Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Cory Klippsten (SwanBitcoin.com) The Case AGAINST Bitcoin EXPLAINED! (#125)

Episode Date: March 11, 2021

Cory Klippsten is the founder and CEO of SwanBitcoin.com. He also serves as an advisor to Unchained Capital, Bitcoin Venture Fund (TVP) and Riot Blockchain (NASDAQ: RIOT), and is a partner in Bitcoiner Ventures. As an advisor he has supported more than $250M of fundraising since 2016, and as an angel has funded 20+ early-stage startups. Cory takes his opposing side and makes the case AGAINST bitcoin, and answers all your questions about FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt! Before startups, Klippsten worked for Google, McKinsey, Microsoft and Morgan Stanley, and earned an MBA in Finance and Entrepreneurship from the University of Chicago. He grew up in SF and Seattle, split 15 years between NYC and Chicago, and now lives in LA with his wife and daughters. His hobbies include Bitcoin, history and travel (Istanbul and Barcelona are favorites). Find Cory: @CoryKlippsten. https://www.swanbitcoin.com/ Get BOTH sides! Watch my interviews with Michael Saylor for the "bitcoin bull case": https://youtu.be/9w0VSQtVnI8?sub_confirmation=1 https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Watch my interviews with Peter Schiff for the "bitcoin bear case" BITCOIN BUBBLE! https://youtu.be/Qn_DPYtChP4?sub_confirmation=1 https://youtu.be/-ypwqOsDIds Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating And please join my mailing list to get resources and enter giveaways to win a FREE copy of my book (and more) http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 📝 🎥 🎥 Watch my most popular videos🎥 🎥 Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Nobel Prize winner Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Michael Saylor The Physics of Bitcoin https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuqyAvX7Wo?sub_confirmation=1 Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM 🏄‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔥 Find me on Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating 📖 Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA 🔔 Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 📧Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 👪Join my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize 🎙️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-impossible/id1169885840?mt=2 🎙️Listen on all other platforms: https://wavve.link/into Artwork: Sloan Sobie Music By: Theo Ryan: http://the-omusic.com/ Yeti Tears: https://yetitears.myportfolio.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishly from magic. Today we are going to be sharing a conversation with Corey Clipsden. So I want to first start Corey because I thought it would be wonderful to do a debate, to do a conversation between Peter Schiff and Michael Saylor. And so I have had both gentlemen on my podcast, both bring, as you know, diametrically opposed views. and I, as I said earlier, I keep getting kind of pigeonholed as being, you know, a gold bug or a Bitcoin bug. I don't know. Are there such things? I know they're hodlers, but do you call yourself a Bitcoin bug? We just call them Bitcoiners.

Bitcoiners, yeah. Actually. So I got accused of both things. Man, I said, well, let's bring the both together. I'll be impartial. And I secretly extended an invite to Michael Saylor, and he politely declined. And then Peter shifts folks. I don't know if Peter's on Clubhouse. Is anyone on Clubhouse monitoring?

See if Peter Schiff is there. He is a follower of mine. Peter Schiff then basically used the fact that Michael didn't debate him as evidence that Michael's scared to debate or whatever. And I said, I don't think that that's a fair assessment, even from a scientific point of view, to assume that someone not wanting to debate you is a sign of fear, cowardice, or whatever. Leave that aside for one second. Then I also wanted to remind people that Corey tuned into my live chat when I got Peter Schiff on Clubhouse for his first appearance. And it sounded like to the uninitiated that Peter was just talking over Corey and not letting him answer and maybe insulting him.

And he may have been doing that, Corey, but part of the blame lies in my lack of Clubhouse technological sophistication and not being able to take questions except for holding them up. to the microphone. So now we have a much better setup. And now we're going to let Corey really take it away. And I asked Corey if we could have a kind of conversation from his perspective. Another precious metal is steel. And sometimes what we want to do is form steelman arguments

to understand better where our opponents might be coming from because it helps sharpen our own arguments. So Corey, from my audience, could you introduce yourself and give us an introduction to what you do? Yeah, absolutely. So Corey Clipson, founder and CEO of swanbitcoin.com, which is basically a retail focus, sort of first place to buy Bitcoin, learn about Bitcoin in the United States. And then we also have Swan Private Client Services, which is an international service for high net worth individuals and companies around the globe to buy Bitcoin.

And I guess kind of a long career in tech and management consulting and finance, work for Microsoft and Google, McKenzie, Morgan Stanley, University of Chicago, MBA, finance and entrepreneurship long, long time ago, and got into startups while I was at Google in 2011 to 2013, started mentoring startups and ended up moving to the West Coast. And I've been in startup land full-time since summer of 13, so about eight years now. I'm involved in 40-something startups as an advisor, investor, former operator, and fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole starting in early 2017 with the price run up and had it completely backwards, thinking of it from a tech perspective,

because all the people that I respected in technology basically had it wrong, whether it was Andreessen Horowitz or Union Square Ventures or sort of all these tech people up in SF thinking that this was much more about tech than it was about money. They knew it was a bit of money, but I think it was kind of like they thought it was 80% tech, 20% money, and it's actually more like the reverse. It's like 80 to 90% money and like 10% or 20% tech. And so it took me about 11 months to get through what we generously called the alt-coin horseshoe,

starting with Bitcoin, exploring everything else, and then coming back to Bitcoin. And what was really interesting about that journey for me is just how much I relied on the incredible educators that started coming into the space in 2017, 2018. So, you know, if you're new to Bitcoin over the last couple years and you think that, you know, while Safe Dean's book was always around, and there was always a Stefan LaVeara podcast or a Tales from the Crip podcast and, you know, Brady Swenson doing Citizen Bitcoin, like, these things didn't exist. Jan Pritzker's book came out in spring or summer of 2019. Like a lot of these things that are passed around that are just touchstones for Bitcoin education didn't exist before. And I was

really inspired by that. And, you know, I think the main thing that I say over and over again that I've been saying for a few years now is that, you know, the amount of wealth that someone is willing to store in the Bitcoin protocol is highly correlated with their understanding of Bitcoin. And so that kind of led me to think, like the way to sell Bitcoin is really just to educate people about Bitcoin and help them ramp up their understanding, and then they would want to buy a lot more.

So this company was founded on that thesis that you could essentially just create a media house or a publisher or something that was putting out tons of Bitcoin content and helping other people put out Bitcoin content, newsletters, podcasts, videos, etc., produce some of your own content, provide the back end for other people's content, sponsor lots of content, and basically just get the education up-leveled and increase it. And then if you had Bitcoin for sale as part of that, then you'd probably do pretty well.

