The Pomp Podcast - Michael Goldstein, President of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute: Bitcoin and the Cantillon Effect

Episode Date: September 6, 2019

Michael Goldstein is the President of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, and CEO of Bitstein Consulting. In this conversation, Michael and Anthony Pompliano discuss Austrian Economics, how Bitcoin doesn't change for anyone, the Cantillon Effect, and communicating Bitcoin's ideas effectively. CRYPTO.COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine.  Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world. BLOCKFI -----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it.

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. Michael Goldstein is the president of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute and CEO of Bitstein Consulting. In this conversation, we discuss Austrian economics, how Bitcoin doesn't change for anyone, the Cantillon effect, and communicating Bitcoin's ideas effectively. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. and card payment. Everything you could want at Crypto.com. Go help your boy out. Tell him Pomp sent you. Download the app or visit Crypto.com. Pomp's got you always. Ever wanted to get into

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pomps at you and thank me later. As many of you know, crypto investors store their digital assets on exchanges or in cold storage for long-term safekeeping. However, this strategy doesn't help them grow their investment holdings or build overall wealth. With the new BlockFi interest account, users can now securely store their Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency. 6% is an absurdly high rate. It's the best rate the industry. I highly suggest you go check out BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, that's BlockFi.com slash Pomp to sign up and start earning crypto today. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their

opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got Mr. Michael Goldstein, better known as Bitstein on Twitter today. And I'm super excited because he is quite popular on the internet for a number of things that he's done recently. But Thanks so much for taking the time to come on and talk Bitcoin. Yeah, thank you.

It's an honor to come on the show. For sure. Maybe let's start with your background, and then we can get into how you originally discovered Bitcoin. Yeah, so, I mean, all that basically came together at the University of Texas, where I was studying computer science. I had been studying Austrian economics on my own since high school, and sometime in In late college, we had a group called the Mises Circle where we were doing Austrian

economics discussion. And around that time, Bitcoin was popping up again. I had heard about it before, but I downloaded the software and I think it was 2011. My balance did not change because I didn't have any Bitcoins and I got bored and deleted it. But then later on with stories about the Silk Road, which tickled my libertarian fantasies, plus, you know, hearing about Bitcoin in the context of a changing internet landscape because of, you know, the ideas of 3D printable guns, suddenly it made sense that we could have gold

on the internet. And in that moment, my mind completely shifted to a Bitcoin-centric worldview and that quickly dominated our discussions at the University of Texas, which later grew into what is now the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, which we founded in late 2013. So it's been almost six years now where I was sharing the sort of pivotal and important pieces of literature from the cypherpunk and crypto anarchist communities that Bitcoin kind of arose out of, as well as share the public writings of Satoshi Nakamoto and a lot of economic analysis of Bitcoin. And at the time, a lot of bankers were starting to take notice of Bitcoin. And because of this, there is this sense of, you know, how do we water down Bitcoin's message to make it more palatable to bankers?

That is, how can bankers take control of it so that we can, you know, use this technology for quote unquote good. And part of the purpose of that original vision of the Nakamoto Institute, which I think still holds consistent, is that Bitcoin does not change for anyone. And we're going to be quite open and honest about its origins and actually celebrate that as a good thing. It's a good thing that it has this extreme decentralized ethos because money is too important to be left in the hands of any one organization. For sure. So before we get into the Nakamoto Institute, which has done some incredible work, let's go back to the University of Texas. And what was the reaction of students and kind of your peers as you were talking about it with them

and people kind of first discovered it? Was it, hey, this is pretty crazy and it's interesting, but probably unlikely to work? Or was there much more kind of ambition around, wow, what can we do to make it work? Um, you know, like, like with most ideas I have in this world, I was, I was the weird guy. Um, and people were very confused why I was so obsessed with this weird internet money. Um, especially because, you know, the common conceptions around money are based around, you know, things like payments and, um, you know, just merely the fact that it's, you know, it didn't have a very high price and it was very volatile. And so it was very difficult for someone who hadn't been in the trenches reading about Austrian monetary theory for many

years to really get a good sense of why all of that was noise compared to this bigger signal of a decentralized censorship-resistant money with a fixed supply. So for the most part, I was kind of the weird person. There was a professor that encouraged it, and I actually did like an independent study program where I was just reading, you know, a bunch of Bitcoin stuff and some stuff around decentralized law and other libertarian ideas. But for the most part, I was just kind of off doing my own thing. I was actually, I did, you know, neglect plenty of studying because I was busy just getting caught up in this, you know, non-academic sort of computer project, you know, learning all about cryptography. You know, I took a security class

and we, you know, had to implement AES. And that was fun. But that doesn't really like get to the real meat of, you know, all of what cryptography is capable of. That was like actually just like nerdy sort of corporate stuff. And so because of Bitcoin, I was able to, you know, expand into the realm of reading about cryptography as a whole and how it affects society. So it was like a very holistic thing. So I was kind of off doing my own thing, but luckily I did have my merry crew of Bitcoiners at the Mises Circle and the other libertarian groups. You know of Pierre Rochard, that's where we met. And that's why we're such good friends is because we were fighting those battles on UT campus together. It's, it's incredible that you guys know each other

always since college. Any stories about that are kind of memorable for you from that time where either you guys had conversations with people and just kind of laughed to yourself about why people really don't get it? Or vice versa times where you had conversations, you walked away and said, you know, somebody that you thought didn't understand it or wouldn't understand it actually was much more receptive? That's a good question. I'm trying to remember if we had... It's actually hard to remember some specific conversations, but I do know a memorable moment is actually that moment that my mind shifted on Bitcoin. Because prior to understanding it, I thought of Bitcoin as a fiat currency because I had a poor definition of fiat, which is that it was

made up out of thin air. Because people think of the opposite as being something like gold, which is something hard and tangible. And this is something that can be very difficult for non-Bitcoiners to get over. Thankfully, I did. And the moment that that changed, once again, I was understanding it was gold through the internet. And that was actually during a talk by the extremely infamous Cody Wilson, who is also at the University of Texas at the time. and he came to give a talk at a group called libertarian longhorns um that speech is still online and it was in that moment uh that very moment that i can trace everything back to um where it completely changed my mind um so that's fun i also remember at the time um i apologize

