Hey y'all, next Wednesday, January the 3rd, I'm giving a talk for Thaddeus Russell's Renegade University at thaddeusrussell.com on the history of the war in Afghanistan.
Of course, based on my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And it's supposed to last a couple of hours and you guys will be able to participate with questions and answers and all that.
So that's next Wednesday, January the 3rd at 8.30 Eastern, 5.30 Pacific.
And to register, just go to thaddeusrussell.com.
See you there.
Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
Had!
You've been took.
Took!
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
But we ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
With him, there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Robert Viglione from Zencash, a new cryptocurrency.
It's a fork off of a fork of a thing, according to a guy I talked to last night.
Interesting little side project.
Well, I shouldn't say that.
A very interesting project.
I actually just spoke with Roger Ver and asked him what he thought of it and he thought it was great.
Welcome to the show, Rob.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Good, good.
It actually did start as a side project and then just started roping me in and now it's all-consuming, so it wasn't completely off.
All right, good.
Well, so, yeah, all-consuming indeed.
And I should say, you're bribing me to be positive about it, although I'm for it anyway, because you're a new advertiser on the show.
And so I will explicitly urge everyone to go and check out zensystem.io.
That's the site, right?
Yeah, that's it.
And I'll say, despite us advertising with you, I'd prefer you just be completely, well, you are just an honest guy in general, so either way, even if you think that there's something not great about what we're doing, I'd rather you just say that, even if we pay you to advertise.
Yeah, everybody knows, I can't even lie if I try.
Give me a break.
But no, well, and I was explaining to Ver when I was talking with him, you know, I'm one of these idiots who knew about Bitcoin from before it was worth even a penny, you know, from the very beginning of 2009, because I'm a libertarian radio host.
I got people coming at me with this stuff all the time.
So I could have $100 zillion right now and own the entire northern shore of Lake Travis if I had played my cards right.
But I've always been interested in this stuff in a kind of a peripheral vision sort of a way, you know, sort of seeing the different cryptocurrencies grow up and seeing different libertarians be very successful and all the, you know, Bitcoins and Litecoins, and now there's the new Bitcoin Cash and all these different things.
And yet I don't ever have any money to invest in anything, so it's always just sort of a side issue to me.
But now I'm thinking, man, really, if only I had saved even just the 100 or so Bitcoins I've ever had, I could have been doing all right here.
So maybe it's time that I really start paying more attention to this kind of thing.
And right around the same time I was thinking that too, was right when I went on the Contra Cruise with Tom Woods and Bob Murphy and Tatiana Meraz was there, and she was like, man, you know, I don't know what your problem is, but cryptocurrencies is everything.
And she had a good rap and is a big fan of yours, as you know, so yeah.
And so now when I was asking Roger Ver about what he thought of Zencash, he, you know, he listed a few different ones and he had yours on the list of the ones that really accentuate privacy and make it impossible, even if there is sort of a centralized, or not centralized, but a common ledger that still no one will be able to tell who's who as they can with Bitcoin and maybe some of the other ones.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
But the thing is, I view that as a first step because I really think that in two, three, you know, four years, all coins will have strong privacy.
I think that this is just a necessary, almost mandatory thing.
Now, that's at least for the public blockchains.
Of course, you can have, you know, big bank blockchains or whatever they plan on doing, and they'll probably be fully transparent.
At least the stuff that we do will be transparent.
The stuff that they do will be completely opaque as usual.
So I don't view that as our long-term value proposition.
I think that's a starting point.
But overall, what I think of what we're doing is we're creating a massively censorship-resistant platform.
And the strong privacy cryptocurrency is kind of the center of that.
But there should be so much more, right?
So everything that we're trying to do is to create kind of like a startup virtual nation and adding all the things that you would want for like a free society in that kind of context.
I mean, the currency is a huge part of life, right?
Money's at the heart of our economic system, but economic systems include much more than just money.
So what we're trying to do is build kind of a big integrated system.
Everything from, okay, you need to be able to securely communicate with people without being spied on.
You have to be able to securely publish any kind of information for the world to see without being censored, right?
You've got to be able to participate in economic systems without arbitrary walls or barriers preventing you from participating, right?
