WBD231 Audio Transcription

Microsoft’s Bitcoin-Based Identity Tool with Daniel Buchner

Interview date: Thursday 28th May 2020

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Daniel Buchner from Microsoft. 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 talk to Daniel Buchner, Head of Decentralised Identity at Microsoft to discuss how a Bitcoin-based decentralised identity system works. We also talk about libertarianism, coronavirus and the protests over the death of George Floyd.

“What we most care about is entering stuff in the most immutable, hardened record imaginable, and right now that’s Bitcoin.”

— Daniel Buchner

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Daniel, how are you man?

Daniel Buchner: Great! How you doing?

Peter McCormack: I am doing well thank you. Good to see you again, a year since we first spoke. I've got loads of things I want to talk to you about. We can talk about Bitcoin and identity and Microsoft, but there's also other crazy shit going on I want to talk to you about. But let's do the Microsoft stuff first. Some people wouldn't have heard our first interview because it was a year ago and my show's grown since.

I think it's quite fascinating that you, as this kind of an-cap, libertarian is within Microsoft doing the Bitcoin thing. So let's give a bit of a background to the people who wouldn't have heard that before. Just explain what it is you do in this secret dark world of Microsoft?

Daniel Buchner: Yeah, absolutely. At Microsoft I work on decentralized identity, that's a subset of identity where people should be in control of all aspects of that, which is like their identifiers of data. That work started a while back at Microsoft. I worked at Microsoft in the earlier years, before Google Chrome was around and we kind of believed in their ethos of free and open web.

Throughout working in my position in Mozilla, I sort of fell in love with the idea of decentralizing both identity and applications. It was something that I started working on there, and actually got the ability to transition over to Microsoft and work on it full-time. So that was sort of the tail of that.

Peter McCormack: Where are we in the world of identity now? Because I, myself, have got various identities online. I have a Facebook identity and a LinkedIn identity and a Google identity, now I've got an Apple identity, which seems to be slightly better than the previous I've just suggested. Where is the world of identity now, and where is it headed?

Daniel Buchner: I think right now, we've had the same identity systems really for quite a while, in terms of consumers. We've had [Inaudible 00:05:19], we've had social logins, that sort of thing for a while. I wouldn't say stagnated completely, but it hasn't changed very much. A few providers of identity really are who you get your digital IDs from, that you log into all your applications and services online. Those IDs are primarily leased to you, whether it's an email address or some other form of authentication, like an app's user name.

Even your Twitter handle, for instance, as we know is certainly leased to you. These are identifiers that can be taken from you at any time for any number of reasons, whether it be a social provider who doesn't like what you wrote and you're suspended or it's removed or maybe a company just goes out of business. There's been email addresses for various companies that just, they go out of business and you're done. If you don't get your stuff off there in time you lose access to things.

That's all well and good while your identifiers are tied to things like your cat pictures that you want to post to Facebook and everything. It's all fun and games until someone says, "Well we're moving everything to a digital world" which we will, just like we don't have paper mail, we have email now. When those things happen, proofs like, do you own your car or the deed to your house, all that stuff, when that starts getting digitized and tied to some identifier, man, you really better be an identifier that can't be taken from you at a whim by either a company or some bad actor because that would be pretty scary, in my opinion.

Peter McCormack: If I was to get banned by, let's say Facebook. If Facebook was to ban me for whatever reason, say they didn't like my podcast, they didn't like my content, does that mean I would not be able to use the Facebook login that I've used for say a number of websites? I suddenly couldn't use that?

Daniel Buchner: Yeah that's the reality today. They're going to cut you off from these systems and they've done it in the past. I think there's people who we know who have disappeared from Twitter all together and they just make up the rules as they go along and sometimes they're applied unevenly and unfairly. I just don't think that we should have anyone really in control of people's digital self. We should be in control of that. So I think the model should change to be something where you own your identifier.

Let's just think about it as a Twitter handle. Even though it's not a friendly little name like that in technical speak, just think about it like that, like a handle. You should own that handle. If you want to happen to log into Twitter as an application or you know Facebook as an application, sure they can curate messages that you happen to post with that application, but they can't cut your ID off from existing in the world, all the connections you've made and friends you have.

Those connections shouldn't be severed from you. I would actually even go so far as to argue though in the long-term, that even your social posts and things you do, actually should be your own. Those apps should more or less be a reflection of what you post yourself and data you retain.

Peter McCormack: So is this some ways taking us beyond just the idea of a decentralized identity more towards a decentralized web?

Daniel Buchner: Yeah, absolutely. Microsoft's not the first company working this certainly. Even my work earlier on in Mozilla wasn't the first entrance into this stuff and I've partnered with a ton of people over the course of this. There's lots of people who are interested in doing it, but really fundamentally you're right. This is about decentralizing the web. The only way to do it successfully is to decentralize sort of the original sin, which was the identity piece.

We don't have any native identity today, just like we don't have any native digital currency, as Jack talks about, when it comes to Bitcoin. Those two things primarily, more than anything else, will realize benefits in the decentralization of society that we have never seen and it all starts sort of at the ID. If you don't own your ID in the world, nothing is really attributable to you.

You can't really have a verified presence in the world. Like if you're getting scammers impersonating you all the time on all these channels, it's really hard. You deserve to have that presence in the digital world, just like you are a person in the real world.

Peter McCormack: Well yeah, I've got it with Instagram. They've got this same person, every couple of weeks they create a new account, they replicate all my posts, they then start following my friends and they try to sell them a Bitcoin mining operation. They succeeded at least one case I know. So my neighbour, who lives opposite of me, he's a kid. I didn't even know he was listening to my podcast. He's 18 years old and I bumped into him the other day because he goes running in the park. I bumped into him, asked him how he was and he said, "Yeah, I've been listening to your podcast."

