We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC056: Bitcoin Fear, Uncertainty, & Doubt (FUD) w/ Dan Held (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: December 15, 2021

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 03:01 - Does Bitcoin have any intrinsic value? 07:01 - Bitcoin uses too much energy consumption. 19:47 - Governments can kill Bitcoin. 30:50 - Bitcoin looks and fe...els like a bubble. 34:14 - Bitcoin is too volatile. 36:33 - Bitcoin is manipulated. 37:38 - Regulation in the coming year. 52:36 - What is the lightning network? 57:41 - Alt Coins are everywhere, why does Bitcoin win. *Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Dan Held's twitter Dan Held's newsletter If you're new to the show and don't know where to begin listening, check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Bluehost Fintool PrizePicks Vanta Onramp SimpleMining Fundrise TurboTax Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the podcast where we're talking about Bitcoin. On today's show, I have backed by popular demand, Mr. Dan held. Dan is an early Bitcoin investor, tech entrepreneur, and content creator that has an awesome way of making complex ideas easy to understand. On this episode, we have a holiday special for all your relatives, where we cover the most common Bitcoin fears, uncertainties, and doubts, and offer a thoughtful response. to the questions we know everybody's going to be having this time of the year. So without further delay,
Starting point is 00:00:35 here's my chat with Mr. Dan Held. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey, everyone, welcome to the show. I'm here, like I said, in the intro with Dan Held. Dan, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me, Preston. So, Dan, if your Thanksgiving was anything like my Thanksgiving, we're around the table, there's family friends there. Everybody's talking about various things. And of course, what comes up, Bitcoin comes up. And of course, Aunt Sally, Uncle Joe, everybody's got their opinion as to what this is, what this isn't. Then you start hearing some of these arguments. Now, some of the things that we're
Starting point is 00:01:27 going to cover on this show are things that I've covered on the show in the past. I wanted to sit down with somebody that can explain it very simply. And in a way that anybody can get it. And we can get into the complexity, but like, let's start with some of these fud, the fear, uncertainty, doubt, arguments that you hear from the family members or people that hear about Bitcoin and passing. And let's just go by the numbers on some of these. You know, one, I want to say, even in the held household, we still have Thanksgiving debates about Bitcoin. So even though my parents have been, you know, been orange-pilling them over nine years, they still have questions. So just to let you know, if you're feeling a little frustrated with the parents, feeling a little frustrated. with the extended family, you're not alone.
Starting point is 00:02:10 Join the club. Yeah, it's, you know, there's also those, I remember the first time I brought up Bitcoin it was November 2012. And I think my dad was worried I was selling drugs. At that time, Bitcoin's only association was with Silk Road and money, you know, money laundering and drug dealing. He's a CPA. So he was super worried.
Starting point is 00:02:27 He was like, oh, man, are you like selling drugs online? So it wasn't, it's gotten a lot better since then. There's a lot more clarity and they're orange-pilled. So, but yeah, you've just come back from Thanksgiving. I'm sure there was some frustrating conversations. I'm sure there's a lot of exciting ones. And I'm really excited today to dive in with Preston here because these are, I think, some, you know, with Fudd, I hear these all the time, friends, coworkers, family,
Starting point is 00:02:51 even lovers back, you know, over the years. You know, they were all, they all had questions about Bitcoin. So I've kind of heard all these before and going into Christmas, you're going to get a lot more. Here's the first one, Dan, but it has no intrinsic value. So cover this one. Well, the first thing to say to that is, oh, you mean like the U.S. dollar would be a nice retort. Going in further, if they believe in the existing monetary system, they usually trust in the Federal Reserve. They may not even know what the Federal Reserve is, but, you know, the Federal Reserve states the St. Louis Federal Reserve put together a research report, and they stated, Bitcoin, like the dollar, Swiss franc, Euro, has no intrinsic value.
Starting point is 00:03:31 So if the family member doesn't trust you saying it, you're like, well, certainly you would trust the Federal Reserve. servicing it, right? I think that's probably the most succinct answer to that question of intrinsic value. And Bitcoin's value is being money. It doesn't need to have an alternative use case. I think this confusion stems from kind of like a lack of understanding of kind of like basic monetary theory where a lot of people think about money from like the older form of like gold, a commodity money, where it has an alternative use outside of, you know, having monetary properties. So Bitcoin's already extremely useful as a money. It needs no other. intrinsic sort of value.
Starting point is 00:04:08 One of the things that I was listening to the Sailor series that Robert Breedlove did, and Michael Saylor does an incredible job talking about money as energy. And one of the points that he made that I just, I thought was really profound is if you buy into this idea that money is actually energy, and you look at a system that uses energy in order to min it and also to mine each one of these blocks where all the transaction sit. You can see how Bitcoin is an amazing representation of energy and how it's being stored but without any type of loss associated with that. So like if we were going to send energy to a battery, the battery then has a loss component
Starting point is 00:04:51 to it. Anytime you try to send it to another domain over space and time, it has a loss associated with it. And so when we talk this intrinsic value, like you were saying, I find it interesting that we could maybe make the argument that it's backed by energy, because that's the other thing that you hear. What's it backed by? I've gone down this rabbit hole before. It's a tough one because then you start to get down the proof of work rabbit hole.
Starting point is 00:05:16 Maybe that's what we go do next of. Yeah, yeah. I'm wondering if that much energy is required to make it all work, you know, if that's useful or wasteful. And so it depends on the kind of the narrative path. So I'd like to think about conversations in this way where you go down this conversation, whether you're talking to a millennial, a baby boomer, or the silent generation, or a Zoomer. You have to think about what sort of narratives will fit their mental models, right?
Starting point is 00:05:40 So like, with the baby boomers and older, you're like, hey, it's gold 2.0. Boom. Yeah. Yeah. A really sticky messaging there. With like the Zoomers and those folks, you have to kind of address, like, why just Bitcoin? Like, why not other digital currencies? Because they're already open to the digital world because they grew up with that. And so, yeah, these narrative paths are super interesting, and it's always kind of tricky.
