YouSaid · the spoken record
Saifedean Ammous
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- 2022-05-11
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- 2022-05-11
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“Politics, it's the Federal Reserve, it's exactly what we have. It's exactly what we have. It's just a group of people who get to decide the rules. And it's essentially a system that is, you know, it's a security. It's a company. So it's not an innovation in any sense. It's a step backwards to what we already had, which is you get a bunch of people in charge of the money. Now, the only reason it survives in this, and the reason I call these things a scam and I have no problem with calling them a scam is because they fraudulently present themselves as being decentralized. They present themselves as just being a different way of doing decentralization than Bitcoin when it's not. It's just they're riding Bitcoin's coattails and they're writing the fact that most people don't quite understand what Bitcoin is and how it works to portray themselves as a cheaper, better, more efficient way of doing what Bitcoin does. It's not. It's a less legally accountable way of doing what central banks do.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the key thing is, you know, Essentially, proof of work was like the invention of flight. Like we've got in this machine and we managed to get it to fly off the ground. And proof of stake is, hey, we found a great way to make airplanes cheaper and faster by not making them fly. Keeping them on the ground, like the invention of proof of work, the reason the entire digital currency space exists is because Bitcoin operates based on proof of work. If Bitcoin was based on proof of stake, it would have died or been shut down from day one.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but I mean, the moment that somebody tells you, hey, I'm going to give you 15 million dollars for nothing, just if you send me $5,000, you know, you're getting something for nothing. And essentially with all of the digital currencies, it's the same pitch. Hey, you know, come use this thing that'll allow you to do things that all of the things that they pretend that they can do can be done with computers without having digital currencies. We already have AWS that does cloud computing, that does everything that shitcoins pretend to do. The only difference is AWS doesn't have its own monetary system tacked on top of it to allow Jeff Bezos to basically print his own money.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, let me give you the counter argument to that. How much time do you spend emailing back all of these Nigerian prince email scams that you know email you tell you, send me $5,000 and I'll send you $15 million”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does this and this and that. And basically, how can we get you to promote this Shitcoin for us? And being straightforward and forthright is a great productivity hack because you just tell those people, no, I'm not interested. It's a stupid Bitcoin. And I wish you quick and swift failure before you take a lot of people's money. And that's what I genuinely think.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, like, again, it's just a Twitter account. If it bothers you so much, ask yourself why it bothers you that some people are so, I'm not referring to you, obviously, but I mean, the people that are constantly aggravated about this, I don't get bothered by anything on Twitter. I just block immediately. And I get to curate the experience that I enjoy. And I recommend people do that. It's really a lot less pathetic than complaining about strangers saying things you don't like, which a lot of, and of course, the reason for it is, you know, I mean, when I say it's stupid, it's not really stupid. There's an ulterior motive there. And the ulterior motive is, hey, I have this shitcoin that I made with five other friends of mine. And I'd like you to, I'd like to write your coattails, Bitcoiners, and I'd like you to please help me promote this shitcoin. I get this practically every week, whether through email or through Twitter, where, hey, you know, this is our Shitcoin. It's just like Bitcoin, but it's better.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I block very prolifically, and I strongly recommend people continue to block. I think Twitter is, you're not going to get to interact with 300 million accounts anyway. So you want to be constantly curating the experience by getting rid of people you don't like and following people that you like. And that's just how, you know, after 10 years of using Twitter, you get, you accumulate a block list, which is very big, which I'm very happy for. I'm going to pass on to my children.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To try and salvage the idea that some people will continue to be able to print money and other people will have to use that money. This is Twitter. It's a free market. It's the internet. You don't have to follow anybody. That's the thing. So what I found really objectionable about the people who are so butthurt, always about Bitcoin maximalists is you don't have to click follow on people you don't like. There are 300 million Twitter accounts and if you choose to follow the accounts that say things that annoy you and then complain about the fact that He say things that annoy you, I'm sorry, but you're an idiot and you don't know how to use Twitter. Just follow the accounts that you like. You don't have to be part of this. You don't have to listen to those people. You can choose there are a lot of Bitcoiners that don't act like this. You can just unfollow the ones that you're like in Vlogs.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think also, you know, the stakes are extremely high in this situation. And I think if you don't like Bitcoin, The Fiat community has financed world wars and genocides and tyrants and the mass death and destruction. The fiat community, if you want to use that term, I don't believe you should, but I mean, you know, fiat has destroyed the savings of pretty much anybody who's lived through the last 20th century. Pretty much anybody who's lived through the 20th century, no matter where you lived, Switzerland, US, Ethiopia, Russia, you've gone through fiat problems. You've had hyperinflation. You've had bank confiscation. There isn't a family in the world today that hasn't had its wealth destroyed over the last century. They all have a story about the inflation and the hyperinflation. And Bitcoin offers us a way out of this. And shitcoins, altcoins are essentially fiat world's last gasp attempt to try and salvage fiat.