The Pomp Podcast - #746 The Bitcoin Difference w/ Aleks Svetski
Episode Date: December 8, 2021Aleks Svetski is the cofounder and CEO of Amber, a mobile company focused on making exposure to Bitcoin and the new wave of digital assets as simple, low risk, and automated as possible. In this conv...ersation, we discuss bitcoin, dollar cost averaging, El Salvador, NFTs, multi-chain world, and time preference. ======================= 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 ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit compassmining.io to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= Do you want a new job in the bitcoin and crypto industry? You should go apply for hundreds of open roles at http://www.pompcryptojobs.com or sign up for our training program at http://www.pompscryptocourse.com =======================
Transcript
Discussion (0)
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.
Alex Svetsky is the co-founder and CEO of Amber, a mobile company focused on making
exposure to Bitcoin and the new wave of digital assets as simple, low-risk, and automated
as possible. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin, dollar-cost averaging, El Salvador,
NFTs, multi-chain world, and time preference. I really enjoyed this conversation with Alex,
and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, let's talk about our sponsors.
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All right, let's get into this episode.
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.
We've got Alex from Amber who is here in studio.
There he is right there.
Help us understand what you've been working on with Amber first.
Let's start there.
Okay, so we've been rolling out Amber Black,
which is kind of the premium product which uh i don't know if i should say this yet but i'll say
it um we've got the buy the shift button about to be rolled out so so that'll be fun so basically
buy the shift yes like peter schiff basically so okay that's a great way to start the conversation
the way it'll work is you'll go into the app and you'll you'll select um the buy the shift
automation you'll say uh if peter schiff tweets about bitcoin buy me bitcoin um so every time
dude that is all time
it's the best
that is so good
that's how home run is
every time Peter Schiff
tweets about Bitcoin
it'll buy you Bitcoin
so we're gonna have
like a whole army of
stackers basically
accumulating Bitcoin
every time he opens his mouth
I wonder if you went back
and like analyzed
his past tweets
what the performance
would be
people have
you've done well
yeah seriously
that's why we're doing it
that's exactly why
we're doing it
it's like the ultimate
contraindicator
so I thought
we should productize this
so anyway
we're kind of working
on that stuff
and then we've got
we've got a
something that I can't announce yet
but it's going to be a partnership with
Bitcoin 2022
and we're going to help people
acquire tickets by using the purchasing
power of their Bitcoin without having
to sell the Bitcoin
so can't announce it exactly yet
but that's going to be exciting, that'll be out in January
fingers crossed
What do you think about Bitcoin right now
in terms of the high degree of volatility
so whether you're trying to create financial assets
around it, whether you're trying to create technology
to actually be able to buy more Bitcoin
or whatever like when you see all this volatility do you think that people we saw the grayscale
bitcoin investor study shows that 55 or so of people who own bitcoin today first time they
ever bought it was in 2021 which is pretty incredible statistic yeah well uh and and
again maybe it's not exactly 55 but directionally it's a big percentage right um how do you feel
about the volatility in them like it doesn't seem like that many of them are actually selling
They've weathered six drawdowns of over 20%, one over 50, one over 40, three over 30.
Like that's a lot of volatility for a single year and they're still here.
I mean, it's no different to Bitcoin's last 13 years anyway, right?
Like since when has Bitcoin not been volatile?
Like since when has, I mean, and the thing is we just need to be careful about how we define volatility, right?
Volatility in relationship to what?
Because Bitcoin in its own sphere is actually not volatile.
Bitcoin's the most unvolatile thing that exists today.
No one changes the code base like it takes four years to roll out taproot.
Bitcoin is the definition of anti-volatile.
But in the madness of the crowds,
which is people discovering how to value this thing called Bitcoin,
there is volatility in perception.
There is volatility in subjective valuation.
there is volatility in how people understand appreciate and like um form an opinion with
respect to what bitcoin is valued for themselves so so that's volatile um but bitcoin itself it's
it's not volatile like it's it's perfectly stable it's perfectly pristine it's perfectly
tick tock next block and i think that's what people need to separate in their heads
So if you've got a bunch of mindless idiots running around selling their Bitcoin for basically fake paper money issued by, you know, central bankers, you should rejoice and you should acquire as much of that as you can.
