The Wolf Of All Streets - Jimmy Song: Bitcoin Is Inevitable | Alts, NFTs, DeFi Are A Big Bubble That Will Pop
Episode Date: April 26, 2022Decentralization is not always the right answer. Saving in fiat is setting yourself up for failure. And you get in at the price you deserve. These are just a few nuggets from this absolute gold mine o...f an episode with Jimmy Song (@jimmysong). Join us for our discussion at Bitcoin 2022, where we talked Altcoins, ETH 2.0, CBDC, regulation, and the political conversation surrounding Bitcoin. JOIN THE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER 📩 https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS ►► I couldn't be more excited to announce that Vuori is a sponsor for the show. I've been wearing their clothing for years and can't get enough of it. Countless episodes have been recorded in Vuori, and I tell everyone they need their incredibly versatile and comfortable clothing. You can do practically anything in it. For our listeners, they are offering 20% off your first purchase. Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet at vuori.com/melker. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but enjoy free shipping on any U.S. orders over $75 and free returns. Get your outfit today at: https://vuori.com/melker ►► Vauld is a Smart Investing Crypto Platform which allows the user to invest without any stress! With Vauld, you can earn free passive income in crypto. Vauld lets you earn the highest interest rates in the crypto industry - 12.68% on stablecoins and 6.7% on BTC and ETH.. Sign up below and get a 40% kickback on trading fees, 5% commission on interest payouts and 5% commission on loan interest. Vauld’s ‘Buy the Dip’ function automatically purchases specific cryptocurrencies for you when the price dips below a pre-set level. It’s awesome! Sign up here: http://thewolfofallstreets.info/vauld EPISODE LINKS Jimmy Song: https://twitter.com/jimmysong Production & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/ FOLLOW SCOTT MELKER • Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scottmelker • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets • Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io • Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe • Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3FASB2c
Transcript
Discussion (0)
This is going to be a huge financial disruption going forward.
And, you know, we're going to get used to this reality.
Well, you know, you have this escape valve in Bitcoin.
And that, you know, the worse the government performs with its currency,
the better Bitcoin looks. That's just how it is. This episode is sponsored by Vauld and Vorri.
Please stay tuned for more information on both of these amazing companies later in the episode.
I finally got the opportunity to interview a legend in the crypto space who I've been looking forward to speaking to for literally years.
That man needs no introduction.
It's Jimmy Song.
We're sitting here at Bitcoin 2022.
You've been around a long time.
I have.
Would you ever envision 35, 40, 50,000 people in a convention center
that takes an hour to walk across just for Bitcoin.
Never would have imagined.
But I'm not sure the numbers are that big.
Is it like 50,000 people?
They've said at least that 35,000 tickets, I believe, have already been sold and they could extend.
But even if it's 25 or 30.
Yeah, that's the biggest Bitcoin conference ever.
Right.
Like so that that's that's approaching like NBA
game numbers, right? Yeah, we're corn and palooza here. It's absolutely insane. So
yeah, I mean, I don't know if I would have ever imagined this kind of thing for certain, but yeah,
Bitcoin is inevitable. So at some point it was going to happen.
So I'm glad it's now.
Right.
But so I guess then for you, like you always envision the hockey stick.
Yeah.
Well, not adoption, right?
I don't know if it's hockey stick or some other curve, but yeah.
Yeah. Something like that.
But it's happening fast.
Relatively speaking, on a year to year scale, you can always see sort of like the adoption
taking place um you know it's maybe not as fast as what people expected but you know it is what
it is right like people can imagine a lot so some people want it to go much faster than it
it actually does and it requires some patience and stuff like that so you know it is what it is
so you've been around basically since the beginning and you've seen sort of the evolution of every use case narrative, FUD, etc., etc.
I never get to ask anyone this. Is there anything that's happening now that you actually don't like that's maybe bad for Bitcoin and not what you envisioned when you started?
Well, the thing that's been bad for Bitcoin for many years is the altcoin narrative.
