YouSaid · the spoken record

Saifedean Ammous

lines on the record: 287
first: 2022-05-11
most recent: 2022-05-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So I try and use my time very wisely, and I'm unapologetic about it. My time is the most precious thing. And the way to get on my shitlist forever is to try and take away my time and to abuse my time. If you do that, it's the one unforgivable sin for me. And I think that's really, I think, that's my way of coming to terms with mortality. We're all going to die. And so let's make the most out of it while we're still here. And of course, the other way you come to terms with mortality is you have children.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you can waste my time once. You can get me to do something, and then I realized that was a waste of time. You will never get me to waste my time twice. And so you show up in my Twitter with something stupid. You're never showing up in my Twitter.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've spent a lot of time introspecting and thinking about these things and I value life a lot. I valued my time on earth a lot. And you'll see this in my dealings with people. Go back to Twitter. Why am I so brash and straightforward? It really is because life is short. Because I don't want to waste. I think, you know, on my, I've said this before on my tombstone. Let it be written. He never let anyone waste his time twice in his life.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You went that actually joined the war. And that, you know, the people who pontificated about war were the people who had experience with war, the people who were sending their own children to war, the people who were fighting with their own money. Now you have all these fat parasitics come sitting in Washington, D.C. deciding, and Washington's just an example, but all over the world this exists, people who have never fought will never carry the consequences, who are going to devalue the world's money in order to go and have other people's children fight each other because of stupid garbage they learned about politics in university.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Governments were far, far, far more careful about their monetary policy and their, sorry, their war policy when they couldn't print their money. And that has changed with Fiat. And that has allowed this new emergence of this class of what I like to call chicken hawks, of people who sit in offices like the entire foreign policy establishment in Washington, D.C. people who have never fought a war, whose children will never fight a war, who will never pay to fight a war, who will never suffer a broken window in their house because of war. Sitting there and based on these fucking moronic garbage that they teach at moronic fiat universities about politics and geopolitics, making decisions about, you know, we need to invade that country and we need to send war there. And they can do that because they have this endless money printer. And that's why, you know, back under gold, if you were a warrior, you know.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kings would send professional armies to fight each other in battlefields. And as soon as it became clear the one side was establishing an advantage, the fighting would stop and the king would settle Because it was extremely expensive to build a professional army and you ran out of money. So it was always the smartest thing to do is to just stop fighting whenever you could. And wars would take place. Countries would fight each other in the battlefield. But in the cities, life went on as normal. And people within the same cities, within the cities of the two countries would be trading with one another. Life would go on, but the war would be there. And it was just an independent part of politics. All right, we have a problem over this piece of land. Let's duke. Let's take it outside. We don't fight in the civilian areas. We go to the battlefield. We fight with professional armies. And in fact, sometimes the conflicts would be, you know, the armies would line up and they would just have a small contingent of the two armies fight with one another. And as soon as one of them establishes an advantage, then, all right, well, you won. Let's move on with it.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I absolutely think it does. Monetary system is what allows people to just continue to treat war as a spectator sport. That's really what it comes down to. And start with World War I and it's continued. And this is why really I think I've said this before. I've tweeted this before and it was a pretty popular tweet, but it also got a lot of people to dismiss the idea with mockery, of course. But I really think Bitcoin is the only technology that's going to end World War I. Once World War I started, we got into this endless conflict. It's been going since then. If you look at all the world's conflicts today, pretty much they all trace back to World War I. And it's because when that Pandora's box of government control of money was opened, there was no longer a real restraint on war except complete defeat and complete destruction and complete death. War had to be total. Before that, you know, under the gold standard.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I saw the settlement expansion, and recently a few weeks ago, I went back to Ramallah. It's amazing every time you go, the settlements are just growing in an astonishing way. It's not just housing units that are going up. It's an entire attempt to build, to basically suffocate Palestinian areas and force Palestinians to leave or keep them living in horrific conditions.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It continues to finance war and it continued. You know, we see war all over the world continue to escalate because the people who make the decision to escalate the war are not the ones who are paying for it and they're not the ones who are fighting. They are the ones who sit in offices. And in the case of most of Middle Eastern conflict, it's people who live abroad. It's people who are abroad who are not part of it who just are emotionally charged to it because they watch it on TV. So, you know, you have billions of Muslims around the world and Jews around the world who feel extremely emotionally attached to it. They're not the ones fighting. They're not the ones paying their own money. They're just getting governments to send money and to send weapons and to take part. And it's fun as a spectator sport from most of these people because they don't get to live in it. But I got to live in it. I saw it. I grew up there. I saw.