The Pomp Podcast - 351: Roger Ver on Personal Freedom and Bitcoin

Episode Date: August 1, 2020

Roger Ver is an early investor in Bitcoin and Bitcoin-related startups. He has been known as "Bitcoin Jesus" for his promotion of Bitcoin. In this conversation, we talked about Roger's background, the early days of Bitcoin, why the world needs a decentralized digital currency, what drove Roger to support Bitcoin Cash, how he has allocated his portfolio, and what it would take to change his mind. =============================== Did you know only 1% of day traders actually turn a profit? So why are so many of us mistaking picking stocks for serious investing? You can’t control the markets, but you can control your risks. So how do billionaire investors control their risk? They invest in blue-chip art. If that sounds unusual to you, you’re not alone. But the ultra-wealthy have been investing in art for centuries. And since 2000, art has outperformed the S&P by an incredible 180%. Just a few years ago, a single work sold for $450 million! Imagine...Being able to invest in the very same paintings as millionaires and billionaires, at a fraction of the cost. Masterworks.io is an exclusive platform that makes it as easy as trading stocks online. And the best part is: you don’t need to know anything about art. Their experts will create a custom portfolio to meet your investment needs. With Masterworks.io you don’t have to choose between big risks and big returns. Sign up today, select PODCAST and you can skip the 70,000 waitlist to get first dibs. Just go to www.masterworks.io and select PODCAST. Hurry, this offer expires =============================== The BTSE exchange allows you to trade confidently. They are the leader in futures, which means they are pioneering Futures 2.0. With BTSE, you can trade next-level futures: freely choose and combine your margin and settlement assets and trade with up to 100x leverage. You can also sign up for a BTSE Elite membership that gives you unbeatable discounts and bonuses across the BTSE Exchange, OTC platform, and more. Go to BTSE.com/pomp to get a 10% discount on your BTSE Elite membership. =============================== LVL is a mobile banking app that provides an integrated Bitcoin and traditional bank account experience for a flat $9 monthly fee. They have no trading commission like Coinbase and no hidden spread like Robinhood. Your cash is held in a private, FDIC-insured checking account and you can buy and sell Bitcoin as many times as you want and only pay the monthly $9 flat fee. Legendary Bitcoiners Jimmy Song and Willy Woo are already advisors and we liked it so much that we invested in the company. This is a no brainer and it will save you an incredible amount of money, so go sign up at lvl.co/pomp or use promo code "pomp". =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Roger Ver is an early investor in Bitcoin and Bitcoin-related startups. He has been known as Bitcoin Jesus for his promotion of Bitcoin from the early days. In this conversation, we talked about Roger's background, the early days of Bitcoin, why the world needs a decentralized digital currency, what drove Roger to support Bitcoin Cash, how he has allocated his portfolio, and what it would take him to change his mind. I really enjoyed this conversation with Roger, and I hope you do as well.

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opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, we should get started here as people kind of trickle in, But maybe let's just start with your background and kind of where you grew up, what you did before you'd ever heard of Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies or anything. Yeah, so I was born and raised in Silicon Valley. Didn't seem like any sort of a special place to me because I was born there. But I was around computers my whole life.

I ran one of the more popular bulletin board systems in Silicon Valley. For those of us that are old enough to remember what a BBS was, for those that are old enough to remember, before the Internet, people ran little local bulletin board systems on their computers where everybody in your local town would connect to. And you could only have one person connect at a time per phone line that the BBS had. But you had a lot more of a sense of community on these BBSs than you have on the Internet now because with the Internet, anyone can be from anywhere. Whereas on BBS, as you knew that most of the people from your own little local town. Anyhow, I was kind of coming of age right when the dotcom bubble was bursting and all these businesses were going bankrupt and they were having going out of business sales where you could buy their computer parts for pennies on the dollar. And I wanted a hard drive for my own computer. And I went to one of these auctions and they were selling nine gigabytes because the hard drives for one hundred dollars each.

And this was when eBay was just getting started. this is probably 1998 or so. And I saw that these same hard drives that were $100 each at the going out of business sale were almost $400 each on eBay. So I took all of the money that I had saved up, which is about $1,400 I'd earned mostly from changing oil at a Jiffy Lube type place as a teenager, and then bought all those hard drives. And then I resold them on eBay. And this is before PayPal. And I remember people literally had to go to the post office, get a postal money order and then ship the postal money order in the mail with a stamp not email and you'd wait for the postal money order to show up and then you'd have to go to the bank and deposit in the

bank there were none of these there was no iphone you couldn't just take a picture of the check and deposit it it was a giant headache and i started selling these computer parts all over the world because i figured out i could make a lot more money doing that than you know going to college and getting a job at some you know big company uh and so been around computers my whole life and uh started a company called Memory Dealers selling computer memory, mainly from these companies that were going out of business or updating their systems. And we were selling this memory all over the world. And a lot of people won't realize this, but right now, if anybody has a stolen credit card, one of the top things people try and do with a stolen credit card is buy cryptocurrency.

But back then, the top thing that people were trying to do with stolen credit cards was buy computer memory. And so we were selling computer memory. And every single day, we had people with stolen credit cards, trying to trick us into selling our computer memory to them with these stolen credit cards. So I understood firsthand what a giant headache it was dealing with online payments on the internet and payment fraud and chargebacks and all this nonsense. And then years later, when Bitcoin came along, I was like, wow, this solves every single online payment problem that people have. I remember when PayPal first came along, too. Actually, I was one of PayPal's biggest affiliate marketers there, getting everybody to sign up for PayPal. They were

paying you, you know, $5 a person that would sign up. And I got hundreds, if not thousands of people to sign up for PayPal there. And then for those that are old enough to remember eGold, it was the same thing. When eGold came along, I was a giant fan of eGold. And I sold my computer memory for eGold. People paid me with eGold. For those that don't know, eGold was this awesome platform that allowed you to buy and sell things on the internet, but pay in X number of dollars worth of gold. And the gold physically stayed put in different vaults, but you would just transfer the ownership of the gold around online. And that was really starting to get traction and really picking up steam until the U.S. government came in and stole all the gold. And I didn't, you know,

I was real young. I didn't have a huge amount of gold. I had a few thousand dollars worth. But that was gone. And so because some people on the platform use some of the, you know, e-gold payment services for some bad things, the government stole everybody's gold and then tossed the founder of it in jail. And so that made me realize, like, as wonderful as gold is, money is if you're having to store it in somebody else's vault and trust them with it, you're kind of at their mercy. And so I lost all my gold and so did every other gold customer. And then maybe if you jumped through a million hoops and filled out a bunch of forms for the lawyers, maybe a decade later, you might have gotten some of your money back. But I never followed up on that just

because it was too much work. It's a war of attrition there. But I've been involved in tech and payments for decades. I'm one of the older people in the cryptocurrency space. So that's a little bit about me, although we left out one of the more interesting facts maybe in my life. So I wasn't born a libertarian, but I started studying these economics books as a young man. And the more economics I studied, the more I realized, wow, government intervening in the economy is just retarding the world's rate of economic growth and preventing the world from being as prosperous and wealthy as it otherwise would have been. And it became really, really clear as I studied this. I thought, wow, if everybody realized this, they would want the

government to intervene in the economy a whole lot less so the world can be at a better place. So maybe saying I made a mistake is a little bit too strong of a word, but I took an interesting course in life, and I ran for California State Assembly as a libertarian. And my campaign platform was that I would repeal as many laws as I possibly could. I would repeal as many taxes as I possibly could. And even if I were to be elected, I said I wouldn't accept any salary whatsoever because my potential salary would come from taxpayers, and maybe those taxpayers wouldn't want to pay my salary. So I don't think that it would be legitimate for the government to force people to pay my salary if they don't want to. So I said, even if I was

elected, I wouldn't accept a salary. And then in my campaign, I got to debate the Republican and Democratic candidates. And I called the ATF and FBI a bunch of jackbooted thugs and murderers in reference to all these children that they murdered in a church in Waco, Texas. And yeah, the parents were religious nuts. But even if the parents are religious nuts, you don't burn to death all their kids in a church. And for those that aren't old enough to remember, in like 1994 or something like that, there was this church group in Waco, Texas, and the United States federal government literally burnt to death. I think it was something like 30 kids were less than 12 years old that were in the building and about 100 people total. So absolute black eye in

American history there. And anyhow, the ATF and FBI don't like it when you call them jackbooted thugs and murderers. So I wound up being the only person in the entire country to be prosecuted for selling these firecrackers on eBay. I was buying them initially from Cabela's Sporting Goods Catalog and then reselling them on eBay. So buying from one website, selling on another. I didn't know I needed any sort of permit or license.

The company I was buying them from, I asked them specifically, do I need a license to sell these? They said, no, they're legal in all 50 states for agricultural use only. So I put right there in the ads of, you know, these are for agriculture use only. Of course, everybody that was buying them knew that like,

yeah, use them for agriculture, but they also work just like a firecracker. And, you know, people like firecrackers. And this is back when eBay had a guns and ammo section. And anyhow, really long story to a shorter story, I wound up doing 10 months in federal prison for selling these firecrackers on eBay. And even while I was in prison, the company that was manufacturing them, the company I was buying them from, were still selling the exact same product with no license while I

was in prison for doing the exact same thing. So it left a really, really bad taste in my mouth for American law enforcement because I've been brought up being told, oh, in America, you have freedom of speech. You can say whatever you want, and you're allowed to do that. And it turns out maybe you have a little bit more freedom of speech in America than North Korea or other places, but not that much. And look what they're doing to Julian Assange now or Edward Snowden for telling the taxpayers what the government was doing with their tax money. It's just a crazy, crazy world. And anyhow, the day I was allowed to leave the country after my 10-month federal prison sentence, I left the United States, haven't lived in the United States ever since, renounced my U.S. citizenship back in 2014.

And yeah, that brings us, I guess, to where we are today. So let's back up for a second, right? Just so people have an understanding of timeline. You grew up in Silicon Valley. At what point did you actually run? What was the year that you ran for political seat? Yeah, so the election was November of the year 2000. Okay.

And then when were you arrested or tried on the federal charges? I forget the exact date of when everything started. My prison sentence started in 2002 and I got out in 2003 and it took some time for everything to, you know, wind through the gears of injustice there. Got it. Okay. And then in terms of that, there's a, you know, you get out of prison in 2003, obviously you've got this kind of sour taste in your mouth with the government, law enforcement, kind of everything you just articulated. uh bitcoin doesn't come around till 2008 2009 what are you doing in the five-year kind of window between getting out of prison and bitcoin never being released into the world yeah so um we should probably talk about some of the books that i read during that time that really influenced me so like one of those books was a cryptonomicron by neil stevenson

i'm sure lots of people are familiar with neil stevenson one of the best science fiction authors around and in this book basically there are all these people that are using this It's been more than a decade since I read the book, almost two decades, probably. But I think it was called Cyber Cash in the book. And basically, it was this peer-to-peer electronic cash that people were using on the internet to buy and sell things. And mainly in the book, they were using it to pay for secret data centers where people could host their data beyond the reach of governments to be able to control or censor

or shut down these websites and that sort of thing. And it was really, really interesting. And then another book was Future Imperfect by David Friedman, in which it talks all about public cryptography and how it works. And he's a physicist by training, but he's, I guess, teaches law by profession. And so the example he gave was once anonymous peer-to-peer digital cash comes around, he was talking about how people could practice law without a license on the internet and using digital signatures that you could prove that you're dealing with the same person over and over. And so he basically described something like the Silk Road,

but for lawyers to give legal advice rather than drug dealers to sell drugs. But it was just so incredibly fascinating how all this stuff is going to become possible once and all the pieces of the puzzle were in place except for the anonymous peer-to-peer electronic cash and and so i was you know basically just kind of waiting in my life for the peer-to-peer anonymous digital cash to come into existence and then when i heard about bitcoin boom there it was this thing i've been waiting for but to answer your question in the interim i've been focusing on my business so memory dealers uh grew up to you know have million multiple millions of dollars in sales every single year. We employed dozens of people around the world, had thousands of happy customers all

around the world. Everybody from NASA to the Bureau of Prisons were our customers for our parts. What were you selling? What is Memory Dealers? So initially, we were selling memory, computer memory. And then later on, we actually wound up focusing a lot more on fiber optic transceivers. And so we worked with a number of contract manufacturers, and we started selling Agilestar-branded optical transceivers. And if you go on eBay today, you'll still see a whole bunch of our used parts being sold all over the world. So it was really fun to see. That's one of the things I love the most about business is you get to meet people all over the world and you get to have friends all over the world that you deal with

over and over. So mainly we started selling optical transceivers for the rest of that time, even though the name of the company was still Memory Dealers. We still sold memory, but the main product were these optical transceivers. And so I had enough capital and money from that So when Bitcoin came along, boom, I knew this is going to change everything. So first step was to buy a bunch of Bitcoin. Next step was to start investing and helping build up all the businesses that would enable Bitcoin to be useful for people in their actual lives to buy and sell things on the internet. And everybody loves to talk about, you know, I'm going to buy a Lambo and move my sick

crypto gains. Well, I had a Lamborghini before Bitcoin. In fact, I had two before Bitcoin had ever even been invented ever. And then the one that I had once Bitcoin came along, I sold it so I could buy more Bitcoin. So I went the reverse route in that. So the way that I want to kind of do this conversation, and for those listening, Roger and I see eye to eye on a lot of problems in the world. And, you know, I think we both believe in a digital currency future. We've got definite, you know, different points of view or perspectives in some aspects of how that gets implemented.

But what I really want to talk about first is what are those problems in the world, then the early days of Bitcoin and kind of Roger's work there and kind of a lot of the insights and stories and effort that many people may not be aware of just because they weren't around, paying attention to that point. And then at the end of the conversation, we're going to get into Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, a little bit of a technical conversation, and kind of what the future looks like. So let's start with, I think, the things that 99%, we were joking before, like 99% of people watching this and listening to this are going to all shake their head, yes, yes, yes, which is the problems in the legacy finance world and kind of the non-Bitcoin or crypto world. Just talk to me a little bit about what were those issues that you had identified before you ever saw Bitcoin, and then what are the things that you knew could be fixed with a digital currency if it was implemented the correct way?

Yeah. So one example of that, that I think probably just about everybody listening to this will instinctually just feel isn't right is inflation, right? When the government prints money, it's basically stealing from everybody else that's using that money at the same time. And everybody kind of feels and knows that, but it's actually even more insidious than that. I remember as a young man, I was reading a Milton Friedman's book. I think it was Free to Choose. And in that book, he talked about a concept called bracket creep. And I wasn't familiar with that at all, but it really made me think, oh, that's why government is incentivized even more so to inflate the currency. And so everybody knows, oh, if the government prints money, they can then spend it on their military stuff or maybe schools and hospitals and roads and bridges.

They can spend it on everything. And everybody is kind of aware of that. But it's much, much sneakier than that. So in America and most countries in the world, there's an income tax. And the income tax is graduated. The more money you earn, the higher rate you're going to pay in taxes. So if you earn $100,000, you're going to pay a higher rate than somebody that's earning $50,000.

