TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #4: What the hell is going on?

Episode Date: November 20, 2017

Marty is back in the studio with Louis and a special guest, Barstool's resident spider monkey, Nate. In this episode Nate signs a band, PFT makes a cameo to give us a lesson in exponential growth, and Marty answers all the questions Louis and Nate have about the current events in Bitcoin. Tune in to get caught up with all of the news that has been going on in Bitcoin.

What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's been a minute since we last met here on the internet. Since we last met, our last guy, Santiago, if you guys caught the last episode, won a big award. MIT, their tech review magazine, awarded Santiago with innovator of the year. Very proud of Santiago and very honored to have had the pleasure to interview him. But this week we're changing pace a little bit. It's been a little chaotic in the Bitcoin world. There's a lot going on, a lot of forks, a lot of drama, a lot of bickering. I'm sure a lot of you are confused. There's been a lot of news in the mainstream, a lot of big hedge fund managers coming out in favor of Bitcoin, others coming out against Bitcoin.

I'm sure there's a lot of confusion in the air. So, to help with this confusion, I brought in a couple of guys that might be in similar shoes as you guys. Two sort of newbies to the space. People who have recently invested in Bitcoin. I don't want to say recently with me. I've been in for like eight months. I'm almost a year in. Eight months is like three years in crypto.

So, you've got some experience, but we have somebody else with us. Another employee at Barstool Sports. The Baron? Of Bitcoin himself? A band is here to look for Nate? For the Baron of Bitcoin? There is a band here to look for the Baron of Bitcoin. No, you can't shake your head no.

You've got to go out there. I didn't invite anybody. There's literally a band here. The Baron of Bitcoin. He has so much Bitcoin. He's been robbing people for Bitcoin. Okay, okay. We're going to have PFT jump in for the Baron of Bitcoin?

He's jumping in here. Hey, yeah, I'm taking over for Nate real quick. So what are we talking about, Kirk Cousins? We are talking about how Nate is the new baron of Bitcoin. How he wrote about Bitcoin five years ago, and now it just started to soar. He won't shut up about it. Every morning I come in, he tells me what Bitcoin's at, like I invested it. I'm like, okay, thanks, Nate.

He's like, it's up another 10%. I was like, I don't care. I don't have stock in Bitcoin. You do. You want me to congratulate you? That's what he's fishing for every morning. Nate just got into Bitcoin. For a guy who's talked so much about it, he's been on the side.

He's a fucking Monday morning quarterback. You know about those guys. He's got the fever. He's got the usual fever. This happens to everybody when you first get in. You're bragging to your friends. A lot of his brags are basically like, I wanted to invest in Bitcoin five years ago. Then he'll stop by my desk three or four times a day and be like,

just tell me different amounts of money that he could have invested in Bitcoin and how much that amount of money would be worth today. It'd be like, oh, so I had $500 and I invested in Under Armour. And instead, if I invested in Bitcoin, it would be worth like $500,000. I'm like, cool. Then I'll come back later and be like, then I had $700 I invested in this. We're just talking about your investment strategy. Your poor investment strategy.

Did you know that if you take a penny and you double it every single day for a month, at the end of the month, you're going to have $5.4 million? How about that? That's more than a Bitcoin. That's what exponential growth looks like. Who's the band? I don't know. I have no idea.

So wait. So we just had- We just got interrupted. We just got interrupted because you had a fucking- I don't think so. I like what we just got there. I think we're going to keep it going. The Baron of Bitcoin is now signing bands too?

He has a band. So we have- We were in the middle of recording a podcast. Fucking Frankie Borelli is supposed to be a professional and not barge into a studio when people are recording. He goes, there's a band here to see you. I go out there. They go, yeah, we're just-

I don't know who they are. I don't know what band that is. Like, why are they looking for you? Are you signing people? I don't know. I don't know who they are. I got it. I don't know.

I got it. I think this is a cold call. I think the band is cold. Yeah, that was definitely a knock on the door. They want to get going. Can you go find out what band that is, please? Did you not ask them? No.

Why? I thought it would be embarrassing. Oh, who the fuck are you? I thought it would be kind of embarrassing. They didn't introduce themselves? He introduced himself by his first name, but I wasn't paying attention. Did you meet this guy drunk at a concert last week? No, they literally just said,

You just had a chance to be the next Jimmy Iovine right there, and you didn't do it. I have more important things to do, like Bitcoin. What if this band is next Bitcoin? Whoa. What if you could get on this band? I could have invested in this band five years ago. Nate, you want to know what's going to happen, PFT?

He's going to be telling you about this band in three years, which he had a chance to have this band on, on his fucking payroll. They came here for you. They came here for you, out of all people. We're going to have to. All right, we're going to get back on the tracks here, people. I'm not joking. can we just like

fucking get rid of all that that was so unprofessional no that was actually the best part this is Barstool this is the whole point of it we had a fucking guy who just won an MIT award

we have Nate the Baron of Bitcoin Nate who's now repping bands through the office so we always we always make fun of me

for doing side deals and being on the fucking fringe you are living on the fringe to recap what just happened is we're doing a Bitcoin podcast Frankie Borelli

comes barging into the studio saying there's a band here to see you I go out there there's a band here to see me I don't know what band this is I did not invite a band to the office

but they're here apparently to see me and then I said fuck this I have more important things to do like invest in more Bitcoin

let's go boys and this is how we get back on topic perfect segues I can't believe the baron of Bitcoin is also running a fucking side deal

with bands now apparently so no no I like it you want to diversify you want to be diversified Nate I love people doing side deals

and like running off and just being and just being one with the fucking world and out there just making money and making deals and not worrying about what fucking Portnoy says

or not worrying about what the Scherning group, nothing, you just out there being you. I can't believe the Baron of Bitcoin is now into talent management. You know how hard talent management is? That's why we're getting out. That's why we're in Bitcoin. Lou, if they can make me 800% over the next three months,

