 Hello and welcome to another edition of let's talk ETC. I'm your host Christian Severino and today I have a special guest with me Steven Kinzella. Did I pronounce your name correctly? No, it's Stefan Kinzella but that's close enough. Okay, Stefan Kinzella and so I think you'll agree he's a will be an interesting guest for us. He is, let me read his part of his Wikipedia page. So Stefan Kinzella is an American intellectual property lawyer, author and deontological anarcho capitalist. He attended Louisiana State University where he earned a bachelor of science and master of science in electrical engineering. So he does have knowledge definitely of technical aspects and a jurist doctor from the Paul M. Hebert Law Center and he also obtained an LLM at the University of London. He was formerly an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Meisius Institute, faculty member of the Meisius Academy and he also co-founded the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom, C4SIF, of which he is currently the director. So wow, welcome and congrats on that very impressive resume. Thank you very much. So the reason I thought it would be interesting to have you on the show and and and I think the audience would agree. So a lot of people get into blockchain technology and Ethereum Classic, which is one of the main focuses of the show because they have libertarian leanings. That's not a requirement but I do notice it attracts a lot of those people and they were all or most of us are technically minded and so a lot of times people will say things and I'll wonder us well you know is that is what you're saying really backed up by do people that know about the law and economy more than developers would they agree with the things people are saying and so that's why I think you're a very helpful guest because you bring that that side of things. We don't usually discuss things with with lawyers and people that know so much about the economy so why don't we why don't you why don't we start with why don't you describe from your website what a deontological libertarian is now on when I search for that on Wikipedia it came up that it was a the same thing as a natural rights libertarian. So can you kind of talk about that? Sure well keep in mind that I didn't write that page so that's someone else's description. I don't strongly disagree with it but I think what the person writing that was trying to get at was there are there's considered to be two basic types now there are some people that think there are three or more but two basic types of approaches towards say ethics okay and to simplify their empirical slash utilitarian and natural rights slash deontological okay so the so the first would be kind of a consequentialist approach which is basically we're in favor of rules in society and laws that lead to the greatest benefit for society in general right yeah and that's sometimes called utilitarianism it's an empirical approach that a lot of economists favor like they try to say should we adjust the tax code this way should we have this kind of law who's going to benefit who's gonna hurt and we sum this up and we try to do the overall best good for society okay all right and then the deontological approach and by the way people that are familiar with the philosophical idea of ontology which is the philosophical study of the types of things that exist the words sound similar but they're actually have nothing to do with each other to deontology and ontology have like literally nothing to do with each other okay deontological just means a an approach that is more rule or principled based and that's why it's more geared towards the natural law so the idea is that we're in favor of rules that are right no matter what the consequences okay so that's the kind of classical division now someone like me I wouldn't really I don't actually think there's a division I think that the rules that are right and good sort of blend with and and compliment the rules that lead to the best results for society on average so I wouldn't really distinguish between the two I think people call me a deontological anarchist and libertarian because I've written I've written in the tradition of on Rand who's sort of an Aristotelian natural rights theorist and Rothbard who was in the natural rights tradition but I myself have been more influenced by Mises Ludwig von Mises in economics who's an Austrian economist and by Hans Hermann Hoppe who is a German Austrian economist who has been influenced by Rothbard and Mises but his his theory of rights is sort of a blend of consequentialism and and the natural rights approach so we can get into that if it's interesting but basically I I prefer to view my approach as logical and consistent and principled so we you talk to other human beings that we live with the ones that share similar values basic values like peace prosperity cooperation and we say listen if you apply the rules of economics and logic and consistency and honesty and and evidence to these things what would what would that lead you to conclude so if we all are in favor of each other prosper prospering and you know everyone doing better in life and we have some awareness of the laws of economics the basic laws of economics then what what kind of like laws would we be in favor of what kind of legal policies would be would we be in favor of okay so you want me to answer that so okay so two general classes of answers that I that I hear to your question is there's the camp that says that we give everybody we respect that everyone's freedom and we leave people alone that's what I think of when I think of libertarianism I I'm a simple guy only I think in simple definitions that's how I would your your definition was obviously much more sophisticated than mine but I that's like a broad category and then I I other people seem to want to focus on taking care of people what yes what we would call the socialistic approach perhaps and those are kind of the two big answers that I see and they're always okay in conflict maybe not all the time but but they those are the kind