Speaker 1: So the big question is this, how do investors like
Speaker 1: us get access to the ideas, information, and most importantly,
Speaker 1: the right people that give us the tools and information
Speaker 1: we need to make informed and educated decisions to have success.
Speaker 1: That is the question, and this podcast will give us
Speaker 1: the answers. This is Mark Moss, your host. Let's get
Speaker 1: this started. Go and welcome to another episode of the
Speaker 1: Market Disruptors podcast. Today, I'm sitting down with Jon Prinzer.
Speaker 1: He has the author of the new book Inventing Bitcoin,
Speaker 1: and we had such a great conversation. He comes from
Speaker 1: a technology background and it was interesting to get his
Speaker 1: take as to how he learned about bitcoin and what
Speaker 1: compelled him to write this book. We get into how
Speaker 1: new people should be looking at the market, how they
Speaker 1: should be looking at bitcoin, the technology, and then we
Speaker 1: dig into the technology and talk about a lot of
Speaker 1: things like the consensus, UH, the security, and so many
Speaker 1: other good things. It's a great conversation I really enjoyed,
Speaker 1: so let's go ahead just jump right into it. So
Speaker 1: welcome onto the show. Thanks Market Things for having me on.
Speaker 1: It's a great pleasure. Yeah. I love reading books. I
Speaker 1: read a ton of books. I love reading books about bitcoin.
Speaker 1: And so this was it was a nice addition to
Speaker 1: the collection. For those that haven't seen it or don't
Speaker 1: know who you are, why don't you just give us,
Speaker 1: like a little background on on who you are, what
Speaker 1: you've been doing, and how you got to this point
Speaker 1: of writing the book. Sure, So I've basically been involved
Speaker 1: in technology for the last twenty years. My background has
Speaker 1: been in early stage startups. UM. I myself am an
Speaker 1: immigrants from former Soviet unions, so I came to the
Speaker 1: States with my parents UM, and so I basically spent
Speaker 1: my my childhood growing up learning about computers and and
Speaker 1: got into startups. UM it's built a few sort of
Speaker 1: smaller startups. I wasn't involved in an early stage engineer.
Speaker 1: And then in twelve UM was involved in the starting
Speaker 1: of reverb dot com, which is kind of the last
Speaker 1: thing that I was involved with before I get into bitcoin. UM.
Speaker 1: Reverb was a marketplace where people to buy and sell
Speaker 1: music gear and became sort of the number one destination
Speaker 1: for musicians. So from eighteen I was the CTO there,
Speaker 1: the chief technology officer, building out the tech team and
Speaker 1: building out the technology UH and the infrastructure, and Reaver
Speaker 1: grew to be about a half a billion dollar in
Speaker 1: sales company and just recently was sold to et S,
Speaker 1: So very exciting. Um, there was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: I had a lot of fun doing that. But throughout
Speaker 1: my time in the last couple of years, I started
Speaker 1: really sort of falling down the bitcoin rabbit hole. And uh,
Speaker 1: I actually decided to leave Reverb. Even though I really
Speaker 1: loved my job and I loved my team and it
Speaker 1: was a super exciting company, I decided that I wanted
Speaker 1: to focus on bitcoin full time because I just couldn't.
Speaker 1: I couldn't have a job, you know, building a company
Speaker 1: and being involved bit quoin at the same time. I
Speaker 1: feel like it's a very um It's something that really
Speaker 1: sucks you in, and once you get into it, it
Speaker 1: just felt like it was the most important thing I
Speaker 1: could be doing. UM. So I decided to leave and
Speaker 1: focus on bitcoin. Uh. And So I actually heard about
Speaker 1: bitcoin back in the day inn I read about it
Speaker 1: and slash Dot, and um, I didn't know what it was.
Speaker 1: I never really bothered its researcher or understand it. I
Speaker 1: actually did end up buying some around thirty dollars in
Speaker 1: eleven and then I watched that thirty dollar investment that
Speaker 1: was the top of that bubble, by the way, thirty
Speaker 1: dollars at the top of the bubble. UM, I watched
Speaker 1: it go down to about two dollars and essentially just
Speaker 1: forgot about it. I think I sold at the bottom
Speaker 1: UM or lost my keys, I'm not really sure, and
Speaker 1: then basically forgot about it. It was a mount gas
Speaker 1: about places everybody knows m mont gx UM later became
Speaker 1: until disaster was hacked or who knows what. Um so anyway,
Speaker 1: basically forgot about the bitcoin for a couple of years,
Speaker 1: was focusing on startups. Heard it about again again. It
Speaker 1: was another media hype cycle we had, you know, a
Speaker 1: thousand dollars was hit and everybody was talking about it.
Speaker 1: So I bought them again and again didn't research it
Speaker 1: at all, which is really embarrassing now for this second
Speaker 1: time having heard of it and not really understood what
Speaker 1: it was UM and again saw I go down from
Speaker 1: a thousand to like, you know, three two hundred level,
Speaker 1: and basically UM again was like, okay, so fool me twice,
Speaker 1: you know, shame on me. Forget about it and sort
Speaker 1: of focused on my startups and UM. It wasn't really
Speaker 1: until until I started really learning about it again. And
Speaker 1: it was my cousin actually, who was working for Microsoft too,
Speaker 1: UM was was working at my shoft blockchain strategy, came
Speaker 1: to me and told me about ethereum, and I started
Speaker 1: looking at ethereum and researching it and sort of I
Speaker 1: thought it was pretty interesting, um, and then realized that
Speaker 1: there was this connection between ethereum and bitcoin, and the
Speaker 1: light bulb went off in my head and I started
Speaker 1: sort of researching that side of things and just completely
Speaker 1: fell down the bitcoin rabbit hole and realized that this
Speaker 1: was the most important thing, um, possibly the most important
Speaker 1: invention of my lifetime for sure, um after the Internet
Speaker 1: force um and the Web, but something that I really
Speaker 1: wanted to be involved in and helping bring to the world. Yeah. Wow, Yeah,
Speaker 1: she fool you twice, right, chame on you. Well, but
Speaker 1: you're butcher, battle hardened and it gives you that perspective
Speaker 1: that you need now. So UM, that's good. Yeah. UM,
Speaker 1: I'm curious. So you said, uh, you know, you said
Speaker 1: that it was the most important invention that you've seen
Speaker 1: since the Internet. Why is that? Why do you think
Speaker 1: it's the most important invention? Well, so it's interesting because
Speaker 1: my background you know, having come from the former Soviet Union. UM,
Speaker 1: I actually was sort of living in a country that
Speaker 1: experienced the exact problems a bitcoin is purported to solve. Um.
Speaker 1: So for a lot of people who are maybe you know,
Speaker 1: in the United States or a pretty sort of like
Speaker 1: first World regulated type of economy, they don't really see
Speaker 1: the value of bitcoin right away. Um, for them, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's harder sell. For me, it was pretty obvious. One. Um,
Speaker 1: in the former Soviet Union, the government had complete control
Speaker 1: over the economy. Prices were fixed, um, all that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. But also, um, you were not allowed to
Speaker 1: own any foreign currency. So if you wanted to own
Speaker 1: you as dollars, that was legal was considered speculation. A
Speaker 1: speculation was legal, So you had no way of storing
Speaker 1: your wealth. And something that wasn't basically under complete control
Speaker 1: of the government and was constantly being devalued, the Ruble.
