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Feb. 12, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:39:51

Freedomain Investment Roundtable 4: BITCOIN MASS ADOPTION?

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	Okay, okay, okay.
	I think we're going.
	I think we're going.
	We're just going to wait for people to start cooking in and doing their thing.
	See if it's going to work.
	I'm sure it will. I'm sure it will.
	We're trying a whole new thing, and I just want to ask people how it's looking over here on the side.
	Things okay? It's a new dawn.
	It's a new day. And just let me know if things were cooking along all right.
	The goat! That's how we start.
	We start with farm yard noises, just like I'm telling my daughter a story about eight years ago.
	All right, things look all right.
	So let's just do a tech check here.
	Tech check. Audio all right.
	Video okay. We've got a bunch of people here.
	All the nerds are watching the crypto charts.
	Oh, you know, I gotta tell you, it's okay to be called a nerd, I think it's fair to say, when Bitcoin hit $61,000 today.
	That's not bad. I will take the nerd designation, the nerd label.
	So I guess I just wanted to say hi.
	Thank you, everyone, for joining us here tonight for the fourth, I guess, crypto roundtable.
	This one, we're live streaming.
	So we're going to, I guess, do a little bit of back and forth on the market as we see it.
	Please remember, this is not investment advice.
	Don't invest any money based on anything that anyone says here.
	This is all opinion. And please consult with professionals, consult with your conscience, consult with Satan himself if you have to, but do that before you consult with us.
	So I hope that you will remember.
	That, and thanks everybody for dropping by.
	Thanks to Jared and David who are back, and other people who are here who are not, dans la vidéo, as they say en français.
	You know, just trying to go with the fact that I have a silent X in my last name.
	So, thanks everyone for joining.
	I guess we'll turn it over to, do you want to start, Jared, and tell us how your last couple of days have been and what your thoughts are?
	My last couple of days have been fantastic because crypto has consistently gone up and Tezos, which I mentioned in the last video, has hit $4 from $3.30.
	I'm not saying that's because of me, but, you know, I mean, correlation is there.
	Where can you buy that, Tezos?
	That's something I've had a couple of questions about.
	Sure. Most exchanges have it nowadays.
	Gemini, I believe, does not, but most exchanges offer it.
	Anonymous Dan asks, what's the selling point?
	Now, Dan, first of all, we're not giving out financial or investment advice here.
	And secondly... This is just a basic investment 101.
	Listen, we have on this roundtable the nicest, most glorious, brilliant, dedicated, and fantastic crypto experts around.
	But even if somebody was able to look through the tunnel of time and give you some sort of magical selling point, telling you would change it because people would get close at you.
	There is no such thing as a selling point.
	If you knew what the selling point would be, Then, like, again, which is impossible because you can't figure these things out ahead of time.
	But even if you did, anytime anyone got close to that, they'd start selling and it wouldn't be the selling point.
	There is no such thing as an objective selling point.
	Just remember that. Don't go wandering off into the desert looking for an oasis that ain't there.
	There is no... And again, everybody's free to disagree with me as they see fit.
	This is just my perspective and opinion, but I would just say...
	Don't ask for these things.
	Don't ask for what's not possible, what can't be achieved, which no one will share with you anyway.
	Because if you're waiting for perfection in the market, you will die a very hungry person living in a cardboard box under a bridge.
	I mean, like an Amazon worker.
	So I just wanted to mention that.
	But sorry, Derek, go ahead.
	I was going to say, can I add to that?
	Because... You taught me the Socratic method, largely, and that has helped me almost more than anything in staying alive in the crypto world, being invested and not getting manic on one side or the other and making poor choices because I know that I don't know.
	And I know how limited knowledge is and that of others and stuff.
	And as soon as someone shows up claiming that they know the way the market's going to go or what the price is going to be or what the thing you got to do is, I know to stop listening to them.
	And the other thing I wanted to mention too is, so at some point you're going to buy, and this is whether it's cryptos or stocks or bonds or, I don't know, Twizzlers, Futures, whatever it is.
	You're going to buy and you're going to sell if you're in the market, right?
	Now, what you have to steel yourself to do is to not look at the best case scenario and compare whatever you did to that.
	The best case scenario will almost never happen to you.
	Almost never, almost certainly guaranteed.
	Almost never will you buy something and sell it right at the peak and realize the most massive gains that you could imagine.
	Or even reasonable, like moderate gains.
	It's almost never going to happen.
	Maybe it'll happen once in your life.
	Maybe it'll happen twice in your life if you do a lot of trading.
	But here's a mistake that people make.
	And I get these emails from people like, oh man, I sold Bitcoin at 30 and then it went to 35.
	But you didn't know that when you sold it at 30 and it could have gone to 25.
	If you've made your gains, be grateful, be happy, be positive.
	If you compare every decision you make to a decision for which there is no rational standard, such as perfect knowledge of future prices, you will go mad, you will paralyze yourself, and you will turn what should be somewhat enjoyable.
	Like, this is sort of an enjoyable thing.
	Don't gamble your rent money, for heaven's sakes, right?
	But you'll turn an enjoyable thing into a self-laceration exercise based upon a standard that no mortal human being trapped in the tunnel of time could ever, ever achieve.
	If you make some gains, be happy.
	Do not then compare yourself.
	Oh, if I'd stayed in, I could have made more gains.
	I mean, that will drive you mad.
	It will take something enjoyable than something not enjoyable.
	It's an excuse for self-abuse, and it is an absolutely irrational and anti-reality standard to have because nobody knows where the price is going to go.
	I just wanted to point that out, but sorry, go ahead.
	Again, adding to that, the longest career I've had has been in the gambling industry, especially as a poker dealer.
	In that position, I was the dealer.
	I got to process the transactions, and hopefully people give me a tip throughout the transaction.
	But a lot of dealers have the impulse to kind of want to play.
	Like, oh, I see the game happening a lot, and I could be a good player, and I can join the game and win a lot of money like these guys do.
	But I also knew that, A, I wasn't that interested in learning to play.
	It's like you've got to invest virtually a college education in losses to learn how to play.
	I'd be a good player. And if I play the game long enough, because I'm not as good as them, they're going to take all my money.
	And that's the same attitude I came to the market with.
	I do not want to learn to recharge in this crazy, complicated way to the nth degree and have all these algorithms on my side and bots and whatever.
	I'm not that invested in that way, in that level.
	And again, if I try to play with these guys against these guys, they're going to take my money in the long run.
	And in crypto, there's no house, right?
	This is really important to understand.
	So if you gamble in Vegas, yeah, they've worked the odds.
	They know what they're doing. You're going to lose your money.
	The way to go to Vegas, in my humble opinion, is you take out a hundred bucks and you're like, hey, for this hundred bucks, I'm going to get a couple of hours of entertainment and I'm going to walk out with nothing.
	I mean, that's most likely how it's going to go.
	And the longer you gamble, the more likely you are to lose because there's a house and the house has to make its money and the house has been doing it a whole lot longer.
	Than you have. It's like the old statement that the market can stay irrational longer than most people can stay solvent.
	But with crypto, there's no house, right?
	I mean, there's no central agency that's going to make money.
	I mean, there may be some exceptions in some of the altcoins, but there's no central agency that is going to make money.
	There are no stockbrokers.
	There is no house, which is why I say it's the people's But okay, so let's, sorry, if there's other people who want to introduce yourself and add, I know we have one, I believe, who's joining us today.
	I sent him an invite earlier today.
	He was very keen to come in. He came in through Telegram.
	Is there anyone else who wants to introduce themselves, say hi, share some thoughts before I dive into the facts we can chew apart like sharks in a dolphin nest?
	Oh, don't forget to unmute yourself.
	I'm sorry to give you like the internet 101.
	Don't forget to unmute yourself and just dive in.
	There's no prizes for being lost in a roundtable.
	Yeah, I'll go ahead.
	I just had to figure out how to unmute myself.
	But I've been organizing meetups in my local area for several years for people that were interested in Bitcoin.
	And of course, everyone or most people ask about how they can invest.
	And what I do What I've been telling people is to start out small and get used to what you're doing with the technology so you don't make any mistakes.
	Don't shoot your foot off, as they say.
	And especially nowadays, there are services like SwanBitcoin and Cash App that will allow you to dollar cost – they call it dollar cost averaging, where it just puts in a little bit over time.
	So if you think you're at the top, you're not sure, you can put in a little bit over time.
	And if it goes down, well, you can buy some a little bit when it's down, a little bit when it's up, and it kind of averages out as you're buying up.
	And there's also places you can do it virtually.
	I know, virtual, on virtual, on virtual, like there's no reality left anymore.
	But you can set up accounts and you can pretend to deposit, say, $50,000, $10,000, $5,000.
	And then you can trade as if it's real, based upon real currency, real rates, but you're not actually spending any real money.
	And that may give you a taste of what level of risk you're comfortable with.
	And, you know, I can't reinforce this often enough.
	In my humble opinion, it's just my opinion, please do not, you know, kids' education funds, well, actually, if it's university, it's probably a better thing to put into crypto, humble opinion, but just don't, you know, if you're losing sleep, You're probably doing the wrong thing.
	It should be something that you have some knowledge about.
	It should be something that you have some optimism about and not something where it's like I can't eat unless Ethereum goes up 4% or something.
	So I just wanted to mention that.
	But sorry, we had somebody else join us here.
	Let me just pretend I don't need my glasses.
	No, can't do it. Bang-a-rang!
	Nice to meet you.
	Is there anything that you wanted to mention as we dive in?
	Yeah, I just wanted to mention when I've been talking to my friends and family about getting involved with crypto, they're not too knowledgeable on how blockchain works and everything like that.
	So I just try to help them understand it's essentially a digital asset, right?
	It's property. Just trying to find a way to dumbfire, put some money aside into the asset, only a small amount weekly or something like that, whatever you're putting into your savings.
	And don't worry too much about the price, right?
	Dollar cost average. We can't predict the future.
	But being that it's property essentially, it should, like, if you understand the use case for Bitcoin, digital gold or as a currency or whatever it may be, Then, if you look back at the price history, then it's probably going to keep going up to some degree.
	And yeah, don't get too ahead of yourself.
	I just tell them to treat it like a glorified savings account, really.
	And if you get interested in it, and you see that you've had some gains, you know, paper gains, maybe you haven't realized that and sold anything, Then, sure, you want to put some more money in.
	Then maybe you start to research a bit more and start to really understand the risks you might be taking on.
	I'm sorry. I think we have a hostage note down here.
