LET’S TALK BITCOINEpisode 111 – Building Cathedrals with Cody Wilson & Amir Taaki

Participants:

Adam B. Levine (AL) – HostCody Wilson (CW) – Crypto-anarchist and founder of Defense DistributedAmir Taaki (AT) - Core Bitcoin developer, creator of Libbitcoin, core collaborator at Dark Wallet & CoinJoin

Today is May 20th 2014 and this is Episode 111.

This program is intended for informational and educational purposes only. Cryptocurrency is a new field of study. Consult your local futurist, lawyer and investment advisor before making any decisions whatsoever for yourself.

AL: Welcome to Let’s Talk Bitcoin, a twice weekly show about the ideas, people and projects building the digital economy and the future of money. My name is Adam B. Levine and today’s episode is a little different. Episode 111 of Let’s Talk Bitcoin is all about Amir Taaki and the movement of thought that he embodies.

We start today’s show with Cody Wilson, a proud anarchist in his own right who, over the last year, has spent more and more time with Amir. At Bitcoin Expo Toronto, Cody gave a wide ranging talk called ‘Light and Dark’ that provides his perspective. I don’t know Cody personally but his demeanor strikes me as that of an anthropologist who’s discovered a hidden culture that has its own norms and rituals and simply decided that he likes that better and never gone back

Then, I sat down with Amir for an intimate chat about discovering life’s meaning, about the honor and duty of having the skills to perform good work at a time when it’s needed and more

Thanks to Brave the World and CanAwareness for these recordings and the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada for putting on the event. Enjoy the show! [1:23]

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Cody Wilson at Bitcoin Expo, Toronto – April 2014

Chair: ...cryptoanarchist and the founder and director of Defense Distributed, the non-profit digital publisher behind the infamous 3D printed gun, Bitcoin Darkwallet. Cody was recently listed, informs the Forbes 30 under 30, as the face of printable firearms and was named by Wired as one of the fifteen most dangerous people in the world. (Laughter) (Applause) Judge his mainstream reputation for yourself. As you’ll see Cody’s motives are positive. With great moral character and determination, his work is respected as having great positive influence in a most disruptive and controversial space. Thanks Cody. [2:08]

CW: (Applause) I’m really glad, by the way, this isn’t like a thousand people. We can have something more conversational, yeah? I have some quick notes. I threw out everything I was going to... Did any of you guys come to the Hackathon yesterday? Did you catch Amir Taaki’s Darkmarket presentation? Fantastic. I’m going to start with that and move to other discussion points. The title of this speech is ‘Light and Dark’ – not that titles matter but I think it’s something that we can start with. There has been a kind of duality finally recognized by the mainstream accounts of Bitcoin trending toward. It’s something we were trying to help to get towards with our announcement like something about the Darkwallet – that there would be this understanding of Bitcoin. There’s the legitimate factors of Bitcoin and then there are the black markets. There is a white market Bitcoin that we’re all trying to work together for and then there is the black market Bitcoin which is an anomaly – kind of outside of things, something that was like an accident of history, shouldn’t have been allowed to happen and we’ve ended up moving past it. Thank God. This is how the senate hearings on the Silk Road were formulated. After the Silk Road, right? Post Silk Road. Kind of wishful, magical thinking were dispelling the ghosts. Whatever that was, who knows why that happened but now that it’s over, let’s talk about how we can work together and kind of unionize and synthesize this wonderful technology, which of course has great social import. How can we work together to make this thing a good thing for everyone? This is a form of light thinking. Der Spiegel did it the best after South by Southwest, they said Ehrsam of Coinbase now represented... he was the great hope of Bitcoin. The United States – its light side. Everything else was the kind of barbarian hoard threatening to pull Bitcoin back into the dark. Of course, this is the very thematic we wanted to establish with our presentation of the Darkwallet, which I should go ahead and say it’s something like KryptoKit, which is just kind of doing Bitcoin in the browser but didn’t express its (??). It means to be anarchist. What do we mean by anarchist? Well, pseudonymity, anonymity for the user and basically obfuscatory techniques to prevent law enforcement trying to find out who you are and what you’re doing. Basically, the idea is well, if there is this potential for Bitcoin to become an anonymous digital cash of the future and to really plunge everything into dark markets, then it should be kind of developed in this direction and no one is really taking this challenge on because of the threats of FINCEN in the United States. No one can give venture capital for expressing this kind of attention. Oh look... it’s filling up. You know what’s crazy is that during the 3D printed gun saga, which I’m sure isn’t quite over yet, it was like March of last year, I was at this huge 3D printing conference in New York – packed with travellers, businessmen, venture capitalists, it was just packed with thousands of people. I did this report on the 3D printer gun and no one actually knew it was kind of possible at that point. I had this giant room all to myself and there were just like 16 people and me and I was like –

Well, there’s going to be a 3D printed gun in two weeks and everyone was like yeah, great, interesting. (Laughter) It made no... ships in the night man... no one even knew I was there... kind of in and out. (Laughter) [5:21]

