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March 1, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:20:11

BITCOIN GOES MAINSTREAM!

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	Alright, look at that.
	After doing live streaming for many years, I finally got the hang of transitions.
	And look, do you know how serious this is?
	Let me tell you how serious this is, what I'm talking about today.
	It's so serious, I've gone full, risky business, Tom Cruise, sans sunglasses, and hair, and youth.
	But I have a collar on.
	That's how serious this stuff is.
	This how serious this stuff is.
	Serious is whatever the opposite is of a heart attack.
	Do you think this factless government will go ahead with the immunity passport garbage?
	Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's the case.
	It's a treasure chest. Gab got hacked and the hacker opened a Twitter account.
	Sounds like a CIA or FBI job to me.
	I don't know. Yeah, Twitter did get hacked.
	And just, you know, everything you do, never assume it's private.
	Anything on the internet, never assume it's private.
	So, June 1, 2011 was the first time Steph titled a podcast with Bitcoin almost 10 years ago.
	Yeah, and I was talking about it before that.
	Your work in negotiation helped me get a promotion to manager.
	Thanks, Steph. You are very welcome.
	I'm glad it helped.
	Philosophy can be its own reward sometimes.
	All right. So...
	Let's go through this.
	Let's go through this. This is going to take a while.
	Just so you know, this is not a short report.
	But you know, here's what I was thinking.
	I was thinking, I love you guys so much.
	And if I'm going to read through this anyway, because this is a big deal.
	Citi coming out with a Bitcoin potential white paper and a big, long, juicy one.
	That's a very big deal.
	That's a very big deal when it comes to mainstream acceptance.
	So... Alright, let's go through this.
	Yeah, and if you guys have questions or comments, I've got it right here as well.
	So, look at me.
	This is a format I used to do many years ago.
	And Tim Poole does it now?
	I should have a beanie.
	Alright, so a bunch of guys and men and women.
	Okay, so first of all, The fact that this came out right after, what is it, $1.7 trillion bailout monster spending mad happy package of infinite helicopter cash comes out of the Biden administration.
	So this is important.
	Steph is sponsored by Citi.
	I do not think that I am, in fact, sponsored by Citi.
	The first Citi GPS venture into digital currency was back in 2014.
	We featured an article in our second disruptive innovations report.
	Although we discussed Bitcoin, we did so with the caveat that it was a branded digital currency in a freely available generic Bitcoin technology, but there was the potential that a non-Bitcoin alternative digital currency would one day supplant it.
	In May 2014, when we published the report, Bitcoin was just five years old with a market value of around 6.2 billion dollars.
	Now, when you have a market value of about $6.2 billion, the idea that something is just wildly speculative or the idea that something else is going to take it over, you know, there's this lie that Betamax is better than VHS, but VHS just had better marketing.
	Somehow that better technology just gets supplanted by better marketing.
	No, that's not true. That's not the way things generally work.
	So we wrote that Bitcoin was familiar, and welcome to younger generations, and although older investors may have heard the word, they were generally less familiar with it and more skeptical.
	Very true. Very true.
	Let's get to the right zoom here.
	We recognized that there was very little Bitcoin activity among institutional investors in organized financial markets, as it was considered, quote, far too risky and volatile.
	In the end, we still assessed Bitcoin as a wannabe asset and a wannabe means of transaction, and lamented that although you could have a lot of Bitcoin, there wasn't much to do with it.
	See, when a business is in an R&D phase, and you can look at Bitcoin up until fairly recently as being in the R&D phase, when a business is in the R&D phase, of course it's not going to have a lot of sales.
	Of course it's not going to have a lot of sales.
	You know, when Bill Gates was half-pillaging DOS from whoever wrote it, there wasn't a lot of DOS sales.
	So the idea that something's gathering strength, and although you couldn't do much with something, it still has a market value of around $6.2 billion.
	That is a pretty big one, right?
	That's a pretty big one. And the idea, of course, here's what's happening as well, just so you get this tipping point, right?
	Bitcoin is far too risky and volatile.
	And now that... Phrase is now, in people's minds, shifting to include things like the US dollar, fiat currency as a whole, and the amount of debt that has accumulated.
	And remember, Trump was no fiscal conservative, man.
	Trump spent, you know, like a drunken sailor high on...
	I mean, Trump was a mad, mad spender.
	And, you know, some of that was outside of his control, of course, because it was mandated spending that's really, really hard to overturn.
	But, yeah, so the national debt, and they've just printed more money than sits in the Fed just over the last week.
	So it's quite mad, right? So, it takes a new product a while to become used by global customers.
	It took the telephone 50 years to reach 50 million customers.
	This took 22 years for television, 7 years for the internet, and just 19 days for Pokemon Go.
	You know, because human beings, well, you know, they have their priorities, man.
	Pokemon Go, really, really important.
	So, the uptake of Bitcoin in the past almost 7 years has been nothing short of extraordinary.
	So, it hit a trillion in market cap in February 2021, which, you know, from 6.5 billion is, well, it's huge, right?
	It's huge. So, there's a whole ecosystem around crypto, and you need that ecosystem.
	Like there's not much point having an airplane if there aren't any airports, you know, or refueling stations that will deal with airplanes or mechanics like that.
	To have a new piece of technology, to have a new thing, you've got to have a whole ecosystem around it.
	So now there's crypto exchanges, crypto banks, and new offerings into savings, lending, and borrowing.
	And Visa will, in fact, give you a card now that rewards you in crypto.
	It's really, really quite a bit.
	So in the report that follows the author's note, the biggest change with Bitcoin is the shift from it being primarily a retail-focused endeavor to something that looks attractive for institutional investors.
	In a search for yield and alternative assets, investors are drawn to Bitcoin's inflation-hedging properties and it is recognized as a source of digital gold due to its finite supply.
	Now, you know, when you see the phrase digital gold, you understand that people are trying to sell stuff to boomers who don't understand Bitcoin.
	So they'll say, well, it's digital gold.
	And the idea that Bitcoin and gold have the same kind of finite supply is complete nonsense.
	It's complete nonsense.
	Gold is not finite, effectively, for the economy because you can always get more.
	There's probably going to be some ways of making more at some point.
	And of course, as soon as we break out of statist space programs, then capitalists will go to the asteroid belt and get tons of gold.
	And so, no. And of course, gold can get recycled, right?
	I mean, there's a whole bunch of gold that sits in, you know, grandmother's jewelry box and doesn't get sold until the price of gold goes up.
	So it's really not like gold.
	But of course, you've got to say it's digital gold as a way of saying, like, the internet is like, it's a digital book.
	And of course, a book and a digital book are not the same thing at all, other than in terms of content.
	So, specific enhancements to exchanges, trading data, and custody services are increasing and being revamped to accommodate the requirements of institutional investors.
	Now, a lot of this has to do with trying to keep the Bitcoin safer from, we'll get into this, the big hacks that occurred some time back ago.
	Now, hacks, of course, drove a lot of institutional investors away from Bitcoin.
	M.T. Gox and all that stuff, right?
	And Bitcoins were lost. Bitcoins were stolen in varieties of exchanges.
	But what that did, of course, was among the more intelligent.
	I assume this group is in that category.
	What it did, it said, oh man, people have put a lot of effort into stealing this thing.
	Maybe it has some value, right?
	So that's important, right?
	So where could Bitcoin be in another seven or so years?
	This report notes the advantage of Bitcoin in global payments, including its decentralized design, lack of foreign exchange exposure, fast and potentially cheaper money movements, secure payment channels and traceability.
	These attributes combined with Bitcoin's global reach and neutrality could spur it to become the currency of choice for international trade.
	Now, this is the phrase that I wanted to mention.
	The currency of choice for international trade.
	I've mentioned this a whole bunch of times.
	I wish I could get rid of this stupid thing.
	Can I move it out of the way? No.
	Can I have it not highlight?
	No. All right. Currency of choice for international trade.
	Now, the business...
	I've mentioned this a bunch of times if you're new.
	The business-to-business market is vastly bigger than the business-to-consumer market, and a lot of times the international market is bigger than the domestic market for a lot of countries, right?
	Right. So, if it becomes a currency of choice for international trade, thus supplanting the reserve currency status of the U.S. dollar, I mean, you're talking million-dollar Bitcoins, in my humble opinion, right?
	There are a host of risks and obstacles that stand in the way of Bitcoin progress, blah, blah, blah.
	Okay, so this is what they wanted to talk about.
	So, let's see here.
	Okay, growing levels of adoption.
	That's kind of important, right?
