Nov. 27, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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(upbeat music) | |
| Joining me today is the first investor in bitcoin.com, blockchain.com, and several other cryptocurrency websites, | ||
| who's also a libertarian, an individualist, and a peace advocate, Roger Ver, | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me on. | ||
| I was going to say Ver, but then I did a little research and it's actually Ver, even though most people say Ver. | ||
| This would lead one to getting into cryptocurrency, wouldn't it? | ||
| That's the exact reason. | ||
| It's very easy to see that that's why I would get into cryptocurrencies. | ||
| All right, I'm looking forward to doing this conversation, because as I mentioned to you briefly before we started, for about two years or so, I've sort of been kind of looking into this world. | ||
| A lot of my audience, the libertarian side of my audience, of course, is very much into Bitcoin. | ||
| So I think probably for the first half of this, we have to just do 101 stuff. | ||
| Are you ready to have your thinking cap on? | ||
| You bet. | ||
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unidentified
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All right. | |
| For someone that's watching this, Bitcoin, they have no idea what that means. | ||
| They think it has some connotation to Super Mario, you know, punching the question mark and getting coins out of this thing, which makes some sense, I guess, at some level. | ||
| What the hell is Bitcoin? | ||
| So Bitcoin is, thanks to the invention of Bitcoin, for the very first time in the entire history of the world, any human being can now send and receive any amount of money with any other human being, anywhere on the planet, instantly, basically for free. | ||
| You don't have to get permission from a bank, you don't have to get permission from a corporation, you don't have to get permission from a government. | ||
| Not only do you not have to get their permission, it's impossible for any of those entities to stop it. | ||
| So you can now send Money from here in LA to Moscow instantly just like that for less than a penny. | ||
| And there's nothing that the Russian government can do. | ||
| There's nothing that the Chinese government can do. | ||
| There's nothing that the American government can do. | ||
| So if you think that it's a good thing that people have control of their own money and they're not susceptible to things like we had happen in Cyprus a few years back where the government just came in and said, okay, we're going to take, I think it was a third of everybody's money in their bank accounts. | ||
| If you think things like that are bad, you should love Bitcoin. | ||
| And even if you haven't used Bitcoin yet, it might sound complicated and difficult, but Think of it like email. | ||
| If I sat here trying to explain to you how email worked, it would sound really hard and confusing and how could anybody figure out how to do this sort of thing. | ||
| But once you've used email, it's not hard. | ||
| It's easy. | ||
| You just type in the person's email address and you send them a message. | ||
| Bitcoin's the same way. | ||
| You just copy and paste their Bitcoin address and you send them some money. | ||
| So the best advice I can give to anybody that's new to Bitcoin, don't be afraid of it. | ||
| Go on the internet and get a Bitcoin wallet and give it a try. | ||
| It's really, really easy to use once you've actually used it. | ||
| Yeah, I mentioned to you that we take donations at rubinreport.com slash donate, and we take Bitcoin donations. | ||
| We didn't do it for a while, and we had all these people saying, why aren't you doing it? | ||
| You're missing a great opportunity here. | ||
| So we did it, and we have about, I think around two and a half Bitcoin right now, and I've seen it kind of go up, and you can't really watch it, at least from where I sit, you can't watch it every day, because you'd start going crazy. | ||
| It's just like watching stocks every day. | ||
| But what is it? | ||
| What actually is it? | ||
| So I get the ease of transfer and I want to talk to you about why some governments kind of embrace it more and some really are against it and all that stuff. | ||
| But like, people, that's what people want to know. | ||
| Like gold, we know what gold is. | ||
| It's a thing, you can put it in your hand. | ||
| What actually is Bitcoin? | ||
| So. | ||
| With traditional monies that people are used to using like the dollar or the euro or traditional payment networks like PayPal or Visa or Mastercard, all of these things have one ledger that keeps track of, for example, PayPal. | ||
| They have a ledger at the PayPal world headquarters and maybe a couple of backups. | ||
| They keep track of how many dollars you have in your account and how many dollars I have in my account. | ||
| When I transfer some PayPal dollars from my account to your account, they update their ledger. | ||
| But because they're the ones that are in charge of that ledger and keeping track of that ledger at any point, they can reverse the transaction I made to you. | ||
| They can take all the money out of your account. | ||
| They can take all the money out of my account. | ||
| The IRS can go to them and say, take the money out of both of our accounts. | ||
| Anything can happen at any time that's beyond our control, even though we like to think of the money that's in our PayPal account as our money. | ||
| But in reality, we have to trust PayPal to hold it. | ||
| Because PayPal has that one ledger, they're at the mercy of their higher ups, which are the government people. | ||
| With Bitcoin, instead of there being one ledger that keeps track of who has how many bitcoins in what account, there's a copy of this ledger, but it's on everybody's computer around the world that's running a copy of the Bitcoin full node software. | ||
| And so instead of there being, you know, one or two or three copies, there's more than 100,000 copies of this ledger around the world. | ||
| And those 100,000 copies of the ledger all stay in sync with one another. | ||
| And those ledgers are in every country around the world. | ||
| So let's say I send some money to you via Bitcoin for something that a government doesn't like. | ||
| There's no Bitcoin company that they can call. | ||
| There's no Bitcoin server that they can unplug. | ||
| All they could do is arrest the two of us, but that doesn't stop the Bitcoin network as a whole. | ||
| It keeps right on going. | ||
| So the real powerful invention of Bitcoin is this ledger. | ||
| that's not on any one computer. | ||
| The ledger is distributed across the entire planet, so there's no single place that anybody could go to | ||
| to stop or modify it or unplug it or turn it off. | ||
| So for me, that's what's so exciting about Bitcoin is the only way to stop it would be to turn off | ||
| the entire internet in the entire world and keep it turned off. | ||
| And in 2017, I don't think that's a very likely proposition. | ||
| I suspect there's some bad guys. | ||
| There's gotta be an evil guy somewhere twirling his mustache going, | ||
| "We can shut off the entire internet, right?" | ||
| Maybe, but hopefully not. | ||
| And hopefully we can build even more technologies to prevent bad people from turning off the whole world's internet. | ||
| And we saw what happened when they tried in Turkey previously. | ||
| They turned off the internet just within the country and people were instantly rioting in the streets and it led to an entire revolution in that country. | ||
| And I suspect that would happen in a lot of countries around the world if they tried to turn off the internet completely. | ||
| Okay, so I'm with you. | ||
| I understand that basically the ledger, the information, the true information of who has what and when they have it and all of that. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| When people say we're mining for Bitcoin, what does that actually mean? | ||
| So this ledger that's all across the entire world gets updated once on average every 10 minutes. | ||
| But it's who gets to decide who gets to make that update. | ||
| So the way that problem was solved is all these people are doing these really Complicated math problems and the only way to find the answer to this math problem is just to guess. | ||
| And you have to guess over and over and over again. | ||
| So these Bitcoin mining machines are guessing millions of times a second or even more than that. | ||
| And when they find, whichever machine, and there's you know millions of these around the world, whichever machine finds the right answer to this math problem is then the one that's designated to be able to make the next update to this worldwide Bitcoin ledger. | ||
| So then all these different nodes around the world make their update and boom, the transactions at the networks | ||
| at the next date and then all the computers start trying to guess again. | ||
| But the benefit of finding the right answer to this solution is at the moment you get | ||
| 12 and a half bitcoins if your computer is the one that finds the right solution. | ||
| And 12 and a half bitcoins at the moment is worth what, like $80,000 or so? | ||
| Oh, I should mention, by the way, that we're taping this probably about two weeks before it's going to air. | ||
| So anything we say related to the specific numbers, I don't want people to take out of context. | ||
