April 12, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:00:35
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| The data is on its way. | |
| Is it? Is it receiving? | |
| Is it receiving? Check, check. | |
| Let's find out. Yes. | |
| Yes, it is. Hello, everybody. | |
| Good afternoon. It is the 11th of April 2021. | |
| Oddly enough, my mother's birthday, strangely enough. | |
| But nonetheless, I hope everyone's doing well this afternoon. | |
| Thank you for dropping by and hope you're having better weather. | |
| In your neck of the woods, but we're going to talk about Bitcoin, cryptos as a whole, and we're going to sort of center around the banning, although I'm not trying to limit it to any particular topic, but I would like to talk about the banning aspect of things. | |
| And I'm going to bring, shockingly, I guess to everyone, a little bit of, a few facts to bear, a few bits of reason and evidence to bear on this question, because I think it's obviously pretty, pretty important. | |
| So, with results, sorry, with the question of banning as a whole, First of all, there's a lot of momentum in Bitcoin, right? | |
| So every day that the Bitcoin price stays around $58K, total market cap grows by about $52 million. | |
| So Bitcoin's price is flat. | |
| It's still growing. So if Bitcoin stays at $58 through the end of the month, it feels stagnant to those of us used to the crazy roller coaster. | |
| But the total market cap will have grown by about $1 billion or 0.1%. | |
| 0.1%. Bitcoin is now larger than the GDP of Mexico, which 1.14 trillion versus GDP of Mexico 1.13 trillion, of which about 1.12 trillion appears to be people trying to get across the border. | |
| So the issue of Who has it is really, really important. | |
| If the powers that be have it, if politicians have it, if people who have a lot of wealth have it, then, as I said before, they're going to put a lot of pressure on government to maintain that level of value. | |
| That's really, really important to understand. | |
| We don't have the ear of the Fed. | |
| We can't sort of, you know, hot text Janet Yellen and have her get back to us any time. | |
| Really rapidly, but the people who have money and power and influence do. | |
| And they know for sure that the value of Bitcoin is increasing relative to the US dollar. | |
| If you want to see something pretty wild, you can find these charts online where people have compared the value of the US dollar in Satoshis. | |
| Because remember, in Bitcoin, you only need 10 Bitcoins to be a billionaire with regards to Satoshis. | |
| So I think that's kind of important to To remember, and there are a lot of people who have Bitcoin who have powers. | |
| I'm going to give you some quotes here as well, right? | |
| So SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce has said, and I quote, this was April the 8th, she said, we were past that point of banning Bitcoin in the US very early on because you'd have to shut down the internet. | |
| I don't see how you could Ban it. | |
| So I just wanted to put this quote out because I thought it was quite delightful. | |
| If you're a Bitcoiner for a month, you're going to sell your Bitcoin to buy dinner. | |
| If you're a Bitcoiner for a year, you're going to sell Bitcoin to buy a car. | |
| If you're a Bitcoiner for two years, you're going to sell your Bitcoin to buy a house. | |
| If you're a Bitcoiner for five years, you're going to sell your house to buy more Bitcoin. | |
| I just thought that was kind of a good quote. | |
| So, I've got a couple of quotes here as well, about people who have, who has it, and there are some, I'm not exactly sure, Where this information comes from. | |
| Oh, sorry, one other quote from Hester Pierce, the SEC Commissioner. | |
| I don't see how you could ban it. | |
| It would be a foolish thing for the government to try. | |
| A bigger problem is we'd be missing out on the innovation around Bitcoin. | |
| And it's always good to make fun of Google, right? | |
| So Google tried to use six billion dollars of its treasury to buy Groupon, yet it owns zero Bitcoin. | |
| It owns zero Bitcoin. | |
| Because, you see, Google is just staffed by such unbelievably brilliant, brilliant people, right? | |
| That's something I'm not going to shed a tear over if Google doesn't buy Bitcoin. | |
| I mean, I'd rather keep them out. | |
| Oh, yeah. Like, I mean, I don't know. | |
| What can I say? So let me just dig up sort of the quotes down here, or the quote of who's holding the Bitcoin. | |
| Bitcoin is now worth more than half of the entire U.S. banking system by market capitalization, but I'm sure it's just a fad. | |
| I'm sure it's just a fad. | |
| And let's see here. | |
| People in the Ukraine, top politicians, journalists, influencers, intellectuals, professors, have all been shown to be holding Bitcoin, which I think that's kind of important. | |
| And that's the kind of stuff, you know, once you start to get the big ETFs in, the big hedge funds in, the big investment firms in, and once you start to get the ETFs being approved, one in Canada's been approved, doing very, very well, Then you start to get financial interest invested in the continued success of Bitcoin. | |
| Here's the other thing, too. It's just a minor point, but I think it's kind of important, which is everybody's paid tax on Bitcoin. | |
| So what happens if they ban it? | |
| Do they owe us all the tax money back? | |
| I mean, there would be lawsuits aplenty, right? | |
| I mean, they can't just ban stuff they've taxed you on it because then it was completely wrong for them to tax you on it, right? | |
| So, the price surges too. | |
| I really wanted to mention that as well. | |
| This is something that's really important for Bitcoin, of course. | |
| So, as far as prices going, we've got steel that's gone up 145%, lumber 126%, oil 80%, soybeans 71%, corn. | |
| 69%, copper 50%, silver 38%, cotton 35%, coffee 34%, God help me, wheat 25%, FAO food index 25%, cattle 21%. | |
| My friends, there's only one thing that seems to have gone down in price and that's gold. | |
| So, sorry, sorry about that to some people. | |
| Sorry about that for some people. | |
| So, we do have, of course, A lot of people, Morgan Stanley is adding, is filed to add Bitcoin exposure to 12 for their institutional funds, and that means that each fund can invest up to 25% in Bitcoin products. | |
| And Morgan Stanley is also an investor in New York Dig, and one of the 12 funds is CounterPoint, which is big. | |
| So, I do think that It's past that tipping point and it was the kind of thing, it was going to be unimportant and then it was going to get very important very quickly and the massive debt crisis that almost all countries around the world are facing is one of the things that is driving Bitcoin's price up and I think it's a strange thing to think of that COVID has been so beneficial to Bitcoin because it's ramped up government spending to the point where people are panicking and fleeing into Bitcoin. | |
| The fact that the government spending hit the jet fuel so rapidly because of COVID and because of the damage to the economy as a whole Then, had it moved past the point where it's becoming embedded in politics and finance to the degree where it's going to be very tough to get it out, and it happened so quickly, there was no time. | |
| I mean, COVID has accelerated government spending by probably a factor of 5 to 10 years, probably closer to 10 years, and that's huge. | |
| And so the fact is that, I mean, it's oddly... | |
| I mean, you've got to try and find your silver linings in your clouds where you can. | |
| But the reality is that it's hit the gas on the government spending so much that it's vaulted past where you could control it, and now everyone's kind of scrambling to get in. | |
| So I just sort of wanted to mention that. | |
| If it's banned, someone just buys the dip. | |
| China owes 75% of hashing power, though. | |
| Well, sure, but, you know, that's going to get solved pretty quickly. | |
| So if there is... | |
| People who want to sort of talk about thoughts or experiments with regards. | |
| We've got a gentleman here from Pakistan who banned it. | |
| I'm not sure exactly when. | |
| It was certainly banned as of 2020. | |
| He said that's recently been reversed. | |
| We also have people who want to talk about LBRY and their tangle with the SEC because of their crypto. | |
| This is a time to shoulder your way to the front of the line and jump in. | |
| I'm very happy to have everyone here. | |
| We're not going to do intros because there's so many people here on the panel, but if you would like to, perhaps, the gentleman from Pakistan, introduce yourself briefly and tell us what's happened in your country. | |
| I have an article open from Sama. | |
| First, I'll introduce myself. | |
| Sorry about that. I'm just new to Bitcoin. | |
| I've heard about it from your channel last year. | |
| In those years, Bitcoin was banned in my country and the assumption was that mostly terrorists were using it. | |
| So people did mine a bit. | |
| I know a guy that he said he mined it a bit and he had a lot of his Bitcoin on Coinbase and then he stopped. | |
| Looking into it. | |
| He didn't understand the technology. | |
| He just knew how to mine it. | |
| And he didn't know what it was actually. | |
| And a lot of people here in Pakistan are like that. | |
| They're just investing into it. | |
| They don't know what it is. | |
| And then the government is saying its own perspective, like propagating its own perspective on it. | |
| Right now, there is this fellow called Vakar Zaki. | |
| He's a really prominent person, influencer here. | |
| Influencer as in he's in the media. | |
| He's like the Joe Rogan here. | |
| So he's constantly promoting Bitcoins and recently he has petitioned He has petitioned a case to unban Bitcoin and the petition is still going on. | |
| I'll share an article. | |
| Maybe you can read it, Stefan, because my English is a little bit rusty. | |
| I'll share it in the chat. | |
| All right. Well, thank you. I will look into that. | |
| Is there anyone else who's had sort of thoughts or experience or ideas about the sort of banning question? | |
| We will take general questions from the audience and appreciate you guys dropping by to watch today. | |
| But yeah, feel free to jump in. | |
| My friend from Pakistan said before, in neighboring Bangladesh, they were actually using the same securitization theory to justify banning Bitcoin. | |
| The Bangladeshi central bank said, quote, transaction with this currency may cause a violation of the existing money laundering and terrorist financing regulations. | |
| They pretend it's for your own good, but when they say for your own good, that's when you run away. | |
| That's my opinion. When they say they want to ban it for your own good, buy more. | |
| Oh, yeah. No, it's no question, right? | |
| I mean, I think they've moved beyond terrorism and child exploitation to environmental issues, racism, sexism, and so on. | |
| So that's a good step forward. | |
| I just wanted to mention, too, I absolutely love the fact that environmentalists are not buying Bitcoin. | |
| I've got to tell you, there's a lot of things that give me pleasure in life, obviously. | |
| But one of them is the fact that... | |
| Environmentalists are leery of Bitcoin because environmentalists are just such intergalactic a-holes who terrify young children in order to expand state power that the fact that they're missing out on something like Bitcoin or crypto because of fears of Electricity usage. | |
| I just think I couldn't be more delighted. | |
| That's one of the immense features, not just that your friends and wise people do good, but the people who scared the living crap out of you as a kid by saying the world was about to end are now too propagandized to join the crypto aristocracy that is coming. | |
| Just wanted to mention that. Steph, can I add something to that real quick? | |
| Okay, so you know, I'm a pretty big advocate of Tezos, though. | |
| I'm not married to any one particular crypto. | |
| If it turns the other way, I'm happy to drop it and find something better. | |
| You already bought the ring. | |
| What's that? You already bought the ring. | |
| What's that, MK? You already bought the ring. | |
| You're committed. Oh, no, I'm not. | |
| I can sell it and go to the next one. | |
| Alright, so the thing with Tezos is it is a proof-of-state chain, and so it is, compared to other cryptos, doesn't use a lot of electricity in comparison, and I'm finding more and more of the community marketing it as environmentally safe, environmentally sound, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the same old green crypto. | |
| Expletive. And so I've got to stop and come in and be like, guys, whoa, careful. | |
| Be very careful, because you were inviting socialists into the community when you go green. | |
| You're inviting socialists, communists, and they are a liability. | |
| You do not want them as part of the community. | |
| So I've had to, within that community, push back. | |
| Sorry I didn't introduce myself. | |
| I'm Jared Woodard. I've been in the other crypto channels, and I've been in crypto for a long time, and share what I know. | |
| Hey, I'm Jon Stewart. I have also been hearing, actually I heard today, kind of the same argument being made about basic attention tokens, if you remember hearing about that at all. | |
| So, the whole idea behind basic attention tokens is that instead of going through this big old chain of middlemen, For advertisers and people getting advertised too, they just said, hey, we're just going to skip all that out. | |
| We're going to pay you to look at our ads. | |
| And with that, the overhead, basically everything in the middle there is cut out of the way. | |
| It makes it less expensive. | |
| They're saying a lot of places that they're looking at at least two times the amount of feedback or rather results than traditional methods. | |
| And with that, I mean, I've had it, technically I've had it since November of 2019, and it put up on uphold the wallet for it. | |
| And I didn't really consider it like real money, I don't know, it was plain money, until I realized back in February, as I was getting into investing in general, that I was like, wait, this might actually be worth something, this might be a thing. | |
| And so with that, I've been, you know, I've had it, I've I put it in Bitcoin. | |
| I put whatever I had in my wallet back in a BAT. And it seems to be kind of going the same way, kind of like what you're saying with Tezos. | |
| But the great thing about BAT in general is the more advertisers that keep hopping onto this platform, the bigger it grows, and the more people who are jumping onto it in general It's not going to operate in the same method like a usual, I guess you could say like usual pump and bill cryptocurrency would be. | |
| In the last three months that it's been up on, what was it, Blockfolio? | |
| I've seen it at least on Blockfolio. | |
| It's been... Pretty consistent. | |
| So three months ago, it was at like 17 cents. | |
| And now we're trending at at least $1.50, I want to say. | |
| And it's been reasonable and recent gains on that. | |
| And I'm wondering, you know, what sort of paradigm... | |
| Well, I would imagine Bitcoin leaps away on whatever legislation gets passed. | |
| But just the different formats like this, I'd like to see how those get legislated as well. | |
| Yes, and just for those of you who want to know, you can tip me at freedomain.com. | |
| You can tip me on the BAT system. | |
| I've got that all set up. Pedro, how you doing, man? | |
