{
  "episodeId": "SLP536",
  "speakers": {
    "stephan": {
      "name": "Stephan Livera",
      "role": "host",
      "tag": "STEPHAN"
    },
    "michael_saylor": {
      "name": "Michael Saylor",
      "role": "guest",
      "tag": "MICHAEL"
    }
  },
  "segments": [
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "00:00",
      "start": 0.12,
      "text": "So that, that's what Bitcoin means to me, right? It, it is a rational foundation for economics for the human race."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "michael_saylor",
      "time": "00:08",
      "start": 8.27,
      "text": "This is Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics brought to you by Swann dot com. Today, rejoining me is Michael Saylor. He is the executive chairman and founder of MicroStrategy, known for being a big Bitcoin advocate, and today we're talking about Bitcoin principles and Michael's view on this. We maybe zoom out. A little bit from some of the controversies of the day and really look at things on a longer term time horizon. What does that mean for Bitcoin and what are the ways to assess Bitcoin's value proposition and what kind of changes should be made to Bitcoin, if any at all? So I'm hoping you will enjoy this discussion with Michael."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "michael_saylor",
      "time": "01:02",
      "start": 62.03,
      "text": "Michael, welcome back to the show and, congratulations on, surviving the bear market."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "01:08",
      "start": 67.78,
      "text": "Yeah, thanks for having me. We all, we all survived together."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "michael_saylor",
      "time": "01:13",
      "start": 73.32,
      "text": "Well, yeah, I, I think it's, great to see, you know, obviously a lot of people can very easily get shaken out, and it was, great to see that you, you huddled on and you were, you're stacking all the way through, so that's great to see. and today we're gonna be chatting a little bit about this idea of Bitcoin principles, and, so do you wanna just set some of the context, like why are we talking about this"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "01:39",
      "start": 98.62,
      "text": "You know, I thought it was a pretty useful conversation to have because there's, there's always a lot of, back and forth on, X slash Twitter about is this good for Bitcoin, is this bad for Bitcoin. There's, there's very colorful conversations about, protocol proposals, about, software proposals, about developer initiatives. About applications, the latest is, you know, all the debate around ordinals, inscriptions, BRC twenty tokens, but you've always got Covenants and drive chains and, and, you know, if we look back, right, the, probably the most formative period in the history of Bitcoin was the block size wars, and, that really did, It, it did define, the network and define Bitcoin, in a very strong fashion. But I, I think that if we look forward another decade or two or three, and certainly over the course of a hundred years, there are gonna be more and more of these issues that'll pop up. There'll be more constituents that will get involved in the discussion, and, I, I don't really think, having a debate in two hundred and forty characters or less on Twitter is terribly constructive for, you know, a, a, a topic which requires a lot of nuance and subtlety. And, I also, I also think that it's important to be principles based in the way we discuss these things. I think if we all focus upon what are our assumptions, what are our principles, then I think there'll be less confrontational, and less combative and more constructive. Right in the community. So I thought it'd be useful to have kind of a constructive dialogue about Bitcoin philosophy, Bitcoin principles, frameworks of analysis, so there's a basis for whatever comes next."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "michael_saylor",
      "time": "03:51",
      "start": 231.39,
      "text": "Right, and as you point out, I think the block size wars of twenty fifteen, sixteen, seventeen were sort of a battle for the soul of Bitcoin, and maybe some people have discussed about, you know, what really is Bitcoin? What are we, what are we doing here? And, you know, what kind of changes are acceptable? And I guess people can disagree on what kinds of, you know, changes there. Like as an example, some people might say, \"Oh, it proved that the block size should never increase,\" and other people might say, \"No, actually, it's more like This way, and maybe in the future, you know, a-and that's just one example on the block size. So let's talk a little bit. I think we'll, we'll bring it to this idea of, you know, Bitcoin as a protocol. And so, do you wanna just spell out some of your thoughts there, like what, if we're thinking about the Bitcoin protocol, a-and what are the pieces of that that should remain, right? What are those fundamental pieces that must remain?"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "04:45",
      "start": 285.04,
      "text": "Yeah, I mean, like, I would hate for someone to define me based upon one tweet response on one issue or, or six responses on six issues. I think that, I think that when we all start to understand each other's principles and philosophies and how we, how we think about these things, I think it lays the framework for us to come to agreement or, at least a constructive, cheerful consensus. So, you know, starting with the basic on Bitcoin, and this is my-- this is how I view it, right? Everybody has the ability and has the right To view Bitcoin through their own lens, and they have their own, their own view of what is it, what is it for, and why are they attracted to it. So, so I, you know, I'm not here to tell everybody else, you know, what to think. I'm here just to articulate one view of Bitcoin that I have, that I've formed over the course of my life. So I'd, I'd start with this observation, I'd say, \"Bitcoin, it's an asset circulating on a network governed by a protocol based on or rooted in an ideology, and it, it provides humanity with a rational- Scientifically sound economic foundation for the first time. So that, that's what Bitcoin means to me, right? It, it is a rational foundation for economics for the human race. And, you know, Bitcoin with a small b is the asset. And we've created a digital asset, and we did it with a protocol, and, the asset's no value. I-it is of no value unless there's a network for it to circulate on. So when I, when I think about the protocol This is the way I look at it. I think Bitcoin, it has three core protocols that are critical to the entire system working. The first protocol is a monetary protocol The second protocol is a transaction protocol, and the third protocol is what I'll, what I'm gonna call a power protocol. It's, it's sort of It's near term real time security. It's not security of the network over a hundred years, but it's security over the network over a hundred days or a hundred minutes. It's, it's the here and now. So that's based on power. Who has the power over the network? So when I think about Bitcoin in general, well, there's lots of Bitcoin nodes and Bitcoin applications out there. Anybody can create a version of Bitcoin that runs on an iPhone, an Android phone, it runs on Linux, it runs on a different type of computer, etcetera. For them to be part of the network, they kind of have to share these three protocols. They're going to differ in lots of other functions, right? There are other aspects of software, for example, compatibility is a com- Compatible with this version of Unix, there's usability, right? Does it, does it run on the iOS and does it support like, you know, touch or not? You know, there's compliance, the version of, of, of, a Bitcoin wallet that runs in the United States, you know, by a publicly traded company You know, we'll have KYCAML restrictions for the state of New York, which will be dictated by New York and by the US. So there's com- there's, there's differences in the software that have to do with compliance there's gonna be security differences and these-- this is cybersecurity. so there'll, there'll be lots of Bitcoin, nodes, and they will all be different in different countries and different jurisdictions for different platforms. But The thing they all have to share in common is this common monetary protocol, transaction protocol, and power protocol. So the monetary protocol is, is the asymptotically approaching twenty-one million, right? There'll never be more than twenty-one million. And there's a lot of-- there's been a lot of focus upon, you know, The blocks of fifty and then twenty-five and then twelve and a half and six point two five and the halvings, et cetera. But the truth is, I, I think about this not over the course of ten years or the last ten years. I'm not even sure the last ten or fifteen years matter, right? We're approaching the fifteen year anniversary. But for the sake of our discussion, let's just say I accept Bitcoin as it is today. You know, through all of its twists and turns, the block size wars, you know, et cetera. And I look out over the next hundred years as my short timeframe, and a thousand years is a reasonable timeframe. So I'm looking at this as, as is this, a rational scientific economic framework for the human race for the next many, many centuries, okay? And when you look at it like that, it's very clarifying and it's simplifying. For example, once you- Once you look out, you know, a thousand years, you're like, \"Well, what is the monetary policy? It's twenty-one million. It's twenty-one million Bitcoin, is the most it's ever gonna be, and some of them will be lost.\" And that's the only thing you really need to understand about that, someone wants to create a, a software programmer, a node that has a different policy than twenty-one million, they're breaking Bitcoin, right? They've corrupted the monetary protocol a-and of course, you can have infinite monetary protocols. You could have five percent inflation a year, you could have five, you know, five hun- five million Dogecoin a year, you could have all sorts of things if you wanted. it-- you can create, a crypto asset or a digital commodity that has a monetary protocol which is inflationary or inflationary for a hundred years and stops, right? All sorts of things. But in this particular case, Bitcoin's monetary protocol has gotten to be very simple. We're around nineteen and a half million Bitcoin, but we're gonna cap out at twenty-one million. So, so the, the truth is, to debate all of the nuances of, of how you get to twenty-one million is almost like second or third order at this point. Maybe it was second order for the last four years, it's becoming third order. It certainly is less than third order by twenty thirty-five, when ninety-nine percent of all the- Bitcoin has been issued and you've got one percent to be issued over the next hundred plus years, you realize that one percent is divided by a hundred years is pretty de minimis. So So the monetary protocol is, i-is a hard cap scarcity. The transaction protocol is the four megabyte blocks every ten minutes Which works out to, you know, max, you're gonna get to seven transactions a second or seven and a half, four thousand five hundred transactions in a block is pretty packed. And so when you work back into it, you think, well, like a slow network is a hundred million transactions a year and a ho-- a fast full network is two hundred million transactions a year, and, and the bandwidth is scarce, right? And the transaction protocol Changed a little bit more over the last fifteen years than the monetary protocol. The monetary protocol is, is pretty much pristine since, you know, Satoshi defined it. The transaction protocol, you know, jerked a little bit or, or, or adjusted with SegWit. And, Taproot sort of adjusted because they, they changed the theoretical bandwidth and the theoretical nature of transactions. What kind of transactions will the network process, and how much bandwidth can it process? The third protocol Is the power protocol. And in this particular case, it's not electrical power, it's computing power, but, but what kind of computer power? Digital power. You can define all sorts of power protocols to control a network. For example, democracy is a protocol, one person, one vote, you know? Aristocracy, one rich family, one vote. Yeah, violence, one gun, one bullet, one vote, right? The world's full of power protocols, you know, the, the deer with the antlers have their power protocol. The power protocol for the Bitcoin network is SHA two fifty six hashing, right? and, it could have been any other, right? It could be a proof of stake protocol, it could be all sorts of, all sorts of other interesting power protocols, but the question is, who at the end of the day gets to create the block every ten minutes, and what kind of power do they have to project in order to create the block? And You know, if I, if I had an algorithm which was a CPU friendly algorithm, right? It's a, a non-GPU, a non-ASIC friendly CPU, well, then, then you're allowing any general purpose computer To participate and generate that computing power. If you had an algorithm that didn't include computing power at all, it's just electricity. But of course, electricity isn't terribly scarce, and computing power isn't terribly scarce. So the idea of SHA-256 hashing creates a very unique digital power protocol. It's something where you can create custom silicon, so you have custom ASICs that are generating lots of SHA-256 hashes, and now we're, we just crossed five hundred exa hash. That's a lot of power, but what's, what's really critical, I think, about the, the power protocol is that it allows you to c-construct a silicon machine with a massive mechanical advantage, like a A, a, a custom ASIC, custom silicon gives you a, a thousand x or two thousand x advantage over a general purpose CPU. And what that means is that what we have here is that three interacting protocols which create four types of scarcity. The first level of scarcity is asset scarcity. The second level of scarcity is bandwidth scarcity. There's a third type of scarcity which is power scarcity. SHA-256 hashes are a very scarce form of power, right? They a-and they can only be cr-created by Bitcoin mining equipment. And so there's a fourth type of scarcity, which is technical scarcity, technology scarcity. The, the ability to design, you know, a high performance Semiconductor chip that does SHA two fifty six hashing, right? What Bitmain has as, as a core competency, right? If you can create that, so in order to guarantee the asset scarcity, you have to have bandwidth scarcity, and in order to guarantee the bandwidth scarcity, you have to have power scarcity, and in order to guarantee the power scarcity, you need technology scarcity, and so you're really looking at like- Four harmonics or, or, you know, four, types of scarcity, and they come together and they create a, a-- they create a network that has integrity and efficiency, right? I need, I need the efficiency that- Like, what's efficient, here's an efficient power protocol. I have a gun, I'm in a room with a hundred other people, one person with a gun that costs three hundred dollars has the ability to secure a billion dollars in a room of a hundred other people. It's a very efficient way to secure the money, right? Whoever has the gun, the gun-- Now, now take away the gun, put the billion dollars in the middle of the room, and now your new power protocol is your fist. Now you, you can imagine, now you've got twenty people punching thirty other people, right? Now, now then the outcome becomes very ineffective. another power protocol is, I'm gonna secure the billion dollars with a hundred million dollars of staked money. You can see the, the issue with that is, in a staked economy, I have to actually allocate ten or twenty percent of the capital to, to protect the rest of the capital. That doesn't scale very well. So when you actually get to the point where you're creating machines, whether it's a construction crane, or whether it's a gun, or whether it's a semiconductor chip, you have, you have inserted know-how in order to channel energy, in order to actually, exert power. And when I talk about, you know, scarcity of power, well, the Bitcoin miners own all the SHA-256 ASIC chips. So, you know, on any given day, if every power company or electricity company in the world wakes up and decides to attack the Bitcoin network, they can't really do it because the computing power, the digital power is scarce and they don't have it. If any government wants to attack the network, they can't do it because they don't have the power. The, the actual- Silicon machine is in the hands of the network operators, and so that creates a certain type of efficiency and stability, and you can't really build a civilization without it. I mean, it's, it's the same kind of efficiency you get when you build a dam, right? You, you dam a lake, and all of a sudden you're generating hydropower. or the same efficiency you get when you have a construction crane and a hundred and fifty pound person can lift twenty tons in air, a thousand feet, right? It's, it's clear you're not gonna- Do it without having a machine. So I look at the entire network and I think it's, it's a pretty beautiful set of, integrated protocols because the power protocol protects the, the transactions every ten minutes, and the transactional protocol is, is a market-driven protocol where people are bidding to put their transactions into the block space. So as, as the, the ecosystem grows, the bid for transactions grows in a, in a classic market Economy fashion. and what you have is Austrian economics dictating which transactions will get implemented based upon subjective value of all the participants in the ecosystem. The miners, over the course of a thousand years, it's quite obvious, right? The miners are paid by transaction fees. The, the block rewards were a bootstrap or an initial subsidy in the first twenty years of the network, but as far as I can see, by the year twenty thirty-five, the block rewards just look de minimis, one per-- you know, so one percent of all the Bitcoin comes out over a hundred years after that. So block rewards don't really matter. They fall away over the long time toward infinity. Affinity, what matters is, is, transaction revenues, and, and over time, I think we can expect the transaction revenues will grow to far outstrip the block rewards, and, and then if you look at, Bitcoin miners, they're really Bitcoin power producers or digital power centers that are defending the network. They're the first line of defense in the network in the sense that anybody that wants to hack or, or interrupt the blocks in the next ten minutes, they have to get through that hash wall. They're also the second line of defense of the network, because the Bitcoin miners all have invested millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions or billions of capital that they can't recoup in, in less than four to eight years, and perhaps longer in some cases. So because they have to recoup their capital investment, they form corporate entities in every single nation state and every jurisdiction, and then they become active, engaged lobbyists for pro Bitcoin policies everywhere in, on Earth where they operate. So, so you, you really could think of, the Bitcoin miners, you know, kind of as all of the, the citadels on the wall that are defending what is Bitcoin, and they're, they're, they are in essence the defense, the defense arm of Bitcoin. In the, in the short term and the midterm. So that being the case, once you adopt, accept the fact that you've got these three protocols, and then you, you ask yourself, \"Well, how should I look at the network and proposals to change the protocols?