WBD430 Audio Transcription

The Bitcoin Brain with Tomer Strolight

Interview date: Tuesday 30th November

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Tomer Strolight. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, I talk to Bitcoin writer Tomer Strolight. We discuss how Bitcoin is analogous to the human brain, the organisation of decentralised systems, and the emergent nature of consciousness.

“Everything in the system is self-regulating and self-adjusting, and it’s decentralised and autonomous, and we can see these phenomena much better in nature than we can in human-made entities; Bitcoin is a lot more like an organism than it is like a company or like a government.”

— Tomer Strolight

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Tomer, how are you?  Good to see you, man.

Tomer Strolight: You too, man.  Long time, no see.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, are you keeping well?

Tomer Strolight: Yeah, absolutely.  I've been so busy writing and creating content and meditating on Bitcoin that I may have lost my mind, or been enlightened, or one of the other things, but something's going on.

Peter McCormack: What, actual Bitcoin meditating?

Tomer Strolight: It's hard to think about anything else, so when I'm meditating, usually some integrations come up that have something to do with Bitcoin, especially as I'm spending all my time writing about Bitcoin and creating content about it.  It becomes inescapable.

Peter McCormack: Are you like Neo in the Matrix; are you seeing Bitcoin how other people don't?

Tomer Strolight: I think a lot of people around the world are having interesting insights around Bitcoin that are new and fresh, and I think I'm having some of these insights too, and we all have them in our own unique and personal way.  And that's why I try to write about some of these things, because it may light a path for someone else to have a similar experience, again their own unique one, but it's like leaving breadcrumbs and saying, "This was an interesting path down the rabbit hole I took.  You might want to pay a little visit here or there".

Peter McCormack: Dude, you're in deep, man!

Tomer Strolight: I know, what can I say!

Peter McCormack: Well listen, Tomer, you were known for writing these very nice, short, easy to digest Bitcoin snacks, and now you've written a feast.  You wrote a thesis.  Honestly, I think it's your best work.

Tomer Strolight: Thank you so much.  You're talking about this article, how Bitcoin is like a giant cybernetic metabrain, in particular?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Honestly, it blew my mind.  You told me about it last time.  You said, "Pete, I'm working on this idea about Bitcoin being a brain", and I was like, "I want to make that a show".  It's a lot to take in.  Anyone listening now, I recommend go down to the show notes and click on it and go read it first.  At least, read the first few paragraphs to get a feeling of what you're talking about, but this is a proper long-form article, dude.  Congratulations, it's so good.

Tomer Strolight: Well, thank you.  And I will try for listeners to make a whole discussion of it here, if we want to try to synthesise it all, so that they don't have to try to read the whole paper, because it's had a few thousand people attempt to read it.  I don't know how many people have gotten all the way through it, and it's actually gotten more applause than I expected, because it's one of these Medium articles, so that's what you get.  And I'm glad that people have found it interesting, because it's one of these out-there concepts.

Peter McCormack: Right, so.  Oh, man, where do I even start with this.  Okay, firstly, you had this thesis that Bitcoin was like a brain, but you obviously had to then go and study brains and figure out how brains work; talk to me about that.

Tomer Strolight: Yeah, it was actually a little bit backwards.  Before I started writing about Bitcoin, I was working for a company.  I was running a company that was teaching brain science and the scale of emotional intelligence, to executives and doctors and nurses and engineers.  And, the way that we motivated the learning in all these science, technology, engineering, mathematics students, professionals, to be interested in studying emotions and emotional intelligence, was to teach them some brain science and talk about where the emotions take place in the brain, and where thoughts take place in the brain.  It was a very effective product and a very effective course.

In the course of delivering that course and understanding the company's knowledge, I learned a lot about the brain, because we were teaching -- our flagship product was called, "The Science of Emotional Intelligence", and half of the material was this brain science about how the brain works.  So, when I ended up leaving that organisation, I had recently accumulated all this knowledge about how brains work, and in my various meditations about Bitcoin at the time that I was having this idea, I realised that all bitcoiners, especially ones who have full nodes, are carrying this identical piece of information, which is kind of like how every cell in an organism carries the same DNA, and we're all updating it and we're all transmitting information back and forth to each, which was kind of like what the neurons, the brain cells, do to one another.

The big epiphany moment, the big moment of crystallisation came for me when I said, well when Satoshi left and there was clearly no leadership and no centre, this then became Bitcoin's brain.  Satoshi may have been the father of Bitcoin, or the guide of it initially --

Peter McCormack: The God.

Tomer Strolight: Yeah, but it took a life of its own when he disappeared.  And like a brain, there's no one brain cell in your brain which is where Peter McCormack is.  Your Peter McCormack isn't in any bunch of these, it's the effect of all these different brain cells transmitting information to one another that Bitcoin's personality, Bitcoin's identity, Bitcoin's living will emerges from this now really decentralised system that in this paper, I draw a lot of parallels between how this system works and how the building blocks of brains work and are connected.

So, that was kind of the moment for me that was, "Oh, my God, there's something really similar between these two things", and there was this event that made them so similar.  And this was months ago that I had this insight, so I think it really helped me then understand in ways that many people struggle to understand how things happen in Bitcoin, because people really struggle when you talk to them about Bitcoin, "Well, how does it govern itself?  Who's in charge?  How do decisions get made?"  You can't point to anyone, Peter, you can't say, "Well, Peter's in charge [or] Tomer's in charge [or] anybody's in charge", there's all these things.

That's actually quite similar to if you asked, "How does your brain make a decision?" there's no one brain cell that's in charge.  There are all these different cells and sections and regions that are working with their own premisses and their own emergent ideas and at the end of the day, you end up having to make a decision, or hold an idea, and it arises inside your brain, in much the same way that we will have some consensus arise within the Bitcoin community, or some debate that remains unresolved.

Peter McCormack: Isn't the brain weird?  If you look at evolution, the marvel of evolution, this thing we can't explain that somehow life was sparked at the bottom of the oceans and from that, evolution came out of it.  But if you really think about it, there are some marvels of evolution.  Like the eye.  Just try and understand the eye, for example.  It's just this unbelievable thing that you just can't understand how that even happens. 

But the thing about the brain that's completely different is that everything we've got is where consciousness exists, and trying to even understand what consciousness is itself, or where that is in the brain, or how that came to be, like why did consciousness become something we evolved to have; it's so weird?

