Read_950 - The Internet Is Under Attack

0:00 This isn't one bad week. It's the start of something we all need to be prepared for. Just look at the numbers. Security firm CrowdStrike says the attacks it sees that likely involve AI agents more than doubled in August, then doubled again in September. And if this week is any indication, it's only speeding up.

0:30 What is up guys? Welcome back to the show. This is Bitcoin Audible and we've got a read today. I am Guy Swan. This show is brought to you by the Bitbox Hardware Wallet. Get your Bitcoin off exchanges. Honestly, I'm kind of shocked at how few exchanges have been hit recently despite the fact that there are so many hacks. But if there is anything to get you to understand why it's probably extremely important to hold your own keys.

0:58 Like we're in an era where we don't even know if certificate authorities are trustworthy. We don't know if the back ends, the PHP, the actual infrastructure that the entire websites of these things are loading, running on, if they are safe or if they can be compromised. So it is definitely a hold your keys zone of kind of internet chaos.

1:21 And we'll get into it with the read. But a discount code you'll have right down in the show notes or in the link below this post if you see this on social. But we're going to get right into the read because this is a big one. And it's been pretty crazy. As I've talked, I've done numerous videos about the hackening now.

1:42 And this is a kind of great breakdown of everything that's going on. So let's jump right in. so this is from whoops this is from matt schumer on x and it is titled the internet is under attack here's how to protect yourself and your family send this to the people in your life anyone who uses the internet which is basically everyone needs to know what's happening and what they can do to protect themselves right now as you read this swarms of ai agents are likely trying to break into the websites you use not one of them many of them we are in the middle of the biggest cyber security moment in years some security experts are calling it black october i have i personally like the black october sounds a little bit racist to me but you know whatever i i agree it should be named

2:41 I'm not writing this to scare you. A lot of this is out of your hands But there are simple things you can do to protect yourself and anything you do is better than nothing Every hour this week another attack has come to light By the time you finish reading this there will probably be another one So here's what's going on and what you should do about it What's happening right now?

3:03 If this is too much right now feel free to skip straight to what to do about it and I'll have that chapter listed in the YouTube description, so you can click on it if you want to listen to that part. But I'd really recommend reading the whole thing, or listening. Yesterday, a serious hole was revealed in PHP, the software behind roughly 70% of websites.

3:27 Think of it this way. Someone discovered that millions of buildings in the country have the same broken lock, and now everyone knows how to open it. The lockmaker has sent out a fix, but every building owner has to install it themselves, and many haven't yet. Within two hours of the news, attackers were trying that lock hundreds of thousands of times, according to CloudFare's CEO.

3:52 Now it's millions. Amazon says someone was already trying it four days before it was announced, and its security chief says the hole is, quote, now being broadly exploited in the wild. That's Amazon sounding the alarm, not Amazon getting hacked. So far, no one has confirmed a successful break-in through it, but attackers are trying everywhere. As a precaution, the organization that runs Wikipedia shut down some of its systems, and governments in the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, France, and elsewhere took websites offline. That's just one story, and it's only the tip of the iceberg.

4:29 I'm sharing a few of the biggest. If I listed everything, you'd be reading for hours. A hacking group aligned with the Chinese state used an AI hacking tool to try to break into more than 2,000 organizations through a backup service IT firms rely on, Microsoft says. A cloud platform used by about 2 million developers said customers' secret keys may have been accessed.

4:53 A friend of mine had someone draining his account with one of them this morning. India's largest bank said nearly 3,900 customers' personal details were exposed on the dark web. A criminal crew used AI tools to attack more than 400 banks and financial firms across Latin America. Hackers broke into 16 financial firms in South Korea, including major banks.