Starting point is 00:06:00 And it depends on who you're talking to, to either open up more doors in the conversation or keep the doors somewhat refined. So in the intrinsic value on it, you could certainly go down the pathway of saying, well, it is backed by energy. And that, you know, that proof of work, the representation of energy is a fundamental reason why it's worth something is because it took work to create it, which makes it stand out against fiat currency, which requires no work. And that's, you know, a good reason why Bitcoin's valuable. But if you open up that pathway, you better
Starting point is 00:06:29 be ready to defend Bitcoin's proof of work. And I think that that's where a lot of people that are maybe trying to explain it to their family and they get themselves in trouble is they'll say something like that. And then maybe they don't really understand the nuances of proof of work versus proof of stake. And then a conversation goes off the rail because their understanding of the breadth of everything that this goes into, I mean, can go miles or miles deep. And if you're not, if you're not, if you're you're not well versed on all those different argument, then it just kind of falls apart and it looks like you really don't know what you're talking about. So let's just pull the thread. Let's keep going down the path, this energy path that we were talking about. So a person might say,
Starting point is 00:07:08 well, it's using too much energy. Don't you find that concerning, Dan? There's a couple different ways you can play this one. One is that all money requires energy. We live in a world that is built of energy based on the laws of thermodynamics. Everything requires energy, breathing, walking, running, gold, fiat currency, and Bitcoin all require energy. And so energy is fundamental to money being useful and money moving around. When we talk about Bitcoin's use of energy, what Bitcoin does is it harnesses real-world energy to protect something in the digital world. And that's what's so special about it is before you could copy-paste different currencies or add a zero in the digital world, there was no way to fundamentally create
Starting point is 00:07:48 costliness or to create unforgeable costiness. Basically, what that means is you can't fake it. And with Bitcoin, you use real-world energy to tie Bitcoin to something real, to something tangible, physical in the real world. And that energy is both in the production of Bitcoin, so the creation of new Bitcoin currency, and also in the protection of the ledger. That's what the, you can kind of think about it, like a big iron branding in these Bitcoin blocks and sort of anchoring them in time sequentially. And so real world energy root the Bitcoin digital world into the physical one. And I think that's like a really, it really ties well for a lot of people when they want some more tangibility to Bitcoin. And so with Bitcoin's proof of work, like, is it useful?
Starting point is 00:08:28 Is it wasteful? You know, what's funny is a lot of people, and I love Nick's, Nick Carter's enthusiasm where he digs into this for those who may not know who Nick is. Nick is a, I would call him a researcher, philosopher in the Bitcoin space. And he's done a great job of comparing Bitcoin's energy consumption to other types of money and also like really, really granularly defining Bitcoin's energy consumption. But the core root of the argument is about usefulness. People don't like Bitcoin's energy consumption because they perceive it being totally useless. But that's what's so funny is that everything in this world using energy is subjective. So is watching the Kardashians wasteful. Some people might think so. Some might not. Clearly the last question. Yes, it is. Yes,
Starting point is 00:09:08 it is. Okay, well, maybe 99% of us, yes. Probably not super useful. But I'm not going to sit here on a pulpit and say, I watch PBS Nova. You know, like I watch space and science shows, and that's a better use of my time. If someone said that at a dinner party, it would be ridiculous, right? People would be like, what are you talking about? Same with Bitcoin. When people worry about Bitcoin's energy consumption, you could easily say, well, are you worried about the dollar's consumption of energy? It requires all the physical buildings. It requires the military. It has giant ships that are powered by nuclear reactors. You have all sorts of other issues as well of like you have huge into huge banks and central banks that are required to keep it all running and printing presses and you have to
Starting point is 00:09:50 print the dollars. And so, you know, most people never think about how much energy is required to keep their current money around. They just see Bitcoin's energy consumption and usually it's given without context and they're like, whoa, that's a lot. So at the core root of it, it's like, hey, Bitcoin uses energy, so does everything else. You could defend how it sources energy, which, like, technically Bitcoin's energy consumption isn't competing with our dishwashers or anything else. Bitcoin miners consume the excess or waste energy across the world. Bitcoin miners are willing to bid for the lowest, they want to bid for the lowest cost energy, and they don't care where that energy is. It could be the middle of Alaska, Antarctica,
Starting point is 00:10:25 down in the bottom of the ocean. It doesn't matter where the energy is as long as the Bitcoin miners can tap into it. People, that's the more nuanced, answer of like, is Bitcoin wasteful? No, it uses energy to protect the Bitcoin network and ensure the unforgeable costiness of newly minted Bitcoin, basically that it requires work and ensures fairness. And you could also talk about it. Well, Bitcoin's actually a green technology because it harnesses all this wasted electricity that would have gone nowhere. But ultimately, the core root of the argument is that people just think Bitcoin's wasteful because they don't like it. And so if you can easily frame it as like, hey, I don't criticize how you use energy. Why would you criticize my usage?
Starting point is 00:11:01 I paid for it. I want to pay for my Bitcoin miner to use energy. Who are you to say? And so, especially if your family member drives like an SUV to be a, you know, a pretty hilarious comparison where you're like, aren't you driving like an expedition outside? So I would some people would consider that wasteful. But yeah, going down that rabbit hole, you typically, the easiest way is to kind of poke fun at the core root of the argument itself, which is around the subjectivity of the usefulness. And so if you just kind of poke holes in that, it kind of unravels that pretty easily. I think you got the best question you've ever brought up there, Dan.
Starting point is 00:11:32 Do you watch the Kardashians? Because if they say yes, there you go, end of argument. Exactly, right? And, well, so I've also done it this way where you ask, what's your favorite TV show? And they're like, they'll say something. And you're like, oh, man, I consider that to be a huge waste of energy. You know, and then they're like, then they kind of realize how silly it is because, like, who would ever criticize your TV consumption?
