WBD591 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin is a Pioneer Species with Brandon Quittem

Release date: Friday 9th December

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Brandon Quittem. 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.

Brandon Quittem is a writer and Communications Director for Swan Bitcoin. In this interview, we discuss his latest article: ‘Bitcoin is a Pioneer Species’, where he compares Bitcoin miners to species that settle and populate barren landscapes triggering the development of more advanced ecosystems.

“Bitcoin mining is everything you don’t understand about energy, combined with everything you don’t understand about Bitcoin.”

— Brandon Quittem

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Well done on it, it was such a great event, I loved it.  It didn't feel like a conference, it was very chill, you didn't have to walk very far and just a lot of people I really liked there.  You know, when you went to the bar afterwards, it was all the people I want to hang out with.  Obviously, not everyone, I'd love other people to be there, but you guys did a really good job in six months.

Brandon Quittem: Appreciate that.  To be honest, and I told this to Cory, he told us six months ago, "We're doing a big conference, we're going to LA, we're going to have a basketball court outside", and I was like, "This is a horrible idea.  We should not do a conference.  Look at the roadmap at Swan, we're launching all these products, we don't have space for this", and yeah, halfway through the conference, things were going well and people kept coming up to me, unprovoked, telling me it was their favourite conference and I was like, "All right, Cory's right again.  His instincts are supreme".

Peter McCormack: It reminded me of Bitcoin 2019 a lot.

Brandon Quittem: Same.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, a lot, which I thought was good.  I mean, Bitcoin 2022 was amazing and it's amazing because it was so big, they managed to do such a big scale and introduce Bitcoin to so many different people.  But I also did miss the 2019 vibe, which was just like a party with all your friends and you get to spend time with people and have a catchup.  No, I loved it and I think you guys nailed it and I look forward to next year.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, and quick shoutout to Bitcoin Magazine, because they blazed this trail, they built the army of event producers and they do a good job, and there's room for both.  They're going to have the enormous cultural event in Miami, or wherever, they're going to draw in all the tangential communities and we need that for Bitcoin.  It will water down the culture a little bit.  Some people will get upset, but very, very important.  Then we can go a little more boutique, a little bit more our vibe, and both make sense.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, loved it, can't wait for next year, a lot of really good moments in it as well.  It was great for us to be able to promote the football club, which I really appreciate that.  We sold a lot of merch; we sold about $6,000 of merch, which is great, because all that goes towards supporting the club and the team. 

Brandon Quittem: Amazing!

Peter McCormack: And also, obviously we recruit a bunch more Bedford soldiers, Bedford pilling these people.  Yeah, I loved it.  I could not think of one thing I didn't like about it.  I'm not just saying that because you're here, there was just nothing to complain about.  And also, I go to a lot of conferences.  For a first conference, it ran, it was really smooth how it ran.  A lot of that comes down to who you have as the event coordinators and you found a good company.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, shoutout JJLA, they are pros.  Not always easy to work with but on show time, yeah, they nailed it.

Peter McCormack: Why, because they're demanding?

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, they're just really professional and they don't normally take first-event clients, because why take a risk with a bunch of no-names.  But Cory's got a guy for everyone, of course.  Here we are working with the premier company in LA.  You mentioned that there was a lot of funny moments; can I share one?

Peter McCormack: Please do.

Brandon Quittem: It's a little bit embarrassing to the person I'm about to mention, however it was recorded so it's going to be on YouTube anyway.  Day two, I was working in the morning.  If you didn't notice, the Swans had our day jobs; the conference, the corporate retreat, we were stretched.  So, I'm showing up 30 minutes before my panel.  I'm like, "Good, I need to check five minutes in the Swan Dome".  I walked in, it's bitcoiner speed-dating, totally unrelated to Bitcoin, we just picked some crowd favourites, Lyn Alden, Allen Farrington, Preston, Greg Foss, just the jolly folks.  Camila's up there, all cute and pregnant, and her little voice is going, "Okay, first question: when was the last time you peed yourself?" and the whole panel's looking around like, "No way am I answering that question!" 

Greg Foss goes, "I can't tell a lie".  He snatches the mic and just goes full on.  He goes, "Last time I was on Preston's podcast, as you guys know, Preston runs a pretty long podcast and I had to go to the bathroom, but I was too embarrassed to tell anyone.  So, I sat there and I peed myself all over his chair!"  The whole house is going nuts!  He goes, "Good thing I had some plastic underneath my chair, because it caught all of it".

Danny Knowles: He's coming in later, we should definitely put a bin bag down, or something!

Brandon Quittem: Just have a garbage bag under his chair.

Peter McCormack: "You've got to sit there, Greg!"  Should we get a diaper?! 

Brandon Quittem: Oh God!

Peter McCormack: We don't call them diapers, by the way, we call them nappies.

Brandon Quittem: Man, British people.

Peter McCormack: Well, it was our language first.  You're really just a descendent of us.

Brandon Quittem: It's true.  I don't like to hear that, but it's true.

Peter McCormack: And by the way, you spelt my name wrong.  I'm a "mack", how about "McCormack"?

Brandon Quittem: Oh, I gave you a "mick".

Peter McCormack: You gave me a "mick".  That's what the BSV crowd call me.

Brandon Quittem: They forked you?

Peter McCormack: They forked me to McCormick.  But the macks are the Irish, the micks are the Scottish.

Brandon Quittem: Oh, I learned something today.  This was originally going to be just my notes and then I was like, "You know what, I should be a good host and send it over".

Peter McCormack: Dude, you did Danny's work for him.

Danny Knowles: It's perfect.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's brilliant.  All right, man, we've got a big topic to get into today.  You've written another epic article.

Brandon Quittem: Indeed.

Peter McCormack: I've read it, skimmed some of it, it was a long one.  How many words was it?

Brandon Quittem: 6,000?  9,000?

Peter McCormack: You've got a book in you, right?

Brandon Quittem: Definitely.

Peter McCormack: Is it going to be a collection of articles, or are you actually -- have I asked something here that you're actually working on?

Brandon Quittem: It's been in the works for a while, but there's no deadline, I'm not actually day-to-day focused on it.  It's just I know I want to compile all the biological explorations of Bitcoin in one book and The Mycelium of Money was 20,000 words and I have a bunch more that are half drafts, half written stuff.  It's really just finding time.  And when I look at my life on a five-, ten-year timeframe, I think it's time to go all-in on Swan, ride this thing until we take it public, or have an exit of some sort, and we can take a deep breath and then go back to family mode and produce a book at that point.

Peter McCormack: By the way -- well, before I ask this, because I don't want to dox you, is where you live public?

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, Minneapolis.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  We have a Real Bedford Supporters' Club in Minneapolis who are fucking crazy; they love it.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, shoutout Edgar, he's the boss.  He comes to the meetup I run every month and he syphons our meetup folks to watch football, and he's got non-bitcoiners who are just football nerds who love the story come in, and then he orange pills them.  It's a nice little symbiosis.

Peter McCormack: Have you been to one of the games?

Brandon Quittem: I haven't.

Peter McCormack: Dude, well we're going to come, we've decided.  We're going to come, we're going to pick a game, we're going to come over and we're going to watch the game with the Minneapolis crowd, so you have to come.

Brandon Quittem: Great idea.  No, I will.  We should do it at the distillery.  We meet up every month at this amazing distillery, O'Shaughnessy in Minneapolis.  We do not deserve this.  I've been running the meetups since 2019.  During COVID, I would drop GPS coordinates and we would meet in a park, we would meet in old office buildings just to keep it going.  And then, I met the owner of this distillery, also a hardcore bitcoiner, he's like, "Have it at our place".  So, he gives us a private room in this 10,000 square foot destination distillery; it's beautiful.  So, we should host it there.

Peter McCormack: Does he give you drink?

Brandon Quittem: He's very generous.  We buy most of our drinks, but he always tosses out all this food and whiskey to sample.

Peter McCormack: Hold on a second.  What's the time difference Minneapolis to New York?

Brandon Quittem: It's 1 hour before.

Peter McCormack: So, it's a 6-hour UK time difference.  So a 3.00pm kickoff --

Danny Knowles: 8.00am in the morning, or something.

Peter McCormack: -- 9.00am in the morning, so we would have to start 9.00am in the morning.  If we get a Tuesday game --

Danny Knowles: We'll just do no interviews that day!

Peter McCormack: Yeah!  All right, man, tell everyone about this article you've been working on, and then we'll get into it.

Brandon Quittem: So, this one is Bitcoin is a Pioneer Species.  I like these biological analogies because enough people talk about finance and economics, so I want to sneak in with some storytelling and some analogies.  And this one's all about energy, it's about incentives, it's about ecology, it's about complex systems in our world, and I really want to tell the story of Bitcoin being good for the environment and how humans are directly related to energy.

Most people think about Bitcoin as a monetary system, which it obviously is first and foremost.  It's a universal property rights system for the whole planet.  But it's also an incentive for humans to master energy.  There's now a price for energy anywhere in the hash horizon, so anywhere between Earth and halfway to Mars, you can harness energy there; there is a 24/7 buyer of that energy, right, small, little incentive.  However you look at humans, humans are driven by incentives.  Now that leads to all this crazy stuff round the world, like a guy in Mexico is taking pig shit and converting it into energy to mine Bitcoin; in Guatemala, they're taking used cooking oil, which is typically dumped in Lake Atitlán, a beautiful lake --

Peter McCormack: I've been there.

Brandon Quittem: The lake with the cooking oil, and some guy's retro-fitted some engines to digest that cooking oil, create energy and mine Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Have you been there?

Brandon Quittem: I haven't; my wife has.

Peter McCormack: So, I went with Jose from IBEX and Carliño.  I was in El Zonte and these two guys turned up and they said, "Hey, we're from Guatemala, do you want to come and see our Bitcoin project?" and I went, "Yeah", and I got in a car with them.  Then when I was driving away, I was like, "Hold on a second, I don't know these guys from shit and they're driving me across the border!"

Brandon Quittem: Do you still have your kidneys?

Peter McCormack: Well, you know what, I haven't checked.  No, I've still got my kidneys.  But I went to lake Atitlán, it's beautiful, but what's happening to that lake, it's dying.

