We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP145: Bitcoin and Ethereum w/ Tuur Demeester (Business Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Listening to TIP. Hey, how's it going out there? So since the last time the investors' podcast covered cryptocurrencies in 2015, the price of Bitcoin has increased by over 1,000 percent. And within the last five years, numerous billionaires have suggested that digital currencies are going to be the next big thing. For example, we have Bill Gates, Google's Eric Schmidt, Peter Thiel, Richard Branson, Patrick Byrne from Overstock.com.

Starting point is 00:00:27 As a side note, in our show notes, we're going to have videos. of all of those people talking about cryptocurrencies and their potential impact moving into the future. So here's what you're going to get in this episode. First, we're going to provide the audience with a little bit of a background on digital currencies, blockchain technology, Bitcoin, all that kind of stuff from the research that we did about two years ago after reading the book, The Age of Cryptocurrency. After that quick recap of what Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are, we have a brand new interview that we did with crypto expert Tur Demaster.

Starting point is 00:00:57 During our interview with Turr, we asked some of the hardest questions that we can think of from the potential of a Bitcoin fork to why Ethereum is better or worse than Bitcoin. And we talk about the advantages of even being able to launch your own company and IPO with blockchain technology on Ethereum. If this is a field of finance that you don't understand or that you haven't heard too much about, get ready to hear some crazy and amazing things. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made buildings.

Starting point is 00:01:30 millionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. So as we said then, the intro will kick this episode off playing just short of 15 minutes of episode 30, where we talked about the concept of money, cryptocurrency, and Bitcoin, and really give you the foundation to fully understand the conversation that we have with Tour de Mistor. So here we go. Today, we've got a really fun one for you, because this one's not what we typically talk about. And we're going to be talking about cryptocurrencies. that have emerged on the market in the last three to four years. And I think for a lot of people, they have no idea what this is.

Starting point is 00:02:17 I know I didn't. In fact, I heard Bitcoin being mentioned in the news, and I just completely ignored it. It had no interest in it at all. I didn't know what they were really talking about. I just thought it was probably like some type of internet scam that was going on and pretty much ignored it. Then recently, I don't really remember how I came across this, but I started doing some reading. I think it was because I was researching ways to prevent inflation on currencies, and I kind of came across an article on Bitcoin, and it gave a general idea of what it was. And so it kind of piqued my interest.

Starting point is 00:02:51 And I started talking to Stig about it, and he was about as skeptical as anybody else on the street. Isn't that right, Stig? Probably a lot worse, to be quite honest. So I told Stig, I said, well, let's stop reading these Internet articles, and we have no idea who wrote these things. and what this is about. I said, and let's go find a really good book that is written by somebody that has some credibility, and let's do some research on this, and just read some more and learn about it. So we felt like it'd be kind of a fun topic to talk about on the podcast.

Starting point is 00:03:23 So that's why we went out and got this book. And the book that we used for our discussion and to learn about this, it's called The Age of Cryptocurrency, how Bitcoin and Digital Money are challenging the global economic order. This was written by two Wall Street Journal, journalists, Paul Vigna and Michael Casey, having read the book, it's a pretty large book. What was it like 350 pages, Stig? Something like that, 400 pages maybe? Yeah, something like that. It was big. It was good. They were very thorough. That's what I liked. And I thought that their arguments were pretty balanced.

Starting point is 00:03:59 I think that they were definitely buying into the fact that cryptocurrencies are going to be the future. But I think that their discussion on Bitcoin and some of the other cryptocurrencies that are out there was pretty balanced. And they gave a really good discussion. So without further delay, Stig and I are just going to kind of jump into this and talk about cryptocurrencies in general. We're going to be pulling some pieces from the book and some. other pieces with just general discussion. So our outline for today, we're going to first start off by talking about what is money. In general, money is nothing more than an accounting mechanism. So with that idea, that's where we want to start with cryptocurrencies because it's really hard.

Starting point is 00:04:39 I think it's really far-fetched for a lot of people to think that there's just bits of data that are going to be used as money in the future. And I'll tell you, after reading the book and after seeing the technology that exists for this, I really do think that, and I think you already kind of see this, but it's just kind of a mirage for a lot of people that whenever I send money to Stig in Denmark, you know, it's not an actual dollar bills being sent anymore. And I think that a lot of people have, they're actually experiencing a form of cryptocurrency in a way, but they really don't necessarily recognize it for what it is yet. And I think it's only going to get more dramatic as time goes on based on some of the stuff that we were reading in this

Starting point is 00:05:19 book. So what's the purpose? Why did Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies emerge in the last five years, call it? And there's really two main reasons. And the first one I'm going to talk about. The next one, Stigl will talk about. But the first one is that governments cannot increase the supply of this cryptocurrency. And so that might sound like a really far-fetched idea for people because it's, you know, bits of data. But how they're actually doing this is they have an open source, and we'll talk about this more later on, but there's open source program algorithm. And it's open source, meaning that there's a group of people that work on it. It's just not one person. And what they've done is they've programmed the algorithm so that it cannot produce more units or coins, if you

Starting point is 00:06:09 will, of that system. And so there's, let's just say there's a hundred coins. Okay. And let's use an example of myself, Stig, Hari, and Colin, the four of us. And if there's a hundred coins and we divide up those hundred coins, each person has 25 of those coins. And the computer algorithm will not let us use any more than 100. You can see how we can keep track of each other's in that little micro economy. If Stig performs some work for me and I give Stig five of my coins, my account is now at 20.

Starting point is 00:06:44 His is now at 30. and Colin and Hari would then still be at 25. And the way that Bitcoin works, and we're getting into a little bit of the technical, but we'll talk about that now while we use that example. So the way Bitcoin works is I would have a piece of paper. Imagine I'd have like a digital piece of paper, and each one of us would have a digital piece of paper. So Stig would have one.

