You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 64: Stephan Livera - How Bitcoin Challenges the Fiat System

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

My guest today is Stephan Livera, the host of the prominent Bitcoin podcast “The Stephan Livera Podcast”. Growing up in Australia, Stephan developed a deep interest in libertarianism and Austrian economics during his teenage years, which shaped his perspective on money and governance. In this episode, Stephan shares his journey from being a chartered accountant at Deloitte to becoming a leading voice in the Bitcoin space. We discuss his insights on Bitcoin's role in challenging fiat currency, the cultural decay caused by fiat money, and the growing adoption of Bitcoin by institutions and governments. Stephan also explores the future of Bitcoin custody, the balance between decentralization and scalability, and the implications of hyper-bitcoinization on governance, sovereignty, and society. Enjoy. ► If you got value, please like, comment, share, follow and support my work. Thank you! -- SPONSORS -- ►► Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn  -- SPECIAL OFFERS – ►► Enjoy the Little HODLer products, learn about sound money while having fun! use code EFRAT for 10% off on non-sale items: https://thelittlehodler.com/  ►► Get 10% off on all books, inc. “The Inverse of Clown World”, using the code EFRAT https://bitcoininfinitystore.com ►► Join me in any of these upcoming events: https://www.efrat.blog/p/upcoming-events  -- LINKS – Stephan’s Twitter: https://x.com/stephanlivera Stephan’s Nostr npub: npub1r8l06leee9kjlam0slmky7h8j9zme9ca32erypgqtyu6t2gnhshs3jx5dk Stephan’s podcast: https://stephanlivera.com/  Stephan’s Substack: https://stephanlivera.substack.com/  Efrat's Twitter: https://twitter.com/efenigson Efrat's Telegram: https://t.me/efenigson Watch/listen on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/yourethevoice Support Efrat's work: ⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/efenigson   ⁠ Support Efrat with Bitcoin: https://geyser.fund/project/efenigson -- CHAPTERS – 00:00 Coming Up… 01:15 Introduction & Stephan’s Background 05:44 Finding Austrian Economics as a Teenager 09:32 Immigration and Growing Up In Australia 12:37 Australia's Landscape: Energy, Woke Culture,  Housing 21:00 The World’s Going Through a Moral & Cultural Decay 25:06 The Trend of Decentralizing Nation States  31:56 Living in Dubai  33:01 Migration Trends & Predictions 34:30 Stephan’s Podcast Journey 36:49 Bitcoin's Evolution: From Cypherpunks to Institutional Adoption 41:07 The Future of Bitcoin Holding: Custodial vs. Self-Custody 43:17 The Role of Banks in a Bitcoinized World 49:14 Market Cycles and the Psychology of New Investors 55:31 What People Don’t Understand About Bitcoin 1:01:09 Resources and Getting Started With Bitcoin 1:02:44 Message of Hope & Conclusion

we're going from a world with one federal reserve where the state controls the money and done it all these things and 30 000 fiat banks to a world with 21 million coins no one can change that and let's say 10 to 100 million lightning banks all over the world that's already a massive massive improvement even if we don't even if we get no further than that bitcoin would have changed the world so there'll be some new bitcoin companies that become banks and there'll be some fiat banks that that sort of see the way the wind is blowing and decide okay yeah we gotta we gotta let our people buy bitcoin hold bitcoin right now the state is able to fund itself through cheap debt right because they can print this money cheaply and they get all this cheap debt artificially

through the printer because they control the money yep in a bitcoinized world that's not going to be the case we want as many people to self-custody as possible but i also recognize that today with current technology it's not going to work for 8 billion people so there are limits what does that mean what does that imply longer term it means that a lot of bitcoin users will be custodial Just by hodling Bitcoin, you outperformed all these fiat people, you outperformed all these people trying to do property. The moguls. Yeah, the property moguls and the fiat, you know, all these things. Good morning and welcome to another episode of You're The Voice.

Thank you so much for being with me. I'm Efrat, here in Prague once again, after I think four or five months that I haven't been here, I've taken the opportunity that I'm here for another conference to come and interview some of my favorite people. And today I have Stefan Livera with me. Hi, Stefan. Thanks, Efrat. Thanks for having me.

With pleasure. I was looking for the opportunity and then when I saw that we're both speaking at the same time, same place, let's grab it. Let's do it here. Yeah, right. So thank you, first of all, to Trezor for hosting me and for being the best sponsor ever. Thank you guys for coming here on a Sunday to help us do this. And we also have Satoshi.

He's here drawing this live as we speak. So you guys will see this drawing after we have this episode out and I'll attach it. And if anyone would like to purchase it from him, that would be amazing. He's one of the more talented artists that I've seen. Okay, so Stefan, quick intro about you for my audience that don't know you, in case they don't know you, the ones that are not Bitcoiners maybe don't know you. So we'll start with that. Stefan Levera hosts one of Bitcoin's leading podcasts.

It's called the Stefan Levera podcast, focusing on the economics and technology of Bitcoin and liberty. Stefan is also an advisor to Bald, a Bitcoin brokerage in the USA. He frequently speaks at Bitcoin and Liberty-focused events around the world and contributes to publications such as Bitcoin Magazine and the Mises Institute. Can you start by sharing a little bit more about your background, how you got to do this today? You've been doing it for the past six years or so, right?

Yeah, podcasting for about six years. But how did you even get there? And you can start as early as you want. Sure, yeah. So in terms of libertarianism, I kind of got into that in my mid-teens. And so then I was already anti-the Fed, anti-central banking, anti-fiat money, all these things. And then I first, let's say, really got into Bitcoin late 2012, early 2013. And so at that point, I was shouting from the rooftops about Bitcoin.

Not many people listen to me, but that's how it is. And so I grew up in Sydney in Australia. And so I was there, you know, talking about Bitcoin, trying to teach whoever would listen and doing talks here and there. And then, yeah, fast forward to, let's say, 2018. That's when I started the actual podcast. And that's when I sort of started being, I guess, sort of interviewing and talking more, you know, to people internationally in terms of what's going on in Bitcoin and Liberty. And so, yeah, then the podcast just kind of grew. It started as a labor of love.

I was still working in the fiat job, you know, at that point. Which was what? Yeah. Yeah, so historically, yeah, so I was a chartered accountant in Australia, so I started my career at Deloitte, and then I was working in banks like Commonwealth Bank Australia. Right, right. And then so, yeah, so then around 2018, started the podcast.

