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BITCOIN DEFI: WHO’S LYING? WE NEED JERRY! 🚀 The Aggregated Ep. 109
Recorded: April 18, 2025 Duration: 2:23:43Space Recording
Short Summary
The conversation delves into Bitcoin's growth as a dominant asset, highlighting its increasing market share and the cultural shift towards exploring its potential in decentralized finance. Discussions also touch on the challenges faced by the broader crypto industry, the importance of partnerships, and the evolving narrative around Bitcoin's utility beyond mere value storage.
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Music Thank you. in case you guys were wondering that's how you get hurt to shut up
right censored again
just kidding nicole actually told me to do it yeah yeah
story of my life all right i uh i was enjoying that song i don't know why but i love that song
it reminds me of some like video game music or something i like this song too but yeah
kind of just waiting for people to trickle back in you know cool cool so i hate that i have to go in seven minutes but i have a meeting that i can't uh
bail on unfortunately so if there's anything else you guys want to bounce off of me before i go
now's now's the opportunity
where were we i forget where we left off we're talking about nodes.
No, but listen, listen.
One thing I've been wondering, so I'm not very technical.
I love Bitcoin.
I've read the white paper.
I understand it on a very high level. But once we get into the grassroots, whenever Bitcoin developers and people building on Bitcoin talk, they speak in a way as if everything is figured out.
people building on bitcoin talk they speak in a way as if everything is figured out yet as sort
of like nothing is is really truly built on bitcoin except bitcoin itself why is that so
i mean i i don't know that i would say nothing is built on bitcoin there's a ton of things we
named earlier that are built on bitcoin liquid lightning i guess counterparty again um etfs right uh no no no sorry sorry maybe maybe i
expressed myself wrong not that nothing is built but nothing has been built built that captured as
much attention as bitcoin itself let's say all of the products that are built are sort of very hyper-specialized, and there's no consumer-grade widespread application on Bitcoin, except Bitcoin itself.
I mean, RAP Bitcoin is pretty big.
The ETFs are kind of a product on Bitcoin that's pretty big.
Could things be bigger? Sure.
But I think there's lots of stuff happening.
Okay. I mean, I don't, I wouldn't say.
How do you ask?
Bitcoin itself is the killer app.
You know, all the other things are interesting,
but Bitcoin itself is the killer app of this entire industry can i just
say something i just checked the stats uh i'm alex by the way uh thank you for having me here so uh
we had 15 growth in bitcoin dominance now it's 63 so for the last year all of the industry failed
to produce something at least i cannot even say better
because they couldn't pronounce anything basically uh if we see at the dominant so i don't think
it's possible how it can say something which can be built on top which is better or more popular
than bitcoin so it's impossible task in my opinion no that No, that's true. I guess the question itself isn't.
But it's always like Bitcoiners, people who build on Bitcoin always speak like it's all figured out.
But whatever the problem is, it still exists. There is always the problem that exists.
Yeah. So here's my opportunity to be the contrarian.
And really, it's a cultural decision.
Like Bitcoin fundamentally is a very useful technology for doing tokens and smart contracts
and high frequency payments and all kinds of really cool things.
The culture of Bitcoin of about a decade ago now.
So this is really the scaling war happened in like 2014 through 17 is when the bulk of
it happened.
But it was decided, all right, we're going to turn off most of the script stack where
the scripts that are still allowed in Bitcoin core, we're only going to allow a certain
number of them to occur per transaction.
And then of those that can occur per
transaction, they are limited in size. And so each of those things, and this is things on top of
having a block size limit, but limiting Bitcoin down to not being able to practically use unlock
time or, or, you know, lots of little things that are inherent to Bitcoin made it that you can no longer
build something in and on the Bitcoin network really easily. It can still be done. You can
kind of hack your way through it and there's ways to do it, but that required a lot of new research
and development in the Bitcoin space in order to, you know, and basically a decade to get back to
like, hey, ordinals can be a thing. And that's pretty exciting. But it really is a cultural decision.
And I always say this about every culture that when somebody says that something can't happen,
they're right. They can't make it happen. But if somebody says that they can make it happen,
they probably can make it happen, too. And this is just, it's a, it's a human ingenuity thing.
And there's a reason that some countries or some continents even look the same as they did 20,000
years ago and other places look unrecognizable from 30 years ago. This is like the American dream
versus, you know, the, the Sahara desert, right? It's just like, it's just very different cultures,
very different values. And then those things extrapolated out over time, they just become very different things.
And so Bitcoin, Bitcoin could be the place where all the DeFi is happening and all the
cool smart contracts and apps and token trading and all this stuff.
But it was essentially decided by the culture that those things were not valuable to be doing on Bitcoin. And this is why, you know, in 2017, Bitcoin had like 98% market dominance. And then by, you know, a year after the scaling war sort of ended, it been above 50% dominance for something like eight or nine
years straight, or sorry, not eight or nine years, but about six or seven years straight,
Bitcoin BTC did not have even 50% dominance because there was so much going on in the
Ethereum space and then all the Ethereum, you know, stuff going on.
Don't get me started on Ethereum.
That's another topic.
No, and i agree so ethereum also has all kinds of deep fundamental problems that are based on their cultural decisions about
how a blockchain should work and could work and whatever else i don't think ethereum is a real
solution uh either i think it's it's less scalable than bitcoin actually and i think a lot of people
don't realize that either but um unfortunately, I have to go.
So it's been a pleasure talking up here.
I'm sure the rebuttal against my ideas
will be epic as soon as I leave.
But per usual, it's always a pleasure.
And just remember, the real thing is that
whatever you think you can do with enough work and enough capital and enough good minds that believe they can, you probably can.
But if you start with the idea that it's not for that, it can't work, we shouldn't do this.
Well, you're right.
You can't do it.
Do or do not.
There is no tie.
I want to let Alex up and introduce and and stuff but i just want to respond to that
really quick uh totally agree uh and i know you might have to run so if you have to drop that's
okay kurt but great okay cool so like i totally agree and i like the way you're framing it as a
cultural thing and not necessarily and i know i think you might also think that it was a kind of cabal thing
which there's probably some like truth to that too it's definitely it's some of that too yeah but i
mean overall it was like the entire community the cabal the culture the whatever that decided
exactly what you're saying you know we don't want to build that that is not our priority
if we can find ways to do it great as a little cherry on top, but that is not our priority. Um, and I think that, yeah, I totally
agree. If you say you can't do something, then you probably can't do it. Uh, you see this all
over the world in so many different areas. Um, it's very much like, that's why I try to stay
such a positive person in everything I do, because, um because you can do a lot of things if you
believe that you can do those things and then put the effort forth because if you believe then
you're going to try I mean this it's kind of funny you see this in video games on online video games
there's always like like for in like League of Legends for example and any other games that have
like a surrender feature people will give up or they'll surrender and say we can't win and then
oftentimes you don't win once they start saying that because they're giving up then they're
playing bad they're doing stupid um and uh if you just stay positive you you probably can come back
or you know you probably can build that cool thing that people said you couldn't build uh it's very
much a culture thing and i think the cool thing right now about Bitcoin, last thing is the culture has shifted and it shifted very slowly, which I think is actually a feature. It's shifted very slowly. It started with, well, maybe some other things are OK, like Monero for privacy. Maybe some Bitcoin maxis were like, maybe that's OK.
maybe that's okay. Then for some reason, this was kind of surprising to me. It became,
oh, maybe stable coins are okay. You had Peter McCormick on the What Bitcoin Did show finally
saying, oh, maybe some stable coin stuff is okay if they want to pay for my show in that,
or if people in third world countries want to use that because Bitcoin is too volatile.
Then you had people saying, well, maybe these ordinal things, I mean, that's when things just
flipped on their head. BRC20 ordinals.
The culture really started to shift.
Now you've got an explosion of innovation on Bitcoin.
Go ahead, Alex.
So, yeah.
So I actually wrote about this in my book.
The history of this is actually really interesting of how this happened.
Kurt, don't feel compelled to leave.
I'm not actually rebutting you there. He left. He's like,
I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear it. He actually had another appointment. He had to
go to. He's like, I don't want to hear it. I want to hear rock, but I don't want to hear anybody
else. But look, the history of this was actually, is actually pretty clear. It's, it's mostly written for what happened here. And this
is actually, you know, the the group of people who ended up forming Ethereum. And if you read,
you know, the, the, the history of how Ethereum was formed, it was really a lot of it was that,
that Bitcoin not being and I am drinking my first cup of coffee right now, so you have to bear with me a little bit on this.
But not being, God, what the hell is his name?
Fatality?
Not complete.
No, what is the thing called?
It's not complete.
It's not, you know, there's crap.
I can't think of the word.
But when all the language is actually...
Pre-coffee.
What?
You know what I'm speaking...
It's pre-coffee.
Are you talking about being Turing complete?
I'm pre-coffee right now.
Do you know the famous computer scientist who actually...
Yeah, I think she's talking about being Turing complete.
Turing complete.
Okay.
So Bitcoin, thank you.
I'm like, what?
Go to the scientist, go to the thing.
Okay.
So eventually...
Alex, it's okay.
We're getting old.
And sometimes I forget my own name.
I swear it's...
No, but she hasn't had her coffee.
Let's be real.
I've got the message dropping them on and make sure they put underwear on.
Bitcoin's not Turing complete.
And there was this idea of trying to be able to do the vending machine, right?
Being able to put in any type of smart contract and come out with any type of other agreement or do lots of different things, right?
Which the vending machine, for those of you who don't know, where essentially you could create any sort of smart contract
and basically be triggered by some sort of token or coin.
And you could actually put something in,
it would automatically generate some sort of agreement, action,
whatever it is, and it would automatically complete
and then reset, right?
This idea of being able to just like a vending machine where you put the money in, the food
comes out, and then it resets for the next one. It's actually a very complicated action.
That idea of automating and resetting for the next action, that's what they were shooting for.
And that is something that Bitcoin can't do for a number of reasons, the core reason being that it is not Turing complete. So the idea was,
should we fix Bitcoin and make it Turing complete, where right now it essentially just
passes value from one wallet to another? Should we change it to do more? Or should we leave it the way it is
and build something else? And what they thought was Bitcoin does what it does exceptionally well,
don't screw with it. And that's why they built Ethereum. It wasn't because it was like, we want
to do all of these other, we don't want to do all these other things or we don't see the future. It was really how do we minimize screwing with the thing that is already working, right?
So it's not about negating the value of what exists.
It's really about recognizing the value of what exists and building alternatives at the
same time.
So almost everybody that worked in that group,
and that includes like Charles Hoskinson and, and, and I'm blanking again on, again, I'm not,
I'm pre-coffee. So the creator of Ethereum, everyone knows, and all the, and the creator
of Polygon and all of these people who all work together, right? They are not absolutists in terms of chains.
And although there was a disagreement originally in Ethereum
about absolutism in chains,
but fundamentally none of them are absolutists in chains.
There is this fundamental idea that chains should solve different problems, like different
chains should solve different problems. There isn't one chain or one platform that should solve
one fundamental problem. And that is the idea of leaving Bitcoin alone and solving a different
problem with a different chain. So that's really where that came from, which is not about, you know, is this bad or good
or, you know, like these other chains, like that's something else that that was like layered on on
top of it. And this idea of your chain is bad and my chain is good. All of that came from trying to
maximize the value of the token of the chain or the coin. That's not what the actual fundamental
build of the chain was about. So we have to separate out those ideas. And there was utility
in that idea of my chain is good and your chain is bad, because in order to build those chains,
they had to build core communities. And in building those core
communities, some part of that identity was this chain is the best chain. All other chains are bad.
This chain is great. We're going to do all sorts of great things. And unfortunately, the way most
people tend to build identities is just we versus them, not we and them. So we ended up with a lot of people who ended up saying,
my chain is great, yours sucks. And unfortunately, we're such a small part of the world, like all of
crypto is such a small part of the world, all of blockchain, that there's just not enough people
really to have us versus them. Like all of the chains serve their purpose. They're all different
solutions for different problems. So when we think about what Bitcoin can do, it can do a lot more,
right? But do we want it to is really the fundamental question.
Yeah, I think, Alex, you're really connecting to what Kurt was saying, that it is a matter of
culture. You know, I it is a matter of culture.
You know, I hadn't really thought of it that way, but now having heard you and Kurt speak about this,
it really makes sense because why break something that works really well?
I don't know if Kurt would agree on that exact point.
Like maybe on the fundamental that it was a a cultural decision i think we all three agree on
uh and i think i agree more with uh alex here on it it's not broke don't fix it and try to do the
other stuff you know other places and or on top of bitcoin is l2s or whatever or other clever
innovations like ordinals but uh yeah i think we should leave the l1 alone for the most part not completely but
for the most part that's my personal opinion i think just to add to that stuff i think uh
it's pretty good stuff that was said uh one thing to note though is like the innovation isn't bad
particularly and i'll explain this framework right like like adoption obviously like bitcoin
becomes adopted and you know there's transactions and stuff, it's good for miners, right?
It keeps the network up and running.
There was a point in time, I believe it was like 2023, 2024, early days,
where miners were earning more on the fees itself than the actual block rewards, right?
And so like in the future, we'll be facing that problem.
Once like the last Bitcoin is mined,
how are these miners going to actually like be incentivized to keep it up and running?
And, you know, I think with the idea, it actually like be incentivized to keep it up and running?
And, you know, I think with the idea, it's like, it comes down to, you know, there needs
to be some form of like transactions taking place.
There needs to be some form of adoption being done on Bitcoin and these native assets, or
no, obviously like Bitcoin being coins, which is a great way to, is a great way to, or pretty
much onboard users to the network is a way we can do it, right?