Starting point is 00:07:04 Harry would have one and Colin would have one. And so whenever that transaction between Stig and I would take place where I would give him five of my coins, I would update my digital piece of paper so that it says that I have 20 coins and Stig has 30. Stig would also update his digital piece of paper. So it says that he has 30 and I have 20. And so would Hari and Colin, even though they weren't involved in the transaction. So basically everybody updates that ledger. And that's what it's referred to in cryptocurrency is the ledger is updated. And so although there was no money, there was nothing physically exchanged as far as the currency goes, the fact that everybody has,

Starting point is 00:07:45 an updated ledger of where the accounting took place, that's how Bitcoin or any of these cryptocurrencies work. And I find that really fascinating. They talk about the different forms of money and how the best type of money to use. And so when you go back into, you know, hundreds of years ago, the type of money that they would always try to use was something that was very durable, something that could hold up over time. Something else that they wanted to use was something that couldn't be replicated or just

Starting point is 00:08:15 produced on a whim like paper. And so that kind of talks to the reason why cryptocurrency has really emerged is because you can't increase the supply of the money. So that's what they're trying to get around here is all these governments, they're printing money through the nose. They're just printing as much money as they can because then that drop the value of their currency, increases their exports out of the country, which produces their GDP to go up. And so what you have is this race around the world for people to devalue their currency by printing more. And so, And so this cryptocurrency solves that problem by stopping that by having a fine amount, a limit, a cap, if you will, on the amount of currency that's in the system. The other thing that's nice is that it's completely durable, meaning that you can't break it or, well, you could potentially hack it, which we'll talk about later, but it will last.

Starting point is 00:09:08 It's not like it's going to wear out. The other thing that's nice is it's very small. It's it doesn't, you know, it's not something you even put in your pocket. It'd be something you'd use over your smartphone. So those are the advantages. So it's really kind of interesting to see how this developed and what they're trying to solve here by fixing the inflation, the currency inflation issue. But there's another reason that Bitcoin has emerged and that's what Stig's going to talk about.

Starting point is 00:09:35 Yeah. And that's really all about cutting out the middleman. So right now we're using banks. And as you're probably all aware of, it's really expensive using banks. I know this from my own experience. Whenever Preston, I were doing transactions, that is extremely expensive. Not only because I would have to convert that in my own currency, but also because the bank would charge me just for receiving that money.

Starting point is 00:09:59 And then when I'm doing my accounting, then my accountant will also charge me for using another currency. So when you have different currencies or actually just sending money to each other, even though it's the same currency, you have some sort of transaction cost. And since banks as a whole really have a monopoly or close to a monopoly on that, things tends to get very expensive. So whenever I heard about this cryptocurrency and whenever I start reading a book, this was really where I grabbed my attention. Because I was thinking, well, how can I avoid paying all of those fees? So one of the lead program developers for Bitcoin, I was watching a video of him talk about Bitcoin. And he said, the best way I can describe this is it's like having a bank in your pocket.

Starting point is 00:10:44 Every single person is their own bank. So if I want to send money to stick through Bitcoin, there is no transaction fee. It's just, you know, I can just straight send him the money. There's really no delay at all for him to receive those funds. He might want to wait a little bit for the encryption to work itself out so that he can see that It was actually a valid transaction and that there wasn't double spending that occurred. So that's what's really, I think, exciting for a lot of people that would potentially be using this. If the currency could actually have a pretty solid and steady rate at which it can be exchanged into other currencies,

Starting point is 00:11:21 I think that you would really see this start taking off. But because it's kind of all over the place, you're seeing a lot of hesitation for people to start adopting this. All right, so that concludes our replay of the very first part of episode 30 than Preston I did more than two years ago. We really hope that you have a good understanding of the fundamentals of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. So now let's transition into a very recent discussion with your Demester. All right, so we are so excited to have Tor with us today, and this is Tor Demaster.

Starting point is 00:11:53 And Tor, as we said in the introduction of the show, just comes with this extreme level of understanding of this stuff way far better than Stiggin I could ever imagine. And so we are really excited to be talking to you today because I know there's a lot of people in our audience that are interested about cryptocurrencies and to be able to have access to somebody like yourself. We're just really, really appreciative for you to take time out of your busy day to talk with us. So thanks so much for joining us today, Tour. Hey, Stig and Preston.

Starting point is 00:12:19 Yeah, happy to be here. All right. So whenever I was talking to various people on Twitter and some of our forums as to what questions we should ask you, the one that came. up more than anything else, was this concern about a potential fork with Bitcoin because of this bottleneck that's happening? So could you talk to us about what this bottleneck is, kind of put it in layman's terms so we can all understand what is potentially going to happen? And then I think the thing people really want to hear is what do you think the fallout would be

Starting point is 00:12:48 if something like that would actually happen? I think first of all, it's important to understand the bigger picture, which is that if you're going to scale network, digital technology, you're always going to have bottlenecks. It's not like we're facing something like the French Revolution or something. Like five years from now, we can have a conversation and there'll be another scaling bottleneck in Bitcoin. Like, it's just going to happen. But then in this particular case, we have sort of two camps as far as how Bitcoin should scale. And just to be clear, it is already scaling, right?

Starting point is 00:13:20 The capacity now on chain, which is, you know, when you talk about the Bitcoin blockchain, it grows by one megabyte every 10 minutes. that's 300,000 transactions a day. There is scaling happening off-chain because we have these Bitcoin exchanges, we have Bitcoin gambling websites who basically perform millions of off-chain transactions a day and then later settle them on the main blockchain.

Starting point is 00:13:44 But the question is now there's this exciting notion that maybe we can scale Bitcoin in a decentralized way, right? We can keep this decentralized story going and make it bigger and have like millions of transactions a second and all in a decentralized way. That's like the big, hairy goal. And so the question is, how do we get there? There's one notion that says,

Starting point is 00:14:06 all right, let's view pragmatic. Bitcoin is a highway. It has three lanes now. Let's just widen the highway and make it 12 lanes, right? That means bigger blocks. That means faster growth of the blockchain, but also an immediate increase in transaction throughput. That's the one camp.

Starting point is 00:14:22 And then roughly speaking, of course, there's also people who are focused on improving efficiency. so that you can put more transactions in that very same block. So that's one camp. The other camp says, well, let's look at how digital technology has scaled in the past, which is, you know, the Internet protocols and so on. What you see there often is that these protocols are very inert. They don't change a lot.

Starting point is 00:14:45 People eventually accept them as is. And then they decide to build modules on top, really a modular way of scaling. So as far as Bitcoin goes, you're talking that about segregated witness, which enables lightning, basically payment channel technology, which is you take the transactions elsewhere and then you settle on the blockchain. Same with side chains is also a way to scale. Take the transactions to another chain and then finally you come back to the main Bitcoin chain. You settle there.

