WBD399 Audio Transcription

The Embedded Growth Problem with Rob Hamilton

Interview date: Monday 20th September

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

In this interview, I talk to programmer & data scientist Rob Hamilton. We discuss the embedded growth problem, stagnation leading to violence, and how bitcoin realigns natural progress.

“These underlying currents that aren’t talked about in our economic system that causes malinvestment, and it’s a lot of forsaking the possibility of the future for immediate-gratification today.”

— Rob Hamilton

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: How are you doing, Rob?

Rob Hamilton: I'm doing well, how are you?

Peter McCormack: Thank you for coming in for this; I am very excited about this.  I can't remember the chain of events, but you sent me your article.

Rob Hamilton: You were on Twitter talking about Eric Weinstein.

Peter McCormack: Fucked up the interview.

Rob Hamilton: Well, yeah, we can talk about that.  I shot you a note on Twitter saying, "Hey, I just wrote this article for Bitcoin Magazine, it hits on a lot of the stuff that Eric comes from in his perspective".  You told me to shoot it to you in an email, and a couple of weeks later here we are.

Peter McCormack: Here we are, it's an epic article, it's not the shortest.  It's a good read, we will put it in the show notes, everyone should read it; it's very, very good and it touches on a few things I wanted to talk about, or I want to talk about with you specifically.

Rob Hamilton: Sure.

Peter McCormack: What's the background to you approaching and working on this article?

Rob Hamilton: Absolutely, yeah.

Peter McCormack: We should tell people what it's about.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, absolutely.  It's not a short article.  Adam Back tweeted out saying it was long but good and I showed that to my wife.  She said, "That describes whenever you talk about Bitcoin, long but good".  Yeah, so the article from Bitcoin Magazine, it's titled Why has the Physical World Not Progressed Like the Digital?  It was an inspiration from -- I've had a couple of brushing conversations with Eric Weinstein on Clubhouse and being able to piece things together over time, there was a Clubhouse room that was called, "Why are media, politicians and professors all lying to us?"  He got on stage, and he laid out this little clip of something called an embedded growth obligation, which jogged my memory.  He left the stage, and I was like, "There's a little bit more meat and potatoes, there's something deeper down here to start discussing".  That's where the jump-off point for me writing the article was.

Specifically also, after the price went from $65,000 to like $35,000, it was a like a two-week period where he kept joining the Bitcoin rooms on Clubhouse.  He's like, "Guys, I want to let you know that you're not scaring me away.  If I was actually an enemy, I'd be doing victory laps right now, because Bitcoin crashed.  I want to let you know that I'm here through thick and thin.  I think what you guys are doing is really important and if we can find out and be fellow travellers and allies, that would be great".  I thought that was a really very enlightening thing, just like being able to have these passing conversations with Eric, because I would consider him a good faith actor and someone who sees the world differently and I think that there's been some brush points with him in Bitcoin Twitter in general.  I just want to say that I think that he has a lot of value to add and the jump-off for the whole article was this three-hour long interview between him and Peter Thiel from July 2019.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think I've listened to that.

Rob Hamilton: It's episode one of his podcast called The Portal, it was the kick-off episode and if anything I have said today is more interesting, you should definitely go check out that full interview too.  It's really rich, deep conversation.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've definitely listened to it, but not in prep for this; I'm sure I listened to it on a drive a couple of years ago.  I like Eric, I do.  I enjoyed the interview with him, didn't go any way I wanted, but I believe he is acting in good faith with regards to Bitcoin.  I think he cares and despite what anyone thinks of that interview, I've got my own personal criticisms of it, but he left an indelible ink on me.  I have not been able to stop thinking about that point where he said, "I believe in you guys; what the fuck are you doing?"

Rob Hamilton: "What are we talking about?"  Yeah, I rewatched the interview, getting ready to talk with you.

Peter McCormack: That's been in my mind ever since and it's done a couple of things.  It's changed my approach to Twitter a little bit, it's changed my approach to discourse a little bit and it's changed my approach to the shows I want to make; trying to get away from just celebrating price gains and actually start thinking about, "What the hell are we doing?"  So, I'm with you, I'm a fan of Eric's.

Rob Hamilton: No, I think that's great.  I think the interview also, listening to it and kind of being mutually frustrated with the conversation, and I think there's a core tension.  This is not specifically in the article, but I've been thinking about this a lot.  There's this core tension with how Eric views the structures of today and the problems and complications we have in society and how bitcoiners view it. 

Bitcoiners fundamentally believe that the money is broken and that's caused a bunch of fallout because of that in a lack of growth and just a lot of downstream complications in society, and that's where the Bitcoin Fixes This meme comes from, is that if you fix the money, you can fix the world, another Bitcoin meme.  Eric paints a different picture, listening to him a bit more.  This isn't in the article, but I think this is an important point from the length and perspective he'd use things. 

In 1961, there was an academic, Derek de Solla Price, who pointed out that there was this exponential growth in the number of PhDs and academic papers that were being published.  With all this boom in science, we had this incredible range of growth and prosperity in the world.  Later, Nixon comes in and removes and closes the gold window and the fallout of Bretton Woods, and the way that I would view it is that he sees that the technology started to stagnate first.

What happened was, at the parabola growth rate you were having with scientists, you were going to get to a place soon where every man, woman, child and dog was going to be a PhD and that's not sustainable.  This is talking about what we'll go into a moment, embedded growth obligations, and how our structures in society built themselves after the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, post America winning World War II and this new global arrangement of economic dependence. 

There's one key thing that in that long three-hour interview with Peter Theil and Eric that they talk about is that you have two poles in society: you have growth and you have violence.  What happens is that when growth disappears, everything starts becoming zero sum and the only way you can gain is by taking from someone else.  That is where usually when you see fall outs in the economic instability conflict breaks out, because there's no longer a seen promise into the future of what could be done, like how can you honestly grow and plan a future for your family and your kids?

When that starts drifting away, people drift towards violence.  I think that's a brief way of laying out maybe how Eric sees that it's technology that downstream stagnated the money, whereas bitcoiners see it is that the money stagnated so then downstream consequences stagnated technology.  It's almost like a chicken and egg in finding out what was the piece that broke first.

Peter McCormack: Could it not be a symbiotic relationship between money and technology?

