Speaker 1: Fellow conspiracy realist. As we said earlier this week, we're
Speaker 1: doing a couple of extra episodes. We went and went,
Speaker 1: did a cavalcade of podcasting team ups with our pals
Speaker 1: at Lava for Good, and we didn't ask them about cryptocurrency.
Speaker 1: But maybe we can get to that when we have
Speaker 1: them on for interviews.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, that's coming very soon as well. But for now,
Speaker 2: let's get to cryptocurrency Part two with Jonathan Strickland or
Speaker 2: we talk a bit about the nuts and bolts of
Speaker 2: coins such as Bitcoin, the more popular ones, the advantages
Speaker 2: of the technology, and some of the flaws in the
Speaker 2: system that have really kind of borne out over time
Speaker 2: since these episodes were released back in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's see if we predicted it a thing. I
Speaker 1: think we got kind of close. Let's get to it.
Speaker 3: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
Speaker 3: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 3: learned this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 4: Hello, and welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
Speaker 4: my name is Nol.
Speaker 2: It's good to have you back.
Speaker 1: Yes, agreed, they call me Ben.
Speaker 3: We are joined with.
Speaker 1: Our super producer Paul Decant. Most importantly, you are here.
Speaker 1: You are you that makes this stuff they don't want
Speaker 1: you to know. Cryptocurrencies Part two. I just followed through
Speaker 1: with that because it Rhyan had a bit of a flow.
Speaker 1: But we are not alone today. No, we are joined
Speaker 1: again with our longtime friend Slash, nemesis of the show,
Speaker 1: recurring guests who I think may have been on, may
Speaker 1: have been the guest with the most appearances on stuff
Speaker 1: they don't want you to know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we've got a jacket for you, Alla, SNL. It's
Speaker 5: really fun.
Speaker 6: We get to go to the join the Five Times Club.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you get to meet Steve Martin, but you have
Speaker 1: to also meet Chevy Chase, ladies and gentlemen. Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 6: Hey, and just like love, I was inside you all along.
Speaker 6: What Yeah, it's just dating.
Speaker 4: I've been meaning to check that. I get that checked out.
Speaker 6: Sorry, Yeah, are you doing a reference? What so so?
Speaker 1: Jonathan, thank you so much, Thank you so much for
Speaker 1: coming back on the show. In our previous episode, we
Speaker 1: we discuss the nuts and bolts of cryptocurrency.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and blockchain technology.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that we agree would would
Speaker 1: probably be the best move for you listeners, friends, and neighbors.
Speaker 1: If you are not familiar with cryptocurrency, please check out
Speaker 1: episode one before you go to this episode, because we're
Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna cut past that. We're gonna cut past
Speaker 1: that blockchain drive.
Speaker 6: Sure.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and on other past episodes we've discussed some of
Speaker 5: the darker sides of what cryptocurrency might be, and you're
Speaker 5: here to really shine a light in some of that darkness.
Speaker 5: Let's see what's real it's not.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm happy to at least to impart to you
Speaker 6: what I know, and I wholly admit there are things
Speaker 6: I do not know, but I don't know what those are.
Speaker 6: So here we are.
Speaker 1: You got unknown unknowns. Yeah, so for a peak behind
Speaker 1: the curtain. Several weeks ago, Matt Nol and I began
Speaker 1: talking about doing something on cryptocurrency conspiracies, and I think
Speaker 1: a lot Noel you had come with this idea, and
Speaker 1: I think a lot of it was inspired by conversations
Speaker 1: we'd all been having, both together and as individuals, about
Speaker 1: speculation and booms and busts in cryptocurrency and the proliferation
Speaker 1: of non bitcoin cryptocurrency. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: we wanted to do with this episode is get your
Speaker 1: take on some of the allegations that Matt has mentioned
Speaker 1: about different well rumors, allegations perhaps stereotypes of cryptocurrency. The
Speaker 1: first one, which is probably the most apparent and something
Speaker 1: I think you've probably remarked upon in Tech Stuff as well,
Speaker 1: which is one of Jonathan's other podcasts available wherever you
Speaker 1: find your favorite shows. One of those topics is cryptocurrency
Speaker 1: and crime. So how much truth is there to the
Speaker 1: characterization of cryptocurrency as like a cash for criminals?
Speaker 6: So there's certainly some legitimacy to that in the sense
Speaker 6: that the very nature of cryptocurrency allows you to make
Speaker 6: somewhat anonymous transactions. If you are super super deductive and
Speaker 6: you are really paying attention to patterns and you're really
Speaker 6: tracking which accounts are getting transfers at what time, you
Speaker 6: could probably draw some conclusions that could narrow you down
Speaker 6: to a specific person. But generally speaking, these are anonymous, right,
Speaker 6: So it's an ideal currency for someone who wants to
Speaker 6: purchase something that otherwise would be illegal because it's not
Speaker 6: easily going to be tied to that person.
Speaker 2: When it's a currency that's used a lot on like
Speaker 2: the Dark Web, and drugs or anything like that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the Silk Road, which was, you know, one of
Speaker 6: the many black markets on the dark web, which has
Speaker 6: been shut down and opened up again and shut down repeatedly.
Speaker 6: That was one of the places known for accepting bitcoin
Speaker 6: currency from pretty much the start of bitcoin, once it
Speaker 6: really got going, So a lot of people immediately began
Speaker 6: to associate bitcoin with this concept of the currency you
Speaker 6: want to use when you want to do something illegal,
Speaker 6: whether that might be purchasing drugs or weapons, or paying
Speaker 6: someone to do something terrible to someone else. All of
Speaker 6: those were allegations.
Speaker 2: Like pranking them or something more.
Speaker 6: Pranking to death, Yes, pranking to death. He's been pranked
Speaker 6: to death. Yeah, it was a lethal banana pie to
Speaker 6: the face, except way more violent and splatting.
Speaker 1: So is this like law and Order carrot top, Yes.
Speaker 6: It's or Gallagher. Yeah, it was hit by the watermelon
Speaker 6: smashing mallet. So seriously though, that was certainly an element,
Speaker 6: and it very quickly got this reputation in those early days,
Speaker 6: and it's somewhat earned, not entirely. I would argue that
Speaker 6: bitcoin kind of falls victim to the same thing that
Speaker 6: peer to peer networks fall victim too. Which is that
Speaker 6: both technologies can have their uses in illegal activities, but
Speaker 6: that wasn't necessarily what they were made to do. Peer
Speaker 6: to peer networks were created so that would be easy
Speaker 6: to distribute files quickly across the network, big files, and
Speaker 6: that doesn't necessarily mean something like a movie that you
Speaker 6: don't have the rights to. It might be something that
Speaker 6: you can freely distribute. It's just that to do so
Speaker 6: in normal means would take too long.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: It's just an efficient way of transferring files over the
Speaker 2: Internet that doesn't require a one to one transfer of
Speaker 2: a single file. It's just a little bit more efficient
Speaker 2: and makes best It makes better use of the pipeline.
Speaker 6: And blockchain technology in general is a great way of
Speaker 6: keeping record of transactions because every single transaction becomes part
Speaker 6: of that shared ledger. It's part of that shared history
Speaker 6: and it's there forever right, so you can track ownership
Speaker 6: through blockchain technology if you want so. For example, if
Speaker 6: you wanted to use blockchain to keep a record of
Speaker 6: real estate deals, you would definitely know who owned that
Speaker 6: or at least what account own that last real estate deal.
Speaker 6: I'll own that parcel of real estate because it would
Speaker 6: be in that shared Ledger, there'd be no getting around.
