YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Gladstein

lines on the record: 163
first: 2021-10-16
most recent: 2021-10-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think we can fight back and I think we can continue to make these digital communications tools and platforms in a way that really benefits us.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a way that you know the government, again, may know the metadata, but doesn't know exactly what you're saying unless they can get your hands on your phone. I think that's very, very powerful. So it can be done. I don't want to be too jaded here. I think it can be done. Yeah.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the exodus to signal was in January. They had a huge user surge for two main reasons. One, hilariously enough, of course, was Elon tweeted, like, you should use Signal, right? Which is not insignificant. And then the other one was that WhatsApp changed kind of some of its terms of service and announced to all of its users in this little pop-up that it was going to be sort of like changing the way it handled your data. That spooked a lot of people. So these two things really combined and tens of millions of people in the following weeks between January and February joined Signal. It's like, it really has had its day in the sun. And they are frantically trying to keep up with it. And it's really nice to see that this encrypted messaging service, which prioritizes your privacy.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's not quite as good as not quite as seamless, right, as a WhatsApp yet, but it's almost there. And they were able to do it. And you're going to see that with Bitcoin wallets as well. I mean, they're almost there. They're like, if you use like a moon wallet is like, I mean, it's so cool looking and it's so seamless and they've spent so many hours thinking about your experience. We are getting there. Whereas 10 years ago it was like impossible to use.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But like delicious whatever on it. PCP is a kind of a pain to use, right? If you want privacy, way better. I mean, and it's way better.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's all sort of built on lightning, but the idea you can think about it is you're slowly starting to build up the idea of a WeChat, but with freedom principles. Because right now WeChat's like the king of convenience and comfort, but of course, it's feeding all that data to the big brother and the surveillance state. And then we have like our own versions over here in America that are not quite as convenient or amazing, but we give up slightly less privacy and freedom. But this thing has a lot of promising features to it. It's worth checking out. It's very like early days. It feels like, I mean, I was pretty young, but it feels like the 90s in the internet. Like it has that feeling. Yeah, you know it's rough around the edges, but you can feel the magic. It's pretty cool.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It just requires a lot of your time, and a lot of people don't have that time. But I will say one thing, like I do think there's this future where we do go into more of this called a tribal model or like tribes, which is this social environment being built on top of lightning by an app called Sphinx. And the idea is like kind of like it's like a decentralized Slack. Like you have your Slack instance, which has like a bunch of people in the community and you have different ways to message each other and it's all encrypted. And then it has like plugins for things like Jitsi instead of Zoom. So like an open source encrypted video messenger, it has ways to plug in the content you want to get from different platforms that you follow like podcasts, things like that. And again, it allows you to pay those people directly in a censorship resistant private way.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I guess maybe you're more optimistic about people caring. I feel like not so few people actually care about their privacy and freedom. I've just watched everybody give it up. But we'll see. I guess just to bookend that, I think we're at this moment where obviously the centralized platforms are just so much easier and better to use. And to strike it out and adventure out and use a federated instance or something, even like Keybase, which is kind of like a cool encrypted way to have group chats.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mastodon is an example of a federated social media. Now, it's ruled by a benevolent, each instance is ruled by a benevolent dictator. It's just like I happen to like this one. So I know. So rather than trust one dictator, Twitter, you could choose which dictator you want to trust. And that's kind of the federated model. And maybe we head that way, but you lose things. When it's federated, you lose the UX, you lose the slickness and the feel and all the millions of dollars they spend on developers. Like Mastodon is like not anywhere close to as nice to use as Twitter. So I feel like, again, it's this trade-off that we make with everything where it's convenience, comfort, speed versus privacy and freedom, right? It's very hard to have something that gives you both.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But like at the very bottom of the very bottom of the backbone of it, it's like this globally connected, relatively unstoppable thing, right? So I think that's a pretty good vision. And Twitter's working towards that with the blue sky initiative. We'll see. I'm a little skeptical that it works out because I use Mastodon, for example.