of the biggest two divisions that I see would you agree with that I see I think I think from the perspective that that I come from we don't we don't agree with all these bifurcations exactly because we see that there are loaded presuppositions in the way that these things are framed and and so it depends upon who works which audience we're speaking to right but if if yeah if I'm talking to someone that just is like dabbling in this or has an experience the libertarian perspective on things then that perspective that you just put out so we would say that's a false dichotomy that that first of all there's no conflict between rights and there's no conflict between the desire to help people and the desire to protect people's individual property rights we think that those things go together but there is a conflict between the idea of having a legal right say a legal right to be taken care of and a legal right to your property they do they do run in conflict with each other because and this this goes into what libertarians sometimes emphasize the distinction between negative and positive rights so basically libertarians tend to say that we believe in negative rights and and and the corresponding negative obligations which means that um you have a right to do whatever you want within your own territory basically and your own property your own body as long as you don't invade someone else's rights which is sort of what you stated earlier as the kind of rule of thumb way of looking at it right and that could be viewed as a negative right because the only obligation or duty that it imposes upon your neighbors is for them not to do something all they have to do is not invade your property they have to not hurt you they have to not you know steal from you they have to not invade your property so the only burden you impose upon them is to just not do something to refrain from doing something I see but if if you believe in positive rights which is the right to be educated the right to a house the right to food okay right these kinds of things that requires that someone else has to have an obligation or a duty to provide you with it so if you have a right to an income that means other people have the obligation to give that to you but that means that you have a right to their property right so so there's always a conflict between the right that you have to your property and other people's rights to try to get a piece of it okay positive welfare rights okay so if I if I understood you correctly you two of the points that you made were that you don't like these these some of these words that get banded about because they they come with baggage and so we wanted you sound like you're obviously very precise on the language that you use which is good and then also you said that the conflict between the two major camps comes whether we're obligated to do something or simply simply have a right to be protected from doing something but that it's the duty if we the whether how much duty we have is the difference would that be a correct way to summarize well or it's the type of duty is it is it the duty or the obligation to refrain from doing something or is it the duty to provide someone with something right so it's it's easy to just mind your own business and stay within the borders of your own property and if you want to cross the boundaries of someone else's property basically and use their property you need to get their permission you can't do it without their consent right so all you have to just refrain refrain from crossing their property borders without their permission and if you think of it in the simplest in the most basic case of human bodies right human bodies are a type of scarce resource and the basic libertarian axiom would be self ownership so every person owns their body okay right which means the opposite of slavery because slavery means someone gets to own someone else's body or in the case of say sexual relations can a man have sex with that woman's body whose decision is it is it the woman's decision or is it the man's decision right and so the the locus of control has to be with the actor himself that controls that body and then libertarianism is just an extension of that basic idea the idea that we are self owners that we own our own bodies that slavery is impermissible extending that to other things in the world that we control and use as extensions of our self so basically people have a natural intuition intuitive opposition to slavery they have a natural intuitive belief in self ownership by and large people that don't want to dominate each other people that think that it's wrong to stab someone or kill them or mug them or attack them without their consent we just extend that consistently to other scarce resources in the universe right now um now to be honest i so i don't have an economics degree so i when i listen to the libertarian arguments they sound the most compelling to me personally and this this isn't an argument in support of socialism but i do see on tv that there are people that have pretty impressive credentials that disagree with libertarianism and so you would think that they would know better if they're if indeed they're wrong and so let me ask you this have you heard any good arguments on the other side arguing against libertarianism because there are some smart people i think you would agree that yes so it's it's not just you know a bunch of knuckleheads that so what would you say to to that well so i believe there's there are some positions that there are really no good arguments against so for example um the drug war or intellectual property for example which are two of my libertarian positions so i believe that all patent and copyright law should be abolished and all sort of drug war is completely illegitimate and so is to say constriction the draft for for for war i don't think there are really any good arguments for that but for the state itself for like a minimal state that does some functions instead of an anarchist position which is what i hold yes i think there are some honest arguments for