https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=aJulp—KgW8
So hello everybody. I am here with Vin Armani, also known as Cyprian, who is a Bitcoin developer quite known in the Bitcoin community. He’s also recently been received into the Orthodox Church. And so there’s quite a lot to talk about with Cyprian. He’s been following my work for a while. We’ve been engaging on Twitter. We’ve also, you know, we plan to talk a bit early before and it just didn’t work out. So this is actually a good time since he has been receiving to the church to figure out what is the connection between Bitcoin and his journey into the church and all the things that he’s discovering. So I’m pretty excited about this conversation today. This is Jonathan Pageau. Welcome to the symbolic world. So Cyprian, thank you for joining me today. Oh, it’s a pleasure and an honor. As you said, I’ve been following you for years now. So I’ve appreciated the work that you’ve done. And then when you started to become interested in talking about Bitcoin, I was like, okay, well, if this can happen, it can happen. And I think that now is definitely we have spoken about it, you know, some months ago, but I think now is definitely the time to have this conversation. And it’s interesting because, you know, you probably follow this that I’m a little suspicious about the coins and Bitcoin just in terms of what they are and what they’re doing and everything. But it’s funny, there’s a personal connection now that’s coming in, which is my son, who’s 16. He said, he said, Dad, I really like to start investing in these cryptos. And I thought, okay, you’re 16. Like, he wanted to put almost all the money he made, like in his job into this. And so I said, okay, well, let’s do it together. So we put in, we both put in a certain amount. And so we’re like, we’re trying to figure it out together. So it’s like, it’s actually a funny time because I’m doing this for him. But at the same time, I guess I have to figure it out, you know, I have to kind of solve my problems with Bitcoin. So tell me a little bit how you got involved into Bitcoin. I was so I have a very sort of interesting history. I’ve led a pretty interesting life. And in 2012, I was in Las Vegas, I was in basically an all cash business, and I had a lot of cash. And my background is as a software developer. So that’s my professional background since since my youth, it’s kind of been the confluence of, let’s say, entertainment and media and art, and technology. And so I’ve been those are my two sort of life interests. And so they’ve I found a way to combine them throughout my career. And I was looking at different options of what can I do with this money? Like I started out with money in my safe at home, and then I had to get a better safe. And then I spent all my days after I would leave my home thinking about the money that was in my home. And that wasn’t very nice. And so Las Vegas is actually a great town for cash, as you could probably imagine. I imagine I never get to Las Vegas, but I imagine Yes, it’s a great town for cash. And so you could do a lot of things in cash, much more than really, I’ve been able to do anywhere except for maybe here in Saipan. And, you know, I tried some things, anonymous private vaults, and some other kind of cool and fun things. And then I recalled that I had, you know, heard about this thing, Bitcoin. And I think maybe I had seen some, either some article or some developer friend reached out to me in 2012. And I said, Oh, let me check it out and found somebody that I could just do hand to hand transactions with and did a few of those. In late 2012, the price was 1,000. Like it was the first time that it had ever gone to a thousand dollars. So I was like a thousand dollars. And immediately I’m scrambling like where, Oh, this is where I’m like, calling friends and everything. Like, remember those bitcoins I gave you and all of this. So some was lost for sure, but I recovered enough. Let’s just say I had a very good Christmas and it was very nice. Everybody was very happy with the gifts that they got. And I pampered myself for my, my good investment and, you know, took some great vacations and everything. But I also said, this is insane. There’s no, because I was looking at it and I said, there’s no reason, there’s no fundamentals behind this to why it would have gone to a thousand. And that’s actually very important. It’s actually very important. And I think that, you know, I heard the previous interview that you did and you began saying, you know, that you had some suspicions or you were a little bit suspicious about Bitcoin. And I think that’s an appropriate feeling to have. So I was also quite suspicious, but interested. And then in 2014, I started just developing on the side as doing some hobby things, some little projects and whatnot. And in 2016, I sort of dropped my previous life and came out as like a libertarian, which I couldn’t do. I was on a TV show. And so like having a libertarian political bent publicly is not necessarily something that you want to do while you’re taking a paycheck from a major network, right? To be a star of a TV show. So I was, you know, I kept quiet at that time. And, but then I came out and started, you know, talking and podcasting and whatnot, and really getting into the cryptocurrency side as it was starting to make its, its next sort of build up and then started developing more. And from 2017, I founded a company called Coin Text that we just recently sold off assets to that. It’s like an SMS wallet, basically. So anybody with the phone through SMS to do this. And so I founded that company and was the lead developer of that. And since that time, Bitcoin has been my full time. It’s been what I’ve focused on exclusively with my professional career. And I’ve really, I’ve just really enjoyed delving deep into it. And since last year, I’ve been doing this school Bitcoin Mystery School, which we can talk about how that came about, because it’s directly tied into my journey to orthodoxy. And, you know, at this point, we’ve got hundreds of students who are in there, it takes place every month, there’s now a continuing education course. And I wrote a book, finished the book that I had been writing called Render Em to Caesar, that is, that is tying in these philosophical elements of Bitcoin. And I think that there’s a really important conversation to be had. The questions that I’ve heard you have about Bitcoin, about trust, about authority, about sovereignty, about value. These are the questions no one is having. But it’s when you realize how Bitcoin addresses those things, when you realize what Bitcoin has to say about who we are as human beings and the nature of reality, then, then you really see the power of it. And then the idea that, oh, it could go from 15 to 1000 starts to not, you start to see what the fundamentals really are. So, so right now, I mean, my, you know, my time is spent doing really more research and development types of things, and educating my students and training up new developers, basically, that’s now what’s going on in the continuing education of my school. So it’s full time, it’s 100% full time Bitcoin for me. All right. So what, I mean, I guess that begs the question. So what is to you the philosophical underpinning of, or what is the metaphysical or whatever cosmological underpinning of Bitcoin? What is it? In a nutshell, the project, the Bitcoin project, as described by its inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, is to be able to allow any two parties to transact value, to transfer value with one another over a communications channel, which in this case, we’re talking really about the internet, without the need for an intermediary, a trusted third party, really a financial institution. And he, in the introduction to the white paper, he says, what is needed is a payment, a financial payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust. And it’s an interesting idea. And when you delve into what is cryptographic proof, really what I believe and what it has turned out and made sense to me that he’s saying is, what is needed is a system based on faith instead of trust. And it’s the difference between faith and trust, trust being that which we have interpersonally between people, which is heavily based on reputation, and faith being that sort of foundational framework with which we predict what is going to happen in reality. So it’s not that we trust that one plus one equals two, our relationship with one plus one equaling two is faith. It’s not that we trust that the