Andreas Antonopoulos, author of The Internet of Money, joins me on the show to talk about his new book, "Mastering Bitcoin: A Guide to Bitcoin's Future." We talk about Bitcoin's future, the halving of the Bitcoin price, and much, much more! Recorded in Los Angeles, CA! Bitcoin and the future of Bitcoin are inextricably linked, and I think you'll agree that it's going to continue to go higher and higher. Don't miss it! If you don't like Bitcoin, you'll love this mashup! It's a collection of all of my favorite Bitcoin talks that I've done over the past year and a half, from my time as a bitcoiner, and a few of the best ones I've ever done. You won't want to miss this one! I hope you enjoy it, and tweet me if you do! with any questions, comments, suggestions, or thoughts on Bitcoin. Timestamps: 1:00 - Bitcoin is not an investment, it's a tool, not a store of value, right? 2:30 - I don't think Bitcoin should be treated as an investment 3:15 - Bitcoin isn't a replacement for traditional money 4:20 - I think Bitcoin is more than a medium of exchange 5:40 - Bitcoin's value is not tied to the value 6:00 7:30 8:00 Is Bitcoin a good investment? 9: What are you going to do with Bitcoin? 10:00 What is Bitcoin's role in the world of money? 11:00 Bitcoin s? 12:15: Is Bitcoin an investment in the future? 15: What s the best thing Bitcoin can do? 16:00 Can Bitcoin be a good thing? 17: What is the best way to invest in Bitcoin? 17:00 Does Bitcoin have a place in the 21st century society? 18:00 Do you know what Bitcoin is? 19:00 How much money is Bitcoin really have in the Bitcoin ecosystem? 21:00 Why is Bitcoin better than gold? 22:00 Should Bitcoin be considered a physical product? 23:00 If Bitcoin is a real currency? 24:00 I don t need a bank? 25:00 Are you looking at Bitcoin as a real investment in bitcoin? 26:40 27:30 What s your favorite piece of advice?
00:03:08.000I look at that a bit as if the Horse Buggy Association of America is going, Oh, we like this automobile thing you've designed, but we have a very big investment in hay and horses and stables and veterinarians.
00:03:21.000So we're going to use the technology behind the automobile, the pneumatic tire.
00:03:26.000And we're going to revolutionize horse buggies.
00:03:28.000But in all fairness, 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.
00:03:39.000I mean, I know you do it, but you also make all of your money this way, and this is, you know, you're a proselytizing person when it comes to Bitcoin, right?
00:03:50.000For the average person, say, who's saved up actual cash money their whole life, and is involved in this established system of money, to throw all their money into Bitcoin.
00:04:08.000Right, but don't you think that that's probably why the media bashes it and why banks are just looking at it going, hmm.
00:04:15.000Like, people see that there's a growing number of people that are using it for transactions.
00:04:19.000There's Bitcoin ATMs now, and people are using it to purchase things.
00:04:24.000There's several companies that accept Bitcoin for products, for actual real physical products.
00:04:30.000Yeah, but I mean, it's not an investment.
00:04:32.000It shouldn't be treated as an investment.
00:04:34.000I mean, I don't even mean like as an investment.
00:04:37.000I mean as like a primary source of money, if you decided to take all of your money, not as an investment, but just say, I'm only going to live off of Bitcoin.
00:04:50.000Like your money's going to go up and down.
00:04:52.000Yeah, that's going to be really hard, especially if you're...
00:04:56.000If 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 nice visa debit card, and you don't pay account fees, and your money doesn't get confiscated by a dictator too often,
00:05:14.000And, you know, you can earn your money and interact with other people, then why would you use Bitcoin?
00:05:19.000The simple answer is that's not really the use case.
00:05:22.000But there are lots of people around the world who simply don't have access to that.
00:05:26.000And for them, you know, in many cases, Bitcoin is the stable currency.
00:05:33.000Ask an Argentinian, 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.
00:05:44.000And in many cases, if they've heard of it, if they've used it, that's the stable currency.
00:05:49.000Their national currency is far, far worse.
00:05:59.000Because 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.
00:06:15.000Well, 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.
00:06:24.000There's been a lot of economic difficulty with the country, and I think their currency has devalued almost 30% in the last year, 20 or 30%, some staggering amount.
00:07:29.000And what we've seen again and again is at times of crisis, we see this pattern repeating where people use Bitcoin as a safe haven investment to get money out of national currencies, especially Bitcoin.
00:07:42.000Where there are very strict currency capital controls.
00:07:46.000So 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.
00:07:54.000Every 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.
00:08:07.000So people are parking the money in Bitcoin or using it to convert it to other currencies and get money out of the country.
00:08:14.000So what is the biggest fluctuation that Bitcoin has had?
00:08:19.000Well, it depends whether you look at it on a monetary basis or on a percentage basis.
00:08:24.000If you look at the movements now, it can go up 30, 40, even 100 bucks in a day.
00:08:33.000But as a percentage, the biggest fluctuations it had were in 2010 and 2011. When it rose from under $1 to over $30 and then back down to under $1 in a period of a couple of months.
00:08:48.000Now for people who don't understand what this means, when you're saying $100 or $1 or $30, what is that in relationship to?
00:10:16.000And that'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.
00:10:26.000Now, 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, what is Bitcoin and how does it work?
00:10:37.000I'm glad I have this opportunity to do it again, because every time we have a new audience...
00:11:09.000It is a set of protocols that allow you to basically exchange value with other people.
00:11:15.000But you can do a lot more with it than just that.
00:11:18.000Most people will use it as a currency.
