WBD652 Audio Transcription

WBD Live in Bedford with Jeff Booth, James Lavish, Lawrence Lepard & Ben Arc

Release date: Monday 1st May

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Jeff Booth, James Lavish, Lawrence Lepard & Ben Arc. 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.

On the 14th of April What Bitcoin Did hosted a live show in Bedford. The guests were the founder of LNBits Ben Arc, CEO/Chairman of Ego Death Capital Jeff Booth, Investment Manager Lawrence Lepard and Macro analyst James Lavish. Across these interviews, we discussed Nostr, censorship-resistant marketplaces, hyperinflation, debt, deflationary economics, Bitcoin and AI.

“When people are talking about Bitcoin price going up, that is not what’s happening. Everything is falling against Bitcoin forever. That’s what’s happening. And so when you’re measuring Bitcoin price going up, you’re actually defaulting to the currency that’s being manipulated.”

— Jeff Booth

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Okay, so Danny's been telling me all week you invented Nostr.

Ben Arc: No, I can't take credit for Nostr.  So, what happened was me and fiatjaf worked on a protocol called Daigon Alley, which you spoke about in your podcast. 

Peter McCormack: We did, in London, in that weird hospital. 

Ben Arc: This is why you should listen to What Bitcoin Did, because it's on the cusp of all the latest and greatest technologies.  But yeah, that was a good while ago, wasn't it?  It was more than a year ago.

Peter McCormack: Do you remember the venue?  It was that weird, old hospital? 

Ben Arc: Yeah, it was awesome.  I mean it was creepy going up to it. 

Peter McCormack: Really creepy.

Ben Arc: I thought where am I going here now, I'm going to get snuffed out?  But when we got to the top floor there, it was a great venue for a podcast.  And yeah, we spoke in depth.  And actually, it's funny because I listened back to that podcast and with the Nostr stuff, because a bunch of us who were excited about it early on, we had all these great ideas of what you could do with the technology.  And then now, people are having those same ideas again.  And sometimes I hear them and I'm like, "Wow, that's a fantastic idea".  And then I listen back to the podcast, I'm like, "Wow, we were talking about that then; we were talking about it a year ago", or whatever.  And if you scroll through the Telegram group, early on we pretty much covered a lot of the ideas now which people are exploring.  So obviously, it's fantastic there's so much attention on that technology, but it was great to be able to cover it early on.

I mean, I think that would be the first big podcast talking about Nostr easily. 

Peter McCormack: Me and Danny were saying this week that you're the coolest bitcoiner there is.

Ben Arc: Thank you very much. 

Peter McCormack: We've agreed that. 

Ben Arc: I say I think it's you. 

Peter McCormack: You just invent shit and then walk away from it.  Maybe it's Satoshi.

Ben Arc: Oh yeah, so the story, my little claim to fame and little spark of my little vested interest in Nostr was that me and fiatjaf, we worked on a protocol called Diagon Alley, and this is an idea for a resilient, censorship-resistant marketplace, where basically it's kind of client-based, and then you would have key crypto stuff, so you'd have public key, private keys, and it would mean that it was hard to take down because everything's kind of client-based, I suppose, like the merchant with all their products, and then they would just push it towards an index that would index it, and that index would be like an Amazon or an eBay.

That was one of the things which nurtured the Nostr protocol growing, so then fiatjaf went and sort of made it much more general and then, I mean yeah, this is just one element which went into Nostr, so I can't take credit for Nostr; I wasn't the creator, Fitchaff is the creator.  But I do have nostr.com, so I'm the CEO of Nostr.

Peter McCormack: It might spread that you're the inventor now because Danny's told me and I've told everyone.

Danny Knowles: I've told at least ten people this week.

Ben Arc: I tell plenty of people, don't worry!  Like, "Yeah, that was me"!

Peter McCormack: So, Danny's stitched me up here because I've got no idea -- usually I have a blue card of what I'm going to talk about, but I have no idea, Danny wouldn't tell me this week.

Ben Arc: Yeah, it's nice to catch up.  I like organising lots of live demos, so they fail and I embarrass myself.

Peter McCormack: Like our speakers!

Ben Arc: Yeah!  So, we've got a live demo here.  So, as you know, we work on a whole bunch of different things in LNbits, and then also in Nostr as well.  Going back to the Diagon Alley thing, then we had Nostr, and then we were always like, "Well, cool, now we can actually build Diagon Alley on Nostr".  So everyone gets excited about Nostr as being a social network protocol, but actually it's far more profound than that, you can build all sorts of interesting things.  I think on your podcast, you spoke about Uber as an example, if you had like geolocation as an event type or something. 

But anyway, so now we can build Diagon Alley on Nostr, and this week we actually had our NIP merge, NIP-15, which is for the censorship-resistant marketplace.  We now call it Nostr marketplace, as opposed to Diagon Alley, because Diagon Alley is a goofy name.  And we've released the client as well, and it works.  We've released it in LNbits, and people have been playing around.  Well, it works.  I mean, we've just released it, so we've obviously found a few bugs.  But it's quite a momentous week, really, lots of stuff has happened.  And I think Amethyst, if anyone knows Amethyst, which is one of the more popular mobile clients, very good Android client if you've got an Android and you want to use Nostr, he did a poll and asked, I think I've got it on here actually, and asked what feature people wanted to see in Amethyst, built into Amethyst; and Marketplace, NIP-15, was winning in the poll for what people wanted to be built into Amethyst, which I think is really interesting because clearly, look at Facebook Marketplace, there's something powerful when you mix a marketplace with a social network, and people like using that.

So, I'm really excited now to see beyond our own client, how people will implement this new marketplace technology into their Nostr clients.  So yeah, if anyone's interested in the release of NIP-15, then if you go to the Nostr protocol, and then you take a look, you can look through the NIP there.  And one of the great things about Nostr is it's very modular, so if you're building a client you can easily build this stuff into your client and then you can have a marketplace running.  And I'll see if I can get around to demoing that in a little bit, so that's one of the demos I wouldn't mind doing.

But then the other thing I wanted to do as well, I wanted to do like a world's first.  So I think, I'm not sure anyone who's done a panel before has had things triggered by people paying lightning payments during the conversation.  So, what I've got here, this is the Bitcoin Switch project, which is you can turn anything on with Bitcoin.  It uses a very cheap microcontroller, just a couple of quid.  I think again, we spoke about it on your podcast, but I didn't actually demo it.  And yeah, for a couple of quid, you can retrofit anything to accept Lightning and then turn something on for a period of time.  So that could be a vending machine, it could be access to somewhere, anything, anything at all. 

It's very powerful, people like it, it's technology, so I wanted to demo that, let's see if it still works.  I have got a couple of QR codes here.

Peter McCormack: By the way, did anyone hear Nostr being mentioned on Joe Rogan this week?

Ben Arc: That was amazing.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Mines is moving to it.

Ben Arc: Yeah, they've moved.

Peter McCormack: Oh, they've moved?

Ben Arc: I mean, to be fair to Mines, they were very early on.  That blew us away in the Nostr protocol Telegram group.  That guy popped in and said they'd implemented Nostr into Mines.  So yeah, great people are picking up on this technology for being so powerful.  And it's really interesting because as a technology, it's just so simple.  I think one of the best explanations I've heard is my friend, Louisa, she wrote this great article, and in it she said that you go from a model of smart servers and dumb clients to smart clients and dumb servers.

Then you think about where the power is in that kind of technology.  And it means that instead of the power being with the server administrator -- did someone just pay?  Someone just paid, there we are!  But the bubble machine, oh there we go, we got some smoke as well!  The bubble machine failed, sadly, so one of the demos worked.  If someone pays the bubble machine again, maybe it'll start spitting out bubbles.  I've actually got -- we can take this a little bit further if you really wanted, but we'll go back to that in a second. 

So anyway, if you think about where the power lies with that, it lies with the client, which is the user, as opposed to the server admin, and it's just really simple.  We're using public key crypto with clients and then having these dumb servers, which are just basically -- well, the relays, which are just relaying those notes and the information.  There, bubbles!

Peter McCormack: This is wild!  Fucking crazy!

Ben Arc: I think that's probably a world first.  I like doing the world first stuff, but we have got another world first as well.  I have one of these muscle stimulators, and if you want, we can strap ourselves up and then people can pay Lightning to electrocute us on your leg.

Danny Knowles: How's your heart feeling?

Ben Arc: It's up to you.

Peter McCormack: Does my brother want to come up here?!

