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Oct. 24, 2025 - Viva & Barnes
01:01:13
Live from Lugano Plan B in Switzerland w/ Efrat Fenigson and Prince Filip Karađorđević!
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Good morning, everybody who's here physically and digitally or numerically.
It's 3.20 in the morning, I think, Eastern time.
So I imagine my regular audience will be catching up on this when they wake up, except for the European side who might be watching right now.
We're live from Lugano, Switzerland.
And for those in our viva barnslaw.locals.com community, you know a bit about the history of Lugano.
I've been looking into this.
It's phenomenally cool.
Battle back and forth between Como and Milan.
Became part of Switzerland in 1513.
What else was interesting about Lugano?
The lake is a thousand feet deep, and Roman settlers first appeared here, at least evidence of 1 BC.
But today we're talking Bitcoin, although I think this conversation is going to meander with Efrat Fenneksen, who my community might know, and I think we probably have some overlapping members of our community, but Efrat has a podcast.
It's called You're the Voice.
I don't know where she was born or raised.
I want to get into this in a bit, but Efrat, so that I don't mangle your bio too much.
Let the world know who you are before we delve into childhood and how you got here.
Good.
Thanks for having me.
This is super cool.
So yeah, we do have a lot of overlap.
Freedom movement is where I come from into Bitcoin.
Super exciting.
I was born and raised in Israel in 1980.
And I've lived in Israel until I was 21.
I moved to Australia for six years.
I have dual citizenship today.
I lived there until about 2007.
I went back to Israel and lived there since.
Had my first and only son in Israel.
And today he's almost 16 years old.
And he lives in Australia with his dad now.
And I get to be a digital nomad and travel the world.
That's very cool.
So born in 1980, how many siblings do you have?
Two.
And what did your parents do, or what do your parents do?
So my father has a metal industries factory, one of the largest in Israel.
So he's one of the biggest industrial pioneers in Israel for the metal industry.
And my mom was a teacher for 35 years.
And then she joined, they're both like 70 plus years old, but they're still working.
And she joined him in the factory.
And it's a big family business.
So a lot of like cousins and uncles and they all work there in 150 people factory.
Work still today.
Very cool.
And if I may, I'll stop after this, but when did they get to Israel?
Were they there perhaps?
So my grandparents from both sides, from my mom's side and my dad's side, both arrived to Israel in the 50s, actually in the 40s.
So on my dad's side, after the Second World War, my grandfather is a Holocaust survivor, and he spent time in 13 concentration camps, survived Auschwitz-Birkenau in the end of the war, and came over to Israel around the time of just before the Declaration of Independence of Israel.
My grandma came from Belgium.
She was hiding actually here in Switzerland for five years with her younger brother.
They crossed the border by foot from Belgium to Switzerland and hid here.
The whole family was murdered from both sides, sorry.
And on my mom's side, my grandma came from Libya.
Libya.
Libya, Libya, yeah, Tripoli.
I've got like, I'm a mix between, you know, the Ashkenaz, as they say, and the Sephardi.
And my grandfather came from Turkey slash, it's Izmir, like Greece, Turkey.
So a real mix.
And they all met in Israel in refugee camps.
And then they built some kibbutzim.
So my history, my grandparents' history, is full of the story of Israel as they were building it or coming into it.
So I have like personal testimonies about many of the things that has happened in Israel as the country was getting its independence around the 40s and 50s.
Okay, that's fascinating.
And well, this would be another topic for like another three-hour deal.
But to get to where you are right now, I think it's relevant to understand.
And I like to, before I interview people, go see their oldest video on the internet.
Oh, my God.
I will throw it out.
One of the more recent ones to the oldest.
It's amazing to see the evolution of a channel of a person over time.
One video that I saw, and I think it explains who you are more than anything, was protesting on the streets in Israel, protesting the Green Pass.
And one of the things that I've never understood is how, I mean, I'm from Canada, and we were on lockdown in Quebec more so than the rest.
We went crazy.
I didn't understand how Israel went as crazy as it did with the Green Pass, with the mass vaccinations.
And to see you protesting on the streets, it's now like near five years ago brought back memories.
But how did things go downhill or get so crazy in Israel where you'd think you wouldn't have that type of digital system?
Right, so short story.
I was shocked that that's what happened and how fast it has happened.
I was walking down the street near Tel Aviv Beach, and I'm arriving to that touristic place down in Frischman Beach in Tel Aviv, and there's a big bench, green bench for tourists.
So normally it has a saying in English saying, like, welcome to Tel Aviv, or we love Tel Aviv.
And they replace the saying on the bench.
It's like a huge bench, and it says, reserved for vaccinated only.
In English, it's like for tourists.
So I look at it, and at that moment, I had a flashback to my grandfather's story from Belgium before the Second World War.
He's telling me how he walks in the park and he sees this big bench with a sign on it saying, not for Jews.
So it's like, and then I go, hold on, I'm in the one country that I'm supposed to be like the safest.
That's the story, the promise that Jewish people have been given.
Israel is a safe haven for Jewish people.
And now I'm being discriminated against, and all these coercive measures are taking place.
And at that moment, I said, for my grandfather, who's already passed away, I am going to fight to make sure that what happened there is not going to happen here, or at least I'm going to do my best to raise awareness for this bullshit.
And I started protesting.
And people were just, and until that moment, I always had, since I was growing up, I had a question in my head.
How come the Holocaust has happened from the point of view of people, just humanity, normal people living their lives?
How would they allow something like this to happen?
And at that moment, I knew how.
When you instill so much fear and propaganda into people, it's very easy to make them behave insanely full of hate and like no rationality towards each other.
