The Pomp Podcast - #694 Bitcoin Can Make You Better with Pete Rizzo

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

Pete Rizzo is Editor at Bitcoin Magazine and Editor-at-Large at Kraken. He previously served as Editor-in-Chief at Coindesk. Pete has spent the last few years documenting the early days of Bitcoin.   In this conversation, we discuss bitcoin, maximalism, toxicity, ETF, and end of year price predictions.  ======================= If you haven’t started building your crypto portfolio on Okcoin, there’s no better time. They’re one of the fastest growing global exchanges around and they have some promotions happening right now to help even more people be part of the future of finance. If you have an account already, you can split $100 in BTC with a friend when you invite them to sign up for Okcoin if they buy $100 of crypto in the first month. The more friends who sign up and buy, the more BTC you get. And I always recommend dollar-cost averaging as a way for investors to have more control over their average price when building their portfolio. Now you can automate dollar-cost averaging with completely fee-free daily, weekly, or monthly recurring buys on Okcoin until November 1. That’s no fees at all on your purchases until the holidays. Get started on the web or on their new super easy-to-use app at okcoin.com/pomp  ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= Cryptocurrencies offer boundless potential, but who will protect yours? Arculus is the crypto cold-storage wallet that combines the world’s strongest security protocols with an easy-to-manage app. Unlike other storage solutions that are less secure and more difficult to use, Arculus doesn’t compromise security or usability. You can store, swap, and send your crypto all with a simple tap of your Arculus Key™ card. And with no cables and no USB connections, you’re insulated from the thousands of hackers online trying to get at all the digital assets people store in the cloud. So that the only person with access to your crypto... is you. Order the safer, simpler, smarter crypto cold storage solution at getarculus.com today.

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. Pete Rizzo is editor at Bitcoin Magazine and editor-at-large at Kraken. He previously served as editor-in-chief at Coindesk. Pete has spent the last few years documenting the early days of Bitcoin as well. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin, maximalism, toxicity, ETF, and the end-of-year price prediction that will blow you away. I really enjoyed this conversation with Pete, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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over their average price when building their portfolio. Now you can automate dollar-cost averaging with completely fee-free daily, weekly, or monthly recurring buys on OKCoin until November 1st. That's no fees at all on your purchases until the holidays. Get started on the web or on their new super easy-to-use app at okcoin.com slash POM. Again, no fees on all recurring buys until November 1st. Go to okcoin.com slash POM today. okcoin.com slash POM.

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arculus doesn't compromise security or usability you can store swap and send your crypto all with a simple tap of your arculus key card and with no cables and no usb connections you're insulated from thousands of hackers online trying to get at all the digital assets people store in the cloud so that the only person with access to your crypto is you you can order the safer simpler smarter crypto storage solution at get arculus.com today again get arculus.com today or go click on the link in the description. All right, let's get in this episode with Pete. I hope you guys enjoy this one. 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. Pete, what's up, man? How are you? Doing great, man. It's a great day for Bitcoin. Great day to be out there talking about it. Absolutely. Let's just start with kind of what you do on a day-to-day basis. So you're the editor at Bitcoin Magazine. Explain kind of what your day-to-day is like and what you're focused on. Yeah, sure. Editor at Bitcoin Magazine, editor-at-large at Kraken Cryptocurrency Exchange, and in my spare time, do a lot of sort of historical archiving or looks at Bitcoin as a

sort of historical invention. So I guess a lot of my time is spent talking to people, digging deep into the more philosophical questions about what Bitcoin is, where it's going. You can find me on Twitter spaces, a lot of that stuff. But yeah, otherwise, just trying to understand the mystery of Bitcoin is my day to day. And so what's really interesting is you used to be at other publications, right? And now you've basically gone from literally your job was to kind of focus on everything to Bitcoin only, Explain what that journey was like and kind of what really focused you in on Bitcoin and had you thinking like, hey, this is where I want to spend my time. Yeah, for sure. That's a great question. I'll just be super honest. Right.

You know, when I joined, you know, the cryptocurrency ecosystem as a journalist. Right. So I started in 2013. You know, I was coming from someone who just wanted to be a journalist. Right. I didn't have a background in cryptography, didn't have a background in economics. I was somebody who was, you know, trying to write for a living. Right. Uh, no harm in that, but that's how that was my entrance. Right. And I just found Bitcoin fascinating. I thought it was a great story. The stories that I were writing were, uh, were interested and, you know, found myself in the right place, right time was part of the founding team over at CoinDesk helped steal that business to be, you know, the largest, uh, you know,

online platform for news, uh, at the time. And, um, you know, I think that was great for me in my career, but really, I think, um, you know, if you're thinking about my transition, you know, over time, I began to basically realize that, you know, I held a prominent position where my work and decisions reflected on Bitcoin. They reflected on how people perceived Bitcoin. That made me the target of certain types of attacks that I'm sure we'll dig into in this episode from people who felt my work was misleading and educating people about what was happening about Bitcoin. And, you know, as someone who was, you know, felt like they were doing a good job on a day-to-day basis, I mean, obviously I felt like they were wrong. And I harbored a lot of sort of

