The Pomp Podcast - Marty Bent: The Secrets of Bitcoin

Episode Date: September 5, 2018

Marty Bent is the Editor In Chief at Marty's Bent, a newsletter about Bitcoin. He's also the host of Tales from the Crypt, a podcast about Bitcoin.  Marty is one of the most knowledgable people in the space. In this conversation, Anthony Pompliano and Marty cover all thing Bitcoin, crypto mining, why hash rate is way more important than people are giving it credit for.

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. Marty Bent is the editor-in-chief at Marty's Bent, a daily newsletter about Bitcoin. He's also the host of Tales from the Crypt, a podcast about Bitcoin. Marty is generally one of the most knowledgeable people in the space. And this conversation covered all things Bitcoin, crypto mining, and why hash rate is way more important than people are getting credit for. I hope you enjoy. 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 so marty's here uh we got a bunch of stuff to talk through today uh before we get started on the smart people stuff let's just go through your background real quick and uh how the hell you got into crypto god my background i think i have one of the most uh i don't know if i could say this for certain but one of the most uh peculiar peculiar uh career paths out of anybody i know so man we're starting with big words peculiar i'm not very good at big words so if i mess them up

don't make fun of me um yeah so i started uh let's go back to college i was studying economics uh in chicago at depaul university um luckily there uh living and going to school in chicago year forwarded some opportunities just being in the city so i uh interned uh at a managed futures fund starting uh i believe uh the end of my junior year and then basically worked full-time my senior year and took night classes so um uh dearborn capital management who ran a an l a couple of lps and uh a suite of 40 act funds uh specifically investing in uh cta managers um all right so you're doing that all in chicago doing that in chicago at the same time i was studying economics this is around like 2012 uh when i first uh sort of bumped into bitcoin i forget exactly what it

was but i was writing a paper on monetary policy for a money and banking uh class i was taking and like was just googling monetary policy and like weird monetary experiments on google uh and stumbled upon the white paper and people talking about bitcoin uh didn't think much of it i was like yeah this might be interesting and then uh as happened to a lot of people i think uh late 2012 early 2013 people started writing a lot about the Silk Road so that piqued my interest again and while all this was going on I was working at the Futures Fund and part of my job there was write commentaries and lead monthly and quarterly calls with the CIOs of the hedge funds that we invested in so part of my job was being a central Bangkok around the world sort of following their

policies seeing what they were saying whether they were coming close or not to hitting their projections and whether they're meeting their goals and basically how their policy changes affected markets and how our fund performed based on those market movements so i got really into monetary policy and specifically how central banks craft it how they set their benchmarks how they look back at their benchmarks and and and sort of after three years of observing i sort of realized that they never hit those benchmarks and was like all right this is a little fucked up and so it back step a little further so i was a senior in high school in the fall of 2008 just so happened to be taking a intro to economics class and this is when the world was going to shit so

in that class in particular um we went through the tarp bill the teacher was very uh astute and very in our faces like hey this is something wrong that you guys should probably pay attention to going forward like this this is not the way uh an economy should work uh fluid so they were on top of it my teacher was yes luckily um so that's sort of what set me on the path and uh led me to bitcoin um yeah so i was that analyst at the managed futures fund like we should be paying attention to bitcoin we should be paying attention to bitcoin i got laughed laughed at enough i decided you know what i'm gonna go uh learn a couple new skills i decided to quit there and go take a digital design boot camp to learn about uh ux and how how basically how users love the

apps that they love and how somebody designs a process and how apps are designed in general and that was a really good course on like human psychology and sort of learning why people interact with the apps that they do yep uh was still in chicago at that point uh decided to move here to the big apple jump uh straight into this hellscape and uh concrete jungle yeah i worked for a software company uh to learn more about back-end development stuff like that we specifically worked with uh cms is more specifically drupal so it was really introduced to uh to the fos mentality when working with drupal for two years and really got an up close and personal sort of uh uh experience with uh a decentralized free open source software community which was

which made my understanding of bitcoin even better over time and then uh and yeah somehow i got i got What's interesting about it is you almost went reverse. I think a lot of technologists over the last two, three, five years have started to learn monetary policy and you almost went the other way first. You basically were studying economics, monetary policy, and then got into the tech side. I had a major in economics as well in college. Pretty much every economics course, if the professor's worth anything, they basically tell you, hey, this is how it's supposed to work and then this is actually how it works.

right and the difference is pretty stark in a lot of economies and so um i think people who have that economic background um and then go into tech realize that like hey maybe the tech is actually better than humans at designing this stuff you know governing this stuff etc um and so the fact that then we end up with bitcoin blockchain etc is kind of a culmination of a lot of that um and so it's super interesting to hear that that's you know your path in yeah no it's a strange one and it was uh i'm happy it uh unraveled the way it did i think uh it wasn't easy at times you know going from like a cushy finance job to to living on a buddy's couch over the summer but uh well worth it because then i had this sort of well-rounded uh experience uh obviously

knew a lot about bitcoin so in bitcoin in particular i was a lurker for like the first five years i was in uh first four or five years i was in just had my list on twitter would like tweets retweet every once in a while but we never really put my voice out there and then uh last may um or actually no it was my birthday last year my parents were down in brooklyn um we got we got we were getting dinner and my my birthday is in june doxing myself um and obviously it was when like the the the pump of last year was beginning to build and i was getting texts and dms from friends and family like what about bitcoin what should i know about bitcoin i was like it was getting overwhelming i was telling my parents this at my birthday dinner my dad uh it was a

finance background as well he's like you should start a newsletter just to to sort of give little bits of information to these people every day so that's how it started the original list was like 10 people that i sent it out to and then i was like all right i'll just share these links online yep uh and it took on a life of its own and so it's amazing that was the first iteration so with that i tried to bring like a barstool voice to try to make bitcoin and the space over the overarching space sort of approachable for people who want to learn more but aren't as technically inclined as as a lot of the hardcore bitcoiners are absolutely well it's also uh it's just a really scary complex subject from the outside especially if you know nothing right and

so if you can make it approachable there's still complex subjects you have to understand but it's easier to at least get started right um all right so let's let's go through uh you're talking about central banks earlier you know economies and how basically they don't work how they're supposed to one of the promises of bitcoin is it's sound money right and this idea that it is a better design system that should provide a whole host of advantages over a long period of time for a global population walk me through when people say bitcoin is sound money what do they mean and then we can get into kind of what that impact would be if it actually comes to fruition Yeah, so I guess the most simple definition of sound money is monetary good that is inherently scarce, that has no ability to be inflated away by central bankers or governments or central authorities in general.