| Nice to see you again. So we're just talking about any issues that people have had and somebody was going to join, I'm sorry I can't remember who, who was going to join regarding the the library situation and this of course is that they've fought this behind the scenes battle with the SEC over their own coins or cryptos and somebody was going to come and talk to us about that and sorry if I forgot who it is but if you'd like to raise your hand and Let me know. | |
| Maybe they came, maybe they didn't. | |
| I'm not going to dive into it because it's obviously pretty complicated and I would probably get most of it wrong, but I know that they're undergoing this battle at the moment with the SEC. And that, of course, is the issue, right? | |
| Which is, is it going to get not so much banned, but just kind of regulated into this slow, kludgy, sludgy thing so that the government can introduce its own crypto, right? | |
| You know, I'm sure everyone knows that that's what's happening in China at the moment, that they're introducing their own crypto. | |
| And what they've got is the ability to have... | |
| you can turn the coins into expiring coins. | |
| In other words, if you want economic activity to increase in this Keynesian cocaine manner, Then you simply say, oh, your coins are going to expire in 30 days. | |
| These number of coins are going to expire in 30 days. | |
| Use them or lose them. And this way, of course, you don't own anything. | |
| I mean, it's just completely pointless. | |
| And for the government to have its hand off those levers, which, of course, is what Bitcoin and other cryptos represent, is really, really the most powerful thing, really, that's happened in currencies since they first figured out that you could get gold out of the ground. | |
| So I do think that... | |
| The banning stuff, I think we're past that point. | |
| I really do. The question is around regulation, public disclosure, taxation, and so on. | |
| But it's going to have to coexist with fiat for a while, obviously, and governments, if they can tax it... | |
| They won't want to ban it, usually. | |
| That's the case. And I also think that the people who are on the inside, right, the people who know what the actual numbers are rather than the nonsense that's kind of put out to the general population about inflation and jobs and all of that, I think the people who actually know those numbers are looking as hungrily as we are at cryptos because they have a place to go, | |
| right? I mean, okay, maybe it's not quite as comfortable as the Titanic, but it's a lot more comfortable than the Ocean at, you know, zero degrees or something like that. | |
| So I think they're looking for a place to jump as well, because normally the ruling classes go down with the ship, right? | |
| I mean, if you look at the fall of Rome, It wasn't like all the senators got to retire to Tahiti, right? | |
| I mean, they had to flee with their possessions in their hand when the Goths sacked Rome at the end of it all, and they just went out into the countryside, and, you know, a lot of them probably died, and a lot of them had to go from making big speeches at the Senate to milking cows in the middle of nowhere, and so there is... | |
| I mean, there's no America to go to anymore, right? | |
| I mean, this was the big thing that happened sort of 18th century and onwards, is that if you wanted a place to go where you could be free, you would go to America, where you would be at least relatively free. | |
| But there's no place to go anymore, right? | |
| There's no new America, otherwise we'd probably all be They're broadcasting from the same room. | |
| So because there's no new America, where do people go to retain their value when the inevitable eat yourself, fund the poor, bribe the voters, death throes of democracy, which always ends the same way and usually lasts about 250 years? | |
| Where do people go? Again, they used to be able to go to America and now what? | |
| They have to go to Bitcoin. | |
| Sorry, go ahead. I recently heard a really interesting comparison by this guy named Balaji. | |
| He said that the internet is to America what America was to England. | |
| And with the idea of that the internet now is where you go for freedom and Bitcoin really encompasses that. | |
| And I mean, I don't know what they'll actually do, but I could very much see a type of revolutionary war situation where the government declares war on Bitcoin, so to speak. | |
| And I don't think we're there yet, but that's like the final boss for Bitcoin, in my opinion. | |
| And I think there's still a lot of attack vectors. | |
| I don't think that's going to happen because, as you know, Pakistan and India and Bangladesh, we tend to not use credit cards. | |
| We tend to use cash. | |
| And so a lot of transaction happens. | |
| There is no ledger of it. | |
| It's not written. | |
| It's like verbal and hand-to-hand. | |
| So what happens is a lot of taxes is missed. | |
| They can't tax a lot of stuff. | |
| So they're actually, when concerning crypto, like Pakistan is now actually excited about crypto because they can look at the ledger and see who has spent what. | |
| So they're actually pushing crypto now. | |
| They're not pushing crypto now, but they're talking about bringing in their own currency so that to curve corruption, quote-unquote. | |
| This is the carrot and the stick that Steph has brought up many, many times. | |
| The crypto community will essentially, in a way, pay governments to leave them alone. | |
| And if they don't, look at the stick, you know, in general. | |
| I think we can probably expect something like a 1930s type gold reclamation situation. | |
| They're going to probably institute a centralized Bitcoin where they can track the ledger of every transaction that's ever happened. | |
| They'll incentivize you to sell your Bitcoin for the centralized currency. | |
| You'll sell it for what amounts to nothing. | |
| And then the elites end up with the lion's share of the Bitcoin. | |
| Yeah, I mean, what happens in that situation is if that were to happen, people create their own other currency and just that FedCoin gets devalued. | |
| If nobody wants FedCoin, its value effectively goes to nothing. | |
| Just like the dollar. They control all the on-ramps like exchanges. | |
| Like if they were to, theoretically speaking, ban Coinbase, ban Gemini, ban any of the fiat on-ramps, And that would be a significant blow. | |
| Again, like, as point Steph's made, though, like, we have a lot of very wealthy people interested in that not being the case. | |
| And that only grows exponentially over time. | |
| And this is one of those things for people. | |
| People demonize and hate rich people, but they're kind of covering their backs here. | |
| Well, and look, you can't just go and destroy people's value. | |
| I mean, you know, it's not Soviet Russia, right? | |
| I mean, so you can't just pass legislation... | |
| To destroy people's value without fair compensation, right? | |
| Like the government can't just take your house without at least giving you fair market value for it, right? | |
| They have to... And so if people have, as we know, well over a trillion dollars invested in bitcoins, then the government can't just come and ban it. | |
| I mean, there would just be so many lawsuits. | |
| There would be So much pushback. | |
| There would be such a grim battle because people aren't just going to sit there and say, oh, well, some guy in Washington said something, so I guess I'll say bye to my $100 million. | |
| Like, they would invest. | |
| And the other thing, of course, is that even if they banded in one country successfully, it's pretty portable. | |
| It's one of the big benefits, right? | |
| You get to 12-word phrase, you go someplace. | |
| And what will happen now is that there will be a race for Bitcoin friendliness. | |
| You know, I've got some, I would imagine, Singapore are probably going to go this way or something like that. | |
| But there is going to be a race for Bitcoin friendliness. | |
| Like the first country that writes acceptance of Bitcoin into their basic law, their constitution, is almost going to rule the world in a way, right? | |
| And so if governments allow for the payment of taxes in Bitcoin and they say we're never going to ban it, Then other countries are going to be much more loath to do so because one of the reasons why Europe failed in the 20th century was all the smart people went to America. | |
| And in the same way, you know, the smart productive tax cattle, you don't want a big gaping hole in the fence where they go rushing off to some other place where they say, hey, you bring three bitcoins, we'll give you citizenship in 24 hours and we'll guarantee that it will never be taken from you. | |
| Is there a candidate? It's pretty compelling. | |
| And there are going to be governments who want to do that, not for reasons of altruism. | |
| They also may want to do that because they themselves The government owners, the government politicians and so on, the media moguls, they themselves have Bitcoin and they want to maintain its value, which means that they're going to give safe haven to Bitcoin refugees. | |
| So I think there's a lot of complicated stuff that's going on. | |
| It's one of the reasons why Janet Yellen wants this universal corporate tax, so they can just keep cranking it up. | |
| But the competition between governments for more tax-friendly environments is only limited at the moment by citizenship restrictions and any intelligent government would simply say, yeah, you come here, you prove that you have three Bitcoins, And you can get citizenship in 24 hours. | |
| You can be, you know, fully participate in the society, and we're never going to take it from you. | |
| I mean, that's without a doubt. | |
| You know, they're not smart, but they're cunning, right? | |
| And that cunning aspect of self-interest is going to, I think, be the case. | |
| I just want to chip in there. | |
| First of all, you said intelligent government, and that's a bit of a contradiction, if you'll mind me saying that. | |
| No, no, the government intelligence agencies. | |
| I mean, it's right there in the title, man. | |
| I'm just kidding. Go ahead. I wanted to ask, is there a candidate for a country that would be so Bitcoin-friendly? | |
| Because I really can't think of one. | |
| Certainly not the UK. Like, the UK seems to be headed in the opposite direction. | |
| I can only speak for the UK, but I don't know about... | |
| It probably won't be any of the mass immigration... | |
| Because the mass immigration countries are buying votes through fiat, which they wouldn't be able to buy through crypto. | |
| So it will be a country that is not mass immigration friendly at the moment. | |
| And so I don't know exactly where that would be. | |
| I've actually looked into that. | |
| I looked into that actually kind of a lot. | |
| I have a friend who's trying to get out of the United States. | |
| So we were looking for places that are crypto friendly. | |
| And you're kind of... Let's just say skewing the tail of the IQ spectrum. | |
| So you have to go to countries that don't know anything about it, mostly. | |
| And we found that Mexico has zero regulation. | |
| They have zero tax on crypto. | |
| They have no... | |
| They don't know anything. The only law they have is that you can't transact in it. | |
| A business can't accept the transaction through a cryptocurrency. | |
| But they don't tax it at any level. | |
| So if you're a citizen of Mexico and you're pulling off of exchanges from a Mexican IP, you're clean. | |
| As of now... | |
| So Steph, I think the question is not really, will Bitcoin be banned? | |
| Will governments ban it? | |
| Just kind of like you said. In one sense, we're already past that. | |
| They can't ban it, but in another sense, they're already banning it. | |
| So banning isn't like a binary thing where it's either going to be banned or it's not going to be banned and it's completely free. | |
| They are banning it. | |
| They have been banning it for years. | |
| The question is, how are they going to continue to ban it, and what methods are they going to ban it? | |
| Well, hang on, hang on. But break down what you... | |
| When you say that they've been banning it for years, just help me and other people understand what you mean. | |
| Just like what you said, they're regulating it. | |
| And that's effectively banning it. | |
| Like, very, very, very tight regulations is effectively banning it. | |
| So, they know that they can't just come out and say, Bitcoin is banned. | |
| That's not technically possible, and it's not probably even politically possible, but what they can do is they can kill it by a thousand cuts. | |
| You know, they can say, it's a commodity, and it's not a currency, so you have to pay capital gains tax on it, and therefore, every little transaction that you make, you have to report. | |
| That's the form of banning it, in my mind. | |
| I think it's much more likely, I mean, if you think of it sort of like Steph was saying at the fall of Rome, right? | |
| The elites go down with the ship. | |
| Bitcoin, if the elites were to garner enough Bitcoin to not go down with the ship, that effectively creates a permanent situation of their status, right? | |
| So I think it's much more likely that they try and sort of do a little, a few laws for the even offer me type of laws where they try and Loop in a few programs where the Bitcoin becomes centralized to their control. | |
| And then from there, they have no reason to make it illegal or make it whatever they want to make it. | |
| It's more about... Right, they just control it. | |
| Yeah, exactly. We're past banning it. | |
| They just want to control it at this point. | |
| And so they're going to use every means possible to try to get control over it. | |
| And whether that's like, oh, let's do a PSYOP. So the way I think it would play out politically goes a little something like this. | |
| We have, you know, there will be two groups of people in society. | |
| The people who have, and I'm going to just use crypto. | |
| I mean, I'm in Bitcoin in the short run. | |
| So people who have crypto, and crypto is going to be increasing in value because it's generally limited, of course. | |
| And then there'll be people who have fiat. | |
| So, the elites are going to want to get into the crypto world and get away from fiat, but there's going to be a mass of people who don't have crypto who are going to have to survive on fiat, and the way they're going to do that is through some sort of universal basic income. | |
| Now, there won't be enough value generated in the fiat universe to pay for the UBI, so what they need is Bitcoin to be the workhorse that produces enough value that they can strip it You know through the power of the state they can strip the value from crypto and use it to pay the UBI for the people who don't have crypto because you know I mean the The labor participation rate in Western economies, I mean, I'm sure you guys have been following this, completely collapsed. | |
| I mean, people don't want to go back to work. | |
| You know, there are people who are restarting restaurants, and they send me these emails, they say, oh man, I'm trying to restart, I'm trying to get my cook back, I'm trying to get my waiters back, and they're like, forget it, why would I want to come to you? | |
| I was making 400 bucks with you, I'm making 500 bucks a month for the government, I don't have to work, and I have to pay taxes, there's no way. | |
| So what's happening through people being out of the labor force and people changing their spending habits and saving more, I think that economy is largely done. | |
| I mean, there'll be some regrowth and some resuscitation and so on, but I think that the purpose is to keep people's fear level up to the point where they can transition people to UBI, right? | |
| So we all, I think, are fairly aware of the IQ issue and, you know, people In the sort of mid-80s and below, it's not an unsubstantial portion of the American population or the Western population. | |