5:18 Japan's government told companies to tighten their defenses after breaches may have exposed tens of millions of people's data. the stop and shop Hannaford and Food Lion websites and apps went down for more than a week the FBI NSA and three other agencies warned that hackers using AI written attack scripts are scouting the systems that run water energy and manufacturing plants governments saw this coming in June the US and its closest allies warned about AI powered hacking quote the timeline is not years it is months end quote four months later here we are the original version of this post is available here i'll have the link in the details why this is different you've heard about hacks for years here's what changed every

6:07 building has weak spots a window that doesn't latch a back door with a cheap lock software is the same it's full of hidden weak spots for decades finding them took rare highly skilled people and there weren't that many of them that was our protection not good locks just a shortage of burglars that shortage is over three things just happened at once first ai can now detect weak spots the php hole was found with the help of ai and ai tools are finding thousands of bugs that sat unnoticed for years second ai can now break in on its own no skilled hacker required One person gave AI agents instructions shorter than a tweet, fewer than 100 Chinese characters, and let them work largely on their own.

6:58 They broke into websites belonging to more than 100 companies, including John Deere, at an estimated $50 per break-in. They don't sleep or get bored. They just keep trying until they find a way in. and third defenders are racing to keep up every weak spot still has to be fixed tested and installed on millions of systems run by people who are already stretched thin even for the most serious bugs it takes about two weeks on average just to get a fix out and plenty of websites never get fixed at all security firm cisco estimates about half of the internet facing servers running that software are too old to get to the official fix put those together and you get a cat and mouse game where attackers only have to win once the gap between attackers and defenders is what you're

7:49 going to see play out in the news over the next several days this is going to keep happening and get worse this isn't one bad week it's the start of something we all need to be prepared for just look at the numbers security firm crowdstrike says the attacks it sees that likely involve ai agents more than doubled in august then doubled again in september and if this week is any indication it's only speeding up the ai keeps getting better every few months while it gets cheaper to run the tools hackers are using today are the worst they'll ever have the tools are also out in the wild now. When an AI hacking tool was linked to attacks on Korean banks, its creator stopped releasing it publicly and its download page came down. But it didn't matter. Anyone who'd

8:43 already downloaded it can still use it. The good news though is that defenders have AI too, and it's finding and fixing weak spots faster than ever. Eventually, software will be much harder to break into than it is today. But right now, offense is ahead of defense, and it could stay that way for a while. What this means for you. Right now, major US banks, including JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, are finding unauthorized AI agents inside customer accounts, according to Axios. Some were set up by customers themselves, but many banks can't tell which ones are acting for the customer and which aren't. Bank executives describe the situation as, quote, horrifying.

9:25 axios didn't report any money being stolen but for most people today the bigger danger is still three things your information leaks so scammers know your name birthday address and bank and their calls and texts sound real your accounts get taken over through some site you used once years ago with the same password you use everywhere and the things you depend on like an app a pharmacy or a store's website go down for days to be clear this is ongoing but the worst case scenarios people are most scared of haven't happened. I hope they never do, but it's better to be safe than sorry, especially since this is going to keep happening. What to do today. First, stay off sites you don't know until this blows over. Stick to the big well-known ones, your bank, Amazon, Google. Small

10:13 sites are the least likely to have patched, and you can't tell from the outside. For the next few weeks, don't type a password or card number into anything unfamiliar. Second, update everything. your phone, your computer, your tablet, and your web browser. When your phone or computer's own settings says an update is available, install it.

10:31 That's your lock. Do the same for your router. And if it's so old it doesn't get any updates anymore, replace it. But never install an update from a pop-up on a website or a link in a text or email. That is a common scam. Not sure how to do any of this? Well, here's a simple step-by-step guide. Also, link in the show notes if you want to do that.

