 It's literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars that are just in dumps to somewhere. If something goes bad, it goes very, very bad. And there have been stories of people being kidnapped and people asking for ransom in Bitcoin. How do you keep them secure in such a way that other people can't get them, but they're accessible to you in order to use and you're not going to forget them? Welcome to Building Tomorrow. I'm your host, Paul Matzko, and with me today... Will Duffield, a research assistant in speech and internet policy. I'm Aaron Powell. I'm director and editor of Libertarianism.org. And I'm Matthew Feeney, the director of Cato's Project on Emerging Technologies. Thanks for joining me today, guys. Today we're going to talk about cryptocurrency and security. There was a hack recently of a digital currency storage site. We'll talk a little bit about what that means, what cryptocurrency wallets are, the difference between hot and cold wallets. A lot of topics to get to. But before we dive into the particulars, let's explain for our listeners what cryptocurrency security means. Like when you say you own some Bitcoin, you own Ethereum or any one of these other cryptocurrencies, how are they supposed to be secured in theory? So, I guess you have your currency resides in a wallet and a wallet is just a set of two numbers, two long numbers. One is the public address of the wallet. So that's where if people want to send you money, they punch in, send it to this address. And the other one is your private, basically, passcode. And so if you want to send money from your wallet, you have to have access to your private passcode. The security thing comes in that anyone who has access to your passcode can take all of the money out of your wallet instantly. And there's no way for you to get it back. And it's very hard to trace where it went, if not impossible. And so the security part comes in with, what do you do with this passcode? It's too long for most of us to memorize. Because it's what, 64 characters or something like that? I guess I don't know how long it is. I'm not sure the exact figure. It's long. It's long. No human's going to be able to, well, very few are going to be able to memorize it. People with those memory castles, whatever they are. And so if you forget it though, you're out of luck. The funds in your wallet are locked away forever and ever and there's nothing that can be done about it. If someone steals it, you're out of luck. So the question of security is where do you put these things? How do you keep them secure in such a way that other people can't get them, but they're accessible to you in order to use and you're not going to forget them? So I suppose we should remind our listeners, maybe don't make your crypto password, password, right, like you said, something a little more complex, right? What were you going to say, Matt? Oh, I was just going to say that what's been interesting about the last year, I suppose, has been this renewed interest in cryptocurrencies that seems to be very well correlated with the price of Bitcoin, which has exploded in value. Although it seems to be on a bit of a nosedive at the moment. And you've seen these exchanges set up, well, probably the most common, at least in the United States is Coinbase, but the interesting irony about these big exchanges is that it's not actually, when you're using these exchanges, you're not owning the Bitcoin in a sense. It's Coinbase saying, here's an IOU in the crypto community or here, if it's not your key, it's not your Bitcoin, right, that you may. But this is an example of people trading, well, doing a balancing act between security and convenience, which is actually, if you want to own the key and not use Coinbase and not use these exchanges, you've got to be very careful by yourself on how you secure these assets. And some people are willing just to have Coinbase handle a lot of their crypto. So which crypto users are tending to use these exchanges rather than storing it themselves? What's the breakdown of? Well, I think my guess is, so I haven't seen any survey on it, but my guess is that people who are somewhat on the peripherals, just getting started, quite like Coinbase because it's a cool way to keep track of the price of the most popular crypto assets. It's easy to use. You quickly link up a bank account. The people who tend to be very wary of these things are people who have, at least from what I've seen, been in the space a long time. They understand the cryptography. They understand the technology, and they know that Coinbase is one scary letter away, one scary IRS letter away from shutting down, effectively. And that should, I think, worry more people who are using it. Now, it's kind of striking to me that as we describe what something like Coinbase is, how similar it is to fiat currency, right? Where essentially, at least in theory, I mean, not fully fiat, where there's nothing backing it other than trust in the government, but the old-style system, like a, well, gold-based system back in the day, where you used to have to trade in bullion your Spanish pieces of eight, right? It was silver or gold. That was what your currency was. That was really inconvenient to carry all that on your person. It's easily stolen. So instead, you deposit that in some kind of central repository, a bank, eventually, a federal government, a federal reserve, there's Fort Knox, there's gold, we issue an IOU, a piece of paper. I mean, what's striking to me is that this really is... I mean, you can compare it to the Scottish free banking system in a sense there, where you have a commodity bank that holds the underlying commodity, and you're issued some kind of script. Well, the irony of all of this is, of course, when Bitcoin first emerged, one of its big selling points was, we