WBD490 Audio Transcription

Freedom Technologies & Civil Disobedience with Austin Hill

Release date: Monday 18th April

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Austin Hill. 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.

Austin Hill is a cypherpunk & former Blockstream CEO. In this interview, we discuss the dangers of absolutism within Bitcoin’s community, building consensus in promoting freedom money, and advancing the human condition.

“There are so many opportunities to use freedom technologies to build civil disobedience, to put power into the hands of individuals, and Bitcoin’s a part of that.”

— Austin Hill

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Austin, good to see you again, man.

Austin Hill: Hey, great to see you, Peter.

Peter McCormack: A couple of good shows we made before, people enjoyed them a lot and said, "When are you going to get Austin back on the show?" and here we have you now.  

Austin Hill: Always a pleasure.  

Peter McCormack: Always a pleasure.  There's a couple of good things I want to talk to you about actually.  One of the things that you sent across to me ahead of time was, I thought it was quite interesting to see coming from you, as somebody who's been involved in Bitcoin for a long time, seen all the attacks on Bitcoin, been a defender of Bitcoin, but starting to think about absolutism within the Bitcoin community; and have we come to a time where perhaps we need to start shifting our focus?  

Bitcoin's so much bigger now, and every major global news story at the moment has a Bitcoin angle, lots of people are coming into Bitcoin trying to learn about it, but there's still that internal fighting on a number of issues, and it's something that's been on my mind a lot.  To see you mention it was kind of interesting.

Austin Hill: So, one of the approaches I think we have to take intelligently about the longevity of Bitcoin, being able to defend it as a community, as a free money, as an ecosystem, is to just think very intelligently about what are the battles that actually matter, what are the principles of the system that you can't compromise on, because a compromise on those actually builds inherent long-term systemic risk to everyone.  So, I would refer to those as technical or engineering compromises.

So, if someone comes out and proposes saying, "Hey, there's a brand new crypto algorithm.  My 14-year-old invented it this weekend and I really think it's better than anything else out there.  Let's adopt that", I would be absolutist, I would support -- and I think the community should be absolutist, because it violates one of the design principles we talked about last time in New York, which is this focus on security and taking the least risky approach, assuming a very large attack population or surface.

So, adopting something technically that would reduce the security framework, or might offer some benefits, but also include some trade-offs that might backfire because of unintended consequences, so right now, for instance, and I'm not fully up to speed, but there's a big debate inside of the Bitcoin Core community around some of the Discreet Log Contracts and the smart contracting functions that come with Taproot; because, when you start to include those with oracles, you could enable a whole bunch of great functionality, so some things that I absolutely love, I would love to see, in fact I would help fund.

If someone comes to me with a peer-to-peer sports betting app; great.  Sport results are very easy to have oracles, you can have multiple sign sources, you can have two people agree; you and I can agree that we're betting on the outcome of the Superbowl, and we're going to agree that the outcome is decided by Fox News, Yahoo! Sports and ESPN sports feed, we're going to take the best results of those three and if they all agree on the result, then the winner of our sports bet -- sports betting is so popular, it's an industry that could bring tons of people into Bitcoin.  You could actually totally change the odds.  It's not my thing, I'm not a big sports better, but that's an application that I think has been -- there's so much profit extraction being done by gambling houses and by centralised companies.  So, I see that as benefit, benefit, benefit.  

But that same functionality that you would build to add that, if it's misused to put restrictions on people's coins, which is one of the debates, so you can put an incumbrance now, because Bitcoin will be spent to an address that is dependent, you're now affecting fungibility, you could potentially start to end up in issues where shared multi-coin wallets get actually very contested and you start seeing more litigation around the outcome of Bitcoin.  

So, tons of things in Taproot are really, really good and we're seeing more fungibility, more privacy, more advanced multisig that I think will help the world deal with custody.  I deal with this with some of my family members who are becoming elderly; what happens if someone were to pass?  How do we deal with inheritance, how do we deal with key-splitting, and I would love for some of my relatives who aren't that technical to have multisig setup, where we could do more advance; it's not just 2-of-3, it's 2-of-3 and any one of the following trusted people.  So, that's an example of something that we could look at at a technical basis and say, "Does this bring more people into Bitcoin?  Does it create inherent risk?"

Taking another stance, like Bitcoin has been attacked for its energy usage.  People use FUD around pollution and climate change to attack something we love.  Therefore, any promotion of climate change means you're not a true bitcoiner.  I find that just a hard argument to win, regardless of what stance you take.  Some people will say, "The science on this is absolutely clear"; other people say, "No, the science has been totally politicised".  I think both of those things can be equally true, depending on certain parts of the study.  

But if you look at it from a pure communication for results point of view and think about, "Okay, what are the principles that we're most fighting for?  Individual sovereignty, distribution globally of the hashrate", you can look at it and say, "Does Bitcoin end up doing good by funding green power and funding energy independence?"  If you are someone who believes that humans are contributing, or someone who just says, "I love the planet and all things being equal, I prefer hydropower over petrodollar power".  Petrodollar power also has allowed a whole bunch of very corrupt governments to profit at the hands of their citizens.  So, you can take a non-politicised view of this and say, "You know what, that's not the hill I'm going to die on.  I'm not going to take a stance that says, 'To be a true bitcoiner like me, you need to have my same point of view on this very contentious issue'".  

So, I think there are issues like, certain responses in here become just memes and community.  I enjoy a steak dinner, I don't think you only have to eat meat to be a bitcoiner!  If subscribing to the carnivore diet is the only way the world's going to enjoy free money, then the free money design is broken somehow, because there are going to be billions of people in Africa, in India, in other places, who their primary diet isn't.  You can argue for the fact that, "Hey, I think there's more education and funding needed on better nutrition science, because most nutritional diets is literally quack diets since the 1970s, with ever-shifting pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey for food pyramids, for what's healthy.

So, you can say, "I want to take my Bitcoin profits and fund better food education, but don't use that as a means to judge whether or not someone is or not a bitcoiner, or whether or not someone is the right type of bitcoiner, because I think that kind of absolute moralism actually, that's how you build a cult, that's not how you build an open, free network, because we didn't have it for the internet.  

If I came to you in 1995, 1997 saying, "There's this incredible thing called TCP/IP.  You can publish a web page, you can quit your job, Peter.  You don't have to work for the man anymore, you don't have to be an ad salesman, you can actually go and create a podcast, but only if you believe in the following things.  You need to be a Scientologist, you need to be a this, you need to believe in the right type of diet and porn and the right political party.  Only then can you enjoy TCP/IP".

Another network protocol that didn't have those restrictions, that was more inclusive, that focused on doing the same job for everyone, would have overtaken TCP/IP, and I just view Bitcoin as that.  I view it as the protocol for financial sovereignty and freedom in the world.  So, let's focus on how to make the protocol the most robust against real attacks; because a real attack, when we start seeing what's happening playing out in the world today, are things like cutting off half the internet, as we're seeing happened in Russia right now; shutting down half the world's power centres, because we ended up in some sort of firing war; or cyber war takes down -- those are real attacks we should be focusing and thinking on, not whether or not someone believes in the same Twitter war you do.

