The Pomp Podcast - Arjun Balaji: A Financial System Built on Bitcoin

Episode Date: September 4, 2018

Arjun Balaji is the Chief Investment Officer of Shomei Capital.  He consistently voices one of the most interesting perspectives in crypto. From diving into the many altcoin scams to a philosophical debate on "What is Money?", this is a conversation you don't want to miss.

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. Arjun Balaji is the CIO at ShowMeCapital. He consistently voices one of the most interesting perspectives in crypto. Arjun never disappoints, regardless of if he is discussing Bitcoin's dominance,

the lack of quality in most altcoins, or participating in a philosophical debate about what is money. This is a conversation you don't want to miss. I hope you enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any 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 we uh we're here with arjun uh we've got a lot to talk about uh i think you are one of the uh realist people and and uh one of the people who are not afraid to uh say what you think and call out the projects that are are frankly uh unworthy of of existing. That's almost all of them. How are you? I am doing well, man. I'm happy to be here. It's a nice muggy day in New York City. For sure. All right. So for those people that don't know, let's just go through real quick your background and then we can jump into a whole bunch of different stuff. Sure. I will kind of start with my birth only because

it's somewhat relevant. I was born in India. We emigrated to the U.S. when I was about six years old. So first generation immigrants was pushed into the, you know, lawyer, doctor, engineer type mold. My parents are conservative gold bugs. Actually, we had a rich gold culture growing up and still do. And so I grew up, went to school in Boston, was trained as an engineer. And that's when I first found Bitcoin was in 2012, 2013 at sort of the heyday of the Silk Road. You know, that first run up in price that was really exciting to watch. And my politics were already sort of aligned in that direction, in that sort of libertarian, anarcho-capitalist mold. And that was the first time I really had exposure to a wide group of people in that lens. So, you know,

price action dies, I sort of lost interest along with that. You know, it was just who's building anything, what's going on. It wasn't until a couple of years later that I, you know, saw the what was happening in the community again and started working on and kind of focusing on Bitcoin full time in 2016. And first thing that I was exploring is the market microstructure itself was looking at where were people, you know, trading Bitcoin? What were people using to trade Bitcoin? The markets, you know, still are very inefficient, but was, you know, far more inefficient back then. Exchange arbitrage was a very big thing. The spreads on the exchanges were very wide. There wasn't really any, you know, there wasn't a lot of algorithmic execution.

The volume was tiny. And so that was my first sort of area of focus. And so subsequently over the next year and a half and kind of with all of the run-up in 2017, I spent a lot of my time helping people figure out how to navigate the microstructure and how to actually trade these markets and where there are opportunities to make money. And there are all sorts of questions there, not only all the things that I described, but figuring out what the right way is to custody assets. And so that's sort of foregoing altogether the question of, you know, what do I buy?

And so worked with a few large traditional hedge funds, you know, helping them sort of evangelizing Bitcoin, helping them explore the space, and have since for the last year spent most of my time investing and trading my own money with, you know, a couple of outside investors and I'm in the process of institutionalizing that further, which is really exciting. Awesome. All right. We're just going to start off with a bang here. 20 years from now, Bitcoin, where are we? Not in terms of price, but can we get to a global reserve currency? Can we get to it being used kind of coexistence with the U.S. dollar? Or what do you think is possible here?

Sure. So I think that right now, Bitcoin is a global settlement layer. We're already seeing that Bitcoin settles, you know, right now between one and two billion dollars a day. Right. Notional, which is in U.S. dollars, which is substantial amount of money. I think that over the next 20 years, that number is only going to continue to go up. I think over the next 20 years, we will have figured out, you know, ways to make Bitcoin viable for small scale payments as well, which won't be which I don't believe are going to be on chain. I think in terms of its existence in the global financial system, I see over the next 20 years, I think it's entirely possible that, you know, central banks will hold Bitcoin reserves. I don't know that it can achieve any sort of reserve status currency over the next 20 years, even in our wildest dreams.

But I think it's entirely possible that it plays a significant role, especially as smaller developing currencies start to collapse. I think what people often forget is that the median lifespan of most nation state issued currencies isn't that long. Right. And sort of even, you know, the we look at the U.S. dollar as, you know, having longevity and the U.S. government being the sort of lender of last resort. But, you know, and the U.S. government in the grand scheme of things has existed and dollars have been in circulation for a substantial amount of time. But I think that especially with much smaller currencies, we're seeing what happens with poor monetary policy. We're seeing it in, you know, Iran and Venezuela and, you know, Turkey now. And, you know, I saw that. I think you put out the tweet earlier this week that Roger Ver stole.

But we're seeing the collapse of currencies all over the world. I think that there's a further conversation to be had about, you know, whether Bitcoin does become a global reserve asset itself. where, and this process is what a lot of the Bitcoin maximalists, a group where I would consider myself firmly in, consider sort of hyper-Bitcoinization, right? So post-hyper-Bitcoinization, Bitcoin is stable enough to be a viable means of exchange and unit of account all over the world. But I think, you know, well before that, there could exist, you know, sort of in a free banking type model um nation-state issued currencies that are just pegged to bitcoin um you know similar to

how we uh you we had the gold standard and and before that in in the late 19th century early 20th century we had all sorts of you know bimetallic pegs all which collapsed for you know for a host of reasons but i think that uh the the first step in that process will be actually returning to a Bitcoin reserve. And this is something that Syphidine has covered in detail in the Bitcoin Standard. And I think sort of before that, we'll start to see substantial growth, even from the volumes it's doing today in Bitcoin's utility as a global settlement layer, you know, where it's already settling numbers that annually are comparable to gold markets. Absolutely. And so as this global settlement layer becomes more prevalent, do you think that these smaller currencies and smaller markets actually gravitate towards it in the short term?