shouldn't have these big powerful institutions that are controlling our currency and finance and everything. What about this great decentralized system? Wouldn't that be preferable? And now you have these big giant institutions like Coinbase Emerging, which are acting in very similar ways, which is a strange irony. I don't know if that's necessarily a fair characterization. So let me take a stab at defending these large exchanges. So a centralized money system, and the stuff that upsets people who thought that we needed cryptocurrencies for a decentralized system. So the stuff that upsets them about it is, first, the government control of the money supply, the ability of them to inflate it, and the money simply being a product of the government, that the government is the one in charge of all this. True fiat currency, yeah. Neither of those apply to cryptocurrencies. So that's totally fair. But even then, the centralization issue, like one of the issues that we have is that you have to basically get approval from the government to be a big player in the fiat currency space. If you're going to do electronic transfers of money or you're going to use your credit cards, those are through just a handful of centralized things and a new entrant can't really come into that market in a meaningful sense. Neither of those are true about these exchanges. So you can put your money in Coinbase, but you can still send that money across this network that is not owned by Coinbase to anyone else who is on that network. You don't need Coinbase's approval because Coinbase will just send it to an address that you give them. You can switch out of it very easily. So it's large in the sense that a lot of people use it for convenience sake and for security sake, but it doesn't feel large in the sense of having outsized power over the market. It's not an issuing authority in any sense. Yes. So in my earlier comment, I didn't mean to characterize Coinbase as, I don't know, the Bank of America or of crypto, right? It clearly is mutt. And I'm on net, I think, a fan of institutions like Coinbase because they've been really good at getting people into the space. And in fact, because I've been in the libertarian world for so long, I was initially a skeptic of cryptocurrencies and I was badgered by so many gold bugs to get involved in all this that I eventually bought a little bit of Bitcoin using Coinbase because it was easy years ago. And it was only more recently when I logged back in to check what the actual value of this was that I thought this is worth worrying about and looking a bit more into the security. So clearly it was one of the most downloaded apps last year, wasn't it? The Coinbase app number one or two on the app store. So for people who are interested in the space, that clearly I think is good news, but we should still remain aware that people using it just don't have as much control over the asset as they would if they used cold wallets or other methods. This is actually a good transition moment. So you just mentioned cold wallets, Matthew. So for our listeners, there are cold wallets and hot wallets when it comes to these exchanges. Your cold wallet is the offsite hard, you know, like non-digital storage medium. It is sometimes that's a, you have a USB key to access it. It's, you don't want it to be plugged in. It's not easily immediately accessible online. It's separated from the digital infrastructure. The hot wallet is what is readily accessible. It's like, it's the comparison I've heard made is checking account versus savings account, but even that's probably not enough distance because your savings account is still these days online and accessible. It's like checking account versus a safe deposit box versus the bank vault. Yeah. So how does this cold versus hot wallet thing play into the recent hack of specifically coin check. I think it was $30 million was stolen from coin check. What's that being stolen from or the 64 million from nice hash last December. Mount Gox lost 450 million. So it's, it's one of those things where my understanding, I don't know about Mount Gox, that coin check, it was 30% of everything on coin check, which is a South Korean exchange. It was basically everything in their hot wallet, which meant they were carrying 30% of their assets in what was essentially a relatively easy to access low security relative. And was this a technological hack or some kind of social engineering gambit? What tends to be the vector of attack on all of these? In most of these, it's a technological hack. And so it's going to be those hot wallets because you, if, if you want, if you're a big organization and you want people being able to buy and sell cryptocurrency through you at a rapid clip, then these cold wallets, these offline wallets, you know, so like basically a private key written on a piece of paper in a vault somewhere or stored on a computer that's not connected to the internet in a vault somewhere, it's, it's inconvenient to get money in and out of that because someone's got to figure out, you got to go down there and get the key and, you know, enter that whole thing. So you want to keep a significant portion of the money that's in your system in these hot wallets, which are, you know, connected to the internet so that you can, you can move money around quickly when people want it. And so that's, in a lot of cases, that's what's getting stolen is those, those wallets, there's hacking in and they're getting access to it or they're somehow getting access to, you know, they're hacking the website and getting access to people's passwords when they're entering them. There's a lot of like keystroke, where they basically will track your keystrokes. So the, the cold storage is much, is much safer and so they keep a lot of it, you know, the larger reserves are stored