It's all silicon. Like we get lumped into the same industry as crypto or something like that.
But the thing is, they couldn't be more different.
Bitcoin is actually decentralized.
All coins are VC-pumped all-coin bags.
They're not adding anything.
And there are ways for VCs to make a lot of money very quickly by dumping on retail.
That's what's hurting Bitcoin.
That's a narrative that I think
is horrible for everybody involved. I mean, even the VCs, they're getting used to, you know,
six month timelines on where they can make like seven X their money or something like that.
It's not good for them. It's going to blow up their funds. And there's so many of them that are going into this, FOMOing into this. We
have like a VC, DeFi, NFT, altcoin bubble that's going to pop at some point and it's going to be
horribly destructive. And I don't think they really realize it, but that's holding Bitcoin
back. It's all of these stupid narratives that don't make any sense, but get pumped by VCs
because they're basically burning their
credibility for money. Right. So we have that problem on one side, but that also means we have
a PR problem because they really shouldn't have anything to do with one another. That's right.
Right. So I always kind of joke, I hate the term cryptocurrency because most of them aren't even
pretending to be currencies anyways. And then as you said, you sort of get them lumped together.
What if we had better PR, so to speak, and people didn't even consider those assets as the same asset class as Bitcoin?
Yeah, that would be wonderful, except the VCs won't let that happen.
The thing is, they have a lot of the narrative.
And for good reason.
They know all of the media companies and everything like that.
They control the narrative from sort of technological standpoint because they've
been known as the innovators of technology for a long time. For the last, what, like since 1980
or something like that, the venture capital has been synonymous with like new and emerging technology.
So when you have, you know, all of that, like sort of stored up, I guess, credibility, you can you can pump these things and people will believe you.
So, you know, Andries and Horowitz or whoever, you know, they go to TechCrunch and say, oh,
this is a cryptocurrency just like Bitcoin.
Who's going to go challenge that? TechCrunch isn't going to do that is a cryptocurrency just like Bitcoin. Who's going to go challenge
that? TechCrunch isn't going to do that, right? Because they're Silicon Valley funded. They get
all their stories from the VCs. They're not going to contradict them because they don't want to piss
them off. So it is a PR problem, but it's one that's because of fiat money. It's based around
this VC industrial complex that's already built up.
Bitcoin doesn't have a central committee that's doing PR or whatever.
Call the marketing department.
We need better PR as a community.
I wasn't saying it's related to Bitcoin.
You really can't do it, right?
And that's the real problem is that when you have all these narratives that are going from one side
and we don't really have, other than Twitter or something like that, a way to push out
counter-narratives saying, okay, these two things are different.
That's not going to get to the public because in a sense, the public trusts the VCs because
they're the oracles of new technology incoming or something like that.
Right.
Until that credibility is burned up, which it will because of this stuff, we can't fight them on the PR level just yet.
Well, I think to a degree, people trust the media and the VCs are the ones who have the key to the media, which means that the story is being told. But like Bitcoin, we sort of live in a world now where everything is decentralizing slowly, too slowly.
But people don't trust as much.
Many people do.
But don't trust as much what they're hearing from the mainstream media or the VCs.
So don't you kind of see at least maybe slow again that we're trending in a direction where people are finding their news from their favorite podcaster or their favorite which they have their own problems too
but their own youtube channel but basically have like opted out of whatever the mainstream is and
are finding their own which we'll call alternative news sources which are just news sources uh that
they believe they can trust yeah i mean hopefully this is one of those users. But the point is that
when you have control over the narrative or when you have the printing press, when you have
this ability to print money, which all of these altcoins do, well, now you could buy off all of
these YouTube influencers or whatever. And most of them actually end up going and pumping some altcoin for money. This is the sort of incentive problem.
Until these things all crash, it's going to continue being a problem.
Because if you're a YouTube influencer that's doing shows on Bitcoin and then some altcoin comes in and says,
hey, we'll give you $50,000 to pump our coin for the next six months.
Are you really going to say no? Right. Like you're making free money.