	It's that savings technology.
	That's the phrase. That's what you call it.
	Lobot from Star Wars has something to add, I think, David.
	You're muted at the moment. You're muted, David.
	Oh yeah, just a meme going around that Bitcoin is savings technology.
	Got a lot of these stickers here.
	So I was just holding that up.
	Yeah, I mean, one of the major business cases for Bitcoin is that it's a hedge against inflation, right?
	This is part of what the savings thing is, right?
	So they've printed, what is it, 40% increase in the money supply just over the last year.
	They're cranking out another 1.7%.
	Trillion dollars in stimulus.
	And this is a time when the economy is going through wrenching changes, various collapses in commercial real estate, in transportation, in hospitality, airlines, and so on.
	And so they're cranking out money with no underlying economic value to support it, right?
	So the idea is that you want money to retain its value over time so that things are predictable in the future.
	And so, if the economy grows by 3%, there's a case to be made that you should grow the money supply by 3%, or, you know, give or take, right?
	Now, gold just kind of does this based upon the price of gold.
	If gold goes higher, marginal producers like mines that are kind of halfy-halfy will get put into production, which will drive the price down.
	And gold has been remarkably consistent, not just over the last couple of decades, but over all of human history.
	I mean, it's really wild. An ounce of gold buys you a nice suit from the Roman Empire forwards.
	I'm not kidding. An ounce of gold will buy you a reasonably nice suit from the Roman Empire, actually even back to the days of Socrates, 2,500 years.
	An ounce of silver will buy you a steak dinner.
	Throughout almost all of human history, it's absolutely when you go asset to thing, right, without the sort of fiat currency in the middle, it is really remarkable that if you want to get some nice duds, you need an ounce of gold.
	If you want to get a steak dinner, you need an ounce of silver.
	That's been pretty constant throughout most of human history.
	So if you think that the dollar, particularly the US dollar, is going to go down in value, which according to basic Austrian economics, praxeologically it's going to because there's many more dollars in circulation than the growth of the economy would even remotely Justify it.
	So that's the big question.
	This is what people are doing, I think, over this last week now that Bitcoin has kind of broken through Jim Morrison style.
	Instead of saying, okay, well, if we don't necessarily say that the U.S. dollar is going to toilet paper status because it's kind of an insult to toilet paper, which retains some utility.
	But if it's going to go down in value, what are you going to do?
	Traditional thing has been gold.
	Traditional thing has been real estate.
	Gold is... Really tough to transport and easily seizable, as has happened in the US and other countries regularly throughout human history.
	Real estate is really uncertain because real estate values were being driven up by mass immigration.
	Mass immigration is grinding to a halt at the moment, which is going to cause real estate values to go down.
	Commercial real estate values are collapsing because people are working at home.
	So it's a huge question.
	Where do you put your value?
	Now, in the past, people would just be trying to race to various currencies.
	Like I could think the Hungarian currency where they just abolished income tax for people under 25 to try and get some babies born.
	Maybe they'd go to places like that.
	That's, of course, really dicey as well.
	And, you know, it's really tough to go visit and check on your savings.
	So Bitcoin is just a way of saying, OK, if the value I'm sorry, end of speech. I'm going to make some noise.
	Bing! At the end of the speech, but if there's anybody else, I know we've got a bunch of people in here who aren't on video.
	You chickens! No, I'm kidding. You're not on video, which is fine, but if there's anything you want to jump in, I'd be happy to hear.
	I agree with you on that, Steph.
	I mean, before I got into Bitcoin, I was going to the bank, and kind of silly, I was collecting these nickels, you know, just telling the bank I want a box of nickels, because I expected, hey, eventually, I know the US dollar is deflating, so eventually these nickels are going to be worth more than the face value.
	That is really, really a box of nickels to Bitcoin.
	Boy, talk about night and day.
	It's a bit of an upgrade for me.
	So I was really happy to discover Bitcoin.
	That is very good. And get involved with that.
	Anybody else you want to jump in?
	We've got a lot of, at least for me, a lot of info to chew through.
	A lot of things have happened just over the last couple of days.
	I haven't felt this accelerated since puberty.
	So if there's anybody who wants to jump in now, we get a bunch of info.
	Or you can wait for the info and give us your thoughts on that.
	But yeah, jump in now.
	Make sure to unmute yourself if you want.
	And I'm also looking at the chat here and would be very happy to...
	to take questions, but again, I want to make sure we get through the info as a whole.
	Going once, going twice.
	Yes.
	All right. You had your chance, people.
	You had your chance. Oh, whoa.
	John. He looks a whole lot different than TV. Yeah, sorry.
	We've got our kids playing, and they're really noisy.
	No problem at all.
	We're talking about the future here, and we're going to need people in it, so have them grow up and buy Bitcoin.
	Go on. Yeah, so I jumped on.
	So this was just as...
	The GameStop stuff was stopping.
	I decided to hop on the silver train, and I've got about 1,500 so far.
	Mostly, I mean, you've got the buffaloes, and I like these kangaroos here.
	They've been kind of fun for just rounds.
	How have you been so far in your physical asset investment?
	Are you talking to someone in particular?
	I guess I could say all of you, but you in particular, Steph.
	What is your strategy in regards to silver?
	You know, I think it's important to have real stuff and virtual stuff.
	There's an old Harry Brown thing, which is like, you know, 25% bonds, 25% gold, 25% stocks, 25% cash, if I remember it rightly, or something like that.
	But, you know, that's all well and good until crypto, right?
	And he died before this really took off.
	So... I'm a big one for not all of your eggs in one basket.
	I'm a big one for, you know, if a particular crypto asset that you have blows up, fantastic.
	But don't think that that's the sum net of your value because there is so much uncertainty.
	Listen, we all know fiat currency is going to fight back, man.
	It's not going down without a fight.
	Fiat currency is going to fight back and it's going to fight back hard.
	Now, again, a lot of institutions, a lot of politicians, and frankly, a lot of criminals own Bitcoin.
	And if you try and mess with the value that criminals have, they will often make your life very unpleasant in very direct ways.
	If I remember rightly, there was some regulator in South Korea who ended up dead in a hotel room because he wanted to regulate crypto.
	So I think that there's a lot of stakes against, like the sort of arrowed stakes against the charge of whatever regulation might be coming down.
	But there's simply no way that central bank is going to be like, oh, well, I suppose there's this new technology that's people-friendly and doesn't allow us to type whatever we want in our own bank account.
	I think that's wonderful.
	Let's get and support the people.
	It's not going to happen, right? They are going to, I mean, you look what happened to Saddam Hussein.
	You look what happened to Gaddafi.
	Hey, you know, just go start your own bank.
	You know, just have a gold-backed or oil-backed currency and you'll be fine.
	It's like, no, you'll actually be dragged down the street with a bane up your ass or be dragged out of a spider hole and hung.
	Not that these guys were great, but one of the assets that they were working on developing was more of an oil-backed currency or a gold-backed currency banking system.
	So the central banking, the cartels, boy, you know, you think Bitcoin's complicated?
	Just try wrapping your head around the fact that the Federal Reserve is A, not federal, and B, It has no reserves whatsoever.
	It's a completely misnamed thing, which is exactly what you'd expect.
	So, yeah, I think it's important to mix up your assets a little.
	And I think getting stuff, as opposed to crypto, it's a good complementary strategy, in my humble opinion.
	Personally, I keep enough.
	The way I look at metals like gold or silver is an absolute worst case scenario.
	Like commies have taken over and I got to bribe somebody to flee the border kind of thing.
	That's the way I look at them.
	Have you been hearing about how it might moon up during the summer?
	I think it's because they're betting against, what was it?
	I think it's over-leveraged about 16 to 1 from what I understand.
	I'm sorry, what is it? Silver, physical silver.
	Silver, yeah, yeah. That it's over-leveraged.
	Some people are trying to say it's as high as 1,000 per ounce.
	I don't think it's that much. I say it's at least 50.
	But we'll see on that.
	They're trying to race against...
	So China's building up on their solar, and so that's why they've kind of been taking over a bunch of things.
	It was Taiwan Semiconductors, another one if you want to go stock route for that.
	And... Yeah, he's going to pull my glasses off when he wants to.
	Just waiting for the moment.
	My daughter had a ferocious hatred of sunglasses when I was a kid and would constantly take them apart.
	I guess she just liked me blinded by the light.
	But yeah, so silver is kind of a funky thing, right?
	So very, very briefly, and I'm sure there's many, many more experts on better knowledge of silver than I have.
	But silver is pretty funky because it is more the dollars and donuts currency.
	And the big question with crypto, which I'd like to get into today at some point, is are we going to get the gold silver?
	In crypto, right, with Bitcoin being the gold.
	Elon Musk was just tweeting about this today, about one crypto to bind them and in the dark, whatever, that Bitcoin was like the ring.
	But silver is pretty funky because it is traded at a vast multiple of its physical existence.
	And this is why some of the Wall Street bet guys are really interested in shorting silver, because if you actually have to physically deliver all of the silver that is papered around the world, it's insane.
	Just how much silver is traded with no relationship to physical silver.
	And the idea being, of course, that if people are shorting silver and then they actually have to...
	Take delivery or provide delivery of physical silver that there's just no chance and it's another way that they're going to work to destabilize a predatory financial system that we have.
	But of course silver is one of these, and gold of course as well, but silver even more so is one of these multiple use products that you can use for jewelry, it's necessary for electronics, you can use it to clean water apparently and your teeth and the crazy stuff, right?
	So because it's multiple use, Because it's vastly inflated in paper relative to physical assets and because, and I know this in sort of brutal youth experience being a gold panner and prospector, it takes a hell of a long time when there's a demand for precious metals.
	You know, to go from zero to gold production, zero to silver production can be as long as half a decade.
	And again, that's not counting the marginal silver mines, which are shut down when the prices are low and reopened when the price goes up.
	But it is not something where you can just start snapping your fingers and getting silver out, which is another reason why people are going to, I think, work at some point on demanding physical delivery of silver, which is going to reveal what some have described as a generally illegal leverage system with regards to silver, but the law never seems to be enforced.
	So I hope that makes some vague sense to people.
	And if people have more expertise, which I'm sure they do, please feel free to fill in any gaps or errors that I made.
	Well, just conceptually, how I understand it is, you know, when people are making trades, just to try to send various amounts of silver physically from one location to another, it's impractical.
	So by the time that trade has taken place, you might have already have sold out of your position or something like that.
	But, you know, given...
	Billions in, what is the global market cap of the silver, like $1.4 trillion or something like that?
