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March 14, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:00:20

BITCOIN: $100,000 BY SUMMER?

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Time	Text
	Sweet. I don't record the crowd, man.
	That's too risky.
	Somebody might find out who I am.
	All right, everybody. How are you doing?
	Good evening. Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
	I'm here with a crack crew of BitHeads.
	We're talking crypto, we're talking Bitcoin, and we're really talking most essentially the philosophy of Bitcoin, which is something I kind of started with.
	And I don't know if you guys noticed or if you checked these things at all, but Bitcoin seems to be up a little.
	Has anybody noticed that today?
	Just a skosh. A skosh, right?
	A little skosh. Hasn't it gone up three times since we started doing these?
	I'm not saying it's causal, but it might be causal.
	No, I'm just kidding.
	All right.
	So just before we start, just a reminder to everyone, these are all just our opinions, not financial advice.
	Please don't make any buying or selling decisions based upon what we're saying here.
	And we've got some new faces.
	So if you just want to take a second to introduce yourself to the fine crowd that's out there, we'll go, I'd say clockwise, but that's kind of a spiral because we got new people here.
	So let's just go...
	Jared, M.K., Tim, Pedro, James, Satomi, and then Jonathan.
	Is that okay? Everybody write that down.
	I already forgot it when I was saying it.
	Jared, do you want to give us two sacks on who you are?
	Sure. My name is Jared Woodard.
	I have been in and following crypto since 2012-ish.
	Like many others, more than just being able to reflect back and look like, I could have bought it when it was a nickel, you know, a piece.
	I've been in a long time.
	I've been into philosophy even longer, and philosophy helped to bring me to crypto, and Steph did.
	So I'm very grateful for that, and I'm very grateful to have the opportunity to give something back now.
	Excellent. MK? I'm MK, and I've been...
	You're a little quiet there, brother.
	Sorry, if you could just lean in or crank it up a little.
	I'll just crank it up a little bit if that works.
	Yeah, thanks. All right. I've been into crypto since I was probably in college.
	I was mining back when you could still mine Bitcoin on regular CPUs.
	I lost some of that Bitcoin years ago.
	I bought it. I've sold it.
	I bought it again. And now at this point, I'm just bottling.
	Right now, I'm trying to get approved to do options trading with Bitcoin, which is very exciting.
	So, yeah. Very nice.
	Tim, you're muted, but if you want to unmute and let us rip with your background.
	Yeah, I discovered Bitcoin and Stefan's show at the same time in 2014.
	And I got completely obsessed with Bitcoin and Stefan at the same time in 2014.
	And is that me?
	Am I outgoing?
	Somebody's...
	Ryan Sovereign?
	Yeah, if you don't have a headset, then you need to mute when you're not talking.
	And so I just got, I'm so excited to be on the show and get to chat with Stefan and y'all.
	I'm very impressed with all of y'all.
	Y'all know a lot.
	It's such a big subject that, you know, you can have tons of experts who actually don't have much overlap in terms of what they know.
	So I'm just trying to do my little part.
	Very nice. Pedro, what's your, what's your story, man?
	I'm Pedro from Spain.
	I actually learned about Bitcoin from you.
	I've been listening to your show for a while.
	I think it was 2012 when I learned from you about Bitcoin.
	I actually bought one Bitcoin for around $80 at some point.
	Then I spent it on a miner machine, which didn't return one Bitcoin.
	And after a while, I ended up with less.
	I'm now holding and trying to promote it, talk to friends, family and whoever listens to, you know, the advantages of not having the central banks issuing money.
	And yeah, that's more or less it.
	Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.
	James, if you want to unmute James B and let us a little over to yourself.
	Sure. I appreciate the time here.
	I've been in Bitcoin since 2013.
	I've been studying Austrian economics since 1995, which really prepared me for Bitcoin.
	That's kind of the primer that's really helpful.
	I've been in the financial services industry for 12 years and was a miner for a while for Ethereum and a couple others.
	Also, got into philosophy in 2014.
	Thanks to Steph.
	Appreciate that. Excellent.
	Excellent. So tell me, hello and welcome.
	Hi. Yeah, well, I sort of come from the precious metals, gold and silver.
	One of my clients used to put on conferences on precious metals.
	And so I've heard of Bitcoin for quite a while.
	But because, you know, being a gold and silver person, you kind of were leery and And then I found a platform where I'm now very much involved with a cryptocurrency, G999. And so now I'm kind of all of a sudden very interested.
	Of course, I, like a lot of people, regret not buying it when I knew it was maybe two cents or something, I remember.
	And, yeah, I see that, you know, gold and silver are still stable.
	You know, it's a good place to part your money.
	I think we're going to have to go to digital at some point.
	Yeah, and technically we refer to the people who come from gold as refugees, refugees from loss.
	So, well, welcome.
	Very nice to have you here. And it's really, really great to get the gold and precious metals perspective because that has cost a lot of the crossover.
	Jonathan, hello and welcome.
	If you want to unmute and just introduce yourself, that'd be fabulous beyond words.
	Yeah, so thanks everyone.
	I am just new to the Bitcoin game within the last two or three weeks now and haven't enjoyed about a 15% unrealized return at this point, but started out more as just an experiment.
	I've been through a bunch of different investments over the past 10 years or so and Well, I think it's Bitcoin's time, so that's why I'm on board now.
	Ryan, great name.
	What's your thoughts?
	Hi, everyone. I'm Ryan.
	It's just like R-Y-A-N, spelled like lion, but I've been around since early 2013.
	I actually found you, Steph.
	I was looking for an audio reading of the Bitcoin white paper, and I found your recording.
	So that's how I discovered you, and I've been watching you ever since.
	That's been going back a ways.
	That's been going a ways. So welcome, everyone.
	Really, really nice to chat.
	You're nice to meet new friends in this new space.
	Well, it's not that new a space, but...
	So I wanted to...
	Let me just start off with a tiny bit here, and...
	Sort of mention why I think that Bitcoin, the philosophy is more important than the money.
	Now, don't get me wrong. The money is important, and I'm not, you know, an anti-materialist.
	But what got me into Bitcoin was not the potential for an income or assets, but the potential for a completely radical rewriting of the way society works.
	And in particular, my family on both the British and the German side suffered enormously, catastrophically and brutally during the First World War and the Second World War.
	In the First World War, on my father's side, four of the five brothers were killed in the trenches in the Second World War.
	My mother's family was harassed and hounded and cast out of public life by the Nazis.
	Good thing to know that history doesn't repeat as far as the Molyneux go.
	And so when Bitcoin came along, I was most fascinated and compelled by the capacity for Bitcoin to end aggressive wars.
	So from an economic standpoint, there's an old saying that says, war is the health of the state.
	And of course, the war against COVID is the health of the tyrants in our local environments.
	But the state is also the health of war.
	So when a country goes to war, let's say it's an offensive war and a country goes for an empire or goes to invade another country, it has three major economic factors.
	The first is it loses income because people are being drafted into war rather than paying their taxes.
	Number two, of course, it has to pay for the wages and the bullet costs and the supply chain costs and everything related to war.
	And number three, If it loses, it has to usually pay some sort of reparations, or at the very best case scenario, it wins, in which case it will have medical bills that will mount for its soldiers who were wounded for the rest of their natural-born existence, which can go on for decade after decade after decade.
	So the big question is, when you look at the 20th century, the century of total war, It's really hard to remember that prior to the First World War, or certainly prior to the 19th century, war was a pretty small and localized affair.
	You might get a couple of thousand knights, maybe a couple of thousand peasants on either side, but the fate of entire nations.
	Prior to Napoleon, prior to the sort of 20th century in particular, the fate of entire nations was often decided by just a couple of thousand people.
	And the reason for that is that you had to actually pay people with gold.
	You had to pay people with gold.
	You had to have gold. You may be able to borrow gold, but there was a limit on the violence and destructiveness of your wars because there was a limit on the resources you could pour into those wars.
	First World War, as we know, Was, I mean, you had sometimes 100,000 or 200,000 people who would die, men who would die in one particular day, think of Passchendaele or the Somme or other places were done.
	How was it able to keep going?
	Everybody went into the First World War thinking that it was going to be over by Christmas.
	They started in the fall and they thought, oh my, we've got to get to the front because it's going to be over Christmas.
	Why? Because that's how war was in the past.
	War was over relatively quickly for the most part.
	Civil wars, not so much, but certainly international wars were.
	The war then dragged on for an excruciating four-plus years.
	You had 10 million dead, another 20 million dead if you count the war-ravaged problem of the influenza epidemic, the sort of COVID of the early 20th century, the Spanish flu epidemic, which didn't, of course, originate in Spain, originated in China.
	History, such a playful repetition.
	How were they able to keep that war going?
	Well, they just went off the gold standard.
	They printed and they borrowed money.
	So fiat currency is...
	You think of how flammable fiat currency is versus gold.
	Gold will just melt, but you get a bunch of fiat currency, you light it up, Weimar Republic style, and it's just going to create a massive bonfire that doesn't burn for very long.
	Fiat currency is the fuel of total war.
	Fiat currency is the fuel of total war.
	Fiat currency is the fuel of the massive expansions of state power we've seen.
	In just a hundred years.
	I mean, people sort of forget a little over a hundred years ago, you didn't need a passport.
	You could go live anywhere pretty much in the world.
	There was a huge amount of freedom. There was no income tax.
	There was almost no national debts except in moments or times of extremity.
	And the amount of freedoms that we've lost has been truly staggering.
	And the fundamental fuel of the destruction of those freedoms has been fiat currency.
	If you look at the end of the First World War, or as a famous German General Fauch said, that the Second World War was simply the continuation of the First World War with 20 years armistice in between.
	What led up to...
	Well, the First World War, of course, led to the birth of communism in Russia.
	The massive requirement for debt reparations, for war reparations, That were imposed on Germany and its allies under the Treaty of Versailles led to the hyperinflation because they couldn't possibly pay off the debt that was imposed upon them.
	So they just printed money, which destroyed the currency, which paved the way to Hitler, which paved the way to the Second World War.
	So war is not only funded while it's on, but it's actually caused often by fiat currency.
	It's very easy for people to sort of rah-rah and cheer war.
	When they don't actually get a direct bill.
	When the bill goes to their children, the bill goes to foreigners, the bill goes to anybody else.
	And this illusion or this, frankly, this massive delusion that's going on that we have infinite resources because of money printing, crushing of interest rates and endless borrowing cannot happen in a limited currency scenario.
	You know, sometimes just getting rid of one central injustice changes the entire world.
	Getting rid of slavery Created the conditions for the industrial revolution and modern capitalism.
	Fiat currency, in the same way, if we get rid of or bypass or find a way around fiat currency, we are laying the foundations for a universal peace that we can scarcely conceive of at the moment.
	If you look at what bothers people about the government, almost always It is funded not directly through taxation, the expansion of government programs.
	Like if people said, oh, we want the Department of Homeland Security after 9-11, say, okay, well, we're going to have to crank up your taxes 25% to pay for it, there'd be pushback.
	But the government expands in this silent, vampiric, soul-sucking way without a direct increase in taxation because the taxation is through inflation and the taxation is through debt.
	What is it in Illinois now?
	They got $300 billion of unfunded liabilities just for their public sector pensions.
	It's absolutely predatory.
	And I think of my ancestors.
	I mean, for me, philosophy is always very freaking personal.
	I think that's what keeps me going and what keeps me passionate about it.
	And I think of the four of my great grandfathers who died in the First World War.
	And I imagine if I could resurrect them and ask them questions.
	And I were able to show them what that war led to.
	It led to communism.
	It led to hyperinflation.
	It led to a 13-year Great Depression.
	It led to the Second World War.
	It led to the Cold War. It led to mass migration.
	It led to the destruction of civil liberties around the world.
	And I would say to them, this is what you died for.
	This is what you died for.
	Was it worth it?
	Now, I think we can all imagine sacrificing our lives through a great cause for peace, for freedom, for security, for a future for our children.
	We can all understand that old saying that says, if there is to be war, let it come in my time that my children may know peace.
	I think of asking the men who died in my family, First World War, Second World War, Was it worth it?
	If you look at the world that played out, was it worth it?
