The Wolf Of All Streets - The Most Bullish Case For Bitcoin Ever Presented | Edan Yago

Episode Date: February 4, 2024

Tune in to our podcast with Edan Yago, a true pioneer of crypto. He'll share his optimistic views on Bitcoin, which might be the most positive you've heard. Learn about being self-reliant and governing ourselves from someone who lives by these ideas and helps create new technology for Bitcoin and crypto. The future is happening now, and you won't want to miss it! Edan Yago: https://twitter.com/EdanYago ►► Sponsored by iTrust Capital Invest in Bitcoin, Crypto Assets & Gold with Your IRA Using iTrust Capital. 👉 https://bit.ly/itrust-scott ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/ ►► OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $10,000! 👉 https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/ ►►NORD VPN GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets ►►COINROUTES TRADE SPOT & DERIVATIVES ACROSS CEFI AND DEFI USING YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS WITH THIS ADVANCED ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM. SAVE TONS OF MONEY ON TRADING FEES LIKE THE PROS! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c #Bitcoin #Crypto #Future Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 0:55 Shady super coders 2:56 iTrustCapital 3:54 Bitcoin vs other blockchains 7:18 Bitcoin space is huge 9:48 What Edan Yago is building 14:38 Bitcoin ETFs: good or bad? 17:58 Self sovereignty & self sufficiency 20:18 How Edan Yago lives a Bitcoin life 23:18 Silk Road 27:10 The world’s most bullish case for Bitcoin 31:48 Gaming on Bitcoin 34:53 The future of Ethereum and Solana 37:03 Governance 39:48 The return of city states 42:58 DAO 47:13 Neuralink 48:08 Technology trade off 49:38 A grand awakening 53:48 The El Salvador case 57:38 The true genius of Satoshi 59:38 Wrap up The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

What did Elizabeth Warren calls you guys? Shady super coders? You shady super coders. Hey, you kids, you know, with the skateboard. You and me, right? The old guys. But why was your life so easy? World domination. Simple goal. As being opposed to... You see? To literally just got fireworks to go off when you were talking. It was so compelling. That was the best thing that's ever happened on one of my podcasts.

I'm going to keep this introduction simple. This conversation is the most bullish case for Bitcoin ever presented from one of the greatest thinkers and builders in the Bitcoin space, Adan Yago. You do not want to miss this. So Bitcoin was supposed to be digital gold and really boring. But now all of a sudden, you guys, you, what did Elizabeth Warren call you guys? Shady super coders? You shady super coders are out here trying to build everything on the other chains on Bitcoin.

Why? Well, why? First of all, because we can. And you know how builders are. But more importantly, because Bitcoin is like the 900-pound gorilla. It's the Godzilla of crypto. It's the most secure. It's the only one that we can be sure is going to be here in five years, in 10 years for our children and our grandchildren.

And if you want to build something significant and real, you want to build on the one chain that is going to stick around. I call Bitcoin not software, not hardware, but something new, permaware, because it's permanent in a way that nothing else like it is. And not only that, it's the most secure, not just because of Bitcoin proof of work, but also because it's got really, really simple code, right? I mean, there's nobody in the world who understands how Ethereum works anymore. Its code has just? I mean, there's nobody in the world who understands how Ethereum works anymore. Its code has just become this massive, like spaghetti pile that no single person understands. Bitcoin, despite the fact that it's even older, because it's maintained simplicity,

is well understood and can be grossed by any given individual. And so there's hundreds of individuals who fully understand Bitcoin. That's a very powerful advantage. And so for a lot of developers, and I'm seeing more and more developers now saying, wow, okay, it looks like the tools to build anything on Bitcoin are coming possible. It basically turns Ethereum into a testnet for Bitcoin. That's exactly how a lot of people are describing it now

as a testnet for Bitcoin. But are there advantages to any of these other chains? Or are they effectively just good places to experiment before you go build it on the granddaddy and build it on Bitcoin? I've been super impressed by what people have built on, let's say, Ethereum. Crypto investors in the United States face some major challenges. One of them is that there's almost no way to get exposure to the asset class inside of your traditional investment vehicles. The other thing is the taxes. They are absolutely atrocious. What if I told you there was a way to solve both of these problems? Well, there is, and it's with a self-directed IRA

from I Trust Capital. Guys, not only can you open a new self-directed IRA and fund it with the limits each year, but you can actually convert over from your 401k, your Roth IRA, any other IRA that you already have, and you can do that tax-free, just transferring over the balance. And then you can go to cash, buy as much Bitcoin than you want and not pay taxes when you sell it. You absolutely have to try this if you are in the United States. Use the link down below. It's bit.ly slash itrust-scott. That's B-I-T dot L-Y slash I-T-R-U-S-T dash S-C-O-T-T. You have to try this now. So let me take a step back, right? So I think a lot of people have gotten used to thinking about Bitcoin as purely digital gold. And that's the only thing it will ever be. And sort of like boomer tech doesn't change.

So what's changed, right? What's changed is that we now have a race between a bunch of different projects to build roll-ups on Bitcoin. And what these roll-ups can do is they can extend what Bitcoin is able to do. You can have basically infinite scalability. You can build any code. You can have basically infinite scalability. You can

build any code. You can have Solana-like speed on Bitcoin, low-cost transactions, maybe too free, too cheap to meter, and any kind of smart contract you want. And what makes this possible is actually technology that was built on Ethereum. So the whole paradigm of building roll-ups, the ability to take sort of a chain which doesn't have its own consensus, take all of those transactions, wrap them up or roll them up into a proof, embed that proof into another chain, and then as a result, all of those transactions become transactions in that chain. That was something that was invented by Ethereum. And so I have a huge amount of respect for Ethereum. Another thing that was invented on Ethereum, for example, is DeFi, right?

The ability to start transacting without going to FTX, without going to Celsius, without going to Voyager. That is really important. We just learned how important it is to maintain control and self-custody of your coins. So there's been a huge amount of innovation there. But at the same time, because Ethereum was trying to move fast and break things to get there as quickly as possible, what's happened is they've introduced proof of stake, which is far less secure and sort of creates centralization. They've got massive spaghetti code. They're slower now than Solana and less secure than Bitcoin. They're sort of stuck in this middle world.

