WBD324 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin Philosophy with Gigi

Interview date: Monday 22nd March

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Gigi. 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 Bitcoin writer Gigi. We discuss the philosophical teachings of Bitcoin, toxicity as a feature, and how bitcoin creates its own space-time.

“Economic reality will dictate bitcoins future, not niceness… it’s fuck you money, if you don’t agree with the bitcoin that I’m using I can say ‘fuck you’ I’m doing everything myself.”

— Gigi

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Morning, Gigi, how are you, man?

Gigi: Hey, Peter, I'm fine.  Thanks for having me.  How are you doing yourself?

Peter McCormack: I'm doing very, very well.  Glad to finally get you on.  I mentioned to you a while ago, I think I pinged you on Telegram, said we should do this and I've been listening to the beautifully narrated Guy Swann version of your book.  I've really loved it, so yeah; glad to do this, man.

Gigi: Yeah, likewise.  I like the Guy Swann version better myself than when I'm reading it, so shout out to Guy; he's like an international treasure for the Bitcoin space.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he is; and we're not going to talk about xPubs today, I don't think, we'll avoid that today!  You're explanation on xPubs was very useful; I still don't understand it enough.  I know you'll probably shake your head and other people will.

Gigi: No, I think it's fine.  What motivated me to write it is that a lot of people expect Bitcoin to be perfect from the get-go and it just won't be, just like the internet wasn't.  And that's why I also drew the parallels to the early computer and internet days.  It was hell for like 10, 15 years and it's still hell in some regard.  Everyone knows, trying to connect to a printer is anything but easy.  Printers are made in hell, I think!  And, even though we don't suffer networking problems that often anymore, as soon as something breaks down, you actually see how complicated everything is.  Like, if your smartphone stops working, you're just at a loss. 

I think with Bitcoin, it's similar and people expect it to be easy; and stuff like that is just never easy.  But, everyone is working on it to make it better and I just think we need a little bit of patience.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, what the fuck is the deal with printers, man?  I've got a, what is it here; an HP Envy, right, and the amount of times I go to print something and it says it's not connected or the print fails and I'm like, how are we…  How is Elon Musk talking about putting people on Mars and my printer still won't connect to my computer and I don't know how to fix it.  The only way I fix it is I end up reinstalling the driver; that's the only way I ever find of fixing it!  How are we still there, man?

Gigi: I don't know.  I don't have a good answer to the question, but the fact that you have to dig into installing drivers and other things already shows you that when you connect certain pieces of technology together, what happens underneath and what happens in the background, the background is kind of complicated.  Making all of it work isn't necessarily trivial and I think we see the same thing in Bitcoin as well. 

Setting up your nodes and connecting it to your phone, for example; setting up Lightning currently; it's all a little bit involved, but I think we can also see the trajectory that everything is getting easier and easier.  And now, for example, in the regular technology world, we're at a place where pretty much everywhere you are, there is WiFi and your phone automatically connects it and it's very, very easy to do all that.  And I think very soon, we will be there with Bitcoin as well and we will have all these abstractions.

But, what makes Bitcoin kind of special is that we must not lose the essense of Bitcoin, what it's all about, just by making it easier.  So Bitcoin, if we're doing it correctly, it will remain hard and difficult in some regard.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  It reminds me of -- I think people are fully aware now of my lack of technical competency and I don't know if you listened to my second node episode with Shinobi?

Gigi: I haven't yet, but I heard good things of it in terms of that you were actually struggling through it!

Peter McCormack: Well, I got a little bit into command line and I learnt a little bit as I went there and we were trying to sync the node; and then we tried to get it to connect to Specter.  And then I accidentally, when trying to set up some of the settings, accidentally pruned my node.  We were trying to set up Tor.

I think it's a really useful show for people to listen to, to see how someone like my brain works with some of these things, because people are like, "Oh, fuck you, Pete, you don't understand xPubs; you should spend some time learning".  Look, I try, right, but it's just a foreign language to me.  But, I think it's useful for people to see that.

I'll tell you what's funny about it is, these shows don't do particularly big downloads, these technical ones; it will do a third of what, say, a Lyn Alden show about economics will do.  But, it had the most emails from people who had listened to the show coming and saying one of two things.  It was either, "You should try this instead; what you're doing is far too complicated.  Just sort your Raspberry Pi out"; or it was people saying, "I'm in the same boat; I've got no idea how this works".  So, I feel a little bit vindicated.

Gigi: Yeah, of course.  I mean, I think the shows that do best are just playing into people's feelings in terms of how they will get rich and, you know, how you can make a lot of money quickly.  I think there is no surprise there.  I think telling people that this is hard and you have to struggle through it and you have to learn some things and you have to take on responsibility, like the responsibility of holding your keys, for example; the responsibility of verifying your own software; the responsibility of running your own node; it's not something that people want to hear and it's not something that people necessarily want to do.

Just to be clear, there is also no right way or wrong way to use Bitcoin and I think there is also no right or wrong way to view Bitcoin.  The whole idea about Bitcoin is that you make the rules and it's your node and it's your thing.  What Bitcoin is; it's a personal thing.  You can decide for yourself what Bitcoin is and how you want to use it.  And as beautiful as that is, Bitcoin doesn't care.  Bitcoin just is, and that's enough.

As long as Bitcoin just is there, people can use it as they want to use it.  And I'm also convinced that our view of Bitcoin will continue to change, just like it has changed in the past.  And also, how regular people will view Bitcoin and how they will use it will change as well and we are living through that.  I mean, we are going now from just regular nerds on the internet to institutional adoption and everything changes kind of with that. 

Also, the way you hold private key material, for example, changes.  A Cypherpunk who knows exactly what he is doing has a different idea of how to store private keys than a multi-billion dollar company that has a board of directors and certain obligations, and so on and so forth.  So, I think all of that will have to change necessarily as Bitcoin grows and develops. 

And yes, currently if you want to use it in a self-sovereign way as a private individual, it's a little bit involved and you have to learn a thing or two; and it's also a little bit scary of course.  You're literally your own bank; you have to take matters into your own hands; you have to decide for yourself what Bitcoin is; and you have to make sure that you're doing things correctly, because there is nobody in the world that can help you.  If you mess up, then that's it and that's scary for people.  I'm not surprised that it doesn't sell well.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it is tricky.  I'm not going to give up on it; I'm going to keep trying and I know I'm going to get there eventually with my own node.

Gigi: And you shouldn't.  I think a lot of bitcoiners have the same opinion.  I think it's kind of a moral obligation to try to be a better bitcoiner; just like it's a moral obligation to try to be a better person so that society might be better.   And in the Bitcoin sense, I think that's also where a lot of the toxicity comes from, that you just want to encourage people as well to just do it and try it and it's not that hard once you start it; but, it's very, very hard to get into it and actually look at it and we all know it's a struggle.

So, again, I think once you realise what Bitcoin is and what it has the potential to become and what actual societal problems it has the potential to fix, if we do this thing correctly, if we don't fall into the easy traps that we had in the fiat system, then it kind of becomes a moral obligation to tell other people to do that as well and take the responsibility and do it correctly; and go through the pain of learning all of that.  Just do it yourself and figure it out and everyone will be better for it, I think.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think it took me a lot longer to realise this than maybe it does other people.  I spent a long time fighting against some of these ideas that you should really try these things and the toxicity.  I used to think the toxicity was unnecessary and that I don't need to run a node.  All these things, I've been told over and over again by the same people and had the plebs shout at me for. 

I think it took me a lot longer to kind of realise these things and I don't know why.  But I would say the last year, I've felt a real shift in myself and my own thinking and I think it's the convergence of a few things, specific things, like getting my bank account closed down with the banks with 65 days' notice; literally watching some of my money inflate away in front of me, and I know it's slow and insidious, but basically I run my business on dollars, but I operate in the UK, and nearly 18% of purchasing power's been lost in the last year top to bottom, dollar versus the pound, which is a problem for me.

So many different things have happened and converged onto this point now where I'm now, "Oh, shit, I finally get it after four years".

Gigi: Yeah, I mean it takes a while to understand it and maybe also change your views on toxicity and learn how it is, I would say, kind of understandable and in a way, important.  And, I'd actually like to dig into that a little bit, because I think some of the toxicity also comes with experience.  I think it takes a lot of character.

Some OGs still have the patience of an angel, you know, and they will go on Reddit and they will go on Twitter and they will explain to newbies the same thing they did for the last ten years all over again.  And, they will explain to everyone why this and that can't work and why Bitcoin works the way it works, and all the trade-offs that it makes, and so on.

So, some toxicity, I think, comes with experience because, you know in the one commercial where the guy is, "We know a thing or two because we've seen a thing or two"?  If you've been in Bitcoin for five, six, seven, eight years, you've seen it all; it's all the scams all over again, because there just might be five to ten different ways how you can scam people, and bitcoiners have seen it all.

So, you can get toxic really quickly, because it's just the same shit all over again and why do you want to even waste your time on it, you know?  It's kind of a time-saving -- such a thing as a time-saving toxicity as well, just like Satoshi said, "If you don't believe me or don't get, I don't have the time to try to convince you".  Basically, I don't have time to argue with you about it.  There are lots of things to be built; there are more important things that I can do with my time; and I can't argue why proof of stake doesn't work with you for the fiftieth time, you know.  If you don't get it; sorry, do some more research, learn it on your own.  It's your obligation to learn it; it's not my obligation to explain it to you.

