BTC Sessions - Bitcoin Gives Asymmetric UPSIDE Via Asymmetric Information - Guest MARK MOSS ep121

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

Mark Moss is a successful entrepreneur, investor and YouTube educator with over 10 million views on his channel "Market Disruptors". In this episode we talk about why Bitcoin is so important, why some people still have blinders on, and the implications of Bitcoin from the individual all the way to the nation-state. SUPPORT THE SHOW: LEDN offers Bitcoin backed loans – Sign up and get $50 free https://bit.ly/397rlLN Get Wasabi wallet and enjoy your Bitcoin privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Buy a Cobo Vault to secure your Bitcoin! https://bit.ly/2GgMFlH Cobo Vault Tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnRjvZKulrA Crypto Cloaks: Get the BEST Bitcoin swag out there (code “btcsessions” gets you 5% off) https://www.cryptocloaks.com/shop/ Bitrefill allows you to use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards around the world https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 Billfodl from PrivacyPros lets you back up your wallet seed in SOLID STEEL. Grab one and be sure to check out their signal-blocking faraday bags! https://privacypros.io/ If you value my work and would like to send me a tip, they are always appreciated! LIGHTNING tips: https://tippin.me/@BTCsessions Join my Telegram channel! https://t.me/btc_sessions

Wasabi wallet and fairly private. Mark Moss is an investor, entrepreneur, and YouTuber with over 10 million views on his channel. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Mark to discuss what else Bitcoin. And we got into a lot of interesting topics. We talked about a lot of the why of Bitcoin. Why was it created in the first place? What does it have the potential to do in the future? and what are the implications of having Bitcoin in our society today from the perspective of

individuals, companies, and even nation states. I really enjoy this convo, so please do check it out, listen through, and let me know what you think. I am Ben with the BTC sessions, and this is your daily session. Before we dive in, I want to give a big shout out to sponsors of the show, ledden.com. this is where you can use your Bitcoin for a variety of different services. Of course, they have their Bitcoin back loans. So if you need dollars and you're in a pinch and you don't want to sell your Bitcoin because that's taxable and you're worried about having a buy back in at a higher price point, this could be for you because you can use your Bitcoin as collateral to get

Canadian or US dollar loans into your banking again within 24 hours. They also, of course, have their Bitcoin and USDC savings accounts with interest rates of up to 11.7%. annually paid monthly and they've got their B2X offering, which uses the same loan mechanism I previously mentioned to buy more Bitcoin effectively doubling your Bitcoin on the spot. If you want to check these guys out, link in the show notes down below. If you click that link in Opt to get either of their loan products,

they will give you $25 for free direct into your savings account. Now, of course, we also have the legends over at Crypto Cloaks. These guys are just killing it. They are blast and stuff through their 3D printers like No Tomorrow. fleet is growing and they make the best Bitcoin swag out there. I have a bunch of it and I have more on the way. The Triton will be here shortly. My Bitcoin grenade is on the way. I have a lightning or rather node shell. I've been eyeing up the Citadel flag. I've got my coasters. There's just so much here and it's a lot of good quality stuff. So be sure to head over to Cryptocloaks.com and use the code

BTC sessions, all one word at checkout to get 5% off. We also have the Kobo Vault. This is one of my regularly used hardware wallets. I love it because it is 100% air-gapped. What does that mean? Well, it means you never plug the thing into an internet-connected device, keeping your keys to your money safe and offline. Everything is done via QR code. Now, they have a secure element in this thing. They've got open-source firmware, and you can opt to do the Bitcoin-only firmware, which I recommend. And it's usable with all of my favorite wallets. You can use it with Bitcoin Core, Electrum, Wasabi, Blue Wallet, and a ton of other ones, including in some multi-sig setups. So be sure to check out Kobo Vault.

There is a link in the show notes down below. And just for reference, I am using the Kobo Vault Pro. That one has the fingerprint scanner and the rechargeable battery. And finally, if you're living on Bitcoin like me, or maybe you just see the prices up and you're feeling good and you just want to treat yourself. You'd like some high time preference activity. You just want to do a little bit of shopping, or maybe you're doing your Christmas shopping and you need to pick some stuff up. Well, guess what? If you're spending Bitcoin at Bit refill picking up gift cards for what you need, you also are earning Bitcoin back.

You're getting sats back on every purchase, which is awesome. Earn those stats back and stack them. Now, personally, I live on Bitcoin. The majority of my income is Bitcoin. And so this is a godsend for me because I need to eat, obviously. I need gas. I need to do my Christmas shopping, all of that, and I can do it here.

But those stats back, I do cherish them. So head over to Bit Refill. These guys are incredible. And you can also refill your phone, your mobile, and you can get inbound lightning capacity. And there's a bunch of other things you can check out. So Bit Refill, link down below. And with that, let's dive into the show.

We are recording. Mark Moss. Welcome to the show. How are you, man? Yeah, thanks so much, Benjamin. Stoke to be here. I'm doing great. Everything's just a little bit better.

The sun's a little bit brighter when Bitcoin's mooning, right? Yeah, 100%. It's been a hell of a year. We're now looking, you know, we've been in it around the $19,000 range for a little bit here. We've been, you know, over $18,000 for more days than we saw in the previous bull run. And things are looking up and it doesn't look like, and there's any indication that things are going to be slowing down anytime soon.

