WBD488 Audio Transcription
The Moral Case for Bitcoin with Jimmy Song
Interview date: Wednesday 13th April
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Jimmy Song. 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.
Jimmy Song is a Bitcoin educator, developer and entrepreneur. In this interview, we discuss Bitcoin’s growing political power, how Lightning has better privacy properties than Monero, why decentralisation is binary, and the moral case for Bitcoin.
“The moral case for Bitcoin is that you don’t have this cesspool of theft, corruption and cronyism that you do with the US dollar. Fiat money is just straight up evil, it is an institution of corruption, of theft, of extracting value from people that can least afford it; and bitcoin is one that’s way fairer.”
— Jimmy Song
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I could tell you the target audience. My target audience is not fully‑converted bitcoiners.
Jimmy Song: Okay.
Peter McCormack: My target audience is not hardcore libertarians. They already understand Bitcoin; they get it. I'd love them to listen to the show and get something from it.
Jimmy Song: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: What we target is people who are new to Bitcoin or have been involved a little over time or heard about it, who perhaps think Bitcoin is we're all a bunch of nutters and we're trying to not scare them off.
Jimmy Song: Okay.
Peter McCormack: We're trying to say, "Hey, here are some ideas regarding Bitcoin you might not have considered. Here are some ideas regarding the state. Here are some ideas regarding money. Come and have a listen". Then hopefully, they graduate and they go on to other podcasts.
Jimmy Song: Yeah, yeah. What you want to do is say, for each episode you go, "Right, I know what my target audience is. What do I want them to tweet?" For this particular one, we're going to talk about morality and stuff like that. At least for me, what I would want them to tweet is, "Well, I didn't realise that Bitcoin is way more moral than fiat money". That's a great tweet, right.
Peter McCormack: That is a good tweet.
Jimmy Song: That's something that is a huge endorsement of what you’re able to bring out. Now you have a much better idea of, "Okay, what kind of questions am I going to ask to get them to tweet that?"
Peter McCormack: That's a really -- so, you do that for all the books?
Jimmy Song: Yeah and I want to do that for all my articles. This is the whole concept of beginning with the end in mind, this is the process. For some reason, when you can place yourself at the end and look backwards, you're going to get a lot more insight into what you need to do.
Peter McCormack: I think, Danny, we kind of already do this. There are people who don't like the show because I'm not them, and they want me to be them and act like them and hold their same opinions. But we always felt like our job with the show is not to be them, and sometimes it's not to be us; it's to put ourselves in the shoes of the listener and say, "How do we take you from --"
Jimmy Song: Point A to point B.
Peter McCormack: Point A to B. You said identify someone. If you've got an accountant in London who's heard about Bitcoin, they're a little bit left and they think it's all used by right-wing nutters to get rich, if they ever come to the show, we want them to come to the show and go, "Oh, actually I didn't realise Bitcoin is used for human rights", "Bitcoin is used for protection against monetary debasement", "Oh, those guys are kind of fair and I might not agree with them and everything, but they're kind of fair and balanced". If we produce a show which is massively libertarian, "Fuck the government, crush the state; everything in the mainstream media is bullshit", they're immediately put off.
An example today, I can give you an exact example today. Put out the show with Scott Horton, a very difficult person to fact-check live, because he comes with a wealth of information.
Jimmy Song: Yeah, I recorded with him last week.
Peter McCormack: Right, okay. He's a guy who’s hard to challenge; you really just have to listen and say, "I'm going to go back afterwards and review it. Some journalist who's got it in for me in the UK, because he hates Bitcoin, he said it's some kind of risk to do -- look up UglyGame, Danny, @uglygame, you can get the tweet.
Danny Knowles: Okay.
Peter McCormack: But basically, he has used that interview to manipulate people against me and draw an opinion of me. Have you found him?
Danny Knowles: I'm just pulling it out now.
Peter McCormack: Hold on; it's interesting.
Danny Knowles: This one?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, just look at this. So, for people listening, this is @uglygame, a guy who hates everyone and everything, "As an interesting, if inadvertent, illustration of how crypto and extreme politics can intersect, here's the prospective owner of a football club breaking from talking to Bitcoin to broadcast a two-hour apologia of Russian invasion of Ukraine".
So, my point for someone like him, he's part of the problem because firstly it wasn't a two-hour apologia; Scott was very clear that he was critical of Putin, he's critical of the invasion. But what he wanted to do is say, "Look, let's also look at US foreign policy and intervention and the history of that and things that have happened". Now, is Scott likely to be biased against the US state and to try and look at all the reasons they've provoked -- yes, that's where he's from, nobody's perfect. But anyone with a brain can say, "Okay, I'm going to listen. Is there enough here for me to go and research and go and check it out?" and hopefully they would.
But the problem is you've got people like this. In the UK, they cannot handle free speech, they cannot handle the idea that someone out there has got a different opinion of them. So, where you've got the people in the US who think, I'm a fucking idiot on the left, these people think I'm an idiot on the right.
Jimmy Song: Well, there you go. That's kind of what happens and especially on this issue with Scott's background and stuff like that. He was against the Iraq War from the beginning and he told us all that it was going to be a disaster.
Peter McCormack: He was right.
Jimmy Song: Where was this guy then, right? He's probably saying, "Oh, you know, Bush and Blair are doing the right thing" or something like that. You've got to understand this guy has a history and he's been right a lot more than you think. It's worth listening to him instead of just dismissing him as a Putin puppet or something.
Peter McCormack: I have a history of jumping into opinions on certain subjects and then, later on, learning there's a bigger picture I've not learned about; it's a part I'm trying to develop and become better at. But, for example, this one: you know that meme, "I support the latest thing"?
Jimmy Song: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: That's even more relevant for Europe and the UK. Would you agree there's less critical thinking, challenging the concept that this is just Putin being a psychopath?
Jimmy Song: I've not spent enough time in the UK recently to --
Peter McCormack: I would just find it's a little bit more biased, just a little bit. This is a guy who, like I probably did to begin with, went, "Oh well, Putin's a psychopath and Russia's a dictatorship, therefore everything is defensible from Ukraine and everything's Russia's fault and there's been no US policy or US foreign policy that's affected this" and jumped into it. Therefore, if I've got a guy on there who's saying, "Look, look at all this other stuff that's provoked them" he's going to struggle with that.
The truth is there is a nuance in there where both sides are in the wrong. Ultimately, the war was started by Putin, so you can say that. You can also say it wasn't helped by US foreign policy, but sometimes you have to pick a side. I think this is a scenario where you just shouldn't be picking a side.
