 Hey there it's time for the show the Tatiana show where you make friends and talk life and crypto. Hello everybody and welcome to this last minute special edition of the Tatiana show. I'm here with Stefan Kinsella. He's a patent attorney and a libertarian writer and we just ran into each other at pork fest so I wanted to catch up about that and then get to this breaking news about Satoshi being Craig Wright, which I don't even know what to say about all that. So you probably know something about that. We actually had you on the show before you were talking about some of these kind of patent trolls in blockchain. But before we dive into all this stuff, if you can please give some people your background a little bit about you know how you got involved in all this stuff and and just some overview about your experience. Sure. Well, I'm a long time libertarian since 1982. So I've been interested in this stuff for a long time. I'm also a patent attorney with an electrical engineering background. So I deal in high tech patent law. So I'm interested in technology and so I got interested in Bitcoin early on and libertarianism, you know, in Austrian economics. They all tie together for me. So I'm a member also of the Open Crypto Alliance, which is a group that is trying to fight the patent troll threat to the Bitcoin and blockchain ecosystem. Primarily by In Chain and Craig Wright and other companies and Craig Wright is also apparently a copyright troll. So that's what the news item today was about. And as we talked about last time and as I've talked about many times, although my patent attorney I've long been an opponent of the intellectual property system patent and copyright law and I've been warning for a while that this would happen and it has happened now and it's happening now. Yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit more about that because normally I even did an episode a long time ago I think with Jeffrey Tucker and John Light and we were talking about you know IP in the music world. And that's a pretty contentious topic that I think we could do on our own with that episode. But can you broadly explain why would somebody not want patents or copyright? Doesn't that give artists money? I mean you know shouldn't people want to have some kind of incentive for their work? I know that's kind of asking you to explain like a really really big thing in a short while but let's give it a shot. Well I mean lots of things give artists money or give other people money. I mean the COVID payments right now are going to lots of people and you could say well why would you want to stop giving people free money? I mean isn't that good to give them money? The question for libertarians is one of justice. The intellectual property thing can be explained for normal people by explaining to them some principles of private property and all this and explaining why IP law is incompatible with that but for libertarians I'm going to take that for granted. If you favor free markets and private property rights if you oppose state censorship if you are in favor of competition then you ought to be opposed to patent and copyright law because these are government intrusions into the free market that reduce competition restrict competition and censor free speech. They're not what they're sold as they're not they're not really systems that help the small guy help the artist they are really rooted in the government in copyright they're rooted in the government practice of censorship that is state control of what can be printed and for patents they were rooted in state grants of a monopoly privilege to protect people from competition and that's what they've turned into now. So they basically reduce and impede innovation make us all all poorer reduce competition they harm the consumer and copyright law damage threatens internet freedom websites are taken down all the time books can't be published and the white papers now being going to be taken down from Bitcoin.org because of a state court using force in the name of copyright law. So this is a perfect example of how copyright law is censorship. Yeah how does that work because okay so I don't pay attention to Craig Wright I've had a couple random friends tell me that BSC has some kind of you know utility and it's okay in certain ways I'm like yeah yeah whatever but I don't pay attention to this big fight and I never thought we would come to this point where all of a sudden there's some headline saying that we're not allowed to use it on Bitcoin.org anymore because it belongs to Craig Wright and I haven't taken the time to truly delve in and I think some people are feeling similarly to me so can you explain to me who gave who the authority to decide that he is and are they saying he's definitely Satoshi and so nobody's allowed to use his work like how does what's happening here? No no he's not as far as I know he's not Satoshi wouldn't matter if he was but he's not as far as I can as far as I can tell and this legal outcome doesn't indicate that whatsoever. Of course they're going to claim that it does because they're dishonest. They did this recently so the way it works is copyright law is granted automatically under almost all nations copyright law which is all compatible with each other under the Byrne Convention. Copyright is granted automatically to any author of any creative work as soon as they write it down basically. It's automatic and the author is the presumed owner of it so whoever wrote the white paper is the owner of the copyright. Now the copyright the paper was published as I understand it initially under an MIT license which means that anyone who uses it has license or permission from the copyright holder whoever