	We'll just... So Bitcoin initially drew interest from owners for its underlying technology and social value proposition, plus its financial potential.
	So, no. I would say this is not particularly the case.
	Now, you know, these guys have their expertise.
	I'm just talking... Underlying technology?
	No. Nobody buys stuff for underlying technology.
	It's the utility that the technology can provide.
	Social value proposition?
	I don't know what that means.
	Financial potential? Meh.
	What they're not talking about...
	So, as it has matured, attention has shifted to the business case around Bitcoin.
	It's expanding utilization and the growing commerce ecosystem around cryptocurrencies.
	So, yes, now they do get a little bit into a hedge against inflation, which is the big thing.
	Bonds are underperforming. People are recognizing that when you've got, I think, someplace in Eastern Canada, 70, 75-year bonds, it's not going to be particularly valuable.
	Once you get Biden into office, this is sort of the big question, right?
	Like, if you hold Bitcoin, if you wanted Trump to get in, and Trump wouldn't have driven this kind of rise in Bitcoin, he just wouldn't have.
	And so now that Biden is opening borders and coronavirus lockdowns, even though they lack scientific basis, are looking to be pretty permanent.
	You know, remember 20 years ago, some guy tried to light his shoe on an airplane and 20 years later, you still have to take your shoes off at the airport, even though he failed?
	Well, same thing with masks, same thing.
	It's a lot easier to scare people than have them get over their fear.
	So... That's it.
	So, here we go.
	36% of small to medium businesses in the U.S. accepting Bitcoin in 2020.
	Now, that's way higher than I would have thought it would have been.
	That is a lot higher.
	536 million, so plus 55% Bitcoin monthly trading volumes in South Africa and Nigeria in August 2020.
	So, you know, there's an old story about cell phones, which is, why would you bother putting in landlines if you have cell phones?
	Or why would you bother putting in...
	I don't know, dry loopback DSL lines if you've got cable, or why would you bother putting in cable if Elon Musk's satellite internet is going to work and all that stuff, right?
	So, that is...
	If you go to sort of what I call the third world, developing nations and so on, they are going to vault over a lot of this stuff.
	They're going to vault over a lot of traditional development of old-style economic entities and organizations, and they're going to go straight to cryptos, right?
	20 billion dollars per day, Bitcoin OTC, trading volumes in early 2020.
	So, you look at this, right?
	Crypto exchange volumes in the first three weeks of 2021, right?
	So, 20 billion dollars per day, early 2020, 500 billion three weeks, 2021, twice the volumes of 2017 to 2018.
	So, here's some interesting charts.
	Ownership of Bitcoin is primarily retail, but institutions are increasingly interested.
	So, retail, yellow, business and institutional clients, white, and unknown.
	Hey, they've got a typo here.
	Uncone. Uncone.
	So, as you can see here, we've got North America, Europe, Latin America, MENA, and APAC. And...
	The institutions, yeah, they're starting to really dig up there, right?
	So, that's pretty important.
	Now, let's go over to the other side.
	Never forget the right.
	So, institutional interest in Bitcoin.
	So, the intersection of low yields and inflationary expectations has increasingly fostered the institutional investor view that Bitcoin could represent an inflation hedge, a portfolio diversifier, and a safe haven not currently offered by traditional government bonds.
	Now, this sounds like really dry and boring, but that's a huge deal.
	When you want security, people would go to government bonds, people would go to GICs, and they would go to gold.
	And gold has completely underperformed relative to Bitcoin.
	And it would have done better had it not been for Bitcoin, I think, to some degree.
	And so if hyperinflation due to money printing or significant inflation due to money printing is going to occur, then traditional government bonds are going to be a bad investment, right?
	Somebody's saying here, even the lower middle class in Pakistan are buying Bitcoin even though it's illegal to own it.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Yeah. I know somebody got a Nigerian scan for Bitcoin.
	They said they would multiply their Bitcoin.
	Yeah, well, yeah, don't fall for that stuff, obviously, right?
	So, a government bond that pays a couple of percent, if people are expecting inflation to hit, then what you get paid off is worth much less than what you've invested.
	So, people are looking for a hedge against...
	This kind of inflation.
	Now, because so many countries...
	So, to put it really briefly, mass migration leads to money printing, because the only way that mass migration can be perceived as beneficial to the general population, or at least not a huge negative, is if there's massive amounts of money printing.
	So, when you have in the U.S. immigrants about 70-75% of them ending up on welfare...
	Well, people will then push back against mass migration if the bill comes due in the moment, in the same way that people would want drugs legalized if they themselves personally had to pay the bill for all of this useless incarceration.
	So you have now in the US about a quarter of people's household income dependent on direct government payments.
	And that's about a quarter of households survive on direct government payments, and that's a giant mess.
	And, of course, if there's interruptions in those giant government payments, what happens?
	Well, you're going to get riots, and cities are going to burn, and supply chains are going to get disrupted, and the economy is going to take a giant hammer blow.
	So people are looking for a hedge against inflation, but they're also looking for portability.
	And gold is a traditional hedge against inflation, but it's not portable very.
	I mean, you can carry it around, but it's kind of rough, right?
	Indications of increased institutional activity in Bitcoin include open interest in CME's Bitcoin futures, a benchmark for institutional activity surged by over 250% between October 2020 and January 2021.
	The holding period for Bitcoin has increased with 10% of Bitcoin now being held for five years or longer.
	So that's important as well, right?
	That's important as well.
	So, the more that people are going to hold, or hodl, yodel, but the more that people are going to hold, the more the institutional investment is going to be.
	Because if you offer someone a lot of money for something, which is kind of what's happening at the moment in Bitcoin, is that people are being offered a crazy amount of money for their Bitcoins, right?
	I mean, as I said, it just went 24 hours, it just went up almost 12% or 6%.
	$6,600 Canadian.
	So people are being offered a lot of money for their Bitcoin.
	And if they're not selling, that means that, I mean, that's a way of going long Bitcoin.
	If you're not selling now, it's because you expect the price to go up.
	So the more that people hold on to their Bitcoins, obviously the higher the price is going to go up.
	That's a supply and demand thing.
	The girl who won't go out with you, you probably think is the best girl around, possibly, right?
	So that's kind of an important thing to remember.
	All right. The number of blockchain addresses holding 1,000 or more Bitcoin has increased steadily, and that's probably due to consolidation from institutional investors, right?
	Okay, so let's keep chugging along here.
	Okay, so let's...
	Hipster Stefan liked Bitcoin before it went mainstream.
	Oh, you've got to give me a bit more credit than that, right?
	I mean, before it went mainstream.
	Ah, my goodness.
	All right.
	How did I make more millionaires than Howie Mandel?
	Okay, mapping the future of Bitcoin.
	Perceptions about what makes Bitcoin important continue to evolve and create new opportunities, while increasing its perception towards becoming mainstream.
	A focus on global reach and neutrality could see Bitcoin become an international trade currency.
	This would take advantage of Bitcoin's decentralized and borderless design, lack of foreign exchange exposure, its speed and cost advantage in moving money, the security of the payments traceability.
	So, for instance, if you look at how George Soros got his money, it was a lot to do with leveraging Different values of different currencies.
	Well, you can't really do that with Bitcoin, because there's no foreign currency exposure, right?
	Foreign exchange exposure, which means some people can monetize their debt, and of course a lot of governments are expected to monetize their debt, to just print money, because they can't pay their bills, and so that's going to make foreign exchange very complicated, and Bitcoin takes most of that out of the equation, right?
	Obstacles remain! Yes, well, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Alright, the entrance of institutional investors to spark confidence in crypto.
	Still persistent issues could limit widespread adoption.
	These include concerns of a capital efficiency, insurance and custody, security, and ESG considerations from Bitcoin mining.
	I don't know what ESG considerations means, so if you guys know, just let me know.
	Security issues with crypto do occur, but when compared to traditional payments, it performs better.
	All right, so what have we got here?
	Illicit activity. Okay, so let's see.
	This is worth talking about, right? As percent of total cryptocurrency transfer value, we have illicit activity of 0.34%.
	2020. Now that's down considerably from 2019 when it was 2.13% and So, that's down considerably.
	So, 0.34%.
	Now, this is part of sort of what I've talked about in the past.
	And this is an institutional.
	So, these institutions are going to give you some pretty mainstream cheeseburger and fries approaches to your meals.
	But it's important to understand that they don't see the world the way that it is, right?
	And, you know, all due respect to Citi, I'm glad that they wrote this and good for them.
	But you guys are still pretty neck deep in the matrix, right?