Tomer Strolight: There's a few amazing things that question gets me to want to talk about and I'll try to remember all of them.  The first thing is, it's a common misconception that your brain is only in your head.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  Wow!

Tomer Strolight: When we talk about the brain, we talk about all these neurons; the brain is just this network of neurons, and neurons are nerve cells, and the nerve cells run and they're all connected into your brain and they run right throughout your body.  There's even a tiny little itty-bitty brain which is a bigger cluster of nerve cells inside your heart.  And, when you feel something in your toes, that's a part of your brain that's actually physically extended all the way down to your toes.  Your brain is your nervous system; it's made out of nerve cells.

Peter McCormack: Well, I can tell you something weird about that, because I had my back injury, right, and the weirdest thing about my back injury that made me realise how weird the body is is that, I had a herniated disc that's pressing on the part of the nervous system that goes through my back, and I had the operation and I'm repaired.  But I've got this ongoing issue where if I go running, I get a pain in the leg.  But the pain isn't in the leg; there's no attack on the leg itself; the leg is fine.  It's wherever the pressure is within the part of the spine in my back that's telling me there's a problem with my leg.  So, it's like a trick.

Normally, if I stick a pin in my leg, it will identify pain there, but there's nothing actually wrong with my leg.  The problem's with part of the nervous system that's in my spine.  It's so weird.

Tomer Strolight: Yeah.  I once had a fancy car, not as fancy as yours, and it had all these computers in it and parts of it kept breaking down.  It was a convertible and the roof wouldn't go down, because the car thought the roof was overheated, because it was an automatic roof, but it was just the sensor that was the problem.  Or, it thought that the car was emitting too much carbon dioxide, but it was just the sensor that was messed up.  So, the car perceived, as you perceived, the pain in its roof, or pain in its window, or pain in its exhaust; but it was really just a dysfunctional sensor, a dysfunctional nerve cell, if we're analogising.

That seems unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that you're feeling pain where you actually don't have a dysfunction, but I'm sorry to hear that you've got this going on.  So, first of all, you've got brain cells all throughout your body.  That's not really the big and profound difference.  Maybe I'm losing my train of thought a little bit here.

Peter McCormack: But is it basically, is the brain therefore the biggest organ in our body?

Tomer Strolight: Well, people say that the skin, again I'm not a brain scientist and I'm not a doctor and I'm not a physician; I've heard that the skin, your epidermis, is the largest organ in your body, because it covers the entirety of your body.  But you can think of the brain as then your biggest internal organ, because it actually reaches out to every part of your body.  And every time you feel something, it's not your skin that's feeling it, that's a nerve inside your skin that is feeling it, and it's nerves right inside your skin, so there's an integration between these things.

I think it's useful to recognise that the same types of cells that cause you to feel stuff are the same type of cells that are in your head, although this is another interesting point.  If you actually operate on somebody's brain and you pull out their brain, they apparently don't feel anything.  So, the adaptation of the nerve cells, depending on where they are, obviously serves a different purpose.  Some transmit a sense of touch and taste, and some do this thinking, they do this neural networking, which is where our consciousness comes from.

So, this was your question.  You were asking about, "Where does consciousness come from; and why do we have consciousness?"  I guess the two points I was going to make are, the consciousness that we can see that we can be certain of -- there are a lot of people who have very different spiritual beliefs about what things are also conscious besides animals, but we can definitely see that animals are conscious.  They have sensory organs, they perceive things and then they act off of the basis of their integration with those things, which is what consciousness seems to have evolved for in that sense, for sure.

Then there's this amazing thing, which is how our consciousness integrates with the sensors.  Out there is a bunch of light waves, photons, and there are vibrations in the air.  That really isn't green, if I'm seeing the colour green.  I perceive it as a colour, but it's really just a frequency of light waves.  And if I'm hearing your voice, there aren't words out there, there isn't music out there, there are vibrations in the air.  But we end up experiencing these things as senses.

We often had even a judgement, like that's a nice sound, or it's a nice song, or that tastes nice, or that tastes terrible.  So, we also end up not just experiencing these things differently from how they probably are in nature, almost certainly from how they are at this raw level of nature; we end up experiencing them as sensations in a conscious existence.  And we often have the ability to either appreciate them, or judge them in some way, or judge them harshly, and that is an interesting miracle in and of itself, that all this objective, boring, "The air is vibrating, there's light waves bouncing around", that you can actually see that as something that -- or there's matter that touches your tongue; you can say, "That's delicious". 

To experience the universe as delicious, or as melodic, or as beautiful, is really another one of these extraordinary things.  Did consciousness have to evolve so that we could appreciate the universe?  But we actually have that ability.  I don't know that a rock appreciates the universe, judges the universe as good or not.  I don't know exactly if a plant does.  I suspect that plants have some ability to say, "Oh, the sunlight, the water, that's really nice", in whatever way, but they don't describe it in words.  But we are able to really appreciate and enjoy the universe through the consciousness that we've evolved and that's extraordinary and you can appreciate the fact that you can appreciate the universe, which is this other level of abstraction.  So, it's really fortunate to be human.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean there's things that are unique to us as human in that we are self-aware of our consciousness, which I don't believe animals are aware of their own consciousness.  We also create art and I know some elephants have been taught to paint, and monkeys and such, but we create and appreciate art.  We have deep emotional feelings and I'm sure some people will say, "My dog's emotional, my cat's emotional", but we have deep emotional feelings and we can talk about them.

All this stuff that's been created is incredible, but the fact that the consciousness exists itself, to me is -- and that's I guess why some people are religious.  They would say, "That is part of your soul", or something, but the fact that it even exists, that me here, Peter McCormack, and you there, Tomer, we know who we are, we're self-aware of who we are.  I don't even know.  One of the best things to do is you should probably explain how the brain works, because I read it, but I'd like to know how it works.

Tomer Strolight: Okay.  Nobody knows exactly how the brain works.  We don't actually know this is exactly how consciousness arises or it doesn't, but we can see various workings of the brain, and we know that consciousness emerges somehow from the operation of the brain, we just don't know exactly how it emerges from the brain.

But what I do focus on in this article is, the brain is made up of a lot of cells, which are called neurons, and all neurons have a similar structure.  And within their structure are these various parts.  Sorry, I've just got the paper in front of me.

Peter McCormack: That's fine.