I'll sign them up right now. But I looked them in the eyes, they don't have it. They don't? That's why I'm in here and not talking to them. Well, I'm glad to have you here, because I'm happy to be here. I love Bitcoin. Somebody's been in Bitcoin for almost five years now.

uh it's it's always interesting to see new people come into the space there's been waves after wave so i've been blogging about bitcoin since like my second month on the job and my first blog about blogging or you've blogged twice about no my first blog about bitcoin was in november of 2013 i was hired in october 2013 my first blog about bitcoin was november of 2013 and i uh i wrote like i'm all in on bitcoin it was when it was like like at 800 i was like i'm I bought zero Bitcoins. And then I have a Gchat to my buddy who has a bunch of Bitcoin when it went down to $5.50. I said, I need to buy Bitcoin.

I need to buy Bitcoin. It's at $5.50. I need in. You know how many I bought? Zero. I blogged when it was at like $2,000. I said, now's the time. Why didn't you buy at these points?

Were you just complacent and didn't get to it? Or was it like you didn't think it was going to work out? I am a lot like the people who know right now what Bitcoin kind of is. but just don't know enough to jump into it. Like, there's a lot of people out there who tell themselves every day, I want to get into Bitcoin. I want to get into Bitcoin and then never do. That was me.

So how do you, right now at this point, how would you describe Bitcoin to, if you, how do you understand it? So I see it as mainly an investment. So instead of doing Bitcoin, I got into buying stocks. Like I'm very interested in investment. I know you're not supposed to just like pick stocks and like buy them, but I found it fun to do. He was picking stocks with his heart.

He had a little heart. I only had one heart play ever. It was Twitter, and that was a bad play. Mine was Apple at 92, and I've made 84% on it. That's a good trade. So, yeah, I'm very happy with that one. I also bought Under Armour at 42, and now it's at 11, so missed on that one. So I see it as an investment kind of like stocks.

Buy low, sell high. That's how I see Bitcoin primarily for me right now, but the more I read about it, what it could be and what it can become, that's why I'm so obsessed with it what do you think it could be and what do you think it will become I mean I just hope it becomes what like

the really smart people think it can become which is like the like currency 2.0 pretty much yeah so

like we discussed with Pierre so can we can we just say something Nate I'm gonna give you the old Bezos quote next time it's better to be right than it is to be smart

you were right so just dive in I know I know yeah and like yeah So, I like that you said currency 2.0. It's interesting.

So, what we have now is like, yeah, we have this alien technology in our hands and it is a digital perfect monetary system. And it is directly competing with our central bank system that we have right now. So, it is taking on big dogs. It's coming after one of, I mean, the largest institution in the world, which is money. And it's interesting because you have quotes from guys at like JP Morgan who say publicly, like, we're not going to buy Bitcoin, we're not going to buy Bitcoin. And then a day later, you know, you see that they just bought a million dollars worth of Bitcoin as an investment. Well, that wasn't the actual fund, though. I know, but the guys will openly say, you know, to protect their assets, their jobs, that we're not Bitcoin guys.

And then privately, they're buying Bitcoin. So when Wall Street picks up on it, that's how you know that you're in something good. And that's what's interesting to me with the bad guy. I've got a lot of banker friends, and they're not allowed to touch it. They're not allowed to, correct. They're not allowed to publicly. Some of them do, but they do it in ways where nobody would find out. Since I've been talking a lot about Bitcoin on Twitter recently,

I've gotten a good amount of DMs from people in the banking sector who are just like, we do believe in this. like we think that this is something that it i don't think people know for sure if it's a bubble or not that word gets thrown around a lot but the smart people and like the big wall street people they at least believe in it for now but as we know with bitcoin like hour to hour minute to minute day to day anything can happen with this thing it is the most fun market i've ever i've ever witnessed in my life and followed and so back to the stocks things i i just look back at how much i put into under armor and how much i put into other random ass stocks if i just put that money

into bitcoin oh buddy oh buddy you wouldn't be working here oh buddy where would you be nate i'd be on a boat i would just be in a boat in the south of france he's dying for a boat the baron of bitcoin is dying for a boat right blue dog when when we have boats we're gonna think about this conversation when we're just like hey remember when all we wanted was a boat now we got two so what if we want boats we better invest more than right now all we're doing is taking what's liquid and putting it into Bitcoin and saying a prayer.

All right. Let's not, this is not investment advice. Let's be clear on this. We'll edit that out. We are not fiduciaries at all. And I would caution against going all in.