He was a bit coy and he said, "Yeah, I've got scammed recently." I said, "Oh why? What happened?" He said, "Oh, somebody added me on Instagram. I thought it was you, I was talking to you and I paid £3,000 pounds into a Bitcoin mining operation." It was like, "What?!" You're talking, what's that? Like $4000 nearly. Every single time I report them and they close it down, they come up with a new one. One time they actually banned me and let the scammer continue and there's nothing I can do about it. Can you believe that? They actually banned me.

Which I had to go then go through somebody I know at Facebook to speak to somebody at Instagram to get my account back. But I can't stop this! I know it's not just happened to me. I think I saw either Cameron or Tyler Winklevoss say on Facebook the other day he's going through exactly the same. I'm guessing if I had a single identity attributable to me, people would be able to verify that themselves and they would know.

Daniel Buchner: Yeah, even independently of any of these organizations. So even if they don't play ball, if you assert your identity and it's backed by strong cryptography, someone browsing an application on the web could validate it themselves. I think that's what we really want to empower people to do, is remove this pressure point from gatekeepers because a lot of them are not even incentivized to care. Unless you're at the highest levels, unless you're like the president of some country or something, maybe they'll put a special taskforce on it to take care of it for them, but there's no money in it, in a lot of ways, for many organizations.

Now for other organizations and I'll give you a little clue about why Microsoft might be interested in all this, because it's not all just about being a good person and doing the right thing. Think about things like LinkedIn. LinkedIn actually is about trust. LinkedIn is about, I browse someone's profile and I'm trying to find out what their resume is. The whole point of looking at this resume, hopefully, is that this is relatively accurate information. So when people put out scam type profiles, it hurts LinkedIn.

I know this happened, my wife works at Yahoo, which is now Verizon and a while back I think they had a CEO that managed to get into the CEO position and a good portion of his resume was completely fabricated. They just took it at face value, I suppose and they didn't look into it. This guy ends up leading the company and he's a CEO of a major company, this is hilarious! There's no reason why these things can't be validated and verifiable.

Peter McCormack: That's an amazing story! But wider than that, why is Microsoft interested in this? Because what's the value to Microsoft in working on this?

Daniel Buchner: There's a number of things. There's a lot of things you just can't do an identity safely unless people own their own IDs. There's actually some legal strictures to this like in various locales, public institutions are sort of prohibitive, or it's very difficult to get them to assign a digital proofs or digitized things to identifiers that are centralized. So they can't find moneyed special deals with say just LinkedIn or just any email provider, or something like that, that might have a specific integration. It actually unlocks the ability to do a lot of different things, like do digital diplomas at scale, to do credentialing for skills and stuff like that, at scale.

In a way that's also standardized, like right now, it's just like people can issue these badges, there's different badge protocols. But it's pretty ad hoc, there's no real systemic way of find them and verify them and it's kind of a mess. So in order for us to unlock a ton of business opportunity in LinkedIn, in other investments we've made, things like GitHub and all these other things, you have to have users owning their own ID. It can't be a Microsoft-owned ID or it's just not safe to do these certain use cases.

Peter McCormack: Also with that, what is it about Bitcoin... I know this stuff can be done on Ethereum and other blockchains as well, but just specifically, let's just keep it to Bitcoin, because that's what my show is. What is it about Bitcoin that enables this to make it possible to create these IDs?

Daniel Buchner: I think it helps understanding, like people think, "Why are you even doing anything with Bitcoin or any blockchain at all?" I think it helps to understand like what does an ID system gain from a blockchain? Because there's lots of bullshit going around about people using blockchains for all sorts of nonsense. I would actually harken back to what Satoshi first called Bitcoin before it was blockchain, which was timechain. It turns out that PKI, which is public key infrastructure and that's like the thing that backs identifiers. I'll give you an analogy of what one is today. An existing example is the DNS system.

The identifier is a domain name and then the backing PKI data is your zone file in DNS that lists your named servers, routing information, then there's the certificate of authorities that have the sort of the backing cryptography. So that's an example of a PKI system. Every PKI system, if it isn't centralized, like a system where they just kind of decree that this users is usurped, if you want to decentralize that, the most important piece is having a global immutable append-only log, because everyone needs to see the state of some identifier. Like if Alice creates an ID and she initially associates, say her phone that she has at the time with her ID and a public key on it, when she goes to get a new phone, she's going to switch that key up.

So everyone needs to be able to see that event, globally and deterministically, or else someone could masquerade as Alice. They could say, "Well, I have her old key so I'm her." You have to have this sort of linear chronology of what happened when, it's a state machine. So what a blockchain does, really elegantly that we never had before, is it's an oracle for entering events into a chronology. That's exactly what we use it for. In its most primitive sense, we use Bitcoin to enter in events in a chronology that nodes sort of watch for and compute so they all can understand the state of every ID that's anchored in Bitcoin. So it's very important. So why would we pick Bitcoin versus some other blockchain, like you first asked?

Well because we're not actually concerned with any of the super sexy smart contracts, interesting... Whatever you might call it. Not to say that there's less interesting stuff in Bitcoin, but we just don't care about features like that, that is not applicable for us. What we most care about is entering stuff in the most immutable, hardened record imaginable and right now, that's Bitcoin. It's pretty hard to argue that isn't Bitcoin, so that's why we use it, is because it has those attributes and it suffices, it does exactly what we need it to do.

Peter McCormack: Okay, cool! What's the status of the project right now?

Daniel Buchner: So when we spoke last March, basically we had done a few months, really quick sprints to do a prototype to kind of prove out that the basic parts of the protocol, which is the scalable, DPKI, an identifier system that layers on top of Bitcoin, kind of like Lightning layers on top of Bitcoin for money. That turned out well and we were able to learn a lot from that. In the last year, we've really been just trying to actually produce this in a production quality.

It's gotten to the state where we're pretty confident of it, and we want to move it to Bitcoin mainnet, and that's exactly what we're doing, as a beta. This beta we expect to last over summer and we hope to get into a V1 final form in the fall. But this is kind of the real deal, this is where it's an open public network. We don't control anything about it, in terms of there's no authorities or anything in the system, we have no special privileges. It's going to be live on Bitcoin and anyone who runs a node and uses the protocol can be a part of it.

