WBD453 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin: A View From The Left with Ben Arc

Interview date: Friday 21st January

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Ben Arc. 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 Ben Arc, an industrious Bitcoin and free open source software advocate. We discuss the attraction of Bitcoin to those on the left, Bitcoin as a commons for society, developing open source applications to take on big tech, and Marxism.

“Bitcoin is a commons, a monetary commons… a shared resource which people can use and then it’s within their interests to keep that resource going and nurture that resource and help it to grow - and that’s what Bitcoin is; and if any private interests try to co-opt Bitcoin…then ‘Bitcoiners’ attack it.”

— Ben Arc

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Morning, Ben.

Ben Arc: Morning, how's it going?

Peter McCormack: Good, mate, how are you?

Ben Arc: Very good, very good, rested.

Peter McCormack: Good.  Well, thanks for coming down.

Ben Arc: Well, thank you for inviting me, it's a pleasure.

Peter McCormack: Well, this was requested in two ways: you directly, but a few requests recently that I've had too many guests maybe who are politically on the right, libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, but not hearing too much from the left.  And obviously, when this show comes out, there will be some people triggered because I've had left-leaning people on the show before and the YouTube comments, they go crazy, because people are like, "Why are you giving these psychopaths --"

Ben Arc: "Why are you giving them airtime?"

Peter McCormack: "-- airtime, why are you giving them a platform?"  For context, I was definitely somebody who would lean on the left as a youngster.  I would say Bitcoin pushed me more to the right, and now I'm just all over the place.  I don't really care what the issue is, I'm happy to discuss most issues.

Ben Arc: I think that's kind of the problem, is the fear that if you have a political viewpoint which is different to the prescribed one, which is currently part of the sort of cultural ideology of the outspoken of Bitcoin, which people are exposed to, then there's the fear that there's going to be kickback from it.  I personally, I work on a bunch of projects, and I've had to distance my political thoughts away from my projects, because I get muted and blocked on Twitter, and then if I'm promoting something I've done in one of our free and open-source projects which I'm working on, then it limits its reach, if I'm being blocked and muted by people on Twitter.

What I would say though is, quite early on in Bitcoin, when it was magic internet money, there was a very diverse range of political thoughts within Bitcoin, with the Bitcoin "community" and I'll trigger some people just calling it a community!

Peter McCormack: There is no community there!

Ben Arc: There's only individuals in a community!  Yeah, so at some point, maybe it was around 2016, 2017 -- because obviously, I mean right libertarians in the US, the Austrian Economics, the ancaps, those sorts, there's immense value in Bitcoin, of course, you can't deny that.  It makes markets more efficient, you're using the cryptographic laws of the universe to secure your private property.  I mean, how can it not appeal to that type of person politically, or with that political leaning.

But then to say that's where it ends and its scope is only limited to those groups of people, and other people with other political ideologies can't see value in Bitcoin, I think just limits its scope and reach.  So, Bitcoin itself, it wouldn't exist without the free and open-source software which it's built on, the copyleft free and open-source software, which is itself a result of private capital failing to meet the needs of certain software requirements.

As well as that, you have consensus, decentralised decision-making, and something like consensus has been explored in left circles, socialist circles, for hundreds of years.  And how to do consensus well has been explored for a very long time.  So, of course people on the left can also see value in Bitcoin.

I think the common enemy, which those on the left, those on the right, are targeting by using something like Bitcoin is state power, state control, and that will trigger the audience, because they'll say, "Well, this guy's associating himself as a socialist, and now he's saying that Bitcoin is good that Bitcoin is out of state control". 

If you look historically at socialism, the history of socialism, it wasn't until Lenin brought about the vanguard and thought that you could take the power of state to bring up our socialist society, that the side of socialism which is statist became more prominent.  Before that, it was always very anti-state.  Look at Rosa Luxemburg, she was killed by the state for being anti-state socialist. 

Then, if we go back to the first International Working Men's Club, which was where Marx and Bakunin fought it out, Marx was very much on the side of this idea of a worker revolution, where people working would seize control of production, and then you would bring about this socialist society.  And Bakunin said, "Well, no actually --" he was also a socialist, but socialist anarchist lefty; he said, "if you did that, you would bring about a red bureaucracy", and what was the phrase he used, "that people would be beaten with a people stick", which is what happened, and the USSR predicted it all, very insightfully.

But then, having these incredibly bad examples where people have tried to bring about socialist society, well I mean, have they tried to bring about a socialist society, or have they actually just empowered themselves?  Having these incredibly bad examples and then saying that that is socialism, it's like looking at capitalism, state capitalism, and saying, "This fails, because interpreting the whole of capitalism is state capitalism", and the capitalists will say, "That isn't capitalism.  That's not a true form of capitalism", and they've got a good argument in saying that.

Similarly, if you have something like state socialism, someone like me would say, "Well, that isn't socialism".  You can't tarnish a cooperative with the same brush as the thing which brought about things like Gulags and Mao in North Korea.  They're not the same.  Decentralising something like production, for example, production of software, production of real-life goods, that's not the same as giving state power so that they can beat people with a people stick.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Well, there's a lot to unpack here.  As I said, definitely since I discovered Bitcoin, I've gone more to the right and more towards libertarian ideas, and I'm very interested in them.  But I'm interested in listening to everyone, even if you're a socialist.  I want to hear from you and I want to hear your ideas, and I always wonder what in there is of any value we can get from you.

Ben Arc: Well again, libertarianism was always a leftist tradition, so it comes from Libertaire, which was a French political pamphlet, which was libertarian socialism; that's where libertarian socialism started.  And then, over time, I think that was co-opted by Milton Friedman or Ayn Rand or someone like that, who then started using the term, as well as the term "anarchist" as well, to describe their right-leaning political ideologies. 

But us on the left, we would say that although the intentions are there to empower the individual and the self, which are very worthwhile intentions, it often ends up becoming a form of kind of neo-liberalism, where you're actually just empowering a new master, a corporate overlord, or you're empowering state, because we do have state capitalism now, where it's been co-opted by big corporation and corporate interest.

So, I think the main thing is that people maybe on the right, they would say that the best form of production for general liberty for people has already been invented, already exists, and that's just capitalism, free-market capitalism, laissez-faire capitalism, just let it do its thing.  And then people on the left would say, well actually without regulation, capitalism can kind of run amok and is there anything we can do, is there any other forms of production which would give people greater liberty, a general greater liberty?

But then at this point, I think it's very important that I must note that there's a big difference in property and in different types of capital.  So, I'm talking about big corporate, faceless capital, the sort which brought about the East India Company.  And there's a great quote actually from the impeachment of the East India Company which is, "A corporation has neither a soul to be condemned, nor a body to be punished, therefore it does as it likes", and that was during the impeachment of the East India Company back in 1790. 

So, it's long been recognised that corporate capital is different from other forms of private capital.  So, when you look at Wealth of Nations and Adam Smith, he talks about this concept of the invisible hand.  So, the merchants of England, they would have some sort of vested interest in benefitting their community, and they wouldn't want to create horrible division of labour and turn man to beast, as Adam Smith said, because they would feel some connection to England.

But then, with multinational corporations, that invisible hand which guides private capital so it doesn't screw people over too much, then just gets eroded away.  And I do think that corporations, when they get to a certain size, could be replaced by some sort of utility commons, and that's the sort of thing which I'm interested in exploring.  I mean, that's an ideological, "Where could production go in the future?" kind of concept.  But if you're just talking about Bitcoin, I would say that Bitcoin is a commons, it's the monetary commons, a value transfer commons.

What is a commons?  So, a commons is a shared resource which people can use, and then it's within their interest to keep that resource going and nurture that resource and help it grow; and that's what Bitcoin is.  And if any private interest tried to co-opt Bitcoin, like Roger Ver did, bitcoiners attack it because they realise that that's a centralising point of failure that we don't want, a corporate interest to take control of Bitcoin, the Network; we want it to be a commons, we want it to be publicly assessable, freedom of association.

Then, I'll go back to Marx and Marx's summarisation of communism.  Full communism was each to their own need, each to their own ability, so the idea being that whatever you need, you can use the system, it's fine, it's free, and then you contribute where and which you can.  That's kind of the utopian, ideological way communism would end up in the future.  But I think just that phrase itself is very much like Bitcoin; it's each to your need, use the system, it's fine, use it, make use of it.

Then after a while, you feel like you need to contribute back and you have this urge to help build and make the system better.  And some people will say that's just for individual interest, and that's fine if that's what you want to think.  But also, we can't hide the fact that there is like an egalitarian aspect to it, where you actually want to help other people who want to access that system and use that system to give them more liberty and freedom.

Peter McCormack: You've given me a lot to unpack here, there's a lot to get through.  Okay, Ben, so when I first discovered Bitcoin, somebody introduced the Silk Road to me and I was like, "This is cool, this is money I can use to buy drugs on the internet; badass", and obviously I discovered censorship resistance, and that was cool.  And it wasn't until years later, where I started to dive into the more political side of it, but at the same time people were saying to me, "Bitcoin's apolitical.  It doesn't matter who you are, Bitcoin is for anyone".

Ben Arc: Fantastic.

Peter McCormack: But the voices of the political side of Bitcoin have been growing, and there is definitely a louder voice for libertarians, there's a louder voice on the right.  The voice on the left seems to get shot down and a lot of the conversations that I've had usually come privately, because people don't want to be shouted at holding their certain views.

Ben Arc: Oh, 100%.

Peter McCormack: So, I think there's a lot to unpack here, and what I'm interested in doing is speaking to as many people as possible, because what I care about is how does society coordinate itself.  I get called a statist cuck all the time, I'm a reluctant statist, but I do believe democracy is the best thing we have right now.

Ben Arc: Absolutely, I agree with you completely.  This attack on democracy, I think where in history have you had peaceful transitions of power where it hasn't ended up in war and suffering, and society being pulled back decades or hundreds of years?  Democracy is the best thing we have, and currently representative democracy is the best thing we have.

