TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #55: BitcoinTINA aka Rick Flex

Episode Date: January 18, 2019

Join Marty on this week's edition of Tales from the Crypt as he sits down with BitcoinTINA aka Rick Flex to discuss how bullish he is, past tech trends and how we may use them to guess how Bitcoin adoption may play out, and much much more. Banger of an episode.

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what's up freaks welcome back to tales from the cryptic your boy marty bent here in a hotel room in miami florida at the north american shitcoin conference uh escaping from the floor to come have a conversation in the room with somebody who i'm very excited to speak with we've had ongoing conversations for the last what year two years year year um bitcoin tina also known as richard he's one of the most animated people i've ever met in the space and i think you freaks are gonna love this conversation richard let's jump into your past how did you find bitcoin it's a tales from the crypt how'd you get into bitcoin first time i came across bitcoin i was at a conference trace mayor was speaking i thought it sounded really interesting i was really excited

by it the guy was running the conference basically said well you know i'm not sure and don't think too much of it and a lot of respect for this guy and i put it out of my mind like an idiot when was this four years ago 2014 okay it's a stansbury conference okay porter stansbury what's that pissed all over it so trace was explaining you did not catch you did not catch the bug this time around I was really interested, and I talked to Trace for a long time after his presentation. I thought Trace was really smart. I really liked listening to him.

I really – that was the only time I've met Trace, and I was really impressed. He was telling me a lot about telomeres. He was very interested in – you know what telomeres are? I think I'm saying this right. Telomeres are feelings. Telomeres are on your genes. You grow older because your genes are not replicating your body properly. I'm going to mess this up, so I'm not – but he was very interested in that.

like genes form fitting to your body affects your health your dna your dna your dna interesting that's what i because i did have i did have a biology sort of bell go off in my head when you said that for the first time it's biological but i i'm really going into an area that i don't know anything about so i mean i talk about things that i don't know about anyway but here this is what this is what this podcast is i know we're talking about something and we're just exploring it you No, I like your podcast a lot. You've got some really good guests. One of my ultimate favorite guests is Dan Held.

I really like Dan. I know. Dan is really smart. He is? I'm a huge fan. He's been putting out some good content, too. Dan Held is really smart. I'm a huge fan.

Shout out, Dan. Yeah, shout out, Dan. Shout out Picks and Shovels. Go check out Picks and Co. And I had a nice discussion with his partner, too. Clark? Yeah. Yeah.

Who I have a lot of respect for, also. Yeah, two good dudes fighting the good fight. Dan, yeah, so Dan and I talked a lot about narratives. You are somebody who believes Bitcoin narratives and some metrics and other things may be a little off right now. I do. And you have some very strong opinions. I want to get into all of them. First, all right, you met Trace in 2014.

You were very interested, but you said there was a lull. What happened? I don't know why. I didn't pay attention. I sort of forgot about it. Came across it again briefly in 2015. Didn't know anything about it. And then somehow caught my attention in 2017.

Price was moving. I got really interested. Started doing a lot of work on it. Didn't buy my first Bitcoin until late September, early October 2017. Bought some. Been buying in 2018. My average price is higher than it is now. More than 2x where it is now.

It's 3,600 is more than 2x. I came to a conclusion post the crash from six to three thousand I started to understand that bitcoins twenty thousand

that no no sixty six the crash from six thousand to three thousand oh I thought you said sixty three thousand

no no no the crash from six thousand to three thousand I came to the conclusion that extreme bull and extreme bear markets are a feature of bitcoin

not a bug price is the primary means of adoption and I think that prices is why people get into Bitcoin. It's really the primary reason. At the end of the day, Bitcoin is really interesting because unlike gold, which needs the world to come to an end and all the gold bugs say the world basically has to come to an end,

they give you a reason for it and they give you a lot of cockamamie stories and I used to own gold and I'll tell you about that in a second but bitcoin doesn't need the world to come to an end in fact the optimal case for bitcoin monetization and ultimately hyper bitcoinization in my opinion the optimal case is a flat stock market for the next 10 years because that is a source of liquidity the world's not coming to an end and then people will look for return and because of bitcoin's innate positive feedback loop because of scarcity which people don't understand people do not understand scarcity

at all what don't people understand about scarcity they've never dealt with it what do you mean we don't have anything scarce right michael goldstein uh was talking about this on twitter a couple weeks ago people misunderstand scarcity too how do they misunderstand it it has to be a demanded good oh of course yeah it does have to be demanded no doubt about it but i'm assuming people people focus too much on supply and not about supply of a scarce good and not not about um the demand for it we're right if there's a lot of something that nobody wants that doesn't really it's not really that helpful but um bitcoin creates a positive feedback loop because once you make that leap into becoming money then people start to think about it differently they still don't understand

it yet as money. That's a process that price ultimately gets you into. But in the stock market, when a particular sector is doing really well, investment banks bring out a lot more securities and they saturate the market. So we don't really have experience with scarcity. We think we do, but we don't. There's always lots of new supply. With Bitcoin, I mean, the Wall Streeters think that forks are the same as Bitcoin, but the forks aren't the same as Bitcoin. This is a really hard concept for people to understand. But I'm going to start off with the question, why Bitcoin? And why Bitcoin relates to the fact that here's something that I imagine in my head.

And I actually heard a story similar to this. not that long ago from somebody here's the story i imagine my head so you were in your mid-60s in 2008 and you worked hard your whole life and you've done all the right things you saved your money you worked hard and you put away a chunk of money you're an average guy you put away maybe two hundred and fifty thousand dollars maybe you're lucky you put away half a million dollars you have a home nice home middle class america and those numbers are just thrown out it doesn't really matter what the numbers were but you planned on retiring and you were going to retire on your social security because you probably didn't have a pension plan which was a defined

benefit plan you probably had a defined contribution plan or an IRA so you're going to retire on that money plus social security and your plan was I'm going to make five percent of my money and I'm going to live on that plus my social security and what's happened to you since 2008 is that little by little you dip into that money and you slice away at it. Like the chocolate cake that's sitting in your refrigerator that you don't plan on eating and you go back to the refrigerator 17 times

and it starts with a nice healthy piece of chocolate cake and you take sliver after sliver and you go back a little bit later and there's no chocolate cake left. And that's what's happened to people's savings. There's no chocolate cake left. And that's a problem. And it's a really big problem.

And it is the root of a lot of the social anger that we see everywhere as expressed through all kinds of different social movements because people know they're angry they feel that there's something really unfair out there they don't quite know what it is i first came across this whole idea a long time ago i was reading a piece uh and something called the gloom boom and doom report by mark mark faber and mark faber was talking about weimar germany and what's interesting about weimar germany was that you had people who were middle class people

and back then in order to get married you had a dowry for your daughter to get married but because middle class people who didn't necessarily have a business

they didn't necessarily have a farmland they didn't have gold or dollars dollars did okay in Weimar it was the German currency that didn't do well

they didn't have foreign currency I actually think it was made illegal but I'm not sure so they were wiped out so their daughters didn't get married and you had things which ripped apart the social fabric of society and you saw it really fast in weimar because it happened really fast but yet it can happen more slowly too and i think we see it happening here i think we see it

happening around the world i think that's why you have the yellow vest movement um i don't know the correct french term for it you do something yes um i don't know what that can tell you either i'm not going to do it because i don't speak french and i'll just say you'll know come from france either but i'm going to interject here this is why i wanted to bring you on because you're uh an older bitcoiner you've seen a lot i'm sure your peers are some of them at least may be experiencing the scenario that you just described no i know mostly richer guys i don't know that many guys that are i mean honestly i i don't really strong flex what's that strong flex good flex there it's a millennial term don't worry about it no but i'm interested like you're talking

about the strength like i know i just know my grandmother in particular she had this idea she retired at 65 and i know she has worries and stuff well here here's what i think and what i think is that these people are up at two o'clock to four o'clock in the morning and this is when your deep fears overtake you. And you start thinking to yourself, what am I going to do? How am I going to eat? Where am I going to live? I'm going to run out of money. And people are damn scared. These people are also historically, in my opinion, this is just my conjecture. Can I prove it? No, I can't prove it. A lot of things in life you can't actually prove, but you know they're true. And here's what I think. These people are historically the bedrock of their families.

What do I mean by that? It means that if you're an 18, 19, 20-year-old kid, you need a little extra money because there's something that's important to you that you want to do, but you can't quite make ends meet on it. You go to grandma, grandpa, say, can you lend me a thousand bucks? Can you lend me two thousand bucks? And generally they're going to say yes, they can, because they're able to. And in years past, they could have. But now they say to themselves, I'll do my best. I'll try to help you, but you know they can't do it. Maybe they've told you their issues, their problems. Maybe they haven't, but you kind of figure it out. Their kids, the same thing. They need to fix something in the house. They need some emergency money. Stuff happens in life, and people need a

little extra help. Who do they go to? They go to family, and that's gradually dwindling away, and this creates enormous social anger. People get it. People understand, and we have dishonest money and i like to call it dishonest money i don't like to call it anything else and why do i call it dishonest money because it steals from you every goddamn day so jump into this let's define this money here i got a very simple i'm gonna give you a choice you can hold three different things a choice of one of three different things for the next 20 years i used to make it 10 years but there were some people who that wasn't quite long enough for them so you high time preference freak well low time low time preference 10 years is very high time oh time high time

preference well it depends on how old you are um if you're going to hold a million dollars or some large amount of money and you can hold it three different ways one of three different ways you can't trade it you can't sell it you can't spend it you have to hold it for a long for 20 years give you a choice cash or some cash like instrument so it can be treasury bills it can be money markets it's essentially cash the s&p 500 and then gold just why not gold what do you pick of those three gold okay fine you don't pick cash and the important answer is you don't pick cash and nobody picks cash unless they're really stupid and they pick cash but they don't pick cash because they know for certainty the cash will be worth less you don't know where

gold will be. You don't know where the S&P will be in 20 years. You're nearly certain cash will buy you less. And that's what I mean. It steals from you every day. You know that you don't want to hold cash. And that's critical. So we have a problem. There's a real problem. It exists. Why Bitcoin? Bitcoin ultimately, in my opinion, will be the answer to that because it's not dishonest money it's money which in time will enable you to save in that money and it will accrete global value of production when it becomes the one and only money now it's a process and you probably break it up into three parts you probably break it up in a process of monetization hyper bitcoinization and ultimately when it becomes essentially the one and only money and and so

a lot of the confusions you get with people is you hear critics say well it can't be money it can't be currency now it can't be used for spending of course it can't be you couldn't uh you couldn't send youtubes on the internet in 1993 either right um but that doesn't mean you wouldn't you wouldn't get somewhere but and that's also like a just like a small tell by individuals of just like the misunderstanding of money like to think that we're going to create a new monetary good and not expect it to be volatile and take a while to accrue to become a suitable monetary good is just asinine like the lack of patience in this world in particular you surely heard this on this podcast and in the newsletter that's my biggest gripe like and it is probably an emagulation of the

conspicuous consumption mentality that people have where it's like yeah we need it to be money now like it needs to be faster faster um but people don't know what money is yeah people don't understand money i went to really top business schools and they don't talk about money in top business schools i'm pretty sure they don't talk about money in top economics classes either i was an economics major i had one money in banking class that's it yeah no no you had a money in banking class so you talked about credit instruments the money we use today is not money it's credit it's difference credit is somebody else's liability

money is not i argue that cash dollars are essentially time zero treasury bills treasury bill is just uh it's cash that's gonna pay you a little something until it becomes cash but it's essentially cash in fact years ago i've seen pictures of this even i'm not old enough for this but years ago they actually made um treasury bills you know ever you probably you've heard the term clipping coupons right you know why they call them clipping coupons no i assume because you clip them out of the paper because you had a bond because you had a bond issuance with coupons attached you literally clipped the coupons that's why they call them clipping coupons okay and so i've seen pictures of treasury notes probably i don't know if it was bills because bills were

always shorter and instruments were usually sold with a discount but with coupons attached and you'd clip them off you literally clip them off and hand them out you hand them out they're they're they're your payment you'd trade hand them into the bank and they would redeem them so you might have various uh various bonds that you might have and you would clip the coupon and then you would redeem it at your financial institution and you the the uh the borrower would redeem your coupon. Interesting. I never knew that. That's fascinating. It's not that long ago.

You could have gotten muni bonds. Imagine the security risk there. People are worried about holding their Bitcoin hardware while it's imagine having a lot of your money. People had bearer bonds. In Europe, they had bearer bonds up until much more recently. Bearer bonds are actually not that old. People could have had bearer bonds.

I don't know when they stopped issuing them. They stopped issuing bearer bonds sometime maybe in the 80s. I'd have to look it up. I don't remember exactly, but bearer bonds were very common. People had bearer bonds for years, and a bearer bond was literally that. If you didn't hold the bond, just like if you don't hold your keys, not your keys, this is really more like cash. You don't hold your cash, not your cash.

You don't hold your gold, not your gold. It's not that long ago, which, by the way, is an interesting thing. I'll give you a little interesting conversation I was talking with. I had owned some gold, which I sold, and I was talking to the security guard there, and he was a Bronx cop, a few years older than me. And he was trying to explain to a guy who worked at this place what about Bitcoin. He didn't really understand Bitcoin, but this is what he did understand.

He said, when I was a kid growing up, my mom used to pay the electric bill with just scooping up pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters and carry it over to the electric company. He said it could have been before. It could have been before he was born, but he kind of remembers it. and then you had checks and then you had credit cards and you know now we have Venmo and Zelle and we've got we've been going through payment systems for a long time actually covered credit cards briefly a number of years ago and did a little report on it in grad school and covered credit

cards but we've been going through various different payment systems so what's really interesting is that Bitcoin seems weird and bizarre to so many people, but it's actually for guys your age, you're really stepping off the sidewalk curb. It's not such a big deal because as the technology changes and it becomes easier and as you have these wallets which become easier like Samurai Wallet and Wasabi Wallet and all these other wallets and the technology gets better, these things become easier. What's the big difference in a samurai wallet and your uh and your venmo nope i mean hopefully not much when the ux improves it'll be very seamless experience very similar i won't take that long uh here's sort of a tangential

question i want to ask you and i'm curious about i've been thinking about this in my mind a lot lately is a lot of people would attribute the massive leaps and technological capabilities and growth of our economy to the monetary system that we currently live under. I would argue that a lot of the innovations happen in spite, just because of technological innovations making everything more efficient and allowing us to build more things. But some people would argue that monetary policy sort of enabling people to get easy credit has given us the world that we live in today.