um yeah i would i would argue that a sound money has to be somewhat apolitical where everybody has a uh that's what i'm looking for everybody has a uh equal opportunity to sort of participate in the network like anybody can go mine gold anybody can go mine bitcoin so as a sound money something obviously that the uh the supply is scarce it's not able to be inflated away and then uh yeah so at its simplest form i think that's that's what i would i try to keep it simple stupid so that's what i think it is and then why am i for sound money uh again after uh the and i think it does really harken back to my my personal experience like being a senior in high school and taking that class in the fall 2008 when things were going to shit studying economics in college

during qe1 2 3 yep infinity uh and uh and then falling into bitcoin as well so i think sound money is important because uh what i don't think people realize is is when money is created when money is printed in uh our economy in the u.s and people just focus on the fed in the u.s uh the people closest to the spigot of the money creation have an unfair advantage to the people below them so that's naturally banks that they can access to the the fed window and i just think that's just from a moral standpoint a bit immoral in the system so a system uh based off a sound money uh and before getting into that the advantages that uh are afforded to these people closest to this bigot uh i think they in the long run are a detriment on society so reverting to a

sound money uh seems more ethical to me uh there's a really good back book the ethics of sound money uh it's on mizes.org i can't pronounce holstman is the uh is the author i forget his first name But really, he wrote it in 2007 before Bitcoin was even a thing. And he really dives into the ethics of sound money. And it's very interesting, the lack of education around money creation. Yep. And so, yeah. It's funny because we talk a lot about, so let's use your spigot example, right?

Not only are the people closest to the spigot have the economic advantage, right, in terms of, you know, capitalism, etc. but also the security of that asset the farther you get from the spigot the less secure it is right so if you think of you know how many people have ever broken into the fed right stolen money right i don't think ever and so if you kind of walk all the way down then when you get into a bank right somebody can come in and steal it through you know bank robbery etc but there's insurance and it gets replaced then all of a sudden if it goes into um you know cash in a safety deposit box and you walk all the way out until there's cash in your pocket and someone can come up and just rob you right and so the farther you get from the spigot not only

is there less economic advantage but also there's less security right and so you know those two things are you know my opinion correlated to some degree of the people with the greatest economic interest make sure that they have the best security and the people with the lowest level of economic interest obviously have lower levels of security well i won't even i won't even attribute that to like secure like anybody can put money in a bank no matter how how poor you are uh and have a certain sense of security but the insecurity of the actual money in your bank account is another thing like so right now i think it's all tweet german banks are starting to institute negative interest rate policies against people with 200 000 i mean this is affecting the

rich first uh people with more than 200 000 uh euro in their banking out yeah something like that yeah yeah um so that's a way like your money can just be insecure just it doesn't even matter where you're holding it just like the whole nature of the underlying money is just not secure from a from a first first principles well you don't own it right once it goes in the bank account right the whole idea of a bank run yeah right is if all of a sudden everyone comes asking my money they don't have it well that's and that leads to another thing like what the existential question what is money and i think that's a lot of that's one thing bitcoin's doing uh that i'm probably most excited about is having people question these types of beliefs like what the hell is

money like people never questioned it before at least i did it before 2008 2009 um and i i think that's one thing that bitcoin has sort of sparked almost like a new enlightenment or renaissance type of thinking uh around these subjects absolutely um all right so let's keep talking about kind of security but let's go to security of the bitcoin network right so uh obviously mining is a huge component of that um one of the big knocks against mining which i know you've you spent a lot of time on is this idea that uh bitcoin has a abnormally high amount of energy consumption in order to run the network agree disagree and kind of what's your response to to people who say that well it's interesting it's hard to know exactly how much uh exact

energy bitcoin is consuming on a daily basis so number one that's hard uh number two i mean actually staying on number one a lot of people actually think it's it's way less than than one percent like around less than a tenth of a percent right now but uh that's not what we're talking about right now number two like people just assume that it's all dirty energy and that it's wasteful so uh what people don't understand is that a lot of bitcoin operations uh especially here in the west and uh even in china china uses a lot of coal i'm sure but they use a lot of hydroelectric uh energy as well and one thing we're finding here in the u.s is uh some miners are going to like in west texas going to oil fields and basically siphoning the excess natural

gas that is being being led into the atmosphere uh at these uh energy distilleries oil distilleries um and basically so that would be wasted energy if these bitcoin miners didn't show up and instead of sending that uh it's either methane or natural gas pollution yeah sending that into the air uh instead of wasting that and polluting the atmosphere more they're actually using that harnessing that energy and turning it into bitcoin and creating a whole uh online economy which is incredible it's something we've never had before in in the course of human history is basically a 24-7 live energy market yeah well it's interesting too because um so we've built a number of these mining facilities right that's how we got into bitcoin and one of the first ones that we built

was uh at a plant where uh we'd invest in a company that took car tires right put these thermal demanufacturing process which just big words for burns the tires in a controlled environment captures all the excess output right um and so it turns that car's materials into oil steel carbon and syngas right you sell the oil and the steel is a commodity you get the carbon and send gas you can turn into power and rather than sell it to the grid or allow it to just evaporate we capture it and mine right and so like you can do this with natural gas you can do this with you know these thermal demanufacturing processes and so you know i think your point is that actually those aren't energy consumption like net energy or net new energy consumption

actually what you're doing is you're capturing excess energy that could be harmful to the environment from a different process exactly and it's not wasteful at all it's actually very very uh efficient if you like it's an efficient market if that's happening if it's like all right this unused energy would otherwise be discarded uh if you're turning that into useful productive energy then all the better for humanity in the long run and then on top of this uh people don't understand like people what's the benchmark for how much energy bitcoin is wasting like what are we benchmarking it against and so everybody sees the stat like one percent of the world's consumption is being used to mine bitcoin or one that might not be true number two all right what's

the benchmark and what type of just because it's one percent of the energy consumption what type of energy is it and we're finding that it's mostly hydroelectric or energy that would otherwise be wasted and more harmful to the environment than if it was it was if it was used to mine bitcoin absolutely well and also i think if you compare it to uh u.s dollar production right so talk about this benchmark if you just say hey what other types of money do we have and what's that energy consumption to create the money um the u.s dollar i think i'm getting this right is like more than 10 times on an energy consumption basis than what it takes to uh run bitcoin network and so is that good or bad i don't think we know yet no we don't know you can get even heady with it like