Starting point is 00:15:11 And so these two camps basically have two different bitcoins in mind, do different futures, a bigger block Bitcoin or same block kind of Bitcoin and then modular scaling. And so it's possible that we'll get a fork, right? that people will start using versions of the Bitcoin client that is not compatible with the current version and that there will be enough of an economic force behind that so that we have two coins that trade against each other. And there are some concerns that maybe one chain

Starting point is 00:15:42 might attack the other one. In general, I'm not that worried. I think the market is just incredible in how it figures these things out. We already have a precedent with Ethereum, which is way more grave because there, it was a very hasty hard fork and it happened to basically fix a huge bug whereas Bitcoin we're in this luxury situation whereas the network is spinning like never before.

Starting point is 00:16:05 There's no errors, no DDoS attacks, no failure at all. It's just like how are we going to scale? And so if it comes to the point where some people feel very confident enough that they're wanting to fork off and they're hopeful that everybody's going to join them, I'm totally okay with that because the coins that I have, which then will be legacy bitcoins, I will have coins on both chains if there is a hard fork. And so I can just, you know, go for the ride, see what happens. And then eventually, you know, if I feel more confident in one chain, sell the coins on the other chain and have more coins on that first chain. So explain that just a little bit more for us so everyone

Starting point is 00:16:43 understands. It's almost like a splitting of stocks. Is that a way that you could describe it where if you had a thousand coins on the legacy, it goes to a hard fork. You still have that thousand coins on the legacy and you also have a thousand on whatever the new coin would be called. Yeah, it could be like, you know, what if eBay was split into PayPal plus eBay, right? I would still have the same stake in the same economic entity only. It would be more granular and I could sell my eBay stock for more PayPal or vice versa. You know, that's not 100% in that analogy, but roughly speaking, because, you know, this

Starting point is 00:17:16 blockchain, you can do two things if you fork. There's two understandings of hard forks. For example, you're talking about a Linux operating system. If I have a different vision for what Linux should be, I can tweak the code and launch my own fork. And then, you know, anybody can run that. And so it's the same thing with Bitcoin. You can tweak the code and create a new blockchain and have a new Genesis block,

Starting point is 00:17:37 which is then you create an alt coin. You start from scratch. Block one, there's no history. And then just people start mining, which is, you know, we already have five, six, six, 700 of those coins out there. But the hard for that people talk about here is that you choose to retain the ledger as is, and you just tweak the client a little bit so that it starts creating its own divergent chain. So, Tor, if I have a coin base account, which is what I think most people that would be listening to the show, if they do own Bitcoin, they probably have a

Starting point is 00:18:07 coin base account. And let's say I have that account and this fork occurs. How am I able to see the two different coins, walk us through this so that we can really understand it from just the regular user who's sitting on 10 bitcoins at their house. Yeah, so we have a little bit of precedent here because Ethereum has had a fork as well. There's now Ethereum backed by the Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum Classic, which is actually the legacy chain that never changed. And then there is the other chain that is the chain that had the Dowel, Beala. But that's a different story. But I mean, at least we can look back and see what happened there. And that was very sudden that that happened. And so initially, people like Coinbase, they said, like, um, you know,

Starting point is 00:18:47 we are focused on where Ethereum Foundation is taking this. We're not really interested in this new, you know, this new version of Ethereum, so to speak. But what they saw it's very quickly is that it became a tradable asset. Poloniac started listing the asset, Ethereum Classic. It started getting a market value. And then people were upset that even though the chain is split and that if they had the ether in their own charge, they would have two tokens, right? And then Coinbase only listed and acknowledged one. And so very quickly, Coinbase turned around and said, all right, don't worry, guys, we are going to also give you the Ether classic, right? We're not going to list it right away. We're not going to trade it, but you can withdraw it from us. So I think that's kind

Starting point is 00:19:29 of what you can probably expect. I think it's extremely likely if we have a contentious hard fork, which is a controversial hard fork. And I do think if we get a hardfoot, at least in the next 12 months. If we get a Bitcoin hard for it, I believe it will be contentious, and that means there will be an economic value for both chains. 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. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st, through the 3rd,

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Starting point is 00:24:03 that I'm reading, it seems to me like there's going to be a high probability of a fork happening this year. But I'm curious what you think that probability is. Do you see this as a 50% kind of thing or you see it much higher than that? And then after you respond to that, I really think that the Ethereum fork would represent a really good representation of what the potential value drop would be in Bitcoin. I don't know what that was. Before the fork in Ethereum, what the market cap was and what it went to after the fork. But I would imagine that whatever we saw there would be something that we might see similarly play out in Bitcoin in the short term, I'm saying. And then I know today that the classic Ethereum coin is worth about 10% of what the forked value is.

Starting point is 00:24:51 I would guess that we'd see something similar happen in Bitcoin, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts on all of that. Yeah. So it's really hard, at least to me it is. It's really hard to estimate the probability of the heart for because there's so much, this is like a game theorist's playground, right? There's so much you can do with just trying to manipulate public opinion, you can bluff, you can agree on something and then not do it. And then there's also the viral effect. Information flows very freely in Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:25:22 And so whenever something new is brought to the market and the market picks up on it, adoption can happen very quickly. And so, for example, Segwit, which is the, key to lightning and then lightning in turn is how you get millions of transactions a day in cryptocurrency. So Segwit, that's kind of, you know, one of the contentious pieces that's on the table, that upgrade. Segway was adopted in Lightcoin. And the way that went was that light coin is a way smaller. So of course, things happen faster. Users started advocating for what's called a user activated softbook. This is something that has been used one time in Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:26:01 The way upgrades usually happen is through the miners, but users themselves can actually choose to run a different type of software, and so force the miners to also then transition. And if users change the protocol, they can basically make the mining revenue is almost obsolete. They can really endanger the economic edge of the miners. And so in that sense, it's kind of like a nuclear option that you can threaten with. Like, hey, if you guys don't do what we want with a minor activated software, we will do it and you will lose revenue. You can even threaten with a proof of work change, right? The way Bitcoin mining software is designed is specifically around the shot 256 algorithm. You can change that. Users can

Starting point is 00:26:44 just, you know, decide to change. And then entire mining farms become obsolete and they have to design new chips to try and make it work again. So I'm just trying to describe. Like there's so many elements to this table, things that even traditional political theory, you can't really apply. And, you know, like when you try to assess, like, is this political agreement going to happen or not? Because usually it's corporate, political, they come together. There's maybe like a rival political clique that then, you know, starts. But we all of a sudden users have huge power in cryptocurrency that is just not comparable to anything in real world politics.

