Episode 57

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Gigi. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Dustin (Host):                    00:00:02               Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to everybody listening wherever and whenever this podcast may find you. Welcome to the did you know podcast and I’m your host, Dustin. Today I’m going to be welcoming back to the podcast, a Gigi previously on episode 47 describing his article on Bitcoin as a living organism. And today is a really just a great talk. And we had actually before the episode started, I was recording and we’re kind of discussing a little bit about what we would talk about and we kind of just kind of delve right in and then realized we hadn’t even done the introduction stuff. So this is going to be a little bit different. You’re basically just going to roll right into the podcast and then probably about 12 minutes and I’ll do the introduction as I realized that we hadn’t even done that part yet.

Dustin (Host):                    00:00:51               So,  that’s why it’s a little bit out of order, but I think that that discussion at the very beginning kind of really informs a little bit later on into the episode. So that’s why I decided to include it and not cut it out or try to splice it in haphazardly. So just be aware of that. But before we go forward, I would like to say thank you to my sponsor E Toro, which is a trusted smart trading platform. They trade traditional assets as well as a variety of cryptocurrency assets. They offer innovative tools and they do over $1 trillion in trading annually and have 11 million, you know, other traders on there in a sort of social network that you can interact with each other. There’s some really cool features such as virtual trading where you can practice strategy on a real order books with fake money.

Dustin (Host):                    00:01:36               And then you can also do copy trading, can allocate a certain percentage of your portfolio to copy. A successful traders moves so they win, you win, they get a little percentage of your profits. You get to copy someone who’s maybe a little bit better than you and you know, it’s an all around great thing go to didyouknowcrypto.com/etoro that’s E T O R O and you’ll get $50 for free to start trading Bitcoin today. Also head over to support my podcast.com and that is a way of helping off the podcast, but also saying thank you to you because if you click on the listener supported discounts, you can get access to the discounts that I have already on things like tracer, mushroom coffee, Bitcoin tax software, all this other kind of stuff that’s absolutely free to you, the listener. So if you’re listening, you can go over there right now. No problem whatsoever. And lastly, I’d like to ask if you’d leave a iTunes review, if you could also, you know, give it five stars if you think that’s you know, warranted, which I think that it is. Um, but most of all I’d like to say thank you, you guys make all this possible. I really do appreciate you guys taking time out of your day to listen and support us and share. So thanks and enjoy the show.

            

PODCAST BEGINS WITH PRE-INTERVIEW CONVERSATION

Dustin (Host):                    00:03:08               Yeah, no, I’ve been trying to, cause I think you and I, we could talk about this or it’s a subject I wanted to delve into if we had time as well because his (Max Hillebrand) concept of not, not being able to own Bitcoin. Yeah. I really, you know that “occulting the knowledge” is probably my favorite description of, of Bitcoin that’s out there. And I think that’s the closest to the truth that we’ve been able to get to. But yeah, that’s it. I bet. Basically the topics are going to be talking about the, the epiphany that you had obviously sent you those, those pictures and then the concept of the, the Bitcoin religion as well. And then you know, if we have time, the not owning your Bitcoin and all that kind of good stuff.

Gigi:                                       00:03:55               Yeah, sure. I’m, I think we, we will have time and I’m happy to talk about pretty much everything. I am the only, the only thing I want to, like the only caveat to that is I had this weird experience and I can’t really, I don’t have the right vocabulary yet to talk about everything. I tried to talk, I tried to talk about it with a couple of people with varying success. So some of it is just, um, it’s not, it’s not that it’s deeply personal, that’s not it, it’s just very, um, you know, yeah, this thing happened to me and I simply elective vocabulary and I can only talk about it with religious language in a way, even though I’m not a religious person at all. I view myself as a scientist and I have been a scientific researcher for a couple of years and I have a very, I’m first and foremost a skeptic.

Gigi:                                       00:04:55               And so it’s really weird that this happened to me now. And just my brain went into a different mode and it’s kinda like, you know, you, you can research sex all you want, but if you had sex once and it was like a life changing sexual experience, it does something to you in a way. And then it’s very hard, too few sex as just a reproductive thing that we do. You know what I mean? And, similarly I had, I had what felt like profound insights, but from the outside it obviously looked like I went crazy and maybe I went crazy. You know, like I, it’s not for me to tell. Yeah.

Dustin (Host):                    00:05:37               I think that most religious experiences are like that, right? Where from internally there’s this profound experience that’s hard too… And I think a lot of, if you read a lot of, , religious writings from, whether it was the, you know, the Buddha or, like a Saint Therese, where they had these massively important experiences that it took them a very long time to be able to put into words. And a lot of them even admitted that they just can’t describe the, experience just because the, there aren’t the words in the vocabulary of language to, to fully describe it. So it’s, really lacking in terms of your ability to, to convey that information because of a lot of it’s so personal given your context, your history and just, you know, feelings you can say, well I love this person. Right. But that doesn’t capture the, exactly the depth of, of that experience.

Gigi:                                       00:06:33               I mean it’s, it’s, it’s the old philosophical problem that words are just pointers to experiences in a way. Like it’s, the work itself is not the thing, you know, like the, if you have a picture for pipe, this is not a pipe. And uh, it’s, it’s similar to like everything we do. Like if you do any kind of extreme sport or if you do surfing for some, uh, for example, you can talk about surfing all you want, if you’d never served. You don’t know really what it is and how it feels like. And it’s the same for, for any experience really. And, if like the more “out there” the experiences, the more troubling it is to just talk about it. But I, um, I actually, I talked to Brandon Quittem about this and this was very, very helpful. Like he’s, he’s the mushroom guy, you know him from, uh, Bitcoin as a living organism, Mycellium network.

Dustin (Host):                       00:07:31               Absolutely. I agree 100%.

Gigi:                                       00:07:33               And he is very, like, he’s very well read in terms of, psychedelic and also religious experiences. And then I kind of knew, knew that. So I contacted him and try to talk with him about it and that was very helpful because he, he has a way by the vocabulary and he pointed me to it, to a book which I got and I’ve read the first 30 pages or so of it. It’s a very weird, very, um, I hate this word, but I’ll use it anyway. It’s a very spiritual book and it was written by someone who had an enlightenment experience and tried to put it into words. And I swear to God, the first 10 or 15 pages, they almost one to one match, My very coded notes that I took while I, while I had this weird wow experience in a way, you know how,stuff like it’s a process that you cant stop.

Gigi:                                       00:08:33               Like it has to unfold in its own, like a Caterpillar turning into a butterfly. You already know that the Caterpillar will be a butterfly, but there is no, there is no, um, Caterpillarness that you have to strip away you just have to wait for the process to unfold. And that’s how, um, that’s, that might be a good segue to bring it back to Bitcoin because that was the trigger for me that I, I realized, um, that Bitcoin in essence is an idea and it’s currently embedded in the Bitcoin network. And, the basic idea of it is that it’s, it’s unstoppable and it’s unkillable. I mean that’s, Satoshi spoke about this, plenty of times that the basic problem of digital currencies was always that you were able to kill them, that you were able to stop them. And, um, I am obviously using biological language now that you know, you, you kill something and um, if something is really decentralized, like that’s the technical language and then it’s very, very hard to kill.

Gigi:                                       00:09:47               And that’s basically the main idea of Bitcoin that you build a system that um, let me try to, let me try to put this right. So I think I believe that Bitcoin is an idea first and foremost and I believe that it is the right idea. Like it, it got the main points, right? And so what is this idea? I think that economically speaking, the idea was to build a system which produces absolute scarcity and it does not discriminate. So it’s, it’s completely open and it’s also neutral and does as fair as it can be. And most importantly that it also cannot be undermined. It can’t be changed. And if you want to translate this to technical terms, what Satoshi obviously did by building a system, like technically speaking, the idea was to build a system which, which has no head and thus is unstoppable.

