Speaker: Welcome to Honest Money.
I'm your host, Anja, and today's episode is brought to you by hard block.
Anja: Welcome back to another episode of Honest Money.
Joining me today is Scott Dedels.
You guys might be familiar with Scott because he's the author
of, uh, a number of books now, actually, second Book, I believe.
He's, um, due to be released very soon.
And he's also the co co-founder of Block Rewards.
Welcome to Honest Money Scott.
Scott: Thanks for having me.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Anja: Yay.
That's awesome.
Um, so anyone, I assume most of my listeners will know you, but for anyone
hearing about you for the first time, uh, I'd love to know a little bit
more about your journey into Bitcoin.
Scott: Sure I started, uh, I was a Bitcoin class of 2020, so I guess that
makes me a medium late to the party.
Um, I was, I came from a background in the world of benefits and
pensions and uh, was working in that field in the lockdown of 2020.
And I lived in Canada.
Canada was a very locked down place during that time, and the government
here just really intervened by printing an absurd amount of money.
And, uh, I thought I, you know, I had, I had taken all the courses, I'd
been 15 years kind of in the industry and I thought I knew what money was
and I was actually not even really interested in Bitcoin When I found it.
I, I became interested in money printing and, uh, you know,
like, as it as it happened.
So I, I spent the early part of the COVID lockdown, sort of reading mees and
rothbard and uh, and sound money stuff.
And, uh, eventually.
Amazon recommended me The Price of Tomorrow by Jeff Booth, which is one
of my favorite Bitcoin books, which is so interesting because it really isn't
even explicitly a book about Bitcoin.
It's a book about deflation and technology.
That book just completely blew my mind.
I read it immediately again after the first time I read it.
Uh, yeah.
Uh, and then from there it was really just a, a like super progressive journey.
I think Bitcoin is a bottomless rabbit hole.
There is something for everybody.
You know, one of the things that I love about the subject is, um, yeah, if you,
if you're here for hard money, you know, or technology, economics, politics,
Bitcoin has something for everyone.
Anja: I love that and I love that.
And, but I wanna go a little bit back to Scott's early life.
What is your first memory of money?
Scott: Oh wow.
Um, my family were a family of savers and I remember very vividly
my mom taking me to the bank to open up, uh, a bank account, a savings
account when I was maybe seven.
And back then you would, um.
There was like a little booklet that was like maybe four inches by four
inches and they would put it through a special machine to print the transaction
history on it, and I was learning about compound interest for my mom.
Uh, so that's kinda my first, my first memory.
We had rules around, uh, if we got gifts, like cash gifts at Christmas
or on our birthdays, a certain portion of it had to be saved.
And, uh, and then we would go into the bank to update our,
uh, our interest payments.
And, and so she was teaching me about the value of saving and interest very early.
And that was about the extent of it.
We didn't really, uh, get into investing or, or, uh, much
beyond that in our, in our house.
Anja: Love that.
And a lot of the women that I speak to in our community, um, obviously
every like avid savers and that's why they like Bitcoin so much
because they don't wanna invest.
They would literally wanna save.
Um, but was there a specific moment with Bitcoin where it
kind of just clicked in for you?
Scott: I had a few.
So it wasn't like I, you know, I think, and this is true for a lot of
people, it wasn't like I, the light bulb went off and it was like this
binary moment where all of a sudden I completely understood Bitcoin.
You know, after reading the price of tomorrow, I became interested in the
technology and like my first real aha moment was like, oh wow, this is a very.
Actually substantial subject.
And there's some really interesting work going on here.
And I think like, this is when people sort of pass through the portal
of realizing that Bitcoin is just more than a magic internet money.
You know, there's, there's, there's really a lot to it, but I. Yeah, a even
after that realization, I spent sort of 2020 and 2021 still kind of dabbling
in all coins and thinking that, you know, part of what I had come from
with this background in pensions and traditional financial planning was the
notion of, um, you know, portfolio.
Balancing your positions inside a portfolio.
And I was definitely caught up in that.
I thought that, you know, Bitcoin needed to be the biggest part of a, of
a crypto portfolio, whatever that means.
And uh, and so I actually, um, experienced what became a very painful
loss in the collapse of the Terra Luna ecosystem at the end of, uh, whenever
that was, I think it was early 2022.
And, uh, I had kinda like, you know, being through that
2020 and 2021 were wild times.
Like that was a really, you know, compared to this last cycle, it was a really, uh,
you know, exciting bull market and, you know, stuff was moving, doubling, tripling
in prices in days or weeks, sometimes.
Anyways, uh, at the, at the end of that, when, uh, when, when the Ukraine
war started and the market started to turn, I basically, I made a decision
that I was gonna split my, my holdings between Bitcoin and the Terra Luna stable
coin, which was, um, yielding like 11%.
