126 - The Crypto Revolution | Josh Rosenthal

Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Guys, we have a fantastic episode for you. The Crypto Revolution. This is the sister episode to our favorite episode of all time called the Crypto Renaissance. We have Josh Rosenthal, who's a PhD in history, who went through the parallels between the original Renaissance, historical Renaissance, and crypto. Now, today, on the 4th of July, Independence Day, we are going through the parallels of crypto and the American Revolution, calling this the crypto revolution. The lens that we are applying today is how's crypto like early America? How are you like an early revolutionary? So excited about this episode. It was an absolute blast with Josh. And I love these historical analogs, David. What were a few of the takeaways from you?

We always joke on bank lists. We're speedrunning the history of money and finance and also human coordination. And this is that last part where we did the crypto renaissance episode. We compared and contrasted the way that crypto is very much like the Renaissance. And Josh makes the claim that the American Revolution, happy July 4th, everyone, is the logical conclusion of the Renaissance. The Renaissance man turns into these revolutionaries who break free from top-down state control. And so this governance experiment, an experiment in decentralized governance based on a protocol, is something that had never been seen before. Rather than a monarchy, we have this piece of paper that is a code that we all agree to. And there's also just some other parallels behind this like innate human desire that is built into the American ethos that I think we have lost, and that's now being captured by the crypto ethos. Crypto is here to produce a more perfect union of humanity. Crypto is a nation of builders, a nation built on freedom and independence. And crypto people are here to discover themselves. This innate ability to build something, to become an entrepreneur, to add value, not just for your own sake, but also for the sakes of people around you, is very much baked into this human desire that has always migrated westward, if you will, starting in Europe with the Renaissance, going on a pilgrimage towards America for freedom. And now we are going, because there's no physical land left to go, we are going into the metaverse to find our freedom and to be able to build stuff. And so Josh Rosenthal is, of course, the best person to tie these parallels together as we go into the crypto revolution to understand in what ways is this the same story that we have heard once again. And so, Bankless Nation, I hope you have a fantastic 4th of July and thoroughly enjoy this part of crypto's history as we go through the crypto revolution.

The last thing I'll say before we get to Josh is I think some of you might find this episode a bit idealistic. Of course, we are idealistic on crypto. Also, there's some idealism about the US. And for some whose experience of America is kind of not the aspirational vision of what America could be, you might recognize that. And I don't think this episode is saying America is perfect or that it's lived up to its vision or its aspirations. But those aspirations are good in and of themselves. And the US has been a fantastic experiment post-renaissance and into the revolution of economic freedom and personal freedom. Not perfect, not finished, not complete, but a worthwhile experiment. And we see some parallels with crypto. So with that, we'll get right to the episode with Josh Rosenthal. Hey Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce you once again to Josh Rosenthal. He is our favorite crypto native historian. He has a PhD in history, received a Fulbright scholarship to the Sarbons Institute for Advanced Studies. He's no longer a practicing historian, though. He has sold some Web2 companies. He's now a crypto investor and indeed a crypto native. Josh is the individual who helped us create our favorite podcast of all time. Both David would say this and I would say this, which is the crypto renaissance podcast. If you haven't listened to that podcast, go back and listen to that. We'll include it in the show notes because it is the precursor episode. It is kind of the sister episode to this one, because we are here on the 4th of July. That is Independence Day for those of you in the US, celebrating our independence in the crypto world. And we are talking about the sister episode to the crypto renaissance. Because first you have a renaissance, then you have a revolution. This is the crypto revolution. Josh is here to talk about it with us. Josh Rosenthal, welcome back to Bankless. How are you doing?

Hey, thanks so much. Thanks for having me back. And just right off the bat, I'd like to say thanks for continuing what you're doing. Like they say you can only know about a person two points, like when things are great and when they're brutal. And like I think it's like more instructive on the ladder. And you guys have just been fantastic in terms of delving into the issues, giving people context, and especially first time cyclers, like broader context, cultural and historical. And I personally appreciate it. So a pleasure to be here.

I think bankless listeners have noticed Ryan and I get more giddy as prices go down for some reason, just because the bear market ultimately, you know, this is where the revolution happens. This is where the revolution is born. It manifests later, but it starts in the bear market. And so we are excited. Yeah, we're here for it.