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The idea behind Zionism is coming from the same place where all these other ethnic nationalisms of Europe were emerging and we saw how horribly these worked out. But the idea that you could, you know, it's one thing to say we want to build a homeland for Germans in Germany. It's one thing to say we want to build a homeland for Germans somewhere else. And that was Palestine. That was Zionism. And that was only possible thanks to fiat, thanks to the ability of the British government and all these other governments to continue to finance this colonialist effort over time.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think he's got a very good point there that this fixation with land and the bitterness with which people have land is likely to decline when people are going to have a form of property that they can keep. And so hopefully that will help in one way. And of course, the more obvious way is that this is a conflict of government and it's a conflict that is financed by fiat. From day one, the entirely insane notion that you could build a national and ethnic homeland. And of course, you know, this is the early 20th century.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I certainly hope so. And I think my interest in Bitcoin comes from a place of desperation with the situation there. Traditional politics is a dead end. I don't see what I can be doing to make things better there using traditional politics. And I think a good friend of mine, Pierre Rochard, you may know him on Twitter. I'm one of the brightest mines in Bitcoin in my opinion. He told me his theories that Bitcoin is going to bring peace to the Middle East because land is a shitcoin.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exclusive ideology that believes this land needs to be owned by people from one religion and everybody else is being kicked out. That is the tragedy of my life. And my wife is also a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon, and her family was evicted from Yafa, which is today on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. They still have their homes in Yaffa. They got kicked out of their homes and their lands and their property. They became refugees in Lebanon. So my children, you know, and it's an ongoing tragedy. It's not something that is, a lot of the people that think of it as, you know, they think Palestinians are just out there to get Israelis because they hate them. But it's an inescapable tragedy. I don't have a home anywhere.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Declaration was written by the government of Britain to the Rothschild family telling them that They'd like to make Palestine a homeland for Jews. So obviously that's not very convenient for people who are not Jewish, for whom that is a homeland. And the past 80 years has been a very painful struggle if you happen to not be Jewish. And obviously, you know, obviously Palestinians have done all kinds of things trying to fight back, and they've done all kinds of wrong things. But I don't think you can escape the fundamental reality underlying this, which is that if you're not Jewish, you are being moved out of the land. And so it's happened in 1947, 48. It happened in 1976, 67. More land was taken over by Israel. Now you see it with the settlements. You know, if you ignore the day-to-day headlines and you ignore the media propaganda and you ignore all of this thing, there's a very clear thing that is happening, which is more land owned by an”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm Palestinian, so that is the tragedy of my life. I'm Palestinian Jordanian. My family's Suffered a lot because of this historically. I've grew up in Ramallah in the West Bank. I wasn't ideal to see that. People like to think of it as this intractable conflict between two bitter enemies. But the reality of the matter is that it's not a foreign ideology came in with the idea that this country needs to be occupied by people from only one religion and the existing population, which, you know, I mean, Jews had always lived in Palestine historically. And at the turn of the 20th century, there were only 10% of the population. But then with the birth of fiat money, incidentally, the link with all of this is that when the Bank of England went off gold, a big reason why they were able to pull that off was that the Rothschild banking family supported them. And in exchange, the Rothschilds got Palestine.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so you don't have to worry about us knowing the password. It contains the password within it and it's tamper proof. So you can save the Bitcoin on it.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Long term, don't buy Bitcoin for the short term. You know, don't buy Bitcoin today so that you can sell it. Don't put your savings in Bitcoin today so that you can sell it all next month and buy a house. Money in Bitcoin that you expect to keep in Bitcoin for another. Five, ten years or so, at least four years is what I recommend for people. So keep a low time preference, focus on the future, and save in Bitcoin.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'd also add the horse that I like to whip all the time is the low time preference aspect of things, saving with Bitcoin. So I think my advice to young people is, you know, when you're young, you think of the world in a very short term generally. You're focused on the present and you think that everything that's happening in the present is the most important thing that's ever going to happen in the history of humanity. Lower your time preference. Think about the future. Think about think further down the line. Think about the consequences of the things you do and then what. So you do this now. It feels good today, but then what happens tomorrow? You go out, you drink, you enjoy yourself. Think about the hangover. But long term, think about the implication of living this kind of life. Think about every decision that you make, the long-term implication of it. And part of that is Bitcoin. Part of that is save in Bitcoin. I urge everybody to put savings in Bitcoin for the long-term.