Again, it's a bit like the left attacking capitalism by looking at state capitalism, or the right attacking socialism by looking at state socialism.  You're looking at representative democracy and you're saying, "All democracy is a failure and it's terrible and it's not fit for purpose".  It's like, "Hold on here, democracy is an umbrella term, there's lots of different types of democracy.  There's direct democracy, there's E-democracy, there's a whole different range of democracies.  Go and look at the democracy Wikipedia and then pick a democracy which you think is better".

Yes, the way in which we vote for things could be better.  I mean, we have all this incredible technology now which allows us to access the internet through a device in our pockets which we have on us at all times.  We have better tooling now for creating better forms of democracy.  It's just a case of all those legacy institutions having to catch up with the technology, which has just grown so fast and so exponentially. 

But tooling is one of the most interesting parts of all of this technological advancement as you look at democracy itself.  That was brought about or made possible by the printing press, because people could then have access to information, they could read political pamphlets.  And then more people had access to education and reading.  But before the right tooling, something like democracy would fire up every now and then.  In Ancient Greece, you had democracy.  You had these little pockets in history where democracy would flare up.

But then if anyone looked at it, they'd go, "Well, that practically isn't going to work.  Something like feudalism is much better, it makes much more sense [or] slavery makes much more sense for society to be able to produce things".  And then, we had democracy, we had the tooling in order to make democracy possible.  And I'm saying that when you have this technological revolution, you have people accessing the internet and accessing all these suites of tools, then different forms of prediction do become possible, and different forms of democracy do become possible, and society will get better. 

You don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, get rid of democracy altogether and then return to a king and a queen because democracy failed.  It's like, "No, wait there, we can just improve the buggy system which exists right now".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and one of the interesting things about this is, rather than wanting the big red button to destroy democracy and we all become sovereign independent individuals with private arrangements and insurances to back everything up, which I think on paper sells very well.  I think on paper, I think libertarians define the way society should operate in probably one of the best ways possible.  I just don't have the belief it would be that way.

What I like about democracy is that there is always this push and pull from the left to the right.  Here in the UK at the moment, we have a Conservative government and let's be quite frank, they've done a terrible fucking job.  They've done a terrible job and now we're seeing this push to the left.  That push and pull to the left I think creates some balance.  What I wish is I wish the libertarians would engage more in politics to have that push and pull from the sides of the state.  So, we have the push and the pull from the left and the right, which is super-helpful, but the state always grows, it's always increasing in size.

One of the things that Erik Voorhees said to me a long time ago that really stuck with me, he said, "I don't want to get rid of the state now".  I mean, he does, but he said, "I'd like to start simpler.  Let's just say, let's make government smaller.  Let's start with 5%, even 1%.  Let's just make the state smaller", and I would like that idea of some form of representative democracy which allows the libertarians have an influence to make the state smaller.

Now, some libertarians do engage in politics and some don't, and that's a conflict with libertarians, I understand that.  But I do like that idea, I do like the push and the pull.  I accept every criticism of democracy that's pretty much out there; it is shit.

Ben Arc: Yeah, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: But I think a society without it could be much worse.  I mean, look at the places in the world where you don't have functioning democracies.  They're usually places which have worse access to healthcare, they usually have more depravation, they usually have lower standards of education; not everywhere.  I know some people will point to some authoritarian places, but generally speaking.  And I do like some of the parts of the democracy we have, the democratic process we have in the UK, but I also like some of the way -- I like the structure of the US system, the state-based system.  I think there's lots of bits and pieces we like.

Ben Arc: I think checks and balances on power are always good, but in any healthy democratic system --

Peter McCormack: That's what Bitcoin does.

Ben Arc: -- they've realised that they need lots of checks and balances.  It could be anything.  Christ, we have the Queen, but it could be some bloke down the street, it could be a check on power.  Checks and balances on power are very healthy and very good.  I agree completely that obviously it's not perfect and it's very much broken, and it often empowers the wrong people and can be easily co-opted.  But like you say, to reduce state, I think the best way to reduce state is Bitcoin.  You take the power and money production away from state and then suddenly, that power, you've chopped off their arms.  Their power is very limited, what they can actually do.

Peter McCormack: And do you know what, Ben, the timing is right for this, because if you look back at the history of governments, they budget in running a surplus and a deficit.  We have these cyclical economic times.  Sometimes there's a surplus, sometimes there's a budget.  For some reason, whatever it is, maybe it's due to globalisation, maybe it's due to technology, but we're now at a stage where governments don't run a surplus, and their deficit just gets bigger, and the money printer's got out of hand. 

It's at that point where in the US, when they formed the United States, they realised we had to separate church and state.  We're now at that point of separating money and state, because the money printer goes brrr, whatever happens, it goes brrr, and we've seen the impact that that's having on people.  If we have Bitcoin as a check and balance, that to me is a way of improving democracy, rather than destroying it.

Ben Arc: You see, I think it would be more complicated than that.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Ben Arc: I can't imagine a Bitcoin-based world.  Maybe eventually, we'll get to a Bitcoin-based world.  But I think in the meantime, look at El Salvador, for example.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, bear with me, I'm not saying I want Bitcoin to replace fiat currency now, I see it as we have both.  Fiat currency is our day-to-day, is our spend, is our liquid cash.  But Bitcoin is my savings account.

Ben Arc: Your easy online savings technology.  But here's the question: rather than just focus on the Bitcoin stuff, could we in fact make fiat better?  Could fiat be something which is like a sidechain off Bitcoin, pegged to Bitcoin, and it's federated, so it isn't within the control of just a small handful of people in the Bank of England; could we make fiat better?  I think we probably could.  And I think again, it would make society better and would limit governments' power.

So, if you think in El Salvador, for example, they're trying to use Bitcoin and it's great for paying for your coffee and McDonald's, it's fast, the digital payments technology is amazing.  Someone, some fruit seller can sell some fruit on the street, they can have access to a digital currency, which they can then go and spend in a big corporation, which they were never able to do; they didn't have a bank account.  A huge percentage of El Salvadoreans don't have bank accounts, so they didn't have access to digital payments.  Now they have access to digital payments.

However, if you're on a surplus income and then Elon Musk tweets some crap out and then Bitcoin halves in price, and then you've gone from $200 in your monthly budget to $100, that's a huge problem and it's a bug in the system.  But I do think, so if you look at Liquid, I know that we were talking before off air, well I won't --

Peter McCormack: You can say it.

Ben Arc: Okay, I can say it.  You were talking about the idea of tokenising your football club.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, let me put some context, because people --

Ben Arc: Yeah, yeah, not in a shitcoin, Ethereum way!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, let me put some context just so people don't think, "Oh, God, he's going to do a shitcoin"! 

Ben Arc: A liquid asset!

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, one of the things I was explaining to Ben before we started is that I would like to give the opportunity for fans to own part of the football club, and globally there are people around the world who own Bitcoin who might want to own part of the football club.  One of the ideas is that you could tokenise the equity, but you tokenise it so it's on Liquid, you tokenise it so it's actual security. 

So, rather than some shitcoin that has no claim to anything, this is actually a claim to part-ownership of the equity of the club, that would be issued on Liquid, traded on something like the Bitfinex exchange, and I haven't made the decision, because I even think some of those people have got questions.  I only want to do it if it's a way of making you have a claim to ownership of the equity of the club, therefore a claim to ownership of the upside.

Ben Arc: And from speaking to you as well, it very much seems like you're in the R&D phase, where you're trying to find the best solution for that, and for the fans of the football club, it would be absolutely amazing for them as a birthday/Christmas gift, or whatever, to be able to buy this thing, because then it actually gives them like a share in the club.  It's a really interesting concept and a great use case for Liquid.

But going back to Liquid, it's possible, the technology exists, that El Salvador could have some sort of stablecoin, the El Salvadorean dollar pegged to some fiat currencies, or some asset basket, whatever.  They could have a stablecoin, but it could utilise, if it's built on something like Liquid, it could utilise the Lightning network. 

So, for the El Salvadoreans in their wallet, they just have Bitcoin and then they have the El Salvadorean dollar.  The El Salvadorean dollar exists on top of Bitcoin, it's completely stable, or pegged to something which is relatively stable, but they will use it in the exact same way.  They'll scan a Lightning invoice and they'll pay a Lightning invoice, and it will be used in the same way.

The technology exists to build that right now.  Some very capable people in somewhere like Blockstream could make that, and I do hope that the El Salvadorean Government is in talks about making something, because it's desperately what they need.  The Bitcoin experiment is great, but the price fluctuation sucks.  It makes it unusable as actual money.

If you think about the Central Bank of China, if you think about the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, Bank of England by the way, not Bank of Britain, which it should be, Bank of England, and then if you think about the Fed as well, they're all exploring digitally native currencies, because they understand the value of digital native currencies and sending microtransactions through a network.

All these countries which don't have central banks, are they not going to look at the toolset which exists to build these things in a decentralised way?  I think they are.  What are they going to do?  Are they going to build a central bank and then that central bank is going to try and build a digitally native currency in a decentralised way?  No, they're going to make use of these decentralised technologies.

As bitcoiners and maximalist bitcoiners who want this idea of a whole Bitcoin standard, where the world runs on Bitcoin, I think we can get there, but I think the way in which we get there is by improving these fiat currencies, using these decentralised technologies, but basing them on top of Bitcoin and then maybe having some fancy-schmancy Bitcoin vault or something with arbitrage to be able to keep -- I don't know.  There's all sorts of interesting technologies you can do in order to roll these things out.  If you look in the UK, we had the Bristol pound.  That was incredibly popular.  Part of the reason it was incredibly popular is because people like a local currency.  They just feel some kind of association with it, because they're from Bristol. 