he is to use it as they see fit so that's a defense to a claim of copyright infringement. Another defense to a claim of copyright infringement is that the person suing you is not the holder of it and doesn't have the right to sue you so I think what happened in this case was Craig Wright number one he registered the copyright in the U.S. and then claimed that this was approved by the copyright office that he was the owner which is not the copyright office will take anyone's assertion that they're the owner they don't they don't investigate it or anything it's just actually you're you have to file it under penalty of perjury and finds so if he's lying I think he's subject to some potential damages there but I guess he doesn't care and then what happened was in he filed a copyright lawsuit against this Cobra guy in bitcoin.org Cobra is some guy that runs some anonymous bitcoin guy who runs bitcoin.org apparently sued him for copyright infringement making the assertion that he was the owner of the copyright and had the right to assert it he didn't prove it he just asserted it and it would have been easy for Cobra to show up in court and simply just deny it and say you're not you have to prove you're the copyright holder the problem is he didn't show up because he wants to maintain his anonymity so when you don't show up when someone sues you in a government court and you don't show up then the plaintiff wins by default there's a default judgment so he has lost because he refused to defend himself unfortunately which I understand why he didn't but he doesn't have any status whatsoever I believe there's a separate lawsuit pending from from square and they're group COPA which is a group that's complementary to ours the crypto open patent alliance which is also a group trying to fight the patent threat to the bitcoin ecosystem and I think square has sued or square one of its sub companies or something has sued for declaratory judgment type action in I think in the UK and so they're going to actually go to bat and they're going to I think try to force Craig to prove that he's Satoshi and I doubt he'll be able to because there are ways apparently that he could prove it if he really were Satoshi by moving some coins around or signing some signing some some coins or something like that I don't know the technical details but my suspicion is he's going to refuse to do that or make claim that he's unable to for some obscure reason and because his credibility is already shot because of trouble and other lawsuits around the world I suspect the judge will just say well you haven't satisfied your burden of proof that you're Satoshi and that therefore you own the copyright so you don't have a standing to assert copyright in this paper that's my guess as to what's going to happen yeah it's really weird how this is like something that's going on in the UK and then you've got the US and it's I mean crypto is an international thing is there even a place where he could go and say that's it everybody you all lose I'm winning all at once I'm definitely Satoshi or would he let's say in attempting to establish that claim like is there a global copyright court or anything like that or because I think there might be some overlap how does that work exactly no every country has their own copyright law but they're all roughly compatible with each other because they are all signatories to the Berne Convention which requires every country to have similar protections for copyright and to recognize a copyright based upon the same principles so once you once you once you publish or create a an original work you have a copyright that's recognized in basically most countries of the world so he has that right he can sue for infringement the owner can sue for infringement in any of their courts although as I said the defendant has a couple of defenses one would be there they have a license under the MIT license the original paper was published with and the second defense would be that the plaintiff doesn't have standing to sue because he's not the owner of the copyright and I suspect that the defendants who put up a fight will prevail on either one of those claims but by the way it does the problem here is not Craig Wright or in chain the problem is the law because when you have a bad law you're going to have people take advantage of it you know it would be like complaining that people are taking welfare or PPP payments in the U.S. but the problem is the law that grants these payments once you have a pig trough out pigs are going to come munch at it the problem is not the pigs it's the trough and so the problem here is the copyright law if if we had a copyright law and no one would ever take advantage of it then we wouldn't have a problem with it the only reason we libertarians have a problem with bad laws is because they have an effect and they have an effect because people employ and use those laws so the problem is the law and it's not abuse this is not abuse the problem is simply that the law is unjust now I guess he is abusing it here because he is he is claiming to be the holder of the copyright and he's probably not but even even there the the legal system permits someone to file a suit and to get a victory and a default judgment if the victim doesn't put up enough of a fight which is what happened here so even even what happened in in the UK just now is legal and not technically abuse it's slimy shady behavior but when you have a law that permits slimy shady behavior to take advantage of it that will happen so what is going on with the organization that you're working with okay because now you've got this crag right thing but like has there been any progress since you guys discovered