YouSaid · the spoken record

Brandon Quittem

lines on the record: 65
first: 2023-07-05
most recent: 2023-07-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“If you're super new and you just want a quick hit, you don't have that much time, you want to take like a baby step, just Google Paul Stamitz's TED Talk. It's like six ways mushrooms can save the world or something like that. It's super dense, super fun. I would say if you like the weirder, more esoteric, push the boundaries of what we know about biology and ecology, look up entangled life by Merlin Sheldrake. He's also a fantastic speaker. I admire his ability to command English language. So just look up Merlin Sheldrake on any podcast, you'll get a good dose. And I do encourage you to read my essays. I know I'm self-promoting here, but they do a really good job of weaving these things together. And if you're a Bitcoiner who's curious about fungi, this is a great way to learn about that whole kingdom. And it's honestly, yeah, I'm trying to mushroom kill all the Bitcoiners because it's an equally fun rabbit hole. And I want more people to talk about it with.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Incentive is why not just capture the game? Why not just change the rules? Why not just lobby the politicians? Why not just get close to the money printer? It's rational to pursue that rather than go compete out in the market. And so what Bitcoin does is as soon as the market realizes you can't change this thing, it forces all the would-be political capture type people, the central planner types, it de-emphasizes their value. It defangs them. It essentially forces them to go get a job, forces them to learn to code, it forces them to create real value and marginally that adds tremendous amount of productivity to society. And it sort of reduces, we're fighting this ongoing force of political capture or the revolving door, all these different ways to look at this, but we're constantly forting that, fighting that force. And why not just get rid of that thing altogether? And if so,”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From the inside out. And in my honest opinion, Ethereum is already past the point of no return for many different reasons. I guess I get frustrated when non-Bitcoiners make that argument because they're essentially building a monetary system that's easier to control and they're handing the keys to whatever political power captures it. And I view that process as inevitable. It's just a matter of time. And if Ethereum gets big enough, it will happen. We want to lean into the fact that this thing is out of human control, right? Greed is built inside of us, and that's okay, but let's harness greed for good. And Bitcoin essentially forces people who are greedy, which is a normal thing to be greedy on some level. It forces that into a market where you have to provide value for someone else in order to gain value yourself. Whereas in a political money,”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it goes back to what I think is the most important part of Bitcoin, which is that it's hard to change. Okay. And so let's say the Ethereum community or similar type thinking, they will quickly say, well, Bitcoin doesn't do anything and it's too hard to change. So you're going to get out competed by features. And the key is we need control to change this thing. And all we got to do is have a nice democratic process to make change. I think this is the biggest folly in the whole industry. And because what you're doing is you're creating a political money, which is what fiat money is, you're creating a political money just with a new software system. There's absolutely no difference. And they could be successful for 20 years, 30 years, right? But inevitably, either it'll get out competed by better technology, or more than likely it'll be co-opted politically and it will corrupt itself.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The West, but that is a function of baseload power not being economical or available in those countries. I guess I'm saying that because there's a huge humanitarian benefit from spreading energy. And I think the zeitgeist today is kind of a more energy is bad, right? These sort of New York Times type talking points or WEF talking points. And I think the counterpoint to that is that you're depriving people of basic human needs. And I think energy is the master commodity of which all human flourishing flows. And so I think we should lean into things like Bitcoin or any technology or any process that does spread more energy at a lower cost. And so I'm very, very, very passionate about that one.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the difference of educating your daughter or your daughter just stays in the village? So these are huge life-changing things for those on the margin, right? A little energy goes a long way. Not to mention the fact that if they don't have, I know if we scale this way out, that's the micro good example. If we provide more low-cost energy at a wider distribution around the planet, it is the single biggest humanitarian thing that you can do for the marginalized parts of society. It allows these communities to be competitive with their exports because they can actually make things inside their country instead of relying on all their imports as well. It provides jobs about a personal one. I've got a nine-month-old son upstairs, new parent. Wow, that process is crazy. And in Africa, if my son was born prematurely, in many places, there wouldn't be a hospital with an incubator to keep the child alive, right? We take that for granted.