WBD566 Audio Transcription

The Path of Freedom and Sovereignty with Natalie Smolenski

Release date: Wednesday 12th October

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Natalie Smolenski. 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.

Natalie Smolenski is an Executive Director of the Texas Bitcoin Foundation and a Fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute. In this interview, we discuss the elimination of cash, the importance of Bitcoin to a free society, and the clear and present danger posed by CBDCs.

“The only way that tyranny is prevented is a strong civil society that the state actually becomes concerned about.”

— Natalie Smolenski

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Right, good morning, Natalie, how are you?

Natalie Smolenski: I'm doing great.

Peter McCormack: I think this might be one of the most important interviews I make, not only in this sprint, but potentially this year.  If we talk about what I think we're going to talk about, and these bloody flies don't get in the way, I think this is going to be a really important interview to do, and let me tell you the reason why.

About six months or eight months ago, Danny will remind me because he'll remember, but on Facebook sometimes, I put out content to my friends and family, and it's a very different audience from Twitter.  It has to be very measured and very careful to introduce some of the topics we talk about as bitcoiners, because it's a massive leap from their world to our world if they've got no experience of Bitcoin, apart from hearing about it in the news.  Rishi Sunak, he was our Chancellor at the time, announced Britcoin, the idea that we would have a CBDC.

So, I put out a Facebook message explaining why CBDCs are dangerous, bad and we should reject them, and one of my friends' mums said, "I've had enough of your conspiracy theory nonsense", and blocked me.

Natalie Smolenski: Oh, no!

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  And so, my main worry about CBDCs is that it is something that the government is able to sleepwalk people into accepting without realising the consequences, because of the leap from where we are to where we are.

Natalie Smolenski: That's right.

Peter McCormack: We've all gone through this rabbit hole of learning about money and how money works, and how currencies on blockchains work, and how CBDCs could be misused.  So, I'm just going to tee this up and say this is a really important interview, because this is one I want to send out to my friends who aren't yet to head down the rabbit hole.

Natalie Smolenski: Okay, fantastic.

Peter McCormack: So, before we start, I think it would be useful just to give people a bit of your background, introduce yourself to the audience.

Natalie Smolenski: Sure.  So, my background is actually rather unusual in a number of respects.  I never really thought that I would be working in technology.  I was an anthropologist and historian in a previous life, I was focused on questions of social theory, political theory, anthropology of religion, how the state as such gets formed by human communities. 

Then I ended up making a transition into the business world, which I initially did through market advertising as a brand planner, and then started working at a software company that built the very first Bitcoin-based digital identity wallet.  This was a Dallas-based company, called Learning Machine, and we basically launched a movement to build open standards for digital identity using Bitcoin as a secure anchor of trust.  And now that movement has adherence all over the world and many companies are building on these standards.  So, I felt very privileged to be at the birth of this movement.  I ended up being the business development leader for that company, spearheaded its exit to the company I currently work at, in 2020, and I continue to do basically scholarly work at the intersection of technology and society. 

I've done a lot of policy stuff.  You may be familiar with some of my work with the Texas Blockchain Council, which I was the founding Board Chairman for, in 2020.  Earlier this year, I founded the Texas Bitcoin Foundation, which is a 501(c)3 that is dedicated to specifically research and education on the social and political ramifications of Bitcoin.  So, we have a lot of technologists working in this space, we have a lot of brilliant people, and I think we have people with very strong convictions about the way the world should be.  Those have to be systematically theorised, they have to be spelt out in a rigorous way that can be defended, but not just defended; that can offend, that can actually frame the conversation around who we should become as a people and as a species.

Peter McCormack: Okay, wow, lots to get into there.  Firstly, it feels like it would be a good time to align the brands of the Texas Blockchain Council and the Texas Bitcoin Foundation.  So, it would be nice to have the Texas Bitcoin Council!

Natalie Smolenski: You know, I 100% agree with you.

Peter McCormack: I know the complexities.

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah.  One of the reasons I created the Texas Bitcoin Foundation is because I think the Blockchain Council saw itself as more of a big tent organisation, which I also think has value, but there needed to be an organisation that had this Bitcoin-forward focus, and I wanted it to actually be a 501(c)3, because Bitcoin's value goes so far beyond its existence as a token.  It is really a nodal point for reimagining the relationship between state and society. 

So, there has to be an organisation that can take that 30,000-foot view without getting into the nitty-gritty of specific political tactics and legislation, but that brings together people, scholars, from various disciplines, who may not even have a point of view yet about Bitcoin, but can understand, based on their expertise, how it will change the world.

Peter McCormack: I am in part just teasing Lee, because I know he'll be listening!  Hi, Lee, hope you're well, mate.  Okay, so I would be interested therefore, with your background in anthropology and studying society and political structures, what was your orange pill moment?  For a lot of people, it's quite difficult when you first hear about Bitcoin.  Everyone will tell you stories, "I heard about it in 2012 and then ignored it, and then something happened in 2014/15, and then I took another look and then I understood it, and then I really understood it".  And over time, the conviction increases.  We very, very rarely get somebody who says, "You know what, I've been in Bitcoin for ten years, I don't believe in it anymore".  That tends to be the journey.  I'd be really interested in your moment, your "Aha!" moment.

Natalie Smolenski: I actually came to Bitcoin through digital identity.  Like I was mentioning earlier, the company that I was with actually partnered with MIT to build something called Blockcerts, which was the very first version of what is now called Verifiable Credentials.  This enabled a movement that today is known as self-sovereign identity. 

So, coming as I did, my academic focus was a study of sovereignty, so I was very intrigued by this concept of self-sovereignty and what does that mean in a digital world?  Well, Bitcoin's value proposition involves being a censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer, digital currency, internet-native digital money.  What if we could do censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer, internet-native digital identity?  Could that potentially be an antidote to the surveillance capitalism that has created this nexus of corporation and state that just encroach further and further upon our everyday lives, without most people knowing, let alone giving consent?

Peter McCormack: Or even approving and being sold on it that this is good for them, the surveillance tech protects us from terrorists and criminals, that we need this.  I feel like there's become an acceptance that we don't really have privacy anymore.

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, it's effectively a moot concept.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Okay, and then yourself as, again, an anthropologist and somebody who's studied people and coming into quite a diverse community, and when I say diverse I mean in terms of political opinions, some loosely held, some strongly held, quite vicious debates at times, disagreements, fights, how do you analyse it; how do you view the subculture of bitcoiners?

Natalie Smolenski: I think it's actually to be expected.  No new fundamental technology -- well, I don't want to say "no", because that's an absolute statement, but it is very rare that a fundamental technological innovation enters human society without being stewarded by a passionate subculture of people who protect it, believe in it and nurture it to the point where it's ready for mass adoption.

So, if you think about the origin of things like mathematics, geometry in Ancient Greece, I mean the Pythagoreans were literally a cult.  They were a religious order that you had to have the right signs to enter the meetings and there was a network of trust.  There was a long history of secret societies in Europe as kind of incubating political movements, including things like the American Revolutionary movement.  And these were not always the nicest, most approachable, most easy-going people.  These were people with a point of view, they understood the violence of the social structures that they were living amidst and also trying to change, and they also understood the stakes.  So, it doesn't surprise me at all that the Bitcoin community is as it is.

Peter McCormack: And as somebody who's also studied religion, are there similarities between how religions organise themselves, and perhaps these subcultures do?

Natalie Smolenski: Absolutely, yeah.  In fact, the term "religion" is a very fuzzy one; it's very contested what exactly religion is, how it differs from, say, a cult.  And in fact, the root word "cult" is where we get "culture".  It's in some ways a broader way of thinking about religion as a set of shared practices that are cultivated by groups of people over time.  So, religion is never static, it's always emotion towards something.  There's a solving for that is happening collectively in these communities.

Peter McCormack: And so, when you talk about Bitcoin being a fundamental technology, how important do you see it then?

Natalie Smolenski: I see it as critical.  I believe that Bitcoin has automated one of the central functions of the state, which is the seigniorage and management of money, of sound money.  This traditionally has been a prerogative of the state and in the modern period, the central banks.  This is not to say that there is no longer a role for the state, or even for central banks, but rather that there is now a particular function of these particular institutions that has been automated and made global and universal by design and default.  And so, there is no local, let's say jurisdiction that Bitcoin emanates from; it is ajurisdictional.  That means a number of things.

One, it's a kind of financial DMZ, or demilitarised zone, which as we can see in a world of weaponised and politicised money, can actually be the precondition for trade between enemies.  Because it is set up to be enemy money, it is presumed that your counterparty in the transaction is someone you don't know and don't trust.  It also is something that anyone can make use of, so it is not the explicit purview of a favoured class, or a Cantillon effect of some kind.  So I think initially actually, what many nation states don't like about Bitcoin will be the very reason they come around to it, because they will recognise that they can benefit from its neutrality, not just lose out from its neutrality.

And then finally, the importance of property.  I mean, this is one of those fundamental rights that the political theorists, the enlightenment, write about, and they often started with property, because it is in some ways the clearest way of talking about ownership, ownness; in other words, what belongs to me versus, say, to someone else or to the community.  And that question, it's never designed with 100% certainty, there's always a debate about where the boundaries of ownness end, like where personal property begins to transition.