I want to be a little serious though. Light and dark - what do I mean? We’re trying to set up these thematics between legitimacy – god, a token word of all things Bitcoin, especially since the summer. How do we make Bitcoin legitimate? What is legitimacy? What is sovereignty? How do we encourage adoption? How do we break ourselves and remove ourselves from this history of illicit illegitimate activity on this kind of separation or, if you will, white markets and black markets or, if you will, as I like to do we can establish these ideas in people. The first person I’ll hold up to you is Charlie Shrem. Charlie Shrem is basically the founder or co-founder of the Bitcoin Foundation. Let me tell you a little bit about him. He believed in advocacy for legitimacy for Bitcoin. He believed in what I call and what we theorize as a State science, a State philosophy, a philosophy of stability, of models, of rigidity, of fixity, of templates. He thought if we could encourage the State to give us a processional model, we could all recognize a kind of platonic form of Bitcoin but if we could move towards that we’d all have a kind of consensus about what Bitcoin was and we could all each have a life in the kingdom and (??) go there together. Charlie Shrem went into that kingdom and he thought very much he could and they would welcome him in... what did he do? (??) rhetoric about the legitimacy of Bitcoin, Charlie Shrem conceives of this concept of the BitLicence, what a pernicious name – the BitLicence. We’re so used to naming bit everything, the regulators themselves, granted this is from Charlie Shrem, but they even kind of fold in their own pernicious regulatory activity into like this sweet lozenge of Bitcoin (??)... aahh the BitLicence. It’s evil. It’s deeply, deeply troubling. Are we conditioned to kind of accept it? Well, I’ve got my BitExchange and my BitLicence... it’s operating on you without you even knowing. He goes to (??) New York DFS and for two years he suggests and they tell him... by the way, I visited him in Brooklyn. I’m not making this up about him. It’s the conversation that we had. He said – The Chinese really want to regulate Bitcoin; how do we do that? Can we regulate the software? No, no, it doesn’t work that way. Here’s what you can do. You can regulate the businesses, you can make sure you have a gateway by which all businesses have to pass through, everyone can (??) here in New York because, you know, New York’s got to get its cut as it’s always going to be a part of finance. Here’s what we can do. We can set up a kind of regulatory framework that all people will contribute to. Coinsetter – you’ve heard of Coinsetter? What Coinsetter is is the first kind of bank of betrayal. This is like something out of Kafka. They mostly didn’t tell us what the BitLicence would be. He asked for Bitcoin businesses to propose directly to him what they thought a BitLicence should be. Coinsetter made the first application. They wrote it down, they suggested the policy framework by which they would like to be regulated but not just the framework, they suggested what even the content of the four corners of the document of the BitLicence would be and they submitted that to the FS. My criticism in the Darkwallet video was simply not to say – Oh, the Foundation’s evil. It’s that you’re doing it to yourselves. By participating in the State philosophy, by giving it that already default position of legitimacy you’re saying number one – we can maintain independence from a regulatory process but also participate in it, but at the same time, you’re doing it to yourself. In the end, the regulators didn’t decide, they didn’t kind of look him up, operationalize everything and kind of tell you what to do. The community itself, like when in Space(??) are deciding to (??) in space, they go – Wait a minute, we can’t just fly in space, we’ve got to ask someone if

we can do this. They literally created a regulatory framework for themselves because they felt naked under the open sky. Do you know what I mean? The same thing with Bitcoin. [9:23]

Let’s contrast that position of Charlie Shrem to Amir Taaki. Amir Taaki gave his presentation at the Hackathon yesterday for the Darkmarket. In thirty hours, he developed a distributed Silk Road. Silk Road being a great, monumental market place for the selling of Bitcoin and distribution of drugs. Its only flaw was that it was centralized and eventually they were able to uncover where it was, find its administrator, allegedly. He’s now facing trial; he’ll be facing trial in November. His name is Ross Ulbricht. If you haven’t thought of supporting Mr Ulbricht and to see if he’s worthy of your support, you can go to FreeRoss.org – check it out today! The thing is, we can think of this literally – Amir Taaki, if you don’t know him by reputation, let me tell you. Amir Taaki is a nomad and the rest of my remarks come from an essay by Gilles Deleuze called ‘Nomadology’. Amir Taaki travels, he’s an itinerant, he doesn’t have a fixed location, no permanent address, he can’t get paychecks, he’s not interested in having a job and being localized in one point. My thought is now that Amir Taaki isn’t just an artist, although this is how he presented Darkmarket after this huge speech and showing me what he did, I’ll describe Darkmarket in a minute. His final statement was – Software is art. He doesn’t think of what he’s doing as hard times. He thinks about it as a conversation, as dynamic, as a pure artistic... not just technique, but expression. Contrast this to Charlie Shrem. The State wants things sedentarized, if you will, in one place and localized. What’s always threatening the State is what’s exterior to it. Think of Defence Distributed – Omg! Where are they? They’ve got 3D printers and they’re printing guns. What are they doing? They need to be in one place. In order to make guns, an element of the war machine in the United States, you have to have a permanent address, you have to be somewhere, somewhere we can come get you and find you and know where you are or tell you where you should be. In Charlie Shrem’s case, this is taking it to the absolute, right? After they’d kind of gotten everything from him about regulating Bitcoin, they put him under house arrest at his parents’ house. He’s stuck; he showed me his ankle bracelets. He goes a step past his door; a SWAT team. He’s localized, he’s fixed, fixity and he has to obey. This isn’t just the idea of cages and jails and everything else, it’s this idea of stability and fixity. Amir Taaki doesn’t even kind of abide by his own social expectations. Where is he? He’s gone. What’s he doing? He’s in Austria. They go on a segway tour. He doesn’t understand the idea. He just goes off on his segway. Eveyone’s like – Where’s Amir? Amir, are you here? Of course he’s not here, right? Why would he come to a scheduled event? (Laughter). You know what I’m saying? It’s ridiculous that he would even appear. Do you think he would have a name tag? No, of course not. They’re looking for Amir and he sees some girl giving away free hugs and jumps off the segway to give her a hug but, of course, segways don’t stop they keep going. The segway keeps going and crashes into a tree. The segway is now broken. Amir is afraid of the authority that runs the segway tour. This women... she’d be very upset so he hears she’s coming. He runs away and they don’t see him for the rest of the day. This segway woman now has to ride her segway and the second segway... (Laughter) You know, he’s not just this kind of goblin; he’s not just like this weird cherub of the digital blackmarkets. He really understands something or lives a certain kind of model of thought or we should say a kind of approximate knowledge or nomad science, is what I’m calling it. Let’s give you a more concrete example, it’s about light and dark. There’s this world of hard forms, Royal science, rigidity, stability and

