The Pomp Podcast - Aleks Svetski, Founder of Amber: Why The Bitcoin Price Is Wrong

Episode Date: October 4, 2019

Aleks Svetski is the founder of Amber. In this conversation, Aleks and Anthony Pompliano discuss Bitcoin maximalism, the intolerant minority, why Bitcoin's community is so important, how investors should view the asset, and why the world hasn't priced Bitcoin properly yet. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO.COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine.  Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Alex Zvetsky is the founder of Amber. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin maximalism, the intolerant minority, why Bitcoin's community is so important, how investors should view the asset, and why the world hasn't priced Bitcoin properly yet. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do as well. at crypto.com. Go help your boy out. Tell him Pomp sent you. Download the app or visit crypto.com. Pomp's got you always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry,

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opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got Alex here. I'm super excited to do this. He's got a bunch of crazy ideas about where the world's going. So thanks so much for taking the time to do this. Thank you, bro. Thanks for having me. My first time in New York, so great way to kick off. First time ever? First time ever. Really? Oh, we're going to have to tell you all kinds of cool things to go do. All right, let's start with your background. You live in Australia now, but kind of what did you do pre-Bitcoin? I had a crazy background. So I came out of uni

and I dropped out second year trading the markets in 2007. So I thought I was a genius. I started off by putting my three grand worth of scholarship money in the markets around early 2007. Within about six months, I turned three grand into 60. I thought I knew everything. I thought I was going to be a millionaire by the time I was 20. And then the pre-GFC tremors happened. But my plan was to be a millionaire by the time I was 20. I was a quarter of a million in debt by the time I was 20. I went the opposite way. Yeah. Well, it's funny because I think a lot of young people, there's very similar stories, right? I know Chris Saka had a similar story to that um i was lucky in that i took a little bit of money turned it into a lot more trading uh

foreign currencies in college uh lost about half of it but was still up and walked away um thankfully but but i think that that is um a starting point for a lot of people as they realize um you know you kind of learn by getting thrown into the fire a little bit yeah well i mean that was the catalyst so i dropped out of uni because at that point in time i had to um i i had to make 1500 bucks a week just to pay my bills before i could eat so i literally the only thing i could the only job i could get on short notice was knocking on doors like selling pay television door to door and i would put four fucking tuna cans so two two tuna cans in each pocket and i would sprint from door to door and i would only eat if i got a sale i love that that

was it and and i dug my way out of debt over about a year of doing that then i set up my own sales company and then i sort of built myself up from there i built a um a renewable energy business so we're installing solar panels and shit on people's houses because i had an engineering background so i can you know design the systems and all that sort of stuff and and i made my first million by the time i turned like 22 23 and that was sort of my my claim to fame in the early days and um and then i got my second big lesson in life which was um which was don't trust uh the government um and basically in the industry that i was in they were handing out uh rebates and shit to everybody right um and it effectively worked if if a customer bought a ten thousand

dollar system uh four thousand would be paid by the customer and roughly six thousand would come through these uh renewable energy certificates which were effectively the government funding element um the government towards right the end of the um of the scheme they sort of uh three weeks out said oh look if if um we're ending the rebate in three weeks if you don't sign up um in three weeks you miss out and everyone went fucking gangbusters like we signed up maybe five or ten million dollars worth of systems in like a couple weeks like we we thought we fucking nailed it and we're like all right sweet you know we'll have to transition the market's going to be slower but we've got enough systems to last us for a while and anyway we went and installed all the systems

and in that 10k chunk there's probably about 10 15 margin left in that when it came time to pay out the the six grand the government component we um everyone got 50 cents on the dollar so well they ran out of money uh basically that that's the easiest way to put it so so we went from having profit on every job to every job being a fucking loss and the more jobs you did the more you lost so that was my second big thing so i lost a shitload of money there um i i you know uh i then went on a sabbatical the thing that saved me during that period was after the market crash in you know 28 um 2008 i really went down the the the gold silver and you know monetary sort of um stuff and i i had bought like some gold and silver because i was convinced

the world was coming to an end um i was half a fucking prepper whilst i was still doing the solar stuff so it was just it was a really interesting period so i got fucked with that and then i ended up going on the sabbatical man not many people know this but i actually became a vegan for like for like a year and a half um i went like that's not allowed in bitcoin but go ahead i know here's the thing i was curious enough to try it and i actually came out of that knowing that that is the fucking dumbest way to eat like it is absolutely categorically the worst way when did you do this for how long this was in 2012 okay to about 2013 it's almost a year yeah so call it i started being vegan just before 2012 and i finished like sort of coming into 2014 so

was about a year and a half that i was okay so i was vegetarian for five months or so in 20 it's probably 2016 2017 2017 yep um i actually never felt better in not eating meat but it was unsustainable because i lost so much weight and i just couldn't okay i just like couldn't make it this this is where plant-based works plant-based works if you want to cleanse or if you want to clear out some shit okay but it is very very bad for hormones for hormone regulation for muscle and for nutrient density so what happens is so i actually i was matt was giving me shit last night because when i went vegan i wanted to write a book about it and show that you could actually build muscle and do all this sort of shit being a vegan and for the first six months i felt fucking

incredible my energy was better my skin was better my like all this sort of stuff so i thought i found the holy fucking grail so i started doing this thing but over time i plateaued and then after i plateaued all my my strength started to come down my hormones started to get all fucked up my you know my fuck started losing hair i was getting flabby all this sort of shit started to happen over time because what happens is your hormones um misregulate so when i started eating meat again so i was convinced by this dude um because i was living in bondi at the time which is sort of like health mecca in um in australia and he sort of snuck some lamb into one of my vegan meals the motherfucker and um and i went from there to eating some eggs and then i don't

know if i can say this on the podcast but i'm gonna fucking say it anyway dude when i started eating some um some meat again i had a i had a fucking boner for three weeks but i swear to god like i my home like i went back to from benching i was like i used to bench 220 pounds and i went down to like 120 pounds and then i went back to 220 pounds within three weeks like i wanted to have sex with every girl that i saw i wanted to beat the shit out of every guy that i saw like i and i was like shit this is what i was missing out on yep and so that's where meat is really important it's nutrient density it's hormones and it's um it's it's fucking strength it's groundedness yep which you don't get in um in in being vegan so anyway um coming

back to the journey so that was a minor detour um i'd heard about bitcoin at this stage but i dismissed it um because i was too involved in thinking that the world was coming to an end and And I was stockpiling gold, silver. I was, you know, fucking buying solar panels and batteries and prepping, you know, for the end of times. And anyway, after that whole sabbatical, I came back to Australia and I spent some time in Singularity University in SV in about 2014. And I was like, holy shit, tech is the way. Came back. I built some payroll automation software, exited that, and then built up this recruitment automation software.

I got Steve Job out of my own business. um i um i disagreed with the way the board wanted to run the company and all this sort of shit so i moved on and that was sort of my foray into bitcoin so 2016 was when i really like went down the rabbit hole and what was the initial interest there right so you heard about it before you dismissed it we were talking before we started uh i had a very similar uh journey i think but what was the thing that really threw you down the rabbit hole and you're like hey i gotta check this out see if this is real if i boil it down to like the the hook was the price i saw the price i was like holy shit i was like this is 600 now like the last time i'd heard about it it was like 150 or

whatever it was and i was like fuck me like i've just busted my ass working and doing all this sort of stuff and i could have just put some money into this thing and gone to the bahamas so that was my initial hook and then i need to give credit where credit's due like um i don't agree with many of andreas entenopolis's stuff these days where he talks about fucking everything's gonna have a token everything's gonna have a coin but his initial talks because because i've got a background also in you know psychology i studied anthropology history and all this sort of stuff and the way he presented bitcoin just really really lined up with my background and the way i think about things and yeah man i like his his works his talks um i went down that rabbit hole then you know

obviously say fadeen stuff um i'll give some credit to to tone vase as well like he was um he was like one of those intolerant bitcoiners that you know wouldn't you know it was bitcoin or, you know, shit coin, basically. All right, show the shirt. He brought a shirt to really get people all upset. It says Bitcoin, not shit coin, amber.app. So we'll get that out there because he wanted to make sure that everyone knew

where this conversation was going early on. Exactly. All right, so let's talk a little bit about Bitcoin maximalism. And for those that are listening at home, we've got the live stream going on Twitter right now. So there may be some people who jump in with some questions that we take as well.

