WBD230 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin Journalism with Leigh Cuen

Interview date: Friday 5th June 2020

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Leigh Cuen from Coindesk. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, I am joined by Leigh Cuen, a journalist and writer at Coindesk. We discuss the importance of journalism, Bitcoin as a peaceful revolution and the strict narratives that are held by Bitcoiners.

“When I say these things, the reactions I have had in the past that are most comparable, are when I was studying extremist groups.”

— Leigh Cuen

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: So you've had weirder years than this?

Leigh Cuen: I don't know if I'd say weirder, but equally weird!

Peter McCormack: Damn, this is definitely my weirdest year.

Leigh Cuen: It's a bad one, it's a weird one.

Peter McCormack: I've had bad years, I've had really bad years, but this is the weirdest one. What do you make of it all? Because the funny thing is you're a journalist and I won't put myself in a similar category as journalist as you because I'm not as professional. But I think when you're a journalist of any sort, when crazy stuff goes off you don't just stick within your lane, you're observant of everything else going on. What do you make of everything right now?

Leigh Cuen: Well you don't stick within your lane for your job because your job is talk to other people, but definitely, we all see a very clear perspective, and I think when something like this happens is when you start to realize how narrow your perspective has been. For a lot of people this felt really inevitable and they see this as a final straw.

While for others, they see it as a new thing, as if this movement has nothing to do with 2016. I covered the election in 2016, and for me this has just basically been deja vu for a few months, which is weird.

Peter McCormack: So you think this is a follow on from the election, this is all to do with what, Trump?

Leigh Cuen: I don't think this is all to do with Trump, but I don't think one man is the most salient point of the political apparatus that was the 2016 election and elections in general. This is a really complex system, so it's not all about Trump, but certainly Trump rose to power during a broader shift that we are seeing continue today.

Peter McCormack: So more about the uprises of power. I see that, and this them and us thing that's getting worse. The situation... Certain things have really stood out to me. The blatant stealing by people within government with the money printing, the insider trading people that people like Kelly Loeffler was doing that seems to just go un-investigated and unpunished. There's rules for one, rules for the other, you see it as a bigger thing?

Leigh Cuen: She's claiming she did nothing wrong. Do you think she did something wrong?

Peter McCormack: I think she definitely needs to be investigated. I think there's some massive coincidences going on there, which I find highly surprising if they are just coincidences.

Leigh Cuen: I think she's one of the most interesting figures in the crypto industry today, a former entrepreneur who has never publicly said whether or not she owns Bitcoin but circumstantially she ran a Bitcoin brokerage, it'd be a little bit silly if she never tried or didn't own any. She is one of the richest politicians in the United States today, hands down, there's no argument about that. If you look at her career before this and even before crypto, she was also very focused on political science, community involvement, this is not a spontaneous thing and she's been working up the local ranks in her local communities as well involved with all different kinds of organizations.

So you see a woman who clearly structured her career towards achieving political power and did so, and did so with economic power. I personally despise a lot of her opinions and disagree strongly with many, many of her views, but I think she's potentially one of the most powerful Bitcoiners in the world today, which is a crazy thing to think. Three years ago, if you were to talk about the most powerful politicians in the world today are potentially involved with our space and could influence the market, you would think we were crazy. We were just a bunch of random weirdos from the internet!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know. When she got that senator position I actually thought that was quite interesting, I didn't see that coming. But it wasn't just her, there was like four of them. She stood out to me because I knew her from being in the Bitcoin world, but there was like four of them who seemed to have done some very suspicious trading post meetings regarding coronavirus, and I certainly think it needs looking into.

Leigh Cuen: I think that corruption in politics right now is the norm and not the exception, so it would not surprise me if it was all of the above.

Peter McCormack: That's the problem though! That's why perhaps we have so much unrest right now is that the ruling elite getting to create the rules that end up suiting their own agendas supported by a brutal police state whereby everybody else seems to just... I watched this... Actually it's way off my radar of someone I would ever think I'd be interested in, but I watched a long interview yesterday with Steve Bannon. I don't care for Breitbart, I think they have an agenda which they get to push, but at the same time, the first half an hour of the interview he talked about how the ruling elite get to make money on the way up and on the way down.

He said, "This isn't a left or a right thing, this is the political system." It was really challenging for me to actually find myself agreeing with him. Luckily he did descend in some of the nonsense right-wing stuff later on, which made me glad that I didn't feel like I wanted to become a Steve Bannon fan, but he was fundamentally correct about what is happening within the ruling elite and political system. We have the Goldman Sachs alumni within some of the biggest most powerful seats in America.

Steve Mnuchin, I'm going after myself right now, is somebody who has routinely been involved in situations like asset stripping Sears, from his foreclosure machine with One West, and now he's the guy with the most important economics job possibly in the world. I think all of these things and actually I think you can throw other things in there. I think you can throw Weinstein in there, I think you can throw Epstein in there, I think you can throw not just the ruling elite of politics but it's also these rich fuckers who just to get away with a lot of stuff, and I think everyone's fed up.

Leigh Cuen: Peter, I want to ask you something.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, shoot!

Leigh Cuen: You live in a system where you feel that the ruling elite abuse their wealth and accrue more power, right? That's what you feel right now.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Leigh Cuen: Here we have this invention of uncensorable money, what makes you think they're not going to do the same thing with the new money?

Peter McCormack: Well it depends what they're going to do with the new money or what they can do with the... There are more checks and balances in place, so one thing we know they can't do is just print money. We know that's one thing they can't do, which is great, which is cool, which we know it's a good thing. Can they accumulate more Bitcoin just hypothetically in a hyperbitcoinization world, say there's no fiat money anymore, there's only Bitcoin? Can they accumulate more of it, and therefore exert more power and influence over people?

Of course they can. I don't think Bitcoin solves every single problem and I don't even know if a Bitcoin world's better. I think there's certain aspects of it that are undoubtedly better, but is the route of the problem just the money printer, or is the route of the problem human greed, manipulation, power? I tend to think it's more the latter.

Leigh Cuen: Yeah, I've become a little bit obsessed with this over the years. What's the problem? I think the problem is us, but I don't think it's our biology because so many different factors we act so many different ways. I think that we've created systems that encourage this kind of misbehaviour and mismanagement, and the question is how to change systems? That's much harder than removing a person.