It was a labor of love. It was a side project thing just because I was so annoyed at the time. Nowadays, it's very different, right? There's so many podcasts and everything now. But at the time, it was basically Marty Bent, Tales from the Crypt at the time, and then Noted, and it was me. And okay, yeah, that was what Bitcoin did, but it was still kind of shit coining at that point. So part of why I started the show is I was so frustrated with all this shit coin garbage, blockchain technology, this and that. And it was like, no, where's the actual like Bitcoin focused interviews. And so I sort of helped try to change that conversation a bit and sort of focus things more on like Bitcoin and Austrian economics. and now of course yeah there's many shows now that are sort of in this space and that's that's

a good thing many people um will not resonate with you know a certain person but they'll listen to this other podcast and this other person who's coming at it from a different perspective so yeah so yeah nowadays i i'm you know mainly just trying to keep talking about bitcoin and help people stay updated on things so i'm known for covering some of the more technical things but trying to cover technical things in a non-technical way to sort of help people understand okay this new technology that's coming or this other thing but of course i've been a long time fan of austrian economics and libertarian ideas as well so i talk about those things on my show too and and what had you as a teenager get interested in these topics to begin with that's not a common

thing that a teenager would actually care about economics or yeah it is libertarian values yeah it is unusual i was on um irc so for the young people for the younger kids it's called internet relay chat and kind of like imagine that's like slack before slack right like this is kind of you would join chat channels and you would talk in those and so I was kind of hanging out in some of those and I found this Australian politics channel and this guy kept linking to Mises daily articles now at the time I thought oh that's crazy that'll never work you know whatever these libertarian ideas it's not going to happen and then over time I found that those articles made a lot more sense than what my high school, you know, business and economics teachers were

teaching me, which was the typical Keynesian stuff or maybe Chicago. So in school, they kind of give you the false dichotomy, right? Like if you're a left winger, it's Keynesianism. If you're a right winger, it's Chicago monetarism. Nobody talks about Austrian, you know, ideas, right? So that's kind of the way, at least in Australia at the time I was growing up, that's what it was. So yeah. So then after that, I sort of got into libertarianism, got into Austrian economics and then yeah so then i sort of learned okay yeah is that what you did in university as well so i did a business i did like commerce at yeah so you know i started accounting and finance and information systems so i sort of had but you already knew like a lot of the austrian economic principles and

yeah you understood money in a different way so how was it for you then going to university and studying accounting oh look i was very mercenary i'll be honest i just kind of told them what they wanted to hear you know i was very like i knew i knew the game i knew what it was i wasn't going to be out there saying yeah um and the central bank to kind of Keynesian you know people like that and in fairness uh because you know a lot of the stuff that I was learning some of that you know in university days that was more like accounting focus so there's not as much kind of Austrianism to that like it's more the Austrian stuff would apply more at the economics right where you would challenge let's say the macroeconomics yeah that kind of thing so in

fairness yeah that was there but then in fairness there was also the finance aspect of it right like in university they teach you oh the risk-free rate is the u.s government 10-year treasury bond of course i didn't i never agreed with that but that was kind of again you kind of have to like okay i'm going through this quote them as when you write your exam you quote all their yeah because i mean ultimately you sort of you have to it's it's a gatekeeper system and you have to pass their gate gatekeeping system to kind of get through right it's kind of like this you know this kind of decentralized cathedral if you will and so uh it functions in this way to sort of keep the thought patterns in a certain box um because that's what that's what works for the regime and

if you sort of you know there's a kind of there's a window of what you're allowed to say and if you go outside that you're kind of you're done for and it in fairness it's gotten even worse right like at the time i was going through university you know i'm 36 now but i was going through university 2006 7 8 and 9 you know it wasn't as bad right there was at least some conservatives let's say in uh in uh at university and things like this but i would say nowadays it's gone like completely left wing like you just you know there's very few uh the sense i get of it is that there's very few right-leaning voices at all in in the universities you're the voice is brought to you by trezor the original bitcoin hardware wallet company pioneering the development of

self-custody for crypto assets since 2013 empowering individuals with an open source device enabling beginners and experts to easily and securely hold their coins i find my treasure super easy to use and recommend it to my friends and family enjoy my five percent discount on treasure product by clicking the link in the show notes and using the code flat so let's stay in australia okay uh you you were born in australia and born in sri lanka actually yeah in sri lanka yeah and uh can you tell me a bit about your your parents your background like what had them come to australia i'm australian as well i came to australia in 2001 oh i didn't know that yeah i just assumed you're israeli okay yeah i i am but i lived in australia for six years from 2001 to

2007 and i got my australian citizenship oh now my son lives in australia with his dad ah okay and um i stayed there for a while so i was an immigrant right for for six years i i did go back to Israel finally I decided to go back but I did you know I experienced what it was like in the 2000s to live in Australia as an immigrant so I'm like curious to know what was your experience or your parents when they came to Australia it was quite unique for me I mean I was never an immigrant anywhere else but I was in Australia it was quite hard for me to blend in yeah I see yeah so for me my parents took me to Australia I was two years old right so I basically grew up in australia and i normalized and sort of naturalized into australia we became citizens and

everything and so yeah i if anything i think of myself more as an australian than i am a sri lankan right because i've grown up in australia i you know i yeah so but uh yeah basically my parents really struggled hard to kind of make it into australia um but my parents were also quite uh anti-taking any welfare so they just really like worked hard they you know dad worked two jobs mom worked you know to look after us and so that was just how it was they just went there and just worked hard and took you know random you know took jobs uh they could like so my dad was doing like video technical stuff and then um my mom was a nurse and so they went and they went on to go and get degrees and go become nurses as well so my dad actually changed over to become a

nurse as well and so yeah so my parents really struggled hard but I think they they really wanted us to let's say normalize or kind of naturalize into the australian way of kind of being and sort of acting so as an example they really struggled hard for us so that we could grow up in the eastern suburbs of sydney um as opposed to sort of going further out west where most of the other sri lankans would have been so i think i you know in a sense i got a benefit out of that that my accent and my the way i sort of think is a little more uh you know with the australian way of thinking as opposed to like going to these enclaves where people just kind of don't they don't really assimilate as much yeah um i don't think that's as much of a problem

with let's say sri lanka and australians per se but you know you do hear about that aspect i mean now it's becoming a conversation now with the whole immigrant how much immigration should you have how much assimilation is you know should you expect out of somebody who comes to a country um these kinds of things but uh yeah i mean i basically uh had a relatively normal upbringing in Australia so then I you know I studied there and worked there and yeah now I'm in Dubai but yeah let's talk about that so in when when I was there I felt like Australia is a is a great place little did I know about you know economics and politics at the time and understood the meaning of welfare country it's things like that I just felt like wow they really

take care of people here and I was 20 something years old and then as I grew up I started to understand how much people in Australia are relying on the government for so many things and how gradually the tightness of the control of the government is on the citizens in this country. And then COVID came and I was shocked to see what Australia has become. And, you know, I said, thank God that I'm not there at that time. At the same time, I wasn't in a place that was any better. I was in Israel, which is as bad. But it almost felt like all Western countries, Western democracies completely lost it and went down that globalist path of surveillance and control. And I don't think that that has left Australia since then. And I think they continue

