WBD656 Audio Transcription
A Philosophical Case for Bitcoin with Bradley Rettler
Release date: Wednesday 10th May
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Bradley Rettler. 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.
Bradley Rettler is an Associate Professor of Philosophy, and a member of the Resistance Money, a philosophy research collective focused on Bitcoin. In this interview, we discuss the potential ethical implications of AI, philosophical reflections on money creation and governance, the importance of financial literacy, and combating misinformation about Bitcoin.
“If you had to step behind the veil of ignorance and forget who you are in the world, would you want to step back into a world that had Bitcoin or that didn’t have Bitcoin? And for most people in the world, it’s good for them that Bitcoin exists.”
— Bradley Rettler
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: Bradley Rettler's in town. How you doing, man?
Bradley Rettler: Pretty good.
Peter McCormack: Welcome to Bedford.
Bradley Rettler: Thank you, it's awesome to be in Bedford.
Peter McCormack: It's awesome to have you in Bedford. Is Bradley the last of the Resistance Money crew?
Danny Knowles: We've completed it.
Peter McCormack: We've done the set.
Bradley Rettler: The trilogy.
Peter McCormack: Isn't it more than a trilogy?
Danny Knowles: No, it's a trilogy. Troy's not part of the Resistance Money crew, he's not the ABC.
Peter McCormack: So it's just Bradley, Andrew and Craig?
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I thought there was another one.
Bradley Rettler: No, if there was anyone else it would be Troy, he's the next closest.
Peter McCormack: An honorary member. Well, listen, don't make me cry like Andrew Bailey did!
Bradley Rettler: That goes directly against Andrew's instructions!
Peter McCormack: So you've come in from Wyoming?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I've been to Wyoming.
Bradley Rettler: Nice.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, loved it. Cowboy country.
Bradley Rettler: You've talked a bunch about coming back on the podcast.
Peter McCormack: Well, so we want to go there, we want to do a Resistance Money event. We want to get all you crazy bastards around the table.
Bradley Rettler: I have already started looking into what table that could be, somewhere in the universe!
Peter McCormack: It needs to be a good, big, thick table, we need a bottle of whiskey, and we need to get into the most important, pertinent questions of time, money, space, and everything else.
Bradley Rettler: It would be amazing.
Peter McCormack: How was your flight over, man, all good?
Bradley Rettler: It was great, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Have you been to the UK before?
Bradley Rettler: Once, yeah. The week before the pandemic, I went to Liverpool.
Peter McCormack: You went to Liverpool?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: You went to Liverpool and Bedford?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: That's fascinating.
Danny Knowles: That's an unusual couple of cities to go to.
Peter McCormack: I'm probably one of the few people who those are the two towns that are most important to me!
Bradley Rettler: Well, me too!
Danny Knowles: You've got an enemy sat here, do you know this?
Peter McCormack: Why, is he blue?
Danny Knowles: Everton fan.
Peter McCormack: How the fuck does someone from Wyoming end up an Everton fan? There's got to be some weird story behind that!
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, it's not too long, but I grew up as a Green Bay Packers fan, so when I started watching...
Peter McCormack: Oh, so you like teams that suck!
Bradley Rettler: I like teams that are involved in the community. I found out about Everton in the community, found out about the academy, and I was like, "That's the team for me". And then they started sucking!
Peter McCormack: Green Bay Packers are the ones that are owned by the community, right? And the area, what is it, like 30,000 people live there or something?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, there are fewer people that live in Green Bay than the stadium holds.
Peter McCormack: That's insane. Aaron Rodgers?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I know a little bit.
Bradley Rettler: Good job.
Peter McCormack: Have they ever won the Super Bowl?
Bradley Rettler: Oh yeah. They won the first Super Bowl and the second one, and then a couple after that too.
Peter McCormack: When was the first one?
Bradley Rettler: In the 1960s.
Peter McCormack: Oh, so the sport's that new?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, they'd been playing for a while, but the first time the championship was called the Super Bowl was won by Green Bay.
Peter McCormack: I quite like it. I prefer college football, but I do like American football. I've got into it over the last few years.
Bradley Rettler: Nice.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think it's good. I'm a 49ers fan.
Bradley Rettler: Okay.
Peter McCormack: That's my team, for no other reason than when I first got into it they were the biggest team!
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I had a 49ers jacket when I was a kid because Joe Montana was awesome.
Peter McCormack: It was Joe Montana, Jerry Rice and then Steve Young came through.
Bradley Rettler: And it wasn't cool to have your own team's jacket, for some reason, the team that you actually liked that was local!
Peter McCormack: So I've got a big first opening question for you. How many grains of sand make a heap?
Bradley Rettler: That's a hard one. Somewhere between 15 and 100,000.
Peter McCormack: Why such a broad number?
Bradley Rettler: I don't know.
Peter McCormack: Danny, why am I asking this question?
Danny Knowles: Well, when we were on the phone, that was one of the things that you said. I can't remember, was it part of your class that you teach?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, so I teach metaphysics and I write in metaphysics. And one of the big questions is about vagueness, words that have application conditions whereby you can't really set determinate limits. So, for example, heap or mountain, sort of vague where the boundaries of a mountain are. Bald; you don't have to have no hair to be bald.
Peter McCormack: Shout out to Udi.
Danny Knowles: And me!
Bradley Rettler: At a certain point, it becomes vague whether you're bald or not, and then it's vague for a really long time until you have no hair at all, and then it's not vague anymore. So yeah, there are these questions in metaphysics about how we should deal with things like, "is a heap", "is bald", when they apply, when they don't apply, because sentences like, "Brad is bald" are going to be false. Sentences like, "Danny is bald", I'm not sure. You don't have any hair but it's by choice. Does that count?
Danny Knowles: It's only partly by choice.
Peter McCormack: You're optionally bald.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I can tell. You could easily have a lot of hair.
Peter McCormack: You would have bald areas.
Danny Knowles: Yeah, yeah, I'd have bald areas.
Bradley Rettler: I don't know why this conversation is focusing on Danny's hair, but there are people that aren't optionally bald, but are balding, and at a certain point they'll go bald, and there's questions in the middle about what to do about sentences ascribing baldness to them.
Peter McCormack: Does it matter?
Bradley Rettler: There's a guy at the University of Leeds who makes a lot of money consulting with companies about how to pay taxes on things that they own when those things are spatially separated. So, do you own a ship if you own all the parts of the ship that they're scattered around a lot, because ships are taxed differently than wood and steel and things like that? And so he writes these philosophy-based arguments for whatever the lower tax thing is!
Danny Knowles: I bet HMRC hate this person.
Peter McCormack: There's always a financial incentive to these things.
Bradley Rettler: That's one way in which it's easy to see that how practical it can be.
Peter McCormack: And so this is a module within a course?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, this is one or two weeks of the metaphysics course that I teach, where we talk about time and space and causation and composition and personal identity and things like that.
Peter McCormack: Let's go with personal identity first; what do you discuss with that?
Bradley Rettler: There, we're primarily focused on what kinds of things persons are. So do we have souls; are we purely material objects; are we animals; are we animals that have souls; which parts of us are essential to us being human; which parts of us are essential to ourselves? So, it's a two part question; one is what kind of thing are we; and then the other is, what does it take to be the same person as another person; when are A and B the same person; do they have to have the same memories; do they have to have the same physical parts?
So, you get a lot of sci-fi that deals with this question. In Star Trek, we have the transporter and what the transporter does is it scans your body, and then using brand-new material, makes a complete duplicate of you somewhere else and destroys the original.
Peter McCormack: It does?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, at least the next generation transporter.
Peter McCormack: I just don't watch Star Trek because I think it's shit, but I'm interested in this idea.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, so something appears across the universe that has exactly the same memories as you do. There's no other competitor because it's destroyed the version that it scanned. Is that you? It has none of the same physical parts as you, there's no sort of causal connection between any of the things that the material object did, but it has all the same psychology as you.
Peter McCormack: So if you were transported here rather than getting the flight in, it makes no difference to me because it's still the same Bradley.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: But to you it might.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I'm not sure.
Peter McCormack: Or if you have the same memories, did you even know?
Bradley Rettler: I would think that I'm Bradley, and I would think that the transporter worked perfectly. Now, one problem is if you don't destroy the original, then you have two competitors and then things get tricky, because that the guy that's still sitting in Wyoming having breakfast with my family is going to think he's me, I'm going to think I'm me, I fly back home and my wife's got a tough decision.
Peter McCormack: Or a party!
Bradley Rettler: That's one option!
Peter McCormack: And so what differs us from animals?
Bradley Rettler: Some people say nothing. So Andrew Bailey, his dissertation was on the view that human beings are just animals, there's nothing that differentiates us from animals that's metaphysically interesting. Some people think animals don't have souls and people have souls; some people think that we are just identical to souls. So René Descartes famously thought we're just our minds and we're related in some interesting way to this material object that's sitting here, but I'm a soul, you're a soul, every person is a soul.
Peter McCormack: But if we just evolved from animals, at what point did we gain souls?