And so in my mind I kind of had this, you know, almost like a bond portfolio,
like a really defensive strategy and then in spectacular fashion, um, it
went to zero, like overnight and.
That actually that happening, um, was really made me understand the difference
between Bitcoin and everything else in terms of its durability, both
as a technology but as an asset.
And, uh, and I really had to, I really had to experience that.
Uh, and that was my Bitcoin only moment.
And it actually then became my moment of really wanting to get
involved in helping other people.
Understand what I'd learned without them having to personally
experience it themselves.
So it, you know, the, that, that moment was a, was became a driving
force for me in co-founding block rewards in writing the books, uh, you
know, getting involved with events.
Like I just, um, I got a tremendous amount of satisfaction in my
financial services career.
Helping people navigate subjects that they just don't know a lot about.
And I think Bitcoin is really one of those because it can take a lot
of energy and effort and there's a lot of bad information out there.
Like it just.
It's if you open up YouTube, um, you know, these things get served up based
on what's popular and, uh, and so it's, it's, uh, it's a minefield for people who
are trying to figure out where to start.
So I, uh, I get a lot of satisfaction, uh, with, with any individual person
that I'm able to reach and, uh, and help them, you know, sell their XRP.
Anja: Yeah, and this is something I'm starting to be really passionate
about because the region that I live in, in Australia, the Northern Rivers
has quite a large alt coin community.
And uh, again, I feel like there's that educational piece.
There's a lot of, obviously, grift happening in the alt co coin space.
And what do you believe is kind of the biggest, um, what, what's the biggest
lesson we can impart on, on Alt Queen is to help them sort of see the light.
Scott: Yeah, I mean, I try to talk to people a lot about, um, pricing assets
in Bitcoin instead of in dollars.
And it's a really abstract thing, but it's basically night and day if you can figure
out why, because, uh, nothing appreciates over duration in Bitcoin terms.
Um, if that fails.
You know, uh, I think that it there, yeah.
I don't know where, where I go next, but you know, people who, who own alt coins.
Another thing I will try to talk to them about is how little you
can actually do with an altcoin.
You know, like what, what, what are people actually using it for?
And, uh, you, you struggle to get good answers and, uh, which is not true
with Bitcoin, you know, like it's, it's depends on where you're living.
But Bitcoin definitely has real world app, real world applications
all over the world right now.
And I think depending on where you live, those applications
are a little bit different, but.
It is something that is being used.
It is a viral idea.
It's a technology that is, you know, being adopted and accelerated.
Those would be kinda like my, you know, things I try to impart on
people in, in 15 minutes before they, you know, start tuning me out.
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Anja: I love it.
I love it.
Um, but how would you say Bitcoin has changed the way you think
about money and life in general?
Scott: Uh, yeah.
So it's changed both of those things, you know, pretty fundamentally I
would say what I experienced when I really started to understand Bitcoin.
Was what I describe in the Dow of Bitcoin as a widening of the present moment.
And I didn't have the words to put it to it at the time, and it
wasn't like a conscious thing.
It was more of just like, uh, a slow awareness that, um, what I wasn't doing
anymore and what I wasn't doing anymore.
Was worrying about the future and, you know, regretting over the past
decisions and, you know, I, I attribute that to, uh, a sense of tranquility
that accompanies owning an asset that is going to be durable over time.
And if, if you believe in that, uh, it's really quite freeing because you
know Bitcoin, you know, who knows what it's gonna do in terms of like price
appreciation or value in the future.
But the general notion is.
We spend a lot of brain power in our day-to-day lives trying to think about
or engineer new ways of multiplying our money faster than it's melting.
And so if your money just doesn't melt, then you can actually have all
of that brain space back and just think about living your life, which,
uh, is a really important thing.
You know, like I think that part of the reason, there are
some people that generally genuinely want to be really rich.
I actually don't think that's everybody.
I think that most people really want autonomy over their time, and they
really want the ability to do what makes them happy and, you know, spend as much
time as possible with people they love.
Like this is kind of like the meaning of life and the, the more convoluted and
complicated, uh, financial investment, wealth strategies become, the more
time they occupy, you know, and that's less time for the other stuff.
So I think that Bitcoin provides people a really beautiful simplicity
where it's, it's solved this problem.
The problem melting money is actually pretty simple when you understand it, but
the solution to that problem can be as complicated or as simple as you make it.
So for me, and this is why I don't necessarily care.
About how fast the Bitcoin price goes to whatever people think it might go to.
Um, what I do believe in is that the value I have stored today will be safely
stored into the future at some moment where I wanna turn it back into, you
know, time and energy that I can consume.
And, um, while I'm on that journey, I'm, I'm gonna just continue
to use that as my savings tool.
You know, you mentioned this kind of earlier in the conversation, but.
