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Feb. 10, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:24:42

Freedomain Investment Roundtable 3: BITCOIN DOUBLES!

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	Taple Music Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from FreeDomain.
	This is our third investment roundtable.
	Just a reminder, this is not investment advice.
	Although, no, no, actually not even, there's no caveats there.
	This is not investment advice of any kind.
	I just was curious though, so we last did one of these at the beginning of February.
	Well, we first started doing these in the beginning of February and don't you know, we did talk a lot about crypto, a lot about Bitcoin.
	And did you know, That since we started these roundtables of market forces, crypto, and investment stuff, the price of Bitcoin has virtually doubled.
	I'm not saying it's entirely due to us, obviously.
	But no, it's pretty interesting, which is why I say this is not investment advice, but it is pretty damn useful.
	So thanks a lot for joining.
	For those of you who listened as we started, or listened to me yammer on about Bitcoin over the last...
	Lord knows how many years.
	I appreciate you coming by.
	I hope that you have found the practical use of philosophy in your own economic environment.
	And thanks, of course, to the people who are joining today.
	We're trying a little bit different now, throwing on a little bit of video.
	Although, of course, most people are not joining with video because I begged them.
	Because they're free domain listeners, they're just massively more handsome than me.
	Except for, well, anyway.
	So, of course, I've just begged them not to make me look bad by looking so good.
	So here we are.
	It's been a week since we first started doing these things, a week and a bit.
	The price of Bitcoin has doubled.
	Other cryptocurrencies, Doge, Ethereum, and so on, have seen some pretty significant gains.
	Of course, a bit of a rollercoaster with the other ones.
	The price of Bitcoin does appear to be holding steady at, what is it, the mid-40s US, around 60k a Bitcoin Canadian.
	I like that. I like that.
	I don't like a continual increase.
	I do not like a continual increase because that is, for me, the definition of a bubble.
	You know how you climb stairs?
	You know, if you sort of look at it in slow motion, you climb stairs, you go one step, and then there's a little bit of an equilibrium and a port, and then you go to the next step.
	Or when you climb a ladder, you're not flowing like water upstream.
	You're just... Take it at a step at a time.
	I want that to be an increase in the price, obviously, and then I want that price to stick there for a little while because that means people are making money.
	It means people are selling, people are buying.
	And when you sell and you say, hey, I just got twice the price of a good car out of my Bitcoins, people are like, wow, Bitcoin, let's hear more.
	I mean, I did a show last night with John B. Wells, who is the kind of voice that gives you a spinal massage if you had headphones on.
	And he was asking me lots of questions about Bitcoin, which is great.
	Love to hear it. Love to talk about that kind of stuff.
	So... I'm pleased.
	I'm thrilled. I'm happy.
	I've gotten the messages from people who have decided to look into Bitcoin and it's been somewhat helpful to them, to put it mildly.
	I'm very pleased about that.
	The more that we can liberate ourselves from fiat currency, the better off.
	I got a little giddy last night and fired off a couple of I guess I could still refer to them as tweets.
	I don't know whatever you'd call them these days because it's on a variety of social media platforms.
	You can follow me at freedomain.com forward slash connect.
	It's a bunch of social media platforms if you still want to get my rantings and ravings.
	And yeah, fear is dead.
	I mean, it's a strong statement.
	And obviously, there could be a dead cat bounce.
	And just because you're dead doesn't mean your fingernails stop growing right away.
	Trust me, I buried enough bodies to know that one very, very intimately.
	But the reality is that the price of Bitcoin to me, I want to know what you guys think, but the price of Bitcoin to me is not a reflection fundamentally of Bitcoin, it's a reflection of fiat.
	In other words, I don't judge Bitcoin relative to human economic activity as a whole, relative to its technological advancements, its portability, its divisibility.
	I measure Bitcoin at the moment relative to the reserve currency status of the U.S. dollar, which has been really the case since 1920, 1921, certainly since Europe committed seppuku in the entirely unnecessary World War I. We've had the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency.
	And wouldn't you know it, reserve currencies last about, ooh, what is that number?
	What is that? It's a nice round number.
	Oh, that's right. The number of fingers and thumbs times 10.
	Reserve currencies, historically, like a Portuguese, Spanish, British pound, all of that, reserve currencies last about 100 years.
	So from the early 1920s, hang on, let me do the math here.
	Oh, I've got to take my shoes off.
	Hang on. Oh, this is life without a calculator.
	That's right. That's right.
	We're at about 100-year mark.
	Coronavirus, of course, has accelerated because the money printing, money firing out of the Fed, not just in America, but all the central banks around the West and around the world, for the most part, the money that's coming out is absolutely mad.
	This whole thing is being kept alive.
	The economy is stopped, and the whole thing is being kept alive by the helium printing presses going almost ad infinitum.
	Interest rates are being held ridiculously low, and The economy has become largely an illusion of deferred inflation, in my humble opinion.
	Now, how do you measure the deferred inflation?
	I think that you measure the deferred inflation relative to Bitcoin.
	That's my sort of fundamental belief.
	So sort of that's where I sit.
	I don't want to go on too long because it's a communal conversation here, so I'm very happy to hear.
	And, you know, we don't have sort of a mute-unmute thing.
	If you want to just jump in, just, you know, shoulder everyone aside and make your voice heard like you're trying to vote someone out, you know, is sus and among us.
	Ooh, there's a young person's joke for you.
	But I'm happy to hear what you guys think, where you're at, where you think the market is at the moment, and what's driving it.
	Personally, I think that Bitcoin is a good reflection of what general society perceives about the fiat currency right now.
	I think that people are finally starting to wake up and to see the impacts of all the money printing that's happening.
	And people can see that oil is back to where it was at the start of the coronavirus.
	Commodities are at their five, like seven-year highs.
	So oil is back to what, like 37 bucks a barrel or something like that, right?
	In the U.S., it's at 58 right now.
	Is it 58? Yeah, futures.
	I'm a little behind then.
	Fantastic. It's still not going to be enough to save Venezuela, which has the largest oil reserve, and it's still dirt broke because socialism...
	Go on. But yeah, corn, wheat, all of these commodities, all of them are at all-time highs.
	Soybeans, it's pretty much an exponential increase right now, and Things are getting more expensive, and I think people are slowly starting to look at that and see like, oh, you know, things are getting more expensive.
	Biden wants to pass another $1.9 trillion stimulus plan, and they're probably going to pass even more after that.
	And, you know, how do I get out of the system?
	How do I sort of get into a location where I can be protected against some of this?
	And, you know, if I can have a little bit of a hedge by placing some of my money into something that's not going to be inflated by the government or something that's a little bit more decentralized and more safe, I think a lot of people are starting to look at that.
	And I have a friend who He follows a lot of politics and he's right now trying to get into Bitcoin and he's having a lot of issues because for some reason none of his deposits are going through and he can't actually buy it.
	But I have people around me who are starting to get more and more interested, who about a year ago were not interested at all in Bitcoin, who were just purely into stocks and stuff like that.
	Well, and I just wanted to...
	Go ahead. I had my speech.
	Go ahead. On the note of people getting involved in crypto and wanting to come in, if you think you might be interested, start the process now.
	Because it can take several weeks to get ready on an exchange.
	You want to start getting set up with several exchanges.
	For whatever reason, I would do multiple jurisdictions around the world.
	Binance is in Asia, Coinbase and Kraken are in the US. There's blockchain.com, which I believe is based more in the UK or at least Europe.
	But you want multiple options, multiple jurisdictions, because for whatever reason...
	Well, it's better to...
	Have it and not need it, then need it and not have it.
	In other words, you can get the process going.
	You can upload your docs or whatever it is you need to do.
	If you decide not to get into it, no harm, no foul.
	You've lost a little bit of time out of your life, which is not a big deal.
	But if you do suddenly want to jump in, you don't want to imagine that you just make a phone call and get some Bitcoin unless you're willing to take your life in your hands and meet with people in a parking lot with cash, which I would not recommend at all in any way, shape, or form.
	Yeah, that's a very, very important point.
	Get yourself up and running now because, you know, we could be, as I believe, right at the beginning.
	I've always had, I mean, just in my head, and this is obviously pure speculation, pure opinion.
	I've got no math behind it, but I've always had in my head about 700k a Bitcoin.
	That's sort of been my thought.
	And, of course, if you look, so last year versus now, okay, it's been a pretty big...
	If sort of the fold increase from last year to now continues over the next year, yeah, we're looking at some pretty substantially high Bitcoin values.
	And the fact that people are sitting on a whole bunch of money to me is really fascinating because all this money printing, all it's doing, all this money printing, there's these handouts, these stimulus checks, and all it's doing is preventing the reorganization of the economy that's necessary due to COVID. COVID should be triggering a cascade reorganization of the entire economy.
	You've got more than a third of people who are probably going to be working at home either permanently or semi-permanently.
	That's very new. You have an entire reorganization of business travel.
	That's something I did forever when I was like two to three weeks on the road when I was in the business world.
