WBD358 Audio Transcription

Gradually then Suddenly Pt 1 - Killing the FUD with Parker Lewis

Interview date: Wednesday 9th June

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Parker Lewis. 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 Parker Lewis, Head of Business Development at Unchained Capital. We discuss money as a coordination function of society, Bitcoin's energy usage, and why you cannot copy Bitcoin.

“It is unnerving when a bunch of virtue signalers...having no appreciation for the fact that 85% of the people in the world live in poverty and they don’t have access to a reliable form of money that could pull them out of poverty, that they would start to criticize without having any understanding.”

— Parker Lewis

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Parker, how are you doing, mate?  Good to see you again.

Parker Lewis: Doing well.  Good to see you.  Look forward to seeing you in person here in about a week.

Peter McCormack: Yes, I think we all need this and all deserve this.  It's nearly a year and a half now.  Everyone's going to be in Miami pretty much.

Parker Lewis: Yeah, everyone's going to be here.  It was good for BitBlockBoom! about nine months ago, but there were only about 200 people, and there's going to be, I think, 10,000 people in Miami for Bitcoin 2021.  Yeah, I think like you said, not just the last year and a half, but where Bitcoin is right now, and especially the last two weeks, they've taken some body blows but emerging from the fire stronger, that everyone will be super excited to see each other and take the helm back.

Peter McCormack: Well, you've been writing relentlessly; your Gradually, then Suddenly series is fantastic.  I've shared it out with some people, but I will put it in the show notes.  I recommend people check it out.  I absolutely love your work; you're one of my favourite people to talk to about the foundations of money.  It's something I'd never considered about before Bitcoin and, whilst we've touched on this before, you and I, when I did my beginner's guide, I wanted to go into more detail with you.

So, we're going to record a few shows over the next few months, but really want to get back into the foundations.  There are a lot of new people who have come to my podcast, probably tripled in size since we last spoke.  They don't all go back and listen to them, so I do want to get into some of these foundations with you because many people don't think about money.  Money just becomes this thing we use day to day; we pay with our credit card; we pay with our debit cards.  A lot of people don't think about inflation or think about what gives money value, so we're going to crush it today, right?

Parker Lewis: Absolutely.  The educational parts of Bitcoin, it is the first step to anybody becoming a bitcoiner, and it's also the firepower that everyone needs to be able to handle the volatility that we've seen over the last few weeks, that if you're not grounded in actually understanding the fundamentals of Bitcoin and ultimately, money too that's just like a foundation, then you really don't have an anchor point and that the world can be very confusing.

So, I think that the work you do, other podcasters, but then also myself and writing, and other writers, that it all goes to that effort of equipping people to understand Bitcoin on a more fundamental level so that it can actually create value in their lives.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and it's good that you allude to these last few weeks; the weak journalists from the mainstream media continue to disseminate nonsense.  We are repeatedly dealing with the same FUD that we deal with every year related to Bitcoin, so we're going to crush some of those narratives now.  But, just to kick us off, just for people listening now who may have some foundation understanding but others don't, let's talk about what is money; what are the basics of money; what gives money value, therefore what gives Bitcoin value?

Parker Lewis: Well, one step back before that and then I'll speak to that.  I think that there was something that you keyed in on at the top which was really important, which is this realisation and appreciation for the fact that, up until Bitcoin, virtually everyone in the world, not going to say everyone because there were people who had consciously considered what money was, but those were very few and far between in terms of those people; and that's generally the case because money has always just existed and it's always generally worked and worked well, or seemingly worked well. 

It's not really until people start to become interested in Bitcoin that they have to start questioning, "Well, why is Bitcoin valuable?"  As they start to ask that question, it really is the first rabbit hole that somebody has to go down, which is what is money?  I think it's one of the best things about Bitcoin, is that it forces people to consciously consider that question because it's a big question and it's not one that is particularly intuitive. 

Oftentimes, if I look at the United States and I ask people why do 325 million people accept dollars as money; most people don't have a good answer because it has been taken for granted; it is something that hasn't been consciously considered, but the answers are generally something along the lines of, it's a collective hallucination or it's a belief system or money has value because the government said so.

I think, from the top, it's really important to say that it's none of those things, that it's not a collective hallucination, it's not a belief system and money doesn't magically have value because some other individuals, that are your peers but in a different capacity, say so.  At a root level I think about it as, money solves a problem that everyone on Earth has, which is a problem of trade and exchange and that, when they start to realise that that is the fundamental problem that money solves, and they have to also appreciate when they consider it that we are all better off in a world which we can trade with others, and that we become incrementally better off the more and more people that we can trade with.

So, the economic good that we call money, that is the problem that it's solving, and we all happen to have -- it's not a unique problem, it's a common problem, but it's identical.  I think of the problem itself as, "How do I trade?" and that that is the economic good which money fulfils.  When you accept that, and I'll use the example of, if everybody on Earth had to go out and hunt their own food or grow their own food, they wouldn't have time to do other things; there are certain people that would be better or worse at doing that and, if we have some way to trade efficiently, the sum of the parts would be far greater than the whole.  If we all don't have to fulfil each individual thing that we need in our lives, we'll actually be able to fulfil many more things.

When they start to think about how are they going to facilitate trade and exchange, they need some intermediary good to facilitate that.  In a very early agrarian economy, a very small economy, it might have just evolved from trading certain goods in a barter scenario; but then, as economies start to become larger, they had this problem of essentially what its generally referred to as a coincidence of wants, that somebody that creates one thing might not want what the other people wants and vice versa.  That naturally resulted in things being traded for other intermediary goods that people would expect to hold value until they would want to convert it back into something that they did value in the real world, or that had real world value.  As this process evolved, the world for really millennia had been converging on different forms of money and perfecting money.

We've gotten to a point in time where we're 2,000 years in the future; we all, whether we consciously consider it or not, appreciate that money is an economic good, that it does facilitate economic coordination, most people don't understand how or why, but that that there is it reality.  The way that I describe it for people is that if the problem that money solves is trade, and that that problem is intersubjective, that if I want to trade with you, we have to both agree on what the intermediary good is, because I have to have the same form or money, and I've had to have received that from delivering value to someone else, if I'm going to pay you and if you're willing accept it in exchange for your goods and services.  So, if it's an intersubjective problem, there is also I think an economic reality that might be disagreed with in academic circles, but that is all value in the world of subjective. 

Oftentimes, people will talk about intrinsic value, and I fundamentally do not believe that to be true.  We might need certain things for survival, but the value of them is subjective and that it's money as the economic good that allows us to objectively measure what is inherently subjective value.  So, we have the same common problem, which is trade, and the solution needs to be one that is common because the problem is intersubjective.  While all value is subjective and that money is the good that allows us to objectively measure subjective value, there are objective ways to measure what will be a better or worse form of money because it's solving a very, very specific problem. 

Most people will do it subconsciously, but when you start to consciously consider what gives money value or what economic good would be effective and efficient at fulfilling the function of money, it starts to really cross over a combination of a few properties; that something be scarce; that if you're going to transfer or trade your time in the goods and services that you create with your time, that you do not want to trade that for an intermediately good that someone can print a lot more of to debase the value because, if you're trading value today, you want to get equal or greater value into the future and the property of scarcity is what helps ensure that.  But scarcity alone does not give money value.  The example that I would use there is for people who are familiar with Mount Rushmore. 

There is a mountain in one of the Dakotas where there are the heads of four US presidents, and there's only one of them in the world; it's a terrible form of money because you can't carve it up and you can't transfer it.  Scarcity alone isn't what gives money value, but when you combine scarcity with the ability to divide and aggregate an economic good, and not only divide and aggregate, but for the properties of that good, when you divide it and aggregate it, to be fungible.

What is mean by that is, if you had ten units of something, if you divided it in two and eighths, or to two units and eight, that the two is actually two-tenths and the eight is actually eight-tenths, that the example that I used there is, if you were to cut a house in half, it's no longer functional as a house.  It no longer is good at securing you and protecting you, and one side of the house is not equal to the other side of the house.

So, when you think about then the ability to divide and aggregate and that it be important that the left side and the right side be common or fungible, it is important and functional, not just for that mere fact, but it's important that one singular economic good can measure all other goods, such that one economic good can be carved up into very small units to measure a bottle of water or into very large units to value Liverpool or the Dallas Cowboys.  It's important that that one good can do all that.

Then the third property is really the ability to transfer that, because again we're solving this problem of trade.  You have to have a common standard of value that somebody can't print more of, scarcity, they can be divided and aggregated to be able to measure all things, but then, for facilitating the trade, you also then have to be able to transfer that.

So, when you start to think about, it's not any one of those of properties, it's the aggregate of all three, and that there aren't many goods in the world that possess all three properties.  And that humans, because they have this very natural need to trade and they understand the benefits of it, they're highly incentivised to find the economic good that's going to allow them to do that best and most efficiently; that's really what Bitcoin represents in many ways.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so, for me, it's really been travelling that's made me understand money a lot better as well.  I'm so fortunate to speak to people like yourself and Nic Carter and Vijay and all these amazing people and learn about Bitcoin, but real-world experiences you really can't beat.  I can think of three places now where I've had this lightbulb moment with money; when I went out to Venezuela -- I'm in the UK, we have essentially one form of money we use, which is the pound.  Everybody uses it; everybody trades with it; we don't have other currencies.  I know some people hold and secure gold, but we don't really use it. 

But, when I went to Venezuela, there were five currencies; there was the dollar, there was the Colombian peso, there was the bolivar, there was Bitcoin and then there was the petro.  What was very clear when I was there is, depending on where you were, people really wanted the dollar or they wanted Bitcoin.  So, when I was going to restaurants, whilst you could pay in the bolivar, they would ask for the dollar, and some of the locals I met who work out there just wanted Bitcoin.  That gave you the realisation that there are people who understand; they, themselves, intrinsically understand what is good money, because they've been exposed to terrible money.