Jimmy Song: Let's hope so, because I don't think war is going to help anybody right now; the war is devastating and crazy in terms of the cost everywhere. To stay out of the war -- I think there are people talking about a no-fly zone, there were people protesting outside the Texas capital the other day.
Peter McCormack: I know.
Jimmy Song: They were saying, "No-fly zone" with the Ukraine flags and stuff like that. Are you crazy?
Peter McCormack: Are you fucking stupid?
Jimmy Song: Yeah. Do you really want to enforce a no-fly zone? Do you have any idea what that would mean and how much of an escalation that would mean, and all these people -- it's going to become a hot war real quick if that happens? Do you want a ground war in Russia? Really; that's what you want to do? Not a very good history there, you know. You don't do ground wars in Russia without some significant consequences.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Did you do it in person with Scott?
Jimmy Song: Yeah, I did and he came to the studio at Bitcoin Commons, which is the same floor as Unchained Capital.
Peter McCormack: He's great.
Jimmy Song: Yeah, I've had him on a couple of times.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Jimmy Song: He's explained the entire Middle East imbroglio and I've read his book enough already. Great book, by the way. Everything leads back to history and he has a talent for linking a lot of it together, which I really appreciate.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, we had him on before during COVID discussing libertarianism. He wrote this article about how the big red button to just get rid of government is a bad idea and it was really interesting to talk to him. We wanted to talk to him about liberty but a war kicked off and as he works for Antiwar.com, it felt like an opportunity to listen to him, so we didn't get around to that. Anyway, Jimmy, good to see you, man.
Jimmy Song: Good to see you, buddy.
Peter McCormack: I'd say it's been a little while, but I usually get to see you every four to six months.
Jimmy Song: Well, we had this stupid COVID thing where people didn't see each for two years. I've seen you on and off just, "Hey, I'm at this conference, let's pass by each other for five seconds" or whatever.
Peter McCormack: "Let's have a hug."
Jimmy Song: "Let's do girl hug", and then you're gone. But yeah, to sit down and talk, we really haven't had a chance since a year or two, something like that.
Peter McCormack: Last time I think we did in person was in the hotel room in Norway?
Jimmy Song: Yeah, Oslo Freedom Forum 2019.
Peter McCormack: Was that the last time?
Jimmy Song: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Or was the last time at the old Unchained office?
Jimmy Song: I don't think we did anything at the old Unchained office.
Peter McCormack: We did.
Jimmy Song: We did?
Peter McCormack: We did Killing the Hopes and Dreams of Shitcoin Bagholders.
Jimmy Song: Oh, I don't know if that was -- that was after, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Jimmy Song: So that must have been after, yeah.
Peter McCormack: So, you've done a couple more -- how many books have you done now in total?
Jimmy Song: That's four books so far. Programming Bitcoin's the one that's not on the table.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Jimmy Song: Two of these are out of the pandemic. We got Thank God for Bitcoin and Bitcoin and the American Dream, so yeah.
Peter McCormack: I'm fascinated by Bitcoin and the American Dream. Bitcoin has become really intertwined now with US politics. I know some people aren't fans of this; I actually am. I would rather have regulatory protection than too much regulatory oversight. I think also regulatory protection in the US incentivises the rest of the world.
Jimmy Song: Yeah, I would agree with that; we're trying to influence. Really, this book is much more about giving value to the people that we aimed it at; we aimed it specifically at politicians. A lot of them just had no idea about Bitcoin, right. They're like, "What the hell is it? All these people are calling in about the Infrastructure Bill in a panic mode, but they don't even know what we want, what we're about or anything like that.
So, this book is aimed at them and it's specifically so that they can get value out of it, whether or not they support Bitcoin. We specifically have a chapter in there about the Bitcoin voter. It's not who you think it is, it's not a bunch of white libertarian code bros, or something like that, that are anarcho-capitalists; it's not. I mean, that's a small segment of it, but there's a lot of other people. We point out in the book, on a per capita basis, black people are more likely to own Bitcoin than white people, at least in the US; I don't know about London or wherever, but those are important things for these people to know. They need to know these things so that they can make an informed decision.
If they're going to oppose it, know that's a significant part of the black community that you're going to be alienating. If you're opposing it, that's a significant part of US veterans, for example, that are into Bitcoin and so on. There are lots of voting blocks that are part of Bitcoin now that you really need to know about as a politician. If you don't know about them, that's going to be a problem.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Have you had any direct feedback from any politicians that have read it? Do you know if it's got in the hands of any of them?
Jimmy Song: It's fairly new, we've been handing it out like candy.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Jimmy Song: But the few people that have read it, they like it; they're very appreciative and it's part of the 501(c)(4) that CJ and Amanda and I are doing. CJ and Amanda were on with you about this book.
Peter McCormack: In DC.
Jimmy Song: Yeah, in DC. So, the idea is that this would give them some good info. The way things in DC work is that you have to help them before they can help you, right?
Peter McCormack: Well, it's interesting because you've got the incumbent and you've got the challengers. It seems like a lot of challengers running for Congress are now becoming bitcoiners. Who knows whether they're using it as a hack? Eric Adams proved it was a hack and proved to be a little bit disingenuous, perhaps, or a bit uninformed, but there is a lot of -- what's that guy? Brian Solstice?
Danny Knowles: I can't remember his name.
Peter McCormack: We've had so many reach out to us wanting to come on the show, and sadly it's just no pretty much every time now. They want to make the same show and they want to use us as a platform and it's, "If you've got nothing new and interesting to say, we're not interested". We will be having Josh Mandel on. We'll be challenging him on some non-Bitcoin things, but there's a lot of them coming out now. That guy I mentioned…
Danny Knowles: I'm trying to find him.
Peter McCormack: Do you remember him? He just tweeted out.
Danny Knowles: I know exactly who you mean; I just can't remember his name.
Peter McCormack: Well, you can check it because, breaking; Dennis Porter just re-tweeted him. But he basically said, "I'm running for Congress and one of the platforms I'm running on is making Bitcoin legal tender". Whether or not that's important or not, the challengers to the incumbents, a lot of them are now saying they support Bitcoin, which is great if it gets us to protection.
Jimmy Song: Right, and they're seeing that it's a large constituency. This wasn't something that we really realised would be the case, say six or seven years ago, because it was, "Okay, it's this tiny corner; they're going to need some industry representation".