	Because if you look at...
	Okay, well, 0.34% of cryptocurrency was used for illicit purposes.
	That sounds bad, right?
	Okay. Well, compared to this as a percentage of aggregate credit and debit card network 2016, 13.46% as percentage of transactions in depository institutions 2016, we got 4.38%.
	So, it's far lower.
	And you can just use this, right?
	It's far lower than other forms.
	And of course, that's still pretty mainstream.
	But where the real red pill is, my good friends at Citi, is that war is reliant on fiat currency.
	The total war of the 20th century was entirely involved with money printing.
	So money printing is responsible, foundationally responsible, for slaughtering about a quarter of a billion people outside of war.
	In the 20th century alone.
	It's called democide, right?
	So fiat currency allows you to wage war in a way that Bitcoin or gold simply wouldn't allow you.
	Like, what was the slaughterhouse of the First World War?
	Well, you know, the first thing that, in the First World War, everybody was signing up in the fall thinking, oh gosh, I hope it's not over by Christmas, and it dragged on for like, what, four and a half years or something, right?
	Cost 10 million lives, destroyed almost all the value that had been generated from the Industrial Revolution.
	And the first thing that these governments did when the war dragged on and on was they got off the gold standard and went straight to fiat currency, birth of central banking.
	Central banking then produced the massive bubble of the 1920s, the 13-year-plus depression, Great Depression of the 1930s, culminating in the Second World War.
	So 40 million people slaughtered in the Second World War.
	All of this is the result of fiat currency.
	So the idea that, oh my gosh, there's crime that occurs.
	And of course, what is this crime that is occurring?
	Is it people voluntarily getting together to buy and sell drugs?
	Well, listen, I don't like drugs.
	I've never taken drugs. I don't believe that they should be illegal.
	It's not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	Too half-poisoned yourself.
	It's a voluntary transaction with no complainant involved, so drugs should be legal as they used to be.
	So, if you take that out of it, if you take out people hiding from tax burdens and so on, which I don't recommend, but it certainly happens, well, if you take all of that down and you jack up fiat currency crimes against humanity, which is, let's not mention, let's not also forget intergenerational debt that fiat currency is dependent on, you can't get intergenerational debt.
	Based upon Bitcoin, you know, just about everything I do is founded on the better treatment of children and Bitcoin demands the better treatment of children because you can't laden them with a million dollars of debt just for daring to take their first breath in a banks-to-run fiat currency universe.
	So, yeah, throw war in, a quarter of a billion people murdered, and that's outside of war, and throw national debt in and so on.
	So the idea that fiat currency doesn't facilitate crime.
	Fiat currency is crime.
	So I'll go with that.
	All right. So I assume you don't really want too much of a history, so we'll skip over some of this, right?
	But it's important to understand the mainstream view of Bitcoin, right?
	So, for an innovative asset just over a decade old, Bitcoin has already amassed a fairly storied history.
	This is the mystery. There is the mystery of its founder, the anti-establishment creed of the cyberpunk movement that spawned it, cypherpunk movements, all right, lingering suspicions that it is used in illicit activities, a multi-million dollar pizza transaction, and its notorious volatility with not just one, but three distinct speculative bull runs, two of which resulted in equally dramatic collapses, and a third of which is currently underway.
	And yes, it always dips and then it rises again.
	That's what you want, right? Large swaths of the traditional banking and financial markets view Bitcoin as a completely valueless asset.
	Noel Rubini, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, recently called it a self-fulfilling bubble and claimed that the Stone Age cartoon family, the Flintstones, had a better monetary system.
	I don't know, if it's a man or a woman, it doesn't really matter, but it just shows you just how ridiculous people are.
	Flintstones had a better monetary system, what, than Bitcoin or fiat?
	Because, you know, giving power-mad sociopaths the right to type whatever they want into their own bank account, and the idea that that's a good monetary system?
	Good lord. The novelty of the blockchain technology underpinning the Bitcoin Payment System Network has been hailed as a breakthrough, and a growing ecosystem of applications and use cases are emerging to validate its importance and utility, right?
	So here's a couple of them, right?
	Censorship-resistant store of value.
	Now, this is the first time that they've talked about this.
	Really important, right? Censorship-resistant.
	Obviously, quite important to me and, you know, Laura Luma and other people who've been deplatformed.
	So censorship-resistant store of value.
	As cancel culture begins to take down the best and the brightest in society, because cancel culture, as you understand, is a complete confession of intellectual impotence, of not being able to answer someone's argument.
	If you want to answer people's argument, then...
	Or if you're confident that you want the truth, you want to engage with people.
	I've had... Countless debates over the course of 16 years doing this.
	Now, can you imagine if...
	You know, I have a whole theory of ethics.
	It's a great theory of ethics, so you can get the book for free at freedomain.com slash books.
	It's called Universally Preferable Behavior.
	Now, can you imagine if I hired people to...
	Plant drugs on people who criticize my theory of ethics and make sure they got fired and deplatformed.
	Can you imagine that? I mean, would that be a violation of any theory of ethics to do that?
	And can you imagine how insecure I would be?
	Instead, I'm like, yeah, come debate me.
	I've had tons of debates on UPB. So, cancel culture is a complete...
	Confession of intellectual impotence, and it starts with cancelling, and it ends with outright violence.
	Actually, technically, it ends with genocide, but that's something I've talked about before.
	So censorship-resistant store of value is really, really important, and I would say that is...
	The essence of things. There were nearly 12,000 Bitcoin ATMs deployed by the end of 2020.
	A new Visa credit card allows users to earn Bitcoin as rewards, and more companies are beginning to accept Bitcoin payments, including one that lets you pay for your next space voyage in Bitcoin.
	Bitcoin's engineered approach to ensuring digital scarcity is also prompting many experienced investors to compare it to digital gold.
	Source code of the Bitcoin network only allows for the creation of 21 million Bitcoins, of which 18.6 million are already in circulation, and somewhere between, it's hard to know for sure, 10% and 20% are lost.
	So, you know, even if you just look at 10% lost, right?
	So, out of 21 million Bitcoins, that's 2.1 million that are lost, right?
	So, that brings you below 19 million is the max, right?
	So, the complexity of mining Bitcoin becomes increasingly more difficult.
	So, it slows down, obviously, right?
	So, these involving views of Bitcoin are being facilitated by an ecosystem that is increasingly becoming professionalized.
	Bitcoin holders can have interest on their balances, loan their coins, and even borrow against them.
	Cryptocurrency exchanges that were vulnerable to technology disruptions and liquidity concerns in 2017 rally have become far more secure, can stream their prices via application programming interfaces, have introduced a broad set of risk and analytical tools.
	And offer specialized algorithms to improve execution.
	Sorry, let's just zoom in a bit here if we can.
	There we go. That was a little better, right?
	Sorry if you're watching this on a phone, but you can always read along, right?
	Over-the-counter trading deaths are facilitating larger order sizes and derivatives are gaining open interest.
	That is true. That is true.
	So prime brokerage offerings are providing best execution services and margin financing, while third-party custody solutions are creating viable options for safekeeping and are obtaining insurance to protect against loss and theft of assets.
	Kind of important. Regulators are starting to offer guidance and in some jurisdictions register and license cryptocurrency participants.
	Now, I know that this bugs people say, well, it should be unlicensed, it should be unregulated.
	Yeah, I'm not a fan of the state, obviously, as everybody knows.
	But here's the thing, you want to start creating an ecosystem of people who profit from Bitcoin, and this bureaucracy is just one of them, so that you have a block against any type of ban, right?
	So, um, decentralized applications are being created and experimenting with new approaches to governance, asset creation, peer-to-peer transactions, and algorithmically designed servicing.
	Now, again, this, they should explain this stuff a little bit better.
	Decentralized finance, Daffy space is surging, total value locked in these de-apps increasing 20-fold from 10 billion in January 2020 to 10 billion by year end.
	Wait, 1 billion to 10 billion, uh, How is that 20 times?
	What am I missing here? It looks like 10 times to me, but anyway.
	To these businesses, Bitcoin is the North Star that points the way and its success is seen as a barometer of interest in the overall on-chain ecosystem.
	Sure. So Bitcoin is the icebreaker, right?
	It powers through and then other people can go in its wake for more specialized things like Ethereum with its contracts and all that, right?
	It's going to be a very big deal going forward, right?
	If you look at the legal fees of enforcing international contracts, it's truly staggering because the lawyers who focus on international contracts are few and far between, very expensive, very specialized, and if you can get programmers to create templates for international or domestic contracts, say on the Ethereum network, that bypasses the need for lawyers and also bypasses the need.
