We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP252: The Bitcoin Impact w/ Trace Mayer
Episode Date: July 21, 2019On today's show, we talk to Bitcoin expert, Trace Mayer. IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN: How to value bitcoin using the Mayer Multiple Why bitcoin is about bringing trust to a new monetary syst...em How bitcoin might look in 5 years from now How to think about the energy consumption of bitcoin BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Trace's Bitcoin Podcast Trace Mayer on Twitter More information about the Mayer Multiple Follow the Mayer Multiple on Twitter NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Bluehost Fintool PrizePicks Vanta Onramp SimpleMining Fundrise TurboTax HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! 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
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You're listening to TIP.
On today's show, we have the distinct pleasure to talk to Trace Mayer about Bitcoin.
For people not familiar with Trace, he's been one of the most influential people in the space,
and he's been heavily buying Bitcoin since it was only 25 cents.
Not only that, Trace is an early investor in the Cracken Exchange, which is valued in excess
of $5 billion, and he's also an early investor in the Bitcoin merchant processor BitPay.
Trace has provided presentations to the Federal Reserve, the IRS, the Boone's Bank,
and many other insanely influential organizations about the impact of Bitcoin.
He holds a JD from California Western School of Law.
He has an accounting degree, and he's just an all-around wrecking ball of knowledge.
So hold on to your hat, and I hope you guys enjoy this conversation with the one and only, Trace Mayer.
You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most.
We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected.
Hey everyone, welcome to the investors podcast. I'm your host, Preston Pish. And as always, I'm accompanied by my co-host Stig Broderson. And like we said in the introduction, we've got the Bitcoin expert Trace Mayer with us today. Trace, I'm a huge fan of yours. In fact, I've been a fan since 2015 when I first started watching and listening to your content. So welcome to the show. It's so awesome to have you here.
Oh, thanks so much for having me. And likewise, it's to be able to be in this marketplace of ideas. And you know, you're also in the ring. So a ton of
respect for doing that. All right. So let's just dive right into this. I always like to start off with a
person's core and what influenced them to become the person that they are today. So I'm curious to
hear your thoughts on this. Yeah, I love to do that. So you have to start with your parents, right?
You know, I definitely have very good parents. And I wanted a bicycle when I was, I think I was like
three or four for my birthday. So I asked my dad for it. And my dad was like, how are you going to buy it?
And so we actually went out on family walks and collected cans that I'd feed to the golden goat and I collected enough money to buy my own bicycle.
My mother, she always felt that it was extremely important for me to understand money.
Even from a very early age, she did whatever she could to kind of encourage that and teach that.
Between understanding kind of theory of money and this entrepreneurship with my father, I started selling otter pops to construction workers and lemonade.
My dad was actually doing an MBA at the time when I was like, I think I was like three or four.
And so I'd sit on his lap while he's reading his macroeconomics textbook while he's also working a full-time job.
That kind of went on.
And so then I'm in middle school.
And in middle school, I start playing online games.
Sure, the games are fun.
But what was more fun is that I would sell the items in the game in order to get US dollars, you know?
So I'm like selling swords and shields in these virtual games.
And I also played Magic the Gathering.
I learned a lot of the skills that that game ends up teaching you in terms of probabilities and statistics and bluffing, you know, kind of like poker and all that stuff.
I think I was 12 at the time.
And my father, he had had some of the different series licenses for securities and stuff.
He wanted to teach me a lesson, you know, about investing as opposed to just doing entrepreneurship.
For the lesson, he was like, you know, he's teaching me about stocks.
And he was like, what stocks should we buy?
And I was like, oh, I think we should buy Marvel stock.
And he was like, why should we buy Marvel stock?
And I was like, because everybody at school is like reading those comic books.
We didn't end up buying any Marvel stock.
But a year later, the Marvel stock had gone from like $6 to like $120.
I mean, some huge amount.
And I kind of looked at that.
And with my like 12 year old brain, I was like, man, I got to figure out how to play that game.