sun is going to come up tomorrow. Of course, it might not. There’s always the chance that something happens and asteroid hits the sun, who knows? But we trust that it’s going to come up and that our relationship with the sun coming up tomorrow is not trust in the same way that it’s like, hey, are you going to pay me back that money that I loaned you? These are two different things. And so the system that we have now is a trust-based system. It’s a reputation-based system. It’s the only way that we can move funds from one person to another and exchange values. So as we move into this digital realm, we have a system based on trust. And I think very soon, very, very soon, and Canada may be one of the places that it starts, people are going to start being cut off from that system as they’re being cut off from other aspects of life. And that trust can be revoked. But you can’t revoke the sun rising tomorrow. You can’t revoke one plus one equals two. And so this is what Satoshi is delivering. This is what Bitcoin has the capability of delivering. And so it’s a very different, you know, it’s also like nails on a chalkboard to me when people talk about Bitcoin is money and then go on to tell you what all the things about money Bitcoin is definitely not money. I’ve been saying that for years now. It’s something completely different from money or at least. So I’ll give you an example. I’m sitting here on my deck. I’ll tell you how Bitcoin is money. I’m sitting here on my deck. There’s things that fly by in the daytime. I see birds. I see their silhouette, but I also see butterflies. And at a certain distance, they look really similar. And then at night, sometimes I’ll see bats. Right. But it’s like somebody somebody saying Bitcoin is money is like somebody saying, Oh, see that butterfly. That’s a bird. Now, let me tell you all about birds. And it’s like, well, no, maybe we need to take a little closer look at this thing and a little closer look at this other one. Like, yeah, they make this flapping motion and they move through the air. And maybe we could talk about flight and aerodynamics and all of these things. But it is so different that we need to take a deeper look and we need to not be categorizing it as something that has come before because it really isn’t. And so I think that what I’m getting from you is that Bitcoin because of the way it works, because it is somehow an impersonal process, it’s a natural you could call it like a natural process to be generous. Like it’s a natural process. And so something like it’s blessing falls on whoever participates in the process. It’s not. And it actually doesn’t it doesn’t have to do with human intermediary authority, which is like you said, what we’re seeing right now is especially with the with this with the pandemic and the way it’s playing out is that we’re seeing methods and ways in which people can be excluded from systems radically and kind of in a surprising way. People even you can see we’ve been seeing people get their bank accounts removed and PayPal accounts dropped and all this kind of happens. So I guess I understand that. But I also wonder because Bitcoin is dependent on systems that are related to these systems of power, including the Internet, connectivity and also traceability. There’s a certain amount of traceability just by the fact that you even though people say that it’s anonymous and that the coin is not directly related to you, the trace of you, wherever you are, doing these transactions is something which can be can be traced and then will is ultimately linked to these systems of power. So I mean, that’s my impression unless there’s maybe there’s ways around it for people that are super tech savvy and are the dark web and all this stuff. But it seems like it’s at least like for most most people, they’ll have to also have to use all these intermediary intermediary organizations like exchanges and wallets and all of this stuff. You know, and then to get the money, you get it. If you need to use this money, you have to have some form of bank account. Like there’s the system. The way that you’re talking about it, I kind of get it. But it seems like it’s far. It’s still far from doing exactly what you’re saying. Or am I wrong? Well, interestingly, you are you are right for one story of Bitcoin. So Bitcoin actually has two parallel narratives that are happening. And it’s it actually comes from the very start and the way that Satoshi put it into place. So there’s Bitcoin, the concept, the concept of Bitcoin. And with this concept of Bitcoin, that it really actually isn’t dependent on the Internet per se anyway, that any digital means of attaching to machines, you would be able to do it. The cryptography and all of that, the consensus rules, all of these, you can make your own networks. And this is kind of the idea of the concept. So this is what I’m primarily focused on. And this is where the let’s say, this is the lifeboat. The lifeboat is in the concept. But you are absolutely right in terms of this other thing and how Bitcoin has manifested itself. And the reason it’s manifested itself is because Satoshi added in as, as these things always are, like the traditional mythological structure in order for him to build this thing, he had to add in this seed of corruption, if you will. And the seed of corruption was basically, as he was building this, he built the system and he’s like, OK, the system works great. But why would anybody when this thing has no price, it’s not worth anything. Why would anybody utilize their computer to keep this running, which was something he needed a critical mass of people to do? Why would anybody do this? And so if people go to the white paper, there is a small little section that’s called the incentive section. It’s only nine sentences. And basically what he came up with was this idea. And he said, OK, here’s what I’ll do. I will incentivize people to keep their computers up and running, because if they’ll keep them up and running and running the software, every 10 minutes, somebody based upon their percentage of computer power that they’re giving to the network is going to get some of these coins. And I will also make the amount that is going to be given total on this particular network, this particular game, because each Bitcoin network is really a game that’s taking place. So the reason why would someone play this game? Because a chance to win some money. And so in the beginning, it wasn’t worth anything. And everybody that was doing this. Yeah, there was some idea that they would get some money, but it wasn’t why they were doing it. They were interested in what could this bring to society, or what could this do in the future? They tech heads, early adopters, whatever. As it started to get a price, and the main reason that it got a price was, as I said, these dark web markets. So as it started to get a price, one cent and then one dollar and all of this, you started to get this inkling of people wanting to just run their computers to generate the coins to them. Before, everybody who had a wallet, everybody who was on the network was also a miner. There were very few people on. So everybody was a miner. If you were on the network, you were a miner. Then you started to get into this situation where, of course, people were like, well, I can trade it. There’s a place to trade it. People will buy it. So let me just run machines. And then we start to get into this mining industry. And what inevitably happened is that some people had coins. They want that value to go up. And there’s a certain segment. It’s the largest segment of people involved in Bitcoin. It’s almost everyone who’s a Bitcoin thought leader. They are dedicated. And they even say they call it NGU technology. They are dedicated to the number go up mythos and ideology. They are dedicated to the price go up idea. And the only way to get the price to go up is you’ve got to get more people to play the game, basically to buy in like you and your son are doing. More people to want Bitcoin, basically. Yes. And the way that you do that, the way that they do it is it’s basically the final corruption of Satoshi of what Satoshi because what was he playing with? It’s a bit cynical. He’s playing with greed, right? He was leveraging greed. Yeah. Now, if he doesn’t do that because he didn’t have to, he could have just said either one, it’s not it’s unlimited supply or two. He could have said, well, I’ll just dump them all onto the network to start and then I’ll just give them to my friends. The network would have worked exactly the same. What makes