And suddenly Bitcoin is able to absorb all of that technology. And it reminds me, you know, back in the old days of Bitcoin, we always used to say any technology that can be useful to Bitcoin will be adopted by Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the apex predator. And it just looks like that was totally true. So when we say it's a test net, there's all these bad ideas that also get washed out and the best ideas arrive and people run with them in the Bitcoin space. So Ordinals obviously began this conversation to some degree, at least in this cycle, maybe for the more mainstream

audience. All of a sudden we got NFTs on Bitcoin, Then BRC20 tokens. All of a sudden we got meme coins on Bitcoin, right? I'm always a proponent of seeing what can be built, seeing what happens. I love the experiment. Not the opinion of a lot of people who are super passionate about Bitcoin, right? So there's sort of been this bipolarity in the Bitcoin community of those who think things should never change. The, hey, you kids get off my lawn, boomer crowd. And then the young hip hop listening kids blasting music, driving past the house that that boomer is very angry at, who are building everything and bringing all the things those boomers hate to Bitcoin. You're kind of the latter, I guess, a little bit.

Although you were building on Bitcoin long before this. I'm one of the old guys of the latter, I guess a little bit. Although you were building on Bitcoin long before this. I'm one of the old guys of the latter. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say, you're like the meme of Steve Buscemi. Hey, you kids, you know, with the skateboard. You and me, right? The old guys. But, you know, how do we deal with that sort of bipolarity? Or do you think that the boomer crowd just gets marginalized because it's unstoppable? Oh, I mean, like, I don't call them maxis, right? I call them the Bitcoin nannies. They're like, no, you can't have tokens. I don't like tokens. No, you can't have rollups. No, you can't have NFTs. You know, they want to point fingers at everyone and tell everyone that they're an attack

on Bitcoin and a scam. And for a while, they had power in Bitcoin because basically Bitcoin was like 100, like maybe 100 at most influencers who had podcasts. And every week you would listen to this Bitcoin podcast and they would be talking about exactly the same thing they were talking about with exactly the same guests that they spoke about last week. Inflation and the Fed and stock to flow and all that stuff and it's because that we we just the developers the builders we didn't have the tools to go out and and build them bitcoin so yeah i've been building a bitcoin for a long time and i was like okay i'm going to build whatever i can um but most people were like okay yeah it's just too hard. Now that's changed. The Bitcoin nannies, they've been shown to be wrong. They've become boring. No one wants to listen to them anymore.

There's way more exciting stuff happening. And really, their opinion doesn't matter because everything that's being built in Bitcoin right now is permissions. We don't need a fork. We don't need to change the Bitcoin code. We figured out how to route around them. And it was to a great extent because of Taproot. Taproot opened the door to all of this stuff. And then Casey came in with Ordinals and was like, hey, we can do NFTs. And then someone came in

and was like, okay, we can do tokens. And now we're doing rollups. And it's just, I think people don't realize what they, how big, this is like a reboot of the entire crypto space because we had the crypto space now for close to 15 years and the one thing that's been true is bitcoin is big but only does one thing and then there's everything else which is exciting and feature-rich but sort of like there's like you know a big battle between them and now we've got this new situation which is emerging this year where bitcoin is the biggest and it gets to look at everything that's been built out there and just pick and choose the best stuff and bring it all over. And so if you think of DeFi and Ethereum's big, Bitcoin is three times the size of Ethereum

and it's got no DeFi. The projects that are building DeFi and Bitcoin now are going to be three times the size of Aave and they're going to do it in a year. I don't think anyone's prepared for what's about to happen. So what are you building then? Because you said you have the ability to pick and choose. That's got to be like a kid in the candy store, but you can't do it all at once, unless you can create a platform where you can do all of those things. But let's talk specifically about what you're building now. Well, I mean, you know, I've been working on Sovereign for three years, right? And we three years ago, we said this is going to happen. And so what we started doing is we started building to this moment for three years so that we would have a head start over everyone.

So we've built out DeFi for Bitcoin. We've built up we've done billions of dollars in trade, hundreds of millions of dollars in lending. We've built out Bitcoin stablecoins. We've built out decentralized governance tools. We've built out NFTs and we've been working. We put out some of the first papers and certainly the most influential papers on how to do Bitcoin rollups. And so this is what we've been doing. We've been building towards this moment for three years and we're going to introduce rollups. And so this is what we've been doing. We've been building towards this moment for three years and we're going to introduce roll-ups. We've helped a bunch of other teams build up their own projects. We're going to create an ecosystem on Bitcoin. And for us, that's sort of like our current goal is to do that, is to bring roll-ups, to bring DeFi, to bring

decentralization and way more self-sovereignty to Bitcoiners. And our ultimate goal is to make sure that we build everything in Bitcoin, that the world will get built in Bitcoin. World domination. Simple goal. Replace the existing financial system. Well, exactly. But the thing is, that was the promise of Bitcoin from the beginning. Yeah. But as you've admitted, you couldn't really do that back then. And nobody was sure that you ever would be able to. Right. Because Taproot really, as you said, introduced that. So Bitcoin in itself is a financial system, but it was never going to have all of the tools that you needed for a full wholesale replacement. Well, there was something kind of ridiculous about it, right?

