The Pomp Podcast - #835 Bitcoin Is The Freedom Technology The Western World Needs

Episode Date: February 22, 2022

This episode is a little different than the usual podcast format. There is no guest. Instead, I will share a couple of thoughts I have around a specific topic. Today I discuss the current financial suppression occurring in Canada. In response to Canada's authoritarian actions, people are getting Orange-Pilled in real time. Longtime adversaries of Bitcoin are starting to change their mind and are seeing why Bitcoin is so important. ======================= 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! ======================= The world's 2nd largest crypto exchange, OKEx, has dropped the "E" to become OKX, reflecting its evolution from a traditional crypto exchange to a comprehensive, cross-platform crypto services provider. With OKX's decentralized platform and Web3 wallet, MetaX, you have full custody over your crypto. Explore DeFi, NFTs and play-to-earning gaming with the world's most powerful crypto exchange. Visit OKX.com to learn more. =======================

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. Today's episode is titled Bitcoin is the Freedom Technology the Western World Needs. Before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is LMAX Digital, the number one institutional crypto exchange. They offer clients the deepest pool of crypto liquidity on the planet, underscored by 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 slash pomp. Again, lmaxdigital.com slash pomp. Next up is Compass Mining. Compass Mining is the world's largest marketplace for mining hardware and hosting. With Compass, everyone can mine Bitcoin. Their team makes it easy to start mining wherever you want, at home or in one of their 23 hosting facilities around the world. Through the Compass Marketplace, retail

miners can access mining hardware with similar prices and purchase plans as the world's largest mining companies. Compass miners own their machines, they choose whatever mining pool they want, and they mine directly to their own wallets. Miners who don't want to host their machines can order ASICs directly to their doorstep. Simple and low cost hosting agreements coupled with best in class customer service are the reasons why Compass is the simplest and most popular way to mine Bitcoin. Start mining your own Bitcoin today by visiting compassmining.io. Again, compassmining.io. Go check them out and let me know what you think. Last but not least are my friends over at OKEx. Crypto is all about democratization and freedom

of choice, but many companies limit their offerings to centralized trading products. The crypto companies leading the pack in terms of innovation are those that extend access to the industry's cutting edge products and services, bridging CeFi and DeFi. If you're searching for a platform that reflects crypto's promise of a more open and less restrictive financial future, look no further than OKEx. On OKEx now, you can easily switch over to the new DeFi mode, connect OKEx's bespoke Web3 wallet via browser extension, and start exploring opportunities at the bleeding edge of crypto. From the DeFi dashboard, you can monitor your portfolio of self-custodied assets across a range of blockchain networks

and generate passive income from yield farming with top DeFi protocols. In the NFT marketplace, you can participate in exclusive drops and trade non-fungible tokens without secondary market fees. Meanwhile, the GameFi section is your portal to the latest and greatest 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 in 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. The situation in Canada

has received international attention across the internet. People are wondering how a liberal democratic country could descend into authoritarian chaos so quickly. Disagreeing with subsets of your population or opposite sides of the political debate are an expected component of democratic societies. But the shocking aspect is how the Canadian government has decided to react. Rather than meet with the protesters to hear their complaints or encourage their protesting within a designated area of the city, the Canadian leadership has responded to dissent with a ruthlessness that is usually reserved for dictatorships. As David Sachs wrote over the weekend, a social credit system arrives in Canada.

In the piece, Sachs argues, quote, for years, ideologues have used accusations of bigotry to hound people from their jobs, kick them off social media, and rescind their right to participate in the online economy. However, many observers shrugged off these cases as outliers, fringe examples that could be ignored because they affected unsympathetic individuals. But now we have a wide-ranging group of working-class people and their supporters who are being financially deplatformed for civil disobedience, end quote. It's pretty incredible to watch this play out in real time. They're individuals who are being financially sanctioned in a way that was previously reserved for enemies of war. Take the Russia-Ukraine situation as a current example. The United States

is threatening financial sanctions, including potential removal from the SWIFT system if Russia chooses to invade Ukraine. There's not much difference between the threats of sanctions to Russia and the current financial sanctions that are being levied against Canadian citizens by their own government. That is wild to think about. If there's one positive outcome of this situation, though, it is that millions of people in the Western world are being alerted to the perils of financial censorship. Previously, most people thought these authoritarian measures would never happen in their own countries. Canada has made them change their mind and start paying attention. This morning, co-founder of Basecamp and creator of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier

Hansen, known as DHH, wrote a piece titled, I was wrong, we need crypto. He started his piece with the following excerpt, quote, to say I've been skeptical about Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto universe would be an understatement of epic proportions. Since the early 2010, some of my most ferocious Twitter battles have been against the huddle army with the laser eyes. There's just so much to oppose. Bitcoin's grotesque energy consumption, the ridiculous transaction fees and low throughput, the incessant pump and dump schemes and shit coins, the wild price swings in the main coins, the obvious fraud that is Tether, and the lack of real decentralization in most of the current Web3 infrastructure, and on and on and on. Beyond all these very real problems and

challenges, my bigger beef was actually fueled by a lack of imagination. I could see the fundamental promise of a digital currency free of banks if you were living in a failing state like venezuela or an overtly authoritarian one like china or iran but how was this relevant to the vast number of bitcoin boosters living in stable western democracies governed by the rule of law beyond the patina of philosophical respectability it could apply to yet another get rich quick scheme end quote you have to give dhh credit for the intellectual humility necessary to admit you were wrong in public, but his journey is not that dissimilar from many others. The idea of Bitcoin as freedom technology was a distant thought because it had been hard to see dystopian or

authoritarian environments in the Western world. Sure, maybe those situations play out in the developing world far away, but that couldn't possibly happen in my country, right? Right? DHH continues his write-up with the following comments, quote, I still can't believe that this the protest that would prove every Bitcoin crank a profit, and for me to have a slice of humble pie and admit that I was wrong on crypto's fundamental necessity in Western democracies, and that it was the Canadians who brought this on. You might as well have told me that it was really the Care Bears who ran Abu Ghraib. Especially since I had some sympathy with fears projected by the US progressive left who spent four years fretting Trump might pull stunts

like these. Then it turns out that the worries of an authoritarian overreach would be fulfilled by Trudeau to the north instead? Who's writing this script? M. Night Shyamalan? Meanwhile, plenty of American commentators are cheering this on. Those terrible, horrible, no good, very bad truckers got what they deserved. To protest for a repeal of pandemic restrictions so as to live the life enjoyed in Denmark by a population less vaccinated than the Canadians? That's clearly beyond the pale. But in a weird way, I'm glad we all got this warning from Trudeau in Canada and not Trump in America. It would have been far too easy for Europeans in particular to dismiss authoritarian assertions of martial law from Trump as being irrelevant to the European

experience. Just like I had for so long deemed the practical desire of people in Venezuela or Iran or China for crypto irrelevant to the entire Western experience. But is France really that different from Canada? Is Austria? Is Denmark? This is a real wake up call, end quote. Ultimately, Bitcoin serves as the chaos hedge. It is insurance for a dark dystopian world that everyone hopes won't become reality. The hard part about technologies that bring freedom, security, privacy, and sovereignty is that the mainstream population doesn't actually care about these ideas. They want convenience. There's a disconnect between the conversation and the actions when it comes to these topics. This is an area that Bitcoin is drastically undervalued and misunderstood.

Bitcoin is a freedom technology disguised as a get-rich-quick scheme. Millions and millions of people join the revolution initially to make money, not to adopt a secure censorship-resistant currency. Economic incentives run the world. Show someone how they may get rich, and they'll watch adoption follow. That is exactly what Bitcoin has done. It is the best-performing asset over the last decade, including 150% or more compound annual growth rate. Here's the catch, though. Millions of people come for the profits, but stay for the revolution. Bitcoin has a unique way of teaching economics, computer science, personal finance, mathematics, philosophy, geopolitics, and much more. In fact, I'd argue that most Bitcoiners have learned more from the Bitcoin

community than they did in school. This is what hardens the Bitcoin holders. They don't care about price fluctuations. Name another asset where it goes down 20% multiple times a year, and there's a 50% loss in price every year for the last four years. Yet majority of the investors continue to hold for the long term. Bitcoin isn't about profits. The investors and holders have no plans to sell. Bitcoin is a freedom technology. It is a peaceful protest that arms the average citizen with a censorship resistant technology that prevents their government from enacting authoritarian measures that encroach on their basic rights. Without the freedom to transact, you have no freedom. Canada has awakened the Western world to the perils of financial censorship. Bitcoin is

the solution. It is just a matter of time before millions more realize it. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I'll talk to you guys next time. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to palmscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to palmscryptocourse.com to learn more, and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.