And so I think DeFi definitely makes sense on Bitcoin.
Granted, there is constraints and all those issues that are being worked on.
But I think keeping an open mind to this and even a contrarian view, like I think it makes sense to revisit the topic of maybe scaling Bitcoin when there is network congestions, right?
In periods of network congestions, we can maybe scale it up.
In other periods, it can remain the same.
So I know that's quite a different topic,
but kind of things like that will help Bitcoin
not only become more dominant in that capacity,
but also will enable like, you know, sort of adoption,
trust, and even incentivize miners to keep mining Bitcoin itself.
I actually love that argument that we have to think about what is going to continue to incentivize miners to maintain, because people aren't really going to be building nodes
without mining. And we have to maintain miners.
Miners are dropping their nodes as prices fall. And we've seen that before. And so they end up
getting concentrated in a few miners who have the ability to maintain these nodes.
That's problematic, actually. We want as much diversity in nodes as possible. And that idea of how do we encourage as many nodes as possible and incentivize node holders, whether they're miners or not, particularly if they are miners, and when they convert from non-miners into just node holders, right, how do we continue to incentivize them in the long run? Because we
have to look at these things. We tend to be not just, you know, people in blockchain. People in
blockchain are extremely short-term thinkers. People in the U.S. tend to be also very short-term
thinkers. But we need to start thinking 50 to 100 years, you know, like how is this going to play out?
Because that is really how financial systems work. We have to think like 25, 50, 100 years, you know, like, how is this going to play out? Because that is really how
financial systems work. We have to think like 25, 50, 100 years, what is going to happen with this?
Because that's really how we determine value. If we want to think about building generational
wealth, you have to think about it in 100 year terms. So this is actually, I think, a really
good way to consider this, which is is what are we going to build for the
long run? How are we going to maintain this system for the long run? Because we don't want people
dropping their nodes because value doesn't exist for them anymore. And then what, trying to pick
it up once value does exist? That's not a good way to maintain a system. I think it was Rock who said
these ETFs, BlackRock, or other institutions that are now building the ETF products, for example,
they are also incentivized to run the nodes
because they technically own a very significant portion.
So people also like Michael Saylor, but it cannot be just like...
It might even be argued that they have a fiduciary responsibility to do so.
Very nicely said.
Especially considering they have investors.
If they didn't, it's just a stupid risk to take not to have a note.
But I don't know.
know if so one one theory i have about bitcoin usage is that if we get to a point where bitcoin
in whatever form is used on a municipality level that it's used to effectively manage the finances
of you know society structures then each municipality would have to also run its own node
structures, then each municipality would have to also run its own node. I mean, I don't know
exactly how it is. I know most people are from the U.S. here, and I don't know exactly how it's
structured there. But let's say on a state level, you have towns, and then each town would have its
own Bitcoin reserve that is provided to them by the federal government. And then each town would
also run its node to make sure that it maintains contact. but that's like i don't know if that's dystopian or i'm really not sure what
what kind of future that is i don't necessarily think that that's this dystopian i mean i think
it would be interesting to think about a municipality running a Bitcoin node.
I think of the futures as the government having some sort of chain where all of your documents can be held in DID, some sort of digital ID.
DID, some sort of, you know, digital ID, and having your documents held so you can, like,
vote on blockchain, and you can get all of your documents on blockchain and everything,
and so you don't have to, like, send away for your birth certificate or whatever it is. You
can get everything on blockchain. And then also, any municipality or local election or PTA or
shareholder meeting, anything that wants to vote,
they pay a nominal fee for this chain to vote. And that ends up being like hundreds of millions
of dollars every year that offsets taxes. So the government is now earning money
instead of getting money from taxpayers, right? Rather than taxing money, than taxing like taxing citizenry, they're actually providing a service that's why I love this idea of like,
let's have the government offer services that are not a drain, but services that bring in money,
revenue bearing services. So that's one of the things that I think that it could do.
And then I do think that there's going to be some sort of non-fiat-based stablecoin that has to be offered internationally in order to maintain value if your economy starts being unstable or inflationary or whatever.
And then you can actually move your assets into a stable coin that is non-fiat based.
I think that's a great idea.
In terms of Bitcoin, it could be definitely...
Or just use Bitcoin as that thing.
Except Bitcoin's an asset, not a stable coin.
That's the problem, right?
So I'm just looking for something that will maintain value. I'm just looking for something that is an exchange of value that's
not fiat-based. There's not very many things in the world that do that, and most currencies don't
do that. Right. I'm looking for something completely outside of the currency system to do that.
looking for something completely outside of the currency system to do that. Now, Bitcoin's an
asset. And right now, its biggest function is actually a non-asset class, right? So most of
the world, when you look at indices like stock markets, et cetera, when you look at these things,
what you're seeing in terms of like bond markets and stock markets, when they go up and down, you're seeing only a specific group of people, the wealth of them go up and down.
One of the most interesting things that we've seen about Bitcoin is it allows us to see a bigger picture in terms of like down into the middle class.
We've been able to see globally the disposable wealth of the world as it goes
up and down, right? It's the best index we've had so far of disposable wealth. And one of the
reasons we see it go up and down, people don't realize that as much as there's a lot of people
saying, hold on to it, hold on to it, hold on to it. You know, there are a lot of people who are literally using it when their economy collapses or when, you know, something happens
and there's an emergency, they will liquidate their Bitcoin because they need the cash. It's
a liquid market. So they'll liquidate their Bitcoin and then they'll buy back into it as soon as they can. So it's basically a
really good marker of how much money average people have around the world. It's been a really
interesting marker. So I've actually been seeing it as it's grown. And we definitely see it more actually not in the US. So it's been
a really interesting marker of that. I think if we have more government nodes, that might dissipate.
I don't know that I want a government. I don't know that I want government incentive in this. I kind of personally,
my own personal view is I like having this sort of freewheeling nature of it where it's not
necessary, there's no government incentive to keep the price at any particular state.
to keep the price at any particular state. I like that people are using it as sort of their
secondary bank account. And that seems to be working for people. So I don't think it's dystopian.
I just think that it's not something that I would necessarily want a government to have a vested interest in the price per se.
Yeah, but I think this is inevitable because, for example, fiat will always lose value over time.
For example, the dollar doesn't have the same value that it had 20 years ago.
Yeah, it's still a dollar.
But if you hold the dollar from 2000 and 2005, you cannot buy the same amount of things that you're used to.
And it's the same for every single currency in the world, a ship for Bitcoin.
If you hold the Bitcoin from 2009, you can buy a lot of things that you go on back then.
And, well, for other things, we also have the ZK roll-up that solves the trilemma.
Speaking of the third incomplete part.
I think it's interesting you say that, like, 2009, you know, can buy, you know,
you can buy more with it now. And I think that's where people always try and compare Bitcoin to
the dollar, which it's not, you know, a currency is meant to exchange goods between each other
that don't have barter trades, right? Like if you work in financial services,
you can't go trade your consulting fee for a loaf of bread. So you need a currency to
exchange that. But same type of thing. If you owned a share of Amazon from 2000 until now,
you can buy a lot more with that one share of Amazon than you could then. So I think like a lot
of people get confused. They confuse what Bitcoin is. Is it a store of value? Is it a currency? Or is it a growth asset? And I
think in this last tariff war, we actually saw that it's quasi. It's not one of those things.
Like gold was kind of shown to be a store of value because gold's gone up. I mean, I don't
even know what percent. I think from like 2,900 to 3,200 during this mess, Bitcoin went down
because Bitcoin is viewed as a growth asset
for a lot of different people.
And same thing with like the dollar.
Yeah, you can't buy the same thing with a dollar that you can today,
but that's because the good or the service has increased.
You know, if you can, I mean, you compare like a TV,
you know, today you can buy a hundred inch TV for $3,000.
Back then you could buy, you know, a 40 inch TV. Does that mean that000. Back then, you could buy a 40-inch TV.
Does that mean that there was, for $400, does that mean that there was inflation?
Or did the product or service get better?
When I go to a fast food restaurant now, is it a 15-year-old that probably doesn't care about their job manning that burger station?
No, it's probably like a 40-year-old that this is their job, this is their career.
They take pride in the quality of the food. So I think it's really interesting that we don't know
where to place Bitcoin yet because it's still in its experimental phase. And what I kind of wonder
is, is that is the use case of Bitcoin going to change as the price appreciation changes?
And I think that's a really cool correlation to explore.
Like it's a growth asset
when it was super appreciating in value,
but as the growth of the value
or the growth rate of the price changes,
does it change that way?
So gold was the same way.
Gold used to be a store of value.
It was something you went and searched for
because it was a volatile, a speculative asset that went up a lot in money or you had.
So I think it's just going to be interesting to see that.
But they all work in tandem with each other.
Like you can't you can't just have Bitcoin that works for the whole world, but then have different economies that function on different economies and different trade systems.
So I think it's going to be really interesting to see how Bitcoin is used. And is it
going to be a store value like gold where people park there in times of uncertainty? Or is it going
to be something like a stock where people are putting money into it to get an above inflation
rate of return? So I think it's just going to be really interesting. I think the case is still out
on that. I think there's a couple couple points i definitely want to kind of mention that
overall good take but i think technology does reduce the price of stuff right over the course
of time we've seen technology reduce and sort of just help out in different aspects i think one
thing to note is like the reason bitcoin even existed was because of like the financial system
that the well 2008 right like that was a direct response to that. And so I think the thing that was
trying to fix was the monetary system, which is unlimited printing inflation, which do
cause prices to go up in some capacity, right? I think it's still premature to see where
Bitcoin would head if it's going to be a sort of asset value or some growth speculation
vehicle. I think over the course of time, you'll see more stability and sort of reach a point
where like, you know, probably reach specific returns
over the course of time.
But yeah, I think it's just too early to tell,
but regardless, I still think Bitcoin
is pretty much an optimized investment vehicle for now.
Yeah, 100% agree.
But remember that Bitcoin was actually not replacing
the the monetary system as much as it was replacing the banking system so we actually
again this goes historically as to what it was replacing we have rec and this is what it was
replacing so we have to look again at what exactly the purpose is and how much it's fulfilling it. And you can see why what the Bitcoin blockchain is versus Bitcoin itself. Right. So the blockchain itself is supposed to replace the banking system. And the Bitcoin is the value that's transferred within the banking
system, right? Like, which is the coinage within the system, right? So that's the...
Why do you say that it's meant to replace banking and not monetary system?
No, I want to say something really quick. There's a lot of interference behind Alex. I'm not sure
what that is, but it sounds like, Alex, I don't know if there's like a TV behind you or something, but there's a lot of driving. Sorry. And Bitcoin is replacing the currency, right?
So we know that it's intended to replace currency, but the way it functions is not a currency, right?
It can't actually replace a currency
because it's missing some vital components of currencies.
It actually functions more as an asset.
That's just how it actually functions.
It's regardless of intention there are some specific things that assets versus
currencies which are opposites right currencies and assets are opposites and
there are some specific requirements that are needed to make something a
currency and there are specific things that are required to make something a currency. And there are specific things that are required to make something an asset.
And this is just how these things function.
And so we have to look, not just,
we can look at intention
and we can look at the way something actually functions
and we can see what something was designed to do
and how it actually functionally works.
Okay, and- So that brings up the question. So that just brings up the question. to do and how it actually functionally works. Okay.
So that brings up the question.
I'm also being asked if we can intro Omniti.
Sorry, sorry, sorry, Hummingbird.
But also being asked if we can give an intro to Omniti Network.
Hey, all good.
We're just, you know, happily waiting our turn.
We joined you guys earlier and it seems like the spaces must have got rugged, but we've been building Bitcoin infrastructure for a while.
Please check out docs.omini.network if you want to build something cool with us.
But yeah, I don't mean to detract from the ongoing conversation. So thanks for thanks for throwing the mic over, but we don't mean to kill y'all momentum.
So thanks for throwing the mic over, but we don't mean to kill y'all momentum.
Good to have you, Armie.
Yeah, just so, and since we do have a lot of speakers who are not regulars here, please, if people do know, when there's an opportunity to jump into the conversation, please do feel free to just jump in instead of raising your hands.
It is an open forum.
So thanks.
Now let's continue.
Yeah.
Let's retweet the space, guys.
We got rugs, so we lost a lot of our listeners.
So let's retweet the space guys we got rugged so we lost a lot of our listeners uh so let's retweet the space we got another hour uh of titillating conversation
i had to i had to use that word i like that word
um but yeah please uh spread the space to your friends etc as always and let's continue
i i guess i'll just jump in on the like what it's being used for, what it's intended to
be used for. I think it's, you know, we don't know what the network will be used for. It's an
amorphous thing and there's, you know, it's not binary and there's a spectrum and there's maybe
what people imagined it would be or what Satoshi imagined it would be and then there's what it actually gets used for and over time right um look at a ethereum people might have thought you know
ethereum would be used for i don't know nfts or who knows what you know there was all kinds of
speculation early on on what it could be used for uh and then there's things that started it started
to be used for that nobody really thought about over time.
So same thing with Bitcoin.
We don't know and I don't think anyone has.
The cool thing about it is no one makes that decision
including Satoshi.
What he might have thought or intended for it to be
is not necessarily what it may be in the end.
