[00:03:05] Scott Lindberg: Like, I, I hear it in your podcast. I hear it in in others. And I, and I actually think that what’s fresh in my mind right now is I actually, our experience in Nashville, and I’m still buzzing on that. I, and maybe it would be just to break the ice. Let me, if I could give like a couple examples from, from that.

[00:03:23] Scott Lindberg: Like I’m just, if you were, in other words, if you were just a game theory guy and you were kind of sitting down watching this two day event in Nashville, you knew nothing about Bitcoin, what would be your, what are your observations. And I, there were two things that kind of came to mind, and these are, I wanted to, to share with you.

[00:03:43] Scott Lindberg: One is that there, there are a couple tenets in game theory and they’re not super complex. We actually use them all the time, but I use kind of like more formally look at them and, and one of those ideas is signaling a boyfriend tells his girlfriend, Hey, I love you. That’s a, that’s a signal, but if he puts a tattoo on and says Susie or whatever on his body, there’s a different signal in there.

[00:04:07] Preston Pysh: Very much, very, very different signal, Scott.

[00:04:10] Scott Lindberg: Yeah. Different. So, but if you take it to business, right, you get into auctions or pricing and imagine that there’s, there’s a Preston catalog and a Scott catalog and we sell the same type of things and I’m worried about what you’re going to price it at.

[00:04:26] Scott Lindberg: Maybe I put a meet the competition clause in there, so now I’m telling the customers, Hey, don’t switch. You know, go to me. I can send a stronger message to you without colluding saying, listen, dude, you, if you come at me, I’m going to like, this can be like mutually assured destruction. I’m going to have a beat the competition.

[00:04:46] Scott Lindberg: Like, I don’t even care about my margins. Like I’m just, if you do this, I’m just assuring you mutually assured destruction on, on this. So that’s just a signal. And Nashville, two days of intense lightning discussions. My thought is like, this is like one of the most high signal events that I can think of.

[00:05:05] Scott Lindberg: And the, and the reason is like there’s, there’s two parts that one of it is I continue to be blown away. It’s, I keep underestimating the amount of talent and like the amazing people. That are drawn to this space. And I just, I mean, I can’t, you know, we’re not going to dox anybody. I know we got the chat and rules and that, but I’m just saying like, it’s pretty like mind blowing.

[00:05:28] Scott Lindberg: And then on top of that, so you have a lot brain power there. And then you look at the attendees and you have 150, 200 people who are willing to shell out some money that they could have spent to invest in some SATs. They are away from their family and by the way, they’re going to eat like crap. They’re going to go eat some burgers, then some fries, and they’re going to like blow their diet and their exercise and like, why would you pay those kind of costs?

[00:05:55] Scott Lindberg: And there’s something about like, well it’s worthwhile for me to hang out with these intense brainiacs on some subject, in this case lightning. And I’m like, alright, as a game theory guy, there’s something going on there. Like there’s materially something is, is is moving here. And the second game theory observation that I had is, I think you could boil all of game theory back into like this one idea you’re, anytime you have more than two players, two entities, you basically have a game and all you’re doing is you’re looking forward and then you’re kind of reasoning back and figuring out what should I do.

[00:06:29] Scott Lindberg: Right. So if, if, if my looking forward idea is I’m going to, I want Bitcoin adoption, I want everybody to, I want everybody to get on the Bitcoin standard, and then I kind of raisin back. And there’s a ton of examples over those two days. The one that’s really sticking out for me right now is comparing lightning with the, with the internet.

[00:06:49] Scott Lindberg: Because we all like, oh, lightning solves medium of exchange. We can scale, but, and I’m not a techie, so some, some techie can kind of fact check me on this, but, but like IP four, basically, if there’s like a million ways of actually connecting to the internet, how is it that tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people think that they’re on the internet?

[00:07:10] Scott Lindberg: And the answer is in between. They’re like, you have your providers, so maybe Verizon or Facebook or Google or whoever, they have the connection, but you’re kind of going through them. Whatever that translation is that they’re doing, they’re, they’re providing the internet and they’re scaling. And so when you look at Fedi, the company and what they’re doing with Fedimint, so like the way, and I’ve heard a couple times, it’s still kind of hard for me to just grasp the whole picture, but the suite, it’s like an operating system and their operating system.

[00:07:40] Scott Lindberg: You can put something on there that says, Hey, this, this will connect you to Bitcoin and this one will like, you know, I don’t, I don’t log into iOS or Windows to build a a PowerPoint. I open up PowerPoint. Right? So how do I connect to Lightning? Well, I have a lightning connection and well now they have ecash.

[00:07:55] Scott Lindberg: And so you have like this ability to scale lightning. And I’m just kind of blown away just from a game theory standpoint to look that far ahead and saying, this is what we need for adoption. And to be able to back that up and say, what do we need to be working on right now? Then see all the, the talent that we just talked about, like focused on these problems that I just never even would’ve thought about.

[00:08:16] Scott Lindberg: And so the conclusion I would come to if I knew nothing about Bitcoin was like, holy crap. Like, get ready, because there’s something going on here, number one. Number two would be we’re not ready for like even as much progress as has been made. We still have like these massive challenges, like the scaling issue.

[00:08:35] Scott Lindberg: And those are my thoughts. Like if you just try to think, okay, what is the use of this game theory idea and, and whatnot. It’s looking forward to your reasoning back. And you can do all kinds of fancier things with different tools on it. But in a nutshell, that’s a couple of examples that I would use to help explain what we’re talking about.

[00:08:54] Scott Lindberg: Does that help?

[00:08:55] Preston Pysh: Yeah, that helps a lot. And, and this idea of a person rationally looking into the future and then trying to position themselves today to have the most advantageous position as we progress in time. You’d look at Bitcoin’s open network. And so just for people, a little bit of context.

[00:09:12] Preston Pysh: So like last week we were in Nashville Bitcoin Park, put off this Lightning summit. There was, what do you think, Scott? Like 200 people there?

[00:09:20] Scott Lindberg: I think it was close to it. Yeah.

[00:09:21] Preston Pysh: Yeah. We had like 200 people that came into town and I mean, it was, it was some heavy hitters in the space, really kind of providing presentations on what they’re doing on top of Lightning, whether it’s gaming or whatnot.

[00:09:34] Preston Pysh: And just being able to see Fedi was another example that was there. So using that framework of how do I position myself today for this potential future event that’s coming. The thing that I keep going back to is this open network and you hear Jack Maller’s talk about this, the open network. How can anybody compete with this idea of anybody in the world being able to build on top of this open network versus you look at the legacy financial rails and everything’s closed.

[00:10:04] Preston Pysh: You have to ask for permission. You have to be in a privileged spot in order to do it. And when I’m looking at deducing, whatever type of model you want to u use, when you’re talking about game theory, and I know you can get into all these various models, you have some of them laid out here like the John Van Neumann, you got super theoretical, you got simulations and I mean it, the list goes on and on and on.

[00:10:27] Preston Pysh: But when you really kind of like look at what’s the one thing, if we were going to deduce it down to, it’s the idea of open networks and good luck trying to compete against that on a global scale, what, what are your thoughts or what would be, what would you say in addition to that, Scott?

[00:10:43] Scott Lindberg: No, I think you nailed it.

[00:10:44] Scott Lindberg: I think the, you just, there’s no way of competing with more minds working on something. The more people who, who are working on this, the better. And when you’re in a closed environment, like you work at Microsoft or whatever, and you’re in a little thing and you’re going to develop whatever this program is that, that I’m told by like, developers, like they really hate it, right?

[00:11:04] Scott Lindberg: It’s cumbersome and can’t do whatever. And yet in, you know, you take Nostr for example, in six months or less than a year, whatever, like all these people coming in. And so I, I think you nailed it with that, but, but part of it also is, it’s almost like, there’s a couple things there. One is co-opetition, right?

