WBD241 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin’s Peaceful Revolution with Knut Svanholm

Interview date: Thursday 2nd July 2020

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with author Knut Svanholm. 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 Knut Svanholm, author of Bitcoin: Sovereignty Through Mathematics and Bitcoin: Independence Reimagined. We discuss libertarianism, collectivism v individualism and how Bitcoin is the only path to a libertarian society.

“If you are a libertarian, and you are not into Bitcoin, you are wasting your time because, this is it, this is the shot, this is the best shot, I would say it’s the only shot that we have at this; a peaceful global revolution.”

— Knut Svanholm

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Hello Knut, how are you man?

Knut Svanholm: I'm fine, how are you?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm pretty good. We've been trying to do this for quite a while, on and off.

Knut Svanholm: Yeah and then forgot about it and then tried again.

Peter McCormack: It's my fault, I haven't even read your book. I feel terrible! But I wanted to read it before doing it, but at the same time, the ideas you pitched to me are also things I want to talk about. Let me tell you something, because you've listened to a few of my shows, right?

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, I have. I've listened to them for quite a while now. Not all of them of course, but some of them. I saw the Defiance thing, the Venezuela thing and I really liked those.

Peter McCormack: Thank you! Well I'm obviously on this ongoing journey, where I'm learning in public, as I think it was Angela Walch who said that. I'm happy to put it out there, talk about the journey I'm going through, the things I've got, the things I don't get. But let me tell you where I am at the moment, because again, this must really bore some people because I've talked about this before, but I didn't know anything about libertarianism before Bitcoin. It's something I'd heard of, but never taken a look at it.

I was very much like I had Stockholm syndrome for politics, my belief was there's a state and you contribute to the state you pay your tax and you get to vote every four years, and never ever thought there's this like alternative scenario where people talk about, which is liberty, where you have complete individualism, you have...

All interactions are voluntary, you don't have any stupid speech laws and obviously as an ideology, or whatever you want to call it, it's pretty hard to argue against it because you're offering people total freedom versus a secondary choice of having your freedom limited by the state. So I get it, this makes total sense, but I've always struggled with, does it work in practice? And secondly, how do you get there? I've been in this idea of directionally heading towards liberty rather than this kind of big red button that you can switch it off, and I'll tell you where I am right now. I'm studying...

At the very early stages, I bought a paper of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, so I bought that paper and I bought a number of books, and where I'm at now is I'm studying human behaviour, because ultimately I am questioning whether liberty is actually possible in the form the libertarians want, because I wonder, if we are just evolved animals, do we have this natural tendency to move towards collectivism, do we have this natural tendency to organize ourselves into groups, do we have this natural tendency... Is the state ultimately something that will always exist? You're trying to fight against something that is within the nature of most humans. Does that make sense?

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, it's the perfect place to start here I think. I believe everything points to that the state is inevitable as things are now. You had a question there in the beginning, you don't believe in a big red button, how do we get to a more libertarian society? And the answer to that is obviously, through Bitcoin. While I've been like a moral libertarian for quite some time now, I didn't see a way to get there before Bitcoin, not really.

You can think these things, and you can have this moral perspective, and you can be a state minimalist, or whatever you may call it, but you will always have to do that using this existing system, and through the lens of whatever age and nation you're living in. But when Bitcoin came along, and when you really start to grasp the impact that this might very well have on society as a whole in the future, then all of a sudden these libertarian ideas don't seem as impossible any longer.

Coercion will be harder to execute, for criminal organizations and the states, if they're not the same thing, which some, or even most, libertarians say they are. It's more of a moral thing for me, really, than a political one. How would you run a country if you got to? Minimalizing the state is a good start, but I think Bitcoin is more of a means to an end. It's a tool for liberating yourself. You don't have to worry so much about the flock any longer.

Peter McCormack: All right. Well there's a lot to pick apart here and we'll work our way through it. I've done this before, I've done it with Erik Voorhees, I've done it with Michael Goldstein, I've tried to pick apart the arguments to test it as much as possible, to test it for myself, ultimately.

Knut Svanholm: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So there's a whole bunch of things to pick through. Let me just ask you to begin with and you don't have to answer, do you just consider yourself a libertarian, or do you consider yourself an anarcho capitalist? By the way, what is the actual difference?

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, that's a very good question. I don't know, I don't really like labels, because I think they get skewed over time. Being a liberal used to mean that you were sort of libertarian. Now they call it Classic Liberalism, and it's a whole other ballpark from what being liberal means now. All of a sudden, being liberal means that you're pro-state stuff, and you're pro all sorts of equal outcome, instead of equal opportunity, thoughts. To not be a racist, you have to judge, to group people by skin colour or by gender or sexual orientation, or whatever it may be. If you don't do that, you're the racist, or you're the sexist.

I think somewhere along the way, the words change meaning, so that's why I'm reluctant to call myself anything. Right now, a libertarian or an anarcho capitalist might be a good word to describe my morals, if you will. Maybe not my political views, but rather morals. You named a couple of books there that you're reading, and I think you should put Human Action on that list if you haven't already read it.

Peter McCormack: Human Action?

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, by Ludwig von Mises. It's a tough one. I listened to it on audio, and it's like 38 hours long or something, but if you can manage that, that's like the magnum opus of libertarianism and why this is the correct moral perspective to have, and how trying to meddle with the powers of a free market always leads to a worse result than just having people do things their own way and cooperate voluntarily, rather than by coercion.

Peter McCormack: This is where we come to that point where I agree theoretically. It's funny, I'm buying books quicker than I can get through them. It's really tough. I'm buying them at a ridiculous pace, because there's so much I want to read.