um but bitcoin maximalism is uh generally um associated with a negative connotation uh it's toxic it's uh tribalism it's all these things just talk a little bit about how you think about bitcoin maximalism um and why you actually think it's important versus it being something negative yep well i've got a friend of mine and shout out to rory highside here um he he coined a term which i loved which is bitcoin supremacy and that is like literally it's beyond maximalism it is we don't even recognize anything other than bitcoin um and the reason i think this is important is um we have a chance at creating a monetary network and a new money that is robust that is secure, that is available, that is fixed. I think the fixed element is so fundamentally

important because if you look at what money is supposed to represent, money is supposed to represent your work or your input into a society. And work, input, and time are all fixed constants in the universe. And what we've got in today's society and in everything that we've had in the past is we've not been able to map work or time or effort put into society directly to money. when money is supposed to be the measurement of those things we've now created something that literally represents that and by definition um you know if we're talking about digital scarcity and fixed a fixed digital unit um we've got that now and all of our energy all of our time all of our efforts should be going into uh making that stronger and bringing that to more people so for

me um i see this as a um a multi-decade multi-generational shift that you know people are going to move towards the um the strongest form of money because of their own self-interest when you do work like people fundamentally value their time they value their work they value what they're doing they're not going to want to long term represent that time or value or work in any unit other than the one with the greatest guarantee of um i guess supply security um uncensorability unconfiscatability the things that bitcoin represents and that's all the shit that bitcoin has optimized for outside of um what every other shit coin or crypto or anything like that has gone and tried to optimize for whether it's fast payments whether it's you know the the stupid

world computer or whatever other fucking idea that people have taken and tried to um use the bitcoin recipe for so coming then back to bitcoin maximalists is the intolerant minority that they represent so the the the cohort of people that they represent are um i was talking i was talking to matt odell um about this last night and we kind of used the the example of the b caches I don't know about you, but every big casher that I've ever spoken to, a lot of the things, a lot of the ways that they view Bitcoin are correct until you sort of get to like the scaling debate and you know how, you know, that they misinterpret what the definition of cash is and the dangers around really centralizing nodes and all of that. but um the thing that you'll note about bcash is is most of them if not all of them hedge themselves by holding some bitcoin whereas you look at the bitcoiners they dumped all of their fucking bitcoin cash they dumped any other fork so that intolerant um ability to stick with what

you believe in is really unique to the bitcoin group and the bitcoin maxis because we come from a core of people who will not compromise who will not you know adjust our values just because it sounds nice or because you know so you know we're going to be hurting somebody's fucking feelings or any of that sort of stuff it is literally bitcoin bitcoin's consensus rules and that's it that we will not waver from that and the reason that's important is because this is a movement This is the revolution of our time. We're separating money from state. The last revolution that happened of this magnitude was the separation of church and state.

And that was, you know, the emergence of science in the Renaissance, you know, four or five hundred years ago. Like that is a big fucking deal. Yeah. One of the things that I definitely think people misunderstand, right? So I talk all the time. I say, look, money is a belief system. And most people will agree with that to some degree. And if money is a belief system, then money ends up looking very similar to religion.

Right. So if you look at the U.S. dollar, literally, you know, in God we trust. Right. The full faith and backing of the government. All of these things are inherent to money and they have been for a very long time. It would make sense that people have a very zealot or religious like view towards the next money, right, which is Bitcoin. And in that situation, I think what you're basically describing is a very, in some people's eyes, fanatical approach to those ethos, to that belief and saying, look, this is what we believe. And if we believe this, we're not willing to compromise. We're not willing to waver from this. This is what we believe. And therefore, we are here to defend it both kind of in the way that we talk about it, but also to attack the ideas that go against it.

Well, it feels fanatical to people because people don't appreciate how important money is in society. Like, you know, we've been sort of taught over time that our money is the root of all evil. You know, money is just for these dickheads who are selfish and all this sort of stuff. Right. But if you take a moment to think about it, if money is the tool that literally holds the fabric of society together, you cannot have society without money. You remove that element, society falls apart because if we define society as a collection of inputs from a collective of participants, the only way these participants can collaborate and build a society is by performing some sort of function or work within a society and that function or work needs to be measured through some form of unit and that unit is money. so so so you cannot have it so you cannot have society without money so if we if any of the people listening to this or anyone hearing this values anything that you have in life it's because money actually exists that's it now the reason why people are so fervent about um you know

something like bitcoin is because now for the first time in history we've got a way to represent money that is that is uncompromisable that is so fucking important because when you can fix that layer um you can really start to um build a world that is incentivized appropriately i.e in today's day and age i always use this example when i try and explain to people why bitcoin is really important in today's day and age if you're a government or if you're a central bank you basically have you can play the game where it's um i flip a coin heads i win tails you lose in other words they can make a bet and if they make a good bet they um they make money if they make a bad bet they make money you and i in the real world we go out there and you you make a good

bet you make a good decision by and large you know not not counting for randomness you get a good outcome you do fucking something stupid you get a bad outcome right that is the corrective mechanism of all of life of all of physics of all of science right only in the monetary system do you have a situation where one the vast majority of society has to abide by those rules do something smart get a good result do something dumb get a bad result whereas a small subset of society can do whatever the fuck they want and they get a good result irrespective and then that starts to create distortions in society so when you can separate money and state which is going to be the i guarantee that is the battlefront of today's day and age when you can separate those two and make

money a fixed constant that is uncompromisable unconfiscatable and unable to be censored by anybody you have a society where the only way to earn more of that resource is by performing more work adding more value or doing more for society that's it you don't have any other fucking way so therefore the only way for you to um to excel in life or to move forward is by adding value to society or the alternative is you fucking steal but you know the beauty of a society like that is you can build you know property rights into it such that you know the deterrent to steal is large enough such that people's incentive is to add value and to produce because that is how fucking um that that is how society should function so well and i think part of this right

is um if you think out of every single country they all have different monetary policies they all have different governments and one of the things that i've always uh found interesting slash uh confusing is if you and i are trading and we're going to denominate that trade or settle that trade a lot of times i don't know what you're doing with your currency if you're a different country you don't know what i'm doing with mine and therefore we're trying to make a one-time trade uh where it's basically like a spot price right okay hey here's where the currency is let's make this transaction but if you get into more longer term type relationships where i can easily manipulate my currency you can easily manipulate yours you end up getting this financial engineering

right it's not true quicksand it's quicksand literally we're living in a time of monetary quicksand where nobody knows what the fuck is going on nope and you know what it's not only that we don't know what the other person's doing we actually have no idea what we're doing so there's a um there's a a branch of um complexity theory called systems thinking and i and i recommend everybody look into some system thinking and start to understand how this happens but um effectively you've got a system which is complex and you have a set of inputs and outputs and when you perform when you add some sort of input into a system it's very very difficult almost nigh on impossible in a complex system to understand what the ramifications are going

to be on this side and that's what we've got with markets today and that's what we've got with central banking and the current system is we're literally playing games with shit we don't understand we're like oh what what if we um press this button here what the fuck's that gonna do oh it fucking just did this this this which we wanted it to do but here's another 10 000 side effects that we weren't expecting oh now how do we fix those side effects oh well let's push this button here and then that fixes a couple of those and then creates another 5 000 side effects so we've got this game of like cat and mouse where we're continually adding fragility to the system to the point where that's the shit's going to blow up in our face yeah well it's i think what

you're really talking about here is uh anytime that the system goes to uh structurally correct right so there are just like in any system um where there's a market markets can get overheated or underheated. Right. And so normal functions. Yeah. What we have seen is when those markets go to correct, central bankers step in artificially to try to correct it. Now, there is an argument to be made, a moral, ethical and more societal argument that says any sort of downturn in an economy can be incredibly painful and can hurt a lot of people. Right. So there's that piece of it. The other side of that argument is, but it is normal and it is better for the long term sustainability of the system correct so let's talk about why it's normal actually i was i was

at an airbnb in um in palm springs the other day for for crypto springs and um and i was talking to the airbnb host there and he was sitting there telling me oh you know blah blah blah you know um recessions are bad and you know we need to avoid recession all this sort of stuff and i was like why why are recessions bad let's take the idea of a downturn and the idea of a break and apply it to a um a situation outside of markets because because this this constant chase to avoid recession to avoid pain i think is one of the root problems with society today we are all chasing the next fucking high the next hit the next bit of you know dopamine released happiness because we're so afraid to experience a bit of lull a bit of pain or a bit of downtime so if you

like let's say you go to the gym right you go and train you go and lift fucking weights what do you do between sets you rest you rest you stop for a minute so the whole nature functions in this way you one must when you when you exert when you move up you must take a moment to rest you have to take a moment there needs to be intervals you cannot move in a single direction forever that is not how nature functions that is not how the universe functions not nothing else in the world functions like that and we've become addicted to this idea that everything must move up and in a single direction, as if downturns or recessions are bad.

