From Wall Street to Bitcoin & The Separation of Money & State | Vijay Selvam

There's only one, you know, challenger to monetary policy and central banking and money itself, and that's Bitcoin. It's the greatest tool that has ever existed against authoritarian states. It's not enough to just say, okay, it's 21 million supply cap. You need to understand why, otherwise it's meaningless. If you could go back in time and ask why was fiat introduced, it was because of all these deficiencies. But the moment there was trust introduced in the system, it started being abused. But now all those deficiencies have been resolved. So you don't need fiat anymore. Vijay Selvam, how are you doing, man? Great. Thank you for having me, Danny. Yeah, I've followed the show for years now, so really honored to be on speaking to you. No, I'm really glad to have you on. One of the things that is probably getting harder, but something I really want to concentrate on is making sure that I have plenty of new guests in the space. This is obviously the first time you've been on. You sent me your book, Principles of Bitcoin. I was just telling you before, I'm most of the way through it yet. I've not quite finished it, but it's brilliant. It's really, really good. It's one of my favorite Bitcoin books I've read in a long time. I get sent and buy a lot of Bitcoin books, and I just don't have the time to read them all. This is one that, for whatever reason, just hooked me. I really enjoyed it. I'm glad to have you on. What I want to try and do here is kind of go back, not fully to basics. I think this will be a show that will be valuable to Bitcoiners, but I also want to make sure it's the kind of show that can be sent to people who might be curious about Bitcoin, want to find out more, and just let people know the real fundamentals of Bitcoin, that it's not all just treasury companies and penny stocks. I'm excited to get into this. Yeah, me too. Let's start. I think we should probably start with your background, because you've got a very interesting background. You were at Harvard Law, Goldman Sachs. You were like a trad fire guy. Tell us about your background. Sure. Yeah, so I'm an attorney in the US, also a solicitor in the UK, originally from India, but I've spent most of my life outside India. Most of my career at Goldman Sachs, I was in New York and then Hong Kong, and also Singapore for many years before moving back to London now. I was a lawyer on Wall Street during the 2008 financial crisis. I worked on a couple of bailout packages for some of the big banks. So I was very much in the thick of that in the early parts of my career. So that was a huge influence upon my, you know, the way I think about the financial services industry, economics, macroeconomics generally. And I became a major gold bug on the back of that. And I was for many years, until I discovered Bitcoin, obviously. I've also worked sort of on regulatory matters, currently International General Counsel at Gemini. So in terms of Bitcoin, I mean, so going back, I'd say it was, I think it was 2013 when I first came across Bitcoin. My reaction to it was all the things you would expect from someone with my background. So you know, Ponzi scheme, used by criminals, no intrinsic value, governments will shut it down, all those reactions, right? And it fascinates me that today, 12 years later, people are saying exactly the same things. And it really blows my mind, right? So those are my reactions back in 2013. And then it took several, it was many years of initially, you know, rejecting it, and then reluctantly learning about it, and then really starting to get it. And I think, yeah, that was kind of my journey. And along the way, it was something that I really spent a lot of time thinking about was, why is it that people with my sort of background find it so hard to understand Bitcoin? And there are many reasons for that. One is just, I mean, people are just lazy, and you know, you're a few people are just reluctant to do the work and read about it and understand it. Another reason is just arrogance. A lot of people are just really like, yeah, you need to tell someone who's a who's made tens of millions of dollars as a hedge fund manager, or, you know, private equity fund manager that you've missed the biggest investment opportunity of your lifetime, they're not going to react very well to it, they're just going to be very defensive, right? I think it's also even more than that, because like, you're definitely right. But it's also, it's kind of like telling them everything that they've ever done, learnt about and then done in business might be a little bit wrong. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're questioning I mean, so yeah, the natural knee jerk reaction is to be defensive. And many people come at it from that from that perspective. But but there's not much you know, you or I can do about that. You've just got to let these people come around to it eventually, you know, like, the meme, everyone buys Bitcoin at the price they deserve, right? So there's, I think there's a lot of truth to that. So you just got to let them be. But I thought where I could, you know, people like us can can add value is, I think, in the third bucket where people are missing, you know, the principles like the core sort of why are we talking about this? What was the core invention and creating a mental model for Bitcoin? It's really hard, because it's really hard to come up with an appropriate mental model for Bitcoin, simply because there's never been anything like Bitcoin before, right? So it doesn't fit neatly into any of your molds. So it is so paradigm shifting. So so my my endeavor was really to ask those first principle questions. Why are we talking about about this? What was that core fundamental innovation? As you say, let's put aside the Bitcoin treasury companies, let's put aside, you know, treasury and the sort of Bitcoin reserves and all these things and or, you know, crypto and Web3 and NFTs and all that. Let's ask that basic question, what was the core innovation here and start from there. So that was that was really my my my kind of objective. I wanted to write the book that I wish I had access to back in 2013. That was kind of my my objective and and yeah, that's that's how it came about. So maybe we should start there, because I mean, that is where you open the book is like, why are we talking about this? And as someone who's come from a very sort of traditional background who initially just dismissed Bitcoin, like what was it that changed your mind on it? Yeah. So so like