The Building Blocks Podcast Episode 7 – Satoshi Nakamoto – Greg Bledsoe & Dr Craig S Wright

Podcast:

The Building Blocks Podcast Episode 7 – Satoshi Nakamoto

2022-07-12 — By Root

Greg Bledsoe & Dr Craig S Wright

https://blockbuilderlabs.com/podcast/buildingblocks-episode-7/

 

episode-7-DrCraigSWright.mp3

 

Unidentified [00:00:12] Welcome to the.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:00:13] Building Blocks Podcast, your go to source for intriguing insight and inspiration about the future that will be built on Bitcoin and blockchain. Music courtesy Nick Belinsky. Nick Valencia at gmail.com. Greetings and welcome to another edition of the Building Blocks podcast. I’m your host, Greg Bledsoe, and today I am honored to have someone famous or infamous, depending on your perspective. Dr. Craig. Steven Wright. We are very, very privileged to have gotten some of his time to have a conversation today. Thank you, Dr. Wright, and welcome to the podcast.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:01:11] Thank you very much.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:01:13] So my original idea for this podcast, because we’ve had some really fun debate ish type exchanges on LinkedIn, was to kind of get into some of those topics where I know we disagree a little bit because there are some topics on which we very profoundly agree and it’s more fun. It’s always more fun to me to have a conversation about something I disagree with someone than it is something I agree. But when I asked people, What would you do if you could ask Satoshi Nakamoto one question? Universally, it seems what people are most interested in is you personally. So I thought I’d just like kind of get into your story a little bit and then if we have some time after we do that, I’d like to get into maybe some of the things where we where I know that we disagree. Uh, so.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:01:59] So.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:02:01] So my personal preamble here. So this is the man that I believe to be Satoshi Nakamoto. It only took me a few hundred hours of research to come to that conclusion. And it wasn’t the Wired and Gizmodo articles that convinced me because I’m always suspicious when I’m told to believe something. I’m always suspicious why it is. Why is someone telling me to believe this and I have to go and confirm it for myself. And so over time, I became convinced. And I’m happy to give I don’t want to get into a lot of that evidence right now, but I’m happy to do that if people want it. You just let me know. I’ll tell you what. What convinced me. But. I certainly believe that Dr. Wright is the inventor of Bitcoin, is the author of the White Paper. And I also believe that Bitcoin is the most significant innovation since the opening of the Internet because it’s another collaboration layer. The opening of the Internet gave us the possibility of ultra wide scale collaboration and just changed the game in terms of the number of ideas that could be tried and floated and lowering barriers, barriers to entry to markets. And now Bitcoin does the same thing again, but exponentially lowers them as a shared data layer, as a with an economic incentive structure that will make it stable and valuable over time. I’m convinced that it’s the future. Now, when I was, I actually gave up on Bitcoin. At a certain point, I personally became aware of the White Paper around 2011, right about the time that Satoshi Nakamoto kind of went away. I kind of became aware of the white paper and started just following it with interest. While my personal life was in a bit of turmoil and I didn’t have a lot of energy to like put into it, but I did set up a laptop and try to mine a little bit and did not find a block. But it was a fine experiment. I think I burned out my laptop on that, but it was but it was fun and I just followed it. I just kept following and following it. And then over time it became apparent that it was not going to be the thing that had interested me in the beginning, kind of in a different way. The incentive structures were getting progressively wrecked, which were going to take the long term value out of it. And so I kind of sold all of the things that I had accumulated. I gave up on it, stopped paying attention to it, took my career in other directions. And then that was it was after that, actually. I think that you were outed. You were doxxed by Wired and Gizmodo and.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:04:50] Well, actually it was our client because he was the one communicating, which I didn’t actually find out until the Florida caucus where I got all the evidence of him and hundreds of different email accounts where he was talking to everyone.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:05:05] Yeah, I think I was going to get into that. I think that he is by far the one with the most incentive to to try to put you to try to out you, but also to put Davis front and center in the story, which both Wired and Gizmodo did. So I want to get into that. But I actually came back around. It was actually during the pandemic. I helped build a business and I sold it and took up to pay out and was going to go back for capital to try to build something else. And that’s when that was I left the business in February of 2020 and then in March 2020 the world stopped. And it turns out it’s a really bad time to get capital when the economy is shrinking by 33% a quarter. So my plan is to have a little time to think and look around a little bit. When looked back at crypto saw, there were some really interesting developments that I hadn’t really been as tuned into, like BSB. And Bitcoin Satoshi vision was back to kind of proposing the things that I thought were interesting about it in the first in the first place, something that levels the playing field. That’s what I was most interested about something that opens up opportunity and levels the playing field. Takes out rent seeking middle people from being stoppers and gatekeepers. And that’s the that is the vision that has always attracted me to it. And so the thing that really, really stood out to me in the white paper, that really the thing that intrigued me the most is that most people don’t understand the importance of the incentive structures in anything that you do.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:06:51] I agree that it’s not just an economic system, mobility tools. So, I mean, the concept here is to reduce fees as low as possible. So the bit that I did back to the race to the bottom, which is the rest of the benefits consumers, more consumers being the lower price, the reduction in costs, transaction fees and costs. And the closer you can get to an efficient economic system.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:07:22] That I’m building in, competition is so critically important where people have to compete for my transaction data, for my they want me to put my data on chain. They want me to use them to do it. They want me to pay them for it. That’s just so critically important. And and the proof of work. To me, proof of work is kind of like lockean social contract theory in that people keep trying to improve on it, but every time they try to improve on it, they just go backwards. They just erode what is right about it. And so the proof of work is so critical in terms of building a stable system with the right economics. And I was just fascinated by this, and it was so aggravating to watch all these arguments.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:08:08] It’s actually just to interrupt. I mean, it’s a little bit different than people think. It’s not just action. It is the entirety of the world. So these signature verification, it is for me blocks proof of work is really all of that. And then finding the solution and at scale, the validation of signatures will actually take up more CPU. Utah. So what I said see the use of I didn’t use that because of respect to that. So you might have some basic out there, but without CPU’s grinding and all of the transactions which end up being more than 50% of the cost, then you’re not going to get fees. So it really is different of BTC because when you cap things off at four or five transactions a second, you don’t have the same dynamics of how you sort of create.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:09:01] Yeah, 100% true. And that’s what was so aggravating to watch this kind of that systematic destruction of this incentive structure. And that’s kind of why I just kind of rage quit, you know, the whole the whole ecosystem for a while because it was just I just like I couldn’t believe people didn’t understand, but I didn’t really have the time to invest, to get super involved, to try to kind of get things, to try to give my nudging, to push things back in the right direction. So I just kind of gave up. So I was very grateful, actually, when that you came back. And, you know, and I do want to get into that, too. But first, so when I got kind of became aware that Bitcoin was a thing, you were kind of already stepping back as Satoshi Nakamoto. So why did you make the decision to kind of fold up the tent on the Satoshi pseudonym?

