, but they're hamstrung by the lack of access to financial services, which we hear have become culturally accustomed to even if we gripe about their corruption and so forth. Now those people in Sub Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia, they may not have banks because society did not develop in that direction, physical infrastructure like that. But, you know, they have cell phones. Like, they have a lot of cell phones and but the year 2025 is estimated that 75% of people on Earth will have a smartphone. Smartphone is the only act technology that get access to blockchain technology or blockchain ledger, like Bitcoin or Ethereum or others and so forth. So those people, you know, the people who are building DeFi, like decentralized financial tools on top of blockchains all over the world. Those people can leapfrog the whole banking physical banking stage that we went through. I don't think they're ever gonna go to that stage because, first, it'll take a tremendous amount of resources to do that. You know, there's no not really a supportive regulatory environment or, you know, resources even to do that. But, you know, these people can do it on their phones. They can use access to decentralized finance on their phones, and they will. They're very ambitious. They're because they lacked other tools, they will always try and get ahead. They will just, in my opinion, leapfrog and just do that. They will start utilizing every tool they have. You mentioned, we talked about Iran earlier. I have a lot of friends in Iran who are so knowledgeable about crypto, more knowledgeable average people, but more knowledgeable than the average person here by far because it had to be. They had to sort of they had lived under a surveillance state at home. They're sanctioned internationally. They have really little option that they wanna try to advance their lives and, you know, make do the normal transactions we all try to do. So by necessity, we learn more about this stuff. And I know people in Pakistan, other countries who, you know like, the idea they store the the value of their wealth, value of their labor and gold and things like that, things which easily lost or confiscated. Land, a lot of people I met who were refugees from Syria. They lost all their land, which was the, you know, lifetimes of investment because they had to flee. You know, these are not ideal forms of investment. And I think that the world's not necessarily at the point of culturally accepting Bitcoin yet or crypto yet, but, you know, it's I can you can clearly see if you study that it could serve its purpose. And if it's, can serve as a decentralized store value accessible to a phone by anyone in the world, regardless of your religion, your ethnicity, your sexual orientation, language you speak, you know, that solves a gigantic problem. It actually levels the playing field a lot. And, you know, if you're never gonna have a bank, like, most people probably aren't in the world, and billions of people are not gonna have banks in the way we think of banks in the future, but you can have access to everything a bank provides on your phone. You know, that solves a big problem and also saves a lot of resources to, you know, in the world. Think about the the energy expenditure of Bitcoin. I think it's a legitimate area of discussion. What's the ex energy expenditure of the, you know, the banking system in The US? Like, what is it exactly? Like, gigantic physical infrastructure, you know, the force which is used to sustain it, logistical infrastructure The investment But what's the investments

the new oil Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. The exploration. The graph and the graph and corruption which inevitably ensues in such an opaque and privatized system. Like, what's, like, what's the expenditure of that? Like, what's the carbon footprint of all that? What's the social externalities of all that? Let's calculate that as closely as we do, you know, with energy expenditure of Bitcoin. Maybe it's, like, bigger than 9% of the country in the world. It could be. It's not not, impossible at all. Let's not, you know, the incumbent one of the privileges of being incumbent is you can make your own costs seem natural, whereas the cost of anything new coming along seem like it's unwarranted and unconscionable intrusion on the way we do things around here. That's not that's really unfair. It's like a tool of power. So, you know, I think we should not be, you know, we all care about the climate crisis, energy expansion, green energy, but let's not be triangulated into defending certain forms of far more egregious energy expenditure and social and environmental harm,

slight bias because you you have a bank account. Yeah. It's a very blue pill, you know, taking a matrix now. You just accept that all this is normal. Like, accept, like, there's a currency which is upheld by the force of, like, aircraft carriers and military bases for everyone in the world and controlled by a very small number of people. And if you want to take, like, a like a, you know, culturally progressing view, like, a small number of, like, white people in America, white guys in America, role and have a lot of power. I don't think that framing with people who resonate with people. Like, you know, that that's the reality today. Like, how is that a justice system to uphold and defend at all costs and to quash any even theoretical challenge to it that undermines it at all? I think it's very unfair. I think it's not good. And we don't wanna replace one hegemony with another either. We want a truly fair and egalitarian system, and it could be, you know, there are technological tools which could help facilitate that, and we should keep an open mind about that. Yeah. Amen, brother.

