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May 20, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:08:14

FREEDOMAIN INVESTMENT ROUNDTABLE: BITCOIN'S WEAKNESSES!

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Time	Text
	Hello, hello.
	Good afternoon, everybody. It is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
	Welcome. I'm sorry, it's been a little while since I've been on the clubhouse.
	The newest club is opening up.
	Nina Hagen. Man, what a strange singer, but very powerful German talent.
	So, I always have this question in my mind, and I wanted to chat it over with you guys today.
	The question in my mind goes something like this.
	What is the longest, most circuitous possible route that I can take to inform you or enlighten you about a particular topic?
	Now, of course, oh, my friends, the topic that we are cooking with today is the Bitcoin crash, the crypto crash.
	Okay, it's down 40%.
	It's still up 1,200% over the last little while, but, you know, down, down a little bit at the moment.
	And this is the price you pay for having the institutional investors come in, right?
	The institutional investors, they have all of these programs that buy and sell.
	I know this intimately because my very first professional job was coding for a stock trading company in COBOL 74 on a tandem operating system, going back a little bit of a ways here.
	And the vast majority of trades are done without any human intervention whatsoever.
	And they follow particular patterns that have been well sussed out, well figured out over the course of stock trading since it was first invented, so to speak, in the Netherlands over 400 years ago.
	Now, so, you know, they've had some time to hone their craft and most people are just kind of FOMO-ing in or bouncing in and all of that.
	So, but before we start, if there's anybody who wants to chat and say hi, I am happy to hear, because I've got my own stuff, but, you know, let's make it not a solo cast and have our good friends of philosophy come in.
	Just remember, of course, this show is being recorded for posterity.
	That's in the title, but I just wanted to remind everyone.
	Colby, you are around.
	What's on your mind, my friend? Yeah.
	Hi, Steph. Great to hear your voice live, my friend.
	Well, thank you very much. Nice to meet you.
	What's on your mind? So, Bitcoin's on my mind big time, right?
	Oh, why is that, you think?
	I've actually just, my wife and I, first of all, a huge shout out to FDR. That was actually a huge part of us deciding to start a family.
	I'm sorry, just to clarify, sorry, just to clarify for those who don't know, he's not talking about the wheelchair-bound president in the 1940s.
	He's talking about Free Domain Radio, not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, just for the uninformed, the uninitiated, but sorry, go ahead.
	Exactly. But we have gone through this journey of kind of understanding Bitcoin just in the last month or so.
	We've started to take that orange pill, which has been especially difficult for me because I've been accumulating precious metals, particularly silver.
	So it's been really difficult for me to kind of swallow the orange pill when I've been saving in silver.
	Yes, I'm with you there, brother.
	I mean, gold and silver have been the traditional Austrian economics go-to for surviving inflation or hyperinflation.
	And, you know, Bitcoin is just like new beast, the mammal at the feet of the dinosaurs of the ancient method of protecting.
	You know, if your currency is going to zero, as all government currencies do go to zero, that's an infallible, absolute law of human history, of economic history, all government currencies go to zero.
	So what do you do? Well, you want to transfer those currencies into fixed assets, real estate or gold or silver or something that's this tangible, or guns, if that's your thing.
	And so the idea that you would transfer from what is essentially a digital currency, an unlimited digital currency, which is the US dollar or any fiat currency in the West, That you would transfer from one digital currency to another in order to protect yourself against inflation is counterintuitive, to say the least, if that makes sense.
	Is that sort of where your head's at, or is it something else?
	Absolutely. I remember for some reason, back in, what was it, 2009?
	I think it was 2009 or 2010, Something clicked and I remembered the financial crisis of 2008 and something clicked.
	I read The Beast of Jekyll Island or The Creature of Jekyll Island.
	G. Edward Griffin, a highly recommended book.
	An amazing, amazing book and beautifully written as well.
	It blew my mind. Completely blew my mind that fiat is just simply created and it's essentially debt.
	Every dollar is basically a liability and owed back to the central bank and that blew my mind.
	Oh, and yeah, here you want a mortgage, the bank just creates the money.
	That's a pretty good gig.
	You don't need a big marketing plan or ads for that.
	Yeah, you want a mortgage? Yeah, we'll just create the money and now you owe it to us for the next 25 years.
	Absolutely mad.
	You could not come up with, you know, people always say, oh, but if you have a state, the society, crazy things are going to happen.
	Imagine being in a state, the society and trying to say something like, well, let's give a small group of heavily armed people the power to create money at will.
	Everybody would say, well, it's so normalized because that's what we grew up with.
	But if you denormalize it, like you completely blank slate it, like we don't have this system and someone proposes it, everybody would say, well, that's completely insane.
	But this is, you know, tragically what we've inherited.
	Yeah, sadly. And yet Bitcoin fixes this.
	Yes, because it has all the convenience of digital.
	With scarcity. And we never really think of digital as scarcity.
	I mean, if digital was scarcity, there'd be no such thing as spam, right?
	If you had to pay, like they used to say, oh, you've got to pay a penny to deliver your email or whatever, that's going to get rid of spam.
	So digital is incredibly efficient.
	You know, you can copy a song from one end of the planet to another, but it's infinite, right?
	So, at least for all intents and purposes.
	So the combination of the convenience of digital with the limitation Are physical.
	And Bitcoin, of course, is even more limited than gold because there only will ever be 21 million Bitcoins, but gold can be mined, I mean, effectively ad infinitum.
	And even if we run out of it here on Earth, there'll probably be some asteroids with gold somewhere floating out there.
	So, yeah, it's a weird thing to get your head around that it's digital and incredibly scarce.
	You know, Steph, and one thing that's been really kind of pushing me over the edge to the orange side of things is I've been trying to move some money from, in particular,
	from the physical precious metal, silver, namely, And just the bureaucracy and the red tape, just trying to move your own money in and out of the banking system is extremely difficult.
	And now I'm looking, I'm like, all right, I want to set up a full node and I want to really learn about this technology.
	Yes, and I think that's a wise thing to do.
	And, you know, for those of you who've ever tried sending money overseas...
	Oh my God. You know, your Swift codes, your ICANN codes, the forms, the paperwork, the expense, the standing in line, it's completely bad.
	And you know, places like PayPal and other sort of payment processors have a lot to do with the fact that banking just sucks as a whole.
	Like banking is just terrible.
	Banking is a government monopoly.
	And all government monopolies suck.
	And by that I mean it's a fascist-style government monopoly in that communism, you know, you own the means of production directly, but in fascism, the government grants monopolies to particular corporations for control over the means of production, and banks could be considered that in many ways.
	And so, yeah, the banking system gave rise to places like PayPal because it was just virtually impossible to reliably send money from one place to another or even if you could do it, it would just take so long and require so much information and back and forth and phone calls and, you know, you go into some bank and there's some… You know, a 48-year-old woman who's never seen this form before, you know, just chewing on her pencil.
	She tries to puzzle it out because the manager is on break and it's just like, oh, there's got to be a better way.
	There's got to be a better way.
