The Pomp Podcast - #973 Brad Mills On The Case For Bitcoin Maximalism

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. Brad Mills is an entrepreneur, investor, and a podcast host. In this conversation, we talk about the case for Bitcoin maximalism, the difference between investor, gambler, and trader, and a barbell strategy for Bitcoin investing. I really enjoyed this conversation with Brad, and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, though, i first want to talk about our sponsors this episode is brought to you by okay coin they are my favorite place to buy trade and state crypto they're the fastest growing us-based exchange

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Starting point is 00:03:52 or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brad, what's going on, buddy? Hey, man. How's it going? I'm doing fantastic. How are you? I'm doing good. Awesome.

Starting point is 00:04:05 I've been preparing mentally, preparing my anus for this dip for a long time. what a way to start uh all right let's start first i want to talk to you the most important thing i want to talk to you about is the case for bitcoin maximalism and i think you've got some very interesting thoughts here uh in terms of uh uh kind of how to argue as to why people should be bitcoin maximalist so you've got the floor what would be your case for why people should be bitcoin maximalist yeah man well you know it's just a conversation that keeps happening on online, right? Like altcoiners typically are critical of Bitcoin maximalists because

Starting point is 00:04:43 Bitcoin maximalists are very critical of altcoiners. And whether it's the chicken or the egg, it just keeps going back and forth. And the new narrative that I'm hearing a lot is that, oh, well, Bitcoin maxis are just anti-capitalist. And I kind of find that is a lazy way of thinking about it because it's the same as the term Bitcoin maxi, really. Like when you use the term Bitcoin maxi. It's just giving yourself permission to just not think deeply about the subject. Just write off the, you know, the criticisms and the arguments that are coming from Bitcoiners about all this stuff in crypto and just write it off as a Bitcoin maxi. And it was hilarious when we started seeing people like Mark Cuban doing that last year. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:05:24 What did you think about when you saw someone like Mark Cuban using the term Bitcoin maxi? Did you think like, where are we in this cycle? Like, how did we get here? Let's clarify for a second. So there's people online who are making the argument that Bitcoin and Maximus are against capitalism. Explain that more. What is that argument?

Starting point is 00:05:42 Yeah. So, you know, I've heard this a few times, actually, and it's because Bitcoiners typically are super critical of the altcoin stuff. Okay. And it started probably, I heard this maybe a year and a half ago. It was kind of like, you know, Bitcoin, Bitcoiners don't like capitalism because as the DeFi things started to kick up. I mean, we got to go back a little bit more to the last cycle and the ICO boom. The ICO boom was 2017 when the same sort of thing happened where a lot of Silicon Valley

Starting point is 00:06:14 funds started to deploy capital into ICOs, which at the time the story was, well, this is disrupting venture capital. We're figuring out new ways to fund startups, crypto startups. And then that was the whole fat protocol thesis and MV equals PQ stuff was coming out from the think boys in Silicon Valley. And I was even susceptible to that at the time because I'm kind of a FOMO sapien as well. I kind of came into Bitcoin in 2011 because of people like Peter Schiff, who were exposing all the fraud that was happening on Wall Street and the problems with money itself. And I was an entrepreneur. So I was hustling and grinding. I was like building apps and trying to hustle my way to growth hacking a startup. And I kind of relate with that culture

Starting point is 00:07:02 of people that are attracted to folks like Gary Vee, Mark Cuban, and other people like that, who are kind of like examples for wantrepreneurs as Noah Kagan likes to call them. And so I put myself in that mindset of like an entrepreneur, that's a capitalist, a FOMO sapien sort of like hustling trying to do what i can to get that bag and then also like learning about sound money and learning about historical trends with money and what happens with the macro markets historically and understanding what sound money really is and going down the path of libertarianism and all of that stuff kind of like combining those two things where i'm like an entrepreneur capitalist mindset with also sound money mind mindset learning about that and then i realized