But, with that being said, you know, there are still bitcoiners that do nothing else all day than explain this stuff to newbies that are just willing to listen and have an open mind.  There are people on Clubhouse right now probably, you know, NVK and others are probably on Clubhouse right now and they have been for 12 hours straight, and they're explaining with the patience of an angel to everyone who's willing to listen.

But if someone comes in and is like, "I just learned about Bitcoin and I'm going to tell you how to fix it and then I'm going to tell you what's broken", and they have no idea what they're talking about, then you can expect bitcoiners to be toxic.  It's also a defence mechanism.  Bitcoiners were attacked and laughed at just for the last ten years pretty much, straight up, and it's no surprise to me that some have a toxic reaction to all of that, as they should be, I think.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I agree.  Look, one of the ideas I've been thinking about a lot recently is that your first Bitcoin lesson takes four years.  However you want to think about it, it takes four years.  It doesn't matter where that four years starts in a cycle, but you have to go through a whole cycle; you have to experience a full bear market and a bull market, because you see all the dynamics at play.

It's funny; I've got two sets of notes here.  There are the things I wanted to talk to you about, but the notes I took when I was listening to your book, and I always feel sometimes, as a bitcoiner, am I being too much of a bitcoiner; think about this too deeply?  But actually, one of the most important things that's happened to me over that four years, my own considerations regarding patience; and in terms of my considerations or understanding of money or wealth creation.

So, I think you have to go through that four years.  And, if I look back four years ago when I first entered and I was thinking, "Yeah, it's going to be a world of blockchains and we're going to have private blockchains and we're going to have all these shitcoins", and I was trying to defend them and thought they were something.  And now we're here in this new bull market and I've just got myself into arguments with people about Cardano and NFTs and all kinds of bullshit and I just don't have the patience anymore.  So, those who do, I celebrate them.

Gigi: Yeah, absolutely.  And I think the reason is that you have seen all of this already.  You've seen it in 2017.  Everything was called a little bit different there, like some of the shitcoin projects that now are popular existed back then as well or what started back then.  But, the underlying problems didn't change and also, the arguments didn't change.  The arguments, one could even argue, got worse because the arguments from the Bitcoin side got better.  I think our collective understanding of Bitcoin, what it does, where it's useful, how it works, what the trade-offs are, are more solid than they were four years ago.

I think the arguments why you need shitcoin X to run this project; they just got worse and worse and worse.  And I feel like some scammers don't even try anymore; it's just like, "We'll just double down on the marketing and we can't even coherently tell you what this thing does, but just buy all these tokens and get rich with us; that's basically what it comes down to".

I think that's another underappreciated part of the toxicity, is that a lot of it is truly trying to be protective.  You know the meme where a bitcoiner is in front of the sleeping newbie and catching all the fire and knives and everything?  It's just most bitcoiners got completely rekt.  Most bitcoiners had a shitcoin phase.  And, if you had a shitcoin phase, the likelihood that you got completely rekt is very high.

I don't want to see my friends go through that and I don't want to see other people, innocent people, go through that.  I don't want to see innocent people fall for all the marketing scams.  They could be stacking good Bitcoin if they would not be falling for all the bullshit.  That's why stacking sats is so powerful and so important.  Just stay humble, try to understand Bitcoin as completely as you can and just start stacking sats today.  Set up Auto-DCA don't even think about it and don't try to time the markets; don't try to be smarter than the market; don't try to be smarter than everyone else, because you'll discover shitcoin number 735 on CoinMarketCap and you think it's going to pump forever, or whatever, and it's just…

We went through all that and we are trying to protect you from doing all these stupid mistakes.  And you can also tell that sometimes it works.  I'm really surprised and I'm pleasantly surprised by the class of 2020 that got into Bitcoin very recently.  I think most of them, or some of them at least, they didn't need to have this whole four-year cycle.  You can see radical, personal transformations in some of those people and they truly understand it; and they also understand what Bitcoin is about, what it's trying to do; that essentially, it's about the separation of money and state and becoming more self-sovereign and taking responsibility for your finances and what you do financially and how you do your savings and stuff like that.

So, it's a very hopeful phenomenon that some people seem to be catching on very, very quickly, including millionaires and billionaires, you know, like Michael Saylor; it famously just took him two or three months and he probably has a deeper understanding of some of the aspects than some bitcoiners that have been around for a while.  So, it's very good to see.  So, I think the dedication and the outreach and the patience at the toxicity; it kind of pays off in the end.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  You say that though, but I don't know.  I feel like my feed is awash with shitcoinery at the moment to epic levels.  The Cardano people, I was kind of ripping on them recently, just making some jokes and they were vicious.  There's like hundreds, maybe thousands of them, just coming in.  I was like, "Woah!  Do you know what; I can't even be bothered with this".  Even ripping on them is a waste of time because of the stuff that comes back; it just became a bit too much.

Anyway, listen, I could talk about shitcoins and shitcoiners, but there's so much other, more interesting things to talk about with you.  I'll tell you something that really stood out to me when I was reading your book is that perennial question that comes up, "What is Bitcoin?" and I've always been trying to articulate a response.  I've done a couple of interviews recently and I've been trying to explain it to my friends.  But, it's always a really difficult question to answer.

You talk about this in the book; you talk about, you can latch on to a specific subject such as, it's Gold 2.0, or whatever it is.  But actually, it's so weirdly big that sometimes, you know, when I was walking this morning listening to your book, again I was like, trying to answer it sometimes does it a disservice; because, when you're trying to answer it in a simple and easy way for someone to understand, you miss out on so much.

So, I almost feel like now, rather than just trying to explain what it is, it's just to say, "Look, you just have to go and get in the rabbit hole".  Rather than say, "Bitcoin is this", "Here are some instructions; go and do these few things and then see how you get on and then come back and talk to me", because I feel like just trying to describe it is too difficult now.  Does that make any sense?

Gigi: Absolutely.  I think you know, my recommendation to everyone, and I made this recommendation for a while, so I'd say for the last two years at least, maybe three, is just buy a little bit, just get skin in the game.  Everything else will go from there.  And the best thing, I think, to get skin in the game is to set up Auto-DCA; because, buying it once and forgetting about it, you will mess up.  You will delete your wallet, you will lose your backup, whatever; you won't write down your seed right, because you can't understand all that, you can't understand how important it is.

The question, "What Bitcoin is", is, I think, impossible to answer, because Bitcoin truly is different things to different people.  That's not just a meme; Bitcoin is different things to different people.  And, Bitcoin just exists.  You can use it as you want to use it and you can view it and see it and understand it as you want to understand it, as long as you align with Bitcoin's sole, so to speak; as long as you don't break consensus, it doesn't matter.  It's what you want to see. 

You can have the view that it's like a settlement layer; you can have the view that Gideon voiced a lot, that it's just a protocol for value transfer and it doesn't matter what comes in at one end and comes out at the other end; volatility isn't important, because you can do it in the span of a few minutes, so you cancel out all volatility; and you can send around money all across the world; and, there is a store of value savings aspect; and, if you want to use it as the best money the world has ever seen and use it as a savings vehicle first and foremost, that's what you can do.

That's also how Bitcoin works.  Again, you have to take responsibility, you hold the keys, you're in charge; and you have to be.  You validate the rules; it's all about you.  You define what Bitcoin is with your node and with your understanding of it and nobody can tell you what Bitcoin is.  You define what Bitcoin is and that's what's behind Don't Trust, Verify.  That's the whole idea of it. 

You are in charge; you're in charge of your Bitcoin; and that's also the idea behind the toxicity in some sense, because if you don't like it, you can fork off, you know, propose a change, create a system that is at least 10X or 100X better, because otherwise the network switching costs would be way too high; and if you don't like it, you can do what you want.  Nobody has to convince you.

An economic reality will take care of the adoption of Bitcoin; the incentives will take care of the rest.  There is no point trying to convince ever naysayer and we don't need to.  As Pierre Rochard said, "People will use Bitcoin, because they will have to eat; period".  Once you understand that, you have understood a lot because that means understanding monetary history; that means understanding the money properties of different monies and the monetary properties of Bitcoin; that means understanding network effects; that means understanding how resilient Bitcoin is; and so on and so forth.

That's where we're at and again, if you don't like, if you don't like something about Bitcoin, write a BIP, or if you don't like it at all, you can fork off.  Just don't come back whining and tell us how bitcoiners were mean and how it's all our fault and how bitcoiners are to blame that everyone is poor now.  We tried to warn you, we tried to explain it to you and if you don't want to listen and if you don't want to understand, then this is on you, again, like the responsibility is on you; and that's what it is, in my opinion about Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what; there are some things about Bitcoin's history that are also uncanny, because when you said there, "We tried to warn you", the interesting thing I would say, for example, is the birth of Bitcoin was after the 2008 Financial Crisis, which was a global crisis, impacted a lot of people.  It didn't directly impact me too much, it didn't really change my life too much; but what's happened since then is we've kind of seen this really slow car crash that's really accelerated through this pandemic.

The timing of Bitcoin, not only the timing of its birth, but also the timing of its, let's say, what I would say is, over the last year especially and maybe two to three years, it's gone from that nerdy toy to that very serious, whether you call it a commodity money, whatever, a financial asset; it's become very serious, with the likes of Tesla and Michael Saylor and Square and Jack Dorsey and Fidelity and all these different kinds of very serious players; it's now a very serious financial asset.

Again, its maturity, its adulthood, is really happening at a time when again it is needed.  And the timing is uncanny with everything that's happened this year.  We've just seen the ECB announcements this week; we've had the $1.9 trillion, further $1.9 trillion we should say, in the US.  Don't you find the timing uncanny?  If this was a script, it would almost be perfect?