And I saw that happening all over again.
So I had my answer to that question, unfortunately.
And since then, I think we've been seeing it unfolding again and again with another crisis and another emergency and have you.
And it's just like clown world.
It's amazing.
Back in the day where you appreciate not history repeating, but history rhyming.
And it's a famous Mark Twain theme.
And early on in the days of COVID, I was reluctant to use those comparisons, those analogies.
But then at some point, you realize it doesn't have to be in the same distance to be in the same direction.
And it was in the same direction that it started.
Well, first of all, I went crazy during COVID, and that's when people said, oh, now you're part of the extreme whatever.
When did you start getting into or getting wise to the relevance, the potential of, say, cryptocurrency in general, but I know it's Bitcoin in particular with you?
That's correct.
With me, and by the way, with most of the people in this conference, I didn't mean you to single you up, but the Bitcoin masculine say it's only Bitcoin and all the other stuff is garbage.
But when did you start getting into the idea of crypto?
So that happened around the end of 21, beginning of 22, as COVID was happening.
And I was still very, you know, you could say an activist.
I was in the streets.
And I was in the search for freedom.
And I was in the calling for freedom.
And I was pursuing as many, you know, avenues of content and solutions as I could find to become more sovereign and to try and minimize my interface with the institutions as much as possible.
And when I realized what the government has done in terms of overreach to my human rights and my bodily autonomy, I was clear that they're going to do the same.
But next time it's going to be on another vector of my life.
And probably it's going to have something to do with money or private property because that's the way governments behave.
And so I wanted to educate myself about money.
So I started learning, found out about fiat, started learning how money has evolved, the history of money.
And then I got into gold.
I became like a gold bug for a short period of time, which is sound money and it's wonderful.
I love gold until today and I hold some as well.
And then I got into Bitcoin, but it was so complicated to understand.
And also, there was no one to really teach me.
I went to like Bitcoin.com.
I thought that'd be like a website.
There's nothing like that.
Instead, there are so many places where you can learn about it and you don't know whom to trust.
So I started asking people around and no one can teach me until a guy that saw me on the streets.
He's the number one Bitcoiner in Israel.
He came to me and he said, I want to teach you Bitcoin because you're so great and you need to know this.
I said, thank you very much.
Who was that?
His name is Ben Samocha and he's got a company called Crypto Jungle in Israel.
He's a great guy, my friend, until today.
So I started my Bitcoin journey on the search for freedom.
I came for the hedge because I wanted to protect what's mine.
And I stayed, not just for the revolution, but also to enjoy the benefits of this thing.
This is the most amazing revelation I had in my life.
Okay, and now I've been watching some of your stuff as well.
So I know you saw one clip where you say, if you don't know how money works, you're never going to understand Bitcoin.
And I sort of realize, I don't know how money works.
I understand the idea of fiat currency.
I understand the evolution from gold from trading and bartering.
Then we get into the digital banking where money doesn't actually exist.
is on a ledger in a computer, and it can be created out of thin air and basically created into devaluing it into nothing.
If you could...
But even if it's not digital, it's like that.
Well, then it makes sense.
Physical money is also printing.
So, I mean, if you could, I mean, it'd probably be an hour deep dive, but summarize how money works, how it evolved, what coming off the gold standard had by way of valuation of the fiat of the dollar, and where it's going now in respect of Bitcoin.
Okay, I'll try to do this in a very condensed manner because it's a big topic.
But I think the most important things to know and understand about the current monetary system, which is called fiat, which is a Latin word for by decree.
I say so, you do what I say.
This is the sovereign, the states telling you what to do with the money, and then they put in place a law, which is called the legal tender, to force you, coerce you to use that type of money in your country to pay the taxes and to exchange in that country.
So you're obliged to do that because they said so.
Now, what's backing that money?
Nothing.
They can print as much as they want.
The government gives the order to the federal, the central bank, and the central bank just can print money out of thin air.
But most of the money in the system is being created by the commercial banking system.
And the commercial banking system follows a principle called the fractional reserve.
Fractional reserve banking is when you can hold a tiny bit of the money that someone gives you in deposit and then lend about 90% of it, depending sometimes 100% of it, to someone else.
And by that, you inflate the money, right?
You get $100 from someone as a bank, you keep $10, and $90 you lend to someone else.
And so the money grows within seconds to become a lot bigger.
And that is legal.
So fractional reserve lending, fractional reserve banking is legal.
And money is based on credit.
So any type of money that is being created is created as credit in the system, means that it has interest on it, which is a way for the government, for the state, for the banks to continue making money out of thin air while they cash out, while they make money out of doing that.
The second principle that is very important to remember is inflation.
So inflation gives the, I mean, fractional reserve and inflation are the biggest scams in fiat.
Okay, so when you understand that those two principles are what is making the fiat system scammy, these are the principles.
So inflation is basically the notion that the state and the government can print as much money as they want, no fixed supply.
When the supply is not fixed, the price of money can change.
And they put the price on money.
And they devalue you by inflating the supply of money.
So the more they print, the less our money is worth.
That's why our purchasing power goes down.
That's why we see it in pricing going up.
But prices going up are only the symptom of the problem.
They're not the root cause.
The root cause is the incessive printing of it.
So inflating the supply.
So that's the problem, the main problem in the fiat monetary system.
It's a leaky bucket.
It's an ice cube that melts in your hand.
And I'm quoting greater people than me in this industry that have explained this really well.
So if you want to preserve the power of your money, what you need to do is find a way to hold value over time and over space in a way that will not leak, leak the energy and make that what you're holding worthless.
