WBD349 Audio Transcription

The Magic of Bitcoin with Tomer Strolight

Interview date: Monday 17th May

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Tomer Strolight. 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 Tomer, and we discuss his many short articles on Bitcoin, the dark magic of fiat money, and why Bitcoin is the most important thing happening in the world.

“Fiat Money is like this dark magic, it distorts all those magical properties which allows for this immense coordination across billions of people in the world without ever having to talk to one another...fiat money destroys this, and Bitcoin fixes it.”

— Tomer Strolight

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Tomer, how are you, man?

Tomer Strolight: I'm great, Peter, how are you?

Peter McCormack: I'm doing very well.  It's great to get you finally on the podcast.  We connected over Telegram, as I remember it?

Tomer Strolight: That's right, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, man.  You're a prolific writer?

Tomer Strolight: Yeah, I used to write a lot when I was in business and then I stopped writing for quite a time, as I was doing a number of other things; but I've written a lot lately, in the last month and half or so.  I decided to write about Bitcoin and I started and I couldn't stop.

Peter McCormack: Are you full time on Bitcoin now, or are you working outside of this?

Tomer Strolight: Yeah, really it's funny, even when I was working full time, I was distracted full time by Bitcoin for about eight years, but when the COVID crisis hit, the company I was involved with was really badly impacted and I left at that point in time.  So, it's been a little bit over a year since I've had a salaried job and I really focussed on my enthusiasm for Bitcoin lately, through this time, and have started sharing my knowledge, writing about it, trying to offer perspectives to newcomers and experienced people.  And so, I'm full time in Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: That's quite a lifestyle change though, right, getting away from the full-time job and waking up and choosing to do what you want to do?

Tomer Strolight: Yeah.  I think for me, this was very much, what do you call it; a blessing in disguise.  I've never been a great investor.

Peter McCormack: Sounds like me!

Tomer Strolight: I was a really big Apple fanatic and the day that the iPhone was released, I think that was back in 2003, I called up my broker and I said, "Put $50,000 into Apple", which was a huge amount of money for me.  So my broker did, and then he proceeded and it went up 10% that day and it was going up really fast; and he proceeded to eventually talk me out of my Apple investment before I'd even doubled my money.

Peter McCormack: Oh, no!

Tomer Strolight: Yeah, so I'd be a multimillionaire if I had kept that investment.  But this past year, I'd had my conviction in Bitcoin for a long time and I had put some money into it; but when Michael Saylor came on the scene and he basically said what happened to me is, "Exactly what advisors do that is advice you should reject; you should find your conviction in something and hold onto it and put your full time into it" and I was able to do that, because I wasn't distracted by a job.  So, I'm not complaining in the least.  I got to focus on what I love and I'm able to do it, so it's terrific.

Peter McCormack: Well, Michael Saylor is responsible for a lot!  I'm more irresponsibly long than I would be if it wasn't for that guy.

Tomer Strolight: Right, you're extremely irresponsibly long!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, extremely.

Tomer Strolight: Good for you.  We've all taken a low here and there.

Peter McCormack: Dude, I'm not a good investor.  I've made two good investments in my life: one is Bitcoin; and two is just working hard in myself.  I'm a crappy investor.  Whenever I've tried to invest in stocks, I've been that guy who's been controlled by the fear and greed, so I FOMO in and I FOMO out and I was always doing it wrong, always losing money.  It's so nice to have something you can invest in where you just leave it forever!

Tomer Strolight: Yeah, I completely agree.  This for me has been the peace of mind I have around Bitcoin, because I've got so much conviction and belief in it and I understand it so well, it lets me focus on things like writing rather than worrying about what my stock portfolio's doing on any given day.  But I'm not an investor either.  I've worked all my life and I had some money saved up and I cared about that money and I worried about it a lot; and that's kind of reflected in some of what these writings that I've written are about.

Peter McCormack: What is your background though, because I don't know your background?

Tomer Strolight: Sure.  So, I'm 51 years old, I started working in about 1994, 1995, which was just when the internet was getting started, right?  My career started before Netscape, the first IPO dot-com company, had even released their product.  I wanted to do things in the computer digital space, which at the time was CD-ROMs.  So, I got involved with a start-up, which was kind of ahead of the start-ups, to put a magazine on a CD-ROM, and that made some progress; but ultimately, the entrepreneur behind it wanted to go a different way than I did.

So, I ended up finding myself working for Canada's largest newspaper company, helped them launch their website, because then the internet had started to get going, and I spent about 16 years at that company doing various things, almost all digital, but I got to know the newspaper side of the business too, and it was predominantly a newspaper company.  I ended up running their digital division as its President for seven years, from 2005 to 2012.  We had a lot of successful business units that we had developed or acquired in there; and then I left there in 2012, because a new CEO had come in and we just didn't see eye to eye about where the future was headed.  I did a variety of things afterwards, but I learned about Bitcoin in 2013.  I was one of those people that read the whitepaper the first time, fell in love; I knew there was something extraordinary going on there.  I found my way to get my hands on a handful of Bitcoin; I lost a bunch of them; tried to get a few back; a very common story.

But, since April 2013 or May 2013, I've been obsessed with Bitcoin.  People would just joke that the only thing I would say is, "Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin" and I've studied it extensively and discussed it extensively and tried to talk to all my friends about it.  But I'm just a real student of Bitcoin and I try to think as hard as I can about it, and this writing has helped me to think about different aspects of it too, because I set out to try to say original things about Bitcoin, not to just rehash things that have been said about it before.

Peter McCormack: Well, you are prolific.  Is it 35 pieces you've written now?

Tomer Strolight: I think it's 25.  I may have typed the 3 beside the 2 by mistake, but I think it's only 25 articles.