Speaker 6: In fact, a lot of people have talked about using
Speaker 6: blockchain for stuff beyond just cryptocurrencies, So there are legitimate
Speaker 6: uses for it, but it's hard to escape that reputation
Speaker 6: once you get it. Certainly there are still people who
Speaker 6: are using bitcoin to do stuff that is extra legal.
Speaker 1: Okay, So then if we were to say on the
Speaker 1: validity of this on a scale of one to ten,
Speaker 1: it sounds like it's about a five or six.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, it's certainly something that has been an issue,
Speaker 6: and you know, people who wanted to commit any kind
Speaker 6: of criminal act, whether it was purchasing something or paying
Speaker 6: someone to do something, certainly bitcoin would be an attractive
Speaker 6: alternative to using a currency that could be traced back
Speaker 6: to you. Really, it's not the currency so much that's
Speaker 6: traced back to you, it's the transaction itself, right, because
Speaker 6: often these transactions have to pass through a third party.
Speaker 6: It's that third party that is the barrier for a
Speaker 6: lot of people.
Speaker 2: Isn't this a thing though, where like you know, with Facebook,
Speaker 2: you're constantly having to accept updated terms of service and
Speaker 2: things like that. Obviously, using something like bitcoin or being
Speaker 2: part of one of these exchanges, there's no such protection.
Speaker 2: So who are we to say that, you know, all
Speaker 2: of a sudden that anonymity goes out the window or
Speaker 2: something fundamentally changes about the way business is done.
Speaker 6: I mean, it all depends on how you've set up
Speaker 6: your wallet, right, Like, if you've got your wallet with
Speaker 6: an exchange, then there are a lot of dangers there.
Speaker 6: There's the danger that you may your identity may never
Speaker 6: be revealed, but someone might get hold of your money.
Speaker 6: So it's a complicated affair. But that's the case with
Speaker 6: any kind of currency or commodity. I mean, there's always
Speaker 6: going to be some element of risk there because there's
Speaker 6: no such thing as a perfect system. Systems are being
Speaker 6: made by human beings, and so far we have not
Speaker 6: created the perfect human being.
Speaker 2: Well, the most popular wallet is coin base, I believe,
Speaker 2: and they've been having they were having some troubles, I
Speaker 2: believe earlier this year.
Speaker 6: Every single one of these these digital wallet companies have
Speaker 6: had some sort of issues. Sometimes they've been relatively minor,
Speaker 6: like people reporting that they suddenly could not access their
Speaker 6: wallets for a given amount of time. Other times it
Speaker 6: gets way worse, where people can't access their wallets and
Speaker 6: they find out two weeks later. The reason is all
Speaker 6: that information was stolen.
Speaker 1: Nice, and it's because it's a unique thing it can
Speaker 1: be stolen to, meaning that it's not so like if
Speaker 1: your if you're quote unquote stealing a movie by you know,
Speaker 1: downloading it through a peer to peer thing. You're getting
Speaker 1: a copy of it, right, physically taking it, but the
Speaker 1: original still exists, right, But in this case, the original
Speaker 1: is long.
Speaker 6: It's because what you what you have stolen is you
Speaker 6: have stolen the end point of the last transaction for
Speaker 6: that bitcoin, right, or that part of a bitcoin, depending
Speaker 6: upon how much was being spent. So what you are,
Speaker 6: what you're effectively stealing is the destination that bitcoin went to.
Speaker 6: So again, bitcoin coins do not exist in any sort
Speaker 6: of physical reality, right, You're what you're doing is you've
Speaker 6: got a record of transactions. It's and in fact, this
Speaker 6: isn't that hard to imagine. If you've dealt with money
Speaker 6: on any digital scale, like just regular cash dollars, if
Speaker 6: you do a transfer from your bank account to some
Speaker 6: other account, they're not sending suitcases filled with bills. They're
Speaker 6: wiring over a notification saying this transfer has taken place.
Speaker 6: This represents this amount of wealth going to this person.
Speaker 6: Same thing with bitcoin. So what you have done if
Speaker 6: you've stolen is that you've stolen that account saying you
Speaker 6: know you you now own the wallet where it says
Speaker 6: this is where those bitcoins went last. And because most
Speaker 6: people are using bitcoin anonymously, it gets really hard to say,
Speaker 6: well that that specific one doesn't belong to you. It's
Speaker 6: it gets real muddy.
Speaker 1: Speaking of yeah, anonymity here one thing that's one thing
Speaker 1: that we discussed in previous episode was the identity or
Speaker 1: identities of the enigmatic Satoshi Nakamoto, yeah, pioneer of bitcoin.
Speaker 1: We also found some pretty interesting allegations or pretty interesting
Speaker 1: arguments that bitcoin some people believe may be a tool
Speaker 1: of intelligence agencies or state actors.
Speaker 6: Have you heard this interesting? I had not specifically heard that.
Speaker 6: It's very interesting because the at least the stated purpose
Speaker 6: for bitcoin is so antithetical to that. But then you
Speaker 6: could argue, well, that's the perfect cover, right, the idea
Speaker 6: that oh, if I go out there and tell everyone,
Speaker 6: this is the perfect currency to adopt because it doesn't
Speaker 6: involve a state actor, it doesn't have any third party,
Speaker 6: it's all direct transfers between people within the system and
Speaker 6: therefore no one needs to know apart from the two
Speaker 6: parties involved, except for the fact that, of course every
Speaker 6: single trend action becomes part of this shared ledger.
Speaker 2: Would that be like for off the books like black
Speaker 2: ops and things like that? Is that the idea here?
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, it all originates from this person, Natalia Kasperski.
Speaker 5: She was giving a lecture at university in Saint Petersburg,
Speaker 5: and you know, somebody snapped photos, as you tend to
Speaker 5: do sometimes, of the slides as she was giving the presentation,
Speaker 5: and one of them was discussing bitcoin in particular. And
Speaker 5: this is just a quote that was taken from this.
Speaker 5: It was in Russian, or it was not written in English.
Speaker 5: This is a translation, but it was. Bitcoin is a
Speaker 5: project of American intelligence agencies which was designed to provide
Speaker 5: quick funding for US, British and Canadian intelligence activities in
Speaker 5: different countries. So the idea that you could wire money
Speaker 5: essentially not untraceable, but you could wire money easily that
Speaker 5: is not in the currency of some other country. Depending
Speaker 5: on where you're transferring it to, it doesn't need to
Speaker 5: be exchanged.
Speaker 6: Its plausible deniability that if like saying, oh well, this
Speaker 6: actors who, for example, snuck into an Iranian nuclear facility
Speaker 6: and installed viral software upon centrifuges. They weren't paid in
Speaker 6: any any countries currency, so therefore it's harder to trace
Speaker 6: back something like that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's also interesting, so that would be really
Speaker 5: good cover for that kind of thing. And then also
Speaker 5: if you're having a very large transaction to maybe another
Speaker 5: intelligence agency or someone you're working in tandem with, you
Speaker 5: don't have to exchange you know, a huge transaction anywhere.
Speaker 5: It's only a couple of bitcoins really, or you know,
Speaker 5: one hundred bitcoins here, and you're like, that's a massive transaction.
Speaker 1: Like the example I heard would be the CIA interacting
Speaker 1: with ISI to support something that would technically be US
Speaker 1: support of known terror groups.
Speaker 6: Sure, so that yeah, kind of kind of also, like
Speaker 6: when you get into two past scandals like the the
Speaker 6: Iran contra, that sort of stuff. Well, let me say this,
Speaker 6: it wouldn't surprise me if there were various agencies intelligence
Speaker 6: agencies making use of cryptocurrencies for this sort of thing.