Bitcoin Bitcoin would have been exactly the same. But he added in this incentive to start out, to get people to bootstrap it, to get people to use it. And so now what we have is we have that incentive run amok. And so when people see Bitcoin, so you look at Bitcoin and you say, well, there’s all these intermediaries. What are you talking about? It’s something to eliminate intermediaries. Yeah. All of the intermediaries are based around the price going up. All of this is around the price going up. And if Bitcoin is going to be killed and the BTC network is going to be killed in this process. So people who are buying into the BTC network, the price may go up, but no one will be using the network because they buy it on Coinbase. They buy it on PayPal. They buy it from some exchange. They leave it on the exchange. They put their US dollars or Canadian dollars up, and then they don’t move it on the network. And as the price goes up, they sell it and they take US and Canadian dollars back. This is not Bitcoin, because Bitcoin’s whole purpose is to remove the banks, to remove the financial institutions. And everybody that uses a financial institution to enter into the game is not doing Bitcoin. They’re doing this other story, this number go up thing, which is a part of Bitcoin. But it’s like, again, it’s the seed of corruption that’s always planted at the beginning. This is the typical mythological pattern. And so I kind of get it. But for example, the idea would be that Satoshi put in limited amount in order to create rarity, and that rarity would then create desire. And that desire then would incentivize people to mine the coin, let’s say. It’s the appearance of rarity and the appearance of scarcity. So these same individuals will say, oh, it’s the first digitally scarce asset, which is just absurd. It’s an absurd statement to make, because the digits in digital are ones and zeros. The number one and the number zero cannot be scarce. And also the idea that anything digital would be scarce. I mean, this video could be viewed how many times on how many machines by how many people, because it’s digital. The whole idea of the digital revolution is that it’s nothing is scarce. So to say, this is the first digitally scarce asset, that’s a game that’s being played on you. That’s someone who is playing the game of, oh, as we say, buy my bags. But he gave the appearance, if people read the incentive section, it’s very clear. It’s very cynical, actually. He says, I’m going to give this appearance because I need to do something to get people. And you know what, if it’s good enough that they’re like, oh, it’s kind of like, okay, it kind of feels like scarcity, maybe it will be valuable someday. He’s putting the pieces, the pattern of what makes something valuable so that people will play the game, but it still is just a game. So what I think I don’t totally follow. Are you saying that Bitcoin is not scarce? Like, absolutely not. There’s no limit of Bitcoin. No, no. And I can prove that to you. So Bitcoin BTC has been forked many times now. So what happens when there’s a fork is the some set of nodes decide that they’re not going to accept the same transaction rules. So the same rules of the game. And they continue on with a new ledger, new history, basically. It’s a schism. Okay. So like, it’s like 1054. So Bitcoin has had a 1054 and it split into Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash. Now, similar with the church split, they share the same saints before, right? They have all the same history before. But now what you have is you have two sets of saints that come off of here, two sets of traditions, two sets of histories that come off. And you can split that five ways from Sunday. And every time you split it, you get a new 21 million coins. So that first split created 42 million. And then two years later, or one year later, one of the splits, BCH, split into two again, BSV and BCH. And then just last year, BCH split again into Bitcoin ABC, which is now called E cash and BCH on this side. So even just between those on which, by the way, Satoshi Nakamoto could come back and spend his coins because he’s the first thing. Right. So the coins that he mined, he can spend them on every single one of those chains. So you already don’t have 21 million coins. You already don’t. Every time there’s a split, Satoshi’s coins double. The number of coins double. So anybody can split his coins double to everybody, everybody who was holding coins at the time of the split, they double, they double. So it’s so there is a sense in which the scarcity is somewhat preserved because whoever already has coins has the same ratio compared to all the coins that are possible, let’s say. Sure. But sure. But there is no limit to how many times it can be. It can be split. So there are split. I mean, those are just a few that I’m mentioning. There’s Bitcoin Gold, there’s Bitcoin Private, there’s Bitcoin Candy. All of these are traded on exchanges. Now they don’t trade for very much. Yeah. Right. But the idea here is about scarcity. And so this is just provably that, well, it’s not scarce because if I’ve got somebody who’s willing to mine it, I can fork a coin tomorrow. It’s very easy. I just pull the code down, change one consensus rule, let it run on mining rigs, and boom, we’re done. So there’s no barrier to entry for someone to inflate the currency. Now they can’t inflate it necessarily in the exact same game. But that almost doesn’t matter because what we see is that to compare it to something like gold, where this is the faith versus trust thing, right? Like when we talk about gold being scarce, it’s like, well, yeah, the number of atoms within the Earth, like the Earth sphere, there’s a finite number. But in this case, there truly is no finite number. So it’s quite different. But you can make people perceive it. And that’s the important part. It’s the perception. And that’s what’s giving it the value in the market. There’s no doubt that it has it. And there’s no doubt that the price will go up. So what role do you see it playing then, like let’s say in the world? Because if it can be split indefinitely and it’s not based on trust of the people that are instigating these, how do you see it working? And what do you see its purpose? The purpose is, well, we’re about to see the purpose. So the purpose of Bitcoin is to be the parallel economy, to be the lifeboat, to give the capability for the, I mean, just to be quite frank, to give those individuals who do not want to take the mark, you know, to give them the opportunity to actually have a society and a financial system. Because this is what is coming. And this is sort of the end piece. But yes, Bitcoin outside of number go up. Bitcoin is not very valuable while everybody still has access to the financial networks. So if everybody still has access to the financial networks, there’s not a lot of utility in Bitcoin besides the gambling and the number going up. So we are saying that if once people start to get really cut off from the financial systems, then all of a sudden the reason for Bitcoin and the value of Bitcoin is going to become, it’s going to be apparent and it’s going to become more useful, let’s say, for people. Yes, but it won’t. But the price of Bitcoin in that case is going to not matter as much because it’s really the concept. It’s the idea that you can pop up a Bitcoin network whenever and wherever you want to using this. So it’s not that we’re going to see one network. It’s that we might see, you know, for every one of these communities that’s around, we might see an individual network within that community. And so it’s actually the knowledge of how do you constitute a Bitcoin network? What are the principles being used, the cryptographic principles, the proof of work? This is the important part, because if you have that and some ability to manifest that in code, then you can pop these things up. So yes, in some ways, I’m very glad that the number go up is happening because where the number go up, and I’m not poo-pooing it for that reason. Like, thank God it’s there because if it wasn’t there, this idea may never have even reached the minds. It would have just like died on the vine and it would have been some apocryphal thing and nobody would have even seen the white paper in the code, right? But because that was there, because people are actually looking at it, there will be the capability when this happens in the, I think, not too far future for certain individuals to be able to reconstitute themselves and to have an ability to not have to do the things