00:11:20.000It's basically money that you can transmit from your smartphone to somebody else's smartphone directly, just like cash, but electronic.
00:11:30.000And the thing about it that's unique is that it's not owned by any corporation, any bank, or any government.
00:11:37.000Just like the web isn't owned by anyone or email isn't owned by anyone.
00:11:43.000And there's lots of companies that can send and receive email.
00:11:46.000There's lots of companies that can set up websites.
00:11:48.000There's a lot of companies that can set up applications that use Bitcoin.
00:11:53.000And I should say that when you set it up for me, the first time you did it, a bunch of people donated Bitcoin.
00:11:59.000So what 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, to build wells in the Congo.
00:12:11.000I don't remember how many Justin Rens said, but it was...
00:12:16.000I 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.
00:12:24.000The Bitcoin community is very generous, is my point.
00:12:29.000And part of that generosity 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.
00:12:38.000They want to tell other people about this technology.
00:12:41.000It's really quite interesting what happens when you create a form of money that is truly global.
00:12:47.000We really don't have forms of money that are truly global.
00:12:51.000Even with your very advanced 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.
00:13:02.000I experience this every time I get paid in Bitcoin.
00:13:07.000And I'll do one conference with the banking industry and one conference with the Bitcoin community and the little Bitcoin conference is going to be free to attend and I don't make any money but they sometimes cover some of my expenses.
00:13:43.000Is this because when they take the money, and they're transferring it, and they're moving it around, and now it's sitting in banks.
00:13:50.000When 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.
00:14:00.000It certainly doesn't hurt to keep it a bit longer.
00:14:05.000They're doing it primarily because the system has a series of intermediaries, and each of those intermediaries represent a risk.
00:14:13.000If one of those intermediaries says, I have the money for Mr. Antonopoulos' wire, and you give that money to Antonopoulos, but the intermediary doesn't give it to you, You're out of money, right?
00:14:30.000Because of the way the banking system is with perhaps five, six, seven intermediaries in a single transfer, that creates a lot of cumulative risk.
00:14:40.000And they protect with that risk by slowing things down.
00:14:44.000And that risk doesn't exist in Bitcoin because it's from one party directly to another.
00:14:52.000The funny thing, I had this conversation with my bank.
00:14:55.000I had done this conference in Germany, Frankfurt, at the headquarters of the Bundesbank.
00:15:03.000Now, for those of your viewers or listeners who don't know, the Bundesbank is the Federal Bank of Germany.
00:15:10.000And they probably consider the United States Federal Reserve to be a mediocre creditor compared to the Bundesbank.
00:15:19.000This is like the best credit rating on the planet, right?
00:15:25.000And I'm going to speak at a conference there, and they're paying me for my expenses.
00:15:30.000They send a wire transfer, and I call my bank, and after four weeks, they finally find it and tell me, we've received your bank wire transfer.
00:16:12.000And if even they can't pay me in the age of the internet instantaneously, there is something wrong.
00:16:21.000With this banking system and there is because I got paid for the Bitcoin conference who was doing in the same town Instantaneously, but there's also concern on their their end about fraud, right?
00:16:34.000I mean isn't but 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 and To the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
00:16:51.000So, the difference is a difference between systemic fraud and individual cases of fraud.
00:17:00.000In Bitcoin, as in the traditional banking system, if a bank or an organization concentrates a lot of money, then you can go in and steal it.
00:17:09.000You basically rob the Bitcoin bank, just like people rob the normal bank.
00:17:33.000Instead 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 seven 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,
00:17:57.000but to get very large amounts, you have to wait for them to give their money to someone else.
00:18:04.000What was that exchange, the Bitcoin bank, that started off as like a fantasy website?
00:18:17.000The Magic the Gathering Online, which you see in the early days of Bitcoin, there were no exchanges.
00:18:23.000So you've got to think back, like, do you remember on the web?
00:18:26.000In the early days when even the largest, most sophisticated corporations had a page with a single logo and a grey background and some flashing lights that said under construction, like in 1994. That's where we are in Bitcoin still.
00:18:41.000There were no well-run exchanges at the time.
00:18:47.000It was very difficult to buy and sell Bitcoin.
00:18:49.000And so this guy in Japan had a site that could trade these Magic the Gathering Online cards.
00:18:57.000And he converted the site to trade cryptocurrencies.
00:19:04.000Turns out it's a lot easier to hack in and steal cryptocurrencies than it is to steal the cards.
00:19:34.000Like, if you rob a bank, like, they can put a trace on the bills, and they can figure it out eventually, and most people get caught, right?
00:19:51.000It's very difficult to actually catch.
00:19:53.000I think recently I was reading about the FBI closing the D.B. Cooper case.
00:20:00.000It's the guy who robbed the bank, got into 717 aircraft, opened the rear staircase and jumped out to the parachute over the Midwest and was never seen again.
00:20:12.000Yeah, they think that guy died though.
00:20:15.000Well, that would be a convenient explanation for the failure of the FBI to catch him.
00:20:33.000I would be more likely or more apt to believe that if someone dropped in the woods out of a parachute with some fucking haphazard gear and...
00:20:43.000Leapt out of the back of a plane, they probably died.
00:20:46.000Probably got eaten by bears or something.
00:20:48.000Yes, or found by a local woodsman in the cabin who's like, some dude fell out of the sky with a satchel full of money.
00:21:02.000Yeah, but when you're stealing money from a bank, can't they trace the serial numbers?
00:21:08.000Like, if you steal cash, like if you go, you know, this is a robbery, stick them up, and you point a gun at the teller, and they fill up the bag with currency, and you run out the door, don't they have, like, a trace on that money, like, where they can, if you spend that cash?