Bradley Rettler: There's different answers to that question. One theory is that when we attained a certain level of ability to think, then God just gave us souls.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's what I'm saying!
Bradley Rettler: There's not really another view that believes in souls that believes that we evolved from animals and says anything other than this idea that, at a certain point we got complex enough that we somehow got souls.
Peter McCormack: Because if we don't have souls -- what is a soul?
Bradley Rettler: It's some immaterial object that does not exist in space but exists in time, and it causally interacts with the physical world mediated through a body. So there's a whole literature on what exactly the relationship between a soul and a body has to be, such that my soul knows to interact with this body given that it's not located in space and doesn't raise your hand when I decide, when my mind or soul decides, "I'm going to raise my hand"; why does this hand always go up and nobody else's hand ever goes up? It's a completely mysterious question.
Peter McCormack: So that's going to get really interesting with AI. I bet that's coming up more and more in your -- well, with everything. We have it with the show, it's coming up all the time. I bet with that it's like at what point does an AI have a soul?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, at what point is an AI a person and at what point does an AI have a soul? Could an AI be a person without a soul? That would make trouble for a lot of extant views and philosophy that treat these as the same thing: to be a person is to have a soul. So if there are aliens and we think they're rational and conscious and reason roughly like we do and have a moral code, then we think they're persons, then we should probably think they have souls, if you think persons have souls.
Peter McCormack: And then could an AI have rights?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Which goes back to the film AI, embody it within a child, and then you have more empathy for the AI.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Do you know what, I think we should be going to school and university when we're much older, so we can make the decisions we want. I want to back and study this.
Danny Knowles: I literally said that to you when we were on the phone. I said, "I wish 18-year-old me could have been interested in this".
Peter McCormack: But it wasn't, it was clubbing, girls and beer! Yeah, it's fascinating.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, tell more Wyoming students to take more philosophy. They're doing engineering and agriculture and practical things. I think you can get into that later. Why not take some time to think about these deep questions like, when AI comes, which is going to be soon, how are we going to treat it?
Peter McCormack: Or is it here?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I don't think so, at least nothing that I've seen. I wouldn't count any of the large language learning things that I've seen even close to AI.
Peter McCormack: What do you make of the idea that people like Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak are getting so concerned that they think there should be a pause on AI because they're worried about where it's going to go?
Bradley Rettler: That makes sense to me. A lot of times, in almost every case, technological innovation outstrips moral and ethical discussion of how to handle it, and that's often led to huge fractures in communities and countries and things like that. So it makes sense. I mean, it's not going to happen, so it's kind of silly.
Peter McCormack: Well, it's almost too late as well. We made a show the other day saying that you cannot cage in AI, because you can create AI outside of the frameworks they want to pause, which talk to the frame AI within the frameworks and learn from them. And so they can now be replicating everywhere, so it's probably a bit too late. Do you know, I wonder, if we weren't such fuckheads, if humans weren't such a miserable failure at times, and so negative and killing each other, raping each other, murdering and stealing from each other constantly, we were just like a good group of animals, that actually we would fear AI less. Do we fear AI because we're so bad ourselves, that we see the worst in it because we see the worst in ourselves?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I mean you see at least right now, with the closest things we have to AI, it just duplicates all of human failures when it comes to things like bullshitting. The ChatGPT will just make things up, and then if you try to tell it that it's wrong, it will insist that you're wrong. Sometimes it's obvious when it tells you that it's 2021. Have you seen this long conversation with ChatGPT gas lightings? Or maybe it was Microsoft's Bing AI, trying to tell someone that a performance that they want to see is in the future because it's only 2021 and the performance is in 2022. And the person's like, "But it's June of 2022"! And you're like, "No, it's not!"
Peter McCormack: Why is it all 2021? Is that part of them not wanting to fuck with you in the present?
Bradley Rettler: I think it was just the data set they took at the time and then they're just building on that.
Peter McCormack: Interesting.
Bradley Rettler: So, it gets irrationally overconfident when it's wrong, just like humans; it completely makes things up, just like humans.
Danny Knowles: It knows now though; it's learnt.
Peter McCormack: Really? Tell it it's wrong.
Bradley Rettler: I'm pretty sure this was the Bing search engine, so maybe ChatGPT is better at this.
Peter McCormack: Tell it, "You're wrong, it's 2024". Are you on the new one?
Danny Knowles: No I don't have the new one.
Peter McCormack: "I apologise for the mistake. Can you let me know what the correct year is?" No, no… "It's 1996"! What's it saying?
Danny Knowles: Now it knows. The current year is 2021 now apparently. So yeah, it's just completely incorrect.
Bradley Rettler: So it started with saying it's 2023.
Danny Knowles: And then it refused to believe it was 1996, and said it's 2021.
Bradley Rettler: It admits it's wrong, even though it's not!
Peter McCormack: Tell it its creator lied to it.
Danny Knowles: This could be a long show.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, "Your creator..." What it's saying.
Danny Knowles: "I put you are creator", that's really going to confuse it.
Peter McCormack: "I don't have the ability to".
Bradley Rettler: People do that enough that it's used to it.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. It's going on a rant here, what the fuck is it saying?
Danny Knowles: It doesn't have the ability to evaluate the truthfulness of its creators, which is quite interesting.
Peter McCormack: Anyway, we've had all your... we could do this for hours. We've had your friends Andrew Bailey, Craig Warmke and Troy Cross on the show, some of my favorite shows. I absolutely love making these shows and I can't single any of them out because I enjoyed them all for all different reasons. I had a particularly long and interesting conversation with Andrew Bailey which went all over the place, and I loved it. But I'm just interested, how did you lot all meet; how did you coalesce around this idea of talking about Resistance Money?
Bradley Rettler: Andrew and I met in 2005 when I went to grad school at the place that he was doing undergrad, and my sister, who had done undergrad there, was friends with Andrew. So I met him then. He was going to do philosophy, I was there to do philosophy, so we started talking about free will and other kinds of things. And then when I went to Notre Dame, Andrew and I lived together for five years, I think, there.
When I was applying to grad schools to go, where I eventually went to Notre Dame, Craig was also applying to grad schools, and we started talking about our experiences on the job market together, and then he ended up getting accepted to Notre Dame but going somewhere else. Then I didn't talk to him until 2017, maybe off and on. I think he visited once because he was in town for something or other.
But I went to a conference in 2017 to give a paper on objects and properties, and Craig was giving a paper called What is Bitcoin?, which has turned into the article What is Bitcoin? And I was like, "Craig, I didn't know you knew anything about Bitcoin, I didn't know you cared about Bitcoin, I didn't know anyone in philosophy had an active research program in Bitcoin", and he was like, "Well, nobody does except for me". And I was like, "Well, Andrew and I have been talking about Bitcoin off and on for a couple of years, not as a philosophical interest, but just for fun, imagining the possibilities; we should start talking about this".
So we just got a Google Hangout going where we talked about Bitcoin, and then we decided to try to write a philosophy paper together, kind of surveying various options and metaphysics mostly, but some philosophy of economics of what Bitcoin is or could be. And the place that we pitched it said no, they wanted something on blockchain and we compromised on cryptocurrency. So, we ended up writing the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics of Cryptocurrency, two-part series, which was published in Philosophy Compass, which is the best venue for sort of overviews of interesting issues in philosophy that are kind of opinionated introductions to the topic for people who know things about philosophy.
But kind of the whole time that we were working on that, we were thinking, "After this, we're going to write a book, and the book's going to be about Bitcoin", so that's what we did; we wrote a book!
Peter McCormack: What drew you to Bitcoin, from a metaphysics perspective?
Bradley Rettler: Well, it wasn't metaphysics, actually. It was my fourth year in grad school. I came back from summer break and one of my friends had gotten super into Bitcoin and he no longer wanted to talk about philosophy, he only wanted to talk about Bitcoin, and he was sending money via wire transfer to Russian banks to get Bitcoin on BTCE, and then that's all he wanted.
So he started explaining what it was to me. And at first I thought it was the same kind of money that's in your bank account. And he's like, "No, no, there's nothing backing it except itself". And the first thing I thought of was, I lived in Singapore for a little bit as a kid, and I remembered seeing the lines of people lined up, the foreign workers who were lined up in the malls to send money back home to the Philippines and Bangladesh and India and things like that. And I thought this is going to revolutionise cross-border remittance payments. Instead of Western Union taking 25%, this is going to cost 3 cents. This is amazing, I'm into this. Then I just didn't think about it for a long time until, yeah, basically until Craig came along.
Peter McCormack: We've got coffees coming in, by the way. Did we order one for Bradley?
Danny Knowles: I don't think we did, I'm sorry Bradley. You can have mine if you want it.
Bradley Rettler: Thank you, I'll take yours!
Danny Knowles: I've had lots of coffee today.
Peter McCormack: What do you drink; what kind of coffee you normally have?
Bradley Rettler: I normally have drip coffee, which does not seem to exist in this country. Someone knocked over my americano on the train.
Peter McCormack: Oh, motherfucker. I mean basically, you want a black coffee?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: We can make you a black coffee. Yeah, Emma will make you a coffee.