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Jimmy Song: A lot of the organisations in DC, like Coin Center, Blockchain Association and stuff like that, when they were formed they thought they were representing these companies. There is no real lobbying work for the actual voters, for the actual people that are into Bitcoin. It turns out that's a significant number; I think DCG released something that said 23 million people in the US have some exposure to Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: 14%, I've heard the other day.
Jimmy Song: Yeah, those are big numbers. That's approaching ARP territory and they're one of the biggest lobbying organisations in DC. The numbers are starting to matter, so a lot of politicians are looking at this. One of the most interesting races that I'm watching this cycle is the Ohio Senate race. The incumbent there is retiring and you have three Republicans and two Democrats that are the top five, right; you have many more people running.
Peter McCormack: That is Josh Mandel, right?
Jimmy Song: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Morgan?
Jimmy Song: Morgan Harper versus Josh Mandel, I think, on the Democrat side.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Jimmy Song: And you got, I think, JD Vance and a couple of others on the Republican side. But all five of them are saying good things about Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but it's how much they understand. So, we had Morgan on the show; she was fine, she was lovely. But I saw her debate against Josh Mandel and he crushed her; he was great on air. And I am conscious, because I've been mentioning Josh on the show a bunch of times and a couple of people wrote to me and said, "You know, you need to be aware of some of his other policies".
I think that's an important thing where we've got people claiming to be single-issue voters. Let's be careful here, let's also be aware of what these people stand for as well. I don't agree with just being a single-issue voter, although I understand why they might be. But let's not just rail people into being single-issue voters; let's just be aware these politicians might stand for other things and they could rump on us, or you, it's your country.
Jimmy Song: That's true. The big thing is, what does it mean to be pro-Bitcoin? You can say good things about Bitcoin, right, you can be, "Oh yeah, I'm all for innovation" and, "I'm all for financial inclusion" and, "I'm all for self-sovereignty" and all that. But what policies are they going to actually --
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Jimmy Song: This is one of the things that we're working on, is that 501(c)(4). It's, "Okay, how are we going to measure success? If these people are for it, what policies are they also for?" because you can say good things about Bitcoin to get votes, but we have to be, "Hey, they're saying good things, but they're opposed to these pieces of legislation". This is where we have to hold them accountable.
Peter McCormack: What's a 501(c)(4) for the audience? I obviously know.
Jimmy Song: Yeah, so a 501(c)(4) is an educational non-profit basically. We can't endorse candidates specifically, but we can say stuff like, "Hey, here's what Bitcoin is. These candidates are supporting these Bills [or not]". We can't endorse anybody or anything like that, but we're an education group. We want to inform the voters about, "Hey, these people say they're all about Bitcoin but here's what they're actually supporting" or, "They're not on record as supporting Lummis's Bill", for example. That, to me, is a nice way to separate the wheat from the chaff, right.
Peter McCormack: Is that the Bill where there's no tax on a purchase under $600?
Jimmy Song: There's a bunch of things within that Bill.
Peter McCormack: Right, okay.
Jimmy Song: But a lot of it is around capital gains and whether or not you have to report it above a certain amount; it's got a lot of good things. Senator Lummis has been a champion of Bitcoin, and she's proving it with this Bill. I want people on the campaign trail to say, "I support Lummis's Bill" or, "I don't support Lummis's Bill" because the minute you say -- and I want all the people that are listening to this that are into Bitcoin, I want them to go and ask them at a campaign rally or something like that, "Hey, are you for Lummis's Bill or not?" because putting them on record on this sort of thing is very important; this is part of the political engagement.
They can blow sunshine up our butts all day long and say, "Oh, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin. I'm pro-Bitcoin", but what does that actually mean? This is where having some policy angle, or some policies that they're pro or against, helps filter the wheat from the chaff, because every politician is going to say, "I'm for everything. Oh, I'm for the teachers, I'm for this [or] for that", or whatever, but it really comes down to policy; what are you actually voting for or what you actually voting against?
Peter McCormack: We can use some of that. Listen, we can talk about actually Ben; you know Ben Prentice?
Jimmy Song: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Ben's made an accusation against me; he says I'm getting a little bit shitcoiny.
Jimmy Song: Oh!
Peter McCormack: He said I am, because I've mentioned Monero on the show twice recently and I've mentioned it in scenarios. I said, "I can think of a certain couple of scenarios whereby I think I could justify using Monero instead of Bitcoin because I find Bitcoin privacy too hard; I know I'll screw it up. I know with Monero I've got less chance of screwing it up. But what I'm not aware of is the trade-offs I'm making if I make that decision".
Every time Monero gets mentioned on the show -- I'm always conscious of the responsibility of the show. When it gets mentioned and it comes up, what happens is a bunch of Monero people share the show out and they say, "Thank you for talking about Monero" and I don't want to promote something if I think there's some trade-offs I'm not thinking about.
I think there's a different trade-off as a transaction versus hodling. I'm pretty sure you could easily explain to me why I shouldn't hodl Monero but at a transactional level, if I was to buy some Monero, make this transaction and then not own any, I think there's a different trade-off. But Ben wants me to ask you about this, because he thinks I'm a shitcoiner!
Jimmy Song: Thank you for asking, because this is something that I've been wanting to talk about for a while. We did talk about it a little bit in Crushing the Hopes and Dreams of Shitcoiners.
Peter McCormack: Shitcoin Bagholders.
Jimmy Song: Yeah. Here is my argument against why you shouldn't be using Monero as a transactional currency. First of all, the anonymity set in Monero is tiny; the transactions are actually fairly large. So, within a particular transaction block, you can't include that many transactions because you have these zero-knowledge proofs. We've tried thousands of bytes and stuff like that, so that's been a thing in Monero for a while. You kind of have an idea of who's doing what because there aren't that many transactions. You can, by process of elimination, get some info out of it and you're only as good as the anonymity set you're hiding behind. It's not that big, it really isn't.
The other thing is that Bitcoin has some really nice privacy properties, especially on the Lightning Network. If you're able to pay for something using Lightning, you actually get really nice privacy properties. If you pay somebody that's far away from you on the Network, there are now routing algorithms that optimise for privacy rather than fees; so you have fees on the Lightning Network. You can optimise on privacy as well and it's going to be up to some of these wallets to implement that in certain cases, but you have very good privacy. If it's going through four hops or something like that, nobody after the first hop really knows where it comes from.
Peter McCormack: Chainalysis can't do any work?
Jimmy Song: No, because it's not on-chain. Unless you're listening and intercepting all of these messages and put them all on a database and analyse them or something like that, there's no way for you to know.
Peter McCormack: But Chainalysis -- Chainalysis; is it Chainalysis?
Jimmy Song: Chainalysis.