that some of these patents were being filed and can you explain that a little bit sure so there are two approaches to fighting this threat and the in-chain has a lot of patents on file I think over a thousand at this point in the UK in the US and other places and other companies too some banks and some other tech companies are filing filing patents as well on blockchain technology what I think is going on in the case of Craig Wright is he is fighting to have BSV be the main chain and they lost the battle to BCH and BCH slash BSV lost the battle to BTC and so I think they I think he's trying to use legal threats to kill the BTC chain so that in the hopes that BSV will write this just my guess although some cryptic comments on Twitter today indicate that because they said something like yeah now that we've won this lawsuit on the copyright on the white paper you should everyone should switch to BSV the true the true bitcoin so I think they're trying to use this as a desperate threat to kill BTC so that the the one dominant blockchain will be BSV that's what I think is happening I think it will fail it would just slow things down and harm some individual people the patent threat is in a way worse I think than the copyright threat because the copyright threat only threatens to take down the white paper from some places but you don't really need the white paper to have bitcoin what you need is you need to have technology implemented on computers that run different things the nodes and the miners and things like that and so a patent lawsuit is more of a threat so one approach is what COPA has done this is the group co-founded by square they have basically a group of bitcoin companies allied together in an alliance and they agree not to sue each other or to let their patents be used by patent trolls later on if they go out of business so it's an attempt to defang their own patents so that they can't be used against each other or the network the problem with that is it doesn't it doesn't stop trolls or third parties who don't sign the alliance so an outside party could still sue people in there and so what our group is trying to do is identify patents among this group of patents that that that people have filed and find the weak ones and challenge them according to the relevant procedures in in their patent systems which is a relatively quick and cheap process compared to patent litigation if you wait and let a patent holder sue a company then that company could face millions of dollars in expenses just to fight it so a lot of them cave and roll over that's why patent trolls acquire licensed royalties from companies they they pick them off with small amounts of money and then over time they build and build and build so there is a divide and conquer strategy so our approach is let's just have a little bit of effort and resources go in the early stage to nip these patents in the bud now so we have identified some that we're looking at we're going to start writing some articles to expose some of them and some of them we're going to file challenges on but right now we're gearing up because we're a volunteer effort so we have some of us we have three patent four three or four or five patent attorneys who have joined together including me to try to identify the weaknesses but in the end we really need a little bit of funding to pay some patent searchers and to pay some patent attorneys to actually do the hardcore filing work which is not that expensive so we're in the process of that I think in the next month or so we're going to have start having some results to publicize yeah how do you get those funds I mean are these other companies that kind of donate is the individuals in the crypto space that are interested in donating yeah I think at the any companies that are potentially vulnerable to this if they just donate a little bit now then we can stave off some multi-million dollar lawsuits later or for example if they start going after companies if one company is targeted instead of rolling over and paying $50,000 or something like that to make it go away and then making the patent stronger they should contact us or COPA and we can all say don't don't settle yet let's get the resources and the help of the community to try to attack this patent early on to defang it so that you don't have to go to court and spend $2 million to defend it so we're trying to do what we can and to you know I made an announcement at the Miami Bitcoin conference where you were where you were at too to try to alert the community we did get some donations after that but we're hoping for more and we also need crowd crowdsourcing help from technical experts to help us like look into some issues related to say elliptical curve cryptography and things like that so if anyone wants to help they can just go to opencryptox on twitter or our website opencryptoalliance.org and yeah we need to all rally together to try to fight this threat to the openness and the you know the competitiveness of the free market nature of the bitcoin should be it needs to be. Do you have any other organizations that you guys have partnered with I mean people can donate but are there organizations that have similar interests so by joining together you know you can be a little bit more effective? I think right now the two main ones it would be COPA and in ours on our website we mentioned a few other things there are some other more general groups in the patent space but they're not really focused on on crypto and then you know of course there's there's my little group myself my c4s I have center for the study of innovative freedom where I've been fighting from a libertarian point of view I've been fighting intellectual property