No, I would disagree with that. You basically... I do too, but I just want to hear why. Well, you basically had a lot of mistakes which were made in the 60s and 70s with monetary policy. And so people have a weird perception on inflation. Nixon imposed wage and price controls,

and I'm pretty sure, but not positive. so somebody i'm sure will check fact me on this i said something on another program and they checked me and they said i had the wrong year it was a motorola flip phone and i actually looked today and they said i couldn't have it started in 1993 and i think that's star tech which was actually 96 but i said flip phone i don't know if they call it a flip phone in my head it was a flip phone it looked like a star trek communicator and i think i got it in 92 i think i said oh we couldn't have had it was didn't come out till 93 and i looked and the thing that I think I had was in 92 but um people love to nitpick and really

sometimes being exact is not the most critical to getting an idea or point across I would agree um so they screwed up the monetary policy and we wound up having very high rates in the late 70s into the early 80s about 1980 ish Paul Volcker was appointed by Jimmy Carter Paul Volcker strangled the economy, very, very high rates. Paul Volcker actually, I believe, had a Secret Service detail because he was threatened. I think they burned him in effigy. Not positive about this, but I think that was the case.

You pushed him up to what, like above 11%, right? Oh, well above 11%. Like 18%, right? I don't know how high 30-year paper got. 30-year paper could have been 15%, 16%, 17%. I'd have to look it up. I don't remember. You can probably look.

You can probably go on the Fed website and find it. Yeah, of course you can find it. You can go on a Fed website and figure it out. And the front end of the curve was higher. They probably inverted the curve. I don't really remember. I can go back and look at it. But I know they were much higher.

And so you've basically been on a downward trajectory for 38, 39 years, 40 years. and not only downward trajectory but much like some people believe bitcoin's price appreciation moves in a fractal it's like these interest rates have been moving down on a fractal fractal too they'll lower them significantly uh they'll get to a point where they're like all right we can we can uh raise them again and then they'll never be able to like raise them uh above a certain point after a certain extent so like it'll go from let's hypothetically these numbers aren't exact like we've been saying like 11 to 7 back up to 9 down to 3 back up to 6 down to 0 now we're trying to get back to 3 well you can't just use the word interest rates because

there are all kinds of interest rates so you've got to kind of be a little more specific fed fund rate okay um i think it's interesting because you hear people on cnbc make comments when they're trying to be flip about something saying well way back when my rates were xyz six percent rates and so I don't see these rates as being any such a big deal but I always find that that kind of comment was is just silly because you're not looking at the size of the debt that you're multiplying the rates times to get your interest expense and so you can't simply look at interest rates themselves you have to look at you know what your interest cost is and one of the problems is that what they've done over the years is by lowering the rates you've kept the interest cost low

and so gradually the rates have been growing larger and larger but here's where i disagree with a lot of people i don't actually agree that federal debt has to be paid off i think that's fundamentally a flaw why is this i fundamentally think this is not going to be possible to pay it off no no that's that's that's really the wrong way to look at it life the life cycle of a country the life cycle of a human the life cycle of a corporation are not the same thing and they can't be compared and when people compare them they're actually making serious flaws in analysis and so when you say oh the country should have no debt that's just ridiculous and absurd there's it depends on the real issue is what you're spending the debt on are you spending the debt on something

which is productive debt or are you spending the debt on consumption items so really it really makes a difference if you're spending the debt if you're spending money which becomes debt on an investment item which is going to grow your economy at a later date that's not a bad use of debt at all that can be a very very good use of debt if you're spending on a consumption item and that's growing out of control that's a separate issue and so people often are very sloppy in the way they have these discussions and so they'll throw it out as a general principle and as a general principle it's garbage people are very sloppy in their analysis people are very sloppy in the way they talk about these things and so am i sloppy richard no you're actually really good

thank you yeah but it's important not to be sloppy like that because when we try to analyze things and try to think about things it's our money we're talking about we want to try to be want to try to get the right understanding and there's there's a lot of fear-mongering right now that's going on in bitcoin i find and they serve a useful purpose the guys who are trying to fear-monger trying to drive the price down either because they're short themselves they want to drive the price down or fear mongering that helps to create a bottom any particular fear mongering i don't want to talk about any particular fear mongering but there are people out there who you know have these crazy prices that they set that they give a lot of explanations for and we have a very young

group of people in in bitcoin i mean for the most part look i'm much older i'm more than twice your age a lot of young people i've seen a lot of markets over a long long time is it encouraging It's what encouraging? That there's a lot of young people in business. Oh, it's really encouraging. I'm really optimistic. I was actually really negative and really pessimistic on the world until I understood and found Bitcoin. I actually thought that we're headed for some problems which would lead to catastrophic outcome.

And actually, the thing that I love about Bitcoin is that I can see a hyper-Bitcoinization ultimately where even the people who have dragged their feet the most and are the most stubborn about finally buying in can kind of be okay and even if they're very wealthy and they potentially lose uh some of their money i i ultimately believe that you're going to pretty much destroy the bond market not because any outside activity will destroy but because holders of debt instruments will ultimately sell their bonds to buy bitcoin and you'll see a cascade out of out of these bonds The guy I was talking to the other day added, and I think he could be right, you could have a Fed response when it attempts to prop things up, and that could help to make Bitcoin explode even higher in the process. And I think that's reasonable.

It gets really hard to know how things are going to work out because we have no idea how things are going to work out. But you can try to think about, I love to do thought experiments. I like to think, you know, what would things look like under given scenarios and try to understand how things are. And I remember many years ago, a very smart investor said to me when I was working briefly on Wall Street, I was a young analyst, and this guy said, it's better to get something approximately right than precisely wrong. I like that. he was talking about analysts who focused so heavily on getting the right earnings the right down to the penny that he thought that was just a big mistake he says that's not how stock prices go up stock prices don't go up because you get the earnings to the penny stock prices go up because

you get the bigger trends right i love the bigger trend in bitcoin i'm incredibly bullish on it I'm one of the most bullish people I know. You're one of the most bullish people I know. And I'm as bullish as I am because I've made a lot of mistakes. And in the process of making a lot of mistakes, I've learned a lot of lessons. In 1989,

I was using Word and Excel. And I remember having an argument with a friend of mine. Let me backtrack. I got my first computer. It was an IBM PC. How many RAM do you think that computer had? It was 1982. Megabytes.

How many? How much? 64K of RAM. Holy shit. Okay, and how about my hard drive? How big was that? I don't know. I had two floppy disk drives.

They were five and a quarter inch. I'm old enough to remember floppy disks. You remember the blue ones, the three and a half inch. Yes. These were five and a quarter. And they were bigger before that. They're like records, right? They were like eight inches before that.

I don't think they were on computers. I think they might have been used in word processors, like Wang word processors. Not sure. I never had a Wang word processor. It was 1982 at an IBM PC. And the first program I got was WordStar. It had two floppy disk drives, 360K each. and I got

I found out about this thing called a quad card I was really excited about the quad card it would add 256k of RAM to my 64k computer

and the first thing I did was I erased WordStar it was so embarrassing star dot star erase what an idiot

it was really stupid why was it stupid because I erased my program I erased my word processing program WordStar was the word processing

it was a crappy word you build it no the word process no i bought it it was a software program and and and what's interesting is you know i was never a one of the i was you could tell i erased my my software so i was not that good at computers i'm still you know but so good but um the early guys the really early guys i was discussing it was the other day on somebody else's show the really early guys were building Heathkit computers in the mid-70s. They were building their own computers

and doing really crazy stuff. And I think Woz did that, although I'm not sure. Vortex seemed to think that that was the case. Wouldn't surprise me. And so the Apple II, I think, was in 1977. So I wasn't super early, but I've always typically been

a very early mainstream adopter. So I lived through this process. This was 1982, got the first computer. And then went through a series of upgrades. 286, 386, 486, Pentium, and I can't remember what was when. It's impossible to remember that. I don't remember when I got the first hard drive or how big it was. Water?

No, just got a call. Oh, you're fine. 1989, I was using Word and I was using Excel, which I liked much better than Lotus 1-2-3 or WordPerfect. You ever hear of Lotus 1-2-3 or WordPerfect? Nope. Lotus 1-2-3 was a killer app. Before Lotus 1-2-3, it was something called VisiCalc.

It was a spreadsheet program like Excel, except it was no GUI. You did everything with function keys. Everything in matrices and stuff like that, or no? No, it was function keys. It was not... It wasn't... It's probably the way you use Linux. I don't use Linux, so I don't know, but it was not a GUI-based program.

It wasn't that easy to use, but people loved it. They wrote macros for it, but it was still not that easy to use. And my friend was telling me he loved Lotus 1, 2, 3, and WordPerfect. I use Excel, and I use Word, and I like them better. And I didn't buy Microsoft. Now, the real reason Microsoft went up was not because of Word and Excel. The real reason Microsoft went up is because Windows became – the Wintel platform wound up – everybody built applications for Wintel. And so if you thought of it like a giant river, all the tributaries and all the little feeders into that river, Wintel became the mighty Amazon with all the other small.

It really had nothing to do with Excel or Word. But the interesting thing, I didn't buy Microsoft at the time. Microsoft was at 20 times earnings. And maybe, going back to that rate discussion, rates were probably 8% or 9% back then. So Microsoft looked expensive. And between 1989 and 2000, it could have gone up anywhere from 100 to 200 times. which doesn't suck no, not at all

that's a good long term play in the early 90s I had a Dell laptop I didn't buy Dell stock the Dell laptop was really pretty good it was a pretty good laptop the first portable computer I saw was called an

Osborne, and Osborne looked like a lawyer's briefcase it was this very large clunky thing And then the first portable computer was a Compaq. And I don't know when they first had laptops, but this was still pretty early. And I didn't buy Dell. I should have.

It was a mistake not to. Dell was one of the best performing stocks in the 90s. You know, it's really interesting because, I'm going to jump ahead here for a second. In the 90s, I was pretty negative on tech stocks, which was a very big mistake. Tech stocks did phenomenally well. And I know Bitcoiners think they understand really excited markets because we saw a few in Bitcoin in the last few years.

They have no understanding of what markets are really like when they're really crazy. Why do you say that? Because last year wasn't anything like? Because the 90s blows away everything that we've ever seen. The period from 1995-ish, 96, tech stocks, NASDAQ, blows away any market we've seen since before or since. It was an amazing market. People were crazy for it. It just went on and it went on and it went on.

It had some brief interruptions. But there was a lot of retail trading. These markets, we've been in markets ever since which have been very much, very pushed by the Fed. That market wasn't so much pushed by the Fed but wasn't held back by the Fed. In 1996, Greenspan uttered the words irrational exuberance and then didn't do anything about it. He probably should have. It was probably a really big mistake that he made.

That was probably the time that people can point to that said he made a really big mistake. We took rates down, by the way, in the late 80s, from 89% into like 92% from approximately 9% to 3%. It dropped like 600 basis points. and he uttered the word irrational exuberance in 96 the market had a hiccup and then he did nothing and nobody cared but markets were really crazy and we wound up that period was just an absolutely amazing period in the stock market and we're going to see that in bitcoin we haven't seen

it yet and when we see it in bitcoin it's going to be beyond amazing because in the stock market investment bankers can create new new stocks and they bring new companies public and so there's no scarcity and the thing about bitcoin and this is very hard for wall streeters to understand because they look at forks and they think that they think that a fork is just more bitcoin so you you fork it and you have bitcoin then you have bitcoin cash instead of having 21 million bitcoin now you have 42 million bitcoin and they don't understand why it's not the same thing and that's very hard for people to understand when they come to it from the perspective of equities and they learned about diversification and they learn about all the things that you

learn in finance but money is not equities and that's a really hard concept for people to get and understand and that's a that's discussion we have a little bit but not yet yeah well money is not equities and then again also these protocols when we're talking about bitcoin specifically like you can't be treated as like startups either no they're not well here i here's how i i have a simple definition for bitcoin i actually work hard on this people like this bitcoin is a protocol built for a social consensus i like that that's my definition of bitcoin that makes sense and people don't really understand social consensus it's really a hard thing to understand it takes a really long while people live with social consensus they operate with it

but they don't really understand there are a lot of things which are very hardcore social consensus let's point out some examples adultery adultery it's not social consensus to to be married and to commit adultery social consensus is you can be very very rich but it's not acceptable social consensus is if you're married you don't you don't do that that's just an example it's one of the ten commandments but it's social consensus it probably became a ten commandment because it was social exactly so social consensus has been around for a millennia it's been around probably from the beginning of time i don't really know i'm not that smart but there are things that we agree upon things you can do and can't do.

The Ten Commandments are a list of things which are social consensus. Yeah, outside of the first three, like everything else is like, hey, just be good to your neighbor. Don't cheat on your wife. Whatever it is. Don't kill anybody.

Yeah, killing people's not good. What are the first three commandments? I know this is a good Catholic, but I'm not the best Catholic, so I think it's don't take the Lord's name in vain. Respect the Sabbath. and don't ever trust another god i think that's it i don't know i'm not gonna go into this because i i don't want to get anything wrong

these are things that i can look up i can look them up too i should know them off the top i i probably should have them memorized too but i don't have plenty of years of catholic school that i should know so what else we got those are some social consensus so why why is bitcoin a social consensus because there's a social consensus around the idea that i started with that your money shouldn't steal from you and we don't fully have that but people understand that it's wrong and it's a problem and so what do we do we look we look for store of value in other things we look for store of value in stocks we look for store of value in bonds we look for store of value in uh in art we look for store of value in real estate we look for store of value

in gold but really where store value belongs is in money and money is a really hard topic because there's there's a lot to it and it's trying to understand money which is critical to understanding bitcoin and the qualities that make a money a good money so for instance Gold, in my opinion, can never be a good money. Because of divisibility and portability or something else? Those are pretty much the main things, yeah. Because it's not extensible and it's not portable. So it necessarily centralizes.

You can't... I argue that paper claims was the technological solution to extensibility. Yeah. Does that make sense? Do you know what I mean by that? Yeah. Makes total sense, yeah. So you deposit gold at a bank, and so that you can go buy smaller things that you can buy with a fraction of an ounce of gold, you're issued a note, and that's your paper claim.

