Bitcoin As an Asset (Why Bitcoin is Unique in Human History)
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode, we talk about Bitcoin and why it is more valuable than gold and precious metals as an asset. We talk about why Bitcoin is better than gold, why it's better than any other asset, and why we should all own some Bitcoin.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
If I have a caravan and I'm trying to move assets between two locations in like medieval Europe or something like that, and that caravan had a lot of gold in it, right?
00:00:10.700
If that is raided by a group of bandits, those bandits, because the gold is easily divisible, it can easily divide it.
00:00:17.460
They can easily use it even in small increments to buy a beard.
00:00:21.560
But if you are a group of bandits and you raid a carriage and it's full of art, expensive art, that is incredibly hard to fence.
00:00:36.420
And the amount of money you're going to get from that is dramatically lower than the amount of money a wealthy person could get from that.
00:00:41.480
And for those reasons, there is differentially less reason to raid those carts.
00:00:50.100
If I split my key between multiple carriages, for anyone to gain access to any of it, they would need to successfully heist every single carriage was a portion of my key.
00:01:03.400
I hope it now makes sense to you why this is such a valuable asset to the ultra wealthy.
00:01:08.220
And then the question is, do we live in a world where wealth is being more and more concentrated among a smaller and smaller class of people?
00:01:15.460
And to me, the answer there is fucking obviously.
00:01:35.760
Yeah, so we got a comment under, we had done a video on, you know, investment.
00:01:40.880
And we mentioned Bitcoin briefly in that video.
00:01:43.440
And, you know, why I thought I liked it more than precious metals.
00:01:48.360
And we're pretty heavily invested in that area of crypto, at least.
00:01:54.220
you, like, I would never get Bitcoin because you don't own your own Bitcoin.
00:02:00.180
You know, it's always on another exchange, like FTX or something like that.
00:02:11.440
Like, even in our audience, which I consider a fairly educated audience,
00:02:14.840
I was surprised by the lack of, like, knowledge about, like, the basics of Bitcoin as an investment
00:02:25.660
If you are a Bitcoin person, you would hear something like that and just guffaw at the insanity of it
00:02:40.520
So what we wanted to take this podcast to do is explore Bitcoin as an asset, i.e. not as a technology.
00:02:49.860
And I think this is a problem with Bitcoin videos, is they so often approach it being like,
00:02:56.740
oh, here's, like, the technical part of, like, why it's cool.
00:03:03.560
Or, like, here's how to invest and look at these weird charts and this is my method.
00:03:08.340
Like, oh, here's it going up into the right and here's it going down and this is how you note it.
00:03:12.760
You know, because of the this and that, like, how it's going to change, blah, blah, blah.
00:03:18.260
Whereas I want to try to do an episode on Bitcoin, and this is why I didn't really prep for this episode.
00:03:23.520
Otherwise, I would have on an episode on Bitcoin.
00:03:26.080
Just at the highest conceptual investment level, like, as an asset, discuss why it's a thing of value
00:03:33.320
and why I think it will be a thing of long-term value that I am very interested in participating,
00:03:39.940
like, long-term when I think about my kids and stuff like that.
00:03:45.060
Well, so, Simone, do you want to take a start in the basics of what you understand of how Bitcoin works?
00:03:58.900
You know, although there are obviously complications to this, like, where the supply could be manipulated
00:04:03.920
if enough people who hold large amounts of Bitcoin sort of decide they want to change this.
00:04:09.280
Another thing that made it stand out to me is that you actually really can own this.
00:04:14.060
And this is an asset that when shit hits the fan, you can take with you.
00:04:19.840
And you literally don't have to have anything as long as, like, you've remembered recovery phrases.
00:04:29.380
You could have it, you know, like, all these different friends, like, hold different ones.
00:04:33.820
Like, there are many different ways you can do it.
00:04:35.420
But, like, literally, you don't even need to have any sort of device or thing.