I said, you know, I was I was a gold bug. And so I actually believe that everyone should be a little bit of a gold bug before they become Bitcoiners, because I think that's the natural path to take. Bitcoin is digital gold. I believe I continue to believe I've always believed that that is the best mental model. That's the best analogy is digital gold, right? It's not a better MasterCard. It's not a better Venmo, Visa or anything like that. It is digital gold, right? Satoshi was trying to destruct central banking, he was trying to destruct money. So that's the right kind of path. So so I think I think and to be a gold bug, you need to understand monetary history, you need to understand monetary policy and also a bit of political history and all the things that led to where we are. Right. So it's a natural path. I think it's also an easier pill to swallow for many of the, you know, tradified people like like myself. So so to answer your question, I was already there having experienced the 2008 financial crisis, having experienced the moral hazard and all the systemic manipulation that was taking place. I witnessed it firsthand. I've been on call with Hank Paulson, you know, the Federal Reserve and so on. Back in 2007, 2008, and I saw it all. So so so I think I think I was already there. For me, the leap was really understanding digital scarcity, just understanding the technology side of things. And then everything came together. It was understanding why, you know, it's not enough to just say, OK, it's 21 million supply cap. You need to understand why. Otherwise, it's meaningless. Right. And that takes hundreds, thousands of hours of reading, of thought, of introspection right before you really get it, because it's not just cold. It's this entire incentive structure, economic incentives that that come together to make it to make it possible to make it happen. So yeah, that was that was the moment for me. Do you wish you could access cash without selling your Bitcoin? Well, Ledner makes that possible. Ledner, the global leader in Bitcoin back lending. 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So can we go really like back to basics for a minute here, assume that I know nothing about Bitcoin because this is the kind of show that I want to be able to send to people who are interested in Bitcoin but have no real understanding of it yet. And this is probably, from the sounds of it, something you maybe learned in 2007-2008 during the financial crisis. Like what is money? Yeah. So, so I know that's a hard question, by the way. It's what's, what's unfortunate is people, very few people ask the question, right? So if you, and that's why it's because the entire concept has been corrupted. If you, I mean, the last very few people understand that the money that they use on a day to day basis, fiat currency is a 50 year old experiment. It's a 54 year old experiment. People just assume that governments have controlled money through history, but no, it's actually only since 1971 that that's been the case, right? So to understand, to answer the question, what is money? You have to really, I think at this point, the best place to start is Austrian economics. So you, you, you look at the father of Austrian economics, who's Karl Menger. So Karl Menger said that money is not necessarily a creation of the state. Money is any commodity, like it's, it's just, it's the most saleable commodity. By saleable, it means it's the most marketable commodity. And there are two aspects to marketability. One is spatial marketability, and the other one is temporal marketability. Spatial marketability is something that can be moved and transacted across space. So portability, right, divisibility, verifiability, scarcity, like all these things, well, it's kind of scarcity goes on both sides, but well, scarcity is actually more temporal marketability, but primarily think about portability and divisibility and fungibility and so on, right? That's one aspect to, you know, what makes a good money. The other aspect is temporal saleability or marketability, which is ensuring that your money retains its purchasing power over time. So protecting the fruits of your labor over time, temporal saleability. So the key ingredient for that or key requirement is scarcity, right? If you have 10 units of a particular money and, you know, when your kids get it, there's, oh, let's say this, you have 10 out of a million, you know, units. And when your kids get it, it's 10 out of a trillion units. You know, it's not very good, right? So scarcity is absolutely key there. And then durability as well, and history and all those types of things. So these are the factors that make a good money. But the key point for, you know, the newbies is money is not necessarily a creation of the state. And this is the core of the Bitcoin kind of philosophy or movement is the separation of money and state. And this is the question that you need, like people need to ask themselves, you know, should money and the state be separated? And the best analogy there is the separation of church and state. Most people, so, you know, many of your listeners, if they are newbies, although I suspect, well, I don't know what proportion of your listeners are newbies, but a complete newbie may be shocked by that, right? Just the idea of separation of money and state sometimes is like, oh my God, that's a treasonous notion. How could you even suggest that, right? But many people probably felt the same way about the separation of church and state during the medieval era in Europe. And if it's, you know, for thousands of years, the church and state were, you know, inseparably intertwined, you know, governmental authority, the state's authority and spiritual authority were intertwined, right? For thousands of years, you go back in time, you know, Hammurabi in Mesopotamia claimed to derive his powers from the gods, right? The pharaohs of ancient Egypt were seen as divine beings with sanctions from the gods, and these were instruments to control people, right? And then I think it was 1534 that Henry VIII, you know, separated from the Roman church because he wanted to get divorced, yeah, and, you know, and that was, again, you know, strengthening the union of church and state. It was only in the, I think it was, what, during the French Revolution and the US Constitution really that the church and state were formally separated. I mean, the word separation of church and state is actually, I think it's, I think it might be Jefferson talking about creating a wall of separation between church and state, and that's the