Latest / Monero Talk / Monero vs. the Surveillance State w/ Blake Lovewell / EPI #302

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Monero vs. the Surveillance State w/ Blake Lovewell / EPI #302 · Monero Talk

• Doug Alright, Blake, what's going on, man? Blake Hey, great to be with you, Doug. Must admit that I'm a big fan, a bit of a fanboy. So it's a real honor to be here in the hot seat where so many other legends in the Monero community have sat. Oh, thank you, man. Blake Really, honestly, I know there are other people out there, too, because I was one of those anonymous listeners who you never get to meet, but well, maybe you will get to meet some of them at Monero Topia and events like that, which are really exciting. Blake But yeah, I was one of them. So shout out to those anonymous listeners there, whether you're painting walls, digging holes, or doing some coding, or just sat back and chilling. We're here to hopefully shed some light on Monero and the wider cryptosphere. Doug Thank you. I'm blushing over here. It's definitely not a hot seat for you, I don't believe. I think we're pretty well aligned on our worldviews and our views on crypto. But before we get into it, why don't you go ahead and give the audience a little bit of an intro with regards to yourself. Doug I'll be honest, I don't know much about you. Tuxudo in the Monero community recommended I reach out to you. I did a little research today and I was very impressed with the content you put out. But go ahead and give an intro. Blake Wow, what an honor. Yeah, Tux, thanks for the link. Yeah, a big fan of Tux's work over. You can check it out. Tux .pizza. That's his URL. He's doing great work there. I found him through, well, obviously, I knew him from Monero talk in his various work with you. Blake But I somehow didn't, it didn't click for me until I saw he was writing about Monero talk. And then I was like, wait, it's the same Tux. It's the same Penguin. But yeah, so my name is Blake Lovewell. Blake I'm predominantly a writer. I also do some, you know, content, video and audio stuff to kind of go along with that. I'd say I'm predominantly a researcher, researching topics that interest me and then trying to digest them and write them up for a wider audience because I feel like much of many of the problems of the world could be helped by just getting good information out there in a clear and succinct format that people can understand. Blake And far too often people like to have their limited hangout where their understanding is higher than everybody else's and that gives them the kind of sacred right to rule over that area. And I know that in finance, that's definitely one area where that happens, where control is established. Blake Yeah, my, my background of interest is from politics. Originally, I studied politics at university and quickly realized I didn't want any job to do with politics because I think if you're getting paid to do anything for politics, you're getting paid to support someone else's politics, not your own. Blake So very quickly veered away from that as a sort of career path and kind of got back into it recreationally. Probably a few years ago now, maybe about five years ago, I still had that lingering urge. I still keep really up to date on the pulse with news, although I have weaned myself off the mainstream media diet, which is not very good for you. Blake There's lots of bad news and lots of things that are intended to make you feel a certain way that may not be the most honorable path. So yeah, now I've been deep in research for a great many years now. Blake And certain things stick out to me as important. And so I do a lot of talk and research on economics, particularly macroeconomics, stuff like central bank policies. I've done a lot of research on CBDC, central bank digital currencies. Blake I know that might be a trigger phrase for some of the listeners out there, but we'll get to that shortly, I'm sure. And obviously, you can see by the neon sign, I mean, I need to update and get a Monero one like you. Blake But I've been in crypto for a good while. So I know my bits and bobs there. Although I'm not a coder, and I must bow down to the superior knowledge of those sacred few who actually establish these protocols and maintain them and do, you know, the kind of the stuff that we can only dream of, but we can still talk about to get the news out. Blake And maybe we're able to talk with other humans in a more efficient way than the people who are good at typing on a keyboard too. Doug What was your pathway to crypto? Did you discover crypto as somebody who already kind of had the, I don't know, anarchist worldview, or maybe that's not appropriate for, I don't know, I don't know exactly where you stand yet, but I get some, I get some of that. Doug Um, or was it, was it crypto that kind of led you towards, towards that philosophy? Blake Well, yeah, I would say I started as an anarchist and the crypto in particularly the cypherpunk ideology stuck out to me. I'd already read Pekka Himannan's Hacker Ethic a long time ago, and I was a big supporter of WikiLeaks work, particularly in 2010 and, you know, going forward from there. Blake And so I think probably some of the first stuff I heard about crypto was that when WikiLeaks were kicked off Paypal or Paypal kicked WikiLeaks off their service, they could no longer receive donations. Blake The only means by which they could receive donations were cryptocurrencies. So, you know, you hear about them through that and then various other means digging in the deep depths of the Internet. And for a long while, I just would track Bitcoin's price and get really excited that it was going up and there was more adoption. Blake And I didn't have any Bitcoin for a good couple of years. Maybe I should have jumped in at that point. But, you know, the past is the past and you get it. You get in at the level that you get in at. And now, you know, a few years down the line, I'm glad I got in back then rather than getting it now. Blake Seems like a much more difficult field to get into now. It was a lot more fun. You know, have a punt back then. Now the stakes seem a little bit higher. And then so, yeah, I kicked off with Bitcoin. I was never a massive fan of Ethereum. Blake I always thought it played second fiddle to Bitcoin's hegemony. Obviously, I do see plenty of problems with the Bitcoin protocol and came across Monero a few years later back when it was still in almost the top five cryptos. Blake And, you know, we we hold out hope that it will regain that mantle one day in my heart. It's still definitely up there still as a. Doug top, it still is a top five. I mean, it's a top three, right? It's exactly what if you get rid of the theory of Monero, exactly. Blake of all the wasted time coins, all the stable coins, all the scammy algorithm AI type weird coins, all you're left with is a real handful and Monero's on the top of that handful. We don't want to become toxic Bitcoin maximalists because I listened to Seth for privacy's podcast and absolutely amazing guy and really positive messages out there because yeah I agree it's very easy to you know get into your own echo chamber and everything sounds good. Blake We've got saying in England if you like the smell of your own farts you know you just get off on your own opinions and you're not looking for counter opinions