The Lies Around Inflation & Why Bitcoin Is The Solution to Our ‘Broken’ Economy
Reclamation Radio Transcript
Scott
[00:00:00] We have been really hoodwinked about inflation. The common perception is that inflation is some kind of necessary lubricant for the economy that keeps things working, and it is truly state-sponsored theft. The system is not broken. It’s working perfectly. It requires that money become less valuable. It makes government debt less onerous over time.
Scott
Bitcoin is something you can own that has basically been engineered to increase in price forever. Really, what you’re doing with Bitcoin is opting out of the theft that happens when your money is made less valuable. It’s very likely that Bitcoin is the most significant invention any of us have been alive for.
Kelly
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Kelly
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Kelly
Hi, and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. I am Dr. Kelly Brogan, and today I sit down with my friend Scott Dedels, who is the co-founder of Block Rewards, the host of Block Reward Podcast, and the author of The Dao of Bitcoin, and who is someone that despite many, many years of my bestie Tara’s passionate and enthusiastic endorsement of Bitcoin, Scott is responsible for really helping me to move beyond skepticism because [00:02:00] I felt so inspired by his perspective, which is really metaphysical, around this…
Kelly
what I’d only ever thought of as an investment, that I decided to get back in the game. And today, we talk about why it makes sense to treat Bitcoin as your savings account. Why gold and real estate and these other seemingly tangible assets have gross limitations relative to Bitcoin. We talk about the paradox of Bitcoin’s scarcity as responsible for its value, right?
Kelly
Because you would think a more abundant, infinite, you know, ever-inflating thing is more valuable. And of course, we all know from lived experience that that is not the case. And we talk about why understanding Bitcoin will invite you to shift how you [00:03:00] conceptualize time, and why Bitcoin will ultimately create an unfuckable with timeline for the collective, which if you’ve ever come to question history, dates, what it is that we’ve been told about what’s gone down in our experience on this plane, that is a very profound consideration.
Kelly
So I hope that this is inspirational and practical and brings you into a deeper understanding of the nature of Bitcoin. Welcome, Scott, to the show.
Scott
Thanks, Kelly. It’s great to be here.
Kelly
Okay. So I have come to conclude that of the many perspectives, opinions, worldviews, and reframes that I value on myriad subjects A sort of Occam’s razor to connecting with someone who shares those [00:04:00] seems to be cryptocurrency and specifically like the Bitcoin world.
Kelly
And what I mean by that is that when I’m meeting somebody and I’m sort of sussing them out, right? Like I’m, I’m getting a feel for what their belief system might be. And I’ve talked a lot of times about how I observe these, these coherent fields of consciousness, right? Where when you believe– when you’re very political, for example, you are likely also to be, especially conservative politics, but even sort of like RFK politics, you are likely to have other accompanying beliefs.
Kelly
Like you might be very concerned about Lyme disease and parasites, you might be a globerther, you might be an anti-vaxxer, right? And it’s sort of like these– it’s like a diathesis, as it’s referred to in medicine. It’s like a collection of beliefs, right? And you pull a thread, and it often comes with other, you know, ideology-based, uh, perspectives.
Kelly
And I’ve noted more and more that [00:05:00] when I meet somebody who is very knowledgeable, so not just like, you know, has a, a side investment, but very knowledgeable about cryptocurrency and specifically Bitcoin, they’ve already engaged in inquiry that’s very familiar to me, and often we are already on the same page.
Kelly
So when you and I met at a dear friend’s wedding, that I had that, uh, similar experience, right? And when we were sort of rapping about, you know, things that we might have in common, but maybe not, right? So we, we weren’t really sure. It turned out that we shared beliefs on so many things that I, like, quickly, you know, uh, decided to include you in our collegial meetings, right?
Kelly
Like our, our closed-door meetings with our– my favorite people. And I wonder if we can start there because I know that you talk about, especially in interviews that you’ve done and in your book, The Dao of Bitcoin [00:06:00] How learning about Bitcoin as a finance bro, if I could affectionately refer to you as that.
Kelly
Learning about Bitcoin was a spiritual inflection point for you. It wasn’t necessarily an intellectual one or nec– you know, like a financial reframe. It was a spiritual, maybe even like cataclysm. And to me, that makes a lot of sense. The way that we’ll unpack that in this conversation is your specific brand of insight when it comes to the significance, meaning existential, metaphysical of this.
Kelly
I don’t know if I– we even call it a financial framework. You tell me what we call it. But you had an experience, right? And I want to track back to that because I think that it’s something I perceive, but I don’t totally understand because I have a lot of blind spots when it comes to understanding economics and history and all these things I’ve, like, been invited to reconsider, uh, my assumptions around.
Kelly
And I’m really delighted to [00:07:00] have the opportunity to pick your brain about this because I know there’s so much that I still have to learn. So maybe, maybe take us back to when you first learned about cryptocurrency and blockchain and all of the associated concepts, and help us understand why that had spiritual meaning, why that was a consciousness shift for you.
Scott
Sure. Yeah. I think for me, you know, it, it did start… I came from a background of traditional finance and had been in that world for around fifteen years, and this journey sort of all started with me in twenty twenty where, you know, uncoincidentally, I think there– that was a time where the great awakening as a term started getting thrown around.