templates and then there’s something like the Gothic journey. Building cathedrals centuries ago when they used to travel around, they were itinerant and they had their monk, masons who would follow them around and they didn’t learn and they didn’t really practice Euclidean geometry. They were all about expressing... what did they want? They wanted to build bigger; they wanted to build dynamically. If you look back at these Gothic journeyman, they didn’t leave blueprints or if they had them, they were nothing like the finished forms that you saw. They were just interested in projection and expression by taking a form or taking an original place and just with like an Archimedean kind of intuition project the building out, creating this dynamically improvisation on the spot. They took what was around them, they took a kind of sense and intuition from the things around them and built incredibly expressive buildings. The thing about this is, of course, some of these collapsed in the 12th century and after or beyond, especially in France. The State always eventually comes in the name of something like safety or in the name of something like (?? reusability). It starts to regulate the construction sites of these great cathedrals. I’m using cathedral on purpose here. Open source, itself, as a cathedral. The great expressive features are these itinerant craftsmen are slowly kind of cut away in the interests of something else. Something in like a rigid, stable form. I believe, the analogy is clear, this is what’s at stake in something like Bitcoin. Why does it help us that we kind of have to ask for a procession of models from authority figures? Yes, of course we have to live in the world, we have to make money but what we’re sacrificing is something like a kind of intuition. Something like Amir Taaki’s Darkmarket. Now, I’ll talk about it more. [14:45]

Darkmarket is the fastest response to the problem of Silk Road. It’s a peer to peer Silk Road, if you will. It solves all the problems of distributed identity, reputation, decentralization, stealth identity, escrow, Bitcoin, all this stuff. They’ve showed it, the proof-of-concept is up. You can go to BitCredits.io and see the results of their work, if not today then tomorrow. They showed it in real time – a distributed Silk Road. Now, there is not one node of failure, there is not a choke point. This was done in 30 hours. This is the fundamental question mark for something like Bitcoin (??) and it was done in 30 hours by an artist who doesn’t have a stable paycheck. He did it out of pure artistic expression and will. [15:37]

Audience member: Darkmarket is on Github. [15:41]

CW: Oh thanks. Darkmarket Github if you’d like to see the rehub and you’ll see all the commits. All the commits were done literally in the last 48 hours during that thing. [15:49]

Chair: Maybe if you want to ask a question, maybe we could have some people start lining up at the microphone when you are ready to answer those questions? [15:55]

Cody: I think I’ve really made most of the points then right? This is a form of State thinking. Let me give you one more little story with some questions. There is light and dark again, light and dark, correct? There is State science, royal, fixed, templates and then nomad science. I give you this as a heartbreaking but like an essential kind of story. Ehrsam, of Coinbase, is now thought to be a kind of real thought leader. The man, who the mantle of the future of Bitcoin is now going to be placed on his shoulders and the people of San Francisco come to me and they’ve declared victory. Gox is dead, the Foundation is essentially dead and so now San Francisco will take the helm and lead Bitcoin into this bright