\" Well I think there are a lot of models you can adopt. I, you know, one is the New York model. The New York model is New York City is sitting on top of granite for two hundred million years. So Bitcoin is the granite. Bitcoin is twenty-one million blocks of granite underneath New York. City. Now, over the course of thousands of years, you've got different nation states. You had a hundred Indian tribes, then you had the Dutch, then you had the British. Then you, then you had the New York colony, then you had, you know, the United States, and a thousand years from now, you may have another nation state on Manhattan. But here's what changes, right? The granite doesn't change. But the roads and the sewers and the, and the city layout changes, and the parks change, and, and the buildings change, and the people come and go, and the politicians come and go, and the rules and, and the political regimes come and go, and the businesses come and go, and customs and fads come and go, and markets come and go, and those are all the things that you can build on the island of Manhattan because you have the granite. And so, if you look at it that way, you start to think, \"Well, Bitcoin is layer one, it's the granite. What's important is I know, I need to know it's gonna be here in a million years.\" That's why, you know, at the very least, I build a building, I need to know it's gonna be here in a hundred years. But if you told someone, \"You know, my building's good for a hundred years,\" well, fifty years from now, they're not gonna wanna buy the building from you. You really wanna know the building, the land that the building is built on, is good for a thousand years. If I, if I forecast a sinkhole in the middle of an acre of, of Manhattan in thirty-seven years, it wreaks havoc with the economy, you know, in that jurisdiction. So it's very important that you have, that kind of Of, outlook and stability. the layer twos, the layer threes, the layer fours, and the layer fives and the layer sixes can all have very high frequency evolution. And there's not that much to risk. Whether Lightning and, and open permissionless layer two will compete with other open permissionless layer twos, you can have competition. We don't have to agree on which one is the right one. You can have layer threes, you can have Bitcoin moving from Cash App to Coinbase, you know, across somebody else's mobile app, and the layer threes can come and go. You can have layer fours and layer fives, applications and services and derivatives. You know, you can have this- This ETF and it could be replaced by that ETF, they can come and go as well, and, and then there'll be people that will actually create derivatives of derivatives. I've got an ETF, I trade options on it, and then I create an ETF to trade the options on the ETF. And, you know, you could think, \"Well, these are stupid things, right?\" That, and maybe they are, right? Art in New York City will come and go. The art of seventeen hundred is different than the arts of one thousand B.C. Is different than the art of two thousand AD. I mean, they'll change all these things. So if you look at Bitcoin, you know, all these things on the Bitcoin base layer, whether it's art or property or applications or, or lightning channels in layer two, all of these things are going to change with what's gonna look like a very high frequency. If, if you were a creature and your lifespan was ten thousand years Th-think about how you would perceive Bitcoin and all these things that people are doing on Twitter and talking about and developing, you know, you would blink every ten years and then another ten years go by, and your view would be very different, and, and in that particular case You would have a good feeling of granite underneath Manhattan, you know? Everything else would change, and then you would think these mere mortals are debating, you know, this and that, like Gramercy Park The use of it, yeah, that's been significant for a hundred years, but over a thousand years, insignificant. And so I, I think that the New York model is kind of helpful I think that, if, if you take another view of the protocol, that's helpful. You know, Bitcoin is our universal econ- rational economic protocol, well, English, math, fire, electricity, and gold. Those are five other protocols. English is a protocol that, you know, has been around about a thousand years. It's changed a bit. You know, there, there's a lot of debates. But for example, there are certain things you can't say in, with the English language in certain countries. And yet we speak English, right? So, your three year old probably can't use the English language the way you use the English language, and if you were in a court, you wouldn't use the English language the same way, and if you were in a foreign country, you know, you might not use the language the same way. So, the protocol will be used many different ways, but at the end of the day, the threat to the protocol is, is to redefine the word good to be bad and redefine the word bad to be good, and that starts to create chaos Right? I, and I think, you know, if you look at math, it's a similar thing. Like base ten math is a very specific protocol. We didn't always have it the way that we use math, and, and certainly base ten math isn't, isn't that old, but it's used across nationalities. Good people use it, evil people use it, people debate how to use it. Some people are really good at using it. Some people are awful at using it, and yet, and yet the protocol, contributes something of value to the human race and, and civilization benefits from having that protocol I think that, you know, fire is the same thing. I mean, you're not gonna let eight-year-olds use fire the way that you would let, an aeronautical engineer use fire or the way you would let, you know, even your campfire instructor, you know, or your survival training instructor use fire. So they're all different And gold, gold is a monetary protocol formed over thousands of years, you know, and it was used across lots of different, different nations and lots of different cultures some nations use it better than others, right? The Aztecs, the Incas didn't use gold so much as a monetary protocol, the Spaniards did. They thought they were winning when they used it, they had lots of chaos A-and the way that they used it, there are people that have used the protocol effectively, but there are ways that, you know, the protocol's been twisted. I think the one, the one takeaway from all of this, though, is Is, these protocols are much more powerful to the extent that you, you believe they'll maintain their integrity over long periods of time. And at the point that people start to lose faith in the protocol, if, if, if the number two means four and the number four means eight, think about the chaos Like, think about how many machines and how many computer programs break if someone redefines four to be two or plus to be minus or, or certain rules, right? And, I think, when Bitcoin is seen as that, as that long-term protocol, we can create economic machines. And, and there's this debate in the community, but most of the community debate is, is Bitcoin developers that actually wanna change, that wanna c- change the core protocols. They have ideas for how to make it more functional and more, more, more performant, but really I think that Bitcoin has already offered us the ability to create a hundred trillion dollar economy Without changing any of the protocol, and you have this interesting trade-off, which is the more you screw with the underlying protocol, the more you interfere With the rest of the economy and all of, you know, layer two, layer three, layer four, layer five. So let me change topics to one other point, which is I think there's a lot of debate because of people's vision of what Bitcoin should be. For, for example, cryptocurrency has saddled The entire industry has so much baggage because if you believe that Bitcoin is a digital currency, you immediately put yourself in opposition to nation states, banks, political currencies, governments, laws, et cetera, and, and you're by necessity a rebel Because to be able to use Bitcoin as a currency, you have to actively break laws or topple regimes, and that's a very, a, a very combative view of the world. If you actually conceptualize Bitcoin as property You know, or money, if, if money is collateral that backs the currency, then you actually have a very peaceful resolution to this problem. I'm going to- Hold, hold my s-my money as a store of wealth, and Bitcoin competes with property or gold as a store of wealth, or it competes with stock portfolios as a store of wealth, and I'm gonna make that my savings account or my savings portfolio, and then my checking account, my medium of exchange, is going to be the currency dictated by the regime where I live, whether it's Venezuela or Argentina or the US or China or whatever. And when you just divide- Those two, and you say Bitcoin is money, but it's not currency. Then all of a sudden, you realize that you're competing against other stores of value, and, and really your crusade every day is to convince people to store their wealth in, in Bitcoin instead of art, real estate, gold. S&P, indexes, bond funds, et cetera. And you can have a completely, neutral view toward- Tax law, legal tender, political, laws, customs, tariffs, capital controls, price controls, trade controls, wars, ideologies, religions Right, politicians, right? The, the entire work. So I, I, I definitely think it's so much more constructive to think of it as property than currency. And I think the, the twist there is, if I take property and I make it fungible and liquid, then it really is money And it's capital, right? So Bitcoin, if you think of Bitcoin as digital capital, digital money, or digital property held for the long term as collateral Against, against, a local currency, and then you say, \"As a citizen of the world, I'm gonna swap into whatever currency I need to spend wherever I am.\" Then you found, a peaceful resolution to the question of, \"Do we have, you know, do we have to be martyrs or can we be winners?\" And I, I've said a lot, \"I'd rather be a winner than a martyr,\" and I'd, instead of saying We have to use Bitcoin as a currency, and therefore you have to repeal all your tax laws and change your legal tender laws. Much easier to say, \"We're gonna use it as, money or as, as a property, and then we will move peacefully and in a compliant fashion through every single regime, and then we're going to convert.\" Every company, every government, every politician, every institution into Bitcoin supporters because it's not inconsistent with their worldview either. Everybody would like to store their value forever."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "33:31",
      "start": 2011.3,
      "text": "I think, you know, the future, if you look at the future, The future contains property, art, money, currency, equity, and credit. All those things are gonna exist. There'll be thou-- There's currently a hundred million companies. As long as there are a hundred million companies, there's going to be equity in the companies, whether it's Apple stock or Amazon stock, right? And, and there are always gonna be companies. Because if you look at economics, it's always gonna be more efficient for a certain group of people to do something for you than for you to do it yourself. You know, if you, if you roll the clock back to say, you know, fourteenth century Florence, you know, in the textile industry, they need like thirty-six different specialists with thirty-six different machines just to weave a, a piece of cloth. So the good old days of, \"We're just gonna do everything ourself,\" you know, on a homestead, they never existed. I, you know, I think- I think that, you know, I, I read, the other day about finding a axe factory, a stone axe factory that's more than a million years old, you know, until they, they find this like Neolithic, you know, Paleolithic, whatever, axe factory, and there's hundreds of axes in the axe factory, and what that's telling you is, a million years ago, a bunch of human beings organized a society that was sophisticated enough that they could dedicate one group of, of the society to do nothing other than create stone axes and trade those stone axes for food, clothing, shelter, services, et cetera. So there's never been a- A time in human history when people weren't specialized. We're gonna have companies, and if you're gonna have companies, you're gonna have equity. The question is, do we monetize the equity or does the equity trade at its fair value based upon the cash flows that the corporation can generate? And there's, and, and credit's not going away. You can't like bonds, but at the end of the day, you know, you're always gonna wanna be able to borrow some money from somebody. A company will wanna be able to borrow money, governments will borrow money, and there will be creditors that will wanna loan the money. And the real issue is, will it be a fair cost of capital? Will, will I get a fair rate for the money or not? And, you know, currencies will exist as long as there are governments, right? And, and, when, when, nation states break down and there's anarchy, then you, then you resort to stone age barter, and maybe you barter gold, and maybe you barter food, and maybe you barter bullets, or maybe you'll barter Bitcoin as, as the most, you know, tradable money in the future. But at the end of the day, you know, you don't really wanna live in a war zone. Because, you know, if you study the history of war zones, the thirty years war in Germany, well, when it's done, one third of the people are dead on the battlefield, you know, and everybody has lost everything and civility has been ripped down to zero. It's, it's not, you know, a desirable situation, so human beings are generally gonna run from War zones. So you, you know, you're not gonna make currencies go away as long as there are governments, you're not gonna make equities go away as long as there are companies, you won't make credit go away, and you won't make art go away, right? The debate right now is over inscriptions good or bad or, or NFTs good or bad Well, you know, here's, here's a story for you. Velazquez, the greatest artist in the Spanish court who painted the, the Spanish kings, he, after a lifetime of service, was spent on a, he was sent on a mission to Italy to acquire art for the King of Spain with the King of Spain's, you know, checkbook, and it was a reward to him. So this is about fifteen, I don't know, sixteen fifty? So he goes to Italy and he searches around, and he can't find any art, because nobody wants to sell it. All the good stuff isn't available for sale, right? And the footnote in the history book is, millionaires in, you know, post-Renaissance Italy were using art as a, as a, a hedge against inflation and a store of value. That's Three hundred years ago, four hundred years ago, hundreds of years, people, you know, people been doing this, and at the same time, there have been rigged art auctions. You know, there, there have been, y-y- you know, art, the entire art business is its own insider game, and people will establish one artist as being special, and there'll be collectors, and there's a massive debate about whether or not the art is worth what it's worth. Well, that debate's been going on for hundreds of years, and today that debate goes on not just with art, but it goes on with, with, you know, luxury cars, sports cars, it goes on with Rolex watches and luxury watches, it goes on with NFTs, it'll go on with inscriptions and ordinals, it will just continue to go on. And, you know, when I, when I hear that someone is a collector of like rare whatever, fill in the blank, I'm like, well, I wouldn't never buy that. Like I, I don't wanna store my money in, you know, in someone's five hundred thousand dollar sports car, but somebody does it, right? And, and, and it will continue. So If you think about this, again, New York, right? In the city of New York, you'll have the art, and you'll have the businesses, and you'll have the credit, and you'll have the bankers, and you'll have the politicians. It'll always go on, and what you're gonna want is the granite not to shift. And, and if you were the gran- the, the granite, and you just looked up, you would say, \"All these silly human beings, you know, they're doing silly things. I wouldn't ever put a bakery there. I wouldn't ever buy that piece of art. What are they thinking?\" And maybe you be right, maybe you be wrong, but it is the human condition, and, and that's the market economy. So if we actually- Humbly submit to the market economy, and we say, \"We just want a protocol to allow humanity to pursue its million different aims with high frequency, every minute, hour, day, week, year, decade.\" Right? then, it kind of gives us a, a really nice framework for thinking about Bitcoin, and I, I think when I look at it, I just say Bitcoin's a global, dynamic cyber economy, and we want it to be open, transparent, permissionless, timeless, immutable Fair. And Satoshi got pretty damn close with the first iteration, and you could say there are some second order tweaks to it over the next fifteen years through SegWit and Taproot But at this point, it feels to me like we've achieved that. And, and on the margin, there have been hundreds of attempts that failed. You could, you could almost argue, not hundreds, but Thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of attempts that have failed. We have one that is succeeding, and, it takes me, you know, to the, you know, to the next part of our discussion, which is You know, under what circumstances should we entertain proposals to change the protocol?"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "michael_saylor",
      "time": "41:00",
      "start": 2460.22,
      "text": "Back to the show in a moment. The lead sponsor of this show is Swan Dot Com. You can use Swan Dot Com or the Swan Bitcoin application on your smartphone to easily buy Bitcoin in a safe way. Now, with Swan Dot Com, you can either buy Bitcoin using a smash buy, a, a chunk of Bitcoin, or set up an automated recurring purchase plan. Now, many people do a combination of both. They may take an initial purchase And then set up a regular automated recurring purchase plan, which helps them ride that through the volatility, and that has been historically a good thing to save over the long term. Now, Swan also makes it easy for you to withdraw to your own self custody, because Swan has free automated withdrawals. And for those of you who are high net worth investors or individuals, Swan Private is a great solution for you. Swan Private will give you a concierge person who you can call up, you can get guidance and advice, you'll get access To special in-invite only events, monthly research reports, and just having that comfort of a person, an expert, a Bitcoin expert who can help you with your decisions on your Bitcoin allocation and other questions like this. If you wanna sign up, go to swan dot com slash livera. The show is also brought to you by coinkite dot com. Over at coinkite, you can find Bitcoin hardware devices that you can use to help secure your Bitcoin private keys. So for example, the cold card Or the TapSigner are some great examples of hardware devices that you can use to help secure your coins. This is especially valuable if you're storing amounts larger than what you would keep on a phone wallet, as an example. Now, the Coldcard is a great device and you can use it easily by plugging it in with a USB-C cable, and you can plug that into your desktop or your laptop and use that easily with software such as Sparrow Wallet, Specter Desktop, Electrum, or if you wanna use it with a phone wallet, you can use it with Nunchuck, as an example The Coldcard is a very secure device. It has multiple secure elements. It has all kinds of paranoid security elements that you can employ as part of your Bitcoin security, whether that is a duress PIN, a passphrase, or if you want to use your Coldcard as part of a multi-signature setup, the Coldcard supports a range of options. Now, I have Coldcards in various setups. I use some in single-signature mode, I have some in multi-signature mode, I have various, setups with that. I really enjoy using the Coldcard. It's very reliable and it, My cold ca- it is my hardware device of choice. So if you wanna get yours, go to coinkite dot com, use code Livera for a discount on your cold cards. And now back to the show. Right, yeah. so let's, yeah, so I think I, I can agree with a lot of what you're saying there around, the New York, the New York City analogy, this idea of a, a solid base that everybody can build up on top of, we can use it as our digital property, our store of value, and as you said, some of these things will still exist. Obviously, equity will still exist. There'll still be debt and credit. Now maybe the form would be different. The artwork will still exist, but, you know, the form may change"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "michael_saylor",