Speaker 1: Soviet Ruble went through devaluations of factors of a hundred
Speaker 1: and a thousand multiple times throughout his lifetime. Ah, it
Speaker 1: was you know, there's shortages of goods everywhere, There's lots
Speaker 1: and lots of problems, So what does that look like?
Speaker 1: So that you're you're the ruble is the currency that
Speaker 1: you had at the time. You're devaluing it, which we
Speaker 1: hear about devaluing all the time. So basically they're taking
Speaker 1: the value out right, the value they're they're essentially printing
Speaker 1: more and more of it in order to quote unquote
Speaker 1: fund you know, social programs. But if you look at
Speaker 1: like you know, if you Wikipedia the history of the ruble,
Speaker 1: you'll see like at some point, you know, they Chad
Speaker 1: they issued a ne rouble because the old one was
Speaker 1: so inflated where people were you had had to carry
Speaker 1: to thousand, a hundred thousand rubles all of a suddenly
Speaker 1: chopped up. Zeros issued a new rouble, trying to create
Speaker 1: you know, sort of price stability, but it's it's not
Speaker 1: possible to create price stability because prices are really set
Speaker 1: by market participants, and when the government's interferes and the
Speaker 1: pricing mechanism, it doesn't really let the courtesy to his job,
Speaker 1: and so over time, people whose faith in and becomes
Speaker 1: a problem. Yeah, that's a it's it's just a it's
Speaker 1: really fascinating to talk to someone who has that perspective
Speaker 1: that's living in it. As you said, right, A lot
Speaker 1: of people in the United States, which is the majority
Speaker 1: of the market that I that I talked to, Um,
Speaker 1: we do get caught up in there, or a lot
Speaker 1: of people get caught up in this kind of vision
Speaker 1: where like, oh the dollar strong, the dollar this, but
Speaker 1: in other countries they see the value as you said.
Speaker 1: But I'm just curious, like having kind of witnessed that firsthand,
Speaker 1: like what does that look like to see your currency
Speaker 1: being devalued? Like for example, Um, there was a book
Speaker 1: that was written about kind of like a biography about
Speaker 1: some of the people that lived through UH in Germany.
Speaker 1: Why our Germany when it happened? And they said that, Um,
Speaker 1: they said that they thought when what they didn't really
Speaker 1: think of their currency at losing value. They just saw
Speaker 1: like other currencies were stronger and that connection. How was
Speaker 1: how what was your perspective on it? I mean for me,
Speaker 1: you know, to be clear, I was a kid. I
Speaker 1: was seven years old when I was in Russia, and
Speaker 1: so most of what I know is through my parents
Speaker 1: stories and through research. Um. What I do remember, though,
Speaker 1: is that we had to stand in line for goods,
Speaker 1: doing basic stuff like bread or whatever. I mean, you
Speaker 1: had shortages of goods everywhere, and people were just like
Speaker 1: getting in line. You saw a line somewhere, you just did.
Speaker 1: You stood in it. You didn't know what they were
Speaker 1: giving out, but you stood in and you got whatever
Speaker 1: they gave you, and then you try to trade it
Speaker 1: for other stuff. Um So that the value of the
Speaker 1: currency wasn't even so much an issue because basically there
Speaker 1: was nothing to you could buy with it anyway. Um So,
Speaker 1: what what that really meant is the government was trying
Speaker 1: to um control the entire economy and reallocate resources and
Speaker 1: say we want this much bread, and we want this
Speaker 1: much milk, and this is the price for an apartment,
Speaker 1: you know, and all that kind of stuff screwed up
Speaker 1: the market so badly that there were shortages everywhere. UM So,
Speaker 1: you're seven years old and you're leaving that. So at
Speaker 1: that time, seven years old, you're pretty young. You're not
Speaker 1: really getting it, but you have the visions of that.
Speaker 1: As you said, I'm sure you've heard the stories from
Speaker 1: your family and whatnot. Like you said, you've researched it. Um.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's pretty it's it's a pretty big impact.
Speaker 1: I mean a lot of what we learned up until
Speaker 1: seven is done through like hypnosis, right, we learned through
Speaker 1: what we see. Um. So I'm sure that had to
Speaker 1: leave an impression. Um. But were you interested in like
Speaker 1: economics and how money works at all kind of growing
Speaker 1: up or was it not until you got down the
Speaker 1: bitcoin rabbit hole that you started to think about it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean really, it wasn't until very recently because I
Speaker 1: sort of I grew up. I had a happy childhood
Speaker 1: here in America. You know, we had a nice life.
Speaker 1: We came in as immigrants. We we came in with
Speaker 1: very little. Um. That's one of the interesting things that
Speaker 1: I learned about asking my appearance about it is when
Speaker 1: we left Russia, they basically exchanged only one dred dollars
Speaker 1: worth of currency for person like gu's how much we
Speaker 1: were able to take at the government's exchange rate. Because,
Speaker 1: like I said, the ruble it wasn't worth anything on street.
Speaker 1: Nobody actually wanted it. So the government gave us a
Speaker 1: hundred dollars worth of currency, and then we left, you know,
Speaker 1: the Russia with four hundred dollars in our project, with
Speaker 1: the family of four. We came here, and you know,
Speaker 1: I grew up, you know, with with computers and my
Speaker 1: dad buying me a computer when when I was eight,
Speaker 1: and I started learning all that stuff. So I didn't
Speaker 1: think about sort of Russia until much later, which was
Speaker 1: when I get into bitcoin, and I started realizing that
Speaker 1: all these things that bitcoin was claiming, like one, uh,
Speaker 1: the government cannot interfere in the issues of this money
Speaker 1: to nobody can take it from you, right, you can.
Speaker 1: You can store your wealth and you can take it
Speaker 1: with you. It's portable, it's not seasible. Like these things
Speaker 1: turned those wheels in my head, and I started thinking
Speaker 1: back to how it was when we were left Russia
Speaker 1: and I asked my parents about it, and he told
Speaker 1: me these stories about how much we were able to
Speaker 1: keep and all this kind of stuff, and I was like, wow,
Speaker 1: this is this is exactly why bitcoin needs to exist, right,
Speaker 1: we need to prevent these these disasters, and we need
Speaker 1: to allow people to put a check on their governments
Speaker 1: from doing crazy things like this. Yeah. So, um, I'm curious. Uh,
Speaker 1: I mean what you're saying, right, what bitcoin is censorship resistant, immutable, right,
Speaker 1: not seizable, non inflatable. Um, it's revolutionary, right, I mean
Speaker 1: this potentially has the ability to save hundreds of millions
Speaker 1: of people that live in these oppressive regimes, but people
Speaker 1: in the United States still don't get why that's important. Um,
Speaker 1: so I like, I like to think about the why.
Speaker 1: I'm curious. As you've talked to your parents, I'm sure
Speaker 1: you have right, and I talked to them about bitcoining
Speaker 1: obviously wrote the book. Um do they seem to get
Speaker 1: it sooner or easier than a lot of people maybe
Speaker 1: that are your age, that are in the United States.