Nevertheless, if you don't have some sense of personal property at all, then you set individuals up for in effect totalitarian control, whether that is the cage of norms, which political scientists, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have written about, where the village lays claim to whatever it is you happen to possess, or whatever fortune you have, nobody can rise too high, because you're immediately cut down; that's a more traditional small-scale society to this.  Or, the modern totalitarian state, where there is in fact no private property, and so anything you have can be confiscated at any time by the state.  So, these are extremes, but if you don't have a theory of private property, of ownness, then it's really hard to justify any other rights politically.

This is why Bitcoin is so important for the individual, because it actually enshrines in a material infrastructure a structure of ownership, through ownership of private keys, and the ability to use those private keys in a self-sovereign way to transact with anybody you choose.

Peter McCormack: So, that idea that any of your property can be taken by a totalitarian state, I understand what you're getting at there and the kind of states we're talking about.  But at the same time, I'm from the UK, a western liberal democracy, but I can imagine an instant scenario right now where the state can take my property from me; and when I talk about my property: my home and my money.

So, there are certain scenarios, say for example if I didn't pay tax, they can go straight into my bank account and take that money directly from the bank, and I can't stop it.  But I can also see scenarios, say if I perhaps was involved in some kind of lawsuit, which was a lawsuit that was unfair but I lost it and had to pay the costs, I can have my home taken from me in those scenarios.  So, how do you differentiate the two?

Natalie Smolenski: I think often, these political labels, like liberal democracy and totalitarian state, are used in very imprecise ways.  Liberal democracy is used to describe the good states that we like; and totalitarian state is used to describe the bad states that we don't like.

Peter McCormack: Which are blurring now.

Natalie Smolenski: Right.  So, what is totalitarianism?  There's a history of theorising it.  One could say that, what characterises totalitarianism is a certain type of not mere outward compliance with the law, but a demand that people inwardly be in agreement with the law.  So, it is not enough to obey, one must enthusiastically obey and enthusiastically encourage or coerce others to obey.  So, it's a kind of colonisation of the inner disposition of the human being that political theorists have described as totalitarian.

That said, whether or not the state is totalitarian in that regard, its ability to confiscate private property without repercussions defines its ambit of sovereignty.  So, what's interesting about self-sovereignty is it's not saying this is the only category of sovereignty that can exist, but rather, "Let's posit that the individual also has a form of sovereignty that is a counterpoint to the sovereignty of the state, so that the jurisdiction of the state cannot be said to penetrate more than a certain degree into the lives of each individual"; that is also privacy. 

So lo and behold, privacy, self-sovereignty, these are constituent components of a free society.  A state that can confiscate property with complete impunity could, the moment it flips to being totalitarian and demands that ideological conformity, do so without any, in effect, civil society pushback.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.  So, when you think about this work that you're doing here with Bitcoin and you consider political structures, what is the end goal; and can it be summed up quite simply?  When I think of decentralisation, when people compare Bitcoin and Ethereum, and they refer to both being decentralised, some will say one is more decentralised than the other, I prefer to think of directionally, is a blockchain, is a network becoming more or less decentralised?  And I see Bitcoin is constantly striving for more decentralisation, and I see Ethereum becoming more centralised, and that is how I differentiate the two.

Is your work considered in a way where you're pushing for more freedom, avoiding heading down the totalitarian route; can it be simplified like that?

Natalie Smolenski: That's right, preserving the free society.  Freedom is taken from us generally behind our backs, and sometimes with our enthusiastic consent.  If our theory of a good society is one that we rely on people we agree with being in power, that is a hierarchical social structure.  That means that we have to constantly work, often through violence, to ensure that the right people are in power at all times, ie whoever we happen to agree with.

What if we actually remember some of the lessons of enlightenment era political theory, which is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  So, how do you ensure power is not abused?  It's not by making sure that the right people are in power, it's by setting power against itself, fragmenting it through separation of powers, and then creating a system of checks and balances where no faction of power can rise too high.  That is ultimately what preserves a free society.

What we've seen happen instead is the consolidation of power in an elite faction of society that's a kind of revolving door; private sector, public sector, executive branch, legislative branch, judicial branch, central banks, large banking institutions, large financial institutions, policy.  In effect, this is a process that anthropologists have described again and again with regards to the collapse of complex societies. 

When the elites of a society become so entrenched, and their interests aligned, what ends up happening is that society begins lurching into this top-down imbalance, where the elites colonise more and more of the resources of the society, and the productive economy of the bottom part of the society can no longer sustain them materially.  And so, you have a growing elite class that regulatory capture is just one of the ways it exerts its power; but that is increasingly parasitic on the actual production of the bottom of the pyramid.  And at some point, there's just resource limitations.  Lyn Alden has spoken often about the energy supply crunch.

Peter McCormack: I mean, we're seeing that in the UK.  I mean, it's interesting, there's so many bits of work that we've been doing recently that are converging into this conversation.  I recently made a film that's about two weeks away from being released, where I went out to study inflation in the UK, what people understood about it.  Post filming that, we've had an energy crisis in the UK, and the energy crisis has gone from the point of people expecting to pay, £1,000, £1,200 a year in energy costs to a predicted up to £6,000.  The only way that's been protected is by the government borrowing a massive amount of money to subsidise the energy costs at an individual and a business level, because businesses would have closed and people could not heat their homes, and we already have people living in poverty.

So, we've had this crunch at not only the base of society, but also in the middle classes, because the middle class is so stretched that their disposable income doesn't stretch so far.  Add to that rising interest rates, with people coming off fixed-rate mortgages, we're expecting there's going to be a surplus of housing as people can't afford to pay for their homes.  We also had a conversation yesterday with Avik Roy, you know Avik very well, love him, and we were discussing the cost of living crisis, which isn't just here, which is happening everywhere. 

Everything you've just said to me kind of points to one of the things I made a note to Avik about, and also harps back to a conversation I had with, do you know Dominic Frisby?

Natalie Smolenski: No.

Peter McCormack: He's a, what would you call him, UK comedian, political commentator?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, he's a comedian, actor, political commentator, bitcoiner, all sorts.

Peter McCormack: Author, yeah.  He's written books on taxations.  And he made a very clear point.  He said, and I'm paraphrasing him, but he said that we used to have a society based on houses with one income and you could afford a house and a car and a holiday and your kids.  We've now got families where we've got two incomes where they can't maybe afford a house, can't afford to pay the bills.  He says we've had society stretched.

One of the things I wanted to say to Avik was, I talked to him about this property, a place called Terminus House.  It's in a town called Harlow.  It's one of the most deprived towns in the country.  They're so short of social housing, they've started turning old office blocks into blocks of social housing; essentially, the UK version of a favela, ghettoised, dangerous office block.

Danny Knowles: I know we brought it up yesterday, but it would be worth looking at.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, this is it.

Danny Knowles: It's shocking.

Peter McCormack: Now, for me, it's shocking.  Now, I'm from the UK.  Despite what anyone thinks about the UK, we have quite a civil society that protects the most vulnerable and the poorest.  We have a good social structure, whether it's with health or housing.  But we get to the point where we're starting to house single parents and families alongside criminals, into these environments which are burdened by poverty, drugs.  This to me is a sign of a collapsing culture and a collapsing country, which is happening on the back of massive GDP growth over the last two decades.

So, everything you've just said to me there, you've just pointed to that.  This is the elites that have taken up the resources which has left very little for those at the bottom.  Yeah, here we go, that's inside.

Danny Knowles: That's inside.

Peter McCormack: Now look, it's not easy to house everybody who needs a home.  But at the same time, to me it's just another signal of many signals that I'm seeing, in that we have squeezed the poorest and we're squeezing the middle class out of being able just to function.

Natalie Smolenski: You're absolutely right.  One of the things we see too in late-stage societies or late-stage empires, is the increased emphasis on rent-seeking, as opposed to new, productive growth.  And so what happens, as elites begin to feel the resource crunch, because they feel it too, even though they have more sort of padding, they begin to search for new sources of revenue; and the easiest way to find new sources of revenue is to extract rents.

We've seen rent-based business models everywhere, including areas of the economy that are truly productive, like software.  I mean, software is a service now, the standard model, you can no longer perpetually own software in effect, you have to pay a rent for it.

Peter McCormack: I noticed that even recently with Microsoft Word.  I wanted Microsoft Word and it wanted me to have a subscription.

Natalie Smolenski: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: I was like, hold on, I'm sure I used to pay, I don't know the amount, £100, £50, whatever and I would just own that software.

Natalie Smolenski: Right, exactly.  So, subscription, rent, whatever it is, this is part of what has caused a boom in growth of certain industries like real estate, like software, but it is also presenting a challenge, because in effect it creates ongoing operating expenditure for the end user or the, previously what we would have called "the owner", but now it's "the client" or "the customer".  So, this also chips away at us in the sense of property ownership.  What does it mean if I'm always renting my property?  What is my sphere of ownness that is, so to speak, inviolable?  Where does that begin and end?

Peter McCormack: You'll own nothing and be happy.

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah!

Peter McCormack: And is this why we've seen, or one of the reasons we've seen the likes of BlackRock, who now own I think 80,000 properties and a lot of these big funds moving into owning properties on a scarce resource, which means there's less properties available for people to buy; it pushes up the prices of properties, it pushes up the prices of rent; is that one of the reasons we've seen that?