You know, because like that's way easier than taking soda cans in my backpack on the bus to like sell to kids.
to make a little bit of money. And eventually, you know, kind of like Warren Buffett, I got a soda
machine, kind of like he got a pinball machine. I sold over 100,000 sodas before I graduated high
school with that soda machine with an average profit margin of 33 cents a can. And then I took that
money and invested. And so I started trading stocks. When I tried to approach the game of trading
stocks and stuff, that's where I really delved into the macro picture. And so I was analyzing everything
and I was like, oh, I want to own oil stocks. And so I had bought a bunch of Canadian oil trusts because they paid monthly dividends and did very well with those. But it wasn't until I was in law school. And I took a particular course on American legal history and I needed to write like a 60-page paper. And I decided to write it on the history of money and currency in American law. For this paper, you know, I'm trying to research for it. And I can't find anything. And so I go and ask the professor who was a he was an attorney and a PhD in history.
I was like, look, I can't find anything.
It's like, I need to write this paper.
It's getting further into the semester.
Can you help me, like, with the research?
So he tries to do some research, and he can't find anything either.
And he's like, you know, if you can't find anything in the next week, you're going to have to change your topic because you're not going to have enough time.
And sure enough, within that next week, somehow, I don't remember exactly.
I think I was dinking around through the internet, but I found pieces of eight by Dr. Edwin Vieira.
And I had the library, like, bring it in from L.A.
And then I started reading through that and I was like, holy cow, because it just started putting all the pieces together and the philosophical and the political theory behind sound money and all this stuff because it's in the Constitution.
That's where I really got grounded in understanding monetary science and monetary theory.
I'd read through that.
And then it was just a very natural fit when I came across Bitcoin because I'd also, you know, in high school and college years, I dealt with Napster and then BitTorrent and censorship resistance.
and the development of these protocols.
You know, that's how I really like came into Bitcoin because I actually, you know, wrote
software, wrote different things that I needed to get done before I came to Bitcoin.
So I came with like this macro economic perspective, this monetary theory perspective,
understanding of software code from having written some on my own.
And then just being a digital native, having grown up in the age of Napster and BitTorrent and
online games and just all this stuff.
And so Bitcoin just became a very natural fit for me.
When I came across it, I was like, oh my gosh, this is going to solve so many of the problems that the world has, especially with Bitcoin now.
Nobody's going to, you're not going to get bailed out anymore.
The days of that are done.
If you look at the media, it seems like the vast majority of the coverage is about the price moving of Bitcoin.
And it's really conceptualized as just another tool of speculation.
Bitcoin is so much more.
So instead of thinking that it's another asset to speculate in, how should we perceive Bitcoin?
Trust. If I'm going to encapsulate it in one word, we're establishing trust in an entirely new way.
I learned double-entry bookkeeping with my accounting degree. Bitcoin is the first practical
implementation of triple-entry bookkeeping. You know, when we're valuing derivatives, when we're
valuing different assets and liabilities on all of these financial statements, well, guess what?
you value the assets really high and the liability is really low so that you get a better bonus. And there's
discretion in the valuation of how that happens. So like pension accounting, you want to talk about a
complete mess. It's how do you value the assets that are held in everybody's pensions? We're talking about
hundreds of millions or even billions of people's lifetimes being stored in certain assets. And guess what
Bitcoin does? It brings trust because you got triple entry bookkeeping. You got immutability. You got censorship
ship resistance. Money is only one application of this. It's an internet protocol. So we're talking about a set of
rules that computers follow in order to come to a distributed consensus about what the state of something is.
You know, money is one application of that, but it filters all the way through because it's going to
filter through to establishing facts in terms of information theory. Like what actually happened?
You know, I mean, in an age of deep fakes that can happen, in an age of, did somebody really say something?
Well, you can put out a public key and you can sign a message with it and you can anchor it into the blockchain.
And now you know that somebody said that at a certain date in the past.
Why is that able to be proven?
Well, because the economics and the game theory that go behind this protocol, we're able to look at the thermodynamics, you know, how much electricity and energy and computer processing power goes.
into that proof of work that's behind that, we're able to get competence levels of assessment
in terms of being able to roll back that history or that mutability of the facts.
You know, I mean, what's the first thing that people who want to commit a fraud do?
They bring out the shredders and they start feeding the Enron and the WorldCom papers
into the shredders because they want to change what happened in the past.
That's how they try to do the bailouts.
And so, Bitcoin is about bringing trust.