Peter McCormack: Are there some differences though, when comparing to the internet?  So firstly, when we talk about carnivore, is that not just a subcommunity within Bitcoin, and yeah, you get the odd moron on Twitter who'll say, "You're not really a bitcoiner".  And I'm going contrarian, whilst I agree with you.  And isn't it also there's a large difference that the internet was just an open, free communication platform; and whilst Bitcoin is an open, free monetary system, the implications of moving to a Bitcoin standard have a large political impact, potentially, and therefore people have assigned politics to it?

Austin Hill: So, some people remember the history of the internet a bit differently, just depending on when you came and how involved you were.  But the internet, what didn't automatically become the free, open internet we see it, there were a number of key decision points and key timeframes when it was fundamentally under attack.  So, I believe it was 1997, Jon Postel, who developed essentially the mail system and ran the biggest spam list as a volunteer, the US Government came to him, because he controlled the root key servers for the entire internet, one guy.

Peter McCormack: I don't know any of this!

Austin Hill: Yeah.  So, Jon Postel ran the top level DNS mapping, so he controlled where all TCP/IP numbers found their routing, and where all domain names found their TCP/IP numbers.  So now, the root servers are held by a distributed group of engineers under ICANN.  But at the time, it was one org and the US Government came to him and said, "We have given you this control because it's our system, we invented this.  Please hand it back", and he said no.  One principled individual that changed the entire course of the internet.

He said, "This shouldn't belong to you, it's a global network.  You invented the protocol, but you can't govern it, and I'm going to wait until an organisation can take over that's international and multinational and has representative democracy", and he did.  There were a number of other steps like this throughout the course of the internet, where very strong stances -- the Church of Scientology for instance, they were one of the most aggressive and horrendous attackers against free speech on the internet.  

Adam and I and the early cypherpunks found this out very quickly, because the first, most popular anonymous remailer was called anon.penet.fi.  It was run in Finland and it was a non-encrypted mail mapping.  So, you could go to anon.penet.fi and give your email address, and they would map it to an alias.  And essentially, it was a pseudonym service.  A bunch of people were using the pseudonyms on it to publish internal Church of Scientology documents that embarrassed them, and they claimed copyright over.  They sued and won a court case, forcing him to shut it down, which led to the creation of encrypted remailers, that Adam and a number of people started to run, which was the cypherpunk response, which was, "No one person should have that trust.  We can use encryption to solve that".

So, that pushed the world through, but the entire creation of litigation and large powerful organisations that would be able to attack your privacy was fought back with encryption, and then gave birth to essentially the Communications Decency Act and some of the privileges that someone could say, "I'm not responsible for the actions of my users", and led to general preference, not all the time, but a general preference among service providers to say, "If you come and ask us the identity of a user, you have to show us that you're legitimate law enforcement, or you have a warrant".

I believe, and a lot of privacy advocates believe that didn't go far enough.  We're seeing Google, for instance, respond to geographic warrants, if you're familiar with…  So, what happens is there's a crime committed, and someone goes in and says, "Show me all Google Maps searches and all Google searches that existed within a 30-block radius within this timeframe", and they essentially do a deep-sea phishing, where everyone's records get turned over, as opposed to identifying the actual person.

So, encryption and privacy should have gone further, and that's where I think there is a general regret that some of the privacy tools the cypherpunk worked on and wanted to see, aside from eCash, have not had the same growth.  We see Tor, but Tor is suspect to a number of attacks; encrypted email, we've had PGP since the 1960s and 1970s, still hardly ever used.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's so hard to use if you're not a technical person.

Austin Hill: That's one of the problems, is the growth of these tools making them very safe and easy.  And the people who tried to make that faced a lot of government pressure to do that.  I won't name names right now of certain companies, but there was another encrypted email provider that actually got a very large warrant, and the government basically asked them to turn off encryption and start logging users, and they shut down the entire service and refused to follow that.  So, this person literally cratered his business and said, "If you ask me to go against the interest of my users, I won't".

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is, we take for granted, I think, a lot of the little battles and little choices that over time, did give us some of the freedoms that we enjoy on the internet.  And so, when we look to the analogies in Bitcoin, I think it should cause us to understand, these battles actually start to really matter.  Tax policy on mining, getting really, really supportive of -- if every single bitcoiner was running round the world saying, "We will never pay taxes and we believe in the fall of government", and this asset group -- how long do you think it is before the governments say, "Okay, if you're a rogue, underground, darknet economy that we have no participation or taxation or involvement, if that's your game, we'll find a way to shut it down".

You would probably see the similar responses what they went after for Silk Road, which you can argue drug policy all you want, but it's hard to argue that as a free participatory, peer-to-peer drug marketplace that existed at the same time that the Purdues were selling Oxycontin and becoming billionaires and having universities named after them, how is this equal justice?  

Peter McCormack: Well, it isn't, but one is done within the framework of --

Austin Hill: Paying taxes.

Peter McCormack: -- paying taxes.

Austin Hill: Being legitimate, funding politicians.  So, this is why I think some of what is happening today with Bitcoin is so exciting, because I actually think we're beginning to see Bitcoin become a single issue on politics.  I think we have a number of politicians who we should be trying to encourage to be the best politicians and get them on the ballot, politicians who actually own Bitcoin and understand free money.

So, El Salvador is one of those, but what if it were five more like El Salvador?  What if we had a league of Latin American and African nations who had Bitcoin, whether it was a full national currency, or their economy had major support through Bitcoin, through mining, natural resources, Bitcoin development loans for their citizenry, and it was creating the economic impact and lift-off such that they'll stand up to the IMF, they'll stand up on the world stage and say, "Bitcoin was part of our economic progress and we support it", the same way they did for cell phones.  And then, you actually saw some of those countries start partnering with G7 and G8 countries, we could see a shift in the world's economy that would bring more people into Bitcoin faster, which ultimately is one of my hopes.

If the price balloons so fast, beyond certain people's ability to incorporate it in their lives, incorporate it in their savings, you get that same backlash we did on the dotcom, and that massive pullback can actually, for a long time and at a critical time -- because as we talked about last time, I think the next ten years are so critical, and we're seeing it play out with currency wars, with kinetic wars based off currency wars, energy wars, and we haven't even got started yet for throwing in some of the singularity technologies we talked about last time.

So, if we do not accelerate and try and raise all people's boats as fast as we can -- and it's not inequality; people use the word inequality.  The world is unequal, but everyone needs to at least have the same starting point, and should have access to the same opportunity set.  And just because of where you live, or the random dice of, "I happen to live in a country that just got hit by a major flood and I got economically displaced, and I had all my money in a $40,000 hut that just got destroyed, am I forever going to be denied economic opportunity?", or can I say, "You know what, I picked up and moved to the United States, because I had 40% or 50% of my savings in an asset that grew 300% over the last couple of years; and when that happened, I was able to hop on a plane, show up to Canada, show up to France, show up to the UK and say, 'I'm a productive member of society and I deserve a place and I'd like to work and I'd like to be productive and I'd like to pay my taxes and be a healthy member of your society'"?