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why isn't it happening? It's hard. There's reasons. Now enter the Bitcoin miners, they have an economic. To go start up these microgrids and they're doing it. And guys like Eric, the CEO of Grithis are reporting that they're bootstrapping energy assets, which leads to more power at a lower cost. So they're lower in the price of power, increasing access to power to rural communities. And it might not sound like a lot to you or I, but decreasing power or increasing power in these communities is enormous for their lives. It's the difference between being able to read after dark. It's the difference between having a mobile phone so you can call your family more than for five minutes a week.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if we look at real examples, right, this is kind of esoteric maybe for people who are new to these ideas. But let's talk about a company called Gridlist. It's a company in Africa. They're doing this right now. And what we're finding in Africa is that there's a last mile problem with energy. So the city's more or less electrified. I mean, horrible conditions compared to here, but the cities mostly have power most of the time. But if you're rural, There's no power and there's no There's no path to power because it's not economical. So that last mile problem. Now enter microgrids, okay microgrids are just tiny little energy assets that are designed to serve these marginalized rural communities. However, funding a microgrid is really cumbersome. It usually relies on foreign aid or some government programs, things like this. It takes years. It's super inefficient. And you got to ask yourself.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bootstrapping mechanism to bring new energy assets online. And just like the pioneer species, right, they colonize the land, they make the soil, then it becomes a complex ecosystem. At that point, the pioneer species gets out-competed. That lichen can no longer survive because the giant oak tree shades it out. And then that lichen hopefully reproduces and starts the process elsewhere. Just like the mining machines, right? As soon as they get priced out, you can go bring those miners to some other site with very low cost energy and you essentially put them in a retirement home to convert any free energy you have into money, right? Because the CapEx already depreciated.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way better because you have a customer from day one. So the Bitcoin miners go to some rural mountainous region in Africa where there's a whole bunch of rivers. And maybe the startup cost to build a hydro facility there is too high because it might take you three years to transport that power to the consumer. And so the project dies on the vine, right? The startup capital doesn't form, whereas with Bitcoin miners, as that pioneer species, they go join the party and they say, hey, if you build out this hydro, I'll buy all your power from day one. And they do. And then over time, let's say three, five years goes by, they build out all the transmission and they bring that power to market to a local city, let's say, in that type of situation, the Bitcoin miners get priced out of the equation and instead all that energy is then sold to the end consumer who will always pay more than the miners. So it's sort of a”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, 100%. So we touched on part of this earlier, which was the story of how did complex life go from the oceans to land, right? And that was a lichen, a symbiosis between a plant and a fungi. And in ecology, there's a unique type of species that sort of describes that process. These are called pioneer species. And their job is to go colonize desolate landscapes and they prepare the land for more complex life too. than come and join the party. And I think Bitcoin miners play this role extremely well. They go find energy sources that are being untapped and miners just due to profits incentives go they set up the this infrastructure and they turn that energy into a commodity right like we described but the second order effect there is that now you have a buyer like the economics of bootstrapping energy assets just got”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In an economic system that no one can stop and can go pretty much anywhere. And the minor or the micro scale, that means individuals can bring their skills to market and benefit from that in their family. At the city level, we can have more robust cities with more wealth and at the macro scale. We just generally have more wealth at the margin because everyone can participate and because of economic signals are clean and because there's no politicking to blow up the game and change the rules every 50 years. That allows us to have a strong foundation to build civilization. So we can have that 1% growth compounded forever rather than these volatile periods that sort of like set us back. And yeah, that's what I would say.