	And so the banking system gave rise to places like PayPal and then PayPal gives rise to places like Bitcoin because, as I well know, you can be deplatformed from the payment processes, but it's a little trickier with the blockchain.
	Right. And...
	Like I, for example, sold, I sold, and it was really hard for us to sell our car, and we just sold the car to buy this dip, actually.
	And then trying to ask the bank for our own money was a job in and of itself.
	You want your own money, you plebeian?
	You philistine, you surf?
	Well, I'm going to need you to beg a little more.
	Oh yeah, no, it's absolutely brutal.
	Please, can I just have a little more?
	It'll be all of a twister.
	Please, sir, can I have some more?
	Get back in line.
	So, yeah, it's like trying to steal figgy pudding from the Queen's Lotter.
	It really is quite mad.
	So, yeah, and I mean, good for you.
	Good for you. There was somebody who posted something on...
	Some social media platform.
	And it was like, oh yeah, I've heard about this new altcoin.
	It's got crazy, crazy amounts of it.
	And 40% of it's been printed in the last couple of months.
	And it's held by a tiny, tiny number of...
	Oh wait, no, that's the US dollar.
	So yeah, it is pretty funny that way.
	Is there anything else you wanted to mention?
	Because I've got a couple of other people who wanted to chat.
	Well, no. Just thanks for having me up, Seth.
	Appreciate it. The one last thing I was going to ask is book recommendations.
	I just got done with the Bitcoin standard, which was really great for a pleb and a noob to the realm such as myself.
	That was great. I appreciate that.
	I'll have to sort of mull over book recommendations, especially in the Bitcoin space, because information changes so quickly, so I'll mull that over, but I'll post that, and I appreciate the question coming up.
	Thank you. Thank you so much.
	Now, let me just...
	Oh, there's got to be a way to do it.
	Yes! Michael!
	You are on, my friend.
	What's on your mind? Hey, what's up, man?
	It's been a while.
	I think I remember talking to you a while ago, but yeah, it's nice to see you again, man.
	I had some questions about Bitcoin, actually, if you were wondering, if you were willing to answer them.
	I'm willing and happy to.
	Yeah, because I've been staring at it for a while and never really pulled the trigger because I kind of wanted to sort of wait and see and then it kind of crashed and then I was doing some research on it too and I guess a lot of these like servers and stuff that mine it can take up like crazy amounts of energy and can be kind of bad for the environment so I was just wondering What,
	you know, like just kind of general thoughts on it and just sort of opinions and I guess recommendations because I, I don't know, like I kind of, it's like my mind changes almost by the day on it, you know what I mean?
	Well, it's wise to be vacillating because it's such new information for a lot of people and so on.
	So, I mean, I can talk about the environmental impact first and foremost.
	I mean, do you think it's a fair thing to say that That which limits consumption is better for the environment as a whole?
	I mean, I'm not so much for limiting consumption.
	I'm more for, like, sustainable consumption, right?
	But the two are...
	Yeah, but the two do go hand in hand, right?
	Because if consumption accelerates, it's harder to create anything that's sustainable.
	I mean, I know we have to consume.
	I'm not saying everybody lives on fish and berries or anything like that, but if there is something that promotes saving and disincentivizes present consumption, that's generally better for the environment, wouldn't you say?
	Yeah, I mean, as long as you're doing it in the right way.
	I mean, I've just been reading stuff about like, because they'll just have these like data mining servers basically like in China or Pakistan or wherever.
	And then it's like, you know, they're just on 24/7 and they're just mining whatever coin, right?
	Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, blah, blah, blah.
	And it's just like massive tons of energy that's being consumed.
	And they're coming from these dirty coal plants, basically, that the Chinese use.
	Well, hang on.
	Because I don't really want to do anything that benefits the Chinese government.
	You know what I mean? Right.
	Listen, I'm completely with you as far as all of that goes.
	So... A lot of the Bitcoin stuff is mined either on renewable energy or on energy that otherwise would have been wasted.
	So I don't know if you know this, like more than half of the energy that gets produced, and I think it's actually closer to 70% of the energy that gets produced in the world, is completely wasted.
	I don't just mean people leave the lights on.
	There's no really good way to store electricity, right?
	Which is why solar and wind is so challenging.
	And so most energy that gets created is wasted.
	Now, if it is turned into Bitcoins, if otherwise it would have been wasted, it's better to turn it into Bitcoins.
	And the reason for that It's that fiat currency promotes massive amounts of spending now and just slaughters you for saving it.
	Do you know why that is? No, enlighten me please.
	I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound like, do you know?
	I just don't want to over explain it if you already know.
	So inflation, I mean, the official inflation in the U.S. is running, what, 4.2% at the moment?
	And that's a way low estimate because everything that's high inflation, they just take you out of the index, right?
	So let's say that inflation is running somewhere, I would say, between 5% and 10% in the U.S., right?
	Now, that's brutal, right?
	Because it doesn't take long for the value of your money to go down by half.
	And so if you save, then you are losing money.
	And basically the money is evaporating.
	In your hand.
	The money is just fading away in your hand.
	I don't know if you heard these stories of the people like, I found $20,000 that was hidden under a couch in 1962.
	I bought this old couch and I found $20,000, right?
	And it's like, well, what's that worth?
	Like $3,000 now?
	I mean, it evaporates.
	It's the stealth tax, the hidden tax.
	It particularly hits the poor and people on fixed incomes in absolutely brutal, brutal ways.
	So if you have a fiat currency system, the tendency is always to inflate.
	Because if you have a fiat currency system, and let's say you just create $5 billion, right?
	You just type it into the Fed's bank account and so on, right?
	Then the Fed lends it out to the people who are running the banks and they lend it out to top financiers.
	They lend it out to the wolves of Wall Street and so on.
	And when they spend that $5 billion, they spend it at full value because it's new.
	It hasn't diluted the value purchasing power because it's the first time it's being spent.
	Now, as that money then circulates through the economy, The people who get it last, so to speak, I mean, they really take it in the shorts.
	I mean, they might as well have dropped the soap in a gay prison shower, right?
	So they really take it in the shorts.
	And so the incentive to just create money, hand it to your friends, they get to spend it at full value and everyone else gets shafted by the loss of purchasing power later on.
	I mean, we know power corrupts and you just can't get away from that.
	You can't really stop it.
	And so you have a system.
	And of course, governments want to create money.
	Because it gives people the illusion that the government is adding value.
	The government is adding value.
	You know, if we're all going out for dinner and there's five of us, And the bill is $100, $20 a head, then if I'm a counterfeiter, it looks like I'm adding value by putting my $20 in.
	But I'm not, really.
	I'm just diluting the purchasing power of your dollars by putting bad money into the circulation, right?
	So I'm stealing.
	I'm stealing from the restaurant. I'm stealing from you.
	And who knows? I might end up George Floyd-style resisting arrest and all that stuff, right?
	So, once you have a central bank currency, a government-run currency, the incentives to just print money like crazy, which is kind of what's going on, right?
	I mean, the only way the lockdowns are sustained is because they literally created trillions of dollars out of nothing and then just handed it out to people.