Scott
I think there’s very s– an, an interesting thread to pull on there that, you know, the term the great reset and the great awakening kind of became simultaneously [00:08:00] popularized. And for me, and for a lot of people that I knew it, you know, living up in Canada, the, the country shut down, and we were really, like, locked in our houses.
Scott
And all of a sudden, all of the noise that produces the sort of general distraction of the nine-to-five world was pau-paused. And, you know, I think for a lot of people, in the absence of that hustle, there was an opportunity to really think. And I started down the journey originally because at the time, I was doing a lot of work consulting for pension plans, which is what I was doing.
Scott
And In Canada, the Canadian government started really exercising a level of financial intervention during the pandemic that was totally unprecedented. We, we were creating money in a way that I just– I couldn’t understand how this could possibly work. [00:09:00] And, you know, paying businesses to stay closed, paying employees to stay home.
Scott
I mean, like, we were just giving free money away to everyone. And I originally came at the problem because I was just worried about, you know, pensions are built in a really specific way, a mix of assets that are designed to sort of mitigate volatility and produce like a long horizon output that’s reliable.
Scott
And that system is a b- um, built on a bedrock that has evolved over decades and We- if you all of a sudden start creating all of this money, like, what does it mean? And it caused me just to start wondering, you know, what money e-even is. And, uh, so I, I went to university as a history student. I had all kinds of background in the rise and fall of empires and the history, the history of architecture and money, but I didn’t have the background in sort of finance and economics.
Scott
And so I actually [00:10:00] spent lockdown reading books that I’d taken out from the library, economics textbooks, and eventually got recommended a, a book by a Canadian technologist and entrepreneur named Jeff Booth. It’s called The Price of Tomorrow. And The Price of Tomorrow is not explicitly a book about Bitcoin at all.
Scott
It’s a book about technology. And Jeff’s thesis in that book is that sort of the intrinsic nature of technology itself is that it gets adopted as the result of representing an improvement to something that existed prior. And so it m- either makes something e-easier to produce or cheaper or both. And if it didn’t, we wouldn’t adopt it.
Scott
And so, so the nature of technology itself is deflationary. Technology should be making everything cheaper and everything more abundant. And the thesis of the book is that it’s impossible for us as ordinary people in the economy to realize the benefits of those changes because we exist in a monetary system that [00:11:00] harvests sort of the economic productivity at the top when they create money out of thin air.
Scott
And this was a big aha for me, you know. And I think that to your point about Bitcoiners maybe having an alignment with other sort of, you know, f- people in your circle or a, a commonality, the questions about the basis of how our monetary system work as a whole are really uncomfortable. And burrowing into that rabbit hole requires a successive willingness to let go of things that you thought were real and held true for a very long time.
Scott
And it gets really uncomfortable. And, you know, like, so there’s a very… For me, you know, Price of Tomorrow kinda shocked me because I kind of thought Bitcoin was a scam or, you know, I’d been told by the TV that it was a internet Ponzi scheme or, you know, maybe like a flash in the [00:12:00] pan thing. And, you know, the book really portrays it in a very convincing way as a very serious innovation and important technology.
Scott
You go from there, and you start wondering, you know, like, what, what is the problem that Bitcoin was created to address? And Studying Bitcoin then gets you into the history of money, how money is created, how the banking system works, and yeah, can be very dislocating because it fundamentally is so different from everything that we think we understand about money.
Scott
And I actually think this is one of the major obstacles that most people arrive at with Bitcoin as a roadblock intellectually is we, we have been conditioned to think about money and wealth and the accumulation of wealth in a certain way. And Bitcoin effectively works counterintuitively and may-maybe even opposite to [00:13:00] everything we think we know.
Scott
And for a lot of people, that’s about as far as they can get.
Kelly
I love that you pointed that out because I’ve actually sort of playfully characterized this threshold you’re, you’re referencing of like, I can go no further with my inquiry, right? Like I can deconstruct no more of my reality. You know, you can, you can question medicine but then not cosmology.
Kelly
Or you can question, you know, uh, education or, you know, it’s, it’s there are these silos of inquiry that a lot of folks get sort of I don’t wanna say stuck in ’cause that implies like they should be moving somewhere else, but it’s pattern. It’s a pattern that I’ve, I’ve noted. And so I have playfully characterized that threshold of inquiry as related to like a father wound actually.
Kelly
Because when you must assert yourself as knowing for sure that there remains even a shred of truth and shared [00:14:00] reality with what authority handed down to us, there– you’re still almost like hoping in your child heart that there’s love there. I don’t know. That’s how I, I see it, and I relate to it, having moved through so many of these shifts my-myself.
Kelly
So I, I do think that, or at least I feel that the nature of inquiry when it comes to the financial system runs very deep. Like it’s very root chakra stuff, right? And I wonder if, if you could sort of summarize like what felt for you and what you think are these like pillars of deconstruction that are necessary to engage when you are ready to make the shift, right?
Kelly
Like do you think there are people, for example, out there trading crypto who like have never asked these questions? Like is it possible to like engage with the concept and buy into it and believe in it and You know, trade in it, maybe even become professional in it [00:15:00] without ever getting into the metaphysics and philosophy and these deeper, more existential questions?
Kelly
Or do you think it’s like part of the embrace of this shift? ‘Cause I imagine you can kinda like dabble in it, but what happened with, with you was this, uh… It was paradigmatic, right? Like, it was an identity shift that allowed you to probably individuate as a man in a way that wouldn’t have been possible had you not been ready to let go of these core assumptions and foundational beliefs that you had lived with your entire life.