Instead of having to chip off a piece of gold at the cash register, you got this paper to exchange. We use silver for that, but silver isn't really as good. Being able to have a technological solution of paper claims, you don't need silver. that eliminates the need for silver the problem with paper claims is that people will always cheat so it's been said with regard to opec for instance and again i don't want to get into a topic i don't know a lot about this i'm sure that people know much much more about this than i do but with opec opec worked for a really long time but then for a lot of reasons you wound up having

up at members that cheated. And so the price of oil came down quite substantially. It's human nature and human tendency to cheat. It's human nature and human tendency to try to get away with something. And so we do. We do because we can. And so you'd have runs on institutions simply because of human nature and bitcoin is a protocol which enables us to deal with that trace mayor has said that potentially in the event that wall street tries to create paper claims you could hard fork it and even if even if most people went With the Wall Street hard fork, which had built-in inflation, the people who would go, you know, even if it was 85-15, let's say the reverse of the UASF, the people who picked the non-inflationary Bitcoin would ultimately do much better. They'd be able to buy more Bitcoin, they'd sell their inflationary Bitcoin, and they'd own more on the non-inflationary Bitcoin chain.

And in time, that would be the better Bitcoin to own because diluted Bitcoin isn't going to go up as much as non-diluted Bitcoin. And that gets back to the issue of scarcity. And I think what we're going to end up seeing at some point in the future with regard to scarcity is in some bull market. I don't know if it's the next bull market or the bull market after that. I believe we're going to find people who trade Bitcoin are going to wind up owning much less Bitcoin than they think they're going to own by trading because Bitcoin's going to get away from them.

And we saw this in the 90s. We saw this, people trading stocks. And with so many stocks in the 90s, if you picked right and you picked well, you did so much better holding most of them than you did trading them. Trading is really, really, really hard. because it's very hard to figure out

what the crowd is going to do at any one time or any one moment, and people think they can outsmart it, and often they can't really outsmart it. The best thing you could have done if you bought Berkshire Hathaway is just held it. I know a guy whose newsletter I used to read who talked all the time about how he bought it

for $70 in the 70s, and he doubled his money and he sold it. Is that, what, like $1,200 right now or something like that? Berkshire Hathaway. Yeah, what's it at right now? Like $300,000. $300,000? Holy shit. That was the A stock that he owned.

Holy shit. It could be more. I'd have to look it up. Why did I think it was only $1,200? Berkshire Hathaway? Yeah, I don't know why I thought that. No, the A stock is a lot higher than $1,200. I'd have to look up where it is. Now you've got me curious.

All right, well, you were looking that up. Let me interject here. So, you're talking about gold notes. and how they bastardize. So would you analogize Lightning Network as sort of the notes layer of Bitcoin? Not really. No?

Because it ties back to the blockchain. Yeah. So it's really not the same thing. Do you think it's a completely new animal or is there anything in your experience or in the world that you would analogize it to? Or is it just bad to try to compare it to anything? I think Bitcoin in its entirety

is a completely new animal. And I think that when people... I think we have to be careful in the analogies we make for it and the understanding we think we have because first of all even the people who understand it the best I understand it on some levels I don't understand the protocol I mean I don't think I understand it at all I don't understand much of the technical aspect of this stuff it's somewhere close to zero that I understand some of that stuff

I understand some of the economics of it the game theory I have a view on the process by which it's being developed and this is understandings I get from listening to people who know a lot more about it

than I do and from what I've seen in the last 37 years being early mainstream adopter in technology after technology in the computing and mobile data and mobile area i think that you were born when were you born docs myself i was born in 1991 okay so you were born just a little bit before the internet but you probably don't remember that i

I mean, the internet was around, but... I remember it. I remember... You were a kid. You were really little. Yeah, so here's my... You were essentially born in the internet age. You're an internet native.

I'm not. Well, I like to think I'm a sort of bridge to it. You're not a bridge. You're an internet native. I remember... You're absolutely an internet native. You're not a bridge at all. I remember life before caller ID.

I remember getting caller ID and being like, holy shit. Life before caller ID. I remember... Jimmy Rogers says he remembers calling up and said, He asked for the number seven for his house. Jimmy Rogers remembers. I remember pay phones. We had a dial.

We had one of the – there was actually a viral clip on Twitter going around last week, and it had me cracking up. It was two Gen Z kids trying to figure out how to work the telephones with the – A rotary phone? A rotary phone, and they couldn't figure it out. They had five minutes. They had no idea how to do it. That's funny.

i remember using the rotary phones but that shows like that's an example of like the disconnect between somebody who lived in that era and now and that's what i think you're getting into so what do you think about us no well no my point my point is that this is this is what amazes me about people my age and i think they don't think about this because many people my age if you're well to do, you don't feel the need to look to something like Bitcoin. If you're an average person, maybe you feel it's beyond you. And there's often this whole technology thing and people tell the story for years. I mean, I had this with my father. The number flashing on the vcr um that's the time and we had a vcr well you're looking why are you looking at me

like that i had a vcr too okay but you remember he didn't recognize a clock no he knew it was flashing he want no no he knew what it was he wanted me to fix the time he did not fix the time so i had to fix the time on the vcr uh but i heard a story about a guy who didn't he's wondering what the numbers meant right i think it was dashing it was flashing like a 1-2-0-0 but some people are afraid of technology and it's difficult and I've always been willing to embrace technology and and not a lot of people not a lot of people my age have they've had it forced on them and they embraced it some were readily embraced it others didn't I'm you know I'm not that old so

there are a lot of people my age who use computers but as new technology comes out difficult technology bitcoin is more difficult technology it's not simple it's not easy um and so people are always reluctant to try to do new things if they don't have to do them no but the point that i was trying to make here is that it's amazing to me how fast stuff happens and even bitcoin bitcoin didn't really start i don't know when the first price i know it's the pizza but when was the pizza when was the 10 000 bitcoin pizza i want to say march 2010 okay so i guess that was the first pricing of bitcoin right i gotta look it up yeah 2010 2011 bitcoin was trading you know literally in in the pennies

bitcoin average is a good chart yes 2010 may 2010 but it was trading in the pennies until like sometime in 2011, I think. You could still buy it. Yeah, the first price spike went from a tenth of a cent to three cents. That was the first. I don't have it on the charts that I've looked at. But you can still buy it in pennies.

And we're looking at a Bitcoin price today at approximately $3,600, having gone a lot higher. This is a very short time frame from 2010, 2011 to 2019. And I think people who've been in it for a while, I've thought about this, people who've been in it for like five years, they kind of lose focus about how short this really is and how fast this is really happening. And so I've seen period after period with the development of PCs and then companies adopting and bringing into the workplace computers using spreadsheets and word processors and databases. And then you saw it with the early part of the Internet.

People would start using the Internet, but it really wasn't until AOL. I had dial-up Internet, which was maybe 24-something, 24K, I don't know, 56K. Then I had ADSL, finally broadband. Even that broadband wasn't that fast. At one time, I had a Bloomberg, I had a T1 line for it. Do you know what a T1 line is? Nope. T1 line was a line that they used.

It was a data line. It was expensive because they'd split POTS lines off of it. I don't know how many POTS lines. Now you've got to describe POTS lines. Plain old telephone service. Okay, okay. That makes a lot of sense. Those are the pair of wires that come into your house.

I don't know how many wires it is, but they're basically copper wires, and they use those copper wires to put ADSL on, and this was the process. And so this stuff all happened really fast, and the technology for this stuff changed really fast. What's interesting is that each technology builds on existing technologies and so it tends to get faster. So there are some guys out there trying to make the case that you're going to get this elongation

and I don't think you are. I heard a guy named Peter Diamantis and Ray Kurzweil talk about this in Exponential Technologies and they argue that exponential technologies actually accelerate rate and i think they're right and i think that bitcoin and lightning are exponential technologies and what we are seeing right now is incredibly rapid development in bitcoin incredibly rapid development in lightning and i think that once we see i was listening to some chain code labs youtubes and nobody listens to these because i was like number 97 high quality high quality

youtubes go check them out very underutilized like you just mentioned people don't look at this they They spend all their time listening to idiots talking about price. And I mean idiots talking about price. I really want to hammer that home. I don't talk about price. Because you don't talk price at all. Price is bullshit. Talking about technical analysis when nobody knows what the hell they're talking about is worthless.

Technical analysis. Let's get some TA hate. Get all the TA hate out. I hate TA. Why? Well, no. TA is useful on Wall Street because if you've got institutional investors, professional investors, active investors who are looking at companies and looking at their earnings

and understand the industry, then you're trying to figure out what these smart investors are going to do and you're going to copy what these other smart investors are going to do and hope to make some money. But what are you doing in Bitcoin? 2% or 5% of the people

know what the hell they're looking at. So you're an idiot and you're looking at what other idiots are doing. How does that help you? It makes no sense to me. It's the dumbest thing in the world. So you're not spending, you're listening to some moron

tell you about the price and try to hammer it down because he wants to buy it cheaper and scare you out of your Bitcoin and you're going to be left like I was not owning Microsoft up 200 times

because some idiot told you it's going to go to whatever. And it pisses me off like crazy. What do you have to say to the people that it's worked for though in the past? They're going to get

their nads ripped off. I haven't heard nads in a while. In time. They are going to get so hurt. And this is where the scarcity is going to kick in. And that's what I started to say before. I don't know which bull market

it's going to be in. But the guys who are wise guys who think, oh i can trade this i know what the hell i'm doing they're going to one day in some big bull market they're going to sell it or worse yet they're going to get short it now i guess there's some ways that you can get short you don't actually have your whole you know your whole account on the line like you would in the stock market in the stock market you get short something like your whole account gets wiped out because you wake up one day do you remember the guy oh what

was the name of the company there was a company some crappy little nothing company i can't remember the name now you'll remember the story he shorted this little dollar stock it was a nothing and i can't this is recently a few years ago there was a guy i have to look up the names i can't remember the names it's like a dollar 20 dollar 50 stock he shorted it and the guy who went to jail said he was going to buy it martin shirkelly martin shrek shrekley shirkelly yeah look up that look up the stock i've been referred to as the martin shirkelly of bitcoin podcast i don't know why that's not a compliment i know i was sort of offended no i i wouldn't call you that at all thank you so this guy shorted the stock he shorted in some reasonable size he thought

he's gonna make money as it's gonna go to zero from a dollar and he had like 35 000 dollars in his account he lost like a hundred and some odd thousand dollars he had to go fund me up what do you go 4x margin no he was just short it and the thing went up overnight like went from a dollar to like 40 dollars overnight yeah but how do you get 4x margin call do you have to have like how much leverage are they using he he couldn't get out of the position okay it gapped up the next day it was closed and it gapped up it just gapped because shrek shrelly whatever your kelly pronounces pronounce his name he was gonna take over the stock and so i'm assuming it's a pharmaceutical stock it was a pharmaceutical it was a biotech or pharmaceutical yeah some crappy little nothing

stock but he shorted it and he shorted it this this dollar stock and it gapped the next day and it it didn't rip his head off or his face off it just it just completely buried him it was it was like he was vaporized it's just i it's it's one of the most horrible stories i've ever seen you know i i i thought he was really stupid but i really felt bad for him because it was just so incredibly stupid right it was one of the dumbest things i've ever seen in my life like first of all how are you so stupid to short a stock like that and and that's like shorting bitcoin here shorting bitcoin at this price you're down 85 freaking percent in in my opinion i call bitcoin the highest quality least expensive most misunderstood asset on the planet and i really

mean that what do you think the best biggest misunderstandings are the biggest misunderstanding is that here's an interesting thing so let's say you're worth five million dollars one day let's say you're worth five million dollars and you live in a not so great part of the world and you put half a million dollars into bitcoin and you have to travel through a really terrible place you could put that half a million dollars on a tracer memorize the 24 words put a passphrase on it and you could walk through the worst places in the world and assuming they didn't you know mug you or rob you nobody could know that you had a half million dollars inside your head there's nothing else you can do that with right now what's that

worth that's priceless that's worth so much and in the not distant future nick zabo is possibly my single favorite guy shut on nick nick if you're listening i love answer my dm i i consider myself to be in a seminar with nick zabo what do you mean he he answers my tweets occasionally he liked a tweet of mine yesterday i was overjoyed i think he's so unbelievably smart And I consider myself very lucky and privileged that I can have an interaction with someone of this intellectual caliber. I mean, he's brilliant. He's one of the smartest people I've ever come across. I would agree.

Go read Unenumerated Blog Freaks if you haven't already. We've pumped it here. You have to read two things. The two critical things you have to read is you have to read The Origins of Money. Shelling Out. This is Shelling Out. origins money is critical and um social scalability uh right uh blockchains i can't remember the exact title now money blockchains and social scaling that's from unenumerated those are two must reads

those are foundational reads yes you can't understand bitcoin without reading those two what do you have to say to the david grabers of the world that uh reject the notion that money goes through a continuum of collectible store value medium exchange unit of account money's always been debt I saw this this feed was it last night the Twitter

was that the yeah Yasin I read about it in the newsletter today if you read the pen I didn't read the newsletter today I'm sorry it's issue number 400 Richard I'm angry

I'm going to read it when I go home okay talked about this topic I had to drive down here that's true from Georgia long trip appreciate you making it

but honestly like what do you have to say to these people like there's there is a strong contingency like vitalik buterin being one of the the main proponents in the cryptocurrency world that the zabian nick zabian i guess i'll zabo i know but i'm saying like zabian like referring to him as like nick zabian italic can't shine nick zabo's shoes okay but let me let me preface the question the but there is a in vitalik's not alone in this thinking at all um there is a contingent of people within quote-unquote crypto who do not buy nick zabo's story that that money goes through that continuum and when it's not it's not relevant whether or not it goes to that continuum money why is that because money is not the best money is not debt the best money is an

asset because you can't have this this was the quote i was looking for let me let me just let me just find this he tweeted this richard brought notes i love it some of the best guests guests bring notes i think a wide variety of supply algos would have worked as long as they're predictable bitcoins bitcoins works well because it's simple enough for a large number of users to understand. Security slash trust minimization is responsible for more of its value as I assess it.