      "time": "44:04",
      "start": 2643.78,
      "text": "For thousands of years before, and they'll do it for thousands of years into the future. And so I think it might be useful then to talk a little bit about the purpose of Bitcoin, because I think that's, that's where some of the disagreement lies. Now, I think, I broadly, you know, when it comes to, let's say, the controversy of the day, right, the ordinals, inscriptions, BLC20, et cetera, I think basically it's a matter of just wait it out, right? Like, I'm, I'm not interested in that"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "michael_saylor",
      "time": "44:34",
      "start": 2673.76,
      "text": "You can't really stop people finding ways to hack and store data on, on the chain per se, but they're paying a price for that, and fundamentally, they-- I believe that will be outcompeted over time with high value monetary transactions. Now, whether that's high value, you know, people are trading for property or to sell a business or to open and close the lightning channels and all these kinds of things, over time, those uses will get competed away. So bringing back to the, the conversation. Station around how should we think about changes to the protocol? I think it, it comes back to what people see as the purpose of Bitcoin. So as an example, there's a big debate, I mean, this is kind of one of those things where people look at the white paper and they say, \"Oh, look, look at the white paper, it's Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, right?\" And of course, that's where some, you know, bee-casher, big-blocker types will sort of say, \"Oh, see, you can't use it as cash anymore Buy cash is final settlement, and by that we're sort of something thinking closer to this idea of, as you said, digital property, digital money, and so do, do you want to just spell out some of your ideas on Bitcoin principles as they relate to, you know, what the purpose of Bitcoin is and what, what sorts of changes, if any, should be considered?"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "45:56",
      "start": 2756.07,
      "text": "Yeah, I mean, I, I think that, you gotta start by saying, you know, bit-- Bitcoins primary role is to serve as an economically sound, technically sound, ethically sound foundation for the future digital economy. It, it, it is in essence sound digital property or sound digital money. I've described it as digital energy, but you- You could think of it as digital material. How do we manifest a hundred trillion dollars of real value in cyberspace? Right? How, how do we do that and make that stable? Right? before Bitcoin, all money, you know, all, all, Financial transactions in cyberspace are based on credit, right? There is no digital money, there's only digital credit in the world before Bitcoin. So I send you a billion dollars or a million dollars, it's a credit on Visa network or on a banking network, and if the, if the, the analog real world institution chooses to honor the credit, then the money changes hands. But, you know, we've, we've talked about the problem with that before. Like, I, I wanna send, A million dollars forty times, and every time I lose two and a half percent, and it takes one month, and so it takes four years to move the money forty times, and I lose all the money, right? In essence, after forty vibrations of the money, it's gone. So, so, the world of credit money isn't, it isn't a foundation to build anything lasting or functional in cyberspace. So Bitcoin's primary role is to serve as a digital monetary foundation for the future of humanity, and if there's nine hundred trillion dollars worth of stuff circulating right now, point one percent of that is digital money, as we understand it with Bitcoin. If we wanna actually move into the twenty-first century, into the cyber economy, you could imagine that we should be getting to hundreds, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred trillion dollars worth of monetary value circulating digitally. So it's the foundation In, in the same way that the granite is the foundation of Manhattan. But it's not the applications, it's not the buildings, it's not the businesses, it's not the political systems And, so, so to think it's-- that it's the currency is a mistake. It's, it's not meant to replace equity, it's not meant to replace currency, it's not meant to be a medium of exchange. It's meant to be the underlying, conservative foundation of the entire economy. Now, that being the case, it's, I, I think that, yeah, it's a- People that they, they, they live for digital currency, they just waste all their time chasing after the wrong thing and debating the wrong thing. Currency's not even that valuable. I mean, if, if, if you look at the entire world economy and you ask what portion of the economy is in currency used as a medium of exchange Is that, is that like one, two, three percent? Like what percentage of, of the wealth of any wealthy person would be currency they use as a medium of exchange? It, you'd be lucky to see it one percent. So only one percent of the economy is anything related to currency, to sort of, to focus upon Bitcoin needing to be a currency to create value is missing ninety-nine percent of the opportunity. The, the real, Value of Bitcoin is if I put the other nine hundred trillion dollars into the digital ecosystem, I can defeat inflation, which, which is decimating ten percent of all the wealth in the world every year, right? That's a, that's a big idea. Or I can move the money a million times a second instead of one time a month. So, so what we're talking about is a high fidelity, high frequency method, the ability to, to move money, based on a computer program A million times faster, a million times cheaper, and the ability to, to, manifest capital in digital form such that it lasts a million times longer, right? That's the breakthrough, right? A million times, a million times a million, right? It's, it's a lot better. Right? It's, and so I think that, the purpose of Bitcoin is that, it's to basically manifest the economy in digital space. it's the digital transformation of capital. If there's nine hundred trillion dollars of capital, what if half of it could be transformed digitally and you move four hundred and fifty trillion dollars into cyberspace? And, well, you would say, \"Well, why would I wanna do that?\" And the answer is, \"So it'll last forever.\" That's, it's, it's immortal, so it's indestructible, check number two, and so it moves at the speed of light, check number three, and so I can, I can vibrate it At the speed of a computer. So if the computer thinks a billion times faster than you and is a billion times smarter than you, and I can move the capital a billion times faster and let the computer use it a billion times more intelligently, and if it's indestructible and immortal Then it's kind of the, it's the difference between relying upon animal power and electrical power to drive the civilization forward. Right? You can heat your home with a bunch of donkeys in your living room, or you can heat your home, home with electricity, clean electricity. It's, right? It's, it's, it's, it's tricky to find powerful enough metaphors, but, but that's an example of a metaphor, right? Electricity versus donkey power in order to move the human race forward. So that being the case, then I guess when somebody makes a suggestion, let's change the protocol, I have a very simple checklist. You know, is it ethical? and, you know, is it good engineering and is it economically sound? Right? So, is it technically sound? Is it ethically sound? Is it economically sound? And, And I, you know, I think, you know, if we could start with an observation before I go too much further, which is the Hippocratic Oath starts with the, the phrase \"Do no harm,\" right? Generally, if you have a healthy, a healthy human being, you wanna start by doing no harm, right? And so here the principles I think apply with regard to Bitcoin. It's already a healthy network. It's already gone from nothing to eight hundred fifty billion dollars in economic energy. It's on a Of course, to ten x that and ten x that again with no change to the protocol, as far as I can see, it seems, seems quite evident to me that we, the next op should be a hundred x where we are, with all of the innovation taking place on layers two through five. So when you come to me and you say, \"Oh, I think there's a problem with Bitcoin, right?\" It's like, \"I just heard about Bitcoin, I'm here to fix it.\" That's the meme. Everybody keeps coming up with this idea to fix Bitcoin, they've all been wrong generally so far, and there'll be another hundred thousand You only get to play God once, and Satoshi played God, and you could say, \"Well, Satoshi got to do it, why can't I?\" Well, the answer is Satoshi did it. The reason we're talking about Satoshi is 'cause the other hundred thousand would-be Satoshi's failed. If you read the history of the world Work your way through ten thousand pages of Western history, there will be thousands and thousands and thousands of episodes of alpha male thinks he was put on this earth, you know, to change everything. Full of hubris and decides that he's going to conquer his own country, then he's got to conquer the next one, then he's got to conquer everything in his way, and then he's, you know, he's gotta, he's gotta do more, change more, et cetera. And that's the story of Julius Caesar That's the story of Alexander the Great, that's the story of Genghis Khan, that's the story of Napoleon, right? That's the story of Hitler, that's the story of every king, you know, and most leaders. I could give you ten thousand of them, but William the Conqueror? But the story always ends the same way, which is they start the underdog, they get a few victories, then their head gets too big for them, then they decide to go conquer the next thing, and then pretty soon they're losing their entire army in Egypt or in Russia or wherever. And, you know, a-and if they manage to conquer everything, they die and the eca-and the entire empire falls apart immediately, like with Alexander the Great, or they die and within one generation the empire falls. falls apart, which is what happened to Genghis Khan. Or, you know, they end up with, with no son, so they murder everyone so they can have a son and there's civil war. Or they end up with nineteen sons and the nineteen sons murder each other and there's a civil war. Or they have a hundred sons and one of them murders the first twenty and there's a hundred civil wars. But at the end of the day It's always, it's always an example of someone that thinks that God told them it's their manifest destiny to go and conquer something else. And, and there's this, there's this basic stoic principle I think which is really important, which is,"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "55:53",
      "start": 3352.52,
      "text": "it's, it's, you may be able to acquire the thing, but it's ten times harder to maintain the thing, and it's a hundred times harder to prosper or enjoy the thing. So in business, that means you can buy the, you can buy the business or launch the product, but can you make a profit? Probably not. But if you can make a profit, can you actually continuously grow the business forever such that you can compete for the next hundred years and prosper? That's a hundred times harder. So the world is full of people that think that they can start a business, but ninety-nine percent of the time they fail 'cause they underestimate the cost to compete and the cost to prosper. The world's full of people that- That they, thought they could acquire that thing, but they can't afford to maintain it, and then they acquire too much and they realize that it's dilutive and they can't enjoy the things they've acquired. And history is riddled with examples of empires where empire builders, they, they overextend and then they realize that they can't maintain the empire, it all collapses, you know, in a catastrophe. And it's, it's always predi- it's highly predictable, it always happens. I-if I were to give you a hundred examples, I would have only given one percent of the examples because it just happens over and over and over and over again. So So when you think about all this, you know, beware men with god complexes. You only get to play god once, and, you know Most, most medicine and most law is iatrogenic. It's, it's kind of amusing, you know, I, I, there's so many examples in history where, where, the historian studies history and, this has been said in 500 BC, in 100 AD, in 700 AD, in 1200 AD, in 1500 AD, modern time, but that basically what's said is, doctors multiply the ailments with their cures and the lawyers Multiply the disagreements with their laws. The doctors wanna prescribe and operate, the lawyers wanna legislate and litigate, that's what they do. And so when you think about Bitcoin's protocol, Bitcoin core developers or, or protocol developers They wanna fix something or they wanna make a contribution because it's in their DNA, but developers are just the lawyers of cyberspace. When the lawyer shows up at the Capitol, they've gotta make a law to save you from yourself, and the more laws they make, the more they cripple the economy until eventually there's so many laws that the entire civilization collapses under its own weight. And when developers show up and they're invited to opine on the protocol, they wanna actually introduce a piece of code to make it better. And each, you know, and it's always, \"Well, I can speculate a circumstance under which we might need this, or I can speculate, you know, if we don't do this, we're gonna have a failure.\" But you know, in the history of mankind, people that preach doomsday, that predicted the, you know, the end of humanity, they have a hundred percent failure rate. And yet every single demagogue, every politician, every empire builder has always preached this, right? I gotta start my own religion because- You're all going to hell, and the world's gonna end. And it's happened, to say hundreds of times is understatement, hundreds of thousands of times, most likely. It's just that we only managed to record about ten or twenty thousand of the incidences. But it's happened as many times as there are leaders born, and it's continually happening. So, I mean, think, you know, you have a, you have a proposal, whatever it is, my first start is, if it's not a global consensus to be a fatal defect, and if we don't, if we all universally think it's a fatal defect, it's gonna destroy the network, then I think we should carefully consider it. I'm not saying we should, we could all be wrong, by the way. Every time every civilization has concluded that the end is near, they've always been wrong, right? In the history of the world, they've always been wrong. So If there was universal consensus of a fatal defect that's going to destroy us all, we simply ought to talk about it, and maybe, maybe we should do something, but it doesn't mean we should do something. We should really think hard about it. When I, when I look at it as an engineer, a-and I spent my career in engineering, Stefan, like for thirty years, I ran a software company. Thousands and thousands of man years of engineering. Conclusion, code is a liability, not an asset. Just like laws are a liability, not an asset, right? The president of, of Argentina is looking to repeal three hundred eighty thousand different rules? Right? so complexity in the protocol creates new attack surfaces. Every time you introduce a new, a new co-- piece of code, it's an attack surface, it's something to break. Given the fact that we're already winning and we're on a path to winning Like, and then this is, this is where it's, you're an optimist or you're a pessimist. For example, do you think the universe is gonna work with or without human beings? If the universe is gonna go on for another billion years, then who needs you to f with the laws of physics? Right? It's, it's gonna work fine without you, right? So you have your little god complex, but probably you'll be wrong, the universe will be right. So if, if you actually have some respect for natural law, and if you have respect for Bitcoin and network, if you think it's already working Then every piece of complexity introduces a way for it to break. Every complexity is a new failure mode, a new attack surface, a new maintenance obligation. I created a new piece of code? Okay, well now we have to test it against every other piece of code every time we update any piece of the software. Okay, so a hundred thousand different permutations of things to worry about testing, and if one of them breaks, we're doomed. And on the other hand what's the usefulness of the new feature, right? That a new feature encourages feature competition. So every time you add a new feature, you encourage someone else to propose their feature. And then you create confusion. It's like, okay, well, there's a new feature, so now everybody in the world has to figure out how that affects everything that they've done or everything they're gonna do. And that creates a, an arms race or a feature race, and that creates uncertainty, and that undermines trust. And ultimately, all of the confusion, uncertainty, and undermining of the trust Undermines the efficiency of everybody else in the ecosystem. So all the layer two, layer three, layer four, layer five, and layer six. It's, let, let me say it this way. I'm playing God and I'm just going to routinely zap four acres of granite in New York City in the next ten years and I'll wipe them out? And put a sinkhole underneath that goes down to the center of the earth, 'cause I feel like I need to do that to save the world. And you live in New York, and you run a business in New York, and you're the mayor of New York. You see the chaos that creates? It's like, do I have to pass a law to, to inspect every acre of New York every month for the next forever to figure out whether school kids will drop into the sinkhole? It's like, you, you think you're doing good, it's like, well, I, I speculate This. It's like my speculation, so please let me do it. But what you're doing is creating an obscene amount of inefficiency in the rest of the economy that you're- we call this strategic incompetence. You're blissfully ignorant and you're so incompetent that you can't imagine what kind of chaos you will create for all the other people not in the room with you right now, and that's what gives you the confidence to go and mess with the world. Right? Because you've got that big an ego. And, I think if you have humility and you say, \"Well, I know, I know one human being worth of stuff, \"and there's a hundred million other human beings that are affected? And maybe I don't know the other ninety-nine point, ninety-nine million human beings worth of stuff, then you would go much more carefully from an engineering point of view. You know, the, the model I would give you here too is the seven thirty seven Max. Are you familiar with the seven thirty seven Max and the debacle that introduced?"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "michael_saylor",
      "time": "01:04:42",
      "start": 3882.83,
      "text": "Yeah, I heard of this story, but, go on for the listeners."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "01:04:45",