Or do you think it's something where they'll continue to kind of flounder and really suffer until some other event makes this overly attractive to them? Sure. If you look at like, you know, Turkey, for example, right now, there's some flight to Bitcoin, but it's not, you know, kind of half the economy. Right. And so how do you think about that? Yeah, I think that there's there's two ways of thinking about it. One is over a very, very long term view. And the reality is that in that very long term view, so long as it survives another day. But, you know, Bitcoin is almost like a black hole. It's a black hole sucking in all assets that are weaker forms of money. I think that over a very, very long time horizon, it's entirely possible that this could include the U.S. dollar. On shorter time frames, I think it's most relevant to even see what's happening in Venezuela, for example, where citizens are swapping boulevards for primarily dollars, but also Bitcoin. because even dollars, you know, despite the fact that there's a substantial number of dollars

that are printed every year, are still a significantly harder form of money than boulevards. And I think that what will happen over time is, you know, that people will always have the sort of inclination to, you know, use their weak forms of money and to acquire and hoard stronger forms of money, especially if they don't have widespread access to it like they do Bitcoin. And so in the short term, I think that we'll start to see, you know, the shift in economies where they absolutely have to, where they have no other choice. So in Venezuela, even if you had bought Bitcoin at the highest possible local rate

at the peak of the market in December, your purchasing power in, you know, relative to bolivars would still be twice, you know, what it would be if you would have bolivars, despite the fact that Bitcoin has dropped by a factor of three. And so I think that in the short term, we'll start to see shifts where people have no other choice, especially in countries that have significant capital controls, where they're still able to bring in Bitcoin. And in the long term, And we'll see what we'll have to. I think that it's inevitable that we'll see it. We'll see a convergence effect there. Absolutely. Yeah. One of the things that's interesting to me is a lot of people talk about the currency element of Bitcoin. Right.

But there's also a income aspect to it as well. And so earlier this week, I wrote this thing, a gentleman from Venezuela. Right. So he's a lawyer. He's got three young kids. And about sounds like two and a half, three years ago, he started to feel some of the economic pressure. He started a business for spare car parts, right? And so as he's going through, more and more inflation is hitting. And right about the time where he realizes, you know, two, two and a half years into his business, hey, this isn't going to work, he discovers Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, et cetera. And so he's not, you know, poor. He's not wealthy by American standards.

But, you know, he had a little bit of money, and so he bought Antminer S7. And so he starts mining cryptocurrency, right, Bitcoin specifically. And then he bought another machine and now his family literally lives off of the income that they receive from a couple of these machines. And so it's, you know, as long as he has electricity and he can plug that machine in and he's able to then go from Bitcoin to fiat, you know, he's got an income stream regardless of the economic situation around them. And when you do the math, I think that one of the interesting parts is he was telling me that the minimum wage in Venezuela today is $1.25, right, in kind of the U.S. currency. But a S-9 is mining, you know, $110, $130, depending on where the price and difficulty is. And so it's making him wealthy compared to that country's standards, you know, in that kind of perspective. How do you think people in those countries will continue to use cryptocurrency, whether it's trading, mining, etc., as a supplement to income, not just as a store of value?

Sure. So the original vision for 21, as I remember, was actually that they were going to produce ASICs that people were going to have all over the world that was going to be embedded in their IoT devices, on their phones, etc. And that everyone would sort of, you know, latently be, you know, earning Bitcoin on a continual basis and that autonomously all their devices are going to be able to frictionlessly sort of transact with each other. And a lot of the original visions for Bitcoin very much imagined the world expanding in this way where people would be mining their own Bitcoin and that miners, you know, wouldn't really be industrialized the way that they were. I think that was a mistake that many and not a mistake even, but just necessarily something that early Bitcoiners often didn't anticipate. They didn't see the growth of industrial scale mining operations, especially for concentrated in China. I think that the way I think regular people can be significantly impacted with Bitcoin is actually an extension of what's already happening via the Internet, where they could live in a regime with substantial capital controls. But so long as they have sort of unfettered access to the Internet, either directly or via VPN, there's pretty much nothing preventing them from earning global sort of living wages, so to speak. The best example that I can describe here is actually recently I bought a wallet.

I bought a wallet directly from someone in Venezuela, not a Bitcoin wallet. I bought a physical wallet. And the wallet has some significance. I have it in my backpack, so I'll show you. But the wallet is made out of boulevards because that's kind of reflective of how much the currency is worth. And so I bought it. I wanted to support this guy and his family. And now the thing that I've been talking to him about is setting up a storefront for him so that he can accept Bitcoin payments directly, ship things out directly because he still has entire freedoms to do that, where they can earn a wage entirely independent of their financial system.

It allows him to accept Bitcoin directly. And so we've been working on trying to figure out the best way to get him up and running there. I think that that's what's really unlocked is this sort of frictionless commerce that can take place all over the world. And it's easy to, you know, produce commentary and say, well, you know, transaction fees are 50 cents and it's really hard to open a lightning channel and nobody's really using the lightning network yet. And there are all these problems. But I think the reality is that if you if you sort of look at it bottom up and you see what how people are using Bitcoin on the ground and what, you know, people sort of psychosocial perception is of it, you know, it's it's easy to see how it's changing people's lives already. Absolutely. And, you know, I think the incredible part is, what are we, 10 years in? Less than 10 years, right? Less than 10 years.

And so it's it's been pretty impactful on that global scale. What do you think about Wall Street kind of, you know, it seems like turning a corner a little bit and starting to say from the previous statement of, you know, not Bitcoin, but blockchain to now, it sounds like definitely blockchain and maybe Bitcoin, right? is kind of, I think, where we are right now, where people are saying, you know, maybe there is actually some value to this digital currency. It's got a deflationary model, et cetera. How do you kind of see that impacting,

one, the currency, and then two, kind of, you know, the future outlook? Yeah, absolutely. I think that Wall Street is in the business of taking fees, right? Wall Street, it's fundamentally investment banking, commercial banking, et cetera. It's a middleman business.

It's a business where you have a corporate entity who's providing a service for clients and taking a fee for being in the middle of transactions. Fundamentally, Bitcoin is about the opposite of that. It's about the ability to trustlessly disintermediate that process entirely and conduct frictionless commerce with two different parties who don't have to know each other. and it's not a surprise to me that wall street has historically not been receptive to bitcoin why they've chose to focus on on sort of blockchain not bitcoin i think that blockchain for wall street is actually something that is fundamentally nonsensical um you know because it's a close friend of mine moron often likes to say that blockchains don't create revenues blockchains destroy revenues. By their very nature, if done correctly, they would take away

revenues from the core businesses of many banks. This alternate parallel capital market structure that people are building is actually a universe where traditional underwriters and middlemen don't make any money. And we're starting to see the downstream effects of this. ICOs this year have financed much, and this is nothing to save the quality of these ICOs, which is extraordinarily poor, but ICOs in aggregate have raised more money globally than IPOs have in Q1 and Q2 this year. And so I think that there is a shift and a focus on Bitcoin, but I think that it's more driven by just demand that they're seeing from high net worth clients, institutional clients about custodying, trading Bitcoin, about buying it, holding it in their accounts, about providing