how much energy do we expend to to uphold the the dollar status as a reserve currency of the world like how many wars have we gotten into how many countries have we bombed to uphold this status of the petrodollar and if you want to talk about energy expenditure wasted opportunities like let's talk about that yep but uh a lot of people a lot it's a lot of these subjects are too hard to dive down people like to see what's been say being said at the surface layer and that's what they tend to believe i do that with other subjects as well of course um all right so i saw that you were i don't think you tweeted this i think you retweeted somebody who said uh you know bitcoin mining's uh been transformed or is in the process of transforming from a capex game to an opex game

talk more about you know what does that mean and how do you see that actually playing out um you know kind of in practice well i think uh i'm not an expert in this area but i think what we're seeing is the the price to manufacture asics is going down is getting driven down so uh mining is going to be most uh sort of most profitable at the steps before and uh after these miners get turned on uh not when they're when they're bought um so who can design the most efficient chip which that would be capex yeah that would be capex but then operationally when you find uh enough energy at an efficient price like how are your miners set up like how are you fine-tuning it uh uh at the hardware and firmware level to to get the most uh energy per hash you know yeah well

and part of it too is do you think that the capex uh requirements are coming down because there's just more competition around chip design hardware design um and a lot of the people who maybe were building you know gpus cpus etc over the last couple of decades are now realizing hey there's a lot of money to be made here they're rushing in competition brings you know not only innovation up But price obviously goes down, and the manufacturers, that pressure as well through their supply chain. Is that about right? I mean, I don't know for sure, but I would assume. So I actually have a good anecdote here.

My wife's aunt, I guess my aunt by extension too. Is that a step-aunt? A step-aunt. A step-aunty. Just checking. She works for a company that sells GPUs and ASICs at wholesale. and last year in particular we had like a massive shortage uh towards the end of the year and she was like i could not figure out like why gpu mines specifically gpu computers specifically

you know gpu chips specifically uh were sold out like i've never seen anything like this we assumed it was gaming i was like no it's like people mining cryptocurrencies so just like an anecdote out from the field there there i mean last year there was a massive rush for all these types of chips and uh if you're a believer in efficient markets that that supply is going to be going to get uh or that demand is going to get uh going to get quenched with supply at some point you know so the the mode of profit is there and like bitmain for as much as people uh hate them like they took the rest risk in the first decade of this technology uh they really went full on and i think they set like a floor like obviously bitmain has a bit of a reputation in the space

But I would go and thank them as well because, all right, you proved that this is something worthwhile and can be profitable for your competitors. And now they're deciding to get in the game. Well, you know what's funny is I read about this earlier this year. So last year, if you think about supply and demand, right, so the supply of hardware for crypto mining drastically lagged behind the demand, right? So all of a sudden you saw this huge spike in demand. Everyone wanted to mine. Not enough hardware. Prices spike, right, because of the supply and demand offset.

and then all of a sudden as prices start crashing in the crypto markets demand starts to flatline and eventually decline but because of the lead time of manufacturing what ends up happening is the suppliers had oh wow this is huge business they'd ramped up all this production and now they're sitting there with you know an overflow of hardware and so now they got to liquidate it right and so you just saw the prices just plummet and so i literally know people who We're buying S9s at about $4,500 per machine in like late January this year. You can go buy an S9 right off, you know, Bitmain's website for like $600, $500, right? And so we're talking less than 12 months to see that type of decline in the price of a piece of hardware is pretty incredible.

It's absurd. It's like, and at the same time, you look at the hash rate. Like, I checked the hash rate today. It's 62x a hash. It was at like 6x a hash last June. Like, it's gone 10x in 13 months or 14 months. Which is insane. So let's dig into this because I think this is part of...

Yeah, we're starting to get into some of the more complex pieces around mining and the network. Explain what that is and why it's important to people. All right, so again, I'm not an expert on this, but so the amount of energy used to secure the Bitcoin blockchain right now is at 60 exahash a second. So to add a block to the network, Like, the cumulative hash rate around the world right now is expending, like, 62x a hash of energy per second.

Or they're solving that many hash functions per second. Excuse me. So that basically means that miners have come on to the network in a huge way in the last 14 months. If you look at the chart, it's exponential. And that's where I'm sort of sitting here. They're like, damn, if it keeps going at this pace, how secure is this network going to be in a year, five years, ten years? How much energy is going to be used to mine this, and how secure will this network be? Well, it is the most secure network in the world, right?

It is the largest computer in the world, right? If you actually take all of the hash rate that you're throwing at it, right? So it has the most computing power in the world. And so when you look at this, it's heavily, heavily decentralized, right? Now, are there, you know, these concerns around some centralized components of it, right? You know, mining pools and certain people have, you know, larger kind of mining farms and things like that, of course. But I think if you look across the entire ecosystem, it is by far the most decentralized. It is by far the most secure.

And ultimately, that's going to translate to value. Yeah, I mean, that's the one thing about decentralization. it's so hard to measure like that's the uh whatever way he's trying to do in this space like who's the most decentralized and what facets of their network are decentralized but i think with mining in particular in bitcoin like we're seeing uh like i was telling you before we record like the effects of uh bitmain's moves in the last year uh helping to decentralize mining like uh they made a big big bet on bitcoin cash uh they i would argue they that uh hubristic move in and sort of positioning by them uh left them a bit vulnerable and people are taking advantage

of it if you look at like the uh the breakdown of hash rate between pools it's becoming more and more okay so let's back up for a second let's go to bitmain and um so bitmain's a hardware manufacturer uh is i think they started 2014 13 14 somewhere in there right um i can't say for Yeah, wherever it started, right? And walk us through, you know, they started out, they've built, you know, let's call it 10, 12 different versions of kind of their main miner, right? And now they've kind of expanded their offering to other types of miners, etc. they're preparing for this IPO and so all of a sudden now people are getting a more in-depth look at the company their balance sheet you know kind of their future plans historical information and so what is right now what do you think are the pros around Bitcoin and then or around Bitmain and then let's go into what we think you know kind of the negatives are