So it's a little bit out of our hands at this point. It's strange for some of the people internally at Microsoft to think about it like this. A lot of these folks have never worked on decentralized systems before, so the idea that like we're just contributors to something and it sort of exists without us, is very new, I think, for some of the people in the organization. But it's been an experience.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so in terms of the DevOps end, and bear in mind, I'm way off anything remotely technical, but is there like a central, GitHub repository that someone or some group of people are responsible for? How does that work?

Daniel Buchner: Yeah, absolutely. So we are the main contributors to the code at this point, but it is in the Decentralized Identity Foundation's GitHub depository, ION is the name of it. So you can contribute code there, you can read every line of code. There's no code insertions after the fact, like every bit of every piece of code that we run, as an ION node, is there. So it's totally inspectable.

It also has a formal specification we've been working on in DIF, where you should be able to follow the protocol specification per use, a node that works and looks just like the reference type script implementation we've done. So we're trying to do everything we can to make sure that this protocol is sort of... It's not some special thing that we have special knowledge about. It's something that's completely open.

Peter McCormack: Okay, in terms of usage, because adoption will come down to usability, how does it actually work in terms of me as an individual? Look, I'm a Bitcoiner, and I've got Bitcoin. Is it I can have, what? One ID per private key I have, that can become an ID, so I could have multiple IDs?

Daniel Buchner: Yeah, so you can actually have as many IDs as you want in the system. You could have thousands for instance. Actually, there's this concept that we kind of play around with that is, you're going to have probably a couple persona IDs, so well-known persona IDs. This is great for someone like you. You want a couple IDs in the world that people know are Peter, like when Peter signs this with this ID, that's Peter. It's not anyone else, it's not any scammers, imposters, that's him. There's a lot of public stuff you'll tie to that.

You might tie your resume, your podcast, like signed statements you make, like public things you say. That's all good, we all want that and most users want that. Then you have a ton of identifiers, like maybe 99% of them, that we call peer-wise or pairwise identifiers. Where you might meet someone, or a company or an app, you get engaged with, where you want to create an ID just for that connection. So that when you create the ID it keeps that connection sort of silent and private between you two, so you're not leaking information.

So it's not just one ID that signs everything and anytime you see any signature you can like triangulate it back to you. What we're trying to do is section those relationships out so that you can keep them as private as you would like between you and your counter parties. To answer your other question about how many keys and stuff, DIDs are an international standard that's being finalized in the W3C.

So this stuff is actually all built on standards, DIDs are represented by this thing called a DID document, which is just a piece of metadata that contains key references and routing endpoints. You can have as many keys in that document as you want, you have say, like a key that maps to your phone and your laptop and other devices you own, because that's the devices you're going to be using your ID with. You can have a bunch of different keys, so it's not like Bitcoin addresses, where there's like a key behind an address or even just multi-sigged, you can have a lot more variety than that.

Then you can also put endpoints that point to certain things. So you can have an endpoint that points to your Twitter profile or you can have an endpoint that points to a personal data store with encrypted data. That's kind of the more future-looking stuff, when we start getting into apps.

Peter McCormack: Will I have some interface for managing all my IDs because it will come down to usability for adoption long-term by the general public, someone like myself. I'm sure the techies will get on with it fine, because I'm kind of imagining stage one is going to be a little bit like when we first got Bitcoin and it was command line. I'm assuming early days are going to be almost like command line interfaces. But at some point, I would want something like a one-pass or a Dashlane where I can just manage all my IDs in a single location. Is that coming? Is that coming now or is that coming later?

Daniel Buchner: Yeah, actually so there's going to be some announcements here about what we're doing to try and help that, which is we're integrating DIDs into our authenticator app called Microsoft Authenticator. If you're familiar with like Google Authenticator or some of the other things, right now it handles 2FA and it's got like your passcodes for your 2FA stuff for apps. We're adding the ID supports so you'll be able to get DIDs. We're not even like up-levelling the content of the DIDs so you don't have to be super technical, it's going to just get IDs for you when you make new connections, help you manage those keys instate.

We're going to be doing everything we can to augment that process to make it as easy for the average person as possible. I just wanted to say, you don't have to get our wallet. The cool thing about the DID system we're building on Bitcoin, you can have an opensource wallet that you go download and all the libraries, everything to create these IDs is completely untethered from any company. So you could say, "You know what? I don't trust you Microsoft, screw you! I'm going to go get this like completely opensource GPL3 thing that I see out there on GitHub and I'm going to run that" and that's perfectly fine. In fact, we encourage it.

Peter McCormack: Do you think this could stop SIM-swapping?

Daniel Buchner: Oh yeah, it has the potential too. I mean if carriers were able to tie your account to a DID or something hardened, literally an attacker would have to physically come take from you, just like they would have to take your Bitcoin, absolutely! I don't think we have this sort of transient ID problem where it can just be like one button push from an operator on their end switches your account.

Peter McCormack: In terms of using it, sorry, I've got loads of these little kind of questions, I think I asked you this last time when we spoke, every time I want to verify an ID, does something happen on the Bitcoin blockchain? Therefore, do I have to pay some kind of transaction fee?

Daniel Buchner: No, so one thing that's interesting about this, is when we talk about PKI systems, and I'll use the analogy of DNS again. You don't have to go changing your DNS records when you log into Facebook, right? You change your DNS records very infrequently like when you want to move an IP address. So much like that, the system of DIDs, like maybe when you get a new phone you want to swap out the public key that was on your old one for the new phone.

So it's a very infrequent activity. So when you go to do authentications, like if you authenticated into an app your DID by signing a public and private key challenge based on the ID, none of that actually touches Bitcoin. In fact, it doesn't even touch ION, the ID system that we're helping to build, that is completely above. That's like once you have your ID and you want to use it, you would go onto the website and the website will assert to you, "Hey, please log in." You would say, "Well, I'm DID123" and what the website's going to do is say, "Well, I don't believe you. I'm going to look that DID up.