	You've got a complete reorganization of the hospitality industry, the airline industry, the restaurant industry, the convention industry, everything.
	All of business has changed.
	The way it used to work, used to fly out, used to give presentations.
	You'd go to, I can't tell you the number of times I spent manning a booth.
	I was a booth boy, a booth girl, a booth hottie.
	And you'd be out there manning booths and you'd say, oh, give me your business card.
	We'll give you a free iPod or something like that.
	And that's how you would sort of drive this.
	Now, I've not been in...
	The software world for a while, but I'm sure it wasn't massively different.
	Everything has changed, and the more you fire money into the economy, the more you paralyze the economy from adapting to the new economic reality.
	That's not going to go away when COVID ends.
	The people think that, okay, who knows when the world's going to return to, quote, normal.
	I imagine it's still going to be a couple of years, probably, but even if the world returns to pre-COVID levels of general perception and mobility, Business ain't going back to the way that it used to.
	If you can imagine some natural catastrophe or some illness accelerates the development of the car, the automobile, Well, when that virus gets cured or that natural disaster is taken out of the equation, everyone then doesn't go back to horse and carriage.
	It's accelerated the development of the new economy.
	As you know, most technological advancement is driven by pornography, right?
	So VHS was driven by pornography, but even when people weren't interested in that or didn't want to do that, it wasn't like the entire movie industry didn't change or the internet as a whole was driven by pornography.
	And just because people use it now for non-pornographic reasons, in fact, I think there's some tiny slice of the internet that's not used for that, it doesn't mean that everything goes back to the way that it was.
	So this is the unfortunate thing about all this money in the system and these low interest rates and this money printing.
	It's just preventing the change from occurring that needs to occur.
	And the longer you hold it off, the more wrenching that realignment is going to be.
	I need to have a little duck that I quack when I'm done a ramble so people know when to stop being placed and stop participating, but go ahead.
	And if you think about it, it's also pretty crazy how in about 12 or 13 years, we went from, in 2008, the government went from just bailing out the banks because if they didn't, there would have been a massive collapse.
	And then 13 years later, we've gone to, we need to bail out literally everybody, every business, regardless of the size, needs to get some sort of bailout money, some sort of loans, something from the government.
	And that happened in just 12 years.
	And the question is, where are we going to be in like 2030?
	Because it seems like the pace is accelerating at which the government is starting to gain control over pretty much everything.
	I mean, when it comes to business, there seem to be a lot of people who want more regulations, more bailouts, more control.
	And it doesn't look like there are any signs that it's going to go the other direction anytime soon.
	Well, I... But it's not one...
	Sorry, it's not one... Let me just be real quick here and then I'll...
	But it's not one big blob, right?
	So the economy is fiat and crypto.
	I mean, that's the big division.
	I mean, you could say there's other assets, of course, capital assets, real estate and so on.
	But in terms of currency, it's fiat and it's crypto.
	And so when you say the controls, the control...
	Yeah, of course, the controls and the management of the economy are going to go much stronger on the fiat side.
	But on the crypto side, that's much tougher.
	And I think you just want to get far enough away from the Titanic, like the lifeboat.
	I mean, if you stay around the Titanic when you're on a lifeboat, you just get sucked into the downswell, right?
	And you're probably going to drown anyway.
	So you get into lifeboats and you get away, which means to me, you know, try and disinvest in fiat-related stuff, try and get into something in my particular approach.
	So there is not one big blobby economy at the moment, although in 2008, crypto was not a factor.
	And so it was one big blobby.
	And the other thing I'd nag you about is like, it wouldn't be a collapse, it would be a liberation.
	You know, like the old system, oh my gosh, that'd be an economic collapse.
	No, it's a liberation from delusion, right?
	I mean, it's painful, but it is a liberation from delusion.
	But sorry, I'll be quiet now.
	Go ahead. Go ahead, Alexander.
	All right, I'll just go for a little bit.
	Yeah, I think what I find interesting is that Bitcoin is starting to finally approach the market cap.
	Bitcoin, I think it's at about 900 billion, might reach a trillion soon.
	It's getting to the point where it's so large that any sort of attempt to try to regulate it or try to destroy it is going to be extremely difficult, and I don't think that it will be successful.
	It's starting to take on the size where it's really starting to become a significant force.
	Well, you want the financial management class invested in Bitcoin because they're the ones who have the political connections, right?
	I mean, it's not like you and I can call up anybody important in government and say, hey, man, we need to have a meeting because what you're planning is blah, blah, blah.
	I mean, they may have a meeting, but you may not ever come out, right?
	So the moment that Bitcoin – like now you've got, as you know, Elon Musk invested a billion and a half, which I think is one-tenth of – one percent of – The market cap of Tesla or something like that and you've got – Apple is reportedly, reputedly getting about a billion into Bitcoin, which is like what, four or five days of their cash flow?
	It's really not very much. So you want these big, large investors, which is why I've been sort of talking about it as I think an interesting thing to look into in this area because – The moment that people who've got connections, real connections, the connections that you and I will never have probably, the moment that they're invested in it, then they're going to be the lobby group that is going to work to push back against any destructive regulations against this kind of stuff.
	And it was a pretty dangerous passage when we were in the smaller amounts.
	But yeah, the more that people are bailing on fiat and going into crypto and Bitcoin, the more protected those ecosystems will be, I think.
	That's my sound at the end of the speech.
	I was going to say, on that note, in a Reuters article that came out, I think, January 20th, Janet Yellen mentioned, I'll just read the quote here, or out of the article, she raised eyebrows of some senators in Wall Street when she said that Treasury would consider the possibility of taxing unrealized capital gains through a market-to-market mechanism, as well as other approaches to boost revenues.
	That would hurt crypto.
	Okay, but hang on, hang on. So, break that.
	Well, would it hurt crypto compared to how much it would hurt everything else?
	So, help people to understand what that means.
	Please. I don't entirely understand it myself.
	Well, okay, so taxing unrealized capital gains, as I understand it, and I've been having to pay crypto taxes for a couple years now, so I understand it better than a lay person on the street.
	So your capital gains are you have capital assets and the The gain is how much they increase over a year or so or over time.
	If you sell within a year, so practical example, you buy Bitcoin and you sell it within 12 months, you owe 35% under the current regulations, unless they've changed and I don't know.
	If you wait over a year and you sell your Bitcoin, you're supposed to pay 15% on the profit there.
	So just not the whole balance, but the profit you got.
	Now, taxing unrealized capital gains would mean that you buy your Bitcoin, you don't sell it, know nothing, but if it goes up over the course of a tax year, you've on that difference.
	As I understand it...
	Wait, you just cut out for a second there.
	You've what on that difference?
	You just cut out for a second there.
	You've something on that difference.
	You would have to pay whether you sold it or not over that tax year.
	You'd have to pay on the profit, the difference on what you bought it in versus what you sold it at or didn't sell it at and just happened to appreciate in value.
	So the analogy here would be if you had a second home, which you had bought for some kind of investment purpose, and the value of that home went up, that you would be taxed as if you had sold it, even though you haven't sold it.
	And it would be taxed probably not at the same level as if you'd sold it, but even though it's a paper gain, but it's a real tax, right?
	That's not a good combination.
	No tax is a good thing, but when you have a paper gain, but a real tax, that's a significant negative because what happens is sometimes to pay the real tax, you have to liquidate some of your holdings, thus triggering real taxes.
	And what it does is it's going to artificially drive down the price, in my humble opinion, of whatever asset this applies to.
	right? It would apply, I would assume, of course, to stocks, because if they only applied it to cryptos, it's still a pretty tiny segment of the economy.
	But stocks, bonds, whatever it is, whatever has appreciated in value, and heaven forbid that they would do real estate too, but whatever is appreciated in value, then you have to pay taxes on an unrealized gain.
	Well, then, of course, what happens if the value goes down?
	Do you get some of that money back?
	It becomes a rolling target of unrealized gains that get taxed and unrealized losses that get taxed.
	Oh, I mean, I guess OCD accountants would be in heaven, but for the rest of us, it would be an actuarial nightmare as far as I could tell.
	As I've paid crypto taxes over the years, it is an absolute nightmare.
	No matter what tax person I go to, I've got to pretty much do the work for them to where I've gotten to the point of largely doing it myself.
	And also for note, for anyone that's getting into crypto, I'm not trying to dissuade anyone or discourage them, but it is something to be aware of that, you know, keep good records.
	And exchanges nowadays do a good job of keeping records and their software that helps.
	The one I use is Bitcoin.tax.
	No, I'm not getting paid for that, but, you know, they can email me and I'll take anything.
	But yeah, talk to an accountant and just make sure – like, don't just assume this is free stuff.
	I mean, it is as far as – like a security depends where you are, but it's a real thing.
	You've got to pay taxes on it, and please do that.
	Don't try and escape the law.
	Don't try and tax evade, and don't give Bitcoin a bad reputation.
	I'm personally convinced that they will try to make an example of the crypto community one day.