Rob Hamilton: I would agree.  The way I view money is a technology and if money is a technology -- have you ever been apple picking?

Peter McCormack: Strawberry picking.

Rob Hamilton: Strawberry picking?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Rob Hamilton: Okay, so an apple orchard, if you have the rows of the apple trees, you're going to have the low-hanging fruit that are really easy to grab and then you can sometimes find really nice apples, but they're a little bit further out of reach; you need to be taller, get steps or something.  If money is like the latter, that allows us as a technology to be able to reach further and further into the future, in being able to grab like the previously unpulled fruit, if the money breaks down as a technology, it is going to cause technological stagnation as well.

The very simple example would be when we were all cavemen, beating each other up with rocks, the fire and wheel were massive technology, but that is really low-hanging fruit.  When you start thinking about the large economic boom that happened in the 1940s and 1950s, this is like a golden era of capitalism in a post-World War II world.  In the United States, this is where you get the white picket fence and the whole suburban sprawl, everyone gets to live the American dream.  Usually when people are talking about what the American Dream is, they're talking about that golden era.

If the money all of a sudden starts to fragment and break, you start throwing miscalculations and everything around where you're going to have a more difficult time being able to plan for the future and being able to organise a society going forward.  Because of that, you have these breakdowns in being able to invest in those future larger-scale projects.  So, much of leading up and through World War II was nuclear.  Since 1952, we've had nuclear weapons and then also all of the aerospace engineering that was required to send those nukes to the other side of the world.  That is where all of the intellectual capital was, focusing on being able to master these elements that 30, 40 years before then would have been a dream.

No one would have thought the idea that you'd have a weapon of that scale, or being able to send rockets across the world would have been real.  But we got there and then because of the economic stability that came from that, we froze, and this is the great stagnation that I talk about in the piece, is that the world of physical atoms had a great stagnation.  The only boom that we've had in growth, and if technology is the seed growth in what kicks off, to be able to have organic natural growth would be like physics.  The reason that electrical engineers probably forgot the microchip, most of the technological gains over the past 50 years have been in the world of bits.  I mention as well in the article that you have this dichotomy between atoms and bits and atoms have largely stagnated, and now you have bits which have had their own parabolic rise.

Moore's law, and for anyone not familiar with it, every two years you're able to double the number of transistors on a microchip, but the cost also gets cut in half.  This is why your parents' computers in the 1980s and 1990s would have been much less efficient and much more costly compared to today.  We've had this incredible tech boom in the world of bits, but we've had the stagnation in the world of atoms.

Eric describes it if you were to walk into a room today and if you removed all of the screens, does the room look fundamentally different from a room in the 1970s short of stylistic fashion, aesthetic choices?  Not really.  Peter Thiel phrases it another way where if you're in the world of science fiction and Star Trek you have Captain Picard, and he has the supercomputer, we've been able to build the supercomputer from Star Trek, but we don't have the holodeck, we don't have warp drive, we don't have the replicator, we don't have any of these other science fiction goal reaches.  We've been able to master the computer damn well, but all of these other pieces of technology have really stagnated and there hasn't been much gain.

Peter McCormack: So, there's a couple of things I just want to work through with you first.

Rob Hamilton: Please, yeah.

Peter McCormack: If we were trying to crystallise what the problem is that we're dealing with in this conversation, is it specifically the stagnation of atoms and development, because I think bitcoiners come from the point that if they're coming from the money, it's the unsustainable nature of the fiat currencies and the instability it leaves for people and society and general unfairness.  But that's not what Eric's particularly talking about, so are we both approaching two different sets of problems which have alignment but from two separate starting points.

Rob Hamilton: I think they're directly related.  In 1971, when Nixon closed the gold window, we basically detached from the material reality, of economic reality.  We no longer were having a money backed by gold and we were able to perpetuate the illusion of growth for many years by leveraging debt, basically running budget deficits, spending more than what we make and what we collect in taxes; and more recently of a phenomenon, but being able to control interest rates and quantitative easing.  That, I think, is a very core piece of this illusion of growth that we've been able to do, is because since the physical world started stagnating, we didn't have additional tech booms. 

Everything that we've had in technological progress has largely been in the world of computers.  It looks like you're living in this incredible time of crazy technology, but a lot of things are the same.  It's just like we're in New York City right now; the city looks very much like it was when I was here in the 1990s, the infrastructure hasn't updated.  Being able to think of it in that way, where once you leave your computer screen, there hasn't been a lot of big changes in the world.

Peter McCormack: What changes are we missing?  What are the expectations, because when you talk about something like warp drive, that seems a little bit far out?  That still could be some super complicated technology, I don't know how far away, but when you talk about going into the living room and it's the same room if you take away the screens, what are we actually missing?

Rob Hamilton: In economic calculations, it's the unknown.  We can't speak to what we could be missing, this is often an argument that someone from like the Austrian School would make with money printing.  "We're able to bring economic prosperity today", and we say, "Yes, but we don't know what we could have had, had you not intervened in the market forces", so it's this problem of an unknown that we can't provably show what the alternate reality would have been.

The question is, is that if you had more organic market interactions, would you have been able to have things arrive sooner or would you have progress?  I am not a physicist by trade by any means, so I'm not going to pretend this is me trying to give the good faith interpretation of Eric's perspective on things, but that is where I would say it's an unknown unknown.  We can't say how things could have been otherwise.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so the crystallisation of the problem is that we've missed out on certain types of innovation?

Rob Hamilton: The crystallisation of the problem is that technology, as a progressive force in society, has had a stagnation and if technology is the fuel that allows growth in economies to build forward, we've been able to create an illusion of growth by money printing and controlling interest rates and keeping them lower.  That would be the way I'd think of it.

Peter McCormack: We have had innovation in medical care, medical treatments.  We've got some pretty interesting innovation in putting people into space at the moment, there's a new space race.  It's not like we've had no innovation.

Rob Hamilton: The space thing is interesting.  We landed on the moon in 1969 with the equivalent computing power less than a graphing calculator that you would have in high school today, and now we have with SpaceX and Blue Origin, they're sending themselves into space in low Earth orbit.  We haven't been to the moon since 1972.

Peter McCormack: Well there's nothing there.

Rob Hamilton: But it's not the frontier of the unknown to be able to push things back!