	It's so high that it's in the neighborhood of student loan debt in the United States.
	So that's about as high as anything goes these days.
	But silver has a dual use, whereas most degrees are negative for Americans.
	Is there anything else people wanted to add about silver, or shall I dive into more crypto news from the last couple of days?
	Yeah, I think it's fine.
	Go ahead. I'll be quick.
	I just wanted to quickly touch that there are actually stablecoins where you can purchase precious metals.
	I'm not aware of any that are silver-backed, but I do know there are a few that are gold-backed.
	Like Pax Gold or Tether Gold.
	You'd have to look into the various different currencies that are out there to check how well pegged they are.
	But there is that option out there.
	And there are also cryptos that attempt to peg their value to a currency in particular as well.
	And I'm certainly no expert on that, but I think it's important.
	People's thoughts on Max Keiser?
	Do you guys have any... I mean, I used to do the Max Keiser TV show many, many years ago.
	If I remember rightly, he did not like the fact that I was skeptical on the global warming hysteria.
	And has he been somewhat anti...
	I know Peter Schiff has been.
	Sorry to interrupt you, Steph.
	Max Keiser has a really good pro-Bitcoin podcast called The Orange Pill Podcast.
	I think it's maybe twice a week and he has some great content there.
	He's very pro-Bitcoin?
	That's good to hear. Pro-Bitcoin, yep.
	Very pro. He does that with Stacey Herbert and it's a good show.
	I recommend people to check it out.
	My recall of Max Keiser in the crypto world was years ago, 2014, 2015.
	He launched MaxCoin or something like that, and I don't think that really went anywhere.
	People say you have a better chance of taking silver to the market and buying food.
	So listen, guys, this idea that somehow crypto is going to vanish because...
	EMP weapons, loss of the electrical grid and so on.
	I mean, come on, guys. When you have hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars enmeshed in a financial system, people aren't just going to say, oh, there's no electricity.
	I guess I'll just throw my cell phone in the garbage along with my millions of dollars in crypto.
	The amount of money that would be diverted from Bitcoin mining to the production of electricity to resurrect the grid that makes Bitcoin valuable would be staggering.
	So, you know, please, don't look at things passively.
	It's really, really important.
	It's like the whole philosophy is called public choice theory, which is that when circumstances change, people will change their decisions.
	So right now, there's no alternative electricity grid being developed.
	Why? Because the one we have is kind of working.
	But if the one we have, for some reason, ends up not working, people are going to develop an alternative one, and you'll have the most brilliant minds on the planet attempting to resuscitate Trillions of dollars, I think, by that time of value.
	And they're not just going to sit there passively and let their entire thing go up in flames.
	It's not going to happen. So this idea that, well, you know, it's electronic and therefore blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And, you know, I mean, if it does turn out that we end up with no power whatsoever in society...
	Whether you have bitcoins or not doesn't really matter.
	You just better be good with a bow and arrow and feasting on your relatives who die in your house.
	Let's not worry about that one in particular.
	People will find a way. Life finds a way.
	I've got to add to that.
	So there are crypto projects which are actually looking into launching their own satellites.
	to independently being able to process. - There's Starling too, like Elon Musk got a whole satellite system that's going on, right?
	There'll be solar stuff, they'll be like, they'll find something, man. - And I've actually got Mesh networking.
	Loka Mesh was a, I think they're having a hard time now.
	They were just about to launch.
	But basically it's a mesh network And what that means is, without having the internet, me and my buddy can transmit, like, just imagine little satellites attached to our laptop that allows us to transmit, make Bitcoin transactions across, you know, seven to eight kilometers.
	That's not a whole lot for, like, global stuff.
	But when a lot of people are doing that, then that whole network can come together.
	Well, and sorry, people have pointed out here, the blockchain is protected against EMPs or massive power outages because millions of copies of the blockchain are saved on hard drives all over the world.
	The moment you get reconnected, it all starts syncing up again.
	And it's kind of funny.
	Let me tell you a little tech story that is my sort of background for understanding this stuff.
	Yeah. Way back in the day when I was a database programmer, networks, particularly networks between countries and continents, were ungodly slow.
	And so one of the things that I worked on was synchronizing databases over very slow data lines, right?
	So what would happen is people would work at various times, and then you would have to find a way to synchronize data Sometimes we'd only have 5, 10k a second to synchronize when people were out of the office and so on.
	So synchronizing databases, which is basically what blockchain technology is trying to replicate, it's so old that I was doing it.
	I hate to say how old I am, but I was working on this stuff.
	25 years ago.
	And the technology was fairly advanced back then.
	You could get like even off-the-shelf consumer products like Access.
	The Access databases could be set up to synchronize across various portals.
	So this syncing technology is very advanced these days.
	And given how fast the data lines are these days, it's a whole different thing.
	So, you know, my suggestion is if you're talking yourself out of crypto because you're afraid that there's going to be no electricity and the whole thing is going to go...
	I would use a different tone with yourself, if not slap yourself in the face with a wet fish.
	We're not going down.
	We're going someplace different, but we're not going down.
	This is not the fall of Rome.
	This is not anything Like that.
	Communication technology, expertise, every kind of electronics known to man is out there.
	If the only thing we need is power, and power is everywhere in the universe, by God, we'll get it.
	And it would be a real shame to miss out on these kinds of opportunities for fear of a scenario that I really don't think is ever going to happen.
	It's like the kids who are like, well, I want to go to prom because of global warming.
	It's like, okay, well, you just let the communists take away your prom.
	I mean, even if there was that kind of risk, let's say, it's no different.
	You still have to diversify your risk.
	You can't just have all of your money in a bank, you can't just have all your money in cash, you know, have some in the bank, have some cash on hand, have some precious metals, expose yourself to some crypto.
	Don't necessarily go all into all crypto, but...
	You know, you could, again, an 80-20 rule is kind of a very conservative idea.
	80% of your assets, whatever they may be, and some conservative, you know, sub, more...
	Some safer investments and 20% is something perhaps riskier, but you could get some asymmetrical return.
	And by the way, what do you think is going to happen to the bank's databases if EMP and electricity and so on?
	At least blockchain has a whole auto-sync thing that's going on.
	The banks don't have that. They don't have millions of copies all over the place.
	Yeah, if quantum computing is going to come out and be a threat to blockchain technology, which it could, there's a lot of areas where that is also going to prove to be the same problem.
	Well, and the quantum computing thing is, you know, let's say they do, they crack traditional hashing algorithms with quantum computing.
	You just come up with quantum algorithms, you know, and from my understanding, they're already working on that problem.
	What they did want to add to if anyone is new into blockchain, there's two big things because I've got experience, customer service and watching people get defrauded and stuff like that.
	To be careful with any scams, unfortunately, the industry is rife with fraudsters and scammers and they don't care who they're attacking like.
	People are worried about AI as something that's undermining the world.
	No, it's thousands of people with, I hate to say it, third world ethics, but first world technology who are able to scratch and peg at every little hole in people's lives.
	And it doesn't matter how much security crypto offers grandma, if someone can convince her to give them the keys to her vault, Her crypto's gone.
	And it's heartbreaking, and I saw it happen so very, very much.
	So just be careful with that.
	They will do incredibly sneaky things like put a comma in the name of something.
	Had you click on the link, and you think you're going to Coinbase.com, but you're not.
	Another thing I wanted to hit on is I've got...
	A lot of experience in crypto, so much more than most people.
	And I still, to this day, when I'm making a transaction, send a small test transaction, a very, very small amount, just to make sure I've got all my ducks in a row.
	So that one thing, again, that's another, because unfortunately, in some cases, you can send crypto between chains.
	When you're not supposed to.
	And once it gets sent to that address on another chain, which you do not have the private key to, you've lost it.
	And it creates a heartbreaking scenario for people.
	So just always, please, send a small amount before you send a large amount.
	Do you guys know the estimate of the number of Bitcoins that have been lost?
	Do you have any guess about the percentage?
	It's pretty wild. I don't know.
	It's 20%.
	Now, hold on.
	Is that lost or lost in a boating accident?
	Well, that's what I've read, right?
	What I've read is that, you know, I mean, to me, if you've never lost any bitcoins, you've probably not been trying hard enough to get into crypto because, you know, I think, I mean, some German programmer lost like hundreds of millions of dollars because he had a vault on a flash drive, which only allowed you 10 guesses, and he couldn't guess the right one by the time it was done.
	And I've heard stories up here in Canada of people rooting through municipal garbage because they threw out a computer with bitcoins on.
	But yeah, 20%.
	So that's quite a lot.
	So when you're talking 21 million, nope.
	We're not getting to those.
	Now, maybe some of those will be recovered and so on, but that seems to be where things are at at the moment.
	Okay, so any other things that people wanted to...
	Oh, yeah, somebody says, I lost a bunch of BCH because I sent it to a BTC address.
	Yeah, that's... I always test you.
	You never dive into a pool or a body of water without checking how deep it is and never transfer anything of significant value before you've done a test and all of that.
	How can you tell between those lost and people just holding?
	I don't know. I don't know the methodology by which.
	That number seems staggeringly high to me.
	I assume it's too high, but it's probably quite a significant amount that is being done.
	Alright, so I'll...
	Yeah, sorry, go ahead. Somebody wanted to jump in?
	Go for it. Yeah, unrelated, sorry, to the at least topic at hand, sorry, but...
	Yeah. I just put it in the chat there.
	So, because of Robin Hood's dealings, I don't want to deal with the devil, but my boss last week kind of showed me the app, and he's got excited about it.
	He's been making a good chunk, but...
	Meow! Yeah, in a minute.
	I'm sorry, which app? Robin Hood.
	Yeah, we had a question about people who wanted to look for something other than Robinhood, but we're going to try and focus on the crypto stuff.
	Robinhood doesn't let you trade crypto, does it?
	It lets you trade Bitcoin, I think.
	Oh, is it? Okay. You can buy Bitcoin, but you can't send it to anybody.
	So you can buy it, and they hold it for you, and then you can sell it with them, and they give you back the USD. So you can only hold it with Robinhood app.
	Right. Somebody's asking, is there any recommendations for wallets and wallets to stay away from?
	I would say, personally, a hardware wallet is a good idea.
	You want to spread things out.
	And I'm not such a fan of two-factor authentication for everything.
	You know, you can clone cell phones, and that can be a bit of a weakness in the whole system.
	So, you know, I would really recommend, because I don't want to give anyone recommendations for stuff that turns out to be a problem, so I would say just, you know, do your research.