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:09:59] Well, I didn’t really I just wasn’t in the front line. So I’m in the background. I kept going with with everything. And by 2030 I built a company in Australia with 53 staff developers, etc. I’ve been working on probably since then. So no one actually knew that I had the biggest bitcoin company in the world in 2013. The problems I had needed to be fixed, first of all. I was going through a breakup and a divorce. I needed to get that away. I also took away some of my focus. And on top of that, I had the Australian Stock Exchange, the Australian Tax Office, arguing with me about whether bitcoin was real and the hobby was. It’s about things. I put an R&D claim to the Tax Office for some of the different areas associated with Bitcoin. Blockchain was developing in 2009. And the Tax Office argued that this thing would never make any money. It was a complete joke and that my claim shouldn’t get through. Even things like my electricity expenditure. They argued that it was all a hobby and I should have to deduct them. And I think my albums, the first few or probably tens of thousands of dollars and running all the computers. And then, of course, they were arguing that I was probably running a throw up to my growth that silly things like this. So eventually I ended up in court by the end of 2013 and I won. But of course by then Bitcoin was had already hit $100 us. And so the tax office then had a hard argument trying to say that this is worth something that would be worth anything. And then they came at me from the other side saying, Now you trying to hide the fact that you had. So let me let me just say that.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:12:08] So for the listeners, the Australian Tax Office works weirdly where agents kind of get commission. On what they collect, which was shocking to me to find out. I didn’t find that out until the Florida trial, which I followed fairly closely. And the Florida trial, for people who don’t know, was where Ira the IRA Kleiman, on behalf of his estranged brother, Dave Kleiman, sued Dr. Wright in order to get half of his Bitcoin holdings and failed miserably and kind of tried to say that Craig was a forger. But it actually turns out that Ira is the forger or someone is a forger. Probably Ira. Ira has the most allegedly the most incentive to do so. So the but the.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:12:58] Well, even some of the documents weren’t necessarily forged. I mean, one of the things I explained was we had a corporation. And like my time, Vivica would take paper copies and reskin them. And if you scan a document, the PDF, it’s not going to have the original site. I mean, that’s a back up practice. You have a paper copy, scan it later at a later date. But that doesn’t mean anything about forging.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:13:28] Yeah. Yeah, I mean fair. But there was one particular email. That was a it was alleged that you had written, but it didn’t it turns out, based on the metadata, that you could not have written it, but Ira could have. So and that’s what I mean when I say and the once you once someone is caught in something like that, then you kind of have to then you have to take a double look at everything they say and do after that. So.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:13:58] Well, I mean, that’s the whole point. The where’s the money? Where’s the trial go? And when you’ve got someone suing another person to get billions of dollars, then they’ve got an incentive to try it.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:14:12] Yes.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:14:13] Yes. I mean, from my point of view, the simple answer would have been just to go in the beginning and say, no, I’m not Satoshi Nakamoto because some have away.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:14:22] Right. And that’s the next thing I really wanted to talk to you about is. So you were kind of had moved more to the background had sort of retired the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym. And then you got doxxed by Wired and Gizmodo, probably tipped off by Ira Kleiman, who also put Dave in the story. Probably to a greater degree than he was. But Dave was there because he was your friend and was. So he was around, but not in the way that Ira, it seems to me from the evidence in the Florida trial, not in the way that Ira tried to make it seem so. But at first.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:14:58] The way I would put it is Dave was my best friend and I wanted to be heavily involved. But unfortunately Dave was very sick and he didn’t tell me as I would have tried out more if I’d known. But that’s the type of person was he couldn’t talk about these things. So unfortunately, because he was ill, he wasn’t able to do everything it would have been sort of integrated into, Yeah.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:15:31] Yeah, male pride is a hell of a thing and I know a little bit about this, not telling people how bad things are when my life was just basically fell apart. I didn’t tell anybody. Not even my parents really knew. So that resonates with me. And then.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:15:46] Well, I mean, I did the same in 2011 when my marriage was falling apart, when I was fighting with the tax office, trying to bankruptcy. And I didn’t go around telling people. I mean, I didn’t ask for help. I didn’t say, hey, look, the tax office is filing bankruptcy against me to try and close down my court case so I wouldn’t be happy with it. I didn’t took the marriage is falling apart because of all this, but it’s part of my.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:16:17] Yeah, it’s a there are some hard lessons I’ve learned about you know what just tell people like. Suck it up and take some help when you need it. That’s that. It’s tough. It’s tough. It really, really grinds you down a little bit. But, uh, I don’t know. You get older, you get wiser, hopefully, which, uh, like, now I was, my wife was asking me when I was. So I get excited about things and I just talk about them and my wife tolerates it, me talking about random things that she has very little interest in. And so one of the things during the Florida trial, I was I was just very interested in it. And so I just talk about it sometimes and she’d smile and nod and she would ask me, so what kind of what kind of person is is Dr. Right? And I, I said, so he’s got a little he’s seems to be on the spectrum a little bit like, you know, what we used to call Asperger’s, now we call it like on the like for high functioning end of the autism spectrum. So that gives him a low tolerance for certain things. So he comes across as a little grumpy and curmudgeonly sometimes, but he’s super smart and, you know, really determined and, you know, maybe gets a little bit of a bad rap. And she says, well, I see why you like him. And I said, I said, What do you mean? She said, Game recognized game. And I was like, Oh, snap, are you calling me grumpy and curmudgeonly? She’s like, Well, I wouldn’t be the first one. I was like, Oh, now that hurts a little bit, but okay, I can, I can take that. So yeah. I a lot of a lot of your story is like it really resonates with me personally. You know. Kind of like having to, like, step back. Not quit, but just reload that. I’ve had to do that a couple of different times. And the real key I always tell my kids a rookie in life is Don’t give up. Just like rework your plan. Yeah, the half of life is just keep showing up. Put yourself in a position for good things to happen, and over time, more good things will happen than bad, you know, like so. And your story is, to me, a really good example of that, you know, and I feel like you’re very misunderstood being, you know, people have certain expectations of what people are supposed to be based on sort of societal norms and when you’re. So for me, I have pretty bad ADHD. And it took me a while to figure out that other people’s expectations really made my ego take a beating because I couldn’t always meet them. I couldn’t always do the thing people wanted me to do. But if I could work my life where I could follow my interest, where I could utilize that hyperfocus as a superpower, that I could do some really interesting things. I could turn up some really interesting insights that other people didn’t think deeply enough to get. And I feel like you’ve you’re like the the avatar of doing that. You’ve kind of like used your neurodiversity as a superpower to do things that no one else really could do.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:19:29] Well, it enables. But you’re saying that hyperfocus I mean, this is an area that I’ve discovered most people don’t do well. I can sit for 10 hours studying, writing, etc.. And most people, if they’re studying for 3 hours, will spend two of it talking to other people, wandering around, pretending to study in papers with bits and pieces in the middle that are.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:19:54] Study after study has found that people usually turn out about six good hours of work a day are 6 hours of productivity is about the max that most people can turn out and on a on a on a bad day when I’m having to do things that I find tedious, I probably turn out less than that. But on a day when I’m get in, when I really get into a nice flow state. I can work 24 hours solid and barely take bathroom breaks. Like, I like like lose track of time and suddenly become aware that I am my bladder is about to explode, you know? So my wife hates it. She hates it so much because I don’t hear anything. Like, I just literally, like the kids are screaming and the house is on fire and I’m just like, still in whatever I’m doing, jazz or bananas. But it really is kind of like a superpower. And I get angry when that flow state gets broken because it’s so hard. I’m so dependent on the muse, right? You have to kind of have to spiral into that. And I’ve kind of learned there’s a little bit of a science to it. So so your story is inspiring, too. I think a lot of people who don’t meet other people’s expectations get misunderstood. And that’s what I really one of the things I really want to highlight here is, you know, well, just the concept of sticking with it and overcoming, because I think you’ve really, really done that and against. Great opposition, which is one of the things that turned me on, that I really need to take another look at the claims that when you so at first you denied being Satoshi Nakamoto and then like I don’t know.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:21:31] Well, I didn’t deny it. I just.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:21:33] Well, fair point.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:21:35] Though. I mean, I didn’t actually say no. I just say so.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:21:40] Yeah. So it was probably I don’t know, it’s couple of months. You were you were saying you were just like kind of dodging the question. But but the article being out there probably turned your life into, like, a circus. What was that like? What was that like?

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:21:58] It was complete silence for a while. I mean, I had people sort of trying to follow me, trying to do things like that, and to get the film put on the windows of the house so that people could take pictures of me. I mean, none of that I asked for just sort of happened and I wasn’t expecting it. So I went from a very private existence where no one knew who was doing what I was doing or who I was with the pop stars to different areas with different narratives. And suddenly everyone knew everything I’m doing and investigating. Every time I sort of decide to have a conflict.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:22:48] Yeah. I mean, it’s really like I know from some of one of my past struggles involved my kids, where I was involved in court proceedings to try to keep them safe. For years. The court stayed involved in our life for years, and we were everything we did was under scrutiny. Every decision could be taken out of context and made to seem nefarious. And it was, you know, it’s hell. It’s how to live under that kind of scrutiny. And you’ve been doing it now basically ever since.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:23:25] Yeah, I get recognized quite a bit now, though. I went to upstate New York just over the last week and someone recognized me in the place. I was saying Finger Lakes, me very much rural back to upstate New York and something great was sitting in the lobby of the restaurant, in the lobby of the hotel and restaurant there and met someone and got a pitch when I was in Toronto just a few days before that. So I went from being completely unknown to occasionally walking down the street in London and having people ask for it.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:24:13] So yeah, I would I would have been one of those people if I’d have seen you on the streets when I was when I was around, I would been in London a few times here and there, but a senior I’d have been like, Oh, Doctor, I really got to have a selfie, please, you know, being very annoying. And I hate that. I really hate when I see people do that to like celebrities and stuff because mostly I think celebrities and the concept of celebrity is just dumb and most celebrities are dumb and they don’t matter and who cares? And so when people like just won’t let them alone, let them eat dinner, I’d, like, drives me crazy. But then I’m like, there are certain people that I would probably be like that with, but they’re really smart people. There are people who are like dumb things that actually matter. And, you know, I think you’re one of those people because I’m just jealous.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:24:56] So not not.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:24:57] No, I didn’t even know what a Kardashian was for the longest time because I really don’t care about I listen, I murder at Trivial Pursuit. I will just I kill everyone in Trivial Pursuit until it comes to the pop questions, the pop culture questions, which I miss almost everyone because I just don’t I follow.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:25:18] I just.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:25:18] Don’t care.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:25:19] I know some things. I know a little bit about boxing. Well. Oh, yeah. Do you like cricket or baseball? Also, you know, I’m the.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:25:29] Same.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:25:30] Babe Ruth. I don’t do that.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:25:33] I do follow athletics more than anything else. And but I don’t view people’s athletic prowess as, you know, the same when it’s gifts they were born with. I don’t value that as much as people who. Do things the smart way, like people who are innovative in combat sports. I like even people who I would personally dislike, like, say, somebody like Conor McGregor, who’s very brash and like really in your face and has said some things that are offensive. And I probably wouldn’t like him very much if I knew him, but he was very innovative and striking in mixed martial arts. And that I admire I admire a lot the way he the way he approaches the game mentally, the way he creates the illusion he creates the illusion of distance and range to draw out behaviors that he wants to counter. And Israel Adesanya now has taken a lot of those innovations and taken them even further. And his Matrix style, where he can just he’s got such a long reach, he can just kind of lean back and let you swing at him and you can’t hit him, but he can hit you and that kind of. So the mental game combat sports but the mental game not like the not like just the physical attributes is like I follow that a lot because it’s really intelligence and that gets that makes me admire people. It’s intelligence and wisdom and it takes both. I feel like it really took both to write the Bitcoin White Paper.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:27:04] Although the wisdom of still learning. But a lot of the time it comes from experience and. I mean, there are things I could have done better even with the cooperation and change. One of the things when we started it, I told Stefan when we moved from Australia over to London, that what I wanted to do was step back and just research and just create things. And that sounds great for me. But the problem I had even then was. Without giving. I mean, if I’ve got a vision, then I have to actually deploy that. If I don’t lead and I don’t focus people on what my vision is, then they’re going to go off and bring in their own and they’re not going to have focus. And I’ve discovered that the hard way. I mean, we had that 2011. I mean, I basically told Gavin, Don’t change the protocol, just fix the broken bits. And of course, everyone goes out there and starts mucking around and wanting to change.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:28:10] And and in ways that seem like to this uneducated observer that seemed to be designed to erode its capability to be disruptive, like.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:28:21] Well, unfortunately, going right back to 2012 and then in particular after Silk Road, there were a lot of people who came in in the 2011 period following the collapse of V gold and then subsequently the collapse of Liberty Reserve. And as they started clearing out, the blockchain is traceable. They saw that as a problem. So the key aspect of Bitcoin that differentiates it from a cryptocurrency is that it is completely open, auditable and traceable. And that traceability is what differentiates it from something like cash or digital products that ended up basically collapsing because they couldn’t be traced. They couldn’t have direct interaction with law enforcement. So the concept of Bitcoin is to remove the overall sort of NSA to level monitoring everything and going back to a more human intelligence approach where you interview someone and find out where they got something over the next person. That way you have to target where you’re going to focus you. You focus on the biggest offenders and you try and take them out of groups, not just the population.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:29:45] Yeah. So this is an argument I had with people for a long time where people were saying that anonymous Internet money, where that’s what kind of what they thought Bitcoin was. And I was like, No, no, it’s not anonymous. It’s private, it’s private. I mean, you can figure out anything, but you have to decide to put resources into it. Like you trace, you can trace it, but it’s not easy. It’s not necessarily going to be it’s not necessarily going to be worth it. Like to monitor everything. You just don’t have the kind of compute power. So you have to figure out who is. So now you have to focus on the bad actors. And this is the this is the way the system is designed to work.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:30:27] And exactly which is the opposite of the size model right at the moment, which is capture everybody’s traffic.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:30:33] And then you’re kind of targeting everyone thinking everyone is a bad actor or could be a bad actor.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:30:40] So instead of targeting the big guys, you target all the little guys.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:30:45] And that’s I agree 100%. It’s a it’s an approach that makes us serfs on the state plantation. We exist at their sufferance. And that’s the wrong model. The right model is one where it’s the consent of the governed. I don’t need the consent of the government. The government needs my consent. That’s the fundamental model difference that I think we’ve kind of forgotten. I think a lot of people have become conditioned to want the government involved in everything, to make things fair, as if that were possible. And I think you’re just not going to get fair, because, as Milton Friedman said, the benevolent intentions of people who accumulate power does not render that power harmless. And I think that’s one of the most important that’s another one of the most important insights of the modern world, which a lot of people who want to be powerful have kind of forgotten. Because once you I feel like once you’ve got more money than you can ever spend, then what do you want next? Well, how about we just, like, run the world? How about we just accumulate power? It’s an. I’ve known a couple of billionaires. You’re very atypical for a billionaire, in my opinion, because you don’t seem to have that kind of divine right of kings kind of mentality where you think.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:32:00] Well, I have a different thing. What I want is with more money, I can get more education, more books, more other things out of this. So I’ve signed up for a lot more university courses. I do a lot more study because I can afford it now. I mean, I went from spending as much as I could in the past to spending as much as I can now, which is more time, less government. And I think I spent about 1.5 million last year on education with different university courses, different programs, etc.. And that’s how I now spend my money. I spend it.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:32:47] That is the dream like to be able to do, to have it to be secure enough to do what you want to do, not what you have to do. I mean, like the concept of retirement is rubbish to me. Like why would I want to sit down and drink Mai Tais on the beach for the rest of my life? Like that doesn’t seem very appealing. It seems super.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:33:05] Boring.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:33:06] Or I would.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:33:08] I mean, I could do it exactly right.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:33:10] And then I need something to do and it just so.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:33:13] Happens, I mean, even then, I mean, even then I wouldn’t do the whole beach, my entire business. I’m actually taking my four days of break, but I’m still doing a few calls in the Bahamas. That’s me. But that’s in a few weeks. And we’re going over to northern Spain, Catalonia.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:33:36] Our beautiful region.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:33:38] And I’m going. And rather than my size, what I’m actually going to be doing is I’m going to a restaurant out there and getting trained in the cooking sort of style in Catalonia. Cooking style. Nice. So it’s the Michelin starred chefs that are in the region. And I’ve done this with some of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants and things like that in the past and be able to afford to do this another, not just sitting in the restaurant actually going behind and working. I know it sounds weird to some people, but I mean, I should pay for the privilege of going into a top restaurant and. Yes. Making it.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:34:28] Well, my wife and I went to the Savoy. That was our big splurge. We don’t like driving to Scotland. And our first stop was in London. And I had. I was it was a kind of I combined a business trip with a anniversary, our one of our milestone anniversaries. We went to the Savoy while we were in London. And I wanted the tour. I wanted to go back in the kitchen and I wanted to see I wanted to like Scout. And it’s I’m with you. I’m 100% with you. And the food in Catalonia really is remarkably good. So, you know, another thing we might talk about if we get through some of the personal stuff is the Catalonian secession movement, which is another fascinating thing that I think you probably have some some thoughts on, as do I. But so why did you decide to own it seems like, you know, a couple of months went by. You realized you weren’t getting away from this and then you decided, just take the bull by the horns and own this thing. And what what was that process like?