And it goes on and up, up and up. And so earning $100,000 today isn't anywhere near as much money as earning $100,000 back in the 1980s was. So what the government is incentivized to do with inflation is year after year, if you have your spending power is decreased by a couple of percentage points, before you know it, earning $100,000 isn't that big amount of money. But if you go from earning $50,000 to $100,000 over 10 years, now suddenly you're in a much, much higher tax bracket, but you're not actually earning any more money, but you're having to pay a higher percentage of what you're earning to the

government. So governments are incentivized through inflation to bump people into higher tax brackets so the governments can have a higher percentage of people's money. And I didn't even realize that that was the case until I was reading about this from Milton Friedman. And so that's something that I think a lot of people when they hear about that think, oh, that's a sneaky way to raise people's taxes, not just through the inflation, you know, undermining their buying power, but using inflation to bump people into higher tax bracket rates. So that's a really sneaky way that governments all over the world are able to take more people's money. And Bitcoin can help put a stop to that or any hard money where there's a limited supply can help put a

stop to that. If you have something with a limited supply, governments can't inflate it anymore. They can't bump you into a higher tax bracket without you actually having to be able to earn more money each year. And so there's obviously the inflation problem. I think, again, every single person listening to this will say, yes, that makes a ton of sense. There's this element of censorship or surveillance. Maybe talk a little bit about how the traditional financial system has issues that many people might not think are a big deal because they feel like, oh, if I'm not doing anything wrong, then why do I care? But obviously, we've seen in other countries, whether it's in the Hong Kong situation or elsewhere, where that centralized control and surveillance and

issues that can stem from that. So what are your thoughts there? What had you thought of and paid attention to before you saw Bitcoin? Yeah, everything seems fine until it's not. And so I saw firsthand with a lot of these, and eGold was a great example of it. They literally stole all the customers' gold because some of the people were using it for payments that the government didn't like. So everything in life is just fine until it's not. And that's why it pays to be prepared because everything's fine. I'm here in the Caribbean. Everything's fine. But if a major hurricane comes, it's not going to be fine. So I need to prepare now and have some extra food and water and things available in case there is some major disaster. And the same is true in the

different monetary systems around the world. So I was born in 1979. So within my lifetime, the U.S. dollar was worth at one point less than the Zimbabwe dollar, right? One Zimbabwe dollar used to equal more than one U.S. dollar. And now today, you know, it's a couple trillion Zimbabwe dollars probably for one U.S. dollar. And that's an example of how things overnight can change. I'm sure that the Germans in the Weimar Republic weren't expecting their currency just go to absolutely nothing. You have to carry around wheelbarrows of it. Don't think it can't happen to you. And that's why it's so important to be prepared to have something that's there and is safe. And so traditionally, that's been hard money like gold and silver. But more recently,

it's now gold, silver, and cryptocurrency because there's this other option. And all over the world, people used to use gold and silver as money. And then later, they started using banknotes for it. And then governments managed to successfully basically sever the tie between gold and silver and the banknotes. Now the banknotes, you know, aren't tied to gold or silver anymore. But now we have this wonderful thing in the form of cryptocurrency. And as long as we don't allow whatever things out there in the world to sever the cryptocurrency asset itself from whatever IOUs or whatever ways people are using it, we won't have the same problem that we had when the gold, you know, the dollar went off the gold standard or when, you know,

Roosevelt literally told everybody, private citizens, you're no longer allowed to own gold, turn in your gold, we're going to take it all. If everybody's using custodial solutions for cryptocurrency stuff, the government can do the exact same thing. So it's important to have cryptocurrencies available where people can hold and use and be in control of it themselves and not just trust it with some central custodian like they used to do with gold and then have the gold IOUs. And then before you knew it, the dollar and the gold were separated. And so you talked earlier about your experience with e-gold. And for those that didn't hear it, It was basically gold sitting in a vault.

And then rather than paper claims on the gold, similar to a gold-backed dollar, it was basically electronic claims from over-generalized description. And you could trade around those electronic claims on that gold that sat in a centralized vault. That system fell apart because there was centralized control, and the government stepped in and ultimately confiscated, arrested people, et cetera. What was your relationship, if any, with kind of traditional gold? So not the e-gold, but did you ever hold regular gold, buy gold, interested in it at all?

Yeah. My parents, actually, my mother had a purse in her closet. It was filled with a whole bunch of pre-1967 silver dollars and quarters or whatever the year was that they stopped actually being made of silver. And she had a whole bunch of those. And I thought that that was really interesting as a kid. But actually, more recently, when I first got involved in Bitcoin, I helped set up the Silicon Valley Bitcoin meetup and then the Tokyo Bitcoin meetup. And there was a real interesting guy that showed up at the Tokyo Bitcoin meetup. This is back in 2011. And I don't have one in front of me, but everybody's familiar with a penny from the US, right? Everyone knows what a penny looks like.

In Japan, there's a one-yen coin that's worth about a penny today. And it feels like it's a piece of plastic coated in aluminum or something. It feels even cheaper than a penny, if that's possible. And for the most part, they have the leave one, take one type jars around. It's a penny, so it's not much. But what this guy did, he showed up to the Bitcoin meetup, and he had a U.S. silver dollar from 19-whatever, and he had a one-yen Japanese coin from right before World War II. And today, a one-yen coin is worth one penny, and it's hard to overstate how chintzy a little tiny cheap piece of – I think it might actually be plastic inside, to be honest. It looks like it's plastic coated in aluminum foil.

It's a really cheapy little thing. But he brought a one-yen coin from right before World War II. And back then, a one-yen coin was one ounce of silver. So he had a U.S. silver dollar, which was one ounce of silver, and a one-yen coin, which was one ounce of silver. And right now, the exchange rate for dollars to yen, one U.S. dollar is around 110 yen. And so a one-ounce silver coin is around $20. A one-yen coin today, right, you didn't have to have, what, 20,000 of them there to be put? What it means is that $1 used to equal 1 yen.

And for someone who's been living in Japan for a long time, the current exchange rate is over 100 to 1, but it used to be 1 to 1. That was a real eye-opener for me. So what it means, and the U.S. government, we know, has inflated the currency a huge amount since World War II, just a huge amount. The Japanese government inflated the currency even more is what it meant. And then he also had the 1 yen paper notes, the paper bills. And he showed me this. And he explained to me that during the war, people that saved the one yen silver coins after the war, they still had some assets. The people that saved the one yen paper notes had nothing after the war. They had absolutely nothing. They were wiped out.

And so that's why it's so important to, if you're trying to store wealth, you have to store it in an actual asset, not an IOU representation of that asset. So it was a fantastic example, I think, of just how destructive governments inflating the currency can be and how destructive to the world's economy, but to individual lives of the people that are living in the world. And this is from somebody that his family had lived to that, and he had these examples. And that's why he was so interested in Bitcoin early on. And I thought that was a really powerful example. And it had a big impact on me. So I want to start talking about Bitcoin now. But before we do that, everyone who's watching on the live stream, please hit the like button, that thumbs up so that more people on

YouTube can watch this and we can kind of share this information. Roger, you were very early in Bitcoin and I think early in two different things. So one was timing, right? In terms of my understanding is about 2011 when you really kind of made a big move into Bitcoin. But two, also early in conviction, meaning that you didn't just say, oh, this is an interesting thing. Let me put $20 in and see what happens. You made a pretty substantial shift in your wealth and your portfolio, if you will, at the time. Talk first about when was the first time that you came across Bitcoin? Did you read the white paper? Did somebody tell you about it? And what was your reaction? Yeah. So like everybody, the first time I heard about it,

I didn't pay as much attention as I would have liked to. So I was listening to a libertarian radio show called Free Talk Live out of New Hampshire. And they mentioned it in reference to the Silk Road and I was eating breakfast at the time. And I just kind of, you know, Googled it real quickly. And the price of Bitcoin at that point, there wasn't really a price. So the price was like somewhere between one and 10 cents. And there wasn't an actual price. It was just kind of a range, like whatever someone's willing to pay you for it in that ballpark is what the price was. And I, you know, I only spent maybe five minutes looking. I thought, oh, this is kind of interesting, but too bad nobody's using it. And I didn't dig in deep and I didn't fully understand

how it's this decentralized system and can't be shut down or controlled. And then that was late in 2010. And then early in 2011, I heard about it again. And then I Googled it again. And that's when I figured out, I put all the pieces together. Oh, there's a limited supply. Oh, it's a distributed network. Nobody can shut it down. This is amazing. And that's when I literally got so excited about Bitcoin that I'm not exaggerating here. I'm someone who needs my full night of sleep every night. But I was planning to go to work that morning when I read about it. I didn't go to work. I stayed home all day reading about it. I stayed up all night that night reading about it into the next day until maybe 4 p.m. the next day and then went to sleep for only maybe half an hour

and woke up again and had to read more about it and stayed up all night again the next night until maybe 10 a.m. the next morning and then only went to sleep for maybe 45 minutes. And that went on for about a week of me only sleeping about an hour a night. And then after about a week of hardly sleeping at all, didn't leave my house once that entire time, only microwaved some food and just focused on reading everything I could find on the internet about Bitcoin, I got really, really, really sick from lack of sleep. And I literally had to call my friend and say, I lost my voice, too, even though I wasn't talking to anybody. I was only reading. I called and said, help me. I need you to take me to the hospital. And he was nice enough to

come and drive to my house and pick me up and drive me to the hospital. And they gave me some kind of sedative. And I passed out for, I don't know, maybe 18 hours straight or something like that. And then I woke up and it's been all Bitcoin all day, every day for the last decade. And the guy that actually drove me to the hospital that day, he now owns one of the main Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum accepting restaurants in Silicon Valley. So if you like Korean barbecue, you can head on over to Korean Spring Barbecue right there in Santa Clara. It's fantastic food, and you can pay for it in cryptocurrency as well. And you can tell me you heard the story about the time you drove me to the hospital in 2011 because I was so excited about Bitcoin. That's a great story.

And so when you're sitting and reading for that week and you're kind of diving into all of the information, what's your reaction? Why are you so excited about the information that you're consuming? Yeah, so I've always been interested in people having control over their own lives and being able to do what they want with their own money and their own career and their own jobs, their own buying and selling of things. And we've had the internet for a long time where people were able to share information for the most part unrestricted.

And there's platforms where people can buy and sell things and advertise their things. But the payments, that was always the missing piece of the puzzle, right? If PayPal closes your account, you can't use it anymore. If Bank of America closes your account, you can't use it anymore. If you get on the OFAC blacklist, you can't do anything anymore. And now suddenly we had censorship-resistant money that people could use to buy and sell things. I never bought or sold a single thing on the Silk Road.

But philosophically, it was one of the most interesting things that had ever happened in my entire lifetime. And I spent a huge amount of time reading their forums and looking at all over the website and keeping track of the different stuff that people were starting to buy and sell. And that's what kicked off the entire Bitcoin and cryptocurrency ecosystem, where people buying and selling things on the Silk Road using Bitcoins for payments. And everybody today knows that Bitcoins aren't anonymous and are very easily traceable by law enforcement. But back then, everybody thought that Bitcoin was basically anonymous. In fact, most of the time, it was even advertised as anonymous. I don't even think they were really particularly using the word pseudo-anonymous.

It wasn't until much later people realized just how public the transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain are. But back then, everybody thought that it was basically anonymous. So people were just going wild, buying and selling things on these different darknet markets. And it was just such an interesting, interesting thing to watch happen. And that's what kicked off Bitcoin and gave it its initial price. And that's what made it grow and grow and grow.

And there's such an interesting... And so my fear at that point when people were only using Bitcoin to buy and sell cocaine or marijuana or different things on these things is, well, governments don't like that. Governments can demonize that. So my goal was to get people to use Bitcoin in commerce for things that aren't illegal. And so I had a long background in e-commerce, buying and selling things. So I set up this website called BitcoinStore.com, which was the very first mainstream website selling products that people would actually be interested in. because before I was selling fiber optic transceivers, not too many people are interested. We advertise, I put up a billboard in Silicon Valley in 2011 saying, we accept Bitcoin for

fiber optic transceivers, get your X2s and Zinfax and SFP pluses from us. But nobody even knows what those are unless you're really deep in that industry. But so what I did is I got, I made contracts with Ingram Micro and TechData, which are the first and the third largest consumer electronics distributors in the entire United States. And I listed their entire line cards for sale for Bitcoin. And we only accepted Bitcoin. And this is back when the price of Bitcoin was like, you know, 12 bucks each or something like that. And so now there are more than half a million consumer electronics products that you could buy for Bitcoin. And we listed them all at our costs. So actually, our prices for the most part, most products, probably 80% of the

products, our prices were cheaper than Amazon. So that was a really big deal. So you could buy all these things more than, you know, any computer phone, any computer gadget you would want, which is what all crypto people are interested in. You can buy them for Bitcoin at prices cheaper than Amazon. And so now suddenly we were getting attention from Fox News and CNN and the Wall Street Journal and everybody because we were selling millions of dollars worth of these parts. And I was on there on social media, you know, tagging Amazon and tagging Newegg and tagging Tiger Direct saying, hey, look at all this stuff we're selling for Bitcoin. You guys are missing out on all these sales. You guys should be accepting Bitcoin too. And that's what really

helped drive off this worldwide adoption of Bitcoin being used in commerce. And once Bitcoin was used in normal commerce where you had the Microsofts and the Expedias and the Neweggs, accepting Bitcoin, it was then much, much harder for the politicians to demonize Bitcoin. Oh, that's a currency only for drug dealers and money launderers. You can say, no, that's a currency for people to book their next vacation on Expedia, or that's a currency for people to buy their new home computer system on Newegg, or Tiger Director, all these things. So it made it much, much, much harder for governments to demonize Bitcoin or try and shut it down. So everyone loves talking about censorship resistance of Bitcoin.

I think one of the things that really helps with the censorship resistance is mass adoption. The more people you have using it, the more difficult it is to censor. And there's a great quote from Mike Hearn, another early Bitcoiner. He said, even outlaws can't use an outlaw currency. And so if the currency is only used for illegal things, then you can't use it anymore. If you want to use a currency for illegal things, it has to be legal, useful for legal things as well, just like the U.S. dollar. You can use it to buy cocaine.

You can use it to buy dog food. And if it wasn't usable for legal things, nobody would be able to use the U.S. dollar to buy illegal things either. It has to be for both or it'll be for neither. So when you kind of wrapped your head around this and you're like, wow, this is really impressive. I think that there's a big, big future for this. I'm going to intentionally make a move into Bitcoin. Was your first inclination to buy a bunch of Bitcoin to set up the store you just described where you would just accept it for parts? What was the first thing that you actually did once you kind of had made the decision, okay, like this is the future and I want to go and be a part of that.

It was all of those things in parallel. But I remember one kind of additional turning point. I was talking on the phone to a friend of mine telling him, and this, I just made my first Bitcoin purchase and I was just getting excited, you know, into all this. And it was, you know, a big purchase, but I was telling him all about Bitcoin and he was not convinced. And he told me very sarcastically at the end of our, you know, maybe 45 minute long phone call where I'm telling him all about Bitcoin. He says, Roger, if you really think Bitcoin is so great, why don't you buy more of it? And, you know, he said it in a real snarky way. And when he said that to me on the phone, I told him, you're right. And so I went out the next day and I bought even more Bitcoin.