You want to preserve that same value, right?
So if you want to preserve it in a good way, you need to preserve it in something that is scarce, something that is like gold, for example, right?
So gold is considered sound money.
And the reason why it's called sound is when they used to drop a penny of gold on the floor, it would make a certain sound.
That's how they would be able to tell that it's not fake, that it's real gold.
I love learning tidbits like that that I'm now not ever going to forget.
Yeah, that's right.
So that's sound money.
And Bitcoin is following very similar principles to gold.
It's just digital.
So it's sound money as well.
It's got a fixed supply.
It's scarce.
Yes, okay.
I see where I always have the question.
Like the value of gold based on its scarcity, there's a ton of things on earth that are scarce that are worthless.
Like a kid with my kid, like, pick up a stone.
This is the only stone of this nature on earth.
It's the scarcest thing.
It's worthless because there's an infinite many other things which are equally scarce that just don't have the human value placed in them.
With gold, I understand it has properties that make it good for infrastructure.
It has practical utility.
And then it's also got that human element of I like looking at gold on the street.
Yeah, the utility of Bitcoin is basically it's proof of work.
It's money.
So it can be used as money.
Stones probably cannot be used as money because it's going to face the same problems we had in history in the past, like with shells and with other instruments that were used for money.
You can fake them.
I mean, you can corrupt them.
They deteriorate over time.
It's hard to move them between places.
And in order to really be efficient in delivering them or distributing them through space, you have to use physical means like boats or planes or whatever.
And that becomes very cumbersome and hard.
And that's why we went to the digital world to do that.
the digitality today allows us to transfer money from one place to another in a much more efficient way.
Okay, so now that's So it's not just scarce.
You need to have more properties in order for it to be good money.
Very interesting.
And now the inflationary elements, this I've learned since is the distinction between Bitcoin and all others is that there is no other cryptocurrency that has a limited issuance, that there will not be one more issue than what was initially issued.
That's correct, but there could be other ones that say that they have fixed supply, but the bigger problems with the other cryptocurrencies is the fact that they have a mother and a father.
They have a CEO, they have an office, they have a company that have created them.
That allows the government or the state to clamp down on them and close them whenever they want.
It allows institutions to censor.
It allows all the problems that we know with a centralized entity.
And all of the cryptocurrencies are centralized.
They've been created by someone and they're very easily can be co-opted.
Where Bitcoin is the only truly decentralized monetary asset that sits on hundreds of thousands of servers of people like me and like you around the world that hold their own keys in self-custody and they don't need permission from anyone to use what they've got.
And that is revolutionary because no other cryptocurrency has that scale with hundreds of millions of people already around the world.
When I said hundreds of thousands, I meant the servers, the nodes that are running on the network, but hundreds of millions of people around the world are already using it and it's in a decentralized form.
So even if one person or one miner or one entity inside of Bitcoin is being, let's say, closed down by some government or some state, we have redundancy of a network.
It's a truly decentralized network.
It's just wonderful the way it's designed.
Is it a conceptual thing or is it just a practical thing the way it was designed?
Like, could it be replicated again and it just won't be because people are now looking out for that?
It could be.
And they tried to replicate it many times in the last 15 or 16 years since Bitcoin has started.
But show me one cryptocurrency that got to where Bitcoin is.
Even Ethereum, which is the most, like the second most popular one, is not arriving to where Bitcoin has reached until today.
So anyone can try.
And Bitcoin is an open source project.
So anyone can take the code and even replicate it and create their own coin.
That's why you have 50,000 coins out there.
They're all trying to do what Bitcoin is doing.
Have they succeeded?
Well, The way you describe it is like I'm maybe having a realization or just misunderstanding something, but Bitcoin was created decentralized before anybody was even looking for that form of decentralization so that by the time the nodes got out, it was sort of like the same thing.
You could start with a ton of nodes.
It grew with time.
There was a real risk in the first few years of Bitcoin's genesis to actually make it.
They thought that it may fail in the first few years because it was so small and it took time for people to understand what it is and start using it.
And there was nowhere convenient to even buy it or hold it.
Like people, it was a jungle.
My question is, why wasn't there a CEO to the Bitcoin the same way there's a CEO up to, I don't know, another thing?
Well, that's the beauty of the Satoshi story where many people, like Tucker Carlson, the other day, saying that, you know, it's a CIA.
And it doesn't really matter.
You know what?
It could be.
Like, the internet is a DARPA project, and everyone knows that.
And so Bitcoin may have been created by the CIA.
It's just irrelevant because once an invention is being put out there in the world, and it's so good, like the light bulb, like the wheel, and it becomes everyone's invention and everyone starts using it.
Does it matter who created it?
It's out of their hands.
It's an open source project that anyone literally can validate, can copy, can do things to.
And it doesn't matter who created it because it's already out of their control, even if they did.
So Satoshi was a real gift in that sense, where he started something, then like, how do you say, like, contaminated the space around him with some good viral ideology.
People took it, they ran with it, it started catching up, and when he saw that it's already mature enough to continue without him, he's like, okay, I'm gone.
And by doing that, he eliminated the risk of closing the project on his side, and he gave it to other people.
That is like a noble thing to do because now it's out of anyone's hands.
Okay, that's fascinating, actually.
And now, I was watching another interview that you gave where you described the difference between CBDCs and crypto.
What a lot of people fear or a lot of questions that people have is, say, crypto can be confounded with CBDCs, but the criteria that you enumerated to describe what a CBDC is, I can sort of understand the difference, whether or not there's sort of practical overlap in reality afterwards.
Explain what a CBDC is by its criteria and how it's distinguished from Bitcoin.