I actually think, you know, one of the things that has happened, particularly
over the last, sort of 20 years since say, the great financial crisis of 2008 is
we've sort of hybridized the concepts of investing and gambling and, uh, portfolios
have had to get increasingly more risky.
Our culture has changed so that people aren't really that excited anymore about,
you know, seven, getting 7% a year.
You can't actually get 7% a year and win.
Because real inflation in the Western world, outside of the
United States is probably more like 12 to 15%, like price increasing.
So you need to do better than that.
And to do better than that, you need to get riskier and riskier.
So when I started in financial services, you know, like nobody even had their
entire portfolio in, in stocks.
You know, you'd have a mix, you'd have bonds, you'd have other, you'd have
instrument interest-bearing instruments.
And then that gradually changed and saving became, you know, like.
When you're investing in the index instead of stock picking,
and that's totally gambling.
Like that is totally gambling.
And so I think that, um, if people really understood that and they were, most
people were given the choice between gambling and, and saving in the truest
sense, they would pick the latter.
And that's really what Bitcoin, that's one of the things that you
can do with Bitcoin that's really beautiful is opt out of the gambling.
And with that you get to lose the stress of gambling going wrong and
you get to, um, have the simplicity of like just understanding really
well what you think you're doing with the value you've accumulated so far.
Anja: Yeah, I absolutely love that.
And I'm curious to know, what do you think most people still
get wrong about Bitcoin today?
Scott: I think the, probably the biggest one in my opinion would be the idea that
we always improve on a technology and so that that infers the likelihood that
some other internet money technology will come subsequently and displaced Bitcoin
and I have this conversation all the time because you have to be pretty deep down.
I think like one of the things would be the, the scope of the
physical infrastructure that has been built to secure the Bitcoin
network all over the world.
Like if you assembled all of the Bitcoin miners operating
globally into a single machine.
It would be the biggest machine in the world.
This thing would be enormous.
And, um, to even have like a, a, a minuscule appreciation for that, you
need to really be pretty far down the rabbit hole and, and like even being
able to comprehend how the Bitcoin hash power collectively is different
than the Litecoin network hash power.
Like these are, they're, they're just not.
They're not even worth comparing.
But, uh, it's a natural, it's a natural thing in humanity because basically
everything we build, we then go on and somebody invent, invents a better widget.
So that's, that's I think the biggest one.
Bitcoin's a one-time event.
We'll never be replicated and uh, we just happen to be around to see it.
And I think there's also some kind of like, you know, maybe
people don't want that to be true.
And, and if it is true, then everybody has to, um, reconcile the truth
that we all had a fair and equal opportunity to study Bitcoin earlier.
And for whatever reason, each of us chose not to until we chose to.
So like I had, you know, they say you kinda have like three Bitcoin
touchpoints before you maybe, you know, take a serious look.
And that was definitely true for me.
Where I live now, when I, I moved here in 2011, uh, and I moved into,
uh, an apartment building and right across the street was a, a coin
store that was selling Bitcoin.
They had a Bitcoin symbol in the window.
I walked past it every day and I used to laugh myself, think like, who
would be so stupid to buy a Bitcoin?
And then, you know, like, I think the second touch point for me was 2017,
and I had a coworker that was caught up in the alto altcoin, like ICO cycle.
And then when it blew up and I hadn't participated, I, I, again, sort of
patted myself on the back for not getting caught up in that stupid fad.
And then it was, uh, and then it was 2020 again, and that was kind of
when, that was round three for me.
So, um, yeah, it's, it's a natural thing.
Um, I think it'll be a, it'll be continue to be a painful realization
for people, you know, as like we're, we'll get to some point when Bitcoin
crashes from a million to 700,000 and.
And, uh, there will still be people who don't own any and, and
haven't spent any time to try and understand why they would want to.
Anja: Yep.
And more eulogies and everything like that.
Um, but in your third time, did you feel like you needed to hear it from
a trusted source in order for you to take a serious look at it in 2020?
Scott: You know, I think 2020 created a lot of bitcoiners because of the money
printing and the lockdowns, but also because as a secondary effect of that,
people just had a lot of free time.
And so like I spent a lot of lockdown either reading or on YouTube.
And so it just happened to be that in that window I had more free
time than I would normally have.
So I read a book and then I would, I, you know, I just kinda like
really compressed, sort of like my initial learning phase that might
have taken a year into 10 weeks.
So that got really that, you know, and I know I wasn't alone.
Um.
So, yeah, I, I think, I think how much time you have to look
at it, uh, can make a difference certainly when you're getting going.
I, as far as like, you know, do I trust somebody I, you know, I found a lot
of bad people, like I was watching Bit Boy and into the crypto verse and uh,
you know, these people who like get a lot of likes, even a lot of Engage
studies and so you think they're, yeah.
