Allen Farrington Austrians, Capital & DeFi Yield

Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today for episode three hundred and ninety-six my guest is Allen Farrington. Now this show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin and Swan Bitcoin is organizing a conference. It's called Pacific Bitcoin. It will be on November tenth and eleventh this year in LA, California. So this one is going to- to be the biggest Bitcoin only conference ever. Hang out with thousands of Bitcoiners from around the globe, catch your favorite Bitcoiners all around the place, whether they're on the main stage or you're chatting with them in the side areas of the conference. There'll be events going on throughout the week, and Pacific Bitcoin is going to be optimized for fun with sports, games, music, photo opportunities, and high fives. This will just be one component of the overall LA Bitcoin Week, which will be filled with educational opportunities, meetups, coworking, and parties throughout the week. So Come along and bring your new coin or friend so they can soak up the vibes and the educational aspects about Bitcoin. The website is pacificbitcoin dot com and use the code Livera to get a discount on your ticket. Now, for those of you who are Bitcoin and Lightning builders, Voltage is constructing the leading enterprise-grade Lightning solution for Bitcoin builders for anyone building the future of financial technology and layer two applications. Nowadays, if you want to integrate Lightning, it doesn't have to be an afterthought. Voltage can make it really hassle-free for You. Now, this can be applicable for you whether you want to scale nodes instantly by the thousands or whether you just wanna be a merchant and set up to take payment with Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. With Voltage, you can get quality liquidity easily, and what was once a headache is now simplified. You can get up and running in two minutes by visiting voltage dot cloud. Are you looking for Bitcoin hardware devices to help secure your stack? Coldcard is my favorite hardware signing device. This is available over at CoinKites dot com. Now, the Coldcard looks like a little calculator, and you can use it in all kinds of different configurations, whether that is a single signature configuration for beginners, where you just directly plug it into your computer, and you use it with wallets like Sparrow or Specter Desktop or Electrum. Now, you might be more intermediate or advanced, and you're looking for ways to use it with a passphrase or using it as part of a multi-signature setup with, a provider or doing your own multi-signature. The Coldcard is such a versatile tool that you can do Version out the Mark IV, which has a faster processor, two secure elements, and NFC support. So to get yours, go to coinkite dot com and use the code Livera for a discount there. So for those of you who don't know, Allen Farrington has been investing professionally and has been around the Bitcoin space, and he is also a writer and author. So he joins me and we talk about various concepts related to Austrian economics and Bitcoin capital, as well as critiques of altcoin DeFi and where is the yield? Coming from. I think these are important questions for us to analyze and think about, and I think Alan has a really interesting perspective to share on these things, as well as perspectives on what it looks like as Bitcoin grows. So here's my conversation with Alan. Alan, welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me. So Allen, I'm a fan of your work. I've been reading some of your articles, and I've been reading Bitcoin is Venice. I can't say I finished the book, I'm probably about seventy, seventy-five percent of the way through, but, really enjoying it so far. Do

you wanna know something funny about that actually? So, I haven't read it, so if that makes you feel any better, that's just, just because of, because of the way that we, we wrote it. So, so me and Sasha wrote this over. Well, it Probably like four to six months over last summer, but it was written in very much like a piecemeal way, and then, you know, we put a lot of effort into trying to make sure it was, it strung together nicely, because obviously almost all of it was originally standalone essays. And, the, the first person to ever actually read it properly was Alex Gladstone, because he had to then write the foreword for it. And then I think when Sasha and I both went to Miami, Sasha panicked and was like, "Oh, sh- Shit, I haven't read my own book and people are gonna ask me about it. This is so embarrassing. So he, he bought one, 'cause we also-- I don't even own one, right? So we, we both bought it. but he, he brought it to Miami with him and he read the entire thing in one sitting on the flight so that he was prepared for anything that followed. I still haven't read it. I'm probably unprepared.

Unprepared. Okay, gotcha.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just, I'm

getting this in How you got into, you know, a-as, as I, understand from your background, you've been, professional investor, but also obviously have an interest in economics and obviously an interest in Bitcoin. So do you wanna tell us a little bit about where your interest in this, in, in economics and, and these topics came from?

Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, it's good that you framed it that way because I feel like I have a, an especially boring sort of Bitcoiner baptism, like a lot of people have far more entertaining stories Of, you know, the, the moment that the penny dropped for them or like some weird circumstance they were in where it just all clicked into place, whereas for me it was, it was a very, very slow burn. And actually, I, I feel like I, I'm very grateful in a way, almost not to anybody or to, almost like to the universe, if that makes sense, that the, the circumstances that I was in and the experiences that I had and so on, and I'll go through these in just a minute, but they were almost perfect to, I'd say, take Bitcoin Obviously not like immediately understand it and be like, "Oh my god, this is the greatest thing ever," 'cause, you know, the, the lot quote that-- or actually, it's not a quote, it's an entire essay, but I think the title of it is that nobody understands Bitcoin, and that's okay. So I'm not claiming that I, you know, I immediately got it, but the handful of experiences that were relevant for me, so- I think I first encountered Bitcoin in about twenty thirteen, I don't remember exactly when, but twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen. And even at that point, so I was studying math and philosophy as an undergrad at the time, so that's-- both of those are obviously very helpful in their own way The only like real job, sort of adult job I'd had that wasn't just like, you know, working in a burger shop for minimum wage kind of thing, was as a software engineer, which I was really bad at actually, but it was a valuable experience. that's obviously super helpful for this too. and I'd also run a business or, as in, like, started a business and run a business when I was in uni, and it, it was terrible. I just lost loads of money. the, the way I tend to talk about it And this one, like as explaining why it's relevant for Bitcoin, is that, you know, it played really well in job interviews. It's like a solid addition to your CV. but no, it was terrible as business, but it was very valuable for my, I guess, personal development. I'm not trying to sound too cringy about that, but I mean, that is kind of why it's good on your CV in the first place. But that then gave me an added appreciation for, I guess you'd say Austrian economics. I know this is something you're issue with describing it that way though, because I almost feel like it shouldn't really require that label. Like to me, the core of the Austrian school, it just is economics, and like almost everything else is bullshit. Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah. So you know,

you know, that's where the term came from, right? So the term, oh, I know, I know the story, yeah, yeah. Well, your listeners might

know though, so go on.