But I guess before we dive head first into Bitcoin, I guess a little bit about you, obviously you run your YouTube channel market disruptors, 10 million views on that thing. How's that been going for you? It's been amazing. It really has. I really resisted creating that channel.

and it was actually one of my old business partners that kind of forced me into it. But it's been such an amazing journey. It's been two years. And people like the content. I have, in about two years, I picked up about 200,000 subscribers. And, you know, I, I, it's been great.

Yeah, super fun. That's awesome. If you have not checked out Mark's channel, of course, head over Market Destroy. I will link it in these show notes as well. But, and beyond that, like you've, you've got a, good history of, again, I'll just tap on a few of the things on your website here. You know, you've founded companies. You've been in real estate and private businesses and gold and oil and tech and a whole bunch of other things. Can you maybe just quickly touch on a little bit

historically, you know, what you've been involved in and then how that kind of contributed to you discovering and being excited about Bitcoin? Yeah. So, um, from a super high level to kind of go through that pretty quickly. I'm at that age where I'm old enough to know the old world and I'm still young enough to kind of catch the technology trend. So I'm kind of right in that straddle generation. So just real quickly, when I graduated high school, I jumped right into real estate investing. One of my roommates was started to buy properties from the bank zero down.

They were just trying to get rid of them. And then we're fixing them up and selling them. I'm like, dude, that's awesome. I want to do that as well. And at the time, so what's important about this is that I've recognized that I'm old enough to now have lived through multiple bear markets. And so in California, the biggest crash we had at the time was from 89 to 92, the real estate market just completely cratered.

So now here I am 1995 and the banks are sitting on all these properties. And so they were basically getting them off the books for free, just take them over, right? And so we started taking these in 1995. coming out of that bare market. The reason why that's important is because we're coming out of another bear market now. But started taking those buying and fix them up, selling them, and making more on one house than people were making in a whole year. And I'm 18 years old.

From 1995 till 2005, that was an amazing run. If anybody's tied into the real estate market, hundreds of fix and flips and hundreds of rental properties and development of multi-million dollar buildings and that kind of stuff. At the same time, then the late 90s came, 97, 98, 99, and all of a sudden, me and my roommate were trading these brand new things called internet stocks. And nobody knew what those were. And like my roommate quit his job and he's like a day trader all the sudden. And like, oh, you did those internet stocks?

So what about this internet stock? And it was an interesting time, not so much different than what we've been seeing in cryptocurrency. Obviously that had the big run up in 2000 and then the big crash, the dot com crash. The stories are, you know, Amazon came out of five bucks, went up to 80 bucks, went back down to five again. And so again, right, we've seen that before. What's interesting is in 2001, at the bottom of that market, I thought it'd be a great idea to start an e-commerce business. Again, I don't know why I like to start businesses at the bottom of a crash. And what's interesting is there was no Shopify, there was no WordPress, none of that back then.

It was really hard to build an e-commerce or I think I spent 25 grand or whatever to do that. And I went to these companies that said, I want to sell your products on my website. And they laughed at me. They told me nobody would ever buy anything online. That was the stupidest idea ever. I was like, what? Like, well, I think they will. And I spent a bunch of money on this website.

And a lot of these companies said, we don't even want our products sold on the internet. I had to, there wasn't anyone online to advertise to. So I was running ads in magazines. And at the time, I was the only.com in the entire magazine. It was mail order back then. You had to cut it out and mail it in with the check. So anyway, I've heard this story before. Technology is stupid. It'll never work. I've been laughed at. So I've been there before. And managed to build that up, Fortune 500 exit, continue doing multiple businesses, exits, continued to do real estate. 2008 sucked for me. I got caught in the biggest financial crash that the world has ever seen. And that shifted the whole course of my life. I was really good at making money. I made a lot of money, but I didn't understand this whole financial casino. I didn't understand. I didn't understand.

understand what the heck was this whole Fed. And I didn't understand that. And so I had to figure it out. I vowed to never let that happen again. I had to dust myself off, call myself out of a hole. And I really dug in deep. And that's where I found out about gold. Shout out to Mike Maloney. Shout out to Ron Paul. And really kind of shifted that. And it was like, wow, the Fed, the Federal Reserve. They're printing endless amounts of money. We need a sound money supply. And all of a sudden, it was like, boom, the light went on. And I've been down that path. ever since. Seeing as I was kind of in this technology and investing kind of, you know, place where they meet, I had started to see about Bitcoin, but it wasn't really catching my eye.

In 2015, I was in the process. I was following a guy named sovereign man, Simon Black, and he's all about having sovereign flags. Instead of having your whole life in one country, why not have multiple passports, multiple bank accounts, et cetera, and really not depend on one financial system. So I was in the process of setting up a Panama corporation and Panama bank accounts, start trying to work on that process. And that was 2015, I took another look at Bitcoin. And I said, wait a minute, it's the exact same thing. I can get my money out of the financial system without having to go to Panama. And so boom, jumped into Bitcoin. Obviously, as soon as that rabbit hole opened up, I thought, this is the only hope for humanity at this point. And I got to

tell the whole world about it. And so ever since for the last five years, I've been talking about it. Yeah. And it's interesting always hearing the, I guess, ideological front that people come to Bitcoin from because it varies, right? Some people are, you know, it sounds like given the Ron Paul, Mike Maloney, obviously, as you alluded to, you're coming from a sound money perspective, perhaps even moderately kind of libertarian individual sovereignty kind of perspective is what drew you here. Yep. And still does. And still does. And so, you know, I'm pretty hardcore with that ideology. And especially now that we're facing this whole, you know, great reset and Bretton Woods too and all this. I mean, at this point, I, I, it's hyped up to say, but I mean, Bitcoin is really the only thing that gives me hope at this point, right? I mean, the world is going into a deep, dark place. And Bitcoin is, is that hope. And so from an ideological standpoint, even if Bitcoin never went up another dollar, it wouldn't matter to me because it's for a different purpose, in my opinion. So, yeah. So coming from that perspective, like you, you came to it understanding kind of the ideological reasons for it even being created in the first place.