You think they're legitimate And uh, you know, that's another
thing that I think people really don't understand about Bitcoin.
Is that the, you know, you mentioned grifting, right?
Like just a lot of the people that are talking about other stuff are being
paid to do it and uh, so there's just an inherent gumminess about every,
even if there was other technology in the space, which is like legitimate
and real, it would be so hard to determine whether or not you were
getting good information about it.
Anja: Yeah.
I love, I must say, I love that you spent your COVID lockdowns reading
Austrian economics going through Roth.
But in meers, like I feel most people were working out getting to like,
some hobbies, but you went down to the Austrian econ hall, like, I wanna know,
like what prompted you to do that?
Scott: You know, it was just like, they were just pre like, so a prime, prime
Minister Trudeau was on TV every day explaining, um, new measures, you know,
and I was, I was part of my work tuning in every day to understand like, what
was the new announcement for the day.
And they just all involved printing money.
And I'm like, who is gonna pay for all this stuff?
And like, and then I was thinking like, you know, wait a second.
Like how does this, how does this even work?
Like, how's it, how, how is this even possible?
And then I got to like, wait a second, you know, we're getting completely screwed.
And uh, and then I spent like three years talking about inflation before.
It, you know, people really caught up to the party.
It was like, you know, inflation's a funny thing, right?
Because it's not like the market or prices, like
immediately sniff the stuff out.
So at least up here, and I, I think it was the same in Australia, um, you know, rare
and desirable assets, things like housing.
They, they first, they were the first sort of line of defense in, in seeing like, uh,
asset price, inflation and, you know, food and, and general cost of living stuff.
It, it trickled so it wasn't super obvious right away.
I mean, it is now here.
Like, um, the cost of food is completely insane.
And, uh, and I think that, you know, um.
Yeah, it is just, it's really frustrating because this is a, a self-inflicted
scenario and now people who have worked, uh, you know, solid careers and had a
certain standard of living are struggling.
Um, you know, money is like this foundational technology for
civilization that enables, uh, stability and uh, and coherence.
And when you really start to break the rules of how people think money works
or should work you, I think trigger civilizational level breakdowns.
And we are now, I believe, living through the early stages of a massive transition
in the way the West works and the, the, the west that we grew up in is gone and
it's just it just takes time to, um, you know, this is a process that is gonna
play out over a while, unfortunately.
Anja: Hmm.
It's the beginning of the end.
It feels like it and it's hard to foresee what, how things are
going to evolve from here on.
But yeah, I actually really appreciate people like you and
Jeff Booth for this reason.
'cause he kind of, whenever I tune into your content, it gives me hope
and I feel like that's something that's really needed right now.
But before we get into the more philosophical side of things, I
did wanna ask you with beginners.
Who I need to Bitcoin.
How can someone enter Bitcoin without necessarily feeling overwhelmed,
particularly now because we're in a bear market and you know, there's a lot of
emotions tied thought for people who might be new and like down now since October.
So what advice do you have for them?
Scott: Yeah, I mean, I think there's sort of two things that I recommend everybody
when I get asked that question personally.
One is, you need to actually spend a little bit of time interacting
with Bitcoin, send a transaction, send some, you know, like use it
and just understand that it's, it's not just a number on a screen.
And, um, and, you know, in that process, set yourself up a, a hot wallet and set
yourself up a cold wallet, you know, and, and just get comfortable with
the basics of, uh, you know, uh, sort of the technology and the interface.
And then on the other side, I think like you, you know, you wouldn't make.
Other investment decisions probably without doing any kind
of like research or, or work.
And if you do, you're probably not having any success with
your other investments either.
So you know, you have to spend some time and if, if you like to read, there are.
Endless, really great Bitcoin books out there to read.
Uh, if you're, if you wanna watch videos in, you know, podcasts, like
there, there is so much available.
So, you know, those are the two things, right.
You need, you need to like apply yourself and, and learn some of the basics of
the, of the technical interaction.
Like, you don't need to start running an node, but.
Um, I think a lot of people do, they just buy some Bitcoin and it's sitting
on a wallet and they have no idea.
They just actually don't have any idea with about anything.
So, um, yeah, those, those were, those, those would be my two
things I would tell anybody.
Anja: Well let's talk about your new book, the Age of Time, um, a Journey
through Consciousness, reality, and the End of the Modern Illusion.
I wanna know, did you come up with the title or the book first?
Scott: Uh, the book that, but, uh, I had been circling around the title for
a while, um, and you know, so that's actually a really good question.
I Bitcoin is, you know, in 20, I think it was 2020, uh, Gigi, who's
a really famous Bitcoin and wrote an article called Bitcoin is Time and.
Beautiful
Anja: article.