because i cannot remember his name very well uh like it's yannis verifakis is that the the the greek uh finance minister um he was actually doing stuff at the uh lbj school on you know various political you know monetary stuff because all of the you know we're still dealing with the fallout of the financial crisis and it was quite funny to me there was never any actual interaction but there was something funny about the fact that over at the lbj school you had this sort of world renowned, you know, sort of expert on a subject, even if he's not, you know, the most mainstream voice, but you know, very respected thinker on the topic of money, just railing against Bitcoin. He had a number of articles railing against it. And meanwhile, over on the

other side of campus, you had this group of youngsters, very irreverent youngsters who had the exact opposite belief. And I do think that we're going to play out, you know, a more victorious route as time goes on. For sure. And so as you kind of have those experiences in college, it's interesting to kind of think through, you know, I think most people say, oh, you know, these young kids are very idealistic, not just, you know, people who end up becoming proponents of Bitcoin, but just in general, kids of 18, 22 years age. And the downside to being idealistic and young is there's a lot of ideas, but not a lot of action, right? So people kind of sit and they pontificate about ideas, but they don't actually end up doing anything about it. You

guys actually did something about it, right? And you started the Institute. Maybe talk a little bit about what the genesis of the idea for starting the Institute was and kind of the early days of what you guys did to actually put it together. Yeah. Well, so you bring up a very important thing about the action. And I think Peter Thiel best sort of summarized it in his quadrants in Zero to One, where he talked about definite optimism and indefinite pessimism and stuff like that. And prior to Bitcoin, the libertarian mindset was basically like, well, we should all be on a gold standard, but that's not going to happen. Everything's going to fail. We should all just be doomsday prepping or something like get get what precious metals you can and you know

just hope for the best um and as soon as bitcoin came uh to to our minds we we shifted into this mindset of you know let's go out and build the future and like in a way we don't we don't actually don't want everything to fail because we're having too much fun um you know building this this new world so uh that was a an extreme shift and i think an extremely positive one and i do agree that uh uh you know we were very idealistic but i think it worked out well as far as the genesis of the nakamoto institute uh funny enough it started as a conversation between me and uh tur de meester uh which many of your listeners uh might know of from Adamant Capital. He was in Austin, I think it was sometime during that summer of 2013.

And I knew about him for a long time. It was the first time we met. And we were just chatting about how great it was that there was the Mises Institute, the Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian economics. Wouldn't it be great if there is a Satoshi Nakamoto Institute for crypto anarchy? And like all good jokes, it turned out to be a great idea. That seems to be a common thread in my life uh is just joke about something until you just make it real but um so i i i went ahead and you know eventually a couple months later i finally buckled down i bought a domain and i just started collecting all of this stuff that i had been reading um from timothy may and way die and hal finney and nick zabo um and all of the rest just as this sort of central repository

to teach people about, uh, these ideas because, um, you know, I, I had been into Austrian and sort of anarcho-capitalist literature, like I said, since high school. And yet these people didn't really pop up. I had, I had heard of the quote unquote cypherpunks, um, but it was usually just in the context of, um, you know, people like, uh, Julian Assange, uh, which was cool, But it was also, it wasn't, it was good as a check on government, but not as much as a praxis for actually building liberty. And so when you come across people like Timothy May, and they're talking about just like, yeah, literally just go build a remailer, an anonymous remailer, and like, you know, let's figure out how to make digital cash and all these other things. it turns it into a real praxis that you can go about and start building. So that was extremely important. And it was just really great to get that information out there. For sure. And I guess part of this, and what's always fascinated me with the work that you guys

have done is you've really done a great job, I think, of staying kind of grounded in the original communications in the original ethos and as more and more groups come into bitcoin both from a awareness standpoint education standpoint eventually as uh as users um those people all kind of take bitcoin and and um use it for whatever purpose they want to use it for but i think that the quote-unquote bitcoin maximalists of the world um to me it's less about maximal maximalism and it's much much more about um kind of just staying true to how something got started and that something has now grown into to a pretty big important asset in the world yeah there's that so i mean first off uh for those who don't know maximalist came out uh originally as a pejorative

by uh vitalik buterin actually directed towards our specific group um so we're the reason that he felt the need to create that pejorative and uh you know the the maximalist label it's a very kind of muddy one and we can talk about all of the linguistic pitfalls of it but it's also the thing that's stuck and i you know i'm i'm one to just sort of uh just go with language like i can't change other people's definitions of words so i'll use what what gets my message across Um, but I think, yes, I think there's the, the commitment to the original vision, um, uh, of, of what this thing is actually doing, uh, as well as taking very seriously all of the, uh, economic, uh, theories that, that we came to, to believe are true. and I do think are true, and just taking them to their unabashed conclusions, to not flinch at the idea that, yes, the hardest, soundest money will dominate the economy rather than just

be a fringe monetary asset for the dark net. The economics show that it can have much more ambition than that. And in fact, we should have that ambition because I believe it brings so much value to society. So we have had very much a commitment to these Austrian views and taking them to their full logical conclusion. For sure. And one of the things that you know, to me is very misunderstood about the fiat world and about Bitcoin ultimately, is how negative the impact of something like inflation in the fiat world is on a pretty large percentage of people in the world, right? I recently had Mark Yusko, my partner, come on, and we spent a lot of time talking about, you know, it's like 50% of Americans can't come up

with $400 in an emergency situation. And so they're living paycheck to paycheck. All of their wealth is stored in cash. They have no real assets. And inflation does not help those people. It actually hurts them. It steals their wealth. And the people who benefit are the wealthy or the elites. And so when you start to introduce other kind of monetary structures or other assets with Bitcoin being kind of the quintessential example, there's not just a kind of a financial impact, that there's also many societal impacts that are undiscussed, I think. Yeah. And I mean, I would refine that sort of dichotomy a bit more. The people who are living paycheck to paycheck, they're having to deal with stagnant wages and

increasing prices of stuff. Even if it's sort of hidden away in the shadowy concoctions of the CPI or whatever um they get harmed then anyone who finally does want to step up and put money into savings they can't merely put dollars under the mattress because it'll all you know go away they have to suddenly start using even more of their time to try to make sense of you know weird financial instruments um that they really shouldn't have to sit around thinking now the the market has made it much easier to do this but it's still a totally strange thing for a human to have to do And they never had to do that back in the day. You just get some gold and you put it on their mattress, put it in a vault or whatever, and you just sit on it. As opposed to now, you have to