      "start": 3885.32,
      "text": "So I'm an aeronautical engineer and, and so I, I know something about building aircraft. And, and the short of it is, aeronautical engineering is a systems discipline. So when you change the payload of the aircraft and you change the wing of the aircraft or the fuselage of the aircraft Or the, or the mission of the aircraft, or the specs of the aircraft, or the furniture in the aircraft, or the electronics in the aircraft, you have to, you have to consider whether or not you've broken anything And you could introduce a new couch and destabilize the aircraft under certain circumstances and crash the thing and kill everybody, which is why You know, y-you're careful about playing God on the aircraft. It's not like shuffling the furniture in your living room. The seven thirty-seven was designed in the nineteen sixties. It's one of the most successful aircraft designs in the history of the world. we were flying it in the '70s, we flew it in the '80s, the '90s, for fifty years we created this, we flew this aircraft, and we made incremental adjustments to the, to the airframe. We stretched it a little bit longer, but we didn't change the shape of the fuselage, and we kept most of the components, and it was very successful, and it was flown by pilots very successfully. And then along comes some, some well-to-do, well-meaning engineers that wanna fix it or make it better. It wasn't broken, it's the most successful, you know, airliner in the history of the world, but, but someone always wants to make it better. Probably someone that graduated from computer science program and they learned about new techniques, and so they decided to upgrade the control systems and the autopilot system. In the aircraft, in the cockpit, you know, we have to migrate to electronic cockpit. And, and so when they did it, they introduced code into, in, into the auto throttles and, and into the control system that was supposed to be a failsafe to keep the plane from crashing. So it overrode the pilot under certain circumstances. And, and they introduced a bug into the, into the code and the way that the software interacted with the sensors on the aircraft. You know, in a system-- systemic fashion, was such that under certain circumstances, the, the software took over control of the cockpit and stalled out the airplane and crashed it and killed everybody. And it just kept happening, you know? And, and if you're the pilot in the airplane N- you, you get murdered by the software, and the software kills you and kills all the passengers, and they were killed by the upgrade. And so as an example of if they had done nothing We'd all be better off, right? And, and it was a massive hubris because there's this arrogance of thinking that no matter what I do, I won't make things worse, and I can introduce as much complexity as I want And the answer is, no, you can't. You can't introduce much complexity, right? Since you're not God and you don't understand All circumstances and, and all, all parts of the functional envelope, you can't, you know, you can't possibly see the full implications. But what we do know is, you know, a bunch of very enthusiastic engineers made an upgrade to actually make the plane unsafe. And, yeah, you always have to be concerned about that, and, and there tends to be lots of examples of that in the world, it's happening all the time."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "michael_saylor",
      "time": "01:08:26",
      "start": 4106.53,
      "text": "Yeah. So one point I just wanna bring up here, just to get your response on this, because there is certainly, and I'm, I'm sure you recognize this also, a role for maintenance, right? There's, there's always a need for maintenance. Bitcoin itself doesn't exist in a vacuum, right? It, it has to connect to the internet, and, you know, there are other aspects of- Code or applications that Bitcoin has to connect with. So I presume then, you know, that's-- you, you would contrast that from the role for maintenance of the protocol so that people can still use Bitcoin, wouldn't you?"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "01:09:00",
      "start": 4140.5,
      "text": "Yeah, I, I think that, one way to think about this is there's a kernel. Like, if you look at the database industry, like there was the kernel, the relational database kernel, Oracle, and Oracle was ported to lots of different computer platforms. And so there would be the version of Oracle on a mainframe and the version of Oracle on a, on an IBM, PC and the version of Oracle on an Apple computer and the version of Oracle that might run on a mobile handset or an Android phone. But the kernel stays the same and the way it processes- Sequel in the way that the engine works, the protocol doesn't change. the ports are various instances, right? It, it might very well be that They have different functionality and they have to be maintained and upgraded with the operating systems as they change, and there's a role for that. But good software engineering is such that You would always want to have a situation where if the system crashes, it crashes on the client, but it doesn't corrupt the data or corrupt the network. So you, you know, you don't want a client, you know, anywhere on the network that would corrupt the network or, or, or corrupt the underlying data. And so there's a question of, how does it crash? Right? How does it fail? Does it fail gracefully, or does it fail in such a way that it, it corrupts all of the data, right? Or, or, or the worst case would be It crashes and it, and it, crashes other people's devices as well. So I think that, that there is a lot of software engineering to be done around Bitcoin. I mean, the engineering of the signing devices, the engineering of the node clients, the engineering of the mining rigs, the engineering of, of the mining pools, right? The engineering of the layer two of the wallets, the engineering of the layer three apps, and, and the light-- the engineering of lightning. Channels. These are all parts of the ecosystem, but I would say philosophically, you want the majority of risk to sit with the-- you want the risk to always be with the client, you want, you want the risk on the edge of the network, you want the risk to be ideally with the application and the corporation. Right? Like, like if, if you're a custodian, you're gonna lose something, you want the corporation to be on the hook for it. if, if you're gonna destroy an entity, you wanna destroy the company or the individual or the client device or the individual miner. You don't want a fatality of the network, right? We, we can't afford to have the protocol corrupted, right? That's That's kind of like if you're, if you're screwing with stuff in your factory, you're not allowed to use, planet-busting nuclear fusion weapons, because if you mess that up, you blow up the planet, right? So don't let people burn down the entire city, don't let them burn down the entire network. with regard to, you know, everything else, like you, Bitcoin can survive the failure of any, layer three application or custodial application, it can survive the failure of any holder, and it can survive the failure even of, a layer two protocol, a lightning protocol. The entire protocol could fail, Bitcoin will survive, right? And, it can survive a, the failure of a lightning channel, right? So there are a lot of components that it can survive. Survive, just like New York City can survive the collapse of any building, any business, any government, any mayor, any administration, and any culture But it can't survive, you know, a hundred thermonuclear warheads that plow, a one-mile crater over all of Manhattan such that the ocean covers it, right? And swallows it. You don't want an Atlantis situation where the entire thing sinks under the Atlantic. So, so you gotta consider the risk. And I think that, there's no point in trying to get involved in all of the software engineering of the layers above the foundation because they're all high frequency, high complexity. My, my general view is just, if you're a brilliant engineer, if you're the Mark Zuckerberg type and you wanna create something that's, that you think is worth hundreds of billions of dollars Create it as an application on Bitcoin and go take it public and raise capital and market it to the world, and maybe you just created the next Facebook or created the next Microsoft. And maybe, you know, if you're right, and if you're wrong, okay, your investors will go bankrupt and your code will be, you know, scrubbed off the network in time. You know, history shows that ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of the time you're wrong, right? There's only like a dozen people that were ever like Mark Zuckerberg, and there was a million people People that wanted to be. So history suggests you'll probably be wrong, but, you know, everybody has their right to take their shot, and you should, and, and you should go ahead and risk your time, your capital, your code, and if you're successful Maybe you're Cash App and you'll have fifty million users on the network and you get to control how those fifty million people interact with Bitcoin, right? And maybe you'll have five hundred million people on the network. Maybe you'll be Microsoft and you'll have a billion people on the network and you'll get to control how your billion customers interact with Bitcoin and maybe you'll have a trillion dollars of Bitcoin in the network. And that's okay, but at the end of the day, you're gonna be an attack surface, you're gonna be a corporation, you'll be subject to a subpoena, you'll be Apple, I mean, think about the problems that Apple, Google, and Facebook have in China right now, right? They're, they all have very much political headaches. So all of these layer threes are gonna have political headaches, but, but you can't belittle the ability to do good. The truth is, you know, Microsoft and Apple and Google have accomplished things in their own way that you could never accomplish with an open protocol or with, you know, a layer one protocol, and so it's silly to try- To do what they do in layer three and the layer one, but it's silly for them to not take advantage of the layer one. So that's what I think about general maintenance of different"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "michael_saylor",
      "time": "01:15:15",
      "start": 4515.9,
      "text": "types. One other area that I think some people may be interested to hear your view here when we're talking about engineering, what of things like non-consensus changes, right? So for example, the big ticket things that people talk about are typically the soft forks, right? So SegWit, Taproot, and so on, but there are a whole host of other changes that are just happening. Lightning as an example with new releases of Bitcoin Core, so for an example, the v2 transport protocol or other things that are, that they are changing, you know, as we speak, right, every six months there's a new, on average, there's a new release, and so some of these changes are already occurring. So What are you, what are you saying in respect to those changes that aren't these kind of big headline soft forks or consensus changes?"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "01:16:00",
      "start": 4560.2,
      "text": "Well, I, I think the core protocol, the monetary protocol, the transaction protocol, the power protocol, the thing, that's the essence of Bitcoin, that needs to be defended in a very conservative fashion a-as the foundation of the entire Bitcoin economy. I think that when you look beyond it at, at various extensions Of those protocols that are optional, right, soft, soft forks, if you will, maybe backward compatible extensions that may or may not be adopted. I think that people can pursue whatever they wanna pursue and the market will decide. For example, if you came up with a Bitcoin node that ran on an iPhone, you know, may-- would I download it? Might you add some iPhone features? Would it be successful? Would it not be successful? People have different opinions about it. You know, maybe it's a good idea, maybe it's not a good idea. I mean, people will make arguments about why it shouldn't be part of the Apple Store, you know, subject to Apple approval, and someone also say, \"Why don't we just let it go?\" You know, I, I think everybody's free to come up with their own, software. It's either Layer Two. I, I'll characterize Layer Two as it's consistent, it's c- it's consistent with the core protocol of Bitcoin, the Layer One protocol, the foundational protocol, but Open source, that's like Lightning. It could be a hundred flavors of Lightning, and, and, you know, there's, there's Bitcoin Core, but people can create a hundred competitors that are different ports to run on different devices. You know, my version has a different way to sync, and it syncs in one minute, you know, on your Android phone, or it syncs, you know, and it's, it runs differently, and people will debate it, they can debate it or not, and, maybe it'll evolve, maybe it won't evolve. I think that as As long as it's not screwing with the power protocol, the monetary protocol, the transaction protocol, then probably the market will work it out. And I think, many of them morph into a layer three because there's a custodian or there's a company or a group of people, a centralized group, most will, because if you wanna do something which has got a lot of, fun-- rich functionality or rich performance or anything different, any other bells and whistles, if you wanna add usability, if you wanna add compatibility, Ability, if you wanna add compliance, you're gonna have to have generally a, a, an organized software engineering team to do it. I think that's, it's obvious we need those, right? If you wanna, you know, run Bitcoin in a certain regulatory environment and the, and the politicians there say you have to comply with this rule or else it's illegal, then someone will pop up to build that kind of compliance software, and that'll be a company, and it's almost certain that the company that does that won't be compliant in other jurisdictions, and so- So I, I, I think that that's just part of the vibrant economy, like a vibrant Bitcoin economy, and, many, many ideas will be tried, and, some of them will be great ideas but not economically viable, and some will be great ideas but will be, be smashed by regulators, and some will be great ideas but people just won't care. You live long enough and you invent-- I've said this before, it's like I invented a hundred things, not many of them were com- Commercially successful, it's easy to, it's easy to create the mobile app on the iPhone. That happened a hundred thousand times. But you can count on two hands the number of mobile apps that got to a billion users on an iPhone. So there should be a vibrant economy and people should be always trying new things. And, and the real issue is, you know, i-is it, an open layer two type protocol or is it layer three or is it something different entirely? I, I tend to think every time an engineer has It's a good idea, and they say, \"Well, Bitcoin really needs this.\" I think, \"Well, why don't you implement it in your version of Bitcoin or in your, you know, in some kind of layer two fashion and implement a special lightning node that has that functionality and let's see whether or not a hundred million people adopt it because they like it there and...\" And then after a hundred million people use it, maybe there'll be a view that it ought to be put back into the core base protocol because it's useful. And then on the other end, maybe a hundred million people will use it and we'll conclude we don't need to put it in the base protocol 'cause it's already been successful, right? Why would you risk the genetic code of the entire human race, right? When, when you don't need to. So I- I guess, ca-- and coming back to the subject of just my filters, like the first thing I always think is, \"Well, what kind of engineering risk does this implement?\" And given the fact that Bitcoin, I'm of the view that Bitcoin is already going to be a hundred x more successful than it is, you gotta show me something that makes it a million times better, that has No risk before it becomes interesting on my radar. Otherwise, I just think seven thirty seven max. You know, I was like, \"You know, great idea, lots of people are dead, and you set back, you, you nearly bankrupted the entire company, lost...\" Twenty, thirty, forty billion dollars trying to do good, and you killed a lot of innocent people. So good for you, right? Maybe, maybe we don't need to do that. I also look at-- I think the economic constraints are really important. When you introduce new functionality in the base protocol, you undermine and impair all the application development on the, on the above layers. So you're, you know, you're robbing the rest of the economy of the opportunity to do it in a layer two or layer three or a layer four because you wanna shove it into layer one. So whatever your good idea was, why don't you start a company to do it and make billions? And if you're gonna rob me of the ability to start a company and make billions, then how are you helping me? It's, it's an example of a government that wants to insert wage controls and price controls and nationalize every major part of the economy. It's like, like when the, you know, when the Westerners go to Africa and we give away free medical care? And we bankrupt all the African doctors and the African hospitals. Like destroying the native farmers in Africa and destroying the native doctors in Africa because we wanna give away food and give away medical care, and we think somehow that we're morally superior, but what we really did was we wrecked the economy. And so I think that you gotta, you gotta be saying, \"Am I gonna wreck the economy of the rest of the layers by trying to introduce this in this base layer?\" I think performance undermines transaction fees and application development. So, so, you know, when you're introducing performance improvements in the base protocol, you're stealing from the miners, and when you're introducing functionality improvements to the base protocol, you're stealing from the application developers. You're, you know, you're destroying their business, either you're stealing, you're destroying or stealing their existing property, or you're stealing their future- Cash flows."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "michael_saylor",
      "time": "01:23:07",
      "start": 4987.5,
      "text": "on this point, I think there's maybe some people may disagree on this point, just, and some of this has parallels even with the block size wars, because there was this kind of idea of, \"Oh, let's get SegWit, because we're gonna get Lightning,\" and then there was kind of this question of, \"Oh, but are the miners losing out? Because now they're gonna lose out on transaction fees in this, in this example?\" And so there was, there was some fighting about that, and some people were coming back with the argument of, Opening channel open and close transactions on the base layer so that the miners aren't gonna lose out, but other people were saying, \"No, you're, you're taking from the miners. It's, you know, the famous, saying, from, one individual, Jihan Wu, was that the transaction fees would be, quote unquote, unfairly cheap. So that, that's perhaps an example of this kind of conflict that can arise when there are upgrades to Bitcoin."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "01:24:00",
      "start": 5040.43,