So I should thank him for doing that. But to answer your question, it was all those things, right? Buy some Bitcoin and then build all the software tools to make it useful for people to use Bitcoin in their daily lives for absolutely everything. And when we talk about buying a lot, are you thinking of it in terms of a lot of dollars, a lot of your net worth? How did you think about the risk reward? So it sounds like intellectually convinced that this is something that solves an issue that I've been paying attention to. I'm very intellectually curious about this. I'm intrigued by this type of solution. I'm kind of convinced enough that it has legs that I'm willing to put my own capital at risk. But did you have kind of it as like an

investment idea? Was it like, let me go convert all of my fiat currency into Bitcoin, you know, on day one, like, just how did you think about what risk you were willing to take at that point, given that, you know, most people would have argued, like, there was a very, very high chance, I don't know, 99% chance it was going to fail, right? And kind of wouldn't be wouldn't actually become what it has become. Yes, I put just about all of my liquid net worth at that time into Bitcoin and Bitcoin startups and just plowed every last bit of everything into that time, energy, and money that I could. In fact, the first investment I made was into a company called BitInstant, which allowed anybody at any Walgreens or 7-Eleven or Walmart to walk in with a handful

of cash. And within an hour or two, they'd have Bitcoins right there in their wallet. And so it made it really, really easy for people to buy their Bitcoins. And then they could go and do what they want. And there was this wave of merchant adoption and people that were getting more and more excited about using it for payments because anybody that had been involved in e-commerce like payments are a problem uh another interesting example of that and i still remember this to this very day it's been this is pre-bitcoin maybe this is 15 years ago but i got an email from a guy and i to this day i feel sad for the guy he emailed me and his email started out he says i am in nigeria and i know you don't believe me but i honestly want to buy some of your optical

transceivers or computer memory or i forget what parts he wanted but uh and because you know for better or worse nigeria has such a horrible online reputation like almost all the credit card fraud and stuff is coming out of nigeria so what this guy did he sent me the email and he said i'm going to pay you everything in advance by wire transfer once you receive the payment you can wait a couple more days and make sure the wire doesn't get reversed and then you can send me the parts that i'm ordering and i i and turned out his order was totally legitimate we got the wire everything was fine. We sent him the parts. And I think he ordered a couple more times after that. But I thought, what an absolute headache for that poor guy being in Nigeria. And anytime he wants to buy

anything from somebody, he literally has to send them an email saying, I'm in Nigeria, and I know you don't believe me, but here's what I want. So imagine if that guy, he's probably a giant Bitcoin cryptocurrency fan today, because now he can use it for all the payments. And he can contact these people outside Nigeria and say, hey, I want to buy something from you. I'm going to pay you in advance from cryptocurrency. My shipping address is in Nigeria, but I'm paying you in advance with cryptocurrency, so you don't have anything to worry about. And people would say, true, no problem. It's not even an issue. Whereas back then, even for a wire transfer, you're going to be skeptical because they have these elaborate other schemes that they do with tricking people

to send fake wire transfers to the wrong person and whatnot. So anyhow, cryptocurrencies just solve so many problems for online payments. And that's what started the whole thing. The Silk Road is what got this entire ecosystem started without any doubt. And so many people who are early, one, didn't have a capital base like you had, obviously. But two, when they started to buy Bitcoin or acquire Bitcoin through earning or mining or whatever their method was, and let's say that they started doing that $0.05, $0.10, $1, $5, when all of a sudden it's hitting $20, $25, if you were getting Bitcoin at $0.05 or $0.10, it looks like, wow, in US dollar terms, I just made an absolute killing financially, why not sell? Why not kind of walk away in terms of seeing the

U.S. dollar value of how many Bitcoin you had going up so much and so aggressively over the coming two, three, four, five years? Why not at some point just take the profits and go do something else? Because, well, you could go do something else, but I can't think of anything that's more interesting that I could have an impact on than cryptocurrencies and peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world. AI is probably going to be more interesting, but other than investing in AI startups, I'm not going to have much of a direct impact there. Whereas cryptocurrency and peer-to-peer cash world, not only can I have, I have had a big impact on that adoption in the world. And especially back then, I remember very clearly when Bitcoin hit $30 for the first time

in June of 2011, the user experience, it wasn't as refined, but the transactions were literally basically instant, not basically free. They were free for just about all transactions all the time. If you hadn't moved your Bitcoins more than within the last, I forget how many blocks, the transaction was completely free. It's in zero Satoshis, totally free. So the transactions were totally free, basically instant, and irreversible. That was amazing. And the supply was limited. Why would I want to sell those for a bunch of dollars that you're guaranteed the US dollar is going to go down in value over time? You're not guaranteed that cryptocurrency is to go up but you are guaranteed the dollar is going to go down and at that point it's for sure

bitcoin looked like it had this amazing amazing amazing future in front of it because the user experience was so incredibly good there's no way you're going to get me to sell any of those back into dollars that would be a that would be ridiculous and and i know i'm not a professional trader i've just been a long-term value holder i look at the things that are going to be the most useful to the most number of people around the world i'm going to hold that for the long term because the long-term price trend of those things are going to be up uh the things that aren't useful to people, well, maybe I'll sell those. Okay. And so at some point, you go from what I'll consider just one person who's buying Bitcoin, investing in companies, to you end up

getting the title of Bitcoin Jesus, right? And that was, I think, a combination of the work that you had done in investing in companies, kind of the amount of time and energy you had spent going and telling people about Bitcoin and trying to convince them that this was the future. Tell us the story of like, what was the first time you ever heard that as a description for yourself or a name for yourself? Kind of what was your reaction when somebody started to call you Bitcoin Jesus? Yeah, two questions. So the first time I heard about it or heard someone refer to me, I think I was at like

a, there was another startup that I invested in, a cryptocurrency startup. And there was like a barbecue with like the founders and some of the other investors. And it was this, you know, beautiful lake house up in Washington state and a bunch of high school kids from the neighboring house had come over and they were, you know, maybe 15, 20 high school kids or something. And I was telling all these kids about Bitcoin and setting up wallets for them and giving them all some, some Bitcoin on their wallets. And they were all really excited because, you know, young people, digital currency.

Yeah, this makes sense. Why would I, why would I use, you know, anything other than, you know, online stuff? And so they were all really excited about it. And I was telling him about, you know, you can use BitInstant to go out and buy more, you know, Bitcoin at the 7-Eleven tomorrow. And all these kids were saying, yeah, I'm going to go out and buy more. This is great. Like, you know, these kids maybe were too young to open a bank account or get a credit card. So this was finally a payment method they can use.

And then one of the other adults kind of walked up and, you know, I was surrounded by all these kids and setting them up on their phones and sending them some Bitcoin. One of the adults said, Roger, it's like you're a Bitcoin Jesus and you have all your disciples around you because all these kids were there, you know, real excited about it too. and uh i guess somehow along the way it just kind of more and more people started calling me that but i never called myself that i didn't choose that name for myself uh i'm an atheist and if you look at what happened to the original jesus uh he was murdered by the government of his day so things didn't turn out too well for the original jesus i hope not to meet the the same fate there uh but uh it was basically impossible from you know 2011 until and still to this day for the most part, it's mostly impossible unless I'm in a real public setting that's not crypto I

want to be left on. But for sure, up until probably 2015 or 16, it was impossible to meet me and not hear about Bitcoin. And if you would allow me, I would set you up with a wallet and send you some. It was impossible to meet me through that point. And it wasn't until the fees on Bitcoin started to become a problem and the blocks became full that it was a little bit harder for me to start to continue giving Bitcoin to anybody I met. But maybe that'll be part two of our conversation. Yeah. What was the thing that drove you to do that? Because I think that that is, it takes a certain type of personality. It takes a certain type of life experience and a certain type of person to not only say, hey, this is something that I personally am interested

in and want to do, but I'm actually going to go and every person I meet, I'm going to tell them about it. I'm going to give them a wallet. I'm going to send them some Bitcoin. What drove you to do that? Or why do you think you had the inclination to do that versus the hundreds or thousands of other people who were into Bitcoin at the time, but they weren't doing it? I think it was every single thing that I was interested in life is pushed forward by people adopting Bitcoin or cryptocurrency now in actual day-to-day life in commerce. And so those things, if I had to name off some of them, it's like I'm incredibly interested in the singularity, right? When computers exceed human intelligence, wow, what an exciting, exciting world we're going to be in there. And so one of the ways to speed up the advent of superhuman intelligences is through more economic growth. The faster the economy grows, the more resources there are to devote to this sort of thing, the faster we're going to get there. And cryptocurrency helps enable that because it enables more economic freedom. More economic freedom leads to more economic growth. More economic growth leads to a faster advent of superhuman intelligences.

the same thing with life extension technologies right i don't want to die if you die that's the most boring thing that can possibly happen to you right because if you're dead you can't have interesting conversations like this or do anything at all about anything so i want anybody who wants to be able to to be able to live forever the best way to do that is through more economic growth so you can have more research scientists and more you know capital be devoted to figuring out a way for people to be able to live forever so you can enjoy wonderful times with your friends and family and people on the internet interesting conversations for as long as you want to at any point if you decide your board of life it's easy to end it if that's what you want to do right so like that's

another thing that i want people to be able to do to be able to live forever if they want to so superhuman intelligence you know uh living forever uh and then just more economic freedom lifts everybody out of poverty you look around the world like i'm i'm having this absolutely amazing life right i can go anywhere i want do whatever i want you know eat whatever i want live wherever i want i'm fortunate i'm incredibly fortunate to do that right but there's other people that are having really, really hard times in life, right? There's people, I was lucky enough to have been born in Silicon Valley. What if I had been born in some other part of the world, right? It would have been much more difficult. And other people think, oh, what if you were born in some other part of

the US? No, I'm talking about what if you were born in some, you know, poverty-stricken third world country? I would have had a really, really, really hard time. Well, the best thing we can do for these countries around the world or these places around the world that are poverty-stricken is bring them more economic freedom. If you look at the different countries around the world, The ones with the lowest standard of living are the ones with the least amount of economic freedom. And because they have less economic freedom, they have less economic growth. So it's so clear for those that are old enough to remember, you can look at East and West Germany, right? In West Germany, they had a whole lot more economic freedom, and they were producing Porsches and Mercedes and BMWs, and people had a very high standard of living.

In East Germany, you had way less economic freedom. the government controlled everything and about the only thing they were able to produce in East Germany was a great big giant wall to prevent people from being able to escape because things were so horrible there. Or today, you can look at North Korea and South Korea. South Korea is wonderful. They have a lot of economic freedom there compared to North Korea, where they have hardly any economic freedom. It's clear which one of those two Koreas you would rather live in. And so anywhere around the world, you look at the places, the places with the most economic freedom have the most economic growth and the most economic growth leads to the highest standard

of living. So if we want to help people all over the world, it's by bringing the tools that enable more economic freedom around the world. And so the Singapore's and the Hong Kong's until recently have been fantastic beacons around the world of those sorts of things. So let's bring more economic freedom to the places around the world that don't have it. And I don't think the most effective way to do that is to beg politicians, oh, can you please lower tariffs and lower taxes and lower restrictions on business? I think the best way to do that is to build the censorship resistant tools that enable people to engage in commerce, to buy and sell whatever it is that they want so long as it's peaceful with anybody else anywhere in the world and not

need permission from the bureaucrats, not need permission from the politicians, have the ability to either say no directly or just have it be completely hidden from the politicians and the regulators and the bureaucrats that maybe they raised some chickens and they sold them to their neighbor or they made something on the internet or designed a website and sent or received a payment for it. Like, let's build the tools that enable people to engage in free trade around the world and not need permission from these politicians around the world. That's how we make the world a better place for everybody.

And if we can make the world a better place for everybody else out there, that makes the world a better place for me, too, because this is the same world that I'm living in. So Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, that's the best thing that I could possibly do to make the lives of everybody in the entire planet better and mine all at the same time. So I'm as motivated as I possibly could be to bring peer-to-peer electronic cash that censorship resistant where anybody can buy and sell whatever they want for the entire world and that's why here i am i've been in space almost 10 years full time and uh i'm still excited about it every single day i've been working on this for almost a decade now and i think i'm gonna continue

going for another decade here as well uh what could possibly be more exciting about this so that that's my rant as to why i'm so excited about this but uh i hope the rest of you that are listening to this like this is the most exciting technology that we have available to make the world a better place for everybody. And it's here right now, today. Don't waste any more time, right? We're all getting older day by day. Let's hurry up and bring this to the world.

Before we start talking about kind of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash and the differences there, my last question about the early days of Bitcoin is how would you describe the Bitcoin community, right? It was obviously small. There was kind of loose coordination and, you know, some conferences and things like that. But like, how would you having seen from 2011 to maybe 2015, 16, like, how did that evolve over time? And how would you talk about that that community that was being built around this asset?

Yeah, in the early days, it was really, really, really a wonderful, wonderful community. I remember just being so excited to just wake up every day and say, and look online and see what new cool things that people build for people to be able to use Bitcoin for. And metaphorically speaking, it just felt like everybody was holding hands and saying kumbaya all day every day about Bitcoin because all of us were on this team of bringing peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world that was going to enable more economic freedom for the world and tear down government barriers to people engaging in trade and making the world a better place. That's the thing that I think a lot of people in cryptocurrency will already appreciate, but a lot of people don't understand. Anytime anybody buys or sells anything with anybody, both people are better off after the trade. When you buy a new TV, it's because the person that sold you the TV values the money you gave them more than they value the TV, and it's because you value the TV more than the money you gave them. So after the trade, both people have something that they value more than before the trade. Otherwise, the trade wouldn't have taken place. so the more trade we can enable in the world the better off everybody's going to be so we need to

build the tools cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency tools to enable people to be able to trade with each other because that's how you make everybody better off all over the world and i bought some you know fantastic little nuts earlier today i value the nuts more than i value the money i paid for them the person that sold me the nuts values the money more than the nuts both of us are now wealthier after i you know bought these nuts from them so we need to build the tools where people can do this without needing permission from anybody anywhere. And that's been the goal for me. And that was absolutely, without any doubt, the goal of the early Bitcoin community was building the tools for people to be able to buy and sell anything with anyone anywhere in the world and

not need permission. And the payments were supposed to be fast, cheap, and reliable. And that's what it was all the way up until maybe 2015-ish that really started to change. All right. So we're going to have a conversation about Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. I want to kind of put a couple of caveats for those that are listening. Roger and I, again, 99.9% of what we just talked about, we agree on in terms of the problems in the solution. It's not just a kind of a inflation type thing. There's multiple impact that can happen from this becoming globally adopted. What I don't want to have is people to think that Roger and I are here to argue over all kinds of different things. I think that Roger and I have a view of the world where the question is, how do we get there? It's kind of like we agree on all the problems. And I think we agree actually on like the finish line, if you will, or the goal that everyone is working towards. The difference of opinion is what is the path to pursue? And I think Roger would agree with this. And I'll give you a chance here to agree or disagree in a second.

But I'm of the belief that like experimentation and innovation and all of these things should be encouraged, even when you disagree with the way that somebody is going to do something. Right. And there's plenty of people who may not like that. But I generally think that there's ideas that come from those you agree with and those that you don't agree with. And so understanding both the way that you think and also the way that other people think is really important. So that's kind of the goal here is to talk through it. Now, with that said, as we can see in the live chat through Twitter previously, there's tons of people who have tons of opinions here. And so we're going to try to do our best to navigate this in kind of the most intelligent way and stay out of what I'll call all of the troll type content. Although, yes, you guys make us all laugh. Roger and I were joking about it before we started.

You know, the memes, the jokes like we get it, but we are going to try to kind of keep this as high value of a conversation as possible. So with that all said, Roger, talk to us about you go from 2011 to, you know, 15, 16 into 17. And you are one of, if not the most recognized supporters of Bitcoin. And at some point, you start to change your mind in terms of, is Bitcoin the solution that can solve these problems? when did that start and kind of where did you start to diverge in terms of wait a second this may not be going the way that i think it should go or this may not be the actual solution that we need yeah there were a couple of steps in that process but i remember one of the the bigger epiphanies i guess in that process there was uh i was hosting a bitcoin meetup in Silicon Valley was at the Korean barbecue restaurant there again. And probably about 100 people showed up that night. There were a bunch of people there. And everybody was paying.