| They go, oh, Vera doesn't know what he's talking about because it was 2.4. | ||
| You know, OK. | ||
| And almost certainly by the time this airs, it'll be something different than what I said. | ||
| Basically, even if we were doing this live right now, things would be changing on the fly. | ||
| I'd have to check live on the phone to see what the current price is to figure it out. | ||
| And Bitcoin is volatile. | ||
| But from my point of view, I want to be exposed to as much of that volatility as I possibly | ||
| can because Bitcoin allows you to send and receive any amount of money with anyone, anywhere | ||
| in the world, basically for free, and there's nothing anybody can do to stop it. | ||
| And there's a limited supply of Bitcoin. | ||
| There will never, ever, ever be more than 21 million Bitcoins. | ||
| So if you stop... | ||
| So how does that work exactly? | ||
| So I've heard that. | ||
| So there'll never be more than 20, and yet we've got all these computers that are constantly working to get the next solution to the mathematical equation. | ||
| So how is there a finite number of them? | ||
| So if one of these computers decided to give itself more than the 12 and a half bitcoins that are supposed to be allocated, all the other computers will reject that and say, no, that's not part of the rules of the game that's in our software code. | ||
| So any computer that deviates From that, their transactions and whatever they're trying to do just gets rejected and ignored by the rest of the network. | ||
| So right from day one, it was programmed into the software code that there wouldn't be more than 21 million bitcoins. | ||
| But those are released over time. | ||
| So half of the remaining bitcoins are released every four years. | ||
| So in the first four years of bitcoins, 10.5 million coins were released. | ||
| In the next four years, half of that. | ||
| In the next four years, half of that. | ||
| And it drops by half every four years. | ||
| So what year will they all be released? | ||
| We have more than 100 years until the last of the bitcoins are released out into the public, so it's not a pressing problem at the moment. | ||
| We don't have to go too far down that since it's 100 years from now, but what would happen when we hit the point that they're all out there? | ||
| Does that somehow drastically change the way the game is played? | ||
| People that are doing Bitcoin transactions, even if they're paying a fraction of a penny per Bitcoin transaction, if people are doing billions of transactions per day, those fees of a fraction of a penny per transaction will incentivize the miners to continue mining. | ||
| And we have a hundred and something years to find out. | ||
| To figure that out. | ||
| I suspect there will be some other issues. | ||
| Yeah, there's more pressing problems than that one at the moment, sure. | ||
| Right, okay, so it sounds to me that it's incredibly secure, right? | ||
| Can you just talk a little bit more about the general security? | ||
| Yeah, so the Bitcoin network, all these computers around the world that are doing mining, a more accurate description of what they're doing is actually they're securing the Bitcoin network. | ||
| So the more computers that are mining, the more secure the Bitcoin network is. | ||
| And the Bitcoin network is somewhere on the order of several thousand times more powerful now than the world's top 500 supercomputers combined. | ||
| So, it's absolutely an incredible feat of engineering. | ||
| Wait, so how do you get that kind of computing power? | ||
| I assume there's farms of servers? | ||
| It's just someone that invested in a farm, right? | ||
| Is that how it works? | ||
| Initially, it was just people at home in their bedroom, because if you found a block, you would get a dollar. | ||
| So, it wasn't that exciting. | ||
| But now, today, when you find a block on the blockchain, you get $80,000 plus. | ||
| So now it's big, big business. | ||
| So people have big, giant warehouses filled with tens of millions of dollars of this mining equipment using tens of megawatts of power per location. | ||
| And it's a big, big business at this point. | ||
| And you can still do it at home. | ||
| One of the most important factors, though, is the cost of electricity. | ||
| So the cheaper your electricity is, the more profitable your Bitcoin mining can be. | ||
| So I assume there's some Bitcoin people that probably want to go into solar and move to Nevada or something. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And then there's people going around looking at buying power plants and buying hydroelectric dams and all sorts of stuff. | ||
| It's really become a worldwide major industry at this point. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mentioned to you at the beginning we're going to have to do some definitions here. | ||
| So blockchain. | ||
| What is blockchain? | ||
| So blockchain is just a fancy name for this worldwide ledger that's kept on everybody's computer that's running this copy of the software. | ||
| And the ledger stays in sync with every other copy. | ||
| So that's basically what a blockchain is. | ||
| And the reason it's called a blockchain is that ledger, it's not updated all the time. | ||
| It's updated in steps. | ||
| And each step or update is a block of new information that's attached. | ||
| And they're all chained together mathematically. | ||
| So they're all in order. | ||
| So if a new block gets added to the end of the blockchain, on average, once every 10 minutes. | ||
| And now the blockchain is, I don't know, coming up on half a million blocks long. | ||
| And it's been going on for, I don't know, eight, nine years now, something like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What are most people actually using Bitcoin for right now? | ||
| Are they using it mostly just to transfer money from person to person? | ||
| Or I noticed actually just two days ago, I bought something on overstock.com and it was the first time that I ever saw on an e-commerce site that I could have paid in Bitcoin. | ||
| I had actually never seen that before. | ||
| But what are most people using Bitcoin for? | ||
| I think it depends. | ||
| It's kind of like asking, what do most people use money for? | ||
| Fair enough, fair enough. | ||
| In my book, Bitcoin is money, so people use money in different ways. | ||
| Some people save with it, some people spend it, some people gamble on the internet with it, some people buy drugs with it, some people do whatever it is they want with it. | ||
| But in my point of view, each person owns their own money and they should be free to do whatever they want with it so long as they're not initiating force or fraud against other people. | ||
| But I'm curious, do you know what any of the trends are? | ||
| Like, are people really at the moment just getting into Bitcoin so they can save it, hoping that, you know, treating it more as a stock than actual cash? | ||
| And we can also talk a little bit about the split with Bitcoin Cash too, that's probably a good segue to that. | ||
| But do you have any sense of what the actual habits are? | ||
| Yeah, so I think that's a great segue into that. | ||
| So when I first got involved in Bitcoin, I was the first person in the entire world to start investing in Bitcoin startups. | ||
| So my first step Let's pause there for a sec. | ||
| So this is 2011, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| February 2011, bitcoins are less than a dollar each. | ||
| Okay, and what possessed you to get involved? | ||
| What did you see that you were like, all right, this is gonna be something? | ||
| I grew up in Silicon Valley. | ||
| Been playing with computers since I was a little kid. | ||
| Loved computers all the time. | ||
| And my hobby was studying economics. | ||
| And just kind of by chance I came across one economics book in junior high when my mother told me I couldn't play any more Nintendo. | ||
| I had to go and do something else. | ||
| I picked up a book off the bookshelf and just by luck it was a book called Socialism by Ludwig von Mises. | ||
| And some people may know who that is and what that book is, and most people I expect won't. | ||
| When I picked up that book, I thought it was a pro-socialism book. | ||
| And I didn't really even know what socialism was. | ||
| But I kind of knew that Americans were supposed to be opposed to socialism, but I thought I should have an open mind. | ||
| I should at least hear what the other side of this point of view has to say. | ||
| And it turned out that, I think it was the Wall Street Journal referred to Ludwig von | ||
| Mises' book, Socialism, as Ludwig von Mises' devastating critique of socialism. | ||
| And in this book he kind of points out that prices are incredibly important. | ||
| Without the pricing mechanism, you don't know what raw resources should be used to produce | ||
| what consumer goods. | ||
| So my glass of water here is made of glass that I don't even know how they make the glass, | ||
| but I guess some sand and they melt it down or something like that. | ||
| But without the prices-- | ||
| We got it from Target for the record, so we spare no expense around here, you know what | ||
| I'm saying? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And with the prices that go into the sand and then the factory and this and that, they | ||
| know that maybe they should make glasses out of sand rather than glasses out of gold or | ||
| glasses out of copper or take your pick. | ||