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So if we zoom way out, I view we're stuck at this sort of nation state industrial revolution game and that game is who has the most resources who can then deploy the most power. So it's a magnitude of wealth or magnitude of power game. The US has the industrial base, the economic base. We have the best military. We're in control. But what this leads to is this nation state politicking over resources. And that comes at a really high cost, right? Go read Alex Gladstein for a taste of how destructive this game can be. Whereas with Bitcoin, it sort of dissolves that industrial revolution game and it creates more of a networked game where your place doesn't matter as much or government doesn't matter as much. We form networks online and we trade through those networks. And so I believe it actually shatters that glass ceiling of social scalability and allows us to unlock more human potential by having”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it maps to reality better, and that allows us at the edge of the network to make better decisions. And that's what the market is. That's where wealth is produced, right? We can specialize at a higher rate. We can make decisions at a better rate. And that alone increases productivity and life satisfaction for everyday people. And so at that level, it essentially scales us socially at a better rate. And Nick Zabo has a term social scalability, right? which is essentially way how do we increase cooperation over distances right how do we flexibly cooperate over distances in time that's social scalability things would be like property rights or rule of law or various things like that communication networks money these are social scaling technologies and what bitcoin does in my opinion is it allows us to go to a whole nother tier of cooperation”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a whole bunch of ways why Bitcoin would be superior to our fiat money system, but that's one of them, right? It creates the scarcity element represents the scarcity of natural resources on our planet. So it's important that those are in symbiosis or in symmetry, right? You can't have a money that prints forever when resources can't be printed forever.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Energy or time or work. It's all the same thing. And that's what money represents. And so if we have a money like we do today, maybe we have a good money, maybe we have a bad money. But no matter what, if we can have a better money, that's going to have tremendous downstream implications for our society.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's so many angles in this question, number one, but I'm going to pick the one that I'm most passionate about. And that is that money is a social technology, a psychosocial technology. It is an abstraction layer that binds humans together. And we use money because we have these neofrontal cortexes that allow us to form abstraction, right? So it's a technology. And it allows society to scale our networks and scale our productivity, right? Without money, you end up in maybe 150 or maybe a thousand person groups because you're essentially trying to keep track of kin and are we friend or foe based on our genetics and i caught the woolly mammoth last week so you got to get this one this week and you can kind of keep a ledger in your head you don't really need money but as soon as you want to have a global complex society you're going to need some sort of an abstraction layer to represent value or”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The fact that it's hard to grasp and it's really easy to write off just like it's easy to write off mushrooms outside out of mind people think they understand Bitcoin right away right it appears simple at first glance so you're like oh I get it it's this it's easy to dismiss because I heard one argument but if you go a little bit deeper you start to realize that this thing's way more complex and way more interesting And a fun analogy here is a mountain climber. So you're climbing, climbing, climbing a mountain, and you see the peak and you're so excited you've been hiking all day and you finally get to the peak and then you look up and you realize, oh, that wasn't the peak. That was a false peak. I got to keep going. You know, a few hours later to get to another false peak and you're just getting demoralized until you finally speak. And the same is true with Bitcoin. You quickly reach these full summits and you're like, oh, I got to figure it out. And if you don't look up, you maybe stop there. But if you look up, you realize that it's way more complex than we thought.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I think it originally was brought out into the oceans because, number one, we don't explore the oceans that much. Number two, we don't explore fungi very much. So fungi in the oceans are definitely not getting a lot of attention. And so as we explore the oceans, we're starting to realize that there is so much more complexity than we thought. And fungi are buried in the oceans pretty much everywhere. How this relates to Bitcoin, in my opinion, is kind of a haste makes waste type thing here where we're sort of just marginalizing the mushrooms, right? And we sort of make up our mind and we find out later that we're wrong. We know nothing essentially. And the same is true with Bitcoin, where, first of all, only a tiny percentage of people around the world understand Bitcoin on any sort of deep level. And so, well, number one, that gives us our chance for price action upside, right? Number two, I think we should accept the”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's describing there with dark matter or dark matter fungi is that there's a whole lot of fungi that we don't know about. And the more we explore, the more we realize that there has to be another participant in the market in order for everything to balance out, right? So dark matter is essentially our laws of the universe don't work unless there's this magic other variable that we can't measure. So we'll just call that dark matter. And then the equations balance. The exact same thing is happening with fungi.