00:04:49.060
And I think that that second point is something that can be kind of confusing.
00:04:51.900
And that was clearly confusing to the individual who first heard about this.
00:04:56.060
So, crypto as an asset, at the most basic level, and I said this in the previous episode on this subject, it is the first time in human history in which we have had an asset with a known quantity that is divisible and easily tradable.
00:05:20.360
And a person could say, well, you don't have full ownership over it, which is just not true.
00:05:24.900
You actually have fuller ownership over Bitcoin than you do gold or any asset.
00:05:32.480
You literally have more ownership over your Bitcoin than you have over a block of gold you're holding in your hand.
00:05:41.880
That is the case because unlike the block of gold that you are holding in your hand and someone could come along and yoink it, with Bitcoin, if you have memorized your passphrase,
00:05:52.240
you literally, there is no way to access it other than hacking the entire blockchain.
00:06:04.600
You could be tortured, but do you understand that that is an additional level?
00:06:08.200
You could be tortured for like the location of your gold or something like that, right?
00:06:12.740
But somebody could also externally find your gold.
00:06:21.700
Unless you voluntarily give up that information.
00:06:29.660
Now, voluntary, obviously, torture and stuff like that.
00:06:32.540
But that is a level of self-ownership that goes beyond the self-ownership of gold.
00:06:37.520
And then somebody could say, well, he doesn't understand Bitcoin very well, so it's useful for me to explain this.
00:06:46.860
Like, who actually has it if you just have a code in your head?
00:06:54.060
It's distributed among everybody who has Bitcoin.
00:06:58.480
It's actually a little bit more nuanced than that.
00:07:00.600
But it's sort of like everybody who has a node that's operational for Bitcoin.
00:07:08.720
So everybody who has one of these, and you can set one up in your house, right, if you want to and participate in the system, is who's storing it for you.
00:07:17.740
And when there is between the nodes incongruencies, so like suppose like a portion of the nodes are like, I want to change what's on the blockchain.
00:07:26.600
You need to get like, basically everyone with a node to immediately participate in this charade when you personally can set up a node whenever you want.
00:07:42.480
Well, these are like culturally extremely libertarian, independent people too.
00:07:51.740
And it would also lower the value of Bitcoin as an asset if anyone found out for everyone else who owned Bitcoin.
00:08:03.340
If you hear somebody online saying something like, not your keys, not your coin, which you probably heard a lot with crypto.
00:08:07.700
So what they're saying is that if you give up your keys, like if you don't know the keys to your own crypto, right, well, then whatever exchange they're on has access to that.
00:08:21.880
And this has happened multiple times throughout crypto.
00:08:23.920
It probably happened less as time goes on, but it occasionally happens.
00:08:28.120
But this can also happen with assets like gold and stuff.
00:08:31.000
But to go into this, well, then an individual might say, yeah, but you have to initially buy your Bitcoin through an exchange.
00:08:46.920
It is true that like the easiest way to buy crypto is through an exchange.
00:08:49.840
It's not the only way, but the easiest way is to buy crypto through an exchange.
00:08:52.280
This is like saying because you buy your block of gold that you then take home and put under your bed at a store that you don't really have access to that gold.
00:09:01.760
You do as soon as you take your keys off the chain and verify that those keys are real.
00:09:07.900
As soon as you have bought a crypto, specifically, we're just talking mostly about Bitcoin on this, on a chain, and then you have taken the keys from the chain and you have it yourself, you now have full access to that.
00:09:23.220
Yeah, although I will say it is surprisingly hard for unbanked children.
00:09:32.300
It is actually really hard for many unbanked people.
00:09:35.760
So like a lot of people working in the sex trade, when they started out with Bitcoin and crypto, they were really excited.
00:09:43.620
I can accept payment because many banks aren't willing to work with you once that happens.