And this is before Bitcoin Cash, or I think this might even have been before Ethereum existed as well. This is pretty early days. Everybody was there. It was exciting. They were paying with their blockchain.info wallet, I think was the main mobile wallet back then that everybody was using. Anyhow, they were paying for their meal in Bitcoin. The owner of the store was super happy to be accepting Bitcoin for all the payments. It was a really fun time. And so like 100 people showed up there. And of the 100 people that were there, 97 were in favor of, hey, yeah, this is great. I'm going to pay for my meal on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is going to be money for the world. Everyone pretty soon is going to be using Bitcoin to buy and sell and pay for everything

with everybody. But there were three Bitcoin core developers that showed up there that evening. And it was Luke Jr., Eric Lombroso, and Brian Bishop were their names. And they literally spent the entire evening there arguing with the other 97 people. There were only three of them that had that opinion that evening, and there were about 100 people there. They spent the entire evening telling people that they should not be using Bitcoin to pay for their dinner. They should be using credit cards. And they spent the entire evening there arguing with people that Bitcoin is not good for payments, and people shouldn't be using Bitcoin to pay for things. People should be using credit cards. I remember another early Bitcoin guy who loves his privacy, so I won't

to tell his name, but he'll know who he is when he hears this. He asked him, he was like, what if I'm someone living in Venezuela and I need to pay somebody or I need to pay for something in Venezuela and there's sanctions, so I can't do whatever. And he's like, well, you should use a credit card. And then he said, well, what if my credit card's blocked? And then I think it was Luke Jr., one of those three guys said like, well, you should have a backup credit card. And it just seems so bizarre to me that these guys came to a Bitcoin meetup and spent the entire evening arguing with people that they shouldn't have used Bitcoin to pay for their meal. And they shouldn't be using Bitcoin for payments. They should be using credit cards instead. And that was kind of where, like, I thought, wow, there's a new group of people in Bitcoin that don't think Bitcoin should be used as money and aren't interested in Bitcoin being usable to buy or sell things. And they want people to use credit cards instead.

So hold on a second. I want to go slow here just so we can kind of really get into the details. I wasn't there, right? Obviously, you're recounting an experience that I wasn't there for. Why do you think that was their opinion? Or why were they talking about that? And obviously, you're not them, right? So there's gonna be some speculation. But what do you think was driving that conversation or that point of view? Yeah, so there's a great clip, I think, that's on YouTube. People can search like Roger Ver, Luke Jr., Bitcoin opinions or something like that. And so, you know, there's this girl in Japan who asked me, why are you interested in Bitcoin? And I said, because this is like one of the most amazing technologies ever. Like we summed up in the first, you know, half hour of our chat here. And then she asked Luke Jr. the exact same question.

Why are you interested in Bitcoin? And this is what Luke Jr. is one of the guys that was there telling people you should use credit cards, not Bitcoin. and he pauses for it's a really long awkward pause maybe you know 20 full seconds and it's a long pause and then finally the answer he comes up with is that it's interesting technology and like yeah okay bitcoins and blockchains it's interesting technology but the reason it's interesting technology is because it enables more economic freedom for the entire world which enables more economic growth which enables all the wonderful things that people want to have in the world and

luke just thinks it's interesting technology and luke was somebody who literally believed in Bitcoin so little that he hardly held on to any at all. He had to have a fundraiser recently to pay for a DSL line for his house, whereas anybody I believed in it so much, I put almost all of my liquid net worth, I put right into Bitcoin. And I think that that's another kind of interesting thing out there is that so many of the people that before Bitcoin had split were in favor of not using Bitcoin for payments and just using credit cards for everything. they hardly held any bitcoin at all there was a really interesting voting website where people could sign with their bitcoins at an address and vote on different topics and like it was like 97

percent or 98 percent of the bitcoins that voted it was a huge amount of bitcoins hundreds of thousands of bitcoins it was lots of bitcoins hundreds of thousands of bitcoins had voted and they were almost all in favor of you know bitcoin being able to scale on chain uh for it to become money for the world and yet that's not what wound up happening eventually so okay okay so we have the kind of the the first you know incident i guess where um you hear people talking about not using bitcoin as cash and kind of having a different perspective where how do we get from that to eventually um having a fork and um the more detail and kind of you know timeline based you can go so people understand. Because frankly, whether people remember this or not, there wasn't

that many people that are in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency today. They weren't around that. So they kind of didn't get to live through this like you did. And so maybe walk us through, you leave that dinner, what are the next events that transpire that kind of continue to push you further and further into, wait a second, this may not be the solution that you wanted? Yeah. So there was another kind of turning point as well that I remember. So there's this thing that Bitcoin has that Bitcoin Cash doesn't have. It's called replace by fee or RBF for short. And that's new to Bitcoin. I think that was probably implemented in 2015 or so. And what that does is it made it all the time in the early days that once I sent you Bitcoin, that's the end of the transaction. There's no way for me to get that Bitcoin back. Once I broadcast the network, the network rule was called first seen, first safe, which meant the transaction that the network sees first, that's the one that's going in the block.

And even if it sees a different transaction later with a much higher fee, it ignores that one because it didn't see it first. And so Peter Todd and a number of other core developers really pushed to have this thing called replaced by fee implemented, which made it so that if I send you some Bitcoin and let's say I pay a one cent fee, I can then any point up until when the transaction is included in the next block, I can then instead of that Bitcoin going to you, I can send it back to me or send it to some other person to do whatever with it and pay a two cent fee or a $2 fee or whatever fee that's more than the amount that I sent it to you initially with, which makes Bitcoin much, much, much lower. less useful for people to buy and sell things and much less useful in e-commerce. Hold on. Before we get into kind of the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, come back to as you are kind of becoming convinced that, hey, there might have to be something else. Were there other moments that you remember that kind of drove you to think that? Or was this kind of you have that one initial dinner and then, you know, over time, you just slowly become convinced that there needs to be another solution? No, this is one of the moments. So because

when this RBF was happening, there was no Bitcoin cash. Ethereum wasn't, I don't know if it even launched yet or not, right? And so there was a big argument within the Bitcoin community, though. People were arguing like, hey, please don't do this. This makes Bitcoin less useful for commerce. So Eric Voorhees wrote a fantastic essay, like an open letter to Peter Todd asking him, I know you're a really smart guy. You're a good cryptographer and brilliant mind, I think is the word that Eric used. He said, but please understand that this severely damages the use case. So Eric had started a website called, or bought a website called Satoshi Dice. In like 2012, it got integrated into the blockchain.info wallet. And if you can look on the blockchain

history, that's when Bitcoin transactions really went through the roof because everybody was busy playing Satoshi Dice because you would send in your $100. If you won, you would get back $200 bucks instantly worth of Bitcoin. And it was just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, on-chain instantly just like that. It was a really magical experience where people all over the world were busy playing this. And RBF not only ruined that, but it ruined businesses like BitPay trying to accept payments and all sorts of businesses all over the world. It made it much more difficult to accept Bitcoin for payment. So myself and Eric and a whole bunch of other people were saying, hey, we need to be really, really careful about doing anything that makes Bitcoin less useful in commerce,

Because the entire goal at that point for at least myself and a big majority of the Bitcoin community was get as many people using Bitcoin in commerce as quickly as we possibly could so the regulators wouldn't have time to realize, oh, wait, the dollar might lose its, you know, world reserve currency status. Everybody might start using, you know, free market money rather than our, you know, pieces of paper that we can print as many as we want at for any time. And so by integrating that, lots of people were upset within the Bitcoin community, but there was still just one Bitcoin and things were still moving ahead. and then the other big turning point to answer your question there that really made me worry about the future of bitcoin was the fees were getting higher and higher like you know at first the fees were zero and then the fees started being a penny and then two pennies and then you know a nickel and then a dime and then you know 20 cents and they were creeping higher and higher and there was some sort of an interview or some online comment somewhere and i figured exactly

where it was but it really made me think oh my god this is a big problem and i think it was adam back when I realized that he wanted the fees to be high. And they were excited for the fees to be high. And that's when I realized, oh, my God, if they intentionally make the fees on Bitcoin high, nobody's going to use it. Because anybody that studies economics, you'll know that when something costs more, people use less of it. If your electricity costs more per kilowatt hour, you're going to use less electricity than if it costs less. If Bitcoin transactions are more expensive to make, people are going to make fewer Bitcoin transactions. And that was the real big turning point. When you say that you thought that they wanted to make the fees high,

why exactly did you think that? They started openly saying it. Maybe this is news to you. Maybe you didn't realize it, but you can actually see quotes from people like Adam Back, the founder of Blockstream, where he says he can't wait for the fees to get up to $100 per Bitcoin transaction, or hopefully they can even get up to $1,000 someday. And then Greg Maxwell, one of the founders of Blockstream and the CTO there. There's an email from the mailing list there where he's talking about, you know, hooray, pop the champagne. The Bitcoin fees are over $50 a transaction. This is, you know, this is a great fit step for Bitcoin. I'm summarizing a little bit, but he literally said, you know, pop the champagne. This is such a big success for Bitcoin and for people like myself

that have been accepting payments from people all over the world in Bitcoin. And then more times than I can count, I had to pay more, you know, thousands of dollars in fees for a single Bitcoin transaction. Then you'll see all some of these people that disagree with me. They say, oh, Roger's lying about that. I'm not lying. You can see the transactions. There's like hundreds of thousands of transactions in which people paid more than $50. I didn't have the data in front of me, but I think it may even been, I think there were like more than 30,000 transactions in which people had to pay more than $1,000 in fees to send a single Bitcoin transaction. And I remember one of the convoluted arguments. Roger, let's back up for a second.

Again, I don't know what quotes those are, right? So I can't kind of agree or disagree on it. So we'll just leave that as it is. Let's maybe for people to understand, when you're talking about fees and transactions and all this stuff, walk people through the design of Bitcoin and where you think that the design is flawed, right? So I think this is one of the key pieces that eventually led to Bitcoin Cash

and some technical changes that happened. But in terms of how Bitcoin works, when you're talking about the high fees, where did the high fees come from? So the high fees came from having an artificially imposed limit on the amount of block space that the miners are allowed to produce on the Bitcoin blockchain. So the blocks on Bitcoin are limited to about one megabyte. There's a little bit extra because of Segwit. So in the ballpark of one megabyte, 1.2 megabytes. And so inside that one megabyte, you can fit about 2,500 transactions every 10 minutes. If more than 2,500 people want to make a transaction every 10 minutes on Bitcoin, only the 2,500 people that pay the most money in fees will be the transactions that are included in the block.

So everybody has to bid against everybody else. So if there's 5,000 people that want to make a transaction, only the top 2,500 that paid the most will be included in the next block. And then the other 2,500 will have to wait until a future block. And there's this thing called the MIM pool, which is basically the queue of transactions that are waiting to be included in the next block. And only the top 2,500 transactions approximately are included in each block. So at the end of 2017, when everybody was trying to use Bitcoin and people were trying to move it in and out of the exchanges and things were really busy on the Bitcoin network, the average fee for the transaction got to be over $50 for a single transaction. And the average confirmation time to be included in a block wound up being more than two weeks, right?

So that's an absolute disaster for anybody that's trying to use Bitcoin for payments, $50 on average per transaction and more than two weeks on average for a confirmation time. And remember, in that two-week period, you could potentially reverse the payment using this replace-by-fee stuff that had been added into Bitcoin as well. It was an absolute disaster. So you just described Bitcoin's design. At some point, you and a bunch of other people decide, hey, we can create a technical version that is similar, but different that we think has advantages to it. Walk us through what, forget how it's designed for a second. How did that come about? Right? Is that you make a phone call to somebody and then all of a sudden people start calling each other and say, hey, this is a good idea. Does somebody call you? Just walk me through kind of operationally, how does the idea come together to fork Bitcoin and create something else? It's actually the reverse of that.

So the plan from Bitcoin from its inception all the way up until later was that the blocks would just get as big as they needed to be in order to accommodate the transaction. So it was people like the Bitcoin core developers and the Blockstream guys and those guys, they're the ones who got together and said, hey, I have an idea on how we can make Bitcoin better than what it was originally. And the ideas they came up with to make it better was this replace by fee thing that I told you about. And by limiting the block size, they thought that by limiting the amount of transactions that the Bitcoin network could handle, that would make Bitcoin better. And people like myself and everybody else disagreed, and we wanted to go on the original path for Bitcoin, which was to allow as many transactions on-chain as possible. Okay, so part of this, and I think why I wanted to do this is I think you and I both have the ability to state our opinion and then also flip around the table and say, hey, the people who disagree with me believe X because of Y, right? The people who wanted to limit the block size, what is their argument as to why that is a good thing to do, right? And so I understand that you disagree with it, but what is it their argument in terms

of why they believe that to be a good thing? Sure. So their argument as to why they think that's a good thing is because if you allow the blocks to get bigger and bigger, it will require a more expensive computer to run a full node where you have the entire blockchain there. And if you keep the block small, you'll be able to run a full node on a much smaller, cheaper computer, potentially on a home internet connection or even a Raspberry Pi. And so in their view of the world, that's a really, really good thing because more people

all around the world will be able to run full nodes. And if you have more full nodes around the world, it'll be harder for governments to shut down all of those full nodes. I agree with that, but I think that they didn't, if I can give the other side of the point of view there, the other side of that is if you get everybody around the world using Bitcoin for commerce, you'll have, you know, companies like Walmart and Amazon and Tiger Direct and everybody else that's using it. You'll have all sorts of businesses that have an economic need to run a full node.

And I don't, and even today, almost nobody's running a full node. There's maybe a couple of tens of thousands of full nodes in the world, if that, on the Bitcoin network, and there's tens of millions of users. So it's a very small percent are using them. And so my point of view is if you want to give Bitcoin more censorship resistance, you need to get as many people around the world using Bitcoin in commerce, in their daily lives as possible. Whereas the other side of the view here is that we need as many people on the network running full nodes as possible, but we don't care about what the total number of people using the network as a whole is. Okay. Those are the kind of the two worldviews on each side there. For the purpose of this conversation, I'm going to generalize those two arguments as security and convenience, right? And I know that those aren't necessarily dead on descriptions, but basically one is the decentralization of the network based on the full nodes ends up being a security related argument that says, hey, decentralization is really, really important. The other argument is that you can have the convenience, so fast.

If I can add a little bit, I think the other side of the argument is that actually by having more people use it in commerce, that adds additional security. So I think that they're both security arguments. The small block is a security argument, but the big block side is also a security argument that you get more security by more adoption. Okay, so fair in terms of you're getting security from two different areas, right? One is more of a deterrent, and one is the computer science type security. So now let's talk in terms of when the small block, big block debate goes on, obviously very, very contentious, literally to the point where, you know, I call it the multifaceted intellectual war played out. There was everything from the memes on the Internet to like some very ugly debates, both publicly and privately. And ultimately it came down to the market trying to decide what to do. Right.

And so maybe describe kind of how, quote unquote, the market, how that process works, and then ultimately the beginning of Bitcoin Cash and kind of how that played out or became into reality. Yeah, so the online discussion about Bitcoin scaling started brewing, maybe it started to heat up in 2015, I would say. And then by 2016 and 2017, it was starting to really get heated. And for the most part, I was just watching. And so like in my heart and with my economics background, like I know when you have a production quota, which is what I view the block size limit is, it's just not externally imposed production quota that leads to inefficient outcomes there. So but I was, for the most part, keeping quiet and just watching because I thought maybe there's some really good other argument as to why the block should be kept small. And I wanted to see and understand that and then evaluate both sides and then decide. So I was pretty much silent in regards to the debate.