| And so all the prices all over the world-- | ||
| allocate all of these resources and all of these companies and all of these factories and people and individuals | ||
| all the way to the time when you get to Target and you look at the different glasses there | ||
| and you think this one's glass, this one's plastic, this one suits my need better than this one | ||
| and this one costs this much, and it allocates the resources of the entire world. | ||
| Without a pricing mechanism, you have no idea what raw resources should be used | ||
| to create what consumer goods. | ||
| And reading this book, I was like, wow. | ||
| Anytime the government gets involved in any area of the economy, | ||
| they're causing a misallocation of resources and resources are being diverted | ||
| from their most economically efficient use to something that's less economically efficient. | ||
| And saying something's less economically efficient is just a fancier way of saying | ||
| you're making the world a poorer place than it otherwise would have been. | ||
| And so I found these ideas incredibly interesting and it gave me a better understanding of the world. | ||
| And so I read one economics book after another, after another, after another. | ||
| And so I got to read these theories about the origin of money and what the origin of money is. | ||
| And the idea of the origin of money is that it starts out as a commodity. | ||
| But not just any commodity. | ||
| It has to be a commodity that's easily recognizable, easily divisible, easily transportable. | ||
| You can store it easily for a long time and it won't go moldy or disappear. | ||
| And it has to have these certain characteristics that make something as money. | ||
| And I read about these theories in the books and I was pretty convinced by the theories. | ||
| And not to go down a whole 'nother tangent, but I actually did some time in federal prison | ||
| in the US as well. | ||
| And when I was in federal-- | ||
| I've got it noted right there. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| While I was in federal prison, I got to see firsthand in this micro prison economy. | ||
| That sure enough the theories in the books that I had read about the origin of money were true in practice. | ||
| So I got to see within the prison that sure enough people are using commodities as money. | ||
| So in prison people use tobacco and postage stamps and Top Ramen soups as money because all of those things are easily storable, easily transportable, easily divisible, easily recognizable, and of course limited supply is important as well. | ||
| And so I got to see firsthand before my eyes that the theories that I had read about in the books | ||
| are actually true in practice. | ||
| And then Bitcoin came along and I saw Bitcoin and I knew from the theories in the books | ||
| and from the practical experience and the empirical evidence I had from the prison economy, | ||
| I knew people were gonna start using it as money. | ||
| And because the supply of Bitcoin was limited and I knew people were gonna start using it as money, | ||
| That meant the price of Bitcoin in terms of dollars would have to go up. | ||
| So my first step was to buy a bunch of Bitcoin, and my next step was to start building business. | ||
| Sorry to interrupt, but at that early stage, when you say, all right, I'm gonna buy Bitcoin, who were you actually even buying it from then? | ||
| So this was, I think, February of 2011, and so there wasn't really an easy way to buy Bitcoin at that point. | ||
| There was no Coinbase. | ||
| There wasn't much of anything other than this one company called Mt. | ||
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Gox. | |
| And it wasn't really much of a company at that point, so I sent my first wire to a person's personal bank account, a guy named Jed McCaleb, to his personal bank account in New York, and I got my first Bitcoins there. | ||
| And then in parallel, I was trying to buy Bitcoins from another guy off the internet. | ||
| For anybody who's been around in Bitcoin for a while, they may have seen the physical Casasius Bitcoin. | ||
| So the guy behind that was also nice enough to sell me some Bitcoins. | ||
| So at one time there was actually a physical - There still are, but they're more of a collector's item | ||
| at this point, and basically it's a physical coin with a hologram, and when you peel the hologram off, | ||
| you can see that it's been tampered with, and underneath the hologram is the magic number | ||
| that's required to actually spin the bitcoins. | ||
| Did they, so they still do make those, or? | ||
| Maybe someone somewhere is still making them, but-- | ||
| Was the reason just because at the beginning, people needed some sort of physical representation | ||
| just to kind of understand? | ||
| I think the main reason is it made it easier for people to get a hold of Bitcoin. | ||
| So one of the main things that I did that really helped spread a Bitcoin adoption in the early days in 2012, I think it was, when Bitcoins were like three bucks each, I started selling these physical Bitcoins and I accepted credit cards and PayPal and I would ship them via FedEx and we had proof of delivery. | ||
| So it made it hard for people to do credit card chargebacks or that sort of thing. | ||
| And we sold thousands and thousands of these physical bitcoins to people | ||
| all over the world that way. | ||
| And it was an easy way for people to get their first bitcoin, | ||
| because then they could peel off the sticker and redeem them onto their computer | ||
| or do whatever they wanted with them from there. | ||
| And today they're quite the collector's items 'cause there's not too many left | ||
| of those early Casasius physical bitcoins. | ||
| Right, so okay, so you make this initial investment, 2011, 2012. | ||
| When did you start to realize that this really was becoming something? | ||
| And as we speak right now, Bitcoin is basically at its highest value of all time, in effect. | ||
| Yeah, I knew from day one, once I put together the pieces in my mind and I understood that Bitcoin couldn't be shut down or stopped or controlled in any way and that there's a limited supply, I was so excited about this that I heard about it as I was eating breakfast at around 10 a.m. | ||
| with the full intent of going into my office that day. | ||
| Didn't make it. | ||
| I stayed home and read about Bitcoin all day. | ||
| I stayed up all night the next day until around 4 p.m. | ||
| the next day and I got too tired and I fell asleep for only about an hour. | ||
| And then woke up again and read all about Bitcoin. | ||
| And I went on sleeping maybe an hour and a half per night for about a whole week. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Until I got so sick from lack of sleep I had to call my friends to help. | ||
| I'm so sick. | ||
| He came and picked me up and drove me to the hospital and they gave me some sort of a sedative or something and I passed out asleep for maybe 12 or 16 hours but then woke up again and it was all Bitcoin and here we are about seven years later and it's been all Bitcoin all day every day for seven years now because this is literally one of the most important inventions in the entire history of humankind. | ||
| Right up there on par with the importance of the invention of the wheel, or the electricity, or the transistor. | ||
| That's how big of a deal the invention of Bitcoin is. | ||
| So I want to get into that, and how it can sort of, why you really believe this can change the way we deal with borders, and societies, and nations, and wars, and all of this. | ||
| But let's just circle back quickly to the split, this Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin split. | ||
| Yep, so when I first got excited about Bitcoin, you could send and receive any amount of Bitcoin with anyone, anywhere in the world, and it was free most of the time. | ||
| The times it wasn't free, you'd pay a fraction of a penny. | ||
| And that led Bitcoin from being, you know, worth almost nothing to this worldwide phenomenon that it is today. | ||
| But much more recently, within the last year or two, a bunch of people that don't have any background in economics or in business People seem to think that people will use Bitcoin solely as a store of value, even if it costs tens or hundreds or thousands of dollars to send Bitcoin from one person to another. | ||
| And so they've intentionally undermined Bitcoin's usefulness in commerce. | ||
| So, Bitcoin on August 1st split into two versions of Bitcoin. | ||
| There's now Bitcoin Segwit and Bitcoin Cash. | ||
| The Bitcoin Cash version of Bitcoin still has fees of less than a penny. | ||
| You can send and receive them with anyone, anywhere in the world just like that. | ||
| Bitcoin Segwit, now the average fee is about $10. | ||
| I did a Bitcoin transaction on the way here. | ||
| In fact, I was sending my Bitcoin Segwit Bitcoins to a Bitcoin exchange to buy more Bitcoin | ||
| Cash Bitcoins. | ||
| The fee for me to send those Bitcoins from my computer to the Bitcoin exchange was $100. | ||
| And so if you ask yourself, you have two versions of Bitcoin. | ||
| One is slow, expensive, and unreliable, Bitcoin Segwit. | ||
| And you have another version of Bitcoin that's super fast, reliable, and cheap. | ||
| It's not a tough decision. | ||
| And that's Bitcoin Cash. | ||
| It's not a tough decision as to which one people are going to start using in commerce. | ||
