Andreas Antonopoulos

00:05All you creeps that are controlling money all throughout the world, your time is slowly closing in. Am I right? Yep. Andreas Antonopoulos, author uh published author of The Internet of Money. Uh you've been on the show many times before, but you've never been on the show 2 days after a book fresh off the presses. Tell us story about how this book got delivered to you today because it's kind of hilarious. Yeah, so nobody knew about this. This is my announcement. This is my second book. First book was Mastering Bitcoin was for techies. Uh The Internet of Money is for everybody else, and it's a collection of my talks. And I was having the first copy delivered to my hotel this morning in order to bring it to the show and give it to you. And uh it it was a day late. It was supposed to be delivered yesterday, and I'm waiting and I'm I'm refreshing the tracking number site. And

01:02then you said, "You know, we can push it back by half hour because you're running a bit late." And And in that half hour, the book got delivered. It literally was printed September 5th. This is the first copy I've touched. And this is yours. Oh boy. I've got it, folks. Issue 0001. Now, why do they do that? Why not just one? Why don't they just make it one? Why does everybody have to do 01? Well, I'm not printing 10,000 issues, so. Well, they never go it's never like 000 0001. Do they ever do that? Mhm. I bought a pair of shoes once recently with that. It was like one out of 12. Why are you in one of my ears only? I don't know. I think this is What the hell's going on there? up one. Well, no. I can't have you in my left ear. It's like you're like the voice of good or the voice of bad. Oh, yeah? Yeah, I got it, too. So, it's on your end. Yeah, that's too weird. We can't have that.

01:59Try it again. Check, check. Nope, you weirdo. You're coming in my left ear only. Probably through the rest of America, too, right? Yeah, they can't have that. People are at the gym going, "What the Jamie's in my left ear." So, this is a collection of all your talks. What has changed in the world of Bitcoin since the last time we spoke We've spoken We We hung out in Vegas, which was great. I had a great time with you. And but what what has changed in the world of Bitcoin since the last time? Well, it's been about a year and a half almost. And so much so much happening in the meantime. We had a pretty slow 2015 2016 picked up again. 2015 still coming off slow and gradual drop in the price. People were very reluctant and skeptical. The media was constantly bashing Bitcoin. And then um at the same time we saw this really interesting phenomenon where the banks

02:57started getting interested in this thing. But not Bitcoin itself. No, the blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin. Um which is rather amusing. I I I look at that a bit as if, you know, the horse buggy association of America is going, "Oh, we we like this automobile thing you've designed, but we have a very big investment in hay and horses and stables and veterinarian. So, um we're going to use the technology behind the automobile, the pneumatic tire, and we're going to revolutionize horse buggies." But in all fairness, I I think what you're saying is hilarious. But in all fairness, it is a weird thing to invest in. Like to go all in on Bitcoin. I mean, I know you do it, but you also make all of your money this way, and this is, you know, you're you're a proselytizing person when it comes to Bitcoin, right? Mhm. Um for good reason. But for the average person say who's saved

03:53up actual cash money their whole life and is involved in this established system of money to throw all their money into Bitcoin I thought that would be insane. You watch the money fluctuate, it goes up and it goes down. Well, I'm think I'm glad you said that that it would be insane. No, that's that would be a terrible idea. Right, but don't you think that that's probably why the media bashes it and why banks are just looking at it going hmm. Like people see that there's a growing number of people that are using it for transactions, there's Bitcoin ATMs now and people are using it to to purchase things. There's several companies that accept Bitcoin for for products for actual real physical products. But Yeah, but I mean it's not an investment and you it shouldn't be treated as an investment. I mean not I don't even mean like as an investment. I mean as like a primary

04:39source of of money of if if of if you just decided to take all of your money not as an investment, but just say I'm going going to live off of Bitcoin. I'm going to spend Bitcoin, but like your money's going to go up and down like going to be really hard, especially if you're um if you're accustomed to privileged banking. Like if you have the kind of banking that we have in this country, if you actually have access to that and you have a a nice Visa debit card and um you don't pay account fees and your money doesn't get confiscated by a dictator too often and you know, you can earn your money and interact with other people, then why why would you use Bitcoin? The simple answer is that's not really the use case, but there are lots of people around the world who simply don't have access to that and for them, you know, in many cases Bitcoin is the stable currency. You know, ask a an

05:34Argentinian, a Venezuelan, a Brazilian, a Cypriot, a Greek and the list goes on and on and on whether they're worried about volatility in Bitcoin and in in many cases if they've heard of it, if they've used it, that's the stable currency. Their national currency is far, far worse, right? Did you Did you say Brazil? Yeah, Brazil has had a massive devaluation in the last year. How much devaluation? Cuz I know that they have experienced some sort of a really radical economic downturn, which is really interesting because a few years ago when we first started going into Brazil, their economy was booming. Right. We I'm saying the UFC. Yeah, they're in a currency crisis right now. Massive currency crisis. on? Well, apart from the political crisis that's going on and I won't speak for that because I'm not a Brazilian, but you know, they've had impeachment proceedings. They just impeached their

06:22president. Um there's been a lot of economic difficulty with the country and I think they their currency has devalued almost 30% in the last year, 20 or 30%. Some staggering amount. Currencies don't move like that. Mainstream national currencies that uh have very large economies behind them simply don't move like that. We've seen it happen only a couple of times. Uh we've seen it happen in in Greece and Cyprus during the economic crisis. We saw it happen in Britain uh during Brexit and we've seen it in places like Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina and places like that. How much currency did How much of a percentage did Britain you lose during Brexit? Almost 20% in a day. Wow. And three things responded to that in the opposite direction. Gold, the Japanese yen, and Bitcoin. Heading in the exact opposite direction. Uh Bitcoin climbed 20% that day almost. Really? So, did Britain rebound?

07:21Um it did a bit, but it's still in historic lows, um multi-decade lows. So, they took a really big hit. And what we've seen again and again is at times of crisis, um we see this pattern repeating where people use Bitcoin as a safe haven investment to get money out of uh national currencies, especially where there are very strict currency capital controls. So, one of the reasons we've seen Bitcoin, probably one of the reasons we've seen a lot of activity with Bitcoin in China, is because of currency controls. Every time the yuan, the Chinese currency, devalues against the dollar, and it's done so I think four times in the last year, every time there's a massive uptick in Bitcoin buying in China. So, people are parking their money in Bitcoin or using it to convert it to other currencies and get money out of the country. So, what is the biggest fluctuation that Bitcoin has had? Um well,

08:20it it depends whether you look at it on a monetary basis or on a percentage basis. If you look at the movements now, it can go up 30, 40, even 100 bucks in a day. Um which seems like a lot. Um but as a percentage, the biggest fluctuations it had were in 2010 and 2011. Uh when it rose from under a dollar to over $30 and then back down to under a dollar in a period of a couple of months. Now, for people who don't understand what this means, when you're when you're saying it 100 bucks or a dollar, $30, like what what is that in relationship to? One Bitcoin. One Bitcoin equals $30 or 2011. And what does it equal right now? 617. $617? Mhm. Jesus. It was uh about $230 at the beginning of this year. So, it's seen a massive ramp up and a renewal of interest. That Okay, so massive ramp up, but like what's the fluctuation? So, if it's at 616, is that what you said?

09:20Yeah, it's tripled since the beginning of the year, almost. Is it possible that it could drop to like 200 tomorrow? Yes. See, that scares the out of people. Yes. And and which is why, you know, at the But here's here's the here's the truth. Over the 70 years that it's existed, the volatility as a percentage has been going down every single year. So, as the economy gets bigger, the bigger it is, the more stable it is. It doesn't get buffeted around, right? It's just like uh very large boat doesn't get pushed around by the waves. Uh Bitcoin is like a Zodiac next to the US dollar's Titanic. And the little Zodiac's bouncing up and down on the waves a lot, right? Mhm. And it might be uncomfortable at times. Of course, if you're heading to an iceberg, you want to be in the thing that can actually turn on a dime. That's a good way to look at it. But uh I don't know if it's a fair analogy, but

10:15it's a good way to look at it. It's It's volatile. And And that's part of It's part of the fact that a 10 to 12 billion-dollar economy stretched across the entire globe is a small economy as a currency. Now, in the interest of making this a standalone podcast, so people are not going to go back and listen to all the other podcasts that we've done, explain very briefly, if you could, Yeah. what is Bitcoin and how does it work? I'm glad I have this opportunity to do it again because every time we have a new audience. So, Bitcoin is internet money. It's a system of money that exists on the internet, uh was created on the internet, and it allows you to send and receive value the the same way you can send and receive an email anywhere in the world instantaneously without intermediaries. Um and that's kind of what you see at first glance. Behind that, it's a whole

11:03platform. It is, as the title of the book says, the internet of money. It is It is a set of protocols that allow you to uh basically exchange value with other people, but you can do a lot more with it than just that. Most people will use it as a currency. It's basically money that you can uh transmit from your smartphone to somebody else's smartphone directly, just like cash, um but electronic. And the thing about it that's unique is that it's not owned by any corporation, any bank, or any government. Just like the web isn't owned by anyone, or email isn't owned by anyone. And there's lots of companies that can send and receive email. There's lots of companies that can set up websites. There's a lot of companies that can set up applications that use Bitcoin. And I should say that when you set it up for me, the first time you did it, a bunch of people donated Bitcoin. So,

12:00what I did was I said whatever people donated, I would match I would double it, and then we would donate it to Fight for the Forgotten. They build wells in the Congo. Yeah. And we built I don't remember how many Justin Wren said, but it was uh I don't even remember how much money, but it was many thousands of dollars that people donated, and then I doubled it, and then we sent it over to the Congo. So. Yeah. The Bitcoin community is very generous, is my point. That that is true. And part of that generosity uh comes from the fact that a lot of the people in this community are very excited about this technology, and want to share it with others. They want to tell other people about this technology. It's really quite interesting what happens when you create a form of money that is truly global. And we really don't have forms of money that are truly global. If you even even with your very

12:53advanced banking system and your access to all of the technology that you have in the American banking system, if you try to send money to some countries, it's almost impossible to do. And I experience this every time I get paid in Bitcoin. I'll go into a conference in Europe. Um and I'll do one conference with a banking uh industry, and one conference with the Bitcoin community. And the little Bitcoin conference is going to be free to attend, and I I don't make any money, but they sometimes cover some of my expenses. And I'll send an invoice. And the banking industry conference will send me a wire transfer. It takes on average 4 weeks for me to get it with several calls to find out where it went, what's going on, why did it get lost. And it takes me on average 15 minutes to get paid in Bitcoin no matter which country I'm being paid in. Is this is the cynic in me. Is this because

13:45when they take the money and they're transferring it, and they're moving it around, and now it's sitting in banks. When banks have money, if they have your money, even if it's just for a few weeks, they have the opportunity to use that money to make more money. Are they doing that? Um it it certainly doesn't uh it doesn't hurt to keep it a bit longer. They're doing it primarily because um because the system has a series of intermediaries, and each of those intermediaries represents a risk. If one of those intermediaries says, "I have the money for Mr. Antonopoulos's wire." And you give that money to Antonopoulos, but the intermediary doesn't give it to you, you're out of money, right? So, there's there's risk with every intermediary you put in, there's risk, and that's called counterparty risk. Uh the because of the way the banking system is with perhaps five, six, seven

14:35intermediaries in a single transfer, uh that creates a lot of cumulative risk, and they protect with that risk by slowing things down. And um that risk doesn't exist in Bitcoin because it's from one party directly to another. No counterparties. That's one of the core principles. The funny thing I I had this conversation with my bank. I said that I had done this um conference in Germany, Frankfurt, at the headquarters of the Bundesbank. Now, for those of of your viewers or listeners who don't know, the Bundesbank is the federal bank of Germany. And they probably consider the the United States Federal Reserve to be a mediocre creditor compared to the Bundesbank. This is like the best credit rating on the planet, right? And I'm going to speak at a conference there, and they're paying me for my expenses. They send a wire transfer, and I call my bank, and after 4 weeks, they

15:34finally find it and tell me, "We've received your bank your bank wire transfer. We're going to hold it um because of a risk profile." I'm like, "I don't understand." Well, you haven't been paid by this particular payer before, so we're going to put a hold on it." I said, "You do know this is the Bundesbank, right? You are holding" and they held it for 2 weeks. "You are holding for 2 weeks because of the credit risk of the Federal Bank of Germany, the most creditworthy institution. I'm not trying to receive money from Somalia, you know? This isn't even something weird. And if if even they can't pay me in the age of the internet instantaneously, there is something wrong with this banking system, and there is. Because I got paid for the Bitcoin conference I was doing in the same town instantaneously." But there's also concern on their their end about fraud, right? I mean, isn't

16:34But there's fraud with Bitcoin as well. I mean, wasn't there that issue with those guys that were investigating the dark web? It turned out that the agents were stealing Bitcoin to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Wasn't that the case with um Yes, absolutely. So, the difference the difference is a difference between systemic fraud and individual cases of fraud. So, um in Bitcoin, as in the traditional banking system, if if a bank or an organization concentrates a lot of money, then you can go in and steal it. You basically rob the Bitcoin bank just like people rob the normal bank. And how would they do that? Just hack into it somehow or another? Yep, they hack in and they do it. And this has happened many, many times. And this is a problem with Bitcoin banks as opposed to person-to-person exchanges. Correct. Because the whole point of Bitcoin is that you don't need to put

17:28your money in the custody of someone else. And if instead you use Bitcoin as it is intended where everybody keeps control of their own money, then in order to hack all of those people, you either have to hack the Bitcoin protocol itself, has not happened in 7 years, and the way it's structured is impossible to do. Or you have to hack each individual account holder. And you can hack individual account holders depending on their level of security and sophistication, but you know, to get very large amounts, you you have to wait for them to give their money to someone else. What was that exchange, the Bitcoin bank that started off as like a fantasy website and some What was that again? Uh this was MT Gox in Japan. The Magic the Gathering online, which Well, you see, in the early days of Bitcoin there were no exchanges. So, you've got to think back like do you remember on the

18:25web uh in the early days when even the the the largest, most sophisticated corporations had a page with a single logo and a gray background and some flashing lights and that said under construction like in 1994? Right. That's where we are in Bitcoin still. So, there's a there were no well-run exchanges at the time. It was very difficult to buy and sell Bitcoin. And so, this guy in Japan had a site that could trade these Magic the Gathering online cards. And he converted the site to trade currencies instead to create trade cryptocurrencies. Uh turns out it's a lot easier to hack in and steal cryptocurrencies than it is to steal the cards. Whatever happened with that? The cuz the story was like hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bitcoins just vanished. Hundreds of millions of dollars. They didn't vanish. Oh boy. They didn't vanish. Someone stole it.