Starting point is 00:11:53 And then they start to realize, oh, well, yeah, I guess I'm being critical of someone's use of energy and who am I to say? Like in TV, you know, TV things are always so personal, right? Because we all like our own favorite shows for our own reason. So, yeah, I found that to be particularly useful. And it goes back to this piece that Sailor was talking about, which is you can now tap into energy that would have been stranded. You look at what like Marty Bent's doing with taking a real life mine that has methane
Starting point is 00:12:22 that's being flared. They hooked it up to a mining rig, which they before would have just flared at off and it would have actually caused impacts to the environment. But now they're actually harnessing that energy and mining it with the methane gas because they converted into energy. And it was often a remote location. They can tap into the block stream satellite where broadcasting the blockchain and boom, there you are. You're creating monetary energy and putting it onto the network and transporting it anywhere on the planet. It's just, it's mind-blowing. How about the trend? When you're thinking about the trend of renewable energy,
Starting point is 00:12:57 energy in the future. Everything that I've studied is suggesting that it's going to create a trend that incentivizes more renewable energy like we're seeing in El Salvador, for example, using the geothermal energy down there. Talk to us a little bit about that. I'll touch on that and I'll touch on a few other components of how in Bitcoin mining, particularly here, is a critical grid stabilizer. So Bitcoin miners act as a load balancer in the system where they're able to provide consistent demand, even when demand may not be there to take all of the supply. So, for example, Bitcoin miners are willing to be there right when a power plant is built. And maybe they haven't hooked up all the sources of demand yet, but they need to start recouping
Starting point is 00:13:35 some of their upfront costs. And so Bitcoin miners are the consistent demand that will be there. Bitcoin miners, because they're transportable anywhere in the world and can connect via satellite, they can be plugged into rigs in the middle of nowhere, where transporting the electricity, the excess capacity may have been prohibitively expensive, for example, like Antarctica. up. And then finally, Bitcoin miners act as a load balancer because in certain states and certain countries, they have different arrangements with the power grid where they will turn off all of their energy consumption if needed. A good example would be in Texas, there was a kind of a freak snowstorm last year, and the grid became, there's a lot more demand on the grid than supply.
Starting point is 00:14:15 So with these agreements, Bitcoin miners are willing to turn off their miners, and for that inconvenience, they were paid ahead of time by the state. So they can act at some. as an immediate decrease in demand on the grid, which is awesome for grid stability. So Bitcoin miners harness all of that wasted electricity or that wasted energy. They also act as the constant demand for different grid infrastructure to keep grid infrastructure humming in the right sort of way. So I think this was kind of like a newer thing that I learned over the last six months around Bitcoin miners are being paid by the grids to be able to be turned off for a select
Starting point is 00:14:48 amount of time. That was kind of mind-blowing because then I realized like, oh, it's sort of this, the Bitcoin network sort of absorbs all this excess energy, and they can sort of be this balancer on the grid. And so that to me kind of blew my mind, just thinking about Bitcoin. You know, a lot of people refer to Bitcoin as like a battery in a way. It's a little bit of an incomplete comparison because it's only a one-way function. This energy and the Bitcoin can't take Bitcoin and take energy back out. So for me, I think it's an incredibly useful resource as renewables come online.
Starting point is 00:15:16 As we look at, like building out more and more energy infrastructure across the world, I think Bitcoin miners play a critical role in the development of green renewable energy by being that consistent demand, it being an immediate ROI on these facilities, while also providing stability to the grid. So this is one that I actually heard over Thanksgiving. But who created it? And like, if nobody created it, like, how can I trust it? I think, say, Fadine, or I forget who came up with this originally, but who created
Starting point is 00:15:45 the wheel? I don't think there's any written record of who created the wheel or fire or anything like that. When a tool is useful and you can transparently see how it is utilized, I mean, Bitcoin's source code is perfectly transparent. Anyone can go parse through it, analyze it, take a look at it. You don't need to know. You don't need to understand who made it. And I think a lot of people also worry about.
Starting point is 00:16:04 So one is like the architecture and design of it. They worry that, oh, there's been a back door put in there. Well, it's transparent. We can all parse through the code if we'd like to. And we haven't found like a backdoor. We haven't found something that would give the creator and uncertain, you know, a different degree of control over the protocol. And I think that leads to the second part of it.
Starting point is 00:16:23 A lot of people worry that a creator of something can control it. And Satoshi, and this is what's so beautiful about Bitcoin's origin versus many other coins, is that Satoshi took very careful steps to remove himself as a source of power in the Bitcoin network. He decided to kind of disappear, to let the Bitcoin network against leaders and those who build on it to build their own community and develop their own set of social contracts and their ability to de-conflict different problems. You know, so Satoshi wanted to ensure that he would never have an overly big influence on the
Starting point is 00:16:55 protocol now in the beginning and he kind of had to to get it up and running. But he made the decision in Bitcoin's early days to gradually step away and then finally step away completely to allow the protocol in the community to survive on its own. And so it doesn't matter how early Satoshi was. It doesn't matter who Satoshi is because Satoshi has no control over the protocol. And I think a lot of people, you know, think about Bitcoin like a startup or something. Like if the founder came back, like a Steve Jobs, could they take control over it again? But, you know, they don't realize that Satoshi doesn't have any more power than any one of us.
Starting point is 00:17:27 We're all participants in the network. And if he came back, then, no, he wouldn't have any ability to make changes. He could suggest changes, but he has no force control. You know, you can't force his control over how the protocols run. I think so many people have been conditioned throughout their lifetime that when there's an economic shock or the The economy's tanking. The central banks are the only reason that it comes back. And so if we don't have them, we're going to be in destitute of the economy for years
Starting point is 00:17:59 to come and we need them, right? Like they've been conditioned to need central bankers because they're the ones that step in and recapitalize the economy so that we can go through another boom cycle. And when I heard this question, I was just kind of laughing. I was thinking to myself, yes, this is the strength. This is why you want to own Bitcoin. This isn't why you want to be concerned about it. I understand why they're concerned.
Starting point is 00:18:22 I understand why somebody who's never seen anything like this, it makes sense why they'd be like, how can I trust if nobody's on the controls? It'd be like, how can this plane fly if no one's on the controls? Right. It's a scary proposition to have no one control or animals after all. We're not, you take away food and water and clothing for a couple days and you'll see exactly what humanity is. And so we've still very, very primitive at our course.
Starting point is 00:18:48 core, we're very fearful. And that's where we give up power to the state to oversee various aspects of our lives, whether it be regulations on what we eat or how we fly, when it comes to the economy. Same thing. We want to believe that someone's in control. It's scary to think that no one's in control or that they don't know what they're doing. In fact, most people would rather believe in a lie than know the truth because the lie is more comforting than the truth. And I see this a lot, especially in the early days when I was talking about Bitcoin where people, they don't want to wake up and challenge their assumptions over money in the government, right? Like, they want to believe everything's running and under control. It's pretty scary to be like, yeah, no, they have no
Starting point is 00:19:28 idea what they're doing and they're kind of running amok. I mean, that takes, it's as sort of akin to, like, if you challenged your assumptions over religion or something. And so for someone's individual personal beliefs, right, like challenging that is a very big, big thing for someone. So I think, You know, people challenging their relationship with money and governments is pretty intense. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future.