| Right, so I might be a little confused here. | ||
| So when I'm telling you that I have two and a half Bitcoin, when you say Bitcoin Segwit, that's the original, so to speak, right? | ||
| So that's debatable as well. | ||
| So depending on when you received those two and a half bitcoins, it was probably from | ||
| a bunch of people over time, however many bitcoins you had on August 1st of this year, | ||
| you now have that many bitcoin cash as well. | ||
| So let's say you had two bitcoins exactly on August 1st, you now have two bitcoins and | ||
| two bitcoin cash. | ||
| Although I believe you said that you were holding your bitcoins on Coinbase. | ||
| I did. | ||
| And as we were talking about before the show, Coinbase is a fantastic company, but it's | ||
| not a bitcoin wallet. | ||
| It's a bitcoin bank. | ||
| And they're holding the bitcoins on your behalf, and now they're holding the bitcoin cash on | ||
| your behalf. | ||
| And so you're going to have to wait for them to get around to giving you access to their | ||
| bitcoin cash, which I think they will. | ||
| But if you were using a bitcoin wallet in which you're holding the bitcoins yourself | ||
| on your own device, you would have access to your bitcoin cash right there from day | ||
| one. | ||
| So what do you mean I don't have access to it? | ||
| If I was to right now log in and I got to do all that stuff on my phone and all the | ||
| password craziness and all that, I'm very happy that you have to do all those things | ||
| obviously. | ||
| What do you mean I don't have access to it? | ||
| You only have access to the bitcoin Segwit version of bitcoin on Coinbase today. | ||
| They've promised to give everybody access to their bitcoin cash at some point, and hopefully | ||
| they'll do that sooner rather than later. | ||
| But August 1st was a couple of months ago now, and they still haven't gotten around | ||
| to doing it. | ||
| And I'm confident that they will, but it's nice to have access to your money now and | ||
| not have to wait around for somebody else to do it. | ||
| And that's why it's very important, and I always tell people, use a Bitcoin wallet, not a Bitcoin bank. | ||
| So why wouldn't everyone want Bitcoin Cash, though? | ||
| Unless I'm missing something. | ||
| I think everyone is going to want Bitcoin Cash. | ||
| So then what's the logic? | ||
| Yeah, what's the piece that I'm missing here? | ||
| The reason everyone's not using it yet is that this Bitcoin Segwit version of Bitcoin managed to Bring along all of the existing infrastructure in Bitcoin that's been around for nine years now, eight years now. | ||
| Bitcoin Cash has only been around a couple of months since August 1st and the fact that Bitcoin Cash is now supported on the Bitcoin.com wallet, it's supported in the Blockchain.info wallet, Coinbase has publicly said they're going to support it, it's supported in the BitPay wallet, it's getting more and more support from wallets and merchant processors and exchanges. | ||
| I think it's a matter of time when people are faced between a fast, cheap and reliable version of Bitcoin and a super slow and expensive and unreliable version of Bitcoin. | ||
| What's the argument from the slow people? | ||
| The people that don't agree with you on this, what's the actual argument? | ||
| If we're really just talking about slow speeds and a clunkier process, obviously that doesn't sound good. | ||
| So to have fast, cheap, reliable transactions on Bitcoin, it requires a more expensive computer to run a full node. | ||
| But the vast, vast, vast majority of Bitcoin users aren't running a full node anyhow. | ||
| You've probably never run a full node in your entire life. | ||
| and none of these Coinbase users are running a full node. | ||
| Coinbase runs a number of full nodes to support your Bitcoin transactions. | ||
| So if you have, the Bitcoin Cash version will require bigger blocks, | ||
| which require a more powerful CPU and more storage space. | ||
| So right now, today, you can run a Bitcoin full node for the Bitcoin SegWit version, | ||
| literally on a $25 Raspberry Pi. | ||
| These people are limiting-- | ||
| What is that? | ||
| A Raspberry Pi is a $25 computer. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| And that's the name of the computer. | ||
| So there's a computer-- | ||
| There's an actual computer called the Raspberry Pi. | ||
| We can run this thing on Pis now, but wait, there's a computer called the Raspberry Pi. | ||
| Yes, spelled Pi, like the number. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| You see, there's a lot of terms here. | ||
| Next thing you know, we're running this thing on cakes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So you can run the Bitcoin SegWit version of Bitcoin on a $25 computer. | ||
| Bitcoin Cash today can still run on a $25 computer, but in the future as Bitcoin Cash becomes more popular, maybe it'll take a $100 computer or even a $500 or even a $1000 or a couple thousand dollar computer at some point. | ||
| But that's okay. | ||
| Most people aren't running full nodes anyhow. | ||
| And if it costs $5 or $10 or $100 to use Bitcoin Segwit, and it costs a penny to use Bitcoin Cash, it's clear. | ||
| So you've been accepting donations on your website. | ||
| I think you got most of those donations before the price of Bitcoin transactions skyrocketed. | ||
| And the reason the price of Bitcoin SegWit transactions skyrocketed is there's one megabyte | ||
| worth of transactions that can happen each 10 minute period that can hold about 2,000 | ||
| Bitcoin transactions. | ||
| In the early days, maybe 10 people were using Bitcoin every 10 minutes. | ||
| So you could do it for free and your transaction would be included. | ||
| Now that Bitcoin is this worldwide phenomenon, more than 2,000 people are trying to use Bitcoin | ||
| every 10 minutes. | ||
| But you want your transaction to be included in the blockchain. | ||
| So if more than 2,000 people are trying to use it every 10 minutes, they have to bid | ||
| against each other. | ||
| And the top bidders are the ones that are included in the next block on the blockchain. | ||
| So now the fees are about $10 per transaction because anybody that pays $9 has been outbid | ||
| by the people that are paying $10. | ||
| So Bitcoin Cash's solution to that is, well, just make the blocks bigger than one megabyte. | ||
| It's 2017. | ||
| An 8 terabyte hard drive is about $100 at the moment, and they're only going to get | ||
| cheaper year after year. | ||
| Yeah, so you're feeling basically is that the technology will always sort of, the computing power that we need for this will always sort of stay in front of the problems. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Just because it keeps getting faster and faster. | ||
| There's this great thing called Moore's Law, which is exactly that, that computing power doubles about every 18 months. | ||
| And so if an 8TB hard drive today is $100, in a year and a half from now it's going to be about $50. | ||
| And a year and a half after that, you know, $25. | ||
| And before you know it, they're garbage in the landfill. | ||
| And people laugh at an 8TB hard drive the same way we'd laugh at an 8MB hard drive today. | ||
| But I remember 8MB hard drives, and I remember when they were several hundred dollars. | ||
| And I'm not that old of a guy, and the same is going to continue to happen with computers, before we know it. | ||
| You mentioned Nintendo before. | ||
| I remember when the first, I think it was four megabyte game came out on Sega Genesis. | ||
| It was a big deal. | ||
| And people were going completely bananas about it. | ||
| That is many lifetimes ago. | ||
| Just real quick, let's circle back to this wallet versus bank thing, because I think maybe I could be a little clearer on what you're saying. | ||
| So Coinbase as a bank is really just holding my Bitcoin. | ||
| If I had this in a wallet, then that's actually part of the actual blockchain, right? | ||
| If you have it in a Bitcoin wallet, you're interfacing directly with the actual Bitcoin | ||
| network. | ||
| Whereas when you use a Bitcoin bank like Coinbase, you're interfacing with Coinbase and you're | ||
| saying, "Please broadcast my transaction to the Bitcoin network." | ||
| Most of the time they do, but like your Bitcoin Cash at the moment, you don't have access | ||
| to it. | ||
| I would actually recommend that on your website you should put a Bitcoin Cash address up there | ||
| because right now if people want to tip you in Bitcoin, it's going to cost them $5 or | ||
| $10 in network fees. | ||
| So if they wanted to give you $1 in Bitcoin, they're going to have to pay $6 or $11 to | ||
| do that. | ||
| And I don't think too many people are going to do that. | ||
| These don't seem like the type of people that would make sense to. | ||
| Whereas if they wanted to tip you in Bitcoin Cash, a dollar, they'll have to send a dollar | ||
| and a penny and that's very tolerable to people. | ||
| And I'm more than happy, after we record, I can show you how to set up a Bitcoin Cash wallet. | ||
| I'm gonna say, I've got my own farm out there of servers, and we're gonna fiddle around and see what comes up. | ||
| So then why would someone use a bank then? | ||
| I think they just didn't understand the difference, just like yourself. | ||
| I think you didn't realize the difference between Coinbase and a real Bitcoin wallet up until now. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| All right, well I think we did a pretty decent job there of, The little stuff. | ||