to go in that trajectory. So what's your view on how Australia is doing and what led you to then leave and go to Dubai yeah so I mean look I agree with a lot of that so I think unfortunately the culture has just shifted a lot in Australia I think some of that is just been this big people talk about the long march through institutions right this kind of idea that like a whole bunch of socialists kind of leaning people they go through the universities and the media and they sort of just control sort of all these things so then there's not a lot left in terms of resistance to those ideas so I think that kind of happened I think I would say Australia started making some really dumb decisions around energy as well so as an example energy costs in

australia in the 90s um were not that high but then they kind of over time they started taking on all these kind of lefty what's now known as like the net zero you know climate scammer ideology so that's kind of come in and they've been trying to shut down coal plants and things like this whereas you know i think a rational way to think about energy is more like no we should be having energy abundance we should be like you know more coal natural gas nuclear everything um i think a lot and then they were really pushing the wind and solar aspects of it with a lot of government subsidies and then what happens is you get into these you know debates about oh how much subsidy is wind and solar getting and then like the lefties would kind of lie about the subsidy that

the so-called fossil fuels would be getting so that's that's one angle of it and the other angle of it i think is in the 2010s we started to see this kind of woke culture start to rise more now in the early 2010s i would say most people sort of saw it like uh these are just kind of a few crazies in university once they hit the real world they'll all learn kind of thing right that was that was the understanding back in those days and then over time the wokes basically have kind of really risen up in power and dominance over you know what's happening as an example and then yeah so i think now we're sort of in this weird place where there are some serious governance and governmental failures happening and i think touching on what you're saying around the welfare

aspect that is also getting worse and worse around the world but in australia there's this thing called the ndis uh national disability insurance scheme or whatever but uh what i'm here i don't follow it super closely but my understanding of it now is that i'm hearing there's a lot of rorting of that system going on there's a lot of people who are claiming to be disabled when they're not really or there's kind of you know it's just welfare statism it's kind of ubi light if you will um so a lot of these things are kind of going the wrong way in australia uh but i would say it's let's say the government debt situation is not as bad in australia as it is in let's say the usa the uk some of the other let's say anglosphere english-speaking nations uh but it is

kind of on a bad path in relatively to australia it's it's getting worse relatively to other countries i i agree but it's like the it used to be a relatively strong country yeah they used to the lucky country right exactly which has all these natural resources that it can enjoy and now it's most of it is like sold to china and australia has very little benefit out of its own resources right and my answer to that would be part of that is because australia has very high energy costs so in a sense they kind of chased away the manufacturing because how are you going to manufacture when energy costs are going so high so i think what you know australia should be a lot richer than it is of course but unfortunately bad governance socialist ideas

left-leaning climate zero whatever net zero whatever ideas have really uh constricted australia and restrained its future growth, right? Because as an example, they could have had a much bigger kind of manufacturing industrial and kind of added, you know, those kinds of things where they take those natural resources and produce them and then sell the product, you know, the product from that, as opposed to now where they're just kind of selling a lot of natural resources. So the kind of the pejorative or the kind of saying I've heard people say is Australia is all about houses and holes, brah, you know, it's kind of, yeah, it's all about, you know,

digging resources and it's all about real estate right so a lot of people in australia they kind of have this fantasy of being a property mogul right so it's all and this happens elsewhere around the world too right but everyone wants to be like a real estate mogul and you gotta you know they kind of glamorize they'll see these articles on websites like domain.com.au and it'll be like oh look at this 26 year old who's got you know 25 properties because they leave it up and leave it up and leave it up and you know everyone looks like a genius in a bull market right so it's kind of levering up on the property and of course this comes back to fiat money and obviously the bitcoin conversation because a lot of these people they all think

they're geniuses right but the reality of it is that fiat currency and cheap leverage is what has enabled these things now of course things can go the wrong way when it's like the gfc or it's the you know the housing market goes the wrong way and you'll leave and these people will leave it up but for now it's it's there's like this institutional setup of oh get a loan the government will subsidize the loan effectively through the central banking and the fiat money system and so people are taking out these very leveraged positions on houses right they might put down 20 on a house or whatever and think of that that's like a 5x long it's so loosely obviously there's there's differences to it um but someone like lynn alden has spoken about this

idea as well that it's not just the kind of you're levering up on property it's that they are effectively getting a fiat short right you are going short the fiat currency and we're seeing this in various countries around the world but as an example if you go to you know the typical like social outing in australia you might have a barbecue at someone's house and at the barbecue everyone will be talking about oh look i bought this property for this much and oh look how much it is now and look how much of a genius i am like that's kind of that's very much the conversation it's like if you don't own property and you're trying to be a property mogul you're a loser like that's kind of that's the sense of it right and so you know everyone wants to try to be a

property speculator and then think about what that does. And the prices are rising like crazy. I saw some prices in Sydney that are insane. Oh, absolutely. And so you think about what that is as a multiple of people's salary. It's going through the roof. And so every day, let's say 20-year-old or 20-somethings, they can't afford a place unless they've got rich parents. And so I think there's also a little bit of a generational battle going on there as well. So it's kind of like you think about the different interests here, right? So you've got the older generations who they bought a property in the seventies or the eighties when it was way cheaper. And so sometimes the battle happens where these boomers and maybe some of the older

gen X will sort of frown on the millennials and the gen Z people saying, Oh, see, you're buying too much, you know, smash Davo and you're, you know, buying your coffees in the shop and why don't you work hard? And, and there are all these young people saying, no, mate, like, even if I didn't eat outside at all or go on any holidays, I still wouldn't be able to afford it. And if you look at, objectively speaking, how much of a percent of their salary is going towards their housing cost, it's much higher as a percent, right? Now, yes, you could argue there are certain things that, you know, the boomers and the older Gen X people had. Yeah, there were some aspects of life that were harder for them. But I think what we're seeing, and again, to me, a lot of this comes back to fiat currency and Bitcoin.