And then what actually made me decide to start speaking up was when I watched the small block side of the debate openly start to censor and delete the posts and try and silence the people that were on the big block side of the debate. And when I saw there are two camps, one side is supporting free and open discussion. The other side is doing everything they can to silence the other side's opinions from being heard. Well, that was everything I needed to know about which side has a stronger argument. And that's when I decided to start speaking up myself. Okay. So I've heard you say this before. Explain where you saw that happening. And again, there's a lot of people who are listening to this who just, they weren't around then, right? So they don't know kind of how the debate was playing out. I can say it's all, I'm blue in the face that like, it was heated and controversial and played out in every nook and cranny on the internet, behind closed doors, like, it was a real deal. But kind of what were the things that you were seeing that led you to say, hey, wait, there's, your belief was that there was censorship going on? Yeah, so now there's a lot of different platforms. You have crypto Twitter, and there's a bunch of different subreddits, and there's more stuff in the ecosystem now than there used to be. But back then, there was rBitcoin on Reddit, and that had more traffic for people learning about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency than probably every single other website in the world combined. That's how big of a deal rBitcoin was. And then the second place thing was this other website called bitcointalk.org.

And so both of those definitely had more people, new people coming to crypto and learning about it than every single other website, every Coindesk and Cointelegraph. And there wasn't any bitcoin.com, I don't think, quite yet at this point. There was more of that, people learning on those websites than everywhere else combined. And then all of a sudden what happened overnight, the main moderator of our Bitcoin was this guy named Thamos that we don't really, we're not really sure what his real name is. there were a bunch of moderators that people knew so there was like a you know one example this is jason king who had been running like a homeless outreach thing called sean's outpost down in

florida and people were donating bitcoins to him and he was using the bitcoins to buy food and you know clothes and helping homeless people in florida it was fantastic he was one of the moderators and he's an early early bitcoiner since maybe you know 2011 or something as well and everybody knew and liked him and everybody knew and liked the other moderators there and there was a people disagreed but that's part of the fun part about internet forums people can type back and forth and state their opinions. And then all of a sudden, overnight, Famos removed all the moderators that people knew and liked and respected and put in a bunch of new moderators that nobody knew who they were. They were all using fake names. Nobody knows who these

before. And then anybody that even tried to post any sort of opinion in favor of Bitcoin being able to scale on chain, they would have their post deleted and their account banned from being able to post there. And they did the same thing on bitcointalk.org. So you had the two biggest websites that had more people learning about Bitcoin and discussing this than every other website combined, suddenly silencing anybody from being able to state an opinion that wasn't in lockstep with this guy, Thamos, in the small block position, which was clearly at that time the minority position. And then right after the censorship started there, the new moderation policy or whatever

they tried to disguise it as, one of the posts there was like, hey, we need to bring back free speech and we need to allow the discussion. It was the most upvoted post ever. And they called for Thamos to step down as the moderator. It had more upvotes, I think, than any other post ever to this very day on our Bitcoin. And everybody was saying, yeah, we want free speech. And then what did they do? They deleted that post as well and censored that one as well.

So it was just a really just shocking thing for me where Bitcoin was supposed to be censorship resistant money for the world. And now suddenly the Bitcoin community is engaging in massive censorship within about even talking about Bitcoin. It was absolutely heartbreaking for me to see that happen. And so again, I wasn't there, right? I can't confirm or deny, as in most things that are controversial, there's your side, and then there's people who would yell and scream and say all kinds of other stuff. But I think it's important for people to hear your perspective as to what happened

in that situation. And so coming out of that, you and a number of other people decide, okay, there's going to be limited block size moving forward. Talk a little bit about how that process process ends up determining, you know, cause there's kind of like the internet debate and then there's ultimately people have to make a decision. Are there going to be big blocks or small blocks? And like, how does that happen? Right. Some people may think that like you go to a place and actually vote with a piece of paper. Obviously that's not how this works. So describe the process of how that decision kind of gets cemented and then what the ramifications of that were. Yeah. So there was lots of negotiating between the big block and small block camp,

so to speak and so like uh initially and i i forget what bit number it was now but like there was a plan to like double the block size every 18 months or something all the way up to i think it was two or eight gigabyte blocks in the future and then like the small blockers no no that's way too big and so then like there was some other you know plan with the lower cap closer in the future and then like the one of the first like major major proposals that actually started to get some traction was to just uh i think a one-time increase to 20 megabytes but the small blocker said, no, that's way too big. And then the next compromise was, okay, we'll do eight megabytes. And then they said, no, no, that's too big. And then the next compromise was, okay, we'll go

two, four, eight megabytes over the next like five years or something like that. And they said, no, no, no, that's too big. And then the final compromise was, okay, we'll go to two megabytes. And then even the two megabyte compromise, there's this thing called the SegWit 2X agreement or New York agreement where there's supposed to be segregated witness and two megabyte block size and for whatever reason and i wasn't there in person when the agreement was made i think that everybody should have agreed to do both at the same time but for whatever reason they agreed that segwit would happen first and then the two megabytes would happen second like a couple months later and so what happened everybody agreed to that you had 90 plus percent

of the you know hash rate all the businesses signed off um the segwit part happened smooth everything was fine and then the two megabyte as soon as the segwit happened there was this giant uproar from a bunch of people on the internet saying don't do two megabytes you know you had people posting photos of them holding axes with bandanas around their faces and just all this crazy meme wars on the internet. And then eventually, the meme wars were so wild and crazy that the two megabyte part didn't happen. And so at some point before that, though, and I had nothing to do with this, and there's plenty of lies about me on the internet, but probably the biggest lie is that I created Bitcoin Cash. The truth of the matter is I had absolutely nothing

to do with the creation of Bitcoin Cash. I hardly even knew that it had been created at all, to be honest. I had zero to do with the creation. And I don't even think I was aware when the Genesis block of the Bitcoin Cash split had happened. I think I found out maybe a couple of weeks later, and I was kind of keeping an eye on it on the side. And then it wasn't until the two megabyte part failed with the Segwit2x agreement, which was months after Bitcoin Cash had already existed. That's when I said, well, it doesn't look like Bitcoin is going to scale to be money for the world with a one megabyte block size. The next best looking opportunity to bring more economic freedom to the world and all the wonderful things that enables looks to me

to be Bitcoin Cash. So that's when I focused my time and effort on Bitcoin Cash, but I had zero to do with the creation of Bitcoin Cash. Okay. So for, again, I'm going to try to dumbed down a lot of what you just said for folks is basically the argument ended up being there was the Bitcoin cash community that, for all the technical reasons that Roger described, believed that you could solve scaling on a layer one technology, move forward. The legacy Bitcoin, if you will, or what is called Bitcoin today, is a belief that there is layer one, layer two and onwards and scaling can be done on other layers. Now, again, I'm heavily over generalizing this because I want to kind of not get into a super technical things. I think we'll

lose a lot of people. And if I can clarify one small thing. So both the small blockers, they believe that you can scale with layers on top of Bitcoin. The big blockers also believe that you can scale with layers on top of Bitcoin, but they don't believe in strangling the base layer whereas the small blockers want to limit the base layer and only have layers on top the big blockers want to do both so to kind of zoom out even further before we go into this next part is basically what you have is when you look at bitcoin there is a belief that having the block size constrained allows anyone to run a full node and then you're going to get scalability through layers on top. When you look at Bitcoin Cash, there is the ability to have an expansive block

size that may or may not lead to only people with access to expensive computers being able to run the nodes, but you can have scalability through layers as well. So that's kind of where we are at the moment. And if I can add one additional interesting fact related to that too, if you go back and look at the internet archive and look at bitcoin.org from 2011 or 2012 or 2013 and look at the FAQ over there, they literally go over all the math with what the current internet speeds are in the world and the current CPU speeds are and the hard drive costs. And they explain, they give you the math on the bitcoin.org website from 2011, 12 or 13 as to how Bitcoin on-chain through bigger blocks could scale to be money for the entire world. So if you look at that, Bitcoin Cash much

more closely resembles what was on the Bitcoin website in 2011 than the current version of what everyone's calling Bitcoin, which I think is an important thing for people to realize, because I think a lot of people maybe thought that the plan had always been to limit the base layer and then only have layers on top. And it's also worth pointing out that companies that did that, the Lightning Labs and the Blockstreams, the products that those companies are selling only have a market if you limit the base layer. If you don't limit the base layer, Hold on, hold on, hold on. We're going to get to all of this. Yeah, we're going to get to all of this. So one of the things that people watching may be like, wait a second, Roger, you're one of the most well-known people in the space.

This fork of Bitcoin cash happens. How could you not have known or how could no one have told you about it? Talk a little bit about because I think that this is probably one of the areas where, you know, I don't know the answer. right and frankly you're probably one of the only people who knows the answer um if i think of like the devil's advocate was sitting here talking to you what they would say is roger helped create this and he created all this stuff and you know yada yada whatever your argument is like look i didn't even know i wasn't involved help people kind of understand like how is that possible and then also um at what point did you come across bitcoin cash and start to realize wait a second this is worth spending more time on, right? Because there's almost this element of like,

it sounds like there was issues with Bitcoin that, or things that were happening that you disagreed with. And so that then sent you looking somewhere else. So kind of talk just through that transition for you and kind of how did that occur and what was the information you were consuming at the time or thinking through? Yeah. So I think a lot of people today don't realize it, but early on nobody cared about altcoins at all like altcoins were just like totally off the radar bitcoin had you know 90 plus percent market share nobody cared about any altcoin for anything at all it wasn't even and even on my radar like i hardly cared at all like i i should have taken uh taken part in the ethereum ipo but i didn't i i waited until it was still like you know seven or eight

bucks which still did all right for me but uh should have bought it at the ipo but you know you win some, you lose some. But nobody cared about any of this at all until Bitcoin's user experience started to degrade because of things like replaced by fee and the high fees that were being caused by the block starting to fill up. And that's when people started to look at altcoins. And they started to look at things like Dash and Monero and Zcash. And there started to be this whole wave of people like, hey, I can start an altcoin that can improve on some of the problems that Bitcoin is having. So mainly privacy, fees, transaction reliability, these sorts of things. But before that, nobody cared about it at all. And so Bitcoin had 90 plus percent market share. And it wasn't until the user experience of Bitcoin started to degrade that people started divesting some of their money that used to be in Bitcoin into altcoins, myself included.

So that's why I bought some Ethereum. That's why I bought some Inero. That's why I bought some Dash is because the future roadmap for Bitcoin wasn't looking bright in terms of having a good user experience. Okay, so are you making the argument, and I'm trying to understand and make sure that I kind of understand your thought process. Are you making the argument that people started to divest from Bitcoin into things like Ethereum because they thought Ethereum could be a Bitcoin replacement? Or was it something else driving them being interested in Ethereum or other altcoins? I think mainly the first one. So even Vitalik, the creator of Ethereum, he would have built it probably all on Bitcoin. But he looked at Bitcoin and the block size in OpReturnWars, which is a little bit, there's whole other videos on that. But basically, people were already starting to argue about, should we restrict the block size on Bitcoin?

And Vitalik saw the restrictions starting to happen on Bitcoin. So he said, well, I guess I won't build Ethereum on Bitcoin. I'll build it on my own chain. And so in other people, like everybody knows about the ICO boom. all that happened on ethereum all of that would have happened on bitcoin if it wasn't for the bitcoin core developers limiting the size of the opera turn data and so for people that's getting a little bit techie but to describe that all these tokens that are on ethereum everyone knows you know ethereum erc20 tokens all of that was starting to happen on top of bitcoin there are these things

called colored coins and a group of guys called counterparty and they had a protocol doing tokens on top of bitcoin and then it was really starting to take off and lots of stuff was starting to happened. And then the Bitcoin core developers chopped and reduced the amount of space of data that people could put in the operatron of Bitcoin, which basically just gutted this entire token ecosystem that was starting to bloom on top of Bitcoin. And so all this entire ICO stuff would have happened on top of Bitcoin had not been for that, what I think was a mistake on Bitcoin's part. So that decision, let's go back to flip around the table. What is their argument as to why they did that and why it was a good thing? It was the exact same argument there. They said they

want people to be able to run a full node on a really cheap computer on a really horrible internet connection and in you know rural rural south dakota or you know take your place take your place as people are going to see this ends up being one of the key points of difference of opinion that drives all kinds of different decisions is is running a full node individually at the lowest level in terms of cost and infrastructure a necessity or something that could be kind of a nice to have, right? So that repeats itself over and over and over again over the years.

When we go to Bitcoin Cash, you decided, hey, I'm going to take some percent of the money and wealth that I have, and I'm going to put it into Bitcoin Cash to start to migrate that way. Talk a little bit about the decision you made. Kind of how did you come up with,

I don't think you sold all of your Bitcoin, but you sold some of it and kind of why some, not all, and then percentage-wise, how did you think about that? Yeah, so I'm not a good trader. I'm not good at timing the market. I'm a long-term value investor. I look at the things that I think are going to be useful long-term. But the main reason that happened is because up to that point, I've been telling every single person I meet, if I get in a taxi, I'm going to tell the taxi driver about Bitcoin, and I'm going to give him some Bitcoin for free, right? And like anybody, everyone, in fact, some of the taxi drivers said, just pay me

everything in Bitcoin. It was really interesting because I could tell people, yeah, this money you can send and receive with anyone anywhere in the world instantly, basically for free. No one can freeze your account. Nobody can block it. Nobody can control it in any way. And it's so fast, super easy and reliable to use. And when the blocks became full, that pitch wasn't there. I would now have to tell people, hey, there's this thing called Bitcoin. You can pay, sometimes it's $10, sometimes it's $1, sometimes it's $50 in fees. Sometimes the transactions go through kind of fast. Sometimes it takes two weeks on average. Sometimes they can be reversed. How can I be excited about that? I couldn't be excited about that. So if I wanted to have anything to do with

cryptocurrency anymore, I'd need to be able to tell somebody about a cryptocurrency that's actually exciting and interesting and useful to people. And Bitcoin Cash had it with its fast, cheap, reliable transactions, even if you couldn't potentially run it on a Raspberry Pi on a crappy internet connection somewhere. So let me ask, there's two pieces here that I think important so obviously bitcoin at some point um was similar to bitcoin cash in terms when you say fast cheap all these things um and there was much less people using it then then at the point where you're saying uh it was slower it had higher fees whatever on the layer one um one were you ever worried that bitcoin cash would run into the same thing there was very few people using in the

beginning but over a number of years if it became popular there would be issues and the second uh piece of this is I actually go backwards to kind of analyze this and the way that I think about it is gold was money for thousands of years it's not very portable it's not very divisible it actually sucks as a medium of exchange in terms of you know if you got to shave off gold or kind of do anything like that in order to improve that people built paper claims on the gold right it's kind of a dollar backed by the gold eventually they built electronic money credit and kind of all these layers up on top of that gold. Now, as we already discussed and kind of agree on, maybe removing the gold from the dollar was not the smartest decision and led to all these issues. But history has kind

of repeated itself where over a long period of time, people would push a currency to become more efficient, more usable, etc. Is this a situation where you thought, okay, understand the argument of there's going to be future layers on top of Bitcoin, and that could make it more usable. But I don't agree that that is the right solution. Or was it a thing where, hey, that might work, but timing is important. And so we need to be able to do this now. But that's going to take too long to actually build out. Like, was it a that's not possible? Or was it that's not ready today? And therefore, that's why I need to go somewhere else. Yeah, so definitely the second part there so like i hope lightning works but it's not usable today and in fact if anything it

seems like ethereum is winding up being bitcoin's layer two scaling solution like there's way there i think several times more bitcoin is wrapped on ethereum than there are you know total liquidity in the lightning network but to go back to about gold but just i just want to make sure that i got this so it wasn't hey layer two layer three layer four on a bitcoin can't work it's just i don't They're not ready. They weren't ready. They're still not ready. Yeah. So basically, it was a timing thing, not a possibility thing, right? Exactly. It was a timing thing. We need to rush because the politicians are going to do everything they can to keep the dollar as the world's reserve currency. They don't want some non-government controlled currency to become the world's reserve currency that everybody's using in commerce as both the medium of exchange and a store value.