Starting point is 00:07:47 bitcoin was that perfect sort of like marriage of entrepreneurship open source technology and sound money and so i kind of dove into bitcoin and started making businesses for bitcoin back in 2011 i was starting like job sites and all that stuff honestly i was doing all that shit way too early i lost a bunch of money trying to make like startups for bitcoin in 2011 and 12 and uh you know spent all this money on domain names and all that crap but then in 2014 it was like the altcoin boom happened and i was in that mindset of like okay if you miss bitcoin because now bitcoin's at 500 bucks you can go and check out this there's litecoin it's like faster than bitcoin and there's pure coin it's a pure it's a proof of stake network instead of a proof of network a proof of

Starting point is 00:08:35 work network and all of those all of those iterations the early iterations of bitcoin like forks and you know there was stuff like next which was like its own consensus protocol i mean we had that massive bubble in 2014 and i i was a bit coiner but also susceptible to that idea that well if you know you can have uh money on a blockchain why wouldn't you be able to have other types of money on a blockchain and other things on a blockchain like so putting medical records let me ask you this question when you start to think about this this ultimately gets to I think the second point that's important here, which is there's a difference between holders, investors and kind of traders and gamblers. Right. Talk to me a little bit how

Starting point is 00:09:20 you see these different groups of individuals and like what is the psychological difference and then what is the difference of how they express that psychological kind of perspective in the market? Yeah, from my own personal understanding of this, it's been honestly like a 10 year journey from getting into Bitcoin in 2011, getting going down the shitcoin rabbit hole in the altcoin logic in 2014. And kind of, I mean, I participated in that MaxCoin ICO. I remember Max Keiser launched his own coin back then. Well, it was actually, I think Kobe launched it for Max and Max didn't pre-mine it or anything. It was just experimenting, but I was like, oh, cool. MaxCoin, I'm going to try that out and, you know, trade it for Bitcoin. So there was

Starting point is 00:10:00 definitely this like anti-altcoin narrative back then, because you do have, what ends up happening is that the people that get into Bitcoin and really go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, they're typically activists, financial activists, or Bitcoin capitalists, or philosophers. And they really kind of trend towards like sound money and Austrian economics and things like that. But then on the crypto side of things, usually it's like, typically it's entrepreneurial people, people with a trading mindset. They just want to make a 10X or they're professional traders. They have a real trader's mindset and they're trying to actually just stack more Bitcoin. Or in the case of the recent bubble, stack more fiat. Most of the time now, there's a lot more

Starting point is 00:10:48 traders just trying to stack fiat. So you do have this clash that there's this part in the middle where you can be a Bitcoin maximalist, acknowledge that there's an opportunity to trade shit coins and make more Bitcoin, but not go down the ethical risk curve and start promoting shit coin logic and creating bag holders for projects that you know are going to end up failing. So I think most of the Bitcoiners in the end that have learned all these lessons, they realize that the majority of people are not equipped to be crypto traders because typically the only way that you're going to make money and beat the gains of Bitcoin over the long term is if you're lucky and you got like a SHIB or something like that and you pulled

Starting point is 00:11:27 your chips off the table and exited the casino before you threw it back into like zombie sheep or something stupid like that and just lost it all or Terraluna. If you're lucky, you can beat Bitcoin, but obviously the odds of that are pretty low. If you're a professional trader, if you've actually honed your craft of trading and you have strict risk management rules and you're not just like making emotional bets, like YOLOing in on things and then not taking your stop losses when they get hit because you feel like it's going to come back. if you're not one of those people that can emotionlessly execute your trades you should just not start because you actually turn yourself into a gambler and most people are trading crypto

Starting point is 00:12:07 and nfts and stuff not really realizing that they're actually degenerate gamblers and that it's just you're not in the casino pulling slot machines and playing baccarat or whatever you're just like buying the next mint or trying to trade the next meme coin or get the next defy thing and you you convince yourself that you're an investor and you start doing analysis on this stuff when really in the end it's you know we can see what happens with these cycles can i make a suggestion i actually think that there's a way to talk about this that uh most people haven't used yet but but would uh register which is uh bitcoin incentivizes timeless investing principles so things like buy great assets and hold them forever right warren buffett charlie munger uh our favorite holding

Starting point is 00:12:52 time is forever, right? Again, same group of guys, uh, being able to go and buy assets for cheaper than what they actually are worth, right? All these things that are kind of these timeless investing principles, uh, Bitcoin. And I think most of the Bitcoin community, most of the information that's out there, et cetera, uh, is just repackaging these timeless investing principles for kind of the modern age and a new asset. But in some way, if you were to take many of the lessons and use, you know, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger as kind of the quintessential example, if you were to take most of the principles that they share with people and then just overlay it onto Bitcoin, then that's essentially what the Bitcoin community says, right? They call it buy