Peter McCormack: Well, you've got to do another 10 now; I thought Ben told me it was 35.

Tomer Strolight: I've written a few more.  I think that's what I typed in my email to him.  You see what happened; he trusted instead of verified.

Peter McCormack: There you go; there you go, man!  We're going to have to have a word with Ben.  But listen, tell me about your approach to writing, because there's the Breedlove way to writing, where I feel like I need to book a week out of my diary, sit down and study every word of every sentence; then, your form of writing is almost like the opposite.  I think it's a lot more accessible, which is no criticism of Breedlove, because he knows I love that, but yours are much shorter, easier.

Tomer Strolight: Sure, yeah.  So, I set my goal on this series, the Why Bitcoin series; I set my goal that no article would be more than four minutes and that almost all of them would just be three minutes, because that's been the strength of mine, which has just been to go in and get the essentials of the idea and edit it viciously to the point where it is just three minutes.  And, the idea for this series was, I had a lot to say about Bitcoin; maybe I had 35 articles' worth to say!  I've certainly written 25 that are published and there's another one that remains unpublished yet.

What I was trying to do was, Bitcoin's such a complicated and multifaceted thing, so I wanted to just focus on one facet at a time that I could communicate about in just two to three minutes in a way that wasn't technical so that it wouldn't overwhelm people who didn't understand the maths or the computer science behind Bitcoin, but still make a profound point, one of these really important points that we see about Bitcoin: its permissionless, or its trustlessness, or how good it is as money, or why it's so important, or why so many people love Bitcoin.

So, every one of these articles is just a simple snapshot of something with one key lesson and they're all interlinked to one another so that people can take more time, but they're all also really short and that's, I think -- I can write tweets that are really short, but if you want to get across a bigger idea and find people's time, three minutes was the real challenge.  And I will say, I love Robert Breedlove's writing; he has such a unique style and he's so thorough and detailed.  But I will agree with you; when I'm ready to read one of Robert's pieces, I set aside some time and I get myself a coffee and I go deep in this.

So, this is more like snacks, but I do want to say I worked really hard to make sure they were nutritional snacks; this isn't just plain sugar, there's some good insights in each and every one of the articles!

Peter McCormack: Well, the one that captured me, the first one I read, was the one regarding why it takes, is it time and energy to create Bitcoin?

Tomer Strolight: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: But I remember it because I clicked through it and I read it in about two or three minutes, as you said, and I was like, "Oh, shit, that was great!"  But the thing that really stood out for me in that particular piece is why it requires time and energy is it actually explains why money has to be fair.  And if you don't have time and energy going into the creation of money, then actually it becomes a very unfair system and actually benefits the rich over the poorer people of society; and it hadn't clicked to me in that way before.

Tomer Strolight: That's what I set out to try and do in this series, right, that I could be writing to people who were brand new to Bitcoin, but also to people like you and even people like Robert; I think he liked some of these articles and shared some of them too, which is just a different glance at this one thing.  We all focus on, "Bitcoin requires all this energy and all this energy comes across", and Gigi wrote a beautiful piece about how Bitcoin is time and it's also really complicated and psychedelic and amazing.

But I just want to get to the simple point here which is, you have to put in your time and energy to earn your money.  So, how is it going to be fair money if the people who make it don't have to put time and energy into it too?  And, that's the essence of the idea; Bitcoin requires that people who make it have to put in time and energy too, so that makes it fair to people who are going to put in time and energy to earn money.  And, I go into more details on it in the article but as you said, it's only two to three minutes of a read, so it doesn't get complicated and it doesn't get technical; it just is that one really important point.

Peter McCormack: Well, let's dig into it.  I mean, I'm going to share your articles into the show notes, so everyone should go and read -- well, I'll share your Medium post and then I'll share specifically the two or three that I've read.  But let's dig into this, why it's ultimately the fairest way to create money?

Tomer Strolight: Right.  Well, the first piece of justice, which is just, if you're going to have to put in time and energy, it's not fair that somebody else doesn't have to put in time and energy, right?  It equalizes the money.  And when we compare it to fiat money, which doesn't require time and energy, instantly, with no energy, trillions of dollars of it can be whipped up overnight; that ends up being this very unfair money; it ends up going first directly into the hands of the people who are closest to the money spigot; it ends up being used for political sway. 

So, it ends up being given unearned to people who haven't worked hard for it, who haven't put time into it, by people who haven't put time or energy into it; so, there isn't the appreciation or the respect for what it means to put in work, to put in time and energy into something.  So, it really subverts the very essence of what money is, which is, I do the things that I'm best at in the world; I dedicate my energy and my time to them; and I trade them ideally with other people who've given the best that they have to give.  But if the money doesn't take their time and work, if there are people walking around with money that they got handed to them, or that they printed out of nowhere, they don't have a respect for the work that I've had to put into my money; and so that becomes a very, very unfair system.

I'm not speaking just directly personally, I think of everybody in the world who has to work and ultimately, trade.  And their dollars are indistinguishable from the dollars that other people didn't have to work for.  So that's just a very inherently unfair system.  I don't even know that I need to say that much more about it.

Peter McCormack: I was going to say, it's a little bit deeper than that though, because people do get money without putting time and energy themselves in, but in a fair way.  So, for example, if I hand money to my children, and if I turn round and give my son £1,000 for whatever, he hasn't had to put time and energy into that; but that doesn't matter, because the money itself started out having one person put time and energy into it.

What we're saying here is, it's the creation of new money which doesn't have time and energy behind it, because it does two things: it creates an unfair system; but also, it can put a pressure on me to have to put more time and energy in to create money of lesser value.