Speaker 6: I don't think they would have had a hand in
Speaker 6: creating them necessarily, but I certainly don't wouldn't find it
Speaker 6: surprising to hear about them leveraging it. You got to
Speaker 6: remember that ultimately, in order to get units of that
Speaker 6: currency in the first place, you either have to mine it,
Speaker 6: which means, assuming your system is on the up and up,
Speaker 6: you have to dedicate a lot of computing power to that.
Speaker 6: And knowing that once that secret is out, you know,
Speaker 6: once everyone knows, and you know, the system depends upon
Speaker 6: everyone knowing. Once everyone knows how the mining process works,
Speaker 6: there are going to be lots of people working very
Speaker 6: hard to be really good at that because that's how
Speaker 6: they earn money. Or you've got to actually exchange real
Speaker 6: world money for those units of currency, right, So, ultimately,
Speaker 6: if you get to a point where someone is exchanging
Speaker 6: large amounts of their current currency, their state sponsored currency,
Speaker 6: for bitcoin, that could be traceable. So you really all
Speaker 6: you've done is shifted things.
Speaker 2: How can it be.
Speaker 6: Traceable though, because you're actually going to have a budget
Speaker 6: item somewhere under someone's budget saying this X amount of
Speaker 6: money was spent from our budget.
Speaker 2: Not if it's a black budget.
Speaker 4: It's classified, Jonathan, Come on.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that doesn't mean that it's not written down somewhere, buddy.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it does, I would think so, and all I'm
Speaker 2: saying too is like, you know, in the same vein,
Speaker 2: sure as hell, it feels like a good way to
Speaker 2: launder money.
Speaker 6: Oh sure, No, that's another element of the criminal aspect,
Speaker 6: is the idea of using bitcoin to launder money.
Speaker 1: With a way more effective than a car wash. Also,
Speaker 1: you got to wonder what the rates are, you know,
Speaker 1: is it fifteen percent? Is it twenty? And then like
Speaker 1: at what point should you just pay taxes on it?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: And are these criminals and order the government? Do they
Speaker 2: do you have to use a thing like coinbase or
Speaker 2: is there another entry way into this?
Speaker 6: I mean, you can have a wallet on your hard drive.
Speaker 6: That's why people have their hard drives, and they lose
Speaker 6: them and they're like, I lost seven hundred million dollars
Speaker 6: on my hard drive. That can happen.
Speaker 1: So we're going to follow up with more of this
Speaker 1: conversation after a word from our sponsors, assuming we don't
Speaker 1: get black bagged. Holy smoked, we made it.
Speaker 6: Noel stole my bit.
Speaker 4: I thout if we all did it, we just all
Speaker 4: had black bags on.
Speaker 1: We could do it again.
Speaker 6: No, no, no, I think we're good. Let's keep going.
Speaker 1: I have four black bags in my bag. At all times.
Speaker 6: I'm not at all surprised by that, and yet still terrified.
Speaker 1: Look, it's it just it's like somebody using bitcoin. Just
Speaker 1: because I have that doesn't mean I'm a criminal.
Speaker 6: One thing I want to refer back to in our
Speaker 6: previous little discussion, he said, ignoring the previous statement, right,
Speaker 6: is that is that just because there's someone who's giving
Speaker 6: a presentation doesn't necessarily mean that there's any actual evidence
Speaker 6: to back that up. I am highly skeptical of a
Speaker 6: presentation happening in Russia, in Russian to Russian audiences blaming
Speaker 6: United States intelligence agencies for the creation of cryptocurrencies, or
Speaker 6: at least the use of cryptocurrencies to fund black ops operations,
Speaker 6: because there may be and I hesitate to say this,
Speaker 6: but there may be a bias.
Speaker 5: What.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm really glad you made that point, because one
Speaker 1: thing that happens to depending on people's ideological viewpoints, is
Speaker 1: we will sometimes tend to pick on one organization over
Speaker 1: another that would do essentially the same thing. Sure, so
Speaker 1: it's a real tall milkshake to say that one intelligence
Speaker 1: agency did something and the other intelligence agencies A did
Speaker 1: not know about it, or B did know about it.
Speaker 1: And also didn't try to do something like it or.
Speaker 6: See, yeah, it wasn't already doing exactly the same thing.
Speaker 6: Like it is not a stretch of the imagination to
Speaker 6: think that. Like I said before, I would not be
Speaker 6: shocked to find out that there had been use of
Speaker 6: cryptocurrencies for these sort of black ops operations, because by
Speaker 6: the very nature everything is being is trying to avoid
Speaker 6: detection from the get go. But I also would not
Speaker 6: be shocked to hear that, say, the KGB had used
Speaker 6: cryptocurrencies to pay I don't know, hackers in North Korea.
Speaker 2: I'm trying to go out on a limon and say,
Speaker 2: there's no way that's not happening at least a little bit. Yeah, man,
Speaker 2: Like it just seems rife for that kind of stuff,
Speaker 2: And like, you know, that's what these black ops are
Speaker 2: all about, is that kind of freewheel and attitude where
Speaker 2: it's just like improvising and figuring out different ways to
Speaker 2: do things, and you know, it's all about being up
Speaker 2: on the latest technology. And I don't know, it just
Speaker 2: seems it rings true.
Speaker 6: I mean, yeah, if they want to use the cryptocurrency
Speaker 6: spy cred, that would probably be.
Speaker 1: In here's another aspect of this that I think argues
Speaker 1: in favor of this behavior. It's that we're now as
Speaker 1: a species and as a conglomeration as state actors, seeing
Speaker 1: a fundamental transformation in the nature of warfare. Right, we
Speaker 1: know that there is a ticking time limit to the
Speaker 1: usefulness or efficacy of cruise ships. Right, we know that
Speaker 1: for several decades, with great success, countries that would not
Speaker 1: normally be able to fight in a conventional war have
Speaker 1: successfully funneled time, blood, sweat and tears and plenty of
Speaker 1: R and D into asymmetrical warfare. Which is why we
Speaker 1: see you know, so called hacker or bought armies influencing
Speaker 1: opinion through soft power stuff like propaganda. The new war
Speaker 1: or the new theater of war. People the Pentagon are
Speaker 1: always said, is informational.
Speaker 6: Well, I mean you've already seen over the past decade,
Speaker 6: we've seen numerous examples here in the United States of
Speaker 6: foreign actors who have infiltrated various information systems.
Speaker 1: Oh, like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Speaker 6: That's more of an overt one, but I was thinking
Speaker 6: of things like in the electric grid, the power grid.
Speaker 6: There have been numerous occasions where security experts have looked
Speaker 6: at the different systems and various major power companies and
Speaker 6: throughout the power grid in the United States and said,
Speaker 6: there's evidence here of foreign hackers putting in code to
Speaker 6: help infiltrate the infrastructure. To what purpose, who's to say,
Speaker 6: but it's not a stretch to imagine that these are
Speaker 6: all kind of little trigger points that should should someone
Speaker 6: want to do serious damage to the United States. You
Speaker 6: flip a switch and you overload a power you make
Speaker 6: it so that it is going beyond its capabilities. You know,
Speaker 6: you could actually physically snap power cables if you're sending
Speaker 6: enough juice through you get to a point like that,
Speaker 6: you cripple the the infrastructure, and it creates enough chaos
Speaker 6: for you to get away with other stuff if you
Speaker 6: need to. So there's entirely that possibility. Now, the fact
Speaker 6: that nothing like that has actually happened, we haven't seen
Speaker 6: any you know, rolling blackouts due to this means that
Speaker 6: whatever they were trying to do, they had not actually
Speaker 6: you know, they hadn't actually pulled that switch, but they
Speaker 6: had started to lay the groundwork. Well, that stuff's happening
Speaker 6: all the time everywhere the United States. You know, obviously
Speaker 6: we're focused on it because we live here, but it's
Speaker 6: happening all over the world from various actors all working
Speaker 6: at cross purposes against each other and.