Tomer Strolight: First of all, in the middle is what's called "the cell body", and it's kind of like, for people who are familiar with all other cells, it's where the nucleus is, it's where the DNA sits inside the nucleus.  So, every cell in your body has a copy of your DNA.  They're almost all identical, but there are events called "mutations", which make one strand of DNA different, but inside of you, inside every cell in your body is all the code that generates you, all the genetic code that generates you, which is the DNA.  And that sits inside the nucleus, or within the cell body of every neuron.

What makes them different is they have these two other parts that reach out, or receive the outreach from other cells.  So, they have this thing called "an axon", which is like a long tail or a long arm, with axon terminals, which are like fingers that come out of it.  But they'll have more than five fingers, it's like a network, they can have 1,000 or more axon terminals.  And then, they have receptors, called "dendrites", which is what the axon terminals of other neurons connect to.  So, they form connections, and this is how neural networks exist.

The analogy that I use is kind of how we will be on Twitter and we will have people who follow us.  So, those are people whose dendrites, our axon terminals touch, and that means that when we send out a signal on Twitter, like a tweet, those people might receive that message; our followers, our people who we might send out a message to.  This is exactly what happens inside a neuron.  A neuron has the ability to generate an electrical impulse, and when an electrical impulse is generated by a neuron, it goes down this axon to the axon terminals, and the space where axon terminals meet with dendrites, this is where the signal senders meet with the signal receivers of other cells, is called "a synapse", which is a word most people have heard.

The synapse is a gap that's got chemicals inside of it, but it's a physical space.  And when that spark hits, when that action potential fires, when the electrical signal is sent, all three words for the same event, it may cross the synapse and spark and cause an electrical connection in the recipient neuron where the axon terminal connected to the dendrite over a synapse.  If that happens, then something else happens to the nerve cell that received the signal.  It won't always be received, but it will sometimes be received.  Whether or not it's received is a function of the shape of the electrical impulse, how close the synapse is, what neurochemicals existed in there.  It's basically how much one cell is able to pay attention to another's signal.

The brain is formed through these incredibly complex networks of these cells.  There isn't any one cell in your brain that's connected to all the others.  Again, it's not centralised, but many cells will be connected to many other cells, cells might be connected in a loop.  In the same way that you follow someone and they follow you on a social network, you can have a round-robin connection so that one cell can fire and send a signal to another and back and forth, or cells may be connected through a bit of a daisy chain, like Alice is connected to Bob, Bob is connected to Carol, Carol is connected back to Alice, so signals can feedback. 

Feedback is a very important part of the learning process.  When a cell expects something and it sends a signal and it receives back a reaffirming signal, that's what ends up happening.  And there's these really, really complex connections that happen between neurons inside a brain.  And maybe the last really important point is of course, because each cell doesn't connect to itself, each cell is part of a unique -- it has its own unique connection graph, which contains it and the rest of the other cells in its graph.  But when it fires, it causes different reactions. 

So, there really is this uniqueness.  Each cell, like a snowflake, I say, is unique inside your brain.  But acting in concert, your brain is this physical network of all these cells that have formed connections with one another, and I'll talk about how connections get formed or broken a little bit later on in this conversation, because just like on Twitter, when you can follow someone and block them and unfollow them, these neurons' axon terminals will connect to dendrites of others and they will be reinforced, or these connections will break.

So, your brain is just this continuous process of neurons firing electrical impulses that may or may not reach other neurons, based off of their connections and the synaptic quality of it.  And this electrical field is generated inside your brain by all these billions of cells continuously firing across these connections that they have.  I think that somewhere in that process, that field that is shaped by the connections, that's your conscious field.  That's this idea of consciousness, why consciousness flows.

Consciousness is not a static, physical thing; it is an energy field, this energy field that's generated by all of your neurons firing, and it's shaped by the shape of the network of your brain, but it flows because it is this electrical flow.  That's why you can't freeze your consciousness; it's constantly flowing.  People who meditate know this.  You can't clear your mind, no matter how much you try, thoughts come up, patterns happen, and you can't snapshot a particular thought.  You have to keep repeating it; a thought takes time, it's a process within your brain. 

So, brains are really interesting and consciousness is really interesting and it's fascinating.  I'm happy to continue to just hang out on this particular part of the topic for a little bit.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know we're onto the Bitcoin yet.  But okay, in terms of the brain, you say the neurons are all the same but they have different connections.  If you were to dissect different parts of the brain that were responsible for different things, under a microscope would it all look the same; or are the different sections of the brain only different because of the way the connections are different?  I'm so fascinated by this.

Tomer Strolight: That's a great question.  I think individual nerve cells are generally hard to tell apart.  Some are longer and some are short.  The nerve cells in your leg are the longest cells in your body.  It turns out that your damaged ones potentially are up to three feet long, because the axon, which is the tail part, is longer in some than in others, so you can differentiate them.  And again, I'm not a brain scientist so I may have this wrong, but in the different regions of the brain, the neurons are just organised differently, rather than they're fundamentally different in their nature.

Some nerve cells are obviously slightly modified and geared to react to different things.  Like your optic nerve cells react to light, whereas your auditory nerve cells react to some vibration, so there's evolutionary adaptation in some of these.  But in the big, major part of your brain, if you look at them under the microscope, I think that neurons generally look the same.

Peter McCormack: So, in doing all of this research, what are the most amazing things that you discovered about the brain which blew your mind?

Tomer Strolight: I think for me, it was really the similarities I saw to how the Bitcoin culture was evolving.  As I said, I was really educated about the brain through this previous role that I had, and I was learning a lot of really interesting things about it, about how apparently, the neural connections that you use more frequently, they develop, they get stronger.  There's a process called "myelination", which image all the electrical wires that we see around are all wrapped in plastic as an insulator; myelination is like this growing insulation around these things so that there's less leakage of signals.

So, thoughts that you have very often, or connections that you have very often, myelinate and they get insulated in a sense.  So this, I think, is also an interesting explanation of why people tend to have the same thought patterns over and over again.  Once you really start to establish a particular pattern of thought, it becomes entrenched, and that's through this process called myelination. 

