Peter McCormack: Drugs, Bitcoin & A Broken Britain

Peter McCormack first bought Bitcoin for 80 pounds on LocalBitcoins around 2013 to purchase cocaine on the Silk Road. His drug use became serious enough to hospitalise him, but he used Silk Road forums for support and stopped taking drugs 13 years ago. He re-entered crypto in late 2016 buying cannabis oil for his dying mother, noticed Ethereum on the same marketplace, bought in at nine dollars, and traded approximately 30,000 pounds up to 1.2 million pounds by the end of 2017. His daughter knocked wine onto his laptop and prevented him selling half his holdings on his father's advice, and after the January 2018 crash and his tax bill he was left with roughly 60,000 pounds.

He launched What Bitcoin Did in November 2017 and credits his tenth interview, with Lynn Ulbricht, mother of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, as the moment he took podcasting seriously. Ross Ulbricht was recently pardoned by President Trump. McCormack notes the irony that a podcast started because he was buying drugs eventually led to him interviewing a head of state in a presidential palace.

McCormack bought a football club, nightclub, and bar in Bedford, set up a local fund, and placed private security in the area to address problems with crackheads and alcoholics, drawing political backlash from the left. He subsequently sold the nightclub, paused the fund, and stopped most local work, arguing structural national problems must be fixed before local efforts can be effective. He abandoned plans for a 400,000 pound pizza restaurant due to regulation and poor economic conditions, and spends two to three days per week on emails dealing with bureaucracy. He argues business rates are a tax paid before a business makes any money, that minimum wage levels make it effectively illegal to employ people at rates they would willingly accept, and that the UK has the balance between risk and reward wrong enough that entrepreneurs are choosing not to start businesses.

On UK politics, McCormack describes the landscape as fragmenting rapidly. Rupert Lowe's Restore party was polling at 7 percent with 100,000 members just two weeks after being announced, and Reform did not exist four or five years ago and is now leading the polls. He predicts within three years the UK will face a choice between a left-wing socialist coalition and a right-wing conservative coalition and describes both outcomes as ugly, warning that a right-wing approach will be accompanied by ethnonationalists who will make immigration policy look racist and fascist. He criticises Reform for embracing Tory defectors who are architects of failure as the party approached power, and admits he censored his own criticism of Reform for a year while waiting for a Nigel Farage interview that never materialised. All major UK parties, named as Labour, Green, Lib Dems, Conservatives, and Reform, are described as engaging in deficit spending and inflationary economics. He cites Milei's Argentina as a model, where short-term pain was followed within a year by GDP expansion, debt reduction, more tax revenue at a lower tax burden, and reduced poverty.

On Bitcoin policy, McCormack argues a no capital gains tax on Bitcoin policy would attract holders and teleport billions of dollars of wealth into the UK. He notes 16,000 millionaires left the UK last year and that many crypto adopters have displaced to Dubai and are looking for a permanent home. The speakers also propose a moratorium on the UK's five-year clawback rule requiring returning millionaires to back-pay taxes missed during their absence. McCormack frames Bitcoin as a multi-decade project of separating money from state, analogous to historical separations of language and religion from state control, and argues humans will always print money because it is the path of least resistance.

On AI, the speakers describe development as being in an acceleration phase with Anthropic, xAI, OpenAI, and Chinese competitors in a race to AGI that cannot be stopped. Any job involving operating a screen faces displacement within a few years, including lawyers, accountants, and creative workers. A housing crash is predicted on the basis that mortgages are structured around 30-year careers while many people cannot be confident they will have a job in two to three years. AI agents are already opening Bitcoin wallets and paying for services but cannot complete KYC and AML processes at traditional banks, leading the speakers to predict Bitcoin is the most likely currency for the emerging AI economy.

McCormack draws a distinction between the financial threshold that genuinely matters, covering rent, groceries without a calculator, and a couple of holidays a year, and everything beyond it, which he says does not produce happiness and requires sacrifices not worth the trade-off. He identifies time and Bitcoin as the two truly scarce things in life, noting that people do not know how much time they have left, whether 30 years or one day.