I'd much rather the latter than a bunch of people sitting there saying no one cares about me, and feeling angry.

Peter McCormack: Is it that you're worried that some forms of absolutism, or some forms of cohorts grouping around certain narratives is going to put people off?  Because, look, I'm with you on the energy thing.  I think my position on that is pretty clear.  From what I've read, the people I've spoken to, the experts, pumping carbon into the atmosphere is not good for the environment.  But at the same time, I'm not sat here saying we should stop burning fossil fuels, because it has a risk.  But I do believe we should start looking at energy policy.

As I notice more moderates and lefties come in, and even people on the right who admit that climate change is an issue, that if we as a cohort look disproportionately like we are of the belief that climate change isn't an issue, does it potentially make the people coming in think, "Maybe these bitcoiners are crazy"; is that what you're worried about?

Austin Hill: My worry is on a couple of levels.  I think the most fundamental part of it, and I think this is one of the downsides of social media and the -- I mean, we struggled with it when we were building our pseudonymity service, is the idea that pure anonymity, or identities with no cost, tend to create this what's called an iterated prisoner's dilemma, it becomes a race to the bottom.  Whereas, if you invest in your identity and there is a cost to it, you tend to be a little bit cautious about the things you say, because at the end of the day, I want to be able to sit down with that person.

I used to try and get in arguments with people on social media, or when they would troll me I would respond.  But at a certain point, I would DM them and say, "I'm happy to buy you a coffee at any time.  Come say that to my face, and if you want to make that a point, I may agree with you, I may not, but healthy people can disagree".  And also everyone just goes away, or they're like, "You're so much nicer than I thought!  I expected you to troll me".

So, freedom money and the principles that I think supersede so many of these debates will require you to have people you disagree with fundamentally about some big issues, sit next to you and own the same asset class you do.  So, I tend to focus on, okay, why create waves, or why create the ability for the enemies of freedom money to paint us as crazies, to minimise the impact, in some cases to just ignore?  I mean, it was one of my biggest criticisms of some of the altcoins, not that they shouldn't exist, it's free open-source software, and yes there was scammy behaviour, tons of horrible marketing, scammy, profit-sharing, like by how they do coin distribution; but that exists in a lot of industries.  There are lousy people doing telemarketing fraud, there are lousy people doing other Ponzi schemes.  That wasn't my biggest concern with it.

My biggest concern was, if that's someone's first experience with digital currency and they get rug-pulled and they're on the downside of this, what if that means they're not going to participate in the real revolution, Bitcoin, for five to ten years?

Peter McCormack: Well, we know that exists, because whenever I get approached by friends or family or friends of family, and they start asking about Bitcoin, there are people out there who just think it's a scam.  I mean, even buying the football club, I've had journalists within the football sector who do not understand what Bitcoin is, and they group it in with all cryptocurrencies.  And some of them cannot see the difference between Bitcoin and an NFT.  They've just lumped it all together and they think there is a scam going on, so I'm with you on that.

On the anonymity thing, that's a super-interesting point, because I've had very public opinions about certain things, they've come back to bite me.  I've thought very quickly, or I've tweeted very quickly, a response to a situation in the news, whether it's what's happening with the war at the moment, whether it's COVID, and I've proven to be wrong, or missed the nuance.  

I did an interview yesterday on this podcast and they were asking me about some of these things, and essentially I'm agreeing with you.  I didn't say these words, but I said, "Essentially, because my identity is public and because my career is public, there is a cost to being wrong.  So, I have to invest more time in really trying to think or think through things so I give a more genuine or accurate and balanced opinion on things".  I did it recently.  I wrote a thread in response to Saifedean's climate change thread, which was a very considered and, I thought, balanced reply, because that's the responsibility of the job. 

Austin Hill: Well, we have to understand that our detractors and our attackers are going to take our words and take them out of context.  So, this is a funny kind of story.  Back when I started Zero-Knowledge with Adam, and we were building obviously this NSA-proof, anonymity, pseudonymity system, I started doing media articles.  I was a young geek and I was used to debating things on the cypherpunk mailing list and all these very hard libertarian communities, and I was a full-on Rand-ite libertarian, and had very strong beliefs that were somewhat associated with my age and just what I'd experienced at that point in life.

There would be these reporters who would come in and do these three-hour interviews with me talking about, "Hey, the dangers of technology, are you ever worried a criminal might use this system?  Are you ever worried a paedophile might use this system?  What about a terrorist?" and I would go into a very nuanced, long-winded conversation, where I'd be like, "The same knife that can be used by an attacker can be a scalpel used by a doctor to save you.  And an ambulance in the wrong hands can drive someone over, or it can pick you up and bring you to the hospital.  Technology itself is inherently neutral and it's the user of the technology who has the morality".

The article would come out and be, "Austin supports child pornographers using his system"!  It's like, "That's not what I said!"  So, at one point, after so many of these articles backfired on me, the company finally got me media-trained, and it was like, "This is ridiculous", but I actually learned a lot.  One of the techniques that they go through is how to talk like a politician, which just unfortunately is so painful.

Peter McCormack: A lot of words that mean nothing.

Austin Hill: Well, and what they refer to as something called ATM, not A2M, that's something different, don't search that.  ATM is Answer Transfer Message, just careful for the audience, I don't know how young our audience is!  So, Answer Transfer Message would be when someone came back to me after and said, "Aren't you worried about paedophiles using your system?"  I'm like, "I think we can all agree that paedophilia is a horrible thing, and we're so glad that parents now have our tool to protect their children against it".  Answer Transfer Message, and that's it.

Yes, it took the dumbing down of it, but especially without an entrusted source, your ability to go into nuance and have your words taken away, social media and the 140-character quick back and forth I think also has that tendency, where it's so easy to just have a quick answer, and the nuance gets lost.  So, you have to focus on, "Okay, what is my actual media message?"

Early on in Bitcoin, when I first started spending a lot of time in Bitcoin, there were a couple of bitcoiners, I won't name the publicly, but they were fairly prominent at that time in the Bitcoin community, open-source developers, some very strong opinions, and there were a couple of them who literally were going out and saying, "Bitcoin is money for ISIS, because free money is money for your enemy and terrorists".  Adam and I were laughing and at one point I said, "Can we do a crowd-funder to do media training for these people, because that's just not the message we want Bitcoin to be associated --".  That maybe be true, it is free money, but do you really stand up in the middle of what was going on in the world and say, "I support ISIS money"?

Peter McCormack: Of course you don't.

Austin Hill: It's just not smart communication.  It's like, you don't run up to the US Government and say, "I'm supporting something that will represent your downfall, because I believe you're all evil, corrupt people and you deserve to fall the way Rome did".  Is that really going to help?  Is it going to get you anywhere?  Is it going to make you friends?

