WBD501 Audio Transcription

The Risks of Hyperbitcoinisation with Rob Hamilton

Release date: Friday 13th May

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Rob Hamilton. 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.

Rob Hamilton is a programmer and data scientist. In this interview, we discuss the risks associated with a transition to hyperbitcoinisation, the limits to what Bitcoin fixes, the issues of a libertarian world run on a Bitcoin standard, the benefits to the energy grid, and Bitcoin’s eternal September.

“The idea is that fix the money fix the world, the thing that’s often said, and that most of our problems in the world come from bad money. And I think my point is that malevolence in man is something that is so core to the human condition that fixing the money isn’t going to actually magically fix all these problems.”

— Rob Hamilton

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: How are you doing, Rob?

Rob Hamilton: I'm doing well.  How are you?

Peter McCormack: Good.  I'm just going to take a nice sip of my cool refreshing Coca-Cola.  What Bitcoin Did, brought to you by Coca-Cola.  Brought to you by Coca-Cola.  How are you doing, man?

Rob Hamilton: I'm doing well.

Peter McCormack: I've never used my Rare Pepe.

Rob Hamilton: No, you didn't.

Peter McCormack: I've still got the thing, the open thing.

Rob Hamilton: Good, Opendime.

Peter McCormack: I sweeped an Opendime.

Rob Hamilton: HODL's bet?

Peter McCormack: Did it.

Rob Hamilton: How much support time did NVK give you to get that done?

Peter McCormack: Zero.

Rob Hamilton: Wow!

Peter McCormack: I think I had five minutes from Matt Odell.  I found one of his tutorials.

Rob Hamilton: Okay.

Peter McCormack: The problem with the green wallet, there was two different types of wallet you can do.

Rob Hamilton: Interesting,

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but anyway did it. 

Rob Hamilton: I'm proud of you.

Peter McCormack: So, how have you been?

Rob Hamilton: I'm doing well.

Peter McCormack: You didn't think I could do it, did you?

Rob Hamilton: I had my doubts.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, how have you been?  Good to see you again.  I saw you last week, see you again today.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, it's great to be in Austin.

Peter McCormack: You're back by popular demand as well.

Rob Hamilton: I'm shocked to hear that.

Peter McCormack: Mainly Danny, Danny fanboys for you.

Danny Knowles: I fanboy for you.

Rob Hamilton: Ah, it's good to have a sim!

Peter McCormack: Whoa!  I feel like there are some evolving dialogues and conversation in Bitcoin which are going beyond what's traditionally been discussed over the last few years.  I feel like there's a lot of different people coming in with newer conversations which are escaping the traditional niche of Bitcoin conversations. 

Rob Hamilton: Right.

Peter McCormack: I know that because I'm doing some, but I also know it by just going out and meeting with people.  I'm hearing these different conversations and I think you're recognising them as well.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, I would say so and I think the change is part of Bitcoin's growth as it goes from a very niche thing in the corner of the internet to something -- when I got in around 2013/14, it was a small group of very ideologically aligned people, but as Bitcoin continues its journey to being global money, you're going to have a larger and larger tent, which means you're going to have a shifting of the values of what makes up people who use Bitcoin, because it's fundamentally a neutral tool.

Peter McCormack: Do you think this is going to create a situation where we have a fractured community who disagree on a number of fundamental issues or do you see it as being a tool that can unite or both, really?

Rob Hamilton: Necessarily, it's going to have to have fractures.  I think there's a difference between social consensus and the technological consensus.  Bitcoin has to be very intolerant to change if it's going to have a global scale and adoption.  You need to be able to have the man in a coma from six years ago, wake up, go to his Bitcoin node, use his money.  He can't be on the latest day-to-day of whatever political or economic or larger discussion, philosophical discussion of Bitcoin.  You need to have that level of scale to reach everyone.

But at the same time, I think a lot of people in Bitcoin, since it's a neutral canvas, they project their personal values onto Bitcoin and that's where you get the social fracturing, where people believe Bitcoin should only be used in certain ways.  Bitcoin should maybe only be -- like with oil and gas mining versus the conversations you have with Troy about ESG, like appealing to those values.  Those are all things that are outside core consensus and I think there needs to be a clear line between if you're trying to promote a contentious hard fork of Bitcoin, you're trying to change the rules, you are an outcast.  But everything else, as long as you agree not to change the rules, you should be part of the larger tenet of what Bitcoin is.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, interesting.  Do you think with that, the discussions end up becoming not Bitcoin discussions, because there are discussions which have a Bitcoin bent to them or certain cohorts seem to attach themselves to a certain turn of opinions?  But if Bitcoin gets big enough, Bitcoin isn't the subject that you discuss and it just becomes different cohorts.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, it's interesting.  I think this is a point that I've been thinking of: you are not Bitcoin, right.  You individually as a person are not Bitcoin.  Bitcoin, the network, is this large, decentralised, many nodes, geographically distributed across the entire world, very strong and safe.  You individually though don't have those properties and I think sometimes, when people get involved with Bitcoin, they come in contact with this incorruptible pure substance and it changes their psychology a little bit where they don't want to have -- they almost use Bitcoin as a shield to protect their ego, where they're going to say, "Bitcoin never changes, so why should I?"  Or, "Bitcoin's intolerant to changes, why should I be?" 

I think a social backdooring happens in people's minds where they adopt the technological properties of Bitcoin as their social properties.  That's where you can see those fractious changes.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Listen, there's a big topic I want to get into with you today; it's been done on the show a number of times.  It's discussing hyperbitcoinisation, what it is, what it means.  I first came across the term I think in about 2017, Nakamoto Institute, read it.

Rob Hamilton: David Kravitz.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Rob Hamilton: Rest in peace.

Peter McCormack: Some people won't know who he is and might think you mean something else there.

Rob Hamilton: No, he left the rules of Bitcoin, so he's outside the tent now.

Peter McCormack: He's a really strange one.  I don't understand why that happened.

Rob Hamilton: No.

Peter McCormack: But anyway, I read it.  I was like, "No, that's not going to happen.  Bitcoin's just digital money and used by a few nerds and some companies maybe", but now there's a bit more of a reality to it.  We've had a year where Bitcoin has an angle to every major news story, whether it's Ukraine, Russia, COVID, truckers, El Salvador, inflation, there is a Bitcoin angle to everything; it continues to grow.  Where are at?  48,000, lots of new people coming in.  The idea of hyperbitcoinisation, depending on how you define it, is becoming a bit more of a reality.  It's, "Okay, this could happen", depending on its definition, but that leads to some bigger questions and ideas: what does that mean for governance; what does that mean for other forms of money? 

So I want to get into this, because I'm not entirely convinced by some of the other narratives people have.  I'm not entirely convinced that Bitcoin eliminates all forms of money, all forms of government.  I also have some reservations or nerves around the implications of the hyperbitcoinisation other people have.  So, there's a lot to get into here and Danny said, "Got to talk about this with Rob".

Rob Hamilton: Sure.

Peter McCormack: Just as a baseline starting point, what does hyperbitcoinisation mean for you?  What is it?

Rob Hamilton: Very strictly, Bitcoin gaining adoption as a global money; that's it.  Everything beyond that is, I think, a lot of interpretations from our own personal values of what it looks like to us.  That's why you have these conflicting visions of what hyperbitcoinisation means.  I think taking a step back, what does Bitcoin do?  It fixes the Cantillon effect, the printing of money where some people are greatly benefited over others; it has a great ability to help the energy grid; it has a great way to kick off global innovation, the energy grid being a great example of it.  It has certain properties as a result of it but it doesn't fix core human malevolence. 

I think in a hyperbitcoinised world, we all have to realise that it is very easy to put your wealth into Bitcoin and just because your wealth is stored in Bitcoin, it doesn't confer any larger moral properties beyond it.  As we say, Bitcoin is for enemies because if it wasn't for enemies you couldn't let your friends use it, in the sense that it has to be actually neutral.  The moment you start bringing a moral layer into who can use Bitcoin, how can they use Bitcoin, that's a double-edged sword that's going to be used against you.  So, keeping it very high level, it's just Bitcoin gaining adoption. 

You're saying it's intersecting with all these stories around the world; that is part of hyperbitcoinisation.  It's no longer a niche thing; it's being used by other people in different ways.

Peter McCormack: Is hyperbitcoinisation a process or is it something that can happen and you can say, "Oh, hyperbitcoinisation happened here and we're now post hyperbitcoinisation"?

