The Michael Knowles Show - The Establishment FEARS the POWER of Bitcoin | BitBoy Crypto

Episode Date: August 22, 2021

BitBoy Crypto joins the show to discuss all things crypto. From the real creator of Bitcoin, to who killed John McAfee, to what in the world is cryptocurrency? Take a listen! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Michael Knowles, and this is the Michael Knowles Show. I could be a very wealthy man right now if I had invested in Bitcoin a long time ago. But I don't know anything about Bitcoin. I don't really know anything about investing. Might be able to be a wealthy man if I start investing in Bitcoin now, but I need someone to tell me what the hell Bitcoin is. Which is why I've brought on the expert. Bitboy crypto, Ben Armstrong. Ben, if you're not following his content, he's got well over a million subscribers on YouTube. he is the place to go for crypto news, crypto currency trading advice,

all these things that I don't know anything about. Ben, thank you for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. Anytime I get to talk crypto, and especially when I can reach an audience that maybe doesn't know that much about it, it's always a win for me, so I'm very excited to be here. You're talking to the main audience

that doesn't know anything about it, namely me, the audience of one. I need you, Ben, if you don't mind, to answer this for me, once and for all, all lay my fears. I have had one this sort of Luddite disposition, which is I'm skeptical of all new technology, and I never would get the new video game consoles when they came out. And I'm an old man, Ben, I'm an old man in a young person's body. So what is Bitcoin, what is crypto? Is it real? Is it just gambling? Is it just a speculative asset? Or should I start throwing

my money into it? Well, I'm glad. I'm speaking to, uh, you know, an old man in a young body is I'm an old man and an old body. So, you know, I've always been a little bit of an early adopter. I think a lot of people would tell you about that. You know, if you ask them about me and my life, I've always been a little ahead of the curve on things of technology. I look ahead and I see what's coming. Even if I don't necessarily think it'll be beneficial for me. Like, you know, gaming is getting absolutely huge. I'm not a gamer. But we try to take advantage of that on our channel. We talk about different, you know, gaming coins and gaming cryptos and things like that.

So I understand where you're coming from. I think the majority of people are skeptical about crypto. Back in 2017, when I really went kind of all in on crypto, I talked to people back then where it's just as skeptical then as you are now. The people that listened to what I was telling them at that time, they're doing very well. The people that didn't listen and remain skeptical, well, they missed out on a golden opportunity.

So I do think it's really important to differentiate between Bitcoin, crypto and blockchain. Crypto is kind of the larger arena that all of that kind of fits within blockchain is the technology that underlies a lot of the crypto infrastructure. There are some coins out there, crypto projects that aren't technically blockchain. They're even using newer technology like Iota as a coin that used something called Tangle, which is trying to wrap your head around that. I don't even know if it's going to work.

But then, of course, you have Bitcoin, which is the first crypto, or a lot of people say cryptocurrency. I personally don't use the word cryptocurrency because it gives everybody, I think it's really one of the most common misconceptions about crypto is they're not all currencies. Like everybody looks at Ethereum and they says, well, you know, how are people going to be spending Ethereum as a currency? That's not really what it is. You're really investing in crypto or in Ethereum as a network and the more successful.

The network is the more valuable the coin will be. It's not about trying to replace the dollar with Ethereum. Now, when Bitcoin started, it was certainly started with the mission to be a currency. And I think this is really where that misconception comes from. I like to use digital assets. I think that's a much better term for everything in the space or crypto assets in some cases. So when it comes to Bitcoin, its original intention was written, of course, by Satoshi Nakamoto,

the anonymous founder. A lot of us think it's a combination of Hal Finney and some of these other cypherpunks, who was multiple people that created it. We haven't heard a word from him. And since I think 2010 was his last post, so we don't know where he is. But he wrote the Bitcoin white paper in late 2008. And what that said, the subtitle was Bitcoin, you know, peer-to-peer electronic currency, or electronic cash is the gist of the byline.