that and there are some decent arguments for that i think they're flawed but i don't think they're they're crazy so for example you know you could argue that if we live in a world as we do today where there are states like china and russia and other states if the u.s were to become anarchist what would happen if china were to threaten us with nuclear annihilation what would happen to this anarchist regime maybe they couldn't defend themselves right so that's a difficulty that anarchist theory has to has to grapple with and there are other arguments like that so i don't i don't deny that there are some honest disagreements about the basics um but the farther you get away from a minimal state say the argument that robert nozick argued for like instead of having anarchy we should have a minimal state or an ultra minimal state or what some libertarians call the night watchman state the farther you get away from that and the more you get into the modern democratic welfare state which has broader and broader powers and unlimited taxing power right to conscript people for war the right to throw people in jail for smoking marijuana the farther you get away from the core functions that you could argue for as a public function the the more indefensible those arguments become i believe okay that makes sense um um now i'm glad you brought up the term i think you said anarchist or anarcho capitalist because that was yes yes so they're different types of anarchists and i'm an anarcho capitalist or an anarcho libertarian now i yeah i i i i printed that wikipedia page so let me just for the benefit of the listeners let me say what the wikipedia page said because i've heard this term and i really want to make sure to get it right and then you tell me if you agree or if you want to add to it so an anarcho capitalist advocates the elimination of the state in favor of self ownership private property and free markets and they believe that in the absence of law by centralized decrees and legislation that society tends to contractually self-regulate and civilized through the discipline of a free market and what surprised me the most or what it was shocking to me was that they they believe that courts of law will be operated privately so yes yes and and then um and then then they talked about the history murray roth bard was the first person to use the term but the question that came to my mind which i'd love you to elaborate on is if the free market sets up a court system and somebody says well i don't care what you say i'm still going to do what i want anyway how do you who who has that final authority to so how so can you kind of elaborate on on that kind of confusion that some people might have absolutely and to be honest i i do a lot of interviews and i i kind of didn't realize i was doing i didn't realize this was not a libertarian show which is fine with me it's kind of a pleasure so uh okay reorientation let me just maybe explain a couple of basics just to make sure the people are listening because if you were shocked by the private courts idea i i just dropped a while ago the idea of private you know the idea of having no military and things like that um i mean i'm open to to i i just never heard that before right no no right so let me explain let me explain the the territory is this there you had these old oh the history is vast okay brian darti's book about about the origins libertarianism is good but basically had the old right you had the you had the they had the old liberals you had all these strains of politics from the last two three hundred years okay and i say in the in the in the fifties and sixties iran and milton freedman and these radical free market types emerged and they sort of allied to some degree with the conservatives for various tactical reasons and they're seen as allied with them now but in a way they're very leftist and very progressive because they're very pro-civil liberties anti-drug war anti-war things like this so they're really not categorized into the left-right spectrum yeah they don't they don't fit so nicely they don't fit in those those categories too well right right so we've come up with our own spectrum which you can look up the nolan chart david nolan one of the early libertarians came up with a two-dimensional chart which has two axes one axis is personal freedom and one axis is economic freedom and libertarians believe in the maximum amount of both okay whereas we would we would simplify and say liberals or leftists believe in maybe a lot of personal freedoms like free speech and things like that but not a lot of economic freedoms and conservatives would be the opposite they would believe in like low taxes but regulating abortion and religion things like that whereas we believe in high freedoms in both and the original guys sort of hark hark back to the original founding fathers of the us and they view the original founding constitution that era as more proto-libertarian because it was kind of a more minimalist government they can only regulate a little bit when these guys are what we now call menarchists which means they believe in a very minimal state that watchman state but there's emerged a more radical strain of anarchists who believe in like the government should not just be minimal but zero or the state i should say the state not the government because we distinguish between those two okay um and but there is a tradition of anarchists that has long before the 50s and long before libertarians like the left anarchists the syndicalists the socialists the communist anarchists and they all say they don't believe in the state so you basically have different types of anarchists even today and they all disagree with each other so like the libertarian anarchists of which i am apart and we call ourselves anarcho-capitalists because we believe there should not be a state and there should be a private property order okay and i'll get to the court thing in a second okay but we think that the socialist anarchists or the left anarchist are not true anarchists because the only way you could have socialism in