Ben Arc: I swear it's not set too high.

Danny Knowles: You just told me you turned up full!

Ben Arc: No, no!

Peter McCormack: After the week I've had, it should probably be you, Danny.

Ben Arc: Yeah, so I feel like I'm going to set that up now.

Peter McCormack: Danny's volunteered.

Ben Arc: Danny's volunteered, okay.  So, where are we?  Let me grab these.

Danny Knowles: Do we need to swap seats?  Are you not doing it?  Oh, come on.

Peter McCormack: I actually have a heart condition; this is a true fact!

Danny Knowles: What are we doing, arm?

Ben Arc: Yeah, arm, I think.  So, let's go here.

Danny Knowles: Can they choose who they electrocute?

Ben Arc: Yes, yeah, I don't know which QR code --

Peter McCormack: Which one's Danny? 

Ben Arc: Well, that's smoke and bubbles, so we'll have to put some QR codes for electrocuting the people.

Danny Knowles: Who just tried to electrocute me?

Peter McCormack: How many times can I do it for 200,000 sats?!

Ben Arc: I'm going to have to stick myself on the --

Peter McCormack: This is a great way of making Bitcoin!

Ben Arc: Yeah, this is just my elaborate scam for making Bitcoin.

Danny Knowles: Where are these sats going?

Ben Arc: Just to me, personally.  I was going to do it for charity, but I mean like, I've got to earn some money somehow, haven't I, so how else are we going to do it?  So, let's do a world's first, shall we?  Let's electrocute people on stage.

Peter McCormack: It's like a Bitcoin Squid Game.

Ben Arc: For Bitcoin.  I mean, this is going to take off and soon people will earn money.  You could do like a YouTube stream and then you could just say, like for bitcoiners you could say controversial things and then have them electrocute you, and then sats.

Peter McCormack: I'm sure the Nazis did something like this!

Ben Arc: Okay, so we have some more -- right, please no one scan these QR codes for a second.  Let me get them on.

Peter McCormack: Just give me Danny's.

Danny Knowles: Lane, you're looking way too keen there!

Ben Arc: Right, so that's smoke.  One of us is going to get in pain in a second.  Yeah, we're still working.  People say you should never do a live -- aargh!  Well, that worked!

Danny Knowles: Yeah, just keep scanning that one!

Ben Arc: Get him, not me!  Is yours working?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, ah!

Ben Arc: Did you get that?

Danny Knowles: Oh, fuck!  Right, so now we're -- here we go.  There we are, that's Peter done.

Peter McCormack: Danny's the one on the right.

Ben Arc: So what else do we need to talk about?

Peter McCormack: You know with Fountain you can do streaming sats?

Ben Arc: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Can we do streaming electrocutions? 

Danny Knowles: Are you getting these constantly as well?

Ben Arc: No, people like me.

Danny Knowles: Fucking hell; this is shit!

Ben Arc: Yeah.  So, how do we concentrate on what we're supposed to be talking about here?  Oh, right, so Nostr; shall we have a look at the Nostr Marketplace extension we made in LNbits?

Danny Knowles: Please. 

Ben Arc: It's pretty cool.

Peter McCormack: Can you leave Danny's QR code up in the corner?

Ben Arc: How do I -- aargh!  How do I do that?  Right, I'll put that there.  Oh, no, is that Danny?  Oh,  I've lost my -- typical Linux.

Peter McCormack: I told my dad we had a serious event this evening about world money and the collapsing economy and the banks being fucked.

Ben Arc: Well, no, so stuff like this is important.  It's very goofy turning on a smoke machine and a bubble machine on stage and electrocuting people on stage.  World's first, people paying to electrocute people on stage while they're doing a live stream, or whatever.  They're very goofy examples of using the technology, but actually if you're unbanked and you're in a developing country and then your local community decides to start using Bitcoin, so people have access to a digitally native currency, very cheaply, these microcontrollers are just a couple of quid each, and then the relay is like 20p or something, you can start retrofitting things to accept Bitcoin and people can have access to a digitally native payments technology. 

I mean, you can't do this with Visa, do you know what I mean?  So, it's far superior to Visa.  So, they're goofy examples of using the technology, but actually -- how's the arm there, Popeye?  But actually, what you can do with this technology is very profound, is what I'm trying to say, but being electrocuted keeps distracting me!

Okay, so let's have a little look at the Nostr Market, as we call it now.  So for those of you who don't know, Nostr is a client-based technology where you have a public key, private key, just like Bitcoin, and then you sign notes and then send them up to these relays and the people who are subscribed to those notes will get those notes.  So, with our Nostr market here, I'm going to generate a new key, which I've just done right now.  So now, I've got a new key.  You can use your own public key, private key, if you want to, you can generate them somewhere else.  Once I've done that, I can create a new stall, oh, here we go, shipping zone first.  So, I have to make a shipping zone first, so I'm going to make a shipping zone, I'm going to call it free.  How much time have we got?

Danny Knowles: As much time as you want.

Ben Arc: Okay, cost of shipping, okay, it's free.  I'm going to create a new stall.  If you imagine like a marketplace, OpenBazaar tried to do this, but it didn't quite work.  You have market stalls, which merchants control.  You go to the market stall, then you pay for some products, and then you visit another market stall.  That's kind of the model which we've built this on.

So if I call this Ben's Shop, and then I could put description if I wanted, but I'm just going to -- all payments are going to be pulled from this wallet which I selected, this LNbits wallet and then I've got to select a shipping zone, create stall, I'm sort of scared this thing's going to electrocute me at any moment.  Once I've created my stall, I can add new products, so I'm going to add a new product here and I'm going to add a T-shirt, a description, "Clothes", I suppose.  So you can add categories, and then we're going to insert an image URL, and here we are, got this guy here.  Copy image address, put that in there, and then how much we're going to charge for the T-shirt, let's say 200 sats; quantity, we've got 100 of those to sell, great product. 

Now as a merchant I've created my products, I've created a stall, yeah, that's cool, fair enough.  But if I go to my market clients, this is a completely separate client, you could run this offline, you can run it -- in fact this server is running offline.  You could also run this just as a separate client just on a github.io website or something.  And then if I go to market here and add merchants.  If I take this public key and pop it in here, then over the Nostr network, if we add that, well the first demo worked so hopefully this demo will work as well.  Here we go.  So what just happened then was this, it's just a front-end client, it's not doing any HTTP GET requests or POST requests, or anything.  I literally just said, "I want to subscribe to any data this public key has", and then it pulled down from a relay this product here.

Like I said, this is completely client-side and actually I'm running this locally, so I'm not even using DNS, I'm not using a web server or anything, it's just pushing it through a relay.  And now I changed the color theme there, let's go for a more of a Bitcoin color theme; if I go to visit stall, I can add that to my cart and then, if I go to checkout, this is the bit which -- actually, I think I need to log in first.  I'll just generate some random keys, add key and then if I go to checkout, "Enter your public key".  I'm logged in, wait there, we need to refresh.  So all communication, this is what's great about Nostr, if you think about with HTTP, you do a GET and a POST request, and then you're hitting these web servers; with this, this is all based on Nostr DMs.  So they're encrypted direct messages between two clients and two key pairs.  So this is a truly censorship-resistant marketplace.

Right, okay, there we are, I've got my keys there, and then I click on that, click on checkout.  And then this is probably where it will fail.  Oh, there we are, then it generates an invoice, and then if I pay that invoice, can someone pay that invoice for me?  I'm just scamming more sats out of people!  And all this communication is happening between the merchant, oops, sorry; the merchant client and the marketplace client is all happening through the Nostr Network over encrypted DMs, it's pretty cool, even the fetching of that invoice.

Peter McCormack: Oh, there we go.

Ben Arc: How much are you paying me?  See if that registers.  Oh, nice, there we are, cool.  And then once I've paid for that product, if I click here, I should be able to see, here we go, so this is a direct message.  This is, because we're encrypting the information, and they come through as DMs, we can now message the merchant and say, where is my T-shirt?  There we are, and that was a Nostr direct message.  In fact, when we were first working on Nostr, I made the first kind of Twitter client on Nostr a couple of years ago, and I really wanted direct messages to be in there.  And actually people in the Nostr community were like, "We don't need direct messages".  And I was like, "Well, that's a useful part of Twitter, for example".