Bradley Rettler: Is that okay?
Peter McCormack: Until then, you can watch us drink ours! What is coffee?
Danny Knowles: You were going to answer!
Bradley Rettler: That's a philosophically interesting question! You have count nouns and mass nouns, like water can be this much or this much, and still we don't say, "One or two", until it's somehow individuated in containers. So when you add some water to more water, it's just water; whereas, when you add one apple to another apple, it's two apples.
Peter McCormack: And you can drink half a cup of coffee and refill it, and it's still a cup of coffee.
Bradley Rettler: It's still coffee, yeah.
Peter McCormack: When does it not become coffee anymore; how many times can you do that?
Bradley Rettler: You're still adding coffee?
Peter McCormack: No, just water. You drink half and you add water.
Bradley Rettler: That's a vagueness question.
Peter McCormack: When is it still coffee?
Bradley Rettler: There's probably no fact of the matter. At some point it's obviously coffee, at a certain point it becomes obviously not coffee.
Peter McCormack: But who gets to decide that? When it's obviously not coffee to me might be different from you.
Bradley Rettler: When it's not coffee will definitely be different. When it's obviously not coffee could also be different, so that's another level up of vagueness. So, there's not only vagueness, there's this meta level of vagueness, which is when we disagree, like when someone is obviously not bald and when someone is obviously bald.
Peter McCormack: It's almost like with Bedford. When did we win the league, because mathematically we won on Monday, but we'd obviously won it on the Saturday against Langford?
Danny Knowles: Yeah, but you hadn't won it.
Peter McCormack: But we had. We were in a scenario, this is one for you, tell me about this, where this is in the world of this. So, on Saturday when we beat Langford, we hadn't mathematically won the league in that if we'd have lost our last three games and another team had won their last five, they would have ended up on the same points it was a possibility.
Bradley Rettler: Then it goes to goal difference?
Peter McCormack: It goes to goal difference. Our goal difference was 30 more than theirs, maybe even more. So yes, mathematically, they could have won the league, they could have won every game 8-0; but they hadn't won any games 8-0 that season. So mathematically, they could have won the league, but it was almost an impossibility. They would have to do something they hadn't done every game, four or five games, and we would have to lose all three of our last games, when we'd only lost three all season. So, we knew we'd won the league, but we hadn't actually won the league.
That became a big conversation all week, particularly some people explained it over and over again. I was like, "Oh well, we've won the league, but we haven't won the league, but we won the league"! So when did we win the league?
Bradley Rettler: Well, philosophers are very permissive with possibilities. So as long as it's not contradictory to suppose that something happens, then we say, for the most part, we say it's possible. So, it's possible that everyone on your team got sick and you couldn't play your games, and somehow this other team win, so there's a world in which that happens. It's very distant from this world, we talk about it in terms of possible worlds, which are just ways things could have gone. So, I'm not sure when you won the league but as long as it was possible that you didn't win the league, I would say you didn't win the league.
Peter McCormack: Well I'll throw another one in. I actually think we won the league when we won away at Rugby Borough. I mean, there was a distinct possibility we could have still lost the league at that point, but I think that was the win that won us the league. I think that was the point, "Okay, I know we've done it now, they're not coming back". If we'd have lost that game, it could have been a different scenario.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, so you didn't know that you had won, you just knew that you will win, "I know we will win the league".
Peter McCormack: Yeah, or I think that win won us the league in that, there was a moment in time and it was like a fork in the road. If they'd have won that, things would have changed. We still could have won the league, and we probably should have won the league, but I think if you ask anyone where did we win the league, they'll say Rugby Borough.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I think you can know things that could turn out to be false. In this case, obviously it didn't. So I would say you knew back then that you would win the league, but I wouldn't say that you had won the league.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, interesting.
Peter McCormack: Anyway back to Bitcoin and Resistance Money.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, so we wrote the book, the book's done.
Peter McCormack: I know, when can I get a copy?
Bradley Rettler: I sent it to Danny, but I said, "Don't give it to Peter".
Danny Knowles: He explicitly said that.
Peter McCormack: Is that really true?
Danny Knowles: No.
Bradley Rettler: I didn't send it to Danny.
Peter McCormack: Have you read it?
Danny Knowles: I've read bits, but I've not read it all yet.
Bradley Rettler: It's pretty long.
Danny Knowles: It's really long!
Peter McCormack: When can I get a copy?
Bradley Rettler: I'll send you a copy.
Peter McCormack: I want to read it, yeah. So it's done?
Bradley Rettler: So it's done. We had a conference in Seattle with some economists and philosophers and, did we have anyone else? Some political science folks who gave us comments on it. And the editor of the book that works for Routledge is sending it out to people to get comments back, and then we'll revise.
Danny Knowles: Because I don't think the copy you sent me was the final copy, right?
Bradley Rettler: No, no, it's far from, but it was the final draft of the first round, something like that.
Peter McCormack: And what is the TL;DR of the book; what are you trying to do with this? There's a lot of Bitcoin books and many overlap; what are you trying to do differently with this?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, so in this book we want to argue that Bitcoin is overall good for the world, and the episode that you did with Craig is on this sort of central thought experiment of the book, which is if you had to step behind the veil of ignorance and forget who you are in the world, would you want to step back into a world that had Bitcoin or that didn't have Bitcoin? For most people in the world, it's good for them that Bitcoin exists, and it's good for them because of the privacy that it offers, it's good for them because of the censorship-resistance, it's good for them because it's inclusive; and so we have a chapter on each of those things trying to argue that Bitcoin is good for the world.
Then we try to respond to some objections. We talk about how to secure money and what cost Bitcoin secures itself at, specifically environmentally. And then we have a chapter on objections where we deal with like six or seven objections like, "What if Satoshi comes back?" and things like that. And then we tally it up at the end and we say, given where Bitcoin stands on privacy, censorship-resistance, inclusion, energy, these kinds of things, it ends up being better for the world that Bitcoin exists.
Peter McCormack: So it sounds like it's more like an academic paper as a book?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, kind of. I mean, we're philosophers, that's what we're trained in. So the subtitle is, A Philosophical Case for Bitcoin. So we talk about whether privacy is good, we talk about whether it's good to have money that doesn't have trusted authorities that can censor transactions, and these are moral arguments that have premises that people can deny. And we're trying to show that even though Bitcoin lets some bad people do some bad things, it also lets some good people do good things, and indeed a lot more of that is happening than the other.
Peter McCormack: So we've got, A Progressive's Case for Bitcoin coming, and we've got A Philosopher's Case for Bitcoin coming, which is good, which means we're getting into much more nuanced arguments for different communities, which is great. How did you approach it; did you tackle different chapters separately?
Bradley Rettler: We got together in Wyoming for two weeks last summer and we had ten days of writing and we tried to write up 1,000 or 2,000 words, so like five to eight pages together. And then once we had sort of the core of what we wanted the chapter to look like, then we assigned different chapters to different people. So Craig wrote the veil one, because he'd already written the DC Times article; Andrew and Troy had been doing a bunch on mining, so Andrew wrote the mining chapter; I'm the progressive in the group, so I wrote the financial inclusion chapter; and then some of them, the responses to objections and things like that, we did together.
The first couple chapters are explaining what Bitcoin is and how it works and why it's different than other cryptocurrencies, and we wrote that together, and that's what we're talking about in Washington in a couple weeks at the BTC Policy Summit.
Peter McCormack: Wow, when's the release date of the book?
Bradley Rettler: We don't know yet. It depends on how long it takes us to respond to the feedback and then how long it takes the press to actually publish it. I would expect sometime before the end of 2023, but I'm not sure.
Peter McCormack: It would be great to get them all together as a release thing.
Danny Knowles: I know, but Andrew's going back to -- do people know where he's from, or where he lives?
Peter McCormack: Well, we don't need to say it just in case, but...
Danny Knowles: But yeah, so he's leaving the States though, right?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: We'll fly him back.
Danny Knowles: Yeah, we need to make sure, or do it soon enough.
Bradley Rettler: He'll fly back.
Peter McCormack: He'll fly back. We need to do that in Wyoming.
Bradley Rettler: Troy will fly out.
Peter McCormack: Troy will definitely fly out. Okay, so very cool, well done, congratulations, amazing. I can't wait to read it.
Bradley Rettler: I am really proud of it; I really like the book.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. So what is money?
Bradley Rettler: A medium of exchange; commonly accepted medium of exchange.
Peter McCormack: Why is money that?
Bradley Rettler: I think, at least in philosophy, we picked a term and we applied it to some things, and then based on what we originally started using it to talk about, other things came to fall under it. So it's a socially constructed thing, there's no sort of scientific calculation that one could do to determine whether something's money. You can't run experiments on something to see -- at least, they wouldn't look like science experiments, they'd look like other kinds of experiments, like you'd go and see whether people are using it as a medium of exchange. But we've got this term that applies to some things and doesn't apply to others; applies to some things at some times, but not at other times; applies in some regions, but doesn't apply in other regions to the same thing.
