 When you have the Federal Reserve, you have something that's like not auditable, right? It's a monetary system that is completely opaque to everybody. It doesn't really even have legislation, they just sort of do whatever they want. With Bitcoin, you have the ability to actually go out at the stuff of yourself, and this is what I'm teaching to my students. Jimmy Song is an author, podcaster, computer programmer, and contributor to what is known as Bitcoin Core, which is an open source project for researching, testing, and upgrading the software that people all over the world use to connect to this decentralized monetary network. Song also runs two-day seminars training coders to work in the Bitcoin industry. Can you guys look into the matrix yet? Do you recognize what's in the script, sir? Back in 2013, when I was learning it, I was very frustrated with the resources that were out there, and it took me days to learn something that really should have taken me like half an hour at the most. It's just that no one was there to help me. And on the other side, when I was hiring at different companies that I was at, it was hard to find people that actually knew this stuff. So I knew that there was a need at both ends, and part of why I started it was because I knew I could do a better job than what the market was already doing. This is the big asymmetry that we use for public key cryptography. Programming Blockchain is a 16-hour seminar consisting of lectures and hands-on exercises. Song has also taught the same material over the course of an entire semester at the University of Texas at Austin. When I was teaching that one semester, I had some pretty brilliant students. These were grad students in electrical engineering, computer science, and business. And the thing is, their motivations are not necessarily the same as the students that I get when I teach my two-day seminars. So they care very much about their grade and making sure that they are not necessarily learning, but getting the right credential. Whereas the people that are coming to my seminars are paying me money, but they are motivated to go learn the actual protocol. This is not really in Bitcoin like a university degree or a qualification. And I think the Bitcoin world in general is skeptical of those kind of things anyway. Song has been teaching students all over the world for more than four years, including Rajeal Walsh, a former New Zealander police officer who took the seminar in Australia in 2018. But I think Jimmy's course is about as close as you get to that where people know his reputation, he's about the best guy that's actively teaching and he's got a reproducible system for passing this information on out of anyone out there. I would love to slay the educational Leviathan, definitely. But yeah, the market's kind of going that way because it's proving itself. And there are lots of different platforms where you can self-learn. For a company's hiring, one of the best signals that you can get is people that are learning on their own. It's like it's a better signal than what college they came out of. Walsh discovered Bitcoin when he read about the Silk Road, a dark web e-commerce site that allowed users to buy drugs or pretty much anything else using the cryptocurrency. Anyone could log on and buy almost anything you can imagine and have it sent out through someone else. And you could all connect through these decentralized systems which were untraceable or were very, very private and anonymous. And to me, that just blew my mind that this had been operating for over two years, run the noses of American law enforcement agencies and there wasn't anything they could do about it. The Silk Road not only established that it was possible to take violence out of the drug trade by allowing buyers and sellers to transact online. It also demonstrated that Bitcoin lived up to its promise of being uncensurable money and that no credit card company, bank, or government could obstruct people from using it to pay for things. And I just don't think most people really kind of comprehended just how big of a deal that was. And of course, you know, you learn about Bitcoin through that process because that's the financial medium that facilitated all this to go on. In 2018, Walsh attended the Building on Bitcoin conference and observed that even people without extensive programming experience were making important contributions to Bitcoin. And these guys were just too regular coders, you know, competent coders but not some supercomputer geniuses who just saw a problem and they decided, well, I'm just going to fix this. And to me, it just blew my mind about the agency that you have in this space because it's open source and it's 21. So I came back and just decided, okay, coders where it is. Walsh was inspired to apply for Jimmy Song's course, though he didn't have the prerequisite programming experience. So he first enrolled in some online boot camps and took a free class from one of Song's former students. So three months ago, I knew nothing about coding and here's me applying for Jimmy's course. Today, Walsh works at Swan Bitcoin in exchange that also considers educating new users to be central to its mission. Just over three years after knowing nothing about programming, here I am working at more or less a dream job. Over 500 people have contributed to the Bitcoin Core software since the project started and anyone can participate in the process of submitting