Gigi: Yeah.  You can definitely see it that way and it seems very serendipitous, if that's the right word?

Peter McCormack: It is.

Gigi: But I also think, there is never a bad time for hard money.  And, if Bitcoin wouldn't exist, people would find other ways to start a wealth.  And we see this already.  Bitcoin is still so, so, so small.  You have the phenomenon of TikTok investors and they're trying to speculate in the stock market just to not only get rich, but also to not get poor; just trying to have something for their earned wealth.  And we would see a resurgence in gold and real estate and other things, I think.

It seems very perfect now, but I think all fiat moneys are doomed; it's just in the nature of fiat moneys.  We see this over and over and over again.  If you have the power to manipulate the currency, you will inevitably use it.  And also, no wonder, for example, we had a global pandemic.  So, according to some, that's good enough reason to manipulate the money supply in an extreme way.  Historically, there might have been war, like World War I and World War II.  It's very easy to justify all the money printing if you have big problems, so to speak, to deal with.  So, that's not surprising.

Now that Bitcoin exists, and I have all reasons to believe that it will continue to exist, people will use it.  It's a tool that you can use and also, they will use it as they see fit, according to their circumstances.  And, in the US now and in other countries as well, it's obvious that the money supply inflates; it's obvious that the purchasing power of the US seller is diminishing and will diminish further, so people will flee into Bitcoin for that reason alone.

But, in other countries, it might be different reasons.  If you live in an authoritarian surveillance state and you want to do business or other things where the government can't see every step that you take; or, you just want to do business with people and maybe your bank or your government says, no, you can't do business with those people, they will use Bitcoin for different reasons.  It's a tool that is there; it's a very powerful tool; and again, like other powerful tools, you will have to learn how to use it as well.

It's the same with cars, it's the same with guns; you can't just put a 14-year-old into a car and assume that everything will go dandy; and you can't just give anyone a powerful weapon and just assume they won't hurt themselves.  And, Bitcoin is very similar.  I'm not saying you need a licence to use Bitcoin, but I'm saying it's a powerful tool and a powerful weapon, if you will, and you need to know and learn how to wield it, otherwise you will hurt yourself or you will hurt others.

Peter McCormack: Okay, that's a very interesting topic and a very interesting concept whereby you need to learn how to wield it, because… yes.  Again, I was trying to relate this to personal things.  I would have a lot more Bitcoin right now if I had have wielded my Bitcoin, or understood Bitcoin, a lot better four years ago; and I didn't.  But, that's fine; we've all got a rekt story, it doesn't really matter.  But, that power to damage others, can you expand on that, how it could harm others?

Gigi: Yeah, I mean of course.  For Bitcoin, it's very easy.  If you don't care about your on-chain privacy, this has effect on other people as well.  Your footprint on the very transparent blockchain, it is always entangled with others, so depending -- this is not only for individuals; it's also for exchanges and other large players that interact with the network.  If you don't do those kinds of things properly, you can absolutely damage others as well; it's just the nature of the beast.

You have to learn and you need to know what you're doing.  You need to do your best.  I think again, you have a moral obligation to try to reduce the harm to yourself and the harm to others.

Peter McCormack: It's a really interesting point actually, because a few moments ago, you mentioned about introducing new people to Bitcoin.  The first thing, you say, is just go and buy some and maybe set up an Auto-DCA, because you get the skin in the game.  And again, I think just maybe, perhaps, I think that's probably what's happened this year then, Gigi, in that when I moved all my company profits into Bitcoin, I had much more skin in the game. 

I guess the success and the continuation of Bitcoin became much more entwined with my life and I think that's perhaps why I've become a little bit more, I wouldn't say toxic, but certainly a little bit hardened in my view; that realisation that, okay, I need a node, I'm going to battle through this; because essentially, my life and a lot of my children's life depends on this now.  So, it's kind of that responsibility.  Yeah, I think you're making a good point there.

Gigi: Yeah, absolutely.  And I think it's not a unique experience.  It's also why I put it as the first lesson in my book.  Bitcoin changes you; it's not the other way around.  You don't change Bitcoin; we saw that in the past.  It's impossible to change Bitcoin, pretty much, but Bitcoin will change you for exactly that reason, because it forces you to adopt this personal responsibility.  And it also forces you kind of, because since we're still in the exponential adoption phase; it forces you to extend your time horizon as well and lower your time preference.

You will plan for the future and you will think about the future more, because it's obvious, if you've been around for a little bit, that the Bitcoin you spent today, you will probably regret in the future.  So, you will plan more for the future.

Peter McCormack: That's a tricky one.

Gigi: Yeah, but it's true.

Peter McCormack: No you're right -- sorry to interrupt.  Go on, you finish.

Gigi: But, that's how I see it, how Bitcoin changes you.  It forces you to adopt personal responsibility for your finances and also for the network in part, because you will want, as you said, you will want to run your own node if you have a meaningful amount of money in Bitcoin.  You will want to validate it yourself; you don't want to trust others, because that's just not good.  And, if you know anything about Bitcoin and why Bitcoin exists, that's just obvious.

The other thing is, it will lower your time preference.  It's just the nature of the soundest money we ever had; of the hard money it represents.  If Bitcoin continues to survive and the incentives and money target properties don't change, and we don't have any reason to believe that they will change, then this will just continue to happen.  So, you will get better at not spending your Bitcoin and you will get better at planning for the future; and, that's why Bitcoin changes you, I'm convinced of that.

I would also argue, it changes you for the better.  There is nothing bad about taking care of yourself and taking care of your future self and taking care of your family and taking on personal responsibility; and just also trying to understand this thing.  I don't think it can be bad really.

Peter McCormack: No, I think you're right, but it is that interesting point where the Bitcoin you spend now, you regret in the future.  But at some point, you've got the balance of the two scarce items that you mention in your book, Bitcoin and time, because ultimately you want to live your life with fulfilling experiences.  So at some point it's like, "Well, maybe I want to spend some of that Bitcoin and do some things, but what if I wait another year and Bitcoin will be $100,000; or, if I wait five years, it will be $1 million?"  

It's a really tricky balance to make, because the price is so -- I mean, there are certain predictable elements, like bull markets and bear markets; but where they top and where they go up, very unpredictable.

Gigi: Yeah, absolutely.  But, I tweeted something out quite a while ago, "The hardest thing about getting into Bitcoin is dropping the fiat mindset".  So of course, price is important and of course, price as a metric is a very healthy indicator of the network as a whole.  It drives adoption; it drives security.  All of that is embedded in the price metric.

But, if you are in Bitcoin to cash back out into dollars or euros, or the fiat money of your choice, I think you didn't grasp the full impact of what is going on currently yet.  I think, by all means, don't chastise yourself.  Treat yourself from time to time.  If you got super rich with Bitcoin, there is nothing wrong with maybe even buying a house, or something like that.  Or, you always wanted to have this nice car; treat yourself, but just be careful of thinking like, "Oh, now I have, I don't know; $10 million", or whatever, "and now I'm cashing out and I'll live off this $10 million for the rest of my life", because I don't think --

Peter McCormack: That will melt.

Gigi: If you are in your twenties or thirties, the rest of your life is still quite a long while and US dollar won't be around for the rest of your life, maybe, and Bitcoin will be.  That's the difference; that's what I mean when I say, dropping the fiat mindset.  You will have to start thinking in Bitcoin and you will have to start thinking in sats; and what matters is the sats you have on your balance sheet.

If every single day, you have more satoshis to your name than the day before it, it was a good day.  And even if you spend a little bit, or whatever you do, it doesn't matter.  Treat yourself from time to time; but, what you should have in mind and what you should have an eye on is your satoshi balance and not your US dollar or euro, or whatever, balance.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I half agree and I mainly agree because I know directionally where we're going.  I know what's happening to the pound; I see it; I see what's happening; I see what my government's doing.  I see what's happening with the dollar and you can see the future based on what's happened in other countries.

I mean, I'm not in that position, well firstly I don't have $10 million of Bitcoin, but if I did, I'm not thinking I'd want to cash that out.  But at certain times, you might want that house.  And, it was Martti Malmi who did that really good tweet thread, where he talked about having 50,000 Bitcoin.  Then he bought a house and, you know…

I think, at some point, there's a certain balance of things.  Like, right now, I've got a certain amount of time until my kids move away and they'd be like, "Wouldn't it be nice if we did have a different house that we lived in [or] we went on this holiday?"  So, it is that balance of those two scarce resources, Bitcoin and time; the only two scarce resources that matter.

Gigi: Yeah, absolutely.  And, I mean, nobody can make these kinds of decisions for you; you have to make them for yourself.

Peter McCormack: No, of course.

Gigi: And the question is, what do you value more; and how do you calculate the risk of, for example, the housing market collapsing, maybe the house gets super cheap in like five years from now; or the US dollar collapsing; or the euro collapsing; or the Eurozone dissolving; or the Bitcoin Network stopping? 

There is a risk in everything and you have to make a decision yourself, what do you value more; how do you see the future playing out; what is more likely to happen?  And, of course, if you're like Bitstein and Pierre Rochard five or six years ago, they saw all that coming and they were called crazy people.  Now, it's not so crazy anymore. 