So unless you have this conviction in Bitcoin and think of like taking money like that as highly immoral, which most of them, frankly, don't.
They don't understand any of this stuff that well.
Then you're going to come to a point where you're just going to take that money.
And this is a very saddening statistic.
Non-technical people in Bitcoin since like 2013, every single one has gone to some sort of altcoin.
And that tells you something.
Right, I mean, the early community has basically just spread out into this tree to go.
Yeah, to pump something because it's quick money.
They think that they're geniuses
for getting into Bitcoin early.
Therefore, they're geniuses
for getting into some other altcoin
or something like that.
This has been the pattern.
And until the gas runs out of this stuff
and it's really fueled by fiat money
at the end of the day, it's going to be like that.
And we need all of this stuff to sort of burn itself out.
And then Bitcoin will like sort of rise from those ashes and show people what the actual value is.
Let's eliminate the VC, the side, the way that this is actually happening but technologically
are there innovations in the crypto blockchain space not on Bitcoin that
actually would have real value if this wasn't the structure of how they're
being funded or I don't think so because most of them are highly dependent on the
money printing that they they're able to. So a lot of DeFi protocols
have some... Right, but removing the... Let's say they didn't even have a coin.
Yeah. So once you remove the coin, then no. Because none of the economics work,
none of the innovations work. They're all highly dependent on their coin continuing to rise in
value. And this is the problem with all of these things is that it's all fine and great until it starts crashing.
Then everything falls apart.
It's a house built on cards.
So this is the real problem is any business will work if you can print your own money.
As soon as you can't print that money anymore, it stops working.
And that, like, quote, unquote, innovations of all of these things is oh we're gonna print
money to do x print money to do y or whatever so like they're dependent on this base of i get to
print money so now i i really don't think there's any innovation there i i've been looking for one
for like the last 11 years and every single time it's you you look at it and it's dependent on this
money printing in order to subsidize you know users using it for whatever use
case that they purport it to be and that's that's ultimately what it is what
about building the same basically technologies but technology but with
Bitcoin is the base layer so like defy on on Bitcoin, NFTs on Bitcoin, any of
these things, right? Like things like the metaverse, crypto or not, are inevitable, just as like the way
that people are going to interact. It doesn't have to be on crypto. Yeah, well, I don't think those
all work, right? Because they're all centralized. And if you're going to do a centralized, then a
blockchain is horribly expensive and stupid way to do it. If you centralize it and make it, you know, it's centralized anyway.
So if you really centralize it and put it on a single database, it's way, way easier.
And it doesn't make any sense for anyone to add a blockchain to it because it just adds, you know, multiple layers of complexity.
And it just, you know, makes it much more difficult to do anything.
So you have a centralized version and that's at least like a hundred times easier in all
sorts of ways.
So I don't see it.
I just don't.
I mean like Visa and MasterCard are really fast.
Yeah.
And they're centralized.
And that's why.
And if you're already centralized, you might as well go all the way and like get all the
efficiencies of centralization rather than like this weird Rube Goldberg machine where
you're paying the cost of decentralization, but having all of the vulnerabilities of centralization.
It's like it's the worst of both worlds.
It doesn't make any sense. Bitcoin, if any of them, how do they scale to billions of people of adoption, right?
To me, that's always the question is that we, not with Bitcoin, the others, we certainly
see like breakdowns, time offline, whatever it is.
And it seems to me that there's no solution, maybe layer two is whatever, but there's no
solution that gets you to this utopian world where three, four, five billion people are using these
things on a daily basis.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, for Ethereum and all that stuff, I mean, the trend that we've been seeing is
they just get more and more centralized in order to handle the scale.
So what they're doing is, okay, we're going to move to ETH 2.0. And it's like ridiculous ideas from, you know, like as a technical person, as a programmer,
I would say these are like ideas that maybe new graduates from college think are brilliant or something like that.
But any experienced software engineer is like, this is stupid.
And you really need to have some real world experience, kid, before you design idiotic stuff like this.