	And again, you probably know someone, you know, maybe it's your crazy uncle in the attic who has just been working on this stuff since day one, so that would be my suggestion.
	You've got to really research.
	I think hardware wallets are a pretty good idea.
	Paper wallets too, right, where people just write down the seed phrases and keep it in paper someplace at the bank or someplace safe like that.
	So these are all, I think, all good approaches.
	But it's such a moving target these days, and there's so much technology around these things that I don't want to necessarily date things too much by giving people a lot of advice about this stuff.
	But again, if you guys want to add into that, I'm certainly happy to hand over the show that way.
	So with wallets...
	Oh, go ahead, David. Yeah, there's a lot of nuance with this technology.
	And so if someone doesn't really understand it or they don't really have the time to dig in to all the resources, I recommend going to your local meetup if you have something like that and just ask some guys there.
	If they can help you out, kind of show you around and then you kind of get introduced to the community in your area and it can be very helpful.
	So I would throw that out there as an idea.
	Bitcoin actually, Bitcoin just crossed 900 billion in market cap for the first time in history.
	It's pretty cool. It's not obviously necessarily a direct result of this show being broadcast, but obviously it's fairly causal.
	Just kidding. Just kidding, of course.
	Okay, so here's a couple of things that I wanted to mention about this.
	People are laughing at the suggestion you keep your paper wallet in the bank.
	Yeah, laugh away. Absolutely. I understand the weaknesses of that.
	Okay, so Twitter is considering adding Bitcoin.
	Venmo adding crypto to wallets.
	Mastercard is now discussing crypto support.
	BNY Mellon, which is one of the oldest banks, if not the oldest bank in the U.S., is planning to custody Bitcoin.
	PayPal is bringing crypto to the U.K. Uber is planning to have fun staying poor.
	I guess they're not going to be doing much with crypto.
	And so that's just in a day.
	Andrew Yang, do you remember him of the universal basic income stuff?
	That's proving the... Well, I guess pushing against the stereotype that these Asians are good at math.
	But he said, as mayor of New York City, the world's financial capital, I would invest in making the city a hub for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
	And that's pretty cool.
	Elon Musk, Frodo was the underdoge.
	All thought he would fail himself most of all.
	And then he's got one coin to rule them all, which is Bitcoin with the Lord of the Rings thing.
	This is pretty wild.
	This is from yesterday.
	This is from yesterday. Yeah, PayPal does already do crypto in the US, so obviously I hate them with a passion of a thousand suns, but they're doing the right thing with crypto.
	Bitcoin, this is from yesterday.
	Okay, you've got to check this out, and this is really astonishing.
	Bitcoin had more than $17 billion in on-chain transaction volume in just 24 hours.
	That's an annualized transaction volume of over $6 trillion, which is about half of Visa's payment volume.
	Okay, so this is really, really important to understand, right?
	Okay, now, was it an unusual day, 24 hours leading up to February 10th?
	Yeah, sure, relative to history, relative to the future, probably not.
	But an annualized transaction volume of about half a Visa worldwide.
	You know, it's not like, where's Bitcoin?
	Bitcoin has arrived, as far as that goes.
	Now, again, Visa is much smaller transactions and so on, and therefore the volume in terms of number of payments is going to be much larger for Visa, but that is really, really important.
	To sort of grasp that if in one day Bitcoin can handle half the transaction volume in terms of total cash of Visa and Mastercard is getting into it and banks are looking to custody Bitcoin for their clients.
	It is the oldest bank in America.
	It's, man, it's there.
	I mean, it's been a long time coming, man.
	It's like that old Sam Cooke song, but it's here.
	And once we cross that threshold where mainstream adoption and the embedding into the financial system gets much more solid, then when, you know, it's just every inch that we go forward is an extra mile that the fiat currency system is going to have to fight to push back.
	And I think it's going to get tougher and tougher.
	And so... That is...
	And there's one other thing I wanted to mention too.
	Like at some point, and this is I guess a free business idea for everyone because crypto was the only thing that tempted me other than philosophy, but what we need, here's what we need.
	We need... And maybe there's something out there.
	I'm sure there is something like this out there.
	If not, go build it. Please, somebody.
	But what we need is an exchange or a way of valuating Bitcoin, not relative to fiat, but relative to food, relative to oil, relative to fixed goods.
	The inflation that's coming and is here already, particularly on the West Coast in America, the inflation on food is huge, right?
	And they try as much as they can to keep the high inflationary items out of the consumer price index so that they can mask inflation so that the people who know the inside numbers can make a profit relative to everyone else who sees their fixed income and savings dissolve.
	But I want to know...
	What is Bitcoin relative to a grocery bill?
	What is Bitcoin relative to a fixed basket of commodities?
	What it is relative to fiat is interesting, and I think that's, you know, I'm still old school enough that the fiat price means a lot, but I do want to see Bitcoin's value relative to real things, right?
	Because that's the way the fiat works, right?
	If your loaf of bread is three dollars, then you look at three bucks and you say, oh, that translates...
	To this loaf of bread, right?
	I want to know what a loaf of bread is in Satoshis.
	And I want to see that tracked over time so that people can see not just the inflationary aspect of fiat currency, but how much more your crypto is buying of the things that you actually need to keep you alive, if that makes sense.
	Oh, gas. Yeah, gas.
	Good point. Is anything out there like that?
	You go ahead. So a methodology for doing that might involve private or personal economies and reputation networks and things like doing that.
	And I'm working on something like that myself, but I know of someone else that's working on something similar.
	So it's definitely something that's been noticed and is trying to be tackled.
	Okay, yeah. So people are saying...
	Just need to peg the stable coin to a basket of goods.
	Yeah, I do want to see, because Bitcoin has to go through its translation to fiat.
	So you go Bitcoin to fiat to stuff, right?
	I mean, okay, so like a really expensive car in Canadian, I guess, I don't know how much they go up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
	But to me, like a really expensive car is like, I don't know, 60,000 bucks, right?
	So Bitcoin is a really expensive car.
	Or, you know, four Bitcoins is a Lambo or something like that.
	I want to cut out the middleman.
	I want to cut out the Federal Reserve, fiat currency, asswipe, toilet paper middleman, and I want to see crypto relative to actual things.
	Crypto to a house, right?
	I mean, a house in Toronto is like, what, $20?
	20 bitcoins, because they're crazy expensive.
	And that's sort of a pretty crappy house.
	But, you know, crypto to, like, what is it?
	Three cryptos for a small condo, right?
	Sorry, three bitcoins for a small condo.
	That's what I want to see. And I really, really strongly suggest that people start setting this up.
	I would too if I, you know, I'm still working on the parenting book because apparently I have the economic sense of a hamster, but I would like to see that.
	And so if anybody's out there and is looking at that or thinking of that or has something in beta about that, please let us know.
	And I would love to.
	Yeah, so the Nixon administration cut off the link between fiat currency and gold.
	Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
	So yeah, that's what I want to see because that's going to show more inflation.
	Sorry, go ahead. As I've evangelized Bitcoin over the years, I found, because I don't want to go into personal details of exactly how much I've paid or this or that.
	I'm sorry, your seed phrase was what?
	Oh, yeah. Just kidding.
	Just kidding. I love tattooed on the inside of my cheek.
	Oh, I can't lose it that way.
	My seed phrase is so polysyllabic I had to get it tattooed on my penis because the only thing...
	Anyway, go ahead. I'm not excited.
	I can't figure out where my Bitcoins are.
	Okay, never mind. So over the years, instead of, like, trying to go into the dollar cost and to try to convince people, they're like, look, I'm cashing this out.
	It's making real-world gains for me.
	I've gotten to where, look, I've bought, you know, two, you know, small cars, reasonable cars, and two humble homes with that, you know?
	And that just translated into the terms of, like, this is what I've gained with it, you know, instead of going into the dollars and stuff.
	And I found that that is way more influential than getting into the dollars, just saying, like, realistically, I sold this and I got this.
	Yeah, and I do want to know whether you can buy more with Bitcoin than you can with fiat, right?
	Because if the Bitcoin to fiat and the inflation is hitting at the supermarket, I want to see Bitcoin to stuff.
	Just straight up directly, and I think that's really going to show the value.
	All right, so I know we have a bunch of people on here we just haven't heard from, or at least some.
	So if there's anyone else who wants to jump in with thoughts, comments, issues, if there are people out there watching who have...
	Questions? Love to hear them.
	You know, this is, I think, a pretty good group.
	I know there was a guy named Juan who was very eager to join.
	I'm not sure if he ended up making it in.
	And let me just check a couple of other places where the questions could be flowing in.
	But, yeah, jump in if you have thoughts or questions or issues or expertise.
	Love to hear it. If you need someone to fill in airtime, just say the word.
	No, no, I mean, because, you know, some people are, like, polite.
	I've read about these people.
	I don't... I don't really understand what that's all about, but some people are like, no, no, no, I'm sure there'll be a polite opening.
	Don't, don't wait for that.
	You know, this is like getting to the front of a crowd at a punk concert, right?
	Back when punk was punk.
	So don't be nice.
	Be in there.
	I did want to mention that I think...
	I don't think it's necessarily going to be diametrically opposed to the world of crypto and fiat.
	I think digital currencies are going to be inevitable at some point throughout the next decade.
	China, I'm sure as many of you are aware, have been Working on their own currency, working with various crypto in the market already, Polkadot, Chainlink, Cosmos as of recently, and they're establishing all the networks.
	As far as I'm aware, they've already soft launched it.
	Many of their citizens understand how to use crypto, how to store it, managing wallets and things like that.
	So one way or another, I believe it's going to come, whether it's your central Fed currency of choice or you elect to get ahead of the curve.
	I think it's inevitable.
	So if you get in early, you're going to ride the wave rather than getting forced to use it after the fact.
	Somebody's pointed out that there's a website called pricedingold.com forward slash bitcoin.
	And you can buy a lot of gold with Bitcoin these days.
	But again, that's great, but that's still an intermediary between Bitcoin and things in the real world.
	I would really love to see Bitcoin to bread, Bitcoin to milk, Bitcoin to gas, Bitcoin to average grocery bill, that kind of stuff.
	But sorry, somebody else was about to jump in.
	Go ahead. I was adding on that the IMF, which is the International Monetary Fund, I don't know if it was in 2020 or 2018, published a cryptocurrency explainer saying it could be the next step in the evolution of money.
	Now, I'm not looking to them for like, you know, kudos on crypto, but it is noteworthy that they're taking that attitude.