think about 401ks and maybe I should get into real estate and all these crazy things. And I would say that the dichotomy, it's the people who are benefited are indeed wealthy, but it's not specifically the wealthy people. It's more specifically people who are friends with the money printers make money off the people who are not friends with the money printers. Because when you inflate the money supply, it's not Bernanke's helicopter where it just drops $100 bills on everyone. It's not this monopoly banker scenario. It's actually the case that money is printed and first handed to a specific industry or group of people that the government and Federal Reserve and commercial bankers choose. And they've chosen the housing market and the dot-com stuff,

and et cetera, et cetera. And what happens is those people, because they now have more money, they get to benefit from the fact that the rest of the economy has not adjusted its prices to that new amount of money. And so they get effectively cheaper prices. And then by time, that sort of economic value, if you can even call it that, ripples all the way to people like you and I, we have to just bear the brunt of all of the higher prices and the value of our dollars less. And this is called the Cantillon effect. And it's been a very well-known feature of money for centuries now. But it seems to be only something that the Austrians have maintained an awareness of and caring about these deep effects because we don't want money to be

benefiting one group over another. This goes into why it's important not to have one organization. And Bitcoin's fixed supply also keeps it from doing that. You have to earn Bitcoin by being in the marketplace. You can't just be friends with someone who has a nice printer. For sure. And so I guess on part of that there, one of the critiques of Bitcoin, which I think data actually suggests the opposite of this critique, or at least it's getting better over time, but I'd love to hear your thought is, yes, okay, so the printed money gets handed to the friends in the fiat system, but there's heavily concentrated ownership of Bitcoin. and therefore, you know, it's a different mechanism, but there's still the effect of

a small percentage of people own majority of the wealth. How do you kind of talk through that with people when that's one of their concerns? Yeah, so there's many ways of looking into that. First of all, the data, looking at that, they have to base it on specific data points that they see in the Bitcoin space. And the Bitcoin space is very interesting because we, for the first time, have very open data around finance you know you just download the blockchain and you have a lot of information at your fingertips to work with and you add that into you know open access exchange data um it's a it's a wealth of information um a lot of it uh my understanding is you know they mistake single address first of all they they mistake like a sort of an address is mapped to

a person. And this is not a very good metric because you don't know what that address is. So for instance, you might look at an address and you're like, wow, that has 10,000 Bitcoins or something. But then it turns out that that's actually like the cold storage for some exchange. And it's like, well, then it's concentrated in a place where there's many people creating an entire marketplace for a Bitcoin. So it's not really accurate to say that that's a specific person. So there's that aspect of it. And we see a lot of this. I think a lot of people need to think a little more deeply about the sort of epistemology around blockchain data. Because, for instance, people flippantly throw out suggestions like, oh, how about we redistribute

Satoshi's coins, which for one, we don't know what Satoshi's coins are. There's spurious speculation that Satoshi is sitting on a million coins or whatever that were mined back in the early days, but there's no hard data that we know to actually defend this idea. For all we know, Satoshi has very little Bitcoins. And then on top of that, this brings up the question of, you know, people malign the idea of saving money. It's often called hoarding by the people who don't want you to be able to save money. If you're looking at that and you're saying, oh, look at all this money that was just sitting there. You can't look at the blockchain and just know that money was being saved or is lost, or if you see money

move on the blockchain, you don't know just by looking at the blockchain that it was being spent somewhere as opposed to someone set up a new cold storage solution that they wanted to put it. So it might actually be going into deeper savings and you just don't know that yet. You can't know these things just by looking at the blockchain. So a lot of the analysis that comes out around these topics, and I explained with that specific one, they don't necessarily have good evidence to suggest that their thought of what's happening is actually what's happening. As far as the inequality uh you know kind of narrative as a whole um i think there's there's a couple ways of thinking it first i i reject the idea that um the economy is some kind of fixed pie um where

if one person has a bigger slice that means that the rest of us don't have a bigger slice um so i don't you know if if someone is making money in a in a free market where there is not you know, aggression and theft and rent seeking and all these things that libertarians complain about. If there's not that, then the way that people are making money is by actually providing value to people. And this is something that is also open access to everyone. So what shouldn't matter is the specific amounts, but the ability for people to engage with the marketplace and stack some sats for themselves. And in today's world, there has never been an easy... Anyone could go, at least in America, they can easily go on Cash App and buy $5 of Bitcoin right now.

So if they don't do that, and then 10 years down the line, Bitcoin's a million dollars a coin or whatever, and they're complaining about it, we were trying our hardest to give everyone a chance to get in on this. I've been evangelizing for seven years now. So I don't think it's fair to the people who have been accumulating to get mad at them because you did not listen to them and do what you can in your own capacity. And additionally, there's ideas like the Coase theorem and stuff like that, where given low enough transaction costs, the market kind of works itself out even regardless of its initial allocation. So even if someone is holding on to many Bitcoins now, you know, the purpose of money is to be able to hedge against future uncertainty. At the current

time, there's not any particular thing you want to buy with that $20 bill in your pocket. But you know that, hey, I might come across, you know, a cool trinket at the store and I'm going to want to buy it. And that's, you know, so people hold on to money. Store of value is when people are doing that on a very long-term basis. The point being that if someone is holding on to many Bitcoins now, that doesn't mean that they're not going to come across the thing that makes them want to give up those Bitcoins because they were holding those Bitcoins so that they could one day find something that they could give it up for. So that presents opportunities. One, it suggests that these things are not fixed. People have different time preferences. They have

different things they value. Someone's going to want to just buy that Lambo. So if you're the guy who knows how to sell Lambos, you're going to be able to get your hands on some Bitcoins. So really, the Bitcoin economy should not be seen as such a winner takes all. If you have all the Bitcoins, you dominate over everyone, so much as an opportunity for everyone to be seeking a better life in a more, you know, freer world with more liberty. For sure. And obviously, look, you've thought a lot about many of these different aspects of Bitcoin and kind of how this will play out. And those listening, they know that I tend to um, agree with, uh, with pretty much everything, um, when it comes to Bitcoin. But what I want to

talk about next is, uh, how to communicate these ideas, right? And you recently gave this, uh, presentation, um, at a conference that, uh, you know, in true Twitter fashion, you had Twitter outraged before I think you even finished the presentation yet no one had heard or seen the presentation yet, which is basically a magic power that you must have is to outrage people before they actually even get to see what you're saying. But maybe talk through a little bit about what that presentation was and kind of the points that you were getting across there. And then we could talk about how it impacts more of the communication on Twitter. Yeah. Well, yeah. So if you ask some people, I'm an absolutely terrible communicator, but I'll let your listeners judge