      "text": "Yeah, I think, I think if you look back at wars, a lot of evil is done in wars on both sides, and a lot of innocent people were hurt. And that, that's the case of every war, the Thirty Year War, the Civil War, every single war, right? So in the Block Size War, a lot of people were hurt by the war. Now, I would start with my observation that we're here right now, the war's been fought. I mean, I can't undo what happened. I don't condone warfare, right? There are a lot of- There are a lot of Bitcoin miners that are bankrupt today because of SegWit, and a lot, a-and the transaction fees did go through the floor, and they would have been higher if the block space had been, more scarce. And so, there, you know, you can say the network survived and we are where we are, and I think that Bitcoin with Taproot and Bitcoin with SegWit is a healthy network, and we have enough functionality to hundred X from here. But I do think every- Every time, if you look forward, I mean, looking backwards, people were hurt, right? Like in the, in the German Civil War, right? In the Thirty Years' War, like one third of the people got murdered, okay? There's no, you know, there's no good guys. There wasn't a good side, right? Both sides murdered millions of innocent people in the war. Every war is like that. Every single war in human history, the, the winners murdered a bunch of innocent people, the losers- Murdered a bunch of innocent people, war is hell. And so one should hope, maybe I'll say it a different way. If you didn't have to have a civil war, and if you could grow, if you could, if you were in charge of a nation, and you had the choice, shall we engage in a civil war or shall we live peacefully together with the status quo? I think the answer is we should live peacefully together with the status quo. And every time a strong world leader comes along and says God told me that the status quo will result in all of us plunging to hell and the end of the earth, and therefore I have to murder twenty-five percent of the population. It's like the Catholics versus the Huguenots in France. Like they, they started a war, went for like thirty-five or forty years with the Catholics murdering the Huguenots and the Huguenots murdering the Catholics, it wasn't good for France. And eventually, the leaders that we liked better were the leaders that, you know, after the Edict of Nantes said, \"Okay, well...\" Calvinists and Hu-Huguenots and Catholics are both allowed to live in the country without us murdering each other. So if I look forward, w- I, you know, I, I don't have a lot of patience or I don't have a lot of sympathy for a developer that thinks we should have a civil war and destroy the property rights, you know, economically murder the miners or economically murder an application developer or economically murder a Bitcoin holder just because they think God told them to. told them that the world would be better if they got their way, right? That's an example of, you know, radical fundamentalism where, you know, a minority wants to plunge the entire nation into a civil war just to get their way because they think God told them they're right and they're appointed. and I, I think- Economically, if you're proposing to basically put functionality in the base layer, then you're robbing, you're, you're impairing the assets and robbing the application layers above you. And if you're proposing to expand the transaction bandwidth, you're robbing, the Bitcoin miners and you're depleting, you're stealing their property from them, you know, without due process. And all the upgrades that are proposed to the base layer, they're imposing a cost on all the network, network participants, a cost on the miners, a cost on the node runners, a cost on the application in order to stay compliant and in, in, in order to avoid You know, being at a disadvantage. So, so when you, when you write code for the base layer, you're just a lawyer showing up at the Capitol writing a new law, and the law is Daylight Savings Time, we've decided that people shouldn't work after four o'clock in the afternoon because there are shadows on the trees, and we don't think people should be able to do it, and if you do it, we're putting you in jail. And I'm doing it because God told me that we can't have people working when there are shadows on the trees. Right? Or, you know, fill in the blank, right? There are a hundred thousand of those laws. Some person with some moral or philosophical or religious argument Makes it, and then they write a law on the books, and the law is a restraint of trade, and the result is someone has their property rights devalued, right? And someone else benefits, right? I, I get rich because you have to use windmills and you can't use nuclear power, and it's like the, the dude that doesn't have the nuclear power plant gets rich, and the person that owns the power plant gets poor, and I did it to save humanity with a law, and I think that- There's always gonna be a never-ending supply of them. The more of them you entertain, if one developer gets their way, the next one will wanna have their way, and then you introduce this moral hazard Because now, now an economic actor decides that it's in their best interest to campaign for a change in the protocol that will help their business or help their interest. Either they wanna be famous or they wanna be rich or they wanna be powerful. And if, if I knew that I could show up in the capital And pay somebody five thousand dollars to get a law passed making it illegal to bake bread within city limits unless your last name is Saylor. Then I would do that, right? I mean, the, the, the entire history Of economic chaos is monopolies handed out by authoritarians to their cronies always justified for the good of the people? Right? And, and any code change to the protocol is some kind of benefit to, to one class, to the detriment of everybody else in the world and everybody that's ever gonna come In the future. So from now to the end of time, every human being that's ever gonna live is gonna be impaired by some constraint that's in-introduced by some Enthusiastic political actor that thinks that they were, you know, given a mission from God to make the network better, and, generally they're not right."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "michael_saylor",
      "time": "01:30:44",
      "start": 5444.61,
      "text": "Yeah. And so one other area I think people will wanna hear your answer on is- What about in the case of upgrades that are opt-in only? So as an example, if it was a particular, you know, opcode that, an existing node runner doesn't have to care about, and it's only, you know, if, if, if it could be, let's say, for the sake of argument, it could be shown that there's no impact to existing users, you can just keep using Bitcoin exactly as it is, but there's this new opt-in opcode, as an example? That people can opt into and only use that if they choose to. What's your-- Do you have any view on that kind of idea?"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "01:31:18",
      "start": 5478.64,
      "text": "I generally think that, if it's, if it's marketed as an application by a corporation, like when Block wants to create Cash App functionality and build it into Cash App, and people get it and it's, and it's otherwise compatible with the rest of the network. Then I think that there's not a lot of moral hazard there. But I think that, when you get to the point where you have two warring camps with two different versions of a Bitcoin node and one of them has different functionality than the other ones, right? Now you're entering into a, a, a religious war, and if they're incompatible, who knows? If, if, if one is a superset of the other one, right? I probably, probably if it's a superset of the other one, it's, it's probably less of a, of a hazard when it introduces something which is incompatible becomes more of a hazard. I, I hesitate to give you a black and white answer 'cause I'd have to see it, but I do think, I do think it's a slippery slope And as a general rule, developers ought to focus, like, don't f with the network. Like, I, I just generally think people shouldn't screw with the network, and they shouldn't screw with the core protocol. It works fine. If you wanna introduce a thousand new ideas, introduce them in Lightning. create, for example, I don't have a problem creating your own implementation of Lightning, which is a superset of somebody else's, you know, implementation of Lightning. Right, so I think you can create different implementations of things at layer two and at layer three, creating different, different, Bitcoin nodes with different functionality. Like, I mean, obviously I don't really have a big concern about like, usability, upgrades. If you wanna create a graphical user interface on top of Bitcoin which is animated and beautiful, I mean, that, those don't represent so much risk. I think that when you're introducing changes to the underlying monetary protocol or transaction protocol, if you, if you introduce something which changes transactional bandwidth, which would have an impact on Bitcoin transaction fees, I think that that's A problem. A-anything that, if you change the transaction bandwidth, then you're stealing, you're, you're robbing, the miners of cash flow And if you're, if you're stealing revenues from the miners, you're putting the mining network at risk over the long term, and that puts the power at risk, right? So you're changing the power dynamics, and that puts the- Stability of the entire network over the course of the long term at risk. So, so I think, I, I'm fairly conservative, like I, I'm not in favor of anybody, you know, deciding who can own Bitcoin. I don't think you should muck with the asset, with the monetary protocol. I don't think you should muck with the transaction protocol. I don't think you should muck with the power protocol, right? It's, it works fine Why break it? Right? If it's not broke, don't break it. Right? You, you could break it and plunge the entire world into a thousand years of the dark ages, right? Good for you, right? What's worth that? What, what's worth taking the risk of that, right? I, I, so I would tend to be very conservative with regard to anything that, that affects The balance of power between the asset, you know, and the transaction bandwidth and the power, you know, scarcity. Yeah. But just like someone would say, \"Well, I didn't,\" you know? I think we should change Shaw, Shaw two fifty-six to Shaw five twelve. Okay, great. So you invalidate all the technology that every Shaw two fifty-six Bitcoin equipment manufacturer's developed over the last decade, and then you introduce your own little piece of equipment, and you wanna, and you basically obliterate or nuke twenty-five billion dollars worth of capital investment by miners, right? You can see why doesn't make a lot of sense. Right? It's like it's-- all, all those things represent moral hazard and, and they create, they create dysfunctional political incentive. Like, do, do you really want people to be continually campaigning to confuse? Bitcoin operators like, like, why would you wanna create a market and introducing fear, uncertainty, doubt, and confusion into the base layer? I like we're back to this issue of, let's, let's take the New York model again. You have ten acres of granite, and you ask me, Mike, is it okay if I like, you know, put radioactive charges under my ten acres of granite that will just kill anybody that wants to plant a palm tree for all of eternity? I'm like, I don't think you should mess with the granite, you know? Like, I-- what if I wanna put an easement on the property for all of eternity that makes it impossible to use it for residential housing? I, I don't think you should do that, right? I think it's granite, you should- If you're gonna actually build a funky building, that's okay, we can tear down the building. But I, I don't think you should write checks you can't cash. So don't build things that would potentially impair, destroy, or change the nature of a Bitcoin between now and ten thousand years from now, once you're dead and once your company's dead, right? Once you're gone, don't mess with the network. Right? Leave, leave the fundamentals alone. And, it's kind of, it's, it's kind of simple. It's like when a dude comes to a Manhattan and the guy says, \"Hey, I have this idea, I'm gonna set off a thermonuclear warhead, but it's only gonna go off for twenty blocks in every direction, and I own the blocks.\" You know, don't you think you're just like, \"Hey, just stop it. Like, you don't need to be messing with that, right? We don't need that kind of behavior.\" It's like, I don't care how smart you are. Right? You just don't need to be messing with the quiet enjoyment of everybody else in the city. Like, just leave the twenty-one million blocks alone. And, and again, it's like the moral hazard is, if you encourage people to do this, then you'll have ten thousand people lined up to do it, then you're gonna have ten thousand companies that will, will basically invest a million dollars each. To try to change the protocol, okay? And now you're just gonna have war, right? And, and you don't really want that kind of war at the protocol level because, I, I guess fundamentally the issue is There's nothing wrong with building a city on a bunch of granite blocks, right? There's just, there's nothing wrong with it, and you've got plenty of room to innovate. On layer two, layer three, layer four, layer five, and layer six. And it's, what happens to Bitcoin when all of us spend all of our time debating a hundred different Bitcoin improvement proposals, and each one requires a thousand hours? So now you've introduced like thousand, hundreds of thousands of hours of debate, you know, and, and can you think of an example where that happens? It's like, yeah, the modern, modern political systems, right? Where pretty soon- Twenty percent of all the citizens in the country are lawyers fighting with each other, right? And then, and I'm, I'm reminded of, is it Aristophanes in his play where he, where he says, \"First thing we do is we kill all the lawyers,\" right? Might have been Shakespeare too, but who knows? It's like, a-at some point, you know, the question really is, if you have the ability to create code, why don't you create code on the network and not try to change the network? Right? It's, it's much more constructive channeling. Of human endeavor."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "michael_saylor",
      "time": "01:39:14",
      "start": 5954.52,
      "text": "Yeah. So, I guess we've, we've covered then the Bitcoin, principles aspect. Is there anything around, Bitcoin dynamics that you'd like to discuss?"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "01:39:23",
      "start": 5963.61,
      "text": "Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's- Worthwhile to touch on that, right? I mean, the real key with the network is we want the network to be a basis of a cyber economy. We need to be interested in the nat-- the natural harmonics of the network and the natural frequency of the network. Because the frequency of the network is key to the stability, the security, and the success of the network. Have you ever seen that picture of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, where they engineered the bridge with a natural frequency which resonated with the wind? The wind blew over the bridge and shook the bridge apart because it, it resonated on the wrong frequency, and the bridge fell apart, literally destroyed the structure. So if you're a good civil engineer, you have to ask the question, \"Am I designing a...\" structure that isn't gonna shake itself apart. So if you look at the dynamics of the network, the-- one of the reasons that Bitcoin is winning is because it has a very long natural frequency at its base layer. The transaction frequency is, ten minutes, and, you know, in a growing network, right? We'll, we'll process blocks nine minutes thirty seconds or nine minutes forty seconds or something because you're always biased You know, to be fat, to be growing. And a contracting, a bear market, if you're shutting down hash power, will process blocks a little bit slower. But generally, you'll be around ten minutes plus or minus a bit. And if you get way off, then after two weeks, the difficulty adjustment kicks in and you get basically tuned back to that ten minute center. I think that's, that's an important part of the frequency of the network, but it's, but it's, probably not, not the thing that makes it most successful. What's more important Important is the mining dynamics and the machinery dynamics. So the question really is, how long does it take to bring on a Bitcoin mining center? It's like I, I put a hundred million dollars in front of you and you wanna invest it in Bitcoin, so it takes you six months to a year to acquire the equipment, another year to engineer the mining center, so it's like a two or three year exercise to bring it online. And then the question then is, well, what's the payback time? And that's probably another two, three, four, five years. So when you're a miner, you're looking at making an investment and getting paid back six years after the initial decision, probably four years minimum. At this stage, it could be as long as ten years, four to ten years. So the natural frequency of the miners is, is four to eight years. And that means that if you're not profitable, you're not just gonna shut down the mining, operation in a month or two months or four months. You've actually gotta stick it out for four to eight years. And one of the other dynamics here is because the miners are running digital power centers and the digital power is SHA two fifty six hashing, that means that if a miner goes bankrupt, if, if you look at, at how the Bitcoin network fails, it fails very- gracefully, if not at all. All of that hash power, the five hundred exahash, it is being run by a network of miners, and in hard times When, the price of Bitcoin falls and the transaction revenues fall, the first thing to fail is the equity, and at some point the equity holders will go bankrupt At that point, the mining equipment is owned and run by the creditors. So then the junior creditors will, will fail, and then the senior creditors will own the equipment. Then when the senior creditors fail, the, the energy companies that actually provide the electricity will own the equipment. And when the energy company fail, the government or the nation state that actually, that actually owns the power source will own the equipment. So it's another way of saying that, a, a Bitcoin mining rig is never getting turned off. It, it might temporarily get sold from one bankrupt entity to another, it might get idle for a moment, but At the end of the line here, there are nation states and there are, there are, public energy providers, and they have electricity which has a marginal cost of zero. They have energy that is zero cost, or they have negative costing energy, where actually they would pay you money to take it, a remediation situation or curtailment situation or I, I got a natural gas field, I've got ten billion dollars of natural gas fields, and the regulator's gonna make me write them off and shut 'em in if I don't find a use of the natural gas. So I would lose money operating a Bitcoin mining rig to avoid taking a ten billion dollar write-off. I would lose money to remediate the methane. And then I've, you know, I've got the Three Gorges Dam that's got ten gigawatts of extra power and it's got a value of zero right now. And so if I'm the Chinese government and I see somebody's Bitcoin mining operation, I just take the equipment, I plug it into my free electricity, and I generate billions of dollars a year of revenue. By monetizing free electricity. So what you can see there is, is the brilliance of the power protocol is it's unique And once you've actually taken ten billion dollars of capital, fungible capital, and converted it into ten billion dollars worth of Bitcoin mining rigs, it's a one-way transformation. You can't transform the capital back. It's sunk capital. The only thing you can do with it is power the Bitcoin network. And it doesn't really matter whether the, any individual Bitcoin miner succeeds or fails, the Bitcoin network is going to remain powered, and that's why with just a few exceptions You're generally gonna see hash rate just continue to move up. For that reason, that's, that's one very powerful ratchet. and the second powerful ratchet Is the machinery dynamics, because the machinery dynamic is how much time and capital has a Bitcoin power rig? Equipment manufacturer put into their semiconductor designs. So if we look at Bitmain or Whatsminer or Canaan, right? How much time have they spent? You might spend four years, you know, developing a design, and now you sell the rig and you sell the-- you sell, ones that have, thirty joules per tera hash, and then they get to twenty-one joules per tera hash, and you're going for fifteen joules per tera hash or whatever. You just keep creating more si-- more efficient rigs. The, the most efficient rig costs $10,000 a machine, and then in the bear mar- bull market, in the bear market, it goes down to $1,500 a machine. And the question really is, at what price is the equipment manufacturer gonna sell the equipment? And the answer is, they're gonna sell it at their variable costs plus a minor markup And the question is, how much equipment are they gonna sell? And the answer is, they're gonna sell as much as they possibly can. And that means that, that, When eighty percent of the profit has been s- or eighty percent of revenue has been squeezed out of a Bitcoin mining operation, the mining will continue, and when eighty percent of the revenue has been squeezed out of the equipment Business, the equipment business will still continue because you're always going to have actors with sunk capital that are going to wanna recover a return on their sunk capital, and that is the reason why you can buy a three eighty six chip. For a dollar, right? That's why semiconductors will continue to collapse in, in, price performance forever, because they're putting all of the money upfront and then they're, they're just selling the semiconductor for whatever the market will bear. And if that's what you do, if you're a Bitcoin equipment manufacturer, all you know how to do is sell Bitcoin mining equipment, so you're gonna continue it. So if you take all these things together, right, and you say, \"Well, what's happened?\" Well, really, Bitcoin is, is"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "01:48:04",