19:22They got stolen. They got cycled through the economy and they're back in the economy now. They're just not with the same owners. No one knows who? No one knows who. That seems bizarre. Like if you rob a bank Mhm. Like they can put a trace on the bills and they can figure it out eventually and most people will get caught, right? Yeah, and not really. I mean No? No, they if you if you do wire fraud perhaps, but in many cases with cash Bitcoin is like cash. It is equally untraceable. It's very difficult to actually catch. Like I think recently I was reading about the FBI closing the D.B. Cooper case. It's the guy who robbed the bank, got into 717 aircraft, opened the rear staircase and jumped out with the parachute over the Midwest. Yeah. And was never seen again. Um Yeah, they think that guy died though. Mhm. Well, that that that would be a convenient explanation for the failure

20:19of the FBI to catch him. Yeah, it would be convenient, but also didn't he like drop into the woods? I I I don't know the details. They never found him, body, or money ever again. But that can happen pretty easy. I would be more likely or more apt to believe that if someone dropped in the woods out of parachute with some haphazard gear and leapt out of the back of a plane, they probably died. Probably got eaten by bears or something. Yes, or or found by a local woodsman in the cabin who's like some some dude fell out of the sky with a satchel full of money. Thump. Yeah. My money. I need a new chainsaw. Yeah. Yeah, but when you're you're money from a bank, can't they trace the serial numbers? Like if you steal cash, like if you you go, you know, this is a robbery, stick 'em up, and you point a gun at the teller and they fill up the bag with currency, and you run out the door,

21:18don't they have like a trace on that money, like where they can if you spend that cash? No? no, not really. And they they can't because they have all kinds of I mean, yes, if they had a batch of sequentially numbered clean money, yeah, but that's not how most banks work. Well, the money they have on hand is the stuff that came deposited in the last week by various people, cash businesses like delis and grocery stores and things like that, and they have no idea what the numbers on those bills are, and they don't trace it. It's simply considered part of the risk of business. And What is this? A boy D.B. Cooper's money before. Oh, serial numbers. Some of it. Look at this. Out of the left side of my ears. don't know, I don't know, it's some it's a bad cable. I have to reset this machine. Okay. No sign of D.B. Cooper ever emerged. Investigators doubt he survived

22:07and never been able to determine his true identity, but a boy digging on the Columbia River beach in 1980 found three bundles of weathered $20 bills, Cooper's cash, according to the serial numbers. That guy's dead as They found his money. Some of his money. What, he like left some of it? He's being sneaky. I'm going to pretend I'm dead. I'm just leave some of this here. No, they they only found like a very I don't think they recovered more than a tiny fraction of it. Oh. Yeah. Okay. But I don't know. I mean, I don't remember the details. steal like 200 grand though? I think it was only like $200,000 or something. Yeah, in in those days you could pay the national debt with that kind of money. What year was it? Like '60s? '71? It was a lot of money in those days. That D.B. Cooper story is an interesting story. It's uh people love a story like that, where people don't get caught.

22:56Yeah, the mystery of the unknown. Well, the Mount Gox thing, the exchange, is kind of a mystery, too. That's a hundred million dollar many hundreds of millions of dollar mystery. Inside story of Mount Gox Bitcoin's $460 million dollar disaster. 460. Look at that guy there leading him around. Uh that's Mark Karpeles who's uh yes who That's the guy who created the out on parole I believe or on or pending trial. So That guy's out? Mhm. $460 million dollars and he's out? Yeah, of course. Well, is he responsible? Just cuz he's You know, that that's one of the things we we don't know and maybe we'll never know. Um how much of that responsible whether it was deliberate, whether it was an inside job, whether it was uh incompetence Certainly there was enormous amounts of incompetence. enormous That's clear. And when you listen to him talk I've I've heard him in speeches like when

23:50he's discussing the issue you're like wait a minute. That guy? Uh yes, exactly. But have you heard Bernie Madoff talk? That's true. Right? I mean the thing is that even even the most and the interesting thing is that just up to the day before Bernie Madoff was indicted, he was the top trusted name on Wall Street. He had the most stellar credit rating. He was the head of the credit rating agency for those types of funds that he was rated under. Um and the next day he's a crook. So is You can see these things happen throughout human history. The changing the form of money you use doesn't change that. But if you change the architecture of money and you make it less necessary uh and um less useful to concentrate the money in the hands of third parties that has an impact. And so So that's one of the issues with this something like Mount Gox or with any banking system other than a Bitcoin

24:49system. With with yes. I mean the problem is the counterparty risk. If you give your money to other people, the entire reason we have oversight in banking is because of the simple truth that if you give your money to other people, eventually they'll try to steal it. That's it. And the only reason they they don't cuz someone in the bank is going to have a tremendous need, a tremendous gambling problem, an addiction, something, right? Or just have a lack of empathy and and social socialization and just be you know, crooked. But they don't even have to be crooked. They can make a mistake in trading and try to cover it up with customer money. They can have a debt. Their their parent may require an expensive surgery that they can't afford. There's lots of reasons why people commit financial fraud and not all of it is because they're just greedy evil but Right.

25:45But the bottom line is that all of the oversight system we have in banking, which by the way, fails again and again and again and again to protect regular people from these thefts. All of these systems we have exist for that one reason. So the answer is not build better systems to watch the people who hold your money. The answer that Bitcoin gives is don't let others hold your money. Hold your own money and then you don't have this problem. There was a recent investigative report about um a firm in Georgia. I want to say it's Atlanta that has a ridiculously high rate of success with investments and they interviewed the guy who runs it and you know, his reasons for why they're so wildly successful and they make so much more money than anybody else were very suspect. And they're closing in on this guy like, what's going on over here? And they think that not only is the Bernie

26:42Madoff model not just Bernie Madoff, but they they think that it's common and that there's a lot of people they that might be supplementing legitimate investments with a pyramid scheme and that it's been a standard operational model for a lot of these firms because they've been able to pull it off. What we've seen again and again throughout history in the area of finance is that when there's a recession, when there's a drop in income and profitability for everyone, uh that event is actually really good for capitalism. What it does is it washes out the frauds. It washes out the failures. It washes out the unprofitable businesses. It's a great cleansing event, right? Because the tide recedes and suddenly you see who's not wearing swimming trunks, right? It's like we knew there was something fishy going on under the water, but um That's a good way of looking at it.

27:41When that happens in in Wall Street, all of those companies that were simply reinvesting the the recent gains to to pay the people who were withdrawing their money or the retirees they're supporting in their pension fund, etc., suddenly they don't they can't do that anymore. They're washed out of the business. Uh badly performing businesses, uh unprofitable businesses, all of these things get washed out. We haven't been doing this in this country for the last three decades. Instead, what happens is every time there's a recession, the Fed steps in uh or the government steps in and basically they pump water to raise the tide again, right? As much as possible. And that means that a lot of the crooks float from recession to recession without getting revealed. Worse, it encourages that kind of behavior. And so you get all of these businesses whose only ability to make

28:36profits is when the interest rate is zero and there's and their business model is take that and lend it to consumers for 29.99 APR. Mhm. Right? Or do payday loans or subprime loans or subprime auto, student loans, mortgages, etc., etc. You need a cleansing event to wash out the fraud. Um I I like the example of a forest fire. If you suppress all of the small fires, what happens is eventually you build up a lot of undergrowth in the forest. A small fire doesn't kill the trees. It just cleans out the undergrowth. You keep putting out the fires, which we've seen since the '70s here in the States. You let all of the undergrowth grow up. Then when a fire comes through, it's not just a little forest fire, it's a raging inferno. Now you can't put it out, and it burns the trees and destroys the soil. Sterilizes the top foot of soil. We've seen this happen, right? And so this is

29:39now happening in terms of our economy, which is that all of this um bubble creation doesn't get washed out in a recession. More stimulus, more funding. The Federal Reserve pumps more money into the economy. Trillions of dollars since 2008. And all of the stimulus, where does it go? It goes into inflating not one bubble. We had real estate, but now we have real estate and subprime auto and student loans and and and and bonds and stocks and currencies all inflating at the same time. Is it possible to do a controlled burn for the economy? Like that's what they're doing in some places where they want to deal with the issue that, you know, you're talking about how they stop forest fires. That that's theoretically part of the mandate of the Federal Reserve, which most people don't realize is a private corporation owned by the banks and not a government agency.

30:37Yeah, that's a tricky name. Yes. Federal Reserve. It has got to do with that. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of gross. Yeah. In fact, um I can't name say my publishing company for the book, the the the Federal Publisher. Um they won't allow me to put the word Federal in the the name of my company as they shouldn't, right? But in order to create an organization like that, you need an act of Congress. Uh in fact, actually what you need is an act of Congress passed in the middle of the night on a recess, which is exactly how they passed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. That was a long ass time ago. Yep. It's so ridiculous they keep that name, but there is Federal Ammunition. I should just say that. You can buy bullets from a company called Federal Ammunition. It's nothing to do with the Federal Government. It's just a good good company to buy bullets from. Mhm. Um it just seems like

31:28the the controlled burn idea, how would you apply that to the economy? I mean, if what what we're talking about You raise the interest rates. You raise them. Yep. It It drains the It drains the swamp. Raise the interest rates. Basically, the interest rate controls the cost of money. If you make money more expensive, then those who borrow it have to have a pretty good rate of investment in return on their investment to invest it, right? Otherwise, they don't borrow money. That's an extremely unpopular idea though, right? So, how do you get that across? Well, it's an it's an unpopular idea because um it benefits savers instead of debtors. Right? So, if you if you have savings, it's a great idea. I remember a time when I could get a certificate of deposit for my savings in the bank, and I could get 3% a year, 3% a year, right? I can't get 0.3% now. So, savers get wiped out. If you're a

32:26retiree who's got all of their money in savings right now, the return you're getting on those savings isn't enough to cover your cost of living. So, So, money basically is shrinking, and that's a tax on savers that um benefits debtors, especially very large debtors like the federal government. Yeah, it's such a complicated system that for the average person that's working all day and you know, you get home, you have hobbies and family and things that you want to do, it's very difficult to get a grip on exactly how money works. Yes, it is. And it's one of the things I found through my experiences doing these talks that I do um and I talk about that in the book, too. That the whole point of this particular book, The Internet of Money, is why Bitcoin. And I talk about the philosophy behind money, the the topics of money that most people don't understand.

33:18Uh and what's really astonishing is that here I am and I'm I'm talking about the greatest experiment in money um started in 2008, 2009. And this great experiment is completely unprecedented in the history of money. And I'm not talking about Bitcoin. I'm talking about 22 central banks simultaneously taking their interest rate to zero and pumping the largest amounts of money ever created into the world economy trying to stop it from collapsing. And that has created the largest bubble in history. And the weird thing is that most people are not even aware that they're living in a time when we are doing this completely unprecedented, untested, no one knows where it goes huge monetary experiment in which 2 billion people are hostage as part of it, at least, right? And nobody knows where this is going to go, but most economists, mainstream economists uh say this doesn't end well.