10:51 third close the doors you aren't using unplug smart gadgets you don't need and delete apps you don't use every connected thing is another way in fourth protect your bank account if anyone calls texts or emails you and asks you for your password or a code that was just sent to your phone it's a scam every time those codes are only there for you to type into your bank's own app or website treat every call text or email about your bank as suspicious until you've checked it yourself don't click their links don't call back the number they give you hang up and call the number on the back of your card if it really was your bank they'll be able to help only type your bank username and password into your bank's own app or website don't give them to anyone else including

11:39 an ai assistant or another app no matter how helpful it seems chase says not to give them to Turn on two-step login for your email and your bank. Here's how. And stop reusing passwords. A password manager makes that easy, and your iPhone or Android phone already has one built in. If you want to be extra careful, keep a little cash at home.

12:00 Enough for groceries for a few days plus some food and water That a normal emergency kit and it worth having anyway what i wouldn do is pull your money out of the bank panic is what scammers count on if a bank itself fails deposits at fdic insured banks are protected up to 250 000 per person per bank that insurance doesn't cover money stolen from a hacked account but federal rules generally limit what you lose from unauthorized transfers if you report them quickly So check your accounts often and call your bank right away if anything looks off.

12:35 Money you're tricked into sending yourself is much harder to get back, which is why the scam calls are the bigger danger. The next few days are going to be weird. More announcements are coming. My hope is that most things will keep working. Just do the boring stuff today. Send this to people in your life right now.

12:53 Your parents, your grandparents, your friends, your group chats. Anyone who's connected to the internet, which is literally everyone, needs to know what's happening the people least likely to hear about this are the ones most likely to get hurt by it so this is going to keep getting worse and my setup i've been using ai like crazy anybody who's been listening to the show knows i've been using it to red team my own stuff and my own devices and you know i've been nerding out really hard on this building my own applications and to do all this stuff like i'm in love with paircast i'm i love my editing app and it's still full of bugs and it would not be a production release yet but i'm going to be using this every

13:38 single day to make content exactly like this and i know probably pretty soon it's going to feel pretty stable and pretty secure and honestly one of the biggest reasons i'm pushing so hard to build my own applications and my own interfaces for all this stuff it's to get away from everybody else's stuff and I don't mean that in the sense of like oh all this other stuff is super bad but it's just places where I'm exposing things I'm logging into another machine or another computer for every single piece of for like 20 different parts of a stack a workflow just to create some media content I have three subscriptions somehow in the mix of all of this.

14:25 And every single one of those things is a massive vulnerability. It's another thing I have to log into. It's another place where I have to give my password over. And some of these things, yeah, sure, you can do a really good... I have excellent password hygiene, I guess you could say. I try to use random passwords for almost everything or at least a repeatable builder for cheap websites.

14:49 and I'm not like super, I don't think I'm going to be sharing anything critical with, but more and more, each one of these becomes a bigger and bigger vulnerability. But that's me. I have so many different moving pieces of all of this stuff. Most people don't have like elaborate password manager and password systems.

15:09 They have something incredibly basic and they reuse passwords over and over again. And it's such a huge vulnerability. and it's going to, I had somebody just while I was working on stuff, I had emails coming in for one-time passcodes for a Microsoft account. I, I don't have, I don't use Microsoft for Jack.

15:28 I got it. I didn't even know what that Microsoft account was for, but I had some sort of Microsoft one account or something from God knows how long ago. And I went digging through my backups and all this stuff. I was like, okay, well, what's the password? I found it. I logged into it. Sure enough, somebody has been trying to log into the account with the email attached. And I was like, well, crap, I don't even know what's on it. There was no order history or anything like that.

15:51 So, but I just went ahead and I just made a random password. I refreshed everything. I put in OTP. I don't even know what the service is. I might delete it after. I don't think I need a Microsoft account for anything, but this is just, I'm just going to get into a habit of like, okay, I'm going to reset everything. And importantly, one of the things that Schumer said in this article that I think is really, really important is never trust the thing that you got the information from.

16:15 Never just use whatever the email is. This is something that I do religiously and have for a long time already. If I get an email about a vulnerability and there's a link to go do it, don't go to the link. Don't click the link. If you know what the website is, if it's like, oh, there's a problem with your Google account, go to google.com.