It is pretty interesting to see how that's going to evolve. And it's interesting to
see how possibly that changes with the rate of appreciation in the asset. Same thing in tradfi
trading and stuff like that. When an asset has parabolic type returns, it's used as one thing. And then when the market cap gets so big, or,
you know, there's, you know, retail involved, or there's just mass adoption, you know, it's
commoditized. So I think that's going to be one of the coolest things to see is how is how that
evolves and then who, and then who, you know, either build something using the network. I would
love to hear from this panel about maybe ways that
the Bitcoin network could actually like monetize itself, like almost lease out the network for
the security that provides. But we can get into that in a second. But just something I thought
kind of happening with Babylon, right? That's proposed. No, that's happening with Babylon
and a couple other third party systems and LSTs, but there's requested updates to core BIPs that are funded and recognized that do that same thing, like drive chains, BIP 300 and BIP 301.
That's exactly what they're for, is to say, hey, I'm going to lock up a certain amount of Bitcoin.
That's going to be my economic security.
I'll be bound to the operational security of Bitcoin, because I'll have to keep track of the consensus and all the blocks. And then as I want to do something on another blockchain,
I will have to spend out of my HDLC every action, every Bitcoin block every so often.
If nobody knows that, please, BIP300 and BIP301. I didn't come up with this stuff. It's just
knows that please bip 300 and bip 301 i didn't you know come up with this stuff it's just there's
been a long-term um understanding that bitcoin having the growth security it once it doesn't
really have a significant competitor the the only thing to do is
you cut out a bit there um but yeah drive chains gotten, I mean, nobody's really built anything on
them, I don't think, or nothing that got any adoption, but it definitely seemed interesting.
There was like, I don't know if elemental side chain was based on drive chain or not, but yeah,
they haven't gotten any adoption or anything yet. But, you know, we keep trying and we keep
thinking of new ways to innovate, to solve problems. That's the beauty of the human species.
I think there's actually a lot of ways to...
I think I'm rugged. I can't hear everybody. I'll come back.
Go ahead.
He can't hear us. He's going to come back. Go ahead, Alex.
Oh, yeah. I think that there's a lot of ways to to
monetize and I definitely think that this you know the DeFi is is an
interesting way but since you're looking at fundamentally the chain itself
replacing the banking system look at how many ways the banking system has found
to monetize right the banking system is basically one big monetizing system. It wasn't
supposed to be, but that's what it is. So, I mean, think fundamentally about how that has actually
managed to do, that's managed to function. So I think fundamentally, there's a lot of ways for
Bitcoin and then the Bitcoin network to monetize. That doesn't necessarily mean that's different from
people holding Bitcoin monetizing, right? Because you can always, that's two different things,
right? Basically, right? So there's this system itself being able to monetize, that's node holders.
And then there's the people holding Bitcoin monetizing, that's essentially coin holders. And then there's the people holding Bitcoin monetizing. That's essentially coin
holders. Those are two different things. So you have to think of who am I looking to monetize? Who
am I looking to try to increase value for? But both of those can be done in different ways.
And we just have to think, well, what are we trying to do? What are we trying to increase the value of for whom? But it's definitely possible.
I've got actually a really cool idea that I've been talking about for a long time that I would
love to see others adopt. And I think we could actually build something to this effect. So we've already started building the ZK Bitcoin Alliance.
This is another alliance.
I'd like to see another Bitcoin alliance.
So the ZK Bitcoin Alliance is a focus on kind of not open sourcing,
but bringing a bunch of teams together to build the technology that we need
to make ZKs on Bitcoin be fully production ready and mainstream
and globally mass adoptable. But another idea that I've had that I don't know if I've talked
about publicly yet, but I might as well try to start somewhere, is if we could get various Bitcoin
L2s, projects, maybe WBTC, who knows what,
anyone that cares about Bitcoin,
if we could get everyone to join an alliance
where they agree that on their protocol,
they take some of like,
the easiest example is L2s of Bitcoin.
If you're an L2 or a side chain
and you want to show that you are aligned
and you stand kind of in unity with Bitcoin, you could enact something
like EIP-1559 from Ethereum on your L2. And if you do that, you start burning small amounts of
Bitcoin over time. And if we had, call it a hundred protocols doing this, we could actually
make Bitcoin deflationary, which I think would be pretty cool.
And you might have, some people might want to burn 1% of their network fees.
Some people might burn 5%.
Maybe to join the alliance, you have a standard.
Or maybe at first it's just a working group, and over time you adopt standards.
And we get the whole industry to try to move towards this and get people basically burning Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is deflationary already. Bitcoin is deflationary already.
Bitcoin is deflationary already.
I'm sorry, I'm about to go.
And I'm just trying to figure out, first of all,
I don't know who this troll guy is up here.
I don't know who this idiot guy is.
I'm going to call you an idiot
because I don't know why you're just throwing up emojis.
I got a little personal troll guy dummy up here.
Who is that? What's going on?
I don't know. There's some dummy up here.
Speaker or audience?
No, he's up here as a speaker, but I don't know who he is.
What's the name, though?
I've never seen him. Hector? Who's this guy?
Anyway, I don't know. I don't want to popularize him for for his lunacy
but uh yeah man uh i don't really know why he's up here but i actually have credentials uh and
i'm not really sure well whoever it is let him let him let him jump up and say what what was
the emoji what was uh intent oh no he's just been trying to troll everything I say And I'm not entirely sure why
I've never met him or know anything about him
Do you have a second for him to tell you
What he's trolling or why?
Yeah, why are you
Trying to troll me, dude?
I don't know you
I've never met you
Are you a bot? Are you like a person?
What the fuck are you?
If you stop speaking, you can find out
I don't really care, what the fuck are you? Well, if you stop speaking, you could find out.
I don't really care, honestly.
I got to tell you, I don't really care about you, to be honest.
I'm just going to, yeah, you take no space in my head.
But I just, so I just wanted to tell you, thank you so much, by the way, for having me.
I got to take off right now.
You guys are awesome.
Thank you for the invite all the time, as always.
And I will see you guys probably next week.
All right.
See you, Alex.
Well, I think you're also going to say something about it being deflationary.
And Bitcoin absolutely is deflationary because every day people lose their keys.
They lose their drives. They lose their drives.
They lose everything.
I mean, I imagine in like 20 years, there's probably only going to be like 8 million Bitcoin that's even like usable because so many people lost it.
So I think Bitcoin has a really good deflationary system right there too.
But I wanted to throw something back to you.
Why do you like burn instead of like redistributing the Bitcoin to the network or existing Bitcoin holders?
I always think that's just kind of an interesting thing of burn versus redistribution.
So in stocks, they do buybacks and those go to kind of the company.
I think stocks should do burns.
I think they would be more beneficial to the actual shareholders.
But stocks are going to an asset.
So it makes sense if you have a company that's worth a billion dollars, you want to reduce those shares because each share is worth more.
Are you saying that the Bitcoin market cap—
But when you buy back, you're not reducing shares.
You're just giving them to someone else.
If you burn them, you're not reducing shares. You're just giving them to someone else. If you burn them, you are actually reducing
shares.
Well, when you buy back, you take them out of circulation
and move them from treasury.
Temporarily.
They're going to someone.
So I like burns.
Like we were doing
exactly what you said previously
with quick swap. We were
giving the revenue of the network to the,
the,
the,
I don't want to call them shareholders.
It's a decentralized network,
but yeah,
there's some analogs there,
but we were giving the revenue to the community and the community voted to
instead we did it as a trial because we,
you know,
we didn't know like you,
what,
what are the implications?
And so we did
a three month trial and it went pretty well. And I'm not really supposed to talk about token price,
but I don't know what, whatever I'm kind of going to here because it relates because, you know,
these decentralized networks, the token price actually does matter. The people that hold it
care, they hold it. And the more that they hold it and the better the price performance, the more the value of those tokens and the more things you can do.
Just kind of like equity. The difference is these are run by communities and equities are run by companies.
So we did a vote for three months to instead of doing staking, I think the vote was to either burn 50% stake and give 50% stakers,
keep it the same, just give it all to stakers or completely burn it. And the community voted
to completely burn it. We did it for three months. It went pretty well. We were burning a lot of
quick that actually scaled up over time to where we were almost deflationary with quick. And then
we did another vote recently to increase the fee
that was going to increase the amount of the fees that were going to that. And now quick swap over
the last month or two has actually been deflationary. And now I can't talk about like how
that affects price performance, but if you want to go look into it yourself, it's interesting.
I think deflationary is a cool thing for assets that you want to have a good
value uh i think for bitcoin it would be pretty cool you can argue that bitcoin may be deflationary
sort of already by lost coins uh but hey why not make it more deflationary um i wanted to do this for doge chain but a lot of doge maxis doge chains a doge l2
uh that uses wrap doge as the gas and i very early on wanted to uh enact uh eip 1559 for that
and burn some doge but a lot of the doge maxis in the community said um and we were trying to
play nicely with the like doge foundation and the maxis um we were trying to play nicely with the like Doge Foundation and the Maxis.
We were trying to compromise.
So we didn't release it with the EIP 1559.
The reason that they didn't like the burn idea was because they their opinion was kind of based on some things Elon had said, which is that those should be used as a currency, not as a store of value. And if you start burning it, you could make it more of a store of value and gather value more, and then people won't want to spend it. They'll want to hold it,
which is an interesting way to look at something when in reality, 90 plus percent of Doge holders
are not holding it to use it as a payment mechanism. They're using it as a store of value
or because they love the fun of it or whatever. But for Bitcoin, something that's clearly a store of value,
why would we not want to decrease the supply over time?
And if we could get people to voluntarily, through networks all over the place,
just take 1% of their revenue and use that to burn Bitcoin
and make Bitcoin deflationary or maybe very deflationary,
why would we not want to do that?
I have a reason.
I have to jump in and tell you,
because if we lose a number of the units of account, then we lose some of the utility and
value of Bitcoin. I do very much appreciate the idea of burning sats, and I think it is actually
more than novel. It's economically productive. But there's a real argument to say that, hey,
if we don't also consider millisats or some other thing so that
we can have more fractions of a Bitcoin, we are taking away some of the utility.
I think that could be done without any fork too, but I could be wrong on that. And why do we need
to do that? Right now a sat is less than a penny. Why do we need less than a sat?
Because a sat is the smallest unit of account on Bitcoin.
So if you make it more deflationary, then there's fewer of those units of account to be used.
So that's my point is that from a mechanical standpoint, it's very useful to have a large number of sats that we can use. It's economically useful to burn them, but without a mechanism to
make more use of the sats we've got on hand, because you're right it's a fair point you know and this was actually brought up
in the quick swap community uh as a discussion so luckily just before this vote or maybe a year
before this vote uh the quick swap community re-denominated its token so there was only a
million quick in the beginning. And when quick
hit 1.7 billion market cap and like 2000 X early on, and that all went to the community, we gave
all the tokens, the community, me as a co-founder, I didn't take any. Um, but so, um, I should
disclaim that LDA did receive 1% to do all of the marketing and BD and ecosystem growth and
everything from the beginning, 1% over like five years, which is nothing. So three percent went to some founders.
I refused my portion. LDA, which I am CEO and majority owner of, did get one percent. I,
working for LDA for five years, have gotten about a quarter of that one percent just by working for
the company and taking my pay in quick. I also bought massively
more on the open market, many multiples more on the open market. But anyways, we did this vote
because quick, when it hit 1.7 billion, the quick price was like $1,600, $1,700 a coin, a token.
And that is like, for a lot of retail is not attractive. This is why companies do stock splits. Right. Coca-Cola has done like 13 stock splits in the last hundred years. You know, Tesla has done several in the last 10 years. So that unit bias is a thing. It matters. People don't you know, people are scared to buy Bitcoin because it is worth 100k a coin. But what they don't understand is that
it's just a decimal denomination thing. It means nothing, but it is a psychological thing. So I did
some math, an interesting fact. If Amazon had never done a stock split, it would be worth $86,000
right now. Pretty similar to the price of Bitcoin, actually.
Now it started higher, so it hasn't multiplied as much. But Amazon has done stock splits. That's
why their price is, I don't know, whatever it is, $20 or $100, whatever it is. So you have a good
point there. Actually, Samip, one of the co-founders of Quickswap, had brought this up as an issue.
So that's why we actually didn't do this earlier we wanted to do it actually years before but we were like we don't want the quick like um there
to be less quick because already there's not enough for this you know just psychological unit
bias but we did a we did another vote a year before which was uh to re-denominate quick and
make to launch a new token with the exact same
tokenomics and a smart contract where you just simply could turn in your old QUIC, and one QUIC
was turned into 1,000 new QUIC. That's why on CoinMarketCap, you see two different QUICs with
the same market cap, because they are the same token. They are just, call it, instead of having
a dollar bill, you have 100 pennies, or in this case, 1,000 pennies.
So it helps with the unit bias thing, which is, again, just a psychological thing anyways.
I'll stop there.
Well, I think just really shortly to tail it, you did explain the reasoning and why this is the right choice, not to argue against myself. But it does make a lot of sense to wait.
does make a lot of sense to wait. Like if the demand is there and you do the equivalent of a
stock split or in some ways alter the unit of account in a system, like that makes a lot of
sense. Doing it surreptitiously because you're such a good boy planning for the future? No,
that's not nearly as productive. I'm sorry, can you repeat that? I didn't understand. Can you
repeat that? It makes the most sense to wait for the need to do it well i mean we all want the price of
bitcoin to go up so and by the way when you say why not give it to the users or the miners or to
someone as staking well if you give it to a certain class of people and this is what was happening
with the quick token is that revenue was given to the quick stakers now you can argue those are the
most kind of valuable people in the quick swap network maybe you could argue that some people would argue
that i'm not arguing that for the record okay so the other but if you burn it what you're doing is
you are actually distributing it now instead of quick having call it a um you know 10 or 20 or 30% APY to the stakers, which was like a third of the quick tokens were staked.
