The Pomp Podcast - #575 Edan Yago Explains DeFi on Bitcoin

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

Edan Yago is a neuroscientist and entrepreneur who dropped everything nine years ago to focus on Bitcoin. He is driven by the opportunity to create a new, open economic system that empowers individual...s globally. He has been pivotal in establishing the recently-launched Sovryn protocol, a decentralized bitcoin trading and lending platform, one of the first Bitcoin-native DeFi platforms. In this conversation, we discuss bitcoin defi, layer 1 scalability, smart contract platforms, altcoins vs tokens, Rootstock, merge mining, Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and bitcoin’s future.  ======================= Remote makes it easy for companies of all sizes to employ global teams. We take care of international payroll, benefits, taxes, and local compliance, so you can focus on growing your business. Sign up for Remote today and receive 50% off your first employee for the first three months. Check out remote.com/pomp and enter promo code POMP to get started. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp =======================

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 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. Now let's kick this thing off. Eden Yago is a neuroscientist and entrepreneur who dropped everything nine years ago to focus on Bitcoin. He is driven by the opportunity to create a new open economic system that empowers individuals globally. He has been pivotal in establishing the recently launched Sovereign Protocol, a decentralized Bitcoin trading and lending platform, and one of the first Bitcoin-native DeFi platforms. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin DeFi, Layer 1 scalability, smart contract platforms, altcoins versus tokens, rootstock, merge mining, Ethereum,
Starting point is 00:00:43 Binance Smart Chain, and Bitcoin's future. I really enjoyed this conversation with Eden, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk of our sponsors. First up is Remote. Remote allows you to employ people in other countries legally and easily. They take care of international payroll, employee benefits, tax headaches, and all the paperwork for local compliance. Forget about location and hire the best person for every open role using Remote. Remote's platform is easy to use for full-time employees, contractors, and your HR team. Whether you're a major corporation or a small startup, Remote has the tools and resources to help you at a price you can afford.
Starting point is 00:01:26 Even better, listeners get a special deal. Sign up for Remote today and receive 50% off your first employee for the first three months. Check out remote.com slash pomp and enter promo code pomp to get started. Again, remote.com slash pomp and enter promo code pomp to get started. Next up is BlockFi. BlockFi provides financial products for crypto investors. Products include a high yield interest account, a US dollar loan product against your crypto collateral,
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Starting point is 00:02:18 I'm an investor in the business. I'm a very happy user and I think you will be too. Go to blockfi.com slash pomp. Last but not least are my friends at Choice. Choice is rebuilding the way you approach retirement, which starts with making it simple to include Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in your savings. More than 20,000 Bitcoiners, myself included, have already signed up to start investing. Whether we are talking about crypto or stocks, Choice lets you trade real Bitcoin and Amazon in the same place, all without paying a dime in capital gains taxes. And if you want to hold your own keys all the way to the moon, you can do that too.
Starting point is 00:02:50 Either way, Choice is on a mission to give you full control over your retirement savings. So head on over to retirewithchoice.com slash pomp. Again, retirewithchoice.com slash pomp and sign up for an account today. And one more thing, you know how I feel about this, but if you have a pro that manages your money, don't take any of their BS. Choice has tools for them too. Take back control today and visit retirewithchoice.com slash pomp. retirewithchoice.com slash Pomp. All right, let's get into this episode with Edan. I hope that you
Starting point is 00:03:21 enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Yago here with me.
Starting point is 00:03:53 Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for having me. You're fresh off the plane. We are ready to rock and roll. 100%. All right. Everyone is talking about DeFi on Bitcoin. I tweeted something.
Starting point is 00:04:06 Everyone comes with the pitchforks. They think I'm an idiot, which means they think you're an idiot too. So let's just start with what the hell is DeFi on Bitcoin? Well, you know, I mean, I think I am probably you as well are most comfortable in the situation where everyone thinks we're an idiot because that probably means we're onto something. True. So look, you've got this monetary tool, right? This new monetary asset, Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:04:31 It's by far the biggest crypto assets, but it's more than that. I think if you look at the entire expense of any asset in the world, right? gold dollars rubles doesn't matter what you're looking at bitcoin has the highest likelihood of all of them to be the global reserve currency in 10 to 15 years true so then the question is all right what is a world where you have this digital reserve currency bitcoin look like and what you want is you want to have a financial system that is as transparent and as incorruptible as the monetary asset itself, right? We don't want to just change money.
Starting point is 00:05:10 We want to change the ways we use money. And that's what DeFi for Bitcoin is. And that's why everyone thinks it's a huge deal because if it happens and it's happening, it changes not just money, it changes all of finance and economics. Okay. I want to go back in history for a second.
Starting point is 00:05:26 I'm going to give a very overgeneralized version of how we get to where we are today. You correct me or disagree as we go. Bitcoin is created. It's amazing. Everyone loves it. They start to adopt it that knows about it and feels that it has value. At some point along that journey, people say, I want to do things with it. I want to build on top of it. It's hard to do, if not, not possible to do at the time. Instead of waiting to figure out how to do that or waiting for the development of a layer two, some people went and
Starting point is 00:05:58 built a new platform, Ethereum, which had composability, smart contracts, all these aspects that deliver value to the Ethereum ecosystem. Since then, there's been more and more smart contract platforms built, but basically there was a new way of thinking about this. Many of those early people thought that they would be able to scale a smart contract platform on a layer one. Fast forward to today, I think most people realize, wait a second, And the general consensus would be, we can't actually scale these on layer one. We're going to have to scale on layer two. There's now a lot of work, Matic, et cetera, that are going and doing this.