that are going to be necessary to remain within the system. Right. And so then how do you, I mean, how do you solve the, how do you solve the, I guess you would have like closed networks, like you would basically set up closed networks that wouldn’t be connected to the big ones, like connected to the big ones that have authority and then run it on that. I guess that’s the only final solution to this. Yeah. And that’s where the real, it’s not, and I won’t call it even an innovation, but the real revelation of Bitcoin comes in and the real revelation of Bitcoin is called proof of work. And it’s a unique, it’s the first time that humans have ever had this capability. And basically what it, it’s an epistemological tool. It’s not a technological tool because what it allows is it allows two people or more, an unlimited number of people who have no interaction with each other or who might even have adversarial relationship with one another to come to consensus on events having happened in the real world. And that, that event being that some amount of measurable work was done, some amount of measurable labor took place somewhere by someone. And this is the, this is the mining. This is, yes. So mining, so we call it mining and the term mining actually comes from that little incentive section. And it’s the, again, it’s the poison pill, if you will, because Satoshi has a sort of a side remark or maybe perhaps to wet people’s whistle a bit and to, to, to, to get at the greed. He says, you know, this system, the way that I’ve put it together, this pattern of the limited supply and it being sort of trickled out and emitted out. He said, it’s like gold miners mining gold, that it gets more expensive the more you pull out of the ground. So he said, I’ve put this in here. He put it there. Yeah. And it was, it was the bait, right? So the, even the idea of mining is it sort of obfuscates proof of work was before mining, proof of work had been around for, for at that point, uh, over a decade. So proof of, proof of work was being used. And really what it is, is it is, it is a way of leveraging the laws of nature. So math, mathematical laws that again, we have faith in and in my school, Bitcoin mystery school, the first day of our sort of novice initiation class, the students actually do this proof of work by hand. And it’s by it’s doing and watching it that they actually develop the faith as well, because you see that, oh yeah, I can predict the future and we can make this more or less difficult. And we can tell mathematically how long it’s going to take somebody to complete this task. So I can give you a task, Jonathan, and, and know that on average, it’s going to take you two minutes to do it, or I could give you a new task and know on average, it’s going to take you five minutes to do it or 10 minutes. So I can actually charge you, right? I can charge you in your time, charge you in your work and anyone in the world, seeing the, what you build from out of this work, which is basically a number that you generate, can verify and validate whether they knew us, whether they saw what was going on. They can just look at the information and say, if they’re in a bunker, they could look at it and say, oh yeah, this guy did 10 minutes worth of work. Okay. So that is, so I guess what I’m starting to understand is that is where the value comes from. The value comes from provable time energy that is spent. So these numbers don’t come out of a, out of a box. You have to spend so much energy and time in order to generate a coin. And therefore that is the value. It’s like a sweat equity type value where you know that so much, okay, that’s, that’s useful for me to think about it that way. So all of a sudden it’s not, it’s not so much just a magical thing, like a completely random, random process. Yeah. And it’s important for everybody to think about it that way. And it’s why it’s so frustrating to me when I see people who are Bitcoin thought leaders who spend zero time on explaining proof of work, they say, oh, it’s a proof of work thing. And then they just go right past it. But proof of work is everything in Bitcoin. All of the other stuff had been done. There’s also public key cryptography, which is doing something similar and that it’s utilizing the laws of nature. It’s utilizing things that we can have faith will be the same and are verifiable by everyone because it’s utilizing math. And, and basically in that way, it’s proving not ownership, but actually it’s, it’s very interesting. It’s proving that, you know, a number that is fundamentally unguessable. So it’s not ownership. It’s actually knowledge. And this is why I tell people that this is not a technology. This is an epistemology, because really what it’s about is it’s about knowledge and the verification that someone knows something without knowing you, without seeing you, you can present me some set of data and I can say, oh, this guy knows a specific number and that’s that this is your private key. This is how you’re able to spend your Bitcoins. And by the same token, you can present me some other data and I can say, oh, this guy has done X amount of work. So X number of what’s called hashes. So what’s interesting is that right now it’s actually this proof of work, which is being attacked. That is the media, the, the, let’s say the official channels are, are attacking proof of work as the reason why Bitcoin is bad, why it’s a problem, because it’s environmentally unsound, it’s using up all our resources, et cetera, et cetera. So how, how do you see that strange situation? Oh, it’s not strange. So when Satoshi released the, the first version of the software, he released it onto a mailing list, a cryptography mailing list called the Metstowd cryptography mailing list. Now this was a mailing list with basically professional cryptographers, mathematicians, an industry list. And there were criticisms. There was only one cryptographer, one old school cryptographer called Hal Finney, who was a big supporter on the list. Now I’ve written a lot and I believe how Finney actually was Satoshi Nakamoto and that he had basically given himself a double identity so that he could support himself. There’s also some other things that Hal had been through the cryptography that’s involved years before that was considered a munition by the government. And there’s a, one of the first programs called Pretty Good Privacy that was developed by a gentleman named Phil Zimmerman. He was actually investigated for an arms control violation by the department of state. He was potentially going to be held up as the same that you would for like selling a nuclear weapon. That’s, yes. Why, I don’t understand. Why would that, why would that, why would that be the case? This is a, yeah, good, good. So cryptography, the history of cryptography, this type of cryptography, mathematical cryptography dates back to World War II. And this is what was going on with at Bletchley Park with the Enigma machine and cracking the German codes. That was where the first computer was actually made, the first digital computer, Colossus. The reason for the existence of the computers that we have was this, was cryptography, was codes. And these were considered to be basically state secrets. They were completely in control, under the control of the NSA. I’ll read you, I found an interesting quote lately that I said, I’m going to, I’m going to read this to John. So in 1976, when this, when this technology was basically dropped by, there’s six guys that are involved. One of them is a guy by the name of Whitfield Diffie. And his quote, he said, after they released their paper, he said, the National Security Agency’s crypto monopoly was effectively terminated. And this is what he says, he says, every company, every citizen now had routine access to the sorts of cryptographic technology that not many years ago, but not the technology that not many years ago, ranked alongside the atomic bomb as a source of power. That’s how valuable the cryptography that’s used in Bitcoin was viewed. Let’s say from World War II through the 70s and 80s. What’s being used is munitions grade cryptography. If you send a message no government can decrypt it. So these were, states were holding these things as secrets. And so the idea to think that it’s like, these are, this is a weapon of incredible power, incredible power. And people don’t know that that’s the case. Right? So this is one of the things, this is why I do my school. The second day, we spend it all on cryptography and T and showing people that like, yeah, right in your Bitcoin wallet