So it was me and Fusion44, who's a RaspiBlitz developer, who's actually here in the audience now, we were the first ones.  I still remember a couple of years ago, Fusion helped develop the direct messages and actually got it working on my Twitter client.  And I still remember now, us DMing each other saying, "Woo-hoo, we're doing encrypted messages over Nostr!"  And now, to see Joe Rogan talking about Nostr is quite amazing, that it goes from this hacky project of all these free and open-source developers to something much more well-known.

So it's quite cool to be there at the beginning of that story.  Okay, so if I go here now and I select the customer, I should see, "Where's my t-shirt?"  "It's on its way".  And again, that's all happening over Nostr direct messages, the buying and selling of the products, and then also the encrypted messaging between -- oh, got a bug there -- the encrypted messaging between the merchant and the customer as well.  So we launched that this week, really cool, and then there's lots of other clients who are also going to be implementing this.  So the problem of censorship-resistant marketplaces is solved.  

I can tick here as well that the order's been shipped, and ship the order.  So pretty cool.  Anyone interested in that, just play around in LNbits, we've got it running on the demo server.  You can play around on there and experiment with it.

Danny Knowles: And what if it's a bigger order; does it have like an escrow system?

Ben Arc: So, very interesting.  So we've solved all these problems in the smart server way, haven't we; and now we need to figure out ways of solving these problems in the dump server way.  And there's a couple of -- I can't remember the name of the project.  There's a Lightning escrow service, which someone's built, which I think could be used with this.  But then also maybe some sort of relay, some of the relays.  We have to be careful that we don't -- because you've got the spectrum of convenience, where making something more convenient just means it's more centralised. 

So you could have a relay service which maybe offers some escrow stuff in it, but then you have to be careful that obviously it doesn't start to centralise.  But this is going to be the constant battle with Nostr, I think.  But yeah, the other one is reputation as well, like after you've made the trade.  Again, I mean there's great people working on solving these problems.  If you go on the Nostr protocol website and you look at all the PRs which are in there, there's lots of proposals for reputation systems and how we can get around that.  I think there may also actually be NIPs which have been merged with solutions on how to do reputation. 

But yeah, you can build so many things with Nostr, it's very exciting.  And what's really exciting about it is, it's not Bitcoin, Nostr isn't Bitcoin, but it's been built by bitcoiners and it can't help but lean towards being Bitcoin-y, so we have Zaps now in Nostr.  And it's a great way to show how digitally native micropayments can be very powerful on a social network.  So, yeah, I think as a driver, it's going to be the next thing which really pushes and drives Bitcoin.  It's going to be people just engaging with Nostr and seeing Bitcoin working so well with it.

Peter McCormack: Amazing.  Okay, my only question is, it's quite complicated what you've done there.  Do you expect to get to a point where it would be easy for a normie to be able to build a shop front?

Ben Arc: Yeah, so I mean it's not complicated really.  So, like going on a WooCommerce website, add products to a WooCommerce website, you'll need to add shipping, you'll need to add the products.  And then, one of the things which is trickiest is probably adding the public keys.  But you could go to a marketplace, we can add the public key in the URL here.  But actually, you could just have a list of public keys in a GitHub repo, and then when someone wants to add their public key, then they just put a PR in and then this just fetches that from the repo.  Or we could do it in some Nostr-y way, where we use a follow list or something. 

So this is proof of concept, minimal viable product stuff, isn't it, really?  But if you compare becoming a merchant on any other platform, you have to click around a bunch, add some pictures, add some products.  Then probably the confusing thing is showing that alongside going to the marketplace.  But in reality, you would just say, "Here's a link to some marketplace with a bunch of Bitcoin products on", and then you would click on the marketplace and it would just get access to that list of public keys from all these merchants who are selling Bitcoin swag, and then it would just pull in all the products and you could just go to their stalls and buy stuff.  So, yeah, it kind of looks complicated now, but I think that's probably my really bad demonstration.

Peter McCormack: One of the complications we've had with selling merchandise and selling beer and tickets to bitcoiners is that we end up having an EPOS system, and then when people want to pay in Bitcoin, then we have to write down each order and then we have to go and deduct it from the inventory management if there's no integration.  Will there be a way that this could integrate with traditional so we could have both a censorship-resistant store and a normal store?

Ben Arc: Well, I'm going to plug LNbits again, but I mean we did this in the last podcast.  Every time you had something you needed, I was like, "Yeah, we can do that in LNbits, we've got this new plugin", etc.  So obviously, these clients, you could just run them on some github.io website, or just a website, like a simple file-serving website.  But if you are running it on LNbits, then you can marry this extension.  I mean, the payment which through there, then I have it here, and I have it listed here, and I can export to CSV, and we have an extension in the works which will make it so you can easily create a CSV with the Bitcoin value and then the real-world fiat value at that time.  Anything you need for your tax jurisdiction in which you're in, if you're going to be a legitimate merchant, then yeah.  So, by marrying up these different extensions in LNbits, yeah, you can totally service that need, I think.

Peter McCormack: We should get together and build a store then, because on our store people are always struggling to find where they can pay in Bitcoin, because they have to get towards the end.  We should get together and do that.

Ben Arc: Yeah, totally.  I mean even with us, we have in LNbits we've got our -- oh, sorry! 

Danny Knowles: Did you get electrocuted again?!

Ben Arc: So, in LNbits, we have our shop and it's a WooCommerce site.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Ben Arc: We're selling the hardware stuff which we do, and the POS.  I have a POS for you; wait there.  You're not attached to wires, Danny.  Could you just pick up that tiny, little 80s-looking calculator?  So BC, BlackCoffee, who runs our web shop, he's made you -- this is an offline point of sale.  So you can have that in the bar of the football club, and then someone if they want to make a payment, they just turn it on.  So if you turn it on now, hopefully it's got battery, you can very easily just input an amount, it's in the fiat value as well.  And then when you pay it, I think I've shown you this before, you can confirm the payment by using a PIN with the wallet.  But it's very simple, very easy, and you don't have to connect to the internet as well.  So you just have it behind the bar, click it on, make a payment.

I mean, maybe using a phone might be easier for accepting Bitcoin payments, but it's kind of cool how you've got, again, like a $15 device, very good for unbanked countries who want to start accepting Bitcoin, particularly if they've got limited internet infrastructure.  And BC's done a really nice job, he's 3D-printed a case for you there with the Real Bedford logo on it and everything.  So, thank you, BC.

Peter McCormack: That's very, very cool.  Nice one.  All right, well, we're going to move on to James Lavish and Larry Lepard in a second.  Just a warm round of applause, thanks to Ben.  I'm also going to give a shoutout now, we do have a sponsor for this.  You've probably all noticed that we keep talking about Iris Energy at the moment.  They approached us, when was it, about two months ago?  We were in America and they were in Canada, so me and Danny went out to see them.  We went snowboarding, hung out, and realised that we align on a lot of things.  They're the number one Nasdaq-listed, 100% renewable energy Bitcoin miner.  And being Australian, they're very civilised like we are in Europe, so we got on very well. 

They've agreed to sponsor everything we do, and they've also sponsored this.  So any of you guys who've got a goody bag, you've got an Iris Energy hat, we're going to be spending some time with them and probably talking about them a bit more in the future, and I think we've got somebody from Iris Energy here, but I won't call them out because they might not want that.  Okay, thanks Ben. 

So a lot of people have flown into Bedford this week, which just blows my mind, and really grateful, this evening that we've been also joined by Lawrence Lepard and Daniel Craig, and my new friend James Lavish.  Guys, welcome, thank you. 

James Lavish: Thanks for having us. 

Lawrence Lepard: Thank you.

Peter McCormack: So there's quite a lot we can talk about.

Lawrence Lepard: There is.

Peter McCormack: Larry, tell everyone what you said you're going to do to Jerome Powell.

Lawrence Lepard: Oh yeah, so I did a podcast earlier with Peter and I don't know how we got on this subject, but we were talking about positivity and negativity in the Bitcoin space.  And Jeff brings maximum positivity and I'm the bad guy.  So basically, I was talking about how if I ran into Powell, I'd love to just kind of knock him down and beat him with a golf club.  The image of that was in my mind, because one of my family members was attacked on a golf course in Florida two weeks ago by an alligator.  The alligator grabbed him by the leg and was pulling him into the water.  Fortunately his brother, who had fought in Vietnam, was there and grabbed his club and came over and saved his life by basically beating the shit out of the alligator with a golf club.  So the image was very much resonant in my mind.  And I think if I ever saw Jerome Powell, that's kind of what I would like to do.

Peter McCormack: You always have the best stories.