[00:11:22] Scott Lindberg: because you, you’re competing with other developers and if you put your time in that, but you can’t feed your family. Like, you know how there’s got to be something there. I think what it gets to is kind of the whole idea of Bitcoin is it’s an idea bigger than ourselves. It’s kind of like, one of the things that I know we’re going to get to in a little, in a, in a moment, but it’s why are people even in the space, like what’s attracting them and look at like the Declaration of Independence, that’s an idea that’s going to go on forever.

[00:11:52] Scott Lindberg: It’s a much bigger idea. And I think that highly motivated, like if you’re at Microsoft and you’re saying, okay, we’re going to develop the next version of whatever, like, how tied are you to that? You know, compared to the massive amount of passion that people have for freedom, freedom tech. I don’t see how you can compete with the, the motivation, the incentive to work on it.

[00:12:12] Scott Lindberg: And I don’t think you can compete with what you’re talking about where you just, you’re just leveraging the synergy of multiple people working on the same problems and working together. They’re not even comparable. The, the closed system will never be able to keep up with that. Open, the open source. I think it’s just a brilliant way of accelerating technology.

[00:12:31] Scott Lindberg: I think it’s just brilliant actually.

[00:12:34] Preston Pysh: I know there’s a lot more that we could go into on the introduction part, but you gave me a reading assignment on my way back from Nashville. I didn’t, I didn’t come.

[00:12:46] Scott Lindberg: Little risk there.

[00:12:47] Preston Pysh: I didn’t complete my assignment, but I got started on it. I’m probably halfway through, maybe 40% through.

[00:12:53] Preston Pysh: And I have to say, I really, really like this book. It’s called The Infinite Game. It’s by Simon Sinek. And you said that you think that this is a really important discussion point when we’re talking about game theory, so I’m going to throw it over to you. I, I agree with you after reading the first part of this book.

[00:13:09] Preston Pysh: I completely agree with you. And I think it’s something that a lot of people don’t realize that they’re playing. They, they don’t make the delineation between I’m playing a finite game versus an infinite game, and why that’s important. So I’ll get into some of that with the audience so that they can understand this important concept.

[00:13:26] Scott Lindberg: Yeah, that’s perfect. Like the, the concept is, is this, and, and just so everybody knows, like he’s, he doesn’t even mention Bitcoin or hard money in this, in this book. I personally found that this book really, really helps solidify the framework. Like if you, if you would divide up game theory about Bitcoin into three, like to the elephant in three bites, the first bite would be why are we even talking about Bitcoin?

[00:13:50] Scott Lindberg: What led to it? To me the second big bite would be what is in Bitcoin? And that’s kind of like how I developed the game and all the different layers of how it works. And then there’s the, the bite number three, and that is the long-term incentives that are in play now with, with game theory, with energy, with social media and freedom of speech, with education.

[00:14:11] Scott Lindberg: Like there’s just so much there. And I think this book addresses bite number one of why are we even talking about it? And then if I were to put it into Bitcoin speak, what I would say is we talk about high time preference and load time preference, right? This is like absolute zero time preference. Like if I’m looking out to infinity, like there’s no, there’s no winning because the game doesn’t end.

[00:14:34] Scott Lindberg: There’s no like end of the quarter, end of the end of the year kind of metric like you would have in evaluating a a, a company. You’re, you’re looking really long time. That’s why like the Declaration of Independence, like it’s timeless. Like you’re, if all men are created equal, that’s pretty significant.

[00:14:50] Scott Lindberg: Like that’s a big long term type of thing. And so the book outlines a couple examples we could probably use to help with that. Like there’s, I thought the Vietnam War example was pretty powerful. He had an example in there with Microsoft, I think they called it Zoom, which was like the competitor. We could probably take those and then come back to what does it mean for money?

[00:15:11] Scott Lindberg: And in my mind what it does is it lines us up and says, okay, well if you take an infinite look at money, it’s really an infinite game. And. You know, we’ve been in, you know, for our lifetime certainly, but over a hundred years we’ve been playing with this, these kind of finite, with a finite playbook. And it doesn’t end well when you play an infinite game with a finite playbook.

[00:15:35] Scott Lindberg: So, you know, Satoshi basically says, that’s not the game we’re playing. We’re we’re actually playing this other game, and I’m going to do a playbook that makes sense with how money works. So historically, like it, this isn’t the first time that somebody or a government has debased their money. It’s taken us a hundred years to get to where we’re at.

[00:15:53] Scott Lindberg: But it was kind of inevitable if you look at it with this kind of infinite mindset that we were going to get to, to where we are. And what he does is he kind of breaks it down. You can apply this anywhere. I’ll, I’ll test to you that if you apply it to yourself personally, it’ll, it’ll humble you. Like if you apply this to your career or your kids’ education, or if you ever, you’re running a business and you apply this, it, it’s, it’s very humbling.

[00:16:13] Scott Lindberg: But here’s an example, like Vietnam, if you look at it from a finite mindset, You’re basically saying, we’re going to win all these battles. How do we have less casualties than the other side? We’re going to win the, the battles. Well, we decimated the other side, and if you want to look at casualties, it was like 58,000 lives lost for us and 3 million lives lost for the Vietnamese.

[00:16:36] Scott Lindberg: And it’s staggering. And in, in terms of a percentage, it’s even worse as a percentage of their population. It would be as if the US lost 27 million people. And you’re like, well, what happened? And basically is they weren’t fighting a proxy war. Like we’re in this little finite mindset. They’re in it, they, they don’t want the Japanese there, they don’t want the French there, they don’t want the US there.

[00:16:57] Scott Lindberg: They don’t, they don’t care. They don’t, they don’t want imperialism, like they’re playing a different game. And it doesn’t end well obvious for, for us. So the, the business example, there’s a couple in there. There’s also like Kodak. Kodak was the first to have a digital camera. And then they delayed it.

[00:17:13] Scott Lindberg: Well, if your metrics are your stock price, your earnings per share, your share of market, your growth, some other thing, and we’re going to beat the competition, well that means that’s a finite mindset. And when you do that, it doesn’t end well long term. Another example he had was the Microsoft Zoom, which was competing with the, the iPad.

[00:17:31] Scott Lindberg: And he had a, I guess he consulted both companies. And he basically, when he’s talking to the executives of Apple and says, this Zoom thing is way better than your iPad, your iPad. And Microsoft was like, their, their strategy was to beat Apple. So that was their finite mindset. We’re going to go beat Apple. And Apple was like, yeah, it’s a good product.

[00:17:50] Scott Lindberg: Like their, their mentality was, we’re going to go beat ourselves. because long term it’s going to go up and down. Sometimes you’re ahead. Sometimes we’re ahead. And, and so coming back to Satoshi, he’s, he’s looking at this thing. He says, okay, you know, long term money like this is, we’re not playing the right game.

[00:18:06] Scott Lindberg: We’re playing with these fiat games, this kind of finite thing. And that’s, that’s not the. The way I look at it. So I, and to me, what the book does is it, it helps give a framework of the significance of Bitcoin and like, why we’re even talking about it. It just, it just helps with a lot of different things with incentives and perspectives.

[00:18:27] Scott Lindberg: And for me, like it’s literally, I went from, yeah, low time preference is great too. Holy crap. Now we’re at zero time preference. And like, it just kind of helped me realize like how big of a deal this is so much bigger than ourselves. And that’s the reason that I recommended the book. It’s just a framework of why we’re even talking about this.

[00:18:47] Preston Pysh: You pointed out to me this quote on the back of the book, and I think for a person who’s hearing all that and they’re saying, okay, I, I kind of get the, the delineation. I think that quote on the, on the back of the book is really the so what of this whole infinite versus finite games. And if Scott read the quote for people so that they know what it is, And then from your own point of view, tell us your thoughts on why you think it’s so profound.

[00:19:12] Scott Lindberg: So the back is we can’t choose the game. We can’t choose the rules. We can only choose how we play. That’s the quote. You’re, I’m assuming you’re, yeah.

[00:19:21] Preston Pysh: Yeah. That’s it. I mean, I, I, I just think that that’s just so profound. I think that Bitcoin, when you think of it through that lens, it’s Satoshi saying like, we’re in this infinite game.