So there's a whole bunch of things that go beyond the cryptocurrency, and we're trying to build all of these into the system.
And now, I know that you have, for example, like text messaging and also documents, secure document transfer and this, as well as money, obviously, at the core of it.
What about audio?
Can you do like a secure and encrypted voiceover IP type thing?
Yeah, so that's definitely on the radar.
Right now, not yet.
So what we're actually trying to do is, so we have a messaging protocol built into our system using ZK-SNARKs, the zero-knowledge cryptographic proofs.
And right now, we have that for data, or in terms like text data.
But of course, the next extension is audio data, right?
I think that's a great idea.
Cool.
Well, good, it was mine.
No, probably it was a lot of other people's.
No, but so I like the idea that, and maybe this is way off the reservation, or a kind of thing that would be an entirely different project.
But it seems to me like Twitter and Facebook should not be websites, that there should be a freestanding application for social media that everybody has the same one, but there's no Zuckerberg.
It's just everybody uses the same sort of program to have their own little website interface like that kind of a thing.
And people use Facebook really as a walled garden separate from the rest of their browser activity to a great degree anyway, you know what I mean?
So it just never seemed, it never made sense to me why you would have everybody all sign up for one thing like that when it could just be a program on a computer.
And why not a blockchain, super crypto, whatever the hell one?
That's exactly right.
And I guarantee you five years from now, that's going to be the case.
So I wouldn't buy Facebook stock.
Of course, I'm not giving investment advice here, but I think you nailed it, is why would you have this kind of centralized walled garden where even more importantly, the economics of the system are kind of perverse.
So you have a walled garden where they own all of the content that you create.
Whereas now the technologies here, we already see it with one blockchain protocol called Steemit.
It's a social media platform that is run on a blockchain.
And now users own their own content and you monetize it yourself.
So it's kind of- Someone was telling me I need to get on there.
Totally, you absolutely do.
They're really just the first, there's going to be a whole series of these.
In fact, we would actually trying to, you know, toy with some ideas.
Like we have this big node architecture that we, I think we have one of the most decentralized node architectures in the industry right now.
So we're trying to think what we do on top of that and adding an additional service like this just makes a lot of sense, right?
Like users should be able to directly have their own, their own protocol where they own their own information and they can monetize it themselves.
And I want to see an explosion of these kinds of services.
Yeah.
So, you know, there was kind of a clone of a wannabe Facebook that tried to do that, but it was still all on their website.
So, but yeah, I could see it, you know, if it's its own blockchain type app that people have, then there's Facebook could just be out of business.
It wouldn't even be direct competition.
They would just be obsolete kind of a thing.
Exactly.
All you developers, I hope you're listening to my brilliant ideas out there.
So, but anyway, let's talk more about Zencash.
So it's you and who, and why is it a fork from this and the other thing?
And what is the deal?
Well, I'll tell you why I got into it is my personal motivation for just trying to see a freer, more peaceful world.
And I think this technology just gives us that opportunity in a bunch of ways.
So my initial partner, Rolf Versluis, he's again, another former military officer.
He's a Naval nuclear engineer.
I'm also a former military officer to get that out there.
I'm a former Air Force scientist, physicist, mathematician.
And so we initially launched this and then started attracting a team around us, just very good, like-minded people that want to make the world better.
We're a very idealistic crowd.
And we come from just this, and the core of our group are like libertarian anarchists that just want a more peaceful world.
But then of course, as you scale and you grow from there, you attract a whole bunch of other people that are interested for a variety of reasons.
But the motivations were pretty much the same.
And so we started going from there and then we started off just forking.
Actually, so your question of why do we fork from a fork?
It's actually a great question.
I'll say when Zucco, the founder of Zcash, brought zero-knowledge cryptography to the market with LibSnark, which is the C++ library for ZkSnarks, and he commercialized it with Zcash, I thought, this is just absolutely brilliant.
We need more of this.
And I think Zucco is an absolute hero and probably deserves a Nobel Peace Prize one day.
I hope he gets it, but there's so much more work to do.
And he's running one project, and what I thought was, okay, let's take this technology and try to massively expand it to the user market.
Because they're focusing hard on R&D, and I'll say they're world-class leaders in cryptography R&D.