but with Bitcoin and with Monero the best results come from really harsh interrogations so sometimes your worst enemy can be your best friend because they're trying to pick holes, they're trying to they're trying to unsettle and upset the whole thing and there you can find weaknesses and there you can also find resolve and strength so yeah it's definitely an interesting sphere to be in at the moment. Doug So given from the point you got into crypto and discovered crypto to now, how has your viewpoint of crypto evolved? Blake it has really evolved. Now I'm at the stage where I really think, I found a quote from Hal Finney, I haven't got it on me right now, but he was basically taught Hal Finney one of the progenitors of Bitcoin other than Satoshi Nakamoto. Blake He was saying that Bitcoin he foresees, he had this amazing vision, he foresaw that Bitcoin would become this base layer for international bank settlements and that Bitcoin transactions would be as rare as gold transactions between central banks. Blake And I'm much more leaning towards that, although he had this opinion probably about 15 years ago. I'm really interested in how Bitcoin through the ETF kind of phase is being absorbed into mainstream financial institutions and how, what role Bitcoin in particular, but cryptocurrency in general can play in sort of that tapestry. Blake So when I started, it was kind of magic internet money. Like I say, back then it was a lot more fun and games. Also then it became number go up. It was very interesting, you know, seeing that although it was never about cashing out, I was always hodled to the moon. Blake And similarly, I see arguments about Monero that you should try and spend it to create the circular economy. I think it's 50 -50 to spend some, save some because, you know, if you're in Monero and you understand the value of privacy, then you think that then you probably do agree that Monero is incredibly undervalued, that it has a long way to go up as its enemy surveillance capitalism has a long way to go in the opposite direction. Blake So yeah, I think some of us say. Doug that, some of us take that a little too far, right, in the Monero community of, you know, just just use Monero, or, or I think maybe kind of it's misinterpreted a little bit. It came from the earlier days of, you know, what that means, trying to gain adoption. Doug Don't buy Monero, right was was the, the great marketing in the early days, with the warning warning, where it may have adverse effects on the financial system, right, or the state apparatus. And I think it went over a lot of people's heads, obviously not me or you or the ones who stuck around, right, I think it was very effective at weeding out the, the true believers, the true cypherpunks, right, it kind of, I kind of saw it as an effective tool for that. Doug But I think it's, it's since been kind of overblown a little bit, and misused to where people say, yeah, you shouldn't, you should never hold Monero, just use it as a tool for transacting. And I tend to agree with you, it's, it's clearly, it's clearly both. Doug I mean, if it works as intended, which it does, and it's growing in adoption for that use case, then given, you know, Metcalf's law, right, as more people are using it, the value of the system as a whole go up. Blake Exactly. And we're kind of a weird crossroads at the moment with Monero in particular, where, you know, since the delisting from Binance, OKX, I mean, that's most of the centralised exchanges. We're down to stuff like local Monero. Blake I'm a fan of TradeOga as well for exchanging. But, you know, we're down to the bare bones of a functional economy with Monero. And, you know, the only way is up in terms of growth and adoption and stuff like that. Blake But it's also a very difficult time for people to on -ramp. But yeah, so it's a really super interesting time. One thing I was going to mention in this, like, sort of timeline of, you know, awakening to privacy. Blake Well, ever since the Snowden revelations, the NSA leaks, you know, kind of all ties in with the WikiLeaks theme that made me really aware of surveillance to a high degree. And I think back in like the 2012 era, people were becoming aware that there was this dragnet surveillance of all internet activity. Blake And it still felt like there were things you could do. You could block trackers on your browser. You know, you could, you know, install all of these various different layers of protection for yourself online, at least. Blake And I feel like that by now, 10 years, 10 or plus years down the line, people have become so disillusioned that they kind of accept a huge amount of surveillance as a given. And don't bother trying to obfuscate their tracks. Blake They'll just give their fingerprint to their phone, give the biometric data to the phone or computer or both, you know, give your iris scan to the airport. All of this would be considered an egregious assault on your privacy 10, 15 years ago. Blake And so I think it's kind of a weird galvanizing effect that those Snowden revelations had on people, because at first it's shock and, you know, how can they do unwarranted wiretapping without going through the court procedure and all of that. Blake And now it's kind of accepted. And people just kind of accept your GPS is tracking wherever you go, and you accept that your bank is surveilling every transaction that you do, you know. Doug Yeah, I I guess and I'm sure you'd agree a lot of it has to do with it just being an evil system that's in place where Where you know the people are are kept fat and happy as as they're caged, right? Doug And there's just enough dopamine being being fed to us that we're we're okay with the state of things even though we're basically enslaving ourselves Blake Yeah, well, that's the brave new world metaphor, right, with the Soma, you know, you have the constant pleasure, you know, fed enough, enough that you will do what you're told to receive more of it, but enough that you are docile, that you won't revolt. Blake And then we've got that multiplied by the 1984, you know, total surveillance and the subservience to the state, which I think we all witnessed in 2020, wherever in the world we are. Something that I think happened then is that there was a massive browbeating of the general population. Blake And I think I'll be the first to admit there's definitely some trauma associated with that. I probably align with lots of the anarchists listening, felt that there was an egregious overreach by the state. Blake But you know, whatever political persuasion you were, there's trauma with that. And I think people haven't really dealt with that properly. And so, you know, there's various different eras of that. 2020 was definitely a large one, 2008 and nine was a very important one for finance, because that was when there was a massive theft of value from the system. Blake And though I wouldn't say that 2008 nine was the start of financial criminality, I mean, I would start that in about the 1970s, where that kind of took over as the dominant thread when the US went off the gold standard, you had this kind of rampant fight financialization, the US hegemony was expanded through, you know, after the failure of Vietnam, they tried to expand it through kind of the backdoor, you know, installing dictators, doing color revolutions and stuff like that. Blake