So that's how we have built the company. Coming up on a year, we launched at the end of March of 2020 for SwanBitcoin.com. and it's been great. And we'll probably start sharing some numbers, probably in Q2, but holding off just for now. But we're a team of about 20 people, and a lot of great bitcoins working on this, people like Gigi.

You guys probably know from 21 lessons, Jan Pritzker, author of inventing Bitcoin, Brady Swenson, Brandon Quidham, Bracky Vaughn Bitcoin, Carmela Campton, on and on, Reed Womack and a bunch of other writers and producers. It turns out they all have other skills too.

Like they either code or they've done SEO or they can write. And so we kind of just figure out what Bitcoiners can do other than just talk about Bitcoin on Twitter and hire them. There's more to doing Bitcoin than just talking on Twitter. I seem to relish in my feed now is now populated by, again, saying I'm a shill for one side or another, which to me means I'm doing my job to being impartial. But, you know, of course, we don't want to just comma T for comity's sake, not comedy. We'll always take comma D, but cometee.

But one thing I really respect about you, Corey, and going over your work is that you are an educator. You obviously have some interest, obviously, but you are impartial and as evidenced by the fact you come on the Into the Impossible podcast. To talk about sort of the Bayer case, the Steelman case, against your own point of view. And I have a lot of respect for that. Because I don't know if somebody like Peter Schiff, again, I'm not sure if he's in clubhouse. If he is, I don't mind saying this to him. I don't know if he can do it, and I don't know if he can take the opposite point of view for a variety of reasons. As I said, I don't blame him for talking over you because that was just awkward, the technological limitations that we had.

Although, as I said, he might talk over you if you were in person. And knowing him, he's gotten a lot of hate mail, et cetera. But what I like is that you are capable of doing this, and you've taken on a role, which I think is really important. Normally, I don't know if you've watched any of my past episodes, I usually interview, you know, Nobel Prize winners and authors and so forth. And whenever I get an author on the phone or on the Zoom, as is more likely, I always ask him or her to ignore the advice that people give you to not judge a book by its cover. I say, no, I judge books by their cover all the time. In fact, the publishing industry is predicated on that. I want to know, where did you come up with the name Swan Bitcoin?

What does that have to do? Is that a Black Swan reference? What does that refer to? Yeah, it is a Black Swan reference. I became a huge fan of Nassim Teleb's work starting in, it was 2002, I think, was when Malcolm Gladwell had the first article about Teleb called Blowing Up in The New Yorker, which was about the same time that he put out his first sort of widely available book, fooled by randomness.

And, you know, blowing up was about him, about Taleb taking the opposite side of most of long-term capital management's trades, or at least betting against the trades that they had on, basically. And it was just this whole idea that life is a call option and that there are free call options all around, free or cheap call options all around, and that if you understand how to take actions that limit your downside and give you unbounded upside, and you don't even need to be right very often. You can be right, you know, a tenth of the time or even a hundredth of the time if the payoff from the times that you're right is so much larger than the times that you lose. So, you know, I think in film, you saw this with, you know, Michael Burry in the big short, you know, bleeding

money for his investors every month as he had these big insurance contracts out, but then there's huge payoff when he's proven right. So that's kind of what that's about. And then the Black Swan came out in, I want to say, 2006 and was just, you know, exploded. it into popular culture. I bought a copy of it for my roommate at the time, who was a mid-senior guy on the Distressed Bank Loan sales desk at Goldman, and he proceeded to buy copies for his entire desk, which is kind of a funny story. I don't know if that maybe helped them get short subprime before the crash, it's possible. But yeah, and then Bitcoin came along, and obviously the white paper was published nine years before I really went down the rabbit hole. I made the mistake of ignoring

it when somebody gave me some in 2014. But for me, you know, a lot of people think black swans can only be negative, but really it's just any outside, outsized event that is not forecast by very many people and that has a major impact, right? And that can be positive or negative. And so I see Bitcoin as being the largest positive black swan potentially in history, but certainly for many, many decades, probably many centuries. So that was kind of the thesis there. And then once we started hiring more people, you know, they have their own views on what it might mean. And Jan and some of the other folks are pretty partial to the idea that Bitcoin at inception, you know, in the Darknet Days and Mount Gox and all of that was maybe a bit of

an ugly duckling. And now it's this beautiful white swan that's taking flight. So it kind of works in that way as well. Of course, you know, one of the telems claims in that apoccal book is that after a black swan event occurs, people say, oh, in retrospect, it was obvious. and that we should have known better. But of course, you know, there's that hindsight is 2020. But as a risk management tool, I want to know from your perspective,

how did you handle risk management prior to Bitcoin? And is Bitcoin the essential, the sui generis? Is there any other alternative? I know we have Bitcoin Tina in the audience probably. But is there an alternative in terms of risk mitigation and hedging that could be useful? Or is it basically Bitcoin, Tina? Tina. Yeah, you're making reference to there is no alternative, which is a great acronym used

by our friend on Clubhouse and YouTube shows. There's no other asset in the world widely available with a better risk-reward profile than Bitcoin. So in that respect, if you're looking for that thing with the best sharp ratio or that thing that lives on the efficient frontier to kind of push out the total return of your portfolio or the total expected return of your portfolio. while reducing that risk, there's nothing better than Bitcoin, and there's never been anything better than Bitcoin.

So, yeah, in that respect, that's true. It's also true that it has, you know, high volatility versus, you know, properly constructed portfolios that may be more about wealth preservation or just make sure that, you know, you're just not comfortable writing it up, writing it down every few years or whatever form these Bitcoin bull and bare markets take in the future. So I'm not sitting here saying that every single person with a billion dollars should be 100% Bitcoin. There are all kinds of reasons that people may choose because of investment horizons or just being averted to having that much volatility. But over time, we expect that volatility will reduce as market cap increases.

Those things should be inversely correlated. So I think as you get in, you know, five, 10 years out from now, you'll be looking at a much, much higher market cap and you'll be looking at much lower volatility. We've already seen that, you know, volatility in pretty much any time frame, you know, one day, 60 day, one year, whatever, reduces significantly over time with Bitcoin. And when I had a conversation with Michael Saylor, of course, he's obviously a very prominent, bullish advocate. a relatively recent convert, much more recently than you. And he's gotten a lot of attention and I think a lot of flack. And it surprises me, just parenthetically, that Peter gets away with basically accusing him and running a con job to suggest an uncorrelated asset could have a place in the portfolio

of many people. But before we get into that, I do want to sort of start down this rabbit hole of talking about the intrinsic merit of this. And I'll take the side of the Bitcoin. Bitcoin bull while you take the bear side and we'll kind of see how that goes. But before we do that, I did feel, and I'm just reminding my audience on the end to the Impossible podcast on YouTube and iTunes, etc. Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube technically. We're talking with Corey Clifston, who is the founder, director of Swanbitcoin.com.