Knut Svanholm: Yup!

Peter McCormack: Recently, I bought the paper, the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. I also bought Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behaviour. I also bought a copy of Plato's the Republic, and also the Skinner book, About Behaviourism. All these different books. Whilst I'm looking at this, I'm thinking, I agree with the goal of heading towards ultimate liberty. I fundamentally agree with that answer, I agree that collectivism and coercion ultimately leads to bad outcomes, I agree with that.

I disagree with socialism. Like I said, I'm in this place... And we'll get to the Bitcoin thing, but I think I'm in the place where I think, like you say, the state is inevitable, because of human nature, because of the bad apples, the sociopaths and the narcissists who...

Knut Svanholm: Not only that. This is where it gets really interesting, I think. I think democracy, in itself, is flawed, not only in the obvious ways, but in a way that most people don't think about. There's this chapter in my new book, Independence Reimagined, about this, and it's called Why Collectivists Win.

The thing is that, if you're a collectivist, or if being in the correct tribe, so to speak, or cheering for the correct football team, or whatever, if that means a lot to you, then you're more likely to form larger groups with other people than if you're an individualist, and you don't really care that much about what other people think about your opinion.

If you have this groupthink mentality in your operating system, so to speak, you will naturally form larger groups than those who don't, than those who don't care if they're agreeable or not.

Peter McCormack: Like a gravity.

Knut Svanholm: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: If you formed a group, people might want to join your group, and you're not going to say no, because you believe in the collective group. So therefore, as more people join your group, they can help you towards your collective goals, whereas if you're an individual... I guess it's a bit like Bitcoin security. I know that people say, when do we have enough Bitcoin security?You don't. It's almost like you're a collectivist, how many people's enough? I guess there's never enough. Whereas if you're an individual, you're always individual. It's directional, right?

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, and the thing is the individual is the ultimate subgroup. You can always split a group apart, and what it all boils down to is that it's only an individual that can make a decision, or that can have an opinion, it's always personal. But humans, we're flock animals, and we tend to form groups and follow leaders, because this has given us a genetic advantage in the past. This is what the beginning of the book is about. You can categorize reality into objective reality, subjective reality, and intersubjective reality, which is everything that we collectively believe to be true.

That includes religion, nation states, and ultimately, money, as well, because we all have to have the same belief in order for it to work, and that's the only reason that it does work. This ties into all the other stuff, because this has given us an enormous advantage compared to other species. If you watch a flock of chimpanzees for instance, or some other primate, they never form group larger than Dunbar's number, which is around 150 people, I believe, because they can't communicate and they don't scale the same way we do in our hive mind, if that makes any sense, because we can form a group that spans continents, we believe in the same god, we believe in democracy, we believe in money, or whatever it is.

It's still just an idea, all of it, and nothing more and nothing less. While this might have helped us conquer the Earth, it has, at the same time, made slaves of us all in a sense. We're not truly free thinkers because of it, because we take so much for granted. I guess this ties into why I'm reluctant of saying that I'm a libertarian or an anarcho capitalist, because I'm trying to get away from all the groupthink...

Peter McCormack: That's a group!

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, that's the thing why I think there's so much hostility between Bitcoiners, because we're trying to communicate with other free thinkers, and other individualists, and other people that come from the same, or more or less the same, urge to not be told what to think.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we'll come to that as well. I think some people actually, they sometimes end up contradicting their own ideology, and some people are just assholes, but we can come from that. I want to stay on that bit, though, because you would've studied this more. You obviously know about Dunbar's number, you know groups of animals form together, 150 is kind of the maximum before it starts to break down in certain ways.

Knut Svanholm: Not all animals, primates.

Peter McCormack: I'm sorry, primates. But have you actually looked into any of the reasons why humans tend to form into groups and collect around ideas of working together? My assumption being is that it was very different in, if you go back hundreds of years, where you'd have very little small communities or villages, you know, 10, 15, 100 people working together. Now we're at this weird place where we've got billions of people around the world trying to get everyone to agree to the same, which is dumb, when you think about it. Have you looked into why humans are drawn into this collectivism idea?

Knut Svanholm: As I said, I think it's a genetic thing. We've had a genetic advantage, the group that could kill the other group, and kill all the animals around, survived, and the other group that got eaten by all the tigers, didn't, if that makes any sense.

Peter McCormack: Right, it's in our code.

Knut Svanholm: If you look back at civilizations, when they start to expand, the invention of ceremonial burial is almost always close to that point where they start expanding their empires. This is because, it's not before you can fool an 18 year old that going out with his weapon here, and killing your neighbour is a good idea. You can't really do that before you invent the thought of an afterlife, and 17 virgins in heaven, or whatever.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've heard that with the terrorist. Let's go back a step. What did they used to do with the bodies? Just let them lay there and rot? There was no burial?

Knut Svanholm: I don't know. I guess they buried them, but they didn't have the ritual around it. But I don't know, and I'm not an anthropologist, that's for sure.

Peter McCormack: So we're celebrating bravery? Become a hero?

Knut Svanholm: Leaders could use that in order to gain power. Like all hierarchal monkeys, the alpha male of the flock gets the most female action, he attracts the most beautiful females in the flock, and gets to bang most of them, because he's the one on top. This is an evolutionary thing, those traits live on, because they survive. It's as simple as that. It might be harsh and depressing to think about, but I really...