Peter McCormack: No, but a lot of people do talk like that.

Austin Hill: Yeah, and I would hope that the conversation would actually evolve to one of harm reduction and less suffering.  What is going to provide the less suffering for humanity?  What is going to provide the most economic freedom?  If you believe in those principles, you don't want to see people suffer and a system fail; you want to see a system evolve, and you want to help society get there by funding better politicians, better technologies.  The work that Alex Gladstein is doing with the Human Rights Foundation is incredible, because he literally goes into parts of the world where the use of freedom money is the difference between living and dying.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I need to get his new book actually.

Austin Hill: I just ordered my copy.  But these are stories we can get behind, these are stories we should promote, and it's not because you can't have those beliefs, because who am I to judge anyone's beliefs?  This is freedom money, this is free society.  Privately, I'll have a drink with someone and talk about whether or not capitalism is good, whether or not socialism is good, whether or not UBI has a role, or whether or not a capitalist-based society based off Bitcoin can actually alleviate the need of UBI, because those are worthwhile, really good discussions to have.  

But to stand up and say, "Anyone willing to pay taxes to support this government is evil", just I don't think that's -- at least in my book, that's not how I choose to promote a technology that I think can alleviate human suffering.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's just not smart either.  This is why I wrote my reply to Saifedean, because this is the author of probably one of the bestselling Bitcoin books, if not the bestselling Bitcoin book, the book that a lot of people will read first, perhaps follow him on social media, and then they're going to see a raving lunatic who has got some pretty -- some of his ideas on consensus on particular topics, and the delivery method, is not one of nuance and balance and empathy; it's a position of, "I'm right, you're wrong, if you disagree with me, you're stupid.  I'm part of the intelligent 10% who understand this, you're not.  You're a soy boy, you're a hysteric and I'm going to block you".

You can send somebody on a journey which is -- well, you can essentially bring somebody in who might be interested in Bitcoin, then completely knock them back out.  It's like, "I heard Bitcoin was right-wing, supremacist money.  Yeah, this guy's proven it to me", and that was the sense behind the reply, the thread.  Danny reviewed it with me, we picked every word carefully, and all that led to was being called an attention-seeking whore, or was it that?

Danny Knowles: I think it was that, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and it's just like, "How the fuck is this helpful?"

Austin Hill: Yeah, and without getting into that specific one --

Peter McCormack: You don't have to.

Austin Hill: -- there are some people within Bitcoin who I have had nuanced disagreements with, whose reaction to that is very outsized with the discussion that we were supposed to be having, in the sense that the reaction to the debate, or the reaction to being called out, or even just to me offering a contrarian, "Hey, have you thought about this?" which I like to think makes us all smarter, right, the old rule in debate clubs was, you would study an issue and at the beginning of the debate, you would draw to see which side of the debate you took, and that's how you proved whether or not you knew an issue well enough, is can you argue both sides?

For instance, there are some people who are very anti-war and anti-violence.  All things being equal, that is absolutely my belief.  I believe violence is the last refuge of the unintelligent and ignorant, as Asimov said; I think that was in the Foundation series.  But it's hard to argue with the fact that someone who comes and says, "Violence has never solved everything"; it's just ignorant of history.  

In World War II, I would absolutely have supported violence, given what was happening in the world and what the world was fighting against.  And absolutely, that ended because of violence.  You look at the scale of human suffering and say, "At a certain point, the violence --" and I'd much rather see that being done by a democratically elected, although imperfect, government that may lie to people, that may have sins of its own, than a tyrannical, fascist government, that was rounding up and killing their own citizens in death camps.

So, to say violence never solved anything is just very ignorant, the same way you can say, "Fiat money is responsible for all wars".  I'm sorry, that's just not true, because I can go back in history, and we can actually find a number of times where fiat money didn't exist where rival clans were killing each other over scarce resources, over access to meat.  As much as people talk about the Native American population, or the indigenous people, and there were incredible times of beauty; I mean, I have two Native American sisters, who we adopted in our family.  I grew up going out to the reserves in Canada, seeing powwows and being exposed to that culture, a beautiful, incredible culture that was horrendously treated by obviously, generally, the white man and the Europeans, who moved here and took advantage.

They, at times, enjoyed cultures of abundance, where they practised gift economies, where their entire economy was actually based off the giving of gifts, as opposed to the collection of objects.  In post-scarcity economics, gift economies are incredible.  But they still went to war with rival tribes.  Most of them who enjoyed that culture of abundance, it was because they had wiped out all their enemies, and they won for their geographic area, and it allowed them a monopoly on access to food and resources. 

So, this idea that -- okay, you can make a very strong argument that the introduction of fiat money, that allows for escalation of a political war machine and defence contractors and the expansion of technologies of war, can make wars bigger, worse, can make it an easier choice to go to.

Peter McCormack: More often.

Austin Hill: More often.  You can argue that it corrupts the political system by having candidates and politicians who are now dependent on that defence contract.  Those are intelligent arguments and it allows us to then go back and say, "How could Bitcoin replace that?  How can we build an economy where we actually have Bitcoin-funded politicians, who are personally getting wealthy with Bitcoin, but their citizens are getting wealthy such that, anyone who ever talked about going against Bitcoin could never get on a ballot, regardless of the party?"  

That would be a discussion that's worth having, and I think America offers one of the best opportunities for that, because you can elect politicians at the local municipal level, that I think are still relatively free from corruption, at least at the very large-scale issue.  So, you could orange pill 50 to 100 towns across America, do what's happening in Latin America and build better politicians, and show that there is an alternative.  But there are ills in society that aren't always related to fiat money.

Peter McCormack: You don't sound very libertarian.  Based on our first meeting or first two interviews, I maybe wrongly made the assumption that all cypherpunks, or the history of the cypherpunks, were all probably pretty libertarian.  And I've got into a lot of clashes, so many clashes with bitcoiners, because I'm not a libertarian.  I mean, I almost agree with everything they say, but very clearly don't think it works.  

Or I think if you break down the structures of democracy, you end up either rebuilding it, or building authoritarianism.  And I know democracy can trend towards authoritarianism, but I don't think you can coordinate certainly 330 million people without some centralised structures.  Now, some would say, "Well, with Bitcoin you can".  I think Bitcoin's just one tool.

Austin Hill: When I think about labels, one of my favourite novels, which has got so much great stuff I recently re-read it again, is a Robert Heinlein novel, kind of classic cypherpunk, which is called The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I don't know if you're familiar with it.

Peter McCormack: No, but I'm going to write it down now.

Austin Hill: Essentially, the Moon was a penal colony, like Australia was many years ago, and all the governments of the world start shipping all their criminals and all their undesirables to the Moon to work on this prison colony.  But over time, people are actually born free on the Moon.  But because they're born in a gravity well there, they can't ever return back and they want their independence; so, the same way Australia at one point was a prison colony, then it became a self-selective government.  