What is it that you think has taken other people longer? Like what stumbling blocks are people coming across where they haven't made that connection yet? Is it just that it's too new to even have been thrust in front of people? or is it partially a symptom of the financial infrastructure and the way that central banks work being so complicated and convoluted that people just don't even begin to understand how money works in the first place. And so why would they care about a new form of money? Like what do you see there?

Yeah, it's all of those things. And so if I want to boil that down, I believe it all comes down to one word, which is why. right? And so in order for us to do anything in life, we have to understand our why. And our why has to be bigger than our why not. So if I want to get in shape, why do I want to get in shape? And the why I want to get in shape has to be bigger than the why not, because otherwise I'm going to talk myself out of it. And so we always have to understand why. And so when you get to the questions that you're asking, you know, why are people not doing it and they don't understand why they should. And so all the arguments that I hear are, It's too slow, you know, it'll never scale, all these things, right? But they don't understand why we need it. I don't care if it's too slow. I don't care if it won't scale because why we need it isn't, we didn't need a faster form of money. That's not what we needed, right?

We needed a censorship resistant form of money. So all my content that I do and have been doing for the last couple years is all around why. So I talk about the Fed, I talk about the debasement of our currency. I talk about the threat of censorship, seizure, things like that. And so I'm trying to introduce the why people should care about a new form of money. In the U.S., we have a hard time with it because our money is generally pretty good compared to other countries. If you live in Lebanon or Venezuela or Argentina, you know why. You don't need to be told why you need another form of money.

In the U.S., we kind of do. And so I think if we just kind of continue to highlight all these areas that people, don't see as a problem, but they'll start to understand it and hopefully move over to it. Yeah. And of course, the countries that you just listed along with a handful of others that have a unique perspective on why are all the countries that have already by far breached their Bitcoin all time high in their local currency. It's being printed so much that that, you know, you look at their charts compared to ours. We're just eking up to previous all time highs. And I'm in, I'm in Canada, so I'm closer to my all-time high in Canadian dollars than you guys are just

seeing the depreciation of the Canadian dollar versus the US dollar. And part of that is the fact that you guys have at the moment the global reserve currency and that affords, you know, obviously certain advantages and a lot of debt is denominated in US dollars. And so that drives more demand for it. Whereas countries outside of the US see, typically are going to be seeing more inflation because if they want to print more money to get more U.S. dollars to pay off some of that debt, it's just, it's like a race to the bottom. It's crazy. Yeah, exactly.

And so the U.S. gets away with it. And that's why people kind of get lulled into that a little bit for sure. But there's plenty of reasons to look past it. I think the other big blind spot that I would say that people have is maybe a lack of imagination. So back to 2001 when I created that e-commerce. store and people who laughed and said no one would buy anything online. It's like, how can you say that? And so what I see today and still even, I think Ray Dalio came out last week and he's saying, well, it still isn't really used as a medium of exchange and there's not a lot of merchants

accepting it. Okay, great. That's a fair, valid point. But it's kind of like looking at LeBron James when he was five years old and saying he would never be a great basketball player. I mean, he's five years old. How could you say that? I mean, he's going to grow and and things are going to change right and obviously when you saw him at 16 well shoot maybe he will be he still isn't an MVP but at 16 he looks like it could be at 18 it was like holy crap sign this kid up right and i think that's kind of where we are today yeah i mean bitcoin's volatile sure bitcoin you know has all those arguments that rad rad rad rad dale or others might want to make but you can't say that just because it's not there today doesn't mean it won't ever get there yeah yeah

I totally agree. And again, I think a lot of people comment it from the perspective of some of these, uh, some of these, these quote unquote features that were touted early on by people that maybe didn't understand the limitations of a global decentralized protocol. It's not speed and efficiency. It's, it's an inefficient database by design, um, to make sure that it's immutable and censorship resistant and those were kind of the the first and most important aspects of it you can build atop it and make those other things possible but you know like if if you trade off decentralization

and censorship resistance that's something that you can't claw back in in another layer that's gone forever exactly and and that highlights another good point which is people have a they don't understand how technology works and how technology cycles work. And they don't understand how the monetary system works. So they're trying to compare Visa to Bitcoin, but that's not really an apples to Apple's comparison. Really, the financial system is much slower than Bitcoin, right? To transfer money like via wire transfer, it could take a week.

And it could cost way more. And so then it's those layers, as you were just kind of referring to, where, you know, Visa is way up high on a stack. And so Bitcoin will get there. You know, Bitcoin will get there. I think it's already there. more than people realize. And so, yeah, just just being patient, right, being able to kind of see that future. And as an investor, what I've learned is that we always, as an investor, we should always

be looking for asymmetric opportunities, right? We should be able to see that. Yeah, we should be looking for more upside than there is downside. Paul Tudor Jones, who's recently, you know, one of the best hedge fund investors in the world, he's recently come over into Bitcoin. He has a rule, five to one rule. So he only invests a dollar if he thinks he can make $5 back. That's a. And the way that you get asymmetric upside is with asymmetric information. And so those of us that know about Bitcoin today have asymmetric information. Most people don't know about it. And the people that do know about it still don't believe in it.