Rob Hamilton: Interesting.  It's definitely a journey, but I think often when people talk about it, they talk about the final destination.  I was making this joke with American HODL.  A lot of bitcoiners view hyperbitcoinisation as their own version of heaven, because it's whatever you want it to be.  In the same way, there's also the idea of Bitcoin rapture, where one day all of the good bitcoiners will go to hyperbitcoinisation and all of the no-coiners will just be left for eternal damnation.  When you have conversations with people, it takes on this very weird moral element which I don't think necessarily applies to reality. 

Putin was talking about taking oil imports in Bitcoin, because he wants to get around the US dollar because of the sanctions.  I don't think Putin is a good person; he's going to use Bitcoin anyway.  A lot of scammers, the OneCoin fiasco, a lot of ill-gotten wealth was portered into Bitcoin.  Tezos has 20,000 Bitcoin; they really haven't done much with it and basically it's an ICO, and they're all using Bitcoin.  We all have to be honest about what does reality look like in a hyperbitcoinised world, where it's not going to have this moral judgment layer that many people apply to it.

Peter McCormack: If you talk about hyperbitcoinisation being Bitcoin becoming global money, how do we know when we're there?  In so many ways, it is global money already, people are using it globally.  There's liquidity in every country in the world, you can send it to anyone in the world.  So, what is the point?

Rob Hamilton: Maybe preferential tax status, where buying and selling Bitcoin doesn't have capital gains associated with it.  By being able to not be penalised to spend with Bitcoin, to have a tax complication on the other side of it, I think would be a very big piece of that; more international trade just being settled in Bitcoin.  Today, it's something where people port to it to store wealth.  Some people use it for a medium of exchange, but usually have to be deep in the technical weeds or a very passionate Bitcoin user on the Lightning Network, which is all amazing stuff and it's building up the future infrastructure for tomorrow, but it's not really been globally applied at scale. 

I think there's 4,000 Bitcoin on the Lightning Network today on public channels, there's probably more on hidden channels and private channels.  It technically is there; from a zero to one, it technically exists, but we're trying to get to the larger scale of adoption.

Peter McCormack: I still don't know what that actually means.  I have personally hyperbitcoinised, right.

Rob Hamilton: Yes.

Peter McCormack: I have, because I consider any considerable purchase through a Bitcoin lens and I consider my long-term financial planning through a Bitcoin lens.  For that to be something -- people talk about a Bitcoin standard.  Does it get to the point where the majority of people are trying to settle in Bitcoin?  Is that what we're trying to get to, because I'm still not clear?

Rob Hamilton: I would say that would be the goal, me personally as well.  I view my unit of account and my spending decisions through the lens of Bitcoin, but it's an individual person's journey.  With 7 billion people on the planet, it's going to take a lot of time to bring people along on that journey.  So, you and I may already be on the other side of what that looks like, but there's a large group of people, a lot of money on the outside looking in.  I think it's just a process that takes time, ultimately.

Peter McCormack: Also, I think it's a process that is going to be messy and bloody and dangerous, and it doesn't fill me with huge amounts of joy.  It's nice when there's a little bump in the Bitcoin price, but the idea of the collapse of currencies, which can lead to the collapse of nations, which can lead to the collapse of economies to get us to a Bitcoin world, that transition feels scary.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, so there's almost two branches in how this could actually go down, just thinking about it.  You could have the dystopian view, where for Bitcoin to rise, other things must fail.  But there also could be a co-integration with the existing financial system over time.  There is a happy path where Bitcoin gets financial regulatory oversight and gets to be integrated with the US dollar hegemony. 

A lot of people have talked how, with instabilities around the world, the US dollar and Bitcoin would be the ones that would be best positioned to be able to benefit from that, as the US dollar being the global reserve currency, you could have it go in such a way where the US dollar gets strengthened because Bitcoin strengthens and there's a lot of Bitcoin in the United States and it could be used as a financial rail to dollarise the rest of the world.

I am fundamentally an optimist, but I am also a realist in the sense of making sure I am doing my small part to not let hell come to Earth.

Peter McCormack: But this is what we're here to talk about; how does hell come to Earth; what are the risks of this?

Rob Hamilton: The risks of basically Bitcoin gaining prominence because everything else collapses?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because there's two ways to look at it.  Everything could collapse and we're lucky to have Bitcoin, and that's a lifeboat for some people and a better financial system; but there is also the fact that Bitcoin could lead to the collapse of other things, currencies and economies because we have these speculative attacks, etc, so chicken and egg.

Rob Hamilton: Well, I wouldn't think it's fair to say that Bitcoin causes the collapse.  I think it provides an escape valve for people that are being taken advantage of.

Peter McCormack: The speculators could accelerate crashes.

Rob Hamilton: Oh!  They're basically front-running the future that they see coming.

Peter McCormack: Of course.

Rob Hamilton: The question then is, it's fundamentally the weakness of the dollar system and the unfair nature of the dollar system that brings people to Bitcoin.  If we had a functioning US dollar that didn't have uncontrolled money printing, very discretionary to politicians, Bitcoin would have less of an actual threat vector.  Was it Saifedean that said that one of the best ways to actually kill Bitcoin is have a stable US dollar and cooperative politicians?  That's never going to happen.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Rob Hamilton: So, it's unfair to put the blame at Bitcoin's feet if it's fundamentally a failure of politicians and institutions to be able to step in and help out.

Peter McCormack: I'm not putting it at Bitcoin's feet.  What I'm saying is, once you go through a transitionary period, you could see an acceleration from it.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah; gradually then suddenly.

Peter McCormack: Gradually then suddenly, yeah.  That's the bit I don't think any of us know how this all happens, how this plays out, what the impact is.  I don't really think we know where you can apportion blame for this, because it feels like a very complicated crossover.  But at the same time, when it happens, we don't know what the financial make-up of the world will be.  A lot of Bitcoin's held in America; does suddenly America come out of this much stronger than other nations?  Are there small nations that took too long to adopt it and they're fundamentally weaker?  Does their entire economy collapse?  I don't even know where to start thinking about it.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, because fundamentally if you're looking at right now, the price of fertiliser is spiking and people are talking about possible famines and shortages because, with the conflict in Russia and Ukraine, that's kind of the breadbasket of the world and if they're in war right now, they can't be planting.  I think the tragedy in some ways is that the poorest countries in the world and the poorest people in the world are the ones that are going to be most adversely affected, because while the US dollar's still working, while we still have wealth and control in supply chains and logistics, we're going to be able to get food, although it may be more expensive. 

So, you're right, a lot of people didn't do anything wrong to have the bad things happen to them and it's a tough thing to reconcile and understand.  For me personally, I think the conversations around Bitcoin and bringing people to the other side into that lifeboat, it's an individual person's journey; usually in person; social doesn't really scale to have good, authentic conversations.  It's me personally, it's a term I came up with, my buddy Chris came up with, "slow pilling", because I went to Bitcoin in late 2013 and I went to BitDevs in New York City and I walked in the room and there were 20 people there. 

After two hours I was, "I am the dumbest person in this room by a mile" and I used that as part of this call to action and seeing what's actually down this rabbit hole.  That was seven or eight years ago at this point.  At first, I was so excited to tell everyone about Bitcoin; you sound like a crazy person.  The orange pill hits you hard, but it's not authentic because you haven't been around long enough to be able to integrate these ideas.  You're just speaking what other people have already said.  You maybe don't deeper understand the consequences of what's going on, so you come off like a crazy person to your friends.  But it plants the seeds for years later for them to come back to me. 

A lot did during COVID, a lot of people reached out to me, "Oh, I want to buy some Bitcoin, how should I store it?  How does Bitcoin work?"  When they're ready, they'll come back to you hopefully as you're further along in your journey, and you're able to have those conversations.  It has to be a one-to-one journey.  I think a podcast like this is a great way to get the message from one to many, but most people don't have that platform to be able to do it.  Social media, where a lot of people try and get that scale, it's not a good place to have these more nuanced conversations.  You get side-railed and distractions all the time and it pulls you in many different directions, so you can't keep that strong message going forward.

Peter McCormack: I think that's a really good point.  I do think social media is the worst platform for having these conversations; it just doesn't work.  I also think it can feel like a bit of a shit show for people coming in, when they're first trying to learn.  Like, "What is all this craziness?" 

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, if you don't have any background or context when you walk in, it's like you walked into a bar near closing time and there's just a bunch of rowdy people running around in little groups and cliques and it's a bit of a circus, right.  It takes time to be able to get orientation and understand what's exactly going on; that's why I think those in-person conversations are so critical.

Peter McCormack: Do you think with the idea around hyperbitcoinisation, more work should be done trying to consider, map out, theorise how the transition happened, what is at risk, what do we risk losing, what do we potentially gain, what are the risks of ignoring this?  Also in some ways, it's not like everyone can come to Bitcoin at the same time, even if they wanted to.  It couldn't support that.

Rob Hamilton: Right.