Peter McCormack: Actually, it's a really important point with regards to what's happening with all the unrest right now. I think it was Jordan Peterson I was listening to, when he was talking about how one of the problems in society is when you lose too many of the men, you have an imbalance between men and women, because a man doesn't typically want to settle down. So if there's an imbalance, therefore, he will spread his wings, and therefore, that doesn't lead to tighter family units, that actually leads to a more broken society. We're not allowed to talk about this I don't think, but we are.

Knut Svanholm: I think Bret Weinstein was on about that on the Joe Rogan the other week.

Peter McCormack: Was it Bret? That's right, Bret Weinstein on Rogan, that was it.

Knut Svanholm: That was a brilliant interview...

Peter McCormack: It was.

Knut Svanholm: Until the solution that Bret had.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I have my questions.

Knut Svanholm: Because Bret is not a Bitcoiner, so he doesn't see the underlying problem here.

Peter McCormack: He was to replace bad politics with more politics.

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, exactly. I believe that that just won't work, changing constitutions and stuff. I guess the Constitution of America was a step in the right direction, and it was the best there was for its time. However, that doesn't matter anymore, and it has no significance any longer.

What you get instead is this guy with a tucked-in pink shirt and an AR-15 rifle, scaring away the mobsters outside his door, outside his castle which is huge. There're all sorts of things going on that are quite depressing, to be honest. I think most people miss the root cause of the problem, which is the money, obviously.

Peter McCormack: Listen, we've got Bitcoin, right? So we understand that. You see that as a solution to this problem. Let me ask you, I'm a big fan of Tom Woods and I have probably made my way through about 500 of his episodes.

Knut Svanholm: Tom Woods?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Tom Woods, he's a libertarian and he's got this show. He had Vijay Boyapati on recently, talking about Bitcoin.

Knut Svanholm: All right.

Peter McCormack: I wouldn't call Tom a Bitcoiner. He hasn't covered it on his show, but I wouldn't call him a Bitcoiner. He may own some, but he just doesn't talk about Bitcoin. He just talks about liberty and the path to liberty. Even if he will consider a minarchist, he will make the joke that, well, "A minarchist is six months away from being a libertarian," or something, I can't remember the exact joke. The point being is he believes ultimately, in liberty, but I never hear him talk about the fact that the state is ultimately an inevitability.

This is when I therefore get into other conversations. If you're a libertarian, and you believe in liberty, but you're not a Bitcoiner, I don't understand those who therefore also aren't involved in politics. I spoke to the Libertarian Party in the UK, and I asked them why they're involved in politics, and they said, "Because we want to get into power, and then our mandate is to reduce the state, and ultimately get rid of it." Which makes sense, right?

Knut Svanholm: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: But I don't think it can happen, but I think it makes sense. But for libertarians who aren't in Bitcoin who also don't engage in the political process, I feel like they have a personal belief about a situation that can never happen, like a society structure that is impossible to happen. So what is the point in that? I get it, it's because it's the principles you want to live by, I understand that. But wouldn't it be far better to look at someone like what Ron Paul achieved.

Okay, ultimately, he didn't get into power, but he did change a number of the conversations. He was there in the debate and he was there debating other politicians. Let's be honest, it'd be very difficult for anyone to say he wasn't the most rational person, presenting the most rational arguments in those discussions.

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, I think the conversation is the most important thing there, because we have two ways of solving problems, and that's violence and conversation. There's no middle ground. We can either fight each other or talk to each other. That's the only two options we have as humans. Using Bitcoin is talking to each other, because money is, ultimately, communication, right? I communicate that I appreciate what you do, and all that. It's a language. You've heard all that stuff before, but I truly believe that, that a sound money is the ultimate tool for free speech there is.

Speech isn't really free if you're constantly being thwarted by a system that is flawed in its core. The amounts of problems that this inflationary currency systems that we've been living under for the last hundred years have caused are too vast to even grasp. Once you see that, it's hard to unsee it, and I think there are a lot of libertarians out there that see the problem with inflationary currencies, that just haven't discovered Bitcoin yet.

Maybe they've heard of it, but they haven't truly understood it, or maybe they don't believe that it will work in the long run and they haven't looked into it enough. It's as simple as that, because if you're a libertarian and you're not into Bitcoin, you're wasting your time, because this is it. This is the shot! This is the best shot, I would say it's the only shot, that we have at this, a peaceful, global revolution, for lack of a better word.

Peter McCormack: No, I mean it's the perfect word. Listen, I agree...

Knut Svanholm: It has a bad ring to it, though. I mean, Castro wanted to liberate people too.

Peter McCormack: Well, yes, of course. But it comes back to that point that, I think it was my friend Tom was talking to me about China. He said China goes in these cycles. They have a revolution, the revolutionaries become empowered, and the process starts again, because "Absolute power corrupts absolutely," that came to same cycle.

Peter McCormack: Can I touch one other area with you, as well? I just want to touch on socialism and the left. I was definitely a socialist as a kid. As a kid growing up, I was like, sure, there shouldn't be poor people, and we should all help each other, and we should have the NHS. I was, without any doubt, I was a socialist, and we're talking, like in my teens. It was only when I went into the workplace and grew up, and my political views changed, and I've pretty much only every voted... One time I didn't vote Conservative, I just spoiled my paper, but every other time, I voted Conservative, apart from the last election. That's quite a funny story, actually.

I drew a picture of a duck and my son's school had an election, and he said he didn't want to vote, so he drew a picture of an octopus. A bit of a family trend there. During the last UK election, I didn't vote, but I got into a number of debates on Facebook, got all of the socialist friends, and I started talking about ideas I probably wouldn't have the confidence to talk about on Twitter, because I'm surrounded by so many smart and intellectual people. It's not to say I don't on Facebook, but Facebook's an easier environment to test some of your own thoughts and ideas. I wasn't going to vote, but I definitely was more fearful of the Labour Party getting into power, because they have a lot of really stupid socialist ideas, and Corbyn is an actual socialist, not just one of these social democrats.