It's got so many great things.  It's got economic lessons, because they literally try to finance their war against Earth, using stolen money and using fiat money; there's an entire debate on how to form proper government; and because they throw out the warden, they now are saying, "How do we select a government?"  So, one of the heroes of the book, Professor le Paz, who is this very learned guy, describes his politics as "irrational anarchist".  

When I was very young, I loved that, and he describes it as, "Irrational anarchist believes in personal and individual responsibility, does not believe that responsibility can largely be shared amongst people, because at the end of the day, it always come down to someone making that choice, even it's for people making a choice; and would prefer to have no laws and to have everyone just take care of themselves".  But the rational part is, you understand that that system rarely works for everyone else, so you're willing to accept the least amount of compromises within that goal.

So, when they're forming the government, they actually talk about things like, "How do you keep government honest?  How do you keep government small?" because once you start down the road of taxation and you give people the right to pass laws, that more often than not, people pass laws for what other people shouldn't do.  How often does someone come into Congress and say, "I'm very, very concerned with my desire to smoke cigarettes.  Can you please make it illegal?"  No it's, "I'm concerned with your bad habit of smoking cigarettes and I'm going to make it illegal for you", and that's just one example.

So, one of the ideas or things that are discussed are, can you get a law proposed by one majority, two-thirds, but have any law be able to be repealed by one-third?  Some of these things were designed and thought of in the Senate and the House and federal in their attempts, but that was almost 250 years ago.  I think the closest government that's done a detailed review on constitutional democracies recently has been New Zealand.  And, what they did for election and parties, and starting to move away from a two-party political system, was really, really intelligent.  

Unfortunately, those things are very hard to update in the United States, because you need to have ratification amongst all the states to update the Constitution, or a large portion of them, but I believe that we all deserve better government, I believe that the freedom to move your money and to move your voice and move across borders is essentially in keeping governments honest, because if a government can hold you geographically and hold you financially, then it's very easy for that government to ignore your voice.

In those regards, I think monetary freedom is essential, freedom of speech in the cyberspace is essential to move us on the long road to what I hope is a more peaceful democratic society, but we are at a very small turning point, because the technologies of AI, the technologies of media manipulation, the understanding that we're getting in psychology, we're literally taking stuff that mentalists and hypnotists used to learn, and we've built an entire ad industry around it, in being able to get inside people's insecurities, their wants, their desires and screw with them.  And that's just done by the advertising industry.  Wait until we have AI software that is able to have these rules and customise it.

I mean, the technologies of mass control didn't exist before, and I think that's why communism failed, that's why a lot of the worst parts of tyrannical socialist governments fell.

Peter McCormack: China has these technologies now.

Austin Hill: And they're perfecting them.

Peter McCormack: They are, and they're exporting them.

Austin Hill: They're exporting them, they're perfecting them, they're embedding them in trade deals with the road strategy in Africa, and that will be the war for the future.  And if America, Canada, Europe, the G8, Latin America, if we don't create some sort of opposition to that where we agree on certain principles, and we update the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to include cyber rights, monetary freedom and privacy, and actually start holding countries accountable when they violate those…

Peter McCormack: Well, this is why what's happening in the world right now is super-interesting, because we're essentially dividing the world into two teams; let's just treat it as it is!  Russia's been cancelled, China's seen as its own entity with its own set of rules, its own technology, its own money.  China's been moving off the US dollar, and now Russia's only trading partner, one of their only trading partners really, is going to be China in the short term.  Russia's had their assets seized, are we going to see an opportune moment for China to exert more influence and control around the world, to export their technologies?  Will you see an Axis of countries, which may include India, Iran, China and Russia, move on to the digital yuan; who knows?

So, at that time, and the dollar's position as the world reserve currency under threat, and it doesn't feel like the US can turn this around, there's a real opportunity for America to be very pro-Bitcoin, and hopefully freedom money wins against surveillance money.

Austin Hill: Well, not only pro-Bitcoin, but pro-advancement of the human condition through technology and individual freedom, because that, I think, is a larger mission than just Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is at the heart of it.  Because that will be the long-term response to some of these zones of opposition.  So, let's imagine, and I love doing exercises with my teams called backcasting, which is where you go out 10 years, 15 years in the future and you say, "Okay, what kind of world do we want to create, or do we imagine; and then, what would be some of the preceding events that might lead to that?"

Russia and China, less so China; because they adopted the Great Firewall of China and because China was so effective, I think, of building cultural terminal uniqueness, the idea that, "We are the Chinese nation, we are better than everyone, and everyone else's way of life isn't our way of life", and I think there's a very large part of the population in China, not all of them, some of the middle class and upper class, but you saw some of the clampdown on that as some of the upper and middle class recently with entrepreneurs, with Jack Ma, as they had more mobility and they spent more time in the West and they were importing some of that freedom, they had a big crackdown.

But in Russia it's been, call it 20 years, where most Russians under 25, under 30, have never known anything other than this assumed freedom.  Yes, there's been one political party; yes, they know that they don't have the same rights to criticise their government that they may see in America.

Peter McCormack: But it's better than under the USSR.

Austin Hill: Way better than under the USSR, and they've taken a lot of those freedoms as just birthrights.  And now that those freedoms are going away, I think Russia has a massive civil war coming on its hands.  How that civil war will be played out depends on some of these technologies.  So, this is where anonymity, mesh networking, encryption becomes so essential, because it's impossible to mount a civil, disobedience campaign, even to organise.  They were organising on Facebook; that's how they were organising the protests.  Facebook has now gone out of the country.

Peter McCormack: There's even, I've read, in the last week that there may be fundamental changes to the internet within Russia.

Austin Hill: Oh yeah, they cut off top-level domains.  They're essentially isolating themselves.  But if every single cell phone can be turned on with the right software into a mesh network that can communicate independently, that could be passing on messages, in a kind of Tor, pay-it-forward, anonymous message that never gets routed through the internet, there are so many opportunities to use freedom technologies to build civil disobedience, to put power into the hands of the individuals, and Bitcoin's part of that.  

Bitcoin with satellite being broadcast, Blockstream, is ensuring that you can access anywhere you are in the world.  If you have a satellite dish, you can still get access to your Bitcoin.  You can do antenna-based, or even broadcast via shortwave radio, a Bitcoin transaction.  So, when you start doing things like Lightning and Lightning Chat, and you use these same protocols to be able to say, "You know what, we could actually communicate, we could organise an army of dissenters, and we could do it in a way that the government has such a hard time tracking, following", and that's just going to increase.  

Elon Musk and what he's doing with Starlink, the more we have satellite-based internet, the more we have mesh networking and encryption tools, it should be next to impossible, or so hard for a government to squash a protest and dissent, if we do things right.  So, what that means is, the cost to an autocratic and tyrannical leader should be going up exponentially, while the benefits of adopting that system should be going down just as fast.  Part of what will determine that is the speed at which the western democracies, or what I would consider the more free, not everything is absolute but the more free societies, the faster they invest in technology.

