Bitcoin's Roots Trace Back To This California Cult

0:00 The extropian roots of Bitcoin. Because I talked about it a little bit before, but I want to get into it. And there's this really great article from 2021 about this. Bitcoin is booming, but not every enthusiast know that the cryptocurrency has roots in a radical futurist philosophy that started to bloom in the California of the '80s. Hal Finney, a Bitcoin pioneer, most of you if you know anything about Bitcoin history, would know Hal Finney's name. A Bitcoin pioneer and the first person to ever receive a Bitcoin transaction, was cryonically preserved by Alcor. That's right. Hal Finney preserved by Alcor. And that was in 2014. Please don't say to Hal's friends that he passed away, or worse, cryonics enthusiasts hope to be

0:45 revived by a future by future science in a few decades or centuries down the stream of time. He did not die, guys. He's got a little He's got a little cold. Cryonics was and still is frequently discussed in the extropians mailing list, the list, now called extropy chat, started in the '90s with the internet and is one of the oldest mailing lists still active. Let me take these off. I don't need those on. We're not watching a video. The Extropy Institute, founded in California in '80s, a few years before the internet, published a print journal for a few years. They say death and taxes are the two things you can escape, but escaping death and taxes is precisely what extropy was all about in its early days, because they were

1:31 libertarians. taxes. So perfect. So Hal was a freaking participant in the extropian online discussions of cryonics, life extension, space colonization, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, mind uploading, and the technical, social, and political aspects of cryptography. Julian Assange lurked and occasionally participated. I joined the list in the 90s after reading a Wired article titled Meet the Extropians. And this is the Wired article. I was going to bring it up for stream, but I I I kind of went against that because I think this this and this is a very uh uh famous photo um

2:18 in if you're into this type of stuff, is uh this photo of these early Extropians that's uh Max More there uh in in the middle. So, who is John Galt? The discussion of cryptography in the list on the list were informed by a strong libertarian stance that was characteristic of the early phase of extropy, similar to the philosophy of Ayn Rand's hero, John Galt. The ideological framework is outlined in Max More's The Principles of Extropy, and the following passages are especially relevant here. Extropy means supporting social orders that foster freedom of communication, freedom of action, experimentation, innovation, questioning, and learning, opposing

3:04 authoritarian social control and unnecessary hierarchy, and favoring the rule of law and decentralization of power and responsibility. Now, does that sound like the tactics of the AI cult people today? Because to me, it does not. To me, that is not it. That is the opposite of how they operate today. Today, it is about forcing this on people, which is what I have a problem with. I have a problem with not having a say in how AI and all of this stuff all of these technologies interact with our lives in so far as to bring us to a next evolution in

3:50 humanity. These people think now, well, even then, that we can be in control of that evolution. And the problem is is they think now that they're are the ones, the only ones capable of doing that for us when we were never consulted in any of this. Because I see in my chats every day that no or every show that nobody wants to be frozen, nobody wants to have robot eyes, nobody wants to have this Most people want to remain human. We're not really interested in experimenting with humanity. And if they were truly

4:35 libertarian still, they would know that. But they're not because they know that you're not going to be able to give everybody freedom into this evolution of man. They're going to need to force it. That is why Extropy no longer really exists. But again, it's good to understand where all of this kind of comes from. Because to me, the Extropians are like not that bad. That's just me. Extropic societies are open societies that protect the freedom or the free exchange of ideas, the freedom to criticize, and the liberty to experiment. Coercively suppressing bad ideas can be as dangerous as the bad

5:20 ideas themselves. Better ideas must be allowed to emerge in our cultures through an evolutionary process of creation, mutation, and critical selection. The freedom of expression of an open society is best protected by a social order characterized by voluntarily by voluntary relationships and exchanges. That is not how these people operate today. Back then, they didn't pull the levers of society. Back then, they were in the fringe. So, for them, they needed the world to say people should be able to experiment on themselves and experiment with, you know, whatever they want because if

6:06 society was cool with that, then they would be able to do the things that they wanted to do. And I actually believe that a lot of these people did not have the vision for what we are entering into now. In fact, probably many of them, at least back then, would have been against what they're seeing today. But, a lot of these people are still active and still out here and they're have 30-something years of experience and trial and error and all the stuff that led them to here. And now, they may be a little bit more, let's call it fascist, a little bit more pushy. It's interesting to note that the words could seem too sedated and watered-down to many hardcore extropian libertarians of the '80s and '90s. In the other hand, many flavors of radical

6:52 futurism have emerged since the '90s, which are distributed all over the political spectrum, which is a really neat way of saying everything that I just said. So, who is Satoshi Nakamoto? If you follow Bitcoin, you know who Satoshi is. Well, you don't know who Satoshi is. We all have theories. They're claiming it's this dude from Europe. I can't remember his name right now. Uh I don't think that it was. I think Satoshi Nakamoto is a construct of the CIA. Personally, Hal Finney, it could have been Hal Finney. If it was anybody in the group, it it was Hal Finney because Hal was the closest to Satoshi. It's interesting to note that Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, and Wei Dai had been rumored to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mystery man who announced

7:38 Bitcoin in October of 2008 in 2008 on Metzger's cryptography list. Hal Finney had made attempts to create his proof-of-work based cryptocurrency called RPOW, while Nick Szabo and Wei Dai had proposed similar e-cash frameworks called Bit Gold and B-Money. All three have denied being Satoshi, but the rumors persist. Nick Szabo and Wei Dai are still suspected to be but two pseudonyms used by the invisible genius who also used the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym, the now 86-year-old Nobel Prize winner John Nash of A Beautiful Mind fame. I don't know how seriously we should take those rumors. Most certainly, those persons have the

8:23 intellectual bandwidth to pull something like Bitcoin out of the unseen realm of arcane mathematics, but the allegations still seem too far-fetched to me. However, I suspect that Satoshi Nakamoto may have been lurking or even participating under on other pseudonyms in the extropy list. Satoshi was into extropianism, smart contracts, uh think Ethereum, uh think NFTs, right? Now, I'm sure a bunch of you are going to talk a bunch of about NFTs, how it's stupid they they were and everything like that. And if that's what you think about NFTs, I'm not going to say that you're wrong, but I'm going to say that bored apes

9:08 were, I think, almost intentionally uh there to corrode public interest in uh smart contracts or NFTs because smart contracts would actually I I'm a I'm a firm believer in smart contracts. I think that smart contracts make our world run better. Our digital world runs run better, and all ownership being in a smart contract makes a lot of sense. But also, they tried to Trojan horse smart contracts into society through you know, Bored Apes and all of the other NFTs

9:53 that went to the moon and became speculative assets. But smart contracts like your home could be a smart contract, your car could be a smart contract. The things you own, the assets you own could the ownership could be tied to smart contracts. That technology I think is actually quite incredible and dates back to this time. This is far before Bitcoin, far before Ethereum.