Peter McCormack: Chainalysis almost certainly, I would guess, within their company have a Lightning division and they're going, "How do we figure this out so we can sell this data to governments?"
Jimmy Song: You don't think they're doing that for Monero or Zcash?
Peter McCormack: No, that's fine, but we're talking about the good privacy options in Lightning. Is there some way of building that database; would there be some way of doing it?
Jimmy Song: Yeah, there's always a way to do that in any of these, including Monero, Zcash, Grin or whatever your favourite privacy coin might be. There's always ways to do that and the one that they're going to concentrate on is the one that gets used the most; it doesn't meant that they necessarily know all that much. In order to do it, it's way more costly.
Right now, if you want to do on-chain analysis, you just download the blockchain, run some heuristics on it; you maybe have some data from external sources, and you include that in order to figure out where it's pathing. But with Lightning, it's significantly more costly for them, and that's what you want to do from a privacy perspective; the more costly it is for somebody to analyse, the better it is for you, because that's an economic calculation that's going to now come into play. If you make it very costly for them to figure out who you are, they're just not going to do it.
So, you're right, they'd probably run a bunch of Lightning nodes and they're trying to intercept, figure things out or whatever, but you still have some pretty good privacy. At a certain level, if you pay, I don't know, Pornhub or something like that, you don't want anyone to know --
Peter McCormack: Why is that your example?!
Jimmy Song: It's because they only take Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Do they? I didn't know that.
Jimmy Song: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: You're the expert!
Jimmy Song: I wrote an article about it in my newsletter. I mention it because there was a paper written by some guy saying, "Okay, what's Pornhub's value to Bitcoin been?" They stopped taking Visa, Mastercard and now all these transactions are in Bitcoin. I have reason, not because I'm a fan of theirs or whatever, but that's something that you might want to be private.
Peter McCormack: You had a very valid reason to go and investigate this!
Jimmy Song: Yeah! If you're going from A to B and you have enough hops in between, that's going to be a fairly private thing; very few people are going to be able to figure it out. In addition, if you wanted, you can do an on-chain transaction; you can do something called submarine swaps, which I think are woefully underused at this point, but you can do that.
Peter McCormack: It sounds like the kind of thing that someone with a -- what?
Jimmy Song: Yeah, so a submarine swap is a way to do Lightning transactions on-chain, or on-chain transactions on Lightning.
Peter McCormack: Is that Alex Bosworth?
Jimmy Song: Yeah, and it's got some really nice privacy properties, because there's no easy way to link the two of them and you need to do a lot of observation. Again, you're upping the cost of somebody being able to break that privacy, essentially. That's really all you ever really want to do with respect to privacy. All privacy can be broken with enough data and enough listening, or whatever. You want to make it so expensive that they are not incentivised to go and do all of those things.
With submarine swaps, you can pay on Lightning and get a UTXO back that's unrelated to any UTXO that you inserted into the Lightning Network. And you can do the reverse; you can pay in Lightning, and then the person on the other end uses a UTXO to pay your favourite vendor, or something like that. That's really nice because there's no linkage between the two and only the person that's providing it for you has that. So, unless they're compromised with Chainalysis or something like that, then you get a lot of these privacy properties.
So, you have so many options within the Lightning Network where you really don't with Monero; you have this one particular zero-knowledge proof with five different UTXOs that are chosen in a fairly deterministic way with some randomness embedded in it. In general, you get some amount of privacy in Monero with zero-knowledge proofs, but it's not impossible to break; there are several papers that talk about how you can -- there's only five possibilities and you can eliminate them one by one, and you're down to three. That's a lot easier to analyse, it's not a very big anonymity set.
With Lightning, it's however large the network is. It could have come from almost anywhere and that's very useful to hide behind; you get a lot of privacy properties that way.
Peter McCormack: Should they not just increase the size of the anonymity set though?
Jimmy Song: Who, Monero?
Peter McCormack: Monero, yeah.
Jimmy Song: Then you start running into a chain bloat and stuff like that.
Peter McCormack: It's fatally flawed?
Jimmy Song: The thing is, the larger the anonymity set, you have to define it in your transactions. If you have five transactions that you're doing it from, then that's five UTXOs that you have to reference -- actually, Monero doesn't have UTXOs; it's all TXOs, and the chain keeps bloating and you have no idea of anything spent or not, because that's the design; that's how you get privacy.
If you increase from 5 to 20 or something like that, now your transactions are that much bigger and your proofs are that much bigger, you have these ring signatures and stuff like that which are bigger. That means you can fit less of them on-chain and that means you have an increase in anonymity here, but you have decrease in anonymity here, because within a block you can be, "Okay, I can figure out what time roughly that person did that transaction; I just need to look at that block and it's probably one of these".
There are so many ways in which there are trade-offs within Monero that aren't really solved that well. So, yeah, I know all the Monero fan boys are probably going to come after me, or whatever.
Peter McCormack: And me.
Jimmy Song: But I'm telling you, it's not a very large anonymity set versus what you're going to be able to get in Lightning, which has literally thousands and thousands and thousands of nodes, and growing all the time, especially for the small transactions where you're going to want that anonymity. Lightning is almost ideal because it leaves no blockchain footprint, which Monero does by default and it has to in order for its property to work. I think Lightning is actually good and, as it grows, I think that the privacy aspect of Lightning is going to be okay.
Peter McCormack: Does it get exponentially better as it grows?
Jimmy Song: You have a larger anonymity set that you can hide behind. If you have 10,000 nodes, then you're hiding in that group. If you have 100,000 nodes, then you're hiding in that group, so it's 10 times the anonymity set which means 10 times the cost to figure out which one it is.
Peter McCormack: But is it exponential the growth that comes with it?
Jimmy Song: I don't know if it's exponential; I think it's linear if I'm not mistaken. Just in any anonymity set, it's proportional to the number of possibilities there are. In Monero, it's really not that much, is my point.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Jimmy Song: Whereas on Lightning, it's significantly more.
Peter McCormack: You happy, Danny?
Danny Knowles: That sounds good to me, yeah.
Peter McCormack: I want to get into my favourite subject to talk about with you which is altcoins.
Jimmy Song: Didn't we just do that? Come on!
Peter McCormack: No, we talked about Monero. I want to talk about alternative coins, shitcoins. The reason I want to talk about it with you is, our show is always growing, which means there's always new people coming in, which means I'm always getting new emails from people saying, "I love the show, I love the Bitcoin but have you not considered ETH? What do you think of Solano?" Is it Solana or Solano, I can't remember?
Jimmy Song: Solana.