But also you have a YouTube channel too that's pretty much thriving in these times. What's the name of that, Corey, again? Yeah, it's YouTube.com slash swan signal. Swan Signal. And Swan Signal, yes. You just type in Swan Signal in the search. It'll pop up. And yeah, we do a pretty serious Tuesday show

where we generally pair, you know, two pretty prominent bitcoins or sort of macro investing types. And that's live every Tuesday. And it's also a podcast. It's one of the top-ranked Bitcoin podcasts. And charging up the tech charts as well, which is pretty cool. And then Friday is our more casual show.

Swan Lounge and that one usually is just a bunch of bitcointers kind of hanging out and talking about the news of the day and sharing bullish price forecasts and ripping on no-cointers like Peter Schiff. Well, he makes himself a very fat, plump target for most of this. But one thing, you know, when I talk to Michael, I'm a scientist, I'm an astrophysicist, and when I would talk to him, you know, I would make this case that is actually going to be a bullish case for the dollar. And I want to make this statement, and before we put on the steel manning, et cetera, that the, you know, the number one fear of the United States government is true.

It's probably deflation, that they're going to do whatever it takes to, you know, keep their heads off the guillotine, probably including printing unlimited amounts of money. And we've heard statements that Neil Cash Carey has said that they have an infinite amount of dollars. I didn't know there was anything in physics certainly has not known to be anything that's infinite, except as Albert Einstein said, the universe and human stupidity. although I'm not so sure about the universe, and he ultimately was right about that. But I want to make the bullish case in the dollar. So the dollar is a very special entity. It is the reserve currency.

It is fiat. That's true. However, it has a certain type of essence of proof of work. And that proof of work, as I said to Michael Saylor, goes by the name of nine US nuclear-powered battle groups, aircraft carrier battle groups, each one of which is worth about a trillion dollars all in, if you include all the aircraft, the battleships, etc., or the destroyers, and the aircraft carriers. Including all that. That's an awful lot of work

that went into generating those. We own, you know, we have 90% of the military spending on Earth. We have an incredible influence on the world. Every country on Earth has positive associations, net positive. Of course, there's net negative. People think negatively of the U.S. I'm sure. But more people want to come here than anywhere else. It's only increasing. The U.S. passport is incredibly valuable, people die for it, kill for it, et cetera. There's a tremendous amount of stored value. And I would say to Peter Schiff, I would say the same thing. I'd say it to Michael Saylor, and I am saying it to you. There's an awful lot of work that went into the accumulation of wealth in the United States. And to say that it was going to go to the moon or go to zero

rather, I find that a little bit hard to swallow. So where am I wrong in that argument? Well, you're thinking about the medium of exchange, the dollar actually being the capital, the accumulated capital. So it doesn't really matter what you measure the value of those aircraft carriers and all the built-up capital and buildings and factories and, you know, the knowledge base in Silicon Valley and, you know, MIT, Stanford, New York, wherever it may be. The entertainment capitals of L.A. and Atlanta, like, you know, it doesn't matter what that's denominated in. So I think that's probably the first thing. You won't find me saying, I mean, where we would agree, and this would go like for any of the strat for like Peter Zion types or the case that you're making. I absolutely agree there's like no chance that another fiat currency is going to usurp the dollar's place as the reserve asset. There's zero chance for the euro, zero chance for the yuan.

Nothing else is close. Like it's the dollar and less until it's Bitcoin. Bitcoin is so in line with the principles of the founders of the United States of America. It's actually like the perfect money for like Renaissance ideals, Enlightenment ideals for the ideals embodied in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, etc. I mean, it really, you have to remember, like we didn't have the Fed printing endless dollars till like 1913. There was 100 years there. We basically were fairly responsible. There was a lot of free banking.

It was essentially a global gold standard for most of the second half of the 19th century. And, you know, everything kind of flourished. There was obviously like all kinds of, you know, bad things at local levels and not everybody benefited equally or whatever. But, you know, you had oil increasing productivity by 10,000 X for factories and moving off of, you know, having to go hunt whales and things like that. You had electricity come to the fore. You had, you know, soap and vaccines and all these things, you know, in the early. the 20th century, you know, that were kind of completed. And so we all saw all this amazing advancement. And the other thing that happened is, you know, basically from like 1800 to

1900, things cost less a hundred years later. So you essentially did have mild deflation over that 100 years at the same time as having all this incredible advancement. So one thing that's just false is that the, you know, whatever you think of the United States, let's just call it some level of greatness or uniqueness or whatever, but that hinges on having the reserve currency is provably false. It's empirically false. It's a tool.

And as with other previous empires that have had the global reserve currency, initially, it's a great thing. You basically can export paper or whatever you're, you know, you can just print money and you can get good in services. But in the later stages of your empire and your status as being the reserve currency,

you face the tripham deletion. which anybody can go rule and get into. Basically, it's that essentially you rot out your manufacturing base and you're essentially kind of just rot from the inside as an empire that has the global reserve currency. So I'm actually really looking forward to a day when we don't have the reserve currency, when we're on an equal, you know, a level playing field and the natural advantages of which there are many for the United States. And I could just tick off like some of the big ones, but you know things like having a level playing field, and the natural advantages of which there are many for the United States. But, you know, things like having more mileage of navigable waterways connected to productive farmland than the rest of the world combined.

The U.S. has about 13,000 miles. The rest of the world has about 12,000 miles of navigable waterways. So it's like the whole breadbasket, the interior, the interior former sea from the old days that, you know, empties into the Gulf of Mexico, for instance, it's just all arable land basically connected to deep rivers that go to the ocean. Things like that, things like being protected on the left and the right, west and east, you know, and not having to fight wars. Nobody can come and invade you from probably the Pacific or the Atlantic. You know, it's really difficult to do something like that. So, you know, entrepreneurial spirit and kind of the base level of society that's been created by the constitution and the checks and balances.