Starting point is 00:13:30 great assets, hold them forever. The Bitcoin community calls it hodl. But like, those are the same two things, right? Now, what I think is also to your point is that there are other assets that incentivize different strategies. And those different strategies are things around the day trading, the gambling, kind of whatever nomenclature you want to use. But if you look and you see people who have built true wealth, almost always, almost always, it's through holding great assets for very, very long periods of time and not interrupting compounding. And what I mean by that is you can look at real estate. I think it's something like 90% of people who are considered wealthy built it in real estate. They own property, right? And so if you think of Bitcoin as digital

Starting point is 00:14:14 property. There's a lot of similarities there of buy something, hold it for a long period of time. The second thing is if you take something like a network of Amazon, as an example, that compounds and compounds and compounds, Bitcoin's compounded at 150% annually for over a decade, right? That compound annual growth rate, et cetera. And so when you start to look at this, I think that by using the new nomenclature, it fits kind of the social media conversation and it's fun and all this stuff. But at the end of the day, it's highly convincing to say to people,

Starting point is 00:14:47 if you take the timeless investing principles as a filter and you overlay it on this entire industry, there's really one asset that seems to stick out in terms of fitting or checking as many of those boxes as possible. Now, some of these other assets may or may not check one or two of the boxes or whatever, but timeless investing principles

Starting point is 00:15:04 have you use that analysis that arrives at Bitcoin. And ultimately, that's what I think the Bitcoin community talks about a lot is timeless investing principles. They just don't use that language. Is that a fair categorization? Yeah, I would say that's sort of true. I mean, Bitcoiners say like, you know, the meme of the last two years has been Bitcoin is saving and Bitcoin is a savings technology. And for sure, like that shift from investing in Bitcoin is saving and Bitcoin is making its impact. At least

Starting point is 00:15:37 That's how I've been trying to present Bitcoin to people as not a way to trade, because if you present it as a investment, right, then people that don't have the nuanced understanding of the difference between investing and trading will easily get sucked down that rabbit hole of like, well, if it's an investment and I guess I can invest in this, then I should trade it and I should sell it when it's high and buy it when it's low and end up getting wrecked. But majority of people are going to not be able to beat Mr. Market, as we see with like when the bubble pops, like most people are holding the bag. And the other thing, Pomp, too, that I think most Bitcoiners turn really like kind of hardened against crypto narratives is because those memes of Bitcoin have been weaponized by people who are kind of like grifting and kind of like charlatans in the wider financial space that are moving into crypto and promoting the logic that Bitcoiners use and then just using it to promote DeFi coins or their NFT launch or whatever it is. And I've been in so many clubhouse rooms and Twitter spaces where I hear people like a Bitcoiner will be on stage like Lamar, Big Mar, or like myself or whoever discussing this specific thing about how Bitcoin is a savings technology. And you should think about it as a long-term savings vehicle and analyze it from the first principles of why did Bitcoin get created? What is important in having a decentralized network and asset like Bitcoin? You go through the government resistance aspects of it, the long-term credible monetary policy and how nothing else fits that bill. And then the guys will go like, yeah, no, I totally hodl. Actually, I just took a loan on my board ape and I bought some ape coin with it and I'm going to hodl that thing for the next 10 years. So yeah, I'm doing that. I'm doing long-term investing. So it's like, oh, my God, the level of misinformation and lack of understanding of the base core principles of like why Bitcoin was created, why it's valuable, what happens in these cycles.