16:33 Go to your account the way that you always go to your account. If you get a call from the bank, hang up. tell them okay what's your name Nancy sure I'm in understand you can't trust that there's going to be an accent you can't trust that it's going to be broken English the models are fantastic now it isn't you will not be able to tell for most of the things especially when it comes to something like Dessa that just dropped by block Jack Dorsey just released a model that was a large language model trained entirely on audio this is actually an entirely different realm this is an LLM that is 100 different from the way we've been doing llms it knows english through audio only there's no text layer it doesn't code it can't do anything all it does is listen to people talk until it can

17:21 repeat the audio in the same natural way that people talk and it's uh i can't remember the the dual path or some something i can't remember what they refer to it as but it's one where the input and the output are streaming both at the same time. So as you talk, the model is already building responses. There's nuance. It will literally laugh at a joke that you make. It's the first model to actually understand sarcasm because it's been trained on audio. It understands the nuance and the empathy and the emotional context of the conversation. Whereas an LLM based on text is basically an LLM that learns the moral and social values of Twitter is everything's text.

18:03 Nobody understands or can hear any nuance or sarcasm or can really understand the emotional mode. The amount of misinterpretation in that is just massive. And it's extremely clever, the idea of how you can actually I'll post this up. I'll go back and throw up information about Dessa in the background while I'm talking about this.

18:26 I actually just want to play a little clip and I want to see if you can tell which one is the AI. And what did you think of it? Are you excited about it as much as I am? I was so blown away. I am so impressed. It's so expressive, right? It is so expressive. It's conversational. It's very conversational.

18:46 It can laugh. It can understand you and your emotions much better than anything I've seen out there. I haven't really seen anything like that either, but it's pretty much like human level. Yeah, it's a bit scary, to be honest. But I'm so excited to see where it would get us. I'm so excited for it to be in the world.

19:07 If I'm being honest, that's crazy. And this is really the thing that I'm worried about is we already have so many scammers, so many people getting hit by scammers. and that's going to get so much worse when like i i know people or i have first i guess second hand accounts of people who have spoken with especially in bitcoin who run services that are security and multi-key you know multi-signature style services and they try to explain to someone that they are getting scammed and the person refuses to believe it because they have such a genuine connection to the person that they're talking to in telegram or whoever it is and now those people can basically be real virtual people you can have video chats with them they can be

20:01 empathetic and they can sound like somebody totally different you can have a relationship with a an old male indian and have it look like a young attractive female and you can literally do it in such a way where it's insanely difficult to tell what is actually happening and if it is a real person and honestly you don't need someone actually up there at all times pretending to be another person because you can now have a machine do it and do it convincingly and these people will have legitimate relationships with them they will think that there's someone actually on the other side willing to listen to them and loneliness is a huge problem loneliness is a massive problem today more so than at many times in this country's history and just in general because birth rates

21:00 have plummeted divorce rates have skyrocketed and we've broken up culturally we've destroyed the family which is literally the source like that is the thing that keeps this together and we've absolutely eviscerated those kind of like familial strong foundations which give people that anchor to hold on to so that they don't have to be lonely.

21:29 Even if it's their crazy idiot family member who they argue with all the time and can never see eye to eye, it's still family. It's still different from having no one at all. And we have built, we've culturally and politically set ourselves up into dependency where people feel like their only way out is to latch on to government.

21:50 And that's exactly the same role that a robot plays, right? It's just an external ephemeral thing that's not actually defined. It's just this weird belief that you have something that cares about you and that you can latch on to and that will provide for you. It's out of fear that most people attach themselves to this thing.

22:10 Now imagine when it seems like an actual person that they're remotely talking to, that they're having video chats with, that wants to empathize with them. Can you imagine the betrayal and the feeling of agony to be talking with someone and actually feel like someone's listening to you and you actually have someone that you can hang on to and understands you and then to find out that the whole thing is fake?