00:09:47.580
But now, because there are all these KYC requirements, especially for US-based exchanges, before you can even start to trade on them or buy or accept, you have to have a bank account that is associated.
00:10:02.760
You have to do all this stuff with your identity.
00:10:06.300
And there aren't great systems if you're totally going off the grid, it seems, with your crypto.
00:10:15.560
A lot of people who are trying to use this system the way it should be used, where you don't have to be involved with legacy banking, are still struggling.
00:10:24.560
And I think that's a misunderstanding of crypto.
00:10:26.260
So I think that the Bitcoin nerds right now, when they're trying to talk about why crypto has value, they're wrong.
00:10:33.580
Crypto is never really a good alternative to the mainstream system.
00:10:37.800
It may be for high-end purchases, but we'll get to it.
00:10:44.680
And in Peru, when I am buying a soda or when I am buying something at a restaurant, right, or I am buying from a grocery store, I am buying in Peruvian Soles.
00:10:58.800
When I am buying a large asset, like a company or a house, I am almost always buying in American dollars.
00:11:06.920
And this is a normal way that economic systems subdivide.
00:11:12.020
I can very easily see an economic system in which Bitcoin is used for large transactions and dollars or local currency is used for small transactions.
00:11:23.660
And when I say large transactions, I mean enormously large transactions.
00:11:30.360
I think the core value of Bitcoin specifically has always been to the world's ultra-wealthy.
00:11:43.700
And so people would be like, well, what do you mean by that, right?
00:11:46.900
Like, and we've mentioned this on the last time we talked about it, but it is worth going into a bit.
00:11:51.320
Like, why is art such a thing of astronomical value to wealthy investors?
00:11:59.340
And when an artist dies, you have a broad understanding of how many of those artistic pieces there are in the world.
00:12:05.860
Like, no, of course, like Bitcoin, there's also market manipulation was in the field.
00:12:10.000
But that's a core reason why historically art had value.
00:12:12.820
Because an artist could die, which could give you a set number of those artistic pieces in the world.
00:12:17.620
And those pieces are light and easily transportable.
00:12:23.080
Like, easier than gold bars in many ways, you know.
00:12:26.320
But I mean, this is why art was used instead of gold bars historically.
00:12:35.160
With something like gold historically, you could always presumably find some new vein or some new way of extracting it from the earth.
00:12:51.440
I mean, you could find new art or people can forge art, right?
00:12:54.700
You know, which is why there's such big industries around detecting that or finding new art.
00:12:58.960
But presumably the numbers that you're going to find are fairly limited.
00:13:04.080
And this is of huge value if you're an ultra-wealthy person, right?
00:13:08.260
Because as ultra-wealthy people, there historically have been periods in which society has turned against you.
00:13:14.140
And you needed to either be able to hide assets or move with lots of assets at once.
00:13:19.640
And gold is typically a really bad asset to move with.
00:13:22.600
An additional benefit of art is that it's harder to fence to non-ultra-wealthy people.
00:13:30.420
Like, you're trying to buy a property in some other country because you're hiding.
00:13:39.560
Like, take it and give me your beautiful mansion in mysterious nowhere-come country.
00:13:44.360
And they're like, well, what am I going to do with...
00:13:49.660
So, like, the Shroud of Torrin actually was traded for two castles in Italy.
00:13:54.420
As an example of, like, art or relics being traded for high amounts.
00:14:01.940
They can trade it to other wealthy people for other very large things.
00:14:11.520
I have a caravan that's moving between two cities that's trying to move my wealth, right?
00:14:16.520
If I have a caravan and I'm trying to move assets between two locations in, like, medieval Europe or something like that.
00:14:22.460
And that caravan had a lot of gold in it, right?
00:14:27.320
If that is rated by a group of bandits, those bandits, because the gold is easily divisible, it can easily divide it.
00:14:34.440
They can easily use it, even in small increments, to buy a beer.