Peter McCormack: So, there are going to be winners and losers in the transition.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, so what is our duty as people who have been here for a while to think about how do we best prepare for that?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I'm a hypocrite for this, but celebrating price rises on Twitter is one thing, but one of the things I think about when I see a price rise, I'm like, "Okay, this is going to make it more difficult for some other people".

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, to get in.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's like El Salvador took the gamble being the first one and it is a gamble.  Being the second one is less of a gamble, being the third one is less of a gamble, but then flips at some point; being too late is a gamble.  There's always going to be winners and losers.  Are we spending enough time thinking through the consequences of hyperbitcoinisation; not just this utopian view that suddenly we have hard money and there's no money misinformation and everything's just going to work great?

Rob Hamilton: We're all cattle ranchers on a 100-acre farm in Texas.  Yeah, right!

Peter McCormack: Are we really thinking through the local and global impacts of this, because I don't see enough of it myself? 

Rob Hamilton: I don't think we do, and having the tough conversations, most people don't realise that you can't give each person in the world a Bitcoin address and support the network; it just doesn't scale with one-megabyte blocks every ten minutes.  You can't onboard the entire world onto Bitcoin directly.  Things like Lightning, things like channel factories, being able to have -- I forgot this new protocol that came out, but it was talking about the coin pools where you could have multiple people own a UTXO together.  So, there's the technology side in being able to make sure we can add seats to the life raft to let more people in. 

But from a social side, I don't think those conversations are happening in general.  Maybe in the social circles you and are in, but it's usually very pie-in-the-sky utopian.  The problem with utopias is that anyone who opposed the utopia becomes an enemy to the cause, and you can justify any means to try and silence them, dissuade them from having their opinion, because they're a threat to their utopian idea.  The first step is being able to break out of that frame and be able to say, "I disagree with you and we need to have these tough conversations".  Maybe that's part of what we're starting today.   

It's such a hard thing for me, because just my journey with Bitcoin -- it's always an individual person's journey and I only have so much time in the day.  So, all I can do is try and bring people that are closest to me in and, maybe second-, third-order effects, they start bringing more people on themselves.  It's not a funny answer, but it's what I know I can do, what's in my direct control.  Once you try and ascribe responsibility to a community, it becomes very hard to be able to get actionable follow-ups, have the ability to show progress.  It's a tough thing to reconcile, what is the responsibility of a community?

Peter McCormack: I have the personal journey you have but I also have this collective journey.  I have a bunch of listeners who are going on that with me, who want to hear certain things.  As a collective group of people, they don't agree on what they want to hear about.  You can go into the YouTube comments; they disagree on some guests and then agree on others and they fight and argue.  But I'm trying to take a group of people on a collective journey to understand the technology, how it works, how it's going to impact their life, how it's going to impact mine.  I have to go on that collective journey. 

Therefore for me, I do have to think through the consequences, because it's important as a group of people we understand these consequences.  What are we really saying with hyperbitcoinisation?  What is it we are really bringing?  What are the consequences of this?  So, for me it is.  I think we should have these tough conversations.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, I think you have a unique position with your platform and your podcast to be able to bring that outward.  You are bringing people on that group journey, and I think just having those dialogues and going to where it's uncomfortable.  Usually, if people --

Peter McCormack: Let's go there.

Rob Hamilton: Let's do it.  Where do you want to start?

Peter McCormack: What is the utopia?

Rob Hamilton: Well, the utopia is this idea that not only is the money fixed, right, but it's all a level of wish fulfilment; for each person you talk to, it's your fantasy of what you're going to do with your Bitcoin wealth in the future.  I think a lot of people want to -- there's an extreme decadence of, live in a big mansion and have a bunch of cars and that's obviously fun; you want to have toys to play with to reward yourself for your wealth, but you're almost neglecting greater responsibility back to your community.

Peter McCormack: That's a personal utopia.

Rob Hamilton: Sure.

Peter McCormack: That's not a societal utopia.

Rob Hamilton: I think most people view hyperbitcoinisation as maybe their personal utopia, but the idea of, "Fix the money, fix the world" is the thing that's often said, and most of our problems in the world come from bad money.  I think my point is that malevolence in man is something that is so core to the human condition that fixing the money isn't going to actually magically fix all these problems.  It may reduce the incentives to do so, but it's not going to actually fix everything. 

There probably still will be war, conflict.  The one quote I wrote down before coming here, I started reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago; I got this from Jordan Peterson.  The very quick line though is, "The dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?"  Just because the idea that you have good money, you're going to absolve man of sin is a lot of hubris. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's almost like that was written for today.

Danny Knowles: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: After the show, I'm going to tell you why that's highly relevant.  I can't talk about it during the show.

Rob Hamilton: Okay, not a problem.

Peter McCormack: But it's super-interesting, because we were discussing something.  There's a situation whereby there's a decision that needs to be made, and it's a decision whereby there is an ethical reason to lie that might have implications, but it leads to a strong, better position economically.  We were discussing it hypothetically, what would you do in this scenario?  We don't all agree; Jeremy's very much along the, truth is the most important thing and deal with the consequences.  Me and Danny have been debating, if there's an ethical lie, it's a white lie, maybe that's the right decision but it would chip away at the soul to make that decision.  I'm sorry I'm being so candid; I just can't talk about it on the show.

Rob Hamilton: Just cut off the cameras and we'll make this our therapy session, and we can keep it going!  No, but there's an interesting thing about a lot of people in life and, for me, my Bitcoin journey -- it's funny, for me using Bitcoin as a tool and what we should do with our Bitcoin journey, for me I have used Bitcoin in my life to be able to afford myself opportunities that I wouldn't have had otherwise. 

Being able to quit my job, go back to school, follow my passions, going down the programming data science rabbit hole, because it's something that really called out to me, I wouldn't have had the permission structure otherwise.  So, I very quickly sold some Bitcoin very happily to be able to offer those opportunities to me because it made me a better person, and I was following my inner calling.  So, the idea I was thinking about coming into here was the idea of the Hero's Journey in Bitcoin. 

The Hero's Journey is a very archetypical story, Star Wars, Matrix, The Hobbit; you can look at a bunch of them, right.  But you live in the ordinary world, that's the pre-Bitcoin's part of the journey.  Then there's the call to adventure, someone tells you about Bitcoin, and what inevitably always happens?  You ignore it, which is the next step of the Hero's Journey, which is denying the call to adventure. 

Then from there, you finally meet a mentor, which I think sometimes is something like this podcast or Twitter or a book.  You may not have an individual one-on-one relationship with them, but you find a mentor to take you through that journey of, "What does it mean to use Bitcoin?  How did you secure your Bitcoin?  How do you use a node?"  It's a very complicated thing to take the first full step into Bitcoin; you need someone to coach you through that journey. 

Then ultimately, you cross the threshold and you go into that world of trying to integrate Bitcoin more into your life and there's a bunch of tests still on the way to be able to understand what that looks like.  The idea is the abyss; you get to the bottom and you're in a period of deep chaos.  But you rise out of the challenge, you come back home and you return to the ordinary world and you share that treasure with the community. 

I think, for me personally, my journey with Bitcoin is being able to use Bitcoin as a tool that pulled me onto this call to learn more about myself, follow my passions, but to also be able to come back and return that knowledge and share it with others, and share the treasure. 

I'm wearing your Real Bedford shirt today and in a light-hearted way, that's a great example.  It shows a little bit of wish fulfilment, because when you were a kid you wanted to start the football club.  But you were able to take Bitcoin in a fun way and bring the treasure back to the community.  That's one way of expressing that progress in that relationship with you and Bitcoin, in that it starts out as this weird thing.  For me personally, when I first started using Bitcoin, I was using it to play poker, because it was a way, in the United States, they banned not online poker, but the bank transfers to and from poker websites.

Peter McCormack: Smart.

Rob Hamilton: The first thing I was, "Bitcoin's not bank transfers" and, "Start playing poker".  Bitcoin hasn't changed, but for me now my mission in life is to get to the end of it and hand over my private keys to my kids; very, very different.  It's the same Bitcoin, but in a way I used it as a healthy way to transform my value structure and putting me through that crucible to get to the other side of my relationship.  I think that's a really interesting thing and you meet a lot of people who have been in Bitcoin for a long time, you see the healthy transformations of, they were using it for the Silk Road and then they come out on the other end and they're doing something else. 

I think part of what hyperbitcoinisation looks like, is going through this Hero's Journey and also being able to have it make you a better person and having it be this grounding force, this is another Jordan Peterson thing, of chaos versus order.  For me, having something like Bitcoin that I have high confidence will always exist and that it will be there for my kids, allows me to function and orientate my life in a certain way, that I have deep trust that Bitcoin will exist.  I have that as a foundation for my own personal exploration in life.