Tomer Strolight: I think that this is a kind of fundamental issue.  If everybody has to put time and energy into the money that they have, including the people that create it, then everyone's going to have judgement about those dollars, right?  They're going to value those dollars generally equally.  They're going to know that they have to work for it.  And, if there are people that can create the money without any work, like if you were someone who could create $1 trillion out of nowhere, you might give your son $1 trillion for him not to have to work either.

But if you actually have to work for it, you're going to think about £1,000, because it really is worth £1,000 to you.  $1 trillion is not worth anything to Janet Yellan or Powell or any of these people; it literally is just like me sending you an email.  It's unlimited and it doesn't take a lot of work and so, that's a distinction that half of us are walking around, I don't know what the precise quantity is, but some of us are working around with money that we had to work really hard for and other people are creating money that they don't have to work for and they're really distorting this balance; it's very imbalanced.

Peter McCormack: I just got off an interview with Nik Bhatia and I mentioned to him, well I keep bringing up Breedlove, but he's just so full of gems; but the tweet that stood out to me recently, and I'd never thought about it like is that, the money printer is essentially legal counterfeiting.  You and I, if we tried to counterfeit money, you'd try and counterfeit the Canadian dollar, if I try and counterfeit the British pound, we'd get arrested and we go to prison.  We go because it's unfair, because it's unfair for us to be able to print our own legal tender.

But he said, "Government money printing is legal counterfeiting" and it never crossed my mind, but it was a really kind of wow moment.

Tomer Strolight: Let me say this, Peter.  I have one unpublished article in this series, which will be published by the time this podcast airs and it's going to be -- all these articles are being taken together and being put into one eBook by the guys at Swan Bitcoin.  It's going to be swanbitcoin.com/whybitcoin. 

Peter McCormack: Hold on, does that mean Guy Swann's going to narrate them all as well?

Tomer Strolight: No, Guy Swann is with two "Ns".  I hope that some day he narrates them, I really do, but I haven't connected with him.

Peter McCormack: Oh you should; he narrates everyone's work.  I didn't mean because it was --

Tomer Strolight: He did tell me that he hadn't gotten around to reading them yet; he was waiting for me to finish writing them.  So, I can tell him that I'm done writing.  But, this new article of mine, which references this concept that you had about counterfeit, is called Why Bitcoin Will End the Worst Heist in History. 

Peter McCormack: Wow!

Tomer Strolight: It's a little bit longer than the others, but it actually begins with asking the reader to imagine a cool idea for a movie in which there are criminals who can have a time travel machine and can travel from the past into the present and steal people's money and take it with them back to the past.  The only way that you know that you've been robbed is because you're born -- you don't know because you don't see the time travel, but you're born and suddenly you're born owing money for something that you never agreed to.

That, of course, is exactly what Federal debts and deficits are.  That money is being stolen from the future using this time machine of fiat money deficit spending and it's the greatest theft in history.  I give a lot of blame to Nixon for what he did in 1971, in this article.  His famous quote is, "I'm not a crook", but I say in the article, "He's actually the greatest crook that ever lived; he should hold up his fingers and say that", because people being born today are still paying for the money that he stole from them before they were ever born, and he died in 1996 or something.

So, this notion of this time-travelling, money-stealing machine is what fiat has really allowed for.  So, it's a bit of a different article than the other ones that I've written.  It's a little bit longer; I think it might be seven minutes in duration, but it also still uses all the easy language and I was really passionate at the time that I wrote it.  I want to say angry, because when you realise just how much is being taken and just how much distortion there is and how, if we go back to the other article we talked about, how much so many of us are putting in all of our time and all of our energy and we're not getting a fair shakeout of the system.  We're borrowing to own money out of it.

Peter McCormack: Sounds like quite a punchy article, "The greatest crook that ever lived"!

Tomer Strolight: Yeah!  And he spawned a generation, or two generations of crooks.  We now have everyday government deficit spending, which is borrowing money that the politicians -- I basically said, if you borrow money from somebody with no intention to ever pay it back, that's a crime called fraud.  If you borrow money and sign somebody else's name to the loan of your money, who doesn't even exist yet, who isn't even born yet, that's a serious case of fraud too, and that's exactly what this deficit spending is, which Nik Bhatia quite rightly likens to counterfeit as well.

I think that's a good comparison too, and so is this comparison to fraudulent borrowing, because you've got to pay back your loans; and if you can't pay them back, or if you saddle some other people with your loans, that's a crime, unless you're the government.

Peter McCormack: But, the government is doing it for our benefit, right; it's not their benefit?!

Tomer Strolight: I also ask in this article, why doesn't anybody get arrested for this?  It turns out that everybody who's supposed to be implementing justice in our civilisation is getting paid with this time travel stolen money as well, so it's just become part of it.  There are other articles that I have in the series that also just talk about how terrible this really is, because when they say it's for our own good, what are they saying?  They're saying the economy needs to be stimulated; let's be real clear.  And what they're saying is, "We don't like the amount of consumption that you people have freely chosen to consume; we need more consumption". 

So, if a month goes by and we don't consume more than we did the month before, they start to panic; and if six months go by, they call it a recession; and they force us to consume.  So, it's terrible for the environment, it's terrible for our psyche that our savings are destroyed; what we try to save for the future must be consumed now, because they're going to destroy the value of the savings.  It's bad for the environment, because we're consuming things we don't need to consume. 

