TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #13: Chiefy Nduom

Episode Date: January 31, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Chiefy Nduom, a man on a mission to bring Bitcoin to the balance sheets of some of Africa's Central Banks. Topics covered throughout the conversation include the current state of the global financial system, the importance of having Bitcoin in a diversified portfolio, and how Bitcoin will evolve to be the collateral of choice in the future when people take out loans. Tune in, grow your know.

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent we're back in the studio on friday this time we had a little saturday coffee session last week with crypto de medici i'm very excited for this week's guest and we've We've got alcohol back in the studio. Alcohol of choice today is whiskey. Specifically, what are we drinking here? Jefferson's. Very small batch blend of straight bourbon whiskey.

Highly recommended. Sipped on it for a little bit already. Very good whiskey. And Jefferson, if you want to sponsor the pod, let me know. We're taking sponsorships. So before we dive into everything, I'd like to introduce everybody to Chiefy Indom. Chiefy welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming. I'm excited to to have you on you Become a bit of a Bitcoin celebrity over the last two months. No

I'm a charlatan in the shell. We all are we all are For those of you that don't know chiefy blew up towards the end of last year towards the last day of last year After he posted an article on LinkedIn 13 African countries should buy Bitcoin right now So we were talking a little bit before we hopped in the studio here, and you were saying your Twitter stardom was completely unexpected. You were trying to keep this bottled to your God and friends. Yeah. When I wrote the article, I was just concerned because I was watching macroeconomic news and I saw too many predictions of the dollar fall in 2018 up to as high as 10%. 10%. And so I was thinking about, and I had been following Bitcoin for other reasons for a very long time, from 2013, I'd been following it. And so when I looked at the options, I

said, okay, look, you know, something, if the dollar's going to fall, and you're a developing country that owns or holds a lot of dollars for import cover purposes, right? You know, you need to think about hedging. So if you look at, you know, people, a lot of the nuance in the article sort of disappeared because i said that some of them shouldn't probably invest if they don't have the technical capacity but some of them who do right should go into it study make a decision to invest or not and that but if you don't even do that you have to do something so even if it's even if you're not looking at bitcoin you should be hedging away from the u.s dollar you should have some strategy maybe move to a basket of currencies you know you need to have

a strategy and that was i i wrote it really to raise raise an awareness in ghana and i did press only in ghana you know for that reason because you know the frenzy that is here in the u.s does not really exist in ghana there's a lot of interest online however you don't really have you know sort of like the daily news like now when you listen to bloomberg they're like the Dow is up by however many points, and Bitcoin is down. And so it's now become a part of the investment landscape, right? And it hasn't really reached that level in Ghana in particular. So I was like, okay, people need to pay attention.

Let me put this out here. And people have made some comments like, okay, I said 10% in the LinkedIn post and 1% when I went to the press in Ghana. And the reason is because, you know, I, you know, the original article I thought was only really going to be read by the few people I have on LinkedIn, you know, some friends, my family, and, and then the, and I knew the news story in Ghana would get a little bit of, of, of traction. but it was really just so it was very pointed at a very specific audience which is you know people who work at the central bank people who work in finance to like think through the concept and hoping that somebody would look at it and say oh you know fine we think bitcoin is a joke but maybe we should buy some swiss francs we should buy some pounds and we should you know hedge your

bets yes so a few weeks ago i'm trying to think how many episodes i think it's three or four episodes ago now we actually have somebody who works here za he's from zimbabwe and he was telling us Zimbabwe's history and sort of how they moved to a multi-currency state to an extent and how Bitcoin may be able to help there. And I thought your initiative in Ghana is very similar, but they're totally different situations between Ghana and Zimbabwe. Well, yeah, Zimbabwe has had a lot of problems and has been seen by a lot of people as an anomaly in the international space, but the reality is that there are many countries who

either peg their currency to the dollar you know formally or informally or they're what they call dollarized economies so the price that you see in the local currency is really reflecting the dollar price and we operate in a number of countries and ghana is one of them so there were a number of initiatives by the central bank a few years prior to try and for example they put out notices saying you're not allowed to price goods in dollars anymore okay which you would find and so you can go to buy a car and the price is the price in dollars and you translate it into the local currency which is the Ghana CD at the point of purchase right and and the reason why is from a technical technical perspective you know you don't

run your economy on a unit that you don't print right you know because you can run into problems that would happen to Greece and other things right yep but you know I think the reality is that there is a status quo in the global macroeconomic environment where the US dollar is important and for good reason reason, right? I've been talking a lot and, you know, some of my thoughts about international finance, you know, when I think about it, I'm not a tech, I'm a lawyer by trade. I'm not really a trader or, you know, like a real investor aside from what I do for my family. So it, you know, a lot of when I look at it, I try and think about bigger picture issues, right? So when I think

about currencies. I think about, you know, betting on a particular country and its economy, right? And I do think that given that the United States has the largest military in the world and has, you know, this hotbed of innovation and has a very good legal structure, there's a reason why the dollar is used as, you know, really the primary unit of international commerce, right? And I've been recently talking about Max Weber and his theories and the concept of a monopoly of legitimate violence, right? And he says, you know, that's really what the state is, right? And so when I think, if you define the state as the thing that primarily has a monopoly

of legitimate violence, then it follows that the unit of value issued by that state would be backed by that monopoly of violence. So when people say currencies can't be valued or they use currency trading value strategies, I think about, okay, when everything goes wrong, right? What are the men with guns going to do? The eggs, actimundo. So from that standpoint, right, you want to have some dollars. But then now you've got – now you've even got American investors

with huge amounts of money saying you're going to look stupid if you're sitting in cash. So – and before, like a few years prior or even like let's say in the 70s If you make a comment that you think that you need to hedge away from the dollar, people would call you a communist or something, right? And now the investors in America are saying, hey, you need to look at other asset classes than just holding cash. So it's a completely new world that we're operating in now. And this week in particular, we had Mario Draghi throwing some punches across the table, coming at Trump's policy, trying to talk down – or Draghi was trying to talk it up, Trump was trying to talk it down. and you had Mnuchin, I don't even know how to pronounce his name,

Mnuchin come in and talk it back today. It's funny how words can affect these currency crosses. Yeah, and I think that that comes down to the central thing that I think gets people who are thinking people excited about Bitcoin and excited about macro thinking is because it forces you to think creatively about the concept of value and you know that, you know, the reason why the words move the value is because value exists in human consciousness, right?

So, you know, if an alien shows up and says, I want a drink of water, and they say, okay, you have to give me this piece of paper, right? Then they're going to be like, why? Why did I have to give you this U.S. dollar, right? And so, you know, you have to explain it to them. It's something that we've made up, right? And it has not existed for time immemorial, right?

So once you start to think creatively about it, right, then, you know, the world of possibility opens up. Yeah, and that's sort of one of the themes that we touch on a lot here at Tales from the Crypt is we were just born into the situation. You start running when you're born. It's like you never, a lot of people never take the step back to sort of evaluate where we are in the context of history. Right. Specifically in a monetary history, and we do live in a time of monetary experiment with fiat currencies. He's a very, very fickle world, I would say, where you have central banks around the world coordinating dovish monetary policy. And this is something we haven't experienced up until this point.

And people don't realize it. They're born, especially here in America, we're born. You're obviously introduced to U.S. dollars. You use it as commerce throughout your life. And you're like, oh, it works. This could never not work for most people. they're sort of stuck in that mindset of never even questioning what it is and what money is at its core so i think uh definitely bringing up the the uh psychological aspect and what it is is

really it's it's a it's a human construction exactly in the mind it's a social construction i spent a lot of time in college studying sociology so i would look at how concepts people take for granted such as race or other things are social contracts so and when you start with that approach and you understand that humanity is you know moldable flexible and things can be created and changed then you apply that to value um and even when you look at global macroeconomic policy and if you read the post a lot of the things that i put in there were like opinions that were unrelated to the argument that i just have that i just for some reason felt like writing about right and you know when i look at it another reason why i do like bitcoin as a global

store of value that's permissionless is that that point you made okay we get born here in america and we use these dollars right and people hold on to their ancestors history as if they were responsible for it however the reality is that where you are from and what your outlook is in life is an accident of birth right it's just randomness you know you're you don't like you don't see your parents out there in the ether and say okay i want to come and be your baby You just happen to occur somewhere, and then that happens, right? And so I like the concept of something that people can participate in that is not dependent upon where they're born or what circumstance they're in or whatever. It's just an open network that if you have the resources to participate in, you can participate in, and there's no permission required.

So it's a very interesting way to look at a value system where, you know, common modern-day currencies are linked to the state, the monopoly of violence, and borders. And, you know, so this is novel and innovative in that, you know, there's none of that there. Yeah, having a peer-to-peer borderless digital currency is something that people can't grasp right now. That's what I—the people haven't—don't understand it in earnest, and particularly the innovation of censorship resistance. Um, but I, I've been arguing that Bitcoin is just like another, not an iteration, but like a, an addition to the internet, like look at what the internet's done with the exchange of information. And now we're just iterating on that and adding a value exchange system on top of that.

And just the internet alone, like what it'll, what it has allowed people to build in the last 20, 30 years has been incredible. And if you have, and that's one thing we're still working on as a plan is getting everybody access to the internet, but those that do have access to the internet have, they have opportunities that humans for the first 12,000 years did not have. Right. This is a very new phenomenon, and it's difficult to get into it because it's still very early. And many of the seminal texts and many of the even ways to access Bitcoin are not very

user-friendly. No. And there's still a whole lot of scamming and fraud in the space. Especially today. We saw that with the Japanese exchange. I forget what it's called, but it took a bunch of NEM. Didn't even know that was a cryptocurrency until today. Me neither.

And a whole lot of it got stolen. And that actually fits directly into even the argument that I've been making about it, right? Is that I would like to see developing countries participate, But I would not like them to participate in the way that you find now where the open nature does allow people to run scams, you know, and where, you know, it's a commodity, right? Because it's a commodity. So coordinated action and collusion in markets that are unregulated is something that can't be stopped. No. So I would not want people who are having trouble collecting value, they're not rich.