00:23:31.000You know, that's one of the things we don't know, and maybe we'll never know how much of that responsibility, whether it was deliberate, whether it was an inside job, whether it was simply incompetence.
00:23:43.000Certainly there was enormous amounts of incompetence.
00:24:22.000So you can see these things happen throughout human history.
00:24:27.000Changing the form of money you use doesn't change that.
00:24:31.000But if you change the architecture of money and you make it less necessary and less useful to concentrate the money in the hands of third parties, that has an impact.
00:24:43.000So that's one of the issues with something like Mt.
00:24:46.000Gox or any banking system other than the Bitcoin system.
00:24:51.000I mean, the problem is the counterparty risk.
00:24:53.000If 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.
00:25:32.000Their parent may require an expensive surgery that they can't afford.
00:25:37.000There's lots of reasons why people commit financial fraud.
00:25:40.000And not all of it is because they're just greedy evil.
00:25:45.000But 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.
00:25:59.000So the answer is not, build better systems to watch the people who hold your money.
00:26:04.000The answer that Bitcoin gives is, don't let others hold your money.
00:26:12.000There was a recent investigative report about 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,
00:26:30.000The reasons for why they're so wildly successful and they make so much more money than anybody else were very suspect.
00:26:37.000And they're closing in on this guy like, what's going on over here?
00:26:40.000And they think that not only is the Bernie Madoff model not just Bernie Madoff, but they think that it's common and that there's a lot of people that might be supplementing legitimate investments with a pyramid scheme.
00:26:55.000And that it's been a standard operational model for a lot of these firms because they've been able to pull it off.
00:27:01.000What 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, that event is actually really good for capitalism.
00:27:18.000What it does is it washes out the frauds, it washes out the failures, it washes out the unprofitable businesses.
00:27:41.000When that happens in Wall Street, all of those companies that were simply reinvesting the recent gains to pay the people who were withdrawing their money or the retirees they're supporting in their pension fund, etc., suddenly they can't do that anymore.
00:27:59.000Badly performing businesses, unprofitables, all of these things get washed out.
00:28:05.000We haven't been doing this in this country for the last three decades.
00:28:09.000Instead, what happens is every time there is a recession, the Fed steps in, or the government steps in.
00:28:17.000Basically, they pump water to raise the tide again, as much as possible.
00:28:22.000That means that a lot of the crooks float from recession to recession without getting...
00:28:28.000Worse, it encourages that kind of behavior.
00:28:32.000And so you get all of these businesses whose only ability to make profits is when the interest rate is zero, and there's $20 billion a month being injected by the Fed, and their business model is take that and lend it to consumers for $29.99 APR,
00:29:53.000The Federal Reserve pumps more money into the economy.
00:29:55.000Trillions of dollars since 2008. And all of the stimulus, where does it go?
00:30:00.000It goes into inflating not one bubble.
00:30:03.000We had real estate, but now we have real estate and subprime auto.
00:30:08.000And student loans and bonds and stocks and currencies all inflating at the same time.
00:30:18.000Is it possible to do a controlled burn for the economy?
00:30:21.000That's what they're doing in some places where they want to deal with the issue that you're talking about, how they stop forest fires.
00:30:29.000That'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.
00:30:44.000Yeah, in fact, I can't name, say, my publishing company for the book, the Federal Publisher.
00:30:51.000They won't allow me to put the word Federal in the name of my company, as they shouldn't, right?
00:30:58.000But in order to create an organization like that, you need an act of Congress.
00:31:02.000In 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.
00:32:26.000If you're a retiree 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.
00:32:37.000That's a tax on savers that benefits debtors, especially very large debtors like the federal government.
00:32:45.000Yeah, 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.
00:33:00.000It's one of the things I found through my experiences doing these talks that I do.
00:33:04.000And I talk about that in the book too.
00:33:07.000The whole point of this particular book, The Internet of Money, is why Bitcoin?
00:33:11.000And I talk about the philosophy behind money, the topics of money that most people don't understand.
00:33:18.000And what's really astonishing is that...
00:33:22.000Here I am and I'm talking about the greatest experiment in money 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 amount of money ever created into the world economy trying to stop it from collapsing And that has created the largest bubble in history.
00:33:52.000And 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 experiments in which two billion people are hostage as part of it,
00:35:13.000And 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.
00:35:23.000He 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.
00:35:32.000And basically defaulted on the backing of US dollars by gold.
00:35:36.000I met this really wacky guy a long time ago that was...
00:35:40.000He was coming around the Comedy Store.
00:35:42.000He was this really odd guy for a bunch of reasons.
00:35:47.000But one of the things is he carried a gun everywhere he went and he believed in...
00:36:35.000At least it's like a weird control freak.
00:36:37.000You know, if someone's saying something to you and they are holding on to you while they're saying that to you, unless you're in love with them, you know, like, it creates a very strange moment.
00:37:50.000A lot of the people who have these kinds of attitudes come from families and from cultures.
00:37:55.000Where 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 pillowcase And with people with guns and dogs after you trying to murder you.
00:38:08.000And this happens today in Syria, right?
00:38:13.000It happens one generation ago to my parents' generation in Greece with the Nazis.
00:39:16.000Yeah, so you can generate a Bitcoin wallet and then make a backup of it.
00:39:21.000And for convenience, some of the inventors in the space developed a system where you can backup any Bitcoin wallet Even if it has millions and billions of transactions and assets in it, you can back it up to between 12 and 24 English words that are generated automatically by the program.
00:39:39.000So it could be like that speech in Pulp Fiction where Samuel Jackson pulls a gun on that kid?