Recessions, downturns, breaks, opportunities to reflect are one of the most important functions of any system because they allow you to take a moment to breathe and to realize. There's a return back to kind of the average, right? If you will. And so the average is there for a reason.

But what I think becomes more interesting is when these central bankers step in and they try to manipulate the economy in a way to prevent those downturns, right? So they drop interest rates, they print money, all the things that we know that they do. What they're really doing is not fixing the structural issues or allowing the market to find a point of equilibrium. What they're doing is they're kicking the can down the road. They're kicking the can down the road and they're increasing the deviation from the mean.

So when the time comes to rebalance, it's going to be all the more painful. So what we're doing is we're sacrificing. This comes back to the incentive mechanism that I was talking about earlier. In today's day and age, the world we live in today, the incentive is to value today more than tomorrow. Whereas the incentive in a Bitcoin ecosystem is to value tomorrow greater than today, is to have a lower time preference. This is a meme that's going around now. So by valuing today more than tomorrow, we continually kick the can down the road and we're creating a situation where our children and our children's children are going to have to bear a debt or they're going to have some sort of shit blow up in their face or because we were too stupid, too weak and too impatient to want to, you know, go in and actually fix the stuff that we've messed up. Yeah, well, it's the whole idea of it's like drinking, right?

Exactly. It's drinking or drugs. When you drink the first beer, it tastes really good. And you're like, man, I really miss having a beer. I want to have a second one. Then you have a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth. And next thing you know, you're drunk. And when you're drunk, it's amazing. You feel like you're on top of the world, right?

No one can stop you, et cetera. Where you feel the negative effect is the next morning when you're hungover. Dude, I'm going to say it's even more like drugs, actually. You take a drug, you feel high. You come down and you want to get that high feeling again. So you take another drug, you take another drug. and then all of a sudden you become addicted and the only way to quit is by fucking stopping and that's it it's the only way you're going to get better because if you continually get higher

forever you're just going to kill yourself at some point and that is exactly what like we are living in an economy in a time where everyone's high like literally we're all high on dopamine the markets are high real estate's high everything's high everyone's on drugs like we're so extended that um you know we need a rebalancing that just the problem is going to be And unfortunately, for most people, that rebalancing is going to be really, really painful because we've moved so far away from the mean that it's going to be hard to manage that reversion in a sensible manner. For sure. Let's go deeper on this idea of the intolerant minority that you were talking about. Describe what that is and what the importance is. So Taleb talks about that and I'm pretty sure that's in Skin in the Game in his book.

And he talks about how intolerant minorities are the drivers or the catalysts for movements and for broad-based changes because they will not compromise on any values or anything that they believe in. So he uses an example of like kosher food, for example. It is much easier for a large-scale food manufacturer to make all of their food kosher because you and I, we may or may not be Jewish, whatever the case is, we will eat kosher food. But people who are Jewish will not eat kosher food. So instead of making two lines, what they do is they just make all the food kosher because then they can cater for everyone. And that is as a result of catering for the intolerant minority. The same thing is going to happen here is we've got this intolerant minority of Bitcoiners who are true to the sanctity of what Bitcoin represents, which is an uncensorable, unconfiscatable, uninflatable form of money. So and the reason we're so intolerant about that is because we've spent the time to sit down and understand what money represents.

Most people haven't done that. Most people just I recently tweeted. I said on a percentage basis of percentages, there are more people on crypto Twitter who understand what money is than people on Wall Street. Yeah. And I'm going to say I'm going to nuance that. And I'm going to say Bitcoin Twitter because literally I don't think many people on crypto Twitter actually understand what money is. Most people on crypto Twitter, I think, take a technologist's viewpoint of what this thing is. I believe Bitcoin is a monetary phenomenon, not a technological phenomenon. Although they're inextricably linked, the monetary phenomenon here is where the game is at.

Okay, so this is an idea that I actually haven't talked about publicly yet, but behind closed doors, I've been talking more and more about with companies that we're invested in or other investors, which is a lot of what we're seeing here. The winners are not going to be technological innovations. Right. It is actually going to be what I call not a network effect, but a liquidity effect. Right. And that a liquidity effect essentially is, you know, take Bitcoin. You could have somebody else recreate every single technical component of Bitcoin and launch it tomorrow. The problem is that they don't have the quote unquote liquidity in the supply and demand of people who want to hold it or people who want to use it. And therefore, that liquidity effect is actually what the defining feature is, not the technical effect. Now, exactly. So, okay. So I'm going to, I'm going to nuance that argument a little bit, because I talk about that when I explain why Bitcoin is the, is the only game in town in this space is step one.

The first thing that another network cannot replicate with respect to Bitcoin is you cannot replicate the life, the period of time that how Bitcoin was launched, the initial holders, libertarian movement, the disappearance of Satoshi and everything that happened at that point in time. Bitcoin's initial dismissal by the world, people thinking that our mining is a fucking joke and all this sort of stuff. Bitcoin is successful now because it was initially dismissed. and that period of time you cannot replicate there is no it is actually physically impossible to go back in time and to produce the same run so so that's the first piece well and it and it grew in the shadows is basically exactly you cannot nobody can go and replicate that because none of us like this isn't fucking back to the future right we we can't go and jump in you know we're not marty mcfly and we can't go and replicate that future again with something else so that's

the first piece marty bent might be marty mcfly i don't know maybe maybe maybe if anyone can do it it's him but that that's the first piece so now once we've ticked that box because of those elements bitcoin now has the most liquidity and if we look at what money is money is supposed to be the most liquid good on the face of the planet it is the good against which we price everything so you've got this what's called a convergent network effect which is the more liquid a money is um the more liquidity it starts to draw in because people want to have or hold the money that is the most liquid now the more so basically liquidity attracts more liquidity and and now that bitcoin is already um the the size and the degree to which it is for every year that bitcoin

grows any other shit coin even if they somehow manage to solve or create their own initial complex method of growth like you know their fucking founder disappeared or whatever it would take them 10 years to catch up for every year that bitcoin grows so it's too late the train has already taken off those kind of network effects you cannot catch so you've got this convergent network effect happening you've got this liquidity reinforcing um happening and you've got this unique um uh what uh gg who um who wrote the 21 lessons he calls it this immaculate conception is that it happened once we ain't gonna fucking repeat that furthermore you've got digital scarcity which is a one-time event that's another thing and then you've got these this

optimization for the objective attributes that bitcoin has which is it optimizes for uncensorability for uninflatability for unconfiscatability those objective attributes help reinforce the belief system around bitcoin being a superior money because we've got objective attributes of bitcoin that we can all agree to much like why gold became a better form of money than iron or copper it was an inert metal it was scarcer it was harder to produce it was more recognizable all of these objective attributes or elements about it so all of these reasons together mean that bitcoin is in a position where it cannot be beaten maybe maybe maybe maybe six or seven years ago you know maybe even five years ago it's too late the ship sailed well so and part of this too is not only the