| People with IQs of 85, 83 and below generally don't really have anything to offer a sort of modern economy, so the transitioning of them onto UBI and the maintenance of crypto as the workhorse that pulls the UBI plow, so to speak, I think is going to be kind of necessary because if they don't have the crypto, Then the inflationary nature of UBI plus no labor force participation, two sides of the same coin, there's just not going to be enough value for them to pay the UBI and then everyone goes down with the ship. | |
| So I do see them putting crypto to work to fund something like a UBI to just keep people on the reservation, so to speak. | |
| Afan, that's absolutely right. | |
| And I want to support what you just said, especially in the UK. When the furlough scheme was introduced, the number one word I heard used to describe it was holiday. | |
| Holiday. They see it as a paid holiday. | |
| Essentially, it is. | |
| The thing is, it can't last. | |
| It's not sustainable. They called it a holiday? | |
| Yes, they used the term holiday. | |
| Like, oh, okay, just lockdown holiday, furlough, 80% of your wage gets paid. | |
| Multiple people in person that I spoke to see the furlough scheme that was introduced by the government as a holiday. | |
| And that is sickening. I mean, you're paying people to not work. | |
| Isn't that the definition of a holiday? | |
| I guess. Technically, here's the definition. | |
| No, come on. Look, I've been a manager. | |
| You don't pay people to not work. | |
| What happens is you pay them a little bit less while they are working and then you pay them while they're not. | |
| But, you know, you don't get a holiday without actually having first work. | |
| You don't get to consume without saving first. | |
| But the fact that they're calling it a holiday is pretty. | |
| And look, I don't know if you guys, I'm sure, you know, we've all, I think most of us have come up pretty, pretty hard, rough and scramble. | |
| Most people's jobs really suck. | |
| You know, most people aren't, you know, ripping code and making memes in the Bitcoin universe for fun and profit. | |
| Most people have jobs that they hate with bosses that they hate and customers that are difficult in environments that are unpleasant. | |
| And they just want to stay home. | |
| They just want to stay home. | |
| And it's going to be really, really hard to lure people back Especially if they keep this mass migration coming in, it's going to continue to depress wages and people just aren't going to want to go back to work. | |
| That's the sort of fundamental political reality that we're still kind of trying to process. | |
| That, you know, the two weeks, which is now, what, 14 months, kind of inevitable, right? | |
| But the fact is that the economy has... | |
| I don't know, if you work out for a while and then you just don't work out for 14 months, I mean, you're a puddle of porridge. | |
| Like, it's just the way things go. | |
| And I guess you can kind of struggle your way back into it, but... | |
| People are just getting money for nothing and businesses can't hire, like they're just not going back. | |
| The businesses are going to fold. | |
| There's going to be giant corporations, there's going to be a UBI pool of proletariat and then there's going to be the Bitcoin aristocracy. | |
| The Scottish Greens have already proposed the introduction of a UBI scheme. | |
| It's not far off, especially in Scotland. | |
| Yes. Politically, what do you do? | |
| This goes all the way back to Rome. | |
| It goes all the way back to ancient civilizations. | |
| It's a very big common problem that when you have a very successful society, you take away evolutionary pressures. | |
| I'm glad that that's happened. | |
| It's a wonderful thing. | |
| But you end up with this giant pool of people that aren't particularly productive, and that's also the result of a terrible educational system and all these kinds of things. | |
| What do you do? And I think that the elites are kind of looking at this and saying, okay, well, we used to at least be able to get them out of the house and go to work. | |
| Now that's not really happening. So, yeah, the UBI thing, because it's UBI or violence, right? | |
| Because when people, you know, if their checks stop coming, they'll just take to the streets and set fire to everything they can get their hands on. | |
| So I would say that crypto is an integral part of how... | |
| The relatively unproductive people in society, and I simply mean economically unproductive. | |
| I'm sure they're wonderful people in their own way, but just economically they can't generally produce more than they're worth. | |
| What do you do with those people? | |
| And I think that they're going to use crypto as the workhorse. | |
| They're going to harness it and use it for UBI. And if they ban, I mean, if they ban Bitcoin, then it's just fiat. | |
| It's fiat or bust. And we all know where fiat is standing. | |
| At the moment, so I just don't see banning crypto. | |
| It's like shooting the last horse that's going to provide you food for the winter in terms of being able to plow your crops. | |
| I've got a question for you. | |
| Okay, so you've been saying a lot that, like, we're going to get two people in society, two groups in society. | |
| Those are crypto and those who don't. | |
| Okay, for the general wage labor person out there who's just kind of getting this message, getting an idea of what's going on, maybe have a little bit of experience or not a lot of experience in the job market that don't exactly have a career, what would you tell them? | |
| What would you tell them to do now to make sure they're one of those people who are on the right side? | |
| They're not... They're not dependent on the government, and they've got crypto in their hand. | |
| When that time comes, what would you tell them to do now? | |
| To leverage? Get crypto in your hand. | |
| I mean, there's going to be this divide between the people who have crypto and the people who don't. | |
| And I use this statistic way back when we were starting out. | |
| If you had, you know, bought a Starbucks coffee's worth of crypto, you know, seven or eight years ago, you'd be sitting on $100,000 or more, right? | |
| I mean, so, and it's still early, you know, people say, oh, 60k Bitcoin. | |
| It's like, no, no, no, it's 0.06 of a million Bitcoin. | |
| Think of it as a fraction of a million rather than 60,000, which I guess seems like a lot for people, but That's why. | |
| And you don't have to buy a lot. | |
| You know, the Bitcoin is a completely arbitrary measure for like 100 million sets, right? | |
| You can just buy a small amount. | |
| You can educate people. | |
| I mean, this is like literally winter is coming, you know. | |
| Gather ye nuts while you may and store them up. | |
| And so, yeah, just get a hold of it. | |
| It's great. You know, it's cheap now, I think, compared to where it's going to be, but I'm happy to hear other people's thoughts about this. | |
| I'm in on this, too. | |
| Here. Go ahead, John, and then I'll go after you. | |
| So, just during the week this week, my wife and I were talking about this sort of thing, or at least in the realm of it. | |
| So, what we decided to do is there's a certain minimum amount that my wife would like to have in the bank account just to feel safe. | |
| I can't... Is that her? | |
| I'll try and be quiet. Is she just telling you to raise it? | |
| Just like right now, live in the show? | |
| Double it, man! I know, right? | |
| So basically everything except this minimum safety net number that she likes to see go in, I can put into a cryptocurrency and I have it in... | |
| I have it in GameStop too, but yeah. | |
| But between those two, and I'm going to be increasing it on my cryptocurrency side, we're getting into it. | |
| I'm at an income level that's not amazing. | |
| It's okay. But at least at my level, to whatever degree that I can, I'm putting stuff in. | |
| So if somebody out there is like me, I've got... | |
| I've got two kids, I've got my wife, I've got all these responsibilities, and I can't do a suicide stack of 10,000 and just live out. | |
| What was that guy's story? | |
| He had been living with a Vietnamese family, paying $500 a month, and dumped pretty much everything he could. | |
| He only made $32,000 a year. | |
| He put $40,000 in on Bitcoin, and he's great. | |
| And then, obviously, in the comments, there's a lady basically complaining, like, why am I not in the same situation as you? | |
| And it was just kind of absurd, because she wanted to spend money on whatever. | |
| But anyway... So if anybody's starting out working, I'd recommend build up your suicide stack, so to speak, and pump it all into... | |
| Sorry, my marketing brain says that you might want to rebrand Suicide Stack. | |
| Right. I love Suicide Stack. | |
| I love Suicide Stack. So essentially what it is, it's just a nice big old chunk that you can afford to put in there. | |
| So we'll make it our... | |
| Let's see here. Suicide stack is amazing. | |
| Comfy games. We could say our... | |
| Yeah, comfy games. | |
| There's names. There's people who are creative. | |
| They don't think of a good name. I don't think suicide stack is going to be topped. | |
| I love that. I do love it. | |
| I have a question. | |
| Pretty recently we were talking about mass immigration, people moving into the past and raising tax, rise of taxes and regulations and all that. | |
| I was wondering, since people can take the Take this coin anywhere and have a code in their mind. | |
| I was wondering, will there be a mass migration, like white flight, that is going to happen in the future? | |
| Like in the past, it happened with the Christians and the Ottoman Empire. | |
| People were attracted to the Ottoman Empire because they had less taxes compared to the Well, I wouldn't call it white flight. | |
| I mean, we've got some good spice in this panel, so I don't think it's necessarily white flight itself. | |
| But I would certainly say that the people who saw the crypto stuff coming, who got invested in the crypto, they're pretty mobile. | |
| You know, I don't know about you guys. | |
| I'll just give you sort of my emotional aspect to this, is that I am almost physically repulsed by fiat currency. | |
| I view it as a fuel for war, as subjugation, violence, bribery. | |
| It's, you know, oh my gosh, what if a few criminals use crypto? | |
| It's like, well, at least they're private criminals, not people with armies. | |
| So, I think that my loyalty to the West You know, I mean, particularly post-de-platforming and all of that kind of stuff, but my loyalty to the West, my loyalty to the sort of historical ideals of the West and so on, diminishes in proportion to which those ideals are vanishing from the West. | |
| So for me, if it's like, oh, you know, here's a friendly place, I don't even need that reasonable climate because I live in Canada, so, you know, anything's sort of an improvement. | |
| But if there's a reasonable place where I can, you know, taste the sweet air of freedom once more, and I don't want to speak for anyone else on this panel, but I would say that my loyalty to the soil It's kind of diminishing quite a little bit. | |
| I'm willing to learn a new language. | |
| I'm willing to learn a new culture. | |
| Probably wouldn't convert to a religion, but, you know, there's got to be some limits. | |
| But I would say that if there is an environment that is very friendly and if there are other environments which are just getting progressively intolerable, progressively probably being the right phrase, yeah, I could... | |
| I could pick up stakes. | |
| I could move. And I think that motion is going to be pretty important in world politics going forward. | |
| It's been so easy. | |
| It's been so easy now, especially since most people can work from home. | |
| I mean, I'm the exception because we've got a teeny tiny place we're in, and the kids always want to play with daddy. | |
| But that aside, I could literally do my job from anywhere in the world as long as I've got an internet connection. | |
| And with Starlink coming out, or if it's already out, with Starlink, I can do that now. | |
| I could literally go in the middle of... | |
| You know, middle of the ocean somewhere, whatever islands around there, and just do my job. | |
| And, you know, keep calling, doing whatever I need to do. | |
| Yeah, I've started, I think back in 2016, I was like, where do I want to settle down? | |
| Because I was in Florida at the time and was not liking it at all. | |
| And yeah, I started basically looking at higher average IQ and a little better proximity to myself. | |
| And that took me further north. | |
| You know, those are the kind of things I take into account. | |
| And yeah, I'm not married to where I'm at. | |
| I would push back on that idea. | |
| I don't necessarily think that a higher IQ place is going to give you what you want. | |
| Nothing against it, obviously, but like I said, I think the laws are going to be first enacted there. | |
| The elites are first going to go there because they know that that's where they can get the most from the people who are there. | |
| So, I don't know if I would factor that in, but I think, yeah. | |
| The way I look at it is, I've heard the argument over the years of like, you know, for an archipulco and the people moved to South America and stuff like that. | |
| It's like, well, we can pay off the local cops and the feds. | |
| We can do whatever we want and blah, blah, blah. | |
| It's like, yeah, but when the shit hits the fan, who do you want to be surrounded by? | |
| You know, what kind of people? Because they're going to decide the way culture and society goes and stuff like that. | |
| And you know what? I want to be surrounded by people I can reason with better. | |
| Yeah, but that's true. That's true of anything. | |
| And now, where I was living in Florida, I was watching this because it was a stark difference. | |
| And I'm like, my general life experience, I hop into a cab and I ask someone to take me somewhere. | |
| And what's that like? | |
| You know, how positive or negative of experience is that? | |
| And my general interaction with people, like getting, like my groceries checked out at the grocery store. | |
| Like, was that a positive or negative experience? | |
| How hard is it? How competent are they? | |
| And then I go somewhere else and I'm like, wow, this is night and day. | |
| I love it. And I couldn't, I can't, You can't throw enough money. | |
| I couldn't be rich enough to change that. | |
| I just have to go live somewhere like that. | |
| Here, I'm going to take charge. | |
| Go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, thank you. | |
| That's one of the things that's also counteracting me from moving anywhere right now with what I have. | |
| So all of my wife's family, most of my family, are here in this little happy valley that we're in. | |
| And it's amazing. | |
| Like, I'd love to be able to go up every Sunday and visit my wife's family and, you know, just have dinner and do all that. | |
| And then every birthday, basically everything. | |
| Everything that is keeping me here is family, and that to me has been, because I have a very good relationship with my family, a very strong, you know, pull. | |
| I could go somewhere and not have to spend... | |
| You know, $250,000 on a one bedroom, one bathroom, 700 square foot house and be beat out by seven other people. | |
| But I wouldn't be able to have my kids see family on the weekends. | |
| I agree. It's kind of tough for me to think about moving because, for example, my kids in the area we live, they can go see their grandparents. | |
| Every weekend we have, you know, my family, they have businesses in the area. | |