As time goes on, I think the bitcoiner thesis will become more and more obvious because, again, it is in the nature of fiat money to disappear, to be replaced by another fiat money, to collapse, to hyperinflate.  Fiat monies go away.  We have a graveyard of fiat monies.  I mean, if you've ever seen the graphs of the purchasing power of the US dollar or similar fiat currencies, it's abysmal.  So, you don't need a PhD to understand where things are going.

If you have ever seen a graph of the purchasing power of Bitcoin, you also don't need a PhD to see where things are going.  So, to me, it's obvious what you want to own and what you maybe want to rent.  There's a saying around Bitcoin, "Just buy Bitcoin and rent everything else", and I think the next ten years or so, that might be a very smart choice; I intend to do that.  It doesn't matter how much I have, because what do you need?  What am I doing with the house? 

A house is an obligation as well.  It all depends on your life circumstances.  I'm still relatively young; I'm still flexible enough to do those kinds of things.  If you want to settle down, if you're in your sixties, or whatever, and you want to buy a big house for your family and your grandchildren, go ahead, do it.  Everyone have to make these personal decisions for themselves.

Peter McCormack: So, have you adopted a full Bitcoin standard?  You must still have to use some amounts of fiat?

Gigi: Yeah, of course.  I mean, there was a time when I was 100% on the Bitcoin standard and I was earning Bitcoin and not fiat.  I'm back to earning fiat and some Bitcoin, so I think I'm in the same boat like Michael Saylor is.  I have everything that I don't need in the next couple of months in Bitcoin and I think if you're serious about this, it will happen on its own accord, just in a couple of years' time; because, if you allocate just 10%, 20% to Bitcoin, wait five years and it will be 90%-plus.  So, you're all in Bitcoin anyway.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, yeah.

Gigi: It's just seems to be the nature of the game and again, we have no reason to see that changing; even though, as I said before, our view of Bitcoin might change and what Bitcoin represents might change as well.

Peter McCormack: Well, that's an interesting thing you say about Saylor.  Yeah, I operate an eight-weeks cash flow business; personal, everything goes into Bitcoin.  I don't know, again, I don't know how I would do that the same in a bear market, because there are different risks associated with a -- I've got a team of eight employees now, so there are different risks.

But, I think one of the most interesting things that Michael Saylor's done, I've brought this up a couple of times recently, is not the big, initial purchase and it's not the massive loans he's taken.  I actually think it's these tweets, I think there have been two or three now, where he comes out and says, "We've put $10 million of profit into Bitcoin".  He's stacking sats, just at a much higher level than everyone else; but, I think that's a really important message that he's putting across.

Gigi: Yeah, absolutely.  He's stacking full Bitcoin; that's the difference!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he's million-dollar cost averaging!

Gigi: Yeah, but that's exactly what he's doing.  And, you can be of two minds of that.  It's kind of sad that the time is running out for the small guy to front-run the institutions.  And, on the other side, it's amazing how far Bitcoin has come and that we have institutional adoptions, and that we see billionaires not only putting it on their balance sheet, not just a little bit, but just moving straight onto a Bitcoin standard, because they understood it's the harder money; it's the better asset; you don't want to hold fiat money; and, it's the smart thing to do.

If you don't need the money, why not park it in Bitcoin until you need it?  And, as Saylor said, he wants to park it for the next 100 years, and that's quite something.  I think it has to do with something that PlanB laid out a while ago.  Think of his model what you will, but I really liked the framing of having different phases, Bitcoin having different phases.  It went from proof of concept to Cypherpunk money to dark web money and so on.  And, as I said before, our view of Bitcoin has changed and I think it will change in the future as well.

Also, as you know, I joined Swan recently and we saw a growing demand as well from businesses and high net worth individuals all around the world.  And that's why we adapted as well and we launched Swan Private and we have now this Concierge service for corporations and high net worth individuals that want to do the same thing that Saylor wants to do.  And, if someone wants to -- of course, there are multiple services that do that now, but I'm just saying two years ago, we didn't see this demand; Bitcoin was a different thing and now it's something else. 

Now, if you have a lot of cash and not too many expenses, like if you have money to spare, it might be a very smart decision to park it in Bitcoin and not on your bank account; and more and more people are doing it all around the world.  Of course, the bitcoiners were the crazy ones at first and now, you could also argue the CEOs that are doing it are kind of crazy as well, because it still is kind of a crazy move. 

But, I think it also relates to the fact that Bitcoin tends to select for extremes in personality at times.  You have to be kind of crazy still to be in Bitcoin.  I mean, you definitely had to be crazy to be in Bitcoin eight years ago, and it's got less and less over time, but it selects for these extreme risk-takers and also, for extreme disagreeable people, because you have to say fuck you to the legacy system; and you have to be able to say fuck you to everyone else.

You also need to have an extreme disregard for authority, because that is what Bitcoin is about as well.  You kind of have to do everything yourself and if someone -- again, nobody can tell you; there is no authority to tell you what Bitcoin is.  So, if you have an intrinsic disregard for authority, then you might find Bitcoin very early; and I would put you in this category as well.  I think, yeah, you're also, in some sense, an extreme personality and you definitely have a disregard for authority, I would say.

Now the CEOs are coming in.  It's the CEOs that are more extreme and the high net worth individuals that are more extreme on those spectrum of personality types, they will say, "Yeah, Bitcoin is amazing".  And, if you're on the other extreme of the personality spectrum, then you will think Bitcoin is absolutely crazy and everyone that uses it is absolutely crazy.  So, yeah, that's my take on all that.

Peter McCormack: It's funny; I had the exact same conversation with Janine yesterday from Block Digest.  We were talking about it attracting slightly crazy people, so it's funny you should say that.

Yeah, I mean look, I think you're right.  Look at Elon Musk.  He essentially moved a lot of his operations from California to Texas, because he was fed up of the Governors in California.  I'm sure he doesn't give a fuck; I'm sure he'll stand up to authority; and, he's the kind of person we need in Bitcoin.  If we ever see some increased regulatory pressure, he's the kind of person we know who could stand up to that, which is certainly a very healthy thing.

Also, adding to this, there are a couple of things that are happening right now.  I have, and I think a lot of people have, this expectation of, "Well, is it going to be a bull market and then, will we have another three-year bear market?"  But, I do think there is some weight behind Dan Held's idea of a potential supercycle, because there is a big difference in what's happening right now.

Whereas before, in previous cycles, where you said people got their fiat mindset, you think, "Well, where's the market going to top, because I'm going to exit?"  There is actually that fear that you time it wrong and you lose Bitcoin, which is entirely possible.  Secondly, I know it's not the most popular area of Bitcoin, but we have got this growing market for borrowing and lending Bitcoin, which kind of stops you having to sell if you don't want to.

Also, we've got people starting to accept this Bitcoin standard, like Saylor is, like I am, like you are, where you have this eight-week mindset.  That makes me think, perhaps we won't see that same kind of three-year bear market.  Maybe we will, but there's something different happening during this cycle.

Gigi: Yeah, I kind of agree.  It definitely feels different, but I don't think the cycles are over and I have some data points to kind of…  I'm not saying I'm right, but I think there is also reason to believe that most people haven't learned.  We saw that in the headlines as well.  There are CEOs now, or CFOs, that just believe in the double-spend FUD and they will sell millions of Bitcoin, like millions of US dollars' worth of Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Oh, man, who was that company?

Gigi: I don't remember the name of the company and we shouldn't remember the name of the company.  This company will be forgotten soon enough.  But, it's still all part of human psychology and dropping the fiat mindset is really difficult.  It's really difficult, and it's especially difficult if Bitcoin tanks again and goes through a bear market; you know, "bear market".

I think things will get very crazy again and everyone will get super greedy and Bitcoin will shoot up like a maniac and it has to crash down again.  Then we will see about the lending markets and all the other things that play with -- even if it's over-collateralised.  But, you know, all these financial products assume that Bitcoin stays in certain bounds and I'm not convinced that Bitcoin will ever stay in certain bounds for the next, I don't know, ten years or so.  It might; who knows?

But, we saw drastic crashes that not a lot of people anticipated in the past and I'm not sure if all the financial products could kind of survive that, or at least the people that use them.  All of it has risk and, yes, I like the idea as well of not having to sell your Bitcoin.  And, if you can take out a Bitcoin-backed loan to buy a house or something, it might be the smarter thing to do.  But, yeah, we'll see about that; time will tell.  And, it all depends on your risk appetite and again, it's your personal decision and how you see it and what you think is risky and what is not.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I'll tell you another interesting thing that was coming to my mind that I've thought about recently, and I definitely thought about it again listening to your book.  Again, by the way, I really liked your book.  I'll tell you what I think about it.  It shouldn't be people's first Bitcoin book and I mean this as a compliment; and, I don't have a specific recommendation for what should be someone's first book.  But, I feel like it's the book I probably needed six months in, when I was struggling with certain concepts, when I didn't know where to direct myself, whether I should be the technical or the economics or all of it.

I felt like, listening to your book is like, if I'd had this six months in, this would have been a lot of reassurance on certain topics and it would have directed me to things I wanted to learn about.  Whereas, I think as a first book, there's a bit too much assumed knowledge, but I mean this in a complimentary way; I hope you understand what I'm getting at.

But, one of the interesting things is, it's quite a philosophical book and there are also a lot of books out there that study Bitcoin in so many different ways.  I sometimes wonder, did Satoshi have any idea really what he was creating, the actual grand nature of it all; or, do you think he was just trying to solve one problem and these are just all the natural conclusions of fixing the money?  Or, do you think he really knew the impact this would have?  It would be a fascinating question to have answered by him, but I doubt we ever will.