Bitcoin was able to grow in the shadows. But one of the things that I think about a lot is the lack of selfishness that Satoshi Nakamoto had. Right. You know, there are at least I'm not aware of a single token, cryptocurrency, et cetera, that has been created yet where we don't know who created it. Correct. And it never will be. And it never will be. that's the thing because this was done now anyone who does produce it to in order to cover your tracks the way that satoshi did we don't live in a world like that anymore that was it was a one-time event it happened then because it was able to happen then this ain't gonna fucking happen again you know it happened right in the um in the depths of the gfc that shit ain't gonna fucking happen again the timing the the period that the style the way it was done that was an

immaculate conception and it's all over game game set match um the other thing i'm also going to mention that just quickly about um what you just mentioned on satoshi's like benevolence like the fact that he came in he created this and um and he left i i when you look at the bitcoin community and you look at the you know the so-called toxic maximalists when you look at what they're doing and their intolerance to shit coinery their intolerance to this whole fucking blockchain crap that's going around their intolerance to anything other than bitcoin they're actually they're an extension of the service that satoshi provided which is when i go out and tell people about bitcoin i'm doing it from a place of yes i want to pump my own bags in you know in one sense

you know so there is that um selfishness you know around it but really what i'm doing is i'm actually doing a service to this person and helping them avoid losing their fucking hard-earned time money and effort on investing in a shit coin or going down the path of block chainery or shit coinery or all of that sort of stuff that doesn't matter so i'm actually doing them service so if you look at the the the bitcoin community especially those hardcore maximists who get a lot of shit those guys are the missionaries they are the people that are doing more service to people coming into the space than any other muppet that is out there trying to promote their own shit coin or create their own shit coin or sit there and do you know poo poo on bitcoin because

they want to sell their own you know agenda or their own thing yeah like these maximalists are literally doing the greatest service to the community and they're doing it whilst copping all of this heat calling them toxic calling them assholes calling them dickheads and and we sort of we take that in we're like call us what you want we will not fucking move from this line and we will maintain the standard and at some point you will come around and thank us for not deviating well and i think if you look pretty early on at most large successful companies um there was a especially in technology there was um a founder or founding team that had a very principal or missionary based uh they had a very low level of social skills a lot of times which led to

they're assholes they don't get it they you know all this kind of negative uh feedback um but they stayed very very very focused on what they were trying to build and why it was important and that focus and that lack of deviation from that mission ended up leading to uh significant impact outcomes uh on the world right and i think that money is not only no different it's probably just uh all of that stuff on a much greater scale correct it's so it's so much broader like i was trying explained to someone the other week that um that the market that money represents is immeasurable it is the biggest market this is the biggest opportunity in the biggest market i don't get like apple all of the tech companies all of the shit pales in comparison because they're all

measured through a monetary unit anyway like so money absorbs and encompasses all of it it's so much fucking bigger like to to your point there that you just touched on i always ask this question to people would you prefer an honest asshole or a polite liar it's a great point it is it's one of the most like and most people believe it or not they'll say an honest asshole but in real life they'll hang out with polite liars yep for sure and and that is a fucking shame because that's again another function of the world we live in which is everyone is too um too afraid to be called out too afraid to be butthurt too afraid to be you know um to be confronted with reality So we go and, you know, placate ourselves and placate those around us with what may not be outright lies, but, you know, we meander around points.

We soften things, you know, we do all this sort of stuff just to sound good. And that's not true just in crypto or Bitcoin, right? That's true across the whole society. And that's why people in the Bitcoin space come off so, you know, quote unquote toxic or like assholes, because guess what? We're honest assholes. Yeah. Well, it goes back to the whole idea of like nomenclature and words really matter. I usually talk about that in the sense of, you know, when we go to war, we say we're going to go fight insurgents, not fight humans. Right. When we sanction somebody, we don't talk about we're going to censor them.

We talk about we're going to sanction them. Same thing here is you can say, hey, that person is toxic. Or you can say that person refuses to say anything other than the truth. Yes. Right. Yes. Those two things are not necessarily incompatible with each other. And also, if you were to say that person refuses to say anything but the truth, all of a sudden now you might be much more attracted to listening to what that person has to say versus the negatively connotated that person's toxic or maximalist. 100%. Do you know what I love about the Bitcoin community is that we take those memes anyway. So we take an insult. You know, initially maximalism was an insult from Vitalik, right?

We took it and we've turned it into a powerful meme that we can, you know, that's a lightning rod through which, you know, Bitcoiners now congregate around. then the next one oh you're a toxic fucking bitcoin now we've taken that and we wear that shit with pride like you've seen samson's caps like we all walk around with that shit and we we hold that with pride because we're not afraid of fucking words like it's the sticks and stones may break my bones but you know names will never hurt me it's like we we don't give a shit about that because we you know that's not you can call us whatever names you want we're here to do a service for the world and at some point in time you'll come around and you'll thank us not only for being intolerant but you'll thank us for having the courage to remain intolerant despite

the fucking insults and despite all that stuff so one of the questions i get quite often um and i've got an opinion but i want to hear yours first before i reveal mine is uh if bitcoin fails can anything else succeed um i mean if bitcoin fails what succeeds is basically 1984 george orwell fucking social credit system you know explain um it is like if we look at the way like let's go back to the cypherpunks you know the cypherpunks 20 30 40 years ago whatever it was now i think it's you know jesus it's yeah it's 30 something years ago right in the manifesto like and i'm going to really crudely paraphrase here that they were saying the world is becoming electronic it's digitizing and the more it does the more the sanctity of privacy um is going to

be diminished. The ability to communicate privately with someone across electronic networks or digital networks is going to be impacted because authorities or central parties are going to be running this stuff. So we need to create open encryption standards such that communication can remain private. Furthermore, we need to create a form of money that can remain private and uncensorable such that people can live in a free society when society starts to digitize and become electronic. That was the foresight. So Bitcoin's not a 10-year-old idea. Bitcoin is a 20, 30-year-old idea. It's always been around. So what they set out to do first, and we managed to crack the private communication first, obviously. That was a much easier problem to crack.

The second problem was much harder. And obviously, Satoshi cracked it in 2008, which is why it's so profound. And without that, the world that we're going to live in is literally the world that um that you know is described so well in the movies like v for vendetta or the matrix or you know george orwell's book 1984 which is the let's look at it this way if money is the resource through which we measure society and the resource through which you know your value and effort and energy is measured and the resource through which you can trade and participate and actually you know buy other goods um if you live in a society where that is concentrated or able to be centralized um and managed by someone you even if that someone is a good actor and you know

wants the best for their people you know some benevolent dictator or whatever you uh you have a high degree of risk or you are in a very precarious situation where let's say you like the wrong fucking thing you say the wrong thing your ability to participate in an economy is just simply switched off you can't get on a bus you can't buy food you can't do fucking shit well Well, this is what we're seeing with the Chinese credit system, right, which is essentially imagine if you want to take the express bus, but you're not allowed to because you came to work late today. So they're going to force you now on the way home. You have to, quote unquote, suffer or be punished. You can't take the express bus.

They have to take something else. That sounds like a really far off, crazy kind of like sci fi based world. But I don't think we're that far off. It is happening right now. It is happening right now. there was um like without bitcoin that is the world we get and this is what i tell people is like whilst yeah you know we're all about you know making money with bitcoin and the upside and all of that sort of stuff what i'm more about and we'll touch on this later is the the idea of

collecting bitcoin now because it is the it is the only free money that exists in this world it is the only opt-out from a world that is that is converging towards concentration and concentration in a manner that creates mal-incentives for those people who are running it to do shit that may not be in the interest of freedom. So, all right. So before we get to that though, one of the things I want to talk about is this idea that we are now seeing a showdown between corporations and countries over that control, right? So we see de-platforming, we see censorship from many corporations which was previously a uh a nefarious activity reserved for governments right now corporations have gotten that ability because they own the platforms on which we're speaking

if governments and corporations are able to do this stuff they end up competing over almost who can be worse right who has more power who has more control and this is where you see some of the stuff i think in the united states in the technology world um of the who has anti-competitive behavior does somebody have a monopoly like like what monopoly does facebook have what has a monopoly on attention yes right it has a monopoly on uh a platform for speech yep there's a lot of people who aren't comfortable with that right and so i think that when you look at that um what we're talking about with bitcoin is uh it's a way to bring back the monopoly on time on money on value all this stuff but we're doing it with from day one it was designed in a way where it does not

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annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency. This rate actually compounds. So you receive a 6.2% APY, which is very attractive given the alternatives. So you can actually take your Bitcoin, you can deposit it with BlockFi and get paid an interest rate of 6% in return. Go check out BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, BlockFi.com slash Pomp to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today. So you touch on a really interesting point. If we are seeing the corporations and the governments of the world censoring and doing all of this stuff with things that are just, you know, like social media, for fuck's sake, which is nowhere near as important as money. What do you think they're going to do if they've got the same type of control over money? Well, and they're doing it now. Right. So, like, I continue to say this. And again, sometimes it's unpopular. So I always caveat it with there are reasons and very strong arguments to be made for sanctions.