Starting point is 00:06:33 So if you look at the two ecosystems, we have Bitcoin, a truly decentralized digital open protocol, and you have Ethereum that's proof of work today, transitioning to proof of stake at the layer one. And then they've got kind of layer two, Bitcoin's got layer two as well. When you look at those two systems, most people believe that all of DeFi is going to get built on Ethereum. most people have written off that no DeFi is going to be built on Bitcoin. This is like the ultimate market setup where everyone, in my opinion, I think yours as well,
Starting point is 00:07:05 is overvaluing one side of that equation and completely ignoring it, not even just undervaluing, just completely ignoring the other side of the equation of DeFi on Bitcoin. Right. Does all of that seem to make sense? Is that all pretty accurate, you think? Yeah, I think that makes sense. know there's this theory that um blockchains have network effects and i don't think they do i don't think the bitcoin blockchain has a network effect i don't think the ethereum blockchain has a network effect i don't think any blockchain has a network effect why because who cares like nobody
Starting point is 00:07:38 says to themselves i really want to use the bitcoin blockchain nobody says to themselves i really want to use well very few people say to themselves i really want to use the ethereum blockchain right what people want is the features that the technology provides so we have gotten confused because it's true that the bitcoin blockchain has a network it has a network but it isn't the network itself it's not what's capturing the network value where the network value is captured is in the asset now up until now that wasn't obvious and the reason it wasn't obvious was because everything was working on layer one and every time someone wanted to launch a new technology a new app a new anything they basically went and created a new layer one for
Starting point is 00:08:23 right so ripple wanted to build i don't know for banks they created their own layer one uh ethereum wanted to create smart contracts they created their own layer one teslas wanted to have a thing where you have governance they created their own layer one right everyone was going creating their own layer one but um that was a mistake it was a mistake for two reasons first of all what we're seeing now is that layer ones do not scale you cannot put a huge amount of functionality onto a layer one and expect it to scale and beyond that that coming back to what i was saying earlier where the network effect is not in the blockchain it's in the assets so bitcoin is a powerful network. It has a powerful network effect because it is the network of people who want to have a
Starting point is 00:09:11 store of value. They want to have access to the reserve currency of the future. There are other assets which have powerful network effects. Tether has a powerful network effect. It's the leading bridge to the fiat world. And as a result, it has the deepest liquidity. It's on the most exchanges. It has the most pairs. Now, Tether is a perfect example of what the future looks like. Tether started on Bitcoin, on a Bitcoin layer called Omni. It then migrated to Ethereum. Today, the vast majority of Tether is on Tron, right? Tether doesn't care. And in fact, Bitcoin doesn't care either. When you take your Bitcoin and start using Bitcoin on Lightning Network, you're effectively using a secondary network. When you use Bitcoin on a sidechain like Rootstock, you're
Starting point is 00:10:00 using it on a secondary chain, right? A totally different network, but you maintain the same network effect and the same access to the network effect because it's the asset, which is the network. The actual underlying technology. So if we look at the Ethereum ecosystem, because they were smart enough to not name the asset in the network, the same thing, right? So in the Ethereum world, you have Ether, the asset, Ethereum, the blockchain itself. The argument you're making is that Ether has the network effect, not Ethereum, the actual blockchain. Okay. So it's not entirely true that there's zero network effect. There's some degree of network effect, but it's diminishing over time. So the reason Ethereum has a network effect is because of the composability, right? So I create a financial application, you create a DApp, right? Your financial DApp uses mine and mine uses like Maker or whatever. And so it's very convenient for us to be on the same chain until you get to 2021.
Starting point is 00:11:02 And what happens in 2021 is suddenly we realize that there's a huge amount of use of these chains. They cannot scale. And so what starts to happen is people start looking at layer two technologies. And real quick to interrupt you, what Ethereum is going through in 2021 is essentially what Bitcoin went through in 2017, right? Which was so many people were trying to use the layer one, fees skyrocket, you get tons of mempool just being backed up, you can't actually get transactions through in any sort of timely fashion. And therefore, the Bitcoin community said, hey, we really got to invest in scalability layer two. And there's this kind of big thing. Ethereum now was trying to scale layer one, they now have experiences. There's obviously fees skyrocketing and a lot of backup on the actual transactions of the chain, because people are trying to use it, right? But they can't use it because the layer one doesn't scale. And so now they're being forced to go and pursue all sorts of different scaling solutions. Some will work, some won't, whatever.
Starting point is 00:12:02 But that's where really they're kind of learning their lesson because they experience the pain. Now they go and they try to build the layer two. Right. So they're both encountering the same problem because they've both finally, you know, in 2017, Bitcoin reached a degree of scale where it encountered the problem. Now Ethereum has reached a degree of scale where it's encountering a problem. but they're reacting in different ways okay explain all right so what happened to bitcoin is bitcoin went through a civil war and what it decided to do and i think this is an extremely temporary thing but it changed the narrative for a while what bitcoin basically decided to do was
Starting point is 00:12:36 reject um computationally intense use cases not increase this the the the the size of blocks and make sure that the holy of holies right the fact that the chain would remain the same that it would always be reliable and that the store of value would always be based on a highly reliable system would not be touched. High security, high decentralization, not so worried about layer one scalability or what's the latest innovation, bells and whistles, et cetera. Just pure security and decentralization was a direct trade-off with everything else, but that was an intentional trade-off. That's right. Ethereum is making a different trade-off. They are both also going to end up in a fairly similar place what ethereum is doing is ethereum is fragmenting so um you've
Starting point is 00:13:23 got arbitrum which is a new layer one launched uh two days ago you've got matic have launched a side chain which doesn't even use ethereum um as its base currency you've got xdai which also uses a proof of stake consensus mechanism not ethereum's consensus mechanism and then you have all of the other EVM chains like Binance Smart Chain, right? All of them are absorbing huge amounts of users and flow from Ethereum. And what we're seeing is more and more dApps are migrating to one or more of these different chains. And so the composability that provided this network effect... It's breaking.
Starting point is 00:14:07 It's breaking. Which means that it wasn't a true network effect. I think it was a temporary network effect, right? You can have a temporary network effect. But you can have dependence without having a true network effect. Right, so you each depend on each other, and there is some value or efficiency that is gained from that. But ultimately, a true network effect would be nearly impossible to break
Starting point is 00:14:29 if it had actually taken hold. Well, I think that's interesting, right? So if you think about the difference between, say, Facebook and Ethereum, right? Facebook never encountered this problem because it's not like when Facebook reached 10 million users, its servers stopped working. So it has a true network effect. And I think Ethereum did have a true network effect.
Starting point is 00:14:49 It's just that that network effect itself could not scale. Okay, interesting. Now that network effect is not going to disappear entirely. I don't think Ethereum is going to disappear. I think Ether is going to continue to have value in the future, right? I agree with that. But the trajectory is not what people are anticipating right now. What people should be paying attention to is that there has been a complete change in the trajectory of where Ethereum is going.