If, for example, Wales were to create a Welsh pound, and there are some people within the Welsh Nationalist Movement who want to build something like this, like a stable currency which is so censorship resistant that the Bank of England or Britain couldn't stamp down on it; people could still use it in a censorship resistant way, but it would be stable and it would be federated and the control would rest in the hands of the Welsh people, the control would rest in the hands of the El Salvadorean people.  I think that's the direction in which it will probably go.

Peter McCormack: Does Wales have its own banknotes, like Scotland and Northern Ireland?

Ben Arc: No, it doesn't.

Peter McCormack: It's a bit unfair.

Ben Arc: It is a bit unfair, isn't it?  I'll bring it up in our next meeting.

Peter McCormack: Although it's fucking annoying when you get like a Scottish £20 note --

Ben Arc: And then no one will accept it!

Peter McCormack: -- and then no one accepts it.

Ben Arc: You get to do your little, "This is legal tender" rant, don't you?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's legal tender, because it's worth £19!

Ben Arc: It's one of my favourite generic rants you can have at people!

Peter McCormack: Well, it's like my kids always gets -- my mum, bless her, actually it's five years yesterday that she died.  Big shout to my mum, because she's the reason I do this.

Ben Arc: Oh, yeah, I heard that story.  You were trying to get medical treatment for her?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I was getting her cannabis oil, because she was dying from cancer, and we wanted to get it to treat her.  We got it too late, but that was…

Ben Arc: That's incredible, isn't it, cannabis oil, which is something that's so abundant and should be easy to access?

Peter McCormack: Fucking banned.  Yeah, so my dad was, "Pete, how are we going to do this?"  I was like, "Oh, you remember I used to buy cocaine on the internet?  Well, it's the same thing".  So, we bought the Bitcoin and then sadly, mum passed.  But yeah, that was five years ago yesterday, so that's amazing, it's gone so quick.  But thanks, mum!  But she used to give my kids their Christmas presents or their birthday presents, and it was always Northern Irish £20 notes.

Ben Arc: Oh, that's cool.

Peter McCormack: Then the kids were like, "Dad, I don't want this, can you give me --", so I'd have to swap then, and then I'd go and people wouldn't accept it, or they'd give you that weird fucking look.

Ben Arc: I used to love getting the Scottish banknotes, because you get the £1 notes, and you'd feel like you'd have a big wedge of money.

Peter McCormack: How old are you?

Ben Arc: Nearing 40.

Peter McCormack: Right, so I'm 43, so you remember the pound note?

Ben Arc: In Scotland, yeah.  Have they actually got rid of that?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, there's no pound note any more.

Ben Arc: Oh, man, that was so much fun.

Peter McCormack: We haven't had pound notes for years.  Most of that was Scotland, but we don't have it here.  Are you old enough to remember the halfpenny?

Ben Arc: Maybe.  I'm old enough to remember finding them in the house, under sofas and things.  It would be like, "What is this?"

Peter McCormack: So, when I was about five, we used to go swimming at the local pool, and you know the penny sweets? 

Ben Arc: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: They used to have the ones that were halfpenny, so we used to have the halfpenny coin.  I mean, we're at that stage now, with certain places, I think it's in Canada, I think it's Canada, they've got rid of everything under 5 cents, and they just round it, because it costs more than a penny to make a penny or something.

Ben Arc: Well, this is another interesting topic we should probably go into.  It's just that physical currency is being used less and less, but then there are still services that are reliant upon physical currency, such as the sweet machine and the arcade machine.

Peter McCormack: Or, you're replacing those with cards.

Ben Arc: Well, yeah, but you can't go and buy some sweets in a sweet machine with a card.  You can, but then you have to have this thing which is online all the time, which is always being connected to the internet.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what I think one of the biggest losses will be for removing physical currency is?

Ben Arc: Buskers.

Peter McCormack: Buskers and beggars.

Ben Arc: Beggars and buskers.  I know, I feel terrible.  Every time you walk past, you're like, "Have you got a card machine?"

Peter McCormack: Well, I always carry cash.

Ben Arc: I need to start doing that, yeah, I need to start doing that.

Peter McCormack: I just keep a small amount, a bit like Bitcoin cold storage, you have a small amount of Lightning on your phone, I always have about £100 in the house so I've always got cash, just for the times when you want cash, you want to give someone cash.  Plus, you don't want to be tracked on everything.

Ben Arc: No.  But I think again, this is why all these big central banks are exploring digitally native currencies, they understand you need cashlike functions for a digital currency, and we can't be using this legacy Visa Network system, it's just unfit for purpose in the modern age.  So, yeah, I mean when it happens, I'll probably use the digital pound.  But I do hope, and I think it's a good way as well for countries which are under something like USD hegemony, where you're empowering…

Actually Bukele had a really good point on this about the dollar in particular, which was if they do some sort of fiscal stimulus, where they can create some quantitative using, and then they create some bolster industry or something within the US, they have the benefits of that, they have the new motorway, they have the new dam, whatever.  But then all these countries which are reliant upon their currency, they don't see any of those benefits.

Peter McCormack: It was Jack Mallers who said to me, when we were in El Salvador, he said, "When they're issuing stimulus cheques, none of those are reaching El Salvador".

Ben Arc: No, exactly, none of them are reaching El Salvador, and it's a really interesting point.  So, it's well within their interest to incentivise these countries, particularly with choosing other countries' currencies, they're incentivised to wiggle out of it and build their own currencies.  And if it's easy enough to do, I think it will happen, and that will be the next step in Bitcoin domination.

Peter McCormack: Well, I can't let you off the hook that quickly on the political stuff, because it all got a bit more --

Ben Arc: Yeah, that was interesting, but let's go back to the political stuff.  So, you said something about, you don't want an overnight revolution.  I agree with you completely, I think it's terrible, an overnight revolution.  And there was a problem, particularly on the left side, where they had this historical materialism, so they looked how and which society changes and they were looking at something like the French Revolution, and it was bloody and it was sudden. 

Then you had this society change, although it didn't change for very long, you had Napoleon take control, or whatever, but anyway you have society change in these big bloodbaths.  And there was always this assumption that that's how society would go from a capitalist for-profit production system to something like a socialist, full socialist system, is it would be something which was bullying.

Then it's like, "Well, let's bring about that bloody event, let's create that overnight revolution", and Gramsci, who was the leader of the Italian Communist Party, he believed in something called "a slow revolution".  He had this thing called, oh, what was it called?  "Cultural hegemony", which is basically common sense, like what's the common sense of the age.  Then, you've always got to challenge the common sense of the age.

So, when slavery existed, it's like, "Well, it's okay to do slavery, because they're not real people, they're worth half a person", or something, and that was the common sense of the age when child labour existed, where it was fine for that five-year-old to climb up that chimney, because they need to be able to provide for their family or something, and that's the common sense.  Now we look back at those things and we think that's horrible, and we understand that they're bad things.

Similarly, when you look at working environments, like worker rights and whether people are exploited in workplaces, obviously some people have incredibly fulfilling jobs, but a lot of people are exploited in the workplace.

Peter McCormack: Well, we can talk about that, because I was listening to a podcast about Amazon on the way here, which really struck a chord with me, in how Amazon operates its business.

Ben Arc: Where all the employees are really happy!

Peter McCormack: Well, they pretend that, but they have phones on them that track them if they don't pick something up at a certain speed, a certain time, and then they could be fired, and the delivery drivers are on such tight timescales that they're basically pissing in bottles to get to the next thing.

Ben Arc: Well, this is what Adam Smith talked about in Wealth of Nations, the division of labour.  So, if you make the workplace efficient, which is -- so, the overarching problem with for-profit private capital is that eventually when your capital can only grow so far, you need to start putting down the pressure on workers.  So, you need to reduce their wages, you need to increase their efficiency and how much they can produce in the period in which they're employed for in order to increase your profits.  That's hard to do, going back to before about different forms of capital, and if you've got a big corporation, it's easier to incorporate, because you're disconnected from everything, aren't you?

In a small- to medium-sized enterprise, which I love, by the way; I love the local coffee shop and the entrepreneur who has a bunch of businesses in his local community, and he has a connection with the people, the employees who work there.  He understands that one of them may have a kid going off to university and he can slip them some more hours and increase his wage a little.  So, there's this human bond and human connection within that working environment, and that form of private capital, which is great.  All too often, that gets stamped out by the more efficient private capital, and this is the problem with monopoly and division of labour.

But that then becomes -- this was interesting, as I listening to your Austin Hill podcast.

Peter McCormack: How fucking good is Austin Hill?

Ben Arc: He's great, isn't he?

Peter McCormack: Isn't he amazing?

Ben Arc: But he was talking about the singularity, and this is another contradiction.  First, you have all this downward pressure on workers and wages as well, so eventually people are going to struggle to buy the things you're producing, so he talked about that singularity, which I think he said was 2040, it's going to happen.

Peter McCormack: Is the singularity where Amazon runs everything?

Ben Arc: Well, it can't, because there's no for profit.  You're not employing anyone, the robots literally do everything.  So, the robots are the teachers, the doctors, the Amazon driver, the farmer, all human beings, human labour, can be replaced by much more efficient robots.  And this is what I quite like about Bitcoin, is that bitcoiners are quite good at being futurists and they understand how technology will advance, and they appreciate something like robots doing pretty much everything which humans can do, better, will probably happen and it will probably happen quite soon.

Austin Hill, he mentioned this in your podcast.  And then it's the case of, how will the robots incentivise to make the things, to pick the foods; why are they going to exist?  Who's going to own them, because Amazon can't exist?  There's no for-profit function there.  Are they going to be controlled by state?  I don't think that's going to happen.  I think the best scenario, because I was thinking about this listening to your Austin Hill thing; the best scenario in that circumstance would be that they're owned as productive commons, because this is a moment where humans have ultimate abundance.

Peter McCormack: Explain productive commons.