Brandon Quittem: Is it?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because basically it's in a valley.  It's so big.  Have you seen it?

Brandon Quittem: I've seen pictures, yeah.

Danny Knowles: How do I spell it?

Brandon Quittem: You'll find it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Google will know that.  So basically, it's in a valley, and people live all around the lake obviously, because villages build around water.  That's it, it's so beautiful.

Brandon Quittem: Stunning.

Peter McCormack: And you travel, you get these little boats across the lake to go to the different parts, but obviously everyone dumps all their shit and piss into it and rubbish.  So the lake itself is dying and there are a lot of political issues with trying to solve those problems.  But there is a Bitcoin community there.  I went to a Bitcoin meetup.  So, I had to go across the lake and I don't know how to describe it.  It was almost like a community of westerners.  There's a hairdresser there and there's a farmer, and they have a Bitcoin meetup and it was incredible.  It was a great experience.  But yeah, sorry, I interrupted you.

Brandon Quittem: No, that's good.  Yeah, I'm just gushing about humans and energy, and I think it's widely misunderstood.  And it's okay if we don't understand things, if journalists and politicians don't understand things, that's fine generally.  However, with energy, the consequences are real and you look around the world right now and we're starting to pay the price.

Peter McCormack: Well, when we looked at your notes earlier, there was one line that particularly stood out, "When we get this wrong, people die".

Brandon Quittem: Exactly, it's deadly serious.  And what is energy?  It's the way that humans interact with the world and the way that humans protect themselves from the environment.  We're essentially engineering a world that's more suitable for humans, compared to the harsh realities of our planet.  Heating and cooling, we take for granted.  How about a hospital?  If you're in Africa and you don't have steady baseload power, you can't have an incubator.  If you have a premature baby, they're not going to make it, because they can't afford the energy.  I just had a kid recently, that one hits home with me.  And there's endless, endless examples like that.

Peter McCormack: Well, I'll tell you why the timing of this is really good.  When you go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, you essentially rethink money; you have to re-understand what money is, what its purpose is, how it works, because up until the point I discovered Bitcoin, I'd never thought about it.  Money was just something which went into my bank account at the end of the month, paid my mortgage and my bills, and then I would occasionally tap a card or spend some cash and buy stuff.  And I would be considering, should I save some, or maybe if I was buying a house, what my mortgage rate was, but I never thought about money itself, never thought about inflation, never thought about any of those things.  You go on a journey of discovery of rethinking what money is and what makes good money and why good money's important.

Then you get to why 0% interest rates warp money and warp incentives.  You go through all of this, and I'm still way early in my journey of learning about money.  I feel like the same thing's happening with energy.  And the reason I say this is if you go back five, six years, pre-Bitcoin, thinking about the environment, thinking about global warming and climate issues, I was very much, even though I'm a hypocrite because I fly a lot, I'm very much in the camp of highly concerned about the environment thinking we need to get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible, and never thought about the consequences.

Because of Bitcoin and Bitcoin's role with mining and energy and energy consumption, essentially going down an energy rabbit hole now and learning about energy, what it means, what its role is, how we produce it, how we are efficient with energy, and it's a whole new rabbit hole.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, I feel the exact same way and to be honest, mining was the last part of Bitcoin I sunk my teeth into.  I initially thought it was kind of boring, or just like a service provider, not for me.  Now I find it to be the most fascinating part about Bitcoin today, and I think it's partially because it's colliding with real-world consequences.  You look at Germany; okay, they get all their energy from Russia, most of Europe does, that's not a good position to be in.  And what do the Greens do in Germany?  They decommission nuclear plants, they decommission natural gas, they went all-in on solar and things like that.  Now, what are they doing?  Well, since they're not buying natural gas from --

Peter McCormack: Coal plants.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, they're turning coal plants on, they're burning biomass.  I'm going to get the details wrong, but there's a supply chain where in the US, they clearcut forests, they take those trees, ship them to a factory, turn them into wood pellets, put them on another truck, bring them to a boat, drive a boat across the Atlantic to Europe, take those pellets, put them on a truck with diesel, drive them to a powerplant and literally burn those compressed wood pellets for energy.  And guess what, it's ESG thumbs up, gold star all around, even though it's the literal most polluting form of energy we have on our planet today.

My favourite energy analyst, Doomberg, says, "In the fight between platitudes and physics, physics always wins", meaning we can talk a big game as a politician but when push comes to shove, we need energy and we're starting to realise, it's really nice to talk about solar panels, but not at the expense of humans.  And I think that's the context we need here is, is it about humans; do we care about humans; or do we care about this ambiguous future where we transition off fossil fuels?  I'm supportive of that long-term vision, but not at the expense of humans today.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So firstly, Doomberg, incredible.  I recently subscribed to his Substack.  I think the first article I read was about the transporting of liquid natural gas across the Atlantic as well, and that was a real eye-opener to somebody who actually isn't virtue-signalling, they're just looking at the data and educating on that.  So anyone listening, definitely go and check out his Substack, it is genuinely brilliant.

Then, in terms of the climate, it is still something I think about a lot.  My position has changed a lot since talking to people like Epstein, who I disagree with on a lot of issues --

Brandon Quittem: Same.

Peter McCormack: -- but he's woken me up to the idea that, hold on, we need energy, we have to be cognisant of the implications of a rapidly changing price in energy, or energy not being available, and we've seen that in the UK.  We've witnessed it where we've had a massive increase in energy prices and people cannot afford to heat their homes or run their businesses, and the government is having to print more money to support them.  So, I'm cognisant of that.

I think the blind spot that me and Danny were discussing earlier -- we had Nate Harmon in yesterday and Steve Barbour.  I don't want to call it a debate; it became a bit of a debate, but I'd rather call it a discussion.  My biggest blind spot, or what I don't know the answer to and I want the answer for, is the Earth is warming, that is for certain, all the data is there that it's warming and it's warming because of the actions of humans.  What I don't know is, and I haven't seen the best data on is, what are the implications of that and what is the net impact of that?  That's my biggest blind spot, because if we're going to do net more damage trying to come off fossil fuels too quickly, then that's not the right move, and I feel like enough work's done there. 

So, that's my blind spot, that's all I care about in understanding now is, what does the increase in temperatures mean, and also at a local level; what does that mean for people in developed western nations; what does that mean for people in coastal regions in South America; what does that mean for people in Indonesia; what does that mean for the farmers in Africa?  I want to know all of that.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, I agree, it's very complex and I think the mainstream talking points on climate don't seem to actually be coming from science, they don't seem to be coming from people who have our best interests in mind.  It feels to me that, I'm going to call it "big climate", it feels hijacked by central power structures and they seem to be just collecting people on their narrative to push things that may or may not be good for that goal. 

ESG is coming out of BlackRock; that's a Larry Fink idea.  From that perspective, he doesn't care about the environment.  He stands to gain tremendously from implementing these things because he writes the rules and he determines the capital allocation for a tremendous portion of the world.  And so, my realisation in the last five years, and I'm very pro-environment naturally, I'm an outdoorsman, I absolutely love the outdoors; but I don't like seeing this like corporate shell game on top of something that matters.  So, it is really hard to figure out what's true or not.

I also see a lot of people caught up in this Malthusian fear spell, and Thomas Malthus was an economist several hundred years ago who looked at nature.  What he found is that organisms, let's take deer, they expand to the maximum carrying capacity of their environment, then they eat all the food and the population plummets.  And Malthus's charting on the US population, look it's growing exponential.  Eventually we'll hit our peak carrying capacity, the environment won't sustain us and the population will crash. 

That was his idea, Keynes was influenced by this, Bill Gates, many, many of the leaders today are influenced by this thought.  However, Malthus is wrong because humans are not like deer.  Humans use technology, we make tools, we learned how to farm more production in less space; we invented fertilisers, GMO crops, etc.  And so, we went from 50% of people growing food to 0.5% of people growing food, through technology.  So, I don't think the answer is, "We're going to destroy the planet", I think the answer is, "We're going to change the planet", and it's up to us to try and adapt, and I think that's the real concern.

Earth is fine.  If you look throughout history, it's been way warmer, it's been way colder and the ecosystems adapt, organisms die off, humans have to adapt, and the least capable among us are the most vulnerable, they can't shelter themselves.  Developing countries have very high energy costs and if you have high energy costs, high manufacturing costs, which means you don't have many goods, your building materials are bad and you're very dependent on foreign investment.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that was the one area I got a bit stuck yesterday with Steve Barbour, so I tried to play it down the middle between the two of them.  But the one area I got stuck with him is that, what do we do, and do we do anything about the fact that I, as somebody who lives in the UK and middle class, you as somebody who lives out in the US, both live in essentially wealthy nations, we're going to find it easier to adapt to, for example, changing temperatures, the effects on crops and the change of water levels, we can adapt easier.  We've got more capital to expend on innovation and technology; what do we do about the poorer countries who don't have the same resources? 

It is a single climate, we're all going to be affected the same, well, we're all affected by it; what do we do about that?  I don't believe there will be a voluntary solution to that problem.

Brandon Quittem: Can I change your mind on that?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, please do, always try and change my mind.

Brandon Quittem: I agree with that generally speaking.  If you look at Central Africa, for example, it's essentially a rapidly changing environment where they're just not getting rain anymore.  If you don't have rain, you don't have crops, you can't support people.  So, Africans are migrating north to get out of this essentially desertification zone.  And there's no incentive for people with money to fix that, is there?  No.

I can't solve this problem completely, but why I wrote this essay was I was inspired by a case study in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  What they have going on there is a national park called Virunga.  It's a huge economic zone for the region.  People fly in and they go see the gorillas and they do stuff like that.  However, all the people who live nearby are extremely poor and they want to heat their home, they want to cook food.  So, they're clearcutting the forest in this nature reserve in order to heat their home and feed their kids.  I don't blame them, right; bad for the environment, but you've got to feed your kids.  They're also in these tiny, little houses, where there's so much smoke from the cooking that the kids develop horrible respiratory diseases because they're poor.