So the work that they're doing is extremely important, but at the same time, I figured we can help out by branching off in a different direction.
And then we wanted to experiment with a whole bunch of other technological frontiers.
In particular, what we figured we would start with is experimenting at the network level, whereas they're working at the cryptographic core protocol level.
So we're doing things a little different, and we figured we would tweak the economics a little bit differently.
So that's the starting point of using their technology.
And what we chose to do is, there was actually a clone of Zcash that removed some controversial parameters for when they first launched.
And we figured, let's just start with the pure clone of their technology and fork from there.
And the clone was called Zclassics.
So we forked from Zclassics, technically.
And that's our origin.
That's kind of how we started.
All right, hang on just one second.
Hey guys, check it out.
You should buy my book, Fool's Errand.
Time to end the war in Afghanistan.
It's at foolserrand.us.
Also, my buddy Eric Schuller is putting all the interviews up on YouTube.
YouTube.com/Scott Horton Show.
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It's gonna take till February because there's a limit of 100 a day, and there's 4,500 interviews.
But we're finally doing it.
Especially all those of you who donated in the past thinking that's where it was going.
I tried, I swear.
I've had so many people make this promise before.
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And yeah, thanks.
All right, well, so I can tell from the price that you're certainly being taken seriously by the cryptocurrency community.
I mean, I think Verd was saying that there are thousands of these things now.
So I don't know exactly how you measure up compared to all of them, but apparently you're right there at the top of the heap from the get-go, huh?
Yeah, it's been challenging to actually get noticed.
I'll say just because there's so many projects out there and all of these, if you've heard of these ICOs, these initial coin offerings that are just going out there and raising a ton of money and kind of dumping their tokens on the market are getting so much attention.
So it's been a little bit of a challenge to kind of be the signal amongst the noise.
I think we're doing a pretty good job, but I also think that we're just starting.
So we're actually hovering around the top 100, which isn't all that amazing, but at the same time, the market value of the project has been exploding quite a bit.
So it's fun, but we still have a lot more work to do.
Yeah.
All right, now, see, as a businessman, I'm a pretty good anti-war guy, but it seems to me like if I was a businessman or if I was a lawyer or something like that, that this would immediately be mandatory for inter-office communications between all of my people, right?
Keep everything encrypted and as private as possible and away from my competition or away from my opponents in the courtroom or something like that, right?
Absolutely.
You're not supposed to say using Google Docs or something like that, you know?
Yeah, yeah, no, totally.
You know, I think that we have to start with the basic premise that privacy is a human right.
So I start there, and oftentimes I'll use PGP for most of my email communications, not because I have anything to hide, but just because I think that we should, right?
I think we should encourage everyone to use as strong cryptography as possible to encrypt their information, just as a matter of doing business.
You know, it doesn't have to be just use PGP or use Xen when you have something that is extremely sensitive.
Use it all the time.
All right, now, so here's the thing.
In 1994, I became a New World Order kook, and I just knew that what they're gonna do, man, is they're gonna outlaw cash so that ultimately everybody has to have just whatever brand debit card, doesn't matter, but it'll be a cashless society so that virtually everything you wanna buy and sell is on the record so that the IRS or the local authorities or whoever it is can come for your ass.
And it sort of seems like maybe, isn't it ironic that it's libertarians who are coming up with all this cashlessness?
But then again, I guess your argument would be that, no, this is all so encrypted and private and decentralized and this and that that rather than playing into Big Brother's hands, this is really a way around the system.
But I guess I'm still concerned because, you know, the NSA, they can crack anything.
The IRS, they have whatever resources they want to take the rest of the resources from the rest of us.
And so is it, do you think, in an ironic kind of a way, are we, are you and the crypto community helping to abolish the anonymity that comes with cash payments?
So this is such a good question.
I have to say, if we only used Bitcoin, and I absolutely love Bitcoin, but if we only use that kind of ledger where it truly is public to the world, I would have a problem with it because everything that we do would be logged.
And at some point, someone would be able to use some big data, backward-looking technology to be able to identify everything that you've ever done.
And I think that's horrible.
And there's actually some countries doing that.
Like India is building national ID registries and trying to track everything people do and actively eliminate cash.
But what I would say is we're already working on the next generation technology.