What can you actually trust?
in the book The Great Credit Contraction, 500 years ago, we trusted having a commodity money like gold or silver in our hand, right? And we moved to having fractional reserve and then eventually having fiat currency. And this was the great credit expansion. But now, you know, kind of like you throw a baseball up in the air, the baseball is going to come back down to Earth because of gravity. The pendulum always swings. And now it's swinging back. And so we've got different forms of we've got performance risk. We've got counterparty risk. You know, all these forms.
of risk, Bitcoin allows us to just totally get rid of. Counterparty risk, the financial ability of
the counterparty to perform, you know, fractional reserve, you don't need any of that with Bitcoin because
it's an equity-based instrument. You don't need a lender of last resort. You need hoddlers of last resort.
Performance risk. That's proof of keys. That's how we can figure out whether they're going to actually
keep the contract or not. And as we develop trust in society, and as we lower the barrier to
entry or the cost in order to get trust, it increases our social scalability of a society, which means
that we can trust people in much easier ways, and then that enables our society to get more complex.
Bitcoin at its core is about trust, and from the extension of that, it feeds into everything.
Like, how do we trust our interactions with other humans? What implications is this going to have
in terms of governments and societies and geopolitics and geostrategie. So it's not just the micro,
but it's also the macro. It's a technological innovation that happens once a species, you know,
this triple entry bookkeeping with the implications it has in terms of money and the wealth
transfer effect that results from that. I mean, it's just maybe I just don't have much creativity,
but I don't really see how we could have a similar type of disruption happen to the human species.
Maybe, but I mean, we're going to be equity-based, like going forward.
Like, it's no longer a debt-based fractional reserve.
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Back to the show.
So, Trace, this evening I was having...
a conversation with a person that never has owned Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency before
in their lives. And the topic of Bitcoin came up and they made the comment to me, you know,
I just don't understand how it's going to have more utility or beat out the dollar.
And the person said to me, like in five years from now, why am I going to be using Bitcoin
in a grocery store compared to the dollar? I just, the person said to me, I find that really
hard to bleep. So I guess I pose the same question to you. How would you respond to a person like
this? The first 10 years of Bitcoin, we've largely only seen a small amount of the speculation
network effect take root. Maybe it'll take a few decades before we really get to like these
other deeper network effects. You know, five years out, store value is probably going to be a
significant use case with Bitcoin. It's already got a multi-hundred billion dollar market cap. We've
got central bankers like talking about it with very odd body language, like they're stressed out.
We got regulators that are heavily involved in the space now. We have legislators like in Wyoming,
the work that Caitlin Long and I have been working on getting these 13 bills passed and then other
jurisdictions that are, you know, both in the U.S. and internationally that are passing different
laws. So, you know, all this stuff is enabling because we have a lot of financial repression that
happens through draconian laws like money transmission laws and money service business laws and
know your customer and anti-money laundering and like all these things tramble money in an attempt
to bring it more and more under the jurisdiction kind of kicks the door down you know we've had a
nationalized we've had a largely socialized monetary unit that's contrary to the fundamental
law of the land the federal reserve note is unconstitutional the constitution it uses the phrase
dollar twice, once in the slave clause, which was highly contentious. So the term dollar needs to have
a definition, which had gotten the 1792 Coinage Act, which is 371.25 grains of fine silver, 0.999 fine silver.
And it's the states that make property rights, you know, and remedies. No state shall make
anything but gold or silver a tender and payment of debts. One, having the federal government
make anything legal tender, they're not given that in Article 1, Section 8. They're not given that power.
And if states make anything legal tender, they can only make gold or silver legal tender under Article 1, Section 10, Clause 1.
Guess what? That's unconstitutional. Well, how did it get that way? Executive Order 6102, Franklin Roosevelt had the federal government seize the gold. He attempted to pack the Supreme Court under the issue of economic substantive due process. Then we had the legislators outlaw ownership of gold and silver. They didn't legalize it until 1974. And after 1970, and after 19.
74 in the case city versus Dover, it squarely framed the issue of what is a dollar, and the U.S.
Supreme Court refused to hear the case. And so we have all three branches of government abdicate, like,
shirking their responsibility to uphold the Constitution when it comes to monetary repression.