	And, you know, we're starting to see the effects of inflation on that now.
	Fiat currency, government-run currency, everybody wants to spend now.
	If you've ever seen the difference, right?
	If you put your money in the bank, it just slowly evaporates or even not that slowly these days evaporates over time.
	If you look at something like, have you ever done this thing where I seem to have a particular genius for buying things right before the next product upgrade, like particularly tablets and phones and stuff like that?
	When I went out to do my documentary in Hong Kong, I think it was September of 2019.
	I wanted a phone that would give me 60 frames a second on the selfie, right?
	Because I wanted, you know, so I had to get the new.
	And then, you know, what was it? A month later, the new iPhone came out.
	And so normally what people do is you don't want to buy tech because you're going to get better tech next year.
	So people postpone tech purchases a lot because they could wait for better, particularly if they're close to a product upgrade.
	And so tech is sort of an example of what it's like when your money gains value.
	And we can't really even figure it out with regards to everything else, right?
	Because tech goes down in price.
	You know, everything else goes up in price, right?
	Your groceries are going up in price.
	Houses are going up in price.
	Gas is going up in price.
	And so if you look at tech, tech is like a microcosm of what Bitcoin looks like, where you're rewarded for waiting.
	I mean, if I had waited a month, I could have got a better phone for the same price, right?
	And so you're rewarded for waiting in the tech industry, and just about everywhere else, you're punished for waiting, for not spending.
	And so if you have a monetary system that rewards people who save, And in a sense, punishes people who spend.
	Well, we'll still spend because we got to eat, we got to live, we need shelter, we need, you know, all of that, right?
	So we'll still spend, but you are rewarded for not spending, right?
	It's the hodling thing, right?
	Holding on for dear life with Bitcoin.
	In general, you are rewarded for doing that in 200%.
	every single year for like the last 10 years.
	It was completely crazy.
	This isn't even just a once-in-a-lifetime investment thing.
	It's like a once-in-a-human-existence investment thing.
	So if we have a currency where your money accumulates value if you don't spend it, that's going to be fantastic for the environment because right now, look at the national debt, I don't even know what it's at, like the 25 trillion in the U.S. or something like that.
	It's way over 200% of Japanese GDP. I think 23, something like that.
	Is it 23? Yeah, yeah. And Canada's just gone completely mental, completely asymptotic on debt lately.
	So what is that debt?
	Well, the debt is consumption in the now at the expense of the future, right?
	Every time you go into debt, right?
	Let's say you buy a pair of sneakers for $100 on Visa, you're consuming the $100 now, but you've got to pay it later.
	And if you don't pay it right away, you've got to pay more of it over time with interest, right?
	So if you have debt, every single dollar of government debt is a predation.
	On nature-scarce resources, because something is being bought, something is being used, something is being spent in the here and now, and the debt means it's not going to get spent in the future.
	But you don't want to forward bulge all of your consumption of nature-scarce resources.
	That's pretty terrible. And of course, everybody knows that the debt can't ever be paid off.
	It's going to be either defaulted on or monetized out.
	They just print money and all of that.
	You can't do that with Bitcoin.
	With Bitcoin, you can't have offensive wars.
	I did a speech on this like six or seven years ago, just going through, you know, if World War I had been limited to gold reserves in the countries that had it, in other words, the contemporaneous Bitcoin manifestation of limited currency known as gold, if they had to fund World War I with gold and had not switched to fiat currency, the war would have been over in four to six months.
	Because that's all they had the money for.
	And probably 9 million lives would have been saved.
	And the downward trajectory of the Western civilization as a whole would have been arrested and all of that.
	So you can't have offensive wars because wars are funded by printing money.
	Everybody is like, I'm for the Iraq war.
	It's like, well, because you're not getting a bill, right?
	Because it's just going to be baked into debt and monetization and inflation and all that.
	that.
	Nobody got a big bill for supporting the Iraq war or the Afghanistan war.
	Yeah.
	Plus the defense companies make money doing it.
	It's like the perfect war.
	It's low level.
	It's out of people's sights, you know, so they can just, you know, build missile after missile and just fund it.
	You know what I mean?
	Oh yeah.
	It just becomes an unholy industry, like a conveyor belt of death.
	Right.
	So if you look at Bitcoin, you can totally fund a defensive war.
	If somebody's going to come and invade your stuff, sure, you might as well spend money on your defense to ward them off, because otherwise you can lose everything.
	But you can't fund defensive wars in Bitcoin.
	If we have a society run through Bitcoin, we have the most...
	Now, the Bitcoin as well, remember, they're mining now because they're still...
	In the future, they would be mining to process transactions rather than create bitcoins, which would be much lower.
	And, of course, you also do have to compare apples to apples, right?
	So the apples to apples is, okay, what does the existing...
	Fiat currency system cost in terms of energy, right?
	You've got banks and all their servers.
	You've got Visa and all their servers.
	You've got your payment processors.
	You've got PayPal.
	You've got all of these places.
	They all run on these big, giant, often-duplicated servers.
	MasterCard and various – all the credit card companies and all the credit cards that even individual stores offer and all of that.
	All of that stuff is just monstrous, and it is far larger.
	The financial system is many, many, many, many times what Bitcoin is at, and even gold mining is many, many, many times.
	So if you haven't sat there and thought, well, you know, I'm really not comfortable using fiat currency other than to pay taxes or your legal obligations, I'm not really comfortable with fiat currency because, my God, it's so energy consuming.
	Well, if you've not really thought that, then you understand that Just the powers that be want you to be afraid of the environmental impact of Bitcoin.
	Yeah, I mean, I would say...
	Yeah, go ahead. Oh, sorry.
	Yeah, I didn't mean to interrupt you, cut out there for a second.
	I thought you were done. But, yeah, and I'll say for me, like, the energy consumption issue is a little bit secondary, but it's just more like doing some research and then it's like, you know, there's...
	I don't know why, but apparently America just decided that we're just going to move our whole manufacturing base over to China for some reason because everything's made there now.
	And so now it's like I just read all this scary shit about like, you know, these Ouija Muslims are like getting thrown into concentration camps and like enslaved.
	And then they're forced to like mine Bitcoin or like build a shoe for Nike or like whatever.
	And so like, yeah, I'm trying hard to sort of like divest my money from companies that are kind of involved in that supply chain.
	You know what I mean? Because I just don't want to support that regime.
	I know it's hard because basically everybody goes there.
	Okay, yeah, listen, there's a lot of what you said and I would certainly make the case that you certainly can't have communism on Bitcoin.
	And so you simply can't because communism is government control of the means of production and the most fundamental and foundational means of production is currency, right?
	That's the one thing that's in common to every single transaction.
	So this is why we're losing freedoms in the West is because the monetary system is communist.
	The monetary system is communist and the educational system is largely communist, right?
	And so, because of those two things, it's just constantly washing away freedoms.
	You know, it's like the tides coming in.
	You've got a beautiful sandcastle of liberty that you built from history, but the inexorable motion of the waves and gravity is going to wash it away.