a private system would be to have a state emerge to enforce those rules right they sort of think the opposite about us right so they think you could only have capitalism with the state to protect the right the rights of the capitalist classes against the workers etc okay so that's sort of the landscape okay now um so the idea is the idea i'll put it simply as it's possible and by the way because i'm a so-called deontological anarchist my perspective on this is not quite the same as the other type of libertarians who are more pragmatic minded so they would just say uh the state doesn't work therefore it's bad okay so and i kind of agree with that but my view is more principled and i would say that we have certain rights as human beings we have a right to private property you have a right to do whatever you want with your body and with the things that you homestead or acquire by contract peacefully without hurting anyone and anything you want to do within that sphere is fine as long as you don't invade the equal rights of other people that's basically the the core idea of anarcho libertarians okay right and if you have that framework then you basically oppose what we call aggression and aggression means the the use of someone else's property including their body without their consent okay basically means hitting someone or walking on their property without their permission right okay so we basically favor peace and voluntarism and consent and if you have that basic principle then you apply it consistently then as Bastiat the great um a french thinker um who wrote the law in the 1850s as he explained just because if something is impermissible for one person to do it doesn't become permissible when a larger number of people vote vote in favor of it so if it's wrong for me to come confiscate property right if it's wrong for me to steal from you it's still wrong if a hundred of my neighbors get together when we pass a law saying we can steal from you and give it to the poor which is like welfare right so we we think that you can't make something right just by majority vote okay and therefore the state by its nature has to tax which means take property by theft from people and it has to outlaw competing agencies okay so it has to be the monopolistic provider of law and justice and force in a given community and those two things combined and actually either one of them uh implies the other that's far afield but those two things are both acts of aggression they're basically acts of violence against innocent people who have done nothing wrong and as libertarians we say it's wrong so we say the state is inherently aggressive and criminal that's why we're anarchist because we think the state is illegitimate okay now then then the practical issue is people say well what would society look like if we abolish the state right you're right how you're gonna protect from invasion and and yes bad actors okay yeah and the pragmatic and consequentialist minded libertarians they sort of start from that area they say that well we would be better off if the government provide if the private companies provided the roads and education instead of the government and so therefore we use your favorite but from my point of view it's the other way around we say it's wrong for the government to take money from me to build a road it's wrong for the government to steal my house to make a road it's wrong for the government to force my kid to go to school it's wrong for the government to tax me and to to pay for public education so that's a that's the more deontological approach it's a principled approach it's like it's just wrong and then the question would be secondary to us of well then what would society look like in the absence of that and from our point of view this question would be similar to the abolition question of slavery during the antebellum south where if you said we have to abolish slavery not because it's inefficient right not because it's an inefficient use of resources we have to abolish slavery because it's wrong because you're violating the rights of black slaves right and if you said i am in favor of abolition of slavery because it is a violation of human rights it's wrong and if someone said in opposition but who would pick the cotton okay you see so to us that wouldn't be an opposite that wouldn't be a valid argument yes yes they said if they said who would pick the cotton if it's a genuine question we can ask we can we can we can we can say okay well we can look into that we can say well maybe but if you ask the question rhetorically into the abolition of slavery if you say like basically listen i know you want to abolish slavery but i don't understand who would pick the cotton and we have to have the cotton picked and the slaves are picking it now and so therefore until you prove to me that the cotton will be picked as well and as efficiently after slavery then as before until that point in time we're not going to abolish it the burden of proof is on you right you see we don't think that way we think that the burden of proof is on them to justify slavery and of course they can't and then if the question is okay we have to abolish slavery and who's going to pick the cotton i don't know we have to wait and see and figure it out we're okay with that answer so that's the first kind of response now of course common sense will tell you who would pick the cotton it would be you pay some labor that machines or whatever so in the case of the court system it shouldn't be that shocking to you because there have been private court systems for all of history and in fact the the entire day well yeah i mean first of all arbitration is is private yeah okay i've heard of arbitration and i never had to go through it but i uh i okay yeah i understand what you're saying and and contracts are private because they're agreements negotiated between people and they're like little legal systems between between the people that are parties of the contract and not only that the entire western legal system that we're used to now that the private law that we rely