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I've always believed life is too short to mince words. One day I'm going to be dead and I'm on my deathbed. I'm not going to look back and say I wish I was a little bit more circumspect in expressing my opinions. I'm far more likely to think, you know what, I wish I said what I really think.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say something along the lines of the Bitcoin maximalists are toxic, they're holding Bitcoin back and they need, and of course it's manipulative. The point behind it is they want to get to you know not that nobody with 300 followers who said something silly, they want to get the notable people to basically change their message. So the idea is, you know, I'm supposed to apologize because somebody with 300 followers I've never met in my life who calls themselves a Bitcoiner said a mean word and then I need to apologize and I also need to cut down on my rhetoric about other digital currencies and I need to do that so I'm only responsible for my own actions and I don't recall regretting anything”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely not. I'm not in the position to regret other people's actions. So let's just be clear. I think the rhetoric of community is, I reject this rhetoric because I think it's a way for kind of political manipulation and subversion to try and portray people as part of a community and hold people responsible for other people's actions, which I think is ridiculous. So some guy on the internet said something mean to somebody. And then this is very common. And I always try and not get involved in these things. So some guy who identifies as a Bitcoiner says something to somebody that's very wrong. Of course it happens. Tens of millions of people use Bitcoin around the world. And a lot of these, I'd say parasites, people who don't have anything productive to do with their life, outrage merchants, they'll come out and...”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, again, I'm not saying it's likely to happen. I'm saying I imagine less likely than all the other unlikely scenarios. Because even with a nuclear war, or half 90% of the planet is destroyed, the 10% continue to run Bitcoin.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but it would also require the US and the Europeans and everybody to want to join in this system in Syncumbaya and play nice with each other around the gold standard. I think, you know, given that gold already is about 10 times larger than Bitcoin, so it has a first mover advantage. Yes. If governments were to go and peg their currencies to gold again, the price of gold would shoot up five, 10x, and it would rise in value a lot more.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the most likely reason that it could fail. I don't think this is likely in general, but I think it is the most likely of all the unlikely things that could destroy Bitcoin is governments go back on a gold standard.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and also, I mean, let's also remember currently bonds nominally don't beat inflation. And in real terms, they don't come close to beating inflation. So currently, you know, with bonds, you're taking on credit default risk to buy a bond and also getting less money back in real terms. Well, Bitcoin doesn't offer you returns, but in real terms it appreciates much more, and it has, I believe, a lot less risk associated with it than any company or government.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Currently, people do that by holding a part of their portfolio in bonds. That's the part that they treat as their saving account. And then the rest they use for not speculation for investment in which they take risk. Yeah, speculation. And that's stocks and equity and other high-risk assets. I think Bitcoin is not going to replace equity. There will always be equity. There will always be companies and people will want to have equity. But it will probably replace a big chunk of current equity markets. Because right now, if you want to save, it used to be that you hold bonds. Now, if you want to save, you go into stock indexes. So I think Bitcoin likely eats a big chunk of equity markets because currently people are using it as saving. And I think it eats all bonds. That's my most... Ambitious thing”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always held this is the prize. This is the main dish. Gold is the appetizer. Bonds are the main dish. Because bonds have replaced gold appetites. Yeah. I mean, bonds have replaced gold in people's portfolio. People, you remember when we were saying gold was you'd hold it as a saving, as the secure part of your portfolio, and then you take risk with the equity.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then there's also national currencies, which are about 100 trillion, and then there's government bonds, which are around $120 billion. Sorry, trillion dollars, trillion.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's going to decline. So effectively, I think the end game is Bitcoin is huge. Bitcoin is worth something like I think the total addressable market for Bitcoin is not just national currencies and gold's addressable market, but also government bonds. That's the really big one.