Lawrence Lepard: I don't know about that!

Peter McCormack: So, Danny and I spoke to Luke Gromen this week.  We did a great interview, super-smart bloke, and he very casually dropped in the idea that we may be hitting double- or high double- or triple-digit inflation soon in the US, in Europe, in the UK.  He was very casual about that, like it wasn't just a minor possibility, this is a high possibility chance.  And that really struck me, because that's the kind of thing you hear about in faraway places like Argentina, Lebanon, Turkey.  So, do you want to talk to people about this and why it's such a distinct possibility?

James Lavish: I mean, it's definitely a possibility, it's a non-zero possibility.  The problem we have here in the United States and the Western Hemisphere, we are beholden to central bankers who, they manipulate the monetary system so deeply that we have a massive, just a monumental amount of debt that is overhanging everything.  And so the problem is that the only way to service that debt is to create inflation.  Jeff Booth talks about this, and it's a major problem for the whole system, because naturally technology, and this is actually what really brought me to Bitcoin is listening to Jeff talk about this, but naturally, when you create technologies, they're deflationary, right?  And I'm not going to steal his thunder on that.  But the problem is, central banks have to create, they have to manipulate the monetary system to create inflation.

Why are they doing that?  Well, they're doing that because there's just so much debt that's overhanging the system that they have to pay off.  Just think about it, if you have a system that every single one of us is operating in a deficit basically; let's just focus on the United States.  So in the United States, we're looking at deficits that they admit to this year, they admit to expecting deficits of $1.4 trillion.  So how do you pay that off?  You either have to have austerity, you have to lower the expenses that you have in your government, and that's not popular, it's political suicide; or, you could raise taxes.  They can't really do that because number one, it's also not popular amongst everybody, so you will lose votes if you do that; and secondly, it doesn't really work.  Eventually it will hit productivity, and productivity will come down, and your tax base will come down, and so it has the same effect.

The third thing you can do is you can just issue more debt, and then pay off the debt that's retiring, that's maturing with that new debt, and that's what they do.  But they have to keep issuing this debt.  And the only way they can perpetuate this whole charade, this whole clown show that we have, is to have high inflation.  Why?  Because if you have high inflation, then you are paying off past debt, you're using dollars that are worth less.  You have more dollars in the system that you're taxing on your gross domestic product, your GDP; that's the product of the whole country.  Well, you can tax that and have more dollars nominally to pay off that debt.  And when you do that, you can keep the system going for a very long time. 

So what I think they're doing, and I've looked at the numbers and we talk about CPI and we talk about PPI and we talk about all the inflation measures, what I think they're doing is they're not admitting what the inflation really is, and it's only going to continue like this until we have a massively deflationary event.  And then they will print so much money, your eyeballs will bleed.  And so it will be a factor of what we printed last time.  And there's your inflationary event that comes in the next few years. 

Lawrence Lepard: I would add to that, that even in addition to that, they're trying to solve a problem by crushing demand that's really not entirely an excessive demand problem.  It's a lack of supply problem that COVID, all the supply chains, etc, created.  And so if you have a lack of supply problem, what do you need?  You need more capacity.  How do you get more capacity?  You invest and build it.  By pushing the interest rate up, it makes the problem worse.  The cost of capital is higher, so you're not going to supply things to solve inflation.  I think Luke is dead ass right.  I think we're going to have double-digit inflation within the next couple of years and it's going to be very persistent.  We're going to look like Argentina. 

You can see it in things like the oil price.  I mean, it's very notable to me that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve kept inflation, or kept the oil price down and they didn't move to refill it, and now the Saudis and others are tightening up and oil is going to go through $100 and we're going to be back in the inflationary game again.  So, in addition to what James said, you've got just a structural problem that's going to make things much worse.

Peter McCormack: By the way, if you don't follow Larry on Twitter, please do, he's one of the nicest guys in the world; but if you cross him, he will end you.

Lawrence Lepard: That is true, I don't take bullshit.

Peter McCormack: He is a savage.  So my first question, whenever I hear any of these things is, I'm surrounded by some smart investors like you guys, I'm always like, "Okay, what the fuck do I do?  How do I prepare?  What do I do?"

James Lavish: Good question.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to refer to Larry first --

James Lavish: Yeah, I know.

Peter McCormack: -- because Larry's also a gold bug.

James Lavish: My first answer was going to be, "This is the most difficult market I've ever been in as an investor".  It is extraordinarily difficult to invest in this market.  So anybody out there who's feeling a little bit lost, who's feeling uncertain, yes, we all are.

Lawrence Lepard: I mean, brilliant macro investors are puzzled, okay.  But I think there's some conclusions we can clearly draw that are sound if you have a long timeframe, and the interim swings could be enormous.  There's a Weimar chart of how the Deutsche Mark hyperinflated, I mean the swings are stunning.  But having said that, bonds are clearly a bad deal, there is no way we get out of this without serious monetary debasement.  And so the notion that -- they're just not going to be money good.  They can't be and won't be money good.  Stocks, I believe, general equities are greatly overpriced, in my opinion.  We could have a very extreme deflationary outcome for a brief period of time, which I think will then be countered by a policy response that will lead to an enormous inflationary outcome.

So, in my opinion, the two assets that you want to hold to address that are gold, because it deals with the deflationary outcome.  Gold is cash that can't be printed.  It is 5,000-year-old money, it can't be printed.  So if we have massive deflation, massive risk-off, people when they're afraid, they buy gold.  And so in my view, everyone should have a little bit, just like everyone should have a little bit of Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is the apex predator, best asset in the world, long-term going to crush gold, it ultimately will flip it and so forth.  However, I say long-term, not tomorrow.  And so Bitcoin is your alpha and gold is your -- really, Bitcoin is your future stocks and gold is what bonds used to be.  Gold is a safe place to store capital.

James Lavish: I would agree with that.  And I would also say that if you have cash in your bank and you don't know what to do with it and you don't want to have 100% of your capital allocated to Bitcoin and gold, which I don't, I have capital needs, what you can do and what I do is you can buy short-term Treasuries, short-term gilts if you're here, but really short-term, like just a few months or less than a year.  And then you can roll those and keep your capital.  At least it's not just sitting in cash; at least if you need it, you can -- so, I get asked that a lot. 

I also have cash, because I think we're going to be coming into an event here.  It could either be a credit event, much like SVB, that happens in a way that the Fed and the Treasury cannot anticipate and cannot stop; there is that likelihood out there.  I attach a fairly high likelihood of something happening there.  And then there's the event of we just go into a recession, and you want to have some cash around so you can start buying things that get really cheap in a recession, or what happens is the market will draw down.

We have a saying, and the saying is that all assets go to a correlation of one and everything sells off.  So you want to have some capital around waiting for that; that's my view.

Lawrence Lepard: And you don't want to be leveraged.  I mean, everyone should go back and study what happened in March 2020.  I mean, that's what happens when you have a massive credit contraction.  And of course, then Powell came in with a druggie, over the top, whatever it takes, and printed $5 trillion over the course of the next two years.  And so you've got to be prepared for that event.

Some people ask me, "Is the bottom in in Bitcoin?"  I don't know.  I think that given how far up we've come off the bottom, I think we're unlikely to go through $16,000.  I think there's a possibility in a March event, we have a double bottom and we go back and retest $16,000 to me.  That would be just a blessing.

James Lavish: It would be momentary, though.  You can't time that.

Lawrence Lepard: The one thing that you have to remember about the Fed is that at the end of the day, their third mandate, they don't say it but it's unspoken and it's clear is, "Keep the financial system functioning".  The mathematics of the financial system literally guaranteed that at some point it will stop functioning.  And when that occurs, they will do what they did in March, they will do what they did in 2008, we've seen this playbook; there's nothing unusual about what they're doing right now.  And yes, they're saying they're going to fight inflation now, until collapse becomes a bigger risk, at which point fighting inflation will go completely out the door and you'll see everything correlates to one, everything goes down very sharply, they respond with an enormous policy response, they print until their eyes are going to bleed, as James says, and at that point in time Bitcoin's over $100,000 and gold's on $3,000, on its way to $5,000. 

So that's a scenario that you need to have in the back of your head, and that's why you don't want to be levered.  You get all levered up in your Bitcoin and we have that event and you get blown out of it, bad idea. 