laws for a long time which is why I'm a member of this group so I'd say just say it's roughly an alliance of these bitcoin tech groups libertarians anti-ip Austrian libertarians anarchist libertarians anyone who's in favor of innovation actually you know there are some groups that are that are in favor of innovation and they want reform of the patent law like the EFF electronic frontier foundation but they don't really have a principled diehard case against patents they just want to reform so their help is is just tepid you know unfortunately because you can't it would be like saying the problem with the drug wars people go to jail too long for for marijuana you know they should only go to jail for three years for a drug offense instead of seven I mean that's not any that's like saying I well we can't abolish slavery but you know we should have a law making the masters treat their slaves politely give give the slaves due process when they're when it's time to be punished for for disobeying the master's order they should have due process I mean what kind of what kind of radical principled message is that you know you need to oppose IP full-throatedly because this stuff is not an example of an abuse this is the natural example this is a natural course of affairs the natural result of having these types of laws when the government grants people monopoly power to censor others free speech or to restrict them from competing they will use it and this is what will happen so this is the problem we need to strike at the root of this so okay that maybe you've already answered this but help me understand because it seems like you're opposed to IP in in principle right but some people would say oh I want a patent like oh I don't I want somebody to pay me for my song I want somebody to pay me for my drug otherwise I won't make the drug blah blah would you say that there is a free market solution that would meet both the needs of creators that don't necessarily want to give away the goods but that isn't stifling competition in an unfair way is it the government interference that makes it wrong or is there something else that people can do structurally that isn't necessarily the state taking control that would keep both parties happy or both sides happy well I think ultimately it's up to the entrepreneur to figure out how to make money in what they want to do in a free market in the face of competition but I would say that you're going to have business models arise that respond to the given legal system so for example Tesla part of Tesla's business model is to rely upon government subsidies to develop electric cars if the government didn't do that then Tesla would have to develop cars in a different way or maybe electric cars wouldn't be developed or maybe they would have been developed earlier or maybe they'd be developed later but the market is clearly distorted and if you remove the government distortions then the the market would change so there's no doubt that if you if you change the if you change the patent and copyright law the way artists approach the market now will have to change they have built their models partly upon reliance upon being able to stop people from copying their songs and things like that and then they can demand a license to allow them to do it and they can sell that for money however i will say that because of the advent of encryption and torrenting and the internet and digital technology which is made copying extremely easy and piracy so-called piracy very easy basically copyright on a consumer level is almost a dead letter it's almost impossible to stop people from copying photographs and songs and movies and software as they wish and they do it and it's widespread and it's rampant and artists and creators know this and they have to deal with this already so they have already modified their their business model approach of the last 15 or so years to account for this threat so you have more of the share you know i think you you have an app like that has a it's a free app but then you have to pay to upgrade and then you have support and you have a people sell swag and then you have personal autographed copies from the artists people are doing all kinds of different things trying to adapt to to to adapt to the fact that it's easy for people to compete with you if what you're selling is an easily copyable file so you can't guarantee that everything that's profitable now would be profitable in a free market but some things will be profitable that aren't profitable now so things would definitely adjust but lots of lots of examples from what people have tried before would lead you to think that it's it is possible for artists to make money in a free market so for example i pointed out like jk rolling the author of harry potter is a i think she's the first female billionaire in england um or the richest woman in england something like that or she was for a while um she made money partly because of copyright on all of her books but you know she started this out as as a some kind of um uh you know very poor welfare type mom writing it on a train as a passion project if she had published that in a copyright free world on amazon self-publishing it probably would have been a runaway hit she might have she would have made a little money but then maybe it would have dwindled after the pirate copies came in but now she knows she has an audience of millions of people and she could have done a kickstarter or something saying hey i've got book number two written as soon as i get a million subscribers paying me five bucks each i'll release book number two that's five million bucks right there right um and then maybe she could repeat that six or seven times