Kelly
So can you talk about what those core beliefs are, right? Like, about money and fiat specifically, you know, and, and And what was asked of you in this shift? And, uh, just because I imagine it’s archetypal, and anybody who’s really making it is going to have to allow these walls to crumble as well.
Scott
Yeah.
Scott
Maybe… And I’ll, [00:16:00] I’ll try to take this in two ways, uh, because I think there’s sort of two questions there. The first one is, can people who are involved in this stop at a certain point and still be fine? And the answer to that is totally yes. There are lots of people who, in Bitcoin they call it number go up technology, and it’s a sort of like a, a, uh, the base understanding that Bitcoin is m- is a, is a something you can own that has basically been engineered to increase in price forever.
Scott
And it does that because there is a finite number of them, and you– the first thing you learn about money when you start studying Bitcoin is that our money system requires an infinite expanding of all currencies forever. And if they were to stop doing that, the entire thing would implode. So money, currency, the value of currency is intimately connected to the total amount of it.
Scott
And the more there is of it, the less valuable the individual [00:17:00] unit is. And so this has to carry on into infinity, and that basically means that, you know, they’re just one can be a reference point for the other. And so without knowing anything else, you can understand that there’s a high likelihood that this thing will continue to go up in price in the currency you’re measuring it in because our money is designed to become less valuable on purpose.
Scott
The system is not broken. It’s working perfectly. It, it requires that money become less valuable. It makes government debt less onerous over time, and, you know, this is why our parents went to movies for a nickel and now they’re twenty dollars. Like, this process is underway, and it has been underway and it, and it is, you know, it is now.
Scott
So if you only know that it’s gonna go up, and there’s nothing wrong with that, and a lot of people do kind of stop there. And if they’ve understood that, they can probably make some [00:18:00] good choices without needing to go any deeper. For me, where I branched, you know, I’m– I had all this accumulated knowledge of you know, courses that I have had to take professionally to do the work that I was doing, and then graps– sort of grasp the initial, like, pang of what if everything I thought was wrong?
Scott
And what does that mean for, like, the advice that I had been giving people and how I might feel about continuing to give that advice moving forward? And that was ultimately why I ended up having to kinda U-turn my life and because it, that, what I came to understand is, is really actually not possible to, to do that kind of within the confines of the mainstream financial system right now.
Scott
And it, it is changing, but it’s, it’s [00:19:00] not changing nearly and fast enough for me So I think there’s, you know, a big one is there– and this relates to your idea around father wound. There’s a certain kind of Stockholm syndrome that comes along with government money, and it’s absolutely intentional. So money is a technology that we invented to originally solve something called the coincidence of wants, which is that bartering economies can function when there’s a certain number of participants or complexity.
Scott
And it– you know, if I have beets and you have milk, it works if we want those opposite things. But as soon as we need to involve other people to trade, now you need something in the middle that lets us allow to do that. And money is meant to do a few different things. And this is like massively conden-condensing the, the in– the innovation of the technology of money.
Scott
But sort of the long story short is we arrived at a place [00:20:00] a, a little over a hundred years ago where governments operated on a monopoly of who gets to say what money is. And that’s really not how it was for the entirety of human history until, you know, sort of the turn of the twentieth century. And that became the start of a real sort of like psychological apparatus that also is highly interwoven with trust in the state.
Scott
And so it’s no accident that our money features the likenesses of recognizable people from history and, you know, places from your– wherever you live. Like all of this actually is by design, and it goes together to give people enough information about what they think money is that they can stop there.
Scott
Money is the thing with the picture of the person I know on it and the White House. Perfect. And so if you put that side by side with this idea that, so why does [00:21:00] that money become less valuable? And it’s not an accident. And so you can learn very quickly that it’s not an accident. So this money that we are legally forced to use because it is, you know, like you start getting into using alternate forms of money, and it depends on where you live, but there are various things that just aren’t al-allowed.
Scott
Like in Canada, you can only pay for a home with Canadian dollars And anything else is illegal. So we are forced to use this money, and it does sort of degrade over time on purpose. And so why does it do that? And what, what does that mean? Who, who knows this? You know, it– there’s a crazy thing about central banks that they are represented as arms of the government.
Scott
Like the US Federal Reserve has a very governmenty sounding name to it, [00:22:00] but they’re essentially private banks. Like the creation of money is private, and it’s a system that has really evolved into, you know, this predatory system where like I mentioned in Jeff Booth’s book, how that ener– monetary energy is siphoned out.
Scott
It doesn’t go nowhere. The system is designed to trap people in debt. And as you pay interest on that debt, you’re– we’re all put on a hamster wheel that is also designed to get harder to twist because the, as money becomes less valuable, you need more of it to maintain even what you had in the first place.
Scott
And that drives on all of these subsequent behaviors that we’ve internalized and normalized, like growing money, you know, like investing to become wealthy or, you know, to get ahead. [00:23:00] And, uh, there’s, there’s just, there’s a lot to unpack there because when money worked better, uh, meaning like when money lost its value slower, we used to be a lot less risky with how we thought about what we needed to do with our money.
Scott
So there’s kind of three things you can do with money. You can spend it, you can save it, or you can invest it. And this is something that actually right in front of my very eyes over the course of my career transformed and really accelerated in two thousand and eight when we started ramping up the creation of money.