00:39:51.000You're going to get a series of words, and they're going to be, you know, asparagus, forest, attorney, whatever.
00:39:59.000What if it's all, like, I like dicks, please shit on my head?
00:40:03.000Yeah, no sentences and no words like that.
00:40:08.000But 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.
00:40:17.000I mean, look, the whole idea behind it is incredibly fascinating to me.
00:40:22.000And I've been a fan of it since the time I met you.
00:40:25.000And before that, I was reasonably interested in it.
00:40:28.000But of course, having you illuminate it in such...
00:40:31.000A great way really made it much more much more enticing much more interesting and I've always been curious from that point on as to where it's gonna go and I just don't I don't know Yeah.
00:41:41.000A system like that, 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.
00:41:52.000And of course, you know, financial crime is not really prosecuted in this country.
00:41:57.000In 2008, giant crisis, millions of homeowners kicked out of their homes, illegal foreclosures, robo-signing mills, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:42:08.000Bernie Madaf, who stole from the rich.
00:42:25.000Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of crooks in the same scale and giant investment banks that are just as corrupt and We don't see that right you you can get you can get Pulled over for a busted taillights and thrown in jail in plenty of the states in this country for six months for having an herb in your car and At the same time,
00:42:49.000you 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.
00:42:59.000The problem isn't the fact that there is fraud.
00:43:03.000The problem is that the system itself is fragile because of that.
00:43:07.000And 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.
00:43:18.000But it's not just them going out of business.
00:43:20.000It's a generation of kids who leave college with nothing waiting for them but a job.
00:43:27.000And coming into a generation where their parents could get by with one income in a household and now Three jobs each in a household of two, and you can't afford to buy a car,
00:43:47.000It's the I can't own anything because I can't afford anything economy.
00:43:51.000So that whole generation is now suffering because of that fragility of the system, and the fragility hasn't gone away.
00:44:00.000But I don't want to dwell too much on the negative, right?
00:44:06.000The thing that I find positive and interesting about Bitcoin is that it serves a global society.
00:44:13.000It is truly global, transnational money.
00:44:17.000There's plenty of places in the world that have it worse than the US. There are some places that have it better financially.
00:44:22.000But it really is quite an incredible concept to be able to have this money that can operate on a global basis.
00:44:30.000With that, the opportunities to buy and sell and trade and invest and borrow internationally.
00:44:40.000The fact that what we did with the fundraising here, to fundraise for those wells, We don't know if that was just people in the US donating.
00:46:02.000I'm not gonna 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.
00:46:23.000You go to someone who's been using precious metals for 10 generations and you say, hey, this piece of paper is money.
00:47:02.000Yeah, and it's accelerating very much.
00:47:04.000I think in some countries you're going to see Either Bitcoin or a cryptocurrency, very similar or based on Bitcoin, be used commonly as a national currency.
00:47:15.000We're not looking to displace national currencies.
00:47:43.000So you've got four or five currencies.
00:47:45.000You can stop a four-year-old in the street and ask them what the exchange rate is and they'll tell you.
00:47:51.000Because they trade for their parents in merchant stalls along the border.
00:47:56.000And they have people coming with all kinds of different currencies.
00:47:59.000It'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,
00:48:14.000video, things like that, where you want to make very, very small payments, where credit cards are not suitable.
00:48:21.000And use Bitcoin as well as their normal currencies.
00:48:24.000What is the progress that makes you so optimistic?
00:48:27.000If you could point to any one thing or several things that make you optimistic about Bitcoin's future?
00:48:33.000Well, I think watching it as a computer scientist, as a technologist, I look at this and I see innovation that is accelerating.
00:48:43.000And I see much of the early vision opening up.
00:48:47.000The possibility of doing things They're so far outside what we could do with traditional money that it often blows my mind.
00:48:58.000For example, a technology that's being introduced into Bitcoin now is called payment channels.
00:49:04.000What it allows you to do is to do a very high volume of very small transactions at a very rapid rate.
00:50:09.000So meaning watching like something on YouTube or some similar video streaming device you would have to pay, service rather, you'd have to pay but you would pay a very miniscule amount.
00:50:35.000You could pay a penny or half a penny or a tenth of a penny to watch a video.
00:50:39.000But what, how would that work for the people that are providing content?
00:50:43.000Like, Well, you see, the thing is, they operate at a scale.
00:50:46.000I have 30,000 views on one of my videos, right?
00:50:52.000So, YouTube pays me 30 bucks for that if I put ads in front.
00:50:57.000If I was getting a penny from each of my customers, because these are hour-long videos, maybe I'm going to charge more, maybe I'm going to charge 25 cents.
00:52:31.000You'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.
00:52:47.000But you're still paying for the content.
00:52:49.000You're paying by the fact that you can no longer Engage with the web without it being filtered to what they think you want and who they think you are, right?
00:53:01.000So you're getting this highly filtered pigeon-holed 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.
00:53:16.000The customer is the advertising agency.
00:53:19.000Whereas if you sell content directly You re-establish the relationship of who is the creator and who is the customer, the consumer of this content, and you cut out the two middlemen.
00:53:31.000Yeah, but you're cutting out advertising?
00:53:42.000There's a lot of dopes that watch YouTube all day.
00:53:44.000Like, they sit in front of their computer, they slack-jaw from morning to night, and they just watch YouTube videos.
00:53:50.000If they just calculated those fractions of a penny all day, that would be dollars and dollars every day, which would mean hundreds of dollars every few months.
00:53:58.000Well, 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 good comment, which actually ends up covering some of their cost of viewing.
00:54:59.000But the point is that you can do more than just currency.