for themselves. So yeah, this past weekend, there was a wonderful conference in Dallas, Texas called BitBlockBoom by Gary Leland. It's a small but wonderful conference. I've enjoyed it both years. And this year, I gave a presentation called The Art of Bitcoin Rhetoric, How to Meme Bitcoin to the Moon. And I talked about many of the different sort of communication pitfalls that we have to work through, um, and, and learn how to craft our message in a way that can get through all of the noise of, uh, just the, the information age. Um, so, uh, I, I presented a number of concepts, um, such as, uh, you know, the, the idea of rhetoric versus dialectic, which is an old thing that comes from aristotle and it's just uh putting a dichotomy between the types of

communication people engage in and there's there's a use for each of them given a particular circumstance so uh dialectic would be a debate and like a a logical systematic you know argumentation style where you're trying to seek truth you're trying to look at an argument and determine like, here's how this syllogism does not work. How can I refine it? And then you have rhetoric, which is more the art of persuasion and trying to change the minds of others and encourage them to be even thinking on your terms. Now, the importance of this is that if you are engaging in dialectic, it's very good in the context of, say, like a private or academic discussion. It's good when you are talking with people who have some sort of fundamental shared

beliefs between you, such that you don't have to sit around wallowing around in definitions. And you also have this sort of implicit trust in the other person that they're going to take your idea seriously, they're going to, you know, fully take it in. And if you, if you beat them by logic, they'll, you know, they'll listen to you and they'll, they'll fall in. And likewise, you know, you yourself are, you know, being open to having your mind changed. Um, so these are very good for, you know, private things, but as we've seen, um, especially in the sort of internet age and, you know, the age of Twitter and stuff, um, this is not necessarily the most effective medium on on twitter where um i think of twitter is just a giant cage match um and if you're going to go

into a giant cage match you need to be ready to be fighting in a giant cage match and this is where the art of persuasion can help because you're trying to get out uh the message but you have to craft it first of all you have to craft it in you know 280 characters plus you know maybe some video or images or something like that but it it takes a a very different skill than uh merely uh laying out a systematic logical argument for something. And on top of that, people are just very hostile. And so that also brings up the question of who do you actually want to engage in dialectic with and who do you just want to be rhetorical with? And this is a very, apparently very controversial topic because people think that they deserve all of my undying

attention now the issue with this is it is a very good position to be in if you can engage in rhetoric while the other group um engages in dialectic because then they're sitting around getting you know scammed into being nitpicky about their arguments while you just get to dunk on them with memes um and uh what we see is like the the real thing is everyone is engaging and memetics. Everyone is speaking to each other with various rhetorical strategies and memes and stuff like that. I was just the one to point this out and to be very honest about that nature of things. So people were very upset about this because I effectively said, when you're dealing with an in-group and an in-group being, you know, the people you agree with or, you know, have set

those sort of, you know, base fundamentals with, those people you can have honest debate with and you should because it's extremely important to find what the truth is. But for anyone on the out group, which includes a whole host of various types of people, you're not going to get anywhere by debating them in the first place. And they're really just taking up your time that could be better spent on various projects, including talking with your in group about how to make better arguments and change your minds, et cetera. And so I advocated that for anyone in the out group, which tends to be groups like no coiners, which for your listeners, I do want you to understand that just because you don't if you don't own Bitcoin, that doesn't make you a no

coiner. It's tricky language. No coiners referring to someone who does not own Bitcoin, but also spends time hating Bitcoin. So this is primarily the economic economist class and the pundit class. So people like Paul Krugman or Nouriel Roubini, Francis Coppola, people like this, they spend inordinate amounts of time just, you know, speaking so ill of Bitcoin despite its, you know, quite frankly, incredible success over the past 10 years. um and i i also argue that you should basically you know effectively bully them and by that i mean you just be aggressive with them uh because they're not only are they they naysaying bitcoin but they are propping up a system which um i think everyone should come to believe is uh has been extremely destructive to human life and liberty and dignity um and so they they effectively don't don't deserve any mercy on that front. We should be telling the world exactly the kind of person

that Paul Krugman really is. I gave the example of him justifying 9-11 because it'll bring an economic stimulus because we need to rebuild all these windows. So this in-group, out-group distinction is very important. So no-coiners, the technical term shit-coiners, as well as multi-coiners. And these are various people who have taken up different, you know, sort of ideologies around the nature of monetary competition. And frankly, most of them have decided to, you know, as I said earlier, maximalism, for instance, was first coined as a pejorative for this position that me and my friends were taking up. These people have usually been sort of on the attack. They don't like that we have this opinion because it says, if it's true,

that it is either a waste of time and or ethically dubious to be taking up these other projects. And they take umbrage with that and decide to very rarely engage it in a way that brings about about arguments that we haven't heard before and that we also haven't completely um obliterated so uh you know this just continues on and what we see is that and and i think with the the aftermath of my talk people self-select into this group and so but basically that that bigger point is that people who show an interest in really learning with you, including people who could potentially change your mind on the topic, those are people that you want to have good discussion with and you want to save your dialectical resources for. But people who are

really just attacking you because you have an opinion that happens to make them upset for some reason. We should not be engaging with them. They have not earned those resources. And it's much better to be engaging in rhetoric with them. I also advocated for, you know, relentless propaganda of, you know, extreme positivity, which, quite frankly, you're one of the best on this um you know we could all learn something from anthony popliano about uh being positive about bitcoin uh the reason for this is uh the the out group um they want to get you in this situation of like nitpicking stuff and quite frankly like i i don't want to have a discussion with them about whether or not bitcoin is going to be 10 million or 9 million dollars a

coin or whatever, until they admit, you know, until someone like Paul Krugman can admit that number continues to go up and his economic models have not accounted for this fact, we simply are not going to be able to have a discussion. And so the proper response is remind him that number go up. Want to know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right. Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal, motherfucking mass adoption. That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and card payment. Everything you could want at Crypto.com. Go help your boy out. Tell him Pomp sent you. Download the app or visit Crypto.com. Pomp's got you, always. Ever wanted