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most power. So initially we were working with our hands. We started working with machines. Machines are much more productive. While code is an even higher level of productivity where you basically program the machines to produce things. So few clicks of a keyboard and you can move millions of machines around the world in certain ways. So it carries an enormous amount of value. I think I always tell all young people to learn to code. It's the best thing. I used to tell it to my students when I was at university. It tells them to drop out and go learn to code. Probably a better use of their time and money”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Market will tell you exactly. You're young, you have the enormous advantage of being able to make mistakes, essentially, and learn from them. So go out there, do things of value for others, figuring out how you can do something that what is it that you can do that contributes the most value to other people's lives. And increasingly, I think with the modern technology, this is increasingly becoming online. I think you should consider how you can create value online because that scales beyond anything that you can do in the physical world in a very, very, well, maybe not beyond, obviously, there are profitable businesses in the physical world. But I think online is enormous potential. And coding, I think, is enormously powerful. I'm not a coder myself, but I strongly recommend people get into learning how to code. And I think it's probably the thing that can...”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say probably the most important advice that I would give is to find a way to give value to other people. This is really the key thing. You need to wake up every morning and figure out how to serve others. This is the key to everything you want in life. Everything that you want is on the other side of you serving others. So figure out how you can serve others in a good way, how you can do it in a way that they value. And you've got an incredible mechanism for figuring that out, which is the market. Go out there and do things for other people.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we pretty much see eye to eye. I think the difference is mainly that he spends a lot of time focusing on American politics and American pop culture, which I don't pay much attention to, I guess.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes, I've met Michael maybe 10, 12 years ago in New York. I used to live in New York when he used to live in New York. I met him a couple of times. There was a bunch of anarchists in New York used to throw a happy hour once a month. It was called the High Time Preference Hoppe Hour in honor of Hans Hermann Hoppe. So I met him there a couple of times and Followed each other on Twitter for a while”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't need to keep creating more debt. We can invest in this asset that is hard and that is internationally liquid and that nobody can make more of. So there is no bubble in it. There is no mechanism for somebody to increase the supply and bring the price crashing down, like with copper in real estate and bonds. So Bitcoin is the way out. And this is why I think there's a good case to be made for why the fiat authorities might embrace Bitcoin because they'll see it is their way out of this enormous debt bubble that everybody is stuck in, particularly the richest and most powerful people in the world and the richest and most powerful governments in the world are the world's biggest borrowers. They're the ones in a lot of debt. So a continuous slow devaluation of the value of that debt as people upgrade and move on to a hard asset that continues to appreciate is the way that we is.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Bitcoin is allowing so, in order to have fiat money, we need to have people borrow. We need to have people make loans. And the problem that fiat money runs into today is that if you want to save money, if you want to hold savings, you have a problem. Where do you put your savings? So you put your savings in debt, in the creation of more bonds, wherever you take your savings, you create a bubble in those things. And this is why we see a bubble in the stock market, a bubble in the bond market, a bubble in housing. It's because people are looking for savings, looking for a place where they can save all of those things are crappy saving instruments because they're like copper in that there's nothing to stop the people behind them to make more of them house builders can build more houses. Governments can issue more bonds. Crappy, fraudulent companies can list on the stock market and make more stocks. Well, Bitcoin finally offers us an outlet.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most Bitcoiners tend to lean toward an apocalyptic transition. Fiat's going to collapse. We're going to get hyperinflation. Everything's going to be terrible. And then we're going to move to Bitcoin. I present the case for why I think maybe that might not be the case. Maybe we won't get this kind of apocalyptic scenario. And this was like the conclusion of the fiat standard, which is once you realize that mining fiat is creating debt”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's really the Trojan horse for fixing the world. Come for the greed and stay for the revolution. It's going to keep going up because people don't like to be poor, except for most economists and academics. People don't like to be poor. People don't enjoy getting their wealth destroyed. And they care more about their self-interest than they care about economic theories, about whether this works as money or not. They see their cousin escaped hyperinflation and managed to get a bigger house because they bought Bitcoin five years ago. They realized maybe I should stop mocking my cousin and start buying more Bitcoin. And this is, I think, an indomitable force that's going to continue. And one thing”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as it goes up, Bitcoin becomes a more significant part of the world economy. And this is something the skeptics don't get. Like a lot of the academic skeptics to Bitcoin, they offer up all of these theories about why they think Bitcoin can't work and then they present it and they think they've delivered the knockout blow as if Bitcoin needs their permission or the word is going to need their permission. Well, the reality is people are going to join Bitcoin out of greed, out of self-interest. Number go up technology is really what's going to get everybody in.