I mean the pros up to this point is they they're an incredible case study and what you can achieve economies of scale in this space like they like i said they worked hard to to get where they are created very uh very tight relationships with the uh the fab manufacturers uh there's only four in the world i believe that can that can make uh the type of fabrication needed for asic miners and they just so happen to have a really good relationship with one of the best in the world and a really tight supply chain and we're able to sort of figure out how to uh for for an extended a period of time how to do the rd process and get get these these new chips turned around in a in a pretty quick fashion um those are the pros like they they really paved the way for like all right

how do you achieve economies of scale in this mining network uh and that brought them uh reportedly 1.1 billion in profits in q1 this year yeah and it's like people keep going back and forth on the number i don't who knows exactly what it is but it was a lot of money it's considerable amount a problem um so yeah that's a pro the cons um i think this is a personal opinion i have no uh inside information i've not talked to anybody at bitmain so i can't say this for sure but i think jihad and crew honestly thought that bitcoin cash was uh was going to take over bitcoin at one point and they uh i think they this goes all the way back to like the hong kong agreement in 2015 when Bitcoin developers and miners in the ecosystem

met to have a sort of scaling agreement and agree on a roadmap. And I think what came out of that meeting, most importantly to me at least, was you really saw that there was a cultural divide between the miners in the East and the developers and the users in the West. From what I can glean from that meeting in particular,

the miners felt a little perturbed that they weren't getting enough respect per se, in the direction of how Bitcoin development played out. With that being said, I think that type of mentality carried over into the fork wars of last year where Jihan and crew tried to exert their power. They thought miners had more power than they did and things like the user-activated soft fork

and no-seg with 2x sort of proved that, hey, actually users have a lot of the control in this network and you sort of have to have that checks and balance. and i think uh bitmain tried to make a power play uh at that juncture and it's backfiring i mean i don't i can't confirm anything coming out on twitter but it seems like uh they messed actually i can confirm that they messed up their their like last wafer chip was was terribly inefficient like their last line of wafers uh so their product was at least part of their product suite was uh not up to par especially in bitcoin mining you need everything to be as efficient as

possible and then i hear they're having like a mass exodus on their teams uh specifically around chip design and the supply chain of it so i think it's a cautionary tale of of sort of keep yourself in check and don't get too hubristic in this space and so what do you think happens from here do you think that more and more of these uh hardware manufacturers will come online and actually be able to compete or do you think that it's going to still kind of concentrate in power of two or three you know main companies that are better than most right and they take you know 80 of the market and now the crumbs are left for everybody else can't say for sure i mean i hope the formers uh sort of the former of what you just described comes to fruition but i stopped making predictions

in this space it's uh it's it's a good way to uh get your dick pushed in at some point um so like uh sorry there goes the g rating but um no like i i have faith that that mining is getting more decentralized and it's things like again this is i think if we are able to achieve uh and bootstrap the better hash protocol laid out by matt corallo it'll make me even more certain that that bitcoin mining is on its way to full decentralization um but i am i'm optimistic that is getting more decentralization more decentralized excuse me that more competition will will drive further decentralization as well i mean you're seeing it like look at the hash rate like it's crazy price is down 80 but hash rates still going parabolic so absolutely what okay so let's keep going on

this theme of decentralization right one of the things i think uh many people who see the beauty and advantage of bitcoin have an issue with when it comes to other cryptocurrencies is the idea of they pre-mine right so let's talk about you know what is a pre-mine and kind of what are the you know what is it that the community has an issue with around the pre yeah so pre-mine this is like so the drama with the pre-mine goes back to like 2012 2013 when the scambrian explosion of altcoins proliferated basically what people figured out that you could copy and paste this this code tweak a couple parameters and have voila have a brand new blockchain and as long as we're as miners were mining you'd have a network with bootstrap value um so a lot of anonymous people online on

bitcoin talk.org specifically this is where most of the uh most of the marketing for these types of coins went down um they basically say hey we're gonna launch a coin um at first like developers weren't even telling people but they would launch a coin with a certain supply schedule and they would write into the genesis block of the chain like hey in the first block mine like a hundred thousand coins and then keep it for themselves and then just go on with the regular uh supply schedule and uh which by the way is the exact parallel to what happens in capitalism in a lot of other areas of life but when you're talking about decentralization it is the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen exactly so it's an yeah so that like the whole ethos of this whole

goddamn project this experiment we're in is full decentralization nobody has complete decision power or uh or economic influence over the network um and a pre-mine a lot of people's eyes especially the hardcore bitcoiners uh is against the ethos of what this is all about so it's it's basically you get some the creator gets something for nothing because they copied pasted some code changed a few parameters and were able to dupe some people into buying it. So that was a lot of I think a lot of the scorn towards pre-mines comes from the fact

that a lot of people were launching these coins and then dumping their pre-mine back in the day on Yobit, Poloniex, MintPal, Rest in Peace, a few other exchanges. Can we get you to name one or two that are the prime examples, Pac-Man?

I mean Back then, like, anything Bryce Wiener touched. So, like, Black, I think, Blaycoin was one, ZetaCoin. There were a dime a dozen back then. And then it became, like, popular due to a fair launch, and that's how other affinity scans sort of bootstrapped there. And part of it, too, was not only what was actually occurring, but then there was just no transparency to what was actually happening, right?

Yeah, unless you had the ability to dive into the code and sort of discern what was going or explore blockchain. um basically the the concept is uh these projects and now they're getting people are getting very creative with how they justify their pre-mines like it's a development fund to incentivize development going forward yep uh which some people would argue is very uh so let's talk about a couple right the kind of larger chains that have these pre-mines that still hold you know double digit or mid to high double digit percentage in a central uh entity ripple stellar neo etc good for the ecosystem bad for the ecosystem where do you fall um

i mean i just don't care about the like ripple in particular like it technically it is xrp which i will correct us xrp yeah but the token um we're the first 33 000 blocks like that's what i know once you can answer that uh xrp troll army i'll give ripple a semblance of uh of legitimacy i don't think that's going to happen um but yeah like uh again like on what you would consider a bitcoin maximum so i'm in this for sound money and i think a lot of a lot of the people in the space have sort of missed exactly like why we're in this and i would argue don't even understand why this experiment exists in the first place um so yeah pre-rhino coins like doesn't stripe have like six billion dollars worth of stellar lumens or something i don't know the details but there's

there's something there and i don't know if they bought them or granted them they were granted them as equity in something got it i don't know but again it's uh again going back to sound money that's all i care about like i think the the recreation of sound money in the digital age is the only thing worthwhile focusing on in this space because it has again money is one half of every transaction on the planet if you can recruit like the opportunity to recreate uh or create a new form of money um only comes around once every few millennia and we just so happen to be born during one of those inflection points and that's why i think a lot of people miss it because this is something that somewhat of a black swan like it never happens typically like it's not your

it's not like the stock market or vc fund it's completely different absolutely um all right so So let's get into take the ethos of decentralization and kind of what's going on from a technology standpoint. And now there's a whole host of people who are trying to take that and apply it to the financial system, right? So not just money itself, but this is banks, this is kind of all the rent-sinking middlemen, you know, all that stuff. Where do you think we can actually go?