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Starting point is 00:23:57 Going into this having event that happened, what was it, May of 2020, this last one, Prior to that, this was probably the biggest fear, uncertainty, doubt that plagued Bitcoin. It was governments can kill Bitcoin. It's funny because now I look at that argument and it's kind of become laughable. But I would say two and a half years back, you couldn't get anybody past that point. What do you got? Let's hear it. Well, yeah, it's people trying to rationalize why Bitcoin can't work.
Starting point is 00:24:31 They've missed out on some of the games and they're just going to. going through a typical NPC pattern, an NPC pattern of excuses. And one of those as well, okay, I get why Bitcoin's valuable because I can't trust my government. But if it's that successful, then governments will try to kill it. You know, so they're already kind of rationalizing because they're like, oh, okay, well, I get why it's useful. I just don't believe it could happen. They're looking for excuses. But at the core root of that argument, you go, okay, so like the government's been effective in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, if we're talking U.S. centric. The most powerful military in the world can't defeat a bunch of people in a jungle or a desert
Starting point is 00:25:07 with AK-47s. You've got that, you know, combined with the war on drugs being a complete failure, which are two great examples of the most powerful government in the world ever to exist, not having the ability to crack down on these sort of things given, I mean, think about the technological advantage that the U.S. government has now versus the Romans or previous governments, right? Like, they have a huge advantage. And then also you look at, so they're like, oh, okay, well, okay, well, yeah, Maybe they can't defeat those things and you're like, okay, cool. So we agree upon that. And they're like, well, but what if all the governments came together to defeat it?
Starting point is 00:25:41 I also say I'm like so like climate change. Like let's say you believe that, and I'm not saying I'm going to like go down a climate change conversation here, but let's say you're a big believer that climate change is like happening very rapidly and there needs to be change that happens now and all the governments need to agree. Most governments feel that way right now. But they don't come together to make all these changes happen. It's sort of piecemeal approach.
Starting point is 00:26:02 And then with all these governments coming together, it's rare to find all of the incentives aligned. China and Russia will always have an incentive to go a different direction than the United States and Europe. They're always going to want to zig when they zag. So I don't think, you know, with Bitcoin, there's a huge incentive for Confederate states. Let's say if all these countries came together to try to defeat Bitcoin, there's a huge incentive for the Confederate states to break away and adopt Bitcoin as their standard,
Starting point is 00:26:28 while the rest of the countries try to ban it because the first country to be the first mover will have the greatest advantage because they will have bought before everyone else. So, you know, and then finally, like structurally, how do you defeat Bitcoin? That's pretty tough. To destroy Bitcoin, you really have to destroy the idea of Bitcoin and all over our heads and our belief that my UTXO set, that my Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain, that that Bitcoin is, you have to crush my belief in that. And that's never going to happen with all of us individually.
Starting point is 00:26:57 So, you know, and to defeat that, you have to crush all the exchanges, you have to crush all the miners, you have to crush all our beliefs in it. And that's such a huge, huge amount of effort and we're, I think we're past that tipping point where we were a small minority community or something like that might be able to happen. And then finally, as Bitcoin grows in adoption, I think Bitcoin ownership in the U.S. what was it, at like 10% of the adult population, is it even higher than that? I forget. We saw in the infrastructure bill when they tried to attack Bitcoin, the Bitcoin community rose up and all of Congress and in Washington heard our voice and they go, whoa, this is a big community. Well, what happens when Bitcoin ownership is 40% of the
Starting point is 00:27:38 population? You can't ban it then. You're going to lose the vote as a politician or you might have a rebellion on your hands. So, you know, I think that Bitcoin has a lot of defense mechanisms. The Bitcoin community really heavily focuses on being decentralized to survive a state level attack. But more importantly, I don't think it's possible with how far Bitcoin has survived for it really to be taken out and isolated and crushed. It's very improbable, given all the reasons that it gave earlier. You know, the one big reason we would hear for years was just the mining concentration in China. And then recently, for people that aren't familiar with this, just this past year, China banned it, like truly banned it. It was a real band this time, I think,
Starting point is 00:28:21 because they banned it for years. But this last one, they banned it and all the hardware, all the mining that was taking place, which was nearly 50% of the network, was completely, the plug was pulled. The network just kept chugging along. Those mining rigs went to other geographic locations all over the world. And the hash rate, I want to say the hash rate is nearly back to where it was before the ban on the hardware. And so, you know, as far as like a state-level attack, you really couldn't get probably more of a state-level attack on Bitcoin than what we saw this past year with them banning all the hardware rigs. I mean, it would be like Google pulling the plug on half of Google's data centers and saying, hey, let's watch how
Starting point is 00:29:04 it does now, like without any downtime. And that's how Bitcoin performed, which was just miraculous, in my opinion. Well, we would have covered China FUD here, but there's not any China Fudd anymore because Bitcoin miners don't exist in China. You know, literally 100% of the hash rate from China left, which is incredible to see it, knocked out two big pieces of fud. One was China, China controlling Bitcoin. And the other one was around Bitcoin's energy mix. So Bitcoin's energy mix, people criticize, oh, Bitcoin is using too much coal or dirty China coal is how they would phrase it. And with Bitcoin miners leaving China, that worry is now gone. So versus other nations where their energy mix is more transparent.
Starting point is 00:29:45 Nick really defends this point eloquently. You're trying to defend Bitcoin's energy mix. I don't think any way you defend it will matter because people just don't, the people that are detractors of Bitcoin's energy consumption don't actually care about Bitcoin's energy mix. They just don't think Bitcoin's useful. So Nick does fight a valiant fight in defending the exact energy mix, but I think he's sort of, he's not going to convince anyone even being as honest and objective as he can be.
Starting point is 00:30:08 I totally agree with you. I think that they're focused on they don't see it as being valuable. They're a not using it. They're not increasing their buying power by owning it and participating in a network that's trustworthy and that can't be reversed or undone or add more units added to it. So they just look at it from a distance and say that's worthless and you're just burning a bunch of energy. Yeah, I'm with you. Totally. I think Chinese miners moving out of China was a huge, huge boon for Bitcoin. And I think it'll be looked at as one of the biggest strategic blunders in human history. I think they're going to look back on this. And I believe there's another moment where the Chinese military, like one of the emperors, like burned their fleet or something.