paradise. Charlie Shrem just has to hold on now. Ehrsam’s got this panel on SXSW and the first person to come up to the microphone to ask him a question after his very consensus, blasé presentation about Bitcoin, whatever corporate Bitcoin, is Ross Ulbricht’s mother, Lyn. How did she get in there? Well, we smuggled her in to the SXSW panel. (Laughter) About $600 to pay for it. She got to the microphone. The mother of the man who basically engendered Bitcoin. There’s this smarmy (??) reporter who thinks he made Bitcoin happen because he reported on the Silk Road, right? Ross Ulbricht was, in so many spiritual senses, the father of Bitcoin, its shepherd into something like the mainstream. It’s proof of all the dark things that we think of and are still to come and he did it first and he made Bitcoin and he gave it that kind of essential touch. It worked – the black market. It worked against the investigative procedures and the interceptive will of the State. It worked and we all got excited about it. Ross Ulbricht did that. She asks, Ross Ulbricht’s mum, she asks Ehrsam ‘What would you say to my son? Don’t you think that what he did was... Can’t we say something about what he did? Don’t you think work like his is important to the future of Bitcoin?’ Keeping in mind this idea of fixity and models and rigidity, State science has turned someone like this Ehrsam character, himself into a kind of caricature. He, by this pressure above him, these venture capitalists, the pressure on his business as the kind of sole point for exchange and his relationship with Silicon Valley and I’m sure with his relationship with the regulators, he couldn’t say a thing. He stumbled. He had nothing to say. He knew he couldn’t say anything. Who knows and it doesn’t matter if he’s an anarchist at heart, like some of these guys I met the other day. Anarchism is not a feeling. He was rendered impotent by the State science. The mother of one of the great nomad scientists, right? The guy, with full abandon and recourse to his own efforts, built this beautiful marketplace in total secrecy, without rules of the road. His mother asks Ehrsam to say just one thing and he can’t. It’s embarrassing. That’s an impotent, model ladies and gentlemen, that will never (??) [18:53]

I’m happy to take questions. Thank you for thinking of this duality with me when we come up with a certain kind of (??) Bitcoin. Don’t be afraid of the dark. Darkmarket. (Applause) [19:05]

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ADVERT:

Hi listener. Here at Let’s Talk Bitcoin, we’re building a global network of correspondents able to contribute on the ground perspective when cryptocurrency related information comes across their filters. If you’d like to join our global conversation, send an email with your name and geographic or culture niche to apply@letstalkbitcoin.com. Just like Bitcoin, the only barrier to entry is your time and good work. Thanks for listening. [20:10]

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CW: Thanks for listening. I’m happy to take questions. [20:17]

Audience questioner: I really enjoyed the presentation, thanks. The Darkwallet was funded, was crowd-funded. What do you think would be the best way to crowd-fund Darkmarket? [20:29]

CW: I don’t know. Again, Amir would tell you that Darkmarket was just like pure proof-of-concept and it’s not production ready. It’s amazing what he was able to show, ladies and gentlemen. Google this if you can. I’ll get Amir to get a production site up and maybe we’ll do video in DD. I think that since the code is already publically available, it’s alright for people to kind of make something more stable and just throw it out there. I don’t think we necessarily need to crowd-fund. Maybe we should. I feel like I can’t right now. We just crowd-funded Darkwallet maybe six months ago and we got a nice amount of money and even though Bitcoin is falling a bit in price and capital as well, I feel I can’t ask for money until we’ve really developed Darkwallet in an alpha and then a beta that you can enjoy and see it as kind of proof of your generosity as you’ve collectively funded Darkwallet. I recommend that anyone try but what’s interesting is that this is almost like Athena – it’s already fully formed and out there, it’s just it’s up to intrepid people to give it something like a stable release. If we don’t see something like that coming, I’m happy to back it myself with... I don’t know... credit cards (laughter). I hope we find someone willing to kind of take the helm here. If you guys went to unSystem.net, I recommend you go on the unSystem mailing list which is just a crypto mailing list but everyone’s very excited about it. The wheels are turning and everyone’s talking about it. It had been thought for a while there would be an open transaction version of this, soon to come but here’s the problem of the possible, right? It’s not possible until it’s already here, so we’re stuck with – Omg, it’s already here, Jesus, the future is now. It’s amazing and I recommend you check it out. I guess that was my answer to your question. [22:11]

Audience questioner: It was, thank you. [22:12]

Audience questioner: For the newbies, distinguish between KryptoKit and Darkwallet and what have you threatened KryptoKit with so they’re stuck on just one extension for one browser? [22:23]

CW: Threatened? Well, Anthony here (laughter) thinks that somehow Darkwallet is a competitor to KryptoKit. I don’t think we really are. Here’s the thing. Back when we crowd-funded Darkwallet, mercifully and thankfully there wasn’t Bitcoin really in the browser. It had been kind of a suggestion – KryptoKit wasn’t out and neither was Sparecoins and these other things so we were able to crowd-fund on this. If we were like a month later, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. It already exists – KryptoKit. The thing is, that one’s a business basically or operated by a business and you can think of it as a service. You’d never find it in the United States with the native CoinJoin that we’d like to run which of course, let’s say it, is a form of money laundering. You should be able to play around with native CoinJoin in your browser with Bitcoin. I believe the only kind of critical difference between Darkwallet and KryptoKit is that KryptoKit doesn’t offer native CoinJoin. That’s not me accusing it of kind of whatever, I’m just saying it’s interested in giving you Bitcoin easily, as a layered web experience, helping you do things like encrypt your traffic, manage your currency easily. It has one of the best ways of doing PGP – PGP is kind of clumsy still but KryptoKit has actually done very well importing and exporting keys. I think it’s a beautiful thing and proof that that space is ripe for development. That space – I mean, Bitcoin in the browser. Darkwallet is, at its heart, purely open source and not run as a business or service. Basically, it has to be that way because any other kind of way of trying to run it, especially trying to monetize it makes us vulnerable to State interdiction and, of course, we’d have to spend more time in cages. I’d have to Skype then, like Charlie Shrem.

Audience questioner: What’s CoinJoin?