	Did you die so that your great-grandson could be kicked off social media for talking about science, reason, fact and evidence?
	Did you die so that Banksters could steal from the poor through inflation and hyperinflation.
	Did you die so that your great-grandchildren would be born into about a million dollars ahead in debt?
	Did you die so that governments could take slow and soft control over the universities and install endless leftists, Marxists, and totalitarians in them to indoctrinate the young?
	Did you die for that?
	Was it worth it? And they would say no.
	They would say no. And they're kind of, they crowd my mind.
	These ghosts, they crowd my mind.
	Now, there are three kinds of wars.
	Offensive wars, obviously invasions and defensive wars.
	I mean, Iraq being a classic example, although Syria is definitely up there and even Afghanistan is pretty close.
	So there are offensive wars.
	There are defensive wars and defensive wars can be taken into two categories.
	A defensive war where there's kind of a cost-benefit analysis, And a defensive war that, you know, evildoers want to take over your free country or your free geography.
	Now, you can't run offensive wars off Bitcoin.
	You just can't.
	Because you can't get the Bitcoins.
	I mean, you can tax people, of course, and you can say, you're going to hand me your money, and that's going to mean you're going to sell some Bitcoins and so on.
	But because there's no taxing of Bitcoins, at least as yet, in terms of you directly sending Bitcoin Your Bitcoins to a government address.
	So you just can't create it.
	If the First World War, and I did a speech on this about eight years ago, if the First World War had been limited to gold only, it would have been over in six months.
	All of the countries ran out of gold a couple of months into the war.
	And if they hadn't been able to make the leap to central banking and fiat currency, the war would have been over in three to six months.
	You know, you have nine million people still left alive, and it wouldn't have led I mean, the crushing burdens that were imposed on Germany were imposed precisely because the war had been so long and horrendous.
	And it ended basically in a draw.
	And the leaders of the victorious powers didn't want to come back and say, well, everyone's going back to the corners.
	We didn't really get anything out of it.
	They wanted to give people the illusion that somehow Germany was going to pay for everything, which, of course, is impossible.
	Can't happen. So offensive wars are eliminated through Bitcoin because you simply can't pay.
	Your troops. Enough.
	You can't print the money. You can't borrow money.
	You can't create the money.
	Because the money supply is crushingly limited in Bitcoin.
	Now, what about defensive wars where you don't really care?
	In other words, you're a terrible country.
	Some other terrible country is coming to invade you.
	Do you really care? Are you going to lay your life down to defend some dictator who's local?
	Versus some dictator who's coming in.
	Maybe you will, maybe you won't, but probably not.
	People aren't going to lay down their lives for someone like Muammar Gaddafi, because they fear that someone else is coming in.
	Maybe they would, maybe they won't.
	But of course, you already have a tyranny, which means you already have central banking and fiat currency, so there's not much to save.
	But the defensive wars, when...
	A dictatorship is coming to your free shores.
	Well, that's where people will pay.
	And they will pay for two reasons.
	They will pay because they love freedom and they will pay because they wish to retain the value of their cryptocurrencies.
	So they will pour cryptocurrencies into a very intelligent war.
	I mean, wars are generally government program armies fighting government program armies.
	The free market war solution?
	Well, there's a lot we can theorize about that.
	Maybe we can do a show about that another time.
	But I'll put my money on the free market every time.
	And if you have free market crypto holders defending their geographical region against somebody who wants to invade and destroy their society, they have both the ideological and the practical material reasons to resist that as intelligently as humanly possible.
	And that won't be some massive war where people face each other across the trench pouring mustard gas into each other's throats.
	That's just not how the free market works.
	It's much more efficient. And dangerous for the leaders who are starting the war.
	So the philosophy to me of Bitcoin is it could mean an end to national debts.
	It could mean an end to intergenerational debt.
	It could mean an end to the financial parasite class holding onto the throats of the poor and the middle class in order to squeeze every last bit of financial lifeblood out of them to feed their insatiable appetite for power and control.
	It could mean an end To endless government expansion, in fact, it could trigger or start a government contraction, which then liberates more of the economy and the society.
	It is an unguessed blessing on the potential for human freedom.
	To limit money is to limit power.
	There's only two ways to limit power.
	You either fight back through force or you find some way to choke off the fuel of power.
	And fiat currency is the fuel of power.
	And finding a way around that, finding a way to create a more restrained and humane substitute for endless money.
	Well, it's never endless money printing, but it sort of feels that way to the moment.
	And right now, of course, the price of Bitcoin is going up because, I mean, the US dollar in particular is just in the process of committing seppuku, right?
	I mean, it's just, I mean, it took, what, it took From the founding of America until 2020, it took that long to create about $4 trillion.
	And then 2020 to 2021, it went from $4 trillion to, what, $18 trillion, something like that, between 25% of all the U.S. currency, 40% of all the U.S. currency in circulation is in circulation right now.
	So the U.S. currency, the end of an era is already upon us.
	There may be a dead cat bounce.
	It may last a little longer.
	And of course, it could only last as long as it had because of a lack of a substitute, but Bitcoin is plan B for Bitcoin.
	That's a powerful thing.
	It's a powerful thing to free people from the eviction of power that served by the coke lines of fiat currency.
	It's a very powerful endeavor to be engaged in.
	And yes, it's nice that Bitcoin's going up.
	It's nice that there's some money floating around a dissident community.
	I think it's great. But most fundamentally, if my children and their children never have to go through what my grandfather and great-grandfathers went through, that's not a bad way to spend some time and intellectual energy.
	So those are my thoughts. If you want to bring yours to the topic, and I will, of course, be watching the chat over on DLive as well.
	I am absolutely thrilled.
	But yeah, it's very much a mission for me.
	So if you want to jump in, please feel free.
	I'm just saying, one of the drawbacks of crypto is the liquidity.
	You can't right now withdraw a lot of money.
	I think that's one of the drawbacks, is the liquidity part.
	Can you explain that a little bit more?
	Because, I mean, selling Bitcoin can be quite easy.
	I don't know. As far as I know, like our platform, I think it's like $15,000 a daily that you can actually, let's say you want to withdraw some money in Bitcoin or whatever.
	That's the limit. Now, they may have increased it.
	So, Tomi, you said you're using G999? Yes.
	It's just a platform.
	It just launched.
	Yeah. I'm just saying that we also deal, we buy in Bitcoin and we get paid in Bitcoin.
	Yeah. If possible, I would...
	Is that liquidity part?
	I want to correct that.
	If possible, I'd look at...
	There's much larger, much more established exchanges.
	There's blockchain.com, Kraken, those guys.
	There's a lot of them out there, a lot to choose from.
	And no, that limitation doesn't exist anymore.
	I just pulled out...
	Well, more than that.
	It's easier than doing a regular banking transaction.
	As a matter of fact, the hard part was having to tie into the legacy banking system.
	The crypto worked great.
	Also, keep in mind, try getting $10,000 of cash out of a bank in the US. They're going to start to ask why.
	This is not a feature that's unique to just crypto.
	It's worse with fiat.
	Yeah, yeah. And it's an issue with the state rather than with the technology.
	And, you know, Bitcoin can't solve that, at least not in the short run.
	Anybody else who've got philosophical thoughts, issues?
	I mean, I'm happy to take, we've got a whole bunch of questions from people.
	Sorry, go ahead. Well, just to kind of acknowledge what you said there, Steph, about the wars and the spoils of war.
	That's an extreme example of violence, state violence, and the example is spot on.
	But there are milder forms of violence like that we experience every day, multiple times.
	Gas prices going up right now, real estate, property taxes, Dividend taxes, capital gains taxes, all these.
	GST if you're in Canada or the HST, whatever.
	And so I look at it as a way of just storing some wealth, putting away a bit of money regularly.
	Hopefully it exits It's stronger than when I entered it.
	And it's there for me when I need it.
	I think Bitcoin's the winner-take-all, just like Facebook, as far as I know.
	And so I think it's a great way to kind of take back Sovereignty of one's hard work, really.
	Sweat, you know, blood, tears, all those things.
	Every time you get a $1.9 trillion stimulus spending bill, there is like a lot of transfer of wealth, transfer of energy, life, all these things.
	And so anyway, That's kind of how I look at it.
	And I'm sorry to interrupt everyone, but Ryan, just if you could very, very slowly just turn and look to your right.
	I just, I'm not sure if you're aware, but you seem to have an intruder.
	She's not an intruder.
	She was invited. Okay, just checking.
	We're kind of married because of you, Steph, so...
	And she's just as on board with crypto as I am.
	And so she could be sitting here just as well as I could be sitting here.
	Fantastic. Congratulations. I just, you know, normally if people are listening in, they're doing so digitally.
	I just wasn't sure if that was.
	Okay, good to know. Nice to meet you.
	Nice to meet you. All right.
	Anybody else want to jump in?
	We can start taking some questions.
	I certainly have some more thoughts.
	We can talk about Alex Jones and his laptop.
	We can all cry a little.
	Got a couple things, Steph.
	Yeah, go for it. Just going along the lines of some other conversations that you've had regarding money being power or the ability to control people also being power, Bitcoin allows people to kind of opt out of that.
	If you buy into the MMT argument that you need money in order to pay taxes and this is how you control a population, then the ability to get outside of the dollar network can allow you to Grow assets can allow you to avoid the stealing effects of inflation.
	When we have a government that says inflation is about 2% and they control the way that inflation is calculated, then that provides them a perverse incentive to continually adjust that calculation so that you don't get too freaked out.
	But at the same time, it in effect allows them to steal people's time.
	I trade my time for dollar bills so that I can then eat, I can pay for my rent, I can have a family, I can take care of my kids.
	And if the value that I'm being paid for my time is stolen also over time, then that's the same effect on me as slavery.
	Because you're taking my time and you're using it for whatever you want, the value that my time generates and using it for whatever you want.
	Well, if I don't have dollars, you can't do that to me anymore.
	In fact, it's the opposite.
	You're now adding value to my time in the past that I can use in the present so that you don't get the ability to control me anymore.
	It's a very powerful change that we've never had.
	It is powerful as well.
	And I don't know if you've been following this Tucker Carlson thing where he had some skepticism about the value of female pregnant pilots.
	You know, they've got to have these outfits for pregnant females to fly planes.
	And, you know, this endless amount of hyper-egalitarianism, social justice warrior, infinite spending to Tweak everything so that it goes to some statistically perfect place that is kind of inhumane.
	You can't do that.
	I mean, can you imagine if you're in free society now for free, I mean stateless, which is kind of another example, right?
	This may be another conversation, but let's say that the army had to come to you and say, well, you know, we need you to give us a couple of Bitcoins because we really, really want to make sure that pregnant women are able to fly fighter jets.
	You know, my first question would be, I don't know that those G-forces would be significantly great for the baby.
	You know, I'm not a doctor, obviously, but, you know, I know how gelatin works.
	It just doesn't seem that it's a very, very good thing to put a baby in a womb in, say, five Gs, you know.
	And I would be, you know, I'd like, hey, you know, make the case, but they don't have to make the case.
	They don't have to make the case.
	If they say, as they do now in America under Biden, they say, well, transgender surgery is now paid for by the US military for its soldiers.
	I would have a question, which is, how is that exactly going to add to your efficacy as a fighting force that keeps me safe from dangerous?
	But they don't have to make these cases because they create the money.
	They've got the money before us.
	They can print the money. They can borrow the money.
	They can put the money out in the form of bonds, which is just intergenerational slavery.
	They never have to make a case.
	They never, ever have to make the case.
	You have now, I can't remember, some city in the US where they're saying, well, the gifted program is going to be a lottery system.
	It's not going to be merit anymore.
	You don't have to earn it. You don't have to be smart.
	You don't have to work hard. It's going to be a lottery system.
	It's like, okay, but...
	Can we have some way of making sure that the smartest people are in control of the stuff that keeps society functioning?
	You know, like the people who build bridges, the people who keep electricity going, the people who keep sewage from backing up and making you sick.
	Can we just, you know, is there a way to make sure that the really smartest people are in charge of that stuff or at least the most competent?
	No! So all of this stuff where you're just diffusing the competence matrix of society and just throwing opportunities wide to everyone, it turns Live Aid into a karaoke concert, which nobody's going to show up to.