Right. I am not in any way saying that I am against sanctioning. But if we were to go out and tell the United States people that we are going to cut off millions of people in another country, the citizens from the global financial system. I think there's a lot of people who will be asking questions. Why are we doing that? How is that happening? What is their other alternative options? You know, how are those people going to get food, money? How are they going to make a living, survive?

All these different things. But what we do is when we sanction other countries, we are simply censoring them. And what we're doing is we're trying to apply pressure. We're engaging in economic combat, right, or war in order to force or heavily incentivize the leadership of those countries to do things we want them to do. So, again, it's a completely rational position to take for the world's superpower and controller of the reserve currency. Because it's the world we live in today. Yes. But the problem becomes the impact that it has below the leadership of that country can be devastating. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And again, like, you know, I'm not going to sit here and talk about, you know, what's right or wrong from, you know, people's freedom and all that sort of shit like that. That is what it is. And the world we live in today, like the US, is the reserve currency. And it is doing things, game theoretically, that make sense for it to remain some sort of reserve currency. But the world that we're building on Bitcoin, and this is why I believe Bitcoin is so profound, is that we're reinventing a new world with its own economic system that doesn't need anything from the old world. So we can just build from scratch our own fucking way, irrespective of what the rest of the world is doing. And over time, people are going to notice that what we're doing here functions better. It looks nicer.

It feels nicer. It's more equitable. It's free. The incentive systems, the incentives are aligned in a much more productive way. So people will come over. This goes to my whole theory that, and Parker Lewis, I think, from Unchained Capital said it perfectly. It's like gradually then suddenly. Right. And I think a lot about this idea of when we first started to develop a thesis around why is Bitcoin important to the world? You know, is this actually going to last? Is it sustainable? All this stuff.

It was people will trust software algorithms, right, especially in a decentralized world to store their wealth. Right. And that was kind of step one. What we didn't realize but now have come to the conclusion of is it's not that you go from 100% in the legacy financial system to 100% in this Bitcoin and cryptocurrency system. No, what you do is you say, I'm 100% to one legacy system to new system. But you know what? I actually think this new thing is interesting. Let me put 1%, 5%, 10%, right? Some small number.

And then you learn and you spend time and you see how it works. And you kind of become more familiar with them, more educated, it becomes less scary to you. Then you go from 1%, 5%, 10% to 25%, 50% to eventually over a long period of time, it will be 100%, right? And so what you actually need is you need people first to make the binary, I'm open to putting some percentage. And then once they start with some percentage, even if it's 1%, then it goes to, okay, now how do we get from 1% to full kind of wallet share, if you will, or wealth share? okay so that reminds me of um and i can't remember if it was hayek or one of the other um austrian economists he was like you know we need to create a money that is not owned by government that in some sneaky sort of way becomes the money that we all use and if you look at bitcoin this is why

i love bitcoin's design and i feel like it's just so like perfect is um bitcoin's a monetary beast and when someone says you know how is it going to become you know the reserve currency well how it's because through through tapping into one of our strongest drives i.e greed or the desire for a better future it is going to incentivize everybody around the world in some way shape or form to participate or get some exposure to bitcoin today and as they do that like i've got a saying which i say i came for the money and i stayed for the money right which is i came for the money because i was i wanted fucking gains but i've stayed for the money because now i realize this is the money and what's going to everyone's going to go through that journey simple as that

they're going to come in for the money they're going to come in for the incentive of a future return um and as they stay in it and as they go from one percent to two percent to five percent exposure they're literally going to get sucked into a monetary system that is superior to the system that they're currently in and and it's going to do that all through um initially tapping into greed and then over time delivering on the promise which is survival like if you've read richard dawkins selfish gene right it's we are optimized for survival we're a living fucking organism and again we increase our chances of survival through having our wealth stored in a more functional form so it is this this is why you just can't fucking beat it like and none of

The government's ruined all this stuff. We're going to come close to it. So I want to talk about another idea that you have, which is this idea of collecting Bitcoin. Yep. Right. I know that there's a saying or a meme that's really gone out there, which is stack sats. Right. And maybe describe a little bit about what you mean by collect Bitcoin and kind of how that compares to the stack sats.

So Matt O'Dell and the guys, they came up with stacking sats and it was just it is the best fucking meme. It sounds cool. And it's a way that we can really brand Bitcoin as something cool. Right. um what i've what i've found though is i've started doing some talks around universities and everything around australia when i say stacking stats sort of people like look at me like fuck you talking about right and um and and what i've sort of started describing it with is um is uh collecting bitcoin and the the analogy that i give to people is um is kind of like

imagine being alive 10 000 years ago when we're still using shells and rocks to trade you know or to measure our value um to measure our value um you could have found a yellow shiny rock on the ground and exchanged it with someone for maybe a couple grains of salt or a few spices because that person would have looked at you and thought what the hell am i going to do with this yellow shiny rock i can't eat it i can't wear it i can't drink it i can't do anything with it and you would have gone and traded that entire chunk of gold for a bit of salt because the rest of the world did not know how to price it did not know how to value it yep we are at that point in time with bitcoin right now the rest of the world has zero idea what money is they have zero idea

how to value this new form of money they have zero idea how to price it like what we're seeing in the market is not bitcoin's value what we see in the marketplace is people's perception of how to price a monetary instrument that is uncensorable unconfiscatable uninflatable and there is very few people in the world that understand how to price that so really the game today is buying and let's even get rid of the word buying the the game today is collecting bitcoin in the same way as you could have collected gold 5 000 years ago before anybody else knew what it was worth yep well and part of this too at least in my opinion right this is purely my opinion is uh if you look at gold um and the appreciation that it experienced until 1971 when we went off the gold standard

right? Since that day, it has appreciated over 40x, right? That's just price discovery. And part of that price discovery is what is gold worth. But some of that price discovery is also the depreciation of the US dollar, right? Against that asset. And so Bitcoin is going to have both of those occur, right? It's going to have the price discovery plus the depreciation of dollars. And so what you get is one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin, just like one ounce of gold equal one ounce of gold forever right but you're going to get the the movement is actually on the u.s dollar side the u.s dollar is volatile compared to bitcoin it's not that bitcoin is volatile compared to the u.s dollar 100 and so you're actually going to get two effects with bitcoin you're going to

get that effect and you're also going to get the discovery effect so you you're going to get the demonetization of the u.s dollar effect but i don't think that is going to happen until the later half of bitcoin so so the the discovery element or the discovery period is literally the period of the world working out that we can have a money that is non-government issued that is superior to the money we have today and once we've worked that out and it's broadly enough held like once bitcoin is past a million dollars a coin at that point you'll start to really see a flight towards getting out of fiat currencies and moving towards something like that because i mean let's we touched on libra before and and you know i really want to just sort of mention that like when libra

came out i was like this is so bullish for bitcoin because what it did in in one fell swoop it did two things number one it um it made for the rest of the population of the world it made the idea of a non-sovereign issued money possible yep when people like with bitcoin people like well how can you have a money that's not issued by the government but now that facebook issued it people like oh maybe you can so all of a sudden made the idea feasible this goes with a buddy of mine who I got to see if he's comfortable with me saying that he's the one who said it, but just a friend of mine said to me, there's a lot of people who don't like Mark Zuckerberg. Nobody thinks he's dumb, right? So the fact that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook and all this stuff was interested in