Okay, so CBDC, central bank digital currency, is basically a cryptocurrency created by the state or the government where they have total control over it.
And it can be set with an expiry date.
It can be set with programmability.
So what you can or cannot do with your money.
And with geofencing, where you can use your money.
So those features, or also the capability to switch on and off your digital wallet remotely.
So basically, those capabilities are inbuilt into CBDC projects.
Even if they don't start using them right from the beginning, they're there, dormant, and they can use them whenever they want.
There are more than 113 projects of CBDCs running around the world in different countries experimenting with it.
Some are in advanced stages, some are in early stages.
And retail CBDCs is basically allowing the state to provide you with a digital wallet with money.
Let's say you're using the US dollar, so you will have digital dollars in that wallet.
They'll be able to set the capacity, set the programming, set the expiry, et cetera, and they'll be able to control basically what you do with your money or not.
Now, that's like the most dystopian case of a CBDC.
And we see that playing out in places like China.
Nigeria tried to do it.
They're failing.
China is pretending to succeed, but whatever, Russia, there are other countries that already have their CBDC out.
When you compare that to, and obviously that's centralized, right?
So there's centralized control over there.
And it's fiat on steroids, that's what I always say.
So it's what we have today, but with larger, greater capabilities for enforcement and for control.
And when you compare this to Bitcoin, which is completely decentralized, so there is no one neck to choke.
There is no center of power and control with one entity.
It's distributed over miners, nodes, users of the network in hundreds of thousands of places around the world.
The power goes back to the people.
The power goes back to the entities that are holding this.
So no state has no control over Bitcoin.
Governments, even if they pretend to tax it, to regulate it, I mean, they don't pretend.
They do that.
They tax it, they regulate it.
In some countries like China, for example, in 2021, they banned it.
But there is no really such thing on Bitcoin because Bitcoin doesn't care.
It just keeps on moving.
Every 10 minutes, a block is being mined and more Bitcoin is being released into the world.
And people keep using Bitcoin even if the state tells them that they can't do it.
Go see places like Lebanon, Turkey, even Indonesia, where it's illegal.
Everyone's using Bitcoin.
It's like the highest adoption rates of Bitcoin.
Nigeria, they use it like crazy.
So they can't control it.
They can't, you can't program on it, whatever you want to happen with it.
You can't put an expiry date.
Like, you have full sovereignty over what's yours, your money, your asset.
And if it's in self-custody, we use as Bitcoiners, we use the term self-custody very often, meaning you take custody over your Bitcoin.
And that is a major distinction that is so important for, especially freedom lovers, to understand.
If you want to have full sovereignty, it's not good to buy Bitcoin and keep it on an exchange or keep it in someone else's custody in a bank or something.
You have to take custody onto your own hands.
And Bitcoin allows you to do that.
Put that in a hardware wallet, for example, one of those gadgets.
And when you have that, then you are the only one to sign your transactions and decide what to do with your Bitcoin.
There is no intermediary between you and your money.
If I decide to now send you money, it's just between you and me.
There is no one between us, peer-to-peer, electronic cash.
This is where I'm conceptually still at a roadblock where you say the choke points.
And I can understand how it circulates digitally, freely, and it can't be, you can't restrict its circulation digitally.
Yeah.
But you can choke the points out at its conversion into material goods.
And the way you're describing this, it'll be amazing.
Like, you know, between Bitcoiners, I'll buy a necklace and send you the Bitcoin.
And that's good between the two of us.
But then the issue is between the rest of society, if people don't value Bitcoin, well, then there'll be a niche place where people use Bitcoin for transactions, but it won't be commercially digestible.
And the governments can outlaw the use of it, tax it, put you in jail for it.
So practically speaking, they'll coerce you into remaining on a fiat currency system.
Yeah, that is a very good point and very important point.
So what we're seeing these days is the trend to KYC Bitcoin, put it behind the same rails of banking that exist today.
You know, when you want to pull out money from the bank, you get all these questions.
Or when you want to open a bank account, you get all these questions.
It's the same thing.
They want to identify you, basically.
The digital ID that is happening all around the world, that is the purpose, because with CBDCs or with KYC Bitcoin, you have to be identified.
So that is the trend, to like take Bitcoin into, that's why you have regulatory clarity so that you can have regulation in place to allow the state to identify you when you do certain transactions.
Now, if you, you don't have to work with Bitcoin in such a way.
You can work in a non-KYC way.
You don't have to identify.
You can buy Bitcoin from anyone and you can exchange Bitcoin with anyone so that no one knows because the network allows you to do that, even if the government says you shouldn't.
But Bitcoin these days is still, in the West at least, is a good store of value, less a medium of exchange, because we do have good payment rails and people are still not understanding really the need in Bitcoin as a payment mechanism, but they do understand it's digital gold, so they hold it.
They buy it, they hold it, and they see the value going up.
Sorry, the price or the value going up.
There will be a time where Bitcoin will become a medium of exchange as well, like it is today in the global south, in developing countries, in Africa, in South America, etc.
And when we get to that point, anyone can trade with anyone, even me with a business, in a non-KYC way.
We don't have to go through those means that the government dictate.
But if the merchant decides that what they want to do is put a point of sale that operates in the same way as that a credit card operates alongside Bitcoin, then they can do taxing over it.
They can do KYC.
I mean, they don't have to break the law.
They can use Bitcoin the way they want to.
But all the options are there.
People just need to educate themselves and understand the differences between KYC and non-KYC and what's the best way to hold it and to transact in it.
And it's definitely possible to transact between people and businesses and businesses and businesses in a non-KYC way.