Peter McCormack: I was thinking about that and thinking, "Where the fuck would you go, there's nothing there, it's just like a big dead rock".  At least with Mars, you've got resources.

Rob Hamilton: Sure, I think the idea is just ultimately that we've lost our ambition in a certain way.  Why isn't there a moon base to be able to do research?  A fair credit to be given is, there has been progress in some capacities; but I think that the interference with the functions of money and investment, when you lower interest rates it's something called a hurdle rate.  If you're an investor, you have what your baseline return is.  If I just held it in a bank, what would my return have been?  As interest rates get lowered, you have less of a moonshot idea to be able to invest into the future.  I'm not sure if I'm…

Peter McCormack: No, I think I understand where you're going with this as well, because if you look at something like air travel, we had Concorde.

Rob Hamilton: Concorde's gone.

Peter McCormack: Concorde's gone, and we haven't had supersonic air travel since and no one's investing in that.  Actually they're investing in just more efficient versions of what we have.  Whereas, there are people out there who would love to be able to fly to New York from London in three hours and they would pay royally for it.  That innovation's just not happening there.

Rob Hamilton: Let me put in here the formal definition of what an embedded growth obligation is, because it's one of the core drivers in the article.  It's, "At what growth rate does an institution need to see for it to maintain its honest positions?" that's how Eric defines it.  I think Peter Thiel in that interview gives a good summary where he talks about, since he used to work at a law firm, you have a law firm with a bunch of partners, like the senior positions in the law firm.  What you're going to have happen is that you have a bunch of people coming in from schools that are like paralegals, they're working their way through the corporate structure to advance to that high level.

You can organically support everyone making it to the top as long as there's a baseline growth rate.  The moment growth starts to stagnate, you almost have a pyramid scheme dynamic unfolding, where you have all of the junior partners in the law firm looking to get promoted, but since the law firm isn't growing fast enough, some of them aren't going to be able to make it to the top of the institution.  This is where you almost have a prisoners' dilemma form, where the leaders of our institutions at large have to maintain, whether subconsciously or consciously, this position of an illusion of growth, because it's what keeps the underlying power structures underneath them, everyone who works there, to keep it going.

I make this point about IBM in the article.  IBM was one of the people who originally started the home PC movement and a lot of the technology innovation.  Since 1995 to 2020, IBM has done $200 billion in stock buybacks; so, taking their own existing cash flows, buying shares of stock and using that as just a way to park their money.  The company today is only worth $127 billion, which means in the past 30 years they've taken more money than what the current company is worth and have just thrown it into stock buybacks.  You have to think, and I want to move away from the legal example, why does this happen?

People in executive suites of corporations, they get primarily paid based on stock options.  What are you going to do if you have a big pile of cash in your quarterly earnings; are you going to maybe invest that and squirrel it away for a 10- to 20-year moonshot investment of some new technological innovation, because that's what IBM used to do?  It came out of their labs; they did a lot of innovative work in the world of computers.  They just went and bought stock, because it was directly for the people at the head of the institution to be able to profit.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.  Yeah, I get what you're saying.

Rob Hamilton: The opportunity cost is, what happened if IBM took that $200 billion and had invested it in other projects?

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Rob Hamilton: We don't know what would have happened.  Maybe some of them would have blown up on the launchpad, but you can't say that would have no opportunity to be able to make the world a better place through investment.

Peter McCormack: Is this just basically the board having a misincentive of how to allocate money?

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, that's a great way of looking at it.  Another way would be universities in the United States.  If you have a bunch of professors who are teaching grad students who are one day looking to become professors themselves, at a certain point there's too many professors.  All the departments are full, you can't hire anyone else.  What was done was making the discharging -- you can't declare bankruptcy in the United States for your student loan debt.  So, you have now trapped our youngest, most likely to take risk people in society, and you've locked them into a large debt that they can't break, they can't get out of.

At the end of the day, if you look at it in a macro sense, the quality of education and your job prospects aren't maybe what they were compared to the 1970s and the 1980s.  If you went and got a degree in the 1970s and 1980s, we went from educating 7% to 8% of people to over half of the country and this is the perfect example of it.  Now, if half of the country has bachelor's degrees, it's not much of a distinguishing factor anymore for entering the marketplace of jobs.  It's all, at the end of the day, gone to a large bureaucratic load of administrators and larger glut, right. 

So, it's these underlying currents that aren't talked about in our economic system that causes malinvestment, and it's a lot of forsaking the possibility of the future for immediate gratification today.  I think this is part of the structures, the deeper structural issues of what Eric talks about with these conflicts and maybe seeing the world a little bit differently and the opportunity.  And about bitcoiners and bitcoiners as a culture, is Eric mentions that the one group of people that are immune to embedded growth obligations are individuals.  If an individual is able to step outside a power structure, they're able to speak that truth to power.  That's a really liberating thing, because if you're able to communicate truth, you're going to be able to try and right these power structures in a way.  I think bitcoiners almost culturally are prideful in the fact that they are individuals first.

Peter McCormack: So, these embedded growth obligations they don’t just affect institutions, they affect companies.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: They affect institutions, they affect the government.  We often hear about growth is, I don't know, in the UK I'll just pick a random number.

Rob Hamilton: Sure.

Peter McCormack: Growth is going to drop to 1% next year and it's seen as a disaster.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Whereas the economy is still growing, but that has a massive impact on investments and the stock markets, and it has this trickling effect.  A better question is, why does the embedded growth obligation exist and how disastrous is it to not see growth?

Rob Hamilton: I think the theory, in researching for my article and this interview was, you've had a new structure world organisation in the post-World War II era, and I think there was an idea that, "We all have thermo nuclear weapons now, all the major powers do.  It'd be better if we worked together in economic growth and trade as opposed to fighting each other".  This goes back to the model of you have two poles: you have growth, and you have violence, fundamentally in the structure of a society.

The reason why is because when we just left World War II, we just had this natural -- everyone felt this uplifting and large economic boom and when that started fading, that is around the time where Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, and we have been able to perpetuate it forward by messing with the money.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Rob Hamilton: I forgot your other question.

Peter McCormack: Firstly is why does it exist; but what is the actual impact of not seeing any growth?  Is it a red herring, is it not that big an issue; or have we created such a structure, especially with globalisation and the way the stock market works, if we don't have growth there are actual downstream issues?