But yeah, as you were saying, the the evil system, it is all too easy to think of the world outside as evil, but I'm sort of relentlessly optimistic as well. Because if you're not optimistic, then what are you fighting for? Blake So I'll always bounce back with that. Doug We try to keep it positive over here, you know. I've been there all right. Well, I always see you with a smile on your face. So, where does your positivity come from? What do you see as the avenue towards humanity escaping dystopia? Blake That's such a good question. I think that everyone harbors utopian ideals, whether you want to see your street have less litter, whether you want to see, you know, your local farmer accepting Monero for vegetables, or whether it's wishing for peace in various different war -torn regions in the world. Blake Yeah, everyone's got their utopian ideals, and I think that if everybody were acting in tune with those utopian ideals, then we'd be in a lot better of a place. I will admit that not all utopian ideals are great because most evil dictators had a utopia. Blake They killing all of the scientists or people with glasses because he thought the intelligentsia were presenting this threat. You know, maybe that's one utopia too far, but those are the exceptions, maybe the exceptions that prove the rule, because I think in general most people have a benign base state, and so encouraging people to act on those utopian ideals or at least align themselves with that hyper purpose is, I think, a good way to manifest positive change. Blake As to where does optimism come from? Yeah, it's really complex and probably quite personal and spiritual. I'm not particularly religious, but I definitely think there's a great bit more to life than maybe meets the eye, or at least than the mechanical, scientific, predominant ideology of us. Blake And yeah, if you kind of ignore that, you ignore that at your own parallel or your own loss. I can't hear you. I believe you're muted. Doug I'm sorry there. More specifically with regards to Manero, we're talking about the fact that the vast majority of humans don't seem to care that they're being led down this path towards dystopia and there's a small minority, there's the cypherpunks and other liberty fighters. Doug What do you see as specifically being some ideas of what the path forward may be that would allow Manero to succeed on a larger level? Blake Great question. And that brings us back to Monero, because I was worried we'd be going down the, you know, spiritual crisis angle, which I wasn't ready for. We ought to go too far down that angle. Yeah. Blake Well, yeah, it's interesting. When you mentioned how, in general, people seem to be subsequent to the dystopia, I was listening to something about CBDCs in India, Central Bank Digital Currencies in India, and they have a digital rupee. Blake It hasn't had a lot of take up yet, but they're still piloting, as many countries are around the world piloting the CBDCs. But they said there that the internet penetration is still around 50%. So 50% of the people in India don't have internet yet, or at least consistent internet access or mobile phone signal to a high enough degree to run internet. Blake I visited India, and India to me was a very internet entwined culture already. And, you know, Bangalore is one of the global hubs for internet and technology based industry. So it was kind of surprising to me to see that the statistics, you know, that the Indian state are collected still showed such low, to me, low reach of the internet. Blake And so, you know, we can kind of see in like a modern country like the UK or the US, excuse me, that there's a huge amount of internet penetration and most people are on board. They see people on the train, I think, you know, a huge percentage of them will be on their phone, scrolling most of the journey. Blake But that's not true of the whole world and India is a country with over a billion population. So maybe not everybody is in the exact same as well. And it's hard to kind of think outside of our own box. Blake So that gives me one avenue for optimism that there's a long way to go before the whole world population are slavish drones with microchips that, you know, march to the sound of the drum of Big Brother. Blake as to bringing this back round to Monero and the cypherpunk ideology, I think that necessity is the mother of invention. Whenever there is a market crash, you know, such as the Weimar crash in Germany, in between World War One and Two, people have to find means to transact when the currency is inflating rampant. Blake Monero is set up and ready. It's like one small download of a wallet piece of technology away from manifesting. So that's ready in there. That won't reach the 50% of India that are off grid. And maybe they are blessed by not having to have recourse yet for Monero. Blake But I know that there is a large amount of Bitcoin adoption going on in India too. And so as those people come, they will be onboarding into a world where Bitcoin is already prevalent and where Bitcoin goes, so can Monero. Blake I think that they can go hand in hand. I don't think it's worth, you know, bemoaning Bitcoin. You know, it exists. It's already tied in with a lot of things too. So, yeah, you know, there's a term backdooring, which is what its agencies do to break into laptops and phones. Blake They'll, you know, find some vulnerability and, you know, access the hardware that way, and then they can surveil it or, you know, access and do whatever they'd like to. Well, I think the same thing can be done by the cypherpunks, backdooring, however an opportunity arises. Blake In terms of Monero, it's, you know, mentioning it to anybody who wishes to transact financially with you as an alternative and offering a discount. But obviously we don't want to just bang on like that to our, you know, relatives that have no idea how to log into their phone, let alone download the GUI wallet and run the command line and so on. Blake But cypherpunks, yeah, cypherpunks write code and that's kind of where it ties in. And having a healthy skepticism of solutions offered or conveniences in particular, not simply taking the most convenient route, but thinking about what that may, you know, cost you, not in financial terms, but potentially so. Blake But the convenience, you know, comes at a very high cost, often of privacy in particular, where you give up your, you know, if you download a browser extension, this browser extension wants access to your history, bookmarks, contacts, the rest of the desktop, you know, oh, it's a convenient browser extension. Blake But do I want to, you know, basically pay with all of my data? The answer should be no. People often think that data is worthless. But in this economy, your data, personal information is probably one of the more important currencies that you have to barter with. Blake And you, if you give that away for free, then you're giving away your gold, you know, your own personal sovereignty. So maybe realigning some things ideologically is a good start as well. Doug What do you see as being maybe some of the events that will take place that will enlighten people about Monero? Blake Hmm. Well, almost every year I see something coming down the line where I think this is it, this is the big one, the big economic crash, having witnessed 2008 and nine, and that was