um and what do you think has to happen for us to be able to decentralize a lot of wall street financial organizations etc like that's like so that dives into like another overarching question in this space as well like what needs to be decentralized and what is able to be centralized and i think what we're finding is the only thing uh that really needs to be decentralized in this space is money so um i do think there will be bank-like structures and the future and there will be benefits to to holding your bitcoin essentially uh this is this is anathema to to uh a lot of sorry beauty on sorry i'm saying this but alert alert controversial i mean just from like and again this comes from like a ux background like uh there will be centralized

services that utilize bitcoin that's okay like not everything has to be decentralized what i really am looking at is things like unchained capital and the block fives of the world that that are allowing people to leverage their bitcoin and uh to to lever up and reinvest and really use their bitcoin as a financial good as a piece of collateral like that is has a shit ton of utility in my mind like that is actually useful and actually worth paying attention to and for everyone who's listening uh what those companies are basically doing is there it's an asset-backed loan where bitcoin is the asset and they lend out fiat currency uh in exchange for uh that collateral exactly um and then so like going back to like banking uh banking utilities on top of

bitcoin uh we're gonna be able to derive we believe we are at least to derive things like uh reference rates using the lightning network like what nika abatia at time value of btc on twitter is working on right now trying to figure out a way uh to sort of derive uh an interest rate uh using lightning network transactions and it's a completely emergent process where you're basically observing the economic activity between channels uh seeing how long bitcoin was held in a channel and trying to derive uh an interest rate off the fees you made because you facilitated payments on the lightning network so things like things that we're used to in the traditional banking sector i think they will merge on top of bitcoin uh but they will be in

completely different ways than we're used to so like right now the fed sets the fed phone rate The economic activity, hypothetically, may be able to set the rate on the Lightning Network and on top of, by extension, on top of Bitcoin in the future. So I think that's the type of stuff that fascinates me. Absolutely. All right. So you and I can go deep, deep in the weeds in crypto decentralization. Bitcoin is sound money, et cetera. On the flip side, you've got kind of the mainstream media, right?

And they're outside looking in and they realize there's a bunch of activity, right? and there's probably some confusion with motion and progress, they really have a hard job, right? Because they've got to basically weed through everyone and their mom saying, I'm building the next Bitcoin, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. Big numbers are getting thrown around. They don't know who's real, who's not. You've got a newsletter, right?

So you come at it from a coverage standpoint at times. What do you think they're doing well and what do you think that they can improve on when it comes to that mainstream media that's a very pertinent topic because i just had joe weisenthal on the podcast actually just posted it today um and obviously he works at bloomberg as part of the mainstream media in my opinion i think he's top class of journalists covering the space in particular what i think he does well is he was notoriously skeptical skeptical in 2013 so five years ago um and and and has since become less skeptical he doesn't think bitcoin's got a

foregone conclusion but he understands why his uh notions were wrong five years ago and has since changed course and be like all right i'll give this some tick but i think what's most important like i said earlier like i was a lurker for five years like this is this is so much to understand and there's so many moving parts and so many people to remember and so many it's it's a global phenomenon so you're you're talking about seven billion people seven plus billion people are potentially involved um so i think with the mainstream media in particular it's tough like to get thrown on the bitcoin cryptocurrency beat like that's what people have to realize like a lot of these reporters are given assignments and yep i would hope that they're doing their best but it

has been piss poor uh and i think that's just uh uh sort of uh that is because they haven't been in the space and inundated in it yeah they don't have the base of knowledge that people in space have right yeah and it's it's tough so that's like when you're again like it's we're moving into the information age the importance of critical thinking is is going to become more the the gravity of how important it is to critically think moving into the future is just going to get stronger and stronger so you really as an individual have to do your do your research and find out who is actually feeding you good information and bad information in the space

and sort of de-alienate between what is good news and what is, quote-unquote, fake news. And that's, for each individual, that's something you have to do yourself, which isn't always easy. And that's something I did with Twitter using the list, like a crypto list I've been curating for like four or five years now.

And it takes time as well, so you have to go through these cycles and see who was right at one point and who led you the wrong way at another. And you sort of have to, it takes time to figure out exactly what's going on. Absolutely. So we got to talk about it because I think you and I have both seen the preview. It, I think, aired earlier this week, but neither one of us watched. So CNBC did this, you know, kind of dedicated segment to Bitcoin, crypto, etc.

And they had two characters, which is probably the best way to describe it, featured on the segment. So the first was Jordan Belfort of, you know, the Wolf of Wall Street, I guess, infamy rather than fame. And and then they had a gentleman who, as I said on Twitter, I probably want to be like his best friend. But he he lives in a tree house and he walks around and wears these tiger paws on his hands. And he was the other featured person in the preview. Like what is going on? I don't know. I think this is...

I mean, I want to bash CNBC. I do want to bash CNBC. I mean, this is like... CNBC has been terrible crypto coverage for the last four years. They've been letting... I mean... But here's my question to you.

Is it because they are looking at this from a journalism or looking at it as an entertainment? I think CNBC has gone full entertainment. I mean, Jim Cramer's Fast Money was the beginning of that. And you're seeing it playing... I mean, crypto drives clicks.

Shout out to Jim Cramer, by the way. Legend. Shout out to Jim Cramer. Eagles fan. Go birds. but i would again like i wouldn't consider it news journalism or anything it's it's something that's out there to drive clicks and their information in the past has been pretty piss poor um i mean and they were letting analysts pump shit coins in 2014 like and

and then again in 2017 they made everybody buy the ripple top rest in peace if you did i i took that video the video where uh they pulled the order book on live television yeah that that's my single greatest contribution is i i uh documented okay but it's like that's the other thing like people have to realize there's a long history of the people in the space and in the coverage of the space and if you understand that you'll you have a clearer sense of what's going on so people forget again like cnbc was pumping nautilus coin in 2014 like what's going on with that like direct uh it it they're more entertainment based so again going back to like first principles like as an individual learn how to critically think and decide for

yourself like who you trust and who's giving you good information and who's trying to drive clicks who do you think uh is on the high end of a quality journalistic you know spectrum for crypto so you got joe at bloomberg obviously who else do you put you know up there i mean shout out kyle torpey and aaron van weirdem uh kyle torpey writes for torpey torpey i'm sorry if i'm butchering your name kyle he writes for uh forbes or bitcoin magazine every once in a while van weirdem is a bitcoin magazine i think aaron's work in particular is is uh leaps and bounds above where where anybody in the mainstream or bitcoin in particular is and then um yeah i mean And Lara Shin, she does a good job of getting everybody, getting in front of everybody in the space to sort of see their case.