And so, Josh, the way we want to take this, I know you had some thoughts you wanted to share with us today, but we want to provide historical context on the American revolution and how that maybe relates to crypto. And we're going to talk about that. So, first, we want to go through the high level of all of this and then go through the high level of the revolution historically and how that applies to crypto from a value perspective, from a vocation perspective, from a governance and identity perspective. There are some incredible analogs and parallels here. And then we also want to end this with some action items. All right. What can people do with this information? And I know you're fantastic at that as well. So let's just set the context here and maybe take us from our initial episode where you asked individuals listening, bankless listeners, to put themselves in the position of the medieval you, someone in a pre-Renaissance time period, how they experienced the world and how the Renaissance changed their experience of the world through technologies like the printing press and through double entry bookkeeping, the neo ledger that we came up with. That's where we started on the journey of the Renaissance. Could you just recap that quickly? And then let's start to talk about this second chapter from Renaissance to Revolution. So take us through that.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. For those just catching up, you know, one of the models I can think of when I look at crypto, you know, I think the best way to describe it is as a renaissance, which is a crazy claim to make, but it's fundamentally the historical rhyme that best fits what I think we're seeing. And so just kind of laying out the TLDR, medieval you lived in a permissioned world, and we looked at value and communication identity. And value for medieval you was access to wealth, and it was subject to the control of others, the decisions of others. Communication likewise was permissioned, it was top-down, and ideas were controlled by access, you know, to expensive manuscripts, and their economic powers reinforcing that hierarchy. And those two things fused to form your identity, your horizons, who you were and what you could do. And the key world to your medieval world was permissioned. And the crazy thing about it is you might not have known it was permissioned at the time. It would have just been the air you breathe. You wouldn't have been aware of that. And so with the Renaissance, we saw two new decentralized technologies converge. And it kind of gets to what drives history. It wasn't, you know, means of production and it wasn't great men with ideas, but it was really communities making history by using decentralized technologies for social coordination. And so there are two technologies that arrive simultaneously: ledger-based financial primitives, which we call double entry bookkeeping, debit and credit, may sound familiar, and a new permissionless communication protocol, which is really the printing press, not just text, but also images and ownership baked into the protocol itself. And so this gave you access to capital, there's sharing of ideas at scale. It essentially unwound a hierarchical world. And early adopters, you know, had asymmetric returns on that. And so the basic idea is that your medieval world, which is static for, you know, recent memory to all the way through centuries, was fundamentally fractured for the first time, bursting open with new opportunities. And so you could hear competing visions and join a community based on your values, your job, your family, could start a business. It's what historians call the birth of socio-political pluralism and proto-capitalism. Your stars were no longer set. And so as we go into the next chapter, you can make meaningful choices. So, what did you do with those freedoms? So if the Renaissance marks a unwinding of medieval hierarchy and the birth of the modern world, it's the birth of this creation we call the early modern world, which is still what we're in, it didn't oblivate medieval structures. It offered a revolutionary idea, the idea of an alternative. Luther forked reality like Satoshi and those forks beget forks. And so, faced with new opportunities, what did you choose to do? Some people chose to stay in those vestiges. And that gave us juxtaposed communities with competing visions. And if you adopted those new values and joined a new community, that meant you likely faced resistance, conflict with previous ties, your family, your friends, your bosses, your landowners, your overlords. And that's kind of the context for the American Revolution. What did this pluralism mean? And so if you adopted these new communities, you had some options. You could stay put and convert your political authorities, and sometimes that ended badly in what's known as wars of religion. You could try to migrate to a different geography and physically reside with your community where it held political dominance. And you had mass communication now, so this idea different geographies courted these communities, partially because of the massive economic benefits they reaped from them. You could also choose to participate in your government and try and carve out liberties for you and your community by threat or military force, but also just by the weight of your newfound economic power. And here's where you have the genesis of a variety of political representation experiments and governance. But for people who still found those vestiges too constricting, there's just one other option that remained, and that was to strike out for new shores and leave. And there is a diaspora in Exodus. Like many attempts in this political experiment on a global stage were undertaken. We've forgotten most of those. Huguenots in South America, Acadia, New France, we just we don't remember them anymore. Largely because just like the last Renaissance was so vibrant, it eclipsed all those previously. The American experiment in independence was the most successful in terms of staying power, it eclipsed those previously. And that largely is the context for our discussion today. If you're an American and into history, you kind of think of Puritans and pilgrims, but at the time, it wasn't fixed. Those people were zealots and kooks and nutjobs, people who were so obsessed with this Renaissance vision of individual sovereignty acting in community that they struck out. And it wasn't just religious freedom the way we think about it, content of personal belief, but it was really about what you could do with that freedom. Associate with others, engage in economic enterprise, and build with whoever you chose. And so that is the American experience in terms of British colonialism. But if you're way out on the edge, over-leveraged, if you will, in the pursuit of sovereignty and community, what then? What happens when the experience doesn't meet the ideals? And that's precisely takes us to the debate with the British colonials, right? Like, do you remain loyalist or do you go revolutionary? What form of governance best serves your interest as well as your neighbors? And how do you even think about that? And so rather than just doing kind of one history like most historians do, one damn thing after another, we can pull on these threads if you're interested in looking at value, which is money, economic systems, and ownership and business, then communication, sharing ideas at scale, the technologies, the platform, and the content, and particularly how ownership functions and therein, and identity, how you viewed yourself, values, and allegiances, and organize yourself according to governance. So that's kind of that's several hundred years of history in two minutes, but there you go.

Yeah. And Josh, we want to get there. And we want to start with kind of like the timeline of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence and kind of start there. But while we're still addressing the themes and the analog behind kind of the American experiment, this experiment in self-governance, bottom-up governance, a nation at its best, aspirationally, by the people and for the people, we start to see some parallels with what we're doing in crypto. So you mentioned this group, this tribe, who rather than work within the existing confines of the establishment structure that was left to them in Europe, they came to the US, literally headed west. That's how we end every single podcast is this is the journey west. And we have these Puritans headed west. We want to get into their head. But a few of the cores that I think we're going to talk about here in the parallels, you know, number one, crypto is a nation of builders. In the same way, I think the best parts of the US in its early phases were a nation of builders. Maybe you could talk about that. But also, America has a history of like.

We weren't sure it was gonna make it, right? There are like lots of parts in the history of the US, just like the history of America, where you're like, um, was that whole experiment a good idea? Are you like, are you sure these people, you know, know what they're doing? This could go off the rails in so many ways, and it almost did. That's another theme. Uh, it's literally called the great American experiment for a reason, in the same way we can call crypto the great crypto experiment. I mean, all this stuff at some level is we're still in beta, aren't we? I mean, this is still an experiment. We don't know fully how it's going to play out. So tell us about some of these parallels and like the common quest, I guess, for self sovereignty and freedom. Why don't you pull on some of those strings at the high level before we get into the detailed history here?