Yeah, so I mean, as, at least as I understand the story, it was basically, it was like the

Austrian economics kind of thing. Yeah. And so then it, it sort of became more, you know, it became known as that. And of course, nowadays the paradigms shifted over time, right? So what became known as the neoclassical and the Keynesian schools of thought became the dominant ways of thinking. Like if you go to university, chances are you're learning from a neoclassical or a Keynesian economist. Yeah. So that was just the, the paradigm. And so what people use now is the term Austrian just to kind of, I guess, call To what are we really doing here? Yeah. What's the method? And that's kind of the Misesian praxeological method.

It's kind of, it's a bit like Maxi in a way. It's, it sort of came about in a similar, like, you know, reclaimed originally an insult kind of thing.

Yeah. Because

it was originally an insult, you're right, yeah. It was the, the economics school at the University of Vienna, which is everyone who was kind of gathered around Karl Menger, who basically just made it, made all of this up, or I Independently, you know, contributed to the marginal revolution in a way that then developed on a very different track to the other, to what came from Jevons and Balrat And, but yeah, the, the German, I, I think they're now-- they, they tend to be referred to as the historical school, but that it's not all that relevant to this particular, I guess, anecdote. And they're basically just stages, like they were chartists, they were-- their, their, their preoccupation in particular The issue they had with Menger was that they were proposing the state theory of money, and he obviously wasn't, and that's where the whole "On the Origins of Money" even comes from, that was Menger like rising to this challenge Right. Anyway, so yeah, Austrianism is awesome, I just wish it, wish it didn't even have that label in the first place. But okay, so what's interesting about this though is that I think probably most people listening to this show, many, maybe not all Bitcoiners, but are at least aware of this if they don't kind of, if they don't have a, a, I guess, an academic bent and explicitly identify with it. But for me, it was almost exactly the other way around, right? So what I mean by that is for most Bitcoiners, especially actually,

Non-Austrian economics, I guess you would call it, and they like, they go through the whole thing, kinda sure it doesn't really make any sense, but they're never quite able to put their finger on it. Then they get to Bitcoin, they're like, "Well, this obviously makes sense, and that crap I learned obviously doesn't." Then they get to Austrianism, and they're like, "Aha, finally, I have a framework for explaining this." Which for me, it was completely the other way around. It was that it was the combination of just having read Proportionally predisposed to it by running a business, 'cause that's another thing, right? That if you-- it's a very similar experience. If you run a business and you're like vaguely familiar with non-Austrian economics, you, you just know it's bullshit. You, and you might not even be able to articulate why, but you just know, because nothing that you're experiencing lines up at all. So I had that as a background, then I encountered Bitcoin. So basically by the time I got to Bitcoin, I had meaningful exposure to computer science, but, well, engineering,

Things that actually work, right? Building software, not just ideas, like building things that needed to work. Then the more abstract side with the math and the philosophy and the experience of running a business and the austranism. And it was basically perfect. It was, and again, doesn't mean I understood it, but meant that I took it seriously in a way that, I mean, goodness, this is almost like ten years ago now, I guess like eight or nine years ago, I think it's paid off well. I'm glad I took Bitcoin seriously when

I did. Yeah, of That if you have studied and read the Austrians, you are more prepared to appreciate Bitcoin. So one of them is this idea that a lot of people suffer from this idea that the money supply has to expand along with the economy, because, right? Because they'll get into this idea, and this even came up recently with, I think Jeff Snyder's interview with, Peter Mc Cormack on what Bitcoin did, 'cause he was saying, quote unquote, "We need some elasticity of money," and, and then, of course, you know, you can't expect people to fully agree Probably the moment that a lot of the Austrian thinkers are like, just cringing.

You know, you know, I only, I only find out quite recently where this came from. I don't, you, you probably know this too, but again, your listeners might not. So I, I, I've like, you know, hated this. Well, it's more just like, not, I don't really have any anger towards it, I'm just like mystified as to why people believe this. But until quite recently, it never occurred to me to think about where it actually came from And there's a good article on, I think it's, Mises dot org. from not too long ago, maybe like twenty seventeen or so, we should dig it up and you can like put it in the show notes, that many people independently pointed to that does actually explain this. And it, I, I was kind of right in my instinct that it literally was just a meme. It was made up by not the, I forget the exact terminology of like these people's job titles, not, not the head of the Australian central bank, but somebody working in the Australian central bank, like some quite senior figure, who had a quasi political role as well. And the reason he came up with it was to craft a PR campaign around tackling inflation, which is like, that's just hilarious when you put that fully in context, right? It's, you know, at the time, I think it was like in the late '80s, and inflation in Australia was, you know, official like CPI inflation, was, you know, high single digits, low double digits, and they needed like a, a campaign, you know, they needed a- Message like a, a, a PR spin to put on what they're doing about it, and they just made up this like, "Well, this is too high, but, you know, two percent is good, better than this." You could just agree with two percent, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. But that's literally where, like, that is now, that meme ha-has been so incredibly viral, I guess, so effective that the, the same kinds of people now say it, having no idea where it comes from and no idea what the original reasoning or like- Lack of reasoning was, and they now say it as if it's, you know, dogmatically, axiomatically true. It's just like some guy just made it up for PR. It's, it's amazing. Oh, the other thing I should add, by the way, I, I stumbled into this recently too. It was on the same sort of, train of exasperation on Twitter. The best, or I think the best way, 'cause I only realized this quite recently, to counter what you have to admit is an incredibly effective viral meme. Is to, to reframe it as follows. So, so what that means, if you really believe this, that, you know, you need two percent inflation to-- the argument is usually to stimulate growth, right? Because otherwise people won't be adequately incentivized to invest, and, and accumulate capital. And but it's, it's like sneakily wrapped up in like actually being a capitalistic argument, even though it's clearly not. The way you challenge this, the way I like to challenge it, is you just say to someone, like, "Ignore money, like, just get money

But even the sense in which that ridiculous idea is conveyed, money is really just performing a kind of informational role, right? It's about incentives, it's not about, trade, let's say. so just get money out of the picture and just think in terms of time, right? So what you, person proposing this theory, are telling me is that you would be insufficiently incentivized to do something, just wh-whatever, just something that you enjoy or actually spare if you don't enjoy it, something that's like a chore but needs to be done, something productive that will help yourself in the long run, right? You're not gonna be appropriately, sufficiently incentivized to do it unless you know, for whatever reason, that if you were to wait a year to do it- It would take you two percent longer. Like, there's no way you're gonna do it now, unless somebody can demonstrate that to you. And like, no one would ever therefore do anything because, like, why would you? You need to, you know, it, it might take you less time in the future, so you'll just wait and you'll not do it. And like, time doesn't matter, your wants don't matter, subjective value doesn't matter, like, nothing matters other than this incentive of like, you need to be lied to by the state, basically. The state needs to Information is being conveyed and convince you that if you don't do it right now, you're screwed.