James Lavish: A better idea is just to have a little bit of cash sitting around that you can have some bids just sitting there, way down.  When this happens, virtually every exchange is going to shut down, whether it's because they just can't handle the order flow, or more nefarious reasons, and we have Choke Points around the world where you physically can't get your capital from your bank onto the exchange to make a transaction.  So you've got to have some bids just sitting there, you won't get a chance to buy.

Lawrence Lepard: My view is that we've got about a 50% chance that we have that event, that March 2020 event where the bad thing happens, something really breaks, everything falls apart.  I'd say the other 50% outcome is the Luke Gromen outcome, where they slowly but surely pivot, they keep talking their book, we get high inflation, and we inflate our way out of this thing with very, very high inflation, which will benefit all of our assets as well.  It just means we don't have that dip down and/or perhaps that dip down comes at some future date. 

Peter McCormack: Do you not fear with Choke Point, which is becoming very real, Choke Point 2.0, I think we've all experienced and seen what's been happening with that; do you not fear that means we're putting a lot of our eggs in a basket that might get closed off?

James Lavish: There will be ways.  I mean, you're not going to kill Bitcoin!  I mean, we will find ways to get money back into the system, or operate around it.  I mean, I know somebody, and this is one-off, but I know somebody who lives in LA, okay, he was a professional athlete, he made millions and millions of dollars and what he did was he bought miners around the world.  He sends his Bitcoin up to wallets, like wallets that are non-KYC, and then he takes that money and he buys gift cards with them at Amazon or various places.  And he actually gets a deal on it because people want that non-KYC Bitcoin.  And so, he's getting 100 cents for every 85 cents that he gives the broker for the transaction.  So he's actually getting a 15% bump on his non-KYC capital. 

Now, that's one way that somebody does this.  He's literally living in LA off the grid and the IRS audits him every year and he's like, "My wife works and, I don't know, I own a Tesla, what do you want to know?"

Lawrence Lepard: So Peter to your point, I mean there are attack vectors and shutting the on- and off-ramps is one of them; the other is taxing the living shit out of it, which we've talked about, and I think it's a possibility it happens.  I think everybody who holds Bitcoin or gold has to be prepared to hold it until we get to the other side of this Fourth Turning, which we really need to do.  And in the interim, they could really mess up our values.  So, we've just got to wait, and one day we'll have a Bitcoin President.

Peter McCormack: Well, we talked about that today.

Lawrence Lepard: We did talk about that.

Peter McCormack: I kind of wish I had the screen up to show it.  Do you want to explain?

Lawrence Lepard: Yeah, briefly.  So, I haven't fully come out and supported him because I want to do a little bit more research, but Robert F Kennedy Jr holds a lot of potential, in my view, for being somebody who could really move this country in the right direction.  I'll tell you the three reasons why. 

One, he knows that COVID was a , and he knows that the vaccines were a scam, totally believes it.  Two, he has come out and publicly said the CIA killed his uncle and probably was involved in killing his father.  And three, he understands the fiat money quintillionaire game.  He quoted in his tweet, he quoted Nic Carter and said, "These people printed $5 trillion, and it basically all went to the rich people.  They're screwing the average people and there's an exit ramp and it's Bitcoin and they're trying to shut the exit ramp".  This is a candidate for President of the United States who's running for the Democratic seat, on the Democratic ticket.  Can he beat Biden in the primary?  I don't know.  Wikipedia says he's a conspiracy theorist.  We know he knows the truth; that's the difference.  And, I think there's a possibility. 

The best thing that came out of our pod this morning that was wonderful is you said, "We've got to get this guy on the pod", and I think he will come on your show.  You get Robert F Kennedy on your show?  Oh, my God!  I mean, in terms of for your show, but also for Kennedy, and I mean if this guy's the real deal, and I'm not 100% sure he is because he's a Kennedy, but if this guy is the real deal, wow, right?  Do you want to hear the tweet?

Lawrence Lepard: Yeah, read the tweet.

Peter McCormack: It's kind of wild.  Okay, I won't do it all, but anyway, "The claim that FedNow is not a first step towards a CBDC would be more easily digestible were we not aware of the Biden Administration's steady barrage of hostile broadsides against cryptocurrencies.  Between 2008 and 2022, the Fed partnered with a handful of big banks to print $10 trillion, 10 centuries of wealth in 15 years, a bonanza for the banksters.  Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin give the public an escape route from the splatter zone when this bubble invariably bursts.  So the White House has colluded with the banksters to keep us all trapped in the bubble of profiteering and control. 

"In his February 8 post on Pirate's Wire, Nic Carter", shout out to our boy Nic Carter, "describes how the White House has organized banksters to participate in a sophisticated, widespread crackdown to destroy the crypto industry.  Carter describes 15 incidents where President Biden has weaponised the FDIC, OCC and DOJ to force crypto-friendly banks to close their doors to crypto firms since December 3", etc.  "We should be wary since CBDCs are the ultimate mechanism of social surveillance and control.  As Balaji says, the distinction between FedNow and a CBDC is important from a technical standpoint, but not from a civil liberty standpoint", etc. 

I think the really interesting thing is that you read it out loud, and I can imagine some locals from Bedford walking in the background going, "Who are these nutters; what are they on about?"  You sound like a nutter when you explain it, but we know it's all true, we know it's all happening.  And so, to have someone like him, a Kennedy, and we know they've got a history of being murdered, stand up and say this kind of stuff...

Lawrence Lepard: Somebody, one of the wags on Twitter said, "Yeah, okay, that's great, tell him to stay away from Dealey Plaza!  Look, it's going to take leadership to get this country going in the right direction, and here you've got a legitimate presidential candidate who knows that the CIA killed his uncle, which they clearly did, and believes that it's likely that the CIA killed his father, which I believe they did.  And, I mean, this is stunning stuff, this is absolutely stunning.  He's saying the quiet part out loud.  I mean, a lot of people in America know he's right, and will he win?  I don't know, but it's going to be damn interesting to watch, I'll say that much.

Peter McCormack: What do you think the political reaction will be to the next five, ten years as this plays out?  It's very easy for one administration to criticise the other as it happens, but we know as soon as they come into the administration, they're going to do the same thing.

James Lavish: Well, I mean it's no different here, it's just different parties that are all playing the same game.  They're not against each other, they pretend they are, they're out with their policies for their constituents, they've chosen who their constituents are, super-liberal or super-conservative; but in reality, in closed rooms, they're all shaking hands, high-fiving.  So what will happen, in my opinion, is that eventually, whether one party adopts it to stand out from the other party, the other party is not going to really have a choice. 

But the difference in the United States is we have a state system.  So, even if there's federal oversight with our SEC, or whatever the different governing bodies are going to oversee these things, we have a state system that is set up to have rights within states.  We're watching a huge battle in Texas right now about Bitcoin mining and whether they're going to be taxed or whether they're going to be restricted.  But you're also seeing people like Caitlin who are working so hard in Wyoming trying to get Wyoming to be a Bitcoin-friendly area.  So, the difference in the United States is that I think it really starts from the states and then it bubbles up to the federal level.

Lawrence Lepard: Yeah, I mean politics in the United States is just disgusting, like politics generally around the world.  I mean, all I need to know is that Elizabeth Warren came to the Congress and she had no net worth and today she's worth $60 million.  How the fuck did that happen? 

Peter McCormack: Complaining about the greedy bankers.

Lawrence Lepard: Exactly, and that's just one example; there are tens of examples that are very similar to that.  And so, this system is hopelessly broken.

James Lavish: Eventually, it's going to be so well ingrained in everybody's minds, and when it becomes a safe haven in these areas that need it so desperately, Lebanon and in Ghana and in Venezuela, it's taking hold.  And so it starts grassroots up, and that's how it works, and eventually they're just not going to have a choice.

Peter McCormack: Larry, you also told me about a gold conference you went to, a gold bug conference.  But everything's a bit different.  I think you should explain that, because I thought that was super-interesting.

Lawrence Lepard: I'm not sure what part of it.  I was at the Zurich Gold Conference earlier this week and a couple of questions have been asked a lot of me; I think it would be interesting.  I go to a lot of gold conferences, I speak at a lot of gold conferences, you know I'm a gold guy, I believe in gold and I think the two assets are complementary. 

First thing, whenever I pull a gold conference, and generally speaking they're older and not as tuned into technology as everybody in this room, I say, "How many of you guys own Bitcoin?"  Half the hands go up, so half of them get it.  And I view my role in this whole revolution as, my job is to orange pill gold guys, because they already get the problem, kind of.  And what they don't understand is that this is safe.  They look at Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX, crypto, etc, all the bullshit, and they naturally conclude crypto is a fraud.  I mean, without doing the work to really understand that what's been created here is immutable, digital security that cannot be tampered with, they don't understand that.  I mean, it is digital gold, it's got better properties than gold. 