Starting point is 00:17:41 People are just pumped up with all these really, in my opinion, like irresponsible narratives from, you know, big influential people like Raoul Pal from Real Vision and Cuban and people like that. I think you've done a really good job, actually, of navigating this bull market because you have a Bitcoin message and you're an entrepreneur and you're an educator, you're a capitalist. So I think of all the people in this bubble that went down the path of, say, a BitBoy or something like that, I have a lot of respect for the way that you handled this because you didn't seem to go out on that reputation risk curve like Real Vision did, where they decided to start interviewing BSV and Ripple and promoting all this DeFi stuff. And really, they're a very influential node in why Ethereum and DeFi was so successful this year because they like to talk about network effects. And Bitcoin has significant Lindy effect and network effects and all the other things, all the other pillars of value that hold up that parthenon of what Bitcoin is, why Bitcoin is valuable. Sure, like you said, some other

Starting point is 00:18:50 cryptocurrency, some other, some DeFi coins or whatever, they may actually have a very strong pillar in one area, like network effects. Like maybe there's a lot of developers or maybe it's more private than Bitcoin, or, you know, maybe there's, you know, like Travis Kling was saying recently that the ETH 2.0 proof of sake move is a super strong narrative. So it has like Lindy effect on the narrative, but like all the other pillars need to kind of nothing else equals Bitcoin and all those different pillars of value. And it's really difficult for someone to understand why Bitcoin really has value. And if you can't disconnect the technology narratives from the investment narratives, then you get what we saw happen in 2021, where a lot of people

Starting point is 00:19:32 see that they can make tons of money by going out on the reputational risk curve, selling all kinds of really high, overvalued, grifty projects and taking money from shit coins. and just promoting this bad logic out there. And that's what I think causes Bitcoin maximalists to get so toxic, you know what I mean? It's very difficult to get this education out there as well because it does separate into echo chambers. You get echo chambers of Bitcoiners

Starting point is 00:20:02 who just are so tired of it all and just call everything a shit coin. And they don't want to bother engaging typically because it's just like tireless having these conversations with people and people don't like to listen if they're just coming in for the FOMO of it. But then you also get on the other side,

Starting point is 00:20:16 these people promoting the idea that Bitcoin maxis are just toxic. And so they don't engage with the logic that Bitcoiners are trying to explain. So it's just like two camps of not bad people. Like it's not like everybody over in crypto. Like I'm sure there's like 2 million people that came into crypto in 2021 to buy Shiba Inu and SafeMoon. Like you can see on the blockchain, there was like 2 million addresses on SafeMoon.

Starting point is 00:20:42 And so I'm sure most of those people are just like me in 2011. I was just excited by the technology and I wasn't understanding really if I was a gambler or a trader or an investor, I didn't really understand sound money. I just saw that Bitcoin was exciting and I could turn on the computer and mine it with my graphics card on my gaming computer. And I learned eventually, but I didn't have people telling me to value this stuff because of community and all this other garbage so that's why bitcoiners in are so i think adversarial towards the defy stuff and the ethereum flippening narratives and the ultrasound money memes that are

Starting point is 00:21:24 coming out of the crypto um camps because dude it's like this is a battle for money in the end we are in a war for bitcoin's eventual survival as a proof a global reserve asset a global reserve currency. Not the, but some people like to think it's going to be the only money. That would be interesting. But I just think that the people that currently control the financial system, Wall Street, central bankers, et cetera, they have a vested interest in seeing the competitors to Bitcoin that they can co-opt, that they can control, rise above Bitcoin. and you can see the proof of work attacks are coming strong and heavy from A16Z and Ripple and Ethereum Foundation and all these crypto companies that are using the ESG narratives and

Starting point is 00:22:16 attacking Bitcoin through the proof of work thing and trying to FUD Bitcoin. I mean, it really is a battle for the future of Bitcoin at the highest levels. I'm sure 99% of the people that came into crypto don't think that deeply about it. And they're just like, yeah, I'm just trying to flip some flip some meme coins and buy some jpegs make some money but you know i think it's just worthwhile having more of these conversations and and debating it in respectful ways and trying to highlight like the follies of some of the logic that's getting pushed out there so so let me ask a couple of questions uh because i actually think that uh there's a lot of uh very good intentions that are misplaced in some of these conversations.