[00:19:33] Preston Pysh: It’s not like somebody can pin me to the wall and say, Nope, this is how you’re going to play the game no matter what. He’s basically saying, you might think you can do that to me, but here’s a, here’s a whole different thing that I, that I’m going to introduce. And I think the world’s going to prefer to play according to these rules as opposed to your rules.

[00:19:52] Preston Pysh: And there’s nothing you can do to prevent people from playing by my set of rules. Right. And the only reason that that’s possible is because. There, there’s no end to the game. It’s not like we’re sitting down and playing your hot all up game or playing Monopoly or you name it. And we know that in 45 minutes there’s going to be a winner declared because this is the set of rules, which is the definition of a finite game.

[00:20:16] Preston Pysh: And this is just different. This is something Steve, they gave a great example with Steve Balmer in the book like when he left Microsoft, I love this part. He leaves Microsoft, right? And at the end he’s like, because he was really upset that Apple had, because he, he had made the comment that the Apple iPhone was going to like, take a, a sliver of market share, like one or 2% and it was, wasn’t going to be a big deal.

[00:20:41] Preston Pysh: Right? And right before he left, I think he left like one or two years after the iPhone was introduced. The numbers were like gangbusters beyond what he had predicted. And his comment was, well, in the last 15 years while I was running Microsoft we, we made more money than any company in the entire planet.

[00:21:02] Preston Pysh: And Sinek’s point in the book is he was playing a finite game. He was playing a game defined by his own set of rules that, like the person who made the lo the most money at, when he pulled the chalk line and said, this is the end of the game, is the winner. And he was basically declaring himself a winner.

[00:21:19] Preston Pysh: And the games just keeps on going, right? Like, he’s not looking forward to where this is going. He’s, he’s saying, well, this is my departure and I’m declaring I’m the winner. Right.

[00:21:28] Scott Lindberg: No, I think in that connection with what you’re describing too, is it actually gets to the, if you’re Satoshi and it’s 2008 and you’ve just, you, you say, you know what?

[00:21:38] Scott Lindberg: This isn’t the right game. Or We have the wrong playbook. Yeah. Well, Bitcoin doesn’t exist yet. And so that’s like, you’re, you’re basically touching on. How do you design the incentives, figure out the different players to design something that can take on this behemoth, this entrenched behemoth that is our fiat system.

[00:21:59] Scott Lindberg: And you’re going to have to have incentives that are self-reinforcing so that this thing can, can grow. So from a game theory standpoint, to think through that, nevermind the programming, everything out, we can get into some of the, you know, when we get to the next stage here in the discussion. But it, that’s incredible.

[00:22:17] Scott Lindberg: Like, it sets up like your, it actually sets it up in saying, okay, I, I don’t want to play by those rules, but so what are you going to do about it? And it like, that’s not. I mean, for me, just designing a game I find to be challenging. And that’s just a simple little table talk game. I mean, you’re talking about like basically saying I don’t like the holy the whole, I don’t like our fiat playbook that we’re playing with there.

[00:22:39] Scott Lindberg: Yeah. I’m going to change that. I just, I’m going to change the rules, graphs, the, the magnitude of taking on that and saying, no, I’m going to, I’m going to develop this thing and I’m going to create the right incentives in with my rule book and my game so that when you play the Bitcoin playbook, it wins. Like getting, well, I can’t even say wins because I kind of go against that, but it, it is, it basically, it grows and is adopted and then basically human flourishing is going to be the result.

[00:23:05] Preston Pysh: So when you frame it that way, you quickly come to the realization that anybody who understands the magnitude of such mission statement or a problem statement, that you cannot take that on in short order. It has to be something that’s drawn out at least a decade or more in order for it to even have a shot, right?

[00:23:28] Preston Pysh: And so as we get into this, this next part of the discussion, and this is how brilliant Scott is. Like Scott and I sat down when we were in Nashville and he’s like, I would really like to just like reverse engineer what Satoshi must have been trying to think about, right? In order to de design a game of epic proportions to take on the whole global financial system.

[00:23:49] Preston Pysh: So you have all this list, this is amazing, the thought process that, that you went through on this. So lay it out for people, right? So like, how can a person design a game that’s going to last a decade or more in order to slow drip this thing into existence?

[00:24:04] Scott Lindberg: Alright, so let’s, like, from a game theory standpoint, let’s, we, we got to keep in mind the tenant.

[00:24:09] Scott Lindberg: We’re going to look forward and reason back. So we just established what we want to do. Another tenant that we haven’t really discussed yet. And that is, yeah, I, so I was in military intelligence when I was in the army. I wasn’t in that that long. And I get all the oxymoron jokes that, that, that come with that.

[00:24:24] Scott Lindberg: So, but part of that is you have to, there’s a tenant where you have to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes to do a war gaming and then work backwards and work through it and figure out like, what should we do with our, and so think about this. There is something called like the curse of knowledge.

[00:24:40] Scott Lindberg: If you were playing chess with yourself, how do you play the other player? Like, you, you can know yours unless you’re, I guess you’re, could be like, you got some mental issues. Maybe you could be like Gollum or something. Or imagine playing poker, right? You’re going to bluff yourself. Like, it just doesn’t, like, it’s not, not like necessarily easy to put yourself in other shoes.

[00:24:58] Scott Lindberg: That’s why like, that’s the reason why a company would take an outsider to come in and say, you help us war game our strategy. It’s precisely because they might bring up something that you haven’t, you know, thought about. And so here’s, here’s where I kind of take those two themes, looking forward, reasoning back, and putting ourselves in somebody else’s shoes.

[00:25:14] Scott Lindberg: And that’s where, this is basically what I put in my book. And I’m going to try to do it in like five minutes. So it’s, let’s do it. It’s 2008. It’s 2008. And we’re satoshi, we’ve just gone through this big thing. We, we’d say we’re playing a different game. We want to change it. And like, where the hell do you start?

[00:25:31] Scott Lindberg: Well, one thing is you can’t have, you can’t have this constant like debasement of, of the money. You can’t have you. The Romans did it. Everybody’s done it. Everybody’s done it. So you have this thing called, I think it’s called ethical erosion. You’ll get to it at the end of the, the book, but basically a slippery slope of, and it eventually, something’s going to break.

[00:25:52] Scott Lindberg: So in my mind, okay, the first thing is like, let’s cap this thing. And he could have capped it and said, I want it to be like 2%. Like gold or I just want to, like, he just went absolute, like, eventually there will be no more Bitcoin. That’s it. There’s 21 million and it’s a hard, it’s a hard cap, but it actually brings up, okay, well if I keep working backwards, I have an instant issue with this ethical erosion.

[00:26:14] Scott Lindberg: Like, we’re, we’re constantly going to, like, no one’s ever been able to do that. So why would I have confidence that a new set of rules is going to work? And then the conclusion that you get to is that you have to do it decentralized. You can’t do this with, where I’m going to trust that some leaders, some country, some banker, whatever it is, some something.

[00:26:32] Scott Lindberg: And you’re like, okay, so that’s great. Now we’ve got, we’ve got to have a hard cap and it has to be decentralized. Okay. That’s, that’s two things that we have to work into our game. Well, decentralization, from a networking standpoint, you, you get into this thing like the game theory. They just love to name everything.

[00:26:50] Scott Lindberg: There’s the prisoner’s dilemma and then there’s the like, there’s like tragedy of commons, like everything that’s like some silly little name to it. So the, the two general’s problem or the Byzantine General’s problem, or the Byzantine fault tolerance, I like, there’s like all these different variations of, of things.

[00:27:05] Scott Lindberg: Essentially what he did is he said, okay, if we’re going to be decentralized, then the solution is proof of work. This is kind of mind blowing in a number of ways. And so for anyone interested in understanding that, I didn’t, I didn’t make that up. That actually comes from the book of Satoshi, Phil Champagne, I think is the, the author.