Ben Arc: So, when you first had property rights, in something like the Magna Carta, there was also the Charter of the Forest which was drawn up, which was that the people of England could access the forest and they could forage, and they were very good actually with those rights at maintaining that commons, because it was within their interest.  If someone went in and started chopping down loads of trees and then destroying the natural harvest which exists within the forest, then the rest of the community would attack them for it, because it would mean that they couldn't draw as much from foraging from the forest.  And that's a commons, okay.  My argument would be that Bitcoin is in fact a commons.  If you start attacking it, then the users are going to attack you for attacking it.

Peter McCormack: That's fair.

Ben Arc: Interestingly enough actually, The Charter of the Forest, that was encapsulated in the Robin Hood mythology, by the way, "Steal from the rich to give to the poor", and all that sort of stuff.  Where was I going?  Oh, yeah, Charter of the Forest, commons, what were we talking about with the commons?  Oh, yeah, so that's the idea, isn't it?

So, I actually think that obviously, a lot of bitcoiners refuse to admit that there is any self-climate problem, and that human access -- they think that there's an unlimited amount of resources on the planet, and we can't damage the planet by producing too much stuff.  I'm kind of on the other side of the argument.

Peter McCormack: I'm with you on that one.

Ben Arc: We can damage the planet and we are screwing the planet; it's quite scary.  We need to have a better ecological relationship with the planet.  And I actually think that the robots being able to do everything, being able to harvest, for example, will be a good thing.  So, if you look at farming, for example now, it's two-dimensional.  You have a field, you've got to get a plough and you plough through it and you get all the corn or wheat, or whatever, from the field.

But the actual most efficient yield-wise, when it comes to farming, is something like permaculture, where you have a forest and you have things growing on the floor, you have things growing in the tree, in the bush, and you have three-dimensional farming and you have much greater yield per square metre.  The only problem is, with that type of farming, it's incredibly hard to harvest.  Whereas, if you have these little bots which can fly around harvesting, it makes sense to reforest the planet.

So, I do think that when you get to that point, instead of having two-dimensional farming, suddenly all these fields will be filled with forest and we'll reforest.  Trees are the best technology to be able to lock up carbon, which there's too much of in the atmosphere.

Peter McCormack: We're going on tangents here.  I don't mind discussing the climate; I want to get back to Amazon and the commons.

Ben Arc: Yes, so this was kind of my point.

Peter McCormack: Because I think I'm going to disagree with you here.

Ben Arc: This was kind of my point was, I mean, who owns the robots? 

Peter McCormack: Well, Amazon owns the robots.

Ben Arc: Well, how are they going to run the robots, because there's no one to sell anything to, because nobody works anywhere, because no one works.

Peter McCormack: Oh, so you're going so far down the line?

Ben Arc: I mean, is that so far down the line, or do you think that humans will get to a point where everything we can do could be replace by technology, more or less?

Peter McCormack: Yes and no.  I don't think so, and probably not in my lifetime, but I certainly see the trajectory.  I see the trajectory of maybe lorry drivers being replace by autonomous lorries, but for a period of time, you're going to have to have a driver in the autonomous lorry, checking that it doesn't go and crash into a bunch of schoolchildren.  And we're going to have incidents where shit like that happens, and people question it.

So, the trajectory's there, but I'm interested in where we are right now.  Because, my issue with Amazon which, I've got so many things I want to talk about with Amazon, but my issue with Amazon is that they're treating employees like shit, their only goal is to make money, and they're destroying businesses.  I mean, our High Street in Bedford is dead, our Waterstones doesn't exist anymore, and I used to like taking my kids there, and we would browse the books and buy a couple of books.  That experience is dead.

Ben Arc: But we destroyed it though, didn't we, as consumers?

Peter McCormack: We have and --

Ben Arc: I buy things from Amazon, you buy things, everyone buys things from Amazon.

Peter McCormack: -- I am part of the problem.  But you know what I want someone to do, I want some to fork Amazon and create NotAmazon.com, give every company the access to the platform to list their products, but you can order from them and you can compare the price and say, "If you buy from Amazon, it's X".  Okay, I'm going to pay £2 more from this, but the delivery driver is not going to have to piss in a bottle.

Ben Arc: I've got an interesting thought experiment for you.  So, you have Amazon which exists right now.  And then we create, using all this crazy decentralised technology, okay.  We realise that Jeff Bezos is a bug leeching --

Peter McCormack: He's a cunt, let's be honest.

Ben Arc: He's leeching a hell of a lot of value out of that system.  So, I mean you can't say that a more efficient system can exist, can't exist.  You get rid of Jeff Bezos and then reinvest that money back into Amazon; there we are, it's a better system.  So, you have Amazon and you have decentralisedamazon.com

Peter McCormack: NotAmazon.com.

Ben Arc: Yeah, well NotAmazon.com.  I mean, I'm going to go a step further.  I'm going to say the products on both of these pages, or both of these websites, they're exactly the same, they cost exactly the same.

Peter McCormack: Same suppliers.

Ben Arc: Doesn't even matter.  They're exactly the same product.  You go on both, and this is a hypothetical thought experiment, okay, and it's for the listeners as well, and they have to be honest with themselves, okay. 

Now, you have a choice.  Are you going to go to the Amazon, where you know people have the beep thing, and this is utopian, hypothetical, could probably never exist; or, do you go to the decentralised Amazon, where the producers get more or less 99.9% of the value and then 0.01% goes towards bounties for the decentralised Amazon software, or something?  So, instead of the people working in the regular, normal Amazon getting 70% of the value of their labour and 30% going to Jeff Bezos, the people working with the cooperative, decentralised NotAmazon, whatever it is, or maybe it's just like a direct marketplace, kind of like an eBay-type thing, but it's really good.  If you've got the exact same products, they cost the exact same amount, as a human being, which one are you going to go to?

Peter McCormack: Well, it's kind of obvious.

Ben Arc: It's an obvious answer now.

Peter McCormack: But you're not going to get there.  The efficiency will come from the centralised Amazon.  You always will get a better service in terms of packing, picking, delivery from that.  The decentralised one, I think the way the decentralised one wins is that you know more is going to the producer, you know the people delivering it aren't pissing in bottles, you know people aren't getting sacked by a beeper.  By the way, if people want to listen to this one that I listened to, it was Rogan interviewing, I can't remember the names, the two people who left for Hill; Saagar and -- anyway, they've set their own podcast up.  This is what they were talking about, I was listening to that on the way up.

But yeah, it's not even that, Ben.  Right now, I want someone to make NotAmazon, which is just a listing.  Do you know what I'm going to do?  From this show, as a little experiment, what's the date?

Ben Arc: I mean, I didn't want to talk about the technology stuff, but I can talk to you about Diagon Alley, which is basically what you're saying.

Peter McCormack: What's the date today, what's the date?

Ben Arc: It's the 13th.

Peter McCormack: Interesting, okay.  I'm going to go for a month without Amazon, and I'm going to document my experience, just see what it's like, because I've probably got an average of a package a day coming, because of equipment.  I'm going to do a month without it and go through the experience, see what it's like, because I want to get away from Amazon.

Ben Arc: Do you think -- so you say that it's never going to happen, that a hierarchical, feudalist, corporate structure is far more efficient than something of a decentralised nature when it comes to producing things?  Again, it depends on tooling, in my opinion.  But do you think that it's worth exploring building something, like a decentralised Amazon?

Peter McCormack: Yes, absolutely.

Ben Arc: Even if you know that it's probably not going to work?  So, for any of the listeners who are still hanging on, going back to the concept of something like socialism being a collection of anti-state socialists, the state socialists, the libertarian socialists, etc, so socialism itself; if you just define socialism, what it is, "It's advocating that the means of production, distribution and exchange be owned or regulated by the community as a whole", just advocating. 

So, it's literally just saying, "I think that the decentralised Amazon is better and I would like to try and build that thing, because I think it would be better for human beings, because they have some ownership of the company, they have more value to take home, because they have the exploitative wage, downward pressure on wages". 

Even though that may be a complete impossibility, I mean people said the same things about getting rid of slavery, by the way, just to put into context.  Going back to that idea of Gramsci and the cultural hegemony of the time and the common sense of the time, slavery was the most efficient way to produce things.  Now we understand it's not, it's more efficient if you have workers who are employed and they have families and they have homes and they can have private property.

Peter McCormack: That's why Amazon needs unions.

Ben Arc: Maybe.  I mean, the unions, they can only go so far and they often get caught out.  I'm a big union person, I'm still a member of my teaching union from when I was a teacher, and I'm not a teacher anymore.  So, I very much like unions.  I think there needs to be upward pressure on that downward pressure which comes down, and one of those mechanisms, one of the best mechanisms for that is things like unions currently.

But I do think that in a free market, if you have a completely free market, what's to stop -- I mean, again, like a laissez-faire free-market capitalist, they'll have to accept this as part of the doctrine, that a cooperative could join that free market and could, potentially, theoretically, hypothetically, in a utopian world, outcompete the private capital.  Then if it does, is that worth advocating?  Is that worth exploring, pushing, helping develop, nurturing?

It goes back to just that natural innate ability humans have to be able to empathise with other human beings, that the human beings working in decentralised Amazon are much happier than the human beings working in the centralised Amazon.  And although decentralised Amazon may be impossible, it's still worth advocating for and actually building towards, and that's a socialist ideology right there.

Peter McCormack: But I think you can build a better centralised Amazon.  A great example, everyone's pissed off with YouTube at the moment, they're censoring the fuck out of people at the moment, might even happen with this show!  We've seen people who are being deplatformed, some are getting it back, some not.  Brett Weinstein lost his channel, Pomp lost his for a day, Bitcoin Magazine the other day.  There's the fear that you might lose that channel.  Matt Odell's created BitcoinTV.

Ben Arc: Very good.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, in preparation for that, and you know what, that's centralised, but it's an opt out.  But it is centralised to an extent.  It's run by that team the run BitcoinTV and I'm cool with that.  I would be cool with somebody coming out and saying, "I'm going to build a centralised NotAmazon, and everybody can list their products, this is the way we operate, and maybe centralised NotAmazon starts centralised and has a roadmap to become decentralised.  I don't know all the answers.  I think some things are hard to build decentralised, and I don't mind an incentive structure for someone to build a better Amazon, an ethical Amazon. 