So there is a lot of social and political advantage there. Kind of the entrepreneurial spirit, the frontier spirit that's lasted for hundreds of years. I mean, it's not that long ago that, you know, Santa Monica had like 50,000 people and no water, you know, and now it's slowly it'll turn into like Hong Kong on the beach over time, you know, and people forget how young this country is. And I think a lot of these things, like we ebb and flow and New York goes bankrupt in the 70s and we have bouts of populism, but, you know, by and large it reverts to the mean. And there are so many geographic and demographic and sociopolitical advantages to the, you know, we have bouts of populism. place that having good money, I think only increases the advantages of the United States. For the moments that matter, choose Kyrad Naturals. Infused with aloeuvreira and vitamin E. Kiraad Natural's bandages protect your unexpected scrapes, cuts, and burns, while also

moisturizing your skin. Find deeper relief with natural ingredients you can trust to start the healing. When life surprises call for the best, choose Kiraad, a deeper level of care. Shop the full collection on Amazon or visit curad.com to learn more. Oh, yeah. I see it as a helpful sign. People talk about it as if it's doomsday prepping and that's all it's good for. And of course, you have to admit, I talk to a lot of people that search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And those people also suffer from the fact that many people who want to believe in alien activity of being real, also believe that aliens are walking around with prosthetic foreheads and so forth. So there are people that are correlated with the Bitcoin narrative that may be that kind of

doomsday scenario and almost anticipating it in some sense. But fundamentally, I think that Bitcoin represents a type of freedom. And we have so, yes, it's true, we are founded. We are the oldest democracy, right? But actually we have very few rights that are pure undiluted, unmolested, so to speak. And I think that the aspect of freedom is actually where we can jump off to. Because on the bare side for Bitcoin, one of the things that we talk about all the time, and I talked about this

with Michael, is the biggest threat being maybe our own government who may not like us to have so much freedom with where we spend our money and accuse people like yourself or others of wanting Bitcoin because its usefulness at its base layer could be traced to black market nefarious activities. So let's start there. I don't know if you have a kind of a plan of addressing

things. But I'm very interested to know in this. How do we know that as with gold, and I brought this up to Peter, it's not like gold hasn't been confiscated by the US government. Oh, it wasn't really, they didn't come to your house with guns. They probably would have, you know, you would have gotten a lot of trial.

Yeah, they didn't come to your house and take all your alcohol either. But I'm sure there are local politicians, as we've all learned, they'll be all too happy to put people that are using gold back then or Bitcoin now. So dispel that rumor or that myth. If it is a myth, maybe it's not. that Bitcoin, you know, as an existential threat from right here in the good old USA. So is the question here, would the government, or which is made up of normal people and

humans that can read and decide things on their own, would the government decide to essentially do the boots on next thing and go door to door and try to extract Bitcoin private keys from people's heads? No, no, not that, but they would be a windfall because you agree that in order to do something with Bitcoin. One of our listeners is saying he's at a coffee shop now that accepts Bitcoin, but it takes five to ten minutes to process the block. So you have to convert it. Maybe you don't, but a lot of cases you have to convert it. And they could do what they did in the 70s and 80s with oil speculators and declare a windfall profit tax because that is an

We got to level you up so you can very quickly decide not to put idiotic things like that and leave them up on your YouTube channel for too long. So I will address that very quickly since you bothered leaving it up for a while, but there's no such thing as like immediate final settlement for dollars either. So if you pay for something with cash app or with Visa or whatever, obviously that's just an entry on an internal ledger and they're extending you credit basically and they have your information. But you get a 1099. You get a 1099 for it. So I'm talking about paying in dollars, paying in dollars at the coffee shop with a credit card.

I'm just saying the taxable. Yeah, go ahead. What I'm saying is you're going to pay for that at the end of the month, right? It's not final settlement, like immediately. And so saying that Bitcoin, you know, you don't need to use the base chain. You can pay with Lightning Network and settle that up later with a non-chain transaction. You can also just swap out dollars, euros, yen, or whatever,

and use, you know, as you've seen with MasterCard and VISA plans internationally adopting, you know, their plans to adopt cryptocurrency as payments. You can just swap out the symbol and just run an internal ledger using Bitcoin and just settle up every now and again between large companies. So this whole idea of like Bitcoin being used for coffee, that's not really what it's for. I'm just saying somebody is on YouTube saying that he's purchasing.

I'm not going to dispute what he said. Yeah, I wouldn't do that. It's silly. I wouldn't bother with that. Yeah. But that, no reason to use on-chain Bitcoin to buy coffee. Bitcoin is for buying coffee plantations, not coffee. Okay, fair enough.

At least on-chain Bitcoin. On-chain Bitcoin. Okay. So the difference that you're saying, not to worry in that I have sold, you know, my microscopic, Satoshi, one Satoshi. And immediately, I got, you know, it was in the end of 2020. I sold a Satoshi or two.

And I, you know, a day or two later, here's a cash app or whatever. And here's your 1099. And I was like, well, what if it was like a lot of money? And what if the government weren't so friendly and declared that this is some special windfall? That has happened in the case of what it was called speculation. And if it's not a currency, as I think I agree,

then it is an investment or it is subject. to capital gains and why would it not be a problem? They publish the rules in advance and it's a very important part of our system, at least in this country, that you can't change the rules after the fact. Well, actually, sorry, Corey, I can't let that slip. I actually did get taxed in the state of California, as I assume you did. In 2012, the state legislature put into effect a tax that was retroactive. And I felt that was unconstitutional, but apparently you had to have a lot of people dispute that.

At the state level? At the state level, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that is, that is like, the worst kind of government. I wasn't here at the time. Okay. I don't know what that was, but yeah, I mean, you should have gotten, you should have marshaled all your resources for a bunch of pro bono constitutional law professors

to come and write against something like that because it's absolutely idiotic to do something like that. I agree. I agree. It's treated right now as a, you know, a capital asset, basically just like any other investment. And so just like, you know, if stocks go up or Bitcoin goes up and you sell it, then you're going to pay short-term capital gains tax if it's within the first year or long-term capital gains if it's after 12 months. So that's just how it works right now.

So again, it's so early in the development of Bitcoin on its path to monetization. We're basically in that store of value stage, and really it's early in the store of value stage still. And then it'll move into being a much more widely used medium of exchange, and then eventually I'd expect in kind of the 15-ish year range, something like that, to be a very widely used unit of account as well. So those are the kind of the three stages of monetization of a new asset. So just remind my listeners on YouTube, there's over 100 people in different channels, Facebook, YouTube, Periscope, Twitch.