I'm going to find the keys that I know are associated with it." When it does, that look up doesn't incur any Bitcoin cost or anything like that, they're just finding cache data and they say, "Great, I have the keys. Now I'm going to sign something and you're going to be able to answer this challenge if you truly own that ID." So that entire activity happened at a third layer like well above, it doesn't touch any blockchain stuff at all.

Peter McCormack: Cool, so it is kind of like a better version of two-factor authentication, right?

Daniel Buchner: Yeah, a better version of two-factor authentication. It gives us an opportunity to do things potentially in the future, better underpinning for things like DNS. It is a global registry, at least ION has the ability to be and I know that sounds scary, it's a global registry of IDs, but when I say registry, what I mean is, every ID in ION is, you know at least the identifier. You might not know anything else about the ID, you don't know that it's a person or a dog on the internet, or anything like that. But you know the ID and the keys. So if you ever ran into that person, you could at least like say, "Hey, prove you're you."

Anything else, any other data that you'd want to expose has nothing to do with ION or Bitcoin. None of that is embedded in Bitcoin. That's completely off and on regular infrastructure. It's up to you what you want to disclose. So when I say registry of IDs, it's mean that ION essentially provides you the ability to iterate over every ID that's been entered into the system. This is pretty cool and it has some interesting applications. One application that I like to throw out there that Devs might resonate with a little bit is like npm, which we just bought.

We just bought npm, it's part of the GitHub family of products and npm is a centralized registry for developers to be able to register packages and packages of code that they use to kind of bootstrap their apps and get going faster. That's great and npm is a great service, but it is centralized. If they want to eliminate your packages, if they want to view anything, they could do it.

What ION provides you the ability to do is you can create identifiers that aren't just for humans or companies, you can create identifiers for intangible, non-living things, like a package. So instead, I can go get a DID for my package and I could put the service endpoint to point to GitHub. From there, I can go scan ION and find all the packets and all the IDs in the system that declare themselves to be say packages and create a decentralized version of npm where I'm no longer reliant on npm happening to exist or to believe my packet is worth indexing. I can create that index myself. I can present the same sort of UI you would see on npm, but I don't need a centralized identity in the middle of that.

Peter McCormack: So when is it out? When can we play with this? I probably won't because I imagine the first version will go above my head! When is this out?

Daniel Buchner: So we're making the announcement first week of June. It's going to be in beta stage, and it'll be running on Bitcoin mainnet. We have a node up, we've been writing some test transactions in the blockchain, for any blockchain spelunkers out there, who want to dive into some OP_RETURN data. It's an open protocol, so anyone can run a node, we made the requirements pretty light. By the way, running a full node is something that is absolutely important, critical if you want, even maybe even more so than money.

If you wanted to spend a little Bitcoin and you threw it out there as a couple bucks, five bucks or whatever, you might not care, you'd be like, "All right, I'm just going to use a light wallet, throw it at some node that I know, or whatever and I'm going to let it go, I think it's going to go through." You could do that. But to look up the IDs in ION, you have to have a full node, you've got to have the index of history. So in fact, we're going to be spawning a new reason why people will want to run full nodes, because it actually provides you concrete value you absolutely cannot get any other way. So running a node for us, it's a priority that anyone be able to do it.

So our target hardware has been this little 2017 Intel NUC that I bought for $400, back three years when we started this. This thing is pretty underpowered, it's like a 2017 i5, it's got six gigs of RAM, a half a terabyte hard drive and we're running this thing at full scale, as fast as you could do, even our Azure blades or anything like that. You could run it at home right under your desk! Part of that is running a Bitcoin full node, IPFS, and other things, so anyone should be able to get it started.

So we're putting out the install guides, there's docker containers for quick install and all of that is coming out next week. We're really wanting to encourage people to install and help us, especially if you're technically capable, or you're a coder or have some aptitude. Kick the tires on it, let us know, find bugs, this is for everyone! This is a public utility, we're not trying to make money on this at all and so just help it be the best it can be.

Peter McCormack: It's still kind of crazy that a company like Microsoft is working on decentralized IDs using Bitcoin. When you just say that, when you just try and walk that through, it's kind of insane! You might not be as drawn to this, but I'll ask anyway. What are the feelings with Bitcoin around the people you work with? Is there a general kind of acceptance and like about it?

Daniel Buchner: I'll be as honest as I can be. Not everyone I work with is into Bitcoin, I would say the majority aren't. They don't care, they're product people, they want to get something done. They do understand that there's one system out there that's just stood and just embattled the test of time. So that parts like sort of empirical; you can't really argue with that part. There are believers among the people who do believe in Bitcoin.

But I'd say the majority, they believe in decentralizing. The reason they believe in it, is for all the things it does, not necessarily how we're doing it, but what it does. What it does for people, what it enables for the business, all sorts of other stuff. I, of course, personally believe it being a censorship resistant and tamper-evasive as possible. So that's the reason why I heavily encouraged us to go this route. But it becomes a humanitarian thing and it's hard to argue with.

Like you could go set up some private permission blockchain or something, but that's only as decentralized as whoever is running those few nodes that gets to decide everything. My point is that... I don't know, that's not really something we're interested in because it's not significantly differentiated from the centralized identity systems we provide today. It's just not something that might be good for people, to get people involved in a system where they could be shut off.

Peter McCormack: Yes, I think that's a fair point. Okay, so there are some other things I want to talk to you about, but if people are listening to this, how do they find out more about these IDs? Where do they go to?

Daniel Buchner: I'd head over to Decentralized Identity Foundation. There's a working group there called Sidetree. Sidetree is actually the protocol the underpins ION, it is a blockchain agnostic protocol. So there's great contributors that have contributed code from ConsenSys, [inaudible 00:31:55], these are a lot of Ethereum companies, a few others from completely different ecosystems, so we've had great contributors from all across the board. Sidetree right now is being run on Ethereum, the name's Elements, that network and it uses the same core protocol.