I think there's just so much complexity to the brain, and in this article I've really tried to simplify it just to that part which I could then easily draw connections to how we, as individuals, communicate within the Bitcoin ecosystem.  I mean, there's just so much fascinating stuff about the brain.  Perhaps one of the most interesting things about it is just how little we still understand about it.  We can take pictures of it and we tend to learn a lot about if from people who suffer from brain injuries, because we don't go in and cut off parts of people's brains, or damage people's brains, but there are people that have these brain injuries that prevent them from forming new memories, or people that have brain injuries that cause them to -- I'm trying to think of some of these other interesting things.

One of the most interesting things I actually did remember learning about the brain and I hadn't prepared to remember the name of the book, but the book is called On Intelligence, and the author is the guy whose name I forget, but he was a Silicon Valley pioneer; he created PalmPilot.  He was studying brains to try and understand where artificial intelligence might come from.

The biggest and most interesting thing that came out of that is how important feedback loops are inside the brain.  Like, if you expect to see something when you take an action, and you take that action and then you see the result, that reinforces a learning.  If you see something different than what you expected, then you know that you have made a mistake.  I think that's a really important thing in terms of learning; that's objective learning.  If you expect something and you do it and you don't get the expected results, you should modify your thinking as opposed to just try harder.  There's that great saying that says the definition of insanity.

Peter McCormack: Einstein, yeah.

Tomer Strolight: The definition of insanity is, "Doing the same thing and expecting different results", and yet we see so much of it in the world today.  A system needs feedback to know when it's making a mistake, and that's a big part of what your brain is designed to be, and we'll see when we talk about Bitcoin, if it's got similar attributes.

Peter McCormack: Well, it is kind of incredible how much we don't know about the brain, especially as we're technical people these days trying to build AI and synthetic, computerised neural networks.  We're trying to put people on the Moon and we're trying to harvest energy from the Sun and we've created CRISPR and we can do DNA sequencing, but yet there's still so much about the brain we just don't understand.

Tomer Strolight: Maybe the last thing: a single neuron has some capacity to do some mental processing.  There are creatures that have a single neuron.  Just like we evolved from single-celled animals to multi-celled animals, consciousness or intelligence or whatever arises from the neural cell developed into having multiple neurons, and that's where the advanced complexity of consciousness and perception and sensation and conception eventually evolved into.

But when we talk about neural networks, most of these neural networks are built with less than ten simulated neurons, and your brain has billions of neurons.  So, the capacity of what our brains are doing to create consciousness is just so many orders of magnitude more complex and parallel than these most advanced neural networks.  But when we see these neural networks being trained for very specific tasks, like playing chess, or playing Go, or optimising something that a neural network optimises for, it takes very, very few neurons, very few virtual neurons, to be able to do better than the best human being can with a brain with billions of neurons.

So, our brains are obviously constructed towards a different purpose.  We didn't evolve to play the game of Go, unlike Google's very small system that was able to play Go a trillion times against itself and figure out how to optimise for that.  It remarkably requires very few neurons to get that intelligent in a narrow context, that powerful in a narrow context.  So again, another really fascinating thing: the more neurons we have, it's not so much that we're stupider, but we're more generalised and conscious.  I don't think Google's Go play machine is actually conscious, it's just automatically wired to just use feedback to continuously get better at playing Go.

Peter McCormack: And then we get to the ethical question where we create AI, does it ever have consciousness?

Tomer Strolight: Well, we created Bitcoin, so Bitcoin has consciousness.

Peter McCormack: Does Bitcoin have consciousness?  I'm not sure it does.  That's a good question, I need to think that one through.  Okay, so how did you start connecting this to Bitcoin; what was that eureka moment where you were like, "This is like a brain"?

Tomer Strolight: It's so funny.  I was trying to orange pill somebody in particular; I was trying to orange this guy who was the founder of the company that I had been working for, who had lectured on brain science to companies like IBM and The Federal Reserve and all these pharma companies, because they were a big client.  And, I kept trying to explain to him how decentralisation works and he was really struggling with the idea, because it's a very complicated idea; it's not something that people really understand.  But I knew he understood brain science, because he was teaching it.

So, I guess on some walk that I was having through the forest in meditating on how I'm going to orange pill this one person in the world, I started to connect the similarities that I outlined in the paper between what neurons do and how they connect with each other and how they communicate with each other, and what plebs do and how they communicate with each other.  And I was kind of building this framework and I was talking about it to this person and I was talking about it to somebody else.

Then, I think for me, the last piece of it fell with this realisation that this system became completely independent of any central control, like a brain is, when Satoshi vanished, and now there was no longer any one place you could look at this thing and say, "Well, that's where the control lies".  It's distributed, it's everywhere at different moments in time, control takes place in the more active portions of this network, and that's very much like the brain.  So, then I sat down to try to connect all of these dots and say, "Does it hold up and to what extent is it just a model and to what extent does it seem to be reasonably accurate, and what are its implications?"

Peter McCormack: Okay, so what falls within the remit here of the brain?  Nodes and miners?  But also, it's not just the protocol itself, you also talk about -- I know people say, "There isn't a Bitcoin community", okay, whatever.  But the people who are active bitcoiners, they're part of this.  Are companies a part of this; is it literally anything that's part of this?

Tomer Strolight: However far you want to take the analogy, you can actually go a lot further than I do in the paper.  But in the paper, I'm just trying to build up the basic building blocks.  In the basic building blocks, I'm saying we, the plebs, people who actually run nodes, or at the very least stay connected within the Bitcoin community and receive messages and transmit messages, and form part of the consensus, are forming a part of the brain, and they're forming a part of the consciousness that is in Bitcoin.

The way I might liken this example in a simpler example than what I provide in the paper is, you have some nerves in your brain that are connected to your optic nerve, or are a part of your optic nerve, so they see something directly and then retransmit it to some other part of your brain.  The part that you actually think you see something in is not directly making contact with the light, it's retransmitted messages that are now forming the sensation, the perception, in your mind.

I view this as, there's a bit of price movement going on in Bitcoin now, and I'm aware of this, not because I checked the price.  I'm on Twitter and there's a bunch of people sending messages, "Oh, the price is up", or a meme of a guy holding a green candle slicing a red bear in half.  And so, there are all these messages that are being transmitted from all these other neurons in the community that are sending a signal to me and the rest of the brain saying, "There's some price action right now".  I don't have to sense it directly myself.  This, to me, is just one of these simple things about how consciousness spreads, how an idea spreads.