I do too. But we'll edit that all out. We, no, no, we'll keep it in. But like, no, because that's the one thing

about this, like this sector, this space is so emotional. It drives emotions. It's very visceral. You can feel it as soon as people get hooked. They're hooked

and they're falling down down the rabbit hole and that's why i wanted to bring you into the the studio today i've realized i saw your your bitcoin post was that earlier this week yes thanks for uh thanks for shouting out the pod that would have been great my bad okay next time when it hits 10k you know in the next month or so that's when we're gonna it it possibly could but that's why i wanted to bring you in what kind of questions you have at this point so you have been a passive observer for what the last four years yes you finally decided to take the dip in yes i'm sure there's a bunch

of things floating around above your head that you're trying to put together and uh you wrote down a few questions um and let's go over them so i guess the first one the most recent news that's been going on bitcoin is the forks uh teams forking off and creating new chains all coins can i stop for one second since this podcast is live i thought on gdx i could buy fucking like alts can i buy alts on gdx no gdx that's coin basis so you can probably buy litecoin and ethereum that's about it fuck so we got i gotta get another fucking bitrex i have tricks what what other one besides bitrex because i wrote on like uh there's one i would try one like changely but you would have to download um the altcoin wallets uh there's yeah so like changely is an exchange where you

don't keep it on an exchange you literally uh it's sort of like shape shift we'll get into this later i could talk about this all day how about you don't hijack the show i'm sorry dude i mean what do you want me to do i'm we're trying to figure out listen this is real life you were you were having a band going i'm trying to buy in real time palani x that's the other one palani x yeah be care be very very careful with this is where the exchange is like i believe me i had this hype this this feeling to in 2013 2014 like i was fucking trading alts and this this space is the wild west like that's why i don't want to do it that's if you're going to trade alts make number one make sure you know how to trade you know how to manage risk and and put in stop losses and

then take profits right i want to make that very clear is this is still like any investment can fall at any given time you can't be stupid about it like it it's a lot of fun and it but it's so swingy and it's so like just like well that's that's why that's why the the meme hodls out there it's that that whole meme started from a post on bitcoin talk.org where the guy was like i literally can't trade these swings i'm gonna hodl he misspelled hold i'm gonna hold for for the foreseen future because it's not even worth playing the swings because in the long run it's just going up this is actually this is actually one of our questions let's just get in you're right we always pivot here nate this is one of our questions like the alt market like i know

you're kind of against it marty so like why like if people do want to play in the alt space give them like give them the steps to the alt space like how are we going to play in the alt space i own two alts but like i still am not great at all it's like i get very nervous when i'm like this stuff still has me very nervous besides bitcoin again going back to if you're going to do this stuff make sure you know how to trade if you don't know how to trade you're going to get your dick pushed in like don't even try it but if you are a good trader and you are playing the alts game a lot of the people that do trade alts their their main objective within that trading is to stack more bitcoin so they're basically playing the price swing so they can stack more bitcoin at

the end of the day uh buy low sell high and stack bitcoin and then do it all over again um alts yeah Uh, so for me, again, going back to, we have this alien technology in our hands. It's very new. It's under a decade old and Bitcoin specifically, in my opinions, uh, and probably most people's opinion, Bitcoin core specifically, that implementation has some of the smartest developers in the world working on it. Um, and as we're finding out, as time goes on, these blockchains are very hard to scale. They're very hard to work with at the protocol level, and basically the value proposition that altcoins have provided, and altcoins is sort of a word that some people in the crypto space don't like because it connotates that they're a currency, but not all of them are currencies per se.

but their value proposition is that they're they're they're iterating on bitcoin and making it a better incentive system maybe they have different mining algorithms that that create a more fair uh mining playing field um but at the end of the day it is software and for me specifically especially with this decentralized technology it all comes down to having competent devs on your team and in my opinion from what i've witnessed over the last five years the bitcoin team has the only competent devs that that that can make these blockchain scale and work without any downtime so uh piggybacking on that a lot of people myself included i guess know that alts are like the wild west we know there's a lot of money to make be made in alts one guy

explained it to me in a way he goes it's like giving you eight to one on a coin flip like you won't always be right on aughts but most of the time you will be is that a fair way of looking at them uh it depends on what type of market cycle it is so yes we're we've been in a an all bull market for the last 14 months, probably. Actually, I'm not certain, but we've been in an alt bull market. It's cooled down a little bit since the summer. But again, like I said, I was doing this shit in 2013, 2014, and the alt party can stop overnight. When the music stops in alts, they're so illiquid because their market caps aren't as big as Bitcoins. Okay, so let's ask this question then. So you're saying that, because this is something I just don't know, 2013, 2014, you were

trading different alts than there are alts right now so you weren't trading monero you weren't trading were you or like what were you what were you into um just because like i'm trying to figure out like you know what i mean yeah so if you're saying there's total different alts i'm like okay then this can just fucking pop up anytime and like what the fuck are we even doing so so what are you like icos right now they're what alts were in 2013 2014 uh they offer a certain value proposition back then i litecoin i bought some litecoin back in the day monero i don't think i forget what monero was released i think it might have been 2014 but i'm not positive um but yeah i messed around with alts for like a year i lost a shit ton of bitcoin i was like all

right i'm done doing this because again like i said once the alt party stops once the record stops the music stops it it's almost overnight that your value gets wiped out and this will happen in 2014 and another reason to be cautious trading alts is because you have to do it through these exchanges which are very susceptible to hacks so i got a bunch of my shit jacked off an exchange so there is no real exchange it's good for alts right now i mean they're safe ones but it's like nassim talib's the life of a turkey everything's getting good until the day it dies it's good what is this so what are the safest ones then at the moment um just for the just for the tales from the crypts fan so they know because because you know there's some fucking people are

i mean we have there's a lot of gamblers on the gambler there's a lot of risky people in this world. If they're going to be risky, I like risk no matter what. If we have risky people, where can they be the safest? I like Bittrex. Again, going back, I don't encourage anybody to trade alts, but if you're going to do it, do it on a safe exchange. Bittrex has been well, from what I can tell from the traders I follow on Twitter. They like Trex. A lot of it, like Poloniex, actually lost favor with a lot of people because they're a little sketchy um they'll do there was a lot of pump and dumps on poloniacs throughout the years um and then like that exchange changed