	So, when you have a communist currency system and you have a communist educational system for the young, which is basically what we have, you're just going to run out of freedoms.
	Now, You can't have centralized coercive control over Bitcoin.
	And so the means of production, the most fundamental means of production, which is currency, is being privatized.
	I mean, that's absolutely shocking.
	And it's not being privatized like the bullshit privatization called corporatism.
	You know, like you've got these magical, fictional, bullshit legal entities called corporations that allow people to pillage and cheat and do unholy things.
	And the corporation takes all the legal hits and then nobody ever comes for their house because you've got the corporate shield and so on.
	I'm talking like this is a genuine...
	It's a privatization of the currency that's never, ever occurred before in history.
	Because in the past, you say, well, gold.
	But yeah, but you can open a node if you want.
	You can mine for Bitcoin.
	You couldn't start a gold mine.
	I mean, I did gold panning and prospecting, as I've mentioned many times on this show, after high school.
	And it was like it was all just there to teach me just how absolutely impossible it was for you to just go up and start a gold mine.
	But you can start it.
	Like, it's a true...
	This unprecedented privatization of the most essential aspect of the economy called currency that has ever occurred.
	And this will never, ever happen again.
	This is why I sort of say it's a once-in-human, because after this is done, it's done, right?
	Like, it's already passed.
	And there'll be other cryptos, complementary cryptos, and cryptos that are better to program on and do smart contracts and stuff like that.
	But we are talking about the privatization Of something that has never been private in the past.
	In the past, you always had to get the emperor's stamp on your gold coins or the king's stamp on your gold coins.
	I mean, geez, in Canada, we've still got the queen's profile on the currency, which is increasingly worthless, of course.
	I mean, they got rid of the pennies, and you can't buy anything with just about any other piece of coinage, even though when I was a kid, you could buy a candy bar for 10 cents.
	That's my economy when I was a kid in Canada in the late 70s.
	So if you think that somehow embracing Bitcoin is going to be pro the CCP, I would argue it's actually completely the opposite.
	We want to push Bitcoin as much as humanly possible, because if you have a communist currency, then you have a communist society over time.
	There's just too much power in the hands of the government.
	They have too much power to reward their friends and punish their enemies.
	So everybody starts swimming in line like salmon on a swift current.
	But if you have a genuinely decentralized and privatized currency, it is the greatest blow to the base of the black tree of power that has ever occurred in human history.
	And so, to me, I get the environmental concerns, and that's worth mulling over and so on.
	And Nick Carter, NIC Carter, is very good on this kind of stuff.
	Just look up his articles and essays.
	Apparently, this is what he does with most of his waking hours.
	It's just pushback against the FUD associated with the energy usage.
	But it's a more foundational thing that we have Free speech in money.
	Genuine, a First Amendment for your money.
	And that's never before occurred in human history.
	And there's no way that's going to do anything other than undermine totalitarian powers like CCP. Yeah,
	I mean, if that's not as much of a risk as you're saying, I mean, that's definitely a relief, you know?
	Yeah, the only way that the existing financial institutions can fundamentally profit from Bitcoin at the moment, I mean, other than sort of buying and holding, is they enter in signaling, this is what happens, right?
	So they enter in and they signal that they're interested, right?
	Oh, we're getting Bitcoin, we're putting it on our balance sheets, we're opening up to our customers, we're pro-Bitcoin and all that, right?
	And that drives the price up.
	They don't want to buy it at a high price.
	That's not their gig. That's not their thing.
	So what they do is they countersign, right?
	They countersign. And you saw this with Elon Musk, right?
	Elon Musk is like, yay, Doge, all the way.
	And today he just tweeted, no, no, Tesla's got diamond hands.
	And he was like, oh, Bitcoin's too much energy consumption.
	We're not accepting it for Tesla anymore.
	And he's like, no, no, diamond hands today, right?
	So they will inflate the FUD bubble, I guess the flood deflationary bubble, so to speak, and they will say, well, you know, we've got concerns and the price is too high.
	We signal that it's going to be down 20% over the next six months, and then all of the paper hands, they sell it, and then they just buy it back at a much lower rate.
	And then they'll drive it up to make their quarterly profits, and then the next time they want to buy some more, they'll just use their buddies in the mainstream media, and they'll go on the business shows, and they'll just drive the price down.
	So there's that process that's going on, and that's just sad nature of having semi-fascistic corporations bucking about with your golden currency.
	So that's going to happen for sure, but everybody's looking for an exit for the U.S. dollar who's got half a brain.
	The U.S. dollar is right at the end of the average 250-year lifecycle of any government-controlled currency.
	I know it wasn't government-controlled for most of its history.
	America as a whole is at the end of market dominance and 100 to 150 years is lifecycle for government-controlled currencies.
	I think we're winding down on that.
	So everyone's looking for a way out, but the way they want to get into Bitcoin is by driving down the price, grabbing it, and then floating it back up, driving down the price again, grabbing it and floating it back up.
	And so, you know, you just have to be aware of that.
	That's the inevitable concept.
	Like, you can't get the price going high without mass adoption, and you can't get mass adoption without big institutions wanting to drive the price down to buy.
	I mean, so the fact that there's this instability, quote, instability, I mean, there's simply no – there's no straight line up.
	There's absolutely no straight line up because these guys are too big, too experienced, and too powerful.
	And there are people in there who don't sort of understand this whole process.
	And so, yeah, they'll FUD it and it'll crash.
	Oh, it's going to zero. I got to sell.
	It's okay. And then they'll snap it up and it'll go back up.
	And so, yeah, but nobody can control it.
	it all they can do is is manipulate the price but they can't control the base thing itself how much should we be worried about that kind of manipulation of like an elon musk type coming in and being like you know buying it low pumping it up then you know crashing it forcing people to kind of panic sell and then but i mean like you know like obviously like if you knew like you know better so you're probably not going to get into that cycle
	but like you know is that like a big kind of threat that you see for bitcoin or do you Oh God, no. If you remember going through puberty, You know, you go through puberty and...
	No, seriously, it's an odd thing to say, right?
	So when you were going through puberty, did you notice like you just knocked things over and you couldn't climb stairs too well?
	Why? Because your body was growing in strange and unusual and new ways, right?
	And so when you go through puberty, you're kind of clumsy.
	And growth has this kind of clumsiness in it.
	And the only alternative to this kind of pump and dump stuff that occurs in the FUD cycle is people aren't interested in Bitcoin at all.
	Like there's no third option called a steady growth.
	Right? It's like saying, well, I want to go through puberty.
	I want to go through puberty, but I don't want to go through any awkward phase.
	It's like, no, no, sorry.
	That's just the way that it is.
	So, no, I don't find this to be a negative at all.
	I mean, given the existing structure, this is the very best conceivable thing.
	And as far as being worried about it, again, I don't want to give anyone investment advice.
	Let's just tell you about the way that I sort of look at it.
	So, you know, don't make any decisions based upon what I'm saying.
	But I will say this.
	Just hold. I hate to say, you know, it's not stressful if you're holding.
	It's not stressful if you're holding.
	You know, yeah, Bitcoin gone down, what, 30% in seven days?