is the capability for you to do this type of cryptography and send these types of messages. Most people have no idea. Right? This is not part of the number go up narrative. Right? So the first, when going back to Satoshi releasing this, when he released it, the president or one of the founders of the electronic frontier foundation, as a matter of fact, happened to be on that list and his criticism at that time, this is 2009, this is a day after it’s released. No one is even mining it. It’s running on like three people’s laptops. He’s saying, I just wish that we don’t have more computers running this, you know, spewing carbon into the atmosphere. So, okay. Yes. And this is, and this is 100% true. The emails are there. You can go and look. So this is a purely ideological attack against something that is a threat to something else. And that’s what people should understand. Bitcoin does not use very much electricity whatsoever. And especially if you’ve got one of these secondary networks, you know, there’s Bitcoin like BTC, that’s using, I don’t know, 90% of the electricity. And the reason it’s using that much electricity is because the price is so high. Because as we’re talking about, like the value is correlated to how much work is being done. So if it costs me 10,000. Right. And if Bitcoin is going for 50,000 worth of work. Well, that 15, let’s say, because if that happens, then the whole system stops. Everybody stops mining. If it goes down to a certain level, it just stops. No, you don’t know. No, no, no, people, people would keep mining, they would just, it would use a lot less electricity. The issue, the issue and the number go up cult will will, you know, present this into a certain degree. It’s correct. The issue is that the way to disrupt the network is to acquire 51% of the total amount of work that’s being done at any given time. Right. So this is a 51%. If you do that, you can control the consensus. This is built in, this is the threat. And so it’s worth the more it’s work is being done to like to outperform the others. Yes. And the number go up cult calls this security. They say the the higher the price, the more secure the network is. This is not really true. Because there’s only a limited number of things that you can do with that 51%. And you can always cut that. If you are, you know, if you have a community that’s relatively small, and some attacker comes on, it’s relatively easy to switch out the software and to cut them out of the loop. And this has actually been done in Bitcoin forks in what are what have been called hash wars. So this is like not theoretical what I’m saying, this has actually been done on multi billion dollar networks, where you you have a few miners who have a lot of the hash power, and they’ve sent secret versions of software to one another to cut out an attacker who’s been there. So there’s a lot of ways to mitigate it. There are there are Bitcoin coins that have traded for 15. And it was just a safe and secure then as it is now in terms of the actual attacks or anything that happened to it. So it’s really, you know, if there’s one network, yes, it’s a problem. If it’s just BTC. But if, if I’m like, I don’t need that network, I’ve got my community that I’m trading with, we’ll just fire up our own and we’ll just make it so that only we can utilize the network. No problem. So so this is why I say there’s two stories. And one story takes you down one particular path. And the other story takes you down a completely different path where you realize it’s a tool that anybody can use that’s open, permissionless, and anyone can fire up a network. So one of the I guess one of the the suspicions or one of the things that is strange about Bitcoin is the fact that it was created by an anonymous person. And so this of course, opens up the thought that there’s something else going on, that there’s that it’s actually being released by some kind of state actor, or something more nefarious. What do you think is the reason why it’s been released by an anonymous person? Like why do you think this was what did that maybe the danger this cryptographic danger of being suspect by governments or something like that? Yeah, well, like I say, I believe that it was this gentleman how funny. So he was the first person to support Bitcoin on this mailing list. He was the first person besides Satoshi Nakamoto to mine. He was the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction, he received the first Bitcoin transaction. He was also the first person to ever tweet the word Bitcoin. So his his Twitter handle is still there at how thin and you could go down to January, January 9 2009. And there’s a tweet that says run in Bitcoin. And it’s interesting because it’s kind of a pilgrimage site for Bitcoiners. You know, you’ll see throughout the years people have gone and they leave little it’s like going to a tomb because he died of ALS actually. Okay, so he became paralyzed. He died in 2014. And his disappearance and becoming paralyzed coincided with Satoshi’s disappearance. But how Finney was the second developer also on this PGP project. So he actually witnessed his friend Phil Zimmerman, he was actually working for PGP until he died. He witnessed his friend Phil Zimmerman be investigated and almost be and go through the whole thing. And it’s a crazy story. MIT ended up sort of stepping in and printing the code in a book. And they said it’s freedom of the freedom of the press and all it was it’s really cool. And it started the whole free software open source movement. How Finney was involved. So having gone through that, it would have made a lot of sense for him knowing that there was a possibility that this would happen to create an anonymous identity and to put it out. The good thing about Bitcoin is that the the concepts that Bitcoin uses are they’re all they all proceed Bitcoin. So these are all concepts that had been tested for decades. And the cryptography, the the hashing, all of that is you use it every day. So we actually couldn’t do commerce on the internet without it. When you see that little lock up on on your browser bar, when you go to an e commerce site and you see that lock, click on that, go into the certificate, right, you’ll see words like SHA 256. That’s the hashing algorithm that’s used in Bitcoin. You’ll see RSA, that’s the public key cryptography system. So these are all used. So and the code is open source. So it’s been gone over with the fine tooth comb. Since that time, there’s nothing hidden. This is known technology, it works, it can be reconstituted from scratch. So, you know, yeah, I think I think the state actor thing is mostly not the not Bitcoin itself, but rather create. How can I say this to create a threat which is strong enough so that will justify the government creating its own digital currency, which will have many strings attached. It seems like this is happening now. I saw an article recently about creating programmable digital currency in England, for example, where where in the code of the currency, you can decide what it can be spent on, you can decide that the money will lose its value after a certain time, they can only be used by certain people. Like this is something which is live happening right now in terms of and it seems to be, in some way, a reaction to the crypto world saying, okay, well, we need to now create our government, you know, because this is all dangerous, this is this is dark web, this is all this illegal stuff, we need to create our own digital currency to compete with that. And people will just accept it because the rest is dangerous, like the other stuff is dangerous. Yeah, well, let’s go down that rabbit hole for a minute, because it’s actually much crazier. And I think your audience will appreciate this. And I urge them to go down this rabbit hole themselves. So what you’re talking about is a central bank digital currency that’s also called the CBDC. And there is a CBDC that was created by the Federal Reserve that is ready to be released. The Federal Reserve had actually announced that they were going to release a what they called a discussion paper. It’s basically a white paper. They said that was going to happen in July. It hasn’t. There’s some legislation that’s in this latest bill in Congress, that is probably what they were waiting for. But what’s interesting about this is it was created, this central bank digital currency was created by the Boston Fed and the MIT Media Labs digital currency initiative. Now what’s interesting about this digital currency, so people can go look it up. This is not secret. You