I would not want them to be involved in a market with sharks, with no circuit breakers, no regulators, no nothing. So when I made the argument, the reason why I chose the central banks to look at it, and the reason why I didn't say every African person or every person in the developing country should buy Bitcoin right now, is because I felt that they already know and work to prevent fraud of all kinds. they already have economists and financial specialists and technology specialists who help run the banking system so they should be able to evaluate what this is and then make a reasoned decision to purchase and of course they would hold it they wouldn't just go in they wouldn't see sitting there day trading the bitcoin right they buy they would buy it they'd hold it

and of course they'd hedge their they'd hedge their price position and another point that i haven't sort of gone into in deep detail is that within the allocation that I'm talking about, I'm not just saying go and buy Bitcoin. I'm saying that within, like, let's say, so in Ghana's case, 1% of the reserves would be $70 million, right? And of that $70 million, you would say,

okay, $7 million goes to maybe purchase of Bitcoin on exchanges, global exchanges, and you put it in cold storage, and you have, you know, human-based multi-sig approaches to make sure that you audit it and you check where it is then you would dedicate money to trading right and trading purposely just to get more bitcoins right and then you would have hedging and management just like you would

with any other currencies you'd invest another seven in um you know investing in technology so bringing in specialists to train people to understand the technology and look at uh secondary and tertiary levers levels on top of bitcoin so you can actually think through hey hey, how can we use this to, for example, make mobile money more transparent and also easier to track in our local economy? You know, one of the things that popped into my head today, I was talking to somebody and I was thinking that,

you know, there's a use case for even governments and agencies to have a cache of a tool like Bitcoin for emergencies, right? What happens when you need to make an emergency payment and the banks are closed, right? you know and you need to get something in today yeah right uh there's an emergency you need to bring people in or you need to bring supplies in well if you have your cash at bitcoin you can you know you can do that anytime anywhere right um and so you know so you'd invest in the ecosystem

you invest in mining right you'd invest in all parts of the ecosystem running nodes making sure that your internet uh capability is good enough to be able to interact and be a part of the network stay up with the latency and stuff like that exactly and so you would create a you know and all of those actions create value they teach people new things they you know diversify what you're doing with your um your value as a central bank and i and now today actually also this morning i've been thinking more so about the concept of a central bank as something new like rethinking what these things are yeah you were tweeting about today the swiss swiss uh national bank yes yes i for some reason this morning that popped and just you know i was just thinking about it and then

i was thinking about how they have managed right because i i i had tweeted about that the fact they made money right they made 55 billion dollars basically acting like a hedge fund right yeah printing money and then buying shares of apple and other things right but i didn't make the connection that the only bank that i've seen that is uh able to purchase uh where you can buy bitcoin from the bank is in switzerland i think that i've seen so far and what that means is that the central bank there gave them permission to do so so in my mind the connection was oh they must have you know if in order to give someone permission you must think there's a future in this business right so they basically they're going long on the new future and and then i mean

i didn't put in twitter posts and i probably shouldn't go and put my science fiction but i but like in in my mind right we get cosmic okay yeah and so you know i'll put all the disclaimers if there are any regulators listening i'm drunk you know i'm here drinking whiskey so and you know uh you cannot uh uh hold me to but basically the concept is i was thinking wow You know, Switzerland is the neutral state, right? They're neutral. You know, the U.S. and Japan were big into quantitative easing, right? Japan for like almost 30 years now, right?

Right. It's been like 25, 30 years. Yeah, the Bank of Japan basically owns their stock market, right? And then you have recently, Trace Mayer wrote an article, or had an interview on Zero Hedge where he was talking about Bitcoin as a geopolitical weapon, right? Which is a scary, scary concept, right? That's one thing people don't realize is that if Bitcoin becomes successful,

it means a lot of heavy shit is going to happen around the world. Well, it could because the dots I was thinking through were like, whoa, hmm, what if it is the case that this is an emerging geopolitical issue and that the concept that China is starting to, quote-unquote, crack down by not allowing miners to claim subsidies that apply to data centers in order to get cheaper electricity and other tax breaks which is causing them to relocate what if that is a reaction to the inability of the miners to control the network which they had they were unable to do in terms of upgrades to the protocol

right over the summer with the old segway 2x new york agreement and beat cash too so what if the concept was well you can't control this thing so now we're not going to subsidize it anymore and now the the miners are moving to more western countries and you have switzerland playing the neutral party and basically just going full out buying tech stocks, buying Bitcoins, right? And just waiting for the carnage to happen. Like basically saying, hey guys, let's get ready for the nuclear winter. Let's buy a lot of Bitcoin. Let's buy a lot of technology stocks.

And then the data wars will start. But, you know, the concept is it's, you know, when you think through, and that's just me just, you know, I'm running scenarios, right? I'm just trying to think what is happening in the world right now, because it's really weird if you really do think about the amount of energy that's being put, the amount of money that's going into the space, the fact that, you know, when I first read about Bitcoin and the game theory of Bitcoin, you know, this is really in 2013, I read about it and I said, you know, fine, there is international monetary game theory already going on.

So, there are political and economic reasons behind it. So, Mario Draghi's comments this week is part of that game theory. Right. They're all positioning themselves, how strong is my currency? How weak is my currency? How do I attract investment? How do I attract? How do I incentivize imports?

And all of that is already going on. So we already have a game theory sort of based economic system, global economic system. But I thought that that concept encapsulated in software was too fragile for me as a person who invests and who works with financial institutions. I thought that, you know, fine, you can say that it's uneconomical for a 51% attack or anything else to occur, right? But it's not improbable. Okay. So I thought, hey, I need to wait and see what happens with this thing. Right. I felt that it was, you know, in some ways you could say it's safer because you can see the attacks occurring on the network. Yeah. Right. And you can track them. Right.

Like we're seeing the spam attack that the network's been undergoing just get completely wiped out. I think the mempools on this cleared out. So, yeah. Right. So, so, so basically, you know, this it's, it's in some ways it's safer when you do things out in the open instead of behind closed doors. right so um and then i you know and by waiting you know a lot of things have been shaken out of the ecosystem the mount cox thing and the you know silk road and all these other things got pretty much shaken out and i was further interested when i said that you know okay one of the questions one of the things i always think very critically about is every time somebody gets up and says the price is going to go to zero it could take 100 years or whatever but it's going

to go to zero i always find it interesting because they never list like the three or four key factors that will bring it to zero you know i'm basically basically saying so you're relying on intuition give me some arguments because i would like to hear them i think yeah i mean i think there's only one argument it would have to be a foul swoop coordination between all the governments in the world to to knock on node operators doors and destroy them which is highly improbable and Right, and also it would be contrary to the concept of a free Western democracy. So you cannot stop innovation. You cannot stop information from flowing.

You can't appropriate property illegally. So go ahead. As a lawyer, let me ask you about this, the whole argument that Bitcoin is free speech because at the end of the day it's just written code that's run on hardware. So at the end of the day, Bitcoin is code. And that's one of the reasons why I also thought heavily about it and talked to my family and friends about it is because I did look and think through that. I thought through that argument and I was like, okay, can they ban, can Bitcoin be banned? And I was like, that would be unconstitutional.

So, you know, there's, you know, I don't really see an argument in a country with this structure that would allow a government to quote unquote ban. And if you try and regulate it out of existence, you also have another component that people don't understand. Regulation that is not just prohibition requires a lot of investment. You have to hire lawyers, accountants, investigators, and other things. And for a state to make that decision, they must – that decision by default. So people saying by default that you have to regulate it heavily is not actually a bearish indicator. That's an indicator that the thing is important. Yeah, Joseph Stiglitz fighting in Davos this week, fighting for heavy regulation.

Right, but heavy regulation will make it grow faster. That's what people don't realize. Because once it's regulated, right, once it's heavily regulated, and so, you know, we're still very early in Bitcoin, right? And so the reality is that a lot of the people who were originally attracted to it, in some cases, were attracted to it for radical ideas, which is fine. It's an open network. Yeah, I was to an extent. Not radical in the sense that – so I come from an economics – I studied economics in college and I worked for a managed futures fund. And I came from a radical, like, we need to fix our money sort of standpoint, like sound money.

That's the perspective I'm coming from. That's not that radical. There are people in the Fed who are thinking that. Yeah, probably. They probably are. I mean, I saw on the 10th when I saw this explainer article about Bitcoin from the St. Louis Fed. Sorry. Yeah. You know, there's explainer article on the from the St. Louis Fed on the 10th, January 10th that came out. And when I read that paper, I was thinking, what is the purpose of this paper? why would someone sitting at a branch of you know the central bank write an explainer paper on bitcoin that has some you know very um uh you know it has caveats but with positive language they say basically saying that it could be seen as a store of value like digital gold right it could it could be so there you know it's likely that whoever approved that paper to be written

i don't know if there's an approval process i don't know if the people there can just write whatever they want i doubt that right but so somebody had to look at this and say okay you can write about bitcoin right you know that means that there are likely people who sympathize with this technology in that branch of the government you know just in terms of running through probabilities and why the paper would even exist right because if they were all if they all thought it was completely just a ridiculous thing why would you bother spending time and resources writing a paper about it that's i mean i think we i think the public has forced their hand the But with the mania of the last year, I think they feel they're supposed to be the monetary authority.

They're supposed to have all the answers. And maybe they felt a little pressure like, hey, if we're supposed to be running the money, maybe we should understand this new money that everybody's talking about. That's a good point. However, you know, if they were just pressured and just didn't like it, the paper would just say, we're writing about Bitcoin and we think it's stupid. They didn't do that. No. They wrote a very well-reasoned article that explained value in very good ways and that explained the concept in very good – and I'm finding that technical people who are not familiar with monetary policy, when they read that paper, they start to understand what it is, what the risks are, and what the potential is. And that, you know, the act of producing something like that is very good for the asset class in the sense that now you have a very sort of grown-up perspective on what it is.

