| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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Digital Knowledge Network
00:07:37
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| We dematerialize it, make it digital, we make it run on a mobile phone, and we put it on a streaming protocol. | |
| If you want to spread your ideas to people, you put them on the radio waves because everybody can't show up in person. | |
| The physicality of you giving a speech in person is going to be too expensive. | |
| If I wanted to give knowledge... | |
| To billions of people. | |
| I can't do it with books or libraries. | |
| That's too expensive. | |
| So I upload them digitally to Google and I make them available for free. | |
| And you just get an iPad. | |
| You download 100,000 different books for the cost of electricity. | |
| And so the challenge of Bitcoin is how do I give property rights to billions of people? | |
| Property rights meaning, you know, somebody in Africa, Asia, South America, they work, they make $500. | |
| How do they keep it for a decade? | |
| If they invest it in Nigerian currency or Zimbabwe dollars or the Bolivar or the peso, that currency is going to go to zero. | |
| So they can't do that. | |
| And if they try to buy land with it, land's expensive to buy, and someone can take it from you. | |
| And they can't necessarily buy the exact amount of gold. | |
| And so how do you maintain your property rights? | |
| And gold is like the Steinway Grand Piano solution. | |
| It's a physical solution. | |
| It was the best idea we had for 5,000 years. | |
| And Bitcoin is the technical solution, dematerialized property that you can carry in the palm of your hand or put in your head. | |
| And the advantage of dematerialized property is you can have any amount of that property and nobody can take it away from you. | |
| If you want to give it to your grandson or granddaughter or you want to send it halfway around the world, you can do it. | |
| You can't mail your ranch in California halfway around the world. | |
| You can't move a building in Manhattan halfway around the world. | |
| You can't move bars of gold around the world. | |
| And so all the, you know, you can't move shares of stock. | |
| And of course, there's 8 billion people on the planet. | |
| Not many people can buy stock to save their life savings and preserve their wealth. | |
| So Bitcoin running on a cheap smartphone is the most egalitarian idea we've come up with to allow everybody on Earth an instrument of economic empowerment. | |
| So that's why it's important. | |
| I mean, if you were rich and affluent, you could have a library, a piano, or a bar of gold. | |
| But it's just not going to work for the middle class, and it's not going to work in the developing world. | |
| Our best hope? | |
| Is to dematerialize that virtual thing and put it on a digital network and deploy it to somebody's $50 Android phone. | |
| So if I understand it, this is based upon people agreeing that Bitcoin matters. | |
| Without that agreement, it's nothing. | |
| Is that fair to say? | |
| Yeah, you could think of it as like a monetary union or a savings alone in cyberspace. | |
| And as people join it, right, they're joining a monetary network. | |
| And the more people that join the network, the more powerful it gets. | |
| But look, it's just like Facebook. | |
| It's Facebook for money, except, you know, nobody ever joined Facebook with a billion friends. | |
| It's like, you know, Google, YouTube wouldn't work either if nobody actually clicked on YouTube and WhatsApp wouldn't work if nobody actually used the network. | |
| So it is a monetary network, not a social network and not a search network and not a video network. | |
| But everybody needs a monetary network. | |
| So I think we'll have 250 million people on this network by the end of this year. | |
| And what you've got right now is... | |
| Like, three million a week joining? | |
| I mean, Coinbase is like, you know, Coinbase and Binance and PayPal and Square. | |
| The most popular mobile apps that people are downloading right now are so they can get on the cryptocurrency network. | |
| Is it taxable? | |
| Bitcoin's property. | |
| So... | |
| The way to think of it is it's tax-like property. | |
| If you buy it for $1,000 and it doubles in value, if you sell it, you'll owe capital gains tax. | |
| And if you transfer it, you'll owe capital gains tax, just like if you bought a house or stock or any other asset. | |
| So the right way to think of it is it's not currency. | |
| It's not a cryptocurrency because currency isn't taxable when you transfer it. | |
| It's a crypto asset. | |
| It's like digital gold, and it is taxable when you transfer it. | |
| So the right thing to do, of course, is don't ever transfer it and don't ever sell it. | |
| Buy it because it's going up in value over time. | |
| And if you ever need additional money, what you do is you finance it, like taking out a home equity loan. | |
| You're better off to use it as collateral and borrow against it because then you don't pay capital gains tax and you don't incur income tax. | |
| And you don't pay tax on the borrowings either. | |
| The most tax-efficient thing to do is construct a very high-quality portfolio of assets and hold them forever. | |
| Who came up with this idea? | |
| So, Bitcoin was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, and we don't actually know who Satoshi Nakamoto is. | |
| We think it's one or more computer scientists who are experts in cryptography. | |
| Coming out of the cyberpunk movement. | |
| Satoshi worked on the project for about two years and then just disappeared, never to be heard from again, and gave this as a gift to humanity. | |
| So it's thought of as the immaculate conception. | |
| It's a big advantage for the network. | |
| Because there is no founder and there is no founding company and all of the original coins mined by Satoshi have never moved the first million. | |
| They were just used to start the network and the network decentralized ever since. | |
| So it really is like money of the people. | |
| It's like the only computer program in the world that we have that literally has no architect, founding company, or owner. | |
| It really is just open source, owned by the world. | |
| And somebody in China or Russia or Norway or California or Venezuela, they equally own it. | |
| And they all have the same privileges, the same information. | |
| Do you see this replacing currencies, including the dollar? | |
| No, I don't think so. | |
| It's called a cryptocurrency, so that confuses people a bit. | |
| But if you think about money, money has a couple of aspects. | |
| It's used as a medium of exchange. | |
| It's used as a store of value. | |
| It's used as a unit of account. | |
| And if the money of the world was not inflationary, if, for example, there was a fixed number of U.S. dollars and nobody printed any more of them, then you could use the currency as a store of value as well as a medium of exchange. | |
|
The Academy and Dollar Component
00:00:37
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| That would be perfect money. | |
| But we've never really had that, not since the gold standard, and we got off the gold standard in 1914. So in an inflationary environment, money decomposes into a currency and into an assets component. | |
| The currency component is the U.S. dollar. | |
| The U.S. dollar is the world's reserve currency. | |
| All right, all right. | |
| I don't know if you could stay on. | |
| I hope you can. | |
| I want to hear about your academy. | |