go look up the digital currency initiative at MIT. That’s who created it. You can go and look up Federal Reserve and that, Google it, the CBDC. This is known. What’s interesting about this digital currency initiative is in 2016, MIT Media Lab reached out and hired the three basically top BTC Bitcoin developers. The guys who held the keys, what we call commit access, the keys to the code, the people who were deciding what goes into the code and what doesn’t go into the code. So this is Gavin Andreessen, who basically had the keys handed to him by Satoshi Nakamoto. He was like, let’s say the heir of Satoshi Nakamoto, now disgraced within the Bitcoin community. Corey Fields and Vladimir Vanderland. Vladimir Vanderland is particularly important because he’s considered fundamentally the lead developer. He’s the guy with the most, he’s the bishop, right, with the most power to be able to determine what goes into the code or not. So they hired them in 2016 because there was no, these guys were working in an open source world and they had no income. So they had no direct Bitcoin income. And so along comes MIT and says, come and work on this research project. You can just do Bitcoin research and all of that. Now, if people go back, what’s great is to go back on the Wayback Machine and go and look at the Digital Currency Initiative site in 2016. And you scroll down and you see that indeed, from the very start, they were working on Federal Reserve, Central Bank digital currencies from the very start. When, like two months before, it was the Federal Reserve was going to announce that, yes, this had been created for them by MIT. Vladimir Vanderland, who was the last one left, basically quit at the Digital Media Lab, quit at the Digital Currency Initiative and went basically silent. He basically is went silent. So what we come down to is the lead developers of Bitcoin, of BTC, of Bitcoin Core, the main software, are the ones who built the exact currency that you’re talking about for the Federal Reserve. They’re the ones who built it. Because again, money. At the end of the day, it was about, well, I got to feed my kids. Like, how long is that? You know, this is we’re seeing that this is the narrative, right? The I got to feed my kids narrative is leading to everything. Now, one additional tidbit that’s very interesting. The head of MIT Media Lab is a gentleman by the name of Joy Ito. Right around the time that the Epstein scandal broke, he was forced to quit. He was forced to quit. Why was he forced to quit? Because it was found out that around the exact same time that they started the Digital Currency Initiative, Jeffrey Epstein was donating a ton of money. And there’s email, some of it even in the name of another individual that we’ve seen quite a bit who used to run a tech giant, and is now sort of retired from out of that in his name. And email saying this is coming from that gentleman, but please mark it down as coming from Epstein. Okay, now I’m not saying what that was going to fund. But when you understand that the Federal Reserve was secretly funding their centralized version of Bitcoin using the using the exact characters who were at the same time working on Bitcoin Core. People can go people can go down that rabbit hole themselves. But it’s just like all of this is real. Right. So Joy Ito, he was disgraced. He had to resign. It was a big you can go look at New York Times, all of that because Epstein was giving money under the table to them, and he was hiding it. Yeah. So it’s coming. No. So Jonathan, again, like, that’s coming. That’s here. It was built by the same people that built Bitcoin. And it’s not that it’s a reaction to it. It’s not that it’s a reaction to Bitcoin because bitcoins bad. It’s that it’s a reaction to Bitcoin because Bitcoin is powerful. So they were like, No, we need to have our own Bitcoin, but no proof of work. None of this stuff. We control. Yeah. We control it centralized, but all the rest of cryptography and everything because Bitcoin works. Mm hmm. So it’ll continue to be a kind of fiat currency, but it will be digital and it will be traceable and it will have all the let’s say the cryptographic power of Yep. And programmable as well, which means you can get money in your account. And then if you write the wrong thing on Twitter, the numbers can vanish. Yes. Yeah. Or just be locked. Yeah. And it doesn’t matter if it vanishes because they can also create as many as they want. Right. Because the proof of work is what’s controlling the emission schedule. But when they want to print new money, no problem. Yeah. They just press a button still. Don’t believe me. They’re not going to give themselves a 21 billion limit. Okay. That’s not what’s going to happen with the central bank. Yeah. But it’s mostly the idea of being able to lock people out of the economy in ways that we haven’t seen yet. This is, I mean, that is the key. And it’s not just lock people out. I think actually one of the most nefarious and frightening scenarios is expirable money. Yep. That’s right. So they send you the funds and they’re like, if you don’t spend this in 30 days, it’s gone. You know, money with self-destruct. A soft communism. You know, you get your allowance and you also can only spend it on certain things and then it then it disappears. Yeah. So this is here. Yeah. It’s ready to be released. I can’t imagine that it’s not going to be tied to all of these other things. Yeah. And that same digital currency initiative built for Japan, for China, for there were a few, there’s like seven or eight countries that they built for UK. So it’s all coming from the same place. It’s all coming from the same place. And it’s all based around the fundamentals of Bitcoin. All right. So I guess like now that we’re at the end of this very dark scenario, I do want to hear about, I do want to hear about, and of course I’ll laugh when I say that, I do want to hear about how this whole process kind of led you to orthodoxy. Because to me, it seems like a strange, just a strange thing, how these things can be related. It is very strange actually. So, you know, as I said, I’ve been working in this space for, since 2017, full blast. And I’ve gotten a chance to work, you know, with some of the biggest companies on really great projects. But I’ve also been lucky that I’ve been able to work with individuals who I was ideologically aligned with. So it hasn’t been these sorts of exchanges and the coin basis and whatnot. It’s been, you know, companies like Bitcoin.com and others who are more focused around this vision of sovereignty, of financial sovereignty and people having that and Bitcoin being able to deliver it. And when all of this goofiness started in 2020, I was living with my family in Southern California and I knew this is not the place to be. So I saw in March, when the thing started happening, I was like, I know this pattern. Like, I know exactly where this is going. And we had been planning to move to Saipan, but it got very much moved up. And we found ourselves here April 5th. Oh, because this is recent. I thought you’d been in Saipan for a while. No, no, we came here because of that. So we came here fundamentally as refugees. And I’ve had a strong spiritual bent and I’ve been involved in a lot of different, very powerful things. So I had a very long relationship that many people know many years with ayahuasca and plant medicine and those types of things. So I had a, you know, I had a, I’ve always had a strong understanding of the mystical, like the realness of the mystical. In other words, like no question that like there are spirits, there is a spirit world, like they interact with us. You can speak to them. And I think people who have had the experiences that I’ve had, you walk away like, oh, it’s real, right? Like real shamanist shamanism type experiences. But in about in 2019, I don’t 2018, I started delving into back into Christianity. And it was through I’d seen a Christopher Hitchens speech around the time that he was, you know, dying of cancer and where he said that he was reading Dharmade McCullough’s book, Christianity, A History of Christianity, the First 3000 Years. I said, oh, this is very interesting that this avowed atheist would be like crowing about how excellent this book was. And so I got it on audiobook and it was sort of over the course of the year when I would do yard work on Sundays, it was like, okay, let me just dig into this, right? Hadn’t been to church since I was a kid, you know, had been exploring all of these other things. And it really, I was really struck getting back