Than the tech. The fact that it's easily understandable is more valuable than the actual tech. No, no, no. Security and trust minimization is what's responsible for its value. The tech is involved with that. No, no.

Security and trust minimization. How do you have security or trust minimization in a credit instrument. You can't. It's hope. You can't. By definition, hope, right? No, you can't.

You cannot have trust. I'm agreeing with you. No, I know you are. No, no, I know you. You can't have trust minimization in a debt instrument. In any debt instrument, I'm relying on your willingness to fulfill its value. Only in an asset, only in a commodity or an asset.

And an asset doesn't have to be something you can touch. An asset can also be, Bitcoin can be a thing without being able to touch it. And that's the social consensus. We recognize that it's this thing that we can use, that we can send around the world, that we know is unique, has the qualities of uniqueness. Bitcoin's an interesting hybrid of data and the analog world. And it's the only thing that I know of which, or the first thing, there are probably others that have attempted to copy it with the forks,

but it's uniqueness of being able to be unique and move like data. This is actually a side thought here. just had a bell go off in my head for anybody that maybe maybe like the wall street types that don't get bitcoin forks aren't bitcoin maybe that's how you explain it really fast like try to send send me bitcoin from your bitcoin cash wallet or something like that no that wouldn't they wouldn't understand that because what makes bitcoin bitcoin is its network effects yeah well exactly it's the network effects associated with bitcoin and network effects build and what makes what it it's the whole idea of money is core to being a human i actually had

asked nick zabo if he thought that money preceded language whoa and he believes what he tweeted to me was that he thought money may have may precede language and we might have used uh tools as a medium of exchange now he didn't comment whether that was money or whether that was barter but that likely preceded language um i think that i can't do his paper justice in trying to describe it here it's a must read though because if you don't understand what money is and this helps you to understand and have a framework for money if you're depending on me to fulfill a promise to you at the end of the day what is debt the future production no no that is a promise yeah promise of future production it's a promise okay promissory note is promise i promise that i'm going to be

good for this promise i'm gonna produce in the future i promise i'm gonna pay you back no but But a promissory note is I'm making a promise to you. You can't minimize the trust on that because I could fail for any number of reasons. I could fail for reasons that are beyond my ability. Yeah, that's right. Future production is not right because the future production could not be there. There are any number of reasons that I could fail. My promise may be no good even if I mean – even if I'm really well-intentioned.

I have no intention of hurting you in any way, defrauding you in any way. I completely plan on fulfilling it, but God strikes me dead. I can't do anything about that. God strikes me dead. So definitionally, you cannot have something which is trust-minimized. And permissory? And permissory? You can't have something trust-minimized and permissory.

Promissory? Promissory. Okay, promissory. Yeah, I don't think so. So all debt, all notes, all credit. I didn't read. Tell me what David Graber. 5,000 years of debt.

He said money started out as debt, never moved through that continuum. But money is older than 5,000 years. Is it? I believe it is. I believe money is probably old. I believe that money. I think in reading his paper, I am pretty convinced that Nick Szabo is right. And I also think that the concept that money has always been debt is fundamentally flawed.

Yeah, and I think this line of thinking is getting back to something we were touching on earlier, which was just slipped by my mind. What were we touching on earlier? What the hell was I just about to say? you distracted me what were you asking yeah yeah go you got a bathroom break i'm gonna go after you and i'm gonna think of this thought we can cut this out we're at minute save this save this and we're back from our p break freaks i completely forgot what we're talking about we're talking about zaba and money yeah and xavier money i wanted to we were talking

about debt you think money is older than 5 000 years i forget the question i was going to ask you and i'm pretty pissed because it was like a great question when it came to my mind i'll think of it again i'll think of it again but uh you just went on a tangent you want to talk about something specifically uh there are a lot of things we'll talk about i can talk about everything all right i know you can this is why you're this is why i brought you in do you want to stay on the train of thought of uh i'm happy to do it go whichever direction you'd like to go all right let's talk about deep platforming you just jumped into that i i think that deep platforming is really interesting i think that i'm hopeful i'm going to tie this in the guys who were

negative on bitcoin right now are missing something really really big here negative on the price or the technology price okay guys were negative on the price we're constantly bashing the price constantly making predictions oh this is gonna go to a thousand dollars oh my god it could go to eight hundred dollars if it does that i don't know i'm gonna have to leave i have to sell all my bitcoin i heard one guy who's famous saying that the other day i thought oh my god you must be kidding it's like what's wrong with you what'd he say a guy who was saying oi vey oi vey if it goes to 800 maybe i'd have to sell my bitcoin like see that's like we were talking about earlier like he was hyperbolic about it right

I thought it was insane. Here's the thing. Bitcoin, this is something I think, and I'm sorry to put it this way, but I've been trading markets for a lot of years. And a lot of these guys, I think, are new to trading. They're new to markets. They just don't think about things the way I think about them because I went to business school.

I've been trading. You have experience. Do you know what the U.S. stock market, look up Wilshire 5000. Google Wilshire 5000 That's an approximation For the value Of the US stock market Wilshire

W-I-L-S-H-I-R-E Wilshire 5000 What's the Wilshire 5000? 27076 right now Okay Then the US stock market Is right now Approximately

27 Trillion dollars What's the market cap Of Bitcoin? Oh man I'm about to get a Coin market cap For a quick one

Yeah that's fine Then we'll go to Coin metrics Shout out coin metrics Better better site. We're going to look at the charts. No, no. I want a price. I want a market cap. Just an approximation.

Price rate at 3.63 right now. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. Do you want realized cap? No, I want the market cap. I don't want realized cap. It's $62 billion. 63 and a half billion

Whatever 62 63 billion So What's 63 billion Divided by 27 trillion That's gonna be like

A fourth of a percent Or 40 percent Of a percent 0.4 percent 40 bips It's 20 basis points 20 bips It was off

20 basis points Approximately It's good enough For government work Yeah That's not happening anymore That's not happening these days Well some

Some governments are working. But it's good enough for 20 basis points. I was off by 100%, but whatever. If you had $20,000, how much is 20 basis points of that $20,000? 46 bucks. 46 bucks, yeah. If this math is right. Wait, no, that's not right.

It's not 46. It's like 40. Well, it's probably some rounding on this stuff. Yeah. 40, 46. Again, it's good enough for government work. You said 20 bips, right? 20 bips.

Okay. Yes, 40. But there was probably rounding in the math that I did. It got to 46. So it wasn't really 20 bips. It was probably a little bit more. But again, it's good enough for discussion. It's not important to be that accurate.

Yes, yes. This is the theme of this podcast. So $40 out of $20,000. Get $20,000. What do you think about $40? Not much. That's the value of Bitcoin. That's where it is right now?

Bitcoin is about $40 relative to the stock market. So if you had $20,000 and you had $40 that you were walking around with in your pocket, just some spending money, that's the value of Bitcoin out of your $20,000. now that's not globally globally it's less right globally you'd probably divide that by about three yeah so in forty dollars divided by about three so what's that like like thirteen dollars yeah six i mean yeah sixteen dollars so if if we brought it down to numbers that people can understand if you had twenty thousand dollars globally bitcoin relative to the global stock

market is like 13 i don't know if i like that analogy but no my point is people don't realize how damn small this thing is right it's like really small so if a couple of wealthy guys wake up one day and says you know i want to own me some of that guys are going to have their heads ripped off they're just gonna have their heads ripped off like that guy like that guy who what Who woke up one day and the stock went from $1 to $40 overnight. Martin Shkreli wrecked him. Wrecked him, totally wrecked him. So let's pause here and reflect.

So what would your advice be to these younger traders? So that's like another, I think that's what my other question was getting back to. It was like, Bitcoin is, I feel like it's a young movement. I feel young. I still feel young, even though some people say I'm aging. I feel young, even though I barely have hair. i think i'll be on your level at some point in the next couple decades so it's not uh nothing to be ashamed about fast but like that's one thing i'm interested though like

okay so that's one thing i ask and i want to ask you as somebody who's older is i i like to ask guests like especially the younger ones one in particular i think you're you're referring to um is are we naive like as young people trying to make this new money is what are we naive no Are we just naive young people pumping onto a pipe dream? No, I think we're underestimating how big this thing is. Okay. And it's easy to underestimate how big it is. I did not understand.

I make the argument that extreme bull and extreme bear markets are a feature of Bitcoin, not a bug. I would agree. Why is that? as i see it the extreme bull markets basically bring in network effects which includes technological development the extreme bear markets pushes bitcoin back into the hands of those who understand it best so if you really understand bitcoin you kind of buy and you keep buying and you and you buy and you know you set whatever your prices are and it may not be perfect but you recognize imperfection this is trading trading is not perfect so you buy some and you

buy some more and you don't know where the bottom is but we're going to get an extreme bull market again and how that forms is that at some point people are going to wake up they're going to start to see this technology that's getting developed i forget who was talking about napsterization of data might have been chris stewart i don't remember from chain code labs which is fascinating some wall street guy is going to finally learn about what's happening with lightning's development with the potential application development on the stuff that these guys are doing and coming up with and their eyes are going to pop open and say oh my god i didn't know this was that i didn't know this would disintermediate these 40 businesses and i think you're bringing up a

good point because like if that does happen and there is an event like hyper bitcoinization event don't know when it is that's just something uh observational my own tendencies like last year going to bull run up to 20 like i was still dca i'm a huge believer of dollar cost averaging so i'm still buying every paycheck a little bit and seeing the little amount of bitcoin that my dca was my average buy was going as the price was going up i was like holy shit like i will never be able like i was afraid to sell the top because i was like what if it doesn't go back down and i'm never able to get back that bitcoin that will happen one day that will happen will people in my opinion there'll be one of these bull markets that things will go beyond

where people think it's possible um and they will end up selling more than they thought they wanted to sell and they'll end up owning much less of it because it'll go from and i'm making up numbers it'll go from half a million to a million dollars in like a day and a half no no no it will it's one there will be a 100% move in a day absolutely it's possible totally possible scarcity is a really interesting and really scary thing here i i was there in the 90s we saw stocks regularly trade stocks regularly trade 20 30 50 dollars a day what percentage movement is that it was huge 20 or 30 percent stocks and there's lots of them you know you're choosing amongst lots of different companies you know i mean certainly there were

probably things that uh could certainly have doubled and i don't remember that but you saw massive massive moves but bitcoin is unique and one day this market is going to turn from a market where everybody's a seller to nobody's a seller and it's going to be like watching a flock of birds and one day the birds are flying one direction and two minutes later they're flying another direction and you're not going to know why the hell that was that's what these markets are going to be like and there are people out there who are really cute they think they can predict this they think they understand this they think they think they got it all figured out they're going to get totally wrecked they'll

either get wrecked because they're short or they get wrecked because they'll just own much less bitcoin than they thought was possible and i'm not saying it happens down here it could happen at much higher levels it's gonna happen i can't tell you when it's gonna happen but i know it's absolutely going to happen i've seen it happen but the difference in bitcoin and stocks is that they ain't making no more of it okay you know what do they always tell you what real estate son you should buy yourself some real estate how come because they're not making any more of it not in san francisco at least a place that's probably only true in san francisco but no no but seriously so i think of bitcoin it's better than buying manhattan when john jacob astor bought

it i think dan said when the when they bought it from the indians for 24 bucks which is why i love dan i think didn't he say that i don't i don't remember somebody said somebody said it and i thought gee that's much better than what i said i really like that better and it's really true it's you think it's a bigger opportunity than manhattan oh it's such a huge opportunity it's so understated as to size the opportunity dan used a number of a quadrillion dollars and and that really means how you have to think about that it's a it's a giant repricing event so you're repricing the world in bitcoin i actually believe you'll destroy all debt in the process and we can go over that oh we're gonna go over this a little bit yeah i think you destroy all that um it's

voluntary destruction and it becomes what i call a bitcoin based jubilee because the debt sellers will drive the price down and uh ultimately borrowers will buy their way out of debt really really really cheap no maybe not everybody will be able to but it's going to be to some people really really scary event uh although i argue that depending on where they do it if you own you know if you have a lot of money in debt at some point and you even buy five or ten percent bitcoin then the move becomes so extreme that you get bailed out you may not get told you may not totally replace your wealth but a lot of it will be replaced one guy said to me and i know he's worried about himself but people always put when they worry about themselves they

say what about these poor people they're really thinking to themselves well what about me but They don't want to say that because that just sounds so crass. But this guy owns real estate, and he said, what about the poor people? And in reality, if they reprice your building that you own in Bitcoin, you're not any less wealthy. And I said to him as an example, I said, because the Google guys have more money, did that hurt you? I don't know. How did you get hurt by the Google guys having more money? You didn't.

They got more money and brought great technology into the world But I'm just saying If somebody else gets wealthy That doesn't mean you lose your wealth If you own things It's going to get repriced in Bitcoin Now it doesn't mean you couldn't have done better Had you bought Bitcoin

Of course you would have done better But it doesn't mean that you become worse off For it because you didn't Or buy it later If you were very well to do If you had a lot of money And you converted to Bitcoin at a later date That's a different case.

Well, what I'm just telling you, somebody who has wealth, who converts, they would have more of the... That's a good point. The wealthy have more to lose if hyper-Bitcoinization happens. Not necessarily. No? Well, it depends on what the nature of the wealth is. Okay. So if your wealth is...

I mean, if they have cash flow businesses that are productive, I mean, that's good to have. Then they'll just end up earning money in Bitcoin. Yes, but... Their business will convert into Bitcoin. But their downside is much larger... Or, excuse me. i know i want to preface this but i i just had like another a lot of light bulbs going off this episode richard um yeah the potential upside for people who aren't well off right now it's very

high it's very high and they're they won't be like they like the average like that's actually what i want to talk about the average american has like 400 in emergency expenses if maybe not even maybe not even maybe not even above so like those people who don't have that like is it going to be that big of a difference like if bitcoinization does i do i think so because i i think that the economy i actually have a view that we're in the early stages of what i consider an emergent economic paradigm and i think the economic paradigm is actually i think it's as big a change from the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution because a really really big change And we've already had some of the information technology revolution, but having a new money, which pushes us into being low time preference, will have certain things necessarily happen, or likely occur.

So, I believe that Bitcoin creates an economy which is anti-materialistic, anti-consumerism. Now, I'm pretty sure, and these ideas evolved because it was my, it sort of came to me. Because I know that your generation tends to be anti-materialistic, anti-consumerist. Really? I've heard that. You would say that? Somebody told me that. Not true?