	Who cares? It's all bits and burps on a computer, right?
	So it's not like somebody's chopping down your forest or somebody's moved into your house.
	It's just a bunch of numbers.
	Now, they're objective numbers and they're great numbers.
	They're limited numbers. All that stuff's very good.
	But you don't lose if you don't sell.
	It's all just a bunch of nonsense.
	So, you know, in general, I don't think it's a good idea, or at least I wouldn't.
	You know, if it's the money you need to eat, don't put it in.
	I'm not a big one for margins and leverages and shorting and all this kind of funky stuff.
	I'm just, you know, get some.
	Get some and hang on. To me, that's the way to sort of ride the stuff out because, you know, honestly, I'm telling you, like I woke up this morning and I checked Bitcoin because, you know, it's kind of a hobby, right?
	And, oh my gosh, what was it?
	It was down below 40 Canadian.
	So, you know, and it was 80 Canadian, like, I don't know, two months ago or whatever, right?
	So, yeah, you know, half your net value in Bitcoin is gone.
	It's like, but it's not gone. It's not gone at all.
	It's not gone at all.
	It's only gone if you imagine that you sold at 80 and then you sold at 40, then you can say, okay, well, then half your value is gone.
	But half your value isn't gone.
	Half your value isn't gone.
	It's sort of like this. Do you ever pitch in baseball?
	Yeah, I played Little League as a kid.
	Yeah, okay, but you pitch, right?
	So when you pitch, the ball is supposed to go...
	Towards the batter, right?
	Because you've got to hurl it at the batter, right?
	When you're pitching though, the ball goes away from the batter first because you've got to cock your arm back to throw it.
	So if you just look at the arm cocking back and say, oh my God, the ball's going the wrong way!
	It's like, no, no, that's necessary for you to fire it at the batter.
	And so, oh my God, the Bitcoin is going down, but that's necessary for people to buy the dip because they're going to wait to buy the dip.
	And that's why it doesn't go down that much and then it bounces up, it goes down a little more.
	And, you know, we've had corrections, whether there's been two corrections of 40% in a single year, and I don't think there's going to be as much of that, but, you know, these guys know what they're doing, they know how to buy the dip, and the only way...
	The only way to break them with this habit is to not sell.
	I mean, the only way to break people of this habit.
	Because the dip is not the result.
	The dip is not the result of market manipulation from the big players.
	The dip is the result of people panicking and selling.
	Because if people didn't sell, there'd be no dip, right?
	If people didn't sell, there'd be no dip.
	So if you fall into this game, it's not the fault, you know, hate the game, not the player, right?
	It's not the fault of the institutions that they put out fear, uncertainty, and doubt because they want to buy the dip.
	That's not their fault. It's a perfectly rational and legal strategy to buy something cheaper.
	Yeah, no, I see what you're saying.
	Yeah, just don't sell. Yeah, just don't sell.
	Yeah, just, of course, of course, like, of course, of course Elon Musk hadn't sold his bitcoins.
	Like, of course, I said this months ago.
	Sorry, you were going to say? No, I was just saying, you give me a lot to think about, so thanks.
	I mean, I feel better about it now, because it's just, I don't know, it's like, one minute, it's like, oh my god, everyone needs to, like, invest It's like if you have a bipolar person in your life, at some point, you've just got to stop listening to them, you know?
	Yeah, flip-flop. Yeah.
	Oh, I'm so depressed I can't get out of bed.
	The world's going to – I've got the best idea.
	I'm going to make a billion dollars by the weekend.
	At some point, you've just – You've got a hypochondriac in your life.
	At some point, you just got to stop listening to them.
	And with this FUD stuff, I mean, oh, I mean, I get, you know, because this is the same principle with the media.
	If I can convince you that the world's going to be in flames in 10 years, then you'll stick around for the ad for hair shampoo.
	I mean, it's just, just stop paying them.
	Stop paying them by selling because you're just rewarding them for making you afraid.
	You know, it's like one thing if you want to go and see a haunted house at Niagara Falls and you pay five bucks to some guy to feel you up, to scare you or whatever.
	That's one thing. But you're paying people to terrify you.
	You're paying people to disrespect and insult the most glorious...
	Wealth storage mechanisms have been invented.
	And so if you sell because you panic, you're absolutely confirming and you're ensuring that the FUD is going to continue.
	Because you are absolutely rewarding people for scaring you.
	And I just don't do that.
	Whatever you pay, you get more of.
	Whatever you tax, you get less of.
	So you want to tax the FUD. When the FUD hits, maybe buy, or at least hold, because that's going to punish the FUD. But if you sell, you're just rewarding the FUD, and you're just guaranteeing you're going to get more of it.
	To me, again, that's if you've got to eat and all that, but I don't hugely recommend putting money into Bitcoin that you need to eat, because you can't eat the coins, right?
	Yeah, no, I get you.
	All right, I'm sorry for taking up so much stage time.
	I'll let somebody else come on up.
	No, I think it was a great sort of question to ask.
	And just remember, I mean, again, I'm not doing any investment device-y stuff.
	I'm just telling you my particular thoughts about it.
	But, Ryan, you wanted to jump in.
	It's really great to chat with you guys this afternoon.
	It's very nice. Hey there, Steph.
	Hello. Am I on?
	You certainly are. Okay, great.
	Well, yeah, I've enjoyed the conversation so far.
	I'm always the one that throws a little cold water on the conversation.
	But let me know if it gets too cold.
	Wait, I'll tell you when my nipples are up, so go ahead.
	Oh, that's good, because last time you asked me to take off my shirt and I wasn't too comfortable with that, so maybe I'll look for your shirt coming off.
	Are you saying that you're more comfortable with it now?
	Anyway, go ahead. Yeah.
	So I'm down with the Bitcoin thing when I'm comparing that with the fiat thing.
	And every time I have a conversation about crypto or Bitcoin, it's a completely different conversation if I'm talking to somebody who's a quote-unquote no-coiner.
	Then I'm all about, you know, Bitcoin.
	I always introduce people with Bitcoin.
	But then if I'm talking to somebody who has some experience with crypto or Bitcoin alone, I'll have a different conversation about Bitcoin that's a lot more pessimistic.
	And if I'm talking to somebody that's really seasoned, then I'll be even pessimistic about altcoins, the coins that I particularly like better than Bitcoin.
	Sorry, just to ask, what coins are those?
	So yeah, I've actually been part of the roundtable discussions on a few occasions, and I haven't actually mentioned the one that I'm most interested in, but I will here.
	So that coin would be Dash.
	And the reason that I'm, well, there are a lot of reasons for that, but it's a lot of the same reasons that I'm also interested in Bitcoin Cash.
	Basically that it kept the original vision of Bitcoin as being money, you know, medium of exchange, and I understand that there are different definitions of money, but I think if you asked some of the early Bitcoin adopters, most of them would tell you that it was always intended to be more of a medium of exchange.
	We're just coming up on Bitcoin Pizza Day, and I saw Pomp's announcement that, you know, he's creating a Bitcoin Pizza Business or something around that and not even going to be accepting Bitcoin, which is just a big slap in the face to the whole industry.