Natalie Smolenski: Certainly.  So, if you're looking to diversify in a world where the productive economy is hitting some limits, then you're going to want to create areas of your portfolio that can collect rents on what is already built, what is already there.  And so, this is where we get into the question of, "How do we actually grow the pie?  How do we move from a rent-seeking economy to a more net new productive economy?"  That actually appears to be a question of resource abundance/scarcity.

We can have a growing economy, but we need a certain type of energy supply for that.  That energy crunch that is being experienced now throughout the world is constraining real GDP growth; it's going to constrain new industries, it's going to push down rent extraction further and further into the pyramid.  And so, this is why I think on the left in particular, which tends to be very concerned about the poor, the middle class, those who are economically struggling, there often is a real disconnect on this issue, because they haven't thought about energy as the underpinning of all prosperity. 

So, there is an emphasis on redistribution, which you can debate different redistribution models; but ultimately, if the pie isn't growing, then you're redistributing smaller and smaller units of value that are themselves losing value to more and more people, which is a recipe for a revolution.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I just want to go back a step.  When you talked about the checks and balances on power, and you may not have an opinion on this, but I would be interested in your thoughts about what's been happening in El Salvador with Nayib Bukele.  He's obviously become very popular with bitcoiners because he's made Bitcoin legal tender.  He's also dismantled some of the checks and balances that would exist on the power he has.

But at the same time, he's very popular and historically, it is a country that's had a massive issue with corruption, all the way through the various parts of the government.  We had, I think, two of the previous presidents are in jail for stealing tens if not hundreds of millions; one fled to Nicaragua, one died mysteriously.  So, whilst the checks and balances existed, he has dismantled them, but he does feel like he is someone who is trying to take El Salvador in a different direction.

Now, you may hear certain claims that he's just a populist, whatever, I don't really care.  But how do you feel about somebody having that much power and taking into their own hands to consider, "Well, I need to extend my time, I need to have a second --"; how do you feel about what's happened there?

Natalie Smolenski: Political historians have written about this trap that countries can fall into.  I'm trying to remember the term they used for it; it's something like "the coup trap", or something.  But there are a number of countries around the world who have gone through these repeated cycles of coup, dictatorship, collapse, new coup, new dictatorship, collapse.

Peter McCormack: And regularly in South America?

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, on every continent almost.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Natalie Smolenski: So, how do countries escape that trap?  I want to extend to Bukele the good faith that he's trying to do what's best for his country.  However, the challenge for whoever ends up being in the dictator position post-coup, and any type of radical consolidation of state power I would characterise as a coup, whoever's in that position then has the responsibility to build institutions that separate powers in practice, and that can function without the dictator, without the personalist power of the intervention of that individual.  And so, that's always the question.

There have been military coups followed by dictatorships that have transitioned into truly democratic forms of governance.  They just tend to be more rare, because the work of building those institutions is very hard.

Peter McCormack: And is it also hard for somebody to let go of power?

Natalie Smolenski: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: Can you think of any examples of where this has happened, for my late-night reading?

Natalie Smolenski: I'm going to say the paradigmatic is the American Revolution.  This was a violent military conflict that was won by an upstart colonial country that was highly fragmented.  I mean, we had basically multiple states who, in effect, saw themselves as multiple sovereign nations.  We really only won the war, because we managed to finagle the support of France, and then ended up with a country.  The consensus at the time was, "We need a king, or we need someone who is going to basically function that way".  It was Washington's foresight to refuse that role that I think became an enduring model for representative democracy in the United States.

Peter McCormack: So, he was offered that role?

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, he refused to be king.

Peter McCormack: I mean, I feel like I've studied a lot of American history post-civil war, and I've never heard that.  Have you heard that?

Danny Knowles: No, but to be fair, it's not something I've studied very much.

Peter McCormack: I just did not know that.  So, what, there was a consideration of the US becoming a monarchy?

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Interesting.

Natalie Smolenski: Or in effect, creating a president role that was no different from a monarch in its powers.  And this is the problem now with the American Presidency, is that we're now on the tail end of decades of consolidation of executive power that was even explicitly theorised by some as the theory of the unitary executive.  This was a reigning or prevailing theory explicitly during the George W Bush Administration, that the President, or the executive branch, is in effect the governing branch, the sovereign branch of government.

So today, the presidency does have, in effect, monarchical powers, and even beyond monarchical powers, because in most constitutional monarchies --

Peter McCormack: We don't have any great power anymore.

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, they don't really have power anymore.  So, what is the electoral contest then?  It's a constant contest of who will be king.  And you have some, in effect like our previous President, who explicitly was very comfortable with the idea of being President for life, and in effect doing away with the whole show of democracy.  So, power consolidates.  I would argue that the separation of powers in the United States was not able to sustain itself through the information revolution, that after the Second World War, our global imperial posture and the rise of the internet, of communication technology, so amplified our power that our institutions couldn't adapt fast enough.

This is now the challenge for whoever the American President's going to be, it's not just Bukele; it's like, in this country, how are we going to re-found our institutions so that we don't have a really, really powerful version of Bukele, who has the entire global surveillance and military apparatus at their command.

Peter McCormack: So, how does that happen then, because as somebody who travels to America a lot, big fan of the country, there is considerable political division right now.  Do you remember that one interview, we bought up this chart, and it would show where they would be crossing the aisle on certain issues and policies.  And over time, it showed how there was a blend of red and blue, and over time there are just two separate blocks. 

Now, there seems to be very little, apart from maybe in Bitcoin which we saw with Gillibrand and Cynthia Lummis, it seems to be very little things that people agree on and work on, and it's now just become us and them; the whole country appears to have become us and then.  Is that part of the failure?

Natalie Smolenski: Yes, it absolutely is.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, here we go.  It wasn't this one.

Danny Knowles: I don't think it was actually this chart, but it's very similar.

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, and we can imagine that 2014 graph is probably even more polarised now.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, definitely.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and it's sad to watch, because I've been a huge fan of studying to understand what the Forefathers tried to do, and I wouldn't ever try and explain it or explain my understanding.  But the idea that this group of people tried to imagine a structure for the future that would protect against the individual obtaining too much power, what they fought for and what they did, for me, was brilliant.  But America seems a very long way from that.

It's strange, to be honest, because we know how much you study, as children, the importance of the Forefathers.  I remember it in Kindergarten Cop, when the kid steps forward and they talk of the Forefathers; it's something I've always been aware of.  And it feels like America has almost lost its Americanism about that.  It seems like the passion for the political party has become more important than the passion for the country, which requires conceding on certain things, and it doesn't feel like anyone wants to concede on anything anymore.

Natalie Smolenski: Exactly, that's right.  And where they do concede, they're often simply bought, and so it's extremely crass.  So, Bitcoin Magazine, their new issue is coming out soon, it's called The Orange Party Issue, and it's all about transcending this red versus blue political divide.  I have an essay in there, called It Is Time to Re-found the American Republic, where I make this exact argument.  We have actually lost sight of what made the American experiment great, Liberty and Justice for all, a kind of ethos of individual ability to experiment, to fail and to succeed.

That has become lost to considerations around policing, both the world and domestically.  And so, the model of the prison is increasingly becoming a model for American social institutions, whether we're talking about schools or workplaces, or the prisons themselves.  Then globally, there is a kind of commitment to projection of power for its own sake, where that sphere of ownness is no longer something we can define as a country.  Instead, our leaders talk in terms of "interests", American interests, but whose interests specifically in America?

So, in the congressional briefing on CBDCs, one of the slides I showed was this growth of US intelligence agencies over time, where the 20th century, particularly after the Second World War, just spawned this explosion of federal intelligence agencies.  This is to say nothing of the actual executive branch and the police.

Peter McCormack: Unconstitutionally?

Natalie Smolenski: Well often, that's always a question.  Under the privilege or purview of some branch or some agency within the executive branch of government, that's how we're going to spin this up.  So, they're not accountable to the people certainly through the electoral process.  They may, through some chain of command, report to the President.  But whether the President is even aware of a lot of their activity is up for debate.

Peter McCormack: Which sounds very deep state.

Natalie Smolenski: Right.  So, this is the thing.  The American right, with its growing scepticism of the deep state, and what seems like its conspiratorial world view, is actually beginning to speak the same language as many parts of the American left, which have been suspicious of the deployment of state institutions to prosecute activists, journalists, pretty much any black person who happened to rise to any kind of fame or notoriety in the United States.

So, this is the thing.  A default posture of, "Let's use the State to solve whatever X problem is", is increasingly garnering bipartisan disdain or suspicion, and that's where I think a new type of political coalition can be built, with bitcoiners, interestingly, as a kind of centre for that.

Peter McCormack: So, sorry, just want to go back a second.  You mentioned there the arrest and imprisonment or prosecution of journalists.  Where has this been happening?  The reason this comes to my mind is right now, I'm personally, to the disappointment of some other people, very critical of Vladimir Putin.  Historically, there's been very little free press in Russia.  What was, or what did exist, was kicked out during the war, and historically certain journalists, they report on certain topics and may end up falling out of buildings, or with bullets in the back of their head, something I've been very critical of.

I support a free press.  As much as we might hate the mainstream media, the entire press isn't CNN and Fox News, and we do have good journalists out there, and I'd much rather have a free press with its faults than a state press.

Natalie Smolenski: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: But where have journalists been targeted in the US?