For instance, let's say that there was a set of medical treatments that was, call it $1 million today, but within four or five years, could be a few thousand dollars, that will cure you of every single cancer, cure you of all disease, and reverse your aging by around 50%.  So, your biological age will be able to be rolled back.  The companies working on all of these have been funded, and I suspect will exist within five years.  So, this is where we had a joke before about living so long.  This is not just a total joke.  I mean, there's a start-up in Silicon Valley which is one of three that just raised a $2 billion seed round over this new anti-aging technique that they've now done with mice, where they took mice that were literally the biological age of 90, and they turned them into mice who were 15 years old, with no cancers, with no side effects and all of them lived.

Peter McCormack: How?

Austin Hill: I can give you the research paper.  

Peter McCormack: I probably wouldn't understand it, I probably would want you to translate it.

Austin Hill: It's essentially a way of reverting a cell back into its stem cell state, where its aging starts to go back.  When this was first discovered, they won the Nobel Prize for it, the scientists.  When they first discovered this in 2012, they figured out how to switch these into the stem cell states and reverse aging, but they didn't figure out how to stop it, and so it just kept getting younger.

Peter McCormack: Like Benjamin Button.

Austin Hill: Yeah, and it would develop all these cancers along the way.  So, they've been working on this for now ten years, and two independent teams have now verified the results, that they can do it and stop with no cancers.  So, this means you could go in and say, "You know what, I really love my parents, I want them around for another 40 years, I'm going to pay $50,000 or $100,000 for their anti-aging to wipe out all their disease", and they literally go back to being 20 or 30 years old.  What does that do for a nation's economic status; what does that do for its knowledge, its workforce?  What if autocratic governments from a certain part of the world were denied access to those treatments, should they not uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?  You want to talk about a sanction?  Half the world's living to 300 and you and your citizens can't.  

Now, they'll try and recreate it, they'll try and steal the technology, but if that's just one of 50 technologies around energy independence, around life extension, around human augmentation and knowledge, all of these areas where we can actually make people's lives fundamentally different on an order of magnitude more, how beneficial is it to be an oligarch in Russia, who has $1 billion, when everyone else is living to 300 and are building industries that don't rely on energy or oil at all, and you just saw your entire income dry up because the world progressed past you?

That is what I believe the long-term answer to these things will be, because then it becomes very, very hard for China, for Russia, for some of these countries to tell their citizens, "No" or, "We're still doing good by you".

Peter McCormack: You also know that the leaders of these countries would still have access to these technologies, typically.

Austin Hill: Sure.  But it's very hard to stay in leadership.  It's like Gaddafi, after a certain point, it's very hard to stay in leadership when the entire citizen's population believes you are the most horrendous, evil person and are being fundamentally denied their rights.  I just think the technologies of equality and freedom will start to rebalance the world's order, as long as we still focus on certain principles which is, are the technologies being used for the betterment and the individual; or, are these technologies being developed by the government to centralise and actually keep their populations poor, keep their populations socially divided?

So, the culture wars that go on in the world, massive distraction.  What does it do?  It distracts people away from understanding a whole bunch about how money works, how government works, because people just get fed up and they get apathetic, and that is a huge danger.  Whereas, there was a time when we actually, I think, in most western democracies, stood up to the call of freedom and said, "You know what, we want to go and fight for our country, we want to be proud of our country, I have wars that I agree with, as you as a Canadian", then -- I mean, we were at the heart of this recently in Canada.  

We had the country entirely, not torn apart, because you need to remember the protests that occurred in Canada, the trucker protests, were the most Canadian protests of all time, not a single window broken, they were picking up trash after themselves!  No protest is totally innocent, there were people's lives in Ottawa who were very disrupted.  But this wasn't a violent protest with fires and windows being broken.

Peter McCormack: It was a festival, it was dancing!  Not everyone supported it though.

Austin Hill: Not all people supported it.  I don't agree with certain aspects of the science position there, but I have relatives, I have family members right now, who due to real immune systems, cannot get the vaccine.  They have been barred from travelling, barred from getting on a plane and barred from getting medical access in the United States, critical medical access that they need that is not available in Canada, and their potential life is at risk because they can't get public transportation because they aren't vaccinated.

So, I'm sorry, when it came to this stance, I supported the rolling back of some of these restrictions, not because I have a particular stance on vaccines, or I'm anti-vax; I just believe restricting people's freedom to that degree and what was being done, with lockdowns, was actually causing more harm, and the science has actually borne this out in terms of people's health, people's ability to interact, the depression, all the second-order consequences, and it wasn't buying Canada much, because Canada has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world at 86%.

It was a massive distraction to the fact that they had underinvested in their healthcare system, and their healthcare system was collapsing because of mismanagement, and that was why they focused on taking away, and that's my belief, everyone's freedom.  It wasn't because of a mass problem with getting people the vaccine, it was simply because of underfunded healthcare systems, so they had to be totally draconian at the expense of some people's real rights.

So when the truckers, after keeping the economy going for two years and literally being alone in their trucks, were told, "Hey, you're now not allowed to cross the border" or, "You're going to have to wait four hours to cross the border", I can totally understand the response.  And the fact that they did that peacefully and the fact that they exercised their civil rights without violating any laws, I support that.  And if you want to arrest them for committing a crime, then pass a law over public loitering in Ottawa.  Don't call them terrorists and Nazis and seize their bank accounts.

Once again, an example of how financial inclusion or financial censorship gets used to demonise a certain part of the population.  And that's why, from a messaging point of view, I am such a big believer in that we've got to find areas where we agree with people, where we can sit down across the table and say, "You know what, we don't have to agree on everything, and five or six of your points and probably ten of my points are things that we'll never agree on.  But let's agree on the base principles of freedom that exist in the technology we both love, and use that as our common ground".

Peter McCormack: And if you remove the ability to financially censor people, you will remove one element of demonising people, which hopefully will bring people back towards each other.

Austin Hill: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: It's hard to argue against.  I'm pro-freedom and I'm pro-smaller government, but within a defined set of rules that we can agree on that make it all work.

Austin Hill: Pro-good government and effective government, because you look at what's happened since World War II in the United States with the lack of funding in certain core things like infrastructure, then you look at the speed at which China's building brand-new cities, hospitals, it's hard to argue.  You're like, "Okay, wow".  Being autocratic and totalitarian, where you can literally say, "Okay, we're going to throw all these citizens out of their town, we're going to rebuild the town if we displace a bunch of people", but for the citizens in that town, they have their rights infringed, it wasn't so good for them.

The trick is, what should we be able to learn from these systems?  What would it take for us to have good government, where we could put up -- for instance, China's building, I think, 240 nuclear powerplants in the next ten years, that's the plan.

Peter McCormack: 240?  Holy shit!

Austin Hill: Yeah, and they've got the cost down to, I forget the exact number.  I recently saw an interview, but I think their cost per nuclear powerplant is down to a couple of hundred million.  And these are some of the safest nuclear powerplants.  They're not the safest.  The safest system in the world that we've seen recently, I think, is the Bill Gates project, called Terra -- I'll find you the reference, but it's this new form of nuclear reactor that fails totally safe.  So, you could literally bomb it and it would never explode, and the nuclear material is contained and there's no nuclear waste.  He has, for almost 25 years, tried to get a pilot plant built with that technology, and almost got it through before what happened in Japan.