Yeah, yeah, sure. So

When we talk about crypto, and I said, hey, Renaissance is a good way to think about it. It's a rebirth or recreation of society. It was an unwinding of medieval hierarchies and every form of technology and control and organization, and essentially unwound them. And then what do you do with the pieces? How do you put those back together? And that's the context of what we call the great cultural renaissance or rebirth of society. And when we really get building, we get building into the Renaissance, tracing these themes like through. And it's not just me as a historian kind of forcing the themes. If you ask revolutionary you, this would be in your head. This is the context for why you're taking actions. And so just the long story short, if you're into crypto, you're part of this like story. And it's echoing throughout the ages. Renaissance, revolution, it's always the same characters. It's always permission versus sovereignty, hegemony versus decentralization, subjugation versus independence. And so the shift from Middle Ages to Renaissance is context, but revolutionary you and even what we're doing in crypto today, they aren't different stories. They're all chapters in the same story. Medieval U is permissioned. Renaissance U had a choice. Revolutionary U is about what you chose to do, that was to build, and to build in public as part of a great experiment, not because it's easy, but precisely because it's hard. People would pile on and it would be ridiculous, but there's no other way to do it but to build through it and participate. And that's actually how you surface unintended consequences and hidden dynamics. And so in both phases, we're driven by this stupendous optimism. You know, critics would say it's naive, zealous and petulance. We thought we could rebuild our world from the better from the ground up. After we toppled medieval institutions, we proceeded to rebuild this imagined community instantiated by consensual currencies and contracts, like the same pieces of crypto. And we we did it all in public, to your point, like on-chain, keeping records on the way, full display for the world to see. And when it failed, and it often did fail, like repeatedly, the old world piled on hard. Our first constitutional form didn't last a decade. That's a giant fail. Back to the drawing board, not gonna make it. Then debt and rebellion after rebellion, not revolution, internal rebellion, until we adopted a strong centralized authority. It was basically a king with a different name, critics said. Where's your decentralization now? And when it came time to build, we to create a more perfect union, we argued, we scopped, we basically anonymously chatposted on each other and then did these middle-of-the-road options. And we gave just an example, we gave the central bank a short-term charter because we didn't trust it. And then we revoked it the first chance we got after just a few years, because we thought it was working against us through bad lack of clarity in regulations and actually causing inflation. Like American history in a nutshell in the history of decentralization as part of this continuous experiment is a history of not gonna make it. The critics always say, just give it time, they'll collapse into chaos and come crawling back. And the crazy thing about all this is we didn't disagree. We actually leaned into it, which is crazy. This had never been done successfully before the building. Our history we'll get into is uh history of moonshine-fueled rebellion, the modern post office attempting to tax our emails, the Fed denying a spot ETF and forcing court action. That's not unexpected. That's what happens when you experiment. And we called it that and did it in public, inviting others to point out the failures, to gloat when the community broke, to carefully track our downtime. It wasn't a bug, it was the feature. And to your point, Ryan, like the safe bet was against it, right? As historians, you step back and you say, oh, we know that was a Renaissance, we know that was a revolution. We always we envision ourselves as characters in the story, and we would have bravely marched out. But the experience of that, it wasn't that way. It was volatile, it was cataclysmic. You know, the people in the Renaissance thought their world was ending, and it was. And when you actually tried this experiment, it would be chaos. The smart bet from the institutional intelligentsia was political theorists reasoned from armchairs and said, hey, governance from the bottom would be chaotic. You can't even have a piece of that. That was like Enlightenment axiom, age of reason. Like the answers would be obvious, thinking from first principles. Like any form of self-governance would burn out and collapse into chaos. And they had reason to say that. Like when we tried these little experiments, dissenting voices from bottom up, peasants' rebellion after Martin Luther, Rousseau in France, it tended to end poorly. Massacres, bloodbaths, guillotine running, you know, 24-7. And if it ever did succeed, so the reasoning went, you know, it'd take on an increasingly ossified structure and become the very thing it was created to replace, which is, you know, irony. And that's like shades of Leviathan. In either scenario, smart bet was to say institutions were inevitable, and history had these time-tested models. Who are you to question it? And like honestly, the loyalist position was very attractive, right? Stick with the devil you know, even if he wore a monarch's crown. And so this experiment that we partook in, the freedom to attempt to pursue one's economic interests and find a governance to ensure that it persists, was crazy. It was like the risky bet to take. Like, Renaissance gave you choice to express one's value, to join a community and help others. And the American debate is about how best to do that. And that's the context. It's not just dumping tea over the boat. It's really history swinging back and forth between decentralization and aggregation, big ticks and talks, medieval to Renaissance and little ticks and talks that characterize American debate and discourse. Like since day one, do you remain loyalist or do you revolt? Centralized institution or more autonomy for divergent geographies and communities? And this is Federalist versus anti-federalist experimenting in public. And the long story short part of it is all those downtimes, all those experiments that did go off the rails and blew up in our faces to the glee of spectators, they paid off. We built through it and discovered an unexpected solution, a way to balance structure with freedom and to prevent both chaos and calcification. And it was a new model of largely demarcated lines with broad spaces to play and tinker. Today we'd call them sandboxes or safe harbors. And we knew those would go bad over time. And so we kind of built into the system eternal vigilance, not from an external enemy, but from ourselves. And one of the things about history is that, you know, there are unintended consequences, exploitation of peoples and lands. And that's true. You want to go deeper into history to get a better mastery of it, to prevent that from happening again and to give you a lens to better look at your current experience outside the blinders of your life experience. And so when we use these lenses, we say, hey, in terms of the Renaissance and the revolution and where we are in this great debate and great experiments, we've ticked and talked back to central leverage. We have centralized institutions with very few sandboxes and regulations that aren't nuanced once again. And so crypto isn't just another part, isn't another thing. It's actually part of this great experiment. It's the ability to rebuild our world from the ground up and to participate in this imagined community instantiated by consensual concerns and contracts. And maybe it won't work, it'll probably fail, it definitely won't go according to plan, and we'll veer between chaos and hegemony all the while doing it in public. And so this is by design, the volatility is a feature of meaningful structural transformation. When things die, they do so by slow ossification. And crypto is the reason why we're forcing this issue, is because now we have the technical rails to actually do this meaningful generative, which is a revolutionary idea, creation for the first time, to remember our history, to pursue a more perfect union as a community of builders and the space and the power of spaces to experiment. It's a way to reimagine what it means to be a nation, but also the technical rails to pursue on a global scale independent. So that's the that's the whole thesis, kind of A to Z.

And the podcasts that we do with you, Josh, the Renaissance podcast and this revolution podcast, I think are so incredibly important. Like there, we could talk about this DeFi app, or we could talk about that blockchain. But when we talk about the pendulums throughout history, we tap into something that everyone, I feel like, knows intrinsically. We have been here before. And when we experience things, when our ancestors experience things, it gets written into our DNA. And we understand some of the concepts that we're going to talk about today intrinsically to our bones. Like everyone can relate to their peasant self in the 1400s Renaissance. Everyone can relate to their ancestor that was a part of the American Revolution. And like even if they didn't have ancestors in that part of the world, there's other components of this swing from decentralization and aggregation to top-down control and authority. Like we have been here before. What's unique about crypto is that this part of the cycle is like we have so much more recorded history to have data points on. And so, like while there have been a hundred pendulum swings between order and chaos throughout history, only recently have we have been able to write all these things down and had the internet structure to be able to communicate these things and the podcasts to talk about them on. And so as the listener listens to this, you are not a passive observer of this lucky revolution that has tends to happen once every 300 years, right? 1400s, Renaissance, 1700s, American Revolution, 2000s, the Crypto Revolution. You are not just a passive observer, you are a part of this story. And if you are on the edge of your seat as I am right now, it is on you to not be passive in this story, but see and understand your role in history because that is how we get this done. You talked about the first attempt at like the American structure that failed after 10 years. The reason why the American experiment succeeded after failure after failure after failure is because of the people that decided to undertake this revolution. They knew that there was a there there. They didn't know where it was, but they were committed to these ideas of independence, these ideas of freedom. So they were going to get there. They were going to run this experiment into the ground. They were going to ride Bitcoin, they were going to ride Ether to zero and nothing else. And so as we go forward into this crypto renaissance, like it's important to understand that like your ancestors have been here before in one way or another. And we are about to park upon this great crusade once again.