You can blame a person, like all journalists are evil, all conservatives are evil, whatever, and say we should just get rid of them, but then somebody else will be the next scapegoat for the reason that everything is going wrong. Maybe there are good people within all of these groups that aren't doing the right thing because that opportunity isn't as accessible to them, and how do we make that opportunity more accessible to them? I don't know the answer to that.

Peter McCormack: Well there's flaws for everything. There's flaws in politics, but there's flaws in journalism. We're jumping around here a bit, but in the U.K. at the moment, we only have one US news channel really on Sky and guess which one it is?

Leigh Cuen: That's still one too many. American news is so bad!

Peter McCormack: But if we want to find out what's going, if you don't sit in front of the TV and watch a bit, guess what is the main channel we have?

Leigh Cuen: Is it Fox?

Peter McCormack: It's CNN. I've been watching it going, "Hold on, this isn't news, this is an anti-Trump channel." Once you realize it's an anti-Trump channel, you see the lens through how they report everything. Look, I don't have a horse in the race here. I have my things that I like and don't like about Trump and the republicans, same about the democrats and I can be pretty impartial. I was watching it with my son last night, and I was saying to him, "Look, we have to be very careful watching this.

This isn't independent fact-based news, this has a lens of being very much supporting the democrat party, anti-Trump, anti-republican." I had to try and explain that to him. So we have systematic problems that go through politics, money, finance, business, journalism, media, there's problems everywhere and I think these riots are highlighting all of it.

Leigh Cuen: So I know a few of the people at CNN, not a ton. The people I know are actually really freaking good at their jobs, so I wonder how is that the brand overall is producing so much bad content when it's so competitive to get in there? I know that they have some qualified people for sure and there's a lot of reasons why as a journalist, you might produce a piece that you're not proud of or that you think is very clearly biased.

You're being hired by a company for them to use your voice to project the message that will make them money and bashing Trump is a really profitable message. Promoting Trump is also a very profitable message. We have Fox news as the equivalent to CNN.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course. I think the thing about CNN, I think some of their investigative work has been kind of interesting. There are some bits I've liked. There's that guy, is it Don Lemon? But see, my problem is him and he seems to go off on these rants that are very much politically motivated. I get it now, I see it, but someone like my son could see that and think it's news and it isn't news.

Leigh Cuen: So I think most people don't understand the different kinds of journalists there are, and Don Lemon is a pundit. He is hired to express and represent an opinion. I am not a pundit. I might do opinion columns sometimes, sometimes I write opinion columns, but every opinion column has been a rare occasion, a very specific occasion and it's not something that I do as my profession.

Joe at Bloomberg, Joe Weisenthal, would be an example of someone who is also a pundit but is a lot more unbiased, he's a lot more scientific in his approach. That's okay, both of these people make their companies money, and their audiences love them both or they wouldn't be there.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I don't know. I guess for me, I'm just seeing across the board Leigh, everything seems to be a bit of a mess.

Leigh Cuen: It is a mess!

Peter McCormack: Have you seen the Darren Aronofsky film Mother?

Leigh Cuen: No, I haven't.

Peter McCormack: Okay, do you know Darren Aronofsky? He did Black Swan.

Leigh Cuen: Okay, yeah!

Peter McCormack: I think he did Black Swan and Pi. He's done this film called Mother and there's a give a bit away of the plot here, but it's worth seeing. But the whole film's set inside a house and you essentially see the complete breakdown of society from inside this house. It's a really interesting film. When I watched it at the time, the first time I watched it, I was like, "What the fuck did I just watch," and anyone else who's seen it is going to be nodding now if they're listening to this. They're going to go, "Yeah, I know exactly what you mean Pete."

I had to watch it again, and ever since then it's one of those films that's really stuck with me. A lot of people don't like the film, but I actually really like it because it stuck with me because things happen in the world and I'm looking back, I can see the part of that film, which is happening right now which is violent protests, which is police brutality, which is break down of society and which is people not giving a shit about each other.

I'm not saying everyone, but the film perfectly represents what is happening right now. It's like every situation, it just keeps getting a little bit worse, a little bit worse, and I'm trying to think where are we going to be within a year? What's going to happen in a year? Are we all going to be still on lockdowns? Are we going to have even more surveillance? Are we going to have even stronger power from the police? More people are going to be out of work? Where is this all heading? I don't know.

Leigh Cuen: I have zero ability to predict a year from now, which is weird and scary sometimes because I used to think I knew what I wanted to do for a few years, and now the world changes so dramatically month to month or week to week even. But I think that you're noticing something that's there, there's definitely unrest, and there's tension. You were talking before about it being unfair, and whether that's a problem of us or that's a problem of something else.

I became really obsessed a few year ago reading studies of different primates, and it turns out if you put two monkeys next to each other and you give one a banana, you train them both to do a thing and you pay one with a banana and one with a cucumber, the monkey that got the lesser deal will get really upset. If you give the other one two bananas and him only one banana, he'll get really upset. The idea of unfairness making us upset is very innate, it's ingrained in us.

We think about Jane Goodall, the scientist who's very, very, famous for her groundbreaking work studying primates. Later on in her life, she realized that one of the problems that she had with her earlier studies is that the primates behaved completely differently when her camp moved closer to them with the bananas in order to study them because now they went from a food source that no one controlled to a controlled food source that they were fighting for access to.

There was all this aggression, and the chimps were fighting and waring. They thought they were witnessing something that was organic, but they realized that it only would start when they would start controlling the supply of wealth, which is for them bananas. In some ways that can make us really hopeful about Bitcoin, as the idea of reducing the control on wealth, reducing circumstances in which we would be aggressive, but we're not sure whether that's actually how things are going to play out because they are just so many other factors right now. Bitcoin is a small, small, small part of the broader economy and the broader system.

Peter McCormack: We'll come to Bitcoin because there are some things I want to ask you about that, and I actually found your interview with Marty Bent very interesting. Also, I've always enjoyed the fact that you will challenge standard thinking, and you'll take it on the chin and go with it. So I do want to get to that, but even before I get to Bitcoin because I don't subscribe to the Bitcoin fixes everything theory, I don't.

I think Bitcoin can do some really important things and lead to important changes, not even just in Bitcoin itself, but the mindset of when you learn about Bitcoin, then you go down these other rabbit holes that make you really rethink life etc. But I don't think everyone subscribes to that and I don't think everyone will subscribe to that. I don't think it fixes everything and even if it does, it might be a multi-decade thing and we have problems in front of us right now.

Leigh Cuen: Yeah, for sure.