00:14:38.280
You know, you could, you know, historically in the Old West, that's where they'd grow out their nails.
00:14:41.360
They'd scrape a little bit of gold dust and they'd use that to buy a beer.
00:14:51.660
We'd get the pinky, the long pinky nails for the scooping of gold dust.
00:15:00.320
But if you are a group of bandits and you raid a carriage and it's full of art, expensive art, that is incredibly hard to fence.
00:15:13.580
And the amount of money you're going to get from that is dramatically lower than the amount of money a wealthy person could get from that.
00:15:19.200
And for those reasons, there is differentially less reason to raid those carts.
00:15:30.420
If you raid it and you get access to the key, you have full access to it.
00:15:36.520
But this allows you to do things like ship parts of the key separately.
00:15:40.480
So, for example, like when we die, different parts of our family who don't like each other have different parts of our crypto keys.
00:15:47.500
Well, and friends who don't know each other exist.
00:15:50.660
Like people have our keys who do not know each other, have never heard of each other, have no idea who else has been looped into this thing.
00:15:59.500
And they have a system that we have developed for bringing them all together and gaining access to all of that crypto, even if we die, right?
00:16:10.360
And we also have a system where we don't know our own keys.
00:16:12.660
So even if somebody were to torture us, they couldn't gain access to our keys.
00:16:17.940
I mean, I think also there's the problem of we cannot remember our keys.
00:16:21.480
They're all maintained through these treasure hunt systems.
00:16:28.900
Because what that means, suppose historically you had Bitcoin instead of...
00:16:31.840
Doesn't that just mean we would be tortured for longer because they wouldn't believe us?
00:16:40.200
But it's not like people torturing you are really close to you.
00:16:50.660
Someone looks at me the wrong way and I'm like, I'll tell you everything.
00:16:54.520
But if I'm literally like, I don't know, they'll think I'm just not breaking.
00:16:59.620
Anyway, so let's talk about this historically from a Bitcoin perspective, right?
00:17:04.820
So suppose instead of moving gold or instead of moving art, I'm trying to move Bitcoin between
00:17:10.000
And I'm doing this in old-timey carriages, right?
00:17:14.900
If I split my key between multiple carriages, for anyone to gain access to any of it, they
00:17:23.380
would need to successfully heist every single carriage with a portion of my key.
00:17:29.560
And have the instructions for how to put it together, which might be a different carriage
00:17:34.800
Not that it couldn't be done, but I hope it now makes sense to you why this is such a valuable
00:17:41.360
And then the question is, do we live in a world where wealth is being more and more concentrated
00:17:49.800
And to me, the answer there is fucking obviously.
00:17:56.380
And in a world with wealthier rich people, crypto has an increasing level of value, specifically
00:18:06.900
We could talk about, oh, yeah, but what about ETH?
00:18:11.200
Except the code base gets changed pretty unilaterally all the time.
00:18:16.760
And if they ever wanted to, they could just change it.
00:18:19.120
It really has none of these assurances that Bitcoin has.
00:18:22.560
Like, I've been going over and over again, all these assurances that make it such a stable
00:18:30.880
Now, I'll tell you what Bitcoin does not fucking have.
00:18:33.260
And this is important to understand if you've only heard about it from the Zeitgeist.
00:18:38.680
It might be the single fucking most traceable asset in the world, which is part of what
00:18:45.920
But if you've gotten into Bitcoin because you think you've gotten some form of currency that
00:18:50.720
people can't trace where it's going, they may not be able to trace who owns a wallet.
00:18:56.340
But even that is harder these days with government controls.
00:19:00.460
It is dramatically more traceable how it's being used than dollars or gold.
00:19:08.900
If you're using a lot of, like, international, like, offshore bank accounts and stuff like
00:19:14.100
If you wanted an iteration of something like this, like, Monera might be better if you're
00:19:18.800
like, I want something that actually is, like, untraceable, untraceable.