He believes in the state only and the means of production. So I would put things out onto Facebook... I remember one particular day, I was testing the idea amongst my friends of collectivism being evil, individualism being about liberty, if you believe in collectivism, you believe in coercion, and you're evil, blah, blah, blah. Just put it out there as a test, but explaining it rationally, in probably very similar ways to that, maybe, you might explain it.

So I had two people phone me because they'd thought I'd gone mad. One of them said, "Look, it's really upsetting me, the things you're putting out there. It's really getting to me" because we had a bit of a discussion on Facebook. She was like, "What about maternity pay and pregnant mothers?" I'm like, "Well, if you choose to have a baby, you should pay the cost. If you can't afford it, save up. Why should I have to pay for it?" We went through the same with education, and we went through the same on a bunch of topics.

So she phoned me up, and we had this really... I remember I was driving, and she's like, "I can't believe what's happened to you over the past couple of years. You don't care about anyone anymore, you've become really selfish," and I was like, no, I haven't. Actually... Yeah, you know what I'm going to say, right? I care about free choice.

Knut Svanholm: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Anyway, by the end of the conversation, she said to me, "Yeah, it's really weird. Everything you're saying makes sense. I just can't vote for Conservative, so I'm going to vote for Labour." It was a really interesting conversation.

Knut Svanholm: This is what I'm talking about, why Collectivists win, because they're more concerned with the success of their tribe, than what their tribe actually believes in. The thing is, if you have a more or less social democratic system, like you have a public sector and you have a private sector. In the public sector, everything is slower and more bureaucratic, and you get less bank for the buck, basically. But when you're in a Keynesian economy, like we are now, the private sector is also distorted, because instead of making sound, long-term investments, they are forced to take out big mortgages, to spend on frivolous things rather than to make sound investments.

They make short-term investments, so they all seem unconscrupulous and greedy money-grabbers and it's easy to villainize the corporations and everything. It's easy to villainize capitalists in a society that functions the way it does today, because of the Cantillon Effect and everything. The larger your company is, the more influence it has on everything else, and it calls the shots, and it has the money to buy the lobbyists, to bribe the politicians. It's all rotten to the core.

So I can understand why people can choose to see either the private or the public sector as the villain in this, and then they chose to be social democratic, or Conservative, basically. They don't see the underlying problem, that it goes even further than that, because the reason that the greediest and the most ruthless businessman win, is because they're allowed to, or even pushed, to make these short-term unsound... There's so much malinvestment, and so much resources are wasted on...

The fact that there is an attention economy is a testament to this. They grab your attention for a couple of seconds and there's money in that and the only way out of that is to be under a sound money system where you have to back things up and you have to have wealth in order to invest, and you have to save up and make long-term investments instead of this Keynesian bullshit of spending all the time.

Peter McCormack: All right, one more thing before Bitcoin. Have you heard of a book called Too Like The Lightning, by Ada Palmer?

Knut Svanholm: No.

Peter McCormack: I've only just started it, and I'm working my way through the audio book, and I haven't got to what I wanted to get out of it, yet. But the reason I bring it up, is I put out a question on Twitter once. I was like, "Is it possible to have a society that is structured so both collectivists and individualists side by side?" For example, if you wanted to be part of a group and a state, but alongside that, an individual could operate and live completely separate from society.

For example, you don't have access to voting, you can only buy services privately, you have to pay to use the roads, you have to pay to use every single thing which is a government service. But you get to opt out of the state. Now ultimately, I think it's a flawed idea, because what will end up happening is all the wealthy people will opt out, and all those who can't afford, won't. So probably, the idea is fundamentally flawed, but I still wonder if that is possible side by side. Is that something you've ever looked into?

Knut Svanholm: Yes and no, is the answer to that question. No, because I believe that all democracies will ultimately lead to more and more interventionism and a bigger and bigger state.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Knut Svanholm: You have to have a revolution in order to decrease the size of the state, and to actually lower taxes long-term, and to have a society that's more focused on liberty. There's just no way around that in the long term. In that case, no. On the other hand, I think that Bitcoin is the society that you're talking about. It provides us with the tool to do exactly that. Especially since it's got Number Go Up technology, which will make us... Just as you say, only the wealthy will be able to float above the other systems. If Bitcoin continues to do the things it does already, that is where we're headed, we will afford to do this, all Bitcoiners will, at some point in the future.

So that's my view on that. But the thing is, I don't know if a society like that, that might happen with Bitcoin, if it will be very violent or not. I'm unsure if the transition from the legacy system to a more sound money-oriented system in this new nation without borders we're building, if that transition is a violent one or a peaceful one. I certainly hope it's a peaceful one, but people with guns and... People will inevitably think that they have missed the train, they do already.

They don't see that you can't miss this train, because it keeps on going, this train, and you can just hop on whenever. Even when all the money in the world is in Bitcoin, we can still be more productive, and then Bitcoin will be worth more, even then. There is no last station to hop onto the train of Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: People talk about "Ahh, fucking lucky Bitcoiner got in in 2010, that's what you care about that", blah, blah, blah. I've heard that. Fair enough, maybe they got lucky, they heard about something, whatever. It never really bothers me. There's less of an excuse these days, because everyone's heard of Bitcoin. Everyone's heard of it, they've had the choice to look into it, and maybe they have, or they haven't. Let me ask you another thing.