I think I'm on Twitch, Corey. You'll be very proud of my technological document. We are on Clubhouse as well with the very well-known Corey Clipson, who is going to break down the scenario, which I originally thought was stood for food, but I think of everything in terms of food, Corey. But it's actually fud, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. So those are the three prongs of the Triton that is used to skewer Bitcoin advocates. Can you walk us through each one of those? What is the Steelman argument against Bitcoin in those three different?

axes or dimensions, as we say in physics? I mean, that's really just like a bucket term for anything that's sort of like an anti-Bitcoin argument. And going back to Peter's brief and fiery appearance on Clubhouse on your show last time, what was interesting is it was kind of a compendium of all the greatest hits, all of which have been dispelled from the last 10 years or so. It was kind of almost everything that's ever been said negative about Bitcoin. and every sort of worry that somebody's ever come up with.

It was kind of funny because G-G-G-G-G-G-G-I-I-I, so if you search him and Peter Schiff, you'll find it actually typed furiously and did a big tweet storm of basically everything that Peter said. So I don't know. I mean, I actually expected you to trot them out, but I can try to remember some of the things that people say about Bitcoin. So you've obviously got the one we just addressed.

which is kind of the B-Cash crowd that's kind of confused about what money actually is and the fact that you can't be a medium of exchange without it actually having value. It can't actually have value unless you have, you know, in the long term, nothing will have value unless it actually has that proof of work and actually has that decentralization. And, you know, historically the only money that's been adopted in that fashion was gold and now we have something that's better than gold. And Fiat never has succeeded, like the longest running Fiat appearances of than, you know, max like 90, 100 years.

We're probably near the end of the dollar's usefulness as a store of value, even though it's still being used as a medium of exchange. Everybody's sort of running from it, and all the smartest investors say cash is trash, and essentially try to just keep, like, as little dollars on hand as possible. It's just working capital for paying immediate bills and everything else should be in some other asset that doesn't waste away. So that's why we need a better money, a sound money.

I'm trying to think of other things that people say, like, you know, the government's going to shut it down. Well, the government can't shut down the Bitcoin network. They could actually shut down the Internet a lot easier than they could shut down Bitcoin because Bitcoin is actually a ledger. And essentially, as soon as computers were reconnected, then people would just reload the ledger and you'd be off and running again. So only if you shut off the Internet forever and shut off always in mesh networks and satellite communications or people using. smoke signals or passing notes to each other, you know, human ingenuity in the face of tyranny and oppression is pretty spectacular to behold. And as long as there's a copy of the ledger and as long as there's a shelling point

around people believing that that really is the ledger that is the fair and correct way to keep track of the wealth of people and companies around the world, then you'll always have Bitcoin. It's really unkillable. What they may say is like, yeah, you could make it really difficult on a country-by-country basis or jurisdiction. Each jurisdiction could do something nasty like shut down exchanges or make it really difficult or tax gains heavily or whatever it is. That's not really how the game theory plays out.

If you do things contra massive, contra basically against technological developments that are spectacular, like what Bitcoin is, you fall behind very quickly. You have a competitive disadvantage versus all of the other countries and jurisdictions that adopt the new technology. And so it's really, you know, it's the smart countries that are forward thinking that are moving very quickly to adopt Bitcoin

and realizing, you know, each person in each company realizing individually, oh, wow, this thing has legs, I want to place a bet here, I want to make some money here, and now you see all the banks coming in. Well, who pays for the politicians? The banks, right?

And do you think that Coinbase with their $100 billion direct listing in a couple of months isn't going to have lobbyists? Do you think that, you know, J.P. Morgan, who's banking all of the big crypto companies now, isn't going to have lawyers, isn't going to make First Amendment arguments about Bitcoin just being free speech? Like, it's too far gone. The train left the station so long ago, in the West, at least. We'll see what happens. And we'll see that India has tried yet again to ban Bitcoin. What's going to happen there is the same thing that's happening in Nigeria. Nigeria banned Bitcoin.

Everybody's still using Bitcoin, and it's trading at a 40% premium. It's proving that their fiat currency, their local fiat currency, is basically worthless, which is exactly what's going to happen in India as well. And then they'll be forced to capitulate and come back in, as China has three or four times already. China brings me to another topic that brings up fear, and that is the so-called threat of a 51% attack. I've heard about this. I'm sure you are far more learned about it than I am,

but walk us through that scenario as a potential steelman against Bitcoin, not for gold. I'm not talking about Fiat. Go for it. Yeah, don't care much about gold. But yeah, I'm probably not the right person to get into the deep technicals, but at the end of the day, a lot of people have this misconception that a 51% attack, which is essentially having like unfriendly or dishonest, you know,

nodes, basically blocking transactions that people want to put through or trying to roll back the chain. It's something that has to be sustained over a very, very long period of time and costs an immense amount of power to do that. So we know how costly it is to run this Bitcoin supercomputing network around the world. It's 100,000. times more powerful than any other computing network. And to be able to roll back transactions and really, like, affect confidence in the chain costs so much money to do that. And it really doesn't make any sense because you'd make so much more money.

Like, the economic incentive is really just to participate as a good actor and use all that hash power to earn bitcoins rather than trying to kill the network. So there's a game theory thing there. There's an exorbitant cost thing there. there is the lead time of being able to get a hold of enough A6 application-specific integrated chips. So these Bitcoin, these computers that are only good for one task, which is mining Bitcoin, to be able to amass enough of those without everyone else in the world noticing that that's happening and that then driving up the price of Bitcoin and making your attack spectacularly more expensive,

it just is not something that you need to worry about whatsoever. And in terms of other arguments that go around frequently, this notion, obviously, yes, of other countries doing it, but I've never felt that was a very persuasive argument because unless all 175 countries around the earth do it, you'd always be able to find a place where money goes where it's treated best, right? That's the old expression. My other question revolves around this debate that, and again, I'm not, Peter's not here, maybe he is, check Clubhouse. A reminder we're talking to Corey Clipsden who needs no introduction on Clubhouse certainly or on YouTube but to my audience and the Into the Impossible

podcast we are welcoming him to talk about basically a response to some of the discussions that we had with Peter Schiff a week or so ago and Peter Schiff as you may have noticed got the attention of Elon Musk recently and they had a very active Twitter exchange I actually had my video producer put together a kind of compendium of these tweet storms between Elon and Peter. And I actually offered to moderate because I was the first person to get Peter on Clubhouse. And here he is with the chutzpah to ask Elon Musk to be on Clubhouse without me being there. So anyway, I said, Peter, you know, you should really let me do it. But I listened to the, I watched the tweet storms

back and forth and really revolved around this kind of concept that Peter calls the digital token. Can you explain that aspect of things? That this is basically vaporware, it's sure it cikes a lot of energy, and then Peter was saying last week as if he's a huge environmentalist, oh, it's really bad for the environment to spend all this money on energy. Let's ignore that. But let's just say it takes a lot of energy, so what? You know, second law of thermodynamics says we can't even quit the game. You always lose and you can't even win and you have to stay in the game forever.