But for me, I see it as the world is going through this moral and social decay because of fiat currency, right? there are cultural consequences to fiat currency and so we're seeing this kind of atomization of society there's less focus on family there's more there's more it's more about the government it's more about the state the state wants to take away your other forms of governance right family church community um other you know private forms of charity other private forms of governance and insert itself they want they want to install themselves okay you don't need that we've got the welfare state you don't need you know homeschooling you've got our educational system you don't need this other thing here's our university university system that we control we dominate and so you sort

of look at these different interests in society and i think you can sort of predict a little bit the way the way it would have gone right that that the incentive of the system is for the state to enlarge itself right like think about if you are a a department manager in some government you look good by having more staff you want to expand your remit you want to look like oh I have a hundred staff under me I've got 200 staff under me whatever it doesn't matter about whether those resources are being put to use in a good way not driven by in the market the profit and loss test that we all face as private entrepreneurs no in the state it's more about how do I grow my little fiefdom and take more resources and so this is a story that I you know would hear and know even in

the Australian government it's the same in corporations this is what in private companies I used to work for 20 years in the private sector tech companies startup companies it's the same every manager wants to have more employees more budgets they don't care about the efficiency of the company on the most part because all they care about is climbing up the ladder and making sure that it looks good on their resume that they manage the big team with big budgets and we're able to do that in various companies so it the the rules of the game completely changed yeah and i think it's fiat driven right you could say a lot of these are zombie companies they kind of make they have very they have access to extremely cheap debt that let's say you and i don't have access to

that as individuals now okay maybe at the housing yeah at the housing sense you could say yeah we've got some access to cheap debt in that way but for businesses or other kinds of credit it's very expensive whereas these you know larger companies and so that's why you're seeing this big centralization and so then it's sort of it's difficult to sort of try and explain and you know because if you're a libertarian you're trying to explain why free markets are a good thing but at the same time you have to sort of say wait like some of these companies and some of the way they exist that wouldn't exist in a real true free market with no intellectual property protection no central bank and fiat money you know no favorable regulation that protects that

the moat of those uh companies and so sometimes what we're seeing now is investors who sort of think of it like oh well you need to invest somewhere that's got a moat or you'll see you know ray dalio come out and say oh look markets like certainty when really what they mean is and he's speaking of you know investing in china or asia or somewhere where the state is kind of giving them a monopoly or giving them a nice little uh favorable regulatory environment to the exclusion of other competitors so i think that's we're seeing the world sort of go in this direction but at the same time there are other countries that are trying to be competitive and you know there's a competitive dynamic because you know as i was talking about in my talk the

number of states is rising over time and i think they still have to compete with each other so there's that and of course there's bitcoin so i think these are reasons where yes you could say yeah there's some reasons for pessimism but there are other reasons for optimism as well that you I think those of us who are huddling Bitcoin, we're doing well out of that. And I think over the next 10, 20 years, the world is slowly going to shift into the Bitcoin direction. And I believe that will have a very corrective effect on some of these, let's say, fiat insanities that we've seen in the zero interest rate environment or in an artificially low

interest rate environment. I'm with you 100%. So let's go a couple of steps back. you mentioned your talk at the conference. So we're both speaking at Liberty in our Lifetime Conference, which is a conference ran by the Free Cities Foundation. And it's all about communities, building communities and cities in a different way than what we are seeing today. So that ties up to what you're talking about. And so your talk was about the multiplying of cities that we're seeing in the last century around the world you you brought that graph showing how many

more states we have today in the world um versus what we had in the past and you were talking about the benefits of having more states so can you touch on your key messaging for from the the talk yesterday i really loved the fact that you were showing the fallacies of democracy democracy as they are today in states and why this is a trend that is going to eventually probably fail or just have a decent competition from outside. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So let me summarize a few of the key points. So I agree fully with the arguments of Hans-Hermann Hoppe. So he wrote this book called Democracy, the God that Failed. So the high level argument is this, a monarch, now ideal is, you know, private law society,

privatize everything but he's he's trying to say look actually a monarchy is better than a democracy that's his view even if you know best would be privatize everything and so his basic argument there is a monarch treats that land like it's his long-term property and he's trying to grow the value of that as contrasted with a demo in a democracy where you get this kind of effect like we were talking about where the bureaucrat just wants to sort of pillage it and you know either the politician wants to pillage it because he's only in for three or four years and he might not be here. So he wants to pillage it and get as many benefits for himself or move on out into the, let's say, into the private sector where there's the kind of revolving door factor. So that's

one element of it. But yeah, bringing it to the talk as well, what I was talking about there is that in the span of one human life, so imagine you were born straight after World War II. Today, you would be about 80 years old, and that's about one human life in the first world or in the developed world so in that time the number of countries in the world went from about 70 60 or 70 in that in that range to nowadays the UN counts at I think 193 or 194 yeah so it's almost 3x the number of countries and that gives you more choices in terms of taxation regulation and you know ways of living right because I think a lot of people are stuck in this mindset of oh the international community, and really what they mean by that is USA, UK, Australia, Canada,

and some of the big Western European countries like Germany and Italy and France. But there's all these other countries out there. And so there's a lot of options and choice. And so I think the countries of the world today don't exist under a global government. Clearly, they exist in anarchy in relation to each other. And so it's a similar kind of idea that, well, you as an individual don't have to be stuck you know the country you were born in the country you grew up in it doesn't have to be that way you can you can go elsewhere and so this is obviously aligned with let's say the flag theory guys as well who are sort of talking about that and i'm a fan of that um so i see it like there will be tendencies towards decentralization as well right

And so we may start to see more, as an example, secession or breakaway movements. We may start to see people saying, look, I don't agree with the way the EU wants to manage things. I'll go somewhere else. We're seeing, as an example, in the UK, there's the left-leaning labor got into the UK. Now they're trying to raise the taxes, do this inheritance taxes and raise capital gains and do all these things. So a lot of wealthy people in the UK are looking for options elsewhere too.

So I just think there's going to be these competitive pressures. and there'll be governments and cities and states around the world who are trying to capitalize on that and say, look, they're not offering you a good deal in terms of taxes, why don't you come over here? And so I think we'll start to see that around the world. It's not perfect, you know, there is no perfect, but probably the best we can hope for

is that there's creation of more of these because it gives you more choice, right? Because in a loose speaking sense, when there are borders or more borders, you can sort of think of it like one state, trying to impose its power outside of its own borders, it's a lot more restricted, right? Because that state has a lot less oversight and power over you. Now, yes, you can argue there are some things like CRS, common reporting standards, and that will, as an example,

that basically means these banks, let's say you sign up for a bank account in some other country, you tell them, oh, I'm a citizen of this country and I'm a tax resident of that country and whatever, and they may then report some of those things back. So yeah, there are some elements to which they will still try to surveil and monitor you but there's a lot less kind of control if you're outside the country uh for obvious reasons and so this is something that you know individuals and companies can start to potentially use where maybe they jurisdiction shop because they want somewhere with maybe lower taxes or better regulation or maybe well here's another example somewhere that's safer right we're starting to see that conversation come up now in the uk in the in

the UK conversation people are calling it two-tier policing right or in the US conversation people are referring to that sort of as this kind of anarcho-tyranny right they're saying oh why is it that the BLM protest was allowed and they in the media that's framed as mostly peaceful but the anti-lockdown protest that's oh you're not allowed to do that you're irresponsible right and they'll be they'll sort of refer to look at these doctors who said oh yeah look protesting during the time of the the covid scam uh is uh you know wrong but in this case it's so you know the blm people should be allowed to protest but you know the covid stuff right the canada trucker protest oh no that you you know so you can sort of see there's this injustice and i think people get that

like it's that you know it's all it's almost like the people who are civilized and uh not kind of doing violent crime, they get sort of policed and canonized about not following every little letter of the law of the regulation. But then there are like full on savages who are just like destroying shops and burning things. And the police will just sort of stand by and let them fight or let them, you know, burn the streets down. And it clearly is this kind of two-tier policing or anarcho-tyranny effect. And so, you know, people are saying, look, why tolerate this? I'll go somewhere that's safer, right? Whether that's, you know, El Salvador or the UAE or some other countries.