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Part of this, you know, and you articulate a lot of it very, very well. But the two core things that I fundamentally believe, and I think that you really nailed in the presentation for the pieces I saw, one was there are different groups of people, right? You have to know who you're talking to. And my favorite is if I go on television, right, and I talk about something, and you dumb down the complexity to speak to an audience that, frankly, they've heard of Bitcoin. they have no clue what it is. They literally think it's all this crazy kind of Ponzi scheme or something. And then you get back online and you'll find people who, it's always like the Ethereum folks, right? Or some other group other than the Bitcoin community that are saying, well, that's not true, this and that. And you almost are like, guys, if I was explaining it

to a five-year-old, would you nitpick how I described it to the five-year-old, right? Or Or would you understand that I was talking to a five-year-old? And it's the same thing with, I think, institutional investors, but also when you're talking to Bitcoiners, right? A conversation that you and I would have will have a different level of complexity and even vernacular used than a conversation that we would have with others, right? And so I think that the idea of, you know, however you want to cut it up, and I know again, people will nitpick on, is it the in-group, the out-group, is there some other name on

it, whatever. There's just different groups of people and you have to speak to them in different ways. And that's not true of just Bitcoin. That's true of every technology in the world, right? Yes. Well, just everything. It's the entire art of rhetoric. And it's literally how you communicate. That is what makes communication effective. Yes. And so, you know, a lot of people got upset because, you know, I'm also unabashedly aggressive on Twitter. I told you it's a cage match. And I don't think that anyone on Twitter can pretend that it's not as a cage match. That's one of the most common people get upset about the

hostility but that's just the nature of things and you know if you're going to get on the platform you do have to be ready for that um you know and we're gonna we're gonna crush our enemies uh see them driven before us and uh you know hear the lamentations of their women uh you know conan style but um you know they they take that side of things and they focused in on that because oh you know he's such a meanie or whatever um but the deeper thing that a lot of people should have you know, listen to in my talk is, is two things. One is what you're describing, which is my talk was in a way, ultimately arguing for empathy, that people should engage in empathy. And by that, you should, you should fully understand that the person you're talking to, whoever your audience

is, understand who they are, where they're coming from, what is their worldview? You know, what is how do they see everything? You know, what makes sense to them? All of that stuff, understand them as a person and talk to them from there. Now, if they are a, you know, earnest person who is interested in seeking truth, then you are going to be able to use that information to be able to help guide them exactly where they need to need to go. I gave the example of, you know, the meme of Bitcoin fixes this. We did a live podcast with Tales from the Crypt later and Q&A, I was talking about this, is how, you know, how do you explain Bitcoin to someone? Well, we have this meme, Bitcoin fixes this. And this is a glib, but I think pretty much true idea that Bitcoin fixes

everything. And if Bitcoin fixes everything, well, if you have the empathy to understand where someone comes from, you can also identify the problems that they're facing in the world, the concerns, the worries, whatever. And you can talk about, well, here's how you've been thinking about it, but consider this effect of, for instance, monetary policy on how it changes behaviors towards this, and here's how Bitcoin addresses it. And that's going to really resonate with people. On the other hand, for the people who are hating, the haters out there, if you fully understand them, then you can know exactly the words to say that make them even more upset. and the most fun personally on twitter is when you're able to layer these things as much as

possible so you can get everyone who uh is truth-seeking and on your side to uh uh get it i had uh you know preston burn shout out to preston he's my favorite no-coiner even he loved my talk and i was the one who was telling uh saying that we should crush no-coiners and show them no mercy. But Preston understood and Preston got it. And he got it. And then everyone who's in that self-selected out group absolutely hated it. And that's always very fun to be able to play out. But all of this requires having that empathy and being able to step into other people's shoes. Now, the other component of that is I was advocating for what I was calling ethical trolling, which is that everything should not, it should not be fiat trolling backed by nothing,

you know, literal nihilism that's just getting a rise out of people. What I was advocating is that you study hard and do the best of your abilities to understand the world around you. You know, I recommended reading the Austrians, reading about computer science and networks and all of that stuff. Have a very firm understanding of the world and one that in your mind is guided towards actual truth and do it so much that you become confident enough to talk to others and help others learn as well. So yes, my talk was ultimately a call for empathetic guidance towards truth with an extremely realistic understanding of the actual nature of communication that people just want to either ignore because they don't like the idea of people being mean, or they were

trying to use that fact for themselves so they could pump their own bags and dump on others so they could make a profit and stuff like that. Well, and the other piece is not only who's the audience you're talking to, right? But it's the way that you communicate and Bitcoin fixes this and others, one of the aspects that I think I kind of theoretically understood or academically understood, but didn't ever see really put in practice until I saw it on Twitter with Bitcoin is it is quite easy to create memes when you have people bought into the same idea. And so if you think of a meme in kind of the traditional sense outside of the financial world to the Bitcoin world, a meme is simply just something that everyone talks about that somebody

captures and puts into a format that's easily, like that's it, right? And it's whether it's a drink that becomes popular or a saying or whatever, there goes the meme, right? But it starts with a group that already kind of has an affinity for that item or that saying. With Bitcoin, you have a highly, highly engaged audience that feels very strongly, right? A lot of the kind of components you're talking about. And so when you look at, when you look at like Bitcoin fixes this plan B, right, even the, the, what started out as a joke for me of the long Bitcoin short, the bankers, like all of these sayings, what they essentially are doing is they are taking very complex topics and they're boiling them down into a very simple words and memorable words.

And so what I think is, you know, something that goes unspoken of in kind of the broader crypto world is every other project, every other coin, everything, forget about the technical kind of competition, forget about all of the academic, you know, our blockchain is supposed to do this or that, or our money is this or that. Every single other project is outgunned by Bitcoiners, because Bitcoiners are the best communicators, and they are by far the best at leveraging the platforms that we currently have available to push the narrative of Bitcoin. And that is such a significant advantage that I don't think people can overcome that from like a brand awareness of marketing and a messaging standpoint when some new person comes in and says, what should I learn here? Bitcoin overwhelms them.

Yes. Well, and I mean, I started off the talk with, you know, mentioning Warren Davidson using the term shitcoin in the most astute manner possible. There is Bitcoin and there is shitcoin. And that was on the congressional floor. It's in the record. It's American history now. And also, you know, your friend Joe Kernan at CNBC, basically pitching everyone on stock to flow and Bitcoin maximalism. And that's incredible. And yeah, these people that they can tell us that, you know, we can't meme or whatever, we're not good at it. But, you know, until I see the same level of just, you know, the virus having spread into such nooks and crannies of the universe from, you know, Ethereum or whatever, then I just empirically I don't I don't think we can, you know, say to the contrary, you know, number just continues to go up. That's just what happens. Yeah. Well, and part of it, too, is when you think of from a communication standpoint, you have these different groups you're speaking to, then you have different ways to communicate, meaning the language, the memes, etc.