If you instead burn the quick tokens, you are now reducing that APY from call it 20% for one third of the people to 7% for all of the people.
7% for all of the people. And then that has implications, which I probably shouldn't talk
about with price and things that, you know, the best marketing in our industry is number go up.
And so if, if, if a token in this industry, I'm not talking about quick now, if a token
generically in this industry is goes down in value because it's inflationary, then people
don't want to hold it. So it creates a
spiral of downward price action. If instead a token is deflationary, so there are less OEs in
existence, more people want to hold it. When more people want to hold it, price goes up more.
And when price goes up more, more people want to hold it and you create a positive
price spiral. So these are some different ways of looking at it. I think, look, if we could get protocols to voluntarily burn just a small amount, 1% each, 100 protocols, and they're essentially
donating that Bitcoin to the rest of all the people, when you lose your wallet, you are
donating to the rest of the Bitcoiners because you are making Bitcoin more scarce by voluntary or by
accident. I'm saying let's get people to volunteer to do it so that we can show because
many protocols people are arguing are not maybe good for Bitcoin or they're not really Bitcoin L2s
or they're not really aligned with Bitcoin. Maybe they're Bitcoin in name only, kind of like Gary
Gensler would call, you know, what did he say? Decentralized in name only, right? So if a protocol
is building something
that they call a Bitcoin layer too,
but it's not actually benefiting
the Bitcoin users or network or holders
in any tangible way,
this is a way to give them a tangible way
to benefit Bitcoin and show alignment
with Bitcoiners.
So with Quik,
I just have a quick question on Quik.
So if this breaks... Pun intended. So with QUIC, I just have a quick question on QUIC.
So is, and if this breaks, you can't disclose whatever,
is the QUIC token a claim to,
like, is it set up like a DAO where the token is actually a claim to the business revenue and assets and all that kind of stuff?
Well, it's not a business, but it's a DAO.
And you could make that argument.
I think some lawyers somewhere would make that argument about most projects in crypto.
Now, luckily, no one is deemed quick as security.
I think it would be ridiculous to call it that.
It's like one of the most decentralized in this aspect of any project in the industry
next to Bitcoin because we didn't do any token sale.
We didn't raise any funds. We didn't do a public ICO. And some of the co-founders took nothing.
And we gave 97% of the supply to the community. We generated 100 million in revenue in our first
year. And I, as a co-founder, and many would say the face of Quickswap, I never took $1. I've never
taken $1 from Quickswap. I've never sold a single of those
tokens that I earned. And I had to pay taxes on those. I should have done an 83B or something on
them, but I didn't. And so I had to pay a bunch of taxes on those tokens when they were actually
worth a lot, when it was a 1.6 billion market cap and I was receiving those. And so I had to pay
taxes on those, which sucked. But I never took any, I never spent them.
I never took any, I work for quick swap, you know, the foundation and, and, and serve the
Dow and I've never taken anything for it. And so if anyone wants to come and say quick swap is a
security, they can fuck themselves. I think you miss, I think you misunderstood. I was actually
making the other point. You know, I was actually making the other point in that, yes, when understood claim or participation in the DAO's affairs.
And like you said, the 100 million of revenue in Bitcoin.
It's not the same.
Like I can hold 10 Bitcoin, but I don't benefit at all from all the transaction value on the network.
I don't even necessarily benefit if
someone burns a bunch of Bitcoin, unless that directly makes the price go up. So I just find
it- Well, burning by default makes price go up, like generally in the long term, right? It just
makes it more scarce. It doesn't mean it directly will do it. But if right then and there, a protocol
is converting the revenue, let's say it's like, call it Merlin or Bob, which are technically kind of more layer twos of Ethereum and their kind of side chains of Bitcoin.
If they're doing their transactions in ETH or in their own token as gas.
But then, you know, you do an EIP 1559 and with some gas or fee abstraction, you actually take some of that and convert it instantly to a wrapped Bitcoin.
And then you take that wrapped Bitcoin once a week or whenever you want to do it
as a DAO or however they do it as a foundation.
And then you bridge that over to real Bitcoin and you send that to the burn wallet.
You are effectively pushing the price of Bitcoin up
if they are constantly buying Bitcoin and then burning it, right?
Removing it from...
But why not take that same...
And again, this is just, you know, I agree with that side of things, like the fundamentals and the technicality of it.
I'm just thinking of like how mainstream people would view something, right?
You know, why not take that same revenue and have it get distributed out to
Bitcoin wallets? Like that might make the price of Bitcoin wallets. I mean, you could do that.
There's all kinds of problems with that. Because wouldn't that make the price of Bitcoin go up
more if people all of a sudden were like, okay, I can go buy five Bitcoin. I can set it in a wallet
and then I benefit from what the whole entire network does by getting a
thing dropped, that might be more appealing than someone just saying like, oh, the supply went from
21 million to 20 million, 990,000. It's a, it's a really, really, really good point. For some
people that would be more bullish or more hype for them or would make them want to hold the token.
There are a huge class of investors in the world that live off of and really look for cash flow. They look for dividends,
right? They buy stocks that have dividends. And then there are some people like myself,
which I don't care about that so much. To me, if I have an asset that appreciates by 7%
per year, or I could instead hold an asset that appreciates by 5% a year.
Um, but gives me a 2% dividend. I'm like, eh, what is that really like a big thing for me,
especially when dividends are classified in not all, but many cases as, uh, income,
which is usually taxed higher and capital gains is taxed lower to me. I don't, it's,
it's six and one half dozen. right? But there are some people who
would like that. And it's a good point. You could do a hybrid and you could, the alliance.
What if the Bitcoin ETF, like what if, because BlackRock holds, you know, billions of dollars
of Bitcoin, it gets, you know, a big drop every month and now Ibit pays a dividend. I mean,
I just feel like that would bring in a much bigger
class of investors that would push the price up more but yeah just it's a good it's a good point
there's other arguments that instead of burning it you could send it to like a bitcoin foundation
or you could send it to the core devs or you could send it to lightning devs or there's all
kinds of things you can do with it that are arguably better in some ways but um i don't
know i think this is a really good
point. I mean, you could also do a hybrid and you could let the people in the alliance vote on what
to do with it. You can make a DAO out of the alliance. Now everybody wants to have a node
because by having a node, you get to vote on what gets done with that Bitcoin every month.
You could have. Yeah, you could make it so you vote with your Bitcoin
or you could vote with your,
on something like Babylon or whatever.
But you could, so you could have it
where now the community says,
hey, let's try a burn for a bit,
like we did with QuickSwap and see how it works.
And if we like it, we stick to burn or we do 50-50.
We have half burnt and half airdropped
or airdrop wouldn't work.
I always like the 50-50.
Just do it half both ways and
then everybody's happy a little bit 50 always worked out pretty i i actually i i like this idea
i love these spaces because we get to come up with cool ideas and test them out and you know
throw things at each other and and uh you know find holes in each other's arguments and find
better solutions in the end i think that would be pretty cool, actually, to leave it up to like
some kind of either DAO or to the members of the alliance to decide what to do with
the funds.
So we have someone with their hand up. B-O-A-S. I'm not sure how that's pronounced.
Close.
I actually know how that's pronounced,
and it's not a nice word.
I can't say it.
Okay.
So I just wanted to say, like, just listening in here,
I feel like you guys are making a classic mistake
of thinking that scarcity equals value.
And just to draw it like an analogy,
imagine if there was only a certain amount of oxygen.
Well, there's competition for oxygen, right?
We all need oxygen, so the value of oxygen is going to go up.
What if somebody came along and suggested that we destroy half of the oxygen to make the remaining oxygen more valuable?
It's not a good model.
And the problem is the analogy of thinking that scarcity is the primary driver of
value is a mistake. And it's the kind of classic canonical mistake that Bitcoiners make. If you
reduce the amount of Bitcoin in the world, then it'll be more valuable. No. Some people will pile
into it with the money that they have and drive the price up.
And those who have it already will pile out of it, cash into fiat and crash it.
So it's just a way of redistributing money already in the world, wealth already in the world faster.
It's not a way of making more valuable.
I'm going to make more value.
One more thing.
I'll let you finish
and then I'll give you some pushback there.
Well, actually,
I'd like to comment on
distribution and DAOs.
But anyway,
the way to create more value
in the analogy
is to create more oxygen.
So there's more growth.
There's more people.
Now, I'm not suggesting
that you make more Bitcoin.
But what I'm saying is that
by simply focusing on scarcity as the fundamental driver of value,
you're actually missing the value of Bitcoin, which is you want it to be much more widely distributed,
which is the equivalent of making more oxygen.
You want it to get smaller in bits terms.
You want the satoshis to be more widely distributed amongst more people.
Like dollars.
Like fiat.
Well, fiat has an inherent structural problem, right?
Yeah, no scarcity.
Yes, exactly.
And Bitcoin differs.
Sure, fine.
But it's a fine balance, right?
But what happens if you only ended up with one Bitcoin?
I don't think we're...
If we get to that point, that's a good problem to have.
No, it's not a good problem to have.
It's a bad problem to have.
And you're pushing it in the wrong direction, is what I'm saying.
Like, to have a fixed supply is fine. It's inflationaryary for now and it will be deflationary when it stopped being stopped being issued can we not call that wrong because it has been done
uh there was a project called nano not the current asset called xno or whatever it is
there was a independent blockchain uh somewhere around 2015 that tried that,
having a single unit of account that was divisible thousands of times.
I don't know what the supply model of Nano is, but I think if you think that I'm suggesting
that we make more Bitcoin, then you've misunderstood what I'm saying.
No, it's not.
I'm saying it's a balance.
I'm just saying that if you want to maintain this productive discussion, which it seems like you do,
and I genuinely appreciate that, you know, there has been an experiment with having a
one Bitcoin-esque blockchain. You know, it doesn't serve your argument is what I'm trying to tell you.
Okay. I mean, I don't know about the divisibility of nano of that of nano in that case but i mean
if it was if it was divisible to you know 21 quadrillion bits whatever 21 quadrillion yeah
parts nanos then it would be the same as bitcoin pretty much that's what it was yeah it was the
same amount of sats just wrapped in a lack of an account bias and a greater need for math.
Okay.
It's not about that use case, though.
I'm telling you that asking Bitcoiners to focus on that kind of extreme use case, like, man, I just covered this a minute ago.
If we have a demand for sats, then we need sats to be able to use them.
Yes, you do.
And if it costs two ss to send one SAT,
then your system is useless.
Burning
Bitcoin wouldn't do that.
It would only be useless.
My point about creating
value through wider distribution,
if there was 21
million people in the world and they all had one
coin
and it costs less than a coin to send a coin, then you've got a system that one coin and it costs less than a coin to send
a coin and you've got a system that works if it costs more than a coin to send a coin is bullshit
why would it cost more i don't understand well to do gaming out how much does it cost to send
a sat at the moment i i don't know uh more more than a sat right now right exactly because mean, that's like saying, how much does it cost to send a penny of fiat?
It's going to cost more than a penny, much more.
Right.
Gotcha.
Yeah, you know.
Except with quick pay in the States, we don't pay anything with SAT and Fiat.
So it's interesting.
So it's interesting.
Someone's paying.
Someone's paying.
Someone's paying.
The point is that if the fees scale to over the practical minimum fee,
you know, you want to pay somebody a pound,
but you're paying five pounds in fees,
then it's not a system that serves everybody.
So you focus on scarcity instead and pushing the price up
instead of creating value, which is pushing the price up.
You could focus on that too.
You can focus on both.
And the scarcity is clearly one of the wins in bitcoin it's like the whole point of it but your economics breaks
your economics is broken right now yeah exactly if you put too much emphasis on scarcity driving
value but what's the too much are we just at the exact right amount right now just have like
coincidentally suggesting that you burn it in order to create into, in order to drive the price up is the equivalent of.
It's not my company shares in order to make the remaining shares more valuable.
You don't actually add to the value of the company.
You drive the price up temporarily and redistribute wealth.
That's already in the,
in the economy.
you're redistributing wealth from like in my case, a chain,
which is gathering revenue,
and they are converting some of that revenue
voluntarily to distribute to the Bitcoiners
who hold Bitcoin.
Yes, it's a transfer value
from a chain that is aligned with Bitcoin.
And by the way, many people do stuff like this.
Who is it? VanEck. They take from their ETF
10% of any profits and they give it to open source development for Bitcoin. They are redistributing
from their profits to Bitcoin developers to support the system. I'm suggesting that chains
or protocols that want to be aligned with Bitcoin, like VanEck. And that's one of the
reasons people buy VanEck is because unlike BlackRock, which isn't so aligned with Bitcoin,
VanEck or native Bitcoiners have been in Bitcoin for a long time, support the network and support
the developers. So they want to be aligned with Bitcoin. There are people who would want to do
this, right? We did this with Ethereum, with EIP-1559 and ultrasound.money, you could look at, go to ultrasound.money and you can see the effects of that.
I think it's generally a cool thing.
And you're saying scarcity doesn't create value.
I mean, what is, I mean, the most basic like mathematical equation in economics is supply and demand, right?
You increase supply, you lower the price. You you increase supply uh you lower the price you
decrease the supply and you increase the price not for no reason though you can't just say i have one
thing and people think it's valuable there has to be a reason as to why you have that one thing and
why other people right and we have bitcoin because of all the reasons we have bitcoin
no no those things those things are just those reasons are just artificial reasons they're not
actual inherent reasons they're not actually solving real problems. People aren't tripping over themselves to go buy them.
They're buying them because they believe- People aren't tripping over themselves to buy Bitcoin.
It's grown by millions of times. I think they are tripping over themselves.
No, they're not. They're literally not tripping over themselves. If they were tripping over themselves,
they'd be buying it. It'd be millions of dollars right now.