I mean, people kept on talking about Bitcoin as money, as currency, but a currency needs an economy. Otherwise, where are people using this currency, right? And you look at Bitcoin, it's just become this thing that people like huddle like dragons in their wallets and never touch. It's not a currency. It's sort of like a dwarven gold, right? For it to become a currency,

it needs to have a native economy. And so that's what we're trying to build. We're trying to... So actually the project that we're, you know, we call it Bitcoin OS. We're trying to turn Bitcoin into an operating system upon which we can build finance,

upon which we can build governance, upon which we can build a new world, right? So Bitcoin moves from just being Bitcoin digital gold to Bitcoin OS, the operating system for the world. I think we've been having these conversations for three years as I'm thinking back about it. I'm not sure when we did our first podcast, but it had to be 2021 or late 2020. And you did believe in all of these ideas back then. But you also did, I think, still have a bit more of that maximalist mentality where Bitcoin itself could become a global reserve currency and could integrate into the greater financial system. Now it sounds like we're going

for a full replacement, right? And maxis forever have been saying that basically the existing systems would come to Bitcoin. They wouldn't even need to be built. Like Bitcoin would just become the global reserve currency and things would become denominated in Bitcoin. Sounds like there's a shift sort of in that ethos. I don't think I ever believed that. Maybe you didn't. Yeah. I mean, I think I remember even being with you on like a call like this and saying, look in 1937, the U S confiscated everyone's gold. Right. And they were able to do that because people held gold in banks.

And so they just sent a bunch of letters to the banks and they were like, Hey, all that gold, you guys have it. It's ours now. So, and here we are like two weeks, it feels like forever, but I think it was like two or three weeks ago. I don't think it's even three weeks.

We've launched an ETF. And so what are, what everyone doing? Everyone's going and taking their dollars and converting them into these IOUs for Bitcoin, which are held at financial institutions and banks. And all of that Bitcoin is potentially seizable. My view is that the people who are really empowered, that the people who are really sovereign and the real heroes of this sort of new world that we're building are the people who maintain control themselves, the people who use DeFi, the people who use their own wallets, the people who don't keep funds in banks and ETFs and exchanges. And they're safer. They end up doing better financially,

and they're also doing better for the world. And so unless we build the opportunity to do that, and to do that profitably with Bitcoin, Bitcoin never becomes what we want it to become. Do you view then the ETFs as a net positive or a net negative for Bitcoin? So I just spoke against the ETFs, but I think it's a net positive. I think it's a net positive because it raises awareness. It raises legitimacy. It gets more people involved. It increases the economic, the value, which is the economic engine of all of this. And it doesn't stop us from carving out our own freedom. And that's the big deal, right? One of the interesting things is

a lot of people have sort of been posting threads about how there's like ETFs or like a risk to Bitcoin because BlackRock will have all the Bitcoin and then they will fork Bitcoin to turn it into a compliant chain and say, all right, this is the new Bitcoin. And everyone will go along with them because they've got all of the money.

But roll-ups change that. The best defense that we have against that ever happening are roll-ups. Because what happens with roll-ups is if we build out a whole bunch of economic value on these roll-ups, and these roll-ups point to Bitcoin, basically it moves all of that value away from just the token and into the integrations. And then BlackRock would not just

have to fork Bitcoin, they would have to fork all of the roll-ups as well. And, you know, good luck with that. That's definitely not going to happen. Way too decentralized. And so this is a massive boost to the decentralization of Bitcoin. And it basically makes Bitcoin unforkable. Maybe I'm naive, but I view it sort of from the marketing perspective as a huge sales funnel. And anything that gets more people in at the top of the funnel is eventually going to bring them down and narrow it down. And we're going to get more people who are self-sovereign, who find out about self-custody, decide to go down that rabbit hole, find the best solution for themselves. So yeah, let's say millions of people come in through the ETF.

If hundreds of thousands of those eventually buy real Bitcoin and self-custody it, then the ETF has done its job, in my opinion. Yeah, I totally agree. I think of it as, I sometimes refer to it as the ladder of sovereignty. You start out, you've got all your money in a bank, you're super unself-sovereign. And then you slowly figure out, okay, actually, maybe, you know, I can buy some Bitcoin, but you keep it on Coinbase. And then you figure out how to hold it in your own wallet. And then you figure out how to put it to use. And then you figure out how to use Bitcoin back stable coins and how to borrow against your Bitcoin. So you can actually

spend the money without overselling the Bitcoin. And then you end up like me, some kind of crazy mountain guy who's growing his own food and has solar panels and sort of, yeah. And then, all right, I'm 90% off grid. But you don't have to go all the way, right? You can just basically hold your own Bitcoin and you're 90% of the way there. And so I think this is just bringing, we are in a process which is going to take a long time. It's basically a generation where we're changing the way people think. We're reintroducing the idea of self-sufficiency. We're reintroducing the idea

of responsibility for your own life. And we have to do this now because the governments are broke, right? Their debt to GDP ratio is insane. They're not going to be able to pay off their debts. Everyone who thinks he's got a retirement account is going to find that it's not worth anything or that it gets confiscated. Everyone who's relying on welfare checks is going to figure out that they're going to disappear. Anyone who's an employee and is trying to figure out like, how am I earning so much money? Like I know so many people who are like top earners, right? They're in the top decile of earners and they're living paycheck to paycheck because they're paying half of that in taxes.

And then they're paying VAT on top of that. And they're paying capital gains on top of that. And they've got like nothing. And then the cost of housing because the government goes up and the cost of hospitals and medical, like somehow you're just getting eaten alive. So I think we have no choice. We have to figure out how to become self-sufficient, how to be responsible for our choices. And so I think I've said this to you before. I think every generation gets an opportunity to make the one right choice. And then if you just do that, everything else falls into place.

For our grandparents' generation, if you just got a university degree, you were set for life. It didn't matter what other nonsense. You could have been a drinker. You could have been a gambler. We're fine. For our parents' generation, if you just bought a house and sat on it, paid your mortgage for 30 years, you're a millionaire today. And for us, you just need to buy Bitcoin, stick it somewhere where people can't take it from you, and that's it. And your children are going to be like, why was your life so easy?

Yeah. But it's interesting because it still comes back to this one simple decision, which is buy Bitcoin. But then there's this endless rabbit hole of what you guys are building and what can happen. So let's talk about what this actually means if the path of government is as you described. How does this become a replacement? What's the pathway? How will people use this in their everyday life in your vision to opt out of that system or if that system dies to have one that they can even participate in? I think I can use myself as an example.

I don't live in a country in which I'm a citizen. I move around all the time. I have a place where I'm basically self-sufficient. I don't have a retirement account. I don't, you know, rely on welfare or unemployment. And I mostly don't pay taxes because I don't have a tax residency anywhere. So I exist in this world, but I'm not really related to the structures that most people consider.