What happened that got me excited about this essay is, some Bitcoin miners came in there and it's a very mountainous region, so lots of untapped rivers that can be turned into hydropower.  And a public-private partnership with Virunga and a French mining company, I forgot the name, sorry, great dude, they came in and shopped shipping containers and built these little hydro dams.  What they're now doing is they're shipping energy to all the people that live nearby, so they don't have to burn trees to cook, they can actually use electricity.  It's also creating jobs for the local environment, it's preventing crime, it's saving children's lives, it's stopping environmental degradation. 

The biggest narrative violation with Bitcoin mining, it's spreading human prosperity from the ground up, and it does not require a subsidy from the government, it requires a free market incentive from a tiny, little shift, which is that energy can be sold to the Bitcoin Network, no matter where you are.

Peter McCormack: I want to go there.

Danny Knowles: Here's that facility.

Peter McCormack: Is there a case study on this, a written-up case study of the impact?

Brandon Quittem: Not an academic version that I'm aware of.  Gladstein's touched on this, many people have written about it.

Peter McCormack: I'd love to know the actual stats, like how many jobs have been created; what's the actual impact?  But really, we should just fucking go.  We've not been to Africa yet.

Brandon Quittem: What I would say is we probably shouldn't get over ahead of our skis on this, because I view these more as case studies or beta projects for the vision I have, but that was the first one that caught my attention.

Peter McCormack: Well, so on the mining thing, this is an example project.  We have the examples of grid stability, which people regularly talk about at ERCOT; we have, what's the name of the guy doing the dumps?

Danny Knowles: Adam from Vespene.

Peter McCormack: Yes, Vespene, do you know him?

Brandon Quittem: I do.

Peter McCormack: Great guy.  So, they are obviously going to landfill sites and flaring off, I think it's the methane.

Brandon Quittem: Correct.

Peter McCormack: There's all these great ideas, but the Bitcoin Network isn't big enough to support all of these projects, economics aren't there.  Obviously, we want Bitcoin to go to $1 million so we can have more of these projects, but I'm reticent to think mining can solve everything.  So, whilst that's great, we're talking about hundreds of millions of people in Africa, I don't know how many people will be affected by climate change.  How do we solve their problems if Bitcoin mining doesn't scale to solve it sooner?

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, and to be clear, I'm not saying Bitcoin mining is going to solve climate change, I'm saying it's a free market incentive that helps people help themselves in a way that spreads energy around the world.  Let's talk about energy for a second, because the moral case for energy is really, really important and we want more energy, cheaper and more widely distributed.  In developed countries in the US, we have low-cost energy, a steady grid, but that is not the norm.  And if you look at countries around the world, GDP is highly correlated to energy production.

It's a symbiotic thing.  You can't build things if you don't have cheap energy.  And if you don't have cheap energy, then you're kind of hamstringed in your country, you rely on the World Bank, for example, to invest in you, which they do some predatory lending.  And so, you just have all these countries just stuck in the literal dark ages.

Peter McCormack: Can I interject there, Danny knows what I'm going to talk about; we just did an interview with Alex Gladstein discussing the World Bank and the IMF and essentially, it's a story of economic colonialism.

Brandon Quittem: Correct.

Peter McCormack: So, post-territorial and war machine colonialism, they've essentially inflicted economic colonialism across the developing world, by giving them loans and usually with dictators, because a dictator will love $200 million loans, because they can steal some.  In return, they -- what was that turn?  Structural adjustment.  So therefore, "Here's your loan, but you now have to change your farming practices, because" the example he gave was Bangladesh, "if you farm shrimp, shrimp's valuable around the world, you can export that", but they're no longer growing crops for the local population, things become more expensive, they have a difference in their trade balances. 

So essentially, we've just enslaved the rest of the world with debt to enable us, as western nations, to live these great lives in these nice houses with iPhones and iPads, and it's a different kind of slavery; it's a debt slavery that we've put on the rest of the world.  I feel terrible about it.

Brandon Quittem: Correct.

Peter McCormack: Then you look at it and you go, Shell pretty much siphoned off the majority of the oil out of Nigeria, and we've seen that.  We're taking their energy and they don't have access to it.

Brandon Quittem: 100% and this is where the magic of incentives comes in.  People often call Bitcoin, "The energy buyer of last resort", meaning you produce some energy, you sell it to customers and there's a little extra, there's nothing to do with it, so Bitcoin miners collocate and they buy the extra; great.  This article is all about Bitcoin energy buyers of first resort, meaning we're about to produce a net new energy asset, and it might take five years for the population to grow big enough to purchase that energy, it might take years to ship the energy, building high-voltage transmission to bring it to the population centre, etc.  In that short-term, a lot of energy projects never get funded, because there's that really long period of ROI.

This is especially important in these developing countries who rely on the World Bank and IMF, because no one wants to invest in those countries because it's so risky.  Now, Bitcoin miners are actually stepping in as a type of capital formation which says, "Okay, we're going to harness some geothermal in Kenya.  It's six feet under the ground, they have hot energy coming up, they can just spread out and collect this energy and power the majority of the country", but huge capital expenditure.  Okay, what if Bitcoin miners were onsite from day one buying all that energy?  Now all of a sudden the investment case looks a lot better. 

So, this essay is essentially arguing that Bitcoin miners are going to lead to a net new production of energy assets.

Peter McCormack: This is what Harry Sudock talks about.  Harry Sudock we had on talked about this, and his example was more domestic.  He was saying you might need a hospital or a school near a town, but there isn't the justification to build out the energy infrastructure for that.  Now, with Bitcoin mining, you can do that.

Brandon Quittem: Exactly, there's less risk in that investment, you can charge less energy for the customers because you have this captive buyer who's willing to take it all at a good price and that's the whole point of the essay; that little incentive, energy now has a buyer, leads to more complex economic arrangements and human flourishing.

Danny Knowles: It's also what Austin Mitchell was talking about in Africa, saying they can now build out much bigger grids, because they can have that buyer of first resort, and then that in turn makes the energy cheaper for everyone in that local vicinity.  So, it's actually reducing the energy price in Africa because of Bitcoin mining.

Brandon Quittem: Exactly.  And those miners can pack up and leave whenever the end consumer population centre builds out; the miners are squeezed out, pack up the machines and go do it again.  Why don't I explain what a pioneer species is actually?  This is probably a good time.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm going to come back to the bit I want to talk about, okay.

Brandon Quittem: Okay.  A pioneer species is a unique organism, it's mostly from ecology, which is a type of biology where you're studying systems, photons from the sun hit the Earth, plants are just solar panels catching photons, they take carbon out of the air and they make complex molecules that planteaters eat, and then carnivores eat the planteaters, and it's just a recycling of photons from the Sun pretty much; and studying how that works out in populations and ecosystems.

One of the organisms there is the pioneer species, and the famous case study is a volcanic island near Iceland.  A big volcano erupts, wipes out all life on an island, you just have an igneous rock floating in the middle of the ocean.  Is that just going to be a rock forever, or will new life colonise that territory again?  Enter the pioneer species.  So, it's a hardy organism, drought tolerant, it can travel on its own and its role is to recolonise that.

So, a typical example would be a lichen, which is a symbiosis between a fungus and a plant, they work together, they land on that rock.  The fungus literally digests the rock with chemistry, liberates all the molecules needed and then the plant collects energy from the sun; those two trade and over time, you convert a rock into soil.  And as you have more soil, you can attract some more hardy plants, and then those plants continue that process.  Then you have trees and then all the animals come back and then you have a peak ecosystem.  That process is called "succession".

Peter McCormack: That's amazing, that first bit, the creation of the soil.

Brandon Quittem: Bingo.

Peter McCormack: That's insane.

Brandon Quittem: It is insane.  So, now let's tie it to Bitcoin.  So, Bitcoin miners are those pioneer species.  So, they're looking around for ecosystems with untapped energy assets.  Let's do the rivers in the mountainous region in DRC.  Untapped energy lives there, but it can't be harnessed now because no one has the capital to invest.  Now, the miners pair up with the people on site, they go colonise that energy asset and now all of a sudden, you're producing more energy, you sell it to the local community and succession occurs again.

Now you have cheap energy, maybe industry wants to come there and buy that cheap energy.  If there's industry, then you need jobs, you need housing, you need roads, you need hospitals.  And from that one little incentive, it grows out and it becomes a flourishing human civilisation.  Then the miners get squeezed out, they go and find a new energy asset to bootstrap prosperity somewhere else and the cycle repeats.

So, I view Bitcoin miners as little citadel seeds.  I know you don't like the citadel meme, but think of it as little seeds that plant around the world and they just produce human flourishing.

Peter McCormack: When I first read it, I turned round to Danny and I said, "This sounds a little bit more like economic colonialism.  We're going in there, we're stealing the energy and we're creating the Bitcoin and we're sending the money back to wherever we've come from".  But now you've explained it, now I understand it.  By the way, how do you come up with this shit?  Is this when you're on mushrooms?!

Brandon Quittem: Usually not, no.  I like ideas.

Danny Knowles: Usually…!

Peter McCormack: Usually, not always!

Brandon Quittem: Leave it open-ended.  I have a reputation to massage.

Danny Knowles: The thing that I love is, even if it's done with the most selfish intention, the outcome is probably a positive.  I really like that.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, the beautiful thing is, we don't have to go there and do this.  The incentive is there for people locally to do it themselves and that's way better.  Like taking pig shit in Mexico, digesting it and mining Bitcoin, that didn't require a western company to come extract resources.  That was all done locally, and I think that's where the magic comes.  You don't need outside capital, because the economic terms are now a lot better.  To be fair though, there will be a lot of people coming in to do that but to Danny's point, it doesn't matter.

Just like Bukele; he's got a lot of faults, but if he unleashes Bitcoin in his country and it takes off, it doesn't matter what he does because he just accidentally empowered all those people, and a dictator is less potent in that type of environment.

Peter McCormack: Everything is good for Bitcoin.  I really like the fact that you've identified this is actually a progressive agenda, or it should be.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, it absolutely is.

Peter McCormack: A real progressive, not a fake progressive.