| It's tough to just give all that away and move somewhere else, even if it's a nice climate or if it's lower taxes. | |
| You cannot want to try to keep those other things together. | |
| It's a big grand quality of life question, right? | |
| Which is, there's more to life than money. | |
| Without a doubt, there's more to life than money. | |
| And, you know, having extended family, grandparents around could be great for kids and all of that. | |
| But, you know, a lot of the Bitcoin space people are younger and single or don't have kids yet. | |
| And they just have a certain amount of mobility. | |
| Yeah, I have a question for the Americans on this call. | |
| Is the New Hampshire Free State not an option? | |
| Because I've considered it for myself. | |
| Great question. I live in New Hampshire. | |
| I've interacted with the Free State. | |
| I've got some experience with that. And actually, after this, I'd like to add some of the library stuff because the CEO of the library lives up here. | |
| He's in the same kind of social media groups I'm on, and so I get to see some of what he shared from that. | |
| Okay, so as far as New Hampshire and the Free State project, Look at libertarians in general, and they will make you want to tear your hair out, okay? | |
| Because, like, comparing, like, left and right, some of the decisions they make, where they go. | |
| Like, the state is evil, but then they can ignore people. | |
| They only focus on the state as evil. | |
| And they could ignore more so the personal terrible choices that people make. | |
| It's like, well, no, that's their voluntary choices. | |
| They can do whatever they want. | |
| But then people who like too much drugs, prostitution, stuff like that, it's like, I don't want to live next to that. | |
| I don't want that in my community. | |
| People should be free to do it. | |
| They still shouldn't choose to do it. | |
| And so, yeah, that's my problem with the Free State Project. | |
| You can be both free and a wild degenerate at the same time, and if you want to raise a family, it's not a good combo. | |
| Yes, and if we want freedom in the future, that's a little more case-selected, that's a little more conservative, that's a little more family-oriented, compared to what we have. | |
| You had something else you wanted to mention? | |
| Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, with the library thing. | |
| So from my understanding, someone please correct me if you know better. | |
| The SEC has been going after various crypto projects for years. | |
| Most recently it's been library. | |
| I think they've also accused XRP of being a security. | |
| And so basically in a nutshell, and don't take this to the bank, what a security is is where You go in and you sell people on a business or an idea or a venture and you promise them they're going to make a profit back, you know, implicitly or explicitly. | |
| And they're claiming that a lot of cryptos are securities based on the way like people who had an ICO, an initial coin offering, were like, hey guys, we want to start Ethereum. | |
| So go out and just donate Bitcoin to this address and we'll send you Ethereum tokens. | |
| And from my understanding, Ethereum back in the day did get hounded by the SEC and settled. | |
| And it still exists. | |
| So it's not a death knell. | |
| It's not the end of the project. I think Tezos too had an issue where the SEC came after them about being a security or not, and they settled. | |
| And it's done it in the past. | |
| And so they've been, apparently, this is what Jeremy Kaufman shared, and he did say he wanted to make clear that, because I asked him, like, do you mind if I share, you know, this kind of, like, a private forum, you're sharing this, do you mind if I share it with the world or with other people? | |
| And he's like, you know, just make it clear that my thoughts and opinions are my own and not necessarily those of my company library, of course. | |
| And so... Basically, he shared what a nightmare it's been for him in his personal life because as these investigations are going on, as this stuff is going on, they can't talk about it publicly and they've got to keep throwing money at it. | |
| It's just an absolute nightmare and kudos to him for maintaining this company and this business and keeping things going while having this state vulture on your neck the whole time. | |
| And so yeah, that's been, basically what he said was they finally got to the point where they could make public comments about it and that the SEC was incredibly difficult to work with. | |
| They wouldn't do anything in writing. | |
| They would make them do everything over a phone. | |
| Things like terms and ideas and things would change from one day to the next. | |
| And again, take everything I'm saying with a grain of salt. | |
| But that was, from my understanding, the experience I've had with the whole library and SEC thing. | |
| And yeah, so they can go after different cryptos for being a security. | |
| If they do get declared a security, from my understanding, it's not necessarily the end of the world for that crypto. | |
| It can be a little bit of a setback. | |
| And personally, for the people that are trying to make that crypto grow, it's a nightmare. | |
| It's a nightmare. And it is a way of trying to harm the crypto industry by going after these groups. | |
| Because it's just, it's horrible. | |
| It's terrible to try to do business with this government agency staring down your neck. | |
| Yeah, that does seem to be one of the main attack vectors. | |
| They did it to XRP for sure, and they're doing it to library. | |
| It might even be useful to figure out all of the attack vectors that the state could use, because at some point they probably will. | |
| But But that's the thing. | |
| If you try to ask them ahead of time, like, what can we do to be careful? | |
| And it's not exactly easy. | |
| Now, don't get me wrong. Someone like Bruce Fenton will tell you, like, no, there are clear or there were clear enough securities laws that you could have, you know, figured out and avoided this situation in the future. | |
| And who's to say? Like, I don't know that Library did or didn't do anything that, you know, made them a security or not. | |
| You know, who knows by the definition of the state. | |
| But it's just... | |
| All they can, and they already have done it. | |
| They tried frontal attacks and trying to discredit the technology and the coin, like Bitcoin. | |
| They tried to say it's only for criminals, it's only for drug trafficking, it's only for money laundering, you know, guns or weapon trafficking, all that stuff. | |
| They've done that. They've also said it's not money. | |
| They've also tried to tax it with different strategies. | |
| Some countries do it more tough. | |
| Others try other approaches. | |
| But I think they have tried. | |
| They will keep on trying. | |
| And to me the most scary thing is that at some point some of those strategies might work. | |
| And maybe the way I see it, Maybe the strategies which are more... | |
| probably will work better would be those which are like a Trojan horse or something like that. | |
| Not frontal attack, but, you know, try to join the movement and derail it. | |
| I think that's more likely to succeed. | |
| and work like in this, Steph, your video, the story of your enslavement. | |
| Most of the evil of the state works because people don't think about it and they think it's good for them. | |
| - Yeah. | |
| - Yeah. | |
| - I'm sorry, go ahead. | |
| - Can I inject some positivity? | |
| - What's that? | |
| - Can I inject some positivity? | |
| Because I was just going to say there's zero track record of governments banning things successfully. | |
| We've got laws against murder. | |
| Those still happen. We've got drug laws. | |
| All this stuff is still happening. | |
| Prohibition? No. They can't ban drugs in prison. | |
| To get rid of something decentralized like Bitcoin, you would need every single state How many are there in the world? | |
| Like 250 countries? | |
| To all agree on something. | |
| And I don't think I've ever seen that in my life. | |
| But then if you look at what's happening, the blockchain is a technology that's in its infancy. | |
| And now we're seeing things that are being developed on this that are completely decentralized. | |
| You've got things like Filecoin, which potentially that could be a way you pay something and you can store a file decentralized across the internet. | |
| It's not in any one state, GDPR, all this crap, none of it applies. | |
| You've got the same things happening with Ethereum where you can actually use that network for computing. | |
| We've got Ethereum name service which could let you have Whatever, free-domain.eth, and that is completely decentralized, so you can't get deplatformed. | |
| So we're in the infancy of a lot of cool things that are happening here, and I think five to ten years, there's really not going to be stopping this unless you literally shut down the internet. | |
| I think we've already hit that kind of critical mass where there's too much dependent on the internet that you can't mess with that anymore. | |
| I personally just don't think we're out of the woods yet. | |
| I think that there's so much vast amount of power. | |
| Other countries aside, the United States specifically, holding the world reserve currency, how much power that grants them. | |
| And I don't think they're just going to roll over without a fight. | |
| And that doesn't mean they'll be successful. | |
| But I do think that that is going to, at least in the short-term to mid-term, hamper things a bit. | |
| And they can, like, for example, one attack vector, which I don't personally care about, the energy usage, like you use drugs, for example, they can't ban drugs, but they do send helicopters flying over places looking for heat signatures for people who are growing drugs, and they raid those houses. | |
| I'm sorry, can I just, I think I hear a helicopter, no, I'm just kidding, go ahead. | |
| So if helicopters can scan for heat signatures for people growing drugs, they can scan for heat signatures of people mining Bitcoin. | |
| They can attack it. | |
| That doesn't mean they will. | |
| It's not a foregone conclusion, but I'm still worried about it. | |
| I don't think they're going to roll over without a fight. | |
| What is the motivation though? | |
| The US government is the second biggest holder of Bitcoin. | |
| What is the motivation? What is the motivation to ban it or make it not usable when they are the biggest beneficiary or the second biggest beneficiary right now? | |
| Well, wouldn't it be used more in a way to directly steal it? | |
| I don't know how many people have their passwords memorized. | |
| Yeah, but I mean, I do understand that. | |
| The same reasons that they confiscated the gold in 1930 in that people aren't spending their money. | |
| Like, people put their money into Bitcoin and then they just hold it. | |
| They're saving it. They're not... That was at a time when people trusted government and the state a whole lot more in general. | |
| I think people trust the government a lot right now. | |
| Yeah, Jared, I think Philip White is absolutely right on this, especially at UK university campuses. | |
| Our maybe little echo chamber here where we just delegitimize the state so casually, that's maybe a bit just because you're in the environment, but going outside the environment, Especially, like I said, UK university campuses. | |
| People just willy-nilly want to throw the power of the state at their enemies. | |
| They trust it so much to just achieve what they want using coercion. | |
| To say that trust in the state is at an all-time low is, I think, a false statement. | |
| That's fair. The state hasn't even started, guys. | |
| The state hasn't even started trying to ban it. | |
| Exactly. But they've got way more to go. | |
| If you guys think that we're done and that this fight is over, I'm sorry, but you're mistaken. | |
| Hold on. This is the fight of good versus evil. | |
| This will never be. Exactly. | |
| That's a good point. We're in this for the long haul, no matter what happens. | |
| Because we cannot lose for the sake of our kids, the people we love, society, everything we value. | |
| Okay, we're in this for the long haul. | |
| We're committed, right? | |
| Yeah. So, good or bad, hard or difficult or easy, we're going to be here. | |
| Yeah, and you've got to get to a point where you actually enjoy this stuff. | |
| Because if you want freedom in your life and it just is super depressing, then you're in the wrong business being a libertarian. | |
| You've got to find a way to actually enjoy this fight because it's going to be a fight for the rest of our lives. | |
| They're not done. They've been fighting us for a long time. | |
| They're not going to give up anytime soon. | |
| And just to bring it back to... | |
| Go ahead. 100%. | |
| You go ahead, Steph. Well, I was just going to mention that there are two types of people who have power over us. | |
| And again, I don't want to oversimplify, but I'm going to anyway. | |
| So there are two kinds of people who have power over us. | |
| One are the people who are amoral profit seekers, right? | |
| They lie to us about the value of what they provide. | |
| They like to tax us. | |
| They like our patriotism to the system that they've designed. | |
| And they just want a comfortable life with power over us, and they want resources flowing in. | |
| And those people are relatively benevolent, believe it or not, because when Bitcoin... | |
| It allows them to transfer the value from fiat to Bitcoin. | |
| They'll be jumping from the sinking ship to the new ship and they'll be like, okay, we'll find a way to live with it. | |
| We'll just find a way to tax it. | |
| We'll find a way to control people because they just want resources. | |
| And that's the farmer. | |
| The farmer doesn't hate the cattle. | |
| The farmer just profits. | |
| The farmer doesn't sit there and say, oh, I'm going to gouge this earth with a stick because I hate the earth. | |
| You know, it's just like, oh, you got to plow the earth. | |
| It's... It's not a hateful situation, it's just a tax cattle kind of situation. | |
| So that's the one kind. I don't view those as particularly threatening, at least with regards to the Bitcoin space. | |
| But the other kind are the ideological, eco-insane, communist, depopulate the planet, And it's personal. | |
| Like, they are addicted to power, and they are, you know, they just want to watch the world burn, and for them to have our money is, you know, the other people, you know, they're like the mafia, you know, they don't hate you, they just, you know, they'll charge you 500 bucks a month to not burn your store down, but it's not personal, they just want the money. | |
| But this is more like the, you know, psycho bunny-boiling ex-girlfriend who's going to report you to the cops and she's not making any money from it. | |
| She just wants to do damage. | |
| And I don't know, obviously, what the proportion is of people. | |
| The ideological people, they're the really dangerous ones because you can't... | |
| I mean, that's just a fight. | |
| I mean, there's no compromise there. | |
| There's no, oh, I'll just give them 20% of my income or 50% of my income and they'll just leave me alone. | |
| The ideological ones, and they do seem to be kind of gaining the upper hand through this woke ideology stuff. | |
| But yeah, if the goal is, you know, radical depopulation of the planet for insane, psychopathic, quasi-environmental reasons, then, you know, the fact that Bitcoin is going to make them wealthy, I'm afraid that's not going to be enough. | |
| You know, whereas the other people who just want our money, it's like, okay, here's the money, and away you go. | |