Natalie Smolenski: This actually is not my area of expertise, so I'm not going to name names.

Peter McCormack: Okay, yeah, that's fine.

Natalie Smolenski: But a pattern that I have seen is that journalists in the United States, who begin to ask difficult questions about those in power, regardless of what level, municipal, state, federal, begin to face difficulties, particularly around access.  So, I would suggest that in the United States, the media has actually come to police itself, to self-censor.  This happens in every repressive regime.  The difference is that unlike, say, in China, the US media's not getting weekly communiques from the party about what talking points they need to hit in their press coverage this week.  That's a very direct hands-on form of censorship and control that the US Government does not exercise.

Instead, it becomes about celebrity, about access, about opportunities, speaking engagements, book deals, promotional opportunities.  So, this collusion, or collision of the world of journalism with the world of celebrity entertainment has, from my point of view, removed the media at large as an effective sort of preserver, protector of democracy in the United States.  Instead, we have media factions who foment conflict and controversy to drive engagement, to drive ad dollars and revenue, and ultimately to drive access to elites.

Peter McCormack: I mean, that's one of the failures of the internet.  I can't remember, was it Andreas Antonopoulos wrote about this?  One of the failures of the internet is in making the internet so free and easily accessible, we destroy so many business models that relied on maybe subscriptions, or if purchasing a newspaper, they've had to drive revenue through clicks.  And if you drive revenue through clicks, you're incentivised for clickbait, which is kind of sad.

Danny Knowles: I think that's so right on the press as well though.  I think people think that there's some angry higher-up telling people what to report on; but from my experience, I think it's definitely a cultural issue, and I think the promotional opportunities are the most obvious of that.  You have to work within the restrictions of your fellow workers, and they can be quite tight.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because you have the social pressures internally, which we know exist in, for example, a place like Twitter, we know that exists; we know at Spotify it exists, because of what happened when there was the Joe Rogan controversy; we know at Netflix it existed, when people walked out based on the Dave Chappelle comedy show.  We know this exists, you have the social pressures internally.  I would also argue that there are, and some people won't like me for saying this, but there is self-censorship within the world of Bitcoin.

Danny Knowles: Totally.

Peter McCormack: And I wonder what your observation, again harping back to your anthropology background, is.  I feel like there is a self-censorship that happens, because there is a growing subculture around a specific set of beliefs and end goal.  And if you step outside of that subculture, you can risk being banished or having your career ruined, memed.  I mean, we saw what happened to Nic Carter.  I fundamentally disagree with some of Nic Carter's points, but I consider him a friend and I will just discuss it with him.  But there is an attack culture within Bitcoin, and I have no doubt some people self-censor.  I'm not sure I do, do I?  You probably wish I probably would more, don't you?

Danny Knowles: I don't know if you self-censor, but I've heard for a fact from other bitcoiners things that they cannot say in public.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we've had that, private conversations where there is another cryptocurrency where they say, "Actually, that is useful for this.  I can't say it publicly", or certain beliefs they have about political structures, whereby maybe they think the government is natural or a good thing, and again they're not going to say publicly. 

We prefer the opposite, we prefer to provoke.  Early on, I maybe would provoke for the sake of it, but sometimes I provoke because I want to see people's arguments, I want to see their colours, and this is why this show, anyone can come on, whether you are a libertarian or a progressive, whether you're a bitcoiner or a crypto person; we'll have anyone on to have the full conversation.  But that self-censorship exists within Bitcoin, and I can't figure out whether that is a good thing or a bad thing.

Half of me thinks it is a good thing, because you have that tight core of people keeping Bitcoin and protecting Bitcoin.  That to me is super-important, because we've got to protect and nurture this technology.  But at the same time, sometimes I feel there that there are certain discussions that need happening, but they are off topic.  And then, I also feel like certain feelings get to be held and disseminated and not challenged enough.

Climate change is an important one for me, and I feel like we are heading in a direction where a large group of people are now fundamentally disagreeing with the science, and calling, "You're an idiot [or] a statist [or] a libtard" if you follow the science, if you agree with the science.  And I understand where this comes from, because they were told to follow the science with, say, vaccines, which it turns out there's some complications around those.  But this self-censorship, I have not figured out whether it's a good or bad thing.

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah.  I think what ends up happening in most social communities is that there's a certain amount of work that people are willing to do to nuance the consensus, but beyond that they don't want to do the work.  At that point is where you enter the realm of, or the Overton window sort of ends, for whatever that community is.  And so, the question from my point of view is always, whatever the topic is that we are discussing, "Are the people I'm speaking with here fundamentally interested in truth, or are they interested in policing a community boundary?"

Peter McCormack: Didn't we say the exact same thing yesterday?

Danny Knowles: Just not as eloquently!

Peter McCormack: Yeah!  Well, I'm not as well educated.  Yeah, it's like, "Do you want truth, or do you want confirmation?"

Natalie Smolenski: Right, exactly.  And often what ends up happening is people just don't have, for whatever reason, they haven't had the language to fully express their point of view, so they devolve into violence, linguistic violence and perhaps physical violence.  But perhaps if they had the language to, say, think in a more nuanced way about an issue, then you could have a more constructive conversation with them. 

So fundamentally, I'm an educator, I taught for a long time, and I see part of my role within the Bitcoin community and within the United States as introducing ways of talking about contentious topics that don't immediately need to devolve into a position.  In fact, not knowing something, not having an opinion about something should be the default position.  We don't know most things about most things, and there's a particular, I think, culture in America, in part because of our global supremacy that we've inherited, that not only our government, but often American people feel like they need to have an opinion on every global conflict, or every major political issue, and you don't.

The same thing with social media.  Social media has given everyone a microphone, which is incredibly empowering, but also you don't have to use it.  And in fact, part of the work of character is knowing when to use it and when not to use it.

Peter McCormack: Are you speaking to me directly there?! 

Natalie Smolenski: No!

Peter McCormack: I know what you mean and I've got a habit of doing that.  I think having language is important as well, but I also think courage.

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, definitely.

Peter McCormack: I think the courage to admit you might be wrong, the courage to apologise when you have been wrong publicly, the courage to say, "I could be wrong about this.  Tell me", and I think it's a weakness of character to blindly follow a narrative of a subculture you're in without challenging it, and I think a lot of people lack that courage, and I don't know why that is.  I don't know if that's a phenomenon that's come out of Twitter, whereby you end up in these groups and you feel like you want to stick with your groups; I think audience capture is a massive issue that exists as well.  But I think language skills is one thing, but I would definitely put courage as equally important, and I just think maybe that doesn't exist, because it's scary.

Natalie Smolenski: Right, absolutely.  Well, I think some people are afraid, and then also we need to be honest, violence is fun.  A lot of people genuinely enjoy the process of attacking, of watching somebody else get attacked, of amplifying the attacks.  Violence is -- Natalie Wynn has actually a great YouTube video --

Peter McCormack: Who's Natalie Wynn?

Natalie Smolenski: She's a kind of leftist YouTube star, who created a channel called ContraPoints, initially to respond to some of the right-wing content that was online, and deradicalise people who were going through the YouTube sort of meatgrinder of right-wing radicalisation.

Peter McCormack: Oh, wow.  Have you listened to The New York Times' series, the audio podcast; what was it called?

Danny Knowles: It was called Rabbit Hole, and I think she was mentioned in that.

Peter McCormack: Was she?

Danny Knowles: I think so.

Peter McCormack: Have you listened to that?

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I mean, that starts with that guy, what's his name?  Stefan Molyneux.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, that's it.

Natalie Smolenski: Oh, okay.

Peter McCormack: And the people who kind of go down those rabbit holes and end up finding themselves in a whole new world; they find themselves in a community, essentially a cult, and it's kind of super-weird.

Natalie Smolenski: Right.  Yeah, so Natalie rose to fame, or I remember learning about her for the first time when she did her episode on incels.  And she did another one relatively recently on violence.  And she's actually a philosopher who decided to take philosophy to YouTube.  And the claim that she makes is, "Look, guys, violence is fun.  People wouldn't be doing it so much if there wasn't some level of hedonistic pleasure that we derive from it".

Peter McCormack: Is  it something that is ingrained in us, in that animals are violent, creatures are violent, we survive, we have survived through violence; is it something that is just part of us?

Natalie Smolenski: I would say yes.  I would say there's actually an evolutionary trajectory that has rewarded a certain type of violence, both interpersonal and ingroup/outgroup violence.  I mean, this example is often used, but one of our closest genetic relatives, the chimpanzees, one of their favourite forms of amusement for male chimpanzees is to just literally go out and hunt and kill outgroup males.  And so, there is a way in which demarcating the social boundary of who's in and who's out, that's a violent act, and it's also a pleasureful act.

People's commitment to truth can often be at odds with not only the violence they anticipate, but also this pleasure that they want to derive from belonging, being able to exclude others?

Peter McCormack: Are you aware of a film called Rise of the Wire Apes?

Natalie Smolenski: No

Peter McCormack: That was mentioned to us yesterday.

Danny Knowles: That came up last night, yeah.