I don't think so. I think everybody's trying to fucking flaunt on each other on Instagram and like... Okay. To flex. To flex here. We're coming back to flexing. Maybe you were only anti-materialistic when you were in college. Yeah.

I didn't have a choice. As he got older, he said, that really sucks having nothing. But what I mean by that is... So let's say... Which would you prefer? Yeah, that's true. So I will actually shout out to my Millennium brothers and sisters out there. Well, let me ask you a question.

The tripe with Millennials is we like experiences more than material. Well, here's a test. Here's a test. So would you rather have a bigger home and less opportunity to spend money on other things or have a smaller home with more opportunity to spend on other things? Where would you rather spend your money? I think you need to preface that differently. Not bigger necessarily, but more comfortable.

That is my ideal goal is to buy it. Like the first thing I'm going to buy if Bitcoin ever goes crazy is a house. And I want it to be a comfortable house. I don't want a big mansion. I want a fireplace, a few bedrooms, a backyard, stuff like that. maybe i was wrong that your generation's anti-materialistic this is pretty materialistic i i don't i don't have a problem with materialism but here's what i think you're talking to somebody lives in a studio apartment with a wife right now so no i understand i i think that

people will tend to here's a better test so imagine the following situation if you could put money in the bank and earn I'm going to pick an extreme number because it makes it easier to think about it this way and you could earn 25% in the bank year in, year out

and you had $20,000 are you going to be more inclined to put the money in the bank and not spend it or put the money in the bank and spend it? Put it and spend it. You're not going to take the 25% that you can earn? Oh, I didn't hear that.

I mean spend the money Are you going to look to Get the return on that money The 25% return that you could get On a relatively risk free way Or are you going to I was too busy chewing on beef jerky To catch that caveat

Yes I would hold the money for the 25% And I think that would be true of many people And that's where the anti-materialism comes from So you'll be Money which accretes in value People I think Are going to tend to want to see that value go up we've created we've created an economy where immediate wants and needs are

satisfied and we've created a debt-based economy to do that and it's easy to create that debt-based economy and we might end up recreating a debt-based economy even in a bitcoin world because people people's their ids are so powerful relative to you know what what we want the pleasure seeking that we seek but the pain that comes from that debt is so great um that it it is hard to know i tend to think that you're not going to have debt in a bitcoin based world i think that lenders are going to be reluctant to lend to low quality credits because they're not going to get their bitcoin back i think businesses are going to tend to prefer equity to debt uh because in a world with deflating prices a fixed payment becomes more onerous and significantly more

onerous and i think that in time yeah no no that was a point in time uh the value of global production will go into bitcoin and as a result of that it will go up in value because you have a relatively fixed uh relatively fixed supply of money and so some people might call that productivity but increased increased global production see this is what i think is going to end up happening with bitcoin i there's an idea that i have and i have no way of getting this done myself so i'm just happy to share this idea so let's do a thought experiment here's the thought experiment i have i call it four technologies change the world so if i take a very poor section of the world and i imagine there are a million kids there

call it a million kids aged 5 to 18 and we give them four technologies some kind of computer some kind of mobile data device a portable solar panel and bitcoin Teach them how to use computers if they don't already know how to use them. You're going to have people who can now work globally. Some of those... For some reason when you're saying this

and this is not off topic, but I'm envisioning Haiti when you say this. Wherever it is, it can be anywhere. It could be India, it could be Haiti, it could be Africa, it could be any number of places. They can now work globally. Have you ever heard of the Satoshi?

theory okay i'll let you finish your thought experiment some of those kids will learn programming some of them will start businesses some of them could start global businesses where basically not much existed before that changes the world you're going to bring online and other people talk about this but but i'm making it more concrete you're going to bring online people who basically are not contributing to the global economy and they're going to contribute in very significant ways

and I think it's going to bring growth rates to levels that we can't imagine. Is it going to help us get to Mars? I don't know if it gets us to Mars or not. I don't, but it's,

but you're going to create, but you're going to create an economy where basically there was no economy where people were living however they were living and that's amazing And that's going to happen fast, by fast.

10 years, 15 years, it's going to happen fast. There'll be hurdles that have to be overcome, how to prevent theft of those devices and so on and so forth. But stuff like that can be figured out. But that just wasn't possible. So think about this, a different thought experiment. So you're a little guy. This is a thought experiment. It's hypothetical.

you're five you're five you're you're five foot three but you're a fucking genius still a thought experiment god damn it and you were just unbelievably brilliant and you were like one of the smartest guys in the world but this is the year 900 and so you can barely see because you need glasses but they don't really have glasses how is your life pretty terrible your life really sucks unless somehow you know you you make it to the king or or the duke or the count or whatever where it is and they decide that you're really smart they really want your advice in 2019 you're a billionaire because you created a company and you're you know

that's doing all sorts of crazy crap. Nerds are taking over the world? Well, no, just think about that. That's what we're talking about with four technologies change the world. So you've got people with untapped talent that are in the middle of some place where there's no resources

and no hope for a future. Now they have media through which to utilize that talent. They have the technology and they can do business globally. so their talents there's some people who will have just meager talents that will only be able to do relatively simple things

with a computer whether that's mechanical Turk maybe they can't do more than mechanical Turk there are going to be some people who will what? I'm going to interject here this gets into my Satoshi theory about to freak you out Richard there's some people who theorize out there

that Satoshi is looking to undermine the global economy, not the global economy the governments in particular and he's waiting for a Bitcoinization-like event at which point in time he may come out of hiding and start basically contracting jobs with his stash and potentially hiring the people that you're describing in your thought experiment.

I don't think he needs to do that. I don't think he does either. I think it'll happen, of course, of a matter of course. Bitcoin enables that. Yeah, but that's just a theory. Would you be scared of Satoshi with his coins? What's that? Would you be scared if Satoshi moved his coins or her?

I don't think Satoshi ever will move their coins. You don't know why? I think those keys are probably burned. I wish they were. I hope they are. No, they're probably burned. You know why I say they're probably burned? It's Schrodinger's box, though.

We don't know. You don't know a lot of things. But Satoshi did all that he, they, it could do to keep themselves private. So, clearly thought about it. I mean, idiot not to realize that he thought about it. Thoroughly. Extremely thoroughly. Right.

So, this was absolutely a plan. And what makes you think that Satoshi doesn't have more coins than that? I mean if you mind I don't know how many He's a million approximately What's the number It ranges between 700 and a million 700,000 and a million

So if he has that Why couldn't he have another 100,000 200,000 Not even like a thousand maybe Somewhere stashed Of course he does If he's alive

Would they Yeah could you imagine Like creating this And not participating in it Of course he participated in it That's ridiculous He told you to participate in it He says it could be worth something

You think Satoshi's an idiot Come on Use some common sense here What if Satoshi isn't participating What if he's just like Of course he's participating Come on What if he's in Nepal

On some mountain Just like meditating Use your common sense I'm all about common sense Use your common sense Do I have good common sense I think I do I don't know

I hope so If you tell me Satoshi Didn't take some coins out of it Then you don't have any common sense This is a provocative podcast I gotta ask these questions Richard This is the job of an interviewer I don't know you that well

i feel like i know you richard that insulted me i feel like we know each other a little well i actually feel that way too because well you don't know me but i i know you because i listen you come into my come into my ear like that sounds awful three times a week rich actually actually oh my god you gotta you gotta cut this this just took a turn for the worse oh my god i get what you're saying though the execution of that line i'm not coming in richard's ear three times a week oh poor me this is getting this is getting published richard's glasses are fogging from laughing so hard right now oh brother no but i feel like i know you i feel like i know you not that intimately

I feel like clearly you must um I'm not gonna be able to show my face anywhere luckily this is audio recording I've already been on a podcast I've already been on YouTube oh good god I'm gonna have I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to wear JW JW Weatherman's mask you gotta wear a Wookiee mask I love JW by the way I'm gonna have to wear a Wookiee mask JW by the way I have our uh episode that I haven't published yet I'm gonna drop that some I'm a huge fan of JW he is I go back and forth I know he's he's given out some bad advice bad advice in

the past particularly with key manager everybody everybody gives everybody makes some mistakes yeah I should everybody makes mistakes to tap my shoulder I'm probably giving out bad advice no everybody makes some mistakes and okay I I happen to really like him and I do too I happen to be every

conversation I've had with him has been incredible I happen to be of the view that you judge people in their totality And people like to be very nitpicking. And the real question is, are people smart and do they help you learn and understand things? And he's helped me learn and understand a lot of things. I would agree. And so I really like him for it.

And I think his idea, so for instance, the whole concept of what he calls the power dynamic. The whole idea that there will be a time in the future. We were talking before about you being able to go through a really bad area and retain the value of your Bitcoin. And you've got guys like Casa Hoddle who are trying to create a multi-sig wallet where they're basically trying to change the power dynamic so that if somebody attacks you,

that you can create a situation where you can protect your value. And so this is going to change in time. and what people think. And I have an example for this. I was looking it up and someone I'm sure will correct me so I can feel better and that I'll be corrected.

But I'll come back to that in a second. There's never been a time in human history when somebody could protect what was theirs and not have it taken from them. If you think about it, there's just never been a time like that. If you were...

other than thoughts right here's the thing if you have something and I want it I can kill you and take it so I'm not talking about me personally yes we said killings bad yes we're not coming or killing right yeah easy come easy go but seriously if you had a business if you had property if you had gold it could be taken from you and and they could kill you and still profit by it bitcoin is the first time that you can have something and you can protect it defend it and not have it taken from you that's why i said it's like thoughts like the fact that the words are technically thoughts at the end of the day but at a certain point once they realize that they can't benefit by it

they won't even try now that sounds crazy to people say of course they'll try here's a story that i remember but i don't remember if i remember it accurately and i really tried research probably likely that you don't remember it accurately more than likely i don't remember it accurately yes this is what i remember i'm going to tell you what i remember and i count on somebody in this audience telling me that i'm wrong sometime in the 80s bmws in new york were broken into constantly because people were trying to steal the radio the radio at the time i think was a blaupunkt radio was it like just unique on the market nobody else no they were really really expensive radios people really wanted to resell the radios and i believe and this is where i'm

not completely sure i believe blaupunkt made them so they're one-to-one correspondence with the car so that a thief could steal the radio but couldn't resell it because it wasn't usable in any other car so relatively soon after this happened they just stopped doing it they were breaking windows regularly they're breaking car windows to steal the radio regularly and the change was made and they just stopped they just stopped breaking windows to steal the radio now something i was reading said other other automobile companies started making better radios i don't think that's what really happened i i looked this up and and i don't think that's what happened from what i remember that's not what happened that they they made a change in it it's really hard people have

a really hard time and this goes back to bitcoin people have a really hard time imagining a world that's different from the world they're living in and so how pronounced is that in a world in a time in which we live where things are growing exponentially people have a hard time imagining a world that's different from the world they're living in they've always had that problem they still have the problem how pronounced is it today very pronounced like bitcoin's at 3600 bucks it should be at 400 000 it's very pronounced right it's very pronounced no it people are stupid people can't imagine are we stupid or are we animals where we literally like our chemistry can't react to it people think they're different they're not that different no history rhymes in

in the 70s did you ever hear of alvin toffler not confidently alvin toffler wrote a book called future shock ever hear that book i've heard of future shock yes i never read the book i'm a lazy reader i am too but this was very popular in the 70s a lot of things in the 70s people were worried about what the future was going to look like people were very negative, very scared of what was going to happen, and the world's changed dramatically from the 70s, and I go back to what I was saying before about why I'm so bullish on Bitcoin and Lightning because they're exponential technologies, and I've seen these changes happen, so I'll take you through quickly, from the PCs to the changes

of the internet to uh you know various speeds in the internet to the social media explosion that we've seen this is an iphone this is an iphone 8 that i'm holding when another flex when what's that he's flexing again when when was iphone invented 10 years ago 2007 that's what i was gonna say too 12 years ago people think it's old technology right people think this is old how fucking stupid is that i'm still rocking a seven this is ancient no no no i'm not saying the eight is old they think iphones generally are old they're not it's 10 years old they think it's old they don't understand the change that's happening in their own lives they don't see it and that's not just your generation it it's my generation too well that's getting back to the

point i was trying to make like it's the chemistry of our so that's another theme i'd like to touch on this podcast like it's like as animals literally as part of nature like our chemistry our biology the way our chemicals and our body react literally we have no precedent in our dna to react to to uh the pace of change that we're experiencing today we could go back 5 000 years and we'd just be the same people right we'd be no freaking different but but we've never experienced this amount of change and how does that change us like that's one thing i'm or does it bitcoin changes us that's a very very big quote on this podcast bitcoin changes you and it's true but

we live day to day as human beings I love the Bill Gates quote because I think it's pretty right and I'm going to probably not get it exactly right but something to the effect that less change happens in two years than you think and more change happens in

ten years than you think and I think we're very close to an inflection point in Bitcoin somewhere in the next one to three years it will become very obvious about what's being developed right now with lightning with wallets with a lot of these guys you have some of the fucking smartest people in the world working on this stuff and they're working on it because they love it bitcoin is fascinating because people love it i'm and i fall for this kind of stuff

that's why we're sitting here on this couch right now i i love bitcoin i really do i i just i love bitcoin i think it's fascinating i think bitcoin will save the world i'm probably one of the craziest people you know in bitcoin i'm really crazy easily easily i am no i'm i'm i'm i'm huge so let's get let's segue this like why were you so pessimistic like how pessimistic of the world were you before bitcoin and how like is it literally a 180 it's 180 did you think like plague levels like mad max no no no no not not exactly but yes i i thought we would have i thought we would have financial catastrophe i mean as close to wanting to be a prepper as could be a prepper except just really too lazy to be a prepper because i like you know i can't i can't

live in a little cornfield that's a good definition of me too but i mean i i very very negative because that we you know just the constant push the can down the road not willing to deal with the issues just the whole nine years and it's interesting because i look at a lot of the younger people in bitcoin and i like them because they're so much like me what do you mean except younger what do you mean because i because i've been this way for a lot of years but what i want to impress upon these guys is that it's going to happen much faster than they think because I've seen it I've seen what happens

I said to Mark Yusko I remember years ago working on Wall Street and people would say I've seen this movie before and I know how it comes out they talk about a stock and it's interesting because there was a firm, Neuberger Berman was mostly

very old money managers the founder of the firm, Roy Neuberger, died over a hundred there are a lot of very very very old money managers there guys in their 70s and 80s who saw everything you get better as a money manager as you get older because you've seen so much you don't know shit when you're a kid you know shit because you keep seeing the same things over and over again that doesn't mean you know shit when you're an elder and older either but you've seen shit you've seen so much and i'm so incredibly optimistic because of bitcoin

i think people think i'm crazy i think you're crazy in a good way i like crazy they just think i'm crazy that's why i call people freaks no i try to i try to attract the craziness they think i'm crazy they're gonna understand i don't think you're crazy i know you don't i think you're eccentric because you're a bitcoiner that's true and i love bitcoiners but i'm serious what i want What I want the younger guys to realize, and there's some guys, here's the thing, in Wall Street, there are always, and I've fallen for this myself, there are guys, I subscribe to this newsletter, Elliott Wave. Elliott Wave is a pile of dog shit. The Gartman Letter is the only newsletter to subscribe to. Huh?