Peter McCormack: Fukushima.

Austin Hill: Fukushima.  And, I mean more people have died from carbon pollution than have ever died from nuclear, by a factor of thousands.  So, society just isn't good at this.  But we can't build a nuclear powerplant, the regulatory costs, the debate, the time it gets locked up.  Every time, by the time you get half a group supporting it, there's a new slate of politicians, because you talk about 10 to 15 years of regulatory approval and still nothing happening, so people just stop investing in it.  

Where does that lead us?  It leads us to be dependent on foreign oil, having to do deals with dictators; it leads us to not being able to talk about an agenda of actually free and abundant power.  And so, it's just so short-sighted in so many ways, and we have to be able to look at ourselves and say, "Okay, how do we change that?  How do we get the best parts of technology advancement that can be beneficial, advantageous for our society, and build more freedom and more independence, and that's not always just based off, "How much more stuff can we buy for cheap from some foreign government that's going to build it for less pennies on the dollar, because we don't care about them?"

Peter McCormack: It takes us back to that first point of being focused on the right things, which is something that's come up a lot of times recently, Danny.

Danny Knowles: It has come up a lot.

Peter McCormack: It comes up a lot; focus, energy, and are you picking the right battles?  It's something we think a lot about, "Is this good for Bitcoin?"  It's fascinating.  I didn't realise we were going to talk about this!  Yeah.  What else do you want to talk about?  Are we good?!

Austin Hill: Well someone asked me recently, it was a fascinating conversation, someone asked me recently, "What excites you recently about Bitcoin?"  I remain still very excited for all the original reasons, but yeah, I did mention, I think, the amount of very cool, interesting stuff I'm seeing in terms of application development on the Layer 2, and some of the speed at which some of those teams are spinning it up absolutely blows me away.

I think some of the steps that are happening at the nation state, if they're navigated well, and that's not just El Salvador, although I'm going down on a trip pretty soon to learn and spend some time there.  If the El Salvador Government does a few things right, they don't have to get everything perfect, but I'm kind of encouraged by this idea of them doing a post-mortem.  So, with software development, after ever release, you always do a post-mortem where you look at, "What could we have done differently?  What did we do right?" just as a self-learning experiment.

Doing that in certain communities is very, very hard.  In politics, I think it's even harder, because a politician standing up and saying, "After four years in office, here's all the things I would do better or different" is usually not a politician who gets re-elected.  But wouldn't it be great if they went out and said, a year in, two years in, "Here is everything we would do different, or we would improve on", around custody, around transparency of the balances, around maybe how some of the wallets are done and the custody rules, and say, "We made a choice and it worked out well initially.  We had some hiccups, and here's what we learned and would do", because that playbook could literally form the onboarding playbook for the next four nations that are working on it.

Peter McCormack: That's a really fascinating point.

Austin Hill: I think that level of self-analysis also allows you to detract against the IMF, it allows you to build political longevity into your position, because you will go down in history as the people who actually not only figured out the playbook, but were honest enough with the world.  Because, when the IMF comes in and FUDs nations joining and points to a 101 and says, "Don't do this.  We're going to reduce your credit rating [or] we're going to have punishments [or] you won't get access to IMF affluence".

So, that's exciting.  The stuff Blockstream's doing, I mean Blockstream has done some really exciting stuff.  And just the whole idea of them as the Cisco of Bitcoin I think was underappreciated for a long time.  But now, with some of the work both technical, but also on the Bitcoin bond, because if we get the financialisation formula worked where the Bitcoin community can offer the world tokenised bonds that have Bitcoin incentive, what that does for changing economics.

You could literally go into a small town and say, "You know what, instead of doing a 25-year zero-coupon municipal bond", which is, if you're familiar, that's how usually towns finance a lot of public goods projects; you go in and say, "You know what, you could do a citizens' economic incentive bond where every citizen who moves to your country gets $5,000 or $10,000 worth of Bitcoin every year provided that five to seven years from now, they're still here".  You could finance that entire thing with Bitcoin, and now you're orange pilling cities and towns right, left and centre, because you've changed how they've raised money, you've changed how they derive tax revenue, you've provided economic empowerment.

You can go to some places where the average income is $25,000, $30,000 or $35,000, where they're dealing with drug addiction, they're dealing with poverty, they're dealing with job loss, and literally come in and do -- I mean, the last example we saw of this was native casinos.  When they came in, even though the casinos had some very negative impacts, because gambling sometimes does that, but it would provide an entire community, in some cases, with enough reserves or enough annuity and revenue share, that they could send all their citizens to go to university, who previously were denied access.  So, I think those are some of the big ones that really excite me that are going on.

Peter McCormack: What about you, Danny, what excites you most in Bitcoin?

Danny Knowles: I don't know.  I think the big thing that's been a topic this week has been the mining, the second-order effects of mining, securing the grid.  That excites me.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so there's two conversations that came up this week.  There's the one specifically here, where we are now, in Texas with ERCOT; have I got it right now?!  

Danny Knowles: ERCOT, yeah!

Austin Hill: Exciting work.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, exciting work.  Margot Paez, who we had on, wants to do a research paper on looking at how miners are integrating with the grid to bring a bit of stability to it, something I don't believe Satoshi ever planned for, but is one of these fascinating things that's come out of it.  And then Matthew Pines discussed how the semiconductor industry is being forced to rethink foundries due to the risks with Taiwan, and there is a need for mining chips, and perhaps that's going to incentivise the build-out of new foundries in other countries to support miners.

I want to know all the future industries that are going to get changed by Bitcoin that we don't know about yet, because there are going to be other things.

Austin Hill: Yeah.  I find both those fascinating, by the way, and I think energy and chip advancement, I mean it was something that even at the beginning of Blockstream, I would talk about and it would just shock.  Bitcoin literally self-funded the advancement of ASICs from 40 nanometres -- they were one of the earliest adopters of ASICs and yes, other industries were, like mobile phones and other things, were riding that same wave.  But all of those had massive amounts of venture capital.  This was just self-funded by individuals who were deploying the best new chips they could.  And seeing that was fascinating as we moved to the ASICs.  

Bitcoin has also funded some of the most incredible advancements in crypto and computer security because now, instead of just protecting your family photos or your email, you actually have a bearer certificate digital instrument, and it's forced the world to finally catch up and say, "How do we actually build secure computing?" which is critical for the future, because the actual trust and the actual issues around AI, around governance, are going to require a massive investment in computer security that Bitcoin has funded and done.