Rob Hamilton: I would say that the way that the economic system is currently structured, there is absolutely a problem if we stop growth.  COVID in the article was a margin call on embedded growth obligations, because we had to tell the entire world to stop.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Rob Hamilton: We're still reeling from supply chain issues and trying to understand, what does it mean to restart an economy.  I think in the way things are structured right now, we have to grow to be able to service our existing debt because right now what you're not going to have happen is you're not going to have political leaders stepping in to say, "Okay, we're going to cut all the government spending and increase taxes to make sure we can pay down our debt".

Peter McCormack: So, it's all to service debt?

Rob Hamilton: In the United States right now, you need growth to be able to service all of the debt.

Peter McCormack: But the debt keeps growing faster?

Rob Hamilton: Yes.

Peter McCormack: It makes me think of my interview with Brandon Quittem, where we talk about fourth turning and that usually ends with some kind of violent event, and it feels like we are heading headfirst into some kind of economic crash at the moment.  It's something like, was it global debt is 400% larger than GDP of the world?

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, Greg Foss I think has made that point.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we've got these negative yielding debts, we've got massive inflation.  We're heading into tricky times.

Rob Hamilton: This is the critique Eric has, that we can't afford weak men to have bad times, because we now have nuclear weapons.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Rob Hamilton: Before this point, you could have had a war or a fallout, but we have never had the ability for a single person or small group of people to destroy the rest of the world.  That's where you have to be on eggshells, being very careful talking about if things go South, that's a dice roll that I'm not personally comfortable with.  I have kids, I know you have kids.  I don't want to have to navigate that tightrope, right.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm not keen on a nuclear war, I think it'd be a bit shit!

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, it would be a real damper on this podcast!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean for fuck's sake!  Okay, so I want to separate what the bitcoiners are thinking from what Eric's thinking.  What does Eric explain that his solution is to this?  Does he have a solution?

Rob Hamilton: This is a really interesting point, and a part that me personally, I was frustrated listening to your interview.  Eric was like, "You guys are the money guys.  Let's go take this fight to them and I need capital to be able to break this", almost like a signed slush fund, which I think is incredible about Bitcoin.  We leveraged a new technology that had never been seen before to route around corrupt institutions.  I can go down to the Federal Reserve here and I can hold up picket signs saying, "Stop printing money", what is that going to do?  Nothing but I can go buy Bitcoin and I can hold my own keys, and that’s a much more impactful way of routing around the corruption as opposed to trying to fight within the system.

Peter McCormack: Also, it feels a little bit like what Bukele is doing on a national level with El Salvador.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, because he's beholden to a US Dollar, El Salvador doesn't have its own currency, and being able to fundamentally route around all of those trappings and the IMF, I know he's been fighting back and forth with them, this is a way of saying, "I can route around your corrupt institutions, and I can instil something that's better for my citizens".

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Rob Hamilton: Absolutely, I think it's a great way of doing it.  To bring it back to the interview with Eric, he's going, "You guys are the money people.  We need money when you start doing a capital slush fund".  I'm not sure about you, Peter, I don't have a spare couple of million dollars laying around to patronage to a science fund.  It's not that I don't believe or think it's a worthy endeavour, but for now, I think me individually, my responsibility is to my family and making sure that everything is good there.  I don't have a bunch of Bitcoin to go throw into a science slush fund. 

I thought that was a frustrating point of impasse was that, he was very keen on using this newfound money in capital structure to be able to bootstrap around the corrupt scientific institutions as he'd use them, but it's hard for us to be able to -- how do you organise that?  It's a really messy conversation.  For me listening to it, it was frustrating because from Eric's perspective, I was at a loss that how do I help fight back if I don't have a bunch of money that I'm willing to give to scientists to route around this?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's more than scientific institutions for him now though.  I've seen he's been expanding his pool of institutions that he is pissed at.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: He's been a bit quiet recently, but he's been talking more about Bitcoin as well, so I think he's close.  We've got him broke.

Rob Hamilton: I think we've got him pushed, yeah, for sure.  What are we trying to do here?

Peter McCormack: What the fuck are we doing here?  It's such an important question and this is why I find the El Salvador project so interesting, because it's like what the fuck are we trying to do here?  They trying to route around international institutions.  They have issues with their relationships with the IMF and the world bank.  They are beholden, as you said, to the US dollar, which means they're beholden to the impact of $8.5 trillion of debt which is likely going to become $12 trillion very soon.  They are routing around the remittance companies, now.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, the corporations, yeah.

Peter McCormack: He's put 50 ATMs here in the US, with 200 in El Salvador so people can wire back money for free.  He's using that to route around these institutions.  What are we trying to do?  Is this the goal to route around the institutions and what is the impact then?  There's lots in this and then how does it all play out?

Rob Hamilton: I think it's an important question right, because it's one thing to go on Twitter, have fun shit posting and having fun pushing buttons, but as Bitcoin as a project continues to succeed, I think there's a couple of things that I view personally as important.  One is just education and evangelising, I've spent a lot of time on Clubhouse talking to people about what's a hardware wallet and how do I do this right?  I do that out of my own spare time, because I care and I wish I had someone like me that I could hop on a call with and talk to about this stuff early.

Peter McCormack: You should start a podcast, you'd just get everyone, literally can ask everyone every question you want.

Rob Hamilton: There you go.

Peter McCormack: And still know not what an xPub is!

Rob Hamilton: That's okay, we'll get you there!

Peter McCormack: You'll get me there.

Rob Hamilton: What's going to happen first; is Eric going to go full Bitcoin, or are you going to get an xPub?

Peter McCormack: I think Eric's going to go full Bitcoin!

Rob Hamilton: Okay.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, maybe we'll get nuclear war before you get an xPub!

Peter McCormack: I think I've got one, I just don't know where it is.  I don't know where I've put it.

Rob Hamilton: Did you drop it on the way here?

Peter McCormack: I think so.  Where did I put my xPub then?  I don't know where I put it, I had it and then I lost it.  Can I get another one?

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, maybe a zPub.

Peter McCormack: A zPub.  We're going go to a pub tonight.

Rob Hamilton: That's all right.

Peter McCormack: Fuck, we're going to drink again.

Rob Hamilton: I'm so sorry.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, okay, so yes.  I interrupted you.