Well actually, just let me make a point. You said, "I'm not sure if it would be a bloody revolution." I think it will be a peaceful and bloody revolution at the same time, because I believe those who see it, will want to transition peacefully. I want a peaceful transition.

Knut Svanholm: Of course.

Peter McCormack: I believe in that. But I don't believe those who... There's a lot to get your head around with Bitcoin. It's a complete reconsideration of everything you know. Even going to the... Our pubs have just reopened here, well, they're open on Saturday, right?

Knut Svanholm: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to meet up with all my friends, we haven't seen each other for ages. Six of us are going to get together, and I'm the Bitcoin weirdo, I'm the one who, if I raise these issues and talk to them, we all know they're going to go, "What are you on about Pete? You fucking weirdo" and I'm going to be talking to them about Bitcoin, and there will be messages that will land. When I say to them, say, "Look, let's just look at the stock market now." There's very easy ones to land right now. "Look at the stock market priced in dollars, US stock market, and look at it priced in gold.

Let me explain to you why this is happening" and that's going to make them go, "Ah, okay." So I'm going to say, "Look, this is the potential inflationary risk to your savings" and they're going to be like, "Ah, okay." I can get that far, but when I say to them, "Yeah, but what we really need to do is dismantle the state, move to voluntary interactions, get rid of hate speech, each man for themselves kind of situation," they're going to be like, "Huh?" Sorry, I was just going to say, the reason I think it's a bloody revolution ultimately, is because I don't think you can transition to this new version of society without an economic shock. If we go back to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the first need is food.

That's the ultimate need, is that you have those physiological needs, and one of them is food. It's that survival instinct kicks in. We've seen that in the breakdown as a society is places like... Venezuela is a perfect example, that first situation is the physiological needs, they need food. If they need food, the situations can get violent and yes, some people will be violent because they want more than food. They want a car, or they just want money, but ultimately, when people are hungry, they'll do crazy fucking things. If we have a big economic shock, then I don't think you can't have a bloody revolution.

Knut Svanholm: But that's not really Bitcoin's fault.

Peter McCormack: No, of course not.

Knut Svanholm: The only reason that it's peaceful now, is that we've all agreed to being fine with being robbed. We're doing this with a looming threat of imprisonment if we don't pay our taxes. That's the basic premise, we are coerced into doing... So we're already, "Die free or live a slave," or whatever the catchphrases are, as you're a slave now, to a certain extent for sure. The fruits of your labour, you don't eat them, you give them away involuntarily.

I think most of us, especially Bitcoiners, there's all sorts of altruistic Bitcoiners that are perfectly fine with helping the poor and making the world a better place. Just because you don't believe that the state should do it, doesn't mean that you think that it shouldn't be done, that's a whole different thing. I just think we should try to, as peacefully as possible, get rid of the coercion part.

Peter McCormack: I wouldn't say it's a peaceful revolution on Twitter.

Knut Svanholm: No, but we're getting back to why Collectivists...

Peter McCormack: I know, I'm just teasing.

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, you've been in multiple Twitterstorms lately, I've noticed!

Peter McCormack: I'm always in them, I can't figure out...

Knut Svanholm: I'll probably get some shit for this, but I believe I can talk to whoever I want. I'm going to stick to my opinions and discuss them with people. I believe that you can befriend someone you disagree with. It's not like you have to only interact with those people you agree with 100%. You know better than the social justice warriors.

Peter McCormack: I know. Look, some of it is my fault, because I just tell people to go fuck themselves. I'm quite dogmatic in my views.

Knut Svanholm: No comment!

Peter McCormack: But ultimately, I get what you're saying. I was talking to my friend Tom about this a lot. He's one of those weirdos, and if he hears this, he'll lose his shit with me, but he's one of those weirdos in the UK who votes for the Liberal Democrats. So like, "I can't vote Conservative because they're stuck-up rich bastards and everyone hates them, and I can't admit that because it's embarrassing" and then he's like, "I can't vote for Labour because they're socialists, so I'm just going to go in the middle, which is the Liberal Democrats."

But I talk to him about this stuff, and we work together regularly, he's a producer on Defiance, and he's like, "Yes, but we have agreed as a society to work together. We've agreed to come together and work as a society, and we need to help the most unfortunate, and if we don't help the most unfortunate, we've actually undone the civilized society that we've built." I would argue that there are certain things that have come good out of collectivism, that I don't think you get under individualism.

For example, without collectivism, I don't know if you have wheelchair ramps in every public building, or every building in the country, right. Now for somebody who's in a wheelchair, that's amazing for them. They know they can go anywhere in the UK and their wheelchair is an impediment to them getting in the building and getting around the building. That is a law. If you don't have a collective rule...

Knut Svanholm: What'd you mean by building, then?

Peter McCormack: A structure.

Knut Svanholm: Is that a so-called public building?

Peter McCormack: Just say, in any business, swimming pool, cinema, even private... Look, I know what difference you're going to put to me. What I'm saying is that for that individual, in the wheelchair, it's good for them.

Knut Svanholm: Let me answer that with an analogy. If you're in a brick-and-mortar store, whatever, you're trying to buy something that they don't have. What is the most common response you get from the employee at the store?

Peter McCormack: Go online.

Knut Svanholm: Go online, or try this other store across the street, or whatever.

Peter McCormack: What about the cinema?

Knut Svanholm: Oh, we don't play that movie, go to this theatre over here, they have it.

Peter McCormack: What I'm saying, is... I understand what you're saying.