	Now, I read the article a while ago, and I remember like in it, they did point out like, oh, but All the negatives of crypto that apply to fiat as well.
	But it was interesting, at least, to see that they took that view with it.
	And to add on to what Bangarang was saying, I definitely believe that at some point, FedCoin is going to be a thing.
	The state is going to try to issue their alternative.
	And I'm not sure how that's going to play out.
	So the big crossover, as I'm sure you guys are aware, one of the biggest demands for fiat is the payment of taxes.
	Because you have to pay your taxes in fiat.
	So the monopoly has their bony hands around your throat as far as that kind of stuff goes.
	So then the question is...
	I mean, every CEO, I know this annoying, boring, my history stuff, but I was on a board and all that.
	So every single major entity around the world right now, whether it's an emergency meeting, whether it's the quarterly meeting, the CEOs and the executives are being asked among a flurry of other questions because of Elon Musk and maybe what Apple is going to do and so on.
	They're being asked, what's the Bitcoin strategy?
	What's the crypto strategy that the company has to adopt?
	And way back in the day, like before Y2K, you know, you had to have a – there's rumblings.
	You had to have a strategy to deal with Y2K. And then as it got closer to Y2K, it really escalated.
	You had to have your white papers prove how your software worked with Y2K, all of the rules that you had about dates if they were only entered with two digits for the years and stuff.
	Right now, it is the case because you see so many businesses working on adopting crypto, right?
	Oldest banks, you got MasterCard, you got your PayPal in the UK, Elon Musk, of course, with Tesla and a lot of other organizations putting their toes in the water.
	And this, not because the fuddy-duddies at the top of these executives, these boards are really versed in crypto.
	They're mostly not, right? You know, they're the kind of people who refer to a CD player as a gramophone.
	But everybody's being asked about this and developing a cohesive and coherent strategy for dealing with the Bitcoin revolution is going to be central to business plans going forward.
	Everyone's going to have to have an answer.
	And what that means, of course, is the demand for Bitcoin expertise is going to go...
	Through the roof. So, you know, it's not a bad gig to get into and so on.
	If you don't mind being the only guy in cargo shorts in a business meeting, I'm sure that's fine.
	In fact, if you go in in a suit, they will assume you know nothing about Bitcoin.
	So businesses are going to need to develop a strategy.
	Now, once as a business manager or business CEO or CXO, when you get asked about Bitcoin, you've got to commit something, man.
	You've got to say, I don't think it's real.
	I think it's a fad.
	I know much more than Elon Musk about the economy, which is, you know, a dangerous But they're going to have to put something down.
	Now, if they get it wrong, They're done, right?
	I mean, if Bitcoin, you know, 100k plus Bitcoin by the, you could argue by the summer, given how it's going, all of this.
	So if, you know, if Elon Musk bought in in the 30s or the high 20s, low 30s, mid 30s, whenever he bought in, because, you know, I'm sure he did it over a while.
	So, you know, maybe he's doubled what he's got.
	If there's another 40% growth from 60 to 100, and I know that's not exactly 40, but, you know, I'm more pretty than math literate, which is not to say too pretty, but...
	So every CXO now is going to have to have, and it's going to probably fall on the Chief Financial Officer, right?
	What is the Bitcoin strategy?
	Now, if the Bitcoin strategy is to buy, then the hodlers, right?
	The holding on for dear life people are going to see a massive increase in the same way that you saw a massive increase in GameStop, right?
	Because people had to buy GameStop to cover their shorts and that drove the price through the roof.
	So if there is a strategy At the CXO level, and I'm telling you, there has to be one.
	Now, the strategy may be, we're going to sit it out.
	We think it's a bubble.
	We don't like it.
	It gave my dog rabies and attacked my cat.
	I don't like it, and so on.
	Okay, that's a valid strategy.
	But if you're a CXO, especially a CFO, and you get that wrong, I mean, you're toast, man.
	These guys don't rise to the top by getting things wrong.
	And so they're going to look at the fundamentals, they're going to look at the business case as a whole, and they're going to look at fiat.
	Finally, you have to, because there's never been an alternative.
	Fundamentally, there's never been an alternative.
	I mean, you say, oh, well, gold is an alternative.
	It's like, yeah, but corporations don't generally sit on Fort Knox's of gold in the basement.
	That's just not the way they play, right?
	So for the first time, people are looking at fiat currency And they have an alternative and everybody's going to have to grapple with the insane money printing that's been going on.
	And every business that is going to conduct its business entirely in fiat for the most part, which is almost all of them up to now, they're going to have to deal with all of that.
	And the businesses that bet right on Bitcoin are going to not just dominate but obliterate the competition.
	And this is the stakes that people, I guarantee you, but no facts whatsoever.
	So, you know, this is my very strong instinct.
	That every board meeting is ferocious about Bitcoin.
	Because if you don't have your Bitcoin as part of your corporate strategy, as part of your corporate holdings, if inflation goes up, Then you will be attempting to replenish your capital equipment, expand, pay in marketing, pay in development costs, pay in expanding your fixed capital, your factories and so on.
	You're going to be paying for that. In crazy inflated currency, it's going to be a complete disaster for you, right?
	If, on the other hand, you've got some Bitcoin, then you are about as hedged against inflation as it is possible to be without a time machine.
	I mean, Bitcoin kind of is a time machine because it lets you go back to when the dollar was pegged to something real.
	And so it is a huge issue.
	Now, it's a cost-benefit analysis for these guys.
	Sorry for the long lecture. It's a cost-benefit analysis, right?
	And the cost-benefit analysis, okay, so for Apple, let's say Apple wants to buy A billion in Bitcoin, right?
	Okay, what's that? Four or five days cash flow?
	They can probably survive the hit, right?
	I mean, it's like, can you not go out for dinner for a couple of weeks?
	Yeah, probably, right? And so the cost-benefit analysis, okay, so if we invest this and it goes down, well, we invest this in R&D projects that go up in smoke all the time anyway, so, you know, but if we get it wrong, if we don't invest in this and inflation hits, which it's already hitting, I think, particularly in food, Then we could be extinguished as a corporation.
	Because the companies that have Bitcoin fundamentally have a printing press for money if inflation hits.
	This is really, really important for everyone out there to sort of get.
	And I'm also saying this to anybody in the business world who follows me.
	You have a license to print money if inflation hits and you have Bitcoin.
	Now, you could say yes with gold, blah, blah, blah.
	But the demand for gold just isn't there.
	And we've seen this repeatedly ever since my debate with Peter Schiff many years ago about Bitcoin versus gold as an investment.
	The demand for gold is not there.
	The demand for gold would be there, but Bitcoin is there.
	So the demand is going to Bitcoin rather than gold.
	So I think that's a pretty significant effect.
	CFOs... Are not going to want to be beholden to inflation if there's an alternative that gives them an effective money printing machine in the basement.
	Because being able to spit out infinite fiat relative to inflation because you've got Bitcoin is about as compelling a business case as I can imagine, which is why I think you can see this tip of the spear business getting into this stuff.
	Sorry for the long blah, blah, blah.
	But if there's anybody who wants to, you know, push back or add or disagree, I'm happy to hear.
	Oh, yeah, no. Wait, can you guys hear me?
	Yeah. Okay.
	Yeah, no, I agree. I think it's going to eventually be more profitable to invest in Bitcoin than it is to invest in a politician.
	What was that old saying? Right, right, right.
	And of course, if the politicians are making enough money from Bitcoin, they won't complain about it too much, right?
	So, anybody else that wanted to add, comments, issues?
	Oh, hello. How are you doing?
	Yeah, I think, I'm not sure if you guys have discussed it in the past, but Michael Saylor of MicroStrategy, he's been one of the big proponents of Bitcoin.
	He saw what happened last year in March with COVID. And he basically did the math and how he saw it was the inflation rate for the US dollar is going to be roughly somewhere between 15 to 20% and effectively to have a business.
	Do you mean this calendar? Yeah, last year I think it was.
	Oh, last year? Okay. I can't remember how he came to that number, but that was the number he came to.
	This is the one show you don't need to show your work, just so you know.
	I mean, I'm pulling all this crap out of my armpits.
	Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	So he basically came to the conclusion that...
	Your company would have to expand at a rate of around about 15 to 20% just to break even.
	Right. Right. And from that point on, he went like a madman trying to add Bitcoin to his treasury.
	He'd recently just held a Bitcoin summit on Feb 3rd and 4th.
	This year, for about 20,000 participants worldwide, around about 5,000 CFO, CEOs, multiple corporations, apparently SpaceX, some of the treasury managers were present in that.
	And he effectively was making the argument, why Bitcoin at a corporate level?
	His argument is basically just to buy, hold, and never sell.
	It's the hardest asset on the planet.
	Basically borrow against it, lend it, earn yield on it.
	And then set them up with all of the largest exchanges on the planet and how to go about it as a corporation.
	So that's one of the extremely bullish things that I'm anticipating over the next few months as these various companies start to add that into their strategy, trying to hedge against inflation and all the rest of it.
	Right. Lewis, you just joined.
	You're muted at the moment. If there's anything you wanted to add, I'm happy to hear.
	Nothing more to add.
	You guys can continue. Okay, so I wanted to share a scenario under which governments may start accepting Bitcoin for taxes.
	Because that's one of the big things, right?
	It's one of the big things. Because right now, if you sell, you know, you might have to sell extra to deal with your capital gains taxes and so on.
	But if you can transfer directly to taxes, if Bitcoin has gone up.
	So this is just a thought.
	It's probably got tons of holes in it.
	So, you know, take it with a grain of salt.
	But... You know, tax rates are set, and people pay a certain amount in tax, right?
	And so many people have become self-employed over the last half decade, and I think that's only accelerated to some degree under COVID. So a lot of people have become self-employed, and self-employed people pay taxes in installments, and they pay them sometimes quarterly, sometimes they pay them at the end of the year.
	So what's happening right now is the tax structure has been set up in Western countries with a rough gauge of inflation.
	So you need to tax it a certain amount.
	People are going to pay quarterly installments down the road.
	And if inflation hits, then the last installment that you're making could be worth, as you point out, 10%, 15%, 20% less than what the government anticipates.
	However, if Bitcoin is going up, then the government would rather get Bitcoin in many ways than an inflationary or devaluated currency.
	So I could see a situation in which governments would begin to...
	Think about acceptance of cryptocurrency for tax payments.
	Now, if that particular bridge and barrier gets crossed, then there's no turning back and the governments will never regulate to destroy the value of Bitcoin because then they become holders, right?