But also the person who's saying it, like one of the kind of themes that I think has played out over the last probably only like six, maybe 12 months is Bitcoin has like, quote, unquote, gone mainstream. If you look out and you see Joe Kernan on television, you see Russell Okong and Matt Barkley in the NFL, folks who are starting to come out that do not come from the finance world, do not come from kind of the technical or the libertarian worlds, they're kind of mainstream celebrities almost. Right. And they're saying, well, I believe in this. Right. And, you know, Matt Barkley is the one who Russell O'Connor gets a lot of attention. He's much more kind of popular on Twitter. He tweets a lot more and he's an incredible guy. He's put on a Bitcoin conference, et cetera. But Barkley is the one who blew my mind when it came out that he asked for his last two NFL contracts to be paid in Bitcoin. Wow. I had not heard about this. Oh, yeah. So Matt Barkley, NFL quarterback, he's with the Buffalo Bills now. and uh somehow it was like me him and russell were all tweeting in a thread and barkley said

something uh and i thought he was joking at first he was like i asked for the last two contracts in bitcoin but uh they didn't give it to me and so i dm'd him and i was like hey are you serious like you know i made sure that it was right he goes yes he asked his last two nfl contracts he asked the general manager of each team to pay the contract denominated in bitcoin not in u.s dollars and so again it didn't get paid right there's a whole bunch of things but in 10 years we went from the creation of bitcoin to an nfl player asking for their contract to be yeah contract negotiation in the highest levels of professional athletics like what it's incredible absolutely incredible um and i think it also speaks to the power of just like the the monetary

memes that we've been pushing for the longest time i mean this is this is where i came from You know, I was saying, like, I got into this thing because of the monetary economics. To me, it is absolutely key. And here we're seeing that, you know, I don't know what, you know, Matt's, you know, leanings are. Frankly, it doesn't even matter to me. What matters to me is that he saw the potential of a competing currency against the others. And I think it's because of, you know, the very unique properties of Bitcoin. And that's just it gives him a marginal benefit to the point where he would want that.

And so it doesn't, you know, we were talking about the Nakamoto Institute, you know, has all of this stuff. That doesn't mean that everyone is out there having to be a radical. What it means is that that's where these ideas were able to forge this new thing. And now that new thing, Bitcoin, can help fix all these different problems that have cropped up because of a poor monetary system for whatever reason. Someone might just be, you know, trying to get their Lambo and they just want to get rich thing. Someone like Matt, you know, maybe he has, you know, very, very big plans of what he can do as an NFL player and all of that. And I know that, you know, Russell most certainly has very big plans of what we can do with this thing. But it really just the memes around that and what a sovereign currency with, you know, decentralized properties and a strong, credible monetary policy, just what it opens up all these people, you can't look away. You can't give up such an incredible opportunity. And it's really

for everyone for sure what um but what do you think about this idea of uh bitcoin as a currency like competitor right and i'll kind of caveat the question with um i mentioned to you before recording like for the longest time sovereign backed currencies have been the default right and they've had very little competition as a category within that category every government's currency competes with each other. So I think that that's a huge piece of it. With that said, what we find is that now there's this new competitor from the private sector that's a true currency that's seeing adoption. Just talk through a little bit about currency competition, the sovereign currencies, and then Bitcoin. So I think an important idea in Austrian economics

is the idea that money itself is always a market-based good. It is created by the market, and it's more just co-opted by governments. So the opposite of this is an idea called chartalism, which basically says that the state is the source of money creation. The people who say this will often be the kind of people who say, oh, well, the dollar has value because there's a large military that will come and shoot you if you don't pay your taxes, which is itself, I like not having a money that has such violent defenders in order to keep it afloat. But that's another topic.

But as far as the monetary competition, we see this all the time. Gold as a money arose because it had these properties that made it very valuable throughout the marketplace, throughout the world. and everyone just converged on this. We've seen many examples of startup currencies in the world that have also, to an extent, succeeded. So I think it was Nick Szabo the other day was tweeting about Scottish currencies that were competing against the sort of monopolies

of the Bank of England. And they did very well for a very long time. These happen all the time. Um, but we do see that, you know, the, the, the world got to a gold standard, but then I would say that everything kind of fell to pieces with world war one, where government started, um, printing money, um, endlessly to fund the war. And it, it really shifted us into a, a fiat mindset, um, for their benefit. So, you know, once gold was centralized enough, then, you know, people require it and you don't have a way. You can't run a full gold node at home and somehow verify what your bank holds, especially not, you know, you couldn't do that at the time. You can't really do it today.

um it's so because of that they were able to get away with uh engaging in these practices um and it was highly successful to the point everyone all the government sort of replicated this and we live in a world of competing fiat currencies um and bitcoin found the the loophole which is oh well this whole thing money is a whole abstract thing in the first place let's just have a digital currency that's sort of this, you know, self-referencing data structure. And then what do you do about it then? And so it sort of obviates that. And yeah, I mean, we're in the midst of these intense currency wars. You have leaders of the free world, quote unquote, you know, like, you know, Donald Trump, you know, harassing the Fed to lower

interest rates more and getting mad at China about various currency war stuff. And now that Bitcoin exists, we get to just eat the popcorn and watch because Bitcoin's monetary policy is not something that can be changed. And so it just continues chugging on and represents a very strong hedge against all of this. So the fiat monies have taken over and have put themselves in extremely fragile state and Bitcoin is exploiting it, especially with the fact that, you know, I don't know that governments have the will to power to do something as drastic as return to the gold standard, which would probably be one of the only ways to actually stop Bitcoin or make it much less valuable. For sure. And, you know, look, you bring up a great point about, you know, the president

others, but the president's kind of the most visible, really trying to influence the monetary policy. And it's because the monetary policy is driven by humans, right? There's this framework that I use a lot, especially when I'm talking to institutional investors, where I say, the idea of trusting algorithms and software is already pervasive in many parts of your life, right? Whether you trust Google Maps to help you get directions in a city when you're lost over asking something on the street to music recommendations to google search results etc you trust the algorithms and the machines to do this at some point you're going to trust software and the algorithm data to better monitor and govern monetary policy than humans