Yeah, and that's uh full disclosure for everybody in the audience, the crypto renaissance isn't me. That was, you know, David and Ryan doing that and saying, hey, I think there's something here. It's like everybody knows this. We know this in our bones, right? History isn't about names and dates and facts. It's about remembering and kind of suspending disbelief to figure out like where you have a part in the story. And for most of history, you don't really have a part in the story in the same meaningful way like you do today, right now. It's it's really important. Yeah, ride ETH to zero is like live free or die. These were the calling cards saying, like, I know despite the fact that all evidence to the contrary, I'm going to persist in this, like, not because I'm just obstinate and into faith and faith or fideism, but because I know there's something meaningful here, even if I can't articulate it. And and it's kind of a counterbalance to this vague feeling of unease where we know something's not quite right, right? Like your medieval peasant self, you didn't know you were permissioned. That was the crazy part about it. It wouldn't have occurred to you. And it's like in some senses, we're medieval today in this part, right? Like we think we have control of our money. You actually don't. You have a broker, you have an IOU, you can't spend as you want to, a credit card won't process it on the rails. You basically, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Or you think you can communicate, well, somebody else owns the platform, they own the broadcast layer, they own the technical code, you fill it with your content, they can de-platform you, or they can subtly shift you through, or they carve out your identity. It's like we're subject in all of the same ways. And it was only with Renaissance U where you woke up and said, hey, there is an alternative. I can do something else. And so all the way up like through this continuation of the Renaissance, like things kind of re-aggregate and you continue like persisting and like participating in this experiment, saying, like, live free or die. I'm gonna do this regardless. And like somehow I can use it as a lens to say we're over-leveraged. And a couple of things of over-leveraging, we've just gotten used. We've been born in this weird period of like stasis again, just like medieval you, where we have 40, 50 years of kind of like global staticism, post-Breton Woods or what have you, where we think there's an institutional path, we think there's a predefined way to get there. And we tend to view volatility as something negative rather than like meaningful structural transformation. And so we kind of have to rewire the way we think about that. And one way to do it is to look at history and say, what would it have been like at the Renaissance? It would have been chaos in Armageddon. What was it like at the revolutionary independence in pursuit of it? It would have been chaos in Armageddon. And like the way we did it was to experiment in public. There is no other way through it. And so, yeah, it really forces the question. It's like not just what side are you on, but it forces you to really clarify your values, what's meaningful, what's important to you, and what are you willing to do as a result of it? Yeah, so well said, absolutely.

Josh, um I've you know long seen so many parallels with kind of the early founding of the US, the American Revolution, and like what we're doing in crypto, right? And I get a little weird on this because I think there's like some pretty direct analogs, right? So like Ethereum and Bitcoin being sort of like in these other crypto projects, this is the great experiment of our era. This is the new America. This is the land of opportunity, right? We even have our own constitution in these crypto networks. That is code, right? We call these things protocols all of the time. Ethereum rests on a protocol, Bitcoin rests on a protocol. Well, the constitution is a protocol as well. The constitution is a protocol for coordinating people, governing people.

Decentralized governance.

Exactly, in the same way that Ethereum and Bitcoin are a constitution for coordination, as are smart contracts. I even see people like uh Satoshi and Vitalik is almost like these this is gonna sound weird right now, but I just think in history it will literally view them as this. Almost like founding fathers.

Yeah.

Right. Like, I mean, these are originators of kind of the thought and the code and the constitutions of our crypto networks that are so important. And we in crypto, as David was just saying, we are like the revolutionaries. We are those crazies deciding to like rebel against the existing system and despite what all of our friends and family say, embark into this new world and this new journey. There's going to be opportunity associated with that. Let's start with kind of the, I guess, the timeline here in the history, because some people listening will have like vague ideas of American revolutionary history. Like I myself have some, you know, I've taken some AP history classes, American history classes, of course. Um, I've watched the Hamilton musical, all right. So that's that's something too, you know. But like I don't know all of the details, but a lot of thought coming out of the Renaissance went into the revolution, right? I mean, you had thinkers like Adam Smith and you know, capitalism and you know, Locke and Rousseau and others talking about like these freedoms. Can you just tell us? Let's take us to the Declaration of Independence. And why did this colony, this British colony, decide suddenly, okay, we're gonna revolt against the king. We're gonna separate from the British Empire, and like we'll go to war if we have to. Why was that decision made? What's kind of the context here? And take us to the early part of the revolution.

You're not wrong thinking about it this way. It sounds like crazy and audacious to think about crypto as like a new nation, right? It's like how it's such a crazy historical claim to make. But this literally is the continuation. Like the historical rhymes fit really well. Like if you do a PhD in poli psi, like the first thing you walk through is Benedict Anderson, you're gonna say, hey, nations are imagined communities instantiated by consensual currency and contract. And so a lot of our discourse has been around crypto as finance and replacing fiat, and that's true, but it really is serving the function of a nation in that sense, right? Imagine communities, consensual currency on tokens and contracts now with smart contracts and NFT for property rights, like expanding into governance, exploring, you know, governance and with a thousand synthetic flowers, being able to permeate not just Democratic one token, one vote, not Republican delegation like based on election, but like quadratic voting and like proof of attendance experience expertise. We're experimenting this. It's all real. And David, to your point, it's not just that we have more history, we have greater visibility to do this all in public. One of the reasons we've forgotten about this volatility and the craziness of the experiment was because that's just not largely shown to us anymore. We just we haven't had the visibility to do this. And so we have better tools to be able to do these experiments at scale with better speed and greater visibility to work together. So it is really a historic moment. And yeah, just taking us to let me let me walk through kind of the history at the same time as I pull on one of these threads. And so I like these threads. Different people have different threads, but these are kind of the ones I use to assess like when a complex system changes. And so this is kind of like value, communication, and identity. And so let me walk through value and I'll take us through a little tour of history. And then I'd really like to stop on one point which isn't thought about in terms of the context of the revolution, but I think is like very salient, as some historians would say, it's the culmination of the revolution and like very much like the stage set for our discourse today. And so that would be that would be the whiskey rebellion as well. So we'll go from Tea Party to Constitution, I'll drill into Fed as an example, and then we'll go into whiskey rebellion, kind of pulling doing the chronology while I do a little bit of this value. And so just big picture is Renaissance US choices, you can pursue. You have this idea of an inalienable right to build, to pursue your vocation and to organize yourself, like with different forms of governance you were experimenting with. And when you don't have, it's not just taxation without representation, it's without clear regulation where the burden of regulation actually like burns you as much as the taxation itself, because then you're submitting not just authority to tax, but authority to like set the stage, particularly where it's unreasonable in the implementations of those policy, which is like a slightly more nuanced view. That's what sent the founding fathers, that's what drove them crazy. And so, like the answer to that is really grounded in value, which sounds like super selfish, but it was a revolutionary concept at the time that like drove them to the Tea Party and continued like pushing back as a result of that.