We love those folks. They have been great in terms of helping the protocol along and we are all using the same underpinning foundations. I think that that's actually a good thing and there's no reason why free and open software can't be used by anyone. So I would go check that working group out. It has links to the ION repos, the docker containers, the CLIs, everything you would need if you wanted to get involved and kick the tires.

Peter McCormack: Right, now I want to get into some other juicy things with you. You're one of those people when I see a notification on Twitter that you've replied to one of my posts, I'm always like, "Ah fuck, what have I said? Have I said something dumb on Twitter?!" Because you've always come in with quite interesting takes and I see you as like a practical anarchist. Does that make sense? It's that you're an anarchist, but I also see that you have a practical understanding of the way the world works. Would you say that's fair?

Daniel Buchner: I guess that gets you in trouble in some anarchist circles, being practical and all! But I suppose so. I try to take a position as, I'm a little dogmatic, I'll be honest. Whether it's a character flaw or not, I suppose it's debatable. But I'm certainly strong willed in terms of the positions I take, but I don't try and just kind of shit first, as I personally like to say, "What could we do to actually better the situation?"

Even if it's through a mechanism or an idea that maybe isn't mainstream, at least present something that says, "Here's a different way." Instead of just saying, "That ways sucks" because anyone can say "that way sucks". It takes a little bit more mental effort to say, "That way sucks and here's how we can do things better."

So I do try to question things and get people to think about some of the structures they've built up in their mind. I think our populace is beholden to a sort of Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to governance that we've been raised in since birth, and that we believe religiously, that there's these two parties or N number of parties who should control things and that's only the way to live life, is trying desperately every election to fight some other subset of people. I just think that that's a sad and tragic way to govern humans.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's interesting you should say that because the last UK election was the last one I decided not to vote. I got stuck in some of the left versus right arguments on Facebook with people, and I started to realize that this just a bullshit game. None of these people actually do give a fuck about us, they just want power and they just want to win. This is just left versus right bullshit that we're just getting sucked into over and over again. So I decided to not vote and kind of reject playing part of the game.

We are living in this most fucking crazy time right now dude. Look, not only have we had a pandemic and lockdowns globally, the economy, globally, is in a very precarious position. We have got Donald Trump today with an executive order potentially coming out about social media, we've just had this guy who was... I would say George Floyd, who was pretty much murdered. Certainly, like in your most liberal argument ever, you could say he was killed by neglect of an overzealous policeman, but I would say he was pretty much murdered.

We've now got riots, it feels like everything is... It's like the kettle's boiling now, in every single direction and everything is kind of getting fiery. How are you feeling right now? Because I think in some ways if you're an anarchist, you almost... At a time right now, everything you've ever thought and stood for and argued with people about and at times where people have probably think you're like some kind of crazy weirdo, like everything you've said and forewarned is coming true all at the same time.

Daniel Buchner: Yeah it's funny, there's no good feeling in that. I would rather be the most wrong person on Twitter, personally. The things I've said, I'd rather it be dead wrong and not see them come to fruition because my belief is that this stuff is leading us down a path to authoritarianism and a serfdom that could be irreversible for generations. If we don't get hold of it, it's not just going to be these initial signs that we're seeing. COVID, some people are craving more government intervention than we even have and they have been able to flex their power in dramatic ways.

Even for the people that crave more of it, it's like they shut down the entire country! Now we can debate how justified some of those activities were, but that is power! They have the power to arrest people for walking around in parks that are too close to each other, people should be scared of that, they shouldn't cheer it on.

We've been laying these foundations with the Patriot Act, with backdooring crypto, the efforts to do that and libertarians, specifically libertarians, have been calling this out for decades without anyone listening. We've been mocked and people laugh at us and stuff, but the last laugh isn't going to be us. The last laugh is going to be tears from our kids, from everyone else that has to live under these power structures that we carte blanche-ly were okay with for so long.

Peter McCormack: Well I've been going through my own transition with this because I think one of the interesting things about libertarianism and anarchism, is that until you know of it, you do have the Stockholm Syndrome. You're conditioned to this left versus right. Prior to Bitcoin, I never even thought of a world without government. I was just like this is the way it is. If anyone had originally explained it to me, I would be like, "Well, that's fucking stupid, that's a crazy idea. I don't want to live in a Mad Max world." Even when the lockdowns first happened with the virus I did say, I put it out on Twitter and I said, "You know what? I'm a bit of a statist right now.

I believe that we require centralized planning to deal with this." And actually, I'll stand by some comments on that. I had a discussion with Ragnar yesterday, like for example, the army did a really great job of building some hospitals very quickly in the UK. Perhaps they would have done that quicker than without it, blah, blah, blah, but it's no excuse. But even going through this process, I've come out the end of it and said, "I was wrong." The government have got, especially in the UK, I don't know what you've used in the US, but the government have got so much wrong about this in the UK. Even if at the start you say, "I give you the power, I want you to do this, I want you to solve it", they've had every power to do it and they fucked it up, every single part in sourcing PPE!

It's today, in terms of providing... We have a poverty problem in the UK. I don't if it's the same in the US, but one of the big fears with closing down the schools was, there are children that rely on those meals at school because their family can't afford it. They had to put in a voucher program just to help feed these kids. They didn't manage to put it in place and there's kids going hungry, so there's so many parts of this that have gone wrong. But I've come out the end of it going, not even the small amount of trust I put in the government was worth it. Yeah, I guess you've probably seen this when you've talked to me, you've seen people go through these transitional periods, right?

Daniel Buchner: Absolutely! I did too and it's funny how people always equip the cliché they always give you is, "Oh, I was libertarian until I got out of college." I was never like a Republican Republican, I was more of like a constitutionalist, someone like Justin Amash, in the United States' House of Representatives. Justin Amash, who was potentially going to run for the Libertarian ticket, that's who I was when I was 17 to maybe about 23.