Starting point is 00:15:15 And that's going to change. It's going to impact everything. It's going to impact how the wallets operate. It's going to impact how users interact. Every explorer is going to now need to be a multi-chain explorer. We are entering a multi-chain world. And that is part of the reason why, going back to the earlier story of what happened to Bitcoin, bitcoin is waking up and coming back into this game i want to stay on the ethereum thread for
Starting point is 00:15:43 a second yeah i think it's really important for people to understand this ethereum has from the beginning pursued a narrative around technological superiority in specific use cases or specific functionality so smart contracts composability all this stuff what we're now seeing is people have taken what I would consider a pretty revolutionary technological change that Ethereum originally started with. And the evolutionary iterations on that are showing to be more technologically superior. So faster block times, better throughput, lower cost fees, all this stuff. Now there are trade-offs, right? So for example, NFT is on Ethereum. All of a sudden Dapper Labs comes around and says, Hey, we can't do it here. We need a specific chain
Starting point is 00:16:32 built for this, they build flow, right? You see Matic say, well, is it a layer two? Is it a side chain? Forget nomenclature for a second. Just, it doesn't work here. We're going to build somewhat on top of, or kind of leveraging some of the Ethereum actual technology, but we're not going to use Ether as that asset, as you described. You then start to see Binance Smart Chain, trade-off. Okay. Faster block time, way more efficient, much lower fees, two times the transaction volume, right? Almost immediately. And it's very hard to argue that developers aren't moving to go use this stuff, but it's more centralized, right? And so every single one of these decisions is a technical trade-off. You're trying to accomplish X, but you're giving
Starting point is 00:17:15 up or getting a worse version of Y. Who wins is almost irrelevant to the structural change that you're identifying which is there is an all-out war on the smart contract platform side of who can build the most technologically superior system yeah that is a very different conversation than the bitcoin system right bitcoin simply just says we're going to be the most decentralized we're going to be the most secure period yeah we're not going to compete on throughput on layer one we're not going to compete on fees all that other stuff is the trade-off right we're going to give up all that we're going to say we're not good at that stuff but we are the most decentralized we are the most secure. These other platforms, chains, side chains, et cetera, they're all saying we're
Starting point is 00:17:58 going to give up on the decentralization. Not fully, but we're going to compromise some of the decentralization or some of the security. Well, they don't say that. Some of them would claim that they're not making that trade-off, right? But I disagree. So I don't think we've actually seen... This is the incredible thing about Bitcoin, right? It was such a fundamental shift paradigmatically in technology we actually haven't seen a true innovation since it right we've seen different trade-offs we've seen different considerations you know ethereum it doesn't have nodes which anyone can run in the same way that anyone can run a bitcoin node right proof of stake systems do not have the same kind of physical uh assurances around you know decentralization and
Starting point is 00:18:43 security that proof of work systems have they have maybe other properties but we haven't seen sort of a zero trade-off uh um uh improvement right cars have clearly gotten better over the last 50 years right like they're in every way no blockchain has gotten better in every way over the last 10 years the thing that i think when i talk about this to people who aren't super deep in the weeds like you or i are as i simply say bitcoiners are pursuing decentralization at layer one over everything else and the rest of folks are pursuing something else over pure decentralization yeah that doesn't mean either one's good or bad it doesn't mean that one wins and the other loses or zero some game it just means that they're fundamentally optimizing for something completely
Starting point is 00:19:33 different what becomes interesting for our conversation today is if you are going to then get scalability at the layer two, what happens is, well, what occurs if we both have the same functionality on layer two, but I'm tied into a more secure chain and actually have the same throughput, the same fee schedule, et cetera, at layer two as you do, then why would I use your layer one tied in if it's less secure, less decentralized, et cetera, if I can do the exact same thing with the same functionality on top of Bitcoin? Right. And I think this goes to the very heart of what many people misunderstand about what's going on with crypto right i don't think that it is a new computer technology right bitcoin is a new asset um and the and it and it uses
Starting point is 00:20:21 technology in order to generate that asset but it's not competing on features it's competing to be the best money out there and so when you have projects that are competing on features you just need to look at what technology companies look like right every 10 years you have a different new leader right but money doesn't work that way and if it were to work that way it would stop being money so that's why it's imperative that bitcoin not try to compete in features because that would be misunderstanding what the game is then now so that brings us to where we are now So now we've got this world where you've got a huge amount of features that have been built. Ethereum and the Ethereum community, the Ethereum developers, have funded and built out phenomenal technologies.
Starting point is 00:21:15 They're not new blockchain technologies. They're phenomenal cryptographic technologies. They're phenomenal decentralized application technologies. But anyone can use them. And that is really one of the incredible gifts of what Ethereum has provided to the world. And beyond that, because of the fracturing of Ethereum, not only that, but the entire ecosystem is reconfiguring itself to be chain agnostic. And then in the middle of that, the very center of gravity of this entire ecosystem is Bitcoin and the Bitcoin chain.
Starting point is 00:21:52 Before you go there, is it fair claim to say that the inevitable end game, when you get fracturing of smart contract platforms and you get a multi-chain world, that there is a constant pursuit of the highest throughput, lowest fees, kind of most efficient blockchains? And therefore, it may take years and years and years, but you incrementally continue to get more and more centralization because it brings more efficiency. And so therefore, you end up back with a centralized system. I'm very scared that that's a possible trajectory. you're scared that it is possible yes well like you think it is likely and that is scary to you very yes like the whole reason i'm in this is because i want to avoid that outcome so i agree that that is already writing on the wall with the way this is going doesn't mean that we have to go down that path it could be reversed it could change but that is where this ends up as people
Starting point is 00:22:45 do it a perfect example is ethereum and binance smart chain if i want faster throughput i want faster block times if i want lower fees what do i do i just bring more centralization at least the more efficiency right yeah with that said and this is a key piece to it is it then brings to the forefront is it more important to have the efficiency on the technological front and to have the throughput and the low fees or is it more important to have the decentralization and this is ultimately when you pit the smart contract platforms versus bitcoin right as just the comparison this is where you see the difference right and so explain now what has changed in the bitcoin ecosystem that is now empowering smart contracts defy on bitcoin all
Starting point is 00:23:28 the things that a decade ago everyone thought wasn't possible now seems to be being built and so what's changed there it's really interesting that you say a decade ago right because if you think about it a decade ago the conversation in bitcoin was any technological advance that could benefit bitcoin will simply be adopted by bitcoin and in 2014 a paper was written uh which described this thing called side chains and side chains basically was a description of exactly how this was going to happen what a side chain is is it's a chain remember i said the network effect isn't in the chain it's in the asset it's a chain which shares the security of bitcoin right and actually there is an additional network effect which is proof of work right so bitcoin has by far the
Starting point is 00:24:16 biggest by far by far the most um hashing power securing strongest computer network in the world that is a network effect right so if you can piggyback on bitcoin proof of work and on the bitcoin asset but have a separate chain which can have its own rules its own features then you can effectively expand the capabilities of Bitcoin to do anything. One of the things that I want to make sure people understand, and it's not super technical, but I think it's an important point, is in a block of transactions, approximately every 10 minutes, there is a certain number of transactions that fit into that block. One of the big debates previously was, should we increase the size of the block so more transactions can go in, or should we keep it the same? We kept
Starting point is 00:25:02 did the same. But what is important to understand is if you almost think about it as an Excel file, right, just for easy kind of visualization, and each cell on the row or on the column down was a different transaction. Inside of that one single transaction or input into the ledger can actually represent hundreds, thousands, millions of other transactions that are happening on a layer two or on a side chain. And so even though the block size does not change, what ends up happening is the scalability comes from being able to do all these transactions on a layer two on a side chain, and then simply writing into a single block one transaction. And so what ultimately we're talking about here is you get the security and the decentralization of Bitcoin's
Starting point is 00:25:49 layer one, but you're able to now exponentially increase the amount of transactions and economic value that gets put into a per block basis, which ultimately could swallow the entire financial system if we wanted it to, without having to change block sizes or kind of the core structure of that Bitcoin blockchain. That's right. Correct? Yeah. Okay.