Once they come to understand that, then I think, "Okay, I've got to hedge my bets, I'll have some of each".  And then ultimately, I have friends who are total gold bugs who now have zero gold, and they're mad at me because they say, "Hey, there can only be one.  Why don't you just have the one?"  And I say, "Because I don't like having 70% drawdowns on all of my net worth, and so I balance the two out".  I mean, I like having gold because when Bitcoin gets cheap, I can sell gold to buy Bitcoin.  But was there anything else particular about the gold comments that you were looking for?

Peter McCormack: I thought the correlation between age and Bitcoin was interesting.

Lawrence Lepard: Well yeah, very clearly.  I mean, and also just the tone.  I mean to be honest with you, I'm there and it's dreary and it's depressing, and the people are between 60 and 90 and they've all been waiting forever and it's kind of like, "God damn it, someday is this asset going to work and I'm going to get rich?"  I mean we were joking about it one night.  I've been telling my wife for 25 years, "Honey, someday we're going to wake up because we got all this and we're going to be so fucking rich, it's going to be crazy", and she looks at me and she's like, "Would you just shut the fuck up?  I love you, I've been with you for 30 years, but I'm tired of hearing that.  I'm just tired of it, because it's never going to happen, Larry, it's just not fucking going to happen".

Lawrence Lepard: So then, "Honey, I got this new thing, it's even better than gold.  It's called Bitcoin.  Yeah, and it's going to $1 million", and she's like, "Now you've really fucking lost it!"  And the great thing is, I live in Naples in the wintertime.  Foss has a house in Naples too, and Foss's wife and my wife have become friends and they're both really lovely women and very balanced, very normal.  And they sit there and they talk to each other about, "Let me tell you the crazy shit Larry did", and Julie's like, "Oh, no, that's nothing, let me tell you about what Greg did last week!"

James Lavish: Yeah, but then it comes back, "Does your husband also think that Bitcoin's going to go to $1 million?"  "No, he thinks it's going to go to fucking $2 million!"

Lawrence Lepard: Exactly.  So, look, it's hard being married to crazy guys like Foss and myself, but we're not crazy, we're right, it's just maths.  I mean, Foss has got it right.  And we're doing this because we want to see this world be a better place, and we want to see -- I mean, we're the gray masters, right?  We're the old guys.  You know, FDR was the gray master during World War II, and Eisenhower and all the other young guys were out there fighting the fucking war.  And you young guys are fighting the war, you know, the Odell's of the world, the Mallers of the world, and women, absolutely, young guys, women, you guys are fighting the war.  And we're sitting here egging you on and encouraging you, and bringing the benefit of seeing how the other side has played the game for 30 years.

I mean, one thing is sure, they've got a ton of privilege, they've got all the money, they control the media outlets, all this shit, and they don't play by the rules.  I mean, it's just brutal the way they break the rules.  I mean, black letter law, they should have basically had to shut down Silicon Valley Bank.  Dodd-Frank said, "All the depositors take a haircut, they lose money because they're in a stupid bank that did a stupid thing".  Of course, that happened, they ran into trouble.  On Sunday morning, Janet Yellen is on Meet the Press and she says, "Oh, we're going to follow Dodd-Frank, there will be no bailout".  Six hours later, they fucking bailed it out, right?  Buy the fucking paper programme, right? 

I mean, they basically violate their own rules, left and right, and I've seen them do this for 25 years and they're going to continue to do it.  But the fact of the matter is, when Bitcoin goes through $100,000, and then when Bitcoin goes through $1 million, and more and more people are like the people in this room...  I mean, I was at a Bitcoin conference in 2016, and there were like 50 people there.  And now, I go all over the world and there are thousands of bitcoiners.  And I mean, here's a good story. 

I'm in the hotel at the Gold Show in Zurich two days ago, and some guy about my age walks up to me, starts looking at me like this, says, "Are you Lawrence Lepard?"  I said, "Yeah.  Hi, how are you?  Nice to meet you.  Who are you?"  He says, "Oh, I'm Joe Smith, I'm a captain for American Airlines.  I just flew the 767 from Chicago to Zurich, I'm overnighting here at this hotel.  Me and all my buddies, we're huge gold and Bitcoin guys, and we love watching your podcasts.  Do you know Foss?"  "Oh, yeah, I know Foss".  I mean, he's dropping all these names.  "You know Jeff Booth?"  "Yeah, I've met Jeff Booth".  I mean, this is a 60-year-old, Chicago-based, American or United Airlines captain.  I mean, the word is spreading, people are getting it, they're definitely getting it.

Peter McCormack: I've got one for you.  I had it last year at the Bitcoin conference.  Some guy came up to me and he said, "Hi, can I have your photo?"  And I was like, "Yeah".  So he stood next to me and took his photo and said, "Thanks, BitBoy", and walked off!  I was like, what the fuck?

Lawrence Lepard: That's rough!

Peter McCormack: That was rough.

Lawrence Lepard: That must have hurt!

Peter McCormack: That hurt bad.  Alright, welcome back.  Holy shit, it's Jeff Booth!  Jeff flew all the way from -- I think you flew the furthest to come here.  Got here yesterday afternoon, went out and got smashed till 4.00am, got up. 

Jeff Booth: I love bitcoiners!

Peter McCormack: Got up, recorded a podcast and he's here now.  What a fucking legend!  The Price of Tomorrow.  Didn't come up when you were drinking, did it?  Right, Jeff, you and I had a great chat today and a lot of stuff clicked with me this week that hadn't clicked previously, and you talked about a similar story with Luke Gromen again.  A lot of stuff clicked with him again.  You've been telling everyone about the deflationary environments that we should be living under for a while now and I think it's starting to click. 

So just as an intro, hands up if you haven't read Jeff's book; it's okay if you haven't.  Okay, Jeff, the TL;DR of the book, just let everyone know what the TL;DR is.

Jeff Booth: Technology creates productivity.  Those productivity gains should flow to society in the form of lower prices.  We live in a system that goes exactly the opposite to that, and that means that instead of the productivity flowing to your life and lower prices, it gets concentrated up in very few people and your life gets worse.  That's the deal and all of the symptoms of the entire world could be described by that simple statement.

Peter McCormack: And how many pages is the book?

Jeff Booth: 240.

Peter McCormack: And what did you realise today you could do with the book?

Jeff Booth: Write, "Technology is deflationary, deal with it".  That could have been the book!

Peter McCormack: Okay, explain it like I'm 5, what is going wrong; why is technology not deflationary right now; what is going on; what is the scam?

Jeff Booth: Yeah, and James just said this, and there's a whole bunch of voices in this ecosystem that are actually making this better or some of my ideas and I'm carrying on some of the other ideas, and they're making this stronger and stronger and Bitcoin kind of resolves that system problem in a transition.  So when people are talking about Bitcoin price going up, that is not what's happening.  Everything is falling against Bitcoin forever, that's what's happening.  And so, when you're measuring Bitcoin price going up, you're actually defaulting to the currency that's being manipulated, that's what's happening.

So, if the currency is manipulating, essentially abundance and money, if you can create unlimited monetary units, then everything else must be scarce, because the monetary units are abundant, it's measuring everything else, everything has to be scarce.  And if you have fixed monetary units, then that productivity will flow to society in the form of a free market force.  The problem is the existing system cannot resolve that problem.  And as James just said, you have about $400 trillion of global debt.  And when people are measuring inside the system, US versus China versus everything else, instead of measuring the entire global debt against the entire GDP, so you had an increase of 100 --in the preceding 20 years before I wrote my book, because technology's moving faster, you had an increase of $185 trillion of global debt to create $46 trillion of GDP.  So effectively, $4 to $1 of debt growth for GDP, and obviously that's not sustainable. 

But it has to be exponentially more to offset technology going the other way.  Why?  Because technology is net negative GDP, right?  And here's why; imagine your calculator app.  The first calculator app cost a couple bucks, we'll call it $10 a month, I don't actually know exactly, but it created some value and people paid for it.  And then the next entrepreneur, because there was money in it, created another calculator.  And while there is a penny of profit, entrepreneurs will attack that like crazy until there's no more profit in it.  And where does your calculator app show up in GDP? 