But I want to ask you, what is actually the... the response to that argument, the digital token, you're collecting these digital beanie babies, but worse because baby babies actually are made of beans? I don't know. How do you address that struggling? I think what that argument supposedly is about is intrinsic value. And Peter claiming that there's this large amount of intrinsic value in gold. And which really, if you actually look at the history of money and how it actually develops, gold was chosen for money because it actually had characteristics that were good for money. It actually is, you know, it's scarce, has a low stock to flow ratio.

It's hard to find more of it. It is divisible enough where you can kind of like slice it up. It's durable. It's one of the most stable elements in the periodic table, et cetera, et cetera. So there's like five or six characteristics of money. 14 if you listen to Andy Edstrom, maybe five or six, if you listen to safety in a Robert Breedlove. and, you know, gold rates very highly on those, and that's why it was adopted as money. And its adoption as money was why it was adopted as jewelry.

And it's why we think of gold as, like, you know, good as gold and this sort of show of wealth. So that correlation, I should say they have the causation backwards, people that think that, you know, because it's jewelry is why it has value. It's actually because it's been used as money for so many thousands of years. is the reason that people use it for jewelry because they want to show off their wealth on their wrists and on their necks, et cetera. So that might be the first thing. And then the second thing is the idea

that money would actually want to have, you know, productive value or intrinsic value, you know, is actually false. And it's only because, you know, we didn't have something like Bitcoin previously that that fallacy has taken so long to be laid bare. So now we actually understand that something with 100% of its value actually being the monetary premium is actually better because you're not crowding out productive use. And what you can see with all these other commodities over the years that have been attempted to be, you know, that people have tried to use for money is, you know, you're competing.

You're basically competing with productive use when you want to use it for money. and if you actually have a better money, you might as well just use those things for filling teeth or for circuits or whatever it is. But essentially, the 90 plus percent, maybe more, maybe 95, 98 percent of gold's value that is the store of value premium

on top of its productive use, essentially will go away over the next few decades as Bitcoin soaks it all up. When we think about the comparison of Bitcoin, not only to gold, I think it is fair to talk about other coins that are out there. People are asking in the chat room on YouTube. Of course, there are kind of, shall we say, frivolous coins that come up.

And there are other coins that are not so frivolous that have a huge market cap. So I'm thinking in particular of ether, which I know you said you don't want to discuss in great detail because of your, well, you can describe why you don't want to talk about those too much. No, we can talk about it a little bit. Okay, let's go for it. So I think they actually have some interesting features. the little I know about them. I'm not a big investor in them. But I actually think there are some things that Peter didn't understand. And if you recall from my debate with him, I kept asking him, like, Peter, you can't hand me a triangle. Like a triangle doesn't exist. It exists in the human mind.

So therefore, it has no physical value. It has no actual tangible, visceral behavior. However, we all know what a triangle is. There are other things that have no materialistic association, but are worth a lot of money. And in fact, there's trillions of dollars, invests. around this and around the world. I gave the example of escrow. Hand me escrow. You can't hand me escrow. It's a contract. It's some sort of way of mutually assuring transactions take place. I find that aspect of some of the alternatives, as I understand, Ethereum is capable of that or was predicated on that in some sense, and it has a huge market cap. What's wrong with that? Besides, just that Bitcoin is better. I don't think that's an actual germane argument,

because there may be other purposes, just as Bitcoin has a purpose, and gold has a purpose. You're not denying that. You're just saying Bitcoin is superior. So besides the fact that Bitcoin is superior to Ether or Doge or whatever, what are the virtues and vices of these alternatives? Sure. Well, just to put a nail in the argument on gold, like gold has a use in industry, and it has a use. It may be like, as Bitcoin Tina likes to say, like there'll be trinkets because it is shiny and it is cute. but those things will cost, you know, like children's toys in the future.

What will go away is that store value premium and that monetary premium for the asset. So the alt coins, the 10,000 coins that have come and gone, the coins that make up the rest of the pie when you look at a stat like Bitcoin dominance. So I do want to make a point there, which is that there's survivorship bias in the, crypto space that includes majority Bitcoin and then call it, you know, depending on where you are in the market cycle, you know, 20 to 40 percent alt coins as far as total market cap. And basically what it is is almost all the coins from 2013 are gone. And most of the coins from 2017 are gone. And in 2025, most of the coins from 2021 will be gone. And essentially what these are are basically affinity marketing scams or schemes trying to get some of the heat and some of the shine from what's going on. with Bitcoin, which is a true proven innovation that's actually doing exactly what it purported to do and has been doing since network launch on January 3rd, 2009. Whereas not a single other token is actually performing in a truly decentralized, you know,

capable of withstanding, you know, state intervention, you can take down any of these very, very easily. They can be turned off by their management teams, they can be taken out by government action. You can't do that to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is actually decentralized. But aren't they too small to fail in that sense, Corey? Aren't they like, who's going to care about, you know, something that has a market trap of 800 million?

You know, if they've been selling unregistered securities, which, you know, by the Howie definition, they all were. The SEC has already indicated that, you know, at least at time of sale, Ethereum was a security. And that's kind of obvious if you look at the law. They've kind of been given sort of a pass, not actually from the SEC, but from, like, one person at the SEC in 2018

said they thought that Ethereum was like, far enough along that it's more or less decentralized now. Yeah, even Michael mentioned that to me. Sailor. Yeah, maybe. We'll see. Anyway, I don't think they're going to go back and do anything about it now. But a lot of these other ones have to essentially play a lot of legal jiu-jitsu

to set up how they essentially launch these tokens. And you can't just sort of create these things that benefit from the efforts of a centralized group where the investors and the team that founds it profit from their collective of endeavors, which is the definition of the security. So you've got to be really, really careful with that. One argument is basically that none of these non-Bitcoin blockchains are decentralized enough to withstand, you know, state pressure, and they're just not really useful for anything other than being slow, relatively, you know, semi-decentralized, but really in the end,

still centralized databases. So blockchain technology is decades old and is slow. and is expensive, and you'd be better off for almost all of these use cases just running it on AWS or some other kind of database system. Let me give kind of maybe like an economic argument as well. The addressable market for money, for store of value that Bitcoin is going after is sort of on the low end, let's call it like $200 trillion. And this is just in terms of today's market for store of value. This does not end in real dollars, by the way, not nominal dollars. excessively like $400 trillion.