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's keep it simple. Let's look at one example Twitter and Jack Dorsey. And I think it's quite clear that what he believes is the solution is as you're kind of hinting at a more kind of like regionalized system, which is not have one, we call it federated system, right? Which does not just have one company in charge of everything, but there's an open protocol and then there's like different instances, right? So Twitter make Jax dream for Twitter is that Twitter is this open protocol that the Russian government can use and the Chinese government can use and the Iranian government can use and the American government can use. And then Twitter as a company is going to use too. And you as the customer decide which implementation you want to join. And there's going to be different censorship on each instance or each federation. But the protocol itself would be like untouchable. This is kind of like the idea behind the internet, right? There's like different parts of the internet that are sent.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is Twitter that bad right now? Like, I mean, it's fixable in as much as you can do verification. So you can give a blue check to someone, and then that person is more credible, and they go to the top of the comments. And there's tweaks you can do. You can continue to improve it. But it's not going to fix the fact that Twitter can decide to kick off the president and a lot of people are going to be upset by that. There's ways you can improve the UX over time and they continue to do so. Like clubhouses is a lot of fun. Great phenomenon. So is Twitter spaces so they continue to iterate? But the censorship deplatforming piece, I'm not sure is fixable because you watch the US government haul these haul Zuckerberg and Dorsey and whatever in front of Congress they want more censorship. I mean, our elected leaders want more censorship, right?”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're removing the whole advertising piece. You don't need to do advertising anymore. You have this direct relationship with your audience. And this is possible with something like Lightning where you can do streaming money that's censorship resistant. And a lot of the people who are building the Lightning Network, for example, Elizabeth Stark, who started Lightning Labs and has done within her company the people that work with her have built a huge part of the Lightning infrastructure, you know, what animates her is this idea of, again, artists and creators being able to have that direct ability to reach out and have that peer-to-peer relationship with their audience. And I'm excited for that. And I do think that's coming. But I am very worried that the golden age of centralized social media platforms is kind of behind us.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the room, in the social room that we have on the internet. And I don't know if there's a magical solution there. I do know that there's technological solutions that will allow us to continue to communicate and for creators to reach their audiences without censorship. And that's very exciting. Like right now, you could be deplatformed from your From whether it's Patreon or YouTube or whatever, and your bank account can be closed down, right? There are emerging ways that Adam Curry, like the pod father and a bunch of other people are experimenting with, where you can essentially have your audio podcast across a whole bunch of different platforms. So it's censorship resistant. And then your audience can pay you over Lightning in streaming money. Like they can stream you money as they listen.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very concerned about social media platforms and companies. It almost feels like we're losing the golden age of the internet when we could go online and interact with each other and share and not be worried about censorship. It feels like that was a golden age, like in the late 90s, 2000s. And now everything is becoming very politicized. And I'm not sure that there's a solution. Like I don't think there's a button we can press to fix it. I'm kind of afraid that this is sort of just what happens when Societies digitize. I think that certain opinions just become demonized in the sort of”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The party, you want to leave the party before it starts to deteriorate. I think America could continue to have like a major, major leadership role for a long, long time. I think certain things we do will become maybe no longer possible in terms of the way we intimidate people on the world stage, especially the way we use our currency as a weapon. I think that that's going to decline over time as we become more of a multipolar world. But I do still believe in America and the values that were founded on, despite all the warts, I do believe in us, and I would prefer us absolutely to be the most prominent of the multipolar world vis- ⁇-vis a regime like Russia or China. Absolutely. There's no question.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No empire lasts forever, and it's impossible to predict when these regimes fall. I mean, no one thought the Soviet Union was going to fall when it fell. Like if you study the news and the scholarship of the era, no one knew that the Tunisian government was going to fall after Muhammad Bozizi lit himself on fire. No one predicted that that would become what we now know as the Arab Spring, right? These things are impossible to predict. And one day the Chinese regime will fall. I just We don't know when.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there's too many people with too much money to be lost to go to a hot war on both sides. But eventually we're just going to, someone's going to have to stand up. I mean, the subjugation of Hong Kong and the genocide of the Uyghurs and the colonization of Tibet. I mean, Taiwan is the next big thing. I mean, Xi Jinping has made it very clear. Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan. So we're going to have to stand up for Taiwan for different reasons, both for moral reasons but also for semiconductor reasons. We need TSMC to be on our side. Cannot have China take over TSMC. So And you just hope it's not a hot war. I mean, at this point.