and reviewing new code no matter who they are, where they live, or what degrees they hold. Since Bitcoin is open source software, the rules governing how it functions are also fully transparent. Walsh and Song say that this spirit of radical transparency and emphasis on demonstrated skill over credentialism are central to what they love about Bitcoin. Anyone can create anything. All the code and all the information you need is there, but free online. Anyone anywhere in the world can read that and participate. You're not going to be able to audit the Fed, but you can audit the Bitcoin blockchain and many nodes do, right? If you're running your own software, you don't have to trust anyone because the software checks that the ledger balances and everything is good. And to really understand that you have to examine the code line by line and so on. And I try to help with that with my seminar and it's not necessarily easy, but it can be done. It's possible. And that makes all the difference in the world. To hear more about Jimmy Song's seminars and about his new book Thank God for Bitcoin, Reason caught up with him in October at the 2021 Oslo Freedom Forum, which brought together the human rights community with the Bitcoin community for a two day conference in Miami. We talked about the morality of money, his disdain for traditional education, and the ways in which he thinks Bitcoin complements Christian theology. I want to get into some detail about this seminar, but before we do that, I want to talk a little bit about like fiat education. What you've referred to as. And you taught at UT for a semester, basically what has become a two day seminar. You talk about the education system and what what your experience has told you about it. Yeah. So I mean, I think I've always been like frustrated with the education system even as a student. So my teachers in high school hated me because I would like fall asleep in class and they would wake me up and tell me and I'd answer the question because I had bread to head or whatever. But I was always kind of frustrated because in a sense the current education system is you just go at the pace of the slowest learner in the classroom. And it's just not a great environment. Right. And in addition, like a lot of the students aren't necessarily motivated and so on. So when I was teaching that that one semester, I had some pretty brilliant students. These were grad students and electrical engineering, computer science, and business. So business school, grad school. And the thing is like their motivations are not necessarily the same as the students that I get when I teach my two day seminars. So they care very much about their grade and making sure that they are not necessarily learning but getting the right credential. Whereas the people that are coming to my seminars are paying me money, but they are motivated to go learn the actual protocol. They'll ask different types of questions and they're more concerned about understanding something versus maybe getting a grade. And these are some of the best of the best. Like they're grad students at University of Texas and they understand things very well. So the contrast for me is if you have sort of like intrinsic motivation, it is so much easier to teach as a teacher. Because if you're trying to teach people that don't want to learn, it's like pulling teeth. It is very difficult. But if you're teaching people that want to learn, that have motivation to go get it because of financial reasons or whatever, and there's lots of reasons why people want to learn. But they are much more motivated to ask you questions, to figure things out, and to really study and to get it rather than, hey, I'm just in this classroom. Like the current model is very much based on like sort of like forced education almost. It's not voluntary, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. And so the students that you get at your two-day seminars now, I mean, they're probably highly motivated, highly interested, and it seems like you probably take the best of the best. I know there's like a base level of skill that you need to have before you can be accepted into this seminar. Just tell me a little bit more about the students you get, the students you accept, and what you're stuffing into their brains in two days. Yeah, so there are prerequisites, like the ability to code, for example. You need to learn how to code because it's like very interactive. And you need to be coding a lot of the time. And I've designed my class that way so that you don't just get lectured at, you actually have to code the things that I just lectured. So and, you know, like you don't, as a coder, you realize you don't really understand something when you're forced to code it. And it's like, okay, now I have to really understand this. So that's the way the class is designed. So, you know, that's a prerequisite. And I make sure that people know how to code before they come to the class. The motivations vary. So certainly there are people that you would expect, maybe programmers that want to get into this industry. They see that it's growing and they have sort of like personal interests. So, hey, let's align these. Let's get a job in this industry and so on. But there are also lots of other people that take it for like reasons I would never have expected. So, you know, I had an accountant take it, for example. And he's like, I haven't coded since college, but I really