 So this is actually all background to be honest Albert to why the the issue came up of how do you explain this and where the real Dilemma is so in a way everything I've said so far is kind of background on what I really wanted to get to Okay, just let me pull a little bit more out of this though So basically what you're saying is the the absence of contracts here is the issue and if you if you added That additional feature Would this whole problem go away? It would be different but even there So so let's let's take an example of a of a system that would be analogous to what Bitcoin could could look like if you added a contract a Contract which I don't think it should So let's take a domain name system or a private network Let's think they take the AOL network early in its infancy, right? Or you can take a free one like a blogger that was giving up free domains, right? if I register a Website let's say a register a free blog with blog spot. This might be a better example I call it can sell us rants can sell us rants blogspot.com because they allow me to register that now You could look at that domain can sell us rants blogspot.com You could say that's a scarce resource and I own it Okay, I might even have a contract with blogger or blogspot about that But does that really mean I own a domain? You can say that in sort of casual language You can say it in practical language. I have the practical control over that domain But as a reality the domain is just an identifier that points people to a certain Website right which is on the internet or on this private network even if it's a private network like in the early days of AOL That's a contract, but then the question is always who owns what right? So if I have data private data in a certain section of the AOL servers, okay? That basically means AOL has rented to me by contract the the temporary or whatever Limited use of some of their physical property their servers. Okay, so they own their servers It's a physical thing that they own It's impatterned in a certain way with data that I've uploaded to it with their permission. That's a contract Okay, so the contract would govern who owns ownable things the the ownable things are still scarce resources The entire world is made of hardware in a sense, right? The entire net internet is made of hardware There are wires. Someone owns the wires, right? There are fiber optic cables. Someone owns those cables you know, there are Satellites and there's servers and then there's transmission nodes and there's switches All these things are owned by someone and then they all connect together by various interoperability Agreements right where they agree to cooperate with each other and link up together just like two roads might link up together So it always comes down to a question of who owns what and of what ownable things So in the Bitcoin case or let's so let's let's take a credit card case Now these examples having to do with modern money are complicated because the government has screwed up money so much and Money today is not what money used to be money used to be Basically some commodity like gold which was ownable and then the question was who owns the piece of gold Right whether it's held by a bank or held by a lender or whatever But now money doesn't you know in a sense fiat money Dollars issued by the government or no more real than bitcoins are they're just I was gonna say that yeah Yeah, they're very similar to Bitcoin except in Bitcoin. There's no fraud involved and there's no coercion involved in the current fiat money system It's used all entirely in a sense But only because the country has no choice because of legal tender laws and other forms of coercion that the state Imposes upon us. So the state has basically taken an existing quasi natural money system And gradually using their you know like the Mises regression idea They've built upon that and they've gradually cut the tide of gold to now We're to the point where we have fiat money units and people sometimes say well You can own a piece of paper and a dollar's a piece of paper Well, I imagine you and I know that a dollar is not a piece of paper There are billions of dollars out there that are not on pieces of paper They're just units and some government maintain ledger system and effect right now in this case You're saying that the contract with the banks is what makes these units ownable or that? Honestly, if you want to be technically precise, I would be skeptical of saying dollars are ownable right now However, if I if I have control of a certain number of dollars of this government Shaky government system. I don't want someone else to be able to transfer them away Just like I don't want someone to take my 100 bitcoins away from me, right? I want to have practical control of that so I can spend it or use it or keep it And so when I but I do have a contract with Chase Bank, let's say at least I could I think is at least an implicit contract At least there's a property there. They own their facilities they own their computer systems and When I log into my chase account I enter a password and I can manipulate funds around that system whether those particular funds are technically Ownable under a libertarian scheme is sort of a In a far-field question because you wouldn't have such a money system in a free society anyway, so that is sort of an anomaly However, I do think that there's implicitly a contract between me and Chase and there's a contract between Chase and any Any scammer who walks in their front door and pretends to be me? So this is why so people say if you're against intellectual property, you can't be against identity theft I'm like, of course you can well You can't really steal someone's identity But when people say identity theft what they mean is that you're using deception to gain access to my resources You know just like if I have a if I'm out of town for a month And I have some housekeeper or some staff at my home and someone walks up and they pretend like they're me and they Deceive the housekeeper or the guard or whatever into letting me into the home Just because they get away with it doesn't mean it's not an active trespass They are actually in my home using my home without my consent Even if my door is wide open if they walk into my house without my permission They're using my home without my consent. That's a type of trespass type of regression Okay, same thing in the bank situation if someone goes into Chase Bank and they pretend to be me They're deceiving the bank. They're using the bank's resources without their permission And the bank is in violation of their contract with me because they surely made a