Gigi: Yeah.  I think Satoshi had a deep understanding of many things, but I also think that it's impossible to know how people will use your invention.  There are some obvious examples like, I don't know, take Viagra, for example.  It used to be a hard medication.  You don't know what it's good for and how people will use it in the end.  And you can also never know the second-order effects of your invention as well.

Nobody would have guessed that the internal combustion engine would change the planet as drastically as it has, in terms of building roads, in terms of changing the composition of the atmosphere, other things.  So, it's very, very hard to talk about these things.  I think some of the early writings are illuminating, especially also from Hal Finney, talking about what global adoption might look like; also in terms of price, talking about Bitcoin banks, talking about institutional adoption; also some comments from Satoshi talking about large server farms that will do the mining and so on and so forth.

So, I think Satoshi saw some of those things coming, but he also tried to solve a couple of different problems at once.  He tried to solve the surveillance problem; he tried to solve the micropayments problem; and he tried to solve the inflation, hard money problem.  He solved kind of all of them, you know.  So, which one is more important?  You don't know. 

Currently, it seems the sound money one is the most important, but it's because most of the world doesn't live in an authoritarian hellhole.  If this would be the case, if everyone was living in China, the pseudonymity, anonymity aspect of Bitcoin might be way more important.  And, if we are further down the road, in terms of everyone gets cancelled, not only from YouTube and Twitter, but also from their payment providers, the micropayment platform thing might be more important and we would be further along with Lightning and other technologies building up on Bitcoin.

So, it's very hard to answer this.  I think it's again impossible to see where your invention might be going.

Peter McCormack: Dude, the UK is becoming that surveillance nightmare right now.

Gigi: Yeah, you have the most CCTV cameras per square metre I think, right, or something like it!

Peter McCormack: We do and, look, that does have benefits on occasions.  I don't know if you followed the story of the girl that went missing in the UK this week?

Gigi: No, I didn't.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so a young girl -- look, this is a really awful story.  So, I knew her; she was a friend of mine; she worked for me for five years.  She went missing in Central London this week and unfortunately, it looks like she's been murdered.  We don't know, because they haven't identified the body, but the reason the police officer who did this was caught is that he was caught on a bus camera.

Look, I know there are lots of ways to spin that and look at that; there are certain benefits to the safety of people, especially young women in a place like London with a lot of surveillance.  But, the UK is also becoming a bit of a hellhole for other things.

So, I tweeted out this morning; have you heard of the Investigatory Powers Act, or the Snoopers' Charter?

Gigi: No, I don't think I have.

Peter McCormack: It's basically the new secret tool.  So, it a new secret tool which basically tracks all your internet activity.

Gigi: Yeah, nothing good will come of that; I can tell you that much.  I don't want to comment on these kinds of issues too much, because it's all very nuanced and I think time will make it obvious how bad something like global surveillance truly is; and I think we saw that with the disclosures that Edward Snowdon made.  I think people underestimate the power of surveillance and the amount of self-censorship and changing behaviour that comes with having a lack of privacy.  And if you intuitively know that you're not private anywhere, no matter if you're at home or just going to the bus or what have you, in a sense surveillance renders all other freedoms useless.

If I lock you in a room and I have 20 cameras on you and I can monitor your thoughts, you are not a free person.  We need the freedom to think, we need the freedom to speak, we need the freedom to articulate ourselves and to express ourselves; otherwise, everything will go to hell, because that's the only way how you can get out of bad situations, by talking through them and thinking through them and more or less, thinking is talking. 

So, I see freedom of speech as paramount and I see any type of surveillance as hampering and muting parts of this speech.  It's not good and it's not a good situation to be in.  I think society as a whole is not in a good situation and I would also say, we are not safer for it.  No amount of surveillance and CCTV cameras will make a safer society.  Are you safe in China?  They have a lot of cameras as well.  I don't think you are.  I don't think it's the kind of safety I would want to have.

Peter McCormack: I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but not everything.  I mean, I agree with you in terms of it's important to have freedom of speech and I think it's important to have freedom of expression; and then, any form of surveillance which affects your freedom of expression is a risk.  So, if you believe that you're being snooped on on the internet and therefore, you might not look at certain websites, I think that is an invasion of privacy that isn't worth it.

But there are certain things.  For example, we talk about, as bitcoiners, we have to protect our security and one of the things I will do in protecting my own home security is have alarms and have cameras set up on the house, so those cameras will exist.  Businesses will similarly do those.  One of the cameras in this thing I mention in London, I think, was on a bus; and the buses, they need to protect the drivers because of security incidents there.

So, I think there is a natural growth in certain surveillance technologies that exist in the terms of protection of people; and I think, if you can access those in certain scenarios, like if you're wanting to find somebody post action, post committing of a criminal act, I think that is worthy; I think that does make us safer.

What I don't like and I think we may come to more of an agreement on, is that Minority Report kind of idea that you're trying to prevent crime before it happens.  So, if you're snooping on someone on the internet to see what websites they're looking at and then you want to arrest them based on the fact that you think they might do something; that's where we get into the tricky territory.

But, I'm not opposed to certain levels of personal or business private surveillance for the protection of business and I'm not opposed to that being used to capture someone post criminal act; does that makes sense?

Gigi: Yes, of course.  And, first of all, it doesn't surprise me that you disagree because of course you're a disagreeable person, because you went into Bitcoin, you know.

Peter McCormack: Fair!

Gigi: But, you have to make a differentiation between a global surveillance network that nobody consented to, that tries to influence and control people, and something like putting up a camera in your workhouse because it's your private property, or even at home.  There is a huge world of difference between those things.

Peter McCormack: Of course.

Gigi: You could argue one of them is security, the other one is surveillance.  It has to do with consent, it has to do with the differentiation between public and private property; and it has to do with what you are trying to achieve with it.  If you want to protect yourself, okay; go for it.  But, if you just want to have total control of a population, like in China for example; that has nothing to do with the security of the population.

Peter McCormack: No, I agree.  And I think this is what my issue is with the UK at the moment, is that we are on an awful, slippery slope here.  As you mentioned, London has more cameras than any city in the world; we have this Snoopers' Charter; obviously you're aware I'm in a lawsuit at the moment because we have no First Amendment protection; and, there are many reasons these days for me to leave the UK and I most likely will at some point, because it's becoming a bit of a -- we have a very severe and decreasing amount of freedom here in the UK and I find that concerning.

Gigi: Yeah, and you should be concerned.  And I think we will see this kind of Sovereign Individual thesis play out in the next ten years or so.  I think, just like money likes to go where it's treated best and Bitcoin will likely go towards places where it's treated best; and Bitcoin businesses will do the same thing and also bitcoiners will go to the places where they're treated best.

It doesn't matter if this is surveillance or security or laws or taxes; once the pain gets large enough, you will take matters into your own hand and you will pack your bags and you will move somewhere else; it's as easy as that.  In general, if you have been in Bitcoin for a while, you also have the means and the connections to do so.  So, I can definitely see this happening and a lot of people obviously talk about it in the citadel context, but I think it's going to be just moving to a different country, where bitcoiners are treated in a better way and humans in general are treated in a better way and maybe where your capital is treated in a better way.  I think this is the first step and everything will follow from there.

Peter McCormack: It's still very difficult to try and get some of my friends' heads around this and understand it.  They're obviously aware of what I've done as a job for the last four years and when we all meet up and talk about it, I still can't convince them.  And, I know what it's like; you find Bitcoin when you need it, etc. 

But I think what's become very visible to me, Gigi, is that this conditioning that a lot of people have to, we just live and have a state, and this idea of having no state is almost something people can't get their heads around; or, this idea that they can actually hold two fingers up, go and live somewhere else, live a different life; they have this Bitcoin lifeboat, or they have this optionality to get out of it; it's too wild a different idea for some people to be able to get onboard with and it's a very hard thing to get people to.

I've got a show coming out today with someone we all love great and dearly at the moment, Mr Robert Breedlove, who I think is one of the most important writers on Bitcoin right now; and we discuss a lot of The Sovereign Individual.  But I still struggle myself personally this idea of no state, I do; I really struggle with this idea.  I struggle to picture what that world is like.  How have you, because you have obviously grown up like me, living with a government where you've got parents who probably vote and politics influences your life; and then, you go through this transitionary period with Bitcoin.  Did you find that a struggle?

Gigi: I'm not sure.  I always try to keep out of politics, because I always thought that what actually changes the world is to be found somewhere else.  Again, as I said before, the effects of the --

Peter McCormack: I like that.

Gigi: -- internal combustion engine and the effects of the internet and the effects of the printing press of the world are way larger than any political movement.  And, you can also argue for other, more mundane things, like birth control, for example, and just in general, sanitation; the fact that we have running water and toilets that work changed way more in the world than any politician might have thought that he would change it.

But, it is difficult in terms of talking to other people about this, because it is such a foreign and strange concept; and also, I don't think we will go to hyperbitcoinisation immediately and all the states will disappear.  I think it will be a gradual transition and a shrinking of states.  There will probably be collapse of some.

But, I also like the idea of having city states and having like 10,000 different Liechtensteins.

Peter McCormack: The Balaji concept.

Gigi: Yeah.  And just in general, I think The Sovereign Individual thesis is not about completely getting rid of all states; it's more about that you are in charge and you have the power and the states that still exist, however large they may be, they will have to fight for you.  And we see this already with digital nomads and also bitcoiners that, if you want to start a business somewhere, it might be smart to go somewhere else.