Gigi:                                       00:10:39               It just can’t be stopped because there is no single head to, to cut off. And I believe that in a way Bitcoin does it in the same way how life on earth does it because the idea is embedded in the entity itself. It’s just like biology. That’s it. With DNA, you know, like the, the, the code of life is embedded in every single living cell. And in a similar way the, the code of Bitcoin and also the consensus code. like if I, if I say idea, think of idea of in quotes, obviously the idea of Bitcoin itself is embedded in the code. So the idea is kind of equal to the code and also the idea is equal to the consensus rules because this is the most important part of the network in a way. I mean it’s debatable what is the most important part of mankind?

Gigi:                                       00:11:28               But this is a very important part and one of the neat side effects of the system is that it is pure information. And that was part of my insight that, like the idea of Bitcoin is so powerful, it will be able to transcend everything. And I feel like this loops back also to, what max Hillebrand and the others were saying, about the, you can’t really own Bitcoin stuff because everything is pure information. You can’t really own information. But what I think is really, really neat and I think it’s just so hilarious that if you, if you get down to it metaphysically you, you really can’t, don’t be kind. You just own a number. I think that’s true. I mean, and you can debate what, what is, what is owning stuff and blah, blah blah. But in essence, you know, a number that no one else knows.

Gigi:                                       00:12:23               And that’s how you quote unquote owned Bitcoin. So in essence, you can’t really possess Bitcoin. But what’s obvious to me is that people can be possessed by Bitcoin because it’s such a, such a powerful idea that, you, I mean, I’m the prime example of one of the prime examples. I’m sure there, there are people that are way more obsessed, than I am, but I am quite obsessed with Bitcoin. I’m having a hard time thinking of something else. And so it’s, it’s funny how you can’t really process Bitcoin, But Bitcoin can possess You, if that makes sense.

Dustin (Host):                      00:12:57               Absolutely. I mean, ideas are any successful ideas like a virus, right? It propagates and spreads and then, you know, continues to find new hosts and continues along and if it’s, if it’s an unsuccessful idea, just kind of dies, in the, in the original host.

Gigi:                                       00:13:15               Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I think that as I said, like, because first and foremost is an idea and I think it’s, I think it’s, um, it’s the most powerful idea that we have right now in a way. And that’s how, how I related to religions because religions are very powerful, so powerful ideas as well. And in a way, Bitcoin is such a powerful idea. It, it can be used as the base Axiom for society in a way. Like it’s a source of truth. You know, it’s this beacon of truth that you can’t, you can’t really argue with it. If you believe in the physics that we know, you can’t really argue with Bitcoin because to change or to say what is embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain is not true, is more or less not believing in the current physics that we know. It’s, it’s just the way the whole system is set up, but also it’s not.

Gigi:                                       00:14:12               And, and that’s where I triggered a lot of people. I think you kind of have to believe in Bitcoin as well because it’s not, it’s not a provable mathematical construct. It’s not…I can’t prove to you that Bitcoin is secure, for example, and I can’t prove to you that what is in the blockchain is actually the truth. And it’s actually what happened. It’s probabilistically true and it’s a messy system just like biology is, it’s very unlikely that it’s untrue. You know? That’s just how the whole system works. And I think all those kind of things that… That it possesses you and it’s such a grand idea that sprouts…yeah, from brain to brain in a way also, it’s, it has just so many parallels to religions. And I didn’t even talk about the obvious parallels that we have a created a god that disappeared and we have a white paper, which is scripture and we have rituals, which is proof of keys and running a node and stacking sats.

Gigi:                                       00:15:17               And we have a religious fanatics and we have, you know, freedom fighters that are willing to die for the idea, stuff like that. So just on a metaphysical, philosophical level, I think it is powerful enough to become its own religion. And I’m saying this, all of this with a grain of salt, but I think that in the next 10 years, the amount of people that will be religious about Bitcoin or that, that are religious about Bitcoin will simply rise. And then it depends on your definition of a religion. I mean, obviously Christianity and Judaism andthe, the big religions that we know, the world religions ARE religions, but you also have Scientology and you also have the Jedi Knights, you know, so it kinda depends on where you want to draw the line. What is a religion for you and whatnot?

Dustin (Host):                    00:16:11               Well actually I just a if you check your Twitter DMS, I just sent you a picture…so I was, I made up this graphic that I was trying to make and I have been, I got some work to do on the hats because the embroidery wasn’t exactly how I liked it from the printer, but that was one of the ones that they’d sent. AndI agree 100%, in this concept of, it being a religion. well actually here I just realized we haven’t even, kind of really started the show yet here. So let me do the introduction here real quick and then we can jump into it here.

Dustin (Host):                    00:16:51               Id like towelcome Gigi, a coder, author, creative thinker and creator of 21lessons.com in bitcoin-resources.com. Gigi, welcome back to the show.

Gigi:                                     00:17:01               Hey Dustin, nice to be here.

Dustin (Host):                    00:17:04               And before we get into anything, I heard that you are actually going to be having a baby soon, so congratulations.

Gigi:                                     00:17:10               Oh, thanks. Yeah, that’s exciting times.

Dustin (Host):                    00:17:14               And we were for those that are listening, we kind of had a kind of an extensive conversation before we started here, but, you were talking about the experience that you had and we’ll get into that in just a second. But, I think that once, once your child comes into this world, you’re going to have kind of a, another, a similar experience in a way that, that it’s, it’s almost indescribable. Once you have a child that just kind of how that, you cant have the words like, “I love this child” and everything like that, but it’s, it’s a very… To me it was a very weird experience to say the least. because at first I was a bit numb because I didn’t know how to, how to explain it. And then once I started, it’s very similar to what you were saying, how your experience was, you kind of didn’t have the words. And then over time you were able to kind of codify that experience, those feelings into words.

Gigi:                                      00:18:19               I think it’s fitting also because everyone who had a child is saying in a way the same thing. And if you didn’t have a child yet, then you just have to believe that it’s, yeah, exactly the thing that everyone is talking about. But you have no idea what everyone is talking about. And like I guess in a couple of months I will look back and I will be, ah, okay. That’s what everyone talked about.

Dustin (Host):                    00:18:39               Yeah. No, it’s, it’s, I’m really excited and happy for you because it is, it’s just a very, very cool experience. And it’s unlike, you know, spousal love and things like that. It’s, it’s very primal and which I think is, you know, not that spousal love is not as well, but it’s different. There’s different types of, of loves and depths and meanings, meanings of that. But, you know, on a recent episode of the Bitcoin echo chamber, you talked about this kind of, for lack of a better terms, kind of this epiphany or religious experience that you had at the, it was the Honeybadger conference, correct?

Gigi:                                     00:19:18               Yes, exactly. And I… Take everything I say about the religious stuff with a huge grain of salt because, first of all, I’m not religious and, but second of all, I kind of understand, well I’m, I’m even having a hard time saying now that I’m not religious, but I, I don’t want to trigger all the atheists and I also don’t want to trigger all the religious people, but,something happened to me in Riga and I had a… I, it feels to me like again, I gained a deeper level of understanding in regards to Bitcoin, but also in regards to other things. And I can only describe it as a religious experience. It was really weird. and yeah, I can’t really say what triggered it, but what happened to me actually was that I was so excited that I, like it felt to me like I had one epiphany after the other and my brain just refused to go to sleep. So I was awake for at least four nights and they actually had had to put me to sleep in the hospital because my brain just would refuse to shut down. So yeah, that was a very weird experience.