Starting point is 00:27:21 And so I don't know. I don't know. The only thing I try to focus on is, you know, what kind of potential damage could there be to afford. That's kind of what I'm trying to see. And then if I'm no worried about that, I don't really care if the hard four happens sooner or later. I think long term, there will be some kind of fork. I'm pretty convinced. So with short term, what would happen if we get a contentious hard fork in Bitcoin?

Starting point is 00:27:44 I think it's fair to look at Ethereum and see what happened there. Although the situation is quite different. With Ethereum, the developers, most of the core developers backed the new version of Ethereum, right? they backed the Ethereum Foundation's Ethereum, which means the bailout of the Dow. Whereas now with Bitcoin, most of the core developers are more likely to support the legacy chain that will then have, you know, segwit implemented. When you look at the price, you have to take into account as well that after the Dow bailout happened and the split, a period after that, there was a series of attacks on Ethereum,

Starting point is 00:28:21 DDoS attacks that had nothing to do with the split. And so that lowered the price. That was my thesis that I presented. It's why I'm short Ethereum is because I thought there were a bunch of vulnerabilities that the market was not discounting the price for. And that, you know, it dropped 70%. But short term, there was not really a price decline. So the pie of value, you know, the market cap of Ethereum prior to the split and

Starting point is 00:28:46 Ethereum post split, those two together stayed roughly the same. And so I think that that is most likely to happen. That, you know, maybe depending on where we are and they change. general price cycle, it's actually not going to affect the value that much. So I guess I'm speaking more from a person who doesn't understand this stuff nearly at the level that you do. If I read something that says, you know, Bitcoin forked, in my mind, because I know so little about this stuff, I'm scared, especially if you've made, you know, let's say you've doubled your money since you were in it, I'm immediately exiting that

Starting point is 00:29:22 position because I just don't understand what's happening. And I'd be curious. curious to know how many people in the community that have a position in Bitcoin think very similarly to the way I'm describing it versus, hey, I really understand how these protocol networks work and, you know, it's split, but these are all the reasons why that's not a big deal. I'd be willing to bet 10% or 20% of the people think like that versus 80% to probably think the same way that I do and are just going to cut their gains and step aside for a little bit to see what shakes out and then maybe reenter at a different point. So that's why I think that regardless of whether the fork is good, bad, or in between, I think you're going to see

Starting point is 00:30:00 a pullback just because of the general understanding of the people that are actually involved in the market. I think that's fair. I think it's fair. I think it's likely we'll see some kind of shakeout. But then, you know, most of the question I think is like how long would that last? A shakeout is basically when, you know, we can sell and strong hands have an opportunity to buy and accumulate.

Starting point is 00:30:20 Hedge funds are not exposed to Bitcoin. You know, there are some estimates out there that are very credible, I think. That say only half a percent of all the hedge fund in the world have some kind of exposure to Bitcoin. That's Minut school. A lot of money is looking to get some exposure to the space. And so a shakeout would be a fantastic opportunity to pick up some coins. Family offices, a little more exposure, some angel investors, a little more exposure in tech. Although I do think that there's some tech people that don't necessarily have a hard money background

Starting point is 00:30:52 that are a little bit misguided on where the actual value is, the value proposition is. And then, of course, I mean, there's just lots of money. Banks have no exposure to Bitcoin. You know, they're focused on these private blockchains, which may turn out to be the intranet's story of, you know, the internet, right? There was a lot of buzz around that in the 90s of, like, private networks between corporations, was that that was the big story.

Starting point is 00:31:18 I think it's a possibility that we would get a shakeout. I still think that the prevailing. trend would define where the price would go. If we are already, technically the price is already somewhat breaking down and then the hard flow happens, people would say, oh, the price went down because of the hard flow. If the

Starting point is 00:31:34 price is still going up strong, the market possibly won't flinch. It can just keep going because the narrative is then that there's a split, but Segwit is adopted now and we can have lightning and all, you know, so it can be spun in two different ways

Starting point is 00:31:50 and I'm convinced that CNBC or whoever, they're just going to go with a narrative that fits the price rather than really understanding why fundamentally Bitcoin is going up or down. I would really like to relate that to discussion about trust because it's really, really hard to put up any kind of monetary system if there's not trust. And I think the system you have today where you have central banks, they basically just print money. I mean, that requires trust more than anything.

Starting point is 00:32:18 But for people to transition into Bitcoin or another. kind of cryptocurrency. Are you concerned that a fork, no matter how it plays out, will alien some people and really wrote that trust with people because now it starts to get more confusing. You're already talking about, called 500 and 600 different cryptocurrencies, but you always have the big one, the Bitcoin. And the second base of lithium, it's already split. So is that a concern that you have in terms of trust? Yeah, I think that's a great question, actually. I think short term, yes, there will be commotion. There will be confusion about the brand of Bitcoin, especially if both sides, both camps are more or less

Starting point is 00:32:58 equal in terms of economic terms. You know, if the legacy Bitcoin has 10 times more value in terms of the Bitcoin price versus the new version only 10%. I think then it won't be a big deal. But if it's a close race, yeah, I think things will be confusing. But I do think that this is a very different debate than what you had with Ethereum because the ether split came in like, in this. Initially, the mantra, the whole value system of Ethereum was immutable transactions, trustless code, code is law, all these things that were said and promised.