Like, because if you stop for a minute and just step back, like volatility is inherent to things like central banks, because what do they do?
they change their mind every day or every week you know first inflation's transient now it's not
you know now it's because of people didn't get vaccinated or then tomorrow it's because of global
climate change tomorrow it's because you know mass toxic masculinity like that's volatility
like volatility in opinion volatility in policy volatility in everything whereas bitcoin is just
it's not it's fundamentally not volatile bitcoin's the only heartbeat that exists in the world today
that we can point to and know that it's there hasn't changed it's still what it is it's backwards
compatible for 13 years that's perfection and it's the relationship between a volatile world
and a perfectly pristine manifestation of like a heartbeat that connection is volatile and the alpha
that we get out of it is we understand that bitcoin is not volatile and by the time the rest of the
world understands it then you know that when the when the relationship between the old and the new
is severed at the point where we don't need the old then you know you don't notice the volatility
anymore what do you think about el salvador and kind of plugging the entire country and they're
plugging their balance sheet in they're plugging their citizens in they're plugging in literally
the debt market that they have into the bitcoin network uh they're plugging uh their payment
system their banking infrastructure like they are literally taking their entire country just
plugging it into the Bitcoin network?
How do you think about that?
Well, I take the view,
and I was with Max and Stacey a couple weeks ago
talking about this.
I take the view that
I don't buy into it being some altruistic thing
that a president is doing for the people, right?
I don't think any statist
or any government person really, really, really, really, really cares that deeply,
maybe, maybe, you know, maybe Bitcoin kind of changed his opinion or his thing.
But like, I kind of start from the premise that, look, the government and any bureaucrat
is there to look after themselves first and foremost.
So if we start with that premise, then what does Bitcoin represent?
Well, Bitcoin represents a plan B from being under the thumb of the US dollar
and being under the thumb,
basically having inflation exported to your country.
I went to El Salvador for the first time
before any of the things came into effect.
And one thing I actually noticed was El Salvador is poorer
than places like Colombia and Brazil,
but the cost of living there is actually higher
because it's dollarized.
So you've got this country that just can't get ahead.
So they need an alternative option.
So even if it wasn't for helping the people
and some altruistic view, it is a necessary step
for a small country like that in order to game theoretically
position themselves somewhere other than being under the thumb.
So if then we extend it, it's like some people are like,
oh yeah, Bukele's a dictator and whatever.
I'm like, well, better a dictator on a Bitcoin standard
than the presentation or the perception of a non-dictator
but being an authoritarian state
which is really what the West is becoming
Australia is just one of those perfect examples
completely lost its mind, calls itself a democracy
has the capacity to print its own money
therefore perpetuate an economic fraud
therefore remove what the most important thing that money does in a society is
remove economic consequence
money exists, and this is something that I've started recently talking about
what's Bitcoin's most important
impact on the world impact on society it is the reintroduction of economic consequence
okay explain that what what that means is what what money exists to do is to tell you
whether what you've done is right or wrong it helps you make value judgments and value judgments
are how we navigate the world if we can make appropriate value judgments we can make better
decisions and we can make progress. And on the contrary, if we can't make appropriate value
judgments, we don't know what the hell we're doing. We're just taking action and we're making
mistakes and we think, you know, what we're doing is right. So, you know, people will go and eat
sugar or they'll jump off a cliff or they'll do whatever, right? So money acts as the mechanism
to tell you, hey, you did good or you did bad. Now, when the money is broken and when you can
play games and you can play shenanigans with the money, like, hey, let's shut down the entire world
economy and then oh let's just add a few digits to the thing and hey we had economic growth what
you've done is you've removed the economic consequence on paper and then you've fooled
yourself into believing what's on paper is actually accurate when in reality people have lost their
jobs their businesses their livelihoods and all this sort of destruction that's happened so what
bitcoin does is it actually reintroduces economic consequence to all action whether at the micro
level at the individual all the way through to the macro level whether institution company uh
country or whatever and that is what rebalances behavior and that's what then filters through
that that's the genesis of bitcoin fixes this is you can't you can't lie and you can't lie on a
piece of paper and then try and make it true and cover it up in the real world and then in the real
world the damage is paid for by the people who had no ability to make that decision so so so you
can't play that game of moral hazard anymore. Yeah. When you think about individuals trying to
onboard into this system or use this system, what are the big challenges that you see from
user experiences, user interfaces, the various platforms that are out there?