Then even from that standpoint, where I still didn't even believe in the Republican stuff, I came even further and I said, "Gosh, it just doesn't make any sense! They're so ineffective at the national level, they do so much more wrong than they do good, yet we continually fund them." I just saw failure after failure. When you see enough of it, it just becomes undeniable. You just can't with a straight face look in the mirror and say, "I continue to support the system" because it's a clown car that just keeps doing what it's doing for decades on end. We are the definition of insanity with current governance.

We just keep doing the same thing, over and over again, expecting a different result, and it just gets worse and worse. You said, "Well, I don't know how it is in the US," and I was going to joke and say, "Well, you know it's much better here." But if anything has happened over the last, I don't know, 15 years of governance in the US, it has highlighted how ineffective and dramatically negative the vast majority of nationalized government is. I think that if you stand back as an objective person who isn't bought into the two trick factories of authoritarianism that all taste the same, you can't look at that without coming away saying we need something different.

One thing I would love to talk about is like in the spirit of solutions, why wouldn't you need a nationalist government? Why would that not be the case that you would? I think there's a lot of great arguments for that. I'm curious, have you... You're saying you kind of had these moments over the last recent period where you've thought differently, has anything occurred to you, like how we could do it without it?

Peter McCormack: How would you do things without government? Well my thing is, and I read a really great article by Scott Horton, because I did an interview with him. One of the things that I've always struggled with is that, if you had the big red button to switch off government, I don't think it would be a good idea. To just turn off government one day because I think not only do you have Stockholm Syndrome, but you have a reliance. Suddenly, I think you would descend into some form of chaos. But I've always liked the idea, and some of the things, you got libertarians who completely abstain from anything to do with politics, but I actually think there's a lot of benefit in having a Libertarian party.

Because if you were to have some success, say a Ron Paul would've got in power, you could go through the process of weaning yourself off government step by step, "Which bits can we get rid of first? Where can we remove interference? Where can we open up the market and reduce government influence? What things we can do to reduce taxation?" Because I think you have to go through a process of weaning yourself off it. So that's kind of where my head is now, but one of the things that I really struggle with Daniel, is that amongst my circle of friends, I am now that weirdo.

I'm no way near down the rabbit hole as you and I put little things up on Facebook as a real testing ground sometimes to gauge opinion. I'm the weirdo, but I'm here thinking, "No, I'm fucking rational here." I'm being rational because I'm seeing like a lot of this with clarity. But I am now seen as the weirdo. I don't even know how to get people over these steps to just think about you're fighting left versus right. You think every single time, every four years, that if you vote, and the government you want in power comes into power is going to change anything. It doesn't change anything, nothing ever changes and everything just gets a little bit more shit.

Like other things get good, we have better healthcare, we have everyone has a mobile phone and an iPad and technology, a lot of people have a house to live in and clothes, we get further and further away from poverty, but at the same time, everyone seems a little bit more angry or pissed off. I can't pinpoint exactly why this is happening, but I see it now with a lot more clarity than I did before. But I just don't see a no government right now. I'm not anti-government, I'm anti-bad government. I'm just not sure if you can have good government. Does that make sense?

Daniel Buchner: Yeah, absolutely! This is the way I feel personally as well and I do think there is a place where it all stems from. It really all stems from one thing, which is this Jefferson quote that I really like, I can't remember off the top of my head exactly. But basically, he talks about how you should have every right to do everything that your natural rights allows, which is free speech, free movement, all of these different things, so as long as it doesn't affect the rights of others because your rights stop where another person's rights begin.

Then he goes on to say, "I don't classify these rights, based on the law because the law is often the tyrant's will and always so, always." He didn't say maybe or if you pass the right law, it's not he's always so, when they violate the rights of the individual. So I think what we have people doing today is expressly violating the rights of individuals through the systems of governance that we have. It really is all rooted in one sort of human desire, that is, people want to see their vision of the world occur.

So what government does, especially authoritarian democracies do, is they empower large mobs of people to go and enforce very subjective, often highly subjective ideas, beliefs, things like that on other people by force. If you wanted good governance, you just wouldn't make that possible, it just wouldn't be possible because right now you can vote to say "I want this healthcare system, I want this system for doing this service." Those are just subjective ideas. What gives any of us a right to join with a mob of other people and force our ideas on people? I look at that, that's bullying behaviour.

That's the kid on the fifth grade playground going around shaking down people for lunch money. I was told not to do that when I was a young kid. I'm not blameless, I failed as well, but now I look at it and say, "I can't do that. I don't want to dictate other peoples' lives." But we've made dictation of people's lives through mobs into a noble activity. People say, "I went and voted. I voted on that measure that's going to force these people who smoke the plant to go to jail." Like they feel good about it like they're some sort of patriot for encumbering other peoples' lives. I think that has to change and that mentality has to change or we will never see freedom in our time.

Peter McCormack: Yeah and the other thing I find with politics, that it divides people, really who shouldn't be divided. I don't like Donald Trump, a lot of what he does and there are some things he's done I think they're kind of interesting, but the things that I know that are really interesting about it, is the stories you read. For example, I think it was on Twitter I saw recently, some girl's parents aren't going to go to her wedding because she's marrying a Trump supporter.

It feels like wherever you have an opinion on something, it's very much tied to your political identity, so you end up just dividing people who have no reason to be divided because in the end, it doesn't matter whoever wins the election, I don't think people's lives will materially change that much. Not as much as they think it will. It almost becomes like sports teams, like Team Trump or Team Biden. But actually, really as people, we should just be working together to better the society we want to live with. But I find that politicians, it's almost like the whole political process itself is getting worse and worse and becoming more like a fight. I don't know if I blame the politicians or the media or this is just like a natural conclusion.

For example, the natural conclusion for artificial intelligence might be the end of humanity, the natural conclusion for politics might be that and media combined is that we get to a point where we just have almost like civil war. I feel like we are heading towards that at the moment. Perhaps everything is just coming to this crescendo of change, I don't know. What do you feel?