Rob Hamilton: What are we doing here is ultimately the point.  For me evangelising, I don't think Bitcoin's at a price appreciation yet where I could be a capital allocator.  Not to steal his thunder, but I listened to American HODL's talk at BitBlockBoom and he was talking about an obligation of bitcoiners of being the capital allocators of tomorrow and being able to destroy their one-time Cantillon effect, because if Bitcoin price appreciates because the Federal Government is mis-managing the dollar, we inadvertently are going to get wealthy off of their miscalculation.

What we could do is this idea of building institutions and investing in projects that we may never see, and I mention this in the article near the end; this is my own personal idea, but it's not enough for me to say that Bitcoin succeeds because it becomes the global money.  Obviously, that's a very important thing, but for me what I think is really more impactful is being able to from that, live in a world where my great-great-grandchildren, that I'm never going to meet, can live in a better world, where this problem has been solved for them, where they don't have to have this cyclical nature of fighting of these power structures and someone corrupting their money, like you've had in Rome, like we have today. 

I want this to be a solved problem, so there's more ambitious things to be worrying about in the future.  I think that's what's interesting about money, is the technology and if Bitcoin is this, which I believe it to be, this big step function innovation, we should be able to have that as a bedrock for a better society, and it's just going to take time.  It's something like today, I personally don't have enough Bitcoin laying around where I can start shooting off into moonshot capital investments to maybe build things that I may never see.  I think that's the macro thesis, is that over time as Bitcoin continues to accrue value --

Peter McCormack: You will.

Rob Hamilton: -- I will be able to.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and everyone from a previous cycle, in future cycles, will be capital allocators.  I do a very small amount.

Rob Hamilton: Sure.

Peter McCormack: Even some from my Bitcoin stash, some from the podcast, and there is this kind of embedded nature within bitcoiners that they are very generous and want to support projects.  All the developers tend to be supported by people allocating their Bitcoin capital to them.

Interesting, me and Danny the other night when we're up at the bar and we're having a long chat/disagreement over my future Bitcoin.  Because he said to me, "Are you going to leave it to your kids", I said, "I'm going to leave them a little bit, enough to give them a good steppingstone in life, but the rest will be deployed to projects and people that need it".  He was like, "What the fuck are you doing?  Just give it all to them".

Rob Hamilton: It's funny, when people ask me how much Bitcoin I tell them, I tell them, "I don't have any, my children have all of it".  That's just me being glib talking to someone asking about my Bitcoin, but I think that is an important role though, is that we are able to be the change we wish to see in the world, as a capital allocator being able to break and route around these systems and I think that's a noble cause.  Bitcoiners in general, not only are they generous but they're very comfortable waiting a long time for a return.  I've been in Bitcoin since 2014, I think the price was somewhere around $250 and that's general ballpark.

Peter McCormack: It seemed expensive.

Rob Hamilton: It seemed expensive, I definitely didn't save all of it at the time, I definitely bought and sold some, just kind of learning.

Peter McCormack: Everyone does.

Rob Hamilton: The journey that everyone does.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Rob Hamilton: It's now been coming up on eight years that I've had Bitcoin, I'm okay with that long-term prospect of being able to figure things out, so these are all the things that I start thinking about.  What are bitcoiners supposed to?  Help invest and build those institutions we're never going to be able to see, education evangelising and for me personally having a family and helping grow the Bitcoin clan the easiest way possible; just have Bitcoin kids.

Peter McCormack: We talked about this idea of routing around the current system.  There is bad money, so we just created our own and it was great.  But what about this part of what's been happening recently, which is working also within the system, talks of creating these things I don't understand but like Super PACs and raising funds and trying to influence and actually get pro-Bitcoin people in Congress?  It's a lot of talk around that and bitcoiners have a lot of money now, they have a lot of influence. 

Do we think Ted Cruz just woke up a bitcoiner or do we think Ted Cruz realised, "There's a bunch of people who may vote for me and that might be good for me"?  I think it's likely the latter, but whatever route you take to Bitcoin I don't care; but how do you feel about the fact that if we're trying to subvert the system, we're also working within it.  So, are we Trojan horsing ourselves into this or do you just think this is a naturality; or are you against it?

Rob Hamilton: So, this is an interesting conversation I've had with bitcoiners, because they all come down on different sides.  You have your anarcho-capitalists who are going to say, "You know what, we don't need to worry about it, let the failing system fail", and then a lot of people that I've talked to I think are helping organise these Super PACs that I've spoken with, I think there's a role for both.  I think that by holding Bitcoin, you are taking the active protest to route around it; you are partially opting out of a current economic system.

Then also, if we're able to have a seat at the table in the current political structure, I don't think it's wrong to at least try.  My concern, and it's not even that I'm actually genuinely an optimist, I think within the current political structure though, that we don't have the adults at the table.  The people who are running our political institutions right now and the people who are at the seat of the table are not our A team.  Because they're not our A Team, it makes me very guarded about giving that avenue too much energy, because in a certain sense, you're giving them power as much as you're willing to give to them in investing time and capital.  I think it's worth a shot though.  We might as well try before we say that it's not even worth it.  That's the way I would do it.

Peter McCormack: Do you think Bitcoin has its own -- its success means it has its own embedded growth obligation?

Rob Hamilton: This is a great point, Peter.

Peter McCormack: Because, we have these cycles.  If we get to a peak Bitcoin and the Bitcoin price continues to slide, everybody has their like, "Shit, maybe I should sell at bit price".  It isn't $64,000 for most people, it's when it comes to $29,000, you're like "Argh".  It keeps chipping away, chipping away and people are like, "Should I sell, should I sell?", and then when it hits the point like no one's selling Bitcoin goes back up. 

But what if that didn't happen?  What if it's just over the space of ten years, it got lower and lower and lower?  Yes, it's this great technology, I can send it around the world, no one can stop me, it's instant final settlement.  But we maybe lose security, people lose interest.  I feel that Bitcoin has embedded growth obligation.