We used to buy calculators, right?  We used to have a whole bunch of labour to be able to produce calculators, and now it's free.  How about your photos; where does that show up in GDP?  You have abundance in photos, it's negative GDP.  Productivity is negative GDP, especially when the rails of technology are driving things more and more digitised, more and more efficiency, and it's exponential in that function.  So you have to ask yourself, if the natural world, prices fall to the marginal cost of production, which is known in economics, why isn't that happening?  It's only happening in some things, meaning there's less things to manipulate to push up in price; food, housing, less and less things all the time.

We're living in that world and we're measuring what's happening from a broken system, and that's why it's so hard to see.  And you're spending your time, most of your time I suspect, even for bitcoiners, I'm going to have a hedge over here for when the system unwinds, and I'm going to try to make fiat dollars over and over and over again.  And I'm going to yell at the system.  I'm going to march down Wall Street, I'm going to break windows, I'm going to yell at all those people; and every time you do, you make that system stronger.  You're living in that system, because you will not vote for that system to collapse.  And in as much as I love Larry --

Peter McCormack: We all love Larry.

Jeff Booth: But we see in that piece, we see this differently, because there is nothing that Powell can do, there's nothing that anyone can do in that system.  Some of those people know that this is a broken system, but what would they do?  Like the Fed.  If the Fed stayed firm and tightened for a long time, then every one of you would vote, because what that would mean is the counterparty risk of the exact $400 trillion would collapse, and everything tied to it, your house, your supply chains, your food on the shelves, everything would fail spectacularly until there was a massive easing to try to reflate it.  So, if it was failing at that rate, everyone in this room would say the Fed loses independence, and they would vote for people who would tell them they'll make it better by manipulating money.  That's how dictators come into power in every other country, that's what ends up happening.  You essentially transfer your individual rights and freedoms away to somebody who tells you they'll make it better, and they'll manipulate money faster.  That's what we are dealing with. 

Bitcoin resolves that system peacefully.  And when I say peacefully, the system is going to be -- there's going to be a lot of chaos, it's going to get way worse.  But for bitcoiners, if you actually know that all prices are falling to the marginal cost of production, meaning prices are going down forever in relation to Bitcoin, then you know everything else that's going to happen in the existing system, as it gets worse and worse and chaotic and Choke Points and all this bullshit to be able to manipulate your time, to be able to lock you into a system that's going to get worse, you just tune it out and move forward into the system that's moving forward faster and faster. 

Peter McCormack: So GDP is a trick really because I've tracked it, I've looked; the GDP growth in this country over the last few decades has been fairly impressive, yet at the same time we have in this country a massive growth in food banks, we now have warm banks which is a depressing addition to people living under poverty, and we have a big growth in poverty.  So GDP appears to be a trick that makes us believe we're growing.

Jeff Booth: So those things are measured in GDP.  Government spending is measured in GDP, as you have to provide services to a whole bunch of people left out of jobs, as people will vote for UBI and everything else, all of that shows up in GDP.  It's ludicrous because it is the system, the error in the system that people are measuring to give validation to the system that it based on insolvent debt to be able to repay this insolvent debt.  It's ludicrous but you can't see that unless you're actually measuring in a different system without the counterparty risk.  And that's what Bitcoin is; it's an entirely different system that works all of the rules.  

What ends up happening with a lot of people in Bitcoin, because this is so hard on the brain, is they carry the baggage of the old system into the new system.  And they carry the baggage of how governments will work, they carry that baggage of how debt will work, they carry that baggage of how equality will work, they carry that baggage, all of it, into the new system that operates totally different.  All of those things, all of those problems -- climate change, you can't solve climate change from a system that needs to grow forever by manipulating money on a finite planet.  It should be pretty obvious, right?  What if prices kept falling?  And like the air that you breathe right now, why aren't you paying for the air that you breathe right now?  It seems ludicrous.  It's as ludicrous as the system we live in, right?  Because all of those things would fall at a rate which you wouldn't require the job that's going to be gone anyways to live in abundance because prices will just keep falling.

Because we can't see that, we carry the baggage from the old system.  Because we've never seen, humanity has never seen a system that has decentralisation and security at the base layer at the first instance.  And so for 14 years, it's gotten more secure, more decentralised, more secure, more decentralised, and you can see it rolling out against an attack vector that is -- the system we live in is 10,000 times bigger than Bitcoin today.  Think about the power in that system, think about your own input into that system, what you're doing to make that system stronger, and it can't kill Bitcoin.  Bitcoin's getting stronger and stronger and stronger.  And then what people don't realise is then the second layer, it would have to look like that if it was going to actually make it, it would have to protect itself against everything.  That base layer would have to be so strong, so resilient.

So, when I think about Bitcoin maxis that are so harsh against the small changes, they were right because it has to be that resilient, decentralised, a security, because we don't normally trust something like that.  We've never had a historic moment that we didn't trust the institution, the bank, the Constitution, all of these that would give us our rights.  Now we have something that doesn't require that trust, nor the manipulation in it, but it had to be that strong.  Also, why you would naturally see if something was so strong and all you could do is hold it but you couldn't do anything else with it, it would create a market incentive, a natural market incentive to everybody else to say, "I got a better version, I got Bitcoin 2.0 that's better than Bitcoin", and a lot of people would fall for that trap naturally because they saw a whole bunch of other people get rich.  Their existing system is breaking down and they're looking for, "I need more money.  How about this?" and you'd create an entire crypto scam market that didn't look like Bitcoin.  It would just be natural that it would look like that.

Then, because technology hardens in layers like that, and it has to be resilient at the base layer, you also wouldn't see what was available on top of the layer until the next layer was there.  None of the innovation on top, like Lightning as an example, or Liquid or a whole bunch of different -- or Fedimint, and all these things, or Nostr, you wouldn't see what's possible with this plus this plus this until it was there.  And entrepreneurs realise, "Holy shit, I can electrocute somebody on stage?"  But you wouldn't see that until it's there, and it's talking to a base layer that's secure.

So for the life of me, I actually can't believe that more people aren't investing all of their time in this space, because the asymmetry of that bet in aligning the world to where you would want it to go is so crazy that I can't believe more people aren't taking their time from this old system and moving it to this new system, because it's so powerful.  And I'm in a fortunate position.  I've got to say, two years ago, I was a hypocrite.  And why I say that is I wrote about this, I knew what was happening, I held Bitcoin, I kept on buying more Bitcoin, but I just held it.  And 10% of my time was podcasts, talking about this and everything else.  And 90% of my time was boards of public companies or fiat companies and everything else.  And that's where I was making all my income and everything else to do that. 

I realised, if this is going to happen, then I need to move 90% of my time to the system I want to make happen and use my energy there instead of the existing system.  And so I left boards, I moved out of some of these so I could start the Ego Death Capital, so I could invest all of my time with entrepreneurs building the rails to bring on billions of people to this ecosystem.  And what I would say in that, what you had to do is I had to take less money in fiat terms to be able to build this, but in Bitcoin terms it's going to be way more.  And the advantage of that is, for me, I cannot believe I get to do what I get to do, I can't believe that Pete invites me to Bedford --

Peter McCormack: I can't believe you came!

Jeff Booth: But it's crazy.  We're living in a phased transition and the people in this room, you're going to look at some of the things that you're involved in in ten years and you're going to go, "I was part of that ride".  It's so crazy to meet the people we're meeting and the people that are driving this and become friends with them and build the rails to the future where the world's going.  It's just actually so surreal.

Peter McCormack: Well, Larry said he was at an event in 2016 with 60 people there.  We've got probably 160 people in a town nobody probably had heard of, even from England, a while ago.  Okay, so that really clicked for me today.  And actually, the 1 Bitcoin equals 1 Bitcoin meme actually clicked in a different way because of that.  But then we started talking about AI.  So how's that going to change the game?

Jeff Booth: It doesn't change the game, it's not a different thing than Bitcoin, it's just a faster -- and for those who haven't read my book, I predicted where AI would be now, four years ago.  All human intelligence is is error correction.  We're an analogue version, or a meat sack version of neurons connecting on error correction.  We don't realise all of the stuff that's gone before us that we put to the background that we don't have to think about every day, because it's already been solved.  That error correction has already been solved and we move that to the background through that intelligence layer, and we deal on top of that background.  That's how we solve things too. 