Starting point is 00:30:48 And that was kind of like a huge turning point in China's power in the world. I think that this moment also will be looked at as that of like this was a strategic, huge strategic error on their part. Totally agree with you. All right. This one here is probably one of my favorite fuds to see online. because I love posting the subsequent chart after seeing this one. And it is Bitcoin is a bubble, Dan.
Starting point is 00:31:16 It's the bubble that never pops. It's tulips. I think that's my, that's the phrase I enjoy the most. I think we still see that on Twitter. Do you still see those guys? Yeah. They pop into the reply guys who talk about tulips and like, whoa.
Starting point is 00:31:28 What is this, 2013 all over again? I mean, that was a popular scene in 2013. Like, oh, well, it's a bubble. You know, because Bitcoin hadn't been around that long. So people didn't really know if it was going to come up again, right? It was sort of like we hypothesized it would. But yeah, to see that now is just so crazy. If you look at Bitcoin versus other popular bubbles, like the dot-com bubble and the tulip bubble and was that like the Dutchese Indies bubble.
Starting point is 00:31:53 I forget if it's Dutch East Indies or another big company. If you look at these very famous bubbles, Bitcoin's duration over its entire existence is far greater than most of these bubbles. So Bitcoin will have been the longest bubble ever in human history if it's truly a bubble. But also, you know, it's kind of funny too because people don't realize that like all money is subjective and it's a belief system. The only reason why the U.S. dollar has any value is that we all believe it has value. And so that's a bubble. You know, the bubble terminology is usually just used as a derogatory term. But when you turn that terminology and use it on normal assets like real estate, stocks, bonds, money, they find that they're like, no, those aren't bubbles.
Starting point is 00:32:32 I'm like, well, they're only worth something because someone else is willing to pay for it. If no one's willing to pay for it, then it goes to zero. You know, that's sort of like their definition of a bubble. Like, oh, well, there's rapid price appreciation and there'll be a collapse and then all buyers will leave. I'm like, okay, well, disagree. And Bitcoin's history has shown that there is a floor. There's a floor of hoddlers who came in.
Starting point is 00:32:54 A lot of them came in via speculation. And many of them stayed for sound money. And that's what provides the for Bitcoin. That's because we're the ones who are willing to buy at the bottom. We keep it from going to zero because Bitcoin has other money. It's a belief system. And we all believe in Bitcoin. And that's how Bitcoin has price stability. Is there are hoddlers that eventually buy? And that's provable. And I think that's what makes Bitcoin a little bit different is all the on-chain metrics, we can see the addresses of people that are long-term holders because their coins don't
Starting point is 00:33:24 move once they go to their public address. And we can see these are the addresses that are accumulating in the dips. And so it's like all verified. You can see that these people are getting more entrenched into their ownership and their trust in the network. And good luck shaking them out of their coins as they're up 10,000 percent from when they first created that public address. Totally. If Bitcoin was a bubble, then it would have gone to zero, and it hasn't done that.
Starting point is 00:33:51 People mistake Bitcoin's adoption curve, which are these rapid price appreciation moments with a corresponding bust as bubbly activity. But how else was Bitcoin going to go from zero to a World Reserve? currency. It wasn't going to go in a linear fashion, a nice clean line upwards. Bitcoin acts like humans do. Bitcoin is part of humanity. We're raw emotional beings and we fomo in and we pay and excel. And that's where the term Hoddle really comes from is like this trader on the Bitcoin talk forums realizing that he's feeling these raw emotions with the market. And what he should do is just hold on to his Bitcoin. And, you know, Hoddle is his misspelling of that because he's drunk when he's
Starting point is 00:34:30 writing this. So I think that Hoddle philosophy is perfect for this. It's, you know, Bitcoin, in terms of its price discovery, of people realizing why Bitcoin's valuable, comes in ebbs and flows and in wild rushes and wasn't going to happen in this nice, smooth fashion, where Bitcoin goes up $100 a day for a year. It has fits and starts. They talk to us about volatility. So somebody who's listening to this, they might say, okay, well, maybe I just buy some of this. But it's all over the place. I saw the price at 65, then it went to 30, then it went back to 65. And they're just kind of looking at it and are saying, I just don't know that I could hold on to something that has that much volatility to it.
Starting point is 00:35:11 So talk to us about what the volatility represents. How do you think of that as an investor, especially somebody who maybe is getting into it for the first time? Just walk us through some of those ideas. Yeah, so volatility isn't necessarily a bad thing. I think that this word volatility has become this sort of like, ooh, evil word of like, oh, man, volatility. It's volatile. That's scary. Well, you know, it's volatile? Like Apple and Google when they were first starting out, there was some of the best performing equities in human history and like, yeah, they're going to be volatile. They're not going to be super smooth. And when people think about volatility, I think volatility is both a, you know, volatility works both ways, not just going down. It can also go up. And so I think volatility, when looked at from like a portfolio perspective, if you're someone who's really focused on volatility and you're really into like, very like classic portfolio. You can think of Bitcoin as being value accretive to, you know, in a modern portfolio theory mindset, adding Bitcoin to your portfolio increases its sharp ratio, which means your return
Starting point is 00:36:11 per unit of risks. Bitcoin's return per unit of risk is a nice addition to your portfolio. So, you know, I think that if you're in the more classic portfolio mindset, that's a great way to think about it. But also like nothing ventured, nothing gained. That's where that's where these 10x or 100x returns come from with Bitcoin is because of the intense volatility. Yeah, it drops 50%, but it also goes up 10x.