Like, I don't have a government. I don't know. I'm disconnected from that stuff. And the reason I'm able to do that, and I basically have no fiat, right? I have just enough fiat to pay for day-to-day expenses. So the reason I'm able to do that is because my savings are in Bitcoin. The way I make my money or the business that I work with isn't even a corporation. It's a DAO.

It's completely governed by Bitcoin. We call it the Bitocracy. It's sort of governed by that. My community are people like you, people who work with me. Some of them, I've never met them in real life. I don't know what they look like because they're anons. So I'm an extreme case today, but what I'm doing in the way that I live my life is becoming easier and easier and easier. And it opens a path of freedom to so many people. So then you start asking yourself, all right, but what about, you know, all of the things like a normal person systems of, okay, but I own a house and also I have like a bicycle. What if someone tries to steal my bicycle? Like I'm going to need the government, right? So I think what's going to happen is all of the major assets, houses, real estate, bonds, stocks, all of this is ultimately going to get written to the blockchain. And once it's

written to the blockchain, once it's tokenized, it basically gets governed by the blockchain. So it basically becomes a token. So your house right now, if you want to sell, you have to get the deed written up. You go to the land registry, right? That land registry is going to get put on a blockchain. And which blockchain are they going to choose? They're going to choose the most secure. It's going to be on Bitcoin.

And then transfers will happen as automatically as any token transfer. And you'll be able to take your house. You'll be able to put it into a lending pool. And you'll be able to take your house. You'll be able to put it into a lending pool and you'll be able to borrow against it. And you'll be able to borrow from people who exist in a borderless world anywhere in the world. And we're going to see that happen. And basically all of the big assets are going to get taken care of that way. And they won't need to be governed by governments. They won't have the constrictions of border-based regulations.

But what about the more difficult case? What about, you know, I'm trying to do a business deal with someone or someone tries to steal my bicycle? Well, for that answer, I'm going to go all the way back to the very earliest days of Bitcoin, which is the Silk Road. The Silk Road is just this mind-blowing thing that humanity built. Because you had like the skeeviest people in the world, drug dealers, and the people who are buying drugs from them, existing across the world, right? And they were doing deals, buying and selling, and no one was cheating anyone. And the reason they weren't cheating anyone was because the funds were held in escrow, because there was a decentralized group of people who were doing arbitration if there was any

dispute. And there was a way to punish people economically if they did something silly. And it turns out that that free market, the freest market we ever had, just works. And I suspect that that's exactly what we're going to evolve into. It's not going to happen immediately, but it's the world our children will live in. It will be a much more peaceful world because it will be Silk Road for everything. Do you think you could have pulled this all off if you were an American? Well, I think it's harder for Americans. And I'm sorry that you're one.

Thank you. I'm thinking I've lived in America. I'm thinking of maybe living there some more. I'm never going to become an American citizen because holy shit. Because why? But I mean, you've got outs. There's Puerto Rico. There's the ability to take your money and put them in an offshore company or an offshore trust. And there's Bitcoin. You hold Bitcoin. It doesn't exist anywhere. So I mean, like for day-to-day things, you're kind of stuck. But for what your children will inherit from you, for your rainy day fund, for your World War III security sort of satchel, you don't rely on anyone.

Of course. Let's take the logic of what you're building and all of this a bit further because you still do need some sort of bank account or some way to convert to fiat so that you can go to the store and you can buy those groceries if you're not self-sufficient. For someone who's gone 25% of the way but isn't fully self-sufficient, but they believe in this and their government collapses, but you still need to go to the grocery store and buy bread, right? How do you then get to fiat? What if they've banned your Coinbase account and there's no way to convert, right? So, I mean, there's obviously huge roadblocks here still.

Well, I mean, there's more and more wallets or sort of providers of cards where you can just keep your funds in like cryptocurrency and it will auto-convert every time you make the purchase. I've been trying to work on a project which would allow people actually to just hold their Bitcoin and to borrow dollars against the Bitcoin. So they wouldn't even be spending money that they were having. They would just be able to borrow against that to spend. And I think the fact that we have the ETF now makes it much, much harder for them to ban for Bitcoin. Maybe for some of the other things.

But for Bitcoin, it becomes very hard to say, oh yeah, you can own the ETF, but you can't borrow against it or you can't have a credit card attached to that, to the same asset. Very difficult. You know, we're probably going to see that continue. And then a few years down the line, you know, X, you know,

Twitter is trying to become a payment system. We're seeing a convergence of more and more of digital social media and payments. And more and more people just have crypto wallets. I think once you hit about 250 million people, that's critical mass of people who are just walking around with a crypto wallet in their phone. It's going to become worthwhile for everyone to just accept those payments because it'll reduce friction for them to get customers. And then they don't be just direct. So let's say I want to title this podcast, the world's most bullish case for Bitcoin. Let's make the case because it'll be a really good clickbait title if we can get there. Listen, we're building all of these things. There's an ETF,

number go up. We're all excited about the prospects of a halving cycle and $237,500 Bitcoin. Okay, those are prices. But what's the most bullish case right now for Bitcoin beyond just price appreciation? All right. So I actually want to start with you. Just like, let's start with this year. What do we have? We've got ETF. We've got halving. We've got new token protocols, right? So runes is coming.

Taproot assets is coming. So we've got tokens now. We've got NFTs. We've got roll-ups, which are bringing the ability to build anything. Bitcoin in 2024 is going to have a miracle year. It's going to be like nothing we've ever experienced before. So all of that's happening.