Danny Knowles: You say Solano.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, Solana. Roberto Solano or Ethernet or Cardano people in the last week. So, I always think it's good to have a refresh on the importance of decentralisation, that it isn't a spectrum. For me, I always think what is it directionally? Is it becoming more decentralised or more centralised? Is it directionally becoming more decentralised? That's super-important, and is it sufficiently decentralised?
But you've covered this over and over, it's always good for a refresh, I love talking about it with you; so, Jimmy, is decentralisation a spectrum?
Jimmy Song: No, it's not.
Peter McCormack: Go on, let's go!
Jimmy Song: It's a one or a zero, okay. Look at the word "decentralisation", okay, does not have a centre. If you have a centre, it is centralised by definition, but it's in the word. If it's centralised, that means that you can go and shut it down. We're seeing two very good examples, because of this Ukraine/Russia conflict. We have OpenSea and MetaMask that banned the Russian users, completely banned them. Everyone in ETH was, "Wait, how's it possible you can do that? I thought this was a decentralised protocol". Well, it's because it's not decentralised, it's centralised. You have OpenSea, a company; you have a MetaMask, a company; you have all these other things that are companies. The thing about altcoins is that they are decentralised in the node.
Peter McCormack: How do you determine -- OpenSea banned users from coming on and using OpenSea just to buy NFTs?
Jimmy Song: Yeah, whatever it is, if you're from Russia you can't go on OpenSea. You can buy, sell or anything, but if you're Russian you cannot go on MetaMask to buy, sell or anything.
Peter McCormack: So OpenSea, I've never used it.
Jimmy Song: I've never used it either.
Peter McCormack: Does it have KYC on it; is that why?
Danny Knowles: I've not used that.
Peter McCormack: Maybe it has KYC so it knows where you are. But MetaMask doesn't have KYC, does it?
Jimmy Song: No, neither of them do.
Peter McCormack: But they do by IP?
Jimmy Song: Yeah, or whatever it is. Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what the mechanism is but they're banning people. Do you understand the significance?
Peter McCormack: No, I understand the significance, so I'm wondering, okay, for example when Coinbase banned 25,000 --
Jimmy Song: 25,000, yeah.
Peter McCormack: -- I'm stuck because my coins are in Coinbase as well, which is centralised, and therefore they can stop me moving it out. I used MetaMask once three years ago, four years ago. I don't fully understand what it is. It's a company, so is it just a wallet?
Jimmy Song: Yeah, basically it's a centralised wallet.
Peter McCormack: Once they ban me, can I not move my coins out of MetaMask to somewhere else?
Jimmy Song: There might be ways or something like that, but as far as I can understand, no you can't if you're part of Russia or something like that.
Danny Knowles: Why couldn't you restore your wallet with someone else and do it?
Jimmy Song: I'm not sure exactly how it works, so it's hard for me to answer that question.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Jimmy Song: The key thing here is that they banned users and you can't do that unless you're a centralised platform. No one can ban Russians from using Bitcoin; that's part of the --
Peter McCormack: Depending on what you're using your Bitcoin on.
Jimmy Song: If you wanted to just do a transaction, move it from one cold wallet to another or something like that, no one can stop you.
Peter McCormack: If I had a Ledger wallet, could Ledger ban people doing it, because Ledger has a node for you to do transactions?
Jimmy Song: No, Ledger can't, because the way they work is that it's a cold wallet and once it's signed, then you can broadcast that transaction pretty much anywhere if you're running your own node, or whatever.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Jimmy Song: Ideally, that's how you do it: you're running your own node and you have some connection.
Peter McCormack: That's ideal.
Jimmy Song: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: But not everyone's going to do that, so we had a Wasabi yesterday, which upset a few people, but they've blocked certain people.
Jimmy Song: They're a centralised service, so that is possible.
Peter McCormack: What I'm saying is, and not to pick up -- well, I have to because that's the job. But what's the difference between what Wasabi did and MetaMask did?
Jimmy Song: Wasabi is a voluntary service that's getting into it. MetaMask is part of the Ethereum Copper, if I'm not mistaken. OpenSea is pretty much the place for NFTs, right?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, forget OpenSea, but I can't see a difference between Wasabi and MetaMask. I know we should be encouraging people to hold their private keys. Can you hold your private keys with Wasabi and restore to another wallet?
Danny Knowles: Yeah, and you can with MetaMask as well, I think.
Peter McCormack: You can, okay. I just don't see a difference between the two, that's my problem.
Jimmy Song: Between MetaMask --
Peter McCormack: And Wasabi, they both have the same policy.
Jimmy Song: Wasabi is just the CoinJoin thing; MetaMask is the entire wallet. You can still run a Wasabi Wallet because it doesn't depend on anything central. For a CoinJoin, yeah, it's a small sliver of what a Wasabi does; you manage your stuff or whatever. MetaMask, the entire service is unavailable to Russia.
Peter McCormack: I guess what people need to do is be aware of the aspects within a Bitcoin ecosystem which is centralised.
Jimmy Song: Yeah, like on exchange or whatever. Those can and do ban people for whatever reason. But the thing is if it's decentralised, then you have control. If it's centralised, somebody else is in the middle and that's the key here; self-sovereignty requires decentralisation. You can have bilateral trade instead of having some third party in the middle that approves or disapproves, and that is the key.
So, all of these things that are supposedly decentralised or whatever, and this was the point I was getting to, is that they're all decentralised in name only, all these altcoins.
Peter McCormack: Dinos.
Jimmy Song: They claim decentralisation and the reason why they do it, and this is in my article this week in Bitcoin Tech Talk, my newsletter; the reason why they do that is so that the regulators won't come after them. There are tons of regulations around scams like pyramid schemes and all these other things, but by claiming decentralisation that they have no centre, "Hey, you guys shouldn't come after us because we're …"
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Jimmy Song: But what MetaMask and OpenSea are doing, what that's showing is that actually you are centralised and we can regulate you. I think it's only a matter of time before that happens to Ethereum, that happens to Cardano. It's already happened to Ripple, the SEC is already going after them.
Peter McCormack: I thought Ethereum got away with it. It was centralised and became decentralised.
Jimmy Song: They're getting away at the moment, but the thing is regulators aren't buying this lie anymore that they're decentralised when it's clearly centralised. At that point, once the pressure builds up enough they're going to be saying, "Okay Ethereum, you need to do this, this and this". Say this Russia conflicts gets to be especially big, or say the US and the UK get involved or something like that --
Peter McCormack: Let's hope not.