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:35:36] I tried not to at first. I tried to basically say, yes, it’s me, never go away. And that didn’t work. Strangely enough, the whole I don’t want to do any more interviews go away. And that only made the media worse. And ironically, you try and sell media. I don’t want to talk to you. And the first thing we did was like you. Why did you want to talk to us? Everyone wants to talk to us. No, I don’t. But you must wear media. So go from one extreme to the other, you simply would just leave me alone. And I do the opposite. Then, unfortunately, I started trying to change the silly narrative that was starting in the BTC land, which was the segregated witness tap rooms, changing all the algorithms, building whitening, which isn’t at all about Scotland. It’s about removing the logging.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:36:42] Which which still failed because you they still you still leave enough breadcrumbs to get caught, as we’ve seen recently. So it’s they’re still failing at it.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:36:51] But that’s why they that’s why they’re going to try and add taproot snore and torture to they make it something, but unfortunately, they’re not going to succeed. The whole innovation of why Bitcoin works when blockchain works is that it’s a public audit system.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:37:12] That’s that. And I wish I could explain this to people that it’s it’s having an immutable, transparent data layer.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:37:21] Like it’s also creating cash. Well, that seems to me.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:37:27] To me, I’ve always the way I’ve always viewed it. And you can correct me. You can you can you can fix this view of mine if it’s wrong. Like the. The coin part is just the incentive structure that supports the bit part. That’s now kind of the way I think about it.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:37:42] It’s integrated. It’s all integrated. So does the incentive structure add some monetary units, etc.? But at the I mean, you can build other things on top of it, like central bank, digital currencies, etc. and they could be efficient. But to be truly efficient you need to just stay in the basic unit of satoshis because every time you add letters, you make less efficiency, you add cost. So by going directly in Bitcoin, you can go into some micropayments and in thousand percent units and with payment channels even cheaper. I mean, the promise is now being able to pay someone 100th of a cent for 4 billion communication packets.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:38:32] Yeah, 100% true either. That’s exactly my view, is that the really interesting possibilities get opened up by the shared data layer and micropayments. Like that’s what opens up things that you can’t do any other way. That’s and the ability to make a dollar a day is like doubling some people’s income. It’s life changing to some people.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:38:57] I mean, right now, right now, you can’t actually have people work from a lot of systems like Amazon Turk. In the West we say terrible, exploitative, etc. These people only earn $70 a day if you capable of earning $10 a day on your own. $1 a day, but you need a bank account. Then the problem is how do we get that bank account? And it’s a catch 22 for one of the world. If you could now find a way of even getting a temporary loan, a micro loan, to get you connected to the Internet, to do some tasks, to learn how to do things, to earn money and pay for things. As you’re going, suddenly it opens up opportunities and we can say, Oh, it’s terrible. These people are being exploited. But it’s like the Nike factories in China before a lot of the purchase closed them. They were people applying to get jobs in Nike and waiting 18 to 24 months, just waiting to hope that they could be exploited by Nike because the level of exploitation in the this what we consider exploitation is very different to of like China or to African nations where if you’re being paid three or four times the average wage in your area, you don’t consider yourself exploited.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:40:20] You consider you consider yourself lucky to have the opportunity. And this opportunity can get opened up for a lot of people. As the Internet proliferates, less and less people are illiterate. Less and less people don’t have the Internet. Less and less people like you go to Pakistan, and underneath the burkas, there’s you see the light of cell phones. Like this is a this development is continuing to. If you have a cell phone, you can make a dollar a day in bitcoin. And you could do that right now. Really?

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:40:53] Yeah. You could make more than that. I mean, doing small tasks for people.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:40:59] Yeah. I mean, you got. You got, I mean, all of these micro. And so when I, when I actually spoke at the Coingeek conference in I was part of a panel on in Lefty’s in Miami. And this is how I opened up the talk was I said, right now there are trillions and trillions of dollars in value that are locked out of global markets because of the cost of doing business in the payment layer. Hmm. And if you remove that.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:41:29] And right now, the other problem is the world has gone towards silly financial products and 52% of our GDP is finance. So we’re taking people away from the end goal and creating a whole lot of sort of money transfer systems that don’t really help build societies, that don’t create more when you need some level of finance. But 50% of the economy, as.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:42:00] It was TARP in the United States, that that made me really realize what a serious problem we have. That the entire financial infrastructure, if you were going to design a financial infrastructure to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich. What we have is what you would design. So I don’t I’m not going to say I know what the intention was or that it’s a vast conspiracy. But you the incentives here and regulatory capture you and now too big to fail. Like really?

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:42:35] It’s all my answer is very simple. You know what they say about the sort of parts of.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:42:41] 100% true. 100% true. The cobra effect is so real. You don’t like you think you’re doing something good. And then it turns out you just had no idea what the incentives you’re setting actually are. That’s actually the secret sauce of my consulting career was to go and point out the net, the rot, the incentive structure the organization actually had versus the one they thought they had. They’re usually the problem is people prioritizing output over outcome. And as Drucker said, someone with a metric to meet will meet that metric, even if they have to wreck the organization to do it. Because that’s how they get paid, because that’s what they get rewarded and punished based on. And and and if you see this, the COBRA effect is everywhere. It’s in a basically every government program. And I mean, really, TARP is thieving from the poor to give it to bail out the rich who took too much risk. Because they felt insulated from that risk. And that’s the problem. You can’t insulate people from risk without massive unintended consequences. So that’s a little bit of a diversion. So I think my original question I was going for before we went off on our very interesting tangent was Why? Okay. So at first you tried to say, Yes, it’s me, but leave me alone. And then at some point you said, okay, you guys are not going to leave me alone. And you changed you changed course dramatically and decided to come out and just be in charge of Bitcoin. What changed your mind on that?