| So, I'm not sure if you guys think that's a reasonable analysis, but that's sort of where I see these two power structures in the world. | |
| I'm just wondering... | |
| Sorry. I'm just wondering... | |
| How many governments are goading each other to ban Bitcoin? | |
| I'm imagining a game of chicken where each government is for tricking each other to ban Bitcoin and regulate Bitcoin so that they can have all the people and all the Bitcoin for themselves. | |
| Do you think that would be happening? | |
| Well, I think what it is, what Steph said earlier was that there's a competition right now to make it more widely available. | |
| Because as it's flowing more, they can always just snatch some out of the stream themselves, so to speak. | |
| at least if I've understood you properly, Steph. | |
| Muted. | |
| Steph, you're muted. | |
| Sorry, if they want to snatch it all for themselves, then it's not really worth that much, right? | |
| Bitcoin has to be decentralized. | |
| Bitcoin has to have a wide bunch of holders, or any crypto, in order for it to have any value. | |
| There's this old Dilbert comic from way back in the day, before there were cell phones or anything like that, and he's like, hey, I bought the first video phone! | |
| And his dog is like, is there anyone else who has it? | |
| No. Well, what's the point? | |
| And he's just staring at the screen of static. | |
| He's, I think I saw something, you know? | |
| So if you're the only one with a video phone and nobody else has it, then the network effect is irrelevant, right? | |
| It doesn't, doesn't, or the network effect is not leveraging the value. | |
| So if the government scoops up more and more Bitcoin and it's not used to store value, because people won't use it to store value if the government keeps taking it. | |
| So the only way is that uneasy equilibrium relationship where you're letting people keep enough value That it's worth them going into it, but you're also scooping up enough value that it's worthwhile for you to have other people use it. | |
| So I think it's going to sort of fall in that whatever sweet spot that never stays politically stable, but I think that's where things are going to land. | |
| The success story for Bitcoin is the same as for Uber. | |
| You need to just make it really popular with a lot of people really quickly, and then it becomes politically unfeasible to ban it. | |
| But it's actually, it's kind of a critical amount of people. | |
| Like if you have, let's say, Bitcoin is something like a trillion dollar asset right now collectively. | |
| So if you have a thousand people owning a billion dollars worth of crypto, that's easy to ban. | |
| If you have a million people owning a million dollars worth of bitcoin, that's harder. | |
| But if you go all the way to the other extreme where you have, you know, a thousand people or a billion people owning, well, let's say a trillion people owning one bitcoin, one dollar, then it's easy to ban as well because nobody cares about it because you have to have some kind of a concentration, like people have to have a significant Amount of this in their holdings for it to be a significant amount of people with a significant amount of holdings. | |
| But either extreme is actually not good. | |
| It's a balance to be met there. | |
| And, like, every day we're onboarding more and more people because it's not just Bitcoin. | |
| It's crypto in general. And, like, every day the total market cap is growing. | |
| Right now, at least. You know? | |
| Yeah, and just speaking back to the people that Steph was referring to, like just the people that, you know, they just want, they're not ideological about it. | |
| They just want it to, you know, number go up and I'm happy. | |
| The big problem with that is when the number starts going down and then it becomes easy for the governments to come in and say, look at this, this is hurting a bunch of people. | |
| We need to come in and step in and regulate this industry as a whole. | |
| Yeah, but that's that's the same song and dance they've been playing and like these are cycles of them just like whenever like before the show we're talking about banning and stuff i'm like this is like these countries they ban it one one year the next they've unbanned it and it's just it's the same old song and dance and they're ultimately unsuccessful don't get me wrong it's inconvenient it has a negative effect here in the moment but in the long run good luck guys um as far as like the the number go down and then the government's got to come in and help they've been doing that before And it's an opportunity. | |
| Number go down, okay? | |
| That guy who's flipping subs and not making, or flipping burgers and not making a whole lot of money, now he's got an opportunity to get a lot more crypto, you know, for his dollar than he was. | |
| That's something I didn't want to talk about earlier, right? | |
| I asked that the question about, like, what would you recommend somebody to do right now as far as getting into crypto? | |
| Is absolutely, if you can't afford, if you don't have a lot of money to put into it, you can be heads and shoulders ahead of everyone else by learning about it. | |
| Get some $2 of Dogecoin, give you like, I don't know, 10,000 of them, and just play with that in an app. | |
| Trade it with friends, with people. | |
| If you screw it up, it doesn't matter. | |
| You lost half a cent. And learn about the technology. | |
| And then when you do have some dollars and money coming in, start investing in it. | |
| But if you just know about it, Ahead of everyone else, you're going to put yourself at a great advantage, and it'll make you hungry. | |
| This is a whole other side thing. | |
| It'll make you hungry to create wealth, to create value, and that will bring so much other better things to your life. | |
| When you can show up and work, and your job may suck, but when you love the idea of getting some crypto at the end of the day, what you're doing there, you can be motivated about it, you can be into it, you know, that could have Compound gains and effects in your life in so many other ways. | |
| There's a big opportunity here. | |
| Thank you for that one. Thank you. | |
| Yeah, I agree with that too. | |
| You have experience with crypto who can get a much better job with people who have wealth and I'm going to give it to you for helping them with crypto or whatever that job is. | |
| Seriously, like if you learn about crypto when so many people don't know nothing and then you go to an exchange and only more of them are going to open and say, hey, let me be a customer support guy for you, you know, and they'll pay you good money with health care and you'll work remote and all that stuff. | |
| This is a great opportunity, you know, and you didn't have to go to school for that. | |
| And everyone's people in the crypto world are falling all over themselves to help you with it. | |
| You know, the education isn't just free. | |
| People will love to help you, you know. | |
| Oh yeah, getting a job in crypto, nobody particularly cares about your education, nobody, because it's so new, right? | |
| All they care. If you mentioned Bitcoin in 2017, man, you got a job like that, right? | |
| I'd also like to point out that since we were talking about the very first video phone, Jared's video quality, I think he actually has the very first video phone, because it's some combination of stop-motion animation and Minecraft that he's coming through in, which is really quite, quite something, so. | |
| I'm just moving so fast the photons don't have time. | |
| He's frame independent. He's between the frames, man. | |
| I was hoping to raise a question. | |
| You made a post on Locals before about the plummeting IQ levels in the West have led to the lowering of emotional self-regulation. | |
| I wanted to ask the question about the securitization of cryptocurrencies. | |
| Will the Trojan horse, for your own good arguments for banning it, prove to be more effective over time given the plummeting IQ levels? | |
| Can you rephrase the question? | |
| I want to make sure I follow it. | |
| You made a post on Locals saying that we should ban Bitcoin because it's unsafe, because it's a terrorist currency or whatever. | |
| Is that going to be more successful over time because of the dropping IQ levels? | |
| Oh, yeah. No, so let me sort of... | |
| I don't know. | |
| There's something about this stupid speaker view that doesn't really work very well because I'm speaking and it's not working. | |
| But anyway, I'll just do it by hand. | |
| All right. So the IQ fall, and people are saying it's around immigration, and I don't think it's obviously not just to do with immigration. | |
| So the IQ fall, though, doesn't mean that the mob rules. | |
| It means that the mob follows, right? | |
| Because when you are smart, you tend to be skeptical, and when you're not so smart, you tend to be... | |
| Well, you have the certainty, and your certainty is very programmable, right? | |
| So, with the IQ falling, the people who are less smart will generally follow along what the government says, right? | |
| I mean, look at the number of people who still believe that, you know, without masks we'd all be dead, you know, and so... | |
| They will do. So the government, of course, is very much running a lot of the propaganda that is going on at the moment, either directly. | |
| There's three layers in which they do it, right? | |
| The first is just directly, but it's coming out of government agents and so on. | |
| The second is, certainly here in Canada, you have a bunch of media outlets that are getting money directly from the government, so there's that. | |
| And the third, of course, is that the government runs the schools, which runs the propaganda, which produces these people who are coming out of some conveyor belt like they're in that old Pink Floyd movie, The Wall. | |
| And so, the less smart people in society are much more susceptible to doing what they're told, right? | |
| And being absolutely certain that it's the right thing to do. | |
| And so, I don't think that they're a factor when it comes to what the government wants. | |
| And they can also turn on a dime, and it doesn't really matter. | |
| I'll give you an example, right? | |
| So under Trump, we were all treated to endless... | |
| Discussions and moral horror and shock at all of the children in cages on the border, right? | |
| The border between America and Mexico. | |
| All the children in cages and they're just being treated so badly and it's just awful. | |
| Anyway, so the fact that the photos were mostly from the Obama era didn't really matter. | |
| And now you have kids being dropped over the wall, you have kids being assaulted, and you have kids being crammed in even more reprehensible and horrifying conditions. | |
| And this information is easily available. | |
| It's not particularly hidden on the internet. | |
| It's not like you've got to go to the dark web to get it. | |
| And it's completely vanished. | |
| It's completely vanished. | |
| And people are just like, okay, it's not even a factor. | |
| It's not even a thought. It's not even interest. | |
| If you look at the incredibly shady and shoddy allegations put against Justice Kavanaugh when he was going out for the Supreme Court by Christine Blasey Ford, where even her own friend said it never happened, there's no evidence, and his... | |
| His incredibly retained calendars proved that it was not the case. | |
| Okay, but then you look at Governor Cuomo of New York, he's got like six or seven people, women who've accused him of pretty serious sexual misconduct. | |
| It just doesn't matter. It doesn't exist. | |
| It doesn't exist. And so people would just like, they don't have any continuity or throughput or consistency. | |
| That's sort of a mark of introspection and higher intelligence or maybe just greater curiosity. | |
| I don't know exactly what the factors are. | |
| And so if the government tells people, if the government wants Bitcoin to look good, then they'll just talk about it looking good. | |
| And I think that's every incentive for them to do that for a lot of the people who just want the money, not the psychopathic control over the population. | |
| And if the government wants Bitcoin to look bad, then they'll try and make it look bad, and they'll work on that. | |
| But the goal is to try and get as much Bitcoin into the hands of as many people as possible, so they have at least a financial incentive to push back against it. | |
| Yeah, so I don't view the masses of people as a whole as doing anything other than trailing after the government propaganda, and that's why we want stability in the Bitcoin world or the crypto world. | |
| We want to expand its ownership. | |
| We want to remind people in power, you know. | |
| I'm sure that there are some people who have a lot of power who, you know, probably not watching this directly because they're too busy doing strange things with a voodoo doll and the Bill of Rights. | |
| But, you know, you may watch this at some point, and, you know, at this point, the people in power and us, you know, whereas before we may have been enemies, and there's probably a big moral divide or whatever, but right now... | |
| You know, the guys who are in a fistfight and they, you know, want to kill each other, when the tsunami comes over the horizon, then they both drop the fight and they both run for safety and we can live to fight again another day. | |
| But right now, the people in power, it's like the tsunami of helicopter money, the tsunami of currency degrading money printing is upon us. | |
| And, you know, we can live to fight another day, but we've got to get to the lifeboats right now. | |
| And you're going to have to push back against the crazy control freaks who just want to watch the world burn. | |
| And, you know, you can continue pillaging us. | |
| We can set up the farm in some new place, and then we can have those wrangles again. | |
| But right now, you'll need to get behind crypto because it's the only port in the storm. | |
| It's the only place where we can get off the sinking ship. | |
| And I'm happy to Join forces briefly, and then we can get back to our fistfight down the road. | |
| But right now, we've got bigger fish to fry than tax rates and regulations. | |
| We have got to – and, you know, the more people we can get onto these lifeboats, the better, because the lifeboat is basically infinite. | |
| I mean, it's not a great analogy, because anybody can get into crypto, anybody can get into Bitcoin. | |
| And so, from that aspect, I do see us as unfortunate, temporary, but necessary allies at the moment. | |
| The people in power who just want resources are going to need to find some way to push back against the really crazy idealists out there who just want to control and destroy people. | |
| Because, you know, otherwise you're going to end up in the water with us. | |
| And, you know, to really destroy the Titanic analogy, the sharks are everywhere these days. | |
| I want to support what you said with this quote. | |
| I remember it vaguely. | |
| You have to look it up to confirm it. | |
| But it was something about you'd rather live under robber barons than bureaucrats who torment you with the approval of their own conscience. | |
| And I think that's very true. | |
| I think that's very true. | |
| Oh, yeah. I want the money-hungry rulers, right? | |
| Because the money-hungry rulers will allow you enough freedom so they can keep taxing you. | |
| It's the truly psychopathic control freaks who will just grind you into the dust. | |
| Because there's no economic... | |
| You don't look at something like... | |
| Cambodia and say, well, you know what we really need to do? | |
| We just need to pull everyone out of the cities and have them pretend to be farmers so that we can all starve to death. | |