	So yeah, I like the low fees.
	I like the medium of exchange and there's a lot more I could say about it, but I'll keep it at that for now.
	Right, so you wanted to hit us with some ice water.
	Go for it. One of the things is, if we look at this whole industry as like, okay, are we really going to be unseeding national currencies like U.S. dollars and, you know, euros?
	Is that the goal?
	Do we really think that that's going to happen?
	And if the answer to that is yes, then...
	It's kind of a little bit delusional right now because the technology is not even close to being there.
	Specifically with Bitcoin's roadmap and scaling solutions, we don't need to go into the details there.
	But my big concern is that money is supposed to facilitate exchange.
	If you look at it from a macroeconomic standpoint, or even a microeconomic standpoint, the whole purpose of money is to let certain people specialize in certain industries.
	And exchange their labor for money instead of having to barter.
	That's the whole purpose behind money.
	So you convert your labor into money, and then you convert your money into the products of other people's labor.
	So if you look at it from the grand scheme of things, it's labor in, into money, and then money into goods and services.
	Labor to goods and services through the medium of money.
	So if your cryptocurrency doesn't do that, then you've got a problem.
	So, how many people are earning Bitcoin through labor?
	Not a lot. Most people are just buying it, right?
	And how many people are buying things with Bitcoin?
	Also not a lot, and getting lesser and lower every day.
	So that's not on a good trajectory either.
	So the cryptocurrency I think that has the most promise is a cryptocurrency that has a vibrant labor market, meaning people are earning that cryptocurrency directly from their labor.
	And then it also has a vibrant merchant ecosystem where people are taking that cryptocurrency that they earned through their labor and they're converting that into goods and services and products that other people have done the same with.
	So that's kind of why I'm mostly interested in Dash, but there are other coins that also have emerging labor markets, which in the cryptocurrency scene is called a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization.
	Basically where you take some portion of your coins and you're creating a market for You know, general goods and services, or labor, really.
	So, like, most of that is programmers right now, like funding programmers to build things, and marketers to market the cryptocurrency in different ways.
	But it can expand into pretty much any industry that's out there right now.
	So, you know, you might envision a future where there's a business, and their business runs completely on a cryptocurrency, but They accept cryptocurrency for, let's just say it's a bakery or something.
	The bakery accepts cryptocurrency for their donuts.
	And they pay their, with that money that they've accepted, they pay their employees' salary in that cryptocurrency.
	That to me is like a closed loop economy that's sustainable.
	And that also requires a lot of like transactions.
	So there's got to be some kind of scaling involved.
	And again, with the scaling, I understand that there are second layer technologies, but they're not ready right now.
	So neither in Bitcoin nor in other cryptocurrencies for the most part.
	You mean like the Lightning Network and stuff?
	Yeah, like Lightning Network.
	And I'd be really pleased if Lightning Network eventually is successful, where success would be non-custodial.
	It's easy to use, and it's private and secure.
	So if your second layer of technology can conserve that purpose, like it's easy, it's private, it's secure, and it's non-custodial, then great.
	Like, that's awesome, but there are big challenges for that.
	There are a lot of cryptocurrencies that are trying to do that on their first layer, like Bitcoin Cash would be one of those, like just increase the blocks.
	And I also understand there are problems with that.
	It is a good argument that why do I have to store somebody's coffee purchase all the way across the world for all time and eternity on every computer in the network.
	That is kind of weird.
	But it is at least a viable solution to keep the fees low.
	So there are trade-offs, obviously.
	So any cryptocurrency that can do the scaling and maintain those same characteristics that I just mentioned, like it's easy to use, it's secure, it's non-custodial, it's safe, it's secure.
	So you can do that on layer one or a combination of layer one and layer two or multiple layers even.
	But I think what's not negotiable is having such high fees in the long run.
	If whatever system you're using requires fees that are more than a credit card system, people are just not going to use it.
	So anyway, that's probably enough to say for now again.
	No, good stuff. I really appreciate that pushback.
	It's fantastic. I sort of roughly try and take them in order and, you know, we'll keep the discussion going.
	It's not like this is any kind of final say on my part.
	So, with regards to who wants to get paid in Bitcoin or how many people are getting paid in Bitcoin and buying things with Bitcoin, well, very few.
	But there's a pretty simple reason for that.
	It's that Bitcoin keeps going up in value.
	So, if you are not like some star...
	I'm a sports ball player who can make demands through his agent and is in, you know, big demand.
	Then people, if you've got Bitcoin, you don't want to pay people in Bitcoin because whatever, if let's say Bitcoin is going up 200% a year.
	Then if you pay someone $1,000 now, you might as well have just paid them $2,000 like next year, right?
	So people want to hold on to their money and they'll generally will pay through fiat because fiat is going down in value and they won't pay in Bitcoin because Bitcoin is going up in value.
	So they want to hold on to that, right?
	So that's an incentive that just because Bitcoin is growing relative to fiat, that means that...
	And so people, do they want to buy things in fiat?
	Do they want to, whether it's paying someone, buying their labor, or buying a coffee or a widget?
	People don't want to, because there's no better strategy in many ways.
	I mean, statistically, there's no better strategy than just holding on, right?
	So right now...
	Right, but you can't hold on forever, right?
	You have to convert your money into something that's useful at some point, right?
	Right. But there is a mechanism for doing that right now, which is you could have your Bitcoin as your long-term storage, right?
	Like your freezer, right?
	You got your fridge, you got your stove, you got your fridge, you got your freezer, right?
	So to cook a meal, you will often take something out of the freezer, put it into the fridge, and then put it on the stove, and then you put it back in the fridge.
	You can heat it up later or whatever, right?
	So Bitcoin is like the freezer, right?
	So yeah, you don't eat things directly from the freezer.
	It's just used for long-term storage.
	You also don't put anything in the freezer that you'd never intend to eat, right?
	Well, of course people are going to use Bitcoin at some point.
	I mean, otherwise you've just got numbers on a screen.
	But the question is when, right?
	A lot of people don't get that point.
	Well, no, but I mean, I think that's too 101 for us.
	We're a pretty smart group and all of that.
	So, of course, people have to use it at some point.
	But right now, we do have a functioning...
	Not ideal, obviously, but a functioning parallel system to Bitcoin, which is, you know, fiat currency, payment processes, PayPal, Visa, you name it, right?
	So we have that. And so people are earning and spending money in that system and then storing value for the long term in Bitcoin.
	And they will do that until such time as Bitcoin ceases to gain value as much as it has been gaining value.
	And then there will be a transition to that now.
	So I just want to sort of point out the fact that people are storing value in Bitcoin is simply because of the massive value accumulation that's occurring in Bitcoin.
	And you understand it's a perfectly rational strategy, which is why people are moving their cryptos off exchanges, putting them into cold storage and so on, because, you know, the seven years Game of Thrones winter is coming and people are preparing for that.
	So I don't think it needs to become currency right now.
	And I did this because there already is currency.
	It doesn't need to be currency right now.