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm very jaded. I mean, it's very difficult to do these things at scale effectively. I do not believe we will be successful in boycotting the Chinese Olympics. We weren't in 2008. I don't think they're much more evil now. And I don't think we're going to be able to do it this time. And again, to go back to the Bitcoin piece, that's why I'm very interested in this thing, because it doesn't require my altruism. It doesn't require some famous singer or some corporation to sacrifice. Anything Literally just going to follow their own profit seeking self interested motives, and they're going to end up making a stronger human rights tool for other people.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To think about that, we have to figure out how to harness celebrities, influencers, and companies and get them to actually stand up for something for once. I mean, that's something we've lost. We really had a spine against that. And, you know, we've lost it. And you lose things. You lose them forever. Look at Tibet. Tibet was a big cause for people in the 90s. Used to go to colleges and kids would have the Tibetan flags all over their dorm rooms. It was like radio head would have Tibet on the stage and everybody wanted, you know, free Tibet was a big thing. Well, guess what? We lost it for some reason. It's not a thing anymore in Tibet has been totally colonized, you know? So I think it's important that we find a way to unlock an interest in the celebrity classes among athletes, singers, presidents. We need to find a way to punish these people.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outer space very clearly, and their regime is the cruelest one on the planet, probably. Why were they able to sit and cheer and get to sort of co-host those the Olympics? This is spineless. Like the IOC, the Olympics, and major corporations should stand up, especially in the cultural sector where you don't lose anything. Or you shouldn't have to lose anything. So I think if we look at the way that we forced the apartheid regime out, this international solidarity of musicians, athletes, performers, celebrities is very, very powerful. Unfortunately, today's celebrities are doing the opposite. We just have this press release go out yesterday about Acon and he's off whitewashing the crimes of the dictator of Uganda and trying to build a future city there with him. If this was the 1980s, Acon would be raising his fist and saying, we need to fight the apartheid regime. How do we get back to that?”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great blueprint is the fight against the South African apartheid. So we did a few events down in Johannesburg, and I've had the pleasure of being able to go to the apartheid museum several times. And it really does a good job of chronicling how they were able to do it. It took a while. There's no doubt. But the way it was done was good. Peaceful action from abroad was very important. So there was like the Sullivan principles. So you can peacefully protest as a company particular regimes. And it's very effective. And not just corporations, but like the Olympics is a great example. Like Chinese government should not be able to host the Olympics. The IOC should say no, not until you close down those prison camps. This is a perfect, peaceful way to push back. No one gets hurt. Same thing when we had the Korean Olympics a few years ago. North Korea should not have allowed any sort of symbolistic kind of hosting rights there. They have prison camps, gulags that we can see from”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I just read again this New Yorker piece that just came out that you should read. It's called Ghost Walls. And it's the story of how the Chinese Communist Party is committing genocide right now, just like other regimes did and the Turks did to the Armenians and the Nazis did to the Jews. And it's happening again right now. We said never again. And, you know, that's just not true. We're letting it happen. And again, with the business stuff, like people are like, Airbnb is like a sponsor of the Olympics.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But since then, we've remained those laws have remained and they're very good. And I'm very proud of that. What I'm not proud of is the jingoistic part of our country where we invade other countries and bomb other countries. I'm not proud of our prison system. I think it's a huge stain on our nation. I'm not proud of a lot of things. So I think you can be patriotic, but you can be critical of your country. And that's important. I feel like the jingoistic thing is the thing that we need to watch out for. That's just my own personal take.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, you have patriotism and then you have jingoism, right? It's very important, and we stay on the patriotic side. As an American, I'm very patriotic in terms of, I love the values that this country was founded on if you read the Bill of Rights. And I love the fact that it was just flexible enough that we were able to change it to grant, or at least to try to grant all people the same rights. It was not the original plan of the founders, right? It had to be changed.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ocean of skims. I took this personality test and I'm a 99 skepticism. So I was first, sadly, because I was first introduced to Bitcoin in 2013. And I was like, eh, whatever. And it took me four years to actually get into it, to go down the rabbit hole. I didn't really start to grasp it and start getting excited about it until 2017. So I was regrettably very, very skeptical for a long time. And I just thought it was like whatever. So I appreciate that. And you should be skeptical. But ultimately, you got to believe in things. Like, I believe in democracy. I believe it's good for people. I believe it's better than tyranny. I believe in the internet. I know that we've had issues with centralization of the internet, but I still believe it's better to be connected than to have bridges between us. And I believe in Bitcoin. And to me, it's like a very similar progressive force that we're encountering. But yeah, be skeptical. Nothing.