negative conceptions about that. But over time, I began to look at my work more critically. And, You know, I think I began to agree with these people. Right. I think to a large extent, you know, like many people who professionally focus on Bitcoin. Right. I wasn't, you know, maybe initially here to focus on the subject and maybe my work wasn't providing a large benefit to Bitcoin or the world. Right. So I had to take a hard look at that and, you know, make decisions to align myself and what I was doing with things that I thought were more aligned with Bitcoin. And so when you think about Bitcoin today, like if you just meet somebody on the street and they kind of talk to you about it, what are the parts that either one you think are kind of most valuable or the most interesting as new people are looking at it? Yeah, sure. I think one of the biggest things is, right, people are often coming to Bitcoin just thinking of it as a speculative asset, right? It's often framed as an investment. And really, I just try to wipe that slate clean. I think where I try to come in with a conversation is Bitcoin is an invention. I thought a lot about what it means for something to be invented, right? You're literally invalidating some previous law of the world.

You think about flight being invented every moment of human history prior to the Wright Brothers flying above North Carolina. It was a scientific fact that man had never achieved flight. And then thereafter, you know, human beings can fly and we fly all the time, right? We take it for granted. So I try to frame Bitcoin as this, right? An invalidated this law of the world where prior to Bitcoin, we really needed a government or a large institution to help us operate a monetary system.

And then thereafter, Bitcoin, we live in a time where that is no longer true. We can rely on this technology to, you know, create and mediate a neutral monetary system that has a lot of benefits, you know, compared to the other systems that have been there historically. You know, so I try to start people with that really, which is like, you know, cleanse the palate, you know, to take a reference from cooking and say, you know, forget the misconceptions that you might have and get rid of the lens. I think a lot of people, you know, they're coming to Bitcoin and their first impression is coin market cap or Masari or something like that.

It's a big list of coins and numbers and ticker symbol. And it's just totally devoid of context, right? It's really hard to learn in that environment. So I always like to start at the 10,000th of view of, you know, forget what you knew previously and get ready to learn something new. So I find you absolutely fascinating. And I really enjoy talking to you every time we've talked before, because, uh, I think you and I agree on, uh, like the end results and part of what, uh, I don't think we disagree. I think there's just like nuance to how we get from where we are to that end result, which, uh, ultimately you, you know, I like the, you and I are both rational enough to say like, Hey, I don't know exactly what's going to happen, but like, here's

where it kind of like, I think the world is going and how it's playing out. One of the things that, uh, is one of those nuances that's fascinating to me is you talk about, you're either aligned with Bitcoin or you're not, or your actions are aligned with Bitcoin or you're, or they're not, but there's no such thing as Bitcoiners. And so, you know, I saw you tweet this recently and I was like, man, that's like pretty interesting. Like explain that a little bit more as how there's no Bitcoiners, but like your actions could be aligned with Bitcoin or not. Yeah. I think it's an interesting lens to it. Right. A lot of people immediately think that if you can be a Bitcoiner, right, like you can somehow represent this as a technology. But I think that's not really a good

way to look at it, right? As people, we ultimately just don't have that much of an impact on Bitcoin, right? It is this neutral monetary system that operates sort of outside of us. So I think when I say, you know, your actions either align to Bitcoin or they're not, what I'm trying to say is that, you know, I think people look at it as a binary perspective. Oh, this person isn't a Bitcoiner because he said something that we don't like, or, oh, this person isn't a Bitcoiner because he supports these other things that aren't Bitcoin. And I like to look at my life a little bit differently. I try my best to align my work with Bitcoin. I try to make sure that what I'm doing has a positive impact. But I'm not a Bitcoiner in every sense of the word. I'm going

to go to the grocery store. I'm spending US dollars. I'm not furthering the Bitcoin economy in that moment. So I'm not aligned with Bitcoin in that moment as a philosophical movement that is attempting to make change in the world. Does that make me a bad person? No. It's like at that moment, I'm not aligned with Bitcoin. And I think it's a more nuanced perspective, because I think we're both sort of arguing about and talking about is this tendency for people to who are really involved in Bitcoin to sort of claim some ownership of it and use that as a way to sort of, you know, attack or target other people to try to kind of, you know, I guess, bring them to the Bitcoin side. Right. So I guess it's just a different perspective for me. Right. I wasn't

someone who was initially a Bitcoiner. I was a journalist. I was someone who was, you know, essentially paid to be quote unquote objective about what was happening with the Bitcoin market. You know, but over time, you know, I just felt that, you know, that was misaligned and it didn't really, and I don't really even know today whether it's your, it's best to describe me as a Bitcoiner, right. I'm someone who simply tries to align as much of my work and human time as possible with Bitcoin, but there are limits to that.

And if you have some idealistic standard, you know, for what a Bitcoiner is, I might not live up to that. And, and maybe that's okay. Right. Like maybe there's a good discussion to be had about how we're both perceiving what is good for Bitcoin. And that's maybe a healthier way to look at it. Yeah. What's fascinating about this is it's almost like if you take every single action you have

throughout the day and you were literally to score them on like good for Bitcoin, bad for Bitcoin agnostic, a person who is in the Bitcoin community would be trying to optimize for as many of those actions to be good for Bitcoin as possible. but it would be nearly impossible to actually get 100%. And so in some way, people are trying to categorize, like, what do you have to have, 80% of the actions, 50% of the, like, what is the cutoff for Bitcoin or not Bitcoin?