Similar in Cambodia, whilst you have a local currency, people really wanted the dollar.  But the most interesting one was these last few weeks when I was in El Salvador down at El Zonte, which you've got to go and a visit, man.  I'll try and get you down there sometime just to see this growing Bitcoin project.  It's 18 months since I first went there, and now almost every store accepts Bitcoin, but it's not just that; people wanted paying in Bitcoin. 

So, I've got this herniated disc at the moment, I went to see this lady who's a specialist in backs, and I got out my dollars to pay and she said, "Well, I only accept Bitcoin.  Could you pay me in that?"  In the stores, they wanted to be paid in Bitcoin.  So, these people now intrinsically themselves understand why Bitcoin is a better form of money.  But I think for a lot of people, unless you've done the work, you've really researched it, it's very difficult to understand maybe why Bitcoin is better money, but when you go to these countries and have the experience of the locals who have been exposed to terrible money, they suddenly understand it.

Parker Lewis: Absolutely, and I think that there are two maybe factors that work in opposition to each other, that if you're in the developed world that has a form of money that is relatively functional day to day, that it doesn't create the immediate incentive to want to learn or to feel like you need to learn. 

On the other side, you do have access to information, and you generally live in an environment where you've got clean water, healthcare, a roof over your head, you live in the comfort of a place where you can spend hours to try to understand Bitcoin.  So, it's basically you don't have the same urgency or incentive, but you are in a position to consume more information.

In a place where the economic reality is more day-to-day self-preservation, those people, while they don't have the benefit of the comfort of necessarily living in a developed world that has a highly functioning economy, they also are in a position to much more intuitively understand Bitcoin; because, it's this idea that whether you consciously consider what makes Bitcoin a better money, that that sometimes can be limiting or restricting of your ability to understand it.

What I mean by that is that ultimately Bitcoin just becomes an AB test, as does any currency.  People don't have to know how Bitcoin works; if they observe it in the market, that it is the currency within their local economy that holds its value the best, then that is going to be the money that they prefer.  That truly is an AB test.  I am contributing value, and I'm happy to make a decision at a point in sale, or point of sale, as to what is going to carry this value that I've already contributed into the future.  If you're wrong, the consequence is very penalising, and you have a very high incentive to be right.  Most of that can be observed in the market. 

Then, for those that don't have to immediately observe it in the market, there are tools, like your podcasts, like my writings, to consciously consider it; but 99% of the people in the world are not going to have to do that.  99% of the people don't have to understand how the telephone works, or how this video conference works; it just works.  That's essentially what people do in the real world.  It's, "I have this problem.  I don't necessarily know how the technology works, but it works, and I will use it to my best advantage".

Peter McCormack: There is another thing that's become really obvious to me with travelling as well; we talk about the properties of money, you talk about it, Vijay did an excellent job with his Bullish Case for Bitcoin; but there is another thing that's become very obvious is the gatekeeping around money as I've travelled. 

So, the place that I've been spending time within El Salvador and El Zonte, a lot of people there don't have access to bank accounts.  It's an actual reality; you hear about this, but it's an actual reality.  Most people just don't; they just live week to week, month to month, day to day with the physical currency they have access to. 

Similar, I went to Guatemala afterwards and I was being told various stories like, if you want to take out a substantial amount of money out of your bank, it's really quite difficult; we're talking low thousands.  He said one of the things that Guatemalans have come to accept, that it isn't really their money.  He was telling me, he was like, "We know it isn't our money, it's the government's money, and, if we want to get a significant amount out, it's very difficult.  We have to complete all these papers".

But the advancement of mobile technical has actually pushed forward the ability for people to have access to money and bank accounts because, when I'm in El Zonte and I go to pay with Lightning, the person I'm buying off has a Lightning wallet on their phone, we don't have to deal with a bank; we can operate outside the bank.  Similar in Guatemala.  The guys were saying there that, with the problems with the banking system, he actually onboarded his mother.  He orange-pilled his mum by saying, "You don't need to go to the bank, Mum.  You can hold your wealth on your phone.  You can hold it in a Bitcoin wallet". 

That gatekeeping that happens around money via the state, especially in the developing world, is another interesting factor that's only just become more prominent to me recently.

Parker Lewis: Well, I think if anybody, whether it's developing worlds or the developed world, if they actually read a bank account agreement, the process of reading that bank account agreement will make Bitcoin far more intuitive.  It's basically, if I were to summarise it, "Check all your rights at the door and I'm going to take everything, and I hold all the chips and I have certain obligations to you, but there are a lot of scenarios in which I don't".

It really is not your money, definitionally.  Any deposit into a bank is now their money and they have a liability to you that they may or may not make good on in the future.  It became necessary as a function, largely to scale what was the prior standard of value, gold, in terms of how the legacy banking system emerged, and I do think about Bitcoin as breaking down those barriers and disintermediating banking.  There's no reason why, if you're on the beach in El Salvador transacting with a vendor, that you need a bank.  

Now, I think that there will still be banks and there will still be financial intermediaries, but the nature of that relationship will fundamentally change as a result of Bitcoin.  But it all comes back to, and starts at, the only way that that economic good, Bitcoin, delivers value to those people in El Salvador is if it functionally performs, or at least efficiently functions, the performance of what money should do for them, which is producing value in the real world and storing it and intermediating a series of transactions.

That woman or that vendor who is asking for Bitcoin, they wouldn't do that if they hadn't observed, whether consciously or subconsciously, that Bitcoin holds its value, whether understanding or not.  So, generally, I think what you do a great job of on this podcast, and what I focus on in writing, is helping more and more people understand the "why", as to why it will hold value; why, with Bitcoin, it also has properties such that you don't need to rely on the bank.

It is a very, very powerful thing to both have a form of money that holds its value, to have some understanding as to why, even though you don't really need to, but then have unilateral control of it.  That is incredibly empowering, but it also provides a level of freedom that wasn't possible before Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Yes.  Okay, so, I think we need to deal with some of the criticisms now, some of the regular FUD that we have to deal with in Bitcoin.  I actually am sympathetic to how people come to these conclusions; what I'm not sympathetic to is when journalists are exposed to the counterarguments and choose to ignore them.

I think most people who come into Bitcoin come with questions.  It is very unusual; it's a decentralised form of money and people don't even know what decentralization means or why it's important.  We're so conditioned to have a state-controlled money that this new Bitcoin thing's a bit weird.  So, I think it's perfectly understandable to question Bitcoin, especially if you're new, but I think we should work through these, because if somebody is new and they are having these questions, I think you're going to do a great job of breaking them down.

I've got notes for our thing, but I'm going to do them in a different order, because I want to deal with volatility first.  I do think volatility is an important thing to understand with regard to Bitcoin.  I always say you need to get through your first four years, then volatility becomes something easier to manage because you've usually ridden a cycle out.   But let's talk about volatility; let's explain why we have volatility in Bitcoin and why that isn't essentially a death nail in Bitcoin's coffin.

Parker Lewis: Maybe before I explain that, what I'd like is to provide maybe some context around is my series and why I write.  I like to reinforce for people that I am somebody who's deep down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, I believe that everything of value for Bitcoin is derived from the fact that there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin, and understanding how that happens is the real innovation of Bitcoin. 

I don't think everyone's going to have to understand that, but that's the difficult thing, but setting a baseline that everything of value in Bitcoin derives from the fact that there's a monetary system that has a fixed supply, that's executed on a decentralised basis that can't be debased and that the entire world can access it and benefit from it.

I have that view today and, when I was coming to understanding Bitcoin, it's not something that came intuitively to me, and I like to reinforce that for people, that Bitcoin is the opposite of intuitive and then you hear something or you read something, and it starts to click.  It's often a series of unlocking certain mental blocks.

There are oftentimes a lot of top-level questions about Bitcoin that shut people down at the beginning to prevent them from going to the next layer or deeper down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, and because I experienced many of those myself, basically two things happen; I had the benefit of reading The Bitcoin Standard before it came out, I also had the benefit of meeting Saifedean Ammous, and he helped me unlock mental blocks.  Then, when the book came out, I started sharing it with people and I realised that it was the best way to leverage my own time. 

I could either explain these ideas or I could just buy a book and give it to them and Saife could do it for me.  But I also knew there were a lot of questions that I had to continue to work through that trip a lot of people up; because I had that experience personally, I thought that it would make sense to essentially, whether or not the way that I frame things makes sense to any individual, it was how I had to work through them logically and that it would connect with many people and accelerate their path down the Bitcoin.

So, as we talk about volatility as the first one, because it is a big question that trips people up out of their starting gate, so I think it is a really important one to start with, there is also this reality that if you could list ten questions on the things that don't make sense to somebody that's first looking into Bitcoin, I also reassure everyone that, practically speaking, everyone that's come before them has asked those same questions or struggled with those same questions and that there are resources out there, my series is one them, that help people think through why each of those questions or how to think about them or why they're not problems.

So, volatility is a big early one that trips people up, and I like to frame it for people as it makes perfect sense, that there's this thing, Bitcoin, that a bunch of crazy people are saying is going to be the future currency of the world, but it's super volatile and they don't see it being used day to day; it doesn't operate any way, shape or form like any form of money that they've known.  So, it's perfectly reasonable that they would look to this and say, "This thing can't be money". 

My response to it is that Bitcoin is both volatile, because there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin, but that is also the fundamental reason why people demand it.  What I mean by that is that all fundamental demand is derived from the fact that there is a currency system that has a credibly enforced fixed supply, and that is valuable to many people.  It's difficult for people to understand, but knowledge just distributes as a function of time.

If you recognise that there is information asymmetry and that, for each person that starts to accumulate Bitcoin or adopt Bitcoin as a standard of value, their knowledge, from that first point of saving for the first time versus one year out, versus two years out, versus three out, increases almost definitionally.  You can't start to begin the fundamentals of Bitcoin until you own it for the first time, and then your knowledge increases.  Then, think about everyone at a different point on that continuum where people are doing it every day. 