Everything else, you can call it like smart contracts, you could call it Fintech, you could call it like making it easier to sort of like create, you know, coalitions or cooperation or consortia or whatever it is. Like all of that stuff just has, you know, a potential market cap of orders of magnitude less. And these things are all unproven and are essentially at best, you know, maybe like early stage venture bets that are way overpriced and at

worse, as we've seen over and over and over again, outright scams. So that's kind of the main argument against all coins. You know, the place that I'd say, like, fine, whatever is like if you're a professional trader and you were before you got into crypto and you're very successful at it and you have great tools and you're not what real traders would derogatory call a click trader, which means somebody that actually used their hands and essentially you're using algorithms, things like that. Like, sure, it's a great way to make money.

Hopefully you store your profits in Bitcoin. All of my friends that are traders in this space, many of whom are very well known. And I talk to, you know, if not daily, at least a couple times a week. You know, their long-term stacks, their long-term store of values in Bitcoin and their denominator, their goal, their base money is Bitcoin and the rate of return that they're measuring themselves against, and trying to beat is Bitcoin.

So even the best alt-coin traders are already using Bitcoin not only as a store of value, not only as a medium of exchange, but also as their unit of account. And that's the people who know Alt-coin's the best, and they're already choosing Bitcoin as the money. And just, you know, not germane to Bitcoin specifically, but just from a technologist's point view, do they have, are there interesting uses of blockchain? We've heard about these, what are they called, NFTs or NFTs or something like that, non-fundgible things. We've heard about Bitcoin a blockchain card. Yeah, that's the latest, yeah, it's non-fundable tokens is basically the latest

narrative coming out of Ethereum, which is kind of like requires a new narrative to spend up every year or two to keep the long-running scam going. So the latest one is NFTs. They've actually been around for a while. There were companies founded around this. you know, back in 2016, 2017. They have, I think it's ERST 721, if I recall,

is sort of the non-fungible, like unique digital object token thing, whatever. You know, I don't have any, I don't have, it's a hard one because I actually,

there are bitcointers that want to see NFTs on Bitcoin. And then there are some, I'm just now paying a little bit of attention because you kind of have to because people ask about it a lot. There's a very, strong argument that you can never ever bring any sort of like valuable ownership of anything

offline, you know, or art, let's say, onto a truly decentralized blockchain. I'm just not deep enough into it to say that. What I do know is that let's say that those problems get solved and I did want to buy unique digital art or unique digital objects. I would never, in a million years, buy one that was secured by anything other than Bitcoin blockchain because I have absolutely no confidence that I would be able to pass it along to my heirs or have it be worth anything in 34 years or whatever. Yeah, that does.

Ethereum is just not secure. And it was the subject of some kind of attack, as I remember, not too long ago. But that brings me to another one of Nicholas Teleb's famous theses. What I love about Nicholas Teleb is that you can get almost the entire value of the book just from the title. So we talked about the Black Swan, influenced Swan Bitcoin. There's another one that's influencing Keating coin, which is called anti-fragility, which I'm going to make fragile coin. I'm not going to do that. I'm just joking, Corey.

But there is this notion of something is anti-fragile if it actually benefits from stress. And I see, and I mention this to Peter, you know, because the argument is, and now you're going to take up this side of the argument. Bitcoin's only been around since 2009. It hasn't seen true super cycles in the market. How can you put so much trust in it? And I told Peter it's been through at least a few bear and bull cycles. When I became aware of it in 2017, you know, it was 3,000,

then it went to about 17,000, then it went back down to 3,000, then it went up. So it's been through many cycles. Does that not count as an anti-fragility encounter that Bitcoin comes out victorious? or am I wrong? I mean, that is definitely, like, in the pro column. I think looking at network incentives

and looking at the different players and the way that they've reacted to different stressors from the outside, I think kind of shows the game theory of the network and the system and how the players, you know, what their incentives are and how they should do it, right? So you even saw that the, you know,

users, the people actually running nodes, had more power than the miners when the miners tried to fork off, right, and tried to push through the NIA agreement and basically double the block size. And that's what caused the split with Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV and however many more those are forked into now. And so that was the user activated soft fork and essentially putting through a pure, more decentralized version of Bitcoin. And the users actually had that incentive, and that incentive to protect Bitcoin has been there from the very beginning. And it's actually not all that hard. In retrospect, it was very heated at the time, but it wasn't all that hard if you think about it. It didn't involve, you know, tons of, you know,

major strife, major spending, none of that. It really was just education and, you know, some social media and a lot of, you know, podcasts and writing that marshaled these people to see the truth and to win the day in the favor of keeping Bitcoin intact as opposed to going off in the wrong direction. So I love that that just keeps on happening. And then when you see, you know, I think the anti-fragility is basically, you know, he talks about probably the dividing line between, you know, fragile or robust and anti-fragile is whether something is alive or not. And that's when it's kind of fun to look at Bitcoin and to say like, wow, this thing really exhibits the character. of something that is alive.

It may be the first truly alive thing that we as humans have actually created that didn't come from life before. We've found things and we've made things out of bacteria or whatever, all the stuff that you're friends across in the building next door have figured out in the biodepartment or whatever, but this is something that actually is alive

and that none of us can do anything about it. And in that respect, you know, this should, and it is, attracting a lot of the singularity folks now because they're realizing that, you know, this thing, this thing lives, and we all kind of work for it and adjust to it. And Bitcoin changes you. You don't change Bitcoin. So that brings me to my final question before we move onto Clubhouse solely onto Clubhouse from the remaining half an hour or so that I have. And that's a question I asked Peter. And I ask many of the colleagues who grace me by coming on the end to The Impossible Podcast, ranging from nine Nobel laureates, four billionaires. I don't know, you might be the fifth. Who knows, Corey? You're not saying.

But the people that come on, oftentimes they have sort of an opportunity to talk their book. In other words, they're going to promote something, which may or may not be proven. We hear this a lot. I was tweeting today about all these references to God that physicists make, who are predominantly atheist. And it's kind of interesting to me that they invoke the name of God

in order to justify some of the claims that God has attracted around him or it or whatever you're going to say about this supernatural force of nature if it does indeed exist. Anyway, one of the foremost exponents of that was Stephen Hawking, who wrote one of the most popular, popular science books in all time called The Brief History of Time. The very end of that book, he references God. But the point of that book is to dispel the need for God via these theories that he came up with, which I won't get into in this conversation.