Starting point is 00:22:59 Take, let's look at the A16Z crypto, state of crypto report. They wrote, I don't know, a 50 page report, whatever the thing was. It was lengthy and it was obviously, took a lot of time, a lot of effort. They really did a lot, right? And I saw a bunch of Bitcoin maximalists

Starting point is 00:23:15 yelling and screaming that it didn't mention Bitcoin. But those same people will say, but Bitcoin's not crypto, right? Crypto and Bitcoin are two different things. it's Bitcoin and then everything else. And so I guess part of it is, I don't know what the answer is. It's kind of this weird thing. What do you think people should do? Should we encourage and ask people to embrace Bitcoin in those types of analysis? Or is it better to actually have them separated? Like what is, I guess, like the Bitcoin maximalist perspective on should Bitcoin be

Starting point is 00:23:51 included in a state of crypto report, or if it is something different, then it shouldn't be in the state of crypto because it's not crypto? Well, I think the incentives there are clear. Like A16Z has been pumping billions of dollars into propping up these DeFi narratives and NFT companies and NFT launches and stuff so that they can't actually make as much money. Like they did, Like A16Z and the Shillacoyne Valley VC apparatus that owns Web 2, Web 2.0, already owns Web 3. So, I mean, it's just disingenuous for them to push this Web 3 top-down meme on everybody that, like, you know, Web 1 is read, Web 2 is read-write, Web 3 is read-write-own. Really, it's Web 3 is you are the exit liquidity for their pre-mine because they've already pre-mined everything. And it's the same people that have installed the surveillance technology that is the-

Starting point is 00:24:43 Hold on. Hold on, though. Hold on a second, though. This is, again, like this is one of these things that- I'm getting off topic. No, no, no. No, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Right?

Starting point is 00:24:51 And again, I want to learn. All right. So you tell me. If A16Z or any other investor gives a founder money and they get something in return, right? They're sophisticated people. They know they're taking risks. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't work.

Starting point is 00:25:04 Whatever. what is the difference between that versus when an investor gives money for equity and then at some point in time they sell it in the public market to retail now again take away for take away the difference if there's misleading marketing if there's fraud if there's uh lies like all all that stuff right so let's just say for example that uh they we're going to use the benefit of the doubt that they're both the exact same thing i don't think that focusing on oh investors gave people money early as risk capital and then quote unquote they're dumping on retail is any better than all of the bitcoin caps because a16z let's keep using them as the example

Starting point is 00:25:50 they invested in coinbase which probably as any equity-based company coinbase has probably done more for bitcoin adoption globally than any other company just on sheer numbers they've got you know 80 million or 70 million users and early on they filled the hole of mount gox got hacked and coin base was the ability for people to do it now that doesn't mean that people can disagree with what they've done now all that stuff right but early on for sure they had a material impact a16z just invested i believe in david marcus's new lightning network uh startup right so it's it's not that they are anti-bitcoin at least from my perspective i've never talked to them about this but from my perspective, they're just saying, hey, we're taking a bet on the whole space. And they're

Starting point is 00:26:31 just plowing tons and tons of money into it. It's like, how do you think about that? Is it we want people to only invest in Bitcoin things and anything else is bad? Or is it as long as they're supporting Bitcoin? So for example, Lightning Network being integrated into FTX, when Sam Beckman Freed recently said some comments about Bitcoin, a bunch of Bitcoiners freaked out and they're like, integrate Lightning, integrate Lightning. Is it so much that, oh, if you have other tokens it's bad or is it no it's only bad if you don't support the lightning network right like there's like there's this balance and i don't know if there's a clear answer like it like it's a it's a complex issue well the way i look at it like i think that it's i look at it like on a

Starting point is 00:27:12 spectrum i like to look at things as like net positive or net negative or just like i think That's fair. So Andreessen Horowitz has significantly amplified the network effects of cryptocurrencies that are actively attacking Bitcoin's proof of work. So I think what Andreessen Horowitz does for the space is extremely net negative. i also think that it's unethical to what they're doing is really just trying to make billions of dollars off of technology narratives that are overvalued and blown out and i think that like what they do in the traditional markets is also unethical and it's you know it's not this isn't a defense of like the sec or calling for the sec like to cheer the regulations or anything like