And so what's the average citizen supposed to do when it comes to claiming the right to protecting
private property? And it does all of these things at a much lower cost than anything else that has been
invented in human history. You can now store $100 million and it can't be confiscated. It can't be
seized. It can't be impeded. You store $100 million of gold. Guess what? They can come and kill you
and take your gold. It doesn't work that way with Bitcoin. It's just going to force the issue
for society in so many different ways. Once you take away that power over money from the state
invest it with the individual, that begins to change tons of things. And it does that because it's
changing the economics of violence at a fundamental level. It's enabling the individual to secure
protection for their private property at a much lower cost. And as a result, they don't need to
acquire protection services at the cost that they were paying to the nation states. You know,
because that's one of the reasons that the individual hires nation states, supposedly. And this
this is the other side of the path is everybody just a slave. People are either going to have sound
money and determine their own financial destiny because they have private property and can perform
economic calculation, or they're going to be slaves to political elites, they're going to starve to
death eventually because society won't be able to perform economic calculation in order to
determine how good should be deployed in society for productive uses. Humanity is now getting
forced to choose with Bitcoin. It's going to be a very exciting future to figure out how this
it's played out. I mean, five years from now, you know, I don't think it's going to be that big
of an issue. But think about it, 10 years ago, how big of a role did YouTube play in national
elections? Like, not that big. 15 years ago, it didn't play any role because it didn't exist.
You know, and now YouTube is changing elections at a fundamental level. But we're talking about
something that might even be more powerful than YouTube. We're talking about the money.
So, Trace, we know we have a lot of investors who are listening to this show who are not looking
at Bitcoin as a way to speculate, but are looking at it as a way to diversify and to store value.
So this question is really for them.
The last cycle that we saw, that was back in 2017, when we really saw the Bitcoin price
spike.
And one could argue that we are now in another bear market from the low 3,000 to more than 13,000
not too long ago. Where do you see us in the current Bitcoin cycle?
How I kind of look at it is this could be a real doozy of one, you know, that'll blow your
hair back. Because you look at the log chart of Bitcoin and I mean, I put out a tweet, you know,
we could be looking at $100,000 to $250,000 per Bitcoin by the time this particular bull market
comes to resolution. Where are we currently at with it? You kind of named the mayor multiple.
you know, I'd put out on several different interviews that I'd done kind of the basic methodology,
but you put a name to it. It's really not something I'd do myself, but it's out there now, right?
And so we look at that mayor multiple, and you'd mention like $3,000 Bitcoin. Well, when there was $3,000 Bitcoin,
it was like 0.5 on the mayor multiple. And now we're like 2.4 on the mayor multiple.
And the mayor multiple is you take the current price divided by the 200-day moving average.
and that gives you a relative price of like 0.5 or 2.4.
And then you can look at standard deviations in terms of that relative price.
And that helps you understand like, well, is Bitcoin more expensive relative to its past history?
Bitcoin's a little bit expensive right now.
Whereas when it was 0.5, it was really cheap.
You know, I totally agree that equal opportunity moneymaker here.
You know, what's you going to do?
Like, let's make some money.
Like, that's the first network effect of Bitcoin.
And so you want to buy it when it.
it's a low mayor multiple because you have a greater probability of it going up. So you wanted to buy it
when it was $3,000 a few months ago. And now, you know, might be a good time to necessarily not buy it.
And maybe sell some of it. And I actually use the mayor of multiple a lot in how I decide to trade
Bitcoin because, you know, I like to trade it because you can make more money doing that. You can make more
Bitcoins. But I'm more about, you know, understanding the sound money aspect of this because I don't want to live in 1956 Czechoslovakia. I don't want to live in Venezuela, where we don't have protection of property rights and people starve to death. I want people to be happy, healthy, free, and have monetary sovereignty. Those are core values to me that are more important than making money. Because this fight isn't necessarily about making money. It's about these fundamental human and civil rights.
money's power. With power and with money, you can accomplish a lot of good in the world. Hopefully,
we can accomplish a lot more good than the people who currently have that money and power.
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So, Trace, just to give the audience just a little bit more context, let me talk a little bit more about
the mayor multiple. So back in 2017, I remember reading an article where you were talking about
one of the ways that you tried to understand the trading range of Bitcoin, whether it was a high
price or low price or what was normal. And at the time, we were in this really hot,
goal market and many people were suggesting that the price could go really incredibly high.
And Trace had pointed out various points in time in the past where the price compared to the
200 day moving average had these multiples.