probably a formative experience for me, because I went deep on it, trying to understand the derivatives bubble, how it was affecting people, what was going on there. Blake I think something like a crash is one of the big facilitators from an arrow. At least for cryptocurrency, I would say, in a broad sense, because cryptocurrency, as Christine Lagarde has said, is a bit of an escape valve. Blake And, you know, Obama said, it's a Swiss bank in your pocket. I think Monero is much more of a Swiss bank in your pocket than Bitcoin is. So a crash is definitely a big catalyzer for cryptocurrency in general. Blake The state of cryptocurrency right now, though, it seems to be really institutionalizing. Bitcoin is going into ETF territory and being adopted by JP Morgan and BlackRock, you know, some of the worst, you know, institutions in the world are getting deeply involved. Blake And whether it can escape their tentacles and carry on with its own agenda, that's up for grabs right now. And simultaneously, as we mentioned earlier, most of the top 50 cryptocurrencies are kind of stablecoins, which stablecoins can easily be tied into a CBDC system, or weird algorithmic versions of Ethereum that don't really offer anything, but they're probably speculative assets more than they are functional technologies. Blake So we can kind of abandon a lot of the cryptocurrency stuff if we're focused in on Monero. And the other thing that Monero offers that other cryptocurrencies don't is privacy, and therefore, the biggest catalyzer for a privacy technology like Monero is the expansion of CBDCs. Blake That's kind of in the short term, you know, I'm trying to envision an event whereby there will be a large scale privacy invasion that causes people to wish that they had a means to transact outside of that. Blake I don't think that will happen for another 10, 50, maybe 20 years when people bank accounts just start being turned off. When the social credit score reaches a certain level, you know, that's going to be the massive catalyzer for Monero. Blake And if Monero can just keep building, keep chugging along, keep momentum, keep the ground swell until then, you know, then we've got the, you know, the keys to our own handcuffs, and the means to seize our own freedom. Blake But events like a large scale, you know, event that would catalyse that I'm not so sure. In terms of CBDCs, whilst we're here, I actually believe that we're in the CBDC system already. When it's there's not going to be a day when the US goes, here's the central bank digital currency version of the US dollar, the digital dollar, you know, 2027, and suddenly all the dollars are tised and everyone is up in arms. Blake 98% of the dollars are already digital. the Federal Reserve already operates an instant payment service. They're already with all of the banks in terms of digital IDs and all of the large banks in the US as well as around the world are involved in blockchain technologies. Blake I wrote an article last year I believe called the seven pillars of the CBDC system. If you're interested it's quite long -winded going into each of those seven pillars but I believe most of them are already in place. Blake However, it's kind of like Bitcoin. There was already hash cash, e -cash, all of these different technologies and Nakamoto really just tied them all together into one protocol as well as solving a couple of other double spend problem and stuff. Blake With CBDCs I think what we're waiting for is for One Nation State to tie all of these technologies together and create the sort of big bad CBDCs system that's going to come out but I think we're already system and so I don't foresee one event, one explosive event that will galvanize people and suddenly will have everyone flowing into Monero. Blake I think there'll be lots of little battles. I believe there's even one going on right now as we speak. There's a huge number of transactions in the memory pool for Monero. I was just checking a few hours ago. Blake Really exciting and interesting and seeing how Monero is able to flex and expand its capacity to deal with a higher number of transactions. It's kind of another test for Monero and whether that's to do with the all -time high flirting that Bitcoin is doing right now with all the ETF hype. Blake We don't know because with Monero it's completely anonymous. No one knows which wallet is doing what but we can tell just some statistics that there are a huge number of transactions going on right now and so perhaps right now we're even in one of these battles and there's the phrase death by a thousand cuts. Blake Perhaps Monero can be victorious with a thousand small successes. Doug I like it. You talk about CBDCs, how about Bitcoin? Do you see Bitcoin as, worst case, effectively becoming a pseudo CBDC or a tool for mass surveillance? Do you see that scenario potentially coming to pass? Doug Or do you think that's a little overblown? And given the nature of cryptocurrency, there will be ways for people to always obfuscate and move out of the eye of the surveillance. Blake Well, I think we are in the worst case of Bitcoin. Unfortunately, the block wars took up a lot of people's time and intrigue in about 2015 -16. And it all became about the size of the blocks. And then we lost the battle to Blockstream. Blake And Blockstream kind of took over the management of the code base of Bitcoin. And now there's no ability to change any privacy of Bitcoin. It's not really possible to do anything with like smart contracts or DeFi or anything like that. Blake And I know that the Lightning Network is also much lauded, but struggling to live up to the promises that were made when Lightning came about. So I'd say Bitcoin is in trouble. And in terms of surveillance, Bitcoin is the panopticon. Blake It's fully surveillance. The only difficult part for a totalitarian state is tying the wallet to the person. But once you've done that, you know every single transaction, every amount, the date and time, the heuristics of every transaction as well. Blake And you can draw a network of links between people. It's kind of a wet dream for a financial surveillance economy, which is the one we're moving into. So yeah, it kind of makes sense that it took a few years for the mainstream finance to digest Bitcoin and start to understand it. Blake Meanwhile, there were bubbles in NFTs and, you know, in the springs I see those. And those bubbles have passed. And now we're into the ETF potentially bubble. Who knows? But I think that Bitcoin is, you know, beleaguered and beset by problems, historic problems, and unable to solve them. Blake But it has this huge removal force in finance because the fundamentals of having a, you know, scarce asset outside of the standard financial system is still such a draw. It's a new locus for finance to revolve around, a new, you know, attractor, a gravitic attractor, as if a new large planet had moved into our solar system. Blake All of the orbits of the planets are really shifting and we're only really at the start of that too. It does bode very well for Monero long term because you can get from Bitcoin into Monero. You know, Bitcoin and Monero can be best buddies because Bitcoin can be the settlement layer that, you know, JP Morgan and BlackRock are also tied into. Blake It can be the gold that central banks have to have some of to back their assets at all. But