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:44:18] Well, the first bit was in 2017. I talked to people before SegWit and this other stuff was fully implemented, trying to convince people that it was not a good way to go. So I talked to a whole lot of people who now don’t like me and James and a lot of BTC developers. And I tried to. Well, make the argument that changing the protocol wasn’t a good thing. I didn’t sit there going, Hey, yo, Santos. I just said, Look, that shouldn’t matter what I’m giving you as fact. This changes the protocol significantly, and you can’t change the protocol. The reason for that, it’s like, again, game. You can’t suddenly, halfway through the game, change the rules. You can’t say anyone with a token who’s currently landed on this square gets an extra $20 just because they are. It doesn’t make it fit yet. So this is the distinction people don’t get. You can’t change the protocol to Bitcoin because it changes the power structures of the power structures of Bitcoin. Any time you change, you give some people a heads up. You give some people extra problems. Some things break. Some things need to be changed. So the protocol doesn’t include like some of the things like turning off any of the codes. I mean, they should have been turned back on, but they’re not a protocol feature. That’s part of the intellectual contract. You can’t make people do it. Unfortunately, people didn’t realize that and started arguing that it’s part of the protocol. It’s not the protocol. It’s things like changing and adding on CLTV, obviously adding differences that drastically change how and what time and sequencing works. All of those create a different system and to pass it off in full of bitcoin is just wrong. So I have no problem with them creating a new system and doing that as an experiment, making another version of it. But you don’t do it to Bitcoin. So unfortunately I had to fight to keep the Bitcoin blockchain going without it being hijacked and bastardized completely. But then others, including friends of Bitmain and Javier, had different ideas again. And even after all of this, the first thing they want do is change the protocol and alter the system again. And the thing is, nothing they wanted to do could be done apart from removing Logan. The only aspect of bitcoin that nobody can get rid of and still have it as Bitcoin is the logging and traceability. Now you can sit there going over. The government can do X, Y, Z against me. Well, if you’re not on Silk Road and you’re not doing significant levels of crime. Then they won’t. But equally, if you buy you the $20 baby, nobody’s going to care, honestly.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:47:44] Yeah, I think that’s 100% correct, because you only have look, the intelligence community only has so many, so many resources to spend and they’re not going to focus on you, you know? If you’re if you’re doing normal levels of like resistance type stuff, like I just don’t like I say, I don’t agree with the FDA. I want to use something they don’t want me to have. So I’m going to buy it on a gray market or whatever. Like, they’re nobody really nobody cares that much about that. There’s ways to get caught doing that kind of stuff. I mean, look, so many people use steroids. There there proliferate in the athletic community. Now, how when’s the last time you saw somebody get arrested for that? Like, yeah, it’s you. If you’re, you know, and the privacy the privacy aspect, that amount of compute power it takes to figure out they’re not going to go find everybody who spent, you know, $80 on a vial of testosterone or, you know, whatever. So, yeah, I’m with you 100%. It’s like it doesn’t a lot of these arguments are so theoretical and they don’t make sense. Like I’ll say, I’m borderline. So my own ideological journey took me kind of like to the border of something like volunteerism or agorism. And then I kind of came back because there’s a few questions. I just couldn’t figure out how you answer if there’s absolutely no state, if there’s absolutely no power.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:49:08] Well, it needs to be a balance. So, I mean, this is the point I keep making. Federalist number ten, Madison. Q A democracy always ends up collapsing. So the reason that America is a republic and not a democracy, although that’s been eroded, is to balance the different aspects of power, not to have a all powerful democracy, because then the mass the mob can do anything they want, including taking property away from others, including interning people, etc.. So you want to remove the power from both the mob and the individuals and take power imbalances between everyone so that nobody can exert it?

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:49:55] Exactly right. And this is the key point people miss because they don’t think deeply about incentive structures. To me, a very easy way to demonstrate this is just to ask someone, okay, let’s say you live on a cul de sac. You have four neighbors. If your four neighbors get together and vote to take your stuff. Does that make it okay? No. Okay. So then at what point of scale does it become okay? Like there’s no if the scale doesn’t change it. Right. So, yeah. So the tyranny of the majority is no different than the tyranny of a minority. So, yeah.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:50:30] So I mean, 51% doesn’t make it right for the 49.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:50:36] Exactly right. Exactly right. And people just don’t. That’s another thing that’s horribly misunderstood and why we’ve got to get back to teaching kids about Hobbs and Locke and the fact that Hobbs lost this argument and Locke won. And it’s been proven. And the more we try to improve it, the worse we’re making it. So.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:50:55] Well, I mean, if we look at something like Rwanda back in the 1990s, people don’t seem to understand that it was the majority government that oppressed the minority and committed genocide.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:51:08] Well, everything that happened in Germany was legal. Is that is the primary argument for that?

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:51:13] Exactly.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:51:13] They made it legal. By an elected representative body. And then they did. Does that make it right? No, obviously not. We still held them accountable. So, you know, and we had a lot of people had to sacrifice to hold that to hold them accountable and prevent it. And, you know, I feel like the modern world and this is this is where my sociological theory about things can only get so good before a society will self-destruct is because your expectations are so out of whack from what you’re actually going to experience. And you just start you just start thinking everything is owed to you. And that all comes at somebody else’s? Well.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:51:57] I would argue that. I’d argue that comes to education. And over time, we always move away from education. I mean, education gets lost. We’ll be looking at the Roman Empire around the fourth century or you’re looking at today. And the changes in education and cultural ization mean that we move away from what worked in the past into trying things for the sake of trying them, or, as we do now, confusing vocational training and getting something for a job with education. Education is about the creation of wisdom, citizenship and knowledge about us as people. It it’s focused heavily on the humanities. So I do a lot of study in the areas of mathematics and physics, but I balance them with studies in history and politics.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:52:52] I think that’s so important to be well rounded. But the problem is. The well-rounded ness that people are getting is not actually well rounded.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:53:03] So much anymore. We’re not caring about educating people. We’re caring about getting rights for jobs. Yeah. And I mean the very different concepts. Learning how to sing, how to read, how to basically understand the wisdom of the past. And that’s a critical part of what is really is.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:53:24] Well, the last Jedi taught us that even the force wants to destroy the Jedi order and destroy all of their historic works. That’s our modern conception. That’s the. We throw out all the wisdom of the past. They got nothing to teach us. That’s the I feel like this is the biggest problem. Right. And and I feel like there’s has been a systematic destruction of our appreciation for how we got here by calling it colonialist and patriarchal and all of this kind of stuff.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:53:54] I completely agree. And we forget I mean, we forget that it’s like the British and the French who sort of fought to get rid of slavery. I mean, made it illegal. Every culture through history had had slaves. But then someone starts changing. Wasn’t the idea of saying, this is wrong and we forget that? That’s the key difference here. The Romans and slaves, the Greeks had slaves. The Babylonians had slaves. The Egyptians had slaves. Everyone through history.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:54:27] And so a lot of places in the world still do. I mean, they’re still there’s like something like 27 million Africans in slavery in the Middle East right now. Like. Like slavery still exists. Human trafficking still exists. Like, we ain’t done yet. We ain’t going. And we ain’t going to get there by calling the good stuff that we’re doing. Colonialist and patriarchal. We’re not going to like by trying to say mathematics is racist and and science is colonial patriarchy. That’s not going to get us anywhere. But everybody wants to cause this. And again, it goes back. Everybody needs something to fight for. Everybody needs a cause. And they look around and they don’t see real problems. So they invent fake problems so they can fight them. But the problem is, these are not problems that can be solved.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:55:12] We got real problems.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:55:13] We really do.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:55:14] Problems. But the people sit there going, we can’t fix that. Well, the problem is you can do small and incremental and slow. Incremental things don’t sound like, well, I can just go out there and click like 100 times and and do a sitting on the streets and everything will be fixed. Rather, I have to work hard for 20, 30 years.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:55:37] And you put yourself on the line the way Martin Luther King Jr did. Like he put himself on the line. Like they would have tests where if he wouldn’t let you protest with him, they would make you line up and insult you and say horrible stuff to you and slap you in the face. And if you reacted, then you were out. You couldn’t protest with them because. That’s effective over time. Now, I will say maybe it’s a defect in my character that actually Malcolm X’s rhetoric resonates with me. More than Martin Luther King Jr’s would have at the time, because, like somebody puts a boot on your neck. My response is fight. And his response was. Put it in. Put it in the news. Let people see it. Generate empathy and sympathy. And that works way better in the long term. But you’ve got to be willing to put yourself on the line for it.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:56:32] And the bit that most people don’t seem to want to understand, however, is that all of this is slow. Yes, incremental. And everything that we’re doing needs to be built over time. So it is not about going out there and we need to change the world. I mean, for instance, if we look at some mental health problems, that’s a growing problem at the moment because we see institutionalized in a lot of issues. And by doing that, we have a lot of people on the street who don’t get treatment anymore, have problems. And we say overnight we fix them. But you don’t. Now it’s not going to go away. There’s no cure for things like schizophrenia. So you either managed over someone’s life or and you remember that 20 years from now, you’re going to be managing people over their lives. It’s not. We’re just going to fix this and go away. You don’t. You fix it and you fix it and you fix it. And it requires tons of effort and work. And they’re the sort of things that we thought people that they shouldn’t have to do anymore, make educated people to think they can click their fingers and just by doing something simple that everything’s fixed. But I mean, like the I mean, on a completely different flip side to this, you take the California most. I mean, the reality here is exactly right. It’s not about not about all the temperature changes or anything like this. It is pure and simple.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:58:13] Because the environmentalists wouldn’t let them control burns.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [00:58:18] Exactly. Which happens to be what the indigenous people in the region use anyway. So in Australia the Indigenous people always used to be controlled burns and we stopped that saying that they were wrong. And then we get lots of fires and then we go, Oh, we need to learn from Indigenous wisdom. Well, I mean, if we’d been doing what we have done, then we would have found that we didn’t have all these fires because the underbrush for ten years and then the confederation. But you wouldn’t be so.

