The Pomp Podcast - Ask Pomp (AMA), Anthony Pompliano & Polina Marinova: Celebrating 200 Episodes of Off The Chain

Episode Date: December 16, 2019

Anthony Pompliano hosts a special AMA to celebrate the 200th episode of Off The Chain Featuring Polina Marinova. Listeners were asked to submit their questions on Twitter using the hashtag #AskPomp. In this conversation, Pomp answers what lead to his interest in crypto and digital assets, how to educate relatives about Bitcoin, his favorite episodes of Off The Chain, and three reasons why governments should adopt cryptocurrency and blockchain. 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.

Whoa. Before we get started, I want to go over the four sponsors for this episode who make all this possible. They're fantastic. So go show them some love. The first is the best URL in the industry, crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal, driving mass adoption. That's why we're all here, right? To get every human on earth a digital wallet and to get them using digital currencies. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and a new card payment. Everything you could want is at Crypto.com. They've been longtime supporters of Off The Chain and recently announced a new exchange. So go help them out, download their app from the App Store, or visit Crypto.com and tell them POM sent you. There's nothing better in the world than a company

helping to drive global adoption of this new technology. Another part of global adoption is making sure that we secure the various blockchains with computing power. CoinMind has built the best consumer experience in mining. Hands down, no competition. If you want to help secure the blockchain and get started in mining, you can go to coinmine.com slash pomp. Order a CoinMine, it'll arrive at your door, and you simply take it out of the box, plug it in, and connect to your Wi-Fi. You'll be mining your favorite crypto in five minutes or less. It is honestly magical. I have one running right now here in the office, and it's super quiet, it's got no heat, and every person that comes in the office asks, what is that? Every single person asks. It's a CoinMine.

The best part to me is that the CoinMind comes with a mobile app that's super slick and the company continues to push over-the-air updates to the device that add functionality, add tokens that can be mined, or increase the efficiency of the device. Similar to how Tesla does car software updates over the air, CoinMind's sending these passively to thousands of CoinMinds around the world on a periodic basis. Pretty damn cool. When Farboot and the team pitched me on the idea of an Xbox or PlayStation-like box that could mine cryptocurrency in your home, I was immediately sold. I invested in the business, have a device personally, and keep telling people to go to coinmine.com so they can save a lot of time if they want to get started mining today. And CoinMine has a partnership with our third sponsor for this episode, BlockFi. BlockFi is one of my favorite companies in crypto because they allow users to deposit their assets in a deposit account and immediately start earning interest. Think about it. If you keep your digital assets on an exchange or in cold storage, you aren't benefiting from any yield on the asset.

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And that brings us to the last advertiser of the episode, eToro. These guys have absolutely crushed it over the years. Their founder, Yoni, was one of the original Bitcoin OGs and has been ahead of almost every trend in crypto. He built eToro to help people buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrencies. But he added a few twists, social trading, copy trading, and virtual trading accounts. Social trading is a feature where every asset available on the platform has its own separate social feed where people talk about the asset, share trading ideas and analysis, and even include various charts or graphs. Virtual trading accounts is targeted at beginners.

If you're just starting out and want to try trading with play money, eToro will give you a virtual account with $100,000 in it to test, learn, and get comfortable. And so, then that brings us to copy trading, which is by far the coolest feature. This allows you, as a user, to select any other user's portfolio to copy. If you see someone on the platform you like, you can set your account to mimic their trades. They buy Bitcoin with 5% of their portfolio, your portfolio buys 5% Bitcoin. They sell 50% of their Ether position, your portfolio does the same thing automatically. Copy trading is awesome, so go join the 10 plus million other traders on eToro and start trading all the most popular cryptocurrencies today.