Knut Svanholm: No, let me get to the point, because this is important. Businesses do that because they have to, because their end goal is the satisfaction of the customer. Every entrepreneur is a slave to his customer's wants and needs. So they will be, to a certain extent of course, and maybe they wouldn't voluntarily put wheelchair ramps on every building, but putting them on every building is not optimizing the resources, because wheelchaired people won't go to the gym, for instance, to the same extent as someone with legs, to a spinning class, let's say.

Peter McCormack: No, I understand that.

Knut Svanholm: So maybe the ramp is unnecessary there, and those resources were wasted, and people just lost their money building the thing. You see where I'm going?

Peter McCormack: I understand your defence. But what I'm saying is...

Knut Svanholm: It's not a defence.

Peter McCormack: Well it's an argument against it. What I'm saying is for the individual in a wheelchair, it is great for them, for the population of people in wheelchairs, for them in the UK to know they can go to any building which is a business, or a public and know they have that, for them, that is a good thing.

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, but if you're a customer, and you're in another country, and you see a store that does not have a ramp for handicapped people, you can choose not to interact with them, and to buy stuff there.

Peter McCormack: What if you're in a small town with only one cinema? All your friends get to go and watch the film, and it's difficult for you. I'm not arguing with the theory of what you're saying.

Knut Svanholm: I'm sure that that cinema would want that extra customer as well, and sooner or later they could pay for the ramp for the handicapped... It's sort of a far-fetched example, the handicapped ramp.

Peter McCormack: It is an example for that person, it is an example in that situation. I just think that has been a benefit for those... Let me think of another one. What about certain aspects of policing, and certain departments in the police I don't know if you would get, I just don't know.

Again, I understand there will be, like, a defence argument. We'd have private police force and there's a demand for that, then we'll get it. I'm just not sure if you will have a coordinated, for example, national... I can't remember what the UK one is, the ones that deal with the worst criminals.

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, neither am I. I'm not sure either. I'm not sure of the outcome. I think this is in the preface of my book, or the foreword or whatever. We can't really know what would have happened if we would have chosen the other alternative in any point in time in history. So we're all chained to the unforgiving arrow of time, right? So I don't know if we would have a better system if we didn't have a public sector, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying from a moral perspective, the individual is the ultimate minority, and the individual's rights are the most important thing, because every group is formed of individuals.

That's what you should focus your attention on, the rights of the individual. Not the entitlements of the individual, because I don't believe you're entitled to anything, but the rights to pursue your own goals and stuff like that, you're born with these rights, and the government's narrative is they give you the right to do this, and they give you the right to do that, but a government can never give anything, they can just take stuff away. Of course, they can give out stolen money...

Peter McCormack: They can give stuff back.

Knut Svanholm: And they can give stuff back, so in a sense, they can. When it comes to rights, I find the word free-trade agreement is an oxymoron. I used to be pro the EU, but I'm slowly but surely becoming an anti-EU person...

Peter McCormack: What? Hold on, let me guess. You were pro the EU because it broke down borders?

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, exactly. But then I hadn't figured out that borders were just there in the first place because someone put them there. That's the thing. Free-trade agreement is an oxymoron, from my perspective, because... When Brexit happened, you have a lot of problems with that now, because you can't interact the way you did with the rest of Europe. 

But that's the fault of the existence of the nation states. They are the ones that put the borders there in the first place, and that they told you that you couldn't cross this border and interact with those people over there. It all boils down to one of our forefathers being really fucking mean to another one of our forefathers and taking their stuff.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. Is your location private, or can you tell me where you are?

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, I'm in Western Sweden, is that good enough?

Peter McCormack: That's fine. Let's just say that Sweden adopts Bitcoin and the state ends up breaking down, and you end up becoming a Bitcoin-based society.

Knut Svanholm: Here's a hole to the rabbit hole, because I don't think states can adopt Bitcoin, that's...

Peter McCormack: No, I mean the state breaks down after the people adopt Bitcoin.

Knut Svanholm: Oh, all right.

Peter McCormack: The state's gone, you're in this hyperbitcoinization, free society in Sweden. What happens when those Danish fuckers start coming running over the bridge, with their axes and shit, and they're like, "Right, now's our chance, we can get Sweden." What happens then? You've disbanded your police, you've disbanded your military.

Knut Svanholm: First of all, the Danes will adopt Bitcoin way before we will, because we're still more collectivist than they are.

Peter McCormack: I don't think so, I don't know man. Your response to the Coronavirus... I need to ask you about that, by the way.

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, I'm very happy with how the state responded to that. I usually detest the social democrats here, but I actually do believe that the way they did it... I don't really mind the high death rates, because I think an enforced police state is worse. This is the thing I wanted to talk to you about, because you wrote a Tweet saying, "A 30-day lockdown, globally, that would be the best solution to this."

Peter McCormack: Yes, that's Bret Weinstein fault again.

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, it is! I bet you Tweeted it while watching that.

Peter McCormack: Well actually, in fairness, I actually retweeted an old Tweet of mine, I said this right at the very start. I said at the very start, I still think this is a good idea. Let me just frame it for you.

Knut Svanholm: Okay and I'll respond.

Peter McCormack: I really did wrestle with this, because I knew when I was thinking this, it's like, but Pete, you're becoming a libertarian, you're understanding about liberty, and then if this is a forced lockdown, then this is... I totally get that. But at the same time, I was about to do an interview with Scott Horton, and I've read some articles on the Libertarian Institute about the big red button being dangerous, and then in the pursuit of liberty, there's these certain scenarios...