 

Greg Bledsoe [00:58:50] That’s 100% true. And something that’s another infuriating thing is seeing people argue against themselves on behalf of the environment. So I’m I don’t call myself an environmentalist because of the stigma, but I’m a conservationist. And my dad was a superintendent of state parks in the state of Alabama. And I grew up in a very conservationist wildlife, wildland forest management culture. And so I kind of know what you have to do to keep these ecosystems healthy. And if you want to say, well, they were healthy before humans, it’s like, okay, but we’ve been here long enough. You want to if you want to do it without humans, you got to go back in time. 5000 years before we made all the changes we made, before we removed all the predators. Now you have to. Now we have to step in and play the role of those predators. Now we have to step in. And unless you want wolves coming up in your yard, then you’re going to have to, you know, step in and play the role that wolves used to play. So it’s just maddening to me to say, like California and the drought situation, they know they’re going to have a drought every four years or so. The population has increased by ten fold since 1956, but there has not been a significant water project in that time. They haven’t built any reservoirs. They haven’t done anything to collect water. They, like the irrigation systems, are all dependent on them. They don’t work in drought, but they could work in drought. But the environmentalist lobby stops anywhere.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:00:19] This is. But this is really the centralization versus decentralization of localization as a political problem rather than saying centralization of political localization. Now in localizing. Elinor Ostrom then demonstrated that if we have a need to have a common pool of resources, we can get rid of the tragedy of the commons by giving stewardship that ownership and community for that. So we can have people. I of park and people in a community can run that themselves. They can own the forest, they can live there and have responsibility. And we can push things out to the edges and that can be monitored and we can make sure that it’s done right. And we can train people, we can educate people to give them all the help that will allow them to do what needs to be done, allow them to know that it’s their house that they’re protecting, that they in their community are making something that is a difference. Yes.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:01:21] Define a station. Is a term that describes this process of pushing decision making away from the center, because the center is actually the worst place to make most decisions. And this is true. This this concept is true in organizations, corporations. It’s true in government. It’s true. It’s true and it holds true. The people in the center. You can think of any organization or any any collective entity like a donor where you have outside that is in contact with reality and an inside that is insulated from the reality of the market and the economy. And we we because we have this aristocratic mindset that there are certain people who are just better able to make decisions for everybody. We want to make all the decisions in the center, but information only gets there through a game of whisper. Where the information is distorted as it approaches.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:02:17] The way that I would say it as a balance is that the best thing to do is to have the center set of vision, a leadership policy and a strategy, and then that is pushed out to the agents. So if you have everyone on the edge having their own strategy, nothing gets done.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:02:37] Exactly.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:02:37] If you look at the sit ins in 2008, it’s like everyone we go to find a strategy and complain about the government and all the stuff in the financial collapse. Back then, nothing happens. Nothing of value. The committee never created something. You need leadership. The leadership, though, should sit, hey, this is what we’re doing. And then allow people to go out there, get that fixed idea, that fixed vision, and build it themselves. And then lots of experiments on the saying.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:03:11] Yes, 100%. And this is like you’ve basically just hit on my organizational theory. I wish I could. Maybe I’ll show you my roadmap document I created recently that basically is basically this basically elucidate. It takes that like my particular organizational philosophy, which is basically exactly what you just described and how strategy coming from leadership. But tactics are being implemented by the people doing the work.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:03:40] Well, this was actually my biggest value Bitcoin. And I said, this is my vision. And then I said, basically Gavin and others. And I said, just follow it. But I wasn’t there to make sure that was followed. I mean, I didn’t need to micromanage. I didn’t need to sit there and say yes no to everything. Rather, what I needed to do was stay there going, This is the vision. Yes. Bitcoin can scale. Stop theory. Yes, bitcoin did grow. Yes, the block size doesn’t matter. And I needed to have those arguments since they look like I did in 2008. Bitcoin will end up consolidating into a few large data center nodes. So what? That competitive anyone can compete. Someone from China can compete with someone from the US to compete with someone from you because they can compete with someone from London. Dot, dot, dot. It doesn’t matter. And as those players come and go, the competitive edge will find the best. And that’s I mean, I needed to keep pushing that point. I needed to keep focusing on the vision, which is what I’m trying to do now. We need to scale not just slightly. I mean, talking about a million transactions a second by the end of the year, but by the end of the decade, I want to get in the order of 1000000000 to 10 billion transactions a second. It just keeps going from there. And people say, why do we need this? Well, it’s very simple. I mean, it’s a Kevin Costner moment. If you build it, they will come. If it’s cheaper, faster, more reliable. Yes. People will just start using it. Why? Because it’s cheaper, fast.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:05:29] It’s economically inevitable.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:05:31] And this is. And this is the difference with I’m setting a central vision. I’m going to build this. What are people going to do? My answer is, I don’t care. I’m building the plumbing. I’m building the platform. This is the decentralized, the localized. Anything you want. If you can build something, make money and it’s legal growth.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:06:00] Yeah, 100%.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:06:02] And I’m sorry if it’s legal because there’s an audit trail, right? So if you’re doing a legal stuff, you end up like. Yes.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:06:08] Yes. And so to me, the fact that you included Bitcoin script is evidence of your knowledge, of your lack of knowledge of how the ultimate innovation would get used. Like, I don’t know what you’re going to do here. To have this and do whatever you want with it. And so, of course, what’s one of the first things that Blockstream gets involved in takes out is a Bitcoin script. So yeah.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:06:35] You have to use it that way. I mean, this is the irony. They talk about centralization. That is centralization. They’re sitting there as the Politburo of the Soviets of BTC telling everyone that this is a democracy. You can vote any way you like as long as it sounds like Stalin. We’re a democracy. Everyone does this.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:07:01] No matter who votes, it only matters who counts those.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:07:05] He’s like, well, I mean, everyone actually did. Everyone who voted voted for Stalin. They just if you voted against them, they tracked you down and sent you to do love. So, I mean, let’s see, I can get to a drug or I can vote for Stalin. Good luck. Stop. And this is BTC. If you do something we don’t like. And you’ve got a product you’re building. We might just change the protocol a little bit. And suddenly your product doesn’t. That doesn’t work anymore. We might turn that feature that you need off. We might tweak it and give someone else an advance warning. Yeah, but if you have a fixed protocol, you can’t do that. I can’t go up to someone and go, I don’t like your business model. I’m going to change this aspect of the protocol and break it. I mean, sitting there going, I’m going to make Bitcoin scale more and have more transactions is completely different. You don’t even need to keep everything. SPV means I need the hash header, not the whole block. And the irony people don’t seem to get is the hash header for each block is just as secure as the whole block. People get over it. What if I don’t? What if it doesn’t validate? What if. Here’s the answer for you. If the ashes of the binary tree, the Merkle tree don’t work, then the hash header doesn’t work. So either the hash is invalid all through or the hash is valid all through. There’s no partial answer here either the whole lot is secure or nothing is. It’s very much a pretty binary structure.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:08:57] Yeah, 100%. You can’t have an and it validates everything below it. Every new thing validates everything below it. And I like people don’t. I wish I could find a better way to explain that to people because it’s one of the things I find the hardest to explain that people just like it takes a while for people to get their head wrapped around that. Okay. So I don’t think we ever got to the to to the real the question that I was trying to, to to draw out, which is like, why did you change your mind? And it was and I think I think if I was going to summarize the answer, it’s because people kept mucking everything up.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:09:36] So in 2017, yes, I came I went out with John McCain, was in a conference and I stood in front and talked to people saying, look, stop doing this whole silly. We can’t scale. Stop saying that everyone needs to run rallies. Because, I mean, the reality is there are only 15 BTC nodes. There are only three of those controlling 5050 1% of the network. All of this lie about having 10,000 is just a few. Alive is not 10,000 nodes. Nodes create blocks. The only consensus mechanism is to create a block and have it built 100 deep. So I know people want to say otherwise. There’s lots of nodes and I’m helping sort of rough weekend wise from The Simpsons, but you’re not now. So I had to come out and stand in front of people to say, look, I’m not going to answer one way or the other. First 2017, I was not confirming or denying. If you asked me about this at all, she said, I’m not answering that question. What I’m going to tell you is how Bitcoin should work. And I sat there and I tried to tell people and I tried to stop saying it through. I said, It’s a stupid change. I said, It doesn’t lead to anything good. I said, Bitcoin doesn’t do that and you can’t change it. And it’s not a community project for the protocol. You don’t get that choice and everyone did it anyway. So unfortunately, that’s going to be a very big negative for a lot of people soon.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:11:07] But yeah, that’s the next thing I wanted to get to. Is that how soon after you changed your mind about kind of. You’re like, I feel like just as an observer, I feel like the probable sequence of events here is you get doxxed, you try to like go back to living your life the way you were realized. You can’t then realize that this is actually a kind of a position of influence now that if you just if you own it like people didn’t want you to be people kept it kept trying to make you be Satoshi Nakamoto until you were. And then they told you to stop being Satoshi Nakamoto because they don’t like what you’re saying.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:11:46] Well, they actually started calling me fake, calling me a fraud before I even said it. So part of why I said screw it was I was not I refused to say whether I was or wasn’t. I refused to say no, not because I was, though. And then I got asked in court and I said I didn’t want to answer. And the judge basically slammed me saying, You have to. And I said, Well, yes, I did. Yes, I am, because I was under drugs. And then, of course, I got slammed by everyone line and all the rest of all. I’m sorry, but. If I’m getting put under oath. It’s very simple. I’m not lying. I put my hand on the Bible and I had to answer. So it wasn’t my choice. I was forced into that position and I wasn’t going to lie under oath.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:12:43] So then. The question had to be answered. And then like at some point you decided to use this now to kind of take the take the narrative back, take the bull by the horns. And it appears to me that you have a fairly deep strategy here to right the ship to help burn out the craft, which partially will happen just from the pure economics of the fact that they don’t work and have no value. They’ll burn themselves out. But in in partially, there’s there’s a legal strategy here to exert legal ownership that will, I think, be having repercussions for a long time to come. So how long did it take you to sort of develop the strategy that you were going to implement, to sort of take it all back from the people who were mucking about with it?