prime brokerage services around it. I think that some of the more savvy banks are looking ahead to this. But I don't think the fundamental attitude has changed. I still see a lot of enterprise blockchain, permission blockchain projects, none of which have shipped anything of value. I think it's pretty safe to say that to date. And a lot of these efforts have actually imploded. But Wall Street, there's a number of things that they bring. I think that the capital that comes with Wall Street is very important in order to sort of institutionalize Bitcoin as a real asset class. I think the second really important thing is that with Wall Street comes a lot better security tools, custody tools, market infrastructure, liquidity, all of which is good

for all Bitcoin users, not just, you know, Wall Street. I think the third thing that's really interesting is that with Bitcoin is going to come, you know, Bitcoin on Wall Street is going to come all sorts of interesting new financial products, some of which I've been exploring. But, you know, the lowest hanging fruit is sort of ETFs and options and other derivatives products. All of which I think help contribute to, you know, Bitcoin's path as a highly liquid, you know, saleable good. Absolutely. What was your first experience with Bitcoin? And like, what drew you into it?

What was the attraction to the tech? Yeah, so my first interaction with Bitcoin was actually transacting on the Silk Road. You know, Free Ross. uh if any if anybody listening uh doesn't know the ross albrecht story that's uh you know it's a great story uh you know despite the fact that he was framed uh so so free ross uh but that was my first exposure to bitcoin and and first it just seemed like a sort of gimmick fad uh fake internet token uh that and i didn't even think twice about it i didn't think about scarcity i to think about, you know, anything else. And then sort of later that year, early in 2013 was when I

first started to look into it and sort of think through, you know, hey, why are people interested in this? What is the appeal? Who works on it, right? Because, you know, admittedly, and this is kind of embarrassing, the first time I saw Bitcoin, I actually thought it was a company. I didn't realize it was this, you know, sort of globally distributed network. I thought, you know, I was like, what's this company, Bitcoin, you know, who runs it? What are they working on? I can't find their website. Yeah, they got some wild ideas.

Right, exactly. I was like, this is kind of a crazy idea. I was like, I love it. And so that was my first exposure. It wasn't until later that I actually read the white paper. I tried running a node. I bought my first Bitcoin before that. It was via, I did a Western Union transfer to Japan.

actually, to buy Bitcoin on Mt. Gox, still involved in that class action. But it seems like we're getting paid. So there's some good things that happen. And the, you know, once it all sort of clicked, you know, how it was, you know, sort of resistant to government shutdown, what the sort of novelty was around, you know, having a digital scarce resource, etc. you know once that clicked uh you know everything kind of made sense from there and uh but it took me a long time i remember i looked at it recently i was looked i looked back at you know finding finding it from over five years ago to figure out what was the first thing i ever said about bitcoin on the internet and the first thing i ever said about bitcoin on the internet is

played around with bitcoin a little bit today uh looks interesting but not sure the ux is there for the mainstream and we're here five years later and the ux is substantially better companies like coinbase exist now bitco ledger um you know there are a number of great wallets uh there are a whole host of exchanges there's a lot of places where you can spend your bitcoin a lot of merchant payment tools uh but the ux still you know could use a lot of work and and it's something that dozens of teams are working on so it's awesome absolutely well let's talk about the uh the retail adoption, right, in terms of, there's a lot of technologies in the space that are fairly deep in the weeds, right, when it comes to how does the tech work, you know, can we solve some of the

scalability issues, etc. And I think that they probably are not thinking as much about how do you drive adoption of that mass consumer, right? I think you mentioned that there's going to be some financial products and things like ETFs that could potentially help, you know, open those gate to crypto what has to happen on the ux side to make it easier for kind of that mass consumer to not use a retail financial product like you know an etf etc but still get much easier access to buying holding and transacting bitcoin yeah so i i think a lot of that ux actually does exist okay in really good ways i think uh coinbase you know despite all a lot of their foibles has done a pretty good job of that i think square has done an amazing job i actually think square has now the

best experience for using and working with bitcoin um but i think that the um a lot of the you know when when people say uh we need more user adoption or growth um they're often focused on the usability of products that interface with uh you know with cryptocurrencies um and i actually think that That's not the sort of main bottleneck. I think that the harder problem is actually, you know, shifting the narrative, right? It's explaining and educating investors, whether they're institutional, whether they're retail, on what the merits of a non-sovereign money system could be, right? And I think from there, branching into and exploring, you know, well, what are other forms of money that could exist besides crypto money that could exist besides Bitcoin? What is the path to monetization of something like Ether, et cetera?

But I think all of that is grounded in an education campaign more than an actual usability exercise. I think what we've seen in the past, especially in the last retail run-up, is that a lot of the emphasis was around retail investors trying to seize what I'll describe as the next Bitcoin, which I find is a pretty misguided effort. But we saw Ripple run up substantially. We saw, you know, EOS and Ether run up substantially. And I think what was couched, and we saw Cardano run up substantially, especially in Asian markets where it has, you know, very broad-based appeal. I think that all of these users are looking for something that is better, faster, cheaper, has higher transaction throughput, etc., than Bitcoin, right? I think that that's what's driving a lot of retail interests is because they think that they can capture something that is meaningfully better than Bitcoin on those axes. And I think that that approach is actually totally misguided.

I don't think it makes much sense. I think that what that reflects to me is actually that users don't understand the value proposition of Bitcoin, right? They might be buying Bitcoin. They might be holding Bitcoin. They might even be using Bitcoin. But I think that that education campaign is kind of the first place to start is teaching all investors, institutional or retail, what the value propositions of Bitcoin are, what the history behind cryptocurrencies is, and kind of where, you know, sort of value can accrue and be captured long term. Absolutely. And so do you think that the people who are looking for, you know, these alternative coins or kind of, you know, improvements to Bitcoin, how much of it is human greed? Because I think there's going to be appreciation of price versus they're actually being thoughtful as to, you know, this is going to be better than Bitcoin. And I truly believe that and would hold it for five years or more.