And that gives us that opportunity to make that upside. And a lot of people just don't want to swing for the fences and even take a stab at it, it seems like. So that's fine. Yeah, I think people have been lulled into a world. where, you know, here, put your money over here, we'll take care of it. You know, you put it in your regular kind of mutual funds and never, never think about it ever again. But also don't pay attention to these fees or where your money is actually going. It's just like kind of a general black hole

that you put it in and I'm sure I'll be fine when I retire. But people don't realize kind of what's going on behind the scenes, how much they can be raked over the coals if they're not paying attention to where that money's going. And it's, again, information asymmetry is is a big one. And, you know, Bitcoin, obviously, you open yourself up to a lot of personal responsibility because we are used to being babysat. The entire financial infrastructure out there has been a symptom of the soft promises of our currency, right? Like if you put money in the bank, well, it's covered up to a certain point because, you know, in the end, if the bank screw up so badly that they are insolvent, they're just going to get more money. They're going to

get capital injections from the Fed effectively. And so because of that, there's a cost to that. And the cost of that is that your dollars purchased less. You have less purchasing power from year to year. And your wealth erodes. You can no longer just gain a skill. And, you know, and and take your human capital, your time, and put that into the currency and just save, you then also have to become a professional investor. How do you see a world where Bitcoin eventually maybe becomes a more regularly used store value and or currency?

How does that affect society as a whole when people can simply specialize in a given field and not have to worry about that. How does that change people's lives? Yeah, well, I think it definitely has a massive shift. And so kind of to your earlier point, to understand Bitcoin, you have to understand all these different topics. And there's all these different angles. And so one of them is really kind of how that system works. And really, if you look back in history, you know, 14,500s, we kind of got to this point where the whole world got onto the

same money standard. So everybody was printing coins that were the same size, same weight. And all of a sudden, that opened up free trade. And what happens is it allows specialization to your point. So instead of me having to grow my own food and raise my own cattle and make my own clothes, I can just be the best clothesmaker unless someone else grow the food, right? And so to your point, today you can't really do that. So I could be the best brain surgeon in the world. And I can make a big impact on people's lives and save them in my brain surgery, whatever. But now I can't just save my money and allow it to store its value. Today, I'm forced into being that investor, as you said, right? And so if we can get back to a world where I can specialize and I can be the best brain surgeon

in the world, I think we'll see society overall elevate to a level that we haven't seen in a long time, kind of like we did in the 14, 1500s. Because really as a business owner, right, our goal is to solve problems, right? We're trying to find problems and we're trying to solve problems and serve needs. And if I'm only doing it halfway, because half of me is still being an investor, if I could be 100% focused on serving others, solving people's problems, imagine how much more innovation we can have, imagine how much more impact we can have on people's lives. So I think it'd be huge. Yeah. Now, I did want to kind of jump back to, again, in the same vein of information asymmetry, a lot of we've been seeing an interesting thing happen lately in that there's been a run-up in

Bitcoin price over the course of the year and we're now looking at basically you know we're we're neck-in-neck with previous all-time highs but what hasn't happened is we haven't seen a big uptick in Google search trends which seems to denote that the average retail investor is not This has not been seemingly retail driven, but we have seen a lot of, like you were saying, Paul Tudor Jones, Stan Druckenmiller, I think I'm saying that right. You know, you've got Michael Saylor and MicroStragety. You've got a lot of these big players. You have Citibank projecting potentially $300 plus $1,000 within the calendar year of 2021.

You have all of these big numbers being thrown out there. And the average person has no idea. And even just the other day, I posted without comment, just a screenshot of Bitcoin's current price in like the past month. And the comments that I got on it were like, oh, that looks like it's going to crash any day now. And so you have like this camp of seasoned Bitcoiners and then like legendary investors and even banks now that were even JP Morgan projecting over $100,000 they're saying. And so you have all of these huge institutions saying, no, this is important. And we're thinking that it's going to grow exponentially and a lot quicker than people think. What is are the average person missing?

And potentially, why are they not seeing it like as in what is Bitcoin's end game? What does it become? What are these big institutions seeing and thinking that it will be? Well, I think the big thing that people are missing is really, they don't understand how the financial system works. And if they understood how the financial system worked, they would understand why Bitcoin is rising so fast. And so, especially, you know, through the pandemic, the government is printing money at an at a breakneck speed, right? We've had trillions of dollars. In one month, they printed more money than they did in the first 200 years. And what most people

don't understand is that as they create more money, they inflate the money system. It makes all the existing money worth less. And that means it buys less. And so people, think, oh my gosh, home prices went up so much. Well, home prices didn't really go up. It was that your purchasing power of your dollar went down and it takes more dollars to buy those. And it's kind of the same thing, but it's actually quite different. And so when you understand that concept, and then you look at what they're doing right now, the economy is shutting back down everywhere, more stimulus is coming, permanent UBI is coming, forgiving student loan debt, just for giving student debt alone is going to debase the currency, devalue the currency by 5%. That's a huge drop in

your purchasing power. We have, and then if you look even deeper, like in the United States, speaking to the United States, we have what we have non-negotiable spending. So we have to spend on entitlements. That's like pensions and social security. We have defense and we have interest on the loans. Those three things that we, those are non-negotiable, those things have to be spent, that's 140% of the income, of the tax receipts. So that means even more spent, more money creation. So we have to now create fake money to even cover the non-negotiable stuff. That means even more debasement. And then interest rates are at zero or a negative in most parts of the world. And so if I'm an institution or some sort of a sovereign and I have hundreds of billions of dollars, I have to

park that. Typically, I'll park that in bonds, sovereign bonds. And those are negative yielding. If I give them money instead of getting it back with interest, I'm losing money. So when you look at all these factors and I can go on and on and on, why would I hold money in that's losing value? Why would I hold money that's being deflated or inflated away, I should say, when I can just move into Bitcoin. And so you have to understand those tell wins. And this is what those people, as you mentioned, Stanley Drucker Miller, are all a sudden seeing and going, oh, my gosh, this is the best trade in the world right now. This is the trade of the decade. And that's because they have this deeper understanding of how the financial system works.