need to understand the protocol so I can give good tax advice. I'm like, really? That's not something I expected. I've had, you know, angel investors take it because they're like, well, I need to understand this so that I can understand my investments a little better and I can vet the people that I am talking to in a more intelligent way and so on. So, yeah, ultimately what ends up happening is that you get a group of people that are motivated by different things and because they're motivated and because they're together, there's something powerful that goes on in a classroom when you have a lot of people that really want to learn together and, you know, they have motivation. I think this is like in places like business school or something like that. You get a similar dynamic where people actually want to be there. So, and they're motivated to learn. It changes the dynamic significantly versus something like primary education, which is like, let's like babysit these kids for 12 hours or something like that. Right. I think one of the overarching themes in the whole Bitcoin space is very much being independent, being self-directed, and figuring things out on your own. You know, taking the initiative to say, this is something I want to know how to do or something that I want to know about and therefore the responsibility is, I'm going to put the responsibility on myself to go figure it out. But, you know, at the same time, one issue with Bitcoin right now that I've seen in many places from people who are sympathetic to Bitcoin and are sympathetic to its purpose. But, you know, there's some relatively intimidating barriers to entry even right now, though it's gotten a lot better. But, I mean, how temporary is that problem in your opinion? And I mean, can there be any real substitute to just like figuring it out for yourself? Yeah. The question is very interesting because, you know, it is this balance between sort of like liberty and responsibility. So anytime you have freedom, there's sort of like a responsibility that you have to take for yourself and this is all a part of self-sovereignty. It makes no sense to just have liberty by itself because you have to sort of like take care of the consequences on your own as well. And Bitcoin definitely has a significant amount of that. We're not naturally used to sort of taking responsibility for our own wealth. And, you know, we're used to sort of like outsourcing it to banks or other people that sort of keep it secure for us. So for a lot of people, this induces a lot of stress because they're like, well, what if I lose this? I can, you know, lose a ton of money. And this is not something that they're used to. I think, you know, people like say during the gold standard and prior to that, you know, they had this sense of responsibility that they grew up with, but we pretty much removed it everywhere. So it's very difficult for them to kind of understand that and get used to it. But it is something that I think, you know, at least in the Bitcoin community, it needs to be emphasized because if it's not self-sovereign then you're trusting somebody else in which case it gets centralized and so on. But, you know, to your point, it is a technology and I do think it's going to get better. If you ask people in 1985, like, is everyone going to use a computer? They would be like, you're crazy. No, no one's going to use it. Like, that's too hard to use. You have to understand command line commands and random things like that. Of course, graphical user interfaces came, they made it much, much easier by making it more user-friendly. But it's still a complicated machine that can do lots of different things. I think Bitcoin will sort of go in the same direction as more entrepreneurs come in and, you know, bring different goods and services that will help the community or, you know, help more people on board. Right. So with that, you were talking about the gold standard a little bit. So let's go back in time and, you know, one of the reasons why people are not used to taking care of their wealth is because, I mean, it was really difficult. That's like practically for basically ever. And, you know, and with that, one of the things that people say about Bitcoin is that it's a Model T of cryptocurrency. But, you know, is it gold that was a Model T of currency? Or like, you know, is that a fair way to put it? I mean, what are the problems with gold that maybe Fiat tried to solve in some sense, but now Bitcoin is coming along and maybe attempting to solve both of those problems while keeping the advantages of each as well. Yeah. So I would say the big problem with gold is its physicality. The fact that it has a physical location, that makes it very difficult to secure. You either have to have, you know, a giant security system around the physical object. So you need like a vault, maybe like armed guards or something like that, which is what a bank does. Or you need to like, you know, trust somebody else with it. Right. Like you can have it yourself and secure it yourself, which is very difficult with a physical object because, you know, there's violence basically available. Or you can trust it to somebody else that will do a lot of the same things, but in a centralized way. And if you study sort of like the evolution of money, especially, you know, the transition from gold to fiat, you know, like ending pretty much in 1971, you know, it started as, you know, people wanting to