Dustin (Host):                    00:20:29               So could you, you know, and that well, I would say that you… You’re saying that you’re not religious and you…you just kind of walk that back a bit becauseI was going to say that you don’t have any experiences like this. Having a, an obsession with Bitcoin as you do, as you describe it, is very much the same sort of experience that people have in traditional religions. And I think that a lot of people, because in my interview with we can kind of maybe move back to that, that experience that you had or not maybe, but I want to move back to that, to describe it. But in my interview with, with Nick Carter, he kind of, or I shouldn’t say kind of, he pushed back against the idea of even framing Bitcoin using religious language.

Dustin (Host):                    00:21:17               So, you know, you and I agree that it (Bitcoin) not only exhibits the igns of a religion, it’s binding, common belief, it has rituals, it has holidays. Which I wrote about in an article I’ll link to, but it, I think it’s already achieved that status of a religion or at very least a cult, which is kind of the preamble to a religion. So why do you think that there is resistance to this idea within Bitcoiner circles? Do you think it’s that there is that they perhaps haven’t come to this realization yet that they’re just looking at it in purely economic terms? That I’m just being a tool.

Gigi:                                       00:21:54               Partly maybe. I think, you know, Nick Carter is an insanely smart guy and I am sure he has his reasons to say that. And I’m not really, I’m not necessarily disagreeing with him because I think a religion has, it’s such a loaded term and it has so much baggage. We don’t necessarily necessarily want to associate, Bitcoin with religion and walk around and say like, Hey, join this religion. It’s so cool. so I think it will just, I think it would be just bad marketing in a way. And I think also, we have to be careful how to describe Bitcoin and how to pitch Bitcoin to no-Coiners and stuff like that. and mind you, when I talk to regular people about Bitcoin, I’m not using religious language. I’m not even using biology, biological language. All of that is very far out there.

Gigi:                                       00:22:49               And um, I’m currently, yeah, dancing on, on the edge of my understanding of what this thing is. And I think that religion fits, and for me it’s simply what is the right level of analysis and you can do this for all kinds of things. I mean you can also ask yourself what is the right level of analysis for humans? Because you can go downwards and you can say that we are just our parts like our constituents and you can say that we’re just organs in a meat bag, you know, and we can also say that we are like our microbiome for example. There are so many organisms living in us and on us. Without those organisms we wouldn’t be able to function. You could also say that we are just ourselves and we could also say that we’re just our DNA.

Gigi:                                       00:23:38               You know? And you can, I just went downwards with the level of analysis but you can also go up and you can say we are our family and we are our friends because you are basically the combination of the five people closest to you. And you can also say that we organize ourselves in groups and clients and companies and other organized groups. And you know, you can have in a level of analysis, which is even bigger than that and it can few people, it’s just tiny dots on a map and just talk about very large organizations or nation States or whole populations of continents and all of that is kind of useful. So the question to me is what is the right level of analysis in Bitcoin? And you can say it’s just serious in once. And you can also say it’s just cold. And you can also say it’s just software, it’s just technology.

Gigi:                                       00:24:25               All of that is kind of true. But you can go further. And I’m, I made all these steps in a way because you can also say it’s FinTech, you know, and we have a lot of FinTech people that are stuck in this FinTech circle. And you can say it’s just finance, it’s financial instrument and you can use it to send value around, but it’s nothing more. I think beautyon (Twitter Handle) has this viewpoint pretty much down and you, but you can go a step further and say it’s, it’s money and you can go a step even further and say it’s sound money. It’s the soundest money we ever had. So it’s a monetary revolution. But you can also say that it’s a social movement and it’s a revolution and it’s, it’s similar to other big social movements. And I compared it to the gay pride movement, for example.

Gigi:                                       00:25:09               Um, I think there are some comparisons there as well because we have closet with kindness, you know, and we had closet gay people and we still have classic gay people in the world. But the next step for me would be that it’s, it’s an infectious idea. It’s like a, it can be used as an Axiom to view the world. And that’s where religion comes in. And I think the most powerful, like a lot of people say that it’s a meme. And to me the most powerful memes in the world are religions. And I think that in, in on the level of analysis level, Bitcoin is such a grand, grandiose, huge ingenious idea and it’s so infectious that in a couple of years it would make sense to talk about Bitcoin as a religion. And I think religious language really works just like biology, biological language and a biological level of analysis really works

Dustin (Host):                    00:26:02               To kind of delve deeper into this. I mean I agree that it isn’t probably good marketing for a percentage of the population, but I’m not an actually an atheist in the least. So I have different issues with that term. Cause Bitcoin wouldn’t be what I described as my faith. But I do recognize that it is exhibiting the signs. I think it’s important to have these discussions because we can’t pretend it’s not becoming something that it’s not. And I think that You say that it’s a loaded term because, well, the term religion, you know, to look at what it means. The Max Lynn Stackhouse who was a writer and a, I believe a preacher in the United church of Christ, if I, if I remember correctly, he defined religion as a “comprehensive worldview or metaphysical moral vision that is accepted as binding because it is held to be in itself basically true and just, even if all of its dimensions of it cannot be fully confirmed or refuted” and I think that that would, that would fit bitcoin because the term religion doesn’t have to necessarily mean that you go to certain places on certain days that you have certain opinions of other people. Although you know, even just using the term no coiner or shit coiner is a way of, of identifying the other outside of your own, out of your own belief system. in Sanskrit, the word Dharma, which is kind of often associated with the word religion, although that’s, that’s not a hundred percent accurate. It also has the meaning of law and Hebrew.

Dustin (Host):                    00:27:41               They don’t have a concept of religion within kind of Judaism, in the same way that they do in our Western sense. But a central tenant of, I think it’s pronounced, Halakah, is translated as law, which is, you know, the law in Judaism is central part of their belief system. While it’s not necessarily the same thing I think that we are talking about in Bitcoin, I think it is very parallel to what we’re talking about where it’s almost a term of law as a matter of faith. Because you see within Bitcoin you have, we talked about the holidays and the rituals like running your own full node as your way to like verify the objective truth within that religion where you have, you know, specific holidays. We have, you know, Bitcoin pizza day.

Dustin (Host):                    00:28:33               we even have certain days, although I don’t think it’s really as big as the other ones where we kind of talk about the, Hal FInney tweet or anything like that where the fork of Bitcoin was kind of trying to be celebrated as a day. Although I didn’t think it took off as much as the others. But it’s, I think there’s a lot of parallels between there and I don’t think that we can ignore that.

Gigi:                                       00:28:57               Yeah, I think so too. And there are more and more days and rituals coming. I mean, we have proof of keys for example, which kind of is, is a ritual and the holiday as well. Um, like it’s one day of the year where everyone, proves that they have ownership of their keys and just move stuff from the exchanges. And we have new rituals popping up all the time. I mean, stacking sats that’s in a way is also a ritual. And, uh, for awhile wasabi Wednesday was really big, like every Wednesday just provide liquidity to wasabi. And, I think it’s very fitting, like you say, and I am what was part of my insight…and I’m still, I’m still trying to figure out what happened and what, what I should really believe and what is the best vocabulary.

Gigi:                                       00:29:50               well I’m sorry to, to butt in, but, I mean you kind of described the, I just kinda want to make sure that we kind of walk it all the way through of what happened. So you, you were at the conference and like you said, you had this experience and you were up for four days because you just, your mind wouldn’t shut off. So what was kind of the, the Genesis of those days as you were. trying to figure this out. What was happening kind of day by day. You, you talked about that you were writing down, basically kind of drew out and your experience was kind of codafied in these drawings that you are doing on a, I don’t know if it was paper napkins, but it was kind of.

Gigi:                                       00:30:31               just books with me.

Dustin (Host):                    00:30:32               Oh, okay. Yeah. If you could kind of describe the, the kind of, the process over those days of how you were, up until this point, how that, that experience kind of revealed itself.