	Because here's the thing, so lawyers are one thing, but if you have a problem With an international contract or a complex domestic contract, then, I mean, you've got to try and go and use the legal system.
	And my gosh, I mean, I remember a trader churning my account many years ago.
	And I ended up going to arbitration because when I wanted to go to the courts, I was told it would cost a quarter million dollars and would take about 10 years.
	So, courts are beyond the reach.
	Courts are used for intimidating people.
	What is it? 15 million lawsuits filed every year in the U.S. and 95% of them against wealthy people.
	It's a shakedown. It's a way of intimidating and threatening people.
	But if you have tertiary contractual obligations that can be fulfilled programmatically, that is email versus the post office.
	So, it's a huge, huge deal.
	Just got here. What did I miss?
	Yes, let me interrupt everyone's listening to get a recap because I showed up late.
	That's kind of funny. All right.
	So, moving money between traditional fiat currency-based economy and this emerging on-chain landscape has been difficult, relying on traditional payment rails and networks that often place limits on the extent of user activity.
	Stablecoins are in your offering, promoting a more efficient mechanism that acts as on and off ramps between the two domains.
	All right. Fiat currency stablecoins are collateralized vehicles that can be used to move large sums of money from the off-chain onto the on-chain ecosystem and allow those coins to circulate like any other cryptocurrency within blockchain-based ledgers and digital wallets.
	These coins are effective for use within public network blockchains, a template for private networks.
	Okay, so they're talking about tertiary stuff here.
	I wanted to get on to the Bitcoin, right?
	Oh, yes, a scenario, right?
	If these efforts progress to the actual issuance of central bank back to digital currency, blockchain would become a mainstream offering.
	Now, so, sorry, they wanted to mention here, a January 2021 study of 60 central banks by the Bank of International Settlements found that 86% indicated they were engaged in some work on central bank digital currencies, and 60% were either running experiments or proofs of concept.
	If these efforts progressed to the actual issuance of central bank-backed digital currency, blockchain would become a mainstream offering.
	Individuals and businesses would have digital wallets holding a variety of cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and CBDCs just like they have today, checking savings and treasury accounts.
	Now, I think that is pretty wild stuff.
	That is pretty wild stuff.
	I don't believe that central bank digital currencies will ever take off, but what they will do is they will normalize blockchains, and then you'll have a central bank digital wallet, which then will allow you to transfer stuff more easily between that and the real crypto, which is Bitcoin at the moment.
	So, I think it's great.
	So, in this scenario, Bitcoin may be optionally positioned to become the preferred currency for global trade.
	It is immune from both fiscal and monetary policy.
	So this is really important. Fiscal and monetary policy.
	So it's kind of well known that the Federal Reserve, if they don't like a particular president, will kind of wreck the economy before that president gets elected.
	If they like a particular president, they will try and boost the economy before he gets elected.
	So it's really politically based.
	Keeping interest rates low is very good to promote an economic boom.
	You know, like smoking is really good at promoting growth of tissue in your lungs.
	And so fiscal and monetary policy is so, you know, I made this case years ago that you couldn't really get physics in the age of miracles, right?
	So physics is the idea, or the science of physics, the discipline of physics is the idea that there's no miracles, that matter and energy and their properties are stable and objective.
	Now, once you have an economy that's run by Fiat means like arbitrary rule from above as well as fiat currency, right?
	But when you have it that it's run by violent people or people who promote violence in order to pursue particular political agendas, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Well, there's no such thing as economics because it's like saying that there's the physics of your dreams or your dreams are like subjective and you can fly and walk through walls of fire and so on, right?
	And so you can't have a physics of dreams.
	It's one of the reasons we know that dreams aren't real.
	They're not objective and universal.
	And so the economy is like a mad fever dream run by power-hungry bureaucrats, banksters, and sociopaths.
	But I repeat myself. And so there is no such thing as economics in fiat currency environments.
	There is such a thing as economics in the realm of Bitcoin.
	So, because it's subjective and immune from fiscal and monetary policy, which is really important.
	Avoids the need for cross-border foreign exchange transactions, enables near instantaneous payments, and eliminates concerns about defaults or cancellations, as the coins must be in the payer's wallet before the transaction is initiated.
	That's great too, right?
	I mean, you send someone a good and you expect them to pay next week, and they don't, and they're in Malaysia, and you're in North America, good luck, right?
	But Bitcoin deals with all of that.
	Okay, the path we described for Bitcoin is possible, it's by no means assured.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, got it. And by the way, none of this is from, Sidney says this, I'll say this too, none of this is financial advice, don't make any decisions based on what I'm saying here, it's just a kind of analysis of what's going on, right?
	So, Bitcoin's future is uncertain, blah, blah, blah, yes, yes, yes, caveat, caveat, caveat.
	And we won't go through the whole thing here, tempting though it is, unless everybody's dying, maybe I'll do this in a couple of rounds, but anyway.
	So, there's an origins launch of a new payment system.
	Satoshi Nakamoto, I read his paper many, many years ago.
	August 2008, right?
	August 2008. It's fantastic, right?
	So, anyway, this is a background thing that is probably worth checking out, which is sort of interesting.
	And... Some quotes from people.
	Bitcoin is like the first plane built by the Wright brothers.
	They built it using human intuition and imitation of birds long before fluid dynamics were formulated.
	Yeah, that's not true.
	It's not true at all.
	It's not true at all. Because Bitcoin largely has remained consistent, whereas the Wright brothers 10 years, 12 years after the Wright brothers planes were quite different, right?
	Okay, Bitcoin and blockchain have spawned a financial revolution.
	Bitcoin network is the first truly global payment system.
	It knows no borders, never closes, and is not owned by anyone, and is accessible to everyone.
	Unlike traditional payment systems that exist on private servers, the Bitcoin blockchain is distributed across thousands of machines all over the world.
	Anyone can maintain their own copy of the shared ledger.
	So nobody knows how many users because everyone is pseudonymous.
	One user can have different addresses, but this is the growth in Bitcoin addresses with a balance, right?
	That's really, really, really something, right?
	And I was back there 2010, 2011.
	So, all right. Censorship resistance, right?
	This is an important thing, untalked about, and this should be a central thing, right?
	Part of Bitcoin's appeal is its censorship resistance, the idea that nobody can be denied access for any reason.
	This feature makes the Bitcoin payment network the most universally accessible one on earth, for better and for worse.
	This is why I say, like, the socialists drive me nuts, right?
	Because socialists should be all over this stuff.
	It takes power away from the banksters, and...
	It's openly accessible and they should have been promoting this stuff as I was for many years because it's a way of transferring money from the politically powerful and politically connected to the poor people.
	And if they had promoted, I don't know, like if they had got, I don't know, to take a silly example, right?
	If they had got one rap star to promote Bitcoin back in 2012, the reparations would have already occurred and they would have made the black community massively rich.
	But instead, they call me a racist, which denied blacks a lot of access to what I was saying.
	It's real shame. No, I don't care.
	They don't care about the poor.
	So, lack of financial inclusion, a social problem.
	So, lack of financial inclusion.
	World Bank study found there were over 1.7 billion dollars.
	Sorry, 1.7 billion unbanked adults in 2017, right?
	That's really wild when you think about it, right?
	So 1.7 billion people, that's a potential market.
	They're hungry, they're talented, they're smart, they're ambitious.
	1.7 unbanked adults in 2017.
	And that's a pretty massive, massive deal.
	You do have to, to be fair, you have to put this together with average IQ knowledge to figure out growth potential, but nonetheless, still a huge number of talented people who are unbanked.
	So the Bitcoin payment system is uniquely resilient.
	Distribution makes it difficult for any one corporation or government to interfere with its operation.
	Censorship resistance makes it practically impossible to lock out any one group of people.
	And this is, you know, violence always achieves the opposite of its intended goal, right, in the long run.
	Violence always achieves the opposite of its intended goal or stated goal.
	So, of course, the cancel culture movement, the cancel culture attacks upon people is going to create a dual platform economy.
	It's going to create a dual platform economy.
	One is going to be fiat currency and people have been driven off the fiat currency reservation are going to be into cryptos.
	And then those people who are into cryptos are going to end up vastly wealthier as a result of the deplatforming.
	This is why You know, like, if you love a girl so much that you'll follow her everywhere and try and break into her phone to make sure that she's not texting any other guy, and you'll call her all hours of day and night to find out where she is, and you'll show up at her house in the middle of the night to make sure she's home because you just love her so much.