Right. And there, there are different arguments you hear from the inflationists, and this is obviously the, you know, if you read on the typical news, they'll have all these different arguments. But I think if you try to trace it back, in some cases, it comes from this idea, what's no, quote unquote, sticky wages. It's this argument that, oh, see, people wouldn't appreciate that their purchasing power has actually gone up, but this is the way to sort of Paraphrase that full argument, but, but, because I, I can't even quite understand it myself. I,

yeah, yeah, yeah. I, so I think that is a slightly more sophisticated way to express this, but even that is pretty readily debunked, I think. I, I think that where I, I like you, I should caveat this, saying I struggle to articulate it completely coherently because I think it's nonsense, so this isn't supposed to be like the best steel man ever or anything, but I think that the way that you counter that is by, I guess, disambiguating, different conceptions of what inflation means. So the most obvious one is just, do you mean the, the growth in the money supply versus what you see in consumer prices? I don't even mean exactly that, although what I'm getting at follows from correctly making that distinction. what I think you need to appreciate is that actually if you, if you want to measure it either way, I don't think it really matters, although it's more-- it's maybe more helpful for this argument to measure the- or to have in mind the consumer prices, you, you have to distinguish between this idea, this like just basically wrong idea of deflation as being this kind of force that at That's on everything as if it's like economic gravity or something like that. It's what I, I love that Saylor came up with this. I think he came up with it on a Bitcoin podcast actually. This idea of inflation, although this applies to many like macroeconomic nonsense, but inflation being a metaphysical constant Right? Or sorry, no, no, a metaphysical abstraction, as in the single number just like doesn't mean anything. It's, it's, it's, you know, not-- It's metaphysical, it's not physical, it's not observable in the real world, and it's an abstraction, so it doesn't actually apply to any individual circumstance, you know, any situation in which humans are acting, right? And like creating, any economic observable in the first place. So this idea that it's just a force that acts on everything, it follows from the misunderstanding of it as Being a metaphysical abstraction as opposed to something that actually emerges from economic activity in the first place. And so I think this is very readily cleared up by realizing that if we had sound money, right, if we didn't have this nonsense tipping of the scales, two percent inflation, everybody must be lied to, you know, do anything productive, lied to to do anything productive, you would expect to see it, well, deflation. Where productivity is increasing. It's not just that all prices everywhere go down and then all of a sudden you're like, "Oh shit, we have to fire people because wages are sticky." Like that's just not how this would happen. It would happen where people are more productive in the first place because they have greater access to capital, level, level, level out, right? And, you know, from that point on, it's straightforward. But I, I don't think that actually- Gets you to the sticky wages objection, even though it is admittedly more sophisticated.

Yeah, for sure. I, I also wanted to touch on the, capital aspect with you. So this is an area you touch on in the book, and, you know, you talk about this, and I think it's also, obviously we're gonna get into the, where does the yield come from? I wanna talk about that too, because, I really think that's, it's well worth discussing and getting people clearer minded about where real yield comes from and what's- The issue with the so-called, quote-unquote, DeFi yield. but I, firstly, let's start with, the capital and your, I guess, your discussion about that.

Sure. So, well, there, there's a couple of different ways that we talk about it in, in the book. I don't know if you wanna be more specific and narrowing it down or I can just kind of go completely off the top of my head.

Yeah. well, as in, like, I think the interesting part that I recall from the book was mentioning how we Almost like intellectual forms of capital or non-physical forms of capital, and even like software being capital in that sense, because it makes it more productive. Oh, yeah, oh, that's, that's one of my, yeah,

that's one of my favorite things to, to spout off on. Yeah, I think, I just find this fascinating. I'm, I'm like genuinely surprised that, I don't know, more economists or even sociologists, I suppose, it's not something that people talk about more as just being really, really interesting. So yeah, there's a whole bunch of This one I think is, is just really important to appreciate so you, I mean, aside from anything else, kind of understand what's going on around you in terms of how, how business is now typically conducted. I think it's highly relevant for, for Bitcoin as well in a number of different ways, that- The, the most, well, this is obviously kind of subjective on my part, but I think the most interesting form of capital today is software. and I think that might be my, my interest in it is maybe somewhat circumstantial. I don't think it's like objectively more-- I don't think that's a really meaningful thing to say, but it's entirely new the way that it functions. Like, I don't think there's ever really been a precedent for how it works before, insofar as it has no raw- Raw materials. the, the only thing you can really credibly call a raw material, which is clearly not, I guess, a, an economic good, is just the time and the, I guess, the effort, maybe the, the opportunity cost of that time. I guess it makes some sense to talk about economically.

So, so, so let me try and set the table a little bit here. So, in general, I guess the way to think about it, there's probably three categories, right? So you, we have consumer goods. These are things that we can consume right away. Whether it's, you know, this water, this water bottle, but then you also have capital goods, which are used to, yeah, yeah, yeah, create those consumer goods, and you have multiple stages and layers, and then in the third category, as Mises says, money is sui generis, so it's kind of like you got consumer goods, capital goods, and money. And then now we're in the realm of capital goods, and we're talking about, okay, it's a computer, or it's a printer, or it's a, you know, something that I use to A kind of capital, and we're using it. And maybe an analogy, let's say even we were operating in a world without computers, we could maybe look at, it might be sort of like looking at a, a recipe book and being like, okay, this recipe is how you create this output. And okay, what are some of the inputs? In a computer sense, well, okay, you got CPU, hard drive space, networking, capacity if it's, if it's internet connected. But in some loose sense, it's like having a recipe to create this output, and people can

A machine rather than for a person.

Right.