And yes, there are choke points.
I just want to make sure that people understand that I'm not coming here to just idealize Bitcoin.
It's only positive.
There are shortcomings, just like for everything in the world, and you need to be aware of them.
So Bitcoin has multiple layers.
It has the miners who are mining Bitcoin to create new Bitcoin.
We have nodes who are validating the transactions on the network.
We have users.
We have maintainers of the code.
Each one of those layers should stay as decentralized as possible.
But one of the risks is the centralization.
So mining, for example, is today suffering from centralization, over-centralization.
You have a few mining pools that are very big, that hold most of the biggest miners around the world.
And the government, as you said correctly, can choke that.
And that's because of the amount of energy that's required for the mining that it's not.
Not because of the amount of energy, just because they all choose to come together and create a pool to mine through to be more profitable and to be able to mine in a more efficient way.
Not because of the energy.
Interesting.
And I've been given the five-minute warning, but I still think we'll get there easily.
The question everybody's asking is maximum price of Bitcoin.
One of the questions I have is like, okay, so you've got a maximum ever issued of 21 million.
Let's say 19 million have been mined.
19 million.
Close to 20 million have been mined.
And then there's going to be the issue of people losing it over time.
There's going to be the issue of population growth over time or population shrinkage, depending on what happens.
What is the, not the prediction for value, but what is the progression of the value?
Because I imagine the more people on Earth, the more you're going to have to value the Satoshis.
And so, I mean, what is going to happen in terms of the breaking down of increments?
I'm not an economist and not trying to predict prices because to be honest, I don't even care.
Because all I care is that my money is in sound money and I can move with it wherever I want.
And I've got that tick.
Price, it will go up forever because it's a fixed supply.
It's already at 120.
Last year it was at 60.
So, you know, we're seeing the progression going.
It will go up way, way higher.
Much smarter people than me will give you a prediction about price.
But about the scarcity, because we're only having 21 million and we have only one more million Bitcoins to mine, this is like the gold rush era, where everyone for the last million in the next 110 years are going to try and accumulate as much Bitcoin as they can.
And not everyone will do it.
One, because they won't wake up on time.
Two, because they don't have the money to do it or they don't think it's valuable or they're simply afraid of it, which I encourage people to drop that.
They will accumulate some Bitcoin.
And in the end, what we're going to see is that the price of SAT, one SAT, you know, Bitcoin has 100 million Satoshis.
Okay, so even one SAT will probably go up in price to such crazy levels that it will be like one set equals $1.
And even if you have a few sets, let's say you have 1,000 sats, that's going to be generational wealth in the future.
Today, people are accumulating tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions of sets.
And it doesn't matter how much you've got, as long as you've got that, you've got the real kryptonite, the digital gold of the future.
So, you know, that's the invitation for people.
Just stack some.
Well, and now just always, you know, plan for the best.
Well, hope for the best, plan for the worst.
What could be the catastrophic stake in the heart of Bitcoin?
I mean, setting aside, like, servers go out, the world blows up fine, everything's in worse shape.
But what could be the worst thing?
If the community of Bitcoin becomes complacent and just buys Bitcoin and sits on it and forgets about it, then we are at a risk that the protocol of Bitcoin will not be properly maintained, properly criticized, properly validated with time by the community to keep it decentralized and secure.
So there is a risk.
There's always a risk.
And we shouldn't be complacent.
We should always be actively involved in preserving the security and the integrity of the protocol.
Amazing.
Now, we're going to take a break and then I'm going to be up here with Prince Philip Kavajojevich in a few minutes.
But before we leave, I've got to tell everybody where they can find you, your social media.
And when I get to my computer afterwards, I'll put it in the pinned comments.
Thank you so much.
So you can find me on X. You can find me on Substack and on Noster, of course.
I don't know if you're on Nostra, but we have to put you there.
Decentralized, no one can censor us.
I'm loyal to Rumble.
Rumble is great.
Noster is like X. So we'll talk about it later.
Thank you so much for having me.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
And we'll be back in a few minutes.
Thank you.
All right, ladies and gentlemen of the interwebs, this is also a first I get to interview an official prince.
And I've been looking into, I was revisiting my Eastern European Eastern European minor that I got from McGill University because I was watching some podcasts with Prince Philip as well.
But Prince Philip is the, now I say, the hereditary prince of Serbia.
That's correct.
Of the, it's a, what do they call it, not a defunct monarchy, but it's abolished monarchy.
Abolished monarchy.
Soon to be reinstated.
No.
Working on it.
Working on it.
At the risk of getting political at a Bitcoin conference.
Prince Philip.
Now, I've been looking into your history.
It's amazing if you can give people the 30,000-foot overview for those who are seeing you for the first time and how you got into Bitcoin.
Sure, so I first got, well, hello everybody.
Good to be here.
Thank you very much for having me.
Thank you for coming.
I first got into Bitcoin in 2017.
And one of my best friends, I was living in London at the time working in traditional finance.
And one of my best friends said, hey, look, Philip, check this Bitcoin thing out.
It's gonna moon, basically.
So I was like, okay, that's interesting.
Well, what are the advantages of it?
Oh, it's like an inflation head.
There's only going to be 21 million.
I was like, that's interesting.
So I bought it.
I got it on Coinbase.
I saw other assets on there.
I saw Ethereum.
I saw Litecoin.
I bought those too.
So I wasn't really studying it so much until 2020 when COVID hit and I saw some real strange things happening in the financial market.
And it forced me to study Bitcoin further.
So by 2020, end of 2020, 2021, I became a Bitcoin maximist.
And now to go back a bit to the beginning, because you're born in Fairfax, Virginia.