Gigi:                                       00:30:44               Um, yeah, that’s a really good question. I don’t, I’m not sure if I have good answers. I, I basically, I didn’t sleep too much in the first night because I was just out, uh, out and about with, with everyone and I didn’t want to miss the conference, so I got up early again. So I slept for maybe three and a half, four hours, something like that. And in the second night, I, uh, I actually wanted to do the very responsible thing and I, I got home at midnight and I wanted to sleep, but for some reason I was just, my mind was very awake and I couldn’t put myself to sleep. And so I basically lay in bed for the whole night and I didn’t really sleep. Maybe I had some micro sleeps, I don’t know. But, uh, I don’t know how this works, but I had a couple of insights and, I wrote them down, whenever I had them.

Gigi:                                       00:31:38               So, um, I kind of have proof that I didn’t really sleep and the same thing happened to me the next night and then things got really out of hand. I was all over the place. I think it was basically because I didn’t sleep. And I think your brain shifts in a very different mode if it’s very sleep deprived. And I basically was more and more behaving like an insane person. And I was just very unorganized and very all over the place and some people that were with me, they obviously noticed that. And I flew back from, from Riga and I, I met one of my best friends and I crashed on his couch and wanted to go home after that. But I actually had to crash on his, on his couch for two nights because I still couldn’t really sleep. And I still had these kind of weird insights/epiphanies and I can’t really put it into words yet, but I basically, my main insight was… I send you a picture, right? And this picture is like a circle, which consists of multiple circles on the outside. So, maybe you can…

Dustin (Host):                    00:32:52               you sent that to me and I’ll, and if anybody goes to the show notes, which would be, didyouknowcrypto.com/ep57, five seven, I’ll have those pictures up there for anybody, but sorry to butt in there.

Gigi:                                       00:33:04               Yeah, no, no, no, that’s, that’s perfect. Just if you look at this picture, I view Bitcoin and understanding Bitcoin as this picture basically. And you can end up in those small circles and you can view bitcoin as, just the idea, you know, and then you might be very interested in the white paper and understanding the white paper.

Gigi:                                       00:33:27               The next circle would be, you can view bitcoin as justcode, you know, and if you’re a programmer, you might get stuck in this circle and you can move on to the next circle and you can understand it as technology and just, as just a software that you run. And, some people I think are stuck in that circle as well. And the next one would be like between the technology and finance is the FinTech circle. There’s some people stuck in there as well. There’s some people just stuck in the, in the final circle and you, you go from technology to FinTech to tech, sorry, you’ll go from technology to FinTech to finance, from finance to finance and monetary phenomena to monetary phenomena, monetary revolution, sound money. And there are some people that really try to analyze Bitcoin as its own thing.

Gigi:                                       00:34:18               So I think understanding Bitcoin as, as a biological organism or as something that has gravity like the Bitcoin explainers, they are in their own circle as well. And , the next steps, like the next steps of understanding Bitcoin are the next circles where you could end up with. That’s, that’s how I pictured it in my mind. You know, like I’m just, I’m just trying to make sense what was in my mind those couple of days. And the next couple of steps are, are kind of huge steps to, uh, to viewing it as something that is a mind virus and a meme. And then you’re back at the idea stage again. So it, in a way, what I wrote on the destroying the first, the first time it popped into my head was like, the rabbit hole is circular and it’s possible to go like one way around it if you’re not stuck in one of those smaller circles.

Gigi:                                       00:35:07               And then the whole idea of Bitcoin is circular. And, I think what triggered my, this understanding that I had. And, um, what also triggered this image was when I talked to Hasmit Cook, he has a very, he has a very deep understanding of, of Bitcoin. And I’ve, I view him as the Bitcoin Pope because, he has such an aura to him and he uses religious language all the time and he does it in a like half jokingly way, but he’s also kind of serious about it. Like typing in Bitcoin, like you, you have to stack sets every day and you have to dollar cost average every day and there is just no way, like selling is a sin and stuff like that. And talking to him. I kinda realized that the last step is, elevating Bitcoin from a cult status where we obviously are, I mean maximalism is a cult and we have dietary restrictions where most maximalists or many maximalists just eat meat and drink water in ta way.

Gigi:                                       00:36:13               And uh, as you said, we have a lot of specialized language to separate us from them and, uh, you have the toxic maximalists and you have no-coiners and pre-coiners and shitcoiners and stuff like that. And I think that the next step from, from the cult is going in the religious direction. And,as I said before, I think religions are the biggest memes in the world. Like they are the biggest, most important and most powerful mind viruses. And I think Bitcoin in a similar way is a mind virus. But if you, if you go this step, you’re basically back at the idea level. And my insight was that again, um, Bitcoin is an idea first and foremost. And I am, I’m pretty convinced that the idea is right. And I think we can also make parallels to religions in that way because, that there are some ideas in the, in this world, like there are some things where the basic idea is right,

Gigi:                                       00:37:12               For example, the sovereignty of the individual, I think the West got this right. And also in the legal system, the presumption of innocence, I think, I think again, the West that the legal system in the West got this right. If you want to use religious language, you could say that the divinity of every soul, you know, like Christianity got this right, that every person has a divine soul. It has a divine part. And I’m, I just know the German saying like the Buddha is mentioned is “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar.” like, you, no matter what someone did, he still has this divine part in him. So you have to treat them with respect, even if they are a mass murderer. And I think Bitcoin got the basic idea right as well. And the basic idea is that you have absolute scarcity. So no one can produce more of it. Absolute openness so everyone can participate. Absolute transparency so everyone can validate the design and the supply as well. And it’s also, I would say absolutely set in stone so you cant change the soul, the essence of Bitcoin and all of that is very religious to me in the, in, in the way that there are obvious parallels to the greatest ideas of the world. I don’t, what do you say?

Dustin (Host):                    00:38:40               So this kind of harkens back a bit to the previous interview that we did where you were talking about Bitcoin as an organism because, I think that there’s a lot of parallels between organisms and religions. In Catholicism, the church itself is referred to as the body of Christ. And evolutionary biologists have, described religion as an evolutionary organism. It stays alive through the practices of its adherence. It survives and multiplies or dies of the, you know, the intake is not enough to sustain it. And I think that this idea of the emergence of Bitcoin as a religion is a natural outgrowth of where you talk about Bitcoin as an organism where it pays people to keep it, keep it alive or this is the natural outgrowth of it where it is creating faith or a religion, however you want to describe it, as a better meme for it to survive than just mere monetary incentive.

Gigi:                                       00:39:51               Yeah. And where I think you hit the, point on their head, like you hit the nail on the head there because I believe that obviously Bitcoin is so powerful because of monetary incentives, like obviously, and all the economists talk about that. And I think, you know, Saifdean Ammous could talk about that for 10 hours, right? Why Bitcoin works and why it’s so powerful and why it captures people’s minds and imagination and so on and so forth. But I believe that we have a certain subset of people, even if Bitcoin, even if we would have a catastrophic failure and it would go to zero, even, even though I think it’s pretty much impossible, but even if it would have that, they would not give up this idea. You know? That’s, and that’s what I realized in a way, it’s way more powerful than I thought because even if it would even let, let’s say we, we break the cryptography, let’s say that everyone can buy a quantum computer, then we break the cryptography and let’s say we, we would have to start from scratch, so to speak, and do it in a very messy way.

Gigi:                                       00:40:53               I think there would be enough people to just rebuild something new out of the ashes. And, um, that’s like from, from an economic viewpoint that’s kind of weird and almost irrational or, uh, with pure economic thinking. I’m not sure if you can explain that.

Dustin (Host):                    00:41:18               No, I don’t think that you can, and this has been something I’ve been trying to work on for a while. I’ve been so at first I was trying to figure out… It’s part of this, of figuring out what is Bitcoin. And it’s funny because the longer that I spend in Bitcoin the more often that I think I know what it is, the more often I realize I don’t know what it is. And I was trying to figure out, you know, that, is there. At first I was going, okay what are the first principles of Bitcoin? But that was a bad term because first principles have a very specific definitions. I think maybe foundational principles of it. Um, and this is still a very rough draft in my mind, and a little bit on, on paper, so to speak, of how I’ve tried to work my way through it and I’ll probably come to a lot different or different conclusions perhaps by the time that I’m done with it.