Starting point is 00:26:13 So we actually already see this happening. And we see this happening on Ethereum with technology which has been developed called rollups. And we see it happening on Bitcoin with technology that's called Lightning Network. Okay. both of them yeah describe ethereum roll-ups all right so what happens in a roll-up is and there's a number of ways of constructing a roll-up but so i'll just talk about this on a high level conception but basically what happens in a roll-up is you have the base chain l1 layer one and you
Starting point is 00:26:41 know you can't stuff everything into it and so what you do is you take the computation for transactions and you move them to a separate chain and now you do all of you you and and and You can basically treat this chain very badly, right? You can have it be pretty centralized. You can have it be high throughput. You can give up most of the assurances that you would want, and you don't care. And the reason you don't care is because you have this high throughput on the layer 2, on the roll-up. But for it to be approved, right, for any transaction to be approved,
Starting point is 00:27:17 it needs to be aggregated with a whole bunch of other transactions and then introduced as a confirmed transaction on layer one and that means that the security is coming from layer one but the scalability is coming from layer two right so you separate those two things and so you get the same l1 security but you get also l2 scalability so um bitcoin basically does something the exact same thing with lightning network right and uses a different way of of approaching this but basically both of them are attempting to do the same thing and now we have bitcoin sidechain technology which is allowing you to basically combine the best of both worlds so you can take smart contracts you can take scalability and you
Starting point is 00:28:10 can take bitcoin security and put them all together into the tastiest you know decentralized pie you could possibly make explain the sovereign platform and kind of how it technically works where the security comes from how does the scalability where the transactions come from etc right so bitcoin is built on a um bitcoin site sorry sovereign is built on a bitcoin side chain technology called rootstock and what rootstock does is it merge mines a chain so that you know bitcoin miners they basically discover a new block on average every 10 minutes but to do that they create huge numbers of hashes which don't discover a block so what you do with merge mining is you say all right we're going to allow you in that process to discover blocks on this
Starting point is 00:29:07 chain as well with some of the hashes that weren't discovering bitcoin blocks so you're doing the same thing you're getting the same uh security you don't need to bootstrap an entirely new proof of work system you just basically piggyback on that security that bitcoin already has so you have a side chain you can move your bitcoin to the side chain because it's the base asset on that side chain and and that is what the rootstock technology does right rootstock does an additional thing Rootstock also is EVM compatible. So what's EVM compatible? It's the same technology that Ethereum uses for generating smart contracts also works on Rootstock, right?
Starting point is 00:29:48 So if you think about what Rootstock provides, it's all the functionality of Ethereum merged with Bitcoin as the base asset. So you don't need a new token and the security of Bitcoin. So when you use Rootstock, you said Bitcoin is the core asset or kind of the native asset to Rootstock, but you get the functionality of Ethereum. Right. On a very simplistic way, to use Ethereum, you need Ether to pay gas fees, etc. Do you also use Ether in this sidechain? No. So you use Bitcoin to pay gas fees, right?
Starting point is 00:30:30 So when you are interacting with a smart contract, you need to pay for that interaction. Basically, it's a transaction fee and you pay this in Bitcoin. And so there's a parsimony here, right? Because the vast majority of crypto asset value is in Bitcoin. It's inconvenient to have to have a new asset every time you want to transact. And so when you're making transactions with Bitcoin, one of the things that sovereign and rootstock provides is the ability to just pay the gas fees in bitcoin itself and what's cool about it is that where does that bitcoin go it goes to the
Starting point is 00:31:06 bitcoin miners so it actually expands not just the capabilities of bitcoin but the security assurances of bitcoin as well when somebody uses the sovereign platform what can they do So Sovereign started out as an idea just about a year ago and has drawn so much attention and so many developers have started working on it that in the last year it has become by far the most feature-rich DeFi platform anywhere in the world. It's got Bitcoin backed stablecoins, so you can now create dollars without... basically compete with the fed right you've got bitcoin you can issue dollars um which are not issued by the fed and are more secure than dollars in the bank right it's got lending and borrowing
Starting point is 00:31:58 so you can lend your record and earn yield in it and um some new features are going to be coming out that i know some people are working on which is probably going to make it the number one place to earn yield in bitcoin anywhere in the world you can also borrow bitcoin so you can go long bitcoin and one of the ways that you can do this is within another feature which is margin trading so you can take long or short positions you can also spot trade so you can trade between usd stable coins bitcoin ethereum and bitcoin um and that's where it is now so that's decentralized lending decentralized borrowing decentralized exchange right all the um in the if we compare it to the smart contract platforms each one of those exists right and some of them take like a uniswap
Starting point is 00:32:46 is actually very very popular right but it is uniswap is a decentralized exchange it doesn't have decentralized borrowing lending all that other stuff right there's another uh you know decentralized application or decentralized financial application that has decentralized lending decentralized borrowing right all the way through so when you look at the ecosystem in general there is all of this functionality you just have to swap in and out of either different assets or go to different platforms all that kind of stuff that's right here and that made sense in a world of composability right yes yeah here you have a single platform that uses the same base asset where all of it is on that one platform decentralized exchanges lending borrowing etc
Starting point is 00:33:31 right when you think about this if you continue to be successful what would the argument be for people to use the other platforms would they be more efficient lower cost more decentralized or actually would everyone just stay and use the most secure chain with the base asset the largest base asset and then just do all the decentralized lending you know borrowing exchanging etc all on that one platform the The reason I got excited about Sovereign is because I think that there's a very strong chance that it is basically the financial protocol of the future, like the financial operating system of the future.