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:13:39] That really came about and started happening. After the implementation of Secrets. I did my best to try and talk to people in the background and try to convince them that it was silly. Some people were convinced for a little bit and then decided that they could do whatever bitcoin anyway and then formed their own sort of brake again. But I tried to work with people and tried to enable others into understanding bitcoin and that didn’t work. So I decided that I needed to come back in openness. I mean, my creation, the iPhone, of course. So it’s no good sitting there expecting other people to fix it. If I want it fixed, then I need to sit there and say, Look, this is what I designed. This is what the sentence means. This is what it is. The Bitcoin whitepaper says you can have an alert system. There’s a reason for it. I built the alert system. There was a reason for taking it out. Well. I said, this is what happens. I explain in simple words the white paper a couple dozen times is the word ownership or owner. It doesn’t say position. It doesn’t say. Position is protected by notes. It says ownership. It says all of this is fee based. It says it’s structured. Now, that works incredibly well for small transactions. For large transactions, you still need middlemen because you have AML requirements, KYC requirements. You have all of this stuff anyway. And sitting there going, Oh, well, we, we have the ability to send $1,000,000 around world. So what? So do y I’m I’m a I’m banking, of course, which in London is the Queen’s Bank because I’m wealthy and I have the ability to send large amounts of money around as well. So what Bitcoin doesn’t save any of that doesn’t solve any of this. In fact, I have more protection and controls with private bankers than I ever will with sort of smart contracts and speaking to them, which is really just idiotic. Now, on the other hand, what I can’t do, I can’t send money around the world instantly at a fraction of a cent. If I want to send $1,000,000, I can do that cheaper, but I can send $0.15. I mean, that is the utter irony of all this right now. I can send £1,000,000 to someone in the other side of the world and see someone over there in Chicago. And it will get to them very quickly. They’ll see it in their account. They’ll start getting interest. And it will cost me practically nothing. Yeah. If I want to send $0.15, it’ll probably cost me £5.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:16:46] Exactly. It’s. It’s absurd. There’s some of this there’s some absurdities built in here which which Bitcoin corrects. And, you know, it it boggles my mind. Some people wouldn’t be in favor of that.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:17:00] And it’s not removing taking bitcoin doesn’t know the impact. It doesn’t give them a home loan. It doesn’t give them a business loan. It doesn’t give them a lease. What it does is it gives them inclusions in cash, digital cash for people who have never been online, never been able to send money around the world, who don’t have PayPal. We don’t have MasterCards. Now, suddenly they can get online and buy and sell and be part of the digital economy.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:17:32] And that exactly is the vision that that drew me to it to start with, not the like. Okay. So I’ll, I’ll admit that the kind of anarcho capitalist idea of stateless money is attractive to.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:17:46] That’s also called fun.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:17:48] So that’s one of the things we could debate.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:17:51] But I’ve written Roxanne, quite a lot of them. And the problem with the anarcho capitalist is they’re taking right out of the Marxist definition of capitalism and the handbook. Oh.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:18:08] 100% true.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:18:09] Marxist concept. I mean, they don’t even realize they’re actually right into it that a deep Marxist philosophy of what capitalism is and why. Well, there is not understanding that the capitalism isn’t the problem. It is the constant push towards murder.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:18:26] So, yeah, capitalism is actually not even really a thing. I mean, Marx coined the term, but both what we think of as Adam Smith’s free market insights and Marx’s predictions that have proven to be completely false were both really attempts to describe how economics works in the absence of controls. If you just let people do what they want to do, what’s going to happen? I mean, Marc.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:18:54] Only to a point. I mean, Adam Smith wasn’t libertarian in that way. He was he had the argument that markets need controls. This is also said you need a small, controlled government. You need someone who sets the rules. You need someone who.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:19:14] Yes, 100%.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:19:15] But doesn’t interfere.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:19:16] And that’s exactly where I feel government should be as small as possible, but no smaller. It should be as it should be the least amount of intrusive possible. It should be the least amount of coercive possible. But there is a level under which it is not really possible to go without kind of some bad effects. Like what’s your legal structure to protect people’s rights from each other? Right. You can’t leave that to me to.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:19:42] Do this.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:19:43] If I like.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:19:44] Well, this is the other aspect that we’re taking away in developing more central strategies and more statute. We’re taking away the right for people to object through judicial process. When a jury knows that someone technically is guilty, that votes the not guilty anyway because they think in this case they should be allowed to get that. Just don’t like that law overturn it. That’s a part of the yes. Western system. And with that, on top of that, the common law we’re voting towards now. Tort is a very powerful aspect of how Commonwealth systems work and instead we’re putting in all these statutes that make complexity the great for. That’s it. Now if you think about it for a moment, I would personally get rid of all of the drug abuse and decriminalize it, but enable tort enabled, negligence enabled product to enable all the rest. Now imagine that any drug dealer could be sued. They could be sued for their product. I’ve become addicted. So I’m going to sue you, Mr. Drug Dealer, because you didn’t tell me about how bad this was. My teeth fell out because of one on ice. I want a new set of engines. Suddenly people are going to have a different.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:21:06] This is like the.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:21:08] If I’m addicted.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:21:09] Yeah, 100%. This is the return to Juris Naturals and giving people recourse even against the government. A very, very, very critical Western innovation. And the more you take that away from individuals and that and the tort process, the more you centralize it and say, okay, we’ll make everything fair. The game inevitably gets skewed towards the people who have the power to make everything fair and their bodies.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:21:39] And so at the end of the day, a lot of the reason that America ended up the way that it was as a republic was the whole sorry, we don’t want to have a central government overseas not representing us. We want to be able to locally representative federalism. And ironically, the way that the argument went at the time was, yes, we don’t want stamp duty, we don’t want this other stuff. But if you tell us how much tax you want to raise, we write sells and the government said, no, we have to do it so we can control it. But wasn’t the idea is you just want to I mean, you just need tax. We’ll pay you that. How much? And we will raise it in the best way that suits our community. The end goal is to satisfy. This is the difference in website vision versus micromanagement. If you go up and say, look, you want to raise this much money through stamp duty, how about instead we put in some of the text that we accept. We accept. Then you should be going. Great. I’m still getting my money. The end goal is achieved. And the irony is, the stamp duty sort of wall before they separated ended up causing something like 25% unemployment in Britain at the time in the before the Revolutionary War. There were a lot of debts that no one thought would be paid because the trade stopped. So all these manufacturers in England stopped producing and for a very small amount of money, which was something like £60,000 that they would have collected, the government ended up losing billions of pounds. Back then, when millions of pounds was worth something. And that’s the ultimate irony here. They damaged their own economy in England far more than they would have ever created.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:23:37] Yeah, this is this is why I’m a free trader. I mean, you’re not the only person you’re hurting with. Kind of punitive trade stuff is yourself. By your preventing, you’re actually creating incentive to go somewhere else. When you think you’re creating incentive to do one thing and you’re actually the October effect. I mean, it just gets us. It just gives us all the time.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:24:00] Well, it also goes back to, like, differential and incremental sort of taxation. I mean, at one stage in America’s history, there was a 99.7% tax on all of us.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:24:14] Well, only at the very top. Only at the very top. That was.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:24:18] I agree. Yeah. What I’m saying is, if you were at that top and you’re earning more, what do you.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:24:23] That’s exactly right.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:24:25] So instead of pay yourself an income now all you do is you read this. That’s right. Anyway, so the irony in all this is that if they said even like 40% tax rate, then you still get look, I’m getting $0.60 in the dollar. You have to keep working. Instead of you get to that race and people go, I’m just not going to pay myself.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:24:46] Well, there’s and this is where the idea of the Laffer curve comes from, that there’s actually a maximum there’s actually a maximum tax rate you’re going to you’re going to extract no matter what you set nominal rates to. And it’s about 18% of GDP. That is the maximum you’re going to extract, because the moment it goes above that, you have incentivized people to cheat, to bend the rules, to find ways around it, to go to other jurisdictions. Because contrary to what people think, tax jurisdictions are competitive and you want to take more so they’ll they’ll just take it somewhere else. And so you’re actually hurting yourself by setting your tax rates higher. And like people, it’s become very fashionable to attack trickle down economics. But the truth is that when you when you disincentivize the people who are paying everyone else, you’ve you’re you’re actually hurting everyone. And the proof of this is that every time in the United States history, tax rates have been cut, Treasury revenues go up. And it’s but it’s a little bit counterintuitive. Like most things that are in reality, it’s a little bit counterintuitive. And you have to think more than 1/2 to understand it.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:26:01] Well, I mean, if you consider that companies like Google just keep money overseas. They do that because, well, if we bring it back into the country, then they pay tax. So they just leave it sitting over there. But if you decrease the amount of tax, then that money comes back in and gets invested into American infrastructure and.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:26:24] Exactly right.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:26:26] So, I mean, that’s the irony people get. So we say, well, we own the services capital asset, but we’re not there to take any money 100%.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:26:35] So you’re incentivized it just to sit there and not get reinvested. Yeah. The whole Eat the rich philosophy is so wrongheaded. I mean, Margaret Thatcher had the best quote of all time on this when she was in in part one of some some MP challenged her and said the divide between the rich and the poor has gotten wider under your leadership. And she says you just expose yourself because every single person is better off. Everyone’s making more. But you’d rather the poor be more poor than the rich be more rich and.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:27:15] Well, this is the thing people don’t get. If we take two individuals and we say, Alice, who’s earning $10 an hour and now we have Bob who gets $20 now and society doubles. Initially, the differential between the two is $10 an hour. But because society’s doubled. Now Alice is getting $20 and she’s better by ten goals and she has more. But now, Bob. He’s doubled again. So he has $40 for each one. So we can look at that and go. Originally there was a $10 differential between them. Now, if we do that on a certain way, labor statistics, we can say there’s a $30 differential between them.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:28:01] Exactly right.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:28:03] From where the numbers.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:28:04] Get bigger.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:28:05] Is actually $20.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:28:06] But if the numbers go up, then all the numbers get bigger, including the differential. But it’s the same is the same as a percentage.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:28:12] Then what? It doubles again. I know, but then doubles again. And now Ellis is on 40 and Bob is 80. And we can sit there going, There’s a $40 differential. In the past it was a $10 differential. So the difference is bigger again, and it’s getting larger all the time. But the truth of the matter is that this has more after those two things than what we originally had is more. But Alice Stewart has more than sheep.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:28:45] I mean, the best way that I the best way I’ve ever found to explain this to people who have a hard time with it, whose fundamental sense of fairness starts to get triggered, is to say that a rising tide lifts all boats. You’ve got to you don’t you don’t take pieces of the pie away from someone to give to somebody else. You make the pie bigger. And the only way you do that is to create wealth. If we really cared about the poor, we’d be obsessed with wealth creation. What creates wealth? Because then that wealth goes. That it does trickle. It trickles. It creates incentives. Competition for labor. Competition is the key. Okay, so let me see. We got about 30 minutes left, I think. So I did want to ask you a couple of more questions here. So one of the. Here’s one that I think might take a while to get into. So one of the questions that somebody wanted me to ask you about was to talk about your childhood a little bit and what it was like growing up in Australia. And so and I don’t love to ask those kind of questions that much, but I did think of a way to link that back to something that I did that I do find really, really interesting. Not that your childhood not interesting. I think I’m sure it’s deeply interesting, but it’s more interesting in terms of how it made you who you are. And so when I look at the White Paper and I see how deeply thought out the incentive structures are in there, I wonder what it was in your background, specifically in your childhood, in the ways that you grew up and what you observe that made you think in that way. So what do you think is there? Like, I talk a lot about people who are successful from the South, about there are some unique things about being from the southeastern United States. People think of it as backwards and bumpkin and whatever, but there are some things that you absorb culturally that give you certain advantages. And I wonder if you have identified some of those things for yourself and how you grew up.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:30:47] Oh, I. I grew up quite poor. At one stage, we lived above a small shop. I make too many systems. So I actually lived in what was her whole life at one stage, which everyone came for. But so I watched my mother work many jobs to sort out how she was working. And but I also saw other people who did quite well because of their positions. And what I learned was it’s not about how hard you work, but sort of combination of hard work and using your brain. You’ve got to innovate. You’ve got to find things. So.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:31:39] Yeah, I it’s interesting. I grew up, you know, rural south in the woods, basically, you know, lower middle class, borderline poverty. The family actually did go bankrupt at one point. And I was sleeping on a couch for a while as a as a teenager, you know. And I had to watch my parents pull it back together and, you know, and just and figure out how to go forward and kind of, you know, those are and I’ve done very well in my own life about completed most of the people who did better than me when I was younger, most people who had more than me. And I attribute that to the mindset you get struggling. Uh, that debt you if you don’t see what it’s like to to how hard it actually is. Then you you’d never have the expectation that you’re going to have to do a lot of things you don’t want to do. You’re going to life the grind. And if you can’t embrace that grind and the parts that you don’t like and which is actually even harder for me because I have ADHD, doing the things that are not interesting to me is like trying to pull my own teeth out with a rusty pair of pliers. It’s super, super hard, but you just have to figure it out. You know, I never did figure that out til I was a grown till I was a grown man in my twenties. And I literally it would bring me to tears, too, to try to do that, to do some of those things that I don’t like doing because they needed to be done. It would be so frustrating. But, you know, again, half of life is just showing up. Just keep showing up every day. Show up and good things will happen to you.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:33:21] Well, not always, but you get to accept that they do as well. Sometimes you got to realize that no matter what you do things.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:33:32] You know that my dad had a saying. So my parents had a lot of really good sayings in my grandparents. My grandparents grew up during the Depression, and so my parents absorbed a lot of that depression, wisdom and sort of like, you know, like one of my mom, one of my grandmother’s favorite sayings as you can put a cat in the oven that don’t make it a biscuit, which is just wise. That’s just as wise you get to where you, you know. But one of my dad’s sayings was.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:34:02] Remind me.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:34:06] Well, one of my dad’s sayings was, shit happens. You deal with it in. Life goes on. I must have heard him say that, like, you know, a hundred times over the course of my life, but I really kind of deeply absorbed that, that into every life, some rain must fall and everybody’s dealt a hand and it doesn’t really matter. Some people get a better one. We get a worse one. You just got to play the one you’re dealt the best. You can make good decisions. And I sort of absorbed that and came to see life is kind of a probability tree that there are certain branches that tend to lead towards good outcomes in certain branches that tend to lead towards bad outcomes. And the job your job as a human is to make the decisions that prune the bad probability trees that puts you that continually move you in a position into a position for more good things to happen than bad and to just keep raising the bar. And it’s it is, it goes back to incrementalism and Kaizen You know, the concept of Kaizen is kind of deeply baked into the lean thinking and dev ops and kind of the incremental improve organizational improvement philosophies. And that’s basically my whole life philosophy and I feel like yours as well. It seems evident that you’ve embraced the idea of Kaizen a continual good change. So one more one more question. This is a question I know some people have for you. And, you know, obviously, you can tell you can tell people to buzz off. But I just want to give you the opportunity to do so. So, you know, you’ve said a few times in various mediums that coins will move. Meaning that at some point btc’s stuff will get shifted around and possibly liquidated. That’s how it’s commonly interpreted. Whether that’s exactly what you mean or not, I can’t say. Maybe you can clarify that. But then recently, 200 so-called sleeping coins that I think remind in 2011 or 2010.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:36:05] They weren’t mine. Just because they’ve got this is. Just because you see something doesn’t mean it’s anyone’s. Yeah.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:36:13] Agreed. Sorry.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:36:15] Yeah, that’s mean. Stop looking at the blockchain and caring about of else.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:36:20] I agree with you 100%. It’s not a really interesting question to me, but I know that people wonder if that was you moving coins around. And you can do it.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:36:30] This is the whole point. Stop caring about other people’s money.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:36:34] And that is a sufficient answer. It is 100% a sufficient answer for me. I believe you will get pestered about this more. But I can.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:36:44] When things happen for me. And my answer is very simple. Nodes enforce ownership.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:36:53] I accept that answer 100%. That is totally satisfactory to me. And. I guess we’re at about an hour and 40 minutes. That’s quite a bit of your time for this conversation. We probably don’t have time to get into any of the areas where we disagree, but I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation enough that you’ll want to do it again. No. And will.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:37:22] Disagree.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:37:23] Well, I think we touched on it a little bit. So you dislike Agile methodology? And I made my career telling people how they were, why they they dislike Agile methodology because they were doing it wrong. Because they misunderstood. Because it was misunderstood.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:37:39] Lots of people do. I’ve had lots of people have been very good and agile. And the problem is. This is what I want built. That’s what I get.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:37:51] And so I would argue. Agile is really about risk management.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:37:59] Because I’d say that as well. I mean.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:38:03] Think of it like I mean, let me just try to explain what I’m trying to say right there.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:38:07] Well, what else it is? It’s like putting your eggs not in endorsement.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:38:12] I would disagree.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:38:13] Now, if you don’t know how to manage, I mean, is the I’m going to use ten baskets of my eggs all over the place because they’ll be safer. My answer is no, they won’t. If you put them all in one and you concentrate the hell out of keeping that basket safe, that’s. Well, okay.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:38:30] So let me let me extend your analogy a little bit. And here’s what I think the real point of Agile is. Okay? So Agile is you have 100 eggs that you’re going to put, that you’re going to that you’re going to put in them you’re going to do something with. Okay. So you have an idea in your mind that if I take these hundred eggs and I do that I use them like this, I will get a thousand eggs back. And so you take your eggs and you put them in a position where you’re either right or you’re wrong. Where you get a thousand eggs, are you maybe you get nothing. Okay. So what if there’s a way to get to that ultimate vision where I only I’m only risking ten eggs at a time or one egg, and I can test my hypothesis. Really? You can think of agile, really, as hypothesis driven development, where I have a hypothesis of value, but I’m not sure until it goes into the market if that’s right or wrong. So what I’m going to do is progressively test the hypothesis.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:39:28] What you’re saying is, I don’t actually know. So. That’s right. You spend resources and you try something new to expend resources and you try something. That worked that way. But Bitcoin wouldn’t have existed. I went through, I designed the thing and I tested it and I drew it out and it was horrible. What a fool type thing with all the different things drawn out and structured. And the simple answer was because then I could see that it would work. So I could have tried something and failed and tried something and failed. And so it would be that it would never be a protocol.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:40:07] What I would argue.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:40:08] The only.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:40:09] What I would argue is that you actually created an MVP. What is the minimally viable way to test this? And you and you built that. And then continue to iterate on it. Once you had tested the hypothesis of value, you continued to iterate on it. And I would argue that that is the agile philosophy.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:40:31] I would say differently. I would say what I did was I did the best product that I could do personally. And then in Australia involved with what we were trying to build, apart from cool knocking around with everything almost all the time and making life difficult was a system that would scale, improve the scale, etc.. Now. We put a lot of time and effort into that, and it was designed. Why is that? And the problem was, if the protocol didn’t change, it would be simple. But the protocol ended up changing. Which you want to know. What I was trying to do. Now we’ve gone back and terra nodes being built sort of by planning it all in the first place and knowing what we’re going to do. But it’s not a is a method. It is. I mean, when you’re talking about something and you don’t know the outcome, fine. But this is something that can’t change anything. Can’t alter anything. Can’t. Lock up anything. There’s no future.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:41:43] So I agree with you.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:41:44] It has.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:41:45] When you’re does when you’re thinking about what is my minimally viable product. Sometimes it has to be a completely baked vision before you can start. And Bitcoin is an example of this. You have to understand how all the pieces work together, but you still have to be open to the idea that you might be slightly off and might need to make some adjustments. But you can’t really worry about that upfront because the whole system links together. It’s an interlinked system or they all have to be. All the incentive structures have to be linked, they have to be together or this whole system doesn’t work. So you built you.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:42:18] Actually see I would actually argue I would argue that the problem was I listen to people and I turn things over and allowed the samples. I allowed help to convince me that Blocksize could be a problem for goals and things like this. And I allowed others to say that, look, there are vulnerabilities. We need to turn off all the codes and check them all. So what I should have said is show me with the vulnerabilities and we’ll fix it. Show me why. This is DOS and we’ll fix it. Instead. Yeah. But at the time I did. I mean, all these people told me how wonderful they were. And being in spite believed them. I mean, Eric Voorhees was basically living on a friend’s house at the time, which I had no idea about. What I found out later was he was unemployable, unemployed, and no one would hire him for his coding. And they’re listening to him. Tell me where the problems of Bitcoin were.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:43:21] Yeah. I mean, I hear you. I hear you. And you know that this is a this is basically another one of those, like, secrets that I locked into early in my career and has really helped me, is learning that the real problems are never in the technical system. They’re in the human system. And if you really think about it, there is no technical system, because if you take a computer out of a box and you put it on the desk, what does it do? It does nothing until a human tells it what to do. I mean, so it’s.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:43:47] Really in some of the arguments people make about, oh, this protocol could be more efficient, blah, blah, blah, who cares? I mean, if you’re talking point 1% efficiency over the ability to scale zillions of transactions, I mean, what do you do to your waste of lots of money doing something slightly different and getting 100% true?