And so a lot of people took that to mean that this is going to be a currency. We're all going to pass back and forth. It was created in response to the 2008 bailouts, the financial, crisis because, hey, if we're responsible for ourselves, but the banks and the insurance groups and all the auto industry, they don't have to be responsible for themselves. That's not really fair. We're having to foot their bill and we don't like that. So what if we had a way that we could be in control of our own money? And that's what it started as. Well, it's a great and noble cause. I think we would all agree. We don't, we want privacy in our transactions. We don't want every single

thing we do track. I think that's something a lot of people in your audience can that resonates with them and they understand that. Crypto in a lot of ways, it works very similar to cash in a privacy aspect. Like if I want to pay you cash for something, I can go pay you cash and the government doesn't have to have their nose in that business. Of course, above a certain amount, you would have to disclose that according to IRS. But crypto kind of, you know, captures that same idea. I should be able to send a transaction without the government putting their nose that in the middle of that. But something happened in the last, you know, eight years, probably starting around maybe less than that, maybe about 2015 to 2016, the narrative of Bitcoin started changing

from, hey, this is a currency. We wanted to replace the U.S. dollar to now people see its value. It's appreciating value over time. It's the greatest appreciating asset we've ever seen in the history of mankind. Some charts will even show you. It's like an infinite rise, you know, like the crazy, for Bitcoin for a penny was what it started as, of course, as the recording here, somewhere between $45,000 and $50,000 per Bitcoin. So the narrative changed to, hey, the biggest value is holding it. So now we actually look at Bitcoin as digital gold. It is an alternative to gold. I could go over all the reasons why it's far superior to gold. I know I just did a debate with Peter Schiff that people can see some of that information on. But so it started as a currency, but now it is more

digital gold. And in terms of an actual cryptocurrency, we're seeing a lot of different options arise from that. There are several coins that try to fulfill that still like Bitcoin Cash, for instance, or Lykecoin or Dash or some of these other ones. But we're also seeing the rise what we call CBDCs, which are central bank digital currencies. These are centralized cryptocurrencies that are just another iteration of your local central bank. So that does clarify some things, but it raises about a million. more questions for me as well. It's a lot to unpack. So I'm glad to hear you say that it's not really a currency or it's not just a currency or it's not primarily a currency. Because that's

been one of my issues with Bitcoin from the very beginning as I've thought, I don't really think this is going to behave like a currency. I don't think people are investing in it as though it is a currency. I think they're looking at it more as a speculative asset. They see it as a thing that they want to put their money into it because they think the number is going to go up and then they're going to have more money. So then the question becomes, Is this just the tulip bubble in the Netherlands? Is this just a bunch of people who are pouring their money into something because the number keeps going up?

But if there's no real value underneath it and if there's no sort of longstanding human interaction with this thing that can give you confidence that it's going to have value, is it just going to collapse one day? Well, you know, and I always got to say this. Like, eventually it will collapse one day. I mean, I don't think it'll be the world currency for the rest of human civilization. You know, there will be a new technology that comes around one day. But in the short term, over the next 50 to 60 years, I would say, there's very little chance of that.

The 55 out of the top 100 banks in the world, more than half, have exposure, heavy exposure to crypto. We're seeing more added by the day. Fidelity recently just jumped into crypto in a big way. They've already been doing crypto custodianhip for a while. you're seeing more and more banks and hedge funds. We saw over this little, we call it the mini bear market where the price is dipped here for Bitcoin over the last few months or on the rise again. But BlackRock, the biggest hedge fund in the world, they tripled their Bitcoin holdings during that dip there. So there are a lot of big players.

We know Tesla bought Bitcoin, SpaceX, owns Bitcoin, Micro Strategy Act owns Bitcoin. PayPal, Grayskill. At some point when you look at when you read the tea leaves here, it all starts to add up, crypto adoption is coming and it's coming pretty quickly. So there's a lot of belief underneath crypto that pushes this forward. And of course, I do like the way you said, you know, or a, you know, longstanding, you know, human interaction. Because, I mean, you could really argue there's not much different between Bitcoin and the dollar. Actually, you know, dollar way more inflationary.

They just print it at will. I mean, a lot of people would say the world's biggest Ponzi scheme is the U.S. dollar. Yeah, I see that. And so I'm trying to make these distinctions so that I don't want to make a criticism of Bitcoin that could be equally true of gold or equally true of the dollar. How like do you point it out? Well, when you get to the dollars, the dollar is sure very inflationary. It's actually very inflationary right this minute under the Biden administration. But it's still backed by a bunch of guns that are held by the Pentagon.