CW: CoinJoin is how we talk about manipulating Bitcoin transactions, mixing inputs and outputs. It’s kind of like... you’ve heard of Bitcoin mixing before? Basically, it’s like a way of mixing and obfuscating identities and inputs. The way we do this CoinJoin and the way it’s still being done is you see a transaction but you’re kind of... it’s basically a total fudge of what happened in that transaction... then there’s the blockchain but you’ve confused what inputs and outputs (??). That’s the best I can say. I’m certainly not technical enough. If Amir was here he would (???) [24:44]

Chair: Sorry but we’re running out of time. One more question? [24:48]

Audience questioner: How do you get people on both an individual level as well as the underlying pipeline level to get to this idea that everything should be encrypted, everything should be secured by default so that way the act of, let’s say, sending a PGP encrypted message isn’t itself an invitation to be suspected of something? If we communicate securely and everyone communicates securely then that becomes the default. How do you get people to that level that they would actually want that? Not only want it at an individual level but be willing to build it into their products. [25:32]

CW: Great question. Everywhere... and this is going to render me an optimist and I’m not but... (laughter) everywhere, except in the United Kingdom, there has been a certain sea-change in public opinion, at least in the West, about privacy as a default, a kind of condition. Maybe something of a general terror about the idea of – Oh right, there is no such thing and I really should have some. There’s kind of been a cottage privacy industry pop back up after Mr Edward Snowden did the Lord’s work (laughter). It was great. If you weren’t aware of it

before (??) and all of those people in the 90s and the due diligence carriers of all things awful and NSA, they had been kind of reminding us – By the way, you live in a totally unfree kind of situation but Snowden, at least, delivered that to us in a such a potent way and we should thank (??) and thank (??). I think, actually, that there is a real appetite now for privacy as a default position as kind of built into the core for our applications and our web experience and a lot of companies are responding to this. Now I’m like a soothsayer about the efforts of Google and Yahoo and these people know, of course, they’re told trade is (??) I’ve been really excited to see (??), I think Darkwallet, we’ve had a very kind of off the cuff, ad hoc crowd-fund strategy – we raised $100k. I think really, it comes down to someone kind of declaring their will to give you that kind of privacy in a package and everyone who’s done that so far, at least coherently, has been rewarded monetarily via a project, via a chance to give that into the market. People want it and wanting it is rife and demand is almost the entire battle, so while people are conscious and demand it, we should give them great software and I think it’s happening. In the cryptowars there was this huge fascination with PGP. I met with Sheldon Richman the other day; he lives Arkansas. I go to Arkansas and meet like Sheldon Richman and all these other great new left anti-war people. He was saying he did PGP but this is the story – I stopped and then something like Web 2.0 happened and Bitdata happened and it wasn’t important any more. It’s important again and while it’s important again, it’s going to have to be people like you man, developing just need software for people that just takes care of it by default because we need it that way. We’re not going to take those extra steps, it kind of has to be built for us but it seems to be happening. [27:57]

Chair: Ladies and gentlemen, Cody Wilson. (Applause) [28:02]

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(Ode to Satoshi song played)

VERSE 1Well, Satoshi Nakamoto

that’s a name I love to sayWe don’t know much about him

but he came to save the dayWhen he wrote about the way things are

and the way things ought to beHe gave us all a protocol this world has never seen

CHORUS: Oh Bitcoin as you’re going into the old blockchain

Oh Bitcoin I know you’re going to reign, gonna reignTill everybody knows, everybody knows,

Till everybody knows your name

VERSE 2Down the road it will be told

about the death of old MtGoxAbout traders trading altercoins

and miners mining blocksBut them good old boys back in Illinois

and on down to TennesseeSee they don’t care to be a millionaire

they’re just wanting to be free

CHORUS: Oh Bitcoin as you’re going into the old blockchain

Oh Bitcoin I know you’re going to reign, gonna reignTill everybody knows, everybody knows,

Till everybody knows your name

VERSE 3From the ghettos of Calcutta

to the halls of ParliamentWhile the bankers count our money out

for every governmentOh Bitcoin flies on through the skies of Virtuality

A promise to deliver usfrom age old tyranny

CHORUS: Oh Bitcoin as you’re going into the old blockchain

Oh Bitcoin I know you’re going to reign, gonna reignTill everybody knows, everybody knows,

Till everybody knows your nameTill everybody knows, everybody knows,

Till everybody knows your nameGive me some exposure

Till everybody knows your name

Singing Oh Lord pass me some moreOh Lord before I have to go

Oh Lord pass me some moreOh Lord before I have to go

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Adam B. Levine interview with Amir Taaki

AL: Amir, the first time I saw you speak was, I think, was on BBC. You were wearing what looked like school uniform and your hair was nicely groomed. (Laughter) What changed? [30:54]

AT: (Laughter) Nothing. I run many businesses in my life and... yeah. (Laughter) [31:05]

AL: I mean, we’ve talked a couple of times over the last few days and one of the things that you’ve said, a few times, is you’ve told me a story about your friend who makes marmalade from expired food, basically. The thing that I keep wanting to ask, and I haven’t had chance yet, is there any circumstance under which you think that it’s good to have government regulations, or it’s good to have standards and regulations that restrict people from doing things, or is it just across the board, no? [31:31]