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost like naive about the evil that's out there. This is what goes wrong with Bitcoin. And I've seen it people fall for these, I mean, like in these different countries, I'm trying to talk to different people about Bitcoin. And the amount of MLM schemes, pyramid schemes, Ponzi schemes, they're just so many of them. And there's plenty here too. But like in Zimbabwe, I was talking to this guy who is a reporter who studies the FX, like the foreign currency exchange markets. He's just saying one of the main reasons people don't want to get into Bitcoin is because they've been scammed so hard by all these other things. So I would say that that's one way it could go wrong is that people just continue to be afraid of it because of things that are like that in the past.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People have been fooled. I mean, And people in the humanitarian sector have been fooled into thinking that some centralized blockchain project is going to help some refugee all collapsed.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, if the Bitcoin project didn't work, it would honestly, it's one of the only things that gives me hope because it is an effective way to push back against creeping centralized control. If for whatever reason, and I can't really see, one of the reasons I'm so into it is I can't really see how it's not going to work. Again, I think the Trojan horse allegory is too powerful. These big centralized actors are going to be too greedy and they're going to want some as opposed to banning it. It's way easier for them to buy it than to ban it. I think that's just what's going to happen. But if whatever reason it failed, I would have very little hope left because really, I mean, the Chinese model of centralizing all of your data and controlling it, I mean, ultimately is a very, very powerful sort of like arch force. And I would be concerned that that would be all of our sort of destiny.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, as we've talked about, my career started in human rights and in promoting individual freedom and fighting authoritarianism. That fight will continue on, no matter what happens with Bitcoin. I think it would be a massive failure and a tragedy if this project didn't work.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I may sound brutal, but I'm coming at it from a political science perspective. For me, it's all about freedom versus dictatorship. And that's why I find it so compelling that regardless of how much power might or how many armies you have, you can't change the rules of Bitcoin.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Proof of work is the key. And Ethereum is about to leave proof of work. About to go to proof of stake, which is literally the existing system where a small group of people get to decide the monetary policy”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say we could take this like ledger part of this radical thing that's for criminals and all these bad people, but we could take one part of it out and we could bring it over here and we could make it safe for everybody. The real McCoy's Bitcoin, I mean, Satoshi referred to it as a time chain. I mean, really what they're talking about is just these like blocks that are connected chronologically of transactions. It's really not that exciting. The exciting part of Bitcoin is the proof of work, where the transaction processing is done by mining and by energy and by real world expenditures instead of like some central ledger. And when you remove the blockchain from Bitcoin, it's not very, to me, it's just not that interesting.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your needs of the process. Everything's an engineering trade off, but yeah, you can trade off some of the assurances of the base layer to go into lightning, for example. And there you can get more speed and more privacy. And the things that Bitcoin lacks, speed and privacy, for example, you can get on these second layers. So there's all kinds of cool engineering things that people are coming up with. But I also want to say, anyone who says the blockchain, like that's a red flag for that person doesn't really know what they're talking about. Like Satoshi didn't use the blockchain in the white paper. Blockchain was a marketing term that people came up with later to try and do this thing that was kind of like, it peaked in 2015 and it continues to be an issue today of it's blockchain, not Bitcoin. And that was like a very corporate kind of social attack on Bitcoin.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I run a full node. It's great. I mean, it's pretty easy, man. You run it, and that way you can be sovereign over all of your usage, right? And you can run it on a Raspberry Pi with less than $150 of equipment. And that's so important because, again, there is no Amazon web service vulnerability here. That is a problem, and I agree with you. We're trending in a bad direction. Where like the government could just turn off a big, important website or a news source, well, they can't turn off Bitcoin because it doesn't live on AWS. It lives with us. We are Bitcoin. And I think that's very, very powerful.