Peter McCormack: Also, sometimes even personally, I sometimes wonder, am I helping the problem, or am I making it worse? I even challenge that.

Leigh Cuen: That's really healthy. It's really healthy to question yourself because I all the time, don't know whether I'm doing the right thing, you've just got to keep trying your best.

Peter McCormack: All right, listen, look before we get to the Bitcoin stuff you worked on this book Cypherpunk Women, I do want to ask you a bit about it. So I've skim read some of it, and some of my favourite people are in there. What's the background to this? How'd you get involved?

Leigh Cuen: There's a lot of different kinds of content that don't make sense for a journalistic platform or for a non-fiction book. Laura Shin, for example, is working an amazing non-fiction book about the crypto industry. Camila Russo worked on an amazing book about Ethereum, certainly with a different perspective than I have, but it's good that someone's out there writing and trying to share information. But there's just so many stories that you only really need 30 seconds to understand this person's perspective, the value that Bitcoin has to them, the way they used it.

You don't need a full article, you don't need a full novel and all these different people have wildly different experiences with Bitcoin. So I wanted to give people a space to express the way that they view Bitcoin in any format. Not only non-fiction, not only an art piece, although some did do art pieces, just here's blank canvas, do it and I'll give you feedback and not let you embarrass yourself. Feel free to go wild! The result was the anthology.

Peter McCormack: Yeah I'm going to tell you my favorite bit, I'm just going to dig it out. But were there any particular patterns you found?

Leigh Cuen: Well yeah, these are all Bitcoiners, so a lot of them believe the same things that a lot Bitcoiners believe that is this is a store value, that this is going to change the world, that this is a cypherpunk technology and there were some people that disagreed with some aspects of that. The other day I was interviewing someone, and he described Bitcoin to me as a volatile security, but that works as a money transmission software.

I was like there are so many things in that sentence that are not usually what I apply to Bitcoin, but I can see where you're going with it, and for you that's how you use it. So there are definitely patterns, there are people who agree with each other on what Bitcoin is, but there's also people who don't agree with each other at all about what Bitcoin is. That's okay and that's great. I think that was the most surprising thing was that I interviewed Bitcoiners a lot, so I would come to questions thinking I might already know the answer, and the answer would be something that went a little bit to the left or to the right of what I expected.

Peter McCormack: Interesting! I'm going to read you my favorite bit, and it was right near the start. But it's with somebody I've had on my show before as well, which is Allie Eve Knox, which I know you're a big fan of hers as well. The reason I really like her use case as well is because it isn't about speculation and number go up, blah, blah, blah. I just did an interview with Ragnar where he was talking about we seemed to have got away with this idea of Bitcoin solving problems like censorship-resistance problems, which I know isn't popular and a lot of people just want hodl, hodl, hodl.

ut I love this bit where she says, "Bitcoin for me hasn't been about shit posting on Twitter or flexing my maximalist muscles. It hasn't been about shitting on all the coins and projects in the space either. It has strictly been about getting in paid in a safe and quick manner." I'm like, that makes so much sense because it is solving a problem now. There's seems to be these two sides to Bitcoin, there is the shit I can't do because the government won't let me or because I get censored by banks even though I'm doing something legal and you're solving a problem, then there's this big broader idea of taking down central banks.

Now the second one I'm not... I know you got into that with Marty Bent and as much people want it to happen, I don't know how easy it is or whether 100% it can happen. But I do know right now, sex workers can use Bitcoin to get paid, people in foreign countries can use Bitcoin to buy things that maybe are deemed illegal, I was able to use it to buy cannabis oil for my mother, people are able to gather round what are moral judgements, moral laws by government, to do the things they want to be able to do, and that to me is really cool because that's solving a problem right here, right now.

Leigh Cuen: It is solving that problem right here, right now. The question of whether it will continue to be able to solve that problem for how many people it will be able to solve it for? Because the government doesn't like being evaded, the government's not like, "Oh thank goodness, you found a way to reject the things we've been trying to enforce."

So when Bitcoin finds a hole to fill, the government will come and try and remove that functionality. The question of if Bitcoiners can continue to diversify and outpace the government as certain use cases become more difficult, is the question of whether Bitcoin will continue to have censorship-resistance.

Peter McCormack: I think you can add to that how usable it is for people broadly and how much also people really care. Someone like Matt Odell or Marty Bent or Shinobi really fucking care and I love it, and they get Bitcoin to a level that I never will and it's really amazing to watch. But is that going to be a 1%, 2%, 10% of people? Will that ever become 50%, 60% of people learning how to use Tor or CoinJoin and things like that?

Will it all be abstracted away? I don't know. But what I'm saying is it's very obvious that we have government overreach, it's very obvious that we're treated terribly by our governments, it's very obvious the money system's completely corrupt and fucked. Yeah, I think a lot of...

Leigh Cuen: Are we treated terribly by our governments though? Are we really suffering? There are people who are suffering at the hands of the government. I genuinely don't have an opinion, I don't know whether or not we suffer more in lawlessness or more under law. This is a question actually I grapple with.

Peter McCormack: Okay, again that's a separate point, and I want to talk to you about that as well because I've gone down that libertarian rabbit hole but never become full libertarian, but like a lot of the ideas in it. But never actually got to the point where I think will it be a better world, will society be better? I don't know, I'm not there yet. But what I'm saying is, I don't know if enough people will ever care that much about Bitcoin. I want them to, I want them to care like I do and I tell all my friends all the time, I post it all my shows on Facebook.

Leigh Cuen: That's evangelical though. I also talk to people about Bitcoin. Is there anything else in our lives that we're like, TV shows maybe, you're like, "Oh, I love this T.V. show, it's so great." I've never gone up to someone and been like, "PayPal is amazing. You've got to try it."

Peter McCormack: Oh my god, PayPal is the shit!

Leigh Cuen: I actually don't like PayPal at all.

Peter McCormack: It can be useful. But the point being is I've doing this show for what, three years? I can't even remember now. Say it's three years and every one of my friends know I have a Bitcoin show, every one of them. Everybody knows there's two shows that come out, well actually, I don't post them all on Facebook, but the most interesting ones. It's like, "Oh, have you seen the Social Network? I've got the twins that are in that, that you might find this interesting," or like a more broadly interesting show.

I wouldn't put an Andrew Poelstra one say up there, nobody cares! Well I say nobody, maybe one in a hundred will occasionally get in touch and say, "Tell me about this Bitcoin thing." So we've got this problem is if we want this Bitcoin thing to take over and solve a lot of problems, we've still got a problem...