At the same time, America has never seemed so weak. It doesn't seem to be able to operate forcefully in the Middle East. It's bogged down. It's massively over-indebted. It can't really bring down inflation. And everyone has lost trust in governments and in institutions and in the banks. Since like 2008, everyone's just been losing trust and trust has been plummeting. And you take those things together and you realize, okay, we've got this asset, which is now being adopted by countries and being adopted by large corporations and has an ETF and has the ability to act as an operating

system for us to build anything on top of it. And you've got people who are becoming increasingly digital, increasingly mobile, an entire generation who are doing this, especially after they learned that they can live anywhere and work anywhere with COVID. And you tie that together with the crumbling of the institutions. it's the perfect setup. Like nothing has happened over the last few years to reduce the case in Bitcoin. Everything that people have been saying about Bitcoin has only accelerated at a rate

I didn't think we would get this far this quickly. And the weird thing is it could happen overnight, right? You could have a major, you could have like the debt ceiling not get passed in the US and suddenly like the financial markets go berserk and nobody knows what to do. And because we're in the middle of a bull run, everyone suddenly got Bitcoin and everything rushes into Bitcoin. Or it could happen three years down the road. There could be a war or there could just be another big bull run and Bitcoin surpasses gold and everyone's like, what? Bitcoin's bigger than gold? Holy shit. It's

so fundamental. And at the same time, you've got countries like the biggest countries in the world, China and Brazil and Russia are trying to get away from the dollar. Right. And then they start transacting in, do you know that right now, Russia is selling oil to China and to India, and the way that China and India are paying them is they're spilling planes like jumbo jets with gold, right? This is not a secure way of transacting, right? One of those planes go down, you lose hundreds of millions of dollars. How long is it going to be before they start saying, actually, let me just click here and you'll get the money, right?

Reviewing the address, A, D, 3, capital, damn, yeah. If you think sending a Bitcoin transaction is stressful, think about sending a jumbo jet with gold, right? So I don't think it's that far away. I think it's crazy close. And, you know, it's like gradually, but suddenly. And interestingly, I think the thing that's going to make it happen or be the catalyst will just be higher prices.

Yeah. I mean, ultimately, yeah, that's the marketing tool. As much as I hate to say that, the thing that's going to make people pay attention, the thing that put it on the CNBC and the Fox tickers and got podcasters talking about it and got Bitcoiners on TV was simply that price went up and people started paying attention. Yeah, but think about what's going to happen now. In this cycle, everything that we've seen before, it's been Bitcoin. Okay, cool. Bitcoin price goes up. But there's all of these shiny tokens. There's all of these shiny DAOs. There's all of these shiny gaming projects and DeFi projects.

And now you're going to have that happen on Bitcoin. Like the marketing for Bitcoin is going to be crazy. The opportunity for upside for people who figure this sort of new narrative out quickly and early is going to be massive. This is a sea change. Bitcoin is going to be doing two things at once. It's going to be absorbing the altcoin world. It's going to be absorbing the altcoin world and it's going to be absorbing the trendfire world, like together.

That's crazy. You talked about gaming. We know that there's all these narratives outside of just ordinals and BRC20 tokens, right? We've had the cycles in other ecosystems, DeFi center and metaverse fall and whatever. Can Bitcoin or things being built on sidechains be fast enough for a AAA game, for example? Yeah. And the reason is you can sort

of modulate with a sidechain how frequently you publish to Bitcoin your proofs. And so you can modulate, so you can say, I'm going to be slightly less, like I'm running Tetris. I don't need to be, you know, Fort Knox secure. Right. But I want to be super, I want to be basically free to use. You can do that. And that's sort of like the trade-off that Solana's made, right? Solana said, look, we've got fewer nodes and they're big and hefty and almost no one can use them, but we're really fast and really cheap. Now imagine you could do that, but you can do it as part of a bigger ecosystem, totally interoperable, no need for bridges. The whole thing is just one system. So there's not the risk of bridges. And you've got way more security because you're built on the most secure system in the world.

How long is it going to take for this to play out? I think we're going to start seeing the first significant roll-ups, maybe even before the middle of this year. I know we're working faster than we've ever worked before because so many people are racing us to the finish line. So that's the level of motivation we have. So I think Sovereign is going to launch Bitcoin OS with a bunch of really cool partners.

I think you've got a bunch of other projects like Chainway and Alpen Labs and Kesar, Taproot Wizards that have been making a lot of noise. So there's a lot of projects working on this. And I think we start getting sort of like that ability to have like really cheap modularity probably by the end of the year or middle of next year. So this is going to happen really fast. So in this most bullish case for Bitcoin, I think obviously it sucks the air out of the room, as you said, because it would be the largest ecosystem, the most secure. What happens

to the Ethereums and Solanas and the other chains of the world if this really fulfills its full promise? Well, my thesis has always been that they are going to become like niche ecosystems, ultimately. I don't think it happens overnight. I think I've been kind of surprised how much Solana has sort of managed to hurt the Ethereum narrative. I didn't expect that to happen, especially because Ethereum is getting roll-ups now as well. So it should be a good year for it. Especially because Solana was dead a year ago. Yeah, exactly. So I think that's really impressive.

But it also tells you just how quickly narratives can change and how narratives can die real quick. Now it can come back. And I expect, you know, 10 years from now, I expect this still to be in Ethereum and I expect it to still have like $100 billion of value. It's just that everything else would have grown so much bigger. I think that makes sense. Do you think that we will be seeing people use them all interoperably

still at that point? You kind of mentioned bridges. I mean, it's nothing but hacks and clunky UX and UI still even in this cycle. Or will there just be no reason to bridge back from Bitcoin to Ethereum or Solana? A one-way bridge. There are theoretically sort of less risky ways to bridge and we might start seeing them. I think with Ethereum, there's going to be sort of like, you know, a culture that develops around it probably where people become sort of Ethereum loyalists.

Maybe it becomes like the woke chain or maybe it becomes like the, you or maybe it becomes like the, the, you know, yeah, whatever. Right. So I think there'll always be a little bit of back and forth. If you look, just look at Bitcoin dominance, it's sort of never really like, you know, it's always, it manages to, you know, go to up to, you know, somewhere between, you know, 40 and 70%, right. Ethereum has never really managed to surpass 20%.