The Gartman Letter is the only newsletter to subscribe to. Oh, good God. But no, no, Elliott Wave, Robert Prechter, Robert Prechter was the guy. And Robert Prechter, you know, his forecast for the Dow is it's going to 400. He's had a forecast that it's going to 400. What year is this? 25 years. He's forecasted going to 400 for years.

That, you know, you're going to go through the greatest of the Great Depressions. What's it at? 22,000 right now? I don't know. It's high. Yeah. It's higher than that. But I used to read his letter.

I finally stopped subscribing. It's like, this is a waste of money. What am I doing subscribing to this for? It's crazy. and these guys have these crazy negative forecasts and being negative doesn't make you any money it just doesn't and we have got an asset which is going to go up well well let's preface there are people that shorted 08 that made a lot of money no no no you can trade things and make money but we're not i'm not talking about i'm talking bitcoin i'm not talking about stocks

I'm talking something different. Look, I didn't think I was negative in 08 and negative going into it, and I didn't think we would be where we are. I thought that we would have gone through a lot of calamity. And I still think that the way I see the last 25-plus years is that we've gone from tech media telecom bubble crash into a housing bubble crash into now a sovereign debt bubble this bubble is global sovereign debt global sovereign debt bubble this this bubble is bigger and ultimately potentially more devastating

than anything we've been in because sovereign debt essentially is your money in my opinion others disagree with me but in my opinion you know the 30-year bond is basically the same as the cash in your pocket, the only difference is the cash in your pocket is time zero and the 30-year bond is time 30 years.

And, you know, all the way down on the curve on that. Because it may be worth many different things, but you know it'll get paid 100 cents on the dollar. You just don't know

what those dollars will buy you 30 years from now. What the hell was I going to say? What was I saying? I don't know what you were getting to. you're talking about young guys I think that I was very negative on all these things

and bitcoin in my opinion people buy these altcoins slash shitcoins because they think I'm going to buy this coin it's trading the 150 million dollar market cap and I'm going to it's going to become the next bitcoin here's the thing

I think bitcoin is going to go up multiple thousands of times what it is now? multiple thousands of times from where it is now multiple thousands of times this is a crazy idea and i think the certainty on it is near 100 certainty okay near 100 certainty well we could have a meteor hit the planet we could have a comet hit the planet we could have nuclear war although nick zabo thinks nuclear war is not a problem what do you mean he said something at the israeli uh

blog i haven't watched that yet i didn't watch it i'd like to see it he said something where he said that Bitcoin would survive nuclear war. Oh, Bitcoin would survive a nuclear war. I don't know if I'd survive a nuclear war, but I don't know if Bitcoin might survive a nuclear war. We wouldn't. But what outside of these natural disasters would make you bearish on Bitcoin?

How can you see Bitcoin? Nothing. How can you see Bitcoin failing? Can you see Bitcoin failing? No. No? I can't see it failing. There's no path.

Not a single thing. There's not one path. Not a single path. Why not? Because... This is the most bullish person I've met, ever. Even I have passed where it's like it could fail. Because...

It can be fixed. What do you mean? If it breaks, it can be fixed. What breaks? I don't know what breaks, but what I'm saying is it can be fixed. I think you're alluding to something in the code. Well, I don't see... I think its nature is such that...

My biggest worry is apathy, so I don't think it's anything code related. I'm not concerned about apathy at all. No? No, because you have people becoming more and more interested in it. I have a theory. I'm going to throw this theory out because I like this theory a lot. He's crossed his legs. He's Indian.

Indian style sitting on the couch. This is an intense conversation. I'm loving it. Careful about this. Okay. so I have a view that human beings

don't become adults until they're approximately 16 years old I think 16 you think 16 year olds become adults I would say no no no

listen to what I'm saying you basically are reborn at the age of approximately 16 yeah I mean Quinceyera's Barbra Sutherland no no no when you're 16 years old

you start thinking about the world differently you now start looking at the world through the eyes as an individual not like a somebody who's dependent on their parents you know what i mean that you just start looking at the world differently and you you start thinking about what am i going to do when i grow up exactly what am i going to do when i'm not dependent on my parents right what i can do when i grow up so you start looking at the world differently and it doesn't mean you're ready for it but you start looking at the world differently so a 16 year old is basically like a newborn babe as an adult at the age of 20 it's

now like they're four years old as an adult they're not grown up yet but they're further along at 24 there's a huge difference in a 24 year old and a 16 year old i would agree by the time they're 32 they're pretty much an adult let me give you the mental picture that i kind of see with this and you'll see what i'm saying there's a movie saving private ryan great baby the tom Hank's character is about 29 or 30 years old maybe 32 he's captain the kids were under him soldiers are 18 19 20 the sergeants probably 20 to 23 how do they

look at him on a different level they think of him like he's their dad they're you know he he they look up to him he's he's an adult they know they're not 16 year old kids are not adults they're kids yeah but they're starting to become adults bitcoin is like that 16 year old bitcoin became an adult around the time of segwit pre-segwit not exactly but pre-segwit that makes sense a lot of like pre-pubescent and pubescent battles that needed to be hashed out?

Pre-Segwit, we didn't really know. And I'm into Bitcoin post-Segwit. Pre-Segwit, we didn't really know how Bitcoin was going to scale. Post-Segwit, we have a pretty good idea how it's going to scale. Not me, because I don't know anything. But the really smart people out there,

the Adam Backs and Greg Maxwells of the world have a pretty good idea. The Trace Mayers, too. People that are much smarter than me. they have a pretty clear idea of how things are going to work they have now figured a lot of stuff out and it's a process and they're they're they're going on this roadmap that they've figured out now it doesn't mean they're going to get it exactly right but they've got a lot of ideas and understanding bitcoin became an adult then but more than that nobody knew about bitcoin

prior to 2017 i mean people knew about it not really wasn't in the public psyche like not in rap songs not in i i i discuss i think of bitcoin in terms of mind share yeah exactly like pop culture that's what i'm representing pop culture like it wasn't not really people didn't really know my mom just tagged me in a post on instagram uh a commercial for an hbo show about pot dealers and they say hey i accept bitcoin now like in a commercial my mom was cognizant enough to like reply to that right because she knows about bitcoin and she was like oh my god because they're mentioning ah fuck they're mentioning bitcoin but she wouldn't have in 2013 even though the price

even though the price in 2013 was 1100 they didn't know in 2013 the world wasn't paying attention bitcoin wasn't yet an adult didn't really break into the the thought process of the world that doesn't mean that everybody knows about it but a lot of people know about it a lot of people have heard about it a lot of people have ridiculed it and are ridiculing it right now this is a really big deal and a really big change they're talking about bitcoin futures they're talking about a bitcoin etf bitcoin was priced at a little above zero in 2010 and 2011 wake up right do you realize how short a period of time that is right do you have any sense of

how fast that is all these guys saying oh it's gonna make 50 years 100 years oh my god we're going in this long death march no it's not gonna be a long march it's not gonna take freaking forever if you're waiting 100 years for bitcoin it's dead right bitcoin's dead bitcoin's gonna happen much faster than that the technology that's being developed is insanely fast the lightning network when was the paper dropped 2015 uh right around right before right when the ethereum paper was wrong 2014 i believe okay i thought a little later but this is 2019 this is four or five years i don't know when the paper was dropped but i think 2015 was the date but i'm not sure you could be right i'm looking it up now i've heard some people say 2016 yeah so we'll

no 2016 yeah joseph poom i was off by two years i forget my bitcoin history 2016 this is 2019 yes january 14th 2016 that's three years ago yeah almost exactly three years ago now there's 570 bitcoin worth of value on the lightning network well that's not that critical one way the other But the point is, there is a lightning network, and people are working on it. Three years is insanely fast. People have no damn perspective. From concept to product. From a freaking white paper to having something that's working where you've got people starting to think about and build applications on it.

This is ridiculously fast. I, a computer illiterate, a tech illiterate, am building something on lightning. There you go. So you've got really smart people doing stuff. this is insanely fast this is an exponential technology exponential technologies according to Ray Kurzweil double every year I'll give you a prediction here five years from now we're going to have a huge number of lightning wallets and nodes out there I don't know what the number is but it's going to be like measured in the hundreds of millions maybe a hundred million maybe more

it's going to be everywhere when people figure this out lightning bitcoin is going to be a lot more expensive. Bitcoin is stupid cheap here. $3,600 is a stupid price for Bitcoin. Bitcoin should be $50,000 here or $100,000. It's priced at $3,600. People who are selling it here are idiots. They're going to look back at this price having sold it here and they are going to have the deepest regret. Buy all you freaking can. I don't know if it goes to $1,000 or $1,100. If it does, it's just freaking stupid because idiots are trying to knock it down. They're really stupid guys they're they're actually dumb do you think um do you think these alt cycles continue i have no idea no uh i'm not it's complicated people or do you think there's like an awakening or it's

like oh it's gonna it's gonna it's gonna take time for people to understand that that that this is about money this is not about this is not about stocks this is not about companies you don't own anything when you own a coin you don't own their revenue stream i believe what's going to happen here's what's going to happen in my opinion i'll give a prediction as lightning becomes more advanced as applications and businesses are built using lightning the old coins will just die they'll just die people won't want to own them they're gonna the investment will be in the investment in new businesses utilizing

lightning and the scaling technologies, the liquids. They're going to have more scaling technologies. Smart guys are going to pour money into infrastructure and businesses on these scaling layers.

In the next bull market, don't know when it starts. I think it starts sooner rather than later, but I don't know when. Delphi Digital is calling an April bottom. I I have no idea when the bottom is. I think all these attempts at calling the bottoms is fundamentally dumb. Personally, I think we're probably there.

We could go lower. I keep wanting to buy, but I'm waiting because I don't want to blow capital. If we're going to go to $2,000, I don't want to buy. Richard, you're contradicting yourself. No, no. You have to know who you're in bed with. And I'm in bed with a lot of stupid people. there are a lot of stupid people who don't know what the hell they're trading

who don't know what the hell they're doing I really believe I know what I'm doing you have to know who the other holders are and I'm in bed with a lot of freaking stupid people I am I own Bitcoin what if those other stupid people you're in bed with have the same exact thought and that is their rationalization

they don't know what they're talking about the guys who are selling Bitcoin here have no idea what they're talking about have no idea what they're doing the guys who are advocating shorting Bitcoin here are morons I'm very negative on these guys There's something really wrong with these guys The guys who are advocating selling Bitcoin

And hammering for lower prices are imbeciles They're really stupid guys They don't understand what's happening with the technology They don't understand how these things have worked In the last 30 years With the advance of these technologies We're going to have better and simpler UX How do I know this?

I don't know Because we've had it time Because look at your Mac computer Do you use a Mac? Looking at it Okay. How easy is this thing to use? Pretty easy.

Do you know how hard my PC was to use? No. It was really hard. You had to download code. It had 64K RAM and 360K floppy drives. It was absurdly hard to use. But you use it nonetheless. It sucked.

Stuff changes, and it changes much faster than you think it's going to change. And people, they don't have perspective. I have a lot of perspective because I'm a really old guy with gray hairs. Well, that's why I wanted to bring you on, Richard, because I think I was trying to think about this during the last pee break, but I think you are the oldest guest on Tales from the Crypt, so here's to that. And I am somebody who seeks out wisdom, and I do think that the wisdom of an older generation is somewhat thrown to the wayside by kids my age. My generation thinks I'm nuts, but I don't care. Wisdom is about experience, not about what other people perceive. I tell my kid actually I tweeted this I gotta find the tweet that I had but I tell my kid the

most important thing to do is pay attention just pay attention there's so much in life you can learn simply by paying attention and she's 21 and she's very smart she does pay attention she's very smart bitcoin is just so obvious i can't help it it's just i look at it and it's just so obvious to me what this is and me too and it's gonna go to levels that people can't imagine and people are going to end up i do think it's okay to trade a little bit here here's how here's how i think about trading. I think people are trading wrong. You've got to be able to trade, number one. No, no, no, no, no. Don't just try

to start trading. I view it as. So, let's assume I'm mostly what I do is I before this traded stocks, now I own Bitcoin. You're going to want to peel some off. You're going to want to peel some off

at some extreme levels. Guys who sold at $20,000 are certainly smart to do that. In my opinion, on extreme moves, if you peel off 10% to 15%, that's a reasonable thing to do. You don't worry about selling that. You want to be able to carry your expenses. If you're working, you've got an income, maybe you make that less. Peel a little bit off so that in the next bear market, you can be a buyer.

How deep the next bear market goes, I have no idea. See, that's something I'm worried about. I think about that often, but I don't think I'd have the patience and mental fortitude to not spend that money on the sideline. You don't have to spend it. No, you don't have to, but I would want to. No, you wouldn't. No? No.

You can hold on to it and look to buy more. You've got to pay taxes on it. Yeah, that's another worry about. By the way, that's why I think the market crashed as hard as it did. And I don't think people really understand this. I've thought about this a lot, actually. All right, jump into it. In 2017, the market started the year, what was the price?

$900, $1,000? It was below $2,000. It was like $1,600. No, it started the year 2017 around $900, $1,000. But it dipped down and then went back up, right? I'm calling it January 1st, I think. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong. I think it started approximately $1,000 plus or minus, whatever.