Yeah, it's, it's been interesting seeing all of these headlines of people that typically would have been the harshest Bitcoin critics. But it seems like we've kind of hit this perfect storm of all of these macro elements that have come together to contribute to what couldn't be a better outline of why Bitcoin exists. It couldn't, you couldn't have. written a better playbook than, you know, they shut down the entire economy, printed trillions of, literally 20% plus of all existing U.S. dollars in a single calendar year. That's mind-blowing.

And they're saying that, well, you know, this is fine. And now you've got this push towards, like you were saying, universal basic income, like MMT, modern monetary. theory where effectively the points don't matter. Yeah. Yeah, it's insane. And I think people kind of underestimate where Bitcoin could go, especially given 2017 just being retail based, had effectively a 17x or something like that over the calendar year.

And now you're looking at companies using it as part of their treasury. you're looking at, again, legendary investors coming in. And yes, you need more capital to see those types of multiples, but we may have more capital. I'm wondering if you think there's going to be the similar style, massive boom, fomo kind of thing, but this time on the front of actual institutions. and if so, is there a similar crash or are these institutions not nimble enough to

liquidate that quickly or FOMO that quickly? How do you see this compared to 2017? Yeah, that's a great question. And I did a video last week, I think maybe last Thursday, and I talked about three levels of FOMO. And so I talked about how in 2017 we saw retail FOMO exactly what you're saying. So retail investors, individual mom and pops, were coming in and buying it up like crazy. What I believe we're seeing today is now more institutional fomo. And then I think the next

phase in the next three, four years is going to be sovereign fomo. And so those are different levels. Now, how is that different? First of all, we know that and we can tell one as the Google search traffic as you talked about. So we can see that today. And if we look at 2017, the search traffic was kind of a kind of a precursor to the price. And so I think SMRush had done a chart. And you can see the price and search volume moving pretty good. I think in May it was like around, price was like $1,500 in May of 2017. And I think it was like three to four million searches a month.

By December, it was $45 million when it was at a tie. Well, today we're back at the same price we were in December, but we're not at $45 million. We're at $3 million, the same place we were in May. So that's one good way. We can also tell by the age of the Bitcoin, right? So we can see like the hodal waves. And we can see that that Bitcoin right now is,

holding for a long period of time. So that's not retail people. That's like longer term hoddlers, institutions. We can also see the size of the wallets. So we can see before it was a bunch of little accounts, little wallets setting up. And today they're big accounts, big wallets setting up. So there's a bunch of data that supports that. Now, why is this one different? So retail investors, they come in looking to make a bunch of money. The price drops 30%. Their wife's freaking out. You better sell that real quick. And we call that weak hands, right? So they didn't really understand why they bought it. They thought they're going to get rich overnight. It drops 20, 30 percent. They freak out, they dump it. And so it makes it super volatile. They, they jump in at the top. As soon as it's going

higher and higher higher, they want to get in. And then it's dumping they dump. And that's because they're weak-handed or their retail traders, short, short timeframes, etc. Today, we have institutions and they don't, they don't invest like retail. First of all, institutions typically have, you know, five, 10-year timeframes. So the retail guy was hoping to make money in 30 days. The institution is hoping to make money in five or 10 years, right? Warren Buffett's own Coca-Cola since, you know, 60 years now. Like they're in it for the long run. When it drops 20%, they don't just freak out and their wife doesn't tell them to sell.

No, they hold. And so I believe that a lot of that volatility we saw in 2017 will probably be cut in half maybe because of the makeup of the buyer today, having a long time perspective, having strong hands, having different intention why they buy it. So I think we're going to see a heavier purchase volume, which we already are. But I think we'll see less volatility as well. It's always interesting to me the way that things have shaped up with the Bitcoin and just kind of the inherent nature of how it was created because it flips the typical ability

of investors to see return completely inverse as to who is exposed to. it first. With Bitcoin very early on, if you were if you were just dabbling and playing around, you got in at a very early time and saw a massive upside. And now you're starting to see companies come in and try to build treasuries, at least allocate a good chunk of cash to Bitcoin. But some of those companies will not be able to, will not have the liquid cash reserves to stack as many sats as some of the earliest Bitcoiners. They just won't be able to afford it. And again, projecting out if, you know, the next epoch, the next four-year cycle of Bitcoin, you start to see sovereign wealth come in, you start to see nation states that are using Bitcoin as part

of their central bank reserve, all of a sudden, those countries may not be able to, one, stack as much as the companies that are starting to do so now, but they may not even be able to also stack as much as some of the individuals did in the early days of Bitcoin. So, I mean, like, it's, it completely shifts the power to some of the most forward-thinking early adopters of Bitcoin. And it could, like, do you see this being a major transfer of wealth and perhaps how we do things just in general in society? I do. I definitely do. And those are great points that you bring up. And back to these institutions and the way that they buy is different. A lot of that that Bitcoin

they buy might not ever make it back to the market. It could be locked up for good. And that's where the supply and demand really kicks in. People like to get complicated with economics, but really it always boils down to supply and demand. And so we have demand or supplied cut in half in May from 1800 Bitcoins a day to 900 Bitcoins a day. It's not a lot. Nine hundred a day. It's not a lot. And now, gray scale trust, which has been the largest investment, you know, way you can invest into Bitcoin, instead of buying it directly, you can do it through your funds. They reported in Q2 that they were buying 118% of new daily Bitcoin. That means they're buying all the daily Bitcoin plus extra. That was 118%. Well, now Cash App said that they've been buying 40%.