Starting point is 00:33:34 And then all of a sudden, somebody took advantage of basically the small print and this smart contract and was able to acquire a huge amount of coins by executing the code that was embedded in the blockchain. and then The Human Foundation decided to bail out people who had been investing in this smart contract. So I think it's more likely that in that environment you can talk about a breach of trust. Whereas with Bitcoin, I don't think necessarily that Bitcoin is less of a digital goal because there is a difference in visions where, you know, how big the block should be. Like it doesn't mean that transactions are being reversed or anything. Well, I think it's a good point that you bring up. And I think especially for someone who is an expert in the field, an authority in the field,

Starting point is 00:34:20 it makes a lot of sense to separate this. And also because you know the story about the various splits that you've seen. But if you were looking into cryptocurrencies for the first time, and you are thinking that, yes, it does make sense you have some kind of digital currency. And then you'll see all these different currencies and you see how volatile they are as well. Do you think it would be perceived better if you just had one cryptocurrency, even though it might have some minor flaws, what people could basically equate, this is cryptocurrencies, yes, and that's called Bitcoin,

Starting point is 00:34:49 or whatever it's called, and that would be the exchange rate you will look up. You wouldn't look up, ripple, you wouldn't look up Bitcoin. You would just look up what is the exchange rate to call the US dollars for cryptocurrencies, even though it's such a wide area to cover. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, again, great question. I think it's actually healthier and better. If you have a long-term vision, it's way better than we have 600 different cryptocurrencies

Starting point is 00:35:13 that are all competing with each other because what we're seeing is the advent of private money, right? And the essence of the fact that something is private is that it happens in the market. There is zero barrier to entry. There's competition. There's features that are being developed in certain coins that are not existing in other coins. And then those features, all the code is open source, they can be merged into other coins, right? And so everybody is kept on their toes and you get way faster development. Of course, you have a lot more, you could say, maybe scabs and deceit and things that are, you know, people telling you stories and people investing in things that will become total duds and things that will go to zero that are now maybe worth $500 million or a billion

Starting point is 00:35:59 dollars. And it was the same way in the advent of the internet, the same way with the railway boom. There were lots and lots of scabs during all those times. I think it's just, you know, whenever there's a disruptive evolution, disruptive technology, you get a lot of hot air and you get some really valuable stuff that is happening. And it's a challenge to discern those two. And you get booms and busts very violently. And during the booms, some of the investments stick. And they are the infrastructure of what later will become mass adopted. So it's the same with the internet. You had protocol wars, if you look it up, right? The internet protocol wars, which was literally huge disagreements about what the basic protocols of the internet should become. Now we all know it's

Starting point is 00:36:44 TCPIP, but back then there were way different visions about what that should be. So I think it's just, you know, it's just clear. All this to me is evidence that we're talking about massively disruptive technology. Yeah, it's interesting when you get into the protocol piece of what Bitcoin is, because for people that don't understand it real well, that's what we're really talking about is a new protocol for exchange and which one's going to emerge as the winner. And as of today, it looks like it's going to be Bitcoin, but there's no guarantee that that's how it's going to eventually shake out 10 years from now. And I think that that's the risk that people've got to be aware of when they're thinking through if I'm going to invest in this, how do I navigate that sea of

Starting point is 00:37:26 change most advantageously? So we're curious how you would answer that because I've read some of your your white papers online tour and they're absolutely incredible. We're going to have those in the show notes for people to read. The thing that I find really interesting that you've talked about is the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum and why you were a bear on Ethereum and I've seen your opinion of that kind of evolve through some of your writing. I still know that you're much of a Bitcoin enthusiast and you kind of place your bet on Bitcoin kind of moving forward. But you started to talk about this difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum, and I would really like to hear more about that. Yeah, so briefly, I want to comment first about, you know, how do you find your

Starting point is 00:38:10 way through this maze? One of the things that helped me or that I use to get clarity or to stay sane, because that's hard enough, is just to focus on what technologies do we have that actually have consumer use cases, right? What real world adoption beyond speculation are we safe? So that's something that I try to keep in mind because you have lofty white papers and lofty business plans. You saw lots of those during the dot-com bubble. It doesn't mean that it's really anything of substance. Whereas Amazon, for example, they could show like, you know, their sales numbers went up and up and up, all that kind of thing. So when you're talking about Bitcoin and Ethereum in particular, Bitcoin was conceived of as digital cash and digital gold, which actually is very similar because cash is, you know,

Starting point is 00:38:58 Another way to say, to talk about cash is like a bearer bond. It's, you know, like something that you have readily accessible. And that may actually imply scarcity and imply some of the characteristics that we know of in gold. And so what happens when you design a cryptocurrency with that as an end goal in mind is that you start focusing on security very, very much. And that's how you end up with these blocks that are just one megabyte, right? I mean, what is one megabyte in these times? You know, the entire Bitcoin blockchain, I think, is now like 30. 13 gigabytes. So that's not a lot of money. But, you know, keeping it small like that allows

Starting point is 00:39:33 the network to be truly decentralized. It allows the future to be insured. It allows transactions to be censorship resistant in an approvable way. So that's Bitcoin. Ethereum, what they wanted to do was to create a decentralized internet. What if we do away with these up codes and say, you can publish anything you want on that blockchain? Any code will execute. This is the cloud-based computer. And so then they call that code smart contracts. And so, you know, we can have a rental contract or anything you can imagine,

Starting point is 00:40:09 you can execute on that blockchain. And so to get there again, their approach is to building way more flexibility. That's something I've talked about in the past. The trade-off is that you have a lot more security concerns. Because what if somebody uploads a so-called smart contract that's actually designed to crash your nodes? And all of a sudden,

Starting point is 00:40:28 None of your nodes are working. They're all, it's like a DDoS attack, and you have to then rush in to fix that little bug and then, you know, continue on. And so security experts, they kind of, it's kind of a nightmare for them because Ethereum has an attack surface that cannot be clearly defined. Whereas with Bitcoin, you can say, all right, here are the exact risks of how the history of Bitcoin could be reversed or of how nodes could crash. It's very, very well defined. Ethereum has none of that. And so it's kind of like it works as long as it works. And so that's one of my concerns.

Starting point is 00:41:03 Obviously, maybe I'm biased because my background is that I want a savings instrument that has high liquidity and extremely high security and almost no kind of party risk. That's my focus. And so Ethereum is never something that I wanted or I aspire to. But even objectively, I still think you can ask the question, what real world use cases are there today of Ethereum smart contracts that cannot be done in a better way by just using a MySQL database? So for me to just kind of summarize so that you can say, yes, you understood that or you didn't. That's basically why I'm restating this.