AT: I’m not thinking that we should nuke the planet and go back to living in caves, destroy everything that we’ve built and come towards but certainly we can put our minds together and think how we would like things to be and find a way that we can move in that direction. [31:54]

AL: When I look at the work that you’ve done with Libbitcoin and a variety of the other projects, Darkwallet’s another example, it’s obvious that you have an ideological take on this and that the purity of that ideology is very important to you. Can you kind of articulate why it is that you live the life that you do and do the work that you do? [32:16]

AT: As technologists, our job is to build tools for people to use and we now find ourselves in an empowering position because of the legacy left to us by many people over history who built the technology and a set of ethics and morals in mind. As someone with a huge amount of skill, we have a responsibility to carry that legacy onwards. There is a revolution in our time, perhaps as important as the invention of DNA itself. The potential for a global consciousness is emerging with another system that spans the entire globe. The internet is something that really has a lot of potential to change the things the way that we assemble as human beings, the way that we do things. I spend a lot of time, since I was very young, living in different communities, in different squats and places and seen the people who try to find other ways that they can live better and change the situation around them and observe what are the issues or problems that they have and think, that in my work, how I can build better tools to serve those people to be able to better construct something that can allow us to thrive as free people. [33:53]

AL: You’ve spent a lot of time in Calafou, which is sort of a post-capitalistic... [34:01]

AT: They call it a techno-industrial eco-village. [34:05]

AL: A techno-industrial eco-village. [34:06]

AT: Calafou is very interesting because I’ve seen a lot of different eco-villages and so on. One of the things that they’re doing with Calafou is investing energy and resources into technology and industry with a proper economic model behind it. When you see some of the squats, sometimes especially like in London, the people are moving a lot from week to

week in different places. When you’re in a place where you’re not going to be a long time, you’re less inclined to invest your time and your energy to build something nice and when you only think you’re going to be there for a few days, you might not keep the place clean and people even become destructive and a lot of tensions between the people arise. When people are in a place where they know they have the opportunity of that place that they can make something, people really become constructive, especially where you give the opportunity for people to pursue their own visions or their dreams. The difference is between a guy, like when people used to get slaves and tell the slaves to pick the cotton and you really can’t get them to do anything much more complex than picking cotton and the only way that you can scale up or improve it is to double the amount of people doing that manual labor. It’s the same thing really with the incentive structures where you have employees working on something but if people do the projects but it’s the project that they want to do and it’s their passion, they do it with a lot more creativity and a lot more drive. The money goes a lot further. We see this in all the open source projects. With Calafou, they think to get a place that they find a way that they can buy this land, like a massive piece of land with many different buildings all around and reconstruct an old industrial complex with diversity of use of the space. They have hackers, they have a bio lab, mechanics, people doing wood and metal, there is an enterprise that makes furniture, people with agriculture, all different people and really thinking about the things with the technology. My friends go and they occupy a big, big forest like one hour from outside London and the people there start to construct houses – nice houses. There are like log cabins with wooden planks on the floor and the walls and everything. There is some girl who built this house with two floors and a balcony all by herself and you really start to think... you give a few basic things to these people like industrial tools that they can have the bricks and they will build really nice houses... or the technological tools... like, in the winter, it’s very cold outside and it’s a lot of hard work to pick the firewood and do all the things and it’s very muddy outside. There’s a big space so a lot of people are trecking to the other side to go and talk to the people and it’s very difficult for a community to self-organize together and be self-managed but you put the internet in all the houses and the people can have a room and a chat room and coordinate through IRC or forums and suddenly things can work a lot better. Basic infrastructure like gas, that people can use to cook and make meals. Even just thinking economically about how we do the things to do them smarter. In Calafou, there is a kitchen and any time you want you can go and cook some food and there are the ingredients there and make something but I noticed in the squats, sometimes people were buying these snacks. You buy these snacks and they are more expensive, when you eat them you’re always hungry and it’s crappy food, it’s not really giving you energy or anything. If you buy the basics, like the potatoes and the rice and those things and you cook proper meals. For instance, in Calafou, everybody tries to cook a meal at least once a week with two or three other people and if everybody in the community does that, then you can have a warm meal three times a day and eat better and live better. Just thinking about how you do these things, there are a lot of different things that we can see how we can do together to make the things better and to live in a place where you own and have sovereignty and own something. A lot of the times, going through our life, we’re renting and working for years and years with a mortgage and, at the end, a lot of people have nothing. They are living off credit, off debt and that’s not a way to live. For instance, with the open source, ecology is a project to construct the 40 basic machines that you need to make a self-sustainable town or village in such a way that these machines are easy to build DIY, low cost

