Hi, Andreas. The hard money aspect of Bitcoin has the potential to remove from governments…the ability to steal their citizens’ wealth through inflation, in order to fund corruption and wars. I’m wondering, do you feel that custodial wallets and “bitcoin banks” may threaten the hard money aspect?
Oh, they completely undermine it. If you can’t steal through inflation, you steal directly. One way to do that: go in and seize all of thebitcoin directly from the custodial accounts, which will start happening in different countries.
Depending on how you look at it…In modern societies, bank robberies happen in a very different way than they used to. Today, the most successful bank robber is someone with a banking license who steals money from the bank. But it’s not really “stealing,” because then they legalize what they did and no one goes to jail. That’s far more successful than the silly old way of [holding up] a bank branch with a machine gun.
Turns out, a banking license is a far better way to rob a bank. Being a [financial] regulator, [that is] even better than having a banking license if you want to rob a bank. Being a central banker of the European Union allows you to rob entire countries, like what happened to Greece and Cyprus. Again, far better than using a gun. You take ten million people hostage [instead].
The risks we are facing in custodial systems, resulting from centralization and concentration of power, becomes systemic risks. When you have institutional custodial systems like that, the people who rob them are [those] who have authority. They don’t need inflation to do that.
Two-part question. Are you aware of Ryan Bundy, the Bundy Ranch, the Bunkerville stand-off, or Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, where people stood up against the federal government?
Sure.
Bundy is running for governor of Nevada. One of the [points he ran on] is bringing blockchain into the government.
Is there a question or is this a political ad?
Both. [Laughter] What would be your suggestion to implement governance into the current government?
I don’t think blockchains fundamentally change governance unless they are decentralized. Most of the proposals I hear from people who grabbed the word ‘blockchain’ are indistinguishable from saying “database” or “cloud,” which is a simple litmus test.
Take the proposal of your favourite “blockchain” project, [such as one] someone proposed in government, replace the word “blockchain” with “database,” and if it still reads correctly then it is not anything interesting. It is a highly centralized database, where one party is in charge; that’s business-as-usual with fairy dust on top. Almost all of the government-driven blockchains I have heard are fundamentally about asserting control over it, which means they are business-as-usual, disguised as something revolutionary and they’re not.
At the moment, we can’t even get [many] people to use this as money [first], without sacrificing their independence and autonomy; as I just mentioned, they go to custodial services.
I don’t see any way that you could have people use it to vote, for example. The problems we have in our democracy… have nothing to do with validating whether the votes were counted correctly or there was fraud. The problems we have are disenfranchisement on a massive scale and complete voter apathy.
The only two choices you have in our voting system are red Goldman Sachs versus blue Goldman Sachs. Picking the color isn’t democracy.