Starting point is 00:41:42 When it comes to Bitcoin, you see that as a good store of value and something that could be used as global money, global currency. When it comes to the Ethereum, it's a great platform for exercising smart contracts. So like let's say I sold you my car and we wanted to set up a loan payment over five years. If for whatever reason, let's say my car is smart enough that I could code it that if you failed to make a payment, it would automatically stop the digital key that you can't drive it anymore and I can repossess the car because you didn't make that payment. We could do something like that on Ethereum. But with Bitcoin, that'd be very difficult to do something like that or to program something

Starting point is 00:42:21 that would operate on the Bitcoin protocol doing something like that. Is that a correct way to look at it? I agree with most of what you said. I would disagree with great. You said it's a great way, a great platform to do smart contracts. And the reason why I took issue with that is that it's still unproven. It's also not the case that you cannot do that with Bitcoin. The fact is that with Bitcoin, you would have to wait a bit longer until we have these

Starting point is 00:42:45 second or third layer protocols built on top of it and then executed in those layers and then just use the main layer to maybe settle the transaction or something like that. So it's not that Ethereum is doing something that's impossible in Bitcoin. The thing is that the worry that I have with Ethereum is that, well, if we accept that Ethereum is a less or an inferior store of value platform, well, how can it then really be the base layer for all these smart contracts that, you know, in the future would hold billions of dollars of value? Why would I trust my real estate transaction with that Ethereum blockchain if maybe in a

Starting point is 00:43:22 year for now, it's going to hard fork and they're going to reverse some transactions or my existing smart contract stops working with this because they change something. That's something I really worry about is that if you stuff too much in one protocol layer, things can get really messy and confusing. I would really like to talk about what you said before at the digital gold. Prest and I have covered gold multiple times here on the podcast. And we always talked about how the scarcity of gold is very valuable in a monster system. which is also why we had that until 1971.

Starting point is 00:43:56 Now, I listened to this podcast with you whenever I was doing research for the interview, and what you did in that interview was that you compared the market cap of Bitcoin with the market cap of gold. And one of the things you said was, what if Bitcoin is just 1% of gold? And back then, it was very little. It was back in October 2016.

Starting point is 00:44:16 And you said, well, if it was just 1%, Bitcoin would be priced at around $3,000. That's what you said. So could you take us through that process in terms of why you think that Bitcoin is perhaps the digital gold and the good properties of that? Bitcoin was conceived as digital gold. This is something that goes back even 20 years before the code was launched in 2009. People were talking about digital gold and how to do that.

Starting point is 00:44:44 And then there's initiatives like e-gold and all those kind of things. There's definitely a long history there. Toshi himself, which is the inventor of Bitcoin, mentioned. Bitcoin that's digital gold compares it to gold six times, even though he was only active for a period of one year. So how is Bitcoin digital gold? Well, first of all, it solves a problem of it's called double spending. The idea is that if I create a digital currency, nothing will stop me from spending the same token or the same coin twice, thereby increasing the money supply and actually robbing value of everybody else,

Starting point is 00:45:17 which is what happens in the traditional financial system, when banks or central banks is create money out of thin air. And so the way they solved that was to introduce this idea of a shared legend, right? We just have a fixed amount of tokens and then we shift them around among the owners, but we keep very precise track of where the money is so that no coin is ever duplicated. So Bitcoin solves that in a masterful way and proof of work is a very important part of that, which is that miners have to do work to acquire a certain voting power to decide what is the final version of the ledger? Because there's new transactions added all the time to the ledger

Starting point is 00:45:57 so that every time you have to decide, like, are we going to go left or right where the ledger is going? So finite supply is solved. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoins that is embedded in the Bitcoin protocol. There's no way to change that except to fork, which is fine. You can do that.

Starting point is 00:46:15 A light coin, for example, has four times the amount of coins as Bitcoin. And it was based off the same code, But those nodes, if you run the software, don't talk to each other. They speak a different language, so they will never interfere. So, finance supply, the fact that the transportation is virtually without cost, right? If I can send you an email, I can send you Bitcoins. I would argue that storage of Bitcoins actually can be done more securely than storage of gold, because with Bitcoin, there's something that's called a multi-signature transaction.

Starting point is 00:46:47 And so I can have a wallet of Bitcoins that can pull. only be spent if, for example, three out of five signatures are provided. And then those keys, those signatures, I can store on five different continents. And so if some entity wants to rob me, they would have to break into vaults on three different continents to be able to spend those bitcoins. That's different with gold. You cannot store gold the same ounce of gold in different locations. So there are several properties like that that make Bitcoin, I think, extremely powerful as a digital cash, a savings instrument, digital gold. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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Starting point is 00:50:46 Yeah. And I think it's really interesting part again that you bring up because whenever we're talking about the price of Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, I mean, what is it that we really need to compare it to? And if you look up like the current price of Bitcoin, say it's around $2,000, and you'll be like, hmm, why is it worth $2,000 today, why it was only worth, call it $200 a few years ago? And, you know, it goes into this very weird discussion of how do you actually find an appropriate price? So whenever I started it, there are some people that saying, well, you should kind of

Starting point is 00:51:21 look at the value of Bitcoin as what is the processing fees you would use for Visa and MasterCat, for instance, if that is really the problem it's solving. And then you will have other people saying, well, you know, perhaps you should compare it to the price of gold because that's another problem that's solving, you know, it's a finite supply, you're storing a value. So let me ask this broad question. How do you come up with a fundamental value of Bitcoin? So to me, the main problem that Bitcoin solves is how do I store wealth? That's the main problem it solves.

Starting point is 00:51:56 And so comparing the Bitcoin market cap, currently $40 billion, to the gold. you know, above ground physical gold, which is about $5 trillion, makes sense to me, right? Right now we're at about 1%. And I think we can totally go to 10%. But it doesn't stop there, in my opinion, because, you know, there are stores of wealth that are vastly bigger than gold, right? We have government bonds. We have, you know, Forex markets are huge.

Starting point is 00:52:24 I think roughly speaking, we can talk about $100 trillion, a pool of $100 trillion worth of value that is considered to be liquid and relatively stable that Bitcoin basically competes with. So when you talk about future valuations, I think it's not outrageous to talk about a Bitcoin price of $100,000 or a million dollars. When you look at the qualities of Bitcoin, and especially when you take into account the amount of scaling that's going to happen, I think it's hard to argue that it's not actually better than gold in several respects or better than, you know, a 10-year government

Starting point is 00:53:00 bond or better than if you take US dollar, for example. So I would like to just take one step back and not so much talk about only the fork, whether or not that would happen called in a year or two, whenever it would happen or perhaps not happen, but really in the grand scheme of things. And I would like to do that by talking about creative destruction. And creative destruction is actually something that we talked a lot about here on the podcast, even though we typically don't use that fancy term. but it basically means that everything will always improve and become more efficient.