But I do like this idea of essentially how many of the actions on a daily basis are aligned with the asset, with the community, with the network. And if you think of it that way, you really are the sum of all those individual decisions. So you start to almost try to change your behavior in a way that increases the total number of decisions that are aligned with Bitcoin.

Right. And I think that's all you can do at the end of the day. Right. So I think when people have problems with, quote unquote, Bitcoin toxicity or the way that Bitcoiners behave online, it's oftentimes that they really feel that people are just putting forward an impossible standard. Right. That nobody could possibly live up to being the sort of ideal Bitcoiner. And I think it's a it's an interesting lens to look at it. Right. Like who is the ideal Bitcoiner? Is it someone who's saving Bitcoin all the time and never spending anything? Is it someone who's trying to further their Bitcoin network by actually spending it and actually advancing the economy in some way? So I think it's a way to look at it, just acknowledging, as you said,

the human limits of it and also divorcing yourself from feeling like your whole personality or identity is derived from being a Bitcoiner, right? There's many other things that I'm sure interest you as a human being and every listener here that make you, you. Right. And I think that, you know, we sort of have this like for us, against us sort of binary. You're either a Bitcoin or you're not. And I don't really think that's healthy yet, because I think the better discussion is what does it mean to be a Bitcoiner? Right. So I think when people argue about Bitcoin toxicity or the state of the Bitcoin conversation, I don't really know if they're arguing about any of those things, particularly they're often arguing about, you know, other tangential things such as,

you know, um, are we, you know, is our, is how our online behavior, like encouraging to people, is it, are we promoting an idea of what it means to build on Bitcoin? And I find like those questions are much more interesting than sort of, Oh, is this person a Bitcoin or a real Bitcoiner? Um, I don't know. I think we would probably both agree to start there as saying like, like there's, there's definitely impossible standard. And I don't know who the perfect Bitcoiner is. Is it Michael Saylor? Is he the perfect Bitcoiner? Uh, some Bitcoiners would disagree. So I prefer to look at it as you're aligned with Bitcoin or you're not. And I think you should try to ask yourself if you are aligned with Bitcoin and then make decisions against that

way. And we could talk about why that's a good lens. And why I think it's a helpful lens is you are really in Bitcoin. What we're trying to do is build a better financial system for the world. And if you think that is a worthy ethical cause, then I think it's worth applying that lens to your own life. Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating when you think of it also as a way to change behavior, right? Like it's almost kind of you, you, you, you move what you measure, right? If you think of kind of like building a company. And so if you measure the metrics, those are likely the ones that you're going to end up moving. Same thing here is if you're actually measuring, hey, how many actions today that I take that are aligned with the Bitcoin kind of ethos or with

the movement, you're much more likely to increase that number over time because you're thinking about it uh one of the things that we we were uh uh messaging about earlier today and i apologize this is my public apology we were messaging and he told me that you were on a run and then you made me feel bad because you said uh i don't want to get hit by a car i said oh i'm gonna stop messaging you yeah trying to trying to maintain that uh bear market physique during a bull market i love it uh but but you have this tweet it said i'm in bitcoin because of toxic maximalist toxicity in general or in action uh i'm sorry toxicity is action against complacency action against agnosticism action against those who protect the status quo how you react is on you

now again this is like the perfect example where i think you and i both we meet at the end and we say okay the the action of standing up the action of saying something the action of uh constantly pushing back against the status quo or against people who are doing something that we disagree with is probably the most important thing in all of bitcoin the way to do it right some of it is what and i'm gonna use toxic toxic maximalism because i think most people just ultimately think of like hey this is something right uh it's the behavior online it's the way that you kind of are constantly going over the top and attacking and etc versus more of like maybe let's call it like a statesman approach where you can actually have the conversation with somebody uh and you can

be firm, but you don't necessarily have to be kind of abrasive or overly kind of arrogant or toxic or whatever term you want to use there. So walk me through kind of how you think about the idea of toxic maximalism and like, where is the place for it in your eyes? Yeah, I think for me, again, it helps to start with a definition. So for me, toxic maximalism, it's really, you know, it's people who are, you know, I think if you view them with some empathy, they're trying to be agents of change, right? They're trying to, you know, and I really framed this tweet of trying to say, you know, they're attacking people who support the status quo. I think that's important because for a long time, you know, when I was speaking about my public position as a journalist,