Yeah, I think that this is the reason why on Twitter I make jokes about this, you know, because Twitter on Twitter, traders and investors are always talking about alt season. When is alt season? When are all the alt coins going to come back? You know, and what's that shift? I think that alt season will always come back. Right. Even with so many of these alt coins down 90 percent, I think alt season will come back. And the reason for that is because crypto networks have such small penetration into the kind of global consciousness and human greed is so immense that I think it will come back. And where, you know, about the greed improvement thing, I actually think that most crypto projects are driven by greed. I truly believe that the cost of issuing new tokens has fallen pretty dramatically. It's virtually zero now, requires white paper, landing page, marketing team, roadshow, advisor list, actual contract deployment.

So you can add on another two hours for that and you're sort of good to go. Right. That's what you need to raise money. And so I think that that mentality in reality has reflected in and in a lot of greed that we've seen from projects. I think that there are some, you know, people who in the world who have made efforts, though I find them misguided. I think Vitalik is a great example of this. Originally, Vitalik tried to bring Turing completeness to Bitcoin. There's a number of reasons why the community sort of pushed back against it, you know, all of which in hindsight look like great reasons. And then Vitalik went and started a separate project. You know, similar things happened with the release of Monero or Zcash. I think that other projects have some novelty to them. But for the most part, especially as you get into the long tail of, you know, say lending projects, right, there's five different crypto projects that are all working on some sort of lending token.

And I think where you get into that, it's much more grounded in sort of greed on the part of teams or, you know, it's an existing team that's launching a crypto project, you know, where really it's a play for non-dilutive financing because that's what all token raises are. Right. You know, there's no corporate rights. There's no, you know, pirata liquidity rights. You know, there's there's really no rights of any kind. Right. And so I think a lot of that is short-termism. I think a lot of it is greed-driven. There are a few sort of brave projects out there that are vesting tokens, right, which is an innovation the U.S. technology investor market has come up with decades ago. There are some teams vesting tokens over very long periods of time, six or eight years, which I find to be brave but something I would be terrified of as a founder.

And so I do think it's mostly mostly greed driven. And over the long term, I think it's great, right? It's bringing more interest to the space. And really, all of these are free research projects for Bitcoin. That's how I view it. You know, whatever it is, you know, if it if it works out long term, it'll find a way to get in. If it's something that's important, it's something people value. So you got one of my questions. This is something I want to spend some time talking to you about in terms of smart contracts, zero knowledge proofs, all of these kind of ancillary pieces of technology or concepts that are being explored by other cryptocurrencies or crypto assets you think eventually get contributed back to Bitcoin as long as they have value and sustainability. yes and it's already happening right so um on on smart contracts uh the root sock team has spent a few years uh exploring this um and and there's other teams exploring side chains to do smart contracts uh eric martindale at uh fabric yeah fabric uh on working on fabric uh is working on a potential layer uh i guess we could call it layer three solution uh to um you know building more complex scripting into Bitcoin. And so that's already happening to an extent. And I think the further Bitcoin monetizes, it's actually going to be increasingly relevant. There's actually

another sort of reframing here, because when I say, you know, hey, people are working on this stuff, the pushback I often get is, well, all of the dApps are still being built elsewhere. And the reality is that people don't want to waste their time, right? People, I think, uh, largely people in the Bitcoin, uh, sort of development universe of, um, you know, say roughly 500, 2000 people, um, of which there are probably 50 or 70, 50, 75, uh, really regular contributors to directly to Bitcoin. Um, and, and, you know, besides that contribution base, there's, you know, thousands of people who work or who are building on Bitcoin or built, uh, in or building services that have to interface with Bitcoin directly.

You know, these people don't like to waste their time, right? There's only so many of them in the world. I think that what they're focused on building right now is the most secure protocol that is most conservative in its assumptions, that is most safe in its sort of method of operation. And whatever else is important, you know, we'll let the market, you know, dictate what is important

and kind of incorporate that downstream. There are a number of on the privacy side. I think one of the things that's been really interesting is this sort of Bitcoin development culture where what it actually forces is a lot of the innovation that is that would be on like a base layer chain to be moved downstream. And so on the on the privacy angle, a lot of the interesting things that people are working on on privacy, they're sort of like improvements on CoinJoin or other mixers. Samurai Wallet I find really compelling as a project. They have an Android app but haven't released on iOS yet. And so a lot of the privacy components being moved to the transaction layer or a different layer I think is pretty compelling in the short to medium-term future.

I am pretty happy with the privacy projects that are out there, particularly Zcash and Monero, both of which use different privacy mechanisms. I've been monitoring the launch of Grin pretty closely, which will launch later this year or early next year, which is another anonymous, fair-mind, interesting privacy project. And so I think that privacy is still something that's very important for Bitcoin users and Bitcoin developers and the community of original cypherpunks that primarily Bitcoin is coalesced around. I've seen demos of different, I don't want to name names, but I've seen demos of different chain analysis tools, and they are terrifying, man.

I think that. Why? Well, they're terrifying because I think the logical implication of a lot of people focused on on-chain analysis, you know, despite the fact that it is still a little bit rudimentary, there's still a lot of information to glean. I think that we'll quickly move to a future where if Bitcoin is not fungible, it's not fully fungible, we're going to have whole we're going to have different types of Bitcoin. Right. We're going to have clean Bitcoin. We're going to have dirty Bitcoin and it will trade at different rates. And I think that that's not what we want in Bitcoin. I think we want fully fungible Bitcoin the same way, you know, gold is largely fungible.

You know, cash, it has, I guess it has an identification in the form of serial numbers. But, you know, direct transfer in cash is directly, you know, it's directly fungible. And, you know, that's part of the reason why, you know, drug dealers and terrorists often use U.S. dollars, right? They use cash. It's their choice of currency. Yeah, shout out Jamie Dimon. He was wrong about that. And and and so I actually really do worry about a future where Bitcoin isn't fully fungible and do think that will fungibility is something that Bitcoin developers are pretty concentrated on.

And it's something that's improved substantially over time. And there's a number of proposals for different, you know, everything from different signature types to, you know, full scale rearchitectures. But I think any sort of large-scale privacy would be many years down the line. But in the short to medium term, there are a lot of efforts focused on fungibility that I find compelling. Got it. All right. So I want to walk through a couple of different people in the ecosystem, the position that they sit in. And you tell me what you think from that perspective as to what they should do or kind of how it impacts them. Sure.