It's trillions of dollars. It's the seventh largest asset in the entire world.
No, it's not. It's not trillions of dollars.
What?
Each coin is not worth trillions of dollars. What?
Each coin is not worth trillions of dollars.
Bitcoin, the total market cap is trillions of dollars, meaning people are buying it.
One Bitcoin has gone up by millions of dollars. The market cap of the value is a fugazi because only a small subunit of that entire 21 million is actually being traded to create a price.
unit of that entire 21 million is actually being traded to create a price.
So to think that that's the actual value, like if someone went to go try to sell, you
couldn't get $2 trillion worth of dollars out of that thing.
Oh, man, you can say that about any asset.
That's a good point, man, because I debate this with people all the time.
There needs to be a metric, a value that assigns like a price to something if like 50% of that asset was sold. Because yeah,
look at Bitcoin. How much Bitcoin was net sold since Trump inauguration and the price has gone
down 20%? I mean, it wasn't 20%. You know, and I think it's a very small number of Bitcoin.
Like you can't go like everybody that's holding Bitcoin can't go sell it to someone else.
And those people.
You're talking about something that is consistent with every asset on the planet.
Correct.
No, no.
I agree with that.
I say stocks, stocks, foreign exchange, everything the same way.
I'm saying it would be cool if there was a way.
Everything.
Everything in the world.
Everything.
No, but it's a ridiculous low float versus anything else.
Like in the sense that you're saying it's $2 trillion, $2 trillion relative to its float is very low.
So therefore, it's not what you're saying.
It's not equal to anything else that's worth trillions of dollars that has a market, is what I'm saying.
Okay.
That's a weird kind of arbitrary argument.
So the point was to say don't burn the coin to drive up the scarcity like those hundred organizations that will build something on top.
Instead, maybe use that revenue.
It doesn't even have to be converted to Bitcoin.
It could just be USDC that gets distributed out to all the quick holders or whatever, and then those people could go buy Bitcoin.
buy Bitcoin, you know, or there might be new wallets that then could buy. So I think like,
Or there might be new wallets that then could buy.
as more people have money they can spend, they'll spend it on Bitcoin to store that money that they
worked hard for, because it should go up, you know, at what they were, or they think that it's
going to go up and not go down. So you don't five years from now be like, man, I worked 80 hours of
overtime, put my money in that. And now it's worth half. I just should have never worked that overtime all that time. But if you work overtime and make this extra money or
participate in a community or stake a token and you get money and then go buy Bitcoin and that
at least goes up by 5% to 10% a year, you look back and say, that was worth my time. Like I
basically banked my time for future enjoyment. What is the difference between getting a dividend and getting price appreciation?
There's not.
There's not if you recognize the price
appreciation. But the dividend
If you buy Bitcoin and burn it,
you will, by fact,
make the price go up. If I go
right now and I buy a million dollars of Bitcoin
and I throw it away,
burn it, the price
of Bitcoin went up in that little transaction, that two transactions. I mean, maybe for one
trillionth of a second, but then a market maker could go dump $5 million worth of token and price
is lower than before you burnt it. All things equal. That's not apples to apples. We're saying
if everything else stays the same in Bitcoin, the supply and demand stays the same, and we burn it.
No, I don't believe it.
This isn't really debatable.
It would have to go up, but it doesn't have to go up just because there's less.
We see it happen. I mean, it's not Bitcoin, but we see it happen with other token protocols all the time.
Oh, we burned 30 percent. We've been 40 percent. The price doesn't even even move because again, it's not a claim to a revenue source.
The current price of Bitcoin is a,
is a result of Satoshi not having not moving his coins.
So if Satoshi moves his coins,
the price should drop by basically.
Yeah.
Yes.
The price,
if Satoshi started moving coins is very likely the price would drop.
I think there's at least a high likelihood of that, yes.
Probably a very high likelihood.
There were times, by the way, there were times, I've been through this for 10 years,
there were times where people spread rumors that Satoshi was about to move his coins
and the price dropped before he even did it.
What do you mean, why?
Because people are counting that as
out of the supply but but nothing changed though the the idea something did change if satoshi for
bitcoin if satoshi is dead and never will access like the guy like the guy said there's there's
valuable reasons why you should buy air why you should have air right so you're saying there's
valuable reasons why you should have bitcoin but then you say if some major buyer decides to move his coins, that's a reason to drop the price even though nothing else changed
So therefore it's a value of the Bitcoin is not really valuable
What's valuable is that there's not other people who are gonna dump on you
And if you burn the coins, there's not that is taking
Satoshi just burner why doesn't Satoshi just burn them? Why doesn't Satoshi just burn them?
We don't know.
I'm not Satoshi and we're not in his mind. You know what I mean?
He hasn't talked to anyone for 10 years.
They're never going to be used.
I equate it to the people that put money away.
We don't know that.
They might be used.
But we don't know that.
If it's Hal Finney, he might have given the keys to his kids.
If it's anyone, they might still be alive watching, waiting for the right time.
We don't know this, right kids if it's anyone they might still be alive watching waiting for the right time we we don't know this right so it's a variable if he burnt them if satoshi came out
today and said i am and not even said burnt all of his coins today the price of bitcoin would
fucking skyrocket i would bet any amount of money 100 it is partially priced in it is partially
priced in because we don't know. There's uncertainty still.
It would be.
The reason the price was skyrocketing is because they know someone can't do a million tokens.
That's why price was skyrocketing.
Sorry, you guys are talking over each other.
Can one of you just talk?
Let's talk Hector.
Sorry.
I'm saying you guys have this concept of burning coins.
Like burning coins doesn't actually exist in the Bitcoin network.
There's always 21 million no matter what.
The idea of you being able to access them is different.
Like it's different with a stock.
And you guys also got this wrong, which was when companies do buybacks, they typically cancel out those shares when they do buybacks.
So the effect is that the value spreads over to the shareholders.
It does not held in the treasury.
So when Berkshire, when Meta, when any one of these guys go buy back their stock, they're effectively reducing supply.
So they go from 10 shares to 5 shares, for example.
With Bitcoin, if someone loses their coins or, you know, like, forced to hide their, loses their private key, they're still 21 million.
The base, the denominator does not change.
You're not, you can't burn them or you can't cancel them out like you're thinking you are.
Like, there's even been.
Well, hold on.
Let me correct your first point.
Different companies do it different ways.
From my understanding, I'm not a professional.
I've never done a...
I've never run a publicly traded company.
But from my understanding, some companies do cancel the shares,
and some companies hold them in their treasury.
Yeah, but I'm saying, effectively, what the big ones do,
like, Apple itself has done, like, what, $700 billion in cancels, like with effective buybacks.
So like you can just, you don't have to run a public company to see this.
You can see this just in documents.
But what I'm saying is those are effectively cancellations and lowering of the supply.
Right.
That's not what happens in Bitcoin.
You don't lower supply.
You just hide them for some reason and you can't access them anymore.
But they could be effectively accessed.
For all intents and purposes and for any normal human being that's not trying to be
just technical and
combative,
when you burn things,
they are burnt, right?
No, no, no.
That's not true because there have been
proposals, there are actually Bitcoin
improvement protocols, or proposals
that have asked
and wanted to move Satoshi's coins
to a burn address.
It's a fair point.
And by the way, there have been protocols, actually, to your point,
there have been protocols which said they burned the tokens and then did some kind of fork to unburn the tokens.
This happened recently with the protocols.
So in every single blockchain is the same way.
It's just a matter of...
No, they're not all the same.
No, because the likelihood of that happening
for something like QuickSwap or some DeFi protocol
or something that has more,
like the community can vote on things and things change,
the likelihood of it happening with one of those
is much higher than it happening on Bitcoin.
Like taking Satoshi's tokens from him and burning him is,
what would you price that in at? And you could price that in but what is that price to
that no point one percent chance I'm agreeing with you I'm agreeing with you
that the idea that it might not happen or there's a library look at that will
happen but the difference between that it actually is technically possible and
can happen so it technically can happen will the effect of it happening actually
you know happen no maybe not maybe it's very low maybe 0.1 percent whatever but that's a difference that's what i'm saying
okay guys can i just address that that was made earlier regarding um somebody i'm not sure who
was speaking because i wasn't a speaker at the time i just joined but somebody was speaking and
they mentioned that they made the point that the price of bitcoin is essentially fugazi because such a low percentage of the volume to market cap trades on a daily basis i don't know who
i'm addressing here but somebody made that point about five minutes ago
um now the reality though is if we compare bitcoin market cap to you know amazon market
cap for example they're kind of similar i think bitcoin 1.6 trillion amazon
is 1.8 trillion um amazon 0.3 percent of its uh market cap trades daily is volume about 43 million
shares um and with bitcoin it's uh 0.75 so it has like a you know two and a half times better um volume to market cap ratio
so if we're going to make the argument that like you know this is the price of a bitcoin is fugazi
because it's such low volume well we can make the argument that the bluest of blue chip stocks in
the world has the same spider dynamic like if bezos came out tomorrow and started nuking
as much of his amazon stock as possible. Yeah, that'd be
Probably significant ramifications for Amazon stockholders in the same way that if Satoshi did that tomorrow, you know similar thing
What I would say is like
Why you can make the argument about any asset
cryptocurrency markets being what they are trading 24 7
365 days a year very very quickly and dominated
by you know high frequency um it like that it things move really fast so flash crashes and
things like that are more common when you throw in the easy availability of leverage here compared
to the normal stock market you know you can go on as an amateur trader you can go on binance perps
and get yourself on 100x leverage in five minutes that adds to the volatility as well so i'm not saying that there isn't like
more volatility than stocks i'm just saying what you can't call one thing a fugazi and then not not
make that same argument for other things and when you say and i'm sure that your next point might be
something like amazon's a you know big huge business that has stuff going on around the world and millions of customers.
Well, Bitcoin isn't a business, but Bitcoin has the most sophisticated computer network on the planet that backs it.
And that's distributed computation that's split in every continent on the planet.
And the majority of countries on the planet has at least some data centers or some Bitcoin mining, not to mention the probably hundreds of thousands of people around the world that run individual nodes. So, yeah, I just wanted to address that.
And the majority of countries on the planet has at least some data centers or some Bitcoin mining.
Yeah, so my thing is, how do we, that computer network you brought up, that's one of the other things too, is like, how does, yeah, just how does Bitcoin monetize that sophisticated computer network?
Like could it be leased out?
It's intrinsically monetized.
It's secure in the value.
All Bitcoin is is a spreadsheet.
How is it intrinsically monetized?
Because the value in Bitcoin is in the security.
It's literally like you can forget thinking about, like, complicated tech.
Bitcoin is essentially a spreadsheet with data entries of how much value each person has.
And then the world's most sophisticated computer network just protects that spreadsheet to make sure nobody fucks with it.
That's literally it.
That's it.
It's not how it is.
You didn't answer that question.
Because the intrinsic value comes from the network security itself.
So these computers are protecting the fact that nobody can double spend on that ledger.
So the value is not, you don't need to monetize the network because the network itself is the value.
Yeah, but wouldn't it be a nice bonus if, say, like, you know, a defense system or something like that could use
that to, like, encrypt data and they would have
to, like, pay a fee to the Bitcoin.
Not really, because, like,
why would you want
to do that? Like, this is like,
you know, like, yeah, it'd be a
nice thing if the gold in the
Federal Reserve was, like, made into
bracelets. But, like,
why would you do that? It doesn't, yeah, maybe,
like maybe that would be good,
but would it really?
I mean, so,
this has been discussed a lot in the past.
$6 trillion monetary network.
AK, if you want to jump in,
I have something to say on this,
or if you want to,
if you have something on exactly this,
go ahead, AK.
No, your momentum is hot.
Go ahead.
Okay, thanks, brother.
Good to see you, man.
AK, everyone, if you don't know AK, AK's the fucking man. So, AK. No, your momentum is hot. Go ahead. Okay, thanks, brother. Good to see you, man. AK, everyone, if you don't know
AK, AK's the fucking
man. So, okay,
this has been discussed a lot in the past.
Like, hey,
we're doing this wasteful,
you know, arbitrary
number crunching calculation.
Like, when I explain Bitcoin to people, if
we start getting in the weeds, they're like, wait, what?
Like, what are you doing with that?
So you're actually just calculating a random number, which is an arbitrary way for us to have a game to decide who gets the next blocks.
And it works well because people can compete in this arbitrary game.
All you're doing is factoring prime numbers. It's very hard to do, and there's no way to do it quickly.
no way to do it quickly. And that's, that's all you're doing now. Quantum could change that,
And that's all you're doing.
Now, quantum could change that, whatever.
whatever. But anyways, so there were people in the past, many people are in the early days who
suggested, why are we doing this wasteful calculations? Why can't we do that? Use this,
this to calculate, uh, like folding proteins or doing, you know, some kind of what was it
SETI or whatever that was like, let's look for planet systems and crunch some useful data.
But the reason we never did that and that
actually is not a good thing is that would now, right now, if you're a Bitcoin miner,
you can only mine Bitcoin. You could go to some other SHA-256 network or whatever, but
you can't do anything with it. You could only mine with this. These ASICs are so specialized, which actually, I used to be against ASICs.
I remember my first years.
And then I realized, no, these are actually okay or even pretty good because they specialize
miners to be aligned with the network.
Because if they decide to do a 51% attack, they destroy the network.
They destroy their own value.