And if you look at gold, gold, it's just a thing, right? It's just a pile of bars. But it can be turned into jewelry. It has been valued by human beings since basically the dawn of time. People like to look at it. It glitters all nicely. People have confidence in its value. People don't think it's ever going to go to nothing.

So my question then for Bitcoin or crypto more generally is, what am I getting? What is the value beyond, if there is one, what is the value beyond it just going up a little bit? I saw this other related technology, the NFT, the non-fundable token. which is, I suppose, and again, I obviously don't understand this very well either, but it's a way of selling some image. It's a way of selling some digital property at which I can just download right now and print out myself, but it's somehow you have ownership of it then. Yeah, like you can print the Mona Lisa, but you don't know. Exactly, right. But so for a digital technology, you know, if I were to sell the NFT, the non-fungible token on a tweet of mine, I guess then

someone would own that tweet, but everyone else gets to look at the tweet too. And I just, don't, I don't see what the added value is. So what, so what am I missing? Well, I would tell you, we're at the very beginnings of an emerging technology that, you know, when I'm really passionate about decentralization. I think that's something a lot of your audience, you know, I hate the techocracy. Yeah. I speak out against the big tech. I speak out against the censorship. The stuff that happened with, uh, what was the app that got taken down out of the app store? A parlor. I can't even remember anymore because it's been for the long as I took it out. But the stuff that happened with Parlor, that's unacceptable.

Crypto and decentralization and blockchain are really the way that we can tie together the internet. A lot of people say, well, crypto's in the days of the Wild West. No, the internet's still in the days of the Wild West. When you're going to have a seven-year-old that can pick up a phone and look at pornography, we're still in the Wild West days of the internet for sure. And blockchain actually has a lot of ways that can solve many of those underlying, rotten, decaying problems with the internet.

So we're at the beginning of this. The first time somebody trip over a gold nugget, let's say, you know, I don't know, in a cave or something, they looked down. They didn't look down at it and say, oh, you know what? One day, that's going to be using cell phones. How cool. You know, they didn't look down. They say, oh, I can melt this into jewelry. You know, how awesome.

The first people that when this, you know, when gold on a technology, but when it was emerging, you know, he said, this is the beginning, like, people didn't know what it was going to become down the road. And with crypto, this is an emerging technology. the same way you would have looked at the beginning of the internet and been like, I don't understand why my company needs a website. It's cool that people can, you know, chat on AOL Instant Messenger, but what do I do with this? That's where we're at with crypto. And a lot of these other crypto projects, like Ethereum, like Cardano,

they solve a lot of the problems that we have in society with the internet. For Bitcoin specifically, this is why I do believe that Bitcoin is more akin to gold than these other projects because it doesn't really have a working network of devi project, decentralized. finance projects like Ethereum does, but it's all developing. So what can you actually use your Bitcoin for? I mean, the same thing that you would probably use gold for to appreciate as an asset. With the development, it was something called the Lightning Network, which is a faster way to send Bitcoin transactions. There are all kinds of things coming in the future with Bitcoin

development that maybe there will be actual more functional reasons to hold a Bitcoin. I mean, right now, like you said, it is just based on the fact that, you know, I like that you said, the dollar is backed by all the guns inside of Washington, D.C. and the Pentagon and, you know, our military, well, I would tell you, looking at the banks and their movement into crypto, I would tell you that the money in the bank's coffers are far more dangerous than the guns. That, okay, this is starting to make sense to me then, because I obviously empathize with the demand for decentralization. And especially now as my dollar is basically worth nothing. And I go to the grocery store and everything, all the prices keep going up.

I think, okay, yes, I certainly want that. I don't want, whether it's the government or big tech, I don't want them having this creeping, awful surveillance state to monitor everything I do or think. So, okay, I recognize why people would want to get into Bitcoin that way. And I see the other point, which is, yeah, maybe Bitcoin itself is not doing anything for you other than going up and down. but the underlying technology of blockchain, this is going to be very important. You know, George Gilder, who was Reagan's favorite economist, actually. Ronald Reagan's most cited economist, so George Gilder has been around a very long time.