34:18What does that mean, though? And then we have the other little monetary experiment, which is, hey, uh money on the internet with a controlled issuance. Only a certain amount of the money is created. It's controlled by a mathematical formula. You can't make more. And as a result, it's got a stable supply. It's sound money and it cannot be manipulated by governments or banks. Well, it's so confusing for anyone as it is when you get into the issue of what is money and where is money coming from? Mhm. And how does the Federal Reserve, how does the government, how does anybody create more money? How do you print more money? Mhm. And if you are printing more money, where is it coming from and what is it? Debt. Right, but what is it? Like what is money It used to be gold. It used to be the gold standard. It used to be if you had a dollar it was a dollar's worth of

35:08gold. It was a note that was worth a dollar's worth of gold. Yes. That made sense. And that stopped Well, it first stopped in 1936, I believe, Bretton Woods agreement. And then it stopped completely in 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window. He basically said, "If anyone comes to your bank and gives you one silver dollar or one gold dollar and says, I want my silver, you say no." And basically defaulted on the backing of US dollars by gold. I met this really wacky guy a long time ago that was He was coming around the comedy store. He's this really odd guy for a bunch of reasons. Um but one of the things is he carried a gun everywhere he went and he believed in um he believed in precious gold coins that were minted outside of the federal government and using those as currency. Yes. And so he would have these coins that he carried with him everything. He'd be

36:05trying to pay for things in these coins. Like gold and silver coins, mostly silver. It's silver coins. And he was trying to explain to me that this is legal and that you know, they're supposed to accept these and it was very weird stuff. He was a very very odd. He was very annoying, too. He's one of those guys that would like talk to you. He kept touching you. He he talk to you and like hold you and like like grab your arm and hold you and like touch you and all right, Like what are you you're a control freak. At least it's like a weird control freak. You know, if someone's saying something to you and they're holding on to you while they're saying that to you, unless you're in love with them, you know, like you creates a very strange moment. Like why you holding me? Can I get loose here? What if I have to run away real quick? I have to break this grip?

36:51But this guy used to carry these coins around with him. Like he had a and sack. He likes to touch his money. Like coins Elvis off commercials and like that? No, man. They were like some weird coin with like an American eagle on them and Yeah, they're they're not they're not Yeah, they're not weird. Um they're minted in the US full silver coins. You can buy them. they're weird as They're weird if you try to use them to buy a coffee. Although a lot of people buy these and gold coins and small gold bars as investments. They keep them in a safe, right? And the idea is if there is a significant then these have holding value, all right? Um and it's not it's I think perfectly sane to say if you have uh some money put aside in savings, don't put it all in stocks. Maybe diversify, put a bit in precious metals, maybe put a bit in digital currencies, maybe put a bit in commodities and other things.

37:46Um that's kind of reasonable investing. And here's the thing, a lot of the people who have these kinds of attitudes come from families and from cultures where there has been a time in the past two generations where you leave in the middle of the night with all of your belongings in a pillow case. And with people with guns and dogs after you trying to murder you. And this happens today in Syria, right? Um it happens uh one generation ago to my parents' generation in in Greece with the Nazis. Um and it happens to the Russian people. It happens to people all over the world. And when that happens, and it's it's really close when it happens a generation before, right? Your parents tell you the stories. It's a it's a different feeling. It hasn't happened to most Americans uh, in at least two or three generations. But when that happens, what do you put in the pillow case? And I'll tell you

38:45something, the pieces of paper are worthless when that happens. And that's why some people do want to have physical coin. Now, one of the things we've noticed now is that digital currencies may start to serve a role. Uh, the fact is that you can memorize 12 English words and carry your entire Bitcoin wallet in your head. And if you do that, well, you can 12 English words? Mhm. What are those words? Rebel sell shin, party on? Yeah, so, um, you can generate a Bitcoin wallet, all right, and then make a backup of it. And for convenience, uh, some of the inventors in the space developed a system where you can back up any Bitcoin wallet even if it has millions and billions of transactions and, um, assets in it. You can back it up to between 12 and 24 English words that are generated automatically by the program. So, it could be like that speech in Pulp Fiction where Samuel Jackson pulls a gun

39:43on that kid. Mhm. That could be your, uh, password. Yes. Um, you don't pick the words, though. Oh. You don't pick the words. You're going to get a series of words and they're going to be, um, you know, asparagus forests, uh, attorney, What if it's all I like dicks, please on my head? Yeah, no sentences and no words like that. But think about the power of being able to transport an unlimited amount of money simply by memorizing 12 words that can't be confiscated from you when you're a refugee. It's amazing. I mean, look, the whole uh, the whole idea behind it is incredibly fascinating to me. And I've been a fan of it since the time I met you and before that I was reasonably interested in it, but of course having you uh illuminate it in such a great way really made it much more um much more enticing, much more interesting. And I've always been um curious from that point on as to

40:41where it's going to go. And uh I just don't I I don't know when I look at the landscape of money, when I look at the landscape of uh people that are willing to make this leap, I don't know what it would take to get people fully on board with Bitcoin, but I believe like you do that the system that we have now, the banking system, is incredibly corrupt and just bizarre. And fragile. And fragile. And and I think that's the thing that most people are missing. It looks giant, imposing, it's been there for a century. That is not a sign of strength. Did you find that that that um company in Atlanta that has this uh massive uh return on your investment that's being investigated? it up and I'm not sure if I found the right guy and I didn't want to call him out. Okay. I'll look I'll look again. But it's got to be a bunch of those people out there that are doing that, right?

41:38Yeah, absolutely. There's There's a lot of um a system like that which is which is very opaque, which most people don't understand, is the kind of system you want to corrupt because that's where you can make the most money without anybody noticing. And of course, you know, financial crime is not really prosecuted in this country. Um in 2008, giant crisis, millions of homeowners kicked out of their homes, illegal foreclosures, robo signing mills, blah blah blah blah. The only person who went to jail Bernie Madoff who stole from the rich. Uh pretty much everybody else scot-free, It is pretty interesting. It's almost like he was just a scapegoat. Well, he was obviously a crook. He was obviously a crook. He was obviously a crook, but And a sociopath, or something. surrounded by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of crooks in the same scale and giant investment banks that are just as

42:30corrupt. And we don't see that, right? You you can get you can get, um, pulled over for a busted taillight and thrown in jail in plenty of the states in this country for 6 months for having an herb in your car. Um, and at the same time you can put a million people out of their homes through straight-up fraud with mountains of evidence and emails and things like that and they're untouchable. That system, the problem isn't the fact that there's fraud. The problem is that the fact the system itself is fragile because of that. And if it was just them going out of business when the fragile system has problems, when it has hiccups as it did in 2008, that's fine. But it's not just them going out of business. It's a generation of kids who leave college with nothing waiting for all them but a McJob. Um, and, you know, coming into a generation where their parents could get by with one income in

43:35a household and now three jobs each in a household of two and you can't afford to buy a car, let alone a house, right? So we're part of the new sharing economy. What is the sharing economy? It's the I can't own anything cuz I can't afford anything economy. So, that whole generation is now suffering because of that fragility of the system and the fragility hasn't gone away. But I don't want to dwell too much on the negative, right? Because there the thing that I find positive and interesting about Bitcoin is that it serves a global society. It is truly global transnational money. There's plenty of places in the world that have it worse than the US. There are some places that have it better financially. Um but it really is quite an incredible concept to be able to have this money that can operate on a global basis. And with that the opportunities to buy and sell and trade and invest and

44:38borrow internationally. The fact that what we did with the fundraising here to fundraise for those wells, right? I we don't know if that was just people in the US donating. It wasn't. I can guarantee you there were people from all over the world donating. That's almost impossible to do with traditional payment systems. You could have then sent that money directly to where the wells were being built. Again, anywhere in the world. And that's really exciting to me. People are uncomfortable with Bitcoin because it represents changing one of the fundamental ancient technologies of civilization, money. And we've only changed that technology four or five times in the history of human civilization. We've gone from bare-bones barter systems, here's a goat give me three chickens, right? To systems of precious metals. Um and other nice objects, feathers, shells, etc. to exclusively precious

45:45metals, to precious metals stamped with the faces of kings. And then at some point around the the 15th century you start seeing certificates of deposit for for precious metal being exchanged, paper notes. The I have a deposit of gold there. I'm not going to move the gold from my deposit to your deposit. I'll just give you the piece of paper that says you're now the owner. And paper money is introduced. And and then plastic in the 1950s, Diners Club, travelers checks, and the first credit cards. And if you think any of these transitions were smooth, none of them were smooth. You go to someone who's been using precious metals for 10 generations and you say, "Hey, this piece of paper is money." They're like, "Mm-mm." Give me something shiny that I can bite. That's money. This paper, I don't know who you are. Go away. How long is that transition? 400 years. Wow.

46:45Right? Until broad acceptance of paper money, 400 years with huge resistance. It took almost 40 years for credit cards to go mainstream. With Bitcoin, we're going to do it probably in less than 20. You think so? But it's been almost 10. It's been seven. Seven. Yeah, and it's accelerating very much. I think in some countries you're going to see either Bitcoin or a cryptocurrency very similar or based on Bitcoin be used as commonly as a national currency. We're not looking to displace national currencies. We're looking to supplement them. I think the idea being that people will get comfortable using multiple currencies just like many places they are. If you're operating um you know, between the border of Kenya and Tanzania, for example, you're probably going to use four different currencies, Kenyan money, Tanzanian, US dollars, and euros easily, possibly also South African rand. So,

47:43you've got four or five currencies. And you can stop at a four-year-old in the street and ask them what the exchange rate is and they'll tell you. Right? Cuz they trade for their parents in merchant stalls along the border. And they have people coming with all kinds of different currencies. It's not that difficult to assume that there's digital currencies in that future, either there or in a major modern metropolis where people are using Bitcoin to transact online, to buy things, virtual things, music, video, things like that. What you want to make very very small payments where credit cards are not suitable and use Bitcoin as well as their normal currencies. What is the progress that makes you so optimistic? Like what is the I mean if you could point to any one thing or several things that make you optimistic about Bitcoin's future? Well, I think watching it as as a computer scientist,

48:37as a technologist, I look at this and I see innovation that is accelerating and I see much of the early vision opening up, the possibility of doing things that are so far outside what we could do with traditional money um that it it often blows my mind. Uh for example um a technology that's being introduced into Bitcoin now is called payment channels. Um and what it allows you to do is uh to do a very high volume of very small transactions at a very rapid rate. Uh let's say you're you want to watch a video and you want to pay the owner of that video to send it to you. Um how about paying by the second? And so you say you set up basically an account and you um pay by every second of video, maybe every fifth of a second, 200 milliseconds of video at a time and you're paying a fraction that is a thousandth of a penny. And you keep watching video and paying a

49:42thousandth of a penny for every fifth of a second on this drip metered basis. Well, you're not doing it, your computer software is doing it communicating with our computer software. And now you can do this really incredible thing. You can pay for content what it's actually worth. Um whereas the threshold for payments on a credit card is $2 to $3. Unless you're Apple and you're doing billions, in which case you can take it down to 99 cents. That's about the lowest you can go. So meaning watching like something on YouTube or some similar video streaming device, you would have to pay Mhm. service rather, you would have to pay, but you would pay a very minuscule amount. Yes. Like what like what are you talking like a couple of cents? Like to watch a video? I literally mean a thousandth, a five hundredth of a cent. To watch a video? Well, it depends how long the video is.