First Amendment. So that was a huge pivotal moment in human history. It took strong men with vision to, you know, implement and execute that. The separation of money and state is arguably an even bigger, you know, it would be an even bigger moment in human history because of the importance of money and, you know, kind of for humanity. Humans have never had the ability to do that until now, right? So yeah, so that kind of leads into Bitcoin, I guess. So you've said about eight things that I want to follow up on there. So let's go through it kind of one at a time, in a good way, by the way. This was great. But when you talk about the spatial and temporal, like, elements of money, gold is obviously very good at the temporal side of things, but not so good at the spatial side of things. Can you just, for anyone that's listening, I just want to make sure that this is a very kind of easily accessible show, because I want this to be the kind of thing I can send to anyone. Like, why does gold fail at the spatial element there? And why does Bitcoin fix that? So I want to, yeah, let me talk about this, the question about what is Bitcoin's core innovation, and that will lead into gold, because there's a perfect analogy. You know, it's interesting, because when you're, I mean, there's thousands of pages and books that have been written about Bitcoin, and, you know, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of hours of podcasts and materials that have been recorded. But all you have to do, really, is go back to Satoshi's original emails, and you will find answers to virtually every question. Incredible, right? And so one of my favorite quote of Satoshi's is, you know, the one about the boring gray metal. He says, as a thought experiment, imagine there's a boring gray metal with nothing unique about it, other than the ability, it's not, you know, malleable, it's not shiny, it's not attractive, you know, nothing unique about it, except for the fact that you can transfer it over a communication channel, right? So that's essentially digital gold is what he was talking about there. So here's the thing, and I love Gigi, by the way, I don't know if you've, yeah, Gigi, I think he has been on the show when, a long time ago, yeah, but he's been a huge inspiration for my book. I love some of his analogies. So this was, for me, a big aha moment, and a light bulb moment, and that's why, let me talk about it for a second. So what is Bitcoin's core innovation? It is the creation of a digital bearer asset. Now, what does that mean? So we talk about peer-to-peer transfers, a peer-to-peer transaction is where I give you something, you take it and you walk away. We don't need a third party to monitor that I, you know, don't give that same thing to somebody else. I took a gold bar and I handed it to you, Danny, you took it from me, you turned around and you walked away, you have absolute assurance that that gold bar which you're holding in your hand is with you, and there is no way that I can give that same gold bar to somebody else. Why is that? Because the laws of physics prevent that gold bar from existing in more than one place at the same time, unless you're some kind of magician, or I'm some kind of magician, let's put that aside. But, you know, it's the laws of physics that prevent that from happening, right? That's the physical world. And that's why we can have, throughout history, peer-to-peer transactions were possible. Now, if I sent you a photograph over email or WhatsApp, right, I could turn around and send that same photo to a thousand other people and they would have identical copies of that. Why? Because the photo is just informational, it is just zeros and ones and information by nature is infinitely replicable at virtually no cost. And so the only way to ensure that I don't send that same photo that I sent you to a thousand other people is by having a trusted third party monitoring my WhatsApp or my email and confirming to you that, yes, Vijay has not sent that to anybody else, right. And that's how it has been for decades, like whatever, since, you know, we had online, you know, digital information and so on. What Satoshi solved was that he enabled you and I to transact digitally with you in Australia and me in London as if we were physically present. It's as if I gave you a gold bar and you took it and you took it from me and you turned around and walked away. You can do the same thing digitally, right. Now that is a paradigm-shifting invention. It has implications in the realms of economics, politics, you know, philosophy and everything else, right. And that's really what it is. So I think your original question was around gold, right. So why did gold not work out, right? It's kind of in the end, I mean, it's scarce, it's worked as money for thousands of years. How did it get corrupted? It got corrupted ostensibly because of its deficiencies around portability and divisibility and verifiability, right. So, you know, if you and I needed to transact in gold, like 500 years ago, I'd have to put, you know, slabs of gold in a ship and send it off and, you know, risk pirates, you know, robbing them along the way. I need to have security. It's not divisible, right. I can't transact in a small unit. It's not really, it's not verifiable. There's fools pirate everywhere, right. It's not fungible. It's fungible, but it's not any of these other things, right. And that was what justified paper money. So people said, okay, put all your gold in a vault and let's issue some paper on the back of that. Paper is much more, it's better to be easier to transport. It's more verifiable assuming, you know, there's trust involved, but it's supposedly verifiable, right. And so those were the justifications for paper money. But the moment there was trust introduced in the system, it started being abused. Whenever there's trust, the only reason to build trust is so you can abuse it at some point, right. So that was the origins of that. And then, so if you take the entire history of monetary history, you can summarize it as, and some people would disagree with it, but I'm just gonna, you know, let's just for simplicity, barter to like grains and other things, to precious metals, to paper backed by precious metals, to paper backed by nothing at all. That's the arc of monetary history, right. Now, what has Bitcoin done? It has solved portability. It's inconceivable to have greater portability. You can just literally remember 12 words and walk across the border with nothing but the shirt on your back, right. It has solved divisibility of quadrillions