      "start": 6484.23,
      "text": "a network with an eight to twelve year natural frequency. Like, if you were to say, \"Mike, what happens? W-when will the hash rate stop growing?\" After Bitcoin mining is no longer profitable, I would say it might very well be, it might keep going for a decade. I mean, for a decade after Bitcoin mining is no longer economically rational for a standalone miner, the hash rate will keep going up Because there are plenty of actors that have negative cost electricity or free electricity, and it'll be profitable for them, and you've got an equipment manufacturer that can sell the equipment at a ninety percent markdown And at some point, it's kind of like asking, you know, will nation states ever stop buying munitions? You notice how cheap a gun is? Like there, you can buy guns that'll kill people for fifty bucks, a hundred dollars, right? So it's, so you're like, \"Well, it doesn't seem like it's a very profitable business, why do people keep doing it?\" There are a lot of people that don't really care, right, that whether the gun is profitable, right? They're, they have another motive involved here. And so I think the same is true with, with Bitcoin power equipment. Like isn't it quite possible that at some point a nation state that has stranded energy or stranded capital re-requires the production of Bitcoin mining rigs at a loss or produces them at a loss just so they can run the network or for other reasons? So I think, you know, the, the real important point here is, a unique, a unique, custom proof of work system, a SHA two fifty six proof of work system, has a huge, ends up with a hundred billion dollars of sunk capital for security? Built into it that's one way that has a useful life of six to ten years, you know, and, and people could say, \"Well, it burns out after eight years.\" That doesn't matter because the machine that you bought for ninety-five hundred dollars that burned out after seven years will be replaced with a machine equally powerful For one twentieth, you know, for five hundred dollars instead of ten thousand dollars in six years, right? It's like, it's, it's like lamenting, \"Will we ever run out of computing power?\" Well, people can buy three eighty-six forty-six chips for like nothing, right? They're, they're putting computers into greeting cards to play songs for you that have all the power of the space shuttle. So Moore's Law is gonna continue to drive the security of the network, and that means that you have to contrast that to a proof-of-stake network, for example. You wanna understand how to make a protocol defective? Here's how I'd make it defective. I would say, \"Well, it's not gonna be, ASIC friendly. I'm gonna actually force it. I'm gonna create a, you know, some kind of, shifting protocol that has to be run on a CPU.\" So that makes the power much less scarce and much more unstable. And then the other, the other thing I would do is I would, if I was using proof of stake and I was saying, \"Why don't you just go ahead and stake ten billion dollars of capital?\" Well, the problem with ten billion dollars of capital is I can convert this, the ten billion dollars of tokens into ten billion dollars of US dollars, into ten billion dollars of Apple stock, you know, and I can borrow the ten billion. So capital isn't scarce at all, and it's not sunk. You know, and, and so how do I make it sunk capital? You know, it used to be you could like stake, remember the Terra Luna meltdown? Well, people were staking their Luna to provide security. Okay, but you could withdraw the Luna in like a day or two days? So if you have a staking thing and you can withdraw your, your stake token in one day, then the price crashes in one day, and the second day all the security leaves the network 'cause everybody withdraws their tokens to sell their token, and then you've got no security. If you have a thirty day protocol, okay, well in sixty days the security of the network evaporates, right? Then, okay, so you're gonna have a seven year protocol where you have to stake your capital for seven years? There's two problems with that. One problem, you just created the textbook definition of a security. You're regulated by the SEC because you've, you've, you've forced people to make an investment of money, right? Depended upon the efforts of others in pursuit of a profit, right? It's, it's, it passes the howie test, right? I mean, that, by the way, that's the case even if you stake for a day, for that matter. But the second thing is you've created, centralized attack surface, and you've got like five developers that control the protocol, and you're gonna end up with all these massive questions about what's the machine that controls the throttling of the capital flowing in and out of the network, and what happens if you hack the machines, and so on. You've created something which is thousands of times more complicated than using, energy and the laws of physics. You know, you're basically imposing computer science over physical science, and if it doesn't break the regular-- you know, the regulatory guidelines, and you've basically created a, you know, an equity token by doing it, then you've created an unstable virtual reality system That, you know, one single bug in one line of a million lines of code and your entire system goes unstable and you've got a Boeing 737 Max problem? One line of code and it just wrecks the, crashes the entire network. So, so the, the real beauty of Bitcoin is, it, it is that natural frequency. And, and, and that's, by the way, and that's what, protects the network or provides a network security in what I'll call a tactical sense. On, on any given day, you have to go through that wall of digital power And you don't have, and all the power is controlled by the network operators, not by you. So that's the tactical, the, the tactical, defense system for Bitcoin. The strategic security, or the long-term security, and here I mean security over a hundred years? Over a century. The security that keeps Bitcoin from being banned or keeps, or, or keeps the government from seizing all of the Bitcoin miners, et cetera. That comes from a combination of economic power, electrical power, computing power, and political power. So, so the Bitcoin miners, they're channeling electrical power and computing power, right? So, so they're the, the physical part, but, but the political power comes from the hundreds of millions of people that, that own something that's a derivative of Bitcoin. Whether you own MicroStrategy stock or whether you own a Bitcoin spot ETF, or whether you own stock in Block or stock in Coinbase or whether you own the Bitcoin itself, I mean All of these things, you know, put you into the political community, and you're gonna use your political power to lobby. And then the other thing that really secures Bitcoin is economic power, and I think that it's worthwhile to point this out because this is a-- this is a, an artifact of Satoshi's brilliance. Satoshi created an immaculate conception and we had a fair launch, and those million Satoshi coins never moved, and there was no premine, and that means that the only way you have Bitcoin right now is you spend a huge amount of money on equipment and electricity to mine it and capital to create mining centers, or you bought it with real cash. And And, you know, we can back calculate how much money's gone into mining, but, I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest twenty to forty billion dollars has gone into the mining ecosystem. I mean, you can trace billions of dollars of capital just to individual companies like Marathon. So ten, between ten and a hundred billion is how much has gone into mining. But if we look at, how much fiat currency has gone into the other side of the equation Let's take MicroStrategy. You know, as a, as of now, you know, I personally am aware of having put more than five billion dollars into the network, and I'm not one percent. And, if you look at-- there are a lot of other ways to get at it, but if you look at the four-year simple moving average of Bitcoin and assume that that was a reasonable surrogate, you can kind of arrive at a conclusion that nearly six hundred billion dollars of real capital has been put into this network. So six hundred billion dollars of real capital from who? From Fidelity, from BlackRock, from, from every institutional investor in the US, from every institutional investor in Europe, from millions of individuals, from, you know, representing pension funds, retirement funds, et cetera. So you can trace a huge amount of capital that's been put into this network, and ultimately the security of the network is gonna come Come from the actions of the people as voters and the actions of the economic actors, of the capitalists, and then also from All the businesses, you know, the application companies like Cash App or Coinbase, you know, have an impact and then the miners have an impact, and they all have lawyers and CEOs and lobbyists and employees, and they have nexus and they pay taxes, and therefore they have supportive mayors, governors, senators, et cetera. Now This is interesting framework. I, I'd invite you, if you wanna analyze any competing network, put any competing network, any other crypto network, on the same framework and ask, how many dollars of real capital have been invested, and how, how much real electricity is running it, and how much digital power is behind it, and then how many people hold it? You, you know, you go to the next one, Ethereum, for example, right? You realize after the, after the, the merge and the proof of stake conversion, no electricity is backing it, no digital power is behind it, right? So you, you pretty much took out two of the four legs, five hundred exa hash versus nothing, you know, and, and, fifteen gigawatts versus de minimis nothing. And then the, the next question is, well, how much economic power? Well, if seventy percent of it, of- If ETH was pre mined, name one person in the world that would admit to investing in a hundred million dollars in ETH. I've never heard of anybody. Like, when, when I announced that I'd personally put a hundred and seventy five million into Bitcoin, there's nobody in any crypto token for the next- Five million tokens, right? After Bitcoin, go to ETH and then go to every other token, you won't find a single person, to my knowledge, that ever admitted to investing one hundred million dollars of cash in any of them, much less a billion. Much less five billion, right? So, so, you know, if I had to guess, right, how much m-- how much real money's been put into Ethereum? A few billion dollars? Like the, the difference is six hundred billion in Bitcoin. If you were to say six billion, I would say you might be stretching it, right? Like we're talking about a factor of a hundred difference, yeah? I don't think you can really get to a number that's more than a few billion, right? So I think that ninety-nine percent of all the real capital has been put Into this one network. So if all the economic capital is in one network, if all of the electricity is on one network, if all of the digital power is running one network, the only thing you've got left, left is political power. And The truth is there, I mean, there are a lot of crypto token holders, right? There are a lot of ETH holders. So, so really, those networks are primarily secured by political power and, and the voice of the people, much more so than the actual, you know, physical power or economic power that's behind Bitcoin. And I think that that changes, it changes the long-term security outlook, but it also has an impact on natural frequencies and stability. When your natural frequency is a month, right? If you have a staking, a proof-of-stake network where you can unstake in a month You just need a price crash for like six weeks or eight weeks, the network goes unstable, it becomes insecure, right, topples over and collapses. And, you know, you wanna see examples of networks that just collapse, right? Look at what happened to FTT, look at what happened to Luna, look what happened to all these other tokens. Many of them, you know, they had these staking frequencies of one hour, one day, one week, one month. And the truth is, if you're designing a system to last, you really want to design a system where if I put a-- First of all, you have to put Billions of dollars into the network, and then it's a one-way function, and you're stuck with the, with the capital in the network for a decade. And, you know, I guess, I guess then, then you're invited to calculate if, if Bitcoin miners have invested somewhere between twenty and fifty billion dollars in permanent- Capital for digital power. What percentage of all the digital power capital or digital capital does that represent of all cryptos in the world? Ninety-five percent would be probably The minimum number you could conclude, it's a number between ninety-five and ninety-nine percent, I think, right? Which is, which is why you come back to the conclusion that you have one thing, which is a digital property, a digital commodity, a digital monetary system. And is, you know, is perfected for this, and then everything else is just a speculation."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "michael_saylor",
      "time": "02:02:22",
      "start": 7342.59,
      "text": "Back to the show in a moment. Mempool.space is the leading Bitcoin and blockchain visualizer. You can use mempool.space to keep an eye on the state of the mempool, especially right now when the fees are a little bit higher with inscriptions and BRC20 and ordinals and all of this stuff. So mempool.space is a great tool to keep track on exactly how much fee you need to attach to your Bitcoin transaction to get It confirmed. Now, mempool dot space are continually rolling out new features that help you assess what's going on, whether you wanna search Bitcoin transactions or you wanna see things in the mempool before they have confirmed, and they've also got this really cool new feature called mempool goggles, so you can filter on all these different transaction types, and for example, you can see the inscriptions, or you can see SegWit, or you can see all these different, filters, and it allows you to see what's going on in the mempool. So there's so much cool stuff going on They have the Mempool Accelerator coming out, so if you wanna sign up for that, go to mempool dot space slash accelerator. And now, back to the show. Right. And one other area that might be interesting to hear your comment is even the hodler dynamic, right? Like you look at the, the number of UTXOs, what's the stat? Might be seventy percent or eighty percent of coins have not moved in more than one year. So that's maybe another example where Bitcoin just has these extremely hardened hodlers. And And, the mere fact that these people are willing to hold for that long, it shows a certain level of conviction, economic power, political power as well."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "02:03:56",
      "start": 7436.11,