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make a transaction on the main chain, and that will be reserved for very large transactions or transactions that need final, final settlement, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that that's fine. And that's okay. And it's very important that that ledger, that settlement layer be kept by thousands of people around the world. The Bitcoin blockchain is not centralized. It is decentralized. It is run by people like me who run a node at home. I run a personal server. I run the Bitcoin blockchain. No one else. You run it. That person runs it. There's no one in. Well, you have a full node.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, and I'll give you two reasons. Number one, the Bitcoin blockchain is ultimately a settlement layer. It's kind of like something like FedWire in the United States. It's a way for institutions to settle with each other. That's what I think it's going to be like in 20, 30 years from now. The average person's never going to touch the Bitcoin blockchain probably. They're going to use things like lightning, or unfortunately they may use Bitcoin banks, but they'll either use custodians or they'll use second layer non-custodial solutions to interact. The main chain is going to get very expensive. It's going to be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars or even more if the dollar starts to weaken.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like you could do that today, absolutely. It's called a coin join, for example. But right now it's more expensive to coin join in Bitcoin. You have to pay premium for your privacy. This would flip that on its head and would basically say if you have one transaction, hey, pile them all in, have as many parties as you want. The more parties you get in, the cheaper it's going to be per party. And that's not possible in Bitcoin today, but it might be in the future. But again, the beauty in Bitcoin are these like these ways that it just aligns human incentives and it aligns our most base desires and needs and realities with like freedom and privacy. And that I've never seen before. And that's why I think it's so interesting.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think this is, and you're going to maybe see this even in the future. There's more things coming in Bitcoin down the pike. Lightning was enabled by an upgrade called SegWit, right, which took place a few years ago, which was the culmination of the block size conflict. There's another thing coming up called cross-input signature aggregation, which may, if it takes effect in the next few years, it may compel exchanges to collaboratively spend all their Bitcoin together in a way that really protects our privacy and fights surveillance. But they're not going to do it for moral reasons. They're going to do it because it's going to save them money and improve their bottom line.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exchanges don't care about privacy. They're doing it because it reduces fees. Lightning is cheaper and faster. So again, we have this really interesting alignment of incentives where like the freedom tech is being promoted by people who don't, I don't, it doesn't matter what their incentives are, I could care less if they were altruistic or not.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's not just Bitcoin itself. Like exchanges today are adopting something called Lightning Network, which is a way to scale Bitcoin on a second layer, much like we had gold bars, which we scaled with paper money, and then we had Visa credit cards, which were a way of scaling the paper notes. Bitcoin scales through Lightning Network. It's a private instant globally final settlement network. It's something you all should check out. It's very, very interesting. The exchanges aren't adopting Lightning for its privacy benefits. Like Lightning operates off the chain, meaning surveillance companies can't see. They can't do chain analysis on lightning because it's on an onion routed second layer, kind of that works kind of like the Tor project.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really interesting engine again that takes advantage of our base nature as humans. And I know that it sounds terrible for me to say this, but I mean, ultimately we are self-interested. And it is hard to get people to care about others living a thousand miles away. We are kind of localized in our empathy. Speaking as someone who works to help people who live in like 100 different countries, it's very difficult to get Americans to care about what's happening in Belarus or in Kashmir. It just is. But guess what? They're going to definitely care about Bitcoin because they want to see.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“North Korea. People are very quick to just quickly toss off the pretty words that they care about human rights as soon as profits come into play. So there's no alignment of incentives, right? The reason why Bitcoin is so powerful is that it aligns the incentives. All of a sudden, they can be as greedy as they want. They are being forced to promote a freedom tool. This I've never seen before, and it makes me, it gives me a lot of like excitement. It's very refreshing because we've been laboring in the human rights space. You have to like raise money and it's all nonprofit work and you're begging for people to make a difference for you. Here you have this incredible asset, which people will accumulate out of self-preservation, self-interest and greed, and yet it will strengthen the power of the individual. That is what we need to fight Big Brother. That's what we need to fight, like what I'm scared is happening in China. This growing authoritarian state, which is powered by Big Data Analysis, this is our way to fight back. And it runs on this.