in there and the only way you would get that is either through, is through, say, social engineering, like you, you talk someone into giving you access who has access to those or someone on the inside decides to steal, you know, someone who does have access decides they want to steal it or you, you know, some kind of Ocean's Eleven and break into the vault thing. That's a future movie, definitely, yeah, right. So you do get significant advantages with cold wallets if you are using it yourself, but it also comes with a lot of risks, of course, because the security is up to you. So if you, you forget your pin code, there isn't a, you know, bitcoin.com that you can call, right? You know, so, you know, if I lose my debit card, I can call up the bank and they'll ask for some ID verification and then they'll issue a new one or if I forget my pin code, they'll go through a similar system. This was highlighted by, for my money, one of the best pieces of nonfiction writing in recent years, which was an article written by Frank Forunfelder who wrote a wired article titled, I Forgot My Pin, An Epic Tale of Losing $30,000 in Bitcoin and it's an incredible piece of writing. I think the tension really builds and it's a couple thousand words. You know, he got one of these cold wallets, Tresor, which is one of the most popular models and you access it with a pin code that he forgot and he also lost, or more accurately, I think his housekeeper threw away the 24-word backup list that can help you recover the wallet and Tresor has this great security feature which is every time you put in a wrong pin code it doubles the amount of time you have to wait before trying again so you wait 10 seconds and you have to wait 20 and then 40 and very quickly realize you'll have to be waiting months before, you know, trying this again. So at some point it's inheritance only. Yeah, and so he came up to it, he said by the 31st try it would be 34 years. Right. You have to wait. And what's amazing about this is it does a good job of showing that you better do a lot of, I guess, security yourself to make sure that things like this cannot happen because there are horror stories all over the Internet of people accidentally throwing out hard drives or people forgetting their passwords and for some of these people there's literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars that are just in dumpsters somewhere. So this brings up a kind of interesting parallel to government and theories of government because so what are the most popular theories of how we get to the state is the state of nature and the state of nature is, as Thomas Hobbs called it, our lives there are solitary poor, nasty British and short, which I always thought would make a great name for a Gary Coleman biopic. But that's bad. We don't want to live that way. The risks inherent in everything we do in our lives are more than we want to deal with and so we band together and give up some of our rights, give up some of our freedom for additional security. And what we've got here is the cold wallets that you keep yourself are ultimately a state of nature in a sense. So they're high risk in this way. They're unforgiving, right? And if something goes bad, it goes very, very bad. But you've got maximum freedom. You're not being controlled by anyone. You have total control over your money. The network can't be controlled by anyone, so you can do anything on it that you want to. So it's that kind of financial anarchism. But then a lot of people say, look, that state of nature sounds not so great to me because I could lose it all. I could screw it up somehow. And so I'm going to give up some of my freedom, some of my ability to do what I want with my money as quickly as possible, give up some of my money because these places charge fees to enter into a social contract with Coinbase. And so it raises, you see really indignant crypto enthusiasts, like the ideologically motivated crypto enthusiasts, the people who got into this stuff because they have libertarian political views and they want to escape the state and embrace crypto anarchism and whatever else, just really looking down on people who would use something like Coinbase or something where you don't own your own private key. Because they're accepting the threat of a bad sovereign as they do in other areas of their life in a way that rankles the anarchists. So I think the risks associated with Coinbase, I want to emphasize that I'm not worried that Coinbase is going to be the target of some kind of Oceans 11 heist. I do think from what little I understand that Coinbase does a pretty good job at keeping this sensitive information stored under lock and key. My worry is when the SEC or the IRS or someone decides that they don't like Coinbase, then you're out of control. But in an anarchist world, there's of course no, I guess, principled objection to something like Coinbase, right? I'm forgetful. I'm definitely going to lose this piece of paper and I judge the risk of a hack to be really low of Coinbase. So yeah, I'll use it. And listeners should I think just download these kind of apps, especially Coinbase, just to see if nothing else how easy it is. And it's kind of amazing that it used to be something just for mathematicians and cryptographers and geeks. Now it's just really easy to use. Well, it's a cool example of spontaneous organization, which is a favorite libertarian principle that we have individuals who are solitary, who are facing shortage and want and scarcity, banding together to create new orders, new institutions. So to me, that's actually exciting. I mean, I suppose I'm not a hardcore crypto anarchist. I think it's cool when you organize something like that. And that the alternative is, of course, a central authority organizing something like that for you in order to make you