They're one of the largest companies in the space and you can get started by going to eToro.com. Again, that is etoro.com, where the entire team's ready to get you started in just a few clicks. And don't forget, go subscribe to the Off The Chain daily newsletter. You can go to offthechain.substack.com. I write a letter of news, analysis, and opinion every morning that goes out to more than 40,000 investors. See you there. 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. all right guys bang bang i'm sitting here uh with a special guest for the 200th episode of off the chain we're going to do something a little different uh i shot out a tweet and said use the hashtag ask pomp to send in your questions and i'm going to answer as many of them as i can during the episode in order to help me go through the questions i've brought in the ever lovely paulina marinova to uh to help read them out so she's going to suffer through this uh with us yep i'm excited to make my debut jesus um all right let's start with the first question okay this one comes

from at crypto nero how many years did you ignore this space before being convinced you saying you started with eth mining was surprising yeah actually when i met you you were not into bitcoin yeah so um i think that uh i i couldn't say that i ignored um the industry uh it was more of i just ignorant to it. I didn't know it. I didn't know about it. I think I'd heard the word Bitcoin two or three times when I was working at Facebook in 2014, 2015. But there was a gentleman, JP Barrick, who really sat me down and was like, hey, you should pay attention to this. But it was all around mining. And so I had a background in data centers and understood how those worked. And so when I saw Bitcoin and Ethereum mining, it was a no-brainer right away.

But, yes, we started with ETH mining with GPUs. What's the next one? At JTV95 wants to know, the justice system hasn't been built for the Internet. Lots of online crimes don't even get looked into. Do you think there will be a justice system built for the Internet? If so, how do you think it could work? Yeah, it's a great question. I think that there's two ways to think about quote unquote justice. Some of it is preventative.

Some of it is reactionary. And so if you think about the justice system that we have, you know, in the analog world or the non-internet world, a lot of it's reactionary. So basically what ends up happening is you do whatever you want. And when even though you know you're about to do something that's wrong, you can still do it. And then once you've done that, the law enforcement takes a lot of time, energy, and resources to build a case and go and force on you. I think what we're starting to see in the internet age, especially in financial services, is more of a proactive approach to justice or law enforcement, where basically the software has the rules coded into it, and it prevents you from being able to do things. Again,

especially in financial services where there's heavy regulation, I think that that is a trend that's becoming more popular. Now, with that said, there's a flip side to it, which is people should still have kind of free choice and freedom and individual liberties. So if all of a sudden we start to prevent people from doing things because we just don't like their ideas, I think that's a slippery slope. And so there's a balance to strike there. But I do think that there's a difference between kind of proactive and reactionary approaches. And the internet definitely is empowering people to take more proactive approaches than before. Um, this one's from Hunter Horsley.

Ah, Hunter, what up, man? What is part of modern life that you think in 30 years we'll look back on and say, wow, I can't believe we did that. Um, yes, great question. Uh, there's probably two pieces. One, um, I do believe that, uh, we're going to look back and be like, humans used to be really stupid because they had to count on themselves. And what I mean by that is, um, I think we're probably, you know, I don't know, somewhere

between, let's call it 15 and 50 years away from true embeddable technology. So you can imagine the ability now for a chip to be embedded in your brain. Now you have all of the access of Google and the internet, all that information right at your fingertips or kind of as part of the computational power in your brain. You can imagine that once we get to that point where every human has that capability, I think we'll look back and be like, wow, I can't believe that they actually use their real brains without augmentation. And so I think that's something to pay attention to. A second trend that is somewhat more controversial is the idea that the meat that we eat today is natural. I think that you see things with like impossible foods,

beyond meat, etc. It would not surprise me at all if there's an ethical argument that ends up getting made around the inhumane treatment of animals, and therefore the lab-grown meat becomes more popular and eventually becomes kind of dominant. Now, there's a lot of questions around how is that scientifically kind of healthy and what those impacts are, but I definitely think that's something to pay attention to. And I'm sure that there's other things, you know, self-driving cars. I can't believe those people actually drove around. You know, if you think of that type of technology, it's likely that the self-driving cars are, yes, going to replace some jobs, but more so they're going to unlock a lot of time for creation and creativity and production