The biggest challenge hands down is the emergence of crypto. That is the biggest challenge. Like
that is the biggest distraction to Bitcoin on the face of the planet. In some ways, you know,
sometimes I've said, look, crypto is good in the sense that, you know, it confuses the lemmings
away and it kind of gives fire uh cover to to bitcoin so that bitcoin can keep doing its thing
and the regulators can go and you know focus their time on that but in reality like what crypto
represents and this is why i'm on such a crusade against it is that it represents a distraction
away from bitcoin that is basically a recreation of the existing system like world coin was a
perfect example like when that came out with that damas sam altman is like oh yeah we should do
world coin and you know i remember it's like one coin for everybody on the planet and then the the
founders get 10 and the investors get 10 it's like all right so wait a minute like we've just
recreated the federal reserve um and then hey mr pleb you know for your one coin we'll take a you
know your iris and we'll scan your biometrics so that way you know we completely own you so it's
like crypto exists to distract people away from what bitcoin is which is freedom money like
literally what you're wearing like what william wallace and all these great figures throughout
history fought for which is the sovereignty of the individual the right for the individual to
own themselves own the product of their labor and be who they are so so for me the biggest
threat at the moment is all the confusion in there because you get people every day
they think they're buying crypto to like you know stick a finger to the to the man right
But all they're doing is they're jumping from the fry pan into the fire
because all they're doing is they're putting their monetary essence,
their energy, into another wannabe oligarch
or another wannabe institution that is going to issue their own money.
So what have you done?
What about the assets that are not trying to be money that are in crypto?
So let's say, what's the most egregious?
Like art, right?
So NFT is probably a good example.
I don't think anyone, and again, maybe there's some crazy person out there, but I don't think
anyone's saying, Hey, the NFTs are trying to be a currency. They're trying to be a store of value
from, uh, uh, uh, accomplish the same goals as Bitcoin. Right. I think that they probably would
be the first ones to say like, this has nothing to do with Bitcoin. This, they don't try to use
like what the affinity, uh, type scam, right. Where they're like, Oh, it's a better Bitcoin
or anything like that. Um, and so they're essentially taking the analog assets, which
is art, whether you like art or not, whatever, you know what art is, uh, and they're digitizing
it how do you look at something that is very obviously looking at three things bitcoin is
trying to be a store value seems to be doing a pretty good job of that trying to be a medium
of exchange seems to be doing a pretty good job of that and eventually be a unit of account as
well right kind of meet the criteria for true money uh nfts if you were to ask somebody or
trying to accomplish something and they wouldn't mention any of those three things right nobody's
going to say uh did you how many crypto punks does this cost right type things how do you think
about those two things they are trying to do the store value part but let me let me challenge you
then on nft so so let's just separate the art from the digital signature right because because
what is an nft it's a digital signature right yep i think that allegedly well allegedly right yeah
so um i i would suggest that if you like somebody's art you send them some bitcoin like the artist can
literally get paid in bitcoin can literally be supported in bitcoin can literally like
the problem that the artists say they have which is i can't sell my artwork you know openly you
know without people being able to pay me like it it was sold by bitcoin 13 years ago so so you can
slap a qr code and you can you know get your thing if you want to have an authenticity you can pgp
sign you know a piece and that's been there like has always existed what i think nfts are doing
which is really dangerous is it's creating illiquid
horizontal markets where
the first one, maybe two people to flip an NFT will make
a lot of money, but the second or third person holding it is going to be holding a digital
signature that's worthless over a JPEG that everybody else has copied
because they don't really care about the art, they care about the signature that
apparently proves that that piece of art is unique
so so then so what they're doing is like it's creating a market of not art anymore it's
creating a market of trying to be the first to flip the next digital signature associated with
some gimmicky piece of art and i think what it's doing is actually taking away from the artists
because there's actually really good artists out there who instead of them focusing on putting
their effort their energy their passion into a beautiful piece of art they're going and creating
some gimmicky stupid jpeg slapping the word nft on it flipping it to someone for a bunch of money
that person who buys it then is like shit i better flip it to somebody else so that i can see if i