So how is Dubai in that sense where you chose to stay? Well, yeah, look, I think it's a lot safer. My wife and I, my wife really enjoys that it's much, she feels a lot safer there. And so that's great. You know, look, there's no way that's zero crime, right? But I think the perception really matters and people feel a lot safer. and whether people are living in like a gated community or a security office building or a security apartment building um and so yeah i think overall that that is a factor that people talk

about um i've heard other people say now i'm not uh the type to flex or whatever but there are people who let's say they want to wear a nice watch or whatever um drive a nice car in places like in the uk they're worried that they're going to get like mugged or robbed or these kinds of things but in dubai people do that regularly they're walking they're driving their nice cars or whatever or they're wearing a fancy watch and whatever um i mean that's not my cup of tea but there are people you know people who want that freedom and just kind of the freedom of not feeling like they're they're going to get mugged yep and so do you think that in the next few years we're going to see a lot more uh inter state between state immigrations and a lot more people

traveling from western world to non-western countries or third world yes and no yes and no the way i see it is if you are a poorer person in a third world country yeah of course you want to move to the developed world it's a step up yeah so i don't blame you like you know absolutely i think and i think there'll be a lot of people who want to do that but then let's say there are people who are high net worth in some of these countries they're sick of paying 40 50 60 taxes and they're like i'm out of here you know so one of the i think there was um some recent statistics i think the one of the highest high net worth migration out was the uk a lot of high net worth people in the uk are like trying to get out um so i think we will see that pattern play out like you'll just

see people who are coming from poorer countries moved um for opportunities and people who've already made some money they're like all right i'm done paying these crazy taxes i'll go somewhere lower tax or safer um and and the other factor is the woke kind of stuff as well because they're worried that these woke nations there's going to be a teacher who's going to try to teach your kid some weird sexual thing and that we don't want that right like i don't want some you know so yeah so that's also a factor that's kind of um pushing people out of some of the more woke areas okay um i'm moving on to your podcast so 460 episodes or so no over 600 now but yeah i mean Oh, so I swapped it.

So it's 642, right? It was the last one. Oh, I don't even remember that. The one you released in Lugano. I looked at the number. It was like, damn. I think it was 640 or something like that. Oh, okay.

Yeah, probably. Yeah. How do you keep going? This is, it's hard work. It's a lot of work. Or have you already perfected it, automated it? This is easy for you. It's like.

I don't know. I think to me, it's just like, I'm trying to spread the word about Bitcoin and Austrian economics and liberty and so you know I just enjoy it you know and so you know so yeah I just I just I guess I've got a process down and I'll just kind of you know get the get that stuff done I have you know I have an assistant who helps me on the audio video side so I kind of you know uploads and stuff and he produces it together and puts it together and you know some show notes and things like that and yeah and then uh yeah and then we put it out so yeah so for me

it's just i want to keep people updated on what's happening with bitcoin and often technical things that are going on in the bitcoin world so i might interview a developer i might interview a ceo or an investor or someone um and as number goes up you know like as as bull runs sort of happen you sort of tend to pick up more followers and listeners um and then in the bear market you kind of lose some but so be it that's kind of how it goes uh yeah and i think you know uh as the price goes up, probably once we get over a hundred K, then I think we'll start to get a lot more, um, you know, people who are interested all of a sudden, and now they need to learn something about this stuff. Um, that said though, um, people often, they kind of only learn during the bear

cycle, right? Like they sort of have to make those mistakes and in the bear cycle, they're sort of like, oh, okay. Yeah. Now I understand why I need to, whatever, listen to some Bitcoin podcasts or read some books about it and sort of learn about the actual ethos of this thing so it's kind of like number go up is kind of the thing in the funnel you know the number go up is what pulls people in but then you sort of have to get them in and sort of teach them about the philosophy of bitcoin the philosophy of liberty and these other ideas that uh what make it sustainable let's say so that's that that's a good um segue then bitcoin has started with this ethos of cypherpunks and how we are going to maintain our freedom in a world that is becoming more and more

surveilled and they they kind of foresaw where the internet is going and where governments are going and bitcoin was then established in 2009 and a lot of people were you know the ones that were smart and early, we're kind of happy to see that that kind of invention can perhaps mitigate or balance that total control that governments can take. And then these days, 15 years into Bitcoin's existence, we see more and more of the governments themselves starting to talk about Bitcoin. The suits in Wall Street are starting to make noises of integrating it into their portfolios and their customers' portfolios. We see BlackRock and the 11 ETFs that were approved in the beginning of the year. And we're seeing institutional adoption,

maybe government state, nation state adoption coming in. How do you see those two trajectories for Bitcoin coexisting? And what's your take on how Bitcoin is going to be viewed by the mainstream that hopefully will enter the game yeah so there's different schools of thought on this but the way i see it is it was always going to go this way right that there's always and there's always a kind of there's an eternal september effect right so for people who don't know the basic idea is i might butcher some of this but the basic the high level of this is that uh in the early days of the internet there were there used to be like these university um people uh because it wasn't that easy to get on and so usenet and there were people kind of

chatting on usenet and things like this online forums and things and so the idea was every september there'd be a new round of students coming in who were getting access to the internet for the first time and it required let's say enough kind of old-timers to sort of enforce the rules or kind of enforce the culture of how you interact on the internet but then what happened And I think the idea was after, I think, AOL or one of these big internet providers turned on access, there was just too many new people coming in to sort of enforce the culture in a way. And so that effect now is known as Eternal September. And so I think you could argue a similar thing has already happened or is happening with Bitcoin. That, yeah, sure, in the early days, it was cypherpunks, crypto anarchists, libertarians and cryptographers and people.