	Well, you're going to drive her away, right?
	Your obsession, your attachment, your neurosis is going to drive her away.
	So... Aggression achieves the opposite of its intended goal and the dual nature of fiat versus crypto and people being driven off.
	This happened to WikiLeaks back in the day, right?
	They got deplatformed from a bunch of payment processors, so they ended up taking Bitcoin and became fantastically wealthy.
	So, I urge people to stop the cancel culture, but you can't because cancel culture is now an addiction.
	You dominate people, you drive them off out of polite society or public society.
	That gives you a thrill.
	It gives you a dopamine rush.
	It gives you a thrill and then you've got to go find somebody else to...
	I mean, people are scouring looking at old tweets and trying to find people to de-platform because in the same way that...
	People will go and scour old buildings looking for copper wiring so they can sell it to buy crack cocaine.
	They're scouring because they need the next hit.
	They need the next fix.
	They need the next junkie addiction reduction of exercising power and driving someone.
	So if you do terrible things to people, you will get a glow, a high power corrupts.
	It's an addiction. So you de-platform someone, you get a high, like victory, victory, victory, and then you feel absolutely terrible.
	Why? Because you're a horrible human being, and you're silencing people for making reasonable arguments or even unreasonable arguments.
	You're just a horrible human being.
	And so you go from this high to this crash, and then you've got to go and find somebody else to de-platform so that you can get the high again.
	And this doesn't end, right?
	This ends with some massive crash, right?
	Right now, people are being driven into exile from regular economic activity, which means that they are forced to the New World.
	Like the people who were driven out of Europe by totalitarianism ended up coming to the New World and building a freer world.
	To be pushed out of a collapsing system, it's like you are driven off the Titanic.
	Hey man, we're not honoring your ticket.
	You're going off the Titanic.
	We're putting you on a boat in a cold sea in the middle of nowhere and you're doomed, man.
	We're staying on the Titanic because it's warm and comfortable here and there's music and we're going to kick you off.
	We're going to throw you onto... A boat.
	And it's like, okay, well, thanks for that.
	Thanks! Thanks for that.
	I appreciate that. You did a great deal of good.
	I did a great deal of good.
	And these guys have a difficult time understanding the censorship stuff, right?
	And the censorship stuff is absolutely going to...
	I mean, who would have thought it was six months between me and the president of the United States as far as deplatforming went, right?
	It's only going to escalate because people are now addicted to the power junkie hit of silencing others.
	And then they've got to go and find someone new.
	And it's just going to escalate.
	Until a whole new environment emerges.
	Where things are more free.
	So... So all these properties make the, sorry, so distribution, operation, censorship resistant, also uniquely accurate, right?
	There's no scheduled downtime, no opens or closes, no painstaking reconciliation.
	A transaction across the globe happens as seamlessly as one across the room, for the simple reason that as far as the blockchain is concerned, each is just a ledger entry, a debit, and a credit.
	Network's radical transparency.
	Individual users might be anonymous, but their activities are not, as every single coin comes with its own verifiable audit trail.
	Despite its reputation as a tool of the underworld, the transparency of the Bitcoin ledger is in some ways a better friend to law enforcement than traditional approaches, where payment data has to be extracted from different siloed organizations and pieced together.
	Right, so you have to go and usually get some sort of court order to get information.
	It can be all over the world, and there's places which won't give it to you, right, like some of these offshore banks.
	Right. The Bitcoin ledger has already been used to quickly solve large-scale crimes and identify criminal activity.
	One explanation as to why illicit activity is currently believed to make up less than 1% of transaction activity is stark contrast to the 2-5% of global GDP caught up in money laundering alone.
	So people say, oh, it's criminal activity.
	No, no, it's much less than 1%.
	2-5% of global GDP is money laundering.
	So, we don't have to do some of the earlier stuff, right?
	Libertarian ideal, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	Absolutely. Ah, just another thing I was right about.
	So, let's see here.
	Monthly end price of Bitcoin versus Google search queries for Bitcoin.
	Yeah, obviously correlated. So, Bitcoin's potential to disrupt financial services, right?
	So, optimistic and sometimes hyperbolic pronouncements about the potential of Bitcoin to disrupt traditional payment rails, banking, and even government control of currencies prompted skepticism and pushback.
	That's one way to put it, or you're threatening the income of people who don't really have to work for a living.
	Late 27, Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, called Bitcoin a fraud with a statement at the Institute of International Financial Conference that people who are stupid enough to buy it will pay the price for it in the future.
	I mean, it's kind of funny, right?
	The conflict of interest was a big thing when I was younger, but conflict of interest seems to have completely gone by the wayside, right?
	So like mainstream media outlets that write that I'm a terrible guy, well, they're writing about a direct competitor.
	People are directly taking eyeballs and, you know, nobody's pointing out, right?
	So when a guy in J.P. Morgan starts talking about Bitcoin being a fraud relative to fiat currency, I would say, projection!
	All right, he tempered these remarks just a few months later, remarking that he regretted calling Bitcoin a fraud, admitted it was not his cup of tea, and worried aloud about what governments are going to feel about Bitcoin when it gets really big.
	Well... Okay, so...
	The power elites...
	It's important to understand how they operate, right?
	So the power elites want something for nothing, right?
	The root of all evil is wanting something for nothing.
	The desire for the un-earned is the root of all evil.
	So right now, they're getting something for nothing.
	By running governments, right?
	Printing money, borrowing money, pushing the bills for buying votes down to the next generation.
	And so, yeah, they...
	But they buy and burn various institutions.
	So they're not...
	Once governments become unsustainable, and mathematically they obviously are, right?
	So once governments become unsustainable, what's going to happen is the power elites are going to try and jump from governments to Bitcoin.
	They're not going to ban Bitcoin.
	I mean, they may try, and certainly some countries have, even though countries that have have seen actually increased Bitcoin usage.
	But the elites, yeah, they'll probably try and muck around.
	But once it becomes pretty clear that fiat currencies days are numbered, they're not going to stay on a sinking ship.
	They're going to jump to something else.
	And they'll probably try and experiment with central banking.
	Crypto, but people aren't going to buy it because central banking and crypto is a contradiction in terms.
	So what they're going to do, at some point, they're going to start jumping ship.
	And they're going to threaten the price of Bitcoin, right?
	So they're going to threaten whatever banning or...
	It's my opinion. I can't prove any of this.
	It's just the way that I've sort of seen things play out historically.
	So when something like Bitcoin comes along...
	They will threaten Bitcoin in order to drive the price down, and then they'll buy Bitcoin like crazy, remove those threats, and float up in helium balloon to near-infinite wealth, right?
	So they're not going to stay with fiat currency because fiat currency has almost run its...
	It's almost run its game.
	It's almost run its game, right? So, let's see here.
	Some governments did react as Bitcoin rose higher.
	Several governments currently have an outright ban on Bitcoin.
	Algeria, Ecuador, Egypt, Nepal, and Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan, a partial ban.
	But even in countries without outright bans or restrictions, there are often restrictions on the on and off ramps utilized to move fiat currency into the cryptocurrency domain, making it very difficult to obtain and use Bitcoin.
	China, Japan, and South Korea have all announced different measures to better regulate crypto trading.
	Better regulate. Now, Japan, of course, their fiat currency, what is their debt-to-GDP ratio, is well north of 200%, right?
	So, they will try to maintain the fiat currency gravy train for as long as they can, but when it can't, when you realize, you know, that moment in the movie Titanic where the guy says, oh, the ship is going to sink for sure.
	It's just a matter of time. Well, once they get that, then they'll find something else, right?
	And it used to be gold or whatever.
	Because fiat currency is so universal, and because central banking is in danger all over the world, people want crypto because it's portable, right?
	All the people who bought their bunkers in New Zealand or whatever, they want an easy way to move their money, right?
	So, I think that's pretty easy to understand, right?
	So, the hacks, right?
	Yeah, I remember these, right?
	MTGOX hack. 2014, loss of 231 million.
	2016, the DAO, blockchain organization, was based on Ethereum, lost an amount equivalent to 50 million.
	So, even worse, of course, if you look it back.
	In January 2018, Bitcoin was hitting its peak.
	Japanese exchange Coincheck disclosed a hack of a different cryptocurrency equivalent to a record 487 million.
	CoinRail in South Korea got hit, 50 million in tokens.
	And that began to shake investor confidence.
	But as I sort of pointed out, it means that it's valuable enough to hack in and steal, right?
	Warren Buffett called Bitcoin rat poison squared.