Speaker 1: I think so, yeah. I mean my dad is also
Speaker 1: a computer person, so for him, he also sees it
Speaker 1: as a technology, and that's kind of how I approach
Speaker 1: it a first, explaining that this is a new type
Speaker 1: of system that doesn't have anybody in charge, and it's
Speaker 1: a very interesting innovation in that sense where there's a
Speaker 1: bunch of computers that are coordinating and there's nobody that's
Speaker 1: telling them what to do. They're just all enforcing the
Speaker 1: rules of bitcoin by themselves, and that that was interesting
Speaker 1: to him. But I do think that they see the
Speaker 1: value uh quicker because and so do any really any immigrants,
Speaker 1: let's come from from a place like Soviet Soviet Union,
Speaker 1: They see that value quicker because they understand what it's
Speaker 1: like to live in a regime which has absolute economic
Speaker 1: control um and basically oppresses its people through the economic system. Right,
Speaker 1: that's not something that's happening in America. Even though a
Speaker 1: lot of American bitcoiners are sort of focused on the
Speaker 1: dollar losing its value over time and inflation and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. That's all true, but it's very very slow, right,
Speaker 1: And in the United States that process is so slow
Speaker 1: that it's hard for you to see a day to
Speaker 1: day Whereas if you come from UM, a place that
Speaker 1: really had a bad economic system, you you have seen
Speaker 1: it happen before your eyes. You've seen the shortages, you've
Speaker 1: seen the currency the value, You've seen this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: So it's definitely easier to get from from that perspective. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you know, with with with the u SSR
Speaker 1: or or we see in venezuel Argentina and and then
Speaker 1: compared to United States, like you said, it's happening slowly,
Speaker 1: so it's hard to see it. But as we've seen
Speaker 1: in Venezuela and Argentina and back to the USSR, I
Speaker 1: think it happens slowly and then it happens fast. It's
Speaker 1: like you're not it's happening slowly, you're not really paying attention,
Speaker 1: but then once it starts happening, it's like it's almost
Speaker 1: too late. Um. But I was curious, you know, just because,
Speaker 1: like I think for me, and you wrote the book,
Speaker 1: so I'm sure you've grappled with this. But bitcoin is
Speaker 1: hard for most people to understand because it's multifaceted, right,
Speaker 1: So there is the technology piece, there's the money piece,
Speaker 1: there's the privacy piece, the like there's all these different pieces.
Speaker 1: There's philosophy and all these things, um and so um.
Speaker 1: But at the end of the day, it always seems
Speaker 1: to come down to why, Like why should I care? Like, okay,
Speaker 1: so it's like a technological revelation, innovation, but why why
Speaker 1: do I need something that can do that? But when
Speaker 1: you've just come from Russia and had your life taken
Speaker 1: from you all of a sudden, you're like, I know
Speaker 1: exactly why I need that. So that's why I was
Speaker 1: just curious about that. Um, definitely, Yeah, it's it's that
Speaker 1: was for me. I almost worked back to the why
Speaker 1: because when I came into the bitcoin, I came in
Speaker 1: from such a tech angle where I was like, wow,
Speaker 1: this is such a cool idea just from a technology standpoint,
Speaker 1: and then I started researching it and then I started
Speaker 1: like sort of getting red pilled in all the economic
Speaker 1: aspects of it. And that's something that I never really questioned,
Speaker 1: you know, like what is money? Right? Like money? Is
Speaker 1: this the stuff that the government prints? And like I
Speaker 1: use it, it's fine, um. And then I get into bitcoin,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, there's all these deeper questions
Speaker 1: to be asked, like well, why does the government get
Speaker 1: to print money? Is that a good thing that they
Speaker 1: get to do that? Um? Has that been abused in
Speaker 1: some fashion? And like when you get to those wise,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, you realize that we do have problems.
Speaker 1: And these problems are not obvious to the everyday person
Speaker 1: who's just like using their money and generally work, especially
Speaker 1: in America or Canada or any kind of you know,
Speaker 1: even in Europe, like largely speaking, people don't see a
Speaker 1: day to day But then you get into the wise
Speaker 1: of this, and then you see like the Equifax tack,
Speaker 1: see people losing their identity information, and you see China
Speaker 1: and you see the sort of the talentari and control
Speaker 1: they have over over spending that how people are spending
Speaker 1: their currency and then watching what people are doing, it's
Speaker 1: like scary stuff and you start to see that, um,
Speaker 1: that we're not living in the same financial system that
Speaker 1: we were living in even fifty years ago, even twenty
Speaker 1: five years ago. We're digitizing extremely rapidly, and that digitization,
Speaker 1: like the money everywhere is going digital. Right, there's no
Speaker 1: doubt in my mind that that's happening. Um, it's going
Speaker 1: to happen within our lifetimes for sure, maybe a hundred
Speaker 1: percent or maybe, but it will be good enough as
Speaker 1: a right. And once that happens, you're you have to
Speaker 1: then realize, Okay, do we want money that's completely controllable
Speaker 1: at the press of a button, where somebody can go
Speaker 1: and print more of it or take it away from
Speaker 1: you or shut down your account because you're, you know,
Speaker 1: an enemy of the state. Do we want that to
Speaker 1: live in that society? Or do you want to live
Speaker 1: in a free society? And that's why I think bitcoin
Speaker 1: is the most important invention of this of this century,
Speaker 1: because it literally is the thing that can stop that
Speaker 1: from happening, and stop this process from happening and give
Speaker 1: us a digital money that's actually free from totalitary and control. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's awesome with bitcoin is that as you as you
Speaker 1: mentioned red pilled, So that's a that's a reference to
Speaker 1: the movie The Matrix, which I just heard they're making
Speaker 1: a new matrix or I think, but it's a reference
Speaker 1: to that where um, he was offered, hey, red pill
Speaker 1: to see what's really going on or blue pill to
Speaker 1: stay in your dream, right, and so um, red pilled
Speaker 1: is a term that we use where like your eyes
Speaker 1: are opened. And what's amazing with bitcoin is um, as
Speaker 1: you said, red pilled. You you get your eyes open
Speaker 1: all of a sudden you're started to ask questions is
Speaker 1: money like as you said, all those things that you
Speaker 1: run down and then even the question as to like philosophy,
Speaker 1: like why is privacy even important? Like a lot of
Speaker 1: people don't even think why I don't need privacy? What
Speaker 1: I have nothing to hide? Right, But yeah, you have
Speaker 1: to understand like philosophically what privacy means to a to
Speaker 1: a society. Right. So, Uh, it's it's awesome him, it's
Speaker 1: awesome to see that. Um. Jumping into the technology side
Speaker 1: of it, Um, maybe if you want to talk about uh,
Speaker 1: because I know there's a lot of people that have
Speaker 1: covered the why so we have you know, bitcoin standard
Speaker 1: or what what Andrea's and topless is done, which I think,
Speaker 1: by the way you said, Andreas kind of shifted your
Speaker 1: mind a little bit, right, Yeah, Andreas was definitely like
Speaker 1: my gateway into bitcoin. I think for several months they
Speaker 1: had like a bene where I watched pretty much every
Speaker 1: Andreas video I could find on YouTube, and uh, he
Speaker 1: what I really like about him is he actually does
Speaker 1: cover the y really well as well as the technical side.