00:19:23.760
Like, you can look into that category of crypto.
00:19:27.540
Because that's a smaller minority of people who value the thing because it's untraceable.
00:19:32.540
So Bitcoin's value is just its fungibility, transportability, and known quantity.
00:19:40.080
Now, what other misconceptions do I often hear here?
00:19:45.880
Well, I think a lot of people are like, well, there's zero practical application.
00:19:50.320
No one can use this for day-to-day transactions.
00:19:52.480
There's zero fucking practical application of art.
00:19:54.480
This is probably a point I should go a bit deeper on because a lot of people hit this
00:19:59.460
as a stumbling block when trying to understand why people value an asset like Bitcoin, which
00:20:06.660
The practical value of any particular asset determines the floor of its value, but not
00:20:15.040
Assets used as bargaining tokens are almost always valued at a level that is much higher
00:20:25.000
Currency is often thought of as, like, the core bargaining token asset.
00:20:28.560
You know, if you look historically, you could look at things like precious gems, crystals,
00:20:35.420
Now, people would be like, yeah, but gold has practical value.
00:20:38.380
Yet, if I ask someone the practical value of gold today, they're like, well, it can be used
00:20:42.920
If I ask someone the practical value of gold historically, they'd say, well, it could be
00:20:48.140
Well, then, why did it maintain a linear value as this core practical purpose changed?
00:20:55.080
And that's because gold has always been valued at much more than its practical value because
00:21:04.460
With gold, I think it can sometimes cloud people because people can think of the industrial
00:21:10.780
Instead, let's talk about something like diamonds.
00:21:12.920
So, you look historically at the value of diamonds.
00:21:16.540
They have almost always been valued at much, much higher than their practical value, especially
00:21:21.680
before we found out about the industrial capabilities of something like a diamond.
00:21:28.840
Because the elites always need some sort of ultra-scarce portable asset to do really high-value
00:21:39.620
But a person could say, well, yes, but even historically, a diamond could be used in things
00:21:46.420
And it's then saying, well, why would you use a diamond in jewelry instead of, like, a
00:21:52.740
There's many seashells that are approximate in beauty to a diamond.
00:21:55.960
It's because a diamond is scarce and therefore a sign of value.
00:22:01.380
It is its scarcity and portability which is giving it its value.
00:22:05.160
Now, a person may say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but at least a diamond, unlike Bitcoin, has some
00:22:14.300
As soon as you have admitted that any asset is trading for more than its practical utility
00:22:19.580
because of its scarcity, that net difference is the net difference of where something like
00:22:28.240
Well, but I mean, I would also argue that when we go to various communities in Latin America,
00:22:35.100
when we look at Venezuela, like, suddenly crypto is pretty pervasive.
00:22:46.980
And this is actually an interesting point that you're making here.
00:22:49.160
Crypto has differential value in economic situations in which people do not have trust in their
00:23:01.580
So if you're thinking about it as an investment asset, I ask a question.
00:23:05.840
Do you think that 50 years from now, people will have more trust in their governments than
00:23:10.540
they do today or less trust in their governments than they do today?
00:23:19.400
For me, the biggest question I have about Bitcoin as an asset is supercomputers and how
00:23:27.180
Because the blockchain is cracked and we have friends who off the record have told us that
00:23:32.360
they, like, if you look at like the quantum computers that they're working with, they're
00:23:36.480
not that far from being able to do it or they could even do it right now.
00:23:40.460
Yeah, it could even be the case that for over a year, someone, multiple people have cracked
00:23:46.260
They just, there's a clear incentive to not talk about it.
00:23:51.320
Now, this is what's really interesting to what Simone is talking about here.
00:23:54.780
If you crack Bitcoin with a supercomputer, you actually have a huge economic incentive to
00:24:02.820
not let anyone know that you've cracked a Bitcoin.