I didn't really realize that the actions that I was taking were in some ways defending the status quo, right? So, and I think the end of the tweet that you pointed out, right, is how you react is on you. You know, what I was really trying to say there is that, you know, you can choose to react with people who are abrasive with empathy, right? So I think what I learned from people who are toxic maximalists, and again, I don't think I would even describe myself that way. I would just say that I learned a lot from people like that because they took a very uncompromising view towards Bitcoin. They took a very long-term perspective on the technology and they were willing at any point when I made, you know, some sort of mistake or like advocated for something,

you know, they were very uncompromising in how they dealt with me, right? And they never really changed, right. And that was, for me, just a completely new perspective, because I think I was often, you know, dealing with people who were taking a very business type lens to the cryptocurrency industry. So I think you can think about, and I wrote a recent piece in Forbes about this, where I really tried to delineate, okay, what is a Bitcoin maximalist? And who are people who are not Bitcoin maximalists? So I ended up categorizing people who are not Bitcoin maximalists as crypto agnostics, and trying to really delve into what they believe, right. And I think they ultimately believe on some level that essentially all of these cryptocurrencies can be good, can be

useful, and that there's just some way that the market itself, the US dollar market for cryptocurrencies is telling us some useful information about what's going on in this market. And I think when I was writing in such a way where I was talking about what was going on in the broader cryptocurrency market, Bitcoiners were often ruthless in pointing out that by doing that, I was helping support some system that perhaps wasn't aligned with their vision for the future, right? So, and I don't think they were always the best at expressing this. But ultimately, I think I've come to realize that really what they were expressing is that, you know, there's a division between Bitcoin and crypto. And Bitcoin, Bitcoiners are trying to

build a financial future in which there is an equitable financial system. And their critique of the cryptocurrency ecosystem at large is that in many ways, it exists to continue to propagate, you know the status quo in which you know everything is an investment we have meme stocks we have you know environment of money printing uh and there was another tweet i had about this recently where it was essentially you know in bitcoin no one is a money printer and crypto everyone is a money printer right so there are differences between these ideologies right and i think ultimately um what got me to the place where i could confidently assert uh that i was a bitcoiner is really i i took a while to think about okay what does it mean to be neutral to

cryptocurrencies? And am I neutral to cryptocurrencies? And is it good to be neutral to cryptocurrencies? And, you know, the people who were the most toxic in supporting Bitcoin, the people who are the most abrasive and assertive and uncompromising in their view about Bitcoin was were the very people who ultimately ended up helping me figure these things out myself, right? To actually think through this perspective of, okay, I assume as a journalist that all cryptocurrencies are neutral. I don't believe that anymore because ultimately I was convinced by people who were assertive and aggressive and convincing me that that viewpoint was wrong. And I think I would say that I've become sympathetic to their aggression towards me

because without that aggression, I wouldn't have maybe changed, right? Maybe I wouldn't have taken the steps to treat their ideas as seriously. And maybe I would have just gone on, you know, continuing to cover the cryptocurrency world as if it was a market, if all these cryptocurrencies are the same, as if Dogecoin is Ethereum, as is Bitcoin, and all these things are the same, right? So I think that's the way that I would walk through and say, for me, it was getting past this lens of neutrality, delineating between Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, and ultimately coming to the realization that the people who were most stubborn, antagonistic, willing to uncompromisingly argue with me about why I was wrong. You know, some people brand those people toxic. And I would

just say, it's hard to argue that they weren't effective, right? Because they were the people who ultimately, because they were uncompromising, for me, they moved the needle. For me, they changed my mind. And even though, you know, I had to come to that on my own terms, that journey started with being opposed by them, right? There was an equal opposite force. And I think, again, I'm not a toxic Bitcoiner. I think that you don't have to act that way to people. But I would be remiss not to note that this was a very important thing for me in my personal journey. And I think it's a big reason why, you know, Bitcoin has continued to differentiate itself from the larger cryptocurrency world. It's a very hard concept to understand. And a little bit of

aggression, you know, might go a long way. So all of that agreed on, could they have been just as effective by simply being nice to you or do you think that it was necessary for them to you know and i'll use not nice because that can encompass so many different things but like is the effectiveness and that they were uncompromising and persistent and refused to back down uh or is it in the tactics that were employed in terms of uh you know use the overgeneralized terminology they were assholes well i mean look you have to it's tough with behavior right you have to take behavior on a case by case basis. I would say that, you know, certainly it was a phenomenon that I didn't see in other places. Right. So when I saw other cryptocurrencies or cryptocurrency

businesses, you know, you have to remember that a lot of these people, you know, were making decisions from a business perspective. Right. If you're a business, it's better to sell more cryptocurrencies. Right. So I think a lot of the people who were in the business community early on in Bitcoin and who now sort of are crypto agnostic, you know, you can see where the compromises sort of led them. Right. And the compromises led them to supporting Bitcoin. Yes, they support Bitcoin, but they also support this other class of financial innovations that, you know, I would argue are, you know, one, much more experimental to probably a lot more restrictive in terms of the rights they offer users. And then three, you know, perhaps just,

you know speculative investments that that should not be considered on the level of bitcoin right and i think um you know you when i when i think about how i arrived at that framing yes sure could people have been nicer to me um you know i think so but you know if i look at the people in the other cryptocurrency communities you know oftentimes really you know you think about debate structure right you know you kind of start with two ends of the poll right and there's negotiation of something in the middle and i think with bitcoiners who are toxic um really what they're trying to say is that there is what is the middle ground is your middle ground here that we're going to continue the you know fiat status quo and adapt it to the cryptocurrency industry