So if you're in Iceland, the króna is money; here in the US, maybe not. So we have this thing that fulfills a role that we need played by something, and whatever plays that role counts as money.
Peter McCormack: Are there any examples of animals using anything as money?
Bradley Rettler: No, I don't think so.
Peter McCormack: Animals ever trade?
Bradley Rettler: They might barter one thing for another, but they don't have a thing that is commonly accepted that they'll use to trade other things.
Danny Knowles: So, one thing I do know is that monkeys will pick fleas off animals and put them on themselves, and then they'll get other monkeys to groom them, because they want to eat the fleas, but it's a way they get a nice grooming, but that's barter, right?
Bradley Rettler: They get a good massage!
Danny Knowles: Yeah, good massage.
Peter McCormack: So, the fleas a barter, but not money.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I mean I don't think you see monkeys collecting fleas and thinking, "Oh, you know what, I might want a massage tomorrow, so I'm going to get some fleas today, and then I'll be able to trade them for a massage tomorrow".
Peter McCormack: So, it's an emergent human technology.
Bradley Rettler: I think so, yeah. And it's done to play this role that, you know, I'm sure you've had people talk about this before, but if you make something that not everybody wants, and you want something that the person who makes it doesn't want your thing, we need something that we can have in common to trade back and forth with people so that we don't end up acquiring a bunch of things we don't need.
Peter McCormack: And so, who should issue money; how should money operate? Is there a philosophical line to that question?
Bradley Rettler: I think there could be. I'm not sure that any philosophers -- I think it might be the case that Andrew and Craig and I have come the closest of any philosophers to answering or trying to answer or even discussing that question. I could be missing some people in philosophy of economics. Certainly, economists have been asking this question for a long, long time.
In philosophy, it would probably have to do with ethical questions. So there's no metaphysical or epistemological concerns, I think, about money creation and money issuance. They would be moral and ethical. For example, what gives people the most freedom? What leads to the most human flourishing? And then you can ask that about anything, who should own football teams? Oh, there's a moral and ethical question to this. Should it be local people, or should it be rich people?
Danny Knowles: Saudi Arabia.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah. So you could subject the, "Who ought to create money" question to any of the tests that you could subject anything else to.
Peter McCormack: Why is it you lot care about money; what is it that's grabbing you about it? It's a loaded question, I'll tell you why in a second.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I can't speak for Andrew and Craig. For me, it's global inequality and inequity and people being born into the positions where they don't have the ability, no matter how hard they work or what they do, to provide for themselves or their family and be able to engage in the kinds of projects that I think humans need to in order to flourish, whether that be art, or music or something like that. There are way too many people who don't have enough. The more I thought about it, and the more I thought about reasons why that might be, money, creation and money governance is, I think, a big part of that.
Peter McCormack: So, the reason it's a loaded question is I spoke to somebody yesterday and he'd written a book about inflation. I just put the simple question to him, "Why inflation; why did you tackle that subject?" and he said, "I think it's the most important subject of our time". I kind of pushed him on that and I said, "You mean any subject?" He's like, "Yes, it is the most important subject of our time of any subject is inflation. It has such a pervasive -- it's caused such damage to society, it affects so many people for the benefit of the few and nobody understands it, or a lot of people don't understand what causes it". He said it's the most -- and I was like, "You might be right. I've never questioned that", but I was thinking, "You might be right".
We've seen entire nations destroyed by inflation over and over; we talk about Venezuela and Zimbabwe, but we've seen it right now very recently with Lebanon; we're now seeing it in Argentina, probably their fifth time in 20 years; we're seeing it in the UK and US; we're seeing the catastrophic effects that inflation has to tens, hundreds, maybe even billions of people worldwide. And I was like, "Yeah, you're right, it is the most important subject of our time".
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure that's true.
Peter McCormack: That's his, yeah.
Bradley Rettler: But if you could convince me that inflation is the reason for climate change, and inflation is the reason for global food shortages and people not having enough food, then I think, yeah, maybe that is the... It's possible that something isn't the direct biggest problem, but is the cause of these other problems that are directly the biggest problem.
Peter McCormack: I don't think I can do the link between climate change and inflation.
Bradley Rettler: I know people have tried, yeah. I'm not sure whether it works, but has something to do with inflation incentivising consumption and short-term thinking and fill in lots of details.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, maybe the design and nature of money, the design issuance of money, would be a better, most important subject of our time because money affects everybody, and as you said, so many live below the poverty line and there's so many incentives tied to how money is issued, operated, and inflation is part of that. Maybe just money is the most important issue of all time. You get money right, fix the money, fix the world.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I think if you if you look at the things people need which is food, water, shelter, clothing, we do all that stuff, or at least most places do most of that stuff, with money. And if you don't have enough money, then you can't get enough of those things. And if you can't get enough of those things, then you die.
Peter McCormack: And the consequence of high inflation right now in the UK, so you said food, warmth, is it food, warmth, shelter you said?
Bradley Rettler: Food, water, shelter.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean we know people cannot afford to eat full meals, we know people are skipping meals now in the UK, if they're particularly below the poverty line or they're choosing to feed their children over themselves. We know people are losing their homes. So yeah, we're heating. We talked in an interview previously about warm banks. So we had food banks, we've now got warm banks. And this is all directly related to the difficulties in the economy and the pressures of inflation and rising energy prices. Yeah, one of my colleagues is Austrian and he said there were places when he was growing up that you could go to for the day that were heated so that you wouldn't have to pay to heat your house one day a week, and those have come back now. They haven't used them for decades and they're using them again this past winter and next winter.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, so we should be debating money more. And it seems to just be locked in the world of bitcoiners to this level of discussion or debate. I could be wrong, maybe it's discussed elsewhere, but I just feel like the bitcoiners have really focused in on the nature of money, what it is, how it's issued, how it operates, what its role is, and the pervasive things that governments do to money.
Bradley Rettler: I've talked to a lot of non-bitcoiners, and when I introduce them to why I'm working on Bitcoin, I talk about these what I think are moral issues, with how money is created and distributed, and also how money is spied on and watched and Visa and you get these stories about, you know, Target sending ads to people for products that they don't think they need, but it turns out they do need and it intuited it based on their… And so there are people that are watching our transactions, there are people that are blocking our transactions. Governments want more control, of course, always, not less. And so, there are more and more consequences for purchasing certain kinds of things. The entire US is somewhere between banning mifepristone, this abortion drug. So, if you need to buy that, you probably don't want to use a credit card.
So they immediately get it, and every single one of them has said, "I've never thought about it. I've never even considered that there could be a different kind of money, or that money could be governed differently. Now that I think about it, of course it seems obvious, but it just never occurred to me".
Peter McCormack: So somehow trying to meet people where they want to be met, triggering them to think about it.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: When you think about money, and with Bitcoin we're going to see, or we are seeing a transfer of wealth, we are seeing some people who have seen their net wealth grow considerably because of the nature of Bitcoin, and we may see the reverse happen; we may see the death of fiat currencies and see this large transfer of wealth. Do you think about the moral implications of that?
Bradley Rettler: Oh, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Because I do a lot.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah. I would love to see people who have the least amount of money get into Bitcoin first. I don't think we'll see people who have a lot of wealth be that harmed, in terms of how much wealth they have, by the increased use of Bitcoin because their wealth is not in currencies. So, people who do have money in currencies tend to be the people who are the poorest and they tend to be harmed the most by things like inflation. So I would like to see them get in first. Unfortunately, the people that they listen to are not interested in them getting into Bitcoin. So I think it's a big problem.
Danny Knowles: What do you mean by that, the people they listen to?
Bradley Rettler: I mean that the places that they place their trust in tend to be legacy institutions, which are slower to realise new things. So I mean, maybe I should slightly take that back because I think there is more distrust in general among poorer people than there is among wealthier people in systems and governments and things like that, because they're not being well served by them. But I still think they have to trust someone, and so whoever they trust, whether it's a certain news organisation or something like that, it will not be people who are probably talking about Bitcoin.
Danny Knowles: I think there's a huge unit bias as well with that demographic. I think trying to talk about Bitcoin in sats is much more useful, because once you start talking about Bitcoin costing $31,000, I've had this conversation with people and it just completely turns them off, they don't understand it, even if you say you don't have to buy an entire Bitcoin. I think the unit bias is a real hurdle.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, "Well, I can only afford 0.0000001". "No, that's good"! Yeah, that's hard to do.
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: It's an interesting point where you talked about the poorest or most underserved in society trusting government less because they haven't been served well by these government or centralised institutions, so they would have less reason to trust than maybe the wealthier; but the wealthier may also distrust, but have more reason to defend it because they benefit from the status quo.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, that's true. So maybe rather than distrust, it's something like work against it or not believe. So the wealthy might not believe it but they might act as though they believe it and support it and act in accordance with it, and all those kinds of things.
