Permissionless (E3)
In this episode of TO THE MOON, Max and Stacy remain in 2011, a year when bitcoin was still ‘magical internet money’. It is also the year when bitcoiners met in ‘meatspace’ at the first bitcoin conferences, including Prague, where Max Keiser spoke and Amir Taaki hosted. In terms of the ‘permissionless’ nature of bitcoin, TO THE MOON flashes back to archival footage of an interview with John Perry Barlow, author of ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, in which Max asks him “what happened to the internet?”TO THE MOON then talks to Nozomi Hayase about ‘natural law’ and how that governs bitcoin, while Rodolfo Novak notes that Satoshi remained anonymous because it is important for a permissionless system to not have somebody who rules it or who has too much authority over it. The episode then takes us into 2012 when QE3 already began and markets were soaring on freshly printed money and yet central banks started to worry about bitcoin as Tuur Demeester notes from the Keiser Report archives.