So Bitcoin was the massive breakthrough in the technology.
But then the next massive breakthrough was what Zucco and his team did with Zero Knowledge Proof.
So now we could actually, well, from a monetary system, now you can have money that's truly private.
But then also from a property rights perspective, you could log your property on a zero-knowledge cryptography blockchain so that you can prove to the world anytime that you want that you own some asset.
But you don't have to disclose up until that point that you want to prove it.
So you could go and load a bunch of assets on a zero-knowledge cryptography blockchain, and they're yours forever.
No one could ever take those from you.
And no one could even prove without you wanting to prove it that you own these assets.
And it only comes to the moment where you need to say, okay, I'm trying to transfer my house, for instance, to someone else, so I need to transfer the title with a deed.
Well, now I'll reveal to the world that I own it.
So I think now we're already solving this problem.
And it really hasn't been that long, right?
Bitcoin came around in 2009, and already in 2014, or really 2013, we had this zero-coin protocol, and ZK Snarks introduced a year later.
So I think we're staying ahead of the game, and we want to constantly stay ahead of it.
Yeah, very interesting.
I don't know.
I guess I'm not sure what else to ask you, because I don't know enough about this stuff.
I don't know.
So go back to how people use this stuff, because everybody could just...
I think you know that most people don't get an encryption key extra thing for their email and whatever.
Everybody goes with just the standard thing.
So what's really the usefulness of something like this to a regular desktop computer user?
Yeah, so I think the first killer app for the technology was basically separating money from state.
And I think this is a huge deal for humanity.
And we're finally witnessing it after how many millennia of the state controlling, monopolizing money, whether it's a king or whether it's a central bank.
So that's the really major killer app.
And maybe to a typical US user, you know, user, okay, sounds cool.
I'm ideologically motivated, but really what's the marginal gain to my life?
But I'll tell you to someone who's in Venezuela, there's a massive marginal gain to your utility in life from Bitcoin or cryptocurrency.
So already we're making a major difference in the world for people who really need it the most.
That's the first step.
And from there, I think we have a whole, you know, slew of opportunities to make life better for people.
But the way, what really attracted me to it was, again, getting my money outside of a centralized financial system.
So I'm happy with where we are right now.
The market doesn't have to grow one more dollar in value for me to say, hey, we're already massively successful.
So I think it's a great kind of brave new world that we have, you know, not the dystopian version, but an actual, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
No, I get you.
And you know what, this is especially why I'm so stupid for not investing in Bitcoin and the rest of these all along, because even though I was like, I don't know what's gonna happen in the future and this kind of thing.
One thing that I do know is going to happen in the future is that every government in the world is going to keep printing money forever because they don't know how to do anything except print money.
So where you say, hey, this is a great way for people in Venezuela to be able to eat food.
I'm saying that's also a good reason for people all over the world to invest in this thing because in the future, all currencies are going to have their turn, their 15 minutes of failure, as it were, as we go through these booms and busts and all of this stuff.
And in some places it's gonna be worse than others.
And then people are going to, out of necessity, find ways to bail out of their national currencies and into something else.
And this is where people like us who can make, well, people like you who make smart bets, people like Roger Ver make smart bets all along can do really well for themselves as well.
I mean, there's 192 central banks in the world, right?
That's a lot of failure headed this way.
Exactly.
Yeah, and I look at it from a moral perspective as well.
This is moral money.
Now, and that's not to just shill this to say it's always amazing because you're gonna see, I mean, look at today.
We have markets down like 40%.
I mean, that's utterly insane, right?
So this is not a foolproof way to get rich.
I would never try to tell anyone, just go put all of your money into this.
You have to look at this entire market as a massive experiment.
But from a social perspective, it's an experiment that's long overdue.
Yeah, well, so I wonder about what you think about ways that this kind of project can be ruined by the state.
Not yours, everybody else's.
Like right now, they're not feeling the heat too bad, but at some point, if they really think that, geez, all these different kinds of digital currencies are really becoming a threat to out-compete the dollar, to hurt the government's position and their dominance of the money supply, what can they do about it?
You know, Ver was saying, well, geez, I guess they could try to shut down the entire internet around the entire world forever and keep it off, but otherwise they can't turn it off.