00:55:04.000Earlier we were talking a bit about trolling on Twitter and other platforms like that before we started the live broadcast.
00:55:11.000Well, think about what a troll is doing.
00:55:13.000What they're doing is they're stealing attention.
00:55:15.000They're taking attention without contributing anything back to the community.
00:55:19.000There's an interesting and fairly 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 Again,
00:55:35.000a miniscule fraction for the comments they like.
00:55:39.000They up arrow, like, thumbs up, but with each one of those likes and thumbs up, you attach a ten-thousandth of a penny with it.
00:56:14.000It's just participation in the community.
00:56:15.000But if they're a troll, it suddenly starts getting interesting because now it gets expensive to steal the attention of the community.
00:56:22.000Because the less you have positive feedback, the more expensive it gets for you to post until eventually you're priced out.
00:56:29.000But that also can kind of enforce or encourage confirmation bias.
00:56:35.000Because 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.
00:56:46.000To argue with morons, because they're going to downvote you.
00:56:52.000But you've got to think about this, again, across a broader economy, with a broader set of forums, in which, in some, you are valued experts, in others, you're the idiot who's arguing against the conventional wisdom.
00:57:49.000It's saying, those nozzles that you're pointing at, I know what those are.
00:57:55.000I 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.
00:58:04.000Otherwise, I don't survive the flight.
00:58:07.000So you are part of the Chemtrail Sprayers Association of America.
00:58:17.000Actually, 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.
00:58:28.000And the ones pointing backwards are usually to break up vortices.
00:58:33.000These are little swirly currents of airs that come off the wing that cause turbulence.
00:58:37.000And you want to break those up so they don't swirl.
00:58:57.000You can present mountains of evidence.
00:58:58.000If someone really, really doesn't want to believe, they really will not...
00:59:04.000Well, there's also, I mean, it's been going on forever.
00:59:09.000I 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.
00:59:22.000I mean, we've known for a long time that depending upon how much moisture is in the atmosphere, when planes pass through it, they will create clouds.
00:59:44.000Those are from propeller engines in the 1940s.
00:59:48.000And what's happening is the propeller is compressing the air, and when it compresses the air, the change in pressure changes the dew point.
00:59:55.000And the dew point is what determines whether the air moisture condenses into a visible vapor, into droplets that are clouds.
01:00:05.000And so by pushing a thing through the air, you're pressing on the air.
01:00:11.000And when you press on the air, that causes condensation to form, and that condensation...
01:00:16.000Follows you in a circular cloud behind the plane.
01:01:06.000You know, I did that television show on SyFy called Joe Rogan Questions Everything.
01:01:10.000And one of the things that I questioned was chemtrail.
01:01:13.000So I talked to a bunch of chemtrail...
01:01:15.000Air quote experts and one of these guys had this study that he had done on water and This standing water study was proving that the spraying in the air was making aluminum It was putting aluminum in the water and the water supply and so he had this water tested and so I He showed me the test.
01:01:58.000And what sludge is is water mixed with dirt.
01:02:01.000So I said, okay, so your water mixed with dirt contains aluminum.
01:02:06.000Do you know how much aluminum there is in dirt?
01:02:10.000Because it's the exact amount that they tested when they tested the water that you had with dirt.
01:02:17.000So what happened is, your dirt tested positive for being dirt.
01:02:22.000And you're using that as proof that the government is spraying the skies above everybody's head.
01:02:29.000And you want to talk about like a piss-poor If it's a cost-ineffective shitbag program that does absolutely nothing, chemtrails would be it.
01:03:26.000People are wiping the Cheetos off their greasy little fat fucking fingers right now and hammering at the keyboards, ready to call us shills.
01:04:47.000Clients aren't sure how it's done, and Joseph A. Meyer Jr., the man behind the obscure hedge fund, Al Arjun LP, is keeping his cards close.
01:07:00.000Thousands of a dollar to two to six hundred you says now?
01:07:03.000Yeah, you could yeah, so I mean If you put in like a fucking big pile of money, yes five grand and if you took it out the wrong moment You would lose all of it and this is why this isn't this isn't a speculative Instruments people can speculate in it I'm sorry to interrupt you,
01:07:23.000but isn't the well kind of poisoned, the financial well, with speculative investing?
01:07:29.000Like what people are doing, it seems like it shouldn't be legal.
01:07:33.000And what's really fucked up about it is that they're doing it with algorithms and they're gambling.
01:07:39.000And they're buying and selling within a fraction of a second.
01:07:44.000And they're doing it to the point where...
01:07:46.000There was a Radiolab podcast where they talked about how investment firms...
01:07:53.000Where investment firms moved their servers closer to the exchange so that they could get in their...
01:08:01.000Their orders and their exchanges quicker.
01:08:04.000Yes, Mahwah, New Jersey, where the data center is...
01:08:07.000None of the stock trading happens in Manhattan.
01:08:09.000It happens across the water in New Jersey.
01:08:12.000There's a data center there where probably the largest amount of money moves ever.
01:08:17.000And 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.
01:08:30.000So that the speed of light limitation across a room of 100 feet does not advantage one customer over another.
01:08:43.000Yeah, well people have been forced, because 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.
01:08:56.000It's so bizarre, because a lot of this stuff is actually done with computers.
01:09:00.000So 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.
01:09:11.000Yeah, over the last decade, most trading floors have seen 90% of their traders disappear.
01:09:17.000You can see photos of it online where it shows before and after photos of very big banks like UBS and JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, companies like that.
01:09:26.000And you see their trading floor and it is empty because a lot of that has now moved to algorithmic trading.
01:09:45.000During this time, they've actually made more money.