      "text": "It's a good point, and, and here's the way I would say it. The difference between money and, and speculation is, if it's money, then the largest holders are buying more. And if it's speculation, the largest holders are selling. So the real issue is, are you-- are the hodlers buying or are they selling? I'll give you an example of great asset classes that are money Apple stock is money. Apple is buying more, and a lot of people that own Apple stock will buy more. New York City real estate or London real estate or Palm Beach real estate, luxury real estate is money Because if you look at wealthy people, they're not selling, there's no one bragging about how they sold all their nice places in Palm Beach, New York, and London. They're buying more. Right? if you, if you've ever met a rich family that has real estate holdings, they don't sit around saying, \"Yeah, we're gonna diversify and we're gonna sell next year, we're gonna get rid of the entire portfolio at a huge profit over ten years.\" What they say is, \"I'm looking forward to the next deal where we're gonna acquire this building, or we're gonna, we're gonna buy this other thing.\" Right? They buy and they hold. And they typically buy and hold to give to their children's children, right? The same is true with, with art. If it's good art Collectors, you know, Frick, Andrew Mellon, they didn't buy art to flip the art, right? They're not speculators. I, I bought a Picasso so I could sell the Picasso. Right? They wanted to buy them all, that's why they call them collectors. So if something is deemed to be really valuable, you bought a billion dollars of it, and your goal is to buy another billion dollars of it. And so if you think about all these things, which thing in the crypto ecosystem is that? Right, Bitcoin is that. Right? I bought a bunch of Bitcoin, my goal is to buy more Bitcoin. Right? It's, it's just a very simple acid test. Do you have an exit strategy, or is that the exit strategy? Andrew Mellon's, you know, Andrew Mellon's exit strategy was, \"I'm going to buy all the great art I can get my hands on, I'm gonna build a beautiful building in Washington, D.C., and I'm gonna endow the National Gallery with the art as a gift to the people of the country.\" That was the exit strategy. And you get the idea, it wasn't a speculation. And, so, so Bitcoin is the one thing that qualifies as money because it's going to appreciate in value over time. The world's full of investments that are speculations or trades. Commodities, of course, aren't money. Every single commodity other than Bitcoin is gonna lose value over time, starting with gold, but certainly silver, soybeans, oil, natural gas You can't really invest in them. You can invest in property under-- you could, you could buy like all the mineral rights for ten thousand acres. That might be an investment that might go up in value, maybe, but But generally, it's, it's super scarce, desirable art, it's, it's desirable property, it's Bitcoin, and maybe it's like unregulated digital monopolies, you know, the Magnificent Seven. But even then, you know, your time horizon on that stuff is ten years, it's not a hundred years. I can show you people that will say, \"I own some New York real estate that I hope to hold for a hundred years,\" right? I mean, I, I, I can find property people that would say, \"Yeah, I got a hundred year life on that.\" Like if I, if I offered you all the mineral rights for the entire state of Pennsylvania, you know, might you keep it in the family for a few hundred years? If I offered you the middle of Tokyo or the middle of London, might you keep it in the family for three hundred years? Yeah, maybe, if you could afford to pay the taxes. So, so I, I, I think that that's a-- that this hodler dynamic is important, but it really is indicative of the fact that Bitcoin is money. And it's, it's a very simple asset test Find ev-- you know, look at every crypto billionaire that holds something other than Bitcoin, and then check to see whether they bought a hundred million more worth of that stuff. And when you find one, you might pay attention, but I haven't seen one, right? I don't, I just don't think-- I don't think you're gonna see it because everything else is, is really, commodity losing value over time. Bitcoin is the money gaining value over time. I do think that does lead us maybe to the last interesting topic, which is- Just politics, the politics of the ecosystem. And, and, you know, if, if you only see the world as Bitcoin node holders, individuals, and miners, and developers And a couple of whales. If that's your view of the universe, then you tend to get into these polarized debates about, you know, transaction fees or polarized debates over the protocol. But here's a different way to see the world. There's eight billion people in the world. There's- Millions and millions of corporations, there's thousands and thousands of material governments, there's tens of thousands of applications, there's thousands of ideologies. And Bitcoin's a solution for everybody, and one day everyone's gonna use this. And so if you see, if, if you see a network with millions of companies and billions of users and hundreds of countries And thousands and thousands of municipalities and governments, right? And hundreds of religions and ideologies, then you have to allow-- and, and cultures, you have to allow that there's gonna be a great diversity in the way that Bitcoin is used So I, I think that, you know, when you're considering, you know, the network, the future of the network, you gotta consider the impact of this, on all political constituencies. So I think of the hold-- the hodlers or the holders, that's one constituency, the miners are another constituency, there's node runners Another group and developers, another group, but that-- but those are kind of technical definitions. Like, for example, a node isn't a node, isn't a node, Coinbase runs a node and, and Cash App runs a node, and if Cash App clears a hundred thousand Bitcoin transactions a day Their node is a little bit more important than my node. I could run a node, but if I'm not approving, a-and maybe more to the point, denying transactions, at the point where I basically take a hundred million dollars wired into my, corporation and then I refuse to deliver the Bitcoin 'cause my node says it wasn't a good transaction, I'm a, I'm an important node So not all miners are created equal. I mean, ones with more hash rate are more equal. Not all nodes are created equal. If you have economic velocity, a hundred million dollars a day of economic velocity through your node, then that's more equal than someone that clears one transaction for twenty dollars once a year through their node. So you, you have to kind of consider the weightings. Not all hodlers are equal, right? Someone that's holding a billion dollars of Bitcoin will probably hire twenty- 20 lawyers and, you know, and go litigate over, you know, the issue of, you know, is somebody Satoshi or not, right? Or Bitcoin positive things, whereas someone that has a hundred dollars of Bitcoin can't afford to hire the lawyers and they're not gonna litigate and they're, you know, and so they're not gonna have the same amount of influence. Not all developers are equal. The developers that work for Coinbase can decide to put Lightning into Coinbase or not, right? The developers at Binance, the developers at Cash App, right? They, they have more influence, you know, to adopt certain, you know- protocol adjustments and do things at layer two, you know, layer two, et cetera, you know, i-introduce the universal, you know, monetary, you know, codes, e-et cetera. So you have to consider that, and I, I think that the, the political system of the future, you're gonna have Bitcoin energy companies, companies that provide electricity To fire, to, to power Bitcoin miners, they have an influence. You have Bitcoin banks, that is corporations that are moving layer one and layer two and layer three Bitcoin around high frequency, like Coinbase, like Cash App, like Fidelity. You're gonna have Bitcoin devices, like the signing apps, the cold cards, right? The bit keys of the world, the ledgers of the world. You're gonna have, applications. Right. And inscriptions and ordinals, they're like the first of a thousand. There'll be thousands of applications, and some will succeed and some will fail, and the market will decide. And, You're gonna have derivatives, like, you know, you, you've got twelve Bitcoin spot ETFs coming, but then you've got someone that wants to do an eighty percent Bitcoin, twenty percent ESG carbon credit Derivative? Someone can create a derivative of a derivative. You can create something to sell volatility on top of the spot ETFs. You know, MicroStrategy holds Bitcoin, our stock, you know, is a security backed by Bitcoin, right? To a certain degree, you know, any company that owns Bitcoin, you know, what-- in, in whatever way, becomes another way to play it. Then you've got corporations and institutions, right? That are aligned with Bitcoin, they all have an interest, whether it's a human rights foundation or whether it's a nonprofit or whether, you know, at some point, Google and Microsoft and Apple, I mean, Apple has an influence right now, I mean, right? If, you know, Apple basically denies Walled of Satoshi, you know, certain privileges, right? They have an influence. And so corporations gonna have influences. And then you've got, fiat banks, and, and the banks are the bridge between- Between the fiat currency and the Bitcoin ecosystem, and so they do have an impact, right? You know, if they, if they're Silvergate or Signature and they're shut down, you can see what happens. But on the other hand, what you see right now is more and more fiat banks are, are coming online. So, you know, when Banco Santander or Deutsche Bank or, or a Swiss bank or, or another bank, you know, gets involved, I don't think it's, it's not a cause for us to regret. We should be, we should welcome all of them because ultimately, the countries and the fiat currencies aren't going away. They benefit from joining the network. Bitcoiners benefit from them joining the network. They have constraints. There are certain things banks can't do. Like the latest guidance was no more than two percent of your capital could be crypto related. Okay, well, there are laws, there, there are restrictions. I love KYC, AML, banking laws. There are certain things corporations can't do, right? That, that's why a corporate, a corporate custodian, can't give you certain Bitcoin transactions in New York City, or you can't do a Bitcoin- Bitcoin transaction without doing a KYC or AML, you know, authentication on certain apps. Well, corporations can't do that, but in certain countries, in another country they might be able to do that. Non-companies might be able to do that, who knows? So- So they have their own constraints. There'll be financial service providers like, Fidelity, like BlackRock. we shouldn't fear them, we should welcome them They will, they will bring new levels of service, right? There's a bunch of people, retirees, that, they've got one relationship, they'll pick up the phone, talk to the financial advisor and say, \"Get me, get five percent of me into Bitcoin, or I want one percent of my assets to be Bitcoin.\" It'll be a fifteen-second phone call It'll happen because there's hundreds of thousands or millions of financial advisors doing business with BlackRock and Fidelity and Franklin Templeton. those people Can't get it any other way. And so these financial service providers will be part of the ecosystem. There'll be regulators, every type of regulator, every-- in every country, state regulators, city regulators. There's treasury regulators, there's security regulators, commodity regulators. There's, there's everything under the sun Right, tax regulators, they're gonna change all the time. There'll be politicians, some will have a positive opinion, some will have a negative opinion. They're gonna continue to act, and then there's so many different ta-types of government agencies, you know, you couldn't count them all, right? So What do I see? I see a world where, you know, if, if everybody's not using Bitcoin, then let's say half, you know, take half of eight billion people, take half of a hundred million companies, take half of Thousands and thousands of ideologies, take half of a million politicians. So lots and lots of, of people are gonna get involved. They're all gonna get involved in a different way. And, you know, when we think about Bitcoin, it's better for us to say, \"Bitcoin's a solution to everybody's problem. Let us show, you know, we're the universal sweetener or the universal benefit.\" The question is, which nationality and which ideology benefits from mathematics? All of them, okay? Which ones do you agree with? Some of them. Which companies, benefit from mathematics? All of them. Which companies would you buy from? Some of them. Right? we're all gonna disagree about everything else Right? We're, we're all gonna disagree about ideology and religion and, and, and regulations, and, and that means that you're gonna see so many different implementations of Bitcoin You'll see as many imple- implementations of Bitcoin as, like, you will see books written in, in English, right? They're all written in English, but they don't all say the same thing, right? Somebody writes Communist Manifesto in English and somebody writes in defense of capitalism in English, and they both used English, and it was beneficial to both of them to use English. And I don't, that's why we don't wanna be censored. It's like, oh, I heard that some people in a place I don't like are using my language. The truth is It's beneficial to, say, the Western world when our enemies use English. It's beneficial to America when our enemies use dollars. It's beneficial to the human race when your enemy uses mathematics. Right? It's, it's beneficial to everybody in the Bitcoin ecosystem when everybody uses Bitcoin, whether they're your enemy or your friend, and you'll see crippled implementations. But they won't all be crippled, and the most important point is, is that the layer twos can fail, the layer threes can fail, the layer fours can fail. The ecosystem has to survive. We, we have to basically make Bitcoin successful. Even I may not be successful, my company may not be successful, my ideology may not be successful, but the world is a better place that Bitcoin is successful. So oftentimes I see, I see a lot of people in the community, and they kind of get this thing turned on its head. Like, they feel like they have to topple a government or, or attack a politician or attack a policy in order for Bitcoin to succeed. But the truth is, they could just say Bitcoin's good. Yeah, yeah. The likelihood that you're gonna win the other hundred debates, zero. The other hundred debates will continue, and all you're gonna do is make one hundred different sets of enemies. And on the other hand, you could just say, \"Bitcoin is like the universal money to benefit everybody, the individual, the family, the small company, the midsize company, the big company, the regulated company, the monopoly, the city, the state, the country, the good countries, the bad countries, the good religions, the bad religions, the good people.\" Bad people to everybody, right? There's this, there, there really isn't any circumstance where you don't see a benefit. And now if we come back to security again, Bitcoin's a lot more secure after BlackRock rolls out a spot ETF. Like, we shouldn't say, \"Oh, yeah, they're bad for Bitcoin,\" they're great for Bitcoin. Now you've actually got, yeah, I don't know, if you've noticed, like, all of a sudden the mainstream narrative has turned from, you know, Bitcoin bad to, \"Well, maybe there's some benefits to Bitcoin.\" Newspapers that, that start writing, they look and they say, \"Well, if the SEC had twenty five meetings to review Bitcoin spot ETF approvals, then when you're a journalist writing for the Financial Times or for the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, and then when one person, one, one senator says, \"I think Bitcoin's bad,\" or one executive says Bitcoin bad, you look at that, and then you also look at the fact that the most important securities regulator has just- Devoted thousands of hours to approving this thing, and they think it's good. And then you say to yourself, \"I'm gonna be out of consensus if I criticize this, because it's pretty clear that a bunch of smart lawyers and smart regulators, smarter than me, that have more power than me, that have done this for their career, endorse this.\" And so at the end of the day, it's easy come, easy go. It's, it's very difficult to get thousands of attorneys to spend, thousands of, of lawyer years to figure out how to do these things. It's very difficult. But once they do it, then all the mainstream politicians, mainstream investors, mainstream journalists, mainstream academics say, \"I guess it's not tulip bulbs.\" You think the SEC is gonna have twenty five meetings to discuss, an ETF backed by tulip bulbs? Not likely. So you, for example, may believe in self custody and hold your own keys and hodling, and you may think I won't never ever buy the spot ETF. Good for you. Like, that's, that's just fine. We need you. But, these other people acting in a different way to create this other Bitcoin back product, they're also gonna help you. They're not your enemy. They're ultimately your friend, because they're going to drive up the scarcity of your asset. Maybe they'll store it in a custodial fashion in a way that you hate, but at the end of the day, they will be funneling billions and then tens of billions and then hundreds of billions of dollars of economic power. To the network, which is gonna drive up your asset, which will give you more economic power and more freedom, and then you can choose, you know, when your Bitcoin's worth ten million of Bitcoin, you can set up your own citadel and your own township and live the way you want and engineer your own rocket ship and go to your own planet, you know, and, and set up the government the way you wanna set it up. But But first get the money, right? First thing, if you look at how progress make-- it takes place in civilization, it, it takes place because you have economic actors with the economic power to do something, and, and, and I could give you hundreds of examples in history But generally, whenever you see a revolution that was to the benefit of the people, it wasn't the poor plebs that did it, it was a wealthy person that actually supported the plebs, and the result was benefit to everybody, but there's always an economic actor involved to support it. So, so I think when you look at all these things, you wouldn't want to have a protocol change to discourage anybody from joining the network, and, and you, you kind of- Don't wanna pick battles unnecessarily that you don't need to pick. Like, m-maybe you hate banks, maybe you think everybody should be their own bank, but, you know, i-if Warren Buffett and Charlie, you know, Munger had decided, I mean Berkshire Hathaway bought thirty billion dollars worth of Apple stock, and it became worth one hundred and fifty billion, and they made a hundred and twenty billion dollars on the trade, and that was more profitable than everything Berkshire Hathaway did in the entire history of the company And that was a decision made by someone that works for Warren Buffett. And so when they decide to buy thirty billion dollars of Bitcoin, and you don't really like big corporations, and when they coddle it with JP Morgan, when Warren Buffett says to JP Morgan, \"I want thirty billion dollars of Bitcoin, I want you to hold it,\" Jamie Dimon would say, \"Okay, well, I guess maybe it isn't just for criminals, because Warren Buffett wants it or Bill Gates wants it.\" And then he picks up the phone and calls someone, you know, at his bank, and they decide to open up a custody operation, and then the price of Bitcoin triples. And, you know, you'll be sitting there saying, \"Damn it, the stupid Berkshire Hathaway people, they just made a hundred billion dollars in like three months. It doesn't seem fair.\" But on the other hand, everybody else in the Bitcoin ecosystem will make trillions and trillions of dollars at the same time, and so there's a certain degree of fairness to it. I mean, a rising tide lifts all boats. Votes, and what you'll, what you'll say is, \"I guess all these people weren't really against me after all, they just didn't understand, right?\" And, and if you look at it that way, if you say, \"This is electricity,\" they're afraid of something they don't know. They grew up without it, they're used to horse and buggies, they have steam, you know, they have steam power in the middle of their building, you know? And, and they're not really ready for this. If you just say that and, and you're patient, then you're like, \"I don't have to define Bitcoin as being against anybody,\" you know? It's, it's, it's not When you actually have to repudiate someone personally or repudiate their business, right? Then you just make it unnecessarily confrontational, you know? Anybody says to me, \"Well, what do you think about this comment?\" I say, \"Well, they're gonna love it one day.\" You know, if Warren Buffett doesn't buy it, his part-- the guy that bought Apple is gonna buy thirty billion dollars of Bitcoin and he's gonna make a hundred billion dollars, and he's gonna take victory laps, and they'll take credit for being brilliant, and it, it's just gonna It'll happen because there'll be one guy that'll look and say, \"Okay, I guess I get it. I mean, if it's good enough for BlackRock and Fidelity, I guess we should like have a little bit.\" And they'll make a little bit more, and then someone else will say, \"Whoa, I guess we should do it.\" And, you know, and, and, and eventually it'll be the same with all the banks. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's gonna get rolled out just like electricity, just like steel in skyscrapers, just like automobiles running on gasoline, just like jet airplanes You know, like we say, everybody's against it before they're for it. So right now, I think that, I think that if you take an expansive view of Bitcoin, the ecosystem, you say, \"Bitcoin's for everybody, every type of organization,\" and there's only-- there's only two types of, of people in the world, those that understand the benefit of Bitcoin and are trying to get more integrated with it. And those that don't understand it yet, but they will. I mean, that, that's kind of the way the world divides, and maybe it takes thirty years or forty years for everybody to go from a skeptic Or ignorant to, I embrace the technology, but it will happen, and, and it's beneficial for us just to be cheerful and constructive. And everybody you meet, if someone says, \"I hate Bitcoin, it's for criminals,\" you say, \"You gotta smile and say, it's just a protocol that can make your life better, and make the life of your citizens better, and make your shareholders happy, and make your customers happy, and delight everybody. I, I just need to show you how.