Peter McCormack: I wrestle with the idea that when we transition -- you know like Parker Lewis would say, "Gradually, then suddenly". When we go through the "suddenly" period of transition from a fiat currency to a Bitcoin, what will that be like; what kind of societal collapse may happen; not saying will, may happen; the repricing of everything, the rebuilding of everything? It feels like you could almost see a collapse and then a rebuild of society, and that collapse bit worries me a lot.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, it seems to me like the only way Bitcoin replaces is if there's a collapse. Otherwise, I mean what we talk about in the book and what I believe is far more likely to happen, is we'll just have two systems running in parallel and you can go back and forth between them. And, Bitcoin is there as an option for the people that want to use it in a much more widely adopted way than it is today, but it's not going to replace fiat currencies unless there's some sort of societal collapse, and that could look like a lot of different things. It could be natural disasters, it could be another pandemic that's substantially worse than this one. But it could be multiple pandemics in a row that force more printing and more printing and eventually some sort of hyperinflation.
It's hard for me to imagine, and when I do imagine it, it seems really bad. So, I'm hoping that Bitcoin doesn't replace fiat currencies, because the amount of devastation that would have to happen to people along the way for what I think it would take for that to happen seems not worth the cost.
Peter McCormack: Is there a moral case for printing money?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I was not against the printing of money to help people buy food and pay rent and stuff during the pandemic because I thought, if you're going to print money, this is exactly how you should do it. You should tell people that they're going to get money in their bank accounts, and then you should give it to them.
Peter McCormack: Rather than paying for a continued investment in the military industrial complex, forever wars.
Bradley Rettler: Or bailing out banks that have super-wealthy clients over their FDIC insured limits.
Danny Knowles: Like direct consumer QE effectively.
Peter McCormack: In extreme scenarios.
Bradley Rettler: But quantitative easing for the people. And I think that, yeah, that's exactly how you should do quantitative easing, is let people have the money and then decide how to spend it.
Peter McCormack: We spoke to somebody recently about that, didn't we; was it Dan Tubb? Somebody talked about, there's two ways you can inject the money into the economy. One would be, say QE for the people, your stimmy checks; or you can do it by QE by buying up equity debts or mortgage bonds, whatever they are. There's two ways, they have the exact same effect, but one gives the money to all the rich.
Bradley Rettler: Exactly!
Peter McCormack: I think the moral questions around the money are some of the most interesting, but the most challenging, but seem to always be the most obvious starting point to talk to people about money, because I think when you start to explain the realities of -- I don't even think many people understand really what money printing is or how it happens and the impact of it.
Bradley Rettler: It took me several years after starting to do Bitcoin as a research interest where I even felt competent to explain just a little bit about how money creation happens. And I still regularly -- I mean, one of the reasons we had this workshop is because we were nervous that we said false things. And Will Luther said, "You said many false things". So it was good to have this because it's really complicated. Nik Bhatia's book has this diagram that has tons of different boxes that I didn't know existed, even as a someone who researches related topics.
So, yeah, I mean, when we when we think about how money is introduced in the economy, we don't think about the fact that we never voted for the person who's introducing it; we don't think about the fact that it doesn't go through the legislature of people that we did elect; we don't think about the fact that we have no say in it; we don't think about the fact that it's not publicised, or when it is, it's publicised in very small ways; and we don't think about the fact that when it is publicised, and people get outraged about it and band together to do something, like Occupy Wall Street, that just quietly goes away, and these protest efforts to maybe try to change how things happen, the leaders are mollified and they go away and then the movements collapse and they get absorbed back into the system and nothing changes.
Peter McCormack: So what if we taught money at school?
Bradley Rettler: We should teach money in school.
Peter McCormack: We never will, but what if we did?
Bradley Rettler: Some US states at least mandate a certain number of hours of financial literacy training.
Peter McCormack: Really?
Bradley Rettler: But it's way more about what compound interest is and how to balance accounts and things like that. It's much less about, "Okay, there's this Federal Reserve and there's a board and there's you know a Chair" and all these things. They teach you how to work with money; they don't teach you what money is or how it comes to be.
Peter McCormack: I think a lot of that also is because it would be subjective.
Bradley Rettler: Maybe. I don't think it's subjective that the Federal Reserve has a Board of Governors and there's a Chair and they get to set interest rates, and how much is determined by that might be subjective.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I didn't mean that. I think for some people it's subjective, "Should we have a central bank?" I don't think we should, I think we should have more of a free-banking model, we should allow banks to succeed and fail. But there's many people who argue about, "No, we should have a central bank and we should be protecting the economy, and we should be defending banks and we should be ensuring depositors so that there is trust in the money and they can keep it", I think certain things like that. And we know, if the education comes from the Department of Education, which would be a government body, we know where their arguments would come from, what they would try and teach. So perhaps you can't ever teach it; perhaps it has to be in a philosophy class.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I mean once teachers, even high school teachers have tenure, they could offer this as an elective, but it's not going to ever probably get into the common curriculum.
Peter McCormack: What ideas around money in Bitcoin do you most wrestle with; what are the ones where you are like, "Fuck it, I just don't know?"
Bradley Rettler: Good question.
Peter McCormack: What do you guys disagree on; you, Craig, Andrew?
Bradley Rettler: We don't disagree on much when it comes to Bitcoin, which is nice. I think the two issues that I probably wrestle with most are, one is this future-focused idea of what happens to the people who don't have enough as Bitcoin gets introduced. And the second is, what happens to the climate? And is Bitcoin hastening the climate change or helping to incentivise solutions to it, or some of both; and what happens in the end, or which direction are we going in?
I think there's a lot of reason to think that the move from mining at home to industrial-scale mining operations was bad for the climate. Now I think there's really good evidence that moving from these industrial scale miners that are using coal and natural gas and things like that to renewable energy is maybe going to make Bitcoin carbon negative within two to five years.
Peter McCormack: And what would the New York Times write about then?
Bradley Rettler: Well, you know, they're not constrained by what's actually happening! So they'll write the same thing they've been writing.
Peter McCormack: So, they're two really interesting points, I want to hone in on both of those. Let's talk about people not having enough. It goes back to that point, that transition, in that we may transition to a Bitcoin-based economy or global reserve currency, and most likely are going to have a very uneven distribution. We could have Michael Saylor as the richest person in the world, magnitudes richer than someone like say Elon Musk is or Joe Bezos is, compared to the average. And we might have people who are unable to get to Bitcoin and Bitcoin is all what people want. So I've talked a lot about when I was in Venezuela, people want dollars; it might be everywhere you go, people now only want Bitcoin and people just cannot get access to it. And so, how do we deal with that?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, that worries me a lot, that the people who need it most won't have ways to access it. And I think the last data that I've seen is that something like 87% of the world population has a smartphone. And it's really hard -- there are ways to have Bitcoin and not have a smartphone, but it's really hard. It involves a lot of other people and a lot of walking, things like that. So yeah, that 13% is going to be people who are lower down in the poverty line.
Peter McCormack: Do we know why people don't have phones, because I've been to some pretty desperately poor places and everyone still has a phone? Their issue maybe is credit or somewhere to charge it. I mean, I was on the border with Colombia and Venezuela, in Cúcuta, everyone had a phone and yet they didn't have any money to eat. But what they needed was a place to charge their phone and they needed to access a wireless point to be able to communicate. They didn't have a contract, they weren't on a network where they had a device.
Danny Knowles: Was it their own phone, or was it like a family phone that they shared?
Peter McCormack: It was a mix, some people had their own phone and some were sharing phones and it should be shared between friends, but everyone had access to a phone. Okay, so the people have a shared phone, that's a different scenario.
Bradley Rettler: If the people who have a shared phone are counted among the 13% of people who don't have a phone, then yeah, maybe the problem isn't as big. I also have been to a lot of places where you would think driving down the street that people wouldn't have phones. For example, in Indonesia, there are twice as many phones as there are people, and I've been to some pretty poverty-ridden places there and seen people with phones. So yeah, I guess the question is, when you have a money like this, people aren't going to be made worse off by Bitcoin existing, but it would be nice if Bitcoin made everybody better off, and I'm not sure Bitcoin can directly make those people better off. It might indirectly do it by incentivising the right kind of projects and things like that globally, but if they can't access Bitcoin, it's not going to help them directly.
So I'd like to see more people working on solutions. At one point, I was aware of some project that was going to distribute phones to people who needed them that were preloaded with Bitcoin wallets and some Bitcoin on them.
Peter McCormack: I think Mark Moss was doing that in El Salvador.
Danny Knowles: That's cool.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think they were trying to get people's old phones and get them distributed to people in El Salvador who didn't have them, I've certainly heard about that as well. You've mentioned climate change a few times now, so that's obviously for you the most pressing issue of our time.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, probably.
Peter McCormack: And it wouldn't be unreasonable to say that there are people within the Bitcoin community who don't consider climate change to be an issue, don't think we need to be so concerned about it that we can continue to burn fossil fuels; we will adapt. It's a range of different opinions, but you obviously have been exposed to that by being part of the Bitcoin community. So how do you think when you see that, because I know how I react?
Bradley Rettler: I think that I spent a long time studying philosophy, I got a PhD, I learned how to do philosophical research, and I think the papers that I write are really good because I have that training. And when I look for people to talk intelligently about climate change, I look for people who have been trained to research and make models and test those models. And so, I tend to trust the people who have expertise in that. So I think that that's pretty settled, that they're all in agreement that climate change is something that we need to worry about, and we need to take steps to change.