It was kind of property rights. Like

Yeah, yeah. It was partially property rights, but it was also there's this revolutionary concept of like generating value. This was like crazy, right? Medieval you, your world was static, and property and wealth and value was static. If you wanted something, I had to take it from you, Ryan. If David wanted something, you had to take it from me. That was the way that things were value was finite, basically. So coming out of the Renaissance, saying like there's an idea of like generative finance, like Shades of Adam Smith, where I can actually create wealth by doing something. That sounds so simple. We take it for granted. We say network effects and virtuous cycles, but that was insane, basically. Medieval you, like the meaningful part about your work wasn't doing value creation. It was being outside the world. You're better off in a monastery, in a nunnery, in a cloister, being outside the work world. Like with Lutheran company, all of a sudden the most meaningful thing you could do wasn't being outside the world, but it was participating in it through economic generation. You could actually create meaningful value by pursuing your vocation, by building a product or a service and doing something for the market. And the market would reward you if it actually was valuable. And when others used your thing, it created value for them. So you had this mutual creation of value in terms of like generative.

realized, Josh, like there's no such thing as an entrepreneur before this.

Yeah, this is the birth of no, you went from farmer to entrepreneur. The holiest thing you could do in the medieval world was, you know, basically be outside of it, be a monk. The holiest thing you could do in the post-Renaissance world was be an entrepreneur. It didn't mean you had to be, you know, VC financing investing. It meant running a small family business. You could be a farmer, but you owned your farm and you could do what you wanted to with the fruits of that. And now you had access to literacy and you could see different manuals for precisely how to do this. It was the birth of capitalism. Historians call it proto-capitalism until it becomes capitalism. And so you literally could generate wealth, and that was radical instead of taking from someone else, which meant that your tools of coordination were generative. You could create value for me as I create value for you. It sounds very kind of like VW bumper sticker on your bus, but it was unbelievable. There was no entrepreneurism, there was no creating a market, there was no refining a service. And so now with this like spirit of capitalism, the holiest thing you could do was like work for yourself, but by doing so, you would actually work for your neighbor and for society at large. And that was just like radical in terms of generation.

And Josh, I want to kind of make the point, right? It's like, you know, we are living in a different era of capitalism. Some would call this kind of like crony capitalism or late stage capitalism. But like going back in time, the concept of being able to open your own family business and get into the merchant class, get into the middle class, that was such a middle class.

A freeing protocol.

There was no middle class.

Exactly. And so this was an amazing revolution at the time. And this is what the like revolutionaries were like tapping into. So like getting back to that theme is so why were the founding fathers so pissed at the British? Like, what were they doing with this value chain? Were they getting in the way of them, you know, creating their own businesses and becoming entrepreneurs? And

No, that was exactly it. That's the context for it. It wasn't, we tend to think of it just in terms of pure political theory, like abstract, you're not being represented. But if you were there at the time, you viewed that, like, to your point, this was the creation of the middle class, and now you're participating in it, right? And yeah, some people didn't have access, but it was crazy that anyone had access to this. And the idea of taxation without representation, particularly burdensome regulation around the details of the policy implementing it, was that it impinged up, it wasn't just theoretical, it literally impinged upon your ability to create your business, to create wealth from nothing, to make the best of yourself and to help your neighbor while doing that. That was the inalienable right. We call it, you know, pursuit of freedom and happy, but that was like literally through value creation. That was the context of everything you read. That was what you did. And so this taxation, it wasn't just representation, but it would potentially break you. It wasn't a slippery slope. It was the details of the regulation were so onerous. We essentially pitched a fit because we said it's a sharp knife to the heart of who we are. You have an inalienable right. No longer has like the divine cosmic, like, are you set in a pyramid? You're now like divine duty is to pursue your vocation, your calling, like through this entrepreneurialism, through what you like and what you're good at and generating something valuable for yourself and for others. And so, by these forms of taxation, and it's not just taxation, it's a policy implementation and a lack of clarity around it that just doomed it to fail and liquidated everyone. That was a sharp knife at who you were, why you were here in the first place, what you're assembling. And so, yeah, we can, if you want to, we can definitely kind of turn back and kind of go through like the way to think about why everyone pitched the Tea Party was like really around it was impinging upon value, like the ability to pursue your interests unencumbered.

and what it's a for people who again maybe didn't take their AP history. What's the tea party? Are you talking about like dumping at in Boston? Actually, the colonists like dumping the tea.

Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah actually

Sticking to the British.

Yeah, yeah, in a nutshell, absolutely. Dumping the tea and sticking it to the British is the easiest way to describe

And this was kind of the start of the Revolutionary War. It was like one of the precursor events.

This is the start of the Revolutionary War and the precursor around it. And usually it's portrayed as people, you know, bros getting mad about not wanting to get taxed or taxes are too high and they dump it. And that's not what happened. It was it was monarchy, it was governance preventing you from pursuing your calling of wealth creation. That's why everyone went apoplectic when that happened. And so they dumped those physical assets. They said we control things on the ground. And that was the clearest. And it was also symbolic, and there's a bit of like cultural construction and ritualism to it. There's things going on around that. But basically, it was because the revolutionary idea was that you could create wealth, and this was impinging you from doing that, basically. It prevented you from participating in a virtuous cycle of creation. And that meant that your colony would fail, right? If you can't create, your colony is going to fail. And the whole reason you're here is because you were already out on the edges. You had already left for a new land. And so, like, now what's the right way? What's the best way to prevent careening from chaos into uh also from like having an overly ossified monarchial system? And so we basically said, no, like where we draw the line isn't just in taxation, but it's in taxation without representation. What we meant by that with the Tea Party kicking off the American Revolution is the policy itself was poorly implemented. And it's just something that happens again and again and again and again. Like if we play the story forward, like the Tea Party, it sounds weird, but it's like this idea of like rule that you have an obligation to the policy, not just the tax. And like it wasn't foreseen, right? Like for as a loyalist, like the whole idea was you were subject, it was a clash of worldview, right? It really was like medieval versus renaissance. Remember how I said some people persisted in those medieval structures? Those were the loyalists. Those are basically people who said it was an ideological battle around like value creation. Loyalists said, you were subject to a monarchy. There's a divine hierarchy appointed by cosmic powers. There's a king here, he's imbued with supernatural authority, there's a divine contract with a crown, and all this ensured that it was for your best. And like that was like a good trade to make. It was safe, it felt good, had a good UI UX. Revolutionary U wasn't part of that. You were part of that like Luther breaking that hegemony and saying, I don't know about that whole cosmically instituted hierarchy thing, right? You've participated in different forms of government, representative pluralism, divergent communities and structures, league of electors, even in popular revolution. And more importantly, you'd managed yourself, right? You'd done it on the ground. You've organized community events and helped others in need. And like those values were contagious. You've gotten used to this independence. And so when you were obligated not just to pay taxes for services and public goods, but when you did so and you not only you didn't see the benefit of it, but it was like clearly arrogant in the implementation of the policy prevented you from not just pursuing your business, but from being you and yourself, that was it. You were done with it. You had absolutely revolt. That was, you know, live free or die. That was ETH to zero, however you wanted, to kind of carve that out, basically. And the debate isn't between like equality and outcome. It's really it was about the form of equality as like opportunity. And so, like, yeah, we kicked it off with a tea party, we dumped some tea, all hell broke out, we're fighting Concord. We're like clearly the worst bet to make. They have, you know, professional troops, like we're fighting from the edges and doing using guerrilla war content. We're farmers, right? We're like militia, it doesn't make any sense.