Starting point is 00:34:19 I don't know that we need more than one reserve currency. I don't know that we need more than one financial operating system. But what I do know is that if we were to have both of these things, it makes a lot of sense that they would be linked together right so you know i i when i was first introduced to sovereign i was excited because i want to earn yield on my bitcoin i um never want to use centralized exchanges but what's become more apparent to me over time as the project has grown and sort of as a result sort of it's become more clear how big of a thing this is is that everything could be replaced uh the banks could be replaced the hedge funds could be replaced the the the payments
Starting point is 00:35:09 companies could be replaced by what is effectively a open transparent and incorruptible financial operating system which is as borderless and as uncensorable um as uh as crypto will allow um and that it we i don't think sovereign itself is going to be everything right um already we're seeing protocols that are building around the sovereign ecosystem but sovereign as a platform you can the reason i say os is think about like your your your mac right your mac provides you with the basic functions of an operating system right you can boot up the computer you can um you know install software but in addition to that it also offers you some of the basic key applications it gives you a browser it gives you a word processor right
Starting point is 00:36:01 but a lot of people build for that ecosystem and and um and i think it makes sense for sort of like the application layer of bitcoin to be the same thing you have the basic financial primitives things like borrowing lending and core derivatives that are provided by the core sovereign protocol And then a huge amount of innovation that you can think of like specific verticals, which are provided by other applications. When you think through the comparisons here between the various systems, I've always used the framework of Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency. Almost all of the infrastructure around Bitcoin has been centralized up until recently, right? That's right. centralized exchanges lending all this kind of stuff that's about 50 of the way there right
Starting point is 00:36:56 decentralized digital money good centralized exchanges and infrastructure that's not exactly the promise of a fully decentralized system but one best we had to allow people to do what they needed to do but they there was counterparty risk in the ethereum ecosystem and other smart contract platforms the assets are not decentralized but the infrastructure is decentralized right and when you especially look at things like sound money and all this stuff right you get into like a very weird world where it's obviously different than bitcoin but the infrastructure is decentralized and i've always thought that if you take the decentralized digital money of bitcoin and you take the decentralized infrastructure that is on these other smart contract platforms
Starting point is 00:37:41 you put them together you vertically integrate them yeah winner like that is the home run winner what people have debated for a while now is does that mean you take bitcoin and you bring it into the smart contract ecosystems so wrapped bitcoin and other things like it right and there's to varying degrees of success people have tried to do this or does that mean you bring the decentralized infrastructure to bitcoin right historically up until you know i don't know last two years or so People just thought you couldn't build the decentralized infrastructure type of Bitcoin. That's right. But now with Rootstock and a couple of other variations of sidechains or second layers, it's possible.
Starting point is 00:38:19 But it's not only possible, it's actually happening. And people are starting to go and do this. And there's hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars of total value locked in these systems. And so the question then becomes, if the entire premise for the smart contract platforms was to get off of the Bitcoin layer one because you needed composability, smart contract functionality, and you needed higher throughput and lower fees, but now you have smart contract functionality, composability, higher throughput, and lower fees on the Bitcoin system, what happens to the rest of the systems? or is it they still coexist and they still have some value but ultimately the majority of the value accrues to the base asset or the native asset uh or kind of native reserve currency of the internet is bitcoin and the vertically integrated decentralized infrastructure or is it actually no it's all just interoperable and so i'm going to go from bitcoin to ether to
Starting point is 00:39:17 name your next asset i'm going to use all sorts of different decentralized infrastructure and it's like a full multi-chain world where i actually don't care what the layer one is because i'm just seeking highest yield most throughput lowest fees look i there's there's so many people who have so many tokens that they really love that i don't want to break their hearts but the fact of the matter is that the reason people call these things altcoins or shit coins is because for the most part look satoshi invented bitcoin he hasn't touched one of his bitcoin but he created new better money and then other people looked at this and they were like wait i can just make money i want to do that like i don't want to have a nine to five job i just want to go
Starting point is 00:40:16 fork bitcoin and then say i have a new coin and then i go to a conference and i say hey did you hear about my new money oh you've got a new money too well why don't we exchange some of your money for my money and then you know like just skip the middleman of work and go straight to making the money right and but they needed to be able to justify that somehow so to justify it they needed to say well look there's all of these things that bitcoin can't do and we're going to make a coin that can do these things that bitcoin can't do and so they went and they created xrp and litecoin and you know a whole coin market capitalists of 2000 different coins um and yeah i think probably most of them are totally useless
Starting point is 00:40:59 now some of them will continue to retain value because they will find use for example i think ethereum is never going to go away i think it has i agree with that it has created a huge amount of value and um it is the king of utility coins right But I don't, but like I was saying, I think the trajectory that people are expecting is not the trajectory they're going to get. A lot of other things are pretty much going to disappear. Like Shibu Inu, you know, no one's going to be talking about it in a year, right? And some of them will just take longer. And most of them aren't going to go to zero, in my opinion.
Starting point is 00:41:39 I don't know about yours. I mean, they're all going to remain somewhere, some kind of weird collectible from a very, very strange time when the world went insane because everyone thought they could make their own currency. And other people were willing to buy it, right? But at the end of the day, we do have network effects. Money is the mother of all network effects that has ever existed. Finance and liquidity are massive network effects. And they have a center of gravity.
Starting point is 00:42:08 And that center of gravity right now, and probably, and this is why I say the most likely asset of all the assets you look at in the world today, is probably bitcoin oh it's inevitable at this point i don't think it's inevitable i don't think anything's inevitable i don't think we get to be that um complacent i i agree in the sense of nothing is actually guaranteed but i think that from barring some external catastrophic event the trajectory of the asset in comparison to all of the legacy currencies that also have a potential to rise to global reserve status it's i mean it's like not even in the same realm of possibility so i i have a very contrarian view
Starting point is 00:42:55 in sort of bitcoin land around this okay my contrarian view is that we're not nearly at that level of certainty okay why um look at the internet all right the internet was going to be freedom for everyone it was going to be free information for everyone it was going to mean that no on the internet nobody knows you're a dog right and for its first years it was this ideal place that you could go you could have civil conversations with anyone you could meet you know it was totally up to everyone it was choose your own adventure for the entire world And what ended up happening was it ended up centralizing around the FAANGs, Google, Facebook, etc. And that's because the incentive structure wasn't right and because people got greedy.
Starting point is 00:43:46 Ethereum, I think, can be extremely successful. And I don't think that we should discount like an option of the flippening happening. and the reason is that ethereum one of the things it's about to do is move to proof of stake now in a proof of stake system it's like the the short term seems so great right you just you've got this coin and and you you you you lock it up and you get more coins right imagine you could take bitcoin and lock it up and just get more bitcoin right so people look at like bitcoin oh it's very It's like Puritan, and it's solid, and it's conservative. But Ethereum, I can get more Ethereum, right?
Starting point is 00:44:32 And so on a retail level, you could see people shifting to Ethereum. And on an institutional level, you could see people looking at this and saying, this is something I can manipulate. And therefore, I'm going to encourage it. Because I can end up like a baron of proof of stake. and so i don't want the exchanges be the barons of proof of exactly what makes more sense for binance and for you know coinbase and kraken who have who are going to become like coinbase is a publicly traded company now right and it's going to have the pressures of a publicly traded company
Starting point is 00:45:08 right and they they they can make a lot of money by getting a lot of people to give them their ethereum and stake and then they can tell people listen if you convert your bitcoin to ethereum you can make even more money because coinbase can make even more money that way right so i don't think there's an inevitability here i think it's really really up to us that's why i think the work that you're doing is so important it's why the work that i do is important to me and why i think everyone who is in this space needs to be paying attention because there is nothing inevitable in my mind about how this i think i think it's the most likely but we have to be extremely careful And I also think that's why DeFi for Bitcoin is so important, because even if Bitcoin wins as the monetary asset, you could still see all of the financial rails totally co-opted.