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is likely going to be difficult for governments to stop people from getting into Bitcoin for all of the technical reasons that make it very hard to stop Bitcoin. So then we have this alternative that is Bitcoin, which is not inflationary and does not have a central authority that can censor it. I think gradually is my hope and I also think my most likely scenario, but maybe I am biased because everybody thinks what they want is what's going to happen. I think we're just going to witness the same relationship because governments make their currency so that they can devalue them. And Bitcoin thrives on that. And more and more people are going to learn. More and more people are going to find out. And whether it's through curiosity or self-interest or through the destruction of their national currency, all roads lead to Bitcoin. So more and more people are going to buy Bitcoin. The price of Bitcoin is going to go up.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think this is kind of what I allude to. I mean, the point of the fiat standard is really a Bitcoin book. It talks about fiat most of the time, but it does so to analyze Bitcoin and the rise of Bitcoin. In the final chapter, I discuss how I think this relationship plays out. The way that I tend to think of it is that most likely what's going to happen is we're going to have kind of financial apartheid where there's going to be two monetary systems. One is government-controlled, and it comes with increasing amounts of surveillance and inflation. And then if you want, you can just”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not entirely concerned about whether governments move or not. In fact, I'd be very happy for them not to move as long as possible. So that individuals can accumulate more and more Bitcoin while it's still cheap The people will move.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What would it take? Gradual Possible trajectories that take us Basically, where the final sort of empirical observation is. That you overt Overtak”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've discussed it with Michael Saylor. He thinks it's highly unlikely. He thinks the people who've been pushing this are very far from the position of power and the traditional monetary and financial system is going to survive intact. I certainly hope so. I think this would be a terrible thing if it comes to pass. But I don't think many people think that it is something that would undermine Bitcoin. Like a lot of common objection to Bitcoin is, well, governments are just going to launch their own digital currencies and then Bitcoin is going to die. And I think this is completely missing the point. People think Bitcoin is important because it's digital. It's not. National currencies can be digital. Bitcoin is important because it's not inflationary and because nobody controls it. Central bank digital currencies are likely to be very inflationary and they're likely to have very strong control at the top. So if anything, they are an advertisement for Bitcoin rather than a replacement for it.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anything you do is completely supervised and controlled through your spending. So they want to introduce a new lockdown. Then they'll just make your money not work. You know, your money's broken today. You can't spend money or you can only spend money in your local supermarket for the next three months because you can't leave your neighborhood. Your money stops working outside of your neighborhood. This Chinese social credit score system is an example of this. And I think, I don't know, I don't have a crystal ball, so I don't know what the likelihood is of implementing something like this in the US.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10% for five years, and then you get negative 20% for one year. It's correct. But now, if you get rid of the credit creation mechanism and it's just assigning money directly, we're likely going to get much faster inflation. And I think that's obviously a huge problem. And perhaps an even bigger problem is the enormous amount of power that it gives to governments. It allows them to create an awful dystopia where you've got your money on your phone and”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because if banks are out of the picture, then we changed the fundamental reality of fiat as being the creation of money through lending, and then it becomes the creation of money truly by fiat, by government fiat. So we move to a system in which money is just basically, it's like we have money that is pieces of paper. And every time we've had money, we've had fiat money that was just pieces of paper, it collapsed very quickly. With the current system, money is credit, and the creation of credit is restricted to some point, and the creation of credit is self-correcting. I discussed this in the fiat standard. If the central bank allows banks to create too much credit, that creates a bubble, and then there's a collapse in the money supply, which prevents hyperinflation from happening because the money creation is self-destructive. It's self-correcting. So you end up with an average of like 7% per year increase because you have”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to think that it's just basically a waffle. It's meaningless because as it exists, the dollar is a central bank digital currency. The vast majority of dollars are digital. But I think the way that over the last couple of years I've changed my mind on this, I think this is some serious substance behind these ideas. And what they mean effectively is the disintermediation of the banking system and giving everybody an account at the Federal Reserve. This is kind of the really dangerous idea. And I think this is enormously significant. Effectively, as somebody who's lived in the Soviet Union, what this is, is the return of the Gos Bank on a global scale with modern technology. So under the Soviet Union, there was something called the Goss Bank or People's Bank. And that was the only bank in the country. And you had an account with the national bank. And, you know, if you said something wrong, your money got terminated from the Goss Bank. Now, imagine that combined with the power of digital technology. And you can see that this could be an enormously powerful technology, really.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I'm happy to give people the benefit of the doubt when they're overpromising, but not when they're making their own money. When you start making your own currency, then you don't get the benefit of the doubt. Because if your idea needs you to have a new currency that you print when Bitcoin is out there, then I'm going to go ahead and assume that you're doing this for the moment.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there is no Uber on the blockchain. There is no Twitter on the blockchain. There is no social media on the blockchain because these are businesses and businesses require centralized authority to make decisions. You can't have it be decentralized.