Just to completely break the fourth wall and make this like crystal clear, right? We have this like top-down regulation from the United States, from the United States government, that is holding so many parts of this industry back. And it is frustrating the entire industry. And like there's so many products that we have not built that we could have. And there are so many things that our entrepreneurs and our builders could have built, but they are hampered by regulation. I'm not missing the fact that Michael Sonnenshine and Grayscale just sued the SEC because the SEC is preventing a lot of the true manifestation of the products that we are building in this space from actually emerging. And it makes sense that this is the way forward, where like you talked about it's not some sort of just like ideological like purism, like, hey, I think governance should be this way. It comes from people with raw economic incentives, saying the regulation and authority and top-down control is preventing me from becoming my true self. It's preventing my business from truly expressing its true raw power because the legal structures and the top-down authority are not allowing me to do the things that I want to do. And the things I want to do are the things I know best. And it is fundamentally about pushing entrepreneurship, pushing computation to the margins and saying, like the state, the holy divine pyramid of godly divine influence, does not know what's best for me. And now that I'm an individual and I have the tools to engage in entrepreneurship and value creation, I need this top-down central authority to get out of my way so I can create value for myself, my family, and my neighbors. And so, like, this is where, like in the American Revolution, where the Americans went and invaded in the Boston Harbor and threw the T overboard. It wasn't about the T, it was about the message. It was about get your hands out of my business because you're holding me back. And now we are doing the same thing where Grayscale is suing the SEC and we're saying, get your hands, get your regulation out of the form factor of how my business is expressed, because you're harming our industry. And we will go down with the ship. And because we're going to go down with the ship, we will fight you until we have our freedom.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's what like the Tea Party is to the Whiskey Rebellion is a filing suit on the SEC. The it's also, we'll get into it a bit, but it's not just it's not selfish pursuit of economics. You really believe that you can generate value in the world, that you pursuing your calling was the way to improve the world for yourself and for your neighbor and for the community of governance. And you chose to participate in that experiment. Like literally a way to think about it is uh is that you're helping your neighbor by making the world a better place and pursuing yourself and helping them pursue themselves. You're opening up the door for them to do the same thing. And the fruits that you actually are growing, like will like feed them basically and governance as well. And so, like, if you want to break the fourth wall, the basic idea is that, yeah, wouldn't other people, at least some other people, be better off, like owning their own like value, controlling their communication, their identity. Wouldn't they be better off in the especially if you're down the distribution curve? Like, why keep trying to play minor league ball, play a different game, right? Like, isn't that a better approach to it? Maybe even that actually, if the technology is really generative, maybe that's how you get out of like budget deficit and interest rates. That's what we've seen like repeatedly through these sorts of explosions and harvesting. Like, maybe you can actually take on new forms of governance. We have the technology now, like to literally do these governance experiments at scale, basically, right? Like, maybe we can pay for public goods in ways our cities can't. Like get out of our way to let us do our stuff. And like, that's not a return to like complete chaos. The solution we came up with was like safe places with safe harbors, call them safe spaces for innovation. Like that was the balance we struck. And so today I'd say we've all but forgotten we've swung so far back. Where's your safe space here, right? Like to do innovation. Like that's essentially what we're suing the SEC through. Not because we're philosophically opposed to it, but because we need a place to like pursue our economic activity, yes, to benefit ourselves, but also others and like also the government. Like, let us help you help yourself.

And so out of that desire, we throw the tea overboard. We kickstart the American Revolution and we gain our independence. We can fast forward through like the shooting and the war part because I don't really intend on doing that. And so we win as independent seekers of the ability to express our values upon the world. And then like that's when the American Revolution or the American experiment starts. Like we are the British retreat and we are given this blank slate to mess up and mess up again and mess up for a third time until we get it right. And so that's where this experiment in decentralized governance starts. And I think that's where the story continues. Can you continue along the story there?

Yeah, yeah. So I think the parallel isn't so much let's like do the Tea Party thing and basically recreate the United States. The part I really think is interesting is like the nature of that debate because it wasn't set. Just like the Renaissance was always reforming, you know, so too, the nature of this political debate was always in the pursuit of a more perfect union. And that debate went back and forth. And so like that's the context I think we're pretty clearly in today. So to fast forward, we basically go through British independence and there's a debate within the community. Do you remain loyalists? Do you revolt? The answer to that is largely around how you viewed yourself in the world and like your economic activities and like how important they were to you, to your identity. And so 1777, we have our first constitution, and it's like odd. It's not what we'd expect, right? It lacks the power to tax. It lacks the power to regulate the government. It's weird. And we've kind of forgotten about that just because that was like a what we'd say now is a false fork or a false start, but it kicks off the great debate where we basically have this exchange of ideas about how best to structure the governance to prevent chaos and also ossification to allow economic generation and you to pursue your true self. And so that's really a debate between like the Federalists and the Anons. They have different names and different points in time. It's kind of Federalist papers with Madison and Hamilton, and you know, they're advocating for a strong discourse. Um and the people on the other side that were saying, hey, be hesitant about strong governance, they weren't just anarcho, you know, anon anarchists. They were anon, though. It was people like Jefferson, but also a lot of these people writing and taking the names of Roman Republic uh.