and so we're up to 20 30 40 50 million and then if someone was making a movie based up on the book they wouldn't need her permission so you might have three or four pirate rogue movies being made of the harry potter books one of them one of the producers might approach harry jk rolling and say we'd like you to be a consultant and give this movie your official approval so that we'll sell more tickets to your true fans and we'll pay you a cut of the royalties of the ticket sales so that she makes more you know i mean there's easy there's lots of ways for commercial products to make money um but you have to think outside the box and people are not forced to think outside the box as much now because they can rely upon government monopolies but they would have to do it more uh if those monopolies were removed but on the other hand artists freedom would be improved too you wouldn't have to look over your shoulder uh be worried about someone suing you because your song resembled someone else's song like led zeppelin or robin thick with that you know got sued by marvin gay's estate for some song because it had cowbells in it um you'd be free to do whatever you wanted so you could reuse remix other people's work it would encourage uh people to be unrestricted you know rap music could engage in sampling without fear of lawsuits um so it would help artists as well as restrict some of the ability they have to use state force as part of their business model uh i think that you're gonna have a hard time getting artists to do that like i'm an artist it's hard to make money it's a miserable gig um but i mean you know yeah i get it people have to like compete in stuff but i don't think that people want to but i think that you could also make the argument that oh by giving away some music you know when napster came out uh the artist actually ended up getting more people and more fans because they gave away a little bit of the music and they got like longer term fans um i would say though that people are a little bit burnt out kickstarter and i feel like it's annoying to try and beg people to give you money and if you don't have a lot of people out of the gate you know with your jk rallying example okay she could release on the internet but it's not just like okay you could put out the greatest thing on the world on the internet if nobody knows about it if your marketing isn't right i.e marketing you need money or you need to be a freaking genius and not everybody's good at all those things so i find it to be kind of kind of frustrating do you think it's worse in the us or anywhere else or like is the is the government intervention making it more restrictive for example like the recording industry ria whatever it is um it's like this big institution that basically negotiates on behalf of all the artists and they say okay everybody's got to get paid this amount of money and this is the rules and we said so and now everybody has to participate along these same rules can you speak to some of the other things that maybe you won't benefit artists there to help make the case that maybe they should reconsider the ip attachment well i mean you just pointed out that it's hard it's frustrating and hard for artists to make money but that's right now that's in a world with copyright so copyright apparently doesn't solve the problem right i think there's a misconception and this is partly because of propaganda spread by the government and ip groups they spread these myths that the patent law is to protect the small inventor and copyright law protects a small artist but you know uh usually these are corporate interests that are served by these laws and the small guy is usually hurt at least until recent you know last 10 or 15 years with with kind of the emergence of independent publishing platforms for books and for music and things like that um you know most people had to sign away their rights to some big studio or agent or label or or publisher um so the and in fact like the copyright system the way it emerged if you understand the history um basically you had the church and the state control what could be printed by hand by the scribes so they wouldn't let them print these hand-printed books of impermissible material things you didn't want the public to know about and then when the printing press came around in the 1500s this threatened the government's ability to censor speech so they gave a monopoly on what could be printed to the stationers company for about a hundred plus years um which was still government control over what can be printed so if you needed to publish a book you had to go through them and the government and the government and the church censors would have their say so first when the monopoly on the stationers company was going to expire they passed a statute of ban in 1709 as a way to formalize this institution and to make it look better they called it a copyright and they gave it to the authors but in practice the authors had to give the copyright right back to the stationers company and the publishers in order to get their books published because they didn't have xerox machines at home right they had to go to the publishers so it was a way of perpetuating the gatekeeper function of the publishing industry and that persisted until probably about 20 15 years ago um now it's being broken down because of technology but technology is also breaking down the ability to enforce copyright law so copyright law is helping to break I mean sorry technology is helping to break the stranglehold on the free flow of information that the publishing industry built up on copyright law was was doing but it also means that the traditional ability to protect your work in fact copyright