	I'd like to thank Warren for that.
	Bitcoin tumble from its peak of 19,000 in December 2017 to around 10,000 in February 2018.
	Beginning of 2019, the market was down to just over $3,000.
	If you think about it, this is pretty wild, right?
	It's pretty wild.
	Just a couple of years ago.
	Two years ago. And changed, right?
	$3,000. $3,000.
	I don't obsessively check, but I am always kind of curious.
	Yeah, so it's holding well north of 61.7 Canadian.
	That's good. That's good.
	That's just toasty, tasty, fine.
	All right. Sorry. Um...
	So, the fact that Bitcoins can be stolen and the theft hurts, there is no way to get a replacement, only proves the coins are valuable, which in turn proves that technology works.
	And of course, what's going to happen is you get insurance for your Bitcoins.
	If they get stolen, you get them back, but you have to do certain things.
	It's going to increase security and so on, right?
	So... That's quite natural.
	And I doubt it's going to be that Bitcoin places get dumped off Azure or Amazon Web Services in the way that Gab and Parler were because these companies are going to have investments in Bitcoins themselves, so they're not going to want to mess them up, right?
	All right. If you think about the roles that financial institutions play, blockchain removes their roles as intermediaries.
	If financial institutions embrace blockchain, they need to rethink their own business model and what value they bring.
	Otherwise, they become increasingly irrelevant.
	Fifteen years ago, it was said that e-commerce was the future and many retailers didn't believe it.
	We will be living in a hybrid world of centralized and decentralized systems for the next five to ten years.
	Yeah, decentralized is the future.
	Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.
	Bitcoin is proof that the way global governments and economic systems have treated money is no longer valid.
	It is amplifying investor behavior in a way that has never happened previously.
	It has changed belief systems, and it will be the proof point that our economic infrastructure is more fragile than we have ever known.
	And a future that is better and more stable is right in front of us.
	Yes. Absolutely.
	Absolutely. Trying to be a businessman, and I was, you know, as you know, before I did this, I was in...
	Gosh, 15 years in the software field as an entrepreneur and a top-level executive.
	And trying to do business in a fiat currency world is like trying to do gymnastics when people are randomly dialing up and down gravity.
	It's fucking mental, frankly.
	It's fucking mental to try and do business when you don't know anything about what the next particular bullshit economic crap that's going to come out of some bureaucrat or politician's mouth.
	It's completely mad, right? I mean, just look at trying to figure out how to run the economy in the transition between Trump and Biden.
	Right where Biden is wildly opening the borders past a citizenship for probably 30 million people who are going to vote reliably Democrat and increasing the refugee intake hundreds of times, which is basically like a Roomba going around the world, hoovering up people who are economically unstable and taking them to America.
	Do you think that if people are really economically valuable, their host governments are going to let them leave?
	Nope. It's like if you're in the Middle East and you have a smart son and a dumb son, you're going to keep your smart son because it's going to make you a lot of money and you're going to send your dumb son to Europe to live off welfare.
	So, anyway. So, do a couple more minutes.
	Wouldn't crypto be an electronic tiger?
	I don't know what that means.
	Sorry. All right.
	Let's do a couple more. So, unfortunately, these guys got into flowcharts.
	So, I'm not a huge fan of these flowcharts.
	I think that if you come up with a good analogy and you're a good verbal communicator, it's a much better way of getting things across.
	But, you know, this is their business, right?
	So, without flowcharts, it's just like you haven't earned your money.
	So the bulk of participation in Bitcoin during its early years of growth focused on either mining to earn revenues or speculation in Bitcoin prices by financial traders.
	No, it's...
	Oh, mining to earn revenues.
	Sorry, not just mining to process transactions to create Bitcoins.
	Okay. Individuals drawn to the anti-establishment creed, the novel technology and proof-of-work approach, the excitement of new marketplace, the cool factor, were the force-driving early activity.
	What had not been as evident, however, was the use of Bitcoin for the actual purpose it was created for, payments.
	Okay, so time.
	Innovation perception mainstream.
	New type of payment system. Currency.
	Focus on technology. Focus on censorship resistance.
	Store of value. So the fiat currency is a terrible store of value because it can be created.
	You can't create actual value at whim, but when you can create currency at whim, Then currency becomes increasingly distorted relative to the value it claims to represent, right?
	So you can create money, but creating a painting takes work and time and effort and consumes resources which are then unavailable.
	All the paint that you use to create a painting is unavailable to other paintings.
	The paintbrush while you're using it, the canvas is now unavailable.
	So, creating currency is crazy, right?
	I mean, as far as you can just create currency, but it doesn't magically bring new wealth into existence, which is why additional currency relative to actual value results in inflation.
	Just a reminder, of course, inflation is not the price of things going up.
	Inflation is creation of money beyond the value that has been created, right?
	Okay, to a resistance to censorship, Bitcoin is not backed by any government.
	The supply and demand is entirely dictated by the free market, not political or monetary policy.
	This positions Bitcoin as an alternative currency for those looking to operate outside their domestic economies.
	I wouldn't put it that way, exactly.
	It can be used internationally, of course, but this is especially true for countries where destabilizing forces may be devaluing their native currency and making it difficult to access US dollars or other fiat currencies used in global trade.
	Oh, dear. It's funny, you know, like the old saying, the rich guy, how did you go bankrupt?
	You had so much money. He said, well, very slowly and then very quickly.
	It's the same thing. U.S. dollar fall very slowly, then very quickly.
	So, destabilizing forces, devaluing their native currency.
	I mean, if you look at the money supply in America, I mean, it's exponential these days.
	And it's completely mad.
	So, the idea that...
	The problem is people are devaluating the native currency, making it difficult to access U.S. dollars.
	Oh, man. No, no. Now, the devaluing of the currency is an inevitable result of Biden's reopening to mass immigration, right?
	It's inevitable. Again, mass immigration drives inflation because you need to create money to pretend that mass immigration is good for the economy, right?
	It's not. So, as soon as Biden got in, that was the nail in the coffin for the US dollar.
	Biden gets in, nail in the coffin for the US dollar, and that's one of the reasons why everybody's becoming suddenly interested.
	Bitcoin began to really rise after Biden got in, because I've been talking about this stuff for years.
	Despite the most ardent wishes, it might prove to be almost impossible for a government to shut down access to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies or prevent its ownership or usage without what would effectively amount to a shutdown of the global internet.
	The other thing too, and this happened in South Korea, some politician really wanted to regulate Bitcoin, and you just round up debt.
	I mean, I don't like it, I don't approve of it, I think it's terrible, but it is natural that when you start threatening, you know, there's an old saying in the movie Risky Business, during a recession never fucked with another man's livelihood.
	And if you're going to start passing regulations as a government official, you're going to start passing regulations.
	To destroy hundreds of millions of dollars that people have worked, enslaved and risked very much to get a hold of, well, how much is a crypto contract for a killing?
	You know, again, I don't like it.
	I think it's terrible, but it is probably the way that things are going to play out.
	That if you start to really threaten people's income, they're going to say...
	There's an old... This is from The Godfather book.
	I remember this very, very clearly from many years ago when I read it.
	So... It is Don Corleone when he's young, right?
	That was played by Robert De Niro, I think, in the sequel.
	So in Don Corleone is young, a...
	A mafia guy, he's just a store owner.
	He's not a criminal, right?
	And when he's young, some store owner comes to him and says, you've got to pay me $2,000 in order for me not to burn down your store, basically.
	You know, they kind of shake down. It'd be a nice store here.
	It'd be a shame if something happened to it.
	And so, he's not Don Corleone, but the Corleone guy goes home and he sort of sits there and he thinks.
	And he says, ah... Okay, I don't care about this mafia guy.
	I don't care about this organized criminal.
	If he was dying and needed $2,000 for...
	An operation, would I pay that?
	No. So, if I don't care about his life and he's threatening me, why would I want to keep him alive?
	So I think he goes and kills the guy, whatever.
	Again, it's violence, it's criminal, it's bad.
	But I don't think it's going to take a lot for people to say, move to violence if people start threatening the value of Bitcoin.
	And again, I don't like it.
	It's wrong, but I can see that pretty much.
	Pretty much going on, right?
	So, the second area of growing focus, store of value, right?
	So, store of value, I was talking about that a couple of live streams ago.
	It protects purchasing power in uncertain times.
	It protects purchasing power in all times, but I guess they're focusing on the uncertain stuff, right?
	As awareness and understanding of Bitcoin grows, there's a shift in thinking underway that can be summarized by an expanding set of questions.