Brandon Quittem: Correct.  Yeah, the progressives want to say solar panels and wind everywhere you go, and that's cute and that's nice from New York City with your latte, but that does not reflect reality on the ground.  People want to eat, they want shelter, they want the basics, and those basics come from low-cost forms of energy.  The reality is, that means fossil fuels today.  And with this sort of pioneer species thing, you can be on this team if you are a progressive, even if you don't agree with fossil fuels, because it's spreading energy and spreading energy is the single best way you can raise people out of poverty.

Jordan Peterson says, "Make them rich".  That's absolutely true, but energy is the master commodity.  If you want to be rich, you need cheap energy because everything is downstream from energy.  So, the biggest humanitarian issue in the world is make people rich.  How to do that?  Give them cheap energy.

Peter McCormack: Well, we're making people poor in the UK by giving them expensive energy; we are literally making people poor.  As I said, we've got people who cannot heat their homes.  We hit a point where they were discussing £5,500 a year for your energy bills; yeah, £5,500 a year, and they've had to subsidise that, they've had to put a cap in.  I think the cap's £2,500.  Now, if you earned £12,000 a year, that's nearly 50% of your -- I mean, it's not possible, so people are not heating their homes.  They're cold, they can't feed --

Brandon Quittem: That's in the UK?

Peter McCormack: It's in the UK, we're pushing people into poverty.  But a lot of this has helped me identify the real-world issues of money printing in the UK.  One of the things I've recognised is that, whilst UK GDP over the last two decades is up, the life people are living, the separation between the wealth gap, is leading to real disastrous consequences.  We've got ghettos; we've got ghettos being created in towns that used to be towns that flourished.  We've got a film, we've got to watch that.  I've got this film coming out about inflation. 

I went to this place called Harlow, and there's a building called Terminus House, and they had a problem with social housing, so they've turned this old office block into social housing.  It's a fucking favella in the middle of the UK and it's a centre of various social issues.  You're putting single parents in there, single mothers in there, with drug dealers and drug addicts and criminals, and to me it's what really identified these issues.

But we're now squeezing the middle class out in the UK.  We've not only squeezed the poor, we're now squeezing the middle class out.  We've got people who are closing their businesses, because they went from having a café, whose energy bill would have been £5,000 a year to £50,000.  This is that place, this is a UK favella.

Danny Knowles: I'm pretty sure they've photoshopped that sunny sky in!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think they have.  Well, it's not that sunny.  I mean, I went there, it's awful.

Brandon Quittem: It reminds me of Soviet housing.

Danny Knowles: It is like that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it is like that, because we've squeezed people so much in the UK.  But yeah, you've got cafés who've got their energy bills going from £5,000 a year to £50,000.  And it's not like, "What can we change?  No, we just can't run our business, we'll just close our business down".

Brandon Quittem: You cannot print energy.

Peter McCormack: You cannot print energy and that has been again, another real eye-opener.  That's one of the problems of doing this job, is that you learn in public.  You're sitting down with somebody and they're telling you something and you're like, "Holy shit" and then you have to go away and you've got to process this.

Brandon Quittem: What about Germany, it's one of the biggest manufacturing hubs in the world, certainly for Europe; 100-, 200-, 300-year-old companies are going bankrupt because the economic conditions today are too harsh.  Imagine what they survived in 200 years?  And it doesn't seem like most people around the world are even aware of this at this point, and that's shocking.  It's very real and it's not going to get better any time soon.  Lyn Alden does a good job explaining this, but it takes a long time to get energy assets turned on.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's 10 to 15 years, is it?

Brandon Quittem: Well, maybe for a new nuclear facility.

Peter McCormack: No, nuclear can be longer.  I think she told me, she thinks we're going to have a decade to recover from the lack of investment in energy.

Brandon Quittem: I agree with that.  But a single energy asset can come online a bit quicker than that, but not at scale, not around the world; it doesn't solve the problem any time soon.

Danny Knowles: Well, they end up just recommissioning coal plants, right? 

Brandon Quittem: That's what we're doing right now.

Danny Knowles: It's what's happening in the UK, yeah.

Peter McCormack: And there's been no new nuclear plants for how long; although I think they've just commissioned two now in the UK to be built, which I don't know how long they'll take.

Danny Knowles: There's one that's meant to be finishing in 2027, maybe.

Brandon Quittem: We deserve it, honestly.  In Alberta, Canada, tons of oil under the ground.  What do they do?  Disincentivise drilling locally, then they just push all the energy production and good production, industrial stuff, over to China.  And then what do they do?  They import all the exact same goods.  China has less stringent regulations, and they had to ship things over on a boat to bring it back to the people to buy it.  Then they pat themselves on the back and they win awards because they reduced emissions.

Peter McCormack: Or complain that China is building, whatever, is it 1,000 coal plants?

Danny Knowles: It's 1,000 that are currently operational, just over 1,000.

Peter McCormack: But they're planning to build 50, 100.  Yeah, of course, they've got to meet the demand of the production to give us westerners what we want.  One of the trickiest things with this, I find, and trying to relay these messages when I get back home, I'm always trying to be very careful how I do it, because as soon as you're classed a right-wing conspiracy theorist, you're immediately out the conversation, you're considered a psycho and a nutter.  I'm always trying to think or trying to find ways to -- I think that's why people think that I'm a bit of a cuck, because I'm always trying to relay these messages into a way that people can digest them.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, you're good at that.

Peter McCormack: But it's hard, it's a tough job to do.  It's trying to get people to understand, "This is not a conspiracy, this is real, these are the real-world impacts, let's take some time to understand it", and it's really hard.

Brandon Quittem: It's really hard.  I think my favourite line on this one, explaining how hard it is is, "Bitcoin mining is everything you don't understand about energy, combined with everything you don't understand about Bitcoin".  It's by far the hardest, and energy itself might be a deeper rabbit hole than Bitcoin, and normal people don't have time to study this stuff.  Most people fall in line with the consensus narrative, which is that we need to stop fossil fuels, because the planet's about to break. 

Young people are diagnosed with climate anxiety now; that's a new disorder that young people have.  One of the servers at our meetup was telling me about this and I was like, "Explain that to me!"

Peter McCormack: That might be an American thing.

Brandon Quittem: It might be.  But essentially she said, "All my friends are worried about the future, and we all are just thinking short term and we think the boomers sold out the future and we're screwed".  That's certainly not true and it's not a way to live.  Young people need to be hopeful and optimistic about the future.  We need to think long term and when you start to realise that, it's not surprising why young people are so nihilistic today, why culture erodes; there's nothing to live for, there's nothing to fight for.

There's where Michael Saylor goes all-in on Bitcoin as hope and I wholeheartedly agree.  You see a bunch of people with an optimistic view of the future and they mean it, and they get together and they're positive, and you can tell, and there's a plan.  Humans instinctively want to be part of something larger than ourselves, and we can't get around that.  And this is a really good thing to attach ourselves to and I think everyone here agrees that it provides great meaning and purpose, and I think it's morally right and good.

Peter McCormack: We need more kids like my daughter.  She's 12, she's so based, honestly, more than me, way more than me.

Brandon Quittem: That doesn't sound too hard!

Peter McCormack: Fuck this guy!  Give me my hoodie back!  If you didn't know that she was my daughter, you would probably think she's Matt Odell's daughter.  She just literally doesn't give a fuck; she's so based.  I think a lot of these issues are bigger issues in the US, and I think they are a result of two-party politics.

Brandon Quittem: I agree.

Peter McCormack: I think so many of the problems that we face now with narrative is two-party politics in the US.  You lead global narratives.  Us in the UK and the rest of Europe, we're just like, "Yeah, America thinks that, so we'll be that".  But the two-party political system you've got at the moment is so divided that every single thing is politicised.  Like, $8 subscription fee to Twitter has been politicised.  You're either AOC and you think it's bullshit, or you're Ted Cruz and you think this is great.  It's just unbelievable and I think that's one of the biggest problems we face in the world right now, is this.

Brandon Quittem: I agree.  And our previous two conversations were about the Fourth Turning, and that's actually one of the primary theses that I was describing there, which is that humans instinctively know something's wrong in the world.  We can't trust our institutions, we're getting squeezed economically, climate, politics; whatever you want to look at, it looks bad.  And so, our instinct is to collectivise and say, "Things are bad, we have to come up with a solution and the costs are going to be high and we have to act now.  So, you're either with us or you're against us", so it just explodes tribalism to a whole new scale.

Peter McCormack: So, a quick tangent, where are we in the Fourth Turning; are we still in there?

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, we're still midway through the Fourth Turning, and each of the four different periods in a full cycle is about 20 to 25 years.  So, I'd say somewhere about 2030 is roughly when I would expect humanity to emerge out of this Fourth Turning.

Peter McCormack: Bitcoin might be the hope that breaks the Fourth Turning.

Brandon Quittem: I do believe that, because it allows individuals to save themselves, and that scales all the way up through society.  If you're in a country and your currency's failing and there's capital controls and you can't get a bank account, there's no way to save yourself, get a mobile phone, peer-to-peer buy some Bitcoin.  At least you can save yourself.  Maybe a company can, maybe a family can, maybe a couple of nations will adopt this and save themselves.  Everyone who does "save themselves" is no longer desperate, they're no longer willing to go to war, or at least the incentive's reduced.

Peter McCormack: I've changed a bit of my narrative with new people asking about Bitcoin now.  I'm always now, "Forget about price, just forget about it.  Stop thinking about this as an investment, you're going to fuck it up.  Unless you get lucky, you're going to buy it, panic and sell; or, you're going to panic buy and you're just going to make a mess of this.  Think of it as a revolution and then think of it as your donation towards that revolution, whether it's £100, £1,000, just make that donation, park it to one side and then start learning about Bitcoin.  And then once you start learning about it, you will naturally buy more, but you're buying it to be part of the revolution.  And the more people who become part of the revolution, the more people buy it, the quicker the revolution will happen".

I've completely changed my explanation on it.  I don't want people thinking of Bitcoin as an investment now.  I know it is; I'm so beyond that now, it's like, "Forget that, stop thinking that, get away from that.  This is about fixing a lot of the problems we have in the world".  We all get there.  We come for the price gain, stay for the revolution.  I want people to skip that bit and go straight to the revolution.

Brandon Quittem: I think it's a naïve take, to be honest.

Peter McCormack: I know!