They destroy the value of their billions and hundreds of billions of dollars of machines
or sorry, probably tens of billions, whatever they are. They destroy the value of their billions and hundreds of billions of dollars of machines or sorry, probably tens of billions, whatever they are. They destroy the value of
all these things. So by only being able to mine Bitcoin, you know that they are going to act in
the best interest of Bitcoin because guess what? They can't go get a job somewhere else. They
fuck themselves if they try to break the network. If you can use those machines for other interesting
things, they could fuck the network and then just pivot and go, hey, we're going to go mine, you know, we're going to go full proteins for some science startup.
That's not Satoshi, though.
That was something that came out later.
So Satoshi didn't think of that.
And I think that's kind of a stretch, in my opinion.
It doesn't matter if Satoshi thought of it.
That's what's happening.
I'm saying to think that the reason that they're ASICs is because people,
they don't want to mess with the network.
No, the reason ASICs exist is because they want to be more efficient
with the processing.
No, that's not what I, yeah.
Let me clarify.
That's not what I said.
So I'm saying that originally,
I thought ASICs were a bad thing
because now I can't mine on my GPU
or CPU like it started.
So I used to be against ASICs.
And then I realized, no, ASICs were actually,
unintendedly, the reason ASICs came around was because they were just more efficient. People
wanted to find a way to be more efficient to get more Bitcoin. They wanted to make more money.
That's the beauty of this network. People all act selfishly in their own interests. And by
harnessing people's selfish nature, or you could even say greedy nature, or their nature to want to make money or enrich themselves or their families, you harness that power.
You don't go against it.
You harness that.
That's the beauty of Bitcoin.
The incentives are properly aligned.
Yeah, if I may as well. I think the rise of Bitcoin has been kind of like a phenomenon in our time.
And it really only happens in certain junctions and in timeline history.
Like, for example, the existence and usage of gold, the existence and usage of silver, and then patrol, and then U.S. dollar, which tied all those things together in the 70s.
and then U.S. dollar, which tied all those things together in the 70s.
You know, when a 2008 crash happened,
there was a ton of instability in the market, in my opinion.
And there was a lot of, I guess, fallouts with the U.S. banking and financial systems.
There was a lot of regulations that had to be put in place that followed,
you know, with the oncoming of
Obama. What Bitcoin kind of at that time, I think, gave to a lot of people in the tech world
is, of course, decentralization, which is why everybody's here. It's not really tied to any
government or bank. It's, of course, you know, on a decentralized network, which is run by the world computer or the world networks or has a limited supply and it wasn't printable,
mimicking the idea of, you know, an actual currency with a regulated reserve, as, you know,
Jack has mentioned here on a public ledger that you can't double entry. So like adding all those
things together gave a lot of the tech community the startup boost that it needed to start building
the technology around it and the ecosystems around it, which is how we saw a lot of the tech community the startup boost that it needed to start building the technology
around it and the ecosystems around it, which is how we saw a ton of growth and yield be provided
in the market. So, I mean, in my opinion, you can only protect such means of value when you have
such large movements like this that could be tied to a large amount of humans, which the US dollar
did it by force. Gold and silver were minerals that the primitive man was just making sure that
that's how they could trade their sheep for or their assets or other things for. And now with
the rise of technology and the ability to be decentralized and ledgered, Bitcoin became kind of one of the new norms.
And clearly, it's a trillion-dollar asset.
So, I mean, however you look at it, it did it right, no?
No, because there's no actual usage.
Like, you have less usage now than you did in 2017.
There's no usage for U.S. dollar either, except that it's tied to patrol and gold.
No, I just told you, it's tied to
patrol and gold, and
it's tied to a huge GDP
that backed it, that has a huge military power behind it.
Exactly. No, why would I go
use a Turkish lira against the US dollar?
I can go to Tulum and pay the guy
to park my car with US dollars.
That's how valuable that thing is.
Correct. You know why? It's because it's tied to phenomenon things that were like patrol how valuable that thing is correct you know why it's
because it's tied to phenomenon things that were like but that doesn't matter what it's tied to
it matters that it's useful the thing is they're not asking bitcoin they're not there's no reason
there's less usage of the bitcoin versus the dollars but you're saying you're saying that's
not true but then you're no i would reckon i would reckon that now the crazy part of our world and what's slowly transpiring as geopolitical tensions are rising is that you have way more off ramps out from Bitcoin as more countries and governments and actual reserves adopt it.
Now, I'm not going to say that today. The U.S. dollar wrecks Bitcoin easily. Of course, it's the world's reserve.
Bitcoin easily. Of course, it's the world's reserve. But very soon, if you wanted exit
mechanisms, other countries that have those same minerals that were tied to US dollars like
petroleum and gold and what was really put in place in world domination, now they'll sell you
their Russian oil and Bitcoin. Now they'll sell you those Chinese goods in Bitcoin. And once that
reserve starts to kind of have a way to, i guess you know combat against the u.s dollar
it actually becomes a better hedge for those countries to start transacting and exiting
through those means and those rails potentially to again put pressure on it's not possible like
it's it literally can't do that swift the swift system itself is too large for for bitcoin like
bitcoin if people try to use swift instead of bitcoin as means of settling between currencies i never i never said the total a total change i'm saying it starts to apply pressure on
the u.s dollar globally but i'm saying the pressure would be so minimal because of bitcoin's ability
is so minimal it can't actually do something significant is what i'm saying that even if
they try to do the swift settlements it wouldn't be able to do that it can't do something significant
but it holds that store of value just like the golden fort knox as somebody mentioned here it's not really significant
it just and now they print against nothing against thin air against just power and name
so at the end of the day if you do have a way that is is immutable it is through ledger and
it is on blockchain it has a place to exist in our world, I think, against hedging, against the U.S. dollar, given its means of...
I keep asking you why, though.
If no one's...
It's not why.
It's a phenomenon.
AK, man.
Why?
Why are you arguing with this guy?
I've been waiting for so long to tell them I would park their car for BTC.
Your opinion is worth so much more.
Like, why are you bothering?
Why are you bothering?
Why are you, I mean, why are you doing that?
It's not worth it.
Like, seriously.
Why are you bothering?
I feel like I went on a phone call and then I came back and you guys are like, I mean,
are we really at this low point?
Is Rock even here? Is he? back and you guys are like i mean are we sure do care a lot for not caring i mean is rock is rock
even here is he yeah so like i'll just say hector i think a lot of people i i'm just not seeing any
of your they're not making sense to me like i understand your bitcoin and you don't doubt So that's why you guys are talking over people. What the hell?
You talk over everyone.
What the hell? Here we go.
Rock, go ahead.
Okay.
So look, you like BSV.
I get it.
You don't like the direction Bitcoin took.
I understand.
Okay.
Are you not a Bitcoin SVer?
I am a Bitcoin purist in any sense.
I want Bitcoin to succeed regardless,
and I'm showing you what's wrong with it.
But you guys are, for some reason,
in some echo chamber that don't want to...
I looked through your tweets,
and it's all anti-Bitcoin.
Have you seen my first tweet of Bitcoin or no?
No, I didn't look back to your first tweet.
Okay, that was in 2013.
So in any case, it was any Bitcoin,
and it still is any Bitcoin.
But you guys are, for some reason...
There is not any Bitcoin. There is only Bitcoin, and it still is any Bitcoin. There is not any Bitcoin.
There is only Bitcoin.
There's any Bitcoin.
Again, you guys are in this bubble.
We guys need it to go up for something and don't have other ways of getting around it.
Your mind can't compute this idea.
I think, to be fair, I think you need BSV to go up a lot more than we need Bitcoin to go up.
I don't need anything to go up because, because thankfully I don't have to worry about it.
So that's what I'm saying.
It's irrelevant to my cause.
Brother, the people here, we need to find ways to make the number go up.
What the hell?
I don't know.
I've been in Bitcoin since $200.
I've had enough number go up.
I'll take some more though.
Sir, may I have another?
Why are you arguing this, Rock?
So your argument...
We'll wrap it up. Why are you arguing this, Rock? So, like, your argument... Like, arguing with Craig Wright!
We'll wrap it up.
Why are you doing this?
Craig Wright has better arguments,
to be honest, but not that I like it that much.
Like, your argument that Bitcoin is not being used
is so fucking silly.
It is being used as one of the largest
stores of value in the entire world.
The sixth largest store of value in the entire world. But it's not being used as one of the largest stores of value in the entire world. The sixth largest store of
value in the entire world, but it's not being used. How is that not usage? There's 300,000
transactions a day. Dude, shut the fuck up. This is retarded. I got, I'm sorry. I don't cuss very
much, but that is retarded. Hold on. You're saying that usage, this is such a stupid argument it's such an idiotic argument to say that usage is
only buying your coffee with something that is not usage i don't buy real estate to buy coffee with
there are all kinds of usages in the world and bitcoin is not being used for that it is being
used to store value gold he's sitting there getting his gold nuggets and he's buying his coffee with gold. I own zero gold. So he's like, I can't do that with big gold.
If we're having an e-cash session, let's make the point.
Let's let AK jump in.
Let's let AK jump in.
If I may, to Hector's point, soon you will be able to buy coffee with your sats.
You will.
There will be many rails.
You could do it.
There's lightning network.
You could do it now, but
people aren't doing it because it's going up
because the store value is so much more valuable
to them. Correct. And
Hector, I don't know if you're laughing about that.
I mean, one of our companies
does have processing across
Lightning Network on actual rails
in actual payment processing as a merchant.
Nice. I didn't know that.
Yeah, these things are happening, but's because of the regulations they can only operate
in legal bitcoin tender countries now as things are slowly moving they'll be able to roll up to
national chains so i mean yeah soon it will happen it will happen so you're missing the point again
so the point is so rock said 300 000 transactions doesn't matter but then the point again. So the point is, so Rock said 300,000 transactions doesn't matter. But then the point is, this whole idea, the whole underpinning of the system is a miner being able to process or willing to process put them into the network, to show you, look at that beautiful chart. It's not because of Bitcoin. People aren't
actually transacting and paying off those fees. Those fees are just, you're completely subsidized
those fees. I agree with you, but great. Sure. Fantastic. But that's like irrelevant because
I'll tell you for a specific reason, we didn't have a big, we didn't have debit cards and credit cards up until what the nineties.
So before then it was cash tender.
So before then, what was it?
What were they giving you coins?
So every system has to have a form of evolution, right?
And now we're to the point where we have very highly centralized systems that are very sophisticated to process transactions.
centralized systems that are very sophisticated to process transactions whereas with blockchain
you don't actually even physically need to go to a location as opposed like for example because a
physical card needs a location or you can input it on a website hold on or you can input it on a
website in this particular case you're directly in a blockchain that can eventually process those
transactions on a sub layer potentially so
that's i'm just saying that's not true i just ordered doordash to a phone so you can't say that
i mean look even if bitcoin never was used for transactions it wouldn't matter and i think it
will be but it wouldn't matter because guess what the The biggest assets in the world, and in my argument, the most used assets in the world
because storing your fucking value is the most important thing.
Ask anyone who's trying to retire or anyone who's trying to...
Huh?
Thanks to fiat debt, you're saying these things.
Yeah, fiat debt and fiat stupidity are Bitcoin rocket fuel, yes.
No, no, what I'm saying is the miners are going around.
Miners are going around and selling shares.
Hector, you've made the point.
And creating debt.
You've made the point, Hector.
You've made the point.
But there is no chance that another system will show up and just be $200 trillion worth of capability overnight.
There has to be some level of transition, migration, time in between.
You're asking for a purist argument, and we don't live in a purist.
It's not about purist.
It's about the idea that 2017 had more transactions per day than today.
And you're saying that it's who cares.
I am transacting every second with Bitcoin.
You know how, because I am storing my Bitcoin and guess what?
I don't even pay for it.
Beautiful.
It doesn't make any sense.
You don't think you're storing your assets.
You don't think storing value. Then why do people have interrupt you a bit i mean i gotta slow down a little we don't have one argument to
discuss can i can i interrupt you a bit because like for me bitcoin gives me so much value and
so much utility and peace of mind because i don't need to think about the security of the Bitcoin. All I need to think about is my operational
security. That's my only concern. Anything else, I don't care about. I know it's there.
It's my long-term projection. I'm secure in my understanding of Bitcoin, its limitation,
its constraints, its beautiful, elegant design,
and that gives me so much value
and so much peace of mind.
So I really don't know how anybody
could argue, unless, I don't know,
they haven't been exposed to Bitcoin,
that Bitcoin
is valueless. It doesn't make sense
at all.
I think the only people
that would argue to that would be people that don't
need those things, right? I think that's why the world is so great. There's some people in some
parts of the world that want that because they don't have other assets or their country's currency
values and stuff like that. There's other countries where you don't really need to own
Bitcoin because the money system and the asset system and the real
estate system is so much more secure. But that doesn't mean that for the other 80 or 90% of the
world that that's not a value and that it doesn't store value. What I think is really interesting
is at what point, and this could just like everybody could probably just give their number,
at what point does the annual return of bitcoin make bitcoin not interesting
anymore like if it starts returning less than 10 a year do people start moving money out of it
what do people think that kind of annual rate of return is that keeps bitcoin interesting as a
store increase of value at 10 if if bitcoin got so large or just like kind of plateaued and was
returning 10 i think you would have more
people using it because then it is not seen as a risk on asset or a, you know, we're going to make
a ton of money from it. It's like bonds, right? And bonds are the largest markets in the world.
Hundreds of trillions, getting close to quadrillion bonds. Those are simply stores of value,
right? If you ask someone in another country, like you mentioned,
which is a really good point, maybe in the US, we just store value just doesn't seem so great to us.
I think that's kind of ignorant. But as we've been inflated away-
We're pretty secure in our system.
It's okay. We're okay. I mean, we're losing arguably like three to 10% a year of our value
being eaten away, which over like seven years, you lose half your value.