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:44:10] There’s a diminishing return on optimization and this is why in development there’s the saying that premature optimization is the root of all evil. Make sure you have something that needs optimizing. Test it first. Make sure people care. If nobody cares, you don’t need to optimize it. You only need to optimize it if people use it. So that’s the first thing that you have to that you have to solve is does anybody care about this? Put it in the market. That’s why my philosophy is ship it, put it in the market because the only test that really matters is production is put it in the market and see if anybody cares about it and iteratively. And that’s why that’s how I got to where I am. In terms of the iterative powered testing of your hypothesis of value, you believe something is valuable, but nobody else may or may may believe that. So the only way to know, as you put it, in the market and see if anybody cares, put the minimum amount of resources you have to into it to get to that test. Now you can optimize it. Now care if it’s a monolith or microservices. Now care if it’s what is the fundamental architecture like caring about that stuff too early. You go bankrupt before you get to something that people want. Now I think the stars aligned for you for for bitcoin so perfectly of you know, the technological layers were ripe for this, the economic layers were right for this. The like everything was just right. And it took a really concerted effort to prevent it from quickly becoming what it what it could what it seems to now finally be starting to emerge as.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:45:45] Well, I’d say it wasn’t perfect. I mean, the reason I say that is at the same time it was released. There were a lot of other things happened that became a negative of all of us. I mean, like I was saying, ego was taken down by the government. And I have all those people positive then Liberty Reserve. And so, I mean, people equated Bitcoin to the global financial crisis erroneously. I mean, I’ve stated before that I started coding in a time before all of that had happened, and I knew that the financial crisis was going to happen just after I would have been the guy in charge.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:46:29] Yeah. Yeah. One of my favorite movies of all time, by the way, the big short. You know, the recognition of bubbles is so important. It’s why it’s why I’m not getting as crushed as a lot of people right now, because I knew we were in an everything bubble and I’ve been waiting on it to crash for a few years. The problem is that the markets can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent. That’s a that I forget where that quote comes from. But it’s a it’s one I think a lot of people in BSD community and ecosystem are feeling is that, you know, we’re everybody’s trying to build useful stuff and waiting on the craft to get burned out. But they’re running out of money in the process of trying to build stuff. And it’s a it’s a problem. It’s a problem. And the real trick is to be able to say, before you can win, you have to not lose. So being able to not lose long enough, that’s also kind of my jujitsu philosophy of self-defense, is that the first thing is stay safe. And then the second thing is you win, but you can’t win if you don’t stay safe. And that’s kind of where we’re feeling that pain. And in the BSP ecosystem right now, what it worth? Yeah. Got any words of encouragement for us?

