The Saylor Series | Episode 15 | Bitcoin’s Seven Layers of Security #2

Link to the podcast audio: https://the-what-is-money-show.simplecast.com/episodes/wim059-the-saylor-series-episode-15-bitcoins-seven-layers-of-security-2

Michael Saylor 1:28
So we’re talking about the seven layers of security of the proof of work network, and the first layer is energy, the second layer is technology, the third layer is political. In all these cases, Bitcoin is becoming more secure, more long-lived, because it’s co-opting important actors in each of these three areas. We need a network of politicians to defend the network. You need a network of technology providers and semi-conductor providers in order to secure it. We need a network of energy providers to secure it. The fourth area that’s fascinating to me is the financial dimension of security of Bitcoin. Because miners are capital-intensive, you need capital to build the mining facilities that require the rigs and to do the engineering. So that capital comes from outside the Bitcoin system. So it’s US Dollar capital for the most part, or its currency equivalents. Bitcoin miners therefore are recruiting a network of fiat investors. There’s a whole set of conventional investors, they can’t buy Bitcoin or they wouldn’t buy Bitcoin but they would buy an operating company that mines Bitcoin. Kind of like people that don’t want to own gold but they want to own gold mining companies. So this is incredibly stabilizing for the network, because for example today the news was: Fidelity had bought 7% of Marathon. So a big, credible, traditional investor — I think Fidelity has like $2 trillion dollars, trillions of dollars of capital, 20 million customers, and they’ve been around forever—that company is now invested in a Bitcoin miner. How does Bitcoin benefit? Well now you’ve got hundreds of millions of dollars to lose if the Bitcoin miner fails, and so the investor has a vested interest in protecting their interest. So Bitcoin recruits a whole network of legal, marketing, and political lobbying capability as it recruits investors. There are trillions and trillions of dollars in the conventional economy that for legal reasons or political reasons or business reasons or tax reasons or practical reasons and technical reasons they can’t buy Bitcoin, but they can buy a security based on Bitcoin. So in fact from their point of view, they would prefer to buy the publicly-traded company, or if you’re a public company investor, you would prefer to buy a publicly-traded company, and if you’re a private investor you’d prefer to buy the stock of a privately-traded company, and that’s just what their pooled capital does. So if you want to co-opt that financial network of investors, you need a capital-intensive use of proceeds. So Bitcoin mining is capital-intensive and proof of work is capital-intensive. If I snap my fingers and I go to say proof of stake and you don’t actually need to buy equipment and you don’t need to engineer the facility and you don’t need to buy the energy, then you don’t need the capital. Well then you don’t need the investor, then you don’t need the investment banker, then you don’t need the market they trade in. I guess then you don’t need the support of the congressmen, the senators, and the regulators they know, and you probably don’t need the media journalists that they talk to. You’re losing all of that, right? And you’re also starting to look like you’ve created your own different system. You’ve created a virtual world where the politicians and the media and the capital and the bankers in the other world are irrelevant. You created your imaginary world. And Bitcoin mining bridges the Bitcoin universe — the crypto-asset of Bitcoin — with the physical and the political universe. And if money is socio-economic energy, well there’s two elements to that. The energy part says that it needs to be thermo-dynamically sound and conservative and correct. But the socio-economic part says: you need the politicians and you need the media and you need the influencers. So the process by which I construct Bitcoin mining companies is a process of recruiting the support of bankers, investors, politicians, and influencers, as well as technologists and energy producers. And that is a virtuous process. That is actually the hard work. You can think of it as when you’re building the Bitcoin mine, that’s the foundation upon which you’re building the bridge. You ever look at these bridges that cross the Chesapeake Bay they have to dig down and they have to put in place massive pilings in order to build the bridge on top of it. So if the sub-structure and the foundation is weak, then the bridge itself is prone to collapse. The Bitcoin miners themselves, they do all four of these things. And then the fifth layer of security is the network itself. And by the network I’m really referring to the Bitcoin mining centers. Every place that Bitcoin miners set up their own mining center, they’re plugging into the energy grid, they’re bringing in the mining rigs, they’re engineering them and suiting them, they’re getting