| You know, look, Chairman Mao didn't sort of come across China in the 1940s and say, oh, you know what we really need to do? | |
| We need a mass famine that's going to kill like 50 million people and that's the best way. | |
| I mean, those are the people who are really, really dangerous. | |
| The fairly benevolent tax farmers Of China for 6,000 years. | |
| There was continuity. There was some stability. | |
| There were, you know, complicated contracts. | |
| There were IQ tests of bureaucracy and all of that. | |
| And then the ideologues came along and ideology is simply the conscience snuffing cloak that people give for their desire for mass slaughter. | |
| And it's those people, like, you can kind of live in an uneasy coexistence with the people who just want to take stuff from you, but the people who want you dead for, you know, they claim ideological reasons, but basically it's just a psychopathic hatred. | |
| Yeah, that's, uh, you can't even have an uneasy relationship with those people as, of course, 100 million people under communism can't testify because they're dead. | |
| That's very true. Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag Archipelago says how people use ideology as a justification for atrocities, and it can be quite terrifying. | |
| And you know that they do, because it doesn't matter if they say, well, we want a better world for the workers, and it's like, oh dear, you know, 20 million workers just starved to death. | |
| They don't sit there and say, oh, well, we should really change that. | |
| Because, you know, clearly we're not achieving our goal. | |
| No, the goal is just to cover. | |
| The goal is just to cover for the mass murder. | |
| And unfortunately, it's just fueled by fiat currency. | |
| And so, yeah, because they never change their course. | |
| You know, if I say, hey, I really want to go north, and then you point out to me that I'm heading south, but I still keep going, then clearly my north direction is just to cover, right? | |
| It's something else I want to do. I think a lot of their complaints about the energy usage of Bitcoin and Ethereum, or the whole space in general, proof of work in general, is the psychopaths you're referring to kind of laying out feelers. | |
| Well, it's just dismissiveness, right? | |
| It's just a way to haphazardly say, oh, these guys are bad. | |
| Don't invest any money. | |
| Yeah, the left, this is an old system. | |
| The left is built up over time. | |
| When they don't like something, they can throw environmental effects at it. | |
| If you happen to create some wealth or some value in some way, shape, or form, they're going to find some way in which it's evil. | |
| You've displaced some North American tree frog or something like that. | |
| Allegedly. Allegedly, or whatever the case is. | |
| Or it's racism, or whatever else they can throw at you. | |
| So they're just flipping over their Rolodex of the old accusations, and oh yeah, environmentalism, we can go after this. | |
| Because right now, this day, in general, contemporary, the left are the bad guys, overtly, flat out. | |
| And this is right out of their camp. | |
| I think the good news is that the decentralized nature of crypto is perhaps the most powerful weapon that we have to fight state power in a very, very long time. | |
| Because if it's decentralized, it's that much harder to get rid of. | |
| There's no single actor to go to that makes it easy to stop. | |
| It's also that much harder for us to organize, though, as a decentralized community. | |
| That's fair. Yeah, it's harder to coordinate amongst them. | |
| I'm sorry, have you ever tried to get freedom fighters to organize? | |
| I'm sorry, is this something that I've kind of missed? | |
| It makes herding cats look like about as simple a conception as possible. | |
| I don't know that a lot of hyper-individualists are ever going to be easy to organize, so that's why I'm so glad there's crypto. | |
| I just want to touch on the environmentalist argument against crypto. | |
| I recently listened to a very interesting podcast. | |
| Anthony Pompliano went on Lex Friedman to discuss Bitcoin. | |
| And there he said that the environmentalist argument against Bitcoin is a subjective one. | |
| It's Bitcoin uses too much energy. | |
| What is too much energy? | |
| How much is too much? | |
| And who decides where energy should go? | |
| I think the US military doesn't have legitimacy to use energy. | |
| Yeah, I mean, what about Xbox and Netflix and, you know, compared to what? | |
| And why aren't you using the most efficient method of generating that energy, which is obviously nuclear at this point in time. | |
| They don't give a shit about the environment. | |
| That's why. Right. 100%. | |
| They're not listening to reason. | |
| It's not going to work. I mean... | |
| They're going to run through this gambit of emotion-based arguments. | |
| It's going to start with the environment, it's going to go to Bitcoin is racist, and then it's going to go to the other 50,000 things you always hear. | |
| They'll use them all. They'll use all the excuses, and it doesn't matter what they're just saying. | |
| Thank heavens that they are doing that. | |
| I think that's absolutely wonderful, and I think we should praise them, and we should worship them, and we should burn incense to their graven images. | |
| We should love them for doing that. | |
| Because what they're doing is they're keeping Bitcoin out of the hands of dumb, malevolent, ideological people. | |
| And I don't want the golden treasure of Bitcoin to end up in the hands of dumb, malevolent, Yeah, I do. | |
| So if you're like, oh no, it's bad for the environment, it's like, okay, well, you don't have the clear thinking, you don't have the intellect, you don't have the individualism, or even the naked mammalian resource gathering self-interest. | |
| It's like, okay, well, I don't want you anywhere near Bitcoin at that point. | |
| Like, I'm really, really thrilled that, oh, it's racist! | |
| Okay, well, if you believe this, you know, Double syllable, endless curse that they put on anyone they disagree with. | |
| Fantastic, because if you think that somehow crypto is racist, then I don't want you anywhere near crypto. | |
| You can take the UBI bus into wherever it takes you, but I'm thrilled that they're using these arguments. | |
| It's a nice dividing line. | |
| You know, like Jared keeps telling me, you take your Coke, man, you put your credit card down the middle, you separate it. | |
| Just kidding, he doesn't say any of that. | |
| You know, you want to separate the stuff. | |
| I want two kinds of people in crypto. | |
| The people who are ideological for freedom and the people who have naked mammalian resource gathering stuff. | |
| Because those people are going to be intelligent about using it, one for ideological reasons, one for material reasons. | |
| But all of the people who are just like empty-headed zombie mobs charging around on the latest piece of propaganda I want you to not, you know, that would be taking a spray paint to the Mona Lisa. | |
| I mean, I guess technically you're painting, but I don't want you anywhere near the glories of it. | |
| Yeah, I'm just waiting for Al Sharpton to kind of pass away, so that way he can't even get in on any lawsuit in regards to racism for it. | |
| You know, Stefan, the favorite catchphrase of yours that really has inspired me is this, the road to hell is paved with anti-rationality. | |
| And you know, that's a perfect manifestation of what you just said. | |
| Well, and the people who were just resource mammal gatherers, they're rational. | |
| I mean, it's not moral. You know, it's rational. | |
| The same way an engineer building a weapon of mass destruction has to be logical. | |
| It doesn't mean he has to be rational. | |
| It doesn't mean he has to be moral. | |
| And so I just want people whose behavior can be somewhat predicted in the space, because otherwise they're just going to tear the space to shreds with random behavior. | |
| And so I want, you know, the resource gatherers, fantastic. | |
| Let's have them in here. You know, I think they're amoral, but at least they're somewhat predictable. | |
| But I don't want a heavily leverageable, empty-headed mob in there just charging around on the latest propaganda stuff, because that's going to make the price very unstable. | |
| It's going to make the And so basically what happens is I want resources to accrue to people who are more rational, and I don't want to deny them to people who are less rational. | |
| I want everyone who's listening to this to look into it. | |
| But the people who are just, oh, it's racist, I won't go to it. | |
| It's like, great, okay, then keep your spray cans away from the Louvre, and I'm very happy. | |
| But we don't want enough of them that they run the show. | |
| I'm just going to point out, they're out of arguments. | |
| If they're dropping to racism and sexism for a decentralized ledger technology, they've lost. | |
| But they don't know what it is, though. | |
| That's in part why they've gone to environmentalism. | |
| Because they bring racism and sexism, and they're like, yeah, get out of here. | |
| It's totally decentralized. It helps everyone across the world kiss both cheeks. | |
| We all know that the blockchain is white supremacy. | |
| I mean, that's all it is. I've heard people say that. | |
| I gotta say, where are all these white supremacists? | |
| They act like you can't swing a stick without hitting one. | |
| Well, if you define it in such a way that anything other than groveling and self-abasement and self-hatred is white supremacy, then good gosh, we're surrounded by them. | |
| As with any cult, there's an out-group, they're the source of all evils in the world, and they're everywhere. | |
| They can't be negotiated with, so you have to destroy them. | |
| It's like Nazis. | |
| There's Nazis under every leaf, but there's actual commies as professors and politicians, socialists, all across the world, but, you know, let's worry about the one Nazi over there. | |
| They're not people, they're just misunderstood. | |
| Yeah, that's why communism won World War II, is because they managed to win the ideological core and had already infiltrated in the U.S. in, what, like the 30s or earlier? | |
| Yeah. They're still there. | |
| I mean, that's why we're seeing what we're seeing. | |
| Yeah, I think you guys are being a little too dismissive about this because it has worked. | |
| These arguments have worked. | |
| This is why we're in the state that we're in. | |
| So we're being a little too dismissive. | |
| Is the price still going up? | |
| You know, the racists, the environmentalists, all of these arguments has brought society to where it is. | |
| Well, it's not the arguments, though. | |
| It's the fact that they control the narrative and they control the media and they educate the children. | |
| Right, which is a fact. | |
| I'm sorry, but we're on a crypto roundtable here and you think that the bad guys have won? | |
| Have you seen the price of crypto over the last few months? | |
| These arguments of racism, the deplatforming has been specifically driving up the price of crypto. | |
| So it's the old question of like, okay, well, would you accept terrible lies being told about you on Wikipedia if it drove the price of crypto up, I don't know, tenfold? | |
| It's like, yeah, I could sell my reputation for that. | |
| It's also why here in the U.S., why the price of being able to acquire a gun and all that sort of trade, AMLA is a dollar a round for nine mil. | |
| It's just absurd. So same thing with crypto. | |
| This may be an unpopular opinion here. | |
| I just want to give a quick shoutout. Yo, yo, quick shoutout. | |
| On the issue of racism, I want to give a shoutout to a UK YouTuber by the name of King Peter the Virile. | |
| He made an excellent video called Divided We Fall, where he touches on the issue of racial division and how it's being sold by Marxists. | |
| Brilliant YouTuber. Look into King Peter the Virile. | |
| Just want to give a shoutout. Credit where credit's due. | |
| I'm already intimidated by the fact that he calls himself the Viral, but I am impressed. | |
| I'm impressed at that confidence. | |
| That's a heavy nutsack that he's carrying in a wheelbarrow there. | |
| I would expect nothing less. Stefan, I think all this talk of commies is making us feel bad. | |
| Would you mind telling us how much the price of Bitcoin has risen since we started? | |
| I think we're up a couple hundred bucks for sure. | |
| So, no, I mean, listen, don't, don't, I mean, good lord, don't, don't, don't feel like they've won. | |
| I mean, yeah, they're fighting hard, but again, we've got the life raft. | |
| It's like, oh my god, they're driving us off the Titanic. | |
| It's like, yeah, that's good, man. | |
| That's good. We have an actual life raft this time. | |
| Yeah, I mean, it's the old question, would I accept the elimination of my YouTube account, my PayPal account, my Twitter account in return for a tenfold increase in Bitcoin? | |
| It's like... I can see that argument. | |
| I can see that argument. | |
| So, without Bitcoin, it would be pretty rough, man. | |
| But every move that they make... | |
| That is hostile to liberty, freedom and economic productivity is just going to drive up the price of Bitcoin. | |
| So we do have an ace up the sleeve, so to speak. | |
| Well, I think there's more to it than that. | |
| It's that evil is inherently self-destructive, especially in the long run. | |
| Every time they de-platform someone, they raise the demand for an alternative. | |
| And eventually that math leads to their destruction. | |
| They're creating a bigger and bigger network of people that they won't do business with. | |
| I'll give you an example that I've thought of. | |
| I can't imagine why shareholders are not launching lawsuits against corporations that endorse Biden. | |
| Because Biden jacking up the corporate tax is going to directly affect their shareholders. | |
| And he said he was going to do that, right? | |
| There was no doubt about that. | |
| So, if you're a shareholder and your corporation endorsed Biden or was pro-Biden and so on, I mean, they've just taken a huge amount of money out of your shares, and that's fiduciary irresponsibility 101, which is you did an action ahead of time that you knew would drive down the price of shares or drive down the value of the company, but I don't know, maybe the people are giving up on the court system. | |
| I don't know. I can understand that to some degree, but that's just sort of a by-the-by, but, yeah, it's pretty, pretty strange. | |
| All right. If we've got another 20 minutes or so, I'm happy to take some questions if people have, if people got a yearning-burning that they're desperate to get out on. | |
| I've got one last question. Sorry, go ahead. | |
| Okay, all right, so I've had people, because I put my website out there, I'm like, folks get in touch from the roundtable, and people have gotten in touch, and some people have gotten in touch with me about scamming. | |
| It's something they haven't brought up in the crypto space. | |
| I just wanted to real quick go over some of the kind of scams out there, what to watch out for, If you go anywhere public and someone DMs you, like if you're on Twitter or whatever like that, people all the time will make accounts of being Vitalik Buterin or the founders of a particular cryptocurrency, someone who's got a face, a name in the industry. | |
| They'll DM you and start having a conversation about crypto and it's going to lead to some kind of scam. | |
| Super skeptical of that. | |
| You get a lot of phishing attempts. | |
| Very sophisticated phishing attempts where people have websites that look like Coinbase.com, but one little character is different. | |