a non-sovereign issued currency, all of a sudden legitimized that idea. Yeah. Let me say this right now is Facebook, Libra, Zuck, they're not interested in blockchain. they are interested in money that is this is the game people that there is no blockchain here they're just using that as a buzzword they're interested in money because this is the separation of money and state i'm gonna blow your mind even farther than that i'm not even gonna say they're interested in money what they jp morgan hsbc wells fargo all these people announcing digital currencies they're not interested just in money they're interested in central banks and the reason why is because today they're saying i'm going to issue a digital currency it is backed by either

a commodity a currency or a basket of currencies it's pegged to something right so that's where the value comes from is my digital currency is backed by something else but what i'm scared of in the future is that they're going to unpeg it now they have a digital currency they control it and they're just a central bank they can print all they want and so they become central banks rather than just being uh in touch with the money yeah well correct so what i'm saying when i say money is i don't mean they're interested in making money like they're making like dollars i'm saying they're interested in money like the actual thing yeah that's exactly what they're interested because that is the game right now so i call it the corporate central bank yeah well that's it because

like the way the world is trending at the moment is you've got and we sort of touched on this before um we started the podcast is you've got um a world that is increasingly moving towards what might look like Fed coin, which is the USD, China coin, which will be a digital yuan. You'll have corporate coin, which is likely to be Libra, Zuckbucks. And you'll have the one bastion of freedom that is the money that's owned by the people, which will be Bitcoin. And people are going to have an opportunity to, you know, the beauty of Bitcoin is that it's opt in and opt out. It doesn't care. You can do that anytime you want. I wonder how difficult it's going to be to opt out of the other three i get the feeling that it'll be easier to opt out of something like

zuck buck than it will be to opt out of a you want right yep you know so so but but this this is literally going to be the four different you know factions of the world is um you know you'll probably have this whole social credit system you know communism under china you'll have hopefully something a little bit freer in the u.s you'll have something that is more um fast-paced you know technologically sort of driven and you know in in facebook but all inherently suffer from the same problem which is this concentration of who runs the money and the money is actually owned by a small subset of the cohort within that jurisdiction whereas bitcoin is the one that is owned by the people owned by everyone i i've watched one of our investors through recently and

i said what you have to understand is uh just like in investing doing something different and being right is where all the opportunity lies, right? And if you look at every single monetary asset that we have today, and historically, they have all had one fundamental flaw, which is they can be debased. And because they can be debased, that they can go on for very long periods of time, right? They can persist for decades, centuries, etc. But eventually, they all fail because they can be debased away bitcoin is the first time that we have seen a globally adopted money that is non-debasable which can hopefully drive not just a short-term sustainability but can actually drive a long-term sustainability and should be able to show uh and in some cases cripple a lot of the

currencies that are debasable because the flows will go to what has the longest term sustainable track record um or outlook correct because and this comes back to what we're saying before the two phases right is we're in the bitcoin discovery phase right now so during the bitcoin discovery phase the incentive to get into bitcoin is gains you know and and as we're doing that we're actually strengthening the bitcoin um ecosystem we're strengthening its security guarantee we're strengthening its brand we're strengthening its market capitalization we're increasing its liquidity we're doing all that sort of stuff at some point in time bitcoin will be the narrative will change and the incentive to buy Bitcoin is no longer going to be the gains. The incentive

to buy Bitcoin is going to be the aversion to loss. Because at that point in time, it's going to be, I want to store my wealth in something that is uncensorable and unconfiscatable and uninflatable. So at every single point in Bitcoin's asymptotic life cycle, you have an incentive that is stronger than everything else in the market. And that's why it's unstoppable and it's unbeatable. Like you're not going to get, and again, we're not going to replicate this. now that the liquidity train is off like the the the brand train is off the that initial immaculate conception is done like and you've got this intolerant minority who will not deviate like you don't have that anywhere else in anything that i've ever seen like i was saying this to

adam meister i was saying it or i can't remember who i was saying it to actually i was like imagine if a brand today like an apple had a cohort of millions of people running around doing podcasts flying around the country doing all this sort of stuff for something called bitcoin like what the hell like nobody has that kind of um brand like uh devotional fervency bitcoins corporations uh annual expenses would be in the billions of dollars in order to get the same impact that this decentralized network with no marketing budget has for sure it's incredible and and people and this is like when you look at all of that people um you know when people tell me oh bitcoin's not a good investment i was like man and this is why i believe like today bitcoin

is the most contrarian opportunity that exists today bitcoin is dismissed by the normal people it's dismissed by the bankers it's dismissed by the government it's dismissed by blockchainers it's dismissed by crypto people it's dismissed by all of these people yet when you look at the first principles it is the strongest thing that exists today and as a result it is the most contrarian bet so the more it's dismissed by all of these it is literally that it's literally that absolutely shout out jason williams who just joined he's out here talking about danny dimes and danny bitcoin uh we're going to be done by 12 30 just so everyone knows so we can go watch the new york giants win another football game um all right getting back to the important stuff uh amber

let's talk a little bit about what you're building and how that fits into this whole idea of collecting bitcoin well um i have been talking to people for the last three and a half years now to just buy some bitcoin and just just buy some and shut up like literally that that's sort of the um the message and you know three and a half years ago when i first started talking to people it was still difficult right you know like you know maybe coinbase was sort of the app that you could go to but um these days it is a lot easier and effectively one of my friends just said why don't you stop talking about and you know build something that makes it easier so i came up with the idea of Amber, I was like, all right, why don't we just round up people's spare change and invest it into

Bitcoin? So that's sort of where it initially started. We've sort of moved more towards the dollar cost averaging meme and, you know, move away from spare change and more just help people accumulate Bitcoin by downloading an app, linking their bank account, setting an amount, setting a frequency and getting exposure to Bitcoin in a manner that's sensible. Because like, I like to transcend the idea of, you know, investing in Bitcoin is great, But most people are afraid of investing or don't understand the concept of investing. So how about we drive the meme of, you know, the variation of stacking stats that I was mentioning before, which is collecting Bitcoin, which is today, it's not even about investing

in Bitcoin. Today, it's literally about collecting Bitcoin. You're collecting Bitcoin because the rest of the world has not priced it yet. And by the time the rest of the world prices it, you're not going to be paying 10 grand for a Bitcoin. You're going to be paying millions for a Bitcoin. and there's not a chance in hell the average person will be able to afford some i'm writing a um a short story now which is the journey of a pre-coiner and a bitcoiner and i've got three

characters in there each who takes a different approach to you know hearing bitcoin hearing about bitcoin for the first time one of them consistently thinks they've missed the boat and they never get in until bitcoin is worth a million bucks the second one thinks that they're really smart and they try and buy and they fomo in at the top and they fomo out at the bottom and then the third one is the guy who just takes a simple approach of just slowly collecting and he's the uni student who has no money but he just buys 20 bucks a week it is uh i said this probably a year ago and it was offhand comment didn't think too much of it but um somebody keeps repeating it to me uh and now it's like ingrained in my head it's just bitcoin is a game of accumulation that's

And the reason why I like the words collecting, accumulating, et cetera, is when you're collecting or accumulating, there's no outflow. And the idea, again, is it changes the mindset of the individual. It changes the mindset of the investor or the user from somebody who is consumptive in their use of money versus somebody who is much more into how do I save. Man, you just touched on such a good point. This is one of the other zeitgeists that Bitcoin represents in today's day and age. In a world where supposedly GDP, gross domestic produce, GDP is actually a measure of consumption, not production. We're on the wrong side of the equation here. But in a world where everything is optimized for consumption, for now, Bitcoin represents this one bastion where savings, patience, a low time preference, where optimizing for a better future is incentivized over spending, consuming, and getting the next dopamine hit now. And it's such a profound thing when you think about it, because it's not just the better money, it's a better lifestyle. Yeah, absolutely. Look, I talk about all the time. One of the best pieces of financial advice, and again, this isn't us giving financial advice, but just if you were to go ask any

financial advisor in the country, what is the number one thing that people should do? It's quote, pay yourself first, right? And pay yourself first. And what that means is make sure that you're saving, make sure that you're, you're putting money towards your goals and then go pay your bills, go do all these things. And the reason why that's important is because if you quote, pay yourself first, you don't even realize that the money's gone. Correct. Right. So if you get $1,000 in a paycheck and you take $100 and you stick it in a savings account, every time you get your $900, you don't even realize you're saving $100. Rich dad, poor dad 101, right? It was literally pay yourself first. And what better way to pay yourself than paying yourself in

Bitcoin? Because it is an artificially scarce asset, right? And I continue to tell people that it is more scarce than gold. It is more scarce than land. It is more scarce than pretty much any asset you can think of, right? Because it has a software-driven artificial cap. So there cannot be any more of them that are created. Correct. Well, it's software-driven. I would say it's software-enforced and it's social consensus-driven, right?