Which is, which is really fascinating when you think about the, like, the applications of this. So to-- This, I agree, this is a more helpful framework to, to think of it within, because usually if, if you, if you thought that there was some kind of economically relevant good that the only input was your time, you'd probably otherwise mean a service, right? And a service is just, I, I think almost by definition is just consumed immediately. You know, it's, it's almost the act of trading it is its consumption. Whereas software is almost the exact opposite of this. It's creating the means of further production that will last, I mean, it could last forever, basically, it's a recipe, right? It's, it's like, it's also in some sense just knowledge that can be recycled and, and, or recycled isn't exactly the right word, reused for productive ends. But I think the other thing is worth mentioning quickly, because this, this may be-- I don't, you might wanna linger on the economic side for longer, but the, there's a fascinating connection to Bitcoin, I think. As well, but not in the sense of Bitcoin being software, but in kind of political terms that the fact that this can be done, I think, I think is already happening, but certainly as we, you know, as we go forward in the coming decades, this creates a kind of a, a political economy, I guess, in which software engineers are-- they have wildly sort of disproportionate leverage over their, over their, their, their politicians, basically, over, you know, whoever's trying to claim political authority over them Because they're means of generating capital, which probably previously, I mean, certainly anything that's at all followed from the Industrial Revolution, has required capital that's, in almost every case, highly immobile. Whereas, you know, you just as a human, if your, your means of generating capital is your own mind, you're highly mobile. You're almost like maximally mobile on any relevant conception of what that means, and you can, you know, you can therefore move away from any, any political regime that you think is Inadequately capitalistic, which is like, this is very exciting, and then if you-- we don't have to enter this right now, but Bitcoin accelerates that for sure.

Yeah, for sure. And I think what you're getting into as well is very aligned with ideas from, say, the sovereign individual. It's this idea that, yeah, yeah, yeah, because your productivity is now online and digital, well, you can move that elsewhere, and you don't have to be living in a high cost of living place like the New Yorks and the Londons of the world. You I mean, nowadays, especially, even if you're not, not just cheap,

but like hospitable to, you know, to your political inclinations, whatever they may be.

Yeah, exactly. And I think there's, there's something interesting about that. Of course, it matters how many people are able to work remotely, and of course, more and more things are moving remotely. Like, you don't have to be a developer, you could even just be an entrepreneur, and you're hiring people in India or wherever, and people are doing that now. And so it's becoming really more but also for entrepreneurs too.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's what I meant in terms of, software being kind of the, the bridge to this now just exploding to, to all kinds of economic activity. 'Cause I think the, the, the only link that you do have to acknowledge there is that every, every type of valuable work that can be done remotely can only be done remotely because we have this base of software that is allowing it in the first place.

Correct, correct. And of course, with Bitcoin, it is really starting to open up that- World of possibilities that, you know, and, and we see this with a lot of Bitcoin companies, they are remote supporting, generally they are remote savvy, if some of them are remote only.

Yeah, I think there's, with Bitcoin, there's, well, a-at least that I can think of right now, there's two ways, two really interesting ways that Bitcoin affects this dynamic. One of them I think gets far more press than the other, though, maybe just 'cause it's more obvious, which is just that you can now pay people more easily. So that's obviously a major You know, bottleneck, I guess, or, or, or, well, roadblock. It's probably a better metaphor, 'cause bottleneck sort of implies it just makes it harder. It's previously basically impossible to do this with people who are sufficiently distributed across different, like, jurisdictions, you know, banking regimes, et cetera. It was just too hard to even bother doing this. Now it's trivial. Now it's like, you know, sending an email is basically the same thing, just send them value. I think people understand that, and that's sort of obviously exciting. I

I think it's maybe more exciting, but it's a little more difficult to grasp, and it's that Bitcoin, the, the ability to not only be paid in Bitcoin, but Kind of to, to save it, I guess. I may be drawing on something like the distinction between it being a store of value and just a, just a medium of exchange. Because if you get paid in Bitcoin, you might just sell it, and then, you know, you're like, you're kind of minimally involved with this exciting new dynamic if you do that. But I think what it allows, given it is obviously, first and foremost, a store of value Is that it allows you to plan to be mobile, right? And especially, I know you've said this goes well beyond just on them specifically, because I think the case is clearest for them that this, this whole thing about, oh, the, you know, the, the capital is now just in your head, like you're able to generate the capital yourself, that gives you enormous bargaining power. That's obviously true completely without Bitcoin. But you're only ever able to bargain over your, your future output, right? And you're basically trading away your future output at a very, very high sort of valuation, if you like, like a premium to, you know, what anybody will pay you for this work. And so that's kind of abstract. What that tends to mean in practice is that, if you wanna, if you have a good enough idea, you start a company, you get funded, and you get rich quite quickly if it provides Enough value to people. The problem you have though is that, that is still, in order for that to happen in the first place, that has to be rooted within a given financial system. And as soon as you make that trade, you, you can't undo it. Like once you sold the equity, it's gone. Bitcoin completely changes this because you have the same leverage in terms of the ability to just generate this capital, but you don't need to fund it that way. You don't need to enrich yourself by giving it away. You can merely get paid in Bitcoin and then go wherever you want, do whatever you want with that. You're, you're not at all tethered to any given financial regime. You may still want to, just to be clear, like that, that may seem like it's a good trade-off, but You have far, far more optionality in terms of how you can monetize this capital you're able to create.