50:31But you could you could Yeah, it could be a scale. You could be a penny. Yeah. You could be a penny or half a penny or a tenth of a penny to watch a video. But what how would that work for the people that are providing content? Like Well, you see the thing is they operate at a scale. I have um 30,000 views on one of my videos, right? Um so YouTube pays me 30 bucks for that if I put ads in front. If I was getting a penny from each of my customers or because these are like hour-long videos, maybe I'm going to charge more. Maybe I'm going to charge 25 cents. You know, 30,000 views, 25 cents, somebody do the math, please. Uh I'm not good at doing rough math. grand. No, it's like 70 bucks. $70? Uh 30,000. I don't know. I don't 25 cents is a quarter of a dollar. No, it's 7,000, you're right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So It's a rare time where I'm right at a math quick question like that. So so

51:32may- maybe I'm going to charge less. Maybe but in any case, I can beat what YouTube gives me in terms of ad revenue with with each customer paying a fraction um of a penny. And here's the real question. But I get this content for free right now, Andreas. Why would I pay a fraction of a penny? Yeah. You don't get it for free. You're paying. No, you're paying in Yes, in micro violations of your privacy. What's your If the product costs less than two or three dollars a stink face. No, no, no. Well, if with you, but that was a weird way to word it. Yeah. If If another cord. If If the payment is worth less than two or three dollars, right? Which means they can't collect it with a credit card. What they're doing is they're selling your data to advertisers. They're selling your identity, your demographics, your data to advertisers. So, you're So, you're getting you're having to give up

52:28things. You don't give them up at that moment. You've given them up previously when you registered for the thing and verified your email and then verified your age and your gender and provided all of this demographic information, which they then parcel up and give to the advertisers. But you're still paying for the content. What you're You're paying by the fact that you can no longer um engage with the web without it being filtered to what they think you want and who they think you are, right? So, you're getting this highly filtered pigeonholed view of content. And they do that using your information to present what they think you would like to watch based on what they've sold to the advertisers. You're no longer a customer, you're the product. The customer is the advertising agency. Um whereas if you sell content directly, you reestablish the relationship of who

53:25is the creator and who is the customer, the consumer of this content. And you cut out the two middlemen. Yeah, but you're cutting out advertising? Good luck. And also, the other thing is like people don't want to pay. Even if it's a fraction of a penny, they They don't want to pay. I disagree. Do you think if people there's a lot of dopes that watch YouTube all day? Like they sit in front of their computer, they slack-jawed from morning to night, and they just watch YouTube videos. If they just calculated those fractions of penny all day, that would be dollars and dollars every day, which would mean hundreds of dollars every few months. Well, you've got to think about this as a broader economy because a lot of these people could also earn a bit by making a a good comment. Uh which actually ends up uh covering some of their cost of viewing. So, that you've got to think about

54:13Oh, you can earn from comments? Yeah, that's where it gets really interesting. all this that you're talking about? No, you could do this with Bitcoin. You could do this with blockchain. What is the difference between blockchain and Bitcoin? Sorry to hijack this. No, no problem. Um so, blockchain is one of the technologies used in Bitcoin. It's a distributed database where um all of the transactions are linked together using cryptographic proofs. Um Bitcoin is one implementation of a blockchain. And blockchain has now been used as a marketing term. So, it means very little. It's kind of like web 2.0. We don't really know what it is. It's a lot of fun. yet? Yeah, uh which is blockchain. Oh, okay. That's ironic, isn't it? It is. Yeah. Um and it's nebulous. Um but the point is that you can do more than just currency. Um Earlier we were talking a bit about uh

55:06trolling on Twitter and other platforms like that before we started the live broadcast. Well, think about what a troll is doing. What they're doing is they're stealing attention. They're taking attention without contributing anything back to the community. Uh there's an interesting and fairly um effective market solution to this, which is instead of assigning someone to do oversight and decide who is and who isn't a troll and censor them. You basically allow people to contribute a Uh, again, a minuscule fraction for the comments they like. They up arrow, like, thumbs up. But with each one of those likes and thumbs up, you attach a 10,000th of a penny with it. You know, irrelevant, small, tiny money. Um, and then the people who write comments that are broadly appreciated, that have value to community, earn a tiny bit of money. Not really anything serious.

56:00But if they try to comment, they have to spend a bit of that credit that they've earned, that reputation that they've earned. And if they're not a troll, it doesn't it all comes out equal in the wash. They don't end up spending anything. They don't end up earning anything. It's just participation in the community. But if they're a troll, suddenly starts getting interesting because now it gets expensive to steal the attention of the community. Mhm. Because the less you have positive feedback, the more expensive it gets for you to post until eventually you're priced out. But does that also that that also can kind of enforce or encourage confirmation bias? Because if you go to a website that's just completely ridiculous and it's a message board filled with morons and you argue with them, it could cost you to argue with morons cuz they're going to down vote you. Yeah. Yeah, it could. Um, and

56:50But you can just choose to not comment. But you could you've got to think about this again across a broader economy with a broader set of forums in which in some you are a valued expert and other you're the idiot who's arguing against the conventional wisdom. Yeah. And and you know, you can actually balance these things out. Well, if you go to a flat Earth forum and argue with those people, Mhm. it costs you money. Yes, I had an argument with someone about chemtrails. How'd that go? Uh, it went really it went very very interestingly. I wasn't expecting them to change their mind. Um, and they really wanted to hear my opinion. Mhm. And it was really interesting because we started the conversation. I said, "Okay. First, I'm a pilot. I have a pilot's license. I fly small planes. That puts you at an extreme advantage Yes. conversation. Mhm. Well, you'd think.

57:44You would think that. It's I mean and it's it's not it's not appeal to authority. Right. It's saying, "Those nozzles that you're pointing at, I know what those are. I have to I have to walk around the plane before I take off and make sure all of them are correctly attached in the place they should be doing the thing they should be doing. Otherwise, I don't survive the flight." So, you are a part of the Chemtrail Sprayers Association of America. Indeed. Yes. That was pretty much the conclusion we reached. the What are those nozzles? Um actually in the in the in the the ones pointing forward are called pitot tubes and they're used to measure the velocity of the aircraft through the air by a pressure differential. And the ones pointing backwards are usually to break up uh vortices. These are little swirly currents of air that come off the wing that cause turbulence.

58:38And you want to break those up so they don't swirl. Um by the way, the trails are clouds. How long have you been a shill the water vapor Indeed. Of course I'm a shill. I'm a shill for I can't believe I'm here. it off, Jamie. Yeah, I've had these conversations with so many people. It's so frustrating. You can present mountains of evidence. If someone really really doesn't want to believe, they they really will not believe. Well, there's also um I mean it's been going on forever. I mean, if you go back to the 1940s, there's pictures, black and white photos from World War I or World War II rather, where you can see planes leaving behind these enormous contrails. Mhm. So, it's a stupid argument. I mean, it really is. I mean, we've known for a long time that depending upon how much moisture is in the atmosphere Mhm. when planes pass through it, they will create clouds. Mhm.

59:30And it's just real simple. Right. It changes the temperature of the air and it creates clouds. And it's usually on hazy days. Not only that, but NASA has a website where you can go to it and it will accurately predict contrails. Look at that. That is Those are from propeller engines in the 1940s. And what what's happening is the propeller is compressing the air and when it compresses the air, the change in pressure changes the dew point. And the dew point is what determines uh whether the air moisture uh condenses into a visible vapor. Yes. Uh into droplets that are clouds. And so by pushing um a thing through the air uh you're pressing on the air and when you press on the air, that causes condensation to form and that condensation follows you in a circular cloud behind the plane. Yeah. And this happens at any plane, propeller plane. I I've done it in a in a

60:23four-seater Cessna that's that's smaller than a than a Fiat sedan, right? And on a on a on a wet day, you can see little trails coming off the tips of the wings. And I'm pretty sure I didn't put any spray nozzles there or flip the switch. I I I didn't I saw the switch. It said "Chemtrail them." And I didn't flip it. I didn't. Do you know how much liquid you would have to have in your plane in order to spray these enormous jets across the sky? I mean, it would be in- Sane. It would be insane. I mean, if the entire plane was filled up, I mean, filled, and you would have so much liquid that it would be visible from the ground floating in space. And then you talk to people about you know, I did that television show on Syfy called Joe Rogan Questions Everything. Mhm. And one of the things that I questioned was chemtrails. So I talked to a bunch of chemtrail

61:15air quote experts. And one of these guys had this study that he had done on water and the standing water study was proving that the spraying in the air was making aluminum it was putting aluminum in the water in the water supply. And so he had this water tested and so I he showed me the test. I'm going over the test. I go well it says sludge. And he goes well it was water. I gave them water. I go okay but it says sludge like the laboratory that you sent this stuff to says sludge. And he and well he was like well what is exactly sludge? What's the definition? I'm like well let's Google it. So we Googled sludge and what sludge is is water mixed with dirt. So I said okay so your water mixed with dirt contains aluminum. Do you know how much aluminum there is in dirt? Because it's the exact amount that they tested when they tested the world the water that you had with dirt. So what

62:18happened is your dirt tested positive for being dirt and you're using that as proof that the government is spraying the skies above everybody's head and you want to talk about like a piss-poor cost-ineffective program that does absolutely nothing. Chemtrails would be it cuz it's not doing anything. Like no one's getting sick. There's no like rise in illnesses. There's no like mind control going on. There's nothing. There is there is no mind control going on. There is no mind control going on. There is no mind control going on. I mean it's the dumbest thing. be easier to just put it in your municipal water supply? Yeah well there's arguments that they're doing that too. It's well of course of course. That's they they move it with the planes to the municipal water supply. Oh yes they're spraying it drops it falls in the water supply and then you drink it. Something like that. Anyway yes so

63:12themselves too by the way but they're immune to it because they're lizards. You know they're down here too. So you spray the sky indiscriminately. I mean, I guarantee you some Illuminatis are getting sprayed. I'm going to get some hate mail for this. I know it. Well, yeah, for sure. We're getting it right now. People are wiping the Cheetos off their greasy little fat fingers right now and hammering at the keyboards ready to call us shills. It's the dumbest It's what There There's a guy who runs What is the website? Metabunk metabunk.com? What is his name? Mick? Anyway, he He calls it the training wheels for conspiracy theorists cuz it's above your head. Mhm. And you're seeing it all the time. You're like, "Oh, what is going on up there? Why does that look like a cloud? Like, what is that?" And you start thinking, "Man, the government's doing something secretly." Mick West.

64:02Yes, Mick West. Thank you. Oh, Metabunk debunked. Look, Mick West is a shill. He's a shill. Debunk, debunk, debunk, debunk, debunk, debunk. He got death threats and hate mail when he came on that TV show. That was me. Woo! Yeah. Oh, this is the guy. Yeah. This is How does this hedge fund manager make so much money? Look at him. Just look at him sweating. Look at his Look at this. Annual returns. Annual returns of 13%, 24%, or even 91% since 2013. anybody how it's done, either. He says it's just a computer program, and you have to pay for a decade up front. And if you leave, he gets half the principal. Oh, gee, I wonder how it works. Jesus Christ, you crook. Clients Hold on a second. Is it Clients aren't sure how it's done. And Joseph A. Meyer Jr., the man behind the obscure hedge fund, Al R. June LP, is keeping his cards close. Oh, Jesus Christ. Invests most of his

65:00clients' money in safe treasury bonds. Yeah, it's safe as if you can't take your money out for 10 years. You know everybody in there can't take their money out for 10 years. That's insanity. That's insane that that's that kind of Like I mean, you don't know this guy, but look at that. What's that? What is that? It's I don't know. I mean, if you had to guess. Uh if I had to I'm going to give you two options. Yeah. Legit or scam? Yes. I don't know. I would say it is most likely a Ponzi scheme. Which is outrageous. Something people throw around a lot. But here's the interesting thing is why do these schemes happen? Look at Look at his at his offer. He offers an extraordinary guarantee. With Arjun, you never lose money. Well, first of all, what kind of name is that? that's actually part of the definition of an investment fraud is guaranteed returns. So, if you make a guarantee like that,

65:59it's usually one of the triggers that gets people investigated. Well, he doesn't But you never lose money. Yeah, you never a great investment. get involved. Yeah. Maybe put some Bitcoin in that and just solidify it. Yeah. Okay, I'm just I'm going to do the opposite. If you invest your money in Bitcoin, you will lose money. Woah. You will. You will gain money. You will lose money. You will gain money. You will lose We don't know. That's No one is And And I want to be really careful about this because many people go out and they push these things as investments. And you can have a lot of volatility. And sometimes when you have a lot of volatility some people get lucky and they make a lot of money. And some people are great at picking their moment and they make some money. They bail out. They make a ton of money. Like right now we're at 600 bucks. If you bought it back when it was like What

66:51was it? The lowest point? Uh the lowest lowest point? Lowest lowest. Uh about a thousandth of a dollar. A thousandths of a dollars or two to 600 you said it's now? Yeah, you could Yeah, so I mean If you put in like a big pile of money. Yes. Five grand. And if you took it out the wrong moment, you would lose all of it. And and this is why this isn't this isn't a speculative instrument. People can speculate in it. Well, isn't it isn't I'm sorry to interrupt you, but isn't the well kind of poisoned for the financial well with speculative investing? Like what what people are doing it seems like it shouldn't be legal. And what's really up about it is that they're doing it with algorithms and they're they're gambling and they're they're they're buying and selling within like a fraction of a second and they're doing it to point where there was a Radiolab podcast where

67:48they talked about how investment firms Did you see that one? Or listen to that one? I have heard that one, yeah. Where investment firms moved their servers closer to the exchange so they could get in their their orders and their exchanges quicker. Yes. Well, in New Jersey where the data centers of the None of the stock trading happens in Manhattan. It happens across the water in New Jersey. As a data center there where probably the largest amount of money moves ever and they have measured runs of fiber meaning that in order to be fair the fiber optic cable between the servers that do the trading and every one of the racks that are in the room are measured to be the equal length. So that the speed of light limitation across a room of a 100 feet does not advantage one customer over another. Isn't that incredible? We're talking microseconds, right? Yeah, well, if people have been forced

68:45because of this to move their offices from the middle of the country where they were to right there or rent space where their servers are right there. It's really It's so bizarre because a lot of this stuff is actually done with computers. So these computers are operating on an algorithm. The algorithms recognize patterns. They start these exchanges and they buy and sell and buy and sell and buy and sell and do all of this within fractions of a second. Yeah, over the last decade most trading floors have seen 90% of their traders disappear. So, there are empty rooms. You can see photos of it's online where it shows before and after photos of very big banks like UBS and uh JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, companies like that and you see their trading floor and it is empty. Um because a lot of that has now moved to algorithmic trading. So, strange. What a weird weird way to invest and buy

69:37and sell. Oh, thank you. Look at that. Oh my god, that's incredible. and it's not because they're making less money, right? This is not This is This is not a downturn. This during this time they've actually made more money. But there's something about those stock exchange videos that were in movies, you know, "Buy! Buy! Sell! Sell!" and they've got their hands up and they're "I want two of these and five of these." and they're holding up pieces of paper. That is so daunting. All that stuff is so confusing. Like to a person on the outside looking at that and trying to figure out what the those people are doing. Mhm. Like it seems exciting and chaotic and vibrant but so confusing. Right. But that is that is the American economy right now. Essentially. It's based on confidence. That's all that's happening. Yeah. So, should we talk about a slightly different topic? Sure, whatever you want.