Starting point is 00:27:59 that because i also think a lot of what happens in the traditional markets is extremely unethical And that's why I got into Bitcoin in the first place. And a lot of Bitcoiners are against that Silicon Valley insider, dump it on the public at 1000x valuations and restrict access to retail from getting those early gains. I think a lot of that is unethical as well and unfair. But the way that they've chosen to go and build this thing out is to redo the same thing that they did with Web2, which is get all these early tech companies, early internet companies, pre-mine the equity, if you want to use that term, and then eventually dump it all on retail and build up the network effects. But isn't that what every single equity-based Bitcoin company is doing as well? well that is i mean there is definitely some bitcoin companies that are you know like raising at higher valuations than they should be doing every by the way i i actually i disagree with you that uh equity-based investment is like unethical or bad right just i don't think it is no i just think it's in this market where the money is broken and the federal reserve is kind

Starting point is 00:29:09 of manipulating things to inflate equity bubbles, keep interest rates low. I think that there's this real problem that we're starting to see it deflate, but I think we're still way overvalued in the traditional markets as well. But I think it's ethical to build a business. And for instance, there's some stuff in DeFi that I think actually makes sense that can have some kind of fundamental value that will eventually fall towards a similar type of valuation model. It's like a PE ratio. But we're at record high PE ratios in the stock market and we're at obscene, well, we were at obscene PE ratios in crypto because a lot of this stuff was being propped up by tier one crypto funds and venture capital funds that were just investing in all this stuff, pre-mining it,

Starting point is 00:30:01 And then putting in the liquidity and LARPing governance and all this stuff and LARPing the technology narratives and then dumping it on DeFi exchanges and dumping it on Coinbase. So here's part of where I think that you and I definitely agree is, and I've been saying this for a very long time, all the way back to 2017, 2018, all the ICOs, all that stuff. I said, hey, I'm not investing in it. I think this is going to end up being unregistered securities. We saw multiple examples where regulators went after those things. And so maybe they change the rules in the future. Maybe they don't, right? I'm not a regulator. I don't know what they're going to do.

Starting point is 00:30:38 I don't know how that's going to play out. But as of right now, we've seen the SEC chairman say that he believes most of these are unregistered securities, et cetera. Let the market figure that out. I don't think you or my opinion is going to dictate where it ends up. I think that is a much stronger argument than the argument around, oh, anybody who invests the equity of a company ends up uh being unethical if they invest in their private market and then they quote unquote dump on retail after it goes public right because i think that part of it ends

Starting point is 00:31:07 up being if you i or anybody else wants to start a company today right and says hey i need capital for it a startup the whole point of it is that the venture capital industry is the risk capital you can't go to your parents or your friends and get the money you can't go to the bank and get the money so you have to go to somebody if you want to start the business though like there's there's rules and it's the the amount of fraud and and unregistered broker dealer type of activity that's happening in crypto in the last year is insane like pretty much 99 percent of it i don't disagree with that right but that's a separate issue what i'm what i'm basically getting at is i think that what we need to actually do is rather than attack people on its face we're much better

Starting point is 00:31:52 off saying to a large venture capital fund, even these exchanges, right? It's kind of like what the FTX thing, rather than attack FTX and say, you're all scammers, everything's bad, whatever. Instead, what do we do? Hey, integrate lightning, help push Bitcoin forward. Sure. But that's happening in like, for sure. Like we should focus on that. That's what I'm doing personally. I've invested in like 20 different Bitcoin startups over the last year and a half and i actually you're balling well i i actually like i i'm a bitcoin capitalist like you know like i will invest in shit coin icos and get in the pre-mine of some stupid shit coin with the intent of taking it and like investing the gains if i don't wreck myself in a bitcoin

Starting point is 00:32:36 startup that ends up building out this thesis that you know what we're all trying to do here provide a fair base layer of money for the 2 billion people in the world that live under financial oppression or live under capital controls. So back in July, 2020, actually around the same time that you put out the CryptoPunks blog post, I also saw what you saw and I started buying CryptoPunks because I was like, this bubble is going to go crazy. And rather than just getting triggered by it on Twitter all the time, which I ended up doing anyway but like rather than just getting extremely triggered and not being able to stop it i just saw the amount of activity that was happening in those same degenerate vc circles that were pumping the