	So, all right, just wanted to mention that.
	It's another thing that I'd like to see kind of go by the wayside.
	If there's anybody else who wants to drop in.
	Is there a raise hand thing here?
	I don't know if there is. If I may.
	You can raise your hand, right?
	We can go old school. Sorry, somebody said, if I may, then we'll go to Satomi.
	Pedro? Yeah, it's better here.
	You want to go ahead? No, no.
	Go ahead, please. Okay. I'm just wondering, like, banks are thinking of coming out with digital currency, and then there is a difference between banks' digital and then cryptocurrency.
	So that means they can still, you know, I guess I'm a little, you know, wondering, I've heard there's people concerned about chips, you know, putting chips in and they can monitor us that way.
	And if banks bring their digital currency out, then it's really the same.
	They've still got control.
	That's actually very much in line.
	Yeah, that's very much in line with what I was about to say.
	And I have to apologize because the proper thing for me would have been to wear a tinfoil hat for this.
	I enjoyed last minute and I didn't have time to prepare.
	But you know, Steph's work It's still more important than ever.
	The fact that we now have this technology doesn't warranty at all that the outcome is going to be more freedom and that the outcome is going to be governments not able to enslave us anymore through taxation.
	The problem here is, and I was actually by chance reading Human Action before, and Mises said something like, the left had to corrupt the language because freedom and liberty was so strong that it was almost impossible for them to fight about the West ideals.
	And then they have to make freedom mean different things in order to corrupt it.
	And it's the same thing here.
	Bitcoin is great if it's used the way more or less it was intended.
	But then these things about central bank digital currencies or even taking over the Bitcoin itself is not out of the questions for governments.
	Because, yes, they cannot do it directly, probably, but they can maybe influence.
	And one of the things I thought from the beginning would actually prevent governments, for example, bad-mouthing Bitcoin and saying this is only for criminals and money laundering and all that stuff,
	would be if people actually used it every day for purchases and it was so common and so extended That nobody would think, you know, government would say, oh, this is only for criminals.
	And people would say, what are you talking about?
	I'm just buying my food with this.
	I'm going for groceries.
	And, you know, the state of affairs in Bitcoin right now kind of shifted a little bit from that.
	So I'm not completely convinced on the philosophy part.
	Of course, if we manage to get Any cryptocurrency.
	If it is Bitcoin, great. If it's another one to replace central banking and to get people to value or see the value in having a currency which is not manipulated by governments, that would be really great.
	But the thing is, we did that with gold for a long time and gold didn't disappear.
	The technology was there. It's not like we really didn't need to invent Bitcoin.
	We need to start valuing the invention.
	Governments didn't destroy gold.
	What they did is they started saying, okay, let's issue bank notes and they are backed by gold.
	And then slowly, okay, now nobody knows if we actually have the gold backing the notes or not.
	Maybe we don't have it, but people don't care anymore because they're paying with the notes.
	And then after that, the next step was to, okay, let's say now we don't even need to keep the gold anymore.
	Now the dollar is the standard currency and the rest of the world is pegged to the dollar and all that stuff.
	Okay. And now they're talking about this great reset where who knows what they're going to do.
	And then maybe these central bank digital currencies are the answer because now they have other means to manipulate the money supply and all that stuff.
	So I think it's important to promote the roots and the philosophy behind the creation of Bitcoin.
	And I think what Steph opened with is what we need to be talking about.
	So we need to be vigilant.
	And yeah, it's okay to be optimistic.
	And it's great that the market now is kind of backing these decisions and this new technology.
	But I see many people getting into Bitcoin only because they think they're going to be rich.
	Yes. And I mean, if you get rich in the process, of course, that's great.
	And if you had the vision, like many people did, to see the value of Bitcoin in the beginning, and now you're rich, yeah, okay, great.
	But let's not lose sight of the real thing here, which is currency or money shouldn't be controlled by government.
	And that's what we need to strive for, I think.
	I'm sorry to sound repetitive, but Ryan, if you could just turn a little to your right and look down.
	I don't know if she was in a plane today or...
	Other intruder.
	There will be another in 10 minutes.
	She could save us all. I just wanted to say hi to your son.
	Hello! Hello!
	Is it his nap time?
	Is that why? Come listen to people talk.
	It's his podcasting time.
	All right. All right. The real question, is it a toddler or hodler?
	Nice. I want y'all to know real quick.
	He's learning early.
	Oh, nice. The ABCs of economics.
	Nice. Now, so I'll give, I promise I'll be short on this one, right?
	So I get a lot of questions. How's the government going to Frack with Bitcoin, right?
	How are they going to mess up crypto?
	How are they going to try and use it against us and so on?
	So I'm going to use a Bitcoin term.
	There's going to be a hard fork and the hard fork is already underway.
	There's a reason why Bitcoin is rising so much.
	There's a reason why Bill Gates is driving all this farmland.
	So there's going to be two economies, you know, Brazil-style, right?
	So the two economies are going to be cryptos versus fiat.
	So what they're going to do, the elites are going to get into crypto, into Bitcoin, which is why the price is going up so much, why so many institutions are piling into it, politicians are getting into it, institutional investors are getting into it, and the smarter people as a whole are getting into it.
	So you're going to have the Bitcoin economy, and everybody else gets UBI from fiat currency.
	I mean, that's just how it's going to work.
	And the UBI is going to be kind of rough.
	But see, the rich people can always retreat to their gated communities with their security guards and all of that.
	And out there, the disintegrating value of the US dollar, it's going to go, you know, what is it now?
	Everyone in Venezuela is a millionaire.
	And so this hard fork of the economy where the richer, they know that the US dollar has hit the iceberg, to use the Often used Titanic analogy, right?
	So the US dollars hit the iceberg.
	They know that it's going down.
	They got the engineers telling them, hey, man, it's going down.
	And so they are quietly getting their assets out of US dollars.
	Foreign countries are doing this as well with Treasury.
	So they're getting their assets out of US dollars.
	They're putting them into land.
	They're putting them into New Zealand, apparently.
	They're putting it into bunkers.
	They're putting it into cryptos.
	And, you know, the old...
	For the elites and for the smart, there's crypto.
	For everyone else, there's Weimar, right?
	There's just paper currency.
	And so what this means is that they don't want to mess up crypto.
	And this was the big...
	The transition point, the big transition point where enough elites were going to get into, enough powerful people were going to get into crypto that they're not going to shoot themselves in the foot.
	It's like saying, well, once you get off a Titanic, you know you're going to sink.
	How are you going to destroy the lifeboats?
	Well, you're not going to destroy the lifeboats because it's going to kill you.
	So the more we can get powerful, rich, smart people to put their money into crypto, which I think is happening as we stand, everybody else is going to be left with disintegrating fiat.
	It's going to be rough. It's going to be a bipolar society.
	And there's not really much we can do about it because, you know, I mean, certainly I know most of the people here and I myself have been fighting like 40 years against this kind of stuff.
	But, you know, we are where we are.
	So I don't think that the government is going to mess up Bitcoin.
	And I think if they do try to mess up Bitcoin, they will get the carrot and the stick, right?
	And the carrot is, stop messing with Bitcoin and you can have some Bitcoin.
	And the stick is, if you continue to mess with Bitcoin, Bitcoin is a currency well accepted on the dark web and hit jobs are very cheap.
	And so I do think that there's going to be Now, what is it they say?
	The lead or the silver, right?
	In Mexico, right? If you go along with the cartels, you get the silver, and if you don't, you get the lead.
	And I don't really believe...
	I'm being a little bit hyperbolic here, but I think there's essences in it.
	They'll just work to destroy people, or they'll come up and say, hey, I found an old tweet where you criticize trans people, and you can either back off crypto or we're going to release you to the blue-haired mob or tear you limb from limb or whatever, right?
	So there's going to be ways as rich, powerful people transition their wealth into Bitcoin, they're just going to guard it fiercely.
	And there will be times when they criticize it.
	Don't get me wrong. There will be times where very rich, very smart people will completely try and create a Bitcoin, but that's only so they can buy the dip, not because they don't believe it.
	That it's got real value.
	So, yeah, be aware that as more and more people come on board, they are going to just slam and undermine.
	And governments will threaten.
	Like, the powerful people will threaten Bitcoin.
	They will threaten to regulate it.
	They will threaten to take it over.
	They will threaten to ban it.
	But only so they can drive the price down and buy the dip.
	That's all it's going to be about, as far as I'm concerned.
	Anyway, that's my thoughts. I'm certainly happy to hear if people have complimenting or different thoughts or other things they want to talk about.
	Well, Steph, I'm curious about that.
	I wanted to push back on that a little bit, or maybe just get some clarity in the sense that it's not the case that crypto, Bitcoin in general, it's all said and done.
	We just got to sit back and it's going to hold its course.
	There's still a part for everyone to play, a place for them to play philosophically in their lives, what they're doing to make that happen.
	It's not going to just happen.
	Like a constitution for a state, whatever, it doesn't just get enforced.
	Like, if it's good, you know, either way.
	Same for- So your argument is that we need to do more to promote Bitcoin when I actually have nine people on the screen promoting Bitcoin?
	No, no, no, I'm not, no, I'm saying, I could be misunderstanding the case you were making that, like, crypto is, it's all, it's good, it's protected from the state, you know, or it's going to survive the state because it seems to me that, like, the state's going to be really invested and really, like, They've proved it's effective when they point guns at people.
	How is that going to stop someone from, or enough people, from giving up the goods in crypto or corrupting it?
	Well, because if the people who have the guns have money in crypto, they don't want to point it.
	I mean, they'll point it at crypto to drive the price down to buy the dip, but they're not going to.
	Destroy the whole thing.
	Like, you don't have a parachute and then shoot the fillet gun into your parachute, right?
	I mean, that's just, if the plane's going down, just your parachute, you want to protect the parachute, right?
	Okay, true. We also have to go door to door.
	I mean, think about this. You have it in a hardware wallet.
	Like, you have to go door to door to get people's Bitcoin.
	Like, you know, and like they say, there's a gun behind every blade of grass in the United States.
	Like, that's not a feasible strategy.
	Well, it's okay. You have to go door to door to get everyone's crypto.
	The same thing for like, theoretically, for a gold transaction, but they still are pretty effective at taxing gold because when people do transact it in the economy, they've got to bring it into the light, they've got to account for it, all that, so on and so forth.
	The same thing is going to apply to a crypto.
	Yeah, except the elite, you know, all the tax law is in favor of the elite, right?
	Like, why do you think capital gains is lower than, you know, working income?
	Both people are taking a risk.
	One's taking a risk with their labor.
	The other one's taking a risk with their capital, right?
	No, hang on, hang on.
	So the capital gains tax, though, is on money that has already been taxed.
	And that's one of the reasons why it's lower.
	I mean, I get where you're coming from, that the elites kind of rig it their own way.
	But It's not nearly as much risk having a job as it is investing.
	So there is high risk in investing, plus the money you put into investments is money that's already been taxed.
	So I think that's one of the reasons why it's lower, just to push back on that a bit.
	Also, I think that one of the things we can look at is people's actions on what they're actually doing in government.
	So you've got recently a U.S. bank that has been approved called Anchorage.
	They're a full-fledged accredited bank.
	So that's not in the realm of control, that's in the realm of adoption and allowing.
	The CFTC recently has allowed different banks to utilize crypto blockchains like they would the Fed network or the Swift network.
	So again, that's in the realm of adopting and integrating.
	And we've also got In Canada now, gratefully, good for you guys, you've got a couple of Bitcoin ETFs that have really taken off and brought in a lot of assets.
	So that's allowing people in their brokerage accounts to go out and own paper crypto, right?
	Not directly, but it allows them to invest in it at least.
	So I'm not seeing actions by the state to stop adoption.
	I'm seeing actions by state and regulatory agencies in a way of promoting it or at least allowing it.
	They're not removing it, they're allowing it.
	Yeah, of course. Sorry, go ahead.
	Well, somebody just posted here and said, thank you, Steph.
	The tax code smokes middle class people, the rich skirt the tax code by just avoiding it entirely.
	It's not true. It's not true.