So, it's just this kind of endless bad cycle that we're on, because of this focus on growth.  And the growth is just a number; it's not actual growth.  If we can produce more GDP, if we can produce more food and shelter and all these things that we need, at a lower price, that shows up as negative growth for these bankers and they only want positive growth.  So, that's a big part of the problem, which is why I'm in Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean I think that's why we choose Bitcoin, right?  But, I think part of it is to do with the flawed cycle of politics, that incentivised kicking the can down the road.  Politicians' ultimate goal is to retain power, or retain power for their party, and to retain power, you're not incentivised to take the pain of economic boom and bust; well, let's say bust, the cycles.  So, it's kick the can down the road or we'll print more money.

Even Republicans, let's say, at the US who are traditionally more conservative economically, there was massive amounts of stimulus being printed by the Trump regime at the end; and I think they will all continue to do this, because there is no incentive for them.

Tomer Strolight: Yeah, the problem is the reason there's no incentive for them is actually because the incentive system is backwards, because the fiat system exists.  Before the fiat system existed, they couldn't just borrow indefinitely, infinitely.  They can with the fiat system and that's why the system is broken; that's why we really need to let the sun set on that system.  It's not going to survive for very much longer, I don't think. 

When the sun sets and the Bitcoin standard replaces it, we'll still have politicians, we'll still have governments, we'll still want to have some kind of social programmes and some people will still be prepared to pay some amount of taxes, but it's not this notion of whatever politicians want to promise in the short term and who cares what the costs are in the long term, that remains possible; it will not be possible under a sound money standard.  So, that's one of the things Bitcoin really fixes.

I have one article called, Why Bitcoin's the Best Way to Save Money, and it's a play on words, because the trick is isn't just about saving money in a bank so that you can save it for longer, it's about like money is in danger; money is going to die if we keep the fiat system going.  Bitcoin actually saves the very concept of money itself, which is so critical to humans flourishing and civilisation.

Peter McCormack: So that's quite interesting, because that sounds like you're not an anarchist yourself.  I'm not and that's the concept of under a sound money system, I still believe we will have some forms of centralised governance.  I assume it will be government, because I do think there are certain things that should be centralised; very small things, but I got dragged down that rabbit hole by someone introducing me to the idea of minarchism.  I'm not fully there yet, but I'm not an anarchist myself. 

But I do like this concept that when the centralised forms of government don't have access to the money printer, they therefore become a service provider to us as people, and we pay that through some form of tax, maybe much lower tax than we have now.  But it sounds like you're not an anarchist?

Tomer Strolight: I struggle a lot with the philosophy of government.  I studied the philosophy of Ayn Rand a lot, Objectivism, and she was a minarchist, for many years before I'd even heard of Bitcoin.  And I think it's a really tough topic because if the world wasn't as complicated as it is, militarily, if there weren't aircraft carriers and jet fighters and atomic weapons, I think some form of organised anarchy, which is just landowner people who own things and work for things having a code where they would protect each other.  If someone came in and acted in a thieving style, then they would collectively respond to that, and I think that would work pretty well.

But then we get to, we can't have just you and me as a militia operate a nuclear aircraft carrier or a nuclear submarine, or develop nuclear weapons, or all of these really complicated things that do exist and you can't make them go away.  So, we need a military and what else we start to describe from what we need from government becomes really touchy.  So, I'm listening very much and I'm trying to think very hard to both the anarchist and minarchist positions and I think at some point, it's just a fine line between what constitutes the government.

But, the problem with having one entity that has the monopoly on violence, which is what the government is, the monopoly on force, is it's a double-edged sword, right.  If you don't have one, then you have chaos in violence and you don't have retaliatory violence; but if you do have it, you have a monopoly on violence, which can be exploited.  So, it really remains a problem.  I think, to tie it back to the role of Bitcoin, if everyone agrees that the money is Bitcoin and we don't let the entity with the monopoly on violence replace it with fraudulent money, with counterfeit money, to use the term you wrote up before, then that government is limited into what it can do.  And, if that money is unseizable, it can't use force to seize the money, so it's more limited in the kinds of immoral things it can do.

So, I would love to have a small government, not imposing taxation at whim, but doing it on the basis of having to be decent managers of the things that must be managed by government and leaving everything else to the free markets, and obviously having a sound money so that none of these shenanigans are incentivised or allowed. 

If we didn't have the fiat money system, people wouldn't be engaged in all these activities that are so counterproductive, that are so possible under that system.  They wouldn't use their creativity to figure out how to cheat a system that's cheatable; they would use their creativity to be productive and that would be a much better civilisation right there.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and the transition to that Bitcoin standard, it's going to be something very interesting to watch, because you and I believe that with smaller government with no control over the money, therefore limited scope for coercion and violence, would lead to a more productive society and hopefully, geopolitically, a safer world in some ways.  But at the same time, that transition may lead to violence and coercion on bitcoiners as governments start to struggle to tax bitcoiners, or have a form of money whereby they can do coercive things. 

So, that transitionary period will be super interesting, whether we see fightback from government or this kind of Bitcoin standard is just inevitable and can't be stopped.

Tomer Strolight: Right.  Yeah, I try to be the optimist on these things and it's not to say that I don't think that there will be no violence or there won't be unfortunate circumstances.  But Nic Carter, a couple of years ago, wrote an article, a really beautiful article, called --

Peter McCormack: Silent Revolution?

Tomer Strolight: A Most Peaceful Revolution.

Peter McCormack: Peaceful, sorry, yeah.

Tomer Strolight: And that really got me thinking again about Bitcoin to say, you know what; there are actually so many checks and balances and all these counterforces inside of Bitcoin that if one government locally tries to ban it, well the rest of the governments in the world aren't cooperating, so Bitcoin just continues to thrive and people can move their Bitcoins and they can hide their Bitcoins if, in their geography, there's a moment of time when Bitcoin is being overly regulated or pursued, persecuted.