and with each of the parts modular. If you have the industrial base, you can reuse the parts in different machines so things like the brick press or the tractor or the trencher... things that save on labor. It’s not the same as a hundred years ago. We have the technology and the tools now and we can live better and localize and connect also more closely our consumption with our production. We have now optimized our production so much that the real cost is in the distribution of a lot of the things. We’ve moved production to these centralized nodes. I think, one of the biggest changes in the market was around the 70s when they decided to sell different kinds of tomato soup. Before, the people used to do the studies and say – OK, how much sugar should we put? How much salt? What consistency should we make it? Then, getting the averages and making the single product the best tomato soup for the market. Some physicist came along and he actually propose that we should make different kinds of tomato soup. Some people like it lumpy, some people like it spicy and it was all different and customized for each people. That’s part of the revolution with 3D printing that we can actually build the things for ourselves, as we need them ourselves, better serving us. That’s the same thing with the production and the consumption. Move the things locally and use the tools so we can better connect the consumption with the production. Not only that things can be better, that you’re eating better, that you’re consuming local produce that is made by local farmers. We’re more aware of the hidden costs in our consumption because there are a lot of things in the way that we’re living and the way that we’re doing things now that is on a trajectory that isn’t really sustainable and is causing massive amounts of unseen damage and the effect on our lives is not very good. We look to someone and we yearn for someone who will care for us and forgive us of our childish mistakes. The reality is that we are the custodians of life’s meaning, we search for a purpose but we make our own purpose. (Applause) [42:14]

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ADVERT:

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AL: Let’s talk about what the world looks like in ten years. We were talking with Andreas and Jeffrey when they were up here and they were talking about the world of post national currencies and denationalized currencies. They were talking about it as if this was something that, perhaps, was fifty years out but, I think, that in practice we’ve seen that when change happens, it tends to happen quite fast. I’m curious... you know... I suspect you’ve thought about this. What do you think happens if we win? [44:02]

AT: I’m not into Utopia and stuff. I’m past dogma and I’m not really into ideologies. I think there is too much of this labelling and categorizing. I think we should elevate the discussion and more talking about values and ethics. What kind of values do we want to promote in the society? It’s one thing to talk about we should be like this, it should be like that but the only way that people are going to adopt the things is if they’re better than what... if the alternatives are better than what is already provided. That’s how we have to start thinking. We have to start thinking and being resource-oriented about what we need. It’s one of the biggest tragedies of our modern era the great waste of human talent that we couldn’t or wouldn’t use. If we can somehow think to apply that – that people are often working in jobs or doing things that is against their self-interest but for money. At some point, you get to your life and you start to think – OK, how am I going to pay for this? How am I going to have the healthcare or do this? To take that worry away from people and the people can do the things that matter and then think – How can I make that sustainable? How can I use the market or the power of these tools to grow how I want to see the things? If we were all doing this together, the more of us there are, the stronger we are. Fundamentally, people are good. There are a lot of people I see here today striving for good things and looking forward to the future with the way that the things are heading – with the exponentially increasing... it doesn’t matter what the roof on the resources is but they’re exponentially increasing use of resources, the population is increasing, the rest of the world wants to also match our energy use, combine all these together and we’re going to hit that roof sooner or later. The police are being given more and more powers every day. More and more laws and legislation that they can use to... how they want to enforce their vision of the world. The surveillance state is getting absolutely enormous. When the Snowden revelations first came out, it was... [46:38]

AL: Isn’t this good? I mean, from the perspective of... you’re saying that these systems can only take hold if they are so obviously better than the alternatives that we have before us. Isn’t that good from the perspective of now, it’s much more likely that these alternatives will be attractive relative to normal? [46:56]

AT: That’s like saying war is good because it’s spurs innovation. (Laughter) The Snowden stuff came out and in the beginning it was like – Wow, this is cool. Hackers have been saying this for a long time. If I can download a piece of software off the internet in a couple of hours and start tracking people’s faces, you can bet that in London, with all the CCTV everywhere, that it’s already being done and logged in massive databases. With every revelation, it gets more and more crazy... like mind-blowing, like the scale of this. This is not targeted surveillance, this is dragnet surveillance, flying drones over in entire neighborhoods, entire communities of people and harvesting all of their communications

and data, logging 60m phone calls in one month in France alone, 70m in Spain. This is usual, you know. [48:03]

AL: Again, it’s that always the darkest before the dawn sort of thing. In order for the alternative to emerge, again, if everything was great, why would these systems be appealing? [48:11]

AT: Things are polarizing a lot more. For a lot of people, it’s going to get very, very bad. The thing is we’re in an economic downturn with the massively burgeoning, bureaucratic state and all the red tape. Meanwhile, for the normal person, they’re working 9-5 doing jobs they increasingly hate for less and less pay and for what? For a box in the city? [48:43]

AL: Again, this just seems like all of these things that you’re saying, these are reasons why people aren’t invested in the current paradigm. If they were successful with their job, if they were happy with the place that they lived... [48:55]

AT: A lot of people are continuing to do the things the same way and they will continue. [49:00]

AL: What are the alternatives? This is the thing is that these people... anyways. [49:03]

AT: The future is not going to be like a sudden crash or some apocalypse. It’s going to be like the things declining and getting a lot more oppressive and a lot more harder to live with all the scarcity of the resources as well. Meanwhile, that’s why we’ve got to put our minds together and think – OK, how can we build something for the future? We, as free people, can survive and thrive and grow as a culture. It’s not only about making this project or that project, but about the idea because once you make something that shows that it’s possible and that the imagination is there. You do it a couple of times more here and then people start to reproduce with the documentation on the internet – these are the steps you need to take. Then people go and they start to replicate it and that’s how you grow as a culture and take the things over. [50:03]

AL: OK, we just have another couple of minutes but I want to talk to you about Libbitcoin. [50:09]