He wrote a book a few years ago called Life After Google, where he said, listen to you young whippersnappers, get into this blockchain because this is the future of the internet. This is going to be the future architecture of the entire internet. So, okay, I get that. And then this leads me to my next question. if Bitcoin, if crypto, if blockchain is posing a threat to centralization, certain monopolies on currency and assets, if it's, a lot of people are going to be turning against it. So I want to know, how is this thing going to survive the inevitable regulatory push and who are the people trying to regulate it? RBC Training Ground has discovered potential in over 20,000 Canadian athletes and counting. your story could be next.

If you've got the drive, they'll help you find your path to the Olympics. Let's see what you've got. Sign up for free at rBC training ground.ca. Yeah, so the people trying to regulate it, I mean, it's a mixture of the CFTC, the SEC, the Treasury. You know, we call her Janet no telling Yellen

because there's no telling how much she's going to print or, you know, recently more, you know, we like calling her Janet Felon Yellen. As you know, she's taking all kinds of bribes from the banks. You guys may not notice a third of her overall. worth came over the last year from Zoom calls. This is the Treasury Secretary. Treasury Secretary.

And a third of her net worth has come over the past year. She is worth $20 million right now. Over $7 million of that came in this last 365 days from speeches she gave over Zoom calls, which were paid by banks. I don't have the list right in front of me of the banks that actually paid her. City was definitely one of them, though, that paid her. So a third of your income or your net worth, not your income, your net worth came over Zoom calls from banks. You wonder who she's trying to protect.

There's a reason she's pushing against crypto. But they're all arguing over who it should be. Now, here at Bit Boy Crypto, we are pushing hard. We're actually trying to create the first crypto lobbying group. That's something we're trying to do to push to get more favorable crypto regulation and help people understand it. We've also, I went and spoke with the Texas State House of Representatives who are, we find the state representatives are great. We're going to be speaking to Alabama soon. We've got several other ones.

I go and give a presentation, talk about the beneficial elements of innovating in blockchain, the new space race between us and China is going to be over blockchain, we believe. And so trying to get that favorable innovation is something we need to push these states to do. On the federal level, they're all owned by the banks. 90% of our politicians are owned by the banks. So the fact is, it's going to be hard from that standpoint to really get favorable regulation, but you can't ban Bitcoin. have seen like China banning Bitcoin mining or, you know, we make jokes about banning Bitcoin

because we know there's no way to ban open source computer code. What they can do is they can come after the on and off ramps to exchanges. But we also know that Coinbase is a highly regulated exchange and they're part of what we call a financial cartel, which is a lot of the biggest banks, including some Hong Kong tycoons where some of the original investors in something called the digital currency group that actually owns a large portion of Coinbase. And so Coinbase is kind of the chosen by an angel cartel exchange. And so now, that doesn't mean you shouldn't use it. It's the easiest way to use crypto or to buy crypto for a person that's new, the Coinbase app. But, you know, Coinbase is not going away. The government's

not going to be able to regulate. And we saw with the infrastructure bill, they had a lot of stuff that was very negative towards crypto. And before it's, you know, it's going to leave the house again and get approved, all that stuff's going to be fixed. And actually, I think it was the, I think it was, I can't remember as the SEC. I can't remember exactly who it was said that in the current state of the bill, that they wouldn't even legislate it as it's written because it's unenforceable. So we don't know who's in charge of crypto. We're a big advocate for having an independent, not, I mean, there will be politicians on

it, I'm sure, but having a separate commission or council that is over crypto with people there that actually understand it at least a little bit. Cynthia Lummis, you know, Senator from Wyoming, she's a person that definitely understands Bitcoin, understands it. Wyoming's, you know, very pro-Crypto. She's definitely a person that, you know, she was also, you know, wrote on one of the amendments to the bill that didn't get passed but had a lot of favorable stuff for Bitcoin. So there are some politicians who do understand it in inkling.

Some understand a little more, but the vast majority of people trying to regulate crypto right now don't know what they're talking about. And we've seen this. The SEC, the CFDC, and the top. treasury, they're all arguing who is in control of crypto, which is just pushing this, you know, it's your common, you know, political nightmare. Well, this is true of most issues I've found in Washington is that the people making the rules and the laws don't have any idea what they're talking about whatsoever.