70:29I want to tell you about some of the new developments that are happening in Bitcoin, which I find interesting. And I'm I'm not going to show because this is is not really about a company or a specific product, but I want to talk about one of the things that has me excited. Which is a um what happens when you combine uh technology that looks very much like peer-to-peer Napster or BitTorrent with uh a merchant service like eBay And you create this hybrid technology which is a completely peer-to-peer um store service called OpenBazaar. And And this is basically a system where you run on your computer some software and you can open a store to deliver either physical goods or virtual goods, have them listed, have them found by others, and then all of the payments are done in Bitcoin. So, by decentralizing the payment system, we can also decentralize the the store system completely. And it is

71:36a completely borderless, multinational uh open and peer-to-peer open-source software merchant system running on top of Bitcoin. Which I just find fascinating. The ability for anyone to open a store, especially in countries where you don't have eBay, right? Mhm. And be able to sell goods and services anywhere in the world and receive payment in in Bitcoin. And is this operational right now? Yep. And I'm selling that book uh on OpenBazaar. So, how does one access OpenBazaar? To to to the Luddite. They They run software. No fees, no restrictions. And they download the software, run it on their computer, uh fund the Bitcoin wallet in which sits on their computer. They don't have to give their money to anyone. There's no intermediaries. And you buy directly from the store, and the person running the store is running the same software. Well, let's see what some of the things

72:36that they have available. We went to openbazaar.org. I have to download the program, so I'm going to find another way to look at it. Okay. Uh yeah, if you go to um Duo Search is a search engine on top. Uh d u o s e a r dot c h. So, Duo Search is So because this is an open protocol and because all of the listings are in a peer-to-peer network, you can just go online, run a search engine, and create a search engine that searches the store. Wow. party that just has a search engine for searching the store. So you can Um you can search online there and tell it what you're looking for and find something from t-shirts to Gary Johnson for president. book. Okay, but not that's not what I wanted to show. Look, you can buy a flip phone. Go back there. You can get a phone for Ari. What's going on there? A lot of these dorks are going to flip phones now. 20 bucks for a Kyocera or that's an LG LG 44.

73:39It's a god damn bargain. Have you ever thought about going flip phone? Me? Yeah. No. I I'm I'm in the opposite category. I haven't actually received the phone call on my phone probably in 3 years. And it's not a I don't have a phone. I have I have a portable computer which also has a phone function on it that I keep switched off. You keep it off? Pretty much, yeah. It doesn't ring ever. It doesn't ring, but people can text you. Um But people text you. Um yes, but that actually gets redirected to my email. So I don't do text. I I I do it through either Hangouts or email. So when I send you a text, it doesn't really go to you as a text? No, it comes through to Google Hangouts. You are one of the weirdest guys I've ever met. I know. I I use it as a portable computer. It's my communicator device. The the phone function is irrelevant to me. Well, don't you ever want to talk to

74:29people? Don't you go, "Hey man, how you doing?" Um I do video talks most of the time. I know I'm weird. Okay. When I talk to people, it's on Ooh, well they're selling CBD oil. Ooh. CBD organic pure raw natural CBD. See? And that is where the god damn government's going to come in and close this whole thing down. What are you guys doing? Mitigating pain, you pieces of We're going to come in with dogs and bite you. Yeah, they're probably actually only selling that within Oregon within a jurisdiction where it's legal, right? Cuz they can sell it within that jurisdiction from that jurisdiction and it's perfectly legal to sell. Right. Colorado. Well, to clarify, it's growing in in getting in size. It's funny when we talk about how weird you are. He showed up Andreas has a Apple laptop and I was like, how dare you walk in here with an Apple product? I expect you to have some Linux box and

75:20Of course, he's running Linux on his Apple computer. Which is just hilarious. Well, I'm also running Linux. I'm running a bunch of things, but yeah, it's a beautiful piece of hardware. I like it. That doesn't mean I like everything else the company does or Well, you just don't like the restrictive aspects of it, right? Uh-huh. Yep. Yeah, you're all Android, right? Yes, I am on on my What are you using now? Which I have a Nexus 5. Oh, that's okay. So, this is the newest and the latest greatest of the Google phones. So, it runs the the pure Google or did you Yeah, it's the it's no carrier branding. It's I bought I own the phone. I It's not a lease. You know what I mean? Well, those the newest latest and greatest Android phones are at the very least commensurate with the newest and latest and greatest iPhones. I I think the the average person that's slight differences in in hardware

76:13really are irrelevant at this point. What does matter, however, is what you can and can't do with the software and how much of your life it controls and how much privacy you have with the software that you run on these devices. As you may have noticed, I'm all about control and privacy. Being able to control my money, control my devices, control my privacy. I think that's that should be a principle that we should all celebrate. It's It's fundamental freedom and we're gradually losing it. Well, I'm a big fan of options as well. So, I'm happy that Android's come along and created options because it was a for a long time it was like, "Yeah, it's an option, but it sucks." And now it's it's not just I mean, the Galaxy S7, have you ever messed with that? The Samsung Galaxy S7? Um I've seen it, yeah. It's a phenomenal phone. I mean, it is easily as good as an iPhone. It's an amazing phone.

77:10And throw it into a a Gear VR headset and you get fully immersive VR that is mind-blowing. Yeah. I actually have a little headset that I can put this phone into and do VR. That stuff's good, but it's not as good as the HTC Vive. Um my friend Duncan, Duncan Trussell, has the Vive. I I also paid $30 for my headset. Well, I guess you saved some money. is uh what? 1,200? It's probably something like that, yeah. Slight difference in price. Yes, there's definitely difference in price. Um but it is it's it's very encouraging that not only is there a competitor to Apple, but it is actually an equal now, you know? And I I just think the more options people have like that, the better they are for everybody. And it it would be nice if there was a commensurable operating system cuz there's not really. The Well, no, not really. Um for for geek heads like me, it's Linux, but

78:02essentially what happened is because Linux was so successful, it became Android. Android was built on top of Linux. Essentially, it is it at its very core, it is Linux. Right, but why don't they make um that kind of an operating system for a computer, for a laptop? Um because from what I can tell, really laptops are gradually disappearing. The laptop market is disappearing really really fast. Um today there were some announcements from Apple, they're changing some of their operating system commitments, but they're making the um iPhone 7 Yeah, they're making the operating system and more like iOS Um and gradually diminishing the importance of of laptops because most people do pretty much everything they need to do on their smartphones nowadays. It is it it makes a difference that it's nice that I can take my phone with me. I have the larger iPhone that I use most of the

78:57time and I have also have a Samsung phone. But the the larger iPhone that I use most of the time I can take with me and I don't feel like I'm missing a laptop. But if I need to work Yeah. need to get some stuff done I I want a laptop. You want a full-size keyboard. Yeah. I want to if I'm writing especially I want to be able to work. Yeah. You know, I want to be able to also plug in headsets and listen to music while I'm working and also have power at the same time and there's a lot of I'm not I'm a big fan of actual computers. I like an actual computer at home with a you know, a detached keyboard and a real monitor. I mean just I just think those things there's some benefits to those things to someone who writes in particular. Yeah. Well, do you think the great American novel is being written by thumbs? Right now. Well, Steven Wright was writing a whole book in tweets. Yeah.

79:44Yeah, he was writing a a novel in tweets. Yeah, that got typed on a real keyboard. For the most part. Yeah. Your book Internet of Money were for people who are listening. Um so, what else is exciting for you right now about Bitcoin? So, I think one of the things we've seen that that has been quite interesting is that it has become easier and easier and easier to use and easier to get into Bitcoin and easier to use Bitcoin in your everyday life. I remember a time when it was very very difficult to do all of those things. Now there are probably six or seven hundred exchanges around the world. You talked about MT Gox in Japan, the first Bitcoin exchange that really the first major Bitcoin exchange. At the time it was the exchange. There were no others. And that was both a single point of failure and a weakness for Bitcoin as it proved. Um but it also made it very difficult. Um now there are

80:46uh at least four or five major exchanges operating in the US. Very easy to access um access the system to connect it maybe to a bank account or a debit card and to if you want to convert dollars to Bitcoin or Bitcoin to dollars. Uh I'm mostly on the other side. I earn Bitcoin and then I convert it into dollars to pay for things that I can't pay in Bitcoin. Very easy to do that. Um that's a major advancement. That makes it much easier for people to get involved as much as they want. They don't have to earn everything. They don't have to do There's a a company called Bitwage uh which allows you to take a percentage of your um paycheck and have it sent to you in Bitcoin. Um and it's very easy for an employer to set it up with any of their traditional payroll systems where they say you can say just like uh I'm going to put 2% of my account into a savings account and

81:43and 98% into my checking account. A lot of companies offer that. Well, now you can say and I also want to put 2% of my paycheck every month into this. And to the employer, it looks like a routing number and account number. But on the other end, it gets converted into Bitcoin and sent to your Bitcoin wallet. So, you can very easily incorporate this as part of your everyday life now. Here's another thing. I'm going to try and show this in a way that doesn't cause me a big problem with my finances, but How would it cause you a big problem if someone sees something? the credit card number. Oh, I see. So, this is a this is He is He's super crypto. Yeah. This a Bitcoin credit card. It's a Bitcoin debit card. Ah. And basically it operates uh uh um one of the exchanges in the US offers this. And there's actually two or three in the US that now offer this kind of service.

82:38Now, what's behind this is a Bitcoin wallet. So I don't have dollars in this, I have Bitcoin in this. But when I went to the coffee shop where I got this coffee earlier today, I swiped this and um Did they look at you sideways? No, I mean they can't tell. They they see a Visa card. It says Visa on the front. It says debit Visa, it doesn't say Bitcoin anywhere. Um and so I make a payment and I get a little message on my phone that says, "We've debited 0.0002 Bitcoin from your account for your purchase at the coffee shop." So you could even tip them in Bitcoin. Yes. Now here's where it gets interesting. You know, I travel all around the world to do these talks and these conferences, so I'm constantly on the road. And I've tried again and again with my bank account to tell them, "Listen, I travel." "When are you traveling, sir?" "All the time." "Where are you traveling next?" "Oh, 16

83:32different countries in the next 7 months." "Can you just put a note somewhere on my account that says, 'Do not block his Visa if it shows up somewhere we don't expect because this person travels.'" American Express can do it. My bank can't. They simply can't. They want me 24 hours before I leave to call them and give them specific list of places that I'm going to be. Um and when I don't do that, when I try to use my card, it gets blocked until I come back to the US and talk to them on the phone, answer a whole bunch of questions about whether it was really me who bought, you know, a pastry in Prague or something like that. And then they'll unblock it. And what's happened repeatedly in the last few months is I'll go somewhere, my card will get blocked because I forgot to tell them. And then I'll pull out the Bitcoin card and it works everywhere without fail.