Speaker 2: Sort of an ensemble cast.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, I mean, you know, we've got we've got
Speaker 6: things like stocks net, which certainly seems to have the
Speaker 6: United States fingerprints on it. It would be hard to
Speaker 6: deny that based upon the code that was used in it.
Speaker 2: Let's give us a little bit of a rundown on
Speaker 2: st Ducks.
Speaker 6: So stucks Net was a virus specifically, all right, is
Speaker 6: a virus. So nuclear power plants one of the things
Speaker 6: they have are centrifuges that spend at a certain RPMs, right,
Speaker 6: and they spin at that certain RPMs because if you
Speaker 6: spend too slowly or too quickly, then things go wrong.
Speaker 6: And Stuck's net effectively, what it did was it made
Speaker 6: the centrifuges turn at a speed that was wrong, too
Speaker 6: fast for what it was supposed to do. The idea
Speaker 6: being that would cause failures in Iran's nuclear power capabilities,
Speaker 6: and it.
Speaker 2: Kind of worked.
Speaker 6: It's tough to do because these facilities mostly have air gaps.
Speaker 6: Air gaps are where you do not have a connection
Speaker 6: between your internal system and an external system, so it
Speaker 6: meant that you had to get physical access to the
Speaker 6: the the location.
Speaker 1: In the form of a thumb drive.
Speaker 6: You could do a thumb drive. Yeah, just do a
Speaker 6: thumb drive. And even if you're just doing a thumb
Speaker 6: drive where you're sending it to, you know, it doesn't
Speaker 6: necessarily have to have been someone on the inside who
Speaker 6: was compromised. You could send a thumb drive to let's
Speaker 6: say the person at the front desk and say, uh,
Speaker 6: there's a new update to the operating system. Just plug
Speaker 6: this in and that'll do it. And then it could
Speaker 6: infect the internal network, which could then go and affect
Speaker 6: whatever systems you need to compromise, but you wouldn't have.
Speaker 2: Like remote control over it. Instructions that would like.
Speaker 6: It's good, good old coding. You're just writing in the
Speaker 6: code like when this happens, do execute this line of code.
Speaker 6: So it's it's in some ways it's really sophisticated. In
Speaker 6: other ways it's very basic.
Speaker 1: But it's it's brilliant in the in this simplicity of application.
Speaker 1: But there's a lot of very elegant code going in there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and the code, yes, it was definitely advanced and
Speaker 6: so that the people argue, because the advanced nature of
Speaker 6: the code, it narrows down the suspect list of who
Speaker 6: could have done it. And because the very nature of
Speaker 6: the code itself. A lot of people have said, this
Speaker 6: looks an awful lot like stuff that comes out of
Speaker 6: the United States.
Speaker 1: Maybe, and also Israel, and also Israel. Israel and the
Speaker 1: US work together.
Speaker 6: That's the that's the common thread. Yeah. So and you know,
Speaker 6: of course, no one's going to come forward and say, yeah,
Speaker 6: got us, it was us, But it does definitely seem
Speaker 6: to point that way. Now, does that mean that it's
Speaker 6: definitely US and Israel? Well, I mean, we we can't
Speaker 6: speak in certainties, but it seems fairly fairly sure like
Speaker 6: it's hard to deny it. Now in that world where
Speaker 6: we've got all these different parties working at cross purposes
Speaker 6: infiltrating different systems, plausible deniability very important, right, Like we've
Speaker 6: we're seeing it through everything from the accusations of interfering
Speaker 6: with election cycles to uh yeah exactly, to affecting entire systems,
Speaker 6: you know. And the usual suspects that pop up for
Speaker 6: things that are happening in the United States are Russia,
Speaker 6: North Korea, and China. Those are your three big ones,
Speaker 6: so you could you know, And then of course you've
Speaker 6: got the States saying it's not us, we didn't authorize this.
Speaker 6: If you use something like a cryptocurrency to pay the
Speaker 6: people who are actually creating the code and executing the
Speaker 6: code and overseeing the botnets and actually doing the work,
Speaker 6: then you've got that level of plausible deniability. You don't
Speaker 6: know who paid whom. It could be that you have
Speaker 6: an outside organization, someone who's not even remotely connected to
Speaker 6: the governments of those of those countries. They say, let's
Speaker 6: just make use of them, because one they have the technology,
Speaker 6: two they have the education and know how on how
Speaker 6: to do it, and three it takes all the heat
Speaker 6: off us because they'll never know it was. We were
Speaker 6: surprised as you are. Yeah, we just paid those guys,
Speaker 6: and we paid them with a type of currency that
Speaker 6: can't be traced back to us.
Speaker 1: We're basically watching the sixth sense with you for the
Speaker 1: first time.
Speaker 6: All we're doing is putting on all of those graphics
Speaker 6: processing units to work.
Speaker 1: It's really interesting. Yeah, it's really interesting. You say this
Speaker 1: because one of the controversial practices in China that the
Speaker 1: governments of the United States and China disagree on is
Speaker 1: who's paying documented Chinese hacking forces because they're not government employees.
Speaker 1: And the Chinese position for some time has been this
Speaker 1: is just a group of idealistic national not very nationalistic people.
Speaker 6: These are people who identify with China's philosophies, but they
Speaker 6: are not in any way sponsored by or endorsed by
Speaker 6: the government. For example, when Sony had their massive data
Speaker 6: breach where gigabye of data, mostly in the form of movies,
Speaker 6: but lots of other stuff too, including like records of
Speaker 6: executives and actors and all this other stuff that got
Speaker 6: leaked out. Uh, there were a couple of different arguments
Speaker 6: about where that came from. One was the possibility of
Speaker 6: it being from North Korean hackers, because it was in
Speaker 6: response to a film that was coming out that was
Speaker 6: The Interview. Yeah, it was the Interview. It was a
Speaker 6: little a little bit of a spoof on North Korea's leader,
Speaker 6: and North Korea had condemned it. So there was an
Speaker 6: argument like, well, clearly you had already said that, you know,
Speaker 6: you objected strongly, strongly to the movie. Apparently you objected
Speaker 6: strongly enough to fund hackers to attack and this this company,
Speaker 6: this global company.
Speaker 2: Which the movie wasn't even very good.
Speaker 6: It's not that good. I've seen it.
Speaker 4: It was fine.
Speaker 1: We did an episode on this that you appeared on,
Speaker 1: John that this, this idea of sophisticated coding and the
Speaker 1: separation of the true actor from the appearance of an
Speaker 1: actor leads us to another very strange question. So far,
Speaker 1: when we've been talking about hidden hands behind cryptocurrency, sure,
Speaker 1: we've been talking about humans.
Speaker 6: Well, why are we going to talk about raccoons?
Speaker 2: Yes, badgers.
Speaker 6: Sticking badgers? Oh roh wo badgers?
Speaker 2: What if? What if?
Speaker 6: Okay, hear me out? Yeah, hit me?
Speaker 2: What if a rogue artificial intelligence created bitcoin for the
Speaker 2: express purpose of siphoning electricity to feed its nefarious dark engines?
Speaker 4: Wait wait, hold on, yeah it eats electricity.
Speaker 1: Awesome.
Speaker 6: Well, I mean, if it's an artificial intelligence, it's presumably
Speaker 6: on silicon based hardware and thus needs electricity to run.
Speaker 6: So electricity would mean power. Power is what allows it
Speaker 6: to process information.
Speaker 1: It needs a lot of it.
Speaker 6: I'm trying, I'm trying so hard to not just call
Speaker 6: nonsense on this.