the political support, they’re raising money, and now the miners themselves have their own companies. And there’s a lot of public companies and a lot of private companies. We’ll have like a dozen publicly-traded Bitcoin miners by the end of the year, but let’s say there’s hundreds of private companies. All of these companies are part of the network of security for Bitcoin. They all have skin in the game. They all have invested human capital, financial capital, technical capital, energy capital, time. As you can imagine, they don’t want to lose that, right? They feel pain. And so because they feel pain, they don’t want to lose that. They invest to protect that. And so how do you invest to protect $100 million invested in Bitcoin mining? You’re going to contribute to political campaigns, you’re going to hire lawyers — you know there are experts in Texas energy law. You’re going to hire lobbyists, you’re going to hire marketing people that are going to explain why Bitcoin is good for the world, not bad for the world. You’re going to hire HR people to manage all your HR issues. You’re going to hire financiers to report this to the investors. You’re going to spend a lot of time talking to all these constituencies to make the investors happy, keep the politicians happy. You’re going to be an early warning system against mishap, like if there’s a bug in the software of Bitcoin, or if there’s a bug in the hardware of Bitcoin, if you don’t trust the mining rig manufacturer you’re going to push back. If you think that the software is not being fast enough or the hardware is not being upgraded fast enough to keep the network secure and to protect your investment, you’re going to lobby and agitate. And you’re going to do that in a context where there’s a balance of power between you and the node operators, the validators —who is a lot, like there’s a lot of them—and there’s also a balance of power with Bitcoin investors. If you try to change the number of Bitcoin or you try to change the block size you’ll probably have a lot of Bitcoin HODLers that’ll push back on you. And then you’re going to do it in balance with your fiat investors, the people that hold your securities, or the derivatives. And you’re going to be managing the business to try to stay in alignment with regulations in 100 different jurisdictions. And you’re going to be communicating all the time. So the Bitcoin mining network is the fifth layer of security of proof of work, and ultimately when you get to a point where you have 50 well-capitalized Bitcoin miners and they’ve got billions of dollars each at stake and they’re spread across all the countries in the world, then they are in essence the first line of defense for Bitcoin. You can call them different things — I refer to them as a motor of sovereignty. They’re running the motor that keeps the sovereign network fresh, and they’re providing the transactions and the security. But you could also look at them as the roundhouses on the wall. They are the first thing you’re going to attack, right? When you decide you want to attack Bitcoin you’re going to attack the Bitcoin miner. They’re the first thing to get attacked. Since they have the most at risk, if you’re a Bitcoin miner in China, what have you suffered? A lot. They have the most to lose. And so the Bitcoin miner in Switzerland is going to be spending a lot of time thinking about whether there’s a political attack coming from Switzerland on Bitcoin. They will be the early warning system, the canaries in the coal mine, if you will. So those five layers, they’re implied by the proof of work algorithm, and we get energy, technology, politics, we get finance and we get network support, and they’re all sources of inertia and antifragility, and they all draw forms of capital that are not Bitcoin. Bitcoin is capital, but dollar capital, semi-conductor capital, political capital, energy capital, human capital — all of these forms of capital are creating a genetic diversity and a Darwinian vitality for the network. If I get rid of all that capital, if I just said, Well Bitcoin’s going to become a proof of stake network and we’re just going to stake Bitcoin to run Bitcoin, you see what you’ve done is created again a hermetically sealed, closed system, but that becomes an inbred system. And that means the biggest Bitcoin HODLer, when they go insane, the security’s not going to get upgraded, right? We’re not going to continue to distribute the network, we’re not going to upgrade the technology anymore, we’re not going to spend much time complying with the local political rules. And Howard Hughes was the richest man in the world, he ended up retiring into the top floor of his hotel and didn’t come out of his room for 7 years, he went bat-shit crazy. You know you can do that when you’re the richest man in the world when you don’t need anybody else, but you can’t do that when you have responsibilities. You have to get up every day and you have to go and put on a suit or a tie or at least conform with the local mores, and that keeps you from going off the deep-end or off the abyss.