Dustin (Host):                    00:42:20               But so, you know, looking at it as central….a decentral, it’s not central, it’s decentralization and money I think are subsets of sub principles of the main principle of Bitcoin, which you already talked about, that sovereignty as a Western concept was something that we got right, as the individual. And that the, that sovereignty as a principle, as a mind virus in itself is something that creates different tools to achieve its, its end. And Bitcoin is one of these tools and probably one of the greatest tools that it has created. And that Bitcoin’s sole goal as far as for its users or I should say the…its effect is individual sovereignty and that in that way it kind of almost preceded Bitcoin and that to achieve that goal in Bitcoin it needed some, it needed a subset of principles, I would say that, money would be one of those, principles and uses.

Dustin (Host):                    00:43:30               Although that’s not, obviously the only aspect of Bitcoin and decentralization was necessary for it to be, because it was centralized. It would not be able to achieve sovereignty. So it’s been something I’ve been trying to kick around in my head because I think it’s important and this also falls into the religious aspect of it as well. I think that it’s important that we have kind of a agreed upon set of, of principles of what, what makes, of what Bitcoin is. It’s because in that way it’s something that can be defended versus a just mere economic utility as a means and onto itself. Whereas these, these principles, these, tenants of, of a religion, are the religious aspect of it. It is an outgrowth of Bitcoin and of this principle of sovereignty to be able to secure it, to kind of bind people all together in a common goal so that when there’s attacks from outside or that there’s moves from inside, too make it too, more wishy washy, to make it, to try to water it down from the inside that there’s these, very, very energetic and very strong reactions to the contrary to stop that from happening.

Gigi:                                       00:45:01               Yeah. I think I have a couple of things to say about that because I think, with moral frameworks and also with religious texts, I think it always was behavior first and then rules second. And with Bitcoin it’s, it’s the same thing in a way. What I mean by that is take the 10 commandments for example. Uh, people obviously behaved in a certain way before the 10 commandments were a thing. And I think people just observed how good families, good societies, school people behaved and they wrote the rules after the fact. You know what I mean? It’s, it’s just you observe what works and then you write it down. And I think trying to do the same thing, it’s, it’s obviously very messy with humans. I mean, we now have the code of the human rights and other things and we have some certain moral standards and we have the golden rule and we have stuff like that, but still it’s very massive.

Gigi:                                       00:45:54               What’s the right thing to do and whatnot. It’s, it’s a very messy concept. And, describing that in setting up rules for behavioral system in a way is uh, I would say almost impossible. It’s really hard to do. And then there’s in the similar vein in, in Bitcoin we, we kind of have this like there is no specification. You know, the Bitcoin network embodies the spirit of Bitcoin to use religious language in a way. And I think describing it and trying to do a 10 commandments of Bitcoin in the specification and in ‘What is Bitcoin?” sense, it just doesn’t work and it can never work because as you said, Bitcoin is a complete, completely decentralized system. So there is no authority that could say, okay, and this is now the Bitcoin system. And that’s, that’s also a lot of people have hangups with, understanding that that’s why a lot of people focus on the white paper for example.

Gigi:                                       00:46:52               But the white, the white paper doesn’t matter. And that’s also why I think that Bitcoin, again, first and foremost, it’s an idea and whatever currently embodies this idea best is Bitcoin. And currently that’s the Bitcoin network and the Bitcoin core client and the stuff that everyone uses and the stuff that, is used as a host for this idea. If a new better other client would be written and it would do what Bitcoin does in a more efficient, more profitable, by the way. Or even if for example, Bitcoin transcends, the internet and we would have something else than the internet, which is better and faster and more salient than Bitcoin obviously would use that. And I think it wouldn’t change the soul of Bitcoin. It wouldn’t change the essence. It would just use another, like the idea itself would use another host at, that’s how I see it. And it’s, it’s all of it is very messy. Both messiness is inherent in decentralization and that’s also why I think that viewing it as a form of life is so very helpful because life itself is very messy as well because life itself is decentralized. I don’t know, I hope everything I say kind of makes sense.

Dustin (Host):                    00:48:09               No, no, it does. So my, like I said, it’s a very, it was a very rough concept that I was, I was moving around and it’s not, it was, it was not meant to be some sort of 10 commandments in a way where it was literally set in stone. Right. As, as in the way that it, when Moses wrote him on the tablets as this is, you know, for time and Memorial and it was solidified. That’s kind of, I’m almost using BSV language in a way. Right, and it, it was more of a… I don’t know, like it’s very hard for me to describe as well because I haven’t been able to quite figure it out as, as a way of describing, because once Bitcoin was was released, its, an idea and it is a idea that once it was released started to evolve in and of itself and to change to make itself more resilient to increase its survival and will continue to change over time.

Dustin (Host):                    00:49:15               So these certain principles that, that I would have now that I kind of mentioned earlier may end up, you know, evolving as well over time in these kind of, tenants of the, of the religion that it’s creating around itself, for survival because at the end of the day, which, sorry, I hate using that term, the, the organism is going to want to preference survival, over over anything else. And that’s really what any organism does through reproduction, through a sexual selection of traits and, any other thing that it does, humans did that with… We, with our increasing, brain capacity, we had to ingest more and more nutrients and better quality nutrients and, have, our children were actually born earlier than we are actually ready to come out,, just because of our brain size. But that was the trait that led to the survival of the human species. And I think that Bitcoin operates in that way too a point as well where it, it is increasing its collective intelligence.

Dustin (Host):                    00:50:34               As kind of this, it’s hard to describe it because we kinda did that in the last episode of trying to describe what kind of organism it is. Right. It, we’re, it’s almost a collective intelligence like a or swarm intelligence. Kind of like a bunch of birds where it’s individuals running nodes and operating on the network who are providing their own collective intelligence and kind of that whole swarm is moving this way and that as it, as it reacts to different things. And we see that as it reacts to, you know, throughout its history, you know, price dumps, pumps, more individuals, the public becoming more aware of it. The proliferation of, of these just shit coins, in random projects out there, uh, especially in 2017 when we saw that where Bitcoin has shifted and has become and bitcoiners have become more, I would say more dogmatic and, and much more kind of line in the sand where earlier on while the, you know, a lot of people weren’t fans of litecoin, doge coin, it was kind of a joke almost in a way, CoinYe

Dustin (Host):                    00:51:44               All these different coins that had come out and we’re in 2017, it was, started to become seen as more of an existential threat of taking away the momentum of Bitcoin where the, where the dogmatism of individuals and kind of calling out these projects as being kind of bunk, seem to kind of rise out of it. Where now you see within Bitcoiners the more, and we could say it’s for worse or whatever. It’s kind of individual choice of how you want to describe it. But, the, the kind of the, the attack dogs andwhite blood cell count, folks have kind of started to rise more to the top as, as these projects have come out to threaten the momentum of this, of this organism.

Gigi:                                       00:52:33               Yeah. And I think it all loops back to again as I said, first and foremost that bitcoin is an idea. And I think the idea is to separate money from state. I mean there are a bunch of ideas embedded in Bitcoin, but as you said, the immune response to all the, all the shit coins and everything that was going on, all the ICO’s in 2017, it was a very strong immune response. And that’s also where, I would say as you also said, the, a lot of the dogmatism and a lot of the toxic maximalism was born by the… I think it wasn’t necessarily response. And you can view it as, you know, on the, on the level of analysis of people. People stepped in and did what is in their self interest because obviously everybody kind of wants Bitcoin to pump, but it’s also in their interest of fulfilling this idea of separating money and state.