I think Naseem Talib talked about them recently, tail issues, or whatever he calls them, but pandemics, defence, there are certain things that perhaps even in a libertarian society, you want. So I wrestled with it, but the ultimate framing for me is, if you're going to do a lockdown, do it properly and there're loads of arguments against it and why it couldn't work, but if you’re going to do it, just do it properly and kill the virus dead.

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, and from a medical perspective, you're right. You're probably very right, and that would have killed the virus. But this is the scary part, because a prerequisite for doing that is totalitarianism, and all your freedoms taken away. If all your freedoms can be taken away in a manner like that, that's not a society I ever want to set my foot in.

Peter McCormack: We're already in it.

Knut Svanholm: Over here, they couldn't. They were too cowardly over here, or whatever, too slow, whatever you may call it, but they couldn't really enforce it. I think in Sweden, the police force is just not strong enough or big enough for them to enforce a thing like that, and there's almost no military, so even if they would have tried, people would have...

Well, we're a very obedient bunch over here. Most Swedes are very obedient, and so we do whatever they tell us to do. I realize now that I'm talking from a perspective of a country that has one of the highest death rates from this ever, but the thing is...

Peter McCormack: Well you got your freedom.

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, in a sense, there. But the part that scares me is that people seem to think that the result is more important than the morals, the ends rectify the means, part of this because I think the ends never rectify the means, in that sense. Make any sense?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, totally, I get that, I totally get that. So let me ask you a different scenario. So I released a show today on my Defiance podcast, called How to End Humanity. I did an interview with this guy Rob Reid, and there was a virus, H5N1, that was really, very lethal, but hardly contagious, and in the lab, they fucked around with it, so it could be very contagious, they just did some of these tests, right? 

So I think we can agree that Coronavirus is highly contagious, it's spread around the globe at a rate that none of us expected. We've got 10 million infected, but probably, it could be 100 million, we don't really know.

Knut Svanholm: No.

Peter McCormack: Now, let's just say it was at a high death rate, like Ebola levels of death, killing 50%, 60% of people who've got it. Initially, we see it in another country, and we have the risk of it breaking into our country, and we see another country and everyone is just fucking dying.

When you're government turns around and says, "We are doing a lockdown now, and it's a strict one, and these are the rules," are you of the exact same thing that, "No, we should all go out and do exactly as we please."? Or, not even in that scenario, like, "Hold on. Yeah, this is kind of fucked up, we should do something about this."?

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, I think if we saw people dying in mass all over the place, we would do a lockdown voluntarily.

Peter McCormack: Perhaps, but you still might get the idiots who're like, "No, I don't care. I want to do what I want."

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, but then the idiots would die. It's Darwinism, it's harsh, and I might sound inhumane now, but...

Peter McCormack: True! I really have wrestled with these.

Knut Svanholm: Let me give you a counter-scenario. Say we have another spread of like, Ebola goes worldwide, or whatever. Highly contagious, high death rate, the nation that handles this perfectly is China. They do a total lockdown, and they lock people into their buildings, and they cut off everything for 30 days, and they kill it. Then that would be the model society for all other societies to look up to after the virus has died out. Everyone will copy their model. China will become everywhere. I think there's a high risk that this is already happening.

All the apps, tracking devices that spy on you, really scary stuff, that they want to keep the virus contained so you should have your GPS on at all times, and you should be... If you have the virus, where have you been, who have you talked to, where have you interacted? It's all part of this really dystopian, or really a nightmare, that's a big risk right now. I think no virus in the world is as scary as that. Just watch a movie like Brazil or whatever, any dystopian movie will tell you where that leads. Orwell's 1984 pops into mind, of course. I'm rambling on here.

Peter McCormack: No, but you're right. It's really frustrating, because every time... I think, I've got you here. You've got to see you've got a solid answer.

Knut Svanholm: That scares me more than viruses.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but they are solid arguments. So tell me, in terms of Bitcoin, how does this solve this? And have you got any blind spots with this?

Knut Svanholm: Blind spots with Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: You'll be like, "I don't have any blind spots, because if they're blind spots, I can see them," but do you know what I mean? Are there things where you're like, "Hmm, I'm not sure it can happen because of A, B and C." But talk me through first, how you think this is going to play out.

Knut Svanholm: Hyperbitcoinization or totalitarianism, or what?

Peter McCormack: No, how we move to a Bitcoin society? How this actually happens? Because you're like, "This is our one chance," and you're probably right. If Bitcoin doesn't work, then we're screwed.

Knut Svanholm: I think we're building a nation on top of every other nation. We're building a decentralized system. Nation has a bad ring to it, but we're building something, a community, to use a more neutral word, that in due time will... When the price of Bitcoin goes up, all Bitcoiners will be more wealthy, and therefore as a whole, we will be more powerful and more influential everywhere. So I believe there's a great chance that this will be peaceful, and that it will happen in a good way, also.

Both scenarios are possible, and predicting the future is a dangerous game. I don't really know how it will play out, and I don't know when. This is the most tricky question, because hyperbitcoinization could happen in a matter of months, or in 300 years. I don't really know, and no one does. I think sooner or later, it will be inevitable, if this experiment that Bitcoin still continues to work, and the way it does. That's the basic premise of my books, they are from the perspective of, if this continues to do what it already does, what does that lead to?

Peter McCormack: How does having Bitcoin stop us going back to our old ways of collectivism? Look, I understand that we're sovereign, and if we've got very good privacy... I imagine in the future, we'll have better tools for privacy, and we can stop the state stealing our Bitcoin. Just, for example, what's to stop a group of people with Bitcoin thinking, "Yeah, we still need a state. Let's all contribute a little bit of Bitcoin towards the state. We can tax people, and..." What stops that happening? We've still got men with guns.