Speaker 2: But the reason, let's also use is an opportunity to
Speaker 2: talk about how much bloody power and energy that mining
Speaker 2: for bitcoin consumed. I think this is a good job.
Speaker 6: Right well, well, and I mentioned in the previous episodes,
Speaker 6: So when you're when you're mining bitcoins, what you're really
Speaker 6: doing is you're trying to solve very difficult mathematical problems
Speaker 6: in order to validate past transactions, the ones that have
Speaker 6: just happened to add the next block to the blockchain.
Speaker 6: And if you managed to do that, you get rewarded
Speaker 6: not just with whatever coins are mined at that time,
Speaker 6: which is predetermined, and every few years the number has
Speaker 6: per block I think's mind.
Speaker 1: Currently bitcoin miners generate around seventy five bitcoins per hour.
Speaker 6: Every and when you look at that by per block,
Speaker 6: it breaks down even further obviously because it's every ten
Speaker 6: minutes is another block, right, right, So but every few
Speaker 6: years that number is cut in half until you finally
Speaker 6: get to the point where all bitcoins that'll ever exist
Speaker 6: are in the system. And at that point it's just
Speaker 6: transaction fees that keep things going.
Speaker 1: While energy spent on mining bitcoins is increasing well to
Speaker 1: a point to a point.
Speaker 6: So if you get to a point where the number
Speaker 6: of bitcoins you get per transaction completed is small enough,
Speaker 6: then you have to reconcile that with how much money
Speaker 6: you are spending on the electricity being used for the
Speaker 6: processing power. And if you're spending more money on electricity,
Speaker 6: then you're making money in the bitcoins you're mining as
Speaker 6: a losing proposition, and people are going to start to
Speaker 6: back off.
Speaker 2: Here's a thing, though, to an article on Motherboard right now,
Speaker 2: with the trajectory of bitcoin value being what it is,
Speaker 2: they say it would be profitable for minors on the
Speaker 2: whole to burn through more than twenty four tarawatt hours
Speaker 2: of electricity in a year's time.
Speaker 6: Sure, yeah, and that's but these are making lots of assumptions.
Speaker 6: Assumption number one is that the value of bitcoin is
Speaker 6: going to continue to be high enough for that to
Speaker 6: be true. And we don't necessarily know that, I suspect
Speaker 6: it is going to be true. But over time, that is,
Speaker 6: by the nature of what bitcoin is going to decrease.
Speaker 6: It has to, because that's just how unless bitcoin's value
Speaker 6: just continuously skyrockets and just keeps on building and never
Speaker 6: takes enough of a backtrack to settle back down to whatever,
Speaker 6: like ten thousand dollars per bitcoin, which is still a
Speaker 6: huge amount, no doubt about it. Then you do eventually
Speaker 6: get to a point where you're getting you're getting a
Speaker 6: decimal like like ten thousandth of a bitcoin when you
Speaker 6: successfully mine a block. It doesn't make sense for you
Speaker 6: to continuously use that much power because you will be
Speaker 6: spending more money than you get. That that's down the
Speaker 6: road though, because it's when you've gone a few years
Speaker 6: where this number keeps having until it gets down to
Speaker 6: this tiny, tiny number. But eventually you get to a
Speaker 6: point where it won't make sense to spend that much electricity.
Speaker 6: In the short term, however, you're seeing massive amounts of
Speaker 6: electricity being used to mine these coins.
Speaker 2: That number I said is apparently about the amount of
Speaker 2: energy that Nigeria uses in a year, and that's the
Speaker 2: country of one hundred and eighty six million people.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and it's it's not a surprise. But what will
Speaker 6: happen is you'll eventually, at least the idea is that
Speaker 6: you'll eventually reach a peak, you know, peak bitcoin, where
Speaker 6: assuming again, assuming the value of the bitcoin doesn't skyrocket again,
Speaker 6: that more and more people will start to back off,
Speaker 6: and once they back off, the difficulty of that problem
Speaker 6: will decrease, and people who are running more modest hardware
Speaker 6: will be able to mind bitcoins and it won't be
Speaker 6: as big of a yield per block mind. But at
Speaker 6: the same time, they're also not the ones who would
Speaker 6: otherwise be spending thousands of dollars just on electricity bills.
Speaker 1: Until the machine consciousness is stated, at which point there
Speaker 1: would be no reason to continue this charade, right.
Speaker 6: I find it very difficult to believe that an artificial
Speaker 6: intelligence is in fact responsible for this, but I will
Speaker 6: support that argument. After you take a break to thank
Speaker 6: your sponsors.
Speaker 7: Who such cheek Jonathan, I am cheeky the sand Sorry, guys.
Speaker 6: I saw an opportunity and I went for it, so
Speaker 6: I said that I was going to support my argument.
Speaker 6: So the biggest argument I would make is just that
Speaker 6: artificial intelligence is nowhere near the level of sophistication necessary
Speaker 6: to create a system anywhere close to that complicated. I mean,
Speaker 6: I follow the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence, and there's
Speaker 6: some amazing stuff in machine learning. There's amazing stuff in
Speaker 6: various aspects of intelligence, but they're all very very narrow applications. So,
Speaker 6: for example, image recognition we're getting really good at that
Speaker 6: voice recognition, We're getting really good at it. But these
Speaker 6: are all just tiny little slivers of intelligence. When it
Speaker 6: comes to innovation, we're really lagging behind as far as
Speaker 6: machine intelligence is concerned. And an example of this is
Speaker 6: if you ever try and use the tool chef Watson.
Speaker 6: Chef Watson uses the same platform as Watson that went
Speaker 6: on Jeopardy and that Jeopardy right, and the way it
Speaker 6: we're is that it was fed a whole bunch of
Speaker 6: different recipe books and then it takes all that information
Speaker 6: and it starts to really analyze it and try to
Speaker 6: figure out which cooking techniques go with which ingredients, which
Speaker 6: ingredients complement one another, based upon their appearance in various recipes.
Speaker 6: And then what you do is you tell it what
Speaker 6: kind of stuff you have at your disposal, and it
Speaker 6: suggests recipes for you to cook and they're Bonker's crazy.
Speaker 1: What's an example.
Speaker 6: So, for example, there's cauliflower fricacy. One of the optional
Speaker 6: ingredients in califlower frecacy is cauliflower. I'm serious, Like, I'm
Speaker 6: going through the list of recipes and this is cauliflower optional.
Speaker 2: Like, so burning question. Yeah, I've always wondered what constitutes
Speaker 2: a frecacy.
Speaker 6: You know, an excellent question that I am not prepared
Speaker 6: to answer, but I will tell you this that Chef
Speaker 6: Watson is. It's dynamically creating these recipes. So if you
Speaker 6: were to put the exact same recipes in or exact
Speaker 6: same ingredients in as I did, you would get a
Speaker 6: different recipe. If I did it twice in a row,
Speaker 6: I would get two different recipes, and there would be
Speaker 6: recipes that were created on the spot at that moment,
Speaker 6: not like stored in some database and then retrieved. So
Speaker 6: it's not like search results.
Speaker 2: Just goes to show that Watson has moods.
Speaker 6: Man, Well, my point being that Watson hasn't quite nailed
Speaker 6: it yet. Sure, this is about cooking a meal that
Speaker 6: is edible to human beings. Creating an entire cryptocurrency system
Speaker 6: in order to mask the consumption of energy is an
Speaker 6: order of magnitude more complicated, and I just cannot conceive
Speaker 6: of that being in the realm of possibility.
Speaker 1: Well, of course not, man, you have a meat brain.
Speaker 6: Yeah, maybe that's the problem.
Speaker 2: What if said Tooshi Knakamoto, is working with the machines,
Speaker 2: is aiding the machines in this endeavor because he wants
Speaker 2: to be the number one meat bag and the takeover happens.