So, if we live in a world where today, there are already 18.7 million Bitcoin that are in circulation, and there will be only ever be 21 million; then if information distributes on an accelerating basis and not exponential basis; that if 10X the people demand Bitcoin, and Bitcoin is generally adopted in waves, which I think is generally a function of just human psychology and nothing specific to Bitcoin; that if demand increases 10X and the supply is perfectly inelastic because we have this finite, scarce monetary system which, again, is the fundamental value; that what you ultimately have is 10X the people valuing something for the first time, that that ride is inevitably going to be volatile. 

It's going to force the price up, but there exists information asymmetry; there exists the fact that a lot of new people are valuing this good for the first time; that it will, very naturally, just as a function price discovery, be volatile.  There is no other path.  Vijay Boyapati, who you referenced who just published the book edition of his Bullish Case for Bitcoin, he has one of the best quotes, and I'll get it as close to verbatim as I can, but it's this idea that establishment economists deride the fact that Bitcoin is volatile as if something can go from nothing to a stable form of money overnight without volatility.  It's entirely ludicrous.  Then monetisation of a good on the free market in every case in history, by definition, has to be volatile.  The volatility is natural.

That volatility will decline as more and more people learn about Bitcoin, more and more people learn about why it's valuable, that it is storing value, again, whether consciously or subconsciously.  If I think about it today as maybe there are 100 million people that have Bitcoin, any exposure, but realistically there are definitely fewer than 10 million that have material exposure; Bitcoin is a utility to 8 billion people, and it's already won and people just don't know it yet.

What's happening now is the knowledge gap for an increasing number of people is shrinking, and people are acutely acknowledging and understanding it; more people literally every day.  People don't unlearn Bitcoin, just more people learn about it.  Let's say there are 10 million that have material exposure to Bitcoin, the next 90 represent a 10x increase of the base, the next 900 million, or 990 million, represents a 100x increase. 

That path, because 18.7 million Bitcoin are already in circulation and there will only ever be 21 million, and there's no supply response to increase and demand, the path merits that it must be volatile when new people of that orders of magnitude, adopting at a price and a good for the first time, are coming to understand it and then appreciating that their knowledge grows over time, and the Bitcoin becomes more intuitive. 

But let's assume that volatile path, and let's assume once 1 billion people have Bitcoin, the next 100 million people don't represent a 10X increase from the 10 million that have material exposure to it today, it represents 10%, and then Bitcoin will become not volatile once the embedded base of Bitcoin holders is larger than the new adoption.

That doesn't mean we have to get to 3.5 billion, because adoption is not just a function of individual numbers of people, it's the amount of wealth that those people have, the amount wealth they're storing in the Bitcoin Network.  Bitcoin naturally stabilises only as a function of population density of Bitcoin holders getting to such a critical mass that incremental adoption is percentages rather than multiples, if not orders of magnitude.  The reason why that will happen is that there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin.  The same problem for everyone, the same solution, and it's a value to virtually everyone.

One last thing on the volatility piece that I think is important for people to appreciate that, even if they understand this idea that there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin, that it's naturally volatile, there's also this recognition of how people deal with volatility in their day-to-day lives.  When somebody adopts Bitcoin for the first time, they aren't just immediately putting 100% of what is their value saved into that asset. 

It oftentimes starts as a 1% of their liquid assets and then maybe, as their access to information, or understanding of information grows, and it's 5%, but, as their understanding of Bitcoin grows, their tolerance for volatility grows.  They're also not exposed to it all at once.  So, oftentimes, people will look at it and say, "How can this be a currency?" or, "How could somebody allocate part of their wealth to Bitcoin?"  

If they start to think about it, I said, "Well, if 1% of my wealth is volatile, but I understand why that volatility skews to the upside materially, then it's just a matter of managing all the other things in my life around that volatility".  It's something that bitcoiners do every day and that, if you start with a knowledge base, then you will come to the same conclusion, that the volatility is to your benefit and you just have manage the rest of your assets for the rest of your life around it and, over time, you'll tolerate more and more of it.

Peter McCormack: So, the guess the reality is that Bitcoin, being a good itself and being a perfect free market good, itself is exposed to supply and demand.  Right now, we're seeing a massive increase in demand, which is affecting its relative value to fiat currencies.  So, we're essentially in that phase right now whereby it doesn't make too much sense to use it as a medium of exchange, yet people are because we know, as this expands, personally, if we hold our Bitcoin, it has a potentially much higher value in the future; we have much more purchasing power. 

What we are seeing is, with a bit of a lag, we are seeing it starting to become a medium of exchange.  Certainly, in El Zonte, in El Salvador, it is being used as a medium of exchange.  So, that makes sense to me, okay.  And rather timely, the next thing I want to deal with -- were you about to jump in with something there?

Parker Lewis: Well, I was going to say that there is something very fundamental about what you just raised which is that, so long as somebody else in my market economy is willing to accept my dollars for their goods and services, I am incentivised to spend a currency that is depreciating in value over time and to save my currency that is appreciating; I will only spend my currency that's appreciating if the person that's delivering value to me on the other side dictates or demands that I pay them in that better form of currency. 

It's not just that we think that Bitcoin's going to appreciate over time, that our purchasing power's going to increase, it's that we know the fundamental reason why more people will adopt it and that, when more people adopt it, if the supply cannot be increased, that its value will increase by that very fact.  It's not by chance, it's because of this necessity that every human being values and benefits from having an intermediary good as money and one that has a fixed supply, and because everyone has that same intersubjective problem, we only need one form of money; that is that driver.

Anybody's who's not spending their Bitcoin and saving it so long as others take it, then that is a rational behaviour.  But what you were describing in El Salvador is, they don't have access to another form of money or, if they do, they've keyed in on the fact that they have access to a better one and that enough of them in a very local area have figured it out.  There's probably a pricing system starting to emerge where they say, "Hey, you want to come and get a taco at my shop on the beach in El Salvador?  Pay me 2,000 sats".  That happens because they have a high enough density of holders and adopters in one area to be able to affect that. 

So, there is this very natural progression of, once you consciously or subconsciously understand that Bitcoin will hold value, the store of value and your understanding that it will, again, be an observation in the market, or understanding about this 21 million supply, then and only then do you consider to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.  It's a very logical progression of, "Is this thing going to store value for me?  If so, then I'll figure out the ways to demand it as a form of currency".  It follows that flow.

Peter McCormack: I think, in El Zonte, there are two different reasons people accept Bitcoin, or demand Bitcoin.  I do think there are people are just accepting it because they've been given the opportunity to accept it as a currency and they know some people want to spend it.  I think some of those don't really care.  They want to sell their good, "Pay me in dollars, pay me in Bitcoin".  There is also this second group who've really spent the time to understand Bitcoin and want it.  So, I think both exist, but it is a seed which is growing and it's fascinating. 

I, myself, Parker, I want my sponsors to -- that's the first question I ask, "Can you pay me in Bitcoin?"  Some can, some can't, but I'm not dictating it but I'm certainly asking the question.  What we're seeing is it's almost every one of these things comes to back to your fantastic title, the Gradually, Then Suddenly; I think we're gradually starting to see that growth in people demanding Bitcoin.

Parker Lewis: Yeah, and there's also just this recognition that everyone exists on a continuum and that certain people might be at a relative similar point of a continuum, but other people within their economy are going to, by definition, be at a different one; but they're on the same path and each of them will get to the same end point.

Like you said, there are naturally going to be people, yourself, you had to understand why Bitcoin was going to reasonably hold its value, and now you want to be paid directly for it.  Others might look at it and say, "Hey, if someone has this and it's a relatively good form of currency, I'll accept it", but somebody else in that local economy will be more like you.  But either one of those two people, ultimately the gap will converge because of the information either, again, observed in the market or consciously considered.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  So, the next thing I want to target, I'm jumping around on the list here because I'm trying to deal with things in what feel like a priority order, and it's highly, highly relevant now, is Bitcoin does not waste energy; we are dealing with relentless amounts of, which I consider a tax on Bitcoin, based on the energy argument. 

The arguments are the same; they're not based on proper research, and people are now having to do a lot of work to try and defend this, and obviously we now have our Mining Council, which I'm nervous about, but you quite bluntly claim that Bitcoin does not waste energy.

Parker Lewis: Yeah.  So, the energy one, I think it's particularly topical right now because of the noise that Elon Musk has created, but not just Elon Musk, also this ESG crowd.  I think that there are a couple of a different tracks that people take when they defend Bitcoin's energy consumption, and there's this important recognition on the top that is Bitcoin consumes a lot of energy. 

On a relative basis, it's actually very small.  But, on a gross basis, and most people don't understand the orders of magnitude of how much energy is consumed in the world, so they don't really have a baseline and when they hear something compared to the amount of energy that Bitcoin consumes, whether it's more energy than a small country or more than 10 million homes in the United States, it sounds like a lot. 

The natural response is that people try to justify it by saying that, "Well, Bitcoin incentivises renewable energies.  It's consuming only energy that's being wasted", and I really think that that is the wrong framing.  It's not necessarily fundamentally wrong.   I believe those things to be true; I believe that Bitcoin does incentivise renewable energy to be developed and I believe that Bitcoin does, not just that I believe, it does that, and Bitcoin also captures wasted energy by definition; we see it every day.  But it's really important, I also think that it's beautiful, that somebody like Elon Musk doesn't get it, he doesn't see it, and he sends a loud signal to everybody else that he doesn't get it. 

What I mean by that is that, if you start to understand the problem that Bitcoin is intending to solve, then that becomes the entry point to understand the justification for all of the energy that Bitcoin does consume and will consume into the future.  The counterpoint is also true; if you do not understand the problem that Bitcoin intends to solve and that it will solve the most fundamental problem of more than 7 billion people in the world, then there could be no defence or justification for the energy that it consumes. 

So, it's if you don't understand the problem statement and the solution that Bitcoin offers, any amount of energy consumed can never be justified, and it's a good thing that we talk about this right after volatility.  If you see this highly volatile thing, and you have no understanding for why people demand it and why people value it, and then you're told that it consumes 18 gigawatts of power, of course you have no grounding or no foundation to even think about it.  It's like, "There is no utility in this thing and it consumes 18 gigawatts of power.  That's bad for the environment". 