Peter McCormack: Why do you have that such strong belief?

Rob Hamilton: That Bitcoin will be around?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Rob Hamilton: The ways that it could be destroyed is ECDSA, the cryptographic signatures break or SHA-256 breaks.  Everything else will be really inconvenient, but it won't actually destroy Bitcoin.  It is one of these things where I can keep my private keys locked away for 10, 15 years and as long as some miners out there are continuing to mine, it's so resilient; you need so little effort to be able to keep the network alive from a sense of global-wide attack. 

Every day that Bitcoin's around, it's more likely that it's going to be around tomorrow and so on, like the Lindy Effect.  It's one of these things where, maybe that's a bad proposition to think that, maybe it's a faulty assumption.  I haven't encountered a threat model yet that's actually scared me to the point where I think that's not going to happen.  But it's also why it's not the only value in my life; I have my family; I have my wife.  There's a lot of other things outside of Bitcoin that I'm grounded to and I use Bitcoin as a tool to achieve those ends.

Peter McCormack: What about this collective utopia, about the absolutely huge benefits to society by being on a Bitcoin standard?  As you said, Bitcoin fixes this.  Are we perpetuating a myth?  Are we being overly optimistic?  Are people saying that being overly optimistic?  Are we imagining a world we've got no idea of it will actually be, and we don't know the actual impact?

Rob Hamilton: It's almost as if Bitcoin -- so, maybe the only other time beside Bitcoin would be the internet, where we started something that can't be shut off.  It's like a train barrelling down 100 miles an hour, just going really fast.  If you're on top of the train and you're strapped to it, because you're using Bitcoin and you have deep conviction in it, the only comforting thing maybe you can say is, it's taken us to heaven, because it's like a coping mechanism.  You're somewhat powerless because if you can't change Bitcoin directly, you have to hope for the best. 

I forgot your exact question, but we were talking about this larger thing.  It's a bit of story also to inspire us, because these stories have been around for sub-Bitcoin $1,000.  It's also a powerful rallying cry because as the prices goes up, it's showing a manifestation that our world view is winning.  It becomes this thing where we all have confidence in it, because if you've been around long enough, you've seen a lot of chaos and turmoil and seen your world view proven. 

One, it's this exhilarating thing because everyone's telling you you're wrong, you end up being right.  Also for some people, they use that mental model of, "I'm always right" as a way to have bad social relationships, because they have extreme arrogance, becuase they were right about Bitcoin, they believe they were right about everything else.

Peter McCormack: That's something we discussed with Junseth earlier.

Rob Hamilton: Did you?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we got into that quite deep.

Rob Hamilton: A tough act to follow.

Peter McCormack: Perhaps one of the better things is to look at the trade-offs then; what are the good things that will come out of it but what are the potential risks.  Let's talk about a risk; this is one that won't be popular: I don't mind paying tax.  I think I pay too much tax.  I think government is too big, they take too much money and they waste the majority of it, but I am not anti-tax, I'm not.  I don't believe in no government, I believe in small government.  But I do not mind paying tax for the government to deliver certain services.

An easy one to explain that a lot of people might be okay with is borders, securing borders.  Fine, I'm okay with that.  I am okay with paying tax for the roads, even though I know the roads will be fine anyway.  I'm okay paying tax for the socialised healthcare, I want to pay that.  I want other people to be able to get healthcare, I do and that is part of who I am.  Now, this in certain camps would put me as a lefty, actually knowing in the UK I'm still a conservative because I want smaller government, I want lower tax, but I still want a health service.  But I am okay with tax.

There is a potential scenario where people are imagining with Bitcoin, you can't collect tax, and therefore what do you lose in terms of social stability where we live in a world where it's everything is no government, everything is voluntary, we have no support structures for the vulnerable in society, we have no support structures for those who are out of work, things like that.  Do we know will that lead to a net better world or a net worse world?  Does it ghettoise parts of the country?  Does it lead to a haves and haves not?  That is something that I am not entirely comfortable with.

Rob Hamilton: I will take it one step further.  I don't think this will happen but I don't think it's impossible, where in a world where Bitcoin wins, you're going to have almost neo-feudalism, where you have all of the people who got into Bitcoin have a bunch of wealth, and then you're going to have a massive gap in the class structure.  I don't think that's likely to happen, but if you're talking about it's hard to confiscate, you have this very strong money that everyone goes to, the people who are first movers are going to have disproportionate advantages. 

The Pareto distribution will be 20% of the people will have 80% of the Bitcoin, or some rough equivalent.  You don't remove hierarchies just because there's Bitcoin.  Humans are naturally hierarchical creatures, they're always going to self-organise in a way where you're going to find people who are better than others, you're going to have competition; you're not going to be able to break that.  On the part of taxes, it's funny and this is a conversation that I get into all the time about not paying taxes and smaller government.  I'm ideologically on the side of I think there's a lot that can be getting to a smaller government before we get to the really hard questions on healthcare or being able to have conversations around border security.

For me, and this is just my personal belief, there is a role for a government and my mission is to try and find common ground on things that we can use to make it smaller.  I think that's a very pragmatic way of going about it.  It's funny because when I first got into Bitcoin, I was probably more on the ancap side.  I appreciate it as an ideological lens to evaluate my own beliefs through, but I still believe there should be a government.  So, am I a statist cuck now; is that where it goes?

Peter McCormack: I've got you; you're captured!  You're with me.  I'm going to get told off for that; somebody told me off recently for calling myself a statist cuck on the podcast all the time.  They're like, "You always say it, you're always calling yourself one.  Then I get to an episode and you've not said it and now you've said it again".  Now, you're part of it.

Rob Hamilton: Apologies!

Peter McCormack: I actually think the statist cuck thing is a really unhelpful way of describing somebody.  I think again, it puts out a binary argument; it's either you believe no government or you're a cuck.  I think that's intellectually weak; for that person, they've removed themselves from what is a really practical discussion.  The reason that's a practical discussion is you can also turn round to that person and say, "Okay, talk to me about property rights.  Talk to me about your home.  Forget Bitcoin, Bitcoin is the first property that's easy to secure, outside of everyone else and very difficult to confiscate.  It's almost unconfiscatable". 

But some people are still going to own land and property and other items.  How are your property rights going to be protected?  Where does the rule of the law for that come from?  It can't come from some weird arbitrary set of courts where you decide which one you want to use based on Yelp reviews and from that we figure out which -- because you have to centralise some of the decision and the rules based around that.  How is that different from government?  How do you come to those rules?  How do you establish what those are?  I really struggle with that area.

Rob Hamilton: Consensus is a big word in Bitcoin.  The moment you start talking about those relationships with government, it's how do you agree to those rules?  I think a lot of the backlash of this stuff is that a lot of people who get pulled into Bitcoin are people who are disenfranchised with the world around them, they think government's too big and they go to one end that's a like a goalpost, a flag for them to rally towards. 

I think this ties into the fact that there'll be an opening conversation part for someone, and it's not a good faith conversation if that's someone's opening gambit, like if you say, "Hey, I believe there should be some government".  It's like, "Oh, statist cuck!".  It's people who -- there's thing where during the Blocksize Wars in 2017, Bitcoin Twitter got really big and there was a rightful reason to be a huge dick to people because they were trying to mess with Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Rob Hamilton: I was talking to HODL about this.  There's now a standing army that has no reason to -- there's no war at the moment, there is no Blocksize War, so it all just turns inward and it's very unhealthy, not productive and it's because we already won, so the stakes are so small now.

Peter McCormack: But that standing army says they're preparing for when it happens again.  By the way, I think a large part of that standing army wasn't even around in 2017.

Rob Hamilton: They weren't, they weren't, no.  This is where, as a community and a social hierarchy, people start grafting on to the aesthetic of being a dick, to be able to gain status.  It used to be you had to be really knowledgeable about Bitcoin, you had to have something unique to say, and it shifted into this culture of being toxic for the sake of being toxic, which again I think are in the bounds -- anyone who's actually trying to change the rules of Bitcoin and the contentious hard fork, absolutely guns are blazing.  But if that's not happening, then it's just about being an empathetic person and having conversations.

Peter McCormack: There's a limit, I think, to how being a dick can take you though.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, sure.  It's not a compelling way of persuasion.  It's not for you to be persuaded, it's for everyone else to let them know, "Hey you'd better stick in line, you'd better not step out of line".  It's not actually trying to convince you, and this is the problem with social media; there's an audience.  Me and you may be having a dialogue, but what actually matters is all the people that are doing likes and retweets on top of it.  I think that's the malincentive where you're removing yourself from authentic conversation, ones you would only be able to have in person and you can't have them online. 

