{ "episodeId": "SLP261", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "dominic_frisby": { "name": "Dominic Frisby", "role": "guest", "tag": "DOMINIC" }, "guest_2": { "name": "Guest 2", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 9.21, "text": "Hi, you're listening to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin. Today for episode two hundred and sixty-one, Dominic Frisby, comedian, author, financial writer, and libertarian, joins me on the show to talk about his latest book, Daylight Robbery. Now, obviously, no libertarian is a fan of taxes, but we talk about it in terms of how taxes have impacted society, why low taxes- Tend to lead to more prosperous societies, and we talk about Bitcoin citadels and patronage and, and also Bitcoin's impact on taxes and how we are going to see a lot more digital nomads or Bitcoin nomads, if you will, and this interplay in terms of surveillance and platforms and the tax collectors versus the taxpayers. Also, we get into shitcoins, obviously, I push back on that, but on the whole, I think it's a really, interesting discussion, and I think Dominic has a lot of interesting ins-- insights to share with Bitcoiners." }, { "speaker": "dominic_frisby", "time": "01:04", "start": 64.38, "text": "Greetings, Stephan Livera fans. This is Dread here, and I have some big news to share. Swan Bitcoin's new private client services division is open for business. So last August, Michael Strategy's CEO, Michael Seiler, kicked off the trend of companies buying Bitcoin for their balance sheets. A flood of high-profile investors and companies have joined him. Names like Paul Tudor Jones, BlackRock, Square, and And Tesla. Swan Private exists to meet the massive international demand from thousands of companies, family offices, and high-net-worth investors from all around the globe. If you're thinking of buying between one hundred thousand and one hundred million US dollars worth of Bitcoin over the next year, visit swanbitcoin dot com slash private. That's swanbitcoin dot com slash private. Follow the onboarding form or email the CEO personally, corey at swanbitcoin dot com. That's C O O r y at swanbitcoin dot com." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:03", "start": 122.96, "text": "Respect funds on one low. Unchain Capital are building Bitcoin native financial services on a foundation of multi-signature. You can separate the keys that need, that are needed to spend your bitcoins, so you can take two hardware wallets to their website and you can set up a long-term storage vault with no setup or storage fees if you build it on your own. On the other hand, if you want a hand setting that up, if you want the white glove treatment, they've got the vault con- Onboarding service where they will ship you some hardware wallets, they'll teach you about multi-signature, they'll answer your questions, and deposit a thousand dollars of Bitcoin in your vault. Use the code Livera for a discount on that and, and Unchained Capital also offer advanced business accounts. So if you are with a business looking to move your corporate or business treasury to Bitcoin where you control the keys, Unchained Capital are a great option for you also. Go to unchained-capital dot com to find out more. If you are interested in Bitcoin mining, Compu is an online marketplace, making it easier for everyone to mine Bitcoin and enhance the Bitcoin network's security. Check out my recent episode two hundred fifty nine with Wit from the team. Compos is the anti-cloud mining option, helping you buy your own ASIC and secure hosting at great facilities around the world. For years we've heard mining is only profitable if you're investing tons of money, but now with Compos, everyone is able to tap into economies of scale and access reasonably priced hardware and cheap industrial power rates. Compos offers hardware and hosting bundles, eliminating the need for advanced technical Knowledge so you can quickly get started mining Bitcoin. Go to compassmining dot io and start mining Bitcoin today. On to the show. Dominic, welcome to the show." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "03:40", "start": 219.72, "text": "Thanks very much, Stefan. It's, late at night here and early in the morning there, I think." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:45", "start": 224.61, "text": "Yeah, eight AM for me. so Dominic, I had a chance to read your book, and I really liked it, but I, I guess first, I know you're a man of, you're one of those guys who wears many hats, so tell us, just for" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "04:00", "start": 239.56, "text": "Well, I've got a, a mixed background in that, I started out as a voiceover artist, of all things. I always wanted to be a writer, but I, in order to become a writer, I went to drama school. And then when I was at drama school, for some reason, I was the best at radio, and I got a voiceover agent when I left drama school. This is in the early nineties, and so just found myself always doing voiceovers. And then you get, you know, voiceovers only last about an hour or two, so you tend to And so while in between jobs, I wrote myself a stand up act and became a comic, and then by the sort of mid-noughties, I'd earned a bit of money, and I was listening to all these people on the internet talking, and I was trying to work out how to invest the money. This is way before Bitcoin ever existed, and, there were all these people about, talking about gold, and I thought, \"Oh, that's interesting.\" And then from gold, you quickly start to learn about money, you know, gold is a very political investment, and, and, Suddenly I understood why house prices were so ridiculously expensive, and, and, and just, it was one of those kind of, I wouldn't call it a light bulb moment, maybe a light bulb year or something like that, but everything just gradually became clear about how broken our economies are. And then there were all these interesting people talking about gold and commodities, and, and I, I wanted to find out a way of meeting them and basically getting fee-free financial advice off them without having to pay for it. And so, I started a podcast you know, it was using my audio experience, and this was in two thousand and six, and, you know, sort of almost before podcasting became popular, I started this podcast. I remember you had to sort of explain to people, no, you, you get the thing and you download it on from the MP3 off the internet, and then you s-drag it onto your phone, you plug your phone into a computer, then you drag the podcast onto your phone, and then you can listen to it. You had to sort of explain to people how to listen to podcasts back then. But on the podcast was this woman called Marin Somerset Webb. I mean, I interviewed like, I did a-- looking back now, they were amazing interviews, but the second person I interviewed was Jim Rogers, who is a famous commodities guru. He was, he was George Soros' partner, and I quickly discovered that, you know, anyone who's promoting themselves, their brand, is quite happy to talk to you on a pod-- same as I am now. I'm promoting my books, I'm quite happy to talk to you on a podcast, I talk to anyone that wants to listen to me. But yeah, It's a really good way to meet people podcasting, because, you know, if you s-- if you sit down and have a cupp-- cup of coffee with somebody, you get through so much, but if you do an interview with some-- somebody, you just get through so much more in an hour. So it's a fantastic way to, to meet people, and, you know, it's a sort of heightened conversation really, a podcast. Anyway, one of the people I interviewed was this lady called Maren Somerset Webb, who was the editor of a magazine called MoneyWeek, the UK's" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "07:00", "start": 419.5, "text": "You to come and write for us, and I said, \"Well, I don't really know what I'm talking about.\" And she said, \"No, you'll be great.\" And so she offered me a column, and, and, and that was in two thousand and six, two thousand and seven, and I'm still writing that weekly column now. And since then, I've gone on to write books, and, and I wrote a film called Four Horsemen, which was very popular a few years ago, and various other things. And I, I think the secret is that because I Forces the discipline of clarity onto the comedian. And so in finance, I think people are, almost deliberately obfuscatory. They deliberately talk in a language that, that, that is alienating because they don't wanna be black and white about something. And, you know, Alan Greenspan used to call it purposeful obfuscation. But anyway, I think one of the reasons why my podcast and my column was popular is 'cause I just put it all in layman's language. And, and, anyway, so that's me. I'm, Goldbug, Bitcoin bug. I mean, on the course of the many things I've written, I, I wrote a book about Bitcoin in twenty fourteen, and I, I think it was the first book on Bitcoin from a recognized publisher. It wasn't the first book on Bitcoin, but, you know, from a proper publisher. I remember I wrote it at the beginning of twenty fourteen. It wasn't the end of twenty fourteen until it came out. It just takes so long. But anyway, so yeah, that's me, this sort of mixed bag of comedy and finance." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:23", "start": 503.49, "text": "Yeah," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "08:27", "start": 506.99, "text": "that's" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:30", "start": 509.62, "text": "And, and I think there's also a crossover also in kind of the libertarian world as well, right? So you're kind of doing stuff in the libertarian world also, or you kind of, you know, chat with some of the, some well-known libertarians." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "08:40", "start": 520.22, "text": "Yeah. I mean, you know, I didn't even know what a libertarian was until about, till I was about thirty-five. You know, and now I'm, you know, Mr. Hardcore Libertarian, Anarcho Capitalist, Classical Liberal, I sort of waver a bit depending on who I've been hanging out with, but wasn't a communist, was a, was a Nazi. That was my sort of university education." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:06", "start": 545.6, "text": "Yeah, yeah. And so obviously writing a book about tax, there's a lot of, for any libertarian person, that's very interesting, right? Because it's like, we see this as a problem, and, I mean, obviously normal books about tax are very boring, they're very dry, but this is more about the stories and also, you know, understanding just how badly we're all being screwed over here. So I think from that perspective, libertarians are quite interested in At least, at least when I was reading through, I thought it was quite an interesting one. So, maybe we just wanna start with, what gave you the idea to start writing this book about tax?