any bank or any institution, you know, it can be the settlement layer. And then if you want to, you know, transact anonymously or move your Bitcoin without being surveilled at all, you simply swap it into Monero. Blake I think that one of the most pivotal technologies is the atomic swap between Bitcoin and different cryptocurrencies to get between the two. But that atomic swap really offers the, you know, privacy and, you know, all of the benefits that we know Monero has, but offers that to any other cryptocurrency that you can atomic swap into. Blake Now I know that very much, you know, in the nacency, you know, they're eight and a half months pregnant. They're not quite born yet. But I do hold a lot of faith. Like I said earlier, necessity being the mother of invention as Monero is delisted here, there and everywhere. Blake People aren't interested in building more centralized exchanges or even decentralized exchanges unless they have protocol level ability to do stuff like atomic swaps. And I think that's going to be one of the things coming from the Monero side that offer that offers tools in those small battles with delisting or with central bank digital currency rollouts and so on. Blake The ability to swap in without money is going to be massive. Doug Agreed, agreed. We're breaking up a little bit. I don't know how it is on your end when I'm talking, but I think we'll be okay. I don't know if it's your internet or mine, but I think we'll be good. We'll be good. Doug You mentioned Monero essentially being more akin to a Swiss bank than Bitcoin, right? And you just kind of explained why. Do you think that could potentially be a moment that happens that could move people towards Monero? Doug Bitcoiners coming to this realization, some kind of event, I don't know, as extreme as a government trying to confiscate crypto and Bitcoiners realizing they can't lose their keys in a voting accident, or I don't know, the assessment of unrealized capital gains on cryptocurrency. Doug And once again, Bitcoiners getting caught in fraudulent voting accidents. What are your thoughts on those ideas? Blake Yeah, I think we're close, you know, we're seeing the sun setting on the boating accident being the valid method by which you can make all of your financial decisions just go away. It's going to be more and more difficult if we're looking in particular at the mic in the EU. Blake They're looking to very strictly regulate centralized exchanges. I'd couple that with Chainalysis, you know, the big company that is involved in crunching all of the data on various blockchains, including bitcoins to figure out who's doing what at what time. Blake There is massive expansion in those technologies because they are a means of control. That's central control, which is what I call like the governments and international institutions. Central control always seeks more control. Blake Bitcoin was something outside of their control. Slowly but surely through different strands, they seek to bring it under their control. The ETFs is definitely one way by which that can be done. By controlling the price, you can control how the market is working. Blake I think that Chainalysis and like a stymieing, you know, a billing effect can go a long way. A delisting of XMR from Binance, I believe, was intended to be a chilling effect from the US, particularly the Securities Exchange Committee, the SEC, to try and put people off Monero, the pressure that they put onto Binance. Blake But I think it hasn't really done that. It's only taken about a week and the price is already back to where it was before. Like I said earlier, we're a really critical juncture. And what we do now can have very large impacts in the future, what seems fairly innocuous, a fairly innocuous act like buying Monero when the price is because of the Binance delisting or people making posts online just kind of talking about their truths. Blake Those things, they can be the seeds that are planted to grow a forest in the future. And that's why I think the time is always now to take these actions. And for paths forwards, you know, it's just, yeah, it's like we have the power in our hands and Monero is this tool that's incredibly powerful. Blake And I know we're preaching to the choir here. So it's about how can we get that word out further without being too evangelical and brow back. Yeah, it's a difficult sell because people are very comfortable. Doug Yeah, you were literally leading me to the next question I had in my mind, which is why I brought up your website looking at some of the articles you've published and this TNT radio show that you've been on quite a few times. Doug Your tent is much larger than just Monero. You're out there talking about topics beyond Monero, right? It all, I think, ultimately related to these concepts of liberty, but you're not just like me talking about Monero all day. Doug You're doing, I think, people like you are in a great position to really get the word out beyond the Monero faithful and to no longer just preach to the choir. What kind of response or do you sense you're getting from people in your camp that maybe don't really know much at all about crypto? Doug Do you see these people finding interest in Monero when you bring it up? Blake Well, yeah, I, yeah, I do my 10 much wider I do. I do a lot of topics. Whenever I do come on to cryptocurrency, I do always slip Monero in there. I always mention, you know, but there are privacy coins. Blake And you know, I must mention Monero is one of the best ones. And that kind of goes into most of my stuff, because, you know, I would love to do Monero full time, to be honest, it's, it's definitely one of my one of my loves. Blake What reception it gets is, by and large, still with cryptocurrency, even with this one, Bitcoin, it gets resistance. If, if people don't understand the thing, they don't want to be, you know, they don't want to admit that they don't understand something. Blake So they'd rather, you know, block it off. So often, people when confronted with something, they don't understand, they'll, they'll resist that, that, you know, they may have even done some research or heard something or most people will have a family member friend associate somebody they've met who has been a total crypto nut. Blake And often that does more harm than good to the cause, if, you know, evangelizing was was their aim, because often they invest in something and then lose all their money, or they lose all their friends, but still have a big stack of sats to hold for it. Blake So I do meet a lot of resistance even today, I did a show on TNT. And it's a really interesting network, you know, because there's such a wide variety of views. And there was definitely resistance, even to talking about Bitcoin, even though I was kind of hedging my bets, one way or the other. Blake Because, you know, I was mentioning the problems with surveillance, I was mentioning the problems with ETFs, as well as some of the potential upsides that they offers. So I think one of the largest things is overcoming that initial resistance. Blake And people can see that in, in evidence in the real world, if you find the right case study, suddenly it clicks for people, you know, whether it's, you know, that quote, I said, Obama saying you have a Swiss bank in your pocket, that's Obama, to me, he's a bad guy, you know, he executes