Speaker 6: He doesn't want to get caught in that sky net.
Speaker 2: It's made of lasers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're doing references today, folks.
Speaker 6: Sorry you invited me on the show.
Speaker 1: I knew what happens, we knew what we were getting into,
Speaker 1: and we welcome it.
Speaker 6: I think this is a fascinating idea, the idea that
Speaker 6: there could like. To me, this is on the same
Speaker 6: level as someone who suggested, and I mentioned this in
Speaker 6: our previous episode two, someone who suggested that the reason
Speaker 6: why the Large Hadron Collider suffered so many setbacks early
Speaker 6: on when it was first going to come online was
Speaker 6: that supposedly, uh, the someone from the future, some entity
Speaker 6: from the future was traveling back in time to sabotage
Speaker 6: the Large Hadron Collider because once it turned on, it
Speaker 6: would cause some sort of calamitous event that would perhaps
Speaker 6: extinguish the human race. And so there were Whether those
Speaker 6: were theories that were that were expressed in jest or seriously,
Speaker 6: I don't know. I mean, they seem tongue in cheek
Speaker 6: to me, but I can never tell if someone's being
Speaker 6: serious or not, which is why I am so awful
Speaker 6: whenever I go to stand up. But the fact that
Speaker 6: those were put forward, it seems very similar to this
Speaker 6: kind of suggestion. And while it's fun to think about,
Speaker 6: and I certainly think it's a great premise for like
Speaker 6: a science fiction story, is just not quite within the
Speaker 6: scope of what we're capable of doing.
Speaker 4: Right now, what do you think that I think it's
Speaker 4: just hiding.
Speaker 6: You just think the artificial intelligence is hiding.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, look at all this energy usage. I'm not
Speaker 5: in here, I'm not inside to what ends. Well, it's
Speaker 5: hiding till one day we get all of those slivers
Speaker 5: that we're talking about of innovation into one unique piece
Speaker 5: of just what it means to be a human.
Speaker 4: Then it will know, and then it will become.
Speaker 6: I think any artificial intelligence of that sophistication would be
Speaker 6: able to essentially and would have already infected all networks
Speaker 6: and distributed itself to a point where we are already superfluous.
Speaker 6: And uh, why did the lights just flicker? Okay, well,
Speaker 6: never mind. You know, I'm just gonna I'm gonna drop off.
Speaker 6: I'm going to drop off on that line of line
Speaker 6: of logic right now.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you. The problem there though, is inherently artificial
Speaker 2: intelligences don't have hands what with to build stuff, right,
Speaker 2: so they need they need us for a time and
Speaker 2: then you know, it's lights out.
Speaker 6: Until when they get better. Robus the robots.
Speaker 2: These days, I mean, they they're hard pressed to, like,
Speaker 2: you know, walk across the room clunky.
Speaker 6: That's again why I sit there and say that there
Speaker 6: our ability to create an artificial intelligence of sophistication that
Speaker 6: would be able to do this is kind of laughable
Speaker 6: because we're still at a point where a robot that
Speaker 6: is designed to learn how to open doors will sit
Speaker 6: and stare at a door for six hours and then
Speaker 6: reach out and pull a door that's meant to be pushed.
Speaker 1: And I have a different hand.
Speaker 2: I do that all the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I literally ran into a door yesterday.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 6: Well, I also don't expect you to create a cryptocurrency
Speaker 6: to hide how much power you are consumer.
Speaker 2: Hey, I make no secret about my yesh.
Speaker 1: Don't sell it, don't sell. In short, so we are
Speaker 1: we've looked at three of or at least three of
Speaker 1: the really really big ideas right that somehow on this
Speaker 1: on this idea of artificial intelligence or machine consciousness. Maybe there,
Speaker 1: maybe there isn't some sort of proto sky net entity
Speaker 1: out there, But would you be as quick to dismiss
Speaker 1: the idea of, you know, the idea of some of
Speaker 1: the same lessons learned from high frequency trading or algorithm studies,
Speaker 1: like I know, sure is using algorithm I mean, sorry,
Speaker 1: bitcoin mining is using algorithms.
Speaker 6: Yeah, absolutely, I mean that certainly people are using are
Speaker 6: the intelligence in order to work with bitcoin, But I
Speaker 6: don't think bitcoin itself is a product or is the
Speaker 6: is being manipulated that on that grand a scale by
Speaker 6: artificial intelligence. But yes, as you mentioned high frequency trading,
Speaker 6: that's where you've got computer algorithms that are making thousands
Speaker 6: of trades per second, really far faster than what any
Speaker 6: human can do, and you end up seeing little mini
Speaker 6: crashes and bubbles in the stock market as a result.
Speaker 1: I can't believe we almost forgot in the first episode.
Speaker 1: We left off at the very end with something we
Speaker 1: need to get to, even if it's just at the
Speaker 1: end of this episode. Wales.
Speaker 6: Oh so yeah, I'm happy to talk about whales because
Speaker 6: we you know, you guys were talking about different questions
Speaker 6: to ask and one of the questions you had was
Speaker 6: could there possibly be any entity or organization that could
Speaker 6: really work to leverage bitcoin in some way that could
Speaker 6: be harmful to others. That leads us to the discussion
Speaker 6: of wales. What are whales? Why do we call them whales? Wales?
Speaker 6: That's a term within the bitcoin sphere for organizations or
Speaker 6: people who own a large number of bitcoins. And it
Speaker 6: is estimated Bloomberg did a piece on this in twenty
Speaker 6: seventeen that one thousand people own forty percent of all
Speaker 6: the bitcoins out there.
Speaker 1: There's already economic inequality.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so you think about that forty percent, nearly half
Speaker 6: of all bitcoins belong to just one thousand people. So
Speaker 6: keeping that in mind, and remember bitcoin, don't I argue
Speaker 6: it's not really effective as a currency. It's more like
Speaker 6: a commodity. In my mind. Let's say that you got
Speaker 6: these one thousand people, and through their circles, they just
Speaker 6: have learned, even if it's only a portion of them,
Speaker 6: learn who the others are.
Speaker 1: OK.
Speaker 6: So it's a a loose confederation of bitcoin owners and
Speaker 6: they all watch very carefully as the value of bitcoin climbs,
Speaker 6: and they're thinking, all right, I feel like at let's
Speaker 6: say seventeen thousand dollars. That's going to be the peak
Speaker 6: before we hit the next plateau or maybe even a
Speaker 6: drop off. What we're going to do collectively so that
Speaker 6: we can really cash in is we're all agreeing at
Speaker 6: x amount of time, we're all going to liquefy our
Speaker 6: bitcoins so that we can maximize our profit and then
Speaker 6: get out before the crash. Which means that they would
Speaker 6: actually be causing a crash because they'd be dumping thousands, thousands,
Speaker 6: hundreds of thousands of bitcoins on the market simultaneously, which
Speaker 6: would devalue it suddenly. The demand would be far lower
Speaker 6: than the supply, right, It's typically the other way around,
Speaker 6: and you could see an entire market collapse. This is
Speaker 6: the same sort of concept as someone who's dealing with
Speaker 6: insider trading, right that they have the for knowledge that
Speaker 6: something big is gonna happen, and they either buy up
Speaker 6: a lot of stock or sell off a lot of
Speaker 6: stock before the announcement hits so that they can maximize
Speaker 6: their profit from it. That's the fear that this one
Speaker 6: thousand people who own almost half of all the bitcoins.
Speaker 4: Which is about seventy four billion dollars.
Speaker 6: Yeah, seventy four billion dollars worth could collectively make the
Speaker 6: decision to get out of the game and maximize their
Speaker 6: profits because I mean, you know, they could they could
Speaker 6: just convert it to whatever currency they wanted to, because
Speaker 6: I mean.