Gigi:                                       00:53:23               And this again loops back kind of a self interest if you, if you think that, um, Keynesianism is just insane and fractional reserve banking and all of that is insane and you want to return to a sound money standards so that, uh, a lot of the ills of the world are fixed, then you have to kind of rise up and speak up and tell every shitcoiner that he’s just, yeah, he’s in the, he’s wrong on this, you know, we’ve won, we have one chance to fix money to fix money and Bitcoin is it. And I think a lot of people came to this realization and started to speak up, but, , as you obviously said as well…and I think the level of analysis of Bitcoin as a, as a living organism works so insanely well because you can flip the perspective and you can view, it from the Bitcoin point of view.

Gigi:                                       00:54:18               And if you view Bitcoin as a living entity as, as its own thing, it obviously pays the maximalists to speak up for it then to protect it. And you have the, as you said, the white blood cells that kick in and yeah, trigger this immune response. And I think it, it works like all this biological language works so insanely well because there is a close line between a strong immune response, like it’s a thin line between a strong immune response and then auto immune disease. And I think what we saw in 2018, after the fallout of 2017, we had a lot of, a lot of infighting and a lot of, battles were fought where, I’m not even sure if it was a, an immune response or an autoimmune disease because the white blood cells, they can go haywire and attack the organism itself as well.

Dustin (Host):                    00:55:15               Well to kind of go back a bit in to your, to your realization or your experience, and you were talking about the different circles of kind of, I guess you could, would it be better, maybe described them as the different kind of circles of understanding of Bitcoin?

Gigi:                                       00:55:36               Yeah, maybe. Yeah.

Dustin (Host):                    00:55:37               Did you, I mean, I, think that it’s quite telling that you did this, in a circle is that there’s not really necessarily a hierarchy of, of understanding, but that maybe I might be describing this incorrectly, but maybe the, that, these different circles of understanding that Bitcoiners have that if you work your way through and you have all these and you’ve come to the realizations within each circle, that that’s how you’ll get a, not a full understanding of it, buta coming to a more, I guess it to go back to religious terms almost in a way of enlightenment in the Buddhist sense where it’s, something that a lot of, or maybe you don’t even,, it’s a not an end goal perhaps, but a goal that, or… That’s not an end t’s not an end that you achieve and then you’re done. But that you’re constantly working your way through these circles constantly to gain more and more understanding of it.

Gigi:                                       00:56:48               Exactly. I think it felt to me, and, and again, I take everything I say with a huge grain of salt. I, mean I kind of feel comfortable talking about it because, I just don’t give a fuck to be honest. Like…

Dustin (Host):                    00:57:06               Well, that in itself when we talk about price discovery in Bitcoin. Right. But I think that this is, a elements of understanding discovery or, of knowledge discovery within Bitcoin where, you know, like you said, it’s, it’s very rough and you still haven’t quite figured it out yet, but it’s a matter of, a price discovery of understanding within bitcoin as we’re working our way through these concepts.

Gigi:                                       00:57:36               Yeah. Uh, I think, since since you mentioned the circles a couple of time, I think just be kind of generally circular and I think, uh, as Hasmit Cook has said that beautifully that Bitcoin is nature. Like it’s at, the end of the day, it’s rooted in energy. And so it is like a force of the universe. It is nature itself and nature, obviously circular. You have circular rhythms and with Bitcoin as well, and you have circular adoption cycles, you have circular price discovery, which, which are the bubbles. But you have a lot of other circular phenomenon. For example, the whole security mechanism in Bitcoin is circular. like mining becomes profitable, more miners start to mine again, security goes up, then the worth of the token goes up. And so we begin again. So it becomes more profitable and so on.

Gigi:                                       00:58:27               And that there are there, like there are dozens of these kinds of circular phenomenon kind of. And I intend to write about it as soon as I can, but I have so many other things to do before that that it will probably take half a year before I can really articulate what I mean and, do all the drawings properly and just articulate everything properly. So I’m, I’m basically using, using this podcast here to think out loud and trying to,work on my articulation. But, the levels of understanding, I think it’s not a hierarchy. And I also, I also think it’s impossible to understand Bitcoin completely. I believe that, like I started to believe that already one and a half years ago or so. I, it dawned on me that understanding that kind of completely, it’s just not possible. It’s just, it’s too all encompassing.

Gigi:                                       00:59:26               And you would have to understand economics completely. You have, we would have to understand computer science completely and cryptography completely and game theory and so many other things. And it’s also what I am, I believe that Bitcoin is also its own thing. Like it’s a combination of all those disciplines, but it’s also, it’s an, it’s a new alien technology that everyone is trying to understand it. And since it’s so new, I don’t think that you can have a full understanding. And what do you, what do you said? That’s exactly how it felt to me. Like in the Buddhist way of things. I felt like I achieved enlightenment and that’s , oh my, I hate myself for saying that, but I, have no other language to use. And in a way I just realized that it doesn’t fucking matter. Like Bitcoin already won and I achieved full Bitcoin Zen.

Gigi:                                       01:00:16               I just, you know, I realized that it doesn’t matter what we do, it doesn’t matter what I do, it doesn’t matter what anyone does. It kind of already won. And I believe that we are 50% there in speaking in time terms. I think it will just take another 10 years and Bitcoin is so economically powerful and such a powerful idea and it’s so technical powerful and has such neat side effects that everything will work itself out in the next 10 years or so. And if it’s 20 years, I don’t care. Like it’s the same order of magnitude. It won’t take a hundred years, it will take 10 more years. I always repeat that in the next nine years we will have three halvings, we only had two yet. Like Bitcoin is still so small. It’s so, so, so small. If anyone is listening to that and it’s like 2019 2020 you’re still so early, you have no idea.

Gigi:                                       01:01:08               And it’s, it’s just a metamorphous and that’s also what I realized that it’s an unstoppable force. It’s an unstoppable idea and it’s a force of nature. And we’re now at the stage where I think it can’t be stopped anymore. I tried really hard to work through this, how to stop Bitcoin and I wrote a very lengthy article on it and then I deleted everything and I just said, you don’t kill Bitcoin. So the article was called how to kill Bitcoin and the content of the article is just, you don’t, and I think that to come back to what it’s said, that the very, very beginning, it’s like a process. It’s like an natural process. It’s just like a Caterpillar transforms into a butterfly. We’re not at the butterfly stage yet, but we are like halfway in in the Caterpillar stage and we have our nice cocoon and just people who are working on Bitcoin, people are quitting their jobs to work on Bitcoin for free. we have a lot of companies that hire core developers. We have a lot of companies that really believe in this idea. The companies are all over the world. The people are all over the world. I don’t think it can be stopped. And I think that the governments and the current powers that be are way too comfortable and too much like they’re asleep basically. And Bitcoin will, yeah, it will conquer this world by storm.

Dustin (Host):                    01:02:29               Well, I think you talked about the fact that you can, you won’t ever understand Bitcoin. I think that this is a parallel to the Christian concept of the imitation of Christ, right? where you are, you modeled your life after the imitation of Christ, which is, you know, got an earth where you, while recognizing that you can’t achieve it, the point of doing so is to continually work yourself towards, a better, perfect understanding, right? So in, in the understanding of Bitcoin, whereas you probably won’t ever achieve that goal of totally understanding it as it continues to evolve in ways that we don’t yet realize or totally grasp, the constant working your way through those circles is a way of achieving a better, a better knowledge of it. And thus having a better understanding of it to, to move forward.