But it's mainstreaming out, right? You had this kind of round of hedge fund people. You had this round of kind of gambler people, all kinds of things. And now, yeah, governments, ETFs, and these kinds of aspects. Now, in one sense, we could argue that it is an overall good thing that states do hold some Bitcoin. Now, I understand from a libertarian perspective, that's kind of a debatable point because in one sense,

you would rather the state not have that and you'd rather have individuals have it. But here's where I think, in a sense, if a state adopts Bitcoin as a strategic reserve or Bitcoin legal tender like El Salvador and other places, then it, to some extent, is seeding monetary, you know, scenerage, right? Because scenerage income is the amount of income that the state makes by just printing more money. and so to an extent if more and more people start adopting bitcoin you know because it's part of just the process right that there will be governments around the world who just adopt bitcoin now of course i want government as small as possible or ideally you know you know fully free market everything but we also live in the world that it exists today and so yeah we're not

moving to anarcho-capitalism tomorrow it may not even happen in my lifetime so we might as well try to, you know, sort of influence things in a more liberty focused direction where we can, where it's possible. And so I think there will be governments who adopt Bitcoin, like you're saying, there'll be these ETFs, it'll be part of the mainstreaming of Bitcoin, there'll be a lot of people who just want to hold it on their brokerage platform. Of course, we want as many people to self custody as possible. But I also recognize that today with current technology, it's not going to work for 8 billion people. So there are limits. So what does that mean? What does that imply longer term it means that a lot of bitcoin users will be custodial now you know i think i've

sort of made my peace with that yeah i've sort of made my peace with that now longer term like let's say maybe we can in the future get some kind of covenant soft fork upgrade that allow that kind of raises that number maybe we don't get a billion but maybe we can go from like a hundred to you know a billion or half a billion or something like that maybe that would be helpful um but i see bitcoin primarily as as challenging let's say central banks or government control of money i will still i still see a future where there will be a lot of bitcoin banks and they may be lightning banks um of course the early days the idea was be your own bank right and of course hold your own if you hold if you can hold your own keys and run run your own bitcoin node you can be

your own bitcoin bank it's just that i i recognize the limitations of you know the current you know the way we have Bitcoin now, it's not going to support 8 billion on-chain plus another 300 million corporate entities and government entities. So the ballpark number you sort of hear people throw around now is somewhere between 10 million to 100 million. That's how many on-chain users of Bitcoin

that you could kind of realistically support today, even with Lightning. Right. So even if we just say 100 million can use Bitcoin, that basically means the richest 100 million people or 100 million entities on Earth who can use the chain and can afford to and kind of in practice can do it,

a lot of, you know, that implies billions of people will be custodial users of Bitcoin. Now, the hope is that it's decentralized as possible, that there are banks all over the world, there are lightning banks all over the world, but that's kind of current state of play. Now, yeah, as I said, hopefully we can raise that number over time

if the community comes to consensus on some of these potential upgrades like a Covenant soft fork or something like this. But that's where we are today. Well, what would you envision in terms of timeframe for something like that to start happening? Like banks to start forming all kinds of initiatives related to custodying people's Bitcoin for them? I mean, I know that there are some solutions already, but it's not large scale because not a lot of people are in the game yet. So, I mean, one way to interpret that is in the early days, crypto and Bitcoin exchanges were the banks of the Bitcoin.

you know think about like mount gox and of course all these early exchanges so they kind of are in a sense your lightning your bitcoin bank already now of course we want as many people to be their own bank and self-custody but as i said there's limits so longer term what i see is services that you know maybe they allow you to hold you know two of your keys and they hold one key this kind of thing like uh bold where i'm an i'm an advisor has a two or three volt but of course you know unchained capital has something like this uh hodl hodl debify i think they have a three or four model where you can borrow against your coins this kind of thing so whether it's custody or lending i think we'll start to see this kind of hybrid model um especially for higher net worth people

where they really want multi-sig um and then yeah for other users they'll just be totally custodial so yeah but I my hope is that there's lots of these banks all around the world and there can also be

this kind of community banking idea right like I'm sure you know Obi and what he's doing at Fetty so that's kind of like this community

banking idea so maybe that's kind of you know so there's going to be it's going to be choose your trust model right based on

what you can afford and what you can technically achieve and what you're motivated to go and do because it's kind of all of those things can you afford it

can you technically do it and are you motivated to go and do it right because even today you and I i'm gonna take a guess you don't run your own email server right i don't run my own email server i you know you use other email servers so i think it's that's the way it's gonna go but i you know the the argument and the point that some people would make is that look bitcoin

doesn't necessarily have to go the exact same way as email um but if you look at other internet protocols ipv4 emails protocol which is smtp and i think imap right and so those are other examples of internet protocols that kind of yeah uh that went a certain way and so we'll see what happens with the bitcoin and lightning and other l2 protocols um my hope is that yeah we get as many people as possible who can you know uh hold their own keys but ultimately i think even if we got no further kind of new features and upgrades let's say we just only had 100 million lightning banks i think the world would be a lot better in that world because think about it today you got one federal reserve the number of banks around the world in terms of

fiat legacy banks probably 30 000 40 000 something in that range that's it right so we're going from world with one federal reserve where the state controls the money and done it all these things and 30 000 fiat banks to a world with 21 million coins no one can change that and let's say 10 to 100 million lightning banks all over the world that's already a massive massive improvement right even if we don't even if we get no further than that bitcoin would have changed the world bitcoin would have already and coming back to what we were saying earlier and what i was talking about earlier like moral social decay and this kind of cultural the cultural consequences of fiat money i see even in that world with 10 to 100 million lightning banks that would also change

massively in terms of you know culture and economics and the size of the state right because I think right now the state is able to fund itself through cheap debt, right? Because they can print this money cheaply and they get all this cheap debt artificially through the printer because they control the money. In a Bitcoinized world, that's not going to be the case. So they're going to have to be a lot smaller. And so this factor we were talking about of, you know, bureaucrats who want to say, oh, look at my department of 200 people under me or a thousand people under me. That's not going to be the case. They're going to have to be efficient. And so coming to the kind of the theme of, you know, the conference liberty in our lifetime, it's like this idea that make,

you know and free private cities is make governments compete for you yeah and i think for now it's a you know it's not as easy for everybody to kind of just go around the world and whatever right yeah it kind of applies for the higher net worth people and maybe higher skilled people but over time i think the effect will sort of filter down and more and more people will be able to do that of course bitcoin is an important tool in this uh you know in this transition uh But I think that is going to change some of these social and cultural aspects of how society is. Wonderful. And do you envision that the current commercial banks will enter the game of Bitcoin? Do you think they will adopt it?

Or they will be obsolete and then new banks will come to life? Yeah, I think it'll be a mix. There'll be some new Bitcoin companies that become banks. and there'll be some fiat banks that sort of see the way the wind is blowing and decide, okay, yeah, we've got to let our people buy Bitcoin, hold Bitcoin. And so we're starting to see this also, right? Like some of these, like was it BNY Mellon that wanted to get the ability

to custody Bitcoin, right? And so this was a conversation in the US. I think it was called SAB 130. They got it, right? They got approved. Yeah. So I think the conversation was something like there was some SEC regulation that was blocking banks, but then they got an exemption to do it.