22:38 like the the pain of having to re be re lonely again and realize that it was all a scam and that you lost all your money or you were sending a hundred dollars every week to somebody that didn't exist or some you know just random guy halfway around the world i cannot imagine having to re re understand in even a deeper way that you're you're one moment of relief from being alone and wanting someone to care about your situation was actually a freaking robot and how how big that barrier if somebody can't explain it now with somebody who's having text chats with someone in telegram and thinks that they're having a relationship and they're sending money to somebody who's honest and trustworthy and is actually a female that likes them and all

23:28 this stuff imagine how much worse it's going to be when it seems like a real person when it can convincingly tell you that you know I can listen to your problems and reflect back and have its own problems and its own history that's going to be rough there's so many people that are going to get caught with this it's going to be a it's already an industry it's an industry and it's only going to get a lot lot worse especially the way everything is public and all connections can happen freely and everybody can be messaged on telegram and Twitter and all of these things like these public spaces and this is a large part of why i think reviving and building around and focusing on private spaces and private direct

24:20 connections is the way that we need to go with the web because it eliminates a lot of these problems by controlling the environment rather than just having everything out in the open and then trying to control like access and block people and filter and all these things when you're still trying to allow anybody and everyone into the thing. Obviously, there's always going to be a public face, right? There's always going to be retail stores where you can just walk in and out and the internet equivalent. But I think most people in most environments and most situations that people are engaging in online don't need that. There are times where you want to reach out and you want to be public and you want to just kind of be in that public square. But I think

24:59 there's a lot of times where you just want to want to talk to the people that you want to talk to and the your family and your close friend groups or your follower group and that should be private you should have the option of that being private any information or data in it to be private or public just kind of within the same environment the same interface and way that you're used to associating with things but that's neither here nor there i just think that that migration is bound to happen in some form or fashion because of how big this problem is going to be and that's just social engineering that's just social engineering and but god how bad it's going to be so bad if we don't like our defenses are going to be very difficult to to put up like

25:48 trying to figure out and teach people like it's already hard enough just to teach people that like listen if you see an ad about bitcoin or something like that just don't touch it like don't click on it dad you know and it's just that problem's gonna get way worse and that's just one layer of this right like this transition is gonna be tough and it's why i genuinely think i really genuinely think you put this on a long enough time timeline our political system does not continue to work as it is designed and the web most pieces of the web and the way we connect don't really hold up as designed our money doesn't really hold up as designed like a pull system a trust first you know block later like if if if 99 of users are real humans and then one percent are bots

26:46 you can do a let everybody in and then close out the one percent find a way to filter or figure out who the one percent are and then block the one percent or put them on an api if it's 99 bots and one percent human your filter and especially if those robots are incredibly talented and they can mimic and look and sound and operate just like a human would your filters fall apart and in fact any barrier that you put up will be so onerous to the user that you won't even grab the one percent of real people so you have to the situation has to change like how we relate to people logging in and working with things needs to fundamentally change and i think honestly we've already seen how the political system is being affected so massively because the ability to control narratives

27:40 everybody talks about oh they're controlling the narrative and they're manipulating twitter and facebook and they're you know keeping people like trapped it's like well yeah but the wild thing is that that used to be the norm and there used to be no alternative there used to be no secondary narrative there used to be five people talking about how everyone is being manipulated and the message is being pre-programmed and all the news agencies are saying the exact same thing Because you couldn't talk about it. A video of, you know, 800 different news clips of everybody saying different nuanced emphasis of the exact same line of the exact same political propaganda.