wars in foreign lands, he works for big banks, I think he's a Goldman Sachs JP Morgan type. Blake And, you know, we can say much worse things too. But to some people, he's just a regular, maybe he was a good president, you know, he was a nice guy, he's well spoken. So if you use the Obama quote, maybe that's the best way. Blake I think the phrase horses for courses, you have to choose the right way for each audience or, or, you know, the right way to put it in. In one of my articles, I delved into cryptocurrencies versus CBDCs. Blake And it's, you know, I was aiming this at the person who'd never heard of cryptocurrencies, never heard of CBDCs. And it's really a different perspective, because you have to really baby steps through every single part of it. Blake And, you know, these things like Monero is a very revelatory concept to explain, it's like truly anonymous digital cash, a way of holding value over time, it's unavailable, it's so simple, it can exist on anyone's computer, even an old computer, or especially an old computer, sometimes that's the best thing to be doing. Blake It's immensely revelatory. So talking about it is hard, it's hard to stick with, you know, down to earth modes of speech. But yeah, choosing choosing the right time, and the right phrase and the right idea, that can go a long way to doing so. Doug It'd be nice to see an article on why digital cash matters or the importance of digital cash. I think you would knock that one out of the park. This TNT radio show, tell us about it. Is it like they got a lot of follower, a lot of listeners? Doug I really don't know much about it. Blake Well, I don't have my own show on there. I'm a regular guest for a journalist, Patrick Kennington, also a good friend. We agree a lot on geopolitics and yeah, it's a network based out of Australia that kind of came to the fore. Blake It was kind of created in the 2020 era, you know, of resistance to sort of lockdown type of thing. So it brought together a kind of smorgasbord of different alternative voices. Yeah, so it's a very interesting network and it's got some financial backing, but it's trying to find its own feet as well as an independent media voice. Blake I think it's, you know, it's treading a very fine line sometimes between being censored for some of the, you know, content that's put out there, because do you remember in the 2020 and the 2021 era, on most social media, certain words and phrases could get you sinned in and, you know, get your account frozen. Blake And for people who depend on, you know, that income from their podcast, from their website, from their blog post or whatever it is, to be, you know, kicked off of those services is a massive problem. Blake And so TNT kind of did offer something of a way for people to still produce that material and yet not, you know, I wouldn't align myself fully with TNT, the network, it's not my network, but I do talk on there. Blake And I think that things like TNT, independent media, things like Monero talk, invaluable, and that's kind of most of the content that I digest is independent media. I, you know, if I'm doing some decorating it, I'm listening to all the Monero talk, all the different, you know, tech stuff. Blake I'm listening to stuff from gold bugs as well. I'm kind of, that's my guilty pleasure is listening to gold bugs saying how the whole economy is going to crash. And that's where I pick up a lot of information about, you know, the FDIC and different machinations of central banks and stuff like that. Blake And that's where I kind of that's the pipeline by which I pick up different interesting stories and then try and digest them. Because I think how is the average Joe going to understand, you know, the closing of this window of, you know, two year Treasury bond, what that means for the economy, like the two year Treasury bond is down, this is the end of the world, you know. Blake So, you know, trying to like marry those two is really interesting. I see you've got my of interest page there with my Monero donation QR code and some interesting quotes. Doug Yeah, I brought it up. You have the Julia Assange quote, censorship is always cause for celebration. It is always an opportunity because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got, that you have got to care what people think. Doug I think that's, that's, that's relevant to Monero, right? With the attempt, the attempts to basically ban it and censor it in those terms, censor people from even knowing it exists. We're, we're seeing these attacks. Doug And yeah, I think most people in the Monero community are celebrating that as a win, right? That it must mean we're, we're doing something right. Blake Yeah, definitely. And, you know, it's often bemoaned as the kind of coin of drug dealers and dark nets. And I've seen recent articles trying to take the far right or extreme right angle, things like that, trying to, you know, guilt by association. Blake But very rarely do they have any evidence of that. And part of Monero's anonymity is that there is no evidence. There's no anything like that. And I haven't seen it being implicated in any large thing. Blake I do remember, I don't know if it was John Oliver, I believe a few years ago, he gave the metaphor that Monero is like buying a large amount of coffins, human sized coffins. And then he said something like, you know, I don't you don't know what I'm going to do with these coffins, you know, I just need them for my own personal purposes. Blake But you know, kind of implying that it's so obviously for crime, that what could do but crime with it, which is kind of really interesting, but having Monero. Doug Yeah, that was classic. It was talked about on national TV though. Blake You know, that's a course for celebration. I remember it was being celebrated. Doug It was great. It was a great moment. But yeah, and likewise... Blake Julian Assange, he is testament to that because he's still in Belmarsh prison in the UK. He's been there now for five years, having been in the Ecuadorian embassy for nine years before that under basically being arrested for over a decade now. Blake And that's because he has the ability to speak, to spread such powerful truths that the state or, you know, the global state or the powers that be or whatever you want to call them, they can't handle him being free and unleashed. Blake He has to be, you know, clamped down upon yet the technology he helped create with WikiLeaks enables people to leak documents fully anonymously, although through various different means, Ed Snowden, Chelsea Manning, various other leakers have been discovered. Blake You remember Seth Rich as well, the DNC leaker, it's never been confirmed as WikiLeaks policy to never reveal him, but we know probably it's likely that some of these leakers were the people behind that information. Blake But, yeah, it kind of shows how desperate they are because he's in jail with no political charges. You know, there's no judicial case against him other than the US wants him extradited into, you know, a black box somewhere never to be seen again. Blake Yet the people were out. I was there on the streets of London just over a week ago protesting outside the Royal Courts of Justice, actually made it into the Royal Courts of Justice. And the feeling was overwhelmingly positive. Blake Like there was change that people weren't going to put