	And a great way to do that is if you haven't paid taxes, because as we've talked in the previous conversations, crypto is not so private.
	Well, it depends which crypto, but most of the ones we were talking about here.
	All right. So is there anyone else who wanted to sort of jump in with thoughts about market forces that are driving this kind of stuff?
	I mean, it's hard to say, of course.
	It's a random walk to some degree where it's going to go, but the floor is open.
	You've got a yearning, burning thing that you've been yelling at your monitor that now you get to yell at everybody's monitor.
	I was just going to make the analogy that the tax on unrealized capital gains is basically the analogy would be a property tax on financial assets.
	Oh, because you're holding them, you would get taxed.
	Okay. Okay. Right.
	Yeah, like you get a property tax on your house whether you sell it or not, except it would probably be more than – what is it?
	1% or 2% of the home's value.
	It would probably be much higher than that.
	What it would do, of course, would it be if a bunch of financial people wanted to buy an asset, then they would encourage this kind of tax because it would cause people to sell the asset to cover tax issues and it's, to me, just another rampant market manipulation.
	But we should, I think, be kind of used to that.
	Is there something else you wanted to add to that?
	The floor is open. I mean, I got a lot to talk about, but I want to make it a monologue, so if other people have stuff they want to share, please.
	Is my mic working properly?
	Yep, you're on, man. Very good.
	All right. So, with relations to the first crypto crash, it went from about 20k to about 4 or 5k.
	Oh, really? I don't remember that too well.
	Yeah, wait, hang on, I'm having PTSD, but I think I'm okay.
	I'm okay. Go ahead.
	It's a pretty distant memory, but if you think of the time, like the emotions were sky high.
	Every article was about Bitcoin.
	Everyone was trading it. YouTube was covered by it.
	And now it's gone up to 40k like it's nothing.
	Because nobody wants to talk about the reason why.
	Nobody wants to talk about the reason why, which is, I believe, fragility of US's dollar reserve, right?
	That is such an elephant in the room.
	That is such a black hole.
	And this has the potential to completely reorganize the financial classes as a whole.
	And yeah, good luck trying to, you know, with Robin Hood when there was like, you can't buy this thing, you can only sell it.
	Like some of the complaints that people had, I don't know whether it was a choice or whether they had losses, stop losses on or whatever.
	You know, good luck with that in Bitcoin.
	You know, good luck with those kind of financial manipulations in Bitcoin.
	The other thing that Bitcoin's doing is these guys are supposed to be the masters of the universe, super smart, right?
	And where were they for the last 10 years, right?
	Where were they? It's one of the biggest investment opportunities in life.
	They might really sound like a salesman, one of the biggest investments, right?
	But these super smart guys.
	So I don't know that the financial press really wants to – what do they get?
	Well, I think the financial press as a whole works kind of like – Oh, we're going to short a stock and then we're going to say, oh, I don't think this company is doing too well and the price is going to go down.
	Or they long a stock and they say, I think this company has real growth.
	To me, how honest it is, it's open to debate and it's all legal, but whether in a free market it would work this kind of way.
	But Bitcoin's out of that whole thing.
	Bitcoin is not a supplement to the existing fiat and stock financial system.
	Bitcoin, to me, is a different animal altogether.
	It is car versus horse and buggy.
	It is internet versus print.
	Paper. And, you know, you'll find, of course, that a lot of businesses that rely on old technology, old paradigms, they're really not that interested in pushing new technology, new paradigms, because they're either going to adapt, in which case they probably have already done so, or they're going to do so, in which case they don't want to pump it because they want to get in while the price is still low, or they're not going to adapt, in which case they really don't want to tout the car when they're all in on the horse and buggy.
	On that note, I was going to say, I believe Bitcoin, if someone fact me, but I believe, if I recall correctly, Bitcoin is the single greatest asset or thing to have invested in in the last decade, like something like a 68,000% increase or something like that.
	And again, take that with a grain of salt.
	On the note of the whole Robinhood situation, I had mentioned Bruce Fitton in the last videos, one of his tweets.
	He says, if you're mad, don't close your Robinhood account.
	Leave it open.
	Keep 21 cents and a partial share of one stock in the account and request paper statements, mailed annual reports, and proxy voting.
	Right, right.
	Yeah. However, that's got to be somewhat dissatisfying after a while.
	You know, sticking it to the man when the man still makes all the money, it's got to be somewhat dissatisfying after a while.
	But I kind of get where you're coming from.
	They did get the one-star review on Google.
	Well, they yeeted a whole bunch of like 100K of those one-star reviews and then I think they finally gave up and just let them handle it.
	You could destroy Robin Hood with arbitrations now.
	Oh, right, right.
	I'm involved with the Patreon lawsuit when Benjamin was kicked off a couple years ago.
	Yeah, we filed arbitrations and we won.
	They hammered a crazy amount of money.
	Good for you. Good for you.
	Now, let's look at...
	Sorry, I don't want to drag the conversation to another area if there's more that people wanted to say.
	And, you know, don't be shy. Can I correct my fact?
	If I'm reading this right from CoinMarketCap, and again, I could be wrong, it's showing a 34,000% increase Bitcoin ROI from the initial investment.
	That seems fairly good.
	I don't think anyone's going to complain between 60,000 or 30,000 return.
	I think the one thing that's unique about this market cycle in particular is that this is going to be the start of the institutions really starting to get into this market.
	I think the smart institutions are already coming in in a very big way.
	The larger institutions are just looking for a way to get in.
	It's hard to try to convince investors, retirement funds, and all the rest of it to put their life savings into what they consider to be a speculative asset.
	And it largely is.
	But as the market cap continues to increase, we get to $1 trillion Bitcoin, which will be around about $56,000.
	I think The big boys are going to start to come in, and it's going to be interesting.
	I think that no one wants to get in first, but once people start coming in, no one's going to be the last one to get on the boat.
	I mean, a lot of the fund managers are older, and there's no thing there.
	They're used to sort of physical assets.
	They view fiat currency as a real thing, like it's not, but toilet paper is more useful.
	At least you can wipe your ass with it.
	So they look at fiat currency as a real thing, which it's not.
	They look at...
	Yeah, I mean, they're real things.
	They're real contractual relationships to the percentage of a company's earnings or ownership.
	But they look for real things.
	They look for a factory.
	They look for a store.
	They look for gold.
	They're used to the real thing paradigm.
	And I think that the perception is going to start to shift that...
	Bitcoin is way more real than fiat, right?
	Because it's digital. Now, you know, we, you guys even more, as most people here are younger than I am, you all grew up in a digital paradise.
	You know, like the bits and burps, they're more real to you.
	You know, I think many of you have many more vivid memories of video games than actual vacations, right?
	I mean, the scenery, the vistas, like I remember when I played a game way back in the day called Unreal.
	And Unreal, when you first started it, there was a waterfall.
	It was the first time I'd ever seen a waterfall in a video game.
	Now, I've traveled a fair amount.
	I've got some lovely memories.
	However, you know, one of the memories that I have is the waterfall in Unreal, which is, in fact, Unreal.
	So, you all have grown up with virtual relationships.
	You have, you know, people that you only know online.
	And those are real relationships, even though you've never met in person a lot of times.
	You've grown up with very vivid memories.
	Of things that aren't real in terms of the real world.
	They're simulated. They're digital.
	They're bits. So for the younger generation, and this is true for me just because I went headfirst into computers when they first came out, the digital world is very real.
	Very real. I mean, I've given a bunch of live speeches, but they're nothing compared to the online views and downloads I've gotten.
	Like, my biggest speech I gave was in the Netherlands, which went out to like 35,000 people, maybe 1,000 in-house, a whole bunch of people online.
	When I was in Australia with Lauren Southern, we spoke maybe 1,000 people at some of the larger events and so on.
	But you compare that to three-quarters of a billion views and downloads, the digital aspect of this show is vastly larger than the physical aspect in terms of the number of people who request or get print books as opposed to the number of people who read them digitally, the number of people who've seen me in person versus the number of people who've only heard me on digital platforms.
	So for me, and I think for you guys...
	Digital versus real is a completely false dichotomy.
	Most good chunks of our lives are bound up in this virtual stuff.
	So when we say, well, Bitcoin isn't real, it's like, what are you talking about?
	The virtual is the real for most of us.
	Whereas I think for a generation that came before me or maybe people my age who haven't had that much involvement with technology, they're like, well, Bitcoin, it's not real.
	And yet they'll say this on a Skype call.
	And it's like, you know that it's as real as your Skype call, right?
	I mean, if you're going to use your Skype call, it's real.
	If you order something online and food arrives, that's exactly the same as digital currency.
	Everything is bits and burps and then a real thing happens.
	And it's the same thing with digital currency.
	Everything is bits and burps and then a real thing happens.
	You can sell your Bitcoin. You can buy a car.
	Uber Eats, it's not magic.
	It's not a magical spell that ends up with food in your belly.
	It's bits and burps to something real.
	And the purpose now is, to me, it's like if you're being chased down a street, right?