i was saying but you would have to download the wallet and it's basically you deposit bitcoin it gets directly deposited into your personal wallet which in my opinion is a good way to to uh get into alts because you don't have that custodial um risk with the exchange but yeah if you're gonna get in again i stress this make sure if you're gonna trade this shit make sure you know how to trade and word to the wise most of you motherfuckers aren't gonna know how to trade yeah i mean i did it i worked in that shit and i still am like fucking worried like it is it's scary it's shit so for anyone like unless you're like a next level person like you may not want to be like a regular joe out there doing this shit because it is like it's fucking scary man

like i don't know like neo got shut down in fucking china it was it was gonna look like it was going to 100 and then the second they shut down all the trading in china it just fucking died they went took a nose dive it was done yeah so it's like anything can happen in the all game manage risk never go all in um yeah and as always with bitcoin don't invest more than you're willing to lose and i want to be extra cautious with this shit because we're living in a time where the average american can't handle a 400 expense like surprise expense so don't go throwing your disposable income at this stuff if you if you need it to live um definitely i cannot stress that enough to the casual person out there who if you want to get into bitcoin just for the sweat

of the swings you don't have to buy a full bitcoin you don't have to buy half a bitcoin you can throw you know 100 200 bucks at it and i mean bitcoin's up uh 933 percent this year so if you're just looking for the sweat of 100 bucks 200 bucks and you want to be in bitcoin please don't buy a full bitcoin like just just get in for if you just want to get in for the fun of it so you can tell people that you have bitcoin i recommend it in that way because i mean 100 bucks at the bar 100 bucks at bitcoin you know it's all yeah that's what that's my advice drink less save more and that's sort of that's the beauty of so but if it's up 900 this year we know damn well it could go down you know definitely i mean and you would be it's not going to go up forever like there's there's

not obvious but there is apparent um trends bitcoin will go hyperbolic and then fall 60 60 to 80 percent have a contracted bear market but past results aren't indicative of future returns and past returns aren't indicative of future results excuse me it could keep going up probably not likely at this point but with that being said we have a lot of institutional money on the sidelines you have things going on around the world like catalan the catalan referendum in spain zimbabwe right now venezuela lebanon and saudi arabia are getting into it so why you mentioned zimbabwe that was one of our questions why does a bitcoin cost more in zimbabwe than it does in america right now like how does that even work because those people are willing to pay the

premium because their currency is so worthless so is the exchange taking it from these people or like or the demand's so high on that zimbabwe in exchange okay let's get the price so my question about that is if if bitcoin's a decentralized currency shouldn't it be the same across the globe no matter where you are that's a great question and um i'm not the best person to answer this but the way i would describe it is yes so zimbabwe in that community specifically it's one i believe it's one exchange in zimbabwe so it's a localized zimbabwe exchange yes it's It's probably the easiest one to use in Zimbabwe where they have a premium on Bitcoin.

Yes, and I think it might be over-the-counter, which means you're transacting directly with people and not going to an exchange. And those have historically been, if you look at OTC markets here in America, there's a big premium on them as well. Yes, that makes sense. And in Zimbabwe, the premium's even higher

because it's such a dire situation there that these people want to get into an asset that can be a store of value for them. But that's also as sad as the news coming out zimbabwe is for bitcoin investors the fact that it can do something like that if we're just talking about bottom line money pretty good for us yeah i mean that's what bitcoin is it's a hedge against the collapse of the modern monetary system um pretty heavy definitely very heavy shit but sometimes you got to take the emotion out of it take a step back oh i have no emotion involved

I just want to get rich that's an emotion that's an emotion that is an emotion okay no sad emotions I mean it's yeah I agree it's literally like

after talking after Santi shout out Santi shout out MIT man of the year I'm just going to say MIT man of the year I don't know what

his fucking award was I like that innovator of the year but man of the year is good too MIT man of the year for Santi what a fucking guy

what a super smart guy like the world has fucked us like it's not like the big banking world like I forget the one guy i was following on twitter he was like he he was talking about how he had a 401k for 800

and it's basically losing money every day like like it's losing money he's like from his first oh yeah mike dudas yeah on twitter the dude from button yeah he's explaining how like they won't let him pull it out unless it's over a thousand he's just they're just eating fees they're eating the fees and it's like what is this what is this system that we built and this is what bitcoin's trying to do it's trying to fix things that fucking we built this banking system and especially all over the world that has basically fouled the people. It really has. It's fouled us.

Let me ask you this. Touching on the banking system, what do you think, just your opinion, obviously nobody knows, do you think it's more likely Wall Street embraces it or Wall Street tries to shut it down? It's split right now. They'll never be able to shut it down.

That's the thing. They might try. I mean, Jamie Dimon's using FUD to talk people away from it. So that's a good point. The banking community split. Jamie Dimon came out and said Bitcoin's a fraud, it's a tulip craze. And then Lloyd Blankenfein from Goldman Sachs comes out and says, we see potential in this.

So even within the banking community, there's no consensus. There's definitely different views, competing views. And again, this is a completely new asset class. This happens very, very few times throughout the course of human history where you have a completely new asset class show up out of nowhere, and nobody knows how to deal with it. So we're all on a level playing field. Like, we're just as cognizant of this as the bankers are. What I find interesting is, like, let me just use my brother as an example. He was a finance major in college, smarter guy than I am, smart dude.