But, yeah, again, I like the indie guys. I like the Aaron Van Weirdums, Kyle Torpies of the world. I'm with you. I think they know, and it's because they understand the space and they know what they're talking about. Absolutely. All right, so you've got a newsletter and a podcast, which I'm fascinated by. And we'll get into why. but uh let's so podcast pretty self-explanatory right uh tales of the crypt tales from the crypt

uh very similar to your podcast try to get people in the space i'm very bitcoin focused uh try to get developers investors and uh designers and people that are interested in the space to see how they got into it uh and we drink on the podcast so it's a little bit longer form hey i came on at 8 a.m when we didn't get any uh you couldn't you couldn't get in late night there was no drinks uh i had to work after so i couldn't do irish coffee um but yeah we drink and actually what i find is uh the booze uh helps open up these smart people who might otherwise not be willing to go into certain areas uh than if they were sober um not everybody's forced to drink uh and but i think it helps uh so yeah just long long long form conversations uh sort of very

very big range of the type of people i talk to and that's been fun yeah yeah okay so uh then you got this newsletter and i'm fascinated by the newsletter for two things one is uh you go super deep you know bitcoin bitcoin network mining kind of all that stuff it's written in a fairly easy to understand way or you could have some sort of knowledge but for the most part anybody could pick it up and read it day one um walk us through the process of how you started it and then like do you write it at night in the morning is it easy is it hard to come up with topics like just kind of spill the beans on all of it yeah so marty's bent the lore of marty's bent yeah so marty's bent is my newsletter i write it uh every weekday this is published issue number 306 today

and so that started uh first issue was june 8th 2017 so a little over a year ago and that basically started uh my parents came to town uh bitcoin was approaching like two thousand twenty five hundred i believe i forget exactly where it was feels like a decade ago right and uh and uh that was around the time uh when all the normies started reaching out tweeting texting dming emailing me like what the hell's going on with bitcoin it got overwhelming at a point i was telling my parents this uh last june my dad was like you should start a newsletter for like your family and friends want to learn more and teach them a little bit so that's how marty's been started in particular i think the first time i sent it out was to like 10 people uh within my uh

close family and friends. Then I decided to post it on Twitter, took a life of its own, and basically what I try to do at Marty's Bent is really get people inundated with the ideas behind Bitcoin and sort of what's going on. So the way I write it every morning, right when I wake up, it is, at this point, it's sort of like a mental exercise for me to get my thoughts down and start my day on a good foot. And the way I basically decide what i'm going to write about is is probably the day before just i'm a tweet deck fiend i feel like i'm plugged into the matrix at at any point in time i'm looking at my tweet deck so i'll see somebody uh tweet something interesting or i'll read an interesting article that somebody linked

to and i'll have uh sort of an idea in my mind like all right i'll probably write about this tomorrow so i go to bed like all right i'm gonna wake up and write about this so i have a little bit of an idea what i'm gonna write about um and yeah it's been people have been really receptive I think people like the randomness it's not very cut and dry it's not very formulaic at all it's sort of random based off

of the ideas that I think people should be paying attention to any certain day. What do you think the type of subscribers are we talking retail investors who want to speculate on tokens is this more kind of hardcore decentralized you know crypto anarchist world

have you snuck a couple of you know CIOs and endowments in there yeah the brain i mean i have access to the list i'm not going to dox anybody but uh yeah the range is pretty good pretty good yeah so fund managers uh people writing at other publishers in the space uh retail investors obviously and yeah a lot of traditional investors i got people from a few banks reading um so i think it's a wide range and i think that's because uh i try to bring the barstool voice to it and again that's that's the the niche that i sort of uh have uh focused in on uh after starting the newsletter because i noticed that there was

this huge gap between the people that wanted to learn more and then the technical barriers the technical knowledge barriers that exist in bitcoin again like we've been talking about this whole episode it's so uh daunting almost to jump in with with no knowledge of what's been going on and and swim so i just try to bring a light-hearted spin to it and inundate everybody slowly but surely one one issue at a time and then at the bottom you've got the uh the thought of the day which is uh is probably the weirdest yet funniest uh thing i have found in the entire crypto space is marty's bent final thought of the day uh today i think yours was uh you know there's nothing better than a morning workout when you're sitting in the shower indian style afterwards and like

questioning your life or something right where did that come from how do you think of them what's going on there it was sort of the uh again so it started out with family and friends at the beginning i was just fucking around with my family and friends like just throw a joke and at the end sort of an inside joke the first few were uh and then as it expanded beyond my family and friends people started dming me like i love your final thoughts i was like i'm not gonna i'm to give the people what they want and yeah it's completely random and i think it's just a good um i think it's just a good way to end the letter just to get people like hey this stuff's really serious some of the top like maybe dump into some pretty heavy topics uh

it's just to remind everybody like hey i'm a person just like you know this is uh you're and also like i hope you realize you're you're reading the writings of a dunce i think you actually called yourself a dunce today which is which i respect um okay so uh that is too funny um what's the most valuable company in crypto today in your opinion um i think i mean by by like empirical stats probably bitbabe but i think most undervalued and potentially the most valuable uh company in crypto long term probably be square what they're doing cash and i use the i use the cash app to buy uh bitcoin now um and i just think it's an impeccable ux i think they're sneaky man they're sneaking up on people i think jack and the the team behind

specifically what they're doing with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is top-notch they they come from uh they really understand like what bitcoin's trying to achieve and have a very good uh ethical mindset to what's going on and they execute extremely well um uh yeah so square is probably the company i'm most bullish on just because uh again i think their ux is impeccable team is top notch and then like the the overarching exposure they have just via their pos systems in general right now can you could form fit bitcoin on top of all that it could be huge absolutely um okay Right, and then what's the one thing you believe in crypto that you think a high majority of people you know

would disagree with you on? If you say something lame, I'm calling you out. I think Satoshi could move his coins and spend them at one point. Really? Yeah. Why? Long time down the road.