Peter McCormack: But not everyone's in agreement, even some scientists. I mean, I am on the side of people who are concerned about climate change, absolutely 100% on that side, made it very clear over and over again. But I've also gone down that rabbit hole and trying to say, "Well, could I be wrong; and where could I be wrong?" And it isn't 100% of scientists who believe that climate change is an issue, or some people claim that it may be an issue, but that we just have to learn to adapt, we're not going to fix this issue. Some have become resigned to the fact that humans are not going to, we're too greedy and selfish.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I'm much more sympathetic to that line of argument.
Peter McCormack: Because it's practical.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I mean I think something like 94% or 97% of publishing climate scientists think that the climate is changing and it has something to do with us, and that we could do things to lessen that. So I am not super-interested in trying to adjudicate that debate because I think it's pretty well settled. Whether we will actually do anything about it, I think is a much more important question and one that I'm sympathetic to the idea that we've come this far, we've known for a while, and every time BP puts out some Twitter ad that's like, "What are you doing to help the climate?" Someone says, "Well, I'm not spilling millions of barrels of oil into the ocean, that's what I'm doing today!"
The degree to which individuals have control over how much the climate changes, the degree to which people skip flying somewhere because they don't think it's worth the cost to the climate, that is just absolutely dwarfed by these companies who have a profit motive to not care about the climate. And so there, I'm really sympathetic to the idea that they're not going to stop doing that and we need to figure out ways of mitigating the climate change that's happening without their cooperation.
Peter McCormack: And do you find a correlation between Bitcoin and that?
Bradley Rettler: What do you mean?
Peter McCormack: In that we have to find a way to mitigate issues. Well, we've either got to find a way to reduce emissions and reduce the emissions of CO2, or we've got to find ways to mitigate changes to the environment because of an increase in CO2. Are you finding any connection between Bitcoin and that, or do you think they're two separate issues, there's no need to link the two?
Bradley Rettler: I mean, I see the direct correlation with people who are trying to build Bitcoin mining facilities in areas where they can use renewable energy and subsidise. I tweeted at some point that my dream is for -- so I live in a town of 30,000 people. My dream is for there to be right outside that town, we have tons of wind, we have tons of sun, so like a solar and wind farm that pays for itself by mining Bitcoin with the excess that it produces. Then my next dream is for there to be a bunch of towns that have things like that, and that Bitcoin might subsidise communities all around the world using renewable energy in this way. I love hearing about the operation, the Hash Hut, or something like that? They put the Bitcoin mining, little, tiny Bitcoin mining huts on top of flared or vented methane stacks and they use it to mine Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Oh, it's like Giga Energy does that.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I'm sure there are a bunch of people. I'm thinking of the one that's doing it in Colorado, because that's closest to me. But I love hearing about that kind of stuff, turning a gas that's 40 times worse for the environment into one that's 40 times less bad. So, I see the direct interplay between Bitcoin and climate change. Were you thinking there was like a more...?
Peter McCormack: No, I was just wondering how you, as a philosopher, have thought about this.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I haven't thought about it much philosophically, I've thought about it more practically, like could Bitcoin incentivise massive renewable energy build-out?
Peter McCormack: And is that one of the FUD topics you covered within the book?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I mean the Security Through Energy chapter is, I'm pretty sure, the longest chapter in the book, and we spend a lot of time talking about the price of securing money in general. Because if it's not Bitcoin, you've got to somehow secure the US dollar, and you've got all this fancy stuff that goes into the physical notes to make sure they're counterfeit proof, and you've got all the fancy stuff that goes into digital security. But then, yeah, we talk about how Bitcoin buys security, and then ways that it might end up being actually good for the environment.
So I mean, one of it seems like the biggest impediments to renewable energy buildout is that the Sun doesn't always shine and the wind's not always blowing, and sometimes they overproduce. And so if you have an energy consumer that's willing to buy at times of low demand in other places and willing to shut off at times of high demand, that can really help with renewable energy specifically, and that's exactly what Bitcoin miners are doing.
Peter McCormack: One of the other things that people attacked Bitcoin for very early on is that Bitcoin is used by criminals and terrorists and such. By having an open, censorship-resistant money, not only can it be used by good people, but it can also be used by bad people. How have you wrestled with that?
Bradley Rettler: The first sentence of the book, and I do not anticipate this changing is, "Bitcoin is for criminals". Meet people where they're at, right! Yeah, and so we talk about what kinds of criminals do and should use Bitcoin. It turns out not very many criminals should use Bitcoin because there's a public ledger and it's not super-hard to track. So, the people who do use Bitcoin tend to be people who are breaking laws of countries that have lower enforcement, and it tends to be countries with laws that maybe I don't agree with, and it's people who are using Bitcoin to break laws that I think should be broken, like laws like women shouldn't be allowed to have any money, things like that.
So it matters what kind of criminal we're talking about and what kinds of laws they're breaking. And I think we're a long way from the situation in which Bitcoin is being used to pay for assassinations and things like that. It's become people who are resisting regimes that have much fewer resources than the regimes that you probably like the laws of.
Peter McCormack: Whereas the US dollar is used by governments to do things which we could argue are equally criminal or morally unjust.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, and I think as far as I know, the currency of choice for people that are doing massive operations against US laws, things like drug smuggling and things like that, is still US $100 bills. Should we stop making those?
Peter McCormack: Well, it's an interesting area to ponder when you start thinking about, there's two forms of money: we have the US dollar -- I mean, there's lots, but let's talk about the US dollar versus Bitcoin. You have people on the state side who want to restrict the use of Bitcoin, which we know is used by good people and activists and people who are in living under difficult regimes to evade capital controls, etc, and we've got those people saying, "No, you cannot use that, this is bad money".
Yet, we are on the other flipside seeing them, as the state, having full control to print, debase, use that money to fund things that we all fundamentally disagree with, which is forever wars and economic imperialism throughout the world, and it's that interesting kind of comparison in that this is what you need to try and communicate to people. But that means you have to almost come to a place where you have a complete loss of faith within government or what you've believed has been right or true your whole time.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I think that most people are not aware of who is using Bitcoin. I think they think of it as tech people on the West Coast and criminals, specifically people who are breaking US laws and living in the US. And, the stories of people who are using Bitcoin in places like Belarus and Vietnam and Afghanistan and North Korea, and the list goes on, are being told on your show and in Bitcoin Magazine and every once in a while maybe in Forbes or something, but never in venues that most people that I talk to who aren't in Bitcoin read. They don't hear about the good stuff.
One of the things I talk about in my Critical Thinking course is what's called the evidence primacy effect. So the evidence that you get first will always shape your view of the thing that you're getting evidence about. And so, if I tell you about this jerk that I met, and then I start telling you he's a really good father and so on, you'll still try to reinterpret all the later stuff in light of believing that he's a jerk, because that's the first thing I said. And so if the first thing people hear about Bitcoin is how people are using it to break laws, then they have to interpret everything else, they don't have to but they tend to, interpret everything else through that lens, "Can I be for this thing that does this really bad thing?" Whereas if you first introduce it to them by explaining the story of Roya Mahboob, or something like that, then the other stuff they'll interpret in light of that, "Okay, so I know this is how Bitcoin brings freedom to people. Is it worth the cost of energy to do that; is it worth potentially limiting the ability of governments to respond to crises by having this competitor?" and things like that.
So, what evidence you get first matters a lot, and unfortunately people are getting, most people are getting the bad stuff first.
Peter McCormack: This is why when you speak to most people they say, well yeah, it was two or three to four touch points before they finally went in. And that's why people then like The New York Times are making this job really hard for all of us by leading with misinformation. And the interesting part of that is it's not so much that -- we're talking about the New York Times article this week -- it's not so much that article; the interesting point for that is when you see who's retweeted the article, especially if they've retweeted with comment, then go and look at the comments and discussions afterwards, these people who retweeted already attacking Bitcoin. And you already know they only know as much as they've read in that article, they don't really know, but they're instantly becoming part of the anti-Bitcoin crowd. What do you do about that?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, or they've had some inkling, some association with Bitcoin and negativity in some way.
Peter McCormack: Or they're on the saltiness index!
Bradley Rettler: So anytime someone gives you evidence that allows you to continue to believe something you already believe, you welcome it with open arms and you love it. And anytime someone gives you evidence that contradicts what you believe, you tend to entrench and actually believe more strongly in the thing you already believed. It's a sort of possession model of belief like, "Someone is attacking something that's mine, I need to fight them off". It's a really bad way of ending up with true beliefs.
Peter McCormack: Why is there therefore such an inertia to people admitting they may be wrong, because it's actually a liberating thing. When you go out and say, "You know what, this thing I thought, I was wrong, I'm sorry", the majority of people are like, "Oh, well done", like people commend you for it.
Bradley Rettler: They are all you!
