Patrick McKenzie

Because some tiny portion of those memos will be useful to law enforcement in the future.

And if you had explained that trade in like a presidential debate in the 1980s, I find it extremely unlikely that any part of the American polity would say, yeah, yeah, I want to buy that.

Could we perhaps spend tens of billions of dollars on it?

But we did that.

And so to the extent I'm like extremely copacetic with crypto folks on this point, A, like this thing factually exists in the world.

I agree with you that it does.

B, in an ideal world, I don't think this thing would exist.

I think I agree with you.

There are very real like, you know, privacy fears.

And then, however, crypto has this habit and, you know, people who are good at sales have various sales pitches that they give to various people.

And crypto will, actors within the crypto ecosystem will talk an excellent game about privacy as long as number goes up.

And when you say, ah, but you can choose between like being tied into the banking system, which is necessary for number go up, or you can choose privacy.

They will say, excellent.

I choose number go up.

Yeah.

Descriptively, that is a very tiny portion of crypto.

This is funny in the echoes of we have extremely low state capacity for this thing that we didn't think was important, which was successfully administering vaccines.

But we do have extremely high state capacity with regards to running the security state.

And if they successfully manage to get their technological ducks in order, which...

There are pluses and minuses there, but they have built some things that are extremely impressive technologically.