Jimmy Song: -- say it becomes a bigger thing and we need to ban Russian accounts from every possible service they can think of and it becomes a bigger thing, at that point the US Government will be able to say to Ethereum, especially if some of their Ethereum Foundation members are in the US or something like that, "Hey, you need to go ban Russian users from Ethereum, because we're getting reports that they are using Ethereum to transfer value in and out and go around our sanctions", or something like that. At that point, they would be subject to that regulation and it would be clear as day that they are centralised.
You can't do that with Bitcoin. They can try and they'll certainly tell all the exchanges, "Don't let them do it" but if there's a person in the US, a relative or something like that, and they're transferring, there's nothing they can do; there's nothing they can do to step back.
Peter McCormack: What could they threaten the Ethereum Foundation people with?
Jimmy Song: Jail time.
Peter McCormack: What do they want them to do?
Jimmy Song: No transactions out of Russia, something like that.
Peter McCormack: How would they stop that; they would have to make code changes to Ethereum?
Jimmy Song: No, this kind of happened with the PolyNetwork; I don't know if you remember that hack.
Peter McCormack: No, I don't.
Jimmy Song: There was a hack about, I want to say seven months ago or something like that, and the PolyNetwork, their smart contract was flawed.
Peter McCormack: I do remember, yeah.
Jimmy Song: It was $700 million, or something like that.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Jimmy Song: Basically, if you look at their Twitter and maybe you can even pull that up, it said, "Dear Hacker, we have instructed everybody to not mine anything from this address or this address or this address on both Binance chain and Ethereum. You are not going to get any of your coins. If you hand them back, then --" why don't we negotiate, basically. The hacker, which is really a word for a smart contract lawyer, he settled for I think it was $500,000.
So, one way to look at it is, it's nominally worth $600 million, settle for $500,000. So, 99.9% of the value of that was in getting the central controller's permission, which in this case, was the developers of the PolyNetwork.
Peter McCormack: Damn.
Jimmy Song: 99.9%. So, most of it is centrally controlled and they paid the $500,000, they called him a white hat hacker, and forgave whatever consternation that this guy caused on the network. But that's what they would probably do is say, "Okay, every miner, if you mine this we're going to reject your block and we're going to go do something" and they had that power because Infura's what everybody uses for the Block Explorer. So, if Infura doesn't follow whatever proof-of-work thing was found by a particular miner, no one else is going to. That's the main one; no one else cares about any other node, it's whatever Infura says. It's very centralised. If they can do that for the PolyNetwork, they can certainly do that because the US Government demands it.
Peter McCormack: It's frustrating where a project claims to be decentralised as well as claiming to be better money than Bitcoin. That's the ultimate frustration, because the power of Bitcoin is in its decentralisation. If you're claiming you're better money and you're decentralised, you're arguing to people, you're making the case that you should own this coin over that coin, that does annoy me.
What about a scenario, and bear in mind I caveat this with I've got no interest in shitcoins, don't own any, don't intend to trade any, I don't promote any, but I am also interested in fair discussion; what if someone like Solana, for example said, "You know what, we're not decentralised, we admit it. We are permissionless and we're happy to be regulated and we are just a different alternative platform that you can build business applications on. We have a token, but we accept we're not decentralised, we're not trying to compete with Bitcoin", would you still consider that a shitcoin and argue against it, or would you just consider that just a platform?
Jimmy Song: Well, if they issued their own token, then there are certain things that you have to consider based on that --
Peter McCormack: Of course.
Jimmy Song: -- which is that they would be running foul of all kinds of laws that exist already, like you can't make your own currency. Liberty Gold, I think, was one and there were several others where they issued their own coin based on gold, some digital form of gold. All those people went to jail. So, I would think that if they ever admitted something like that, all those people that did Solana should go to jail.
Peter McCormack: Really?
Jimmy Song: Yeah, because you're issuing your own currency that's centralised and able to be -- maybe they get away with it, because they have enough lobbying power or whatever.
Peter McCormack: Do we want them to go to jail?
Jimmy Song: I don't want anyone to go to jail, but that's probably what would happen if they did.
Peter McCormack: What I'm saying is I'm trying to consider the alternative argument, because I can advise people against the value of these things. Bitcoin's got so big now, if it has already won the race, I wonder if there's an alienation by overly criticising every single project that ever exists. Would it be better to say, "Do you know what, I don't agree with it, I don't think it's a good project. I wouldn't put my money in there, but hey, you should consider Bitcoin", because these aren't going away. We've had years and years of these projects being graded. Are we putting our energy in the best place?
Jimmy Song: It depends. Whenever people ask me about my opinion, I'm going to tell them, "Hey, I think it's a scam", because I think that's an accurate way to describe what these things are. It's a way for VCs to get rich, most of them who buy insane amounts of premine tokens at an extreme, pump the hell out of it and then release it to the public and win money that way for their LPs or whatever. I think that's immoral; I think that's horribly bad for everybody.
Peter McCormack: I agree on immoral, I'm not sure scam. I agree on immoral.
Jimmy Song: I think it's really -- if you did that with stamps or something, that would be a Ponzi scheme; that's exactly what that guy Ponzi did and there are pyramid schemes that are very similar, whatever. I think by any reasonable definition, that's exactly what you're doing; you're pumping up something that has no intrinsic value for the sake of profiting yourself. I think that's a scam.
You might say, "Well, we should be nicer to them" or, "Not talk about them as badly because we're putting our energy in the wrong place". I try not to think about altcoins; it's just that a lot of people ask and if they're going to ask, I'm going to tell them exactly what I think. You ask, I'm delivering, that's what I'm doing.
Peter McCormack: I'm eking out the answer for the listeners. What I say doesn't matter; it's what the listeners take from this and a number of people listening to this show have written in and said, "Thank you so much. I'm Bitcoin only; I've learned a lot about this". It's funny, that takes us really to this, because I did want to ask about this.
For me, Thank God for Bitcoin is the moral case for Bitcoin. Interesting, we were with Jeff Booth the other day and we were talking about money misinformation, how you have Bitcoin which is money truth and the rest of the market is money misinformation. It's a completely distorted market people can't prepare for. Their wealth gets destroyed and that really is, whether we say Thank God for Bitcoin on the moral case for Bitcoin, I'm not religious, I think it's the same point, right?