Speaker 1: And um, I actually watched all the videos before I
Speaker 1: even looked at the Bitcoin white paper and really understood
Speaker 1: sort of like the code side of things and what
Speaker 1: the nuts and bolts are because he does that's such
Speaker 1: a good job explaining it. I felt like I already
Speaker 1: knew advice time I get into the primary sources. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I always recommend a videos to people who are new.
Speaker 1: So let's get into the technology side, because your book
Speaker 1: kind of covers that part, right, I mean, is is
Speaker 1: that what you're kind of intending is to like kind
Speaker 1: of explain it better so like people understand how it
Speaker 1: works and why it's like unique and important. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean to me, when I because I'm a tech person, Um,
Speaker 1: when I sort of started in the space. I saw
Speaker 1: a THEORYUM, and it was a very shiny and well
Speaker 1: marketed piece of technology, and it looked like it was
Speaker 1: friendly for developers and and so I easily understood what
Speaker 1: they were trying to do. Whereas with bitcoin, I think, UM,
Speaker 1: a lot of the actual innovation isn't for state technological,
Speaker 1: but it is economic UM, and you have to understand
Speaker 1: the economics. Definitely, if understand sort of like why they're
Speaker 1: trying to do these things, but um, in order to
Speaker 1: understand the claims that bitcoin makes, such as that it's
Speaker 1: scarce and there's only twenty one million of them, it
Speaker 1: can't be seized from you, there's nobody in charge of visuals.
Speaker 1: You have to understand the nuts and bolts of the technology.
Speaker 1: And I found that when getting into this book that
Speaker 1: most of the resources out there were very They were
Speaker 1: either highly economic, high level, or they were super deep
Speaker 1: on the technology. Like Andreas is a book. I mean
Speaker 1: it gets into code, it gets into really really deep stuff,
Speaker 1: and that's great if you want to be a developer UM,
Speaker 1: but I think for the everyday person that would be
Speaker 1: useful for them to understand how bitcoin works without actually
Speaker 1: getting so deep and admired into sort of the code
Speaker 1: that side of things. So I think in your book
Speaker 1: one of the points that you really made is like
Speaker 1: the technological masterpiece or the big piece of the technology
Speaker 1: of bitcoin is they solved away or or they solved trust.
Speaker 1: And so I think with computer systems um that we've
Speaker 1: had previous to bitcoin, we always have to trust a
Speaker 1: database essentially controlled database to keep that ledger up to date.
Speaker 1: And so Bitcoin has solved trust. Maybe you can just
Speaker 1: kind of talk about that. Yeah, So I think, um,
Speaker 1: one of the things that we need to understand about
Speaker 1: bitcoin is that we're we're creating a new banking system effectively. Right,
Speaker 1: So in a traditional banking system, we have one central
Speaker 1: entity that's the bank, and that bank uh is in charge.
Speaker 1: Just to simplify, that bank is basically in charge of
Speaker 1: issuing the money as well as transferring that money between
Speaker 1: you know, point A and point B. Now, the actual
Speaker 1: banking system is much more complicated than one bank, but
Speaker 1: nonetheless there's always some central party that's sort of doing
Speaker 1: these transfers. So, um, what I talked about is how
Speaker 1: do we go from a system where if I want
Speaker 1: to move money from you know, Jhan to Mark that
Speaker 1: I have to call my bank and say I'm yan
Speaker 1: and moving Mark uh some money to Mark, and here's
Speaker 1: my account number and so on. How do we move
Speaker 1: from that system to a system where there's no central
Speaker 1: person or a party to call. And the way that
Speaker 1: we do that is we first have to give a
Speaker 1: copy of that ledger, so that what the bank has
Speaker 1: is essentially just a ledger with everybody's account balances and
Speaker 1: and how much money is being moved from one point another.
Speaker 1: We need to move that system to be owned by everybody,
Speaker 1: essentially democratizing that sort of ledger. And so the first
Speaker 1: thing we do is we give everybody a copy of it, right,
Speaker 1: And so that's pretty simple. Everybody can have a copy
Speaker 1: of the ledger. We don't need to have a bank anymore.
Speaker 1: But then you start to get into an issue of well,
Speaker 1: if I want to move money, then instead of calling
Speaker 1: the bank, I'm going to basically tell everybody else who's
Speaker 1: got a ledger that I'm doing that, and everybody has
Speaker 1: to write that uh information into their ledger. And if
Speaker 1: we have that kind of system, well, how can we
Speaker 1: actually trust that people are going to do the right thing?
Speaker 1: How are they going to write the right information into
Speaker 1: their ledgers, and who can we actually trust about the
Speaker 1: state of the world. And that is the that is
Speaker 1: the fundamental problem the bitcoin solves because prior to bitcoin,
Speaker 1: there was no way for us to coordinate a bunch
Speaker 1: of computers or people or what have you that that
Speaker 1: where we didn't know who they were. Right, with Bitcoin,
Speaker 1: we don't need to know who any of the participants are.
Speaker 1: We don't need to know, um, whether they're honest or
Speaker 1: malicious or what they're trying to do. We put our
Speaker 1: faith in the algorithms. Or it's not even faith, it's mathematical.
Speaker 1: You know, it's mathematical, right. We we use mathematical algorithms
Speaker 1: to make sure that um the information that's going into
Speaker 1: the ledger is correct, and that is all done through
Speaker 1: this kind of lottery process. So really the problem that's
Speaker 1: been solved, as you said in the book, is trust.
Speaker 1: And so the whole world revolves around trust. You've talked
Speaker 1: about like a new banking system, but really, if we
Speaker 1: want to get into it, it's way bigger than that.
Speaker 1: Um right. It's kind of like a movie with like
Speaker 1: a drug deal, right, like give me the give the drugs, No,
Speaker 1: give me the money, right, and they don't trust each
Speaker 1: other even when they're face to face. But now that
Speaker 1: the world is connected, you know, via the Internet, we
Speaker 1: have this massive global trust problem and we've seen like
Speaker 1: our institutions, Facebook and whatnot, we can't trust them, um
Speaker 1: and so trust is breaking down, um and really so
Speaker 1: so bitcoin is like a trust layer, right, like a
Speaker 1: like a like a trust system. So maybe it's maybe
Speaker 1: maybe the money aspect is just the first killer application,
Speaker 1: and then we'll see lots of other new ways that
Speaker 1: trust is being used. Maybe through bitcoin, it could be.
Speaker 1: I'm not really sure yet. I mean, I think it's
Speaker 1: it's hard to say because one of the things about
Speaker 1: bitcoin that's interesting is that the whole security model of
Speaker 1: bitcoin depends on bitcoin, the asset itself. Right. The way
Speaker 1: that the bitcoin works is that miners, which are essentially
Speaker 1: people that want to participate in maintaining this ledger for us,
Speaker 1: they can participate freely. They don't have to ask any
Speaker 1: way for permission. The way they do that is they
Speaker 1: burn energy, and they burn electricity. When they burn that electricity,
Speaker 1: they play a lottery system, and that lottery rewards them
Speaker 1: with with some bitcoin. So that lottery system, um, ensures
Speaker 1: that that miners behave sort of honestly, because if they don't,
Speaker 1: they do something that's malicious, then they will have burned
Speaker 1: that electricity, they will have expended that that effort in mining,
Speaker 1: and then their entries won't actually be written into the
Speaker 1: ledger because everybody else will reject them. So bitcoin as
Speaker 1: a trust system, all of that, it's doings that's enforcing
Speaker 1: that people, um spend energy to write to create bitcoins
Speaker 1: and to write transactions into the bitcoin ledger. So that's
Speaker 1: kind of the primary thing that's enforcing. Whether there's any
Speaker 1: additional applications beyond money, it's hard to say. Um, there
Speaker 1: may be other things that we can do with it,
Speaker 1: but I'm I'm skeptical right now. Um, because the asset,
Speaker 1: the bitcoin asset itself is so key to the actual
Speaker 1: security model. Well, it's definitely a mechanism to transfer that value.