So, I think that there's a lot of really positive things that suggest that we should be able to get through this thing through a proper transition without blood in the streets, without terrible things happening.  Nobody knows for sure, but I remain pretty optimistic about what Bitcoin can do.

Peter McCormack: Well, the one area where I think we might not be able to avoid that is that we have a world now where, in most countries, I think there is an expectation to have some form of social safety net, or access to socialised services; and you tend to see revolutions happen when there is a breakdown in access to health or education, etc.  I've talked about it a few times on the podcast. 

I was in Chile last year and there were riots on the streets and that was due to a breakdown in a couple of things.  The pension system changed, and that was seen as essentially a corrupt decision with the government, so I went out there and I spent time interviewing and talking to people and most of the complaints were access to health and education. 

We don't have a big, red button, but migrating away from systems where we have socialised services such as health and education, moving to a system where it's essentially socialised services have to be replaced by voluntary contributions to help others, you could see revolutions.  You could see people who are outside of the Bitcoin system -- I guess you could see a rise in socialist protests.

Tomer Strolight: I think that that's really interesting, Peter.  I think there's a couple of things that have become completely taken over by government that aren't necessarily traditional functions of government; healthcare and education aren't necessarily government functions.  They're not like the military, the protection of the nation.  And, there's been so much, in part because of the COVID lockdown situation, but there's been so much advancement in how we can provide some of these services that there's really a lot of room to deliver them at a far different cost with a far different infrastructure, which is really hard to do when they are monopolised by government.

So, how many people are educating themselves now; and the whole idea of education being only the first 22 years or 18 years of your life and then, theoretically, you have everything you need to know to get out into the real world for the next 60 years of your life.  That's a really flawed conception of how education's going to work and there's so much education that's available for free right now.  So, I don't think education's going to be the thing that breaks the back of a revolution, because we can get so much education so inexpensively, so professionally, over the internet.

Peter McCormack: Well, sorry to interrupt, not an individual element, but I think collectively, we're conditioned now to believing certain things are provided by government.  And bitcoiners don't.  I know bitcoiners are like, "I want to educate my own children; healthcare shouldn't be free; we shouldn't have a welfare state", etc.  I'm saying the collective breakdown in services being provided to the people, like the social safety net, the collective breakdown of it all, that transition away from that, I could see it sparking a different revolution.

Tomer Strolight: I'm trying to play a little bit of the devil's advocate with you too.  We have seen technology replace certain things that were either provided by other industries, or by government, and it quietly disappears into the background.  We've had private telephone companies for example, but they were very heavily regulated; they were essentially licensed by the government.  So, they were government entities.  And, as the internet came out and now, we're having a telephone call, but we're not having it over a telephone line, you and I right now; we're having it over the internet, over all these platforms.  There are so many different platforms that substitute and replace telephony that we don't really care about the government's regulation of these things anymore.

It's not like people are having a socialist revolution saying, "We don't have telephones; is telecommunications an essential service; we need the government to provide it?" because we have so many free substitutes.  So, I think I'm proposing that something like education can actually find so many good, free, desirable substitutes that people won't have a bloody revolution over the fact that they aren't getting government education.

Healthcare may be a slightly different thing.  The access to certain types of treatments that you can't get more easily, things that require surgery for example, those are trickier topics, I agree.  But, there's a lot of technology that's getting a lot better to make a lot of things that we used to rely on government for just not expensive; so that's another positive.

Peter McCormack: Look, I want to be an optimist like yourself; I try and think through all these scenarios.  What I'm most interested in is if we hyperbitcoinise and move to a Bitcoin standard, how is the transition, what does it look like; because it is a very different world that we live in on a Bitcoin standard that people predict?  I think certain parts of it certainly feel a lot better.  I think, as I said, geopolitically, it makes us a lot safer.  I'm not sure in the short term if it makes us safer on a local level, because a transitional period of swapping between one currency and another, volatility and the breakdown of currencies; that could have negative consequences in the short term. 

Yes, if you were rebuilding a society, if we were to buy ourselves and island and build a citadel, rebuild it with a sound money, of course I think it would be better and different, but I just try and think it through.

Tomer Strolight: Listen, I'm not going to pretend.  If we have an end to the fiat system replaced with a Bitcoin system, we will see the collapse of things that don't make sense under a Bitcoin system and only exist as this artefact of the fiat system, which is a lot of government jobs and a lot of what we call bullshit jobs, I guess.  There's a lot of stuff where people aren't necessarily working.

The trick is to get people's perspectives to change.  We also all have this idea in our head that we have to work five days a week from 9.00am to 5.00pm at some location, and I think a lot of those assumptions have been revisited, in part because of the pandemic reaction.  So, I think people are able to say, "You know what, let's use all the productivity tools that we have in our civilisation; let's meet over video conferencing, rather than have me drive to the office and drive back, so everyone can live where they want; they don't have to spend hours commuting.  They can connect asynchronously even".

The more these things start to become ubiquitous and invisible, the less attached we are to the old way of things that were a bit more artefacts of the fiat age, so we just end up looking back and saying, "Well, we don't really need that thing anymore", and nobody really needs to fight in the streets over -- we need cheap mass transportation during massive rush hour, because nobody's rushing anywhere anymore; they just need to go and open up their laptop computer somewhere.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to do a bit of a switch on subjects now, because I want to refer to another one of your articles, the Why Choose Bitcoin?  It feels like it's a good starting point because again, I was talking to Nik.  I really hate the question, "What is Bitcoin?" because it's a really difficult question to answer simply; you can go down multiple rabbit holes.  But I guess you could flip it when people say, "What is Bitcoin?" and actually say, "It's not about what it is; it's why you should choose it".  It makes it a little bit easier to onboard people into Bitcoin.  Is that something you found; was that a response to people asking you?