can make a profit but as more and more nfts get created what you do is you create this horizontal
market where there's no liquidity in each one so the more nfts that come out the less liquid the
market becomes the more stretched it becomes the less chance there is of flipping the nft that you
bought six months ago because the new one is hot so i want to take uh let me use a nuanced version
of this right which i think gets more at the issue uh nfl tickets or nba tickets if i go today and i
buy a ticket from uh let's say the dallas mavericks right mark cuban has obviously uh been bullish on
crypto uh bitcoin there's been plenty of uh kind of engagements where he's had with bitcoiners
he says hey i'm gonna sell my dallas mavericks tickets i'm gonna sell it for 50 bucks and i buy
they make $50 off that purchase rate primary sale. If I then turn around, I sell it to my brother
for a hundred, they make nothing. If he turns around, he sells it to John for 200, they make
nothing. And then John walks into the game. So there was technically $350 worth of economic
transactions, but they only made $50 off the first primary sale. If they now say, Hey, we're going to
create these into non fungible assets, right? So forget tokens for a second, just something where
we can track where it goes. And when I sell it to him for a hundred, they get 10%. So I got $50
off the primary sale. They get $10 off of the first secondary sale. Then he sells it. They get
another $20, 10% of the secondary sale. So now instead of making $50, they've made $80. John
goes into the game. Again, I don't think that they're arguing it replaces Bitcoin. Definitely
they're saying it's a store of value. I don't think they're saying it's a unit of account or
even a medium of exchange. All they're trying to get at and whether they're doing a good job or
not is they're trying to get at how do we take something that has complete dislocation, a primary
and a secondary market. Today they go after the secondary market. They do not like the secondary
market because there's all these transactions that happen they make no money but now they
actually align the incentives with the team and the secondary market do we look at that as and
by the way i don't think most people actually in those situations are they decentralized right i
think that's another piece okay good thank you thank you so if if they were to come out and say
it's not decentralized at all all we're trying to do is we're trying to get at this technology
that allows it more efficiently doesn't even mean it's the only way to do just more efficiently
be able to take 10 of every single secondary transaction we by no means are decentralized
all we are trying to do is just monetize the secondary market is it is that an easier way
to wrap our heads around like other applications of this technology or is it the use of things like
decentralized when they say hey it's a decentralized way to do it that's where uh bitcoiners i hear a
lot of bitcoiners yell and scream like it's not decentralized and that seems to be like a huge
sticking point is that your read as well okay so so let's come back to this technology what do you
mean by is this an application of this technology what does that mean yeah so there's a whole bunch
of different ways to do it right and i think that part of the beauty uh or really the the main point
of proof of work is that it's truly decentralized i don't think anyone in the world can look at the
bitcoin blockchain the proof of work system the relationship between miners nodes right and say
this is not decentralized now there's a whole bunch of other people who have different ways
of doing it either today or in the future in terms of building consensus and they say it's
decentralized i think that's where there's a huge debate what is actually decentralized what's not
but i don't think anyone looks at bitcoin and says this is not decentralized my point is any of the
other uses that they want to do in terms of building consensus i don't care there's proof
of stake there's proof of time there's delegated proof of i mean there's like a million of these
things now right and i think most bitcoiners look and say those are all inferior ways to
get consensus because ultimately you need proof of work you need a fully decentralized system
but if they just say look actually we don't want to be decentralized
we want speed and efficiency and we're nearly centralized
if not mostly centralized or we are just centralized
it almost feels like then you're saying like no
you need decentralization to separate kind of a true store of value
that can't be manipulated, can't be controlled, can't be debased
and then you're like oh this is like database technology
so that's what we should call it
so decentralization is not an end, it's a means to an end
I agree with that
and the means is what?
it's it's censorship resistance right so it's the it's the inability for anyone to mess with
something and that really only has one use case like money is the the foundation of all human
civilization you can't have a civilization without the capacity of human beings to store the product
of their labor and then exchange it amongst each other so so that's a non-starter so if we start
there then what we should agree on is that hey if money is that important we should place money
into the realm of the physical laws of the universe, right?