AT: Ah yeah. [50:09]

AL: Am I pronouncing that right? [50:10]

AT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [50:11]

AL: OK, great. Libbitcoin. The second time I heard you speak was on Plan B show back in maybe August or September and you explained that you were working on libbitcoin, an alternative implementation of the Bitcoin specification because, right now, the world that we live in with only the Satoshi client as the primary implementation is a world like one where you only have Internet Explorer. [50:35]

AT: Yeah, one of the biggest threats to Bitcoin is centralization of development. Now, it’s not enough that the source code is open source. There are a lot of decisions, deep down on the technical level that only very few people understand, like Peter Todd or a handful of other people. When you’re faced with that decision between A or B, if your motive is slightly corrupted, maybe you’re working for some corporation, maybe you might take the choice B which slightly favors corporations over black markets. Next time, it happens again and again. It’s not like some sudden big backdoor put in by the government, it’s the sum of many small steps that slowly morph Bitcoin into something very different from the Bitcoin with the principles of Satoshi encoded into there. It becomes a Govcoin or a Corpcoin and it’s no longer serving the interests of the people - a Bitcoin for small businesses, for peer to peer transfers, for the black market. It’s not only about the protocol or certain consensus development decisions, it’s also about features, about where do we, as a people, invest our time and energies because just like the internet, there are people who develop technologies to trap people, to surveil people, to censor people, to limit people’s freedom. It doesn’t even have to come from corporations, it can come from ourselves, from Bitcoin corporations that say – We need to protect our liability, we need to protect our interests and going and implementing features like the blacklists or triangulation of transactions or any number of different features that we can’t foresee right now. In the future, there will be that pressure and that inertia to develop those things. We need people who are developing Bitcoin in the spirit or with the integrity of what Bitcoin was intended for – a tool to serve people, to serve a market which empowers everybody. It’s very important that we have a voice in that development circle. We’re not going to get that voice by going to the Foundation and asking to be part of their inner circle. The way that we’re going to get the voice is by forcing the issue, by making software that’s better and that people want to use. The way that it’s going to be better is by playing on our strengths. What strengths do we have? We have software that is equitable, that everybody can use and that everybody can transact with their anonymity intact, that they can use crypto-features unencumbered with one another and that is what we have to do with Bitcoin. Moving away from this image of Bitcoin as a tool to buy a drink in a bar, as something to make it easier for you to shop in the supermarket – Yeah, I’ve got my iPhone, using Bitcoin... I’m not criticizing that but there is a bigger reason for Bitcoin. Bitcoin brings us new tools that we can exploit and everybody can use these tools. We can use it to really construct something different that hasn’t ever been imagined before possible and is better than what exists, like the crypto-features. With the Darkwallet, we want to bring these features out to the people for the young entrepreneurs, the tools of trade and business of the future. It goes beyond just new finance. The blockchain is an amazing new data-structure that we can use and it goes into things about resource management. How can communities or groups of people... it used to be that we had small communities before but now we have the technology to link up these communities and actually make them scale on a bigger level for people to be able to organize together on a much larger scale. Tools of governance... I’ve spent a lot of time in communities seeing how do the people govern and each one has a different culture just like every open source project has a different culture. There are different models with different tradeoffs that serve different people. That’s the problem with having one government enforced by one state. Maybe there could be start up governments like what the CIC is doing in Catalunya. There are using the legal structure of a cooperative... [55:35]

AL: Let me give you a lightning question here because we’re just about out of time. Amir this has been great. OK, so at the beginning of this conversation, I said that you have ideology that’s important to you. In the middle of this conversation, you told me that you don’t identify with ideology anymore and that it’s about values. In less than a minute, can you articulate what you think the most important values are for you? [55:55]

AT: I have a list somewhere. (Laughter) I met this Jeff Berwick guy last night and he was telling me about his plan to get some African nation pay off the government and the politicians and divide it up into shares and sell the country out. I was like – What if some guy buys up half the country and he’s like – Well it’s private property. I was like – Who enforces that and he goes – You have the right to enforce that. That, for me, is so fucked up. (Laughter) (Applause) Some rich, white **** buys half the country, puts his mansion there and says – This is my space with the guns and the military... so, another mafia. That’s not for me. [56:47]

AL: No more mafias. [56:48]

AT: No mafias, no. It’s not about – I want my sovereignty, **** the other guy. No, it’s like – I want my sovereignty. We want our sovereignty. I’m going to link with my friends and do the things together. What is better to live with your friends working on cool projects with swimming pools, a gym, boxing gym, hack club, cinema all for yourselves and you own the land together... like a massive space where you can have big parties and nice girls around and live free and do what you want and have all your friends come and visit you - not only 100 people, 10,000 or a million and all having fun and being free. That’s the way to live. [57:30]

AL: Ladies and gentlemen, Amir Taaki. (Applause) [57:33]

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CREDITS:

Thanks for listening to Episode 111 of Let’s Talk Bitcoin.

Content for this episode was provided by Brave the World and CanAwareness This episode was edited by Adam B. Levine Music for this episode was provided by Jared Rubens and the boys from

Bitcoinsandgravy.com with their Ode to Satoshi

Thanks for listening. [58:02]