You've done your history, yeah.
And now I forgot where you got your degree, but how does it come to be that your mother's Brazilian, your father is Serbian?
So yes, maybe a bit of more history.
So monarchy in Serbia was abolished during the Second World War.
And my grandfather, on my father's side, was the last king of Yugoslavia, third of Yugoslavia, King Peter II.
He was essentially kicked out of the country.
And he ended up in London after visiting many countries where in 1945 my father was born in London in Claridge's hotel where Winston Churchill actually designated the room that my father was born in as Yugoslav territory for the day.
And they actually put a bit of soil under the bed while my father was born there.
Then my father lived in exile all his life until what?
Get to my birth.
So he then in 1970 met my mother who happens to be a Brazilian princess, Princess Malia de Gloria Orleans Braganza.
And if I may interrupt you there, it happens to be like, does royalty, is there a requirement to marry among royalty?
There is some interbreeding, yes.
Oh, no, I didn't mean like that.
I mean social pressure.
I think you're cool about third or fourth cousins, you're right.
Anything closer is a little bit questionable.
So your mother comes from other royalty, yes.
So from Brazilian, she's a second daughter of what would have been the emperor of Brazil.
I'm also a descendant of the last emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro Segunda II.
He is the one who actually helped to liberate the slaves in Brazil.
And that cost the monarchy.
That led to the abolition of the monarchy because it didn't benefit the slave owners who were getting free labor essentially.
So the elites took down the monarchy and a republic was formed.
But at least people became free.
Okay, very cool.
And sorry, that then leads to where my parents married in 1972.
In 1980, my older brother was born in Chicago.
Then in 1982, I was born.
I have a twin brother.
I'm the older one.
That makes a big difference in the heredity world.
And then parents separated.
I moved to Spain.
And I mean, I'm giving you my C V over here.
No, no, but your oldest brother renounced the principle.
And you being the older of the twins makes you the next in line.
He abdicated in 2022.
That was about the same time that I became a public Bitcoiner.
May I ask what prompts one to abdicate Princedom?
So my older brother, Prince Peter, he wanted more of a private life.
He's an artist.
I want to respect that.
I want to protect that.
That he doesn't live in Serbia.
I moved to Serbia back in 2020 and he lives in Spain and he doesn't want to get involved in that.
So the time in 2022, we felt it's something that was always in discussion for many, many years.
And it just so happened that we did it in 2022.
Okay.
And prior to COVID, I guess, prior to COVID, what's your knowledge of Bitcoin and what are you doing in life?
Well, first time I was introduced to Bitcoin was a lot of people, well no, a few people, was on 2011 or so when Wikileaks couldn't accept visa and MasterCard payments, but they could accept Bitcoin.
And I mean, I said, oh, that's interesting.
I really didn't pay attention to then.
I wish I did.
Then it wasn't until 2017 that I actually switched on again.
But it wasn't until the COVID bullshit that happened that I really paid attention to it.
That's wild, then, that's beyond my memory.
Like, I knew WikiLeaks from 2015, 2016.
2011, they were already getting debanked and having financial issues and were relying on Bitcoin as alternative methods.
I mean, I'm pretty much sure that's how I first learned about it.
very cool and so you're not then 2016 2017 what are you doing for work at this I was working in traditional finance, asset management, in a company based, I mean, with offices in New York, but another made a big office in London in a quantitative equity team.
I was a portfolio analyst.
Not that I know many people here might not know what quantitative equity means.
I do, but could you explain it for them?
Well, it's one way of managing, selecting trade, selecting assets.
So we were dealing with equity, so stocks and shares, to put it simply, and we would use algorithms to help choose our trades.
And I was involved mainly in what's called factor investing, which I'm not going to get into the details.
Okay, that's very interesting.
People were telling me now, like, where we've gotten with AI, that investment bankers had been there about five or seven years earlier in terms of making more educated guesses as to what would be a good investment.
Okay, we won't go there.
And then you discover Bitcoin, you get into it.
What prompted that?
Well, what prompted you striking an interest in discovering more about Bitcoin?
Oh, that was 2020 when the COVID pandemic happened.
Sorry, pandemic.
I think we agree on a lot of things, Prince.
Yeah, you saw a lot of really weird stuff happening in the financial markets.
All the stimulus, quantitative easing, getting ramped up again, all the stimulus, all this money printing happening.
And this is something I've seen Bitcoin is talking about.
And I logged into my old dormant Twitter handle and at the time, TwitterX.
And I started following some crypto accounts and also some Bitcoin Maximus accounts.
And I saw the exchange between Bitcoin Maximus and crypto accounts.
I was like, well, the Maxis are talking a lot of sense over here.
So I started studying.
I actually bought the Bitcoin standard.
And I started listening to some podcasts and everything.
And then I was sold.
I was very much switched on.
And then I remember, like, I think it was around, so when COVID hit, you know, markets tanked around March 2020.
They reached the bottom then.
And you'd expect during a normal pandemic that it would be a signal that markets wouldn't perform very well.
But what happened was by September, October later that year, the SP 500 and Dow Jones were hitting record highs again.
And you're thinking, that's funny.
Why is that?
That's because all the money, all the money printing, the cantilling effect, meant that all the money was just been pumping the banks of these massive companies that made up the SP 500 and Dow Jones.
And that basically led me to realize that, yeah, the game is kind of rigged to favor these bigger players.
The printing of money and the devaluing, I think most people understand quantitative easing.
Explain that.
Quantitative easing is a way, to simply put, is a way of the government to stimulate growth again in the markets as they buy their own treasuries.