| Do you feel like we basically got the, am I missing something on the 101? | ||
| Yeah, for anybody that feels like they're missing anything on the 101, go to bitcoin.com. | ||
| I'm a little bit biased, because that's my website, but it's a fantastic resource. | ||
| Get a Bitcoin wallet and start using it. | ||
| It's like email. | ||
| If you'd never actually used email and you only heard people discuss it on a talk show, it would seem hard. | ||
| But once you've used it, it's easy. | ||
| It's the same with Bitcoin. | ||
| So go and actually use it. | ||
| And use it with Bitcoin Cash, because it won't cost you $5 each time you use it. | ||
| It'll cost you less than a penny each time you make a transaction. | ||
| All right, so the part of this, so shifting from all that, the part of this that I thought was really interesting beyond just the financial discussion and just sort of the way that the future of commerce is gonna work and all that, is you really believe that Bitcoin can change the way governments act, the way we as individuals respond to and talk to our governments and all that. | ||
| So I'm giving you sort of a broad question there, but tell me about that. | ||
| I hear people asking me all the time, well, aren't governments going to regulate Bitcoin? | ||
| And what about government regulation of Bitcoin? | ||
| But I think they're asking the wrong question. | ||
| The real endgame here isn't that governments are going to regulate Bitcoin. | ||
| Bitcoin is going to regulate governments. | ||
| Bitcoin is going to limit the power that every government on the planet has to control people. | ||
| Look at what happened a few years ago in Cyprus, where every single person there had a big percentage of their bank account. | ||
| Just completely wiped out. | ||
| Bitcoin gives the ability to people to opt out of that sort of system. | ||
| In the United States here, you know, the government can print as much money at any time for any reason and you better believe that they're doing that all the time. | ||
| If you're using Bitcoin that sort of thing can't happen. | ||
| And one of these really interesting ideas that had never occurred to me when I was, you know, going on my binge of reading economics books as a kid was by Milton Friedman and he pointed out the idea of bracket creep. | ||
| And The government inflates the currency every single year, so maybe you have, you know, 2 or 3 percent inflation. | ||
| And, you know, one year to the next, that's not that big of a deal, but compounded year after year after year. | ||
| Before you know it, $100,000 isn't, you know, in 10 or 20 years from now, it's not going to be that big of an income. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the government tax brackets are likely to stay about the same. | ||
| So maybe $50,000 income today is the equivalent of $100,000 a year income after however many years it takes to compound to that. | ||
| So instead of being in a 25% tax bracket, you're going to be in a 45% tax bracket, even though you're not actually earning any more money each year. | ||
| Bitcoin is the exact opposite of that. | ||
| There's no central authority that can make more bitcoins out of thin air, unlike the U.S. | ||
| dollar, so that's a really powerful way of people to opt out of this government inflation racket that they have that they use to bump everybody into higher tax brackets year after year. | ||
| Right, so it's sort of, it's kind of hard to picture what this would actually look like in the future, but if you, if everything you're predicting and would like to happen happened, in effect, As the years go by, people will obviously be buying | ||
| more Bitcoin using the US dollar in whatever country they're in, | ||
| whatever their currency is, they're gonna use that less. | ||
| And that very, by just doing that, the governments will in effect have less control | ||
| over the people because all of your interactions, all of your exchanges will have nothing | ||
| You can see I'm grinning from ear to ear. | ||
| But is this why, isn't Bitcoin illegal in China, or they just changed something, or wasn't there something just in the last couple weeks? | ||
| They've changed a lot of things in China at the moment, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. | ||
| If you have access to the internet, you can use Bitcoin. | ||
| And this is really, really, really exciting. | ||
| And I guess it's worth pointing out too, I wasn't born a libertarian, I wasn't even I didn't really have any political views at all, and it was the more economics I studied, the more of a libertarian I became. | ||
| And then it was kind of really depressing, because I looked around the world, and governments are manipulating the economy in all these ways. | ||
| They're slowing down the entire world's rate of economic growth. | ||
| And if you have economic growth of 2 or 3 or 4 percent per year, From one year to the next, that's not that big of a deal, but compounded year after year after year, it really makes a huge, huge difference. | ||
| And so even if the government's just slowing down the rate of economic growth by just one percent, and I think it's substantially more than that, compound that times a hundred or a couple hundred years, we'd all have flying cars and space stations by now and be living forever because of little nanotechnology robots that can go in our body and fix everything that's wrong with us. | ||
| Who doesn't want that sort of thing? | ||
| And if you don't want it, don't participate. | ||
| You're not forced to participate. | ||
| And that's what we're talking about. | ||
| We're slowing down the rate of progress of all of humankind and Bitcoin is this incredibly powerful tool to help speed up that rate of progress. | ||
| Man, there's so many different ways I could go with that. | ||
| So the dystopian future part of this that I guess I would fear is that if the government loses control of the monetary system, all the governments lose control, and the only way they can stop us now is to go after the internet, wouldn't it stand to reason that governments would start going after the internet? | ||
| Like literally the internet itself, like actually try to disconnect the internet, whatever that means. | ||
| Maybe, but lots of governments are dependent on the internet as well, but there's also lots of smart people that are building these mesh networks. | ||
| In which it's not dependent on the same sort of centralized infrastructure that a lot of the internet is today. | ||
| And those technologies are only going to get more and more powerful and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper thanks to Moore's Law. | ||
| And before we know it, we'll all be able to connect with everybody else and we won't be dependent on these big ISPs. | ||
| How do they go about doing that? | ||
| Like a mesh network like that? | ||
| So basically, in effect, getting us off Google and Verizon and whatever else, right? | ||
| That those won't be the only pathways. | ||
| How do these guys get out of that system? | ||
| Well, I think we're of a similar age, and I'm sure both of us remember before there were smartphones, and before there were iPhones, and before there was Siri and Google and all these things, and now you have the entire database of human knowledge right in your hand, and if you buy a used iPhone, you can get it for about a hundred bucks. | ||
| And another couple of years, that's going to be, you can buy a cheap Android phone for | ||
| $20 right now. | ||
| Like, that's incredible. | ||
| So, the hardware to do this is going to get cheaper and cheaper. | ||
| The technology is going to become more and more accessible. | ||
| It's going to be cheaper and cheaper for anybody to put satellites up in space. | ||
| And maybe governments are going to try and stop this and do bad things to do that. | ||
| But if they start trying to shut down the world's internet to prevent people from using | ||
| their own money, that's just a fantastic example that the government people are the bad people | ||
| and they're not our friends and they're not here to help us. | ||
| that's here trying to say, "Hey, we're going to turn off the internet if you use money without | ||
| our permission." | ||
| Those are bad people. | ||
| We shouldn't support them. | ||
| We shouldn't want anything to do with them, and that's just more proof that we do need Bitcoin to opt out of their violent, corrosive system to control us all. | ||
| We shouldn't be their tax cattle. | ||
| We shouldn't be their livestock. | ||
| Yeah, it's a great sell for libertarianism in general. | ||
| I mean, this is why I'm always selling the ideas of freedom. | ||
| It's like, if you think people, everyone complains, the government's horrible all the time, yet half the people want to give them more money and give them more control, and it's like, no. | ||
| Do the opposite. | ||
| Yeah, you don't starve them, but let's try it that way. | ||
| So, I think, I'm following all the logic here, so when you talk about why this would basically stop wars, do you mean because of economic reasons, or because basically we wouldn't be giving, economic reasons meaning countries wouldn't have economic incentives to fight, but also that the people wouldn't be giving them enough money to fight in the first place, is that? | ||
| So there's a couple of reasons, and since we have quite the big audience, I've never talked about one of them publicly. | ||