And I think that's, you know, and so I think it's, I think it's not going to be a fast process. I think we're talking five or 10 years. I do think that there's going to be like this general decline in its dominance. I want to talk about governments a bit more. And this is a topic that you and I have certainly covered quite a few times in the past. But you're very passionate about decentralized governance also with government, not simply just with your tokens, right? We've talked in the past about looking for land in certain countries where you could effectively

carve out your own country that is operated by a DAO, how much of that would be empowered by this system? And how far could that theoretically be away if you're still passionate about it, which I assume you are? Look, my ultimate goal for me and mostly for my children, the kind of world I want to leave behind is I want to leave behind a world which we struggle even to imagine in terms of, I want there to be things that we think are paradoxical. We today think of individualism as being opposed to... You see? Even Zoom literally just got fireworks to go off when you were talking. It was so compelling.

For the people listening, he literally just fireworks went off in the back of his screen. Continue. All right. It's the best thing that's ever happened to one of my podcasts. People think about individualism as being opposed to community. And I think that's because governments have interjected themselves between the individual and community. It used to be you'd go to church or you'd have your civic group, or you'd have, you know, your free masons or gentlemen's club or whatever. And there was be a way for you to connect with your community and

you would do charity work and you would have, you know, a role to play in community. And the government basically came in and said, look, we're going to do education and we're going to do welfare. And we're going to take care of, you know, the policing and the firemen and everything. And this all happened over the last 200 years. People think it's been like this forever, but it hasn't. And so I think people have become atomized by, by this process. And so what I've, what I, the world that I would like to be in is a world where people have all of the individual power that you can imagine, like everything I just spoke about. And exactly because of that, they say, okay, now I need to find a community. I need to find people who think like me.

And, you know, I need to, and have my shared values. And I don't want, you know, to wake up every day and doom scroll Twitter and feel like the world is just full of assholes who want to shout at each other. I want to be able to meet people in real life and have shared values with them and raise kids with them. And I think the way we do that is we create these opt-in societies. And I'm convinced it's going to happen.

Governments are broke. All of the money is being sucked into Bitcoin. And what's going to happen. Governments are broke. All of the money is being sucked into Bitcoin. And what's going to happen? And, you know, I've been looking for, you know, I've been looking for these opportunities. And we're starting to see some of them emerge. Like in Honduras, there's Prospera, right? It's basically a free city, right? Poor country basically said, here, like, you know, here here's some land try to build freedom and and and

if you go to prosper today you can get medical treatments you can't get anywhere else i'll give you an example you know how you have to brush your teeth the reason you have to brush your teeth is because there's bacteria that if you have any sugar in what you're eating they'll eat the they'll take that and they'll turn it into acid right So they've genetically re-engineered these bacteria to turn it into alcohol. Micro amounts of alcohol that won't impact you, but as a result, you don't need to rot your teeth. So I can imagine a situation. I don't even need to imagine it anymore. Like my kids are never going to have to brush their teeth.

They're just going to have this bacteria replaced, right? Today it costs $20,000, but in a few years it will be, you know, a couple of hundred dollars. And this was pioneered in a free city because they didn't have the, and they don't have like the same regulatory regulation.

So we're just going to see little communities pop up like this. And these communities are going to draw in like the best and the brightest because those are the people who are most free. And they're just going to become the economic engine of the world. And then at that point, it's basically inevitable.

And so I think we're going to see the return of city-states. So Atlas shrugged. Gulch, gulch. I mean, that's what we're talking about here. Yeah, except gulch, gulch was hiding. This is people saying, like, we want to engage with the world. We're going to be part of the world.

I mean, think about the American community, like the expats living in Puerto Rico, right? These are kind of stateless people. They've come together. They formed their own community. They're living in not a low regulation environment, but a less regulation environment. And you go there and you meet those people and they've got their own clubs and they've you know and they're starting to give back to their local communities because they don't want like everyone to hate them and so there's like a real bonds being created there i think this is this is

inevitable and then the question becomes how do how do people govern themselves well i mean you'll be able to leave any of these societies really instantly. So these societies will have to offer you the best possible service. Will it be like Singapore times 10 or Dubai times 10? And they'll basically become like these for-profit businesses where they're all competing for you. They're like trying to be the best possible place for you to live because they are not their own countries. Because I don't think they're ever going to become their own countries their countries will slowly wither away but these won't be countries they'll be run like daos they'll be run like daos you'll sign contracts

with them which are basically smart contracts and they will have obligations towards you in just the same way that a dao has and so all of this shitty experimentation that we're doing with daos right now 90 of which ends in tears the 10 that we're learning that doesn't end in tears is going to power the future. So who takes out the trash and cleans the toilets in this society? The service providers. What you might ask yourself is, okay, but what happens to poor people? That's really the core of that question. Right. Yes. One of the most astounding things that people don't recognize is economists economists disagree on everything on every single thing how do you create uh anything right but there is one

thing which study after study after study of economists have come to consensus on which is that if you allowed everyone to live under productive regimes today, and there are two ways you could do it. Either give them a productive regime or you allow them to move to Europe and America, global GDP would double overnight. Why are people in Mexico poorer than people in the US? Why are people in Africa poorer than people in Europe? They don't have property rights. They don't have good governance. And there are other things as well,

but those are the primary drivers. And so if you basically have a system which is able to give everyone access to property rights, which is basically what Bitcoin is, it's property rights for everyone. And DAOs are governance for everyone. And you force those DAOs to be really, really good because they're constantly competing with each other. Then you basically have good governance for everyone. And then you combine that with the fact that we have AI, we have technological improvements. You allow an explosion of productivity. So my basic answer to you is we'll become more productive and we will be much less rich, much less poor. But my even bigger answer is everyone in the world,

everyone can afford Coca-Cola. And when governance, good governance gets privatized, everyone will be able to afford that as well. Or we'll just have Elon Musk's future robotic army clean our toilets. I mean, you talked about AI. It's a joke, but you talked about AI, and I think that technology will probably handle a lot of those problems in theory. I mean, look, technology is a trade-off. There are going to be new problems created by the technology

as well, of course. And that's why I think a trade-off. There are going to be new problems created by the technology as well. Of course. And that's why I think community is so important. And it's why being part of a community like sovereign is so important to me. I don't want to be a victim of Elon Musk's AI robot army. And the only way we avoid that is by coming together and protecting, you know, having some way to have strength in numbers, have strength in togetherness.