into the ancient church about how little I didn’t know what in terms of that history. And then started into a practice of prayer. Of course, I don’t know what I’m doing, and fasting. And I started to get some, I was working on Bitcoin and some very difficult problems at the time. And through the fasting and through this, what I now understand was developing a system of prayer, through that, I actually started getting solving all of these problems. Like I would be in the middle of a fast and I was getting, and I was like, okay, this is kind of very mercenary, you know what I mean? Where I was like, okay, I’m getting so much insights from the fast. Yes, exactly. And so when I came to Saipan, I said, well, I’m going to actually take up, and where I had gotten the fasting stuff was, it was mainly a lot of Pentecostal that I was consuming Pentecostal stuff. And I was like, oh, this is very interesting. And it was resonating with me. Like I said, oh, there’s a spirit thing. And so when we got here, we ended up, we had this beautiful house right on the beach that was, that we lucked into. And I just started morning and evening, a practice of prayer. And I don’t know how it was that I started doing the Jesus prayer. So I don’t know how I ran across it. Maybe it was from a Pentecostal thing, but I said, I’m going to do this. And I’m just going to, this is where I’m going to go. And I’m going to start with this. And it was actually in, it was coming back off the beach that I had this flash that said, you’re going to do this school. It’s going to be called Bitcoin Mystery School. You’re going to teach these things. You’ve been working on these things. You’re going to teach these things. And I was like, nobody wants to, what, this doesn’t even make any sense. But I said, okay, I’m going to follow it. Right. Cause I just, I was writing my book. I was getting a lot of insights from my book, from this practice of prayer. And I just announced, Hey, I’m going to do this thing, put a thing up. And somebody who I had spoken to in the past reached out to me and said, cool guy. And he said, Hey, there’s some guys in my parish. I’m Orthodox. I knew he was Orthodox. Like there’s these guys in my parish. We would like to all do this. Like as a group, we’ve been talking about like things that may be needed in the future. We think Bitcoin’s important. We’d like to do this as a group. I said, Oh, awesome. You guys can be like my guinea pigs. I’ll do a private course. You guys will be the very first course. And it was in that course that one of the participants in the course was the priest of the parish. Okay. And it was in, it was, so it was in that time and sort of some, I don’t know, there was something going on with those guys. It was really awesome. And him in particular, I was like, he’s a really unique guy. And I was like, and I said, I wonder if he’s got any YouTube videos or anything like that. And I just started that night in between the first and second, I just started watching all these videos of him. There weren’t that many, but things that he had done. And it just really spoke to me. And sort of at the end of the class, I said, Hey, father, you know, I don’t know if you’re open to this, but could we talk about maybe you helping me with my prayer? Like I would like to be more effective with my prayer. And so it was over the course of several months of him and I just having what’s become a very deep relationship that obviously my prayer got much better. And he, you know, sent me an Orthodox prayer book and started talking about if you want to do this, little did I know that I was becoming a catechumen. And then things just, things got really, really potent and powerful. And honestly, to a point that was beyond, like I was going really far in terms of my prayer, I had, like I say, I had previous, this previous shaman shamanistic experience. So I was like, Oh, I’m going to try to approach it like that. And things just got actually really serious to a point where I was like, Oh, this is too much. Like this is, I can’t do this. And so it was funny, like the next time I said, I need to talk with you. The next time we had a conversation and like what I was wanting to say to him was I need to be at the church, like, because I would like to continue this practice, but I can’t do this outside of a framework of the church. I realized that now, right? Like I’ll, I’m going to hurt myself mentally, even physically. Right. So I was like, and it was, and it was through that, that he said, okay, then let’s, let’s formally start your catechism. And so we did that. And then just through, I mean, it was very providential the way everything fell into place that he, and a reader from his parish, you know, we arranged, brought them out here to Saipan. They, you know, we set up a little, yeah, we set up a little chapel. It was beautiful. They did the first Orthodox services that had ever been done here, baptized me in the ocean actually happened to be crazily enough. I’m married to a Russian Orthodox woman and my kids are baptized. Yes. And my children and my children are baptized Russian Orthodox. This is for how long have you been married? I’ve, I have six years. I have a five year old. Yeah. I have a five year old and I have she’s almost three, three year old, two and a half year old. Those were the only times I had ever been in a Orthodox church where the baptism of my children. That’s right. But it’s so interesting. Like she never pushed it on me. Yeah. Right. But it’s so obviously it really fell into place. And then so they came, came here, did my baptism, sanctified our marriage in the church, which is beautiful. So we got to have a church wedding here. And, um, and yeah, since, since that time it’s been, it’s, it’s actually crazy things have happened. It happened, you know, after they left a few weeks later, randomly we’re out on the beach, 4th of July and 4th of July, as a matter of fact, we’re out on the beach. I take my daughter into the water. I turn around sitting in the seat where I had been sitting is a priest, Orthodox priest in Saipan. Exactly. And I’m like, what? And all of our, all like all of our, we were out there celebrating. So all of our friends were there and their mouths are like wide open. He’s in a, he’s in a full black Cossack, big silver pectoral cross. My wife is crying and it’s like, he’s a mission priest. He’s got a parish in Taiwan. He answers to, he’s like, got this, I forget what it, I forget what it’s called. It’s kind of, it’s like the equivalent of like an embassy sort of thing that the Russian church does. So he answers directly to the patriarch. And so he said, you know what? No Russian priest had been here for 200 years. We have the records, but I just decided that I was going to come here and Guam and you people are the first people that I’ve ran into. And he didn’t know you were Orthodox. That’s hilarious. Well, my wife saw him walking with his Cossack and everything. And she goes, wait, it’s calls him in Russian. And he’s like, comes over and sits down. And then I walk up and I’m like, what else? This is incredible. And so, so then we got, we had more, you know, more services here. And actually some of the people who are here, kind of there’s a little crypto community, two of the brothers after experiencing that decided that they were going to become catacombs as well. So it was like, it was pretty, they were, cause it’s been, it’s been incredible, the things that have happened here. And so, so I’m, you know, part of the, part of what was happening with, with Bitcoin was that the patterns and the reflection that I was, that I was seeing, and a lot of this is in, is in the book that I wrote, render unto Caesar was that it really is a reflection of the Trinity, the things that are happening in Bitcoin. So the way that Bitcoin lays itself out, the pattern that’s there is, it’s like, it’s a very much an echo of the way that the Trinity is, is laid out in the tradition. And so these were the types of things that were happening. And so for me, you know, I tell people like, it’s because Bitcoin brought me to orthodoxy. And so it’s just the series of events that happen. I mean, cause it makes no sense, right? Like the way that this whole thing happened, it makes no sense. The way that it’s laid itself out makes zero sense, but, but yet here I am. Yeah, here you are. That’s for sure. So can you explain, like, can you give us a hint of why Bitcoin, what it has, how it manifests the Trinity? Cause maybe it’s too complicated, but I, when you said that, I was like, okay, I, I would be like to