Can, you know, I don't know, Pump, you're pretty cool,
but like, can you change the speed of light?
I wish.
Yeah, right.
So, I mean, can you guys like add some more time to your day?
No, you can't.
So time, speed of light, you know,
like you can't change those things.
So what Bitcoin does is it's for the first time in history,
it places money in the realm of physics.
So then it's out of all of our hands.
And then we have a level playing field.
People talk about a quality of opportunity.
like it's a nice dream but it's a it's nothing we can actually achieve in on the planet because
time resources energy is all unevenly distributed in the planet but if we can have a quality of
opportunity over money then that is a massive massive massive achievement and that's what
bitcoin solves all the other stuff you know for example cryptocurrencies that stuff is all just
a distraction so we can place that in the bucket of like confusing people out of bitcoin which is
really, I think, negative
because the more people we move into Bitcoin
the sooner we actually move on to a world where we have
equality of opportunity. So crypto
in general is a distraction.
Then if we look at applications
of database technology with some
sort of consensus mechanism
you know, maybe
issuing tickets for a
game or something like that, that's fine but
it shouldn't be
classified in the same
I guess
field as the technology.
It sounds like you agree, is Bitcoin is money, right?
And it's a better money.
It's a decentralized, digital, programmatic,
monetary policy-driven money that nobody can screw with, right?
And there's immense value to that.
There are other applications of other things
that there's an entire spectrum
of pretty clever technical innovations
all the way down to like,
you literally just took a database and put a website up
and called it something else, right?
And so I think that ultimately ends up
being a huge differentiator.
or agree with you in terms of Bitcoin
is the money of the future, digital currency, whatever.
This is other stuff.
What I think ends up being the part
where people get confused is that really,
and it's coming from the mainstream media,
they lump it all together, right?
And they say like, hey, Joe's trying to solve ticketing.
John, you're doing art.
You're doing Bitcoin.
And Pomp, you created some like
electronic medical health records, right?
And like, oh yeah, they're all competing with each other.
If this was just, forget crypto, blockchain,
any of that stuff.
if we were just in the technology world like old school silicon valley 10 years ago
and you said wait a minute he's doing tickets you're doing art you're doing money and you're
doing electronic health care records like literally you're in the sports world right
you're in the art market you're in the finance market and you're in the medical field like
they're not even related at all but it's the this uh uh lumping of it together that i think causes
more confusion than anything because what i've found is that most people they don't want to
compete with each other right and that and that's like a weird thing because no one wants to talk
about it but the actual builders they're like dude like you know i own x asset let's say bitcoin for
example i'm building electronic medical health records all i'm trying to figure out is what's
the best database technology and maybe they're right maybe they're not who knows but when the
media lumps them all together then people are like well this stuff seems weird like which one's
going to go up more yeah right the media is a big problem i think i think there's also a bunch of
players in the market that have taken advantage
of the Bitcoin narrative
and the crypto narrative
to use
to kind of
I guess strategically lump themselves
in the same place so they can gain
some sort of advantage from it.
So I think whilst
yes, the media
is the media.
Basically, I have a simple heuristic
in life, which is anything the media says
just do the opposite and you'll do fine.
And that's like, I mean...