So, humans are just moving through that paradigm, that next step on evolution, where we're moving that intelligence to machines.  And there's more storage, more compute, and it is logical, it is completely logical, and this is why people are scared of this.  There's two camps, "Wow, this is going to make me way more productive, I'm going to make a ton of money".  And that's partially true, if you're early on AI.  What that actually means is as the pie is shrinking, you're going to take more of it.  Does that make sense?  So, as the entire pie price is falling, the marginal cost of production, if you're early on AI, you're going to take more of it.  But what you're doing is actually training the AI to take your job too, that's what you're doing.  And so it's just a path that prices should fall at a faster and faster rate as you're doing that. 

Now, because of incentives and because of the way the world works, what people will think is, "Wow, I'm going to do this and I'm going to win", and they will think they're winning in the existing system, and the whole system is kind of burning to the ground because more and more people are losing as a result of that.  But it's inevitable that at some time -- and I think this is why this is hard.  People think in light switch moments and their fear overtakes their ability to think.  Instead of just thinking about that, think about AI as a trend that is constantly going to get better and better and it's going to merge with machines, all sorts of machines, humanoid machines, all sorts of different machines, and the cost of those machines and the AI is going to be super-intelligence and it's going to be smarter at every single thing than you are or any of us is today.

Imagine that world, whether it's 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 100 years from now, but it's going to be a trend towards there.  Wouldn't in that world food also be free?  Wouldn't in that world all of these things, because it would constantly trend down, also be free?  Because there's no labour in it anymore, all of the labour isn't needed.  So if you stop that trend by manipulating money, you concentrate the AI in very few people and everybody else is slaves.  That's what it would look like.  And because we wouldn't vote for a system, if a politician said to you, "Hey, you're going to get paid less next year, but your real income is going to go up", most people don't even know what real wages are, right?  In other words, prices are going to fall faster than your wages are going to decline.  If a politician said that to you, how many people would vote for that politician?  They'd look like a lunatic.

So it's not the politicians, it's us, and Bitcoin won't let us change it, so it forces that function and prices.  But the only way to measure what's happening there, the only way to measure that productivity falling is through Bitcoin.  If you hold Bitcoin, you're measuring that outcome properly.  If you hold fiat, you're not.

Danny Knowles: If it's inevitable that everything trends to this marginal cost of zero, is there any point in bitcoiners getting involved in the policy side of things, or getting angry at the New York Times on Twitter, or should we just completely separate ourselves from that system?

Jeff Booth: So for me, I can't answer for anybody else.  I can't answer for Larry, I can't answer for Greg Foss, I can't.  A lot of my friends will do that and everything else, and I actually think that some of it's really valuable right in a different way than what I would do.  What I do though is, okay, this is all going to look like this.  You can't change a politician inside the system, can't change it at all because they can't let it collapse, they have to keep printing, nobody in that system.  And all of the media channels have to do the same thing.  The next step of that is, and we should talk about Nostr, the next step of that is they have to close the communication channels, they have to.  It has to look more like China; you have to lose your individual rights and freedoms.  Not maybe, it has to happen.

GitHub, anything related to Bitcoin on GitHub has to be taken off.  If an Executive Order could come tomorrow to Microsoft to say take it all off, so the whole repository, all of that, and then on Nostr too, anything that they don't like, has to.  And here's the thing, people will vote to make it happen because they so need more money out of that system; that's the scary part of it.  All of these things are still in front of us, out of the existing system.  So could you yell at it?  Yeah, you could yell at it, but it won't change it, because again, go break a bunch of windows, go march against Wall Street or do what the truckers did, which I helped through Bitcoin -- when I say that I helped, I was a Bitcoin wallet holder and just when 70% of Canadians turn on you for free speech, you realise how manipulated the system is and how much they believe that.

So all of those things will happen.  They'll print more money to solve that problem and everybody will go home and forget.  And so all of those things, what you just asked, yes, you actually probably empower that system and you make it stronger because you also pull away people because now you could look like a conspiracy theorist, and there's a whole bunch of people that have no idea what we're talking about that move further away because it's easy to label people, in-group bias, out-group bias, so they move further away from the conversation rather than closer to it.  And I just thought, okay, I know all of this is going to happen, so what do I do to put my time and energy into things that actually are going to make a huge difference and onboard billions of people?  Again, everybody's entitled to their own thing, it's just for my time and energy, I want to put it to where I think it will have the highest and best use.

Peter McCormack: I think I know where you want to go with Nostr now, and I think Ben's display earlier was great, because I thought of Nostr as just something that was allowing us to talk to each other, a bit like a decentralised Twitter.  What I realise is it's actually a decentralised internet.  So let's talk about Nostr.

Jeff Booth: So, what Ben showed you there -- and there's a lot of people who think about Nostr right now and they'd say it's clunky, it's early, all of these things.  When I was on Twitter early, it looked the same.  When I was building on the internet early, you want clunky?  Ten minutes to download a cat picture!  You want clunky?  That's what the internet looked like.  And so that's actually where the value is, because as it's clunky, it actually tells you where to solve to actually create value.  And so all of those entrepreneurs that are racing into that system are creating value to be able to solve that clunky. 

Now, if the communications have to be closed, if that is next in line, Operation Choke Point, all of these things is next in line, CBDC is next in line, and in China they can say to Apple, "Close this", and Apple closes it, Apple complies.  And if you think that that won't happen in the US or here and in Europe, it will happen, it has to happen to protect the existing system.  The existing system has to lock you in and destroy your money in real terms to be able to remain solvent.  And then it has to do it again and again, because technology is moving faster and faster. 

So this is a guarantee that some of these communication channels get closed.  And because Nostr has integrated bitcoin at the base layer and it's a communication channel that nobody can stop, it's decentralised, then GitHub is going to be replaced on Nostr, YouTube is going to be replaced on Nostr, all of these centralised services Ben showed you, Amazon is going to be replaced on Nostr.  And instead of replacing it in a centralised version, that value is going to accrue to people, and prices are going to continue to fall in that version. 

That is very early to be able to say that.  Now, think about for you personally what it means.  So if you look at any other centralised application or anything that's grown really fast through network effects, YouTube, Google, Facebook, all of these things, Twitter, if you're there early, you're growing along the growth curve.  So if you're providing value early, you're growing along the growth curve.

And so if you're a TikTok influencer early, it's resilient.  Now, later on you have to fight the algorithm to stay relevant, and they could take away all your views tomorrow as other people are competing, but it's more likely that you'll stay relevant versus a person that's way late to that, trying to get views, trying to get through that noise.  If you're not on YouTube today, go and try to create a YouTube channel to get views.  Good luck.  All of the content, everybody trying to matter and get views on YouTube, really hard.  If you're already there, it persists. 

Now think about Nostr at the base layer, instead of at the client level.  When I say client, I'm talking about instead of YouTube, the base level would be the internet or Nostr, and the client in this case would be YouTube.  The network effects exist on the base layer, and the clients compete on top of that.  What that means is, if you sign up in Nostr now through any client that's competing on top of that, then they are competing for your attention forever.  And if they increase the price to lock you in, then you move, all of your followers, all of your content comes with you forever. 

So now, imagine a network effect that grows like that, and you're early, that grows like that, and then instead of just on a Twitter type of client, now YouTube's there, now Spotify's there, now all of the artists are there.  And that all accrues to you if you're providing value to other people.  And so it's such a powerful idea, and it decentralises communications and it's tied to Bitcoin.  And these things don't -- one plus one equals, in this case, ten.  You can't see the non-linear path until some of these things start to happen and what that means, and some of the entrepreneurs.  And when Ben shows you and you say, "Oh, that's clunky", I bet you 99% of the people in the room said, "Oh, that's clunky, that's too hard".  When I saw that, I thought, "Wow, you can make a smoke machine go on a QR code.  That means you can open doors, all of these things all over the world, you can do on a QR code".  And some of the innovation that's going to come on this that it just breaks my brain to think about, but entrepreneurs are going to be all over it, are going to create crazy value. 

You should be there.  You should be there as fast as possible, providing value, because that value will accrue to you too.  And it's going to de-risk a centralised communication channel that we're in.  Imagine a centralised communication channel, if you think minds can't be adopted today, imagine that centralised communication channel with a variable in the AI that says, "Convince these people that this is the right answer", owned by the state.  And every click you do is trying to convince you and it's measuring how much time you're on whatever site.  And if you click off something, "Okay, I'm going to try something else to move this person's mind there".  That's where everything today in that centralised system with AI will take you. 

The more that you're listening to the existing news, the more that you're leaning into the existing news, the more you're actually corrupted by that. 

Peter McCormack: Round of applause for our guests.