secure their gold because they wanted to sort of outsource that responsibility because securing gold physically was so difficult. And then it went to basically these places that, you know, held the gold for you, which we call banks. And that centralization eventually led to, you know, fractional reserve banking, which in turn led to central banks, which in turn led to the abolishment of the gold standard. So the lack of security, ultimate, the lack of security, let's put it that way, ultimately led to fiat money. And this is something that we pointed out in our book, Thank God for Bitcoin, that, you know, there is this sort of like slow descent into, you know, less and less sound money that happens because of its physicality. With Bitcoin, because it doesn't have a physical location, it is, it can be unconfiscatable. So you can make it so that, you know, only you have access to that coin. And, you know, you don't need arm guards and motion detection systems and steel doors and all this other stuff that banks have for it to secure physical stuff. You have something digital, which means that, you know, you can kind of keep it in your mind. And if you don't have to give it up, if you don't want to, I think what VJ Boyer Party calls like a super property right, it's a property right that we've never been able to have that before with any physical commodity, because it can be seized. There's the lack of feasibility that that's something brand new that we've never had before. So your podcast is called Bitcoin Fixes This, and we're going to get to your book. But one of the chapters in your book is what Bitcoin can't fix. So let's talk about that. What can't Bitcoin fix? Well, I don't think it can fix the human heart, right? Like there are evil people in the world. And if you're a Christian, you believe that we, you, everyone has some level of evil in them, and it's a matter of sort of like, you know, surrendering yourself to God so that that evil can be fixed to some extent. But that's something that I don't think can be fixed. It doesn't suddenly make people good. There are lots of evil people in the world, and it doesn't make your heart good. So I would say to answer it more succinctly, it doesn't fix character. It doesn't fix, you know, just what you are on the inside. It does sort of like change the incentives so that it doesn't punish goodness and reward evil, right? Like which the current fiat system does. Instead, it goes the other way, where rewards like doing stuff like saving money for the future and punishing things like, you know, like FOMO spending and things like that. That leads us into your book. One of the first sentences in your book is that money is deeply spiritual. And I think for many people, religious or not, that probably sounds kind of absurd. And maybe for the religious people, maybe even like bordering on some kind of blasphemy. You know, I think the general assumption about money is that it's worldly and materialistic. And while it's important to our lives, that may be just a unfortunate symptom of how, you know, the market strips us of our humanity and forces us to care about these material things rather than focusing on, you know, helping other people or developing a spiritual connection to God. Explain more. Why do you say that money is deeply spiritual? Yeah, so money is really, it is spiritual. First of all, money doesn't exist without people. Like you remove people from the equation, money does not exist. If you think of it sort of like in a mathematical way, which I do because I was a math major, you can think of, you know, the civilization as a network of relationships. Each person is a node and each connection or each edge is the relationship between people. And those relationships are significantly affected by money, right? Like it's actually kind of a way to figure out the balance between people, right? And this, by the way, is interesting because it's mapped very well by the lightning network, which we can get to. But that relationship between people is, it can be enhanced to a large degree with money because if you are with a stranger, you don't necessarily want to interact with them because you don't know like, you know, how you can relate to them and so on. But if there exists sort of like this common money, well, now you can trade with them. You can relate to people through that. And of course, it's a big part of like the stress of a lot of relationships. A lot of divorces happen because of money problems. And, you know, money is just the reality. And if you read, if you're a Christian, you know, like think about, you know, what salvation is described as in the Bible, right? It's debt, payment, forgiveness, redemption. These are all monetary terms, right? And they're there because they give us sort of like an insight into our relationship with God. And our relationship with each other, it has, you know, this monetary component which we can use to understand and interact with the rest of civilization. So it has a very deep place in human relationships. And it is therefore very much spiritual. So it's a way, you're saying that money is not this materialistic worldly concern. It's actually a method by which we can relate to and develop relationships with people who we otherwise would have not been able to do so. Yeah, and relationships that we already have, you know, like a lot of sort of taxes occur in that way. Like because, you know, when you die, you have a state