to me that's my biggest fear about what's going on in the alternative cryptocurrency in space and why in my public writing i've tried to delineate it from bitcoin because i do think that um you know human beings you know you know great we've done a lot of great things but we're also capable of building highly complex systems uh that can have systemic errors that that elude us for for very long time right so i think we have to really ask ourselves and a lot of my public debates recently especially with woody werthermeyer have really been about this if bitcoin is bitcoin if it is this attempt to build a neutral financial system and cryptocurrency is something else it's sort of this crypto fiat system um you know i think we have to understand it right we have to

try to we have to try to figure out what it is and you know if we're talking about hostility and aggression towards an idea maybe that is an idea that is worth being aggressive or hostile to Because we don't really know where that is going. We don't really have a firm understanding, I think, of what even the vision for that system is. And I think at least the toxic Bitcoiners, they have a very clear vision for where Bitcoin leads, I would say, at this point. And to the extent that they're uncompromising in evangelizing for that position, I think that uncompromising nature, you know, while the behavior may err at certain points, it's really trying to get across the point that it's there is no compromise for this vision. Like, what is the what is the compromise to this? There is either a neutral financial system that grows to sort of, you know, encompass the world economy or, you know, there's some version of the status quo where, you know, there are some, you know, new version, new world leaders or new system. Right. That ends up kind of impacting people. So I think you have to look at it from that perspective. Right. So let me let me pitch you a variation of this. The most effective are not toxic. Michael Saylor, not toxic. Jack Dorsey, not toxic. Alex Leishman at River, not toxic. Jack Mollers, not toxic. Right. Senator Lummis, not toxic. Naeem Bukele, not toxic. Now, again, I think each one of those in a variety of different ways are steadfast. They're committed. They don't back down. At times they can have uncomfortable conversations. Right. If you watch Senator Lummis with the Treasury secretary kind of saying, why do you need to look at my bank account, you know, to know about cattle or a couch purchase? So it's not that they're not willing to to not have the uncomfortable conversations. Right. And I think that that's where ultimately it's the standing up, the action, the doing something, the constantly pushing back.

We've seen, you know, Jack Dorsey on multiple occasions say to people, well, actually, it's not Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, it's Bitcoin or it's not crypto, it's Bitcoin. So still remaining steadfast and kind of drawing the line in the sand and not being willing to compromise on either ideals, ethos, beliefs, et cetera. But at the same time, I would make the argument that if you're embracing toxicity, you have a natural limiting ceiling. You can't possibly break into the mainstream. you can't have incredible global impact

because what ultimately it gets is it goes back to simple things, right? It's how to win friends and influence people is you ultimately can't be just an asshole and screw everyone over all the time because here's the best part. You know who's toxic? Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York.

And people were laying in wait and they were waiting to screw him over. They couldn't wait for him to slip up and he had screwed over so many people and stepped on so many people to get there that eventually when he slipped up, they all came with pitchforks for him. And we've seen this over and over and over again.

So I think that like the nuance, my personal view, right, of this is if we take what most people would label as toxic maximalism and we draw a box and we say, what are the principles? What are the ethos? What are we unwilling to compromise on? And we pull that out, that to me is the value.

The wrapper around it is actually, you don't have to yell and scream. you don't have to curse somebody out you can be just as steadfast and in some way i actually think it's more effective right when i wrote the piece yesterday kind of about sun tzu about like the more that you are aggressive towards someone the more they dig their heels in right the less aggressive you are and almost the more uh again like statesman you are and again this is like hilarious that you and i are having this conversation because i've dunked on nine million people on the internet as well but like over time i'm learning this of that's ultimately

where if we look and say like who are the people over the last i don't know 12 months who have probably had the largest kind of inflection point impact a nation state adopted it pretty big deal now some people may say oh it was toxic compared to other presidents but he's not cursing people out he's not yelling and screaming he's not kind of doing that stuff he's definitely dunking on the imf or posting you know memes and stuff like that so like there's like a variation to this but i think that's uh kind of the the thing that i'm spending the most time uh thinking about now here's what i will say i'm willing to change my mind over this as i think about it more and I see more examples and stuff, it just feels like the same things that existed

in the legacy world about just building relationships with people and like the ability to communicate information is going to apply here as well. And if we ultimately want, you know, take the Mark Cuban conversation the other night, if everyone had gone in there, just yelled and screamed and cursed and all this stuff, like all it would have done is further divided everyone. But instead, if you say, hey, look, we disagree on something. Explain to me your point. I'll where you rebut it. Explain to me your point. I'll rebut it. Explain to me why you think this is a big obstacle. I'll give you some data point, whatever. Like you enter into this conversation, which again, you don't have to compromise at all. And I think that's where you and I are like,

that's the common ground between you and I in this view is like the non-compromising perspective is why Bitcoin is where it is. The fact that millions of volunteers on the internet all came together and created this trillion dollar asset by building infrastructure, by writing software, by going ahead and kind of building this global brand, et cetera. That's all of these small actions by individual people added up it's just in some weird way like there's nothing better than winning and smiling while you do it rather than like flicking somebody off while you do it right and i think that's ultimately the the uh my thought at the moment yeah i would say what i would interject in that is is i think a lot of this is also shaped by my understanding of sort