	You just have to look up the percentage.
	Of taxes paid by the super wealthy is truly staggering.
	Like the top 1% pay close to half of the tax burden.
	So no, this idea that the rich are totally getting away with not paying any taxes is not the case.
	I mean, if you're wealthy, your tax bill will choke a camel to death.
	So just be aware of thinking that the middle class are the only people who pay taxes.
	Yeah, salary taxes are very high.
	No, the real people who get away with not paying taxes are the poor.
	Let's be frank about this, right?
	A third of the population pays like 2% or 3% of the taxes, and they get massive amounts of benefits.
	If you're starting to look for who's getting a free ride, it's not the super rich who pay massive amounts of taxes, it's the poor, in particular the people who are on welfare or social...
	They're getting free health care, subsidized dental care or free dental care that they don't pay nearly enough to cover the costs of their education or miseducation of their children.
	So, no, if you're looking for the free riders, look at the military industrial complex, look at the government unions, look at the poor.
	There's a whole bunch of things, but the rich do pay an enormous amount in taxes and you can't just wave that stuff away.
	And again, if you doubt me, just go look up the data.
	It's pretty clear. In dollar figures, no one's going to argue with you on that.
	I'm just saying, tax rate-wise, they do not pay the same tax rate that someone that is earning an income.
	At the same time, whether you're making dividends or you're going to a job every day, why can't that rate be the same?
	No, but dividends are the profits that you get from money that's already been taxed, right?
	So you make five bucks, you get taxed on the five bucks, you put that, you know, three bucks into a stock, you get dividends, so you can't tax it at the same rate as income because it's the result of income that's already been invested, so I don't think you can sell at the same rate.
	Well, all the fiat's made up anyway, so, you know, why can't it all be taxed at the same rate?
	But anyway, none of this is about crypto at this point, right?
	Like, No, no, right.
	So let's hear, there's a couple of facts that I wanted to throw out there, because I don't, you know, if you're in the space, you kind of see this stuff.
	Okay, how long, this is for the panel, right?
	I don't know if you guys like the Q&A, I kind of like him, so if you like him, let me know.
	So how long did it take for Bitcoin to become a $100 billion asset?
	Was it around sometime 2013, maybe?
	I don't know, 2014? That's great.
	So it took eight years for Bitcoin to become a $100 billion asset.
	Bitcoin's market cap just grew by $100 billion in how many days?
	Yeah, we got a lot further, I think, to go.
	Yeah, so it took eight years to get its first $100 billion and it just grew by $100 billion in three days.
	At this point, it's the network effect.
	There's more utility as more people start understanding what it is and eventually start transacting in it.
	Can you imagine what its value is going to be when people are using it every day for transactions?
	But that's what I'm saying.
	I do want to push back a little bit on Steph's point of view on this.
	I'm not saying government is going to try to destroy Bitcoin now.
	They did try. They couldn't.
	And now what they're going to do, in my opinion, is not they're going to try to destroy it.
	And of course, they are going to try to buy as much as they can.
	But what they're going to try to do is they're going to try to salvage the fractional reserve banking and the monetary expansion.
	That's what they're going to try to do.
	And so, if people is not actually holding their own keys, but they have banks holding accounts for them, and then is the bank the one that has the keys, then you can do fractional reserve.
	You don't really, you know, Bitcoin doesn't solve that if you are not the holder of your keys.
	If for some reason you're not transacting on chain, you're using second, third layers, then there's many convoluted things that they can do to actually issue more money than Bitcoins are.
	And that's my point. At this point, I don't think they are going to attack Bitcoin directly because most of them already are buying the dip, as you say.
	But then they're going to try to make it worse for the rest of us.
	Yeah, there's going to be derivatives that start up based off Bitcoin and that's going to have some kind of risk involved, I think.
	Yeah, I haven't heard of shorts though yet.
	I think they tried writing Bitcoin shorts and the last time I heard about that was a few years ago.
	Well, you'll also know when the elites want to buy Bitcoin, they will start complaining that it's racist and sexist.
	I mean, when you bring that vengeful, blue-haired...
	Drama power into the equation and it'll be like, well, if you hold Bitcoin, you clearly don't care about minorities, even though we are a tiny minority of people who actually hold Bitcoin.
	Here's another thing, too, I think, that is driving where things are going.
	So most people here, I'm not going to ask, right?
	But I think most people here, I mean, mostly diamond hands, right?
	Mostly holding on. So the people who are buying Bitcoin, they're buying Bitcoin and then taking them off the exchanges.
	So it means that the supply of Bitcoin that's available for purchase is decreasing at the same time as demand is increasing.
	And that is a pretty powerful situation for a price increase.
	So people buying stuff are just taking it off the market.
	And they're thinking the $100,000, $200,000 million Bitcoin or whatever, right?
	So they're buying now at the bottom, and it is at the bottom relative to where I think it's going to go, my opinion, of course.
	But if you're buying it and taking it off, Then people are going to want to buy more, but the supply is going to be decreasing or is decreasing at the moment.
	So I think that's quite wild.
	So discussing the philosophy and ethics of crypto, what we're here for, and Steph, you gave a great speech on that vein to begin with, that reminds me, I wanted to get back to, while I was asking for kind of this topic, this conversation was Crypto's gotten more and more to it.
	You hit on this to where everyone's in it for the gains.
	And they've kind of lost sight of the mission that was originally here.
	And I don't know if folks know that Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, that kind of stuff came from the cypherpunk movement, which started back in the 80s.
	You can look for it online, the Cypherpunk Manifesto.
	It'll give you an idea of those original values that were pushing that.
	And I'm glad that we have James B and I think Jonathan here, you guys have been in since like 2012, 2013, or anyone else has been in around that long.
	You guys can share your perspective on this.
	Like back then, the people who are into crypto and Bitcoin We're Austrian economists.
	They were having philosophical arguments, libertarians.
	It was a lot about the virtue and the values and that kind of stuff.
	You didn't see nearly as much of the win-lambo-gains conversation.
	We've gotten farther and farther away from that.
	Do y'all recall that back in the day, like the people you talk to in general in crypto, it was all like, it was heavy philosophy.
	And kudos to you, Pedro, if you've read Human Action, that is a tense book, man.
	30% through, just not there yet.
	I don't know if I made it a percent.
	I've tried the audiobook several times and I just, I can't get Mises rights just so dense.
	But that's actually my point.
	I don't think people is taking money out of Coinbase, for example.
	I think they have it there. Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, I view Bitcoin as basically, it's like the, you know, you get the Death Star that is the fiat currency world, like the central banking world.
	And this is that bombing run where, you know, Luke's gonna shoot into the, you know, exhaust vent, right?
	And it's just gonna blow it up, right?
	If you hold long enough, like, You know, on a long enough timeline, hard money drives out soft money.
	And the argument that even, like, say we get FedCoin, right?
	Like, why would you break up with your beautiful girlfriend that treats you well and go use that shit, you know, currency, right?
	That's like, every day you hold it, you lose money, right?
	Well, for the same reason that people handed over their gold when they said, give it up, because they're pointing a gun at you, you know?
	There may be another reason, too, because now we will have the opportunity to borrow in an inflationary currency, which is the benefit to the debtor, and we can save in a currency that's going to appreciate in value.
	So when you have that separation, that allows people to choose which avenue they would like to participate in.
	For me, I'm going to take a mortgage out in dollars.
	That's great. And then if you want to print trillions more, have at it.
	But all of my assets and all of my savings is going to be in Bitcoin, which you can't touch.
	So I think that there's a room for both avenues.
	And there will be because you're not going to get governments to just lie down and say, oh yeah, we're fine with everybody just managing themselves.
	That's not going to happen.
	But I also think To Pedro's point earlier, that if all governments got together and tried to ban this, that's going to be very, very difficult to do or even to control it.
	Because all you need is one government to say, you know what, we're not going to do that.
	What we're going to do on the side is we're going to start saving as many Bitcoin as we can.
	And that way, if the saber breaks apart, we're the ones that hold You know, 10,000 Bitcoin or 2 million Bitcoin, something like that.
	So it makes it really difficult because you've got a prisoner dilemma there, where you've got people who will be acting in their own self-interest, but saying something different in public.
	And that is what governments have done.
	Now, to play devil's advocate, how did that work out for countries that tried to get off the dollar or tried to go their own goldback route?
	I'm thinking Libya, Gaddafi, stuff like that.
	You know, I could be wrong.
	at a similar thing, how did that work out for them? - Well, no, but the elites around the world weren't invested in the potential for the Libyan dollar.
	Right, but they are invested in crypto.
	So for me, looking at things, I don't know, I hate to say from a historical perspective 'cause it's not an argument, but I will sort of say that if I were the ruler, I don't know, of Stefland or something like that, I'm the ruler of Steffland.
	And all of these crypto people are facing suppression through their governments at home.
	And you can see this already in countries.
	You want to go get a second passport, what do you do?
	You just go and invest in Malta or you go to Micronesia or you, you know, and if you say, hey, just come and invest.
	And we'll give you a second passport, right?
	So all that will happen, you saw this in Ireland, the sort of the Irish tiger of the 90s, where they cut corporate gains taxes and so on.
	So all you do is you say to somebody, oh, if you have, you know, five bitcoins or 10 bitcoins, you can get a passport to my country.
	And people, if they're sitting on a lot of Bitcoins and it's, you know, not the North Pole that is offering this or something, right?
	Then countries will simply offer to be a safe haven for Bitcoin people because that's where the smart...
	That's a way of reversing the brain drain that's sort of been going on in a lot of places.
	It will make sure that the smartest and wisest and people who've got some real affluence will end up in your country.
	Whatever country does that will make Monaco look like Sierra Leone, right?
	So that would just be a safe haven country.
	That will happen for Bitcoiners if we're under threat.
	And it's not like if you invade that country, like, there's no building where all the Bitcoins are stashed, right?
	You can't grab the gold, right? You know, like, okay, you could take out all the computers that are mining or handling transactions of Bitcoin in that country, the network doesn't go down, right?
	The other thing I wanted to mention, again, this is sort of a perspective thing.
	So, in less than a year, the American government has done six trillion dollars in bailouts.
	I mean, $6 trillion in bailouts in less than a year.
	And of course, this weekend, right, I guess the stimmy checks are coming in, right?
	So that is just astonishing.
	The other thing I wanted to mention as well is that people who nag, and I think Jared and I talked about this briefly, but people who nag about, oh, you know, crypto mining, it's so bad for the environment.
	It's like, hello, do you think gold just jumps out of the ground and flies?
	And what about diamonds? Do you think diamonds, oil, anything, everything we do that either stores value or creates energy is hard to get out of the ground?
	But what you do have with Bitcoin, and it really is an amazing thing when you think about it, you have some of the very smartest people in the planet with the very highest incentives to lower the energy requirements of Bitcoin mining, right? Because it's a new industry, right?
	I mean, crypto mining is...
	Less than five years old.
	And if you guys remember what the personal computer industry looked like when it was less than five years old.
	I mean, people were still soldering ZX80 computers together in their basement and going half blind from the fumes.
	So it's really, really It's really, really early.
	And crypto mining revenue, February 2021, crypto mining revenue was almost $3 billion.
	That's in one month. Now, of course, their biggest cost is energy.
	And what they're going to do is they're going to work really, really hard and someone's going to have a breakthrough.
	They're going to find some more efficient solar thing or some great battery thing or some magic wind thing or some geothermal thing.
	They're going to find some way of turning energy into dollars.
	Because it's kind of tough, right?
	Because... Turning energy into dollars usually requires some intermediary thing, right?
	You turn energy, or you drill for oil, you get the oil out, and then you sell the oil, that turns in.
	But this is directly really turning energy into dollars.
	And so you've got the smartest people in the youngest industry with the greatest incentive looking to find ways to reduce direct energy consumption costs.
	And it is by far their greatest cost.
	And I'll go with that level of incentive than anything else.
	So wait, what you're pointing out is that- The problem there is that energy is not the issue with Bitcoin mining.
	It's not supposed to be efficient energy-wise.
	It's supposed to be inefficient.
	No, I get that. Sorry, I don't mean that the algorithms get easier to solve.
	I know that's not how it works.