84:21Because it's a prepaid, because it's a debit, everywhere without fail. If I need to move more money into it, if I need to take money cash out of an ATM when I'm traveling, I can use this and it's so much easier. I can simply transfer Bitcoin into that account, and 10 minutes later, I can withdraw that in cash in any currency in any country. You say that with such glee. It's convenient. but you're so excited about it, too. You are. It's You can't hide it. But yeah, I get it. I get it. excited about these things. Because it makes it easy for me to use Bitcoin. And and yes, it's Visa, you know, the evil empire, the banking system, etc., etc. But for many people who are going to experience Bitcoin as an additional currency in their life, one they use for online purchases, having the flexibility to use both um and making it easier and more transparent is how you get to mainstream

85:12adoption, especially in the developed world. Now, how would someone get a hold of one of those cards? How do you How do you They just open an account with an exchange. They have to do all of the Patriot Act, Bank Secrecy Act, show me ID, proof of residence, etc., etc. But in the end, they get a Visa card. And what exchanges are available for getting Visa debit cards like that? Like can you name some? So people can Sure. In the US, Coinbase, coinbase.com, and BitPay, bitpay.com. Both offer Visa debit cards. In many countries around the world, Xapo, X A P O, offer a debit card, and there's a there's a bunch of others. There's a bunch of others. Interesting. That's interesting. That's actually very promising, cuz that makes it practical. Yes. So that's one side. Then a few other things that have happened in this space, certainly we have seen um a lot of the banking industry realize

86:07that they could actually use this technology, and not just fear it. And you know, we have this um and I certainly bring this view of banks as giant caricature dinosaur evil things. But within them there's just normal people, right? Swept up in the institutional inertia of this beast. But there's people who um some of them get it. They get that this is exciting and interesting and disruptive. They want to use it within the banking system and they're trying to work from within um to get people interested in this. And we're seeing more and more of these organizations gradually try to find ways to adopt this technology to streamline and to improve banking itself. This is very similar to what we saw in the early '90s when the internet started happening much more mainstream. The phone companies at first fought it tooth and nail, right? They they fought the service providers, tried not to give

87:08them access to their lines, tried not to kick them off the and not give them DSL networks at the time. Um they fought it at the FCC, they tried to control it. And eventually they all became ISPs. Right? So eventually jumped on the bandwagon and used it to improve their own infrastructure. Now, if you make a phone call on a regular traditional old phone your phone call is going over the internet. Almost 90% sure that it is. So they wouldn't let the internet be on the phone network. Now the entire phone network is on the internet. Whoa. It flipped. That's called infrastructure inversion. Um in the early days of the automobile they wouldn't let automobiles in towns too because they would disrupt the the horse traffic, right? And they had all kinds of weird laws including in in the UK they passed a law which required someone to run ahead of the car with a

88:01red flag. Called the Red Flag Act. That did wonders for the British automobile industry which was 20 years ahead at the time and then wasn't. Um Wow. That kind of reactionary behavior is very common in new technologies. And then infrastructure inversion happens. Eventually, the thing that was considered impossible, that roads would be paved to make automobile travel practical everywhere, happened. And horses were quite happy to ride on paved roads, right? Uh, whereas for automobiles it was almost impossible to use in a rutted muddy road when you have uh, four-wheel drive vehicle trying to compete against a four-hoof drive animal. Mhm. Yeah. And in those early days they pointed at that said, "Look, this thing is never going to work. Automobiles are never going to happen because you don't have the infrastructure." But if you have the need, infrastructure

88:58happens. And we've seen that with with the automobile, we've seen that with the electricity, we've seen that with the internet, we've seen that with all of these technologies. And now we're going to see it again with money because if you have this technology, building the banking institutions on top of this is easy. But making Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, making the internet of money play by the rules of the old banking system is almost impossible. Now, I like that expression, cryptocurrency. Yeah. But in cryptocurrencies, what is to stop banks from creating their own cryptocurrency? And what I mean, what is so wonderful about Bitcoin in comparison to other cryptocurrencies? Now, that's a great question. There's nothing to stop them. In fact, they're already doing it. They are? Yes. First of all, you've got to realize there's more than a thousand cryptocurrency already. A thousand?

89:53Yes, more than a thousand cryptocurrency. What's the worst one? What's the one we should avoid? That that list is almost 900 long. Oh. 900 of them that suck. Yeah, I mean, it's a long tail, right? Um, there's a couple that are interesting that offer different perspectives. Um but we're we're seeing a lot of private institutions interested in creating their own. Um and there's nothing stopping them from doing that. But they have to make a fundamental choice. They can either create something that is controlled, contained with specific outlines and borders with controlled access, permissioned access as they would call it. Um and that by definition is not global. It can't be global. It has to be contained within a specific jurisdiction because that's how they're they operate. Both corporations and banks operate within specific jurisdictions. So, they can do that. Um but then

90:49it has to be closed to innovation, closed to permission, and not global and transnational. And so, what Bitcoin has, and not just Bitcoin, but any public open cryptocurrency of a global nature like Bitcoin, is that you don't need to ask permission to join, you don't need to ask permission to innovate, you don't need to ask permission to create a new application, and any application you write will instantaneously work anywhere in the world to anyone without permission. That's the magic of Bitcoin. And if you think about it, that's also the magic of the internet. That's why the internet has been successful because it allows anyone to join without permission, connect to any application or service they want, write an application and launch it globally without asking the phone company if they're allowed to do that. There's no one to ask permission from. And to extend that analogy, they also

91:45tried to build private internets. And they're still trying. Um CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, and the early closed networks that had their own content that you could connect to that weren't part of the internet. And then after that, corporate internets. Have you heard of the intranet term? Right? So, when you have an internal network within a company that has stale content, crappy applications, and doesn't talk to the rest of the world, and is behind firewalls, that's an intranet. Intra. Intra. And they've built those, and they sometimes serve very useful purposes. But, they're not the internet, and you can't scale them and make them secure and make them useful enough. So, essentially, that would exactly be what would happen with money if local banks or national banks Yes. So, to follow from the title, the the internet of money is a very powerful expression because it really explains

92:44what this is. This is the internet of money, which means it's open, borderless, global, and requires no permission to participate. And people will try to create the intranet of money. Um and it will have all of the limitations that the traditional banking system has. Hm. So, yes, they can come along and do that. Um and the nice thing is that people don't have to make a choice to use one or the other. The only system of monopoly we have is that you have to use the national currency of the country you were born in and you live in in order to pay the government of that country. Other than that, you're free to use any currency you want anywhere. Some of us are free. Many of us are not. And Bitcoin fits into that model. It's the if you want to use it for this particular use, use it. Well, if if you extrapolate where all this stuff is going, if you you look at

93:41I mean, if you're correct, then if over the next 20 years Bitcoin really does emerge as not just an acceptable currency worldwide, but it's right up there with everything else. And and maybe even preferred by a lot of people that are in the know or tech-savvy or what have you. If that really does take place, it's going to slowly but surely erode a lot of the major problems that we have with society today as far as this government having massive amounts of control over the economy Mhm. and the banks being the ones who sort of enforce the the kind of laws that have allowed the mortgage crises and allowed these bubbles to occur and also to fund and help fund the politicians that enable them to keep these laws in place. I mean, all of that sort of is a lot of that is because of power and a lot of that power is going to go away if something like cryptocurrencies

94:44emerge as being the predominant way that we use and exchange money. That's the optimistic way to look at it. Yeah. The less optimistic way to look at it is that over the next decade, we are going to gradually move into a cashless digital money society. We're kind of doing that now with like Apple Pay and stuff. that already. And there are some countries that are completely cashless. Really? Where? They're very close to completely cashless. The ironically, one of the one of the countries that has a very high degree of digital money is Kenya. Kenya? Because of M-Pesa, which is the mobile money they have, which is now taken over a significant percentage of the GDP. Really? We're also seeing in Scandinavian countries now cash is less than I think it's less than 8% of um of the productive use of money So, they're using credit cards, is what you're saying? Uh uh credit, debit, mobile pay,

95:46uh Apple is Kenya's M-Pesa? What is that? M-Pesa is a text message money. M-Pesa? Text message money? Yeah, it's money you can send through SMS. It started off as basically people exchanging um minutes, mobile minutes, that were transferable by SMS, and they started using it as currency, and then eventually it became officially a a corresponding currency to the Kenyan pesa. And now it's the predominant currency? Um it's Yeah, in in most places, from what I understand. Uh I haven't been to Kenya, but I've talked to a lot of Kenyans who tell me, "Yeah, we we all use that and only that. We don't use cash. We don't use credit cards." Wow. It it is kind of shocking, but here's the problem. The problem is we are going to a digital currency society where cash will be gradually eradicated, either through non-use or a lot of countries and a lot of governments are are trying to actively

96:38ban it. So, they're putting limits on how much you can use cash, say, you know, $1,000, and if it's more than $1,000, using cash is illegal. When we go to the society, we have to really think about the implications. Do we want a society in which our digital money is under complete surveillance and complete control, where if you go to the wrong protest, or if you support the wrong political campaign, or if you make a payment to the wrong person, or receive money from the wrong person, suddenly your money disappears. It's no longer yours anymore. It's frozen. It's seized. It's gone. Um and someone has control of that. Corporations, banks, governments, and in most cases, there is no difference between corporation, bank, and government, right? Um and so, that's one scenario. And the other scenario is one in which individuals control their money, and it is digital money, but it's

97:35digital cash, like Bitcoin, where you can pay an individual from one person to another, just like I can with cash today, without any other party getting involved. What really strikes me as amazing is that we've gotten used to this idea so quickly, which is that we no longer pay people. We no longer pay people directly. The less we use cash, the more we pay people through a corporation, right? So, from tipping your valet to tipping your taxi driver to tipping wherever, tipping is pretty much the last remaining part of our society where cash is used to pay from one person who is not an incorporated entity to another person who is not an incorporated entity. Everything else you have to pay through a corporation, whether it's a bank, right? Whether it's Venmo, whether it's PayPal, whether it's any of those things. And we've gradually gotten used to this environment where we can't pay

98:37another person unless there's a corporation involved. And that's astonishing to me. And as cash disappears, that then becomes a final fact that every single payment in your life will be from you to a corporation. And that corporation takes a piece of that, every single thing. And not just that, it doesn't just take a piece, it also controls and surveils and monitors your use. And if you violate the terms and conditions, you are destitute. Wow. So, our So, the issue is not what we have today versus the digital currency of the future or Bitcoin or whatever. It's both futures are digital currency, and in both futures cash will no longer exist. That is inevitable. We are going down that road, and now we have to choose. Do we go to the digital cashless society of corporate control over money with the complete and total merging of corporate and state money,

99:38where instead of having separation of state and money, you have the merging of state and money and corporation and money where your money is branded money. You have Chase dollars. You have Goldman Sachs dollars. You have Coca-Cola dollars, right? You have money that is controlled by a corporation. Or do we go down the other future where we have money that is basically an internet protocol that is completely global that any person can pay any person they meet in the streets without any corporations getting involved just for me to you digital cash. And that's really the it's a less optimistic view because I'm fully aware of what the other future is and it's already playing out. And it is a very in my opinion a very dangerous future. This is so fascinating to me cuz it's so speculative and I love when you don't know what's going to happen and someone presents a bunch of different scenarios

100:32and you get the mind starts to wonder and and then you also sort of plan for the future like it becomes like something to it almost becomes something to look forward to or bet on, you know? Like boy, I bet it's going to work like this or I bet you cuz we really don't know. I mean and what what is the resistance that Bitcoin is facing from standard financial institutions that are in control right now because there must be some form of of resistance and is there any involved? Like is there any sabotaging of Bitcoin that has been suspected or proven? I think uh I I don't really know if there's any sabotaging going on. So that's that's that's a claim I'm not going to make any any claims about that. Okay. Just wink at me. Tell me what to say. What I'm going to talk about is the the progression of what happens when a giant well-established financial institution

101:30that's been around for 50 years or 100 years is faced with a disruptor that they cannot tamp down, that they cannot shut down, sue, buy, co-opt, uh eradicate, ban, legislate against, right? And And what happens then is what I call the five stages of grief. Um first, we start with denial. So, and and we saw this play out exactly like this with the banking industry. The first reaction was denial. Bitcoin can't possibly work. It's not real money. It doesn't really exist. It has no value. It will never survive. Fast forward 5 years, you keep making that argument, it becomes less and less credible because it's not real money, yet the big metal bird that brought me to Los Angeles today was paid with not money. So, you can claim it's not money all day long, and I've been living on it for 3 years, which kind of undermines the argument, right? Um if I earn it and I

102:33spend it, and people give me rides in big metal birds, it's money. Um So, that isn't working. It's going to go away on its own. It's going to die. It's going to lose all its value. Every time it dumps in value, they cheer. It's like, finally, Bitcoin is dead. They write another obituary. We publish them on bitcoinobituaries.com to make fun of them later. Uh it now has 110 obituaries, I think, published every time they say it will die, which is every 2 months. Again, denial only works for a while. Then they go into anger. It's the money of terrorists, criminals, pedophiles, pornographers, and the unsavory elements of this world. Pedophiles. Th- That's always the the one they pull out, right? They love to use that one. Yeah. Yeah. find one, they can find one pedophile who uses Bitcoin. Mhm. Pedophile currency. Yeah. Exactly. Um Dirty trick. It It is a bit of a It It is a bit of a

103:28bit of a dirty trick. And they've tried to do this again and again and again. They did it with the internet, right? The internet when it first came out they you heard this media narrative it it sells papers. It so it didn't sell clicks at the time cuz they were doing it about the internet, but it sells papers which is the idea that the internet is a haven of crooks and fraudsters and terrorists and pedophiles and pornographers. Great. Yes, criminal use advanced technology. Criminal use the most advanced technology they can get their hands on cuz they're in a very highly competitive high margin high risk business. And of course they're going to take the criminals wear shoes to run away from bank heists. Criminals drive cars to get away from bank robberies. They use cell phones to coordinate with each other. They drink water so as not to die of dehydration. We're not going to ban all