The idea was that they did this to say, hey, a subtle shift to empire actually tends to create, you know, persistent imperialism. And so it's a debate between how best to govern, how best to represent. And that like kind of kicks off the whole discourse. And they did this debate in public while the old world piled on. They did it through shitposting repeatedly. You know, there's images of someone, you know, and the Federalists are really good at shitposting. They like, they wiped out the Anons, like they just did a fantastic job. Like some of their better stuff is you see, like, you know, an Anon and he's like prickly and anti-federalist, he's like a porcupine, and you know, the devil's whispering to him, giving him taglines and memes to generate, and the the British Crown in the form of a lions doing the same thing, and Lady Liberty's weeping basically. He's just, if you're into decentralization, not into this hierarchical, monarchial, like medieval vestige worldview, like you're basically just like a incorrigible like SOB, right? Why else would you be doing that? There's another answer why you might be doing that. And there's another image where it shows what goes on behind the scenes and and you know, an anti-federalist club, and they're a bunch of drunken gluttonous like folks just getting like sh smash-faced. And that's like why you would do that. Why would you threaten your behaviors are self-serving? They aren't in the form in the service of neighboring others of governance. They're basically they're just for your own ends. You're just you have no self-control, like basically. That's why you eschew these centralized structures. One of my favorites is this, you know, mad raging Tom. You can look it up, and it's like some people think it's Thomas Paine, it's probably Jefferson. Either way, he's trying to pull down democracy and the devil's helping him and they're having a difficult time. And, you know, he's obviously drunkard because he has a bottle of whiskey at his feet, and that's why he's doing it. And there's like there's a subtle sexual that's probably better for another podcast. The point is like, the point is there's other reasons, it's like very nefarious activity. And like, long story short, if you want to strike out on your own, if you want to like move towards this anti federalist position, like you're essentially like making this leap into the unknown, and that always ends up back in the arms of like British monarchy, right? Like, so there's another image to leap or not to leap, and they have George there. And so this is the discourse.

And these same governance debates are absolutely found in the crypto world. Yeah. We have like the super libertarian Bitcoin maximalists that came first into the industry. And they're like the anti-federalists. It's like get your big organization, like top-down control, out of here. And then you have something more of the federalist, which I kind of consider to be like the shared security model of Ethereum, where we have this one center of security that secures the whole entire union, right? And like we've called Ethereum like the United Roll-Ups of Ethereum, right? Like we have the bottom layer one that organizes and secures the layer twos on top of it. And this is like the federal saying, hey, we do need a strong central government to protect and coordinate between all the states. And then you have also like the Cosmos model, which is like leaning a little bit more back into the states' rights, heavy states' rights, heavy app chain emphasis, total sovereignty. And so like these conversations have happened in the crypto space. How do we organize our blockchains? Whereas previously it was like, how do we write our constitution? Now it's like, how do we coordinate our blockchains?

Yeah.

No, that's exactly right. Like the crazy part about it is we're using, so we have these IRL governance models and we're importing them into the synthetic world as we're recreating the nation now, right? And like as we move to the second unfold, these transformations tend to move in like two unfolds or two phases. One where you do the same thing you saw previously, but use like the new technology to do it better, faster, cheaper. And then the second unfold is actually to do things you couldn't have otherwise imagined that wouldn't otherwise be possible using the new technology. And so like phase one, we're early days, right? We're using like IRL governance models that we know, some of which were popular, some of which have like kind of faded away to manage the synthetic worlds. And phase two of the unlock, I think we'll actually, and we'll get to it, we're actually going to start using like the things we generate in the synthetic world out of a synthetic lab where we speedrun not only finance, but we speedrun governance to actually port back over to new governmental models. And you're you see that even in early days with different politicians playing around with different ideas. But the point is we actually have the simulation capability to do that now. So yeah, you can add the point of this whole discourse is that like shit posting and the world piling on, like whenever you're trying to do anything, wherever you are in the spectrum of decentralization, like that's just how the experiment plays out, right? Like that's just like characteristic of it. So when you see that, don't think, oh, it's a bunch of crypto bros getting mad. It's like as crazy as that sounds. And Ryan, to your point of like, how did the British, they saw them as a bunch of crypto bros, right? They're just like low-level, unintelligent, like people that are just pursuing their own economic interests at the expense of helping their neighbor, right? Like, oh, that's why you're into crypto, isn't it? And to say, no, no, we're actually pursuing this, like, this experiment of how best to like govern, to free ourselves and like also to work with others for their benefit, even if they don't recognize at the time, that was like lost on those folks. And so this is just like very much a continuation of the experiment. And again, you know, you can read now and that's great, but you're still communicating through these images, which have the semiotic import. And like, that's the best way to tell a story. These tend to be broad memes. They're absolutely like shitposting with memes is starting with Luther all the way like culmination of Renaissance into revolution. This is how we do it into crypto. It's not, this is like what happens when we have historic epic structural transformations. We do this experiment in public and we meme it out.

And by the way, guys, if you are watching on YouTube and we're showing these memes as Josh is talking about them, kind of early manifestations of memes, you know, I feel like, you know, from the historical timeline perspective, a lot of pop history in the US, like people kind of skip this whole phase, right? So it's like, oh, the America won the revolution, and then there was the constitution, everything was perfect. But you're saying no, okay. So the war was won. But then this first constitution was kind of garbage, kind of didn't work for anybody. And people cut sort of forget about that. And then there's a series, like a decade of debates, even longer, between the Federalists and the Anons, as you say.

Crypto tribe.

Yeah, the crypto tribes. And then the outside world, I know there's this scene from Hamilton the Musical where King George like gives a song and he's like at the end of it, he's like, good luck. Like he's just like, colonists, good luck with this. Because we were bringing the empire in the structure, and you're just this whirling band of chaos, and cool, you can win a war, but like can you actually govern? Probably not. And then he's got evidence here where he sees the Federalists and the Anons kind of arguing back and forth. But what was the outcome of this? Because it wasn't pretty. In fact, there were even like rebellions, Josh.

Yeah, yeah.

And I know you want to talk about the whiskey rebellion. Is that the first one? Like we had the Tea Party. And this was not a rebellion against the British now, it's an internal

rebellion in the US. So, what are these rebellions? This is a forgotten chapter of American history post revolution.

Yeah, no, it's so good. It's also just back to your point on that first constitution, you can kind of think about it like early DAOs, right? You can even think about it like, you know, pick your DAO where you know you have a leader and they go away and say, just figure it out, and you have 12,000 people in Discord typing around and it doesn't quite work. And then like Kane comes back or somebody comes back and they're like you you have to find this balance between top down and bottom up. And there's not one solution, but you have the freedom to experiment around. And so you can think of our first constitution as like purely decentralized, just do whatever you want to. And like the knock is like that's the exact same thing as people pointing and saying, Hey, we told you corporations would always win. Their DAOs are too chaotic. Like

The historical path is you tick and you talk and you experiment your way out of it. That's like that's what you expect. Like, yeah, and so like the same thing, like the British and world point of view, like the reasoned people in the armchairs sitting back and like they basically said, look, you're gonna, it's gonna be complete chaos. Yeah, you can win a war because you're naturally more chaotic, and like that's you can do it on your own terms, but like you can't rule, you can't organize. The debate was about are you just like tearing down authority for its own sake? Or are you really doing it to pursue your true self and your neighbor and others? That's the debate. And like that's gonna be tested, and like, can you actually pull that off? And like early days, like, not great. Try one constitution, it like fails basically. 10 years you're writing it, like you're shitposting each other like through this debate, and like a series of ongoing revolutions, just like ongoing renaissance, is like we just forget about them. Shea, just a number of others. Like the whiskey rebellion is kind of one of my favorites, and like I wanna, I'm not saying it's the most important, but I like the idea that it gives us a glimpse into kind of similar analogs to what we see because it's very much an overreach of like one party, like through a particularly poor implementation of policy tax, like impinging upon entrepreneurs who are more sophisticated than we would think they are, to not only like supplement their IRL income, self insure their crop, but actually provide back to the cities. And so, like drilling into the whiskey rebellion is really a different way to tell the Fed story.