Tomer Strolight: Yeah, so it's funny; my series is sandwiched by two articles.  The first one that I wrote was called, Why Choose Bitcoin; and the last one I wrote was, Why Bitcoin Exists, and they're both short.  So, I was going to write this article series.  I had announced it in a couple of these Telegram groups I was in, and I got back tons of suggestions for titles; there were like 160 suggestions I think I just got from Robert Breedlove's Patreon group members.  So, I sat down to start writing on some of these titles and they just didn't resonate; they didn't have that clever insight that I wanted to have in these articles.

So, I went to sleep that night and I ended up waking up at 3.00am in the morning.  This Why Choose Bitcoin article had come to me in my sleep.  The whole point, I realised, is Bitcoin's better money and it continues to be better money because you have to choose it.  It has to earn your choice; and not just yours, Peter, but every single person in the world who uses Bitcoin has chosen it.  So, it has to win the choice of everybody who's going to be in this economy.  And that means it has to be really good; it has to be better than everything else.

That was the brilliance of Satoshi's original invention; it was so much better than everything else.  And all the effort and energy that goes into keeping it decentralised and making improvements in it, it's all about continuing to earn people's choice.  So, in the article, I compare it to fiat money that's forced down your throat; you're told by law at the point of a gun; so, how's someone pointing a gun at you going to give you a better solution than someone saying, "Here, what do I do to make it better?"  So, fiat money has no hope to win against Bitcoin.  And gold?  Gold can't get better; it's a basic element so it can't improve.

Bitcoin continually improves and the more people that use it, the more it improves naturally.  So, why choose Bitcoin?  Because it needs to earn your choice.  And when you realise that, you can see why it's going to succeed in the long term in earning people's choice.

Peter McCormack: That's a really interesting concept as well.  That's not something I've ever considered before, that Bitcoin is a form of money that improves.  That's quite interesting, like gold is what it is; it's a shiny rock; it's hard to transport, hard to send.  All you can really do with it is somehow cut it into smaller pieces and give it to people.

Tomer Strolight: Melt it back, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, melt it back.  And, fiat money just gets worse.  Well no, look actually, to be fair, fiat money improves in certain ways and it has done in terms of, as it became digitised, it improved, it became easier to spend and use; but ultimately, in the end, we don't want a form of money that becomes debased.  But, Bitcoin is a form of money that improves as more people adopt it and it improves as the technology around it improves.  That's a really interesting concept.

Tomer Strolight: Yeah.  I also point out that one of its features is that it's not easy to change.  So, Bitcoin improves, which means it changes, but it doesn't just change willy-nilly.  There's this whole consensus mechanism behind it; anyone can choose not to participate or not to use any of the changes in it.  It's one of these great features that Bitcoin developed to earn your choice is that it's hard to change.  So, there's a lot of devil in the details around Bitcoin, which I think so many of the people who criticise Bitcoin, they just haven't looked at these details; they don't appreciate them.

I hope that I've managed to swing a few people's opinions around by getting them to see some of these facets of Bitcoin that are not obvious at all.

Peter McCormack: Well, making it hard to change is a feature.  And I know a bunch of the shitcoiners will talk about Bitcoin in terms of they'll use things like, "Oh, it's the Myspace" or it's slow, or they come out with these criticisms.  But actually, Bitcoin needs to do one thing very well, which is be secure and avoid attack and then it needs to be easy to send to each other, which is pretty much is. 

Making it hard to change it ensures that the changes that are added at a protocol level are important, are needed, are required.  We don't get some just superfluous scope creep for the sake of it.

Tomer Strolight: Well, Bitcoin makes these hard, hard promises about the money supply and about the permissionless use and the censorship resistance and all of these things, and those are enviable promises which the community will not let anyone modify and break those promises.

Peter McCormack: It's also really interesting when you say we have this fiat money forced on us, so we have this crap form of money forced on us; and with Bitcoin, it's our freedom to use it.  But, the gatekeepers of fiat money want to make it as difficult as possible for us to use Bitcoin?

Tomer Strolight: Right.  They don't even understand what Bitcoin is.  I've had the opportunity to try to teach a course to CEOs and boards of directors and heads of business units of financial institutions; this is going back a few years when I had the opportunity to do that.  Some were curious; most, they had a very fixed world view; and so to them, the curiosity wasn't there.  Certainly, the desire to put the energy into understanding what Bitcoin is wasn't there and they were looking for the easy way out.

I had the Head of Visa for one of Canada's banks immediately walk into the class and say, "You know what; I'm not allowed to sell it anyway, because I need to do KYC AML on people, so this whole thing's irrelevant".  I said, "Well, you know, you can do KYC and sell it to them at that point", which floored him, but he was just so hostile to the idea that it was hopeless.  And they're scared, right? 

The banks generally don't want people losing all their money.  This is something the banks don't understand, so they think it's about losing all their money and there's so much garbage in the space which isn't Bitcoin, in which people will lose all their money, so Bitcoin's right down the middle.  It's taking the high road on both sides of these things.  It's not a scam, which so many of these altcoins are, all of them in my opinion; and it's not this socialised money that's forced down your throat, which is what fiat is.  So, it really is the high ground and people that work in one side or the other have a hard time seeing that.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's a funny thing, because the banks are worried about us losing our money; they're worried about fraud; they're worried about where we invest our money.  I mean, I've seen recently banks are not allowing people not just not send their money to Bitcoin exchanges, but they're not allowing them to send their money to invest in Bitcoin companies, which to me is just an atrocious abuse of power.