Brandon Quittem: I align with the political mission tremendously and I think most people who are in the bear market or around do.  But I think hijacking Number Go Up is way more effective, but it does have a lot more potential for abuse.  They come in, buy the top, get burned and then they hate you for recommending a bad investment.  I think the right approach is still the investment, because I don't think most people want to be political revolutionaries; those folks are already here.  I think we need normie narratives like, "Maybe don't just buy stocks, maybe buy a little Bitcoin too", I think that's actually the approach.

Peter McCormack: Thanks, Brandon, just destroy my whole new narrative!

Brandon Quittem: I'm sorry.  Try it, prove me wrong.  I would love to be wrong about this, I just don't think I am.  My approach is, "If you're going to buy this asset, you cannot do anything for five years.  You're not going to text me in one year scared because it's probably going to go down.  This is a five- to ten-year thing and if you're willing to park some money there for that time period, you're ready to buy Bitcoin.  If you're not able to wait five years, you shouldn't buy any today".

Peter McCormack: Well, I think we all understand that four-year cycle, but add a year just in case.  But I'll tell you where it came from.  With the football club, I'm at high risk of being accused of encouraging people to invest in something, so I wrote an article on the website; it was called Why You Should Not Buy Bitcoin, and explained to them that, "Don't buy Bitcoin, learn about Bitcoin.  Just go and learn about it.  I'm not advocating buying it, just go and learn about it", and actually it was quite effective.

Brandon Quittem: Smart.  And I think that also takes the pressure off a new person and you pitch it as, "This is a new thing like the internet.  It's going to be a big deal, I believe, and if you care about yourself and the future, maybe you should learn a little bit about it".

Peter McCormack: Well listen, if we've got some new people listening, because I'm going to send this out to some of my friends, let's deal with how people misunderstand energy.

Brandon Quittem: Definitely.  I mean, there's so many of these, it's almost irritating even to bring them up.  Let's see.  The first one is that people believe that energy is globally fungible, and what I mean by that is that you can instantly transport energy anywhere.  That's not true.  Energy is in these silos in locations all around the world.  And so, if the demand is not right next to where the energy is produced, you really can't sell it, which is why prices on energy vary so much.

In the Texas grid in ERCOT, when conditions were very strange, price of energy was negative, they were paying people to take energy assets because you can't sell it across the world.  In the UK, they might charge you 50 cents a kWh, whereas if you live in a region with hydro, during wet season it might be 3 cents a kWh.  So, it's not fungible, it doesn't transport well, supply and demand have to be right next to each other.  That's a few points together.

Another one is that modern grids need to overproduce energy because we can't store it.  Battery technology is too expensive and we don't even have the raw Earth elements even to full-scale battery, even if we wanted to; which means when energy is produced, it more or less has to be consumed immediately.  What that results in is a grid where we overproduce energy.  Two to three times the energy of an average day is produced and only a third of that is consumed that day, and the reason is you have to plan for the day out of each year which has the most demand. 

Maybe in Minnesota, it's very cold, that might be 15 January; everyone's heating their homes so a high draw of energy.  But in the springtime, it's 70°, no heating, no AC, everything's fine, you barely use any energy.  And so, what that results in is an enormous supply glut of energy that has no consumer, literally nothing you can do about it.  So, the Bitcoin miners come in, they buy all that extra energy like a sponge and, like Danny mentioned earlier, that improves the economics of the energy asset, which allows you to lower the cost of energy for all the other consumers, so it's a nice little symbiotic there.

What else?  Another one, consuming electricity doesn't necessarily produce CO2.  The mainstream media gets this one wrong all the time, they time to account the carbon cost for Bitcoin mining and they assume that electrons that are already harnessed create net new carbon, when the reality is that the energy production already occurred and whether or not Bitcoin miners bought it or not didn't change the total carbon output.

Peter McCormack: That's a really important point.

Brandon Quittem: It is an important point.

Peter McCormack: And that's been missed off of this.

Brandon Quittem: And again, it's so hard to understand energy that I actually don't think we can expect the average person to grapple with this stuff.  So, it comes back down to a narrative war of lowest common denominator, or simple memetics, and I think the reality is people are going to have to feel some pain before they realise that energy matters, and that we cannot rely on solar panels to do this. 

Even if we wanted to go all-in on solar panels, China owns the supply chain, so what are we going to do there?  We might be in a war with China within five years, we're certainly in an economic war today.  Taiwan is a hot button; semiconductors.  We can't rely on China long term, so that's not even a real idea.  Maybe we can put those plants in Mexico, or something that like, within the next decade, but that doesn't solve our problem.

Then the last one is just about baseload versus supplemental load, or consistent power versus variable power.  So, in order to run a modern economy, you need a base amount of power being generated so that all the machines in the hospitals and everything work.  You can't have a hospital cutting in and out; people die.  So, baseload power comes from dense forms of energy, which is either fossil fuels or nuclear, or hydro during rainy season as well.  So, those are mandatory, we have to pick one, the likely answer is all three in various locations.  Then, things like wind and solar, the sun's on, the sun's off, it's windy, it's not windy.  Those are just supplemental forms of power, they cannot replace the baseload.  So, I think that just needs to be in context.

Another one that I just thought of here is that fossil fuels are used for things that we probably will never electrify.  So, we take fertilisers out of natural gas, the Haber process, or something like that.  We have to use diesel-powered machines in our agriculture in order to work the land, transportation with trucks.  Maybe we'll do electric, but probably not.  So, there's these certain things that we can't get away from: plastics all made from fossil fuels, right.  So, it's a lot bigger of an issue than simply electrifying the grid.  Those are top of mind for misconceptions.

Peter McCormack: When you think about movement away from fossil fuels, I think anyone who's gone down the rabbit hole with this has realised, and this was Epstein's point, he said he doesn't want to debate people on whether climate change is happening; he agrees it's happening.  His issue is the rapid removal of fossil fuels and the risks that come with that.

Brandon Quittem: Correct.

Peter McCormack: I think he's absolutely right with that.  At the same time, I still have that blind spot.  I mean, we've gone up 1° in 120 years; is that correct?

Danny Knowles: I think that's what Nate said yesterday.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but the speed of temperature change is increasing, and it looks like we might hit that 1.5°C point within the next 30 years.  There are models that say everything up to 2.5°C, 5°C and 8°C.  And there are going to be effects of that.  Ideally, we wouldn't hit an 8°C average temperature rise on the planet.  Ideally, we would stay pretty constant.  So, at some point we do need to transition away as best as possible from fossil fuels, but not entirely.

When you're considering this, how do you think we transition away, when you've been down this rabbit hole; is it basically nuclear?

Brandon Quittem: Yes.  It's so extremely obvious that nuclear has to be the biggest growth vector if we're going to replace fossil fuels.  I think not being scared of natural gas is the right move also for the next few decades.  Natural gas is 40% or 50% as bad as coal, so a huge improvement.  And, if you look at emission reduction in the last decade or two, it's mostly because we shifted to natural gas and we should lean into natural gas; it's a good form of energy.

But yeah, long term, it's nuclear.  China's investing massively in this.  If we get to the end of the essay, I start to extrapolate what happens if these incentives play out over decades, and one of those is I think small modular nuclear reactors will be all over the place, where -- I'll just give a little teaser.  Bitcoiners could buy Texas, let's say, and they could just drop a nuclear plant there in the middle of nowhere, generate power, so the whole city gets cheap or free power, and mine Bitcoin with the rest.  And then, you can just build this off-grid ecosystem with that hub of nuclear energy with no dependencies from outside that area.

So, I think nuclear is obviously the move, and I think the newest technology of making them small is going to be important to that.  I don't think it's in any sort of production mode, but the Gen IV SMRs are good for like 150,000 people, which is a tiny, tiny reactor compared to what we have.

Peter McCormack: It's Bedford.

Danny Knowles: We're speaking to a guy about that in January.  He's working on that.

Peter McCormack: Basically, Bedford's 174,000 people.

Brandon Quittem: There you go.

Peter McCormack: We could put one at the football club, we could mine Bitcoin.  Some people talk about the climate hysterics and I think they have a valid point.  I am somebody who is concerned about the climate, but I don't feel the need to glue myself to a Van Gogh or spray shit or climb above a tower so the motorway has to close, all these tactics that we're seeing.  I believe these people, their heart's in the right place, but I don't think they understand what's really happening here.

I kind of think of them a little bit like shitcoiners.  It's very difficult to convince a shitcoiner why Bitcoin is king and you should stop wasting all your time with all these shitcoins and put your money into Bitcoin.  I find it's almost a similar discussion with these people, Extinction Rebellion kind of people.  How would you approach explaining this to these people; how do we switch the narrative for these people?

Brandon Quittem: I think you're spot on; their heart's in the right place, just totally misguided, and I think the shitcoiner thing is a good analogy.  I think the way to win this argument is not to quibble over energy production and types of energy, it's to look at Bitcoin as a different social technology to run our species.  So, money is at the base of how all our incentives are structured, and ecology's about incentives; small change, big outcome. 

So, with the fiat money system, a politically captured money system with never-ending inflation, what that's doing is it's incentivising inflation, it's incentivising consumption, and that leads to a lot of poor ideas that are funded and a lot of waste.  So, you can think of it like we're just foot on the gas pedal at all times going in random directions and we have no idea where we're going.  And the output is an incredibly, globally connected world, all this cheap plastic crap, consumption ruling society and that's really bad for the environment. 

If you want to fix that, you shift to a deflationary money.  Jeff Booth explained this well.  A deflationary money prevents poor investments, because the cost of being wrong when you invest is so high that people make more strategic decisions.  And that tiny little shift would decrease more emissions than any amount of gluing yourself to paintings, or honestly anything that we're talking about energy right now, I think the number one thing would just be to shift to a deflationary money.  Our average energy consumption, our average environmental impact would go down tremendously.

Peter McCormack: Are there any blind spots with deflationary money?

Brandon Quittem: It's a good question.  I think it's really hard to think about this question because we've all grown up in inflationary money, it's the water we swim in, we don't know we're wet, that idea.  I had this conversation actually this week and the one concern I have is that, if the money supply cannot expand, that prevents government from reallocating capital to those who are in need.  Theoretically, it makes sense for a central party to help out the people who need it in our society, because we don't want to live next to tragic human suffering.