of sats and even more potentially if you need it. Perfectly verifiable, right. So in many ways, Bitcoin has made the original rationale for fiat redundant. So if you could go back in time and ask why was fiat introduced, it was because of all these deficiencies. But now all those deficiencies have been resolved. So you don't need fiat anymore. So I mean, that was very well, well said. But this is part of the reason why I've never got fully on board with the digital gold narrative. I know before you were saying you think that's one of the most powerful narratives in Bitcoin, but, and I agree in a sense of trying to explain this thing that from the outside looks very complicated, but then when you compare it to the fiat system, it's actually very simple. But as a way of explaining it, I think it's great. And I think it's a very accessible way of explaining it. But I also, this is a terrible analogy, but it's almost like to me calling an aeroplane, a flying horse, like because Bitcoin solves so many of the properties that gold couldn't, I feel like it's underselling it. And I feel like it maybe keeps Bitcoin in the store of value phase instead of foreseeing the future of it being a real medium exchange and a real unit of account. I don't know what you think about that. So it's maybe because people don't fully understand the word digital. So within that word digital is all these other properties that you just described. If it's digital, it's basically like an email. So built within that word is the assumption that it's as portable as an email. It's as transactable as an email is. So maybe it's a single word that doesn't do justice to all those properties that you get via it being digital. I agree with you. Do you think we need to have better narratives in Bitcoin? Yeah, for sure. I mean, in a perfect world, again, I think we would only be talking first principles. I think we would completely separate Bitcoin from crypto. You know, sure. Stable coins have come out of crypto. I'm not dissing anything about crypto, but let them do whatever they do. That's its own world. It's a different world. Yeah. It's a different world. So I would separate the two, but 99.9% of the world do not necessarily see that distinction. They see it all, it's all part of the same thing, Bitcoin and Dogecoin and so on are all interchangeable, right? Literally 99.9% of the world, I think, sees it that way. So I think that is, in terms of narratives, I think clarification of that separation and what we are disrupting. There's only one challenger to monetary policy and central banking and money itself, and that's Bitcoin. You need to understand that. I think that is the better narrative. And that's why I like digital gold, because I mean, we're in as particularly now in the last few months or the last few years, I think we are seeing this crazy move into gold being potentially, you know, I mean, we see some of the statistics, right? The dollar is now at 30 year lows in terms of its share of global reserves. It's just fallen to, what is it? 42%. It was 45, which was a 30 year low a few couple of months ago. Now it's just fallen to 42%. Gold has risen to 25%. There's some tectonic shifts that are happening. You see all the BRIC nations that are, you know, really loading up on gold. So I just, I like that path. It's again, to simplify things, it's just easier. It's an easier portfolio than this magic internet money. It's like, it's just a nicer, it's an easier, yeah, path really. Understand why gold and then, hey, then digital gold, right? I mean, gold, but it has all these deficiencies. So why not digital gold? And then you ask this question. So I just like that path better. Yeah, I do think that makes sense. And like, I've never been a gold bug, mainly because I never had any money before Bitcoin. And Bitcoin was the first thing that I found that was like a real store of value. And like the thing that I am very bullish on, is it moving to these different, like the medium of exchange and unit of account. And I just worry that the digital gold keeps it kind of stuck in that same place. But let's move on to the separation of money and state, because I think this is actually really interesting at the moment, especially with everything that's happening in the US. Obviously, the Trump admin are kind of, I struggle to say adopting Bitcoin, but they're at least pretending to kind of be open to Bitcoin. And this isn't necessarily like the separation of money and state, it's more Bitcoin being integrated into the state. I don't know how you kind of look at all of that. Yeah, I caution against, basically, I mean, it worries me that a lot of people adopt Bitcoin, because they hear what the President of the United States or whatever is saying about it, because that can change on a dial, panic sell, because, okay, like, you know, all the Democrats have come to power, they're going to reverse everything Trump did. And that's, you've not really understood the basic, the, you know, the fundamental reason why you're doing this. So, so it always concerns me, I'm very apprehensive of those types of narratives. But I did, there's a whole chapter in my book about, you know, Bitcoin as a reserve asset. And this was before the recent, when I wrote the book, you know, this wasn't really mainstream conversation, Trump hadn't been elected. But I spent some time thinking about it. So what struck me when I was studying, you know, I guess, political history, primarily, was was, you know, the Age of Enlightenment in Europe was was a key period in history, the 17th and 18th century. That was a time when individual liberty started to take precedence over absolute monarchy, it was key period, it was the first time when those kinds of ideologies came to the fore. And all these ideas of self sovereignty and, and libertarian philosophies and so on. I wouldn't say that it was the, you know, they were born during that era, but they really came to the forefront during that that period. The American forefathers were greatly influenced by those ideologies. And if you if you think about, I think, you know, Benjamin Franklin says, it is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority. It's crazy to think about, you know, those, that kind of a statement, right? Thomas Jefferson says, it is the natural progression of things for liberty to yield and for governments to gain ground over time, or something, I may be butchering it a bit, but something like that. Liberty to yield and for governments to gain ground over time, or something, I may be butchering it a bit, but something like