[00:27:24] Scott Lindberg: And he actually collects a lot of the messages that Satoshi sent. So it’s this white paper plus all this other correspondence and he actually says the solution to the two generals problem is proof of work, which has all these implications like with what we’re talking about with mining incentives and energy producers versus consumers and all these it has and the physical world connected to the digital world there.

[00:27:45] Scott Lindberg: There’s so many implications to that, but in the context of kind of reasoning backwards, It’s like, okay, we need a hard market, like, or a hard cap. It’s 21 million has to be decentralized. So we have to have proof of work. Got it. Now what, like what do I, how do you get this thing out there and you’re looking at like adoption curves, and you got like your innovators, your early adopters, your late adopters.

[00:28:05] Scott Lindberg: You have kind of like the classic s curves and you’re going to want to reward people early. So now your, your question is like, well, how do I take this 21 million and put it out there? Do I just make all of it at once? Like I say, here it is, do I follow the gold method and say I want it one and a half, 2% a year for however long it takes to get it all out.

[00:28:24] Scott Lindberg: But if you, if you like, talk about game theory, I want to incentivize and reward the early adopters. So I want to have really big rewards upfront, but eventually I have to get to zero. Well, so where you end up with this, this reasoning is, is what he has with the havings. You have the issuance schedule. All right.

[00:28:44] Scott Lindberg: So now we’re in our journey. We have a hard cap. We’re decentralized, we have proof of work, and we, we have this issuance schedule with havings. And then you, you could even get into the incentive structure after that. They’re all done with the, the transaction fees. That’s a whole other-

[00:29:00] Preston Pysh: And I think that’s one of the most miraculous things that, that he, she them would’ve had to think through is, all right, so like, clearly I’ve got an incentive to push this out, but then like, how in the world can I possibly keep some type of incentive flowing as those coins are already issued and still have a hard cap?

[00:29:21] Preston Pysh: That’s the part that I think is somewhat miraculous to think through.

[00:29:23] Scott Lindberg: Right. Each of these. So, so what it is, it’s like an ecosystem. You got like layers of systems. You have like games within games on this thing. And the last one that I’ll mention just to kinda round this out, is you have a lot of things.

[00:29:33] Scott Lindberg: You don’t have like a, a central body there that’s going to be able to respond to things. For example, nevermind, like someone like China, like some policy to ban banning or a mining. Just the fact that technology, like Moore’s Law, if, if every 18 months the efficiency of, of chips is doubling and has been, how in the world do I make sure that everybody sticks to this issuance schedule that I just spent all this time thinking about?

[00:29:58] Scott Lindberg: And where you end up with is like, you’re like, well, I need some kind of, I need like a governor for this, this issuance engine that I have here. Yeah. Now you end up with a difficulty adjustment. And I’m like, okay, well holy crap. So now, like, now I need to have a hard cap. It has to be decentralized. I have to have proof of work, it has to have havings, and I need this throttle governor.

[00:30:20] Scott Lindberg: Yeah. I need the governor on this thing. And that’s, that’s your difficulty adjustment. And you just take it. So to me, that’s what I tried to, when I say let’s, let’s look forward reason back and put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes. In this case, let’s put ourselves like it’s 2008 and you’re satoshi and you’re saying, how do you crack this thing?

[00:30:37] Scott Lindberg: You got to, and you hit on it earlier, like to think through all the incentives on this. I just, the more I studied it, the more I just like, I wanted to keep telling my wife about it. And this is where like the, like I started like had to build a game because my wife was like, I don’t really care about your little abstract ideas at first.

[00:30:54] Scott Lindberg: And this is mind blowing how he put these pieces together and he didn’t, like, he didn’t create shot 2 56, he didn’t create, like, he just assembled these things in a way that you could have a game that had rules and no rulers. And this is phenomenal. Like, it’s just phenomenal.

[00:31:10] Preston Pysh: When I look at, when I look at the original design and there’re not being any type of immediate settlement features in the design.

[00:31:18] Preston Pysh: It’s very clear to me, but I think others would argue because of maybe the naming convention in the original white paper with cash and things like that being used, that he was going after store value. He was going after a solution to peg global currencies from the basement. And if that means that transactions don’t settle for 10 minutes, well so be it because I mean, that was, that was the design was 10 minutes. And he, being as intelligent as this person was, they clearly know people aren’t going to sit at a coffee shop or wherever for 10 minutes waiting for settlement. And so I, I think when, when he was really designing this, it was just all about solving this settlement between large entities.

[00:32:01] Preston Pysh: I’m curious if, if you would agree, I’m assuming you do.

[00:32:04] Scott Lindberg: Yeah, I do. It actually brings up a point that I kind of skipped, but when you say you have the, you pick your amount, you pick your 21 million, you pick how you want it to go out. But another key part of that is understanding the timeline, like what you’re talking about.

[00:32:17] Scott Lindberg: You have to think through, how long does it take to build up, let’s go back to like the Fetti example. If there are a billion dollars of payments on lightning today, but 40 trillion of credit card payments a year, like it takes time to do this. So he had to understand, or she, them, whoever, when laying out like, why, why go all the way out to 2140?

[00:32:41] Scott Lindberg: Like, I mean that, to have this thing, and I, my suspicion is that, is he understood that this was going to take time to build these other layers. He understood the internet. He understood the internet was built on layers. My guess is that the reason that this is going to take so long is because he knew he wasn’t solving for medium of exchange.

[00:33:02] Scott Lindberg: It was a store value, like you said, and that was the, the first part of it. But he, he had to give enough time to. For people to work on all these things, you know, if it was ever going to succeed. And if, you know, if adoption happened too fast, like when the was it WikiLeaks? I think it was WikiLeaks, he actually like said, yeah, it’s too early.

[00:33:21] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Slow down, slow down.

[00:33:23] Scott Lindberg: And I think the reason is, what you’re hitting on there is it’s intentionally long because this is not, again, infinite game, right? He’s not looking at this has to be implemented in a, in a year or five years or whatever. He’s saying, I want this implemented. Like, I want this to, to be implemented.

[00:33:40] Scott Lindberg: And he’s not, you know, he’s like, yeah, there’s going to be other things that have to be developed. How do I make sure they have time to develop those things so that this can succeed? It’s, it’s like he, he must have understood that it was going to take a, it was going to take time. You had to have a really low time preference on this thing to put these pieces together.

[00:34:00] Scott Lindberg: Otherwise it would go too early and it wouldn’t work.

[00:34:04] Preston Pysh: Of all those design specs that you just went through, like at a very generic level, which one are you most impressed with and why? Because I know what the, I suspect, I know what the general consensus is, but I’m, I’m curious to hear your point of view as a, as a game designer.

[00:34:20] Scott Lindberg: So it’s kind of jumping ahead to the next one. The one that I am still trying to like really grasp this and that is this whole connection between I’ve linked the physical world to the digital world. I think there’s a handful of deep thinkers out there that, that get it. Like a Michael Saylor, you know, there’s like, there’s a handful of first principle people.

[00:34:40] Scott Lindberg: I think that they get it. Like I’m just trying to the, like the whole idea, for example, of what’s going on with Alex’s work with like IMF and World Bank and kind of debunking these ideas that we’ve been basically following with the, the, the kind of fiat finite playbook. And the incentives that you set up with, with energy to go and find stranded energy, low cost energy, and a link between energy and human flourishing.

[00:35:07] Scott Lindberg: Now you get into like fossil future. That’s where all these other things to me, like I think are pretty, I, I’m amazed that this, this to me is like designed Frankenstein or something. He had a designed, a nervous system, the muscle system, the skeletal system. Like he had to design everything. So it all worked together.

[00:35:23] Scott Lindberg: The, the one that I would highlight is and I’m still like, I’m, I still have to do a lot of learning in this, in this regard. It’s just understanding the implications of proof of work. That to me is that’s, that’s kind of where I come down. I’m not sure where you’d come down, but that’s where my head is.

[00:35:38] Preston Pysh: I agree with you. I think that that’s, I mean, there’s a reason, none of this proof of stake stuff, anybody who understands how profound proof of work is, as soon as they hear something is like Ethereum move to a proof of stake model. Any Bitcoin or that really understands why it works was like, oh, well they’re done.

