The Pomp Podcast - #746 The Bitcoin Difference w/ Aleks Svetski

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

Aleks 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)
Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. 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. First up is LMAX Digital, the number one institutional crypto exchange. They offer
Starting point is 00:00:39 clients the deepest pool of crypto liquidity on the planet, underscored by a 100% uptime track record through volatility spikes. They leverage LMAX Group's liquidity relationships and ultra-low latency technology. LMAX Digital is the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading and custodial services. If you've never heard of LMAX Digital, it's probably because you're not an institution. They have no retail, only institutions. They feature a central limit order book streaming spot Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash, all paired with US dollars, euro, and yen. LMAX Digital, they're secure, they're liquid, and they're trusted. Learn more at lmaxdigital.com. Again, lmaxdigital.com. Next up is Compass Mining. Compass Mining is the
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Starting point is 00:03:12 in play-to-earn and blockchain gaming. Venture to the forefront of crypto innovation and connect with OKX DeFi today. Again, go check them out at OKX. That's where you can find OKX DeFi. 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
Starting point is 00:03:34 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.
Starting point is 00:03:55 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
Starting point is 00:04:30 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
Starting point is 00:04:38 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
Starting point is 00:04:46 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
Starting point is 00:04:52 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
Starting point is 00:04:59 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
Starting point is 00:05:15 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
Starting point is 00:05:34 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?
Starting point is 00:06:10 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,
Starting point is 00:06:44 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?
Starting point is 00:07:41 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
Starting point is 00:08:30 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?
Starting point is 00:09:02 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
Starting point is 00:09:27 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.
Starting point is 00:10:01 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.
Starting point is 00:10:21 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
Starting point is 00:10:53 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
Starting point is 00:11:15 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
Starting point is 00:11:56 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
Starting point is 00:12:36 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
Starting point is 00:13:17 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
Starting point is 00:13:56 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
Starting point is 00:14:36 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?
Starting point is 00:15:11 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
Starting point is 00:15:37 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
Starting point is 00:16:10 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
Starting point is 00:16:54 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
Starting point is 00:17:30 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
Starting point is 00:18:10 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
Starting point is 00:18:52 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
Starting point is 00:19:30 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
Starting point is 00:20:01 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
Starting point is 00:20:37 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
Starting point is 00:21:19 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
Starting point is 00:21:47 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?
Starting point is 00:22:07 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?
Starting point is 00:22:41 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.
Starting point is 00:22:55 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
Starting point is 00:23:29 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
Starting point is 00:23:45 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?
Starting point is 00:24:02 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,
Starting point is 00:24:19 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
Starting point is 00:24:35 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?
Starting point is 00:24:49 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
Starting point is 00:25:18 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
Starting point is 00:25:50 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
Starting point is 00:26:06 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
Starting point is 00:26:28 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
Starting point is 00:27:17 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
Starting point is 00:27:45 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
Starting point is 00:28:02 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
Starting point is 00:28:17 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.
Starting point is 00:28:41 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
Starting point is 00:28:59 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
Starting point is 00:29:14 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
Starting point is 00:29:38 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
Starting point is 00:29:57 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
Starting point is 00:30:16 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
Starting point is 00:30:33 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.
Starting point is 00:30:50 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.
Starting point is 00:31:07 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
Starting point is 00:31:22 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,
Starting point is 00:31:51 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
Starting point is 00:32:39 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.
Starting point is 00:33:02 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.
Starting point is 00:33:22 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
Starting point is 00:33:41 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
Starting point is 00:34:01 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?
Starting point is 00:34:31 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.
Starting point is 00:35:03 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.
Starting point is 00:35:31 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.
Starting point is 00:35:57 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.
Starting point is 00:36:16 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.
Starting point is 00:36:35 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.
Starting point is 00:36:49 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
Starting point is 00:37:00 and then we just like buy the shift every day. All right. Thank you so much for coming.

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