of the new daily Bitcoin. Now PayPal came on the scene two, three weeks ago, and they're already buying 70%. So add that up, 118%, 40%, 70%. Well, that's a lot more than 100%. And that's just three institutions. How does Stanley Druckettmiller and Ray Dalio and Microstrategy, where do they get their Bitcoin?

Where do you and I get our Bitcoin? Think about that, right? And so it's definitely going to change the way it's done. You were asking the question, like, how do I see this changing, especially with the sovereign nations and whatnot if they can't get enough? And also just the idea of the amount of influence some of these earlier, almost like engineer-minded individuals that kind of help build Bitcoin itself and the infrastructure around it, having that much wealth and perhaps that much influence over society.

moving forward. Do you think that that changes things? I mean, it definitely can change things. I mean, we can see on both sides of the of the political spectrum. You have George Soros, who is constantly trying to, you know, buy his way and influence over the world in the United States specifically. And then on the other side, you have the Koch brothers and they influence on the conservative side. And so people use their money for influence. I donate money as well. And so I use my money to exert influence as well. So that would definitely come into play. I think though overall, so yeah, so money always does that. I mean, look at Jeff Bezos. He's arguably, I mean, well, he's, I think the richest guy in the world at this point. He owns one of the most tech forward companies,

but yet he bought the Washington Post. Why do you buy a newspaper that's going out of business? It's dead man walking. Yeah. Why would a guy, the most tech forward guy ever buy a dead asset that's dying? influence. That's why. So I think, yeah, you're always going to have people with money trying to influence things. But I think what it will do, the positive side is that it will at some point start to take power away from the nations, away from the sovereigns. And that's what we really want. And that's why it's our tool for freedom and for the futures. We can basically kind of limit the power of governments by taking some of that power and money away from. Now, a lot of that power is the power of them to

create more. So if we can kind of neuter that a little bit, that that puts them in check. But yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out. It's, I like what you said there about the power to create more because a lot of wealth. Like for instance, if you're if you're well positioned and you have a lot of wealth and influence, then in our current system, that very much means that you also stand to gain more of the wealth in that if you're closest to the money spigots, then you proportionally and percentage wise will necessarily have the inflow of the newest cash, meaning that you are not feeling the pinch of inflation because you're getting it first and using it to buy, again,

actual scarce assets, whether it be real estate or gold or maybe even Bitcoin. but Bitcoin kind of flips that on its head in that just because you have a lot of Bitcoin doesn't entitle you to more Bitcoin. And so in order to enjoy the fruits and purchasing power of your Bitcoin, you need to effectively spend it and purchase goods and or services. And so a lot of the early Bitcoiners that do have a lot of Bitcoin, they could never buy as much Bitcoin as they have. They would never be able to afford at this point. And the only way to accumulate it in going forward will be to offer goods and services that people value. And so I think that it kind of gives us this truer form of individual sovereignty, but I guess capitalism in its purest form, perhaps.

Yeah. And that's a great point. A lot of people think, because they've learned the wrong part of economics, they think that rich people are just going to hoard it all. that's not what rich people do. Rich people invest, right? Rich people create wealth. And so when you have a free market,

the first market you mentioned, the cantillion effect, right? So the Fed creates money. They give it to the top first. They have an unfair advantage. And as it trickles down, people lose favor. But in a free market, like you're talking about,

the only way to get it is by providing valuable goods and services. So you might have the biggest Bitcoin stash in the world. But if I can provide a valuable service or product to you, you're going to give me some of that Bitcoin. You will. And so in a free market, it will move around. It will transfer based off the amount of value that people are providing to other people. Yeah.

And even beyond that, let's say I didn't ever spend. Let's say nobody ever could offer me quite the goods and services that I wanted to part with my Bitcoin. And I was just a cranky old man. And I just died with my private keys buried somewhere and nobody could have. Well, I've just taken supply off the market. market and and the existing supply is now the measuring stick for human value and time and assets. So it's it's nice to to kind of see that an actual good measure stick for value in human time that we don't have with dollars. Now I wanted to touch on so for the average

person that's looking at this and saying I see value here. I'm worried that it's near all-time highs, even despite the previous conversation that we had, I'm worried it's near all-time highs. I don't know what to do. Should I start, should I buy a ton right now? Should I wait for dips? Should I DCA? When people are talking to you about that, what kind of conversation do you end up having with them? And where do you, what do you give them as possibilities? I mean, these are the, these, I guess you have three choices. I mean, these are personal decisions, but you have three choices. Choice number one. one is don't buy. Choice number two is buy today and see what happens. And choice number three