	What I mean is that because it is inefficient, it means that by far the greatest cost for the miners at a $3 billion a month industry is the energy required to run the processors that do the mining, right?
	Whether the GPUs or whatever it is that's doing it.
	And so they have a huge incentive to find ways to reduce that cost because it's the biggest single thing eating into their profits.
	Because, you know, you have oil, you got to ship it somewhere, you got to refine it, you got to put it into a petroleum tank, someone's got to put it in there, or you got to put in a gas station, it's a whole series of things.
	Whereas this is direct, like, if you can figure out a way to get your processors humming in a way that is really efficient, If, let's say, a gold mine finds some way to reduce the energy requirements to get gold out, well, they still have all the transportation and refining and purification and shipping and reforging it into the ring of power or whatever the hell goes on in a goldsmith shop.
	But with Bitcoin mining, it's direct energy to cash, like energy to cash, energy to cash.
	And the fact that it is inefficient is going to get more so means that they have a greater incentive to try and find Ways to reduce that energy consumption thing.
	And this is why, what is it, Mongolia, where they massively subsidize the energy prices is why they all go there.
	Somebody's going to figure this out and going to make a fortune.
	Jared, I feel I'm a body language expert.
	And when you're doing this, I have a feeling that you may have something to say.
	That's just how I roll, man.
	So what you're saying is it will drive technological innovation in the area of energy production, essentially.
	No, no, energy generation.
	I'm sorry, generation production.
	Yeah. Awesome.
	Awesome. I mean, if we don't think that's true, then we have to give up the basic principle of economics that people respond to incentives, right?
	And people do respond to incentives.
	It's their biggest single cost.
	They're the smartest people. And whoever can crack that code and find some way to make it more efficient is going to be a bazillionaire.
	MK, go for it, unless you're high-fiving me.
	That too. I will high-five you.
	But I was going to make a point that this transition has happened a couple of times in Bitcoin, right?
	Like when I started, you could mine it on a CPU. Then you could mine it on a GPU. Now it's like dedicated silicon.
	That's all it does.
	We have to keep in mind, there's two Bitcoins.
	There's the Bitcoin now when you're still like, we haven't hit 21 million.
	So the mining is still pulling new Bitcoin.
	You're still creating the currency, right?
	But we're going to get to that point where we hit 21 million.
	And unless there's a hard fork, like that's all she wrote in terms of the number of Bitcoin.
	So now the miners become basically what they're going to be doing is paying the transactions.
	They're going to be making sure that people can actually transact on the blockchain.
	And what's going to happen is it's going to be like Uber.
	You've got the surge pricing.
	More people want to transact on this day, so the rewards for mining are going to go up, and they're going to go down.
	And as we get more and more efficient, suddenly it drives towards zero, where we basically have this currency where we can just transact, and it doesn't get much more efficient than that.
	So there's two Bitcoins, and to say like, yeah, it's just going to asymptotically demand more energy going forward.
	I don't know that that's true. I saw someone make that case as well, that this energy production thing, as soon as we get the bulk of the Bitcoins, it's going to significantly change.
	Well, and it's still a lot less energy inefficient than, say, war.
	Yes! That's the big offset.
	Energy inefficient, right? The US military is one of the biggest polluters on the entire planet.
	And all national debt is destructive to the environment because it's consuming in the present at the expense of the future.
	You're front-loading, your consumption of scarce resources, and all government debt, all stimulus, all of this is incredibly destructive to the environment because we're not postponing and spreading out our consumption of resources.
	So I'll take my chances with the GPU dudes.
	James B, go for it! All right.
	Well, in response to MK, I don't know about you, you may be near immortal, but we've got until 2140 before we run out of new Bitcoins.
	We've got a little bit. And I think that there's people solving the energy issue right now.
	I mean, in North America, we've got, I know of a company that will take those Empty shipping containers, fill them full of Bitcoin miners, they drop them off at a gas well in North Dakota, and then the normal natural gas is being flared off by these companies.
	Now it just gets piped into a generator, and they start Mining Bitcoin right there from a source of energy that would normally just be flared off and lost.
	I'm sorry, I need to interrupt this broadcast for an emergency dad joke, which is that if natural gas can produce Bitcoin, I'm just going to go order some Indian food and I'll be right back, a fantastically wealthy man.
	But sorry, go ahead. That's right.
	Yeah, we're all going to be there.
	So with that, we're going to be able to utilize very clean, very abundant, but also extraordinarily cheap sources of energy to power Bitcoin, especially in environments like North Dakota, which I know if you've been there in the winter, it's very similar to Canada.
	And the problem with cooling these machines is it doesn't exist.
	There's one solution. Right.
	James, you were pointing out that, yeah, it's going to be until 2140-something until the last Bitcoin is mined, but don't forget that every four years, the amount that comes out is halved.
	So that's also part of what MK and I were factoring in there.
	And we've already mined the majority of the Bitcoins to date.
	Yeah, over 80%.
	Well, and a bunch of them are lost, right?
	Yeah, there's a bunch that lost too.
	But that fact right there, the having every four years, man, you've really got to read a post by a guy by the name of Plan B, who has a stock to flow financial model on how Bitcoin And compares to gold, compares to silver, compares to diamonds and real estate.
	And the stock to flow model is roughly like this.
	The stock is the current worldwide supply of anything, gold, oil, Bitcoin.
	And the flow is the one-year additive to that.
	And then you create a ratio on how many years at current production would it take to replace the current worldwide supply.
	Then the stock-to-flow for gold is somewhere around 60, and right now Bitcoin is around 52.
	And that fact has created so much value in gold, according to his argument, that during the next halving, Bitcoin is going to go to 100.
	The stock-to-flow of 100, which has never existed for a commodity in the history, well, human history.
	So it's very interesting to see how that model holds up.
	So far, It explains 99% of the price in Bitcoin.
	If you're a real geek like me, that's an R squared of 0.99.
	Break that down for me in layman's terms.
	Buy more Bitcoin? Yes.
	And hold it. Hold it.
	It's the ultimate real estate, right?
	Like, you know, they're not making any more of it.
	And they, you know, once you hit 21 million, that's it, right?
	You want to have a seat at that table when you get there.
	Well, and of course, you simply need to look at people like Maxine Waters and Ilhan Omar, right?
	So Maxine Waters is like, why can't you get a refund if you lose money on stocks?
	Like, this is somebody who's high up and in charge of the economic system who doesn't have the faintest clue how any of this stuff works.
	That's number one. Ilhan Omar, she is, what is she, proposing legislation now that nobody's going to have to pay any rent until April of 2022?
	And that, of course, that's democracy in a nutshell, right?
	It's why there's rent control, because tenants outnumber landlords like 100 to 1 or 50 to 1 or whatever it is, right?
	So just the idea that you have complete...
	Idiotic, economic, I wouldn't say even lunatics, because lunatics aren't that harmful.
	But people who just don't have the first clue or are completely corrupted by populism and just have no interest in sustaining anything.
	Real estate, you know, as I said this before, when you get a leftist government in power, real estate is not a very great investment because they'll just yank that stuff left, right and center or crank up your property taxes or, you know, inhibit your capacity to buy and sell or make it impossible for you to charge rent.
	Or whatever it is, right? We've already got commercial real estate rolling to the grave.
	And personal real estate investments are going to be kind of rough.
	So this is why the window to invest in various commodities, to me, how long is it going to be before the Fed really starts cranking up purchases of stocks to keep the price up?
	I mean, they do it indirectly, in my view, just by keeping interest rates really low.
	So people got to do something with the money and inflation's going up.
	Gold, I don't, it's just not moving.
	It's not moving because people are looking for some place to invest.
	Real estate isn't that great, in my opinion.
	Gold is stagnant.
	And bonds, good lord, government bonds, are you crazy?
	And stocks are a bit of a bubble at the moment.
	I mean, how the stock market can be so far up after a year of everything falling apart is just lunatic, right?
	And, you know, it's like catching Catherine Zeta-Jones on an upswing.
	You know, like at some point, she's going to be Britney Spears or Jim Carrey sobbing into a pillow, and it's just not going to seem worth it anymore.
	So I think Bitcoin is just where the value is going to go.
	And you're going to try and squeeze a whole lot of economic activity into a relatively limited number of Bitcoins.
	It's going to blow, I think, up.
	Let me do one last try at my pessimistic theory.
	Please, go for it. Yeah, yeah. No, balance is...
	I've heard... Sorry.
	Yeah, I've heard that balance is good.
	So it's just the first time I've heard that, but I think it's good.
	Go ahead. No, what I'm saying is not that...
	I think Bitcoin is probably going to be 1 million euro or 1 million dollar each.
	Maybe 1 billion at some point.
	I'm not saying... At some point?
	I know, come on.
	Put it on the line here, man.
	Just narrow it down a little.
	What kind of time frame are we talking about here?
	Say it again slower.
	I don't know, 50 years, 100 years.
	Oh, 50 or 100 years? For sure, my prediction for this year is...
	I'm afraid that my interest in your predictions has waned a little bit because it's going to be beyond my lifespan.
	So, fine.
	At some point. I'm still on board.
	I mean, I can still work with that one.
	It could be a little far on the end, but, you know, I still got it.
	I've never felt younger.
	Sorry, Pedro. If you like predictions.
	No, I'm going to ask people.
	I'm going to ask people at the end and you can tell me, you cannot tell me what the predictions are.
	But Pedro, keep on with your theory and I'll try not to see it.
	Okay, okay. So what I'm saying is, even if Bitcoin keeps raising in value, the goal Was to stop central banking monetary expansion, right? And maybe even fractional reserve banking.
	So if Bitcoin is worth one billion dollars, but we still have central banking, because people is not actually using Bitcoin like we are.
	They don't hold their keys.
	They don't, you know, they just have an account somewhere.
	Then, it can be that Bitcoin is extremely successful as an asset, but we still don't get rid of wars.
	That's my point. I want to just jump in because I wanted to echo, Pedro, what you're saying.
	I got involved in 2014 and the values that you saw expressed on Reddit are different or were different than they are today.
	Before, the values were, yeah, save it, hodl it, get it.
	But it was also spend it, try to transact with it, try to spread it around on a, like, And teach other people how to do it.
	Like, get people to get wallets on their phones and stuff.
	And then today, it's not like that at all.
	Like, I remember there was huge excitement when Dell started accepting it and Microsoft and Overstock.
	And then today, none of that adoption is happening from the consumer level.
	Everyone, like, it's been said, don't worry about being able to use it.
	Just buy it and hold on to it.
	And then the being able to use it part will just come sometime down the road.
	And there's not much of a roadmap for how that's going to happen.
	And then for people who think that using it is important and that we need to not just wait for it to happen, but like actually...
	Sorry to interrupt you, Tim. I just wanted to thank Ryan for his son giving us a graphic demonstration of Bitcoin value back there.
	You know, bouncing up and down all over the place.
	It's great. So Tim, okay, but that's a great, great point.
	And I don't have a big answer for it, but I'm just curious what you mean by using it.
	So do you mean buying a coffee?
	Do you mean raising money for a company?
	Because there's two big use case scenarios for money, right?
	One is business to consumer, the other is business to business, right?
	I see Bitcoin as B2B. Maybe it's Bitcoin Cash, maybe something smaller, something more localized, maybe Ethereum, maybe something like that is going to be business to consumer, like buying a coffee or whatever it is.
	But I think for larger purchases, I think that the Bitcoin environment is going to be pretty powerful.
	And that's where the majority of economic activity occurs, right?
	You know, you go and pick up a pencil in a store, you know, it's gone through 50 hands, three countries, you know, 12 different companies, and those people all have to have their economic transactions that is bulk, right?
	It's big, big stuff, you know?
	They're buying trees, not pencils, right?
	They're buying forests, in fact, not pencils.
	So if you say, how do you use it?
	Right now, I think what's happening is people are storing value from the collapse of the US dollar in anticipation.
	That it's going to retain purchasing power relative to the US dollars.
	Because people say, you know, it's one thing to say, oh, Bitcoin's going to 100,000.
	It's like, okay, well, what's 100,000 going to buy you?
	Bitcoin goes to a million, and a coffee is a million, right?
	I mean, it doesn't really make sense.