Yeah, you know, it's, you know,
essentially that's what it is, right?
Like Ethereum 2.0 or whatever.
Right.
It's the, you know, mental masturbation
of a college graduate that, you know,
has never had any real world experience.
But, you know, it gets just more centralized.
And we call these coins like decentralized in name only
because they have to have decentralized in their name
as a way to avoid regulation.
That's the only reason.
If they were centralized,
they would be stopped by the SEC right away. But they have this arbitrage opportunity of pretending that they're decentralized so they can't get regulated
That's the fiction that they put out
And they're they're able to run all of these scams that would be illegal in any centralized context
I didn't but okay, so then we obviously have Gary Gensler here who clearly says Bitcoin's decentralized. It's not a security.
Maybe ETH got through because it was kind of happening before him.
But do you think that then we see him label effectively everything a security because of that very issue and we actually see a lot of it?
I think it's inevitable.
Yeah.
I mean, we had what the Liberty dollar and something like that.
And they operated for like 10 years, you know, we had what the Liberty dollar and and something like that.
And they operated for like 10 years, you know, and before the SEC really cracked down.
But if you have a centralized point of failure, you're going to get regulated at some point.
It's just an inevitability.
So, you know, whether Gensler does it or somebody else does it.
This is the big, big deal about Bitcoin is that you don't have a single point of failure, so you can't regulate it. But all of these other things, they will get regulated
at some point and that's it. And that's the inevitable conclusion that these technologies
have or these scams have. They're going to get caught. That's just how it is.
You talked about ETH 2.0.
I think a majority of people just sort of accept it'll be successful.
It'll be great.
It'll happen.
It'll work.
Right?
Obviously, nobody's looking at the code like you said, right?
But what if it doesn't?
I have heard people say maybe it forks.
Maybe the merge just doesn't work. Maybe we end up with multiple chains. I mean, how vulnerable it is, what bugs are in there.
I mean, who knows?
I will say, though, that it's probably going to have some serious issues at some point
because the computer science structures that they're trying to put out, again,
they're designed by a know-nothing that pretends he's some brilliant genius.
It's not.
It's the mental masturbation of a kid that took a couple of computer science classes
that thinks he knows everything.
I've met those kids coming out of school, and then they get slapped hard by reality,
and then they realize, okay, I need to change something.
You know, it hasn't really happened to some of these people yet. So, you know, we'll see.
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Listen, I asked you at the beginning, like, what is the biggest problem that we have?
And obviously you said that that's sort of it.
What about central bank digital currencies?
Yeah, that's the wet dream of every government, right?
That's exactly what I call it.
I call it a central bank's wet dream.
Yeah, it really is because they can cut out all of these banks and the banks from the middle and like have a direct relationship with every single person
and direct surveillance and everything else yeah so i i think it's a horrible thing and i think
it'll be a a tool that will that will be inevitably used by the state
for nefarious purposes
but at the same time
you know like
we have this alternative I think it'll
turn more people towards Bitcoin
so you know that
you know
with every good comes some
bad with every bad comes some good
sheep are gonna sheep right I mean there's a certain I hate to say it but there's a certain percent of the With every good comes some bad. With every bad comes some good. Sheep are going to sheep, right?
I mean, there's a certain, I hate to say it,
there's a certain percent of the population that's always going to behave in one manner.
It's never going to change anyways.
I like to take the glass half full approach that you just did.
Well, we've always had like a UX, UI, and PR problem, sort of as I said, right?
It's just not that easy to use.
It's getting easier over time.
But if your government literally says, this is how you use money use. It's getting easier over time. But if your government literally says,
this is how you use money now. It's digital. You put in an address and you send it back and forth.
Oh, and by the way, now you have no privacy. That should be great for Bitcoin, right? Because now
you've jumped the obstacle of people who didn't want to take the time to learn. Now they know how
at least to digitally transact. I know how to send you money now with my phone. I mean people have PayPal memo
but so maybe there is a
Maybe that actually increases the adoption curve. I think eventually I mean, like I said, I think Bitcoin is inevitable and like the more
Sort of oppression comes into the current fiat monetary system or to whatever, the more people will adopt it.