01:09:48.000But 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.
01:10:03.000To a person on the outside looking at that and trying to figure out what the fuck those people are doing, it seems exciting and chaotic and vibrant, but so confusing.
01:10:29.000I want to tell you about some of the new developments that are happening in Bitcoin, which I find interesting.
01:10:34.000And I'm not going to show, because this 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 what happens when you combine technology that looks very much like peer-to-peer Napster or BitTorrent.
01:10:54.000with a merchant service like eBay and you create this hybrid technology which is a completely peer-to-peer store service called OpenBazaar This is basically a system where you run on your computer some software,
01:11:13.000and 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.
01:11:27.000By decentralizing the payment system, we can also decentralize the store system completely.
01:11:37.000Completely borderless, multinational, open and peer-to-peer open-source software merchant system running on top of Bitcoin.
01:12:42.000Yeah, if you go to DuoSearch, it's a search engine on top.
01:12:48.000D-U-O-S-E-A-R dot C-H. So DuoSearch is...
01:12:55.000So 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.
01:15:59.000Well, the newest, latest and greatest Android phones are at the very least commensurate with the newest and latest and greatest iPhones.
01:16:08.000I think the average person, the slight differences in hardware really are irrelevant at this point.
01:16:15.000What 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.
01:16:27.000As you may have noticed, I'm all about control and privacy.
01:16:31.000Being able to control my money, control my devices, control my privacy...
01:16:37.000I think that should be a principle that we should all celebrate.
01:16:41.000It's fundamental freedom, and we're gradually losing it.
01:16:45.000Well, I'm a big fan of options as well, so I'm happy that Android's come along and created options.
01:18:35.000Yeah, they're making the operating system more and more like iOS and gradually diminishing the importance of laptops because most people do pretty much everything they need to do on their smartphones nowadays.
01:19:47.000Yeah, that got typed on a real keyboard.
01:19:49.000Your book, Internet of Money, for people who are listening.
01:19:54.000So, what else is exciting for you right now about Bitcoin?
01:19:59.000So I think one of the things we've seen 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.
01:20:12.000I remember a time when it was very very difficult to do all of those things.
01:20:17.000Now, there are probably six or seven hundred exchanges around the world.
01:20:44.000Now there are at least four or five major exchanges operating in the US. Very easy to access.
01:20:53.000Access the system to connect it maybe to a bank account or a debit card, and if you want to convert dollars to Bitcoin or Bitcoin to dollars, I'm mostly on the other side.
01:21:04.000I earn Bitcoin, and then I convert it into dollars to pay for things that I can't pay in Bitcoin.
01:21:20.000Earn everything they don't have to do.
01:21:22.000There's a company called Bitwage, which allows you to take a percentage of your paycheck and have it sent to you in Bitcoin.
01:21:33.000And 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, I'm going to put 2% of my account into a savings account and 98% into my checking account.
01:23:02.000And 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.
01:23:14.000So you could even tip them in Bitcoin.
01:23:31.000Oh, 16 different countries in the next seven months.
01:23:35.000Can 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.
01:23:47.000They want me, 24 hours before I leave, to call them and give them a specific list of places that I'm going to be.
01:23:54.000When I don't do that, when I try to use my card, it gets blocked until I come back to the U.S. and talk to them on the phone, answer a whole bunch of questions about whether it was really me who bought a pastry in Prague or something like that, and then I'll block it.
01:24:11.000And what's happened repeatedly in the last few months is I'll go somewhere.
01:24:14.000My card will get blocked because I forgot to tell them.
01:24:17.000And then I'll pull out the Bitcoin card and it works everywhere without fail.
01:24:21.000Because it's a prepaid, because it's a debit, everywhere without fail.
01:24:25.000If 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.
01:24:32.000I can simply transfer Bitcoin into that account.
01:24:36.000And ten minutes later, I can withdraw that in cash in any currency in any country.
01:24:48.000Yeah, I get excited about these things.
01:24:51.000Because it makes it easy for me to use Bitcoin.
01:24:54.000And yes, it's Visa, the evil empire, the banking system, etc.
01:24:59.000But 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, And making it easier and more transparent is how you get to mainstream adoption, especially in the developed world.
01:25:14.000Now, how would someone get a hold of one of those cards?
01:26:31.000They get that this is exciting and interesting and disruptive.
01:26:35.000They want to use it within the banking system, and they're trying to work from within to get people interested in this.
01:26:42.000We're seeing more and more of these organizations gradually try to find ways to adopt this technology, to streamline and to improve banking itself.
01:26:54.000This is very similar to what we saw in the early 90s when the internet started happening, much more mainstream.
01:27:02.000The phone companies at first fought it tooth and nail.
01:27:05.000They fought the service providers, tried not to give them access to their lines, tried to kick them off and not give them DSL networks at the time.
01:27:14.000They fought it at the FCC, they tried to control it, and eventually they all became ISPs.
01:27:23.000So eventually jumped on the bandwagon and used it to improve their own infrastructure.
01:27:28.000Now if you make a phone call on a regular traditional old phone, your phone call is going over the internet.
01:27:43.000That's called infrastructure inversion.
01:27:47.000In the early days of the automobile, they wouldn't let automobiles in towns because they would disrupt the horse traffic, right?
01:27:55.000And they had all kinds of weird laws, including in the UK they passed a law which required someone to run ahead of the car with a red flag called the Red Flag Act.
01:28:04.000That did wonders for the British automobile industry, which was 20 years ahead at the time and then wasn't.
01:29:03.000We've seen that with all of these technologies.
01:29:05.000And now we're going to see it again with money.