00:24:05.140
Otherwise, everything you take from it has no value and you would take stuff at small
00:24:11.480
You'd likely do a Superman thing, like a tax on everyone who has Bitcoin.
00:24:15.320
Now, what's interesting about these quantum computers is at least my understanding of
00:24:18.420
existing technology is you really can't have that many at a time.
00:24:21.620
And they can really only be operated by large state or corporate institutions.
00:24:25.760
What do you mean you can't have that many at a time?
00:24:28.340
I just mean they're incredibly expensive to build.
00:24:30.180
I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger,
00:24:36.260
and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
00:24:41.180
Oh, as in like very few people would be able to afford.
00:24:44.740
So I've heard some people be like, well, I found this method that would enable me to do
00:24:50.420
So, I mean, it's plausible that someone has developed a method that's actually affordable,
00:24:54.420
less plausible than the people who are brute forcing it with money, of course.
00:25:00.800
So that's what I worry about with Bitcoin is does increasing technology make it less relevant?
00:25:05.360
And I think that is a really real and very big fear.
00:25:11.980
Yeah, I guess there's less risk with the U.S. dollar because there are so many different
00:25:17.020
People would say, well, what if governments ban it?
00:25:19.740
Like that could hurt its value and that can hurt its value in the moment.
00:25:24.080
But over the long term, look, let me put it this way.
00:25:28.900
How much how many Chinese people do you think own Bitcoin and how many times do you think
00:25:40.400
If anything, increasing and frequent bans just make it like prove its use case more to
00:25:47.900
Hearing a government ban something once is scary for its long term potential.
00:25:53.680
Hearing that a government had to ban something like five different times is very promising
00:25:59.060
to that thing's long term potential because it indicates that the government clearly is
00:26:06.380
And therefore, you know, an asset does not require government approval to continue to be
00:26:12.860
And also, any negatives from the bans are already baked into the price of the asset.
00:26:21.580
And I think for us, though, like the big thing for us was doing a lot of work with Venezuelans
00:26:27.220
and doing a lot of work in Latin America and just seeing it actually in everyday use.
00:26:33.020
Because for us, we were first exposed to crypto in like 2012.
00:26:37.980
And it was always in this really like abstract kind of difficult to use environment.
00:26:44.000
So I was just like, well, this is always going to be relegated to like super techie
00:26:47.000
people who are really into it from a theoretical standpoint.
00:26:50.380
And then when I saw super non-tech savvy people using and exchanging crypto, I realized, oh,
00:26:58.360
OK, so even people who are not into tech who don't even own a PC or like, you know, like
00:27:05.880
anything, a lap, like anything larger than a smartphone are using this.
00:27:13.920
So people can be like, yeah, well, the government can't like it can ban your ability to hold
00:27:19.200
Bitcoin, but it can't ban your ability to hold gold.
00:27:21.400
And it's like literally the U.S. government has done that before the 1935, a gold reserve
00:27:28.100
act banned the ability to personally hold gold with the exception of jewelry and collector's
00:27:36.440
Like, no, any asset that threatens a weak currency is going to be subject to potential
00:27:43.760
The question is, how easy is it for the government to search your house for that asset?
00:27:47.720
Gold, fairly fucking easy, especially with current technology.
00:27:58.740
You just made the point that it's like easy to trace.
00:28:09.940
I had all my keys in the boat and then the boat sunk and I don't have...
00:28:13.760
You know, or you were one of those people who tried to memorize your keys and you forgot
00:28:17.700
them or, you know, there are so many famous cases though, like already, of people who
00:28:25.460
bought Bitcoin, you know, and it was like this really theoretical thing and they completely
00:28:29.860
forgot about it because they thought it was worth absolutely nothing.
00:28:33.280
And then, you know, especially when Bitcoin was at its height, like around the pandemic,
00:28:37.700
they like, you know, are digging through old like computer wreckage to try to find where
00:28:42.700
So just because you can prove that Bitcoin went to a wallet that you at one point had
00:28:46.540
control over doesn't mean people can prove you have it right now.