You know, there's nothing, well, I don't know, nothing they can do, but they can't get rid of it.
But I wonder if you have particular worries about what the state might do once they start really getting jealous here.
And I have no doubt that they will.
So I agree with Roger's perspective, kind of as a boundary condition.
So as a boundary condition, it could really never be shut down effectively, but that's not to downplay the massive amount of risk there is to the average person.
If you had major governments try to crack down on this, they could cause an enormous amount of damage to values.
And they could hurt people too.
And what they always do is they target certain people to make examples of them.
So we can't downplay the potential humanitarian aspects of that kind of selective enforcement, right?
But from an economics perspective, also just say a blanket ban on this stuff, say they start shutting down exchanges, say they start outlawing things like this.
Okay, the market value may go down 90% or more.
So yeah, sure, it's still around, it's still resilient and you can't shut it down exactly.
But think about how many people's livelihood would be lost in that kind of scenario.
So I do worry about it.
I try to be optimistic and think that national leaders wouldn't do this to their people, but you never know.
Yeah, well, they outlawed gold before, which just sounds like that must be some right-wing paranoid fantasy.
There's no way they outlawed, oh yeah, no, they outlawed gold.
They came and they took it.
Wow, so yeah.
I mean, it does sound impossible, right?
Doesn't that sound like something some idiot made up?
But yeah, no, really, they will go that far.
They'll go further.
Right, yeah, it's like, hey, you're a conspiracy theorist.
But what I'll say though is I think where I view us is we're in a race right now because it's like an Uber model where you want to just make this as widespread as possible so that if anyone were to try to crack down, you have like a very large public backlash.
So that's where I view us right now is we're in this like intense race to distribute the technology to as many people as we can.
So I encourage everyone out there listening to this.
It doesn't have to be us for sure, but just start thinking about the technology, get into it somehow.
Even if you're not putting money into it, just start evangelizing the technology, start downloading it, try to play around with it, use it.
Even if it's small amounts, use it just to understand what's going on because it is much more than making money.
This is a social revolution.
Yeah, well, I'm happy to see it because the status quo sucks.
Everybody agrees with that.
And of course, the libertarian answer, a lot of regular folk will be skeptical of this, but the libertarian answer is legalize everything and just get the government the hell out of all of this and just let people work it out, it'll be fine.
I mean, there's a tweet I'm making fun of right now by Donald Trump today talking about how we foolishly spent $7 trillion in the Middle East and it's time to start rebuilding our country.
And it's just on the face of it, like this guy's bombing eight countries right now as he's saying this.
And I don't know if he even realized the contradiction or what, or he's just being funny or what, I don't know.
Then the other thing is, would we really be much better off if the government had wasted $7 trillion on domestic fascist economics, which is all he means by infrastructure, right, is welfare to connected corporations at the expense of everybody else?
Right.
Seizing people's land and that's kind of, poor people and brown people's land.
Yeah.
And getting away with it.
It just seems like, I don't know, maybe everybody's ready to clue into this.
Separate not just money in state, but society in state.
Just get rid of these guys, you know?
Maybe we wouldn't even really mind Donald Trump if he wasn't the president of the United States, you know?
Well, hey, I'll plug another project I'm working on.
It's called the Seasteading Institute.
I don't know if you've talked to your- Tell me all about that, man.
I know nothing about it here.
I'm a Libertarian radio host.
I haven't done a single one about seasteading this whole time.
Go ahead.
I think we need to get some of the seasteading guys besides me on the show as well, because I think your listeners would absolutely love the project.
But, I mean, basically the concept is- I gotta tell you, man, I love boats.
Awesome.
So, yeah, the point is just to experiment with startup societies offshore.
And the reason offshore is because we have massive amount of ocean space available.
But if you look at geographic land masses, there's really no room to experiment in anything that would be close to kind of like a good place to live.
So what we're doing is we're actually building our first offshore platform and kind of startup society out in Tahiti, in French Polynesia.
And the government actually invited us out there to do the first experiment.
So the point here is we need much more experimentation in basic social technologies, like how human beings organize each other.
And we might as well start from the perspective that it ought to be voluntary, right?
Let's remove these power dynamics and forcing relationships from society.
And good luck trying to vote in the next candidate who agrees with us on that, right?