Daniel Buchner: I actually think this the natural conclusion. I have to have empathy for people like you mentioned, where the parents won't go to the wedding of the daughter because political affiliations of her potential husband or something. The reason why people are so fierce about this and have become so tribalistic is because it really actually does represent force. Government and the votes and the representatives you send are an extension of violence. I've never seen a government law passed where they send the Care Bears to your house to hug it out, to just try and convince you as friendly as possible and maybe sit down and have a beer with you and see if you just really want adhere to their subjective law.

They come, either with court orders, if you don't show up, they're going to send a bench warrant, then they're going to send armed goons to you. It is not a joke, every law is backed by force. So when you see these two mobs, the reason why they're getting more and more vicious is because they know one thing that is true which is if one mob wins, sure, they are very much the same, we're still going into debt, we still have the Patriot Act, we still have troops in the Middle East, and they are very alike in many ways. But there's all these little fringe subjective things that they don't want forced on them using violence.

So that's why they've become violent towards each other and that's why they are so aggressive. It's because they are literally in a fight or flight mode that tells them if I don't win, something's going to be forced on them. That system, that is the root of our dissent. It needs this sort of authoritarian [Inaudible 00:52:50], is that system of pitting people against each other using violence.

Peter McCormack: Well we've seen it also with this monopoly of violence that the police have I mentioned it earlier with George Floyd, what happened this week, which is just so gross, like just fucking unbelievable. We all just watched somebody die on camera right in front of our eyes with a guy with a knee on his neck which blows my mind that it's happened. Now we're seeing riots and now we're seeing the result of that, I keep thinking, when are we going to get past this? When are going to get past this power tripping whereby the police can just kill somebody like that?

I'll tell you one thing that is really interesting, this will get me in trouble with my friends at home, they just wouldn't understand this thing. But recently I was a bit like where we saw... Remind me of the state, but there was a bunch of, it was almost like a militia came out with their guns and rocket launchers and went up to the government building, government courthouse, whatever it was. I was like, "What the fuck? You don't need a rocket launcher" and it clicked with me because if you get away from the number of gun deaths in the US, yes, that is terrible, that is shocking, I don't like it at all and I'm not saying I want guns in the UK right now.

But it is amazing how the people in the US can get together and they can go up to a government building, with their guns, and say, "We've had enough, we don't want this anymore. We're not going to stand for this, and we're willing to defend ourselves, and we can defend ourselves."

Daniel Buchner: Yes.

Peter McCormack: That is something that is actually very unique about the US that has taken me a long time to get my head around. I'm not fully there, I don't 100% get it, but I am a lot closer to understanding why that exists now and why that's... That's the Second Amendment, right?

Daniel Buchner: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned some good examples too. There's a couple other ones. I'm not going to say his name right, I apologize for this, I think it's Ahmaud Arbery was the young man that was like sort of chased down by those guys in the trucks and he ended up getting shot. The Black Panthers actually came to their march and escorted them with a bunch of rifles down to the place where they wanted to do their protest. No one got any beanbags shot at them and there was no teargas. There was a guy in the protest that just happened for this last man, Floyd, for this last one, lo and behold, they're firing beanbags off and other stuff, over in a different section.

There's a section of a couple people, they're strapped, police are minding their Ps and Qs. Why? Because no one wants to deal with that. It just makes society a little bit more polite when you know that there is sort of the ability to defend yourself versus helpless people, people tend to get a little bit more polite about how they conduct themselves. I would say this is one thing that I'll mention about defence, like defending ourselves as citizens of the United States as really as free individuals. Some people laugh at that and this is, to get into a topic that I think we can change people's minds with, they say, "Well, you can never defend yourself with guns.

The government have so much bigger weapons than guns." So a few stats to throw out, there's something on the order of like 350 million guns in the United States. That's an enormous number of gun and it pales in comparison to any other country. We have more armed citizens, somewhere between the neighbourhood of 75 million to 90 million armed citizens in the United States. That is more armed people than all the world's militaries combined times two. So I would say good luck if you want to try a sustained occupation in the United States, more than all the militaries combined times two, so that's tough sledding!

That was tough sledding back in World War II and it's tough sledding now. Now in terms of the government itself, generally speaking, in a civil war a government is not going to sit there and just destroy every single part of a country. The whole point is so they can seize infrastructure and so they can take... No one wants to govern over a burning pile of nuclear rubble.

So the idea that they're going to carpet bomb large metro cities and all this other stuff or somehow engage 90 million people over 3.8 million square miles of territory that's 20 something the times the size of Afghanistan, is a pipe dream. We certainly have the capacity to defend ourselves. When I look at the Second Amendment, it's highly effective. If people don't understand that, that's because we don't understand the decentralization and diffusion of that power amongst Amendment people.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, exporting that though to somewhere like the UK is going to be very difficult. I can have this conversation with you and I get it now. Like I say, I'm a lot closer to understanding it. If I tried to have this conversation with, if I was standing in the pub with some of my friends and I said, "You know what? The problem in our country is that we don't have something like the Second Amendment, which allows us if we're unhappy with the governors of our country to go and stand outside the Bedford County Council Office with our rocket launchers and say, 'We've had enough'."

To stand there as a group of people and to issue a warning that we've had enough, it's not going to wash, people are going to be thinking I've gone fucking mad. It's a really tough thing to try and explain to people but I think that I understand it, and I think I get it. Maybe the other point is, I don't know how many times a militia has actually come to shots with the government.

We've seen situations where things have got out of hand, I don't know if I would refer to Waco as a militia, but that was certainly people who were armed and went up against the government and that was tragic, but that was more of a cult. But in terms of the militias, I don't know how many times that actually has come to shots. You might know of examples. The other example I can always think of is that one where they were trying to protect the guy, he had his farmland?