Starting point is 00:33:20 ico bubble i saw it all coming back to life and i saw this new vector of nfts is going to be the next big bubble and all these like insiders were starting to buy up the nft stuff and start doing yield farming and all these other ponzi scheme ponzi nomic mechanics so i was like you know what I still have some network in the crypto scene because I worked at a crypto fund in the ICO bubble and we invested in like 70 ICOs. So I saw how the sausage was made in the last bubble. And then I realized going through that plus the block size wars as a Bitcoiner, as a Bitcoin maximalist, if you want to call me that, I have those two personalities, if you want to say. Like I'm a FOMO sapien and a Bitcoin maximalist. And I've I've saw the sausage get made. I saw how unethical everything was happening over there. And I'm like, this is just nonsense. And it was frustrating to see that the Bitcoin venture capital space wasn't getting as much FOMO as the the shit coin stuff, because you can make like 100x if you get in or 1000x if you get into the pre-seed of a of like an FTX backed protocol or DeFi coin or whatever. So of course, there's all this incentive for people like Andreessen Horowitz to go build these 50 page things because they got to create exit liquidity. They got to build it up and build it faster than the regulators can regulate it. So that's actually what ended up happening. They put so much money and energy and time and resources into building up this stuff that the regulators just got overwhelmed. And now it's like the bubble is cracked. The NFT bubble's popped. And I think now we're finally starting to see people start to pay attention to what's happening on Lightning Network and start to allocate like what David Marcus is doing and potentially FTX and stuff. They're now starting to finally pay attention to Lightning Network and Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:35:09 They're coming back to Bitcoin. And I'm actually seeing a lot more competition in the Bitcoin venture capital rounds now, where a year and a half ago, two years ago, I was the only one sometimes deploying into the seed round of a Lightning startup or whatever. They're raising like, you know, $100,000 or $50,000 or something on like a $1, $2 million valuation. Now, it's getting more competitive. Call me when that happens.

Starting point is 00:35:32 People raising a million dollar valuation, call me. I got one actually that's going at $4 million valuation that I'm investing in. It's not too bad actually. $4 million is the new $1 million. All right, we got to go, but where can we send people to find you on the internet? I'd love to keep having conversations with people. I know a lot of influential people watch your show. I mean, I love just having long form debates about this because what you just said was interesting and it's tough to defend against that logic. I'd like to hone my skills a little more. What you said actually, it is a challenge because if you try to have this libertarian mindset and also a free markets perspective and balance that with the

Starting point is 00:36:14 understanding that Bitcoin is an open source technology, then it's really difficult to find the part in the middle where you can be critical of what's happening in DeFi and crypto and also continue supporting your, your, your like hatred of the sec and the, and the central bankers and stuff. I've, I feel like it's like longer conversations, more nuanced conversations that, that you get to that meet and people need to hear critical Bitcoiners like myself and others, I think explain their logic and get to that point because otherwise we're just going to get a whole bunch of more shit like Luna. And I mean, there's a lot of overvalued stuff still in crypto that people are drinking the Kool-Aid on. They really do believe in these community narratives and

Starting point is 00:36:58 utility narratives and stuff. And I really think we just should have a lot more conversation. So if anybody wants to reach out to me, I'm Brad Mills Can on Twitter. I got the Magic Internet Money podcast. And if you've got a show or something like that, or if you want me to talk to a private group, if you've got some high net worth individuals, you run a mastermind group or something like that, whatever. I'm always happy to have these long conversations about Bitcoin versus crypto because in the end it comes back to the idea that bitcoin was created for and it was to create this government resistant human resistant base layer of sound money a peer-to-peer cash network that we could use to have a more fair way to transmit and communicate value and

Starting point is 00:37:40 it wasn't about making a shitload of money it wasn't about like pre-mines or anything like that um so yeah man i i'd love to keep having these conversations that anybody can feel free to reach out to me. I'm usually on Clubhouse as well. If you go into the cafe Bitcoin rooms on Clubhouse, there's like a hundred or so Bitcoiners just 24-7 hanging out and they're shooting the shit, talking about this stuff. So if anybody wants to come in and ask some questions to some Bitcoiners, like, hey, what do you think of this project? What do you think of my logic on valuing this stuff? Whatever. We're always having these conversations. So come hang out with us. Awesome. I appreciate it, my friend. We'll definitely have you back again in the future.

Starting point is 00:38:17 And until then, have fun on the internet. Thanks, man. all right sounds good 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.

Starting point is 00:38:47 Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.

The Pomp Podcast - #973 Brad Mills On The Case For Bitcoin Maximalism

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