So, it becomes this meta game of being able to chase clout status, letting other people agree with you and it becomes, oftentimes, just a waste of time.  If you're not having a good faith conversation, why even bother playing with it?  These are conversations I used to have with my wife when I would get in some debate on Twitter and she'd be, "What are you doing?  Do you care about this person?  Then just stop".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "Bluedot54 fucked me off today".

Rob Hamilton: Right.

Peter McCormack: Him and his 22 followers.  Twitter's a miserable failure, but I don't think it's from a lack of people wanting -- there are people out there who want to have those discussions.  The problem is it's like in a football match.  You can be watching a game of football and you can be down in the corner, player comes sliding in, does a tackle.  He wins the ball, it's a good tackle; but in winning the ball, he takes down the striker.  All the people in that corner who support the team of the striker they're like, "This is bullshit, referee.  Fuck you".  That can happen because that's their team.

Rob Hamilton: Sure, right.

Peter McCormack: So, they shout and yell and they confuse the picture, whereas all the people who support the defender are, "Oh, great tackle" because it was, but vice versa works.  It becomes like that on Twitter.  Somebody can make a very intellectual nuanced point that deserves discussion, but if it's on the wrong side they're all, "Screw this, fuck you".  It's become like that, it's become like sports; it's a miserable failure.

Rob Hamilton: It's close to the fracturing of Bitcoin as a community, where I think there's a very vocal minority of people who take the zero-tolerance view to having a conversation.  The problem is persuasion in such a way is you can't tell them, "Don't do this", because the moment you start trying to control a bitcoiner and tell them what they can and cannot do, that's a trigger; you're just going to get more bad reactions in response. 

The best you can do is just lead by example, have good conversations, being your own best role model, doing what's best for you and your family and your local community, and just keeping it in a way where you remove power from the people who have shitty attitudes by not engaging, or just understanding, or maybe even just feeling bad for them, "It's sad that this is the way you talk to people.  Whoever hurt you, I'm sorry they hurt you but I'm not your therapist, I'm not going to try to heal you".

Peter McCormack: Give me your dad's phone number, I'll give him a call.  We'll have a chat with him about it.  Circling back to the point through, it's that impact on society.  One of the memes I'm not a fan of and some people might say, "Look, it's just a meme", but I'm not a fan of the citadel meme.  The reason I'm not a fan of the citadel meme, it makes me think of elites, it makes me consider a group of elites who, within the current structure of society, have manged to build themselves into a position where they can go into the citadel and recruit people maybe outside of the citadel to come in and do work, who get banished at the end of the day out of the citadel because they can't afford to be there.  I think it creates these haves and have-nots. 

I am of the belief that the society functions and coordinates by how it protects vulnerable people in society.  That does require some form of taxation, I don't want a lot but some form of taxation, and some form of protection for the vulnerable in society, whether that is through laws and regulations for civil rights and equality, or whether that is some kind of protection for people if they're without work and they need to be able to feed their family and survive. 

I think when you take that away, you look at the societies that don't have that, they ghettoise, they collapse.  When you have a breakdown of the rule of law, the weakest in society become the most vulnerable; you have an increase in violence and rape and murder and theft.  I think we've been very lucky to live in a western liberal democracy and we've built this up.

Don't get wrong, it's fucked at the moment, it's completely failing.  But I think for the majority of my life and the 43 years I've had, I've been very lucky to grow up in one of those.  The idea of burning that all down to live in a citadel seems to me a net loss.  My worry with Bitcoin is it may be that's one of the outputs of hyperbitcoinisation, we get that kind of world.

Rob Hamilton: This goes back to humans being naturally hierarchical creatures.  You opt out of the fiat game and you enter the Bitcoin game and since you're here early, you get to put yourself near the top of the structure.  That's where the citadel thing comes in; you get to have your own castle.

Peter McCormack: Your feudal thing.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, the feudal thing; that's an extension of the citadel meme is that you're going to have these fiefdoms of different castles of Bitcoin lords.  It doesn't fundamentally address, like you said, community problems.  I'm trying to think through this.  You have this balance of centralisation and decentralisation, and the government on one hand and the Bitcoin vision on the other hand.  For me, you want to have -- this is where I go back to, I want to have some level of government to be able to have that rough structure for rule of law and order.  My personal bent is probably something more of a communitarian, and going back to the Hero's Journey --

Peter McCormack: A communitarian, I've never even heard that word.

Rob Hamilton: Focusing on communities, local government as opposed to federal government, where you have the most impact control and you know people; you have your own social and friend network of people who are around you and for me, being able to focus on the things that I can control.  Because, I think there's this problem where, when you outsource things to government, it becomes a group problem and defusal responsibility leads to inaction.

Peter McCormack: And inefficiencies.

Rob Hamilton: Inefficiencies too, yeah, but some things have to be inefficient and that's okay; those are the trade-offs for living in a society.  For me, if we're going to do wish fulfilment, if I had a citadel, I would probably be someone who would do a lot of local care of the community, not because I'm being compelled to but because I would like to help those around me, because I do think that communities are judged by how those who are least well off are being taken care of.  I think that's a really fair rubric of, anyone can make it but what happens if you don't?  That's a judgment on the quality of that society and that's a really fair point.

Peter McCormack: Let's talk more of a benefit then, let's talk about having -- we had Jeff Booth on and we discussed the misinformation in fiat money and how that distorts society and leads to malinvestment.  How do you think that improves under a Bitcoin standard?

Rob Hamilton: Bitcoin has this unique property where every time you make a financial calculation in Bitcoin, if you miscalculate there's no refunds, the money does not come back to you.  In a fiat game, where you have bailouts and crony capitalism and favours being cut, people can just keep misspending money and there's always another printer around the corner to be able to help you out.  This is where you don't actually get a market feedback loop of taking in new information, integrating it, getting feedback from the market on how successful you are, if you always have someone who's just going to walk in and buy or subsidise your business.

So, in a Bitcoin world, you're going to be able to have an ability to make your economic calculations, and those who generate value are going to accrue more Bitcoin and those who can't generate as much value are going to have less.  This is where, in a fully-functioning capitalist system, ideally you're going to have a world where people who are able to generate a lot of wealth and value, take someone today like a Jeff Bezos, Amazon has fundamentally changed all of our relationships with how we interact with commerce that's benefited a lot of individuals, but there are costs to that.  I know you were trying to quit Amazon for a month.  How did that go?

Peter McCormack: Do you know, I never actually started it just because I haven't got round to it.  No, I do want to do it; it's more of a case of, I've been travelling most of -- I've barely used it because I've been travelling, so it's not a proper test even.  If I went in, I probably haven't put an order in in a month but I'm here, so I literally haven't had a chance.  The real test is when I go home and I don't use it; that's going to be the real test.  Maybe I'm wrong to do that, maybe innovation is something we have to accept and Amazon is a natural output of technological innovation.  Personally, if I'm somebody who, like you, prefers the local community, I should just be making an effort to put my money into local, smaller businesses.  I am going to look at it; it will be an interesting test.  I assume I will fail.

Rob Hamilton: I think Amazon is a positive for society.  I understand it's like when the car was invented, people who were doing horseshoe repairs and making carriages lost out, but that's the creative destruction of capitalism; you're going to have to necessarily have -- to have progress, typewriters stopped being used because computers were invented.  The change in and of itself is not a moral judgment; you have to be conscious of being able to separate out.  There will always be disruption and labour being dislodged because they no longer have a job.  But it's what enables the quality of life that we have today and we have to somewhat embrace that.

Peter McCormack: Quality of life for who though?

Rob Hamilton: Well, this is the market as a distribution function; it's for what everyone decides because you choose to spend your money in Amazon.  So, everyone who is choosing to spend their money in Amazon is making a decision saying, "Amazon's bettering my life".  I think there's an interesting interplay with class though.

Peter McCormack: There's people who get Amazon packages every day, but there's certain people who won't be using Amazon every day because they don't have money, but they might be the person who has to go and work there because it's the only job available.  Where they used to work in a bookstore and talk to the people coming in, they're now having their pee breaks timed and having to run around and struggle in a depressing environment to work in.

Rob Hamilton: This is the interplay with class, and this is something that I'd probably consider myself in the political compass of right libertarian, but having sympathies for class-based arguments and understanding that you're going to have winners and losers, and how do you handle and manage how the people who lose in the capitalist system are being taken care of?  It's also this funny thing too where I'm not sure if you remember, it was here in the US, when all of the coalminers were getting put out of work because there was a lot of new energy being put up.  The whole idea is we're going to make them learn how to code, we're going to get coalminers learning how to code. 