Really? Yeah, my brother's a smart dude. Smarter than you? Smarter than me. I mean, you signed a ban today off the street, so I don't know, but go ahead. So, yeah, that just shows you how smart he is. I don't think he knows one thing about Bitcoin. Like, not a thing.

And he was a finance major, and he has a good job, lives a pretty decent life. how how do we get your everyday guy to understand bitcoin and crypto when people like us who study it every day read about it every day don't even understand it people like us go ahead it takes time so it takes time you gotta you gotta you gotta one step at a time sort of figure it out it's taken me and i am i stress this in the newsletter i stress this as much as i can i'm by no means an expert i've just been around this space for so long that i sort of understand it better than so isn't that a problem where you can hand somebody a dollar and be like this is worth one dollar it takes five years to understand bitcoin is that uh would that be an issue

moving forward no because no um i've mentioned this before on the pod but there's a tweet out there by this dude neil wood fine he's based out of beijing beijing and he said bitcoin if it's successful will usher in the next enlightenment because people have to learn stuff like cryptography game theory economics network effects and stuff like that it forces you to learn so yes it's going to take time for everybody to get to a level playing field but it will be an overall benefit for society because we're learning almost like another industrial revolution in a way like that kind of level yes bigger because it's person the person you don't have these these centralized third parties getting in get in the way of transactions like like pierre

said in episode two we are disrupting one half of every transaction on earth which is money and we literally as a species as a human species our brain is not evolved to the point where we can comprehend the amount of change this will bring and that's what i'm trying to do with the newsletter with this podcast have everybody take a step back be like all right holy shit we've got this in our hands this is gonna fuck not fuck things up but it's gonna change things in such a drastic way that we can't even comprehend it like i feel especially for the listeners of this podcast like thanksgivings in a couple weeks you go home four days five days four days whatever you go home either or and six days your father asked you about bitcoin what what would be your

your your three minute explanation to how to get you know the 65 and up generation to understand exactly what it is over 65 my parents are young my parents aren't even 50 my parents are always dirt um yeah so they're just fucking old for them yeah so for for boomers uh bitcoin is most comparable to gold as in it is a scarce asset that is finite and um is is a store of value over time a lot of older older people uh like to have gold and silver as an investment the old saying goes an ounce of gold has been able to get you a nice suit throughout history so in the roman times you could get a nice toga with an ounce of gold right now you can get a nice suit with an ounce of gold i think it's at like 1300 bucks and that's been true throughout time so it's a nice store of value

uh that the older generations are sort of used to as an investment um and that's sort of what bitcoin is but for the digital age so if you're going to compare it to something yes and do you see an issue that so someone like me i like holding bitcoin as an investment i wouldn't want to spend it at a store because i feel like i would be losing value by spending it i know i just spent my first bitcoin today and i was very like it gave me like right this is how do we get over that so so happy you said that um because this is what we're going going through right now on bitcoins that's why we have bitcoin cash um perfect segue is because uh roger ver and a group of contingency of miners and other stakeholders in in the bitcoin space have decided uh they were

early adopters um and back when they got into bitcoin in like 2010 2011 transacting on the bitcoin network since there wasn't a lot of people using it was very cheap so you could send transactions for fractions of a penny and you could buy coffee with bitcoin you can go and do it without worrying about paying absorbent fees um and as more people adopted bitcoin it came onto the network and the price rises um the fees are denominated in satoshis and parts of a bitcoin so naturally the amount of fees in u.s dollar amount or denominated in u.s dollar go up over time as more people come on and that's a huge debate going on right now is why why are fees getting higher and what i what a lot of people think and what i agree with is that it this is

just the natural progression of this technology is you have this network effect you have people coming on and just uh the nature of the protocol like fees are gonna rise because it means there's more demand for bitcoin and it's just you're seeing the fee market develop um and this is good for the network i would argue because it secures it in the long run um and then so your point when will ever be where you can go to a store and buy coffee with it so in economics throughout history money any money that's ever been created it sort of had to go through this continuum where it's a collectible first where people like it so bitcoin in the beginning was a collectible like our boy laszlo when he bought the pizzas he spent ten thousand bitcoin just

thinking hey i got this collectible this dude's willing to like buy me pizzas with it so i think that transaction was like established bitcoin as a collectible and then as you go through the continuum you have to have you go from collectible to store a value which is what bitcoin is now people invest in it expecting it to to appreciate throughout time and then eventually you get to a medium of exchange where where um where do you think that inflates the price when people you know you hear about bitcoin in the news and like oh i want to get involved in bitcoin with no intention of ever using it as a currency it's more just like you can just show your buddy your phone hey look i have half a bitcoin i mean that definitely helped i mean it definitely drives

at the price, if a lot of people are doing that. But the point is, if we are, so my investment thesis since the beginning is we're going to have a great rotation from fiat currencies into these cryptocurrencies. And as that rotation happens, obviously Bitcoin's price is going to rise. But at some point, like we talked about with Pierre, you have what's called hyper-Bitcoinization, where you sort of have this black hole effect where all the value in the fiat monetary system gets sucked into bitcoin and once hyper bitcoinization happens that will drive bitcoin's valuation up an obscene amount and you'll get to like a level where you're able to use it as a medium of exchange where um where you won't feel so

where we're weird about where the price is yes where the price is going to be stable to a certain point this is a theory yeah um and on top of that there are second layer solutions coming out one was almost uh almost uh i think they're getting to a beta which is lightning that network um and so these are the big debate right now is should you have all these transactions on train on chain on the protocol or should you try to try to push a lot of their transactions above the protocol so you're not uh stressing out the blockchain with a lot of data um so i would argue that it's smart to build second-layer solutions that aren't as decentralized, but... Do you think the government would get involved in that?

