Feb. 23, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
08:33
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| Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux. | |
| I'm the host of Free Domain, which is the world's largest and most popular philosophy show, and I just want to break down what I think is going on In the world of Bitcoin at the moment, because some of you might be feeling a little jumpy about this kind of stuff, and I'm here to put it in some larger economic perspective. | |
| This is not advice of any kind, it's just my thoughts, but here we go. | |
| So first of all, you want to think of Bitcoin in the long run as measuring itself not relative to the US dollar, but rather in fact measuring itself relative to goods and services directly. | |
| Saying that Bitcoin has value because it's worth more US dollars is like saying you have value because you have a stalker. | |
| Somebody who's deranged and crazy and attached to you for some obscure psychological reasons doesn't make you a more attractive person. | |
| It just means you're kind of the victim of a stalker. | |
| While I appreciate the fact that Bitcoin has gone up in value relative to U.S. dollars, it's not the fundamental or final measure. | |
| So that's an important thing to understand. | |
| The second thing to understand about Bitcoin volatility buying and selling is that for an asset to fundamentally appreciate in value, you need two things. | |
| The first thing you need is people who are willing to sell it, and the second thing you need is people who are willing to hold it. | |
| In other words, if everybody says, At, say, 40k US, everybody says, oh, that's it. | |
| It's the highest it can go. I'm going to sell. | |
| Then the whole thing crashes and goes very low. | |
| So you need people who are willing to hold it, what they call diamond hands. | |
| You've got the thing and you're willing to hold it. | |
| And you also have people who are willing to sell it. | |
| If everybody holds it and nobody sells it, then there's no market for it. | |
| People can't buy it. | |
| They lose interest in the asset and then its price is going to decline because it's this view. | |
| Like, if you knew that there was a woman who never went out with anyone Who never dated anyone, a nun or something like that, would you ask her out? | |
| Well, of course not, right? On the other hand, if you know a woman who will go out with just about anybody with a pulse, will you ask her out? | |
| Probably not. Because there's not enough antibiotics in the world to survive that date. | |
| So, that's an important thing to understand. | |
| You need the holders and you need the sellers. | |
| Now, the holders are going to drive the core value and 60% of Bitcoins have not moved at all over the last 12 months, which during a massive rise in price is pretty unprecedented and very cool. | |
| So, you need people who are going to hold and then you need people who are going to sell. | |
| And the people who are going to sell are going to really help out Because they are making a market of the purchase and sale of Bitcoins, and the holders, I think, are going to do well in the long run. | |
| As I've said for many, many years, I've been talking about this stuff since 2011, I always have thought about 700k US for a Bitcoin. | |
| That's Pure nonsense, of course. | |
| It's just my particular perspective and thought. | |
| So the fact that the price is going up and down, the fact that there are big movements of Bitcoin is a wonderful thing. | |
| It means that there's a market. | |
| The fact that most people are holding is what is driving up the price of that. | |
| So I want to give you a tiny analogy here, and you can do with it what you will, but it's something that came to me this morning. | |
| Think that you are a complete alpha female. | |
| You're the perfect alpha female. | |
| You know, smart, intelligent, philosophical, liberty-minded, and incisive, and funny, and you've got a great figure, and a great face, and great hair. | |
| Like, you're just the perfect model. | |
| What is it that you would want to do? | |
| Well, you'd want to make yourself as attractive as possible because you want to land, as an alpha female, you want to land the alpha male, right? | |
| You want to land a guy who's, you know, smart, intelligent, funny, wise, good-looking, successful, whatever it is that the standards are, you know, pretty top of the field in just about everything you can think of. | |
| So what are you going to do if you're a woman in possession of the perfect package? | |
| You are going to spend a certain amount of time just making yourself more attractive. | |
| You might hit the gym, you might, I don't know, facial regimens, get your teeth polished, whatever it is you're going to do to make yourself as attractive as possible. | |
| And that, of course, is Bitcoin going through all of the process of Making itself market-friendly, making itself easier to use, making itself a little bit technically less opaque and going through all the struggles of which fork is going to be the valid one and how it's going to grow that way. | |