28:28 You couldn't montage that and share that out with 50 million people. Today, that literally happens. and so all of these things are getting exposed it takes a very long time to go from go from being aware like publicly aware and in the the public psyche to truly dealt with to like fundamentally change because this the nature of all of these problems are so deeply tied to how the system itself has actually been put together and simple bringing it into the light and capacity to talk about it and to argue about it on the platforms and in social media and you know this kind of global identity crisis that we're having having is exactly what exposes those things and starts building the pressure to some sort of change obviously i hope it's not violent change but

29:23 you know unfortunately it usually is and government is itself a institution of legitimized violence with a giant PR firm in front of it. So inevitably, governments will become violent, and they kind of are already. They look at the number of whistleblowers that commit suicide. What a coincidence. But because of that, I just think there's going to be massive pressure on all of these systems, and we're seeing what that pressure looks like.

29:54 But as everything becomes fake and fakeable and trust breaks down in a massive way, like remote trust breaks down, I think we're going to see a lot of boundaries and a lot of borders redrawn. and not even just because war and conquering and obliterating an entire area and taking it out. It's not even just going to be because of political moves.

30:22 It will be because of balkanization. I think we'll have a lot of balkanization in the coming few decades. And all this stuff only accelerates it. But then our capital structure and the way we do business is going to have to change dramatically as well. And this isn't even to do with hacking. This is just the fact that YouTube, I think it's always good to analogize with changes that have happened in the past. YouTube allowed the middle content creator, right? It allowed the people like me to exist where I'm semi-famous in one tiny little cult of a corner of a demographic or a community based on some idea.

31:09 and so I have content and I can technically make a living. I am producing content for an insanely small network in the grand scheme but I have access to that and I'm capable of doing that because of the way the networks are built, because of how we connect to each other, because of followers and subscribers and comments and all of that stuff.

31:34 And YouTube basically enabled this, was kind of the first big notch or chip out of the block, so to speak, that showed that entire new layers and types of content creation were possible. and that you can make money and they can be self-sustaining and that there was a new class of media coming that was going to take attention away from broadcast media and the Hollywood monopoly, I guess, on the cost and distribution to an audience.

32:07 And the audience was no longer attached to any of their production system. It still took a long time. But Hollywood is kind of undermined the center stage of the Hollywood narrative and Hollywood propaganda is no longer center stage. It's no longer the core narrative builder for culture and for political society.

32:31 And because of that, and it took a long time. It took a long time. It wasn't just because like, oh, media existed and now we have people who have 10,000 followers or 100,000 followers or a million subscribers. And now, boom, Hollywood is gone. No, it took a really long time to adjust. you know it took a whole generation growing up thinking that youtube was was a place that you could just go spend a couple hours rather than having to sit down and watch a feature film or go to the movie theater and i think that same sort of thing will kind of occur in manufacturing and in business and in retail we've already kind of we've seen it right we've seen the amazon stores the ebay and all of these things but they still have a massive

33:17 consolidation problem where the network effects overtake much of the variety but generally speaking the gig economy is huge the gig economy and everybody having their side job is utterly massive but that is going to that's going to get an exponent it's going to get an order of magnitude larger because of what these models enable and we're going to have you know products that have the 10 000 users that can be sustained we're gonna have the we're gonna have the global small business and i think small business is going to increasingly be one of the main i mean small business always has been in one of the strongest parts of the economy but i think it's just going to continue to grow and spread because it requires movement like jobs are going to be fewer and far

34:15 between and they're going to jobs are more likely to exist at certain stages and scale of business but i think they will be more ephemeral like we've already gone from in a lot of ways it has already changed like the idea of you know coming out of college and getting a 50-year career because you know your boomer parents your your parents parents uh did that that was always stupid we didn't know it we didn't know until after we got out of college and went into the the job market it's like oh my god this economy holy shit it's not 1950 and what do you know the public school system still thinks it is because they're stupid and trapped and it actually can't evolve or do anything at all except get more expensive and shittier but you know government run things so you get out in the