Scott: Uh, you know, and that was, that was one of the first things that I read
about Bitcoin that didn't have anything to do with money and started my own personal
journey of like, oh wow, like this is a really expansive subject and something
that I could really sink my teeth into.
So, um, I wanna, I always kinda like credit that.
And, um, so, so parallel to that, like I mentioned, I was experiencing
some of these things that went on to.
Inspired me to write the Dow Bitcoin.
These are like personal, um, a shift in my perception about, you know,
inhabiting the present moment differently.
So, uh, as I was writing that book, you know, the funny thing I think happens
when you write books, you end up sort of like teaching yourself what you think you
are trying to explain to other people.
And what I thought I had explained in the first book actually just ended up causing
me to think more about what I was, what wanted, what inspired me, uh, at all.
And so that's really what age of time is.
You know, uh, once I had acknowledged this notion that Bitcoin can transform your
ability to stay in the present moment, um, I started wondering about like what
is that phenomenon and what causes it?
And it's a much deeper than simply being able to save your money reliably.
What I think is going on is a couple things.
One of them is civilization, and I'm a student history, so I, I have always
loved, um, you know, learning about cultural transformation over time
and, and money is a, is a critical aspect of how civilizations endure.
You know, the great civilizations have always been reserve currencies.
This is something that has.
A, a continual transition from one to another that has corresponded
with, you know, the British Empire ruling the seas and the pound being
the, the currency, the of the world.
So, um, what does money do?
And, uh, what, what, what is time and how does this, all of this come together?
I think that time is an innovation that happened in Europe, uh, modern mechanical
time as an innovation that happened in Europe, uh, you know, kinda 600 years ago.
And when that happened, uh, it was an invention that mechanical
clocks started to appear in clock towers and they became a, um, like
a core part of civic infrastructure.
So all of a sudden, for the first time ever.
People could start thinking about organizing their day around
something instead of like the natural world, like where the sun was.
So there's tall thing, you know, displaying a, a round circle with
the two hands is spinning and now that's the reference point of reality.
And what clocks I think really became, is a civilizational tool for
creating an agreement about order.
It lets us make sense of when things happened and when things will happen in
a way that is distributed and shared.
And so the clock itself is a, is a, is a technology for ordering
events and synchronizing things and enabling coordination at scale
because clocks scaled themselves.
And then we started having time zones and we started thinking about.
Not just local time, but like, you know, uh, when, when we started traveling by
train, it's actually mattered when a train left London and would arrive in Bristol
and those cities needed to have the same clock so that trains wouldn't crash.
And so we, so the, the, the level of coordination around clocks triggered
or co-evolved with kind of the mechanization of industrial society
and, and, uh, and eventually we, we landed here where we are now.
Um, so Bitcoin does the same thing.
Bitcoin is a system that, uh, it's a clock in the sense that it's a
technology that helps us determine the order of when things happen.
What's different about Bitcoin is that it doesn't require agreement
on all of us saying it's a certain time because Bitcoin, the bitcoin
clock doesn't work that way.
Bitcoin's clock, uh, every 10 minutes assembles, uh, you know, a a, a set
of transactions that can sort of get minted to the blockchain permanently.
We all agree that those ones happen after the ones that came before it.
And so it's, it's sort of a new way of forming agreement
around the order of things.
And what's cool about this clock is that, uh, things can only go so
fast in Bitcoin, the fastest you can hope for something to be permanent
in Bitcoin is around 10 minutes.
Now, why I think that's interesting.
Is comes directly back to this original insight I found around the Dow of
Bitcoin, which is in the digital world.
We face a never ending compression of the now, and it has a lot to do with the value
of money because if the amount of time you have does not change and the value
of your money is continually diminishing.
Then the value of your time or the extra time that you
have is continually narrowing.
And so what I think, you know, age of time is kind of a suggestion that beyond
just being a clock, Bitcoin is a mechanism that sort of puts a, a floor on the, um,
the never ending devaluation of time.
And as a result of doing that it's a new sort of temporal substrate.
It's the new, uh, base layer for, uh, civilization because, you know, the
Bitcoin conversation talks a lot about money, but I argue in the book that
in terms of a coordination mechanism for civilization, time is actually
a much more fundamental invention.
It was clock towers 700 years ago that really kicked this whole party off.
Like fiat was a much later invention and Pure Fiat is only 50 years old.
But, uh, this thing with time has been going on for hundreds of years and it's
been so gradual that, uh, you know, people all over, we're all questioning
the rules of the money system and whether or not the Fiat money system makes sense.
But time is a much less scrutinized notion, and I think it's, uh, as the
further down the rabbit hole you get.
It's actually in some ways just as absurd.
You know, the, the things that we take for granted or the unquestioned, uh,
assumptions about how time works and what it is, are just as you know, big
and profound as those early reactions people often have when they learn
that money is fake and the piece of paper you have with a, you know,
famous person on it is nothing So.