	And so that's another aspect I think that's worth, you know, it's obviously somewhat pie in the sky.
	But this is why I'm not in government, because if I were in government, I would be sitting there saying, well, wait a second here.
	Let's look at the real rate of inflation.
	Let's look at all the self-employed people, right?
	Because everyone else paying, you know, every paycheck or, you know, bimonthly or whatever, weekly, depends when their pay comes in.
	So I would sit there and say, okay, let's figure out if we're going to get taxes at the end of the year from self-employed people are going to be worth 10% to 15% to 20% less than at the beginning of the year, then maybe we want to start saying to people, you can pay your taxes through bitcoins, which is going up in value, and then you get a money printing press, so to speak, but without actually having the Fed, right?
	So I think that is a possible scenario.
	Again, it's fairly far-fetched, but I do see that's one avenue that could come to pass.
	Yeah, Francis Suarez, I think that's how you pronounce his name, of Miami.
	He's looking into doing just that.
	Accepting Bitcoin for taxes as well as putting Bitcoin in their treasury.
	So I think it's already getting started.
	And the revolution that occurs, boy, this is going back a ways.
	But I gave speeches probably half a decade ago or more about how Bitcoin ends war.
	I mean, this is why, you know, wanting to create, listen, wanting to create a great life for people who follow philosophy is foundational, you know, to what I do.
	Like I want you guys and everybody who listens and hears and watches this, I want you to have a great life.
	Now, the government doesn't.
	But I do. I really do.
	And I want you to have great relationships with your kids and your spouses and your friends and yourself and virtue and your conscience and all of that.
	And, you know, a little financial security is not a bad thing when it comes to trying to get a great life.
	And one of the things that I've been talking about or talked about in the past is just how, you know, if Bitcoin begins to gain ascendancy, You have a stranglehold on the money spigot that drives the military-industrial complex.
	It's the end of empire.
	It's the end of regime change.
	It's the end of 750 military bases overseas for the United States.
	The end of the mad money printing delusion that characterizes a late empire of increasing virulence and violence.
	And also, it's a way of getting financial security without going through the indoctrination mills of higher education.
	There's lots of so many benefits, right?
	You get to make money. What is it?
	Some guy, there was some teenager who said, his parents said, you've got to go to college.
	And he said, well...
	I don't want to go to college.
	No, no, you've got to go to college.
	He said, okay, I'll tell you what. If I can make a million dollars by my 18th birthday, do I still have to go to college?
	And, of course, his parents were like, yeah, okay, fine.
	If you make a million dollars before your 18th birthday, what, you made a million dollars before you?
	Because, you know, he went into Bitcoin and all that.
	I think that's, you know, it's an important thing that people, you know, you get some Bitcoin, you can have some kids earlier and younger, right?
	Because right now, as everyone knows, birth rates are down, marriages are down, everybody's life is just circling the drain of this goddamn...
	Coronavirus, right? And this is a way of being able to secure, I think, some potential financial stability and so on, and just getting the hell on with your life.
	Sorry, you got a baby there.
	Getting the heck on with your life without just having to wait for the reopening, which could take years if it ever happens.
	I mean, the question of whether we ever go back to normal is pretty open-ended right now, but...
	I just really, really wanted...
	It is about, you know, some financial security is good and all that, but it really is just about this is a way to avoid higher education, make some coin, get on with your life, get your family going, get your parenting going and all that kind of stuff.
	Because, you know, I mean, there's a lot of younger people in this call.
	I mean, obviously one... Quite fertile.
	But this holding pattern, you know, there's estimates that, you know, 15% fewer babies are going to be born in various places around the world this year.
	People are just, you know, you can't date, you can't snap, right?
	So this at least gives people some opportunity, and it's much larger than numbers in a wallet, which, you know, is important and all that.
	It's a very sort of big picture thing.
	You guys have supported me for 15 years and enabled me to do what I do through some pretty hairy passages, or generally hairless for me, but whatever I can do to repay that with expertise.
	I've just, you know, it's a minor sort of aside.
	I'm just really, really committed to doing because I'm so incredibly grateful for the opportunity to be able to do what I do that I just, whatever value I can provide in return.
	And I think gathering groups of people like this together is really good for that.
	So without wanting to stretch everybody's interest beyond the breaking point, is anybody else seen data, facts, stuff that you want to share with the planet as a whole?
	For all time, no pressure.
	It's got to be brilliant. Yeah, well, I heard some people talking on our Discord that they didn't think Bitcoin could be used for small transactions here and there.
	And there is a second layer built on Bitcoin, which does allow for that type of things.
	You can buy smaller end products like a couple dollars or even down to pennies.
	Well, hang on. So because there's a couple of ways that people understand this to do with Bitcoin.
	So the general one is the Bitcoin Cash versus the Lightning Network.
	Are you talking about something else?
	Yeah, I'm talking about the Lightning Network.
	It's built on Bitcoin.
	It's a BTC. And it's another peer-to-peer network built outside or on top of Bitcoin.
	And using a Lightning-enabled wallet, you can send smaller transactions instantly.
	Now, from my understanding, it's really not user-ready.
	The meme is it'll be ready in 18 months or six months, every six months.
	It's a moving window, as far as I can see.
	I use the Lightning Network to buy goods from stores like the Fold app or BitRefill.
	I buy gift cards.
	It can be used.
	Depending on which wallet you use, it can be difficult to set up or very easy because they have custodial wallets that basically do everything for you.
	You just sign up and they accept the Lightning on your behalf and then they pay on your behalf.
	It can be pretty easy.
	Well, I mean, I think that supply creates its own demand, right?
	So in this case, I think it's the reverse, which is that I think you're going to need to pull demand for the coffee and donuts transactions in order for the Lightning Network to have the motive to complete, right?
	So right now, it's to some degree a solution in search of a problem because people aren't paying for coffee and donuts using Bitcoin.
	So I think that as the acceleration and, you know, once you start to get the credit cards embedded with Bitcoin, and they're going to need that speed.
	And once you need this, I mean, why would you build something?
	Like, it's like building a railroad someplace in the hopes that there'll be a town there one day.
	Like, don't you just wait for the town and then build the railroad there?
	So I think you're going to need the demand and the Lightning Network.
	Again, once people will realize how much money they can make from the coffees and donuts Bitcoin transactions, the methodology will be put in place to have it come about.
	Just because it's not there right now, that signifies to me not a technical limitation, but a lack of market demand.
	Now, you could say, well, if it was there, the market demand, blah, blah, blah.
	But there's lots of people watching this kind of stuff, and once they can make more money from a Lightning Network than they can from simply buying Bitcoin, they'll...
	Once it's matured to that point, you know, and of course, as the mining of Bitcoin and the value of Bitcoin begins to slow down, which it will at certain parts, then people will take their technical expertise and instead of building it vertically, they'll build it out horizontally, right?
	So they'll start embedding it in more markets.
	They'll work to keep transaction costs and transaction costs low, transaction speed high.
	There's a huge amount of, I mean, absolute geniuses in the Bitcoin sphere and right now they're following the money, which, you know, It's hard to blame them for.
	It's kind of what people do, right?
	So as far as the Lightning Network goes, yeah, you know, once people really want Bitcoin, but right now, nobody wants to sit there, you know, like the infamous story at the beginning of Bitcoin, of the 10,000 Bitcoin pizza.
	Do you remember, guys, if you've heard of that story, right?
	Nobody wants to sit there and say, well, that was a great $80 latte I had six months ago.
	You know, people just don't want to do that right now.
	And so right now, Nobody wants to buy small transaction items on Bitcoin because the level of future regret could be pretty self-punishing.
	Well, I think those services are actually, they might already exist.
	I don't use them personally, but if they don't exist, they are coming.
	Visa, MasterCard, Google Pay, iPay, what have you.
	I think it'll be some form of like you'll essentially be giving them your Bitcoin and they'll be paying for you with fiat.
	But there's one service that I currently use, which is more like a traditional bank, Celsius Network, they are working on a card with Visa that's going to be, it's rumored to be zero fees.
	I'm thinking at least low fees.
	But what they'll be doing is generating a microloan against your crypto.
	So when you go to pay for something, it won't be realizing gains, so it won't be a taxable event.
	And you'll be effectively paying for things like a daily, you know, a coffee or dinner or something like that, using crypto without actually having to sell it.
	And then, you know, you pay off the loan or whatever.
	Good. Okay, a couple of comments and questions.
	Sorry, if there's somebody else wanted to add something to that, I'm happy to hear.
	Somebody points out, I had an account on a Canadian exchange and it had a disastrous end after the CEO died.
	And I'm curious what the thoughts are about exchanges and the issues of trust redundancy if a QCX situation happens again.
	It's the name of the exchange.
	I don't know anything about it. It's just what the person is saying.
	Privacy, etc. In contrast to the concepts of anonymity and privacy being in the pro column, To get Bitcoin.
	And look, there is a big tradeoff, right?
	There is a big tradeoff that if you want to trade, a lot of places will require identification for you.
	And if you do want to trade, you don't have direct hardware necessarily, control of the remote wallet and lots of things that are going on that way.
	I mean, to me, that's life.
	I mean, there's no perfect solution.
	Everything's a trade-off. There are always costs and benefits.
	But yeah, if people have any thoughts about exchanges and the issues of trust, redundancy, privacy, etc., how do you guys deal with that or what are your thoughts on that?
	Go ahead, man. You go ahead, Jared.
	Oh, I was going to say, I pick multiple exchanges.
	geographic regions.
	So like Binance is in Asia.
	Blockchain.com, I think, is based in the UK or somewhere in the rest of Europe.
	And then you got Kraken and Coinbase in the US.
	So that way, if they're having local legal issues, you may not be able to work with them as well.
	You might have to use a different exchange.
	So just keep your options open there.
	I just wanted to point out that Kraken here has no relationship to the lawsuits.
	Sydney Powell, I just wanted to point out that there's no relation to release the Kraken from last year.
	For any audio processing software out there, this is the in Minecraft moment where Kraken has nothing to do with any voting machine.
	Sorry, go ahead. Nice, nice.
	So yeah, multiple exchanges.
	And there are also options called decentralized exchanges.
	And essentially... You could think of that as a piece of software running that you send your crypto onto and it matches you up with a buyer and or a seller, whatever, and you make your transaction somewhat automatically through that.
	And some of them do require KYC and some of them do not.
	So that is an option.
	And I mean, if you do choose that option, you're still like at least legally tax liable, you know, just so you know.