The more interesting thing is how the Bitcoin hive mind thinks, how does it actually process.  So, how does it process a problem?  I cite an example of that in the paper.  I said, when all the energy FUD started, we didn't hire a consultant or form a committee to rebut the energy FUD.

Peter McCormack: Well actually, that's not exactly true, is it, because Saylor did form The Bitcoin Mining Council?

Tomer Strolight: So, that's one thing with The Mining Council.  So, I'm saying in terms of addressing, long before Saylor participated in forming The Mining Council, which is about more than just the energy FUD, Nic Carter did a lot of research and published a bunch of articles, and I published a short article.  Mine was nowhere as influential as any of his stuff, but actually Michael Saylor did share the article that I wrote, which is a retransmission and a distribution to other nodes, and other people made note of it, and someone turned my article into a short video, which got transmitted on Tik Tok and got spread out there.

So, what I'm trying to say is anyone could write an article and anyone could have any insights, and gradually what happens in this feedback loop is people say, "This article holds merit, this thing about moving to the cheapest energy, which is actually renewable energy.  It's recapturing stranded energy, etc", and we end up with this synthesis of the valid ideas and the compelling ideas that we all end up in harmony with at the end of the day, anyone who's paying attention to the issues.  So, we get this freeform thinking that any neuron in the system can introduce new information.  Bad information gets rejected by being contradicted.  Good information gets amplified and distributed throughout the brain. 

Then, at the end of the day, we end up with this decentralised distribution of valid information and no distribution, or very limited distribution, or invalid information, which is very different from a corporation that would work top-down, or a government that would work top-down and say, "We hired a consultant.  The consultant said this is the answer, now everybody follow suit and everybody's directed to follow suit".  Again, there's nobody in the Bitcoin community who can be forced to hold any particular view by anybody else.  There's no authority, there's no hierarchy in the system.

So, this is, I think, what helps on a couple of dimensions.  It helps us to better understand decentralisation when we think about how things work in our brain, and it helps us to realise how decentralisation actually works in Bitcoin, and there's a similarity here.  So, even if it's only a reasonable model and Bitcoin isn't actually conscious, which we could have a fun discussion about, it's a very useful way to see how we, as conscious participants in the Bitcoin community, end up processing ideas and coming to conclusions.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's interesting, because it makes me think of anything I've seen, whether it's a documentary and they're studying the brain, and they'll ask certain kinds of questions or try and trigger certain emotional responses, and the brain scans will say, "This part of the brain lit up.  But also, this little bit here also lit up".  When you talk about price action, it could be the area of the brain which is the people that are big traders that really lights up.  But then, maybe people who are developers only lights up a little bit, because they're less bothered.  So, the analogy works.

Tomer Strolight: Yeah.  When we had the Taproot activation exercise, not everybody was interested in it, so a lot of the parts of the brain were dormant.  But there were Core developers who got really interested in it and they wanted to have a safe activation and a peaceful activation.  And there were those of us who were very active in the user-activated soft-fork fork wars, and we wanted to activate with another user-activated soft fork, and there were two parts of the brain that were lit up and we had these discussions and debates and this dialogue.

At the end of the day, if you recall or even know what happened, both a UASF client was released and the speedy try-out client was released, and both parties said, "We want to see the speedy trial succeed"; the party that also released the UASF client said, "We want it to succeed in part, because everybody knows that there's the threat of a UASF to make it happen".  So, it wasn't like the whole thing came out and again, there was a committee meeting and there was consensus; there were various regions of the brain that served different purposes. 

It's almost like you've got a part of your brain that's your fight-or-flight reaction, and you've got the part of your brain that is your cerebral cortex, your neocortex, which does all the thinking, and the two can be in conflict at times and you need some resolution.  This is maybe a similar analogy; I don't want to characterise one camp as the other.  I was talking to developers, who might be very well labelled as the rational, calm, careful side; and the UASF people, who I was also talking to and participating with, who were the emotional fight-or-flight, "We've got to make sure that we're ready to fight" side, and we ended up with a peaceful resolution, but not because one side could control or command the other.  It was just the overall weighting.  And there was this conscious process of going back and forth.

That's what I argue.  I'm not saying that your node is conscious and it's aware; I'm saying this meta-entity, which is the whole of the Bitcoin community that acts, not in unison because we all make the same decisions, but acts as a unified whole as it shares these ideas and thinks about them, exhibits something that's very similar to consciousness.  It takes in information from the outside world, it processes it, it makes sense of it and it takes external action.  That's consciousness.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  So, explain to me what part the nodes are.  So, the nodes are the neurons?

Tomer Strolight: Well, the nodes are actually the DNA -- you're the neuron, I'm the neuron, and we contain a node.  The node is the DNA and the interesting thing about it, Bitcoin DNA contains two really important things: it contains the code that are the laws of Bitcoin --

Peter McCormack: The consensus, yeah.

Tomer Strolight: -- and it contains the blockchain, which is the state of Bitcoin, who has what money.  And we're all in complete agreement on all that.  I'm in agreement that you have half a Bitcoin and that I've got a tenth of a Bitcoin.  So, there's no disagreement about the rules and there's no disagreement about the stakes that everybody has, and that creates a particular alignment that doesn't exist in other communities, that use Twitter for example. 

So, in the paper, I have this one moment of scepticism which says, "Well, isn't the phenomenon that you describe true of any community, on Twitter or on social media?" and I point out, "Actually it isn't".  Those communities are continuously fragmenting and falling apart and people are arguing, and there's no resolution and there's no consensus.  It's, "I will wear a mask.  I won't wear a mask.  I will wear two masks.  I will force you to wear a mask.  I will not wear a mask", and we just witness everything fracturing and shattering into pieces. 

Whereas, in Bitcoin, we notice more and more people coming in, and more and more consensus being built over time, even though we have arguments from time to time; but the arguments rarely lead to any shattering or departure of any people.  And if they do, they leave via a hard fork, they break the consensus rules, they actually leave the organism, they mutate out of being bitcoiners; they become Bcashers, or whatever other chain people fork off onto.

Peter McCormack: Bullshit!

Tomer Strolight: Right!  But within the Bitcoin community, we end up, no matter how much I disagree with you about any one particular topic, we have zero disagreement about the rules of Bitcoin and who has how much Bitcoin at what address.  And we each, because we have a stake in the system if we hold Bitcoin, which we all do, we want to preserve and protect that and make it as valuable as possible.  So, we are all allied, like all the cells in an organism.  If the whole organism dies, we all lose a lot. 