Back to the show in a moment. Now, the events at exchanges and lending platforms over the last few weeks have been an important reminder for us all, with various platforms suspending withdrawals and others potentially having insolvency. And so, you don't wanna have your Bitcoin caught up in someone else's insolvency. Make sure you are using self-custody to store your coins on keys that you control. And Unchained Capital can help you with this because they've got a com- Concierge onboarding, they can ship you the hardware, walk you through the setup, help you with withdrawals, and answer your questions through that process, and there's even some ongoing support. So if you've been putting this off, this is now the time to get it done sooner than later. Go to unchained dot com slash concierge and use the code Livera for a discount on your package. Those of you involved in Bitcoin mining, you've got to check out Brains. Brains can help you by giving you software, Brains OS Plus, you can install this software which is custom On various Bitcoin mining machines, so you wanna go to the website b r a i i n s dot com and check out whether your mining machine model is supported. If it is, you're in luck because they can dramatically help you in terms of the efficiency of your machine, so you can increase the hash rate and basically get more Sats for your electricity dollar or fiat that you're spending on electricity. So this is a really great benefit, and Brains also have a range of other educational content that you can find on their blog, as well as their Insights dashboard. Which you can use to keep an eye on the Bitcoin mining market and see how things are. Are we still in capitulation? What's going on with the hash rate? And you can also do profitability calculations there also. So that website is brains dot com. Go and check it out. And now back to the show. Sure. And so I think we are still in a transition phase. The world is transitioning into Bitcoin. Obviously, you and I are bullish on Bitcoin for obvious reasons, but the rest of the world isn't seeing it like you and I do, and we're going through this transition phase, and there might be a lot of people who- Would argue that let's say you set up a business and you only take Bitcoin for payment, well, you might be really restricting your potential customer base by doing that. And as soon as you now have, okay, well, we're gonna do Bitcoin and fiat payment, boom, now we're reopening that fiat door, now you might need to have some kind of incorporation or it's in your personal legal name, and you might need a bank account, you might need some kind of payment processor, all of that in the normal world, whereas if you were just Bitcoin only, zero fiat, you don't Managing that transition over, right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that'll, that'll be very, very gradual. I tend to think, yeah, I, I just tend to be quite-- I don't know if pessimistic is exactly the right word, but I'm not Incredibly optimistic that it's gonna happen any day now. I think there, there's, there's two interesting comments on, on that kind of dynamic and how I maybe expect that to change or like why I expect it to change. Neither of which make me like particularly, you know, super optimistic, but it's, you know, it's kind of, it's getting there, the momentum is there. One of them is that I, I actually don't think it's so bad. I mean, obviously you kind of have to do it in practice, but in theory, I don't We're, we're getting to a point, and a lot of places we're already at this point, where the fact of offering both can actually kinda be its own marketing, because it's just fundamentally, if you're paying with Lightning, basically is what this comes down to, it's so, so much cheaper, especially if the items are smaller ticket or lower margin or both, it is so much cheaper to accept the payment in Lightning, even if you intend to just convert it into fiat. Like this is the pitch that I think is being made and will start to be made a lot. More just to regular businesses who are contemplating this and like thinking, you know, oh, what should I do about Bitcoin? Like, this is kind of an obvious thing. Accept payment in Lightning, even if you don't intend to stack Sats, because you can cut out interchange fees, which is, like, I don't wanna go off on this for too long, but There is a tangent that is maybe worth picking at, 'cause I think the more you tug at that thread, the more interesting it becomes, and that the reason that difference exists in the first place, to my mind, fundamentally comes down to fiat being credit, right? The reason that there are like interchange fees exist in the first place, the reason that if when you make a credit card transaction, there are at least four intermediaries who are all doing different things and are all profiting from taking credit risk, even though- Like ostensibly there's no credit involved in this, but there has to be to make a payment, right? That's radically different to Bitcoin, which is nobody's liability, right? It's just an asset, it's a bearer asset, you transfer it instantly, that's amazing. So back to the, the idea of the, the business, if they accept both fiat and Bitcoin, but for example, they offer you Sats back if you pay with Lightning, or they just make it cheaper if you pay with Lightning, that's actually, that's like pretty good, I approve of that. If the,

I don't know, McDonald's only take Bitcoin, like that would be insane strategically for them, whereas this, I think, is probably gonna start to happen. The other one is, it's not quite as exciting as that, it's not something I think sort of regular users are gonna see, but there needs to be-- and, and there is, this isn't a complaint, this is just kind of, you know, forward-looking, there needs to be a lot more, let's say, options to move liabilities into Bitcoin as well, 'cause I think the main reason

want to do it, which is obviously it's a kind of a tiny minority who want to do it, but the main reason that they, they're just not really in a position to do it is that they have dollar liabilities in the first place. Like they, and that can come from all sorts of reasons. Like, you know, if you have an established business, it's, it's kind of act of the same thing, but it's the reason that even if you accept Lightning, you might wanna then just- You know, put it back into dollars right away because you have to pay off your lease or your, you know, whatever debt you have, you know, blah, blah, blah. But the more that that can be stripped out, the more people are freed up to, to actually start-- and, and, and this is now basically what I'm getting at here, is that it will slowly become a unit of account as well. But I'm thinking, you know, what's necessary for people to treat it that way? and I think, yeah, being able to denominate liabilities in Bitcoin is important too.

Right. And I think at this point, of course, there are some individuals and some services literally priced in Bitcoin, and I don't mean just like the USD value auto converted to Bitcoin at the time you buy it, like literally the service is denominated and priced in Bitcoin. But that's very few. Let's say some of the CoinJoin, services, maybe certain individuals in the space who are charging a certain Bitcoin rate, but generally speaking, the world right now Now is operating mostly in terms of USD pricing, or obviously depending on which country you're in, but that's kind of currently where we are. But of course, where, where are we going? I, I, I do believe- Yeah, we're just gonna chip away at that

basically. I mean, you can only, you can kind of think of, you can work backwards to what I just said as like fundamentally what needs to be tackled, and that it's only okay to price things, or I don't mean okay in like a moral sense, it's only, prudent to price things Bitcoin, hardly anybody's calls are in Bitcoin. The reason is that partly, hardly anybody's willing to accept Bitcoin, so that's kind of circular. But I think even more fundamentally than that, people don't tend to think of Bitcoin as their unit of account for capital formation. So they don't have the funds to afford costs in Bitcoin in the first place. And the reason they don't do that is because they don't have Bitcoin-denominated liabilities. Their funding is all in dollars, which means their investment is all in dollars, which doesn't- Doesn't completely mean, but strongly suggests their costs will be in dollars. And by the time you've gone through all of that, like, you kinda have to charge in dollars. So, but this, this can be chipped away at.

Yeah. But part of that is this initial volatility. I know even in the earlier days, there was, the infamous Mihai Popescu had, this M P E X or some exchange. This is like twenty twelve days or so, and the price was something like, I can't remember exactly. I think it was like Right, and it was like literally a Bitcoin-denominated thing. So, you know, there have been people who've tried these things, and because of the volatility and because of people's expectation about where this is going, if they-- like, if you believe this thing is going to millions of dollars per coin, of course, that's gonna change your willingness to denominate long-term things in that.