	So we'll get to that in a sec. But that's my question around use case scenario, right?
	It's sort of like saying, well, I'm storing nuts for the winter.
	It's like, well, but you're not using them.
	It's like, well, yes. But that's because I don't need to right now, but I need to in the future.
	And storing nuts for the winter is what makes sense, right?
	So I guess that's my question of use.
	If it's used as a store of value, you know, you buy food, you put it in your freezer.
	Well, you're not using that. It's like, well, yeah, but I can't eat it all at once.
	So I have to store something for later, at which point I'll use it.
	And I'm just trying to understand what you mean by what it would mean to use something rather than store value.
	I think Aristotle said something like, there's three main purposes of money, store value, medium of exchange, and unit of account.
	And then Bitcoin, they're just not going for the medium of exchange function.
	They can say that they're trying to do lightning, but that's not really getting much traction.
	So hang on, but there's not a demand.
	Right now, there's not a demand for people to go to Starbucks and buy stuff with Bitcoin.
	But there was. Back in 2015, there was a new giant company adopting it every month.
	And then that's all stopped once the fees started going up.
	No, it stopped.
	It stopped because Donald Trump got elected.
	No, seriously, I'm not kidding about this.
	Have you not noticed that Biden is the boom to Bitcoin that has never been seen before?
	Biden is the rocket fuel for Bitcoin.
	Because Trump sold this goal, right?
	Sorry to get all political, right?
	We'll keep it briefly. Whether you agree with Trump or not, this was the goal.
	So Trump said...
	We're screwed as an economy.
	And the only thing that we can do is grow our way out of deficits and debt.
	That's the only thing we can do.
	So he was cutting regulations.
	He was lowering taxes.
	He was just doing a whole bunch of things designed to get the economy growing fast enough to start outpacing deficits, right?
	Now, I mean, he spent like crazy.
	But this was the general theory.
	And so, you know, if you're the priest giving last rites and then the doctor says, I have a miracle cure, you're like, okay, well, I'll come back and see, right?
	And Trump, from the anticipation that he was going to win in 2015 to his victory in 2016 through till early to mid 2020 when the depths of the COVID pandemic economic destruction became clear, Companies were like, oh, okay, well, the miracle cure is here.
	The economy is better.
	Unemployment is at record lows, and job growth is at record highs, and maybe we can grow our way out of this thing, and we don't need Bitcoin.
	In other words, maybe the Titanic ain't going to sink, in which case, why would you want to get into some tiny boat in the middle of nowhere, right?
	So, I mean, this is my particular analysis of it, that Trump put Bitcoin on hold, which is why I was kind of ambivalent when Trump didn't win.
	I'm like, well... For the American economy, that's not so great.
	For my economy, Fantastic.
	I think it's self-evident that it's a safer position if 99% of people are holding the crypto themselves and whenever they want to use it, they don't have to go through a bank.
	Or some crypto institution.
	But the people who are holding it are expecting it to go up.
	So of course they're not going to spend it.
	In a free market of currency, why does one have to serve all those functions?
	I'm sorry, I didn't finish my thought.
	It's harder for the government to attack it if it's on this giant decentralized things where everybody's holding their own thing.
	Like, if it's all of our crypto is aggregated into banks, and then that's how we're using it, it's easier for the government to interfere with that.
	You can effectively do a short squeeze by moving it to a hardware wallet.
	It's the ultimate short squeeze.
	You can because you know about it.
	But most people don't know about it.
	In that future time, the Bitcoin that are held by these business-to-business transactions, like Steph pointed out, when someone does want to get it to a hard wallet, how many people's signatures are you going to have to have to move that?
	What kind of board meeting are you going to have to have for that to happen?
	And like, sorry to go back to that point too, where Steph was pointing out, you know, in this scenario in the future, if Bitcoin is the settlement layer for business to business transactions, When I think of the businesses we have today, like Google et al., I'm not inspired.
	One is a safer situation than the other.
	And then maybe both of them are perfectly safe.
	That's a safe enough, like having all our crypto in banks is just going to be fine.
	But maybe it's not. And then I'm not convinced it is safe.
	Okay, so Tim, let me ask you this.
	Let me ask you this. What scenario would you feel comfortable embracing?
	Like, what would have to happen for you to feel, you know, positive or enthusiastic as, you know, madly evangelical as the rest of us?
	And I'm just curious about it.
	I'm not trying to corner you.
	I'm genuinely curious, like, what has to be in place for you to just be like, yeah!
	Or whatever it is that's going to be.
	I want to buy my groceries, buy my gas, pay rent, furniture.
	I just want to make all my purchases with Bitcoin, and I don't want to go through a bank to do that.
	And I would like it if it was easy for everybody else to do the same thing.
	Okay, but I'm just curious why you don't...
	Obviously, you can sell Bitcoin, you can transfer your money onto a Visa, and you can...
	Let's say you got a Visa bill of $2,000 a month because you put everything on Visa, right?
	Or whatever, right? So you get $2,000, you sell $2,000 worth of Bitcoin, you put it on your Visa, it takes you about 20 seconds, right?
	And then you can go and buy everything with your Visa.
	Yeah. And you just bought everything with your Bitcoin.
	Okay, there's one tiny extra step that's going to take you like 20 seconds a month.
	I'm just curious what, like, I'm not sure what's missing here.
	Yeah, okay, so it's not that using the Visa card is much more difficult.
	It's that I know that it's way easier for the government to go talk to some Visa representative than it is to go and hunt around 200 million 300 million people.
	The number of people that the government needs to bother in order to add friction is way smaller if we're using this Visa card system as opposed to just me directly with the grocery store and the gas station.
	Well, okay, but then you're sort of talking about tracking and stuff like that.
	But I mean, if you've got the Bitcoin, and I recommend everybody talk to an accountant, pay your taxes on your Bitcoins, very, very important.
	Don't imagine it's free stuff.
	There's no free lunch at the moment.
	Right? So... I mean, to me, if you sell your crypto, you put it on a visa, you go buy stuff on that, you're buying with crypto.
	You say, oh, well, it's easier for the government to track.
	It's like, well, the government knows how many cryptos you have because you've reported it and paid taxes on it.
	So I don't know that it's a...
	And if you have public...
	I have a public donation wallet that people can see what's in and all that.
	So I guess that's...
	My question is, I'm still trying to sort of understand what's missing.
	Is it like, oh, the government can't track you?
	It's like, well, that's not a Bitcoin issue.
	That's a government issue. I don't even think that they would really just go after me individually, but they will go to Visa and say, hey, we're going to need 10% of every transaction.
	Like, whatever fee you're causing to make this happen, we need 10% of that or 20 or half of it or something.
	They inject themselves into that.
	But it's not a competitor.
	It's the government. Like, if Visa is using dollar, If the store is still paying all the taxes, you still get worse funded.
	And also, if you have to change, Visa can de-platform you.
	You cannot be de-platformed for Bitcoin.
	So you're going to date ugly girls because they're being harassed by you.
	Stefan, if you're using one of those Visa cards, they're not going to let you use it.
	Okay, but so I'm still trying to figure out, is there a better shot that's out there, Tim?
	I'm trying to liberate you from potential negativity.
	Maybe you'll convince me to your side, but what's out there or on its way that solves your problems?
	Because if you're waiting for perfection, it's not going to come.
	Bitcoin Cash does that right now.
	That's the plan, is to just go directly.
	There's enough bandwidth, transactional bandwidth, to run all the transactions for the whole world.
	I'm sorry, in what? And Bitcoin Cash.
	And others. I just want to say that Tim is on the right track here.
	And I loved Bitcoin.
	I've been in here since 2013.
	I loved Bitcoin, the original vision, the ethics around it.
	And I'm super sad about the state of Bitcoin right now.
	And there are better options.
	And the only reason that they're not being explored more is because the Bitcoin narrative is so strong.
	So Bitcoin is running on the fumes of 2011, 2012, 2013 Bitcoin.
	It's not going to last forever.
	But other competitors will come in, and I'm just concerned that everybody is putting their eggs in the Bitcoin basket, and it's not a good future.
	I want to help clarify something that I think gets confusing, because a lot of people will say crypto and Bitcoin synonymously.
	They'll exchange them one for the other, or use Bitcoin as a general term for Bitcoin, or sorry, for crypto, cryptocurrency, which can be kind of confusing sometimes.
	Well, that's, I mean, if people are saying that, that's the wrong way to say that.
	They're not synonymous, obviously.
	Of course they're not, but it's general, like, talking to, like, normies, when all they've heard is Bitcoin, that's synonymous with crypto to them, you know?
	Or when you say dollar, everyone thinks it's the U.S. dollar, though there are lots of other things, so.
	Listen, I'm with you.
	I'm as disappointed as everyone that the entire programming interface of Bitcoin seems to have been shed, you know, like last year's Gucci purse from a fantastically rich trophy wife or something like that.
	So I think it's a real shame.
	And, you know, I'm sure that there will be the programming environments in various other cryptocurrencies will certainly, like, the question of the board, right?
	It's more than a shame. I'm sorry? It's more than a shame.
	I'm so upset with it because these high fees...
	They were engineered in.
	This was a decision that the core developers of Bitcoin made to create high fee Bitcoin.
	And I don't know why, I'm not going to actually read into why, but it was definitely avoidable.
	Bitcoin Cash did the right decision by just increasing the blocks a little bit.
	I know the arguments against that.
	But one megabyte limit is definitely not a magic number.
	And it could have been increased slowly, whatever.
	But there are other coins that are doing that.
	And I'm just...
	Steph, have you looked into the other cryptocurrencies?
	And why are you so excited about Bitcoin still?
	Yeah. Well, I have.
	We've done entire roundtables on alternative cryptos and so on, and we'll give Jared to make his pitch because he's got a very interesting one under his belt there.
	I think it's fantastic.
	I mean, I think that the competition space that's out there, there are a lot of people who say Bitcoin is the only signal, all the altcoins are noise.
	But here's the thing. Again, people responding to incentives, the fact that the fees are high creates a massive incentive for mining and investment and creating the hardware that runs this kind of stuff.
	So there's an upside to it as well.
	If Bitcoin ends up being the icebreaker that breaks through people's public consciousness around understanding cryptos and getting involved in cryptos and understanding cryptos, if it is One point, like crypto 1.0 is Bitcoin, and then something else comes along.
	I think that's fantastic as well.
	But as far as the high fees, yeah, I mean, that's a pain in the ass, except it's created an entire infrastructure.
	You know, it's sort of like saying, like, sorry, I've done it in a second.
	Would you have an entertainment industry if agents didn't charge 10%?
	Well, no, you wouldn't, because there's way more people who want to be actors and writers and directors than there are roles for them.
	So you have to have a gatekeeper, and the gatekeeper are the agents.
	So you go to the agent, and the agent maybe takes you on, and then when the headshot comes from the agent rather than just in the mail, it has more credibility because the agent's putting the reputation on the line.
	You say, oh my gosh, 10% of everything that I make, but that's the only reason there is that industry.
	So transaction fees are high, yeah, that's a pain in the ass, but...
	It has drawn a huge number of people into the industry.
	It's created an entire infrastructure of trillions of gigaflops or whatever it is to process stuff.
	And if it's just the gateway drug to better cryptos, fantastic.
	I mean, but the other cryptos have not taken off.
	They don't have the mindshare.
	They don't have the network effect.
	They don't have the dedicated hardware.
	They don't have the institutional investors.
	So, you know, bagging on Bitcoin when it's opening up the gateway to better things that wouldn't get there otherwise, you know, it's pretty easy in an action movie, it's pretty easy to be the second guy through the door.
	It's the first guy through the door who's, you know, getting shot at the most.
	So I don't have any hate on for it.
	I mean, I wish they were lower, obviously, but if the price of them being lower, the fees, is that we wouldn't have the infrastructure or the general public perception of things, I think that's a shame.
	So I think some of the resentment is not, or not resentment, but some of the negative pushback about Bitcoin today or the bad feelings.
	I can empathize where Ryan's coming from is that, you know, from 2013, 2015 on, we helped push and help evangelize and help get Bitcoin get to where it was.
	And then, you know, those values separated.
	And it's like, there's a loss there.