Scott
And like to give people just a sense of like how much this problem is accelerating, something like forty to forty-five percent of all of the US dollars in existence today were created in the last five years So it’s a problem that’s speeding up, and this is why people are really starting to [00:24:00] notice that the rate at which prices are going up is– seems to be getting faster.
Scott
So this is a problem that, that’s has been accelerating over time, and it definitely started more in two thousand and eight. What started to happen during that time was a, a gradual fusion of saving and investing. And m- as money started to work worse, we needed to think of saving as, like, having your savings invested in the S&P 500.
Scott
And so we, we… You know, you can’t do nothing with your money if it’s designed to expire, and that’s a really, like, underlying thing that causes… Like, everybody has computed this on some level. We just haven’t really thought about how absurd it is, you know, because we-we’re, we’re caught in the rat race. And so I guess the, the next step for me of thinking about why this [00:25:00] innovation is important is I think that most people actually don’t aspire to be super wealthy.
Scott
They want autonomy over their time, and they wanna be able to enjoy their life in a way that is meaningful for them and, you know, spend it with the people who are important to them. And it’s actually that thing that gets attacked by decaying money because when you have to start thinking about all these different ways, you may have to work more side hustles.
Scott
The preserving of wealth, uh, becomes like an abstraction of your purpose and takes us away from what we’re all really meant to be doing here. And I think that given the choice, and this is based on my career, like most people actually aren’t that interested in trading stocks or, you know, do these different strategies, right?
Scott
It’s like it’s just something that we have to do, uh, because of the [00:26:00] penalty of what happens if you don’t. And I think that this is why saving is a really important option, and I discuss Bitcoin as though it’s something that is actually designed to sort of reintroduce the concept of saving. And people think about Bitcoin as an investment because they…
Scott
First thing that people understand is that the price goes up over time, which is true, or it has been true. But I actually think that, you know, owning Bitcoin is it’s just a way for you to put your money in another form of money that doesn’t spoil. And if you think about it that way, this is kind of like what triggered for me, uh, the, the next step along my journey of, uh, experiencing a sort of energetic freedom because we’re all…
Scott
You know, if, if you believe that we’re all really looking for A way to have sovereignty over how our time is [00:27:00] spent and ’cause our time is represented in money, right? We essentially transform some combination of our energy and time into that medium of exchange that solves the coincidence of wants. And we store it there so that in the future, we have the ability to, to turn it back into energy and time to consume it, either by doing something we want or having something we want.
Scott
And so if we, if we can’t store it, then we have to get really creative and think about other ways to have a better mousetrap. And, and so Bitcoin is sort of like a battery that is zero entropy. If you think about the storing the energy and, and your time, you’re moving your money out of something that is designed to rot and putting it into something that is really timeless and non-physical and can’t be expanded.
Scott
And, and this is where [00:28:00] to come back to this idea about Stockholm syndrome. We have been really hoodwinked about inflation, and the common perception from the TV is that inflation is some kind of necessary lubricant for the economy that keeps things working, and it is truly state-sponsored theft. When new money is created out of thin air, it devalues the money that you had to earn and pay taxes on.
Scott
That’s it. It’s a transfer of energy. That energy… And the thing about our time and energy is it’s finite, and it’s spent. So you don’t have the ability to go back and re-earn that money. And so what we’re experiencing now as the quality of life and the cost of living is running away from us is the, the, the theft of our time and energy.
Scott
And it’s not like they don’t understand this. It is a decision that gets made [00:29:00] at, at the highest level to sacrifice sort of, you know, the many for some kind of like larger objective. But– and this is why I think that, you know, Bitcoin is such a cool thing when you start to understand how it can exit you from that system, ’cause really what you’re doing with Bitcoin is opting out of the theft that happens when your money is made less valuable by them continually making more of it.
Scott
Is a real sense of freedom because I have now shifted sort of my consumed time and energy into something that is theft-proof And it doesn’t matter so much for me how much of that there is, so much as what I have feels protected. And for me, what that really ended up doing was producing a long-standing sense of stillness, which was what I initially experienced when I was locked in my house in twenty twenty [00:30:00] And you actually, you know, at least for me, I had spent ten or 15 years thinking of all these creative ways to get more money.
Scott
And if you can box that up and remove it, and what I found is all of a sudden there’s all kinds of other things that I’m actually way more interested in and enjoy a lot more. So there’s just extra room and my limited bandwidth that I can spend and consume in ways that are way more, you know, enjoyable for me.
Kelly
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Kelly
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Kelly
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Kelly
I’m pretty skilled, I think, at attracting sleeper resources that are game-changing, so I am delighted to put you on. Go listen to episode one fifty-three of Reclamation Radio. We unpack the whole thing in a way that makes sense. And if you want someone to run the numbers of your specific situation, book a free call with my friends [00:32:00] Josh and Ken over at kellybroganmd.com/whole.
Kelly
It’s amazing to consider how normalized the concept of investment is because I, I don’t think I’ve ever considered that there could be a world where just having what you have is almost like in a static way is sufficient. And I know that the confidence with which you speak about, you know, working with Bitcoin, let’s see, tell me if, if this is not the way to think about it, but almost as like your savings account kind of a thing, right?
Kelly
Like having your– tr-transferring your currency into Bitcoin for that reason alone, let, let, you know, let alone that it has the capacity to potentially grow in, in significant ways. Your confidence in that has to do with the scarcity. And for me, this was of, of Bitcoin itself, right? This was like a [00:33:00] paradox.