tax, but that's like a relationship between you and the people that you've already known. There's a lot of monetary sort of, well, let me put it this way. Every relationship has some form of monetary component in it, whether you recognize it or not. And, you know, like it might not be as important in certain relationships and so on, but it's undeniable that money represents sort of like your labor or the value that you provided others. And as a result, you know, we trust in the money to along each edge of every relationship to represent that. And if you are transferring value to another person, essentially you're participating in this network of nodes which we call civilization. And that's how the free market is supposed to work with money. It's this thing that gets transferred across every edge in this giant graph of human relationships. So of course, like it's deeply impactful and matters deeply for everything. And to just sort of call it worldly and say it doesn't matter, I think kind of misses the point because even in our relationship with God, there is this monetary metaphor, probably because there's something deeply significant about value transfer within relationships. You know, some people just claim that money is neutral. It's just a neutral tool that we use. It's neither good nor evil. But you all make a different claim in the book that it can actually be money itself can be good or evil. And it doesn't matter necessarily how you use it. It starts more with the money. Can you expand upon that? Why is it different from like a hammer or a gun or these other tools that probably they do seem much more neutral? Well, I would even question that. But to a degree, first of all, this is not an argument that is original to us. I think we have young Guido Hulsman who wrote the Ethics of Money Production and Gary North who wrote Honest Money. They made these arguments before. The monetary system can be good or evil depending on the incentives that it produces. So the incentives that the Fiat monetary system produces are very much towards essentially theft, especially by government. I call it inflation attacks that is impoverished. Has no transparency, no legislation, or even consent by any of the government. And it ends up becoming this pernicious force for theft. And we know theft is wrong. That's the very property rights are very basic. And I think most people can understand that. So if a monetary system incentivizes theft, which the central bank Fiat monetary system definitely does, then I think it's very much evil. Like if there was sort of like a system that incentivizes you to do something evil, I think you can call the system itself evil. So, you know, like, I don't know, like the Nazis, for example. I don't. And jump straight to the Nazis every time. Straight to the Nazis. Right, like they, you know, if they incentivize some particular evil thing and they certainly did by persecution of Jews or whatever, I think you can call that system evil. And the monetary system is as gargantuan as certainly as, you know, a whole worldview like Nazism or Stalinism or many other things. So it's not so much a tool as it is a system. And, you know, depending on the actual system, I think you have to evaluate it based on the incentives that it does. And at least for money, you know, there's definitely a tendency towards theft that you don't see in something like, you know, a hard gold standard where you actually have to carry around gold. I mean, you could steal, but it takes a lot more effort. It's very costly with central bank Fiat money. It's literally like a press of a button. And, you know, you have six trillion extra dollars. It's kind of insane. So you're saying that the, because Bitcoin as a system helps human beings avoid things they would otherwise be tempted to do, bad things that they'd be otherwise tempted to do, that makes Bitcoin good. Yeah, I would say so. And that like if it incentivizes the good things and this incentivizes bad things, I would say that the system itself is morally superior to something that does the opposite. Yeah. And what's interesting about that too is that Bitcoin actually doesn't matter like your opinion about what's good or evil or my opinion or anyone else's opinion. Bitcoin doesn't know that. All it does is incentivize human beings to behave in certain ways according to maybe their natural state. So, but, you know, that's kind of, you know, some people might say that's a little bit at odds with how Bitcoin has a reputation, false or not of being used by criminals. And, you know, albeit cash has, it's used by criminals as well, but that could just be a result of how the US dollar is much more popular. What do you say to that? Yeah, so certainly it can be used for evil purposes. I don't think like I mentioned earlier, it doesn't change the human heart, right? If you want to do something evil, Bitcoin's not suddenly going to stop you. And this is sort of like the mentality shift that you have to have. That's kind of what the fiat monetary system, or at least it tries to do or it claims to try to do, is prevent people from doing evil, right? Like if you are, you know, if you're trying to open a business as a marijuana dispensary in Colorado, that's something that the fiat banking system doesn't let you do because they won't let you open a bank account with, you know, because of federal mandates and so on. So that's a way to sort of like, quote unquote, prevent evil. I