And as isolated individuals, which is what a lot of us are right now, we're actually quite weak. Going back to those Bitcoin maxis, you know, the toxic people who don't have any friends. I know them well. They're quite weak. They're fragilizing themselves. You rely, we all rely on everyone for our food and health care and you know the education of our children and making sure there's some you know ability for us to get on a plane you know i i recently started to learn to fly because i want to be able to do it myself but you know i'm my private plane is never going to take me as far as a jumbo jet right so we're super reliant on other people and i think

if we embrace that and combine it with like individual sovereignty we're going to create a much better world so you're not going to get a neural link uh chip in your brain that's going to give you free starlink internet and help you drive your tesla with your brain and control your robot service i have starlink internet because i want to be off grid, but, but I'm not, the only Neuralink that I would work use is going to be open source. Look, my, my sort of two, first two startups and what I studied at university was neuroscience. I'm, and that was because like I had, I, you know, I was way too early,

but that was my vision. It was like, Holy shit, imagine being able to plug my brain into the internet. So I think that's ultimately going to happen as well, but I'm never going to stick Facebook or Tesla directly into my brain. Zuckerberg's in your brain when you're sleeping, telling you to check out his new Instagram ads. Yeah, no, that's not favorable out his new Instagram ads. Yeah, no, that's not favorable. You said something interesting. You said that all technology comes with a trade-off. Is that true of Bitcoin as well? Yeah, definitely. I'll tell you what

the trade-off is. The trade-off is we don't have the ability to get rid of people we don't like. Bitcoin is for enemies. So, you know, Russia invades Ukraine, the US can say, yoink, we're taking your $300 billion. It doesn't work. So I think the trade off is small. But we don't have the ability to do that anymore. We have to accept that bad actors out there. And for individuals, what that means is you need to take a lot more personal responsibility. No one's going to secure your Bitcoin for you. You have to do it yourself. And that is a concept that a lot of us... Think about all the people who get screwed in scammy ICOs and follow all of these...

Phishing links and... Yeah, phishing links and... Those people suffer. That's the trade-off. And they suffer more than they need to in part because our society has forgotten how to live without guardrails, right? These people don't know that they're, they've never been exposed. The idea, they've never even been exposed

to the idea of self-sovereignty. Exactly. So, you know, everything they've bought has been sort of regulated and wrapped in cellophane for them. And now they're finally exposed to an extra free market and they're getting fucked. And that is really sad. When was the last time that you think self-sovereignty was even, I won't say a universal principle, but even superficially understood by the masses, the concept, if ever?

Or is this the grand awakening? I think that the age of exploration with sort of the industrial revolution, this weird thing that Zoom's doing is screwed. See, this is why I don't want Zuckerberg in my brain. If I do a thumbs up, will I get a thumb bubble that you just got? You have a cool setting. I don't know.

If you just look at even not that long ago, before World War I, so 100 years ago, there were no passports. There was government expenditure instead of being 50% or 60% of GDP was 10% of GDP. Police were privatized. Firemen were privatized. You paid a fee and basically they would come and they would put out any fire because if, you know, this house burned down, it would affect this house, which belonged to someone who was paying the fee. But then they would charge you for it and you would get screwed. So everyone sort of had like this insurance policy with firemen and churches took care of most welfare if you walk through the streets of london like one in 20 buildings used to be an orphanage because there were a lot

of orphans and and private civic societies were taking care of you know everything from cradle to grave from being born to going to school, to being in a foster home, to where you get buried. And over time, there's been this creep of the government taking control, but our grandparents remembered self-sovereignty. Is there a happy medium? Because that doesn't sound that amazing for a lot of the population either. Is there a certain... I think population either is there i think it was i think it was amazing i think it was amazing not in comparison to where we are now because they didn't have a lot of the creature comforts that we have that's right i mean it was it was not

amazing because they lacked the technological and scientific advances exactly but if you compare that to how life was even 30 years before it it was just like, there's never been progress like that in human history. And so it was amazing. Like people were, were astounded. The world was so optimistic. It's part of the reason that World War I was such a shock to everyone, right? Like everything was going so well. I think it was amazing. I think you would get it today again, but way nicer, right? You would have much better creature comforts, much better medical science. You wouldn't be buying really expensive spices. You'd be buying really expensive NFTs, and that's got a lower carbon footprint.

Like, I think we don't know. Think about how many bullshit jobs there are and how much money is wasted in bureaucracy, not just government bureaucracy, all kinds, right? And how much energy is wasted by people in shitty social media, you know, just doom-scrolling. We have so much potential that is currently untapped. It's tragic. Is this a natural long-term pendulum swing?

Do you think, because it feels like at this point in time with the rise of socialism, populism, define it however you want, that we are seeing people once again aware of the problems of government that perhaps they had blinders onto for decades. Right? I mean, or do you think it only goes, you obviously don't believe it just goes in one direction, that the government gets bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, more powerful, and that never ends. Right? Eventually, people come with the torches and pitchforks in every single one of those societies.

So are we at torches and pitchforks? Or is Bitcoin giving us the ability to peacefully transition back with the pendulum swing? That's what I think. I think we don't ever get to the torches and pitchforks. I think people are just going to opt out. And that's the secret. The secret is the fact that we have an alternative that people can just opt out in gives us not just more freedom and more opportunity, but it means that the violence that could potentially

have happened without Bitcoin doesn't have to happen and probably won't. Have you been to El Salvador since they made Bitcoin legal tender? I haven't, no. Me either. I keep meaning to go and something gets in my way. Is that the happy medium? A nation state that adopts Bitcoin? Is that a stepping stone?

Yeah, I think that's a stepping stone at best. Look, I mean, nation states are going to remain but but think about think about the difference between like el salvador's got a very energetic and seemingly intelligent president who's taken on a lot of dictatorial powers but seems to be doing right now well with them. Will that last? I don't know. If he stays in power too long, he will probably get corrupted. But it can work really well. The other reason it can likely work well is because people in El Salvador can relatively easy go elsewhere. And because they're trying to attract talent. So they have to stay good.