They want that to be the dollar or they want it to be whatever's controlled by the government. And so if we move quickly to get a mass adoption, it'll be too late for governments to stop it. But now we're already starting to see that the number one cryptocurrency is Tether at this point. All right, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Let's stay focused. Hold on. So as this is happening, you decide, okay, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin. You take what percent of the Bitcoin that you had at that point and move it over into Bitcoin Cash? I don't remember.

And prior to that, it was a significant percentage, a double-digit percentage, right? But even before that, I had been concerned about Bitcoin scaling. So that's why I bought a bunch of Ethereum. I bought a bunch of Dash. I bought a bunch of Monero. I bought a bunch of Zcash and Zcoin and on and on and on. And I diversified into the cryptocurrencies that I thought would give people the best user experience. And so it wasn't only Bitcoin Cash.

The other thing that I think is important here, if anyone is not aware of this, Roger's not talking about like a million dollars worth of Bitcoin at the time, right? in 2015, 16, and 17, I believe you had hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin. And the decisions that you're making here are involving, you know, tens of millions of dollars, if not more in terms of when you're deciding to move out of Bitcoin into something else, right? Right. Got it. Okay. And so when you go ahead and you move some portion, you know, double digit percentage, whatever that ends up being into Bitcoin Cash. You're also simultaneously doing that with other tokens. What is kind of the early days of Roger Ver with Bitcoin Cash look like, right? And from the

outsider's perspective, it almost looks like you kind of did exactly what you had been doing with Bitcoin, right? You kind of ran around the world telling people about electronic payments and kind of all those things. Now it was you were using Bitcoin Cash rather than Bitcoin as the thing that you would send them or the wallet you'd give them or whatever. Is that fair to say? Yeah. There was a little bit more work to be done because when the split happened or when there was the one single Bitcoin and then you had Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash had all the characteristics that made Bitcoin popular to begin with. But the thing that everybody's calling Bitcoin today had all the infrastructure,

even though it didn't have the good user experience. So on the Bitcoin Cash side, even though it had the good user experience, we had to rebuild all the infrastructure that was lacking because we lost it all at the time of the split. So that's still an ongoing process to this very day. And it's still a catch-up game. Okay. So we'll get to all that in a few minutes here. But as this was occurring, it's a little weird, I think, right? Because you were Bitcoin Jesus, right? Like literally you had spent years and years of your life and very effectively promoting Bitcoin, talking about it, pushing it. And what a lot of people may not realize is you'd also made tons of investments in the space, not just in Bitcoin, but in all sorts of infrastructure.

And so one of those things is Bitcoin.com. You had a bunch of other things that you had spent time on. And so as you start to transition, how did you think about all of that infrastructure? Was it something where in your head you said, hey, look, I've got to go now get all of the investments that I've made there to kind of switch over and use Bitcoin cash? Was it something where, look, I don't think I'm going to be able to do that. So actually what I want them to do is kind of coexist and support both. Like what was the thought process given that you still had these financial interest in a bunch of infrastructure and you also had exposure to Bitcoin cash and Bitcoin because you'd sell all the Bitcoin, right? So how did you kind of think

about those two things and how they would intersect with the equity investments and the infrastructure investments that you had made? Yeah, I think each individual, you know, I, even when I invest in a company, I'm not the owner, the big owner of the company, right? The CEO gets to decide what they're going to do and what they're going to focus on. And I think at the end of the day, the businesses are going to focus on the things that are the most useful to their, their users or their customers. And so anybody that, you know, that's listening to this, if you haven't, if you're on the fence or you don't know, or if you haven't tried using Bitcoin Cash, try using it, try

using Ethereum, try using Ripple, try using everything, and then use whatever's the most useful to you in your own life. You don't have to be like some tribal guy and like, there's some comic where they ask, Do you believe in the Trinity? Oh, yes. Do you believe in the resurrection? Yes, yes, yes. And they get to some really remote detail of way down in religion, like, oh, my God,

heretic, and they're going to fight. And it's just like, I feel like that's a lot of the same sort of stupidity in the cryptocurrency space. I think all of us are trying to build, or at least most of us are trying to build the tools to empower individuals to have more control over their own lives. If you're excited about that, Bitcoin Cash adds to that. Bitcoin adds to that. Ripple adds to that.

All of these add to that. So the more tools that people have in the world to have more control over their own life, that's a good thing. Don't hate on them. Go and go and cheer for them. All right. So here's the part that I think before I'd ever met you, talked to you, anything was the most confusing was exactly the same that you just said, which is you're still a fan of Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash and many, many other things. Right. And so help people understand and unpack that a little bit, right? Where somebody who was so convicted on Bitcoin, obviously now is a big proponent of Bitcoin cash, and there's plenty of people who agree, disagree, whatever. What I always tell people is like, look, there's points of view in the world. The market will ultimately determine whoever is right on this stuff.

But what I find fascinating, and it's very rare in the world, frankly, is somebody who can have a belief in something, right? So for you, Bitcoin Cash, and you're still able to intelligently talk about and have some level of conviction in Bitcoin, obviously, right? You still hold Bitcoin and these other things. And so just unpack that because I think when people see that, that's just a confusing thing, right? Of like, why still have Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash? And like, how do you think about having exposure to both? Yeah, so any good investor has a diverse portfolio.

And it's like I've seen a couple of these Bitcoin max was saying, why don't you sell all your Bitcoins? Like, well, I still have some dollars too, right? I still have gold. I still have silver. I still have other stocks. Like, have a diverse portfolio. Like, selling, putting all of your net worth into one thing, that's bad investment advice. But in regards to why Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash?

Well, if you look at Bitcoin, it has this amazing network effect. You know, tens of millions of users around the world, the biggest market cap, the most liquidity, and this, you know, worldwide name recognition where people all over the world, if you go to the guy in the street, have you heard about Bitcoin? They'll say yes. If you go to the guy in the street and say, have you heard of Ethereum? They're probably going to say no, right? And so Bitcoin has this amazing network effect, but it also has this horrible user experience. If you try and use it for payments, the payments are slow, expensive, and unreliable. And so then you look at Bitcoin Cash.

If you go up to somebody in the street and say, have you heard of Bitcoin Cash? They'll say, well, is that different than Bitcoin? They won't be sure. And it has less liquidity, a lower market cap, less name recognition. But it has this amazing user experience with lightning fast transactions that are a fraction of a penny and are irreversible and go through reliably all the time. And now you can make tokens on top of Bitcoin Cash as well in like 30 seconds. Then you can send on-chain dividend payments to the token holders. The tokens act like anonymous bear shares that are able to receive dividend payments.

Like, I think a lot of people don't realize how big of a deal the token ecosystem on Bitcoin Cash is. You have Tether is now on top of Bitcoin Cash with an SLP token. Like, there's a lot happening. All right, hold on. So, this is one of the key, I think, differences of opinion. And this isn't something that I think people will find religious in nature, like in terms of emotional. This has played out over and over and over again for decades in technology, right? What you just described is the difference between market forces and technology, right?

And so I'm going to go backwards again to go forwards, which is if you go back to VHS versus Betamax, right? There's a lot of people who would argue Betamax was the better technology. VHS got adopted. And even though it was inferior technology, it ended up being the winner because of all the reasons why people have studied and there was adoption. Now, if you fast forward that to this Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, I'm going to say that regardless of your or my opinion in terms of what ends up winning. I think that the two arguments can be

categorized as you would argue that Bitcoin Cash has superior technology, which leads to that better user experience, in your opinion. And ultimately, that will drive adoption, which will lead to the market determining Bitcoin Cash wins. I think that there's another argument, which is you can debate what technology is superior or not superior, but the network effect of money and the belief system of money and the adoption that Bitcoin already has will continue to carry it to be the winner. And then that adoption buys you the time to backfill and build the technology necessary to make it this global scalable thing. Would you agree or disagree with the categorization of those two arguments? I think very, very well put. Fantasticly well put. And that's why I hold

Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash today because you should have some of both. I don't know which is going to went out from those two paths. So what I would say to that, right. And I think that this is kind of, and part of why I wanted to do this again was that we can kind of very intelligently identify like a point of disagreement, right. Your, your perspective is, Hey, I've diversified exposure to Bitcoin cash and Bitcoin, either one wins you win. Right. I think that I go the opposite direction, which is, um, history has shown that the adoption ends up being the winning strategy, right? Is there a possibility that I am incorrect? There's a possibility that both of us are incorrect and digital currency doesn't end up being successful, right? What I think though is

when I look at the probability of if you gave me the choice to invest in technology or in the market adoption, right? As an investor, even outside of digital currencies, I'll always choose the market adoption, right? That's just how I think about this stuff, how I've always thought about it. And so I think for people who are watching this, one of the key elements to the disagreement and all this stuff is that exactly, right? Is does the technology buy time for the market adoption or does the market adoption buy time for building the technology? So the second thing that I want to talk about is as you move past that point, then we get to this world of the infrastructure itself, right? And I think that when you look at the computing power,

Talk about how you think about the importance of the computing power actually running these networks, how you see Bitcoin Cash today versus Bitcoin, and if there is a world where Bitcoin Cash ended up being successful in the future, how would that transition occur? Or maybe you would even argue it doesn't need to occur. Like, just talk a little bit about the actual computing networks and the differences there today and kind of how you would see that playing out in the future. i don't know if i fully understand the question but i kind of view it like for those that are old enough to remember myspace before facebook myspace was incredibly popular it had a huge network effect and then myspace started having the equivalent of you know slow unreliable uh expensive in terms of time you had to wait transactions transactions being page loads on the site so when the true and the user experience on myspace became slow expensive

of an unreliable. There was a mass migration to Facebook. And I think we could see the exact same thing happen with everybody that's trying to use Bitcoin for anything commerce related. You could see a mass migration. So let me just comment on that, which is, and I have an unfair advantage over you because I worked at Facebook and we obviously spent way too much time obsessed with why did MySpace fail? The one thing that I would say, the one difference between myspace and facebook and and uh i think zuck would be the first one to uh admit that like i don't know if they necessarily knew what they were doing when they created the news feed itself but with myspace it was a directory of people so you could go and you

could go to people's different pages and all this stuff the thing that facebook did that actually locked people into the network was the news feed now you just went to the news feed and everyone's content got put there and so it was less of roger go navigate to all of your friends pages and check to see what they're up to. And it was more of now Facebook has this like integrated experience. And so I've heard people argue, it doesn't matter for this conversation.

You know, MySpace didn't have network effect because you still have to navigate to all the different pages. They just had a lot of users and Facebook really got the network effect and they ended up winning. Neither here nor there for this. What I think though that I hear you saying

and confirm for me is today Bitcoin has a network effect. Naturally, money is a super viral product, right? In whatever form it is. And it's got the market share. It's got the kind of name recognition, whatever. But I think your argument is you can break a network effect if the product itself never meets expectations

and people will eventually migrate somewhere else. And you feel like there's some percentage chance that happens? Is that a fair characterization? Yeah, I think there's a pretty darn good percentage chance that that happens. I mean, the user experience for payments on Bitcoin is so bad today. What number would you put on it? Are we talking over or under 50%? It's probably somewhere in the ballpark of 50% would be my guess.

And so David Friedman is an economist I really like, and he always says, look at the actions people take rather than the words they say. So if you look at the actions that I've taken, like my BTC versus BCH portfolio position, it's somewhere in the ballpark of 50-50 in terms of dollar value. So my actions lead me to – even if I – I'm telling you with my words what my actions have been. I think it's somewhere in the ballpark of 50-50 between those two, but then I also have nice positions in Ethereum and Ripple and Dash and on and on and on. Because I don't think we know what the winner is guaranteed to be in the end. Okay. And I want to be as respectful of your time, but I know that you've kind of committed to let's have the full conversation here. One of the things that I want to play a game, right? And I read through all these Twitter

threads. And as I told you, I took out every single troll and meme and all this stuff. And And frankly, they were coming at me as much as you, right? So kind of we were in the same boat of under attack by the meme lords. But what I pulled out was a bunch of questions that I would consider the negative view of Roger or the negative view of Bitcoin Cash. And what I want to do is I want to ask you the questions and then allow you just to respond, right? And kind of it's not for me to make a judgment in many cases.

It's more of I want people to be able to ask the questions that they have. you respond and then people can decide you know how they how they feel from this um the first one we already addressed which was like why do you still own bitcoin right i think that kind of you clearly articulated that um the second one is uh why is bitcoin uh cash usage so low and part of that also being why are bitcoin blocks consistently bigger than bitcoin cash so kind of i think those two things are related. Talk through kind of how you look at that and explain it and then kind of what you think about that moving forward. Yeah. So there's two questions there. So why are Bitcoin cash blocks smaller than Bitcoin blocks? Because there's more transactions happening on

Bitcoin every day than on Bitcoin cash so far. But in terms of why are so few people using Bitcoin cash, that's not true at all. Bitcoin cash, depending on the day, is the second or third most transacted in chain in terms of the number of dollars being moved in the native token on chain. So it's Bitcoin is number one. And then depending on the day, it's Bitcoin Cash or Ethereum. Sometimes Bitcoin Cash has even more value moved on it than Ethereum does. So like that's a really, really big deal. So Bitcoin Cash is widely used around the world. And when you go to Bitcoin.com, there's lots of tools to help people use Bitcoin Cash because it really, really works. Okay. So, and again, this goes under the, like the part that I like about this conversation

is there's a couple of key themes and we're going to keep revisiting them through all these questions. That goes under the market adoption is in the favor of Bitcoin today. Your belief is you think it'll switch to Bitcoin Cash. There's obviously a bunch of people who think it'll stay with Bitcoin, right? The next question is, do you run a Bitcoin node still at all? I have a BTC and a BCH node that I can boot up from time to time and sync with the network. I don't leave it on all the time, but I do have those nodes. Yeah. Okay. Another question was how many Bitcoin cash nodes are yours? So myself personally, I have the one that I can boot up and sync from time to time, the bitcoin.com business. It probably has a few. I'd have to ask the

different tech guys how many we have, but I would guess with the mining pool and everything else between 10 and 20, maybe around the world would be my guess. Okay. Another question was, let's see here. What are the metrics that you use to evaluate the success of Bitcoin or Bitcoin cash? Like what are the things that you think are most important in terms of determining whether something is working? Fantastic question. So objective values would be like how much commerce is happening on chain? How much money is being moved on chain? How many transactions? What's the average value of those transactions? The more emotional answer to that is how empowering is this tool for more people around the world to have more control over their own lives? And that one,

it's a bit harder to put a concrete number on or an objective standard. But if you look at people in third world countries, they're not going to be able to figure out how to set up a lightning note. They're not going to be able to figure out how to use any of these layer two stuff. They're either They're going to use Bitcoin Cash on-chain or a custodial Bitcoin solution where someone else has their private keys and they're at the mercy of having their account frozen. It's going to be one of those two choices. Okay. In terms of Bitcoin Cash, when you think about that future migration, right? So market is winning in terms of – or market has adopted Bitcoin.