It would have to be, I don't know. I just think like, I don't know. Do we ever want to know who Satoshi is? Hold on, back up, back up. who do you think it is first i don't know i have no idea no idea no no guesses no guesses all right and this is like this is probably uh i think if satoshi were to come i'm not saying this is going to happen i'm saying if satoshi were to come back under certain circumstances i think it would be okay i don't think he ever will he she if they ever will but i don't think it would be the end

of bitcoin which a lot of people seem to think do you think it would be bad though i think temporarily yeah it would definitely shock the market um yeah we'll see that could be that could be the dumbest thing i say in the long run we'll find out but no well i mean i think that the the counter belief right is that the fact nobody knows who it is and it's this more mythical you know entity um has a lot of value so that yeah so this this hypothetical satoshi coming back includes like uh an anarcho uh cypherpunk anarcho capitalist cypherpunk future where he's still anonymous and is able to um able to contract out jobs anonymously over the web and just pay people on bitcoin to to do certain tasks maybe it's not for him exactly maybe he wants something built

for a certain community in a certain part of the world so you're saying so you're basically saying come back and not reveal identity yes i've never heard that one before that's pretty good it's that could be it could be completely so go back to you said uh move what 800 000 bitcoins i think it is something like that right i think yeah it ranged from like 800k to 1.5 okay uh to purchase something to just move it to show that somebody's got control of it what's the where's that come from i mean uh well so this gets into another theory and we're getting down a rabbit hole here So some people think that Satoshi's stash is a quantum computer alarm system because the way that his coins are secured and type of contract, there's two types of way to do it. I believe there's pay to pub key and there's pay to pub key hash.

And the pay to pub key hash is what most people use today if they're not using, it's like the most secure way, not the most secure, but it's more secure than pay to pub key because it adds like a hash onto your public key, I believe. which makes it harder to figure out your private key satoshi's are pay to pub key no hash um and i could be butchering i could be yeah yeah uh maybe pay to pub stick or something like that i forget exactly but the way satoshi's coins are are uh secured in uh his utxos are secured in the type of uh wallet structure he has it is susceptible it is more susceptible to like quantum computing than your typical address. So a lot of people think that was done on purpose by somebody from the future to alarm us.

If Satoshi's coins ever move, it means quantum computing is here, and that is the alarm. Okay. That is, I actually haven't heard that one. So there's all theories. Sorry, so I got to ask then, government's involved or not involved?

uh could be could be the fifth pillar bitcoin sign guy brought that up on my uh on my podcast uh this idea of the fifth pillar of people working within the government that sort of have the the altruistic views of the people and anti-government slant maybe somebody from the nsa saw this and it's fifth pillar and released it to the world uh uh altruistically and with good intentions behind it but it could also be in the far east played by the ncaa nsa excuse me ncaa as well but the nsa too i don't know if the nsa or the ncaa is taking more money from people if you believe the uh the bitcoin cash uh builderberg conspiracy theorist uh it's a big nsa ploy to uh to enslave us all to the bitcoin network in the long term who knows

though i just think it's interesting is it's sound money experiment and just the fact that anybody can download software and participate in this network is is incredible absolutely all right uh last question for you and then i'll let you ask me uh one question uh probability that bitcoin that can actually become the global reserve currency in the world um we're doing this in end of august 2018 of august 2018 so maccarallo came on uh my podcast or probably november of last year and he gave it a five percent chance but with the way the hash rate's growing uh and The way mining is decentralized I'll bump that up to a 10% chance

First person to break double digits I'll bump 10% 5-10% 10 is definitely the highest That we've had 5 is probably average Anecdotally But that's a pretty high percentage

It gets higher every day The longer it survives The more probable it will survive into the future But again, anything could happen The governments could cripple it overnight that's why uh but but how do you think that happens right like i recently wrote this thing and i was like uh so i compared you'll love this i compared bitcoin to uh for loco right so uh i was in college and uh that's a bad for loco yeah for loco was a for those who don't know

it was an alcoholic energy drink and uh there there was a bunch of um speculation rumors floating around that the government was going to step in and ban uh the not the ingredients but basically the recipe for how they created this because it was putting a lot of people into the hospital, right? Because basically you didn't realize how drunk you were. And so I think that there was like in one or two places at a state level or like a local level, it got banned and all of a sudden sales exploded

because everyone ran to the store and tried to buy all the existing inventory off the store shelves. Ultimately, the government did step in and say, hey, you can't do this. You've got to basically redo the recipe. well one sales had exploded so the company actually made a ton of money um so i've literally talked to the founder uh one of the founders and he's like look it's one of the best things that happened from a sales perspective uh and then two was everyone then was hoarding

all of the uh the cans i was once a four loco hoarder and then basically they dumped them on the market right once it was uh banned by the government they made much money or had these parties whatever so bitcoin if all of a sudden government stepped down so you as government and stuff and said hey illegal what happens right do we see a spike in adoption do we see it just goes away that nobody really cares you know kind of what do you think happens there right like essentially i have no idea how exactly it would play out but again going back to the game theory that satoshi created within bitcoin i think it's just so fucking perfect because if the u.s let's say the u.s were to ban bitcoin like it's a country and opportunity

a country that is outside the u.s an opportunity to sort of fill that gap and really take over and i think in the long run it's it's a prisoner's dilemma uh as soon as one country sort of dedicates resources and and sort of endorses bitcoin in particular i think that's when you're going to see like a mad rush and i think at that point it will be impossible for governments to because it's like if we don't keep up we are going to fall behind that's one thing um and yeah the The other thing, the Streisand effect comes into play. If you look at Venezuelan Bitcoin buying volume on local Bitcoins, it's been pretty consistent for the last year almost,

basically on a dollar bought per day term, not Bitcoin. U.S. dollar bought per day. You can't even value in bolivars anymore. But that's somewhere where Bitcoin mining was banned. They're apparently being forced to use the petro, but the evidence is showing that people are still buying it no matter what, And that's just one government that's tried to ban it. Well, what's interesting about that example is some of the surrounding countries, they're also seeing spikes in purchases, right?

And I saw somebody was speculating on Twitter saying, hey, these countries have not yet stepped in and banned this or tried to really regulate it. But what these individuals are afraid of is that they will. And therefore, they're basically taking, you know, an example of their peer or their neighbor country. And so they're getting ahead of the regulation, ahead of the government intervention. And they're just buying up as much of these digital assets as they can, mainly Bitcoin. with the protection built in that if their government does step in, they've already acquired or accumulated Bitcoin.