And the grown-up perspective did not conclude that it's magical internet money. No. And that's one thing that I love about this magical internet money is that it's forcing people to think hard about monetary policy. And again, like we said in the beginning of the episode, what is money at its core? Yep. And it's incredible to be alive during this time when this, I would call it a changing of the guard to an extent. I think that people's minds are being open. And when I think deeply about it, you know, I read Ray Dalio's Principles, his book, which is a very good book that is kind of like a, you know, it's a self-help book written by a guy with a lot of money.

And you read it, and it goes over his thinking, and it goes over how he runs things. But there's a passage where he says that nature optimizes for the whole, right? It's not really concerned about you. And when I think about this kind of network and the thinking behind it and the technology behind it, I think that paying more attention to it is good for humanity because we're learning how to manipulate and control data in new and exciting ways. And the craze in terms of fast money, like, oh, my God, the price is going up. is now forcing people to think about computers

as opposed to frivolous things. So I think that's good for humanity. Yeah, and going back to what you were talking earlier when you were describing how the Ghana central bank should diversify between buying Bitcoin directly and then investing in mining and node operators and internet infrastructure, that's what I love about Bitcoin so much,

is the network. The network's a self-fulfilling prophecy to an extent. But, like, I love your advice to not just buy Bitcoin directly. Invest in the infrastructure around the network, and you will bring value to the underlying token. There's a huge problem going on right now in this space. Huge. And it is blockchain. Blockchain, not Bitcoin.

Bitcoin's MySpace, you didn't hear? It is, it is. It feels a lot like MySpace. I mean, like, blockchain and ICOs and tokens, and I think that there's a whole ton of promise, but I think the public doesn't understand that this is venture capital. Exactly. Well, that's what I've touched on before, is, like, we're trying to apply old world sort of structures to this new technology, and I think people are just going to get blown

the fuck out because their concept of what this technology is is just they're trying to equivalent equivalent it to what we're used to and it's just not gonna work no it doesn't work at all so for example i uh someone who advises people on investing in what i call digital assets on twitter was use the analogy that forks of the bitcoin code and ledger are stock splits and yeah and they're not stock splits that is a very dangerous idea yeah i think that that that allows bitcoin whales to create financial weapons of mass destruction by making forking you know the the code and the ledger and saying here's bitcoin idiot buy it and you know and i've got by the way i've got tons of it i've got so much of bitcoin stupid and you know and i want

the etf to value it so now you know something i thought of in my bedroom you know is valued at a billion dollars and i can you know make 300 million by encouraging people to buy my products with it and all you have to do is copy paste and change a couple parameters and it's living and and that is a that is actually a beautiful part of of the of of this ecosystem however you once you copy the code right and copy the ledger and run it on a separate set of equipment it is no longer bitcoin it's something else yeah i mean that should be that should have become apparent after the bitcoin bitcoin cash or when bitcoin cash forked off of the network that's what people need to understand is when you fork you're forking off the network here you're not you're not some you're not like

a new bitcoin version that that people need to upgrade to you're running a completely different protocol and this is a very important point that i saw and there was a letter issued by the sec i believe where they were commenting on some of the etf applications and they asked questions which at first i thought why are these questions here but then i realized that i think they have run through what we just described and are contemplating prohibiting the valuation of forks and bitcoin etfs because they ask questions about you know what are how are you going to value these and What is the implication of market manipulation by quote-unquote Bitcoin whales and that's like so my whole I think I might be in the minority in this view where I don't think crypto hedge funds are smart at all

Like like I think the risk that you take on by holding all the assets in the central pool is stupid I think it's totally anathema to what Bitcoin was created for which is Holding your own wealth and then again like we're talking about now with the forks like we're finding this out with coinbase like and they're not even a hedge fund they're just a service where people are buying bitcoin it's a whole clusterfuck like people if they wanted to could go to coinbase and say hey i want my bitcoin gold i want my bitcoin platinum like i'm holding it on your exchange you gave everybody their bitcoin cash why aren't i getting these other forks and it creates a whole clusterfuck for everybody and that's something that you have people running

out of the gate so i've been talking about this a lot with lewis who who's my boss here he he helped me start this podcast and really encouraged me to like get into this um it like these crypto hedge funds like and they're they're like they don't they're it's old old money trying to get on a new hype phase and trying to make a quick buck but they don't realize like the logistical shit show they can run into the nature of these protocols i think that if you're structuring an entity like this, first off, every digital asset should probably be ring-fenced in its own LLC. I don't think you should pool them together. And because for a number of reasons, you don't want risks to spread. Similarly, I would think that you have to have a very clear policy on what

you're investing in. And I think the reason why I came up with that article is because I do believe in the gold 2.0 disrupting gold thesis there are a number of investors who are promoting this concept but i've looked at it and i've read some writing there's a gentleman named vincent lanley uh he is the world bank he writes at coin telegraph and other people who have written pretty extensively about you know that trajectory of this emerging as an asset class with the market caps and so on and so forth. I think that's a very compelling story for value. However, if you have an immutable ledger, the value is that immutable ledger. And the value is the consensus protocol within that walled garden. And so as you said, once you move out of that

walled garden, you cannot relate value to that because the value is that walled garden and the immutable ledger. You know that your balance is there forever. And so I think that investors who want to take advantage of these sort of things where basically somebody just shows up and says that hey you were a part of this ledger so now you can be a part of my software right they're basically it's like the technology technological equivalent of a drug dealer giving someone a free baggie of crack yeah yeah right hey here's some free money there you go have some fun right and you know, enjoy it, you know, but it's, it's a trap. So, so when I look at it and I, and I know a lot of people really don't like, like there's, you know, these are some of the most, um, I guess

the people don't like this argument. A lot of people in the space, when I say things like this, I can tell they're angry. They're angry. I've gotten some angry comments. A lot of emotions in this space. Yes. Angry comments. You know, I'm just, I'm just a guy talking about Bitcoins. they'll be angry we're all just dudes talking yeah exactly i'm nobody you know i'm and a few women actually there's women in blockchain yes yeah but um it's not that serious and it's just but you know but i i do think serious thought needs to go into how can you make these things available for the ordinary person to purchase them within their 401k or whatever a retirement portfolio and you have to be responsible about that you have to make tough decisions

And one of those decisions to me would result in the drop in price of a lot of Bitcoin forks because, you know, the SEC would say, okay, we're approving the ETF, but no forks, right? And the thing that I said is just, you know, once you legitimize them, you know, it's the Pandora's box. How do you decide which one to include, which one not to include, you know, and what are the market effects of that? And furthermore, you know, as another analogy, you can just say it's alchemy, right? If it's digital gold, you can't just create more of it out of nowhere. You need to be able, you know, you can't just get a little bit of, you know, get nodes and miners and just say, hey, we've got this new thing. No, you have to, you know, stick with that. You know, the gold in Bitcoin is the massive network that now exists with a massive amount of computing power and participation.

And you don't relate it to vapor. And, yeah, and the mental power that goes in. And that's one conversation I had last week with my guest, is we got into what people need to realize at the end of the day. This is code. It can be buggy. You want to be putting your value in code that's most likely not to be buggy. And Bitcoin, up to this point in time, has proven to be the most secure blockchain. Right.

And I think that the fact that it's open source, which allows anybody to go and just comb through it and try and discover something, aids in its security. And so, right, exactly. By definition, the moment you decide to fork it and put another team on it, it's by definition an inferior thing with less attention, less scrutiny, less history. And that is, I think, like the 800-pound gorilla in the blockchain space, which is that many of the new blockchains are very new. And what happened to Bitcoin, you know, in its early years? What's the probability that you, with your new blockchain technology, won't experience the things that happened to Bitcoin? Well, I would argue there's even more scrutiny on these new blockchains. Bitcoin has that first mover advantage where it didn't have as many eyes on it in the first few years where it was lucky.

It was able to solve patch bugs that would have otherwise been fatal when there were fewer eyes on it. So now when these blockchains are launching and you have billions of eyes on it now. But remember, most people don't even, like with ICOs, most people don't even read the white paper, right? No. And let alone have the skills to go through. But you know who is reading that? Somebody like the DAO hacker or the hackers. Exactly.

Exactly. I heard about a company, there's a number of companies that now do audits for ICOs and other things, and they're finding lots and lots of errors, lots and lots of problems. You know why? Because this week, Barstool Sports, some company in LA, pitched our investors that Barstool should have an ICO and should have a token. Nice. This media company should have a token. Can I buy some of it? What's the price? How much money am I going to make? I told them not to be stupid. I told the Shernan group, the people that made this office and this studio possible, I was like,

do not engage with these people. Barstool does not need an ICO. Then I went to the website of this group that was pitching them and they were taking this meeting. I was like, have you seen their website? It's basically like a WordPress, the shitty CSS. Everything was fucked up. It wasn't professional at all.