That's where the name recognition is, all that stuff. frankly a lot of that is due to the early work that you had right in terms of going out and really talking about this and spending so much time and educating people and driving adoption what would it take on the bitcoin cash side for you to say look i'm 50 50 right now like actually this isn't going to work and you know give up it has like a negative connotation to it but basically just come to the the realization or identify hey bitcoin cash is and is not going to be the solution because it's not a tech then market thing. OK, the market is going to be the most important thing. And then, you know, walk away from Bitcoin cash, I guess. People ask in all

kinds of different ways, but that's essentially what they're asking. Yeah, Bitcoin would have to start being more usable as peer to peer electronic cash, enabling more economic freedom around the world than Bitcoin cash. And it's not even close at the moment, but maybe that'll change in the future. Okay. And I think that if I had somebody here, like if I had two technical people, one from Bitcoin Cash and one from Bitcoin, the two arguments would be, again, layer one scalability with the potential to add layers two and above on Bitcoin Cash. On the Bitcoin side, it's layer one, constrained block sizes, scalability comes from layer two, etc. As you said you're unhappy with kind of the layer two examples today, but that's the opportunity.

Like everything, it'll get better over time, but it's a question of how much time. And so on that front, I would love to recommend, I think you'd be a fantastic host for that with an open mind and respectful demeanor. Peter Risen, the chief scientist of Bitcoin Unlimited, I'm sure would love to participate. And he'd be the big block advocate there. And I think it'd be fantastic. You could get Elizabeth Stark of Lightning Labs and they can both discuss the pros and cons of the Lightning Network, or Adam Back, the founder of Blockstream. I think either Elizabeth or Adam would be a fantastic person to have a discussion with Peter Risen on Layer 2 solutions. Peter Risen wrote some really interesting essays about why he's not

bullish on the Lightning Network in the short term. And I think that would be incredibly interesting. I know I'd love to watch that discussion. But from what I've heard so far, Adam Back and Elizabeth Stark don't seem to be willing to have that conversation, which to me makes me wonder are their arguments not that strong if they're not willing to have that conversation but for any of them that wind up hearing this or if you know those people ask them to do it because I think all of us all over the world would be able to learn a lot from watching and listening to that conversation. So another question is how do you think through again the market cap the number of payments transactions all that stuff why do you think

people are still using Bitcoin, even with the issues that you've described, right? So if the issues are that big of a deal, and you're basically, you think there's a 50% chance that people will end up leaving Bitcoin, moving to Bitcoin Cash, what's keeping them there? Is it just a network effect type thing? Or is there other things that you kind of rationalize in your head as to why they're staying there? And really, what I think this question is getting at is like, I had Ross Gerber come on, who's a big Tesla bull, right? And I asked him, I said, well, what did the bears believe that you were able to recognize, but you just disagreed? What was Ross's answer to that on Tesla? Because Tesla's been on a wild ride.

Yeah, well, so he's been right, right? And he actually had a pretty good answer in terms of how he walked through exactly the work he did to get convicted. He went to dinner with kind of the Tesla bears and, you know, did all the work. And then he was just like, I just think they're wrong on and he had a couple of things, you know, in terms of what those things were. I think this question is getting at why are people staying with Bitcoin if there's still all the technical issues that you've described? Yeah, so I think the answer to that question is you can look at it in terms of market cap. So Bitcoin Cash's market cap is somewhere in the ballpark of $5 billion. And Bitcoin's market cap is, you know, somewhere close to $200 billion or

some much bigger number. So you have, you know, $200 billion of capital versus $5 billion worth the capital. The people with the $5 billion in Bitcoin Cash are motivated to see Bitcoin Cash succeed. But you have almost $200 billion worth of capital in Bitcoin that are motivated to see Bitcoin succeed. So that's a lot of capital out there that's in favor of seeing Bitcoin succeed. But if people start seeing the writing on the wall of things like Bitcoin not being usable in commerce, and I don't have the data in front of me, but I think the average transaction size on Bitcoin at the moment is something like $1,500. If you're somebody that needs cheap, fast, reliable payments and you live in a low-income country, Bitcoin's not very useful to you.

As of yesterday, the average fee on the Bitcoin network to get included in the next block is $5, right? $5, that's a lot of money to people in a lot of first world countries. The average fee to be included in the Bitcoin cash block is less than a penny. That's fine for anybody anywhere in the world. So I think- But I think part of this, right, and I'll paraphrase the quote, But it's Yogi Berra says, oh, nobody ever goes to that restaurant because it's too crowded or too crowded or whatever it is. Right. And I think like ultimately, like that's kind of what this whole debate gets to is the reason why some of these issues come up is because everyone's using. Right. And everyone being still a small group of just cryptocurrency enthusiasts, whatever. But it sounds like that's the thing that in order for Bitcoin Cash to succeed would have to change. Is that fair?

Yeah, you'll need more people using things. But it is true when a restaurant's too crowded, people go to other restaurants that would have originally gone to that first restaurant. And I think that's exactly what happened with Bitcoin is it could have accommodated a whole lot more people. Like, honestly, I think the market, the price of Bitcoin today could have easily already been $100,000 per single Bitcoin if it didn't run into the scaling disaster that drove away, you know, businesses like Microsoft stopped accepting Bitcoin. Dell Computer stopped accepting Bitcoin. Bitcoin Jesus stopped promoting Bitcoin. And that's how big of a deal this scaling problem was with Bitcoin. So there would be some people who would be willing to admit, and I don't know what percentage of Bitcoin would say this, which would say the scaling debate, the final result, ended up in a place where they didn't agree with it, right? So for whatever reason, they thought that there should be bigger blocks, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But they still believe that Bitcoin will succeed in spite of those decisions.

So it's a thing where, hey, we were on this trajectory. We made some decisions. They would argue that we made a detour, but like we're eventually still going to end up at the same place. Maybe we just took a detour on the way. I think the argument that you would have, and correct me if I'm wrong, is, hey, those decisions ended up being much more than a detour. And therefore, I chose to basically get another call. Right. What do you say to the people who just think it's like a detour type deal, but ultimately Bitcoin will still be successful, whether you agree with those decisions or not? And the people that think it's just a delay, they very well may be right. I have one foot in the Bitcoin cash car and one foot in the Bitcoin car and one in Ethereum and everywhere else. But the frustrating part, though, is no matter whether it's going to be a different car that gets to the finish line or the Bitcoin car just gets there later, whichever car gets to the finish line first is going to get there later than it otherwise would have. And that's the most frustrating part to me. Like we could have had this amazing peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world sooner. Instead, it's going to wind up being later than it otherwise would have been if we hadn't run into that scaling civil war within Bitcoin. That's the most frustrating part for me. All right. One of the questions that I absolutely loved, and I saw one person ask it, which I wish that more people would ask it, is when I talk to you, I see all the people with all the, you know, they've got all the controversy, they say all this kind of stuff. It feels to me like you still have half your heart with Bitcoin and half your heart with Bitcoin Cash, but ultimately your heart is in electronic payments. And kind of this finish line that we keep talking about where there's a world in the future that will be much better than the world we're in today. And so would it be fair to say that if Bitcoin Cash was not successful, you would gladly kind of jump back on the Bitcoin bandwagon and start pushing that forward? Or maybe you found something else that you thought would ultimately get that, but you're kind of tied to the mission of getting to that future world.

and you're trying to figure out what is the best vehicle to get there? Yeah, absolutely. I'll be the biggest cheerleader I possibly can for whichever tool I think is going to be the one that gets us the fastest to that future in which people have control over their own money and don't need permission from banks or politicians to do what they want with their own funds.

Even if it was Bitcoin? If it's Bitcoin, yeah. Bitcoin, Ripple, Dash. Even if it was the US dollar somehow, I'd start cheering the US dollar if I thought that was the one. Come on, don't be crazy now. Wow. So I guess then that leads to the question of like, what are the things that you would look at? It's kind of a I've been asked a bunch of times, right? Like, what are the things that I would

identify as would make Bitcoin fail? Right. And I've got a whole list of everything from self-inflicted wounds of introducing bugs during the software process to all kinds of things I would look at. What are the things for you that when you look at Bitcoin cash either would have to happen for you to say, okay, it didn't work? Or two, are the metrics where, whether it was liquidity or market cap or something, you would basically say, oh, you know what? Maybe I actually need to hedge more into something else. Yeah. Great, great question. I think the thing that would make me feel the most frustrated with Bitcoin Cash is if it stopped being usable as cash, if it no longer had fast, cheap, reliable payments or something else that came along that

had fast, cheap, reliable payments, and an as big or even bigger network effect, because the network effect is a really, really big deal. I don't know if they're bots or if they're real people, but anytime I go on Twitter, I see a bunch of people tweeting, what about Nano? What about Nano? The honest truth is I don't know about Nano because I haven't really come across its network effect other than a bunch of people on Twitter tweeting about it. Maybe I'll spend an afternoon reading into Nano, but as far as I know, you can't really We pay it with Nano at many websites, and I know very little about Nano, but the thing about Bitcoin Cash that's so awesome is it has just as many, if not more, places that you can pay with it online and offline than Bitcoin. In fact, I think almost for sure there's more physical merchants where you can pay with Bitcoin Cash than there is that you can pay with Bitcoin, and that's a real big deal, and that's a sign of the network effect.

So if you see the nano tweeters, wait till they start DMing you because they're absolutely insane. And I definitely think that a lot of them are bots. One of the things that I just wrote down was probably the most used word, other than Bitcoin Jesus to talk about you in the threads was just scam. Right. And I think when people hear that, you know, it's easy to kind of get the mob out and everyone gets their pitchforks and just, you know, who are we yelling at today? Right. type thing, especially in today's society. And so what I tried to do was like, why? And I asked a bunch of people, why? And they came up with a whole bunch of different things. And so I just kind of want to walk through a couple of these. And in fact, these let you respond, right? Which the first one was bitcoin.com as a URL promotes Bitcoin Cash. So why not use bitcoincash.com or something else? How do you think about the use of bitcoin.com and then having Bitcoin Cash and voting in on there. Yeah, so bitcoin.com is my domain name, and I can promote whatever I want on it. I could turn it into a site to promote the Federal Reserve if I really wanted to. It's my

domain name. If you don't like it, you can make me an offer for the whole domain name. I can sell you the whole thing and the whole business. You can pay me in Bitcoin Cash for it, and then you can do whatever you want with it to anybody out there that doesn't like what we're doing with it currently. So that doesn't make it a scam. Now you know I have to ask, what price would you sell it that? I think 22 million Bitcoin cash would get it. 22 million Bitcoin cash. There's only 21 million ever. Got it. And so I guess what people would say is like, you're absolutely right, right? In terms of you're able to do whatever you want. And I love the example of like, you can promote the Federal Reserve on bitcoin.com and knock yourself out. Do you feel like it's misleading to promote

something other than Bitcoin on there? Or how do you, like, I guess if you went to a board meeting, right, for Bitcoin.com and you were sitting there, you were talking about like, hey, here's why we make certain decisions. Like, what is the logic behind the decision? Not can you do it? Of course, you can do a lot of things, right? But like, what is the logic and kind of how do you think about the advantage for Bitcoin.com in doing? So I guess two points there. So if we were to be promoting BTC on Bitcoin.com. We'd be promoting an inferior product that gives people a bad user experience. And every day, we still get user support requests. Hey, why didn't my transaction go through? Hey, you guys are ripping me off. I had to pay $5 to send my Bitcoin. I thought

Bitcoin was supposed to be free or cheap to send. And every day, we get people doing that. And even if you look at it historically, if we were promoting BTC, that's not the Bitcoin described in the white paper. That's not the Bitcoin described on Bitcoin.org in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013. The thing that everybody's calling Bitcoin today, it has the Bitcoin name and it has the Bitcoin network effect, but it doesn't have the characteristics that made Bitcoin popular to begin with. Bitcoin Cash has far more. It has all of that except for the most proof of work on the longest chain, but it has the fast, cheap, reliable payments. If you read the white paper, it's clearly talking about something that more closely resembles Bitcoin Cash than Bitcoin.

I feel like if we were to promote BTC only on Bitcoin, we'd be doing the entire world a disservice. Like I think Bitcoin Cash can bring more economic freedom to the world faster than Bitcoin can today. And you guys right now do Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash on Bitcoin.com? Yeah. And in fact, like our entire goal on Bitcoin.com is to make as clear as possible the differences between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, because we want everybody to know and understand the differences, because we think if people understand the differences, we think they'll prefer Bitcoin Cash, just like myself. I understand the differences. I prefer Bitcoin Cash. And I think that's part of – maybe that was the reason that our Bitcoin and bitcointalk.org had to engage in so much censorship.

They were worried that if people were able to hear both sides of the arguments, they would prefer the big block side of the argument. That's why they had to engage in the censorship. All right. Hold on. So on bitcoin.com, you're comfortable in terms of – or do you think people try to buy BTC and end up buying BCH or vice versa? Do you think that people get confused? I think very, very few people, if any, get confused. So no, I don't think there's a problem because we put it very, very clearly right there so people can see. And we have entire articles describing the entire history and the differences between both.

So anybody that spends the time to even do a little bit of research in the topic can understand that BTC and BCH are two different coins with two different characteristics. And I don't think anybody's being fooled or tricked into buying one on accident instead of the other. If anything, I think if people buy BTC thinking it's the Bitcoin described in the white paper, they're being fooled. All right. So another thing I saw was somebody tweeted a chart, and I apologize that I forget. It was either BTC over BCH or BCH over BTC. But basically, it was showing that the price appreciation of Bitcoin drastically outweighs the price movement of Bitcoin Cash. And so basically, you said earlier, like, you're not a trader, right?

And I'm in the same boat as you. I'm not a trader. But over what is now months, if not years, the Bitcoin price has performed differently than the Bitcoin cash price. And so how do you think about those price movements? And do you worry at all about that as a signal? I think that part of that is because I'm such a horrible trader, right? Right after the split, I'm like, didn't do any dollar cost averaging from one end to the other. It's like, hey, let's move quickly and let's move a lot. And so at one point, the price of Bitcoin Cash was, you know, about half of Bitcoin. So that means for any Bitcoins I sold at that point, I got two for one, whereas the current ratio is like 40 or 50 to one between Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin. So, you know, any Bitcoin core people that sold their B cash at that point, you know, you're welcome. You got a good deal on it.

But I remember in 2012, the entire Bitcoin ecosystem was feeling really discouraged. Bitcoin in 2011 got up to $30 and people felt like, you know, we're on the moon. This is fantastic. And the price went from $30 down to a dollar and some change over the next year and a half. And there were a lot of people think, oh, I should get out before this goes to zero. And no, not me. I was building and promoting and building and investing. It's the same phase in Bitcoin Cash right now.

All the infrastructure is really starting to get there. I'm still building. I'm still investing. We have our $250 million Bitcoin Cash ecosystem fund. I've deployed about $15 million of that so far. We're deploying a couple million every month here. It's a really big deal. We're building out this ecosystem.

And the overall number of people using cryptocurrency on the world is still small, right? So Bitcoin.com, we're not trying to reach existing crypto people. We're trying to build the tools to bring the rest of the entire world into using crypto. And Bitcoin Cash is in a really good position to be the onboard ramp for all those people around the world because it's fast, cheap, and reliable. That's what people want. They don't want to have to calculate manually what the fee ratio needs to be and what the block time is going to be. They just want something that works. But if we can build something that works, that's non-custodial, where Bitcoin.com can't freeze their accounts, and if we get subpoenaed, we don't have any information about what people have going on.

We can provide privacy in the wallet, so it's fast, cheap, reliable, and private and easy to use. Boom, that's going to be a winning combination for the world. And I don't see Bitcoin having that. It just has this name recognition and bigger market cap at the moment. So I promise people if we did this live, I would try to take some of their questions. And two of the things you just said, people just went nuts with. So first is, and feel free to not answer if you want, but people want to know how much value you lost by being at Bitcoin Cash versus Bitcoin with the funds that you diverted. A lot, right? So at the high point, I think Bitcoin Cash was 2 to 1, and now it's, what, 40 or 50 to 1?