Peter McCormack: Statist cuck, you!

Brandon Quittem: Theoretically.  But what we're seeing now is, it's a really inefficient way to allocate capital.  So, there's a lot of waste, but let's just say for argument's sake it's a net positive because we reduce some human suffering in the short term.

Peter McCormack: But, hold on, there's another reason.  There's not just the moral reason to reduce human suffering, there is the net benefit to society of not having the haves and have-nots and not having the violence that comes with a massive wealth divide.  Like in the UK at the moment, if people cannot feed their family or heat their homes, there might be protests, they might resort to crime, we don't know the impacts.

Brandon Quittem: Correct.

Peter McCormack: There is a solid argument that the redistribution of income will lead to a safer society.  Now, I know that some people are going to listen and be fucking hammering their keyboard writing to me, but you see this in high tax places like in the Nordic countries.  They are relatively safe countries to live in.  Yes, they have high tax; yes, it's not socialist, but it's not far off; but there is a solid argument or debate to have around it.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, and I agree, I don't know if we can directly show causation that high tax is equal those positive outcomes.  I think generally that logic is sound, but I think it's a lot more complicated than that.

Peter McCormack: But the countries that don't have social safety nets, the ones I've travelled to, have dangerous ghettos.

Brandon Quittem: I mean, we have them in the United States as well.  But I think your point by and large stands; I will concede that point.  Short term, it helps, but the long term consequences of having a money that's politically captured results in a situation where the people who have power and influence, they can decide, "Do I want to produce in the free market: hard, real consequences.  Or, do I want to suck up to the monetary system and try to capture the money printer".

What I think we're doing with political money is, the incentive is too great to capture the money supply, so productive people go there, so it's poll politics, rather than producing.  And I think what that produces in the long term is, we break our money all the time; and I would argue that that big break that occurs every 50 to 100 years, when we replace the money system, I think that does more damage than the short-term pain of not feeding people on the side of the street.

Peter McCormack: That's fair.

Brandon Quittem: So, with the deflationary money, we take that power away from the state; and then what we need to see is humans giving a shit about their local environment and producing, maybe through charity, maybe through other types of endeavours, actually helping people redistribute wealth voluntarily.  Simultaneously, another important point here is that a deflationary money, what that does is all the benefits of technology, which is doing more for less, what that does is it decreases prices because we get better at things.  And in a deflationary world, the have-nots, their cost of living goes down every year rather than going up.  That's a really important point.

Peter McCormack: So, this is something that Stephan Livera raised to me, and I want to go and look into this because I said to him, "Bitcoin will reduce the wealth divide", and he said, "No, it won't, it will probably increase the wealth divide but it will raise up everyone from the bottom".

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, exactly right.  It doesn't matter that the CEO makes 500 times more than the janitor.  That is poor logic from a sophomore philosophy student who is captured by Marxism and doesn't realise his ideas are bad.  The reality is, we want the largest wealth divide imaginable, which sounds bad, but why is that?  That's because we allow people to take risk and innovate and produce things and if they're right, there's an enormous reward for them, which they deserve.  Their innovations spill over and they raise up the bottom.  Everyone gets cheaper goods, everyone gets cheaper energy.  This is really important.

What we need to be comfortable with is, what is the minimum that a person's life is like; and are we morally okay with the least among us's life?  Do they have food, medicine, basic education; can they raise a family?  Whatever we agree, that's what we want to see and I think a more market-based world with a deflationary money is how we achieve that.

Peter McCormack: When I was with Dominic Frisby making this film, he said to me that inflation is the biggest fraud enacted on the population, and he was showing me price changes.  But he said, "The truth is, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, there would be one wage in the house and that would support a family.  We're now at a stage where we've got two wages generally in a lot of houses, and people can't even afford to have children".

Brandon Quittem: Correct.

Peter McCormack: He said, "How has this happened when we've become a richer society; how has this happened?"

Brandon Quittem: That's a complicated one.  I think that the shortest answer is America decided to leave the gold standard entirely and the net result of that is that America exported dollars and we imported goods; we exported labour and we imported goods, so it hollowed out our working class in America in exchange for a larger supply of financialisation.  So, the Wall Street types, the big banks, the big tech, the industrialists at the top, they skimmed a larger percentage of America's GDP and there's just literally not enough jobs for labourers.

At the same time, the money's being devalued every year and most people aren't getting raises to keep up with that.  Again, it's a consequence of a political money and a political money is a proof of stake.  If we want to talk about work for a second, proof of work, what Satoshi did was he created a monetary system that cannot be captured.  The only way to change history is to do the work, and doing the work's expensive, so people don't try to cheat, and it redirects allocation of productive people's resources to producing things that we all need in the market.

Peter McCormack: Why do shitcoiners not get this?

Brandon Quittem: I've been thinking about Vitalik a lot.  I think he's the primary reason that Ethereum people like proof of stake, and that's the only other shitcoin that even has cultural energy at this point.  And I actually think that Vitalik misunderstood proof of work early on, which most people did, and in 2016 he made up his mind on proof of stake.  Since then, he can't change his mind, he already dug his heels in, so he has no incentive to learn if he was right or wrong about proof of work, because he built a movement around proof of stake.  So, I genuinely think he misunderstands it.

I also think that it's really easy to misunderstand proof of work.  I think it's the hardest part to understand and it's also the most crucial.  I tweet all the time flagrant things like, "If you don't understand proof of work, you don't understand anything about the whole industry; your opinion is null", and I actually do believe that.  Satoshi's genius is a lot more subtle than people think.  It's not moving money around, it's not smart contracts, it's not any of that stuff, it's literally just creating a monetary system that can't be captured, it's creating a ledger of historic transactions that require energy to change, which simply makes it hard to change history, so then you don't waste time trying to capture that thing anymore.

Peter McCormack: Do you ever think Satoshi got lucky on some things and because he's not around to answer it, we attribute it to total genius?

Brandon Quittem: I think it's a great question and I think the answer's probably yes.  I think he got most things right.  There are examples where he screwed up, like one CPU, one vote.  He made mistakes, but I think it's way more powerful if the idea of Satoshi is this messianic figure.  It's like Prometheus.  Prometheus stole fire from the gods, gave it to man, gave man a huge leg up and the gods punished him forever; chained to the rock, the bird ate the liver every day forever.

Satoshi is like Prometheus in a sense that he stole money out of the central powers and gave it back to the people in the market.  Satoshi's not getting punished forever because Satoshi had good OpSec, so he learned from Prometheus.

Peter McCormack: So, if you're right, which I think you are, there is something we need to happen.  We need Bitcoin to be used as a currency and we will need Bitcoin to be used for settlement, because as the block reward trends down, we require economic activity to be able to support the miners.

Brandon Quittem: Agreed.

Peter McCormack: How do we do that, because there is a hodl narrative?  I like to spend Bitcoin, by the way, but there is a hodl narrative.  Is it important for us to push that and I'm going to say something, I know I'm a heathen for even raising this, but do you think there will be a time we might have to discuss an inflation rate, which I know is antithetical to Bitcoin, but…?

Brandon Quittem: I think it's a question that we should have and I think we should be more comfortable having this conversation in public, rather than the group think where even if you ask the question on Twitter, you get attacked; that's silly.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you're cancelled, you're done, out of Bitcoin.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, it's very predictable, tribal behaviour, but it's not very productive.  My belief on this is that we can try to push people to spend Bitcoin today, but if you live in a western country, there's no incentive.  It's a tax headache, Visa works great, and we expect Bitcoin to go up.  Those are pretty powerful forces preventing spending in the West.

In developing countries, you don't have a good bank, you don't have good payment rails, you can't cross borders with your payments, it makes a lot more sense to use Lightning, etc.  But I don't think this is an issue, because we have 10 to 25 years, let's say, before it starts to become a problem.  And in that timeframe, if Bitcoin's not filling up blocks simply as a savings vehicle, we don't even have to talk about spending, just as a savings vehicle, if it's not filling up blocks in 20 years, then Bitcoin has failed for other reasons.

I don't have any evidence to believe that that's happening and the shitcoiners would say, "Well, look, the trend with fees is not going up fast enough", and they just plot a line 20 years in the future and they expect past performance to make a linear line.  That's totally wrong.  That's assuming that -- have you seen the chart where it goes up every day?  The turkey loves his butcher more every day and then Thanksgiving comes and the chart goes straight down and the turkey dies.  That's what the shitcoiners are doing saying Bitcoin can't produce fees. 

It's a complex system and until there is actual need to use the chain more, we're not going to see fees, and thank you, Satoshi, for putting in the subsidy, hopefully at the right time period, that demand catches up to that.  In ten years, let's talk about it.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to give you an interesting comparison on where you said Visa works well.  Emma, do you mind being part of this show just for one moment, I want to ask you a couple of questions?  Just for people listening, Emma is the wonderful operations person who travels with us.  You're new to Bitcoin, Emma, sorry to embarrass you like this.

Emma Firman: It's all right.

Peter McCormack: Emma ran the merch stand.  If someone came in to buy something, would you prefer card or Bitcoin?

Emma Firman: Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Why?

Emma Firman: It was quicker.  It just took forever to put the card payments, the details through our system.  Yeah, Bitcoin was instant.

Peter McCormack: If we'd have had the Square reader, do you think you still would have preferred Bitcoin?

Emma Firman: Probably, yeah, because what I found were a lot of people wanted to pay it with Bitcoin, but actually not everyone knew how to use it, did they?  Pete and Danny were teaching people how to use it to make the payment.

Peter McCormack: So, we came here and we got a Square reader and it was a week to get approved.  I was like, "Shit, we can't accept that".  So, the only way we could take a card was via our website, with a discount code to get rid of the shipping, and we had to take all their details, so it would take forever.  Or, as Bitcoin.  But actually, even if we had the Zettle reader, Bitcoin is faster, it feels faster.  We didn't have one Lightning payment fail.

Brandon Quittem: That's great.