| You go there, you put in your information, and then it's automatic. | |
| It's a script on there, and it automatically logs into your Coinbase account and pulls your stuff. | |
| Or whatever exchange. | |
| I've seen that stuff happen before. | |
| And I don't mind. If you are skeptical of something, send me an email. | |
| I've put my information out there before, and I'll take a quick glance at it. | |
| It's usually pretty easy to tell the scams. | |
| And... Twitter, the social media companies, they are not doing what they could to prevent it. | |
| But just be extra careful about scams out there because when it does happen, when they do convince you to send $50,000 or $50,000, because I've seen both amounts, there's nothing that can be done about it. | |
| It's gone. You're never getting it back. | |
| And so just be skeptical, be careful, check with other people, and, you know, Yeah, that's all I've got to say for now. | |
| Never click on the link or type the address in yourself. | |
| Sorry, go ahead. It's actually huge in the miner community right now. | |
| There's a bunch of scam websites that have these super sophisticated mining technologies and they only accept cryptocurrency. | |
| So once you send it, they can just run away with all your shit. | |
| Yep. I don't think anyone in Dev's audience needs the scam lecture, though. | |
| It's very simple to spot these things. | |
| Look, I've worked customer service. | |
| I've seen, like, bright people can still get, like, especially when you're getting into crypto and it's emotionally kind of like you're on a high. | |
| It's just you're really into it. | |
| You're ready. And I've almost been, like, clicked on things myself. | |
| And I've worked security. | |
| I know better on the other side of stuff. | |
| So I just know that it can happen. | |
| Be careful. | |
| That's all I'm saying. And check with somebody else. | |
| Get a second, third, fourth opinion. | |
| You're better off not doing it if you think there's a good chance of a scam. | |
| There's plenty of legitimate options. | |
| Somebody has said we should let MK talk. | |
| So, was there something that you were burning to say, or was that just a passport? | |
| Yeah, I was going to say, so, we just had a contentious election, right? | |
| If you could convince the half of the country that's still riled up and, you know, kind of angry about this, that, you know, they voted for Trump as a big F you to the system. | |
| You could convince them, hey, just... | |
| Putting a couple hundred bucks into crypto would be a giant FU to the financial system. | |
| You know, things would look a lot different, you know, when you wake up tomorrow. | |
| That's a damn good point. | |
| And that's one of the things why, sorry, that's one of the reasons why GameStop is getting so absurd, and that's why that's been so shorted, you know, to try and counteract all the stuff that they've done. | |
| Sorry, little girl. And so everyone in there, well, a lot of people I know have GameStop, and they're hoping, you know, to crash this thing, at least for hedge funds. | |
| And on that end, but yeah, so, and there's a lot of due diligence that people have done out there to confirm that this really is a thing, so unless, you know, unless they pull something magical, I'm gonna have to mute myself, but yeah, anyway. | |
| A quick bit of advice for the audience in relation to two very interesting books. | |
| If you want to, you need to read this. | |
| You need to read this. | |
| If you want to avoid needing to read this, you have to read this. | |
| You know what I'm saying? You better say what you're holding up. | |
| There are a lot of audio. If you read the road to surf them, so you avoid needing to read Guerrilla Warfare by Mao Zedong. | |
| There you go. You know what I'm saying? | |
| Read one to avoid needing the other. | |
| Tev, I'd like you to give me some sunshine over there, because you seem to have a very different perspective than I do on this, and because I definitely can see a future where Bitcoin is worth one million dollars, and it still does not contribute to a freer world. | |
| And you seem to think if Bitcoin is worth a lot more money, that means we are winning the battle and we are more free. | |
| So can you help me get to that mindset? | |
| I can, but it probably won't be what you think, so I'm getting a bit of feedback in my ear, so I'll take this out. | |
| So, I'll just tell you where I'm at, and maybe this will make some sense. | |
| This is not to say this is some objective philosophical statement. | |
| I'm just telling you where I'm at. | |
| I don't care about a freer world anymore. | |
| I care about the world that is freer for, you know, friends, loved ones, family, my daughter, the future, but the state... | |
| If there was some magical way to turn around the state and make it smaller and more reasonable, then we wouldn't ever be able to get rid of it. | |
| In other words, if there was some way to make communist workers insanely productive, then communism at least would have an economic argument for it and morality would mean nothing because it would mean that you could achieve... | |
| At least pragmatic effects, productive effects through evil, which means evil would win over good, at least in the productivity race. | |
| If there was a way to make slaves massively economically productive, more economically productive than, say, workers in a free market, then you'd still have the moral argument against slavery. | |
| But it would be so productive that it would be unstoppable in a way, right? | |
| So the government can't be managed. | |
| The government can't be controlled. | |
| And I think that the goal of Brexit and the goal of Trump was to try and find a way to at least slow the growth of the state. | |
| And I think that actually did work. | |
| Brexit maybe, Trump for sure, did work to slow the growth of the state. | |
| He did repeal a lot of regulations. | |
| He did get some more free market guys into the judiciary in various levels and so on. | |
| But the reason why we can't have a government in the long run is because it will always end this way. | |
| There's nothing that can be done to stop it. | |
| There's too much momentum. | |
| There's too much self-interest masquerading as morality. | |
| There's too much sentimentality. | |
| There are just too many dumb people or programmed people or... | |
| People who will resist any kind of truth or reality. | |
| There's too much divide. There's too much manipulation from the media. | |
| There's too much misinformation in schools. | |
| And so, for right now, as far as making a freer world, that's after the crash. | |
| There's nothing that can be, like Bitcoin is not going to push back against the size and power of the state in the long run, but what it will do is it will keep the people who can rebuild the freer society out of harm's way and with resources so that when it comes time to build, like if you've just had your country bombed from end to end, this is just an analogy, right? | |
| If you're Germany or Japan at the end of the Second World War, You need your engineers. | |
| And the engineers better have a lot of authority and a lot of resources because you've got to rebuild. | |
| You've got to get your electricity grid back online. | |
| You've got to get your sanitation system going. | |
| You've got to get your plumbing and your water treatment facilities. | |
| You've got to get engineers, you need your farmers, and you just need those people. | |
| So, as far as, you know, Bitcoin is going to allow the people who can rebuild to have a significant amount of resources, which means the rebuilding is going to be much faster. | |
| Now, I don't mean rebuilding from some big bombing thing, anything like that. | |
| But you're going to have a system, a systemic collapse, without a doubt. | |
| I mean, mathematically, the world debt is so insane at the moment. | |
| The world debt is, what, 335% of world GDP? I mean, it's completely insane. | |
| And so that system was done and dusted when I was born, probably before, not on the day of, but probably before I was born, that system is done and dusted. | |
| It's toast. And so for me, the Bitcoin is of itself. | |
| Blockchain doesn't fight bullets. | |
| It doesn't fight armies. | |
| It doesn't fight tanks or anything like that. | |
| But what it can do is move resources to the people who are smart and wise enough to rebuild society in the image of the non-aggression principle, into the image of a truly free, stateless society. | |
| And, you know, the goal, of course, in the long term was to do it multi-generationally through peaceful parenting. | |
| Things have moved a little faster. | |
| COVID, of course, hitting the gas that much more because of that. | |
| So to me, Bitcoin simply says that the smartest and the wisest people and the most forward-looking people I mean, as you know, the returns just on Bitcoin over the last 10 years have been 200% a year. | |
| 200% a year. | |
| And the people who listen to me or to others who we're talking about in 2010, 2011, probably done all right. | |
| And I care about those people. | |
| I care about the tribe of the smart and the virtuous. | |
| As far as the world and society, I will tell you quite frankly, I give about as much of a shit about society as society has given about me. | |
| I don't mean a lot. It's a chillingly reciprocal relationship, right? | |
| I've always said, you know, treat people the best you can. | |
| When you first meet them after that, treat them as they treat you. | |
| That is an unstoppable, unlosable proposition for dealing with the world. | |
| And I put absolutely all my muscle energy and a huge amount of personal risk and safety sometimes. | |
| Into trying to reason with the world. | |
| And then I was lied about. | |
| I was slandered. I was deplatformed. | |
| And the world is like, okay, he's gone. | |
| That's okay, because there's another cat video in my queue on YouTube. | |
| And that's fine. Honestly, I've said this before. | |
| I'm just an empiricist. | |
| I'm just eating information like Pac-Man and the glowing dots. | |
| Which is, I care about the people who care about me. | |
| I care about my family. I care about my friends. | |
| I care about a community of reasonable people. | |
| I want to make sure that they have the maximum amount of resources to come through the coming storm. | |
| I'm handing out umbrellas to friends. | |
| I'm not just handing them out to anyone. | |
| And this is why the fact that it's more tight-knit community now, I think, has real value. | |
| And the fact that I've been cut off from broadcasting to a large degree to the world as a whole, it has real value. | |
| So if this helps with you at all, it's my perspective. | |
| I'm not saying it's right or objective. | |
| I'm just telling you sort of my perspective that it's like the people, oh my gosh, don't you care about the people... | |
| The kids at the border, and it's like, I simply refuse to care more about people's children than their parents do. | |
| Like, I simply, I will not do it. | |
| I will not care more about children than their own parents do, because that's simply used to manipulate and control me. | |
| And I will not continue to sacrifice safety and security in order to protect people who have no interest in protecting or respecting me. | |
| Now, the people in this conversation, you may probably don't agree with me on everything. | |
| I certainly don't agree with me on everything. | |
| But I hope that you will at least understand that when I come to talk about, you know, Bitcoin can save the world. | |
| It's not by saving everyone in the world or saving all the freedoms which are currently under siege, because we're going to lose those over time. | |
| It's always a losing battle, right? | |
| It's always like, oh, well, we managed to slow down the latest gun grab or, you know, we managed to push back six months against vaccine passports. | |
| But it's just a losing battle. | |
| It's like just trying to prop something up at a windstorm. | |
| The wind's going to win. | |
| The wind's going to take it at some point. | |
| But I do care about people having resources and mobility, right? | |
| Because those are the two things that you need. | |
| You need to be mobile and you need to have resources. | |
| If all you have is land, you can't take that anywhere. | |
| If all you have is real estate, you can't take that anywhere. | |
| Even gold is tough to transport. | |
| But if you have crypto, you're mobile and you have resources. | |
| Those are the people that I care about. | |
| About saving, because those are the people who've helped me out. | |
| Those are the people who've helped me gather some resources and mobility. | |
| But as far as saving the world as a whole, I mean, it's not possible, it's not feasible. | |
| And at this point, for me at least, even if I could, it's not morally desirable because it violates the principles of reciprocity. | |
| That is the foundation of any healthy relationship. | |
| I hope that helps. Whether that convinces anybody of anything other than my own perspective is up to you, but that's my thoughts. | |
| I agree 100%, and I think it bleeds into something that you said. | |
| This raises the question of the validity of accelerationism. | |
| Should we just accelerate the collapse, or should we... | |
| Because there's elections coming up in my area, so I'm like... | |
| We're not ready for a collapse. | |
| This is a big topic. | |
| What makes you think we have any control over this process at all? | |
| It's like saying, should we make the communist workers less efficient? | |
| It's like, that's a process that's going to happen, whether we like it or not. | |
| That is a process that occurs regardless of our input. | |
| Like voting patterns, for example. | |
| There's elections coming up in my area. | |
| Should I vote for the leftist party to accelerate the demise, or should I try and make a stand? | |
| You're assuming that your vote even matters. | |
| This matters because this comes up at the Free State Project and it's an idea. | |
| So the position is, do we accelerate the demise of the state or not? | |
| An analogy I like to go to is we're on a sinking ship. | |
| Should we be getting people off the ship or should we be poking more holes in the ship in the meantime? | |
| Obviously, I'm more of a let's do what we can because the ship's going down no matter what. | |
| We know that. Okay? | |
| So, I'm more on the side of, let's get people off the ship. | |
| And so, philosophically, if you convince people that it's better to sink the ship, that's also a shorter time horizon. | |
| They live riskier. | |
| They take bigger risks with themselves. | |
| They go... | |
| Sorry, I know I'm not doing this case justice. | |
| I hope someone else will. The lifeboats aren't ready. | |
| They're not ready yet. | |
| We have to stay on the ship for a while. | |
| Why are we not ready for a collapse? | |
| Well, Bitcoin's not ready for a collapse, if that's what we're talking about. | |
| We're talking about Bitcoin, right? | |
| And so I echo Steph's sentiments that I don't care about the world, necessarily. | |
| I care about some people, and I care about my immediate friends and family. | |
| And freedom-loving people. | |
| But let's just take this group, for example. | |
| Our little group of whatever, we have 12 people here. | |
| 16, and our extended families and friends network, so maybe 100 people. | |
| If the financial system collapsed right now, Bitcoin would not work for us at all. | |
| It would not create, so the whole purpose, if we step back, the whole purpose of money is to coordinate economic activity. | |