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Achieved that stability because it became the most salable good and so therefore became the good that contains the most cash balances in the world. And the end of the 19th century everybody held cash balances in gold and new production was a tiny little addition to global to the supply. So that's what made gold the most relatively, I shouldn't say stable because nothing is stable in economics, but relatively it holds on to its value and it's much less volatile than digital currency than national currencies. That's because it has the highest stock-to-flow ratio and that's because its supply is a tiny fraction of the liquid market. And as the liquid market grows, as the size of cash balances grows and trades in Bitcoin cancel each other out, you get only slight changes in value. So I think as Bitcoin matures,”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One person jumps from that to this small pool, they can make a big splash. As the pool grows, essentially the saleability increases and the likelihood of one individual purchase affecting the price so violently increases. And so over time, as the size of the market increases, I think we're going to see the volatility decline more and more. Ultimately, if you look at gold historically, gold has been very, very stable. It did not achieve its stability because the central bank was in charge of gold supply or because there was a gold committee that decided how much gold gets produced.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than 1% of the global money market. So there's about $100 trillion of money out there in the world, $100 trillion roughly of fiat, and about $10 trillion of gold. And Bitcoin is less than $1 trillion. So, you know, one rich guy decides to get into Bitcoin. That's going to show up on the Bitcoin chart. You look at it. Elon Musk decides to buy Bitcoin. You see the buy. You see the news. It happens and you see the pump. Elon Musk decides that he doesn't like Bitcoin. You see the drop. But a few years ago, it used to be that one random millionaire would cause that pump. Now you have to be the richest guy in the world to do that. In a few years, you're going to have to be the richest country in the world to be able to do that to the Bitcoin price, maybe many years, maybe not a few years. But as Bitcoin grows, think about it as a liquid pool of money. Currently it's a small pool next to a much larger ocean, which is the entire money market.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The options are you hold assets, which only go down stable, you know, relatively stable, not a lot of volatility day to day, the value of your dollar doesn't change 40% overnight, 20% overnight or something like that. But it does go down reliably. It's going to go down 40%. You can count on it. It might take a year, two years, five years, ten years compared to the things that you want to buy. It's going to go down by 40%. And it's not going to come back. And it's going to go down another 40% and then another 40% and then another 40%. So the option really is relatively short-term stability with long-term decline or short-term volatility with long-term rise. And so that's another way in which Bitcoin teaches people to have a low time preference and think about the long term. So stack accumulate and think of it in the long term. It's a function of the fact that Bitcoin is new. Bitcoin is currently less”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No denying there's a volatility and there's a high oscillation in the value in the short term. So I think the safe way to approach that is in terms of position sizing. If the volatility bothers you, then you're overinvested perhaps. So maybe you should reduce the size of your position so that the volatility doesn't bother you. This is the short answer. Stack as much as your conviction will allow you to tolerate the volatility. And of course the reason you should try and consider tolerating volatility more is”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, energy. Bitcoin is not competing with Portugal because Bitcoin is buying energy from places where we can't buy it because all the places where we can buy energy for our washing machines, we're bidding up the price enough to make it non-viable for Bitcoin. That's why you'll see those headlines about Bitcoin consuming more energy than Portugal. Well, if you look at Portugal, I mean, they've got giant power plants in Portugal. They've got millions of people and they've got enormous amounts of infrastructure. Where are all of this infrastructure for Bitcoin mining? You don't see it in the cities. It's all isolated. It's all out away from the cities. Or it's connected to grids that have serious overcapacity. So Bitcoin is not out there buying the expensive energy, taking energy away from people who can't afford it. It's out there buying its own energy because it doesn't need to buy the expensive energy that people really need.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's why it's very good. Instead of hating people for their religion and for their skin color, hate them because they support Manchester United. Exactly.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's great because I think obviously it's a very stupid thing to do, but I think if you don't do it in football, you're going to do it in real life.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he should win the battle on d'or this year. He probably should have won it last year as well. He's been absolutely outstanding. But, I mean, just people are so crazy about Messi. They keep giving him accolades. He hasn't deserved, I think, Messi in the last couple of ballonors that he got. I mean, he's a great player and everything, but no, he did not deserve it last year.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, he's been doing it for 20 years at the top. Nobody's ever done that. He's won everything everywhere, everywhere he goes, at the top, at the Champions League. Really strong argument to be made for him. And Messi's never done anything outside of Barcelona. That's the thing”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He does not need Yeah, I love Portugal. And even though I'm a Liverpool fan, I still respect Cristiano Ronaldo a lot. In fact, I hold a very unpopular opinion where I think Cristiano Ronaldo's the greatest football player ever.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, well, maybe we should shut down Portugal then. What the hell has Portugal given us? Obviously, it's not the beach.