Peter McCormack: A couple of people were a bit slow when it was coming off their own node.  Obviously custodial wallets are faster.  We're now at that point where I prefer Bitcoin payments.  Also, if we take card payments, they go, Zettle collects them when we're back at our football club; Zettle collects them and then we don't get a settlement until the next day.  With Bitcoin, we've got it immediately.  It's better.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, I mean it's a nice story, but I would be careful to extrapolate that to the masses.  You're at a Bitcoin conference where people want to spend because it's novel, and you're wanting to receive it.  It good to receive, I agree with you on that, especially if you value Bitcoin, but there are still enormous burdens.  The people who spent that Bitcoin, they have to account for their UTXOs, when they bought, when they sold and what was the capital difference.

Peter McCormack: If they can be bothered to.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah.  You can technically break tax laws if you choose to.  I don't think that's a good idea.  I still don't see it.

Peter McCormack: Okay, I'll give you another example.

Brandon Quittem: Hold on, let's look at it, it's not happening.

Peter McCormack: No, but I'll give you another example.  The reason I'm saying this is, I think a lot of times, people use Bitcoin because they just want to, because they're a bitcoiner and they want to spend it.

Brandon Quittem: It's novel.

Peter McCormack: They want to play with it.  Okay, when I went out to El Zonte in El Salvador last time, I used to go and get money out of the bank and I'd have to get dollars, and I'd spend my dollars and at the end of it, I'd have some left over.  And I've probably got various little piles of dollars back in my home in the UK that don't get used.  Last time I went to El Zonte I didn't, because everywhere in El Zonte accepts Bitcoin, so I had no need for dollars, I had no need to carry any money and I had no need to worry about having dollars left at the end of it.

For me, there are instances now where Bitcoin, as a spender or a receiver, are preferred over Visa; they are actually preferred.

Brandon Quittem: I totally agree.  There are micro-cases that make sense.  Cross-border is one, developing countries without proper banking systems is another.

Peter McCormack: But what I'm thinking about, when we first got the internet, the first time I was on the internet, it took about eight minutes to download a jpeg.  It was slow, and then suddenly at my school, we got ISDN so it was a bit quicker.  Then suddenly at home, we had ISDN.  It gradually grew and got better and better.  I feel like that's what's happening with Bitcoin now; it is getting better.

Brandon Quittem: In little niches, I agree.  But you're not going to get western people to spend it day-to-day and do the tax accounting and pay capital gains tax when it's so easy to tap and pay.

Peter McCormack: Of course, but we are seeing -- I mean, we saw the bill with Gillibrand and Lummis, which wanted to allow --

Brandon Quittem: Just de minimis.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Brandon Quittem: But then you have a deflating currency and an inflating currency.  Why would you spend an asset that we bought because it's going to go up versus an asset we know is going to go down?

Peter McCormack: Well, maybe you're in the part of the cycle where you think it's going to go down so you spend some.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, we do see that when Bitcoin's price is high and a local top, people are more willing to spend their coin because it's a good time.  Now you want me to spend some coin?  Madness.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well now you should be buying.  But what I'm saying is, trajectory-wise, we're heading in the right direction, but we will need a lot more of it.

Brandon Quittem: I think it's going to take a very long time.  I'm glad you're optimistic; I'm less optimistic.  In the short term, I'm less optimistic.

Peter McCormack: Well, I think hodl's a great narrative for new people coming in.  Spending, I think is a good narrative for people who've been around for four or five years and they've got some gains, because not only that, not only does it support the miners, but it also supports the companies trying to build Bitcoin companies.  We need your IBEXes and your OpenNodes.  If people are spending Bitcoin, that supports them as well.  So, I consider it almost my little bit -- like a tax on the system is that I support it.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, and I think supporting it for ideological reasons is nice and I think that bitcoiners will do that as almost a charity, or a political vote with their money, but the incentives aren't there, I don't see it.

Peter McCormack: Emma prefers it, she's not even a bitcoiner; come on, man!

Brandon Quittem: That's because you didn't have your banking rails set up, which is a unique situation, to be fair.

Peter McCormack: Well, I think Emma said she preferred it from Zettle, which she's used, because it's instant.  I think it's faster sometimes.

Brandon Quittem: Sometimes it is, but not at scale.  Shall we talk about what happens if I'm right about this symbiosis with miners and energy, look to the future a little bit?

Peter McCormack: Yes, tell me.

Brandon Quittem: I think this is where things get fun.  We've established the fact that Bitcoin miners help produce net new energy assets.  There are countless examples today, there are going to be many more in the future.  If that's true, we're going to have more energy more widely distributed around the world, which is good for humans.  So, yeah, harnessing energy anywhere can be monetised; existing energy assets are more economical; and the cost of producing new energy is decreased.  Those are the base incentives.

So, what happens in 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years?  This was very fun for me to think about, "How do I do this thinking?"  This was the best part of the article in my opinion.  So, the first one is that Bitcoin mining is the catalyst that leads us to energy abundance, meaning pretty much zero marginal cost of energy.  So, all intents and purposes, our day-to-day life, energy is pretty much free.  And the analogy is that similar to how, when the internet was getting built out, there was demand for broadband, demand for fast internet.  Simply having the demand led to a supply increase.  That's a market signal that says, "Everybody wants this product so, shit, we'd better invest really quick and get this product everywhere".

I think the same is with Bitcoin mining.  There's now demand for energy anywhere in the world, so people are getting creative building new ways to harness it.  And at scale, that's going to be a massive increase in energy for humans.  Tangential point here, unrelated to the article, I have this thesis, and I'm not alone here, but the thesis is that in the future, especially as block subsidy goes down and Bitcoin growth starts to level off, what we're going to see is that miners are only profitable if they have essentially free energy. 

That might be because you capture waste heat; that might be because it's stranded; or, that might be because you're helping to bootstrap a new energy asset.  But, "Buy a big facility and just harness a bunch of energy at grid prices to make money", I think that's going to be a temporary blip in Bitcoin's history.  So, it's really just going to be a supportive ancillary service.

Peter McCormack: Do you think that could lead to a drop in hashrate then?

Brandon Quittem: No, because there's so much negatively priced energy around the world.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, energy is always going to have a mismatch in supply and demand.  It might take ten years to build an asset and then it might take another ten years for demand to build up.  You might overbuild some hydro; in the wet season you have too much, but in the dry season you're good to go.  It's just a natural by-product of energy.  The only thing that would change that is if batteries became 10,000 times cheaper, or something like that, or every bit of energy we harness we could preserve, but that seems extremely unlikely right now.

But let's say energy is essentially free in the future, all of a sudden all the things we want to build, the energy constraint is gone.  And remember, energy is the master commodity of all products.  So, if the energy is gone, or the energy cost is gone, we can do whacky stuff, like take water out of the ocean and take all the salt water out, and literally just throw energy at the problem and produce fresh water.

Peter McCormack: So, desalination of salt water, that is an energy --

Brandon Quittem: The constraint is energy.  We can do it today, we have prototypes, but it's a negative ROI process right now.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.

Brandon Quittem: But we increase our energy capacity, decrease the cost, we'll have those plants all over the place.  And fresh water's going to be a really big issue.  We've been burning through it bad.  I saw a map recently that showed the Southwest of the US, which I think includes -- actually, it doesn't include LA; but let's say Arizona, Nevada, essentially all of that water comes from the Colorado River.  So, snow lands on the Rocky Mountains, melts, goes in the Colorado River and goes all the way to southern California.  All their water is relying on that one river; very, very vulnerable.

So, that's not a very good situation.  Fresh water's going to cause wars in the future, it probably already has.  If we can get rid of that problem, huge win for humanity.  And there's a ton of things like that.  Increased food production; space travel; I heard about this concept called molecular weight refineries, where you essentially just put material into a machine and that machine can then deconstruct it into the atoms or molecules that we need, very Star Trek-y, but again energy is the input.  We don't even think about building those things because the energy cost is so high.

Peter McCormack: Terraforming Mars?

Brandon Quittem: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: How's that going to happen?

Brandon Quittem: There's a lot of theories.  I think that it's a very hard problem.

Peter McCormack: Doesn't Musk want to let off nuclear weapons in the atmosphere?

Brandon Quittem: That's one idea.  Sci-fi authors have been discussing this since the beginning.  Literally blow up bombs there, or concentrate the sun's rays, or there's all kinds of whacky ideas.  But the real idea is we evolve to live on Earth and everywhere else is trying to kill us, Mars, space, it's horrible.  So, if we're going to live there comfortably, not under a bubble, we'd have to do things like that.

Peter McCormack: When you talk about early adopters leapfrogging the laggards, we might be looking, in a decade, two decades' time, back at El Salvador and saying, "Bukele was a visionary".

Brandon Quittem: Absolutely.  He's taken a big risk, but I think we will look back on him and say that.  The first example is just adopting Bitcoin.  If you own Bitcoin on your balance sheet and other people don't and the price goes up, you gained relatively your position in the world.  So, countries like El Salvador, nobody's held of them, nobody knew about Bukele before this.  He buys some Bitcoin, he goes on a PR campaign, now everybody knows him.  And if the price goes up 5 years from now, all of a sudden El Salvador could be a serious country, 10 years, 20 years from now.  They might leapfrog those second-tier countries that, they don't need to take the risk.

So, the same is true of energy.  If you have more energy, you have more wealth.  So, those who adopt Bitcoin mining in their own country have this flywheel of incentives that lead to more energy locally, which means cheaper goods, which means less reliance on other countries, which means better exports, higher quality of life, more innovation, etc.  So, they're just base shifts and fundamentals and we shouldn't be surprised that the rogue states are adopting Bitcoin, because they have the most to gain.

Peter McCormack: Well, they also have advantages of using the technology right now.

Brandon Quittem: Well, anyone could use the technology right now.  But if you're the leader in the US, you have everything to lose; why would you take unnecessary risk?  It's like the innovator's dilemma.  If you're in a large corporation, you stop taking risks, you stop creating products that will cannibalise your business; it's against human nature, which is why the upstart can shoot the moon with a new idea that the incumbent would never see.

Why did Polaroid screw up and miss digital cameras?  They actually patented it first.  They came up with the technology 20 years ahead of time, but they were too arrogant as an organisation.  Human nature took over and they didn't innovate.