	Now, with regards to daily purchases, yeah, Bitcoin is not going to be able to handle the coffee and donut scenario.
	And there's no conceivable way in which it will unless people unless there's some radical improvement in data speeds and people vote to up the block chain and all this kind of stuff or block size.
	So, yeah, I get all of that.
	And so what? I mean, you got your gold, you got your silver, you got your platinum, you got your bronze, you got your copper.
	You don't need the same coin for every purchase.
	So I look at Bitcoin, you know, like those big Eight-engine, giant-ass military planes, you know?
	It's like if you've ever been, like I was invited some years ago to give a speech at a conference in Belize, and from where I was, it took me three planes.
	You know, there was a big-ass plane, and then there was a smaller plane, and then there was like a twin prop plane that got me to the island of Belize, right?
	So I just viewed Bitcoin as like this is the big giant plane, and no, it's not going to go to a small town.
	But it's going to get a whole lot of people from point A to point B where there's sufficient demand.
	I like that example.
	That's great. So Bitcoin to me is for big business to business transactions that don't have to be settled in a split second.
	You've got your 99-year leases.
	You've got your building of the factories.
	You've got big developments of real estate and so on.
	So yeah, it's just this big giant plane and you say, well, wait a minute.
	That's not very nimble and that's not going to land on my local airport.
	It's like, well, that's not what it's for.
	So... You got a smaller plane and, you know, the smaller plane… It could be a helicopter at the point.
	Yeah, it could be a helicopter.
	It could be a Kitty Hawk.
	It could be a catapult for all I know, right?
	So you got your big plane and then you got your smaller planes like Ethereum and then you got your smaller planes for local stuff, you know, the hops.
	You know, like when I was working up north, we would fly out of little towns and sometimes basically the only airports were lakes, right?
	because you could use seaplanes in the summer and you could use ski planes in the winter.
	And those planes could only go like 100 miles, but they were really great in bad weather and they could land on a short distance because they weren't.
	So, you know, you've got Ethereum for the silver and then you've got Dash and Bitcoin Cash and a bunch of other things for the more localized transactions.
	And because they're all cryptos, it's seamless.
	Like, you know, like the data that you and I are sending back and forth in the form of this conversation is hopping across a whole bunch of different operating systems and servers and TCP IP points and We don't know. We don't care.
	We don't care at all.
	So the fact that you've got a bunch of cryptos all competing… On speed, efficiency, functionality, they're all going to specialize on different things, the same way that the big-ass planes specialize in hauling weight and the little planes specialize in short landing distances and low fuel consumption.
	So, yeah, there's going to be a whole bunch of things.
	Now, as far as the fees go, it's interesting, right?
	And you've got to grit your teeth with me on this one.
	Maybe this will land, maybe it won't, but I think it's pretty important.
	Can I stop you?
	Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Or pause you real quick?
	Do you see a potential future where instead of the 747 taking you over the ocean and then you hop in your helicopter to get you from one small place to another, what about a future where you've got Like, you've seen the UFO stuff, right?
	Where, you know, it zips in at almost light speed and then it just stops right on a dime.
	And then it's, you know, kind of orbiting around where it needs to settle down.
	That's what I think you have to compare it to.
	Because, yeah, like, compared to fiat or whatever, Bitcoin's great.
	You can send it overseas and it's relatively inexpensive, like, compared to something like gold.
	So, I can see how...
	If you imagined a world where there are only planes and helicopters, that analogy might make sense.
	But we're entering a world where we're building the UFOs that can zip from planet and solar system to solar system and then just stop on a dime and orbit around.
	Sorry to interrupt, but if there's a technology that allows for that, it will either be directly or indirectly incorporated into the Bitcoin protocol.
	Ah, but that is an assumption.
	No, it's not an assumption because, again, I don't know where the market cap is now, but, you know, a couple of days ago, it was like a trillion dollars worth of market cap.
	People have massive, massive interest in maintaining the value of that.
	So if some new technology comes along that does this Elon Musk fantasy, it's 100 times faster and 100 times cheaper and, you know, all this kind of stuff, right?
	Then there'll either be a layer built on top of Bitcoin or it'll be incorporated into the core code.
	Because nobody's just going to walk away from a trillion dollars of value.
	Or they'll just transfer their trillion dollars of value into the new UFO. Which is just as easy.
	It's actually way easier to do that.
	Oh, God, no. Oh, no.
	No, no. No, because there's no transfer.
	There is no transfer in that way.
	And the reason I say that is that...
	Is there a transfer from a Bitcoin to an altcoin?
	No, not... I mean, just bear with me for a second here.
	Just one button clicked. No, it's not.
	It's not that way at all.
	I'm sorry to be annoyed.
	It's not that way at all. Because it will have to go to zero to sell.
	So let's say everyone wants to sell their Bitcoins and transfer it to MagicCoin or UFOCoin or SpaceCoin or whatever.
	Okay, so a couple of people are going to slide over.
	It won't affect the price that much.
	But as soon as there's some kind of stampede...
	Then the value of Bitcoin is going to just completely crater and go to zero.
	I mean, in a sort of very extreme scenario.
	So when you say, well, people will just transfer over, it's like, ooh, no, people will see the Bitcoin starting to go down in value.
	And they won't want to sell at that point.
	And so what they'll do is they'll say, we're going to...
	They'll transfer it even faster. No, they won't.
	No, because... They're moving over this other one that's increasing in value.
	I better jump over there.
	No, because you're selling what's going down in value and you're buying what's going up in value.
	It's much better. To simply transfer the technology the other way and maintain the value in Bitcoin rather than it is to sell your...
	You can use that same argument for the fiat system.
	People aren't going to sell their fiat because as they're selling their fiat, the value is going down.
	They're not going to do that. They're just going to fix the existing system.
	But you can't fix the existing system because it's political.
	And so is Bitcoin. No, Bitcoin is not political.
	Come on. What are you talking about? No, it's not a state function.
	What are you talking about? It's not defended by force.
	You can compete with it without violating any laws.
	It's not infinite. It's not controlled by politicians.
	Come on. I get the word political, but let's not stretch it too far.
	No, it's not political in the sense that it's unethical or immoral, because it is all voluntary, but it's certainly political, and we don't know what's going on by this.
	No, no, what do you mean? You can't just define, we just define political so it's not political, and then you say, but it's certainly political.
	It's like, well, no, tell me what you mean by the word.
	It doesn't make any sense. Okay, I'm just using political in different ways.
	So you can use political in the sense that it's government, it's state, and therefore it's always violent because, by definition, the state is violence or, you know, opposed to natural law.
	You can also use politics in the sense that it's just amongst the people.
	It's, you know, I don't know right offhand what the derivation of the word political, but I think it has something to do with the people.
	Now, no, listen, dude, that's not a fair use of, no, hang on, no, it does matter, it does matter.
	This is not a fair use of language.
	Because if you're going to say, it's like, no, it does matter, it does matter what word we use.
	There are people in Bitcoin, there are people that are controlling Bitcoin even.
	I mean, people like to think, especially in the cryptocurrency camp, people like to think it's this big decentralized blob.