the the argument that was given to give copyright to the authors in the statute of ban was not that they could use it to prevent people from publishing their stuff it was so that the author could be the one who could decide whether their work was published so in other words it wasn't the decision of the state censor or the publishing company it was the author so the whole purpose of copyright was to prevent the author's work from being censored it wasn't to let the it wasn't to let the author censor other people it was to let the authors work get out there but now it's been perverted and twisted and turned upside down I guess I would have to say that copyright law is actually in fact not helping most artists and they need to realize that they have to be in favor of liberty we have to be whole human beings you know I'm a patent attorney if I succeed in abolishing the patent system I can't make money being a patent attorney I'm happy to pay that price because it's the right thing to do if I'm a drug attorney and I make money defending my libertarian clients from going to prison putting the being thrown in a cage because there's they were ingesting cocaine or marijuana I want the drug war to be abolished I want my job I want my job and my career to go away do you think there's a lot of people like that though do you think that that that exists I mean how many how many lawyers are there out there because people are like all lawyers are scum suckers right and in a way you got to wonder like how is the system ever going to change because there's a lot of people that are sculpting the system that are benefiting I applaud you for putting principle over you know your pocketbook but I mean how do you do you think other lawyers are like that or what do you think is the principle so then how do you fix that isn't that bad news bears it was just like my point earlier that if you have a bad law people will take advantage of it and also people will profit off of it by specializing in perpetuating it just like the teachers unions are going to favor public schools right just like mailmen working for the U.S. post office are going to say the post office is a great thing they have a vested interest in being dishonest even in pushing what's in their interest so that's not going to change this is why I'm a bitcoiner I hope I actually think bitcoin is our greatest hope our greatest hope for liberty and that's just one subset of technology I think technology and prosperity and bitcoin as a subset of that is our greatest chance for liberty so technology has already eviscerated copyright law made it very difficult to enforce my hope is that patent law will suffer the same fate as 3d printing matures now I don't think it's going to be tomorrow if this may take 50 years 20 years 30 years before 3d printing is advanced enough to where everyone has a very sophisticated 3d printer in their house they can download an encrypted file for any object on the dark web right because the information can be protected and they can use that information to print a device that's patented so I think hopefully 3d printing will allow us to evade and undermine patent law just like encryption and the internet has helped us to evade and is undermining copyright law so I don't wait for the profession to change or the politicians to change or even the voters who are ignorant of all this and have been bamboozled by the by the propaganda about it I don't think there's any hope that that's going to change I don't speak the truth in the vein I hope that I'm going to persuade my fellow patent lawyers it's just because you asked the question and I answer honestly okay well I mean that's that's a good encouraging point that there is going to be you know a lot of innovation that can't be controlled I wonder how successful governments will be using some of these threats to say oh well nope sorry gosh shut down freedom of speech and and it always kind of makes me think about the different ways of speech exists right I could say oh I want to tweet as much as I want but there's also things like the ghost gunner or whatever right and are you allowed to print the are you allowed to print the the plans to make a gun like that do you think that is there even an incentive like if I was a government I wouldn't want people to print a ghost gunner or any kind of fake gun obviously or well I guess it's a real gun but you know guns are what they take away right before they take away you know more people's freedom do you think that there's an incentive to have that right upheld by the overlords the guns are the guns are a good example so 3d printers are also going to make it difficult for the government to restrict gun freedom which is also important yeah I think they're going to try to stop it but that's like trying to enforce copyright in a world where copying is easy I think once that once the technological genie is out of the bag it's it becomes impossible for the government to stop it you know some have argued that the government will shut down bitcoin when it becomes obvious to them that it's a threat but I think the way bitcoin is designed the only way to shut down bitcoin would be to shut down the whole internet right yeah they would have shut it down by now I think if they wanted to I mean they're not that stupid they would have figured like somebody would have figured out by now okay this could really threaten us let's shut it down but no I mean you know that's why they have bitcoin obituaries right exactly 330 something of them right my bitcoin socks say that and counting hey you know there's always there's always another chance for bitcoin to die maybe not today maybe tomorrow anytime yeah and then you buy the