So I decided to expand on this idea by taking more data points and incorporating every
single day that Bitcoin traded as our data set opposed to just a few instances in time.
and then plotted that out, figured out what was a normal multiple, what was an extreme multiple
on the high and on the low side. And this did a distribution plot using statistics to figure out
what that looked like. So this is what's fascinating is on the low side, the price of Bitcoin
has only gone below a 0.5, only eight days in the past decade. So eight times it has gone below a
That price recently occurred.
In fact, when it did, Trace tweeted about it.
And this was probably just, you know, six months ago that we hit this price.
And, you know, Trace, you tweeted it out.
Hey, this is not normal.
This is a very low price.
And of course, most people did nothing about it.
And literally today in a six month kind of time frame, it's 400% higher than when
you sent out that tweet.
Now, what's interesting is the price today.
is at a 2.4, which is very high relative to other points in time when you look across the
whole spectrum of all the days that it's traded. And we're recording this on the 27th of June
2019, just for context. And what we've seen historically is whenever it comes up to the
multiple we're seeing right now is typically the price takes a break for 30 or 60 days before it
keeps doing whatever it does. Now, there's no way of knowing that what's actually going to happen
and whether that's going to happen again. But, you know, that's what the multiple is suggesting.
So the point of all of this and the reason I explain this is the main reason I made the tool was to help people
understand what those statistics look like so that if you're buying it for the first time and there's a very
high mayor multiple, like right now, you just need to, I guess, buckle up and get ready for a
wild ride. And there's probably going to be some, a painful first 30, 60, 90,
days if you're buying it at a high multiple. That's just something people have to be prepared for. And that's what the
math has taught us by viewing it through this lens. At the same time, if you're buying it at a low
multiple, you're probably not going to have much of your temperament tested if you own it for
another 30 or 60 or 90 days because it doesn't happen very often. And so we're just trying to
put the mathematics out there so people can kind of look at it and say, all right, this is normal or
This is very abnormal.
And I'm in the fear of missing out phase and the multiple is very high.
And if you're buying, just be prepared.
That's all we're trying to do.
So, Trace, I'm kind of curious.
I'm sorry to take up so much time because I really want you to be talking and not myself.
But this is something that we have kind of gone down a path together.
So I want to kind of hear your thoughts.
We've got the fundamental analysis.
And I've gone over that a little bit with the sound money thesis, the store value,
the seven network effects.
But then we've got the kind of a technical analysis because you make money when you buy.
You need to buy undervalued assets.
Now, one of the problems that a newbie would have is that they don't have any Bitcoin at all, right?
And we're talking about an uncorrelated, asymmetric return, sovereign equity-based monetary unit that's hard-capped in supply, where we know exactly how many there are.
It's not like gold or silver.
It's global.
It's immutable.
It's uncomposcatable.
It's decentralized.
and it's a digital store of value.
It's a way to transfer value over a communications channel.
It doesn't really matter what the mayor multiple is.
If you don't have any of it at all, you're totally naked on this huge well transfer that can
happen.
Now, if you've actually got some, oh, okay, like now you might like start figuring out
your personal strategy when it comes to how much capital you want allocated to this.
I like to put the statistics and the probabilities in my favor.
So, Trace, let me shift gears just a little bit. How do you think about the energy consumption of Bitcoin?
The energy markets, when you look at them, they're highly regulated worldwide. In a lot of ways,
with how the proof of work and all of this works, like you're going to want to have some Bitcoin as a hedge
against potential increases in the cost of energy because energy could get pretty expensive
because the opportunity cost would be vining Bitcoin with it instead. The other thing is, I think that
We have just a ton of propaganda around energy.
Look at the disaster of the European economies because they've been, quote, glowing green and all
of this stuff.
Bitcoin in so many ways uses the inefficient electricity, or at least it has been using it
so far.
It's electricity that's stranded in different areas.
It's largely renewable, like hydroelectric dams, things of that nature.
As the mining gets more and more competitive, you know, and these stranded energy cases
get hooked into the Bitcoin blockchain, that's when we're going to start seeing the effect
on the energy markets where the opportunity costs is mining Bitcoin, especially if the
price like really runs.
And one thing, I definitely think that hash rate follows price and not vice versa.
It's going to come online whether people want it to come online or not.