So the first one, if you're the president of the United States and you see Bitcoin, what do you do? And do you think it's a threat to the country, to the U.S. dollar? Do you think it's something that you should embrace? Kind of, you know, how do you think through that framework if you're sitting in the Oval Office? Sure. I do think Bitcoin is a threat to the U.S. dollar. But it's not the only threat to the U.S. dollar. Right. So, I mean, the the renminbi is a threat to the U.S. dollar that, you know, we actually have renminbi denominated, you know, we have petro renminbi futures contracts now. Right. Which is very relevant. And so if I were the president, you know, would my consideration would be, hey, you know, this is a threat.

And Pierre Rochard at the Nakamoto Institute has written about this in the past. in the future where Bitcoin is a credible threat to nation states, you know, we'll start to see more and more speculative attacks. And what are the most, what are the most likely kind of first couple? Sure. I think that the first couple, you know, we're already starting to see at the fringes, right? They're in countries with no capital controls. So take Turkey this week as a perfect example. And they're starting to get shut off, right? So, you know, just this week, we've seen turkish citizens get shut off from paypal uh soon they'll be shut off to you know to other sort of internet retailers um and as their connection to the outside world is starting

to get shut off uh and and bitcoin by the way bitcoin trading is not yet illegal in turkey but i do anticipate you know either that bitcoin will be made illegal or that fx will shut down Or that, you know, or that, you know, I forget what I was going to say, but the I like I anticipate that this will happen in the short to medium term future. So you think that the first attacks are not violent in nature, they're more politically savvy in terms of trying to use either market forces, you know, access to Internet, access to communication outside of work. Yeah, I don't think that we're going to see sort of like full on nation state level disputes over Bitcoin yet. But I think that it would be prudent, especially given the amount of Bitcoin, like this sort of industrial Bitcoin concentration in Russia and China. It would be prudent to own some Bitcoin. Right. And there's been there are a few people working on this in Ghana, for example, who've been, you know, lobbying and working with, you know, the central banks of Africa to try to get them to hold Bitcoin exposure.

You know, I think we're fully at the point right now where it's more it's more prudent to own a little bit than to not own any at all. And, you know, I would approach it the same way if I were the president. Right. is uh to do you know two big things one is to make sure we own some bitcoin and second more importantly is to be welcoming of entrepreneurs working on truly you know decentralized systems because i think that what you have uh and and this has been described uh by a number of people but what you the universe where the u.s is not welcoming of crypto entrepreneurs is one where we effectively push away uh you know sort of the potential architects of this open financial system elsewhere. And that's not a place that we want to be at all. And I think that that could

come with a lot of negative repercussions. And so I think the first order of priority is to be welcoming of Bitcoin and other kind of truly open networks and technologies, while also clamping down on, you know, sort of doubling down on investor protections and protecting retail investors from fraud, et cetera, et cetera. But I think that's less of a problem with Bitcoin specifically and more of a problem in this kind of long tail of crypto projects. But I think that Both of those things are really important. So let's keep going with the example. You as president, you say, hey, we should own some Bitcoin.

There's, you know, two or three billion dollars a day trading. Do you just go buy, you know, as much as you possibly can over a couple of weeks and try to build a, you know, 20, 30 billion dollar position or kind of what do you do? Yeah, I think that, you know, first I would call the guys at the NSA and make sure they didn't create Bitcoin. This isn't some huge NSA ruse. You know, these things, you know, these things happen, right? We'll find out 25 years from now what the NSA knew and didn't know. But, you know, even, you know, RSA encryption in a forum, they'd actually come out with it privately. the NSA did four or five years before it went through academia.

But sort of tongue-in-cheek, that's the first thing I would do. But in terms of accumulating a position, I don't know the specifics about sort of what disclosures would be required or which branch of the government would have to approve it or what can be done by executive order, et cetera. But the first focus, rather than accumulating it, would probably be to shed better regulatory clarity on the environment, because, you know, the regulations that we have now are confusing. They're bad for entrepreneurs. You know, it's

confusing because it's unclear, you know, because Bitcoin is really new, right? It doesn't fit into sort of existing paradigms, especially doesn't fit into sort of, you know, more traditional conceptions of money transmitter businesses and money service businesses. And it's unclear, uh you know well you know the irs says one thing the sec says another it's unclear what the status of it is um the sec has attempted to shed some light on decentralization i think that that's also uh largely uh sort of uh it's very up for interpretation um actually there there are some problems there i think as well uh because what they've communicated is that there's some sort of slide for uh how decentralized something is uh where i you know i don't i i think that

that's very very hard to say right it leaves a lot of wiggle room um and so i think the first thing you know you know sort of even more paramount to buying bitcoin is actually clarifying you know what the regulatory environment is around bitcoin and making clear that you know we are supportive of and encourage the development and use of bitcoin uh but we'll see i mean it's it's kind of at odds with, you know, with state issued currency to some extent, right? It makes for all sorts of, you know, actually even more complex regs around taxation, right? If I'm spending Bitcoin, you know, do I have to calculate capital gains whenever I buy a cup of coffee? Or, you know, is there a threshold under which it won't matter? These are all, you know, very relevant

and important questions. Absolutely. If you're a traditional investor, right? So maybe you have some working knowledge of cryptocurrency, blockchain, Bitcoin, but you're looking at your portfolio and you're managing assets. How do you think about crypto in general, given kind of your portfolio construction? And then how do you actually start to participate, if at all, into the asset class? Sure. And so I think that there are a couple of interesting lenses to look at Bitcoin, right? So as a sort of traditional investor. So one is, you know, Bitcoin as a form of crisis alpha, where, you know, it serves a similar function to maybe gold in that sense, where it can be sort of a non-correlated asset to the rest of the

market. It could be a safe haven when the rest of the markets are in turmoil, and that it's part of having a sort of responsible portfolio. I think that's one lens to look at it. It's something that people have proposed. I think it's mostly incomplete because Bitcoin was, you know, it was born in the sort of aftermath of the last financial crisis. Bitcoin itself has never gone through a broad based, you know, sort of collapse in equity markets. I think it's unclear how it'll perform in that universe. And I actually don't see it performing well in the event that we have a large sort of risk-off type market movement, you know, absent a potential sort of sovereign debt or currency crisis. I think that in that sort of lens, Bitcoin could actually potentially

shine. Another lens to approach it as an institutional investor is to say, hey, this crypto thing is this big bet on a new trend right a new macro trend uh and the trend uh that a lot of people have described as web 3.0 um or something else where i think this the smart way you know while i personally believe that the smartest like most you know on a risk adjusted basis the smartest thing to do is just to buy bitcoin um you know a lot of investors i i know are sort of opting to own a basket of cryptocurrencies, which will, you know, sort of eventually converge on, you know, the market winner or winners, depending on how you think the power law dynamics will shape out. So that's another sort of option to sort of play into it. The third is investing directly,