	And there's some rickety old house.
	Some bad guys are chasing you down the street.
	And there's some rickety old house out there in the woods.
	And you kind of dart to the right and you go into this rickety old house and you climb up these creaking stairs and there's holes everywhere and you can barely see anything and you don't want to turn on your cell phone flashlight and people see you.
	Now, on any normal day, you wouldn't be doing that.
	You wouldn't be creeping into some old, dangerous, death-defying, tetanus, nails-sticking-out-of-the-walls kind of house, but you're being chased!
	And And people don't understand that Bitcoin is a refuge.
	Bitcoin, okay, so, oh, it's a rickety old house.
	Okay, yeah, I get it. Architecture is still being worked on and there's kinks.
	I get it. It's a little slow and it can be kind of more expensive than people predicted to transfer.
	I get all of that. Okay, but even if you view it as a rickety old house, nobody's going to want to live in this rickety old house.
	Nobody's going to want to go to this rickety old house unless you're being chased.
	And if there is a fall, a significant fall in the value of the U.S. currency, if they can't get other people to buy their debt, Which is foundational to the fall of a reserve currency.
	People are going to need refuge.
	And people, even if the house is rickety, even if it's bits and burps, they're going to need refuge.
	And I think that the refuge aspect...
	You know, you've got wealthy celebrities and very rich people buying up tracts of land in New Zealand and other places because they're looking for a refuge.
	You've got a whole market in second passports and third passports because people are looking for refuge.
	You've got people fleeing the cities because they need a refuge.
	They want to live in the country.
	And so the idea that you're just going to look at things like they're normal, like you're just going to look at somebody walking down the street and saying, well, there's no way they're going to just go and run into that rickety old house.
	It's like, well, if you look over their shoulder and there's a whole pitchfork of people running at them, then yeah, they're going to do some things they wouldn't do otherwise.
	And I think that's what a lot of people are missing, that this is a great refuge.
	It's sort of like, last analogy, sorry to overload the analogy tray here, but it's like saying, well, who on the most luxury liner ever would just throw themselves into some rickety old lifeboat and go out into the ocean?
	It's like, well, no one unless it's actually sinking, in which case they're going to get a lifeboat and go out into the ocean.
	It's their only chance. So the store value, I think, people are going to start.
	But the perception that the fear is in danger is still being...
	It's glossed over and layered over by all of this money printing and it's still vestigial status as a reserve currency.
	So I think that once people get the view of the refuge status of Bitcoin – and that's not all it is.
	I'm just saying that that is – and I'm sorry for the analogy of the rickety old house.
	I'm just like from a boomer perspective.
	It's all digital and all that.
	I think that once people get that, they'll understand why the short-term case for crypto is so strong.
	I think some of the things that people are also noticing, if you look at the housing market in the US, it's basically split in two now.
	And you've basically got 14 million people that are not paying rent or mortgages.
	And after a certain point, if you own that property, if you're the typical boomer, that was the asset that you could touch and see, and you're basically being told, They just keep pushing the deadline on the eviction moratoriums.
	So at a certain point, at what point is that just taken from you?
	Oh, you mean like your landlord and people just aren't paying their rents, right?
	Yeah, and they, you know, the eviction moratorium, you know, at first it was through the summer, and now it's through the new year, and now it's till next, like, June or whatever, and they just keep pushing that, right?
	And you've got a lot of people that are holding those, and, you know, traditionally real estate was such a safe asset, and now you're seeing, like, okay, well, you don't actually own it.
	That can't happen with, like, a crypto, right?
	No one can say, like, I can't evict my coins from my wallet.
	I own them. I can do what I want with them.
	I also wanted to point out, for those who are not watching the video, Your chair makes you look like you have the strangest Princess Leia headphones in the known universe.
	I just wanted to sort of... I was like looking at that like, oh my god, how big are these headphones?
	Do you have hearing problems or is that n-dimensional?
	Yeah, just...
	That's just...
	Obi-Wan, you are our only...
	Okay. So, yeah, no, I think that's a good point because, you know, the two classes of real estate, residential and commercial as a whole, I mean...
	It's all undergoing a huge amount.
	You know, people are moving, and this is actually quite an interesting thing that's coming out of COVID, is that people are moving to be closer to family.
	Because they may need the additional support.
	You can't travel as easily.
	And so, yeah, people are moving out of the cities.
	And I think that's a really good thing in many ways.
	Certainly, I'm not a big fan of living – certainly wouldn't live downtown if you paid me.
	But so people are moving out.
	Real estate values in the country will go up.
	Real estate values in the city will go down both in terms of residential, in my humble opinion, but commercial, which we talked about before.
	I remember when I first got into the business world, getting a lecture from an investor on the business-to-business market because you don't see this as a consumer.
	The business-to-business market is far larger than the business-to-consumer market.
	The business to consumer market, like the stuff you go in a store and buy, right?
	Think of all of the things that have to go through for you to be able to go into Bed Bath Beyond and be able to buy some strange goop for your bath, right?
	I mean, all of the manufacturing, all the shipping, all the factories, all the contracts, all of the lawyers, everything that has to go on just to get you a little hand sanitizer or something.
	So the business to business market, I can't remember the number, but it's some massive multiple of the business to consumer market.
	And so a lot of what people are doing is saying, well, the business consumer market is kind of changing and people – but it's like, yeah, COVID's biggest effect is on the business-to-business market, in my humble opinion.
	And that takes a while for, I think, Main Street to get a handle on.
	Alright, do we have people here just to listen or do you have things you want to add?
	Now's your chance brothers and sisters.
	Going on the previous example about real estate and how people are, how the government makes it impossible for you to evict people so you basically don't owe the property that you own.
	If you look at China, you can kind of get an idea of where we might be headed.
	So in China this has happened for a while but In China, when the market has gone down, what they've done sometimes is they've told institutions that for the next 30 days, for the next 60 days, they were not allowed to sell their stocks.
	So in other words, the market is going down.
	China doesn't want their markets to go down.
	So they say, okay, institutions, you're not allowed to sell anything that you have.
	And stuff like that, I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon, but you can also get Stuff like that with stocks and with Bitcoin, again, nobody can really tell you that, hey, you can't sell that.
	I don't think there's an easy way to actually be able to control that, but with things like stocks, it's definitely possible to limit selling and to basically kind of take it away from people.
	Right. Right. Now, is there something else that people wanted to add into this topic?
	Because I did want to get to China and Iran.
	Not obviously physically, but I would like to talk about that as a stabilizing factor, believe it or not, in the Bitcoin universe.
	But is there other things that people wanted to add to this phase?
	I'm certainly happy to hear. I can add to the real estate topic.
	As someone who has invested and is looking to invest in real estate in a very, very rural area, I fled as far off the grid as I could.
	It's booming. The stuff I used to see is totally gone off the market, and I'm having to go out and hunt.
	Yeah, I mean, if you want to stay safe from criminals in a collapsing economy, just be on the range of being on foot.
	You're pretty good to go, right?
	Criminals don't like to run for 30 miles or 50 miles to get out of the city and come prey on people.
	Yeah, it is booming out there, right?
	For sure. And I think that was fairly predictable.
	But the combination of...
	Instability, supply chain issues, shipping issues and rising crime rates in the cities combined with work-at-home designs means that the country has become massively valuable and the cities, I think, got a negative case at the moment.
	People have always dropped like flies in cities, sadly.
	Yes. Well, remember, in the year when the Roman Empire collapsed, The population of Rome, I think, from 2 million down to 18,000 in a year.
	And, you know, a lot of the people, and, you know, I try not to take gloating satisfaction in foppish people having to learn real work, but a lot of these people were, you know, like very dainty, highfalutin society types, and they had to go out and get work on a farm.
	Probably was the best thing for them, but I bet you they didn't like it very much.
	So, yeah, I think that's very true.
	So, anything else people want to add to that?
	Because I'd like to get to the China-Iran thing, which I think is quite interesting.
	Well, hopefully all these forces together will help soothe the wealth inequality between the generations a little bit.
	Yeah. Be nice.
	Yeah. So, I mean, a lot of the wealth was transferred from millennials to boomers through debt, and a lot of the wealth is going to be transferred from boomers to millennials through crypto.
	And so the pendulum, I think, is on its way.
	And if we have a time, I'd like to make a case for...
	Crypto kind of being a reward for people exploring virtue and philosophy.
	I'm all down for that.
	Go for it, brother. Alright, so I think about how I personally heard of Bitcoin to begin with.
	This was back in 2011, 2012, and I was kind of re-evaluating my life and digging into my thoughts and values and beliefs and philosophy and things like that.
	And just based on that and exploring what is moral and exploring the state, the nature of the state and relationships.
	An immeasurable amount of that was thanks to your help.
	But I also would find that the people – so that's how I found cryptocurrency.
	The state's aware. Weevil, it's diluting our dollars.
	And then, you know, because I was interested in those things out of a moral drive, I found Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.