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only profitable miners are the ones who can get cheap electricity. Basically, if you're mining at grid cost, if you're mining at around the average electricity price in the world at around 14 cents, if you're mining at 14 cents in Bitcoin, you're most likely not going to make it. If you're running your miners at 14 cents, because everybody could mine at 14 cents. And so what happens is if everybody's mining at 14 cents 14 cents stops being profitable and then only the people mining at a lower price are profitable. So that's why Bitcoin mining is not competing with your washing machine. This is the absurd thing about this kind of energy scarcity viewpoint where, oh no, it's a catastrophe. Bitcoin is taking all the electricity as if the electricity is just one fixed buy that we all have to share and fight over. And this is how I keep making fun of these stupid headlines they put out where Bitcoin's consuming more electricity than Portugal.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put the load of the washing machine on the grid at the same time. There needs to be one power plant and all of the infrastructure needs to work at the same time and the electricity is pretty expensive because it's being done in a place with high demand. Bitcoin does not need to buy electricity from places where it has high demand because it can buy electricity from anywhere. This is what's truly mind-blowing about it. You can buy, you know, what you need to, the electricity that you need for mining can be done anywhere. So you can mine, you know, you can have a waterfall in the north of Canada 300 miles away from any population center. There's water falling. There's energy. You can put a hydroelectric dam there and then you can use that energy to operate the miners and then the miners just need a satellite internet connection and effectively you're selling that energy that is isolated to the grid. And because of the way the Bitcoin functions, because of the difficulty adjusting.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So fuck your washing machine Given a choice between my washing machine and my Bitcoin, I'll choose Bitcoin. It's a technology that has already saved my life, and I think it's going to save the lives of many, many, many, many more people. But of course, I don't have to choose between my Bitcoin and my washing machine because we're just constantly consuming more energy and we're going to continue to consume more energy in this world. And that's just what progress is. And a small remark. So in principle, I don't think this is a problem. But the other thing about Bitcoin, where it is different from washing machines, Bitcoin is truly unique in this. It's the only thing whose energy consumption can be produced absolutely anywhere. Your washing machine needs to be in your house where you live, and you live in a city surrounded by ten million people, and they all have their washing machines, and they're all connected to the grid, and they generally tend to do their laundry around the same time. And so you have to...”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and this is the thing, all of the people that complain about Bitcoin's energy consumption, I presume they use washing machines. Now, why should their desire for clean and dry clothes get to consume energy? And I mean, I used to live in Lebanon. Lebanon had hyperinflation. I escaped from hyperinflation. I escaped. It prevented My life could have been ruined by hyperinflation, and the reason that it wasn't ruined is because I have Bitcoin. So I don't know, am I allowed to swear on your policy?”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Countries that have reliable 24 hour cheap electricity. If your child is born premature, that you put in an incubator, put him in an incubator or her, they're highly likely to survive. If you don't have 24-hour electricity, that child is not going to make it. And you see it, the level of energy consumption per capita is highly correlated, not just to income, but also to health outcomes, to infant mortality, to all of the things that you care about. And Bitcoin is just another technology. It does consume a lot more energy than central banks. A lot of Bitcoiners like to take a cop out of this by saying, well, you know, central banks consume money and ATMs consume energy. And I think if you calculate how much central banks and banks consume, I think it's a rounding error next to what Bitcoin consumes. I think Bitcoin is just maybe not a rounding error, but it's still, Bitcoin, I think, is going to consume a lot more. And that's a good thing.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I should be clear, you know, it's not a quality of life in the sense that many people think of this as oh, yeah, well, you know, taking needless flights for vacations. No, no, these are the cherries on top of the cake, but the substance of the cake, the real benefits of energy is the fact that children serve premature babies survive.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what life is. You know, if you reduce the consumption of energy in the US to the levels that you have in poor countries today, the U.S. would become desperately poor. A lot of people would die. Cities would collapse.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Machines that spend a lot of energy. So that's what a telephone does. Instead of having to send somebody across the world to tell somebody something else or send a letter, a telephone allows you to do it. The car is like that. You could walk, but a car consumes a lot more energy, but it allows you to travel much faster and safer and more reliably. An airplane is like that. Modern telecommunication, human prosperity is an increase in the consumption of energy. And I think it is an absolutely criminal thing. And I genuinely mean the word criminal to portray energy consumption as a bad thing because it is truly depriving people of the chance to live a life that makes life better. It's truly criminal to tell poor countries that they should not consume the same energy sources that are being used in rich countries on which our modern infrastructure and modern life relies.