Went to $20,000. And along the way, people probably sold some to buy altcoins. I remember sitting in a restaurant talking to somebody whose son was really nervous about their taxes because they traded like crazy. So if you bought Bitcoin at $1,000 and you sold it at $15,000 to go buy whatever altcoin, you now had a taxable event.

A lot of people thought they didn't have a taxable event And they thought that unless they went to cash, whether that be dollars or whatever, that they didn't have a taxable event. And that's wrong. They learned that they did have a taxable event. And I think a lot of cash came out. We know from an example, a prime example, this is the Peter McCormick story. By the way, I love Peter McCormick's podcast. I'm a huge fan of Peter McCormick.

Shout out, Peter. but he started with 30 some odd thousand dollars went to some 1.2 mil and then went down to 30 some odd thousand dollars again getting killed on taxes and getting killed on prices i think his story is a typical story i think there are a lot of people like peter mccormick and i was glad that he told us that because it helped me have a tangible data point on what i believed to be so so i think the crash from six to three thousand was probably although they're not necessarily maybe miners closing down having to liquidate and liquidate some of their bitcoin it's funny you know we crashed from six thousand to three thousand this is like november right

yeah something like that it crashed from six thousand three thousand and it looked like a forced liquidation kind of that's what capitulation is forced liquidation in the stock market capitulation is the margin clerk tells you you got to sell actually they don't tell you you got to sell what they do is they tell you you got to put up more you got to put up more cash or we're selling you out margin clerks are very sloppy sellers they don't actually care what price they get because it's not their money and they don't and they don't care didn't you work on wall street for a little while uh chicago board of trades i'm trying to think how much do margin kirks care if they sell you out not at all they don't care especially if you're trading futures they don't

care no they sell you out they don't have they don't have the ability to care they don't call you're done they don't care you're done so if this looked like classic liquidation for whatever reason people had to sell so they sold they sold the crap out of it they looked at this market and Oh, that doesn't look like capitulation to me. What are you talking about? What do you think capitulation looks like? That's kind of what capitulation looks like. The market puked by 50% in like three days.

What do you think capitulation looks like? Richard, we're looking for final capitulation. Final capitulation. What is the final capitulation? This is also a little bit of nonsense. I looked at some numbers the other day, and I don't know if this is right. Somebody please check me on this. trading view by the way i think you look are you mostly looking at coinbase when you're looking at

trading view but although not necessarily i don't know how they get their numbers but bitcoin averages looks like they have different numbers and when i look at the secondary low the volume was actually lower in bitcoin averages than it was on trading view somebody had posted something that looked like the spikes were really huge. So we may be working on data. There are people maybe looking at this stuff, looking at data that may be wrong. Nobody's questioning the data.

They're just taking it at face value. I don't know if it's right or if it's wrong. But people aren't looking at the data. If you're going to rely on data for your decision, you better damn well be sure the data's right. If you're making a decision on it, don't you want to know if it's right? You're just going to guess?

You're going to say, I'm making a decision on this thing and the data's wrong? Don't you want to ask? Shouldn't you ask that question? Yeah. Isn't that what a good analyst would do? Yeah. Yeah.

I would assume. I'm happy I'm not in the analyst game. I'm happy I don't have to dive in any of this. People are sloppy. People are really sloppy. What do you think? I'm drunk now. We've been drinking.

Richard gifted me, gifted Tales from the Crypt, some Angel's Envy, a very good whiskey. We're about halfway through this bottle. Bourbon. Bourbon. Bourbon whiskey. This is bourbon. No, it's bourbon. It's from Kentucky.

They're synonymous to me. Not if you're from Kentucky. I'm not from Kentucky. Neither am I. I'm from Philly where we get the Philly special, which is $5 for PBR and a shot of Jack Daniels. I know Philadelphia. I like Philadelphia. It's a good town.

It's a great town. It's a great town. It's where America was born. Philadelphia is a great town. Bastion of freedom. The main line is a great place. Main line, yes. Main line is a...

The great northeast. I was born in the great northeast. The great northeast. Yes. I went to college in Philadelphia. I remember hearing about the great northeast And I always thought that sound You went to this place called

I was born Shout out Frankfurt FKD baby I've heard of Frankfurt There was a place There was some diner in the great northeast Robbins Diner? I think

I don't know what it was called I think it was Robbins Diner I know exactly what it was There was some Right across the street from Tony's Pizza I know exactly what you're talking about I have no idea But people would always call

The great northeast And I always had to laugh But Philadelphia is a great town I love Philadelphia I think Philadelphia is an awesome place And I really love it I think Philadelphia is a great town Thank you for flattering me

I do too I think it's very underrated Philly's obviously Historically got the underdog You could live very nicely in Philadelphia On much less money than Living in the suburbs of New York You could live in Philadelphia

And work in New York You could If you wanted to It's a long commute It's a commute but But Philadelphia is a really nice town I have nothing but nice things to say about Philadelphia But

I have no idea what I was going to say now what was i saying we were talking about um talking about the looking at bitcoin average versus versus oh yeah bad bad data bad data make sure you have good data make sure well people don't necessarily check the data that they're looking at and they need to check the data because the data really matters and the problem if you don't check your underlying assumptions on the argument you're making then the argument you're making may be bad

and it's always critical to check what those underlying assumptions are it's hard to do that it's very hard to check your underlying assumptions but it's really necessary and a lot of people just don't do that and I think that well

where do we come into this topic Richard let's be fair can that be extrapolated to you not understanding the code is that a parallel type of line of thinking like here's you you don't know for sure that the code does what you assume it was because you can't know and these traders looking at this price data though they might not know it's they might not know

it's uh accurate is that is that similar am i not sure if it is but i do think that first time I've ever seen Richard speechless no I'm just thinking I like this I like thinking Richard literally never heard him speechless what's happening with the code is

I may not be able to understand it or read it but there are other people who are looking at it and trying to pick it apart and trying to understand it and read it and so it would be better if i could do it myself mm-hmm but i know there are people who are much better at this than i am who are much smarter at this than i am who are looking at it and who are picking it apart and are trying to understand it. And I'm not sure that's the case when it comes to people looking at things like this. If I

compared one service to another and found something that looked like a discrepancy, then maybe it's just a simple, obvious discrepancy. And I don't know if people are looking at it or thinking about it. And I think that fundamentally people have a very hard time imagining the world could be a different place than it is

it's really hard to imagine and I think it takes 15 to 30 years it could happen in less time I think this happens really fast I think that people wake up

to this they start to see what this technology can do and when when smart investors wake up to something they just want to own it and they start bidding it up and there's just not that much of it trace mayor gave the example at a much higher price that if you took ultra high net worth investors individuals that's with $30 million or more of investable assets, that's approximately 220,000 people. And at this point, at this point,

that's about 50 basis points to buy up all the available Bitcoin. He estimated 10 million Bitcoin that could be purchased. You're talking about only owning 44 Bitcoin. At some point, you're going to have a situation where people you didn't expect to buy are going to be buyers. And supply is going to dry up. And sellers are going to turn from sellers to not being sellers

and may even turn to being buyers. And this market's going to change and reverse and the character of it's going to look different. I think a lot of people have a hard time imagining this changing and have a hard time. And I think the idea that it has to follow a script of a prior bear market is an absurd proposition. Yeah, and I think especially like the proposition that future bear market is going to be prolonged is stupid too. That doesn't make any sense to me.

If you look at the stock market over the last hundred plus years, market after market looks different. Different things happen. They say, oh, well, it's not the same, but it rhymes. sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't um you've got to be really careful about trying to make predictions i've i've done this has been a mistake i've made myself i have looked at markets and i've made certain assumptions and i thought things were going to work out a certain way and they didn't work out that way and i thought i was very erudite and very you know looking at this has got to happen this way for these reasons and look i could be making the same mistake about bitcoin

But the interesting thing is that you've got people working on this thing who are just incredibly smart. And Bitcoin in some ways, the only thing that's really locked into place is the social consensus. So we have a social consensus about Bitcoin. I wouldn't even say it's locked into place yet. It's pretty locked into place. 21 million cap. Well, no, what I mean by that is we have certain ideas about Bitcoin, and one guy said to me, who I like, but I didn't like when I heard this, said, oh, we should consider, he was tweeting it, we should consider recycling lost coins. Just call us out.

Hasu said this. I think it's a terrible idea, recycling lost coins. It's a terrible idea. Lost private keys should stay lost. I agree. I don't think we should recycle anything. Recycling lost coins is an incredibly stupid idea. You've got to be very careful

with trying to tamper with the underlying core of what this thing is. This actually is a perfect segue. We were talking about before the podcast when I asked you from the bathroom, do you think Bitcoin's inception and subsequent proliferation is a serendipitous event that can be replicated?

serendipity is my word of the week i like serendipity there was a restaurant in new york called serendipity did you know that no they served things like frozen hot chocolates it's called serendipity three frozen hot chocolates yeah they had hot or cold crazy desserts and cold cold it was frozen hot chocolate it's cold they had frozen desserts And they did all kinds of desserts It was a restaurant It was phenomenal Great

Very fattening Gained 10 pounds just walking in the door Alright Enough about the restaurant serendipity Do you think Bitcoin was a moment of serendipity That can be repeated? I don't know You don't know?

I don't know I doubt it But I don't know I'm going to be more bullish than you In this one instance I'm going to say I don't think it can be repeated I don't know what you mean by that so it's hard for me to

be more explicit so do you think something could overtake Bitcoin another digital currency at some point in the future with better features I think Bitcoin is very much under the mentality of

something that's not perfect but works what's the uh saying i'm thinking of less perfect it's not like when you launch a product you want here here's the thing about bitcoin but let me finish let me finish yeah so like given the fact that bitcoin may not like the technology may not be the ideal may not uh utilize the ideal sort of it doesn't have the ideal transaction throughput the ideal i think it's very clunky and stuff like that despite that like even though all coins may be

more fungible may have faster transactions per second or more transactions per second excuse me uh i think they're trying to create serendipity where bitcoin was created in a moment and it was it's literally like a flash in a pan that cannot be replicated even if there's quote-unquote better technology bolted onto another protocol. The beauty about Bitcoin in my opinion

is that Andreas Antonopoulos talks about the trilemma. And the problem with the trilemma is that you can have two out of three things that are really great and the third thing is going to suck. The solution to that

from the way I understand it with Bitcoin is that the solution is on a scaling layer. And so what happens with Bitcoin is Bitcoin can take from things that other people have come up with, ideas and creativity that may not be currently on Bitcoin and fold it into Bitcoin,

whether it be at the protocol level or on a scaling layer level. And this is one of the things that makes me as bullish as I am on Bitcoin. Because these ideas and solutions can find their way into Bitcoin. When I say Bitcoin, I mean Bitcoin as an ecosystem. Not necessarily the base protocol.

I assume Lightning is not going to be the last scaling layer. we have there's already a third layer what's the third layer you have elements, you have liquid that's the second layer third layer in the sense that like people

third layer applications being built where people are building apps on top of it I don't know where things are headed but the interesting thing about this is here's one of the things that makes me really just incredibly bullish about this you're incredibly bullish no i'm incredibly bullish i i look at guys like adam

back and the team working on teams working on this stuff and i just pick him him as a name these people understand how the internet was built they understand what the flaws in the internet are and they're trying to build something which corrects for some of those flaws and they have both a knowledge a depth and breadth of understanding which is just spectacular

and they're open-minded to certain ideas they're closed-minded to other ideas they believe it needs to follow a social consensus and ideas will be fought out in Bitcoin

like the UASF was fought out it's not going to be perfect there's no such thing as perfection but the process that exists in Bitcoin is amazing and so what do you mean by amazing

why is it amazing it's amazing because you've got people who are both smart and open-minded and it is I don't even understand why it's amazing I look at it

and I am I'm just blown away by the number of people in this space who are so incredibly smart, much smarter than me in so many things you're too humble Richard no I'm smart about a few things

but these people are really smart you know I look at devs who didn't know anything about economics and they know so much they've learned so much their mind, they're so curious and they work so hard at trying to understand things I'm a dilettante

I don't know shit I figure stuff out no I'm serious, I'm a lazy reader I'm very lazy Richard I'm in the same boat That's why I have this podcast So I can get the smart people drunk To come explain this shit to me

I'm really I'm blown away by these people That are so smart And It's software It can be changed And there's a community out there Of people who have

A view On how things need to be That's the social consensus There's something very powerful about that and there's a level of flexibility i'll be honestly i don't know that i can explain it no i i agree i agree there's it's just like something innately that you feel it's like as a bitcoiner i don't want to be pontificating about being a bitcoiner but like i just innate like we were discussing before the call like before the interview like sitting in my

cube richard just broke his shoe we're getting too drunk here um i got an extra pair for you but uh there's just something innate about it like i remember sitting in a cube in 2013 just being like i need to focus on this there's something about it like there's it's almost like the ring from lord of the rings like there's just some allure to it and it's just like i again like again i'm a street smart kid from north philly northeast philly from the great northeast and there's just something about like the innateness of my perceived street smartness that like bitcoin has set off like an alarm in my mind like pay attention this is going to happen like something common sense is really underrated there are a lot

of people who there are people who come to this country who come with nothing they have a drive. They have innate intelligence. They don't have a lot of schooling, necessarily. And particularly years ago, they achieved tremendous success. They have an ability to understand things. There is a native intelligence. There's something

magical about bitcoin there's something very special about the group of people involved with it i'm very impressed with this community i'm very impressed with the people i love i love bitcoin twitter i don't want to say crypto twitter i love bitcoin twitter i think there's so many guys who are so smart look i'm an old man but there are a lot of young guys who i look at and And I think they're really, really, really smart guys. It gives me so much optimism for the future. I love guys like you, Marty. And there are other guys in the space.