[00:35:56] Preston Pysh: Right, like immediately, like that’s not going to work long term, because your incentives are, are now dislocated from physical reality. I know I did a conversation with Jason Lowry on and, and Michael on that particular point. I think it was like episode 99, 98, somewhere in that range. And they do such a great job of highlighting the nuances of that particular point.

[00:36:17] Preston Pysh: The other thing that I, that I would just add onto that is you talk, you called it the governor, or the difficulty adjustment I think is just so important and it really goes to whoever this person was that designed this had to have understood Moore’s law and the impact that Moore’s law was, was going to have on this 10 years into the future.

[00:36:39] Preston Pysh: And they would’ve had to have played that out and come up with that solution in order to ensure that they’re, that the game doesn’t become lopsided after four years of play. Right.

[00:36:49] Scott Lindberg: It’s just mind blowing. It is mind blowing. I agree with you. That, that it’s kind of fun. because too, like I said, when we get to it, we get to the game design.

[00:36:59] Scott Lindberg: Like how do you teach that to others that it’s significant. I was like, I have to have this in the game, but I know that like, some people are just going to hate it.

[00:37:06] Preston Pysh: Let’s, let’s talk about the game a little bit. So, so I get, just so people can kind of hear from, as a player’s point of view. So I go down there, he has the board set up.

[00:37:16] Preston Pysh: How many people were, were playing Scott? It was like five or six, four because I, because –

[00:37:20] Scott Lindberg: Boss was supposed to come over. Remember he did kind of discuss-

[00:37:26] Preston Pysh: So I sit down at the, at the board. It was really neat. There was this, there was this blockchain that was going in the middle of the board and you can see the bitcoin that all add up to 21 million.

[00:37:38] Preston Pysh: And there’s a bunch of Bitcoin on the first set of blocks, and then there’s half as much on the next set of blocks and then there’s half of that as, as you like. Play the game. Then you had cards and you’re basically sending you, you’re mining blocks. You’re highly incentivized to try to mine the blocks early on because there’s more Bitcoin.

[00:37:57] Preston Pysh: But then you’re also sending transactions to the other players and you’re reordering these transactions and you’re able to earn fees through, through, I mean, the whole game was just so brilliantly put together. And while I’m playing it, the main thing I kept thinking, Scott, is like, how in the world did this dude deduce this really complex, sanely complex thing into a playable game that I took the game with me down, I think it was over the holiday right after the Bitcoin conference in May.

[00:38:32] Preston Pysh: We, we went down to my parents’ house. So I took the game with me. I taught my son. He picked it up like immediately. He’s like really young, right? Like he picked it up immediately. And was having a blast playing it. We like sending transactions and, and even my parents, like my mother knows nothing about this stuff.

[00:38:51] Preston Pysh: She enjoyed it. Walk us through, I guess, you sitting down and like trying to make this, how long did it take you to, to design this, first of all? because I, there’s no way you did this quickly.

[00:39:02] Scott Lindberg: At the time I had a, a fiat job and it, it was two years of the design and back and forth and play testing.

[00:39:10] Scott Lindberg: My, my brother is not a big corner, but he loves games. We go to game conference every year and. My oldest son is also not a Bitcoin, but he’s a good gamer. And I would, I would try to go learn something and I, and I wanted to stick, I wanted to the ethos to be true to Bitcoin. Right. I also, you know, this was also helping me communicate with my wife because she, you know, at this point wasn’t Bitcoin yet.

[00:39:32] Scott Lindberg: And I had originally started with like tiles. I had these things laid out with stickers on them. I’m like, here’s what’s going on. And then it just kind of, I just kept iterating. I’m so well, one, I love, I love games and I kind of keep out on that and I’m stubborn, so like, you just, I’m like, I’m just going to keep doing this.

[00:39:49] Scott Lindberg: You know? I, I have some other motivations. If I could just throw in real quick before we get to, to some of that, that breakdown. Yeah. So it’s interesting you brought up your mom. So like, I played cribbage with my grandfather and then still play with my dad and now my, especially my sons, but our, our kids can play with my dad and my oldest son just got engaged and I have this vision that when he has kids will play too.

[00:40:11] Scott Lindberg: So like, it’s. It’s this idea that right now look how much time we spend on the screens, especially the kids. And I don’t like that we’re missing the human touch, we’re missing the fellowship side of this. The covid thing, just freaking crazy. Right. When I was thinking about the game, I want something that can go across ages so that whether it’s your, your kids and grandkids or whoever it is, that it’s playable for everybody.

[00:40:39] Scott Lindberg: And, and that, and that means is not everybody’s going to sit down for a five hour game. Like we, my, my wife and I tried to teach our kid, well we did, we forced them to use cashflow. I don’t know if you know that Kiyosaki game. Yeah. Really good for teaching financial statements, but we had to bribe them with snacks and threaten them and like, it wasn’t fun.

[00:40:56] Scott Lindberg: And so, like for me, what I’m looking for is, I, I want something that you can sit down in 45 minutes-ish, depending, maybe an hour, depending on how much you’re talking. You have your, your favorite chips and your drinks or whatever. Anybody across any age or, or background, even if you don’t know anything about Bitcoin, this case, you can still sit down and spend time together.

[00:41:16] Scott Lindberg: So that, that to me, like is the first thing on the mind is I want, I want opportunities for, for fellowship. And then the, the fun part of it is, and this is where the play testing came in, is I don’t want to be like cashflow. Like I liked the game because it helped teach, but it wasn’t fun. Like there wasn’t a replayability fun factor in it.

[00:41:35] Scott Lindberg: It was a pure education tool. You know, here’s this Bitcoin thing, all these epiphanies, it’s like dopamine hit after dopamine hit every, every time you learn something new you’re like, oh my God. I mean you like, you know, you want to share that. And it’s just so overwhelming. So I’m like, I want to be true to that.

[00:41:50] Scott Lindberg: I have to simplify it to keep it to 45 minutes. But what is essential to keep in there? For example, when I first plate tested it with my brother, I. You know, we had this thing where you could take anybody’s Bitcoin and move it. And I go, we can’t do that. because I’m never going to sign a transaction. It just says, here’s your Bitcoin.

[00:42:06] Scott Lindberg: And he’s like, well, your game sucks because your, whoever gets the first few blocks in their first epoch is going to, like, they’re done. There’s no point in playing. And I go, but you can’t take it. So we’re we’re, this, this went, this was the hardest part of the game to develop. It was harder than the difficulty a adjustment.

[00:42:22] Scott Lindberg: And it, it was basically like, well, I’ll split it up. I’ll tell you what, you got this hot and cold side now.

[00:42:27] Preston Pysh: And just for real fast, he’s, he’s saying the difficulty adjustment in his game. That’s what he’s referring to. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don’t want people to think that you’re saying it’s harder than the actual Bitcoin.

[00:42:37] Preston Pysh: Keep going, Scott. Sorry.

[00:42:39] Scott Lindberg: No, no, no. Good point. Yeah, I’m in, I’m in the Gameland right now. And so your, your, your, your original question was kind of how do you start to develop this? Well, it’s got to be true to the ethos, but I want it to be playable in, in a short amount of time. I want it to be fun. I want the fellow, I want all that in there.

[00:42:52] Scott Lindberg: And that being true to the ethos, that was one of the hardest parts of it. And it, what it led to was okay in the game. Now for those that haven’t played, there’s a, you, when you first mine the transactions or the Bitcoin, you add them to the time chain, you, the reward goes to your wallet, which is just a card, but the card split into a hot and cold side.

[00:43:09] Scott Lindberg: I can attack you as long as your Bitcoin’s on the hot side. I actually try not to tease you about the sim swap, but I think I put these different, I put different threats in my head. I think it was a phishing scam, swim swap and like stolen keys I think. But then half the other, the other sides of the die where you moved it to cold storage, you could protect yourself.