that, right? And if you just think about the Constitution was largely to protect people from the state. Those are incredibly powerful sort of, you know, ideologies. And you think about where we are today, where we've just subjugated ourselves to, you know, the state and unquestioningly, unquestioningly, you know, accepted surveillance and, you know, loss of privacy and corruption of our money, right? So when I was thinking about all that, I can go on about it, right? The separation of powers within the UK, separation of powers in the UK, as well as the US, you know, I think, again, Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton, I think Alexander Hamilton says, you need to have ambition to counteract ambition. So it's sort of like different arms of the state challenging one another in order to not allow one arm to become, you know, absolutely powerful. What are all these things? It's decentralization, right? It's decentralized consensus, decentralized power. I can't help but think, like, I mean, when I read these things about American history, I can't help, or even English history, political history, these guys would have loved Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin is, in many ways, that it's like the digital embodiment of these, like, American values of, you know, self-sovereignty and so on. So it just made a lot of sense, and I really love that. And there's a chapter where I talk about that, and I talk about why, I mean, in the current environment where the dollar is waning in its power, rather than risking another challenging, you know, hostile nation to Western values, this currency, you know, coming to the fore, why not adopt Bitcoin, right? I mean, and it looks like gold actually might turn out to be the one that comes to the, you know, fore. At least first. Yeah, at least first. So then, again, like, why not digital gold, right? So, and especially given it aligns so well with Western values and so on. So I think people need to, well, when you talk about Trump, everything, people, you know, the Bitcoin strategic reserve and all these things, people should, it's great that we're having these conversations, and the Overton window, it's amazing that, you know, I mean, you and I have been around during a period where it would be, what I mean, inconceivable, it would have been laughed out of the room for saying these things. Not even that long ago. Yeah. So, I mean, it's great that we're having these conversations, but I think people need to, the important thing is that people need to be pushing this for the right reasons, right? And yeah, and that need, that requires asking those basic questions. This episode is brought to you by the massive legends Iron, the largest NASDAQ listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. Iron are not just powering the Bitcoin network, they're also providing cutting edge computing resources for AI, all backed by renewable energy. We've been working with their founders, Dan and Will, for quite some time now and have been really impressed with their values, especially their commitment to local communities and sustainable computing power. So whether you're interested in mining Bitcoin or harnessing AI compute power, Iron is setting the standard. Visit iron.com to learn more, which is I-R-E-N.com. 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And when you look at what's happening at the moment with privacy developers going to jail, we have basically the only way of realistically buying Bitcoin for the vast majority of people is through these sort of KYC exchange choke points. There's also government started to stack Bitcoin or stolen Bitcoin. Are we truly separating money and state? You know, there's so many attributes of, you know, there's permissionlessness, censorship resistance, unconfiscateability, and absolute scarcity. These are the four core properties of Bitcoin, right? And they're all very, very valuable. But I think I'm one of those people that would say that the one property that is a little bit, you know, everyone's created equal, but some are more equal than others. There's one property more, you know, a little bit ahead of everyone else. And that is the absolute scarcity, right? It's more important. It's a little bit more important than censorship resistance. It's a little more important than, you know, unconfiscateability, permissionless. It's a little bit more important because that is at the core of it. And as long as that cannot be corrupted, Bitcoin cannot be co-opted. Like, I don't care. I mean, Hal Finney was talking about Bitcoin banks, right? In the first few months of coming across whatever, for a couple of years or whatever, coming across Bitcoin. None of this is new. He didn't see that as he was like as cypherpunk as it gets, right? And he didn't see a problem with that. The key piece that needs to be incorruptible is the 21 million. And I don't think any of this co-opting and so on and so forth is a threat to that. Because people can always, I mean, look, if you're just going to put all your money in a Bitcoin treasury company or something, then, I mean, I'm sorry, that's just, that's on you. Okay. Like, you know, if you understand Bitcoin, you need to have a significant portion of it in cold storage because you're, and then maybe, okay, you have a little bit in these other leveraged products, right? You get more Bitcoin, but with a view to ultimately hopefully selling that and getting more Bitcoin, right? That is the kind of idea. So that's on you. And as things stand, I think it's stopping you from selling your Bitcoin treasury companies or whatever and just buying cold storage Bitcoin, right? So I don't think there's any, at least I don't see a major risk to co-option or corruption of it. I think the greatest risk to Bitcoin is from within. I think throughout Bitcoin's history, like the fork wars, you know, the block size wars was probably the greatest threat that ever existed. I don't think any government banning it or co-opting and all of that was ever a risk to Bitcoin, but if there ever is a risk to Bitcoin, I think it comes from within. So a bit earlier in the conversation, you were talking about the ramifications that Bitcoin has on both politics and philosophy. I know that you have a large part in the book about both of those things. Can we go through them one by one? Like what are the ramifications this has on politics? I think the biggest implication for politics is, well, it's the greatest tool that has ever existed against authoritarian states. I mean, Alex Gladstein was very kind to write the foreword for my