01:29:07.000Because if you have this technology, building the banking institutions on top of this is easy.
01:29:15.000But making Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, making the internet of money play by the rules of the old banking system is almost impossible.
01:29:23.000Now, I like that expression, cryptocurrency.
01:30:01.000Yeah, I mean, it's a long tail, right?
01:30:04.000There's a couple that are interesting that offer different perspectives, but we're seeing a lot of private institutions interested in creating their own.
01:30:16.000There's nothing stopping them from doing that, but they have to make a fundamental choice.
01:30:21.000They can either create something that is controlled, contained, with specific outlines and borders, with controlled access, permissioned access, as they would call it.
01:30:48.000But then, it has to be closed to innovation, closed to permission, and not global and transnational.
01:30:56.000So 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.
01:31:12.000And any application you write will instantaneously work anywhere in the world to anyone without permission.
01:31:21.000And if you think about it, that's also the magic of the internet.
01:31:25.000That'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.
01:31:37.000There's no one to ask permission from.
01:31:42.000To extend that analogy, they also tried to build private internets.
01:31:51.000CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, and the early closed networks that had their own content that you could connect to that weren't part of the intranet.
01:32:00.000And then after that, corporate intranets.
01:32:05.000So 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!
01:33:06.000The nice thing is that people don't have to make a choice to use one or the other.
01:33:13.000The 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.
01:33:24.000Other than that, you're free to use any currency you want anywhere.
01:33:28.000Some of us are free, many of us are not.
01:33:32.000It's the, if you want to use it for this particular use, use it.
01:33:37.000Well, if you extrapolate where all this stuff is going, if you look at, I mean, if you're correct, and 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,
01:33:53.000and 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 gonna 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 and the banks being the ones who sort of enforce Yeah.
01:34:35.000I mean, a lot of that is because of power.
01:34:38.000A lot of that power is going to go away if something like cryptocurrencies emerge as being the predominant way that we use and exchange money.
01:34:50.000That's the optimistic way to look at it.
01:34:53.000The 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.
01:35:04.000We're kind of doing that now with Apple Pay.
01:35:52.000Yeah, it's money you can send through SMS. It started off as basically people exchanging minutes, mobile minutes, that were transferable by SMS. And they started using it as currency, and then eventually it became officially a corresponding currency to the Kenyan Pesa.
01:36:07.000And now it's the predominant currency?
01:36:10.000It's, yeah, in most places, from what I understand, I haven't been to Kenya, but I've talked to a lot of Kenyans who tell me, yeah, we all use that and only that.
01:36:22.000It is kind of shocking, but here's the problem.
01:36:25.000The problem is we are going to a digital currency society where cash will be gradually eradicated, either through non-use or...
01:36:34.000A lot of countries and a lot of governments are trying to actively ban it.
01:36:40.000So they're putting limits on how much you can use cash.
01:36:42.000Say, you know, a thousand dollars, and if it's more than a thousand dollars, using cash is illegal.
01:36:49.000When we go to the society, we have to really think about the implications.
01:36:53.000Do 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,
01:37:30.000The other scenario is one in which individuals control their money.
01:37:34.000It is digital money, but it's digital 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.
01:37:45.000What really strikes me as amazing is that we've gotten used to this idea so quickly, which is that we no longer pay people.
01:37:59.000The less we use cash, the more we pay people through a corporation, right?
01:38:05.000So, 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.
01:38:24.000Everything else you have to pay through a corporation, whether it's a bank, Whether it's Venmo, whether it's PayPal, whether it's any of those things.
01:38:33.000And we've gradually gotten used to this environment where we can't pay another person unless there's a corporation involved.
01:39:23.000We are going down that road and now we have to choose.
01:39:27.000Do we go to the digital cashless society of corporate control over money with the complete and total merging of corporate and state money where 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.
01:39:55.000You have money that is controlled by a corporation.
01:39:58.000Or 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.
01:40:06.000They meet in the streets without any corporations getting involved, just from me to you, digital cash.
01:41:21.000What I'm going to talk about is the progression of what happens when a giant, well-established financial institution that's been around for 50 years or 100 years is faced with a disruptor.
01:43:34.000The internet, when it first came out, you heard this media narrative, it sells papers.
01:43:42.000It didn't sell clicks at the time, because 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.
01:43:55.000Yes, criminals use advanced technology.
01:43:57.000Criminal use the most advanced technology they can get their hands on, because they're in a very highly competitive, high-margin, high-risk...
01:44:05.000Business 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.
01:44:14.000They use cell phones to coordinate with each other They drink water so as not to die of dehydration.
01:44:19.000We're not going to ban all of those things, right?
01:44:22.000And so you have that anger And they tried that for a while.
01:44:30.000Every 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 Shanghai Banking Consortium.
01:44:45.000Is that really the biggest money launderers in the world?
01:44:48.000Yes, they were caught money 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.
01:45:00.000And they got a fine, and no one went to jail.
01:45:04.000So there are inconvenient facts like that.
01:45:07.000Every time they say Bitcoin funds terrorism, you say...
01:45:11.000I see them driving Toyotas and Humvees.
01:45:18.000They're driving around in the vehicles we left behind.
01:45:23.000They got a lot of their funding from pallets of money that we left behind.
01:45:28.000They're getting paid in dollars for oil that they're selling to our closest allies.
01:45:34.000We shouldn't really mention Saudi Arabia.
01:45:37.000So these are the inconvenient truths, right?
01:45:40.000So you don't talk about these in polite company, or at least you do.
01:45:44.000Like, that's what I said when I was invited to speak in front of the Senate in Canada, and they started asking me about terrorism, and I said, actually, mostly funded by our allies.