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:47:39] Build. Don’t speculate. At the end of the day, the key thing to do here is stop thinking about how much money you’re going to make through other people’s effort and understand that it’s about how much you do yourself.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:47:54] Yeah, 100%, I think. I think nobody as far as I know. So one thing that Jackson Lasky said that I found to be profoundly true was that the that getting into the BSD ecosystem is a filter. And you have to like be able to see things that a particular way to have arrived here. So you have a lot of people who are highly rational, who believe the fundamentals are going to win. They’re kind of anti speculation. And they’re builders. They’re builders who want to use it for what you for, what it’s for. But at the same time, what we really need is the mass adoption to kick in. And I think we’re really close. I think we’re really close to mass adoption.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:48:38] But also, I mean, it’s like the Internet is exponential is sort of this funny thing that looks flat. Yeah, looks flat. Your looks flat. What the hell that happened?

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:48:52] I’ll tell you, in 2017, I started doing a series of talks on how we are exiting the U-shape of the curve of exponential change. The innovation timeline used to be millennia and then it was centuries, and then it was decades, and then it was years, and now it’s months and where it’s going to continue accelerating. So now we have to predicate everything we do on that, that tomorrow is not going to look like today. And and and I think that’s where we are right now with Bitcoin as well, which is a big is going to be a huge factor in enabling people to make change even quicker, which every layer of innovation allows people to make change quicker. And Bitcoin is going to make that. It’s going to lower the barrier to entry so low that many, many people are going to be able to escape wage slavery and and build residual and passive income. It’s going to be it’s going to be revolutionary.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:49:56] So I know what you’re saying and some people will. My answer is very simple. We have time preference differences and I’ve got long horizon time preferences. I’m lucky I can think about things and plan for 20 years as people plan 20 minutes. And the problem with that is what you’re saying. There might be more money, but don’t go out there. And rather than wait a week, they’ll take a payday loan and they’ll get further debt. And that’s not going to change just because we have more.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:50:29] No, I agree.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:50:31] We need to educate these people now to actually be like let and plan their finances. So. Unfortunately, even with more money, we’re not going to sell. Yeah.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:50:44] I agree with you 100% that there’s there’s multiple layers to this and you can’t create. And this is the whole argument that’s going on in society right now is what’s the right goal to strive for? Is it equal outcomes or equal opportunity? Is it does everything have to appear perfectly equal on the surface for things to be equal under the surface? And the truth is like, how can you get to people who grew up in different cultures to have the same outcome when different siblings who grew up in the same household can’t equalize their outcomes now? Like, it’s just absurd. It’s an absurd. Like, all you can do is give people the opportunities and like, and this is my argument. So, so I volunteered in homeless efforts a lot. And the thing that I’ve really observed is that in the Western world, for the most part, and in the United States particularly, no one stays homeless for a long period of time, except people who either are have mental illness or choose to. Because the opportunity is there and we’re going to expand that opportunity and make it even easier to avoid the discouragement that leaves that leads people to just drop out because that’s what happens. Somebody just decides it’s too much trouble. I’m just going to drop out of society. And because there’s a playing field is tilted and it’s too hard and things that are this whole thing is unfair and that’s all true. So the more fair we can make it, the the less tries we can make it take for people, the better the world is, in my opinion.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:52:21] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the problem is we’ll always have someone sort of backing up, but allowing them to try again. And that’s why we have bankruptcy was to get past all their losses is 100% true.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:52:38] I mean, it’s really about it’s not the first try. It’s the fifth try. It’s the sixth try. You got to get to that. You got to get to that sixth try.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:52:48] You learn by filing. I mean, if you look at Richard Branson, I mean, one of the things I don’t like as much is in the past, he used to embrace his values, but now he likes to say how successfully always was. I think he was much better when he was sitting there going, I tried. I failed in this company. I tried. I failed in this company. I try to fail and look, I succeed.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:53:10] That’s it. Exactly.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:53:11] I mean, grit, resilience.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:53:13] And you got to we got to raise our kids to expect that that it’s not about how many times you get knocked down. It’s about how many times you get up, you know, dust yourself off. Try again. It’s cliche because it’s true. You know, there’s these say these sayings survive because they’re true. And this is why you don’t discard the wisdom of the ages, because they already figured some stuff out. Like kids don’t realize their parent’s already been through this. We already figured some things out and we learned it the hard way. And you don’t have to. But people, certain people like me are very hardheaded and can seem to only learn the hard way. That was the way I have learned almost everything. So hopefully I’ve set my kids up to like use me as a cautionary tale, if nothing else, and not have to learn everything the hard way. So and I honestly, I just want to take a second here. I mean, we’re at the end of our time that we have allotted. I think we could go for hours and hours, but I don’t think people like four hour podcasts are a thing. Right. But most people aren’t don’t have the time to sit and listen to it. I, I do.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:54:19] Yeah. Yeah.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:54:21] But I just want to thank you for, first of all, for taking the time to talk with me. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I hope that we have a lot more in the future because you’re a very interesting person to talk to. And, you know, I feel like every time I talk to you, I’m going to I’m going to learn something. And I but the second thing I really want to thank you for is for releasing the White Paper and for kicking this whole thing off. I feel that we’re on the verge of really making.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:54:50] An effort to get people to actually read it. BE Well, I mean, not, not with preconceived ideas, but to actually take the words for the original meaning, not what people have changed them to be defined it as in 2008. It doesn’t matter what people say it means now. It matters what it meant when the paper was written. And when you look at this, understand that ELLISON Bold, direct exchange, that doesn’t mean you sent to a node and understand ownership doesn’t mean yes. I mean these words that a dictionary need to think and that I’m saying.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:55:27] I love it. I love it. You’re in you’re an originalist. The Bitcoin originalist interpret it the way it was meant, not the way you think it should be.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:55:36] Yeah. It’s like the Constitution of the United States. I think they really meant was when they were thinking about this, they were planning that in 250 years that the computer systems that interact. No, no. Okay. No, I didn’t think that way. When they said privacy, they meant privacy. They said property limit, property stop reinterpret hundred percent.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:56:01] True. You’re the Justice Antonin Scalia of Bitcoin, which is a very big compliment in my opinion. I mean, obviously, this man had his problems, but but he.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:56:13] Yeah, well, I’m not into sort of judges who make more. You mean that they’re wrong? Yeah. I mean, their job is to basically.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:56:23] Exactly right.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:56:24] To. To make sure that the words are interpreted correctly. That the rules are followed. We go back to letting juries actually be there. I mean, we’ve gotten rid of juries in civil trials in the UK and I think that’s wrong and there’s a lot of push in the US to do it as well, which I think is wrong. Yeah.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:56:44] They really are.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:56:45] The will of the people.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:56:47] I mean, it’s one of the layers of protection from unjust laws is jury nullification. The concept that the jury can just nullify the law and say, we’re not going to convict somebody over this. And, you know, like mass disobedience cannot really be countered by a central authority. If like, I mean, this is like, okay, I’m about to get off on another tangent about how slavery actually ended. And it was by it was by basically state nullification of federal law. But, you know, we probably don’t have time for that. But I again, thank you so much for your contribution to society and the world, and thank you for taking the time to talk to me. And I hope people find this really enjoyable. Listen, and I hope they keep tuning in because we’re going to have I want to have more conversations with more people. And as eventually I’ll start lapping around and talking with some of the same people again, and I hope I’ll talk to you as many times as you’ll talk to me.

 

Dr Craig S Wright [01:57:46] Well, I’ll get back to that boring use case that everyone seems to ignore, which is micropayments, small casual payments, electronic cash.

 

Greg Bledsoe [01:57:56] I appreciate your diligence in that because that’s what I’m that’s what I’m interested in. So this is Gregg Bledsoe for the Building Blocks podcast. Thank you so much. All right. So it’s not my recordings. Thanks so much. Really, really did have an enjoyable conversation. Thank you for listening. Please follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter as well as like and share Blackboard Labs content on both platforms. You can find me at Major Legacy on Twitter and tip me at Border Legacy on hard cash. If you feel so inclined, let’s go build.