So, we're all ultimately more interested in the preservation of the system and able to find common ground and cooperation, than people who just have an idea that they don't want the virus versus somebody else who has a view that the virus doesn't even exist versus someone else who now has a view that the virus can't be controlled, or that it can with a mask, or that it can with a vaccine.  Every other community just keeps fracturing and fracturing.  The Bitcoin community keeps growing and growing and getting tighter and tighter.

When I wrote this paper months ago versus now, it's like, "Wow, bitcoiners are even so much tighter now than they were before, and it's taking on a deeper meaning to people than just getting rich".

Peter McCormack: So, it's the DNA which is the consensus rules and the blockchain, which is what ties us all together.  And even if we are in disagreement, that thing we can't disagree on.  Yeah, interesting.  But there can be slight difference.  I don't understand this, you might know this, but is the DNA in every single cell that our body has exactly the same, or can there be slight differences from cell to cell?

Tomer Strolight: We're inferior to Bitcoin, because if a mutation takes place --

Peter McCormack: No, but there are different versions of the nodes, right?  You can still operate old versions of the nodes.

Tomer Strolight: Yes, but they're all going to end up in identical consensus on state.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, yeah.

Tomer Strolight: So, the blockchain is the same and because the miners are all enforcing all the rules, if you're running an old version, you're not going to be getting blocks sent to you that your version might be exploited by, because the miners are all mining the latest.  So, even if you've got some weaker rule that might allow a SegWit transaction to be anyone can spend, you're not ever going to receive a block that contains a SegWit transaction that wasn't spent with a Segregated Witness signature, because no miner is mining that.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  So, a hard fork is possible within Bitcoin; that is a possibility.  We know if we want to increase the block size at some point in the future, that's something that might happen, who knows.  Would you consider that gene editing?

Tomer Strolight: Yes.  Or, some kind of mutation.  But it's fine to call it a gene.  Now, I'm not really that focused on what genes are and what they mean inside of this analogy to a brain, I'm more focused on that higher level structure from which different nodes within it send and receive messages to one another, which generates consciousness inside of it.  So, I would almost want to say I don't really want to weigh in on if a node is like genes, and a hard fork is like gene editing, because I haven't really thought much about what the right analogies are there.

Peter McCormack: Okay, let me try this one.  Bitcoin SV, is that a brain haemorrhage?!

Tomer Strolight: It's like when you insert shit right into the human brain; it's called "having shit for brains"!

Peter McCormack: Do you know what it is, it's like Dolly the fucking sheep.  They try and clone it, but eventually it gets all fucked up and dies.

Tomer Strolight: Right away, pretty much.  I think that's actually -- so, as much as we're somewhat joking, I think you're actually right.  If you and I were to do some gene editing on each other, or on ourselves, we would probably die, because we don't have a fucking clue what we're doing, so we're likely to insert some piece of code that's just going to lead to fatal death.  And when you have somebody who can't code and who lies about everything make a gene edit, yeah, it's no surprise that the lack of understanding -- and even gene editing is a dangerous thing to do. 

Who presumes, even someone who wears a white smock and has five years of university studying three PhDs, who's to know exactly what happens when you edit the gene?  Unintended consequences, or unknown realities about the thing, are pretty serious.  So, when we do any kind of soft fork even, it's vetted so, so carefully, because it will propagate throughout the whole network by really good developers in a decentralised manner.

Anyone can show up, anyone can critique, anyone can attack, anyone is free to demonstrate that there's something wrong.  Nobody has authority to turn a blind eye to something that somebody raises.  So, that's the Bitcoin brain working to adapt itself in that decentralised manner, in Bitcoin SV or Bitcoin Cash or any of the hard forks.  There's one or two or three guys, right, and they say, "We're doing this and I'm making the change", and the Bitcoin developer, their review of these change recommendations are LOL at best or, "This is a disaster, because this is not the way this thing works". 

But those people are able to proceed in those avenues, so this is why I distinguish Bitcoin from all these other things, even the things that are very close copies of Bitcoin, that lack the decentralisation, which is the key feature in the brain-like characteristic, or the brain-like model being applicable.  The minute that you have one neuron in charge of all the others, it's no longer like a brain in biology, it's something different.  It's like a hierarchy; it's like a business.

Peter McCormack: Right, so if we're the neurons, and the consensus and the blockchain is essentially the DNA within that, where are miners within your brain analogy?

Tomer Strolight: So, miners also run nodes, so they're also a special kind of cell.  They're, in a sense, beyond the brain.  They're a metabolic function.

Peter McCormack: Are they stem cells?

Tomer Strolight: No, I think Bitcoin has many organs, and so --

Peter McCormack: Are we going bigger now?

Tomer Strolight: Yeah.  Well, Bitcoin keeps developing abilities as it gets older.  It develops certain defences, it develops certain capabilities, so it was very young and very embryonic in the early days and it needed a parent to take care of it, who was Satoshi, for a couple of years.  Then Satoshi could leave and it was left independent, all on its own, to grow abilities.  And it develops certain defences, like the toxic maximalists, who are there to defend any attempted attack on the integrity of the system and its rules.  It's developed a toxic gland, right, it's able to be poisonous to attacks on its integrity.  So, it's developed the ability to be poisonous to things that want to harm it.

I think this is where really interesting phenomena happen.  When it develops the mining capability, so the miners are -- it's developing a bigger stomach, right, or a bigger ability to harness energy.  An animal would go out into the world and seeks energy; it eats other things or it absorbs energy from the sun, if it's a plant.  Bitcoin, whatever kind of thing you liken it to, is increasing and growing in its capacity to go out into the world and consume energy.  It uses some of that energy to feed its brain cells, which then do some thinking as well, but it's all part and parcel of this mega organism that is Bitcoin.

So, that's why I try to be careful at the beginning of the paper.  Brandon Quittem has likened Bitcoin to a mycelial network, and GiGi has said it's alive; and I'm saying here, I'm actually focusing on one organ within this living entity that keeps developing new skills, and it's grown a brain, which is kind of interesting.

Peter McCormack: And I love the ability that this brain has, this kind of consciousness and that it can think.  I mean, I often thought, "Does Bitcoin have an immune system, an immune response to certain types of attacks, which get stronger as well?"  First, the forks, it wasn't prepared for those kinds of attacks; it is now.  The FUD, it wasn't prepared for those attacks, but now it's learnt.  So, if somebody is making an attack on Bitcoin related to, let's say terrorists or energy, as the brain learns, it can respond to it quicker.  It doesn't have to go away and research; it kind of lights up, as we said, and it can respond.