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sending out spores and reproducing, then the price crashes. Now you're into this sort of integration period. Most of those spores or new market entrants leave, they write it off, they leave with their tail between their legs. But a few of them plant roots. They're like, whoa, there's something deeper here. They form companies, relationships. And they're the hoddlers, right? They're the weekly DCA army that maintains the price floor. And so that's sort of the colonization period. And again, it goes right back into that quiet lull for a few years as we rebuild the hardened, strengthened, form new relationships. And the mycellial network gets bigger in that bear market, totally out of sight. And then all of a sudden, another raging bull market comes bigger than the last one and people are caught off guard.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it could be years. It could be a lot of, I mean, diversity is so large, but certain mushrooms come up in the spring every year or the fall, right? So there's patterns, but a new fungal colony probably doesn't have enough energy to reproduce for a while. So it's just underground foraging, building, forming relationships, building its own mass. Now let's talk about the hype cycle in Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin is mostly in a bear market, mostly normal people don't talk about it. They don't know about it. That's the mycelium form of Bitcoin. We're still in that now. Then we have a bull market. That's like that mushroom being reproduced or being produced. Everyone's talking about it. News, everything's going wild. And then it hits that peak, that euphoria when the craziest things happen imaginable. And three months later, we look back like, oh yeah, that was clearly the top. We got a little euphoric there. That's the spirulation part. That's the mushroom.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is insane. So quietly underground when the conditions right produces the mushroom. And as soon as that mushroom reaches the peak, it releases all its spores, tiny little mushroom seeds, and they're lighter than air. They flow all over the place. And most of them die. But a few land together, they fuse, and they create new fungal colonies that go underground, and then they're in that quiet place for maybe years before they reproduce again. That's the life cycle. For years.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you know nothing of food dynamics, so you're going to miss how blood flows through the veins, for example. That's probably not even a good example, but you get what I mean. Multiple layers is key. And so let's come back up to fungi, the life cycle here. Most of a fungi's life is in that mycellial form. It's out of sight, out of mind. You walk through the forest, you don't even see it. And then when the conditions are absolutely perfect, humidity is right. Temperature's right, moisture is right, et cetera, it concentrates all its energy to produce a mushroom, the fruiting body. And some of these are actually among the fastest acceleration things we found on our planet. So little tiny mushrooms, which are mostly water and cell walls made of chitin, which is the same as like a crab shell. So very, very hard rigid mixed with water produces a unique form.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I made this thread in the last bear market and it kind of went viral. I put some visuals here. I think it does a good job telling the story of fungi too. And caveat, I'm like secretly trying to teach all the Bitcoiners about fungi. I think it's an equally deep rabbit hole. And another quick tangent. My personal interest in life or what am I good at? What am I here for, I believe, is to pursue the frontier of knowledge. And I think that means overlapping industries. This is biology and technology, right? And if you're a decently obsessed amateur in multiple fields, which I am, you can actually produce novel insight that the experts in those separate fields would totally miss and they're obvious to you because you have that overlap. And so I guess this is me saying we need more generalists in the world, right? It takes like 25 years to be an expert cardiologist. And great. You might contribute 0.1% more in cardiology.