upon was developed in two great legal systems in the world one was the roman law okay and from say minus so 500 bc to 580 roughly that thousand year period and the other was the the the english common law which started maybe seven 800 years later for about a thousand years to until today and they were both basically decentralized systems they were not completely private but they were not controlled by legislation and governments as we think of today they basically were they resulted from two human beings who had a dispute and they needed this dispute resolved and they knew that fighting each other would result in social ostracism or penalties and so they had an incentive to go to some some arbiter some arbitrator who would decide the case a judge basically okay and they put their they put their dispute before them and the judge tried to find the just result or the right result and looked at precedent and tradition and expectations of the parties and natural law and common sense and made a decision and made an award you get to own this not you whatever and over time these principles developed into the body of private law that we still rely upon today right private contract law property law okay court law things like that um so the idea is that this would this is what would happen in a private law society and let me mention one more thing and then um and that is that even in today's society we have roughly 200 governments in the world so in a sense we have anarchy right now between countries now they do have treaties between each other but that's analogous to private contracts okay there's no there's no overlord government that makes all the countries abide by the treaties and we have transnational commerce you'll have a french company doing business with a tent in a belgian company or whatever right and the contracts happen to be enforced they find a way to do it through contract and through arbitration and through cooperation between the government's legal systems so it's clearly possible to have anarchy in a sense and one more thing there's a great article from the early journal of libertarian studies by alfred couson who is not a libertarian but it's a great article it's called how do we ever really get out of anarchy and he points out that within a government within a state there's no overlord enforcer that makes them comply with the rules of the government itself so even within a government you have a type of anarchy because like say the u.s. government you have the supreme court issue of verdict and richard nixon complies with it he steps down because the supreme court said you have to turn over the tapes okay right there's no pistols being pointed at him there's just an interlocking series of understandings and social traditions and understand and agreements that result in a web of law that binds the people within the government itself i mean you see this playing out right now with all these um the things with trump and the and the and the Mueller and the democrats they're all playing this dance but they're abiding by a certain set of rules that they respect okay not that these rules are valid or just or natural but that it's possible to have a set of rules that do that do bind actors within a system and we think that that's possible within society at large we just think that they should be just instead of arbitrary and based upon force okay now um if now when let me let me tell you a little bit about my simple introduction to libertarianism and then you so i i i mainly read Milton Friedman um specifically his great book free to choose which i've read twice and gone through with my well not the book but i went through the series tv series with my daughter and i watched that twice it's on youtube i highly recommend it i think he's one of the greatest intellectuals in history um but um um would you say that that is a good starting point for somebody that kind of wants to jump into and learn more about this whole discussion because he to me seems like one of the most amazing teachers i've ever heard i think he was great um my personal sort of a pantheon of a list of works i i i think is his book capitalism and freedom is really the pinnacle of what he wrote in terms of libertarianism free to choose is really good too um now he is more of a consequentialist and minarchist libertarian but yes he's fantastic and up there along with him would be henry haslett in his book economics in one lesson i think if you read one of the milton freedman books free to choose or the series or his capitalism freedom and and and um and henry haslett economics in one lesson and the very short book by frederick bastia that had mentioned earlier called the law which is like 1850 or something those three things will give you a very solid foundation mostly in consistency and economic thinking right and based upon kind of some simple principles of justice but yes i totally agree with you milton freedman is great he's not quite an anarchist but he's uh he's great okay now i'm going to put you on the spot because or here's i didn't have an answer to my own question that i thought of after i saw the free to choose series which was wow his this guy's arguments are so amazing um you could i you could almost see somebody believing you know everything he says so then it occurred to me that i should probably see the flip side and then i was trying to think is there some uh communist marxian economist that maybe did a youtube series as well that is equally particulate to just kind of get a balanced uh viewpoint or the other side so can you think of i couldn't think of anybody that was the equal of milton freedman on the other opposing side can you think of somebody just a no and and i hate these kind of questions i mean i don't blame you for asking the problem is if you don't have an answer it sounds like you're you're not being objective but um like i'm like well known to be anti i'm a patent lawyer okay and i'm against the patent system and i do lots of talks and debates and i'll get asked all the time hey cancella we want to do would you i'd like to do a