I was like, that's the nature of the space right now, And ICOs specifically, it's just a bunch of people hopping on the hype train like, hey, we'll structure your ICO, we'll make sure, we'll teach you how to do an ERC-20 spin-up and start your own network of value. Which you can learn for free by going to the Ethereum website. So, you know, don't hire a consultant, just go to the website and learn how to do it. But the thing is, I think it's a very interesting space and you never want to discourage innovation, you never want to discourage entrepreneurs. but I think that everybody should just assume that 99% of what's out there won't work and so you've got to do a lot of work

to see what could possibly work and even for the things that will work many of them will probably take more time than people think they will take and Vitalik Bitter himself says that a lot he's like things have been taking longer than I think that they would that's one of the things he learned

from going through the process so when I think about the blockchain space and a lot of people have said this You know, for it to become a real space, you know, first, you know, the simple blockchain with the simple theory, right, sound money, that's it. You know, very simple, you know, application, permissionless store of value and transmission of value. Slow and dumb. That needs to succeed and become and grow to act as, you know, the cornerstone of a very exciting industry. the fulcrum from which everything can sort of yeah i totally agree and that's that's one thing

i touch on a lot in the newsletter i write and this podcast is the hubris that you see out there that people who are discovering this and like think they've figured it all out and think they've they've discovered how it's going to be applied throughout history or going to be applied to our society it it blows my mind to think that less than a decade in we're going to like have this figure it out and exactly how it's going to work it's very funny like when i when i posted one of my actual first posts on linkedin about bitcoin i posted it and i shared the email that i sent to my business group of 2013 just you know because i was about to start talking about it said you know we've been studying it for a while right and someone commented that oh it's easy to come out an

expert someone actually used to work with me in it and uh so my next article i noted and try and make it explicit to people now that you know i am not a bitcoin expert there's no such thing right and like anything that i do if i'm going to go talk to a banking group or something i don't get paid to do it i'm doing it because i think it's important for them to look at and and the reality is and i always you know and a big part of the argument is always that you know build the capacity to understand it yourself don't listen to me because one of the ironic things about the run-up in price is that it's likely that if you were to interview, you know, a significant sample of everyone who's purchased a digital asset on Coinbase over the past 12 months, that most of

them, the primary decision point would be their trust of somebody else who's invested in it and made money. So the trustless system is growing through people trusting people, right? And so it's ironic, right? But that's human nature, okay? And that's fine. It's okay for people to trust people and and follow what they do but you know you always it's always buyer beware look at what you're doing understand the risks and what you're doing and once you once you go deep into that you'll spend less time thinking about how much money to put into it and more time thinking about how to understand it and interact with it that's that's our that's our quip here at tales from the crypt this is a journey people you're going to go on a journey of learning and that's uh we've

talked about this before too one of my favorite tweets about bitcoin from neil wood fine is that if bitcoin becomes successful it may usher in the next enlightenment because it forces people to think about things they've never thought about well yes and and you can think about that in very very practical terms um people who go on exchanges and stuff usually in many cases are very concerned about hacking and other things and just by purchasing a little bit of bitcoin from an exchange like kraken or gemini right you know you'll you'll see advisories about you know how SMS is, you know, is risky in terms of the porting risk and how, you know, you need to use an authenticator, right?

And there are posts that they've put on about basic internet security that should just be standard in the industry, right? Like right now, a regulator should come out and say, banks, financial institutions, exchanges should not be allowed to use SMS as an authentication method due to the porting risk. So come up with your authenticator within six to 12 months, right? That should be the standard. And that's not a big ask either. No, no.

I mean, they're open. That's why everybody uses Google Authenticator. The people who know how to do it. It's not esoteric, right? But this space is driving people into those better standards. And for those of you using Google Authenticator, make sure you physically write down the backup to your authenticator. I've had that happen to me before where I lost a phone

and lost access to Google Authenticator. Yeah. You need the backups. Have the backups. Right. And if you're paranoid, you split up your authenticators across multiple phones. So you're never completely out.

Only the paranoid survive. Right. But, you know, this is something that, you know, the concept of leading to an enlightenment is very interesting to me. I do think that paying attention to digital value forces people to value digital things and technology. And that process should lead to a new innovation, should lead to investing. I mean, so here's a scenario, right? What if somebody has $300 and they decide to buy Bitcoin instead of a pair of Jordans, right? And now they're paying attention, watching the Bitcoin space as opposed to watching the shoe space.

Is that a plus or a minus for humanity? I don't know, but you can make an argument that that person may learn how to build a computer, that person may decide to learn how to code, that person may learn to decide to learn about monetary policy, right, as opposed to just shoes. So, you know, there are pluses and minuses to everything, and this particular asset class, you know, I look at it, emerging asset class, it does, I think, force people to get a little bit on their game. And anybody, like most serious people I know about that I've met, I've met a lot of serious people now in the past few weeks, right? Most of them are very well read. Most of them think critically about things. They don't just take the world for granted as it is. Most of them think in a long-term view about society.

and so whatever your political background or your view about the world this is something that is leading to an open and interesting discussion that's good it's it's incredible i mean and it's invigorating too like i'm i'm addicted to it like i i can't i can't go 30 minutes without checking my crypto twitter list to see what's going on because the news happened is happening so fast new developments are coming out every day i mean yesterday was a huge news day for the space fundamental wise like robin hood's coming out with an app or excuse me they already have an app they're about to uh enable bitcoin ethereum and i believe 15 other cryptocurrency uh trading pairs uh on their app so it's going to open up a whole nother avenue for for new investors and

then you had coinbase buying a trading firm you had a strike coming out which is a lightning network stripe like api where people can start building on top of the lightning network and helping merchants out uh receive instant nearly fee list transactions then on top of that you have the mempool clearing out like the fundamentals are lining up right now and it's uh it's it's funny to see uh the new wave of people that came in like towards the end of last year with the price rise who bought between 15 and 19 000 like hey it's boring right now it's like no you need to pay attention to these things that are going on around stop priorize away from the price charts and start looking at the fundamentals right exactly and and i am uh so clearly not an investment

advisor but i tell people when they're looking at this like to have a reasonable allocation and there are academic papers showing that press by one by a professor lu out of johns hopkins he does a little study and comes to the preliminary conclusion that you know 1.3 percent portfolio allocation over time for people who manage money could be a good thing could be not it necessarily is and so and the best thing to do is you know to have an allocation that you can lose and not feel bad about and then forget about it and then study about the the whole space because i've sent this many times before i'm not you know i'm not you know the the trading uh industrial complex has been shoehorned onto bitcoin right in terms of this it's you know it's basically just taking

what people did in forex and applying it to bitcoin which you can make an argument that it's interesting but it's not necessarily the best best use of human brain power people so people people who are good at it go for it right exactly but for most people you're going to fail so why not just hold on to it and then learn how to invest generally and have financial freedom generally and then you won't have to be watching charts and prices because you already have a plan and you're following it, and you're saving, you're investing, and you're not worried about your financial stability. That's what gives people the freedom to then move actually exponentially

in terms of wealth and knowledge by studying and finding a good space. I keep telling people that there are a lot of people who are spending months and weeks reading books to learn trading charts who could just study to become an accountant or a certified financial planner who understands Bitcoin, and then they could make a real career out of it. So even sometimes like I've been going around setting up hardware wallets for people doing that for a small fee and like something small like that. Just learn how to make people comfortable because, again, it's a whole it's a whole conference. This is something that's completely out of most people's comfort zone.

So if you're able to make some people that are looking at into it more comfortable, that's a way to make some money. That's a way to make some Bitcoin. Right. And there's so many tangential ways you can get into this. Absolutely. There are many people who just want someone to explain what the Bitcoins are. That's it. What are the Bitcoins? That's all they want to know. They may not want to buy them, but they just want to know what it is. And frankly, there are a lot of global leaders, and the person who is paid to explain what Bitcoin is to them is not doing their job. They come through and they say, okay, they're going to ask you about Bitcoin. What am I going to say?

Say something about money laundering and say something about blockchain. say that you like blockchain but you're not sure about that's okay now go go any serious organization right now in my view that is tangentially related to managing storing and valuing financial assets or value

should be dedicating some staff to understanding this thing and in fact that is what's happening for many of them but to me there's a global consensus that the concept of quote-unquote, blockchain is innovative and new and cool, right?

But the oldest implementation of that technology is Bitcoin. So if you're going to say that you like that, you know, and you manage a team of economists or investors or whatever, you need to have at least the intern, at least one intern, who's really just 100% focused to this space so you're educated. Yeah. Because it's big and it requires thought and study. And it's moving fast.

It's moving at breakneck speed. and that was one thing. I was sitting in the office for the Managed Futures Fund that I worked for and I was that junior analyst screaming, we should be paying attention to this. We should be paying attention to Bitcoin. We should be buying some.

I got laughed out of the office. I went and decided to learn more about UX and UI design and sort of products and how they're built and how code interacts with apps or help people build apps with code and understanding front-end versus back-end technologies. And I wish they would have listened to me, but I'm happy they didn't to an extent.

Well, you know, look, one of the things that I say is that I have not, I have yet to meet anybody who is really serious about this asset class, who has, you know, at least gone to one conference, who has managed mining equipment or a node, who has studied and read the top papers on SSRN, which are freely available about this asset class, I've yet to meet anybody who's taken that level of effort

who is bearish on the concept generally. Everybody I know who knows a lot about it likes it and is excited about it. And usually there's a high correlation between ignorance as to what it is and bearishness. So this is something that has a lot of potential. It's something that a lot of people look at as a very scary thing because it could enable money laundering or illegal things. But I always say that, you know, even as not a purely technical person, any smart criminal doesn't put their information in a computer, right?

So, you know, I think that, you know, there's a paper that I saw today by some Qatari researchers, and they had gone through and analyzed historical transactions on the blockchain and managed to use techniques to actually pinpoint who these people were with publicly identifiable information, right? Now, this space is all about censorship resistance and other things, but you have to realize that it requires using the internet, which is, you know, this huge gerrymandered public managed thing. And so, I mean, gerryrigged, you know, it's been like sort of patched together, you know, and it doesn't always work. And even in New York, I walk around, sometimes my phone signal goes out, right? So, it's not God, it's just technology, right? with a very huge potential implication. But, you know, and the point is is that a lot of people's perceptions

about what it is and the bad things are just, and I see a lot of it as just fear-mongering and ignorance. Yeah, it was Joseph Stiglitz this week. It's for money launderers and drug dealers that want to transact anonymously. It's like if you actually looked into this, Bitcoin's not anonymous at all.

Fungibility has been lost at the protocol level. They're pseudonyms. They're not, yeah, pseudonyms. you're not anonymous and it's very difficult to be it's practically I remember reading an article once just because I was interested and someone went through the steps

to have a phone that is actually an anonymous phone because if they want to find you they're going to cross reference it to your other phone, your other patterns and I was looking through the steps and someone was saying how we'd actually make this work

and they're so ridiculous they're just so to actually have a phone that you own that nobody knows it's you, right? You have to take it to places at random times and take it on little trips and give it to your friend and say, go to New York while I'm going to Milwaukee. It's ridiculous. People don't realize how difficult it is. And so when I look at this space, I think that it's going to lead to more awareness and changes in the law. For example, I think that eventually we're going to be forced to move towards higher value-added tax,

and what they're going to do is tax people at the point of consumption, and they're not going to worry about income tax anymore. Oh, that's one thing I've been arguing for years, is why go on an income-based tax system when you can do consumption taxes? Because a lot of accounting firms make a lot of money every year on it.