But yeah, I also think some of the industries that may be most exciting are ones that we can't think of now, because they won't be industries directly, one-to-one affected.  But there are certain clear applications.  Like, I think we'll be able to deal with getting rid of spam, a lot of the identity issues online, when we actually have ubiquitous Lightning payments, and the idea of doing some sort of hashcash, which is what it was originally designed for, but those are all very exciting.  But the ones I'm most excited about, or hopeful for hopefully, are the ones that bitcoiners will create with the economic freedom.

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Austin Hill: So, the bitcoiner who goes out and says, "You know what, we can now afford to tackle this big society issue, because thankfully I was into Bitcoin very early", and that's where my hope for bitcoiners is, or those who have enjoyed some economic benefit from Bitcoin, is that they have that sense of gratitude, and they have that sense of wanting to reinvest.  That doesn't just mean reinvest in Bitcoin, but finding issues you care about passionately.

In the same way, way in the past, we had industrialists, we had Carnegie, we had Rockefeller, a lot of their wealth creation wasn't exactly innocent.  The old adage was, "Show me a massive fortune and I'll show you a massive crime", because some of those very large, very wealthy industrialists, used monopolistic power.  They used, in some cases violence, in the case of Standard Oil.  But some of those people reached a point in their lives where they were like, "Okay, I can't take it with me, so I'm going to at least do some image rehab by going and building some things".

I don't think our generation and the people enjoying Bitcoin wealth need to be like that, and should ever be ashamed of how they made their money, by getting into something they believed early, by having diamond hands and sticking around, when everyone else was afraid.  And as they enjoy that economic prosperity, as we see Bitcoin's price climb to a few more orders of magnitude higher than it is, I think you'll see a new class of Bitcoin millionaires, hundred-millionaires, billionaires, who are now sitting there saying, "What good can I do with this money and how can I benefit society in ways that they believe in?"

I'm hoping that some of the effect of that will also start to have a trickle down, the same way we same venture -- some of the best entrepreneurs were created in Silicon Valley, the density of intensity, because people did have success, they were young enough not to want to retire and they were like, "Well, if I did it once, I'm going to do it again", and that's what gave us this pay-it-forward, reinvest culture, willingness to mentor.  And I think, or my hope is, we'll see that on a very broad scale globally around bitcoiners and some of what they choose to do with their wealth.

Peter McCormack: Amazing.  

Danny Knowles: Before we close out, if that's the stuff that interests you, is there anything that you're concerned about?

Austin Hill: I mean, we are definitely entering a very, very dangerous time where, like I said, I think most of it I addressed on my last call, the singularity age and the increasing threats of some of these issues.  We're approaching that age, and it will only grow, where the cost of a mistake gets closer and closer to being, as that Vulnerable World thesis talks about, a mistake we can't come back from.  You never like to be in a situation from a risk, security-thinking, for instance, and that's where some of my concerns lie, because if a couple of things go wrong in the world and we haven't built up the resilience, or we don't know how to manage our human reaction to it, then…

The example here is like after 9/11.  9/11 was definitely a tragedy and I would never want to minimise it.  Anyone who lived through it obviously saw how horrific it was.  But when we judge it on the scale of all human deaths and all human suffering, that many people die in car accidents every day.  Yes, it was done all at once and it was done very tragically --

Peter McCormack: And dramatically.

Austin Hill: And dramatically, and it was done by a very small group of people wanting to actually attack another group.  But the reaction to that, what it's cost us in going to war, what's it cost in the loss of freedoms, and in some areas the uninformed or un-thought-out reactions to that because it was so emotional, some would argue that some of the costs of those things far exceeded what the actual attack, or some better ways of dealing with it.

So, Bruce Schneier, the cryptographer, always talks about this in security terms, in terms of security theatre.  So many of the things we do around airport security are just security theatre versus do effective airline doors, and actually design x-ray machines better, which American airports haven't.  The European ones are actually distributed very close to the gate, if you're familiar with most of those.

Peter McCormack: I travel a lot.

Austin Hill: Yeah, so the American ones, you make one mistake at one gate, you need to empty out the entire wing and go back and run everyone through the security machine again.  So, this happens once in a while, where they realise that the machine was off and they don't know how many people went through without being scanned; they have to empty it all out and restart!  The European security machines, that doesn't happen as -- if that were to happen, you're dealing with a very small amount of people right at the gate, because the scanners are at the gate. 

So, Bruce Schneier argued those two things.  If you do those two things effectively, you solve 95% of your airline security problems.  Whereas, so much of everything else we do, taking off the shoes and doing this and doing that, and the massive line-ups and hassles, were really security optics, security theatre, to make people feel better about going back to an airline industry.  And that fear was actually very small-lived, because people have short-term memories.  There was a period of time following 9/11 when I had friends in New York who were like, "I'm never walking into a skyscraper again.  I will never do it again after seeing what happened on 9/11".  60, 90 days later, they're back in a skyscraper and the initial trauma was over.  

So, all this to say that I think the demand for us to be more informed and thoughtful about how we address big problems, how we react to bad, unintended consequences, the call for that to get smarter, faster, better, couldn't happen fast enough at a time when I fear we are not.  We're stuck into some of the debates of the past about whether or not someone should have a certain civil right, or whether or not a certain religious issue should exist, or who gets access on the Supreme Court.  I mean, these wedged debate issues that seem to really keep people distracted and stuck in debates from frankly, I think, 50 or 60 years ago.  And we keep rehashing these, instead of learning how to be more intelligent.  That's just where this is, oh, what was it, the guy who did King of the Hill?  

Danny Knowles: Mike Judge.

Austin Hill: Mike Judge.

Peter McCormack: Oh, yes.

Austin Hill: He did that famous movie that was kind of cheesy, but it was essentially where this soldier falls asleep and wakes in the future and he had an IQ of 70; he wakes up and is the smartest man on earth, because --

Peter McCormack: I don't know this.

Austin Hill: I'll get you the name.  Anyway, it's famous, famous.  It basically predicted that over time, the current system encourages people who are less thoughtful and less intelligent to take over society, and that anyone with an IQ above a certain level will become essentially an extinct species.  I just hope we do not go down that path, because we need to be having better conversations and encouraging the best part of our thoughtfulness and society to make their voices heard, and I'm a little concerned.

Eric Weinstein brought this up, I think, quite effectively.  There's just this trend towards apathy, and there's this trend towards, "I can't make my voice heard, because we've seen what raising your voice can sometimes do and the cost that people pay", like you talked about.  We will desperately need these voices, and I'm worried that if people haven't flexed their voices, or haven't got in the habit of using them effectively in the right forms to move towards collaboration, to move towards better decision-making, to move towards better decisions, then when we need those voices the most, they may not be there.

Peter McCormack: Yes, yeah, I fully understand, I fully appreciate what you're saying.  And I think it helps to have more conversations like this, more conversations publicly, long form, better than getting on Twitter and arguing with a nym who has no social capital to lose.  So, I appreciate you coming on and doing it again.  This is the third time in very recent times, and I'm sure we're going to talk a lot again in the future.  I love talking to you, so thank you.

Austin Hill: Peter, thank you, thank you guys, really enjoyed it.

Peter McCormack: Thanks, Danny.