We see also the reverse effect.  The BitLicense in New York; there aren't too many Bitcoin companies in New York and everyone is moving to Texas, for example.  So, we will see these kinds of things play out on all scales, I think; people will move to different states in the US; people will move to different countries in Europe; and people will move to different continents if they have to; and, that's how I see it developing.

In terms of talking about politics and stuff like that, Bitcoin or not, it's impossible to talk about politics and I think it always has been.  It's especially bad today.  I think social media and the internet has polarised everything to the degree that it's just impossible to have this conversation in any meaningful way.  Everyone already has a predetermined view and made up their minds and all nuance is lost. 

It's hard, but I also think it really doesn't matter.  I think that things will play out because of other reasons, not because of politics.  I think it's noise, it's mostly noise.  And I think things like the dematerialisation of the world and things like Bitcoin, this is where the signal is to be found and it's not to be found in politics.

So, it doesn't matter if you're red or blue or whatever kind of party line you might adhere to in Europe, it really doesn't matter too much.  I'm not saying you shouldn't pay attention, because you should pay attention to at least find out when you might want to leave; but in terms of voting, for example, it's way more important how you vote with your wallet and how you vote with your feet.  And I think bitcoiners and sovereign individuals in general kind of know that intuitively.

So, the fact that people are building businesses in Texas now and not in New York is way more important than US and New York maybe voting for a change. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I agree.  I mean, I've been following Balaji's ideas on this, the 10,000 cities concept; that the vote with your feet is far more effective than the ballot.  I think he's absolutely right.  And I think, sometimes I find I get a bit lost in that idea of the end of the state.  I just think the thing we're most likely to see during our lifetime is this reconfiguration of the state, whereby regulatory arbitrage will force the state to become competitive and provide better services.

Like you said, we're seeing that with Texas; we're seeing that with Mayor Francis; we're seeing it with Estonia, Malta, Portugal, all places now where I'd never have thought of moving but, Gigi, I'm like, "If I move there, they're going to be less in my business, they're going to tax me less and I can get on with doing what I want to do".  That, I think, is quite an interesting concept and I'm bought into that now.  I have the anchors of being a parent at the moment, but that's not going to last forever.

Gigi: Yeah, of course.  And again, everyone's situation is different and it might be difficult to move if your kid's just started school.  It's very hard on them to rip them out, or what have you.  Every single life is different and you have to decide this for yourself.

I think this will happen no matter what.  I'm not sure if all the states will survive this transition.  I think we will have some collapse, just like with companies as well.  If you're a truly, big, large company, you might not survive the transition to the information age, for example.  We saw that with some newspaper and publication companies, or we saw it with Blockbuster and stuff like that.

If you're small and agile, it's way easier to adapt, and I think this will be true for states as well; and we can already see that play out, you know.  Like in Switzerland, for example, they have a very agile structure and they only have four cantons; and they are somewhat of a direct democracy and they can change things rather quickly.  And, it's not surprising to me that one of the "crypto hubs" in the world is Zug, where you can also pay your taxes even now in Bitcoin and do other things.

This will continue to happen.  If you're small and agile enough, or corrupt enough to make it just a top-down change, then yeah, you will make this transition rather easily.  I'm not so sure about bigger constructs.  I think they will probably crumble under the pressure; they probably won't manage to change as quickly as they have to.

Peter McCormack: It's quite wild to live through it all as well, right?  I mean, we're going through this transitionary period where, certainly ten years ago, a decade ago, I would never have thought I would be living to see something like this.  My assumption was my life would continue pretty much as it was.  But now, we're living through a transitionary phase, which is the kind of thing that may be documented, or will most likely be documented in the history books of the future.  It's kind of wild to live through.

Gigi: Yeah, absolutely.  It's definitely wild.  I think it's also not that surprising.  A lot of people observe the fact that technology's changing exponentially and also, the rate of change is exponential.  And, even before Bitcoin, there was a lot of literature around this concept; and a lot of smart people, and also science fiction writers, predicted some of the things that we are seeing, like where you are in the world, for example, doesn't matter too much anymore and it's very easy to just move, for example; so, the concept of cyberspace and companies and people moving to cyberspace, so to speak.

I think we see that play out and I also think it's just the beginning of it.  We see so many weird and foreign and powerful technologies.  I mean, you yourself, for example, you built a media publication house, so to speak.  Of course now, you have some employees, but you did most of it on your own, especially at the beginning.  And the fact that you can even do that is amazing, you know, and it's all driven by technology.

The same goes for people like me.  I published a book; I never intended to publish a book; I started writing it just as a tweetstorm and the tweet thread got really long, so I put it in an article.  The article became three articles and people started reaching out to me, "Hey, where can I buy this as a book?" so I put it in a book.  I did everything on my own; all of it.

Peter McCormack: Dude, it's so good.

Gigi: Thank you, but it's also, you know -- 20 years ago, this wouldn't have been possible; not at all.  The reason why I was able to do that at all is that I don't have to take care about printing and publication and sending the books around and stuff like that.  I used Amazon self-publishing and it's the only way I can do it.  I don't have the time in the day to even pack the boxes and go to the Post Office; I've a million other things to do and it's just not useful work for me.

I would never do it if I have to take care of the logistics myself and the same goes for creating podcasts, creating YouTube shows, all of it.  If you would have to do it in the same way that it had to be done 20, 30 years ago, it's insanity, you know, it's absolutely insanity.  And, it's also a testament to how far we've come with the internet as well, because streaming video was absolutely impossible 20 years ago.  The stuff we're doing now, it just didn't work; the internet was there, yet we didn't have the bandwidth, we didn't have the throughput; we didn't have all the technology that makes it work.  It just didn't work.

Peter McCormack: You're right.

Gigi: And I think, you know, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see where things are going as well.  I see the stuff that we are already seeing for some extreme individuals, I see this on steroids, people that live wherever they want to be; true digital nomads.  If you want to go that far, they're going to have streaming money.  If you want to work for a day or two, or if you want to work for 48 hours straight; you sit down, you code, you do whatever and you generate income.  The next two weeks, you're back, I don't know, at the beach, surfing and doing whatever you want.

I think it's not hard to imagine and I think all of it will kind of change.  It will transform cities, it will transform states, it will transform families; we see it now, thanks to COVID and just because of remote work and all these possibilities, we see people moving away from the large hubs, moving away from the cities, back to the country, raising a family, having a small farm, being more self-sufficient.  A lot of bitcoiners talk about that and it's absolutely possible and also desirable.

I think the reason for that is that Bitcoin is the perfect example.  You don't have to be in Silicon Valley; you don't have to be in New York; you don't have to be anywhere.  You have to be on Bitcoin Twitter; you have to be in cyberspace.  That's where the people meet; that's where their ideas clash; that's where things are happening; that's where connections are formed; that's where friendships are built; and everything changes.  The whole make-up of the Earth will change because of it.

I realise that it might sound crazy to your normie friends, but it's also obvious if you take more than 10 minutes to think about it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but you're right.  I mean, look, you can, with a mobile phone, just a mobile phone, you can create a TV show or a podcast and you can compete with the New York Times and CNN.  If enough people like what you have to say, you can compete with them.  You have everything available at the touch of a button, most of it offering free trials, or…

There's that really great book, The $100 Startup, which talks about this and everyone can compete.  I don't know what it means long term, I don't know what's going to happen to other companies; but, I think you're right.  It's just a fascinating time and thing to live through.  I do want to ask you about something else, though.

Gigi: Go ahead.

Peter McCormack: I want to ask you about your orange-pilling of Lex Fridman and Eric Weinstein and I think we'll touch on Jordan Peterson as well; but, the Eric Weinstein and Lex Fridman thing was really interesting, because I think I messaged you.  We were chatting on Telegram and I was like, "It's so weird; I'm now in a Clubhouse room with them" and then I realised you were in there as well.  The two of them were in there together, but I feel like they both came at it and saw Bitcoin very differently.

Gigi: Oh, man, I have a lot to say about that actually!

Peter McCormack: I bet you do.

Gigi: Again, it looks back to toxicity and the stuff we discussed at the beginning.  It's just we have, as bitcoiners, experienced this a million times already.  Someone who has expertise in another field and thinks that he's really smart and understands it all, comes in and tells a bunch of bitcoiners that Bitcoin is broken and he knows how to fix it.  So, that's basically what happened with Eric Weinstein.

Peter McCormack: The old meme!

Gigi: Exactly, "I just heard about Bitcoin and I'm here to fix it"!  It's the Superman with the gigabrain.  And, don't get me wrong --

Peter McCormack: My problem, sorry, just to interrupt; my problem with Eric Weinstein was I heard him on Lex Fridman and then I heard him in the room and I'll be honest, I struggle with most things.  I didn't understand a word he was talking about.  I literally didn't understand it and I've spent a lot of time with a lot of really smart bitcoiners and they have a way of explaining things I understand, or I can question them and they get me to the point where I'll understand it.  I had no idea what he was talking about!

Gigi: Yeah, I mean that didn't help; the fact that he can't explain gauge theory in five sentences so that other people can understand it doesn't help at all.  What I wanted to say is, don't get me wrong; I love both of these guys.  I think they're insanely smart; I listen to both podcasts.  I think Lex is an awesome dude; I think he has the heart at the right place.  I think Eric has a lot of good takes on most topics.  I think he's obviously really smart.