Peter McCormack: It came up last night, it was a recommended to watch that.  That's apparently to do with the violence within apes.  Okay, that's interesting.  But you also see it growing up.  Every kid wanted to get Grand Theft Auto, steal a car, pick up a prostitute and kill her; that's what everyone would do.  Whenever you're watching football, our football, soccer, when there's a fight on the pitch, all the officials come out and say, "What a disgrace".  Everyone that's watching is like, "That's fucking cool"!  Or, during the World Cup, or the Euros in, gosh, what was it, Euro 2016, the Russians are particularly violent and the British are particularly violent, and they always tend to fight each other.  But the Russians went full, "Let's go and fight everyone".

Danny Knowles: They would destroy towns and all sorts.

Peter McCormack: Do you remember the guy who had the GoPro on?  So, you had this guy running around, I think it was Marseille, running up and punching -- it was entertainment.  It was weird, but it was entertaining.  It was almost Black Mirror-like, but it was entertainment.

So, how have we learned to control and tame that, because we are gradually becoming less violent, and I would make an uneducated argument that perhaps in Europe, we're a bit less violent than other places.  How has that been tamed; how have we controlled this?

Natalie Smolenski: I always see things like violence, they're an expression of energy.  They're an expression of, for lack of a better term, the human life force.  And so, what tends to not work is simply pathologising it, criminalising it, punishing it, because that is actually a counterviolence.  And so the person inclined towards violence then says, "Oh, okay, so violence is okay, as long as I use it in this social policing kind of mode".  So then, this is why you often see the biggest bullies become the biggest enforcers of the law, because it just becomes a socially acceptable way for them to wield violence.

Peter McCormack: Right.

Natalie Smolenski: So, how does violence optimally get socialised?  Well, it becomes directed towards ends that in some way benefit the community, whether that is hunting, bringing that food back, or the violence of the slow, controlled social work that builds institutions.  I mean, human institutions are ways of controlling violence.  You go to work, you don't necessarily like everybody you work with, you don't necessarily agree with the way things are structured, but there is a kind of inertia that holds things together that enables you to achieve things together.

The foundation of these institutions is violence.  In fact, there's a long history of political theory about the state and state building that says the founding act of every state is violence.  There is no law that pre-exists any given state that brings that state into existence, because it is the state as an institution that becomes the condition for law.

Peter McCormack: That makes sense.

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah.  And so it's always about, what is the violence being directed toward; not, is there violence?

Peter McCormack: Robert Breedlove, I made a show with him about this, he talks often about the logic of violence, and that technology will change the logic of violence.  And he has a belief that Bitcoin will change the logic of violence.  I don't know if you've looked at that.

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, there's been a lot of conversation I've seen, on Twitter particularly, about the relationship between Bitcoin and war especially, but also sometimes violence.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, I haven't bought the concept that Bitcoin will end all wars, I just haven't bought that, because war existed before easily exchangeable money, so I don't buy that idea.  I understand the idea that it changes potentially the industrial complex, the military industrial complex; it changes our ability to fund war; but you could just go to a scenario where war is funded by bonds again, rather than deficit spending.  So, I haven't fully bought that one.

Danny Knowles: And that's like Alex Gladstein's point, isn't it, that it removes unjust war, because if you have to raise money from the people, they have to agree with what you're doing, so you can't have something like the Iraq situation.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you can't do it through deficit.

Natalie Smolenski: The existence of such, of sound money, does not, to your point, suddenly eliminate the existence of credit.  So, it's not a question of, "Is Bitcoin a limited constrained supply for nation states?" but rather, "How will nation states monetise Bitcoin?"  The existence of gold never prevented war, or other hard commodity monies.  Rather, states went through the predictable process of minting coin, them summarily debasing the coin over time, growing until they couldn't, until they were literally conquered or subjugated by another people, who then became sovereign.  So, there is a parallel question of human institutions, political, social institutions that doesn't go away just because we now have Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: I know we're meant to be getting on to CBDCs, but there is another thing I want to ask you, because there are, within the Bitcoin community, a lot of anti-state people, libertarians.  Every time I sit and discuss with them, I've said this over and over, I fundamentally agree with them theoretically.  I'm still, even at this current time, I'm a supporter of democracy, I feel it's a strange -- I mean, at the moment in the UK, I could not vote for Liz Truss and I could not vote for Kier Starmer, there's no one I could vote for.  We've lost anyone to believe and get behind, and the reason is not fundamentally the people themselves; the system itself has broken.

I know now that whoever comes into power is going to bring in more laws which reduce freedom and they're going to destroy the money further; I'm just accepting of that now.  But I fundamentally agree theoretically with a lot of what the libertarians say.  My problem is that I think the state is a natural monopoly, and I worry if you burn down the state and start again, you could end up with something worse.  I mean, you've studied political structures, I assume you've studied why you get democracies in one country and you get totalitarianism in another country and why that happens.  My worry is that if we try and end, or move on from democracy, we get something that's worse, without the checks and balances.

Natalie Smolenski: Well, this is why I don't particularly care what people are against.  What are they for?  That's what interests me.  Okay, you don't like democracy, well what is your positive political project?  What are you advocating for exactly?

Peter McCormack: Anarchy?

Natalie Smolenski: Yes, but then the question becomes, "What is anarchy?"  Is the family an anarchist unit?  Families still have hierarchies, there are still people who are dependent and others who provision.  So, I actually think your question is spot on.  There's been a lot of socialist, communist, political theory in recent decades on the left; that's been more of the focus there.  Then more on the right, we've had ethno-state theorisations, we've had unitary executive --

Peter McCormack: What's this, ethno-state?  What was that?

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, like basically racial or national supremacy arguments, that governments are for and by a particular people that are ethnically demarcated in these ways.  So, Dugin in Russia is a great example of this.  But there are also many proponents in other countries.  So, we've had these various political theories, but what we haven't consistently had well theorised is an anarchist position.  What does that mean?

One of the interesting things that Bitcoin introduces into the political conversation is the notion of rules without rulers, a system that is designed to be self-sustaining and self-maintaining, in terms of its governance procedure.  So that is where, as a political theorist, I'm actually interested in doing some more work.

Peter McCormack: Well, if you do it, please send it, because I'm interested in it.  Again, I've spoken to anarchists and theoretically, everything they say I agree with, but I don't agree with the reality of what will happen when you put humans in this position.  And look, I'm not a smart person, I'm not eloquent like yourself, but I can understand and I do have basic questions and I do fully expect that hierarchy will come again.  If you break hierarchy, new hierarchies will be built, and will we create something worse?  That's always what I worry about.  My expectation, as humans, is that we will.

We've fought wars for decades and centuries to have the freedoms we have.  I feel relatively free as a British person.  I can travel freely, I can stand outside Downing Street with a placard complaining about Liz Truss if I want, I feel fairly free.  I feel like my freedoms are shrinking, but I still feel fairly free.  I don't want to live in a Russia or a China, certainly not a China.  So, I just feel like the idea that it's become, for someone to support democracy is pejorative, is madness to me.

Natalie Smolenski: Right, exactly.  So, this is the question.  Do you believe that communities should govern themselves?  So, now you have a group of people who are self-governing.

Peter McCormack: A state?

Natalie Smolenski: Right.  So, what is the mechanism by which they govern?  A monarchist might say, "Well, one of them gets to be the king, and then their heredity rules, or makes a certain amount of decisions on behalf of the collective".  Others might say, "The most prosperous citizens should rule, oligarchy".  And actually, I think that a lot of people who publicly profess to be anarchists or libertarians are crypto oligarchs.  They actually believe that those who are the most powerful financially, economically, they've kind of won, and so they get to make the rules, which is not certainly the system that I ascribe to.

Then there are various flavours of democracy, the people rule, the demos rule.  Well, who are the demos; and how do you position the demos in relationship to the elites?  Because, to your point, hierarchy is a social technology, it's one of the most primitive human social technologies.  It arises as a way to streamline decision-making and coordinate social action at scale; because if you have everybody making every decision about everything, the species dies out, the collective does nothing.

So, one of the questions that the Texas Bitcoin Foundation is actually taking up is precisely this question of governance, "What is the relationship between state and society in a democracy; and how does scale impact that?"  If you're governing a community of 150 people, which is the Dunbar number, you may have a very different form of government or self-government than if you're governing a behemoth of a state with 400 million people, like the United States. 

From my point of view, the larger the scale, the fewer decisions the state should make, because they're so much more impactful and so much more likely to go wrong and negatively impact.  This is one of the challenges of re-founding American institutions is, I think, also re-localising decision-making in local communities.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so if there isn't this re-finding of institutions, what are the risks that you've identified for directionally where the US is headed?  America is the land of the free, land of opportunity, land of economic opportunity, an open, free, fair country as a brand, not always in reality.  But it is also a surveillance state, as the UK is, and it feels like it is directionally mirroring a lot of what it hates about China.

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: But doing it worse, because it isn't a totalitarian regime.

Natalie Smolenski: That's right.

Peter McCormack: So I've often thought, if America sees China as a threat, don't copy China and do it worse, beat China at freedom.  Therefore, CBDCs are the wrong answer.  Bitcoin to me is naturally the right answer, because it's a freedom technology.

Natalie Smolenski: That's right, and this is the argument that I make in the white paper on CBDCs.  I start with this contrast between the American model of political economy, ostensibly from our past and then the Chinese model of political economy, not because China's actually unique in this regard, but because it is the new model that virtually every country in the world is adopting.  And, that is a strong state that leads economic life, directs economic life, and also fully surveils the population.