Dustin (Host):                    01:03:40               But with, you know, to go back to the discussion of religion where, so you talked about in the echo chamber (Bitcoin Echo Chamber Podcast), how within one to two years you said that you see it as kind of, emerging into more mainstream, whether it’s mainstream, public or just mainstream Bitcoiners as that.. Where do you see it, how it exists today, and then how do you see it kind of going forward in the future in whatever, you know, whether you want to go one or two years or 10 years or a hundred years.

Gigi:                                       01:04:16               Um, I think obviously currently Bitcoin has cult status. Like all the maximalists are part of the cult and everyone is saying it tongue in cheek, but it’s obviously true. I mean, again, we have carnivore dinners, we have, people that are on a steak only diet. We have, people that are not willing to speak the names of other shitcoins, you know, like don’t even, it’s like, have you heard of ripple? And then it’s like, what, what ripple? No, never heard of it and, like people self identify as as maximalists and people self identify as toxic maximalists and um, all of it is a kind tongue in cheek, but at the same time it’s not the people, they, obviously go to those gatherings and it’s a lot of comradery and it’s a lot of cultish behavior.

Gigi:                                       01:05:07               But I’m not, I’m not using this term. I’m using this term technically and not in a the Perjorative, sense. So I’m part of this cult as well, obviously. And I think the first, um, the first people are starting to take this even more seriously and that’s I think where we, get to religious tendencies. But again, take everything I say with a grain of salt, I don’t mean that people will build churches for Satoshi and go into these churches in the next one or two years or something like that. Not at all. I just, I just mean it in a way that, Bitcoin is such an important part of your life that you are being religious about it. That’s how I mean it. And we have people that do the same thing for the first three star Wars movies for example. It’s such an important part of your life that, that you are just being religious about it and you watch it for, for example, once a month or something like that.

Gigi:                                       01:06:07               And if someone else makes a joke about it, he will not be your friend anymore. And, uh, that’s, that’s how I see it developing and everything after that we’ll see. I mean, I think there are a handful of people, probably hundreds of people worldwide that are already very religious about it. Like they religiously stack sats. They sacrifice a lot of their life to just get their hands on as much Bitcoin as they can. And it’s not only with stacking sats like you said as well, it’s, , in terms of trying to understand it as deeply as you can. I mean, I sacrificed all of my old life in a way to study Bitcoin full time and I’m still doing that. So I sacrifice a lot to, be able to do what I’m doing now. And I think there are a lot of people I can meet that are just so obsessed by it. And, I don’t mean obsessed in a bad way. It’s just, like it doesn’t make sense to, to do anything else because you’re, you’re, you’re your whole mind and your whole soul is in this thing anyway, so you might as well try to give it your best shot. And, yeah, that’s, that’s very close to a religious devotion I would say. So that’s, that’s how I see it.

Dustin (Host):                    01:07:29               Well, given that Bitcoin lives in the digital space, it does not live in the physical space. I don’t think that it will ever, or I shouldn’t say it will ever, it won’t ever, but that, the idea that this would, you know, if you talk about a Bitcoin religion in these terms that it would be somehow, um, building its own buildings. I think that it will be seen in the future as the first, online, digital, , religion in a way that it will live totally within the digital space. as we are moving more and more towards a digital future where we’re less, we spend less time in the meat space and more time in the digital space and it wouldn’t make sense to me, other than just for mere tradition because people still have a lot of ties and rightly so to the physical space, right where it will present itself. Um, at times in that, I mean we kind of see that in a way where early, early Christians would, would gather within the Roman empire. They would go, you know, in the catacombs or into small homes and they would meet and they would talk about, their faith and, and practices or rituals. They’re in small groups and we kind of see that within Bitcoin meetups already where it’s kind of these small groups of the faithful, if you want to call them that and, and new converts, you know, meeting and talking about it becoming a kind of, getting a base understanding of it.

Dustin (Host):                    01:09:09               Whereas as they move on, they, they work on their own and kind of study on their own to get a better understanding of it. But it’ll be 100% or should say like 98% digital versus versus physical.

Gigi:                                       01:09:26               Yeah. I think, I think that’s true, but I also think that it’s important to meet in a physical space because just a, the bandwidth is so much larger. Like if you’re talking to a person, uh, face to face in the real world, it’s, it conveys just at, for example, conveying the level of conviction on Twitter, it’s really hard. But if you meet someone else in real life, at a meetup or at a conference, it, you immediately click with those people that have the same level of conviction as you are. It doesn’t matter if it’s high or low. it’s kind of like, it’s weird how this works.

Gigi:                                       01:10:03               And so I think that physical spaces are important and I’m, I’m not sure if I am, I’m, I mean, I 100% understand what you mean when you say that Bitcoin is purely digital. And I agree. Of course. I think, again, it’s just an idea and it’s, it’s the current incarnation of this ideas, with the current software on the current pipes that make up the internet. But it’s also, it can be physical in a way. I mean, we, um, for example, your private key can be a physical thing and we have hardware wallets and open dimes and paper wallets and stuff like that. And in a way, it’s also not obvious to me that Bitcoin is purely phys…. Like Bitcoin obviously needs the physical world to function. And, , I’m saying that because I, when I went through the mind exercise of how to kill Bitcoin, you could try to attack the physical infrastructure of the internet and do segregated internets.

Gigi:                                       01:11:02               Like you can cut the undersea cables and stuff like that. So in a way, Bitcoin is this weird organism, which lives proudly in the informational realm, but also partly on the hard drives and five optical cables and other stuff in the physical realm. So it’s not that clear cut to me, but I got exactly what you mean. And in a way we had this, we had these, um, purely digital things before that for example, in second life and in other online games and other online communities where, uh, you have worldwide communities and it’s not obvious that those kinds of communities exist because there are no huge gatherings and there are not huge, um, buildings where people meet up. But those are millions of people that share the same interests and share the same worldview in a way. And if they meet up, they are forced to be reckoned with.

Gigi:                                       01:11:52               And I think we can see that with online gaming and we can see that with e-sports for example, suddenly there are stadiums with 30,000 people, 50,000 people and they are fully booked and they are like 30,000 people watching a Counterstrike tournament. And, um, I know that because I’m part of the group as well. Like I, I’ve been in those kinds of stadiums and it’s, it’s a force to be reckoned with. If you meet people in the real world and you realize that, there are many of you, I think we will have the same thing happen in Bitcoin in the next couple of years.

Dustin (Host):                    01:12:27               Yeah. Well more what I was getting at was just as we move forward in the future. But, the, the experience that you get, especially in large crowds cause that that just kind of plays into the, the crowd and, and mob mentality and not a bad way, but in a good way where you have these common experiences that you can’t quite get where if you go, just to, to stay on our theme. If you go to a religious festival where regardless of what it is, whether it’s you know, the Haj or going to a large mass in Catholicism or going to a Buddhist monastery where there’s a large amount of monks all praying, where you participate in this common experience, it’s much more powerful than either just watching the video and, or just reading about it and reading like you can go and you can read about religious experiences of, of mystics throughout history.

Dustin (Host):                    01:13:28               But it’s not the same thing as experiencing it yourself and kind of being in that physical location. And we have a long way to go before technology can catch up with, with reality or the physical reality of recreating those experiences. But you, you mentioned private keys and, and this was the, the last topic I wanted to kind of go over was, because it’s something that I’ve talked about on other episodes and you’ve talked about an and Max Hillebrand as well, is that this concept of, of ownership in Bitcoin. And I think that, you know, within your circles of understanding, I think as you move more and more through those circles, and gain more understanding is this, this idea that you don’t own Bitcoin and episode 54 that I just did with Stefan Kinslla who’s a, I don’t know if you’re familiar with him,

Gigi:                                     01:14:23                I know him

Dustin (Host):                    01:14:25               Yeah. And he is coming from it from kind of more of an anti IP stance. And his, coming to this realization is different. It comes from a different Avenue than then what we’re talking about. But you know, Max Hillebrand described it as you occult the knowledge of Bitcoin. And in a way, Stefen, also talks about it, but from more of a legalistic term in that you can’t own a number, you can’t own any. He talks about, you know, Bitcoin as being an idea and in a way where you can’t own an idea, and shouldn’t ever be able to own an idea because it’s just, it’s just really gross. And in terms of where it, well, what are you gonna do, you know, Sue, everybody that comes to, that has this idea later or thinks about that idea. But I think that that’s the best way of understanding Bitcoin as not merely a good, , like gold or wheat or something like that. A commodity good. But as purely an idea. And as, as pure mathematics, you also, even within IP, you can’t own a mathematical for me, you can’t copyright pi as it is, it exists in the universe and you can’t just own a piece of the, the foundation of the universe.