debate instead of an interview could you recommend to me the top two or three people on the other side okay and unfortunately i think there are like literally no good arguments for ip so i i'm always stumbling it's not i'm not trying to sandbag it i just can't find anyone and on the question you asked as i said earlier i think there are some respectable arguments for um for for some kind of minimal state and some kinds of interventions uh not in the truce of state but if you want to go say communism or totalitarianism right against against some form of western liberalism some form of of minimal or a limited state that we have now i i think there are just no good arguments because just the empirical evidence alone there's hundreds of millions of people killed um and just impoverishment you know in the last century alone by communism and forms of socialism and i just don't i mean i think that in 1991 you know or 90 when when communism fell they they basically lost their argument in an empirical sense now in a more moderate in a more moderate form like if you argue for the welfare state yeah let's let's let's do that that's i think that probably the best arguments would be something like say francis fuki yama i don't know if you've heard of him but he had this provocative article which turned into a book in the night i think around 1991 the end of history yes the end of history and the last man okay and they sort of argue that it's sort of a neoliberal view that uh uh modern what a liberal democracy is the ultimate pinnacle of humanism and you have to have a balance between the desires of the masses but you have to have capitalism in some form as the engine from you know that provides growth and prosperity but then you have to have a state that redistributes it to it a bit so i would say and then john rawls of course is the famous political philosopher um and i'm blanking on the name of his book we had a famous book in 1970 or something uh i think it's called a theory of justice and that's and that's the book that robert knows that the famous libertarian philosopher argued against in his book anarchy state newtopia so those sort of books are the antipodes of the two views but they're all rooted in the liberal tradition in the sense that say john rawls and these welfareists believe in some form of redistributionism right but they don't believe in ultimate communism i mean you could look at hillary clinton and and and barock obama and these guys they don't really oppose the free market and capitalism they understand that you can't have communism you can't have central command of the economy they may go a little bit too far but they understand that the essential essence of the western liberal system is commerce trade private property rights free markets they just think it has to be heavily regulated by other values right the way the way i would pitch it is that like a libertarian like me i think that you should not commit aggression against someone you shouldn't steal from them you shouldn't invade their body without their permission i wouldn't say it's an absolute but it's it's basically my principle i think it's just wrong right whereas if you put it that way to the the typical social democratic type thinking person which is what most people are nowadays they would say well i think that aggression is wrong but there are other values and we have to balance and weigh and juggle these things against each other right so like equality is also important and the in some kids starving in africa give being given food is also important right i think that a lot of those concerns would be would disappear if they had a better understanding of economics like if they understood the incentive systems that governments have to come with and basically the whole field of public choice economics which explains why a lot of the grand schemes and projects that these idealistic utopian progressive dreamers want to accomplish they just cannot be accomplished because once you set a program in motion it has its own inertia and the people inside that program want to benefit themselves right right well see now you you see that's a okay so just uh if i can try to uh reiterate some of what you said so you believe in what you believe because you think it's right and but at the at towards the end of your comment you are also saying that not only do i believe it's right but it also provides the most benefit yes and that's why that's why i said earlier i don't think there's a conflict between consequentialism and between deontological or principled approaches i think they they they dovetail together but yes yeah okay so in the in the the last part of our show why don't we move into um the talking a little bit about um blockchains and uh like bitcoin so a lot of people involved with this technology i think have visions that it's going to help promote a lot of the um political and economic viewpoints that you share um and a lot of people don't know if the government's going to eventually just figure out a way to kill it and that's going to be the end of it but yeah yeah what are your what's your experience with this technology and kind of what are your thoughts on vigilante little activists well first of all i'll say that so i'm i'm of the austrian which is austrian economics which is like a hard money pro gold anti federal reserve anti inflationary money tradition and libertarian and suspicious of the government controlling money in the fed and so just from that point of view there's aspects of of just any kind of private money that attracts us right and there are some austrians who think that bitcoin is impossible because they think that money has to arise from a physical commodity i've never believed that i've always thought that this is i think that bitcoin is a new phenomenon in the world i think the the idea of the blockchain and aspects of that it built upon nick zabo's idea or are complete genius and if we knew who who satoshi was i mean he probably should get the Nobel prize someday just for the this new phenomenon and we're reaching a new stage of human