That's true. So it's very difficult to get rid of something that's feeding people. We've got to find something for them to do that can make them happy. That's actually the one thing my sister-in-law and I agree on. She works for a city, and she's a big banking background. And we've had our spars about Bitcoin and the future of money.

And the one thing we do agree on is the consumption tax. Right. I mean, look, and full disclaimer, my dad used to – he was a partner at Deloitte. So I think part of my education was paid for through accounting work. So I'm not – I think accountants do great work. Don't come kill me, accountants. But I think that the current implementation of income tax is, it doesn't really make sense, not good use of time. And, you know, there are actually very interesting accounting concepts that relate to this space that we're going to need to think through, like the question we talked through about forks.

Like, you know, there needs to be an accounting standard on what this is and how you value these things. You need to come with new valuation. There are plenty of new exciting things for accountants to do as opposed to just bean counting every year on these crazy income tax rules. And also it solves at least one part of the problem, which is that if money does actually evolve into something that is completely uncensorable, then yes, that's what you're going to do. You're going to have high consumption taxes, pretty much probably high real estate taxes and other things. And then that will give the freedom for the space to move without significant loss in government revenue. But, you know, the reality is that all of this is good stuff. You know, changing laws due to advanced technology is a good thing.

That means we're moving forward. Yeah, I think it's important that we move forward. I would argue that we've hit a bout of stagnation, especially at the political level here in the U.S. I'm completely apathetic towards our government at this point, specifically here in the U.S. There are a bunch of old people that can't get anything done, that are wishy-washy. It's always, whenever you bring in a new president, if you're coming from a Republican regime, going into a Democratic regime, regime everybody's optimistic at first and then a year or two in it's meet the new boss same as the old boss it's it's it's it's getting it's getting tiring it's at this point i think i think

that uh probably most young people now are more excited about bitcoin than politics and i think that that's okay i think that so actually let me rephrase that i think that um politics is as boring as the electorate allows it to be. And so now as people get into these more interesting things, they hopefully will demand of their politicians and use the political process to make the laws and regulations more aligned with their worldview and how they see the world changing. I think that in the United States, if you look at the whole drama with the Russian hacking and so on and so forth i mean that is everybody was like so surprised about it and like oh my the terror someone's going on facebook and making fake accounts i'm like fake accounts are

like probably like the killer app for facebook and have been for years i mean like you know what i mean there's remember when there's the whole drama about real fucking expense like real names on facebook everybody's like what my real name now people are gonna know like you know Nobody wanted – nobody wants social media, you know, to not have some degree of, you know, not anonymity, but, you know, people want to be able to have fun on social media and just talk about funny things, right? And the point should be, like, I think the strategic reaction to that, I would be like, ha-ha, funny, funny, like, everybody listen, right? Don't get so angry. Don't take everything you see on social media as the truth, right? and actually we need to very quickly authorize a bill

to increase funding for education because if our people were well-educated, they wouldn't be falling for spoof accounts from Russia. Exactly. So the whole thing was just crazy. No, it's one of the Tales from the Crypt book club's books that we talk about a lot is The Sovereign Individual. It's a must-read if you're into Bitcoin

because it was written in 1997, republished in 1999, and it predicted a lot of what's happening right now, including Bitcoin. It predicted the conditions that would lead to Trump, and it predicted fake news. And their line on fake news was basically, in the future, the ability to discern between what's truthful and what's not is going to be imperative. And that's one thing we're finding out in today's world.

You have to be able to critically think for yourself. Which is good. And I think it will be taught in schools, and I think it probably already is. And I think that opposed to trying to regulate a space that is just really the Wild West, as you said, individuals need to be educated, to learn, to value what is in front of their face and make a critical decision about it and the veracity of it. And that is the direction in which the world is moving. as things get decentralized there are many people even for now who get most of their news through a friend through social media so that's you know decentralized trust in authority of news is now moving to individuals through social media right and so it's incumbent upon individuals to actually

be able to discern what's coming from them and and you know we're not just going to rely on some you know uh big media organization to say this is the arbiter of the truth no and it's funny to see um how the different generations consume uh media and information differently like uh my father-in-law love him but he's he sits there and watches mb msnbc all day and that's like that's his news source and that's the only thing like and i'm sitting there with my tweet deck up i've got my crypto finance journalism media the geopolitical uh sort of list that i'm reading and getting information from from people that i've vetted over years and years i'm like how could you not like consume information this way how could you let like msnbc like just you know when

you mentioned that i laughed internally because like you sound like my mom my mom gets her information from social media so like you know she'll send me a link and i'm like who sent you this on facebook or on whatsapp you know it's facebook and whatsapp are different than twitter And I agree. Twitter in particular, before all of this, I actually had deleted all my tweets, obscured my name in picture, and maybe had like 200 followers because I wasn't using it anymore. i just was like um i don't i don't i'm not using this thing did twitter um but at the time you know i would i would use twitter like i would use like in the years past i've been on twitter since 2008 so in the years past i would you know uh use it for like friends and i have like a friend i have friends who are you know like i remember when twitter was really cool right and i had friends

were like in media here in new york you know and they were like always on twitter 2007 2009 and then i thought that it lost a bit of cool factor for a while right lost its luster it did and then you know but basically i what i had not noticed because i wasn't paying attention was that very intelligent people were using twitter just as a sort of sounding board for their thoughts and ideas right and even in my personal experience with it you know after i posted the article which i didn't intend to get a lot of information there were a few people who had retweeted a few things that i said and then my phone was going so crazy i had to turn it off and so and then i you know one night i think it was near new year's i just said you know i'm just gonna start saying the

things that i think that i usually would say to like i have a whatsapp group my family and you You know, that's where I send out most of my crazy things, you know? And then every so often one of them will say, Chief, you stop spamming us with these crazy ideas of yours, right? And Twitter is actually the best place for crazy ideas. You just go out there and you think about... There's a bunch of kooks who will grab onto them. Right, right.

Let's appease this idea. Yeah, and it's great. It's like it will turn you into a radical in a very short period of time Because you're like, wait a minute, other people think this too? Wow, it's crazy. That's the beauty of it. When you meet like-minded people on the internet, specifically on Twitter because it's so immediate, it's invigorating. It's like, all right, I'm not crazy.

Right. No, it's actually – and that's actually probably the most frightening thing about this entire experience has been that factor because – Frightening. I say frightening because it would be one thing if you put out a lot of crazy ideas, right? And then you met with a bunch of the people who were behind them and they were all like complete psychos, you know? They're just completely gone, you know, and just, you know, degenerate people. But I'm meeting people with very good jobs, you know, very smart, very accomplished people are the ones thinking this way. And that part scares me a little bit because it feels like, you know, we've gotten to a point in society where so many people are not really concerned with complex ideas that people are starving to meet other people who think about complex ideas because it's become, you know.

It's become a bit taboo to not just fall into the lifestyle conspicuous consumption and celebrity and the TMZ type media and gossip and stuff like that. Yep. I come to find that a lot of the people that I meet in this space, even people who have been for a long time, who I can predict probably have a pretty high net worth, most of these people that I meet and talk to are very normal, very down to earth. they don't they're not flashy they're just normal people who are interested in very nerdy things and and that i think is very good um i think that and i and i and with twitter in particular um you know facebook has become something you know i've been off it for about i've been off it for about a year as well and then i went back on recently and i looked at the things that were on there and i was just like ah turn this off right it's um and and i think that a lot of the

problems that they've been encountering in terms of having to reorient what they're doing and how they're doing it are a reflection of that. The, you know, people have become so sucked into these tools and, you know, and their dopamine receptors are being, you know, primed to look for certain types of content and interact with certain types of content. And I find the concept of decentralization i think that it works perfectly for the next stage of new technologies um i think that you know your ai assistant should not you know by law belong to a large company no that i think that in the future even though the cloud is so important in the future people will produce boxes you can put in your house that will run your ai assistant everything else so that the

A computerized copy of your brain is yours and is protected and is private. And Google's not selling that information to advertisers. Yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, I think it's, you know, because that is advertising on steroids. That's not fair. I think that people should have, you know, people, AI systems are good, and I think AI technology is good. But I think that machine learning or things that are really running complex operations on your behavior that you can't understand should really be yours. They should belong to you.

They should. And that's another recurring conversation we have on this podcast is owning your own data. And that's one thing a lot of people don't realize right now is that they're products. They're products of Facebook, Twitter, Google. They're following you around the Internet, and they're selling your data to advertisers. Yeah, I think so. Sorry to interrupt, but that's why Bitcoin's so beautiful

and the concept behind Bitcoin's so beautiful is because it's a push system where you're pushing data when you want to reveal it, and it's not getting pulled from you automatically. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I think that's a very good point. And, I mean, I played around with Toshi. You know, I don't know if you...

it crashes a lot what Brian Armstrong was building when he should have been implementing Segwit hey hey leave me out of that man I'm kidding

I'm not going to tell Coinbase how to run their business oh yeah you can it's a free world right but you know

and I have I do have opinions on Coinbase right that you know and I guess I'll talk about maybe

in a few seconds but the point I was thinking about was I do you know I find it interesting to do the ad bot on Toshi right

because I think that, you know, that concept, right, just that concept does drop some millions out of Facebook's market cap, right? Once you can successfully implement a sustainable ad bot, right? And, like, I was using Tochi for a while, and with the ad bot, I was like, free either every day, free either every day. And then every so often they'd be like, there wasn't enough funds in the ads, you didn't get yours. And then I was like, ah, put this thing away.

I didn't get my free either today, right? So I was playing around with it, I put it away. But when it comes to that concept of owning your own data, I remember the Diaspora Project, right? And it was really interesting. And I thought, oh, this is really good. And it was actually really ahead of its time because the whole concept of a decentralized social network, right?