dip so but but look but look back on the original thing look for kreg right in his in his cronies to trumpet this as a victory proving that he is satoshi as part of their sales pitch to get people to invest in them or to take them give them some credibility or to switch to the bsb chain for some reason I think that's what they're going to do they're they're going to dishonestly depict to portray this this this default judgment as an endorsement of the claim that he is satoshi by a government court which is just not true it's a complete lie okay well uh i'm glad to have that cleared up I feel confident to tell people that it's not true anymore and and I can refer them to this episode we were just at porkfest and I know that you're doing this blockchain law stuff what were you talking about at porkfest well usually people ask me to speak on ip because that's what they know me for but you know I write and talk a lot of a lot of other libertarian topics over the years contract theory and rights theory and legal issues so I spoke on the problem with libertarian constitutions and the idea of drafting of the right libertarian constitution and contrasted it with what what we how we should do the law in an anarchist free market society the idea of private law codes based upon libertarian principles and my idea of how i'm going to finish some kind of statement of libertarian principles in a systematic hierarchical fashion that I think lays out what our libertarian principles are all about and that could serve as a basis for the development of libertarian legal principles based upon these libertarian principles so it was about libertarian constitutions and law are you excited about the ability for blockchain to help with that do you think that there's some or is it more of a matter of writing it properly do you think that blockchain implementation will be helpful unlike a lot of other bitcoin enthusiasts who make all these claims that block the blockchain technology is great and has other uses smart contracts i'm a huge skeptical for all of that really okay some of the bitcoin proponents even say things like not bitcoin but the they'll say well bitcoin is not going to work but blockchain is great i think they have it exactly backwards my view from what i understand of it is the blockchain is an ingenious but extremely and intentionally inefficient slow cumbersome expensive ledger or database that has only one use and that is for for for money and that is only for digital money and that means only for bitcoin because i think there can only be one and i think it will be bitcoin so i think the blockchain has only one use and that's the backbone for bitcoin i think smart contracts uh the the whole idea of smart contracts is confused and misplaced um but that's me i could be wrong about that but that's my that's my understanding because everyone that talks about smart contracts i i sense confusion in what they say they use the word contract to refer to things that are not contracts they use the word property and ownership to refer to things that are not property and ownership so i'm a big skeptic of all these things um there was a talk there was a debate at pork fest by the guys in the bitcoin um uh tent or whatever you call it um it was um tone vase and surfer jim versus uh uh jeremy kaufman and some other guy arguing about bitcoins versus shitcoins and uh surfer jim had some really good comments about the problems with using bitcoin and blockchain for anything other than as the backbone for money namely that you can automate transfers of digital assets they're in the blockchain but to go outside of that go to translating to the real world which you would need to do for a contract right because it has to affect things in the real world like title to an object like a car or a house or money in someone's bank or if you have to get data out of the real world which they call oracles some third party has to be there to do that or if there's a dispute over the interpretation of a clause of this contract you have to go to an arbitrator or a human being so i don't think these perfectly automated self-contained contracts are possible except for purely digital assets so there's extreme limitations uh on how these contracts can be used and not only that most contracts have lots of clauses that require human interpretation and judgment so they can't be automated um so i i just think that the whole idea of i mean i think bitcoin bitcoin is revolutionary because it solves a problem a big problem and the problem is that we need money because barter is inefficient so money solves a big problem but government has taken over our money and has made it extremely unreliable because it's inflationary so bitcoin solves that problem but that's why it's revolutionary smart contracts don't solve a big problem because we don't have a problem with having contracts written and enforced um they work fine okay maybe they're slightly inefficient and maybe smart contracts would make them two percent more efficient but that's not revolutionary right uh which is also why i think the original idea of bitcoin as a payment network like the bitcoin cashier's idea now it's kind of the early ideas about bitcoin as being a payment system that would be cheap and easy and fast and a replacement for paypal or the visa system or credit cards or whatever i think you can see in retrospect that was misplaced too because that didn't solve a big problem because we already have a point to sale network we already have uh paypal they work fine they're fast they're quick they work great um what are you gonna do reduce the fees by two percent okay that's fine but that's not revolutionary and in fact i think lightning will do