Yeah. Well, there's, there's another interesting reason that this could come about, though, and it's kind of scary in a way, it's a bit dystopian if you run it out far enough Bitcoin point, right? And a, a kind of a cheeky retort to that, 'cause I don't, I don't think currently all that many people would say this seriously, but I guess my point is like, this will become more serious, is that, okay, but is Bitcoin volatile in dollars or is dollars volatile in Bitcoin? And if there's enough, or maybe dollars is like the worst example, but you know, whatever the local currency is, whatever your obvious alternative that you wanna price things in, if that becomes-- and it's not volatile, if it hyperinflates, like it only goes in one direction, right? Right? If that, if it hyperinflates enough, maybe you decide, I'm, I, I can't risk taking that, I'm only taking payment in Bitcoin, and then that doesn't solve exactly, but it starts to unwind the network effect. At the heart of one of the problems I raise, which is that, you know, as much as you'd love to pay your costs in Bitcoin if you're a business, right, so that, that then enables you to charge in Bitcoin, no one else will accept your Bitcoin payment. That's exactly how that, I think, will start to unwind because it, it then flips and like, well, no one wants your, I don't know, what's a good example? I always forget the names of currencies like the Bolivar, I guess, right? Like, no one wants to be

Yeah, of course. I think the likely scenario, at least as I see it, is that a lot of the world, will move to the USD. we're seeing this even in places like Argentina, where they've had, you know, every decade or so they have this kind of monetary crisis, high inflation, so they already-- They already know the drill. They already kind of go to USD. Yeah. and I think a lot of the rest of the world-- They already know this again. Yeah. They're kind of like, "Well, okay, my dad had I tried to look at where I think it's likely, it's, you know, pe- people will go to the USD, but then eventually, just in the same way that the world is dollarizing, people will Bitcoinize because they'll just see, hey, this is even better. So, I think it'll just take time though. But also, I wanted to chat with you a-about, some of the yield questions, because obviously, this is something you wrote about, and I had, Big Al on to chat about it as well, but yeah, I

Things like this. So do you wanna just give us a, a bit of a, an overview on, you know, where your head is at on, quote unquote, DeFi, these days?

Oh, sure. Yeah, that's maybe an interesting place to start. so I'm not exactly sure where my head is at, to be honest, because there's, th-this might scandalize some of your, your listeners. there are some aspects of it that I'm, I guess, impressed by, given all the chaos lately, and I do think it's important to But only to then explain why it's like actually not that big a deal anyway. what, what I mean by that is the, the various sort of legitimately decentralized components of this, that, that sort of stood up, they didn't, they didn't freeze.

So as you were saying, you were saying there are some are- areas that are actually decentralized, or what were you getting at?

Well, yes and no. So I think it's worth distinguishing. So this is something that the, the more crypto-centric people were getting really agitated about, that the likes of, Particular, Blockfi, I forget the, Three Arrows, Genesis, there may have been more, Voyager, Voyager, yeah. that they're not,

they're clearly centralized, right? They're, they're not really decentralized finance, they don't have any of the alleged benefits of decentralized finance in terms of the, the enforceability of the contracts and the, you know, the transparency of what's actually happening on their books. And I think that, that is important to distinguish. Like, yes, they're basically just Just probably illegal banks, effectively. not, not that I can-- even that I kind of hesitate with, 'cause when I say that, my point isn't, "Oh, they should have been regulated away," it's more just like, "Use the right words, right?" They were banks Banks, they were fractional reserve banks and, but in assets that have no lender of last resort, so they are now insolvent. So they're quite different from DeFi. the other thing that they like to tout, which-- so this is the one thing that I think is worth giving credit to, that if something similar were to have happened in TradFi, even though, you know, there would have been like lender of last resort stuff going on to backstop it all, it's highly likely that credit markets would just have frozen. And I- And it, there would have been contagion basically, whereas here, i-it's kind of like interestingly, free, I guess. So we, we saw a legitimately free market in credit creation, in, well, in fractional reserve banking, and, you know, it's kind of Bitcoiners could have told you it was a terrible idea, but now we know it's a terrible idea 'cause they're actually all now bankrupt. But at the same time, the lending protocols that were- Part of this, obviously not a huge part, they were fully functioning, right? They, they just kept going, nobody cared, every contract was, was honored, every payout was made, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that is worth acknowledging. Solely to then be accurate in what I think is an even more stinging critique, which is that the fact that they didn't break isn't the same as saying they're useful. So this is, I, I think a good example of this in like a tradfi world would be something like the fact that, I don't know, what's something obviously for, like Enron, let's say, right? The fact that the trading of Enron shares on, I assume it was on the New York Stock Exchange, I don't actually remember, but- The fact that the trading of those shares on the exchange was, you know, facilitated, like all the trades were made, it kept going right until it, you know, completely fell apart. That doesn't really reflect well on anybody or anything. It, it doesn't-- It also doesn't indict the New York Stock Exchange, right? In the same way that none of this-- Although I, I think it does, but for a reason I'll get to in a minute, none of what I've said so far indicts, DeFi lending protocols, but it's not really a good thing either All, all it's demonstrating is that they were used to finance fraud, right? And so this is where you do start to indict them. The reason they were used to finance fraud is because they can't be used to finance anything else. There isn't actually any use case for the services that they're providing. So the fact that they work is like, you know, work in quotation marks is technically interesting and perhaps praiseworthy in contrast to what would certainly have happened in tra- But that's like the, honestly the best you can say about it. And I'd then go further to come back to this question of, you know, where, where, where's my head at on DeFi and where does the yield come from, right? Is that The reason that these, CFI basically like Celsius, everybody else, I have to, I have to think about what their names even are in the first place, but they're not quite DeFi, CFI people, the reason they were able to do that in the first place, like the reason there was this, I guess, market to be made, like there was this entrepreneurial, entrepreneurial activity with the, you know, doing fractional reserve banking in these assets, is that underlying it all is actually- DeFi assets that are designed in such a way to spout off nonexistent yield, that these banks then think that banks then think that they can intermediated at a profit, and it turns out they can't because one, fractional reserve banking doesn't really work anyway, as we could have told them, but they now know, but two, it especially doesn't work if the assets themselves are like fundamentally insolvent. It all, it all- It doesn't even really matter that the banks-- I know, maybe another way of putting this, right, is that fractional reserve banking can work until it doesn't work, right? It can-- It's the same kind of thing. It's like the fact that it didn't break doesn't-- is like not really that good a thing, because it will eventually break. And so that's kind of where my head is at, that this one little glimmer of like, "Oh, that was kind of cool," like, "Okay, good for you," but ultimately you still caused this problem, so calm

Obviously, I, I'm Bitcoin only, but let's say the steel man, it might be something like-- Oh, so, so am I, just to be clear. Yeah. But the steel man might be something like, "Oh, but look, Allen, I was able to use these so-called decentralized lending protocols to retain my exposure to a given shitcoin and also, quote-unquote, unlock some of the value, right? So instead of me selling that coin, I was able to, let's say, put up two hundred percent collateral and borrow against it to buy my Lambo or my car That's the, I guess that's maybe that, that's in their, they're saying that's the use, that's where the yield is coming from, because, you know, I, you know, I'm, borrowing against my coins, against my shit coins.