Rob Hamilton: Speaking with Eric on Clubhouse, he said that he hates memes in general, which I think as an aside, I think that's why Ben and Clown making WTF Happened in 1971 is such a great -- it's how a younger generation communicates ideas.  Because, now it's WTF Happened in 1971 is a Bitcoin meme even though -- but to the point about embedded growth obligations, the meme of number go up I think is a very hollow idea where I've said number go up before, like when the price is ripping, because it's just so fun and exhilarating; but that's not a sustainable pillar to be able to grow a community.  I'm not sure if that's a dirty word to say if Bitcoin even has a community or not, but the expectation that the number will always go up, I think it's something that could be really destructive to how bitcoiners organise themselves going forwards.

If expectation is that it always goes up, I think even most bitcoiners would say, "We'll get to a point eventually in a hyperbitcoinised world where Bitcoin is the unit of account for everyone, that it plateaus and maybe grows a little based on productivity gains over time".  I still think that it's a fair critique to say that the idea of number go up looks like an embedded growth obligation to me, if you're just expecting it to go up.  Most people individually are not contributing to the network, they're holding, which in its way is own contributing but --

Peter McCormack: I know what you mean.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, but they're not working on the code, they're not building on top of the Bitcoin stack or doing anything in the space to add value to it.  I think it's a fair point and I think that something just in general we need to be open-eyed to and making sure that the number go up is a means to an end of a better world; it's not just to make money to have money.  There's supposed to be other responsibilities and other opportunities in the world that come from that.

Peter McCormack: It's good marketing for Bitcoin.

Rob Hamilton: Absolutely, it's the memes, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but also at the same time, I'm with you on that whole idea like number go up is just -- there's so much more to Bitcoin than just making money.  Yes, it's great marketing, but I took my laser eyes off months ago, because I was like, "No this is wrong.  This shouldn't be the approach", and I feel like I'm getting much more interested in the kind of things that Alex Gladstein talks about, the things that Bitcoin could do.  The problem is, that's not sexy.

He is arguably one of the most underappreciated and underfollowed people on the whole internet with what he's doing, and yet everyone knows who he is, but I think he scandalously underfollowed, I think he in some ways, outside of coders whatever, he is doing the most important work with regards to Bitcoin usage.

Rob Hamilton: I listened to your recent interview with Peter Schiff, and you were trying to make this appeal of like, "Peter, let's just put Bitcoin price aside for a second.  This is meaningfully helping people in oppressed countries".

Peter McCormack: And I think he agreed, we got him.

Rob Hamilton: You got him, that was big, yeah.

Peter McCormack: You go through the YouTube comments and everyone's like, "This is shit, why are you having him on?"  When we explained what's happening Belarus, what's happening with women in the Middle East, what’s happening in Nigeria, he said, "I can see.  It should just be backed by gold", it's like whatever.  But we had him, he agreed on a cryptocurrency, and I think he's close.  People are like, "Why do you talk to him?"  I'm like, "When we get him, because we will get him, when we get him, he will actually be an important spokesperson for Bitcoin".  Other people say, "Just leave him to it", but if you can convince him, you can convince anyone.

Rob Hamilton: I learned a lot from Peter Schiff during the 2008 Financial Crisis, when I first started getting more economically and politically minded when it came to money, and he was a great resource for me, and I still think he is.  He's a very knowledgeable person.  Sometimes though, he gets caught up on this idea of markets and exchange rates and less of what is this technology fundamentally as a breakthrough innovation.

Peter McCormack: He can't get away from requiring the intangible versus the tangible.  That's where he struggles.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, and I think that's also an inter-generational thing as well, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Rob Hamilton: I know you're an old person as well, like Peter Schiff.

Peter McCormack: What the fuck?  Who the fuck is this guy?!  How old are you?

Rob Hamilton: Me, I'm 31.

Peter McCormack: You're a baby.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm 42 for fuck's sake. 

Rob Hamilton: Old people like you.

Peter McCormack: Old people like me; I'm not old, look I've got tattoos!  Go on, "Old people like me".

Rob Hamilton: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Fuck!

Rob Hamilton: Fundamentally though they don't understand the idea of a digital world, because it's something that grew up after them; whereas someone my age and younger, I grew up with an internet budding and --

Peter McCormack: Do you remember when there was no internet?

Rob Hamilton: I do.  A few memories, I remember being -- well it must have been second grade, so I was maybe 10, 11 years old and my family got their first computer.

Peter McCormack: Do you remember no phones, before there was mobile phones?

Rob Hamilton: No cell phones, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay.  Do you remember when Tottenham last won the league?

Rob Hamilton: They've never won the league.

Peter McCormack: They did, like 1960.  Fuck I'm so old, this is bollocks.  Can we go down the pub?

Rob Hamilton: We can do that, yeah.

Peter McCormack: All right, come on, yeah, okay.

Rob Hamilton: Fundamentally not being able to view the world as a digital layer, I think that's where the abstraction hits a wall, just from mental models, where if you didn't grow up with the internet, understanding digital goods, I used to -- I used to play a lot of video games growing up, I used to work at an Esports company.  The idea of digital competition and digital stakes and being able to actually ground that in the real world, I used to sell World of Warcraft gold for cash and then I would use it to buy lunch.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's cool.

Rob Hamilton: It would be one of those things where I very quickly understood, "Oh, this digital thing has value, that's cool with me.  It doesn't matter that it's not physical".

Peter McCormack: Again, even more, I've talked many a times my daughter playing Roblox, and she has Robux, and she buys like a fucking giraffe and runs around and loves that shit, and my son's on Fortnite.  They just get it.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: They just get it.

Rob Hamilton: That's why I think in a certain sense, that's why I put part of my personal ambitions as a bitcoiner is to have a Bitcoin family.  Being able to pass those values down, not like --

Peter McCormack: You're birthing Bitcoin babies.

Rob Hamilton: Well, it's a great way to grow the community, I think.  I have 100% success rate, because they're not going to be able to leave the house until they agree with me.

Peter McCormack: My kids are bitcoiners, yeah.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: They're interested.

Rob Hamilton: That's awesome.

Peter McCormack: They ask a lot; not enough, but my daughter more.  She's actually a little rebel as well.  I think she's more --

Rob Hamilton: Is she CoinJoining behind your back?

Peter McCormack: I think so, I think she's more libertarian that I am.

Rob Hamilton: Interesting.

Peter McCormack: She's 11, bless her.  Yeah, so anyway but what are we doing?