Leigh Cuen: Do we want it to take over? Do we want Bitcoin to be the dominant currency?

Peter McCormack: Good question. I think I do. I think I want a small country to be the test first.

Leigh Cuen: I don't know if I do. I would like Bitcoin to continue existing. I would like it to be usable for me, and I would like it to be popular enough and widespread enough that it is usable for me; a money that's is usable. But I really enjoy the opportunity for recourse in the banking system. I like the idea of having money that is not controlled by software that I can't...

Peter McCormack: I get what you're saying. It's like if someone steals your credit card, you can get the money back and you don't have to manage a private key for your entire wealth. Look, I get that and I'm with you, there's benefits to both parts of the system, which is why some of my wealth is on a hardware wallet and some of my wealth is in a bank. I get both. What I'm saying is if Bitcoin was say a dominant currency which naturally enforced a little bit more responsibility on the fiat system and the banking system, that is possibly a good thing.

Leigh Cuen: So if the people that have a lot of money now are using it corruptly and you want to investigate them and that's a hard thing, having a very dominant currency that would make it harder to investigate them, how would that not have negative repercussions in addition to the positive repercussions?

Peter McCormack: Good question! Are you asking about fraudulent use or you asking about monopolistic powers?

Leigh Cuen: So, both. I didn't cover the story in particular, so I'm definitely not an expert on it, but if I recall correctly, there were Bitcoin transactions involved with Russian groups that were reporting propaganda in the American election 2016. Do you remember that story?

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Leigh Cuen: So that's a real-world result and that is a real-world use case. I'm not sure I enjoyed having my family's homeland subject to the manipulation that so much money moved at once without permission can reap, all that chaos. I don't think that was the only factor that got Trump elected, but it certainly was one of the factors and that's just one.

Peter McCormack: Was it that influential though, and without Bitcoin, would they have been able to find another way to do it anyway?

Leigh Cuen: Without Bitcoin, they totally would have found a way to do it anyway. I don't think that Bitcoin is uniquely dangerous. I just think people think that the only ways that someone else will use a tool is the way that you want to use a tool, and it turns out that's not it at all.

As it's still so young and we can make design choices and we can make ecosystem infrastructure choices, we want to think about how it is that we can make it more difficult to use it, in ways that harm people or make it easier to use it in ways that help people. These are both subjective terms and are really challenging to work with in an open source environment.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I guess what percentage of transactions within a financial system is criminal, nefarious use and should the rest of us face a poor choice of money options, surveillance to try and protect us against that?

Leigh Cuen: No, certainly not. Our methods of trying to curtail negative usage have failed. So what we need to do is not limit Bitcoin, it's not like, "Oh, Bitcoin is the danger." It's think about how do we make it easier to use it in these good way? Because if it was easier for journalists to produce unbiased high-quality work, I bet you a lot more people than do today would do it.

But the system makes it hard, so how do we make the system make it easier to make good choices with Bitcoin? This is a question I don't know the answer to, but when people say, "Bitcoin will X, Y, Z," it's like, no, no, no. Humans will, and how they use the Bitcoin will determine what happens after that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah I see where you're going. I think we're talking about multiple different strands at the same time here. Let's keep it back to the money. Bitcoin is a dominant currency, over fiat within a country, what are the implications? I think the Bitcoin idealist would say that is if you have better money, you have the reduced the ability for the government to print more money which protects your own wealth as an individual, which creates a...

Leigh Cuen: Bitcoin requires electricity at this point. So are we imagining a world which mesh networks are possible, or one in which the government can just turn off a neighborhood? Because that happens.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well okay, again, that's another separate point is how would a government fight back against a potential for a currency taking over that isn't controlled by the government? Definitely want to ask you that question, but let's just hypothesize that we get to a point where Bitcoin is a dominant currency, what are the implications of that?

Does that create a better financial framework to operation within? Is that better for business, for individuals? Does that make government more honest? Does it solve all these problems that we have with the state?

Leigh Cuen: I don't think it makes people more honest. I don't think that the...

Peter McCormack: Does it change the game theory?

Leigh Cuen: It totally changes it, the problem is it doesn't change the people that are playing it, right? So it won't make the politicians more honest that they stop printing money, they can just have another way that they administer access because that's what money is giving you, it's giving you access to freedom, to resources. So if they stop printing money, then they do something else. There's plenty of history of corruption before money printing, but there's not a great history of urban, diverse, thriving, economically equal societies.

There are some, not a lot. What we're saying is it's going to be this rare niche case, which is hard to say, what says it's a fair society. To who? We're expecting the best possible results instead of thinking maybe the problem isn't the money printing, the money printing makes it easy. So okay, we'll make it harder to make bad choices, and that's a good thing. That's a very good thing.

So it's a positive outcome, but will it remove that? No. How do we make it easier to make good choices? Because if you remove the possibility to make bad choices, but you don't necessarily redirect the system in another way, then how can you make any guess where it's going to go? Your scenario is a better world, but the question is how to get there? That's the really pivotal question, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we're talking about incentives here, the incentive structure.

Leigh Cuen: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Responsibility for our own money, the relationships we make, the products we produce, who we do business with, how we do business. The layer on top of that is whilst you still have a state, so what difference does it make to the state? We know, for example, that if the state runs at a deficit they can print more money. We know that and that can lead to inflation and also that can lead to the debasement of our own wealth and creation, so we know that.

So if a particular country moved to having... I think the interesting point would be a country starting to use Bitcoin as a reserve alongside gold. We know that's not essentially the first step towards this, but does it change the incentive structure of the government? I guess the incentive structure of a government only changes at the point whereby the fiat system is no longer the dominant currency.

Leigh Cuen: There's a long way from here to there.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and is it doable?

Leigh Cuen: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Because you debated it with Marty. Remind me, is that you don't believe that the government will roll over so easily?

Leigh Cuen: I think it is highly improbable. It doesn't make it impossible, but highly improbable, because there are so many factors that have nothing to do with it being a good technology. It's a great technology, fabulous, but there are a lot of different motivations, incentives, and players that have nothing to do with whether Bitcoin can do the job. People will protect broken systems that they benefit from or that are convenient for them, even if there's a better option available to them. Is that a pessimistic view on people?