	And what do you know? The other people that were in the cryptosphere were Austrian economists, you know, they were fluent in Austrian economics, and they were very brilliant people, especially because you had to be someone in the tech world, on the ground, you know, in this conversation already to have heard about Bitcoin back then and be, you know, be in the sphere. And so in a way, The gain in crypto, and that's changed drastically over time.
	It used to be people that are way more values.
	There's a great moral argument here.
	We have to do this.
	That used to be the majority of the community.
	And over time, of course, that's changed.
	It's become more speculation.
	But again, now that still is true today in the sense that if someone's interested in morality and philosophy and things like that, they're going to find your content and you're going to connect them to crypto.
	So it is kind of a reward in a way for being interested in those things.
	There's so many aspects in the universe that are like, oh man, it seems like even if you're the good guy, you get the raw end of the deal.
	But it's nice to point out the silver lining, I think.
	No, I think that's right. And you have to be skeptical of everything that is said to you to be a philosopher or to be interested in philosophy.
	And so, yeah, when people say, this is money, and you're like, you know, the thing I said earlier, everything that everyone in particular in authority says, you say bullshit.
	Oh, this is money? Bullshit.
	And I remember, of course, and I mentioned this on the show many years ago, when I first came to Canada, you could buy a candy bar for 10 cents.
	And relatively rapidly, it went to a dollar.
	And I had – so before we left the UK, sort of friends and relatives gave me – I very much remember this.
	They gave me 38 pounds and 50 cents.
	And it was $2 Canadian to a British pound back then, so I got that doubled, right?
	So 73 pounds or $73 or whatever it was, right?
	And I remember as a kid, of course, you know, your fundamental currency is candy bars, right?
	So 73 bucks, I'm like, wow, that's 730 candy bars, man, that's really good.
	And then, you know, it wasn't too long, again, massive amounts of debt, and they needed to fund mass immigration and all that.
	So the inflation, the money printing press went, did its thing.
	And I remember like, oh my gosh, now I can only get...
	I only get 500 candy bars.
	Oh, 200 candy bars.
	Oh, my gosh. I can only get 73.
	And I just remember thinking, like, there's a massive, massive, massive candy I can't have.
	Now, my teeth probably thank the printing press, but nonetheless, that is a very, very real and vivid thing.
	And, of course, a lot of people who are into Austrian economics were looking at the money printing press that was going on, the M1 money supply in particular, and saying hyperinflation is going to kick, and they wanted to get into gold or a fixed asset and so on.
	And because I received so much more value from the digital assets of my shows than I ever did from the fixed assets, you know, for a month or two, I actually sold my books.
	Then I decided to give them away and take the money that I was – and just invest in – take the money that I would have made from the books and instead just invest it in advertising and things like that.
	Yeah. So for me, looking at the sort of physical assets versus the digital assets, the digital assets were much more valuable, they moved much more quickly, they had much more effect on people than the fixed assets, the physical assets like books or my speeches.
	And so for me, when it came time to, okay, what's a good hedge against inflation?
	Just my experience with the show is that the digital is worth much more than the physical, which is why I think I grab it.
	And for those of you who remember, I did a debate many years ago with Peter Schiff about Bitcoin versus gold.
	As the best hedge, right?
	As the best opportunity.
	And by the way, during this conversation, Bitcoin broke 60,000.
	Canadian, sorry, don't get too excited for my American friends.
	But again, I'm not saying it's causal.
	I'm just saying it's happening.
	So yeah, I think being skeptical, being curious, and understanding how the world works, knowing a little bit about the history of currency, I think has helped people quite a bit in this area.
	Alright, that was it for that speech.
	Again, happy to hear this. Whatever you guys want to do.
	I just want to comment on how that was a bit of a good heart attack.
	There's an exchange I used Which had a bug where your Bitcoin balance didn't show up at all.
	I was using it the other day for a good five minutes.
	So I log in. I see my balance.
	I'm like, excellent. They actually offer interest on the crypto you hold with them, which is pretty awesome and something you can't get 6% at a bank.
	Anyways, that's besides the topic.
	So yeah, I'm looking. I'm like, great. Everything's on the up and up.
	And then all of a sudden, my balance is like zero.
	Excuse me? Yeah.
	I'm like, guys, you got to get that fixed.
	You're asking for a cardiac arrest.
	Right, right, right. No, that's quite exciting.
	Okay, so, sorry, somebody else wanted to say?
	Go ahead. Sounds like that would give Peter Schiff an aneurysm.
	Yeah, I think poor guy did lose some Bitcoins.
	Anyway, okay, so let's talk about, I don't know if you guys know much about this.
	I don't, so I'm happy to lean in your expertise so I can talk about what I do know.
	With regards to Iranian and Chinese Bitcoin mining, have you guys looked into that at all?
	I just know what I've kind of osmotically picked up over the years.
	Just incidentally following the news.
	What do you know? Yes or no?
	Don't tell me what you picked up.
	I need to get what you know. Okay.
	So actually hearing about Iranian Bitcoin mining is the first I've heard of that.
	But as far as China, they've always – for a very long time, they've been the primary miner, the miners of Bitcoin.
	So in order to mine Bitcoin – Nowadays, you run a very specific kind of hardware called an ASIC, A-S-I-C, and application-specific integrated circuit is what that stands for.
	Yeah, we didn't get that last time, but people gave it to us.
	Oh, the internet corrected me so gently.
	And just listen, I'm sorry, just interrupt for a second.
	So if you're interested in Bitcoin, just make sure you pronounce it correctly that you're very interested in miners, not minors.
	It's very, very interesting, very, very important to get that correct and don't mistype it.
	Sorry, go ahead. Indeed.
	So, they use these ASICs, and what they do is, in this specific case, the hashing algorithm that Bitcoin uses is SHA-256, and it's a machine made to do this math problem.
	Crunch it, crunch it, crunch it. You put energy in, and it spits out the solutions to math problems.
	They're just running these machines.
	The reason it's equitable for China to do so is because they have all this state-subsidized energy production.
	One of the interesting, beautiful things about crypto mining and Bitcoin in this case is that You can now, instead of having to move that electricity across power lines and lose some of its value in doing so in order to get a customer, you can burn it right there and secure one of the most or the most important financial network in the entire world.
	I know people, there's hippies out there that may be like, oh, you're wasting energy.
	But it's like, no, no, no. It's doing an incredibly important job.
	Compare that to the amount of energy resources that politicians burn.
	It's a godsend.
	So anyways. So they have this cheap electricity right there, and you can burn it right there without being transmitted across lines, and that's why it's a good case for China.
	I do crypto mining on my own, and what it does is I'm using a graphics card, and I'm having to pay high electricity rates, so my return is not nearly as great as others.
	I'm also like, I'm up in the north, so I'm getting some of the heat.
	It actually produces a lot of heat the miner does because of the work it's doing and the amount of energy it burns.
	But yeah, so that's largely why, and China for a long time has really held on to the mining market, and it It seems like the state every once in a while in China messes with the Bitcoin market by claiming to regulate it or make it illegal or back and forth.
	They're just jerking the market around, it seems like.
	They're kind of known for it.
	So yeah, that's what I can add with the China.
	That's also where a lot of these ASICs are manufactured.
	So it's a lot easier for them to just pull it right off the factory and get it right into use.
	Well, and as far as It's not environmentally friendly because you hear, oh my gosh, this Bitcoin mining, it's like, my gosh, compared to, it's a small town and so on.
	It's like, come on, dudes. Like, do you know how absolutely and unbelievably brutal fiat currency is for the environment?
	Fiat currency, the environment is, you get wars, you get massive overpopulation, you get incredible misallocation of resources, you get useless consumption.
	And you get, you know, every piece of debt is a precious piece of nature that's consumed in the present at the expense of the future.
	And so if you're concerned about the environment, you want a currency that's going to limit massive overconsumption, and that's crypto in a nutshell.
	So I just really wanted to point that out.
	That is, yeah, the US military is the number one polluter.
	It is kind of unfair when you have state agents that can offload the cost of the electricity onto the taxpayer, onto the future taxpayer through debt.
	That is a big issue with regards to the fairness because the limitation on mining is the electricity bills.
	And at some point, the Bitcoin mining becomes too expensive really to – I don't think they'll ever get quite to the 21 million.
	But we'll see.
	But I mean unless it's state actors.
	But OK.
	Is there something else people wanted to add to that?
	I wanted to talk about how I think this could help stabilize things.
	Sorry.
	Go ahead.
	On that note, I'll start taking them seriously when they start measuring the carbon footprints of like politicians and regulation and things like that.
	Let me get something to compare that to.
	Okay, so again, I'll just give a pause here if there's other people who want to mention something I want to mention.
	I do find it interesting that a lot of these countries who claim to be trying to regulate cryptocurrency, one of the first things they first do is actually try to ban all the privacy coins.
	I don't know if you guys have gone much into the privacy coins like Monero or Zcash or any of The other coins that you actually can transact anonymously on the blockchain without actually having a trace for who that's coming from.
