The Pomp Podcast - #575 Edan Yago Explains DeFi on Bitcoin
Episode Date: June 7, 2021Edan 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
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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,
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
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retirewithchoice.com slash Pomp. All right, let's get into this episode with Edan. I hope that you
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are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat
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All right, guys.
Bang, bang.
I've got Yago here with me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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,
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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,
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
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
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?
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?
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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,
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
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,
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