What's you going to do?
Like pass a law that you can't mine?
It's just going to go somewhere else where it can or it's going to continue mining and
it's going to be using Blockstream's satellites or whatever.
censorship-resistant technology is out there to use.
So, Trace, what are you most excited about in the coming year from a technology standpoint?
Well, hopefully, Schnoor signatures will be on the horizon via soft fork.
I'm also very, very interested in Memble-Wimble.
I doubt that I'll get rolled out in Bitcoin first.
It's already been rolled out in Grin and Beam.
It's any of this privacy and fungibility technology that I'm very interested in.
Because Bitcoin, we've had to make a tradeoff between limited and amountness and fungibility.
I think that's a good thing because if we can continue lowering the cost in terms of time, money, and privacy for this monetary sovereignty, that's just going to continue vesting more and more power with the individual.
So, Trace, I truly cannot thank you enough for coming on the show.
back in 2015, early 2015, I remember distinctly watching a video on Real Vision TV and you were the person that they were interviewing about Bitcoin.
And I didn't know almost anything about Bitcoin at that point in time.
And after your interview, I was so convinced that what you were talking about had so much credence.
And it gave me this incentive to go out and just try to learn as much as I possibly could about.
about Bitcoin. Read as many books as I could get my hands on. Watch more interviews that you had done.
And I just learned so much about your opinions on why Bitcoin was important. And it just had a
huge impact on me. And it actually led me to buying Bitcoin back at that time when it was
$200, $220 a coin. And it's just amazing to be here talking to you.
Thanks so much, Preston. It's experiences like that that really help continue giving
me motivation for doing the work that I do. You know, another thing with Bitcoin, we shouldn't be
too hard on ourselves. We have a tendency to judge our past self based on our current self's
knowledge or understanding. But keeping that in mind, the most important trade you're going to make
are with your future self. It's going to be this concept of time preference. And Bitcoin
hits you right in the nose with a frying pan when it comes to that. It's things like that that when
you've talked about the impact it's had on your life, the ones I really like, you know, I'm at a
conference or something. And someone's like, you know, I've been following you for years and
I used to drink a bunch of alcohol and I used to smoke a bunch. Now I don't do any of that because
I want to buy and hottle more Bitcoin. You know, seeing people get rid of habits that are just not
helpful or healthy or useful to them in converting that into better habits or being able to do
something better or more useful to their future self. And, you know, by extension, the people they
have relationships with, whether it's significant others or their children or being able to take
care of their parents or grandparents. These are things that I find very helpful because it's not about
running around like this life thing. It's not about running around and like collecting a bunch of
coins like Mario. No, seriously, like money is only going to make you more of who you are. You really
have to figure out like what motivates you and why do you do the things that you do. Like, do you want to
be happy or not? Because you're going to master what you do. You could be a lawyer. You're,
You could be an accountant.
Like, you're going to master what you do.
And I think a lot of what we do is, you know, we live life, but we don't live it very intentionally
in a way that we become masters at the art of living, at having happiness and kind of joy
in our own lives and then also in our relationships with other people.
And that's really what being down here is about.
I mean, if you're just running around, like, collecting coins like Mario in some video game,
like, how long are you going to do that?
You're going to still be thinking about that when you're 89?
No, like, you might be sorely disappointed.
And so this concept of time preference, you know, there's what really matters in this life and why are we doing the things that we're doing?
You know, if you believe that you're going to continue to exist after you pass on, like Dr. Evan Alexander has written significantly about the neuroscientist.
Time preference is a very powerful thing in looking at all of this and looking at our motivations for why we're doing what we do.
hearing that from you and from a lot of other people that I run into at conferences and stuff.
It helps me kind of feel warm and fuzzy about some of the work I've been doing,
which is really what all of us want at the end of the day, isn't it?
We want to feel happy and we want to feel like we're being a positive influence
and useful and helpful to other people.
I couldn't agree more.
It's not about ourselves, but how much value we can bring to other people.
But Trace, thank you so much for coming on our show.
Where can the audience learn more about you?
Twitter like at Trace Mayer.
And then from there, you know, you can find my Bitcoin knowledge podcasts and a lot of my other work.
All right, guys.
That was all the press that I had for this week's episode of The Investors Podcast.
You see each other again next week.
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