Speaker 1: I think it just goes into a bigger conversation of
Speaker 1: what is money? Money is communication of value, um, and
Speaker 1: what and so what is value? Will values all types
Speaker 1: of things, right, So, UM, anyway, you get into some
Speaker 1: philosophical stuff there, but UM, so it does that, um,
Speaker 1: And as you said, these miners are burning energy. They're
Speaker 1: buying electricity, so they're having to spend the money, so
Speaker 1: they have this economic uh, the skin in the game,
Speaker 1: if you will, right, So they're they're having to spend
Speaker 1: money on equipment to burn energy in order to produce
Speaker 1: the bitcoin and transfer the bitcoin, and that's basically what
Speaker 1: secures the network. Everyone's kind of economically incentivized to keep
Speaker 1: it up. Yeah, I mean, the idea of bitcoin is
Speaker 1: essentially like this. So there's a there's a lottery system.
Speaker 1: We need to be able to create bitcoins. But we
Speaker 1: can't just give that power to the government or to
Speaker 1: some singularity, right, So the way that we do it
Speaker 1: is we're distributing that effort to anybody in the world,
Speaker 1: anybody at all who wants to do that can. The cost, though,
Speaker 1: is that they have to burn electricity. And the reason
Speaker 1: we have this cost is that this is kind of
Speaker 1: one of the cool innovations of bitcoin, although it's not
Speaker 1: technically bitcoins innovation. This is the idea of proof of
Speaker 1: work um. It came before bitcoin um. But the idea
Speaker 1: of proof of work is that we can have a
Speaker 1: mathematical proof that you've us like you've achieved the statistically
Speaker 1: improbable result. Right. So, so the way that you can
Speaker 1: think about it is that we're playing a lottery. Okay,
Speaker 1: everybody who wants to participate in bitcoin mining or security
Speaker 1: ex playing a lottery. They're tossing a random die and
Speaker 1: they're rolling a die and they're generating really really large numbers,
Speaker 1: and they're taking transactional data, which is basically stuff that
Speaker 1: people like people want to be moving bitcoin from point
Speaker 1: to point B, and they're applying a mathematical function to
Speaker 1: it called the hash function, which basically makes it into
Speaker 1: one giant blob of numbers um. And this giant blob
Speaker 1: has to land on a number line that's that's very
Speaker 1: very large from zero to the number of atoms in
Speaker 1: the universe roughly um. And they're trying to hit a
Speaker 1: very very small space on that number line. And so
Speaker 1: by doing this lottery and by actually finding that little
Speaker 1: space on the number line, what they're doing is there's
Speaker 1: essentially proving to everybody else that they've expended a certain
Speaker 1: amount of energy, or that the probability of them hitting
Speaker 1: that little space is so small. Without having expended in energy,
Speaker 1: that would have been impossible. So when they do that,
Speaker 1: they show that skin in the game, right, they show
Speaker 1: that they've spent that energy, and they still have to
Speaker 1: produce something that will that is considered a valid Bitcoin
Speaker 1: transaction at the end of the day. Because even if
Speaker 1: they spent all that time mining and then try to,
Speaker 1: for example, give themselves a thousand bitcoins, everybody else will
Speaker 1: look at that transaction and say that it's invalid. Right,
Speaker 1: So every computer on the bitcoin network enforces those rules.
Speaker 1: So if you wanted to cheat and sort of like
Speaker 1: take over bitcoin there, it's very difficult. Right. First of all,
Speaker 1: you would have to have more than half of the energy,
Speaker 1: half of the mining energy um to yourself, right, so
Speaker 1: you have to have we call it attack, you have
Speaker 1: to have just over half of the of the total
Speaker 1: energy expenditure of bitcoin. And all that would let you
Speaker 1: do is just mine bitcoin. You wouldn't actually be able
Speaker 1: to uh violate the rules of bitcoin, because all the
Speaker 1: other notes that receive your quote unquote money that you've
Speaker 1: generated this this bitcoins, they would reject anything that doesn't
Speaker 1: look like a real Bitcoin transaction. So all that would
Speaker 1: let you do is effectively a sense or transactions to
Speaker 1: prevent certain transactions from happening, or mine empty blocks and
Speaker 1: prevents the bitcoin chain from moving forward. But you can't
Speaker 1: really like cheat the system in a sense because the
Speaker 1: the enforcement of the of the of the rules of
Speaker 1: bitcoin is done by every note in the system, right
Speaker 1: and the the This gets into a little bit of
Speaker 1: a philosophical piece. But money. For money to be good,
Speaker 1: it has to have a true cost of capital. So
Speaker 1: like with gold, for example, it costs me money to
Speaker 1: get gold out of the ground. I have to spend
Speaker 1: money in order to produce it, and I'm expending energy,
Speaker 1: time capital to get that. The problem is, like with
Speaker 1: the dollar or any other feet currency, is there's no
Speaker 1: true cost of capital, and so it perverts the entire system.
Speaker 1: There's no uh, there's no feedback loop, right, and so
Speaker 1: bitcoin you have to spend money there and there's a
Speaker 1: cost to produce that, and it keeps the system in check. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that that. Um, you know, the government money
Speaker 1: has really screwed up our perception of how money should work.
Speaker 1: Because if if there was no government, right and we
Speaker 1: were just you and me on an island or something,
Speaker 1: and we had to pick something to use his money, um,
Speaker 1: we probably wouldn't pick grass or tree leaves or something
Speaker 1: that was extremely abundant, right, because then we would have
Speaker 1: no real way of of transferring value with each other.
Speaker 1: And and and being certain that you're not just gonna
Speaker 1: go and pick a bunch of grass, know, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden you're twice as riches me. Right, it
Speaker 1: makes the money useless. So in order for for the
Speaker 1: money to be valuable, it has to have a certain
Speaker 1: amount of scarcity. It has to and and the scarcity
Speaker 1: comes from cost to produce. Right. Um, if it was
Speaker 1: air or grass or tree leaves, there's a very little
Speaker 1: cost to produce it. It would be very easy for
Speaker 1: for for us to keep making more of them. Um.
Speaker 1: Whereas with something like gold or something like precious metals
Speaker 1: that were historically used as money, or even things like
Speaker 1: jewelry beads, uh, glass beads, shells that were found from
Speaker 1: far away places, all these things had a certain cost
Speaker 1: of production. Um. When we got into sort of government's
Speaker 1: fiat money, all of a sudden that went away. Because
Speaker 1: now we've replaced that cost of production with just trusting
Speaker 1: the government that they're not going to produce more than
Speaker 1: they should. Um. But as we've seen that trust has
Speaker 1: been abused um time and time again. All over the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think anybody trust the government not to print more.