	And these are people who haven't been in Bitcoin very long.
	I've been in Bitcoin since 2012, 2013.
	I've seen the political...
	No, but you've still got to tell me, hang on, no, listen, you've still got to, look, it's like using the word rape for lovemaking, right?
	So if by political you mean, well, there are people who have particular interests which they try and push forward, look, that's everyone.
	No, that means that you and I are having a political conversation.
	Everything is political. People negotiating are political.
	Let's just use the term, there are incentives, and certain people have certain incentives to make certain things a certain way.
	Absolutely, absolutely. Hang on, hang on.
	And that is true.
	Everywhere you go, this is exactly what Bitcoin is designed to solve.
	And other cryptos, to be fair, obviously, right?
	Everybody wants to push their own particular interests and agendas, and it takes a very mature and wise soul to rise above all of that, and very few people do.
	And so the fact is, you get a choice.
	It's either going to be Bitcoin, or it's going to be fiat murder coin with a gun to your head.
	Okay, so yeah, there's people who are pushing their agendas, and I'd rather them not be armed.
	It's crypto or those.
	I mean, yeah, you can't just compare Bitcoin to fiat because that's an easy win.
	That's Mike Tyson against me.
	That's an easy win. But if I compare Bitcoin to another crypto, that's a different story.
	Are you saying that other cryptos don't have developers who are pushing a particular agenda?
	No, but what I am saying is that certain developers are funded by the stakeholders, which is the coin holders.
	And that makes all the difference.
	For example, in Dash, the core developers, everybody who's developing the Dash protocol is paid by the Dash blockchain.
	It's not paid by MIT Labs or AXA, some kind of a banking hedge fund that funds the core developers.
	It's funded literally by the people that are holding the coin through their voting.
	So it keeps them honest. It keeps them building the protocol.
	In the interest of the coin itself and not some outside interest.
	No, no. There is no interest of the coin itself.
	It's in the interest of their value of the coin.
	Of the holders of the coin, I should say.
	Yeah, so they're still pursuing a particular agenda.
	Now, you may structure things, and I don't really understand the difference between these two structures, and I'm happy to have it explained to me, but please do it like I'm five years old.
	So, there's still going to be self-interested parties who want to maximize their own holdings.
	Always. It's the proof-of-work versus proof-of-stake argument and so on.
	We'll see how this shakes out.
	Not in this particular case, but it doesn't divide along those lines.
	Dash is a proof-of-work coin.
	It's not a proof-of-stake coin, and yet it has this mechanism of funding developers from the core protocol.
	Let me talk about fees.
	Okay, so a couple of fees on fiat coin.
	Because, again, you say the fees are high.
	And listen, Ethereum in particular, the fees are brutal right now, and I'm sure this is the case with some other coins as well.
	Functionally, it's unusable for smaller transactions, as far as I can tell.
	Yes. So, okay, but let's...
	Fees for fiat, right? A couple of fees in fiat.
	Number one, inflation, right?
	So you've already got, I think, at least 5% to 10% fee just holding it, let alone...
	Using it, right? So if you had a fee on your Bitcoin or Dash or Ethereum that stripped 5% to 10% of your holdings every year, whether you used it or not, well, I guess if you used it, somebody else would be paying that fee, but that would be considered, like, that's insane.
	That's ridiculous, but that's what we've got going with fiat.
	The other thing, too, is that let's say...
	That every Ethereum or Dash coin that you bought got you, I don't know, let's see, got you tenfold liabilities, right?
	So you buy one Ethereum, and if you look at the hidden contract, you actually owe 10 Ethereum, but later, right?
	That would be considered an insane...
	Fee. But this is the way fiat currency works, right?
	As you know, when you pay the government a dollar, it uses that as collateral with which to borrow arguably, you know, eight to 10 more dollars, right?
	So the unfunded liabilities for the US are cooking up around $200 billion off, the earlier caller said, the national debt of $23 billion.
	And so the fees for using currency, for using fiat currency, not even to mention the fact that it's used for mass immigration, it's used for wars, it's used for funding indoctrination camps that masquerade as government schools, it's used for all of these civilization-destroying government programs.
	It's used to pay women to have children with unstable dads and have them raised in our selected environment.
	So even if you just look at sort of the softer social things and strip those out, the fees for using fiat are so brutal that it outstrips everything in the crypto world.
	But it's because we're so used to fiat we don't see those as much.
	Right. And I know you're not just talking to me, you're talking to other people, but you don't have to sell me on the fiat versus Bitcoin argument.
	I understand that. And in my mind, Bitcoin is worth infinitely more than fiat because from a moral perspective, It's infinitely more moral.
	So it doesn't matter what the, like I would, if I had the choice between the two, I'd always, and if I was just completely, you know, in the moral realm and not in the pragmatic realm, I would sell all my fiat for Bitcoin if those were my choices.
	But the choices is obviously, there are more choices obviously.
	Yeah, and I wasn't trying to sell you on Bitcoin as a whole.
	I was just saying that if we're going to start talking about fees in cryptos as a whole, we also have to look at some of the not-so-obvious fees in fiat.
	Right, yeah. And I'm with you there.
	There are way more fees in fiat than Bitcoin.
	Those people that are trying to argue that Bitcoin fees are too high compared to fiat fees, that's a non-starter for me.
	I'll take Bitcoin any day.
	And they don't come with jail terms for non-payment of imaginary bills like taxation and so on, right?
	Absolutely. All right.
	Listen, really, really wonderful conversation.
	I really, really appreciate that feedback.
	And I will look more into Dash.
	I like Dash, but I haven't looked into it as much as I should.
	And I really, really appreciate that push.
	I will certainly do that.
	And if you know a core Dash dev who would like to get front and center and talk about it, I'd be happy to host that conversation.
	I think it would be very, very interesting.
	And I am quite curious about the other cryptos that are going on as well.
	Yeah, I can arrange that for sure.
	All right, thank you. Are there others who wanted to mention anything in particular?
	I would be happy to hear.
	It doesn't have to be this topic.
	It could be just about anything.
	And don't forget, it's less than two hours I'm going to do my live stream, which you can get at dlive.tv forward slash free domain.
	That's dlive.tv forward slash free domain.
	It's going to go on at 7 o'clock, which is just a little under two hours from now.
	So I'm having to close this one off, and I really do appreciate people's conversations.
	If you have anything else you wanted to mention, it's been a while since I've been in the club, and I'm happy to hear if there's anything else.
	Let me just see if there's anybody else with their hand raised, or are people just slack-jawed at the philosophical wisdom and linguistic perfection flowing forward from their speakers?
	It's always hard to tell. All right, going once, going twice.
	All right. Looks like we're closing down.
	Thanks, everyone, so much for a wonderful chat this afternoon.
	We are going to be, as usual, taking donations, even in crypto, at freedomain.com slash donate, and have yourselves a great, great afternoon, a great pleasure to chat with you, and I'll try and figure out a time in the week where I can wedge these things in on a more regular basis, but a great pleasure to chat with you all, and have a wonderful evening.

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