[00:43:28] Scott Lindberg: And what’s funny about all this is this, this was the hardest part to develop, but there was an influencer we met like in, in Miami and he, he took the game home and I think it was like his five and seven year olds. And he said they just kept on playing on their own. And he hears from the other room, one of the kids telling the other, his brother, You better get your Bitcoin in cold storage. Right? They’re like, and you’re like making awesome. So like-

[00:43:52] Preston Pysh: That’s exactly how my son plays it too. So like, mine was there in the hot wallet and I’m like buying rigs and like doing all this other, my son, man. The second he had a chance to put it in cold storage, like every turn it was like boom, boom, boom.

[00:44:05] Preston Pysh: Like it was all in cold. Yeah. That’s just how, yeah.

[00:44:08] Scott Lindberg: So if you, if you learn like, I mean, that’s the thing too. So you play with someone who doesn’t know, it’s like a bridge. You play with someone who doesn’t know anything about Bitcoin, you just shut up and play. Like at the end of that, they’re going to associate cold storage with safety.

[00:44:19] Scott Lindberg: Yeah. Yeah. So maybe this can help, I don’t know, maybe we help someone not get rugged later. So I don’t know. That’s, I don’t know, maybe that’s a bridge too far. But I mean, when you, when you think, well first, and the other thing is kids will pick it up faster than the adults. Just in general.

[00:44:33] Preston Pysh: I would agree with that, with my personal experience on it.

[00:44:36] Preston Pysh: Like my son, just like, it was crazy how fast they would just, I mean, yeah.

[00:44:40] Scott Lindberg: It’s, it’s awesome. Yeah.

[00:44:41] Preston Pysh: And how fast they recognize the incentives too. So like they, he’s like looking at the board, he is seeing like all this Bitcoin, like at the start on the early blocks, and he is like, oh, well I got to get all that.

[00:44:50] Preston Pysh: So he’s just like playing to, meanwhile, like some of the older folks that I’ve played it with, they’re just kind of like trying to wrap their head around like all the whole, like, almost like they’re overthinking the, the, the incentives, right?

[00:45:03] Scott Lindberg: Yeah. It’s, I’ve had that feedback that it was a, even for people who have been in Bitcoin for a while, it’s very, the, the havings are in your face.

[00:45:10] Preston Pysh: Like, they’re like, literally you can see it on the board.

[00:45:12] Scott Lindberg: They’re like literally in your face. You can’t, like, it’s part of your strategy to win the game. I kind of like that, especially if I’m talking to, like to my wife now because she’s a Bitcoin now, but when I went to her, she, she doesn’t learn the way I learn.

[00:45:24] Scott Lindberg: I’m like, oh, I’m going to go listen to podcasts and read books and do whatever. That’s not how she takes in information. So this like being able to visually see something like a having, even though it’s not, yeah, it’s not a, you know, it’s, you can’t do it literally in four years. You got 45 minutes. So how do you get that point across?

[00:45:42] Scott Lindberg: Well, I’m like, okay, well, you visually can see it. Your rewards are getting cut in half and then they’re going to get cut in half again. So think about what you want to do. So that was the only hard part about that, was trying to figure out how to get 21 million into a, a nice even evenly divisible number. Yeah.

[00:45:59] Scott Lindberg: Yeah. With your tokens. I can’t have, you know, I can’t, 21 would be too small a number tokens in a game, but I can’t have a million. Right. So like, you’re like trying to find the balance and have the havings and like meet all those things that, that took you, I, I had all kinds of variations in this, in this spreadsheet, trying to figure that out.

[00:46:17] Scott Lindberg: But at the, the end result is now you can see it visually and it’s, it’s kind of fun to watch people’s reaction.

[00:46:23] Preston Pysh: The thing that I really have an appreciation for with it is the game arc and the how the game collapses at the end and how it slowly builds in the beginning. And then you have this gameplay kind of in the middle, which is, it might sound really simple for somebody that sits down and plays a game and they’re like, oh yeah, that’s how all games go.

[00:46:41] Preston Pysh: But they don’t realize how insanely difficult that is to organize and design. So that, and, and the other thing that I think is really difficult is making sure that the game ends at like 45 minutes or whatever time that you’re trying to design around, because you don’t want some game that goes four hours because people will never finish it.

[00:47:03] Preston Pysh: Talk to us about like, some of those dynamics as you were playing it, because I’m sure like the game at the one year mark that had all these flaws and things that like, oh yeah. Made it not fun to play at certain points. And you’re like, okay, so like how do, how in the world do I design around that? Talk to us a little bit about those ideas.

[00:47:19] Scott Lindberg: Yeah, I wish it was, I, I mean, I love the, I know what you’re talking about with the arc and it, it worked out, but the way I got there was less of me coming up with this great insight and saying, I want to implement this. And it was much more of, I mean, I’m a Midwest guy, so you, you can’t, you can’t steer a park truck, right?

[00:47:36] Scott Lindberg: You got to, you got to be moving. And so the play testing and trying out all those different things, it, it, it was literally, I, I mean it was sort of like, I’m just going to like, you know, it’s Edison with all those light bulbs. I’m just going to try every element I can figure out and maybe one of these things does something different, right?

[00:47:51] Scott Lindberg: And I just kept on trying and some of them didn’t work and go, okay, well we won’t do that. I wish I could tell you, I had some kind of like, wonderful insight with the design on that. It was literally just what we described. It was just constantly being willing to, and that’s where I’m really grateful because like I had people who were willing to play with me like on, it takes a lot to play.

[00:48:12] Scott Lindberg: Test a game. Like you got to, you have to be a really, you have to be a very patient person to sit down and, and play test with a, it takes a special thing.

[00:48:19] Preston Pysh: You got to have good friends. You got to have good friends. Yes. How about this idea? One of the things that I’ve read on game theory is just you, some games are designed for highly skilled players to evolve over time.

[00:48:33] Preston Pysh: Chess is a great example of this. So if I play that a lot and I’m playing against somebody who’s new, I’m just going to annihilate them. Then you have other games like shoots and ladders, for example, where you spin the the wheel and I mean, it’s just total lucky wins. Like you really don’t need any type of skill whatsoever.

[00:48:51] Preston Pysh: And when you look at how a game designer can kind of really balance this skill aspect, The idea of indeterminacy or variance, call it a dice. So if we were going to play chess, and I was going to, and let’s say you’re a phenomenal chess player and I’m a beginner, we could introduce maybe a dice role that after every time you play, you could roll a dice.

[00:49:16] Preston Pysh: And if it’s an even number, you have to skip a turn. And if it’s an odd number, well then you play it as normal. And by introducing this variance in the game and handicapping your ability to play every turn, all of a sudden, even though I’m very bad at chess, the game just got really interesting. And we are now kind of at a competitive position.

[00:49:38] Preston Pysh: So my question is really kind of twofold. How did you introduce this variance into the game in order to make it more playable between really great players and beginners? And then how do you think through this idea of variance with respect to Bitcoin itself? When we look at everything that’s evolved over the past decade.

[00:49:58] Scott Lindberg: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:49:59] Scott Lindberg: So from a game perspective, like to me there’s a, if you go to a game conference, they’ll have like entire, like entire halls of people doing a catton competition. Right? And what you have there is so chess, zero chance, man. It’s like you have to build up your skills. That’s it. Versus the other games, like you talk about just like pure chance.

[00:50:21] Scott Lindberg: And what I wanted, what I think is enjoyable in a game is I want someone to have a lot of options. I just think anytime I can add another option in there that it, it, it adds something to it. So in the game we’re talking about do you want to buy more mining rigs and increase your hash power? Well, there’s an opportunity cost to that because if it’s the last block of the epoch, your opponent might get that, or your son’s strategy of going to cold storage early.

[00:50:47] Scott Lindberg: Some people just like have at it and they just go, you know, some people buy all, all these rigs and like they want their hash power to go up. I, I like that there’s a lot of, I want to give as many options to the players that they, they feel like they can actually have a strategy and they can go execute.