book. I think he's written a lot about this and he has some great stats, but I think it's something like 75% of the world lives under some form of authoritarian regime, you know, kind of system currently. And these are states where, I mean, it's like, you know, you think about the banking, the financial banking system that works, it's kind of the backbone of our day-to-day existence, right? And when that system is weaponized against you, it's just not only that it doesn't work for you and what is it, one in three people are unbanked or one in four people of our fellow humans are unbanked. They don't even have bank accounts. And a much larger share of those people have the banking system weaponized against them, right? Parts of the Middle East or, you know, Africa and so on. For such people, Bitcoin is hope. You know, it's the only thing they have to fight back. I mean, it's like, you know, sort of, what's that, there was, I think Alex Gladstein talked about this new law that was proposed, I'm not sure if it was passed, but this law that was proposed in Iran where if any woman who's seen not wearing a hijab or just, you know, dressed in, you know, appropriate attire, it would be fined by an automatic deduction from their bank accounts. So there's no room for, you know, paying a fine is one thing where you can either ignore it or challenge it or whatever, but waking up one morning and looking at your bank account and half of your money has disappeared because you apparently, you know, was seen without your hijab. What recourse do these people have? And people, you know, in the United States and the UK and so on sit on their high horses in their, you know, privileged worlds and poke fun at Bitcoin. What solution do they have for that woman in Iran, right? And now imagine a digital asset that is permissionless, censorship resistant, you know, unconfiscatable and absolutely scarce where, you know, she can just store the fruits of her labor beyond the reach of anyone. Um, so that's, you know, I think that is the biggest political, um, implication of, um, um, Bitcoin. Um, but talk about that. The other one I think in the political realm is, and this is what I think needs a lot of, a lot more, um, work and, and, and it hasn't been explored sufficiently. is Bitcoin's impact on violence. And this is actually, Trace Meyer has written a lot about this, or he talked a lot about this back in the day. But if you think about, throughout human history, the majority of violent acts have been committed in order to acquire or defend physical property. These wars for or to defend against physical property have shaped the maps of nations and the course of human civilization. The vast majority of human strife through history has been driven by the acquisition or defense of physical property. The resource curse is this thing where countries that are resource rich have been the ones that have faced the most conflict. I mean, colonialism, Western Europe, the UK, went to India and parts of Europe. Why? Because of physical resources that they wanted to take. Now, what happens when you move from physical wealth to dematerialized wealth? I think people have just not appreciated the power of that. You don't need vast armies and fighter jets and tanks and naval forces to defend your physical property. You just need cryptography. So the cost of defense of your property is just plummeted. And you could use those resources for other purposes in your respective countries. So that is really huge and really underappreciated. To me, that is the biggest political implication of dematerialized wealth, which is Bitcoin. It's funny you bring up Alex Gladstein. I've just got into Bali this morning. There's a conference happening out here, and I'm really curious to hear what the conversation that they're having in a place like this will be. Because you go to a conference in the US and everything is just talking about the financialization of Bitcoin in general. And Alex will be out here. He's bringing a whole squad from the Human Rights Foundation. And again, back to narratives, I think that is one of the most powerful narratives. When Alex talks about the things that Human Rights Foundation are doing, and obviously it's not just Alex. His amazing leader are there, but Arsh and CK and all the people working there. It's impossible to ignore. And when you look at the background you've come from going through Harvard and Goldman Sachs, do you think that is one of the reasons that people from those kind of backgrounds find it so hard to understand Bitcoin? Because they are coming from a very privileged position. I mean, so this is why I actually asked Alex to write the foreword for my book. Because, yeah, I agree. That is one of the most underappreciated and just... Most people would be shocked. When you say Bitcoin and human rights in the same sentence, they probably just go like, what are you talking about? That, you know, how? This is, you know, because it's internet Ponzi scheme. Like, what are you talking about? How does that have anything to do with human rights? And that's why I wanted him, and I'm very glad that he agreed to do it. Because it is the most underappreciated aspect. It's the permissionlessness, the lifeline that it offers to unbanked people around the world. What is it? 90% of South Sudan is unbanked. Can you believe that? That's a country where 90% is unbanked. You know, 200 million people plus in India are unbanked. 60 million people in Mexico or something like that are unbanked. And all these people have cell phones. And so, yeah, you just connect to the internet, open a wallet, and you're banked. That's huge. But people, it's massively underappreciated because... But I can only blame the media for that, right? You have the media constantly talking misinformation. The only thing they say about is volatility. You know, Aaron, what's his name, Andrew Sorkin, or CNN, just constantly obsessed with volatility. It's cannot see beyond volatility. It's just a complete obsession. Yeah. And I've spoken about this before on the podcast, but again, with the Human Rights Foundation, a couple of years ago now, I was out in Malawi, which by many metrics is the poorest country in the world. And a few days before we got there, their currency was devalued by 40% overnight. And if you want to talk about volatility, that is volatility. Bitcoin is very stable comparatively. And this is the place where Bitcoin can truly be a lifeline. And don't get me wrong. I think this is coming to the rest of the world. But right now, they're the places that need it most. The tricky