evolution there's lots of things happening i think we can't predict what what's going to happen artificial intelligence 3d printing you know encryption right what doug casey calls files people ph y l e s people associated with each other not based upon their their ethnicity or their regions but upon other affinities and i think bitcoin could be extremely disruptive look i'll i'll say that i was i was i was never skeptical of it in an economic sense like some of my fellow austrians were but i was skeptical that i thought that i thought it might be a threat to the government if it ever became successful and i thought the government would shut it down i actually lost the bet against one of my friends in 2013 and i learned my lesson i paid him a hundred dollars in bitcoin which is now worth about fifty thousand dollars okay so i lost a fifty thousand dollar bet wow but i i wised up and i bought some in 2014 and so now i'm just watching what happens um and i think my hope and my my my somewhat prediction is that it's going to be something like uber like uber is something that got popular so fast that by the time it got popular enough to raise the ire of the protected industries the cab companies etc it was and who were going to lobby the government to shut it down it was too late right and i think uber has escaped the the clutches of the government because the government is slow and stupid which is one thing we have in our favor and i'm hoping that that happens with bitcoin by the time the government wakes up and tries tries to outlaw bitcoin it will be too late and also is distributed again around the world right so even if one or two or ten governments outlaw it they're just going to be left in the dust by the countries that don't and there are lots of countries that don't have the dominant world money basically everyone except for the us right smaller countries that don't they don't care if their currency is is outmoded by bitcoin so it's going to just prosper there my my guess is that bitcoin could if it emerges and gets more and more dominant it could if it if it replaces say gold and then starts it starts becoming a haven for people to resort to instead of the inflationary currencies like the dollar and the euro and others that it's going to severely limit the power of the government number one to to inflate and that's what funds government wars so it could have a direct effect on the ability of governments to wage war it could also impact the government's ability to tax people and to regulate the economy to have currency currency limitations exchanges and all that so i think it could severely it could end up being the thing that's the silver bullet or the stake in the you know stake in the in the vampire which is the state it could kill a state now this is an ambitious and utopian goal but i'm hopeful and i do think that there's huge potential for bitcoin my personal view is i'm leaning more towards the bitcoiners the ones that believe that there can only there should probably only be one in the long run it's probably going to be bitcoin because of its network effects and that uh that uh that you know i think it's going very very high in the future or i'm hoping that it will so that's kind of my thoughts on bitcoin although i admit that i'm a i'm an amateur in the uh right no that's good no that's really good what if i could just add one other supporting um uh data point to your your optimistic uh hope that this technology will get popular so fast that nobody can shut it down one when i when people when people when i get in discussions about this very thing one one thing i will remind people of is that think about hollywood and how powerful hollywood was and how hard they tried to basically re-engineer the internet to stop piracy right yes and they couldn't do it and even today they're still rampant massive file sharing and so freedom yes one out and so i use that to try to encourage people to remain optimistic that it is true that a technology can take off go ahead go ahead and not yeah so and so that's a the key point there is that all these things are basically based on technology so as i mentioned i'm a patent attorney and i'm a libertarian but i'm i think copyright and patent law are two of the worst laws that we have and should be totally abolished but i do but thankfully the advent of the internet and and and encryption and torrenting has basically made copyright almost obsolete so even if you have strict laws against it copying is going on at a rapid pace now and as i think a quarry doctor appointed out that you know the internet is a perfect copying machine and right at this point in history copying will never get harder than it is now it's it's only going to get easier so so basically technology has made copyright obsolete and i think the same thing is going to happen with patents because of 3d printing so when you have 3d printing become more uh more sophisticated and i think it might take 30 or 40 years but when you have people have a copying thing in their basement or down the block and they can get an encrypted file of a pattern for an object they can make whatever the hell they want they don't need someone's permission right right so that's going to kind of help circumvent patent law which is a good thing i believe it's also gun control as well yes it's going to circumvent gun control and lots of things it's going to cause some problems too okay but that's freedom freedom emerging and i think that bitcoin could do something similar with with money um there's a great article by one of my favorite philosophers my favorite Hans Hermann Hoppe and he's got this article called banking nation states and well i forgot the rest of the title but it's in his it's one of his books it's on his website uh hanshoppe.com and he points out that there's a systematic way that the state over time takes control of society so like it takes control of transportation so like the romans build the roads right it takes control of of the courts and law right which are kind of quasi-private and it takes control of education all the kids