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Software system, let's say we invent something really cool. The other side is the politicization because it's so hard to change, it doesn't matter what the politics of the day are. It doesn't matter what the current thing is. Bitcoin just laughs. It's totally unaware of the current thing. It just does what it does. So I think both of those two combined essentially overcome why money's fail. And it doesn't mean that Bitcoin won't fail, but it does mean that this is the first potential money to last 500 years. right that's 10x the the average or or maybe more drew bansal uh makes a good case for how if we're going to go to space we're certainly not using fiat money on a database here we're certainly not using gold so maybe we are using bitcoin but that's a story for another day”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“World and gold is analog. It's just too slow to keep up, so we make fiat money. The other way monies fail is due to overpoliticization, which essentially just greed steps in or short-term thinking steps in, and then we just break the money and no one wants it anymore. And so in those situations, money lasts, let's say 50 years, maybe 30 years if things are going well. And I think Bitcoin has a chance to not be a 50-year money. I think Bitcoin is the first chance of being a 500 year money because it can evolve and adapt. So it handles the technology disruption angle. It learns, it gets better, it's software. We can reimagine it. And the worst case scenario, we can port the UTXO set into a new software system. And the UTXO sets where the value is, because that's the network, the holders themselves care about that, and it's backed up everywhere. And so you could port that into a new.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Easy to justify. But over the long term, that may undermine the currency. And I think that's why currencies have such a short shelf life is because humans meddle with them and over time it hides risk. And then there's a systemic blow up. And so compare that to Bitcoin. There is no politics there. There's no one's printing more because it's too hard to make changes. And the market clears. It removes the distortion. There's no politics. There's very little, if any, systemic risk. And so I think my honest opinion, that's the most important part of this Bitcoin thing. It is not 21 million. It is not a blockchain. It is not any of this stuff. It's actually the fact that we have a monetary system that's extremely hard to change. And historically, monies fail because either they get out competed technologically, which I think is what happened with gold and why we moved to fiat, right? We went to a global world, an information.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, first, I would say that I don't see a world where ever where there's a single money and nothing that trades like money is around. Like there will always be multiple types of money, I believe. And so when I say that, I'm more mean. It's an option for anyone. It's a lifeline for those who don't have a better monetary system that they can access, right? And it's 100% voluntary. And so based on your needs locally, you're going to make the best decision for yourself. Now, from the other side, the systemic risk side, like what happened to the big Mike Banana, the major difference is that fiat monies are political monies, right? And that means that people in charge make decisions, oftentimes short-term decisions, which come at the expense of long-term things. And it's rational for that to happen, right? The barbarians are at the gate. We got to print more money to defend ourselves. Super rational.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bitcoin is like that. Bitcoin is this ecosystem, this living, breathing dynamic system. And what it means for money is that Bitcoin accepts the short-term price volatility. Bitcoin's price is volatile, and it always probably will be more than fiat money. But what we gain in exchange is that long-term systemic stability. It wears the risk on its sleeve. There's no bailouts in Bitcoin. The market clears. Risk is cleared, and we move on. And in my opinion, that's a huge win for humanity because it provides a more stable economic layer. We connect the whole planet like a mycellial network where anyone in the world can speak the same economic language. Doesn't matter what your government says, doesn't matter what currency you're supposed to use. You can access this network with a $10 smartphone. And you're now economically viable online.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Short term price stability. You have these little ledgers, and you try to steer the price and try and keep it stable. But it comes at the expense of that long-term systemic risk, right? Every time you meddle with the price of money, every time you bail out zombie corporations, every time you meddle, you're just burying risk. You're hiding the risk. And that systemic risk builds up over time. And then the one fungi takes out the whole banana crop and you have some sort of financial collapse. And so essentially just don't account for fat tail risk. And now let's compare it to Bitcoin, which is more like an old growth rainforest, not a monocrop, not a single banana. In that environment, fierce competition, incremental progress, thousands or millions of species, sustainable, a single fungi attacking a single species there, you wouldn't even notice. A thousand fungi attacking a thousand species wouldn't even dent the complexity and the resilience of the forest.