So, I start people with, they have to understand that first principal problem of what is money, and they have to understand why Bitcoin fixes the problem with money and that it's possible that, singularly, Bitcoin solves a problem for 7 billion people, because without that, there's no way to agree to disagree if we're not speaking from the same principle.

The analogy that I use, well not the analogy, the example that I use is -- let me explain the macro of this and then I'll get into a micro example that helps it make sense.  Money is the economic good that coordinates all other resources within the economy, it's what allows humans to trade with each other efficiently; and I ask people to go do this exercise: the next time that you go into a grocery store, sit in the very centre of the grocery store and start to consciously consider how many human beings had to conspire to get all of the things that you want in one place such that, at the end of your day, you can mindlessly walk through the aisles and grab one of what are thousands of goods all in one place. 

When you start to add that up, that on any modern grocery store it's probably not fewer than 100 million people contributed to that process; if you start to think about each individual good, the supply chains that were required to not only produce the good but to get that good to market; to get that good into your grocery store; all the materials; the point of sales systems; the technology and point of sale system; the roads; the trucks that delivered it; the energy that required the roads to be built and the trucks to be built; all of that does not happen by some collective hallucination.  It only happens and it only exists by the function of money. 

Each one of those inputs, as well as the goods on the shelves; the shelves themselves; the POS terminal; the roads; the trucks; the energy to build all those things; each one of those things required energy to be consumed.  There are energy inputs and there are energy outputs, and the first energy input is getting energy out of the ground.  In order to get energy out of the ground efficiently, it's a very complicated thing. 

It requires money to do, because it requires a lot of different skillsets.  If you start to think about wells and oil field services and you have upstream, midstream, downstream refinement, power production; those very first principal energy inputs, those themselves are highly complex systems and require a monetary good to coordinate.  So, if all these goods that we consume down the line, and thinking about the grocery store, they also only get there via the function of money. 

So, when you start to understand this problem, you start to realise that we will not get the goods at the grocery store, nor will we have power at our homes if we don't have a reliable form of money.  The way that I describe it in Bitcoin Does Not Waste Energy is that, because of that fact, money is the first order, and then the second order is getting energy out of the ground, and then the third, and higher-level orders and derivatives, are the actual end market goods. 

If all of those end market goods require energy inputs and that they're the energy outputs, the highest and best use of energy becomes securing the money and the monetary network, because we won't have the other things down the line if we don't have the money to get the energy resources out of the ground.  So, the example that I use to connect that for people is Venezuela.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Well, I can tell you my experience.  When I went out there, firstly, I went to Colombia and I went to the border at Cúcuta; and when you talk about a store being able to coordinate all the different people to ensure that store's full, that is broken down.  I was at the border of Cúcuta where, every day, tens of thousands of people cross the border to buy things now in Colombia because they cannot get them in Venezuela.

Parker Lewis: Yeah, and when you see those real-world examples, and you feel it, it becomes more tangible.  When you recognise that 85% of people in the world don't have a great coordination answer, and that Venezuela went from having one that generally worked to one that doesn't, and it becomes more tangible for those people in the process of it stopping to work, because they know what it's like for wealth to be destroyed.  And they start to understand and associate that problem, again, consciously or subconsciously, with the breakdown of the money. 

If I bring it back to the highest level of Venezuela, it is this recognition that Venezuela is one of the most oil-rich countries in the entire world; it's either Venezuela or Saudi Arabia.  There is this natural resource that really is the good that we need to unlock and will lift people out of poverty.  Again, we need to consume energy, we need energy inputs to create energy outputs to get clean water.  We need energy inputs and energy outputs to get healthcare, to get food at the grocery store so that people don't have to live in an impoverished world or be sick for 90% of their days because they are neither nourished or they don't have clean water.  Money is also the good that fulfils all that.

So, you take Venezuela, the most oil-rich country in the world, if not one, two, and it's underneath the ground.  If you look at oil production in Venezuela, it is rapidly falling off a cliff, and the reason why is because they don't have a form of money to coordinate the resources to get the resource under the ground, above ground and then refine it to turn it into the products that we need to consume in our daily worlds.

What that also means is that the country that has this beautiful resource underneath its soil can't, in a reliable way, deliver power, electricity, clean water, food, healthcare to its citizens; you take wealth, and that wealth gets destroyed, and people become impoverished.  It's all tied back to this money function breaking down. 

It's a perfect example of this energy component, because when I talk about how money is the first order and that the highest and best use of energy should be to protect a monetary network because every other energy input and output and coordination of resources is a derivative of that first order, it's not that Bitcoin is going to consume energy that's going to destroy the planet, it's actually going to ensure that the energy that we need to lift people out of poverty continues to be fulfilled.

If you don't have a water waste management system efficiently like some places like India, the environment is actually massively polluted.  Bitcoin fulfils a function that everyone needs and, when we think about it as utility, you could justify nothing of an energy input that you consume down the line if you can't justify the energy input that Bitcoin consumes.  So, while I do think that there are benefits to highlighting Bitcoin's going to actually improve energy grids, which it will; Bitcoin's going to incentivise development of renewable resources, it will; Bitcoin's going to capture wasted energy that wouldn't otherwise be consumed, it will; but that fundamentally misses the point. 

The best use of energy, because money is literally the most fundamental of economic goods that allows for civilisation to coordinate and to lift people out of poverty, that if you actually want people to be lifted out of poverty, then you should be promoting energy consumption in a Bitcoin world.  That actually pisses me off.  It is spoken from such a point of privilege, when people in the developed world are either billionaires or hedge fund investors or private equity investors, I find it unnerving.

I'm not a social justice worker.  I work on Bitcoin in many ways for selfless reasons, but it is unnerving when a bunch of virtue signallers have no appreciation, either for the complexity of energy production and consumption and the benefits which that provides them in their day-to-day lives, while also having no appreciation for the fact that 85% of the people in the world live in poverty and that they don't have access to a reliable form of money that could possibly pull them out of poverty; that they would start to criticise the solution to that problem without any understanding; that they would crow about it without actually getting to the first principles to actually provide any conscious thought to, "Well, why would this energy be consumed?" 

They just immediately look at the surface and say, "It is consumed and I have a very shallow and lazy way of thinking and, because I don't understand the utility of Bitcoin, therefore it must be a waste".  What a position of privilege to make that statement given the state of the world!

Peter McCormack: I don't often see you based, Parker!

Parker Lewis: Yeah.  It's not exactly a Jack Mallers, but this particular subject, it truly is unnerving, like the idea of ESG.  These people have no clue!  It is all about power, it's all about virtue signalling, and it is without any fundamental understanding of actually wanting to do any social good; no fundamental understanding and no desire to do social good.

Peter McCormack: Do you remember when we had that conversation about Venezuela in Texas?

Parker Lewis: Yeah.  We had it at Cooper's.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I'd released that episode where I was like, "Bitcoin won't fix Venezuela", and you came to me and you said, "I was really triggered by that, Pete".  At the time, I was like, "Well, it won't fix Venezuela because your fundamental problem is removing the government". 

I'm much closer to you now on this based purely on your explanation of coordination of the economy, in that you can you do this despite who's in government, by allowing people to have a form of money which allows them to coordinate.  So, I still think they need a better form of governance than Maduro, but I understand where you're coming from now. 

Parker Lewis: No, and I think I talked about it a bit when we had that conversation in Austin, but I also understand where you're coming from.  I think about it at the root level; if they don't have Bitcoin, they have no hope.  They don't have a tool to come back, cronyism, government manipulation and government coercion.  So, if you don't have that tool, you are at a loss. 

But I also am sympathetic for the idea that money is just a tool.  It is just a tool that is used by humans to coordinate all of their economic activity, and that is a really, really important tool, because it is what allows for the type of coordination that can lift people.  Without that, you do not lift hundreds of millions and billions of people out of poverty.  That is money and a coordination of money that allows that.

Bitcoin does not magically remove the kleptocrat from the kleptocracy, and that is ultimately something that people have to do.  By having a coordination tool, like Bitcoin, it gives them a fighting chance; it gives them a foundation off of which to stand.  But I'm also recognising of that idea that, ultimately, you have to want to be free, on a really fundamental level, to fight back in more ways than just having money.

The money actually provides you with a tool to be able to coordinate in a way that either routes around government as a method for self-preservation and survival, but that it also, because Bitcoin changes people, once they have access to that tool, they're actually more capable of cooperating and coordinating with others.  But, again, it doesn't eliminate a dictate, it doesn't eliminate a kleptocrat; human beings have to do that, and they have to have that will.  Bitcoin just provides them one peaceful tool to be more effective in that process.

Peter McCormack: Excellent.  You've given me a real -- that piece there, I'm going to be cutting out and I'm going to be creating a video.  I'm going to put it up on the Facebook, put that with some strong and important words, so thanks, Parker.

Okay, the next thing I want to touch on is regulation, and this, just purely on a selfish reason.  Somebody might be okay with volatility, they might understand the long-term investment thesis with Bitcoin and say, "I get this, I'm fine.  I'm going stack my sats"; they might be okay with the energy argument or not give a shit, just say, "I don't care.  I just care selfishly about my investment"; but the idea that the government might suddenly ban Bitcoin is something people will think about. 

It has just been banned again in China for the 85th time, it is banned in Bolivia, I think it's banned in Pakistan, so there is, on a selfish level, that fear, "What if the government does ban this; what does that mean for my investment?"  You say it can't be banned.

Parker Lewis: Yeah, and that may be a bit of a loaded term, but I'll help unpackage what I mean there.  Yeah, I think it's titled Bitcoin Cannot be Banned, and the way I start people, and I also start people with this for any and all questions that people have about Bitcoin, it goes back to that same first principle which is, all value in Bitcoin is derived from the fact that there will only ever be 21 million.  That fixed monetary system provides a utility for so many people that that is why people adopt it, that's why Bitcoin gives people value, it solves the problem of money for literally everybody in the world, or it has the potential to.  People have to start there on this question. 