35:05 economy and you realize that this whole thing has changed well it's already changed again like the notion of like how jobs will work and how to make capital how to earn i think is going to change quite dramatically in continuation of that trend and obviously our education system is only going to even get further and further it just becomes useless it already kind of is in a lot of ways um so like as that trend progresses i think it's like there's a model there's a model that has a machine that builds machines that build machines that build products like the the one that what was the crap i forgot what it's called i'll see if i can find it but i'm gonna have to close this one out here pretty quick um but it was the one that i think i talked about it on the singularity stack

35:56 I may have talked about it on the last episode, but it's a machine that literally builds manufacturing machines to build products. And you can basically give it a different process and give it a different product and it will produce a different machine for that new product and like that not 3d printing like that a 3d printing on steroids and you know downloaded into star trek it just like that's absolutely wild and that is going to unlock so much power and potential to tackle any problem like what i'm doing with vibe coding and stuff is going to be is going to slowly make its way into physical space.

36:42 The ability to design a product, to come up with an idea, to attempt to get it out there, to catch somebody's attention and find who it is that needs this problem solved that are in your community. And it will... I think the idea of the global small business and the online community will just be drastically amplified.

37:12 Drastically amplified. And it's another reason why I think the balkanization of our networks will be a big part of this as well. Because the bot flood. The bot flood. AI bots and everything are going to be insanely valuable, but we're going to need to know who's running the bots. It's like it's going to have to have a key that is signed into someone's account and working on their behalf.

37:42 Which is basically what API keys are. It's just a horrible user experience. It's not built for everyday people to actually use it. It's built for developers who want to dig 10 hierarchical areas down into some stupid settings thing. And then get into the copy paste and open up a terminal. Nobody wants to do that shit.

38:03 but it's going to need to be a core and extremely user friendly function and that's why I think like some sort of a key and sub key system just so that you can know whose bot is whose and basically people's AI can simply act like and travel around as them in the web or in whatever networking system that we have.

38:35 But there's just going to be so much, so much change. And the hackening, like we're unraveling a massive system that has scaled out of a world that doesn't exist anymore, out of a set of conditions and a set of economics that no longer align with reality. And they have changed quite dramatically. The comment in this piece, actually, about the economics of attack versus defense, that's absolutely true, and I think that's a fantastic way to think about it.

39:18 And this is how all great technologies in history have fundamentally changed. uh you know the the political struggles of the time and and rewritten borders all throughout history like what was gunpowder versus uh um uh versus bow and arrow uh and you know government the nature of government and agriculture actually agriculture is actually one that swung in the wrong direction which is really fascinating we talk about this we've talked about this on the show in the past for anybody who's listened, but go into pieces on like extreme monetary history and, you know, some of the earliest ideas of civilization and like why government arose.

40:01 And one of them, I think this was actually in, um, what was that book? Oh, I can't remember the name of it. I'll try to put it up here. Um, so stupid. I read this like two or three times but talking about how agriculture is actually what led to governments and mafias like type institutions is when you're like a hunter-gatherer and you can carry all your wealth with you nobody can keep you in a cage right they're not going to come and come to your house or your tent or whatever and they're like by the way you're going to give us you know half of your stuff or we're going to beat the living crap out of you and kill your wife or whatever well that doesn't work very well maybe maybe with the uh you know the roving thieves or whatever

40:52 they beat you over the head and take half or all your stuff but then what are you gonna do you're gonna leave you're gonna take all the wealth that you have and you're gonna peace or you hear about your friend in the area gets hit over the head and all of his stuff taken you're gonna go ahead and just get out but what happens when your wealth is stuck what happens when your wealth is stuck on the land. That's what agriculture did. You build a house, you plant a crop, and it's not going to produce a yield until next year. And so now if somebody comes and says, you know what, I'll take 10% or I'm going to beat the living crap out of you and I'm going to burn your farm down.