you know yes that's a pretty common okay that yes that's going to happen as part of that you're going to want transparency right and i kind of walk them slowly with like almost like breadcrumbs into why Bitcoin's monetary policy and the transparency, the auditability, the kind of algorithmic discipline that it has is so much more valuable than, you know, literally the president tweeting at the Federal Reserve's going to do this, do that. You know, hey, you guys are idiots. Yes. Right. Yeah. I mean, we've had, you know, decades. So I've, you know, been a fan of, for instance, you know, Ron Paul, great American statesman for a very long time and he spent so much time you know calling for you know end the fed and um you know

rand paul talked about audit the fed and stuff like that there's decades of of this kind of uh policy uh you know calls for policy and yet you know it never happened it's not going to happen meanwhile bitcoin presents an opportunity where you know it's not even possible to have this like strange cabal of people behind closed doors that the the full power of like the you know united states citizenry would have difficulty peering into um you just buy a pretty inexpensive computer even like a raspberry pi if you need to you can download the entire blockchain verify the entire thing and you without having to talk to anyone else in the world knows that your money is what you think it is for sure what um what's your take on uh often texas and the bitcoin community there

uh it seems like um kind of the uh you said earlier the toxic maximalism uh that is the epicenter which uh which frankly is a i think a badge of honor at this point for for anyone in the bitcoin community who believes that this is the future but what's kind of going on down there in austin yeah well so i'm biased because you know i'm central texas born and raised um so of course i would believe that the texas hill country is god's country but um austin texas has just been incredible so this is you know like i said this is where uh we we founded the the misi circle which became the nakamoto institute and that sort of that sort of we've had that uh load star and the lone star uh kind of uh effect where it just draws in um that mindset of uh extreme adherence

to um economic truth and uh you know uh shaming altcoin scams and all of that um and so we just have an incredible community here we have uh you know a bitcoin developers meetup that um justin moon um you know hosts and we we've had incredible speakers there's you know we got people like andrew polstra and and brian bishop around uh we have you know memers like myself um i'm more than that yeah educator all of that um we have jimmy song is here um pierre is on his way back um there's just a fantastic community of people who are dedicated to this um and and working on a whole there's a huge sort of division of labor as i'm saying like you know andrew I'm so glad that he's not wasting his time memeing online because he's doing such incredible research and development work.

So we really have that division of labor of people who are just enticed by this idea of Bitcoin and everything that it represents and the entirety of its logical conclusions, taking it seriously and going out and doing whatever they possibly can to make it better. um so it's it's a really fantastic community and it's it's away from you know the the noise of wall street or the noise of silicon valley we kind of have our own our own you know austin is already kind of our bitcoin citadel um and uh i'm i'm so glad that i get to be a part of that community for sure and then um before we get into some rapid fire questions to wrap up um i gotta to ask you about the toxic maximalism which uh still to this day cracks me up that uh believing in something um and being willing to defend it and kind of stand up for it uh that used to be called conviction um but somehow now is called a toxic maximalism maybe talk through a little bit

about how you think about it and kind of what you've seen um you know as that term has kind of proliferated uh all the time yeah yeah well uh you know the so one of the techniques i talked about in my talk was reframing and it's taking you know making sure that you don't fall into someone else's narrative because then they get to define the boundaries of what you can talk about and basically with the toxic thing it's hard for me to there's so much noise on twitter and stuff So it's hard to, you know, do the archaeology to figure this out. But as I remember it, the toxic claims were coming out of people who tended to dislike Bitcoiners because effectively we were too extreme about like not wanting to get into shit coins and didn't didn't have any bit of sympathy for people who were engaging in scams. How dare you call everything a scam? And the problem is those people, I'm sure there's a lot

of very earnest people working on various projects, but you have to be honest about how many scams exist in the Bitcoin community and even more so in the broader, way more so in the broader cryptocurrency community. And yeah, so it was sort of like this, like calling us toxic for you know, just wanting to, uh, you know, stand with our ethical convictions. Now there's plenty of actual jerks online and I, I don't actually like that, that style of rhetoric, nor do I think it's at all effective. Um, but those, those, that's a very like fringe group. The people that were getting called toxic were more of the, you know, Udi Wertheimers of the world who were, just out there speaking truth and not allowing people to get them to believe that a scam was

not a scam. So there's a bit of... Yeah, I don't know. I wear it as a badge of honor if people call me that. I don't go around necessarily calling myself toxic or anything like that. I like more positive terms. But if people are going to call me that, it's like, hey, call me what you want. But let me know when you actually have an argument against me. And until then, you'll just be getting the full force of my trolling. Yeah. And look, you know, I joke all the time and I say that most Bitcoiners have even argued with other Bitcoiners, right? Like it's not a, hey, if you're not in our group, then we're going to argue with you nonstop. And, you know, we have, it's all kind of peaceful here. Actually, a lot of some of the greatest conversations I've seen are between people who are arguing and joking and trolling each other within the Bitcoin community. That's the dialectic. Yeah, they're all on the same side, right? Yeah, because then you can have honest discussions about what are the risks of various forks and what are the trade-offs on a certain thing.

These are important questions that all of us need to be addressing. But they're too important to be left to people who do not want to actually have that serious discussion with you. I completely agree. To wrap up here, what do you think is the most important company in Bitcoin? The most important company, I would say, forget about the companies individually. They come and go. And there's a lot of interesting business models and stuff. But the investors and the hodlers of last resort are my favorite contingency in Bitcoin. They're the most important. And

companies should be existing for the purposes of serving them and others. But to give some examples of companies, you know, I really love the companies that are addressing things like storage. So there's stuff like Casa and Unchained. They're also looking into like actually building out the financial services around that. um you know blockstream has had endless contributions i love chain code labs um and other organizations like that that just sort of uh out of the you know goodness of their hearts and desire to make their own bitcoins more valuable um they're putting resources to the cause so um yeah but as far as the company i don't i don't want to sing a lot of company but i will shout out to all my hodler friends i love it and enemies by the way what's the um What's the one regulation that you would change or improve?