Peter McCormack: The same with Blockbuster.

Brandon Quittem: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: I kind of think or hope that Bitcoin, and now putting energy into this, will become this great leveller.  So, whereas we have a domestic wealth divide in the UK and you have it here in the US, we have a global wealth divide.  I kind of hope it becomes a leveller.

Brandon Quittem: So, back to before.  We don't want equality.

Peter McCormack: No, not equality, but a bit of a leveller.

Brandon Quittem: We want to raise the standard of living for the lowest socioeconomic class above a certain point that we feel good about, and energy is 100% mandatory for that process.

Peter McCormack: Well, if it could wipe out the World Bank and the IMF and all these centralised institutions, which enforce economic slavery on these smaller nations, I think that's a good thing.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, it allows developing countries to have real, sustainable growth, because it's funded in a way that's not predatory, and it gives energy assets to that country so then they can actually manufacture things, instead of being reliant on expensive imports.

So, yes, I think that having sound money that's not politically captured and having incentives to produce energy at a lower cost, those are fundamental.  If we have those, then we should be able to raise people out of poverty, because food is cheaper, housing is cheaper, there's more jobs, materials are cheaper, transportation's cheaper, healthcare's cheaper.  Those are what we need to have a standard of life that we can be proud of.

Peter McCormack: All right, talk to me about this parallel society idea, because this is so interesting.

Brandon Quittem: So, the theory stems from the idea of the great spreading out.  So historically, cultures have lived on rivers and lakes, and they do that because rivers are transportation, fresh water, food, they're defendable.

Peter McCormack: Lake Atitlán, like we discussed earlier.

Brandon Quittem: Bingo, it's a strategic point.  In the future, if we're right about energy, we'll be able to harness these remote energy assets anywhere in the world and mine Bitcoin in the short term.  What that will lead to is, humans may leave these megacities, which is where all the energy assets are today, they'll leave those and essentially go wherever we want.  The spreading out, we could drop a nuclear reactor in the middle of nowhere and build a city around that.

So humans, I believe, will slowly spread out, they'll have more land, and it's a really important thing, because we only have a couple of hundred countries today.  They're not making more land, we're not really experimenting with government structures, so we're sort of stagnant, and I would like to see more competition between states.  The best thing about the US, in my opinion, is federalism.  The states compete, we try experiments, we learn from the wins and the losses of each state, theoretically we all benefit.  I want to see that on a global scale.  I want to go from 200 to 2,000 to maybe 20,000 territories, where the local politics reflect the individuals' desires.

One way we can do that is by distributing energy.  And the only way to distribute energy more widely is to have a captive customer that comes with the energy asset.  So, it allows us to spread out.

Peter McCormack: But you also have that cultural side to Bitcoin, whereby you talked to me about that project in Africa.  I want to go and see it, I want to see the project.  But there's the project in Honduras that we spoke about, there's the one in, is it Indonesia?

Danny Knowles: In the Philippines.

Peter McCormack: The Philippines.  One of the benefits of having 500,000 Twitter followers is, I can go to any city in the world and say, "I'm here", at least one person is going to come down the pub.  You might get 5, you might get 20.  And I know that even though we might be completely different people, we've got something we align on and we can hang out and we can talk and it's great fun. 

When you talked about parallel societies, I was also thinking of that, in that you know these cities, you can travel from one to the other and they're going to be your people with you.  Like you say, the politics might be different, but in terms of the general direction you want things to go and things you care about, there's going to be a lot of alignment.

Brandon Quittem: I agree.  It feels in a way like Galt's Gulch in cyberspace.  The productive people want to step out of a system that we may not agree with, that you will have nothing and be happy.  Let's frame it this way.  I view there's two paths this decade and I'm simplifying a little bit.  There's going to be megacities which are hyper-efficient, totally surveilled.  Literally you will own nothing and be happy.  And as we continue this hollowing out of -- if we continue down the fiat path, we're going to continue to remove low-level jobs, you're going to automate them away and there's going to be less jobs for the bottom half of the population.  What are we going to do?  We're going to put them in megacities with shipping container houses, free internet, free porn, bread and circuses, just distract them and keep them there because we can't just kill them all, so we have to consolidate them.  That's one way to live.

Another way to live is to be on the fringes of society, to go to one of these start-up cities, to go West and colonise a new path.  And I think what we're going to see is the inherently productive, entrepreneurial, visionary-type people are going to feel suffocated in those megacities and they're going to venture out.  And if you have a city with a bunch of productive people, it can be small and still have enormous productive output, because we have the internet so we can work remotely, we have money that can't be stopped, we have decentralised energy which can produce food, so we have everything we need to break apart from the matrix and create that parallel path.

Now, I don't think it's going to be quite that simple, but I think this line of thinking really matters because we're heading in a period where centralisation is going to peak and it's going to strangle the thing that makes humans special, which is individual action, individual entrepreneurship, problem-solving, etc.  So, we're going to have these start-up cities and their role, in my mind, is to preserve the spark of freedom, is to preserve the idea that humans can create amazing things simply because they want to.  It doesn't need a central planner to steer the ship.  So, yeah, in a way it's like preserving the spark that we need here.

Peter McCormack: You will mine Bitcoin and be happy; I love it!  All right, listen, we could go on for ages on this.  I know other people are going to want to talk to you about this.  I feel like I should allow you to save some of it, but I do specifically want to finish on one bit, which is the moral imperative of this.  I feel that now, I feel this moral imperative to support Bitcoin in the best way possible and I have not always been the best bitcoiner, I've not always understood Bitcoin, I've not always understood why people think about Bitcoin in certain ways, but I definitely feel that moral imperative.

I felt it so much after the interview with Gladstein, when he talked about what the IMF and the World Bank are doing to people, but I feel that moral imperative now.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah.  I think right now, we're seeing billions of people suffering under authoritarian regimes and they're not really able to save themselves, because they don't have a monetary system that supports them.  Okay, now we have Bitcoin.  You have a mobile phone, you can sock away a few satoshis and hopefully you can protect yourself from that period.  So, I think there's a few points here for why it's our moral imperative.  The first one I just mentioned, which is individuals can save themselves.  We have a way to store money outside the system so you're not beholden to the fate of your state.

The next one is that what we're going to do is we're going to unite all the humans on the planet under one economic language.  Everyone in the world can now contribute to a global economy with satoshis that no one can stop.  So, what does this do for the budding entrepreneur in Kenya, who can't get funding for a start-up, and he can't even really sell any products because his financial rails don't leave his country.  Now he's on a Bitcoin standard and those ideas can enter the world, he can create something amazing that we all benefit from. 

How many Leonardo da Vincis are buried in Kenya right now, but they can't get their idea out?  How many Maya Angelous are in Timbuktu but they just can't participate?  So, it's our moral imperative to get that human capital online, let them compete in the marketplace.  A few of them will shoot the moon, create a life-changing innovation, and again it raises up the bottom of the boat.  And I think that's entirely lost when people are discussing Bitcoin.  It connects us all on one specific economic language, and Szabo described this as social scalability, which is the idea that, how do humans cooperate in large numbers over space and time? 

We went from small tribes and we create agricultural societies and we're contributing there; then we go to these feudal states, industrial states; now we're in the nation state game.  Each advancement there required technologies that allow us to cooperate better, whether it's language, whether it's property rights, whether it's courts, whether it's armies and borders, religion; all these things allow us to cooperate better.  And since the Industrial Revolution, we've essentially hit a glass ceiling on social scalability.  It's large nation states, whoever has the most army, the most power wins.  So, magnitude of power rules and we're going to just fight over resources forever in this game until we can find a way to transcend that nation state, to shatter the glass ceiling of the nation state.

I think what Bitcoin does is it slowly erodes that large state incentive, similar to the Sovereign Individual thesis, it erodes that game, it allows us to all connect on an invisible substrate in cyberspace, sending satoshis around.  And it knows not of the borders, and that alone brings people online and it allows us to cooperate more, it allows us to break into 10 or 100 times as many jurisdictions.  And I think all of these are good for humans.

The final one, and we touched on this earlier with regards to moral imperative, is it removes the incentive to capture the money, so it shifts productive people to the market, rather than capture the money.  You add all these up and it's very clear that it is our moral imperative to bring this on.  If you care about people, give them some energy, give them some Bitcoin.  If you care about people, let their ideas enter the world and compete and the good ideas help everyone.

Peter McCormack: Brandon, you're fucking brilliant, you really are fucking brilliant.

Brandon Quittem: Thank you, Peter.

Peter McCormack: Every time I sit with you, I feel like I've sat with an absolute genius, and I feel dumb as fuck, but it's an absolute pleasure to sit with you.  This is brilliant, I'm kind of lost for words.

Brandon Quittem: I appreciate that.

Peter McCormack: Every now and again I do an interview that I have to go away and think afterwards, because it impacts me, and I've got little notes in my head.  And once you're gone, I'm going to be saying to Danny, "I've thought of this; what about that; what about this?"  Honestly, I think you're brilliant and I wish you wrote more and I look forward to your book.  I look forward to everything you do and I feel just honoured that you sit and do this with me.

Brandon Quittem: Appreciate that, Peter.

Peter McCormack: So, thank you so much.  Where do you want to send people to?

Brandon Quittem: All my writing is now being published at brandonquittem.com.

Peter McCormack: I saw you had a nice, new website.

Brandon Quittem: Yeah, I built it in 72 hours.  It's a little shitty WordPress site.  It's simple, I like it.  Otherwise, Twitter's the primary spot.  Ideas go out there, links to the website there.  @Bquittem is the handle.  Come say hello there.  And lastly, we just wrapped up Pacific Bitcoin Conference.  Tickets are on sale right now, pacificbitcoin2023.com.  We're releasing a limited amount of super-early birds, they'll probably be gone by the time this airs, but if you can get the early bird tickets, we're running it back next year.  I work for Swan, swan.com/Quittem.  Create an account with Swan, we'll give you $10 in Bitcoin for free.  That's all I need to show.

Peter McCormack: Mate, you're brilliant.  Keep doing this, this was an absolute pleasure.  Thank you.

Brandon Quittem: Thanks, Peter.