Starting point is 00:45:53 More regulation, the large organization, I mean, Kraken's becoming a bank, right? And they're like one of the most pro-Bitcoin exchanges out there, but you can't trust anyone. That's the whole point of all of this, right? Don't trust. So, yeah, I know that was a bit of a tangent. When you talked earlier, you said there is altcoins, shitcoins, etc. I think a lot of people struggle to understand the difference between what I think you would categorize as Bitcoin, altcoins, and then tokens, right?
Starting point is 00:46:30 You guys have SOV, which is a token. Explain maybe first what SOV's role or responsibility is within the sovereign system, and then describe the difference between a token and altcoin and bitcoin in your opinion maybe i'll do that in the reverse order okay so i think pretty much every single bitcoiner knows that tether even though it's money right is not competing with bitcoin and why do they know that because they because tether isn't trying to be sound money right uh it has no argument that it's sound money it's literally like a a somewhat risky version of the dollar right but it has extreme utility it can be used for various things um so that's the difference between
Starting point is 00:47:20 a coin as i see it right bitcoin is a coin which is effectively trying to be a reserve currency a store of value, as well as a medium of exchange, right? And a medium of account, right? You get all three of those, you got the Holy Trinity. Tether's not trying to do that. Now, that's the difference between a coin and a token. Now, you can have other types of tokens. There's NFTs, non-fungible tokens.
Starting point is 00:47:51 Non-fungible tokens are clearly not trying to be money. Now, maybe they are useful, maybe they aren't, but you know they're definitely not trying to be a competitor to bitcoin so bitcoin is a cryptocurrency meaning it's decentralized it's sound money has very specific properties that's right and uh as of right now it is the leading cryptocurrency that's right and you're making a difference between a cryptocurrency having to be decentralized and having to be sound money tether while acting as a currency it's more of like this like digital currency almost to some degree where it is simply used for store value medium of exchange but it's not
Starting point is 00:48:29 decentralized it's not sound money right and the other hand it's a trying to go for something else the trade-off right but die for example which is a different stable coin I think actually is pretty decentralized but it's also a token right and in fact there's a system with two tokens one which is die which is like the stable coin and one which is MKR which is kind of like a futuristic version of equity of shares right because um the the the maker dow system earns fees and it pays those fees out um effectively indirectly but it pays those fees out um to the mkr holders right now if you think about a world right which goes through hyper bitcoinization right bitcoin is the
Starting point is 00:49:17 central monetary asset but you have like this entire decentralized financial system that's around it you're going to want tokens to represent all of the different financial assets commodities like gold equities futuristic equities like mkr the ability to buy and sell property everything right and we're going to discover all kinds of new ways of interacting and constructing these things because not only do we have programmable money we have programmable finance so this brings me to sov right so what is sov sov is the um the risk and coordination token of sovereign it's kind of like a um you know if if if uh a monkey is um equity uh and then then a human being would be you know whatever comes after equity right so it's kind of like the human being it's the next level i
Starting point is 00:50:17 I think, of where equity could go if it becomes programmatic. So it's not equity, but it provides some of the functions and many functions that equity doesn't provide for the sovereign protocol. So the sovereign protocol needs to be able to evolve rapidly, much more rapidly than Bitcoin. Why? Because it's not trying to be money, never changing like a law of nature.
Starting point is 00:50:42 It's trying to be finance, which is highly dynamic and introduces all kinds of risks. so those risks need to be managed features need to be developed and so you need an ability to coordinate uh around how to evolve the system that's one way that sov is used and that and and and it does that by creating incentives for people to think very very long term so basically what you do is you take your sov you lock it up and you earn all of the fees that the that the um protocol generates with the exception of the fees that go to the bitcoin miners um they and they get distributed on the basis of how long you you've locked up right so the longer
Starting point is 00:51:22 you're locking up the more you you will earn so i and a whole bunch of folks that i brought together along with folks who had approached you we built the syndicate we bought nine million dollars in change of these sov tokens and what we are doing is we basically come into the system and we say in exchange for the capital that we've given to the project, we're going to leave these tokens here. And essentially we get, let's say I own 1% of the tokens, which I don't, but let's just say I did. I would get 1% of all the fees.
Starting point is 00:51:55 So you make $100 in fees, I get 1% of the $100 in a generalized manner. And that continues to happen. No. Okay. Because this is one of the cool ways in which it's so much better than equity because it's programmable.
Starting point is 00:52:11 right? So first of all, just by passively, if you just passively hold a Tesla share or, you know, let's talk about a company that provides a dividend at Walmart, right? You just passively hold a Walmart share, you get money, right? If you just passively hold SOV, you don't. You need to actively participate in the system, right? So it's sort of like an access pass into participating and having influence over the system and then um you signal to the system i'm going to think about the system long term by locking yourself up for a longer period of time and you and then you you you get a better a greater earn out right and and this is just one aspect of of what you do with sov but it helps demonstrate how this is different and i think very very
Starting point is 00:53:00 exciting because what it actually means is that we now have these financial asset classes which are not cryptocurrencies but they're also global they're also borderless and most importantly they're not protected or they don't rely on a court system of a particular country of Delaware or London they rely for their security on bitcoin miners and cryptographic property assurances are so much better than legal property assurances there's another key difference between sov and sort of like an altcoin you never need to use it as a user to use sovereign so you can go into sovereign be totally unaware of sov so long as you have bitcoin you can pay transaction fees uh you know lend earn yield do everything you want in the same way that you can drive a tesla car
Starting point is 00:53:52 right without ever knowing about tesla or you can rent a house without ever knowing about mortgages right these are two totally different things and i think the recognition the realization that you don't need to build everything on layer one also frees you up to say all right not everything needs to be a coin when somebody does this and they're holding those sv tokens and they've locked them up right and they're earning a percentage of uh the fees what is the incentive for them from a participation standpoint right is it voting on new features is it looking at proposals describe when you talk about active participation what exactly does that mean yeah so the um butocracy which is what the sovereign governance system is
Starting point is 00:54:48 called. It's not fully developed and is continuing to evolve. It has a very, very high level of participation. There's over four and a half thousand people who have locked up S&P. And there's over 60% participation in almost every single vote, of which there are several a month, right? I saw this firsthand, so just pause for a second. When I wanted to make the investment, i wrote up with help from others a investment proposal it's pretty lengthy you know pages yeah i then put it forward into this bitocracy uh system how many people on the discord 20,000 people or something whatever the number is some big number they all have a lot of opinions as they should they care about the system there's tons of feedback flying around questions all this