Robert Breedlove 15:01
So this vortex you’re describing of energy, technology, politics surrounding Bitcoin, that’s it’s kind of assembling for itself, it’s centered on the expenditure of energy. That’s what makes it real, that’s what gives all these actors skin in the game. And the proof of stake model would be something that severs that bridge. We have this digital reality and physical reality that’s anchored by energy expenditure, but if you moved to proof of stake you’ve now severed that bridge. On the network mining specifically there’s this dynamic equilibrium of the governance between the miners, nodes, and all these various stakeholders. And the last point that I think is really important and we saw exhibited in this Chinese mining exodus was: the network is very amorphous. If one jurisdiction tries to stamp it down, what happens? A lot of these miners get boxed up, shipped elsewhere, plugged back in.

Michael Saylor 16:02
It’s a swarm creature. But it’s a swarm creature that lives in the physical world and in the political world. It is not a creature in cyberspace. It’s not a disembodied astral projection. If you cut the cord, if you don’t need energy, if you don’t need the semi-conductors, if you don’t need the political support, if you don’t need external capital, and if you don’t need to engineer a facility, if you don’t need a corporate structure, then you’ve created a virtual world like Second Life. And now if I create a virtual world and I design in it a virtual money or a virtual token, and then I stake that virtual token to secure a virtual network so that people can trade virtual goods and virtual things, I can create virtual security but it’s virtually certain that someone’s going to create another virtual world, right? The problem is: yeah you outsmarted yourself. You created something which was free and easy, which means that the guy that copied whatever to create Ethereum, well then the guy copied Ethereum to create Cardano and then someone copies Cardano to create the Uniswap and then they make SushiSwap and then they make the next thing. Because you could do it fast and easy. What you’ve done is you’ve created a virtual casino or a virtual world and virtual money. And it’s not that you can’t create a business around it. Like Second Life is a business. Fortnite is a business. Online gambling is a business. You can create a virtual casino or a virtual game or a virtual world — Dungeons and Dragons — and you can live in it and you can buy your virtual Vorpal Blade and you can use it to kill the virtual dragon. But the problem is: you don’t have a bridge to the thermodynamic real world, nor do you have a political bridge to the political world, and you have lost the space-time constants that give the property integrity, and durability—and that’s a good segue for me to go to layers six and seven. The sixth layer is the spatial layer and the seventh layer is the temporal layer. So by spatial layer I mean the proof of work Bitcoin mining network forces you to spread out throughout the world, because you’re not going to find 120 terawatt-hours of energy in one building. And even if you did in one building, the heat engineering is such that you can’t stack the Bitcoin miners up over each-other like that. So you have to spread out, and the natural competition means that well we find a volcano here and a nuclear reactor there and we find some stranded gas here. It’s an open system and it’s naturally diffusing and decentralizing, and that’s important. If you have a proof of stake network and I have 50% or 20% of all the money, then I can just stake the entire network in Monaco. Why would you need to spread it to the four corners of the Earth? Well the problem with staking the network in Monaco is that maybe Monaco has a political attack, or maybe the building gets wiped out. What if I stake the entire network on like 16 computers in the same place? You’re centralizing it and there is no thermodynamic incentive to decentralize it, and there is no requirement. But in fact with proof of work and the requirement of energy, it naturally is going to create an incentive for someone to put this on a waterfall in the middle of Africa. And that distributes the security load. You don’t want all the security to come from Manhattan. If all the security comes from Manhattan that’s proof of stake, that’s centralized, pretty soon you’ve got a central bank. Pretty soon three people get together and decide your destiny. Everything just centralizes. You really want to have the security to come from a country that you can’t get to, because if you can’t get to it, your enemy can’t get to it. And ideally it decentralizes so it’s even hard to distinguish where it’s coming from. So that spatial layer is forcibly decentralizing it, and it’s not just decentralizing it geographically, it’s also decentralizing it politically. And that causes it to decentralize across lots of institutions, lots of political jurisdictions, lots of geographic places. And if you want to attack it, there is no one central place to attack. You can’t define the vector. There’s no logical nexus and there’s no physical nexus. Like how do I find the top 51% — like 51% of the hashrate is in 198 facilities around the world — how do I take control of all 198 of them overnight without anybody noticing? Because that’s crossing 100 borders.

Robert Breedlove 22:25
Yeah it’s neutralizing all of these central attack vectors. Just by virtue of its own proliferation it’s becoming more immune to attack from anyone.