So the theory behind that is, if you have full surveillance, you no longer need democracy, because the government can now know what you want based on your behaviours, which can be funnelled through a series of predictive analytic algorithms, to tell the government what policies are favoured and disfavoured by the population.

Peter McCormack: But do states sleepwalk into this, or is this centrally planned that, "This will be best for our country"?

Natalie Smolenski: Both, I would say a little bit of both.  I would say a lot of people do sleepwalk into it, because they simply can't imagine the possibility that power could be misused.

Peter McCormack: And is technology one of the reasons this happens?

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: You start to look at some of the worst in technology.  If you think what happened during the COVID crisis, whether it was a crisis or not, but with the consideration of vaccine passports.  Now obviously, especially within our community, people rejected these passports, the idea that you would have to prove your health travelling across borders, which by the way sometimes you have to do anyway going into certain jurisdictions; you have to have certain inoculations.  But that idea was just a step too far.  But I can see how somebody within government thinks this is a good idea because they have the technology and it makes everything more efficient, without fully considering what this actually means as a societal construct.

Natalie Smolenski: That's exactly right.  We've had proof-of-vaccination requirements for a very long time, in different social institutions at different scales, pretty much ever since vaccines were invented.  For example, it's very hard to enrol your child in a public school in the United States without having proof of vaccinations. 

Peter McCormack: Do you have the MMR here?

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, and a whole bunch of other stuff.  So, you have to demonstrate that your child is not going to be a vector for other children, which I think at the level of that school is a very reasonable request to make.  The problem is when you then create a vaccine policy for 400 million people that is enforced to enter and exit borders, that is enforced in contexts where perhaps it has nothing to do with the purpose of that transaction or that interaction.  And so, it's the sort of AML-KYC-ification of everything where there's no distinctions anymore between the information I need and the information I want; just give me all the information.

Peter McCormack: But when I look at the Chinese model, social credit scores, I just see this as control, decisions based on control.  But I can see in more western liberal democracies that it's done through naivety, sometimes maybe control, but I can see how we sleepwalk into these decisions, because the logic of the technology makes sense.  I could come up with ten different examples immediately of different ways where technology seems -- surveillance, you could make the argument for surveillance: crime reduction. 

In the UK, I listened to an interview with somebody who worked for MI6 and they talked about all the different plots they've foiled, and we've had terrorist plots.  We had the tube bombings, we had the failed tube bombings, we've had a number of knife attacks.

Danny Knowles: The stabbing on London Bridge.

Peter McCormack: London Bridge, Borough Market.  So, we've had successful terrorist attacks where innocent people have died.  I mean, what was it, I think it was 52 on the tube attacks, and Borough Market, I can't remember, 13 or 14 people just stabbed to death.  And he was talking about how they use surveillance, both the technology, but also stationing officers to track people and follow people.  It makes a very good argument for the safety and protection of the country using technology; it's an argument that's hard to disagree with.  But when that comes to the point where everything is surveilled, NSA standard, you can see how that's a problem.  And I don't know what the right answer is.

Danny Knowles: This is the ten most surveilled cities in the world, and they're all in China apart from London.

Peter McCormack: Well, didn't Neil send that article, they've got 55% or something of all?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I tweeted about that recently.  Hold on, London isn't in China!

Danny Knowles: No, they're all in China apart from London.

Peter McCormack: Apart from London, yeah!

Danny Knowles: It's not a good list to be on though.

Peter McCormack: It's not a great list to be on, but we've always known we're one of the most.  But also, at the same time, I'll give you another example.  Did you hear a couple of years ago in the UK, a young girl, called Sarah Everard, was murdered, a blonde girl was murdered by a policeman?

Natalie Smolenski: Oh, I think yeah, I did hear about this.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so she was my friend.

Natalie Smolenski: Oh, no.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, she worked for me.  I had an advertising agency in London; she worked for me for five years, knew her very well.  And, when she went missing, my old business partner, Ollie, messaged me and said, "Sarah's gone missing, Sarah Everard", and I was like, "Really?"  He said, "Yeah, she's not been seen for 24 hours".  So, I had a friend who worked at the Met Police and I phoned him up, and he explained to me what was going to happen.

Now, he was very clear, if she's not found within 24 hours, there's a very high chance she's been killed, okay.  If she's been killed, you want the perpetrator to be caught, you absolutely want that person to be caught, because you don't want them to do this to somebody else.  The way he was caught was, on the road he was on, there was a camera in the bus; so, buses now have cameras in them to protect the bus drivers.  They caught the moment where he had her at the side of the road, he's a policeman, and he showed his warrant card, and he arrested her under something to do with the COVID Act, that she shouldn't be out, she should have been at home, because we were on lockdown.  We don't have to debate all the lockdown rules.

The point being is, he was caught because of that camera, that moment.  Not only did it capture him, it captured his car and his number plate.  They tracked the number plate to the rental company that he rented it from and found it.  And he's now in jail, he's been given a full life sentence.  Again, you can see, especially young women in London after that, would want there to be cameras and surveillance, because they might feel more protected. 

This is the area I find super-tricky, because I fully agree that we shouldn't be the most surveilled, I fully agree that we should deserve privacy; but I can also see the defence of why you would have these, and I don't know where to fall on this.

Natalie Smolenski: Right, exactly.  Well, this is why every city in the United States is investing significantly in camera technology and other surveillance tech.  I mean, some of the biggest technology start-ups in the US are surveillance technology start-ups.  And the way that public consent for this is, to use Chomsky's word, manufactured is crime prevention and crime reduction, and there's a lot of data that these companies can point to that the Chinese state can also point to.

One of the cities that I was reading about for this white paper installed a bunch of surveillance at an intersection where bicycles were regularly being stolen, and bike thefts dropped to zero.  So, people want the ability to recover their property if it's stolen, they want the ability to find perpetrators of crimes; that's all true.  The question becomes, and I actually think this needs to be answered predominantly at a local level, "For the integrity of this community, what type of policing practices" and I would put surveillance under the umbrella of policing, "what type of policing will be most effective?"

Peter McCormack: Can we have good surveillance though?  I mean, can we separate it from what is an invasion of privacy?

Natalie Smolenski: I think we absolutely can, and the answer for that is going to be different in different communities.  So, this is also where we get into a very interesting question, the difference between laws and norms.  Norms are actually the social fabric, the practices, the expectations that hold society together.  When you have a collapse of norms and you start relying on laws exclusively to police a society, that's a collapsed state; I would say that society has collapsed.  This is what's happening, what we see in the United States, not just locally, but at the highest levels of government.

There are things that presidents do that people routinely ask, "Can a president do that?"  Well, it's not illegal, because nobody ever thought to legislate that, because the thinking was that a president would comport themselves with a certain kind of character and adhere to certain norms.  If we can't assume shared norms, I would suggest we don't have a society.  And so the process of re-founding, I think, starts at the local level of understanding what are our shared norms in this community, and then scales from there.

Peter McCormack: Can you point to some of this breakdown being because of the failure of money; is that one of the reasons?  I know for example now, my children will not be able to afford a home at all.  The only reason they're not going to be saddled with debt is because I'm not allowing them to, but plenty of their friends and peers will be.  And they have this expectation that they can't get on the ladder anymore.  I've had this conversation with my son, "How do I even get to where you got; how do I get to a home?  I just can't see it", and we know there's this amongst the youth, there's this kind of detachment from them between themselves and the way governance occurs.  I mean, didn't you talk about that in your article?

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, what do we do about that?

Natalie Smolenski: Well, a big part of this is -- so some of this is structural.  Actually, most of it is structural.  One of the markers of a declining or collapsing society is that this fear of new economic activity shrinks.  And when you're young and you are not capitalised, you're not very well resourced, what do you have to make your way in the world?  You have your productive labour, and so you need places to be able to start, you need a zero point to start from.

In societies where those initial steps on the ladder are not available, typically what young people do is they exit, they go to other societies where they are available.  So, there's a historian, named Peter Turchin, who has written about the colonisation of the Americas, and not just him, many other historians, in effect as the project of second and third sons of European nobility, who were not inheriting the family fortunes and basically couldn't find anything else to do.  They wanted to be the masters of something, they wanted to be property owners, they wanted to be wealthy, so where did they go?  They went to the New World, where they could conquer.

Peter McCormack: Well, we know this happens.  Danny, you might know this better than me, but places like Tonga, what's his name?

Danny Knowles: Lord Fusitu'a.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, didn't he talk about the idea that there's little opportunity for young people in Tonga, so they end up going to New Zealand and Australia.  I know Ireland specifically has an issue outside of Dublin.  My father lives in Ireland and a lot of people there will -- his neighbour, both of their children have moved to Australia to work, because there's opportunity, because there's no work locally within the area they're from in Ireland.  And a lot of people in Ireland will move to the UK to get jobs.  Is that basically what you're talking about?

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah.  On the one hand, there's the magic of the frontier, which is this open, at least in the minds of those going there to make their fortunes, this open space where they can start from nothing.  As the frontiers close, then it becomes a question of, how fast is the pie, the productive economy, growing?  In areas where it's growing quickly, then there are these zero points where people can enter; in areas where it's stagnant or declining, they can't enter.  This is why we have to solve the energy problem.

Peter McCormack: Well, so I wonder, does this problem occur because the state has interfered too much, or not interfered enough?  When I say interfered too much, have they created too many barriers for economic opportunity; or, thinking about the world that Avik does, have they not created enough opportunity?  Perhaps it's a mixture of both.