I talk about it quite frequently in my podcast. And I view that as an example of confirmation bias. that he so wanted to disprove the existence of God for whatever reasons. Maybe he was angry. Maybe he loved God. I don't know. I don't care. But I wonder, to what extent can your belief, credulity in Bitcoin be shaken? Is there anything that could falsify the bullish hypothesis that you support? Or is it intrinsically unfalsifiable? I mean, I guess it would only be the facts on the ground,

which would really be like Bitcoin going to zero and nobody buying me. But so many people so much smarter than I am for the last 12 years have spent so many thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of hours collectively thinking of every potential threat and either figuring out why it's not a worry or actively working to mitigate the threat and working on Bitcoin to make it stronger. This is not something that is static. This is something that develops over time that, you know, takes all of the best developments from. outside and if it fits, then they bring it in. They look at every potential threat as they identify it. They change Bitcoin to make it stronger. And it's really hard to, I mean, by definition, any threat that is a worry to Bitcoin at this

point lives in the fourth quadrant. It's an unknown unknown. We already know and have mitigated collectively, me, not personally, any part of the probably, but I've been working hard on mitigating the threat of like any sort of government action against Bitcoiners, at least in the United States. That's kind of the one thing that I work hard on. And I just think that chance is now vanishingly small given what's happened over the last year. But yeah, I can't think of something. None of us really can think of a reason.

And that's why these, you know, the credible fudsters don't really. exist anymore. It's just kind of like a clowns gallery that are marketing their own thing. You know, it's just people trying to stay in the spotlight, whether it's Peter, tweeting about Bitcoin between five and eight times a day on average when he's supposed to be selling gold but doesn't have a leg to stand on. Or it's Noreal Rabini, like trying to stay relevant when he's just a disaster. Or it's, you know, one of my favorite authors, thinkers, philosophers, probably my favorite in all three, Taleb. But, you know, he's got a personal beef with somebody who wrote a Bitcoin book and decides to take that out personally on Bitcoin.

And, you know, he doesn't sound like the Teleb that we know and love from his books. When he tries to trot out these worries about Bitcoin or these attacks on Bitcoin and Bitcoiners, he just sounds like some dude at the bar that's had too many, unfortunately. I don't think that'll last. I think eventually, like, when he sits down and thinks about things, like he usually thinks them through and generally ends up correct. I think that will happen with Michael Burry. that will happen with Taleb.

And I think the only people you'll be left with are the people that have businesses to market and need free media, essentially, to market their businesses. And those will be the only people left arguing against Bitcoin. And it's a vanishingly small number of people, and there's no incredible doing that anymore. One final question. I know I said I already asked you one question, but what would it take for you to sell your Bitcoin? What kind of scenario can you envision? Oh, just not having any.

not having anything else to sell. Like if I didn't have anything else to spend, that's when you sell Bitcoin is when you don't have anything else to spend. And even then, it's starting to look like you could probably do what, you know, the owners of Manhattan apartment buildings do or what NFL franchise owners do,

which is you basically just take out super cheap loans secured by an appreciating asset and you essentially like rack up debt for the rest of your life and you never, ever, ever sell the asset. So it's very possible that all these people that are buying Bitcoin today will never, ever, ever sell. Yeah, and maybe last question. The last last question of this dream.

So normally with an asset that if I had some insider tip and I had true conviction in Bitcoin, which I don't, but if I did, I wouldn't be telling you to buy it. I'd be buying it all myself or I'd be buying as much as I can. And to what extent does that contribute to this perception that there is such a very, very passionate group of people who are working extremely hard? do you feel that people look at it and say, well, why are you promoting this?

Is it to benefit people? Is it circling back to the very beginning of our conversation? What is your mission? I asked Michael, he says he wants to educate a million minds. You, as I said earlier, are a teacher in addition to whatever success you have as an investor or as an exponent and owner of a business. But where do you see it going? What are you going to use this wealth for?

I asked Peter. I asked Michael Saylor, what is the purpose of wealth to you? Cory Clipson. I mean, beyond sort of like meeting basic needs of family, I think, you know, at this point, I'm just so fully immersed in trying to make Bitcoin happen and happen, you know, as soon as possible and spread as far and as wide as possible. And I don't think that we know what the new problems are going to be. We can, we're thinking them through and having lots of conversations about what a Bitcoinized or post-hyper-bitcoinization world looks like, and also what opportunities there will be when you have fair money that's global and, you know, essentially a friction-free global economy and all the productivity that gets unlocked by that.

But we see something along the lines of, you know, essentially like a deflationary economy that's much more equity-based and kind of the getting rid of debt. You'll either have zero debt or you'll have like 90% less than you do today, something like that. All those global debt markets will shrink. So so many things will change and so many things will inherently get better in a Bitcoinized world that I have a lot of trouble working on anything else other than this right now because I think this is the most important thing going on in the world today. So I'm pretty much just like focused on like my family, my friends, you know, maybe donating here and there to, you know, people's causes when it comes to my attention. but otherwise focused completely both personally and professionally on Bitcoin. I think it's really important to note that I would say 95% of the people that I know working in Bitcoin

were hardcore Bitcoiners first before starting to work in Bitcoin. They don't start working in Bitcoin and then develop like this, you know, roster of arguments in favor of Bitcoin. That has causation completely asked backwards. and is the type of thing that you would get when a marketer with a poor product is projecting their own motivations onto another group of people. So when you hear all-coiners saying that Bitcoiners are trying to run a Ponzi or that, you know, well, they don't mean it because of their Bitcoin bags or you see gold bugs, you know, trying to project something onto Bitcoiners as they try to shell their bags, the gold bags, they're completely missing out that almost everybody working in Bitcoin can't work on anything else because this is what they really, really truly care about. and they cared about it long before they started working on it. Corey, I want to thank you so much for going into the impossible and educating my listeners who don't usually get to hear.

Although lately, I have to admit, I've been having a lot of fun talking about it, but maybe we'll talk someday about the scientific applications of this. And I want to point out that thanks to Corey, and thanks to me, Bitcoin is now $50,620 at least according to my iPhone. Corey, thank you so much for going into The Impossible. Yes, my pleasure. See you soon.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Hello, I'm Stuart Volko, producer of Into the Impossible. If you enjoyed this episode with Professor Brian Keating, please let us know by subscribing, commenting, sharing, and most importantly, rating and leaving reviews. It really helps keep our universe expanding. We appreciate hearing from you and read every review and comment. We're always open to your suggestions for future episodes.

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