Some people think, but again, this revolves all around open-source software, so right now, a lot of the tools being built on top of Bitcoin are open-source projects, so anybody can contribute, and if the government were to try to co-opt something, there's so much peer review that they would get called out for trying to do anything. A question that I've gotten a few times, so I've been, like, tweeting and blogging about Bitcoin a bit more recently since I've gotten obsessed with it. I mean, when you become the baron of something, you better be in the world. Yeah, so people want to know what stops either major corporations like, you know, like the big ones, the Microsofts, even like the Amazons who rely on, like, money coming in, like, you know, people spend billions of dollars on Amazon a day, or the U.S. government, which is basically, you know, a major corporation. from just creating their own crypto and forcing people not accepting bitcoin not accepting other

cryptos besides those like what's stopping the government from saying hey crypto is the future but you have to use ours it defeats the whole purpose of this i know but so it which i get to a point but couldn't they theoretically do it for it to happen to destroy the bitcoin network you'd have to have every government around the world coordinating and doing it in one fell swoop which i find highly unlikely you can't even could multiple countries come to an agreement that almost like how like the european union came to use the euro no no they can't force it can't force it on because it's a decentralized network again it's open source software so if you have hardware and you're able to run a node that

basically decides the rules of the system you understand like people don't like that's what i'm trying to say is like it makes sense to me that no i'd say it's for for the government to shut it down they would have to go house to house i'm not saying shut it down but people want to know if some guys somewhere can create bitcoin what's stopping our government from creating their own bitcoin nothing they could try but again they're the value proposition is is out the door as soon as they try it because the whole proposition of bitcoin is it's a decentralized peer-to-peer network without a central authority and again you it's hard to wrap your head around sometimes exactly again this shit's all hard like there's no way anyone can

anyone that acts like they know what they're doing and they're fucking smug about it is an idiot because this shit is like let's not act like like no one even the smartest of the smart people what do we i'd say maybe a hundred people in the world know exactly what it's gonna five five maybe five five okay i'll take your word on that yeah it's probably five yeah maybe five people that completely understand it at like a technical level and how everything interacts with each other and that's why i was saying that's why i go back to bitcoin because you have the smartest people working on this protocol i guess that's one of that was one of our questions we had down too it's like we see all these blockchain companies in blockchain and we're going to disrupt this

industry of blockchain like can we just be honest like there's not enough developers right there's not enough developers to do this there's not enough people like there's not enough competent developers competent developers i mean there's not enough competent developers right now to build any like to build like to build products in themselves like that's what pierre was saying like uh shipping a product like barstool is hard in itself shipping a decentralized protocol is orders of magnitude harder like yeah i mean it's fantasy land and you the people like so the people that are working on bitcoin are people that literally built the infrastructure of the internet like tcp ip like they come from this group of engineers a group of hackers that

refer to themselves as the cypherpunks and over the last three decades they've been working on technologies that help privacy they've been talking about digital cash since the late 80s like this is this has been something that's been in the works for three decades in 2008 excuse me to the two decades leading up to 2008 uh 2009 and they finally figured out how to make it work satoshi did and now we're seeing seeing this invention out i mean just like thinking about like stock exchange like people building out low latency high frequency trading systems with fucking c plus plus and shit like that there was only a couple thousand of those people exactly no that's what bitcoin's written in the c plus plus in the world yeah there's only a couple

thousand those people in the entire world exactly like they would be like and like to get someone to learn that or like know how to do that like they were those guys were making these people are like on such a freak level of smart that like you can't even comprehend like i mean what they think about like the attack vectors they think about the scenarios they put they put together in their heads like they think through this stuff so thoroughly and again a lot of people just like people like bitcoin cash dislike the core team because they won't accept their changes because they're not up to par and that's why you have these people forking off is because they tried to implement changes on the protocol but the smart guys were like uh not good enough and

that's that's why i caution people to get in getting into alts i'm like we don't know how these these protocols work yet we're not sure how they scale yet and i'm pretty certain some joe schmo anonymous dev from the internet spinning up a blockchain is going to be able to so like do you put like i mean let's take the sanis if you guys don't know this guy andrew de sanis on twitter he's a madman we follow him he's seems like a genius though marty knows him he's a genius the kid's a genius there's no doubt about it like is he one of the people that you would consider like understands what he's doing i assume yeah yeah andrew he's he's a genius he's crazy and i love him i love i love his insanity he

he actually started out he apple apple hired him i believe when he was in college to try to hack their hardware like figure out like uh where their where their systems were were vulnerable so he's he's on that level where apple was was was confident in his abilities to hack their their hardware that they they hired him to do that so he is definitely a competent dev he's working on something right now saying he's going to launch it i haven't seen it yet but um he definitely understands like bitcoin at a very very fundamental level or not fundamental but a very, like, he knows it in depth. Technical and high level.

Yes, yeah. So it's like, and this guy, if you follow him, he's... What's his at on Twitter? I don't even know what it is. At DeSantis, D-E-S-A-N-T-I-S. All right, that'll be a must follow. Yeah, he's, but like, it's next level stuff. Like, you could follow him and he'll be tweeting about things.