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "09:37", "start": 577.24, "text": "Well, it was the-- When I got into gold and then Bitcoin, I was convinced that our system of money was the root of all evil. Fiat money is the root of all evil. And, you know, when you hear people saying Bitcoin solves this, it really does. I mean, it just solves so many things. It's just the most fantastic invention ever. And, you You know, I was having this conversation today, is, you know, I was just getting into an argument about state healthcare with somebody on Twitter, one of my idiot comedian friends who doesn't know any better. And, I was just like trying to explain to him that, s-- you know, if you had state- He was trying to ex-argue that, that private healthcare can't, cater to minority needs, and I was trying to say, \"Well, look at the in-- you know, if you had just state media or just state clothing, then would there The media channel, we'd all dress exactly the same. It's, 'cause clothing is provided by the free market, we have this huge range of expensive, cheap, you can wear pretty much whatever you like, and, you know, because we have the internet, you know, the internet has catered for niche interests in a way that no amount of government planning ever could in a million years. And so I was trying to have this thing, and, and then, and then somebody, and then I just suddenly realized, you know what? I don't need to have this argument. I've had this Bitcoin really does just solve everything. It's, it's beautiful. You can just go, \"Oh, you know what? If you have your state healthcare and I'll have my Bitcoin, and everyone can live happily ever after.\" But the, but so Bitcoin, but anyway, I, I fiat money, all our problems stem from fiat money was my theory. And then I started my, I've sort of evolved that, and this actually started with a comedy show is, in fact, even though money is the blood of a society, and so it's essential that, that, you know, blood The design of the, the society, the, the sort of structure of a society, you design a society by the way you tax it, and money is a, is a part of that, and inflation is obviously a huge tax. But, and so I started to evolve this idea that in fact, almost more important than, than our system of money is our system of tax. And I just started to read a bit and think about it, you know, when I was walking the dog and so on, and then I suddenly, the more I read about it, and you, once you start to look at Of, taxation. Suddenly, everything becomes clear, and you realize that there has never been a society at any time in all history without taxation of some kind. And even if that taxation is voluntary, and you can even take something like, you know, Bitcoin, you know, even though we all participate in Bitcoin in a voluntary manner, there is a tax in Bitcoin, which is the transaction costs and the money that goes to the miners. That's your, your feudal tithe, if you like. And so even with- Within Bitcoin, and now it's, it's not tax, you know, coerced income tax or something, but it is still nevertheless a form of tax. And you design a society the way you tax it. And so I've evolved this idea that, you know, they're a good tax, tax is like a measure of freedom. you can have, you know, Margaret Thatcher used to say, \"You can't have freedom without economic freedom.\" And, you know, the, the, all these arguments we're having about free speech and, you know, with COVID, free movement and free" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "12:59", "start": 779.48, "text": "Kits as well, and, and tax is like the core, the core part of that. And so you sort of, you know, at one end of society, you'll have the extreme totalitarian North Korean thing where a worker doesn't own any of his own labor, and that's sort of one hundred percent taxation, or even worse, slavery when you don't even own your own body. you know, and then at the other extreme, you have an anarchy, which is one hundred, no taxes and one hundred percent freedom. And in the social democracies that most of us live in today Somewhere between about forty-five, fifty, a bit more than fifty percent if you include the inflation tax and debt and so on. So we're sort of halfway between those two extremes. And, you know, I'd like to see us get back to the sort of fifteen, twenty percent level because I just think that's a much healthier place to be. And so, and then you look at history, I'm, I'm sorry, I'm rambling a bit, so I'll stop after this, but just more on the importance of, of taxation is, once you start looking at history and you realize And you go, actually, every war in history was funded by some kind of tax, and in fact, the tax made the war possible, but the wars made the tax possible. you know, a lot, a lot of time leaders try and enact new taxes, and they can't, they need some kind of cri-crisis in order to enact them. But every revolution was some kind of rising up against some kind of injustice perpetrated by the tax system. Every conquest is about taking control of the tax base, the land, the labor, the produce, the profit, even things like- The birth of Christ, Mary and Jesus were in Bethlehem to pay taxes, and non-payment of taxes was the crime for which Jesus was crucified, and the first men on the put moon were put there by a tax-funded operation. And you suddenly, you look at the world through this prism and you go, \"Well, what's the tax story behind that event?\" And you suddenly realize that there's a tax story behind everything, and, you know, you, you, you define a nation's destiny by the way you tax it, how prosperous it'll be, how rich, how poor. How free or subordinated the people will be. And so I've come to this new idea that basically tax is everything. And my aim was to try and retell the entire history of civilization through this prism of tax. And, that's quite a big undertaking, and it-- Well, I was, I was planning to write it in three months, it ended up taking me three years. but the, ultimately, hopefully, I've done it in an entertaining way. It's not just some boring economic treaties. I've tried to do it by telling stories." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:30", "start": 930.36, "text": "Yeah, for sure. And I think that really comes through in a few areas where you help outline, as you're saying, it's kind of like a revisionist view of history to try and go back and understand where was the tax implication or what was the tax that then c-created this downstream impact. And, you know, examples in the book, I recall there's one talking about a window tax, and then literally that changes the way buildings were built or the way people were living their lives and potentially even had health impacts because poorer people couldn't afford to pay the win- Window tax, so they would be living in houses without windows and then less exposure to the sun, and it's, it's like a really funny," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "16:05", "start": 965.42, "text": "yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:06", "start": 966.36, "text": "almost cruel impact of taxes." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "16:09", "start": 969.16, "text": "That's where we get the expression \"daylight robbery\" from. And, yeah, I was, it often the tax, they, they, they, they thought by taxing windows, they were taxing the rich, but in fact, it was the poor who ended up paying the biggest price 'cause they lost their daylight. And, and in those days, there was no electric lighting, there wasn't even gas To use your day, lose your daylight was no small sacrifice. Even our surnames, Stefan, we have because of taxes, whether in Asia, in China, or, or in Europe. typically, you know, until the poll taxes of the twelfth, twelve and thirteen hundreds, you just had one name, unless you were a noble. You'd be Stephen or John or whatever it was. And, and then, but then they had to distinguish between, you know, Stefan who lived by the hill from Stefan who's a smith, from Stefan John's son from Stephan, you know, with the crooked nose or whatever it is. So often people, like in Celtic cultures, a lot of people are named after defining characteristics. So things like Cameron means-- I think Cameron means valiant, and, and Kennedy means shaggy hair. There are all these weird, or maybe Cameron means crooked nose. Anyway, I can't remember, but you'd be named after some defining characteristic, either your job or your parentage or s-- some geographical feature where you lived, and it was all for the purposes of collecting poll tax. taxes. And we think, \"Oh, well, that's just a European thing.\" The same thing happened in China about five hundred years earlier." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:36", "start": 1055.68, "text": "The, the government wants to own you and, we are in some sense treated like tax cattle, and they need to brand their cattle. And, no, it," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "17:44", "start": 1064.03, "text": "it- That's exactly what it was. It was branding." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:48", "start": 1067.57, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "17:48", "start": 1067.95, "text": "It was your cattle branding, your name." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:53", "start": 1073.2, "text": "but, I think i-it's also interesting as well, earlier in the book, you talk a little bit about how there were some voluntary examples of giving and funding, and you talk about, how, Aristotle would mention this idea, kind of paraphrasing, but this idea that poor men couldn't never be magnificent, and that if you wanted to be one of the great heroes, you either had to be like a warrior or you had to be a patron. Of society, and you were doing some kind of undertaking to build something for the other people in your community, right?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "18:22", "start": 1101.92, "text": "Yeah, this is a, a wonderful thing, and it was something Dostoevsky said something similar. He said, \"What's the point of me giving this poor man my coat, or me giving him half a coat, half of my coat, because then I won't have a coat and he won't have a coat? I'm much more capable of going on to great things if I keep my coat and I stay warm and I earn the money to pay for this guy to get And that's why the sort of pursuit of riches and wealth isn't necessarily such a bad thing, because once you're rich and powerful, you're better able to do great things, and this was, the idea of Ar-Aristotle's Magnificent Men. And, but yes, in ancient Greece, until the Peloponnesian War, taxes were voluntary in ancient Athens, and it was, it was considered the, you should pay them, but you weren't actually obliged to pay them, and they had a system called liturgy, and it was thought that the- Rich of the city, because they shared an unequal amount of the wealth, should, if the-- if they needed a new bit of infrastructure, a new bridge or a new warship or a new, some games putting on or a new building, whatever it was, it was, it was considered that the rich should undertake this duty, and not only should they pay for it, they should carry out the work as well. So rather than having some, you know, bureaucracies taken from somebody and then some bureaucrat allocates them, the, the rich guy carried out the work. So not only was his wallet on the line, his reputation was on the line as well, and that tended to mean that the, the, the work was carried out to a high standard, a-and everyone enjoyed the benefits of this public work being carried out to this high standard, whether it was a games or-- Now, somebody will come along and say, \"Yeah, well, that got manipulated, and powerful people used this liturgy as a system to vie for power.