of the historical like periods of bitcoin and the conflicts and then how they were shaped and i think Explain that. Yeah. So let me dive into that a little bit. So, you know, one of the, I think, ongoing questions about the cryptocurrency space is, is it possible or within cryptocurrencies for some minority group to, you know, evade the changes of a majority, right? So I think a lot of people kind of look at Bitcoin as this protocol that ensures rights, right? That you have the rights, when you own Bitcoin, you have the irrevocable right to that money. But these are still sort of complex systems in which it is possible for people to build, you know, political type coalitions and to enforce change on other network users. So I think when you look back at

the sort of history of Bitcoin's progression as a technology, what you find is that, you know, there was this dream that was Bitcoin, and then there was the initial code that was launched, right? And I think one of the kind of big narratives of Bitcoin is, you know, how do we get from this original code base, you know, to this vision, right? And I think if you look at that historical conversation, what sort of emerges is that, you know, just while Bitcoin is, you know, definitionally this neutral monetary system, you know, there are points in which political groups tried to form and force actions on the community, right? And I think, you know, when I look at Bitcoin toxicity, I really see it emerging out of the earlier periods in Bitcoin,

in which the definition of what Bitcoin was and what it was trying to achieve was not as clear. And there were many people who were, you know, of the belief that it was necessary for Bitcoin to change and compromise in ways that ultimately would have been net negative for the protocol. Right. It would have pushed it towards being something that maybe operates more like Ethereum does today than the Bitcoin that we know. Right. And I think what's important to kind of to bring back from that time period and injected in this conversation is that, you know, without that response, without those people who are essentially saying, like, look, Bitcoin gives me autonomy over my money for the first time in human history. I am able to own an asset, to hold that asset. And I don't have to be subject to anyone because I own this asset, right? I think even though that is what Bitcoin achieved, right? And we know and now celebrate that by, you know, sort of holding our own keys, celebrating Bitcoin sovereignty. There were still groups that tried to form and exert, you know, some form of political

authority over those individuals, right? And said, you know, hey, that's great. But, you know, we have this other idea for what Bitcoin should be. Wouldn't it be better if it was for payments? Would it have been better if it became more like Bitcoin Cash and it was, you know, easier on the base layer for you to send Bitcoin payments? So, you know, again, I think that it's easy to say that Bitcoin toxicity, you know, or this idea that you are, you know, you can be acerbic and assertive about your rights in Bitcoin, you know, has qualities that we don't like, right? That maybe people who, you know, express those sort of views act in certain ways we don't like. But I think what you find if you look in the past is without these people who are willing to stand up

to these things, you know, you may have had situations in where Bitcoin was just another money system in which, you know, there was a group of people who could change the monetary supply for whatever reason, right? And this happens in many other cryptocurrencies, right? There's many other cryptocurrencies you can find today that have monetary supplies that are, you know, changeable and they have governance structures that are somewhat opaque and, you know, that's all well people can use them, but that's not Bitcoin. But those things almost came to Bitcoin, right? So I think what you find when you look at Bitcoin toxicity is it's this way, I think where it sort of comes from is this idea that in Bitcoin, you have certain rights, right? And those rights

really should never be infringed upon in the system if Bitcoin is to achieve its goal of being Bitcoin. And so I think because I'm able to look at it through those lens, I'm a little bit more sympathetic, right? I see that, you know, the level to which people have needed to be uncompromising in the past, you know, because there are people who have been in the position like a Michael Saylor who have tried to enact change on the network. They've tried to force things to be different than they are. And, uh, in those situations, um, you know, what you find is that the people who were more uncompromising, you know, had to embrace tactics, um, that, uh, you know, maybe, you know, people find unpalatable. And of course, the argument remains,

maybe these aren't necessary anymore, right? And that's something that's recently been advanced. But again, I would still assert that, you know, one, Bitcoin toxicity has been historically important for Bitcoin, because two, there are always going to be conditions under which Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are potentially, you know, technological systems that could be co-opted in some way, right? You know, we were still quite early in the experiment of Bitcoin. Uh, and this is think is one of the dramas around the ecosystem that's going to play out. I got two of my brothers here with me. They got questions for you. What questions you guys got? Uh, so how's it going, Pete? Thanks for doing this by the way. Um, so mine would be,

I think I saw the other day you had said you had written like 2000 articles on Bitcoin or something like that. So obviously you've spent a bunch of time and done a lot of work, uh, you know, in the industry for a long period of time. So my, my question would be, how has that kind of from when you started, I'm not sure exactly what year it is, but when you started until today, How has the kind of the information that you're sharing been accepted? And how many more people are reading it now? And kind of how has that adoption taken place, not only between retail investors, but also kind of the institutional folks that read it also? Yeah, actually, I mean, obviously, you know, in 2013, you know, I wrote my first article for Coindesk about a local Boston

area, vegetarian restaurants that accepted Bitcoin. So you could imagine that the market for that story was pretty small. And that, you know, if such a thing happened today, it wouldn't be of relevance to the global Bitcoin community. But I think it's important to remember that's how small the ecosystem was back in the day. I often said that in some ways it felt like writing for an early Bitcoin media startup. It was like writing for a local paper that just happened to be global. But I think that in terms of my writing, my writing has definitely skewed a lot more towards trying to be of interest to the people who are deeply trying to understand what Bitcoin is, right? I think if you take a long-term view of Bitcoin, I think we're still early. But