have to go to government schools so it is it's like an insidious way that it puts itself into society to get its tentacles of control and finally it gets control of of money in banking like like you know how the government go over money and then they cut the tide of gold and they had the federal reserve so it has these ways of warming its way to control over society right and and but to my mind that means that if you break the government's ability to control money that's going to be a key turning point i personally think that we you know we're not going to have a libertarian or anarchist revolution and when i got people marching in the streets we're not going to have a victory by means of my fellow libertarians running around handing out pamphlets to tell people to change their minds because we're always going to be a small intellectual geeky minority that's not how you do things but i think we're going to win for the same reason that communism collapsed it's just collapsed of its own weight and just because freedom is just more efficient people are just not going to need the state the state's going to the state will wither away as march predicted but not not in the way he predicted it's going to wither away in favor of freedom and capitalism as people just have so much wealth and technology they'll have little robot nano armies around them and the printers and and and and encryption and billions of dollars in bitcoin and the government will just become increasingly irrelevant that's my kind of my utopian dream and hope right right um i wonder if we can close with this if you could say something encouraging to people like me so i'm a nerd who focuses on technology and i i don't know as much about law and economics as you do but it seems to me that with with this technology people that believe in freedom um agree with a lot of your program we we can almost use technology to make the same or even a more effective change in society than than somebody that's say a politician you see what i'm saying that this is like one of the first times like i've seen that technology somebody that's involved with technology could really make big political changes it what can you what do you think about that well i i i hate to be a polyana and but i am no be feel free be honest be honest go ahead yeah like it is optimistic and and i don't like to be naive into it to say the state doesn't exist and that there aren't right setbacks but um yeah i so i agree i agree with that i think that technology is the key to the future and i think wealth is the key to the future and and we're we're at a cusp on the industrial revolution curve right so you think about human society had about the same standard of living for like 5 000 years until about 250 years ago right and then we started on this industrial revolution curve which is an exponential curve and we're we're accelerating even that now with the with potential ai with 3d printing with nano technology right with the internet with mobile technology technology we're going to have telepathy pretty soon effectively right with little things in our heads and we can and with with with this kind of money and the power of the state is going to go away and i think technology is the key to the future um i i don't want to say it's it's a given we we could have gray goo and stuff ourselves out with religious ideology and with war and with bio terrorism okay nuclear war it's possible and i i think even if we have nuclear war it'll be horrible but it'll just set back humanity for 300 years and then we'll finally re-emerge or maybe maybe 50 years so it'll be bad for us but in the long run maybe we'll survive so um i'm hopeful my only concern is that we you know what's the is it freeman dyson or someone who said or the physicists who said well where are they it's not dyson it's someone else but you know it's like we don't hear any signals from outer space so that implies that life is either very rare or it snuffs itself out i'm hopeful that it's very rare and that's why we don't hear from them but um no i'm very optimistic about i think things are getting better we're richer we're healthier we're uh and and uh uh technology is is going to enable us we're we're at the cusp of great things uh we're we're we're young gods i think i hope and our our grandchildren will be gods okay interesting interesting thought well um thank you thank you stefan for sharing your thoughts you're obviously very educated very talented person and uh yeah thank you and maybe we'll have you on the show again sometime in the future be happy to do it all right did any other last closing thoughts or comments you want to make i would just say one thing i would say that um you you mentioned you know like i sound like i'm educated on law and economics and um i would say this i i think that uh specialist you don't have to be a specialist to understand enough to understand a lot about the world right if you understand technology that's a key thing and all the rest that you need is a little bit of honesty and sincerity and consistency in your thinking and uh just a little bit of economic literacy and like i said if you just read economics in one lesson by henry haslett if you understand the law of supply and demand and a few basic laws of economics that can help inform your thinking about higher level political norms you don't need to be go to have an economics degree in fact that might might be a detriment right with the way that makes our teaching in school so it's not that hard to self educate yourself on a few basic things about economics and the basics of law you don't have to go to law school you don't have to be an economist to know enough to have an educated opinion about these matters and then the the technology is is what i would say is key the technological information immerse yourself in technology and uh i think try to take advantage of it and buy some bitcoin i would say yes all right and with that well why don't we go ahead and so we'll stop there so thank you again and uh uh best wishes to you this holiday season you too all right bye