Speaker 1: We just we just know what's happening, and and everybody
Speaker 1: just kind of step step. Um. So this proof of
Speaker 1: work is is also this big invention that bitcoin kind
Speaker 1: of perfected. As you said, it wasn't the first to
Speaker 1: use it, but um, really so bitcoin was able to
Speaker 1: assemble multiple pieces together, uh, to make it new. So
Speaker 1: would you agree that maybe, uh, people like to use
Speaker 1: the analogy of MySpace and and uh Facebook, which I
Speaker 1: know you talked about in your book, and and uh
Speaker 1: how that's not really applicable to this situation, but uh
Speaker 1: in that in the way that people try to use
Speaker 1: it is that Facebook was the first generation. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: my space was the first generation. Facebook was the second, um,
Speaker 1: which was better. Um, but Bitcoin wasn't my Space. Actually,
Speaker 1: Bitcoin was a better version of other ones that had
Speaker 1: come out before it. So if you wanted to use
Speaker 1: that analogy apples to apples, I mean, Facebook is a
Speaker 1: better iteration where it took pieces of of other things
Speaker 1: before it and kind of put it together. I think. So. Yeah,
Speaker 1: First of all, Bitcoin was not really the first. It
Speaker 1: was it was assembling of many other pieces of work
Speaker 1: that had come before, and a lot of ideas that
Speaker 1: came before. UM. But more importantly, within my Space and
Speaker 1: Facebook analogy, there's a flaw in the analogy and that Um,
Speaker 1: you can have MySpace account and a Facebook account at
Speaker 1: the same time. And that's how Facebook was able to
Speaker 1: steal cheer from my Space because people just there was
Speaker 1: no cost to create a Facebook account, right, you could
Speaker 1: have both of them at the same time. UM. With bitcoin,
Speaker 1: it's more of a money. So you have one dollar
Speaker 1: bill and you have to decide are you going to
Speaker 1: buy one dollar bill worth of the coin or one
Speaker 1: dollar bill of something else. So you're making that decision,
Speaker 1: and you're really hoping that everybody else around you makes
Speaker 1: the same decision. Because money is only good if it's
Speaker 1: extremely liquid and extremely salable. Meaning like if I go
Speaker 1: to trade, you know, to a random person on the street,
Speaker 1: are they going to actually accept my money? If I
Speaker 1: have a U. S dollar anywhere in America, I know
Speaker 1: that they will accept the US dollar, right. UM. If
Speaker 1: I have a Venezuelan Bolivar, nobody here wants it. Even
Speaker 1: in Venezuela, very few people want it, and most of
Speaker 1: the time they're going to try to go for the dollars, right.
Speaker 1: If they can't, there's a black market like that. So
Speaker 1: in any situation where there's for a sort of a
Speaker 1: money that's dying, people prefer the better money now here. Uh,
Speaker 1: bitcoin is still very early, right, it's still very early,
Speaker 1: but it's already got a tremendous lead over every other
Speaker 1: competitor in terms of its liquidity, salability UM, in terms
Speaker 1: of its UH security model being proven. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: been ten years that bitcoin has been running, so uh,
Speaker 1: it's securing hundreds of billions of dollars of value. And
Speaker 1: now we're talking about any new competitors coming out. People
Speaker 1: have to make that conscious decision of selling their bitcoin
Speaker 1: and buying the competitor with the hope that everybody else
Speaker 1: will do the same thing. Because of a strong liquidity
Speaker 1: and network effective money, it's really really hard to shift.
Speaker 1: You know, it's called the Shelling point. Right. Everybody sort
Speaker 1: of agrees that bitcoin is that is that most important asset,
Speaker 1: and everybody is already in it, so it's very tough
Speaker 1: to shift everybody over UM. But that's only like one
Speaker 1: of the things about bitcoin it's important. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: lots of other things that are going to be very
Speaker 1: difficult for us to ever reproduce, such as sort of
Speaker 1: the mysterious founder that disappeared that nobody knows, right, like
Speaker 1: every other coin has got some founder that the government
Speaker 1: can go after, co worse and so on. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: you've got any other coin that comes up has to
Speaker 1: compete with bitcoins existing network of minors, which is a
Speaker 1: tremendous amount of hash power that's out there. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's all this kind of stuff that it's very
Speaker 1: difficult for anybody to compete because they're trying to catch up.
Speaker 1: But they're catching up. They're trying to catch up with Bitcoin.
Speaker 1: They're trying to be a better technology, which is already
Speaker 1: hard because Bitcoin's got better developers. They're trying to attract
Speaker 1: all that liquidity away from Bitcoin, which is hard because
Speaker 1: of the monetary effect. You know, there's it's just compounded.
Speaker 1: And then there's also the time aspect. Bitcoin has been
Speaker 1: around for ten years now. You're trying to catch up
Speaker 1: to something that's already ten years old with something new,
Speaker 1: and you're trying to do that in a decentralized way,
Speaker 1: without a founder, without somebody in charge. I mean you're
Speaker 1: gonna have a hard time, you know. It's that's kind
Speaker 1: of where we're at. Yeah. Yeah, And you make a
Speaker 1: really good case for that in the book. So everyone
Speaker 1: should go read the book for sure. I'm curious being
Speaker 1: a technology guy, and and as you said, you kind
Speaker 1: of got into Ethereum in the beginning and said, oh,
Speaker 1: I kind of get this right, I understand what you're
Speaker 1: trying to do. Um, Now you're kind of really focused
Speaker 1: on bitcoin. How do you, um, how do you look
Speaker 1: at the rest of the ethereum but also just the
Speaker 1: crypto space compared to a bitcoin. I mean, obviously you've
Speaker 1: already said the best money kind of wins. What you
Speaker 1: think is bitcoin? Do you think there's other applications or
Speaker 1: just kind of what's your overall thought about that. You know,
Speaker 1: when I first got in, and like I said, I
Speaker 1: did get in through the theorium door. Um. Ethereum has
Speaker 1: a really good marketing campaign and you know, their website
Speaker 1: basically said here you can create a bank at a
Speaker 1: hundred lines of code. You can make your own coin.
Speaker 1: That was really cool, right, because if you come from
Speaker 1: a technology background, you know how hard it is to
Speaker 1: build distributed systems. Financial systems like that stuff is really
Speaker 1: really tough. Um Ethereum sort of democratized that, or at
Speaker 1: least purported to democratize that, and we see a lot
Speaker 1: of activity and Ethereum right, there's tons of tons of
Speaker 1: people building stuff. Um, My question is whether any of
Speaker 1: that stuff actually has true long term staying power because
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of the ethereum uh use
Speaker 1: cases predicated on this like giant ecosystem of things running
Speaker 1: on this Ethereum block chain. The problem with block chains
Speaker 1: is that in order to be decentralized and to actually
Speaker 1: be like censorship resistance, they have to be um super
Speaker 1: lean because they can't just like attract more and more gunk.