Starting point is 00:53:35 And the example that we typically use and the Warren Buffing Chalamanga uses is that they're saying we used to ride on horses, now we have cars, and soon we will have driverless cars. So it's not really not a question about if it will happen, because it will happen. We just don't know when and in which form. And we can see the same thing with different monetary systems. I mean, we have seen this with the bothering system, Winston, ancient Rome, whatever that system has been,

Starting point is 00:54:04 we always come up with someone that's been more efficient. And I think there's a lot of good arguments for saying that cryptocurrencies, one way or the other, if the digital age is a more efficient monter system. Having said all that, I also think there's a lot of reasons why you could argue the opposite, why it won't go that way. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it.

Starting point is 00:54:27 that. Will we see cryptocurrency as something eventually replacing the Fiat monetary system, whether it happens in 10 years, 100 years from now, or will always be like a way of storing value digitally? Yeah, great question. If you look at finance, obviously there's some changes that have happened over the years and different financial products that have been designed. And we have come off the gold standard. Like for 6,000 years, the way to save was to have gold. And then that transition gradually became, went from like a gold backed standard to then fully digitized just, you know, fiat tokens, what we have now. I think that Bitcoin is really, it's a monumental proposition for creative destruction, like really like, it really fundamentally challenges. And

Starting point is 00:55:16 you can go back to 2012 and look at this ECB paper that was put out talking about virtual currencies is what they called it. But I think Bitcoin was mentioned 150 times. And in the paper. And basically, the ECB was talking about how their senior edge revenues were being threatened by these private digital currencies. Saniorich is from a central bank point of view. What we call inflation is actually part of their revenue stream. That's how they make money for themselves so that their revenue stream was actually threatened by these competitive technologies. I think that what is most likely to happen is that we get some. kind of a crisis in the financial system, right?

Starting point is 00:55:59 For a Bitcoin will grow on its own, but then when there is a big crisis where we have a currency that used to be considered a store of value that all of a sudden goes into stackflation, high inflation, hyperinflation, I think that could be a sea change moment where people realize that there's actually this backup financial system that's already operational and they can just make the switch. And that's when you will see governments accepting taxes expressed in Bitcoin, for example. That's when you'll see Bitcoin being used as a reserve instrument, those kind of things. So I do think that we can see a significant, you know, like almost unimaginable adoption of Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:56:42 Or, you know, maybe I'm wrong and maybe it's another cryptocurrency happen in the future. Yeah. And back to what you said about that might be a safe haven if we see a crisis. I mean, traditionally, a lot of people were saying, oh, we need to go into gold because that was storing value if something happens. And just like, just as a comment to that also like to stress that whenever we're talking about the value of Bitcoin or the value of gold for that matter, it's always priced in another currency. So that doesn't necessarily mean that the value of Bitcoin or gold has gone up. It could also be that they say the value of the dollar has gone down, which is another interesting. Which is why I'm less hesitant to say Bitcoin is going to go to a million dollars because what is that million dollar going to buy? Is it going to be a car, a house? Is it going to be a bicycle? It all depends on the inflation. That's a great point. And what I've been a bit confused about whenever I've been reading up on the price development of different commodities, whenever I looked up on price development, for instance, on gold, is that I don't see a closer correlation with Bitcoin and gold. And I don't know if it's because there is a lot of

Starting point is 00:57:50 And Bitcoin, obviously there's a lot of speculation in gold as well. Or it's simply a question of having a somewhat similar supply side. The demand side is very, very different from Bitcoin, but all these people flowing in right now. And I'm curious to hear about your thoughts on that and really explain the volatility. So it is true that the correlation with Bitcoin and gold is very weak. Actually, the correlation with Bitcoin and virtually anything, any financial asset is at least, it's true. extremely weak. There is, there is some, the best case you could make is a negative correlation between, you know, Bitcoin dollar and Chinese Yuan dollar, which is basically indicating that if there is a downtick in the Yuan, if there's some fears of devaluation, then people go to Bitcoin. And there is a very active trading community in China. So that is interesting in itself. And why is it not higher? Because it, you know, it would be logical to say, I think, I think the main reason is that Bitcoin is just tiny, super tiny, and that the forces of adoption play a much bigger role.

Starting point is 00:58:56 So you have these, you know, if you look back on the Bitcoin price, you have these waves, these cycles. You know, Bitcoin went from $1 to $30 and then down to $2 and then up to, I think it was $160 and then down to $85 and then up to $1,200 and then down to $150. So like, and I'm talking about between these price points, we saw sometimes six months or a year path. So like really big price waves. So I think that is really adoption. That's technological adoption. That is basically all the time this dynamic between weak hands and strong hands, strong hands buying at the bottom and then weak hands jumping on board as the price accelerates.

Starting point is 00:59:37 And then as the price declines, the weak hands panic and they sell and new strong hands come in. I think that is an important part of, you know, understanding the Bitcoin price. A lot of people that got involved in Bitcoin had a technology background. They weren't necessarily looking to, you know, make a lot of money or they didn't have an understanding of investing necessarily of value investing or anything like that. And sometimes people just misunderstand Bitcoin as well. Sometimes they buy it because they think it's going to be the next visa competitor. And then they see the fees on the Bitcoin network all of a sudden go to one, two, maybe $3 and they panic. It's like, oh my God, like my whole narrative is

Starting point is 01:00:13 destroyed. I should sell. So it's not necessarily that these people lack the will, but sometimes there's some different interpretation of what Bitcoin is. So I think that plays a big role. There's also the fact that Bitcoin miners all the time are exposed to the Bitcoin price. So every 10 minutes, a block is mined. Some miners somewhere wins that block. So they get all the transaction fees in the block plus block reward fee. Currently 12 and a half Bitcoin.