Gigi:                                       01:15:43               Yeah. And that, that is like, that loops perfectly. Back to, to my insight as well. It’s a, again, I know I repeat myself, but, but the main insight for me was that Bitcoin first and foremost is an idea and all parts of it are an idea and it’s an infectious, very powerful idea. And, uh, the fact that private keys are just numbers and in a way our also just an idea is part of that. And, but the whole system like Beautyon wrote a very good piece, how America, why America cant regulate Bitcoin. And it talks about that extensively, that, the whole system is just speech. All of it is just speech. Like it’s protocol. And you can, if you want to, you can do Bitcoin on paper perfectly. Well it just takes a long time. But all of it is, is on the, on the idea level, you know, all of it is speech and that’s why America can’t really outlaw it and can’t really ban it because same as with the crypto Wars (referencing the battle for making encryption illegal)

Gigi:                                       01:16:44               And the, the fact I think it’s so funny and I said that the a couple of times already, but it’s, I think it’s just hilarious that you, you cannot, with this in mind, you cannot possess Bitcoin but Bitcoin can posses you, and I thinkI just find this and endlessly funny because obviously we all possess Bitcoin in a way, but we, all we are doing is we are, protecting this idea, which is our private key. We are protecting this information. And that’s also why Bitcoin is so insanely powerful because you can like your private key, the, the number that is stored on there, it can take many forms. It’s just information and you can express this information in so many different forms. You can store it on a chip in a hardware wallet and only you then, then it kind of becomes something that you can possess.

Gigi:                                       01:17:40               Like technically in a way you possess the hardware wallets and no one else, not even you knows, knows the magic number. Only the hardware wallet knows the number. And so you can kind of possess the thing. And so we go back to physical security and stuff that we are very familiar with, but you could also, create a brain wallet of course. And just the, the information that is so important that is your private key. You just store it in your head. And most people currently store their seed phrases just on pieces of paper and throw it somewhere, I guess in the sock drawer. And, uh, I just think that it’s, it’s a profound insight once you realize that. Like, I think understanding Bitcoin, you have multiple of these profound insights and the fact that your private keys just information is one of them. And uh, I agree with, Stefan Kinsella that all of this, it’s a hairy topic and it’s problematic in the, in the legal sense.

Gigi:                                       01:18:40               And he wrote the grant book against intellectual copyright. I think that’s the title. And it’s basically we run into the same problems that you have if you want to copyright mathematics or if you want to copyright code, you know, like from a legal perspective, code is on the level of ideas and mathematics as well. And you can’t really copyright it from that. You get into a very weird, territory because there are mathematical constructs that you can use to transmute a formula into just numbers in a way. And then you suddenly copyright numbers and, uh, who should have the right to copyright the number. You know what I mean? It’s, we have similar problems like that in Bitcoin. And I think it’s really, it’s really interesting and it’s really funny.

Dustin (Host):                    01:19:30               Well it kind of wrap this into your realization as well, I think that while this is the, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the Sapir Warf hypothesis where,

Gigi:                                     01:19:44               I don’t think I have no

Dustin (Host):                    01:19:47               Yeah, it was, it was if you’ve ever seen the movie arrival, I don’t know if you’ve saw it?

Gigi:                                     01:19:52               Yeah

Dustin (Host):                    01:19:53               So in, in that movie, it’s kind of what led me down that rabbit hole of kind of looking at this and while it’s not without its own criticisms and controversies…it’s a hypothesis so obviously it’s not, accepted as..

Gigi:                                     01:20:07               Whats the name again, I didn’t get it the first time.

Dustin (Host):                    01:20:10               Sapir Wharf, S a p i r W a r f and their hypothesis was that the structure, of language and the way that language is created and the kind of culture behind it effects, well it also affects the culture but affects the person who speaks at their kind of, their cognition, the ability that they see the world and, and kind of understand it. And your perception of, of the, the world is kind of, it’s through the lens of your spoken language. Cause there’s different, if you look at the differences between like, you know, Chinese and English or you know, German and English and I think especially in English as my experience, through, trying to learn other languages is that I think as we’ve come farther into the future, we’ve kind of almost, the incentive for language is to become more efficient, right? So we have less words to describe things and we just have, have fewer words to kind of, we have fewer words and each word kind of stretching encapsulate larger and larger, um, experiences and descriptions of things, which I think is good for, you know, even online language, right? You have these very shorthand things where if you look back, I remember looking back at like old English words and I know that there’s a lot of words in German that have these very, very specific things that they are describing, describes nothing else.

Dustin (Host):                    01:21:41               And I think that that’s sad in a way because we kind of lose our ability to, have a very definitive and very specific, description of it, of an experience or an item or thing that happened or whatever it may be. Just because, you know, we may call just, you know, everything is cool or everything is bad or that’s great versus this specific word that describes a very specific experience or thing that happened. And I wonder if as we move forward and we all start to, you know, fall into the, the Bitcoin world view and use the language of Bitcoin, whether it’s the colloquial language that we speak on Twitter or it’s the, as people start to maybe, get more into understanding the code of it, that that might prove out to be true, that this hypothesis might help us to change our perception of the world, mainly because we are adopting a brand new language.

Gigi:                                       01:22:47               Yeah. I think, I think we’re just missing the, not only the language but also in a way that, metaphors for Bitcoin and something to compare it to. I think we don’t have anything really to compare it to, and I think again, biology kind of works and on the level of analysis of, of people, I think Bitcoin kind of works and I think maybe a good way o tie it together and maybe to end on this.There is this, this quote from “Snow Crash” I just started reading it. Uh, Brandon Quittem recommended it to me. It’s a science fiction novel and I think the quote goes something like this. It’s “what is this snow crash thing? Is it a virus? Is it the religion? is it a computer code?” And in the same way Bitcoin is all of that. And I think maybe even more.

Dustin (Host):                    01:23:44               Yeah, I think that’s a, that’s a perfect way to end the episode. I’d really like to thank you for taking time out of your morning to come on and discuss this and I look forward to, in the future that we, that we have continued conversations as you come to understand this experience on a even deeper level.

Gigi:                                     01:24:07               Yeah. Thanks for having me. And thanks for providing a platform where I can think out loud.

Dustin (Host):                    01:24:12               And where can people follow you, find you, read what your, what you’re up to.

Gigi:                                     01:24:19               Oh yeah. I’m Der Gigi on Twitter, D E R G I G I and I also post everything that I post on, on medium on dergigi.com And as yousaid in the beginning, I also have 21lessons.com and Oh, by the way, there will be a book out soon. So I will put 21 lessons into a book. And I also curate Bitcoin-resources.com and I want to move Bitcoin resources, into the open source and community domain so it’s already open source on Github. And I will start looking for collaborators very soon. So if you’re interested in doing that, please reach out to me. I’m, I’m very easy to reach. My DMS are open and my contact details are on dergigi.com as well.

Dustin (Host):                    01:25:05               And I will have links to all the things that we talked about, articles and websites, and well everything, that we talked about. And once again, thanks for coming on.

Gigi:                                     01:25:18               Thanks for having me, Dustin.