If anybody ever says, "The government's going to ban Bitcoin"; anybody, whether they're new or someone that's midway on their path of Bitcoin, they should ask that critic, as with all of these questions, "But how does Bitcoin enforce a fixed supply of 21 million?" because I will promise you that the critic that says that the government will ban Bitcoin does not know.  They do not have an understanding of how that is possible, which is Bitcoin's true innovation.

When you start to understand that the critic has no close, then you start to put the messenger in a different light.  They may be somebody that you respected for some other reason in your life, but then, if you can understand that they are not an expert on Bitcoin and that they do not have a conception for how it happens, how Bitcoin enforces a fixed supply, they don't really have a foundation off of whether or not to posit whether Bitcoin can or cannot be banned.  They're perfectly ill-equipped to add commentary to it.  So, I think it's important to start with that baseline. 

Then the derivative becomes, okay, if we accept that Bitcoin either has value or does not have value, whether it can enforce a fixed supply or 21 million, that everything rides on that fact, I tell people to think about a decision tree.  If you believe that Bitcoin cannot fulfil or credibly enforce a fixed supply of 21 million, then the decision tree of, "Is Bitcoin functional as money?" if you say, "No, it can't credibly enforce a fixed supply of 21 million", then there's nothing for the government to ban, like "There's nothing to worry about over here, guys.  It doesn't work as money". 

But, if you come to the conclusion that Bitcoin can credibly enforce a fixed supply of 21 million, then Bitcoin is functional as money.  Again, there are some other things that you'll need to unpackage to get from digital scarcity to functional as money, but that's the path to get there.  Then, at that point in the decision tree, it's like, "Yes, there actually is something for government to ban, so now I need to evaluate this question".  But, if you haven't evaluated the higher level, you don't know whether or not you need to go further and you don't have a baseline to evaluate whether or not they could.

I simplify it for people by saying, "Ignore 21 million for a second, but what would be the scenario in which the government would want to ban Bitcoin?"  It would only be the scenario which Bitcoin is working as money.  If they wanted to ban Bitcoin, then it would be a very loud signal that, in their mind, Bitcoin is some threat to their monopoly status over money.  That, in itself, should be a very loud signal that Bitcoin is working to you, whether or not you understand how or why Bitcoin functionally enforces a 21 million fixed supply.

There's another economic reality that, when would the government do that?  Again, the government will only do that when it becomes apparent to them that Bitcoin is threatening their monopoly status, that Bitcoin is becoming so successful that's it's storing wealth so effectively for so many people that it's threatening monopoly status of the currencies that they use to control their people and power around the world, that only then do they step in to try to ban it.

So, you can either be the person that doesn't own Bitcoin and doesn't have their purchasing power increased to such an extent that the government would feel threatened by it and not have a decision point if the government came to you and said, "We're going to ban Bitcoin"; you could either be that person that doesn't have a decision to make, because they continue to hold the form of money that lost its value relative to Bitcoin.  

Or, you can could be the rational economic actor that decided to act out of survival and self-preservation, to hold a form of currency that does store value, that in fact increased in purchasing power so significantly because so many people adopted it that it's threatening the monopoly power of reserve currency. 

Any rational economic actor choses the latter.  They choose to have a decision point.  At that point in time, if the government comes and said, "This is now banned", then you want the decision as to what you do; you want to be in control; you want to hold and own that asset for that period of time, because you're a survivalist, because it is Darwinian. 

Then, the next thing comes, which is, if you've done the work to understand how Bitcoin enforces a fixed supply of 21 million, you'll start to gain an appreciation for -- and it's only able to do so because it's decentralised and that there is a very natural order that, as more people adopt Bitcoin, and as the network gets larger and potentially larger to the point where the government then realises that there's a problem, then and only then, the government realises it, but also the Bitcoin Network is also so much further decentralised at that point in time because it's grown.  Growth dictates that it's decentralised.

So, Bitcoin's immune system and its security system exists on a decentralised basis and it becomes more and more secure.  Basically, the game of Whack-a-Mole becomes larger and larger as more people adopt it, and if the government comes out and says, "We're going to ban Bitcoin", it's only because it's working.  They also send a loud signal to billions to people that it's working and that they should be paying attention.

When people start to understand those dynamics, they understand that there's only one right answer.  It's that, if they've developed an understanding of the 21 million, they will also have developed an understanding in why the government can't stamp it out.  They may make it difficult to own in certain jurisdictions, but Bitcoin will flow to the places where it's openly accepted, and that's where societies will flourish.  The societies that have good forms of money and that accept and embrace good forms of money, they will move there. 

But, even if one regulatory regime tries to stamp it out, not only will they be able to, but there exists a reality that the government has tried to ban things in the past; they tried to ban private ownership of gold.  When they did that in the United States in 1933, gold did not cease to exist as a phenomenon.  It did not lose value.  The dollars that people were forced to trade for lost value.  When the government tried to ban booze, booze wasn't banned, Prohibition. 

There is this fundamental reality that when an economic good, when an innovation is so valuable and delivers value to so many people, that human beings will find a way to use that utility.  As you understand the construction of Bitcoin, you also understand that, if any government attempts to ban it, it will fuel the wildfire.  It will be like a 60-mile-an-hour wind on a forest that has a raging fire.  In my view, if a developed country that's not a communist country ever tries to ban Bitcoin, it will be the fait accompli of all fiat currencies.  Most people that are in the position, when they play the 4D chess in their minds, will also understand that; that it will be the demonstration that they have and they'll close. 

The thing that they were telling their citizenry that this thing was a shiny object and that it wasn't money and it was too volatile to be a currency, all of a sudden, they send the loudest signal that you should probably have that.  That's a comment that Saife makes, so I won't use it as my own original thought, but he says if your government wants to ban something, you should probably want to own that thing, because there's a reason.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Well, every time I speak you always say to me, "When you are moving to Texas?"  We had a conversation before this.  I also think there is, not just the banning the Bitcoin, but those states and nations that are hostile to Bitcoin seem to be hostile across the board, seem to have quite draconian, oppressive laws. 

The UK itself is becoming an absolute shitshow.  Look, I'm a proud Brit, and I'm proud of my town and I love British people, but I am quite significantly considering where I want to live because of the difficulties that my government puts in place for me to be an everyday ordinary citizen, not just with Bitcoin, not just with the banking system, but everything else.  That does create that regulatory arbitrage; we are seeing it. 

Estonia and Malta have done very well in Europe in attracting Bitcoin people due to the friendly regulatory environment they've created.  So, that is a reality; the regulatory arbitrage is existing.  You're seeing it yourself in the US, people are moving now.  COVID has lit the fuse to make people realise they don't have to live in San Francisco, they can live in Wyoming, Florida, Texas.  It's happening.

Parker Lewis: Yeah, and the reality is people respond to incentives and, if people look around the world and say, "Well, if the government bans it", you're not just going to get up and leave Austin, Texas and move somewhere else.  But that regulatory arbitrage is a thing and there's this very fundamental -- it has nothing to do with money, it has everything to do with freedom, that human beings or the majority of them are predisposed to want to be free.  They're going to seek that out and they're going to enforce that they have it one way or the other.

We talked, whether it was in April, I think we were trying to get you to come to our Austin Bitdevs, you couldn't leave, and it wasn't just because of the UK but it was because of the relationship between the UK and the United States, but I was joking with you then, I was like, "You need to get on a private plane and get to Texas.  Get your kids, get your house in order", and it's the FUDs telling the same thing where --

Peter McCormack: Yeah, they can't leave.

Parker Lewis: -- "You can't come to Bitcoin 2021", and those are restricting of freedoms.  One of the beautiful things about Bitcoin that's never existed in this way, it's if money is the storeholder of wealth and that it's intermediating a series of transactions, I trade one day and it's going to be some time in the future until I convert that back into real world value, I'm storing wealth; and what Bitcoin lets you do is, in a way that has never existed, it allows you to create real-world value in one place in the world and literally put that in your pocket and fly across the world and transplant that value to then be able to exchange on the other side. 

The tangible example that I would use is imagine that gold was the monetary good; most people don't, I appreciate, don't understand why gold was money but there's a reason by they called it the gold standard.  The world previously converged on one standard of value and there's a fundamental reason why, and there's a fundamental reason why Bitcoin is not replacing that, but just use gold as an example.

If you had worked for 20 years in India and you had traded and you were storing wealth in gold, you cannot just pick up all that gold.  It's relatively easier than to move something other that is physical, but you can't just put 100 pounds of gold in a bag and get on an aeroplane.  Bitcoin represents the greatest mobility of physical capital that has ever existed.  Bitcoin is digital, but the value you create in the real world is physical and you're storing it in a digital medium and this idea of governments banning Bitcoin is inherently tied to this idea.

It's not just that regulatory arbitrage existed, it's that you can put in your pocket the value that you've created in Britain and bring it to Texas and help coordinate economic activity here, if you want to, in a way that you otherwise couldn't have done before Bitcoin.  That incentive, I also think about it like because that is a deterrence, that it will induce good behaviour on behalf of governments.

In the United States, in certain ways, it's being threatened, but there are a lot of people in America who really value the Second Amendment and that right to bear arms.  It's not because they want to go out and war with each other, it's actually because, when there are 600 million guns in America, those 600 million guns that are held by the citizenry are a deterrence to a tyrannical government, either a tyrannical government or some other government coming and trying to war with the United States. 

When the people themselves are armed, that deterrence provides a protection; I think about Bitcoin the same way.  If you have a Bitcoin key, and let's imagine just the United States, the same exact circumstance where there's 600 million guns, imagine there are 300 million people in the United States, or 325 million, imagine there are 600 million private keys.  