But anyways, depending how you look at it,
how you calculate it, whatever.
But for many people in the world,
storing their value is the most important use case
they ever ask people who've lost their fortune
to inflation bombs, to collapses,
or just slow eating away of their value.
Ask them if store of value is a use case.
Yeah, 100% agree with you.
100% agree.
Like when I talk to some of the people I know here in the States and I just ask, like, why
haven't you been in Bitcoin or crypto?
I mean, I just ask people sometimes, they're just like, I don't need it.
Like I make a half million dollars a year as a programmer or an asset manager i can put my money
in u.s stocks and like i'll never need that and need the risk of that fluctuation but not all the
world can say that and not all the population so yeah i think it's i think it's really interesting
but i mean the bitcoin blockchain has nothing to do with the u.s dollar value like the bitcoin
block you can hold your 21 million units and it could be worth a dollar each that doesn't change
and you still have securely held those 21 million units so it seems that we guys actually care about
is the u.s equivalent of course you gotta of course we do if bitcoin lost 99.9 percent of
its value the network would be considered failed in my opinion that's what i'm saying you don't need a network what you need is just the thing to hold on to for it to go up
correct you just said i just need a thing and how do you do that outside of bitcoin
what's your recommendation it could be anything it literally everything has gone up tell me
five years name one baby babies video there's one nvidia like many other stocks might not be around forever and we don't know what
might not be around forever how can you know fair enough okay i mean you you can be around forever
i'm pretty sure yeah i'm saying that's a bet i could i would give i would give a i mean look
it's all to each person to decide how to store their value but clearly a a big part of the world is deciding that Bitcoin is their best storage value.
And that's why it's the sixth or seventh largest asset in the fucking world.
But how is the world like the world?
If you looked at the actual unique, like the unique wallets on the network, there's only like 45 million, maybe if that.
And that's being generous of unique transactions of unique wallets on the network.
So that's not the world.
Okay, the transaction, you're mixing up assets and currency.
Transactions are useful when you're talking about currency.
We're talking about something that functions also as an asset.
When people are holding on to something because
it's maintaining its value, it's functioning as an asset. And that means fewer transactions,
right? Why? Because they're holding on to it. They're not actually moving it. Stop talking
when other people are talking. I'm talking. Stop talking. Thank you.
Stop talking.
I can handle myself, please.
It's so disrespectful.
Shut up.
Just shut up.
My God.
People have been trying to explain things to you and you just keep talking over them.
It is so frustrating to try and even hear you or anyone else.
Now you know what it feels like, right?
It's so frustrating.
Just stop talking. Now you know what it feels like, right? It's so frustrating. Just stop talking.
Now you understand the frustration.
So the transactions don't matter. Transactions don't matter. They're talking about asset value.
Asset value doesn't mean transactions, number of transactions. This is not Visa. Visa is about
currency. Currency is about number of transactions, right? This is about asset value, something that actually grows in value. You don't care about how many times it flips over. What you care about is, is it actually maintaining or growing in value? Is it shooting off value? Is it while you're holding it, is it worth more value?
What is the value that you're holding on to?
You have to keep these things clear in your head.
The value of something is not limited to its ability
to give a number of transactions.
If you're looking at something strictly as a currency,
then yes, you may care about the number of transactions. But if you're looking at something strictly as a currency, then yes, you may care about the number of transactions.
But if you're looking at something as holding on or increasing value, then you don't care about the number of transactions it's holding or to carry off.
You're caring about something different.
No, you're not getting it.
You care about the price and value that it holds.
But listen, this is the thing you're getting wrong.
You're not understood.
It seems to me you're not.
I am not getting something wrong.
Okay, so.
So what the attitude, man?
You're very frustrating because you're so disrespectful.
You told me that I waited.
Now you're speaking.
You won't let me speak.
Okay, go ahead.
Keep going.
When you're done, let us know.
I think AK is trying to speak.
I just want to speak something really quickly. And I think maybe, Hector, you may. Keep going. When you're done, let us know. I think AK is trying to speak. I just want to speak something really quickly.
And I think maybe, Hector, you may have the misconception.
The reason that there is maybe the 45 million wallets in existence is because the rollout of this technology has been through technical means,
access through phones, access through computers, access through digital wallets,
access through phones, access through computers, access through digital wallets.
the equivalence of what you're trying to compare to is actually 100 years or whatever, 80 years
worth of US dollar that has been physically redistributed to the world. So you're telling
me that somebody- And forced with military.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, yeah. Enforced with military. Yeah. But just let's say somebody in like Africa, are you going to consider them a holder slash, as you just said, quote unquote, you made a big mistake, investor in US dollar because they have five dollars in their pocket equating to a wallet, meaning they are meaning if there is 100 millions of somebody in a continent that's only holding that $5, it equates to the actual wealth or storage of that actual currency.
It doesn't. It really doesn't.
It just means that that currency was distributed to them.
It doesn't actually have a particular growth in the value of the U.S. dollar based on how many wallets are holding it.
And, you know, I got a spare change. I got
a box under my bed. Does that mean that now I control how much the store of total assets there
is? I don't. No, it's actually just in circulation. So the US dollar continues to be in more people's
wallets over the last 80 years because they have an indiscriminate printing
policy that gets enforced due to their global presence and dominance, meaning they can continue
to print and continue to redistribute globally, quote unquote, to more wallets, as you say.
Does that mean that the value of the US dollar continues to stay high? It actually doesn't. No,
it has so many other factors. For Bitcoin, its rollout has
been digital. That's why you're not seeing so many wallets already. But its actual adoption
as a hedge against what its equivalence is, is U.S. dollar primarily. Now there's other currencies,
is clearly evident because it's in trillions against the U.S. dollar. Trillions. So eventually,
it's in trillions against the US dollar. Trillions. So eventually, there's going to be rails that
create systems through there to keep mitigating the costs, since it's a technological rollout,
that when it gets redistributed to you or in your hands, and you are using it, it actually costs
less than the US dollar to print their dollar over many years, and with dominance or force,
redistribute it to your pocket globally
it actually costs way less so it's just a matter of adoption but i i don't think like you're looking
at it like an investment a lot of people are investing in the currency sure because they see
that it's a rising one just like if you were um back in the day when the u.s dollar was floating
and before it went against the you know fixed, fixed against the price of gold and petrol. If you were an investor in US dollar, instantly
your currency got stronger. That's why the US economy got a big bump back in the 70s and the
80s because they were established as the global leader. So it's just a matter of economics. Like
I think you're mixing it. You're thinking you're it. No, it's... Alex was the one who said you don't invest in currencies.
You're not getting it.
You don't invest in currencies.
Let me tell you what you're not getting.
Here, let's let him real quick respond to...
I think he gets a chance.
Yeah, yeah.
Go ahead, Hector.
What's your thoughts?
I want to hear what you have to say after, Alex.
Thanks.
So you said you treat it as an asset.
So if you must treat it like it's an asset, you must treat it as in the sense that it
can be valuable like an asset.
So for example, Visa, the network, has an asset called the stock.
The reason its stock goes up is because it's able to generate revenues because it's a more
ubiquitous solution for payments that it does with dollars.
And if it didn't have any ubiquity
and inability to create these transactions that increase over time the value of the asset would
go down or be stagnant or not move bitcoin bitcoin bitcoin literally bypassed all of that established
itself as a currency you're still looking it's not a currency it's not a currency it's a type of
visa as a software dude no listen listen okay bitcoin is not a currency. It's a type of visa as a software. No, listen, listen. Bitcoin is not a currency. It's a money.
Money is different than currencies.
Money is anything can be a money.
Visa is a software that serves.
Okay. Visa is a software that serves currencies.
I'm not saying that. I'm saying Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the money.
Visa is actually so behind Bitcoin because Bitcoin served those currencies as a hedge itself.
While it had those abilities to transact as an actual processor.
Okay, do you understand your whole argument for this idea of thinking that the debanking by Bitcoin is all because of some editor on some English newspaper?
Like, that's where your entire thesis comes from.
Like, besides that point, Bitcoin is just all it does is a peer-to-peer cash system.
That's literally what it says in the paper that people are telling you over and over it's not
and so to think that's anything else besides what you're saying like those
every shows every shows every other currency it's a pure these aren't
current doesn't make was not a currency it's a money it's not a currency what
is it's a hybrid I know it could be anything Charizard your your Pokemon
cards could be money for the right people AWS credits could be money
Starbucks points are money these are all types of money. How ubiquitous that money is is dependent. Visa
network tokens that you use to pay for your goods and services are also monies, right? The dollars
that are coming from the US dollar, that's a currency that is issued by a state government.
And so you got to understand that. So besides that point is that if you think you're buying
this thing because of the asset and it goes up, then you must also consider, oh, the reason it's valuable is for X, Y and Z.
But if you think that lower transaction throughput is a positive indicator or a positive reason as to why this thing should be valuable, then that to me is where you lost me.
Because Visa, in its example, it's a stock with its own asset.
And the reason it goes up is because of its abilities.
And so if bitcoin has
abilities then yeah it should go up but to me the ability of storing your value that's the main
ability there are others that's the main ability that's the result of this okay so we should buy
visa we should buy visa because it should go up not because of its throughput capacity because
its ability to serve people because it should go up because we all believe that visa should be
valuable and it should go up well i mean that that is why people buy stocks, by the way.
I mean, yes.
Hold on.
Fundamentally, you know, people are – analysts are going through and they're saying, well, what is the ROI?
What's the PE ratio?
What's, you know, what's the hurdle rate and all these things, right?
But at the end of the day, they are buying it because they want it to go up.
Yes, but there's backing as to why they believe it will go up
can i just cut in there on something regarding um you mentioned uh lots of things can be money
under certain circumstances you cited charizard cards and um amazon stock i think or something
like that but i think your point is generally that anything anything could be money uh but i
just want to just challenge you on that.
I mean, it's well known that money has to have certain properties.
Currency essentially has to be a medium of exchange.
It has to be divisible.
It has to be a unit of account and so on.
Money has those properties plus it has to be a long-term store of value, and it has to be durable, essentially, over the long term.
Other things, too, like unit of account.
Go ahead, Jack.
Yeah, so essentially, currency is short-term things you can transact with.
So you could make the argument that Charizard cards could be currency in certain circumstances,
just in the same way that seashells have been currency historically
and so on, and those big giant wheels that we all know about
from the Bitcoin standard, the rock things.
But you can't make the argument that something can be money
or anything can be money because it can't.
Because, like, a stock might not be around.
It's not a long-term store of value.
The price can fluctuate massively and so on.
So yeah,
I just wanted to just point out those two things because we have to be,
if we're going to have a precise argument and we are getting into the weeds
here a little bit,
we should be precise about what we're saying and you can't,
you could claim things that are currencies,
but it's actually very difficult to claim things are money,
which is the reason why so few things have been money throughout history
I think an additional...
Just a second, please let me get in a word so I can say bye-bye
Because time is money and my wife is going bankrupt with my attention
And I'm at the brink of death
So to avoid any tragedy tragedy thank you all so much
i'm zoran from dagdao we are a crypto incubator we work with projects we work with service providers
work with other vcs we work with other communities and follow us we don't post a lot on twitter but
we're very active in our telegram private groups it's token get it it's very cheap to get in right
now once again thank
you so much for the conversation appreciate you all and see you next time bye bye are we talking
to ducked out anyone from lda jack richard ducked out do you know are you guys talking to lda or
quick swap or any yeah i think we are we are okay cool yeah we were talking with marshall all the
time okay let's let's let's let, let's have a chat as well.
Thanks for your time.
Yeah, yeah, sounds good.
And everybody, really quick, before he leaves,
everybody in the audience, follow everybody on the stage,
especially, I want to thank Polygon for, you know,
supporting the show and always co-hosting our dear, beloved Polygon.
Give Polygon a follow.
Give Quicksalap a follow.
You don't need to follow me,
but give Alex a follow,
a.k.a. Jack, Omni, DuckDow, Humming,
and even Hector,
our dear friend Hector here.
I don't know where he is.
He might have dropped off or something,
but give Hector a follow too.
And give our audience members.
I see Jared in the audience.
Hector did his thing.
Hector did his thing.
Everybody has...
Don't follow Hector.
Hold on. Give Kingared in the audience this thing actor this thing everybody has everybody hold on give give king dank uh in the audience to follow for supporting he's been here i think most of the time a lot of people in the audience have been here the whole time you guys are nuts
i don't know what you're doing listening to us for three and a half hours on your friday but we love
you um give rainbow a follow giveels, I see in the audience.
Shout out to BitAngels and the amazing stuff they've done for the whole industry,
helping with the launch of ETH and Tether and all the crazy stuff they've done.
We love BitAngels.
Give Kenneth a follow.
I see David Pope.
I often see him in the audience.
Give Digital Fellow a follow.
Give Victor Browns.
Who else is in the audience that we know here.
We've got a very different audience actually today.
We've got ETHDaily.eth.
Give them a follow for your ETH news.
Give BuyBTCCoin.com a follow.
Give everyone in the audience a follow, guys.
Go follow each other.
Go on a following rampage right now on each other in the audience.
I actually followed everybody.
Nice.
We actually lost like most of our listeners because the show rugged earlier.
We had a ton of people.
I think we had like 400 listeners or 350 or something.
And then Darren rugged the whole space.
It's his fault.
Blame the panda.
Okay.
Last minute stuff, guys.
We'll close out here.
Let's finish the remarks. If you want to quick, quick shill your stuff or whatever, and then we'll close out here. Let's finishing remarks. If you want to quick, quick shill your stuff or whatever, and then we'll close out here.