It was this silly thing because a lot of the response was, "They're in their late 30s, early 40s, they're not going to be able to get a tech job".  That was a media narrative that was being pushed on them.  Then some media companies had to let go of their journalists and everyone was, "Oh, maybe you should learn how to code".  Then that became banned on Twitter; it was a bannable offence to tell a reporter to learn how to code.  There's interesting ways power structures reinsert themselves where, "Oh, the miner, the people that are working in coalmines, they can learn how to code.  Me?  I'm a journalist, I'm dignified.  I don't want to do that; that's insulting.  Ban that person".  And that's what happened for a while. 

So, the class structure doesn't only always play from a monetary level, but it's also like a social status level, where people perceive themselves in society. 

Peter McCormack: What happens to Amazon worker rights in a society without government and rules?  Is it, "Yeah, this is a great place to work"; or is it, "Fuck, this is the only job I can get"?

Rob Hamilton: Let me think of that.  The idea would be, and I am going to try and play both sides, you're going to have a world, let's take the happy case versus where you're going to have a lot of people who -- you're going to be able to work in Amazon but you're able actually to build savings; your money's not being devalued.  Maybe you have to work at Amazon for five, ten years but now you have an actual base of money, since you're being paid in Bitcoin, that's actually going to raise value over time so you're able to actually, instead of living hand to mouth, you actually can work a job and have savings, and maybe be able to take a crack at being an entrepreneur or move across the country to a different opportunity. 

That would be the idea of the working class in general, a hyperbitcoinised world raising all ships.  As the money gets better, people who honestly do work and generate value are going to be able to get that compensation and store it away for a better day. 

Peter McCormack: If there's money left at the end of the month, after they paid for their --

Danny Knowles: And also in that situation if everyone's got Bitcoin, is everyone not just rising at the same rate?  How do you elevate to the next class?

Rob Hamilton: The increase in productivity of society would be able to increase the value of the Bitcoin.  The idea is if you're saying literally everyone's holding Bitcoin, you're going to be in a position where, as innovation still continues to happen, you're going to have more goods and services available for the same 21 million Bitcoin.  You're going to have more opportunity and more wealth out there but the same 21 million Bitcoin and Bitcoin's value continues to go up.  It's not going to be orders of magnitude, right.

Danny Knowles: But as an Amazon worker, if you're trying to get out of the factory or whatever it is and move on to the next step, if you like, if everyone's wealth accrues at the same time, how do you take that step?  Bitcoin doesn't give you a leg up if it's giving everyone a leg up at the same time.

Rob Hamilton: Not everyone's going to have the same rate of savings.  This goes back to the idea of Bitcoin doesn't change the core, just drives the man; you're going to have people who are going to spend it on shiny objects.  There'll still be some level of consumerism and people who don't save are going to have less opportunity.

Peter McCormack: But Amazon won't be subject to minimum wage rates, so likely the compensation work at Amazon will drop and also at the same time conditions will also likely drop.  Then they won't have to run adverts in cinemas before someone watches a film telling you all the great perks and things at Amazon, and perhaps at the end of the month, they've still not got enough money left or they have to work two jobs.

Rob Hamilton: This goes to a world with full anarcho-capitalism.  So, the idea on the counterbalance would be that you would be able to get jobs at another company or you'd be able to find work elsewhere to be able to not have to go to Amazon, because people are going to be competing for labour.

Peter McCormack: If there's enough jobs available.

Rob Hamilton: If there's not enough jobs available -- so, you're saying there's only one game in town and Amazon's the only company?

Peter McCormack: That is the case in some places, pretty much.  When a Walmart comes to a small town, that can be the biggest recruiter.  We have had towns where industries have died and there's people just massively out of work.

Rob Hamilton: If Amazon wasn't there, what are they doing for work?

Peter McCormack: Some of them don't go back to work.  Some of them retire, rely on government support.  Would we just see a natural migration of people who, because there's no government support, maybe you've got no family, you have to move and find work?  What I'm getting at is I think there's a certain glue in society that protects people and I fear we lose that.  Don't get me wrong, I think it's gone too far sometimes and there are incentives for some people not to work or maybe to have children; yeah, I get that.  But losing that entire glue, I think you end up probably with a different type of wealth disparity, but one where there's no bottom.

Rob Hamilton: Because you don't have that safety net to step in.

Peter McCormack: No safety net at all.  I can listen to and understand and debate the ethics of taxation and all tax is coercion, and all coercion's bad, and therefore government is bad.  I know the argument, I've had it shouted at me 100 times.  But I also think of net benefits and I look at the best places to live in the world and they are western liberal democracies which have created the social safety net to protect the most vulnerable in society, not just economically but in terms of civil rights, equal rights.  To lose all that, I feel is a backward step.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, it's funny being in the position of taking the ancaps out of the argument when I'm not an ancap.  I think in a world where Bitcoin continues to gain dominance and continues to win, it's going to be a messy transition period as we talked about.  You don't just all of a sudden get to the end.  I'm not going to pretend that I have the right answer to be able to say, how would someone in rural Appalachia working at Walmart, where are their opportunities are going to come from. 

I think ultimately though, it sounds like a broken record, but just going back to focusing on the things that I can directly control.  That's where I find the most meaning and being able to find out what I can have a direct impact on, because the world is a very big, large chaotic place and I don't have the hubris to think that I'm able to solve all of those problems.  I very humbly walk into understanding that I know very little and that my sphere of influence is very small.

Peter McCormack: Growing.

Rob Hamilton: Growing, maybe.  I am but one man and the ways that society will govern itself, I think there will also be a lot of an element of individual self-selecting based on their communities.  The idea that in a world where you have this full dissolution of the state, I don't even think it will truly happen but just to take that --

Peter McCormack: I don't think it can happen.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, I know, but you still get people self-selected based on their values to live in certain areas.  It's not like Portland, Oregon's going to become a Republican paradise overnight because hyperbitcoinisation happens.  You're going to have people in a local community with a certain set of values, with agreements on what they're willing to do.  It's also a great way to attract labour and talent.  If people there are going to be taken care of elsewhere, it provides an opportunity where you want to bring people along for labour.  It's like a microcosm with Tesla.  When town supervisors or congressional -- I forgot who it was -- basically told Elon to go F himself, "Yep, bye, I'm going to Texas".

Peter McCormack: And he went, "See you!"

Rob Hamilton: And now Texas has all of the industry and the capital, right, and the employee base here.  I think there's a natural self-selecting mechanism where people are going to find ways to be able to find local communities that align with their values and be able to get taken care of that way.

Peter McCormack: Let's do another good one, just so I'm being fair.  Let's talk about the impact of hyperbitcoinisation on the energy grid.  How comfortable are you talking about that, because we talk about that a lot at the moment?

Rob Hamilton: I can talk about it.  I am by no means an expert in mining or energy grids, but this is something that I've gained a deeper appreciation of with Bitcoin.  Your conversations with Troy have been fascinating listening to those.  Also Harry Sudock, love listening to him.  He really clicked this idea with me where energy is not fungible and ideas that you basically have to do one of two things to make energy: you have to spin a turbine, whether that's a wind turbine, or steam, or hydro or a coal plant, whatever it is; or you're splitting atoms, like nuclear reaction.  But once that energy's created, it has a very short, short timeline to be able to actually get you somewhere.  Battery technology is not at a place today where you can have a bunch of energy generated and you can hold it for a week or two while you wait for the time to use it. 

Because of that, the energy grid baseload of what people are using every single day, you need to be able to provide that and link it to homes.  You're going to have excess energy and using something like Bitcoin, that's going to be able to come in as a buyer of first and last resort; that no electron gets wasted.  You're spending the carbon footprint anyway to generate the electricity; it's use it or lose it.  And Bitcoin can come in and be able better to monetise energy infrastructure. 

Additionally, I think most people don't understand this.  Transmission, I think it's somewhere north of 30% of all energy in the United States when it gets generated, gets lost on the way from the power plant to your home and it requires very complicated infrastructure of high-voltage lines.  You've probably seen them out near your highways and stuff where you see them just going for miles and miles; these really tall metal structures with thick power lines.  That's because it's the only way you're able to actually get energy from point A to point B with minimal loss.  Then you have to go to a substation to be able to step down from high-voltage to regular voltage and that's the last mile; to get it to your house.

Bitcoin provides this amazing opportunity to -- it's so funny, because I feel like I'm just going to grok everything that Troy was saying.

Peter McCormack: That's fine.

Rob Hamilton: You have this advanced echelon team on the frontiers of energy.  Energy can be isolated and stranded in such ways where, if no one is using it and it's just sitting there being wasted, you might as well have Bitcoin come in which can help boost your infrastructure to be able to provide a better baseload energy grid for more stable energy.  That's fundamentally something where prosperity and wealth comes from; energy consumption. 