And then, you know, there's been a lot of, you know, political back and forth on that particular point of who should be allowed to custody, should banks be allowed to custody Bitcoin? And I think to some extent, these banks have seen, oh, look how much the Bitcoin ETS were like a world beating product. They were just like massively smashing the records of, for new ETS having how much demand there was for them. The banks want a piece of that pie.

So of course they will want to custody Bitcoin. And then obviously what's the next natural product of that lending? They want to make money. They want to lend on top of the Bitcoin. So I think that's something we're going to see that will evolve over this cycle. But then, you know, I think we are humans kind of collectively, we're very much a herd animal. So we're going to see this kind of, my guess is that we'll see this kind of same kind of momentum. And then, you know, there'll be a moment where kind of the price has gone beyond what, let's say, the amount of people who are buying it can sort of sustain. And so then we're going to have a crash. I don't know if it'll be an 80% down crash, but maybe it'll be like, you know, 60%, 70%. I'm guessing, right? I don't know. None of us knows.

But so I think we'll see these cycles kind of play out over time, just as we've seen them happen before. Now, maybe it'll be a little more muted than historically, the volatility. Whereas, you know, in the earlier days of Bitcoin, you saw these 80% drawdowns. And can you imagine like taking an 80% drawdown? in the normal in the normie stock market if they have like a five percent drawdown they're all like losing their minds about that right whereas in bitcoin people could just you know people shrug off like a 50 percent drawdown of steel right yeah in order to be a real hodler but again eternal

september there'll be all these new people coming in and they won't have been through these 80 drawdowns so you know for them it's going to be harder and so sometimes people you know people talk about oh i need to touch the stove before i learn yep there'll be people who have to touch a stove multiple times before they even learn right and so some people get burned on custodial platforms some people will get burned in whatever the next ftx is you know there'll be all these things that happen now of course you know as much as possible choose your trust model choose your trade-offs not your keys not your coins all these things but there will be people who get wrecked because they don't learn they're new they just think i just want the easy thing let me just buy

this thing on the platform you know so let me play with some some shit coins yeah of course there'll be people who do that i mean um yeah i think my hope though is that let's say more and more etfs start to offer in-kind withdrawal so i'll give you an example in australia monochrome is doing that what is monochrome so they're a bitcoin etf provider in australia so obviously they're tiny compared to the u.s market but they have something that i think is unique i interviewed jeff i know jeff the you know the founder um they allow you to withdraw on chain so imagine that like you're a fiat normie you come in at the top you can get your actual asset instead of fiat yeah now this yeah this would be withdrawing you know this would be like a redemption you're leaving the fund but

the idea is you could come in like top of funnel you're a fiat normie you just buy this thing on your stock platform and then later you could literally yeah that's amazing right that doesn't happen in the u.s yeah not available in the u.s because and some of that is around this cash creates versus in-kind redemption but hopefully over time now of course there could be uh interests that don't want that maybe they try to block this right but hopefully let's say 10 or 20 years down the line that might be an option as well so that could also be another kind of interesting way the the industry evolves so yeah let's see right but of course until then you know there'll be all these people who are buying Bitcoin in their, whatever, in their retirement accounts and whatever,

whatever. And there'll be people buying micro strategy. There'll be people buying, you know, Bitcoin mining stocks, public miners and things like that. Of course, you know, holding your own keys on your own hardware wallet or your own multi-sig, you know, I think of that as the best level of sovereignty. Um, but there'll be people who say, look, I'm, I'm, I might keep most of my coins there, but they might want to put some coins into a platform because they want to borrow against their coins or they want to do these things, I can't stop them.

But that appeal will be there. Yep. Max Keiser said at Nashville that they're going to open a Bitcoin bank in El Salvador. Right. And I believe Saylor is going to go

in that direction as well with MicroStrategy. It's just my guess, but it just feels so natural for them. Yeah, possible. I mean, I guess it's hard to predict how things go,

but let's say as long as the fiat printer exists... people will try to abuse it people will try to use it right like i mean it's it's kind of and fractional reserve yeah yeah like because and this is actually this is another big debate in the austrian kind of circles i've been on the full reserve side and i've been kind of in the you know pushing uh that side of the debate but uh there are people in the austrian school that would say that fractional reserve is something good yeah so they it's complicated right yeah it's a complicated thing and it's not my argument but if i have to try and steel man their view

they would see it like you can't escape some of these things or they would have um certain carve-outs that they see as legitimate so they might see it like oh this you know commercial bills doctrine or this kind of terms of trade um and then there are others who let's say used to would have considered themselves austrians in decades gone past but nowadays they don't really they're not really seen as austrians so um you know there's all kinds of different reasons and arguments around that um i believe bitcoin is different though i believe bitcoin will kind of people who try fractional reserve eventually get wrecked just like ftx and mount gox and these things so i think certainly there'll be people who try but i think the system

will not create a kind of sustainable fractional reserve over the longer term yes there'll be people who try but i don't think it'll sustain longer term interesting i i need to also uh at one point uh interview kathleen long i really want to right yeah she's definitely in the full reserve camp and she's you know yeah wow and i'm not surprised that they're putting all those sticks in her wheels it's just like it kills all of their existing yeah paradigm yeah and i mean to me this comes back to this is the banking parallel of the two-tier policing all right it's like if you're on one side you're allowed to do this thing but on the other side no you're not allowed right so it's kind of there there is a two-tier system and uh it's going to take time

before let's say the free market and bitcoin uh surpasses it will i believe it will but it's just going to there's going to be you know some hurdles there's going to be some challenges on the way sure sure sure okay um what do people need to know about bitcoin and they don't on the most part or they're overlooking or missing in your opinion so i think yeah like that that point we were talking about as in the 10 to 100 million like i think a lot of people don't you know they've heard certain slogans about not your keys not your coins sure But they don't understand that that actually, at least today's technology, that wouldn't work for 8 billion people. Yeah.

Whereas I think a lot of the more casual Bitcoin followers, they wouldn't know that. So they would just think of it like, oh. It will always work and it will be okay. Yeah, so I think there is a need for technical development and maintenance. Yeah. So I think that's something a lot of people don't appreciate. I think something people have to understand is that online conversations go towards the most extreme, right?

