The Next 10 Years Will Decide Bitcoin’s Future | Brandon Quittem

**Brandon Quittem** (0:02)
Bitcoin is what we said it or what we think it is. If it is the best money, of course everyone's gonna want a piece of that. Doesn't matter what political persuasion you have, there's something here for you. Doesn't matter if you're BlackRock or the Fed or, you know, Anon cold card in your basement guy.
There's something there for everyone. Everyday Bitcoin's around and not neutered is another day closer to that future, even if adoption is slow at different periods. If we get through this fourth turning, if it's 10 years from now, and we have self custody rights, and it just keeps chugging along, I think that number goes from like 20% to 50%, right? So in my opinion, not just Bitcoin, like the direction of society for our lifetimes and our kids' lifetimes will be decided in the next five to 10 years. Lock in decisions now disproportionately affect the future in a way that 80s, 90s, it wasn't like that.

**Danny Knowles** (1:00)
Let's get into this.
Brandon Quittem, good to have you back on the show, man. We were just talking before we started recording. It sounds like you've got a new Bitcoin article coming out. And this is the thing that we spoke about last time on the show. I've spoken to Fernando about recently, the idea that Bitcoin has gave up on this sort of novel, philosophical writing around Bitcoin. Are you bringing it back again?

**Brandon Quittem** (1:24)
Yeah, I'm hoping to. But full disclosure, I started this essay in like 2022
And only recently when I saw the divisiveness in the culture and people lamenting what's going on, we're fighting, we're blaming the orange ties, we're doing this. Now I feel like the essay, which we'll get into today here, I feel like the message I was trying to get across then is actually more relevant to the discourse today. And so, yeah, we were talking over the last week, hey, what should we talk about? And we've been kind of riffing on these ideas. And yeah, I think now is the time to bring it out. And to your other point, yeah, the ThinkBoy content is essentially gone. And to me, that was the most interesting part of my time in Bitcoin. Call it 2018 to 2022, maybe.
Gigi's coming out with mind-blowing stuff every other month. The list goes on. And I had so much fun consuming content then. And I look at content now and I honestly, I'm pretty bored of most of it. I don't listen to a lot of podcasts here and there. Yeah, sure. I loved your one with Fernando, by the way. I thought that was a really good discussion.

**Danny Knowles** (2:30)
Yeah, he's awesome. But I totally agree. That's when Bitcoin was really fun. And I feel like it's got too serious. It's got too orange tie. Everything's the financialization side of Bitcoin. And the philosophical part has really been lacking. I'm hoping that you're bringing it back, man. So tell me, so you started writing this in 2022
What was the sort of impetus to write it then, and what sparked it to come back now?

**Brandon Quittem** (2:56)
Yeah, the original idea was around the thing that I think a lot of Bitcoiners still don't grasp, or at least I observe, and I don't think people grasp, which is that the good things about Bitcoin are emergent. The properties we care about are not defined in the code, in anything. They emerge out of it. And what do I mean by that? Like 21 million emerges out of the code, even though it's written down. But how can you trust 21 million? Because everyone involved has UTXOs, and it's in their economic best interest not to screw over their own wealth. And so if you trust humans are greedy, you would trust that the UTXO set doesn't want to screw that up. That's emergent.
Censorship resistance, we could just lose that, right? That doesn't come with Bitcoin. And what Satoshi did was created a protocol with a whole bunch of different Franken technologies that come together, and what comes from that Franken technology are the properties we like. They emerge out of that system. And so that was the original idea. Earlier in the, like the early drafts of the essay was critiquing things like Ethereum, right? Where I don't think Ethereum has the same durability and the social protocol or the social contract that comes with the protocol. However, now I think the essay has a new meaning and it's around fractured groups with different points of view, and that's totally fine. That is a natural state of Bitcoin. That's the normal state.
And then we talk about that monoculture period between 2018 and 2022, which I agree was the most fun.