We usually don't want to tell people to spend less energy, but use less energy; maybe recycle, but it's very uncomfortable all of a sudden to say, "Well, as humans in the western liberal world, we're very used to being able to have power on whenever we want.  You use that outlet right there, it'll work instantly; there's no waiting, warming up period.  We don't have brown outs where the power goes out for a bit because there's too much energy being used". 

Being able to have Bitcoin come in as a monetary incentive to monetise the energy grid provides us to be able to build that more robust energy grid, be able to subsidise and pay for renewable energy which has a lot of problems, where if you have solar panels, it's a sunny day, there's a lot of sun; it's way too much sun that can actually be used locally, so you just waste energy.  You can actually help out the margins for renewable energies by having Bitcoin come in as a mining source to generate income to offset all of those surpluses.

Then, when there's an energy shortage, you're able to come in and you're able to say, "Okay, miners you need to shut down right now because we have the ice storms in Texas.  We need to be able to shut these down so we can get the power where it needs to go".  I think that's a really beautiful thing of an unintended consequence.

Peter McCormack: Phenomenal, isn't it?

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, it's incredible.  Hal Finney; I saw this tweet and I'd never seen this tweet before.  It was a week after his running Bitcoin tweet and he said, "Thinking about Bitcoin and reducing CO2 emissions".  Talk about a man ahead of his time.

Peter McCormack: Dude, so get up my Twitter feed and I'll show you something interesting.  I've come off Twitter; I'm literally using it to retweet the show and I saw that as well.  I think I saw it with Troy.  So, if you scroll down, look.

Rob Hamilton: You just retweeted it?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I just retweeted it.  I'm not engaging in any debates on Twitter anymore; just can't be bothered.  But I will retweet stuff that's interesting.

Rob Hamilton: Signal interest, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I saw this as well, "Thinking about how to reduce CO2 emissions from a widespread Bitcoin implementation".

Rob Hamilton: 27 January 2009; Bitcoin was three weeks old.

Peter McCormack: It's truly incredible to see this tweet.  I was like, "What, what?"

Rob Hamilton: I'd never seen that tweet before.  I saw it either last night or this morning.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Rob Hamilton: Incredible.  I think just a lot of people who are very passionate about helping the environment, because they identify a problem that's happening, maybe they don't deeper understand how energy grids work.  I think Bitcoin's this really amazing opportunity to educate people how energy grids work and explain how -- it's like a judo move.  Actually Bitcoin helps; it's not a hindrance and I think it's a really powerful way to talk about how the hyperbitcoinised world works.  Every bit of energy needs to be very deliberately used, because it could be making Bitcoin.  Like how we financially view Bitcoin as this check of, "I view all my financial decisions through Bitcoin", all of your energy decisions start being viewed through the lens of Bitcoin, so you don't want to waste energy.

Peter McCormack: This is all super-interesting.  It brings you to what I've been thinking about; there is no utopia, there are just trade-offs.

Rob Hamilton: Yes.

Peter McCormack: There are new things that happen and there are things that go away.  Whilst we may say Bitcoin fixes this, Bitcoin also breaks things.  When you view that as a negative, it's actually quite subjective.  For example, you would say Bitcoin fixes the energy system.  We could say, probably if Troy's thesis is correct, probably that's a net good.  If it just suddenly leads to rampant increase in carbon emissions because of increase in coal plants, you'd say that's probably a net bad, but depends on who you are.  You could say Bitcoin breaks the welfare system.  Now, depending on who you are, you might say that's a good thing because the welfare system's broken, but depending on who you might be, you might think that's a bad thing. 

I just think we have all these trade-offs that are starting to come with Bitcoin that we really have to think about, because there's the theoretical side of hyperbitcoinisation and then there's hyperbitcoinisation happening and the actual impact it's going to have on individuals, companies and society.  Whole companies might collapse because they didn't convert to Bitcoin at the right time; that is a possibility.  Nations may collapse. 

What I'm saying is there's all these unintended consequences and I think it's really important we talk that through and we consider it, so people are either prepared or companies are prepared or countries are prepared, and we try and help them towards that lifeboat; but help them towards the consideration of what that means.  I'm kind of rambling now!

Rob Hamilton: No, that's fine.  You're good, no it's great.  It's about being aware, going in with eyes wide open and understanding what the trade-offs and what the world can look like, and not drinking your own Kool-Aid or orange Kool-Aid, and thinking about those orange-tinted glasses about how everything's going to be great.  I think part of -- having an honest conversation is part of getting people maybe prepared or to think differently or expand outside of what the normal conversation is, to have new conversations, because that's part of Bitcoin's growth and maturity too.

Peter McCormack: They're difficult conversations.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, uncomfortable ones.

Peter McCormack: What are the uncomfortable ones we've not touched?  I know you've got your notes out.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, I'm glancing through.  We got through most of them.  I think this idea of purity spirals in Bitcoin, where people like to -- it's like this no true Scotsman fallacy of, "Well, the true bitcoiner is a carnivore.  A true bitcoiner is a libertarian".  I think these are weird things where I understand where they come from; they come from a place where I have these value structures with Bitcoin, Bitcoin was this for a long time, and there's an uncomfortable tension.

Part of Bitcoin's natural growth is it's going to change, because it's almost like if you as an individual, if you were the same person in high school than you were today, it would be somewhat tragic.  You're supposed to be evolving as the world changes around you and being able to develop your own character and your own voice.  Bitcoin necessarily is going through that awkward puberty stage right now where it's trying to figure out where it's going next. 

As this decentralised hive mine, the only thing we can do is put social pressure on others to try and conform to our world views, because they can't change the rules of Bitcoin, you can't take my Bitcoin.  So, the only thing you have is social pressure and shaming and I think that a lot of the general discourse -- and I think it's really mainly isolated to Twitter.  I tease Reddit, because I go to Reddit and I started with Reddit back in 2013, 2014 for Bitcoin.  I feel like the larger Reddit culture intersected there now, so it's Redditers talking about Bitcoin; not people who are very serious about it or put a lot of thought into Bitcoin talking about it.

Peter McCormack: Are there enough people that makes it matter?

Rob Hamilton: Yeah.  It's just part of its growth process.  It used to be the place where I always went to for Bitcoin information, but over time you lose the signal from the noise.

Peter McCormack: It's just the will to live.

Rob Hamilton: It's called the Eternal September.  Have you heard of this?

Peter McCormack: I have.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, so Eternal September, for those that don't know --

Peter McCormack: Isn't there a band called Eternal September?

Danny Knowles: Don't know.

Peter McCormack: I think there is.

Rob Hamilton: So, Eternal September was this concept from the old early days of the internet with the Usenet forums.  What happens was is that every September, the new set of college dorm kids would come and they would invade the internet, not have any sense of idea of etiquette or thoughtfulness, because the internet was this new novel thing.

Peter McCormack: Those jerks!

Rob Hamilton: Yeah.  Then it would take three months to school the new crew on, "Don't type in all caps", like sentence structure, how you communicate with people over the internet.  But then by the time everything got nice and stable, the new swarm of college kids came in.  So, when AOL started sending CD drops all over the country, "Hey, sign up for the internet" it was Eternal September, because the new wave of people coming in was so large, you were no longer able to install a sense of culture and cohesion and norms. 

I think Bitcoin partially may be going through a bit of that as it continues to grow, it enters more of the world stage.  I think it's uncomfortable in the way where we feel like we're disempowered, where if you've been in Bitcoin for a long time, you no longer feel like you have the ability to, "It's the good old days", or you don't have the ability to exert your narrative control anymore with Bitcoin.  I understand why people want to push back, but also this is hyperbitcoinisation; there's more people using it, people from different backgrounds and perspectives.  I've listened to your episode with Margot and the one with, was it Brian or Ben Arc?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Ben Arc.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, Ben Arc.  I find those conversations more interesting because they're bringing perspectives I haven't personally considered before. 

Peter McCormack: Exactly.

Rob Hamilton: It's integrating new information.  If you've been around for a while, you've put a lot of thought and listening into the podcast and thinking about this stuff, you're looking for new nuggets of information to start digging into.  I think that's more compelling.  You may not agree with all of it, but I think in a good faith conversation, "Oh, they're not trying to change the rules of Bitcoin?  Okay, yeah, let's have a conversation".  That's the one threshold rule: you're not trying to do a hard fork of Bitcoin.  As long as you're not trying to do that, happy to talk to you.