Long answer to short question, uh, age time is, uh, you know, I
love the title because, um, it's got a few different meanings.
You know, I think that, uh, but, but one of them is kind of this
notion that I think that hyper Bitcoin and where we're going as
Bitcoin is this information package.
When you understand Bitcoin, it changes your views on a lot of things, and
as more people understand it, that
uh, collective understanding grows brighter.
It's multiplying, and we're living through that right now.
And I think that if a change like this can occur in one person or many
people, I'm not, I'm definitely not the only person who's had ideas like this.
We're in the early stages of this idea diffusing to everyone.
And so it's not just the case that different ideas about money are possible,
but I think that, uh, you know, different ideas about time themself, uh, are.
You know, we're in the early stages of seeing those unfold.
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Anja: You just cook my noodles in the best way possible.
'cause I remember the first time I read Gigi's article, I
was like, what did I just read?
I had to read that again and again.
Um, so I kind of feel like what you've just done to me is kind
of like, I need to go back and watch everything you just said.
'cause it just sounds very like profound.
And one of the questions that I actually had for you was
kind of answered essentially.
What's one idea from your book that surprised you while you were writing it?
Scott: Yeah, I mean, I would say, that's a great question.
I thought the book was gonna be about time.
Well, you know, which is funny thing to say, and through the process of writing
it, what I really understood is it's a book about meaning and what I think.
You know, the core problem that, and why it goes beyond money is that human
civilization is an accumulation of shared meaning and purpose, and we need,
we need duration, we need time, and we need continuity for that meaning and
purpose to be shared and to be durable.
Money is a tool.
The stability of money is a tool that enables that.
And that's why you see great civilizations have money that works
reliably and it's why it's a problem when, this is exactly what we were
talking about earlier, the conversation.
When money stops working, you start to see these like sort of social breakdowns.
Um, but I ultimately think that, you know, civilization, humanity is um, is
a continual evolution in coordination.
You know, like this is what we do together, is we figure out how to solve
problems and how to connect and belong.
And where I think Bitcoin has probably the most exciting application is as a tool to.
Bring us back together and unify how we think about being
able to coordinate at scale.
And we can do that with this amazing system that has transparent
rules that no one can change and it is durable over time.
Like Bitcoin has a pre mapped issu and schedule that will outlive all of us.
Anybody watching this podcast will not be alive when the last Bitcoin is mine.
So that alone is, is a time horizon that is long enough for
us to really think big again.
And I think part of the issue that we're experiencing today is that our
political systems are also subject to these same problems that force.
Shorter and shorter decision making timeframes, you know, everybody's
just trying to get elected.
Again, everybody's just trying to solve these like, it's like bandaid
thinking and the great civilizations.
Didn't think that way at all.
You know, you don't build a pyramid in a quarter.
You build a pyramid over hundreds of years and just imagine like, what was
the last project humanity embarked on that would last longer than a human life?
We don't do it anymore, and we don't do it anymore because
we just don't think that way.
Like we don't know how to inhabit the timescale of the
minds that we're thinking about.
Being a part of something much, much, much larger than themselves.
Like that's really to me, what meaning and continuity imbues on somebody.
You know?
I think that when we are forced into this hamster wheel of the
rat race of fiat money, it forces us to only think of ourselves.
Like it really narrows our aperture for how we imagine ourselves
as being part of a chain and.
Earlier cultures were way more aware of themselves, both as being
ancestors and being inheritors.
You know, like they were.
It was about stories and rituals and things that placed you in a lineage.
So you had been handed down something from the people who came
before you, and it was your job to.
Pass that down to the people who are gonna come after you.
So that's what we've really lost in my opinion, and this is the thing
that I'm excited about and what age of time is really about, is it's an
excavation of thinking about, you know, civilization and what does it
mean for us to have access to a tool.
There.
Well, that we can do this without being given permission to do it.
Anja: I love this so much.
And, and, um, where was I gonna go with this?
Um, like, I know we use Bitcoin, some of us use Bitcoin as a unit of account,
like we price things in Bitcoin or we make financial decisions based
on what, what something might be worth in the future in Bitcoin terms.
But I've also noticed an example of where people are using Bitcoin as time, and
it might seem like I'm being funny, but I'm not, and I wonder if there's more.
So a lot of Bitcoiners, as you know, are having babies and there's a bit
of a baby boom happening in Australia.
It is so funny because watching my, you know, non Bitcoin of friends
announced their baby news, it's like
so and so was born on this date at this time weighing this much and Bitcoin is
on Twitter are like the complete opposite of that, another node added to the
network at block height like thousand.
So is that like one example of how Bitcoin is a measuring their time in Bitcoin?
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Scott: is, I'm in Bitcoin.