\" Well, yes, they did, but so what? Because the ordinary people in the sort of crossfire of these people vying for power got better- Better services and better buildings and better warships. So it was a better, it was a, it was a bit like Satoshi designed Bitcoin in such a way where the incentives are for you to keep contributing, and everyone who buys Bitcoin becomes a cheerleader for Bitcoin in some way. So there's this self-reinforcing prophecy going on the whole time. The tax system worked in a similar way. One of the problems I, I have with, with the tax system we operate today is that there's no relationship between the person who gives and the per- person that, that receives because of this sort of unaccountable machine government thing in the middle. And, you know, in the charitable process, the giver has needs as well as the recipient. And even if, if, if it's just somebody saying \"Thank you,\" but you don't even get that. And, and often, you know, taxes are paid to provide welfare, mostly, you know, in one form or another. But, you know, different circumstances require different forms of welfare. If you, you know, some guy, some bum might just need a kick up the- The backside, whereas somebody else might need care and guidance and somebody else might need, but with a sort of one size fits all s-system, it, it's just you don't get that thing that you would find in a free market system of tax. So, yeah. But the ancient Greeks proved that liturgy, that voluntary taxation can exist, and I think Bitcoin proves that voluntary taxation can exist. You participate in the bit-- Bitcoin network, you pay your fees, you pay your taxes." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:40", "start": 1300.31, "text": "Yeah, I think that's a-- There's a lot in that that I'd love to unpack because if we look at examples like David Beato's from Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, I think if you look at that, the comparison of like private welfare versus government welfare, and it shows how it was a little bit more tailored to, you know, that situation, and the incentive was a little bit better because you cared about your-- it was about your community as opposed to the government, which is just sort of faceless. They just, they just take your money, tax money, and then it goes off into the ether and they waste it because the government faces no profit and loss test. But" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:15", "start": 1334.99, "text": "Notion and now the wealthy, you know, Bitcoiners in that citadel might fund, an important work or some kind of great artwork or a big cathedral or, you know, some great, maybe some defense against the Keynesian no coiners, out there, as, how out in the, in the Keynesian no coiner wastelands. And, I think maybe that is, this idea of, Bitcoin bringing about an era of patronage, right? This idea of, funding Great art or great, community infrastructure." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "22:49", "start": 1368.53, "text": "Yeah, I think, I think the Bitcoin citadels might, may well look like that. You look at somebody like Roger Ver, you know, and I know because of Bitcoin Cash and all the rest of it, Roger's, Roger's reputation is mixed, but I happen to think Roger's a great guy and he was a great early champion of Bitcoin. But I mean, you know, he's made an absolute fortune by being an early adopter, but boy, is he, he gives money away. He supported Ross Ulbricht, all these various economic think tanks, he gives so much money, and, and there are plenty of other, you know, Bitcoin whales who are, are similarly generous and, with their support, and a lot of them do it anonymously. But yeah, I think that, that- Voluntary liturgy, where you put your name on projects, it's gonna be a huge, it's gonna be a huge, thing in the Bitcoin citadels. It's what's gonna make them happen." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:38", "start": 1417.71, "text": "Yeah, they might, sponsor certain projects or sponsor development into certain software or even hardware, other projects that help, give more freedom for people. the, the" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "23:48", "start": 1427.76, "text": "Liberland project re-is reliant totally on, on, on, on donations. I, I'm not sure how far. I once heard that guy do a presentation. It was one of the I never heard in my life, I was just pissing myself. We are going to build the world's biggest tax haven. It's made me laugh so much, but I'm not sure how, how evolved that particular project is, but, but yeah, I mean, it, it will, it, it will be built on voluntary taxes." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:14", "start": 1454.38, "text": "Yeah. On" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "24:15", "start": 1454.74, "text": "exiles." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:16", "start": 1455.7, "text": "and I think also historically, and maybe not even that far back into history, but looking at examples like Hong Kong, as you mentioned in the book, and I think this is another common one amongst those of us in the libertarian Talk about Hong Kong because, well, up until recently, obviously with the recent kind of CCP, aspect of it, it's probably not as good an example now, but at least from the point of view of having a small tax code and having very low taxes and intentionally not keeping statistics so that the statist bureauc- bureaucrats couldn't come in and try to fiddle and tinker with the system, at least in that time, Hong Kong started out being poorer than, you know, Britain, and then now, and then became richer on a per capita basis Which is a really incredible example when you think about it." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "25:00", "start": 1500.43, "text": "Yeah, I mean, Hong Kong is just the most wonderful economic story, and it was all built with this chap called Cooperthwaite, who was a Scot, John James Cooperthwaite, who grew up reading Adam Smith, and it said he slept with a copy of Adam Smith by his bedside, and he became the financial, well, as the first the event, firstly, the Assistant Financial Secretary and then the Financial Secretary. And, this was in the immediate years after, after World War II. And on a per capita basis, Hong Kong's per capita g-- we don't actually know, because one of things Coopertwaitt insisted on doing, as you say, was, was abolishing the national, the Office of National Statistics. It wouldn't have been possible with Coopertwaitt in charge for this sort of, COVID authoritarianism to take hold, because there would have been no Office of National- National statistics going, look, we've got this amount of cases, just wouldn't have been possible, 'cause he, one of his big things, he, he, he's, people have said, if you wanna make a country as, a third world country as successful as Hong Kong, what's, what should you do? And he said the first thing you should do is abolish the Office of National Statistics, because, interventionists use them as a means to get involved. And Coopertwite's thing is that the ind-- the, aggregation of individual decisions in the free market Than one decision taken by a bureaucrat with no skin in the game. I, I mean, he would have loved Nassim Taleb, would, would, would Capethwaite if he, if he was still with us. But anyway, yeah, i-- in the nineteen forty-five, Hong Kong's per capita GDP was on a par with most of Africa, and it was about a quarter to a third that of the UK. And within a generation, maybe, maybe a generation and a half, by the nineteen nineties, Hong Kong's per capita GDP had overtaken the UK, and by the Overtaken America, and it was just an extraordinary success story, and at the same time, its population went from something like seven hundred thousand to seven million, so its population went up by ten times, and it still overtook those ca- countries on a per capita GDP basis. Its education was better than ours. Its," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "27:14", "start": 1633.99, "text": "health, people live longer, they're, they're healthier, and it has better public transport. And, what was so beautiful about his system is that there was no income-- the taxes as a percentage of GDP never, never exceeded fifteen percent, you know, which is a sort of-- it never exceeded fourteen percent actually, which is sort of like a tithe, basically, the old tithe, the Christian tithe, you, you pay one tenth of your earnings. And by the way, the tithe- Predates Christianity by several thousand years. It goes all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia, and I think most other cultures have their own equivalents of the time. But anyway, so tax was roughly at the level of the tithe, fourteen percent of GDP. There was no income tax except for higher earners, like today in the West, roughly fifty percent of five o fifty percent of government revenue comes from income taxes. There was none in Hong Kong except for higher earners, and the majority Authority of taxation in Hong Kong came from land value tax, not from income taxes. And, land value taxes, which we can talk about if you like, I think are a really good way to keep a healthy balance between government and taxpayer, between government and citizen. Through a land value tax, the two keep each other in check. and it's the idea of Henry George, the, the, he was a, best-selling author in the eight-- late 1800s in, in the United States. And he had this idea that land value tax should be the single tax, and it's the only tax you pay, and we'll talk about it in a second if you like, and relate it to, you know, the, the principles of taxation is theft and, and so on. But in any case, you know, Hong Kong operated this. It relied largely on land value tax, it had very low levels of taxation, and it was the economic success story of the second half of the twentieth century. It was so successful, Singapore copied it, Taiwan started copying it, South Korea- They copied it to a certain extent, Japan did as well, and, you know, it, it had a huge role to play in the Asian miracle. All down to this one guy, Coopethwaite from Scotland, a remote part of Scotland, who was an Adam Smith acolyte, who wanted to abolish the Office of National Statistics." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:27", "start": 1767.23, "text": "Yeah, I think that's a really- And he" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "29:28", "start": 1768.31, "text": "kept, they kept, the English kept saying, and it was, it was a colony, it wasn't a democracy, there was no vote, people couldn't vote. He was basically the, he was The outcomes for the people of Hong Kong were wonderful, and people wanted to go there because they knew they could make their fortune there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:47", "start": 1787.34, "text": "Yeah, and that also comes into the whole topic of, you know, democracy, socialism versus just private property ownership, right? And so I think that's also another thing because people tend to conflate democracy with freedom, but then in reality, it ends up being a more socialism, or it ends up pushing a lot more socialism or in that pathway, whereas those of us in the more f-free market, private property side believe more in just like, and, Can, it can be a bit awkward in some ways because then we're sort of saying, \"Oh, look, Hong Kong is a good example,\" or say Singapore, even though, so even though Singapore has certain aspects on which obviously socially they're a bit-- they're not necessarily libertarian, but that's at least from a tax point of view, they are very like low tax, they're one of the low tax nations of the world. So it's an interesting, I guess." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "30:32", "start": 1831.93, "text": "Yeah, I think those countries are not perhaps- Maybe it's a, just a basic human respect thing, but there isn't as much free speech there as there is, say, it's not, you know, free speech isn't entrenched, maybe 'cause it's a lot of, because a lot of the immigrants there have come from China, and they're like, \"Whoa, we better watch what we say.