\" I, I apologize, I haven't yet found a way to show you how you can benefit your family, your friends, your shareholders, your employees, and your citizens, but I'm confident that once you understand it You'll see that this is a benefit to you and your constituents. Please be patient with us, we're new, it's novel. I'll tell you one funny, last funny anecdote on this subject. for a thousand years, people didn't-- after Galen, people didn't understand how blood flowed through the, body, and it was Harvey that finally figured out that the heart pumps blood through the arteries and recirculates it back through the veins, and it was the biggest, breakthrough in medicine in a thousand years And this is-- when, when Harvey said, \"You know, the blood, the, the heart actually pumps the blood through the body,\" people couldn't believe it. And, and Harvey's famous statement is he said, \"You know, no doctor over the age of forty will ever believe me. Nobody over the age of forty will ever believe that the heart pumps blood.\" You know? And, and, and, and that's just-- you got a paradigm shift, a new idea. And it takes people time, and I think that's where we are with Bitcoin. I think, I think we're first and foremost educators. So I guess coming back to the, the, the, the point of this podcast, talk about principles, I, I guess my big idea is this. Bitcoin is successful because it represents scarcity of assets, sc-scarcity of money, scarcity of bandwidth, scarcity of power, scarcity of technology. It represents, the conserv- ervation of these things. It's the ultimate conservative network, and because it's conservative with regard to all these attributes, it conserves your life force, it conserves the energy in cyberspace, and we should approach it with a conservative mindset, which is It works. It's a brilliant, beautiful living organism spreading in a viral fashion. Last I checked, it's growing forty-five percent compounded annual growth in, in the forty months that MicroStrategy has, Been in the Bitcoin business since August of twenty twenty. Bitcoin's up forty-five percent compounded. That's how fast it's growing, and it's growing four, five x faster than anything else, right? And so you have something which is extraordinary successful, and we're about to break into a year where it's being embraced by the Wall Street establishment. And I said, I said, \"Biggest, it's the biggest development in thirty years, right?\" The last time something big happened was in nineteen ninety-three. The S&P five hundred index was Was, converted into an ETF called SPY by State Street, and they allowed you to in one click buy five hundred stocks in the S&P five hundred index. That ETF has four hundred and forty billion dollars of capital in it right now, just that one ticker. And of course, if you put them all together, there must be a trillion dollars or more of capital. So that was a big breakthrough, and we monetized corporate equity as money for the last thirty years. That's how you save your money. And so thirty years have gone by, we're about to now have Bitcoin in, in ETFs available from all major providers. Major breakthrough. Bitcoin is winning. Bitcoin, you know, I've already established, right? It's got the economic support, it's got the political support, it's got the technical support, it's winning, it's stable, it's well-engineered. There are a hundred thousand businesses that can be built on top of it, right? That being the case, when we think about, any changes to the base layer, we should be hyper, hyper conservative. We should, we should be the same way, you know, a doctor would be. You know, you've got a beautiful child, they're healthy. You know, you don't want the doctor doing elective surgeries on them to make them just one percent better by cutting them open. Because, human, human biases, we always overestimate the benefit we'll bring and we always underestimate the unintended consequences And it's, it, you know, at some point, you've got some kind of medical cure that's ninety-nine point nine percent effective against, a hypothetical problem that happens one in a million times? And you mandate it to a million people, and what happens is you save one person, you kill nine hundred and ninety nine innocent people, and you waste the time of the other million people. And that's what happens with, you know, excessive, enthusiastic intervention in a healthy economy or a healthy organic ecosystem So I think, I think we should just be very, very thoughtful, and we should try to channel energy cheerfully and constructively At either building functionality in the layers above the base layer, because there's lots of stuff to be built. Go get Apple and Google to build Bitcoin into their products, get Microsoft to build Bitcoin in their products, build something to compete with them. There's, I could give you a hundred thousand ideas of something to do. Every company on Earth could basically flip their treasury to Bitcoin. Get every single company, millions of them, to, to convert to the Bitcoin standard, right? So that you can rework everything on the Sun. There's a, a lot of stuff to do that constructive That's, that expands the ecosystem, that will improve our odds of, of success and improve the rate of, of adoption without putting the base layer at risk. And so I'd say focus upon that. And, and with regard to the community, you know, the, the internal Bitcoin community, I don't think we should fight amongst ourself over, you know- Trivial things, like there's a lot of fighting over, are you enough of a carnivore, right? Or are you enough of a whatever? And, and, and ultimately, like Bitcoiner on Bitcoiner violence is, i-is a waste of time because we agree on ninety-nine point-- It's like we agree on ninety-nine point nine percent of the stuff in the world, and someone disagrees about how to do multi-sig and what Sony device, and we hate each other. So I, I think that, we should keep that, you know, It should be thought of in the context of its social, but, but, you know, we should back off on getting distracted. And I think that, we shouldn't really define, Bitcoin as against the currency, against the nation, against the banking, against the status quo. We don't need, to topple the status quo. you know, we'd be better off just to say Bitcoin is digital property that can be, that can and will- Will be integrated into everything on Earth to the benefit of everybody. We're here to bring you, you know, something to make your life better, better living through Bitcoin, right? That's the motto. Everybody's good. Right? We don't have time to make more enemies, right? We should just evangelize and, and, and either make friends or we should show people that are indifferent why they should be our friend and, you know, work around people that are just hostile without giving them that much Airplay, right? Like, yeah, you can go and find the one person out of a million that disagrees with you and protest in front of their house every day, or you could just say, \"Well, that person's not gonna adopt Bitcoin this decade. Let's just go next door and knock on the next door, right? And, and move forward. And, and above all...\" Like, don't break the network. There's only one real fatal error, right? Bitcoin's winning right now if we do nothing, right? So the, the fatal error would be to, to get worked up into some kind of mass psychosis where we all decided that Bitcoin was gonna fail unless we changed the base layer protocol radically, and then we basically depowered the network, right? I mean, look at the, you know, Ethereum had twenty billion dollars worth of Ethereum miners that would have fallen to the death to protect Ethereum, and they basically turned them off and they ran them all away, right? So what we don't wanna do is destroy something that's working. You, you could destroy the power protocol, you could destroy the transaction protocol. It's like, you know, you, you could destroy the monetary protocol, you know, with these, you know, with these brilliant ideas, you know, we'd, like, we need to tail emissions to fund developers. Like, what happens if you have a budget? For developers, you end up with a ten-year roadmap with the Spurge, the Plurge, the Verge, the Surge, the something, and then you end up with a hundred more hard forks, right? And it's like- The truth is, the world's full of people that need something to do. I would say we-- the, the real key to wisdom, channel your energy constructively if you're gonna do something Improve Lightning, build an application, persuade someone to adopt Bitcoin as a, as a reserve asset, educate someone, these are all constructive things. Destructive, dilutive, destructive things are Fight with random people 'cause they wanna fight with you. Attack the, attack the core network and, and, and make it confusing and introduce anxiety and confusion and fear, uncertainty and doubt into the base layer Right? And then attempt to imprint your ego, you know, o-on, on the base protocol, you know, like, \"I, I gotta, I gotta introduce this so that my name will go down in history forever.\" And I, I think that Real humility? It's like, you re- you remember all those people, but generally what they did is you remember them because they blew up the empire and murdered ten to a hundred million people and they got assassinated. That's why you remember them? And maybe, maybe some humility would suggest that you might just want all your friends and family and the people that love you to live happily ever after, and you don't need to be remembered for having- Broke everything, you know, or, or stood the world on its head. So, I-- That's the end of my, monologue. Thank you for listening."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "michael_saylor",
      "time": "02:39:00",
      "start": 9540.14,
      "text": "Yeah, so I guess closing out then, is there anything else you wanna discuss in terms of, you know, Bitcoin philosophy? Is there anything you wanna add to that?"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "02:39:09",
      "start": 9549.85,
      "text": "I would just say my last points are, you know, Bitcoin represents-- I said it was rooted in an ideology, right? It's an asset on a network, you know, that, How do I say it? It's like a, it's an asset on a network based on a protocol rooted in an ideology, and the ideology is a choice of natural law versus human law. I-- we prefer natural law over human law. We prefer, physical sciences over computer sciences, and a choice to favor the universe over the metaverse. You know, it's like Elon Musk joked, he said, \"You know, like the laws of physics, you know, are non-negotiable, right? Whereas the laws of man are, are suggestions.\" And, and, and Bitcoin is, is really that, that submission to natural law, there's a humility to it, and most- If we look at Austrian economics, if we look at capitalism, if we look at liberty and freedom and, and most of the more positive ideologies in the world, they're all rooted in natural law and natural rights. And when you start to try to superimpose artificiality or artificial edicts It's like humans will come up with a hundred thousand laws that say you can't bake bread and you have to go to sleep at a certain time and, you know, you can't think this and you can't say that, and these things get taken to the extreme and what they do is they destroy the society, you know, it's just too artificial. And, and computer science, one of the, one of the things about Bitcoin is it's, it's not a big code base, right? Satoshi didn't set out to like impress people by writing as much code as possible. The whole idea was to make it the minimum amount of code. I mean, the, the real goal of great design, right, is, is the least. You see that little video that circulates on YouTube where it, it shows the guy with the tin can and he's got eight different, or six different templates and he's got eight different types of blocks, and he, and he's got a triangle block and he shows it goes into the square hole, and he's got a circular block and it goes in the square hole, and he- And he's got a rectangular block that goes in the square hole. And, and what he shows is people oftentimes they overthink and they overdesign. I wanna create eight different ways to do eight different things, when in fact I can do everything one way. And great designers, they don't come up with a hundred and eighty-seven buttons You know, like, this has got a lot of buttons on it, but the iPhone doesn't have but like one button or zero buttons, right? It's like, the ideal interface is like simple, simple, simple, simple. And so in computer science, when you code all this stuff, you need millions and millions of lines of code to simulate. Think about how many lines of code you need to simulate the way water flows down a hill. You know, I give you a simple hill, I drop a pot of water, I write a computer software, and you-- it's like, you're gonna write so much software to simulate that? Well, how much code does nature need to make the water flow the right way? Just the water just goes, right? Just It's not hard, for nature to do these things. So, so what you want is something simple and elegant and, and subject to natural laws. The cons- Conservation of energy, right? There is a speed of light, there is a speed of sound, right? There is, there are the laws of gravitation, right? There, there is conservation of energy. You can't destroy matter, you can convert matter to energy, energy to matter, you can convert energy from light to heat, to acoustic energy, to kinetic energy, but at the end of the day, the energy is conservative, it's there. And so the philosophy of Bitcoin is rooted in physics. And it's rooted in engineering, and it's rooted in a humble submission to nature, and, and that is the same as the market logic of Austrian economics. It's like, let the market decide, let the people do what they're gonna do. Don't attempt to tell everyone in the universe how to behave. Right? Leave them alone. So I say, leave Bitcoin alone. It's a living, organic life form, just leave it alone, right? You happen to think that the world could benefit from X? Do it yourself on your own application, risk your own capital, risk, you know, if you wanna introduce a protocol and give it to the world, that's, that's fine, you can introduce any number of open protocols. Linux is open protocol, HTTP is open protocol. You know, you can have your own lightning protocol, co- you know, create a competing lightning protocol. You can do all those things, but ultimately respect nature, right? And, and, and respect the fact that Satoshi Managed to engineer this genetic life form. Satoshi created a crypto life form, released it into cyberspace, and it lived. And everybody before created something and it died. And so after hundreds and hundreds of experiments, they all died and millions of things that died after it. Here's the one thing that lived? And we should be in awe that that thing lived, and we should, you know, our, our job is to help people adopt it, help it grow and succeed But, but, you know, you're about as likely to improve the genetic code of Bitcoin as you are to improve the genetic code of a cockroach or, a virus. Or a rabbit. It's like, like the, leave the things and, and let them reach their full potential because, you know, Bitcoin's eight hundred and fifty billion right now, there's no reason why we can't reach hundreds of trillions of dollars of an economy without changing You know, any of the, the fundamental genetic protocols materially, they're, they're pretty good and, and they seem to work fine. So, so I think, bottom line with the philosophy is You know, the lesson of stoicism is just 'cause you can do a thing doesn't mean you should do a thing. And go forward with humility and grace. And when you've won the lottery, have the wisdom to know that you've won the lottery and don't like gamble it all double or nothing ten more times and lose it all. Like William the Conqueror won the lottery. He was a bastard orphan, and he man-- and everybody wanted to kill him, and he managed to rise up and become the Duke of Normandy And then he managed to get the perfect wife and four sons, and that's everything. He then proceeded to cross the English Channel, conquer the UK, his family fell apart, the nation fell into civil war, and he died fighting with his own son. And after he was dead, his sons fought with each other. And that's an example of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Napoleon did the same thing, Julius Caesar did the same thing, Alexander the Great did the same thing. Like the world's just full of these people that, you know You're the king of the entire nation and everybody's happy and at peace with each other, and they gotta go and mess it up, right? Somehow. And so Bitcoin is, it's the winner? And it's working out well, and it's growing forty-five percent a year, and there's a million things that will grow from it. I think we're just so fortunate to have this as an opportunity. I would focus upon the ninety-nine percent of the people that don't fully understand it. I would educate them and I'd help them onboard, and I wouldn't spend a lot of time infighting over whether or not, you know, you're allowed to own an ETF versus self-custody versus have Bitcoin with Fidelity versus do business with a corporation, you know? It's like these are all second order things, and a hundred years from now, we'll still be disagreeing about politics, and we'll still be disagreeing about, you know, custody relationships, and we'll disagree about a lot of nuances. The real question is, you know, does Bitcoin grow forty percent a year or twenty percent a year or ten percent a year or five percent a year? You know, and, and, I think we're just better off to-- This is why I say, put the laser eyes on. The significance of laser eyes is, you've got the single most important thing you could do with your life that can make humanity better. And you're not gonna solve every problem of humanity, but you could like solve half of them, or you could provide a solution to everybody that makes their life better. So focus upon the thing that you can save, focus upon the, the benefit you can bring to the world. Don't let yourself get drawn into a hundred side struggles and, you know, regional wars Over things that people've been fighting over for hundreds of years, and they'll be fighting about for another hundred years because it's like, we didn't end political struggle? After electricity, but we sure did make life a lot better for humans, right? We didn't end religious struggle, but, you know, two out of every five, you know, children died in childbirth, you know, in sixteen hundred. And, you know, a combination of, of good medical technology and electricity and light, you know, changed that number from forty percent infant mortality to less than one percent infant mortality, some very, very low number. So I think we focused upon spreading the good cheer of technology, better living through Bitcoin, and, Everything else, it's like I used to joke, it's like all my good ideas were delusive distractions. I, I will say this, like Bitcoin's my best idea, and the only reason I was able to do anything with Bitcoin is I had a few other good ideas, but- Ultimately, I never pursued a bad idea, Stefan. I never pursued a bad one. I pursued good ideas that I thought were great, but they end up being distractions and dilutive to my success at the great idea. And so So I, I think that that's, that's how I would end this thing. Do the right thing for Bitcoin."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "michael_saylor",
      "time": "02:49:55",
      "start": 10195.38,
      "text": "Right. Yeah. And I, I guess, let's see, what everyone has to think about, Bitcoin principles. it's been a, a, a enlightening chat, and, thank you for joining me, Michael, and hope to chat again soon."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "02:50:08",
      "start": 10208.25,
      "text": "Yeah, thanks for having me."
    }
  ]
}