from humans. Imagine how much time people spend in cars not doing something other than driving. And so I think that's, again, something that people will just look back and say, wow, I can't believe they just sit in the car. And so that'll be something to pay attention to. This is a good one from Elja Boom. What is your next goal? Be clear. Be as clear as possible. Oh, my next goal. That's a really good question. I think I've got a whole bunch of different goals. Most of my goals end up being pretty long term stuff. You know, for me, one that's easy, I think, for this audience to kind of wrap their head around is in 2017. I put a really big focus on figuring out Twitter and growing that audience. In 2018, I put a pretty big focus on kind of systematizing and figuring out how to grow

the off the chain newsletter. In 2019, I spent a lot of time kind of systematizing and learning how to grow the podcast. And so for 2020, I think that one of the big goals for me is to figure out YouTube and what that really looks like is, can I go from the 6,000, 7,000 subscribers that we have today to 100,000 subscribers by the end of 2020, I think would kind of show that we've gotten the mastery of that platform, how the algorithms work, the type of content people want, kind of the distribution, but then also the systems in place on the content creation side. And so if you think about it from why is that important, now we basically have four platforms where if there's

any sort of algorithm changes on a YouTube or a Twitter or any other platform. You kind of have multiple channels, some direct where you own the relationship with the end user, and then some that are more kind of mass distribution, like the Twitters and YouTubes. But that's definitely a goal that I think is short term based and pretty measurable. Awesome. This is from at Greg 1976 13. Wow. Okay. When you pitch family offices, blockchain and Bitcoin, what are their reasons for saying no and how has this changed over the years yep um so there's every i think conversation is different um the largest conversations or i'm sorry the largest family offices those conversations um what i've taken away from it is like the easy answer is we're going to do nothing so when you're

presented with a new idea um it takes some forward thinking some courage uh and it takes action to follow, even if you buy into, you know, kind of the pitch that you're hearing. And so it's very easy, simple and kind of the default to do nothing. But once you actually decide, okay, this is interesting, then you've got to figure out a lot of stuff around custody. How are you going to acquire it? What are the regulations? Is there any sort of documentation or requirements for the structure of the family office that you need to be cognizant of, et cetera. So I think if the default is do nothing, if you can convince people, they'll take action. But then there's another group, and I think the group you're hinting at here,

which is the group that hears the pitch and then decides not to do something. And that group is really doing it because they don't believe in it or they don't think it's a good investment opportunity. And usually those come down to, one, there's regulatory uncertainty in their opinion, so they're not interested. Two, they're worried about custody or volatility. A third thing is they just are kind of like fiat maximalists. They don't believe that there's any sort of currency that could become popular and kind of take over. And normally what I try to explain to them is there's a qualitative and a quantitative argument. The qualitative argument is everything that kind

of Bitcoiners in the crypto community believes around the possibilities of this asset. And so that's a little bit harder, I think, for a lot of folks to wrap their heads around if they're not in this every single day. But the quantitative argument is pretty hard to refute in terms of the non-correlated asset with an asymmetric upside and the impact it can have on our portfolio, given the modern portfolio theory. And so I think that's really where we try to focus more is just using math and data to show them what an asset like this can do for their portfolio. And obviously, we've been pretty fortunate to find some like-minded individuals there, and we'll continue to do that. At Jimium Group asks, Bitcoin slash digital is cool and all, but what happens when

networks go down or blacked out? What's the hedge against local blackouts? Yeah, so we saw this actually in Venezuela. Their entire grid went down. And there was a couple of things that people did. So the first thing to remember is if the grid goes down, the legacy banking system goes down. But with Bitcoin, basically, you don't need the entire grid to be up. You yourself just need to be able to get access to the Internet. And so when that happens, I think that you need to be able to, one, have some sort of electricity generation. So you can think of just having a generator, you know, solar or something like that. Two is that you've got to be able to get an Internet connection established.

And some people, I think, in Venezuela were showing that they could literally get it via satellite and kind of get out. And so the beauty of kind of the grid going down for something like Bitcoin is that as long as you yourself can get Internet and electricity, then you can connect to that network because it's always running. And so you're not dependent on the entire national grid or banking system to be up and running. This is from at Coindorado. What were your hobbies slash interests during your time in the Army? I mean, no surprise. Working out, shooting guns, and then I actually read a lot. So I, for whatever reason, I was young.