	So I know that especially one of the Chinese crypto exchanges, the moment you want to actually put fiat into their wallets, you immediately can't use any of the privacy coins anymore.
	And I find that this is a trend alongside a lot of other, like, country-regulated exchanges where they're in one of the Western countries where they basically go, well, if you want to put fiat into your wallets, we can't transact in privacy coins.
	What are your thoughts about that?
	I'm not much of an expert on the privacy coin things.
	Just about everything I do is very public, so I can't really speak to that, but I'm certainly happy to hear other people's expertise on that.
	Well, I'd say there's a case to be made that for privacy coins or cryptos in general, they are a just-in-case states collapse.
	Because states have been known to collapse.
	And it is a place for people to legitimately store some value and some wealth.
	Well, and the growth in the privacy coins will be driven by...
	Well, some people will perceive as excessive regulation, right?
	So that's certainly something.
	I mean, if they require, you know, the driver's license for every transaction around the world, that's going to get pretty ridiculous.
	And it's going to really harm developing economies where these things are not particularly easy to validate or upload or anything like that.
	So, I mean, I think there's certainly room for it.
	And if the regulation remains reasonable, there'll be less demand for those kinds of coins.
	But yeah, if they regulate.
	Sorry, go ahead. I think the main reason for people wanting the use of privacy coins is protection against censorship, right?
	So while you might be able to, let's say, create a paper wallet in Bitcoin and transact with it, everyone else at some point is going to have a trace to your wallet, right?
	So you can actually tell who sent what money to who and how much of it.
	And it's like out in the open.
	And so if a government is interested in going after you as a private citizen for whatever censorship means, let's say you supported the wrong political party or you protested something and they wanted to basically freeze your assets or take your money or investigate you or anyone connected with anyone else.
	Let's say you're a friend of someone who knows someone else who's a criminal.
	And they want to get everyone else in the chain.
	That's one way they can do it.
	You know, through the Bitcoin blockchain, you can easily trace who's transacted what.
	And so, you know, the fact that governments want to, you know, prohibit the use of privacy coins to me is definitely not like out of the ordinary.
	It sounds like something they absolutely would want to do.
	But, you know, to me, that's the biggest concern.
	It's like, well, you know, I think we should have the right to privacy.
	If we want to conduct, you know, private transactions with people that we know, then that's perfectly acceptable, in my view.
	Well, in a free society, there wouldn't really be much difference, right?
	You may want public transactions if you're a public company.
	You may want private transactions.
	In a truly, like a stateless society, it wouldn't really matter at all.
	But, of course, in the society that we live in, it seems to matter quite a bit.
	End of note, there are some cryptocurrencies that allow you the option of having public and private transactions within the same currency.
	Now, do you know which ones those are?
	So actually, okay, so fair warning, this is the one I'm most invested in.
	So it's in my interest that I'm making this case.
	But Tezos is, well, they're implementing in this next upgrade the private transactions.
	And it's a very interesting coin, but I know you wanted to get on to another topic.
	No, no, no. I like interesting coins.
	Let's hear a bit about it. And I don't know much about Tezos, so let's hear a little more.
	Okay, so I heard about Tezos in 2017.
	Oh, and sorry. I'm sorry to ask and then interrupt.
	Just by the by, I think everyone understands that those of us who are really interested in crypto own some crypto.
	So, I mean, that's, you know, I don't mind if you say that.
	That's totally fine. I have some crypto.
	You have some crypto. I really wouldn't want to hear from somebody who doesn't really have any crypto, if that makes any sense, because it's like, okay, so what do you either know about it and don't think it's valuable or whatever?
	Again, if there's a case against it, I'd like to hear that as well.
	But I think that's well understood, but I just want to – I'm glad for saying it, but – I think that's a general statement for us here as a whole, but sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, so I heard about it in 2017, and I go and I look at the people involved, and it's Arthur and Kathleen Brightman who started Tezos, and I guess a joke between them is that at their honeymoon, he was reading the Ethereum white paper and kind of planning Tezos.
	Anyways, I looked into their kind of more political leanings, and there seemed more Anarcho-capitalist, libertarian-esque.
	He's a big fan of Murray Rothbard.
	And so from there, I'm like, okay, excellent.
	That's great. And then I go in and look at what they're implementing in Tezos.
	And one of the first features I saw was that it was written in OCaml.
	And I apologize if this gets too technical.
	It's written in a programming language.
	That lends itself to formal verification and as a layman from my understanding what that means is that you can test the code to make sure it is doing what it's supposed to do and only what it's supposed to do.
	And so this is the kind of software that financial institutions, like exchanges, or, for example, automatic pilots for planes, like, to not screw up.
	Which, you know, when I heard that, I'm like, well, gosh, how come every cryptocurrency wasn't written in that to begin with?
	But anyways, that's besides the point.
	The next feature was that, was there, okay, so this is the Bitcoin and Ethereum forking situation was coming up, and that was a big conversation.
	A lot of A lot of conversation going around there.
	So Tezos has a plan to prevent these forks.
	And the way they're going to do that and the way they've been doing that is by having a scheduled vote on the chain.
	You use your holdings in the token to vote on proposals.
	So anyone can go and make a proposal to an upgrade or a change in the code.
	And then that gets voted on.
	And it actually gets voted on like five times over a course of three months.
	So, it gets checked the first time, then it gets tested, then it gets put on a test chain, and then, like, finally, at the end of the day, if it passes all these votes over and over again, the community includes it in the blockchain, and it upgrades the blockchain.
	And so far, we've implemented several upgrades to the blockchain.
	And this next one is going to be the one that adds Zcash's privacy features.
	And so one of the reasons they wanted privacy features was for, because it's a smart contract platform.
	So it is in a way competitive with Ethereum, like you can run all your stuff through it.
	But they're targeting more like financial institutions and places like that.
	And if you're going to do that, you have to have the option for private contracts and accounts that people just can't explore.
	And just to add some details, it's a proof of stake coin.
	They call it liquid delegated proof of stake.
	And so essentially what you can do, and I actually run a solo staking operation myself, is you stake on the network and you get a regular interest rate.
	So it is inflationary, roughly 6%, but...
	That is... And also the process of using the chain burns some of the coins.
	So it may not break out to exactly 6% inflation.
	But personally, you know, I used to be a hard set.
	Like I want an absolute set of coins.
	And over the years, I'm less concerned with that so long as it's – is it a voluntary coin?
	Am I forced to participate in it?
	And this is a measurable, predictable rate of inflation.
	And so far, I've been very happy with it.
	I've roughly – if I recall correctly, roughly broken even, but it's doing fine.
	And I'm happy with the Pentosh God.
	Oh, and another big feature, another big selling point is that the Tezos Foundation has – is one of the largest holders of Bitcoin.
	What that means is that if times are rough and you've got to run lean, this project can last.
	One quick question.
	Who is the beneficiary of that inflation or am I misunderstanding how it works?
	Great question.
	So the beneficiary of that inflation is, for example, someone like me who runs a staking operation, which actually secures the network, but also you don't have to run a staking operation in order to benefit from that inflation.
	Anyone can delegate their coins, a small amount or however much, to a staking operation.
	And then what they'll do is they compete in the marketplace to pay you back the majority of your coins minus whatever they compete.
	It's a market rate. So some places offer 5%.
	They charge you only 5%.
	Some places only charge you like 10%.
	Does that answer your question?
	Anyone in the network, participating in the network, can benefit from that inflation.
	It encourages people to participate.
	Thanks. So it's an incentive to keep it secure, partly.
	Absolutely. And one more thing, this is one of the major selling points on this coin to me, because I came into the community early of Tezo, so I wanted to help set the conversation, was that it is a You get one vote for every one tesos you have.
	So it's very capitalistic.
	It is property equals say.
	Skin in the game means you get to make the call.
	So anytime someone with a socialist sentiment shows up, I'm like, no, no, sir, this is pay to play.
	If that's the way you are, you need another community.
	Just to give you, sorry, the annoying technical tip, Jared, you need to make sure you look at the camera rather than me.
	I know, it's kind of weird. Yeah, yeah, because otherwise you look like...
	Okay, so let me tell you the...
	Okay, so let's dip over to something that I think is interesting economically and sociologically, but...
	I think it's a good case to be made for stability.
	So Bitcoin mining in China. This is from buybitcoinworldwide.com slash mining slash China if you want to check it out.
	It was last updated January 8th, so it's a month old, but I don't think too much has changed.
	China is the undisputed world leader in Bitcoin mining.
	Chinese mining pools control more than 60%.
	Of the Bitcoin network's collective hash rate.
	Not only does China manufacture most of the world's mining equipment, but massive mining farms are located there to take advantage of extremely cheap electricity prices.
	So, this is just so people understand.
	Hashing power by country.
	So, this is trying to solve the equations to get the Bitcoins, right?
	So, of the worldwide, let's give a little quiz out there, right?
	So, China...
	Has 65% of the worldwide mining hash power breakdown.
	65%. Anybody want to guess what the next number is down from that?
	I'm going to say 2%.
	Anybody else?