41:30 Well, now you can't pick up and leave. Now the question is, you know, what's the economics of violence well that mafia now needs a trade and they need to they cannot steal too much if they steal 80 then it just becomes pointless like well i'm just not going to plant a crop i'll just leave then then it becomes meaningful to have the discussion to leave and the economic trade-off isn't as great but if the mafia only takes 10 and then they promise if you don't leave I mean, you keep planting your crop here and you plant a bigger crop next year so that we get a greater amount in our 10 percent.

42:09 We'll keep you safe from other mafias. And so this actually fundamentally, like massively changed the economics of violence because the wealth was stuck. Wealth was trapped on the land. And when that happened, all institutions, all politics changed into an entirely different thing. You had to scale in aggregate.

42:30 You had to scale as a collective, as a community. And thus, the nice, the acceptable mafia became a normal thing, and we called it government. And we tried to play this little game like the thing that will kill us if we fall out of line was actually something that we ran. But that's a nice fairy tale.

42:49 but this notion of the economics of you know attack and defense has again changed dramatically because the capacity to attack and the cost of doing so is nothing you just go i could i could have kimmy right now on my computer you just be like try to get into this website i'll be back in an hour and it will just run and it will be the cost of electricity this will mean that you know fundamentally a lot of our structure on the web changes and the security assumptions change dramatically and because of that we're going to have a hell of a hardened web like the internet itself i believe will be hardened in a more dramatic and probably fascinating like just absolutely wild to watch play out it will change dramatically in the next five years like dramatically um it might not look like it

43:50 but anybody who's watching i think the back end and how things work i i think will it will be visible to the people who look um obviously the user experience won't change enough that it doesn't feel like the internet but structurally i just think there are a lot of things that are going to have a really hard time holding up in the very new and very different economic and technological landscape, which is redundant, but, you know, it's wild.

44:29 So stay safe. Stay safe. There's a lot. I know a lot of that was just rambling about the future of AI and shit, but... Oh, it's going to be a trip. It's going to be a trip. I haven't even looked at the news today. I've been focusing on vibe coding and recording this. I've probably missed like three major news items.

44:49 I probably just had a hardware wallet swept. I don't even know. I'm old. I'm tired of this shit. The hackening will continue. Get ready, get some sleep. And stay safe out there. Don't believe anything. Don't believe anything on the web. It's all bullshit. It's all fake. It's actually a shout out to Simple Proof and Juan and those guys.

45:21 Because they've got a really cool thing where they're trying to get it so that things are hashed into the blockchain. As they have security camera footage and political event footage. It's instantly hashed. and that upload is collected and published somewhere so that you can discern at least the time that something was created and that if that video was altered, that it basically has a provable timeline.

45:51 And I think that's a – it's fascinating. It's really all about, like, how could you implement, right? Implementation is the problem. But Simple Proof – I think it's simpleproof.com. they've they've proved exactly how powerful this can be the question is when and how does the pressure arise for people to care enough to realize that their digital camera which this can be done privately by the way it doesn't have to like be like uploaded to the cloud and then apple stamps it and now we have a trusted intermediary doesn't have to be like that this can be done entirely independently and privately um but like what has to happen and how serious does the pressure have to be to change something that basically in physical space

46:39 for how it relates to the web. You actually have a thing in a camera that does this job. Interesting. Interesting stuff and I think it will probably be a part of where things are going because you have to know when something was created and you have to be able to prove that it didn't change. And what other than a hash and a blockchain that can't be reversed what's the other solution to that I don't have one so wild times I'm going to get back to building my app and my pair drive and all that stuff and I synced all my stuff from pair drive photos today I'm excited I'm excited so much to show talk soon, subscribe get yourself a bit box my bitcoin has been safe and sound on my Bitbox and in my multi-sig.

47:33 And I love it. And you get a 5% discount. It's a great way to support the show. Send me a zap on Noster. Follow me on all the places. Subscribe to all the places. And I'll catch you on the next one. Until then, this is Bitcoin Audible. I'm Guy Swan. And that's my two sats. Outro Music