If they're all distributed physically throughout the United States, if the government wanted to try to impede that, the aggregate nature of those keys is a deterrence and that the keys themselves provide security.  Actually, it's not so much that we're going to have, or we will use them, but that it will be peaceful and that the government won't come out and ban it; because if they did, we could literally take those keys and go to another geography in a way and take our value in a way like we never had before, and their existence is what will actually prevent it. 

The incentive structure is what will act, or cause people to act in a way that is consistent with their own interests.  There will be exceptions.  There will be the Chinese, and there will be the Indian governments and the wealth will be expropriated from those nations as a result, but the people that make the good decisions will flourish, and prosperity will go to the places that have the most Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Which may be Texas!         

Parker Lewis: Which I believe will be Texas, for the record!  I think it's science actually!

Peter McCormack: Well, I'm coming to spend a month with you soon so we'll see how that works out as a test.  Okay, this one's my favourite one.  The reason this is one of my favourites is because, once I understood this, it gave me the foundation to understand a lot more about Bitcoin and why I reject all shitcoins. 

I don't care if people trade shitcoins, go ahead.  I do think shitcoins provide some value in teaching people about Bitcoin, so I'm not a complete anti-shitcoiner, but at the same time, understanding that Bitcoin is not too slow; understanding how the foundational layer of Bitcoin works; how it provides security; how it provides decentralization; this, to me, was the most important lesson.  

So, Bitcoin is not too slow, something which Nano people, XRP people, BSV people, Bcash people, they always claim it's slow, it's outdated technology, it's a boomer coin.  I actually think this the most foundational thing you need to understand about Bitcoin, that it's not too slow.

Parker Lewis: I do think that this is one of the most foundational questions that people struggle with, again because when they look at money and they recognise that the money that they use day to day is not volatile, that they have the same problem with Bitcoin's volatility, that is doesn't map well.  The same thing exists on this idea that Bitcoin's too slow. 

Oftentimes, they just have two ideas when they talk about too slow, that it's that Bitcoin transactions only get cleared or settled every ten minutes and, realistically, it's not just every ten minutes, in on average every ten minutes.  So, there might be 20 minutes before the next Bitcoin transactions are settled, and then it might be three minutes after that, but on average, it's ten minutes or so. 

So, it's both long periods of time on a relative basis as well as unpredictable, and that doesn't map well to how people think about how their money operates today.  They think about it as, when they swipe their credit card at the grocery store, that money was paid and, if that can't happen at that point in sale, then they can't be functional as money.

The other thing is that there's the slow nature of it, but then there's also the transaction capacity.  There's a reality that there's a limited amount of transaction capacity on the Bitcoin base layer.  People will be look at that and they will say, "Bitcoin cannot fulfil the number of transactions that exist in the world today so, therefore, it can't be the solution".

So, it's important, I think, for people to have that context of what we mean when people say it's slow and it's because of block intervals and really the way to think about that is just transaction settlement, that the transactions don't get cleared, but on average, ten minutes; and that there are a limited number of transactions that can happen on average every ten minutes and that, ultimately…

I reinforce for people before I provide the explanations that I have on this piece; it's again, always start from the perspective that people like myself and people like you, Pete, we've struggled with these same things.  We had these same questions because they are logical questions to ask and that there are resources, and that everyone that's come before you has had to get beyond this, has had to emerge on the other side and say, "No, it's not too slow and, no, there are ways to satisfy all the transactions", and it's important to know that.  So, I start there with the baseline.

Then I let people know again, everything comes back to this idea of 21 million Bitcoin, that Bitcoin's innovation is -- and it's this idea, or the way I describe it in the piece, Bitcoin is Not Too Slow, is keying in on this idea that Peter Thiel talks about in his book, Zero to One, that Bitcoin's true innovation, the reason why it's provided a step function change and improvement in money, is that it created, or however you want to think it, created, invented, we discovered finite scarcity; that finite scarcity exists in digital form.  That's zero to one, that fact that there will be only ever be 21 million Bitcoin. 

As he describes in the book, the scaling of a new technology is oftentimes one to N.  So, zero to one is finite scarcity in digital form, and that is 21 million Bitcoin; one to N, which is a scaling problem, is far more pedestrian of a problem to solve than having solved the problem of digital scarcity and finance scarcity, because that finance scarcity provides the foundation for a global monetary system.

So, when people start to appreciate that, it's like, "Wait, think about the weight of the problem.  Is Bitcoin finitely scarce; is it possible for something to be finitely scarce in the world?"  The analogy that I use for people is, when I send email to you, I have a copy of the email and you have a copy of the email; when I send a document, I retain a copy of the document on my server, now you have a copy of the document on your server.  If Netflix is streaming data to me, Netflix has that data on their servers and it's being shared; there's a permission for a period of time that I give access to it. 

But before Bitcoin, everything in the digital world was, practically speaking, infinite.  The innovation that Bitcoin has provided is to go from that infinite world to a finite world where, if I send you a Bitcoin, I no longer have it and you have it or, if I send you a fraction of a Bitcoin, I no longer have it and you have it.  It's possible, on a decentralised basis, for people all over the world to be sending transactions to their counterparties in their local economies in a way that we can all rely upon, that the settlement of it happens and all the Bitcoin and all the money gets to the places that's supposed to be and that it can't be spent by others; that's zero to one.

How we scale that apparatus is, again, it will be a challenge, but it's also pedestrian relative to the problem that's already been solved; it's that we generally have to have some humility that, if this first innovation is the one that really went from zero to one, we don't necessarily have to know how the smaller problems that are more martial will be solved, even if they're still challenging, but, almost by definition that the 10X problem was solved, that the 10% problems will be; there is this reality that we're working on them every day.

Peter McCormack: Let's put some context, let's just give some idea about how long it took to solve that zero to one problem; it was multiple technologies and multiple innovations that were finely put together by Satoshi that did this, but this is a problem that people were working on for at least, what, two decades?

Parker Lewis: Yeah.  I think it is, just as a marker, it's good for people to appreciate that because there is this idea, and it speaks to another one of the pieces, another one of the things that people struggle with, but oftentimes look at Bitcoin and they say, "How could the first one be the one?"

Part of that is a default because they are comparing an economic good, that is money, to competition that they know between companies; it's that competition, and there is something that is fundamental about money that dictates that there only be one, that the natural order of money monopolises.  But even if I set that aside, they saw Myspace and then Facebook come along.  They look at Bitcoin as a --

Peter McCormack: AltaVista.

Parker Lewis: Right, AltaVista, that's a good one.  Ask Jeeves.  But they see Bitcoin as a technology and that it's a technological revolution, and they miss that it's a monetary revolution, and they're thinking about it on technology perceptive rather than a monetary one.  In that world, if you're thinking about Bitcoin as a technology rather than a money, you will miss the fact that it solved a fundamental problem that you never considered before and that, when we think about the derivative problems that Bitcoin will solve from there and how it will do that, there's just a very fundamental perspective on Bitcoin that…

When we think about the things that are actively being developed, whether it's Lightning Network or sidechains; all of those pieces of the puzzle exist at a higher order than finance scarcity.  Those problems, while they're being actively worked on, can't be worked or are of no value if the baseline itself doesn't have a fixed supply or a finite supply, because all value is derived from that.

So, it's just you have to think about it and understand Bitcoin in multiple levels, then to get to this point further out that Bitcoin is not Myspace, it can't be replaced.  To your point, which is the right one, Bitcoin wasn't the first one, Bitcoin was not the first digital currency that was conceived, and that's something that most people, just as a fact, do not know.

This was problem that cryptographers were working on for 20 to 30 years.  Bitcoin wasn't the first digital currency; it was the first digital currency to work.  But then you have to pair that with do not think about Bitcoin about a technology, think about it as a monetary network.  If it was the first one to work, then it would also be the last one to work.  It has nothing to do with Bitcoin and everything to do with money.

Peter McCormack: Love it.  That kind of answers one of the other problems that we've listed down where this is the typical thing that someone like Peter Schiff will roll out and has said,"It has no value because it can be copied" but this is exactly the same; it can't be copied because they're thinking about it in terms of technology rather than a monetary revolution.

Parker Lewis: Right, and that really keys in on the same idea or at least that thought process, which is think about Bitcoin as open-source code, okay.  I tell people, "Bitcoin does not have a fixed supply of 21 million just because software code magically says so".  The way I articulate that to people is, if you copy Bitcoin's codebase, you can do it, it's open source.  People have done it; you could do it tomorrow.  Go to the first principle, go copy Bitcoin's codebase and say that there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin.  Two problems exist.

You can copy the codebase; you can't copy the monetary network.  You can't copy the people that have adopted this other system as money and that have understood a framework as to how, in this system, the 21 million will be credibly enforced, and you've just introduced something that has no credibility.  But it comes back to this idea of the reason why Bitcoin was the first digital currency to work, wasn't the first one attempted. 

But then, because it was the first one to work, it would merit that it would be the last.  Because Bitcoin is already functional and because it was the first to work, because it was the first one to figure out how to deliver a credible, which is an important term; so just that we say there be will 21 million that is credibly enforced and that none of us to have trust as to how that happens and that it's not possible to deviate from it, then that existence of a finite supply monetary system obsoletes the necessity for any future to come. 

Because it's obsoletes it, because we only need one currency, people will struggle in this world where there are multiple currencies that exist; there's the dollar, there's the euro, there's the yen.  But if they go and pull 99.9% of the economic value that is transacted by people by in the world, 99.9% of those people only interact with one currency on a day-to-day basis.

Again, go back to the example of the grocery store.  It's not by some coincidence, it's not by some collective hallucination that we all arrive at that end point.  It happens for very fundamental reasons; it happens for reasons that I've worked through in my pieces that are more on first principles rather than on the FUD.  But you come back to this idea; Bitcoin exists, accept that it does exist, accept that it's a monetary network that has, I don't know whether it is today or not about $800 billion, was $1 trillion, will be many trillions to come in the future.  That exists in the world.