It totally is.
And I also think, you know, these are, these are like proto rituals of, you
know, this is early examples of Bitcoin culture, uh, where people are, are, you
know, aligning themselves to a, a rhythm that is different than, uh, the rhythm
that we have been told to follow, you know, that we were adopted into at birth.
So I think Yeah, I totally, and I think there's, there's a lot of
different examples like that, right?
You see people, yeah.
Time locking transactions, you know, they're sending a certain amount
of Bitcoin into a distant point in the future where they can meet
it one day or somebody else can.
Like, I think it was just a fractal has a, has a piece of art that has a
one Bitcoin, um, that's, uh, locked up until I, I think it was 2140.
Uh, these are, I think these are also ways that people.
Um, relate to what I was talking about there with the, the
ordering of events differently.
You know, and, and bitcoin's really cool because like, there's also, there's
something called Phantom Time Theory, which is, uh, you know, an, uh, an
academic, uh, sec, a sect of, of history that suggests that, um, there are lots
of different problems with the historical timeline that we've been presented.
And there's just lots of things that either aren't totally
accurate or didn't happen.
Um, you know, like there's 300 years of European history
that are difficult to prove.
And, um, so Bitcoin is also this unalterable record of what happened.
And as a result of having an Unalterable record, you have like a, a really
durable, um, tool to, you know.
Remember what, what, what came before.
And this is something that I think is actually gonna become a lot more important
over the next maybe 20, 30 years.
Because this is one thing that we totally saw during COVID, depending on
what you were trying to learn about.
Uh, I noticed early on that, uh, YouTube and Google were censoring
and deleting content that I was really interested in watching.
And so in the digital world, and certainly in the AI world, uh, the reliability of
information to persist, uh, especially if it's not the kind of information that, uh,
the people who own those platforms might want you to know about is gonna be hard.
You know, bitcoin's not some kind of like a silver bullet that can
fix all those problems, but I think what one thing that it does offer
is, it's a system that the better you understand it, it changes how you
think about things and it might cause you to want to invent similar things.
Things that have other, you know, have those traits again embedded in them.
So like, uh, you know, I think Bitcoiners talk a lot about the idea of like, you
know, proof of work transforms into Bitcoiners, don't tend to waste their
money on stupid stuff, disposable stuff.
So if everybody all of a sudden starts using Bitcoin, then it would be rational
to assume that at some point the only things that anybody will buy will be
stuff that's like really awesome quality.
And so that could trigger, you know, who knows beautiful monuments.
It might be like, you know, refrigerators that last for 30 years, like, who knows?
But the opposite is true right now.
Right?
Anja: Refrigerators that last for 30 years.
Scott: Yeah, I,
Anja: everything's disposable that like old school.
When you see those old school appliances, like the refrigerators from like the
early sixties, I wanna say, I don't know when they first started out, but they
were so much fancier than refrigerators today that had all these like cool
little gadgets and sections within that were just so cleverly thought out.
And now it's like mass produced and just very minimalist.
And I'm
Scott: totally even like, you know, airlines in the 1960s, you used to get
like a cooked meal and on you would be served it on China, like with silverware.
And that was like a regular seat that wasn't first class.
So, and money did work appreciably much better in the sixties.
Like that was before 1971.
And Nixon and the, the, you know, the birth of like pure fiat.
And so that's in just an example within the lifespan of people who are alive now.
So, uh, you know, I think if this thing plays out over hundreds of years, um, you
know, we're, we're just, we're so early and that's why I think Bitcoin is so cool.
You know, it can be.
Really inspiring and frustrating for people who want things to
happen faster, but like, um.
You can use your imagination and, and, and just about anything is possible
if this technology remains sort of durable and secure over long timeframes.
So
Anja: love it.
And what you end, the speak is, uh, sorry, the listeners won't know like the
whole time we are talking, I keep getting goosebumps every time you say something
that just like blows my mind and I remember having this sort of a reaction.
Like a physical reaction to like learning about, um, the difficulty adjustment and
some of these like really cool things about Bitcoin, like time locking is a
really great example and I'm brought glad you brought that up because
even that alone is just one of those things, like we've never had anything
like that in the history of mankind.
All these different cool things that Bitcoin has solved aside.
Even that one thing is just like such a cool thing to think about
that that can even be done.
It's mind blowing.
Mm-hmm.
And, and the other thing you mentioned about the immutable ledger, like we've
never, again, never had that before.
Like Yap stones that were used as, you know, ledgers back in
the day are fully destroyed.
Like I imagine maybe there might be one living in a museum somewhere.
This is like, yeah completely indestructible and yeah, it's just
insane to, to, to think that this is something that's been created and this
is why I am so obsessed with Bitcoin.
It's like, how can you not be like, the fact that we're
witnessing this in our lifetime?