which, you know, many investors have done. The custody infrastructure for holding assets isn't quite there. And I think that'll change a lot in the next six to 12 months. the financial products that could exist for investors aren't aren't quite there yet but i think that that is that's the third sort of option is investing directly and being very wary of putting money into projects that seem appealing on the basis of sort of blockchain technology right which i consider largely to be a scam but i think that a lot of the original money that came from traditional investors went into exactly that from a lot of traditional hedge fund managers, private equity investors,

fintech investors. A lot of that money went into funding private enterprise permission blockchains where in that sort of 14 to 16 period when investors thought Bitcoin was dead, they invested in all of these private blockchain projects because that was something that they could understand. And I think that that's a really dangerous place to be. So if I were an institutional investor, I had outside clients, my, you know, sort of lens would be to allocate a very small percentage of portfolio directly to Bitcoin. And, you know, if that isn't compelling would be to allocate to a basket, and there's a couple ways to buy baskets. Got it. And so let's go down the rabbit hole of this enterprise blockchain, or, you know, not Bitcoin, but blockchain.

I tend to agree with you that 99% of those use cases or applications are complete garbage, right? And, you know, if you take a step back and you remove all of the hype and sexiness of the word blockchain, you're talking about a database, right? I mean, that is what we're talking about here. And so in order for people to get that excited about a database, there would either have to be, one, some, you know, such a technical leap in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, etc. Or two, there would have to be something that that database allowed us to do that we previously weren't able to do before. Yeah, it's a sort of enterprise blockchains or back office automation system, right? It's a form of like back, it's a back office upgrade, essentially. And the awesome part is Wall Street historically doesn't put money into the back office, right?

It puts the bare minimum because it's not a profit center. It's a cost center. You know, why invest more in the back office than you absolutely need to? This really is a way for back office teams to lobby for more financing for the sort of essential infrastructure that needs to upgrade. And so I don't see a lot of value being captured there. uh you know because actually they're creating hypothetically more efficient systems right if the if there's all these sort of improved efficiencies um a lot i don't i don't see how it might be cutting costs but i don't see it uh creating and subsequently capturing a lot of value

which is uh you know the disconnect i think a lot of people have in this ecosystem broadly not just on wall street but in general is uh the disconnect between value creation and value capture um i i I think that that problem remains largely, you know, unsolved in many teams' minds. Absolutely. And so if Bitcoin is that digital currency, right, it maybe takes some time to play out, but we eventually get to, hey, this is a true currency that has multiple properties that we're looking for. Do you think that there is a world in the digital age of finance where there is digital stocks, digital bonds, digital commodities, kind of all of these other applications

that aren't necessarily enterprise blockchain, but they are digital assets. They're native to this environment, but they represent or have analogous, you know, kind of properties to their non-digital peers? Yes, Pom. I think we'll tokenize the world. No, no, no, no.

No, I think that all sort of financial instruments will eventually be digital in some form, right? Even stuff that's represented with paper now in the basement of the DTTC. I think it's all going to be digital. It's sort of inevitable. And I sort of welcome that future. That'll be really exciting.

I think that there will emerge kind of new capital market structures altogether where deals will be financed sort of frictionlessly all over the world. You'll be able to move from brokerage A to brokerage B in a very straightforward process. I think that all that infrastructure will eventually exist, because I see, you know, capital markets and capital formation,

I see sort of sound money first as the largest addressable market, and not by, you know, a small difference, it's by many orders of magnitude. And then sort of second thing I find compelling is actually a recreation of a capital market structure around that. So I do think that this will be somewhat inevitable uh but actually the things that are interesting to me here are less around uh what a lot of you know it's sort of more tokenized securities offerings and kind of unique financing models and on people have proposed uh you know doing under reg d offerings here in the u.s what i'm interested in is actually kind of like the more subversive stuff right where i would consider binance uh binance coin right bnb um binance's native exchange token to be an

example of what i would consider a subversive uh you know illegal securities offering is a stretch because it might be illegal only to u.s investors uh but you know they basically raised an ico issued a token in exchange for that had some uh discounts and features for holders of the token and then issued a basically a burn mechanism where they bought back tokens and subsequently burned them based on their profits every quarter and now they're launching you know very very very sizable crypto fund that's investing in very high quality early stage projects. And they're basically passing on returns from that fund back to users. Right. So, you know, what I'm describing is entirely a security. Right. It's a very sort of unique form of security where it has this dual

utility function and security like feature where, you know, the benefits of the efforts of Binance and their team feeds right back into the security. And many people would be appalled. Right. They would consider it super illegal but what they've now created is a very broad investor base of you know tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of investors all over the world all of whom have profited substantially the token is appreciated substantially and they've been fully transparent i think the next levels for them is moving to a decentralized exchange model which they've been working on for some time uh first second um you know shifting to a model where all their cash flows are actually directly distributed on chain right and they can do um you know once

they have a decentralized exchange going they can even do uh potential uh buybacks and burning functions all autonomously um and you know what happens in that universe starts to resemble something much more close to a dao structure and uh while i think the dao was a disaster um it was still exciting right it was exciting for me to follow um it's still exciting to me now, I think the potential of DAOs is very underappreciated. And all of these DAOs, I think, will have, you know, equity-like characteristics, right? I think that they will exist all over the world and all sorts of different capital formation structures. And that's really cool to me. And so around that, I do see a whole new sort of decentralized financial system forming. Whether

all of these will have separate tokens, I don't know. And there's a number of questions that remains that are how governance look in this sort of a dow like universe but it's cool it's exciting absolutely um let's go back to this idea of a security and a utility and kind of can something have you know properties of both can it transition between the two etc and so um you know in the traditional non-crypto world there's shareholders that hold equity and there is utility to sometimes being a shareholder access to a shareholder meeting or event that type of stuff but but for the most part outside of you know some kind of more gimmicky type stuff if you hold a security it's a security and there's not much utility to it other than the value the appreciation etc

in this world we're seeing kind of the blending or or that blurring of those lines what excites you the most in terms of you know as long as people continue to follow rules and regulators kind of work with them etc like what do you think is possible there right is it the binance model or is there other things that you think could possibly be um you know this kind of blended security utility could be used for that could be compelling to uh to either investors or or holders of the token that use it in an incentive model? Yeah, I think that my favorite utility, for the most part, I hate utility tokens.

I think that they have little utility. I think that there hasn't been a single utility token, a pure utility token that I've seen designed that has thoughtfully figured out how it could work at a future high-demand equilibrium state. Even Ether? Yes, including Ether. But I think that my favorite, actually, utility token example is something like SIA.

I find SIA's model pretty compelling. And the way it works is they have two different tokens. One is an equity, a traditional sort of equity token, where it has all of the sort of same class structures as equity would have. And it has a separate utility token, which is used for participating in the network that has a lot of the qualities that utility tokens have in their future, you know, sort of high demand, high throughput state. It's highly unlikely that the utility token is ever going to make a good investment. And they're clear with that from day one. But what it does offer is, you know, exactly what it describes, right? It helps access utility in their network.

While the security structure actually provides recourse for investors, right? They have some claim and it aligns incentives for the team. Because I think the problem with most utility tokens is that there's a strict conflict oftentimes that emerges between the incentives of the team and the incentives of their potential users and the incentives of their potential investors. Oftentimes, these three things aren't totally aligned. A universe where there's high velocity in utility systems and these network tokens or these networks actually do see high usage rates is actually one where users benefit, but the team or investors might not necessarily be incentivized to do work on it or participate as an investment in sort of a fixed supply world.

You know, oftentimes these are it's problematic for users while being more beneficial for the team or for investors. And there's all sorts of models that people have come up with to try to work around this there. You know, there's token bonding curves and kind of mint and burn models. And people are, you know, they're trying all sorts of things, right? They're throwing a lot of things at the wall, experimenting with crypto economics and tokenomics. and, you know, all of these sort of, you know, LinkedIn buzzwords almost. But the reality is that I find the security utility token, that kind of dual token structure that has clearly delineated what the incentives are for each party

and aligning all of those in the same direction, I find that super compelling. I think it's really cool. Got it. uh no and i i think that that's a uh a really interesting kind of thought process to go through and kind of see you know where that could even lead 20 years down the road right um let me ask this what's the one thought that you have uh or the one belief you hold that a large majority of people would disagree with you on yeah so uh there's a lot of things i mean i i i the i i would already consider myself a Bitcoin maximalist, which I think is a minority position. But I think

it's probably more interesting to see, you know, sort of even in the universe of Bitcoin maximalism, which oftentimes to outsiders is this sort of amorphous blob of a community, right, where everybody is aligned and, you know, sort of eat steak and, you know, hates socialists and is all sort of the same type of person and loves guns. And while I love guns and hate socialists, I'm actually vegetarian. So there's a minority position there. But I think that the more interesting question is kind of what do I disagree with most, even in the sort of Bitcoin maximalism world? And there's two things. So one is that I see credit systems and the sort of banking systems being built on top of Bitcoin as being inevitable. I think people will do them.

and I think that they have the potential to work for a really long time, right? And so a lot of, you know, a lot of the, a lot of Bitcoin users, enthusiasts, especially those that were here from very early on, disagree with that premise, right? Including most recently it sparked up in a debate between Saifedean Amous, who wrote the Bitcoin Standard, and George Selgin, who is an OG cypherpunk. He was in the original, you know, he was on the original cypherpunk mailing list. He's with, I believe, the Cato Institute now around free banking and Bitcoin. And I actually find Selgin's view very, I'm very sympathetic towards it.

I think that all these sorts of unique banking constructs, I think, will emerge on top of Bitcoin and credit systems on top of Bitcoin are inevitable and that we should kind of welcome it. I don't know if it will be sustainable or work forever, especially because there are a number of structural limitations to how Bitcoin is designed. And these are good. There are limitations to what, you know, non-Bitcoin sort of bank actors can do. But I find that vision of Bitcoin to be not only inevitable, but, you know, pretty interesting. And so that's kind of one large thing that I disagree with, you know, in the sort of Bitcoin maximalist universe. The second sort of belief that I would have that is probably contradictory to many people in the Bitcoin maximalist universe is that I really do believe that in especially in the short to medium term, which I would describe

as, you know, even extending past to the next 10 years, I think that Bitcoin will be winner take most not winner take all. And it will slowly increase in dominance. I think it's at roughly 55 to 60% dominance right now. And I anticipate that that will go up over time. But I see two things as as potentially being a few things as being valuable to the market that will sort of emerge over time i think privacy is sort of systematically undervalued i think everyone says they talk they care about privacy um but you know i i don't think that's reflected at all in the relative value of uh projects uh and teams working on privacy uh relative to every everything else uh especially in the utility universe uh so that's one thing i think is sort of systematically

undervalued um i think some form of stable coin um i don't think any of the stable coins that exist uh right now that have launched are uh really robust um but i think that over the next at least over the next five years i think a lot of them sort of you know by design uh will be you know very hard to kill right and then they won't die for a very long time so i actually see them holding some sort of appeal uh especially because i think that the design of stable coins uh though a lot of it is misguided kind of Keynesian nonsense. I think that narrative is very appealing to a lot of people I talk to on Wall Street who sort of look at that and go, wait, you know, that kind of makes sense to me. I can see, you know, this sort of algorithmic central bank model being

compelling. So I think we'll see that as well. So in terms of how the market evolves, though long term, I am sympathetic to the view that Bitcoin is this sort of black hole. I think in the short to medium term that there are a lot of things that'll hold value because of what the market views as structural limitations of bitcoin uh for now got it makes sense um all right before i ever uh before i end each one uh i let the guests ask me one question um what question would you ask me the uh i think that my biggest question that uh i've always i'm so scared of what you're about to ask how did you come up with the virus is oh man you're the second person to ask oh really this is the second time uh so we didn't talk about uh long story short uh i think twitter is full of

uh characters of ourselves right and so it's uh the example i always use is like imagine if we were all just uh in the wwe on twitter and like you know there's the hero the villain the announcer the referee etc and those characters all have you know taglines right you know right if you ever watched wrestling growing up you could probably tell me you know the undertaker the rock steve austin and all the characters uh and so i did not have a grand plan uh when i first said it it was more of just you say that you say no no no no no i swear uh so the idea that you know blockchain bitcoin crypto was just it was capturing the mental energy of so many people and it was just spreading and no one could stop it.