Peter McCormack: Yeah, they love you and they commend you for it, they're like, "Okay, you're flawed, but you're honest". Yet there seems to be an inertia to admitting you're wrong.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I think this comes from deep psychological tendencies within us to want to believe what the group believes, and that was very advantageous when we were hunter-gatherers. There's been some really interesting philosophical work recently on when to go against the group's beliefs, when to be a rebel and when to sort of toe the line, and what causes people to choose to do one or the other. So, yeah, it was for a long time a really good idea for communities to cast out people who went against the community, because it was hard to survive and you needed everyone working together. And vestiges of that are not serving us well these days when we apply it to more abstract theoretical things. If everyone thinks that they heard something that they can kill and eat over there, and you think that it was over there, and you're insisting on everyone going that way, they probably should leave you behind because you're not helping survive.
Now we apply that to abstract political, philosophical discussions and we still have our same mindset toward those beliefs which is, "This is mine, I'm going to keep it, this is what me and my friends believe", and it costs us a lot to go against that.
Peter McCormack: So, that's probably a lot of the reason why there was kind of, for a long period of time, this group think within Bitcoin, whether it's agreements about what Bitcoin is or should be, or small blocks, but also then starts to expand into other topics like, "I'm a carnivore, I don't eat seed oils", because there's this group think that goes with it. And that I guess is because Bitcoin could be attacked from the outside, whether it's media, government, whoever wanted to attack it, so they became strong as a unit by saying, "These are our core beliefs", and anyone who didn't follow the core beliefs was ejected because they were essentially a weakness within that defensive system. Is that basically what you're saying; is that applicable to Bitcoin in that exact way?
Bradley Rettler: I hadn't been thinking about it at the time but absolutely. Even some of the metaphors, like cyber hornets and things like that. Think of it as this community that stands together to fight off not just attacks on Bitcoin, but attacks on eating vegetables and things like that.
Peter McCormack: Can that then also become a weakness?
Bradley Rettler: Absolutely. In every area of thought it becomes a weakness, when you're not willing to tolerate dissent from within the group.
Peter McCormack: And something that we have witnessed. And so what happens after that; what is the evolution of this? Do groups always fragment?
Bradley Rettler: I guess, I think it depends. There are certain groups that have been able to succeed by casting out people who go against the way that the group thinks, which works as long as you can keep recruiting in new people. If you're only ever casting out, the group will eventually splinter off and when it's too small, it dies.
Peter McCormack: And, can they get consumed by a larger group? You know, if there's a group of philosophers, it becomes a much larger group than the cyber hornets, can the cyber hornets themselves implode and then this new group leads the narrative?
Bradley Rettler: I think that's pretty rare. Once you have a group, and this is probably trending into like social psychology or something, I'll just speculate wildly!
Peter McCormack: Yeah, we've gone all over the place.
Bradley Rettler: But once you have a group identity, it gets really hard to change that identity. So think about the Bitcoin community getting subsumed into the sound money community or something like that, which has gold bugs in it and things like that. That makes sense as a narrative, but in fact we've seen exactly the opposite, the intense fighting. So the one group's identity is around this one thing, and even though a lot of them are holding it for these kinds of reasons, they found their community over here and they're not moving over to the other group. And the people who are in the Bitcoin community, who aren't in it for the sound money of course, are going to try to reject that subsumption.
So yeah, I think it's something that happens in all groups that reach a certain size, is that they start to have these splinter groups. And I think Bitcoin is starting to get there. The community is big enough that there's a lot of disagreement among unimportant things. So you get the progressives and you get the libertarians, you get the people who are vegan and people who only eat meat. And it forces you to decide how much you care about these other things. Are you in Bitcoin just for Bitcoin and you're willing to tolerate? Or do you think that Bitcoin entails that you have to believe certain things about food and art and whatever? And some people do and some people don't. Like, my political views have been welcomed with open arms by some people, and I've been blocked by others.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know that feeling!
Bradley Rettler: I know you're in the same boat! We've probably been blocked by a lot of the same people.
Peter McCormack: So we had Calle in recently, we had a great discussion with him, and he basically said, "There is no room for ideology in Bitcoin. We have one job, one job only, which is to maximize the amount of people who have access and use censorship-resistant money; that's it". I'm paraphrasing.
Danny Knowles: Yeah, that's pretty much what he said.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, "That's all I care about, I don't care about anything else. I don't care about what you identify as, I don't care what your pronouns are, I don't care what you eat, I don't care about anything else. It's like, 'Do you want good money?' and that's all we should care about". I think it's been fascinating over this last cycle to see these different cohorts build up. We do have a philosophers' cohort now, where I couldn't have pointed to that four years ago; we definitely have a progressives', couldn't have pointed to that; we had libertarian, or we have right wing, or we have these other different groups.
We've got a European group now, a distinct European group, but we have nation groups now, and I think this splintering is great for Bitcoin because it means there is no ideology. But what I want to happen, what I hope happens, is that people then start to coalesce around the idea of money and what good money is and all the ideology can be left behind because it's so unimportant. Otherwise, it's just going to be all this infighting over fucking nonsense.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, when you have the group start with a bunch of people who overlap, not just on one thing but on multiple things, then they have this decision to make when other people want to join the group but don't uphold those other things, "Do we let them in? It'll be good for the one thing, but it'll be bad for the other things; or do we try to keep them out?"
Peter McCormack: Have you had any difficulties within academic circles for being an advocate, or even just somebody interested in Bitcoin?
Bradley Rettler: Yes.
Peter McCormack: I need more than yes, what can you tell me?
Bradley Rettler: For the most part no. So, one thing that's great about going through university and going through grad school, especially in something like philosophy, where there are very few widely agreed-upon and endorsed answers, is that you get really comfortable loosely holding beliefs about things that you're not an expert in. And so if I'm talking about moral particularism or moral generalism --
Peter McCormack: Hold on, what's moral particularism?
Bradley Rettler: It's just an example, but we can talk about it later. But just as an example of something that I've read a few things about, I know what the words mean, but I don't really know the arguments and I haven't evaluated them. And so if you ask me what I believe, I'll be like, "I don't know, I sort of lean in this direction", but I'm easily convinced in the other way. So philosophy teaches you to do this, even about the areas that you publish a lot in and work a lot on, because you know there are people who are just as good as you, who've come to different conclusions about that.
One of the greatest philosophers of metaphysics in the 20th century, I disagree with about almost everything, but he's so good that I feel like there must be something to these arguments. Maybe I'm just not seeing it. But I can't dismiss him and I can't dismiss these views because someone super-smart and respectable held them. So what was the question?
Peter McCormack: Academic circles.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah. So most philosophers, I don't talk to other academics, most philosophers, when they hear that you're writing or working on Bitcoin, they ask you, "What are you arguing for?" and I say, "I'm arguing that Bitcoin is overall good for the world", "Oh, what's the argument?" They want to know what the argument is before they evaluate. Now that's not true of everyone, and so some of them, probably ones who if I was talking to them face to face, they would go through this line, but they'll just snipe on Facebook or something about how Bitcoin is destroying the world, the climate, it's undermining the government, something like that. But for the most part, people are really interested in hearing the arguments and I think the arguments are good and I want them to hear the arguments, because I want to know if there are any weaknesses in the arguments.
I am pretty confident that Bitcoin is good for the world, but I could encounter some evidence that it wasn't, and I could change my mind, and then I'd regret having come on this podcast!
Peter McCormack: I like that point where you had there, where the first thing they say to you is, "What are you arguing for?" It's a really good starting point for any conversation.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I mean a lot of people think that if you're pro-Bitcoin, that means you're anti-government, you're anti all fiat currencies, and so on. And I'm just arguing that it's good for Bitcoin to exist. What's the argument? Well, it's the veil. There are a lot of people who need Bitcoin, and if you step behind the veil and realise that you could be any one of those, you'd prefer to step back into the world with Bitcoin.
Danny Knowles: That was such a good framework for an argument in Craig's piece.
Peter McCormack: We talked about that with Lane, didn't we?
Danny Knowles: So good.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, did you buy the domain?
Danny Knowles: No, it cost like £3,000.
Peter McCormack: Is it? That's not too bad.
Danny Knowles: I know, but...
Peter McCormack: Lane's literally like --
Danny Knowles: Lane owns it already, he's trying to sell it back to me!
Peter McCormack: Yeah, Lane's like, "I'm going to sell some of my Dogecoin, sell it back to him"! And so Bitcoin is becoming more accepted academically then, which is great.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I think so. I mean, a lot of people are reading the Philosophy Compass paper. Some of the public philosophy that we've done, like in USA Today and Newsweek and stuff like that, they haven't liked, which is fine. It's not for them, it doesn't have the same rigour of the arguments and covering all the bases and things like that. But by and large, there's been interest and acceptance and a willingness to have conversations about it from almost everybody that I've talked to.