They're really smart. They're, I respect them so much. There are so many people in this space who are so smart, who have really great understanding. many people older and younger than me much smarter than me and it gives me so much hope for the future it gives me so much positivity um i just think that bill burton posted something he said well if bitcoin fails then he's just gonna go out about his business everything's gonna be fine i said bitcoins are gonna come with the one and only

money i guess i guess if a comet hits the planet or a meteor hits the planet then you have to worry about that it won't really matter what what happens to you it's it it seems so obvious to me i i can just see it i don't know why i can see it maybe i'm wrong maybe i'm just a freaking fool it just looks ridiculously obvious to me setting off these alarm bells in my mind like pay attention this is gonna happen i think it's i think it's a sure thing because they're really smart people who manage to figure out answers and solutions when they can't figure something i listen to some of these podcasts and youtubes i listen to guys like bit connor like rosa beef they run into an issue i hear them talking and oh my god i don't

understand what rosa peep is saying nobody can he talks too fucking fast he's talking so fast this man is so much smarter than i am it's insane and i love this guy he's brilliant i can't understand a word the man's saying he's i gotta listen to him like at quarter speed right i i can't i i don't understand what he's saying he's so much smarter than i am and bit connor to these guys are incredible they're going to find answers and solutions because they're not going to stop until they do and and that's amazing and bitcoin is software and they're going to figure out answers and if the answer isn't you know if it isn't going around the mountain they're going to cut a hole through the mountain they're going to find an answer to this whatever it is because they have

drive. They have brains. They have curiosity. And there are so many people like this who are so freaking smart. And if it's not them, it'll be somebody else. Because this is an amazing project. And it has a phenomenal idea and philosophy behind it. It's a very optimistic view of the future for humanity. it's going to take humanity

to places that we can't imagine so many people have such a negative outlook on where things are going to be and how things are going to happen and Bitcoin is such an optimistic future I always loved Star Trek as a kid I was never a Star Wars fan Star Wars is such a dark future

Star Trek was such an optimistic view of the future Bitcoin is such an optimistic view of the future because every individual is important. Every human life is important. That doesn't mean that there aren't times that people have to make hard decisions, but in Judaism they say that if you save one life,

you've saved the world. Because as one person, you may not be able to save more than one life. and you don't know what that person is going to be what their progeny is going to be you may very well have saved the world by saving one life

the people in Bitcoin are amazing people and some of them have been in it a long time so they they grow cynical because they think they've been in it so long they go through these hard

bear markets and maybe if i'd gone through so many of these look i don't love this bear market i mean don't get me wrong it it it sucks when you know you watch you know when you watch the you know bitcoin go from 20 000 to 3600 lower and it may go lower yet it's not fun but it provides an optimistic future it's so optimistic it's so amazing i love bitcoin And I think that it's going to change humanity. It's going to change the opportunities that we have because money helps enable social scaling. Nick Szabo understands that

and understood that and tried to convey it to people through the things that he's done, the things that he's written. And Bitcoin, because of what it is, is going to open up an opportunity for human social scaling. We as a species, we mean nothing as an individual.

I can accomplish nothing. You can accomplish nothing as one human being. You can do nothing. You're worthless as a single individual human being. Ouch. But together, and so am I, together as a group doing things, being able to scale socially,

we accomplish so much the opportunity is limitless and bitcoin money enables social scaling and bitcoin because of what it is enables money to scale socially scale

I don't know if I'm using this term the right way in ways that we could never do before I believe that the Chinese will ultimately adopt and embrace and comfortable with Bitcoin as will the Russians, as will many other people, the Chinese will wake up one day

and they will say, my God, what's the big deal about Bitcoin? If people in China buy Bitcoin and hold Bitcoin but they stay in China and they keep their money here, that's not capital flight. Their money is there because they're there and they're going to spend their money there.

People are going to wake up to things that they hadn't thought of before. They're going to start to understand things. People don't change the way they see things. They change the way they understand things. And it's really amazing. It's really positive. It's a hugely optimistic view for humanity.

And it's a really big deal. And it may be the biggest invention of I don't know how many years. it's a really big deal I don't know but it's a really big deal and more and more people will come to understand it little by little they'll adopt because of price

people love to make money it's not like gold gold needs the world to come to an end to be successful bitcoin doesn't bitcoin can win because people it it appeals to human nature people love to make money people love to get rich

and people will adopt bitcoin simply because they want to make money now it may be crazy but that's why they will buy bitcoin they will hold bitcoin they may sell it because they don't understand it but the world doesn't have to come to an end for bitcoin to win and because of what bitcoin is and we didn't really go into this in enough detail because of what bitcoin is bitcoin will win we've done we've got another three hours to kill so i'll do this in another show right i can go on forever i know you can and i think this is actually a great place to end bitcoin as optimists optimistic future i'm very optimistic i'm happy you are as somebody as a young person trying to look up to somebody who's experienced some things

i'm happy that you're optimistic i was pessimistic as well and i was a senior in high school you've heard this story i was senior high school in 08 like how can the world be this bad and luckily found bitcoin and i agree i agree i believe it produces an optimistic view of the future that many people will see it as pessimistic but i do think it's truly optimistic in many facets That's what sound money incentivizes, the proliferation and innovation of greener energies. No, it's simple. It does. It does proliferate.

But it's simpler than that. People need to trust their money. Average people don't necessarily want to own stocks because, you know, everybody's celebrating John Bogle and all the great things that John Bogle did. But at the end of the day, stocks are not money. The interesting thing about money is that money is so core to being human, and we think we understand it, and yet we don't. And yet we don't really trust the money that we have. We know that the money that we have is dishonest.

And yet we rely on it for everything. If I buy a stock, I have to be hopeful that I'm right about the stock, that I've done good research, that I understand where the business is going, I have to understand all the various things that I have to understand about the way a company is run, are the people honest, is the accounting good, do they have a good share of their industry. Money isn't about that. Money is about, I've worked, I've put in time, I've put in effort, I went to my job, I put in hours

I labored for some period of time and they paid me for that labor and then I put my labor into money and I hope that that money is good and everybody knows that the money they have isn't good it's bad the money they have is going to become worthless

it's going to steal from them every day it's going to be used by somebody else because their money isn't good I put in my time and my effort and my labor and it's stolen from me how does that make people feel? that's a terrible thing you have to have money that doesn't steal from you

you have to have money that retains its value you shouldn't have to seek out value somewhere else because the money you have isn't any good and you seek it and poor answers to it. Stocks are a poor answer to a good money. People would put less money into stocks if they thought their money was any good or real estate or art or whatever.

Your money should retain its value. And people understand this and they know this. And Bitcoin is going to win. we're in a very early stage and a lot of people don't understand this and they look at it through the lens of equities and they didn't understand equities that many years ago equities became a cult in the 90s

with the stock market going up and people thought they knew a lot about it people know much less about stocks than they think they know anyway people know much less about investing than they think they know also a lot of people think they know a lot of stuff they know much less than they think they know because they don't test the underlying assumptions they're arrogant but

in time Bitcoin is going to be good money which is going to give you honest money honest money it's going to give you a foundation

you'll invest in other things in a Bitcoin world you will invest in other things you won't just hold money you will invest in businesses but you won't have to invest and businesses because your money is becoming devalued every single day and so you'll think about things differently money is core to humanity nick salvo understands this read those two papers

it's critical that you read them you need to understand them because you can't understand bitcoin you can't understand what's wrong with things until you understand where we came from and why we're here and it's not you know look it's not the only thing you have to know but it's a great starting place definitely great starting place and

I think this is a great ending place for this episode it's been a pleasurable where are we at now 2 hours 45 minutes minus the pee break

it's been fun I hope you had a good time I had a great time put that mic to your face I had a great time this has been a long time coming I think

the free screen will love this by the way I love Marty Marty Marty Marty is absolutely one of my favorites I have several favorite pods

and Marty is is in there i love marty marty has great pods marty has great guests i don't know if i'm one of them but marty has great guests you were certainly marty has marty has really smart guests and i don't know if i'm one of them but um i love marty i'm very you know i'm very pleased and i'm very optimistic i love richard i love this conversation i thought it was fun it was fun it was great isn't this is the first of many as you freaks can tell richard is long-winded he can go on we can talk about whatever forever so this is the first of many episodes by the way i love matt odell i do too i really love matt i picked him up as a co-host you gotta shout out

to matt odell shout out i'm a huge i'm a huge fan of matt odell matt's sleeping in hong kong right now what the hell he's doing in hong kong you'll hear about it and i'm about to post i am so i'm i i'm really bullish on matt odell i love matt odell you think he's great i've been uh i've Been a Matt O'Dell hobbler for a while. Send him my best. I'm sure he'll hear this and he'll get it. Matt, we're sending our best to you. I love Matt O'Dell.

I'm a huge fan. Do you have a parting note for the freaks? Don't be foolish about Bitcoin. I don't know if we go lower. I really don't know. Nobody knows. Don't listen to guys because you think they sound smart and you think they sound erudite

and they tell you this case, bears all... Jim Cramer says this. Jim Cramer's really right about this, actually. He's not right about many things, but... Huh? He's not right about many things. Jim Cramer's actually really fucking smart.

It took me a long time to figure that out. I was always a Jim Cramer fan. I bought a book called The Triumph of the Optimists. The really big money... It took me a really long time to figure... I was a bear for years. I'm a natural bear I love to be bearish I love to get short I'm a natural bear I mean I was

negative on I was negative on so many things it kept me from making a lot of money being a bear bears sound smart they're erudite they they sound like oh we've got this really good case we've really thought this out you know who makes the really big money the bulls big big big money getting rich kind of money is made in bull markets not bear markets you don't get rich in bear markets you get rich in bull markets I used to think you got rich in bear markets

that's bullshit you don't get rich in bear markets bear markets will usually rip your guts out and you usually lose if you think you've made it at some point you're going to have a lot of it taken away from you in a bear market because you thought you were smart and you did something and you put on a position and

you lost what you had bull markets are really what make you big money in bull markets you make multiples of your money i think bitcoin will go to levels that are unimaginable we're going to get to 20 000 how long it takes to get there i don't know but the cognitive dissonance associated with getting to 20 000 will be staggering many people who thought bitcoin was garbage because they were told by Jamie Dimon, Warren Buffett, Nouriel Roubini, whoever it is, that Bitcoin was garbage, Bitcoin was trash, Bitcoin was a bubble, Bitcoin was a scam, Bitcoin was tulips, Bitcoin was whatever.

They're going to look at $20,000 and they're going to say to themselves, oh my God, look, Fidelity is selling Bitcoin and New York Stock Exchange through Iceback is selling Bitcoin and this company and that company and Goldman Sachs is in it with Poloniex. And they say, wait a minute, Bitcoin's at $20,000. Why'd they tell us it was a scam? Oh, Wall Street told it was a fraud so they could buy it cheap and we'd sell our Bitcoin. I get it. I understand.

They lied to us again. And then they're going to buy the crap out of it. Bitcoin's going to go from $20,000 to $100,000 in like a year or maybe less. Beware, freaks. In some stupid short period of time, I could be off. Maybe it's 15 months, but it's going to go up to numbers that you can't imagine because people are going to say, what the hell is wrong with this? Cognitive dissonance is powerful, and we're going to get up there,

and that's what's going to happen. That doesn't mean we get up there to $20,000 and immediately goes to $100,000. It's not going to do that. It's going to test. It's going to do whatever markets do. It'll sell off. But then it's going to start making its way to $30,000, and it's going to go up to $100,000 in relatively short order.

some guy told me this is what i want to tell you some guy told me do you realize that past the having at 900 bitcoin a day it would take 42 million dollars in a year to support bitcoin at 130 000 42 million inflows a day is that what you're trying to say no 42 million dollars in the year that there's new issuance of bitcoin to the bitcoin at 130 000 requires 42 billion dollars oh i think it's a million 42 billion okay every year nuisance of gold is approximately 3 000 metric tons it's approximately 105 million ounces the numbers worked out to about 130 some odd billion dollars at a price of like 1200 and something 1250 wherever it is so basically to get to 130 000 with new bitcoin per day would be 42 billion dollars of new money coming out okay

gold is already there at 130 plus billion dollars and going higher so bitcoin go to 3x of that, or nearly $400,000 at $132 billion of new Bitcoin. And by the way, that's only going to be for four years, and then it's going to get cut in half, because gold is adding 1.6-ish percent, 2% every year. So think about what you're listening to when you hear people talk to you. Look at the numbers, run the numbers, think about it. Don't just take something at face value. don't just think because somebody sounds bearish that they sound really smart question it

think about it question what I'm saying look I don't mind it's better to understand what your underlying assumptions are always test them always question them

always try to figure that out because it's in a debate if you're debating somebody it's those underlying assumptions that are critical and that's how you're going to win a debate the way you win a debate is you pin somebody down on their underlying assumptions and you know you've won when they change the topic on you because they're trying to squirm out and they've lost but they don't want to actually admit that they've lost the debate and so they're gonna change they change the topic i really hate

that it's really stupid test underlying assumptions and it's hard it's really hard to figure them out sometimes because we have things that are so built into the way we look at the world that we don't understand what our own underlying assumptions are. But until you look at what your underlying assumptions are, you're not going to understand the conclusions

you draw. And so you always have to test those and question those. Anyway, that's enough lecturing for the day. So, I'm done. Thank you, Marty. Is that it? That's it. That's enough. Until next time. That was a fun time.

it was great i love you marty i love you too richard it's been a fun fun three hours this is the longest podcast you're the oldest oldest guest longest podcast setting a lot of records here today i i don't think i spoke for like two minutes total out of three hours so you guys get a lot of richard this episode i'm ecstatic for it because he is one of my favorite bitcoiners in the world uh we actually have to take a picture we have to take a selfie my wife wants a selfie she's a big fan of bitcoin tina she uh and we need to do this to send it to her she she wants to she wants to know that we met and and conversed thank you we had to have proof of proof of conversation via photo proof of conversation um that's really cool i'm so flattered do you

know some guy flattered me and said they said they've been hodling for years and and they heard me on something and they said oh my god i've like totally rethought this and like i feel so good about holding bitcoin now i was like oh my god this guy made me feel so happy well you make me feel happy richard your bullishness your optimism makes me optimistic it's good to see as somebody who's constantly questioning uh whether or not i'm naive uh somebody uh who's been through the ringer who's who's seen some shit to to sort of push back say hey you might not be naive so thanks for coming on thank you for having me thanks for coming down from your pod the middle of georgia uh fascinating that you that you made this drive i'm flattered and uh that's it that's

all we got this week freaks we just we just crushed like half a bottle of angels envy i'm slurring my words we're headed to uh the bitcoin magazine sls happy hour you're coming i didn't tell you this but you're coming all right we'll see you freaks next week peace and love