You'd be like, I don't know what's even going on here, but it seems like a genius. Yeah, it's a lot of feelings with DeSantis. He's like, I don't know what he's saying, but like, I feel, I can feel it. Maybe we'll make it a segment where we just like take a few of his tweets and we try to like i doubt you're listening to this because i know you you've been working a lot lately but if you want to come on this is an open invitation i would

love i mean when we met earlier in may it blew my mind the conversation we had one of the other big questions i've gotten in the last week is a lot of people even people in the office like we have a lot of gamblers a lot of d gens in the office who just like the sweater stuff like the swings of stuff and they've been saying to me i feel like it's too late i i missed the boat on bitcoin it's too late people have been saying this to me since it was 200 exactly so what i say is i mean i said i was gonna get in at 550 i said i was gonna get in at 800 i said i was gonna get at 4200 it took me until 6600 to get in would you ever tell somebody that it's just like too late on bitcoin no no no i mean not until we hit hyper bitcoinization right it's like you're

like multi-million dollar bitcoin but um yeah i've been to i mean again i i know i know we're not trying to give like financial advice that's that's the hardest part about this because i know i didn't mean to phrase it in a way that we're trying to influence people to do one thing or the other but those are major questions that i i keep getting it oh i feel like it's too late one thing that I want to reiterate is you're not please don't buy a full Bitcoin like 99% of people out there please don't buy a full one if you just

want to get in for the sake of getting in you can do a low amount let me interrupt you here and throw out a little fact every millionaire in the world if they wanted to buy one Bitcoin wouldn't be able to so if you do have a whole Bitcoin you have you have a step up on most of the people in the world

but yes if you can't afford it do not buy one whole Bitcoin at once uh definitely average in what i tell people is the dollar cost average in set a set amount per paycheck maybe 50 to 100 read a couple things about investment yeah trading wizards that's a good one um but yeah i i i i i'm always hesitant to be like yeah now's a good time to buy because i never know like tomorrow like some news could come out in exchange you get hacked like it could fall and they'd be like what the fuck you told me to buy but again i always tell people long term you're going to be thinking 10 to 15 years out if you want to get into this just buy put it on a

personal wallet forget about it and that's why i say only invest as much as you can yeah because even if you're putting in 50 bucks a paycheck right now in 10 to 20 years that 50 bucks could be 50 grand and i come from like a poker background and a lot of times you'll play at a table with you know like some 22 year old college kid who can't afford the game that he's playing in so they'll play very passive you know they'll be like just like you know pretty much just like draining their money away at the table handing it over to people a little bit at a time because they're so scared so never play with money that you know you can't afford to lose and never invest too much of your net worth that you can't comfortably lose because as much as bitcoin's up right now like we have no

idea what's happening tomorrow exactly i mean how would how would they stop bitcoin it basically have to be like a reverse of the banking system right where the banking system would be like we fucked up we've fucked up a lot of shit like we're gonna fix it for you guys like that's the only way i see bitcoin no because no because money like that's the thing like so again we were born into a situation where we just expect like oh this is the way the world works this is the way money works i get dollars i get a paycheck i do this nobody really understands what money is at its core like what a u.s dollar represents what it represents is debt and we're getting to a point where after bretton woods which is we were on a quasi gold standard until the 1970s and we went

off of that and since that we've had like the the value of the dollar has dropped precipitously and it's gotten to a point in the way the value of the dollar drops is the treasury gives the banks um treasury bonds and then the federal reserve prints cash and buys those bonds from the banks and those bonds are basically debt that we have to pay back in the future and it's gotten to a point in my opinion people will argue this that we are never going to be able to pay back that debt like it is an insurmountable amount we are basically just paying off interest on that debt not even at some point we're not even going to be able to pay off the interest because we've we've created so much money and that's what bitcoin is reversion to a

sound money where nobody's able to say hey we're going to print more bitcoins like it would it's highly unlikely that whatever happened to bitcoin because you'd have to have everybody on the network reach consensus that that's what they want to do and that will never happen because there's a very intolerant minority that is only in bitcoin because it is sound money and they we'll never let that happen okay that makes complete sense this is i mean it's a great learning hour great learning hour nate do you have any more questions because we're coming up on an hour i'd like to keep this one under an hour whoo um i mean i feel like this was like extremely informative um man trying to think if we had anything else to go down but oh i guess

the one other major thing um so the main place to buy bitcoin right now is coinbase and on coinbase you can buy bitcoin you can buy ethereum and buy litecoin um are you as high on the other two as you are on bitcoin just in your opinion because when when people ask how do i buy bitcoin you just send them a link to coinbase.com you see the three coins yeah and it's like i get this all the time so what do you what do you tell people like oh what are these other two because right now bitcoin's at 78 and you know ethereum's 30 330 and i think light's at 70 or so um obviously you always want to diversify whenever you're investing in anything what how do you how do you explain we talked so much about bitcoin what about these

other two big ones that trade on coinbase very good question um yeah so bitcoin obviously the big dog litecoin uh if you're going to make an investment thesis for litecoin it would be that it is a great test net for bitcoin so uh when people want to get new features incorporated into bitcoin litecoin is actually usually the first chain to incorporate those features basically to let people know like all right it would be safe we incorporated this on bitcoin and that sort of drives value towards uh litecoin as a test net for bitcoin so basically like this is their this basically litecoin's they're like is like their ab testing platform for fucking bitcoin it's like they're dealing not ab yeah yeah it's like their qa testing