Peter McCormack: Well no, I don't disagree. You only have to look at what's happened over the last couple of weeks, especially I think quite interesting to just observe what has happened at the White House. So day one there are police stationed at the White House while there's demonstrations. Day two, three, whatever, it goes from police to military police, to the army, to dispersement of crowds, to now I saw yesterday barricades being put up.

So that there could easily be an analogy to the barriers and the defense that could be built around a financial system. The White House fell under threat, they put an army around it, then they put barricades around it itself, which by the way, was really fucking surreal to watch that the White House is being defended from its own people in such a way, and people who have no weapons being defended so heavily by people with weapons. But I think that is... Sorry, you're better at this. Is that a metaphor or is that an analogy for what could happen for the financial system?

Leigh Cuen: It can be both.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but so if the financial system which is under threat which is protects the government, what is the military police that gets put around a financial system? What are the barricades that put around the financial system? Is it that there becomes limitations put on the use of Bitcoin as we saw in China?

Does it outright get banned at some point? What does that even mean? Does that push it underground and it becomes this cypherpunk nerd talk because you know you can't get rid of it? You can make it illegal, but you can't get rid of it. So how does that play out?

Leigh Cuen: What do you mean?

Peter McCormack: Well, what is your belief? Your belief is Bitcoin continue to grow, that the government will essentially put in policies or rules or things to stop people using it or restrict it.

Leigh Cuen: We've seen that happen already. We've seen this happen.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but how far would they go? How far could they go, and what would the reaction be?

Leigh Cuen: I am really scared and sad to even guess because what we've seen so far isn't great. We see people who are imprisoned, who lose their livelihood, passing laws against Bitcoin or usage in certain ways so that it's really risky. I'm thinking specifically of in countries where Bitcoin is really, really useful, the risks become higher and I don't think that's desirable. That's not something that I would like to see because people suffer in the meantime.

Peter McCormack: Do you think then certain Bitcoiners maybe have blind spots around this?

Leigh Cuen: I think most Bitcoiners have no idea what the word freedom means.

Peter McCormack: Okay, expand on that.

Leigh Cuen: So I'm really happy for them that they care about it, they've just never not been free.

Peter McCormack: Well that's broad because we have Bitcoiners in all parts of the world. Can you focus on what you specifically mean?

Leigh Cuen: I mean people in some ways that are like me, affluent, upper-middle-class, educated, who have access to computer science tools and financial services, and who can tweet things that make people angry and not fear for our lives. We have consequences, there are certainly consequences to choices, freedom is not the absence of consequences, but when people get really excited about the idea that they're going to be able to make any choice they want, it's assuming that all the people around you aren't going to be enforcing social norms.

You're always going to have some kinds of restrictions. The question is, what is the accountability structure, and what is the incentive structure? There's no happy anarchy world in which everyone makes all of their own financial choices with no influence and no input from someone else because that's just not how people live in close quarters.

Peter McCormack: No, that's fine, I'm following you. But therefore, do you think that leads to blind spots or...

Leigh Cuen: Yeah, totally agreed.

Peter McCormack: I see it when you go on and you see people debating on Twitter saying almost any defensive, any form of state is statism therefore everyone should be fully an-cap because that is the ultimate form of freedom, which I fully understand that defense.

Then people talk a bit about, well Bitcoin is the ultimate... It's like a peaceful resolution, every time you stack stats you're taking power away from the government, and if we keep doing this then eventually we can bring the government down. Do you think that's naïve? Do you think that's brave? A bit of both?

Leigh Cuen: Yeah, I think trying to bring down a government is usually naïve, sometimes it's also brave. People have done it. Look, it's not as if Bitcoiners are the first people. Most rebel groups don't live into their old age, there are some who do, and that is what fascinates me. What fascinates me are who are the people that break social norms for what they believe to be moral and ethical reasons and live to tell the tale.

Most pirates, for example, during the heyday, what we consider the heyday Pirates of the Caribbean died because they were caught. There are some who weren't, who were those pirates, and why were they so successful? There's a really great example from the China seas, where she was sex worker who hooked up with a pirate, and then when he died took over his ships and grew the fleet to 70,000 pirates. It's one of the biggest fleets that's ever been that's not a nation-state army and they actually negotiated with the government to stop piracy, the government paid them off to stop, and then they lived a happily ever after.

How does that happen? Because for most people if you think about different terror groups, they think that they're doing the moral thing in overthrowing the government. They genuinely believe that's the right thing to do, but it does not usually end well for them. So I'm really fascinated with the idea of how do people live happily ever after and still not follow the narrative that was scripted for them?

There's so many open questions and I don't know how it is that Bitcoiners will be able to answer that, but I hope that many people who use Bitcoin think about these things as well. I hope they have long, happy, healthy lives that are also effective and feel morally satisfying to them.

Peter McCormack: See this is why going back to the anthology, that's why the anthology is so interesting because as I travel the world or even say dating and you meet somebody, and they're like, "Well, what do you do?" And I'm like, "Oh, I have a Bitcoin podcast," and they're like, "Oh, tell me, what's Bitcoin." The really interesting thing is...

Leigh Cuen: That's the reaction you get? There's people who don't know so much anymore?

Peter McCormack: I still occasionally meet people who don't know. Especially if you're single and you're dating, one of the first questions, "What do you do for a living?" It's like, "Well I'm a podcaster," "What's it about?" It's like, "Bitcoin," they're like, "Oh, I've heard of that. I don't fully understand it." That's usually the response, then I think, "Yeah, I don't fully understand it either." Then trying to explain what it is I think you have two choices, you explain it from your own bias, so you might explain it like Bitcoin is freedom money, it's censorship-resistant, it's seizure resistant, it's the best form of money the world has ever seen, it's the hardest...

You can do all of that stuff. But actually, one of the most interesting things is where you start to find and going back to the anthology, is that it gives the people the ability to find use cases for them. So my use case for Bitcoin is sometimes to get paid and it's a savings technology which I use to stacks some stats and put away for the future and bit of speculation. A handful of times in my life, it's been censorship-resistant, so I've been wanting to buy things which I can't buy in normal use cases, and that's my use case. It's a very tough sell to turn on somebody and say, "It's a new form of money to take down government central banks." That's a really tough sell.

Leigh Cuen: I don't think people should try and sell that moral. That sounds like recruiting for a political cult. No, I don't tell people that.

Peter McCormack: But a lot of people are doing that.

Leigh Cuen: Yes, they are, that is correct. It's like the book Dune with the free men.

Peter McCormack: Is that the one... Would I have seen the film about?

Leigh Cuen: Yeah, there's a film of it.