is average in your buy, a DCA dollar cost average. Those are your three choices. Obviously doing nothing. Let's table that. But it really comes down to your level of conviction. It comes down to how much of a risk taker you are. So could Bitcoin correct? Definitely. Will it correct? 100%. I guarantee it's going to correct. When and how much, I don't know. So what I saw in 2017 is people wanted to buy it 12,000. Oh, it's going to correct the 10. I'm going to wait till 10. And then it runs up to 16 and then corrects to 15. So like they never got, they should have just bought a 12, right? And so we could see the same thing today. It could run to 25 and then correct back to 22. And so it corrects higher than what you could just bought in today. We don't know the answer to that

question. So one, just buy in now. And if it drops to 16 or 15 or 12, so what? Do you believe that it's going to go to 100,000 in two or three, four years, then so what if it takes a dip, right? We've, you and I, people who have been in this space for a long time. I mean, we saw it dip to what, 4,000 this year. So, I mean, you have to hold through that stuff if you have the conviction that is going to go long term. So it starts with having like a sovereign, having strong hands, having that long term perspective. So I'm going to buy today at 18 or 19, whatever it is. And if it dips to 12, that's okay, because I believe it's going to 100,000. So that's the first way if I have the conviction for that. The second option is, you know what, I don't know if it's

going to go that high and I'm afraid it's going to take a dip. But at the same time, I'm afraid of not buying it in today. So what I'm going to do is instead of putting, let's say, $10,000 in today, I'm going to put $1,000 in today. And the next week, I'm going to put $1,000. The next week, $1,000,000, we're averaging in. And so that way, if it does dip, great, then I'm going to buy some at the lower price. I'll average it down. And if it does just keep running up, well, I'm going to pay a little bit more for it, but at least I got some at this level. So if you're not, if you don't have that much conviction, dollar cost averaging is for you. If you don't want to deal with the hassle and stress of that, just lump some by today.

Yeah. I actually, I tweeted out, I think it was within the past day or two. But if you, with small amounts, even, if you had started at the all-time high and just put like you'd been doing like 10 bucks a week or something. since then until now with the pre now kind of hitting the previous all time high you would have put in like 1500 bucks which would now have a purchasing power closing in on around 4,000 so again that that dollar cost average you were able to pick up at the lows when it was dropping down to 3,100 in the depths of the bear market and that that quick dip down to 4k earlier in the year you you would have been buying then you also would have been buying at the previous all time

high, but over time, that averages out to the point where you've, you know, with the general trend of Bitcoin, you've done well for yourself. So, you know, for me, it's always worked well. Now, that's exactly right. I did a video maybe a few weeks ago talking about that. And I broke down two different scenarios. If you bought at the very peak and you kept buying, or if you bought at the bottom of the bear market in 2018 and either scenario, you're like, you know, you've doubled your money. if you would have kept buying throughout that time. So it works. Yeah, yeah, 100%.

And I think for ease and trying to take emotion out of it and stop trying to like chase those gains where you're going to inevitably make bad decisions, you know, buying because you're freaking out or selling because you're freaking out, I think it's for a lot of people. It works quite well. Now, I wanted to kind of, you know, I'm conscious of time here, but I'm going to start wrapping it. But I wanted to do a couple things here.

Number one is I was wondering if you could, maybe we'll just focus on one, what in this day and age is the worst or most baseless criticism of Bitcoin that you still regularly hear? Well, I don't know. I wouldn't say any of them are, I guess the most baseless one. The biggest criticism that's the most baseless that I hear is it's too slow and it won't scale.

Because that's not true and it doesn't really matter. So that's baseless. We have layer two scaling solutions that are faster and cheaper than any other cryptocurrency out there. So I use lightning a year ago. It works. Right? So the whole scaling and thing that, and it's expensive and it's slow, that's completely baseless and it's still one of the biggest objections I hear.

Yeah, 100%. And so the antithesis to that, what criticism do you think has the most merit that you hear still? I would say that the government's going to make it illegal. And I would say that that is less and less realistic as it used to be. We have our first senator that's pushing Bitcoin now. the Federal Reserve is the one that's really going to care to make it illegal, and they've granted a banking license to crack in. We have the whole financials, not the whole, but most of the financial system,

which are the biggest lobbyers to the government, they're all in Bitcoin now. So the chance of that happening is very, very low at this point, but at the same time, I understand the battle that we're up against. If you're going to, the bankers are in the process of taking over the world right now through the whole Bretton Woods II moment and whatnot. and they do not want to lose their power of creating money. And Bitcoin takes that away.

And so I do understand that it's going to be a battle for the ages. And while I think, like I said, the probability of it happening has gone down significantly. It's still the one that at this point probably has the most merit. Okay. Awesome. Awesome. And then I guess a two-part question to kind of round it out here. what and it can be recent or it could be a while back but but what is one thing

that took you a while to learn about bitcoin where you've recently had like an aha moment about some aspect of the technology something where you went oh oh i finally get that part or what what recently or what's the last thing you can recall in bitcoin where you've had another one of those aha moments shoot um i don't know the last aha moment i've had um you know i've been i've been and reading and writing and talking about this for a long time i would say probably the the last thing that i've maybe had that aha moment just because i've been learning about it is um sending up my own nodes setting up my own multi-sigs um learning how to put privacy

onto that um so that's probably i guess my biggest aha um not that i didn't know it but i just I didn't know it because I hadn't spent the time to really dig into that. It's all kind of new. So I have been messing around with that lately and learn a lot about that. And I would encourage everybody else to do the same. Yeah. And I guess to tag on to that is, is there something that you're looking to spend even more time? Because I mean, Bitcoin's always a continuous learning experience. I guess that would kind of be your same answer, but I'll let you answer it again. but, you know, what are you looking to learn more about Bitcoin, given that you can always learn more? Yeah, I mean, you can definitely always learn more. I think, you know, what I'm interested in where I really spend my time is, again, learning why Bitcoin.