Yes. Fair. Yeah. And this, again, comes back to the intolerant minority, right? If this is a social consensus-driven thing, we, by definition, requires an intolerant minority who will not deviate from the the core tenets of what that social consensus is and that forms the basis of you know the core of bitcoin and as bitcoin continues to stay around that core grows and the bitcoin consensus the base bitcoin consensus rules

ossify and you then have a like you know you mentioned before money is this um you know belief system. And it is like, you know, fundamentally speaking, like we're the only species on the planet that, you know, have this tool, which we decide to call money in order to collaborate. But what's very, very important is that you can have a belief system that, you know, the Zimbabwean dollar is money. The problem is it's not based on any objective attributes, right? Outside of trusting Mugabe or whoever the last guy is to run it, right? Whereas gold, as an example, had objective attributes that we could collectively come to consensus on were a better set of attributes to represent this belief system of money. Bitcoin has a far

superior set of attributes that through this social consensus mechanism have created a network that is now ossified or is to a large degree ossified around being uncensorable, unconfiscatable and fixed in supply right and with those elements now we have a better form of money we have something that is superior and we have something that is more liquid and you know all of those sorts of things that we mentioned before and really just comes back to the point about today the only game in town and the most important game in town is buy and accumulate bitcoin collect bitcoin because at the end of the day this thing like whether you're as a fervent believer as me or pump, you know, and think that, you know, this is the game. Like I'm buying Bitcoin now

because I'm not going to trade it back for dollars. I'm not looking for the gain. I'm collecting it because I want to participate in a Bitcoin economic system in the future. And that's what I'm basically collecting for before everybody else realizes what it's worth. This is my edge. This is my, this is the edge that I have on the rest of the world. It's what you believe that other people haven't realized yet. Correct. And so whether you believe to that extent or whether you don't believe to that extent and you'll just think that, oh, Bitcoin is this interesting thing and you've seen it grow from $1 to $10,000 or whatever it is now,

it doesn't matter where you are on the spectrum. Having some exposure to Bitcoin now is the smartest decision you can make. Yeah. I think it's Parker, and I apologize if I'm wrong, but Parker Lewis, he basically says, you know, we're finally at a point where it is more detrimental for you to be wrong by not having exposure than it would be for you to have exposure and be wrong. Yeah, the risk is now greater, exactly.

The risk is now greater because there is a higher probability now that this, like five years ago, I could understand, right? You know, six, seven years ago, I could understand. It was hard, Mt. Gox, this, that, like you had a million and one things going wrong. I could understand. Right now, there is literally no excuse

with apps like Amber, with, you know, things like Cash App, that there's things out there now which make the exposure to Bitcoin in a sensible manner simple and easy if you're not holding bitcoin right now like i'm sorry you're deranged you've lost the plot like it is it's borderline um ignorance at this point in time what talk through us uh what exactly is the functionality of amber and where can people go uh find out more or download the app amber is available in australia now um next and i'll show you only in australia right now um next step is going to be um uk and europe um we're sort of

working hard to get that rolled out now the functionality is really simple you download the app you link your bank account you set an amount you set a frequency you click done it you know within a minute you've um you've bought your first bit of bitcoin um you can do recurring you can do a one-off buy um you can withdraw over to your own wallet so we're really big believers of um you know your keys your coins so we you know fundamentally have built the product to be an easy on-ramp if you want to store some bitcoin on amber by all means go for it we're 100 cold storage but if you want to withdraw it out to your own wallet by all means you can do that as well we actually you know promote that as a um as a thing to do and that is literally game set match for

what bitcoin for what amber is today down the track i what i sort of envision is the reinvention of the financial institution if we look at financial institutions today they are the the institutions that provide the function and access to three things the ability to store send and receive money. In the future, we've moved the ability to store, send and receive down to the protocol level. So the financial institution of the future is no longer going to be the one that facilitates and provides the function. They will only be the access point. And the best access point is going to be the best apps that provide the best features for those people who want to participate on a Bitcoin economic system. So when I look at what Amber's future is going to be,

i look at us being what i like to call a bitcoin bank we're going to reinvent what finance looks like but do it all on top of bitcoin outside of the existing financial world such that people can have the ability to you know whether it's lending borrowing interest merchant facilities payments you know access to other investment club well whatever it is you can do all of that on bitcoin 24 7 globally without borders all on a bitcoin denominated infrastructure and bitcoin rails not on the legacy system and part of this is if you can basically be the portal or the entry point for people to uh collect bitcoin acquire bitcoin accumulated whatever you want to call it uh you then can build out all the different functionality around that correct correct exactly you don't you

don't build out that other stuff before anyone has bitcoin so this is what i always tell people because you see all these apps these days like people are um you know building like um pos terminals and merchant facilities to accept bitcoin nobody's got bitcoin like who the hell is going to pay you with bitcoin we don't have bitcoin and furthermore when you have bitcoin and you buy a coffee for five dollars and in five years time that coffee actually cost you 10 grand you want to shoot yourself in the face so it's the wrong thing so today the most important thing to build is the product that makes collecting bitcoin as simple as possible when you have a cohort of people that have bitcoin you can then provide products and services that enable them to utilize

the bitcoin in other methods other than holding it that's the that's the most rational thing i can think of for sure and and it really just comes down to again time preference right literally well it's time preference but it's also self-preservation and um looking after yourself like most people will come into bitcoin initially they'll maybe trade it for some shit coins they might spend some bitcoin you know they'll do all that sort of stuff but over time what they'll realize is that they should have just held bitcoin for sure show them the shirt one more time so he brought two things today we've got one a shirt as well there's one shirt but there's a second shirt that he brought which is bitcoin not shit coin and then he also brought me the bitcoin times

which is a uh a really really high quality um magazine i think we can call it right it's a publication publication yeah it's going to be we're going to release two a year so it's going to be a limited edition publication okay it's not about news it's about long form deep thought content um it's the the writers so i did the first um one it was it was an extension to a talk i gave so i did the first one the second one is going to and subsequent ones are going to be eight writers per edition by invitation only who are going to write long form deep well thought out content for bitcoin that is going to be timeless so the idea is that the stuff we write here is going to be timeless and will stand the test of time so people can come back and look at

and think holy crap what were these guys thinking so a couple names i can uh mention for the next edition which is going to be the last of this decade um coming out in a couple months is going to be gg's going to be writing in there hasma cook um uh nick carter um murad and his brother masir um we've got a couple awesome writers like that so there's a couple more dan held's going to be um writing a piece in it and and effectively we just want to have timeless content in there and what we will also do each edition we're going to print 2100 of them satoshi baby we're going to print 2100 of them um and have them up for sale on a um on a lightning uh denominated um uh btc pay server uh shop and so people can go to uh it says bitcoin times dot news here is uh is where

some of those will be um and then there will be uh a bunch of them y'all i'm sure you'll see it all over twitter etc and uh because most of you guys know that um i will i'll tell you what people put inside the books uh this is number four of five and uh it says bitcoin not shit coin let's change the world pop which uh all of you at home know is uh is exactly what we're trying to do here so that's uh that's awesome um thank you very much for this dude i really appreciate it 100 and by the way in case you're unintelligent it says the end at the end so that you know that it's over um all right before i wrap up i always do a rapid fire set of questions what do you think is the most important company in Bitcoin today?

Ooh, I'm biased because I think it's me, but. So normally I say not including your own company and I didn't think you were gonna say that, but go ahead. So not including your own company. Okay. I really, really like the stuff that, I would have said back in the day Zapper, but I really like what Unchained Capital is doing.