| So there's the preparation. | |
| Then what you have to do is you have to put yourself out there. | |
| You have to go out there and you have to be in a situation where you are going to... | |
| Meet your potential mate, right? | |
| And that, of course, is people evangelizing Bitcoin, bringing it to general acceptance, making it less confusing to people and all of that. | |
| And then what you're going to do is you're going to allow yourself to be asked out by some men that you don't intend to marry because you want some dating experience. | |
| You don't want to be perceived as somebody who's completely anti-dating and totally frigid and you don't want to meet your alpha male with no dating experience whatsoever because you might seem kind of awkward. | |
| So you'll go out with men, not too many, and you probably won't even sleep with them, but you'll go out with men for a little while just so people know that you're available to date. | |
| Now, you won't go out with very low-status men because that would signal to the alpha that you have two lower standards and you're probably not very stable, don't understand your own self-worth and so on, but you'll go out with a couple of guys. | |
| Now, going out with a couple of guys while retaining Your core allegiance to the long-term marriage is Bitcoin and its price fluctuations right now. | |
| Because what's happening is, you know, the paper hands are people who buy and sell really rapidly. | |
| The diamond hands are the people who hold on to the asset, hold on to the value. | |
| So what's happening right now is Bitcoin is changing hands until it finds a diamond holder, right? | |
| Somebody who's just going to hold on to that value until it goes up to whatever that person thinks it's going to go up to. | |
| So this is the woman dating around and what's happening is at some point she's going to meet the alpha and she's going to fully commit to that guy. | |
| She's going to stop dating all the other guys and... | |
| The goal is, of course, that they live happily ever after, which if their union is based upon a profound sense of self-worth and self-value, it probably will. | |
| If it's based on a we-look-good-together vanity, it probably won't. | |
| But let's go with the former. It's nice to think that that's the way the story plays out. | |
| So with regards to Bitcoin, yeah, there's going to be price fluctuations because people are in there to buy and sell. | |
| Like the woman's dating guy, she's not going to settle down with. | |
| She's just testing the waters. | |
| She's getting some experience. | |
| She's not planning on committing it to it. | |
| So there's some people buying Bitcoin. | |
| When it goes up, then they sell Bitcoin. | |
| And over time, Bitcoin will accumulate, I believe, towards the diamond hands. | |
| It goes from paper hands to diamond hands. | |
| It goes from the inconstant speculators to the long-term investors. | |
| And eventually... | |
| I mean, it won't kill the market because, again, the more the market goes up, the more people are going to want to dip in and out to make some money in the short run, which, you know, is totally fine. | |
| It's totally fine. But in the long run, Bitcoin, I believe, is going to accumulate more towards those who hold it long term because the consummation of Bitcoin is when Bitcoin starts getting valued relative to goods and services. | |
| Like there's a couple of bars in New York City that are for sale for 25 Bitcoins. | |
| So once you start to think of, oh, a house is 20 bitcoins. | |
| A car is half a bitcoin. | |
| Once you start thinking, that's the holy grail. | |
| That's where bitcoin just goes totally mainstream and has the chance to do its greatest good, which is to displace fiat currency. | |
| When you start thinking of bitcoin, In terms of goods and services, rather than from Bitcoin to fiat to goods and services, that's when the true marriage will begin to appear. | |
| Because Bitcoin relative to goods and services is going to be a whole lot more stable than Bitcoin relative to fiat. | |
| Because fiat is just being money printed like a fire hose at the moment. | |
| So there's a lot of instability. | |
| Because fiat is tied to politics and American politics are going through such a wrenching leftward change at the moment. | |
| There's just going to be a lot of instability. | |
| So I think it's really, really important to understand what, in my view, in my just particular opinion, and I'm not showing you any graphs or any charts here. | |
| Here's my particular opinion. You do want the buying and selling. | |
| You do want the short-term price volatility at the moment because that creates the market. | |
| But you do want Bitcoin to drift towards the people who are going to hold it until it starts getting priced in more mainstream outlets. | |
| It starts getting priced relative to actual Goods and services. | |
| You know, at which point you can probably pick up an entire congressperson for three satoshis. | |
| Ooh, there's an inside joke for you. | |
| Freedomain.com. Thanks so much for listening. |
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