Yet us as bitcoiners, we're much better than the banks at protecting our own money generally speaking.  I know some people aren't, but if you get your shit together, you're very good at protecting your money.  You store it as securely as possible and you're very considerate every time you spend a bit of Bitcoin.  It's a real interesting contradiction, because we're cool; we're happy to manage our own money and they're trying to prevent us from doing that.

Tomer Strolight: Well, there's a big definitional problem; we call Bitcoin money; they call dollars money.  They don't think Bitcoin is money, so when you say, "I can protect my Bitcoin", they're like, "You're protecting some bizarre, made-up, fake, worthless, rat poison, tulip thing, so that's not money".  So, we use the word "money" and they use the word "money" to describe two very, very different things.  We accept into the concept of money an idea that they haven't accepted yet; so, they're protecting us from making this terrible mistake of trading our money for tulips, for magic beans, and that's where their internal justification comes from.

Peter McCormack: Well, I want to finish today on another one of your articles, and we could have covered a lot of them, but I will encourage people actually to go and read them, because I think you deserve that.  But I love the title of this: Why Bitcoin is the Most Important Thing Happening in the World.  It's a really interesting thing, because people outside of Bitcoin don't realise that.  You try to explain it to them.  I said to my friends, "The most important thing you need to be doing now is you need to be reading about Bitcoin.  Listen to my podcast, study Bitcoin, buy some Bitcoin".  They don't get it.  Yet us on the inside; we know.

Tomer Strolight: Yeah.  This article came late in my writing.  It was always inside of my, but I think I was shy to say, "I think Bitcoin's the most important thing in the world".  What chutzpah I have!  What gall I have to make such a statement when there are so many important things happening in the world, to say that Bitcoin's the most important thing happening in the world.

I was inspired to write this one.  I had some Google employees invite me to do a lunch and learn about Bitcoin, in part because I was writing this article series, so they ended up with a few questions.  The first question they said is, "Let's talk about why Bitcoin is important" and so I paused to think for a minute and I said, "Well, I actually think it's the most important thing that's happening in the world right now, because it fixes so many other things that are broken.  Money is such an important thing to human beings, it's such an important thing to human civilisation.  Civilisation only exists because we have money and a strong civilisation only exists when we have a sound money".

So I said, "Money has this magical property of coordinating all this human activity so that you and I can walk into a store, we can see something, and with a little bit of money, we can get it.  That thing had to be manufactured, it had to be engineered, it had to be shipped, it had to be stocked, it had to be priced, and we don't have to worry about all the people who were involved in any of that; our money buys it.  So, that's the beauty of money; it's magic".

Then I talk about, "Fiat money is like this dark magic.  It distorts all those magical properties of money, which allow for this immense coordination across billions of people in the world without ever having to talk to one another about anything and just what we demand gets produced; and what gets produced, we can choose how much money we want to pay for it; and fiat money destroys this; and Bitcoin fixes this.  So, we get our time preference under our control; we allocate resources according to what we actually need as human beings, rather than what is popular or what is the whim of government.  It saves us from anxiety; it moderates our short-term consumption".

So, I think Bitcoin is going to rescue civilisation and the environment and all these other things and so all those things are important and Bitcoin's the most important, because it fixes all of them.

Peter McCormack: Because it allows for -- it pushes us more towards an open and free market?

Tomer Strolight: Yeah, I think there's even more to it.  That article, I was really moved; Michael Saylor shared that article in a quote and his quote tweet was something like, "Bitcoin is a moral, technical and economic imperative".  I probably memorised this, because it's the only time he's ever retweeted anything of mine, but it's on all those things. 

It's a moral imperative; it fixes all these problems of ethics in our civilisation.  It's a technical imperative, because it's required, and for people who've listened to Michael talk, it fixes so much about the monetary energy of the world's economy; and that makes it an economic imperative too; it fixes a broken economy.  So, there's all these details and that's why Bitcoin isn't just this maths-based money; it's something that's so much bigger.  It really is a fix for everything that's broken in our civilisation in a way that's consistent with all of this technological advancement we've had in our civilisation over the last 20, 25 years, where microcomputing and interconnectivity, internet working, is ubiquitous.  So, let's have something that works forever now, that takes advantage of that.

Peter McCormack: So, do you think Bitcoin ultimately, what it does is, it fixes or prevents the bad incentives that are temptations to humans?

Tomer Strolight: Yes.  I have an article on inclusivity and it basically says, human beings are flawed; we're prejudiced.  So, how does Bitcoin fix the fact that human beings are flawed?  It takes human beings out of the equation.  Now, there's no human being that says you can't use Bitcoin.  Anyone who can come up with a big, random number can use Bitcoin, which is everybody.  Bitcoin removes the ability and incentive for politicians to print more money. 

My favourite article in the series is, Why Bitcoin is Like Nothing You've Ever Seen Before, and it really talks about how Bitcoin doesn't have so many things in it.  And by removing all of those things, it becomes inviolate, it becomes incorruptible, it becomes invulnerable; it just doesn't have these things that are all the vulnerabilities of other systems.  So, if we can bring Bitcoin into the world in a bigger way, we will have a reliable civilisation that can't be corrupted by human flaws.  We took the human weakness out of the system.

Peter McCormack: Well, there are two sides to that.  So, there's that side that you've talked about with regards to politicians and the incentives of printing money; but there's a flip side to that as well.  It can force us to fix some of our own flaws, in terms of our own thinking, our own consumption, our own saving.  I mean, it's certainly had that impact on me, just by the nature of, you become -- look, I'll spend Bitcoin; I'm not a hodler for life; I've talked about it plenty of times. 