Natalie Smolenski: The generation of economic value is, I would say, most successfully demonstrated by political economies that have that privilege of free market with some amount of state intervention, to enforce a set of shared game conditions.  So, that is a thesis that is up for debate.  Some would say, "No, no state involvement whatsoever, markets truly unfettered".  Others would say, "No, the state must direct markets"; this is the Chinese model.  In terms of just sheer growth, they haven't been proven wrong. 

The question is, how much of the value that the Chinese economy has generated over the past decades is actually piggybacking on the value generated in more free market societies, the technology, the innovation, the corporate forms that gets borne in the US and then picked up in China?  So, this is the thesis or the argument that I make in the CBDC paper.  We can see historical examples of this is the medieval period in Europe, where those local jurisdictions that adopted freer market norms then became innovation hubs that positively impacted even the authoritarian jurisdictions that were nearby, because they created a rising tide.

So, this is a balance.  There isn't going to be one set of policy prescriptions for every community.  I think that every locale needs to answer this question for themselves.  But broadly, an inclination towards a freer market, I think, has been shown to create bottom-up value much more effectively than a top-down model of state-driven growth.

Peter McCormack: Excellent, okay.  So, moving on to CBDCs, we got there!  90 minutes in, I think Danny promised you an interview of less than an hour and a half.  I'm really enjoying this, thank you.  So, considering a CBDC is something we again seem to be sleepwalking into potentially, what is at stake here?

Natalie Smolenski: I mean, at stake in CBDCs specifically is the elimination of the last sphere of financial autonomy that remains, and that is physical cash.  Although the Federal Reserve and the ECB have issued public statements to the effect that they're not --

Peter McCormack: I carry physical cash always.

Natalie Smolenski: Right.

Danny Knowles: It's not much good here.

Peter McCormack: I carry this.  It will be replaced with the King soon.

Natalie Smolenski: Indeed.

Peter McCormack: You should get one.  Anyway, sorry, I interrupted you there. 

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, that's what at stake, the last non-KYCd form of financial transacting is physical cash.  And every CBDC design model has posited that full identification will be necessary to both receive CBDCs directly from the central bank, and then to transact with them later on.

Peter McCormack: Even without CBDCs though, do you not see the elimination of physical cash?

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, I think governments one way or another are going to work to eliminate it.

Peter McCormack: I'll give you another example of why you can sleepwalk into this as well.  Do you know I own a football club?

Natalie Smolenski: Yes!

Peter McCormack: So, I've actually had to start learning about running part of a business's cash base.  We have a bar and food and people come and they can pay with Bitcoin, they can pay with their card or pay with cash.  Cash is a pain, it's a real pain.  You have to have a float, the float has to have the right amount of coins to give change, then you have to count it; it's a pain.  Everything that's payable by the card is easy.  I can see why you sleepwalk into removing cash, because it's easy. 

Natalie Smolenski: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: People who don't think about money, don't think about surveillers, don't think about KYC, don't think about any of this, because they've not been thrown down this Bitcoin rabbit hole, which is the vast majority of people, I can see how you sleepwalk into getting rid of cash.

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, 100%.  I mean, this is how the internet has come to be owned by a small group of megacorps, is the convenience and ease of navigating TCP/IP and HTTPS through a platform.  It's very easy to use, it's beautiful, you know exactly where to click to do what.  That is how we've captured the world.  The early internet was not this way.  I mean, the early internet was peer-to-peer, it was basically only nerds using it.  They knew how to use this in a self-sovereign way.  But as adoption scaled and then as the web commercialised and became a new platform for commerce, it had to get radically simpler so that anybody, regardless of their technical knowledge, could use the infrastructure.

So, this is the challenge with Bitcoin, and people said this over and over again.  It has to become super-easy to use in order to compete with these more centralised forms of money.

Peter McCormack: What is the state of development of CBDCs within Russia, and where is America currently at with this?

Natalie Smolenski: Russia has made announcements about it, I don't know where they are.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, I meant China.

Natalie Smolenski: In China, they've been piloting CBDCs in a number of cities and interestingly, they're running into the same challenge, where people are like, "Well, money is already digital.  I already use WePay and Alipay for everything, so why do I have to use this CBDC now?"

Peter McCormack: And they're completely surveilled through Alipay and WePay though.

Natalie Smolenski: Right, exactly.  So, this is part of my argument in the paper too.  The digital dollar banking system is already fully surveilled, so why do you need actual digital cash that's a liability of the central bank?  Why can't the commercial money that's already fully surveilled achieve this purpose?  But yeah, so China's piloting it.  Interestingly, they're not the further along.  A number of countries have already issued CBDCs, smaller countries.

Peter McCormack: Who particularly?

Natalie Smolenski: The Bahamas, Eastern Caribbean, Nigeria, I believe; they're named in the paper.  It's unclear to what extent they're actually being used.  The US is currently in the stage of moving from the research stage to the implementation stage, so it's a very tricky stage to be in.  The Federal Reserve, the Treasury, the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy have all released reports about CBDCs, not recommending them explicitly, but also not not recommending them, and saying, "If you were to design a CBDC, here are the requirements that it would have to meet". 

So in effect, they've created a blueprint for a CBDC, all the while saying, "Oh no, don't worry, we're not planning to actually do this.  We would need a law from Congress".  So, okay, at least that part of the political process still functions.  But Congress is on it!  So, there was something called the ECASH Bill that was introduced a few months ago by a group of senators, disappointingly including some members of The Squad, to require --

Peter McCormack: The Squad?

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, the progressive, young, female, congressional representation.

Peter McCormack: What's The Squad?

Natalie Smolenski: You know AOC?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but what's the name; is that like a known name?

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, that's the name for her kind of coterie, not just her, but a group of young, progressive, democratic women of colour who were elected to Congress over the last few years.

Peter McCormack: You see, this is one of the reasons recently, we've been making a hard push on the show to have more progressive, leftist bitcoiners on the show.  We've had Jason Maier, who's writing a book; we've had Logan Bollinger; who else have we had?  We've had loads, haven't we?

Danny Knowles: Mark Goodwin, I guess, but that was a little different show.

Peter McCormack: But the point being is that Bitcoin has mass awareness, Bitcoin is growing, it's certainly been adopted more by the conservatives at the right, and then the progressives.  And I've always seen America as the frontline for Bitcoin.  If America accepts Bitcoin, if America uses Bitcoin, a lot of the world will follow.  If America rejects Bitcoin, there's a big incentive for other states to reject it, so it's really super-important for me.

Rather than focus on what you hate people on the left for, or think Libs of TikTok represents every progressive in America, which it clearly doesn't, which is a small minority of morons, like you get a small minority of morons on the right, we should accept Bitcoin is coming, we should accept progressives are going to see Bitcoin, and we should be explaining to them why they should care about it. 

This is why we so keen to have Jason on, because Jason is writing the book, A Progressive's Case for Bitcoin.  We should embrace this; this is good for Bitcoin, this is good for everyone else; which means that you have, rather than what tends to happen when you see someone like AOC, well no, specifically Elizabeth Warren tweet something about Bitcoin which is fundamentally wrong, you see all these progressives underneath agreeing with her and saying the same. 

I think we have to do a much better job of actually educating these people about Bitcoin, not, which I'm a hypocrite, not say, "Have fun being poor", not calling them libtards; actually introducing them and saying, "Look at how Bitcoin can improve wealth equality, look at how Bitcoin can create more inclusion, look how Bitcoin can help mitigate against climate change"; we should be doing that work because of The Squad.

Natalie Smolenski: I 100% agree.  In fact, I had invited them to the Texas Blockchain Summit.

Peter McCormack: Are they coming?

Natalie Smolenski: No, but maybe one of these years, they'll decide to.  I think the challenge is that the progressive left has embraced a kind of redistributionist politics that incentivises them at this moment to welcome CBDCs, because what they want is direct Fed accounts for every American.

Peter McCormack: They want to press a button?  UBI?

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, they want to be able to press a button and have the stimulus just pop up in your account, no cheques, no things getting lost, no things getting stolen; everything can just be seamlessly redistributed that way.

Peter McCormack: Conditions on what you can spend the money on.

Natalie Smolenski: But this is the problem, because if you create this structure, "Money giveth", you've also now created the rails for, "Taketh away".  So, now you can put a -2% interest rate on that Fed account and say --

Peter McCormack: "Better spend that".

Natalie Smolenski: Right, "You'd better spend that before it runs out", and that -2% can be deducted at any time interval.  It could be daily, it could be weekly, it could be monthly, it could be yearly, whatever.

Peter McCormack: You can't buy beer with that.

Natalie Smolenski: You can't buy beer with it, you can't shop at this store, because they're flagged as a terrorist risk, you can't go here because the owner of this is under investigation for X, Y or Z.  So suddenly, you've created in effect a company store out of the entire American economy.

Peter McCormack: Yes.  What happens to -- sorry, I was about to say something, but what happens to the likes of Visa and Mastercard in these scenarios of the CBDC?

Natalie Smolenski: They will become, most likely, if a CBDC gets rolled out in the United States, it will use the commercial banking sector and the established credit card companies as payment rails.