The Canadian trucker thing was a huge boon for Bitcoin. Whenever you try to oppress or put more
authoritarian controls on the fiat monetary system, more people are going to want to get out. And
even in Russia and Ukraine, you see Bitcoin buying like crazy because people want to get
out of that country and they want self-sovereignty over their own money.
So all oppression is ultimately good for Bitcoin because that's going to help people understand what the heck it is and why they need to get it.
And if you are in danger of getting canceled, hey, here's your currency.
And the more the government cancels people, the more the government monetarily oppress people.
It's great.
So CBDCs, while it's like, you know, horrible for human rights in all sorts of ways,
it's ultimately going to benefit Bitcoin because people are going to come to the realization.
In game theory, this is what you call like sort of the reaction, right?
Like, OK, well, you do this, then I have this other move
to counteract that. And that's ultimately what's going to happen.
And people didn't have that move before.
No, no, they didn't.
Right. Which is funny, because we get a lot of criticism of like the way that the United States
reacted to the 2008, 2009, 2010 crisis, but there wasn't really another asset class for people. I'm
not saying they get let off the hook by any stretch of the way, but when you touched on Canada, and I love what you said,
because there's always this, it can't happen to me mentality, certainly in places like here.
That was the first time that it wasn't like, okay, yeah, but that's Venezuela, or yeah,
that's Iran, or that's Lebanon, or whatever, that it was like, holy shit, it's Canada.
Or even the US, where we got a 7.9% inflation print.
Which we know is way higher.
That's the number they gave us.
Well, the real inflation is actually monetary expansion, which is probably closer to 25.
But even the CPI inflation print is going to be probably, you know, eight, nine, maybe even 10 percent.
We haven't seen these numbers since this early 80s, something like that.
So we're this is going to be a huge financial disruption going forward.
And, you know, we're going to we're going to get used to this reality.
Well, you know, you have this escape valve in Bitcoin. And the worse
the government performs with its currency, the better Bitcoin looks. That's just how
it is.
I mean, you say Bitcoin's inevitable. I think we all believe that. But that's a great catchphrase.
What does that look like?
Yeah, that's a great question. Once we have Bitcoin like the base layer currency, I think it fixes a whole lot
of things because a lot of stuff is actually funded by fiat money, whether we recognize
it or not.
Like, you know, we get all these Uber rides for really cheap, right?
Because it's funded essentially by VC money.
Where do the VCs get their money?
From their LPs.
Where do the LPs get their money?
Well, mostly because they're like cantillionaires or whatever.
They get a lot of the monetary expansion routed to them.
So they are able to use that money to, I mean, VCs essentially have this like banking function right now.
They're the ones funding startups or whatever.
Literally everything.
Yeah.
So, you know like that that funding kind
of goes away um i see it sort of like as bread and circuses right from the roman empire like
uber sports whatever man yeah it's it's it's all sort of ways to keep us from recognizing our own
plight or whatever once once people start waking up some of this fiat stuff actually comes back to haunt them with huge inflation prints and everything else.
I think it's inevitable that people will recognize Bitcoin for what it is.
And it'll change all of that stuff.
And we'll have to get used to paying for stuff, right?
It's not going to be all bread and circuses.
You don't get all of that for free. So, yeah. But that's interesting because we land in this utopian sort of world, but I hate to think
about the path in between for your average person. Listen, so like, it's interesting.
Oppression is good for Bitcoin. It is. But God, it sucks to have to say that because there are
people who are being oppressed. It is. Right. And so how much more oppression, how much more pain does there have to be to get to
the point where there's recognition?
Everything literally has to blow up almost.
There's no soft path here.
Well, it depends on how quickly people wake up.
How much pain do you have to have on touching the hot soap before you stop touching it,
right?
And that's essentially, it comes down to whether or not people are, how committed they are to believing sort of like the current narrative.