00:28:51.160
So people can know when you spend Bitcoin on something.
00:28:53.980
So if I'm spending Bitcoin on something illicit, people can easily prove that.
00:28:58.740
People cannot easily prove that I currently have Bitcoin, which is important to note.
00:29:03.340
Now, another thing to note about gold as an asset, and this has always been very confusing
00:29:07.740
There requires a very specific and narrow level of social collapse to be of utility as
00:29:17.700
So for gold to be the single like recurring reserve of asset, I would need most global economies
00:29:27.560
So like the United States, everything like that, like the Europe, et cetera.
00:29:32.420
I would need the internet to break down because, you know, Bitcoin would need to not be a better
00:29:37.740
But I would need people to broadly understand the value of like a scarce tradable metal and
00:29:49.500
That is that requires like a level of social cohesion, which is just very unlikely in these
00:29:58.400
So what do you say to the people who are like, and that's why I just buy guns and ammo?
00:30:03.060
I think that is a very valuable thing to invest in.
00:30:08.360
So pretty much if society falls below a certain level of technology or a certain level of social
00:30:13.400
cohesion, guns and ammo become the core store of value.
00:30:19.820
And that being the case, I can understand the huge swath of levels of which society could
00:30:26.580
collapse below, let's say, like 10% societal stability.
00:30:32.440
Below 10% societal stability, guns and ammo are the core source of value, right?
00:30:37.280
Gold becomes the core store of value between like 10% and 15% societal stability.
00:30:48.320
That's where you still have global networks of trade, but the internet is down, okay?
00:30:55.640
Between, I'd say like 15% and like 60% societal stability.
00:31:02.600
So these are scenarios in which people don't really trust most governments, but the internet
00:31:08.040
Global trade is kind of operational, but with private piracy.
00:31:12.120
Those are the scenarios in which Bitcoin is the core asset of value.
00:31:15.220
So it's just like a much wider range and much more likely range in terms of when I look at
00:31:20.140
real outcomes for the world that I think we're going to fall into.
00:31:23.420
You know, as I say, I think the world's heading to where South Africa is today in terms of stability.
00:31:28.220
So rolling blackouts don't mean the internet has no value or Bitcoin has no value, right?
00:31:33.680
It's the same with, you know, unsafe streets, unsafe care, you know, moving assets.
00:31:38.800
All of that stuff only increases the value of Bitcoin, right?
00:31:41.940
Even frequent blackouts doesn't make the internet go away as like a thing, right?
00:31:46.640
I think things need to get pretty fucked for the internet to go away.
00:31:55.500
I don't know how much there is protecting the internet the way it works now.
00:32:03.680
The other thing that I know people have stored as an asset in case of collapse is Wikipedia.
00:32:11.020
And then they have other hard drives they can put it on and trade it for.
00:32:15.960
And they have it in their clarity cages, obviously, because that's very necessary.
00:32:20.800
So they put, by the way, they took Wikipedia from before.
00:32:24.900
Before it became all biased and everything, which now is wildly biased.
00:32:33.260
So, I mean, there are scenarios in which it matters.
00:32:38.140
I don't think people should, like I've said before, buy any sort of crypto, not being ready to lose all of it.
00:32:48.340
And for multiple reasons, like the value can go to nothing.
00:32:52.860
But also, like, never consider buying a currency if you don't have a cold wallet that you plan to move it to.
00:33:00.180
Like, leaving it on an exchange, I agree, is not a good idea.
00:33:07.020
And there's also weird things you can do with all this.
00:33:09.800
It's split up portions of your key and make it so that even you can't easily access it, which is the way that we handle everything.
00:33:15.480
Which is weird to a lot of people, but I think it makes us marginally safer.
00:33:20.680
Yeah, I'm sure people have much more sophisticated ways of going about this.