Peter McCormack: The space one?

Leigh Cuen: The good guys are also the crazy guys.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but that's always the way! So what's your thesis then? Going back to yours, I know you explained it earlier, but what's your Bitcoin thesis?

Leigh Cuen: What do you mean? My thesis on what Bitcoin is?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, what is it? Where do you think people could most benefit from using their time into promoting Bitcoin? Because again, going back to my interview with Ragnar, he said in the early days Bitcoin was a payment technology, and the Silk Road was a use case.

He said, "I've got a use case right now," he's a gun man, he's a big gun guy, and there's companies who can't get funding who for whatever reason with the fiat system can get funded with Bitcoin. He's like, "We should be pushing censorship-resistance." There is the hodl thesis that challenges that. Some people even say that you shouldn't spend Bitcoin. He made me rethink that. Where's your thesis?

Leigh Cuen: So Bitcoin is money, and there's a lot of things you can do with money. Some people say they're smart, some people they're not a good use of money. I don't think that you're morally obligated to use you Bitcoin in a censorship-resistant way, it just makes more financial sense to use other kinds of money when you can because at the moment it's easier and cheaper. But if there's a time when it's easier or cheaper to use Bitcoin, then why the hell not? It's money, you can spend it, you can accept it, you can invest it, you can do all the things that you would do with money.

For me personally, I am terrible with technical devices and computers, and I am not that great at speculating on the market, so I don't use it for the purpose of trying to make investment choices in other blockchain projects. Other people I know they'll buy it because they want the trade. I have no idea what would be a good trade for me, a bad trade for me, that's not useful for me. I found Bitcoin for me helpful when I need to transact when I'm traveling or working internationally.

I do that a lot, and it's really a pain in the ass to carry a bunch of cash with you, but it's only useful for me when the other person is willing to transact with me in that. So this is why for me it's beneficial if more people think Bitcoin is valuable because then I can use it as money in more scenarios, but it doesn't mean that I want people to have some kind of Bitcoin cult in the way that I don't want anyone to have a dollar or a Shekel or a Euro cult.

I want them to know where the value comes from, and that includes understanding how corrupt the government is, the value of my dollar, and then I want people to make choices that make sense based on the risks and the opportunities with that currency. There are some risks to using Bitcoin that don't exist with the dollar, being traced back and associated with a certain kind of computer accounts or things like that, but there are opportunities that don't exist with my dollar. So I just think it's money, and I want to use it, and I want to use it and live happily ever after. So this combination of things is my focus.

Peter McCormack: What was it like, because before you were writing about Bitcoin and money, you were writing about the sex industry, right? Are there equally controversial topics to write about in the sex industry, and how does the reaction to your content you were writing in the sex industry compare to say the Bitcoin industry?

Because one of the things I've noticed is that you'll dive into some topics sometimes controversial, sometimes subjective, and then there'll be this tidal wave of bullshit that comes with it. Whereas whether you're right or wrong is irrelevant, it doesn't matter your subjective position, as a journalist you're obligated to go out and look into things. How does it compare? How do the two industries compare?

Leigh Cuen: There's a lot in common in the fact that it's very relationship-oriented industry, small groups of people that own some of the well-known companies. But also it has a lot in common in the sense that there's a ton of freelancers and entrepreneurs that are flooding in and really changing the power dynamics in that industry because you just have to think about the way media's distributed and how that influences the power. When porn was only done on film then you needed to be able to have a film studio and someone that's going to print those physical copies and distribute them.

Now that really anyone with a smartphone or a laptop can record erotic content, and that really certainly you want better equipment for better quality, but anyone can, that entry barrier and you don't need to rely on a distributor. You could have a Twitter account and get clients directly that way, there's a totally different power dynamic. People don't recall that actually still most of the people that own porn companies, traditional from the 80s and 70s and stuff, are all men.

There are some women, and that's starting to change, but can you imagine there's an industry which one group of people is selling work predominantly made by another group of people to their own... There's so much exploitation that's accessible and easy and has no accountability in that kind of scenario. As we see the power shift and more people be able to directly transact peer-to-peer, we see still there are some people that are mistreated, but so many aren't.

So many are having a great time, so many are doing exactly what they want to do with an educated choice about how it is their content is distributed, what kind of content they want to make, what kind of clients they want to work with, how they want to work with them and that's been incredibly empowering for a lot of people. When I think about how that compares to Bitcoin, I think Bitcoin has the potential through enabling peer-to-peer transactions that don't rely on essential gatekeeper to empower a lot of people and to help people empower themselves.

You don't empower someone, they achieve it for themselves. So this is really, really good on both angles. On the other hand, both of these topics make people very emotional. Sex, power, and money make people very emotional, and myself included. So you see people react. If I write about a restaurant opening up, I've done all different kinds of writing, nobody is going to be writing in letters, tweeting about it...

Peter McCormack: "Fuck you. What the fuck are you on about?"

Leigh Cuen: Yeah! The interesting thing is who ends up getting upset, because a lot of times people get really upset when you say something that's positive about something they dislike, and they accuse you of being really biased. When you say something positive about something they like, then you're completely unbiased. So in both of these beats, you have a lot of high emotional stakes among your readers, so in these ways, I think it's also very similar both the sex beat and Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: So you've had similar reactions to your content in both industries?

Leigh Cuen: I wouldn't say that in the sex industry I had as harsh a reaction. When I was transitioning into that beat, I focused for a while on research related to Gamergate and different groups of extremists that were harassing sex workers and other women as well, not only sex workers. But I was specifically focused on how they were finding and targeting sex workers, and the reactions to those pieces were very comparable to the reactions to pieces I get about crypto.

When I say these things, the reactions that I've had in the past that are most comparable are when I was studying extremist groups should tell us something about what's happening around Bitcoin. That doesn't make us feel guilty, that just means that we should definitely look to actively promote more positive and less fanatic aspects because we don't want that narrative to be the dominant narrative of Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, see that's interesting because when I do the Defiance stuff I touch on different subjects, and there's anything from North Korea to knife crime in Scotland, whatever and nothing I do drives as much as a reaction as the Bitcoin stuff, and from people I think I'm on the same side of as well.

I'm thinking like, "I'm on your side, and you're going fucking crazy at me!" But I've seen you take some particular harsh flack and some particular aggressive responses from people. Firstly, are you ever writing a piece thinking, "Oh, shit. This is going to trigger some people."

Leigh Cuen: Weekly!