Let's talk about Diaspora a little bit. Can you explain it for people who don't know? Generally, it's decentralized Facebook that occurred many years ago. I can't remember how many years it even started. It was maybe three or four. It occurred well before the CryptoKitties and ICO craze, right? And the whole concept was this whole concept of, you know, own your own data. You can basically run kind of something like a node where you, you know, you have your friends and your interaction on the Diaspora network, right?

And when I thought about that, like, and I think about it, I'm like, so that's a company that actually I would like to see an ICO from or something of not like in the typical fashion. But that's something that's an idea, an implementation that, you know, should be receiving funding and should be growing because the concept of like owning your data and especially when it comes to social media, if you say a lot of interesting things on social media and there's a lot of revenue being generated from those things, you should be automatically compensated for that content because you're a content producer. Right. And especially when people are getting, you know, they're spending so much time on these things that, you know, give them some of the value. So I think that, you know, especially with decentralized communication, you know, I'm very into technologies that would help enable people to create their own versions of, you know, walled social media applications using open protocols like signal protocol and other things, right? You know, so that you can have some confidentiality and, you know, say what you want to say because that actually leads to more productive and good ideas. Yeah, no, I think Blockstack's definitely one of the projects working on that. I respect Ryan and Maneeb, the two co-founders of Blockstack, very much.

I've been to a few of their meetups throughout the years here in New York, and I think they have a really good grasp on this concept of owning your own data. And they're building out an incredible platform with Blockstack. And then beyond that, it's like there's not too many projects I'm excited about. about and in that in that regard but yep it's something people are beginning to think about and that's something we didn't think about like as the internet grew into what it is today and people are like oh my god it's so easy to sign up for facebook start sharing stuff that you thought about that they were they were products and now people are waking up to it we're iterating

on these things and we're realizing that maybe the way we structure the internet and the companies build on it throughout our first go isn't the best way. Now it's okay. We recognize that users being products probably isn't the best thing, and let's start building out these new systems where you can give control back to the consumer. It is very interesting. And we spend a lot of time talking about things

other than Bitcoin in terms of ICOs and stuff, and I feel a little bit of responsibility. I do get asked questions about these projects and other things, And as someone who has vetted projects as a lawyer, you know, for money, for a job, and then also in terms of our own fundraising and funding other companies, the one thing I say about these things is look at the use of funds page. That's the only thing you need to read. Look and see where is the funds being raised going to go. So, and personally, I have, you know, if I were to go to an investor that invests in one of our companies and say, I'm running this new project and I want half of the money

for the project and the other half, I want to have a party with it. They would basically run me out of the room. So, and, you know, and so I'm not really, so I sound, a lot of times I sound like a Bitcoin master. It's not always, it's not always a party line. It's usually marketing. disguise that party with marketing right but if your d is so good you don't need to market it right there's the internet like you know like things can grow you know i put up some stupid

facebook posts talking about space and spaceships and people like you know and and uh you know and it's moving right so if your idea is really super good you don't need to put like literally you know i had a group of people in dc right i want to meet with people about talk about this stuff because I was so excited. I put like $100 behind a Twitter post, right? I boosted Twitter with $100, and like 30 people showed up. So, I mean, and now people think, oh, maybe it's a small amount. No, the people that showed up were serious people, right?

So you don't need that much to market a really good idea or something that people are really excited about, right? I mean, if you're trying to change a paradigm, maybe you've got to put a lot of money behind it. And if you're running an ICO, don't send me hate mail. I think you're doing a fantastic job. But right now, the reason why I'm sitting here talking is because I wrote an article particularly about Bitcoin and a sort of economic, social, political rationale for going into it. And that's the only digital asset that I can make that, in good faith, argument for now.

I think that everything else shows fantastic promise. And if you're into venture capital type activities, go for it. but for you know for me i see myself as a value investor with everything that i i decide to spend time on and even though i'm not getting a return for the time i spend on bitcoin in terms of money i'm getting a exponential return in terms of knowledge so i spend my time on it for that and i talk about it for that because i think other people you know need to pay attention and you know now we have like i always tell people like recently I mean, Dropbox is going to IPO.

I was using Dropbox since Dropbox was available to be used, right? The moment I saw it, I was like, whoa, this is great, you know? And, like, it has advantages still to this day. You know, you use Google Drive and everything moves up and down over the internet. You know, it uses your local network to optimize, you know, data moving amongst computers and other things. It's a very great product, right? But, you know, I never had an opportunity to get any value aside from being a customer. and now some people somewhere are going to make a lot of money

off of something that I've been really happy and excited about for many, many years, this space is one where you can get... You'll be rewarded for... For your excitement and enthusiasm without having to ask Mr. Moneybags, which is good. No, which is incredible. The open source nature of these protocols and these projects

just allowing the retail investor to participate is something that people are just getting acquainted to and are addicted to. Right. And that's also very interesting because I think that one of the things I'm hoping to see in 2018 in this space is the rise of more registered investment advisors who understand this, who don't just throw it off.

I remember I was talking to somebody, and I was talking to a company I worked with, and I was saying, hey, you need to spend more time on this space, and particularly Bitcoin. And they were like, well, we got this in the projects. And I was like, do you know, for a period of time, this was the number one app on the App Store. You don't ignore something that is moving with this kind of aggressive velocity. You don't. And you figure out a way to engage with it. And I think that it's incumbent upon entrepreneurs who have professions, lawyers, accountants, you know, the people who, financial advisors, they need to start understanding this more because their clients, not just because their clients want it, but because this could very well be the future of money and all that. And it's a fantastic opportunity that could, you know, bring a lot of professionalism into the space and also prevent the biggest thing, which is people getting scammed, right? Like lots of people.

And the biggest worry I, one of the biggest worries I have, and one of the reasons why, once again, I said that central banks in developing countries should look at this, is because if you advise individuals to get into the space, what happens is BitConnect. What happens is, you know, the price of Litecoin goes from $30 to $400 overnight if you don't give people advice before they get involved in this space, right? You have all of these irrational, like, so unit bias. I remember, like, I can't remember, but I think a founder of a company asked me what unit bias was. Oh, my God. And I was like, your company is never getting any money. Yeah. And, you know, and the thing is, is that.

That's what we talked about. I had somebody in this office ask me, or tell me, what if I'm going to buy Ripple? It's so cheap. Ripple is unit bias coin. It could go to like $1,200. I'm like, do you realize how big that market cap would be if Ripple went to $1,200?

It would be like $120 trillion market cap. Yeah, I would go into my real thoughts on Ripple, but I think this is being recorded. So I'll save that for afterwards. But Ripple things, this space, right? Like, I can't, you know, you never know what's going to happen with any of these technologies, right? So, you know, it's, you know, and so I don't want to be that Luddite or that anti-innovation person, right? So that's always the line you're telling as well, too, is like, because I tread towards maximalism and I call a lot of bullshit on a lot of these projects.

Right, right. And I remember, I remember it like, I remember it the first time this actually happened, right? You know, there's, do I talk about this or not? big controversy over james altucher oh yeah right everybody hates him right i've met him before right i met the guy and he and you know he was perfectly nice to me right and you know he had you know look and so i see there are two sides to every story if you bought bitcoin when he first started talking about it you'd be happy but people don't also like the concept of like crypto genius on AdWords, right?

People hate it, right? And so there's, you know, there's a, you know, but like then I remember thinking to somebody, I was saying like, okay, well if your mom was going to get into Bitcoin,

like you'd want James Altucher to talk to you about it. I don't know. So it's sort of these, it's like one of these things where, and people like, people are rabidly angry about, you know,

quote unquote charlatans and frauds. The way I see it, you know, once you get into space, you have to have an open mind. And what I would suggest is people should listen

to everybody and then just pick the best things for themselves and then like and me purposely the reason why i gave my the ico disclaimer in this talk is because usually i try and avoid even talking about them because they're they are but it's the same it's like crack cocaine you know the moment you take a significant amount of money and you pick an ice and you know one of these tokens or whatever and you get a 5 or 10x return eyes red you're on the computer and it's just like Give me more. Give me more 10X, right? And it's like, and that is not good for human beings.

We don't know how to process things like that. So at a certain point, after being involved in this for a while, I told people close to me that, hey, you know, if you have any of these things that you believe in, put them in cold storage and forget about them. You know, you're not a trader. You can't predict the future. and nobody else can predict the future.

You're taking risks. So if you're going to be taking risks, do it in a responsible way. And I think the best way to take risk on Bitcoin is to learn about it. And I can vouch, at least for this one, that more so than anything else, there are other assets, digital assets,

that I tried to engage people about as early as 2013, 2014. And the people involved in these projects, every so often I say negative things about these projects on Twitter, the people involved in these projects they were not nice they did not help they did not you know um appreciate an earnest desire to learn but for other ones and bitcoin in particular if you go to even a place full of like really

aggressive in my view so far people most people if you earnestly say i want to learn about it and you know what do i do they will help you get the information and that's different from a lot of different things then what should i buy what should i buy yeah right exactly exactly that's the one thing i stress and this is what bitcoin enables is everybody to be a sovereign individual this is a very personal decision for everybody like your money the hard-earned money that you are putting into these tokens it's very like you worked hard for that money you should make a very educated decision when investing and i do not want to be responsible for hand-holding you towards these investments like this is a personal decision this is something that you have to do a lot of

research in and really get to know yourself before you get into this well right now i think that really people who invest like if if you're like if you're buying these things with with an investor's mindset in order to say that you're investing you need to know what investing is and how to do it and most people don't know how to invest. That's why we have regulated the industry. So I do, you know, it is important for people to learn the general concepts, and there are a lot of people out there with decent perspectives on that. But, you know, the level of, in the United States,

the level of materialism and waste that has occurred over the past 10, 15 years has been remarkable. and you know we have entire industries that are based on fluff nothing you know the there you know the the i saw a chart today about the fang stocks and the value and so in that kind of world there is a need for a real serious discussion about value about investing about savings and fairness because the you know the underpinnings of the system are made by human beings who make decisions that decide what our interest rates are decide how expensive it is to go to school how expensive it is to eat and so on and so forth and you know and there does need to be a serious

discussion a lot of the stuff that i talk about and one of the reasons why i am excited about this is you know when i was in 2003 or so i spent some time when i was in law school writing about my thoughts on capitalism and other things yeah i did some research you wrote your college thesis on land tenure. Yes. Talking about The Mystery of Capital? Yes.