contract with me We promise to you we will have adequate security measures in place that we will not let Some some scammer come and take the money and that's in your account And if if we do then we're on the hook for it So there is a contractual network that you can envision there and then is there okay? I want to ask you one more question. Sorry go ahead before we move on This is a good background But we have a lot to get into but I just want to say the fact that Mises left this out of human action this Insight is interesting because if he had included it wouldn't he have to address the question of does money have to be Ownable in a legal sense or did he address that in the earlier work? well, what he left out of human action was this this very interesting discussion in socialism of How property rights arise in the first place and he how he distinguishes between basically physical control what I would call possession he calls it something like a de facto ownership And de jure ownership or legal ownership, which I would call just ownership because ownership to me me implies a right Which is a legal thing. So it's just a terminology thing I'm not sure why he left it out of human action. It seems like he would have incorporated that in there I don't see any reason to believe he rejected that As for the money theorem, I just don't think he ever conceived of anything Digital right or anything that wouldn't be a commodity that wouldn't have arose his money my personal view from reading Mises and I am not an Austrian economist. I'm just a Appreciating outside admiring student I think his regression theorem does not prove that money has to arise from a commodity And I don't think it meant to prove that I think he was trying to overcome the The criticism that there's a circularity, right? There's a the circularity in the idea that money that money like gold or something can have money Sorry value and he he did he invented his regression theorem is a way to show that it doesn't have to be a circularity It's not a bootstrapping problem because you can trace the value of money evolutionarily back day from day Until the time that it was solely a commodity with only a commodity value Which is almost certainly how money actually in broad form arose in the real world So he was only imagining here's how money really did arise and if it did arise this way logically There's no there's no infinite regress basically, right if we just yeah If we just substitute the word commodity with direct use good doesn't the problem doesn't solve the problem It might but then we have to talk about the world what the word good means and then then you get into a hole another Austrian issue and potential libertarian issue because the word good is another vague term for legal purposes because You'll have intellectual property advocates say something like well if I can sell my labor on the market That's a good because it has a value, right? And therefore someone can own it you couldn't sell it if you didn't own it So you'll get these kind of fallacious Arguments if you're not careful with even those terms like the term good so Economically, I have no problem calling it a good But when you start assuming that just because something is valued look I think if you keep the Austrian the Misesian concept of subjective value in mind It helps avoid a lot of these mistakes, right? We say something is go ahead. Sorry. I was just gonna say value satisfying is is what I mean by good, right? Something that satisfies I want but all but all that means is that well if you think about the general structure of human action all human action is aimed at an End that is Something the actor wants to achieve in the future necessarily in the future So basically they forecast or they envision a future world that's going to happen without their intervention And they don't like it. They don't like it compared to what they think could happen So they they come up with ways they can affect the course of action. That's called means They employ means which causally interfere with the course of things, right? They're trying to achieve a different outcome that outcome is their goal or their end now That outcome could be any number of things the outcome could be The ownership of an object like if I want a new television might be I will go to the market and purchase a Television right that's the end of my action the end of my action is the ownership of an object or The object could be to have a new pair of shoes and maybe the way that means to attain that is to employ my labor With my leather right and some other resources I have at hand and make a pair of shoes by hand That's the outcome that end of my action But the end of my action may be something that's not ownable, right? Which is what people lose sight of they're all valued the outcome of the end of my action may be to You know Have a county fair arranged where everyone's happy for for a month It may be to get a girl to give me a kiss or it may be to make friends with someone or it may be to read a novel There's any number of things I want to do And when I achieve them that's called profit, right? I have a profitable or successful action and I've made a psychic profit and I value I Demonstrated that I valued it because I pursued it But it doesn't mean that I've necessarily achieved something that I own, right? If a girl gives me a smile if I tell a story and people smile and clap, you know It doesn't mean I've acquired ownership of some new thing that's ownable So we have to realize that just because we value things and our actions doesn't mean that things that so-called have value or Economic goods that can be traded and sold in the sense that there's an ownership title to those things We have to make a distinction and I think that's what people lose sight of especially in intellectual property So the common argument is that well Obviously people value ideas because they will sometimes pay you to give you an idea In other words, I will offer to pay you money for you to give information to me that I desire to have from you So that proves that I value you giving me information. That is true I totally agree with that it doesn't prove that just because you quote sold it to me means that you owned it See, they can't get around this metaphor that's used with the idea of a sale They think that if you sell some thing quotes around the word thing you had to own the thing They are too locked into the framework of a traditional sale of a moveable Sorry or of an ownable object a scarce resource an ownable object It is true that sometimes we have exchange like that you give me a dollar or you give me a gold coin I give