And that's the ideal time to accumulate Bitcoin is before any of that shit goes down. And then even beyond that, you get into the sticky situation like is code speech? And at the end of the day, Bitcoin is just code. You just execute code on a computer and software. And I think what we're seeing right now with defense distributed

and what's going on with the 3D printed gun is a good sort of precursor to the type of fight we could see uh in the future with bitcoin so that's something i'm following very closely now because the government local governments and local da's and state all right we got we got we got to dive in we were gonna end it but let's spend two minutes on it real quick so uh guy basically comes up with a uh blueprint for 3d printed guns right um creates a youtube video goes viral uh literally printed every part the entire gun 3d printed uh and then open sources that blueprint right um i believe what is it federal government stepped in uh somebody stepped

in and said federal government in 2015 i believe stepped in and said you cannot uh offer this on your website anymore and that's when he took uh the case to court and he recently won like the last three months and so now it is you know what he was doing was considered free speech right yeah so that's like the tricky thing because i'm not a gun guy at all like i don't yeah my i wasn't allowed to watch power rangers because they had guns in it like mine came from like a no gun background i grew up in north northeast philly like i really felt a need for a gun i don't go hunting um but i do believe like at the end of the day like this is a very interesting topic because at the end of the day you go to a library and they have books on like literally like how

it's made like the show how it's made yep it's basically the only thing he's doing but with a gun like how's a gun made like i think that that should be information like that's open to the world like people should know like he i believe uh cody wilson the man we're talking about the founder of defense distributed posted a tweet the other day is basically like is is michelangelo uh like a terrible terrorist and it just basically showed a blueprint of him uh of how to make like an arrow or like an arrow gun oh interesting so like this stuff's been around for a while and just because you can you can print it out now via code uh it's still like a how-to guide uh well what's the difference between a dad writing it down for his son or exactly you know somebody

for their mentee or whatever versus this guy doing it put on the internet exactly and that's the other thing so that's the other interesting argument there's like a huge cottage industry of people who make uh people make like custom guns and they have access to these books like all right here's how you make a gun that's been completely fine up to this point i just think again going back to mainstream media i think they they like to scare a lot of people and this is a it's a good boogeyman to put before people uh and i i think it like i said i think it's going to be uh the way the government and the media attacks cody and what they're doing at defense distributor distribute excuse me is going to be a good precursor to what we can expect with bitcoin

in the long run we live in a wild wild world yeah alright you get one question what do you want to ask me put me on the spot here so you just changed your prediction what was your original prediction 50

50,000 end of year end of year I just want to commend you and say hey it's okay to change your your thoughts but how has it been since you've changed how's it been since you changed your prediction so let's go back so uh 50 uh is a little there's

a little bit of a uh a folklore here if you will uh i got put on the spot on bloomberg i think it was i think it's bloomberg uh in like december of last year and they were like you know how high can it go and i said to him i was talking about you know look there's these corrections that happen every so often you know five or whatever that happened i think in 17 and so uh i said look the next big psychological number is 50 right so i could see it going there and so it started out as could see it going there said on public television and then it was like all right psychology psychology right and so i just kept on it kept on kept on it uh and i and to uh the the mistake i made was i continued to stand by that number right and present the psychology

argument right of just like people are going to continue to um invest in this asset to the next number etc i had a conversation with uh ethan ackerman uh shadow crypto ethan yeah yeah so he uh so he came here and uh to his credit he uh he pushed me on it he was like look i think we're going down i think we're going sideways for a while and and he really just kind of he wasn't trying to convince me of anything he just that's what he believed and then he kind of walked me through it and so i went back i started looking at a bunch of the data um and you know the funny thing about data is like if i asked you right now how long was the bear market between 2013 2014 and into 15 right if you ask 10 different people they'll all come up with different numbers around

400 days right some people 18 months some people hit you with you know 403 some hit you with 420 you know whatever and so one of the problems in crypto is just the data sucks right because we just don't have standardized data and these data sources that we all kind of follow etc but if you go back and you look at you know the general trend um it suggests and i think a lot of people would agree that we got a ways to go right in terms of falling um could be as much as 50 percent um and so i think when that happens and you've got this kind of bottoming out you go sideways for a while and there's that parabolic run again from a psychology standpoint right one of the things that i keep going back to is like you can't have another bull run until people forget about

the last crash right like people like we you know it's the um and i forget who says it but uh you know the time to buy is when there's blood in the streets yeah like there's not blood in the streets yet there's people who you know they bought it the top they've written it down they think it's coming back until those people believe it's over i think we still got pain to suffer yeah it's got to be mass humiliation to a point and no that's one thing i mean i stopped trying to again like i said predict make predictions so i try not to do that but what i do do is i've been keeping a journal for like the last five years and i like to go back there are journals now it's multiple books i need to go back and sort of look at what i was thinking like uh like in the depths of the

bear market in 2013 or 2014 2015 and that's always giving me some solace because it is interesting seeing like the sentiment then like there was a lot of worry uh because that was my first bear market that i experienced so and i was like keeping track of it and it's funny going back and and using that oh this is reassurance for this bear market like things are going to get better but i it's funny how like just uh i had the same emotional reactions to the the price changes uh during this bear market and the bull market that that uh that preceded it uh than i did back then so that's good to like that's one thing i would recommend keep a journal write about like how you how you react to price changes and just the ecosystem overall and and get get get a good

amount of reps in there and then like look back what you said like a couple years ago and uh it's a good source of solace right absolutely and and then another thing like when will we bottom who knows like it's different uh this time around like the block reward 2014 2015 was that 25 bitcoin per block for most of that so there's uh there's less bitcoin to liquid in the market today but again the price is higher so uh it's probably the same amount of uh demand getting eaten up each day and then obviously more people are educated there's a there's a more saturation of the user base there's other liquidity options too right asset back lending etc now yeah coin shares do the people from coin shares this really great piece like this uh bitcoin bull markets usually

get uh proceeded with uh new on and off ramps to the masses and again like go back to square like just pass vemo and downloads and a lot of people have had this app for a while love it and bitcoin is just becoming more and more integrated with their product maybe that's the next a lot of people are looking at backed and the potential etf but again and they also said in the coin shares paper that's probably institutions are going to be waiting on the sidelines and watch the uh watch the retailer sort of push this market up going forward we'll see though who knows yeah I am a big fan of your approach in not making price predictions.

Now when I make the price predictions, I basically say, listen, I was already wrong, right? So you got to take all this with a grain of salt, but making the prediction and writing it in a journal, right, to me is probably the smarter thing to do. Making it publicly forces you

to think even more critically because you know that you will face the public humiliation of being wrong. And so for the last 48 hours, I've had all these people yelling and screaming at me on the internet. It's over now. We're back to regular scheduled programming, and we're off to the races.

But, dude, thank you so much for coming. This has been a ton of fun, and we're big fans. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. It was fun. Yeah, of course. It's interesting to be on the other side of the mic. We got videos here, too, so we're going to have to get your face on YouTube.

It's unfortunate for all your listeners. All right. Thanks, man. Hey, everyone. Pop here. if you like this episode of off the chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple spotify and other podcast charts please do us a favor and rate review and subscribe to review simply go to the off the chain homepage scroll down until you see the five blank stars taking

15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts i appreciate you listening and see you next time on off the chain We'll be right back.