	There's a question that doesn't come from the audience, but it comes from me, and this goes to David.
	David, approximately how much Bitcoin do you need to have to be able to afford Doors?
	That's just a question that I have.
	Just looking over your shoulder there.
	Are they very expensive where you are?
	Are they golden doors? It's getting cheaper all the time, I hear.
	I'm sorry? It's getting cheaper all the time.
	Yeah, yeah, you know, because that's, I mean, Lambo, yes.
	Doors, absolutely not.
	And I would also just like to thank everyone for not needing glasses and making me feel young.
	All right. So somebody else has asked or commented, Bitcoin has a big flaw, which is that it's very inefficient in terms of applying its security because a $5 transaction has the same level of security as a $5 million transaction.
	Imagine how absurd it would be if a bank guards $5 like it guards $5 million.
	It does not seem like Bitcoin will be solving this issue anytime soon.
	What are your thoughts on this?
	this?
	And do you think that investing in altcoins that act as sidechains to Bitcoin and offload some of the lower value transactions is a good idea?
	David, did you want to take that one?
	You seem to be more up and up on Bitcoin's capabilities.
	I didn't. I wasn't following the question.
	Oh, I'm sorry. Did you zap out?
	Did you zap out? Completely zoned out.
	Okay, let me just read. Is this something that...
	So people saying big flaw in Bitcoin, a $5 transaction has the same level of security as a $5 million transaction.
	And it doesn't seem like Bitcoin is going to solve this issue anytime soon.
	Do you have any thoughts on that?
	I don't really care, but I guess if it's a $5 thing and the same level of security is a $5 million thing, it's sort of like saying that the bank spends the same amount of money guarding $5 is $5 million.
	Okay, yeah, I think I might understand what they're saying.
	So anytime you send a Bitcoin transaction on-chain, whether it's $5 or $5 million, it's the same amount of security.
	So once you get that first confirmation, some miner somewhere has put that into a block on the Bitcoin blockchain.
	And every confirmation after that, it's just more and more set in stone forever.
	So it doesn't really matter how much you're sending.
	You get the same amount of security with your transaction.
	Is that what they were asking? I'm afraid that your guess is as good as mine.
	I don't really know.
	I couldn't even answer that.
	Just quickly, if it's a standpoint of, like, being efficient, I mean, that's kind of the nature of the technology itself is that it doesn't really matter the scale.
	It has that same level of being secure.
	What I would say, it's like, think of it like, I mean, if you're Elon Musk, sure, you might have nicer cars and you might have a nicer house, but when you go home to watch Netflix, like, you're watching the same Netflix that everyone else is watching.
	You're watching the same YouTube that everyone else is watching, right?
	All right. Okay. David, here comes the question.
	Are you with us? I am ready.
	All right. David, I heard you mention you use the Lightning Network on the live stream.
	Can you post the wallet slash resources you use for it personally?
	I'd love to learn more. That sounds almost like a hacky question, but I'm sure that makes more sense to you.
	No, absolutely, I will do that.
	Yeah, so I'll just name them here too.
	I think Breezed is a very good wallet for Bitcoin Lightning Network.
	That's a non-custodial one, so you actually own your coins.
	There's Blue Wallet, which is a custodial Lightning Network wallet, which people like.
	And there's another one, Strike, which is a good one.
	Which is also custodial, and that one holds your value in terms of fiat.
	So a lot of people aren't used to seeing their money fluctuate all over the place, so they actually set it to fiat.
	My light just went out, but I'll turn my lights back on and I will post those references in the chat.
	My second question, David, is how much Bitcoin do you need to have to pay your electricity bill?
	And is it very expensive where you are?
	I assume you're not in China.
	All right. People are saying great show tonight, guys.
	Thank you so much. Will Ethereum 2.0 reduce these insane high gas fees?
	I don't even know what to make of that question.
	Jared, go! Yeah, I have some thoughts on Ethereum.
	Back when I was working at...
	At one of the exchanges, the Ethereum team was there, like going over their, this was back in 2017, and they were going over their plans to eventually become proof of stake.
	And I was kind of doing my work and kind of listening in on the call.
	And I remember people kept asking like, well, how are you going to solve this problem?
	How are you going to solve this problem?
	Like, oh, well, we'll figure that out later.
	You know, a lot of that.
	And so many years later, they're still like, you know, it's around the corner.
	It's coming. It's coming. So, I mean, I'm not saying that they're not going to do it.
	It's just like, I'll leave it when I see it.
	Yeah, Ethereum is somewhat notoriously slow, but Ethereum 2.0 is meant to solve a lot of those issues.
	There are solutions, there are Layer 2 solutions that exist, ZK rollups, things of that nature, but they're not widespread.
	The ETH 2.0 upgrade is We don't know when it'll be, if it's 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, who knows.
	But as far as I understand it, they are going to release it incrementally.
	And one of the updates that might come sooner than later is the EIP-1559, I think it is, where basically they'll be making a change to how the gas fees and the miners fee is structured.
	So it'll basically smoothen out the gas fees and make it not so...
	Volatile and try to meter the way the gas fees system kind of operates just to make it more efficient and, in theory, cheaper.
	And also, they'll be burning the gas fees as well, which should make Ethereum more deflationary as an asset.
	Crazy TV says, and it's a good website, casebitcoin.com slash charts.
	See the doubling days charts.
	It really surprised me how quickly Bitcoin has doubled.
	Now, this is a big question, pure speculation time, as all of this is.
	Miracle Mark asks, do the majority of coins survive the next five to ten years, or do five to ten coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.
	take over? Thus, the 1,000-plus shitcoins phase out.
	So do you want to break out the term shitcoins just so people understand what's being talked about?
	Yeah, I'd love to go. It's largely a pejorative derogatory for things that aren't real.
	Really? Thank you for making that clear.
	Well, for someone, if it's not their pet project, everything else is a fraud and a shitcoin.
	And so... Yeah, that's what shitcoin is in Marjorie.
	Is that going to happen?
	Are a couple coins going to take over?
	I think in the large part, it'll just be like the stocks, it looks like.
	There's some blue chips, and then you've got a whole bunch of other ones out there, and there'll be a lot of options.
	You could be right, of course, right?
	I'd push back a little bit because comparing stocks to cryptos is like comparing stocks to cash.
	That's great. I personally hesitate with those.
	Again, you may be right. I'm just saying my particular – go ahead.
	Sorry. I want to correct that.
	You're absolutely right. It would be more indicative to say – Communities, because to me, at least, cryptocurrencies represent a value set and a way to approach things.
	And so it's more like they're allowed to be all these different communities who believe there's these different ways to solve these problems.
	It's wonderful. Hey, if you want to try your commune, rock out.
	Go do it over there, you know?
	Yeah, I would say, based upon the history of operating systems, which I think is not totally separate from coins, you know, when I was a kid, there was, oh my gosh, PET, VIC-20, Atari, there was Commodore 64, there was, oh gosh, OS2, I think it was.
	It was some operating system put out by IBM back in the day.
	And there was, you know, dozens and dozens of operating systems.
	I still remember in my early teens, I had a little calculator watch.
	I worked in a hardware store and I used to, when it was slow, calculate how many weeks I had to work to buy a computer.
	And there were all of these computing magazines that had, you know, this is the most amazing computer.
	It has three programs and you can't share anything with anyone because it's its own operating system.
	So you had this immense ecosystem of operating systems all competing.
	And what drove, you know, of course, the Apple people nuts and all of that was that IBM... By sheer accident, no planning, ended up with this open architecture and IBM sold itself based upon the number of applications it had rather than the quality of the operating system because the operating system was a means to an end and the end being the number of programs you could run.
	And then there were niche markets like the Amiga was really good for people who wanted to make music and Atari and Commodore were good if you wanted to play games and so on.
	So there were niche markets for particular uses, but it generally came down to two.
	I mean, the gold and silver, so to speak, the Windows and the Mac or the iOS architecture.
	And, you know, I mean, there's still others around.
	Of course, there's Linux and various flavors of Red Hat stuff and all that.
	But it kind of shook down to two.
	And the difference being, of course, that these are going to interchange with each other so seamlessly that you're not going to have the same sort of barrier to entry.
	And so it really comes down to me to the number of corporations that are going to adopt various standards.
	The easier it is to adopt many standards...
	The more they'll offer with the caveat that confusing your customers is really a good path forward.
	You know, option paralysis is a very big issue.
	You know, if you've ever just stared blankly at Best Buy, like you need a new tablet, and it's like, uh, uh, eeny, meeny, miny, because, you know, it's going to be some cost-benefit to all of them.
	So I do think it's going to share.
	I mean, there's no way 1,000 currencies are going to flourish.
	Another way to look at it is something like languages.
	You know, the number of languages in the world is shrinking.
	Because it just becomes so much more efficient that way.
	So I think as long as there's a thread that connects all of these things together, the pressure to discard currencies, particularly for niche markets, there could be a currency that is developed particularly for art collectors.
	There could be a currency that is for assessing the long-term value of wine.
	There could be a number of competing sub-currencies that exist within their own niche economies because there are some economies that are very inward-looking.
	There will, of course, be Crime coin, like there will be, and I don't just mean fiat, which is really the crime coin of most of history, but crime coin is going to be some dark web thing where you take out hits and, you know, whatever it is, there's going to be some of this ugly stuff is going to go on and so on.
	But I think where there could be a case to be made that if there's sort of an insular market, people are going to want to have a coin in there because it's a barrier to entry to other people coming in.
	And there may be specialized transactions that Or specialized, you know, I'm thinking like amortizations of long-term capital goods and things like that.
	There could be very, very specific things that you wouldn't necessarily code for a general audience.
	And there may be lightning speed that's necessary or a complete lack of speed that's necessary because everything is big, slow, and ponderous.
	So I could see niche coins, but there's no way a thousand coins are going to flourish in my humble opinion.
	I think there's going to be one for the general economy, a gold, silver, and a bronze, or gold, silver, and copper.
	And then there's going to be niche coins, which you're going to need pretty specialized knowledge, I think, to understand, and they're going to operate within their own ecosystem with the caveat that they're going to be able to break out into the larger economy as a whole.
	That's, I mean, a real rough sketch and, you know, probably mostly nonsense, but those are my thoughts.
	Yeah. I just want to say, when it comes to crypto, the term currency kind of doesn't do it any favors.
	I would say the vast majority of crypto on the market aren't even trying to be currencies.
	They're trying to serve mostly financial solutions or protocols or things like that.