How do they buy their own treasuries?
They print money to buy their own treasuries.
And what they're trying to do is they're trying to crowd out the fixed income treasury market so people are forced to buy equities to push growth further.
It's just sort of elaborate way of just printing more money.
Okay, but now people are saying that at some point in time, the interest on the debt itself is going to be crippling.
I mean, people are predicting just an entire Trump right now is asking for lower rates because the debt repayments on higher rates is huge.
But what happens when nations go bankrupt, that they can't sustain the debt that they've incurred by printing an inflationary practice?
Well, it's a good question.
And we expect it right now.
The system is unsustainable.
When nations reach 130% debt to GDP ratio, then you're thinking that not many countries have actually gone back without some sort of crisis or collapse.
So this is, I think, few countries have reached beyond the 133% debt to GDP ratio.
So I think we are on imminent crash at some point.
But I say, but as Lawrence Leopard's book, The Big Print stipulates, is that they will bring that weapons, that weapon is to print more money and continue the game.
Okay, and so then what is the faith that you have or what is the practical use of Bitcoin in hedging against or protecting yourself against the ultimate crash that's going to come with fiat currency?
Well Bitcoin is firstly it's finite, 21 million.
I mean we all know that here.
You can't print any more of it.
You can't create any more of it.
And it's on a schedule.
That means Every block you get at the moment 3.125 Bitcoin, and after every four years is a halving, and this goes on to the so to you at the end of the day, you'll end up getting almost 21 million Bitcoin, and that you can't change that.
So it's absolute scarcity, and that's the first time that's ever happened in finance.
The other thing, it's unconfiscatable.
You can't take it away from me.
You can control you want, but at the end of the day, if you protect yourself well, it's something that can't be taken away.
And that's very powerful.
And people are waking up to its empowering and sovereign-giving tools.
The absolute scarcity, 21 million, but if it's infinitely divisible, is it now?
Now I'm thinking, oh, this is going back to my philosophy of like the Zenonian paradox.
If it's absolutely scarce, there's only 20 million, but you can divide it infinitely.
Is it in fact, is it finite?
Yes.
Because you can divide a pizza infinitely, but you still have one pizza.
Now we've entered the Zenonian paradox, but we'll never get to the division.
So, okay, that's, I mean, it's very interesting.
Now, the Bitcoin versus all other cryptocurrencies.
I mean, I know the term Bitcoin maximalist, I suspect everybody here is going to know what it means, but explain what Bitcoin maximalist is versus the alternative.
What?
Not a Bitcoin minimalist.
Well, Bitcoin had it.
Some people like to liken it to an immaculate conception that the conditions of its birth will never be recreated again.
That means that anyone trying to recreate Bitcoin again, you will know that they're recreating it again.
There was a point in time when Bitcoin in its very infancy would have had the ability, people would have had the ability to create a 51% attack on it because there wasn't enough energy hash rate protecting it.
But that is long gone.
But that's not the case for new cryptos trying to come out where they need to sort of have a pre-mine, or they have a 70% pre-mine or 80% pre-mine, where they end up having a big concentration of coins.
And at the end of the day, it's completely decentralized.
And it's just inflation, really, at the end of the day.
So everything else after Bitcoin is just a distraction in inflation.
And it's people just trying to figure out ways of scamming other people to get their Bitcoin.
Okay.
And now, is there a, in transacting in Bitcoin, are there any preferences that you have in terms of not exchanges, but wallets?
Bitcoin itself as a transaction coin is slow, but it's slow for a reason.
It's slow because it's secure.
It's never meant to be lightning spot.
It's security is number one.
Security is what makes it beautiful.
What's been built on top of that security is these layer two solutions.
And one of them is Lightning and the other one is like liquid.
I mean, Lightning is the one that has had more adoption.
And that's what's given the speed of transaction.
And like the name suggests, it can happen in lightning speed.
And this also makes transactions a little bit more private as well.
And it helps to, well, this is what's going to compete with Visas and MasterCards, because with Lightning, you can actually outdo the amount of transactions that Visa and MasterCard have.
It's very interesting.
I've never been to Lugana before, and people were saying that you can transact with cryptocurrency here.
And when I had Efrat on earlier, we're talking about the choke points of where governments can restrict or impede the use, the free use of crypto.
I can see people's concerns when they look at a town like Lugano and see if you're transacting in cryptocurrencies, everything's close by, and they can see this becoming the proverbial 15-minute city where you get used to transacting in crypto, but then the government comes in and says this merchant can't do it, and so now this person is effectively cut off,
and so you don't have a CBDC in the way that Efrat was describing it, but you have a practical one where even though you have this cryptocurrency that can't be taken from you, you're being choked off at the points of these cities which have now become totally digital cities.
Is that a realistic fear?
And is there an alternative or a solution to that potential?
I mean, as an adoption as a medium of exchange, as Lugano is one of the early adopters, it's just a process of better regulations and allowing people having more financial freedom, which is actually quite fitting to Switzerland.
Even though Switzerland don't, they're not suffering from the ills effects of inflation and the fiat system as other countries around the world, but they are very much ahead of the head when it comes to banking and finance.
So the city Lugano, I'll applaud them for adopting Bitcoin and its medium exchange.
But as you said, look, if it was a CBDC, that's very scary stuff.
The CBDC is totalitarianism on steroids.
And this is a highly centralized technology, which means that in a second they can take your money away from you.
They can program the money against you.
And it starts as an easy solution to make your life more comfortable and more efficient and stuff, but it ends up being a tyrannical tool of total control.
But really, Bitcoin doesn't really care so much about adoption with regulations.