But, that doesn't mean that they understand Bitcoin, or that doesn't mean that they have -- they will have to go through the same journey that everyone else does.  At first, Bitcoin is stupid; period.  I went through it myself.  I took longer than most; it took me many touch points and many years to finally understand it.  Again, I wasn't surprised.  It wasn't even toxic in the first place; I don't think the room was that toxic.  I mean, for God's sake, there were 3,500 people in there and 50 of them on the stage and only 2 --

Peter McCormack: That was when he left.

Gigi: Of course, when he left.  But, as NVK said, he kind of dropped a bomb.  He was talking about how to fix Bitcoin with gauge theory for 10 minutes.  Nobody understood a word and then he left.  That's what was frustrating for me, because Eric Weinstein, he is not a friend of the academy, how traditional science is done.  He's not a fan of peer review; he's not a fan of the traditional discourse; he is a fan of the battle of ideas.

He also said, when he came into the room, "I don't want to come in here as the big guy with my credentials", etc.  Okay, why did you come in as Eric Weinstein in the first place; why don't you have a nym like a lot of bitcoiners do; why don't you just create a temporary account and just listen in?  And, if you have something smart to say, you can say it because this is Bitcoin; it doesn't matter who you are.  Build up understanding, build up your reputation, it doesn't matter who you are; you can have your voice and you don't need to use your credentials in Bitcoin.

It's even preferred, you know; drop your credentials.  Nobody gives a fuck.  Nobody gives a fuck how many PhDs you have.  If you have a smart thing to say in Bitcoin, it will be heard.  It doesn't matter what your past is or what your credentials are.  So, that's the first thing that really roughed me the wrong way, because he is raving and ranting about how it should be and I'm telling you, the battle of ideas that are happening online, in forums, on Bitcoin Twitter, in Clubhouse and offline; this is what a flat battle of ideas looks like.

What Eric Weinstein wants to have is what's happening in the Bitcoin space and he went into a room and he didn't like it.  Well, bad luck; that's how it looks like.  If you don't go through the hierarchical, step-by-step bullshit that universities force you to go through, that's how it looks like.  That's how it looks like if everyone has a voice and if things are truly equal.  As NVK said, "It doesn't matter who this fucking guy is; he doesn't understand Bitcoin and he should shut the fuck up and listen" and that's just a fact.

I think Lex was way better there; he was way more humble and he tried to understand it, and I think he truly thinks that all of it is interesting; but I think he finds it interesting for the toxicity reasons and for social reasons, not necessarily for the way that Bitcoin will change the world.  And with Eric, just talking about gauge theory, for example, there are a lot of smart bitcoiners, there are a lot of physicists in Bitcoin as well; and so some people were able to parse what he said.  That was the second thing that really drove me nuts.

Peter McCormack: Can you?

Gigi: I mean, I don't have a strong background in physics, but I know a little bit and since I listened to Eric, I think I'm better than the average bitcoiner at deciphering what he was trying to say.  And there was also this clip on Twitter that other bitcoiners shared and everyone was like, "Okay, let's try to decipher this" and I chimed in there as well.

The criticism that Eric has is an okay criticism; it's just he doesn't understand Bitcoin well enough for the criticism to be warranted, because what he wants to have is to have a system like Bitcoin without any global state.  In our universe, you can do that because the physical laws take care of the rest.  You have an underlying field, in his terms; you have a gauge field that penetrates the whole universe and the universe takes care that things like retrocausal operations cannot happen.

One law of our universe is that, if A depends on B, A has to happen first, whatever first means.  Even with relativity, even with quantum physics, all of it, you can have quantum experiments where it seems that stuff is happening retrocausally, but you can never make sense of it; you can't get information out.  The same with relativistic effects; you don't have an absolute time, you don't have something like simultaneity, but you will also have inside a single light cone, you can make sense of the world, because A happened before B happened before C and so on and so forth.

Okay, we need this substrate to build up any meaningful system in the first place; and Bitcoin is exactly this substrate in cyberspace so that the rules and the laws of Bitcoin make sure that we have this "gauge field" that penetrates everything, and this is what builds up the space-time in cyberspace.  This is what Eric doesn't understand and I deliberately right now put it in his terms. 

But, this is literally what Bitcoin does; it builds up a space-time continuum in cyberspace, in purely the informational realm.  It has time going forward; it's the blockchain, it's the time chain; and the space dimensions, just think of them as you will, think of it as block space, or whatever, but we have a spatial dimension as well.  You can go, for example, forward and backward in the transaction graph.

So, this is what we have and what Eric actually wants to have, with these local transformations of bundles, etc; this is the Lightning Network.  We now have the substrate and on Lightning, you can do local operations where you don't have to share a global state with everyone else.  I just wish that he would understand that it's his ignorance of how the system functions and what it does that is to be blamed for part of the toxicity that was in this room.

Peter McCormack: So, he just hasn't spent enough time looking at it.  He hasn't been down the rabbit hole enough; he hasn't sat down with the right people and talked about it in-depth to understand that what he wants is actually happening?

Gigi: I think so.  I mean, I don't want to sound pretentious, because he is definitely a smart guy and he has spent some time looking at it and he comes from -- he has a strong mathematics background and he, of course, did a lot in the investment world as well for Peter Thiel and so on and so forth.

But, I think he doesn't understand deeply enough what kind of problem Bitcoin solves.  And there is only, you know, there isn't a magical way of how you can solve it.  There were so many gems of wisdom that were dropped in these 15 minutes, or 30 minutes, where Eric was there; and one of them was NVK where he said, "Bitcoin is both the map and the territory and it's operating in the physical realm.  It's using the physical laws of our universe to build this map/territory in cyberspace" and there is so much deep wisdom in that, because it's actually true.

Proof of work anchors the informational realm; and in the information realm, with bits and bytes, we only have information and the transformation of this information, which is computation.  That's the only thing that we have.  You cannot link information to something else in the real world.  The map will never be the territory; it's impossible; it's an impossible problem and Bitcoin solves it in this kind of beautiful, probabilistic, game-theoretical way and utilises proof of work to anchor it to the real world. 

I'm pretty sure Eric doesn't understand that properly and that's where this criticism comes from.  Okay, it's a valid criticism, but there is just no way to solve it in another way, I think.

Peter McCormack: So, it makes me think, this documentary's out at the moment called, You Cannot Kill David Arquette; have you seen this?

Gigi: No, I haven't.

Peter McCormack: He's an actor, David Arquette, I'm sure I said his name right; and he, a few years ago -- you're going to laugh at the analogy; but, a few years ago, he went into the world of wrestling as a joke, kind of took it semi-seriously, and he became heavyweight champion, or whatever it was.  But, one of the things they've always had in the wrestling world is, the actors in Hollywood, they can't just come in and just become wrestlers; and if you do, the golden rule is you don't just make them world champion, because they haven't earned their time. 

It doesn't matter if they're from Hollywood, it doesn't matter what they've done; they haven't been in that space.  They haven't been fighting in the rings and taking all the pain, which wrestlers take, to get there, because we know it's all made up.  And it kind of makes me think of that, like Eric Weinstein hasn't come humble, he hasn't come in asking questions; he's just come in and he's basically telling people what he thinks and then leaving.

Actually, in some ways, when people were a bit, "Fuck you", I was like, "Well, come on, it's Eric Weinstein; let's just give him a chance".  And now I get it, I get why Rodolfo was, "Fuck you, I've been here for 10 years and I've put the blood, sweat and tears in; I've defended Bitcoin; I've been through the civil war; I've been through every fucking attack this has been through and I'm just not having it".  And I understand that now.  That toxicity; you get it whether you're a pleb, a nobody or an Eric Weinstein.  You're going to get the toxicity if you don't come in with the right attitude.

Gigi: Yeah, absolutely.  And I think, as I said before, I think it's also a kind of defence mechanism, because in the past, we had conversations and there were conversations to be had, about what Bitcoin is, how it should operate, what its future should be.  And in a sense, the civil war was a battle about Bitcoin's sole.  As I said at the beginning, everyone has to decide for themselves what Bitcoin is.

I think the question was, "Should we risk a hard fork and going down this slippery slope to fix this one small problem, so to speak, or can we fix it in any other way?" and I think there is a metarule to Bitcoin to keep it backwards-compatible, to have no hard forks, except when it means the death of the network.  That's basically what it was about.  You can call it a scaling debate and so and so forth, but that's not accurate.  It was about something else.  It was about this eternal question, "Is there ever a time where a hard fork is warranted and is this time now?" 

So, the toxicity that Eric experienced comes also, I think, from this white blood cell defence mechanism that bitcoiners have built up, certain heuristics, that if someone is friendly to you, he's probably not your friend; he probably wants to attack Bitcoin, or he wants to scam you or sell you something or sell you a shitcoin, or whatever.  And there are other heuristics that are just insane shortcuts to a deep understanding of Bitcoin.  One of them is, if it's not Bitcoin, it's a shitcoin; period.  And the market agrees.  Just look back to all the other shitcoins.  It's just, everything that's useful can be absorbed by Bitcoin.  It's just software; we can change it if we have to.

But, all of it is nuanced and it is very difficult to understand.  And so, if someone comes in now and is just, "You have to be nicer", and "Nobody will use Bitcoin because all the bitcoiners are so toxic", that's complete bullshit.  Bitcoin first of all doesn't care; bitcoiners don't have to care.  Again, there are some angels like NVK that do like 10 hours of Clubhouse every day to explain this stuff to newbies.  But again, Bitcoin doesn't care; bitcoiners don't have to care.  And, economic reality will dictate Bitcoin's future, not niceness.