because of that, there are still very serious questions about, you know, how Bitcoin operates as a technology, whether it will be able to achieve its aims. Those are the things that I'm more interested in digging into. So luckily, you know, Forbes, who I write columns for in Bitcoin Magazine, who I do my more historical research for, you know, they're interested in supporting that. And I've sort of moved away from catering to the mainstream business crowd. You know, I know you guys are the best business show, so hello to all the business people out there. But again, you know, what I saw from writing for those companies in which, you know, their target audience was businesses is I thought that they were, you know, moving away from

some of these questions that I thought were important. And, you know, again, focusing on the more speculative investment type, you know, articles about Bitcoin, I'm sure of which there'll be many today about, you know, the first Bitcoin ETF, that this is, you know, some sort of great advance for the industry. um you know again i i sort of felt that that market was oversaturated and you know over time i wanted to uh to work on that less because i didn't feel like the conversations that were happening within those articles you know were terribly meaningful john what questions you got yeah pete thank you for doing this um so you seem like a pretty rational guy some of the bitcoin

maximums they really go off the edge and say look if you're not involved in this um don't want to hear from you where do you see bitcoin going in the next like five ten years on the adoption side of things. Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, we're at a very unique inflection point in Bitcoin history right now. You know, institutions are taking a look at it in a big way for the first time. We have a nation on Earth where you can move there and then Bitcoin is effectively legal tender. I mean, that said, I do feel like, you know, some of the estimates about where we are in Bitcoin's adoption curve are probably a bit overstated. You know, again, I tend to kind of look at it from a view of the longer I've been here, the less I feel like I know and the more that

I feel like I want to know about Bitcoin. And I just see that, you know, I don't see that learning curve accelerating, right? I don't feel like the investors today who are looking at Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency industry necessarily know a lot more than they did in 2017, right? When the conversation was more about cryptocurrencies generally and ICOs. So I think when I look at the industry, I try to look at it of, okay, is the median investor today more sophisticated than they were in the past. And I just, you know, one of the things that I would say is like, I just don't know if that's true, right? Well, Bitcoin has come a long way and the network, you know, has advanced. I think there's a, it's really tempting to equate Bitcoin's price,

you know, with how well understood it is, right? Obviously it's amazing. Bitcoin was originally worth $0 when I was introduced, you know, it's grown to be a $60,000 asset, you know, that's how much one Bitcoin is worth. But that doesn't really tell us much of anything about how well people understand it, how big the network is going to be. Um, and I think people have really kind of, um, put too much importance like on the price of Bitcoin in that respect. Right. Uh, I have, you know, another Forbes article where I talk about that, you know, Bitcoin's price looking increasingly predictable and cyclical, and it's looking more and more like we're headed towards the end of the year where Bitcoin is going to, you know, reparity with all time highs,

you know, make some jump into the, you know, six digits. Uh, and then I think, you know, likely kind of, you know, experience some sort of downturn and sort of, you know, reformation of the cycle. Because again, I just don't think we're at the point where, you know, even if everybody in the world was ready to get on a Bitcoin standard, like the technology of Bitcoin, like isn't quite there, right? It's great that we can support the country of El Salvador. And that's, you know, really amazing technical achievement. But to say that, you know, we're ready for some sort of hyper Bitcoinization moment today, to me seems premature, right? I don't think the technology is ready. I don't think people are ready. And, you know, so the other question about my work,

that's one of the things that I'm increasingly focused on is I think that, you know, when hyper Bitcoinization does occur, I mean, I think it's going to be a really destabilizing moment for a lot of people, right? I don't really feel like the average person has really accepted the extent to which Bitcoin may impact their lives, right? And I think that at that moment, I really worry about, okay, what is that person going to feel like when that occurs? Have we done enough to really explain to them what Bitcoin is and why this transition is good? Or are they going to react to it fearfully, right? Are they going to, and you see this in El Salvador, right? There's massive demonstrations in which the political opposition to the president has, you know,

effectively weaponized Bitcoin as, you know, part of their partisan strategy, right? One political party is pro Bitcoin. So the other political party is against Bitcoin. And so I worry about those things on a larger scale, right? Maybe we just see that play out because there are certain people who are incentivized to be against Bitcoin because they don't understand it because we haven't done enough to evangelize for it. So I think, yeah, those are some of the things that I think about, right? I tend to think that we're sort of earlier in the adoption curve. I tend to discount how much the price really means about adoption. And I guess I tend to worry about a future in which Bitcoin really does take off on a massive scale because I worry whether people are

psychologically ready for that because I think it does mean a big change to just everything in the world. Pete, before I let you go, now that you are Bitcoin-focused, you got a price prediction for the end of the year? You said six figures in there. What do you think is going to happen? Yeah, sure. I'll throw it out there. I think we're going to go above six figures for sure. And I think that that number is going to be a lot larger than most Bitcoiners think it is. I think my personal prediction is that we're going to go probably north of 300. I would say that this is based on my personal opinion that one of the things you see in Bitcoin is when it really goes parabolic, there's no one selling Bitcoin, right? So what is the Bitcoin price? It is a, you know, number that essentially, you know, the market sort of looking for a price at which the marginal seller will return. So I view Bitcoin tops as a sort of social attacks on Bitcoiners. Right. So so for me, like the top is the moment where you're like, man, I have to sell like I have to sell some Bitcoin because, you know, my brothers are going to yell at me. Something's going to happen. You know, I'm going to be sleeping on the couch tonight if I don't sell my Bitcoin.