The one regulation, I mean, I think the biggest regulation that holds us back has to do with IRS rulings around capital gains and stuff like that. So I'm notorious for my stance against spending, but it would be nicer for the economy to actually have that ability for people to better express their time preferences and values and spend and buy as they please without having to constantly be worrying about paying a fraction of that to the IRS. Because beyond that, the United States has been very friendly to Bitcoin so far, even if people don't quite understand that. And I think that's only going to become more so the case. The IRS is the one that's really holding us back. I think that's a very fair kind of perspective. What's your most controversial thought in Bitcoin? Like when you share it,

a wide number of people will disagree with you. I think the most controversial so far has just been the fact that I tie the fiat economy to the degradation of the food supply, such that I argue that in a Bitcoin world, people would eat more meat. You got to explain. So yeah, part of my toxic behavior is promoting Bitcoin carnivory. And it's this idea that plants are not necessarily beneficial nor harmless, and that meat is actually an extremely nutritious and healthy and environmentally friendly food that has been an extremely

important part of human life since its foundations, but that a fiat economy has managed to make us believe otherwise and shape our ideology around food away from that. And I expect Bitcoin to encourage a return to that so that we can better take care of our human capital with health and longevity. So yeah, I do have a website on that if people want to look into it justmeet.co justmeet.co justmeet yes awesome definitely put that in the show notes um what is the uh what's the most important book you've ever read most important book i've ever read um that is a great question um i'm gonna have to go with uh either human action by ludwig von mises which you know shaped everything that i know about economics and what i'm everything i said

in bitcoin is basically just a rehash of everything i've i've believed about economics for many years now. That and another contender is a book called Democracy, The God That Failed by Hans Hermann Hoppe, which fundamentally shifted my view on the nature of democracy, kind of questioning it as this perfect political system that people want it to be. And the reason I think it's so important is that in a Bitcoin world, we're going to have a much more decentralized world and we're going to have to learn how to uh get along with people who have fundamentally different beliefs than us um in a in a peaceful manner um instead of being caught up in trying to change their mind so that they vote for stuff um because you know we showed just with

bitcoin alone voting does not change the blockchain um so this is a it's an important idea to wrap your head around like how to live in a decentralized world and i think a book like that helps tremendously i've never read that i'll have to check that one out um before we wrap up i usually let everyone ask me one question and then we got to talk about aliens what uh what do you think about aliens believer non-believer oh man um i don't know i don't know i i have well have they have have have they done the run on area 51 yet like we have our chance to find out it's the fact that the government actually responded to a facebook group i i love the idea of a a government sort of war room sitting around and having to like you know figure out what do they mean by naruto run

well here's the other one was i saw recently uh after the jeffrey epstein uh kind of scandal around his death somebody said uh that um they were going to create a group uh what did it say and they were going to storm the Clinton house because they can't suicide us all. And I was just like, wow, that is getting, you know, kind of taking the meme, you know, going back to the memes, taking a meme and really applying it to every event that they possibly can. Right. Although I recommend everyone buy Bitcoin as a run on the Fed. We can bring this whole thing down.

All right. What one question do you have for me to finish up? uh how how do we know when the virus has fully spread oh man i i think it's one of these um one of these answers where uh there's no there's no finish line right it's um the whole thing of the virus is spreading so two things on this when i first started saying that i had no clue that uh kind of much uh earlier in the days of bitcoin that then i was really paying attention um i think kind of 2012 to maybe like 2014 uh there was this idea of a mind virus and um a couple people turned i think actually marco santori is the one who kind of uh walked me through that so that was pretty cool to see that like it wasn't actually a new idea right

um the reason why i used the word virus was different i think um really the the genesis of it was uh in technology you get these viral products right and when a viral product literally goes viral it's like a virus right it just latches on and kind of seeps into these communities and it gets passed from person to person to person um and unless the group that is in control of the product uh does something to uh kind of shoot themselves in the foot a viral product will continue right it's kind of like um you know things that are in motion will stay in motion and so um when i said the virus is spreading it was just like hey this thing is going viral it's getting into new areas. It's getting passed from person to person. Now, the funny thing about this

is there's more humans that are born every day, right? And so it's almost like the virus is part of, if you compare it to like, let's say Fiat currency, today you have to teach every single newborn at some point in their life about money, about finances, right? And people get that education early. Some people actually don't get that education until very late in their life. But I think that Bitcoin, you know, has a higher probability of becoming a global reserve currency than most people give it credit for. And so even if it does reach that point where it's, you know, tens of trillions, if not 100 trillion plus dollar asset, all of a sudden you realize the the virus is spreading. It now has to spread in different ways. Right. It's no longer just adoption. It's around education, around holding, right, all these different aspects of it.

And so I just don't think that there's like a finish line necessarily. But we definitely have a ways to go to get to a point, you know, to let's say kind of have the true market penetration that I think is possible. I would agree with all of that. And I also think you could add on that, you know, even after Bitcoin has taken over and is the global reserve currency that dominates everything. um from there you know if if i'm correct this has many downstream effects on the economy and on life itself and because of that um the virus will start you know spreading in new ways because new ideas will flourish thanks to it i argue that you know we're going to create a new industrial revolution because of bitcoin mining um and this will just penetrate everywhere um

um so like yeah i i can understand like the virus never stops it just keeps growing and growing and the more that it grows the more that it will grow uh and that's it's very exciting i i um i will finish up with uh with saying one thing which is when you sit and you think about um you know not only how far bitcoin has come but uh you look out into the future and you say if we are right right Which there's a probability that we're not. I don't think that you and I are as concerned with the downside as maybe some others. But if we are right, the impact on the world will make this one of, you know, a handful of technologies that completely shaped the way that people live their lives. Right. And you can go back to electricity, the Internet, etc. But the part to me that is so fascinating is when electricity came around and people had candles in their home, there might have been fear or misunderstanding within that household. And maybe they walked next door and they talked to their neighbor about, have you heard of this thing, electricity? But there was no global conversation around it, right?

The internet didn't exist. When the internet was created, everyone wasn't on it at first. What we're seeing here is if we are right, we are going to be able to go back and historians will be able to go back and look and see how a technology that ended up changing the world was so feared, was so misunderstood, was so railed against by so many people for a very long. I mean, we're talking a decade now, right? And it will persist for a while. And I think that that to me is the part that's a little overwhelming is even in the face of all of that, Bitcoin has accomplished what it has accomplished. And if it is successful, the impact that you and I think of, we're probably actually

underestimating the impact that's possible. Historians will be amazed that at one point anyone could have considered Bitcoin toxic. i love it man all right michael listen i could sit and talk to you uh literally for hours so i really appreciate you taking the time to uh to do this um and then maybe when i'm in uh in austin next weekend we can do it again but uh thank you so much yeah please come visit and once again i'm so honored to have been on the podcast 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

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