Look. You know, today, in El Salvador, obviously, there's very big news of the government adopting crypto. Yeah. It's not totally clear the full, you know, game plan or vision of what they have in mind for this. And I think that they're reasonable questions to be asked about the government and, you know, how this is being implemented, but it's something interesting. It's definitely a significant, like, to go from something which is being talked about on a mailing list of a few cryptographers, bit over a decade ago to a nation state adopting it. It's a pretty big deal. Of course, like Iran and other countries have been experimenting with how to use Bitcoin to escape the US dollar system, which they're very disadvantaged under. I think that if it continues, you know, it's very interesting. Like, we could see a great decentralization of international trade. The US, which is constructing the system, which is the central most important node, could be circumvented in many cases, you know, all the time. It's not necessary all the time, but cases were required. And the more successful that these endeavors are, the more other countries will adopt them. And and, you know, politics, it always changes. Like, alliances always shift either domestically or internationally. There are always new issues coming about. There are always new rivalries and new alliances developing. And the system the alliances and rivalries and friendships and, animosities, which exist today, are gonna be different in ten years. So countries which are okay with the US dollar system today may not be in ten years and may not be in twenty years. And in fact, I find the entropy even to be quite likely over time. So all all this takes place. So when this tool is available and people can see that, you know, if it's working in certain countries or if, you know, certain countries leading to effective effective ends, it'll be a tool in their toolbox when they need to, you know, get around US, certain US actions. Let's say hypothetically in ten years okay. You know, Donald Trump came and screwed up the Europeans deal with Iran on the nuclear file because of don't because of the election in The US. Let's say in 2030, I don't know, Donald Trump Junior is elected or, like, Eric Trump is elected president, and he just does the same thing again to, European Iranian trade. And at that time, European Iranian trade may have gotten a lot stronger because at all these years of of, building up behind it. And the Europeans could be very antagonized again. Last time when they were antagonized, they create insects, which was like a special body to function European Iranian trade, which insulated from, US surveillance, other pressure. If by 2030, the technology underlying blockchain and perhaps Bitcoin has been further legitimated in advance at that time. They may very well say that we have a problem now. Let's use this tool, which obviously works in other contexts. Let's just use it, and it's very easy to apply, in fact, because it's already been built out and developed by others in this time. And, actually, you know, they could have done it even in 2015. They could have done it, sorry, in 2016 when he started after Trump was elected. But there was a less confidence and less familiarity behind it. I expect that you know, I'm not totally sure, and I think there are some black swan events which come come about to, negatively impact Bitcoin. But I do think that it's quite it's not impossible that it continues to develop the tool of international trade. And blockchain, it's certainly gonna develop and be used as a tool of international trade and other applications of it. So I just think that the more that the the more that we see successes on localized cases, the more you likely see wider international adoption because it just solved the problem.