Peter McCormack: Yeah? When you're publishing it, are you like, "I think I just need to go for a walk after I hit submit," because you know the torrent is coming?

Leigh Cuen: I have to say I wish that I didn't care, but no, I want to be correct. I feel embarrassed when I make mistakes, and I do make mistakes all the time. So when I publish a piece that I know is going to be controversial I actually want to be there at the computer for a few hours because if somebody points out something that is genuinely wrong, and there have been times that people in very rude and aggressive ways pointed out things that were genuinely wrong, I want that fixed as soon as possible.

So a very controversial piece means I'm actually... Which is not what most journalists do because it's a pain in the butt, and we shouldn't expect most journalists to do this, but I look for the criticisms because I'm trying to think, does this match up? Do I need to reassess something? I'm really big on corrections. I think part of that just comes from being a less technical person in a highly technical space.

I know mistakes will happen, there's no way to do my job without them, so I need to instead of thinking of that as a wrong thing that happens like, "Oh, this means I failed." I'd be like if I proactively find all the things to make it as correct as possible, that's the success as opposed to having no feedback.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but that's the fact-checking side, and I'm with you on that. I'm not technical myself. I did a whole interview with Andrew Poelstra recently and honestly I would say I understood about five minutes of the hour of what he saying. I had fucking no idea, and that's fine, I'm cool with that. But that's the fact-checking side, I'm more interested in the side where you're delving into maybe subjective ideas, which isn't about facts, which is about opinions because I think it's important. One of the things, I don't know if you noticed my ongoing thing about nodes? Have you followed the nodes and node-gate?

Leigh Cuen: I didn't follow why everyone was upset. I know that people were saying whether or not you're a "real Bitcoiner" depending on whether or not you run a full node right now.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well apparently I'm attacking Bitcoin now. So quite a long time ago I said "Look, just to tell you all something, I don't have a node. I never have, I don't understand it and I don't know if a node is a wallet. I just don't get it and to be honest, I'm happy with my hardware wallet, and I don't really care." A lot of people were really upset, it's like, "Oh, you should really care about this," and that forced me to make a show.

The value I think in doing this is you get to explore an area, so you get to explore nodes, the incentive model arounds nodes and why is it such a small percentage of people have them when it's seen as so important? So I see that as an important thing to do, yet there will be a portion of people who forever will meme me on that. They'll be like, "Well he doesn't run a node," or "He doesn't know what he's fucking talking about." Yet at the same time, a topic has been opened up, a conversation has been opened up about the incentive model and why people aren't doing it, so I see it as an important thing to do.

Perhaps the tactics aren't always right, but I think it's an important thing to do. But it's very tiring where people consistently miss what you're trying to achieve by having the conversation rather than the point itself. I'm assuming you have similar when you're going on particularly challenging subjects?

Leigh Cuen: Yeah and to be fair, not all my opinions are correct. I feel a little bit on Twitter and social media and these places exhausted with constantly performing my gender, and it's not something that I do in regular life. In regular life, I'm not always bringing up women and the fact that I'm a woman, and the fact that women exist and might have a different perspective on that. But I found that a lot of times when I was in these spaces I would be one of the only women and so I would notice other people reacting being offended by something or being spoken over, whatever, and because you're already the odd one out you don't want to be like, "Oh by the way, I differ here."

So by all the time just being like, "Hey, I differ here," so many people all the time DM me and write me being like, "Thank you so much. I need a group, I feel more comfortable expressing myself" or whatever, because they're no longer seen as "Oh, that extreme Nazi feminist," like feminazi or whatever, because in comparison to me at least they sometimes they only... The Overton window is really important in these discussions. There's not a lot of real diversity in the discussions about Bitcoin when there is so much diversity in the usage and in the infrastructure building aspects.

It's not reflective because the people who are loud make the people who are quieter just don't want to deal with that. So if you prove that you can be yourself and still be involved in Bitcoin and not need to constantly be biting your tongue and not only biting your tongue but pretending basically because you want to be liked for yourself, you want to be accepted for yourself, you want people to work with you for who you are and not who they want you to be.

So I hope that all those messages and emails I get continue to be the case, but I definitely don't think that I am some role model who has done it right. I'm just making this up as I go just trying to be myself as I go. Like okay, this is me, this is what I think, this is what I feel, this is how I do my thing, and how do I do that without offending people who view the world very, very different way?

Peter McCormack: Yeah but again, that's where I find it tiring. I'm not a journalist, I'm someone who works probably in the field, but I'm not a trained journalist, I was an ad man.

Leigh Cuen: You do some really good work though.

Peter McCormack: Thanks, and I've done some really shitty work, but you just figure it out as you go. But I know I'm in that field. But the question I put to you, can you name me a journalist who has work which is universally loved by everyone?

Leigh Cuen: That's a really good question. I think Christiane Amanpour is not considered controversial. She's liberal, so there are conservatives who don't like her.

Peter McCormack: The CNN...

Leigh Cuen: Yeah, but she's widely respected for the work that she did earlier in her career, some of the war reporting and no-one can say she's not a badass, and no-one can say she doesn't put her money where her mouth is.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and she's interviewed everyone from the Pope to Maduro, but she won't be universally loved.

Leigh Cuen: No, of course not.

Peter McCormack: That's the point. I think, is it Matthew Taibbi? The guy who works for Rolling Stone? He's pretty good. The point I'm trying to make is that there is nobody who's universally loved as a journalist because as a journalist you're meant to peel back the layers of uncomfortable subjects. If 90% of Bitcoiners believe that you should and have a node, and then 10% aren't, well what is that 10%? Let's go and have a look at that reason, let's dig in.

That's what I think the role is of a journalist is to peel back those layers, and I think it would be help if people understood that's what journalism is about. It's about asking uncomfortable questions, it's about going into those niche subjects that you might agree with, that might make you feel uncomfortable, but that's the point. I think if people understood that, they would maybe therefore debate the point rather than attack the journalist.

Leigh Cuen: I'm not sure if that's true because a lot of times I'll have people in interviews tell me like, "I don't want the story to be about that. I don't want to talk about that topic," and I'm like, "That's fabulous for you, but unfortunately, this is important information. So you can say 'no comment' or we can be vague in certain ways, but we can't just avoid the topic."

People know sometimes that's what you're coming for in terms of hoping to abide and improve the conversation, and they want to very specifically influence a conversation to happen only in one way that benefits them. They get very upset if you in any way falter from the orders that they're giving. So either they don't understand what a journalist is or they do know what a journalist is but just believe that they're all-powerful. I don't know.