thing is kind of the education and infrastructure to get Bitcoin to those people. But, I mean, that's why it's important to have people at the Human Rights Foundation doing what they're doing. Yeah. And the volatility argument, honestly, is something that has, you know, again, the obsession with it, it blows my mind. Because there's such cognitive dissonance over it, right? Because if volatility is about, like, what is Bitcoin disrupting? Bitcoin is disrupting money, right? Of course, it's going to be volatile versus what it is disrupting. What were you expecting, right? I mean, you talk about, like, okay, so if volatility versus fiat, volatility versus the dollar is bad, by extension, then no volatility should be really good. That's a stable coin. What are you talking about? So, you know, if Bitcoin was successful in disrupting money, of course that the path to achieving that disruption was going. I mean, disruption is always volatile. The path to disruption is always volatile. It is not going to be linear or incremental. It's got to be volatile. Because, you know, it takes time for Bitcoin to permeate through the psyche of humanity. People need to understand it. It takes time for people to understand it. And human understanding is volatile. Human emotions are volatile. So until a critical mass of humanity understands Bitcoin, of course it's going to be volatile, right? And I don't know how that, why that surprises people. And on the other hand, volatility is falling, right? And this is the other thing. Like, you just need to take the right time horizon. If you take a four-year time horizon, look at a four-year moving average of Bitcoin, 200-week moving average, which Adam Back really loves to talk about, because that is a smooth up, you know, 45-degree line that has never had a single down day. It is the most non-volatile sort of line. And if you're a young person, you should be taking at least a four-year investment horizon on your investment. Why are you looking at it on a minute-by-minute basis or an hourly, but you should be taking, you know, invest in it and come back five years later or 10 years later for that matter, right? So it's just, it's really frustrating, but yeah. I mean, I do think that's interesting though, because like my time horizon when it comes to Bitcoin isn't four years, it's 20 years, 30 years. Like this is something I'm putting away for a long time. But on the positive side of that, I do think the time horizon that we're going to have to push again as like a narrative in this is going to reduce. Like it seems like volatility is reducing. I think that's a good thing for the adoption of Bitcoin. I think give it a few more years and we could be talking about just put money away for two years and then maybe it's one year. And then maybe like you just put money away. And I think that's going to be a massive positive. It's funny, like this conversation unintentionally has been kind of all about narratives. And one of the things you talk about in the book, and I know other people have written about this, is Bitcoin being like a mirror. Like whatever you want to see in Bitcoin, you kind of can. And I think that is one of the most interesting parts about it. Like if you're a very progressive person, you know, Jason Meyer wrote books on this. Like you can see your progressive ideals reflected back to you in Bitcoin. If you're very conservative, you can. If you're anarchist, you can. And I think while that is very important in Bitcoin, it's also one of the things that make it difficult to understand. And how do you look at Bitcoin in that sense? Yeah, I mean, you see yourself in it in a way, but it also forces you to ask yourself who you are. It forces you to ask yourself where you fit on the continuum between left and right. Are you, you know, or libertarian versus fascist? Where do you fit, right? Because those are ideologies. How important is privacy to you? How important is self-sovereignty to you? So it forces you to ask those questions. It also says a lot about who you are in the sense that do you have the intellectual humility? Do you have the open-mindedness to admit that maybe you were wrong about it? Maybe you haven't seen something, you know, sort of. It takes a lot of intellectual humility and intellectual honesty as well. So it forces you to do that. And it reflects back, you know, it kind of, if you reject it and you're not, it shows you who you are in that respect. And I mean, yeah, I close with that. That's my closing chapter in the book because I think, you know, it comes a full circle. It really kind of, you come back to yourself at the end of the day. And humans by nature, they prefer the status quo, right? And that's because, you know, it's risk aversion. And throughout history, and I have this list of, you know, inventions and what people said about it. You know, historically you have, of course, Paul Krugman talking about the internet being a fad in the 1990s. You know, every single major invention was completely trashed by people when it was introduced. Like even the bicycle, you know, it's sort of, it's crazy. The bicycle was completely, people said that, oh, it's, you know, it leads to all kinds of health disorders. It's going to destroy, because women were riding bicycles around, it's going to lead to the degradation of morality in women and all these types of scaremongering, which has eerie parallels sort of with Bitcoin, right? So, yeah, it shows you all these things about yourself. Like, I mean, yeah, kind of, are you open-minded enough? Are you progressive enough to at least explore it? And then maybe adopt it and advocate for it, but at least, you know, be open-minded enough to accept that, yeah, maybe you got it wrong. Maybe there's more to this than what you're hearing on CNBC or reading in the New York Times. It's the freedom virus. So when you talk about the ramifications on philosophy, this is one of the most interesting parts to me. I think we kind of touched on it a little bit there, but do you want to expand on that? Yeah, let me, I can add some context to that, because like Bitcoin has definitely changed me as a person. And I know to people who may not be like deep into Bitcoin, that might sound like a wild statement, but things like time preference change your life in a huge way. And if you have money that you can actually put away and trust that it's going to retain value over time and like increase in fiat amount, like it does change the way that you view the world and the way that you interact with the world. Yeah. So, yeah, it comes back to the origins of consumerism, which ends in economics. So fiat money depends on debt. It needs debt to keep going, because you need to be able to spend, you know, future productivity today, right? You need inflation, you need that, all those things to work in order for it to be sustainable. So it encourages debt, it encourages over-consumption and which in turn leads to environmental degradation and the destruction of civilization and culture along the way. So I talk about that and I talk about, I mean, it's visible everywhere, like architecture, you know, it's sort of, you just look at the modern architecture, which is built to be, you know, made redundant in a few years when it's not fashionable anymore, as opposed to, you know, really a robust, beautiful architecture from a few hundred years ago. I mean, I feel like you being in London, there's probably no clearer city to see that. You see like a beautiful 15th century churches and then just horrible glass buildings everywhere. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So these are all, you know, by-products of fiat. They're all by-products of consumerism. They're all by-products of debt and just moral degradation in society that, you know, that has resulted from this system that we live in. So what Bitcoin offers is a way to go back to a bygone era of hard money. And if you think about it, I mean, that's why there wouldn't have been a way to do that. You know, that's why it's so powerful, Bitcoin, because it empowers individuals. It's this non-violent, you don't need a war, you don't need to have any kind of conflict, you don't need to have a revolution. It's a silent, peaceful revolution that all you need to do is transfer your value into this new, unconfiscatable, permissionless, censorship-resistant asset that just exists in the ether. And that's all you need to do. You don't need to pick up a, you know, whatever, you don't need to revolt against the state and pitchforks and all of that, right? So that's incredibly powerful. I think it was really important to do a very sort of fundamental Bitcoin show. And I know we've only touched on all of these things kind of quite briefly and very sort of high level. You have an open invite to come back whenever you want, and we can maybe get into more depth on them. Maybe the one thing I will maybe, you know, sort of mention is, and this was the basis for the book as well, aside from the first principles aspect of, you know, describing things and asking the basic questions, was also the holistic aspect, and that's what the cover is. It's, you know, technology, economics, politics, and philosophy as a Venn diagram and then Bitcoin at the center. And this was, we talked briefly about it, but, you know, the blind men and the elephant parable. So this is the first page of the book, and I loved this. Honestly, I opened the book, read that page, I was like, right, this is what I'm going to read. So just for your listeners, so this is, it's an ancient Indian parable, actually. So you've got these blind men, and you have an elephant, and they're asked to touch different parts of the elephant and then try to describe what an elephant is. They don't know what an elephant is. So one guy goes and touches the elephant's tail, and he says, oh, the elephant is like a rope. Another guy touches the elephant's leg and says, oh, the elephant is like a tree trunk. And then another guy touches the elephant's trunk and says, oh, the elephant is like a snake, right? So I think that's, well, we saw that's a good analogy for Bitcoin because you've got CNBC that's, for them, Bitcoin is only about volatility, or the New York Times, Bitcoin is only about the environment. So you've got to look at things holistically to see the full elephant. It's like the blind men all of a sudden got their sight back and saw the holistic elephant, and I think that's Bitcoin. And that's the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Humans are wired to see things holistically. So if you look at it in a silo, if you only look at it from its economic aspects, you're going to miss its implications for the people living in authoritarian regimes, its political aspects. If you only look at that without understanding its technology, words like censorship resistance and permissionlessness and scarcity are going to be just words. You need to understand where they derive their meaning from. So that was my idea, and that's why I tried to cover all of them holistically, bring them all together, because that's the only way to really see Bitcoin for what it is. And that's one of the reasons why I think the last chapter being about Bitcoin as a mirror is such a good callback to that very opening parable, because I think when it comes... I've basically stopped trying to orange-pill people, like just random people in my life. I've spoken to everyone I care about. I've done nearly 10 years of this, and some people have got it, some people have chosen to ignore it, and that's fine. But now if anyone comes to me and asks about Bitcoin, I always try and start with getting them to ask the questions they want to understand from me, rather than trying to explain something to them. Because I think when you try and explain Bitcoin, because it is this huge behemoth of a thing that touches so many different elements, you can end up just describing the rope, or you can end up just describing the tree trunk. It's very hard to give a full holistic picture, which is, again, why I think this book is great. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, Danny. But like I say, Vijay, anytime you want to come on, I'm more than happy to do it. We should do another one and get into a little more depth. We've kept this quite surface level, but it's an important show. I think for me, I've been doing a lot of shows on treasury companies and macro stuff, and it's nice to get back to fundamentals of Bitcoin. This is one that I'll share out with friends who are trying to get interested in Bitcoin. But we should do one where we do more of a deep dive at some point. Yeah, I'd love that. Yeah, perfect. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate the time, Vijay. Where do you want to send anyone who doesn't know who you are, doesn't know where to find you? So my Twitter handle is Vijay Selvam XO. That's probably the best place to find me. And buy Principles of Bitcoin. It's a really good book. But yeah, thank you, Vijay. I appreciate the time, man. And we shall speak again at some point. Next time I'm in England, we should do one in person. Yeah, yeah, I'd love that. All right. Thank you, mate.