legible so the state can see you. So there is the possibility, I think, as you're alluding to here, Matthew, that at some point the state could say, hey, we don't like the fact that cryptocurrency is by its very nature illegible or very, you know, very hard for us to read. And so how can we tax it? How can we regulate it? How can we police it and its users? And that's a legitimate concern. But there were a couple of articles that you guys shared today. People going to kind of extreme lengths when it comes to creating these new institutions and orders. One was a bunker. It's from an article by Tom Metcalf for Bloomberg, the wealthier hoarding $10 billion of Bitcoin in bunkers, so you have to go check out the, when you read the article, there's a picture of one of the bunkers and it's like a Swiss military installation that's been demilitarized and there's like a giant steel vault door that the person's hauling open and that's where the cold wallets are being stored for wealthy investors. It's quite a striking picture. But my favorite paragraph from it is this, every part of their DNA, this is the users of the people who are storing their cold wallets, is geared to security, said Sean Clark, first blocks founder, who noted the vault's fingerprint scanners were equipped with a pulse reader to prevent amputated hands from being used. Whenever we make big transfers, they FaceTime us and we have duress words, which like if you're kidnapped, if it's big enough, they'll fly out to see us. So think about the chain of security measures there. At one point they said, okay, we just need the password and that's a hard thing to get because it's offline, it's, you know, this whole complicated thing that no one has memorized so you have to get access to this physical password. Well, that's not good enough. One's if that's stolen, if it's stolen from you, but then they said, okay, so we'll have a fingerprint scanner so we know it's you and then someone said, oh, when's if they chop off your hand and bring it and scan your dead thumb? Okay, well, we'll put a pulse reader on it and if you have the pulse reader, we know it's not a dead hand, it has to be alive. And then, well, but when's if, you know, you're still alive, but they have a gun to your back or something while you call in and have your thumb on the reader, well, we'll have duress words so you can signal, hey, the pineapple is in the tree. You know, oh, they said pineapple, we're not going to let them make the transfer. I mean, it's actually quite a fascinating example of how far this institution's building is going. It also makes me wonder, like, the practicality of this for most users, right? Like, this is one thing if this is a place for... These aren't most users. These are the users who would, in other markets, be using a Swiss bank account to store something. Okay. Yeah. Well, so maybe not for billionaires, but Trezza, which is one of the wallets I discussed earlier, has an interesting solution to what some people have referred to as the $5 wrench problem, which is you can have one of the best passwords around. You can have vaults and all the rest of it, but when someone is dragged into an alley and is bashing over the head with a $5 wrench demanding your password, then all that security flies out of the way. So Trezza, for example, allows you just to set up as many accounts as you want on the one device. So you can have one sort of dummy account for muggings, right? Which has quite a bit of money in it, but it's definitely not your full amount so that you can give out the fake password to it. But this is a worry, and there have been stories of people being kidnapped and people asking for ransom in Bitcoin. Just earlier this week, then three members of a Bronx biker gang were charged in a $2.5 million crypto kidnapping heist. They tossed somebody in a van and took off with them. Yeah, and that's not that... They've been around for a few hours at gunpoint until they turned over all of the accounts. Which I mean, I think it would be fair if you were, you know, it'd be fair to point out that, look, this is a nonunique harm. Like, kidnappings already happen, right? Like, you take the heir of the Getty Foundation. I mean, they just made a movie out of this year or two ago. And mail his thumb or finger back and say, hey, pay me the ransom and cash or else. So I think the rejoiner would be, yes. This is worrisome, but is it really any different than a non-cryptocurrency-based system? Like, is this a unique or an exaggerated threat compared to the status quo? I think there is a slight exaggeration of the threat given the medium. It's much harder to track and recoup losses. You know, traditionally they catch the kidnappers when someone goes to make the money drop. There isn't a money drop in this. Well, it depends on how smart the criminals are. One of the things that I think will actually make cryptocurrencies more mainstream is when governments realize that actually it's not anonymous and that you can track this stuff. If you are relatively skilled at financial forensics and you're examining blockchain transactions, you can figure out where... Now there are methods that smart people can use to disguise transactions, but you'd have to be pretty knowledgeable about this. How much do borders matter there if you're sending this stuff all around the world? I mean very little, right? But there are international law enforcement efforts, right? Interpol will save us. Yeah, Interpol will save us. So we should expect more of these kind of stories, but I think, as Paul mentioned, that this is a unique problem to cryptocurrency and as it becomes more common law enforcement, we'll try and figure out ways to track it down. Law enforcement will try to figure out ways and the various companies, the various players in the crypto space will