don't think, in my view, I think that tends to overstep the rights of everybody else. And, you know, of course, there's going to be people that are trying to do evil. If you quote unquote, try to prevent evil, it tends to, first of all, not prevent the evil and second, infringe on the rights of everybody else. So there's that way to do it, which it tends to be extremely centralized, or there's the other way to do it, which is allow for it and then prosecute them afterwards. I mean, if you are doing money laundering or ransomware or whatever, well, I mean, they're doing evil. I think as a society, we recognize when people's rights are being violated in some way, shape, or form. But if they are being violated, then yeah, go prosecute them. I think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But to like sort of say, well, you're not allowed to do this because you might do X, that I think is very, I don't think that way works. And I don't think that way is just either. Another thing you guys talk about in the book is how bad money, like fiat money, incentivizes a love of money. And well, the first thing is like, a casual observer might look at Bitcoiners talking about loving money. And they're like, you guys are obsessed with Bitcoin. You love money. But what do you mean by bad money incentivizes love of money? And what's wrong with money? I mean, after all, money is deeply spiritual. Yeah, yeah. And I agree that, you know, there is, like money is a gift, right? Like in that sense, it's very useful. It can keep sort of like an account of how much value you've provided to others and have that paid back to you later and so on. But money, like at least in a central bank back, the monetary system, tends to get people obsessed with it. And the reason is obvious. It's, well, not necessarily obvious, but it's because of inflation. You have continuous monetary expansion, which means that in order to keep up, you are more or less forced to invest. So I joked that you have to make your money twice once when you earn it and second time to keep it. Because if you want to keep your money, well, now you have to go into real estate and stocks and all this other stuff because otherwise it will be debased away. So like M2 in 1959 was like $289 billion. It's now currently like 20 something trillion. It's expanded at like 7%, right? Like if you measure it that way, rather than the CPI, which always magically comes in at like 2% or 3%. So it's been expanding at a tremendous rate for a very long time. So you're forced to think about how to keep it. So that takes away a lot of the energy and time from a lot of some of the most productive people in the world. So they're always, if you know anybody rich, that's what they're concerned about. Okay, how do I keep this money? What investments do I put it in? And how do I make sure that this is going there or whatever? And that causes this obsession with investments and so on. So that's one aspect in which you get obsessed with money. The other aspect is like, if you're living paycheck to paycheck especially, you are obsessed with money because you can't really save. There is no sort of like a buffer. This is on the other end. You got the ultra rich side who are completely obsessed with investments. They're putting time, money and energy into things that really aren't benefiting anybody else. They're not creating goods or services which would benefit civilization. Instead, they are obsessed with making 7% every year just to keep up with inflation. On the other end, you've got people that are like living paycheck to paycheck that can't save because there's no savings vehicle. So that means that they don't have a buffer. So they're constantly like in this debt cycle and they have to be obsessed with money because otherwise they can't live. So either way, this whole system essentially makes it so that you end up absolutely obsessed with money. That is what you think about day and night. Whereas for Bitcoiners, and you pointed this out, we are obsessed with Bitcoin and especially Bitcoin adoption because we think this will reduce both of those things. If you do have the ability to save, well then you don't have to care so much about investments. You can actually work a little harder now and then relax a little more later instead of just getting into this debt cycle where you're essentially enslaved to the bank or credit cards or whatever or your job or whatever. So it ends up being a much better system because it frees people's minds and thoughts to actually provide goods and services for others. So this book, Thank God for Bitcoin, is an outgrowth from a Bible study group where you guys wanted to investigate money and it kind of grew from there. And I think that's your target audience. I think you've said that that's exactly who you want to target. Like this Thank God for Bitcoin, it should end up in your Bible study group. I think that's basically your position on the book. And one of the things you all talk about in the book is that money as a subject kind of strikes fear and awkwardness into the hearts of Christians. And why do you think that is? Yeah, a lot of it is because of the stuff that we talked about. Like if you already have money, then you're concerned with keeping it. And if you don't have it, then you're concerned with debt and like making sure you get out of it and so on. And again, this is part of the obsession that is sort of induced by the Fiat monetary