So rather than try to change a system that is, I would say, arguably, definitely captured by certain interests.
And instead of trying to change that, let's just go offshore and experiment on our own.
So that's what we're doing.
And actually, we're gonna start construction on the project mid-2018.
And hopefully, we'll have our first platform done by 2020.
Hey guys, check it out.
I got a new sponsor, Zencash.
It's a new cryptocurrency.
They do messaging and documents and all kinds of new stuff.
Zensystem.io to find out all about it.
And they've got a great white paper that explains exactly the deal with this new blockchain currency.
And I don't know everything about this stuff, but this one looks promising to me.
So check it out, zensystem.io.
And of course, also buy my book, Fool's Errand.
Buy Mike Swanson's book, The War State.
More importantly, read The War State, however you get it.
Borrow it from your friend.
It's a great history of the rise of the military-industrial complex after World War II.
You'll really like it.
And you'll like his investment advice at wallstreetwindow.com.
Buy your precious metals from Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc.
Your anti-government propaganda from libertystickers.com.
We got a brand new website coming and brand new art for a lot of old stickers.
And then maybe I'll come up with some new stickers.
So good things happening there at libertystickers.com.
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Now tell me what this thing is going to look like then.
I'm picturing what, like a mobile home park on the water.
I'm just messing around.
Go ahead.
Just think a luxury version of it though.
Yeah.
So yeah, and that's the thing is the people attracted to this, I think are just really good human beings with, now that the crypto movement has happened, we have a little bit of capital to actually invest in stuff like this.
And Roger's actually doing a project, a free society project.
I don't know if he talked to you about that.
No, I don't think.
So what was, oh man, that's crazy.
He absolutely should have.
Now you're seeing.
Well, I was the one asking the questions and they were the wrong ones because I don't know anything about this stuff, honestly.
So now people are actually starting to say, let's just create for your more peaceful world, their societies on our own.
Rather than asking for permission, let's just go do it.
And who could say no, we're not going to let you do it because we're doing it offshore peacefully.
We're not interfering with anyone.
If anything, we're going to create value for the world.
But that's my optimistic side.
And we'll see where this goes.
I think over the next five years, you'll be hearing a lot more about what we're doing.
But right now, it's still in the startup or building that minimum viable product offshore in Tahiti.
But I invite you to check it out.
It's absolutely paradise.
Yeah, well, listen, hey, Tahiti.
I mean, that's a synonym for paradise, right?
I don't know.
I can't really think of any pictures of it I've ever seen in my head, but I can make one up.
Very light blue water, right?
Hey, but so here's my question.
How expensive is it to build an island basically on an ocean that can have storms and things and all this?
It seems like the capital investment to make something like this happen just to try to build a new town out there.
Is the technology such that this is really a viable thing at an affordable price?
Yeah, that's an awesome question.
So we're doing this in three phases.
The first phase is just being realistic and saying we don't know if the technology is fully mature to go deep sea yet, right?
So rather than starting with a hard problem, we're starting with the easy problem of building inside of a lagoon.
So a protected lagoon in Tahiti.
The technology is absolutely ready for that.
And the capital investment, without speaking about specific numbers, we're looking at the order of magnitude of tens of millions of dollars to make this happen.
Now, stage two is going to be going outside of the lagoon and going onto a continental shelf kind of setting where it's still not deep ocean.
So it's an increased set of engineering challenges, but not the really big deal.
And the third phase is once we've actually grown and matured, we go deep ocean.
Now, you asked what will this look like?
Now, we're not trying to build these remote libertarian utopias in the far edge of the world from a US perspective.
What we're trying to do is mature technology, both science technology, but then also like social technology and how we cooperate with each other voluntarily.
And as we mature this stuff, the plan is to actually replicate these projects offshore from major cities.
So what we'd really love to do is build these startups offshore US or offshore, say like India, where you have just a huge amount of human capital that's kind of stuck in really bad economic regimes or political jurisdictions and say, well, here's an escape valve.
Here's, you know, we want people, like we want immigration.
We want people to come and work and be productive and just unleash human potential.
Sounds great.
I mean, you know, technology, I'm no engineer, but I know things are changing very rapidly all the time.
I don't know.