\" But, so, yeah, and they're not, you know, you'd probably have more fun in Berlin or somewhere, but, but the, you know, Berlin in the 1920s was probably The, the Hong Kong tax code is one and a half percent the length of the UK's tax code. One and a half percent. So if the UK's tax code is a hundred pages, Hong Kong's tax code is just one and a half pages." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:19", "start": 1879.36, "text": "It's phenomenal." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "31:20", "start": 1880.36, "text": "But in fact, the UK's tax code is twenty thousand pages." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:24", "start": 1884.08, "text": "And then it just creates this whole system that feeds on itself, this kind of what starts as cottage industries then morphs and metastasizes into these, you need an army of- Tax lawyers and tax accountants, to now navigate this morass of, regulation and taxes and how do I structure things to, you know, and it, it essentially, I think that's also part of the-- It's not, it's not productive. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "31:49", "start": 1909.3, "text": "It's just reallocation of res-- It's not productive. And, you know, what's so beautiful about is, you know, people wanted to go to Hong Kong, so they went there voluntarily, and because it was low tax and the system was clear and the system was honest, it generated tremendous loyalty. And, you know, ancient Athens was like that as well, and Bitcoin's like that. There's a huge loyalty to the Bitcoin cause because it is transparent, immutable, and all those things. Everything you pay is, you, you see it. And, you know, it's like the armies in, in, in the early Roman Republic. the, the, the soldiers went to war voluntarily, and, and, and they got their pay in, in loot and conquest and all the rest of it, but they were also incredibly loyal citizens to Rome. And, Bitcoin's a bit like To war on Bitcoin's behalf," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:37", "start": 1956.77, "text": "you know? Yeah, that's a funny, analogy. I mean, it's a bit of a loose one, but yeah, you're right. I think the other interesting thing will just for me to talk about the impact over time, because I think, well, probably you and me and many of my listeners, we're bullish on Bitcoin, we think it's going way higher, so many more people are going to adopt this thing. What does that do to government? And in some ways, and this is another point I think you touch on in the Well, now Bitcoin is helping maybe make that accessible to people who aren't necessarily at that super rich level. And so then it's that question of what's the impact of that going to be in terms of the state and government taxes that they try to lever on, or try to impose on us? And I think I've speculated for a while that I think they won't be able to tax in the same way, and they may have to move more towards a property tax kind of model, as in physical property model. What do you think?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "33:33", "start": 2012.63, "text": "Yeah, well, inevitably, and I- I'd, I'd love to talk about property taxes, but w- I just wanna address this first. Government have got a huge problem on their hands, huge. Because, you know, even before COVID, they had these ridiculous spending obligations that, that their tax revenue just couldn't meet, and they were paying-- they were meeting their obligations by debasing money and debt and inflation and the rest of it, as well as high levels of taxes and fiddling the books. But with COVID, that obligation has increased by even more. Now, we tend to think- Of nation states as, you know, Italy, Germany, these places have just existed forever because we've grown up with them. But actually, Germany's not even two hundred years old. Italy was only became a unified country under Mussolini. It started in about the eighteen seventies, but it only began-- You know, so the nation state as we know it is only a relatively modern model, and it rose up partly because of the, the industrial systems, the industrial revolutions of the, you know, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries. This physical economy where there were labor went to a certain place and there was the clear movement of labor and clear movement of goods, and it was easy to tax this physical economy. And the, the nation state, tax is power, whether it's king or emperor or, or government, if they lose their pa-- their tax revenue, they lose their power. And, and tax is a system of control. You control, you regulate an economy by the way that you tax it. And the nation state is built up around these tax systems which tax- The physical economy. And that applies to workers as well. An ordinary worker goes, works for the same company, works ten years for that company, and his income tax is deducted at source. Now, fifty percent of government revenue, as I said, derives from income tax. Well, the economy has changed. Now, all the growth isn't in the physical economy. The physical economy has grown, it's grown at three, four, five percent a year, depending on this, this, that, and the other. But it's the digital economy where all the- The growth is. And if you compare, you know, Silicon Valley in nineteen ninety or two thousand compared to Silicon Valley today, you just can't compare the two. And the reason is, is the scalability of digital. You know, Google can have a, a, work out a brilliant search algorithm, and immediately it can make that algorithm available to the entire world. I can Invent a brilliant app and upload it to the app store, and it can be downloaded a billion times. There's a scalability to digital that doesn't exist in the physical economy, and as a result, because things grow quicker, it attracts more investment, and so you have a self-fulfilling cycle. Now, if you-- One other big comparison between the four biggest companies in Silicon Valley in nineteen ninety to the four biggest companies in Silicon Valley now, I think the market cap of those companies is something like a hundred times higher now than it was in nineteen ninety. But those four largest companies employ a quarter as many people. So now, just think about that, that's a quarter as many people. That is, but it, it has created employment, it's created work for m- millions, thousands, millions, millions, hundreds of millions of people, but not in full time employment. They're freelancers, small businesses, entrepreneurs, and so on and so forth. Now, tax systems have not-- are built around this physical economy Have not been able to adapt to the digital economy, and the digital companies have run rings around them. You know, Starbucks has got its premises here, but it's, you're hiring the Starbucks trademark, and that's in Holland, where there's no corporation tax. And, you know, do you know what? Apple, that well-known American company, it's actually an Irish company because there's low, you know, and Google is based in-- and, and they just run rings around. And it's all completely legal. It's, it's not tax evasion, it's tax avoidance. It's But the nation state economy, the tax systems have, have been, have not been able to adapt to this new digital economy, and that is where the wealth is, that is where the growth is. Now, on top of that, the nature of work itself is changing. So where before they relied on income tax because people-- more and more people are becoming freelance, the gig economy, contingent workers, and that, with remote working and COVID, that's only accelerated. More people are doing multiple jobs. They're not Working for the same company, and when taxes are paid after the event, there's much less compliance, there's much more less error. Income tax isn't the easy thing to collect in the large levels. It's been repeatedly proven that people, two people doing the same jobs, one doing it on a freelance basis, the other working for a company, the guy does it on a freelance basis, pays much lower levels of tax. So already it's getting harder. But the next thing is, and this is what Bitcoin and the, and the internet generally has made possible, is non-dom status. If I'm Remotely on the internet. Why do I need to live in London and pay London house prices and London taxes? I can go and live in, you know, Cornwall or, or Yorkshire. Well, do you know what? I can go and live in, Portugal or Greece or Malta, 'cause they've got much-- you know, they're trying to get me to move there, they're giving me loads of incentives. And, and so you're seeing the rise of non-DOMs, and you don't have to be. In fact, you can go to Portugal and earn The big expense in your life, the government, is removed. And so we're seeing the rise of the digital nomad. It's, it's, what's his name, Rhys Mogg's sovereign individual. It's, it's the, the digital nomad is the sovereign individual. And obviously that, the remote working thing has accelerated 'cause of COVID. The move, moving around thing has slowed, but that's not gonna last forever. 5G is becoming more and more commonplace around the world. Air travel, you know, you're assuming I'm gonna fly from Asia to China in, With these new jets that are coming, and it's not just, you know, European or North American people going to Thailand or Colombia, it's South Americans, Africans, Asians, it's everyone, the new internet middle classes, and you're just gonna see those that can move will, and so you're gonna end up with this two tier system where the physical economy, is gonna be taxed really hard, and you're gonna have all these people working in the digital economy who are gonna be like, as he calls them, sovereign individuals, and they're, they're gonna be like- Like a sort of a class above, and it's much easier to grow your wealth when you're not constantly having to pay taxes on it. And certain jurisdictions will design themselves to be more attractive to these new sovereign individuals, and those jurisdictions will do well, and other ones won't. And eventually, a lot of those nation states aren't going to be able to pay for their outgoings, and so they'll debase the currency even more, they'll get even more socialist, their aggress-- tax collection will get even more aggressive. And those that can will vote with their feet and leave, and those that can't will stay. And then the biggest clincher of the whole lot is over fifty percent of digital nomads already operate at s-- to some extent in the crypto economy, and that's not to say they're necessarily designing coins, but they make and receive payments at least some of the time in cryptocurrency. And as soon as you start operating outside of the banking system, and using non-fiat money, non-government money, well That economy is even harder to tax and regulate. And so that, that is, that is the, the world that we're going into, and COVID has accelerated it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:07", "start": 2466.58, "text": "Now a message for the sponsors of the show. 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So if you are sitting on a phone wallet or maybe you're still leaving your coins on the exchange, the Coldcard is a great next step in terms of improving your security at such a great low price point. point relative to the security that you're being afforded by this device. It supports single signature and multi-signature. You have the ability to verify your receive addresses on the device. You can use passphrases, Duress PIN, BrickMe PIN, all sorts of features. Just go and give it a try, CoinKite dot com, and use the code Livera for a discount. Now, back to the show. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack in there, and certainly I think the whole trend of nomad, nomad capitalism or Bitcoin nomadism, whatever we wanna call it, that is, I think that is going to grow because there is so much opportunity there. And in some funny kind of way, it's like the more people go into that, it creates this feedback loop because the more people who start becoming Bitcoin nomads or even, even if they're not going nomad, they're at least earning money in Bitcoin, it sort of, it leaves more and more of the inflation and the- Taxes to the people who haven't gone Bitcoin, and so it just, yeah, over time, it just, it's gonna be like a seesaw where everyone just kind of runs over to the other side because, hey, I can get better return that way or I can get a better deal that way. now, I guess the counter argument, and I think broadly that's correct, that is the trend we're going on, but I think there is some level of government counter argument here. Obviously, I'm a libertarian, I'm, I'm not saying I want this, but on which people are using these things. So for example, you know, if eBay or some of these other, platforms are out there, then the government will say, \"No, give us your data, eBay, \"because we wanna go and track these people down. Or they might go to the Bitcoin exchanges, as, they went to Coinbase even, and, and said, \"Hey, we want data on who's, who's got Bitcoin and things like that. \" So how do you sort of see that dance going?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "44:38", "start": 2677.97, "text": "I got, I got a thing from my YouTube channel And paid to the US government. You know, it's exactly what you said, YouTuber doing it. And, you know, the, the, the beer moths, the e-bays, the YouTubes, the Amazons, they're all in cahoots with the government because one makes the other possible. yeah, that, that's gonna be one of the battlegrounds. And, you know, data is-- the digital world is the enemy of government, but data is, is also, you know, this is the go-- how the government will track you," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:17", "start": 2716.98, "text": "country people who go and legally lower their taxes by going overseas, and, I mean, they'll have to structure things appropriately and so on. And look, I mean, I'm sure there'll be a range, there'll be some people who do it on the kind of legal way, and then there'll be others who just do it whatever, and, you know? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "45:31", "start": 2730.87, "text": "Yeah. I know there's a huge class of digital nomad who, who literally does-- do not know to whom they should pay tax. They, you know, they s-- don't spend more than a hundred and By the way, because Americans, if you wanna stay American, you keep on paying taxes to America. But outside of-- That's a thing that Abraham Lincoln brought in, 'cause he was trying to protect Union revenue in the American Civil War, and never went away. But the, yeah, but, but, but elsewhere, yeah, so, and there's a, there's a lot of people who, who would like to pay taxes somewhere, feel they ought to, but literally don't know. And then the admin just get-- becomes too burdensome, and they're like, \" Loyalty to the country they came from. They're not using that country's services, they found that country, you know, that country exiled them basically, and so why should they pay that country taxes? There are a lot of people who feel like that, and I have a lot of sympathy with that, with-- I have sympathy with both views, you know, everyone's got their own little opinions. Here's a pitch I heard, 'cause an argument that gets used against me a lot is, \"Oh, yeah, but as people get older and they have kids, they'll settle down somewhere But a lot, I think something like ten percent of UK parents, so they're not sending their kids back to school. the internet is the most fantastic learning tool ever invented in all, all of history. But I heard a pitch the other day, do you know what WeWork is?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:59", "start": 2818.66, "text": "Yeah, yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "46:59", "start": 2819.26, "text": "Okay, so I had a pitch from a company that's trying to do WeWork but for schools." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:03", "start": 2823.37, "text": "Wow, interesting." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "47:04", "start": 2824.47, "text": "So you become a member of WeWork, and while you're in Cartagena, you send your kids to, you know, WeWork school in Cartagena." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:17", "start": 2837.02, "text": "So" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "47:17", "start": 2837.16, "text": "again, we're seeing," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:18", "start": 2838.12, "text": "yeah," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "47:19", "start": 2838.66, "text": "yeah, it's a solution to the, to the education, you know, it, it makes schools education will adapt to this, to the new reality it probably already has." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:30", "start": 2850.02, "text": "Yeah, so there'll be a whole range of options. There'll be some parents who do all their own education for their children, there'll be some who maybe go and get, let's say, Ron Paul home curricula, homeschool curriculum, there'll be some who use this new kind of WeWork system, and others who maybe just go, send their kid to a local school, just Home kids would, and they'll just move around with their families. Now, that isn't always feasible for everybody, but I can see that as the direction that, more and more people who want more freedom, they kind of go down that pathway." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "47:59", "start": 2878.8, "text": "Yeah, or boarding, another option is boarding schools. You know, the boarding school, the English boarding school rose up because, people who'd been sent out to, to run the empire in India or wherever, wanted to send, give their kids an English upbringing, so they sent them all to boarding school in England, and, you know, system in the world, the English boarding school, you know, it's the, provided the inspiration for Harry Potter. Yeah, of course. But, but you know, that, you know, we might see boarding schools making, well, I mean, boarding, there's loads of Asians, Chinese and Korean families sending their kids to boarding school in the UK. So, and, you know, we'll, maybe we'll see boarding schools, more and more boarding schools." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:38", "start": 2918.39, "text": "yeah, yeah. And so then, I guess bringing it back to where the, the taxes will be More into, well, I think, you know, those of us in the anarcho-capitalist camp would rather it be like an upfront fee for service, right? Like maybe you move to a citadel and they say, \"Hey, this is your fee for the year, you just pay this upfront, and that's all your kind of government services or like, you know, local services.\" but I think a lot of places will try to still do taxes, and right now it's just like it's difficult because there's all these, they, they get entrenched, right? These different taxes In these areas, and maybe we'll just move more to like a property tax model and move more to like a Hong Kong sort of style. I wonder if that's the direction it goes, at least in the larger states." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "49:28", "start": 2968.18, "text": "Are you-- Would you describe yourself as an AnCap or a" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:31", "start": 2970.67, "text": "libertarian or sort of, yeah, proper AnCap? Okay. Yeah, I believe in, yeah, I believe that would be the ideal, although obviously I'll take whatever incremental steps to less regulation and less tax that I can get." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "49:42", "start": 2981.79, "text": "Okay, so just, I'm just asking you this question for fun Taxation a form of theft? Or is our taxes the price we pay for a civilized society?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:52", "start": 2991.64, "text": "Oh, yes, obviously I'm more in the, the theft. Or if you wanna get really technical, it's extortion, but whatever, like tax is theft, yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "49:58", "start": 2997.96, "text": "Okay, so I tend to agree, but I also understand the \"taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society\" argument, even if I don't agree with it. Of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:06", "start": 3005.71, "text": "course, yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "50:06", "start": 3006.43, "text": "But as an am-cap, let me, let me pitch land value tax to you. And I know you've So the, the philosophy of land va-value tax, and I call it, I don't call it land value tax, I call it location usage tax, and I don't think it's likely that this tax will become commonplace, but that doesn't mean that I can't argue for it, because it's, it's just quite difficult to explain. short of, it, it might be able to exist if a new civilization is founded somewhere, but I don't believe, you know, it'll get implemented in the UK. And, but let me, anyway, let me ask I'll argue for it now. So the physi-- the, the philosophy goes back to the, a group of philosophers in the Enlightenment called the physiocrats, and their idea was that there are two forms of wealth. There's the wealth that is man-made, the wealth that you've made, you know, you've designed this brilliant computer program, well, that's a man-made, it's a-- and it's made everyone's life better, and you deserve to be rewarded for that. So there's wealth that is man-made, you know, a brilliant house or something is man-made, but Land, you know, fertile land or a, a beautiful sea or with lots of fish in it or oil under that, whatever. These are all forms of wealth that have arisen as a result of nature, not because of human endeavor. There is human endeavor in exploring for the oil and extracting it, but the oil was already there. And the idea of the physiocrats was that the wealth that nature gave us is owned by everyone, it's owned by the community. The wealth that you created shouldn't- be yours to keep. So if you are a worker and you work, and you are paid to do that work, you should be able to keep all of the work. But if you have a house, and it's on a plot of land, and, you know, the government builds a railway station at the end of your road, and as a result, everyone wants to live near this railway station 'cause it's a really good line that goes into the middle of London, and it, you can get there in twenty minutes, and so your house triples in value as a result. Well, your house tri" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "52:17", "start": 3137.08, "text": "Of anything that you've done, you've just got lucky. It's tripled in value because the land that it's on has suddenly become really desirable because of the needs of the community. And so the philosophy of land value tax is that it is the only tax you pay. Henry George called it the single tax, and you aren't taxed on your property, you aren't tax-- taxed on the house that is on the land, you are taxed on the land in its unimproved state. So if there's gold under the ground, you know, that land is worth a lot, but somebody's still gotta build a mine to extract the gold, and that takes a lot of effort, a lot of endeavor, a lot of risk, and all the rest of it. And so if a mining company does that, then they should be commensurated for that. But nevertheless, the gold still has a value. And so for example, the physiocrats, the, the land valuetests would never have had it that the wealth of Saudi Arabia went to a few princes. That wealth should have" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "53:16", "start": 3196.1, "text": "You have land value tax. You have, you divide all the land in the country up into parcels, you work out who owns what. Desirable land in the city center's gonna command a high rental value, remote farmland's gonna have a rental value of practically zero, and you take the annual rental value of that land, and let's say the annual rental value of that land is a hundred pounds a year, and you say, \"Right, land value tax is five percent, or it's ten percent.