People have been trying to copy it for many, many years.  Have the humility to understand nobody has been able to replicate it in 12 years.  Ask the questions as to why, and there are answers.  Just start with that understanding.  Don't trust, but start from that understanding and try to figure out why, because that also then comes back into this idea of Bitcoin's not too slow. 

If the true innovation is zero to one, 21 million fixed supply, all value derives from that fact.  If money monopolises based on its very core function, we don't have the need for other cryptocurrencies or other digital currencies, or other currencies period, dollar, euros, yen, that's really what Bitcoin's not; bitcoiners now don't even really think about it as competing with Ethereum.  I mean, Ethereum's trying to compete with Bitcoin, but really Bitcoin's competing with day-to-day currencies, the dollar, the euro, the yen to a lesser extent, or more through an intermediary goal.

If Bitcoin solves that zero to one problem, the only way to scale Bitcoin is to build on top of it, it's not to build on the side of it, and that's actively what will happen.  I do like to go into a granular basis to give people an understanding, when you swipe your credit card at Starbucks or at the grocery store, your money's not going to Starbucks or the grocery store.  They're checking your account to see if you have enough money and the money transfers at some later point in time in large settlement transactions that actually happen much slower than Bitcoin.

So, there is a reality, and this is not how I expect Bitcoin to scale, that if we put the exact same banking system on top of Bitcoin, it would work from a customer experience perspective or from a user experience perspective the exact same way.  There'd be settlement transactions in the background, you'd swipe a credit card; Bitcoin could work in that way.  Again, I think there will be a lot more disintermediation of the financial flows, but I think it's important for people to key in on that. 

Think about Bitcoin and that ten-minute interval, that is like the New York Fed settling large transactions; and high-value transactions will exist on the Bitcoin mainchain where you need large settlement transactions, or clearing transactions, and that smaller transactions day to day, whether they be credit or actual settlement, the smaller transactions will happen at higher levels of Bitcoin, like the Lightning Network or on sidechains.

Then this other idea of a limited transaction capacity, the Bitcoin blockchain as it's commonly referred to.  One of the things that people miss about Bitcoin, I'd say, is the idea that there is -- one thing to note for people: just think about Bitcoin as being able to process about 3,000 or so transactions every ten minutes.  Obviously, there are billions of people in the world, all the people that are starting to store wealth in Bitcoin have not just suddenly been like, "Oh, you know what, we're not going to be able to satisfy transactions for a billion people.  People are just going to have to deal with it".

We do have payment channels being worked on in Bitcoin that exist at a higher level where you or I could have millions of transactions back and forth between each other, and then we just settle the net on the mainchain in one transaction; that's technologically how I think most people, whether it's the Lightning Network or some other federation that's similar to the Lightning Network, how Bitcoin will scale volumes.  But, at a more fundamental level, that limited capacity on the Bitcoin mainchain of 3,000 transactions every 10 minutes, that limited throughput, and the scarcity of that throughput, is inherently tied to how Bitcoin was able to have a zero to one innovation of finance scarcity.

So, you have to understand, or at least the way that I understand it and I think that this, it helps other people understand it, that there is no fixed supply of the currency without a fixed supply and fixed throughput of transactions.  The reason being is that, every time a Bitcoin transaction is settled, to give people context, there are people on the Bitcoin Network that run energy, as we previously discussed, to provide security for the network.  That security for the network is basically validating transactions.  "Is the Bitcoin being spent, is that a valid Bitcoin transaction or not?"

The two most important rules in the Bitcoin space, not Bitcoin space, there are a number of consensus rules, but the really foundational one of how to conceptualise this fixed supply of 21 million is, this Bitcoin that's being spent: was it issued in a way that consistent with the 21 million supply cap; and has it previously been spent?  Those are the two most fundamental validation rules.  There are others that are puzzle pieces that are also important.  They're all important, but those are just conceptualising at a high level, two of the most important rules.  Was it issued consistent with the 21 million supply cap; and has it previously been spent? 

In return for providing that security function, those people that are consuming energy to secure the network to validate transactions are getting paid singularly in Bitcoin, Bitcoin denominated.   So, they're consuming real world resources to perform a security function and they're being paid just in Bitcoin.  They wouldn't do that if they did not have some expectation that that value would hold into the future. 

Today, every 10 minutes, or on average every 10 minutes, 6.25 Bitcoin are issued; that amounts to about 900 per day or about 325,000 per year, which represents about 1.6% inflation, or 1.6% of the network that's having to be devoted to subsidise security today.  But, if it's 6.25 today, about a year ago, it was 12.5, and every 4 years it cuts in half, so in about 3 years the 6.25 will cut in half again to 3.125, that process of cutting in half is how we get this to point of having an asymptotic fixed supply of 21 million.

If you continue to go out every four years and divide in half, eventually you get to the smallest unit of Bitcoin, and the amount of new Bitcoin that is issued is zero.  But, if we come back to today, every 10 minutes, in return for security and return for enforcing this fixed supply of 21 million, 6.25 Bitcoin are issued.  But, in addition to that, a certain small amount of Bitcoin is attached to every transaction to compensate those providing security for the network to validate individual transactions.

At a future point in time, 6.25 will be zero, and it will only be the transaction fee component.  The way that we ensure that there will be a transaction fee market to pay for security is by having a fixed throughput, that you have to create competition for that fixed throughput to prioritise high-value transactions and to create the fees that are necessary to ensure that security will beyond the last Bitcoin being issued. 

When you also start to think about it from that perspective, it is how Bitcoin solves the tragedy of the comments problem.  We have this fixed throughput that everyone constantly has to be figure out how to use most efficiently and to figure out how to use most economically and profitability.  Those that are able to do it most profitably are going to deliver the most value to other people, but it is this inextricably linked fixed supply that's tied to fixed throughput; the scarcity of these two things provides the foundation of a monetary system that billions of people will be able to use and humans are going to have adapt to how they use that scarcity most efficiently and most effectively. 

That is why we have to scale Bitcoin at higher levels rather than at the Bitcoin mainchain because, if it was at the mainchain level, or at the base layer level, then we would have a tragedy in the comments problem; we would have people spamming the network and all incentives become aligned by having a fixed throughput and that that security function of 10-minute block intervals helps, basically, create the flywheel that ensures that we'll have these higher-level orders.  But there would be no higher-level payment orders that can scale payments, the one to N problem, if we didn't have the zero to one. 

That zero to one digital scarcity problem, equation, merits that block intervals be 10 minutes.  That provides a security function to the network, and then the limited throughput also provides security on to the network because it ensures a vibrant fee market and competition.

Peter McCormack: You're crushing it today, Parker.  I don't think there are very many people who speak so well about Bitcoin.  I'm only going to take up a little bit more of your time.  There's one last thing I want you to cover because it's the last regular FUD thing.  It came out yesterday I think; was it the Wall Street Journal?  A guy wrote that we should ban Bitcoin because of the ransomware.  He was rightly criticised for that ridiculous take.  You say Bitcoin is not for criminals.  Bitcoin is for everyone, and we have to accept that it will, and does, have a certain amount of criminal usage, as does all money, but I'll let you take it.

Parker Lewis: Yeah, the Bitcoin cannot be banned, or the idea that Bitcoin can be banned and Bitcoin for criminals, I don't know if it's the stage of grief, like one of the last stages of grief is denial, the idea that Bitcoin can be banned, it's an admission that Bitcoin works.  Similarly, if people say that Bitcoin's for criminals, they're in the same statement admitting that Bitcoin's functional as money.

So, again, the decision tree always comes back to will there only ever be 21 million because it's, is Bitcoin functional as money?  If it credibly enforces a fixed supply of 21 million, it is.  If not, it's not.  The point that you bring up is the right one.  When you start to understand the history of Bitcoin, people oftentimes learn that Bitcoin, one of the first early commercial uses of it, was on the Silk Road, and thank God for Russ Ulbricht, and that he did that and then hopefully we'll have someone sane in the White House to be able to get him out.

I also reinforce for people that criminals are not in the money losing business.  Drug dealers are not in the money losing business.  In fact, the US dollar is the preferred currency of cartels everywhere, so let's just start with that reality, or those two realties; dollars are the preferred funding currency of criminals everywhere and criminals do not like to like to lose money, they're in the profiteering business.

So, when people have this basis that the Silk Road was one of the first early uses of Bitcoin, they very logically say, "Why would someone use it?"  Again, it comes back to, if you don't understand the first principle about money, of why Bitcoin is fundamentally of value and you saw it fluctuating on the screen and you think that your dollars work fine, or your euros, of course you're predisposed to think that only somebody that is of some illegitimate or illicit purpose, that would be a utility to be outside the system.   But, again, you're not coming at from a perspective of understanding what money is, what makes a good form of money or not.  Because you haven't asked those fundamental questions, you're entirely ill-equipped to have any opinion about whether or not Bitcoin is for criminals. 

There is a reality that, because criminals are not in the interest of losing money, that all examples like the Silk Road made apparent was that Bitcoin worked, that someone was able to effect a transaction and it was reasonably going to store its value for a period of time, that that money provided a utility.  If it didn't, it wouldn't have.  But then, if it did, there is no logical conclusion that it would only provide value to criminals or that it ever did, and that if Bitcoin was functional as money, if it credibly enforced a fixed supply of 21 million, then that would be a utility for everybody.

When we think about this context, it is, if Bitcoin credibly enforces a fixed supply of 21 million, of course criminals are going use it, of course, but Apple Computer can also use it, Dell can use it, GE can use it, GM can use it.  There is also no logical leap, that if there's a currency system that works for human beings, that when you have a better form of money, a greater proportion of that monetary system will be controlled by people that offer things like drugs or that are criminals and not the Apple Computers of the world that will similarly get a utility out of it.

When people start to appreciate, and I think it truly is one of the worst developments in probably the last 30, 40 years is the weaponisation of the financial system and the degradation of financial privacy, that if you think about any innovation, criminals are criminals, period.  There's a rule of law, and criminals will break those rules of law.