Kelly
It, it continues to be a paradox that’s a little tough for me to wrap my mind around, right? ‘Cause the, the notion that because it’s scarce, it is more abundant, right? And because of the inflationary abundance, you know, there’s, there’s scarcity embedded in our, the, the social fabric of our culture with regard to currency, right?
Kelly
So, so how is it that you feel so certain that there isn’t necessarily risk, uh, involved in that transfer? And, and what does it have to do with the idea that there is a fixed amount of this out there in the world?
Scott
Yeah. There’s, so there’s, there are maybe two pieces to that, but I’ll, I’ll try to get to them both.
Scott
I think, you know, I, so I personally believe it’s very likely that Bitcoin is the most significant invention any of us have been alive for. Which is a really funny thing considering [00:34:00] how many people have, you know, a, an impression that it is like a flash in the pan or, you know, it’s… And the why this thing is so significant is what Bitcoiners call digital scarcity.
Scott
And so the Internet is an information network And that network, a feature of it is the ability to have things be copied easily and infinitely. So it’s an important feature of the internet that I could take, you know, I download this episode onto my computer, and I could copy it ten times. I could send it to other people.
Scott
Like this is an, really a critical part of the, of the internet. And when you study Bitcoin, you understand that people had been conceiving of a, of an internet native money for a long time before Bitcoin was successfully created, and there were lots of failed endeavors prior to it, and all of them had certain [00:35:00] obstacles.
Scott
Uh, one of the core problems was counterfeiting. Like, how do you prevent, how do you prevent counterfeiting in a network where a feature of that network is being able to copy things infinitely? So they needed to solve that critical problem, and as a result of solving that problem, they produced this finite thing.
Scott
You know, it’s like a, it’s like an abacus, where there’s only a certain number of beads, and the beads cannot be sent off of that. They can just be passed around back and forth to different addresses. What’s really kind of profound about that invention is it was for the first time ever, and the only time this can really happen, the creation of something non-physical that we can prove is finite.
Scott
We– And we know this because of how the Bitcoin code works, and the Bitcoin code is open source and can be downloaded by anyone, and anyone can examine [00:36:00] it. It’s, it’s not impossible to change, but it’s, it’s very difficult to change. So now we have this thing that exists in the virtual world, but we can prove that there’s only a certain amount of it, and we can know exactly where all of it is And this created sort of a binary stratification of different types of scarcity, because gold is the most enduring form of money throughout human history.
Scott
And the scarcity of gold has been sort of the, the core factor in its dominance as a form of money over time. It’s really hard to find gold, and then you have to get it out of the ground. And the gold supply typically expands globally around one to two percent a year. So it’s, it’s very rare, but it’s not finite.
Scott
And if you think about the difference, if scarcity is sort of the core thing that has made gold the most [00:37:00] enduring form of money, and there’s something that is objectively more scarce than gold, we know that scarcity is, is a critical thing with value. And in the digital world, this problem sort of accelerates to an unknown endpoint.
Scott
One, because the currency expansion is speeding up, and two, because everything else in the digital world is meant to be infinite. So we are moving into a world that is more online, and it makes sense to me that we should… You know, it’s like it’s absurd to measure infinite things with infinite money. And this is kind of what we’re doing now.
Scott
This is why the price of everything goes up forever. And it’s just like a nonsensical way of thinking about value. And so the, yeah, the, the, the invention of digital scarcity is a paradigm shift in how we think about measuring sort of a unit of time and energy. [00:38:00] And this is why I think ultimately, you know, Bitcoin, in part, could be thought of as sort of like the metric system of value.
Scott
It’s the thing that will never change. And eventually, we will use that sensible measuring tool as a way to orient and understand what other things are worth. So that’s quite a long ways away. And what’s going on right now is we’re watching the Bitcoin price go up as the market understands what Bitcoin is for beyond the fact that its price goes up And so we have sort of two actually separate systems coexisting parallel to each other and, you know, measuring each other, mirroring each other.
Scott
And Bitcoin was a dollar fifteen years ago, and it’s n-ninety thousand dollars today. You know, it’s– And if you zoom out far enough, it’s basically just watching [00:39:00] a vertical line like it’s… A-a-and, you know, I think that, and it’s an, it’s another funny thing about our society has– we’re really being trained simultaneously to have this compression of our attention spans, and we’re experiencing like the modern collapse of time, where, you know, we used to watch one-hour TV programs, and we would sit through the commercials.
Scott
And now if somebody doesn’t like the first three seconds of a TikTok, they’re gonna scroll, and while they’re doing that, they probably have another device on. Right? So it’s like an assault on our attention spans that’s happening, and I think it’s by design. And that thing also makes it very difficult for people to objectively Just consider what’s has gone on with Bitcoin over the last fifteen years.
Scott
So the why I’m so sure part has a lot to do with understanding [00:40:00] the infrastructure and technology behind Bitcoin. And the more you learn about that part of it, the more safe you feel with the notion that it will be an enduring technology. Bitcoin is like civilization-level infrastructure, and that transition is completely underway.
Scott
It’s a network that operates on positive incentive l- feedback loops that feed each other. And so this is part of the ingenious way that Bitcoin was designed. It’s a system that incentivizes everyone to cooperate, and Bitcoin miners are a part of that mechanism. Bitcoin miners get slammed on TV because they use a lot of energy, and we have been told that, you know, the climate change is happening and energy consumption is bad.