you my sheep in that case. There's an exchange of things So the end of the actions of both parties in those cases is to come to own something They didn't own before but as I said the end of all action is not ownership of a thing, right? And if I pay you to sing a song for my daughter's birthday party I am transferring money to you and you do desire to as the end of your action, right? Your goal is to acquire ownership of this coin Okay, but my goal is to achieve my daughter's happiness by having someone sing at her party And once that action once that event passes, I'm satisfied. It's happened, but I don't own anything I didn't acquire ownership of anything So that's an example of a contract where and now we can describe in metaphorical terms We can say you sold your singing services. That's fine. You can use that terminology But it does not mean that you own your singing services. It doesn't mean you own your singing ability This is where the problem arises with the overuse of metaphors and the imprecise use of language Okay, so in that case you own your body and If yes, if for instance, you were to purchase if you were to contract with me to for me to give you A password which would be maybe I don't know a 16-bit pseudo random code You would just be paying me to manipulate my body in a way that Satisfied that that value, right? So you'd be paying me to write something down or paying me to recite a sequence But you wouldn't be buying the sequence I think you can call it buying the sequence, but it's not it's not like legally precise Okay, it's fine to describe it that way because economically That's the goals of the actors and we can we can use metaphors and analogies to describe The interaction between these people if you look at Rothbard's title transfer theory of contract Which I agree with which views contracts Is simply the exercise of control of a resource that's owned by the owner Instead of as binding promises then this this all follows naturally in the case you described What's going on is that Someone wants information that they can use for some practical purpose Like if you actually if there's a scheme in effect the bitcoin scheme in effect The way it's set up is someone's got to have a certain key Or password to make a certain change in the blockchain happen Okay, but someone else has that information and it's confidential It's only in their head or stored somewhere in their private property that they have access to right And you need to induce them to give you this information You want to encourage them to perform an action to perform an action with the resources of the own namely their body And any other resources they have they need to manipulate to get you this this data So you want the data you want to quote buy the data But what that really means is you're willing to make a contract where you say listen I hereby give you Okay, now let's assume dollars is an ownable thing. Let's say a hundred dollars means, you know 200 ounces of silver or whatever right 2,000 ounces of silver um I hereby Give to you this title to this owned resource If you perform the following action, which is giving me information that I want right and if that happens That's a mutually useful exchange, but technically speaking. It's not really an exchange of titles It's an exchange economically because both sides benefit from it and they both But i'm just using this conditional title transfer of my money to induce The other person to use his property in a way that I find pleasing to me Which means he opens his mouth and he gives me useful information that I can then go use As part of some other network to do something else that I want to do right Okay, so that sounds we have to yeah go ahead that that sounds a lot like for instance someone giving you a violin lesson Right giving you the information that you can use. Okay, so let's yeah, so let's get to the to the meat of it Then and what is the new insight or what is the new angle that you're bringing now that might help So trying to explain Which I've sort of done here why I think it's it's it's a misnomer to say that bitcoin is ownable Right and again the reason is because Bitcoin is just information stored in different people's computers And if you own the information that really means you own their computers But you don't even have a contract with anyone So you don't have any contractual right to their computers, etc So discussing this trying to explain it to people Um, you know, I had people starting trying to make analogies to the intellectual property argument to try to navigate and figure out this bitcoin thing and um, some of them A common argument and I've made the argument this way before myself an argument for For why a copyright for example is not legitimate Is that it tries to grant property rights and information But information unlike scarce resources has this property that it's infinitely replicable Or infinitely copyable and I agree with that But I think that sort of misses an intermediate step And that is the following if you think more closely about this um Property rights are the rights to control Right, the legally recognized socially recognized right to control are to use A given scarce resource that is a thing that's of the type that people could have a conflict over it If there was no possibility of conflict over these things you would need property rules in the first place We all be living in a garden of Meadon There's the whole reason for property rights Is this universally accepted? I don't think it's I think it has to to a degree I think it is universally accepted. I mean The the very institution of property rights is widespread around the world It's not consistently put in place and I would say pretty much all libertarians Recognize that there ought to be property rights in these kinds of scarce resources And you know the funny thing is like, you know, if you imagine a dog Which is a stupid animal Even dogs recognize kind of a temporary limited property right in their dog bowl You know, they're eating out of their dog bowl and another dog approaches They're going to growl and because there's a possibility of conflict because there's only so much food in the bowl They can't both eat the food, right? This is a common sense almost undeniable Feature of what property rights are For some people that'll be the most objectionable thing you've said so far picking on dogs Okay, yes, I love my dogs. I'm looking at two smart poodles right now, but they're unintelligent in the sense of conceptual rational beings Okay, I'm just saying even dogs can recognize although I agree. I would take my poodles over some socialists. Um any day