Jimmy Song: I mean, the case for Bitcoin from a moral perspective is that you are not stealing from other people; that's really it. We wrote that book to Christians, which we know there's a significant number, to help them understand from a Christian perspective why it's a better money than fiat money, how immoral fiat money is and, to your point, all these altcoins as well. That's the case that we're making. You talked about this with Jeff and many other people, that ou get all these skews because, essentially, value has been stolen from all of these other people. As we point out in the book, it’s not just stolen from rich fat cats or something like that, it's not like that at all. In fact, it's been stolen from the poorest of the poor in the entire world.
If you think about the US dollar, every time they print an additional dollar, it dilutes everybody else that's holding the dollar. Well, if you look at cash, for example, US dollars the actual physical bills, 65% of physical US dollar bills are outside the United States. Now, where are they? In all sorts of countries for very good reasons. A lot of people don't like holding their local currency, so that's their form of savings.
When the US dollar's expanding, and in the last two years, it went from $15 trillion to $22 trillion, so that's a significant increase, almost 50% increase in the amount of M2 money that exists, that's a significant inflation; well, who is that hurting? Your PPP loans, your stimi cheques, where's that coming from? It's coming on the backs of all those people that are outside the United States that are getting their dollars diluted. I talked to Yeonmi Park about this. In North Korea, the most desirable --
Peter McCormack: She's amazing.
Jimmy Song: Yeah, the most desirable currency in the black markets in North Korea is the US dollar. That's what they save their money in. Who are you hurting when the dollar expands? It's them, it's the poorest of the poor, it's the most vulnerable people, people in the most oppressive places, whether it's North Korea or Zimbabwe or Venezuela.
Peter McCormack: It was when I was in Venezuela, people wanted dollars.
Jimmy Song: Yeah, yeah. Those are the people that are being diluted. My friend Alex Gladstein, he's been on your show too.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, he's great.
Jimmy Song: He sent me a thing because he knows I'm interested in North Korea. It's a report out of North Korea from the defectors or people that are still in there, talking about how prices in North Korea just doubled. Just doubled! That's what happens when you expand the dollar; it is highly immoral. These are people that are getting hurt all the time so that we could get our stimi cheques, so that we could have our PPP loans, so that we can have all these things that Congress spends money on and feeds rent-seekers, essentially. Those other people that we don't see, those are the people that are being hurt and that's the case that we're making in that book.
Peter McCormack: It's not that I agree with this, but why does the US Government owe a responsibility for people who choose to hold the dollar in another country? Is it because they've created the dollar global standard as a reserve currency; is that why?
Jimmy Song: Yeah, and they more or less imposed it on the world as part of Bretton Woods. Post World War II or towards the end of it, it was a bunch of bureaucrats from a lot of countries that decided, "All right, we need a new monetary world order". Those are the exact words that they used, in a hotel in New Hampshire called Bretton Woods. They decided this is how it's going to be for the rest of the world, and because the US was the most dominant power with most of the gold, they were able to impose it on the rest of the world.
So it is, in a very real sense, a monetary imperialism that's been cast over the entire world. That's why, yeah, the US is responsible, because they imposed it. Previous reserve currencies had a similar dynamic, including your home country with the British pound before that. So, yeah, I would say the US Government is responsible for all of this global trade happening in the US dollar, because they more or less imposed it.
Peter McCormack: Give me the moral case for Bitcoin then.
Jimmy Song: The moral case for Bitcoin is that you don't have the cesspool of theft, corruption and cronyism that you do with the US dollar. Fiat money is just straight up evil. It is an institution of corruption, of theft, of extracting value from people that can least afford it. Bitcoin is one that's way fairer and that's the case that we make; we don't even mention Bitcoin until the last two chapters.
Here's all the things that are wrong with fiat money: all of these things are the result of fiat money, including high time preference behaviour, the politicisation of absolutely everything. When you have a money printer available, everyone wants access to that money printer and it is all about, they will fight tooth and nail for that money printer, so everything becomes politicised. All of these societal ills are a result of fiat money.
Then we bring in Bitcoin and say, "Okay, here is why Bitcoin is very different; there is no centre, there is no central controller". That means that you have certainty around the amount of Bitcoin that you have; it's not going to get stolen from you. It is unseizable money and it's undilutable money. That means that you have actual control over it and that gives it much better qualities from a moral perspective, because if a money is hard to steal, then that's just better money.
Dollar is very easy to steal, not physically from your pocket or something like that, although there is that too, but from diluting it, you are actually stealing value from people, even if you're not taking the dollars out of their pocket. With Bitcoin, you can't do that and that makes it a more moral money or a system that makes it very, very difficult to be immoral in.
Peter McCormack: Is there ever a moral case to dilute money in times of crisis, times of economic crisis? We've been talking about this at the moment in the UK. We've got a huge energy crisis; people cannot afford their energy bills and the Scottish Government is going to be issuing rebates on energy bills so people can afford to heat their home. In that scenario, perhaps they're running the money printer, they're diluting to do it in times of recession. If we had a period or a responsible government that ran both surplus and deficit and tried to balance the economy, would there ever be a moral case for the money printer?
Jimmy Song: I personally think no. There was a French bishop, by the name of Nicole Oresme from the 13th century, who made this case way back there which is, is there ever a time that the printers can debase the money; this was with metals and stuff like that. His conclusion was, "No, he might as well take my coat and say he has need of it". It is literally taking your stuff away and if you're not doing so voluntarily, that is just theft straight up. Can there be justification for theft? This is what Les Misérables is about; it's about the family is starving, so is it okay for me to steal bread and so on. That's a much deeper and more philosophical question. At least in my view, it is morally wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right ever, so I don't think that argument necessarily works.
Peter McCormack: What about a scenario where -- I'm trying to come out with my toughest questions for you, Jimmy; what about in a scenario where an exchange has inside information and can countertrade the market, ends up dumping the price of Bitcoin, destroying someone's purchasing power; Is that immoral?
Jimmy Song: They're dumping it for what reason; for their own benefit?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, because they can countertrade the market and end up wiping out accounts and attaining that Bitcoin.
Jimmy Song: That's a good question. I'm not really sure what the moral implications are.
Peter McCormack: Because dilution of money destroys the purchasing power.
Jimmy Song: Purchasing power, yeah.
Peter McCormack: If you had enough Bitcoin that you could trade the market, you had a way of opening a large short, crashing the price, etc, and acquiring Bitcoin, you are also destroying purchasing power.
Jimmy Song: I don't think that would be immoral, per se. That would be if I held a lot of Beanie Babies and I know you're a Beanie Baby collector, I don't want to crash the price and so I sell all my Beanie Babies. I'm doing what I want with my own stuff; I'm not necessarily stealing from you. It's just I'm ahead of the market in some way, shape or form. That's not immoral because I'm not taking anything away from you.