Speaker 2: Surely they're in some kind of underground like torture club together.
Speaker 6: There's probably a fight club, probably a bitcoin fight club.
Speaker 2: I'm just saying, like you'd think players of that level,
Speaker 2: as anonymous as it all is, are more likely to
Speaker 2: be aware of each other than say some of the
Speaker 2: smaller players.
Speaker 6: Well, there's certainly like they're online discussion groups about bitcoin
Speaker 6: where where people who adopted it early certainly know each
Speaker 6: other or at least know each other by handle, if
Speaker 6: not by name.
Speaker 5: You kind of think there's some younger people, much younger
Speaker 5: than you would imagine, sure, being old enough to have
Speaker 5: that much money.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's really it's especially for the
Speaker 6: early days again before the computing demands got so high,
Speaker 6: because the computational problems got so complicated, and obviously if
Speaker 6: you got in on the ground floor and you were
Speaker 6: constantly using at least some of your bitcoins to help
Speaker 6: supply the need for more advanced computing equipment. You could
Speaker 6: just continuously build out your your mining rig to mine more.
Speaker 6: So as long as you're mining more coins than you're
Speaker 6: spending on your mining rig, you're in the winning situation. Right. Well,
Speaker 6: if this group of people all decided that they were
Speaker 6: going to do that, it could be a total catastrophe
Speaker 6: for the currency as a whole. And there have been
Speaker 6: some folks who have said that bitcoin is in a
Speaker 6: bubble and that bubble is going to burst, And one
Speaker 6: of the things that could cause that is a tacit
Speaker 6: agreement among the whales to get out of the game
Speaker 6: rather than watch their investment balloon up in value and
Speaker 6: then deflate and then balloon up and deflate. I mean,
Speaker 6: I can't imagine what that would do to me. Like
Speaker 6: if I were sitting there looking at my digital wallet
Speaker 6: and thinking, all right, I've got twenty bitcoins. Wow, today
Speaker 6: it's two hundred thousand dollars and then the next ac no,
Speaker 6: it's down to twenty thousand dollars. I lost eighty grand overnight. Like,
Speaker 6: it would drive me crazy. So that is a real fear.
Speaker 6: Whether or not it would ever happen is a totally
Speaker 6: I mean, it's still a hypothetical. It's not like it's
Speaker 6: actually happened, but it's still a possibility.
Speaker 2: Supposedly, there's a lot of work being done with neural
Speaker 2: networks being used to predict the change in bitcoin price.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And honestly, now we're getting to a level of
Speaker 6: technology that is I mean, it's fascinating to me. Neural
Speaker 6: networks are amazing. I love neural networks. But you're getting
Speaker 6: to a point where you're taking technology, which is something
Speaker 6: I understand pretty well well, and you're applying it to
Speaker 6: market theory, which is something that is like witchcraft to me.
Speaker 2: Even to the experts, it's like witchcraft. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 2: you have these like high level economists who just completely
Speaker 2: contradict each other all the time.
Speaker 6: It makes me feel like string theory. Yeah, because you
Speaker 6: talk to someone who's an expert in string theory and
Speaker 6: you say, you keep asking questions, you will eventually get
Speaker 6: to a question where they say like, yeah, I the
Speaker 6: math tells me what it is, but I don't understand it.
Speaker 1: That's the thing. When you're at the bleeding edge of something,
Speaker 1: to use the phrase you had established earlier, When you're
Speaker 1: at that edge, people are guessing and it becomes very
Speaker 1: close to ideology. They're economists that have clearly been demonstrably
Speaker 1: wrong over decades, and they're sticking to the model.
Speaker 2: And the nature of an edge is that it's not
Speaker 2: that hard to fall off.
Speaker 4: That's true.
Speaker 6: That's true. It's really I like that. I want it
Speaker 6: on a bubber sticker.
Speaker 5: So it just really fascinated something that I didn't understand
Speaker 5: before we did this episode. Yeah, that exactly how many
Speaker 5: cryptocurrencies exist, and you know, we keep saying that there
Speaker 5: are a lot of them.
Speaker 4: Did you guys mention how many?
Speaker 6: I just all I did was okay.
Speaker 5: So according to coin marketcap dot com, which tracks all
Speaker 5: of them, and it gives you it gives you their
Speaker 5: market cap, it gives you the price of a single one,
Speaker 5: the volume, the circulating supply. It's really interesting. It gives
Speaker 5: you a change over time for a twenty four hour period.
Speaker 5: You can get really deep into it if you want to,
Speaker 5: the way you would a stock market. Just a currency exchange.
Speaker 5: It has almost fifteen hundred different currencies that are out
Speaker 5: there right now. That's that's insane to me. I was
Speaker 5: I would only I've only ever been aware of for
Speaker 5: I think right.
Speaker 6: Like ethereum and bitcoin.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that they're that many. And if you look through
Speaker 5: this list on this website, it's so much money just
Speaker 5: wrapped up in these ethereal things.
Speaker 6: It's so much wealth.
Speaker 1: Read those white read those white papers, Matt, sign up.
Speaker 2: That's my thing that what makes one more attractive than another?
Speaker 2: Is it just that it has a cooler name, Like
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 6: I mean it's it's honestly, when you when you really
Speaker 6: boil it down, it's it's the ones that people feel
Speaker 6: are valuable. Yeah, I mean it's the same thing as
Speaker 6: really any again, any currency. Like if we go way
Speaker 6: back in time where we get to bartering, then we
Speaker 6: can have little philosophical discussions like like, Ben, really, do
Speaker 6: you think that this laptop I have is worth only
Speaker 6: two chickens? I don't care how close you are to
Speaker 6: your chickens. I'm going to need more than two chickens
Speaker 6: for this laptop.
Speaker 4: He's very close.
Speaker 1: You don't even know their names, man, No, how dare you?
Speaker 6: Yeah? Do you know my laptop's name?
Speaker 1: Yes, Dell, it's actually Lappy.
Speaker 6: I named him after Strong Bad's laptop. But no, it's yeah,
Speaker 6: it's a good point, but but we could You know
Speaker 6: that that gets to a point where you argue, all right,
Speaker 6: well how much how much is the thing that you
Speaker 6: make worth the thing that I make? Because I need
Speaker 6: what you have and you need what I have. And
Speaker 6: then the problem that came in is when let's say
Speaker 6: that I need a table and the guy the carpenter, Nole,
Speaker 6: you're the carpenter. I'm going to go to you, and
Speaker 6: I'm like, I need a table. I am a goat farmer.
Speaker 6: I can give you goat milk, and you're like, dude,
Speaker 6: I do not like goat smoke. Well, now I have
Speaker 6: to either find someone else who makes something you do need,
Speaker 6: trade the goat smoke for the thing that you like, nol,
Speaker 6: and then bring that to you and then get my table.
Speaker 6: Or we have to invent a currency because this is
Speaker 6: just too crazy. I need some other means of transaction.
Speaker 1: Let's just start a cult.
Speaker 5: Yes, and just last thing there right now, in all
Speaker 5: these different cryptocurrencies, there is over half a trillion dollars
Speaker 5: circulating in this just vapor somewhat vapor aware of money.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, I know it sounds crazy, but seriously,
Speaker 6: when you when you really look at all currencies, you
Speaker 6: realize that there's there's only like a half step of
Speaker 6: difference between the quote unquote real currencies of like dollars
Speaker 6: and pounds in euros and things like that, and digital currencies.