And so I'm not surprised that crypto, which genuinely is somewhat complicated, is eluding them. So speaking of who's in control of Bitcoin, you mentioned this name earlier, but I want to go a little deeper. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Oh, Satoshi Nagamoto. So this is the guy. We say the guy. Now, I got into Bitcoin first in 2012. And so first Bitcoin I bought was it was at $12. I kind of backed into it. I was not using the Silk Road like a lot of people who got in at that time. I was actually buying a software for a business that I needed. And for people who haven't followed it, the Silk Road, because there was a major legal case about this. The Silk Road was this sort of network of dubious

legality that was outside of the main internet. It was on like the secret internet. The dark web. You had to log in to all these different things to access it. And this is one of the places where Bitcoin really began to flourish. It did. So it's a little bit of a black eye on Bitcoin that one of the things that really pushed it into the spotlight was such a negative thing where people were, you know, buying nefarious, you know, but if people want to feel better about it, just know, there's a guy out there that paid 30 Bitcoin for some trumes, you know. So, you know, you. I was just a, you know, I was just By the way, I mean, people can buy drugs on the dark where I guess now they shut it down, but they could have bought drugs on the dark web with Bitcoin or they could have walked

down the street in Chicago and paid cash for it too. So, you know, this is not just a total black eye on Bitcoin. So, but we do look at it kind of like that, but it was one thing that caused, you know, Bitcoin to flourish for real. But, you know, when I first got in, I remember reading an article about this guy, Satoshi Nakamoto. And at that point, like, they were still thinking it was just some random Japanese guy, which was so funny, the education that we provide on our channel with Bitcoin,

it wasn't out there during those times. It's hard to learn about Bitcoin. So over many years, we put a lot of stuff together, and I'm of the opinion, I feel very strongly, that Satoshi Nakamoto is actually a combination of many of the, what they call a cypher punks. It was a group of people that included Julian Assange, Craig Wright, Hal Finney, Nick Zabo, many of these early kind of innovators in the world of crypto. and, you know, they created this thing called Bitcoin through something called Bitcoin Top Forum. This was where they would go back and forth. How Finney was the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction or transfer?

To why a lot of people think he was probably the one. Now, how Finney has passed away. He had a disease and died. And many of the other candidates for being Satoshi Nakamoto have also passed away, which, you know, there may be a little conspiracy there. Dave Climmon is a guy that people look into. His death was very suspicious. he's associated with Craig Wright, who claims to be, he outright claims he created Bitcoin,

but no one believes that's true. A lot of people think it's maybe because he was good friends and partners with Dave Clyman, who could have been Satoshi, and then he died of mysterious circumstances, which is why Craig Wright's out there saying, I did it because he knows the real creator can't come out and say it. But here's the important thing. Before you go on, though, I think this merits a little more discussion because I had heard this that, you know, Satoshi Nakamoto is probably multiple people, and a lot of the people who it could have been have died under very strange circumstances. I have a pal of mine who floated,

call it a conspiracy theory, floated this idea that John McAfee had something to do with the development of Bitcoin. He did seem to have a lot of money in Bitcoin at one point. He died under infamously suspect circumstances saying, they're going to kill me, they're going to kill me. And then he committed suicide, allegedly. So regardless of whether McAfee was involved or not, what does this mean? I just, I suppose what really worries me about all of this is John McAfee dies, forget about Bitcoin for a second. John McAfee dies and he says, they're going to whack me. People are going to come and kill me and say it was a suicide and then he allegedly commits suicide. Jeffrey Epstein. We all joke about it. We say Epstein didn't kill himself because no one thinks Epstein

killed himself. But we just say like, oh, ha, ha, ha, you know, the nefarious forces of this world murdered this man and they'll get away with it. And then, and then you get to, Satoshi Nakamoto and a bunch of these dudes who allegedly created this world-changing new digital asset wind up dead and there are questions of did they were they killed by state actors, were they killed by non-state actors? And we all just kind of brushed that off as, oh, well, that's what happens. You know, if you're very powerful, you'll be assassinated by some people. I mean, that we should take a moment and pause. That is a very scary prospect. Oh, it is for sure. And this happens. And, you know, it is very sad that we live in a world where we