system. And that anxiety and fear that people feel, it's not really kosher to talk about in almost any setting. And we're not really taught about it. It took me, I went to high school and college and everything. I was never taught about how the central bank-backed Fiat monetary system works, that nearly every loan in the economy is ex nihilo and all that stuff. Like no one really understands it. So we're not taught about it. We're not educated and we don't understand what it's for. We just like sort of are bombarded with the immediate sort of needs of the money that we have or the debt that we service. And that becomes sort of like the thing that we have to serve instead of other things. And that's, yeah, it gets to be sort of an obsession. And for a lot of people, it's definitely not healthy. But yeah, to get back to your question, why don't people want to talk about it? Particularly Christians, I think. I mean, there seems to be almost like, it's not universal for sure, but I've seen it a lot in my own experience where there seems to be kind of a default skepticism or maybe even a hostility towards like markets and maybe they're just using buzzwords. But I mean, I think that's kind of what I'm getting at a little bit. Right, because they should be rightfully at least suspicious of the obsession with investments and obsession with debt and things like that. There's definitely something correct about that. But I would say that a lot of that is induced by the fiat monetary system. And like getting into the correct view of money, which is it's supposed to serve you, right? Like it's interesting when you think about the fiat monetary system, it's all based on debt. So all money is debt. And the people that get the lowest interest rates tend to be the richest and the highest interest rates tend to be the poorest. The degree to which you have to pay attention to it is the degree to which you're in debt. And even very rich people are in tons of debt because that's how they can make more well from their money and so on. Poor people are certainly in a lot of debt. It forces you to be obsessed with it, right? Like as a Christian, what you would call like serving money. It's literally servicing debt, right? Like it's like there is the bank that gives you a loan of some kind, whether it's a mortgage, credit card or whatever. You are servicing that rather than servicing that. And that to me is at the heart of why people are so low to talk about it because they recognize that their actions are very much serving this monetary God instead of the God that they purport to serve. And I think Jesus made it very clear. You can't serve both money and God. So you have to choose one or the other. If you're in debt, I think to a large degree you are forced to serve money. Your book is filled with Bible passages that kind of support the points you're making. And one of the things that struck me is how there are a lot of stories in the Bible about currency collapse. There was reference to currency collapse in Egypt. And so tell me more about these biblical accounts and what do you think Christians should be gleaning from that? And I guess we've kind of touched on this already, but with all of these references and all of these passages that you referenced in the book, why has this been so... Why is your book novel in a certain sense? Why is it novel? You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. So I think all of those systems, right? And if you study the history of currency collapse and things like that, it's almost always because of a central control of the currency. So at least in Roman times, the basement of the Donarius ended up causing a lot of problems for the Roman Empire and ultimately led to the collapse of Rome. But that whole... Every single civilization that debases their money ends up collapsing. But the temptation to debase comes from centralized control over money itself. And of course that's happened like at an accelerating rate over the last 150 years or so. There's more and more incidences of hyperinflation all over the place because there's a central control of the money supply and they will always be tempted to go steal from everybody else. And they tend to be the biggest thieves of all. So that in turn means that these civilizations end up collapsing because you only need one bad ruler or one bad government in order to trigger that. And then once it's triggered, it's sort of a snowball going down. You're not really going to stop it. But with Bitcoin, you have something that's actually decentralized. You have no central controller it doesn't even have a physical location. So there's no executive order 6102 to confiscate all gold. So that means that everyone has this ability to possess their own stuff, to be self sovereign over their own money. And that lack of centralization means that it doesn't have to... currency doesn't have to collapse like it always seems to. That I think is the better way and I think that's how we'll be under a Bitcoin standard as long as people actually take responsibility over their own coins and so on. I want to jump back to the seminar a little bit because something you said reminding me that I forgot to talk about something which is you spent all this time in high school and college and no one ever taught you how the Federal Reserve system works and never taught you how the monetary system works. I suspect that's because they don't understand it. I don't know if