\" And so if you want exclusive rights rights to that land, and you want the government to protect your exclusivity to that land, then you have to pay the, the, a fee to the community for your exclusive use of that land, and that fee is a percentage of its annual rental value in its unimproved state. Now, why I think this will appeal to anarcho-capitalists is that fee that is payable to the government is totally transparent. There are no hidden taxes, there's no inflation, there's no debt, there's no... Health taxes, no VAT and all the, you know, deduction at source and all the rest of it. And if the amount that government is levying to run its services is too high and everyone's having to pay twenty percent, the taxpayer will feel the, the, the cost of those tax rises, and he will say to his government, they will say the taxpayer will say to his government, \"As one, no, we're not paying that.\" And so it causes a very healthy natural balance between taxpayer And tax collector. It also encourages, it stops, like, if you had two plots of land sitting next to each other on, you know, Fifth Avenue, and one of them's got Trump Tower on it, and the other one's just sitting vacant, the amount of tax that those two plots of land would pay is the same. So it forces the owner of that land, instead of just sitting on it and watching his currency get debased and watching the value of his land go up, no, you've got to put that, you've got to pay a rent on that land. So it forces people is the efficient allocation of capital. And, so I think that's, that's my pitch, Stefan." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:25", "start": 3324.56, "text": "Yeah, so I think there are-- This kind of, it does remind me a bit of the typical arguments that we've seen. Now, it's kind of like a Georgist idea, right? The Georgism. It's" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "55:33", "start": 3332.91, "text": "totally a Georgist idea, yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:34", "start": 3334.45, "text": "Yeah, yeah. It's a Georgist idea, and I know that, Murray Rothbard and others in the Austrian camp have critiqued that kind of thing, but I think what I would say Comparable to what we have now, which is this huge, huge tax, and at least, like, in that sense of like, hey, it would be less bad than what we have now, yeah, alright, let's do it, right? But I think for me, I, I see it like longer term, I see it more just moving to like a straight fee-for-service model, and then that way, it, it would be fully kind of people who might own, they might be the citadel owner or manager, and then you just pay them a fee for service, and they do the water" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:16", "start": 3376.24, "text": "I think, certainly, I think this whole land value capture, kind of idea, is preferable to what we have now." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "56:26", "start": 3385.82, "text": "O-okay, fair enough. Here's, here's the thing though, this is why it appeals to me, is that it, it's that basic division. What is given to us by nature is shared, what is theirs as a result of your endeavor is kept. And it's that basic principle that I hope would appeal to even the more extreme anarcho-capitalists listening to your show." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:49", "start": 3409.43, "text": "Of course. Well, I think, I think the, the in practicality, there might be aspects, and, people talking about, say, nationalization of land or how'd you capture, how, what, what, what would, what would the real value of that be? And would that be, like, would that be another angle by which the system starts off getting more statism coming in and saying, \"Oh, see, you valued it at this You gotta pay me this tax, and it just becomes--" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "57:13", "start": 3433.27, "text": "There would be arguments, there would be arguments about what the rental value of that land is, but it would-- it's pretty hard, it's, it's, it's pretty easy to prove." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:21", "start": 3441.47, "text": "Right. Yeah. Yeah, certainly." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "57:23", "start": 3443.38, "text": "and one, you know, like we have-- I'll tell you why perhaps why I'm more in favor of it, but you should be as an-- Are you Australian?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:30", "start": 3449.98, "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "57:31", "start": 3450.6, "text": "Okay, so true or false, the Queen is the largest landowner in the world, and she owns one sixth of Is that statement true or false?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:43", "start": 3463.41, "text": "I guess so, yeah, yeah. I don't know." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "57:45", "start": 3465.21, "text": "It's true. And it's 'cause she owns, you know, most of Australia and most of Canada, as well as the UK. Yeah. And if you look at like the richest family, the richest landowners in the UK, the large land ownership hasn't changed since ten sixty-six, you know, a thousand years ago when we were conquered by Norman, the William the Conqueror. And so, you know, so that land ownership has just-- and I think somebody was tweeting at me Florence are the same families that were the richest families six hundred years ago, and that kind of entrenching, and people tried to stop it with inheritance tax, but it just didn't work, 'cause people put their stuff in, in, in, trusts, and inheritance tax ended up hitting the middle classes, and inheritance tax is a horrible tax. Now, I'm not attacking those families for being rich and wealthy and looking after themselves, 'cause fair enough, I would have done the same probably in their situation, and, you know, their ancestors were very clever. But the- The overwhelming evidence of history is that the richest people in history have not necessarily got rich through some kind of breathtaking endeavor and being breathtaking businessmen. It's because they've managed to get laws changed that suit their business interests. And this applies even to people like Rockefeller or the oil barons. It applies to Bill Gates. You know, Bill Gates' gen-- wealth is as much because his father was a brilliant patent lawyer as it is because of his own actual- Computer coding ability, you know, is, i, i, and, and people, you know, and it goes all the way back to Marcus Crassus in ancient Rome. It's all by some kind of protectionist measure that whereby they, they keep their wealth. And land value tax m-means that the, the value of that land is shared by all, but what you build on the land is kept by you. So it's quite a sort of communist aim, but without The government. It's a system. It's a system. It's a bit like Bitcoin. It's a system. It's a protocol rather than a, a government." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:48", "start": 3587.79, "text": "Well, nevertheless, I think, the point really is that over time, it's like this never-ending dance, and I think that's a point you make in the book as well, that it's this never-ending dance between the tax collectors and the taxpayers, and they are just, you know, it's, it's like constantly one-upping each other in terms of, you know, the payer finding some way to either Things in a different way, and then the collector trying to look for ways to surveil them and understand, \"Oh, what are your assets? What's your income? And let me try and put in things that tax you at the source so that you don't even see that money.\"" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:00:22", "start": 3622.05, "text": "It is a never-ending dance. Let me tell you an ancient sum-- a proverb from ancient Suma. \"You may have a god, you may have a king, but the man to fear is the tax collector.\" From ancient Mesopotamia, that proverb." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:38", "start": 3638.28, "text": "There you go. Yeah. So I think, also, wondering if you got any thoughts around just the concepts of income versus capital taxation, right? So do you see it like that's-- it's gonna be that shift towards capital taxation if the go-- if the state isn't as able to surveil your income or kind of take your income from the source?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:00:58", "start": 3658.91, "text": "Yeah. I, I, I just think income tax is, is one of the great evils of modern society. And we, we've always-- like, the tithe is when you get- Give a tenth of what you earn, and that, it wasn't always paid in cash, you'd often pay the tithe in your labor or in a share of your produce. So, you know, income tax is basically a, a sort of modern evolution of that. So it goes back a long way. We tend to think that income tax was only invented in the Napoleonic Wars in the UK, but really it goes back a lot older. But income tax, nevertheless, in its current form, is evil, and it is one of the biggest causes of wealth inequality. The, the two biggest causes Inequality is fiat money, debasing, printing money, and income tax, and those two evils combined have screwed over a generation, and they've got their revenge with Bitcoin, and good luck to you. But the, you know, so if, if you start out with nothing, the all you have is your labor, that's all you've got, and yet you're constantly taxed every year, thirty, forty, fifty percent, whatever the rate is, chipped away at you. So it's Very hard to build up a pot because you're constantly having it shaved away, whereas the guy, the thing you want to buy, a house or a, whatever it is, an asset, goes untaxed. And so the guy who owns the asset, the older generation, sitting there with his asset, and the guy who's starting out is constantly having his money taken away, and then the money he's paid in loses purchasing power because of inflation. So what it-- what the money he saved last year buys him less this year. Meanwhile, the asset in question- The asset he wants to buy, normally a house, actually benefits from inflation. And so the combined effect of inflation and income tax are the biggest source of wealth inequality in the developed world. And yet the, the socialist left thinks that taxation is the means to equalize society, and he think-- he believes in modern monetary theory and high levels of income tax. Please, they are the two things that have caused the wealth gap, and, and more government isn't gonna solve it, less government will solve it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:03:16", "start": 3796.22, "text": "Yeah, I was saying recently as well, some of this is generational in a way. So I, I was saying, hey, millennials and Zoomers, you know how your parents' generation were able to buy stocks and property on the cheap? Well, Bitcoin is that for you right now. This is your opportunity." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:03:32", "start": 3812.11, "text": "It really is. And, I mean, I mean, Bitcoin's obviously not the opportunity it was, but it's still, it's still an exit. But, you know, the, the, the opportunities, like Bitcoin's the gateway drug, and, and, but the opportunities that The, this new digital economy is springing up. You know, all these altcoins, all these NFTs, all these new businesses starting up, and most of them will probably amount to nothing. But some of them, you know, it, it's like dot com, the year two thousand, but a million times more, and everyone's trying out new stuff, and then people go, \"Oh, well, it's a bubble. It's a shitcoin, it's a bubble.\" And I go, \"Yeah, of course it's a bubble, but, we need bubbles because Bubbles accelerate investment. Bubbles bring things forward. Bubbles make things happen. People try shit out as a result of bubbles, and some of it works and some of it doesn't. You know, people go, \"Oh, it's tulips.\" Well, the tulip bubble was in 1637, and here we are in 2020, nearly four hundred years later, and where is the center of the global flower industry? Amsterdam. Amsterdam has been the hub of tulips for four hundred years. So don't dismiss the tulip bubble. The tulip bubble Made Amsterdam. And you can, you know, you look at railways, we're still traveling in the UK on the same railway lines that were laid down as a result of the railway bubble of the 1830s, and the same with the railways of America in the 1870s. And I'm talking to you on the internet through all this incredible wired and wireless technology as a result of the bubble that was dot com and all the infrastructure getting built. So don't dismiss bubbles. And I, I just, I mean, I can see, and you get- All sorts of scams and nefarious things and, God knows what else, and bubbles and stupid ideas, and I've no doubt that, you know, everything that's going on in, in Bitcoin, like Bitcoin is like, it's the most bubbly technology that's ever been. You always get a bubble around a new tech, but Bitcoin is a new technology that's money. It's literally the most bubble-ish. If, if Marvel Comics designed, you know, the ultimate super bubble hero, it would be Bitcoin and crypto. And so- As I say, a lot of what's going on, you know, in the crypto world, I can't begin to understand half of it, and I get that most of it's bollocks, but I also see that it's, it creates, like, who'd be staking real estate in a virtual reality game world? You know, how can a plot of real estate in a virtual reality game world be more than a plot of real estate in the real world? But it is. I don't get it. It's insane. But that's bubbles, and, and it will amount to something. It means something to someone." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:06:18", "start": 3978.08, "text": "Yeah, so I see it like, yeah, there's a lot of just scams and shit coins out there. Ultimately, this really, the tool to use is Bitcoin, and that's what's gonna enable people to, I think, change the game a little bit in terms of taxes and the way society is structured, and as, you know, as we've been talking about, they might change the way taxes work, and it ultimately enables and makes things accessible that was previously only available to the super rich, and now it's, it's a, it, in that Giving that possibility to everyone." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:06:47", "start": 4007.42, "text": "There are no barriers to entry, it's just open because it-- the technology is so far ahead of the regulator, and that's fantastic. I, I, I sort of like, I'm very good friends with John Matonis, who's a sort of early, original gangster, early Bitcoin adopter, one of the early thought leaders in the space, and he's a real Bitcoin maximalist as John, and so he's sort of indoctrinated me with his Bitcoin maximalism, and I have a lot of sympathy to it, but I can also recognize that Shitcoins, there's a lot of great work going on, you know, f- for example, I'm, I'm really interested in privacy technology and some of these privacy coins are great. Haven protocol, I just think what's going on there is excellent. Monero, you know, and, and, you know, and then I get, you know, you wanna, like a lot of the time when I'm sending bitcoins, I don't trust the wallet, so I often like to send a small amount first just to check it's all working. And then you're like Are much lower, there's a use case there. And so, you know, I, I wouldn't, how many sh- altcoins are there now? I think there's eight thousand or nine thousand or something." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:07:55", "start": 4075.08, "text": "Oh, there's thousands of them. I, look, I think it's not even like, to me, I see it like, if you-" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:08:00", "start": 4080.03, "text": "I think, I, I see Bitcoin as, as the gold. If, if you look at the role of gold in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that was the sort of bedrock of the money system," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:08:15", "start": 4095.88, "text": "A lot of, even the transaction fee stuff, really, people should just use Lightning, to be honest. Like, Lightning works, it's here, it's actually really easy to use now. There are lots of wallets that do it. I think it's just kind of like people from twenty seventeen days are still-" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:08:27", "start": 4107.1, "text": "I wasn't given the op- I tried to send some money, I wasn't- How do you- I don't even know how to use Lightning." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:08:32", "start": 4112.67, "text": "Oh, well, I'll, I'll, I'll set, I'll, I'll help you" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:08:38", "start": 4118.03, "text": "set up after this. I'll" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:08:45", "start": 4125.88, "text": "But it is coming now. A lot of big exchanges are supporting it. There's like Bitfinex have had it for a while, Kraken said they're gonna do it, OKCoin are gonna do it. I think OKCoin is live with Lightning now. there's others out there who already have Lightning as well, Bitaru, one from Australia, they have it. Okay. So it's, it's, it's coming and it's a lot cheaper. It's basically, Lightning is way cheaper than all the, the \"quote-unquote\" cheap shitcoins." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:09:11", "start": 4151.67, "text": "Yeah. So, And, and we used to say, in the old, this is before Bitcoin, but we all used to say, an ideal portfolio, you know, before Bitcoin, gold was the sort of, the play on fiat money, and you would, I would say to people, have eighty percent of your portfolio, seventy or eighty percent of your portfolio in physical gold, and then have another ten or fifteen percent in, in producing gold miners, and then have five percent in mining exploration, because you never know, one of those mining explorations might come good, and then you can make a hundred times So you could make a similar case and go, \"Well, have eighty percent of your portfolio in, in Bitcoin, maybe ten or fifteen percent in, you know, Ethereum or Cardano or one of those ones, you know, one of the top ten, you know, maybe another ten percent in the other, in the top ten, and then have five percent in shitcoins, because, you know, you run the risk, w-when a bear market strikes, you'll lose all your money in the shitcoin as you do in the mining exploration play, but there is a chance you could make a hundred" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:10:16", "start": 4216.62, "text": "Yeah, I'm basically Bitcoin only. I just think of it like most of these just shit coins are ultimately, they're just like helping these scam people scam like unsuspecting retail, unfortunately. And also, we've got to remember taxes, liquidity, like, there's all these other considerations. I think it's one thing for people who kind of trade them around or whatever." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:10:35", "start": 4235.31, "text": "Are they all really scams or they're not genuine? What about something like D-Cred? Do you look at D-Cred?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:10:40", "start": 4240.75, "text": "nah, complete shit coin. Yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:10:44", "start": 4244.31, "text": "What about, do you like Monero?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:10:47", "start": 4247.33, "text": "Nah, I don't, I don't use it myself. Although, I mean, I could sort of understand why people might use it from a utility point of view, but even then, like, I, I'd rather just use CoinJoin, right? I'd use Samurai Wallet, and I don't know, you're, you're involved with Cipherpunk." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:10:58", "start": 4258.72, "text": "Okay, fair enough. Or Wasabi. That's what, it's like talking to John Matonis. yeah. What about, what was the one I got" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:11:13", "start": 4273.43, "text": "I mean, I, I know of it. I don't, I never touched it. I, I like, I've heard of it, but I never used it. I don't even really know much about it to be honest. yeah, so for me, I just see it like, there's a movement here. Bitcoin is the movement. There's a lot of these other shit coins that are kind of trying to ride the coattails. Now, I think maybe stable coins is a different thing. That's just crypto fiat, right? People just- Yeah, yeah. Like It's basically Bitcoin. I don't, I don't even use stablecoins myself, but I can just understand why other people would. Do you," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:11:48", "start": 4308.4, "text": "do you, do you have any Ethereum?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:11:50", "start": 4310.8, "text": "No, no, I've never, like, I've never touched any of those altcoins. Even, the other thing is, even with these altcoins, we've gotta remember that just even if they're used for a certain thing, it doesn't mean value will accrue to them, right? So it, it might be a utility token and then it's still down. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:12:08", "start": 4328.83, "text": "yeah, fair Altcoin to Bitcoin ratio, and it's very rare to find an altcoin that's rising. Like, you get it, my observation is you get it at the end of cycles. So like, Bitcoin was outperforming everything until maybe November, December of last year, and then suddenly something happened, and then the altcoins outperformed Bitcoin for a couple of months, and now I, I get the sense that market's turned again, and most of them are falling relative to Bitcoin again. So that little sort of fillip, but yeah. So that, that's why I advocate having the Portfolio in Bitcoin, but occasionally, you know, if you time it right, you can, you can, you can do okay out of it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:12:49", "start": 4369.2, "text": "Yeah, and then I guess the, then the question is, you've got to think about taxes, accounting." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:12:52", "start": 4372.84, "text": "'Cause I think, I think, yeah, yeah, you have to think about all that bloody nightmare. 