figure out better and better ways to prevent this sort of stuff happening. It might not need to be as elaborate and macabre as amputated hands and whatnot, but there's a lot of media frenzy around this stuff. This stuff makes these heists make very good stories. This is new tech that's very weird tech that also has a lot of what's called outsized characters involved in it, and so it's fun to report on. And we're also in the incredibly early stages of this tech. Like this is like looking at the internet in, you know, 1990 or something. Every gold rush is exciting. So the space is going to get more boring. And that's a good thing. It's a good thing. It's going to get boring because it's going to get settled down, and as more people have this stuff, you won't know, like, oh, well, this guy, we know this guy's a Bitcoin guy, so we're going to go kidnap him because everyone will be a Bitcoin guy and the security will be better. I think there are real concerns here, but they will be mitigated fairly quickly. Yeah. Well, the historical corollary this reminds me of, I was thinking about this earlier, it's a pre-federal reserve, pre-national bank, pre-Jacksonian. It's like the 1820s and 30s when you had a whole network of dozens, even as many as hundreds of banks, all essentially running their own private currencies. So you would have, you know, cash was secured by deposit in the Bank of New York or in, and at that time, it's a new system, it's a new form of fiat currency backed by deposits in these individual banks. It led to a lot of currency speculation. It led to a lot of arguably a bubble in investment, but ultimately there actually, there's a whole complicated, like, economic history literature on this phase of financial regulation, of financial industry. It actually ended up kind of working. It gets superseded by the debates over a national bank and someday the federal reserve, but for most of American history, I mean, the balance of American history, there is no federal reserve or even the national bank. The, but there's a lot of instability at first. The point here is that there is a lot of turnover in these banks, a lot of them fail, but over time, it gets routinized. People get used to the system. They figure out who the good actors are, right? Like for every bank that falls, there's one that persists, that builds consumer trust. We are in that kind of moment right now, but it's something that we're actually, like, accelerating through more quickly, right? The cycles happen more quickly in a digital world. So we've already gotten that initial, like, burst of speculation that kind of irrational or a hubristic boom in the price of, say, Bitcoin. We might be actually getting on the other side of that now, though. The kind of speculators, the enthusiast, well, it's now being routinized. Normal investors are creating ways to create index funds for Bitcoin. It's becoming more standardized. We're all the way there yet. We had Dennis Rodman wearing a pot coin t-shirt, taking up a lot of time on CNN over the weekend. The marketing gimmicks are still fairly outlandish. Or Steve Bannon, the deplor coin. What? Really? That was in a New York Times article written by Nathaniel Popper, who wrote a book I have yet to read called Digital Gold, which people rave about. Yeah, he's, I guess it would be fair to call him the Times's crypto reporter. So yeah, interesting stuff. I will say, to some extent we've been saying, this will all get better as this space looks more like our traditional financial space in terms of the kinds of institutions and all of that. But I will say that I remain fairly, you know, my interest in this field is not in the, I'm not a monetary economist. The financial stuff is not, you know, is not what really grabs me. It's the possibilities of using this to advance a freer world that inspires me. And in that regard, I remain really optimistic even as things become normalized and we get, you know, stodgy conservative institutions running and participating in the space and so on. Because the underlying technology remains the same and that underlying technology is accessible to anyone. Like the fundamentals of this network, you can download onto your phone and run it by yourself and it's easy to do. Like anyone, you know, spent 20 minutes reading about it and you can do it. And so these organizations get powerful, we can have all these things, all these things you want to, can just opt out of that system and go back to the frontier, which you can't do with our existing. I mean, you can take your money, you can take your cash and squirrel it away, but the cash is still traceable and you're still participating in this government system that the government ultimately has control over. And as the technology advances, I mean, every major cryptocurrency is pursuing ways to make it more anonymous, more private, to cut out the ability of the government to track it even more. So in my, you know, my core libertarian heart of wanting a world where the state doesn't have access to us if we don't want it to, I think that the future is still very bright and this stuff is a really important way to get us there. Well, then that's a great point and it's because all these things we're talking about are still non-state action, right? These are still, there's this growing network of private exchanges, of private currencies. One of the articles, I think the one who runs the Swiss, you know, military facility as a cold wallet storage, ZAPO, I think it was called, one of the striking things about the founder who's from Argentina is he, his whole source of getting involved in like kind of Bitcoin cold wallet, cold storage is the Argentinian, the collapse of the Argentinian financial system where the government was essentially printing money, right, to make up for, you know, a gap in the