	Okay, so here we go. Bitcoin as a payment moves towards the mainstream.
	For a brand new innovation, it's somewhat unusual to see the Bitcoin community already has its own holiday.
	Okay, so that's the Bitcoin, right?
	A guy, two large pizzas and paid with Bitcoin, currently $450 million.
	So, yeah, it's a little painful, a little painful, I'm sure.
	Right. Bogey King's outlets in some South American countries accept Bitcoin.
	KFC offered a limited-time Bitcoin bucket of chicken for its online delivery customers.
	A crypto project for ordering pizza underway called Lightning Pizza.
	I think Lightning?
	Anyway. Allowing you to pay for Domino's and Bitcoin.
	The American Cancer Society sent up a cancer crypto fund, a million dollars to fund ongoing research initiatives.
	WikiLeaks accepts donations in Bitcoin.
	I, of course, have accepted donations in Bitcoin, and I would appreciate that.
	If you find this helpful, freedomain.com slash donate, I would appreciate that.
	Microsoft allows the use of Bitcoin to top up a user's account.
	AT&T provides a cryptocurrency payment option to customers through BitPay.
	Twitch accepts Bitcoin as payment for its services.
	I think they de-platformed me as well.
	It's hard to keep track these days.
	Overstock partnered with a global crypto exchange to allow Bitcoin payments for online orders.
	Dallas Mavericks, blah, blah, blah.
	Miami Dolphins, blah, blah, blah.
	Okay, so. Several large companies speak openly about holding Bitcoin as part of their corporate treasury.
	MicroStrategy, the largest independent publicly traded business intelligence company, announced it holds 70,470 Bitcoins.
	They bought those for $1.125 billion December 21st, 2020.
	You probably know a lot of this stuff.
	Marathon, Patent Group, they purchased $150 million of Bitcoin.
	Tesla, of course, you know about $1.5 billion and this is only continuing.
	I think Kevin O'Leary, a Canadian guy, finally caved and recommends Bitcoin now.
	I think he's moved to 3% of his holdings of Bitcoin.
	So, a 2020 survey, 36% of small to medium businesses in the U.S. accept Bitcoin.
	Again, Cygnus seems wildly optimistic there's been a notable migration of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies onto consumer-focused platforms.
	So, that's good.
	That's very good.
	This is helping to not only raise its profile, but increase the perception of Bitcoin as another currency that looks, acts, and can be used just like U.S. dollars.
	Now, this actually, so small to medium businesses, they're getting hit hard by coronavirus, of course, right?
	And the fact that big box stores are open, small businesses are forced to shut in many places.
	But if they're accepting Bitcoin for online orders, that can be enough for them.
	As I said before, businesses are going to be divided, and those who have Bitcoin and those who don't.
	And those who have Bitcoin basically have a license to print money relative to fiat currency.
	So, PayPal, October 2020 announcement, allow U.S. holders to buy, sell, and hold cryptos, and all that, which is, you know, pretty mainstream.
	Not a fan of Bitcoin, but that's helpful, right?
	So, a quiet Bitcoin boom currently unfolding in Africa, right?
	So, monthly cryptocurrency transfers to and from Africa of under 10,000 jumped more than 55% to reach 316 million in June 2020.
	The number of monthly money transfers also rose by almost half, surpassing 600,000.
	A 55% jump in monthly Bitcoin trading volumes of all market participants in South Africa and Nigeria to more than 536 million in August 2020.
	So that's pretty good.
	That's pretty good. Africa has leapfrogged in the build-out of its financial ecosystem, foregoing the establishment of a robust banking industry, and instead jumping quickly to mobile digital wallets.
	Fantastic, right? Now, I'll tell you why this is helpful, too.
	And, you know, you've just got to kind of navigate the world that is.
	I'll tell you why this is so helpful.
	I'm sure you guys know this, too.
	So, you probably haven't heard a lot about how essential Bitcoin is to Africa, right?
	Which is fantastic, right?
	So, Bitcoin will start to reach its real potential when it is talked about as racist and sexist, because not enough blacks and not enough women, say, own a Bitcoin, right?
	And the fact that Bitcoin entrepreneurs, Bitcoin innovators and so on have often been painted with a negative brush, like myself, as being racist and sexist, well, that's kept blacks and women from understanding Bitcoin and acquiring it, which is on the media.
	I did my best. It's on the media, it's not on me.
	So what's going to happen is Bitcoin is going to be a class issue and a division issue, a class issue and a sexist issue, right?
	And so the more that we can point out that if Bitcoin is racist, why is it so essential to the blacks in Africa?
	You know, it's fantastic that the blacks in Africa get this technology.
	It's going to really help them accelerate economically, which is wonderful.
	And... Great. I mean, wouldn't it be great if the African economy grew to the point where they wanted to stay home rather than live on public dollars often in Europe?
	I think that'd be fantastic because it's not a sustainable situation, not a productive situation.
	So, wonderful.
	So, you're going to start to hear this as soon as Bitcoin really starts to explode.
	What's going to happen is the elites are going to...
	So, how did the elites promote their own interests at the expense of the general population with sexism and racism and identity politics?
	This is how they destroyed...
	The Occupy Wall Street movement is they just started sending actual activists and paid activists to start to talk about sexism and racism and destroyed any kind of unity.
	They'll try that with Bitcoin, but just remember, Bitcoin is huge in Africa, and it's absolutely, absolutely wonderful, and it's going to give them a huge economic advantage.
	A country with economic pressure struggling with currency devaluation in Nigeria's oil-dependent economy has been rocked by low crude oil prices and COVID-19.
	The central bank has twice devalued the Naira in 2020.
	So that's bad for, you know, importers.
	And they're going to start to work towards alternatives, of course.
	This could be what saves Venezuela.
	It could be a whole bunch of things, right? So let's see here.
	A couple of quotes. And again, it's a 105-page document or something like that.
	So I'm going to go through the whole thing, but I think it's worth doing a couple more.
	So Bitcoin exchanges expand options as bank-like services for retail emerge.
	So Bitcoin's development arc has followed an unusual path.
	Well, of course. Of course it has.
	That's like saying that I followed an unusual path to become one of the biggest public intellectuals of the last decade.
	Well, yeah, of course, because it's new, right?
	Of course it's new. It's like saying that airplanes follow an unusual path relative to cars.
	It's like, yeah, I get it. Being grassroots-driven, relegated to the fringes of the financial system, and lacking any regulatory clarity for much of its existence, it has reversed the normal pattern of capital deployment.
	So, yeah, retail-focused endeavor.
	Yeah, it's currency for the people.
	It's currency for the people.
	So, Bitcoin exchanges.
	Okay, I thought you understand all of this.
	We can get past this. Something else I wanted to get to here.
	those who hang on to their coins, no matter what the volatility, are often sent to hodl.
	Holding on for dear life, yeah.
	The desired hodl can be very much linked to the psychology of bull market behavior.
	Having seen the value of their coins run up sharply once a new high, so there is a tendency to expect that pattern to recur, and thus the desire to hang on to not spend their Bitcoin and altcoin holdings to benefit from the hope for future increase.
	All right.
	psychological tendency for gains to beget gains In a book titled A Wealth of Common Sense, the author presents data showing that after the S&P hit all-time highs between 1915 and 2016, it was higher one year, later 74% of the time.
	Three years later, it was higher 87% of the time, and five years later, it was higher 83% of the time.
	Looking at the stagnant wallet balances of holders, new market entrants began to think about ways to treat those balances like a bank would, paying interest on their holdings, using them as collateral, and lending them.
	New set of crypto banks, so you're aware of all of that.
	So, yeah, crypto-based savings accounts.
	All of this just makes it more usual, right?
	So, let's do it. If you have any questions and comments, I'm happy to hear if there's anything I can do to answer.
	I'm happy. So, yeah.
	So, everyone who holds is helping to drive up the price because the demand is going to be there for sure.
	Alright, so I'll take a couple of questions, and yeah, you guys can look at all this stuff if you want, but I think it is really important to read this whole thing through.
	It's very interesting because it gives you a sense of just how mainstream people are thinking about this asset.
	It's really, really important.
	Alright, what have we got here?
	I say Bitcoin under 20k this year.
	Well, everybody has their opinion, and you should obviously follow your own thoughts and research and all of that, right?
	People have lost roughly 140 billion in Bitcoin because they forgot their passwords or got locked out of accounts.
	Yeah, yeah, it certainly has happened.
	It certainly has happened.