Michael Saylor 22:38
It becomes immune to a cyber attack, it becomes immune to a physical attack, and it becomes immune to a political attack. And it even becomes somewhat immune to a protocol attack where someone tries to get people to change the protocol. It’s just much harder to attack the durability and the integrity of the network because it becomes so spatially distributed. Proof of stake, 10 people might actually stake 51% so now I can actually identify the 10 people. Now I know who to attack. Psychologically, physically — whatever. I don’t even know where to start with something which is spatially distributed. So the seventh layer is temporal distribution. And by that it just means that the attack has to come over time, because it takes 12–24 months to create a world-class Bitcoin mining center. It takes another 12 months maybe to order all of the equipment. So how do I go about ordering 7th generation equipment secretly or with malicious intent, and then I have to convince someone to front me the money, right? So I have to hoodwink billions of dollars of investors, then I have to buy billions of dollars of equipment, then I have to wait 12 months, then I have to get someone to engineer the center and I have to get them to agree to do it because they trust me, and they’re not going to do it if they think I’m going to attack the network. Then I have to convince the politicians to let me build it — it’d take 3–5 years. Then I have to get all the engineers, then I have to build it, then I have to bring it online so that I can attack the network. And I’ve got to do all of that without a single person guessing that I’m trying to do it. If one person thinks that I might have malicious intent, they’d leak that on Twitter and 2 million people would know it in 7 minutes. So the space-time functioning of Bitcoin is important. You don’t want it to move fast. This is why if you read the Blocksize Wars, a lot of maneuvering back and forth but at the end of the day, the immediate a priori observation is that they shouldn’t have tried to change anything. It was a mistake to try to change the blocksize. It’s a mistake to try to change the frequency. Why? Because when you create a crypto-universe or a crypto-creature, the block size and the frequency of the network are akin to the space-time constants of the universe. It’s like trying to change the gravitational constant and the speed of light. You don’t get to play God except once. You can play God once. If Satoshi had designed the network with 1.2mb blocks and 8-minute frequency it might have worked. And there’s some parameters that wouldn’t have worked. But once he started it and it started to spin then you don’t change it, because the size of the blocksize is kind of like the packing density of carbon molecules. It’s like, if you were to change the speed of light or the gravitational constant, let’s say you changed the gravity on the surface of the Earth. Let’s say we made it 3x what it is right now? What happens to every creature, every bridge, every building, every plant, every factory? What happens when I crank up the gravitational constant by a factor of 3?

Robert Breedlove 26:56
They are failing strategies all of a sudden.

Michael Saylor 27:00
If you change gravity — heck, crank it up by a factor of 10. What happens? Every building and everything built up until now collapses, i.e. all work is negated. Not just work by mankind — work by animals, work by mother nature, rivers, mountains collapse, bridges collapse, companies collapse, countries collapse. So you would negate all past work, you would imperil or impair all structures. You would impair or destroy all machinery constructed. Any machine that works would stop working. And you would throw the future to chaos. And it’s pretty obvious you’re playing God, right? Change the speed of light — the same thing’s going to happen. The Reynolds number determines the hull speed of a ship. Change the Reynolds number, change the way that molecules move around a hydrofoil. Nothing works. Some things sink. At best, everything just gets destroyed, commerce collapses. So when you think about it like that, you come back to the crypto-universe, you say, Okay you created a crypto, you set the space-time parameters. Now the future of mining is based on that blocksize and that frequency. Change the blocksize, change the forecast of the mining revenue, change the expectations of every investor, change every business decision, invalidate all business decisions. At some point the foolishness of doubling the blocksize — which is what the big blockers wanted to do — if they had doubled the blocksize over and over again they would have driven the transaction fees to zero. When transaction fees go to zero the revenue of the Bitcoin mining business is dramatically changed. Now there’s no future revenue model. Now you have miners lobbying to change the block reward. You would basically bankrupt the mining business, screw it all up, and then you’ve got no security network because I can’t afford to actually secure the network. So they were imaging a world where everything had to be on the base layer, and they’re monkeying with the base layer. And instead what they should have seen is that the world is in layers. The key is: the base layer of Bitcoin is like the granite underlying Manhattan. You never needed it to be lighter. If somebody said, I have an idea: let’s turn the granite in Manhattan into cotton candy! It’ll taste better. It’s like, Are you an idiot? If you turn all of Manhattan into cotton candy all the buildings are going to sink, we’re all going to die in a cotton candy swamp. You know it’s so silly like we’re laughing, but the point is—But the granite’s heavy and it’s hard for me to move and it’s slow and the transaction fees for moving granite around are high — Yes! You’re not supposed to move the granite! You’re supposed to build on top of the granite. And the same is true with the base layer. You’re not supposed to move the base layer. The point of the base layer is to be here 1,000 years from now, right? Yeah you can wave your arm and convert the granite into sand or into mud and you can move it. You can shovel it out of the way with your little toy shovel from the seashore from when you were a kid, but the point is: you can’t build a city that’s going to last 1,000 years on mud and on sand. And if you have an understanding of the universe, the universe is layers and layers, and the consequences of the speed of sound is everything that flies through the air. And the consequences of the speed of light is everything in the universe. And the consequence of the gravitational constant is how the water flows and how the mountains move. And once you understand those things you can build everything. Everything that humanity has done in the history of the human race is predicated on those space-time constants being what they were. And when you decide to routinely change them you’re playing God. And when you play God you pretty much destroy everything that came before and throw into chaos everything that comes afterwards after leveling every building and leaving a trail of wreckage in the present day. It’s like an earthquake except it’s worse than an earthquake. It’s like a continual rolling, randomized series of different earthquakes every second. And that’s why you don’t want to screw with that.