01:46:03.000No, we moved on to talk about more realistic and interesting things and a much more positive view of what this thing is.
01:46:08.000So they tried to discredit Bitcoin by attaching it to terrorism, and you informed them of the facts of where terrorists are actually funded from.
01:46:16.000Yes, in a very public forum on live TV, which was very difficult to continue that line of conversation.
01:48:10.000But what is happening is it's doubling every year in terms of transaction volume, transaction amounts, number of everything is doubling every year.
01:48:18.000And that's the kind of characteristic curve you see in disruptive technologies being adopted.
01:48:35.000It's got to be ready and it's got to be easy to use and so right now It's not easy to use.
01:48:43.000It's not ready for mouse 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 we already have has to not work so well.
01:48:58.000This is what's happening in the developing world, where you have banking crisis which drives people into a safe haven.
01:49:04.000Or you invent applications that couldn't be done before.
01:49:08.000A self-driving car that you pay by the mile automatically as you're driving along.
01:49:17.000A micropayment industry for paying for content directly.
01:49:21.000The Internet of Things, where devices can buy services online automatically.
01:49:28.000Things that you can't do with credit cards.
01:49:30.000I 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.
01:49:43.000So what do you think could be done to sort of further this along or to accelerate this?
01:49:54.000As 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.
01:50:12.000User interfaces, design, security, making backup easy, providing infrastructure services, exchanges, Your paycheck, your ATM services, your debit card services,
01:50:32.000One of the examples I like to use is, I got on the internet in 1989. I sent my first emails shortly thereafter, about 1990. And in order to send my first email, I had to have Unix command line skills,
01:50:47.000a login into a Unix mainframe with access to an internet connection at an academic institution.
01:50:54.000And then I worked very hard for about two 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.
01:51:06.000And then almost exactly 20 years later, my mom went, swipe, And did the same thing on her iPad.
01:51:15.000When you take 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.
01:51:29.000I have 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.
01:51:40.000But isn't there a vast difference, though, between something like email, which is not just a disruptive technology, but a completely new innovation, the ability to send things wirelessly through the air or even wired, like electronic mail, did not exist.
01:52:40.000Into that gap you can fit anyone who has access to even a rudimentary feature phone or smartphone with a very basic level of data service.
01:52:52.000The level at which you need to have technology for someone to adopt bitcoin and immediately become in themselves a global bank in the back pocket of their pants.
01:53:06.000Compared to the level that you would need to reach before JPMorgan Chase built a branch within their area and offered them services after going through a very careful verification of their identity and blah blah blah blah blah.
01:53:23.000So we're gonna get to leapfrogging effect.
01:53:26.000Just 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.
01:53:39.000Because the difficulty to actually extend landlines was so high that when cellphones came along, at some point it became easier to just go directly to cellphones and bypass that entire generation of technology.
01:53:54.000We're expecting, and I certainly see it as very possible, leapfrogging in economic inclusion.
01:54:00.000The ability for people to join the internet of money long before they ever see a bank.
01:54:06.000The end result is it's not just about banking the unbanked.
01:56:29.000Well, I mean, it won't render this one null, because it can coexist on all of them, but that one has a PIN number and a passphrase that you have to put in.
01:56:37.000You would not be able to break into that device.
01:57:12.000A bug bounty is when a manufacturer of a piece of software, for example, puts out a bounty and says, I'll give you $10,000 if you find a bug in my software that someone could exploit to break my software.
01:57:54.000So my money is the bounty that's sitting behind that bug.
01:57:58.000And this means that Bitcoin is being tested and has been tested every single day of its seven-year existence with an ever-increasing jackpot at the end of it.
01:58:09.000Which is why you see Bitcoin exchanges, when they don't do good security, they get hacked.
01:58:15.000And whoever hacks them gets the bounty.
01:58:18.000But Bitcoin itself, which has the biggest bounty of them all...
02:01:27.000The 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.
02:02:49.000In 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 United 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,
02:03:33.000I 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.
02:06:54.000What this shows, however, is that when I came on the show the first time, I think, about three years ago, I didn't yet have one of these 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 because then they're compromised.
02:07:20.000And then send the money to those digital keys and then put those in a vault, in a safe deposit box, in a safe.
02:08:35.000And as it gets easier and easier, more people come on board.
02:08:38.000Not only are they able to use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but they're able to do it with security in a way that doesn't require an enormous amount of expertise.
02:10:48.000And it's getting bigger and bigger all the time.
02:10:50.000It came in really handy during the quake.
02:10:52.000A 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.
02:11:45.000I mean, you look at kids today, you go to a store or go to the mall or something like that, you go to a restaurant, they're fucking glued to their phone.
02:14:20.000Is 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.
02:14:30.000I mean, I think it's absolutely amazing and fascinating.
02:14:38.000In a lot of ways, it's a solution for the control that the federal government, the Federal Reserve, the banks, and even politicians have over us today.
02:14:50.000That control is slowly being eroded by the internet.
02:14:53.000Not even slowly, pretty rapidly being eroded by the internet.
02:14:57.000Whatever control politicians used to have, it's not nearly as...
02:16:36.000This happens with every type of technology.
02:16:39.000It's ridiculed at first, and then gradually it matures, it gets less cumbersome to use, and if it has some fundamental properties, Utility, something it's useful for, that's different, that's new, that you can do things with it you couldn't do before,
02:16:56.000then at some point it hits an inflection point and it becomes mainstream very, very rapidly.
02:17:01.000And then everybody is both surprised and at the same time claims ownership and say, well, I always thought that this Bitcoin thing would succeed.