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“True, true. However, it's extremely vulnerable because they're all clones of the same organism. They're all brothers and sisters of the same exact genetics. And so what that means is what happens if a disease vector comes? And this did happen in the 50s. At that time, there was one banana that made up for the vast majority of bananas consumed around the world, especially the exports. And it was called the big mic. Big mic banana. And some enterprising young fungi saw an opportunity called the Panama disease. They figured out how to eat that banana and take it over. And over the course of a couple years, we had a global food shortage because one fungi learned how to eat one banana, and that decimated 80% of the banana exports on the planet. And that same story applies to fiat money in the same way because fiat money hyper efficient, you know, you send her, you can control it, all these different things. And it offers the benefit, which is.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a good narrative to explain Bitcoin to people. At least that's what I found because we intuit biology much easier. You can tell stories we're of biology, right? So it sinks in deeper, whereas like dry technical, step-by-step, most people, that doesn't really work on. And that's just sort of a side note there. But the other angle on anti-fragility before I pass it back to you is the systemic anti-fragility, right? So we did the micro. The organism itself is anti-fragile because it learns from a macro standpoint, let's compare fiat or an inorganic system to a Bitcoin or an organic system. Let's say monocrop. Let's take bananas. You just bulldoze all the trees and plant a bunch of bananas and your dole and you just monocrop one banana all around the world and you ship it around and you make money selling bananas, right? Hyper efficient, extremely low cost, great way to deliver calories true.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Developers put their heads together, create a custom software patch or enzyme. They ship that software patch or enzyme throughout the network. The network updates itself. Vulnerability patch, organism stronger, and that attack would be harder to execute in the future, right? So again, the system learns, it adapts, it evolves. And in that sense, it does mimic life. And I know that comes across kind of crazy. And believe me, I was the most shy to publish Bitcoin's a living organism when I did in 2018. Everybody's talking about finance and software, this and that. And I'm like, I don't know. I think it might be a living organism. But it turns out the analogy is salient. And I think the primary reason why comparing it to living organisms makes sense. Number one is because this thing does not behave like a software project or like a money. It really does learn, evolve, and it mimics life in all these different ways. And I think.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're now measuring electricity and action potential. They're sending information, and it goes back to specialized parts of that fungi to create a custom molecule, again, their masters of chemistry. They produce a custom molecule, ship that enzyme right over to the edge of the network to then defend its new attacker. And what happens over time is the fungi itself creates a chemical library of these defense molecules. So it learns, it gets better, more fit for its niche over time. which is the only way the honey mushroom could take over an entire mountaintop and live for thousands of years if it learned and adapted. So these are extremely resilient creatures. And let's use that same little narrative for Bitcoin, for example. Let's say we find a bug in the code or some attack vector is found, right? Information travels through the informal network. It gets to a developer.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everywhere. There's really no central processing unit. So you could cut the mycellal network in two, and now you have two networks growing. No problem. So no central point of control, no central point of failure. Bitcoin's the same way, right? You could remove any single developer, node, miner, exchange. Doesn't matter. They can be as vulnerable as possible. No problem. But there's no CEO of Bitcoin to jail. There's no one version of the software to shut down. There's no essential hardware to seize. There's none of that stuff. And so it forms that same sort of anti-fragility in the Tlebean sense that you attack it and what happens? It actually routes around your attack and the network becomes stronger. So if you think of that underground drama, fungi are fighting off bacteria, other fungi trying to find food. And all of a sudden it identifies an attacker on one side. Information travels through the mycellial network. Literal information, by the way, that”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So essentially, the age of the dinosaurs ended. The fungi inherited the whole planet. They steward the planet. They prepare it for life. And this tiny little mole, they call it a tendric, but it's just a tiny little mouse essentially. He buried himself underground and outlasted this horrible cataclysmic event as the mushrooms are preparing the surface for future. And then this little mole pops out, I mean, generations of moles. Mole pops out. all the dinosaurs are gone and it becomes the age of mammals, which we're currently living into now. I say that to say that the fungi essentially survive all these cataclysms and they just wait and prepare and then, you know, their opportunistically adding other organisms into the mix to suit their own benefits, to be clear. But it is that symbiotic cooperation slash competition type environment. Back to that mycelial network, right? Underground sells a little too.