	20. 20?
	We got a 2. We got a 20.
	Anything. It's 7% for the USA. So China's got 65%.
	The USA has 7%.
	Russia has 7%.
	Kazakhstan has 6%.
	Malaysia has 4%. Iran has 4%.
	And good old Canada here, cruising in at 1%.
	1%.
	Such a great educational system we got going on here.
	So, yeah, so China is close to 10 times the next competitor, USA and Russia, respectively, 65 versus 7 and 7 percent.
	So that's pretty wild, right?
	So electricity cost is the most important factor, right, for this stuff.
	And particularly as the mining difficulty increases, the return from bitcoins for electricity payments goes down.
	The least efficient miners, the ones that have to pay the most for electricity, are shut down.
	I'm sure they're cranking back up again now.
	But electricity in China is very cheap compared to most other countries.
	It's supplied by hydroelectric facilities or subsidized by the state.
	Of course, they've been cranking out these coal-powered plants.
	And so the cheap electricity is really wild.
	So if you look at...
	So this is US cents per kilowatt hour.
	This is back a ways.
	But India and China are at 8 cents.
	USA is at 12 cents.
	Canada's at $0.10. Germany and Denmark at $0.35 and $0.41 respectively, so it just doesn't.
	So, you know, all of this green stuff is just benefiting China so much, right?
	Because, you know, you've got all this green regulations, which drives up the price of electricity, which shifts Bitcoin mining to China.
	China may as well be funding the environmental movement in the same way that the Saudis funded some of the environmental movement to make sure that domestic production of oil in particular was not going to occur.
	They could make a massive amount of money, right?
	So, let's see what else we got here for, oh, this is by province, not that.
	I was going to say, and all of the cheap coal is coming straight from my country right here.
	So, Australia is sending almost all of the coal that China runs their country on, and when they tried to recently sanction us through Yeah, I think.
	The kind of coal they can find in China is not as efficient at being burnt.
	So they started buying through India, who was importing all its coal from us.
	It's a joke. It's a joke.
	Yeah, it's, of course, only for show.
	It's only for theater. Okay. Now, China, of course, coal is the cheapest source of energy, pretty much.
	And whether you like it or not, it's also dirty in some ways, but there's clean coal as well.
	So, in 2006, coal was 79% of China's electricity generation.
	2030, what are they projected to be down to from 79%?
	What do you think? Anyone?
	Bueller? Anyone? I think it's similar.
	Yeah, so they're clawing it down from 79% in 2006.
	Quarter of a century later, it's going to be down to 75%.
	So they're knocking 4% off their coal production.
	Because right now, it's just way too profitable to turn coal into bitcoins, right?
	So, energy producers can freely burn coal and use the energy for Bitcoin mining.
	Instead of physically transporting the coal, they just do the Bitcoin mining right next to the coal, and then they convert carbon directly to crypto.
	It's pretty wild. It's pretty wild.
	So, China is home to four of the five largest Bitcoin mining pools, and I won't get into all the details about that.
	You can check out the whole article itself.
	People don't like the fact that the Chinese have so much control over Bitcoin.
	And look, I understand that.
	Totalitarian dictatorship, I did a whole documentary on that.
	You should check it out at freedomain.com forward slash documentaries.
	Now, China, of course, also is trying to create its own digital currency, although given how much the price of Bitcoin has gone up, I think that probably is on hold.
	But let me make a very, very brief case as to why this is a delightfully wonderful thing, which is China has massive influence on Western governments.
	The more value that China has in Bitcoin, the more it's going to pressure Western governments to not reduce the value of Bitcoin.
	Because what does China want to do with its Bitcoin?
	It wants to buy up the West, the same way it wants to buy up and is largely doing it, Australia.
	And so it wants Bitcoin to have high value in the West so that they can use the Bitcoin they've generated to translate it into taking it.
	So in the long run, is this good?
	Well, no. But in the short run versus, you know, for the people who have Bitcoin in particular, you and I can't call up Bitcoin.
	Elected representatives in our supposedly democratic regimes and get better.
	The Chinese sure can. I mean, I'm pretty sure the Chinese have compromise on just about every Western politician of influence and significance.
	And so they can make sure that they keep very much at bay anything that harms the value of Bitcoin.
	So while I'm not a big fan of communist regimes and it's very subsidized, it's not a free market situation.
	It's not a free market in the situation, the high price of electricity here either.
	It's important to remember that when the world's most aggressive totalitarian regime is heavily invested in Bitcoin, there's an upside.
	You know, you got to look for the silver lining in these things.
	And I do believe that there is a significant upside that anybody who messes with the value of Bitcoin, Bitcoin is also messing with the Chinese Communist Party, and they've been known once or twice in history to act fairly assertively in protecting their own interests.
	I'm just saying their interests and our interests happen to be somewhat aligned at the moment in terms of the value of Bitcoin.
	So, yay China!
	I mean, this is where we are in the world.
	So, I don't know if you guys agree or disagree.
	I'm happy to hear counter-arguments, but I think that's the upside to the downside.
	That's a pretty good case.
	I absolutely agree. There's a gallery of about 50 pictures from Chinese politicians and actually US politicians.
	And just from the energy in the pictures you know who is in control.
	Well, and China, of course, heavily invested in U.S. Treasuries.
	And, you know, I don't mean to mine the stereotype, so to speak, but let's say that East Asians are fairly good at math, you know, because of the complexity of rice harvesting or whatever it is that you, whatever Malcolm Gladwell explanation you want.
	Let's just say that they have a tiny edge on mathematical calculations.
	You don't need to be a math genius to know the unsustainability of U.S. Treasuries.
	So, if they're looking at taking a loss On U.S. Treasuries, if the value of the U.S. dollar goes down, where are they going to put their money?
	Where are they going to put their resources?
	They're going to put their resources into itty-bitty coins, right?
	Into bitcoins, because they'll be able to pay out much more of the West with bitcoins than they will with fiat.
	And so, yeah.
	Yay, we're all on the same side.
	It's kind of strange, I know.
	Makes strange bedfellows, right?
	Somebody says, I'm the one Asian that can't do math.
	Yeah, I don't think you're allowed to.
	Sorry, we don't allow any brachial stereotypes here in this conversation.
	I'm sorry. I, in fact, will give birth to an ostrich through my forehead during the course of this conversation.
	It does appear that the amount of government debt, that the numbers don't really matter anymore, and it's just a degree of control, because they seem so nonsensical at this point.
	Sure, sure. Yeah, no, I get it.
	And of course, whether fiats are falling relative to other fiats, as I said before, it's kind of like a bunch of people jumping out of a plane, looking at each other and saying, well, we're not falling relative to each other.
	It's like, yeah, but relative to the ground, i.e.
	math to fiat, you kind of are.
	Okay, so those are the major things I wanted to cover.
	I'm all ears for people who are more specialized and have greater expertise in this area than I am.
	If there's any yearning burnings that you got cooking in your brains that you want to share with us, I'd be very happy to hear.
	Those are the major things I wanted to get across today.
	So I can add something that's kind of rumor millish, not really sure what is substantive to it, but someone who was arguing to me, and they were making a technical case, I couldn't really follow it, about how the plan with the U.S. fiat situation and our obscene debt Is that eventually within the banking system, they're going to call our debt and force us back to some kind of austerity.
	And basically what's going to happen is they're largely going to cancel large swaths of debt and force us actually back to some gold settlement.
	Or we're going to have to pay up our gold to cancel our debt or something like that.
	I mean, basically saying in the long run that – saying, like, just hold an ounce of gold because you'll be, you know, obscenely wealthy in the day that that happens.
	So, yeah, just a little bit of rumor mill that I had heard.
	I don't know what's true to that.
	But financial revaluations are contingent upon the riot factor now, right?
	So, in the past, if you look at places in Europe – and Europe is the one I know the best, right?
	All the Roman Empire to the French Revolution to Weimar Republic and all.
	So, if you look at – Tidy-widey Western countries when there's a financial re-evaluation, when there's a death and rebirth of a currency, when there's significant recessions and depressions, You know, we kind of go along.
	We find a way to survive.
	We don't burn down cities.
	We don't, like, this kind of stuff, right?
	But now, for a variety of reasons, we don't have to get into it at the moment, unless people are absolutely fascinated, but right now, political calculations involve the riot factors.
	I mean, there's no question in my mind if Trump had won the election, there would have been mass riots, burnings, like incredible bloodshed and so on in American cities.
	Because you saw that all summer, right?
	You saw that all summer, billions of dollars in property damages, hundreds of lives lost.
	But, you know, because apparently rioting, you see, is the language of the unheard, unless it's got anything to do with the Capitol and Trump supporters, in which case they're just insurrectionists and trying to overthrow the government.
	And it's just a double standard you'd expect, right?
	But right now, when people are looking at, oh, should we monetize the debt?
	Should we cancel the debt? Should we renege on the debt?
	And so on. What they have to deal with is, okay, what's going to happen in the inner cities if the checks start coming?