I guess my only reservation is I always feel like, you know, we should prioritize fighting evil before doing good things, but that's probably just my own dark, twisted soul.
Like really actually doing good things is probably more important than just criticizing bad things all the time.
But I always wondered, like, with all the tune in and drop out, maybe if we all kind of didn't drop out and worked really hard, it'd make a marginal difference, but it's a pretty big margin.
You know what I mean?
Like if we could, if the libertarians could somehow really elevate the level of discussion about the genocide going on in Yemen and shorten that war by three weeks, we would save a lot of people's lives.
You know, I don't know.
Yeah, I totally agree with you.
So I say do both.
And the way I look at this stuff is we're not, at least for me personally, I'm not abandoning what we have going on in the US.
It's more like, let's go do a proof of concept to show all these people who say, you know, good luck trying to convince someone that you could build roads without a government monopoly.
Okay, well, let's just go do it, right?
So this whole seasteading thing to me, right, and the whole cryptocurrency thing to me is just us going and doing it and showing a better way.
And ideally, what I wanna see is the spillover back into US society where we say, look, it worked phenomenally well in these other areas.
We can do this here, right?
So it's kind of like Hong Kong provided a great example for mainland China to start reforming.
And they're so much better off today than they were during Mao Zedong's cultural revolution.
Right, so rather than argue with Mao, just go ahead and create a Hong Kong.
And then you'll be the example of change eventually.
Right.
They'll never say, hey, you know, Hong Kong is, you know, with an ideologically much superior experiment.
Instead of just, you know, admitting defeat, they'll just go and start implementing change.
That's kind of the way I see it.
I would just love for, you know, people in Washington, DC to say, hey, look what we did with like cryptocurrencies.
We've shown a better model for money potentially.
Look at what they've done like in seasteading or any of these other projects.
You know, like we should be improving in ways that go beyond just a lobbyist writing some thousand page law.
Right, that's not a marginal improvement to society.
In fact, I think every law that gets written is in some way some, you know, regulatory capture thing that is making us a little bit more constrained, not better off.
Yeah, ever since 1787.
Hey, man, so listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show and how much I appreciate you sponsoring the show and all of this.
So let me give you one last chance here to tell everybody about Zen Cash and how they can get interested in it and how they can get the right wallet to use it and all the rest of this stuff.
Sure, yeah, yeah.
So what I tell everyone is, you know, if what you've heard today or, you know, interests you in any way, just come check us out.
And we have a website, you know, zensystems.io or zencash.com.
They both go to the same site.
And you can go there and see all the different communication channels we have.
I think one thing that sets us apart from a lot of other communities is that we have just such a, kind of almost in a way like a cheesy, warm, welcoming community that's just extremely supportive.
So yeah, just come check it out.
Join our Discord channel, you know, come join our Telegram, join any of the channels that interest you and just pop in, check it out and see what you think, you know.
And if from there, you're still interested, then I would say check out, you can read our white paper so you know what's going on.
We have a public roadmap.
We're like, our goal is to be the most transparent and decentralized project in the world.
So the first step for that was, you know, publicizing our roadmap for everything that we're planning and what's going on so you can keep track of that real time.
You'll find that in our community and just pop in, you know, and I'm sure that people there will be able to direct you to anything that interests you.
And then you can start contributing, right?
We have an open forum where if you want to contribute, say, set up a meetup group in your local town or city, you can go ahead and submit a proposal.
We'll give you some Zen to do that, right?
So that's what we're trying to do is just open the system for anyone to participate.
And it's all different kinds of ways to participate.
You don't have to program C++ code to participate.
Cool, very cool.
All right, and we'll have links to all that stuff, the white paper and the website and all of that in the show notes on this interview as well.
But that's zensystem.io and you can just search guys, Zen white paper and it'll come right up there.
All right, well, thanks again, Rob.
I really appreciate it very much.
Yeah, no, thank you very much.
This was awesome.
Talk to you later, Scott.
All right, take care.
Merry Christmas.
You too, bye.
All right, you guys, there you go.
Zen Cash, check them out, zensystem.io.
And you know me, I'm at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, libertarianinstitute.org, foolserend.us, that's for my book, Fools Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You might consider buying it.
And you can follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show, thanks.