No, that's, I mean, that may be correct, that, you know, that may have happened to somebody, but I, I would just prefer that people are honest about what, I don't know, what they're talking about, like what these assets even are in the first place. And so I, I owe to Elise Kline, who I'm sure, I'm sure you know, I'm sure many of your listeners know. And I remember when she said this to me, it just kind of, everything just clicked into place. I'm like, "Yes, that is the perfect way of thinking about it. That is wonderfully concise. " And it's that everything you just said, while true, is gambling, right? And I think this is a useful framework because it's not Completely dismissive, right? Gambling is a real thing, right? Gambling is a real industry. There's a supply and a demand for this service, and it creates assets that have financial value, right? And you could even have-- I mean, it probably technically doesn't quite make sense, but you could do like cool equivalent financial engineering to the, to the legitimately DeFi protocols, but it wouldn't- M- as far as I'm concerned, it wouldn't matter because it's not capital accumulation. I think the problem here is that, one, it's gambling. So it is real, it's just stupid. But it's, it's gambling that is sort of masquerading as capital accumulation. That That's, I think, the best framework not only to conceive of some of its benefits, but to then articulate why it very quickly gets into being basically fraudulent at times too.

Yeah, gotcha. And I guess let me summarize a few things there. So in, in a way, we could think of it like it's kind of almost this Rube Goldberg machine, but at the same time, it's a machine that enables mass gambling and leverage, and effectively, without people understanding, in some cases, and maybe in other cases they do understand what was going on, there was actually- Actually just a, a whole load of leverage, and it was just basically a house of cards. And so in, even in my steel man shitcoinor steel man example, where let's say I'm some, whatever, some shitcoinor who wants to borrow against his coins, where's, like, 'cause I'm paying back yield for that, I'm paying back interest somehow, where is that coming from? Now if I have a job, if I have some productive business enterprise, and then, okay, I'm paying it back with that, but I think that's maybe that's ultimately the point

Would be-- This would be an interesting question. Are there DeFi loans that have been successfully made to an entrepreneur who actually used that capital to go and do a business and make some return and then pay back the loan successfully? Because that would be-- I guess theoretically, that would be a refutation of this idea, right?

I don't think it happening once would be a sufficient reputation. Right. It, it would force you-- Well, me, I guess, it would force me to not be quite so damning and to kind of like nudge myself to be a bit more open-minded. I'm not sure about it, I guess, but I think it's like, you have to treat it on a value weighted basis. Of course.

Yeah, because if there's one guy who made it work, but then like ninety-nine percent of them all just got wrecked on shitcoin gambling. Not

just, not just because of, I think that, that attitude, which I also share, by the way, that is a valid way of thinking about it, but that's almost like, you know, what is the fairest way to represent this or something? That's Valid, that's, that's helpful to keep in mind. But I mean something more specific than that, and I think it's tied to the yield, right? So it's back to this question of where does the yield come from? That the, this is what I'm kind of in a very roundabout way blaming the DeFi stuff for, even though some of the, the financial engineering in the middle of it was cool and worked. The, the CFI stuff that blew up is predicated on these yields. Like what they were doing is basically skimming interest, right? They were, places for different kinds of yield, and they were borrowing at one interest rate and lending at another interest rate, and it was a complete disaster. But that kind of activity is what's propping all of this up in the first place, because there's no yield. So back to the example of the one guy who actually did something legitimate, good for him, but he was in a position to do that in the first place because of all this bullshit yield that, that ultimately, the other thing you've got to point out, right, is it's all coming from, from VC, like that's what props it VC, 'cause it's not a venture capitalist investment, it's like a, an equity infusion into a fundamentally insolvent enterprise or something. So like that is required for the one guy to do the one good thing. That's why I think the value weighting is more important. It needs to be many more than just one guy for this to turn around.

Of course, yeah. And so I guess if we were to sort of look on, let's say, some of the different articles where people are looking at, okay, where is the yield coming from? They're saying, "Oh, look, " Some of these people are, you know, they're, loaning out to short traders, and so this might be, you know, let's say on Bitfinex or one of these other exchanges, there is actually a, a component there where they are paying interest, but again, that comes back to the leverage component of it.

Oh, sure, but I mean, that, that argument is even more confused though, because this is like- This is now making analogies to TradFi that the fact of making the analogy in the first place demonstrates the person saying it doesn't understand what's happening in the thing they're comparing it to. So we, we say this and we go into more detail on this in section four of Only the Strong Survive, if people wanna go back into that, I won't like recite the whole thing now. But, but one of the things we say though is that in, in TradFi, right? In some or other way, everything is, in fact, priced on yield because there are real returns on capital Exceptions to that, so like, you know, maybe it's, it's, it's, speculative yield, like you think the yield is gonna come one day, even if it's not coming now. Maybe it's derivative, so like literally a derivative or it's like options or, or like a short is kinda like that. But I so-and that, that's a perfect lead into this, that everything that is derivative, that isn't itself just straight up like it's a bond that's a yield, it's an equity that's a yield, everything that has some kind of derivative value,

ability of it, like why it's, why it's a good thing that these things exist in tradfi for the most part, is it, it helps you price the actually yielding assets properly. And if you, if you sort of reverse engineer why a short, say, or an option ought to have any value in the first place, it comes back to there being a yield somewhere that people are just disagreeing about how to price. And so- So incorporating that into DeFi where, once again, there are no yields, doesn't make any sense. It, or it's the sense it tries to make is just obviously circular. It's like, it, and again, it's back to this like, it's back to this question of financial engineering where, I can totally see, like, w- in the example you were talking about, it was kind of obviously centralized anyway in terms of what these pseudo-banks were doing, but for the sake of argument, you-- I, I don't see why you couldn't have like some De Ledfi protocol that just enabled shorting or like, say, this probably exists for all I know, like gave you direct exposure to the prices of other DeFi assets, and that could work, but it doesn't matter because none of the value should exist in the first place.

So I guess the other way to think of it, and I think to Elise's point, as many of us have been saying for a while, is that this is almost like a decentralized casino. There's this, you know, if you sort of put a box around these different elements, and some of that includes some of these CFI institutions, some of that may even include some of the leveraged trading exchanges or Shikoin casinos, as they are colloquially, and, some of the so-called decentralized protocols, you put a box around all of this, it kind of functions gamble, and this is their way of gambling because maybe they don't wanna go to Las Vegas or Macau.

Yeah, well, I mean, that's, that's pretty obviously true, I think in the majority of the, of the use cases, right? In that it's-- I don't think it's even that they can't be bothered going, it's that there's like no barriers to entry here.