And so, you know, since most Bitcoiners expect one hundred thousand, I don't think they're selling at that point. Right. So I think the Bitcoin price is going to have to continue going up until some point at which it convinces enough people to to redistribute their Bitcoins. So, yeah, I'm expecting the peak this year to be pretty aggressive. I'm a big believer in cyclical Bitcoin price theory. And, uh, I actually really take the side of thinking that, uh, we want the Bitcoin price to be more cyclical and predictable. I think if Bitcoin, you know, uh, you know, this four year cycle kind of theory, if that breaks down, then I think it may be a little bit less confident in Bitcoin, uh, than I, than I am right now. And do you think that those long-term holders are

just going to hold it until there's some specific price, or do you think that they eventually just say, Hey, 300 K is nuts. This is just keeps going up at vertical and then I got to sell it. yeah i mean i think that that's one of the big questions right so i talked a lot you have dylan leclerc a lot on this program he writes the the deep dive newsletter for bitcoin magazine and you know we go back and forth on this a lot right and my perspective as someone who's been in the industry for a long time is that you know what is the marginal seller if you really believe that bitcoin price you know is defined not by people acquiring bitcoin but people refusing to sell than in a top situation, really what you have is the reemergence of the marginal seller, right?

Someone has to be selling Bitcoin at some point, right? Otherwise, it's just, you know, you kind of are in a parabolic spot. So I think it's, to me, at least this is consistent with what I've seen in the past tops, is the previous tops were essentially the price was so high that they had to convince the long-term hardened Bitcoin hodler to become the marginal seller, right? Somebody has to provide the market with Bitcoin. The Bitcoin price is just a number. It's, it's, it's looking to kind of coax demand out of the market. And it's going to go up until some point where psychologically, uh, you know, we as long-term Bitcoiners break. So I do think it will be the long-term Bitcoiners, you know, who, who maybe start, uh, to think that they can take something

off the table. Right. I think the alternative view is essentially that, oh, that's not going to happen. You know, uh, no one's ever going to sell their Bitcoin. I don't know. I think the Bitcoin price can go high enough to convince you to sell. Look, when I started writing about cryptocurrency, Bitcoin was worth $50. So I think it would go to $1,200. No, I watched it go back to $200. Did I then go to $20,000? No, I didn't think it would do that ever. At this point, my capacity for disbelief in the Bitcoin price is, you know, I think at this point it's, you know, but again, I would, I would actually, you know, argue on the other side of that. I, you know, i think that would be a great thing for the industry like more people will become interested

in bitcoin hopefully but um you know i would caution like how much we've really achieved at that point i uh i love it you you uh you may be more bullish than uh anyone else who brought on the show recently i love it really okay i just dropped uh your twitter account into uh the chat anyone who who just is the number one on your uh on your price predict who has the most lofty prediction lots of people for like the next uh having in a million plus um but probably what was it raul paul i think actually 400 he said 400 but he said it not till the end of q1 or q2 of next year and so yeah by the end of this year he thinks 200k so you're uh all right so you know what i actually because this is recorded i actually i i flipped a little bit and i said 300 but

privately i've been saying 500 because again i think that the number has to be high enough to really wow like you got like like i think again like one of my theories here is that bitcoin tops are psychological attacks on bitcoiners because again we're people who were born in the fiat system right we we are people who are looking at bitcoin and viewing it in us dollars so when i was talking about my recent article about you know sort of bitcoin agnostics right one of the things with the cryptocurrency industry is that you know we're sort of looking at all these dollar symbols and we're trying to derive some meaning from it and i think that most bitcoiners also are guilty of that right so i think you know uh yeah if bitcoin wants to create

a top it's gonna have to convince some of you know you the never sell bitcoin bulls uh to give up some bitcoin so i i think uh i am confident in the bitcoin technology's ability uh to coax sellers back to the market uh and i think that that uh you know the price at which it does so will likely be higher than we can posit currently because it's an attack on us. 500K Bitcoin. A lot of people be freaking out for that one. I just want to be top on your board. Don't worry. You're the top. No problem. You took the entire fort by storm there. Hey, again, I never thought I would see the prices that I saw. And again, I don't... What's different about the time we live in now than them i hear you all right everyone make sure you go follow pete on twitter and uh definitely

pay attention to all the work he's doing you're doing a fantastic job so i appreciate you uh you coming on on short notice here i think people really enjoyed it and uh we will definitely have to do this again as we get closer to 500k bitcoin price by the end of the year awesome man appreciate it guys all right sounds good buddy talk see you soon