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And I think it's an astonishing testament to just how far backward people's scientific and technological thinking has developed to the point where we think of energy consumption as a bad thing. I think it's just, and in the fiat standard I discussed in the whole hysteria around energy, and I think it's a product of fiat inflation because it's a way of trying to covering up the fact that energy fuels that are reliable and necessary for the current world are becoming more and more expensive because of inflation. And so governments are always looking for excuses for why you should not be using those things. And so they promote all kinds of stupid pseudosciences that tell you about why these things are bad. But really, you know, all technology is, well, not all, but the vast majority of technological innovations involve economizing on human time and judgment and replacing it with machines, with relying on”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, because it's worth it. The airplane uses a lot more energy than a kayak, you know, when you're going to cross the Atlantic next time, what are you going to take? A kayak that is environmentally friendly according to this insane definition? Are you going to take an airplane that consumes a lot of energy?”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As upgrades, and you know, they market this thing as well, Bitcoin can't upgrade, but we upgrade all the time. Well, yeah, you know what else upgrades all the time? Facebook, Apple, Amazon, anything that centralizes very easy to upgrade. And that's precisely why, as Michael Saylor says, these things are somebody's liability. They are security. You're carrying on somebody's technical and economic liability. They can hard fork, they can 10x the supply tomorrow.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but I mean, ultimately, again, it doesn't really matter how many nodes you have if you have, if the way that the currency is run is that you're going to have a hard fork every few months, which is the case with most other currencies. Bitcoin is the only one that's not have a hard fork. Basically, the unique thing about Bitcoin in a tactical sense is that you could get the original software that Satoshi himself ran in 2009 to start the network. you could run it today and it would sync with the blockchain. There's one bug you need to fix, one mistake that was only appeared, I think, in around 2013 or 14 or something like that, that he wasn't aware of back then. So you just need to fix this one tiny little bug. And then the consensus parameters are still the same. So you're able to sync to it. This is not true for most other digital currencies. I'd say probably all of them because they've all had many hard forks, which they think of.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the fact that with most digital currencies, you can have hard forks very frequently and they can change the supply all the time means that there's a small group of people who agree amongst themselves how to move forward”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With other digital currencies is that because basically Bitcoin has cornered the market on a digital currency, the only way that you can really get traction is to generate a whole bunch of buzzwords, but we're doing this and we're doing that. And so other digital currencies are optimized for bells and whistles and buzzwords. And that means adding a computational load, which makes the nodes bigger, harder to operate. And therefore, you have a very small number of nodes. In fact, very few digital currencies are keen to publicize how many nodes there are. And they don't have full nodes in the true sense. And it doesn't even matter how many nodes they have because de facto, you can spin up a million nodes tomorrow on AWS. Doesn't really matter. What matters is de facto do the nodes dictate the rules of consensus.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they invest all of that money. Based on the idea that if they behave according to what the nodes want, the nodes will reward them with Bitcoin. So the miners are in no position to dictate terms for anyone. They've put up their capital up front and they will only recoup it if they do what the nodes want. So therefore, what really matters is the decentralization of the nodes. So you want to have as many nodes as possible. You want to have a system where there's a large number of nodes. And this is, of course, the biggest problem with...”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One mining company that produced the majority of the machines that were on the network. And their allies had a control of the machines that were out there. And they controlled the majority of the hash rate. And they thought that they could change Bitcoin's supply, not supply, sorry, they could change Bitcoin's block size, which is a tiny little detail, technical parameter. It's not even all that big of a deal for the economics of it. But they thought that they could pass this change. They could force this change on the network. And the members of the network rejected it, and they weren't able to do it. So the nodes are what is sovereign. The nodes are what determine the rules of the game. The miners are a service provider. The miners invest capital up front. You know, they buy the machines, they buy the electricity, they buy the locations, they pay the rent.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The nodes are what matters because the nodes are what determines Bitcoin's consensus parameters. I think the best way to think about it is that miners simply sell a commodity to the nodes. And that commodity is Bitcoin blocks. So what a miner does is they solve the proof of work problem. So they keep operating their computers until they can get a solution to the problem. And then they attach that to a bunch of transactions and present it to the nodes for the nodes to ratify and approve it. So therefore, and this is, I strongly recommend people learn about the 2017 Loxize war to understand why miners don't control Bitcoin. I discussed this briefly in my Bitcoin standard, but there's a recent book that discusses this in detail called The Block Size War by Jonathan Beer. It's a great description of in 2017, essentially the miners thought that they could control Bitcoin.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very compelling, brilliant case for why this makes them categorically different from Bitcoin. Bitcoin, you're buying property.”
2022-05-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #284 – Saifedean Ammous: Bitcoin, Anarchy, and Austrian Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source