Yeah. And potentially more of a multiple possible, right? Like if they-- Because the way they're sold on this, obviously, the marks, the retail marks are sold on And maybe you'll hit a, a ten x, a fifty x, or a hundred x if you're really lucky. And then

I think, and I think that's, that's exactly the relevance of the point I made a few minutes ago about how it's fundamentally gambling, but it's masquerading as capital formation. Like when you go to just a regular casino, right? You go to Vegas, you go to Macau, whatever. You, well, maybe this isn't true for everybody, but in theory, you should understand the odds, right? You should know that the house always wins, right? And, and like, maybe you'll get lucky, and, you know, that's fine, but like in aggregate, obviously, you're not going to like the, your, your expected return is negative. I think most people know this, and, and they do it as entertainment, right? They're not doing it to like, hopefully, they're not doing it to try to get a good return, right? 'Cause they know Whereas in this case, that is at best ignored and at worst lied about, because it is, it is communicated as capital formation, and that's, that's fraud basically. That's, I, I can't think of any other nicer way of putting it. It's just, it's lying for money.

Yeah, and of course. And then you layer on these other aspects where, let's say, insiders and influencers get paid to promote these random altcoins or they get the sweetheart deal, they get the friends and family rate. to buy whatever these tokens are at a cheap price, and then obviously dump it onto retail at a much more inflated price. So you, you layer all of that on, and it's not just simply like going to a casino, it's not just like going to Las Vegas and playing roulette or whatever. So I think those are interesting points to consider in terms of DeFi critique. And so hopefully that's been educational or i-informative for listeners. I also wanted to chat, I thought there was a really interesting, point you were talking about in the book where you were talking About how Bitcoin as a market is deepening over time. And so, I'm not sure if this was yourself or your co-author who wrote this, but you were saying this idea that, look, MicroStrategy couldn't have done what they did a year earlier, and that Apple likely can't even take a big position yet.

Yeah, and so that's, that, that's, I mean, hopefully that's just kind of true anyway, and it reflects more people, you know, at the, at the very least, it reflects more people being aware of Bitcoin and kind of interested in

That distinction though, so deepness of the market rather than just price, is that they're not necessarily the same thing, right? Deepness refers to, or depth, sorry, depth refers to, the, the volume of trading going on, but it may still be happening at the same price, right? So you could, I just completely made these numbers up, I have no idea if they're accurate, but you could have ten million, say, dollars of trading a day, at whatever the price is now, you could also have a hundred million dollars of trading a day,

Part of the book accurately where we, where we do bring this up, I think the point we're making is that depth is also helpful in addition to price and probably drives price in the long run. One reason, and this actually, this links back really nicely to something we were mentioning maybe, twenty minutes ago, thirty minutes ago, one reason being that it enables more financial services around Bitcoin to be built. The most obvious one, and I think we do say this, exactly this point, the most obvious one being Strike. Right? There's, I don't need to like go through Strike's entire business model now, but just kind of in the abstract, the ability to-- so what depth does in the market for like Bitcoin to US dollars is relatively speaking to like, you know, more depth versus less, it just makes it easier for people to trade in and out without worrying about volatility. I think that's maybe the key thing. So the deeper these markets get The more feasible it is for, maybe a different example from Strike actually, but another one that we mentioned before, the more feasible it is for businesses to accept Bitcoin payment, even if they don't intend to SxS, they just wanna convert it immediately into dollars, the deeper the market for that is, the less risky, the less prudent, and you know, obviously you can argue that, well, actually the least risky thing is just buy Bitcoin, but like, we're back to this, you know, what are the stepping stones to get there? this I think is a, is

And on top of that, it helps in terms of if you have, let's say, you have an employee in these other countries. Well, now if you're paying that employee, then they might find it easier to, let's say, they need to sell some Bitcoin for fiat or to, you know, locally, and to have well-built peer-to-peer markets. Now, in many countries, depends, depends where you are, which cities you're in, but there's normally some kind of Telegram chat room or WhatsApp chat room where people are doing peer-to-peer stuff, or even, you know Or even at the local Bitcoin meetup, and so this all grows over time, and so I think that's really the sense in which this network effect is growing, or that's one main one. Of course, there's all the other ones, the developers, the miners, the, you know, the services, the merchants, all of these, aspects that are growing and, reinforcing each other.

Yeah. I, I think another way, another interesting way of thinking about this exact point is just that, don't even need to talk about like market depth necessarily, just something like- You know, ease of getting in and out of the asset, see, 'cause that's ultimately what depth does for you. but there's lots of other things that do that too. what anything that helps in that respect does, pretty much immediately, is make it easier to use, sure your listeners will be familiar with this terminology, makes it easier to use Bitcoin the network rather than committing to using Bitcoin the asset. That could be disappointing in some respects, 'cause again, it's back to this thing about like, well, you should really just be stacking Sats, like that That's the best thing to do. But again, if, if, if that's step one, if you're going from literally nothing at all, it's like, do I wanna use PayPal or do I wanna use Strike? Or like, you know, do I want, reward points on my Amex or do I want Sats back because I'm using, I don't know, like, like the Bolt card, for example? That's a great first step. Like people getting used to the benefits of Bitcoin, the network, is an excellent way to eventually nudge them

Patiently, well, low time preference, I guess, right? Like in the long run, this is gonna be a good thing.

Yeah, of course. And so I think it's, it's just fascinating to see, how it's growing over time. And I think even in terms of educational material out there, right? Like it just because Bitcoin has been around now for twelve, thirteen years, there's just material out there so people have some awareness of how to do these things. It all grows and builds. I think we've seen some people kind of take a detour into the stable

And I think that's, that's sort of at the end of the day, that's, that's where it's going, and I, yeah, I think that's probably, a good spot to finish up there. But Allen, if you have any closing thoughts for listeners, on our discussion about, you know, capital and, the problems of DeFi and, anything else you wanted to touch on as we finish up?

Oh, closing thoughts. I don't know, buy the book, I guess? Or no, don't even buy the book, As in freedom and as in beer.

Fantastic. Well, listeners, get, get on, follow Allen on Twitter. His handle is, at allen f thirty two. I'll put all the links in the show notes as well and, you know, either buy or get his book for free, Bitcoin is Venice, and of course, I'll link to Only the Strong Survive. Great. Allen, thank you for joining me. Thank you very much for having me. Just a reminder, if you're enjoying the show, make sure to leave a review so that other people can find it.