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On a distributed ledger, we're going to have Indian real estate on a distributed ledger. And it's just, it's concern trolling marketing. You know, oh, there's a problem with real estate in India, real estate deeds, blockchain fixes this, buy my shitcoin. And then people buy the shitcoin, Indian real estate isn't fixed, and the guy gets rich and they move on. But I mean, I'm still waiting for a DAP to actually emerge. The promise that we keep hearing is something completely world-changing, world transforming. And the reality is not one app. Like there's one of my good friends, Jimmy Song, eventually they refused to go ahead with it, but he wanted to bet with one of the Ethereum people about these depths. The Ethereum people are constantly saying those depths are going to grow and they're going to have so many applications and they're going to have so many ideas. And the reality is all the apps that work are centralized apps.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't see it being justified for anything that is not as mission critical as moving large amounts of value, which require very little amount of information. So when you look at all of the buzzwords that the Ethereum and other Altcoin marketing people like to use, and if you want to wonder really why we come to this kind of aggression is because we've heard all of this. I've had all of these hucksters come to me for years. I've had, you know, people in 2016 talk to me about how Ethereum blockchain technology is going to revolutionize real estate deeds in India. I remember this guy, I'm not going to mention his name, but this guy was, you know, 2016, and he sold a lot of shitcoins and he got made a lot of money off of shitcoins based on these silly ideas. We can have blackjack.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problem with the apps is, I mean, it's just the economics of it makes no sense in the sense that currently if you wanted to run an application, whatever the application is, you want to run it on AWS, you pay a specific amount of money, you want to run it on your own laptop, you pay specific amount of money per kilobyte of data. If you wanted to run the same thing on a distributed ledger where you're distributing the data over thousands of computers worldwide, it's infinitely more expensive. And that's why we haven't seen any of these dApps take off. And that's why I've said this many years ago. The only working application of blockchain technology is Bitcoin, because with Bitcoin, with a few hundred bytes of data, with a few bytes of data, you could move a billion dollars worth of economic value from here to China and move it safely and reliably. So that”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have strong opinions on the prospects of the technology. Personally, I don't want to ever imagine myself having something on my eyes. I'd rather just go out into the real world. But I don't have strong opinions on virtual reality. I do have on dApps and NFTs.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you don't because there's no marketing on Bitcoin because all of these ideas get promoted on proprietary shitcoins because.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's potentially, I mean, you can do it if in a centralized way, but can it survive? Can it last for a long time? I don't think so. And I think it can last perhaps initially with marketing, with centralized marketing, you can promote it. But ultimately. User demand the people that are not interested in speculating because they want to get rich on this, the people that are going to use it, they're going to want to use it because they can trust that it is not going to be messed with.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but the only way that a proof of stake system will take off is if you have a military to force people to use it. That's the thing. Ultimately, there's no way that it's going to take off on a free market. And that's why for all of the bluster about wanting to move to a proof of stake system, Ethereum have been saying this since 2014. It's now been eight years that they've been talking about it. We still haven't seen the proof-of-stake system operational in the wild. It's vaporware for all practical intentions.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Isn't it exactly what the Federal Reserve is? The Federal Reserve is a proof of stake system. The Federal Reserve is owned by its constituents.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but I mean, you know, you're talking to somebody. I grew up in Ramallah in Palestine in the West Bank. I've changed my mind on all kinds of different things, the fact that I was even open to the idea of Bitcoin has required an enormous, enormous amount of a heck of a journey. I'd much rather appreciate direct arguments rather than these kind of general fluffy, you know, you should be, oh, of course, yes, you should be open-minded, but also you come up with conclusions and you delete spam email sometimes when you know that it is spam because you have to move on with your life. There's an opportunity cost to considering every spam email.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fanboy pipeline is a very strong one because it's the same thing. It's like you like the idea of people being in charge in money and you think you're going to be the one who's going to be in charge of money. So you see a lot of this phenomena. And you see the same people that want gold and don't like central banking, they get into Bitcoin.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have that kind of heart, it's not property, and I really very strongly recommend your discussion with Sailor for people who want to elaborate more on this. There's a bunch of people in charge, which means that legally they should be doing this under securities law, but even as an anarchist, if I don't want to care about that, the technical implication of it is this is never going to be adopted as a neutral way of transferring value on the internet because you need something that enemies can trade with one another. You can't have something that has a small group of people in charge because the small group of people themselves can be corrupted. And B, they can be coerced. You can put a bunch of people in a room, put a gun to their head, and you can change everything in any of these digital currencies. And that's why I think you'll find a lot more sympathy among fiaters to shitcoins. The Keynesian economist, to Ethereum,”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source