Starting point is 00:36:33 And so those who can hoddle onto it, those hoddlers are the only ones deserving of the value of Bitcoin because they're the only ones who believed in it strong enough to weather those storms. Price swings up and down. But yeah, I mean, lots of stocks have been volatile. Like, again, in venture capital, the valuation of these startups fluctuate wildly. You know, in Bitcoin's earliest years where it was more volatile, and still quite volatile, but not as volatile as it used to be. And so, you know, Bitcoin's not going to have these really,
Starting point is 00:37:02 you know, it's not going to have this smooth price appreciation. You don't want it to either. Stable price, stable purchasing power actually signals manipulation. So, for example, with the U.S. dollar, it has a very stable decay rate of about 2 to 5 percent depending on inflation rate annually. And so it has that because the central, you know, the U.S. government and central bank, the Fed have absolute control over the money. And so if something has a stable purchasing power, it usually means that's heavily manipulated versus something free-floating like Bitcoin. That is actually more stable, longer term, because it has no centralized control mechanism,
Starting point is 00:37:40 but the price discovery path is a little bit choppier as it makes its way to becoming gold 2.0 or the new world reserve currency. All right. So we covered a bunch of fud there. I want to talk to you just about more of the current events. So for people that are maybe listening to this, they're, they're, beginners, we're going to get into a little bit more of an advanced conversation or something that's for people that are into the community a little bit heavily, they're probably wanting
Starting point is 00:38:06 to hear us talk about some of these other ideas. Let's talk a little bit about regulation. So in the coming 12 months, how do you kind of see Gary Ginsler, people at the SEC? What's their cards that they're going to play probably in the next 12 months? In particular to like alt coins. Great question. So what's interesting about Gary Ginsler is that he really understands the space well. But he's very knowledgeable. I don't know if you've seen some of his courses that he taught on Bitcoin and blockchain tech, but he's very knowledgeable for a regulator. In fact, I would say he's one of the most knowledgeable in the space. And so recently he's taken a path of, I think, really coming down hard on stable coins and potentially some
Starting point is 00:38:45 coins that have like proof of stake or pre-mine reclassifies. He's potentially classifying them as securities. So I think, you know, it's really interesting to see him kind of flex into that. I'm not really sure what his gameplan is. And of course, I'm not an attorney. I'm not on the regulatory side. So it's hard to really guess what's going on over there. And by the way, of course, speaking right now is 100% of my own personal beliefs, not associated with cracking the company at work at, just as a clear caveat.
Starting point is 00:39:12 So it's interesting. I think Gary's trying to really take the SEC's governance and power and really start to exercise that over the space. It depends on how it all plays out. What he wants is, I think, a lot more regulation. And that could have a negative effect on some coins. Bitcoin, I don't think, is really affected by this at all due to Bitcoin's origin and fair proof of work mining from the beginning. There is no pre-mine.
Starting point is 00:39:36 There is no staking mechanism. He's come out and point blank said this, right? I think so. I don't want to paraphrase him because I forget exactly what he said. But basically, I don't think they have any issue with Bitcoin, which is really interesting. We've also seen this in the ETF applications where I think they asked the Ethereum ETFs to withdraw. I don't know if you heard that, but the Ethereum BTFs were withdrawn when the Bitcoin Futures ETF was about to be approved. So some of that was super interesting
Starting point is 00:40:05 to see positioning-wise. And so we'll see how this all plays out. I don't have enough clarity and understanding of how the Hill works, Washington combined with these agencies to understand how this will all kind of shake out. But I would say the summer that was a really big, really tumultuous time period of the infrastructure bill combined with the SEC kind of, becoming louder and more vocal about their ownership. And then also what's interesting, too, is that the CFTC is also jumping into the mix. It's kind of a wild government battle here. What's kind of funny is I think Bitcoin's already very highly regulated. CFTC, Fensen, IRS. This is just in the U.S. alone. I mean, you know, regulate Bitcoin. So it is interesting to see
Starting point is 00:40:44 these other agencies, and that's where my understanding of the regulatory environments isn't like a full picture like someone else who is experienced in this would. You know, what they would have that perspective. For me, I'm just kind of like, wow, I thought Bitcoin was already highly regulated. I didn't know it needed more regulation. But I think they're definitely clashing a little bit more over other types of coins, I think, than just Bitcoin. And so they're wanting to kind of pursue different angles there. I know I've been in a couple spaces in clubhouse rooms with very high-ranking people from the SEC that have been participating in community conversations. And I mean, there's just absolutely no discussion about shutting any of this down.
Starting point is 00:41:23 It's all about, you know, what's in the best interest of the entire investment community as to how to protect investor interests and to make sure that people aren't being taken advantage of. And that we don't regulate ourselves. And this is a really important point, that we're not regulating ourselves so much that we're not going to be able to remain competitive in the global marketplace with respect to fintech. And I mean, this is coming from like Hester and some others there at the SEC that are like number two at the SEC. So I don't know. It's been it's been kind of refreshing. I don't know if that's the right word to use, but surprising. I think I've been surprised at how they do understand that if they overregulate, I think they
Starting point is 00:42:10 know they're going to make a major policy blunder and regulatory blunder. Yeah, I think that there's a lot of folks like Hester Pierce at the SEC that's very supportive of this kind of like, if you want to broadly bucket everything together as like part of this blockchain or crypto sort of tech. I personally, you know, I'm just a fan of Bitcoin. So, you know, but if you were to broadly bucket it all together, you know, Hester Pierce, I think, is very much demonstrated she's knowledgeable and really, really into the space and, you know, actively fighting for innovation.
Starting point is 00:42:41 So if you want to broadly bucket all of that as innovation, I think, you know, Hester Pierce is a big champion for it. So I think that, yeah, the SEC isn't a singular voice. It's a lot of different voices. But overall, I totally agree. Like, I don't think they're going to shut down things. In fact, over on the lending side, so the SEC and Coinbase had a bit of a clash, where Coinbase had a lend product.
Starting point is 00:42:59 And the SEC said, hey, this is a security. And there was a bit of a clash there. As I've kind of like read into it, talked to a couple of companies in this space, definitely seems like I don't think the SEC is going to come down and shut down blockfire or something because that would hurt investors. You know, if there was a big freeze or they seized assets, that's going to hurt investors. So from my understanding from what I've heard from folks in the space in terms of like the whole legal kind of pathway that they've gone down is that the SEC wants to see compliance,
Starting point is 00:43:29 not necessarily, but shut these companies down and have 100,000 or a million investors losing their money. They more of what, you know, want to come down, make sure that everyone's adhering to the regulations that they oversee, but they're not here to like shut down things and cause massive loss. It definitely does not seem like at all the vibe I'm hearing from the different legal councils. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up, and customers now expect proof of security just to do business.