The more you think about it itself, the more fascinating it becomes.  But what is the use of this thesis?  I'm asking that question, but also knowing the answer, because you answered it at the start.  You said it's a good way to explain decentralisation, because that is a tough concept to explain to people.  When people are like, "What is Bitcoin?" and you're like, "Well, it's money, it's this, it's that, it's digital gold", but what it really is is a decentralised form of money.  And when you try and explain what decentralisation is to people, that's kind of hard.  I'm going to have to try this one out, Tomer, and come back and report to you.

Tomer Strolight: Let me try to toss a couple of things.  There's that terrible acronym, Decentralised Autonomous Organisation, which is good up until it gets to the word "organisation" and certainly not good once people have tried it in practice on other chains.  But Bitcoin is a Decentralised Autonomous Entity, and it is decentralised, and in a sense it is autonomous, because there's nobody in charge of it.

Autonomous just means it drives itself, it steers itself, and there's no one person steering it, there's no central body steering it, to the extent that it's steered at all.  It's due to a collective consciousness of everyone in the Bitcoin community choosing to move the steering wheel.  But for the most part, the thing drives itself.

As I wrote in another article, which I mentioned, Bitcoin is a technology that does not allow you to adjust it, but it adjusts itself, thank you very much.  Every two weeks, Bitcoin adjusts its difficulty based on everything that's happening in the world, and if you make an adjustment to you version of the source code to change the difficulty adjustment algorithm, you're just going to get booted off the network, you're going to rejected from the organism.

So, you don't need to touch it, I don't need to touch it.  It needs to be adjusted, but it does the self-correction.  That also is like a living thing.  We've come to this view that we need doctors to adjust everything, but we have immune systems, which is what you were talking about; we have adaptability.  If you're lifting ten pounds more over a couple of days, your muscles get stronger; and if you stop using them, your muscles get weaker.  Well, that's like the difficulty adjustment in Bitcoin.  If we're taking on more energy, we just make it harder, so that the blocks keep running at the same pace.

So, everything in the system's kind of self-regulating and self-adjusting, and it's decentralised and autonomous.  And we can see these phenomena much better in nature than we can in human-made entities.  Bitcoin's a lot more like an organism than it is like a company or like a government in this sense.  Got no CEO, no employees, and everything that's a part of it is incentivised to be a part of it.  Its very survival depends on it being a part of it.

Peter McCormack: It's so fascinating, Tomer.  Like I say, I think this is your greatest work.  Your previous writings, as I said, you did that thing where you wanted to write things that people could read in two to three minutes and learn something in bite-sized chunks and they're useful.  This is a whole thesis where the more I think about it, I step back and I realise something else about it.  I'm like, "Oh, yeah, because it does this".

Where do you go with this next?  Do you think this might evolve and you will go on to think of Bitcoin more as an organism and separate the parts which are maybe the brain or the separate organs; do you think that's a potential evolution of this?

Tomer Strolight: In my mind personally, this is not to speak of my writing, in my mind personally, I see Bitcoin as a living thing and I see it as a living creature that I have a relationship with, that is a symbiotic relationship; we each benefit from one another.  I do what I can for Bitcoin; being a part of Bitcoin is beneficial to me. 

The example I use is, we didn't know for thousands of years, we didn't know until a few hundred years ago, so however long human beings have been around, less a few hundred years, that microorganisms existed.  And we didn't know that our bodies were made out of cells which contained our DNA until even more recently.  So, there was all this life around us, and we weren't aware of its existence of it at all; the theory of the existence of germs until people developed microscopes, and saw a whole other universe of life there.  It was shocking and people didn't believe it at first.

So, I'm proposing that in addition to microorganisms which we haven't seen, there might be things out there that are macroorganisms that are hard for us to see, because they're so big and their timeline is so different from ours that we just can't relate to their consciousness.  And I think Bitcoin is this example.  It exists, it consumes energy, it grows, it has a risk of dying, but it's very robust; and, it's going to live a lot longer than any of us, but it needs us to be a part of it.

So it's like, you're made out of cells.  Every cell in your body is going to die nine times during your lifetime, or even more; ten.  Hopefully in your case, even longer, because every seven years, every single cell in your body is replaced.  So, every single human being who is a bitcoiner will die, but Bitcoin will still be around, because they'll be replaced by other human beings, which are other cells.

The more you look at it from a lens of, it's lifelike; it may not have every single identical component, because it's using computer technology, not just organic technology, but when you look at us as a part of Bitcoin, it's just the same as if you look at humanity as an organism that's existed for hundreds of thousands of years, and it's made up of humans and the humans breed and they make more humans, that humanity continues and goes on, hopefully.  And that's another macroorganism that we don't really tend to appreciate.

But in the same way that a neuron in your brain might not be fully aware of the brain or your existence, but it needs it to stay alive, we as human beings need humanity to stay alive.  And those of us who choose to become bitcoiners also benefit from and participate in the organism that is Bitcoin.  It's a rapidly evolving organism, evolving much more rapidly than humanity.  And, it may actually lead to an accelerated evolution of humanity.  That's not human beings, but if Bitcoin solves the problem of human civilisation, which is humanity collapsing and regressing all the time, because the reason civilisation collapses is because money keeps getting debased and money collapses, so people's communication and peaceful coordination with each other collapses; and if Bitcoin fixes that, which many of us believe it will, it will be an evolutionary leap forward for the being that is humanity.

Peter McCormack: It's a really good place to finish it.  But I do want to ask you something else.  We should also say something now for all the people who are following on YouTube.  There might be some who are listening who, there might be a sound difference, they're probably going, "What the fuck happened halfway through?"  So listen, anyone who's listening or watching, I had massive Wi-Fi issues when we were trying to record this the first time and it kept cutting out, so we gave up halfway through.  The next time we could do this is me here in Miami, because I couldn't get my internet fixed while I was there.  So, this is why we've split! 

But before we finish, Tomer, one thing: can you plug your film, because you made a brilliant film, Bitcoin is Generational Wealth.  It's fantastic, so just do a plug.  Tell people what that's about, where they can go and watch that as well.