What?
Yeah.
Scott: It's so cool.
Anja: Yeah.
But I think we're kind of towards the end of the questions.
Um, looking ahead, what excites you most about Bitcoin and the
philosophy where it's going?
Scott: You know, I think that, uh, we, uh yeah, that's a great question.
Um, I hope that we just continue to see an organic adoption of the technology.
And what I think is gonna happen is the, you know, as the opportunity for
Bitcoin grows and bigger people, you know, larger interested parties start to
take advantage of the opportunity to make bigger amounts of fiat money at scale.
I think we're gonna see more and more ambitious things,
and some of them will fail.
Uh, you know, so one of them is like maybe the normalization of
Bitcoin's backing a mortgage.
Like we're, we're in a, we're entering into a period I think as Bitcoin
becomes more and mainstream, that we're gonna start to see more, you know,
attempts at commercial application for using Bitcoin and uh, some of
them will end up being lasting.
Uh, integrations of Bitcoin in like regular day-to-day technology.
And some of them will be the things that like, you know, catch the next round of
new Bitcoiners and cost 'em their Bitcoin.
So I think that we're, you know, I'm like, I'm kind of, of this mind that
like, Bitcoin is, is exactly on time.
Like it's just, it's gonna do whatever it's gonna do.
If you think about, um, I was a teenager in the 1990s and so when I was.
When I was maybe 11 or 12, we got dial up internet in our house.
And I remember my mom sitting me down to explain to me that we were getting
the internet and like at that time, um, downloading one image took about an hour.
So you didn't even get to have a preview of the image before it was
so, uh, hey, you know, and by the time I was starting university, email
was kind of just becoming a thing.
That was the late nineties.
And then by the time I was done university.
You couldn't have a a white collar job without email.
And I think that's kind of where we are with Bitcoin right now is
like email in the late nineties.
So it's still optional, uh, if you want it to be.
But uh, objects in the rear view mirror are a lot closer than they appear.
And you know, if you think back, if you were around for.
The mass proliferation of internet technology at that time, things moved
super fast and you know, all of a sudden, you know, there were some
critical things that needed to happen.
Like, uh, you know, online transactions, streaming, video technology, none of those
things existed and they were invented and those things enabled the throughput
that everything else followed after.
And that's what I think is going on with Bitcoin right
now with liquid and lightning.
Um, you know, there's just things, subsequent innovations that will enable
the everyone else to, to come on board, and I think that this is what we'll see,
but sort of between now and, you know, sailor talks about the Bitcoin gold rush,
where it'll end in 2034 when bitcoin's, you know, largely mined by then.
So.
Anja: Yeah, interesting.
Like I'm just here for the ride.
I don't know what to expect in terms of adoption.
Sometimes it feels like it's happening really fast.
Other times it happens, it's just, it like feels like it's happening
slow, and then it helps to kind of zoom out sometimes as well.
Yeah, I find,
Scott: I mean, I think that the biggest problem is like.
20 years in the life of an individual person is a really long time in
the life of a, of an asset that's gonna live for a thousand years.
It's like, it's a cup of coffee.
So most of the, you know, I talked about this in now Bitcoin as well.
I think that like most of the, you know, frustrations that come along with Bitcoin
and Bitcoin adoption have a lot to just to do with people's, you know, internal
time needs, like these are just imaginary, uh, things that don't
have any bearing on Bitcoin at all.
And uh, that's just an unfortunate reality for us as early participants.
Anja: Yeah, I love how, how much emotion we all attach to Bitcoin and sometimes
I notice I catch myself doing it too, and then I'm like, just, just relax.
Like.
You know, this thing.
Yeah.
It's gonna win.
Um, you don't need to Yeah put, uh, put so much, um, energy into it sometimes.
I just feel like, yeah.
Before we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts that you'd
like to share with the audience?
Obviously, I will include all the links, um, to the book and to anything
you else you want me to include, but do you have any final parting words?
Scott: Hmm.
Uh, yeah, I mean, if, if this, if any of this was interesting for you, I, yeah.
Age of time.
We'll come out sometime in April.
I'm just sort of putting the final touches on it right now.
And, uh, yeah, I would encourage you to read it.
I think, uh, this is a book I'm, I'm really excited about.
I'm really excited to share and, um, I'm active on Twitter.
If, uh, if you're listening and you are, and you were interested and you know, send
me a message, I'm always happy to chat.
I love meeting Bitcoiners from all over the world.
Uh, you know, especially Australians.
My wife's Australian.
I, I try to get Australia as often as I can and, uh, and
hopefully back to Bitcoin alive.
Uh, maybe not this year, but, but, uh, but soon.
Anja: Yeah.
Love it.
Thanks so much for your time, Scott.
Scott: Thanks again for having me.
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