Scott
But energy consumption transforms real physical energy into Bitcoin like a synthetic commodity. You can think of [00:41:00] Bitcoin miners as like refining energy and computation and transforming it into a synthetic natural element that is finite. And Bitcoin miners have an important role to play in the symbiosis with the energy grids because they can produce something that’s called flexible load demand, where miners can use electricity when everyone else is sleeping.
Scott
And power grids really aren’t designed to manage the ups and downs of people’s energy consumption demands. So it’s a, it’s a system that is maturing as more people understand it and the economics incentives become more attractive, and it will turn into a matter of national security eventually. And I think you’ll see large, you know, federal scale Bitcoin mining projects become normal in every country.
Scott
So today, you know, we, we can measure [00:42:00] how much computation is happening in the Bitcoin mining, you know, armada. And that number is actually more impressive than the increase in price. It’s a, it’s a number that is growing exponentially, and it’s a representation of the growing, you know, investment in miners.
Scott
Miners secure the network. They make the network resistant to attack in a decentralized way. So the, the, the miners all over the world that are competing to win new Bitcoin every ten minutes are– you know, it’s a, it’s a worldwide infrastructure for a monetary system that no one’s in charge of. And that network already today is the largest computer network in the world.
Scott
It’s bigger than the NSA. It’s bigger than the CIA. There’s no military that has this [00:43:00] level of computation. And, and Bitcoin is still, you know, barely a teenager. So this, this thing will become so secure and robust. You know, there’s nothing s– you know, anything could go wrong. And I always sort of say like high likelihood, but it’s, it’s when you really start to understand the scale of what is being erected around this machine that is distributed across the world, that’s what makes me feel the confidence that, you know, this thing is going to be around.
Scott
And, you know, it, it just, it makes– it solves so many problems. You know, like in Canada, I always– you know, Americans have a unique position for having the money that everybody else in the world wants. In Canada, if I try to spend my Canadian dollars basically anywhere else, even in the United States, nobody wants them.
Scott
You know, like I– and good luck if I went to Europe. Like there’s just… And so it’s a really crazy thing about money [00:44:00] that we’re only allowed to use it in the place that we live, and it will only be accepted in the place that we live. And part of this like crazy thing about the Stockholm syndrome, you know, this, the systems that built money It’s a control mechanism that keeps money in the place where you live, and eventually it will become a tool that lets you know when you’re allowed to spend it and how.
Scott
And, you know, I, so I believe that it makes sense that we have a fair money that nobody is in charge of, and nobody can arbitrarily steal from the users by creating more of it. And it makes sense that, like, humanity would settle on one universal form of money that has rules. Then everyone can understand how those rules work, and that nobody can have it confiscated from them, have it, you know, [00:45:00] censored in a way that they’re, they’re not allowed to take it somewhere.
Scott
It, it should be universally understood and accepted, and that’s to me the backbone of A real, like a new era of civilization. This is like how we get to a place where people are optimistic about the future again. Because, you know, maybe just to put a bow on it, like if we could articulate the pervasive sense of angst that most people are grasp-grappling with, it’s that they know the money they’re using doesn’t work as well as it used to, and they don’t understand why, and they don’t understand that there’s a solution.
Kelly
So the nature of this solution has also been something that I’ve had to wrap my brain around, because many of us who have been suspicious [00:46:00] of agendas and, you know, the slippery slope towards a social credit system, uh, and electricity-based access, you know, whether it’s Teslas or electric stoves, you know, have considered an investment in something tangible like gold or silver or even a house to be some sort of sovereign reclamation of, you know, ownership and, and value.
Kelly
Obviously, the technology-based virtual nature of Bitcoin flies in the face of all those considerations. And so I wonder how you, you reconcile that personally, because I know that you think, you know, um, in a similar way, you know, to, to those of us who have otherwise harbored these suspicions about what could be coming down the pipe.
Kelly
[00:47:00] And I also, you know, wonder about your confidence that there won’t be any sort of takeover or government interference or, you know, some kind of vulnerability. And again, I don’t, I don’t understand the nature of Bitcoin enough to even know if this question makes any sense. But I, of course, do suspect that anything of actual value will soon be, you know, will soon have the, the slimy fingerprints of, you know, s-centralized authority.
Kelly
And so I wonder what you think about that, or am I just being sort of unnecessarily paranoid about it?
Scott
I mean, hard assets, physically hard, tangible assets like gold and houses. I mean, it’s hard to make an argument against gold because, you know, people obviously do value it, and what the price has done this year certainly shows that a lot of people still feel like gold is [00:48:00] really important.
Scott
One thing that Bitcoin will teach you is that we don’t, with most physical things, have the kind of ownership that we think we do And this is a really beautiful part about Bitcoin as because of how it works, it’s really difficult to confiscate, and you do absolutely own it. Like, what confers ownership of Bitcoin is somebody having the ability to send that Bitcoin from one address to another, and that is an absolute form of ownership.
Scott
That is an improvement to, you know, you may think you own your home, but if you don’t pay your property taxes, they’ll sell your house. And, you know, gold, I think that, you know, some of the challenges that could happen with gold are having the ability to trade it or dispose of it. You know, like it’s– these things aren’t, you [00:49:00] know– There are a lot of different characteristics that are important with, with money, and, you know, one of them is fungibility and another one is divisibility.