Now, it may have negative consequences for you, but that's the risk you took when you bought Beanie Babies. In that sense, I don't think causing somebody else's property to go down in value -- unless I'm actively damaging it. If I cut up your Beanie Babies, that would mean that I would be harming your property; that would be immoral. But if I'm doing something with my own property that I have the right to do and it happens to hurt you, that's not my problem. That's the risk that you took in taking some of that.
Peter McCormack: I think I'm going to have to dig into this; I'm going to have a read of this. I'm going to be in for Bitcoin and the American Dream first. Just to close out, Jimmy, you've been in Bitcoin for quite a while now. Do you remember your first year?
Jimmy Song: 2011.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I thought you told me that before. We're 11 years in from that now, which is incredible. How do you take it all in, because for me there's been a lot of change in five years and certainly eight years; but for you, 11 years; how do you just take this all in because you've been along for the whole ride?
Jimmy Song: It's unreal to me. I'm a coder, I'm a programmer. I've been a programmer geek for most of my life; I started coding when I was nine years old. That's what I've been and I'm coming on podcasts with you, I'm writing books, I'm helping the Lummis office craft their legislation. I'm going to Oslo Human Rights Forum to talk to human rights people about how they can better do -- it's unreal to me that I am in this position. I'm getting invited to Christian conferences to talk about Bitcoin because they're like, "You know what you're saying money is something that nobody really talks about, so we want you to…" It's completely surreal to me that I am in this position now when I was a coder.
Coming back to it: 11 years, that's the transformation that I've gone through and I'm sure you feel similarly because you have, I think as remarkable, or even more of a remarkable, story in becoming a top podcaster in Bitcoin. For me, the changes in the industry are just that; they're changes and things are happening. In some sense, they're inevitable and others it's just people working on it. But for me, the way I take it in is just one of gratitude, because I am able to have multiple streams of income and spend a lot more time with my kids and work on something that I'm very passionate about, and working to bring the world to a place that's better than it was before. I think I've talked to a bunch of bitcoiners. All of them say the same thing about the past two years is, "If I didn't have Bitcoin I'd be so depressed right now".
Peter McCormack: I don't know what I'd be doing!
Jimmy Song: I know a lot of people that didn't have Bitcoin and they are depressed, because the world lacks hope. This is something that Michael Saylor says is --
Peter McCormack: It gives you hope.
Jimmy Song: Bitcoin is hope. You need some bright light and it gives some sense of things getting better, and Bitcoin is making things better. For me, I have nothing but gratitude towards what Bitcoin's been able to do. I take it in with a sense of wonder and joy and, yeah, gratitude more than anything else.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I can fully appreciate that, but that lens is super-interesting actually because I think every bitcoiner can see all the crazy shit in the world, this last two years, right now, what's happening to money, but we have that lens of hope. It's not just that lens where it's, "I have the money that protects my wealth" but also, "Oh, people can actually do something". You can create something that is outside of government control, which is outside of all the bullshit of politics. You can actually create something and fix part of the systems.
We also can see the use cases, how people are using this to help people and help their other life; there is that and I'm with you. If you didn't have that lens -- all the people who don't understand Bitcoin, refuse to look at it, refuse to check it out, don't have that lens; all they can see is misery and high gas prices. They don't have that. I look through that lens and think, "It's not going to be pretty but at least we have this". We have this tool we can defer to that can just help; I fully appreciate that and I appreciate you, man.
Jimmy Song: Thanks for having me on but, yeah, it's such a surreal thing, isn't it?
Peter McCormack: It is, man.
Jimmy Song: It's how are we doing this, Peter, how are we…?
Peter McCormack: We turned up.
Jimmy Song: Yeah, and it's we're now in the Bitcoin space doing this and that. Is this real life? What timeline are we living in? How did this happen? Those are the questions.
Peter McCormack: I think we just turned up and we had Dylan LeClair in here earlier and he's part of that new cohort of people that just turned up. He's 20 years old, he's smart as shit and I don't know how much energy I'll have to do this; I don't imagine I'll be doing this in 10 years, I think I'll be too tired and hopefully --
Jimmy Song: It's like driving a Lambo and doing something, watching your team win the Premier League, hopefully.
Peter McCormack: The second one's a bit more unrealistic, but we're going to try for both. But just seeing this new cohort of people come through, that's brilliant as well; there are people recognising this and turning up and doing it. I feel like a pompous dickhead saying, "You just turned up", but people just did turn up; we've sat in a room four or five times and done this and other people are doing it.
Jimmy Song: I think you're giving yourself too little credit, because you worked hard and I worked hard.
Peter McCormack: We did.
Jimmy Song: We didn't just turn up; we showed up and we worked hard and that's how you really get into it.
Peter McCormack: There are a lot of people out there who work hard, who maybe don't get to do -- I always remember I used to have this web design business and this is one of the things that's stuck in my mind more than anything. We went to Stoke and there's a place they do pottery. There's a factory and there's people there who've worked in that place for 40 years doing the same job day in, day out; they work hard, they work hard and it's a different life.
Jimmy Song: Well, it's a different kind of working hard.
Peter McCormack: It's still for them and, in some ways, they work harder but in a different type of job. But I think a lot of people work hard, I just feel very fortunate and very lucky to have met you early on and been able to do this, and I appreciate everything you're doing, Jimmy. So, I'm sure we're going to do this a bunch more times over the next few years and talk about Bitcoin and stuff. All right, pimp these books, tell people where to go, where to find you, check these books, especially this.
Jimmy Song: Yes, so I have four books to my name: Programming Bitcoin, The Little Bitcoin Book, Thank God for Bitcoin, Bitcoin and the American Dream. They are all available on Amazon; you can also go to my website programmingbitcoin.com, which is the title of the first book and there are links to go buy all of them. It's available on Amazon all over the world in English; some of these are in different languages. I think The Little Bitcoin Book is translated to 15 or 16 languages at this point, including Farsi and Hindi and stuff like that. Thank God for Bitcoin has been translated to two or three and we'll see what happens with Bitcoin and the American Dream.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, you might have to do Bitcoin and the British Dream, Bitcoin and the Spanish Dream, Bitcoin and the --
Jimmy Song: I don't know. Those don't have the vision that people have of the American --
Peter McCormack: We all want the American Dream; we all want to go to Disney.
Jimmy Song: Anyway, they're available on my website, on Amazon and you can follow me @jimmysong on Twitter.
Peter McCormack: Keep crushing, man. Good to see you and good luck with all of this.
Jimmy Song: Thanks, man.