104:20of those things, right? And so you have that anger. Um and they tried that for a while. Um every time they try that you just turn around and say, oh well, you know, actually the biggest money launderers of drugs in the world are HSBC, the Hong Kong Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Consortium. Inconvenient fact. Is that really the biggest money launderers in the world? Yes, they were caught laundering $700 billion for the Sinaloa Cartel over a period of 10 years during which 19,000 people died in Mexico as a direct result of that. Um and they got a fine and no one went to jail. So you know, there are inconvenient facts like that. Every time they say Bitcoin funds terrorism you say, uh I see them driving Toyotas and Humvees. Um right? That isn't that's a bit incongruent. Like they're they're driving around in the vehicles we left behind and they're they got a lot of their

105:25funding from pallets of money that we left behind and they're getting paid for dollar in dollars for oil that they're selling to our closest allies who we shouldn't really mention, Saudi Arabia. Um so these are the inconvenient truths, right? So you don't talk about these in in polite company. Or at least you do. Like that's what I said when I was invited to the to speak in front of the Senate in Canada and they started asking me about terrorism and I said they're actually mostly funded by our allies and What did they say when you did that? That was the end of that train of thought. They stopped you? No, no. It was live public TV. But what what like what went down when No, we moved on to talk about more realistic and interesting things in a much more positive view of what this thing is because So they tried to discredit Bitcoin by attaching it to terrorism and you

106:12informed them of the facts of where terrorists are actually funded from. Yes, in a very public forum on live TV which was very difficult to continue that line of conversation. So that's anger. Is there resistance in Canada like there is in the United States or No, actually um they've been very very positive. Very positive to towards um towards cryptocurrencies in general. Yeah. Interesting. And there's a lot of development going on. There isn't that much resistance in the United States really. Uh the banks are shutting down bank accounts in some cases. We've seen that in the United Kingdom too. What is the right right now like what's the percentage of people that are using Bitcoin on a regular basis? It's very difficult to say. Um primarily because there's no clear association between one person and one Bitcoin address or account there is no account, right? Right.

107:08To to use Bitcoin all you have to do is download an application on your phone. Nobody you don't have to register anything. And so as a result it's just like how many IP addresses are in use? Does that tell you anything about how many people are using the internet? You can't really tell. That's a good thing. It's It's because of its nature. I would say we're probably looking at about 2 to 4 million users. Based on That's very interesting. Based on activity levels, based on logins to websites that some of them do publish results, it's very hard to say for sure exactly how many. Mostly concentrated in the US at the moment. Also in China. 1%. Somewhere in the range of 1%. Of Of the United States population. Oh no, this is globally. Oh globally. I'm sorry. Yeah, globally globally maybe 2 to 4 million people. said most of them are in the United States? Most of them are in the United States.

107:59Many of them are also in China. So there's 4 million, it is possible that it's 1% of America. Maybe. Yes. Maybe less. Yes. Maybe half a percent. Yeah, something like that. That's interesting. That's a lot. But what is happening is it's doubling every year in terms of transaction volume, transaction amounts, number of everything is doubling every year. And that's that's the kind of characteristic curve you see in disruptive technologies being adopted. And that's a very promising curve. What is the tipping point? Like what needs to happen? Is there anything that needs to happen for it for a widespread adoption? You've got to need it. Uh it's got to be ready and it's got to be easy to use. And so right now um it's not easy to use. It's not ready for mass adoption. And in many parts of the developed world, we don't really need it. So in order to make it something we need, either what

108:55we already have has to not work so well. This is what's happening in the developing world where you have banking crisis which drives people into a safe haven. Or you invent applications that couldn't be done before. A self-driving car that you pay by the mile um automatically as you're driving along. Um A if uh um a micro-payments industry for paying for content directly. Um the Internet of Things where devices can buy services online automatically. Well, things that you can't do with credit cards. I think if you start seeing applications like that emerge, and I'm very confident they're coming because we're seeing the innovation behind them, then you can make it something that is more needed even in the developed world. So, what What do you think could be done to sort of further this along or to accelerate this? Is there anything that can be done? Um

109:54As I said, I think the third ingredient is making it easier for people to use, and that's a matter of innovation and maturity, and we're doing that. I mean, that's already happening. Other than that, it's just a matter of time. We just have to wait and be patient until it happens. What could be like the steps that could be taken to make something like Bitcoin easier to use? Well, there's a lot of things to do. Um user interfaces, design, um security, making backup easy, providing infrastructure services, exchanges, uh um uh your paycheck, uh your ATM services, your debit card services, merchant services, things like that. Um one of the examples I like to use is I got on the Internet in 1989. I sent um my first emails shortly thereafter, about 1990. And in order to send my first email, I had to have uh Unix command line skills, a login into a Unix mainframe with

110:50access to an Internet connection at an academic institution. And then I worked very hard for about 2 days to get the software working, and then eventually I sent an email, and then it took a couple of days to cross the Internet. Right? And then almost exactly 20 years later, my mom went swipe and did the same thing on her iPad. So, when you take, you know, two days of compiling software, writing complex Unix commands, sending an email, and it takes a while to get across the internet, and then 20 years later that's down to swipe. When we can take Bitcoin from, I've to install a wallet, understand what it is, the QR code of the Bitcoin address, and how do I back it up and secure it, etc., and you turn that into swipe, then we'll be ready. But there isn't there a vast difference though between something like email, which is not just a disruptive technology, but a completely new

111:46innovation, the ability to send things wirelessly through the air, or even wired, like electronic mail did not exist. But as we're saying, Right. But mail did. I mean, it's just a change in the medium. Essentially, you're doing correspondence. But it's so much easier and more convenient, whereas like using a credit card right now is fairly convenient for people. Online banking, fairly convenient. Yes. For people who have credit cards. Yeah, so the And now that's that's where the numbers really benefit Bitcoin, because we're we're in the age of the internet, and instead of economic inclusion becoming greater, instead of more people around the world having ready access to these technologies, we're seeing entire countries getting cut off from economic inclusion. The banking system is not expanding as fast uh to reach these populations, and there's this vast gap

112:36left. And this gap is several billion people. And And into gap you can fit anyone who has access to even a rudimentary uh feature phone or smartphone with a very basic level of data service. Um so, the level at which you need to have technology in order to for someone to adopt Bitcoin and immediately become in themselves a global bank in the back pocket of their pants, compared to the level uh that you would need to reach uh JP Morgan Chase built a branch within their area and offer them services after going through a very careful verification of their identity and blah blah blah blah blah. That's never going to happen. So we're going to get to leapfrogging effect. Just like in many places in Africa, the first leapfrogging event we saw that was noted upon and people wrote books about this is the fact that in many places in Africa landlines were never deployed.

113:39Because the difficulty to actually extend landlines was so high that when cell phones came along at some point it became easier to just go directly to cell phones and bypass an entire generation of technology. Right? So we're expecting and I certainly see it as very possible to see a leapfrogging in economic inclusion. The ability for people to join the internet of money long before they ever see a bank. The end result is it's not just about banking the unbanked. It's about debanking all of us. Banking is an application. You don't need an institution. You just need an application. And that that transition is pretty powerful. Is there any concern that people would take people's phones and hold them at gunpoint and just steal all their Bitcoins? Like if that's all you own. Like if you have a wallet and that wallet is all you own. If you're on Bitcoin 20 years from now or whatever it is.

114:35And that's your entire financial portfolio exists in your phone. Mhm. And someone can come along and force you at gunpoint to transfer that over to their phone and then they take off in the night. Yeah. Well, first of all, already today you wouldn't keep your entire financial portfolio on your phone. I certainly don't. Um there are a number of very convenient and easy to use devices that allow you to store your Bitcoins securely on an offline device. I have a couple in my bag. I might show them to you later. Which which allow You might. You might. But you might not. I mean, if you want, I'll show them to you now. Just Okay, let's see. The way you said it. Okay. It's like, "What is this?" It's like teasing me. This is it for people at home that are listening this. You like Um I don't know what to make of this. I don't I didn't want to get wrapped up in the uh headphone cord and uh

115:30Okay. What is that? So, this is a device that a lot of people in Bitcoin are familiar with. Can we see that? Yeah. So, this is called a a Bitcoin Trezor. It looks like one of those things those old ladies press when they fall down. Yes. I've fallen and I can't get up. Yes, it's a bit different. Um so, this is a USB device. I can connect it to my computer. Can I see it? Yes, please. Well, I have all your money now. Does that feel weird? Uh you don't have all my money. You have Bro, I got it. So, I have a I have a backup of that device. Um and this is where what I mentioned before is this 12 to 24-word backup that I have. Which means that if I lose that device, um I can recreate it on my backup device. Which I'm carrying here already. one. I have a second one. I actually have four of these. Oh, wow. Um and you can transfer that 24-word seed to any device you want and

116:24it will immediately have access to all of your money. Will it render this null? Yes. Ah. Well, I mean, it it won't render this one null because it can coexist on all of them, but that one has um a PIN number and a pass phrase that you have to put in. You would not be able to break into that device. I could. Yeah. Maybe most people can't. Um I'm good at that dude. Yeah, excellent. But is it possible that someone could figure out a way to crack your 24-word code? No. I mean No? No. You say that, man. Don't say that online. I I I say that hackers, man. They take that as a challenge. Well, Never say you can't hack me. Here's the thing. Bitcoin in itself is the world's largest bug bounty. And this is something that most people haven't realized yet. A bug bounty is when a manufacturer of a piece of software, for example, puts out a bounty bounty and says, "I'll give you

117:20$10,000 if you find a bug in my software that someone could exploit to break my software." Apple does bug bounties, Google does bug bounties, a lot of companies do these bug bounties. It's very wise. And it's great because what they do is that way they they find these they have professional hackers, really, who go in and break the software and it's legal. They do it legally, so it's nice. But another way to look at this is that Bitcoin has 10 to 12 billion dollars of market capitalization behind it and if you can find a way to break, say, my 24-word seed, you have access to my money. So, my money is the bounty that's sitting behind that bug. And this means that Bitcoin is being tested and has been tested every single day of its 7-year existence with an ever-increasing jackpot at the end of it. Which is why you see Bitcoin exchanges, when they don't do good security,

118:14they get hacked and whoever hacks them gets the bounty, but Bitcoin itself, which has the biggest bounty of them all, remains secure. And the reason it remains secure is not magical. It's about spreading out the risk in such a way that there is no single point you can put your thumb on an attack. So, anyway, this little device. These types of devices, there are ones that have a fingerprint scanner on them that are easy to use. There are They come in various form factors. We call these hardware wallets. And what's interesting about this is that the Bitcoin keys that control my Bitcoin are created on this device, they remain on this device, and this device signs transactions, which means I can take it, and I can plug it into this laptop, and if this laptop is compromised, I don't care. It will not be able to compromise this. I can take this, and I can plug it in to the You know those

119:13desktops they have in hotel lobbies where you can print your boarding pass? Mhm. Okay. Consider that the cesspool of computing. You You go there, that thing has 25 different viruses fighting for dominance, right? The moment you plug in a device, they start tearing each other apart trying to get to your device. I can plug this in there and make a Bitcoin transaction and not have to worry about that because the keys stay on here. Mhm. Right? And And no one can figure out a virus for one of those? Well, that's the thing. This is designed specifically to have a very, very narrow, well-defined interface. So, the only thing you can send to it is a Bitcoin transaction. It then displays that Bitcoin transaction on the screen, and I can decide is that who I actually wanted to pay? Yes, confirm. And then I've paid them and nobody else. Is it impossible to integrate a virus

120:05into a Bitcoin transaction? Like you can encode messages in certain software, like Yes. Wasn't that what Al-Qaeda was doing They were sending pictures and inside the actual digital image, the ones and zeros, they were encoding actual information you could read? You can embed data. So, you can embed a virus. you can't execute that data cuz this thing will not execute the data it receives in the transaction. It simply um runs a fingerprint function on it and signs it. Oh. So, yes, the the point of this is that Jamie's incredulous. Look at him. Yeah. Seems like it's you're you're setting a rule that's just going to be broken in a month. Like, yeah, I can't do it today, but next week we figured it out and now we're to like stop Well, I you know, I've had this device now for 3 years. Um this is one of the first editions. Um I keep I keep uh my Bitcoin on there.