	I mean, Ethereum isn't even necessarily a currency.
	The way I describe it, it's like...
	It's like an Apple App Store or an OS system.
	90 to 95% of all coins in existence run on Ethereum, right?
	Anyone that's got a two-bit idea to try to build a crypto will almost certainly use Ethereum because it already has the network effect, has somewhat of a monopoly on the market in that sense.
	So if you're getting involved, there are different areas of the market.
	And in crypto, it's such a breakneck pace.
	Usually, anyone who's got the first kind of Proof of concept and manages to implement it somewhat.
	The network effect just takes off and they wind up running a corner on the market.
	Something like Chainlink, for example, is one of the top 10 coins.
	They focus on what's called like an Oracle service and some of the more tech-savvy guys could probably explain that better, but it's basically like they take real-world data And translate it onto blockchain, onto the blockchain.
	So various cryptos, maybe a decentralized exchange or something that's trying to be more like a lending and borrowing service who needs to keep track of all the various prices.
	They'll use Chainlink and their Oracle services to be able to, instead of making an in-house one where maybe there's They're not as good as someone who's completely dedicated to offering this Oracle service.
	When it comes to the coins, like what's going to do well, what's going to die, my personal thought is basically anything that survived multiple market cycles, as you could consider more of a blue chip, like a Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin maybe, But in the bull market, basically everything does well.
	The trend of the last market cycle was decentralized finance or DeFi products.
	They did really, really well.
	I think that's going to be the same thing this time around.
	I'm sorry, what do you mean by decentralized finance products?
	So, I mean, basically like financial products, which are essentially decentralized, so there's no...
	No, no, you can't just shuffle the words around and think you've explained something.
	What's a tall tree? Well, it's a tree that's tall.
	Yeah, so let's say you have like a bank-type service, like a custodial service.
	You can deposit your crypto with them.
	As a company, they maybe earn yield on it.
	You can loan from them.
	That would be an example of a centralized service.
	Celsius is one that I'm very big on.
	Then you could have a decentralized version like Aave, where it's just basically just a protocol.
	You can deposit your assets with the protocol and the smart contract itself will They will lend out your assets, but it's agnostic.
	It's simply you agree to whatever the terms are, you put your assets into the contract, whether you want a loan and put in collateral, or you want to deposit and earn yield.
	And, you know, say if you don't pay your interest, if you're borrowing or you don't pay back your principal within whatever the framework is, then you'll get liquidated.
	But there is no company, there is no middleman who's managing it for you.
	It's all smart contracts.
	It's all decentralized effectively.
	Okay, got it. Somebody here says Tesla actually made more profit in Bitcoin than they did cars.
	Could be true. And of course, you know, the electric car is a big mirage that only lasts as long as people don't ask where the power to the electricity comes from, right?
	It's like those wind turbines where you have to have helicopters up there de-icing them.
	It's like the helicopters are running on what now?
	Somebody says ITT Gaming now holds a patent to accept Bitcoin to play the machines.
	And here's another big question.
	Is there a list of corporations that are anti-crypto?
	My God. As soon as somebody starts compiling that list, maybe it's out there.
	It wouldn't be necessarily, you know, like the hunt and destroy list of social justice warriors, right?
	It's a shame that took down that woman from the Star Wars show recently.
	But... What's going to happen is at some point investors are going to look at the rise in Bitcoin and say, I'm not going to invest in companies that don't have crypto holdings.
	And then the cost-benefit analysis is not just...
	to fiat, it's share price to fiat, right?
	And therefore the case for crypto becomes very immediate and very certain.
	So yes, if there does become a perception, you know, I'm going to like, you know, the BLM statements that everyone had to put out last summer or face potential riots or boycotts, there's going to be, hey, where are you on crypto, man?
	And I remember way back in the day, there were disinvestments from companies that didn't have a coherent Y2K strategy and who were ignoring it and so on.
	So there may be a time, and it may not come just directly from shareholders.
	It may come from hedge funds or other large institutional investors, ETFs and so on.
	It could be that they say, listen, if you guys don't have any good coherent crypto strategy, you're off the list, right?
	And that's going to drive things.
	Like we're right at the beginning of the network effect.
	And so that's sort of an interesting thing to remember.
	All right.
	Let's see here.
	I think a token slash crypto which represents a fraction of ownership of a set of large stable companies would be fantastic.
	Well, you should go and make one, I think. - Oh yeah, Miami mayor, we wanted to point that out.
	GPU manufacturers are a solid investment, even without the crypto demand like AI simulations and gaming.
	Oh, quick question for you guys.
	Well, maybe it's not a quick question.
	Quick question, maybe not a quick answer.
	Do you think Bitcoin is easily open to market manipulation by BTC whales?
	So whale, I don't know.
	Generally tends to be, if I remember rightly, a thousand bitcoins or more.
	Do you think that the bitcoin is easily open to market manipulation by BTC whales?
	What do you guys think? In my experience, the crypto market, and it was much more prevalent way back in the day, like I could make small trades that would change the market.
	It has very much been open to manipulation, if that's a word you want to use, but people are gaming it essentially like that.
	But as time goes on and it takes more and more money and responsibility to have acquired that kind of money to do it, I think it goes down.
	Well, there is also a general flood or at least a current of money.
	So if the whales are into manipulating the price of Bitcoin and as the market cap of Bitcoin goes north of a trillion, it's going to be progressively harder to influence that even if you've got a thousand or more Bitcoins because, you know, You're just going to be a relatively small blip in the marketplace as a whole.
	But generally, if people are into market manipulation, they will sell their Bitcoins to manipulate the market.
	The Bitcoins will end up in the wallets of people who aren't that much into market manipulation.
	And this is why things tend to stabilize over time.
	Unlike my girlfriend when I was a teenager.
	I think Tesla will start selling cars for crypto.
	Yeah, that's right.
	That's right. I'm just going through the...
	Yeah, go ahead.
	We haven't had an explanation of the Lightning Network, and I understand it reasonably, but I think David might be more knowledgeable than me if he's willing to break that down.
	I think that'd be helpful. If he can keep the lights on, man, I'd be happy to hear it.
	I will do my best on that.
	Keep pedaling, man. Keep pedaling!
	Yeah, so the Lightning Network is a complicated system, but I'll do my best to explain it.
	So from a...
	From a technical standpoint, you're creating a contract with one other person.
	You're setting up a certain amount of money on one side and you're saying you can push some money over to the other person.
	That's called a channel.
	With that person, you can move money back and forth instantly.
	The Lightning Network is just a lot of those nodes hooked together.
	That's about the simplest I can explain that part.
	Yeah, maybe I can supplement that a little bit.
	So the way it's been described in the past is like a spoken wheel system where you have a bunch of these little private channels that are opened up between people.
	So let's say Lewis goes and opens up a lightning channel and he puts like five Bitcoin into it.
	You sign up on one end or the other.
	You guys can transact within that range of Bitcoin and then at some point in the future, when you want to actually resolve those transactions on the blockchain, then it actually gets put into the blockchain.
	So you can have all these little, little transactions going back and forth and then eventually it gets resolved on the actual Bitcoin blockchain.
	So is it like a rain check, basically?
	In a way. In a way, it was cryptographically secure, and there's something backing it along the way.
	Yeah, I think you explained that very well.
	But a user of the Lightning Network, even today, they don't really need to know all those technical details.
	Because if you sign up for something like Breeze, when you install the app, The Breeze Company automatically gives you a channel of incoming liquidity.
	So you can set it up and someone can send you money immediately.
	It takes some time to sink, but within 20-30 minutes, you can start receiving money.
	Somebody points out, there is a way to be private with Bitcoin.
	Satoshi, the originator of State Anonymous, see BitcoinPrivacy.Guide.
	Again, no recommendation, but there are many people not being private with Bitcoin and other coins.
	That's a problem. Be careful.
	I'm half and half. Honestly, I'm half and half about it because the more anonymous it stays, the less institutional it's going to be.
	So you can trade some anonymity for a rise in Bitcoin value.
	So I'm, you know...
	If everybody stayed anonymous, then there would be no institutional buy-in, I think.
	I think both are important.
	You do need transparency, but you also need privacy for not even a government thing necessarily, but just plain privacy and security.
	If you're going to pay your staff in crypto, you don't necessarily want them to see your entire balance and where your inflows and outflows are going.
	The distribution of ownership in Bitcoin is pretty concentrated at the top.
	It's actually less concentrated than you think it is, and you can just do search for articles.
	I've read some recently. Yeah, they're a bunch of whales, but it's not quite as 99.1 as people think.
	So let's see here.
	Satoshi stayed anonymous by dying before spending anything.
	Oh, I don't know. I don't know.
	Nobody knows, right? Nobody knows.
	Stephen is a coward. He won't ever talk to me.
	Maybe I just don't talk to people who insult me.
	Maybe you ever think of that? Just, you know, just a thought.
	Just a thought about how you conduct yourself and whether people want to spend time with you.
	Why won't she go out with me?
	I mean, I yelled that she was a coward for not going out with me.
	It's like, maybe she's just got a brain.
	Anyway. All right.
	Any last thoughts before we close up?
	Anybody want a yearning burning?
	Let me just check our chatty chat here and see.
	Hey, remember when my voice was deep?
	That was cool. Now apparently I've just got all squeaky.
	Anybody? Anything people want to add before we close for the night?
	And thanks. Obviously, thank you enormously, everyone, for dropping by and the questions and comments are fantastic.
	Just thank you for hosting everything and everybody that showed up and all the questions that came in.
	Yeah, great questions. Great questions.
	Really, really appreciate that from everyone.
	So again, not investment advice, but just a bunch of guys talking about stuff.
	But yeah, study it yourself.
	Learn about it yourself.
	I think that's all really, really important.
	And yes.
	Thank you, everyone, so much for dropping by.
	Have yourselves a great, great evening.
	Let me just, you know, say some words here while I try to remember how to close this thing off in some sort of graceful fashion.
	I have had a lot of complaints that my last facial expression tends to be rather random and weird.
	Whenever I close these things off, I can pretty much confirm.
	Anytime you pause my videos, I either look angry or I look stoned.
	There's really nothing in between. That is just that you can test it, man.
	You can test it.
	It's my inner self coming out.
	Yeah, thanks everyone so much.
	Have a great evening. We'll try and set this up.
	I don't know if we can do a regular thing or we're still trying to see who wants to come in and get a bunch of people who say I want in.
	So I've sent out those invites.
	Really, really appreciate it.
	Have a great rest of the week and we'll talk to you soon.

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