Think about guns; law-abiding citizens will use guns to defend themselves every day.  It's not about going and hunting, I love hunting and all, but guns are a function of self-defence.  That is what the Second Amendment is about.  Whether or not guns are legal or not, criminals are going to find the tools and commit crimes with them.  But it's not just guns, it's the internet.

We developed the internet, not we, but some smart people in the 1970s, and then it was commercialised over time.  Of course, criminals use the internet every day.  It's actually the internet that enables ransomware.  So, it's like, "Why don't you criminalise internet use?"  The tool is the tool; the act of a crime is how the tool is used to affect some crime. 

So, criminals use roads every day, criminals use the internet every day, and every innovation, if it is innovative, it, by definition, will provide value to so many people that it will become a common tool that is used by everyone, including criminals.  But, the tool itself is not criminal, we just have weaponised money and the financial rails as a way, a foolish way, to try to stamp out the criminals.  But as we find with every tool, whether it's the internet or roads or guns, the criminals, by definition, are committing crimes; they're going outside of the rule of law and they're using all the tools that are available to their resources to do so.  It's not something unique about money.  I think that those are really two foundational points. 

There is also the reality, and then if I get to the fundamental of all about Bitcoin.  Bitcoin only is functional, and again this ties back to 21 million Bitcoin, there are a certain set of consensus rules; the two ones to articulate relates to 21 million, even though all of them are important in enforcing the 21 million. 

Think about it as all those 15 rules, I don't know if it's technically 15 but it's approximately in and around there, there are a certain number of consensus rules and two of the critical ones are, is any Bitcoin that's being transacted today, was it issued originally consistent with the fixed supply of 21 million; and has it previously been spent?  Part and parcel to how Bitcoin enforces those 21 million rules, or there's a 21 million fixed supply or those consensus rules, and that that happened on a decentralised basis. 

That is only possible if Bitcoin operates permissionlessly and if is resistant to censorship.  What I mean by resistant to censorship, or what's commonly referred to as censorship resistance, it doesn't mean if PayPal wants to de-platform you; that's not censorship at the Bitcoin Network level.  If my company, because I'm a regulator in a financial institution in the United States, whether I think the law reasonable or not, if I decide not to work with someone, that's not censorship at the Bitcoin Network level.

Censorship at the Bitcoin Network level is that there are a certain set of consensus rules that validate whether or not a Bitcoin is a Bitcoin, and those rules are, in fact, native to the network.  Bitcoin is a closed loop system.  It's important to appreciate that Bitcoin knows nothing about the outside world; all it knows is how to issue currency and whether a Bitcoin is a Bitcoin.  Those are the only two things that we need it to do.  But, in order for it to do it, the only rules that must apply are the rules that are native to the protocol and those set of consensus rules.  That is how Bitcoin enforces a fixed supply of 21 million.

If it were possible for an outside force to censor the Bitcoin Network, and basically to apply a rule that is exogenous to Bitcoin, to alter them, whether it alters them actually in the codebase or to prevent otherwise valid transaction from being processed, then that process potentially, of censoring a single transaction, calls into question the entire value chain.

If you can censor a single Bitcoin transaction at the network level, prevent a single transaction from being mined and cleared, that if it says, "Yes, this Bitcoin was issued consistent with the 21 million supply", and, "Yes, it hasn't previously been spent", and yes to a number of other boxes that have been checked; if that transaction doesn't get validated because some exogenous force said so, then what you have just demonstrated is that Bitcoin is censored and that the rules of the network are not the only rules that are governing what is and what isn't currency in this system. 

If you can alter or influence one rule, and if you demonstrate that Bitcoin is censorable, then everything is at risk; that you could potentially alter the fixed supply of 21 million and that it's not just a very slippery slope, that is it actually the censorship resistance that enforces 21 million and, if it becomes censorable, then that would be at risk.

When you think about that, who are the logical people that we would think to censor?  Criminals, right.  Whether it's you think that the people of Iran, if you thought that they were criminals, like we should want all 85 million people in Iran to able to have access to a reliable form of money, or someone might look at it and say, "Oh, that person's a drug cartel; we shouldn't give them access to it".  We're not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

It's this idea of, if we have an innovation, it's going to be used by everybody.  We expect that some people are going to use it for illicit reasons, but we're not willing to -- and I say "we", it's anybody that thinks about Bitcoin as a value or a utility, that there's a utility to having a currency that's something that's outside of the government that has a fixed supply of 21 million.  It would not be rational to say, "Oh, I think it's good idea to not censor a single transaction", even if you think that the person's of ill regard, that you wouldn't sacrifice the entire network and the entire utility because of that. 

You would accept that it is possible, and it will be inevitable; just like criminals use the internet, they're going to use Bitcoin.  But we're going to get so much from a utility and that, by the fact of if we were say, "Oh, that criminal can't use Bitcoin", and we enforce an exogenous rule, all of what we've done is undermine our entire currency system, which is a utility.

Now, there's a reality too that, based on the construction, because it is so decentralised and because Bitcoin is in every jurisdiction, that even if a company, like a virtue signalling company like Marathon Oil, wants to have like an ESG-compliant --

Peter McCormack: Fuck you, Marathon!

Parker Lewis: Yeah.  Even like an OFAC-compliant mine, mining is not money transmission.  As a miner, you're not a financial institution, you're not subject to PSA and AML.  All you're doing is virtue signalling and you're trying to create attack vector for Bitcoin unknowingly, maybe.  But, all the while, even if you do that, there are enough Bitcoin miners and people that are mining all over the world to ensure that the single transactions, at a protocol level, cannot be manipulated and it can't be censored.  That very fact ties into the fixed supply of 21 million.  So, yeah, fuck Marathon!

Peter McCormack: Fuck Marathon!  Did you see what happened with them when they mined their OFAC-compliant block?  People were sending tainted coins to them for that block.  Brilliant!

Parker Lewis: Yeah, and then, with the next mine, miner mines a block, they will ultimately mine on top of it.  So, it's all virtue signalling.  It's beyond virtue signalling, it's communicating a lack of understanding of a network and a lack of understanding of Bitcoin.  All of those people just naturally get dealt with; the network's in control there.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Fuck off, Marathon!  Wankers!  Parker, man, you've nailed it, two hours.  Let's let people know that it's the second time we've done this now.  Parker and I have recorded this about, what was it about, about a month ago, six weeks ago, and the sound screwed.

Parker Lewis: Yeah, I think so. 

Peter McCormack: The sound screwed up, so we left it for a few weeks to do it again.  I think this one's come out better.  I think your tools are even sharper than last time.  This is a great show to send round to my friends, it's a great show for new people to Bitcoin, and it's a great show for someone, even like myself, four years in, who wants to refine some of his thinking.  I will definitely be stealing some of the lines you've put out on this show. 

I really appreciate you, man, and I think you are one of the most valuable assets to Bitcoin with your writing, the time you give people, like myself, to do podcasts when you've got a business to run, and I am looking forward to catching up with you next week, mate.  It's been a long time.  We can share a whiskey or a beer and, finally, hang out.

Parker Lewis: Yeah.  I'm looking forward to that.  I appreciate not only what you do but also spotlighting the series.  I do think about it as part of my writing -- I originally set out to help leverage my own time because I saw the benefit of leveraging my time via Saifedean's book, The Bitcoin Standard, but that, through that process, it actually caused me to distil my own thoughts. 

By distilling those thoughts, it put me in a better position to be able to communicate ideas that work in my head, to get them logically down on paper and then I could speak about them more effectively.  But, through that process, it also helped me focus my understanding of Bitcoin, and my understanding of Bitcoin and understanding of how it credibly enforces a fixed supply, hardened as part of that process.

Also, as I come on these podcasts and talk about different ideas and get asked different questions, I'm constantly learning.  I think everyone's constantly learning because Bitcoin's constantly evolving.  So, it doesn't matter if somebody's brand new to Bitcoin or someone's early in their journey or wherever they are that their point, that all of these resources, and even like articulating ideas here, I'm thinking about new ways to say something based on different questions that I get asked.

So, it's actually helpful to my process and helping me be better, and I hope that the people who listen get some benefit.  I know that certain people won't, but then certain ideas connect with different people, and that's why more people are getting out more content and more educational resources as more ideas, it's going to connect with different people or different reasons, so I really do appreciate coming back on.  The second try at it, it feels just as good and I look forward to digging in to more of the series and seeing you in about a week.

Peter McCormack: When's the book coming because you definitely have a book; you have enough material for a book?

Parker Lewis: Yeah, I'm working on it.  Truthfully, the Bitcoin adoption over the last four months has been so great, and I am helping to run this business here at Unchained Capital day to day, helping people cast through their Bitcoin better.  Certainly, I was hoping, when I began the year, I was hoping to have it by Bitcoin 2021, and it's just going to be a collection of the essays reproduced, repackaged.  So, I'm not going to try to rewrite things.  I want those things to be artefacts that, "I said this at this point in time", but I do want it packaged as a book so that people can read it and have a physical version.  Now my goal is BitBlockBloom!

Peter McCormack: It's August.

Parker Lewis: That's end of August in Texas.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.  Awesome.

Parker Lewis: So, I'm going to commit the summer of Bitcoin to getting that book done so we can get the resources to even more people.

Peter McCormack: We will see.  We might be calling up for another leg up, so you might be rammed and busy, but I'm going to hold you to it.

Parker Lewis: What we might need to do is go down to El Salvador, go to the beach, be able to get me in an environment where I can actually focus on some things I need to do on the writing side and knock it out there.

Peter McCormack: I would love to get you down there.  I've been toying with the idea, and I mentioned to Michael Peterson, I think we should have a conference down there.  I think a lot of bitcoiners need to make that pilgrimage and see the place because it is incredible. 

Listen, this is awesome.  What you've done is you've highlighted how beautifully simple Bitcoin is and incredibly complex at the same time, but it is a beautiful system and your work is invaluable, so thank you, man.  Beers next week, whiskeys next week in Miami and we'll see you, dude.

Parker Lewis: Look forward to seeing you soon.