And the quicker they wake up out of it, the better you're off, right?
Like we all say in Bitcoin, like you get in at the price you deserve.
And this is the level of sort of like free inquiry and open mindedness that you need to have in order to understand Bitcoin.
If you're closed minded, then, yeah, sorry, you're going to suffer because of your closed mindedness.
Now, whether you see that as an actual vice or not, it is.
And reality is going to slap you hard because of it.
But I mean, yeah, you're going to suffer because of your vice.
And that vice is following the orders of the authoritarians that are telling you these
narratives. Yeah. And I think for those people, the really hard trap is like, even once you get
it, if you're living literally paycheck to paycheck and penny to penny, then it becomes
this like out of reach solution that maybe is there because most people are not like,
I got an extra 20 grand.
It's not even 20 grand.
I mean, like there are people.
Yeah, I mean, people, you know,
put away five bucks a week, right?
Way back when.
And they're fine now because, you know,
they were able to save.
And this is the magic of saving in a currency
that has an absolute supply.
When you're saving in dollars,
it's always sort of like you're having to play catch up with inflation and you're not accruing
value. But if you are, but if you're accruing savings in Bitcoin, it works, right? Like that's
the key. You're able to save money and it gives you motivation to save money.
And, you know, we call Bitcoin savings technology for that reason.
People don't have a good savings technology. And like the closest things that we have are real estate and stocks.
And those are way asset inflated at the moment. So you you have that extra tool. Well, it makes all the difference.
Once people wake up to it, now you're motivated. I was talking to people about this. A lot of
people that live paycheck to paycheck are starting to accumulate Bitcoin. And it's like,
okay, yeah, that's the mentality shift that you need to have. That's what it means to wake up.
So even if you're living paycheck to paycheck, maybe you don't buy that latte and save the five bucks and buy Bitcoin.
Those things make a difference. In a fiat world, it's all YOLO and FOMO and like live for tomorrow.
That's what we call high time preference behavior. Low time preference behavior is all a part
of that Bitcoin mentality. Right. I mean, people have, they've been saving
the wrong asset, but people have been told to save their whole lives. It's possible. Even if
it's a buck or three bucks or four bucks or five bucks, it will make a meaningful difference.
Absolutely. And I think this is what it means to wake up. And people will wake up to it
at some point. And it's not a short-term fix, right?
It's something that you have to be in for many years in order to really get.
But that's what it's going to require because it's very difficult to understand this whole system.
And people want quick solutions.
This is a low-time preference thing.
Get rich quick scheme. It's not. It's a low time preference thing. Get rich quick scheme.
It's not.
It's a five year thing.
Right.
But talking about that, right?
So it was always like short the bankers, long Bitcoin, right?
But now we have this sort of cognitive dissonance
where like the Bitcoin community cheers institutions,
VCs, Wall Street, hedge funds coming in
because number go up, right?
Partly.
Right.
But so should we be, is it for every man?
Is it for institutions? Is it literally for everyone? Or is there actually harm being done
by the institutional narrative? It's the money of enemies, right? So you can't control who goes
and buys it. And if institutions want to buy it, they can. Should we cheer it? I don't know.
I mean, in a sense, they're capitulating to the Bitcoin narrative every time they buy it, they can. Should we cheer it? I don't know. I mean, in a sense, they're capitulating
to the Bitcoin narrative every time they buy it. But they're also going to sell at the first sign
of trouble. Possibly, possibly not, right? It depends on your time preference. And, you know,
it's like any person or whatever. So I don't know. I don't know how beneficial it is, how harmful it is or whatever.
I just know that it's the money of enemies.
And, you know, at some point, they won't be selling, they'll be holding.
And for those institutions that, you know, again, everyone gets in at the price they deserve.
I love that.
And if they got in at an early time or a late time or whatever, they got in at the price they
deserve. That's when they woke up. So, you know, good luck to them. But, you know, it doesn't
really matter to me. I mean, we're so small anyway, so maybe it's just all hands on deck.