Starting point is 01:00:41 Not too bad, right? That's $24,000. And so if the Bitcoin is rising, they can either sell it right away or they can hoard it. can decide to keep it and sell it at a higher price. That's very tempting, especially if you have a one-year bull market, a lot of miners, they start thinking that maybe I'm not just, you know, in blue-collar, minor, and I'm a technology guy, I'm not necessarily a speculator. You know, they sometimes change their mind and decide to hoard coins.

Starting point is 01:01:10 And then supply gets constricted, right? Instead of 380,000 bitcoins a year, maybe you get only 100,000 that new bitcoins on the market and all the rest is hoarded, which is, you know, great until the price starts declining again. Then the miners might not only offload the bitcoins that they have already hoarded, but because the price declines, maybe their profit margins are getting understress. Maybe they overstretched. Maybe they have some debt that they incurred. Maybe there's new competitors on the market that have made mining more expensive. And so maybe they will start selling a higher percentage of the new coins as well. That's thing is really important to understand.

Starting point is 01:01:48 Because this made me underestimate the length of the Bitcoin winter in 2014 and 15, I think, is that not only were miners hoarding on the way up, but they took a long time to start offloading, offloading and offloading these coins. So there's more dynamics, but these are some of the things that I think sometimes people miss. So one of the things that I find really fascinating about blockchain technology is all the other things that you can do. And we talked about a little bit when we got into the Ethereum discussion. But let me just throw out a scenario here for people that might not understand this aspect of blockchain.

Starting point is 01:02:24 So say Stig and I wanted to start a new company and we wanted to do an offering of equity of the business. Say we wanted to sell off 10% of our business to raise money early on. We can now do this through blockchain technology without having to go through some big bank that's going to suck a ton of fees out of area. You're basically able to do your own IPO through blockchain technology. So I've read this in books that you can do this, but I've never really talked to anybody that's done at an application. So my question for you is, can you do this today? And if you can, where would you go about doing it? Yeah, you can do it today.

Starting point is 01:03:04 I think it's like Ethereum.org slash crowdsend. I think there is actually a page and they will just walk you through it, how to do it. And it will be a smart contract and it'll be published on the Ethereum blockchain. And you can start raising funds. And, you know, I don't know the exact number, but hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised this way. And I think that long term, there is something there. I think there is really something there that's going to stick around where this obvious evolution from, you know, Wall Street based capital raising to then, you know, venture capital to then crowd sales with like Kickstarter and things like that.

Starting point is 01:03:43 to then, you know, actually offering equity to the market. I don't, as far as I know, because, of course, I mean, equity offerings have happened in the past, like straight to the public. It has happened during the railway boom. It happened during the, in the 20s. So it happened many times in the past, and usually during a bubble, a lot of people get scammed. And this is in part why securities laws have been, you know, brought into creation. So it's really interesting, a couple different points that I've,

Starting point is 01:04:13 thinking about as you said all this, is first of all the fact that it would have to be done on Ethereum and not the Bitcoin blockchain. I find that to be really interesting. And I think about it more from the dynamic that if IPOs are just one thing you can do on Ethereum that you're not today able to do on Bitcoin, that gives a lot of momentum to that as a currency. Because if now, if you got that application and another person builds the next Airbnb that you don't have to pay Airbnb a fee to, it's just, you know, customer to. transaction because you don't need that overhead there. That creates a lot of momentum in that currency. The other part that I have a question for you on is, let's say Stig and I do this IPO

Starting point is 01:04:54 on Ethereum. And the coins that people are able to basically secure that say that they own some of this equity are Ethereum, it's ether? Is that what it is? Or is it some other spin-off coin that would be called Stiggin-Preston's coin that makes it separate from ether? I don't understand that part of it. Can you explain that to us? Yeah, I think most ICOs create. In your case, it might be like S&P coin or something like that. And the cool thing about it is that all of a sudden,

Starting point is 01:05:23 you might have a phone call with a few of the exchanges, and then one of them might bite. Maybe you'll offer them some money even. There's exchanges that will take some money and then they will publish your pair, your token. All of a sudden it gets traded. And because you are the company, you obviously have allocated a lot of tokens to yourself.

Starting point is 01:05:46 And so then as it gets traded, it gets a value. And you can basically offload some of those tokens to liquidate them and make some money. And obviously, if you had malicious intent, you could do a pump-and-dump, right? You can, you know, invest $200,000 in marketing and, you know, make sure that there's an enticing story. The price pumps. And you can then offload and you can make $500,000 based on, you know, the buzz. But yeah, I think the attractiveness is if you have a token that is specific and it trades, then all of a sudden the market is going to value your company at a certain amount.

Starting point is 01:06:21 All right. So, Tor, we can't thank you enough for taking time out of your day to chat with us. I could literally talk to you for probably the rest of the entire day. And it's the morning over here. So I've got a lot of questions for you. This stuff is fascinating. My opinion is if people don't get smart on this stuff and start to really understand it, they're going to be left in the dust with a massive opportunity, whether it's Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever, there's just so much to learn.

Starting point is 01:06:47 And you are definitely one of those sources out there that I really trust. I know anything you write is now on my reading list because, man, I've learned so much from reading your blog and talking to you today. So we can't thank you enough for that. If you could give a handoff to people listening to this where they can learn more about you, your Twitter handle, stuff like that, I'm sure they would love to know what that is. Yeah, I would recommend just Google my name. The first result is my Twitter handle.

Starting point is 01:07:14 I'm on Twitter every day. So that's where I do most of my stuff. And then I have my articles. I usually post on Medium. Medium.com. So if you go there, it's pretty easy to find more articles. I have some reports that I've written over time, but I publish those links occasionally. Because I don't like to promote reports that are maybe a bit outdated.

Starting point is 01:07:33 So I talk about those as they come out. And then what I'm doing in general is that I'm moving to the hedge fund space. It's kind of my passion is to, I think the time is ripe for institutional investors to come into Bitcoin. There's a lot more interest now. And so that's where I'm looking to specialize. All right. That was all the Preston and I had for this week's episode of The Investors Podcast. We see each other again next week.

Starting point is 01:07:59 Thanks for listening to TIP. To access the show notes, courses or forums, go to the investorspodcast.com. To get your questions played on the show, go to Asktheinvestors.com and win a free subscription to any of our courses on TIP Academy. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making investment decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the TIP network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

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