Speaker 1: And that's what's happening with the Theoreum is it's like
Speaker 1: it's growing out of control and that's reducing the number
Speaker 1: of those that can actually validate thethereum Um system. And
Speaker 1: so in order to solve this, they're building Etheroreum two
Speaker 1: point o, which like even me as a technology person,
Speaker 1: like I've looked at some of that stuff and it's
Speaker 1: completely mind blowing how how insanely the complex it seems,
Speaker 1: and how like probably none of it will work because
Speaker 1: like there's a fundamental there's a fundamental problem here, Like
Speaker 1: I'm not as smart as Vitalic or or Ladder are
Speaker 1: these people who are working in ethereum. But there's but
Speaker 1: you know, there's some intuition here where like there's there
Speaker 1: are computers and they need to share data, right, they
Speaker 1: need to They need to send data across the world
Speaker 1: from US to China. There's latency issues, right, There's things
Speaker 1: that you just can't solve unless you keep that data
Speaker 1: really really small. And that's not the direction Ethereum sided.
Speaker 1: In order to support all this crazy stuff that they're building,
Speaker 1: they're gonna have to figure out very complex ways of
Speaker 1: splitting it up. And at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: it's going to turn into a system that's not really
Speaker 1: especially decentralized. Now, is there a world where like ten
Speaker 1: companies share some database and like benefit from that. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Sure, whatever, that's fine, I don't care, But
Speaker 1: it doesn't like it doesn't UM for me. The reason
Speaker 1: I work on bitcoin is because what we need is
Speaker 1: a society is not like a fancier way to settle
Speaker 1: trades between banks. It's it's a new monetary system that's
Speaker 1: not UM. That censorship resistance and that's uh, you know,
Speaker 1: not in the control of the government. And I just
Speaker 1: don't have any faith that Ethereum can execute that part
Speaker 1: of it um and let alone any other coin. I mean,
Speaker 1: everything else is like I said, there are problems in
Speaker 1: terms of the deaf teams, the founder, centralization and all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff, um and and so I think
Speaker 1: we only get one chance to getting sort of this
Speaker 1: new monitory system. Right, We've already got it with bitcoin.
Speaker 1: It's attracting more and more of the right people, of
Speaker 1: the right developments, um, the right uh financialization systems. I mean,
Speaker 1: look at like the you know, the Chicago more cantilic
Speaker 1: changes in trading theorym I mean maybe they will one day,
Speaker 1: but everybody's doing bitcoin, Bitcoin become bitcoin, right. Their brand
Speaker 1: is there, the meme of money, the bitcoin is money
Speaker 1: is there, and it's it's spreading um and ultimately it's
Speaker 1: network effects. Yeah, I I I loved what you just
Speaker 1: said there, and I probably couldn't said it any better myself.
Speaker 1: But it's it's it's it's really it's a revolution. I mean,
Speaker 1: bitcoin is here to change the monetary system. That's what
Speaker 1: I'm that's what I'm watching for. That's what I'm that's
Speaker 1: what I want. That's what I'm trying to help usure
Speaker 1: in UM. Whether a company comes up with a better
Speaker 1: software to control their supply chain, that doesn't really matter
Speaker 1: to me. Like you know, like I think it's been
Speaker 1: a weird conflation and it's caused like you know, if
Speaker 1: you go on Twitter, there's all these wars of like
Speaker 1: bitcoin versus block chambers is etheroryum. It's it's a weird
Speaker 1: war to be having because it's like you want to
Speaker 1: work on money, then you work on bitcoin. If you
Speaker 1: want to work on you know, distributed databases, go work
Speaker 1: on this other stuff. But nobody knows if any of
Speaker 1: it's going to be successful because by and large, these
Speaker 1: things only work in small sort of private one data center. Right.
Speaker 1: There's there's issues of scalability there, Like if you want
Speaker 1: to have something that competes with like a traditional database,
Speaker 1: you've got to be doing thousands of actions a second
Speaker 1: at minimum, It's not tens of thousands. And that stuff
Speaker 1: is just not what block chains are built for. That's
Speaker 1: not like their sweet spot. Um and and the only
Speaker 1: block chain that actually works, you know, UM to its promise,
Speaker 1: which is to be immutable and to be decentralized is bitcoin,
Speaker 1: and the ethereum is maybe close to that, but because
Speaker 1: of all the founder centralization that's there, Like, I would
Speaker 1: never trust it to be my money, right, I would
Speaker 1: never trust Etherorium to have Like the monetary policy of
Speaker 1: ethereum is not credible to me, even though um. I
Speaker 1: I listened to one of your recent UH podcasts with
Speaker 1: Ryan Shawan Adams who was saying that, like the theoryum
Speaker 1: is gonna have one percent issuance or something, but that's
Speaker 1: not a credible monetary policy because like the talent could
Speaker 1: be course, like Joe Lubin could be coerced, these people
Speaker 1: could be told by the government or by some shadow
Speaker 1: entities to make changes. Like I'm I'm not a conspiracy theorist, right,
Speaker 1: this is just the reality. If we're gonna build a
Speaker 1: new money, we're gonna come up against state resistance and eftherorium.
Speaker 1: It's going to fold under state resistance guaranteed. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: that's the big thing, right, is it is? I don't
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't think there's such a thing as
Speaker 1: immutable ish, right, It's not like kind of like it
Speaker 1: is or it isn't and so that that's definitely a
Speaker 1: good point to bring up, um, you know, uh, and
Speaker 1: and having having a monetary policy or even just comp
Speaker 1: you know, having the code fixed that everybody knows exactly
Speaker 1: what the rules are and then people can start to
Speaker 1: build on that makes sense as opposed to having this
Speaker 1: shifting policy where people aren't aware of what's going to happen. Right,
Speaker 1: And that's another thing with other coins Etherorium and any
Speaker 1: other coin really is you see a lot of like
Speaker 1: hard fork governance, meaning like, uh, they pretty much change
Speaker 1: their system every year with a hard fork, and it's
Speaker 1: kind of expected, like everybody's on board with this. This
Speaker 1: is like an ecosystem wide acceptance that like ballic is
Speaker 1: going to tell us that then you upgrade is coming.
Speaker 1: We're all just gonna upgrade. So that in and of
Speaker 1: itself is the thing that undermines any credibility as a money.
Speaker 1: Just because it has some monetary premium today doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: mean it we'll retain them in the future, especially if
Speaker 1: like bitcoin catches on more and more and more people
Speaker 1: start to realize, well, like I have a choice, Am
Speaker 1: I going to buy the thing that's going up or
Speaker 1: hold the thing that's going down. It's gonna be like
Speaker 1: tough for people to keep punishing themselves, right, Yeah, for sure,
Speaker 1: Um so maybe we can just uh that's that's really
Speaker 1: good stuff. And again I just recommend everyone read the
Speaker 1: book because you getn't get into so much detail on app.
Speaker 1: But you say that now you know you want to
Speaker 1: be building on bitcoin. Uh, you want to talk about
Speaker 1: what you're doing? Now? Is there something like that you're
Speaker 1: working on that you want to talk about? Sure? Um
Speaker 1: so I'm I'm working in a couple of different efforts.
Speaker 1: I love to keep a lot of balls in the
Speaker 1: air at the same time. So, first of all, the
Speaker 1: book is being translated into a number of different languages.
Speaker 1: Have Spanish coming out very soon, maybe the Sweet hopefully, um.