Yeah, let's get into that.

Yeah, yeah. So there's a series of ongoing rebellions, and like basically they really hit the people. You know, it's not just theory. These are the results of on-the-ground experiments, causes and effects, and these unintended consequences, basically. And so we go through this new, we basically have a series of these rebellions. We end up with a new constitution after a decade of debate, like from this like shit posting back and forth and from these rebellions, where we'll get to an example of that. And after a decade of debate, we get together and we have a new constitution, and we're trying that's why we use the words in order to form a more perfect union. And this has checks and balances, has delineated lines of power, it carves out places to experiment. Today we'd say sandboxes, particularly financial and economic. But like, how did we get here? Like, what was the nature of that like chaotic like experiment in public? And that's like the central bank is a really good example of that. So 1791, Hamilton manages to push it through. And like Jefferson hates the idea, right? Jefferson thought like three later agencies would like become permanent institutional cruft. So Jefferson's able to negotiate, you know, a 20-year charter for the Fed to be revisited. And that charter was revoked in 1811 after this lengthy debate. And like even the congressional research services will say it's a function of bad regulations, creating inflation, uh-da-da-da-da-da. So, like, what does it actually mean on the ground? And like the example that is like a really good lens to give the listeners a taste of what it was like is the whiskey rebellion, you know, 1794. The Fed is set up, all hell breaks out as a result of them not like using like clear regulation and impinging upon your economic liberty to be your entrepreneur. And basically that's the result of you know revoking the charter and then basically creating out these like safe harbors and sandboxes. So the Boston Tea Party is what everyone loves to talk about, and it's a key point, and I get it, but like the whiskey rebellion in some ways is like is like a better analog around this.

Like what was the importance of whiskey? Take us back to that lens, because I don't think we have good

Yeah, so whiskey is whiskey is um

So the American Revolution creates debt. And then basically the question is who's going to pay for it? Right. And so it's always a question, like throughout history, you see this clear theme of like fiscal policy, like determining governance. And like, of course, who's going to pay for it? Not like the British in New England, but those on the frontier, like out in Appalachia, the Irish, the Scotch, the Germans, like the people in the sticks, right? And so like they're going to pay for it by like having their whiskey taxed. And like the way the whiskey was taxed was if you were bigger, you paid less, which is like reason for an uprising. But it was the nature of the regulation. Like the Fed demanded taxes to be paid in fiat in full. And that was like the most inflammatory, it was the least way aware, most arrogant legislation that essentially would liquidate every farmer and cause like inflation shock and like supply chain crashes everywhere. So you're a farmer, you farm corn, right? That's what you're doing in Appalachia. You're not a medieval farmer. The difference is you own your land. You can do anything with a fruit. So you're literally an entrepreneur. You're running a family business, and you're not dumb. You're really smart. You diversify, you mitigate risk, and you engage in product development. You make, you do the most revolutionary need is the most American thing you can do. You make moonshine, right? Like you turn your excess corn into whiskey. And that excess corn would otherwise rot. And this is like huge. And like as a Kentuckian, I have to say this isn't bourbon, like disclaimer, disclaimer. It's like it's more like white dog or whatever. And it could actually be like good. It could be like Apple. Anyway, uh the point is like whiskey allows your farming to be profitable. It is a supplemental income that allows you to do your first line business.

Is it like a store of value? Is it almost like a currency?

Yeah, so it's a currency, but it's also like a way to self-insure your crops. As a farmer, you never know what's gonna happen, right? You plant too much, you're broke, you plant too little, price crash. Like it's like problematic either way. And so like whiskey allows you to plant too much. It allows you to overplant, basically. And when you overplant, like what do you do? You have enough to hit the market price with the excess you've invested in, you know, time, labor, and capital in those supplies, you turn that corn that would otherwise rot into risky. You literally distill the value. It's called liquid gold. You're so on one hand, it's supplemental income that makes your farming possible. Like long pause, that's your first line business, your entrepreneurial business. Your farming is possible because of the supplemental money from the whiskey. It's also possible your farming is only possible from the whiskey because the way you're self-insuring your crop by being able to produce enough, ensure you hit the market like peg, and then be able to turn the excess into something valuable itself. So instead of having like Fed basically insuring, you're self-insuring. And then third, like to your point, Ryan, yeah, it's absolutely a currency, which is crazy. So you're creating like commodities steadiness and commodity prices, but it's a currency because, like, on the frontier in Appalachia, you have very little access to like dollars. You don't see fiat dollars. Most farmers families see like five, very few fiat dollars every year. Foreign spirits are very expensive, it's tough to transport across the hills. So you distill value and you trade, you barter, you settle accounts, you pay for goods and services in whiskey. It's their community token, basically, right? It's like if Moonshiner is the original DAO, that's them. And so you don't have a lot of access. And so if you have a demand, you're fine paying taxes, but you need to be able to do things to do that. The regulation around the unnuanced regulation saying pay them in full in fiat, it would break them. It would liquidate all the farmers instantly. It was a lack of policy with nuance, and it caused absolute chaos. A rebellion, unintentional inflation because of the supply lines and liquidating all the farmers. And so crazy rebellion, not unlike the Tea Party.

So, probably one of the biggest reasons why this rebellion was a rebellion, again to what you're saying, it's not about the tax. I'm sure they were happy to pay the taxes. It's about not being heard. It's about you guys don't even understand what I'm doing here. And you guys are doing this undue regulation. And this is our frustration towards like the things like the IRS and the SEC and the CFTCs. Like, you guys are just, you could do things that uh make us aligned with you, but you are doing this stupid thing that rejects us. And now, as a result of that, you are not allowing us to work inside of the system. You don't know who we are, you don't know what our business is, you don't know about the value that we're generating. And because you're not permitting us to work inside of the system, you're forcing us to work outside of the system.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Sadly, inside you.