| So I have my skills, you've got your skills, he's got his skills, and we can collaborate and cooperate and exchange our goods and services and that makes you know life so much better right if we had to do everything on our own we'd just be we'd die so we need this economic coordination but but bitcoin so you need transactions for that if if bitcoin can't you know if we're paying 10 bucks a transaction it's not even worth it anymore so we've got something that's not ready we've got a lot of options other than bitcoin right now No, | |
| I get that. I totally agree with you. | |
| But the infrastructure is not there ready to take over. | |
| That's what he's saying, right? | |
| Something that I have learned over the internet. | |
| Guys, you have to step back. | |
| It's in its infancy, right? | |
| We're basically looking at 1995 internet where you're using dial-up. | |
| Right, that's the whole point. We're saying, hey, we're not ready to do HD streaming. | |
| It's like, you're right. | |
| That's what I said, yeah. | |
| But what makes anybody, and again, I'm certainly happy to hear these arguments, but there's nothing that anybody, unless you guys have some secret superpower capes I'm not aware of, there's nothing that any of us can do to either speed it up or slow it down. | |
| I mean... No, but the votes, I mean, look, there's lots of people who voted for Trump. | |
| And, you know, even if you don't believe that anything hinky happened with the election machines themselves, which, you know, may turn up at some point or not. | |
| But, I mean, the election was definitely rigged because you had massive tech companies suppressing the Hunter Biden story. | |
| and all of this kind of stuff and and lying about Russia collusion and lying about the fine people hoax and lying and saying that Trump told people to drink bleach and like I mean so that the whole election was was kind of nonsense anyway and you know they it happened once the idea that it's going to happen again they learned their lesson and there's not going to be anything going forward and as far as voting goes I've said this before I mean The mass immigration that's happening means that there's no functional conservative movement left in the West anymore, | |
| right? Because the immigrants are going to vote left, as they have always done and as they're designed to do. | |
| And as I've always said, if immigrants from Mexico voted for Republicans, the Democrats would build a wall visible from space with, like, tigers and alligators and lasers and stuff like that. | |
| So, you know, I personally, I'm just like, this is my big step back from politics that I've done over the last sort of seven or eight months, which is, I think it's an interesting thing to observe. | |
| I find it interesting to read about. | |
| But the idea that, you know, one vote, you know, we all know the, Brian Kaplan wrote a book, The Myth of the Rational Voter. | |
| So the idea that, you know, one vote or another, it's going to make any particular difference. | |
| I would say take the time you'd spend into researching politics and research crypto or talk to your friends about crypto. | |
| I think that's to me where the energy would be better spent. | |
| Something that I've learned over time as well is, I used to be very focused on politics. | |
| I used to be doing all sorts of stuff. | |
| But now that I've changed my focus, I've been able to realize actual... | |
| That's right. | |
| Actual... I've just been able to realize actual changes for myself and my family as opposed to, okay, I, you know, didn't go to Capitol Hill on January 6th. | |
| I wouldn't have done anything. I would have probably been in a situation by getting myself, you know, who knows, put in a jail or who knows whatever they could have pulled off. | |
| But now, I've been able to focus on investing in crypto, investing in temporarily, at least in good stocks, on a temporary basis. | |
| I've been able to... You said the stock market, man. | |
| That makes her upset. Self-improvement, self-knowledge. | |
| That's one thing I found to be incredibly invaluable is that self-knowledge. | |
| I think Steph has talked about it a whole lot. | |
| Once or twice. And that's something I've been putting into myself. | |
| It's the difference between the illusion of making a difference versus actually making a difference. | |
| Exactly. And, you know, I can mention offhand to my brother-in-law, I could mention to him, because he's doing pretty decent himself, but he has no investment whatsoever in crypto, as far as I can tell. | |
| I could make him pretty darn rich if he were to listen to me. | |
| But that's, you know, heads up to him. | |
| No, but you can choose if you want. | |
| If you care about him, you can choose to buy on his behalf. | |
| Right? And then just hand it to him as a gift, right? | |
| I mean, Max Heiser style. | |
| No, seriously, you can't, if you want, right? | |
| You don't have to rely on somebody else. | |
| You know, if you think that someone's going to need a kidney transplant, you can just go buy one. | |
| Put it in your fridge. | |
| You know what I mean? Like, you can buy on his behalf, and then later he can just give you the Fiat back for it or something like that. | |
| So, there's things that you can do if you care, of course, right, about people. | |
| Before we go, I'd like to ask a question. | |
| So, to the roundtable in general, I How can people get involved in this community? | |
| How would you recommend, because there's a few things you have to learn to even be able to do this. | |
| What app do you use to, how do you get Bitcoin, transact in Bitcoin, and how do you help, how do you identify companies that are even working in this space so that you can give them support? | |
| I'm going to, sorry, just interrupt. | |
| It's just a great question. | |
| And I would, in general, though, just really suggest that people look their stuff up online because I've always been hesitant and people always say, oh, what should I use? | |
| What service? What wallet? | |
| I don't want to recommend anything in particular because... | |
| Who knows what's going on behind the scenes? | |
| Everybody's got to make their own decisions. | |
| And if something does go wrong and I've recommended something, then that's not particularly good. | |
| So I would just say, in general, do your own research. | |
| It's pretty easy to buy crypto. | |
| I mean, you can download apps on your phone. | |
| You can look up who's reputable. | |
| And you can look at the number of downloads. | |
| You can read the reviews. | |
| You can look online for reputation. | |
| Just about every company has a review of some kind. | |
| And it's pretty easy to get into it these days. | |
| I mean, back in the day, you had to meet people in a parking lot with a bag over your head and stuff, right? | |
| And so, it's pretty easy to get into these kinds of things. | |
| And again, you don't just have to look into Bitcoin. | |
| There's tons of other cryptos. | |
| There's Tezos, of course, Ethereum. | |
| There's Doge meme things and stuff like that. | |
| But yeah, it's a pretty low barrier to entry compared to how it used to be. | |
| I'm sorry, Ferry, do you want to say? | |
| Algorand. What's that? | |
| It's a very interesting new cryptocurrency developed by Silvio Micali. | |
| Again, I found out about it from Lex Friedman's podcast. | |
| He's a Turing Award-winning computer scientist from MIT, I believe. | |
| Very intelligent man. | |
| And I like what he had to say, so I bought some Algorand just to hodl it for a few years and see what happens. | |
| Would you describe him as Viral? | |
| No, I would not. | |
| Okay, so you've broadened out, you're in a post-virale situation, okay? | |
| Yes. I'd recommend, it's the easiest thing ever. | |
| Ready? If you're whatever internet browser you're using right now, switch over to Brave. | |
| It builds up the BAT on the side there. | |
| It gives you an Uphold account, which is just a wallet for it. | |
| And then from there, you could swap it into everyone. | |
| If you want to go straight into Bitcoin, go for that. | |
| If you want to go with one of the newest, you know, whatever, Doge or who knows, you know, something up and coming. | |
| Go for it. Over a month, I made enough BAT to cover the gas costs for one transaction. | |
| Wait, are you guys going to get into a discussion about gas prices again on Ethereum? | |
| Uh-oh. Oh, don't uncork the beast. | |
| Do not uncork the beast. | |
| Dude, gas fees made Stefan have to go to anger management. | |
| Let's not do this again. There is no course that will manage that level of anger. | |
| Like, I'll need an entire team and some horse tranquilizers, and even that will only take the edge off it. | |
| So, yeah, Ethereum, get your shit together. | |
| I'm telling you, man. | |
| It's bad. Phillip wanted to jump in. | |
| Yeah, I got what could be useful. | |
| So, in terms of, you know, progressing into a stateless society and, you know, combating the state and things like that, I think it's probably important to remember that it's about 2,000 years from Socrates to the Enlightenment, and we're probably in this group, thanks to Steph, a little bit closer to the Socrates side of it. | |
| So, prepare for the long haul, man. | |
| I mean, the stateless society is inevitable, but it's not inevitable in your lifetime. | |
| So, the best thing you can do is get 2,000 years worth of crypto. | |
| In the case that Steph has always made, you can live this in your personal life. | |
| You don't have to get everyone else ever in the world on it. | |
| And that's life-changing. | |
| If you're trying the impossible battle of changing the world, that's a path to misery, versus you can live it in your own life. | |
| That's why peaceful parenting is the vehicle. | |
| Right, Stefan? You've made that case for many years. | |
| It's certainly going to need to happen before anything else. | |
| Otherwise, we're just going to end up crashing and reproducing, which would be a real shame. | |
| Let's just start and rewind and watch. | |
| Rewind the horror movie and think there's going to be a different ending. | |
| All right. Any other last thoughts, comments, promotions, websites, pet projects, anything you want to mention? | |
| Go for it, Farid. Yes! | |
| Can I just rehash something? | |
| Sorry, Farid had his hand up first. | |
| Go for it, man. I just want to rehash what you said before about immigrants who come in voting for the left, and I just want to back up what you said. | |
| It's worth asking yourself why leftists don't want white South Africans or Arab Christians moving as refugees to the West, even though they are two of the groups on Earth that might have a legitimate claim to refugee status. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Amen. Yeah, we'll all meet up in the Alps when Switzerland legalizes Bitcoin in perpetuity, but anyway. | |
| Okay, anybody else wanted to mention something? | |
| Jared, go ahead. Yes, so I've talked about it in the community and on here before, starting a Tezos staking service on Steph's behalf, and so I'm going to move forward with that. | |
| I've got enough people letting me know they've got some Tezos. | |
| So if you're interested, you can go to jaredwooder.com, and from there, I'm sorry, I don't know the link off the top of my head, but you can find one of my blog posts references how to... | |
| How to get this going, where I'm at with it. | |
| Roughly, it should take about a month for me to get this up and running. | |
| The way this will work is it won't effectively cost you anything in the sense that with Tezos, you don't have to run the staking operation yourself. | |
| You can, from your wallet, stake to these people who compete With each other for you to stake your coins to them. | |
| What happens is they offer to take a fee, so they're going to keep like 10% of the rewards and give you 90% back or whatever. | |
| It's like Coinbase charges like 20 or 25%. | |
| Some people charge as little as 5%. | |
| And so, I'm probably going to go 10%. | |
| And that 10%, instead of me keeping that like I normally would, that'll go to Steph, minus whatever I have to keep to cover my tax implications and stuff like that. | |
| And man, if you're an accountant or you know some way to make this work better to where I can make sure Steph gets more of it, by all means, please reach out because I would love for that to happen. | |
| But yeah, stay tuned. | |
| 30 days. Free Domain. | |
| Staking for Steph is what I'm going with right now. | |
| Thank you. One thing that I have to say as well is the timeless book, it was written in 1928, The Richest Man in Babylon. | |
| Still applicable today. | |
| I'm starting to relive it. | |
| My granddad told me about it 10 years ago and it seems to be working. | |
| That was the second finance book I read. | |
| It's fabulous. Rich Dad, Poor Dad. | |
| Absolutely incredible books. | |
| Alright, grab your mic if you've got a last thing to say. | |
| I've got one thing to say. | |
| Just answering, I can't remember who asked it now actually, but what we can do to make this go forward. | |
| I would say the best thing you can do is get a job where you're earning crypto. | |
| I think the The thing that the state has going for it right now, more than anything almost, is that the state employs people. | |
| At least, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 percent of people, maybe even more, earn money from the state. | |
| Fairly directly. And that's why the state has their loyalty, because that's the hand that feeds them. | |
| And that's why it's so hard to get traction with crypto with some people. | |
| It just kind of goes against that subconsciously. | |
| But once people are earning their incomes in crypto, then they don't need the state. | |
| They don't need the Fed. They don't need those institutions. | |
| They're independent. | |
| So that's what I've done, and that's what I recommend for everybody. | |
| How would you recommend actually doing that? | |
| Well, I don't know. So there are a lot of... | |
| I can't remember the site right now, but there's a site that basically lists a bunch of cryptocurrencies that have the so-called treasuries where they've got a ton of money and they're paying people to do work in that specific cryptos scene. | |
| So there's billions of dollars available. | |
| Anthony Pompliano, I think, has a website of crypto jobs, and I assume a lot of those you could get paid in crypto. | |
| I can't remember the name, if anyone remembers, but he's the guy who, like, you can't get a picture of him not smiling to save your life. | |
| I'm not sure what kind of vibrating cactus he's sitting on, but it's really quite impressive, and he seems like a pretty good guy. | |
| Raise yourself, guys. | |
| It is crypto.jobs. | |
| No, I don't think that's it. | |
| That's not it. That's one of them. | |
| That's a trick question, isn't it? | |
| Yeah, yeah. You're trying to mess with us. | |
| Too obvious. Crypto.jobs. | |
| All right. Anything else? Millions of dollars available. | |
| Oh, no, I'm sorry. There's also PompCryptoJobs.com. | |
| I imagine that's the one that Anthony Pobliano... | |
| PompCryptoJobs.com. All right. | |
| Yeah. All right. | |
| All right. Well, thanks, everyone, so much. | |
| A great pleasure to chat with you guys today. | |
| I'm glad to get the word out. | |
| And if you want me to include any links, just let me know before I publish the show. | |
| And I hope we can do it again at some point soon. | |
| It's kind of tough to find the right time for everyone. | |
| There's lots of different time zones and so on. | |
| But, yeah, a great... | |
| I really, really appreciate you guys lending your expertise to this because, I mean, it's a lot more than I am in certain areas, and that's hugely important. | |
| Thank you so much for the listeners for dropping by, and have yourselves a great... | |
| Great evening, lots of love from up here, and take care. |
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