	Is it cheaper for them to just print money and keep sending checks?
	Or is it cheaper for them to, I don't know, call out the National Guard and attempt to put down insurrections in 50 cities?
	Or riots in 50 cities?
	I mean, I think that we are at that place.
	This is why I got bored of politics and didn't really, haven't been covering politics since last summer.
	Once the riot factor has taken over, like I did a show with Michelle Malkin some years ago about A cop who, you know, he was accused of bad things by some blacks, and I don't believe that people really thought that he was guilty.
	It's just like, okay, well, if we don't throw him in jail, there's going to be a lot of riots.
	And you see this kind of pressure going on, not just from the black community, it's from a wide variety of communities, and Antifa is not exactly a black-centric community.
	But there is this issue of, okay, how do we make decisions in politics anymore?
	And I think the riot factor, the taking over of various parts of cities, the burndowns, it's really, really expensive when there are riots.
	And fiat has to fall pretty far before that becomes a good cost-benefit and losing control of the cities in particular areas in ways and all the negative PR that that has for politicians and all of that.
	So, yeah, the riot factor, that's what I think about when I think about, okay, what are they going to do with the debt?
	Well, they're going to keep the can going as long as possible.
	And what they're going to hope for, and I think that maybe they thought, or maybe it is, maybe they thought COVID was the way, say, hey, man, we're out of money.
	It's not our fault. It's COVID. And don't blame us.
	Don't get too mad. It's just – or some natural disaster.
	The way they used to do this, as you know, when they couldn't pay their bills, they just went to war, right?
	Because you can impose austerity on a population through war in a way that you simply can't through peacetime.
	Now, war is not really an option at the moment, not just because of the obesity of the Americans, but the fact that, you know, it's just weapons of mass destruction has made war as the solution to government debt kind of off the table.
	So I think they're all hoping for some natural disaster, and again, maybe COVID's the thing, where they can get out of the debt in some remotely plausible fashion without actually bringing math to a mathematically illiterate population.
	Sorry, long ramble, but that's...
	I think that the riot calculation, I think, is what's going on in Washington.
	At the moment, and that's why politics is not, you know, not a philosophical arena anymore.
	Yeah. Well, then that's like, that's by design at this point.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think so.
	I think so. All right.
	We've been going for a good old chunk of time.
	Anybody with some closing thoughts?
	I don't have any. I'm empty.
	I'm done. Jared, go for it.
	Look at the camera. Look at the camera.
	Don't let me come over there. Thank you.
	Thank you. Yes, appreciate it.
	And remember, none of this is investment advice.
	Nobody's telling you what to do with your money.
	We're just talking about our thoughts.
	And, you know, most people here have crypto.
	And just remember all...
	Like, I really want people to be clear about this because...
	It's your money. It's your choice.
	It's your decision. I have a philosophy and I'm sure you guys all share it.
	We don't tell people what to do.
	It's information, reason and evidence.
	You've got to make your own decisions with your own money.
	But don't make any decisions based upon what we're saying.
	Double check, triple check everything and make your own decisions with your own sovereign free will and consciousness.
	I just wanted to sort of point that out.
	Amen! Go ahead. Anybody else want to throw something in?
	Yeah, I've got one small closing thought.
	Yeah, please. If the financial system goes down, gold's going to crash as well because everyone's got to be scrambling to cover their positions.
	And it could go up again.
	But I mean, relative to what?
	Probably to Bitcoin. And the America going to war part, they could never pull it off successfully with China.
	China's just eyeing Taiwan.
	And if you cancel the debt and you can't go to war, where are you going to import goods from?
	China? Like, there's no way out of this.
	Well, there is a way, I think.
	It's just somewhat crypto-based, at least in my opinion.
	But yeah, there's not going to be a war with China.
	And of course, now that Biden's in China, it's going to be more aggressive with Taiwan.
	That's pretty predictable. All right.
	Anything else? I don't want to cut anyone off.
	Don't kick yourself later for not having said something if you want to.
	It doesn't have to be perfect.
	I mean, Lord knows we're not.
	So anything anybody wants to add, go for it.
	Hopefully, we'll get some states that use crypto.
	The century popping up after some might collapse.
	Well, it's interesting if they use states.
	If they use crypto, are they really states?
	That's a whole other question.
	I would argue somewhat to the contrary.
	Actually, this is something I forgot to bring up when I was talking about the value proposition.
	The position of Tezos is that, if I recall correctly, there's a Swiss village that used the Tezos chain to disperse their COVID relief funds.
	But I'm pretty sure that's the case.
	And same with France, because Arthur Bratman, the founder, is French, and France has an interest in Tezos.
	Apparently, they're looking into it for some of their stuff.
	All right. We like those real-world test cases.
	All right. Going once.
	Again, I hate anyone go to bed saying, oh, I should have said something.
	Going once, going twice for the close-off?
	Anybody here? I've got one question.
	Stabilization of Bitcoin.
	Is that necessary?
	Will it happen? Any ideas on it?
	Or will the price just fluctuate and will people accept it?
	I think it will be stabilized when it's approximately 95% of the world economy.
	We've got a ways to go.
	It's a little bit of a speed bump between the here and the there.
	But I don't want Bitcoin to be stable.
	Because stable means it's stopped growing, or rather it's only growing relative to the world economy as a whole.
	So I want it to, my particular perspective, I want Bitcoin to go up in value.
	I want people to cash it out so that they broadcast its value to other people who only view fiat as currency, and then I want more and more people to recognize its value.
	And so for me, I don't want it, you know, obviously oscillating like Catherine Zeta-Jones' mood, but I do want it to be stepping up in a semi-consistent manner, which I think it's been doing.
	Over the last year or two.
	I do want more and more people to get invested and get interested in it.
	There's a splash benefit to all cryptos such as Tesos and other cryptos because of the interest in Bitcoin.
	I do not want any kind of stability.
	It's like saying, Steph, do you want stability in the growth of your show?
	No! I want it to grow like...
	Anyway, insert growth analogy.
	I'm out. I'm done, man.
	So I would not look for stability.
	In other words, I would not say, well, if I'm going to put my money in Bitcoin, it's going to be the same pretty much in a year.
	I wouldn't particularly spend a penny of my own thing that way.
	But stability is not the name of the game.
	Towards the end of an empire.
	Stability is not the name of the game towards the end of an empire.
	And I think being nimble, being quick, because we're like the mammals beneath the feet of the dinosaurs.
	There's a big giant asteroid in the sky, which is probably going to change things a little.
	But nimbleness, I think, and quick-wittedness, I think, is of most value at the moment.
	Stability is not something I'm looking for.
	I don't bring stability.
	I don't look for stability.
	I don't respect stability.
	That's my particular thought.
	I was going to say that stability compared to what?
	Some of the currencies in the world are much more unstable than Bitcoin.
	Gold has been pretty stable, right?
	Gold has been relatively stable.
	And if you buy gold, you're probably not super happy, right?
	I used to say...
	It's like, you know, they say you don't have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun your friend.
	And then, in the same way, Bitcoin doesn't have to be better than the dollar right now.
	It just needs to be better than the Bolivar or, you know, whatever they're using in the Ukraine.
	It just needs to out-compete in those countries.
	A quick question, which TSS wallet do you use that gives you the ability to vote?
	I don't even know what that question means, but I'm passing it along anyway.
	Thank you. I saw that.
	I was going to bring that up. So right now, voting is only done by the stakers, by the people who are actually processing the transaction.
	So like someone who's using a wallet to stake their coins to a delegator, they would not have the option to vote.
	The delegator would be voting on their behalf.
	But from my understanding, that is looking into being corrected so that eventually in the future...
	Individuals can delegate their tokens to one person but stake independently.
	So at the moment, there's not a wallet to do that.
	Whoever you're delegating to is going to vote on your behalf.
	And usually the big institutions like Coinbase and stuff, they pass on the votes.
	That's it from my recall. Chickens.
	All right. Okay, good.
	Well, listen, I really, really appreciate everybody dropping by today.
	Thank you so much. At some point, we may open this up to a wider audience for the true chaos of free market interactions.
	But really, really appreciate yourself, Princess Leia dropping by.
	Fantastic to get your insights.
	We really appreciate hearing from the upside down under.
	It's great to hear how the world of tomorrow lives.
	And, yeah, thanks, of course, to all of our Chinese friends who are listening in.
	It's wonderful to be so aligned with our interests together and to hands across the ocean.
	Love you guys. Keep mining.
	Keep influencing politics to keep everything good.
	And I appreciate that.
	If you'd like to help out this conversation, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	Hugely appreciated. But, you know, if you're low on cash, it's been a tough year for everyone.
	Please, please hold on to it yourself.
	But, you know, if you're flush, you want to help out a little, certainly appreciate it.
	Thank you so much. For dropping by, and we will, I don't know, we'll try and come up with some good regular schedule for this.
	Right now, it's a little spastic, but we're just not into stability, right, brothers?
	All right. Okay, thanks, everyone.
	Take care. Talk to you soon.

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