| Really up until now. | ||
| We'll talk about that one today. | ||
| Alright, let's roll. | ||
| One of the easy simple reasons is that lots of governments fund their wars via inflation. | ||
| They just print money and they use that money to buy guns and bombs and tanks and they use it to murder people all over the world. | ||
| And war is just a euphemism for murder. | ||
| Sometimes some bad people get killed, but for the most part, innocent civilians are getting killed all over the world. | ||
| And let's say somebody came in here and stole my wallet and ran off down the street. | ||
| If I started chasing them down the street and shooting guns and I shot a dozen innocent people that didn't steal my wallet and I said, oh, it's okay because I was trying to get the bad guy who stole my wallet, I would go to jail for being a murderer for killing all those innocent people. | ||
| So let's take for granted, let's say Saddam Hussein was a really bad guy who deserved to be killed. | ||
| They murdered more than half a million Iraqi children to do it! | ||
| Right? | ||
| That's murder! | ||
| You're killing kids! | ||
| Right? | ||
| It doesn't matter how bad of a guy Saddam Hussein is, you don't go and kill a bunch of kids to get them! | ||
| And that's exactly what the United States government did. | ||
| And if any individual did that, trying to catch a common thief, you would go to jail for it. | ||
| But for whatever reason, people just have amnesia or closed eyes when governments do the exact same thing. | ||
| If you're murdering innocent people, you're a murderer. | ||
| And that's what governments do, and they do it primarily through printing money and use | ||
| that to pay people to go and drop these bombs and guns and tanks. | ||
| And Bitcoin takes that power away from them because if the end game is to have Bitcoin | ||
| replace the dollar, replace the euro, replace the yen. | ||
| And when I'm saying Bitcoin today, I'm referring to Bitcoin Cash, to be clear. | ||
| But replace all those things. | ||
| And that takes away government's ability to inflate the currency, to pay for all these | ||
| things. | ||
| And people, maybe sometimes they worry, well what about schools and roads and bridges and | ||
| hospitals? | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| People love schools. | ||
| They love hospitals. | ||
| They love roads and bridges. | ||
| Things that people like, people will be more than willing to pay for voluntarily. | ||
| I'm not interested in paying to drop bombs on people in countries I've never been to | ||
| and I'm probably never going to go to. | ||
| And I think 99% of the people out there in the world also aren't interested in doing that. | ||
| And for the 1% that are interested in doing it, do that with your money. | ||
| Don't force me to participate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The other really, really interesting way that I've never ever spoken about publicly up until now, but I think Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are a big enough part of our society at this point where I'm not really worried about the attacks From governments on them. | ||
| And initially, that was my strategy from day one. | ||
| I wanted to spread Bitcoin to as many people around the world as quickly as I possibly could so they would become too big and too widespread to be shut down. | ||
| So if people are using Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to buy their groceries and their diapers and things like that, how can governments shut it down? | ||
| But here's an interesting way. | ||
| But do you think we've hit that threshold yet? | ||
| No, but we're getting pretty darn close to that. | ||
| And at this point, there's, I don't know, 100-something, 200-something governments around the world. | ||
| If one government wants to shut it down that probably makes other governments like it even more. | ||
| I would guess maybe there's a bit of that at this moment. | ||
| China's been cracking down on Bitcoin a bit. | ||
| I would guess Trump and the US government maybe like Bitcoin a little bit more now that China doesn't like it. | ||
| Which we could use a little bit of that leverage with China, right? | ||
| Because how much do we owe them in actual dollars? | ||
| Sure, maybe we can pay them back in Bitcoin for pennies on the dollars in the future once the RMB goes to nothing because everybody's using cryptocurrencies. | ||
| But another really, really interesting thing, so let's go back in time and a bad guy that everybody agrees upon, you know, Adolf Hitler. | ||
| I think pretty much... I thought I could do one show without a Hitler reference. | ||
| Well, I'm playing it safe in my example here as well. | ||
| Let's say, and I'm sure you can find people out there that don't think he was a bad guy, but the vast majority of society does think he was a bad guy. | ||
| So, Adolf Hitler started doing bad things with money stolen from people in the form of taxes. | ||
| And what did the rest of the world do? | ||
| They started stealing money from other people in the form of taxes, had kidnapping and slavery in the form of a draft. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And like, lots of people went voluntarily, but I'm sure lots of people went involuntarily, and we should be clear with our language, right? | ||
| The draft is the moral equivalent of kidnapping and slavery. | ||
| They're literally kidnapping people, and enslaving them, and sending them off to some far-off land to fight against their will, and if they don't do that, they go to jail, and half the time when they go off to the far-off land, they get killed as well. | ||
| So, the draft is the moral equivalent of kidnapping and slavery. | ||
| So, Adolf Hitler is a bad guy. | ||
| Everybody agrees with that. | ||
| Almost everybody. | ||
| But then the rest of the governments around the world start going and doing all this crazy bad stuff. | ||
| Well, what would happen if we had this online anonymous digital cash in which people could pool their resources and set up a betting pool? | ||
| And anybody that correctly predicts the right day that Adolf Hitler dies can anonymously collect millions of dollars in anonymous digital cash that people all chipped in a buck here and a buck there and ten bucks here. | ||
| I bet you could have raised a lot of money for someone to correctly predict the right day that Adolf Hitler dies. | ||
| Well, I mean, I said dystopian before. | ||
| Now you're going real dystopian, right? | ||
| Well, is this dystopia or is this utopia, right? | ||
| Imagine if people could have raised ten million bucks voluntarily from around the world and Adolf Hitler can't round up Jews and send them off to the concentration camps anymore. | ||
| Is that a dystopia or a utopia? | ||
| Well, it's a utopia in this explanation. | ||
| There's a piece of me And I love all these dystopian movies, which is why I can go down this road in all kinds of different ways. | ||
| There's a piece that's sort of like, wow, you could really end up creating some insane vigilante system where it's not just Hitler that's gonna be taken out, but anybody that gets smeared by the media or whatever, and then this is constantly happening to people that actually don't deserve it. | ||
| So that would be the dystopian part, but in this part... So I've been thinking about this for more than a decade, since before Bitcoin. | ||
| And yeah, it's scary. | ||
| We don't wanna see Justin Bieber or people like that having bad things happen to them. | ||
| But on the net, if you look in the last century, governments murdered more than 100 million people around the world. | ||
| I mean, that's a lot of people. | ||
| So in effect, you think it would cause governments to police themselves basically to do good things because there's basically a ransom on them, right? | ||
| That's really the idea here. | ||
| It might do that, or it might just make it too dangerous for governments in the traditional form that we have today, where they go around and boss people around and threaten to send them to jail if they don't obey. | ||
| Maybe it'll make that sort of thing not possible. | ||
| And as a voluntarist, I think all human interaction should be on a voluntary basis. | ||
| Starbucks asks me to buy their coffee. | ||
| They don't tell me to buy their coffee. | ||
| If I decide I don't want to buy Starbucks Coffee? | ||
| Nothing bad happens to me at all. | ||
| But if I decide I don't want to pay for Obamacare, if I was a U.S. | ||
| citizen living in the United States, I would go to jail for not doing it. | ||
| If I think health insurance through Obamacare is a good idea, I'll pay for it myself. | ||
| I don't need to be forced at the point of a gun or with the threat of being sent to jail to participate in that sort of thing. | ||
| And that's what governments are. | ||
| The very definition of government is a monopoly on the use of force, and they're forcing people to do things against their will. | ||
| And if you think forcing peaceful people to do things against their will is a bad thing, You should be opposed to the state. | ||
| And I don't know what the end effect of the invention of cryptocurrencies will be on governments, but I'm sure it will vastly, vastly, vastly limit their power. | ||
| And that's a great thing for all of humankind. | ||
| It liberates the individual and it speeds up the rate of economic growth for the world. | ||