Starting point is 00:55:42 kind of stuff at one point we scheduled a call uh i'd never done a phone call on discord before mass chaos uh it's like 900 people i think on a saturday morning got on this call and i'm on the call and they're asking questions everything from super sophisticated to frankly just hey you know thanks so much for your interest and you know it's gonna be cool to work together and then it went to a vote and it passed with i don't know 99 or whatever the percentage of approval was and only then was there actually an investment made right that is 180 degree difference than me calling up a founder saying hey i like your business i want to invest what are the terms okay i'm in let me sign a wire right and only the ceo or the ceo and the board having the decision over
Starting point is 00:56:28 the entire company that kind of feels like the future think about it from the perspective of sovereign user right you don't want to be involved in any of this but you want to use sovereign but you know that there's four and a half thousand extremely rabidly active people who are examining everything all the time debating it you know like like the craziest like it's governance by you know a deeply incentivized reddit subreddit like the kind of people on wall street bets who discover like this these crazy investments that no one else would find this is what the sovereign community is except that it knows how to weight people towards not being extremely short-term minded but being long-term minded it's a huge innovation in social scalability right like the ability to
Starting point is 00:57:17 have so many people who basically have your back i think is phenomenal and you don't need to know any of them they don't know each other either so to me that is you know when people i you know i was earlier talking about bitcoin as being a monetary revolution but money itself is a is a social scalability consensus tool right like there are other very very big social consensus tools that have been invented over the course of history religion for example right like the catholic face has over a billion adherents right but money has over seven billion adherents there's basically no one who isn't an adherent of money it's the most powerful social network that's ever invented that was ever invented and now using the tools that were invented to create that degree of
Starting point is 00:58:09 scalability for a new type of digital money we're also able to start creating new ways of thinking about what is like do we even need corporations anymore right i don't think we do the reason the corporation was invented was because there needed to be a way of providing monetary incentives for a large number of people to come together around a project like you know uh farming in louisiana or building a bridge right um but now we have dows and i think as bitcoiners one of the things that i don't like about a lot of sort of twitter bitcoin is that there's a very strong streak of of almost self-imposed ignorance they're not interested in anything that's happening outside of the bitcoin ecosystem and i get why right like shit coins are fucking annoying i don't know if
Starting point is 00:59:03 i'm allowed to say that but but um but there is a lot of well-meaning people very very intelligent developers who are building really really cool stuff and one of the reasons it's happening outside of bitcoin is because there are tokens which aren't currencies but are being used to incentivize all kinds of other activities and so one of the things that sovereign has done which i think is really cool is it said look let's think about this from first principles we want to use bitcoin security we expect the financial world to be built around the reserve asset which is going to be bitcoin and we also want to be able to incentivize the growth of a community and fund the development so among other things that's also a good reason to have a token and as a result
Starting point is 00:59:47 sovereign is growing at a phenomenal pace right just in terms of the amount of developer like Ross, I was going to ask you, explain some of the numbers behind the growth so far. I mean, there's about as many core developers in Sovereign as there are in Bitcoin Core right now, already. There's over a billion dollars in value that is being managed by the Sovereign system. There's four and a half thousand people who are actively participating in this new sort of decentralized governance system. There's the most feature-rich DeFi platform anywhere in the world. And all of this has happened over the course of the last year, right? Something really phenomenal is happening.
Starting point is 01:00:32 I haven't seen this level of excitement. I've only seen this level of excitement twice before. When Bitcoin was launched, right? Or at least when I started to become aware of Bitcoin, which was when the first early adopters started becoming aware, and when Ethereum was launched. And, yeah, I think the crazy thing about sovereign, right? Like the SME token, for example, isn't traded anywhere yet.
Starting point is 01:01:01 It's not traded on exchanges. It's not traded on Uniswap. It's, you know, it trades purely on the sovereign protocol. It has days where it exceeds $15 million in transactional volume, right? That's crazy. And it's about to go on to Uniswap. If it's about to go on to all of these exchanges, you know, what is about to happen? I think it's going to be probably the biggest story in the coming years of crypto.
Starting point is 01:01:34 I'm betting on it. I continue to say it. The most mispriced opportunity in all of the crypto industry is DeFi on Bitcoin. Yeah, I agree. It doesn't mean that it's winner take all. doesn't mean it's a zero-sum game it just means that if you put DeFi on Bitcoin compared to let's say DeFi and other smart contract platforms the smart contract platform DeFi is likely overvalued and the DeFi on Bitcoin is likely undervalued and it's merely because people wrote it all
Starting point is 01:02:05 and here is one of the last things I'm going to leave you with and I got three questions and you're going to ask me one to finish up. In 1999 and 2000, every single idea that ended up being successful on the internet was tried. Streaming music, file sharing, food delivery, subscription businesses, all of it. Put a .com on the end, raise tons of money,
Starting point is 01:02:33 launch your product, cross your fingers and hope you can IPO, take the cash and run. before people realized it wasn't ready yet right the ecosystem the technology the user experience the customer adoption the psychological understanding of what was happening the smartphones right all of this stuff was not in a place where those ideas time had come fast forward 10 to 15 years to 2010 to 2015 food sharing or i'm sorry uh uh ride sharing food delivery streaming music file sharing all that stuff now is here sometimes the ideas take a decade to actually hit because you need adoption you need user experience you need
Starting point is 01:03:31 psychological understanding you need developers infrastructure all that stuff my bet with sovereign is that just like if you had taken the ideas from 1999 and 2000 and continued to reinvest in them over and over and over again for the next 15 years you eventually invested in the most valuable companies in the world that if you go back and you look at 2009 10 11 and 12 you look at all those ideas and you invest in them now, most of them are being, we're targeting at being built on top of Bitcoin. And we start looking at them now. They're going to be some of the most valuable products, companies, projects, et cetera, moving forward. Sovereign is building a fully decentralized, vertically integrated financial system, financial platform with what I believe,
Starting point is 01:04:23 and i think you believe is going to be the next global reserve currency if it is the next global reserve currency and sovereign continues to build great technology that has great user experience and does all the things you need for product market fit etc it is likely that we will continue to see more and more migration of users some from other smart contract platforms some from bitcoin who just now realize they can use their bitcoin and some who literally come to use those products and then happen to buy Bitcoin to use within the system. But if that occurs, my guess is 12 to 24 months from now, we're talking about Sovereign
Starting point is 01:05:00 as one of the largest DeFi platforms in the world. I think that's likely. I think it's very likely. Today, with a billion dollars plus managed by the system, top 25 DeFi product? Yeah, I mean, it's... Somewhere in there. I mean, it really depends how you measure it.