[00:51:02] Scott Lindberg: But I really like games like Kaan that kind of shakes it up. So even if you play against though, let’s say you’re an experienced player, I sold a chance against you. Because there’s some element, I like games that have some element entropy in there, that, that kind of shakes it up a bit. And it actually works perfectly with Bitcoin.

[00:51:21] Scott Lindberg: So I named the cards, I call them the decks, the NAS cards. Like if you think about what’s really going on with mining. Right. There’s, that’s real Bitcoin. Like you, I mean, the whole reason it’s proof of work is you can’t just engineer it backwards and know what the block is. Yeah. You, you’re going to have to keep on trying and trying and trying.

[00:51:38] Scott Lindberg: So for me, the way that I introduced it, it helped with two things. One, it added like what I wanted for the game to have some element of entropy to it. But it gives a whole bunch of opportunities to talk about how important entropy is. Anything from seed phrases to the Ss in in mining the connection to Bitcoin like entropy is, is and, and generally, you know, we’re humans are not good at it.

[00:52:02] Scott Lindberg: Like, you just want to come up with your own seed phrase, like, someone’s probably going to figure it out, you know? And so the, the connection there is like those two things, the mining and, and seed phrases, I think are, are what come to mind that if someone actually was interested in learning more about Bitcoin, that’s what I would, you know, say, because the, the cold, the, the hot cold storage like that, I mean, no one’s going to really, if you, if you had your life savings at Bitcoin, you’re not going to like keep it on the hot wallet.

[00:52:27] Scott Lindberg: There’s no way. Right? Yeah. So that’s not, that element of chance was only to handle that particular gameplay mechanism. Yeah. In the game cards themselves are meant to be, like, the reason that you can’t just do what you want is you’re, you’re taking a chance, you have to say, this is, I have a one outta three chance that if I draw this card, this’ll happen, or I have a 50% chance of getting that.

[00:52:47] Scott Lindberg: Like I, there’s all these like chances built into the distribution of the different decks. And then you have like the constantly changing difficulty dial too. So you’re trying to, it might work now, but it might not work, but it comes around to your turn again because something else happened with another, another player.

[00:53:04] Scott Lindberg: So it’s both playable. It makes it better by having a little bit of entropy in there. And it’s perfect for all kinds of Bitcoin discussions.

[00:53:13] Preston Pysh: And something else that I just want to highlight, one of the things that I’ve realized with the game is the timeline is really consistent relative to other games that I’ve played.

[00:53:22] Preston Pysh: Like it seems to end in a very consistent manner. And my opinion on why, and you can correct me if you have a different opinion because it’s your game. But my opinion why is there’s actually a difficulty adjustment in this game. So as blocks are getting mined, you’re constantly adjusting this. After each turn, each player’s term, you’re adjusting this difficulty will. That either speeds up or slows down the game as you’re mining all the blocks on the table, which is really nice because when you sit down to play the game, you know that you’re pretty much done at like 45 minutes after you start. It’s pretty awesome.

[00:53:59] Scott Lindberg: Oh, I appreciate that. Yeah. The only time I’ve seen it different than that is it depends on who you’re playing with.

[00:54:04] Scott Lindberg: And I’m playing with Bitcoin or they competitive, they want to put real SATs in there and make all kinds of jokes and whatever else. And then sometimes you play with people who just, they’re, they’re new to it. They want to pair up with somebody. They’re a little intimidated by all the different elements of it.

[00:54:16] Scott Lindberg: They’ll overthink it. Yeah. And so if they can sit there and if you have someone that’s going to take five minutes a turn, like, I don’t know, maybe get a time route or something. But I’ve tried to kinda look for what you’re talking about and I, I just don’t know yet. I don’t know if it if it’s changing that much or not.

[00:54:31] Scott Lindberg: I mean, it’s funny because some games, the difficulty will go away the heck down. Like people really are mining. And then there’s other ones where everybody’s just going to cold storage, that things maxed out and like, there’s nothing stopping anybody other than the fact that they’re just deciding to do that instead of mine.

[00:54:45] Scott Lindberg: So I, that’s an interesting thing. I think I’ll have to look for that as I, as I go forward. I just did it because I wanted it in the game. I want, I like that element. I like the like and the mechanism that it, it creates. I don’t know.

[00:54:58] Preston Pysh: One other comment I’d tell you, like as we’re playing the game and like the difficulty adjustment, Like my mother, she looks over at me when we’re playing it as a family and she’s like, so does Bitcoin actually do this?

[00:55:09] Preston Pysh: And I was like, yes it does. It’s like there was these nuances in the game that were really subtle that you put in there, but they sparked these discussion points and it really helped them understand and like just like the havings that were happening, like all that kind of stuff, just like really solidified some of these like core principles in the game.

[00:55:28] Preston Pysh: One of the things I wanted to bring up in reference to variance and volatility as it relates to the actual Bitcoin itself, a comment that I hear all the time from people is, how in the world are Normies or just people off the street front running Wall Street? How is it that the Wall Street Elite haven’t figured this thing out after a decade?

[00:55:54] Preston Pysh: My comment really goes to this idea of variance where you’re, where you’re getting the most skilled experts in the world are being pit up against everyday people. And the game is really competitive because of the variance that you’re seeing through just the price action alone. I mean, you’re dealing with something that has 70, 80% annual volatility for the professional investors.

[00:56:20] Preston Pysh: They’re looking at that like, I can’t touch that thing. And if I do, it’s going to be with such a small portion of my position size because it has so much volatility. And then you have these players to the game that aren’t from Wall Street, but they’re looking at it from just a different lens. Maybe they’re looking at it from game theory, maybe they’re looking at it from the mining side of the house because they come out of energy or whatever it is and they’re, you’re really kind of exercising this point where variance in the game itself.

[00:56:49] Preston Pysh: Is allowing this competition to really take place between like the extreme experts in finance and people that have no experience in finance. It’s just really fascinating.

[00:57:00] Scott Lindberg: Yeah. I mean, we don’t know what a real free market is just because of how controlled it’s been, right? I know that this is a theme that’s been echoed in a lot of different, you know, conversations.

[00:57:07] Scott Lindberg: So, you know, I actually, I think it’s actually good to see that I, I, I think with the, the folks that are in the, the, the traditional finance world does, my, my thought while you’re, you’re asking that or making that comment is look at what if ask what, what game are they playing? They’re playing a finite game.

[00:57:25] Scott Lindberg: Yes. That finite game has rewarded them very well. I mean, if you’ve been a banker for some number of years, you’re probably a millionaire. Like, there’s no, like the, what are your incentives to switch? Well, it looks highly volatile. It’s different than what I’ve done in the past and I’m making a boatload do in this thing.

[00:57:43] Scott Lindberg: Why would I. Why would I change what I’m doing for that? Whereas the people who are attracted to it, like the talent that you have coming to it, if you’re that Bitcoin attracts people that, for all their, their different reasons and you know, you go through that, the unbanked versus, you know, the people who are just passionate about freedom, whatever it is.

[00:58:00] Scott Lindberg: And I think it’s, you just ask the question, what game are they playing? They’re playing a finite game. What are their incentives? Well, their incentives have rewarded them handsomely. For playing that finite game. Why change now? Like, I mean, I just, and so to me it’s, I guess there’s a, the other thing too is that you probably have some closet ones that are maybe, they’re probably, maybe they’re doing it on the side on their own.

[00:58:21] Scott Lindberg: They’re not telling anybody because they-

[00:58:22] Preston Pysh: Oh, I think you definitely have that change paycheck, right? Yeah, yeah.

[00:58:26] Scott Lindberg: Do it on the side. We wouldn’t be able to see it. That’s like dark matter in the space. Like you wouldn’t, you won’t know that right now.

[00:58:32] Scott Lindberg: But I would, you know, if I, if we had perfect information, I would bet you that some of them are, are getting it.

[00:58:40] Scott Lindberg: But because they live in their fiat world with their finite rules sat in their framework, that’s the framework that they’re living by. Like, why would they publicly tell anybody that they’re hedging their betts over here? So even if they did get it, they wouldn’t tell us. So that’s why would they-

[00:58:58] Preston Pysh: Amen.