Peter McCormack: Maybe. I was thinking more about the receptive audience who maybe you'll tweet out something that you've published on CoinDesk, they'll see the headline, they'll see the topic, and because they don't agree with it, they will attack perhaps you rather than debating the point.

Leigh Cuen: Okay, so this is actually very normal though. So I think one of the best things I ever did in my career and it was such spontaneous thing, was I took a class about conflict psychology. It was a workshop even, not even a full class. It was a very limited workshop about conflict psychology, and it turns out that whether you're talking about a husband and a wife arguing about who did the dishes, or you're talking about a Palestinian in Israeli arguing about who killed someone, people say very similar things about the person who's on the other side from them. They do several things.

First off, the other person is deliberately causing harm, and they know the harm they're causing and are doing it anyway. It's not because maybe they might say greed or something as a generic motivation, but there's no motivation that is not nefarious. The motivation is nefarious, and they're intentionally doing something wrong, and people tend to believe that when they feel offended. Another thing that they love to do, and I do this too, is when we're offended by someone, not only did they do it on purpose, but it's a pattern of behaviour.

You will look into their history or into other areas of their life looking for a pattern of behaviour that proves they are nefarious while the person who is accused of the wrongdoing believes that their wrongdoing was an isolated incident and a mistake. They believe that there were complicated circumstances that led to something they didn't want, and they were right in choosing the lesser evil that they did in the circumstance they did.

So these are the two different mentalities that people think. So they're actually not even... If you can start to understand why it is the person did what they did, then you stop thinking so much that they're nefarious, but if somebody sees an article trashing their favourite coin they're like, "I'm upset. This person clearly has it out for me and is incorrect, and is wilfully ignorant."

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I guess I should look into that and I should take a look into that myself. But I don't know, I like journalism which asks uncomfortable questions, and I think we're going to see a lot more of that over the coming year. There's going to be a trial coming up for four policemen in the US, and some really uncomfortable questions are going to be asked, I don't think around the main suspect, I think it's pretty clear what he did, but I think some uncomfortable questions are going to have to be asked about the other three and how complicit they are.

Some journalists will just take the very direct approach of saying all four are guilty and should be prosecuted. Some people might have to ask some very uncomfortable questions about what about the guy who had only been three days into the job? What did he know? What did he understand about the situation? They're uncomfortable questions that have to be asked, and I think the job of journalists is to ask uncomfortable questions.

Leigh Cuen: Yeah, the point is not to make your subject uncomfortable and the point is not because you want to cause someone harm. The point is because these uncomfortable questions need to be discussed with as much identified bias as possible, as opposed to everyone thinking that they don't have a bias. So then you need a third party to come in and ask all the different people involved what's going on and try and come to what are things that we mutually agree on.

That's what journalism is. It'll be so funny to me that people will talk about the same statistics to me like hashrate or whatever, and they'll say the same numbers, but they'll describe them totally different like, "This is really good, this is a bullish thing for Bitcoin, this is fabulous, this is great." The other person will be like, "This is terrible, this is awful, blah, blah, blah, blah. This other thing is so much better." First, we need to figure out what are the things that we can all agree on, and then we figure out how we interpret them, and that's a journalist's job.

But it can be really uncomfortable for people to think about the fact that their opinion is not God, that other people's opinion might also be valid, and I'm not excusing myself from that. I think about a time I'm offended by someone, someone really, really, really offends me. "I'm convinced he did it on purpose because he's being a sexist asshole. I am convinced that he's done this before and I think about this..."

It takes time to calm down and try to remove that and be like, "Okay well, all of those things are not true, and this person did not intend to cause any harm and has a logical, ethical reason for why they did what they did." It can be risky to be like, "Well then, my logic and my ethics which are so different, are they the ones that are wrong, or is he?" The answer sometimes is that neither is wrong, we just both came from completely different viewpoints.

Peter McCormack: Well, I love your work Leigh, you know that. I'm always chatting to you, I'm always reaching out to you. It's not that I always agree with you because I don't. Sometimes I really don't agree with you, but I always like the fact that you will... I think you're quite brave in going after subjects and particular subjects. I commend you and I support you.

I think the standing you've created for yourself in the Bitcoin world is because of that. I know not everyone agrees with you and sometimes... What is that thing? What's worse than being hated or what's worse than being talked about is not being talked about at all. You might be polarizing, but it's because you're challenging people, and I think that's the right thing to do.

Leigh Cuen: Thank you, I try!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I think you should continue doing it. All right, well listen, look, it's Friday night here in the UK, I'm going to go and have a drink with my son. We should do this again but in person next time. Hopefully, flights will be going again!

Leigh Cuen: Yeah, for sure.

Peter McCormack: Hopefully I'll be back in New York and see you again soon. What's coming up, what are you working on?

Leigh Cuen: So I've got a couple pieces filed that I think are actually really important and let's see how I describe them. One deals with crypto and the Middle East and the other is more related to Bitcoin. I have another few pieces related to different parts of the Bitcoin economy, so how people are spending it or using it, I think those are really nice. I'm very lucky that I get to write about Bitcoin all the time, it's pretty fun. I think in June we'll see some pieces that I'm pretty excited about.

Peter McCormack: Well, I'm looking forward to seeing them. Tell people how they can follow you.

Leigh Cuen: If you just literally Google Leigh Cuen CoinDesk then my author page will come up. That author page is where all of my articles are, so you can always just check it once a week or something if you miss something that I posted. On Twitter @La__Cuen.

Peter McCormack: I will put it all in the show notes. I've actually got your page open now.

Leigh Cuen: Awesome, thank you so much! This was really fun.

Peter McCormack: It was great! I've not touched almost any of the subjects that I wrote down to talk about, but we've just jammed on some ideas, but I don't know, I feel a slight affiliation with you because I think we both don't follow the full hardcore Bitcoin narrative and...

Leigh Cuen: Heretics, we're heretics!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and because of that, we get challenged or maybe we're just outside that inner circle of the most hardcore Bitcoiners. I'm happy to be there, I like to create challenging content, and I like to ask difficult questions. But I feel an affinity with you when the mob comes in.

Leigh Cuen: Thank you, appreciate the solidarity!

Peter McCormack: Listen, you know I love everything you do, take care, I want to see you again, it's been a while. Stay safe, and see you soon.

Leigh Cuen: Thank you!