I was, especially when I was deployed, I was 20, 21 years old and pretty much spent most of my day working out. Um, and then, uh, obviously the, uh, the weapons proficiency, uh, was important given what we were doing on a day-to-day basis. Um, so I spent a lot of time on that. And then, um, as I've talked about, uh, a ton, uh, I specifically read, um, a lot of books, but there was three specific ones that were, um, quite, uh, foundational to my life. Um, I read, uh, Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, uh, The Richest Man in Babylon, uh, and Thinking Grow Rich. And those three books I read kind of back to back to back. I was 20 years old and they really changed the way that I thought

about money and work and wealth and kind of what I wanted to spend my life doing. And so that was a big focus along with that kind of physical activity and the weapons proficiency. This one is from at Walsh SRCM. Why wouldn't a deflationary currency be bad? Theoretically, people would spend almost solely on necessities and save the rest to increase their wealth. This would obviously crush economic growth and therefore is my biggest concern about BTC. Yeah, so I think that there's a very important conversation around consumption versus savings. And we live in a world that has been driven by consumption. Fiat currency, the inflationary aspect of it, incentivizes you to spend money. So either to take your fiat currency and buy goods and services or to take your fiat

currency and put it into assets, real assets, things like real estate stocks, whatever it ends up being. And so the reason why it's important conversation is obviously Bitcoin has a very different approach. It is a deflationary structure with a disinflationary monetary schedule. And so you're actually incentivized to save. Now, the reason why this is important is if you go back for thousands of years, things like gold were money. And those have very similar structures to what Bitcoin is today. And so I think that what we have to remember here is that the fiat experiment is actually quite short. It's only been around since about 1971. And so we've got, you know, give or take 50 years of this experiment. And yes, there has been incredible economic

growth, but also there's been incredible economic issues as well. And so there's a strong belief, I think among a lot of people that that inflationary experiment, what we're starting to see here is kind of the kicking of the can down the road. Now, first it was interest rate manipulation, right, and movement. Now we're starting to see the QE over the last decade. And so that's kind of become a constant necessity from central banks to keep the economy going. But once they don't have the ability to impact the economy with interest rates and with QE anymore because we're addicted to it or kind of used to it, all of a sudden they have to go to something else. And I think this is where you see things like monetary theory, MMT come into, et cetera. And so I think that there's this general belief that over time there's a bet that that system or that experiment ends up not working out in the long run.

And something like Bitcoin is really a return back to what served as money for thousands of years. And so I don't think that people should be worried about it as much as they should just have the historical context of what money has been for a really long time. Two questions. One from Matt Weiday. How can I educate my relatives about Bitcoin? And then someone at Joey Clark V, also CryptoUGA. Shout out, go dogs. He said, yeah, what's your elevator pitch for YBTC for the average, Joe?

Yeah, so I think that the key piece here, there's two things. One is there's tons of resources online. You know, the things that I've seen people use that's been quite effective. So Murad and I recorded a podcast episode. This is going on probably over a year ago now. That was kind of the bull case for Bitcoin. I know a lot of people have had their relatives listen to that, and that's really kind of changed the way that they thought about it. Obviously, The Bitcoin Standard by Saif Deen is a great book that I think a lot of people kind of enjoy reading and understanding, again, the historical context, the more macro components of this.

And then things like Jameson Lopp has a great Bitcoin resource. I think it's lop.net slash Bitcoin that has pretty much every talk that you could imagine, every book, every article, et cetera, that would be helpful in this conversation. So I would say those three resources are pretty strong. In terms of like what's the pitch, pitch is pretty easy. I usually tell them, look, there's a financial system that you've grown up in. It's an inflationary U.S. dollar denominated system that's built on fractional reserve banking. There's a new system that's being built. It's an alternative.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a replacement, but that system has very different structural components to it. If you have 100% confidence that the current system is going to persist forever, you should keep 100% of your assets in that dollar-denominated ecosystem. But if you even think that there is 1% possibility that this other system has a chance of being successful, you should, quote-unquote, get off zero, and you should move some of your dollar-denominated assets into that new alternative financial system. And so that is where we get into, you know, sizing the risk correctly, et cetera. Most people we see doing this are doing it in kind of 100 basis point type, you know, allocations to begin with. But obviously, being able to get them off zero, now they've got some skin in the game, they're paying attention. And we tend to find that they, you know, kind of go down the rabbit hole once they're off zero. Awesome.

Awesome. At Kinetic Crypto wants to know, how do you think we can get merchants to start accepting Bitcoin and crypto more regularly? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think that there's two components to this. One, there's an education piece of it. People just got to be more educated on what is Bitcoin. Why should they accept it? How is it beneficial? And also kind of a 1A component of this is having customers go in and say, hey, do you accept Bitcoin? and I'd like to pay you in Bitcoin. That tends to move merchants pretty easily. The second thing is also an economic argument. So something as simple as there's a lot of businesses now that will actually give you a discount on the purchase of goods if you use

Bitcoin because they don't have to worry about the chargebacks and the credit card fees and all of the kind of legacy issues that merchants have. And so I think that explaining that to folks around here is why this could be beneficial to you and your business, I think is an economic argument and then also an education, you know, kind of component to it. And there's a lot of people who are working hard to do this. There's a lot of companies that have built technology to kind of help facilitate this. So I think we're on our way, but it takes time. And the more people we have out there, the better. At Canadian Hodl, what if first world governments choose to ban Bitcoin to retain financial control, similar to the gold ban? Is this plausible?

Look, anything's possible. It's definitely a world where I think more and more people are paying attention in kind of the government ranks. The good news is that I think every government that at least I've seen talk about it, there are some proponents of Bitcoin and kind of what the the industry stands for. Again, that doesn't necessarily mean that they couldn't ban ownership. I think the important thing is they couldn't shut it down, right? So they couldn't shut down the network. What they could do is they could ban ownership and basically say, you know, turn over your Bitcoin, all that kind of stuff. It's plausible, but I don't think that we're near that happening anytime soon. And so, you know, I think it's Matt O'Dell, who's one of

these guys who puts it well. He goes, look, prepare for the worst and kind of plan accordingly. But also understand that, you know, we're still very early in the stages of this. And you see the central banks trying to wrap their heads around, you know, what is this stuff? Should we be participating in it? And so I don't think that's something to worry about kind of in the short term. At Alex Crypto 09, what will happen after the last Bitcoin is mined? If incentive for miners is transaction fees, would this be sufficient? Yeah, I think that's a general belief right now is that the transaction fees for miners would end up being the incentive.

With all the information we have now, I do think that it would be enough to keep those miners on. Again, it's hard to kind of predict what happens 120 years out in the future. But I think structurally that's directionally correct. And so as we get more information, I'm sure people will kind of reevaluate and morph their opinions. But I think that's the generally held belief right now. At Chaka321, what's the most important movie you have ever seen? Ooh, the most important movie I've ever seen. That's a really good question.

I don't know if I've got the most important movie, but there's a bunch of movies that I really like. For those that don't know, I'm a big movie buff. Polina's laughing right now because whenever I get on an airline, I can immediately tell whether the movie library is good or not because I fly way too much. But I would say good movies that just kind of jump to mind. Huge Lion King fan, which is something that I think is probably not expected. I really, really like The Greatest Showman, which is actually a musical. But I like that story and kind of the family components to it, et cetera. I like Cinderella Man.

I think that's a good one. Four Brothers is another one. And then I am notorious for probably having watched every war movie known to mankind. But all of those, I think, are up there. And then one other one that I think people probably wouldn't expect, And I'm going to get the name incorrect, so I probably should figure it out and put it in the show notes, is The Life of Mitt, I think it's called. But it's basically the story of a guy who's stuck. He's a photographer at a magazine, and he's stuck in his job, and he's just locked into corporate America, can't escape.

And he somehow gets thrown on this wild journey where he realizes, like, you only get one life to live, and go have adventure and enjoy it. And basically, you can imagine that the movie pretty much is like him throwing the middle finger up to his corporate job and saying, like, I'm going to go live my life. But I think that that's a pretty powerful movie for those that feel like they're locked into into the little monkey cage in the cubicle. Tell them how you make me watch movie trailers and I hate it. So I'm regretting already having to come help me with this. But there's a joke that we saw online which perfectly emulated this, which was if you ever want to go watch a movie and you don't know what you want to watch, well, the best way to figure out what the movie to watch is is to watch all the movie trailers. Well, if you watch four, five, six, ten, twelve different movie trailers in a row, then now you're not watching a movie. You're just sitting there watching movie trailers.

And it's super annoying. And so I enjoy doing that because it's kind of try before you buy. But what you end up seeing is it's movie tapas. It's basically the ability to watch as much as you can and kind of try a bunch of different things all at the same table. So this is from Jason Benick. Which U.S. bank do you believe will be the first to break tradition and embrace Bitcoin deposits, transfers and transactions? It's a great question. I think the first one to buy a crypto company that has done that.

I don't think any of the major banks are going to kind of jump in the water headfirst and just do it themselves. I think what ends up happening is they're going to do it via acquisition. They're going to see a crypto-native business that's super profitable and growing really fast. And when they see that, they're going to realize the economic benefit to them, and they'll go and they'll just buy it rather than build it, incorporate it internally, and then kind of scale it out using their resources and their scale. At the state of Crip 1, on 200 podcasts, rank the top 10 interviews you have had or the ones you believe were most impactful. Oh, man. Okay, short answer. I can't do that.

But maybe what I can do is I can throw out a couple that were really fun for me. Murad and I, I don't think I'll ever top the episode we recorded. um he he uh he came in and uh it was the right time it was the perfect message he articulated it so uh kind of eloquently um that uh it just you know it got a lot of attention for all the right reasons um and so i think that's probably the number one episode i remember recording um other ones that stick out in my mind um i remember uh the one i did with caitlin long she was one of the first three that i did uh i really really liked um when i uh kind of got to sit down and pick her brain and really understand how she saw the world. That one was good.

What I'll call the celebrity club, Kyle Bass, Anthony Scaramucci, and Spencer Dinwiddie, those three guys all, for various reasons, were kind of memorable, just that their world is not Bitcoin, but they all have various levels of interest in it for different things. And then I would also say that some of the conversations I've had that weren't so Bitcoin native also are quite interesting. And so anytime that I can talk to somebody who's really smart and has a lot of has kind of a lot of ideas and can articulate them well, I love to sit down with them and talk. Skrt, skrt. Want to know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right. Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal. Mother f***ing mass

adoption. That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending and card payment. Everything you could want 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. your boy Pomp's got you. Everybody got some electricity and Wi-Fi. All you got to do is go to CoinMine.com. You buy a CoinMine. It's like an Xbox or a PlayStation that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin. That's right. You purchase it. It shows up at your doorstep. You pull it out of the box. You plug it in, connect to your Wi-Fi. Five minutes or less,

you're mining Bitcoin. All you have to do is control it from the mobile app they provide, And then you receive over-the-air updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis. Kind of like how Tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software. Just you're updating your CoinMine. Consumer mining made easy. That's right. Go to CoinMine.com, tell them Pomp sent you, and thank me later. One more word from our sponsor, BlockFi.

Their new interest account allows you to securely deposit your Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% 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. At YJFang22. You guys got to get better Twitter names.

What are the three biggest developments that we should pay attention to in the crypto space over the next one to two years? Three biggest developments. I think that there's going to be an acceleration of every stock, bond, currency, and commodity getting digitized. I think that there's going to be even greater levels of humans trusting algorithms and software over other humans. I think that we're going to see large financial banks start to incentivize their users to use stable coins or digital dollars. So whether higher levels of interest, better rewards on a credit card, that type of stuff. And then the fourth thing is I think that Bitcoin is going to start to take even more of a material share of global transactions. Like I think that Bitcoin is a really quiet beast when you look at the hash rate and the transactions and all the things that are happening there.

I think people are drastically underestimating what it can do. And so paying attention to that's going to be important as well. Great. Okay, this is Abhinav Agarwal, 94. Give us three reasons why the government should adopt Bitcoin slash cryptocurrency. Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know if I've got three reasons kind of clearly articulated, but the things that kind of jumped to the top of my head are one, anytime you're doing bilateral trade between nations, as the president of the United States has been highlighting, there's tons of manipulations of currencies and economies. Something like Bitcoin is a non-sovereign backed currency, meaning that if you're two countries, you know that the other counterparty to the transaction is not manipulating their currency. They can trust that you're not manipulating yours because you guys are using something that is outside of the control of both of you and it's fully transparent and verifiable. So I think that's kind of one. Two is the fiat experiment probably doesn't work over a really long period of time.

And so I think that's going to end up being something that's important to pay attention to. And so just like individuals should have kind of that chaos hedge or smuck insurance, I think that government's doing that as well. It makes a lot of sense. And then the third thing, and one of the things that I think goes untalked about a lot, is the ability to turn excess power into capital, right, and one of the most scarce resources in the world. All these countries have lots and lots of excess power. a lot of it's renewable power, and what they're trying to figure out is what do they do with it. And so there's not many things that are better than simply let's go build mining facilities,

let's set those up, and let's start securing this computing network that is already the most powerful computer in the world, the most secure computer in the world. And so I think that that's a third reason and an economic argument as to what they should be doing with it. At Irritated Wasp, in your opinion, what gives billionaires reason to be pessimistic about BTC? what would or could produce optimism for them? And does this matter? What got them here is not what we're talking about. If you're a billionaire and especially if you're quote unquote self-made or you didn't inherit the money, the dollar denominated inflationary fractional reserve system worked pretty damn well for you. You kind of won the

game, if you will. And so the idea that people are saying we should switch the rules of the game or we should go play a different game, probably aren't super attractive to you because it's an exact contrast to what built the wealth you have. And so I think that it's no surprise. It's just them talking their book, frankly. So I think that's one piece. What brings them into it is there's actually a lot of, I think, billionaires or wealthy folks who realize just because what got me here doesn't mean it's going to get me there, right? And so the world's changing. And when the world changes, I need to reevaluate from a first principle standpoint what the future looks like. And so those folks are hard at work trying to understand that. At ClintBeastwood1, what are

the most important three books you have ever read and what's on your reading list currently? Yeah, so the three most important books, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Think and Grow Rich, and The Richest Man in Babylon. And really, I think of the most important book is always what the book was, who you were at the time, and the timing of when you read the book. So those three all read together, like I previously said. In terms of books that I've read recently, I really liked Sam Zell's book. I read Steve Schwartzman's new book. Let's see, what else have I read? I read Edward Snowden's Permanent Record. I'm currently reading a book called The Telomere Effect, which is all about kind of our DNA and how it relates to aging.

Basically, the DNA strand at the end of your DNA has something that is overgeneralized in a simplistic way, similar to like the plastic caps on the end of your shoelaces that kind of close off the DNA strand. And as you have a more stressful life, you sleep less, you eat worse, you don't exercise, et cetera, those plastic caps or those telomeres end up shortening and as they shorten you age faster and so if you've ever seen somebody who's you know 25 years old but they look 40 it's probably because they have short telomeres and so this book basically goes into the science behind it and some of the things that you can do to kind of stop the shortening of the telomeres or even reverse it and help to elongate them at chuck's knee twerks whatever what are these names all

Right. If if a robot takes your job, is it entitled to support you for the rest of your life? No, I think, you know, if you've ever seen the the saying or Lamar Jackson of the Baltimore Ravens after these NFL games, he's been wearing a shirt that says nobody cares, work harder. And so I don't think that it's in kind of the automated world that nobody cares. I think actually a lot of people are talking about this. So a lot of people care. But the idea of working harder, that works in sports. I don't think working harder is going to solve the problem here. I think what people need to do is they need to be very intelligent about optimizing for skills that computers and machines aren't going to be able to do.

And so one of these ideas that I have is that creativity is mispriced, meaning that the machines are going to be really good at doing monotonous kind of repetitive work. But the ideas of creativity, of kind of the human ingenuity, et cetera, that's going to be really hard to replicate with machines and computers. And so if you can figure out how to start to get into a world where that's your advantage, I think you'll be in a good position. And then in terms of should the machine actually support you, fuck no. I think that the idea is most people are monetizing their physical labor or their intellectual labor. right and that's how they're getting paid but one of the things that we all do is we create a lot of data i've talked at you know pretty extensively about the idea that all of that data eventually you're going to own you'll hold it in a wallet and as people want to buy it from you they basically

you can permission them in or out so something as simple as how many steps you took today what your heart rate is what your blood pressure is what you ate kind of your insulin levels you know all that kind of data that that it's something like an apple watch and a couple of very easy tests could figure out. There's going to be a lot of healthcare companies that want to buy for either research or marketing purposes or whatever. And so they'll buy it in anonymous kind of aggregated format. And you'll have to permission them in to do that. And in exchange for you giving up your data to be included in the data set, then you'll get paid something. And so I think that we can get to a world where kind of the basic needs of a human are met by simply allowing them to

monetize that data. It's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take some while to get there. But I definitely think that that's going to be a much kind of more capitalistic approach to solving the problem, rather than kind of, you know, kind of a more socialist, hey, either the machine or the government should take care of you. At BeanSim84, how many people in percentage of Bitcoin buyers actually pay something with it and don't use it for speculation? It's a great question. I don't think we know the answer, which is also part of the advantage of of Bitcoin is we don't know what people are using it for. So when we look at like on-chain transaction volume, it's really hard to tell what people are doing with it. And so I think that

that's, you know, one part of the strength of Bitcoin. Two, it makes it really hard to answer this question. Obviously, it is not as many people as we would, you know, think it is. But at the same time, one of the things I've started to talk a lot about with institutional investors is, you know, they'll ask questions like, well, you can't buy coffee with it, or people don't buy coffee with it. And what I explain to them is, you probably don't buy coffee with dollars, right? What you're likely doing is when you go into that coffee shop, you're swiping using credit, and then you're paying off the credit card at the end of the month. And so when that happens, yes, you're using a dollar denominated system, but you're actually using

dollars using credit. And so I think that Bitcoin is very similar here, and that people are using other aspects of it or they're using it for other things than buying coffee. But over time, as the second, third and fourth layers get built on top of it, we'll get more scalability. It'll be much easier from a consumer experience, user interface, et cetera. And so that kind of more P2P transactions or merchant based transactions will accelerate. But again, we're 11 years into this thing. And so I think we've just got to be patient and understand that time's on the side of bitcoin at illinois block c1 how will crypto change political fundraising um i don't think it'll change really that much uh i definitely think that um kind of the ethos uh if there's a

campaign um or a candidate that really buys into uh kind of what bitcoin is and how it works probably the the most um the closest candidate today is somebody like an andrew yang around all the automation and Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and blockchain, et cetera. But I don't think that whether a candidate accepts U.S. dollars or Bitcoin, it's really going to matter. It really just comes down to are people willing to donate to support somebody's ideas? And thankfully, in the United States, we've got a democratic process or as close to it. and those campaigns have to kind of work to get the support of people. And so I don't think that Bitcoin will end up changing it.

That's all I got for you. That's it. All right, guys, thanks so much. I appreciate it. Go follow Polina on the Internet. She loves when everyone from the crypto world tweets at her. I'm joking because she has a – and the notifications of her Twitter is incredibly peaceful and calm and kind. And everyone is so loving towards each other.

And then she will see all of us in the crypto community. And she's like, oh, my God, I can't believe that you guys talk to each other that way. Yeah, be nicer. So thanks so much for listening. Polina, thanks for helping me do this. And we'll see you guys next time. Bye. Hey, everyone.

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