And then there's probably what Rodolfo is doing with cold card and stuff, but in different elements. So somewhere in that sort of space is self-custody and more intelligent, you know, non-self-custody. Okay. What's the one regulation you would change or improve if you could? Regulation. If I was a government and I had a brain, I would be buying Bitcoin and I would make it easier for everyone to buy Bitcoin. Simple as that.

So anything that touches that. Exactly. So if you can make it easier for people within your jurisdiction to buy Bitcoin, you're going to have wealthier people, smarter people come to your jurisdiction. Simple as that. What is the most controversial thought you have in Bitcoin? Oh, shit. I mean, Bitcoin, not shitcoin, it's no longer controversial. I would say toxicity is really, really important.

I would say it's the white blood cell mechanism inside Bitcoin. is um you know white blood cells are toxic to disease and i would say us bitcoiners that intolerant minority are the white blood cells in bitcoin and we must stay strong and irrespective of what people call us whether it's toxic whether it's whatever bullshit name they want to give us we must maintain that standard because you know if we don't no one else will i love it uh what's the most important book you've ever read um Ayn Rand um Atlas Shrugged yeah it used to be it used to be Skin in the Game by Tyler but um Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged like she literally predicted Bitcoin 70 years ago it's pretty crazy dude yeah um aliens believer non-believer who ever met one

before um probabilistically it makes sense um uh i think definitely if okay i'll put this caveat if there are they're not in a galaxy anywhere near us okay but but probabilistically they exist just a different galaxy yeah yeah all right do you think that we would be able to reach them in our lifetime no no chance no what if they come here uh they ain't coming here no yeah why not uh too far away if it's if it's if like the the yeah i think if they're in in a galaxy it'll be a galaxy very far far away um and i don't think we're um we're catching up anytime soon not not in this lifetime at least you know and you know maybe maybe you know five ten generations from now all right that's fair seven minutes left before i have to go watch the new

york giants march towards another super bowl championship for all you uh clowns at home who disagree leave me alone uh what one question do you have for me to finish this up hmm are we asking the audience or am i asking you you ask me i'm sure they'll chime in okay okay okay okay all right um how rough can i be with these questions as rough as you want people have asked me all kinds crazy stuff okay okay um see i personally don't see any value in um all of this blockchainery shit that's going on and around bitcoin so what what is it that intrigues you and why do you sort of drive narratives around you know blockchain being something special or um you know all that sort of stuff so the short answer is automation right and i look at a whole bunch of aspects of

the world that are going to end up being automated we use the word blockchain we're talking a little bit about this before we start recording um because there are elements of what a blockchain looks like that are being incorporated etc i would say 99 of the things that are being called blockchains are not actually blockchains right they're uh some variation or they've got components of it etc but for us and we've started to really i think change the way that we talk about some of this stuff because it's not about quote-unquote blockchain technology it's truly about automation right yeah and so we start to say things like um you know people were all upset in uh in the ethereum community because i recently came out and said uh it's not about d5 it's about automated

finance right and so it's like you know uh some of the automated finance products will be decentralized but not or i'm sorry some of them will but not all of them but 100 percent of the decentralized financial products will be automated yes right and so the automation is actually the bigger trend than the decentralization and so when you look at it that way it's like are there certain things that will be decentralized whether it's you know defi or other aspects that people are trying to incorporate quote-unquote blockchain into yeah sure like like i'll buy that there will be some people who build decentralized things um that get value you could argue wikipedia for example is quote-unquote decentralized to some degree right doesn't involve blockchain right

That's correct. And it doesn't involve a ton of shit coin. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so for us, it's, you know, the things that become interesting are when you have the automation as the end game, right? Or as what they're building. And so the best companies that we've invested in who are not Bitcoin related or interface with Bitcoin, right? So they have some kind of application of elements of a blockchain outside of Bitcoin. When they pitch us, they don't even talk about blockchain, right?

And the only time that we uncover that there's elements of the blockchain is when we do the technical diligence and you look into their technology stack and it's like, oh, that looks like a blockchain. Okay. Right? I mean, okay, what do you mean by looks like a blockchain? What does a blockchain look like? Yeah, so I'll give a direct example. So as most people know, the largest investment we've made in our fund is a company called Figure Technologies. What Figure's doing is they're basically digitizing and automating.

At first, it's mortgage origination, but really they're replacing DTCC, right? Now, DTCC, to build a fully decentralized DTCC on a blockchain and anyone can validate any transaction, et cetera, would be, I would argue, nearly impossible, if not impossible, right? To replace that legacy piece of infrastructure. So what these guys have done is they've taken something that has a lot of components of what a Bitcoin blockchain would have. And they've said, we're going to get large institutions to validate the transaction. So it kind of looks like a Libra type association. but it's not it's not a true blockchain in the sense of a fully decentralized immutable etc you're dealing with financial assets that um you know if i have a stock certificate that's a bearer

asset and you hack me well the corporation is not comfortable with you now having a hacked stock certificate that you hold right so you have to have certain elements that um bitcoin actually are core strengths can't be core strengths in these other assets and so for us like that system the value proposition of figure is there's a quote-unquote digital mortgage but the true value proposition why they grow so fast you go within five minutes they tell you whether you're going to get it or not they fund it within four days yeah right that user experience is compared to a 45-day heloc origination process in the legacy world it's all about the user experience yes so i think blockchain is just the word that gets thrown around to cover up you know the

reality so i remember when the smart contracts became a big name and i was just saying smart contracts nothing special it's just business process automation it's like literally writing code like if this then that function yeah that is what code has existed for since the beginning of time you know so it's not a smart contract it's just code that that's literally it and we joke we're like nobody comes nobody comes to our office and pitches us and says hey i have a mongo db company that's it right or i have an excel file company and so when people come and say i have a blockchain company the way that we think about it and this has evolved over time right um but but the way that we think about it today i think is uh that's just one of the technologies that you

use in your technology stack but it's much more focused on the automation and that's where the value proposition comes from it's not that you're just using a certain piece of technology yeah i mean i would take the argument just one step further and i would just say that people should remove that fucking the word blockchain from any of their of any of their vernacular because it just it's not what it is like if we're going to describe bitcoin as a you know as a blockchain which i think is almost an insult to bitcoin because like here's a fun fact and i don't know if you know this, but the word blockchain was never used in the Bitcoin white paper. You know that, right? I did not know that. That's pretty good. That's pretty good stat. The word blockchain

came out in 2011. I love that. Yeah. So it never existed. So a correct definition of Bitcoin is actually a time chain. Like Bitcoin actually is something that is designed so that you can't go back in time. Because traditionally, like in the real world, the one thing that we can't do is we can't reverse time. Every action goes forward. Bitcoin is a digital version of that. It's the only digital network that can only go forward in time, you cannot reverse anything, or it's probabilistically, you know, difficult to reverse something. And that was the innovation that Bitcoin gave us is digital immutability and scarcity. And that entire recipe that Bitcoin represents decentralization, you know, segregated timestamped, you know, data chunks, blockchain,

you know, incentive, disincentive mechanisms, economics, game theory, all this sort of stuff has been mishmashed together to deliver digital immutability and scarcity there's no point in taking elements you know subcomponents and i'll write about this in the bitcoin times i say if you take one element out of it i.e the data structure and you try and sell it as immutable or wherever you're lying because that's not what you're selling you're literally just taking a timestamp database which we've had for 20 30 years it doesn't matter so well it's uh like and so figure for example they called their uh you know their settlement system provenance because it's more about who owns it at this given time rather than the community and that's not a blockchain

yep and that's fantastic and i think that's a great product and i've been going around saying this to people for ages is you don't need a shit coin you don't need a blockchain you just need good tech that automates things that makes things faster that makes things better and that has a better user experience and that is where the innovation is going to be and when we look at Again, another network effect for Bitcoin, and I'll end on this, is that as Bitcoin becomes this stable settlement layer, we're going to be able to build products and services driven around automation that can query and access and take the guarantee that Bitcoin provides and abstract that out to deliver financial services that we've never been able to deliver in the traditional world because you cannot get instant settlement finality and a guarantee of that through a traditional central bank. bitcoin is the central bank of the internet like that's what it is bitcoin not shit coins bitcoin not shit all right man listen i appreciate it very much thank you for so much for coming to do this i appreciate the gifts and i want to do it again in the future 100 brother thank you

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