If you can't handle the discourse and the battle of ideas that is going on, then this is on you as well.  You have to learn why Bitcoin culture is the way it is and it all boils down to the way that Bitcoin operates.  It's fuck-you money.  If you don't agree with the Bitcoin I'm using, I can say, "Fuck you; I'm doing everything myself.  I'm using my own node, I'm holding my own keys"; that's the way Bitcoin operates.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Look, it's something that took me a long time to get my head around, it really did and I get it now.  I very much misunderstood the plebs and the role they play as well and I have fought them; and it takes time.  I would love to see Eric come back and just engage in a discussion where he wants to listen and learn, as well as ask questions.

I do think Lex is slightly more interesting.  He does seem to want to learn more.  Unfortunately, he seems to also be bought into the allure of some shitcoins.  Hopefully that won't last!

Gigi: Yeah, that will pass, like all shitcoins!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it will do.  I also think Jordan Peterson's going to be a very interesting one.  He seems to be just teetering on the edge of just getting into this discussion.

Gigi: Yeah, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: I kind of want to hear him with you and Breedlove at some point; I really want to hear that discussion happen. 

Gigi: Yeah.  You know, I think the chances are great of that actually happening.  Jordan is still interested, as we saw on Twitter, and I think he has a lot on his plate as well; just published a new book.  And he still has health issues and if you listen to his recent podcast, he said that basically it takes him like six hours to get going in the morning and he starts work at 3.00 in the afternoon, then he works for two or three hours and then he has to go to sleep again.

So, I think everyone needs a little bit of -- we just also need to be patient with people, including Eric and Lex.  I think Lex needs to go through his shitcoin phase.  I think Eric just needs to be humbled over and over and over again; and everyone will understand Bitcoin when it's the right time for them.  Eric will have to come back.  I don't think he'll do a Peter Schiff and die without having any Bitcoin on his balance sheet, or any understanding of it. 

I think Eric is probably halfway there already and I think Lex is more than halfway there, because I think once you dabble with shitcoins, you're already over the edge; you think that something is better than fiat, for example.  And with Peterson, I'm really looking forward to talking to him, either directly or hearing Robert talk to him. 

However, this will happen, I think it will be very, very interesting, because a lot of the themes that Peterson talks about align extremely well with Bitcoin and we discussed, not necessarily the toxicity, because I think that's the wrong word for it; but, I think the stuff that we discussed, in terms of taking responsibility upon yourself and also planning for the future and just lowering your time preference, it's focussed on the individual and I think Peterson would really like that.

Bitcoin is very individual-centric and everything follows from that; and if you can help others, if you can run a node for your family or friends and help your community in some way, all the better.  But first and foremost, save yourself; start stacking sats and save yourself first and then everything goes from there.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean I've not agreed with everything I've read or heard Jordan Peterson say, but I do like the way he -- some of his talks, when he gets some quite pokey questions; we had that Channel 4 interview where she tried to do a takedown, and he absolutely destroyed her.  But a lot of that, there is, like you say, a lot of that alignment with kind of that self-responsibility of Bitcoin, a lot of the freedom things we were talking about earlier.

But, it is super interesting about there is this kind of wave of very successful podcasters, kind of known voices, that are now just starting to circle around Bitcoin.  There are some similar circling around shitcoins, which is really sad and annoying, and promoting the whole NFT thing, which I just don't understand.  But it is interesting that Bitcoin is getting into the wider conscience now.

We see these MSM articles are still trying to push the narrative of, Bitcoin's bad for the environment, but that's getting shot down quite a bit now; and I've actually seen a couple of articles which aren't negative on that side of things.  I feel like we're really starting to cross into this mainstream consciousness and not in the negative FUD way; not entirely in the negative FUD way we have previously.

Gigi: Yeah, I think so too.  I mean, that's a discussion I think will stick around for quick a long while, because it's not straightforward to understand that Bitcoin actually probably is good for the environment and is good for renewals and so on and so forth.  It's really easy to just point to the energy consumption and just pull some numbers out of your arse and you'll calculate the carbon footprint of Bitcoin and it will just boil the oceans and that's it.  So, I think this won't go away very, very soon.

But, we also saw extremely bullish news from Europe and if you've read this shareholder letter, it attacks this energy angle straight on and it's --

Peter McCormack: Amazing.

Gigi: Yeah.  It's amazingly bullish, because the people that are behind this, they actually know what they are talking about.  They are heavily invested in the energy sector and renewables, so there is a lot of weight behind it.  And if just new mainstream media articles come out, you can just straight-up tell them that they have no idea what they are talking about and point them to that shareholder letter, for example.

In terms of the wider podcast circles, yeah; coming towards Bitcoin, I think this will just continue and I think people like Lex Fridman, Eric Weinstein and Jordan Peterson, they are just again on the extremes of the personality spectrum.  They are very disagreeable; they are very open-minded.  Lex Fridman is insanely open-minded and he is definitely an extreme person.  Just look at all the things, all the challenges he does, for example, and the physical strain he puts himself through.

Eric Weinstein is extremely disagreeable.  He goes against the fiat way of doing everything pretty much; it doesn't matter if it's politics or science, or what have you.  And with Jordan Peterson as well, you know; he's very, very open-minded and he's very open to new ideas.  And so, I'm not surprised that it's those kinds of people that slowly but surely come around to Bitcoin.

I think, as Bitcoin grows, which it inevitably will, it will bump against more and more people and more and more larger personalities; and I think it will be the open, disagreeable, smart people first and we see this also with CEOs, like Michael Saylor and others; and this will just continue; it's just the scope is larger.

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, congratulations with that, that work that you and Breedlove and John have done in trying to bring these people in.  It's been impressive just to watch from the outside; it's really interesting.

Okay, before we finish, again congratulations on the book as well.  Anyone listening, 21 Lessons; it will be in the show notes.  It's not a long listen on audible; you can do it in under three -- it's about two and a half hours; am I right?

Gigi: Yeah, something like that.  It's not long at all and again, it's because it wasn't written as a book in the first place, so I tried to remedy that by writing a second one, which will be way longer.  But, you can just go to --

Peter McCormack: Well, we're going to come to that.  Tell them; we'll do that.

Gigi: You can just go to 21lessons.com and read it online for free as well, including the audio book; or, you can just get it on Amazon, physical form, or Audible.

Peter McCormack: So, I used an Audible credit anyway, but I highly recommend it and especially if you've been in Bitcoin for a little while.  As I say, I thought it was a really helpful book.  It kind of crystalized some of my own thinking and reaffirmed some things.  It put me in the direction of some other things I know I need to learn a bit more about.  I thought it was fantastic, but that's what I just wanted to finish on.  Tell us about the new book, 21 Ways?

Gigi: Yeah, I kept writing after 21 Lessons, and I'm actually more proud of some of the articles I wrote after 21 Lessons than about 21 Lessons itself, because again, I just sat down one day and wrote this very long tweet thread and in the end, it turned into a book; that's how I see it.  But I think, you know, thanks to people like Breedlove and also some newer voices like Allen Farrington for example, and there are many, many others; also Brandon Quittem.  There are so many great people that wrote amazing things, and really deep thinkers that wrote deep pieces about Bitcoin.  There is a lot of meat to the whole matter. 

I just want to do all this deep thinking justice in the new book as well and it's called 21 Ways, and the subtitle is, 21 Ways to Look at Bitcoin.  So, I want to take 21 different perspectives of how you can understand Bitcoin and go really deeply into them.  Bitcoin is Time, an article that kind of exploded that I published, I think last month, is one of the chapters of the book.  It just explored Bitcoin through the lens of time.  What do you need to build up an arrow of time in cyberspace in a trustless manner?

I think it's one of the most important things to understand if you want to understand Bitcoin, from a somewhat technical/philosophical perspective, that this is what Bitcoin actually does.  But, there are many other things to be said about Bitcoin as well; and another perspective would be, for example, to look at it from the soundest money we ever had; and what makes a sound money; and what are monetary properties; and why is Bitcoin such an amazingly sound money?

I have 21 of those and I'm still writing it.  It gets harder every day, because more obligations come in and one of them was having a daughter and another one was joining Swan; but, I'm doing my best to get up super early and write an hour or two in the morning and sometimes late at night, and I'm struggling along.  I think I have 6 chapters now almost finished, so 6 out of 21.  I really have to be done in 2021, because that's what I promised, and it has to be published in the year 2021, I think!

So, that's the plan and I hope to make it and if someone's interested in it, you can follow along on Twitter and also, I have a Patreon for the book, where I publish some drafts of chapters and other material.  I'll just continue to do my best, be as useful as I can, write about it.  I always say, I do as the Coin commands, and that's writing words and code; and my plan is to keep doing that and just be as useful as I can.

Peter McCormack: Well listen, it's great to kind of meet you, but it's been great to follow your work, especially recently.  It's funny; your character, your avatar, is someone who looks quite scary; you come across as hostile, just the picture I had of you, because of your avatar.  But, you're obviously a very nice chap.

Gigi: Oh yeah, I'm very toxic!

Peter McCormack: But no, listen, your work's brilliant.  I was so excited to do this interview this morning.  Obviously, you know Ben's working with me and we talked about it, listened to the book, listened to it a second time this morning walking around the park.  I think it's fantastic, I think it works brilliant; I think you're a massive asset to the Bitcoin community and just keep doing it.  Anything I can ever do for you, if you ever want to come on the show, please do.  I look forward to the new book.  Hopefully we can discuss that and just keep doing your thing, man.

Gigi: Thanks, will do.  Thanks for having me, Peter.

Peter McCormack: Any time, brother.