Starting point is 01:05:21 But, like, I actually don't think that sort of TVL is the right measure. I think you probably rather want to be looking at transactional activity. Okay. But, you know, yes, it's definitely already, you know, in the top tens and growing probably more rapidly than almost any other one. But also, not only is it growing faster, i don't think it has the same glass ceiling that the others do right i think it i don't think that there's that limit first of all the bitcoin the pool of liquidity it accesses with bitcoin
Starting point is 01:05:56 is vastly greater but beyond that like you know sovereign has for the last year or so mostly been building out basic infrastructure and users who are using server now have started to notice a change that things are starting to come much much much more quickly and the reason is a lot of that basic infrastructure has been built. And so now what's getting built out are the features, which is why it rapidly went from just another protocol to the most feature-rich protocol in DeFi. And so, you know, all right, but now what comes next is what's crazy. Because what comes next is things that nobody has. There's a team, there's at least one team that I'm involved with, which is working on providing a new way of providing global mortgages, right? There's a team
Starting point is 01:06:45 working on on crypto pensions which could be provided to people who have who would like to have like more higher more highly assured pensions right so right now your pension is assured by the government which we already said like legal assurances are not as good as cryptographic assurances so there's work around that um soon there's a team which is almost done working on a way for you to get zero interest loans on your bitcoin this is gonna be huge right like you've got bitcoin you can go to blockfi today and you can pay in you know some kind of interest rate take on the counterparty risk of blockfi and pay you know some fairly expensive rate in order to borrow on against your bitcoin so you don't have to sell your bitcoin sovereign is going to have
Starting point is 01:07:31 zero interest zero counterparty risk uh liquidity for you on your bitcoin there's um margin trading with bitcoin against like for example ethereum which is about to come there's a team working on perpetual swaps the most popular protocol in uh in defy and they are working with people from the working with the people who invented it from from bitmex on this stuff like the amount of stuff that is about to come to sovereign like i don't know if it's going to be i think you're going to start over the next few weeks already seeing some of this stuff but like the pipeline of stuff that people are building for sovereign just doesn't end it's it's um i think it's i think no one is ready for what's for what sovereign i am all right three questions and we're gonna finish up sure
Starting point is 01:08:19 first most important book you've ever read all right well given the conversation we're having today i'm gonna suggest the sovereign individual that's a layup all right second question uh sleep schedule our friends at eight sleep uh i've got a thermoregulated bed i turn it super cold i sleep like a baby used to sleep five or six hours now i sleep seven or eight uh absolute game changer uh what is your sleep schedule today and how has that changed over the years all fucked up um i uh now that i'm on america time what i tend to do is wake up around 3 30 a.m or 4 a.m work for a few hours and go back to sleep so that i can be in touch with people from like asia and europe and then um do some more work and then sort of try and leave evenings open um this is working okay
Starting point is 01:09:08 but i wouldn't say it's a lifestyle that that is highly sustainable um yeah sleep's a challenge um but then again it always is in a bull market get your need to sleep come on let's go get your need sleep all right third question aliens believer or non-believer i think there's huh all right let's talk about alien intelligences for just a moment i think they're here and we made them and what do i mean by this i actually think that you can think of um government as an alien intelligence you can think of corporations as an alien intelligence you can think about um the financial system as an alien intelligence what do i mean by that every single bee has a brain right but it the hive makes collective decisions, which often are not even to the good of the particular bee, they are
Starting point is 01:09:59 detrimental to the specific bees, right? Human beings have created these ways of working. Let's talk about a government for a second. A government has desires, it has motivations, it has intentions, right? And it has an intelligence. But that is not the intelligence of any one of the single human beings that is in the system, right? Trump was not deciding what the United States would be doing and Biden isn't deciding right now.
Starting point is 01:10:30 It's something else. It's an alien intelligence. And I don't think it's a particularly friendly one. So do aliens come from outer space? Maybe. But I think the bigger thing that we're not paying attention to is that we in our collective action
Starting point is 01:10:48 do create alien intelligence and very often this alien intelligence is hostile to us. Which is why, coming back to our conversation, why having better ways of decentralized coordination where anyone can also opt out is so important. Decentralization is obviously a better system. All right, you can ask me one question. What do you got for me?
Starting point is 01:11:13 um what for you has been the uh yeah i i think i i'm really interested what got you so into this into bitcoin yeah freedom but like where did that come from like my whole life uh i mean i was in the army right yeah which is exactly no i mean like my point is like people like i was also in the military right typically the people who are most interested in individual freedom don't end up in the military it's not a great place for individual freedom right yes but at the same time i think that they believe in the ability to liberate and they believe in some semblance of ethics principles and collective freedom that drives individual freedom so you can't have individual freedom
Starting point is 01:12:06 if you don't have collective freedom, right? If you're in a communist country, I don't care what you say, you don't have individual freedom. You have to have democracy. You have to have capitalism. You have to have these kind of core principles in order to then empower that individual freedom.
Starting point is 01:12:23 I have a very unique perspective on the world because military deployments, I've traveled a lot. I understand economics, went to school for it. Uh, I've been at a number of technology companies, I've built companies, I've done a bunch of investing. Like I've done a lot of weird, uncorrelated, non-connected things in my life.
Starting point is 01:12:45 The single most important issue that we all face is that 50 plus percent of the citizenry across the world is being systematically put into poverty. Yeah. Full stop. Yeah. That is what is happening. and the absolute biggest scam is the monetary manipulation that goes on that drives the bottom 50% of people into poverty because they don't understand that the dollar is being devalued or
Starting point is 01:13:19 their local currency is being devalued you will not educate them all it is nearly impossible they don't care they want to go to the movies they want to go fucking eat they want to go hang out with their friends whatever i don't want to hear it i got 20 bucks in my pocket i'm good don't talk to me about this economic stuff the only way you can solve that problem is through technology in a peaceful protest of the system and to get that asset into the hands of as many people as you possibly can because it is the only salvation that they have because they will not change their i so agree with you like we've tried to solve human misery and collective action problems using the liberal arts way for the last 3 000 years and had made no progress the only thing that
Starting point is 01:14:05 has ever provided real human progress is technology i said this before people get very upset when i say it but i stand by it the adoption of bitcoin will bring more positive impact to the world than all philanthropic efforts combined a hundred percent degree for exactly the same reason it will solve the one major problem yeah which is the devaluing of the fiat currency puts billions of people further and further into poverty misery precarious positions when you fix the money you fix the world look we've had technologies that have improved all kinds of things and finally we have a technology of freedom that is that is why i think we're living in the most optimistic time ever so i think too where can we send people to find you
Starting point is 01:14:54 on the internet um yeah twitter probably uh at idaniago all right and what about sovereign sovereign either the sovereign so i've built out with some other people a website for sovereign which is um sovereign s-o-v-r-y-n dot app s-o-v-r-y-n dot app that's right or on twitter sovereign btc because that's the way you want your btc to be all right man listen thank you so much for doing this we'll definitely do it again in the future all right man stay sovereign

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