before it gets implemented into into bitcoin that's pretty valuable then at one point yeah i mean not today but like that would be valuable one day yeah yeah um and that's not its only use case but that is one of its use case which i would some would argue me myself included that might be a good use case for litecoin um uh ethereum people always use the words smart contracts when it comes to ethereum those are the big buzzwords huge buzzwords so i get a lot of shit for this but i'm an ethereum bear um i've i've oh deep web tim when he deep web tim deep web tim does not like me talking about ethereum i respect deep web tim i can't wait to speak to him about ethereum but being around since 2013 uh seeing like the run-up to

the ethereum launch uh and basically the promises they made before it was launched what's happened since it was launched i do not believe ethereum is viable long term uh they're they're very ambitious which i appreciate but i think their ambition may blind them to a certain extent because they're trying to do too much at once uh they're very complex out of the box which i don't think is a good strategy and uh they're they're about to embark on a journey in the blockchain space that is very arduous which is a transition from proof of work to proof of stake so basically the way the the blockchain is secured uh there's two there's two popular ways to do it right now proof of work which is computer resource intensive you use an insane amount of computing power to

basically secure the network and prove everything that's happened proof of stake is is uh is extensively less power intensive um but uh it is unfounded whether or not it is uh as secure uh it can easily be gamed and and and uh co-opted uh so a lot a lot of people including myself would argue at this point and ethereum is trying to transition from proof of work to proof of stake which is uh a task i would not want to take on there's a lot of but there's a huge amount of risk of doing that and one being so miners are making a lot of profit do you do you think they might have the right idea and someone else will do it better um no i don't think that i don't think they have the right idea because they're trying to blockchain the world and i don't i see i don't

think uh myself i again i said it before i'll say it again i think we're trying to figure out how bitcoin works um i don't think a touring complete world computer virtual machine is is is advantageous right now um that sounded like a line out of the matrix exactly so that's what that's my beef with ethereum they're they're more marketing heavy than tech heavy and uh they're selling pipe dreams to people that's why i asked that question is like do they have the idea but not know how to do it or is it just so there's or as you just said is it just a marketing so that's another reason why i caution people away from all this is because at the end of the day bitcoin is going to be able to incorporate whatever you innovate on your own blockchain so there's this company rootstock rsk

and they're basically working on implementing an ethereum like platform on top of bitcoin like i was telling you in second layer applications this company rootstock is promising to do what ethereum can do uh basically better on top of bitcoin so um yes there are people that are speaking of alts like that how so how rsk isn't an alt it's not an all it's a project yeah how many alts are just trying to pump and make money and how many are actually trying to like 99 percent okay so not very many are actually trying there's an incredible nobody's actually trying to make a difference in the alt world they're just trying to get rich and sell yeah most people and like i was saying like 2013 2014 it was heavy pre-mined alts that were pumping dumps and what we had this

year was the icos are basically the next iteration like the snoop dog alt isn't trying to change the world exactly the paragon weed whatever the fuck that was yeah it's very interesting because you the more you read about alts and crypto and the deeper into crypto twitter you get it's all alts alts alts alts alts and then you just have to take a step back and be like this is just like a get rich quick scheme in a way I mean me and Marty went to one like ICO consensus

it was the Ethereum marketing arm we went to one of their and it was that made me like Nate it would look worse than Milton's office Nate I pulled back I was like we're gonna go to this cool fucking place it's the episode of South Park where they're playing World of Warcraft and they're just like shitting in

it was almost like if you like think Barstool is like like we had Milton but like we were kind of blowing up and everyone was like oh like this fucking huge company like i was expecting to walk into this like fucking like new age thing it was a fucking shithole and everyone was just eating ramen it was a shithole of an office sorry guys if anyone hears this i don't care but like because i've worked in that environment but it was i was like holy shit like no one knows what the fuck they're doing it's amazing step back and realize that like one i mean i kind of got i

got caught up for a minute too like one tech's hard it's almost impossible to begin with and two like this is brand new like no one knows what's going on yet like people need to realize that like if someone comes in like we know this or we know this you really don't know shit like most people don't know shit yet so like that's why we're just gonna stay with bitcoin the barons here we're gonna get we're gonna i'm gonna let give you guys final words let's just stick with bitcoin for a little bit baron i think this was the best episode of this podcast to date no bias yo the band's playing

we got the band playing this was a very good episode we did have Innovator of the Year on last episode but I think for everybody all of our listeners this has been the best episode today because it's the most relatable

this is this is again enter this market with caution can you believe we have a band here that Nate just signed Nate just signed Nate signed

Nate doesn't even know the name of this band you wanna know what the Baron they saw Nate's name come up on the blockchain they were like we need this guy he's blogging he's buying bitcoin he's signing bans what can't this motherfucker do oh i'm sorry guys everyone that that's listening please subscribe review tell us you hate us tell us you love the baron give us everything was this helpful at all for this was helpful to sit here and ask you the questions and then i'm gonna go

back and listen to it again and it's like i think this is gonna be like a two-time listen episode just to let stuff sink in and just try to really continue to wrap my brain around this world that we're living in right now. It's a process. It's a process. It's a learning process. And I do want people who are listening to tweet us or email us whatever, questions, comments. If you want anything us to touch on further. Yeah, I mean, the Baron may end up coming on a few times now. The Baron might be my new co-host. I've been looking for a co-host. I mean, this isn't a bad triangle that we're sitting with right here.

But we're also going to get some smarter people than us in the room. We need, like, I mean, not Marty. Marty's A-plus guy. Me and you are fucking idiots. I'm on a level playing field with you, but I'm going to try and get some smart people in here. I'm going to for sure sit in on all of them because, like, all we can do right now is learn. And the more we know, the richer we get, the more boats we own. Again.

Boats, bands, Bitcoin, we're out. Peace and love.