I ordered some things yesterday, it's funny as fuck.  Right in this conversation, look, I just got a fucking text message from Amazon, "Delivered your package"!  How fucking -- because I ordered a bunch of things for my football club, some balls and bibs and shit, and I just got it on Amazon, because that's the way you do it, it's just easy, it's done, it comes the next day.  But if NotAmazon existed, I want to see the comparison. 

You order on Amazon and you order on NotAmazon, this is the delivery time of both, this is the cost.  It might be like, "It's going to be another day and you're going to pay £2 more, but this is what the drivers are paid, these drivers are not under pressure, people aren't being sacked".  I think that marginal increase in cost, I'm always going to be happy to pay that not to service a basically scumbag, slave system.

Ben Arc: Let's think about the tooling.  I mean a big disclaimer on all of my political views, they've got no association with any of the free and open-source projects I work on.  I mean, this is what's great about some of the projects which I'm working on, in that we have very diverse political opinions, and some of them are completely the opposite side of the political spectrum to me and we still get on great and we still create great, cool software.  So, one of the things we became excited about in LNbits was payment splitting.

Peter McCormack: Explain LNbits to people.

Ben Arc: LNbits is basically like a WordPress for your Lightning node.  So, if you've got a Lightning node, you want it to serve different purposes.  If you're a content creator, you might want it to be able to throw up a QR code on your YouTube video, for example, or whatever.  So, you have all these different extensions, and you can extend LNbits in any direction you want to extend it in.  If you're a merchant, then you can have a point of sale, or product management, or some sort of front-facing shop.  So, you have all these different extensions.

So, if you think about what was successful about WordPress is it's a very simple blogging website development tool.  You install it and then you build it in the direction you want to build it in and you can customise it, and LNbits is essentially that.  It's a Lightning wallet account system which sits on top of your node, but you have all these extensions that you can develop in any which way you want.

So, one of the extensions which was created by fiatjaf was for cryptograffiti, he did a set at the San Francisco old Fed thing, I think it was, the old Federal Reserve, a DJ set during the lockdown COVID stuff.  One of the cool things about it, so you put an LNURL Pay on the screen, so basically a static QR code, you can use Lightning to pay.

Now, if you paid enough, you would then get as a receipt, a download link for the song which he's playing.  But one of the functions in the software, which actually fiatjaf and cryptograffiti didn't immediately pick up on as being super-cool, but people in the LNbits chat really liked, is the fact that when you made a payment, 10% went to the DJ, 90% went to the producer.  So, at point of sale, the payment was split.  So, we all became excited about that, and now we've created a dedicated split payments extension.  So you can say, "When money comes into this wallet, I want it to go X amount to this wallet, etc". 

So, then you think about how that could in fact, on MicroVentures, like we're going to go sell coffee on the street, okay.  I'm going to be working making the coffees, you're going to be front of house.  We're going to have some other people working there, they're going to be this and that.  Then we decide how much, at point of sale, how much percentage do we each get; who's working the hardest; who's got the most responsibility?

Peter McCormack: How do you figure out who's working the hardest?  Do you have phones to track how long you take to make a coffee!

Ben Arc: Well, no, this is a very interesting question.  So you have that, again hypothetically, you have that small-scale production of coffee.  Now you think, "Well, maybe if I buy a laptop in a shop, at point of sale then maybe X% could go to distribution, X% could to sales, X% could go to manufacturing", and then when it hits those wallets, it could split again.  And we could do this, because we have microtransactions; this is one of the cool things about microtransactions.

So, the cleaner in the factory, on the factory floor, looks at their wallet and they're getting these sats just rolling in.  Sometimes, the sats start to slow down, they start to get less sats, and they're like, "Well, why is that?" and there starts to be some discussion on the shop floor, "Why am I getting less sats now?"  "Because we just made the percentage smaller for sales, because distribution needed more money for this, that and the other".  And then the people on the shop floor are, "Actually, we need more sales to be able to sell", and it becomes this discussion.

When you talk about the failure of something like DAOs, people aren't incentivised to discuss and to actively engage and vote on decision-making; whereas, if it actively affects the amount of sats they can see pouring into their wallet, I think that kind of changes.  This is utopian science fiction.

Now, when it comes to tax collection, so Bitcoin makes tax collection infinitely harder.  One of the best forms of tax collection, and it's also quite fair, I think as well, is VAT, Value Added Tax, which people buy loads of stuff, so they pay more tax.  If we've got payment splitting and if we have ultimate privacy of course, as users, and this is my utopia, and shrunken Bitcoin-dominated government has ultimate transparency, because we have their read keys and we have their public keys, we can see where all the money's going, when I pay for that coffee, my 20% tax or my 10% tax can go directly at point of sale to government.  So now, that coffee shop doesn't have to worry about doing tax returns and stuff.

Maybe you could extend that further.  Maybe my wallet, I can say -- this is a very progressive, Bitcoin-shrunken government now; maybe I can say, "I want 50% to go to education, 40% to go to healthcare, 5% to go to the roads, 5% to go to military", and then at point of sale, I'm making a democratic decision.  I'm saying, "This is where I want my tax money to go.  I'm spending this money, I'm investing this money in my government".

Peter McCormack: Is it voluntary, or do you have to spend a certain amount?

Ben Arc: Oh, you have to.  So basically, if you're a government and you're trying to tax businesses, physical real-world brick-and-mortar businesses, and this is in a Bitcoin world where people are using Lightning Network and Bitcoin, it's very easy to hide money, one of the best ways to tax people is to say, "Look, you've got to have this point of sale, and at point of sale, tax has to come to us; X% has to come to us".  This is in the medium term, okay, this is far away from our robot utopia, or whatever.

So, what I'm saying is, when you have different tooling, like we have payment splitting, microtransaction payment splitting, then different ways of money flowing through the system, we don't need the money managers which you would have.  So now you're talking about how centralised, feudal Amazon will always outcompete decentralised Amazon.  Centralised, feudal Amazon, part of their power is just like state; part of their power is in the money management.

If you could take away the money management, and then if you could somehow use this new tooling, it's that thing where, because you're breaking new ground and you're working with tools which haven't existed before, you've got to think of use cases for them which aren't immediately apparent, which is very hard to do.  It becomes obvious when you look back, with retrospect.  Six months later you think, "Of course, why wouldn't we have payment splitting and someone in their kitchen receiving their sats directly when a point of sale is made with the coffee", but it takes a while to experiment with this technology and this tooling.

But I do think that the technology and the tooling we're building is going to build fairer forms of production, like that for example; it's going to work towards the decentralised Amazon thing.  So, when you were talking before as well, I don't want to talk too much about the projects which I'm involved in, because I don't want to associate my ridiculous political ideology with that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but people listening who do that need to shut the fuck up.  They just need to shut the fuck up and allow everyone to talk and be heard.  Sorry, just a bit of a rant here.  If we scare people off from having even opinions or having conversations, we're rebuilding the ship that we don't like, and that's one of the things that really fucking pisses me off about some of these morons on Twitter, who literally dogpile in and shout people down to the point they're scared to actually say what they want to think.

They're creating a new form of self-censorship where people are like, "I don't want to share my opinions, because I'll get shouted at", and then the marketplace for ideas is being destroyed.  So, I'm just going to have a rant, and anyone fucking goes at the work that Ben's done or his colleagues, or Ben's ideas, you're a fucking idiot, you need to shut the fuck up.  Sorry, rant over!

Ben Arc: I feel like my big brother just waded in and told the bullies off!

Peter McCormack: No, it just does my head in, because what we're doing, we're killing the conversation.

Ben Arc: Well, this is an important point.

Peter McCormack: It's group think, it's bullshit.

Ben Arc: This is the difference between rhetoric and dialectic.  So, the dialectic is thesis, antithesis, synthesis.  So, how would you come up with better ideas?  Well, you have your ideas challenged, and then you incorporate.  So, when you were younger and you were like, "Yeah, I'm a full leftie", then you had your ideas challenged and you started to realise that actually, the capitalism stuff isn't all evil like it's made out to be.  Actually, if you have better free markets, then maybe it's not as bad.  And then you'll change your opinion and you lean in a different way.

Then quite often, with people with extreme viewpoints, on either side of the spectrum, it's rhetoric.  They just shout opinions and then if anyone challenges those opinions, then like you say, they go after them, they mute them, they block them, whatever.  Bitcoin, like you say, a lot of these conversations -- originally because I saw in 2016, 2017, I think it was probably around then, that there was this real co-option and this real idea that Bitcoin was exclusively for an ancap, Austrian Economist, whatever, and I thought, "Hold on, that doesn't make any sense.  I don't think that way, I don't believe in those things.  I see value in them, but I'm much more left learning, socialist, anarchist, libertarian type".  I changed my handle on Twitter to @thebitcoinsocialist, and that really --

Peter McCormack: Uh-oh!

Ben Arc: And I was there for years, man, and I was flying that lefty flag, and people blocked and muted me to hell.  But I had lots of people, when I went to real-world events, conferences and things, I mean even people, I would say, people actually working on stuff in Bitcoin, actually developing things, a lot of them are very apolitical and pragmatic like yourself, and believe the world's nuanced and complicated.

But I would also have a lot of people who would come up to me and say, "I'm so glad you waved the flag, because I agree with you and I do think it's this free open-source software, it's copyleft, it's decentralised decision-making", and we'd have all these conversations.  People start to admit they're not actually --

Now there are some good Telegram groups, people now being more outspoken, and I think it's in direct response to this kind of co-option and this idea of rhetoric of just saying, "This is Bitcoin, this is how it works, and this is what sort of society it will build.  It will be citadels, etc", and it's like, "Hold on, will it be all that stuff?"