This was a fun little debate.
I think whenever we talk Bitcoin, it seems to go in a crazy direction.
There's a closing comment that I got to throw in because it's relevant to the discussion.
And I'm not going to extend the discussion.
But part of the discussion about Bitcoin and its usability is the frequency
of transactions. And there's plenty of room to do that with more than just ordinals and runes and
alkanes and, you know, other types of token standards that are coming out. So just a word
to anyone who's looking at Bitcoin DeFi, it's growing really quickly. And if you're looking
at any op code, look at opreturn.
There's a new sort of aggregation around that as a standard place where people are doing things on Bitcoin.
Maybe it's not the e-cash that a purist might want, but it is substitutes for e-cash that are built on Bitcoin with Bitcoin completely without a third party trust system.
So we're doing a lot of other stuff.
You know, please check out RichSwap.io if you want to trade runes. without a third party trust system. So we're doing a lot of other stuff.
Please check out RichSwap.io if you wanna trade runes.
It's one of the most affordable DEXs on the market.
It'll be resuming service in about 24 hours,
estimated by the total of the Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem
is growing really significantly.
You can see that through ZKBTC
and a number of other projects
that'll work with BitAngels and LDA. So, you know, just appreciate y'all having us on. And, you know,
I do kind of like that we get into an e-cash versus digital gold debate. I just, I hope it's
useful to the audience because sometimes it might get a little confusing to some of us who haven't
had this discussion a bunch of times already, but I do
think it's productive to some degree, right? We still need to think about eCash in the future.
So thanks for having us. It's a really important discussion. I would say go read the Bitcoin
standard. I think that's a great place to start for audience members who some of this might have
been maybe too in the weeds or we got into very technical arguments. But these are things we have to think about.
Yeah, eCash versus store value, transactions and DeFi versus store value, all the different blockchains.
And why do we need so many blockchains?
There's so many different discussions to be had here.
One thing I'll say is it is never a dull day in this space.
That's why I've been here for 10 years and it's what I've dedicated my life to.
And I'm pretty damn sure I'll be doing this for the rest of my life.
This is what I love. And, you know, some of us, we have different opinions about how we can do the things we're trying to do and what the things we're trying to do even are.
These are all technologies that are beneficial to humanity, to our fundamental rights like privacy and property rights.
And, you know, the ability to put checks and balances on overbearing governments or, you know, monopolistic, maybe aggressive corporations.
Not that I'm against corporations, but there's a lot of important things that we're doing here.
Privacy, censorship, resistance, and just better efficiency and disrupting these incumbents like the banking system who are just, you know, in some ways it's fair.
They provide value and they kind of extract, but a lot of it is just they found ways to become rent seekers and extract value as opposed to provide value because of their monopolies through governments and other means.
And so we are disrupting all of these things.
Here, guys, I just wanted to correct some parts of what Hector said, because, for example, you can use Bitcoin for a lot of things and you have at least five ways to pay with it in the real world at the moment.
And also on the NVIDIA stock, NVIDIA hasn't outperformed Bitcoin.
In fact, Bitcoin outperformed NVIDIA by a lot.
The only difference is that NVIDIA right now has a higher market cap, but that's it.
In terms of growth, Bitcoin is a lot higher.
It's like in a completely different galaxy compared to Nvidia.
Yeah, Bitcoin is up.
People don't remember, but Bitcoin, it's debatable, but it started at around three-tenths of a
penny or six-tenths of a penny, depending on what you mark as the first transactions or first actual economic value that it had.
But imagine three-tenths of a penny to $80,000 per coin, and we're arguing that people don't value it or that it doesn't have a utility or something.
a utility or something is kind of crazy to me. Like, well, like if, if we would have been at,
It's kind of crazy to me.
you know, the early days when I was in Bitcoin, we were talking about, oh, could Bitcoin get to
a thousand dollars or could it, oh my goodness, what if it gets to $10,000? You know, what if
it's used by, you know, a million people and now governments are buying it and debating buying it.
And by the way, that number of how many people use Bitcoin by
like wallets, and we say it's like 45 million, that is a wrong number. Now, we might not like
this. Some people might not like this. Some people might think it's okay. Some people are neutral.
But there are lots of people holding Bitcoin through other mechanisms, through ETFs. And now,
by the way, BlackRock, Fidelity, and many others have started putting this in pension funds.
So like Fidelity, I believe, has their, they're all, they're all in one ETF. And they have three
versions of it, like an aggressive one, a less aggressive one, and even less aggressive one,
a conservative one. And in those, they hold 1% of it in Bitcoin, 2% of it in Bitcoin,
or 3% of it in Bitcoin. So so that every all these people who have that in
their pension fund are holding bitcoin and they don't even know it but it is giving them outside
returns let's go and this is the same thing for lots of the endowment funds lots of big famous
universities uh the likes of i i can't remember but things like harvard and you know mit i don't
i can't remember which ones but some some of the most famous Ivy League schools
are holding Bitcoin now in their endowment funds. And there are lots of different smaller pension
funds in the world that are holding Bitcoin in their pension funds. There are certainly ones we
don't even know because they don't want to announce it publicly yet, but there are certainly lots of
family offices and sovereign wealth funds and others around the world that are holding Bitcoin.
There are probably many governments holding Bitcoin that don't want to say it because it undermines their currencies.
But they are no doubt there are countries that are gathering up Bitcoin.
Just recently we saw, you know, 290 out of whatever, 330 or something, you know, congressmen supported Bitcoin. And now we found
the ones that have admitted publicly, many are coming out that were not, did not have the
courage, or maybe they were scared of what it could mean to, you know, people if they said
they were holding Bitcoin. But there are a ton of congressmen, senators, and other politicians
that are coming out now saying they've been holding Bitcoin since 2014 and 15 and 13 and that we're too scared to say it before. So how many more are those in the world
that are holding Bitcoin that we just don't know? Do you remember, it was around the time SPACs
were really big. It was around, I guess, 2021, which doesn't seem like very long ago at all.
But do you remember there were all those,
if you guys were on Clubhouse when it was a thing,
and if you were like in Twitter,
there were no Twitter spaces,
so it was just tweets all over Twitter.
But everybody was speculating
that Bitcoin could go to 30,000 and then 35. And it sounded crazy, crazy, crazy.
And I remember buying Bitcoin at 19 and people going, no, I can't believe you bought it at 19.
And I was like, just watch. And they're like, it's not going to go to 35. That's insane. That's
insane. And people were like, I don't know if you guys remember this, this, these spaces.
And I have to say, this is a lot of credit to Swan. Do you guys know if you don't know what Swan is?
Swan Bitcoin?
Yeah, Swan Bitcoin. Swan Bitcoin had organized a bunch of these spaces that were educating people on Bitcoin.
people on Bitcoin. In Clubhouse or here? In Clubhouse. In Clubhouse, they organized a bunch
In Clubhouse or here?
of these, like they put their employees in there and they organized all these spaces to teach
people about Bitcoin. And then eventually they morphed into this weird thing of like, if you
don't invest in Bitcoin or you don't like that, it was a me versus them kind of thing. But
originally they were just these educational spaces.
And so people started really learning about Bitcoin then during the, you know,
when everybody was like, I'm at home and I'm bored as hell.
And they were learning about this stuff.
And they started talking about, like, what does it actually mean?
And what does, you know, Bitcoin going to $50,000 or to $30,000 or $37,000, like, what does it actually mean?
you know, Bitcoin going to 50,000 or to 30,000 or 37,000, like what does it actually mean?
And they actually did a lot to educate people on that kind of thing. So when we talk about like,
how did this even happen? And is it a fluke or whatever? I mean, it wasn't. It was slow and
painful for the time that you were there. Like now it seems like it was so fast and how did I miss
it or whatever. But at the time, it was like this process of constant education, constant,
constant, constant. And we're still in that phase of this constant, constant education.
And then I remember when iTrust came out with these, I'm going to mix Bitcoin with metals and we're going to be able to invest in it. And this was like, in your IRAs and your Roth IRAs,
et cetera. I'm good friends with the founder of that, Morgan Steckler. We're very good friends.
I know Morgan. All right. And so, and he was like, I'm going to do this. And I'm like, I don't,
you know, like, I think you can legally do it. Let's do it. You know, he was shilling. I trust
to me back in, I don't even know, close to close to 10 years ago like so probably i don't even remember yeah probably but he was shilling it so hard to me
and i to be honest sometimes i would get a little and i've told him this since but i'd get a little
annoyed with how much he was shilling it to me and i probably should have invested because i trust now is managing it's the largest like ira bitcoin manager in the world i think uh but yeah he's a really good friend of mine
great that's great i mean i'm so happy for him it's like uh it's such a he's no longer with them
he got a nice exit on that by the way but um now he's working with um uh another company doing a similar thing actually
i forget the name of them they pitched at bid angels in los angeles and they already have like
four or five hundred million under management in just like six months it's really cool but
anyway sorry to interrupt go ahead all of it was just to say that like all of this stuff it it seems
like how could this happen it's only a few years,
but it has been years of grind. It's almost like being in a startup where if you've been inside it,
like you've been working it, it's been constant grind of just trying to build awareness and have
people understand this is what this thing is and this is how it works. So it's not really like, how did this, you know, it came out of nowhere, it doesn't do
anything or whatever.
It's really like this constant activity of trying to make people aware.
And the focus shifted to making institutions aware, enterprise and then institutions aware. And enterprise started
stacking sats and Bitcoin, right? And the biggest one that you see, obviously, is Sailor's Company,
which is now just basically a Bitcoin stacking company. It used to be a software company,
but now it's a Bitcoin stacking company. But he's not the only one, right?
A lot of companies have Bitcoin on their balance sheets originally because there was a loophole, and it still exists, for taxes.
And that's going to close up, and we're going to see how much companies still maintain Bitcoin on their balance sheets, even when that loophole no longer exists.
Right. So when that started happening, you stopped seeing all the work happen on the side of retail.
And so it looks like for retail, for all these rooms and spaces and all the work of like talking, talking, talking, constantly saying,
this is what Bitcoin is, this is what Bitcoin is. It seems like it might have died off, but really
it just shifted to bigger money. That's all that happened. And so all the money that's going into
it, now you see what exactly what Rock is saying, like BlackRock and these giant institutions are
in it because that's where all the pressure went, you know, into shifting it into Bitcoin. So just so that you know, like that's really what's been
happening. It's not like it hasn't been constantly moving and people are still looking at it as an
asset. They're not looking at it as currency. They're looking at it strictly as an asset because that's how it's functioned.
And it has functioned as a phenomenal asset, even with 30% pullbacks. There is not another
asset in the world that you can say that about. That is what they're seeing. They're like,
this is incredible. Once we stop having those pullbacks and the volatility goes away,
Once you stop having those pullbacks and the volatility goes away, it won't have as much growth.
Generally, higher volatility is correlated with larger, it could be larger growth, upside or downside, by the way.
But anyways, there's so many ways people are being, just to add a little more to what I said earlier, we really got to wrap up.
We'll do some final last minute words here.
It keeps going.
You know it's a good space, though, when we keep going way past our three hour limit. But, um, you know, another thing people
don't realize if you hold, um, SMP 500, which I don't, I can't, by the way, X is not working for
me today. Like it's lagging like hell when I try to search things or when I try to, um, do Brock
and stuff. But anyways, SMP 500, if you're holding it, you are, you are whole,
you have exposure to Bitcoin. So in these pension funds and your black, oh yeah, BlackRock just
adopted for one of their major, um, retirement funds, they started putting some Bitcoin in it
from their ETF. So they're eating their own dog food with their ETF, putting it in their
retirement funds for people. Yeah, no, this has been, this has been a really great space. I appreciate you guys for
putting this together. And yeah, I got to run too. Got to take the kids to go get some Easter
pictures done here. But yeah, great space. We'll definitely hit up some of you for some stuff on
the side. But Alex, great to see you on here here I don't know if you know about Hummingbird but BTC Ted in the office and all that we're big fans of
you Alex so cool to be on a space with you today but yeah I won't won't
Hummingbirds and it's an AI community marketing platform you know definitely
check it out ducked out it was on here earlier great friends of ours as well so
definitely check them out but yeah I just love everything you guys are doing and thanks for running the space
today. Really cool time.
Yeah. Likewise guys. Thanks so much for, for having me on the space.
Always a pleasure. Always a good time.
I always say that this quick swap LDA,
a rock whole team polygon a lot of pillar, you know, Alex, you know, Hummingbird, Omni, Jack,
Omniti, everybody, the whole, this space usually since I joined it many, many months ago,
has been a pillar to what I consider a pillar of the blockchain community. A lot of passionate
people, people that care, you know, about pushing the narrative and evidently live it out every day.
So it's very great to be amongst individuals that are kind of harboring and
pushing this ecosystem.
And it always sucks to be around bad actors that are exploiting technology and
these systems that many put their whole lives to try to build.
So I really very rarely do attend spaces.
I'll go on some of our own spaces and then I come on the quick swap space.
So that should give you some testament to how good this place really is.
So thanks for having me once again, guys.
Always a pleasure.
Happy to be on board.
And anybody who has any ideas or companies that are building or technologies, protocols, you name it, please shoot a DM over.
My team goes through the DMs a lot, so they will reach out.
And we can most definitely take a look at what great things everybody here is building.
It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks, guys.
I'm taking off.
You guys are amazing.
Love doing this.
I'll talk to you guys later.
Bye, Alex. anyone speaking or is rock rock no we are here okay yeah i think rock might be wrong that was like is that um yeah okay yeah i'll close things up
okay bye-bye but yeah it's been fun thanks guys bye-bye thank you