Hernando de Soto is a very interesting book and that also, that book, when you read it, lets you understand the abstract nature of value because a big part

of the argument is that if you don't have a good legal system and a good land tenure system, right? So that's, like I was telling you about Zaha from Zimbabwe earlier,

one of the problems he brought up that he hopes Bitcoin can solve or in the future is his grandmother owned a farm in Zimbabwe and rented it out for a decade or so and then eventually wanted to go sell it and went to the farm to get her title and then found out the person she was renting it to

had switched out the title on his name without her knowing and sold the farm separately without her being involved at all. So I've looked at this issue a little bit carefully I am a lawyer who has a family investment group that invests in banks and financial institutions, so we have to look into land as collateral and other things and the potentials of it. And I think that blockchain technology, like aside from the transmission of value, public registries of all kinds where there's a good degree of immutability, right, even though you need to have trusted entry points into the immutable network because you don't want to have corrupted entry points into an immutable network. So now, you know, you have immutable fraud, right, and things of the sort, right?

But the thing is, is that for many of them, it's actually very challenging for me because, like, okay, take land. And, you know, disclaimer, there are some products that I found interesting in the past that work on the land title industry that, you know, I am invested in other things. But when I think about it critically, right, those things are a speculative bet for me because I always say, okay, in all these countries, We could start with an SQL database, you know, permissioned SQL database, and Google Maps API. Mm-hmm. All right. And just pin? No, you just create, you know, with Maps API, right, you can actually create shapes.

So you could just use Google Maps API, and you could use an SQL database, take the land registry, clean the data, and then just put it out in the public. Mm-hmm. so you could go to a map and any coordinate you could click on it and it would say it belongs to A, B, or C oh damn

and it could take five minutes to solve this problem with currently available is anybody working on it like this well I mean I use

I use I use at first it was called I can't remember they discontinued the product but they had like a version of Google Maps that allowed you to

it wasn't Google Earth but it allowed you to like create a lot of shapes and manipulate things and I would use it if i was looking i was doing you know research on and land you know in real estate investments and other things or real estate holdings i create a map and i'd put all of them on the map right and it's you know it's very easy using google fusion tables could do it for a while but you can like

so for example if i'm analyzing oh yeah i recently used it to go in banking right so i do analysis on the collateral and you know you can make a layer and you can just see all of the collateral and i you know reference crime statistics and other things and it's easy and like this is these are it's google my maps is what it was whatever and it's just it's super easy to do you just take a data table you throw it in there with the gps coordinates and you can create tons of layers and see lots of things right and like that's and that's even like that's even more ridiculous because you know you could you could basically do this not even with an sql database you could do with an Excel sheet and the GPS coordinates

of the various properties. So the reality is that the reason why that problem with land tenure exists is because people in positions of authority don't want it to work. And you can actually see that in the United States. Why not? Because they make money from selling fake titles. And similarly, do an experiment.

In the United States, actually, this would be an interesting experiment. If you go in the United States and you rank states by perceived level of corruption and then cross-reference that table to the ease of searching the land title registry online for that state, then you'll find some interesting things. I'm going to look up Illinois when I get home. Hey, hey, don't say I have business in Chicago. Someone's going to murder me. Illinois is great.

No, I got good connections in Chicago. You do? Okay, but yeah, there's no corruption in Chicago. What are you talking about? I love Chicago. That's the one thing people don't realize. They call it the Windy City, not because of the wind, but because of the politics.

Oh, the politics are fantastic. All the politicians in Chicago are my friends, and I love them. But the thing is, seriously, though, this whole thing, but when you look at these things, right, and I, when I, you know, if you lived in New York, I lived in New York for nine years. It's the longest time I've ever spent in one place

in new york really yeah and so in any time you live in new york you pay attention to real estate right took some real estate development classes and so i got into you know all the new emerging websites like property shark and other things at the time or in the early you know aughts whatever right you know you look and you can and it was so exciting to me i was like whoa i could pay this people money and i can see who owns any property in the city i was like what and so yeah so i would just go and i would just go and look at properties and just see okay who owns this one who owns that one oh look and it's interesting right um but you had to pay for it but it's you know this this concept has been doable for so so so so long it's just that you know people you know

don't you know people have it's the it's the public that needs to demand it to happen yeah the incumbents don't want to give up the the authority to to register no right many but even like even not the because like so in this use case right i think that the immutability is the big thing that's the number one the number one innovation is the censorship resistance the immutability right right so yeah so once you buy it and it's your it's yours but i do think that the authority to approve like it's gonna it's gonna be held within human beings yeah because the oracle problem we need yes there's gonna be some there's gonna need some people that we pick that we think are good people yeah that say that okay this is a valid transaction now it goes on

the immutable uh ledger and you know and but you know with a problem you know but with something like land i think that you know with bitcoin and with value right it's more important than it is because like people don't people um transactions in land don't have the same velocity of transactions in volume right you know and and and also the reality it's you know it's always i find it always so funny like with all the fee debate people and all of the all the stuff and the reality is that most people who are the most interested people in Bitcoin don't want to sell it. So they don't give a hoot about transactions. They're like, what transaction fees? Never transacting. These are people who would not sell their Bitcoin until you can buy immortality

with Bitcoin. They will just never sell it. Most people, most hodlers I know, they plan on just using it as collateral and handing it down to their grandchildren. Now, and this is one of the things, I'm glad you brought that up, because I talk about this a lot and i'm very excited about it because i think that it is very good collateral yes it is because any asset any asset you know once human consciousness goes away the value of any asset goes to zero right if everybody dies all financial assets value is zero because we know we it has to exist in our brains we have to think we like it right so if everybody decides that this thing

that's immutable and permissionless has value you create a much more vibrant financial system where you can leverage this asset for interesting things. And also you can reduce the cost of banking relative to this asset, right? And there are already banks that specialize in lending against relatively intangible or hard-to-value assets. There are banks that will lend you money against art. There are banks that will lend you money against stock portfolios and other things, and then they focus on that, right?

And I think that eventually there will be banks that focus on lending money against bitcoin because there are people who don't want to sell it and right and so imagine how many more companies those people would be starting and how many more people they'd be employing if they could get loans against these huge holdings of bitcoin that they have it'd be good for the economy so if anybody at uh regulatory agency and banking is listening to me please please issue a statement and to say that okay you know treat them as unsecured loans to start this is my long-term view like i plan on using my bitcoin as collateral one day to start businesses like you were just describing.

Like, I never want to touch it. I just want to be able to, I'll sign my key, say, hey, I proved that I own this Bitcoin. Like, I'm going to take out a loan against it. If I'm not good on the loan, yes, you can get some Bitcoin eventually, but I think I'm going to start a good business and be able to pay back the loan that you gave me.

And it's interesting, like, for this particular concept, one of the reasons why I'm excited about it is that particularly in developing countries, like, let's say you're in a country with no good operating land title registry. the Zimbabwe problem, right? And you want to store value. Most people, you know, the first thing,

there's a paper by these two Yale professors, I keep forgetting their names, but basically it's called Mortgage Your Future Theory, right, where they talk about how you can make an argument that's irrational that people are allowed to borrow so much money for land, right, and over-allocate to it, and that they should actually early on in their life borrow money to invest in stocks

because every year in the stock market is a separate and distinct asset and your probability of doing well is higher the more years you're exposed. So their argument is, you know, you should responsibly borrow and they've run some numbers that show that it can work out better

than other asset classes. So I think that people need to think carefully and we need to readjust banking systems to not be so focused on real property and other things and think about other more interesting assets, like encouraging people to be able to, once they have proven that they have a good advisor

and they know about financial management, they can borrow certain amounts of money to invest in earning assets other than real estate, right? Because now, like anybody, you don't have to pass any tests to buy a house. Once you have the down payment and the credit score, here you go. You may not even know how to plunge a toilet

and you can buy a house, right? But if you wanted to borrow a lot of money to buy stocks, They'd be like, oh, my God, what are you doing? Do you know what you're doing? And so it's a – but they're both assets. It's a double standard there. Well, not just – but they're both assets where you can't reliably predict the price, future price, or else you wouldn't have had a financial crisis based on the housing market collapsing, right? So really there's more interesting ideas in terms of lending should be allowed.

But I wanted to bring up one point, and I'm not shilling for Open Dime, but I think in this concept it's a very easy – and even in a developing country – We endorse shilling for Open Dime here. Okay, good. So it's a, you know, easy, cheap solution whereby even in a country with very low infrastructure, as long as you can maintain a bank vault, you could take custodianship of Bitcoin, right, and you could lend against it. And so basically, you know, banks everywhere are regulated. So not only is your auditor going to come in and look what's going on, but the regulator is going to come and look what's going on. And if you steal someone's Bitcoin out of the vault, you're going to jail, right, which is good. system so someone can safely keep an open diamond in a bank vault right and then borrow against the

value as the price goes up or down or whatever and have it insured on the back end as well boom there you go and and like this doesn't require like you know trying to create a multi-sig wallet like parody that's going to get hacked right it doesn't require anything it just take an open diamond put the bitcoin on and go to sleep right and then just audit it you know check it and you can create an alert on the on the public address create a movement alert yes exactly and then you're done so this this model is actually something i'm very excited about and then and when i do talk to people who have authority to talk about i bring up this concept because i think that it'll bring a lot of transparency into finance and it's an because it's an it's a it's

an area of finance it's difficult to game right and that's actually you know it's subject to movements in price but the reality is that the value of an asset you can leverage is higher than and the value of an asset that you can't leverage. So its existence will help to bring in some price stability. It'll help bring in an equilibrium in price because it's gonna take stock that would otherwise be sold off the market. And then so you will get to equilibrium faster

when this happens. And the price depends on your unit of account bias. If your unit of account is one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin, You have nothing to worry about. Ding, ding, ding. Yes. Yes. Yes.