[00:58:58] Preston Pysh: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Well, and I think that’s where I, that’s why I really admire Michael Saylor is because he could be totally playing that game. And I’ve heard through rumor mills that there’s people of a similar net worth that are playing the game of, I’m not going to tell anybody, I’m just going to continue to try to amass as much of this stuff as humanly possible.

[00:59:19] Preston Pysh: But I, I really admire Michael going out and really trying to educate the world. And there’s, there’s, in my opinion, a better educator that can actually define this stuff in such clear and concise. And from an engineering standpoint, it’s just, it’s quite impressive to see how much he’s really kind of stick his neck, neck out there because he could be attacked through regulatory or policy because he’s a publicly traded company and anybody else out there that’s doing it from an education standpoint that have a lot to lose at the same time, but doing it because they feel like it’s, it’s kind of their duty to the world to, to help educate.

[00:59:54] Scott Lindberg: Yeah, amen to that, it goes back to if you have an infinite mindset and this, this is something bigger than yourself.

[01:00:01] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:00:02] Scott Lindberg: What would you do? Well, if they exemplify it, you would, yeah. Want to spread it. You would want to communicate what you’ve learned to others and. You know, that expression about we’ll all hang together, like going back to like the Declaration of Independence, like stick your neck out.

[01:00:17] Scott Lindberg: I think it’s admirable. Yeah. I think it’s admirable, and I think it goes back to the first part of our discussion. Why are we even talking about Bitcoin? Well, because we’re, we’re playing a different, we’re, we’re in a game and they, these are people who recognize it and for them that cause bigger than themselves is going to lead to decisions about what they do to help others.

[01:00:37] Scott Lindberg: I at least, I mean, I don’t, I don’t know them personally, I’m speculating, but it seems to me that they, when I listen to them speak and they’re interviewed, that’s what I hear. Like, I get that this is significant. This is a, this is a major shift and this is a major opportunity for like the human flourishing.

[01:00:54] Scott Lindberg: Like this is a big deal and they want to do their part to help it. That’s what I hear when I listen to those, those guys.

[01:01:01] Preston Pysh: So, Scott, I want you to recommend resources to folks if they want to learn more about game theory. I’m just going to hold up one of my favorite books and, and I know you read this because I recommended it to you in Miami.

[01:01:12] Preston Pysh: I love it. Yeah, this is awesome. This, this book is called The Characteristics of Games. Richard Garfield, who’s the creator of Magic the Gathering is supposedly one of the most complex and sophisticated smart, intelligent games that’s ever been created. He’s the one of the co-authors in this book, which is one of the reasons why I, I got it and read it and it is phenomenal.

[01:01:33] Preston Pysh: This book is phenomenal. You have some book recommendations. Go ahead and provide those, Scott.

[01:01:39] Scott Lindberg: Yeah, absolutely. And so this will depend on what your interest is if you’re just getting started in all this, the thing that helped me with the framework was price of tomorrow. I think that is a good way of kind of setting the, the, the framework.

[01:01:53] Scott Lindberg: And then also on that same, the, that same vein, The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek that we mentioned early to just understand like what, like why is this even significant? That’s where I would start there. If you want go deeper on the Bitcoin game theory, I would go, I actually have them here. I should just hold up.

[01:02:09] Scott Lindberg: Alright, so that’s the first one we were just talking about. Yeah, talking about if you want to go deep on Bitcoin itself, what I found to be very helpful was the book of Satoshi. Yes. This one really good. You got to go through it. And even if you don’t understand all the technical stuff, like you can pick out the big themes on there, like the two generals problem leading to proof of work as an example.

[01:02:33] Scott Lindberg: I thought that was pretty good. And then the idea of game theory itself is interesting. This is the one I, I’ve read a couple books recently. This is the one that I, that I think I would, if I had, just pick one to start with. Artist strategy. Those would be the, those, those four books.

[01:02:48] Scott Lindberg: They’ll kinda, you’ll understand everything we just talked about, if you, if you listen to those four books or read those four books.

[01:02:55] Preston Pysh: For people listening, Scott’s game is phenomenal. I find it is just a, not only is it this amazing educational tool for family members or whatever, you get the kids out of the iPads, you have this social interaction that, that Scott briefly talked about.

[01:03:15] Preston Pysh: Scott, you have two versions of the game, correct?

[01:03:18] Scott Lindberg: We do. So the load time, I, so I built the game. The first version is the log version, the way I would want it as a gamer. So we call it the load time preference version. All right. That’s the high-end one. And then-

[01:03:31] Preston Pysh: Which has the nice pieces like you would get in a standard, people have to realize when they go to look at the site or whatever, like you’ve purchased these in low volume, so the prices are going to reflect that a little bit.

[01:03:42] Preston Pysh: It’s not like he’s making this at 10 million copies in every toy store in, in the country, but. So keep going. I’m sorry I interrupted you.

[01:03:50] Scott Lindberg: No, no, no. You’re, you’re, you’re dead on. I’m, I, you’re, I, could you just be my sales guy? You’re doing better. So the, the other game though is, so like we, we had the opportunity, for example, to like talk with some folks from me, premier Bitcoin in Miami.

[01:04:02] Scott Lindberg: And then we, we actually do want to advance Bitcoin education on this. And just because I’m a geek and I like these high-end games, right? That may not be the right thing. So we developed, we call it our school edition. And this would be, so you have cardboard pieces instead of the plastic pieces, for example.

[01:04:20] Scott Lindberg: It’s the same game, same rules. It’s just it, it’s more equivalent to what if you went to like a Walmart and you picked off a shelf on, on a game there. It’s at that quality level. So you have the high quality original, which on the website is just labeled Deluxe. And then you have this other one, same game.

[01:04:38] Scott Lindberg: So especially if you’re playing with your, you know, younger kids or something, maybe you just want the school edition, the book we sell separately. because I realize most people. They don’t care about all that, but I basically just said, here’s all the things that help me. Bumps them into a book.

[01:04:52] Scott Lindberg: Here’s all my notes. And, and then, so you’ll see a book on the website too. That’s, you know, basically teaching through games is what I labeled it. So for those that you know, maybe are, you don’t have a meetup close to you or you don’t have a family member who already knows Bitcoin, then it’s, that’s for you because you can just pick it up and go, I want to learn about this and I’ll point you to where I started and you know, you can just take it whichever way. Choose your own adventure kind of style.

[01:05:18] Preston Pysh: We’re going to have links in the show notes to the game, to the book that accompanies the game. All the other books that we mentioned during the show.

[01:05:27] Preston Pysh: Scott, this was such a pleasure. It’s been such a pleasure getting to know you and hang out time to time and just, yeah, great job. And this is such a cool topic. I really appreciate you coming on.

[01:05:39] Scott Lindberg: Oh, well thank you Preston. Can I just add one thing before we off?

[01:05:42] Preston Pysh: Yeah, yeah.

[01:05:43] Scott Lindberg: I have to publicly say thank you to you because I’m, the whole reason that I got in Bitcoin was going back to, I, when I first started was listening to you and Stig and you’re like, what’s this Bitcoin thing?

[01:05:54] Scott Lindberg: Is anybody looking at this Bitcoin thing? And then, I don’t know, from there, it led to books and, and other things. And like, I wouldn’t, like none of this would’ve happened if that hadn’t, so I just wanted to like say public shout out. Thank you. For me personally, it’s, it’s an honor to talk to you.

[01:06:09] Scott Lindberg: because like you’re, you’re the voice in my ears. That was like this Bitcoin thing. I don’t know, what is this Bitcoin thing? I don’t know. Like, so I just wanted to, I I just wanted to get that out there.

[01:06:20] Preston Pysh: Thank you. You’re way too kind sir. Thank you. Well, this was a blast and I’m sure we’re going to be in contact much more here in the future, Scott, so thanks for coming on.

[01:06:29] Scott Lindberg: Alright, thanks Preston.

[01:06:30] Preston Pysh: If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for, We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm.

[01:06:47] Preston Pysh: So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.

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