So the person who's kind of talking in the most hardcore way sort of, you know, and sometimes online conversations become a competition of who can be the most hardcore, right? Like you got to be, oh, you got to be, every one of your coins has to be non-KYC and you got to be multi-sig and you got to be a perfect this and that. And otherwise you're a, you're a statist or you're a loser or you're a whatever. but i think uh now there's a role for our you know what we think of as the ideal state uh but there's also an element of uh let me say it this way i think a lot of people have this idea that oh bitcoin has never been hacked right how many times have you heard someone say that

well that's not factually correct right like in 2010 there was this uh buffer overflow value overflow era where like 84 billion bitcoins were created now it was before bitcoin had a price but yeah absolutely so so people don't know some of these things and so then there was a big chain split in 2013 and um at the time gavin andreessen who was the main uh maintainer at that time um now fallen a bit out of favor uh in terms of developer community and i guess in the community but at that time you know there were big fixes and things required and so there was i there was some database um error and that caused a chain split and they had to kind of quickly do a fix there um and then in 2018 there was an inflation bug it didn't get exploited but it was you know

discovered um and so i think that's something people have to be wary about that bitcoin needs maintenance it needs review and you know it's not this perfectly pristine thing that it can sometimes be marketed as now i agree that it you know it's the best technology it's going to improve our liberty. Uh, but I think sometimes it's, you have to understand the warts and all aspect of it. I think that's probably something. Um, as an example, when people run their Bitcoin nodes, sometimes there's a perception of, oh, screw running the latest version of, um, Bitcoin core as an example, but they don't understand, oh, wait a minute, there's bug fixes. And some of those bug fixes are only disclosed later. So as an example, you might patch your Bitcoin

node software up to the latest and it might include bug fixes that have not been publicly disclosed yet so that's kind of something maybe people don't quite understand but that's also why you know yeah yeah it's important that bitcoin is not like an auto update system because they could like put some kind of malicious patch in there but at the same time you've also got to be wary that you try to stay within generally within the latest two years of releases so every six months there's a new Bitcoin core version release. So that's something people need to sort of understand and think about. It's part of the journey though, right? So people, you know, again, come back to the funnel. People come in as a fiat normie. They don't understand. They just buy it on their

terminal or whatever. And then they later, oh, wait, I need to get, I need to learn about how to hold my own keys. Okay. Now I get a hardware wallet or now I get a multi-sig or something. And then later, oh, I need to learn how to run my own Bitcoin node. Otherwise, you know, Bitcoin is not being decentralized if you don't learn to do that. So, you know, it's a funnel. And then over time you sort of learn and you go down that funnel and you sort of learn more okay now i need to try to learn a bit about what's happening at a technical level because i want to sort of stay up to date and it requires bitcoin is a system of decentralized validation right so the idea is when you run your own bitcoin node and you're kind of checking the rules of bitcoin it's like a fake

bitcoin detector per se it's like you are sort of in a loose sense you're defending the protocol rules that you agree with right if somebody were to come out with the different set of protocol rules it would it would matter which economic nodes were running you know that which software and also typically what happens is there might be a futures market if there were to be a fork uh and then so people might you know sell one side and buy the other because to reflect their view and this happened back in 2017 as well around um segwit2x there was b1x and b2x so i mean we're kind of get into technical details but my point is more just that over time as you learn more about bitcoin you become a bit more of an active uh bitcoiner and you start to think and try to

learn more about what's happening at a protocol level um because that is what defends and keeps the system decentralized now of course there's also other elements in which you know we need to be wary so for example mining decentralization that's something um i know the ocean uh guys are really working hard on that and there's you know there are other people like demand pool as well they're doing stratum v2 um so there are efforts on that but it just you know eternal vigilance right it comes back to eternal vigilance is the price of our liberty that we can't just sort of get complacent yeah for sure wonderful which um resource of yours do you recommend people to start from if they want to start following you and your work is it on your website is it specific episodes

of your so i did an intro episode it's funny we talk about i'm episode 600 and something i did an episode uh 71 so this was like a the only solo episode i ever did on my podcast where i just kind of take people through that's the only one you ever did on your own yeah uh out of all my 600 episodes now i did have a few youtube early days i did some youtube kind of short videos i might even start doing some more of those but in terms of the podcast so far 71 is kind of a good intro because it kind of talks you through some of the basics of like the monetary history arguments and why Bitcoin is unique and special in that way. Of course, I regularly write for different publications, whether that's Bitcoin Magazine or Bold or occasionally I write for the

Mises Institute. But I would say for people who are new, just kind of going through some of the early episodes of my podcast. I'm not saying you got to go and listen to all 600, right? But just kind of go through and just kind of pick and choose what you find interesting and i think people will sort of quickly learn and many people have actually onboarded into the ecosystem whether they're developers or ceos or michael saylor or other people they've told me they've they've kind of onboarded through listening to a bunch of my episodes um so you know uh i think people will get some benefit out of that uh and also trying to stay up to date on what's technical and what's changing or what are some possible future developments in terms of bitcoin and where

it's going awesome what gives you hope stefan these days well obviously bitcoin i think bitcoin gives me hope i think this idea of competition between um states gives us options and people should try to use those options so i'm a fan of people doing flag theory and you know just because you're born somewhere doesn't mean you have to die there like you can you can go to different countries and you can take advantage of different situations and uh yeah like i think it's just most i think probably one interesting takeaway i would give people is think about the imbalance how much content there is out there nowadays about property flipping or doing airbnb arbitrage or rental stuff or doing stocks and dividends there's not there's actually not that much about

just hodling bitcoin and when you really stop and think about it over the last 10 years Bitcoin's CAGR, Combat Annualized Growth Rate, something like 65% per year on average for 10 years. Now, to be fair, I think it's going to taper down over time, right? Like if I'm guessing for the next 10 years, maybe 35 or 40%, something like it's going to taper down over time. But isn't it crazy that you could have, just by hodling Bitcoin, you outperformed all these fiat people, you outperformed all these like people trying to do property and- The moguls. Yeah, the property moguls and the fiat, you know, all these things. But there's so much excitement

because people think they need to be doing things about property or stock investing or bond investing or whatever, they don't realize what's staring them in the face right now. If you just hodled Bitcoin, if you just, you know, get some Bitcoin, earn it, mine it, buy it, however you do, whatever, and just hodl it on your hardware wallet or your multi-sig, and you'll kick the ass of basically all these people who are putting in all this work.

So I just think that's, it's kind of, it's under-recognized right now. And so I, you know, look, if I'm kind of spelling out what I think, I think I don't hold any gold. I'm bullish on gold over the next 10 years. But I think Bitcoin is going to outpace. I think Bitcoin is going to do much better over the next 10 years than gold. And so the world is going to slowly recognize that over time, whether that's individuals, companies, family offices, you know, counties, states, nation states, they're all going to

start learning and coming around to Bitcoin. Amen. Hallelujah. Oh, yeah. Okay, Stefan, following you where? On Twitter? Yeah, so Stefan Levera on X. You can find me on Nostra, StefanLevera.com. You can find my podcast searching Stefan Levera podcast on all the platforms. And yeah, you can find my articles as well just online, Stefan Levera. Yeah. I highly, highly recommend following Stefan. I thank you so much for doing what you're doing

and having all that passion and having the patience to explain things to people, Even though you've been in that space for so long, it's really inspirational. Well, thanks for hosting me, Afra. Pleasure.