That doesn't have to be cryptocurrency, but it's, you know, I think part of that part of American hegemony sort of, like, seems to be a big player in forcing a lot of these countries to become dollarized. I don't know. So, you know, one thing that is likely to come about in the future is that the digital dollar will be created in The US, and a digital yuan is already being created in China. And you create a digital currency. It's like a digital state backed currency. It's, you know, the term is a central bank digital currency, CBDC. And, effectively, it's like it's like you're taking physical money out of circulation entirely, more or less. And this is money which you can have rather than with a retail bank intermediary. You can have it you bank out with the treasury department, and the government's directly issuing you money, like the bailouts and the stimulus, grants that were given that could be given rather than given to Chase Bank or whoever as intermediary. They just give them the citizens directly. You can implement monetary policy directly, and, you know, that seems to be the wave of the future. And then Liz Warren's comments about a month ago attacking Bitcoin, she mentioned this is something she supports as a potential developer in The US. And, you know, I I find this to be in one sense, you know, good in a sense that, okay, like, it harms banks, harms retail banks, could theoretically disintermediates their role as allies with central banks. That's a good thing. And also could, you know, it could also lead to expansion of financial services to people who, you know, lack back accounts for various reasons today, regulatory compliance reasons and so forth. No. That's a good now the bad is that, you know, if you have a state digital currency, you're creating a surveillance state on the scale of, you know, something that's never been seen in human history, like, beyond, anything that's ever been possible technologically. Because, you know, everyone in the world has you know, is using a dollarized economy and theoretically has their digital dollars somehow under the surveillance of this treasury department, or the other side of the world's all using yuan and having, their their, you know, banking transactions and finances monitor monitorable and controllable by the Chinese Central Bank. You know, they could see everything that's going on very easily. They could force spend your money theoretically. They confiscate your money. You can freeze your accounts, and there's nowhere to run. Like, they'll have total visibility everywhere in the world. There's digital dollar everyone. And, you know, other countries theoretically could develop their own digital currencies. But developing digital currencies is very hard. You need a lot of state capacity to do that, and a lot of countries will not have the state capacity to do it. There was the Venezuela tried and was not able to actually do this. They didn't have the administrative way to do this. So if we have a world, which I think is quite likely of central bank digital currencies, which are run by a few large powers, you're gonna see a great, great extension of imperialism, economic imperialism, like, a very intimate form of economic imperialism, which can target individuals in very intimate ways, you know, and and there's no escape from it, really. Now in that world, if that you have in the world like that where Bitcoin is gone because, you know, people regulated out of existence, so they're just, like, you know, progressives in The US and the Chinese Communist Party teamed up to destroy this. Then if you are unjustly targeted by, you know, a major government in the future, you'll have nowhere to run. There'll be no neutral digital currency to flee from the state backed digital currencies, which are depriving you of your human rights and so forth. So, you know, I think that that is a very strong reason for Bitcoin particularly to exist. And I've sort of been hedging and saying, you know, I'm not defending Bitcoin completely and things like that. And I do think there are criticisms of it and I think there are, you know, could be replaced. But something that does what Bitcoin does will need to exist in that world. Otherwise, we're gonna have inevitably, like, a form of totalitarianism, which will be shocking to us today, and perhaps future generations will come to accept as normal. But, you know, it will be a significant setback for human freedom and even the possibility of human freedom once the world is that intensely

doesn't like them. Absolutely. Look. If you are if you gen genuinely are opposed to the system as a prevalent exists in its negative manifestations, we have to look at the tools and the the, you know, tactics we have to actually undermine their power in a meaningful way. Mhmm. And inevitably, in twenty first century, they're gonna be technological tools, and they're gonna be tools which utilize advances in information technology. And the blockchain and digital scarcity that it creates, the possibility of digital scarcity, which is a scarcity is a key component requirement for creation of currency, for instance, that will inevitably be a tool that so, you know, I'm glad like, well, hopefully, this can be a start of the longer discussion between people Sure. Who are averse to it or not aware of it, and they can, you know, be point to be made in opposition or in favor. But a constructive conversation can go forward beyond, let's just say, let's make it illegal and move on and, like, just forget about this thing because it's not gonna happen. And it's not shouldn't happen either. We shouldn't we shouldn't have to defend the status quo

do what you can in your immediate vicinity, I guess. Yeah. It's very dis disempowering. It's kind of like, you know, demoralizing, like, to just say let's put on hands as distant state, impersonal state that's gonna take care of everything. Theoretically, it never does and actually and, you know, it's crucially we have all these complaints about it operates and so forth, but ultimately, deeming the state to be savior in one way or another of everybody. I think this is, like, not a very empowering way of thinking about it. And you can organize from the ground up, and it's difficult in some sense. The physical and the economic structure society militates against that. But, you know, there are avenues to accomplish that using the ways we do have to connect with each other, which in many ways have been greatly enhanced, by accident almost just by technological events. Mhmm. Cool.

Yeah. You know, the I write for The Intercept in my articles on politics and foreign policy run there. But if you want my general commentaries, you can catch me on Twitter, and I can usually blog here and there, and I'll share a link later on on Twitter. But, yeah, follow me follow me on social media, and, let's get the conversation. Thanks, Mataza.