That's very good. I mean, this is an exciting area of finance. It's new. And I think that everybody's thinking about it. Everybody is thinking about how they can do that. And I think that this whole, like, oh, blockchain, not Bitcoin thing came up through a lot of the problems that Bitcoin has had over time. A lot of those things have gone. And I think that there are a number of things that are going on that are wrong.

Let's talk about them. What's going on? So let's talk about Bitcoin Cash. Let's get into it. So the whole ETF thing, I really got into that because of what I saw with Bitcoin Cash. and just from being like a guy who doesn't really know that much and just having CryptoWatch open in the screen,

my workstation is crazy. I have many, many screens, you know, and I keep CryptoWatch open, not because I'm necessarily trading, but I just like to watch the market just as I keep Bloomberg on 24-7. I put that there because I want to see what's happening, right?

See if anything crazy goes on, right? And I would see these weird moves in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, especially on weekends and holidays, like Thanksgiving weekend and other things. And I'm like, hmm, looks like someone's manipulating the prices. And this is just a hunch.

I have no information. I can't accuse anybody of doing anything. I wouldn't. But I looked at it and it seemed curious that this would happen repeatedly late last year. And everybody who, like everybody's been writing about... It wasn't even only the price.

It was like the hash rate too. They're fluctuating hash rate between chains as well. I mean, it was a pretty overt manipulation. That's a little over my pay grade. No, I'm just playing. I'm joking. But the reality is that. But I'm saying that you don't even need to go that deep to see that something curious is happening.

And then the launch on Coinbase, I thought that Coinbase, everybody, most people introduce people to this space through Coinbase because it's easy and fast. Great UX. Great UX. And, you know, and I think that's working. So like the only like devil's advocate argument I would make against everybody who's so angry about them not implementing Segwit and everything else, right, is that they have spent a lot of time and money on their fiat rails, more so than other companies. So there are more rails and faster in some cases, not all, not for wires, but like they spend a lot, it seems like they spend a lot of time on ACH and credit card rails, more so than anybody else. And that's actually why I find Coinbase to be actually one of the biggest threats to

banks, because they have a team in there that understands how to manage the most commonly used fiat rails which are credit cards and ach right and i think they focused on that because they just want to be the mcdonald's right they want to be the place where if somebody just makes that decision that it's 500 they grab their credit card or they grab their whatever and they go in right um it'd be interesting to see statistics on how what the volume of purchases via credit cards would be right um through coinbase but you know i think that they should be commended for that in terms of bringing people into the space right and now i'm going to take them to the witch hit but on in terms of that bitcoin cash launch right they kind of half apologized but they need to apologize

for that nonsense that was it was asinine like if you're going to be the mcdonald's of the industry like give somebody a fucking warning just don't like drop it on the public so the reality and i think i may get this wrong but when i was watching it i think that this occurred in between the launch of futures on the CME and the CBOE. And in each case, right, these exchanges told everybody, we're doing it on Sunday. Why are they doing it on Sunday? Because they want low volume and they want to work out any kinks, right? And they let everybody know exactly when it was going to happen months or weeks in advance. So you cannot feign ignorance to the responsible way to launch a new asset on a platform and my wish and hope is that they actually remove it

from there and the reason why is that it's a fork of bitcoin they should not have a policy and so actually i'm proud i don't want to get hate mail i'm joking but i'm not really i personally think that there should chiefy i will step in where you're afraid to go yeah you can say it brian armstrong quay base have been i don't want to say enemies of bitcoin but they've been actively trying to change bitcoin for years starting with bitcoin classic moving to bitcoin xt moving to bitcoin unlimited moving to the new york agreement and then when the new york agreement didn't work out and segwit 2x didn't work out they decided hey fuck it we're gonna fuck with bitcoin by adding bitcoin cash out of nowhere to try to disrupt the network like for some reason i don't

know why i don't know what the reason is i don't know if bitcoin in its current current state is not as profitable as Coinbase would like it to be for them. I don't know what the case may be, but for some reason, Brian Armstrong and his team have been trying to change Bitcoin for years, and they've done it unsuccessfully, and I think this Bitcoin Cash edition might have been out of spite. I'm not going to put any words in your mouth. I'm not going to say this is how you think. This is my thought. Thanks. I appreciate that. What I'll say is that, look, there's a responsible way to introduce an asset on any trading platform and that was the responsible way is not by surprise

or on like you know or even if you have a blog post early in the day anybody knows this so i think they need to apologize for doing that i think that was very bad for this that is one of the things that actually soured me on this space and a key reason why i decided to write publicly because i felt that things were going on that people need to know about and there needs to be a more responsible way i think that the fund the only thing that i could speculate is i think there are some people who mistakenly believe that these things can practically become a currency within short periods of time and they're using various reasons to try and make it a more widely acceptable medium of exchange right but until you create a digital asset that

has a team of people like a central bank or fed you know who are managing the supply and keeping it at parity with other currencies for other strategic reasons having it as a widely accepted medium exchange is going to be very difficult because people are don't want to have to pay you know five bitcoins for the lambo today and 10 for tomorrow it doesn't work in a market and your accountants are going to be working like 17 million hours trying to get your books in order It doesn't work. It has to go through the continuum. It has to establish itself as a collectible and a store of value

and then eventually become to a medium of exchange when the market's saturated enough that people exchanging Bitcoin doesn't... So you can make a perfectly reasonable argument that once, let's say, Bitcoin hits the market cap of gold and you're at a price of $300,000, $400,000, and then on an annualized basis going from there, the price appreciates in line with global inflation, right? Then I could see the Lightning Network and Bitcoin actually having some of the major

characteristics of a currency because you'd have relative stability throughout the course of the year, growing to 1% to 3% on an annual basis in terms of price appreciation to a basket of fiat currencies, right? That's a scenario where I can see the Lightning Network really being like, okay, now we have global money, right? But then I get back to Max Weber, right? You know, all currencies really are backed by a state with monopoly legitimate lines. Where's the Bitcoin army, right?

Where are the people with the guns who are going to defend this network when things go down, right? The U.S. has it. China has it. Ghana even. Everybody has a military, right, to protect those interests. And this network does not have that characteristic. So I don't really see it as a currency. I really believe in the gold 2.0 thesis. And I think that eventually, with technologies that we may not be able to perceive or anticipate now, it can become even you know many more many more things in the future yeah and again it's

establishing itself it's going to take time have some patience people that's another theme on this podcast is is trying to tell or trying to help people realize that they need to be patient when these technologies are building themselves out you're not going to get everything out of the box overnight and i think yes and i think everybody has experiences you know um if you start investing and I'm not a professional in it but I play around with investing so I first got into this. I would play around

and I remember one time I was using an exchange and I shorted Bitcoin. Didn't work very well. Sorry for your loss. No, I did not make a loss. I recover from my losses. I do not yet end the year down.

It doesn't happen. So basically, but the point is that I was playing around with it. I was just experimenting, right? I was like, how does this thing work? And I actually, you know, people don't, like, I get in, I'm a banking nerd, right?

And I'm a finance nerd. So, like, I will go and open bank accounts and time how long it takes. That's pretty nerdy. Yeah, I do it. And I'm like, you know, I'm smiling the whole time because the person doesn't know I'm timing them. I'm like, I'm going to put this in a spreadsheet. You know, and then I, you know, so I test out financial products. Like, you know, if something's interesting to me, I'll open up the exchange accounts and just see how it works, right?

And, like, I learned a lot of things about, you know, and I do it as, you know, figuring out the future of what's happening. Because if you're in this financial services business, you need to know what people are doing in order to know where you need to go. And you need to try out the products. So, you know, you try out money products, you try out trading products. And so, you know, I played around with it. And after that, I said, you know, that's a very dangerous tool to play around with with this particular asset. And everybody has their experiences where they realize that, yes, the best thing to do is probably to see it as a store of value. And I see it as a store of value slash emergency expenses slash major expenses, right?

If you need to make a big purchase fast, that's a very good use case. And I can see that as a use case for many different types. You know, let's say you have a consortium of companies that are involved in a JV or something. Right. And it's in a risky business. Right. That needs liquidity fast. There's a really good use case for multi-sig wallets and Bitcoin so that, OK, we know that things could go down any minute. Right. Or, you know, we're trading, you know, algorithmic trading thing in very risky leveraged bets. So we need to make sure we can meet margin calls immediately. Right. they're really good uses for this type of asset for sophisticated investors and they're also really good uses of it for you know based on the sound money concepts and other things right for the ordinary person with a responsible allocation so it's a it's a it's a really interesting thing yeah it can really help out with the uh the clearing side of our uh financial system but with all that being said we just blew through two hours there really that was two hours almost

I think we're at like $1.55. Can't be much longer than that. Wow. Wow. I think that there's a side effect of Bitcoin is loquaciousness. It just, you know, it makes you loquacious. You can go on for hours. We're about to go to dinner and discuss it for four.

Oh, great. I hope there's more whiskey. There will be. We're going to a steakhouse down the street. Chiefy, where can we learn more about you? You know, you can Google me and you'll find strange things. But, I mean, really look for me on Twitter. My Twitter handle, I guess it's Chiefy Indom, my last name, N-D-U-O-M.

And every so often you'll find inflammatory tweets that disappear because I don't believe in leaving an indelible record of my thoughts on the Internet. Chiefy's trying to turn Twitter into Snapchat. He would love a Twitter Snapchat. I want disappearing Twitter messages. I want it. If that happened, I would buy stock at Twitter. Not advised right now, though.

Not at all. none of this is investment advice it's a bunch of crazy people talking on radio on the internet oh the internet internet radio you're not old

you can find me at martybent on twitter subscribe to my newsletter link in my bio and yeah subscribe to the podcast if you like it share it with your family and friends that are curious about bitcoin um yeah and i guess that's all we have this week freaks peace and love

that was good that was fun that's what i love this show