Listen To This Episode:
Prior to the Bitcoin 2021 conference, “Bitcoin Magazine Podcast” host Christian Keroles sat down with keynote speaker and incredible Bitcoin thinker Allen Farrington for one of his very first podcasts appearances. This interview covered two of Farrington’s seminal works and why Farrington prefers to investigate Bitcoin’s cultural and literature alignments over the typical framing of economics, trading and technology.
First, Keroles and Farrington dove into the latter’s article, “The Capital Strip Mine.” The article is a roughly 30-minute read and it dives into why the current fiat system is effectively strip mining the U.S. and current financial system of its resources. Farrington compares what is going on in capital markets to the strip mining techniques that have become popular in the modern day. Farrington laments that, because of fiat money’s poor incentives, civilization has taken on a growth-at-all-costs mentality and has thrown away all regard for long-term thinking and preservation.
Second, they got into Farrington’s blockbuster article” Bitcoin Is Venice, Bitcoin Is.” In this article, Farrington educates the reader about the anomaly that is Venice, Italy at its peak. Venice was a magical mixture of sound money, capitalism and free society when many of its neighbors were still operating in futility. Venice, in contrast to other large cities, was a bastion for the arts, wealth and thought. Farrington details how Bitcoin’s sounds and fair monetary properties provide a framework for humanity to return back to Venice-like conditions and hopefully prosperity.
Lastly, Keroles and Farrington discussed Farrington’s plan’s for his now live Bitcoin 2021 keynote presentation titled, “The Milk Of Paradise: Bitcoin And The Western Canon.” The speech discussed how Western literature, culture and historical lessons can all be fit into the values and properties that Bitcoin codifies into a physical network on nodes that maintain consensus in a decentralized way. Please enjoy this fascinating conversation with Allen Farrington.