| Like, maybe there's some scary things that'll happen, but the benefits far, far, far outweigh the drawbacks. | ||
| Yeah, I suspect that some people are probably watching this going, wait a minute, wait a minute, this guy is just trying to talk up Bitcoin, because he probably owns a lot of Bitcoin, and he'll talk it up, talk it up, talk it up, get it going, and then when he feels it's hit its peak, or when he wants to cash out, he'll cash out, and then that's that. | ||
| So there's some truth, I own a lot of Bitcoin, and if Bitcoin cash becomes really successful | ||
| all over the world, I'll make a lot of money. | ||
| I've already made a lot of money, but I've already donated millions to charity. | ||
| I donated several hundred thousand dollars to help Ross Ulbricht get his appeal going | ||
| and hopefully get out of prison. | ||
| For those that don't know, Ross Ulbricht is the person that was convicted of creating the Silk Road, | ||
| which was the first online anonymous marketplace in which people could buy and sell anything | ||
| that's sole purpose wasn't to harm other people. | ||
| And that guy, for creating a website, now has a double life sentence plus 40 years. | ||
| He didn't kill a single person, he built a website, and now the government sent him to jail | ||
| for two life sentences plus 40 years. | ||
| So his mom would make a fantastic guest on your show in the future, she's an incredibly-- | ||
| Wonderful woman and can you imagine you know if you have kids imagine your son Got sent to jail and he's gonna die in prison for having built a website that allows people to buy and sell things Mainly pot. | ||
| Is that what it was? | ||
| Well, I was gonna say what were people mainly drugs is what people were using it for and if you think about it What are drugs drugs are things that make people feel happy and there's a bunch of alcohol on the shelf behind me Why is that drug? | ||
| Okay Pots okay in California, but in the neighboring state it's not? | ||
| Like, because a bunch of people that you and I have never met got together and wrote down words on a piece of paper and then called those words a law. | ||
| Writing down words on a piece of paper and calling it a law doesn't alter morality. | ||
| Either it's perfectly moral for me to smoke pot or drink alcohol or smoke crack, or it's not. | ||
| And the politicians getting together and writing down words on a piece of paper and calling it a law doesn't alter morality in any way whatsoever. | ||
| And so this poor young man is going to die in prison unless he somehow gets an appeal or gets out for making a website that allowed people to buy and sell these things that make them feel happy. | ||
| And for anybody who's drank some alcohol or smoked some pot before, They do it because it makes them feel happy. | ||
| It improves people's lives. | ||
| And yeah, some people get out of hand and get addicted and do bad things, but that's life. | ||
| People die all the time. | ||
| Some people eat greasy hamburgers and get obese and die of a heart attack. | ||
| It's their life to do it with. | ||
| It's not the politicians' lives. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you mentioned a second ago that you were a citizen of the United States. | ||
| You actually renounced your citizenship about what, about five years ago? | ||
| 2014, May 4th. | ||
| I'm sorry, February 4th. | ||
| It's one of the crowning achievements of my life. | ||
| My only regret is that I didn't do it sooner. | ||
| Okay, so you are a citizen of Japan. | ||
| So I'm not a citizen of Japan either. | ||
| I'm actually a citizen of a wonderful country in the Caribbean called St. | ||
| Kitts. | ||
| Which is probably a country nobody's ever heard of because there's only about 45,000 people in the entire country. | ||
| So wait, first, why did I think it was Japan? | ||
| I've been living in Japan for over a decade. | ||
| Japan's my main home base. | ||
| Japan's a wonderful country. | ||
| Anybody who hasn't visited there, you're in for a real treat if you go and visit Japan at some point. | ||
| Yeah, so what caused this decision a couple years back and why St. | ||
| Kitts? | ||
| When I first got out of federal prison, I felt I had been treated incredibly unfairly by the United States government. | ||
| For people that are interested in the details, we can talk about it or Roger can give you the details. | ||
| Maybe real quick we should just hit on that. | ||
| So why were you in prison? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So the short summary is I read all these economic books and I got really excited about the power of economic freedom to make the world a better place. | ||
| And so I thought the best way to tell more people about the wonderful benefits of economic freedom was to run for California State Assembly as a Libertarian candidate. | ||
| So in the year 2000, I ran for State Assembly as a Libertarian. | ||
| I got to have a debate against the Republican and Democratic candidates at San Jose State University. | ||
| And in that debate, I called the ATF and FBI a bunch of jackbooted thugs and murderers in reference to all the children that they burnt to death in a church in Waco, Texas in, I think, 1994, I believe it was. | ||
| That sounds about right. | ||
| Maybe their parents were religious nuts and really believed in all sorts of magic sky people and Jesus this and Jesus that. | ||
| Even if their parents were religious nuts, burning to death all the kids doesn't help them. | ||
| You've murdered a bunch of kids. | ||
| So if you're somebody that goes and burns to death a bunch of kids in a church because their parents are religious nuts, you're not a good person. | ||
| So I called the ATF and FBI agents a bunch of jackbooted thugs and murderers in reference to what they did in Waco, Texas back then. | ||
| I still think they're a bunch of jack-booted thugs and murderers for what they did there. | ||
| And not just that, there's plenty of examples, but it turned out there were some plain-clothed ATF agents in the audience. | ||
| And at that point I was 20 or 21 years old, somewhere in that ballpark, and I had already had some success in business. | ||
| And they really didn't like the things that this, you know, young man was saying. | ||
| And so they started looking into me and figuring out, well, how can we prosecute this guy? | ||
| And so at the time I was selling computer components on eBay. | ||
| And I was also selling a product called a Pest Control Report 2000 on eBay, which is basically a firecracker used by farmers to scare birds out of the cornfield. | ||
| And today that sounds a bit crazy to sell firecrackers on eBay. | ||
| This was in 1999 or so. | ||
| This was back when eBay had a guns and ammo section. | ||
| You could buy AR-15s and shotguns and ammunition. | ||
| They had a fireworks section. | ||
| It wasn't a big deal to be selling those sorts of things. | ||
| So I was selling them on eBay. | ||
| For those who are familiar with Cabela's sporting goods catalog, they were selling | ||
| the exact same product in their catalog. | ||
| Anybody could order them. | ||
| They'd ship them to you in the mail. | ||
| This was before 9/11, so it wasn't a big deal back then. | ||
| I wound up being the only person in the entire nation prosecuted for selling those without a permit. | ||
| Even while I was in prison, other companies were still selling the exact same product without a permit. | ||
| Eventually, the manufacturer and the other resellers were all asked to stop selling them. | ||
| None of them went to prison, none of them had to pay a fine, none of them had any problem whatsoever. | ||
| I was the only person in the entire nation to go to prison or have any problem for selling them. | ||
| So I did 10 months in federal prison, had 3 months of federal probation. | ||
| The day I was allowed to leave the country, I left the country. | ||
| I looked into renouncing my citizenship at that time. | ||
| Unfortunately, it's very expensive to get citizenship somewhere else, and it's extra difficult if you're a felon in the United States to get citizenship somewhere else. | ||
| So, I looked into it at the time. | ||
| It was a lot of money, a lot of work. | ||
| I didn't have as much money then, so I decided, I guess it's good enough to just live outside of the U.S. | ||
| Needed to pick a country. | ||
| Wasn't sure where to go. | ||
| I had had one Japanese girlfriend before in the United States and it was a good experience, so I figured there were more to be had in Japan. | ||
| But if I'd had a Russian girlfriend, I would have wound up in Russia. | ||
| If Brazilian, it would have been Brazil. | ||
| It was just kind of by chance that it was Japan. | ||
| But here I am more than a decade later and very settled in and speak fluent Japanese at this point. | ||
| I can give your next interview in Japanese if you'd like. | ||
| Next time we'll do this in Japanese. | ||
| But why St. | ||
| Kitts though, ultimately? | ||
| So St. | ||
| Kitts is one of the few countries in the world where you can get citizenship very quickly by investing in real estate. | ||
| So I bought some real estate in St. | ||
| Kitts, visited the island in person. | ||
| Like, I love St. | ||
|
unidentified
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Kitts. | |
| St. | ||
| Kitts is a... | ||
| Gorgeous place. | ||
| Like the low all year is maybe 72 degrees and the high is maybe 80-85 degrees. | ||
| Not very humid. | ||
| Wonderful weather all year round. | ||
| So I've been spending every single winter there. | ||