'Cause I look at what happened in the early days, and a lot of people, early investors, Stephan, they sold their Bitcoin too early. This is before, the whole sort of ethos of Bitcoin maximalism had taken place. And I bought Bitcoin at five dollars, it's gone to fifty dollars, I made ten times my money, I'm out, whoa! And then Bitcoin, you know, they sold their Bitcoin at fifty dollars. But what, what happened? You know, and you see this in stock market cycles, a lot of the time it will start with the large caps and make its way down to the small caps. And when it goes into the small caps, you know, you're at the end of the cycle, but that's often, you know, ninety percent of the gains are made in that last ten percent of The, the small cap, there's, there's, you know, shitty speculative plays. But the, the, you know, they have their little time in the sun, but, but the, the, I suppose you've just gotta be nimble and, it depends if you're a speculator or if you're just a, a holder, I suppose." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:13:56", "start": 4436.7, "text": "Yeah, so certainly. I mean, I see myself more like a holder, and I see it more like people try to play these gambling games, and then they end up-- most people end up losing when they play those games." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:14:09", "start": 4449.63, "text": "It" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:14:13", "start": 4453.31, "text": "How much times they lost? Did they track their taxes? Did they track their accounting? Did they do, you know?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:14:17", "start": 4457.55, "text": "No, of course they didn't. But here's the point I was gonna make, is that the guy who bought Bitcoin at five dollars and sold it to fifty dollars, Ethereum gave a lot of them a second chance. And you look at a lot of those early adopters who've become, you know, multi-multi millionaires and billionaires, a lot of them actually made them big money in Ethereum, 'cause Ethereum, you know, Bitcoin moves first and then the other po'coins play A thousand times their money didn't make a thousand times their money in Bitcoin, they made it in Ethereum. And, and, you know, you look at-" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:14:50", "start": 4490.94, "text": "Oh, I don't even check for you." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:14:52", "start": 4492.32, "text": "Like, so Ethereum's at what, eighteen hundred bucks now, something like that, and Bitcoin's at-" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:14:59", "start": 4499.54, "text": "I think I'm talking to the wrong person, but anyway, I'm just making the argument for fun. But so Ethereum's at eighteen hundred and, and Bitcoin's at what, fifty, fifty-five? Am I gonna get loads of Bitcoin maximalists calling me, you know what? Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:15:11", "start": 4511.57, "text": "they'll be coming after you for this. Oh, okay. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:15:13", "start": 4513.41, "text": "Well, between that and Lamarr, well, I want you to know before you destroy me on the internet, I'm a nice guy, just deluded. But so Bitcoin's at what," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:15:23", "start": 4523.82, "text": "sixty," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:15:25", "start": 4525.76, "text": "fifty-five But if, if Bitcoin goes to a hundred thousand or even two hundred thousand, so double or three or four times where it is now, I, I think Ethereum will go to probably ten or fifteen thousand. So it will, it will go up by more. It will move later, but it will go up by more." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:15:43", "start": 4543.75, "text": "Possible, but even then, I don't, I don't know, we don't know for sure. it, it could have some, blow up in the system or we could see them try to transition to proof of stake and things screw up or we might see, That's the other thing as well, when people play shitcoin games, don't forget, if you look at the sh- top ten, you know, shitcoins from five years ago, it's way different. You don't know that the top shitcoins now will still be around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the other thing, like, people under- don't understand the risk they're taking when they play these shitcoin gambling games, really. I think that for me is why I'm Bitcoin only. I encourage people to just, just hold, just keep it simple, just buy Bitcoin" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:16:28", "start": 4588.88, "text": "Not by his words. And if you look at my portfolio, it's lit-- of my crypto portfolio, it's literally ninety-five percent Bitcoin, maybe even more. Yeah. So, I do, you know, I've, I, I've, I've got like, I've got, I've got a few ethers, but not many, and I've got a little bit of Decred 'cause I like that team, and I've got a, a little bit of Haven Protocol, and I've got a little bit of a coin called Secret Coin, I've got a little soft spot" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:16:58", "start": 4618.7, "text": "involved with the, Cyberpunk Holdings, right? But I think at the end of the day, like, we have to remember which one of these is gonna be the money, you know? And that's, that's what's gonna be important at the end of the day, I think. So, yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:17:10", "start": 4630.67, "text": "Yeah. It's gonna be Bitcoin, it's got the network." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:17:12", "start": 4632.95, "text": "Exactly, yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:17:13", "start": 4633.91, "text": "You don't never underestimate the network effect." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:17:16", "start": 4636.36, "text": "Yeah, yeah. I also find it a bit odd that I think, I think a lot of people in the libertarian world got kinda confused, Became massive kind of drags on the system because now they tricked so many libertarians who could have otherwise been really rich by holding Bitcoin, you know, and then they tricked everyone with vCash and all these stupid things. that to me is a bit frustrating, but" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:17:40", "start": 4660.69, "text": "yeah, he believes in it though," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:17:42", "start": 4662.03, "text": "you know, what can you do, right?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:17:43", "start": 4663.21, "text": "He believes in bit Bitcoin Cash, he really does. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:17:46", "start": 4666.78, "text": "yeah, well, it's, the market is, really punishing that anyone who believes that." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:17:51", "start": 4671.72, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:17:52", "start": 4672.24, "text": "The" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:17:52", "start": 4672.34, "text": "market's telling a different story, and you Tells you who's right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:17:59", "start": 4679.8, "text": "Yeah, ultimately, that's, that's the way it goes. But, probably a good spot to wrap up here anyway. So Dominic, make sure you let everyone know where they can get the book. I, I enjoyed reading the book. I think it was a really interesting kind of look into taxation, where it has been in the past and how it impacted society, and then how things might change going forward. So where can people find you and find the book? it's, you" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:18:20", "start": 4700.94, "text": "can" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:18:21", "start": 4701.1, "text": "find me on the" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:18:21", "start": 4701.68, "text": "internet. but the book's called Daylight Robbery: How Tax Shaped Our Past and Will Change Our Future. And I've had a lot of praise for the audiobook. I read the audiobook myself, so if you're into audiobooks, I'd, I'd recommend the audiobook, but you can, you can get it on Amazon or all good book shops. And, despite my wrong opinions about, shitcoins, I would urge you, I would urge you to read this book 'cause it, I, you know, I, I spent years and years and years And, you know, before, before Bitcoin came along, I was one of the biggest anti-fiat money advocates, and it was a really hard narrative to explain to people how fiat money is robbing you and the damage it's doing to the world. And, you know, I made videos about it, I made that film Four Horsemen and books, and, you know, so I consider myself one of the sort of knights of the anti-fiat money crusade. And, this is by far and away the best thing I've ever written, and, and- And, I think it's, I, I, I think it's a, it's a good read, so enjoy it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:19:26", "start": 4766.49, "text": "Excellent. Well, yeah, look, and I think the other point I would make as well is that getting more people to think about how much they're being taxed is important. I think it's important to have that conversation and to try to drive that conversation, yeah, even amongst people who aren't libertarians, right? And so maybe hopefully if they can come down this pathway a bit more, then they can start to actually understand what the problem is and then understand why" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:19:52", "start": 4792.64, "text": "Got the fiat money narrative out there, so more and more people are like, \"Okay, I'm gonna earn in fiat, I'm gonna save in Bitcoin.\" You know, Michael Saylor, what a powerful voice that man has been in just getting that, but it's, you know, it's, it's whoever-- This is the wonderful thing, it's like the armies of the Roman Republic, all these people, and as soon as you buy Bitcoin, you become a cheerleader for it, and it has got that fiat money narrative out there wonderfully well. Everyone, you don't need- Like, you used to have to explain what fiat meant. You, you don't-- Everyone knows now, and, and it's just been fantastic. It has exposed the narrative, and we said, \"You know, the truth is in the price.\" The, the fact that Bitcoin's gone from less than a dollar to fifty-five, sixty thousand dollars, whatever it is now. You know, the fact that it's done that, it has proved that, you know, all the debasement of fiat money has manifested itself in the price of Bitcoin. It's, it's like a truth machine. And, and, and it's wonderful, and but the next big argument we need to have in the, in the story, the next big challenge we have in the, in the Lord of the Rings saga is, is tax. How do we just-- Now we've, we've won the money argument, we're building our citizen-- citadels now, how do we design them? And the way you tax a society is the way you design it, and when you go and build your citad-- citad-- citadels, the way you tax it will determine how- How successful that citadel is, how loyal the citizens of that citi-citadel are to it, and it will determine its destiny." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:21:31", "start": 4891.79, "text": "Fantastic, thank you for joining me, Dominic. My pleasure, Stefan," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:21:34", "start": 4894.59, "text": "thank you." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:21:35", "start": 4895.57, "text": "So if you enjoyed the show, make sure you give it five stars in your podcatcher or podcast platform, and a review also helps new people find me, as well as obviously sharing the show with your family and friends so that they too can learn about Bitcoin. Get the show notes at stefanlivera dot com slash two six one and also- So the transcript will be there shortly. Thanks for listening, and I will see you in the citadels." } ] }