Robert Breedlove 32:19
Yeah the way I’m looking at this is if we go back to life and Bitcoin being the survival strategy propagating forward, those strategies optimize for the environmental invariance. So life is optimizing to overcome gravity in a way, and if you change one of these invariants, all of a sudden you invalidate all of the survival strategies. Like all of the adaptation, all the fitness modifications that’s ever been done is just worthless all of a sudden.

Michael Saylor 32:52
You double the gravity, you kill all of the birds. Like that! You kill all of the birds. “Why don’t we just double the blocksize, like cut it in half?” Yeah because everything will die. Like cut the oxygen content in half. What happens?

Robert Breedlove 33:11
And then that very precedent destroys Bitcoin, right? Had there been a successful change — and I’ve heard it put this way, is that Bitcoin cannot be reproduced because irreproducibility was the invention. To create something that no one can change.

Michael Saylor
Make it immutable.

Robert Breedlove 33:33
Yeah if you somehow change it, all of a sudden you’ve destroyed that invariance that it was offering. And this is incredible — I’ve never thought about how all these layers actually preserve it in such a way. And the temporal layer is interesting too because if you try to attack it, it’s like there’s no way to do it without alerting network participants. So it’s like a lag or a buffer in the complex system that stabilizes it. If you try to change it, people adapt.

Michael Saylor 34:04
Okay, well that’s the speed of sound. Like for example, you’re like, Wouldn’t it be great if sound moved faster or slower? A shock wave is when you attack the air faster than it moves out of the way. Well do we need a speed of sound? Yeah! You need a speed of sound. What if we made the speed of sound equal to the speed of light? Not a good idea. If you want the universe to work — what if we got rid of friction? The transaction fees are too high, let’s take them to zero. Well that’s the same as saying, Let’s get rid of friction. And let’s get rid of gravity. Well getting rid of friction and gravity is a problem because pretty much everything we’ve created works with it. How about your tires without friction? How well is your car going to drive without friction? They’re not bad things. In the defense of the big blockers, the Lightning Network was not as manifestly clear today, but all you have to do is look at a Lightning wallet and a Lightning transaction and look at a layer 2 and a layer 3 transaction — look at how Square Cash App works, look at how Muun works — I can send 1,000 sats in 1 second for 1 sat. Once you see that you realize layer 2 platforms, layer 3 applications are going to move Bitcoin at the speed of light in an almost friction-free way, and what did you really want from Bitcoin? You wanted it to not break. It’s foolish to risk the immortality of Bitcoin in order to go from 1mb to 2mb blocks. It’s foolish. How about — you could have had something that would be immortal and you could build a civilization that would last for 10,000 years and you could just do it with layer 2 and layer 3 apps, but instead we’re risking putting out the fire of civilization to try to change the space-time coefficients of the one crypto-network which successfully took root and decentralized.

Robert Breedlove 36:30
Yeah and that emulates nature properly, to your point, where nature evolves in layers. So we need an unshakable foundation to support higher layers.