| I think this winter will be my fourth or fifth year there. | ||
| I'm headed there after LA. | ||
| So it's a great place. | ||
| If you're looking for a holiday place, go to St. | ||
| Kitts. | ||
| I really recommend it. | ||
| Now you're on the Board of Tourism there, too, apparently. | ||
| I'm happy to come and say hello. | ||
| It's a small place in St. | ||
| Kitts. | ||
| Now, I can obviously understand, after hearing your story, which I had read about, obviously, beforehand, I can understand your frustrations, of course, with the government and all sorts of things, and that they singled out one person, all that. | ||
| What was it like, actually, that moment when you, I assume you have to sign a couple documents, and what do you do, you slap a guy a high five at the end? | ||
| What was that actual moment like? | ||
| That's a great story, too. | ||
| So I had to go to the U.S. | ||
| Embassy in Barbados, and I can't remember the name of the clerk there, but if he happens to see the interview, like, thank you for being such a good sport and having a good sense of humor with all this. | ||
| So I went up to the, and you have to have an interview. | ||
| in order to renounce your citizenship. One thing that really surprised me, and I | ||
| didn't know this, is you're not telling them that you want to stop being an | ||
| American. | ||
| You're asking for their permission to stop being an American. | ||
| And I asked the guy at the window, I said, "Have you ever seen somebody be denied | ||
| the ability to stop being an American?" He said, "Oh yeah, it happens all the time." | ||
| Really? It really was stunning to me. | ||
| I would have thought that if you don't want to be an American anymore, it should be up to you. | ||
| But no, our masters in Washington, D.C. | ||
| decide if they're going to allow you to stop being an American. | ||
| But this clerk at the window, when I came up and I gave him my bundle of paperwork, there was a fee. | ||
| The fee is even higher now. | ||
| Now the fee is $2,000-something. | ||
| When I renounced, I think it was $440. | ||
| And he asked me, he said, do you want to pay with cash, credit card, or Bitcoin? | ||
| And I had the same look on my face that you just did now. | ||
| I said, what? | ||
| I said, how would you know that I would be interested in paying in Bitcoin? | ||
| He said, oh, we know all about you. | ||
| We've Googled you. | ||
| And I said, well, can I actually pay in Bitcoin? | ||
| He goes, no, I was just kidding. | ||
| So basically, you had to fill out, they knew you were coming, right? | ||
| You made an appointment online. | ||
| So he was just messing with you, kind of. | ||
| He had a good sense of humor about it, though. | ||
| So you have the initial interview, and he cautions you, he warns you. | ||
| He says, I think the draft is the moral equivalent of kidnapping and slavery, and war is mass murder. | ||
| I think taxation is theft. | ||
| I'm a voluntarist, I don't believe in government. | ||
| And he told me, he said, I have to caution you, if you stop being a U.S. | ||
| citizen, You won't be allowed to serve in the armed forces. | ||
| I thought I'm probably okay with that. | ||
| And so I've been a felon for 15 years now, more than 15 years. | ||
| As a felon, you're not even allowed to vote anyhow. | ||
| And philosophically, I'm not really interested in voting at this point. | ||
| And even back then, I wasn't really interested in voting. | ||
| But he told me, he said, if you renounce your U.S. | ||
|
unidentified
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citizenship, you won't be allowed to vote. | |
| Man, he was just throwing you all the eggs, huh? | ||
| And then another one, so at the time, I don't know, I was 34-ish, I think, he said, if you renounce your U.S. | ||
| citizenship, you won't be allowed to collect Social Security. | ||
| And I'm pretty sure that's not going to be around by the time I'm old enough to retire also. | ||
| This was like a real breakup situation. | ||
| They were pulling out all the stops. | ||
| And he has this script that he has to cash me in. | ||
| I think there might have been one more thing, but all of those were like, Instead of like, oh my god, what was I thinking? | ||
| It was like, hooray, I can't wait to be free of Social Security and all of this stuff. | ||
| It's not a decision that people take lightly either. | ||
| It's a big, big, big step in life, but they make you have a one-week cooling-off period. | ||
| So he cautioned me of all those things, and then I had to hang around for another week on the island where I don't know anybody, and then went back a week later and signed the paperwork and this and that, and I was free. | ||
| And that's it? | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| And you did it. | ||
| So now you're a felon without U.S. | ||
| citizenship. | ||
| Yeah, and so every single time I come into the country now, I get sent to the secondary inspection. | ||
| And there was another guy... Because is it on your... Well, no, you don't have a passport anymore. | ||
| No, no, I have a St. | ||
| Kitts passport now. | ||
| But is there something on your St. | ||
| Kitts passport? | ||
| I get flagged in the U.S. | ||
| system as, you know, watch out for this guy. | ||
| And so another interesting thing, like anybody who's met me, I'm a pretty white-collar kind of guy, but since my actual charge is dealing explosives without a license, And it's worth pointing out that the crime isn't dealing in explosives. | ||
| The crime is doing it without the license, without the permission slip. | ||
| But that's automatically considered to be a violent felony. | ||
| So not only am I a felon, I'm a violent felon as well. | ||
| I used to have a buddy that would sell firecrackers out of his basement in high school. | ||
| It was pretty common when we were probably in the 90s when we were in high school, I think. | ||
| But I get flagged on their computer and they're like, "Oh, watch out for this guy." | ||
| So they send me to the secondary inspection. | ||
| Sometimes they're real uptight about it and they're watching me, and then other times they're like, | ||
| "What did you do?" | ||
| I said, "I sold firecrackers on eBay." | ||
| And they're like, "Oh, that." | ||
| Oh, you're that guy. | ||
| That guy. | ||
| But apparently they have some list of notes about me on their computer | ||
| and they have to read all the past notes about me and then write new notes about the time that I'm coming in. | ||
| So the list of notes they have to read about me gets longer every single time I come into the country. | ||
| So it's a bit of a burden. | ||
| God, that sounds like an episode of Seinfeld on crack or something. | ||
| All right, well, I think we did a little bit of everything here. | ||
| I wanted to do the 101 stuff, which I know you've talked about many times before, and I wanted to get some of your bio. | ||
| If you had to, just to wrap this whole thing up, if you had to predict Where this is all going. | ||
| Obviously, you're very hopeful for all this, but you know, there is some upside down stuff. | ||
| You know, we didn't even talk about the Reddit split and that, you know, there's some people that are, you know, you've got your haters and trolls and all that. | ||
| I'll deal with them. | ||
| If you send them to me, I'll deal with them. | ||
| Fear not. | ||
| But if you had to give me like a prediction of where you see all this over the next couple of years, what do you think is going to happen? | ||
| So a couple hundred years ago if I told you there was going to be a separation of church and state you would think I'm a nutcase and a heretic and I might get burnt at the stake for saying such a thing. | ||
| Before the invention of Bitcoin it would sound crazy to say that there's going to be a separation of money and state. | ||
| But now that doesn't sound so crazy anymore and it's starting to happen right before our eyes. | ||
| And I think within another couple of decades All currencies are going to be beyond the control of governments. | ||
| People aren't going to be using dollars and euros and yen. | ||
| They're going to be using Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum and Monero and things like that. | ||
| And that's a wonderful, wonderful thing for all of humankind. | ||
| And just like a separation of church and state was a great thing for all of humankind, a separation of money and state is as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I gotta tell you, I thoroughly enjoyed this. | ||
| You know, I find I always learn a little something when I'm doing these, but I think I learned a lot here. | ||
| And as I said, you know, these are ideas, the ideas that I try to put into this business that I, you know, I've built a business here, are the same ideas that I try to talk about on the philosophical level. | ||
| And now we got to turn these 2.5 into something major. | ||
| Let's do it! | ||
| So you're officially my business manager or something now? | ||
| You're my digital cryptocurrency business manager. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| I'll gladly do that, and I'll help you set up a Bitcoin Cash donation address on your website, and I'm sure people will love to send you tips in Bitcoin Cash. | ||
| There you go, awesome. | ||
| Well, it was a pleasure talking to you, and for more on Roger, you can go to bitcoin.com or follow him on the Twitter. |
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