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Centralized networks, although not smart like we are, they do make good decisions because we're each individually on the edge of the network making decisions. Which wallet do I use? Which exchange do I use? Which software patch do I go for? And we're all making decisions for us, right? And we have the best information. And the aggregate of that creates the network. And that makes it very resilient as a life form, right? which fungi are extremely resilient. We've had six mass extinctions on our planet as far as we know, like, you know, 65 million years ago, asteroids come, kill the dinosaurs. In that period, asteroid hit”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The slime mold created a network. It grew and formed to create a network to capture all the food. And they looked back and they realized, wow, it created a more efficient, more resilient subway system than the Japanese engineers built, which are world-class. And so again, the humble amoeba outcompetes the best engineers on our planet. And I don't say this to knock the Japanese engineers. I say this just to describe the fact that there are different types of intelligence. And this is an emergent intelligence that it just comes out of the desire to find food and be optimized. And I think biology has these sort of base operating parameters, these search functions, these optimization functions inherent somewhere deep down in the algorithm that produces evolution to produce this type of information. It also tells us a lot about Bitcoin, right? Because these”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Together, aggregate consensus in the network. So Bitcoin also is that same archetype of the decentralized intelligence network. And I think the most, so I wrote the first essay on this topic in 2018 and the crowd favorite of the essay by far was the slime mold. So I got to tell this story. First, the slime mold is not fungi. It was formerly considered fungi. We learn a little bit more. Now it's classified as an amoeba. But you can think of it as a bunch of single celled organisms that form a clump and they like to hang out together and they travel in packs because it's best for them. And so that's what the slime mold is. And some scientists in Japan put down oat flakes, which are the slime mold's favorite food onto a petri dish. And they essentially mapped out Tokyo's subway system. You know, Shinjuku, this stop, that's all the stops. Then they unleash the slime mold into this little maze. And in the course of an afternoon,”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tip of these little filaments, they're making decisions locally. Do I go left? Do I go right? Do I eat that? Do I run away from that? And that whole thing, when do we reproduce all those decisions are made at the end? And the whole sum total of those decentralized endpoints forms consensus. And that's where the intelligence is. So it actually pushes decision making to the edge where the information is actually the most relevant, totally different than us. right and this actually mirrors the decentralized or inner subject inner subjective consensus formed in bitcoin right the nodes individually determine what software they want to run which enforces the rules that they believe in the miners choose the blocks that they want to include to append to the network the exchanges wallets merchants all the infrastructure above that stewards users i mean everyone all of those little endpoints together voluntarily participate”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's actually an extremely profound point. And it's hard for humans to appreciate this type of intelligence because it looks so different from us, right? We have a central brain. We think very highly of ourselves just so happens we think very highly of ourselves with our brain. We'll leave that aside. The mycelium is a totally different type of intelligence. What it's like is a neural net like you described. Again, let's go back underground, these tiny little tubes all over using chemistry, growing, moving. It's just a process, this anarchic flow of little filaments underground. And those millions of little endpoints are searching for food. They're defending their territory. They're inventing new molecules to subvert the competition. And it's constantly re-architecting itself. And rather than having a central processing unit like we do, the decision making is actually made at the edge of the network.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tells the market to create more supply. And the same is true in Bitcoin. More demand for these energy sources tells the market to create more supply and more supply of energy is good for humanity, right? We want low cost, reliable power all over the world.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sticks in the woods that have no use case. And the Bitcoin miners convert that into a digital commodity. And the Bitcoin miners are actually going to out-compete the aluminum smelting plants in most cases because the Bitcoin miners have no capex on a power plant. As soon as the miners are done at that power source, you just move the machines, put them somewhere else. You can deploy them almost instantly at any scale, right? And so those Bitcoin miners are just going around trying to find untapped resources and liberating value out of them. And energy itself is kind of a passion of mine lately. I think it's a really important conversation looking at the world right now. And what these miners are doing produces so many second order positive effects, right? And I think that the simple analogy is actually looking at broadband internet. And so as soon as there's more demand for faster speed internet, what happens more demand?”