121:02Um and I haven't had a problem yet. I don't put my money on exchanges. I keep it on devices like this, which is why I haven't had my money stolen. The point of this is not to make it more secure, although it does. It's to make security easy for someone who's not technical. I could create a whole elaborate system as a security expert to secure my Bitcoin. That was never a problem. The point of this device is that you can secure your Bitcoin. My mom can secure her Bitcoin without really knowing how, but just simply following how this works. So, it takes security, packages it in a device and simplifies it dramatically. Um that kind of thing Here's the other question you asked me. What happens if someone points a gun at you, right? We call that the $5 wrench solution. It's like, should we build a 10,000 super It's It's from a cartoon by Randall Monroe on

121:58XKCD. It says, "Should we build a 10,000 supercomputer to crack his encryption?" Um no, here's a $5 wrench. Just beat him until he tells you what the password is. Um so resistance to that is difficult, but one of the things that these devices have and and other systems in Bitcoin have is duress passwords. So, you can put a small amount of Bitcoin in a specific account that opens with a different password. And so You shouldn't have said that. Now people know. Thank you, You gave me the duress password. Yeah, but they don't know which one is which. And this is a well-known technique. And we actually recommend using that as part of Listen, when I go to a country uh where security isn't as good, right? I carry my cash in a money belt or leave it back at the hotel in a safe. But, I also carry a bundle of notes, high-value notes, like the equivalent of say $50 here in the

122:59United States in my front pocket. And if somebody comes at me, pulls out a knife and says, "Give me your money." I will hand them my phone. It's a throwaway cash I have in my front pocket, and I will walk away from that. to this podcast, they're going to know this has a belt, and that's where all the real loot is. There you go. That's it. So, I mean, this is something a lot of people do, right? Yeah, I'm sure. And That's why robbers are aware of it. Yeah, but for the most part, they'll take the cash that you hand them and run away. Probably. Yeah. Yeah. I can't help thinking, like although these little devices that you're storing your Bitcoin on look elegant in 2016, I can't help thinking that they're just going to be like those Gordon Gekko giant brick phones when he was walking around the beach looking like a pimp from Wall Street. You remember that movie? They are that.

123:48And like he's holding that big-ass brick up to his face. They are that. People will be watching this show Yeah. from now laughing at those things. laughing at those things. And that's fine, because guess what? I I just found a photo yesterday. I was looking through some of my files. I just found a photo of me Yes, thank you. Mhm. Look at him. Like a pimp with that big stupid phone. I found a photo of me from 1991 with a leather uh side carrier with one of those in that holster. Right? One of those brick phones. It was I think it was second-generation Motorola. It was just about this big. That could like ruin your hip. Like all that weight. Look at that. Yeah. I was I was I was a sophomore in college. It's like 1991. The first cell phones have just come out. I'm in computer science. I'm a geek. I love gadgets. So, I go buy one of the first cell phones. It cost me an

124:44arm and a leg. I paid like $5 a minute to make calls on it. $2,000, right? Weren't they? I think I paid something like 750 pounds sterling at the time. It's probably about 1,000 bucks. For a thing like this that's whose battery lasted an hour. The batteries are so terrible. a fantastic photo of me with a leather holster with that strapped to my side and I looked so cool. Can I see it? No, I don't have it with me. You don't What do you have a physical photo somewhere? I actually found a physical photo. I haven't digitized them yet. What? When you do, please send it my way. I will, absolutely. It was straight up on Instagram. I I also have poofy hair in the front and I'm wearing a ridiculous shirt. It's Yeah. You were pimping. 1991. You were straight 1991 straight pimping. yeah, exactly. I understand. So, yeah, it will look ridiculous. But, the point that you make so well is that

125:40we did go from Gordon Gekko to the Nexus 5. Right? And and we're going to do that again in the Bitcoin technology. This isn't something that's standing still. The amount of innovation that's happening today, even though it's not mainstream yet, is staggering. I work in the space full-time. All I do is read about what is new in Bitcoin and that's a full-time job. How many people are there like you? Are you the only one like this? No, no, absolutely not. The only one who's this integrated? No, absolutely not. There's of people like you? Yeah, there there's probably about 1,000 people Like you? who are doing this, yeah. Who are living off Bitcoin, constantly investigating Bitcoin, reading about it all the time, lecturing and writing books about Bitcoin. Well, not so many lecturing and writing books about it or speaking at conferences, but there's 100 to 200 who are doing that too. Yes.

126:33100 to 200? Yeah. Maybe you should talk to the other 199. Maybe they make better guests. No, you're great. How dare you? No, I there's I I'm not claiming any special mantle here. There's lots of people who are very much into it as I am and it is a full-time job and because so much is happening. So yes, you're right. These devices will seem antiquated. What this shows, however, is that well when I came on the show the first time, I think, about 3 years ago, um I didn't yet have one of these Mhm. and I used to store my Bitcoin on what was called a paper wallet, which is basically where I print out the digital keys with a convoluted process to make sure my computer that's doing the printing isn't compromised cuz then they're compromised. And then send the money to those digital keys and then put those in a vault in a safe deposit box in a in a safe. Yeah.

127:26And that worked great. For 2 years I kept a small amount of Bitcoin safe that way. Problem is it took a lot of expertise to execute on that and there were many ways to get it wrong. So we've progressed. Now the way you back this up is you write down 24 English words. Like how hard is that? That it shows to you one at a time on the screen and it tells you write them down. It runs with software on a website which has really three or four buttons. It's fairly easy to use. The device itself has two buttons. I could probably teach my mom how to use this. Uh and she owns Bitcoin so that would be useful. But and she owns one of these. But it's still not ready. She'd probably only use it when you're around. Yeah. No, she doesn't use it at all. Andreas is coming over. Get out my little goofy Bitcoin thing. Let me pretend I use this. Uh she wouldn't humor me that way. Mhm? No, no. So um

128:26the bottom line is that 5 years from now this is going to be even simpler and we keep iterating and maturing of the technology. It's not standing still. And as it gets easier and easier, more people come on board. Not only are they able to use Bitcoin um and other cryptocurrencies, but they're able to do it with security in a way that doesn't require an enormous amount of expertise. And this is the same This happened with the internet. I remember this fantastic show you see in 1994 they've got Good Morning America. And there's this clip from the outtakes they're doing before they're doing this big internet story. And they have the host chatting amongst themselves before they start the story. And one of them saying, "So, what is the internet? Is that the um email?" No, no, no, no, that's just email. So, the at sign is the internet? No, no, no, no, the at sign is email. It's the www

129:18that's that's internet. Um and dot com, that's internet. And it's going through this process where they're trying to grasp this alien and strange-seeming technology and all of the terminology is weird. Let's play this. As host doing that little tease. That little mark with the A and then the ring around it. at See, that's what I said. Mhm. Um Katie said she thought it was about. Yeah. Oh. But I've never heard it I've never heard it said. I'd only seen the mark, but never heard it said. And then it sounded stupid when I said it. Violence at NBC. I heard it around or about. We had a fight in the lunch room the other week. See, there it is. Violence at nbc.ge.com. I mean Well, Allison should know. What do you say to that? anyway? Internet is uh that massive computer network. The one that's becoming really big now. What do you mean that's big? What How does one No, what do you write to it

130:18like mail? No, a lot of people use it and communicate it I guess they can communicate with NBC writers and producers. Allison, can you explain what internet is? No, she can't say anything in 10 seconds or less. Allison will be in the studio shortly. What is it? What is it mean? It's a giant computer network made up made up of started from Oh, I thought you were going to tell us what this was. Did you look in the dictionary? It's it's not in there. It's it's it's a computer billboard but it's nationwide and it's it's several universities and everything all joined together and Right. And others can access it. Right. And it's getting bigger and bigger all It came in really handy during the quake. A lot of people that's how they were communicating out to tell family and loved ones they were okay because all the phone lines were down. I was telling Katie and I've been telling

130:58don't need you don't need that you don't need a phone line to operate internet? No. No. So if you show this to That's awesome. If you show this to a millennial right now, they're like, "Ah, 94, that was just before the Civil War." Right? Yeah, that was This is 18 Is it 1894 Slavery was legal. Right. They had TV then. people back then. It's like they can't even conceive of a time when the internet was just so completely impossible to understand. I feel very fortunate that I grew up without it and got to experience it in my 20s. Right. Me too. I experienced it emerge and I was like, "Whoa, what is this?" But it didn't really have the same sort of impact you know, on my life that it has on the lives of young people today that are growing up with it where Right. They're I mean, you look at kids today, you go to a store or go to the mall or something like that. They go to go to a

131:50restaurant, they're glued to their phone. They're glued. All right. Yeah, here comes the prediction. This generation which is growing up right now, they never know a world without internet. They also never know a world without Bitcoin. How dare you? Now, 15 to 18 years from now, none of them are going to get a driver's license because there will be no self-driving cars. I need one. There There no human driving cars. I'll move to Montana where I can drive my own god damn A hobby? It will be a hobby and you'll pay $3,000 a month in insurance to drive your own car. How much? I think you'll see that's where it's going to go. Come on. I don't know. Humans behind the wheel, grandpa, that sounds insane. $3,000 a month? Didn't So you're going to be telling your grandchildren that we used to drive our own cars and say that sounds crazy. Did hundreds of thousands of people die every year? Yeah.

132:45Yeah, but we live like men. Yes. live sucking this digital dick like all these other out there. Yeah, there you go. But think about it this way. Imagine a child born today that never sees cash. Yeah, I mean it's entirely possible. to another country where they're backwards and they still use paper as money, right? It's entirely possible. So what seems inconceivable to us then becomes the norm, then it becomes inconceivable to live without it, right? And then you're trying to explain you know, so what consensus algorithm did the Federal Reserve use? Oh, it used the 12 white dudes decide for you consensus algorithm. What is What is a proof of work algorithm? No, no, Johnny, it was a proof of war algorithm backed by oil. I am happy you exist. I love having you on the show. I love talking to you. I love the fact that you have this beautiful vision of digital currency and

133:48if it were and if you're correct and it all pans out, I think it's going to be amazing. I I love that you know so much about it. I love that you come on here and educate us. I love that every time you come on, there really does seem to be more and more progress. It is tangible, it's trackable, it's interesting and it's fascinating and I'm all in. I'm on team Bitcoin. I'm 100% committed. I I really want it to happen. Uh but it's just one of those things, man. It's just entirely fascinating and until it absolutely is here, like credit cards, like the car, like all the other things that you were describing that really didn't exist before and now exist almost primarily. Mhm. I mean, I think um it's it's it's absolutely amazing and fascinating. And again, in a lot of ways, it's a solution for the control that the federal government, the Federal Reserve, the banks, and even

134:47politicians have over us today. That That control is slowly being eroded by the internet. Not even slowly, pretty rapidly being eroded by the internet. Even whatever control politicians used to have, it's not nearly as it's not nearly as easy to hide. It's so much more transparent. It's so much easier to protest today. It's just a different realm. We're living in a different world. And that world is happening incredibly rapidly. From I got on in 1994. You were on before then when it was like this really fragile, strange internet. I mean, you were in the early days. I'm really fascinated to see what it's going to be like 20 years from now. And I really do hope you're right. Well, that's one of the beautiful things about this is I think if you've experienced things like this before, and we're very lucky to be part of a generation where we have um advancements in technology happening

135:43at a rate where you don't just see one or two, but you see several in a lifetime, right? That are pretty earth-shattering in their complexity and involvement. We've seen the internet, we've seen social media, we've seen the miniaturization of computers. Now, we're going to see self-driving cars and digital currencies and all of these other things in a single lifetime. Once you've seen two or three of these, you start capturing the pattern. And the pattern is when it starts, everybody ignores it, makes fun of it, can't possibly see how change would happen, right? Um and this happened with the automobile, it happened with electricity, it happened with credit cards. The first time credit cards were introduced, nobody thought they were going to work. It was a crazy stupid experiment. Nobody wanted to take them. This happens with every type of technology. It's ridiculed at first and

136:40then gradually it matures, it gets less cumbersome to use. Um and if it has some some fundamental properties, some utility, something it's useful for that's different, that's new, that you can do things with it you couldn't do before, then at some point it hits an inflection point and it becomes mainstream very, very rapidly. And then everybody is both surprised and at the same time claims ownership and say, well, I always thought that this Bitcoin thing would succeed. Well, let's hope we're those people. Um this book is available right now, The Internet of Money. Where can people get it other than some funky exchange in some dark web corner of the world? Where can people get this? Yeah, so this is available on an obscure site called amazon.com. Ah, that one. Yes. It's It's also available uh it's going to book booksellers worldwide and Amazon worldwide. It's available on

137:34Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, Kindle Lending Library. Um if you buy the print, you get the Kindle version for free. It's available for sale for Bitcoin. Um and uh yeah, it's out now. Actually, um It doesn't have any pictures in it. What's up with that? It does not have any pictures in it. Um I have uh a giveaway for five copies of the Kindle edition and five copies of the print edition. Um people don't have to purchase anything. They sign up, they follow me on Twitter, and they have a one in a hundred chance of winning a free book. Um so if they want to try that, uh Jamie here has the links. Maybe they can go in the show notes and people can try and get that giveaway. Is there something you could say over the air that can It'll be on the I'll put it in the info on YouTube. Info on YouTube. Okay. All right, folks. Uh thank you very much, Andreas. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Uh I

138:24hope you write. I really do. And The Internet of Money is available right now. Yes. Right now. I have copy number one, you Right here in my greasy hands. Thank you, sir. Always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.