Peter McCormack: I love those conversations.  It was interesting because when you go to YouTube comments or iTunes reviews, you get a real insight into what people are thinking.  There's a lot of people who don't want the alternative thoughts or opinions.  They've already formed a set of opinions and if somebody comes up with new ones they're like, "I'm unsubscribing from your show because you're having these people on".  I would encourage these people to say, "These are the shows you should listen to.  If you're a libertarian, don't go and listen to a show about libertarian Bitcoin.  Go and listen to a show from a left-wing bitcoiner.  See where they're coming from, try and empathise with them".

Rob Hamilton: This goes back to my point about people using Bitcoin, I think, as a shield for their ego, because it reinforces behaviours that they identify as themselves and they do themselves as Bitcoin.  So, Bitcoin cannot be different to what they are because it's an attack on their own self-identity.  I think that's something that we should genuinely be very cautious of and making sure that Bitcoin, as a tool, can make us better people and not make us reinforce our shitty behaviours.

Peter McCormack: Rogan said recently, "You should not be your ideas".

Rob Hamilton: Right.  Your ideas should evolve over time and this goes back to if you want to be a different person than you were when you were 18.

Peter McCormack: That's why you get stuck in the debates.  You can't debate because if your ideas are you, once your ideas are challenged, it becomes very difficult to untangle yourself from that. 

Rob Hamilton: Especially if you gain a reputation for having ideas, then your ideas become part of your social class and status, and this is why I'm actually happy I'm under the radar.  I'm on Twitter, I'll talk with people on Clubhouse all the time.  But I give myself the permission structure to change and update my beliefs because, at the end of the day, if I didn't have that set of beliefs I wouldn't have been the person who went to BitDevs in 2014 and realised, "Hey, maybe something's different here.  Let me go learn about this".  You have to embrace that journey.

Peter McCormack: Bitcoin isn't libertarian anyway.  A group of libertarians found it, but also there's a group of left-wingers who have now found Bitcoin, there's a group of conservatives that have found Bitcoin, there's a group of moderates that have found Bitcoin and they have genuine use for it.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah.  Bitcoin is anarchy in the sense that no one is in control; there isn't a board meeting that decides the next rule changes of Bitcoin.  It's a very slow process to integrate new changes.  It took Taproot four years and that was something that everyone mostly agreed on.  So, the larger umbrella is anarchy and then once you agree within the rules of that anarchy, it's whatever you want it to be and that's the whole point; you get to make your own rules and have your own value structure adhered to it.  To think that one thing or another -- this is a belief I actually updated recently. 

I used to be saying that Bitcoin was inherently right-wing because it had property rights, in relation to talking about the taxation stuff.  But honestly, that's not strictly a right-wing value, the idea of private property.  Even someone who is on the left is going to believe that you should still have private property.

Peter McCormack: Of course.

Rob Hamilton: But that was me and my own ego death of maybe I'm trying to associate -- because I'm right-wing and it's funny, it's a right libertarian bent maybe, but being able to have an honest conversation would be like, maybe that isn't me, that's Bitcoin.  I talked about that before, when people touch Bitcoin, this pure uncorruptible substance, it messes with their head; naturally so and the orange pill hits really hard. 

But part of your journey is being able to create that distance between you and Bitcoin and being able to understand that you are not Bitcoin; the map is not the territory in the way that the rules of Bitcoin are not the rules for yourself, the way you should socially govern yourself and the way you should interact with people.  It's a tool you should use to empower yourself and help those around you.

Peter McCormack: That would require a lot of discipline and self-reflection.

Rob Hamilton: Just all the shit posts on Twitter instead then!

Peter McCormack: But it does, it does.

Rob Hamilton: It does, absolutely it does.

Peter McCormack: The whole, "I support the latest thing", "I oppose the latest thing".  There's a lot of people fall into both camps and if you fall into one of those camps, I don't believe you've really done the internal work to allow yourself to be wrong, to be challenged, to admit you're wrong.  Maybe you have a fear from your cohort that you'll be banished from the discussions, from your Clubhouse rooms, whatever.  But there's not enough people doing that work, really challenging themselves internally.

Rob Hamilton: It's also bad incentives in the way where maybe I don't even want to -- is there a responsibility for someone who, "Shall I be speaking my beliefs and pushing back on people?"  Where I come down on it is that I'd rather not invest the time with people who are bad faith negotiating with me.  That's maybe what we should do as a response to all this, to do something better.  I have a hard time trying to justify having these intense fights over the internet.  In person, I'll be in Miami; if you see me, happy to have a conversation and I'll be there all week.  I think having the conversations in person, you get a much better feel to have an authentic flow. 

This is also something I really love about Clubhouse; it being spontaneous audio, you really quickly got to understand who was actually thinking for themselves and who was spending 20 minutes drafting the perfect tweet to own you back.  You can think on your feet; you have to have an authentic conversation.  If there's a really long pause, you've really quickly found out that's someone who doesn't quite think things through.  You start stumbling over your words, you start rambling and you start going in a bunch of different directions.  I think it's a much more compelling way to organise people to have these more intense conversations, because you have to be able to speak from the heart to have a good feel of things, which means you've had to integrate ideas; maybe ones that you've previously disagreed with. 

I think text and the time lag just enables for really bad, "I'm just going to google, I'm going to find all the points that make me agree and validate my world view and I'm going to put those in the replies".  If you had to go off to google to find all these supporting facts and stuff, maybe you're trying to protect your own self-image as opposed to maybe allowing the idea that you were wrong. 

Peter McCormack: I couldn't agree more.  This is my job, I literally do it all the time and I have this ongoing struggle with discussions or attempted discussions that are text-based, the reward structure's broken, it's a miserable failure.  Getting into a situation like this, I can have this conversation with you, and what comes out of it is it will get published and some emails will come in, and there'll be some YouTube comments.  I can read through it and go, "That's a useful comment, I didn't think about that" or someone can send me an email saying, "Your guest said this and it's wrong because of this".  I'm, "Okay, that's cool because of that".  Then I can just ignore the noise. 

But what I can do with this is I can control how I respond to some -- because, by the way, it turns anyone into a prick; I turn into a prick on Twitter.  I can control the conversation; I can control and discipline myself and I think we need more of this.  Wouldn't it be great on Twitter if you're having an argument with somebody on it and after two replies, you just press a button and you get on a Zoom call.  The conversation would go very differently.

Rob Hamilton: It's something I'm surprised I haven't seen with Twitter Spaces, where it actually happened with Preston Pysh and Mark Cuban; they were fighting about Bitcoin back and forth.  It's the equivalent of the, "Meet me outside after class".  So, Preston just opened up a Twitter Space calling Mark Cuban out, and I was actually in that room and I was talking to Mark Cuban.  I think you were there too, that's right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Rob Hamilton: We were talking for a while, but what was funny was I'm surprised that didn't happen more; to be able to go to a conversation channel that's higher bandwidth with audio, having more information you can exchange.  I thought you would start seeing more of that with Twitter Spaces where you have a text fight and then, "Okay, let's have a deeper conversation".  Like you said, click one button and be on a Zoom call maybe.

Peter McCormack: There's more empathy in person-to-person.

Rob Hamilton: Absolutely, yeah.  I think it's not only more empathy, but what's important about the empathy is rather than me speaking from a pulpit of these are my beliefs, I get to understand what do you value, and try to triangulate where my beliefs and your beliefs intersect and we can have a compelling conversation, as opposed to reading from a script, which is much less interesting.

Peter McCormack: Again, that requires discipline and maturity.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, and this is where I ultimately defer to the idea of casting pearls at swine.  It's an old biblical thing, but the idea being you almost devalue the wisdom if you try and give it to people who are ungrateful for it.  Maybe the best way is just to opt out and maybe that's why Twitter's become a circus, is that all the adults left and now we're just in an insane asylum all locked in with each other.

Peter McCormack: It is a fucking insane asylum!  We watched a film last night; have you seen Darren Aronofsky's Mother!?

Rob Hamilton: No.

Peter McCormack: Do you know who Darren Aronofsky is?

Rob Hamilton: I don't.

Peter McCormack: He did Requiem for a Dream, Noah, Black Swan.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, Mother!, I'm not going to tell you what it's about, but if you do watch it, which I'd encourage just because it's just so weird and mental, just imagine it as Twitter; that film as Twitter.

Rob Hamilton: Okay.

Peter McCormack: That was Jeremy's observation last night; I'd recommend that.  Well, listen man, this was great to talk about with you and you know I love talking to you.  Danny loves having you on the show and you'll always have a home here if you want to talk to me about something.  Tell people where to follow you and find out more of what you do.

Rob Hamilton: My Twitter handle is @Rob1Ham.  You can also find me on Clubhouse, the same handle.  Shoot me a note and let me know how the conversation went.  I always love to be told why I'm wrong and maybe learn better from it, so reach out.

Peter McCormack: All right, man.  Take care, brother.

Rob Hamilton: Take care.