Tomer Strolight: Yeah, so if you go to your favourite search engine, or YouTube, and type in, Bitcoin is Generational Wealth, you'll end up on this video, which is a 15-minute movie that I've gotten some flak over.  It's not a documentary, it's a piece of science fiction.  What we made it to do is to explain how Bitcoin changes the game and makes for generational wealth preservation to be possible.

We wanted to concretise, not just to talk about that in abstract terms, but to show what life might be like in the future, now that we don't have to confront civilisation collapse over and over again.  So, it spans a 150-year, 170-year time period that begins in 1948 and goes all the way to the year 2109, projecting what things might be like with Bitcoin in the world now.

A lot of people have been deeply touched by it, which is really the reward from it, to know that I've helped bitcoiners see not just what they're fighting against, which everyone can see, but a little bit of what we're working for.  And that's been really the best part of this thing.

Peter McCormack: Well, there's a whole show we could make around that subject alone, which we probably should do.  We should try and find a time to do one in person.  I need to get myself up to your neck of the woods.

Tomer Strolight: Yeah, we're so close now!

Peter McCormack: So close!

Tomer Strolight: Whenever you're ready.  I'll find you a good steak here too.

Peter McCormack: Dude, I'm not allowed to eat steak for two months, the doctors told me.

Tomer Strolight: Oh, what about seafood then?

Peter McCormack: I'm not allowed shellfish or steak for two months.  Well, I'm allowed one steak a month for the next two months.  My cholesterol's got way too high.  Turns out a carnivore diet isn't too healthy, apparently.

Tomer Strolight: Well, you haven't had a heart attack yet, is what the carnivores will tell you, right?

Peter McCormack: Well, you'll say it's coming.  He said my cholesterol's way too high, so I'm allowed one steak a month for the next two months, but maybe I'll save that one for you, dude.

Tomer Strolight: All right.  And I can make you a nice mushroom risotto if you prefer!

Peter McCormack: Well, I could do that as well, man.

Tomer Strolight: I'm just trying to entice a face-to-face meeting.

Peter McCormack: We've got to do it.  Listen, we're moving to trying to get back to all our interviews in person.  This is why we're in Miami.  We're setting up a studio here, doing seven interviews in four days, then we're going to do two in DC and then eight in New York.  And that gives us six weeks, which is cool.  We're trying to get to that point.

Tomer Strolight: When you're in New York, I'm really close.  And if you're not able to come here and if you do want to get together, I could maybe come there.

Peter McCormack: We will figure it out.  We're going to have ourselves places we'll go to in New York, Miami, Texas and LA.  They're going to be the four hubs where we know we can go.  And people will fly out.  Like, we've got Brandon Quittem flying in to do an interview with us, which is going to be cool, so people are willing to do it.  So, yeah, we can do that, man, we can do that.

Well listen, I'm glad we finished this out, brother.  This is amazing.  Anyone listening, go into the show notes and go and read this article.  It's like a mind bender.  It's up there with some of those ones that Breedlove's done where you've really got to sit back and get your phone out of the way so you're not distracted, because you can't just read it, because you get to different sections and you have to think.  You've kind of got to get your head around it.

But listen, you've done great work.  What's coming up next, what are you working on now?

Tomer Strolight: I want to do more films.  I'm constantly writing articles, but now that I've seen -- like with the film, Generational Wealth, it's been out a couple of weeks, or a few weeks, and it's gotten 120,000 views already.  My articles, a great article will get 2,000 views.  Occasionally, I've had some that maybe get tens of thousands of views, but that's only because they cover some really controversial topic.

When I write thought pieces like this, or interesting pieces like that, a few thousand is all I can get.  And here with the film, I was able to actually reach 100 times as many people maybe, 50 times as many, and really emotionally connect.  And there's stuff that I'm working on now that really is taking my mediations on Bitcoin to the next level like, "Why does it invoke and stir and arouse spiritual journeys in so many people, and moral exploration in so many people?"  I've got some really interesting things about that, and just my continued admiration of that story of Satoshi Nakamoto, and different pieces of that that I'm working on.

So, I'm all over the map, trying to figure out exactly if I specialise at some point between doing Bitcoin philosophy, Bitcoin analysis about how it works, Bitcoin on morality, Bitcoin on spirituality, what it means to be a bitcoiner.  These are all areas that I'm dabbling in and finding myself going deeper and deeper into, and I'm being rewarded for it by seeing a following develop, and just the reward of actually occasionally having these interesting insights about Bitcoin that may be new, or that I can at least share with other people who haven't heard them before, and that's a really fun place to be, because it's right at the edge of the frontier of this new horizon that we're all experiencing together.

Peter McCormack: Well, you've got a great name, Meditations on Bitcoin; it could be a book, it could be a film series.  I feel like it could be something I put on when I go to the gym and listen to.  But you've definitely got a brand.  I like that idea of a Meditations on Bitcoin, but I don't know, man, you'll figure it out.  But I love this, dude.

Okay, well let's get together again, let's get together in person, let's cover Bitcoin is Generational Wealth, we can do that.  I've got so many trips coming up, we'll find a time to do it.  Are you coming to the conference?

Tomer Strolight: I do plan on coming to the conference; I'm very excited.  This will be my first Bitcoin Conference, and I ended up writing a bunch of things about the last one just from watching it at a distance.  So, to experience it first-hand is going to be really meaningful for me.

Peter McCormack: Well, we could probably do something then.  I'm going to be in for the whole week with my producer here and we'll have all our equipment set up, so maybe that's when we'll do it, man.

Tomer Strolight: I'll probably be there a couple of extra days.

Peter McCormack: We'll make it work then.

Tomer Strolight: It's exciting.

Peter McCormack: Tomer, in British time, it's 3.47am, so it's going to be bedtime for me.  I'm a little bit jetlagged, so I'm going to bail now and get some sleep, but I'm glad we finished this off; it's fascinating, like I said.

Tomer Strolight: Me too.  Thank you for having me on again, Peter, I really appreciate it, man.

Peter McCormack: Any time.  I've got you, dude, I love your work, I think you're brilliant, so just keep doing it.

Tomer Strolight: Thank you so much.

Peter McCormack: Stay in touch and let's see what people think of Bitcoin and the brain, man.

Tomer Strolight: For sure.  Well, have a great sleep.  Be well.

Peter McCormack: Peace out.