Scott
So you need to be able to… You know, gold would never be practical if the internet turned off tomorrow for you to pay for your groceries or buy a coffee because you, you wouldn’t be able to, you know, shave it off, right? And, and so it, it’s great at some things, but it’s not gonna solve everything for you.
Scott
Now, can the state capture Bitcoin? They’re definitely trying. You know, and I think that’s– this is the reason why Bitcoin isn’t already worth, you know, a million or ten million. And, and I mean, you know, that, you know, as money becomes less valuable, we will watch Bitcoin hit absurd price in dollars that will shock people, and this has also already been unfolding.
Scott
You know, you realize this when you get to Bitcoin that people thought they had missed the boat when it was ten dollars. And when it went from ten dollars to a [00:50:00] thousand dollars, nobody could imagine that it would be ten thousand and then a hundred thousand, and it will go to a million. And it’s just this thing that is…
Scott
You know, as more people understand that having scarce and rare things is valuable in a system that is designed to be infinite, you know, it’s just a matter of when you get on that train. I think that the state– The, the problem is– Well, there’s a few problems. One is, I’m not sure the level that states genuinely compete with each other and how much they cooperate, and I don’t know how much trust there is actually between, say-
Kelly
Uh, just look at the Antarctic Treaty if you want the answer to that.
Scott
Exactly. Totally. China has tried to ban Bitcoin seven times, and China is, you know, among the nations that exercises the most control at the ground level over average people, and they haven’t had no ability to do it And so, you know, I think [00:51:00] what you’re seeing in the US right now is sort of like the soft embrace that’s trying to create a regulatory framework.
Scott
And I imagine that the next step, if governments want their own paper currency to survive, you know, and I don’t know if this is five or fifteen years, but there will have to be some kind of a relationship between that paper money and Bitcoin the same way when the Federal Reserve Bank was created in nineteen thirteen, there was a fixed relationship between the dollar and gold.
Scott
And o-over, you know, between nineteen thirteen and nineteen seventy-one, there was still a direct relationship between the dollar and gold. It was just that that relationship kept being changed. And when Nixon temporarily suspended the redemption of gold in nineteen seventy-one, that really severed any connection between fiat money and reality.
Scott
And, and of s- in the fifty years since, we’ve just been [00:52:00] operating on credit and debt Which is also a new thing, you know, like paper money was an invention, another innovation in the technological tree of money. It was a, it was something that was created to help, you know, move money around the world faster, and it was good at that.
Scott
But we’ve just kind of hit this point now where paper monies all collapse eventually. I mean, every paper money ever has eventually collapsed. And outside of the Western world, the average lifespan of a paper currency is twenty-two years. So we’re just in places there where the money is less bad, but less bad is still really bad.
Scott
Like the U.S. dollar has lost over ninety-nine percent of its value in the last hundred years. And so it’s, it’s happening just slow enough that people aren’t burning down the capital. Um, yeah, sorry. But, you know, is there gonna be some kind of a capture of Bitcoin? I don’t think that they can get rid of it, and I don’t think that they can ignore it.
Scott
So the next step [00:53:00] will be they will try to maybe benefit from it or, you know, and then Bitcoiners talk about this like the last stages, and then they fight you. And there was in nineteen thirty-three, the U.S. federal government made the possession of gold illegal at Executive Order sixty-one or two, and they went about to confiscate personal gold holdings, and after that was done, they immediately repriced gold higher.
Scott
And repricing of gold was a, was another historical tool for sort of resetting the monetary system and revaluing government debt. And, you know, something’s gotta give, right? Like the U.S. took two hundred years to accumulate a trillion dollars of debt, and another trillion dollars will be added to the U.S.
Scott
debt between now and February. So it’s like, uh, it just doesn’t work. And so, you know, I think that who knows how this is gonna go, but the [00:54:00] technology piece of Bitcoin suggests that it’s, it’s very robust and durable and has a high likelihood of enduring. And the other side of it is like the financial system is not what you thought it was, and it is engineered to like a casino.
Scott
You know, like some people go into a casino and win. But generally speaking, the casino wins and most everybody else gets rinsed. And that is what is going on, you know. And, uh, and Bitcoin is a, is a different path. It’s a way to liberate yourself from sort of the trappings of The financial matrix.
Kelly
The last question is a deep one, and I know that you could probably give a weekend workshop on this, but I imagine you’re one of the only people talking about Bitcoin through this lens.
Kelly
And so I want to, [00:55:00] yeah, sort of dip back into the philosophical arena because you talk about… I know that you, like myself and our colleagues, question conventional historical timelines, right? And that you’ve, uh, you have a history background and that this is one– uh, an adjacent, uh, topic that you’ve taken many, many a deep dive into, you know, sort of questioning the history that we are told on a very deep level.
Kelly
And, you know, I’ve heard you suggest that the, the timeline that Bitcoin encodes becomes, like, unfuckable with basically, and it represents a shift out of the, the narrative chokehold that, you know, let’s say Rockefeller education has had on what historical reality is, for example. And I, I know that you also take that even [00:56:00] farther when it comes to the consideration of time, how we conceptualize it, and why Bitcoin has the power to move us into a new paradigm.
Kelly
Because I don’t think it’s obvious to most of us what time and money in this sense, you know, or, you know, this new financial construct might have to do with one another. But you’ve already referenced that that’s part of the suffering that is incurred by the current debt-based currency system. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this vast topic, because I think it’s such a, it’s such a unique point of inquiry, you know, when it comes to how you think about these things.