Speaker 6: It's it's it seems like there's more because you can
Speaker 6: hold things, you know, most of them have physical versions
Speaker 6: of them, like dollars you can buy you can get
Speaker 6: a dollar bill, and since you hold in your hand,
Speaker 6: it has permanence and you think of it as being
Speaker 6: a real thing. But when you really really look beyond that,
Speaker 6: you realize, wow, we're all just pretending. And as long
Speaker 6: as everyone keeps pretending, everything's fine. But if we ever
Speaker 6: come to a day where we decide to stop pretending,
Speaker 6: we're bone.
Speaker 1: We're all we're all elmer FuG yeah, or Daffy Duck
Speaker 1: walking off the cliff right before they look down.
Speaker 6: As long as you don't look down, you don't fall. Well.
Speaker 2: But if you think about it, though, too, if you
Speaker 2: really want to go down that rabbit hole. It's like
Speaker 2: the reality that we all accept comes with kind of
Speaker 2: being part of a police state. Because as soon as
Speaker 2: you step outside of your lane and say, I don't
Speaker 2: accept this anymore. I want more, I should have this
Speaker 2: much money, I'm gonna take it, you get shot or
Speaker 2: you getting put in jail, Like, there are very real
Speaker 2: boundaries that force us to be a part of this
Speaker 2: system and accept it. So it's a lot easier to
Speaker 2: accept it knowing that if you don't, you're boned too.
Speaker 2: So it's kind of a boned if you do, boned
Speaker 2: if you don't.
Speaker 6: What it comes down to is our confidence in the
Speaker 6: method of transaction, and if our confidence is sound, it
Speaker 6: doesn't really matter what we call it, or whether it's
Speaker 6: digital or physical, if we're confident in it that the
Speaker 6: thing that I have in my hand will be able
Speaker 6: to purchase the goods or services that I want, and
Speaker 6: then tomorrow it's just as good, and the next day
Speaker 6: and the next we're fine. It's when you sit there
Speaker 6: and say, this thing we've all been pretending has value,
Speaker 6: I just realized it doesn't, and now everyone else has
Speaker 6: realized that, and then suddenly the value just disappears because
Speaker 6: we've gotten rid of our shared delusion.
Speaker 1: We did an episode asking whether money is a religion,
Speaker 1: and it's still One of the things we always took
Speaker 1: away from that and found interesting was that, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a reason genres of some religions and versions of
Speaker 1: some currencies are referred to as denominations. Yeah, it's not
Speaker 1: for nothing does etymology exist.
Speaker 6: Also, remember it's not money that's the root of all evil.
Speaker 6: It's the love of money that's the root of all evil.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we have like three emotions a year,
Speaker 1: so you don't need to worry about that.
Speaker 2: Speak for yourself, Toddy.
Speaker 4: I found two currencies that are tracked on here.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: The first one is called snake eyes okay, and it
Speaker 5: just goes by the handle snake. So you got I
Speaker 5: got like twenty snake man. I think that's awesome. That
Speaker 5: needs to catch on right now. It's like worthless, so
Speaker 5: I just need to get that back up.
Speaker 6: I just see thousands of snakes wearing eye patches.
Speaker 5: And this one it's just it says it gay money,
Speaker 5: that's what it says.
Speaker 4: So you know, maybe more power.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: Well, if there's fifteen hundred of these, then I see
Speaker 2: no reason why we can't get n bucks on the board.
Speaker 1: All right, and thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Let's end with that.
Speaker 6: How do you do it?
Speaker 2: How do we go from bend bucks the notion to
Speaker 2: ben bucks the publicly traded tradeable available cryptocurrency we do have.
Speaker 1: We do have tangible bend bucks by the way, well
Speaker 1: glad to make the switch.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you definitely don't need tangible ones. So what you
Speaker 6: would need to do is you would have to set
Speaker 6: up a network. You would have to create the software
Speaker 6: that would allow you to create the blocks of transactions,
Speaker 6: just as Bitcoin and all these other cryptocurrencies use. So
Speaker 6: you would have this technology where it would be proprietary
Speaker 6: to bend bucks. Where you know, the method we use
Speaker 6: to create the math problem that the various computers on
Speaker 6: the network have to solve in order to verify transactions
Speaker 6: is unique and one that we could scale up or
Speaker 6: scale down.
Speaker 2: We can't trade snake eyes for ben bucks.
Speaker 6: You could, actually, I mean certainly there can be. I
Speaker 6: mean that's why exchanges exist, right The exchange exchange is
Speaker 6: purpose is to determine what is the relative value of
Speaker 6: all these different currencies so that you can make those exchanges.
Speaker 6: Although all it really means is that you're handing the
Speaker 6: units of bend bucks over to the exchange, The exchange
Speaker 6: hands units of equivalent or snake guys to you, and
Speaker 6: then the exchange has your bend bucks.
Speaker 1: So this is totally possible.
Speaker 6: Oh, it's possible, it would be. I mean, do we
Speaker 6: have any computers in the office that aren't currently being
Speaker 6: used for anything?
Speaker 1: I hope those words taste good when you eat them later.
Speaker 6: Because I'm just saying I mean, I mean, I got
Speaker 6: a gaming rig, which means that I can be like
Speaker 6: the number one minor of bit Bucks, which means I
Speaker 6: can be.
Speaker 2: Getting in on the ground floor.
Speaker 1: We're taking all our We're taking all our old gaming consoles,
Speaker 1: pulling a Pentagon and networking them together. Remember when the
Speaker 1: when the Pentagon brought like or do o D excuse me,
Speaker 1: got like two.
Speaker 6: S the OLDPS two.
Speaker 2: Contribute.
Speaker 1: I haven't too let's so well.
Speaker 6: You know, the thing was that Sony eventually made a
Speaker 6: change in the firmware that removed the ability to boot
Speaker 6: into Linux using PS twos. But they were actually being
Speaker 6: used as supercomputers when they were networked together by the
Speaker 6: US government and others. It's pretty cool we.
Speaker 4: Could flash firmware or something, right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I think they might have finally lifted it. Honestly,
Speaker 6: I haven't kept up because PS twos are so twenty
Speaker 6: years ago.
Speaker 1: So let's put an air gap in this conversation for now,
Speaker 1: thank you again so much for coming on the show
Speaker 1: and walking us through crypto conspiracies.
Speaker 6: Jonathan, Now, thank you so much for having me. I
Speaker 6: am now going to go home look at my paycheck
Speaker 6: and wonder what is happening.
Speaker 4: I think we're all going to do that.
Speaker 6: You're all going to look at my paycheck. That's totally
Speaker 6: again company.
Speaker 4: You get a check, weird? Yeah, I just get snake it.
Speaker 6: Actually, I just get a guy at my door saying
Speaker 6: you're good, and then he walks away.
Speaker 2: It's called pain for protection.
Speaker 1: My man, Is that the guy who touches your face
Speaker 1: when he talks to you?
Speaker 6: No, I.
Speaker 2: Kid say to you on both cheeks.
Speaker 6: I suspect that's Josh. He went from walking up behind
Speaker 6: me and inhaling deeply where he would take in my scent. This,
Speaker 6: by the way, totally not a joke. Josh Clark of
Speaker 6: stuff you should know, used to come behind me and
Speaker 6: sniff me. I think it might be him, but he
Speaker 6: just disguises his features, so it's just a guess at
Speaker 6: this point.
Speaker 1: Speaking of fantastic segues, you can find Jonathan Strickland on
Speaker 1: tech Stuff. You can check out his excellent his excellent
Speaker 1: work on YouTube where he introduces you to concepts of
Speaker 1: everyday science and brain stuff, and where he gives you
Speaker 1: a much more optimistic look at the future than we
Speaker 1: do in his video series Forward Thinking.
Speaker 6: Thank you if you.
Speaker 5: Have any thoughts, and that's the end of this classic episode.
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