Rob Hamilton: What are we doing?  It's a question of top down versus bottom up.  The ethos of the technology and the people that get attracted to it are grass roots bottom-up people.  Because of that, we hit a schism basically where Eric wants to do things from a top-down perspective.  Take it to the economists and show them that they can't calculate inflation, which I am tending to agree with.  The fundamental problem though is that my --

Peter McCormack: What does that do?

Rob Hamilton: It's not like Chairman Powell's going to come out and say, "I got rekt by Bitcoin Twitter, I'm going to increase the interest rates now.  Sorry guys, I didn't want to do this".  It's not going to happen.  It's $40 billion a month going to housing market, mortgage-backed securities and $80 billion a month just buying our own debt.  There isn't some sort of like grand debate of ideas.  Me personally, I don't think where we're going to be able to course correct this from the top down. 

That is why I think the things that you're doing, Peter, going out interviewing and talking to people about Bitcoin, you're helping provide a spotlight for what people are doing in Bitcoin, what Bitcoin means to people, and I think that's a way to provide a grass shoot for a grass roots bottom-up organisation of people who are going to be able to loosely organise on principles and build a better future for tomorrow.

Peter McCormack: Well that's why again, I keep going back to the El Salvador project, and I know some people are against the idea of a government mandating it.

Rob Hamilton: Sure.

Peter McCormack: But governments mandate the use of sovereign currencies; at least it's Bitcoin, but that is a grass roots project.  By the way, that project started a year and a half before Bukele's announcement.  It started as a grass roots project, by Michael Peterson, where he got a bunch of kids, he gave them work, he kept them out of gangs.  They earned the money, got their local mother at the pupuseria, which is a law shop, to accept Bitcoin, created a circle of autonomy, she held onto some of that Bitcoin, she is now buying a car.

It was a grass roots movement and it spread peer-to-peer through Zonte to Tunko to San Salvador.  Then it got to the US, Jack came over, he started his project.  The President heard it and here we have a country.

Rob Hamilton: I think it's a perfect example of the actions of individuals.  At the end of the day, me as an individual what I'm going to be -- because bitcoiners don't have the mouthpiece of institutions.  It's this grass root one-on-one communication.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Rob Hamilton: Putting skin the game, believing it and walking people through that journey.  I think the whole story with El Zonte is a perfect example of someone who's really passionate about something and put a lot of time and effort into building that out.  It must have seemed crazy up until the point it became the national currency of El Salvador.

Peter McCormack: Right.

Rob Hamilton: I think it's an amazing example of how us as individuals can have outsized impacts of what we're doing.

Peter McCormack: I said to Michael Peterson, I was with him and we were having dinner the other week and I said, "You do realise you may have been the trigger point for hyperbitcoinisation.  Your decision to make this project may lead to the world adopting this as a standard, because we've got the first country domino.  Looks like we may get the second in Paraguay, Ukraine and they're going to start falling.  You did this".  I also said, "If it all goes fucking wrong, it's all your fault"!  He never wants to take any credit; I think the guy's amazing.

Rob Hamilton: No, but it's an individual who had a passion, saw an opportunity and built it.  I think another example would be Jack Mallers, saw an opportunity, built a company and now is routing around all of those remittances.  At the end of the day, the problem with thinking too big, trying to be Don Quixote chasing around windmills, is that you get way too blown up and abstract.  Then it's hard to remove an accountability loop of what immediate change am I resulting in, because if you're trying to do this big fight, what's your metric of success or progress?  It's really hard.

Whereas as an individual, if I can get someone to understand Bitcoin, maybe buy some, a little bit as part of their investment, hold their own keys, that's the grass seedling for them to be able to talk to someone else about it, right.  It's a tension point that bitcoiners have, just culturally wanting to be very grass roots and loosely organised and decentralised, but at the end of the day I think it's gotten Bitcoin this far.

Peter McCormack: The measurements of success are really interesting as well.  Me and Danny were just sat with a journalist talking about what's happening down in El Salvador.  When I was with Bukele last, the second interview, I asked him -- I said firstly, "People want you to fail, they definitely want you to fail, even though that's not great, because they don't lose anything if you're a success, but a lot of people lose if you fail, but they want you to fail.  So, what's your measure of success?"  I could easily see if the price crashes that people will start hanke-ing and some of the journalists will start writing what a disaster this project is.

What they won't talk about is the fact that perhaps they went from 70% unbanked to 10%, because they've now got these applications on their phone where they can trade and use multiple forms of money.  They won't talk about the fact that the Western Union is making zero money from El Salvador and that money has actually ended up in people's pockets in the form of dollars.  They will just look at the price and attack.  These measurements of successes, there's no binary single success point, but there are multiple measures that you have to look at and I think we've got to be cautious of these shitty mainstream journalists who will want to pick their measure to attack these projects.

Rob Hamilton: I would agree, and I think the concern I would have is also just someone in good faith, if the journalist was rooting for Bitcoin to fail from the start.

Peter McCormack: They all are, I think.

Rob Hamilton: I think mostly they are too; I agree.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Rob Hamilton: There's a special place in my heart for Joe Wiesenthal from Bloomberg.

Peter McCormack: I like Joe.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, I like Joe, he's one of the good fiat minds around.

Peter McCormack: I consider him a bitcoiner, but with an ultracritical eye.

Rob Hamilton: I think ultimately, he has reasonable critiques and someone who's available to provide their own perspective and wrestle with those ideas I think are people that are worth having in the conversation.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, right.

Rob Hamilton: I think they're people who make Bitcoin stronger by being able to have those conversations and critiques and causing a self-reflection.  Like the whole interview that you had with Eric causing some reflection on how you interface with things, I think that's exactly -- we want to have these people around as allies, fellow travellers, whatever they may be.  I think he's a positive net force.

Peter McCormack: That's why I sometimes think about how do we recruit these people, and I was like Schiff's reply guy for a long time.  I still sometimes do it, but I actually an alert set up so every time he tweeted, I would change his tweet to everything that was Bitcoin to gold and reverse it and just make his points!

One of the things I've noticed is like if there's a public figure, there may be an honest journalist, maybe hard to find but a public figure, anyone who maybe has a critique of Bitcoin, something we may have all had early on in our career, you go into their mentions and obviously it always shows all the people you follow first.  It's just a list of people ranging from educated replies to harassment to abuse and I don't think this works as a way of getting people onside.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, the problem one is that how do you co-ordinate all of these people who pride themselves on being a jerk, right?