Speaker 1: And then I have a Russian translation in the works,
Speaker 1: of course, gotta get one from my people. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: um I've realized more more and more as I get
Speaker 1: into the space that like, I want to be more
Speaker 1: of an educator even though my backgrounds and technology. So
Speaker 1: one of the things I'm gonna be working on next
Speaker 1: is a bitcoin site called Bitcoin Answers. Uh. It's going
Speaker 1: to be really really short form content for people are
Speaker 1: just getting in dispelling some common myths, answering some really
Speaker 1: basic questions. Um. And then I've sort of been toying
Speaker 1: with the idea of building an app that helps people
Speaker 1: buy bitcoin triggered by certain events. Um. But there's a
Speaker 1: lot of complexity and doing that without making a custodial
Speaker 1: So that's something that I'm slowly researching, trying to figure
Speaker 1: out the best way of going about doing that. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean to me, the current space is very new,
Speaker 1: so we need more education, need more onboarding. UM. I'm
Speaker 1: involved as an adviser to a company called give Bitcoin,
Speaker 1: which is a really cool effort. They're going to be, um,
Speaker 1: helping people gift bitcoin to other people, but then also
Speaker 1: timelocking it, so basically enforcing people to become Hoddler's right away, uh,
Speaker 1: and then the timelock. During the timelock, they will be
Speaker 1: offering educational content, which I think is super important because
Speaker 1: bitcoin is not currently something trivial to get into. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of questions people have when they're getting
Speaker 1: into it, and UM, we need a better onboarding process.
Speaker 1: So that's the stuff that I'll be working on because
Speaker 1: I think that's the most important thing we could be
Speaker 1: doing right now is just helping more people understand bitcoin,
Speaker 1: get bitcoin um and learn how to use it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was. I I've been been a full time investor
Speaker 1: for for a long time, over twenty years, and I
Speaker 1: still invest in a bunch of different assets and um.
Speaker 1: I I have a part ownership of oil field And
Speaker 1: I was talking with with one of the other GP
Speaker 1: members yesterday and we're and he's also getting into bit
Speaker 1: when we're talking about the ability to mind bitcoin off
Speaker 1: of the oil fields from the natural gases flaring and whatnot.
Speaker 1: You're familiar with upstream data, Uh yeah, yeah, Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're there. That's uh something that I'm really excited about
Speaker 1: as well. That's a cool company that they're doing exactly that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we actually have we're working oil wells and we're
Speaker 1: going to be talking about trying to convert some of
Speaker 1: it over. But anyway, we're just kind of talking about
Speaker 1: how bitcoin is really now. I I believe it's kind
Speaker 1: of become its own asset class. And just like you
Speaker 1: would see gold, or just like you'd see oil, you
Speaker 1: have all these antilla businesses that are built around oil, right,
Speaker 1: companies that are making equipment to drill oil and companies
Speaker 1: that are making pipelines to move oil, and companies that
Speaker 1: are like refining or with gold, same thing, right, companies
Speaker 1: that are getting it out or making equipment to get
Speaker 1: it out or to refine it. And so bitcoin and
Speaker 1: maybe now bitcoin is that asset and now all the
Speaker 1: ancillary businesses can be built around bitcoin. Um. So whether
Speaker 1: that's transferring bitcoin, story and bitcoin, moving bitcoin, educating, right,
Speaker 1: and so like you can kind of build all that
Speaker 1: out around it. Yeah, I totally agree. I think we're
Speaker 1: just very early in that ecosystem where a lot of
Speaker 1: businesses we're gonna see a lot of churn, right, We're
Speaker 1: gonna see a lot of things that are just too
Speaker 1: early to market. Um. And you know, some of the
Speaker 1: stuff that's just coming out, like bitcoin loans is interesting,
Speaker 1: but it might be a little early, might be just
Speaker 1: the beginning of that. Um. It's just gonna be about
Speaker 1: market timing and figuring out what the right time to
Speaker 1: be investing these things is. But I do think that
Speaker 1: there's a flourishing ecosystem and there's gonna be a lot
Speaker 1: of interesting opportunities in the space. Um. You know, for me,
Speaker 1: it's like there's there's two aspects of bitcoin. One is,
Speaker 1: if you're an American, you know, person and investor whatever
Speaker 1: in your your life is fine and you're not worried
Speaker 1: about government seature of your money. Like bitcoin is just
Speaker 1: a good way to help the rest of the world.
Speaker 1: Like you can invest in bitcoin, and that in and
Speaker 1: of itself helps other people that are in struggling economies
Speaker 1: because it helps stabilize the valuable coin, helps them get
Speaker 1: out of the out of poverty. And we're talking about
Speaker 1: people like in Venezuela and Iran and all that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. So I like that bitcoin has um an
Speaker 1: aspect to it that's both selfish, where like we can
Speaker 1: invest in into it and make money, but it's also
Speaker 1: a global good where when when we're helping bitcoin, we're
Speaker 1: also helping it spread across the world and become I'm
Speaker 1: honesty good that people can actually you know, used to
Speaker 1: escape their sort of horrible um screwed up economies and
Speaker 1: deitillarians totalitarian states. With I love it. I love it.
Speaker 1: We'll wrap it up with that. We're gonna leave it
Speaker 1: with John says that buying bitcoin is helping to save
Speaker 1: the world, and I agree, save yourself and save the world.
Speaker 1: At the same time. I love it. Good stuff. Hey
Speaker 1: yeahn So, UM, where can people find the book? Where
Speaker 1: can people learn more? Keep up with you and so forth? Yeah? Absolutely,
Speaker 1: so you can find a book on Amazon just type
Speaker 1: in inventing Bitcoin. Um. You can also buy it at
Speaker 1: inventing bitcoin dot com. You can pay with bitcoin there
Speaker 1: if you like, or Lightning Network. But then I have
Speaker 1: to process the orders manually. So please don't I have
Speaker 1: an Amazon if you can. If you can't, then I'll
Speaker 1: be happy to help you out. Also, if you are
Speaker 1: listening to this podcast and you are in an economy
Speaker 1: where you you don't have Amazon or you can't you know,
Speaker 1: get stuff like, just contact me. I'm always happy to
Speaker 1: um send out books to places that are hard to reach. UM.
Speaker 1: Also very interested in talking to any educators or people
Speaker 1: like that who want to have books for the classrooms. UM.
Speaker 1: I've done a number of high school talks, so I'm
Speaker 1: really excited to bring bitcoins to younger people as well. UM.
Speaker 1: You can also find me on Twitter. U s k
Speaker 1: w P as my handle. It's pronounced scoop um, so
Speaker 1: ask WP and uh yeah, hit me up on Twitter.
Speaker 1: My my dms are open. I'm I'm happy to have
Speaker 1: a chat with anybody. Yeah, we'll link to all that
Speaker 1: in the show notes. H yeahn. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: It has been It's been great. Um. I love what
Speaker 1: you're doing. Keep it up and we'll talk again soon.
Speaker 1: Thanks a lot, Marco's a pleasure. Hey. If you like
Speaker 1: this episode of The Market Disruptors Podcast, please help us
Speaker 1: take this to the top of the podcast charts. Just
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Speaker 1: Taking fifteen seconds to just leave a quick review goes
Speaker 1: a long way in helping us reach more people and
Speaker 1: disrupt more markets. I really appreciate you listening and I'll
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