So I'm always trying to see what the Fed's doing, what these monetary policies are doing. And really, I guess I'm trying to actively monitor all the risk vector, if you will. So one, the catalyst, right? So like I'm trying to monitor the Fed fund rate and the Fed printing, things like that. Also trying to monitor the regulations and things that are happening on it as well. There's like new travel rules that are happening and all this. So there's all kinds of rules and regulations. So I'm always trying to learn more about that so I can help navigate the future of Bitcoin for myself.

Like if, for example, legislation was introduced to make it illegal, well, I'd probably want to know about that sooner than later. so then I could start to decide how I want to proceed with the holdings that I have or whatever. So I guess I'm more interested in learning about the factors that are there or could be introduced that would affect Bitcoin down the road. Okay. And this is a pretty open-ended question here. I know I'm kind of throwing you a few of those to wrap this out, but I find some of the responses can be interesting. in a kind of like compacted version and take your time here. But what what does Bitcoin represent for you? Yeah.

So I would say Bitcoin represents hope if I was going to put it in one word. And I'll summarize it as quick as I can. I was raised in a pretty kind of grassroots conservative kind of political home. My family talks politics over the dinner table. And both my grandfathers are World War II vets. My father's Vietnam vet. And so I grew up in that pro-America position. 2012, 13, I started getting really disillusioned in politics after the great financial crash and all that.

And I told my wife, you know, look, things are going down. And I don't want to be a freedom fighter. I'm a surfer. We travel the whole world. Like I'm going to be in Nicaragua or El Salvador on a beach and a hammock. I'm a fish and surf. And like, I ain't going to be around freedom fighting. I said, we're not connected enough to survive in that in that post world.

And it was Bitcoin that all of a sudden I said in 2015, now we have a tool. Now we actually have a weapon to fight back. And so it gave me hope then. Today, fast forward today, the world is getting scary. Obviously, technology has created this prison almost for us, right? We're using AI, social media can basically train our thoughts from the time we're little kids. They can censor all our speech. You know, China, obviously, with their whole social credit system, facial scanning.

I mean, we're moving into a totalitarian nightmare that could potentially get rid of all freedom and free thought and put us into that prison. And in addition, and countries are becoming more tall, tellitarian authoritarianism, right? I mean, Canada especially is getting crazy right now. U.S. going back into lockdowns as well. The only way that I see that changes for us is through competition. We need countries to start competing. Oh, you don't want to be locked down in Canada. You don't want all your freedom take away.

Come over here. We have capitalism and freedom, right? Well, I would want to go there. When I was a kid growing up, I had several friends whose families moved from Iran or Afghanistan or even South Africa. And when they moved over to escape an oppressive regime, they moved to America, freedom. When they came, they had to come penniless. They weren't allowed to get their money out of the banks.

They couldn't sell their real estate. They couldn't get their gold. They came penniless. So the countries own you. And it's crazy to think today in a world where a country could literally own you. But I believe that only competition will break that. And Bitcoin changes that because now I can move to another country with my wealth. And that's never been possible in history, never been possible until,

today. So I believe that's going to speed up competition. And that is the only thing that's going to break this authoritarian nightmare that we're heading into. China, the U.S., Canada, hey, we're going to lock your ass down. You can't start a business. You have to force a vaccine, blah, blah, blah. But another country over here says, hey, come over here. You can start a business. We don't have any taxes. And like, you could go with your wealth, with your money. And once a few people start competing, everyone else is going to have to start competing and hopefully hope that will, that will break trend towards authoritarianism. Yeah, I love that.

It almost turns nation states from owning citizens to offering services to potential citizens. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I mean, you're in Canada, but in the United States here, we have like the DMV, so we have to register our vehicles, get our driver license, and we have to go to the government. It's like the worst thing in the world, man. I mean, it takes four hours of waiting in line, and there's so much. mean and rude and all these things because there's no competition there. And so that's kind of a good example, right, when you're forced into that.

I think I heard Robert Breedlove say it's like if you were a cow, I was getting milked, like dairy cows, but then all of a sudden you could grow wings and fly away. Yeah, 100%. I love it. Well, Mark, I've got to say, first of all, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show. I really enjoyed the chat. I think we got to hit a lot of different things. where can people find you feel free to shill away as you please well i like to do as much as i can to help everybody so there's not a lot of shilling uh the best place that you can find me is just follow me on youtube just search mark moss on youtube um and i'm and i'm pretty active on twitter so just

the number one um at at number one mark moss and feel free reach out send me a message uh tweet tweet out this this interview ask some questions regarding this interview tag me in it and I'd love to hear from you. Awesome. Well, Mark, thank you very much. Yeah, thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thank you guys so much for watching and or listening. If you are here on YouTube, please do hit like, subscribe, and share all of those things really do help and they help bump this video in front of way more eyeballs when you do them.

So thank you for those of you that have been doing that quite a bit lately. If you want to help out the show in another way, you can hit up the sponsors I previously mentioned. That was Leden, the guys at CryptoCloak. Kobo Vault and Bit Refill. And if you really loved what you saw, you can always hit me up with a Bitcoin Lightning Network tip at my tippin.me page. That is t-I-P-P-I-N dot me

slash at BTC Sessions. With that, I'm out. Have yourselves a wonderful day, evening, wherever you may be, and I'll see you next time for your daily session.