Peter McCormack: You can't.

Rob Hamilton: You can almost lead into it.  At the end of the day, if Bitcoin is going to fail because people are jerks on the internet, it never deserved to succeed.  It's almost one of those things where I would try to view myself -- I've been a dick sometimes on Twitter, I'm not above it.  My usual tone though is try not to be too combative, but it's one of these things where you can get -- you're more likely to get a fly with sugar than vinegar, whatever it is.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Rob Hamilton: The point being is that if you're nicer, you're going to be able to bring people around much sooner and their ego, their individual ego is less wrapped up in me versus Bitcoin and you're able to extend an olive branch to bring them in.  That's how you can grow the tent.  Or you can tell them, "Have fun staying poor"!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, yeah.  I don't like that anymore.

Rob Hamilton: No.

Peter McCormack: I don't like laser eyes, I don't like, "Have fun".  I get it and I get memes; I get the importance of memes.  I just think on a personal level, I decided I need to engage and have proper conversations and I want to get good people sat with each other.  I want to get Eric now sat with somebody else, maybe because that one didn't work.  I want get them sat with good people and have a good conversations that make progress rather than debates.

Rob Hamilton: I think that's fair, and I personally dump people saying, "Have fun staying poor"; I usually break it down, is someone of good faith actor versus a bad faith actor.  But even then, I think the conversations are what are important, especially you running a podcast, being able to facilitate the best quality conversations is your way of being able as a force multiplier to expand the effect, right, because if a lot of people listen to the conversation, maybe it shifts some perspectives on how people view things.  It's a really incredible way for you as an individual to be able to have an extended reach to be able to help push the mission of Bitcoin forward.

Peter McCormack: In terms of what are we doing, is it really more of the same like, "Look at the progress we've made.  Look where we are", or is it more about every person thinking about themselves individually?  What is your contribution and is it net positive?  How should we be using our time?

Rob Hamilton: My first criteria is me and my family, is being able to understand what positive impact I'm able to provide on the world and I think that's the first step and I think in the larger concentric circle of myself, family, community, when it comes to Bitcoin as a community, the progress I think is every day it doesn't go down to zero is a huge success.  The ability to grow the tent and grow more allies, a band of rag-tags and misfits to be able to come band together and being able to create a positive impact in the world. 

I think as time continues, as Bitcoin continues to succeed, we're almost able to level up in a way.  I don't think we would have had El Salvador in 2017; we've almost levelled up now to a level of maturity where we're able to have a nation state run on this.

Peter McCormack: I don't think anyone thought we would have it in 2021.

Rob Hamilton: I don't think so, no, it totally blew everyone's expectations away and I think the question is, as we're stable and we're able to keep on organically growing out, through honest trade and measure, how do we move it forward?

I have this quote I wrote down that I put at the end of the article.  Peter Thiel talks about this as maybe the question of where I think Bitcoin can help.  He says, as a side note, "That whole three-hour interview of Bitcoin where the gold standard isn't mentioned once", which I thought was kind of crazy that this whole stagnation, the whole technological trend, Bitcoin wasn't mentioned which was one of the prompts of why I wrote the article. 

But near the end of the interview Thiel says, "One of the challenges, and we should not understate how big it is, is in resetting science and technology in the 21st Century is how do we tell a story that motivates sacrifice, incredible hard work and deferred gratification to a future that is not intrinsically violent?"

Peter McCormack: It's literally Bitcoin.

Rob Hamilton: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: Literally Bitcoin.

Rob Hamilton: I think that's what Bitcoin role is, in what are we doing here.  We're creating a future of deferred gratification and hard work, tough economic calculation, being able to view it in a sense of these Bitcoin that I have and I hold are something that I plan on being around for decades.  That sets the entire lens of how I, as an individual, am able to orient my actions in a more honest direction and I think that's part of what are we doing in Bitcoin.

For now, we're just in the reserves, all as individuals doing our best; but as the project continues to grow, we're going to have our tools ready at our hands to be able to, as Bitcoin continues to level up, have a greater outsized impact in the world.

Peter McCormack: If we were to be sat with Eric right now, what would you say to him about this?

Rob Hamilton: If I was talking to Eric?

Peter McCormack: Buy Bitcoin motherfucker!

Rob Hamilton: No, one is that I've really appreciated all those conversations that I have with him on Clubhouse.  He came in when the price was crashing.  He's like, "I'm here because I'm an ally of you guys", and I really appreciated that.  I've learned a lot from him, and ultimately when it comes to Bitcoin is thinking that, if there's been a technology stagnation, maybe viewing money itself as a technology in that the reason why we dance around each other on what came first, the money breaking or the technology breaking, money is a form of a technology for global co-ordination, that maybe it's the same exact thing.  And the reason why we're not able to jump forward is because the money is broken, we're not able to do that proper capital allocation to the apple or to the metaphor I made before, reaching those highest fruits, the next rung of innovation; we're locked out because we're using a fake ladder with all the gaming that happens

Peter McCormack: Treading water.

Rob Hamilton: Yeah, we're treading water.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, interesting.  Listen, I'm hoping to talk to him again.  I'm in LA at the end of next month, I'm going to ping him.  I want to have that second conversation.  Part of me is doing it on my own, part of me thinks I should get another person with him, with a bit of prepared time.  I think knowing how that first interview went, I know how the second one should go, and I'd love the opportunity of just bringing him a little bit closer in and I hope it can happen, so that's brilliant.

I really enjoyed this, dude, and I appreciate you coming in.  I think the article itself was fantastic, we will put it in the show notes, we will share it out.  I think you should come on the show again in the future.  I think you're a really valuable addition to the Bitcoin community and keep birthing Bitcoin babies.  We need as many as we can and if people want to read the article anyway, because they're too lazy to look at the show notes or they want to follow you, where can they follow you?

Rob Hamilton: My Twitter handle is @Rob1Ham and you can look it up, just type in my name Rob Hamilton and Bitcoin Magazine; it will probably be the first hit, and yeah.

Peter McCormack: Okay, right.

Rob Hamilton: My DMs are open, so anyone wants to shoot me a node or be a jerk to me, how about it, I'd love to talk to you.

Peter McCormack: Shall we go and get a steak.

Rob Hamilton: I'd love to.