They have to stay competitive. And I think that's the key. We need to get these jurisdictions to compete amongst themselves. And the more we can get sort of more and more jurisdictions, even small ones like the city, you know, free zones that I've been talking about available, the more choices you get and then the more you're empowered. There's two ways of thinking about political empowerment.

There's voice and there's exit. And we almost always today think about voice because that's what they want us to think about, right? Your voice is you can vote or you can complain or you can protest. But exit means, ah, you know, see you guys. I'm going over here. I'm doing something different. And it's much more powerful because they can't stop it. And it's definitive. It's interesting because I'm remembering that Bitcoin 2021 at Mano Wynwood, which was a massive shit show because twice as many people as could fit showed up, was when they made that El Salvador announcement. And that's when I first met you in person sitting on a picnic bench. Oh, yeah, that's right.

We had talked many times before, but that was the first time that I think we actually met in person within a day of that El Salvador announcement. That's now almost three years and we haven't seen any more announcements of the sort. Does it surprise you that El Salvador announcement. That's now almost three years and we haven't seen any more announcements of the sort. Does it surprise you that El Salvador has been somewhat the only country? Now, listen, we have a lot of adoption people aren't talking about. Bitcoin mining in multiple countries

like by the government and it's happening, but not in the same way. It doesn't surprise me at all. I was surprised that El Salvador happened. I think it was a canary in the coal mine. It was sort of like a sign of things to come, but it was too early. And El Salvador could do it because El Salvador had a very unique set of circumstances. They used the dollar.

That's the answer. Nobody could attack their currency. Yeah. So I think we will see it. I think the ETF brings it a lot closer. And I wouldn't be surprised this time around to see a couple of governments, not saying they're going to have a coin standard, but saying they're adding it to their treasury reserves. And that wouldn't surprise me at all, this sort of cycle. The central banks is the one that would not surprise me at all,

exactly like you said. You just described that sort of the jumbo jets full of gold. We know that central banks are buying gold, any they can get their hands on all over the world. It's not a big jump to Bitcoin from there, especially when you have BlackRock, Larry Finks of the world out there talking about it being a flight to quality and such. You know, I think that's probably oversold as a driver. I think the nice thing about Bitcoin and everything that has happened up until now is that the individuals, like the mass of people are and will remain in the driver's seat. And they, all of the large institutions are just sort of trying to catch up or keep up at best, but it will be a very important signal and will give a lot of people confidence.

And it will just be another sign that this Bitcoin thing just is refusing to go away and just keeps growing and growing and growing. It's like a little, it's like someone, it's like Satoshi. I think, you know, the genius of Satoshi is understated. It's just crazy how much it's like a mythological figure but one of the most amazing things about satoshi is that he created this little kernel of code and just sort

of like threw it into the world and it contained within itself everything it needed to sort of self-replicate and just start swallowing everything around it it had its own marketing it had its own black hole built into it that is a level of genius it's like i remember in 2013 i wrote an article in coindesk saying that um if i didn't know better i would say that um that the internet became self-aware and after gorging itself on all of the porn it could get its hands on which was all of it um it decided like, what's the next thing I need? Money. Okay, I'll just create it. And it just sort of created this money and was like, here guys, take this because it's clearly sort of, it's hard to look at this thing and not say,

wow, this is the creation of a super intelligence. But Jamie Dimon says that Satoshi, as he pronounced it, Satoshi is going to come back from the grave or out of hiding and he's just going to make as many Bitcoins as he wants and there's no fixed 21 million. What do you say to JD Diamond? It's a great theory. I can make as many Bitcoin as I want. I can fork Bitcoin, you know, until the cows come home, but no one's going to give a shit. And that's the nice thing about consensus. It's really, it really is based on what we want going to give a shit. And that's the nice thing about consensus. It really is based on what we want and what we believe in. And that's, you know, coming back to can BlackRock fork Bitcoin? No. If we have roll-ups and we have greater decentralization of Bitcoin,

we have a lot of economic activity happening and being built in Bitcoin, which we will deliver, it becomes unforkable. Well, we had Bitcoin Satoshi vision. That would be BBV, Bitcoin BlackRock vision, right? Yeah, exactly. I think it'll end up going the same way. Anything I missed, man? Anything you're dying to mention before we go? Yeah, I think I would just say this.

I think what we've spoken about now has been like big picture and it's sort of what drives me. On the day to day, what I care about is the actual progress that we're making. So I think everyone should check out the actual progress that we're making because it's gobsmacking. I've never seen Bitcoin move the way it's moving now. Like the development ecosystem being built around Bitcoin is just going to, I think it's going to shock people. Second, I have to plug the project that I've been working on for three and a half years. Sovereign, I think, has been at the forefront of this,

both in terms of building a truly decentralized community, managing to do everything as open source and with the high level of integrity and building towards this vision instead of building towards next year or in two years. So definitely check that out because you can do things with your Bitcoin with So definitely check that out because you can put your, you can do things with your Bitcoin with Sovereign that you can't do anywhere

else. Third, I want to say, it's always so much fun to be, I love chatting with you and we should do it more frequently. I agree. It's great that we now have spaces as a platform because it's so much easier to get together and talk to people day to day, as opposed to try to schedule this like mammoth hour where zoom is doing fireworks in the background. So we'll definitely keep in better touch. I mean, listen, as a early believer in sovereign, I'm still holding every single token I ever had, even the roller coaster where it was millions of dollars to thousands of dollars

to everything in between, because I want to be there want to be there for the entire ride. So I can talk all day about my support for something, but money talks, right? Yep. Yep. That's true. Money makes the world go around. It does. Well, thank you so much for the time. Everybody will put, obviously, your information in the description and more about sovereign so that people can find it but man always as you said a pleasure to have these conversations you uh you keep me grounded and you keep me inspired so it's great i then i uh want to show up and talk about this stuff again for another uh day five times a day Thanks for that, man. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me.