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Starting point is 00:47:22 you start getting into lending and you're doing over collateralized lending that's getting marked to market by the second 24-7, 365. You need something that immediately clears. You can't wait for a four-day, three-day ACH when you're dealing with these types of products and this type of volatility. So we've seen this emergence of the demand for stable coins. We've seen, what are we at? Over 100 billion in stable coins, like in the last year. Last six months. And so I think where maybe they're getting concerned is they're looking at this and saying,
Starting point is 00:47:56 all right, this is growing so fast. And it's obviously an integral part to where this is all going. that you have some type of Fiat stable coin peg because everything's still denominated in Fiat bills for almost everything. So there's a need for it, at least in the transition period to maybe a Bitcoin standard. And I think that when they're figuring out how do we regulate this and make sure that it's actually backed and that the Treasury still has control of the units in circulation, I think that's where they're really getting antsy and a little concerned. I don't think it has to do with
Starting point is 00:48:36 Bitcoin, the protocol in particular. Yeah. I definitely don't think the worries over Stablecoin. Stablecoins are about Bitcoin. It's a lot of capital to move. That's a lot of capital to move around. And with Staplecoins, I think that everyone's going to waking up to like, whoa, these are way more useful than the existing ACH wire system. Like, man, I'm moving around money in old institutions and I'm like, oh, this is such a pain and it takes forever. There's all sorts of paperwork and then they might freeze it. Stable coins work really well. It's a great way to settle between counterparties if you want a centralized stable coin asset.
Starting point is 00:49:14 I think they're probably worried about a couple things. One would be systemic risk to the system, like if things were under collateralized, like let's say with tether. I don't want to go down the whole tethered, fudder rabbit homeless. We want to cover that later. But for those folks who are worried about tether, there would be a concern that, oh, they're totally unbacked or something, I, by the way, I don't think that's true at all, and it's not because they're open to audits now. Dan, think of it like this. Let's say that, let's say the Swiss come out and they have a token that's pegged to the Swiss dollar. And let's say that there's a company that stood up a peg
Starting point is 00:49:48 to the Swiss dollar that's tokenized. And then the government just says, you know what, we like your model. Just make sure you do your deposits of your treasury with us, the government. And we're just going to audit the number of tokens that you have in circulation. It becomes extremely popular, and it starts to be used in place of the dollar, in place of the euro, or in place of, you name it currency. If governments aren't looking at it that way, that they could be compromised, especially as all these exchanges and all these interest rate products are then being stood up inside of these exchanges, like they're out of their minds. They need to be in the game, or they're going to get out competed in that space as well.
Starting point is 00:50:30 Totally. I think stable coins are a big innovation for fiat currency. Again, I don't think they compete with Bitcoin in the long term, but in the short term, governments would be remiss not to embrace staple coins. I think it's a huge innovation. Now, the dangerous path here, I think, goes down to the CBDC side. No doubt. I'm sure people were cringing as I was saying that because you're right.
Starting point is 00:50:48 Let's go down this path of why this is really important from a privacy standpoint, because this is vital, what you're about to say. Yeah. So governments look at it. the viability of stable coins and they're like, whoa, this is like a burgeoning innovative ecosystem. Let's take it a step further and create CBDCs. CBDCs are central bank digital currencies where essentially you could bank with the Federal Reserve. There are a huge number of issues with this. One, that means that the government completely controls one money ledger. This money ledger
Starting point is 00:51:16 would control everyone's transactions. So every single transaction you do would be seen by the central government. It would mean that they could censor, tax, or rebout any transaction you send. And they would have full control over the entire economy down to every gum packet purchase. So I think CBDCs are somewhat of an abomination in terms of privacy, control over the economy, basically cutting out commercial banks potentially, and then finally, you know, heavy censorship. Because if you're on the wrong political party, you're the wrong race, you're the wrong business. All of a sudden, the central bank could start to censor your transactions. So I think CBDCs are not an innovation at all. Stable coins are a great innovation and they work well. They work well.
Starting point is 00:51:56 well in the field in terms of like it's being actively used today. CBDCs are an excuse to exert more control over the economy under the disguise of innovation, but they're not innovative at all. It's 1984 on steroids. So let's talk about lightning a little bit. So when we talk about the lightning network, we're talking about node to node. I have Bitcoin in a channel. Let's say you have a node, I've got a node. I've opened a channel to you for one Bitcoin worth of capacity. And then we can use that channel back and forth in order to spend Bitcoin immediately. And then it gets into the whole network effect of if you're connected to another node and have a channel open and I have one, well, then we can basically spend to anywhere within that network of channels. How do you think
Starting point is 00:52:41 that this is progressing to date? And from a privacy standpoint, it has unique implications where I think it's way more private than we're at on the layer one of using Bitcoin. And so it kind of is a bit of a solution to the quandary that you just mentioned there with the central bank digital currencies. But talk to us about some of this from your point of view. Yeah, so like how lightning can kind of replace the medium of exchange function or what do you want to dig on? Yeah, that in particular, and if you want to talk about El Salvador and maybe how you see that playing out and maybe what that means just as things continue to progress and what it might mean down the road. Yeah, so money serves three functions. Sorry, Bitcoins, I know you've heard this one before, but for the folks who haven't delved as deeply into this,
Starting point is 00:53:29 money serves three functions, medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. The money first has to be a store of value. People have to store value in it, believe in it as a money, before it can progress to the other two stages, medium of exchange and unit of account. Those two stages are predicated on a couple different factors. Low cost of transfer, price stability is one of those, which means that the price has to, you know, for a unit of account, you can't swap out the pricing on loaves of bread. it every single minute if the price is fluctuating a lot. The price needs to be somewhat stable.