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It back into the ecosystem, eats what it wants, and sells the rest. And so they perform a very important role there. And it's very similar to Bitcoin mining, actually. And you could say that Bitcoin miners are actually converting waste or stranded resources like that fallen tree. They're converting that into a valuable digital commodity, right? And before Bitcoin, this often happened with, let's say, stranded energy in Iceland, right? The famous example is to have geothermal in remote locations. So essentially free energy and no customers, what do you do with it? Either you try to build a manufacturing plant nearby or something like that. And what often happened is they would smelt aluminum there because the highest cost input for aluminum is energy. And so they would build an aluminum plant in the middle of nowhere to take advantage of that free energy. And Bitcoin miners do the same thing, right? They co-locate to these stranded energy sources, these fallen.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And now, if we want to shift to another type of fungi, the other primary role that they play is actually as the recyclers of the planet. So the saprophytic fungi is the technical term, but all it means is they eat dead and dying organic matter, not even organic matter. They eat anything pretty much, but mostly dead and dying organic matter. So the question would be, you walk through a forest and there's all these trees and there's some leaves and sticks on the ground and stuff. Why aren't we just buried in leaves and sticks and dead animals? And that's because the fungi consume all that. And they're so good at chemistry that they take a fallen stick on the ground and they're just disassemblers, recyclers. They just take that whole thing apart bit by bit, break right down to its base molecules. And then that essentially liberates value out of a wasted resource and then recycles that essentially sells.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly right. And specifically, I'm going to probably refer back to this multiple times, but the kingdom is so diverse that what you described is 100% true for the mycorrhizal fungi. And those are the specific ones that form symbiosis with trees in order to make the trade. And so in that context, yes, they absolutely need each other.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we can take that the alternatives to Bitcoin if we even want to call them that afterwards. But Bitcoin is very, very simple, right? It produces blocks. It's a secure base layer that just creates a transaction ledger. And that's all it really does. And that's a good thing. And if you want to do a visa type payment network like the lighting network on top of that, that would make sense. But you wouldn't want to combine a central bank with Visa, right? Those are totally separate layers with different functions. And if you try to do it all at once, you're essentially breaking the law of the universe, which is the scale and layers. And so thankfully, in the block size wars era of 2016-17, cooler heads prevailed and Bitcoin optimized for that base layer for security. And then we're going to do Lightning Network. We're going to do services on top of that, like exchanges are maybe a layer, all these new things coming out. And that's just the right way to scale.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, great question and good tie in here. So, the formal story or argument here is called Gaul's Law. And it essentially states that to make a complex system, you need to start with a simple system. Okay. And that law appears in biology and in Bitcoin. So in the biology layer, it might be the virus, bacteria, fungi, plant, animal hierarchy, or it could be, for example, atoms make molecules, molecules make cells, or ganules, organs, systems, organism, ecosystem. Right. So each one of those scale layers does what it does best. And if you zoom in at that little scale, there's a whole drama happening at the molecule level, right? And you zoom out and those molecules are part of a larger system. And that seems to be a fundamental law of the universe, which is that do what you do best and make that simple and straightforward and robust so that you can layer on more complexity on layers above. And so bringing that to.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And over time, over a very long period of time, we have about a foot or two feet of topsoil on our planet. But it started with that fateful moment. And once a little topsoil comes, it makes way for other land organisms to then colonize the slightly more fertile dry land, right? And fast forward all the way, that made room for us today. And so we and every other terrestrial complex life on our planet owe it to the fungi for creating the conditions on life for which we can emerge. And simultaneously that helps the fungi, right? They're tree farmer. So if they create this beautiful forest, that's more trees producing food for them. And the story continues. So I'll stop there.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT