The Pomp Podcast - Bitcoin Sign Guy: The Legend of the Sign

Episode Date: May 23, 2019

Bitcoin Sign Guy is known as the Bitcoin Sign Guy. In this conversation, BSG and Anthony Pompliano discuss crypto anarchy, Bitcoin art, privacy, freedom, rule of law, code as free speech, and Bitcoin's macro trends. ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

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. This episode of Off The Chain is with the one and only Bitcoin Sign Guy. In this conversation, we discuss crypto anarchy, Bitcoin art, privacy, freedom, rule of law, code as free speech, and bitcoin's macro trends i really enjoyed this conversation and i think you will as well let me know what you think and shoot us some tweets afterwards 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. Got our best man on it. All right. Bang, bang off the chain with a Bitcoin sign guy. Sunday, Mother's Day recording this going live. What's up, man? How are you doing, bro? I'm doing all right. Listen, we've got a lot to talk about uh first let's go through your background first and then we'll get into the bitcoin sign story let's do it what uh where are you from i am from connecticut i'm a yankee yep that's uh that's where i get my stupid preppy wardrobe uh and uh yeah that's how i had the pink

tie and the seersucker jacket because i like to uh i don't respect the fed so i had to wear something absurd. You stunted on them. I had to flex a little bit. All right. So let's just get right to the story, right? So how the hell did you end up sitting behind Janet Yellen at the meeting? Yeah. So I was working at a free market think tank in Washington at the time, just covering the event. I worked for a monetary policy scholar and I was just there taking notes to report back to him. I had previously worked at a number of hedge funds out in Connecticut,

and there I would cover Fed analysis, which basically means that you have to watch hours and hours of video of Federal Reserve and other global central bankers just speaking incredibly tersely and listening for whatever word they might let slip that gives an indication of if they're looking to raise or lower interest rates. That's basically the game.

Yeah, so basically you've got humans who are trying to read like another group of humans' cards that they're trying to hold close to their chest and it literally could be one word or a phrase that dictates or indicates, oh shit, interest rates are going up or down and there's a whole bunch of ramifications that happen Once you decide that it takes on complete second order effects.

So in in many ways, you know, all economic data that come out like, you know, new housing starts or, you know, construction data, car production, like all this data, this is the fundamental distortion of central banking. All that data is interpreted through the filter of, well, what does this make the Fed more likely to do? It's like, oh, there's good economic data. That should be bullish. But no, it's bearish because it'll be like, oh, they're about to raise rates. Shit, pump the brakes. How accurate are people in looking at the data and looking at what the Fed or some of the representatives say and actually predicting what they're going to do? Dude, they go into it at such a granular level.

Like, you have funds, like, I think it's Two Sigma. They were, I think, the first to just throw it on deep learning. They use, like, a neural net, and they figure out, like, they just give it to the computer. They're like, the computer can tell what this says. So it's reached truly an absurd level. All right. so you go to the meeting you're sitting there go to the meeting janet yellen is uh is saying whatever she's saying you're sitting behind her did you know when you got to the meeting you were

gonna do it no no it was all spur of the moment all right so you're sitting there uh did you pick that seat because you would be like behind her on tv or anything no that seat was just uh how the how the chips fall so the the hearings are actually public and anyone can go uh like seated to my uh right i guess there was actually just a homeless guy who uh who has a has a bone to pick with uh the central banking system so uh yeah we bought he was a bitcoiner yeah he's a bitcoiner now um and uh but basically what what i mean is that it's public anyone can go uh and it was really just how the chips fell that I had the seat not no premeditation all right so you so you got the uh the outfit on right and you're kind of making fun of them by wearing this outfit

uh you end up sitting just randomly behind her yeah uh can you tell that there's cameras yeah so from my from my previous job uh I I knew that you know the camera's on when when when Janet's talking so yeah it was uh i thought that i would because they put the videos up on like their archive so i thought that i would go there later take a screenshot you know stick it in my pocket and it'd be all good it would be my little my tiny little treasure uh and i had i had no idea that anyone would pick it up at all all right so you're sitting there uh you've got the legal pad and you just literally sketch out buy Bitcoin on it and then you're just like, fuck it, I'm going to do it?

We'll do it live. Got to do it live. All right. And so the part that shocks me is not only did you come up with this, did you write it, did you have, frankly, the courage to do it, but you actually placed the sign perfectly. Like if you had reached too far, right, it would have been behind her head. If you hadn't gone far enough, there was somebody else's head there.

but you got perfect placement, like no practice. How did you do that? I don't know. It's the finesse of an art student. I actually studied art, which is why I maybe can draw for worth anything. Listen, it's clearly articulated, right? You knew to turn and go landscape with the paper. All right. So you do it, right? And I remember the day that you did this. So for those that don't know, he held up a sign on a legal pad that said, buy bitcoin and big bold letters right behind janet yellen's uh head while the cameras are rolling as she's discussing you know federal policy and all this stuff uh immediately rips through twitter right uh when did you know that it was going viral i had no idea oh well i okay

i take that back i my phone was dead at the time so i didn't have twitter but after about 30 minutes I was escorted out of the hearing by one of the parliamentarians for the hearing. So basically you do it. You keep sitting there. You don't know what's going on on the internet, but eventually somebody there comes and says, hey, you, you're coming with me. I'm assuming you knew, oh, it's probably because I just held up this sign. Yeah, yeah.

I thought that maybe it was just because she saw it, like saw me do it, or not because she saw some internet reaction. Yep. And so when you get outside, like, are they trying to arrest you? Are they just pissed off? Or are they actually respectful? No, I mean, it's Capitol Hill. So they bounce you respectfully.

But after that, I left. I went back to the office. And then all my coworkers were saying, bro. Yo, you did it. I plugged in my phone and I thought, whoa, holy smoke. And so I remember when you did it, then there was a second photo that emerged. I think it was on Reddit where basically you're holding up like the buy Bitcoin sign with another sign. That's like who you are and a wall of that.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I hate to be such a flagrant capitalist about all this, but, you know, I got to stack sats the only way I know how. All right. So as soon as you see it going viral, what's the reaction that people have in terms of – are the messages you're getting from friends like, hey, this is cool? Are people like, yo, you're an idiot. Why did you do that? So my dad actually works in markets as well.

So he is – his conversion from no-coinerism is ongoing. But he saw it and he was embarrassed. he was like yo i want to crawl under my desk right now like you just you just torpedoed your like career on like on national television basically exactly um i mean in to that like he he he was uh correct in some sense i did end up departing uh my job at at the think tank i was working at But I quickly found another foothold at CEI. And then from there, I went on to work at another Bitcoin fund. So as you're doing this, right, the internet just absolutely exploded when they saw this photo.

And the reaction was less, I think, about you. It was just immediately like Bitcoin sign guy. And it was the idea that somebody was able to market this decentralized digital currency in one of the most archaic and 180-degree difference rooms in the entire world. I mean they're literally sitting there talking about interest rates and federal monetary policy and all this stuff, and you hold up this sign. And it was just like to me, the irony of it wasn't planned. It wasn't a well-produced sign. Right. It was just like we got the point across in the most Bitcoin way possible. Right. Well, yeah, it comes from it comes from outside.

I think that the entire technocratic monetary order is completely blindsided by Bitcoin. And it's almost been unutterable up until just the other day when Brad Sherman said, oh, well, look, actually, we need to pump the brakes on it because it actually might completely disrupt our finely tuned system here. Let's talk about Sherman, right? So he's a Democrat from California. He's been in office for 22 years. His largest donors are all financial services companies. One of them is a payment processing company.

You know, I actually have a deep and abiding respect for Brad Sherman because he gets it. He knows that Bitcoin is here and it poses a true and credible threat to the system he sits atop. The people that I have, you know, less love for are like, I don't know, multi corners, people that sort of have their their the highly progressive and utopian people that think, oh, it'll all it'll all work out beautifully. But the Brad Sherman mindset is correct at its core. Yeah. So as soon as he said this, I saw a bunch of people being like, oh, he doesn't get it. And I went the exact opposite. He gets it.

That's the best part. He actually understands exactly what is going to happen. Brad Sherman gets it. Augustin Carstens gets it. The people that don't get it are just like the blockchain, not Bitcoiners. people that think that this tech will be massaged somehow into the existing world order no there is a sea change about to happen and i think if you're a neoliberal uh listening to this you should start stacking sandbags well and part of this is i think what brad sherman there was a couple of points

that he brought up that i thought were really interesting one was uh he very explicitly laid out this idea of the u.s dollar being a weapon on a global uh scale right i haven't heard very many politicians explicitly say that in a public forum right so this idea that like the u.s dollar is a part of the defense of the united states and the offense of the united states right so that's one absolutely two is he explicitly stated bitcoin has advantages over sovereign currencies right so it was the first time i heard a publicly elected official admit that and the third thing was this idea that um if you understand how the dollar fits into the global economic system and you understand the potential that bitcoin has to disrupt that there's two paths to take one is

to embrace it and one is to ban it yes by saying ban it he's playing right into the hands of bitcoiners and like the crypto ecosystem because all that's going to do is it's it's the best advertisement in the world for what we're talking about absolutely 100 what what did you take away from his comments specifically around like the U.S. dollar and weaponizing it as part of this like foreign policy? Sure. Yeah. The petrodollar is, you know, I think the strongest foreign policy tool that the U.S. government has. So, you know, as we if we mean decentralization, we mean, you know, the balkanization of large power in the world, you know, devolving devolving power down to its true level, which is emergent, market-based, and entirely undirected.

Absolutely. All right. Before we get into crypto anarchy and we get off the Bitcoin sign, you have put together a limited edition, 21 of these buy Bitcoin signs. So you have actually recreated the buy bitcoin sign on a legal pad it's in this beautiful case and you're selling them yes uh one bitcoin a piece one bitcoin a pop uh you can go to buy bitcoin dot art to buy them uh i actually have not checked uh since yesterday i may be sold out but i i i kid you not some And somehow there were 21 people that gave me their names. But at any rate, you can go there. There's an order form.

The part that I love about this is, again, one Bitcoin for a piece of history, 21 of them. Own the meme. Yeah, own the meme. Own the meme. And when you and I talked about you doing it, the first thing you said to me was, I got to get more Bitcoin. Right? Once again, got to stack sats. Shout out to Marty Bent and Matt O'Dell for crafting that fine, fine meme.

It's probably one of the best in crypto. It's really good. It's really slick. So the other day I tweeted at them and I was like, yo, you guys will never get the kind of recognition that they should for creating that meme. And I said it's one of the best marketing messages. And Matt O'Dell just came in and fucking reverse dunked on me on Twitter and was like, it's not a marketing message. It's a lifestyle. He went between the legs, reversed, dunked on me.

And I had to just say, hey, man, you win that one. That's sweet. I like stack sats because ultimately I think that Satoshi's will be the numeraire of Bitcoin itself. I don't think that we want to deal with eight places to the right of the decimal for the rest of our lives. I would much rather use Satoshi's or Kilo Satoshi's KSAT. That's my modest proposal. Uh, but yeah, uh, stacking sats. Fabulous. So smart. So smart. All right. Let's get into a crypto anarchy. You are a crypto anarchist. I think I can say, uh, what the hell does that

mean? I mean, I would like to be crypto anarchy means being willing to build things to affect, you know, Bitcoin's revolution. Okay. So what, what does that entail? building things literally just just that if you are making a product that helps people i guess adopt bitcoin uh use it more effectively or uh if it clears up headaches for them getting out of the legacy system that's that's all very well and good but yeah the emphasis is on entrepreneurship and uh you know self-sovereignty but not in in a in a way where you truly have you know self-ownership self-direction uh yeah and so the whole idea here is bitcoin's going to become the global reserve currency right and so there's two things

that you can do you can convert your legacy bad technology fiat currency into the new decentralized digital currency of bitcoin so one just upgrading your assets right and then two is there's a whole bunch of infrastructure that needs to get built to make it easier to more securely and safely hold it transact it right use it in stores etc and so it's the idea that if not only are you holding the assets but also you're going to want to um build all that infrastructure and a crypto anarchist is essentially doing anything possible to help facilitate the building of all that infrastructure is that accurate absolutely uh it's you know people these days they hear the word anarchy and their mind skips to nihilism you know uh you know the old bomb throwing and anarchists

like Vanzetti, I think, the Italians, those damn Italians. But it's truly about building things and participating in Bitcoin in a constructive manner. What are the biggest areas you think right now that people should be focusing on? um well i would really say anything that increases bitcoin's liquidity is probably a fair a fair thing to focus on and any examples that you're excited about right now uh so actually i have a a startup um that is designing a reputation system uh for bitcoin over-the-counter trading So this is something that can be used to perhaps you could call it like a KYC AML workaround. But, you know, as we upgrade our cybernetics, you know, from legacy systems to new systems, you know, we have we have new ways of doing business, of generating trust.

and figuring out how we conduct civil society online. I mean, really, the old institutions, like policy think tanks in general, like an official conversation around policy, like this is all outstripped, all outmoded. You have 20-somethings coding for Bitcoin Core, having true policy discussions in, and it's all litigated in the forum of Twitter and, you know, telegram chat groups. There is no more, you know, official, official narrative. Absolutely. And so let's talk a little bit about this idea of liquidity, right? This,

you know, really, I think most people, they struggle with the balance in their mind between a store of value asset that you should hold right versus the need for liquidity how do you balance that uh i i would say that bitcoin as a store of value has basically been decided effectively by the the hard cap uh i i admire you know the austrian thought that went into that decision by satoshi and then when i say liquidity i i really mean something that makes it easier for legacy finance to acquire so the the concern and of course you working in legacy finance you could speak to this better than i could but you want uh your average portfolio manager to say oh yeah you know i could take a big position in bitcoin because i could actually take the position without

uh you know exposing myself too much so because i can buy it and when i want to get out of it i can get out of it right there there's enough of that liquidity there to to go in and out at with size right meaning it's not just hey let me buy 500 or 500 000 i want to actually buy 50 million 500 million dollars worth of bitcoin liquidity is really a synonym for uh economic scaling essentially absolutely so let's um let's switch gears a little bit and talk about uh some of the payment processing stuff uh absolutely uh and defense distributed just give us kind of an overview of uh of how you got involved in all this sure so uh a project that i have a deep respect for is the work of Defense Distributed. If you're not familiar with them, they produce the 3D

printable firearm materials. And so they have been battling with the U.S. government over code being free speech and essentially linking the Second Amendment inextricably to the First Amendment. So they have a lawsuit against the Attorney General of New Jersey right now. If you're in New Jersey, you cannot essentially speak online because the state has outlawed the distribution of their 3D printable files. So let me just summarize real quick. Defense distributed is um a gentleman created a computer file that simply is software code inside of that software code are plans right to feed to a 3d printer that 3d printer then can produce a gun right yes and and that gun works it actually can fire a projectile the gun works and it is made

out of plastic right so there's there's a there's 3d printers which are additive manufacturing they build up layers upon layers of plastic or uh composites that can fuse together uh and then there's also sort of within the category of digital manufacture there's subtractive manufacture which is a CNC machine, which is a spinning bit that mills out material, sort of like a drill press, but still controlled by the same G-code axes that a 3D printer would use. And so these are the basic tools that you can translate code speech into a physical object. So the category is called visible.

You can go to Pirate Bay, the website with torrents, and you can go to the visible category. You can do a category search, and you can find all this stuff there. And so with this, the idea was anyone with a 3D printer could take this computer file, and they could create a weapon. Yes. Right. Obviously, when the second you're talking about weapons, government, law enforcement, et cetera, all get very upset and start paying attention. I think that the defense distributed response is software code is speech. Yes. And the difference between taking that code and creating a table versus some other object versus a gun is really it's the same mechanism. It's the same mechanism, but the gun is more politically interesting.

The real thing here is that just like Bitcoin, the government is essentially shocked that we suddenly have these legal arbitrages. You know, so there's the way that you can make a gun for yourself with with these tools is the same is the same principle as the fact that you can be your own bank with Bitcoin. There is nothing holding you back from computer access. And we suddenly have these new ways of of transacting in a flat, horizontal, decentralized manner. And so part of the government's response to this, not only is it just, as you said, politically interesting because it's a weapon, they're worried about things like a plastic gun can actually be brought through a metal detector, right? They're worried about the lack of registration around who owns the guns and their insight into that. Are there other aspects that they're worried about, or are those the two big ones? I would say, you know, if you utter the word terrorism in the West, it's basically been treated as carte blanche to do whatever you want.

You want to tap everyone's phones? Just say terrorism. You want to get a 3D body scan of everyone who travels city to city? Just say terrorism. I mean, it's absurd. I should try to figure out a way to work it to my advantage. Like, oh, yeah, buybitcoin.art. If you don't buy my signs, the terrorists.

The part that's really interesting, right, and many people know I was in the Army for six, six and a half years, did a deployment overseas. and uh the idea of terrorism is normally the act of doing something not even necessarily to harm people but it is to scare them or control them with fear yeah right terrorism is fundamentally marketing yep and you know i always joke with folks and i say that uh the difference between marketing and propaganda is just which side you're on right when you're doing it you're marketing When somebody else is doing it and you disagree with the message, that's propaganda. Yes. Right?

Always. You'll notice if it's the Obama administration opposes the Russian Vladimir Putin's regime. All these words are coded in a way that constructs an image. For sure. And so as this is going on, the law enforcement, government agencies, et cetera, obviously are not happy with defense distributed as they're fighting this. And I come up with the mindset of this is going to get decided in court. You and I sitting here, no pining on what's legal, what's not legal. We can have opinions, but the real kind of battle is going to happen in that legal framework.

Right. But before we got there, there was a whole bunch of stuff done in terms of trying to prevent defense distributed from distributing the computer files, from shutting down their payment processors. Like you talk about some of the challenges. Sure. So, I mean, the the oh, thank you. The the main one and the one that I am personally contending with is their deep platforming on a number of payment processors. Uh, so the, the payment stack, the card payment stack is, you know, banks, card network, like Visa, uh, payment processors like T-SYS, uh, and then you have gateways like Authorize.net. And then you have, you know, resellers, which is what I've now become, uh, which are called ISOs. And basically, if any one and if any single one of those components in the stack object to what you as a merchant are engaged with, if they get cold feet, you know, they can they can shut you down. So, you know, there are places that, you know, crypto positive people will will find, you know, difficulty, you know, remaining on like, you know, PayPal, Stripe. You know, it's you have to be you have to be anointed.

You have to be a blue checked and or blue check friendly to to use these services. Well, and one of the things that we see. So this isn't just, in the case of Defense Distributed, the idea of whether the selling of the computer files is legal or not, or they actually monetize not by selling the open source code, they're selling 3D printing devices, right? Yeah, they sell a 3D, it's not a 3D printer actually, it's a desktop CNC machine. Got it, okay. Okay. So, and as they're doing that, these payment processing companies are, are just, you know, trying, we're not going to, we're not going to process your work. Yeah. They have a lot of baby boomers, baby boomers got money. They pay with credit card. They don't pay with Bitcoin.

So, uh, yeah, they, they need that money. They need that, that money. And, uh, it, it's a headache for them and their contemporaries, you know, every five minutes, like, Oh damn, got that got turned off by paypal got turned off by stripe however and the payment processes have done this with crypto they've done this with cannabis right they've done this with defense distributed like this is not a new part of the playbook it's trying to go after the single point of failure which is if you cannot accept the money you cannot sell yeah exactly obviously when you have a decentralized digital currency that has much more sovereignty in terms of bitcoin now the playing field shifts a little bit right and they actually can't prevent whether it's a crypto

company a cannabis company just defense distributed from accepting or participating in the bitcoin ecosystem yes so you know bitcoin bitcoin works uh like btc pay server is stupid easy stupid easy But yeah, this this legacy stuff is a pain. And so for the time being, while we're still paying with credit cards, someone needs to build a payment processor that is is working and willing to develop specialty underwriting relationships that can at least give people a second chance. For sure. And so as you've been working on this, is there anything specific that you went into the situation believing or not believing and now you've changed your opinion? Interesting. I don't know. I feel like I've been fairly consistent my whole life since, you know, my coming to political consciousness in about middle of high school. Yeah. And one of the things to me, you know, as we've talked about this, that's really interesting is Defense Distributed has a couple of components to it, right?

So they've got the open source software, which is pretty well understood, pretty well defended at this point in terms of how that's treated, what the copyrights on it are, who can use it, how do they repurpose it, all of that. Then they're selling this desktop CNC machine, right, which is by itself not good or bad, right? So you can make an argument that somebody's using it for good or bad purposes, but the actual machine is just an inanimate object. It's open hardware. And by the way, I must mention that if you want to join Defense Distributed and their legal battles, you can go to ddlegio.com. How do you spell that? D-D-L-E-G-I-O, like Legionnaires. Got it.

D.D. Leggio dot com. Become a member of Defense Distributed and support what I think is the defining legal battle of our time right now. All right. And at the heart of this legal battle is this idea that code is free speech. Code is free speech. And talk about that a little bit. Well, the real thing here is that we have the Constitution, we have the way this world order has been, we have the foundation of it. And interestingly enough, we view banking as this huge, heavy, sclerotic system that has no hope of ever changing. Yet, somewhere buried in the foundation of all of this, of neoliberalism itself, there is a key, a shard, a splinter that can be used to dismantle the entire thing. So, ultimately, it will come down to, well, Bitcoin, code, speech, can't get rid of it. Unless we want to, you know, slide into full despotism, which I might, you know, not discount that quite so heavily given past performance.

But we do have an exit door that is sort of baked in. I always talk about Bitcoin specifically, especially with institutional investors, and say, listen, Bitcoin doesn't necessarily need to replace the U.S. dollar or the fiat system. It is an alternative, right? One is a non-transparent, human-driven, inflationary model that is pretty well understood. Another is a decentralized, digital, deflationary model that many people are just learning about today, right? And they're alternatives to each other. So you get option A or option B. yes and you as an individual get to choose whether you'd like to participate in option a or option b

choice choice choice is key there the the point of choice is that when there's choice there is a market when there's market when there's a market there's competition when there's competition you see human innovation you see uh you see people apply themselves uh to to bring better things so So that's really the point of it. And we should have this at every level. Like on the level of nation states, how many countries are there? 216 right now? Something like that, yeah.

Something. I hope I didn't get that wrong. But, you know, you think that that's really the number of countries we'll have in 50 years? Probably not. I think practically every European country has a few independence movements within each one. So we will see greater choice. And we even see this in the United States. I mean, look, Tim Draper and that whole proposal to take a state and break it up into four or five.

Let's balkanize California. Dude, you should have done it yesterday. It's long overdue. But really, the thing with that is everyone always says the United States. You've got to say these United States. The states never would have signed on to the U.S. Constitution if they believed that they wouldn't be able to leave in the future. And then, you know, we have the Civil War, which the great negative consequence of that, not to apologize for slavery or anything grotesque like that, but we essentially, the mechanism for exit within the country was effectively defeated. Do you think we'll see one of the 50 states leave the United States of America? i i don't know i i think that we will see uh like i said sovereignty must devolve down to its level

like water finds its level right now things are too top down too platonic fascist you know that's like somebody and i probably can't say who it is but uh somebody who's pretty well known in crypto recently was talking to me about this idea of like sovereignty doesn't have to be at the state level right like it could just be you me and 20 other people we just say hey we're going to opt out right and we want to live a different way under a different uh um kind of set of rules uh and i haven't thought enough about it yet like what the pros and cons of that are but just the the mental model or the break from sovereignty has to be at the country or state level to it actually is just a group of people i think is really interesting yes i i agree uh and while we're on that topic

you know just like the fetishism of like the collective uh democracy itself i mean it it's it's uh keeping us held in these i don't know constrained constrained uh systems what what um what's your thoughts around this idea of we've talked a lot about like privacy and freedom and personal freedom but there's a counterbalance of i don't think it is uh there's any society in the world right either today or historically that has uh operated with no rules Right. No, no. So there's got to be rule of law that the people agree to. But what's the balance? So rule of law is good. Rule of law has, I think, treated humans well since it was first developed. However, the point is that the way we enforce rules in society, markets, it doesn't always have to be sponsored.

It doesn't necessarily need a state sponsor. Like the way you transact at the store, you know, it wasn't designed necessarily by any particular, you know, party. It was just how it happens. So what I'm getting at is we can come up with new rules, new cybernetics. We don't need necessarily to have, you know, legal recourse in the courts or we could we now can do like, I don't know, atomic swaps. We you can transact. You can have a counterparty that you can transact with never knowing their name, their telephone number, their address. You know, these the cybernetic framework of the world is changing with Bitcoin. It's becoming more automated. You know, in some in some ways, that's that's actually really this is sort of maybe the Andrew Yang take.

But that's what's if I have one reservation about Bitcoin, it's that, you know, holding the money was the last thing that we really trusted humans with. We gave it to all these smart bankers on Wall Street, and now suddenly we've taken that and just given it to a faceless computer, a combine of entropy. Yeah, it is. It's really interesting to think through how contrasting the different viewpoints are. And we have this world that I think a lot of people are indoctrinated into. And they just that's how they grew up, right? They just know that, look, this is how it's always been. This is how it will always be. But when you stop and you think about some of the core components of what we're talking about, right, simple things like privacy, right, the right for you to not have to give 100% of all of your information up to people that you don't know what they're doing with it, right? The idea that freedom of choice should be paramount in multiple facets of our life that it isn't today, right? Or even the idea of why you are forced to trust a private company to determine how you use your money, when you use your money, where you use your money, right? These things are kind of nonsensical when you really start to look underneath just that kind of top layer. What I don't know is how do you get people who maybe aren't like you and I who spend the time to really learn about this stuff and develop opinions and work to get to this point?

How do you get the mass population to start to see that maybe there's a different way to do things? As with politics, it's purely demographic. So the reason why people say are statists is because that's what they're comfortable with. That's what they grew up with. Just like you have family traditions. We have religious traditions. You have things that are passed down, but things do slowly evolve over time. And so as we have rising generations that are fully comfortable, you know, practically using the smartphone from from the from the womb, you know, you get people that understand, oh, yeah, money is it has these properties. It's a technology, but it can it can be iterated on. It can be improved. It doesn't have to be paper. we can we can design design a way to to do it better than it's been done by the technocrats of the past. Absolutely. You've got really interesting views on Bitcoin. Right. I think

one has kind of everything from the code is free speech to its role in a much larger story around automation and that. Maybe describe a little bit how you see Bitcoin evolving moving forward and then also where it fits into some of these larger trends. Sure. So, yeah, the automation trend is just that, I mean, I'm not making any predictions about, you know, post-scarcity utopia or anything like that but we we're giving more and more to the computers every day i mean take take the stock exchange the new york stock exchange it's basically a ghost town and uh you know when when they when companies like ring the open ring the opening bell you know they're looking down on guys who are basically just playing a playing a playing a part acting they're literally actors they're

extras they're they're extras and uh it's cute it's it's cute but you know you you realize that we have all these uh all these digital systems that uh that run our lives and uh it's it's not really trusted to humans anymore so one of the things that uh i really use as a talking point with um institutional investors is this idea that like humans are going to trust machines more than they trust that they're humans. And I always describe it as, you do this today, you get lost in a city you're not from, you ask Google Maps to tell you you don't ask a stranger on the street. If you have a question, you ask Siri or Google, you don't ask your friend. If you want a music recommendation, you trust Spotify or Apple Music, you don't trust your friend. So we're already

seeing this in certain aspects of our lives, but it's always non-financial situations. Now what we're starting to see over the last decade is robo-advisors and some of that stuff. But the big one the big leap is actually we are going to trust an algorithm to make monetary policy decisions more so than we are going to trust humans who go into a room look at some data and then make an opinionated decision right and i think that that makes people uncomfortable it is it is scary though i guess at some level we are already you know we're complete we've completely jumped you know the the shark so to speak we let uh dating apps which i highly condemn we let those you know algorithmically determine who they're going to uh you know show us that we

might find a match why are you so against the dating apps i because i i'm uh a uh a proponent of uh like i don't know call it familiar humanity uh i think that we need to uh return to each other and uh describe this more like what do you mean uh i mean i i don't have it really fleshed out but just to uh to see to see each other face to face oh you're saying like basically the idea that most of the the conversation and the like quote-unquote getting to know you is happening in digital form rather than face-to-face or not that it's not that i have no objection to say text messaging but what i'm saying is that if if you go on a date with someone that the computer suggests to you uh that it's uh it it imports a degree of artificiality to perhaps everything in

your life maybe everything is a a an image a simulacra and you know that already describes our consumption habits anyway we consume images we don't really consume uh you know products themselves it's a it's very much an image-based uh society and market is that necessarily bad if true uh i think it it produces psychological dislocation if you uh are living in hyper reality are you a simulation believer i mean uh i mean that people people like to joke about that a lot uh but the the point is that uh you say you have a city and you have a map of the city all right make that map of make that map bigger and bigger and bigger and make that map 3d make it so big that it is the entire city that it covers the entire city at at some point

uh you're you're just living in the map so that's that's the way that reality as we think of it has really been built uh so we have you know mental memes that that we hold dear uh and we we cling to them but in in many cases uh they they they distort reality uh i am fond of saying he who controls the meme controls the message that's great man marshall mccluhan would be would be proud of that that's like a good good synthesis there absolutely how how does bitcoin fit into this whole larger theme of automation uh i mean simply simply automating trust in in the purest sense like it it holds the gold so to speak and if uh if blockchain utopians you know they want to take it even further they want everything on the blockchain they want uh you know automated uh

soft serve and so it's the the point is that it's it's fine it's fine to put it to put our money onto this shared ledger that's so that the technologic aspect of it is fine all i'm saying is don't let it occlude that you know we build technology to serve humans yeah you know we we We should not let the techno capital singularity, you know, stampede upon us. But instead, we should we should acquire, you know, a set of morals from some, you know, other, you know, non non automated, non digitally generated source. Like I'm a Christian. My name is actually Christian. I, you know, are you doxing yourself right now? I'm not, I won't give my last name, but I, I like, you know, uh, you can't, you can put the Bible on the Bitcoin blockchain,

but you can't generate, you know, the Bible from, uh, from a computer. Yeah. Yeah. What, um, what do you think happens next with Bitcoin? Right. So like, just so people kind of, well, let's just say, take like a timestamp of where we are at the moment. So we've got a digital currency that is about 10 years old, a little more than 10 years old. It's got about $130 billion of market cap. It just went through its third market cycle of kind of boom and bust. We now are at a point where retail investors are aware of it. There are what I'll call early signs of everyday use case infrastructure being built. We've got a politician who's calling to ban it we have uh institutional investors who are getting interested

right many of them haven't yet done something major but but they're kind of at the gate if you will sure where do we go from here well i i think eric bosco has has good thoughts about this i think and i hope i don't you know crib this too sloppily uh i think he describes the honeymoon phase that it's basically the the phase of unawareness from you know people that have stake in the monetary uh you know order now uh they they sort of don't know about bitcoin first of all or they uh they're basically unaware and they they don't actively seek to make a make the policy decision on Bitcoin, the policy decision being, you know, ban it or love it. So as we get closer to that decision, you know, this is, I guess, the honeymoon period winding

down. So, yeah, it's about awareness of Bitcoin and appreciation of Bitcoin's radical potential uh being you know fulfilled to me it is um you know when you really sit and think there's once in a lifetime type opportunities right so if you look at what elon is doing with um trying to bring humanity to another planet there's not very many people who want to try to do that to have the means to do that three frankly are crazy enough to do that right all this stuff yeah he's got a shot right he's he's got a shot i personally think that elon musk will die on mars and i and i don't mean in a crash landing i mean i think the man moves there i think that you know a martian colony is you know fully fully within humanity's grasp so i tend to think that there's

a higher probability of that happening than many believe right um but i think bitcoin for example is another you know once in a lifetime type opportunity where we are talking about a digital asset replacing money it is it is extremely exciting you know i was a i was a dork that was interested in money before bitcoin um but wow when you when you think about like what bitcoin uh represents there's there's so much potential there any uh any last thoughts in terms of uh what you wish people uh knew about bitcoin or things that you think maybe they misunderstand that you want to clarify uh no i just buy bitcoin i mean it's a it's a it's a simple thesis as uh this was unplanned and uh he inspired me we uh i made this little sign

while we were uh sitting here recording you got to put the strike through the through the bitcoin jesus christ the bitcoin sign guy is critiquing my bitcoin my buy bitcoin sign and telling me i did it wrong so uh that's how my son is going do you even know bitcoin are you even a real bitcoiner dude yo bitcoin never forgets the strike through the beat this is gonna get out of control really fast if we let uh if we sit here and just talk about bitcoin oh yo but but but tell them tell them what you're doing with what the the sign oh the sign the group uh or not yet not yet not oh all right stay tuned stay tuned dear audience viewers we we have uh we have some plans in the works uh to uh continue to drive awareness uh and education about bitcoin

um this week is not forget forget all that it is to continue to dance on the graves of central banking the uh my favorite tweet recently uh one of the winklevoss twins i actually and i apologize to my camera if it was tyler cameron tweeted uh i i can for the life of me not tell them apart well well it's on twitter so i should be able to read their name and remember but but i forget which one said it uh but they were like should we rename blockchain week to bitcoin week and i was like that's the greatest thing i've seen in a long time it is snake oil week it is you you what's the crazy slime around from uh it's all greasy what's the craziest thing you've seen someone pitch that you're just like that's the biggest scam of all time the biggest

scam like like not necessarily like scam in the sense of like they're just fraudulently you know like stealing from people but just like something that is being presented as uh an articulate intelligent idea and you're just like that is complete horseshit well i it's not actually the the the craziest idea that isn't actually crazy at all is the honest ponzi idea and just basically being uh you know up front some of i i forget which which tokens it it was but some of them said oh yeah we are an honest ponzi you know with transparent like algorithms that uh that determine how uh how the payouts work but it i do like that because this stuff is so easy to code you can play all these you know game theoretic experiments uh very rapidly and you can really

determine uh economic behavior uh you can basically run a like auger is a case study in uh you know i don't know betting or you know what i'm saying uh the uh the the ease that with which you can design uh you know and chop up the flows with uh with crypto systems is uh it it permits a a type of engineering that is very nimble absolutely uh before i wrap up i always do rapid fire questions most important company in bitcoin that's hard to say that's a that's a real tough one uh defense distributed you might not be wrong with that right i mean look it it is it will be one of the landmark legal battles uh for sure because it has so many ramifications yes right i think we can agree on

that uh what one regulation would you change or improve if you could uh hmm i mean it's it's tough to say that if there's like one single thing um the system sort of leans leans on itself uh i i and like i said before the there there are there is legal matter buried in our current system that gives us the opening we need so oh the opportunity is there the the opportunity actually already exists i i don't think that we need any uh you know legal acts of god to to for bitcoin to make it i think we're 100 at escape velocity and beyond already absolutely strap in uh most controversial thought you have in bitcoin the thought that you have that you think most people would disagree with you on uh well i don't know if people agree

with me on like the fact that uh or on my thought that bitcoin you know strips us of a small shred of uh you human humanity it's possible most important book you've ever read most important book well it the most important book i ever read was the bible but um this book if uh this is a fun book uh fanged numina by nick land i uh i made the san francisco public library buy this book so you if you if you really want to uh you know strap in on a on a wild ride you can go uh to san francisco and check that book out uh after i after i return it of course how can they uh get it if you have it yeah uh nick land you can you can read that what is this about dude the techno capital singularity the acceleration bro there's the acceleration dude are you accelerating

are you accelerating on the cover on the inside of the cover of the book one of the sentences no no no read wielding weaponized machine nicali recombined version gee i dude i can't even read this read um i'll read you i'll read you the beginning of meltdown meltdown the story goes like this earth is captured by a techno capital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization takeoff logistically accelerating techno economic interactivity crumbles social order an auto-sophisticating machine runaway as markets learn to manufacture intelligence politics modernizes upgrades paranoia and tries to get a grip that's in your local san francisco public library get at your boys all right aliens what

the hell do you think real not real have they been here do we know what they are there are the there are aliens and they're all uh they're all children of god the aliens are children of god we all are all right what what is your take in terms of are we gonna ever like contact them communicate see them hang out with them grab a beer oh what's that give them some bitcoin what's that uh what's the name of that paradox that oh if there are for me for me thank you i i think that that's somewhat i i can't tell if that's compelling or not because i think that we still need to develop better you know uh space microphones if you will to listen for these uh uh listen for these messages if any exist there's somebody like somewhere in the world who's like a space

microphone developer if anyone knows about a space microphone developer please let me know uh tweet me or dm me i'll definitely bring them on the podcast and that's a conversation i'd love to have yes all right before we end uh you could ask me one question what do you got for me uh who who has been uh your your rabbi for learning how to market bitcoin so well i mean you you play the game at such a high level every everything you everything you say goes viral how do you do it what's what's your secret damn it tell us tell us now so uh that there's two things i think are really important one is uh the things that i do and the tactics that i use are not bitcoin specific so you can do this with anything right uh bitcoin happens to be like the success of those strategies

and tactics on steroids because it's so emotional right so like that definitely helps the second thing is uh and i tell people this all the time and people always are like yeah yeah that's a stupid thing but like it's like keep it simple stupid it's authenticity it is literally just like transparency and authenticity so like when i'm excited you know i'm excited right when like i'm pissed off at somebody you know i'm pissed off at somebody right when i believe something i think it just transparently and authentically comes through that like yo this guy may be crazy but he actually believes this and so i think that once you get that like foundation of just you have to be willing to say the things that you believe whether you think people agree with them

or not like like that that kind of mind shift or the unlocking into the freedom of being able to just say what you believe i think is the number one thing that holds most people back once you do that then it's all about tactics and strategies right so like look i ran some of these growth teams on social networks so i understand how that some of the algorithms work that definitely helps two is like i've just tested more than most people like i've just iterated on this over and over and over again i've tweeted more than most people i've seen what works what doesn't work how do people respond all this stuff and so when you're doing that two things happen one is you learn what works and so you just keep doing more of what works but then two is you're like curating your audience

right and so like if i was to go and talk about pretty much anything else other than crypto my twitter account would just be dead right like people just be like dude shut up like start like talk like do the bitcoin tweet again give the people what they want yeah but like but if i talk about bitcoin or crypto the things go viral it's because the people have been promised that content and that's what they're looking for and so when i violate that and i go outside of bitcoin or crypto very rarely is it successful now there are a couple of things that are tangentially related right so like things around like personal freedom sovereignty right like that type of stuff definitely works um and recently actually uh the idea of um cannabis has been has become more and

more popular because it is a very similar uh fight with government and kind of rules and things like that that crypto has is being treated very differently though right and the difference is there's millions of people in the united states that are locked up in prisons today because of a plant right whereas with crypto it is more uh socially unacceptable or not yet accepted compared to other assets versus cannabis and drugs we're actually imprisoning people right so so i think that there's a lot of empathy between those two groups in terms of uh people who believe in bitcoin and crypto also have an affinity for we probably shouldn't have millions of people locked up because they'll plant in the ground right and so like just understanding what those affinity

groups are and how they relate to each other um you know has been a a journey to some degree but once i've understood that then i kind of understand like here's the boundaries of what people want to hear about talk about well folks you heard it here first from the master you can now go forth and signal max listen bitcoin sign guy absolute legend highly highly highly recommend you go to buy bitcoin.art oh yeah 10 of the proceeds will be donated to the uh ross ulbricht and julian massage defense funds and uh i also donated one to coin center oh awesome so yeah hop on that they're they're selling fast i i've seen them uh i think that they're really really cool we actually took a picture with the one yesterday so i'll post that at some point um but uh but

i'm a huge fan uh i think that uh in a uh in a fleeting moment you made uh one decision that uh that frankly echoed through the world and uh and really just kind of gave excitement and hope to a lot of people so uh so on the behalf of everybody thank you uh thank you for coming and doing this bitcoin's in the room bitcoin is in the room bye bitcoin with the line through the b all right man thanks so much peace 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.