Michael Saylor 36:42
So let’s talk a little bit about proof of stake because that’s the elephant in the room here. Look, proof of work is an open, competitive, natural system. It emulates Darwinian competition. And it’s open. Proof of stake is a closed, controlled system. So the problem with a closed, controlled system is it’s not Darwinian and there’s no genetic diversity. It becomes inbred. So let’s take a shoreline — a living shoreline. If you’re trying to actually maintain such a thing. The way they engineer it is, you would create 200-foot long revetments and you would put a break in it for the seawater to come in, and then you create another revetment to protect the shore from the surf, but you always have to have a break for seawater to come in. If you don’t leave that channel for seawater to come in, then the water behind the revetment becomes putrid. You ever seen a putrid standing body of water without circulation? It breeds bacteria, it becomes infested, it becomes dangerous, it’s not healthy. And why? It’s closed. It’s a closed system. All cities, all civilizations — why do you build a city on a river? Because you need something to carry the waste away. What happens if you recirculate your waste in your own [inaudible 38:19]? How long can you recirculate the waste in your space suit? How long can you recirculate the water and the waste in your apartment? Well proof of stake is recirculating itself and the problem there is, unless you have perfect components and you have perfect conditions, at some point either the toxicity of the closed environment destroys the ecosystem, or it becomes so fragile because of the lack of Darwinian competition and the lack of ecological genetic diversity that eventually it dies. It’s like a creature endlessly cloning itself. After you endlessly clone yourself you’re subject to genetic mutations and defects. That’s why every organic creature has sex, right? You actually want to keep mixing the DNA in order to avoid the mutated defects. And you can’t cleanse yourself. You can’t fix the species if you close the system.

Robert Breedlove 39:38
This is like the photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, eventually it gets very blurry.

Michael Saylor 39:45
Yeah. And coming back to the other elephant in the room here: Bitcoin is a successful proof of work network that has created our first digital money, our first digital property. Bitcoin has done that. We can see that. There are no successful examples of a proof of stake network succeeding as digital property. That’s the elephant in the room. There are no successful proof of stake networks. What would be required to be successful? Well here’s a simple one: if the United States government designated a proof of stake network as property and not a security. It’s never happened. In fact the head of the SEC just went on television and said, If there’s an ICO and there’s a shared enterprise with intent to profit then it’s a security. So as far as I can see every proof of stake network that’s been launched looks to be by legal definition a security, not property. And even Ethereum isn’t a proof of stake network, so there’s a debate about whether it is property or not, and that’ll eventually be resolved. But there’s absolutely no question that at this point the only successful digital property that’s ever been created in the history of the world was created on a proof of work network. There’s nothing else. Everything else is just like a garage-science experiment or a venture experiment. And on the surface they all appear to be securities. I mean none of them has successfully decentralized or been embraced as property. And it’s not clear whether they can successfully decentralize. I mean, theoretically new things are possible, but practically speaking we have one example of crypto-property or crypto-money, and that is Bitcoin. And everything else is a speculation.

Robert Breedlove 42:11
Let me ask you: it seems to me like central banks in a way are a proof of stake network where essentially the more gold they have or reserves they’re staking, the more interest and inflation revenue they can generate, effectively. Could we say that then a proof of stake network could only really exist with — because again there’s gold underlying that, a proof of work underlying central banks.

Michael Saylor 42:46
You could say currencies are proof of stake. If you own a country, you can designate your currency or your token to be a currency, because you make the law. Venezuela can designate their currency and the US can designate its currency. So you have examples of those systems. They’re not crypto proof of stake systems, they’re fiat systems.

Robert Breedlove
But they are inherently centralizing. I don’t see why a crypto system would be different.

Michael Saylor 43:20
They are centralized. They all centralize. It seems logical that other stake systems will centralize. And by the way, centralization is not inherently a vice as long as it’s treated as a security. For example, a publicly traded company that has a stock has a centralized token — that is the stock. But they have obligations to disclose the number of those such tokens to their shareholders and it’s illegal for them to act in a duplicitous unethical fashion. And it’s also illegal for a politician to promote that security, because that gives it unfair advantage to one company over another. So if you treat it as a security, then a staked token is ethical and legal.

Robert Breedlove 44:32
Yeah. It can just never work [as] money.

Michael Saylor 44:34
Yeah it’s just not ethical to create private money as a security token and represent that it’s property. That’s where you’re crossing the moral hazard boundary. So I think the summary here is: Bitcoin has created digital money, digital property, if you will — either — on top of a decentralized proof of work network. There are other proof of work networks that are much smaller and less successful that are less decentralized that are struggling to a degree, not winning against Bitcoin. And there are other theoretical approaches to creating a decentralized network — none of them have succeeded to date. If the definition of success is to be deemed morally and legally as property by a legitimate government.

END

Robert Breedlove 45:44
Alright everybody, that was Episode 15.