I will spend Bitcoin and my goal is to balance how much time I have with how much Bitcoin to maximise my enjoyment out of life and set up my children as best possible without giving them too much, right?  So, it's a balance.  I'm not somebody who has a huge amount of Bitcoin, but I wouldn't want to die with tens of millions of Bitcoin unspent.  I would want to have spent that, either on positive projects for other people, or buying stupid cars, or anything I want to do; it's that balance.

But the last three years for me, after I got rekt, has been about re-establishing my financial base.  And now, I do consider every purchase.  So, I think it doesn't just fix the way the free market works, it doesn't just fix politicians, but it fixes you yourself.

Tomer Strolight: Yeah.  So, there's one really almost purely emotional article in my series, called Why We Need Bitcoin, which really it says you're an amazing person, to every reader of it.  You're an incredible thing; you're only going to happen once in the history of the universe and in order to be your best self, you need to know that your energy is not going to be stolen from you, so that you can plan for the entirety of your life.  And, that's why we need sound money and that's why we need Bitcoin.

So, I not only agree with you, I think these magical effects that Bitcoin has on people, which is to remove the anxiety that they don't know where they're money's going to come from ten years from now, or even a year from now, to have stability so that they can focus on their long term and become who they are.  I guess for me, if we're wrapping up, I always deep down inside wanted to be a writer, but I was on the treadmill, trying to earn money that I could spend before it all got inflated away, or my investment advisor rekt me on something.

Now I have Bitcoin and now I have a vision into the future, with conviction and certainty, so I can dedicate my time to what I love, which is writing about Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: It's interesting you say "magic".  I just wanted to get that Arthur C Clarke quote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", so I guess that resonates with you?

Tomer Strolight: Absolutely.  I've wondered so much about just how smart Satoshi was, how creative Satoshi was, how inventive the whole thing leading up to Bitcoin was; but the launch of it, creating the secret identity so that he could disappear when the time came to do that.  There's just so many magical things in the history and story of Bitcoin.

I've written my first piece of fiction as well, which is about Satoshi, so it's going to be published in Citadel21 Magazine on 21 May, which is probably a few days after this gets released and it's a short story, called Satoshi and Me, and it's Sci-Fi, fan fiction, Bitcoin porn!  I don't really know what else to call it.  I wrote it to express the heroic achievements and the appreciation of the heroic achievements that went into the creation of Bitcoin that Satoshi himself must have come up with.  I know we've just passed the tenth anniversary of his disappearance and you had Pete Rizzo on your show and he wrote that great article that talked about Satoshi, the human. 

This for me is like an artwork to paint Satoshi as a hero, as a tremendous hero.  And given that Satoshi never benefitted from spending the coins, never benefitted from the fame; he doesn't walk down the street and people give him high fives and say, "Great job, Satoshi".  Whatever, whoever Satoshi was, if they still are, they did away with that.  So, this story also imagines giving them the satisfaction of the appreciation for what they came up with, in a relationship between the protagonist of the story and Satoshi Nakamoto.

Peter McCormack: Wow!  Well, I look forward to reading that.  Well listen, man, I really appreciate your work. 

Tomer Strolight: Thank you.

Peter McCormack: It's stuff that I will happily send to my friends.  I think you break Bitcoin down into really easy, digestible, small lessons that really just tick you over, so I'm going to share it all out in the show notes.  I recommend everyone goes to your Medium page and it won't take them too long, but digests your work and I just wish you the best luck for the future.

Tomer Strolight: Thank you very much.

Peter McCormack: I assume you've got a book in you; I don't know if you're thinking about that.  Maybe it's a collection of short Bitcoin stories?

Tomer Strolight: There's a bunch of different writing I'm doing.  I'm trying to do some thought pieces around how Bitcoin is evolving, which are longer.  I do want to write a novel; there's a novel in me someday, which will involve Bitcoin in it, but it will also be a long-term science fiction novel; and I think I'll be turning this collection of stories into a book and I guess there'll be an eBook available for download.  There is one right now as your podcast airs!

Peter McCormack: Well, tell people where to go; where do you findi?

Tomer Strolight: So, you can find my articles on at tomerstrolight.medium.com.  The eBook is going to be on Swan Bitcoin, so swanbitcoin.com/whybitcoin and on Twitter, I tweet a fair bit, so you can find me @tomerstrolight.  I also have a small podcast, which I do with a guy who's been on your show, Keith Levene.

Peter McCormack: You do a show with Keith Levene?  How do I not know that?

Tomer Strolight: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I love Keith.

Tomer Strolight: So, the show is called For the Love of Bitcoin and it just is, there's a bunch of us who love Bitcoin.  There's a third host on it, who's Bitcoin Mechanic, who's the guy who released the Taproot activation client that's not Core, but based on Core.  So, it's just the three of us trying every week to get together and talk about what's happening in Bitcoin, why we love what's going on, or why we're frustrated with certain things that are going on, and it's a very hardcore, deep down the rabbit hole podcast.  We've only just got it started, so that's For the Love of Bitcoin; give it a listen.

Peter McCormack: Amazing.  I'll check that out.  I love Keith, I think Keith's great.

Tomer Strolight: So do I; I absolutely love him.

Peter McCormack: He's awesome, man.  Well, brilliant.  Look, all the best with this, it's great to get you on.

Tomer Strolight: Yeah, thanks for having me, Peter.

Peter McCormack: Hopefully at some point, we'll get to hang out.  I know Canada isn't the best place to try and get to at the moment, but at some point in the future, hopefully we can hang out.

Tomer Strolight: That will be amazing.  When you're in Canada, or if I'm in Bedford, we'll look each other up!

Peter McCormack: All right, my man, well listen, take care, Tomer.

Tomer Strolight: Thank you.