budget and in effect then raiding the bank accounts of every Argentinian, right? It was devaluing the currency and devaluing the savings of ordinary Argentinians. You know, just like overt expropriation. I mean, I know as libertarians, taxes theft, but this didn't even have the like democratic processes that go behind voting on taxes. It was just we're going to inflate the currency to get out of a financial tight spot and you're going to pay for it, Argentinian investors. And so what does he do to avoid that kind of state expropriation, state intervention in the currency inflation? He buys bitcoins, he builds a bunker to store, you know, the cold wallet storage. So, I mean, again, this is a way for him to get around an intrusive, liberty-violating state government. And because we live in a globalized society, an Argentinian can buy a Swiss bank vault, a Swiss military installation and keep his money free from that kind of coercive theft. Doesn't, I mean, speaking specifically to this cold storage model, that seems pretty vulnerable to the state and some people to crack open your bank vault. Oh, sure. Just like if you keep your cash at the bank, the state can do that. But it is the speed with which you can opt out of that is very fast. The ability to take, if you have $10 million in a bank account, it's hard to get that all out and totally off the grid at a rapid pace, whereas you can do it in moments and transfer it into something that then you don't find and you have all of it and something you carry around in your pocket or in your head. So I think that's a big difference. I think the preparation analog in thinking about communication security applies here and that under a traditional banking model, by the time you realize you need to be able to move your money around the world and take it off the grid, it's already too late unless you've been set up for that. This pre-sets you to make those sorts of moves. Yeah, I mean, if you try to move that quantity of money, right, you're going to, first of all, you're going to have to wait however five business days at a minimum for smaller transfers, larger transfers. You have to get essentially the approval of a bank president. You have to go jump through a lot of hoops and then you're also any movement over a certain dollar threshold gets reported to the government, right? Like they're going to know you're trying and very quickly they're going to let you do it in large enough increments to get it all out before there's a freeze slapped on your account. Whereas if your money's in the vault, you're a wealthy investor, you've got, I don't know, $10 million in that cold wallet in underground Switzerland, you can fly there in an afternoon, pull your money out, put it in the cold vault in, I don't know, the Urals or somewhere else. So that's an advantage of the system. Maybe it's not perfect, it's not, so it's not clear to me, I don't know enough about Zappo to know about, but are they holding the private keys in these vaults themselves? Because it seems to me that in a system where they're actually just storing devices without the keys, it wouldn't really matter if the government was at the door because they would still need you to put in either the PIN or the passcode or whatever. But still, easy to move if you had to. Ideally you want a system where they need to know the contents of your memory in order to access them. I don't think they store, so they store the, like a device, like your treasure. My understanding is they store a device, but they don't, like, Zappo wouldn't have your key. Oh, well, if that's the case, then there wouldn't be much use of the government even knocking on the door in the first place because I'll get these devices that they can't. On storing this in your mind, have we seen any, I guess, crypto-oriented either meditation practice services or hypnosis or other strategies to allow you to remember this key? They're probably unconnected, but in roughly the time that cryptocurrencies were really taking off, a number of, there are books and articles coming out about how to memorize anything, that people memorize a deck of cards or so on and so forth. So, but I do think that the, I'll go back to just the value of all of this from a libertarian perspective is to use a term that Paul used earlier is legibility. That the government wants us to be legible. It wants to be able to see what we're doing or at any time it turns its eye on us, it wants to be able to have a record of what we've done, where our money is, how we got that money, that it can dig through whenever it wants to and sometimes it says it needs to do that for revenue-raising purposes for criminal, investigating criminal activity, but it's also a mechanism of control. States around the world want their people to be legible for control purposes and I think that we, a fundamental human right is to be as illegible as you want to be. And so this system with all its warts and with all its odd characters and with all its risks is still the biggest step that we have seen to date in taking an extraordinarily large area of our lives, namely our economic activity and moving in a direction where it becomes truly illegible. Well, even if there are ways for the state to access that money, right, like they raid the vault, they take your treasure, they take your USB key, they don't know what's on it, right? So I think you're right, the key gain here is making you more illegible to the state. I mean, they could take it. There's a way they can expropriate it, but they don't know what's on there until they do so. Like that itself has a great deal of benefit. So James C. Scott's next book will be Crypto Tribe, Valley Tribe? Well, thanks, guys, for coming in and talking about cryptocurrency and crypto security. Until next week, this is Building Tomorrow. Thank you.