Peter McCormack: Well, this is why I feel a sense of responsibility, when people were saying, "Pete, you need to get some more left-leaning people on the show", and you were tagged and, "Get Ben in, talk to Ben", I was like, "Yeah, I'm going to do it".  I mean, the incentive structure for running a podcast is --

Ben Arc: Don't piss off your audience!

Peter McCormack: No, it's audience capture.  If you have an audience, capture it.  Speak in their language, grow your downloads, create your loyalty and then advertise your downloads to your sponsors and your sponsors will spend more money.  That's the incentive structure.  But I talk about this with Danny, my producer, it's a shame he's not here, I wish you could have met him.  But we talk about this a lot and we always say, I mean I was literally on the phone to him on the way down, I said, "We are never, ever not going to make a show because we're worried about what the audience thinks.  We always want to be known as the show that will talk to anyone".

I mean, I had it recently, right, go back a few weeks.  I did this on purpose.  In the same week, I had, I think it may have been consecutive shows, I have Laura Loomer, who I think her ideas are fucking mad and I fundamentally disagree with her.  I think she's antagonistic, I think she discriminates against people, I think she has siloed her own opinions and I fundamentally disagree with her.  I told her, I said, "I disagree with your ideas".  And I got a whole bunch of people go on YouTube complaining about having her on, other people saying, "Well done having her on", and other people saying, "You're an idiot".

The next show, I think it was the next show, I had Anita Posch on, and Anita's very much on the left, and we had a conversation which was about the financial patriarchy.  The title alone was triggering people like, "What's this fucking bullshit?  What are you on about?"  It's like, there is a financial patriarchy.

Ben Arc: Yeah, there is, absolutely.  White men control, it still exists.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it does.  And in certain parts of society in certain countries, there's absolutely a patriarchy that controls and oppresses women, and that does come through money.  To deny that is fucking ludicrous.  But what I'm saying is, in that week, I've had polar extremes on the show, because you can listen to people and get ideas, and that's what we should have. 

So, I'm always going to have -- do you know what, I want to talk to the people that people want me not to talk to, that's actually what I want to do, because I want to learn from everybody.  And I think if we can all listen to each other, we can take things forward.  I'm not a socialist, I like the NHS and I think I can learn from you.  Well, I'm going to learn from you, because your recall of history is incredible.  And I can learn from everyone and that's what we should do, not this fucking yelling and giving each other shit, because actually it becomes very authoritarian.

Ben Arc: It's much more comfortable if you think that you have the answers to society and to the world, the material world, and that you're on the right side of history.  It's much harder to think, to question your own cultural hegemony and to think, "Well, am I on the right side of history; am I doing the right things?  Could things be better?  Can things improve?"  That's more difficult and harder to do.  It's much easier to just be black and white, okay binary, and this is what you get a lot of within, I don't know, maybe --

Peter McCormack: It's all circles, it's not just Bitcoin.

Ben Arc: All circles.  But maybe a lot of this stuff is surveillance capitalism, the incentive structures and things like Twitter and Facebook and things, maybe they propagate this way of thinking.

Peter McCormack: They certainly do.  Algorithms are fucked.  Algorithms have fucked the people who refuse to step back and realise that algorithms have fucked them.  Once you recognise the algorithms are fucking you, you can step back.  One of the most important things I think some people can do is question themselves, "Could I be wrong?"  I do it all the time. 

I come out with some of the most ridiculous statements sometimes.  I came out with one at the start of the pandemic, I was like, "Yeah, we should lock down everyone" and I realised I was wrong.

Ben Arc: Did you ever see that Mitchell and Webb sketch where they're dressed as Nazis, and then David Mitchell, he's stood there and he's looking quizzically in the air and he turns round to Robert Webb and says, "Are we the baddies?" and the whole sketch is that, is these two Nazis.  And then at one point, they're like, "Well, we actually have skull and crossbones on our uniforms, so we probably are the baddies".

Peter McCormack: Oh, fuck, I've got skull and crossbones on my football team.

Ben Arc: Are you the baddies?!

Peter McCormack: No, we're the goodies!

Ben Arc: No, but I mean going back to surveillance capitalism, going back to things which we all use, like Twitter and Facebook, for example, has private capital failed there?  Should it be done in a way which isn't in the hands of private capital?  I think it probably should.  So, I don't know if you're aware, I'm going to give a big shoutout now to an absolutely phenomenal project, which could solve a lot of these problems.  And a lot of us bitcoiners are incredibly excited about it, even though it has nothing to do with Bitcoin, apart from that it uses Schnorr public-key crypto, which is pretty cool.

It's Nostr, so Notes and Other Stuff Relays, that's what it stands for, Nostr.

Peter McCormack: Tell me about it.

Ben Arc: So, it's a very simple concept, which is that you have client software, and then you have these relays which just relay notes, which you send to the relay using web sockets.  A simple example I did was make a kind of Twitter platform.  So, you have a public key, private key, I have a public key, private key.  I subscribe to your public key and then anything you sign as a message and send up to one of these relays, I can then pull down, because I'm subscribed to your public key, and I can verify it's you who sent that message.

So, I made a very simple Nostr Twitter client.  Fiatjaf very recently actually fully upgraded it and if you go on, oh crikey, if you go on -- I've got it on Nostr.com, but that's a fork of his new Twitter client, so actually go on his repo and check out the actual Nostr Twitter client he's made.  But if you go on Nostr.com, I was like Roger Ver, I bagged the protocol as a domain -- if you go on Nostr.com, you'll see that you can do a lot of the stuff you can do on Twitter, and it's not that much more work which needs to go into it in order to make it a competing system with Twitter.

It's quite interesting as well, because these relays can serve different purposes.  If you're like me and you want quite a vanilla experience when you go on Twitter, I don't want to see anything gross and extreme, then I can subscribe to relays, I could connect to these relays which only have that type of content and do filter out horrible content. 

Peter McCormack: Who filters that stuff?

Ben Arc: So, it depends on the relays, whoever's running the relay.  But there are relays which people won't filter anything.

Peter McCormack: So, relays would be reputation based?

Ben Arc: No, I mean these relays are -- I mean, that could be a separate relay on its own, just verifying reputation and stuff.  But the point is that they're really easy to spin up, and if you take a relay down, it's not this kind of inconsequential, because you can just spin up another one and people could just connect to that instead and start communicating over that relay.

So, the route to this concept, and this is quite interesting, when I first made LNbits, I wanted to show that, because we've got these extensions and they're quite easy to make on LNbits, I wanted to show that you could make like a proof-of-concept extension.  So, my proof-of-concept extension was something called Diagon Alley.  So, thinking about dark markets, I'm not a big fan of dark markets, but I appreciate the software challenge, as it were.

The problem with dark markets now is, if a dark market gets taken out, it sucks for everybody involved, people lose their reputation, people lose their money and then they have to go to another service and build up their reputation and have to try and prove somehow that they're who they say they are.  So, I made this thing called Diagon Alley.  And the concept of Diagon Alley was that you would have a market stall and you'd have your products on your market stall, and then you could point those products at a front-end indexer, which would just index the products.

So, for the user, you go to the index.  So, it's like eBay or Amazon, you pick the products you want.  All the communication is being relayed through to the client software, to the person who's actually got the market stall.  And you're able to prove that you're you using a key, so you're signing notes to say that these are your products and this is your reputation.  And you build up that reputation, you have all these products which you've got listed.

Then the indexer gets attacked, it gets taken down, it doesn't matter, because that person who has that market stall, they control all the data, they can just point it at a different front-end indexer.  And this indexer is free and open-source software, so you can just spin it up anywhere.  It's like pirate pages, you can spin them up anywhere.  So, it becomes kind of censorship resistant, not because it's decentralised; it's just very easy to spin up and it doesn't matter if it gets taken out.

But when I made that proof-of-concept extension, Diagon Alley, the extension was literally just to list some products and then throw them at this indexer, no one really saw value in it, apart from fiatjaf, who's got involved in the project very early on.  He kept saying, "We need to make something of this when you get round to it".  And then, he extrapolated out just using it for a marketplace thing, and he generalised it more into a whole protocol, which is this Nostr protocol.

Peter McCormack: Could you use it for NotAmazon?

Ben Arc: Yeah, you could use it for NotAmazon, absolutely.  So, we keep saying to each other, we keep saying, "We need to build Diagon Alley".  At the moment, everyone's very excited about the Nostr Twitter thing, because you can see that it works.  And also, you can do things like, because you're using Schnorr signatures, this is also quite cool as well; because we're using Schnorr signatures, we're experimenting with all the libraries which have been written for Bitcoin, which haven't really been tested very well, so it's cool to have somewhere which doesn't involve value really, where we can use those libraries and help improve those libraries.  So, everyone's very excited about the Nostr Twitter thing.

Peter McCormack: Is it a decentralised Twitter?

Ben Arc: I mean, I can have a client on my phone, I can access my messages, I can post a tweet.  People who are following my public key -- although in the new update that's not public, it's like a name, so "Ben Arc".  People who follow Ben Arc, they can pull down that tweet and they can verify that it's from me.

But because we're using Schnorr signatures, you could use things like a hardware wallet.  So, if you think about Nike or something, or some big corporation, McDonald's or, I don't know, Donald Trump, if you think about a President or a Corporation, it would be quite nice to have multisig, and then also have a hardware wallet, so you have to take the note off, sign it, multisig it, and then blast it out into the world as something you've produced, rather than that control just being in somebody's hand which could be corruptible.  It's more secure as well.

So, we can do a whole bunch of -- make use of a whole bunch of Bitcoin things.  Public-key crypto, I mean, it's the answer to a lot of the world's problems, and I like the fact that Bitcoin gives a lot more exposure to people, and then hopefully Nostr will do that as well, it will give people a lot more exposure.  So, direct messaging, for example, on Nostr Twitter, we have direct messaging where we can create a shared key using public-key crypto, and then we can encrypt a message and I could send it to you.  And if you send it through the network, it's completely encrypted; only you can read it.