Starting point is 00:53:59 And then medium exchange, it has to be integrated with a lot of the payment processing terminals. It has to be in demand by the merchants and wanted to be sold by the consumer. So with a medium exchange transaction, it's always a two-way street. The consumer and the merchant must both want to exchange in that currency. And so that requires a level of network effect. So lightning is a technology that has been built on top of Bitcoin that enables Bitcoin to be move in a very fast, so instantaneous and very low-cost manner. There are also additional benefits like privacy and some other functions, too. With Bitcoin Lightning, that does unlock the media of exchange use case on one level, the costliness and the speed. So usability, basically the usability
Starting point is 00:54:41 function of it. What it does not unlock, though, is the unit of accounts and other properties of media of exchange, which would require network effects and price stability. In El Salvador, we've seen, the network effects start to occur on a localized basis. So that's really interesting where merchants now have to accept Bitcoin and some individuals are choosing to pay for items with Bitcoin and they use this over the Lightning Network. For the newbies here and you may not understand Lightning, Lightning is kind of like, you know, you've got like ACH wire in different ways to send US dollars and you've got like Venmo. Lightning's kind of like a Venmo. It's semi-trusted in a way, but it's also a way to move transactions basically for free or very, very low
Starting point is 00:55:24 So when it comes to lightning adoption, what that means for medium of exchange, we're starting to see that in El Salvador in a very small localized level because that network effect of merchants and consumers has been achieved. I don't think we would probably see that there on a unit of account level because the price instability of Bitcoin is still very high. Bitcoin is still very volatile. And so when we look at Bitcoin's trajectory from the store value era, which we're very much in right now, to becoming increasing the store value plus medium of exchange and
Starting point is 00:55:52 unit of account. I think it will happen in pockets of consumer and merchant network effects occurring. So let's say 40% of the population owns the asset, well, then they might want to transact with it. And so that's sort of something that doesn't happen in a binary function of one day everyone's using it, one day in the day before no one was. It's sort of a network effect function that happens over time. As more and more people store value in Bitcoin, then all of a sudden they're like, I only want to accept Bitcoin as payment. And some people might be like, I only want to pay for things with Bitcoin. And so that happens over many decades. I don't think that happens like a snap of a finger that takes a long time because
Starting point is 00:56:24 after all, money's a belief system and it's going to take a while for people to believe in Bitcoin because that includes generational change, right? So with El Salvador, I'm super optimistic and super excited to see what's happening there. I do think that there are still issues around network effect. First people want to have to store value in it and hold it before they want to transact with it. And El Salvador is a little bit leapfrogging that and just kind of moving it more to a medium of exchange. So I'm excited to see how that experiment plays out. But across the world, I think that that experiment takes many decades to occur. But we might see that happens sooner in countries with bad currency. So like Argentina, Venezuela, El Salvador, these are countries where I think Bitcoin
Starting point is 00:57:04 has a better use case immediately for that medium of exchange unit of account use case than in countries like the U.S. or in Europe where they have a more stable fiat currency. All right. The last one I got for you, Dan, relates to somebody who would say, there's so many coins. There's all of these all coins. How do I decide what I own? Why are you just talking about Bitcoin right now? Why aren't we talking about all the other ones that have billions in market cap? Totally. This is a classic question, great question to answer. Okay, so people who are listening to this, who are newer, you're probably thinking I've missed the boat. I've missed out on Bitcoin. I've missed out on these gains. I've got to catch up. Well, you know, if you pick the right alt, you might do that. A big word of caution there, a big might. Bitcoin's return per unit of risk is the best in the space. It's really hard to pick the right alt coin that might go up or down. Bitcoin is the number one asset in the space, has been the
Starting point is 00:58:02 number one asset and still has tons of price appreciation. If Bitcoin achieves its purpose as a gold 2.0 or a world reserve currency, it should hit between a 20 trillion, 100 trillion market. which means it has tons of upside from here. So while you might be, you know, excited to go buy something else, definitely you want to learn about Bitcoin. You want to read about Bitcoin. I would definitely recommend checking out Bitcoin first. Bitcoin still has a healthy amount of price appreciation. So that's what a lot of the newbies care about. They're like, Dan, I don't care about sound money. I don't care about all of those characteristics. I'm just worried about return. So if you just care about return, that's the way to think about it. Bitcoin is probably
Starting point is 00:58:38 your best risk-adjusted return in the space. Now, if you care about money and you care about what Bitcoin is about and like its fundamental properties, Bitcoin is unlike any of these other cryptocurrencies. So, for example, we could all use a different type of metal to be a money. But why do we all use gold? Well, gold has certain properties as a metal that make it a better sound money. And there's a network effect of more people believing that gold is worth money and there's less people that'd be willing to switch to an alternative metal. Bitcoin operates in a similar fashion. Bitcoin's network effect, its moat is really hard to dislodge. We all believe. leave in Bitcoin and store value in Bitcoin, we're not just going to switch over to another
Starting point is 00:59:16 cryptocurrency at a moment's notice. These currencies, these cryptocurrencies are all governed by protocols, but those protocols could be changed by the community. That's what a lot of people I think don't realize is that these aren't necessarily immutable. Bitcoin has changed in a very small degree over time, and other currencies have changed a lot, for example, like Ethereum or other protocols out there. So I think that Bitcoin's, you know, preservation of its 21 million monetary policy, its preservation of the decentralized nature of it, ensure that Bitcoin has the highest probability of success. And so Bitcoin has objectively the best characteristics of origin, monetary policy, decentralization, all characteristics that a money needs to have
Starting point is 00:59:57 in the digital world. And so Bitcoin has the best characteristics for that, which make it probably your best investment choice. So I think for those who are wondering, should I buy an alt versus Bitcoin, you got to check out Bitcoin first. It's the whole reason for the space. If you're worried about returns, Bitcoin's still going to be a great return. You know, if things all work at, I don't know what the future holds. So let's put it this way. If I'm wrong, most of my net worth is in Bitcoin. So, you know, it'll go the other way.
Starting point is 01:00:23 And then, yeah, look, if you want to explore the stuff, sure, but make sure you understand Bitcoin fully, because I think when you understand Bitcoin fully, you'll understand why it's so unique and why you should look at that and really focus on that versus everything else. Love it. Dan, I know you have a newsletter. I know you're active on Twitter. Give people a handoff where they can learn more about you if they found the conversation useful. Yeah, if you liked what I said, you want to hear more. You can YouTube, I'm Dan Held,
Starting point is 01:00:51 Twitter. I'm at Dan Held. And I write a newsletter on Thursdays called The Held Report. Basically, it's a longer form version of just kind of my raw thoughts on different topics in Bitcoin. So yeah, follow me on those. Really appreciate it. And also throw me out a shout out on Twitter. If you like the episode, if you have a comment, I'll probably reply. So I would love to hear your feedback. Awesome. And for people listening, we'll have obviously a link to all that in the show notes. So, Dan, thanks so much for joining us. Preston. Thanks for having me. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I'd love to have you as a
Starting point is 01:01:30 regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, If you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it's something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening. And I'll catch you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses, or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

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