	Just because stupid people smoke cannabis doesn't mean you should classify everyone who smokes that as nut, rag, demon, show, joke, thing.
	I think you're currently high.
	I think you're currently high.
	You cannot have something that creates wealth out of nothing.
	Something must give. All right.
	Oh, you know what? I don't know if we can, but let's see if we can.
	Why don't we see if we can?
	Let's see if we can. Can we hand out any, distribute any coins?
	Any lemons? Why not?
	Let's do it. I just added 500 lemons to chest.
	Right, that feels like it should go somewhere.
	All right.
	The big critic of Bitcoin is that it doesn't follow Mises' regression theorem.
	What do you think about that? Don't know.
	I couldn't answer that one. Sorry.
	Not my wheelhouse. So, let's see if any other comments or questions.
	Otherwise, I can shut things down.
	And, of course, you should look this up.
	If the government can't print money anymore, why don't they just crack down harder on taxes?
	Fully funded IRS army spying on anyone who's bought.
	They could certainly try.
	And the government will probably try and get its hands on some bitcoins, for sure.
	So, technology advancements.
	But see, once the society becomes unmanageable, the elites will simply leave.
	I mean, the elites will simply leave or they'll retreat to hugely gated communities.
	They'll retreat. It's got to be some reason why Bill Gates is now the largest farmland owner in the United States.
	They will go elsewhere.
	They'll go overseas. They might go to Eastern Europe.
	They might go to Poland. They might go to other places.
	New Zealand is a big destination.
	So they're not going to sit here and try and grind everything down.
	Once you realize you can't stop the sinking of the ship, you go to the lifeboats.
	So they're not going to go down with the ship.
	All right. What have we got here?
	No different than investing in a software company with BTC being the blue chip.
	Well, no, it is different from investing in a software company because Bitcoin is not a product.
	Bitcoin measures the relationships between products, whether the product is the US dollar or the product is a pizza or a contract or a paycheck.
	Bitcoin is not a product.
	It measures the relationship between products, which is what currency is supposed to do.
	Right, let's see here.
	Michelin to raise prices by up to 8% on some tires in North America.
	Inflation coming. Oh, yeah, inflation has already hit in terms of food.
	They call it shrinkflation or something, like you just get smaller amounts of food for the same amount of money.
	Oh, yeah, no, inflation is already there.
	And if you want to look at some real crazy inflation, look at how much tuition has gone up relative to even general inflation.
	It's just crazy, right? Goldman Sachs has reportedly restarted its cryptocurrency trading desk.
	Dollar GS will trade Bitcoin futures and non-deliverable forwards for clients from next week.
	I haven't verified it. You can look it up and all that.
	You have to live with a sense of fatalism.
	Bitcoin is counterfeit.
	Lol, I don't know. The whole economy is fake.
	What? I don't...
	Bitcoin is counterfeit?
	I don't know what that means.
	Bitcoin is the exact opposite of counterfeit.
	Counterfeit is when you can create fake value by copying something that has value.
	Go and try and create a fake Bitcoin.
	I dare you. And if you can figure it out, you've just destroyed a trillion dollars worth of value, which you can't.
	People have been trying to hack and create Bitcoins for 12 years straight.
	Nobody can do it. So the idea that Bitcoin is counterfeit, That you can just create Bitcoins, or are you saying Bitcoin is counterfeit to fiat currency when you can't create more Bitcoins easily and they're limited, whereas you can create all the fiat currency you want and it's unlimited?
	No, I don't know what that means. You got, like, Jacob, with all due respect, man, If this is your opinion and you're not being ironic, which sometimes happens, right?
	Please be careful.
	Maybe it's because I have, up until recently, a huge voice and now a reasonable-sized voice.
	But you've got to be careful about what you say, right?
	So if you are saying things like, I don't know, Bitcoin is counterfeit or Bitcoin is going to zero or Bitcoin is a scam or whatever, right?
	Well, it's not, right?
	It's not. Come on, 12 years.
	Look where it's at. Come on.
	I mean, look at the institutional investors.
	It's not. It's just not.
	But here's the thing, though, is that maybe you're bitter that you didn't get some in the past or whatever.
	But here's the thing. You're harming people.
	You're hurting people.
	Because someone's going to read that, and they're just not going to get involved.
	They're not going to look it up.
	And this could cost them millions of dollars down the road.
	Now... This is why I don't give financial advice and I, you know, nothing I ever say should be taken as financial advice.
	I do have in my mind, so it's my opinion, I have a price point of 700k US for Bitcoin.
	When it gets there, I don't know, it could be higher, it could be lower, it's my general thought.
	And that may not be the end, but that's just in the mind, right?
	So, let's say that I, and I just read this article about how, you know, Bitcoin takes even a small percentage of world economic activity, you've got a million dollar Bitcoin, easy peasy.
	So, let's say you're out there, you've got to be careful, and I say not be careful because there's some, you know, you're going to go to hell or anything like that, but your conscience, like what you do in the world, your conscience watches everything.
	Now, if you've been out there, you know, just trashing Bitcoin, and let's say it turns out that Bitcoin turns out to be extraordinarily valuable, then your conscience will sit there in your head and you say, I cost an unknown number of people a massive amount of money.
	I cost an unknown number of people a massive amount of money.
	And it's all anonymous. You know, like if you've been saying to your brother for, I don't know, five years, oh, Bitcoin's a scam, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Okay, well, then maybe he went to go and buy some gold and, well, maybe he just kept his money in the bank.
	His money's lost value. Gold has barely accumulated and Bitcoin's gone to the moon.
	Are you going to sit there and say, well, the advice that I gave my brother that Bitcoin was a scam, he should never buy it, has now cost him half a million dollars or a million dollars or something like that.
	Can you live with that? I mean, can you?
	I would have a very tough time living with that, right?
	I would have a very tough time living with that.
	And I have been right about Bitcoin.
	And I'm proud of that.
	I'm proud that I've helped people and look into it and come to their own conclusions and make their own decisions.
	I've never said buy. I've never said sell.
	I never will. But Watch what you say because of your conscience.
	Because if you trash one of the greatest investment opportunities in the history of mankind, then it has, okay, you obviously will be harmed by it, but our conscience can handle it if we harm ourselves.
	Our conscience has a much tougher time if we harm other people.
	If we harm other people.
	I'll give you an example, right?
	Stress and illness is correlated for a lot of people.
	And you can read books by Gabor Mate on this, M-A-T-E. G-A-B-O-R-M-A-T-E. So, let's say that you say, oh, Bitcoin's a scam and your brother doesn't end up investing in it.
	He loses his job, and he's really stressed, and he gets sick, and he loses his house.
	I mean, he's a sovereign individual.
	I get all of that. It's a little bit on you, though.
	You had an effect on it.
	You had a role in it. And it's the same thing if you just say, oh, you know, Bitcoin is going to unreservably rise in value and never be a problem.
	People are going to invest, and then Bitcoin might have a clawback.
	It always will. It always will.
	It will have a clawback. It always does.
	Then, you know, don't...
	Just be careful about what you say.
	And I say this because I want you to be happy.
	I want you to be happy. All right.
	I think in America you can only legally get paid in dollars.
	I know for sure it's illegal to be paid in gold.
	I don't know. I think so. Could be.
	All right. Recommended platforms to buy cryptocurrency?
	I will leave other people to answer that.
	I don't want to say that. All right.
	All right. I'm going to buy BCH and XMR with my next paycheck.
	You would have to update the ledger on...
	Okay, sorry about this. I got into Bitcoin, but it was $900.
	I should have bought more. Well, you know, you can always say that.
	Obviously, you can always say that.
	But how about you just look at the massive gains and be happy, right?
	I think that you can always say I could have had more, but that's the human...
	If you have a... You could always have done something better.
	You could have always done something more.
	You will never be satisfied, and you will live your entire life on the edge of dissatisfaction.
	And who wants that?
	Who wants that? That's no good.
	Be happy with what you've got, right?
	Alright. Well, thanks everyone.
	I appreciate that. It was very nice to drop by with you guys.
	Look out for this document.
	Let me just go to the top here to make sure that you can see it.
	It's a Citigroup document.
	It's available in PDF. Bitcoin at the tipping point.
	Well worth reading from cover to cover.
	And yeah, I hope you guys have a great afternoon.
	Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	If you would like to help me out, either for present value or past value, I would really appreciate that.
	It was a great pleasure to chat with you guys this afternoon.
	Have a great afternoon, my friends.
	Thank you so much for your support of what it is that I'm doing.
	I really, really appreciate it.
	And lots of love from up here.

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