Scott
I would love to. Thank you. And, uh, and I’m, I’m writing another book about this. So in the fiat world Monit– time units have a money, have a value associated with them. And this is why when I say that money is a, a combination of, you know, it’s a measurement of energy and time. [00:57:00] The problem in that system is that if you think about it sort of as an equation, time is the thing that is finite for each of us, and the money part is continually changing, and it’s changing for the worse.
Scott
So our time can only be devalued in the current system, and the manifestation of that is that we have less and less disposable time, or we become less abundant with our time. We perceive time in a way that connects deeply to the notion that our time is being devalued. Now, what I’ve learned about time is that our brains construct a version of the present moment in a way that isn’t necessarily real in the way that we think it is.
Scott
We learn how to understand time. This is part of Growing up. And there are a [00:58:00] lot of artificial reference mechanisms that we have co-created as a civilization to make sense of time. And Bitcoin is a money invention. It is a step function improvement in how money works and how we think about value. But it is actually the first real innovation in timekeeping in seven hundred years.
Scott
And it is the first technology that humanity has ever invented where no single point of authority is, uh, going to have the power to tell us what time is or what time it is. So today, Apple tells most people what time it is, and Apple is sort of synchronizing everyone’s pocket cube that they keep on themselves at all time and reference.
Scott
And Bitcoin is a different kind of clock that [00:59:00] beats to a rhythm that is not necessarily procedural in the way that we think of time now.
Scott
Bitcoin adds blocks to its blockchain roughly every ten minutes, which is just often enough that it can be a reference, and it’s just slow enough that it’s able to be done in a way that is decentralized across the entire world. So no one has ownership over creating this consensus. And so it’s not telling us that it’s one fifteen.
Scott
Bitcoin is creating an unfuckable with publicly available record of the order that things happened, and it does it at a predictable rate. And that clock is on a terminal endpoint of time around twenty one forty that will, you know, s- endure [01:00:00] long after any of us watching this now are gone. It’s so it’s like time’s arrow, you know.
Scott
And there’s a concept in time about causal loops. And a causal loop is when something’s origin and its endpoint are sort of inextricably linked and cause sort of like a, a narrowing of, um, you know, potential outcomes, right? So Bitcoin is something that people hardly understand how it works as money right now.
Scott
But underneath it is a mechanism for changing the way people think about… Because if you go back to that analogy of the equation about money and time, in the Bitcoin world, the fixed piece is value, so the time piece is less important, right? And so in that system, it’s much more aligned with the way humanity would have interacted with time before the invention of the mechanical clock [01:01:00] People’s perception of time throughout most of human history was more to do with cyclical rhythms and processes.
Scott
Equinoxes, astronomical events, days and nights, right? The idea that somebody would me-need to be somewhere at one fifteen is completely insane, right? And it’s the result of mechanical clocks merging with a monetary system that prices time like it’s a commodity. And so what Bitcoin does is it liberates people from the commoditization of time by making the value part fixed, which should enable people to have a different experience of the perception of time itself.
Kelly
I am very excited that you are unpacking this in a new book because it deserves that level of treatment. You know, this, this– the depth of this, uh, I think [01:02:00] is, is something that you perceive in a way and translate in a way that is very unique. And I know that you… I, I had sort of, I don’t know, I don’t know, like, felt like I got burned by , you know, Coinbase and Bitcoin, and I was sort of over it, and I had diversified my investments in all these other ways.
Kelly
And after talking to you, you know, for a few hours, I went home and I made my transfers and I, you know, set up my Trezor and got started again. And have, you know, now since set up my daughter’s, and I feel re-inspired because of the way that you represent the mystical nature, you know, of, of this concept, and you have a very unique ability, I think, to, to marry, uh, these, these secular and, you know, financial worlds [01:03:00] with the metaphysical and these very profound considerations for humanity.
Kelly
And I’m excited for how you might continue to, to guide us. So thank you, Scott, and let us know. You know, you have a lot going on. You have block rewards, you have podcasts, you have now soon to be books, plural, and I’d love for, for folks to know what and where to, yeah, resource you around.
Scott
Thanks, Kelly. And, uh, and thanks again for having me on.
Scott
It’s been a real pleasure. Yeah, I am really passionate about helping people understand this differently. And part of the issue with Bitcoin is there’s just a lot of bad information out there, and you will find a lot of crap on YouTube, and it’s, it’s hard to find the signal. My personal website is Lantern Bitcoin, and on there, you know, you can find the books, some things I’ve written, you know, different podcasts.
Scott
I speak at Bitcoin events and, uh, and so those talks Are there as well. Block Rewards [01:04:00] is a company that I co-founded a few years ago, and we are building software to help people get paid in Bitcoin and to help businesses pay their employees in Bitcoin. And I believe that this is a really, you know, critical step forward in creating a future that is one people wanna be a part of.
Scott
And so the, that work is, uh, happening at blockrewards.com. We’re only in Canada right now, but we will be in the US next year and, uh, hopefully beyond after that. And yeah, the new book is called Age of Time, and I’m hoping that it will be ready, you know, sometime in the spring.
Kelly
Amazing. Amazing. Super exciting.
Kelly
Thank you so much.
Scott
Thanks [01:05:00] again.