Peter McCormack: Well, that's the kind of progression we want. What I'd hate to see happen is what we have seen with some academic circles, which is there's a push against facts, and a push against what's traditionally been held as factually believed truth, and a political bias pushed into academic circles whereby people face a threat of losing their tenures or losing their jobs. I mean, I interviewed Bret Weinstein for everything that happened with him at Evergreen College, where he was essentially harassed out of the university. And, it would be a shame if people start reading things like The New York Times article and Bitcoin is harassed out of academic discussion.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, I don't see that happening in philosophy. There's one point at which it might happen, which is the gold standard of any academic article is an anonymously reviewed piece, anonymously reviewed by peers. So they don't know who wrote it, and you don't know who's reviewing it. So that is one place at which roadblocks can be set up, because there's very little social cost to doing that. And so someone who is against Bitcoin might be assigned as a referee for a paper that's arguing that Bitcoin is good for the world, and for that reason, might say no.
So this is what happened with our book at a different press than the one that we ended up going with. And I'm really glad that we ended up where we did, I think this lets us write the book that we want to write, and this other press wouldn't have allowed us to do that anyway. It can be a more crossover philosophy book that's more accessible to non-philosophers, which is what we wanted to write. But this other press had four anonymous referees and two of them, if I recall correctly, almost didn't read the proposal.
One of them said, "This sounds like a Bitcoin hype piece. They're just trying to get people to buy Bitcoin", and another said something about Bitcoin being one small part of the general blockchain community.
Peter McCormack: Oh my God!
Bradley Rettler: And so, we don't know who they are, so there's no real cost to do this. And then when you add in, you know, this is for a university press where there's a lot more knowledge and onus on the referees; when you just have an article that you've submitted, it's super-easy to reject an article for almost any reason. The acceptance rates in philosophy are 2% to 5%, so most articles get rejected. And so, you could set up roadblocks at that stage if you're really anti-Bitcoin. And they're the kinds of things that happen on Facebook and impersonally are more likely. Those reactions are easier to have when you're not actually face-to-face with the person saying, "Let me explain to you why this is a good argument".
Peter McCormack: Are there any parts of the book where you guys particularly wrestled with and you couldn't agree on and struggled to get consensus? If you're writing a book and there's three/four of you, you kind of have to reach consensus on most things. I'm wondering if there's any things that you guys wrestled with together?
Bradley Rettler: There's one I can think of which is, so I did the first draft of the Against Bitcoin chapter, where we lay out all of the arguments and respond to them, and I think I talked about like 25, and just did a paragraph or two. But basically, any argument that I had heard against Bitcoin, I wanted to be included somewhere. So, a lot of them are in the Energy chapter or the Privacy chapter or something, but anything that wasn't handled in those, I put in there. And then Craig and Andrew wanted to go way deeper on some of them, like Lightning centralisation. They wanted to get really into that and spend like three pages on that, and I had maybe three paragraphs, and that meant leaving some other stuff out because we can't write a whole book that's just against Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Sounds like you could have done a whole book against Bitcoin?
Bradley Rettler: We easily could do a book that just talks about every objection to Bitcoin. I'm not sure how publishable that would be.
Peter McCormack: But that means somebody out there could write that book without defending it as well.
Bradley Rettler: Yes, that's true, just the negative case, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, which is exactly what happened with The New York Times article, in that the only place I will give them a pass is that it's right that they wrote an article on Bitcoin mining, it should be, there are people who are challenging it. I would hold journalists' integrity to go out there and investigate this and say, "This is what's happening. Yes, there was a coal plant switched on for this, but yes, look what's happened over here, the incentivisation of the build-out of green energy. And look how much greener Bitcoin miners are compared to these industries. But yes, Bitcoin could do better here". If they wrote a proper balanced, investigative piece, that would have been a good thing to do. They didn't, they wrote a propaganda piece.
But I think it's right to have, and I think it therefore is right for bitcoiners. Bitcoiners should spend more time talking to people they disagree with. More podcasts should have Frances Coppolas on or the people you disagree with them, and just consider where you might be wrong. Because otherwise, we just sound like we're the other side of the same coin.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah. From what I understand, the author talked to a bunch of people in Bitcoin, he talked to Troy for example, and they had a long back and forth. It seemed like maybe nothing got changed in light of Troy's what I assume were perfect objections. I'm not even necessarily against just putting forward one side. If this is what the writer ends up thinking is true after talking to both sides, then I'm for putting that out, right? I think you guys have an episode with Micah Warren about the game theory of Bitcoin that, you know, he's presenting a bunch of worries and they should be heard. I think he said that you said that you needed someone to balance that out.
But I'm not even necessarily sure. Someone will write stuff trying to balance it out afterwards, and that's what we should do with the New York Times article. Daniel Batten has some great threads of response, and someone should publish that other than just his own Twitter and his own blog; maybe not The New York Times, maybe someone else, but we should have the debate in public. That's great.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Well, everyone should get the book anyway and we should also get you all together when it's released, help promote it. We're having a big philosophical discussion. Okay, before we finish though, what are the big, broad philosophical questions that you've pondered your whole life?
Bradley Rettler: The first, I think the first philosophical question that I pondered was whether people could act freely if God knew the future. So that's what got me into philosophy, was if there's a God and God knows the future, then how can I do anything freely? And it turns out you don't even necessarily need God. If there are facts about the future, about what I'll do tomorrow, then how can I act freely, given that those things are true? So that's what took me down the philosophy rabbit hole, related questions in philosophy of religion like, how is it possible that there be a God and that evil exists, given that God would be strong enough to stop any evil from happening and want to because God is good and know that it was going to happen, because God knows everything?
Peter McCormack: Are we assuming God is good?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, yeah, it's really easy. If there are bad gods, or if God is bad or whatever, then there's no problem. But how could there be a good, smart, capable God and yet all this evil exists?
Peter McCormack: There's a lot of religious connections to the philosophical questions you have.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, for me they started in religion.
Peter McCormack: So what are you pondering now?
Bradley Rettler: I'm still working on that!
Peter McCormack: Oh, you're still on that one? How many years has it been?
Bradley Rettler: That was 2006, no, 2003, so 20 years.
Peter McCormack: And you're still on that question?
Bradley Rettler: I mean, I know what some of the answers are, I'm just not super-happy. There's a new one too, which is again religion, that not everyone believes in God, and not only that, but not everyone has very much evidence that there is a God; and if there were a God, and God cared about people knowing that God existed, then you'd expect there to be a lot more evidence, evidence everywhere. And in fact, a lot of people are reasonably rational in not believing in God because they just don't have enough evidence for it. And that's surprising, given that God exists.
Peter McCormack: But I think one of the things about having a God is if we had too much direct evidence there was a God, it would massively change how we behave.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, that might be good though. Don't you want to act based on all the truths?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but at the same time, my son, there's the way he'll act around me and then there's a way he'll act when he knows I'm not around. He gets to have a bit more fun when I'm not around, because he knows he can get away with things. Does God want us to have a bit of fun, thinking he's not looking?
Bradley Rettler: I mean, if the fun is the kinds of things that are morally, or that God would permit, then we would do them if we had even more evidence. So if the question is, does God want us to do the equivalent of throwing massive parties in our house when our parents are gone, then I would think probably not.
Peter McCormack: You haven't thrown a massive party, have you?
Bradley Rettler: So yeah, I guess God wouldn't ever give us misleading evidence, but there are some things, if there is a God, that God is withholding that would have a lot more people believing true things, true things about God, that we don't currently believe.
Peter McCormack: Do you think there is a God?
Bradley Rettler: I do, yeah, that's why these are problems!
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Bradley Rettler: If I didn't think so, then no problem at all. But I'm writing a paper in the Ted Chiang and Philosophy book that's coming out. Do you know Ted Chiang? He's a sci-fi short story author. But he has a short story, called Hell is the Absence of God, where you can see people that are in hell, and there's regular angelic visitations, and the angelic visitations always result in death and destruction and stuff. And so I'm writing about the distinction between the problem of evil and this new problem of God being hidden, not giving enough evidence for people.
Peter McCormack: It's funny, I don't believe in God. Have you seen the film, Event Horizon? It's where the ship goes to hell.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: So I don't believe in God, but I fear hell.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, that's a bad position to be in.
Peter McCormack: I even heard somebody say it once. They said, "I don't believe in God, but I fear him". So I think they fear they might be wrong.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, which all the more -- those kinds of people, God should be giving more evidence to. You're clearly open to it if you're scared of it. And so, either God doesn't care about people believing or God isn't capable; that doesn't seem right. So it's a hard problem. Thankfully in the paper, I don't have to answer the question, I can just make the distinction.
Peter McCormack: All right, you ready to go and eat some food?
Bradley Rettler: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Anything else you want to talk about?
Bradley Rettler: Well, I will say that anyone who's interested in the book should go to resistance.money/book where we have synopses of each of the chapters. And resistance.money in general is the website where we have all of our work, both academic stuff and non-academic stuff.
Peter McCormack: Right, the trilogy's done, we need to get you all around the table together. I cannot wait to read this book and I cannot wait to take you to the football tomorrow.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, not tomorrow.
Peter McCormack: Sorry, Saturday. I keep thinking it's tomorrow, because the event's tomorrow.
Bradley Rettler: Yeah, the live event.
Peter McCormack: The live event, then football. Thank you for coming over for this. Good to see you, man.
Bradley Rettler: Appreciate it.