the shift button literally short the media yeah like maybe maybe we should like just do a button
for like whatever every time the media like mentions bitcoin it just buys you some bitcoin
instead like because like i don't know it's just if there was ever a contra indicator a contra
signal that it's them but yeah i i just think we need to um we we need to when we're talking
about bitcoin we we need to talk about bitcoin as its own thing and we need to reclassify like
bitcoin is not a cryptocurrency like bitcoin is perfect money a cryptocurrency is the attempt to
issue private money under your own governance system which is more like a nation state which
is more like fiat so so cryptocurrencies have much more in common with the federal reserve
which is a private entity issuing its own money ethereum is like the federal reserve a private
entity issuing its own money so solana so all these other things and then the attempt to shoehorn
bitcoin like technology into the saying the selling of tickets then is another question
in and of itself or whatever other you know applications of bitcoin like technology you know
may exist i actually think that that's a like again my personal opinion is that um that is
chasing a red herring
I think what we should be thinking about doing
is using
kind of like what Jack's doing with LDK
and Spiral and everything
how do we use the Bitcoin stack
to reimagine the issuance of tickets
reimagine the storage of records
use the ingredients
that Bitcoin gives us
immutability
the capacity to hash to something
hash time lock contracts, multi-signature
lightning, etc
what the guys at Impervious are doing
how can we abstract elements of Bitcoin
to reimagine how we provide products and services
as private businesses
because that's where the value is
you want to invest in good entrepreneurs and private businesses
that are building stuff
not trying to run their own economies
and that's where I think there's a big important nuance there
What questions do you guys have?
Go ahead
One of the things I think has immense value
is that transactional ticket
and be able to capture the secondary market sale on NFTs
or just really any technology like that.
Do you see value in that?
Not on an open platform because an open platform
like an open blockchain can't scale for that.
So you do that, you build it with AWS
and you issue the tickets.
So I bought a Jordan Peterson ticket the other day
and on the app, the AXS app, I can sell the ticket
back to AXS so I can sell it to someone else
so I can transfer the ticket.
You can do that.
Like Bitcoin 2022 sells their tickets through TIXA
and through Tixer I can sell it to somebody
and then I can just change the name on the thing.
That can all be done already.
We don't need NFTs for that.
You don't need any of that sort of stuff for that
because each digital item on a private database issued by a company
has a unique identifier on it already.
You don't need to do that on an open platform
because the open platform can't scale for that.
So basically the open platform will clog up anyway.
It'll create expense that doesn't need to be there.
and at the end of the day its maximum capacity
is probably one conference anyway
so may as well just issue the damn conference
on a private company database
whose goal it is to provide this service
do away with all the other crap
it's just unnecessary
so you were talking earlier about some of the other cryptos
relative to Bitcoin
and saying how it's not always a good thing
for people coming into the space to see some of those first
but relative to Bitcoin specifically
and when it comes to Bitcoiners
what is the number one thing in your mind
that people can be doing to increase the adoption of this?
I actually think we need to get our heads away
from increasing adoption
and so I did a whole piece a little while ago
called selective adoption versus mass adoption
I think mass adoption is a scam
I don't think we need mass adoption
if you go back and look at any transformative
revolutionary technology or moment or phenomenon
throughout history
it was selectively adopted in the beginning
by the 1% of people who could reimagine
and rethink the way the world might function,
not by the masses.
The masses come last.
So they are the laggards.
They are the people who come later.
And the classic cliche example is Henry Ford saying,
if I had asked people what they wanted,
they would have said faster horses.
So when you're reinventing something,
particularly like a zero to one moment,
you don't care what the herd says.
So what you do is,
Bitcoin is fundamentally different and incompatible
with anything that came before it.
It's incompatible with gold.
Like I can't, you know, send Bitcoin on the gold network.
It doesn't exist, right?
You can't send gold on the Bitcoin network.
So it's incompatible.
It's incompatible with fiat.
Like they just don't work together.
You have to move from one world into the other.
So for me, what I'm thinking about is kind of the example
of what you guys are wearing on your shirt
with William Wallace.
Well, what pump is?
I don't know what the hell you got.
Okay, okay.
Okay. So, you know, the Scotsman or the 300 is a great example. It's like, how do we recruit
more of the 300, not the Arcadians who are like the farmers and the blacksmiths? Because
we're going into what I believe is going to be the most pivotal moment in human history
that we've had maybe since the discovery of fire. Like this is how important Bitcoin is,
because for the first time in history, the metaphysical idea of money is going to fuse
with physical human action like and and when we do that when you can't fake um you know the the
consequence of your actions anymore what ends up happening is all human action starts to correct
you can't lie anymore like you can't just say oh yeah you know well we locked down everyone but
it's okay the the economy is fine because we printed some money like people are fucking
starving now so you you need to you need to adapt your behavior to reality you you stop jumping off
a cliff right so so so coming back to um what i was saying there about fuck i went on a mad rant
help me out here what was i saying just before that um so the the entire idea i think what
you're trying to get at here is uh as more and more people start to help drive adoption
yeah right oh god i was it was the selective adoption piece so so what we need is the signal
to remain pure and clear
so that we can attract people who are like the 300
because that's who we need to understand Bitcoin.