It will just happen to your peer-to-peer anyway.
And money doesn't have to transact all the time.
Bitcoin adoption, I don't think, is the best measured by how much transactions is happening.
I think it's more how much people are saving with it.
Because at the end of the day, the fiat economy that we have today incentivizes people to depart with their money because of the inflation, because you can't hold on to fiat because you're losing energy, financial energy, all the time because of the debasement.
Whereas Bitcoin is always gaining energy, where you're always gaining spending power.
So you're going to only partake with your coins when you feel it's correct to partake with the coins.
So it doesn't fuel that trash, high-velocity trash economy that we live today.
So it actually changes that for the better and it re-incentivizes society to do good as opposed to waste.
That is actually the thought that I'm having: it is set aside the role that Bitcoin plays in it, but rethinking currency at large.
Like, I forget, I was listening to someone earlier here this morning, and they were talking about Bitcoin, the scarcity.
At some point, each Satoshi is going to be like a work of art.
But the thing about works of art or like massive diamonds, you can't transact in them, you don't want to, and people hold them not to transact, and so it's not useful as a form of currency.
How is that the middle ground going to be achieved with people holding Bitcoin to appreciate in value, but then also using it as a currency without relying on it converting to fiat?
You're incentivized to hold the Bitcoin.
You're incentivized to do it to have a better future.
Do you understand the concept of lower time preference?
Look, of time preference.
Yes.
It's the way of delaying gratification.
It's the way of sacrificing for a better future.
And it's a concept which is very much studied in Austrian economics.
And so the concept of saving is what creates capital formation.
And that creation of capital formation is what then leads to buying, to exchanging with other people for capital goods and creating an economy.
When you save, you are also benefiting other people around you by lowering their time preference, by raising the value of the money that you're saving together.
So in effect, it's how money should be thought of and used, and how it was back in the days when under a gold standard or other sort of precious metal standards, and even with big ray stones or shells, until they find a way to increase, debase it.
But that's something that's never going to happen to Bitcoin.
Okay, interesting.
And what are you doing now in terms of business?
You're working with January.
Jan 3.
Yes.
And what does that do?
So Jan3 is a company started by Samson Mao.
He is former executive of Blockstream.
And he started Jan 3 2022.
And I joined soon after he started.
And one of his focuses is nation-state adoption and speeding up hyper-Bitcoinization.
Speeding up hyper-bit.
Hyper-Bitcoinization.
That's when hyper-Bitcoinization is another way of saying that at the end of the day, all money will tend to one, meaning that it will tend to go to the hardest money, which is Bitcoin.
It's something that most Bitcoiners are predicting that we will be all one day.
It's a singularity of Bitcoin.
Exactly.
So Jan3, I mean, Bitcoin is a grassroots strategy.
It's a decentralized strategy, and it's decentralization at its finest.
And that's a bottom-up approach.
But Jan 3, we have a top-down approach, which is speaking to nation-states, so presidents, prime ministers, ministers, and high-level politicians, and also corporations and influential individuals, and teaching them how they can adopt Bitcoin in any shape and form, from medium exchange to a store of value, to even mining.
But that's the top-down.
But we also have our decentralized Bitcoin technology tools.
And one of the ones that are a flagship technology is AquaWallet, which is a Bitcoin, it's a Bitcoin owned self-custody wallet that also uses USDT Tether on liquid sidechain.
And it's a way of transacting on the USDT network, but on the liquid sidechain.
And we also do other things.
I mean, I'll continue with that.
So you are basically working towards a future in which crypto is the ubiquitous currency of the world.
Yes, we're just helping to speed it up.
And now the que, now I'm asking this, and it's a stupid question.
I apologize in advance.
We're used to currency exchanges, a dollar buying more in certain parts of the world than in other parts of the world.
What happens when there's crypto as the universal currency?
What impact is that going to have on countries where a dollar would have bought more versus a dollar would have bought less?
Well, yeah, well, that's the thing why we're using USDT, because we are refocusing on the global south, particularly in Latin America, where a lot of people in South America, Central America, are actively seeking US dollar exposure.
They have been hard done by the US dollar dominance, but they prefer to transact in US dollar because they see it as more of an inflation head compared to that local currency.
They understand that, but when it comes to Bitcoin, they might not have reached that level of understanding yet.
But we're helping to facilitate that.
That's why we put USDT on our wallet, because it's a way of them understanding, the way of them transacting with the US dollar, but also having Bitcoin there as a savings vehicle.
And they can also transact it on the Lightning Layer 2 chain solution, which I talked about.
So, yeah, at the end of the day, I mean, some people have envisions that not fiat itself, but the currencies, so the US dollar or maybe the British pound and stuff, might not actually disappear, but may actually function on Bitcoin Rails.
And technically, that's a Bitcoin standard.
All right.
And we've got the time to take off now, but do you see this happening in our lifetime?
That's a good question.
And I hope to see it happening at least in my son's lifetime, but as soon as possible, because really the world is suffering from this horrible financial system that has been placed on us for over 100 years now.
I mean, it goes back even further, but since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, that was some dark, dark stuff that happened there, and we're still dealing with the negative effects of that today.
Amazing.
And now I think we have to go, but because I knew you had kids, hold up, boy.
I got two books for you.
One is my wife's, and one is mine.
It is Louis the Lobster Returns to the Sea children's book.
And my wife did a neuroscientist coloring book.
My wife is a neuroscientist, for those who don't know, but that's it right there, the brain.
So coloring book for kid and a reading book for kid.
Thank you very much.
My son's going to love that, really.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
It was fantastic.
It's a real pleasure to speak to you today.
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