	And they're riding on the momentum of that branding of the Bitcoin brand, that name, When it's kind of been divided, it's not what it was.
	And we're all here because of what Steph said in his introduction, that Bitcoin has the power to eliminate war, but not this Bitcoin.
	This Bitcoin does not have that power.
	I don't think it does, but I'm grateful for it because it has It has, like you said, Steph, it has broken the gate open and allowed people to, you know, it's a gateway drug to possibly better alternatives.
	But any money that tries to be money where you're not actually using it as a medium of exchange is not money.
	That's just an investment.
	And it's not money. And money will still rule the world.
	You know, like the thing that people transact on a daily basis, that's money.
	Bitcoin's not going to be that.
	Not high-fee Bitcoin.
	I'm going to inject some hope here.
	We need some hope on Bitcoin for a second.
	There's hope in crypto.
	I've got an answer for that, though.
	I think that one of the core fundamental things that was important about Bitcoin from the cypherpunk era was to be your own bank.
	No one could deplatform you.
	No one could stop you from using it.
	And Bitcoin itself allows for that.
	I run a node here in my house.
	There are high fees for transferring it.
	However, I can use the Lightning Network on a Raspberry Pi which cost me less than $100 and I can run my own bank and those fees are minimal, less than a penny to send money anywhere in the world.
	That Lightning Network is super powerful and I think that we're missing how incredibly genius it was To focus on a second layer protocol, like for example, the Federal Reserve you can use to send money anywhere around the world, but it can take days for us to settle.
	Visa cards can do the same thing and you can get those payments there much quicker.
	But Visa doesn't settle instantly.
	The person you send money to, it takes several days for them to get the dollars in their bank account.
	Lightning Network settles instantly.
	And you can reverse it with the other person, but it does settle instantly and I can run it here in my house.
	So if I can run my own bank and I can send money anywhere in the world and be in control of 100% of that, it's very helpful.
	With Lending Network, you need to open a channel.
	Or you need to trust a company to open channels for you.
	If and when Lightning Network gets to a point where people can actually use it, then yeah, let's have a discussion about Lightning Network.
	But Lightning Network is nowhere near normal people user-friendliness.
	And when you say it settles instantly...
	You can use it right now. You could download the Strike app from iOS.
	Most people can't.
	Most people can't, most people won't.
	Well, hold on. It's free to download an app on your phone and you can use it and send funds anywhere right now.
	I mean, there's nothing holding you back.
	Strike is available in 200 plus countries in all their own currencies.
	It's new and it's growing, but it's things like that.
	These adoption The things that are actually coming on the scene are going to make a big difference.
	I think that we need to think dynamically, like Steph has talked about previously, that the future is not going to be the same as today.
	And what we did to get here is not going to be the same thing that we need to do to get to tomorrow.
	And we're going to have an exponential increase in adoption of Bitcoin, which is going to bring additional solutions and adoption programs for the rest of the world.
	It's so young and it's so new.
	My first dial-up was a 2400 board modem on a 386 laptop with a meg of RAM. And so, you know, and that was what, probably 30 years ago, right?
	So 30 years we go from that where you could, it was like watching a fast typist watching the text to go across the screen, that was how slow it went back and forth, to now we have live streaming with like 12 people and it's broadcasting and it's stored.
	And I mean, that's an incredible thing.
	So, you know, we've been in the space for a long time.
	So it feels like, oh my God, things are so slow and they could be so much better and it should be right.
	But when you're looking at it from the outside in, the fact that it took eight years to get to 100 billion and then it got there in three days.
	I mean, see, here's the thing.
	It's like a self-knowledge thing, which doesn't mean it's right.
	It doesn't mean it applies to everyone.
	We are innately dissatisfied people.
	We were dissatisfied with fear.
	We're dissatisfied with statism.
	We're dissatisfied with the education.
	We're dissatisfied with the media.
	We're dissatisfied with other podcasts.
	We are dissatisfied people.
	And that's a beautiful thing. That's where all progress comes from.
	It's from dissatisfied people.
	And if you want people to embrace what it is that you're doing, being dissatisfied is the worst place to start from because it just seems negative.
	And I'm saying this our relationship to ourselves fundamentally.
	We have an incredible tool here.
	Is it perfect? I don't know what that would even mean.
	You know, what does it mean to have a perfect lifeboat for the Titanic?
	I don't know. It's not the Titanic.
	And that's enough for me, you know?
	I'm happy with that.
	Is it perfect? Again, having that as a standard is having a non-reality based standard.
	It's like saying, I can't be happy until I'm in perfect health.
	Well, what does that even mean? I don't even know what perfect health means, right?
	So I'd like to push back on the fees for a moment.
	Hang on. Let me just finish this and then we can get back to the nitty gritty of the fees.
	But I just sort of invite, like you guys were in early.
	You're very smart. You're very competent.
	You're great communicators.
	And you've got a couple of cryptos, right?
	So it's a pretty good thing.
	It's a pretty good thing.
	And if you want other people to get enthusiastic about the next thing, you've got to get them enthusiastic about the current thing.
	Because if they don't understand the current thing, there's no way they're going to...
	If they don't understand Bitcoin, there's no way they're going to understand Bitcoin Cash or the Lightning Network or Ethereum or programmable environments for value transfer and storage.
	And there's no way. Get them enthusiastic about this thing.
	Get them to understand this thing.
	And that will create a market.
	And people will get in there and then they'll find the shortcomings of this thing.
	And you have a built-in market to look for the next thing.
	But saying this thing sucks means there won't be a next thing.
	Sorry, go ahead. The market for getting off the Titanic is huge.
	To not notice that, guys.
	Come on. Everyone's on the Titanic.
	It's sinking. And we're giving you an option of like, hey, inflation's running like 6% to 10% a year.
	Nobody's saying like...
	You know, screw Bitcoin.
	I'm not going to use it.
	I think Ryan was pretty close.
	I was pretty clear that I'm not happy with Bitcoin, but what I haven't said yet is that I'm still very, very optimistic, very excited about the cryptocurrency scene in general.
	And I just, I wish people would talk about it more than Bitcoin right now because Bitcoin's basically given up on it.
	It's not a question of whether the technology is capable of improving.
	The question is whether the people that are in charge, the developers, the marketers of Bitcoin, want the technology to succeed.
	I'm of the opinion that I don't think that those in charge of Bitcoin, and there are those in charge, I don't think that they want the technology to go where it originally was supposed to go.
	But other cryptocurrencies are.
	They've picked up the mantle.
	They're continuing the vision.
	I wish Bitcoin was on track.
	I hope Lightning Network works, but I'm not optimistic about that, not because technology is not possible, but because I think those in power don't want Lightning Network to be non-custodial, low fees, self-sovereign, all these kinds of things that it was supposed to be.
	I just don't think that's their vision anymore.
	Ryan, have you ever worked at a startup?
	I have. All right.
	Because basically, you know, the company that you join when it's 10 people is not the company that is the same company of 50 people or 100 people or 500 people.
	And to be upset about its success, right?
	Because basically, they're just trying to get market traction, right?
	And basically, the market's saying, like, we want you to replace, like, you know, all these legacy assets, right?
	And what I'm seeing is it's turning into basically, like, how do you move large sums of money?
	And the market for moving large sums of money is very large.
	Sure, and that's a great market.
	But do you know there was a $44 million transaction, I think it was yesterday, in Bitcoin Cash, and the fee was half of a cent.
	You know, it's fine for Bitcoin to go for that, you know, value system and go for that niche of what they're trying to do.
	Yeah, I agree. Aggravating about it is that that was not what was described in the Bitcoin way.
	But I think Steph is making a great point that we can come across as just kind of like bitter and sour instead of pushing forward if we stick on that too much.
	But I don't want to be a full-on Bitcoin Cash shield.
	And then I'm passionate about it.
	And then I'm optimistic. Personally, I'm just crypto.
	I don't care about the name.
	I don't care about the particular. Crypto needs to win.
	If I'm saving money, it's got to be a deflationary cryptocurrency.
	I don't really care. But listen, what Bitcoin Cash is, is people who was there in Bitcoin in the beginning, Making a hard fork is the same technology.
	They just raise the limit to avoid high fees.
	And then the fees, you have two models.
	One model is very high fees.
	And Steph was saying you need to fund all the energy, all the power, all the mining industry.
	Okay, there's two ways to fund that.
	One is high fees, low volume.
	The other one is low fees, high volume.
	The whole world using low fees, that's a lot of money for the miners.
	And then what happens there is there's a better chance that if everybody's using it, it's tougher for governments to ban it.
	That's what I'm saying. And actually, it's the same technology.
	It's born the same.
	And at some point, people said, okay, let's raise the limit because there was a lot of controversy.
	And, you know, beacon cash works.
	The same way Bitcoin worked in 2014 when I was using it and showing it to my friends.
	And then at some point in 2015, I tried to show it to my friends and I saw that it took six or seven hours to confirm.
	And then at some point in 2017, it turns out you have to pay two, three dollars for a transaction fee when the regular thing was one cent.
	And then you still have that in Bitcoin Cash.
	And there's others, of course, and I am optimistic about cryptocurrency in general.
	I'm just a little bit sad, as Ryan said, that the reasons for Bitcoin to have high fees are not technical.
	The technology can do it and Bitcoin Cash proves it.
	The reasons are Obscure and I also don't want to go full...
	It's greed. I mean, people want to get paid more, right?
	No, no, no. But it's not the miners who want high fees.
	The miners are okay with low fees as long as it's high volume.
	In fact, the miners at some point were voting like 70% in favor of raising the limit to the size of the blocks.
	And it was the developers.
	And then there is actually one big company called AXA funding some group of developers.
	And then now there's a new technology called Liquid.
	So I don't want to go full conspiracy theory, but there are things there that are not completely clear.
	And that's why...
	But see, here's the thing.
	Sorry. So human beings are fallible and human beings are greedy.
	And so we have the choice, this is my sort of where I started from, we have the choice between fallible, greedy human beings with control of central banks and guns, or we have fallible, greedy human beings trying to negotiate in a relatively voluntary environment with Bitcoin.
	Trying to convince you to use their particular crypto.
	Yeah, I mean, so the choice is not, fundamentally right now, this is sort of where I started, the choice is not between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.
	The choice is between Bitcoin and central banking, between Bitcoin and war, between Bitcoin and debt, between Bitcoin and bribery and corruption and violence.
	There are millions of deaths and financial enslavement and collapsing currency and people not being able to eat and riots in the streets.
	So if we focus on Bitcoin versus Bitcoin Cash, and that's fine.
	I mean, no issue with it. I think Bitcoin Cash is great.
	But if we focus on that and we lose the narrative that makes sense to people, which is right now, it's the big whale in the room.
	It's what people know about.
	It's Bitcoin versus fiat.
	It's Bitcoin versus fiat.
	That's how we grow Bitcoin.
	And once Bitcoin is in, Bitcoin cash may well win, but you've got to get the network effect before you get the transition.
	You've got to get a lot of people at least knowledgeable about what's going on, holding some, understanding it, and then they'll use Bitcoin and say, well, this is kind of slow and expensive.
	And it kind of is. I mean, let me be frank with that.
	It's kind of slow and kind of expensive in a lot of situations.
	And then you can say once they're in and they perceive it and they understand it, they get the value.
	Then you can say, aha, now we've got this Bitcoin Cash going to solve.
	They don't even know what problem Bitcoin Cash is trying to solve right now.
	They have no idea. And so this is why I say, if you promote Bitcoin, you will get the crypto of choice that's your preference.
	And there's obviously wonderful things about other cryptos relative to Bitcoin, but you've got to get people into the space that there's almost no way to do it now other than through Bitcoin.
	Get them in. You know, there's an old saying about writing, and I've always had this with my writing, get it down, then get it right.
	Just get the ideas down, get them on the page, start writing something, and then just edit like crazy if you need to.
	Get it down, then get it right.
	Because if you wait for the perfect sentence and the perfect flow to coalesce in your head, you'll be staring at a blank page forever.
	And that's why I'm saying the more you love Bitcoin Cash, the more you should be getting behind Bitcoin, because that's going to get people into the space.