anyone understands it but with Bitcoin, it actually is possible to understand it. It's open to anyone who wants to take the interest. So tell me more about your seminar in that respect and Bitcoin in that respect as compared to Federal Reserve which is operating in secrecy and that makes Bitcoin pretty revolutionary. Yeah, it's transparent. That's kind of what we're talking about. You're not going to be able to audit the Fed but you can audit the Bitcoin blockchain and many nodes do. If you're running your own software, you don't have to trust anyone because the software checks that the ledger balances and everything is good and you can go in and learn exactly how those transactions are structured, how the blocks are structured, how the ledger is designed and everything else and how to check for all of that stuff. And that's key because if you have an organization like the Fed, they have zero transparency. I mean, they release like meeting notes like once a month, like that's about it. You don't really get to see where's the money actually going, who's benefiting from it, who are the owners of it and we don't know any of that stuff. That stuff is just completely hidden and it's sort of like lurks in the shadows. And this is in stark contrast to Bitcoin which is completely open source. You can examine the code yourself. You can go learn every single thing that is part of the system and there's nothing hidden about it. And that in turn means that you have to really understand that you have to examine the code line by line and so on. And I try to help with that with my seminar and it's not necessarily easy but it can be done. And that makes all the difference in the world. Whereas with the Federal Reserve, all the public information that we have, there is very little chance that you're going to understand all of the things that are going on. Even people at the Fed do not understand all of the things that are going on. They're just sort of guessing and saying, okay, we have this information and we're going to do these open market operations and we're going to allow these loan facilities and all this other stuff in order to save the economy and it's Keynesian arrogance at its worst. Yeah, so I want to close out on this because one of the things in the book is like a couple sentences that was like the most striking part of the book for me which is there's a very common refrain within Christian circles which is on faith, hope and love and the greatest of these is love but let's focus on the hope because you all talk about how Bitcoin can provide hope to people in a way that is new in a certain sense and so expand upon that and talk about what's at the end of your book I think that you want the people to read it to come away feeling very hopeful about the future which in a time like now when things are like so crazy in Bitcoin right now like in the context like we're at the Oslo Freedom Forum and there's some hope here and there's Bitcoin as a big presence here talk about hope especially from the theological perspective and how it ties in with Bitcoin and money because I don't think a lot of Christians would say you know where the hope in the world is going to come from and improved monasteries Yeah, indeed, that's probably not what they're thinking but I would argue that that's true in part because well first of all like if you read like you know ethics of money production or honest money and both were written before Bitcoin and you read the ending and it's something like okay we need to get everybody back on the gold standard and you know work towards that and so on and while I respect that position I just don't think that's realistic and it doesn't seem very hopeful because when you think about like how the system works and how it perpetuates sort of like paying for votes essentially by bribing the electorate to vote for your policies based on you know their perception of what's happening and so on that's not going to happen whereas with something like Bitcoin you can opt out of the entire system and go to an entirely new system that's a lot more fair and that I think is hopeful because it gives you sort of like a prospect for the future that's not centrally controlled by some monolithic entity you know like the government or the Fed or what have you it gives you sort of like self-sovereignty it gives you agency it gives you the ability to do things that you want to do and not necessarily you know things that other people want you to do through sort of like their forced incentives through the monetary system a theologically hope is you know sort of like an understanding of what's happening and what's going to happen in the future and certainly as a Christian that's something that I am very much looking forward to as you know looking forward to what I am becoming and what God is making me to be in the same way I think when you look at bitcoin it helps you see what society can be what civilization can be much in a much better way than the sort of centralized control sort of system that we have now where everything is controlled by somebody and you know you're forced instead of you know volunteering to do whatever and it gives people a lot more freedom it helps people thrive and it's all based on this expectation of having this freedom in the future that you might not otherwise have in a centrally controlled society like that we largely have right now that it's been very much proven in the last 18 months