up with it anymore. And the pressure from below, be it from the truckers rallies or in particular the farmers protests that are spreading the world over that kind of groundswell that doesn't get reported in mainstream media, that fosters a new generation of independence. Blake And I only think we're a few steps away from tying these movements together to have a more free and open quorum or group of people discussing interesting political ideas and making, manifesting changes, positive changes in the world. Blake So, yeah, it really is exciting times. And whilst we're on the sand protest note, one more thing, I did crowdfund some stickers, some free sand stickers using Monero on kuno .hand .media. They run a donation system whereby using a certain feature of the Monero wallet, they can track donations into a certain wallet if you give them the secret view. Blake I was able to receive one Monero, one XMR of donations from about 10 different people towards these stickers, which I got printed at a local sticker shop and took them up to the protest, gave them out. Blake And then looking back at some of the footage from the day on, even on mainstream media, I saw people wearing this sticker on their lapel. And in that way, people all around the world, I don't know who you anonymous donate as well. Blake Maybe some of you are watching right now, but thank you because you were able to change by donating a Monero through a kind of, you know, a not -for -profit fundraising piece of technology using a certain aspect of the Monero wallet that's, you know, really cleverly made. Blake And, you know, that manifested something in the real world. And so more of this sort of thing, that's what I have to say. Doug Yeah, we talk about Kuno all the time on Monerotopia. And Kuno was built by Enarchio, who is now building XMR Bazaar for us. Great guy. And that's your marketplace. Yes, XMR Bazaar. And a big fan of Kuno as well, trying to push that and grow that. Doug And I can't wait to, I'm glad it worked out for you, but I can't wait to see people like the Canadian truckers or like the farmers, these farmers we're talking about. I can't wait to see people that are protesting in support of Julian Assange start to use Kuno as their tool for fundraising. Doug Any thoughts on how we can facilitate that and push that forward? Blake Well, we mentioned the truckers and one of the big stories to come out of the truckers was de -banking that people who donated Bitcoin to the truckers, who paid instead, were punished and de -banked. Blake And that was Bitcoin or bank donations, but by and large it was actually Bitcoin donations. So there we had an opportunity for Bitcoin to be this, you know, revolutionary cypherpunks or anti -state tool, and it failed that test because it was so surveilable that people who donated in good faith, you know, thinking you're just dating to a trucker, you know, just to a private wallet, what's the problem with that? Blake Because there was not good OPSEC, because operating Bitcoin privately requires a huge amount of foreknowledge and, you know, one slip can totally reveal the operation. Monero is more foolproof in that sense. Blake I wouldn't go as far as to say idiot proof, but is anything idiot proof? But it's simple enough that it has privacy on the base layer. And so if you have farmer protests and, you know, moving forward, whatever kinds of protests, you know, money greases the wheels, like it or not. Blake But using money to grease, though, in an anonymous way, is a much better option. So simply by promoting Kuno at the right time, you're doing God's work there, Doug. Doug Thank you, man. You too. I'm looking at Julian Assange. You're reminding me that actually he was he was really it was this book. I don't know if you ever have you read this? Freedom in the Future of the Internet Julian Assange. Doug Yeah, I mean, it was that book that really ignited my or deepen my understanding of the importance of censorship resistance. And that aspect of cryptocurrency. And I wish I had read the book earlier. Doug I had bought it before I really had gotten into Bitcoin. I had heard of Bitcoin, but had yet to stop and understand it and realize, you know, it's decentralized all that. But I had bought this book and it sat on my shelf for like a year. Doug I maybe I just read the first whatever 30 pages over 20 pages or something, put it down. And then once I got got into into Bitcoin and read the white paper, I was like, wait a minute, let me go back to that. Doug Like, what did Julian Assange say about Bitcoin? I open up the book and, you know, go to the glossary and start reading. I'm like, oh, my God, I wish I would have read this couple of years ago. And it was a real, you know, it really solidified my understanding. Doug And ultimately is what pushed me towards Monero was understanding once again, yeah, that the real the the the importance of the free speech aspects of this right, censorship resistant free speech money, totally. Doug And that how important it is that we continue to have a tool that gives people the ability to practice free speech through money that we need that in society, for free and open societies to flourish in the digital age. Doug Do you think Julian Assange is is a Monero advocate or any thoughts on that? Blake Well, WikiLeaks, when they, I think it's 2014, when they were de -banked by PayPal, they accepted Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a few others, including Zcash. And they were early on board with Zcash, and this was probably before Monero was even a thing. Blake I know that now Assange would definitely support Monero. There's no doubt about it. And yeah, it's interesting because you were mentioning Monero is like freedom of speech money, but Monero doesn't talk. Blake Monero is numbers, you know, by and large, you know, it's all sorts of different protocols and stuff like that, but it's not a political, you know, it doesn't have a big label on it. You can use it for whatever you want. Blake But by simply by using it, you know, we're able to act politically and establish our, you know, our free rights as sovereign individuals. Doug Exactly, exactly. You know, where you put your money is, is just probably as valuable as what you say, right? It is a form of speech. I kind of asked the same question about Edward Snowden, right? You had brought him up earlier. Doug What do you think that's all about? The fact that that's Snowden, because it seems like, you know, you've investigated these, these, these guys pretty well, you follow these guys pretty closely. Why do you think he's never been kind of a big manero voice? Doug He's once again, he's a Zcash guy. Any thoughts on what's going on there? I always found that a bit concerning. And I wonder, you know, Assange, I get, yeah, we have, we haven't heard from him for, for, for unfortunate reason. Doug We haven't, so we haven't really heard him talking about cryptocurrency. But, but Snowden has had the, has had the global stage, the ears of freedom fighters around the world. And he really hasn't muttered much about an era. Doug Looks like we lost Blake over here. Thank you. I'll write this down to edit it out. Blake Hey, sorry, I lost you there for a second. I just had to check my route. It was empowered. You've asked about Snowden and yeah, it's all good. We're all we're back online. Yeah, Snowden does