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, but you have to pay them. You have to pay the men with guns. The thing with Bitcoin is a whole population could have an unknown amount of Bitcoin in their heads at all time. The only thing you need to learn how to do is how to memorize 24 words. If you memorize a seed phrase, you can have that money without anyone ever knowing that you have it.

Peter McCormack: But come on, no one is going to... Well, very few people are going to take that risk, especially if they can have a better way than just memorizing... I understand the theory.

Knut Svanholm: This is the for the sake of argument here, how this differs from every type of money that preceded it. Information used to be indirectly valuable, but now it's very directly valuable. The information that represents your Bitcoin is the very thing that is valuable, and that turns everything on its head about ownership. A state owning money involves a lot of cooperation with who actually decides what to spend and when and where.

With Bitcoin, I've been talking about this before, but how does that actually work for a nation state? Someone has to hold the keys. People say, well 10 million key multisig and 60% of the keys unlocks the Bitcoin or something like that, it could be a society like that. But I have a hard time seeing how that would play out. For instance, in Venezuela, you've seen this, that they accept Bitcoin via BTCPay Server for passports for Venezuelan...

Peter McCormack: I just saw that.

Knut Svanholm: And I wonder, who holds the keys to those Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: I don't know, man.

Knut Svanholm: It's either someone in Venezuela, with a gun at his head, or it's Maduro himself, if he's mentally capable of handling Bitcoin. You don't really know these things. It's so much harder for anyone to confiscate Bitcoins that it is to confiscate, let's say, gold. You, for instance, in the UK now, you have all the Venezuelan gold, or some of the Venezuelan gold is in your vaults and I just read a headline that the British central bank are refusing to give it back to Maduro because they don't see Maduro as the legit president of Venezuela.

Peter McCormack: No, they think it's Guaidó.

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, so they actually own the gold, right? The person who made that decision, in reality, he's the one who owns the gold. But with Bitcoin, it's a whole different ballpark, because the one who holds the keys, is the owner of the Bitcoin, regardless of guns. If you shoot that person, the Bitcoin would disappear. That's not the case with gold. So there's so many rabbit holes to fall into here, when you realize that information is actually literally worth something rather than just metaphorically worth something.

Peter McCormack: Man, you put up a good argument and defence for everything dude!

Knut Svanholm: Thank you! I do my best.

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, look, you should tell people about... Did you write two books?

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, I wrote Sovereignty Through Mathematics, and I've been doing this all by my... It's just a hobby of mine.

Peter McCormack: Just a hobby?

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, I've always been a creative person, I have a bit of ADD, so I started writing a book. Actually, I first started writing articles, I compiled them into a book, but then I got my name associated to a bunch of articles that I read they were sort of bad, so I said, why don't I write a proper book about Bitcoin.

So I did, and I stopped when I got bored with it. I had a New Year's resolution that I would write a page a day, for a whole year and I kept that promise for a hundred days, and then I got bored with it. The book is finished now, it's a hundred-page book, here it is. So I went to Riga with 50 of those, you got one...

Peter McCormack: I did.

Knut Svanholm: And I gave it away to a bunch of people there, traded one with Jimmy Song, for The Little Bitcoin Book, and all that, and mingled around with people. So good to see people in MeetSpace. That was my introduction as a Bitcoin author to the world. After that, they've been catching on, and I'm just enjoying the ride, so I wrote another book during my vacation in Spain this Christmas. The first book is called Sovereignty Through Mathematics, and the second one is Bitcoin Independence Reimagined.

Peter McCormack: Man, I will make time to read them, I promise!

Knut Svanholm: They're on Audible, if that's easier.

Peter McCormack: Or listen. There's just this big pile of books. I promise you, I will get through it. Well listen, look, I'll add links to this in the show notes, I'll tell everyone to buy your books and support what you're doing.

Knut Svanholm: Thank you.

Peter McCormack: I really appreciate you coming on. These are really interesting subjects for me to talk about. I'm working my way through it in my head, I'm trying every time to break them, so I can reinforce my own thinking. I think it's a journey, right? Nobody wakes up a Bitcoin maximalist, nobody wakes up a libertarian... Well, I guess you're born one, but nobody really does.

You go on a journey of discovery, and in doing that... It's really hard, but it's really good having the support of other people, and trying to earn these kind of complex societal and political and economical ideas. I always appreciate someone like you coming on and letting me throw questions at you. I think it was fantastic. So Knut, thank you!

Knut Svanholm: Thank you, Peter. Before we close out, once again, Human Action is a good place to start if you want to know a bit about the history of libertarian thought process and everything. Like I said, I'm not sure that I'm right, not at all, from an outcome perspective, but it's about basic morals. It's about morality. Should or should you not force people into different behaviours, that's the basic premise.

Peter McCormack: I agree. I've got the Amazon page open now, here it is. I think I might go for the Audible book, though, as you said. Find the time when I've got 30 hours, probably when I'm out running, or on my bike. I will give it a go, and if I've got any questions, I'll come back to you. Appreciate your time man, and hopefully we'll see each other at some event soon when the planes are flying.

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, I'm thinking of taking a ferry to Riga this year.

Peter McCormack: Nice! Just fingers crossed it still happens dude, i really do. All right, man, Liverpool are about to play Man City, I've got to go watch. I appreciate your time dude, you take care! See you soon.

Knut Svanholm: Yeah, stay safe and take care. See you on Twitter!