Peter McCormack: Because, one of the things that scares me, not scares me, but I don't like about the CBDC and I think other people haven't thought about is, it's a good thing that the financial system is fractured.  Sometimes the banks go down, sometimes American Express goes down.  If I'm going to pay and Mastercard's gone down, I can go to cash, or I can go to my Amex.

Natalie Smolenski: Right, exactly.

Peter McCormack: I've got all these; I've got Bitcoin, physical cash, Mastercard, Visa, American Express.  Anything can break and I've got something else I can use.  If we have one blockchain controlling money, which by the way I'm not even sure they can technically do this, and it's built on Solana, we know every other week it's going to stop working, and then the whole financial system collapses.

Natalie Smolenski: Right, and this was one of the examples I gave with the Eastern Caribbean's implementation of their CBDC, DCash, where it just went down for a few months, either earlier this year or 2021, and it was because they used a Hyperledger Fabric private blockchain implementation, and just whoever's job it was didn't update the SSL certificate.

Peter McCormack: I mean, it's so fucking stupid, isn't it?!

Natalie Smolenski: So for two months, the entire CBDC was unusable!

Peter McCormack: But it's so stupid. 

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah.  And this is why governments are likely -- what they're going to do is contract out to the private sector, so the Bank of International Settlements, BIS, has been partnering with the Swiss National Bank and a company called SIX, which is a banking consortium, that has built a private blockchain ledger to pilot CBDCs.  Now, they're very quick to say, "This doesn't mean Switzerland is rolling out a CBDC, don't get any weird ideas", but they have demos, they have presentations, they've written papers about it. 

So, what's happening in the US is Amazon is positioning their blockchain as a service offering, particularly to the ECB, with major global software vendors positioning themselves as the implementors of this.  And so, what's going to happen is, private software companies are likely going to deliver and maintain the currency of the realm.  How does that really sit from a constitutionality, political theory standpoint?  I don't know.

Peter McCormack: Danny, did I ever tell you about when Mastercard got in touch to sponsor the podcast?

Danny Knowles: I think you did, but you should tell the story.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so we had Mastercard reach out to sponsor the podcast.  I was like, "That's interesting.  Well, it's the old world, but I mean I use Mastercard.  What is it you want to promote?"  They had a couple of things, and they said, "And we want to advertise that we are ready for CBDCs", and I was like, "Are you aware my show is a Bitcoin show?  Do you know what we think of CBDCs?"  So, that never really went ahead.

Okay, so we all understand the threat.  What can we do about this; what are you doing; what do you want people --

Danny Knowles: Just going back to that, does that not highlight how even Mastercard aren't aware of what this might be?

Peter McCormack: I just don't think most people consider it, because I think people are so conditioned now to being surveilled financially.  I expect every single transaction I do through my bank account to be surveilled.

Danny Knowles: 100%.

Peter McCormack: I expect the banks to give that information willingly.  I know the bank look at it themselves, because I lost a bank account because they phoned me up to ask me about my payments and I told them to fuck off, it's none of their business.  I was glad my account closed down.  So, I know they're doing it, I know the government is, I know to have privacy we have to take it into our hands, I'm not particularly great at it, but that's why I always have cash, because there are certain things I just don't want to be tracked for. 

But yeah, I think they sleepwalk into it.  I think some of my Mastercards think, "Oh, this is a new innovation that's coming, this is great for people, this is blockchain".  I think they sleepwalk into it.  Yeah, so people listening to this, what message do you want to get across to them; and are you trying to create action; do you want action from people; do you want support?  What do you want to get out of this?

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: How can we help?

Natalie Smolenski: The only way that tyranny is prevented is a strong civil society that the state actually becomes concerned about.

Peter McCormack: Rebuild the institutions.

Natalie Smolenski: Yes.  What we need is massive pushback from the American people against CBDCs.  That means writing, calling your Congressman, your Senator, any media outlet that is willing to publish letters to the Editor, or op-eds, talking about it on your blogs, on social media.  There has to be a political price for implementing this policy in the United States, and this is one of the things that I write about in the beginning of the paper, is this disturbing tendency that we've seen among the American electorate to continue voting for people who further the surveillance state, as long as we like one of their policies on something else, or their identity, who they are.

The problem with that is if everyone we're voting for continues consolidating state power, eventually there will be nothing to vote for, the problem you were describing, "Who am I going to vote for?  Who actually represents me on this roster?"  I mean, this is a problem I think in most political jurisdictions.

Peter McCormack: So, it feels like to me that one of the most important things to do is break this political war, this partisan problem that America -- we've got it growing in the UK, but it's not as bad, but this specific partisan problem that you have here, you've got to break that.  And then with that, you've got to have stronger leaders.  You've kind of got to bring people together, which Bitcoin does, that's the idea, right, the orange party?  But you're not going to get an orange party tomorrow, and Brett Weinstein, I think it was, who tried to attempt to do a party which would -- what was it called?

Danny Knowles: I can't remember what it was called.

Peter McCormack: It got banned on Twitter, and they tried to bring together, it was Andrew Yang on one side and there was a Republican on the other side.  But yeah, I mean it's everything you're speaking the same language as me, every problem that you've seen, I'm seeing, I just don't know how it happens.  I feel like we need strong leaders.  Have you got any allies?  I mean, I know Texas Blockchain Council are very good, they've got good relationships with people in DC; have you got allies?

Natalie Smolenski: Absolutely.  So last week, I did a congressional briefing for the US Congress, and Representative Tom Emmer from Minnesota --

Peter McCormack: How was that, by the way; were you nervous?  Did you nail it?

Natalie Smolenski: Maybe a little, but I think I nailed it!  Representative Tom Emmer gave the opening remarks, and he actually was the first to introduce a bill to prohibit the Federal Reserve from launching a CBDC in the United States.

Peter McCormack: Oh, so we like this guy?

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah. 

Danny Knowles: We've spoken about him coming on the show.

Peter McCormack: Really?  He's a Senator?

Natalie Smolenski: Congressman.

Peter McCormack: For which…?

Natalie Smolenski: Minnesota.

Danny Knowles: So, we'll try and get him.

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah.

Danny Knowles: Well, we can get him; we'll get him.

Peter McCormack: I'll tell you who else is in Minnesota soon, because we go up there.

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, but he's a fantastic ally.  And then, only a couple of months later, Texas Senator, Ted Cruz, introduced a companion bill in the Senate.  That's basically the same language as Emmer's language, but in the Senate.  So, that suggests that there is momentum against a CBDC.

Peter McCormack: I know Cruz is, but is Tom a Republican as well?

Natalie Smolenski: He is, and this is the challenge.  The ECASH Bill is all Democrats.  So, the partisan narrative that has emerged around money is one of the walls that we, in the Bitcoin community, need to actually seek to break down.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.

Natalie Smolenski: So, a nation cannot survive without ideas.  This is the premise for the Texas Bitcoin Foundation.  It's great to do policy work, it's great to build businesses, but you can do that even under authoritarian regimes.  The thing that makes America a free country is the ideas that are embodied in these activities.  So, in order to have ideas that are worth building on, we need institutions, like the Texas Bitcoin Foundation, to do that work.

So, what I would invite your audience to do is, if they're so inclined to make a donation to the Texas Bitcoin Foundation, we're a 501(c)3, it's fully tax deductible; instead of giving more money to the behemoth of the state, perhaps give it to a charity that is doing this research.  Because, what we'd like to do next year is put on events that are interdisciplinary with historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, economists, bringing people together across the political divides within academia itself, because it's not just the broader society.  The social sciences are often completely politically different from the hard sciences, so we need to have these theoretical conversations, and we're going to start small, we're going to have some small events in Austin.  But if we can raise even $20,000, $30,000, that will help get these scholars here and having these right conversations.

Peter McCormack: So, $20,000, $30,000 funds you for how long, or funds one event?

Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, it will fund one event, maybe two events.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  Well, we'll make a donation of course.

Natalie Smolenski: Oh, fantastic!

Peter McCormack: So, give us the details afterwards and we will support what you're doing.  I've loved this, honestly, I've absolutely loved this.  Danny said to me a while ago -- was this the one you were most looking forward to on the trip?

Danny Knowles: I think so, yeah.

Peter McCormack: He was like, "I cannot wait for you to speak to Natalie", because he knows the types of interviews I really like, and I knew I'd enjoy this.  You are welcome back on the show whenever you like.  I'm sure there's a range of subjects we can get into from the history of things you've discussed.  We could probably not even discuss Bitcoin.  I've loved this, we will make a donation.  Tell people where to follow you and to find out more information.

Natalie Smolenski: So, txbitcoinfoundation.org, that's the website, then I'm on Twitter @NSmolenski. 

Peter McCormack: Okay, right, we'll put that all in the show notes.  Send us the details and whenever you want to come back, let us know.  We'll be back here in…?

Danny Knowles: January.

Peter McCormack: January.  Let's make another show in January, I'd love to sit down and talk with you again.

Natalie Smolenski: Let's do it.

Peter McCormack: When have you got to leave?

Natalie Smolenski: This afternoon.

Peter McCormack: What time?

Natalie Smolenski: My flight's at 3.30pm, I want to say.

Danny Knowles: You can come for the first half!

Peter McCormack: All right, well listen, good luck, stay in touch.  Anything we can do, reach out to Danny or me and we will help you, and yeah, let's do this again in January.  Thank you so much.

Natalie Smolenski: I'd love that, thank you.