Peter McCormack: So, it could be decentralised Twitter and Signal at the same time?

Ben Arc: Yeah.  I mean, it's not really decentralised, per se.

Peter McCormack: It kind of is.

Ben Arc: It kind of is, yeah, it's very censorship resistant.  But yeah, it could be a whole load of things.  And again, it's a new concept tool, very simple concept, seems like, "Why wasn't this made before?"  And if you go on the Nostr protocol, if you google "Nostr protocol", and then you look at the protocol repo, there's a good breakdown of things like Mastodon and things.  Then there is a question, "Why hasn't this been made before?" and then, "Well, we don't really know"!

Peter McCormack: Well, it just hasn't.

Ben Arc: But it's really simple and it works well.

Peter McCormack: The problem is network effects.

Ben Arc: Yeah, I mean there are a lot of bitcoiner and Twitter types, when they stumble across it, they do go and make an account on the Nostr Twitter thing, and then they start tweeting and then start DMing each other and experimenting with the software.  You don't have to download anything.  This is the cool thing, you could run the client yourself, if you wanted to, locally and verify all the code and everything, or you can just use somebody else's client online.  It's basically all browser based, so there's only so much which can go wrong really.

Peter McCormack: Where do you stand on moderation with things like this?

Ben Arc: Well, this is a very interesting concept.  So you think, you don't want people being exposed, like you don't want your kids being exposed to horrible stuff, do you, basically?

Peter McCormack: Well, it's a bit more than that.  So, let's look at the anti-censorship products that exist out there.  I checked out Gab, it's just fucking full of bullshit; you have your 4chan and your 8chan, which to me has just created a generation of absolute fucking idiots, just fucking idiots.  And I would never want my kids exposed to that, and that's my responsibility to stop them being exposed to that, great, but I will do.  But Twitter with zero moderation for me would be a problem.  Twitter with its current levels of moderation is also a problem.  I think things are being --

Ben Arc: Well, the decisions are being made by a centralised authority, which comes under the control of the US Government ultimately, so they need to second-guess what the US Government wouldn't want them to say or would want them to say.

Peter McCormack: But it's got worse.  Ever since Trump, it's got worse.

Ben Arc: Yeah.  Also as well, they're a very liberal part of the US and there are young people working on it, so there's lots of things which will be said from the far right and then they'll ban them.

Peter McCormack: Not even the far right; just from the right.

Ben Arc: In Nostr Twitter, because you can connect to multiple relays, you just connect to the relays which you want to be exposed to.  So, like I said, there'll be some relays which don't censor content, there'll be some relays which do censor content.  If there's a relay which you feel is censoring content in a way you don't like, just connect to a different relay.

Peter McCormack: But you need the network effect to build it up so there's a better service there.

Ben Arc: You'd be surprised.  I mean, in a Telegram group, for example, if you have ten people in a Telegram group, you have nice discussions, you check it daily, you can have a little chat with people.  Similar with Nostr Twitter, or -- yeah, say Nostr Twitter, for example.  If you got ten friends on there and you're connected to the same relay and you're dropping messages on there every day and chatting to each other, it's a useful tool.

Peter McCormack: But then is it really like an alternative to Telegram, rather than Twitter?  Because, what I'm interested in is Twitter being better, or a better Twitter.

Ben Arc: So, Twitter has this thing called Bluesky.

Peter McCormack: Does Twitter have it, or is it separate from Twitter?

Ben Arc: That's a point.  Jack Dorsey has funded this thing called Bluesky, which nothing has come out of, and they should really look at Nostr.

Peter McCormack: Come on, Jack, if you're listening.

Ben Arc: Yeah, exactly.  They should really look at Nostr and start making some commits, because I really think this is the best option for people.  Check it out and the audience can check it out and see what they think.  But no, it's desperately needed in society, and you do need censorship.  But what's cool about this is you're kind of censoring yourself, almost. 

You can build a whole range of things, by the way, so I did a little paper on a decentralised Uber, which I remember Andreas Antonopoulos used to talk about.  So, you have different note kinds.  So I said, "Well, we could have a note kind for your geographical location".  So, I go on this client software, go on an app, I say I'm a customer, I want to get a taxi. 

So now I've got a public key and a private key and I can say, "This is my location, I need a taxi".  Then, all the people who are sharing that location, all the taxi drivers, they just sign a note and say, "This is my location".  I can then go look at their reputation, which is attached to their keys, and you could have some verification service, so, "This is verified by SuperVerificationService.com", or whatever, so you could have a verification service to prove that they are who they are, and you could look through their reviews and see if they look like legitimate reviews or not.

Then I could say, "Look, I need a taxi", then the taxi driver might be, "Actually, you haven't got any reviews, you've just set up this account, so I'm going to take a bit of a gamble and I'll go and pick you up anyway".  Pick you up, take you somewhere, pay however you want; it would be cool if you paid on Bitcoin Lightning Network, or something, but you can pay however you want, and then you can both leave a review for each other, so you have reciprocal reviews.

I wrote a paper about how you could do that, not a paper, just a repo thing, how you could do that on Nostr very easily actually; it would be an easy thing to make, and it would work as well.  Like you say, it can use the network effect for it to work.  But anybody could be a taxi driver, so it's kind of the promise of Uber.  Like, I could get in my car and I could set up, "I'm a taxi driver now", and I could advertise and then probably charge people less, because I haven't got any reputation, but then build up my reputation and then maybe charge more, because I've got a really good reputation, thousands of reviews, or whatever.  Things like sockpuppetry and Sybil attacks, they're something which needs to be worked out, but you could do that with verification services and verification relays. 

I actually thought about this and I was thinking, what other services do people need to meet at in a geographical location, and then also have a rating review system?

Peter McCormack: Sex!

Ben Arc: Yeah, man, you did it, it did the same thing for me!  It popped into my head and I said to my girlfriend and I said, "I'm sorry, but I think this would be really good for prostitution".  If you think about it, you've got client reputation and also the prostitution reputation as well, it would be much safer, because they can say, "Okay, you haven't got any reputation, so I'm going to take a gamble on you [or] I'm not going to take a gamble on you".  So I think, as a tool, I called it BUber, because it was Bitcoin Uber.

Peter McCormack: BUber!

Ben Arc: That was the Bitcoin Uber, but then it sort of made sense that maybe that's why I thought of the sex thing.  Because then I was trying to think of other services, and that was the one that really stood out there.  Actually, that could be a really useful tool for --

Peter McCormack: Sex workers.

Ben Arc: Yeah, for sex workers, and it could make women safer as well, by the reputation system which exists within it.  There's a lot of things which need to be built on it.  If you're interested, people, it's @nostr_protocol on Telegram.  And if you go to google "Nostr protocol", have a little look at that.  There's lots of good bitcoiners involved in it, r0ckstardev is involved in it and fiatjaf and a whole load of great people working on it.

Peter McCormack: Well, I'll definitely check that out.

Ben Arc: There's a lot of software which needs to be built to make it work realistically.  What's cool about it as well is it really had nothing to do with Bitcoin, because a lot of these solutions, they involve having to use Bitcoin in some way, like having to use the Lightning Network to send censorship resistant messages, and they're all kind of cool and interesting.  But it shouldn't be a prerequisite to censorship resistance for sending a message from one person to another, having to also have a Lightning node, which is just a big pain in the arse.

Peter McCormack: Well, this is the problem with shitcoins and the Web3 crap coming out of Chris Dixon, that everything needs a token, and not everything does need a token.

Ben Arc: Not everything does need a token.  The public-key crypto stuff solves a lot of problems and you can just use that.

Peter McCormack: I mean, look, that is super-interesting.  It's nice to see other projects like that which don't require Bitcoin.  I mean, it feels like a Bitcoin project.

Ben Arc: Well, it's all made by bitcoiners.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but also those kinds of ideas of getting away from centralised services is super-cool and that's commendable.  I'm definitely going to check that out.  I think we should bring this full circle.

Ben Arc: Oh, right, yeah okay.  Well again, let me put in that disclaimer that that project obviously has nothing to do with my ridiculous political views.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, why say they're ridiculous?

Ben Arc: I'm being self-deprecating, just to fluff the far-right audience members who are like, "Yeah, you are ridiculous".

Peter McCormack: It's a difference of opinion.

Ben Arc: Dialectic, if you want.  I mean, discussion is very important.  The world's nuanced and complicated, it's far more comfortable to exist in a world where you're on the right side of everything and it's black and white.  This, "Free market's good, socialism bad".  But actually, you need some pragmatism and nuance in there.  I can see all these amazing, wonderful things which exist in free markets.  I love small- to medium-sized enterprises.  I think they're incredibly efficient, good for people.  I don't like things like corporations.

Then similarly, if you're on the other side, you could say, "Well, I can see that cooperatives, if you can build them and they work, they're better for the workers who work in that working environment, but they produce nothing; and that's better than something like a big corporation, and corporation is a bad form of capital, which we need to somehow move away from".  How do you move away from it?  Well, you could regulate it out of existence.  Well, that kind of sucks, because then you're empowering the state more.  Or, do you create some better way of doing it within the free market system, which can outcompete it in a free market kind of way?

So absolutely, you need the dialectic, you need to reach synthesis by exchanging ideas.

Peter McCormack: There will be some negative comments coming in.

Ben Arc: Yeah, I welcome them.

Peter McCormack: Because you mentioned Marx!

Ben Arc: This is the problem with Marx.  So, people read The Communist Manifesto and think, "Oh, this is Marx".  Actually again, he basically did what I did and he praises capitalism with the first part of The Communist Manifesto, it's ability to string the world together with all these trade routes, and bring all these people out of poverty and build a -- and then he says, "However, it will result in this revolution happening".

But then if you read Das Kapital, Das Kapital's about just private capital.  I mean, it's actually the introduction to what was going to be a range of six books, but Das Kapital is a very complicated, economic analysis of capitalism, not negative; it's just an analysis of capitalism, using what is called "historical materalism".