So we need to get like the Tucker Carlson's
on like, you know, what Saylor did with him
the other day was magnificent.
We need to get those kinds of people into Bitcoin.
We need to forget about trying to do the mass adoption thing
because Roger Ver is an example of someone
who wanted mass adoption for Bitcoin
and he was willing to change Bitcoin and its principles
to get mass adoption because in his mind,
And mass adoption meant Bitcoin's a payments network.
I mean, I bought Bitcoin when it was a payments network.
So that means to get mass adoption,
we need to basically recreate PayPal.
And what happened was he got booted off
and he forked off and now he's got his BCH shitcoin,
which is worth nothing.
So what we need to do is we need to maintain
the integrity of the message
and be basically like a communication node
for Bitcoin that is pure,
which is, this is what Bitcoin is.
Bitcoin will not deviate from this.
and this is why it's important
and that's the signal we need to attract other
what I've started calling remnants
which is inspired by the Isaiah's Job article from the 1930s
which is by Ayn Rand and Rothbard and all of that
we need to attract remnants to us
so that is going to come from clarity, from truth and from integrity
not from trying to dilute the message of Bitcoin
so that we can make it more appealing to the sheep
who are not going to get it in the first place
I guess my question off of that would be
I think most people assume that that tangles with the give and take of adoption means that there's acceleration in price, there's acceleration in people using the technology, all this kind of stuff.
Your way of saying we need to go slower and make sure everyone understands it at a fundamental level and it doesn't change is a slower way to do that, right?
And it would impact on the opposite side.
So how do you think about that relative to not only the price for sure, but also like Bitcoin becoming a unit of account, Bitcoin becoming potentially a global reserve currency?
How do you think about the timeline of those things relative to your adoption pattern?
We keep trying to impose our individual generational timelines on this.
And Bitcoin's going to be here for the next 10,000 years.
Bitcoin's going to outlive you, me, our families, all that sort of stuff.
It's going to be here for 10,000 years.
So we need to start thinking about it in that timeframe.
Now, we don't actually have to do much to convince people.
So an article I wrote last year was called Bitcoin and Lockdowns,
and I put together a framework of understanding Bitcoin adoption,
not through the lens of price going up or anything,
but through the lens of Bitcoin moving from a luxury to a necessity.
So what happens is Bitcoin doesn't need to change
or we don't need to talk about Bitcoin too much.
We just need to remain pure on what it is.
And what will happen is as the existing system breaks down
and people run for their lives looking to save their wealth
or save themselves, necessity is the mother of all change.
and what will happen is they'll come to the only thing
that is non-volatile, which is Bitcoin.
So we don't actually have to drive the price of Bitcoin up.
The collapse of the clown world simulation around us
will drive everything to Bitcoin.
So we don't actually have to do anything.
What we need to do is maintain pure signal,
maintain integrity, and maintain this impenetrable fortress
that doesn't change.
So we're the castle, we're the promised land.
And what happens is the people find the promised land
because they have to, not because we're waving a flag
saying, hey, we're the promised land, come here.
This is the promised land, they'll come here.
We've got to wrap up, unfortunately.
Where can we send people to find Amber
or where do you want to send them?
Easyamber.app is Amber.
And just give us kind of the 30 seconds
on what they can do if they go download the app.
Best accumulation app in the world.
You can buy the shift, you can order by the dip,
you can stack daily, weekly, monthly, whatever.
And then soon enough you'll be able to use
the Bitcoin purchasing power you have
without having to sell you Bitcoin
to acquire Bitcoin products and services.
That's a great pitch.
I'm an investor in the business.
I love it.
Thank you so much.
Keep going.
I love the buy the shift.
That's freaking great.
That might be one of my favorites that I've ever heard.
We need to put together a whole arm.
We're going to do a hashtag with it
and then we just like buy the shift every day.
All right.
Thank you so much for coming.