	It's going to give them the resistance of the problems that Bitcoin is not solving.
	You come up with a better solution and you'll get them there, but you got to get them.
	You got to get them into Bitcoin, I believe, first.
	I just want to say, too, I've really appreciated the conversations, you know, these conversations, these roundtables, because, yeah, I... I've been so bitter about it for such a long time.
	I got that sense. I really did.
	I thought we were going to have a call-in show here.
	And, you know, talking, helping me see it from that perspective has really, like, soothed, like, that issue for me.
	Good, yeah, because we're on the other side and we're fighting about these little things.
	And everyone out there, they don't have any idea what Bitcoin cash is.
	They don't have any idea what Ethereum is.
	They have no idea what any of these things are.
	But they've heard of Bitcoin.
	And if they just look at us, you know, fighting about, you know, it's something called, they call this like the narcissism of petty differences.
	And what it looks like from the outside is that these are small differences.
	Now we get that there are big differences in implementation and we're thinking of the world running on cryptos, you know?
	And the other thing too, the more we get into Bitcoin, the more it highlights the weaknesses of fiat currency.
	Because the more Bitcoin, when Bitcoin keeps going up in value, People are saying, why?
	And we say, because Bitcoin is the true measure of inflation at the moment.
	Bitcoin is the true measure of inflation at the moment.
	Because we've got to pry people away from central banking in order for them to appreciate the value of Bitcoin.
	And it's not that Bitcoin's going up, it's that the US dollar is going down.
	We get them to understand that.
	They'll understand why we need cryptos in the first place.
	And that can literally save people's entire savings and lives and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
	So we are rescuing people and arguing about, you know, which brand of penicillin to use.
	Let's just focus on getting people out of the burning buildings of fiat right now, in my opinion.
	You guys are arguing about things that, like, you know, if Bitcoin is the missile in that exhaust port heading at the Death Star, you're arguing about what we're going to use after the Death Star's blown up.
	Like, let's blow it up first.
	Well, devil's advocate, like, the argument I think they're making on with him is, like, we're talking about the philosophy and ethical.
	Ethics of crypto and how that's going to end war and so on and so forth.
	And the proposition being made, my saying is proven, is that Bitcoin has been compromised so that it can no longer be that.
	And that's a longer conversation to have.
	We're supposed to be talking the philosophy and ethics of crypto.
	We are getting off on Bitcoin history.
	And I think that'd be better for another call and another roundtable if people wanted that.
	I do see that. No, we are doing ethics.
	It's just more of an internal inside baseball discussion of the ethics of cryptos.
	So I think that the history is helpful and I think it's worth having these conversations because we're talking amongst yourself.
	We're going to go out into the world and talk to the people who aren't knowledgeable about these things.
	And we need to put that aside and get behind whatever's going to get through the ice to begin with.
	Sorry, Jared. Go ahead. No, no, no.
	Yeah, that's a very, very good point.
	Very good point. For me, I'm like, any tiny little morsel of value that is taken away, taken out of the fiat money system and put in anything else is a gigantic win.
	Yeah, and a lot of people, remember, we're dealing with a population that is steadily becoming dumber.
	You know, and seriously, that's the important thing, man.
	It's an important thing, you know, that the Marine Corps IQ since the 1980s had dropped full 10 points.
	And it's pretty rough out there.
	And we really just need to break it down to people and, you know, let's win the war and then divide the spoils.
	I guess we're trying to divide the spoils before winning the war, so to speak.
	Let's win the war against the central banking, against fiat currency, and then we can let the best man win.
	But right now, we've got to just get people away.
	You know, fiat currency is like this hot, crazy woman that our best friend is addicted to.
	And, you know, We got to try and get him away from her first.
	All right, so we got two hours.
	Let's just go round and you don't have to do this if you don't want to.
	Give me a dollar. Value.
	I'm afraid it's going to be Bitcoin.
	Sorry, dudes. We'll do that next time.
	Oh, yeah. Jared, you wanted to mention something just before we...
	Sorry, you'd mentioned me earlier. You wanted to mention something before we finish?
	No, no, no. I'm curious, like, what timeline?
	We're like, dollar value on what timeline?
	Well, you tell me. I mean, and please don't give me, Pedro, your 50 to 100 years.
	Come on. Come on.
	Come on. When Ryan's kid is going to be, like, in the grave before you...
	Oh, man. Before your prediction comes true.
	It's like saying, you know, I think the human, your life expectancy, Steph, is not going to be 100 years from now.
	It's like, yeah, you got it. Okay. So something, okay, maybe by summer or by end of year, you can sort of pick something that's actionable for people.
	And again, none of this is advice.
	Don't make any, it's all just, we're pulling numbers out of places where the sun doesn't shine, right?
	And hopefully we'll do that on camera and we'll start our own dance club.
	But anyway, And listen, by the way, the moment that OnlyFans takes crypto, this entire thing is going to go to the moon.
	Literally to the moon, because people will be mooning for crypto.
	All right. Oh, there's your second dad joke of the night.
	You need to check OnlyCoins. There's OnlyCoins.
	It exists. It's there already.
	OnlyCoins. I was actually just trying to lure out the person most familiar with OnlyFans.
	So, Patreon, you win that prize.
	You win that prize.
	All right. Okay, so just pick a time frame sometime before the end of the year and what you think.
	Now, this is all nonsense.
	No one's going to hold you to anything.
	It doesn't mean anything. It's just, I think it's interesting.
	Okay, I'm always wrong.
	So, fat caveat when it comes to predicting this.
	But I would say end of the year, by the end of the year, 120.
	120,000 US dollars.
	120 US, alright. I'm saying 170 by the end of the year.
	Oh, hang on. Let's just do this.
	Can we do it the same way we started with?
	I'm going to go 100 by summer.
	So tell me, I don't know if you're interested in making these predictions.
	I know you're coming a little bit from the outside, but feel free to if you want to.
	I'm not familiar.
	You know, I'm really enjoying this and getting so much out of it.
	So I don't want to say anything because I wouldn't have any idea.
	Okay, I'll imitate you later and put an estimate in.
	Okay, I'm just kidding. MK, did you want to throw something out there?
	100K by the end of the year. 100k by the end of the year.
	All right. James.
	Oh, no, we'll go with Pedro. Pedro's like according in his timeframe down from something geological to something human.
	No, I think between December 1st and December the 15th, something like that, it will be between 100 and 120, I think.
	And hopefully, Bitcoin Cash will be around 50.
	Nice. Jonathan.
	Yeah, I would tend to agree with what everyone said, around 100,000.
	There's going to be, I think, a bit of a psychological kind of speed bump at that point, but I think we'll probably blast through it by the end of this year.
	So you're not with me, Summer, but close to the end of the year.
	Okay, Tim, go. Well, you know, like at the end of every bubble, there's always like one day where it just doubles in one, like in one day.
	So we'll get to 100 at some point.
	And then the next day will be like 200.
	And then that will be the sign that this particular cycle is, you know, popping.
	Okay, Tim, you've got to adjust your medication here because you're going from like bitter pessimist to like insane optimist.
	Like, is there something you can dial in your drip or something?
	No, it's great. I appreciate that.
	I was not guessing.
	You're like, It's all gonna go to shit by July.
	Okay, James, what do you got?
	We'll get to this and hopefully people will...
	Alright, so for me, I'm gonna go 100,000 this year, 1 million in 2025, 10 million 2030.
	Oh, I just got wood.
	Wait, are we talking balsa or mahogany?
	There's ladies in the room.
	I don't know. Can you use your wood to actually chop down a tree?
	That's my question.
	All right. Yeah. All right, Ryan.
	Tom's going to close us off. Ryan, what you got?
	Oh, I don't know if I can play this game.
	I'll just say I hope it's low because I've sold most of my Bitcoin.
	Yeah. Just kidding, guys.
	That's where the pun's coming from.
	You and Nicholas Nassim Taleb, right?
	I'm still in crypto, though.
	Very, very dangerously heavy.
	Bitcoin cash.
	That's where all the pessimism comes from.
	I like Bitcoin cash, but I haven't mentioned my coin of choice.
	We live on crypto. We pay our rent in crypto by all our...
	I earn crypto for a living.
	I work for cryptocurrency.
	The price doesn't matter to me because when it goes low, I'm earning a little bit more.
	And when it goes high, the value is a little higher.
	So either way, it doesn't really matter to me.
	Yeah, so the world changes when people start earning in crypto.
	No, and it's like what they used to say on peanuts, right?
	Somebody said to Charlie Brown, what's your definition of a perfect life?
	And he said, you've got a lake and you've got a convertible.
	And people are like, hmm, lake and a convertible?
	You're talking about this? Well, you know, if it's raining, your lake is filling up.
	And if it's sunny, you can go and ride in your convertible.
	So it's good to have these kinds of balances, right?
	All right, Thomas, the closest guy who looks like he's being interviewed by the FBI because of the backlighting.
	I wonder if you could... We can see you, by the way, just in case you're wondering.
	Did you want to give us some guesstimates?
	One million dollar Bitcoin by the end of the year.
	Nice! One million dollar Bitcoin by the end of the...
	Wait, is that an Earth year? Don't give me this Pluto shit, man.
	Do not give me this other dimensional...
	Oh, I meant Uranus, actually.
	Dog ears. Dog ears.
	So you got one million US Bitcoin by the end of the year.
	I'm going to give him the seven years, the dog ears thing.
	No, no. He said one year.
	Okay, we got that. If this is the case, Ryan will come over and beat you up.
	All right. Good.
	Well, thanks, everyone. Derek, there's something that you wanted to mention.
	Yes, two things.
	First of all, ladies.
	Ladies. A lady. The lady.
	I am single and looking for a wife to start a family with.
	I'm 36. I've never been married, have no children, am financially secure, and a part of a great, great community of people dedicated to philosophy and the healthy, happy nuclear family.
	If you want to be a stay-at-home mother to not just peacefully but philosophically parented and homeschooled children, please email me at jaredwoodard at protonmail.com.
	If you see that wonderful life that Ryan has, and you want that too, let me know.
	And also, I will mention this, I've known Jared for a while now, and we played a couple of Among Us games with my daughter, and he's great with kids too.
	So, yeah, he's a philosophical community guy and a great guy.
	One small other thing I wanted to add to people in the community.
	I know I've been saying I'm going to start a Tezos staking system to be a donation platform in part for staff.
	So what I'll do is I'll set this up and people can delegate their coins to that system.
	And the part that I would usually keep from that instead will go to Steph, but I need to know how much interest there is in that because it takes time and bandwidth to set that up.
	I'm very happy to do it.
	I've got the coins to start it out to get it rolling, but I need to know that there's people that are interested, so please let me know.
	I'm interested. Can I say just two things before you close?
	Yes, sir. Well, first, it's been a blast.
	I'm really happy and thank you very much for organizing this.
	Second is, if Bitcoin is 1 million at the end of the year, I would be extremely happy.
	But you're not happy with its price right now, dude.
	I am happy with the price right now.
	Yeah, I am. Did you guys know that during the course of the show it hit an all-time high?
	I'll take it. That's not bad.
	Let's go. Hear it because it will make their ears explode with intergalactic fracking comments.
	But I think that would be very interesting because I would like to learn more.
	I was out of the space for a while.
	I dipped into politics for a little while, as you may or may not recall.
	So I missed a lot of the excitement around Bitcoin and I'd like to learn more about it and its limitations at the moment because I do remember being a little surprised when I did a transaction like Bitcoin.
	Really? Still not coming through?
	Whoa, that's a fee. Okay.
	So, all right. Thanks, everyone, so much.
	A real pleasure to meet you all.
	Thanks for those of you who came back.
	A great pleasure to meet our new friends here as well.
	And don't forget to sign up.
	I ask people on the newsletter if they want to be part of these.
	It's freedemand.com forward slash newsletter.
	That's also where I announce where these are going to be.
	And you can follow me, of course, on a variety of social media platforms at freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	Sorry, freedomain.com forward slash connect is for the platforms and freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	If you'd like to help out what I do, I would hugely appreciate that.
	Lots of love from up here.
	Thanks, everyone, so much. A great pleasure to meet you all.
	I will see you soon. Take care.
	All the best.

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