So, as an economist, this is another thing which frustrates me, Mises, he's a genius, absolutely; Hayek, genius; so was Keynes, he was the economist with two brains, had some incredible ideas, fought really hard to prevent another war, predicted the Second World War after the First World War and the reparations against the Germans, genius; Marx, genius, great economist.

Peter McCormack: Can we talk about Marx for a second?  Is the issue with Marx in that when you mention Karl Marx, people jump to, "Marxism has led to the deaths of 100 million people"?

Ben Arc: Exactly, "You've got that blood on your hands" sort of thing.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you've got the blood on your hands but actually, there's a difference between Marx being accurate in his observations, and then the interpretation of Marxism by others as a way of organising society, which are two different things.

Ben Arc: Exactly.  It was the assumption that a revolution would happen, in a kind of bloody way, which then brought people to try and push this revolution happening.  Marx said it would happen, in that the most advanced capitalist society would then transition to socialism.  But it was pushed on one of the poorest nations on earth, Russia, with this largely agricultural, feudalist society; it was pushed on them.

Peter McCormack: When this push and pull, it was like when I was out in --

Ben Arc: Well, Marx, if you were to look at any of that stuff, it would be an atrocity.  He'd have rolled in his grave over what happened over his theories.  He and Engels had this concept called "withering of state", which is very interesting, withering of state; I'm glad I remember to mention it just before the end here.  It's when, in a socialist society of exchange, state will become superfluous and cease to exist.  So the concept is, when you minimise state institutions and replace them with self-governing cooperative structures, that you will no longer need state, and I think that's basically what a lot of bitcoiners want as well; we want to replace state with Bitcoin and with some of the systems we can build on top of Bitcoin as well.

There's a great quote by Saint-Simon as well, which was, "Soon the art of governing men will come to an end.  It will be replaced by a new art, the art of administration", which is that when you're able to replace -- actually, Nick Szabo, one of our own boys, he has this concept of social scalability, which is basically that, which is basically that you can use the tools which we're building to replace all these institutions which need to exist currently in order for society to work the way it works.  But you can replace them with the tools we're building, and it will be a better, more free society.  And you can also use those same tools, like we said, within the private capital, like we were talking about payment splitting and things; you can replace a lot of the structures which exist just with some software, basically.  So, those who say that Marx was a statist, go and read Withering of State, google it.

Peter McCormack: Your critics, did they misunderstand you, or did they disagree with you?

Ben Arc: I think a lot of it is, if you have a binary viewpoint of the world -- so basically, if you ever have an amygdala response to something, you have to question whether you're being rational and whether you've just hit an opinion which is flying in the face of your material reality.

Peter McCormack: Are you shooting from the hip, or are you considering your responses?

Ben Arc: Yeah, are you considering your response?  If that amygdala kicks in, then I think quite often when you have an extreme viewpoint, either side of the spectrum, and if something challenges it, then I think it kicks in that amygdala response.  But yeah, like you say, discussion is how we improve, how people get more liberty eventually; the slow revolution.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, man.  Well, listen, I really appreciate you coming down.

Ben Arc: Thanks for having me, man.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to want to do a follow-up actually at some point, because there's a whole bunch of stuff we didn't get into that I want to dive into with you.

Ben Arc: We should do a separate software one, actually.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I don't add much value there, because I've got no fucking idea what I'm talking about, and I'd rather listen to Stephan Livera interview you about software.

Ben Arc: No, I mean, on a sort of heady protocol level, I'm terrible.  I'm more of a front-end, "This is cool, what we can do with this software, let's experiment with it", kind of way, so I'm probably with you on that.

Peter McCormack: But I think if we'd have dived a little bit deeper, there were some other areas I might have disagreed with you on, but I'd have liked to have gone into them.  There will be a range of responses from this, I can guarantee you now.  Go and read the YouTube comments, they're going to be, "Yes, thank you for getting somebody on who I agree with", or, "Yes, thank you for getting an alternative viewpoint on", and there's going to be a, "Fuck you, statist cuck, socialist fuck", and we just let them bounce off us.  Nobody's harmed by us having this conversation.

Ben Arc: What's that great quote by Proudhon, "Property is theft, property is liberty", so going back to basically what we were saying, that it's nuanced, it's complicated, yes, property is great, but not all property is great and it can be exploitative.  Owning another person of slavery, that's a bad form of property, capitalism's a bad form of property.  It's nuanced, it's a spectrum.  There's good private property and there's bad private property.  There's good capital, there's bad capital.  There's good this and that.  We've just got to find the least buggy best part of that, whatever we're looking at.

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, I appreciate you coming on.

Ben Arc: Yeah, you've got to end this!

Peter McCormack: Well, no, we don't, you can carry on.  Is there anything we've not touched on you want to touch on?

Ben Arc: No, it's good, it's fine!

Peter McCormack: I mean, I just feel like we've come full circle.  I want to go and consider it, listen to the responses and think about when we can dive back in.

Ben Arc: Oh, there's another quote actually which I want to get in there, because I just think there's some great quotes from the anarchists.  So, Proudhon was an anarchist, the first anarchist, by the way.  He referred to himself as an anarchist, and that was the, "Property is theft, property is liberty".  There's another one by a guy called Murray Bookchin.

If you're an ecologist, if you believe in humans should have a better relationship with the environment and also you're anarchist leaning, Murray Bookchin's fantastic.  Just go and read him, he's brilliant.  But he has a quote which is that, "Technology increases potentiality for freedom, but bourgeois control over technology empowers the hierarchy and control over people", which is if human beings -- and it's having control over technology, it's a bit like the Hal Finney quote, isn't it, "I realised we could use these tools for liberation". 

Us having control of the technology is good for people, but then if it's controlled by state, 1984-style state, or if it's controlled by some big, horrible corporation in surveillance capitalism, then that's bad.  So, yeah, Murray Bookchin.  He wrote that in the 1970s.  It's quite insightful.

Peter McCormack: I think we're going to have a good set of show notes for this one!  No, I appreciate you coming on, man.  Like I say, I think holding the views you have and coming to talk about them on my show is kind of a brave thing to do, because you know there's going to be a reaction.  I don't agree with you on everything, but I've really enjoyed talking to you and I'm going to want to do this again.  It's fortunate that you're not too far away, so it's quite easy to organise a show here in the UK, which I don't get to do as many as I'd like, which leads a lot of the conversation, because I think there's definitely a US bias to my guests, and therefore a US bias to the conversation.

We are very different in Europe from America, we are naturally a little bit more socialist, and I don't think that's been entirely bad.

Ben Arc: No, you can look at, if you like, I'm always fascinated with the Bitcoin Conferences, when you go to Bitcoin conferences; you go a European one and there's a heavy emphasis on the free and open-source side of Bitcoin.  And then when you go to a US one, it's much more about the business sector of Bitcoin, and there's less free and open-source projects there.  And I just think there are two different approaches.  Like you say, if you look at the node map, for example, most of the nodes in the world are in Germany, and a lot of the German hackers, the sort of anarchist left types.

So, there are two different approaches and ways of thinking about Bitcoin, and both of them have good points and they should engage each other.  And I'm actually seeing more and more, so I know in Miami now, for the new Bitcoin Conference, they're going to have this absolutely ginormous, which Matt Odell's helping organise, so big shoutout for him for doing it; but they're going to have this huge hackspace now, encouraging free and open -- and giving free tickets as well away to free and open-source projects.

Peter McCormack: Nice.

Ben Arc: So, it's great to see the US Conferences now.  Because, I mean back in 2019, the hackspace was me putting two tables together and saying, "This is the hackspace", because it didn't exist.  And now it's a full auditorium.  So, credit where credit's due, they are starting to encourage all this free and open-source thinking, rather than just thinking about Bitcoin as business.

Peter McCormack: Awesome, man.

Ben Arc: Anyway, yeah, let's end there.  Thank you very much, Peter.

Peter McCormack: No, dude, where do people find you?

Ben Arc: If you go to @benarc on Twitter, and then I think @arcbtc on GitHub.  That's got all my projects on.  I make a lot of hardware projects, like points of sale, vending machines, arcade machines; and then also work on LNbits as well, which came out of the hardware projects.  But that's quite a popular piece of software right now and it's very exciting to work on, still beta.

Then also, the Nostr stuff, when I get a chance.  I always feel really bad, because we've got some incredibly productive people in the community who constantly pump out software and code, but I'm not nearly contributing as much as I should be.  But yeah, so google those things, LNbits, Nostr and then also I've got a series of hardware tutorials, BTCIOT, if you google that.  It's on the World Crypto Network on the YouTube channel.

Peter McCormack: World Crypto Network, is that Vortex?

Ben Arc: It was, but then he forked, so the Bitcoin Network Crypto, or something, it's a very similar sounding name.

Peter McCormack: I love Vortex.  He messaged me the other day.

Ben Arc: He had great branding on his channel, and then he stopped making videos, and I was quite sad actually.

Peter McCormack: He was such a great guy.  I just think he did his tour of duty in Bitcoin and he wanted to move onto other things.  But he messaged me the other day.  I haven't spoken to him in ages, I want to see him again, I think he's such a fucking great guy.

Ben Arc: He's such an eloquent speaker, seriously.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and just a nice, good person, and really good human.

Ben Arc: Yeah, absolutely.  It would be good to see if he gets back into the fray.

Peter McCormack: I'd love him to.  Well listen, thanks for coming on, we'll share all of that in the show notes.  Stay in touch.  If you've ever got something you want to talk about, please do come back to me, you've got my details, you've got Danny's and yeah, good luck, man and take care.

Ben Arc: Good luck with the football club and I look forward to seeing how you do this sort of future sci-fi tokenisation.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, let's see how that plays out.  I'll be putting that out to consultation to see what people think, just get their opinions, and I expect there'll be a range of opinions, but let's see what we can do there.

Ben Arc: Yeah, but it's exciting breaking new ground, well done.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, peace out, man.

Ben Arc: Cheers.