00:33:25.740
But we're just talking about, like, basic functionality here and why it gives us hope.
00:33:31.460
And I think a lot of why we like it is ideological because we have this sort of libertarian view that people should have.
00:33:38.440
I don't fucking, I think Bitcoin has value because the number of tyrants in the world is going to increase.
00:33:42.720
I think the core bet I'm making with Bitcoin is tyrants go up.
00:33:53.440
You're not at all wrong, as depressing as that may be.
00:33:58.660
But again, I think you should be ready to lose all of it because, you know, the world is unpredictable and it's a weird asset.
00:34:06.960
Well, I understand you're saying, oh, yeah, we are not investment advisors, blah, blah, blah.
00:34:10.960
We're just talking about something from, like, a conceptual standpoint.
00:34:16.520
And you're saying, yeah, don't invest anything.
00:34:20.480
Don't invest anything you're not prepared to lose.
00:34:23.020
But, I mean, I broadly think that most metal assets that were traditional value stores, gold, silver, etc., they're just going to decrease over time, long term.
00:34:32.860
Yeah, I definitely have a lot less confidence in precious metals that are not, like, strategically undervalued now.
00:34:42.020
Like, we're talking about stuff that's used in batteries that are going to be ramping up in production, for example, right?
00:34:48.940
But just, like, traditionally precious metals is less.
00:34:52.600
These are the proxy for wealth in a historic context because they're just, like, super unusable as wealth stores and wealth movers.
00:35:03.380
And if you look historically, you could say, well, then why were they so useful in the Old West?
00:35:10.660
Like, in the gold rushes and stuff like that, you know, it was in people's evoked set of wealth, right?
00:35:18.980
And it had corollaries in the historic context, right?
00:35:26.720
Gold hasn't had a great competitor in a very, very long time.
00:35:31.220
Now it has one and it's just one that is almost comically better than it.
00:35:42.540
But, again, you know, bullets, I'm not saying bullets don't matter.
00:35:50.020
I'm just saying if you want to store it for the vast majority of societal collapse scenarios, it's crypto and bullets.
00:36:03.380
There's some other things that might be worth storing value in, just not precious metals.
00:36:09.080
Well, I also think that when you get to weird stuff like that, even bullets, the risk of counterfeiting, if you're not really careful, is higher, right?
00:36:18.880
So then that's just one other thing to consider.
00:36:22.860
If you're wondering why I think gold has such low value, imagine society has collapsed.
00:36:27.720
Somebody comes to you, the fucking car full of gold, and they want to trade it for your guns or your food or your semiconductors or your whatever.
00:36:44.020
Do you actually think that there's somebody else out there who's going to take that in exchange for shit that you need?
00:36:50.100
Or are you going to say, hey, I noticed you have a gun in your car.
00:36:59.320
I noticed you have some horses or some chickens.
00:37:07.820
Well, that's your opinion, and that's my opinion.
00:37:12.180
And I'm sure we're going to get a lot of other opinions in the comments, but fun to talk about it.
00:37:17.260
We also have no idea how much gold there is in the world.
00:37:19.400
And that's another thing that's important to know.
00:37:20.920
Like, we know how much Bitcoin there is in the world.
00:37:22.640
We have no fucking clue how much gold there is.
00:37:26.520
No, what I mean is we don't know if there's gold in Fort Knox.
00:37:32.600
We don't know if there's gold in a lot of the banks.
00:37:45.120
Like, that's a weird thing about that asset class.
00:37:50.060
Now, realistically, if it turns out that, like, a bunch of gold that we thought existed in the world doesn't exist, it would increase the value of all other gold.
00:38:00.340
And the fact that people can lie about this so easily devalues gold over time as institutions are more and more willing to lie to the public, which I think is the world that we're entering.
00:38:11.560
So in general, low-trust world, potentially dangerous world, corrupt world, Bitcoin plus crypto equals promising.