Possibly. Yeah. It's amazing watching like people that were absolutely like hated by the community
and they like buy one Bitcoin and all of a sudden they're like, hero.
We try to be welcoming in this community.
You change your mind, great.
That's awesome.
Instead of, hey, you're our enemy forever.
That's good.
Strong opinions loosely held.
We're allowed to change their minds and wake up.
I think it's just important for people to realize Bitcoin doesn't give a shit either
way.
It's totally agnostic.
It doesn't matter who's using it.
Like, I love, like, the Elizabeth Warren, the sanctions, right?
And, like, we should ban it.
To me, that's like saying that there's someone spreading fake news on the Internet.
Let's ban the Internet.
Yeah.
Like, not worry about the person who's doing it or the activity.
Let's ban the layer.
It's so stupid.
Well, regulators are going to regulate, right?
They only have a hammer and they see everything as a nail.
Bitcoin's not a nail.
That's the thing.
And she does what she does because she has a very safe seat in Massachusetts.
I mean, the two Democratic senators before her,
like John Kerry was the junior senator from Massachusetts for
like 30 years, right? That tells you how safe her seat is. So she can afford to go say that.
But you're a Democrat in a toss-up race like Ohio. You can't really say that anymore.
Do you think that we're actually seeing... I like to think so, but do you think that now the community is large enough that it's like a little, a literal political
risk to be on the wrong side and that you, whether you actually care about, I don't take the positive
view of them. I think they're just trying to keep their jobs, but they have to have an opinion. And
now it has to be the right one or they can literally get voted out. Can we be a strong
enough voting block immediately?
We have a midterm election coming up in a few months.
Do you think that the Bitcoin community actually has enough power now to decide who?
Well, so I think the latest stats I heard were from Grayscale,
something like 23 million Americans have some exposure to Bitcoin.
Oh, Bitcoin and even crypto in general is like 65, 60 something million.
Yeah, some much larger number.
So, I mean, ARP is about 40 million, you know, and they're the strongest lobby in D.C. pretty much.
So, I mean, we're up there.
And this is what all the politicians are scared of.
And, yeah, you look at like the Senate race in Ohio, for instance, you got three Republicans, two Democrats.
You know, these are the top five people for that race. All of them are saying good things about
Bitcoin. You have to. You have to, because that's a that's a significant part of your
electorate. And, you know, like 20,000 votes means a lot in those places. And you're looking
at much larger numbers, especially if you look at like the single issue voter and stuff. So it's, yeah, it's going to matter.
And, you know, it's only going to matter more.
And in a sense, the Bitcoin voter is going to be a huge constituency.
You know, I obviously wrote a book about this, Bitcoin and the American Dream.
So Bitcoin is going to be a much bigger part of the political conversation going forward.
That's just true.
The Gemini's report just said that of all of those people holding it, 45% bought it for the first time in 2021.
That's insane.
Well, I mean, it kind of makes sense because of all the inflation going on.
But yeah, I mean, we're going to see more adoption every time.
But that's the hockey.
I mean, that's crazy. But that just shows us how absolutely early we are.
So after this conversation, where can everybody keep up with you and follow you?
Well, so my Twitter is at Jimmy Song. My website is programmingbitcoin.com. And
you can sign up for my newsletter, jimmysong.substack.com.
Well, hopefully we'll be having this conversation another year or two down the road,
and we'll have 10 more years or 20 ahead on the adoption curve.
Well, let's hope so.
Hopefully they don't have so many NFT things here.
They're skirting it very carefully.
Even on stage, it's really funny.
You're not allowed to say it, but you can dance around it.
I really hope the people here start booing whenever anyone mentions crypto or NFT or something.
I want the crowd to just go, boo!
We need a new name than crypto.
Bottom line.
Well, I mean, it's just Bitcoin and everything else.
It's Bitcoin and scam coin.
That's what we should call it.
We'll like it.
Thank you, man.
Thank you.
Much appreciated.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode
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