So I didn't sell all of my Bitcoin into Bitcoin Cash at 2 to 1, but even if I sold 10, that's still a big chunk of money, right? And it was definitely more than 10. It's a lot. Okay. And then the second thing is, the second you said B Cash, everyone just went nuts. uh so talk a little bit about bcash versus bitcoin cash and kind of like um why the preference of one over the other and kind of explain that yeah so two i guess two points in there so the first one so where the origin of the word bcash came is a bunch of people that didn't like the bitcoin cash and big blocks and that fork of bitcoin they went out and registered the you know bcash twitter account and our bcash on reddit and you know bcash.com and all these domain names and social

media accounts and then had them all pre-populated and set up with all sorts of negative information about Bitcoin Cash and the big block movement. And then they tried to convince everybody that the name of Bitcoin Cash would be Bcash so that when people would search for Bcash, they would see all this negative content about it. So it was actually like a social media attack. And the people that owned all the Bcash social media names are people who actually hate Bitcoin Cash.

So there's no way that Bitcoin Cash could ever actually change its name to Bcash, even though Bcash isn't a bad name. It is an easier name to say, but if all the people that own all the domain names and social media accounts for Bcash hate Bitcoin Cash, there's no way you could ever switch to it. So it was actually part of a social media attack. And then there's the other semi-world famous photo of me giving the guy a middle finger at one point. I invite everybody, please watch the entire interview.

It's like an hour-long interview. Don't just watch the 40-second clip or whatever it is. And if you've ever watched Ali G or Borat, that's what was going on. The guy was pushing my buttons for 45 minutes and like, I shouldn't have lost my temper. But after 45 minutes of him pushing my buttons, I lost my temper and snapped and I shouldn't have done that. But like, that's what happened. And it wasn't because he called it B cash.

The thing that pushed me over the edge and made me snap was when he accused me of having paid for a whole bunch of sock puppets on the internet. Like maybe the nano guys are doing that. I don't have any proof, but I have never, ever, ever paid for anything like that ever. And in fact, I've discouraged people from ever doing it anytime I've ever heard of anything like that going on. And so when he just stated, as a matter of fact, everybody knows that it's you, Roger, and all the sock puppets you're paying for are the only people that like Bcash. That's what set me over the edge. It wasn't him using the word Bcash. It was him accusing me of engaging in, you know, psyops and, you know, the same sort of crazy propaganda governments engaging with their 50 cent armies and all this other crazy stuff. So two follow ups on that quick ones. One, do you laugh at the photo now? Like when you see it, is it just kind of like, it's stupid, but at the same time, like it's almost one of these things where I know a lot of people who have become a meme to some

degree, they just were like, whatever. No, I, it's probably my least, I regret that way more than like having, you know, sold firecrackers and gone to prison. Like that's, that's not the person that I am one bit. Like I'm a passionate person, but I'm not an angry person. I almost never, that's one of the few times in my life that I've lost my temper like that. That's not who I am at all. And it's really, really disappointing to me when I see that. Pretty much anytime I tweet anything, people reply to me on Twitter with that picture. And it's really sad for me because that's not the person that I am at all. I think that's a very sober, rational view of it. And the second piece is, I see somebody keeps asking, how do you handle all the stress of people, either, you know, again, like I said, like one of the most popular words is scammer, right? And, you know, I don't care who you are as a human, you just got to be like, this sucks, right? And so like, how do you handle the stress of, you know, community backlash or people disagreeing or wanting to argue and kind of all that stuff all the time?

Yeah, I don't worry about it one bit because I know the truth and the truth is far more important than being popular. And anybody who's been in the ecosystem for a while too knows the truth as well. So anybody that's busy calling me a scammer or somebody who's been fooled by probably a bunch of sock puppets on the internet, because don't underestimate the power of social media influence. If everybody around you tells you that Santa Claus is real, you believe it. If everybody around you tells you that Roger's a scammer, you're going to believe it without evidence for either one of those things. i've got one more question and then i kind of want to summarize our conversation here but before i do that if you're watching the live stream please hit the like button so that more people can watch this it's super helpful for whatever reason youtube buzz algorithm enjoys that one of the last questions i have for you before we summarize kind of the conversation is satoshi you're really early in bitcoin how do you think about who satoshi is do you want to know who it is do you know who it is just just talk a little bit about uh satoshi yeah at one point um i was fairly convinced that craig had some role in that uh whoever or wherever satoshi is at this point like

i think he deserves his privacy uh if it were to be craig i would be uh rather than improving my opinion of craig it would just uh diminish my opinion of satoshi substantially um so yeah Fair to say you don't think it's Craig? Yeah. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And if he were Satoshi, he could provide that proof at any moment, and he hasn't done it yet. So no, I don't think he's Satoshi at this point. Okay. And then any ideas of who it could be or speculation on who it is? Space aliens? I don't know. Be careful in 2020, man. And you guys, the people listening to this will like this story.

On the early, early days of BitcoinTalk.org, there was a really fun and interesting thread of people discussing. The thread was like, what's your favorite thing about Bitcoin? And people were talking about their favorite things about Bitcoin. And one guy's favorite thing about Bitcoin was that now when we finally make contact with space aliens, we don't have to be embarrassed about the type of money we're using anymore. And I thought that was a pretty interesting point. That's awesome.

So the last question about Satoshi is just, there's a lot of people who want to speculate and kind of play the games of, you know, who is it? Do you want to know? Or do you think it's actually better that it's an unknown person or group? And there was that other video that came out a month or two ago that made a really interesting, compelling case for Adam Back having been Satoshi. And it definitely made me scratch my head a bit and say, hmm, yeah. But do I want to know? No. I think that's one of the things that just kind of adds to the lure of all of cryptocurrency in general is that it's created by this mysterious figure. And everybody can imagine Satoshi to being the exact perfect person that they would want him to be. And the fact that we don't know exactly who it is means that nobody's going to be mad at that person. So everybody can envision that, oh, Bitcoin was created by Satoshi, who agrees with me on everything. So he was trying to create Bitcoin to be this exact perfect thing that I want it to be. So it's fantastic from a marketing standpoint. Yeah. And so kind of in summary, I think that I want to just, you know, really wrap up where I think we agree and then where we disagree and disagree, again, has a negative connotation, but it's really just a market bet.

Right. And so as we started the conversation, like there's a lot of issues in the world, both economically with the monetary system and those that lead into other aspects of life that are just broken. Right. And there needs to be a solution. I think you would agree with that. And I think you and I are dead in line with that being a digital currency. Right. And at some point we need to have a cryptocurrency become the global currency, and that will drive a lot of impact and improvement across the world. Where you get into kind of a difference is you've got Bitcoin, you've got Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash has a very specific view of the world. And kind of the two key things I think are, one, superior technology in the eyes of the Bitcoin Cash community will ultimately lead to adoption, which will ultimately lead to kind of, quote, unquote, winning. And a key piece of that is that everyone doesn't need to run a Bitcoin node, right?

Or that's not as important as other aspects. I think in the Bitcoin community, kind of this constant journey to make sure that anyone anywhere can run a node has always served as one of the core key tenets. And because it has all of the market adoption or a lot of market adoption has been the leader there, both for early work of yours and many, many other people, regardless of any technical limitations today, that market adoption gives the head start and ultimately will allow Bitcoin to build out what it needs to to kind of serve that function. Did I miss anything in kind of the categorization of where there's a different? I think we might have lost Roger. Let's see if he comes back here. okay sorry about that oh all right no problem uh what was the last thing that you heard uh i think you were talking about the differences between bitcoin cash and bitcoin

and then got it so uh basically what i was saying is bitcoin cash um believes that uh in their eyes the superior technology will lead to market adoption market adoption leads to you know quote unquote, winning that race. And one of the key things is that there's a belief that not everyone needs to be able to run a node, or that's not the most important thing. On the Bitcoin side, there's a very heavy belief that anyone anywhere should be able to run a Bitcoin node. And regardless of any technical limitations, they will eventually be solved because Bitcoin's market adoption and network effect will buy at the time to build that out in Layer 2 and other technologies. Is that a fair characterization in terms of how you see

kind of the two different really narratives and journeys playing out? Yeah, actually, I think that's a pretty good narrative or pretty good characterization. But hedge your bets, right? You don't have to put all your money on one horse here. Have some of each. And especially if you're one of those people, if you believe in the first argument that Bitcoin, the bigger market cap will overcome the technological limitations that you have currently. If you're not running a full node yourself, maybe that's an indication that maybe the other path is okay as well. And the part that'll be so frustrating for me is if those layer twos never come into use well enough and everybody's having to use custodians. Well,

you're just right back to what happened with the gold standard and the dollar. They got separated. Now everybody's at the mercy of the dollar. What if that happens with Bitcoin? Everybody starts using custodial solutions. And before you know it, look at Mt. Gox. They're running fractional reserve for a long, long time, maybe for years and years and years. Who's to say? Maybe that's going to happen with the Coinbases or the Zappos or the other custodial wallets out there in the world. That's a real big problem, is if you're using a wallet in which you have custody of the funds yourself, you don't have to worry nearly as much about those other sorts of problems. And so would it be fair in saying that ultimately the winner here, and I always tell people like,

my personal opinion doesn't matter in the sense of like what quote unquote wins right or what ends up being the globally adopted thing would you agree that it's just going to come down to whatever the market determines yeah but the market is never done determining is the other part of it too like i see people on twitter saying oh the market has decided the market's never done deciding right iphone one at one point was the number one thing in the market well it's not anymore right and the iphone 11 is one of the best the best iphone in the market say it's not going to be next year So the market is never, ever, ever done deciding. And even if Bitcoin Cash were to wind up being the top cryptocurrency, that's not forever, right?

And people always used to ask me back in 2011 or 12 or 13, like, well, what if something better than Bitcoin comes along? And I always told them, I hope something better than Bitcoin does come along because then we all get to use it, right? It's a good thing if something better than Bitcoin Cash comes along. If something better than Bitcoin Cash comes along, we all get to use that too. stuff. The more things that are better than what we have today that come along, the better the world is that we want as many better and new things to come along as we possibly can, because that's how the world progresses into a better world. So the one of the last things that I want to talk about is when we get done with this, I'm going to have a million people talk to me. They're

going to say, what is Roger Ver's view of the world? Right. And one, just thank you for spending the time to go through this. I want to do it live so that people could kind of ask the questions and really engage. But also, I think my response to that would be, Roger spent a good number of years of his life promoting Bitcoin. He sees this vision of the future where digital currency ends up creating great things in the world. He made a decision to divest or diversify about 50% of the Bitcoin into Bitcoin Cash. That hasn't gone so well so far from a financial return perspective. But his belief is that at some point in the future, there's going to be a divergence or a loss of interest in Bitcoin and people will move to Bitcoin cash. The current market dynamics, Roger would say, show great adoption for Bitcoin.

But there's a belief that that will change in the future. If I was to categorize it that way, is anything in there inaccurate or do you feel like that's a pretty fair view of the world as to kind of how you see it? I think I need to hire you to be my new spokesperson here, too. Such a fantastic- No, no, no, no, no. I'm staying on the Bitcoin side. So I see all the people asking. I own no Bitcoin cash, that stuff.

But- Why? Let's ask you why. Why don't you diversify? Again, it comes back to when I look at- Peer pressure on Twitter or is it a rational reason? Not at all. It's, look, the fact that we're even having this conversation, right?

There's a bunch of people who are all upset. And you saw the people who get all worked up about it. I generally think kind of three things are really important, right? So when it comes to non-financial, non-technology type stuff, like free speech and lack of censorship, right? I couldn't believe in more. I was a soldier in the United States Army. I went to Iraq, right? So I have a very specific kind of experience in life that most people don't have. But in recent light of a lot of the social unrest in the United States, one of the things that has absolutely blown my mind is we're a country that hangs its hat on free speech, but it seems every day, like we're

moving more towards a world where it's an encouragement of free speech. If you say the things I agree with, which is such a big problem, that's not free speech. Right. And so I've, you know, I've aired my grievances about this all over the place and basically said, you know, the testing of free speech happens most when somebody is saying something you disagree with. So it was important for me to have this conversation mainly because I thought a lot of people thought that we shouldn't have the conversation, right? And so that was kind of one key piece of it. The other thing is, I've made, you know, we've invested over $100 million in early stage companies over the last four years, back to all kinds of companies, both in

kind of the crypto space and a bunch more that are not in the crypto space. And the one thing that I think when I look at objectively, I say, I understand both arguments. I personally believe even have a very deep conviction in the idea that the market adoption ends up buying time for the technology to be built versus technology leading to the market adoption leading to the winning, right? And so is there a possibility that that's the wrong assessment? Of course, right? You're always possible to be wrong. But the way that I invest, right, is I basically make an analysis, and I'm willing to be very binary in nature, right? So I'm willing to kind of make an assessment.

And it's this belief that like the concentration is actually a better strategy for me personally than diversification, right? So it's kind of like the warm-up. Are you trading Ethereum or any other coins or only Bitcoin? No, nothing else. Yeah. And so again, very rare, I think, in a lot of cases.

Like there's plenty of people who kind of own all this other stuff. But it's not a Bitcoin versus Bitcoin cash. It's literally just a Bitcoin versus everything else thing of like, hey, I've got very deep-seated conviction here, and this is where I think I want to spend my time. And I think the other piece of this, and you hinted at this earlier, and probably one of the number one questions that I get from institutional investors is ultimately the competition, the real battle, right, is I say that the crypto world is going to put forth something to be the global reserve currency. Right now, the market's determined that that thing is Bitcoin. And it's

going to have to compete on a monetary policy level with fiat currencies whatever the thing ends up being put forward like that's going to be the really big battle and so it's funny to me that there's so much divisiveness and fighting and all this kind of stuff in the crypto world because i think people forget that the battle between a deflationary asset and an inflationary asset like that's a that's a big deal right like that that's no walk in the park and so um i think that that coming at some point i don't know if that's two years away 10 years away 20 years away you know whenever it is but but i think that that's the other thing i always kind of keep my eye on the prize a little bit of like ultimately that's going to be the thing that determines

way more than pretty much any other debate that goes on in uh in kind of the crypto industry yeah that would be my biggest sadness if if what winds up playing out here is that rather than the entire world winding up using a hard money asset with a limited supply uh they all just wind up using you know digital dollars on the blockchain and the federal reserve can print more digital dollars in time they want and it seems like it could possibly head in that direction to me and that that would be really sad i will have a slightly better improved version of the dollar but uh nowhere near as good of a version of money for the world that we could have had if we had uh played our cards a bit better absolutely um listen thank you so much

for doing this i think that um hopefully you got some value out of this and i can already see from people's responses that uh they got a ton of value out of just understanding and not only one that of work you did on the early days of Bitcoin, but kind of how you see the world today. Obviously, I think we've got some divergence of opinion, but I'm happy that you and I can have kind of a very rational conversation just about what is happening right now. And so hopefully as this continues, we'll be able to do it again in the future. Thank you. If you like Pom's content and his channel, subscribe, share the video on social media, tell a friend, set them up with any cryptocurrency wallet you want, send them a little bit, show them how it works. We're going

Spread the whole world as fast as we can. It doesn't matter which cryptocurrency it is. Use the one you like the most and go out and tell a friend. Now Roger's going to get accused of being a pomp shill on Twitter. You're not going to be able to win, man. I'm pumping the pomp. So go out and spread this message here because we want as many people to be aware of the infrastructure and ecosystem as we possibly can.

And pomp is one of the best messengers the space has out there. I've listened to lots of your interviews and when you talk about the problems, I'm nodding my head the whole time. And it's just like, what's the solution to get to the world that we want to be in? And we have slightly different strategies, but the end target seems to be almost identical there. Awesome, man. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you too. See you next time.