that in the end to be honest so i think that this payment idea didn't solve a big problem the smart contract idea doesn't solve a big problem um well there's not a big problem to solve and i don't think they solve it anyway because i don't think smart contracts are really that useful except for a very narrow subset of contracts so bitcoin to me is revolutionary because it uses an inefficient database to solve a huge problem and that's that's good enough you know and it's going to achieve liberty for us by by choking off the state's funding right that it's printing press basically so that's enough for me uh bitcoin just does that i'll be happy with it and if if asshole is like craig right don't slow it down with it with their pesky lawsuits and i mean these guys have tried to use copyright now they've threatened to use trade secret law they've threatened to use trademark law because of the name bitcoin they threaten they threaten to use patent law and they threatened and tried to use antitrust law too and probably other types of law too so they keep using utterly evil coercive state laws that should be abolished in the service of trying to promote their chain over someone else which is totally reprehensible yeah and i don't think that they're winning any fans um okay so if people want to support you and they want to learn more how do they how do they do that like what are some action items go to open crypto alliance.org and look at our look at our information and if you if you have an interest in volunteering some of your time if you're if you're a technical expert like for example on elliptic curve cryptography contact us through that site and we'll talk to you privately about what we need to try to start attacking some of these patents and if you're a company out there with any cash to consider donating in this effort we can talk to you about that we don't need a ton of cash to get this going uh we just need a little bit to get the first few rolling and once we have started having some victories it will start showing um i mean i i actually personally think from the patents i reviewed from inchain alone the vast bulk of them are complete what you would call bullshit but the problem is the patent office is manned by incompetent personnel that examine these patents and they're enforcing a non-objective law so there's really no objective answer so it's hard to say they're abusing the system but a lot of these patents would be struck down if they were looked at with a closer eye it's just that takes money to do it usually takes a lawsuit which takes millions of dollars so we want to do it before at the early stage when it's cheaper to lever to leverage the funds so if you're interested in learning more talking to our founder jedd grant in luxembourg about what what you can do to help us uh just fight for the bitcoin ecosystem and they're they're by fighting for human for human liberty and human prosperity uh contact us awesome well thanks thanks so much uh i support you guys and uh thanks again for hooking it up with uh bitcoin 2021 that was great and um i don't know i look forward to seeing you again maybe we should do some kind of a debate have you ever debated anybody about the music thing like i don't feel like i can make a good argument but i'm not sure i like what you have to say so i want somebody i want somebody to take the other opposing position i want to i don't know explore it a little bit more but with somebody who can advocate for it a little bit more strongly than i can have you ever done anything like that i've done lots of debates usually on patent law or ip in general i don't think much specifically on the music question but i'd be happy to especially we can have a friendly discussion about it and try to learn from each other i'm all in favor of trying to find ways that artists can can survive in a world where we have more freedom that they have to to cope with but yeah be happy to be happy to talk further with anyone about this i have just a guy in mind i already have somebody who i'm who i'm thinking of a music friend of mine so that that'll be fun thank you steven for steven stefan for joining us today and uh we'll see you next time on the tatiana show everybody final what's the point of all this technology without a little love in our lives our hosts tatiana morose and loren casavitz have come together to bring you proof of love go to proofoflovecast.com the tatiana show has been brought to you by cryptomedia hub dot com a boutique marketing and pr agency for bitcoin and beyond for the show the tatiana show where you make friends and talk life and crypto we've got to think and reflect and use lots of intellect with our hearts when we work together i know that it can be so looking all around and saying that life ain't fair so that is why we will fight and stay up late at night listening to the tatiana show thank you for listening to the tatiana show please follow us on twitter at queen tatiana or on facebook and instagram at tatiana morose music more episodes can be found at the tatiana show dot com and make sure you leave a review on itunes and tell your friends you are listening to the tatiana show this show may contain adult content language and humor and is intended for mature audiences if that's not you please stop listening nothing you hear on the tatiana show is intended as financial advice legal advice or really anything other than entertainment take everything you hear with a grain of salt oh and if you're listening to us on an affiliate network the ideas and views expressed on this show are not necessarily those of the network that you're listening on or of any sponsors or any affiliate products you may hear about on this show