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, like when Tesla stacks Bitcoin, they're just doing that as self interest. They think it's going to be a good inflation hedge. Fine. But what they maybe don't care about, don't realize, or they don't need to care. I mean, Bitcoin's power is it like co-opts people into promoting a freedom tool, even if they don't care about or even if they hate freedom. It doesn't matter. So when Tesla stacks Bitcoin and the price goes up and more interest goes up and more people around the world are like, wow, Bitcoin, then more people get involved. Again, more adoption, more price, more developers, better user interface, more privacy tools, more mining, more network security. It's just this like positive feedback loop that continues to grow. And it will grow intensely in the next decade as we go through the adoption cycle. And the reason why I'm so excited about this is the human rights world, again, to get back to our previous conversation. It is very hard to find people who have the empathy or the altruism to actually make a difference abroad in places like China or Saudi Arabia.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Professional investors, corporations, and soon governments. I mean, you just had today this morning on CNBC the leader of the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, a congressman saying, like, we need to be pro-Bitcoin as a country. And the other day, Peter Thiel had a very interesting comment where he was basically like, let's not fall behind China in this race. So you have influential people in our government sort of posturing for this Bitcoin race that's going to happen in the next 10 years. You're going to see this. Countries are going to compete to stack Bitcoin.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that government instructs some of its bureaucrats and cronies and officials to start stealing Bitcoin or accumulating it or whatever for short-term gain to get around sanctions and use it to buy dollars or something like that, right, which they can't get normally. Well, guess what? All those people who the regime has instructed to figure this thing out and use it, they're all going to realize, oh my God, this is money the government doesn't control. And it's going to spread like a virus. So this is like the idea of the Trojan horse allegory, why I think it's so important and powerful with Bitcoin. All the people talking about Bitcoin today on TV, they don't care about freedom or privacy. They just care about number go up. But what they don't realize is what's concealed within. And that's very, very powerful to me.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to buy, mine, tax, accumulate this thing because it's the best performing financial asset in the world. What they don't realize or they're going to have to ignore is that they're also aiding and abetting this freedom technology, which allows individuals to be sovereign and eventually erodes their power. There's no question that rogue regimes and bad actors have already used and will continue to use Bitcoin. The thing is when you think about a North Korea or Venezuela,”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guys. And there were actually people inside Troy, Cassandra, a prophet, as well as Lao Kuan, who was like a priest who said, no, no, no, this is obviously a trick. This is obviously a trick. But they were like dispatched and ignored because the horse was like, it was just like so badass. So the Trojans were like bringing it in in the city. So they brought it in themselves. No blood spilled at all, right? In the middle of the night, of course, what you realize is the horse was packed with Greek soldiers and they come out and they let the army in, which was like hiding behind an island. So this idea that something could be so attractive that you really can't say no, even if you know what's inside of it is it played in Bitcoin. So Bitcoin has this number go up technology, right? This is what we call it in sort of shorthand. NGO, NGU, right? But what people don't realize is that NGO is like the Trojan horse. Inside the Trojan horse is FGU, freedom go up technology. So dictators and rogue regimes and corporations are...”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the actual Trojan horse, yeah, which was told in the Aeneid, actually, by Virgil, right? And the idea was the Greeks had been like trying to take the city of Troy for like a decade at these impregnable walls, and they couldn't do it. And Ulysses and the rest of the Greek army were like, we don't know what to do. So Minerva, the god of strategy and war, kind of like they get this idea from her, I guess, to actually try to use subterfuge and trickery to take over the city. So the idea is to, and this was sort of hatched by Ulysses, right, to put this horse together that would kind of be like a gift. So the idea was the Greeks pretended to leave, right? They deserted. They left behind one soldier and this horse. And the Trojans looked at it and they were like, what's going on here? And they brought in the soldier. And the soldier's like, look, they left. They're so sorry for all of the desecration and blood spill. This is their gift to you. It's, you know, honoring Minerva. You know, it's like this trophy for you.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's been interesting. It's been 12 years, more than 12 years since Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin. And they haven't been able to stop it. They have tried. They have tried a lot. I wrote a long essay for Quillette on this. Like, why haven't governments been able to stop Bitcoin? And my thesis is essentially that there's been like this mix of different kind of technical, social and economic and political incentives and disincentives that make it very difficult. And I think to me the best way to think about it is that Bitcoin's like a Trojan horse. So just to actually tell that story just a little bit because I think it's important to understand the classical mythology tale. I find this very interesting.”
2021-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #231 – Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source