And it was this, you know, viral phenomenon or this virus, right? And so I tweeted it one day. It's like Snow Crash. A little bit, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And when I tweeted it, I put a rocket emoji next to it. And next thing I knew, people were tweeting it back and tagging me on things. And it just took on a life of its own. And, you know, look, I tend to think that, you know,

there are things uh that take off because they have a little bit of truth to them right and that's kind of why we latch on to them uh that one is um it's kind of run its course right if you notice i don't really push as much anymore because i think everyone's got the idea hey right there's no stopping this thing yeah um but but i'm actually surprised at um you know how bad The crypto community is at taking what is pretty intelligent, thoughtful, many times complex ideas and work and presenting it to an audience that probably doesn't have the same passion, understanding, etc. And so this, you know, taking up the complex ideas and making them simple, right, and really delivering them to a much wider audience, I think, is not only compelling for Bitcoin and crypto's sake, but also it helps, right? And so I think that something like the virus is spreading is really easy for that kind of, you know, lesser in the weeds crowd to grab onto. And is that the message we want them to walk away from crypto with?

No, right? But at the same time, if that gets them interested and gets them in the door and then we can actually educate them, I think actually it can be a valuable thing. Yeah, this is something I've written about in the past because I actually think that the most interesting sort of fundamental, quote unquote, fundamental indicator to me, you know, counterintuitively is actually price action. Right. And kind of fund flows. Right. Because that's always, you know, I view a lot of people view the crypto markets as, you know, startups with stock tickers. which I think is kind of a flawed model for a lot of the reasons I've described. But I think that currency markets, it's actually much more important to focus on fund flows. What do people see as future money? What are the narratives that they're going to latch on to?

And I've mentioned a lot of narratives that I personally find compelling. What are the narratives that you think institutional investors are really interested in? Yeah. So I think that the best framework for this is they have sleaze of capital, right? So they've got equity, debt, real estate, fixed income, et cetera. And if they see ways to deploy equity capital into this vertical, that is attractive to them. They understand what they're buying. They have a dedicated pool of capital for it, et cetera. i look at you know take equity so venture capital specifically as um it's like somebody raising a vc fund and saying i have a health care focused vc fund right you're just doing venture capital inside of the health care industry yep crypto crypto focused vc fund is just venture capital inside of crypto blockchain space right i think where the institutions kind of get off the rails or there's a disconnect is when they're getting pitched hey you should buy bitcoin you should buy

these digital assets there's going to be some early adopters for sure right and they'll probably write you know single digit to double you know lower double digit millions of dollars checks uh to dip their toe in the water etc i don't think that the majority are ready to do that yet right they don't understand the asset class they don't know where the capital comes from you know on their side and so there's just some some hurdles that need to kind of get jumped over before they're ready to do that but i do think that you know if you can start to show them hey you know mining it's an infrastructure investment right and there's cash flow and and you start to kind of walk them through a couple of different applications of the blockchain uh technology

but allow them to invest without holding the digital assets themselves i think that's a much easier conversation than hey go buy bitcoin uh i would not be surprised though at the same time if over the next 12 months that rapidly changes yeah and i think that you know ice and some of these larger names um i really put them in two buckets some are the uh pretenders right and some are you know the operators right right the pretenders are the ones who just keep you know every day there's a different press announcement and they're you know exploring something they're potentially going to possibly announce a you know a future partnership with somebody and you're just like what are you guys doing right the operators are the ones you know i think ice is in that

bucket where they're saying look we've already built some stuff we're going to continue building stuff it's going to launch in the next you know 60 days and and you know that type of um kind of propensity for action i think from a large player uh is definitely eye-opening to these institutions and then you know look we've seen a couple of institutions jump already across the ecosystem i think that you know we probably need another three to four months of that continuing to happen and then it's almost going to flip you know very violently and people are going to say look if you do not have this in your portfolio, you actually are not fulfilling your duty because this could potentially be one of the highest performing assets in a portfolio and you don't have any

exposure. Yeah. It's like I sometimes say, it's people don't have a choice, right? People can decide when they want to become a Bitcoin Maxwell, but they really don't have a choice, right? It sort of converges on that eventually and people will capitulate eventually, right? I'm not super worried about that absolutely i last thing i'll leave you with is um i have uh and this is coming from somebody who you know fully believes in the digital age bitcoin being that digital currency but digital stocks bonds commodity you know all that stuff um not even necessarily convinced that it has to be on the blockchain right it can just be digital um i think that when you really dig into blockchain technology specifically uh i would say you know over 80 90 percent of people

probably start with bitcoin and they have this like well-worn path from bitcoin to enterprise blockchain to alt coins to you know whatever and they end up all circling back and end up at bitcoin yep right and so like every single person i know has gone down some variation of that path where you all you the intellectual curiosity takes you there right it's could you actually apply this technology to you know this application could you you know whatever and it just takes time Right. It's probably 18, 24 months and people come back around and they all just, man, I could have saved myself a bunch of time if I had just, you know, saw Bitcoin, believe Bitcoin and stuck with Bitcoin. I mean, there's the more you research the space, the more you look at other projects, you come back to it because there there's an elegance to it. Right. It's this elegance of immaculate conception. Right. It's this elegance that game theoretically just works. Right.

It's the security model, which is the best in the world, right? It's the subservience of miners to users. Consequent, you know, sort of in contrast to what a lot of people believe, that's how Bitcoin works. You know, it's seeing, you know, the success of the user-activated software initiative last year in light of Segwit2x and Bitcoin Cash and, you know, users controlling Bitcoin, right? What we learned last year. And you can make all of the commentary that you want about Bitcoin, about its transaction capacity, about its, you know, about a number of things. But what you can't criticize is that Bitcoin is hard to change and that users control Bitcoin. Right. Miners don't control Bitcoin. Businesses don't control Bitcoin. Barry Silbert doesn't control Bitcoin. Users control Bitcoin. And that's really awesome.

And once you realize the simplicity to that and the path to governments even trying to shut down Bitcoin, it all makes sense. You can't unsee that, right? Once you take that red pill, it's just, it's game over. We're going to end this thing on three words. Bitcoin is beautiful. Yes, it is. Awesome, man. Thank you so much.

I really, really appreciate this. You definitely have a unique perspective in this whole world and I appreciate you sharing it with us today. Yeah, I'll see you at 100K. We'll record again. Hey everyone, pop here. If you like this episode of off the chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple Spotify and other podcast charts,

please do us a favor and rate review and subscribe to review. Simply go to the off the chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on off the chain. We'll be right back.