talk. He has Twitter and before Julian, the embassy did have Twitter and that was one of his most powerfuls, I would say, was was the Twitter account that's able to run the world from prison in the embassy. Blake Ed Snowden is also imprisoned in Russia, not by the Russian state. But he's trapped there and his freedom is severely restricted by his status as persona non grata to the USA. But he does talk on Twitter and he doesn't mention Monero by name. Blake Hasn't done yet. But he you know, he's very embedded in the crypto world. He does often talk about that. One thing I found most interesting of his latest tweets was his very cryptic reference that he believes a nation state is building up stacks of Bitcoin in the seat of the field. Blake I don't know if you've heard of Mr. 100 who's been buying 100 Bitcoin a day. I know that Max Kaiser, too, has mentioned that it might be Qatar. And then we have the Qatari representative flying to El Salvador, Bitcoin country, and going to one of the big Bitcoin fairs there. Blake And so potentially there, Snowden has revealed. I don't know why he can't reveal them by name. Potentially, he'd be revealing his source or something like that. But he's revealing that there are big moves. Blake You know, nation state level moves being made in Bitcoin in terms of narrow, I think I don't know why I can only speculate, but I think that for someone like Snowden, he's already got his ballpark that is NSA, that is surveillance and that is his own leaks and stuff like that. Blake To go outside of your own remit, you have to be so sure of what you're doing and perhaps for him to promote Manero, which to some may be the dangerous queen of Internet pirates and so on, might be a step too far. Blake And he's got to stick to his ballpark. As I mentioned there with the kind of Qatar story, he's having to self -regulate his speech there. So we don't know why. But, you know, we can always pester him with DMs and questions and we can even ask him to come on Manero talk. Blake He may well come on because, you know, he's similar to a John McAfee, maybe a slightly more sober John McAfee. I actually tried getting him on. Doug Yeah I tried getting him on a few years ago and I communicated with him and his assistant and at one point we almost had him and he wanted us to pay pay him and I agreed to do it and it was it was a significant amount of money my thought was I would raise it from the Monero community I think it was like 10 grand or 20 grand it was it was it was a very high number and then so I said can we pay you in Monero and that's kind of when things went sour I don't think necessarily for that reason he said you know he was he was he was getting busy with other things or something but yeah that was my experience with with Snowden so I don't know you know and then I changed it to you know what we'll pay you another means if you need so I'm a little I'm a little sus I'm a little narrow as my you know barometer for how true a freedom fighter is because I understand my litmus test right because I understand it's very well and I know where I stand and then I could kind of measure somebody else especially if I know they have access to the information so that that's yeah that's where I'm from with my opinion of him yeah but I hope to be proven wrong Blake Yeah. Just because somebody does something good doesn't mean they're a good person. Just because somebody does something bad doesn't mean they're a bad person. And Snowden's NSA leaks revealed, you know, what many of us kind of knew was going on, but in such a way that was intense, unignorable, very well documented and risked his life to do so. Blake So that is a good thing. And yeah, what you mentioned there, you know, you never know what the hell is going on. And Snowden's whole journey to Russia was, you know, escaping the claws of the United States just out of their grasp. Blake All that risk. An expensive lifestyle. Doug Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know all that risk he took right and it was an extreme amount of risk and it was for You know the betterment of society and improving liberty around the world And here there's very little risk in tweeting about manero or talking about it openly yet. Doug He He refrains from doing it Um, so I don't know. I don't know. Maybe maybe he's maybe he has some good motive that i'm not aware of Blake Potenti, well, you know, yeah, he's offering cryptic tweets here and there. He's he's he's not so direct. And yeah, Monero is a true litmus test. Perhaps that's the A grade and then the B grade is Bitcoin. Blake And then, you know, you know, you can go down the levels from there and until someone passes that. But right now there's only an elite few who are in the Monero A grade. But, you know, it's an honor to be, you know, amongst them. Doug Blake, thank you so much, man, for jumping on. I know our connection wasn't the best, but I think it will work out and we'll edit it. But greatly appreciate you taking the time. Anything you want to put out there before we close it out? Blake Yeah, apologies if the connection was from my end. We're in the internet age, and you'd think we'd be beyond this point right now. I saw an interest, though, that in the last 10 years, we're at a completely level. Blake They haven't got any faster, despite the technology having improved and despite fiber -optic cables being laid. That kind of shows how far we've come and yet how far we have to go. Yeah, the last things I would just give a shout out. Blake You know, Seth for privacy, his previous podcast was amazing. And all the people he highlighted, too, the kind of grunts, the code monkeys doing the real hard work that enable us to have this freedom technology. Blake The unsung heroes, which they're definitely digital. I also want XYZ, another one of your guests. His was really interesting. And I attended writing the book that he wrote, and he's done it for me. So yeah, check out his work, too. Blake Shout out to any supporters of that anonymous Kuno fundraiser, too. Anyone out there fighting the good fight, yeah. And it's been a pleasure talking with you, Doug. And I hope to put forward the good word of Monero wherever possible. Doug Thank you so much, man. If you just want to say, where can people find you and follow you, get in touch with you? Blake I'm big C so I don't have social but you can find Mark regularly updated at BlakeLove .com that's basically where you'll find me. Doug BlakeLoveWell .com. All right, man. Cheers, brother. Hopefully, maybe hopefully we'll see you at Monerotopia. I don't know if that's in the cards at all. I know it's probably pretty far from where you are, but that would be cool. Blake Is it in Argentina this year? Doug It's going to be in Buenos Aires and Argentina in November. Blake Very interesting. I'll see if I can, you know, put my cards in order and see what we can do. I know that there's a Prague arm of the Monero community too, in Czechia, and that's a bit closer too. Yeah, we'll see what we can do. Blake These real world meetups are definitely really... Yeah, these real world meetups are definitely so important. Doug Yeah, definitely try to get to one or the other. You won't be disappointed. All right, man, so much, so great meeting you and nice talking with you, and I hope to talk to you again soon. Blake Yeah, probably fine. Doug Thank you, Blake. Ciao.