laugh about Jeffrey Epstein and not because, I mean, we laugh because it's, it's comical to believe that he hung himself. Everyone knows. Everyone outright in the public. Everyone knows he didn't hang himself. But I will tell you a story, which is, I know a person who was a very high level, you know, a person in the military, someone who had a lot of international kills under his belt. And this is a person I said the name. People, they might not know who it is, but if they did a little research, you know, there's been stuff out about him. And, you know, he said one of his things he missed the most, one of his biggest regrets in the military and as basically a person that, you know, had a lot of

international kills, 50 to 60, I believe, he said that he was very irritated. He never got a state side killed. You have to think, you have to think of. about this. There's literally a person out there responsible for killing Jeffrey Epstein. There's literally someone out there. Hillary Clinton, by the way. So we know that. No, I'm joking. I didn't say it. I'm not allowed to say that. I didn't hear that. But regardless of, you know, let's just imagine Hillary Clinton didn't even exist and that wasn't a meme itself. Someone out there literally was responsible for the actual kill. Someone went into that cell, John McAvey, who I know personally, I met John McA, or I haven't

met him in person, but we've done several three or four interviews together. And I know people that know him very well. And I can tell you, I'm pretty sure he didn't have anything to do with the beginnings of Bitcoin, but he knew a lot. He certainly knew a lot. Someone went into that cell and murdered him. And that's a very dark proposition to believe that we, you know, we talk about the control and we talk about the censorship. There are literally people working for these people who are going and doing these kills of people are involved in this. So I do have to say that. But on the greater subject here, I will say that there's a lot of suspicious stuff around many of the people floating around the beginnings of Bitcoin for what we know.

But I still believe that the number one person responsible was Hal Finney. There's a lot of evidence of that. And he actually died of natural causes. He did have a disease and he did die. But I think it's kind of a perfect storm. I think it's a perfect storm of the best thing possible. Now, certainly I wouldn't want to wish death on anyone. But the best possible case for Satoshi Nakamoto for Bitcoin is that he has passed away.

He owns anywhere between 600,000 to 1 million Bitcoin. He would actually, when Bitcoin goes over, I think 55,000 like it was before, Stoja Nakamoto technically would be the richest man in the world by the public numbers. You know, there's people that owe more money, but that's a different story. But, you know, with, you know, him passing away, that means a couple different things. It means that Bitcoin will never move. So that's like a million out of the circulating supply. But it means there's nobody to speak for Bitcoin.

So there's no, that's been one of the most beautiful things. He's like a folk hero, Satoshi Nakamoto. He can't come out and tell you what his vision was. He can't tell you, guys, I meant this is a currency, not his goal. He can't come out and tell you like, you know what, guys, I actually don't like the way that the volunteers have been developing Bitcoin lately. There's nobody in that role. And if you look at Ethereum with Vitalik Buter, and he says stuff all the time that makes the

Ethereum miners upset or the community upset. You look at Charles Hoskinson with Cardano or Brad Garlinghouse with XRP, you know, there are certain things they say that a lot of people don't like. Bitcoin doesn't have that. So it's really been the perfect storm of allowing Bitcoin to flourish without, you know, someone having to get attacked for it. And so I don't believe like personally, look, I'm, you know, I'm all for conspiracy theories that aren't really conspiracy theories. You know, we know a lot of stuff that people towed out there as conspiracy theories are actually facts like the Jeffrey Epstein thing for sure. But when you look at Bitcoin, I actually believe in a little more wholesome. Like it was created. The creator actually died. Ultimately, you know, that's great for Bitcoin. Don't

wish death upon him, but it's great for the future of Bitcoin and that, you know, not having someone to speak for it has been extremely beneficial. That's right. It allows it to be stable, not even just in the numbers and it's, you know, the actual numbers of Bitcoin, but in the, in the narrative, the narrative is very important too. Is this one guy's weird pet project? Or is this something that really now belongs to everybody. I have so many more questions. I have so many more angles. I want to take this down. I have so many different investing tips that I want to ask. But we got to leave it there. Thank you very much. Ben Armstrong, Bitboy crypto. Go check out his channel. It's already got lots and lots of subscribers. But go add some more subscribers to that and find out more answers to

questions that I clearly am not able to answer. Though I'm better able to answer them now after talking to you. Thank you, Ben. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.