know that. Sure, sure, sure. So, so Bitcoin is, so Bitcoin is basically the interaction as is, as are so many things of a, some set of foundational and fundamental rules, randomness and consciousness, right? So, so this sort of potential, potential and randomness, this is what’s happening in the proof of work. So what proof of work is proof of work relies upon basically the law of random numbers. And so that’s what we’re, we’re utilizing. When you do proof of work, what’s happening is that you are, you’re basically, let’s say, rolling gigantic dice. And every single time you do this is called a hash. And what comes back is a number and you’re fundamentally trying to roll below a certain number that’s like astronomically hard to do. So if you tried to do this by chance, I mean, to give you an example, like we’re, we’re talking about X hashes that are being done on these Bitcoin networks. So it’s a million, million, million of these roles. So that’s a one with 18 zeros that you have to do every second in order that every 10 minutes you would come up with this number. So it’s like, it’s actually that it’s, it’s your, it’s less likely. So there’s a lower probability of finding a Bitcoin block, like on a per hash basis, then a virgin birth would be. So it’s like, they would say, well, a virgin birth is like, technically possible, right? Even like a materialist, like they’d be like, okay, yeah, there’s some. And if we had this confluence of events and you could lay it out, but it would be like, oh, it’s a one in a quintillion, quadrillion chance that it would happen. Right. Well, finding a Bitcoin block is literally less than that, less probable than that. That’s why you got to do so many roles. Right. So you have this entire sphere of potential. And this is, so it’s basically, yeah. So a bunch of dyes being rolled, and then you have something which recognizes the right number. Yes. Yes. So, so some set of fixed rules. So these would be like the consensus rules, but that are also related to these mathematical truths, right? So they’re built on top of the one plus one equals two, right? So we have these truths. We have a, we have a, a box and arena, whatever you want to call it. We have some framework inside, in which everything is working. And this is the framework of nature. And then you have this very real probability that’s going on. And then you have the interaction of logos. So it’s that the logos actually is interacting with the, so the consciousness of individuals can change some aspects of the rules. The consciousness of the individuals is actually needed in order for somebody to turn on their machine and actually get it going, right? Like it can’t work by itself. Right. So there’s, so there’s this three way. So you have this reality, you have the system that’s working. It also needs, it also needs like something to care. Yes. I need, you need a, you need an agent to care about this or else, like it’s not going to happen. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And so this is the, very much to me in, in contemplation and prayer in, in, in moving through this. And again, I go into it relatively deeply in my book that it’s this very much to me is an echo of the, the sort of the, the trifurcation, if you will, of the one God into the three persons, into the, the eternal everlasting creator that is all everything into the potential of the Holy Spirit, where, where everything is, and into the, the logos of the sun, into, into the care, as you say, into the human element, right? And that it’s the interaction of all three of those that makes the system. Yeah. And so I’m not sure about that. For sure. I’m not sure about the Trinitarian, but what I do see for certain is like the creation narrative in Genesis, like the idea of heaven, earth, and then man, or, you know, the, the, the perceiver, the, the agent, which is able to act as a joining of the two together. So you have this like crazy potential that’s bubbling, that’s bubbling up all this stuff. You know, you have a pattern above, and then you have something in the middle, which is able to perceive that, which is valuable out of what is coming up is able to say, Oh, with that one, that number is the one I care about all those other numbers, they can just fall away. That’s the one that matters. And then that is what kind of makes the system work, let’s say. Yeah. I think that’s, I think that’s very accurate. And it is also that the, the numbers themselves, I mean, as you, as you just articulated, it’s not the numbers themselves that are valuable because getting the same number on a future block is not, there’s nothing there. It doesn’t mean anything. So it’s not just that you’re looking for that number, right? It’s, it’s that you have to have a very specific number that’s tied to a very specific history. Right. So, and that’s the, that’s the, as you say, that’s the awareness, that’s the consciousness that’s looking at it. And so it, when, when the system is, is looked at as it is, it’s very different than, and it’s very unfortunate to me that how it’s perceived by the public when they talk about Bitcoin and why you’re absolutely right to have suspicions about that story is that, Oh, this is something that I buy. And then the number goes up and then I sell it after the number has gone up and here I am. And it’s like, no, it’s really a lot deeper than that. There’s a lot more going on and it’s brand new. All right. Listen, we’ve been going for quite a while. So I think this, you’ve definitely brought me at least along and understanding the manner in which it generates value and at least, you know, how we can understand it as a kind of this cosmic pattern of how something has meaning, let’s say. And so it’s helpful. I still need to definitely need to think about it. And interestingly enough, I guess I’m being dragged into this right now. And so I will, I will start to, to kind of experiment it in participation with my, with my son and see, you know, I don’t, at least for now, it’s not, I also, I don’t, how can I say that? I’m not attached to it. And so, sure. Like for me, you know, we put a bit, put in a bit of money and we’re just kind of watching it. It’s like, it’s like, it’s like an experiment for me. So I’m just trying to figure out what, what it is. And so, yeah, so I will continue on. Thanks for your, thanks for your time. And well, what I would say, what I would say, Jonathan, with that is pull it off the exchange and put it in a, put it in a wallet and send it between your son, send it to people, use it. Right. Because I understand like you, you, you’ve put in the bit of money and you’re watching it go up, but it’s like, if you want, if you do want to feel it, if you do want to explore it, like you’re going to need to use it. Right. So you’re going to need to see. It doesn’t seem like there’s ways, like the idea that you could use it, it only works if you exist within a network of people that are, like you would, I would need to be like, let’s say in your network of crypto users, where we all recognize this. And so we can use it to exchange between like amongst each other. Right. But right now, let’s, I’m not, I’m not in that. Like I don’t have a world around me where I can say, Oh, you know, you know, like the guy, the guy who comes in, I don’t know, I guy comes to mow my lawn. And so I like send him some crypt. I send him some Bitcoin as a, as like a payment for, let’s say, but that doesn’t like, at least now it does, at least in my world, that doesn’t exist. Well, maybe, maybe what we could do is maybe for you, for your, you know, your carving class or one of those things, start accepting cryptocurrency. And if you want some help with that, yes. And then you can be in the community. I will, I will promote that to my community and tell them, go get into Jonathan’s class and pay with crypto. I sell all my books for crypto. I sell my classes for, for crypto. So it’s like, that will give you the opportunity. There’s nothing that allows you to feel the power more than actually not buying it and waiting for it to go up, but to actually sell goods and services and your labor and to get it in exchange. To use it. I would love to help you. All right. I would love to help you do that. All right. I will, I will definitely keep that in mind because I think, I think that I agree with you that it’s the only way that I can really understand what it is. And so, so we’ll see what happens everybody. We’ll, we’ll slowly down this path. So thanks. Thanks for everything, Supriya. And, and I’m for sure we’ll talk very soon. Thank you, brother.