Daniel Buchner: The land, it was in Nevada. I think it was the... Was it the Bundys or Bradys? I forget what the last name was.

Peter McCormack: I think it was Bundy.

Daniel Buchner: They ended not having to fire a shot. That's the reality, is that the government backed off and in the large part, kind of conceded. That was because they had a few hundred people and they thought maybe the optics, maybe the PR of coming in with a drone or something would be a little terrifying. But that's exactly what you need to do. You need to say, "I can assert myself to a point where it is going to be very painful for you as the authoritarian regime in power to do something about this." Versus, you are a sheep, you have no defence, and no one's towing the line in your regard. You're going to do whatever they say.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's going to be an interesting time with this election coming up because... Well, it's just going to be very interesting. I'm going to watch it, it's almost like entertainment and it's almost become like entertainment. I don't have a horse in the race. I would really struggle to choose between the two candidates because I think they're both deeply flawed in entirely different ways. I think it's ultimately going to create even more division within the US and I just really don't know how it's going to play out. I'm assuming you don't vote? But how do you take politics...

Daniel Buchner: I do, occasionally, I do. It's always for the Libertarian candidate. Yeah, I think this election is almost just like an absolute comedy. You have two mid-seventy year old, dementia-addled kooky individuals who have various character flaws of incredible degree versus Jo Jorgensen, who's the Libertarian nominee. She's an esteemed lecturer at Clemson, she has a master's in business, she has a PhD in psychology, she worked in the tech industry and other industries and 95% of the population is going to vote for these mid-seventy year old lunatics.

It just blows my mind! It blows my mind every day that I wake up. You couldn't get something that would typify how broken the system is than the 2020 election or maybe unless you go back to 2016. So from that perspective it's hard to vote. I think I just put on Twitter the other day, I am getting to the point where I don't know that there's like a great legislative solution because people are so ingrained, but I don't think they're in such fight or flight mode that they're not going to blink. No one's going to blink, it's like a game of chicken and they're both just resigned to driving to the end of the road and falling off the cliff.

Peter McCormack: It's funny actually. Did you see the documentary, The Great Hack, about what happened with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica?

Daniel Buchner: No, I haven't watched it yet. I know a little bit about the thing, but not the film.

Peter McCormack: Well there was one part of it where, I can't remember the country they were in, I think it was a Caribbean country and the only way the minority, I think it was the Indians, the minority Indians had a chance of winning would be if there was a low voter turnout amongst the other group. So they did a campaign to create apathy amongst voters. I was like, "This is shocking!" But actually right now, I think one of the most important things in politics now is apathy, is low voter turnout, is people saying, "I've had enough of this" because one of the really sad things is there's going to be people out there, for example, on the Republican side, who are going to be voting for Trump.

There's probably people who might vote for Trump who don't realize that it is his buddy, that he appointed, Steve Mnuchin, who possibly cost them their own house. There will be people who are Republican voters who during the 2008 financial crisis would have lost their house and he was at Goldman Sachs and he was part of the group of people who architected that financial crisis. Then afterwards he became a foreclosure king, and now he's Treasury Secretary.

There are people who are going to happily vote for him and not realizing that this is somebody who's worked against them, thinking that it is so important for someone like Trump to win, because he gave them back their identity. I don't think the people realize like how little of fuck this, essentially I would say a mafia group of gangsters, don't care about them. They really just care about themselves, their friends and their power. It's really quite... I don't know man, It gets to me now.

Daniel Buchner: Yeah man, one thing I would love to say is from Larken Rose. This guy, Larken Rose, he put out this video a while back, I don't know if you've seen this video but he basically walks through how government is, by all intents and purposes, a religion. It is absolutely a religion. You essentially have people that religiously vote for these deities in government that they think they're a part of, they think they are government.

You hear it repeated all the time, "We're the people, we are government." It's like, at what point in your life did you start confusing yourself with people who are steering inside trading rumours and going to the stock market in front of you that learned of stuff in Congress, that are backdooring your communications and spying on you, at what point did you confuse them with you? I'd like to understand how that happened.

Peter McCormack: Larken Rose follows one person on Twitter. Do you know who it is?

Daniel Buchner: Larken Rose? On Twitter? I know Larken Rose just from some of the videos and content. I don't follow him on Twitter or anything.

Peter McCormack: I'm just here now. He follows one person and it's Ross Ulbricht.

Daniel Buchner: Oh really? Okay, wow!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's kind of interesting. I've never heard of him, so I've just googled him after you said it. I'm going to sit and watch some of his videos. Look, it's an interesting time, like I'm definitely going through my own transitional process. I won't say I'm becoming red pilled, my red pill is like an intravenous drip at the moment, I'm getting a little bit at a time. I go forward and then I go back and then I go forward and then I go back. Doing this publicly is always a challenge because you get challenged in both directions.

People who think you're crazy and people who think you're not red pilled enough, but it's certainly a very interesting time. I do feel like everything people like you that I follow have said, and other people have said, it's almost been proven correct. It's not great that it's happening because ultimately in being proven correct, that people are going to come to economic harm and maybe other types of harm. But definitely now is a really interesting time and a time to see it all. Fuck knows how it's all going to work out! Anyway listen, look, as ever, this is great, I really appreciate you coming on.

It's always good to talk to you. I think last time I saw you we were drinking red wine together in a nice building in New York. Hopefully, I'll get to see you again sometime and hopefully we'll get back flying but I don't know when that will be. But if people do want to follow you, which I recommend they do because like I say, I think your takes are a lot more practical, and you're not just shouting and ranting, you're actually giving constructive ideas, where do they follow you?

Daniel Buchner: It's @csuwildcat on Twitter, that's my alma mater's mascot. It's a long story and very stupid, but that's the name and if you want to go there, same name on GitHub, if you're interested in code stuff. Just follow me there too.

Peter McCormack: All right man, well listen, hopefully I'll see you soon. Thanks for coming on and yeah, take care buddy!

Daniel Buchner: All right, thanks a lot!