Original subtitles

- [JC] Fear, uncertainty and doubt.

- [Jimmy] Fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

- [Brady] Fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

- [Joe] FUD is fear, uncertainty and doubt.

- [Lamar] Fear, uncertainty and doubt.

- FUD, F-U-D stands for fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Now that's not just for Bitcoin,

but applies to gold or minerals.

It applies to stocks.

But there are people who are groups who want

to get the price down on Bitcoin,

mean their goal is to buy more of it,

but they don't wanna pay the price right now.

- And it is often intentional published by opposition

to Bitcoin about

basically untruths about how Bitcoin operates,

about Bitcoin's effect on the world.

And then of course it can also come

from just misunderstandings

or not understanding about how Bitcoin works.

And that kind of FUD is just as harmful.

It's just not intentional, or maybe malicious,

but it's still just as harmful

to the public's understanding of Bitcoin.

- It's more like propaganda.

And if you look at it sort of like the classical definition

of propaganda.

It's a way to influence people to a certain action.

Or in this case, it would be sort of like inaction

or thinking that it's something that not worth doing.

Generally, it's the action that people want you

to take after giving FUD is

go do something else to mitigate that FUD

or to sell some asset, or do do something like that.

- For the most part, people create FUD.

They create fear.

They create uncertainty and they create doubt and an attempt

to have you sell your Bitcoin 'cause you're scared.

As more and more people sell their Bitcoin,

the price drops and they're able to come right behind you,

and scoop up your Bitcoin at a lower price.

That in a nutshell is what FUD is.

(soft music)

- Oh man Bitcoin,

has such a loaded question because Bitcoin is everything.

- Bitcoin is unconfiscatable,

decentralized store of value.

- Bitcoin is better money

that will help us build a brighter future.

- Bitcoin is digital gold.

So it's digital in the sense that it is,

very quick to transfer over space.

- People ask me all the time,

do you have a Bitcoin with you that you can show me?

And there is no Bitcoin you can show anyone.

That's like saying, let me see your email mailbox.

I can't show that to you. And I can't show Bitcoin to you.

- Bitcoin is a distributed ledger technology

that allows for the transference

and some value peer to peer across the network.

It is decentralized and distributed across the globe,

and allows people to participate freely themselves.

- Bitcoin is the first time

that civilization has ever been able to create something

specifically like a money type of thing

that you could actually trust.

- It has a perfect scarcity of 21 million, meaning that you,

it's going to hold value much better than something bad

is expanding quickly kind of like the U.S dollar

or lots of other assets.

Pretty much anything else if there's a large demand

for more of it will be produced.

So if we started using aluminum as cash today,

like people would just produce a lot more aluminum

and that would drag down the price

that the stock of it would would increase.

But Bitcoin is not like that.

- Our money throughout history has time

and time again been co-opted by individuals,

or a small group of individuals at the detriments

of the society that they're governing or ruling.

And the same thing has happened with the dollar

that has been basically taken control

of by the Federal Reserve Bank,

which is a small group of individuals that make decisions

about how the global reserve currency works.

And most importantly about its monetary supply.

- It's digital gold, it's perfectly scarce,

it's decentralized, and it is digital.

So giving it sort of like the best of all worlds.

It's like the op money in the sense

that it's very convenient to transfer across space.

It's like, gold in that it has scarcity,

and no permission required,

meaning that it has saleability of cost time.

It's digitable.

- Gold was probably the first hard money we've had.

And when I say hard and it's hard to replicate hard

to create more off.

But Bitcoin is hard money because like I said,

it's provably limited.

So it's a whole different idea of what money is.

And most people don't even understand money.

- We can build a better future using a money

that is less corruptible I guess,

and money being the foundation,

or one of the most important foundations of civilization.

Bitcoin is a beacon of hope.

A lot of people think that Bitcoin started

with the launch of the network in January of 2009.

But really its origins lie, decades before that

with the group of computer scientists,

cryptographers called the Cypherpunks.

- It really started with the Cypherpunks,

and you can go read the Cypherpunk Manifesto.

And this was an email list back in like 1992.

A lot of people that you might've heard of

were on that list, including people like Julian Assange.

Adam Back,

Zuko Wilcox,

mark, and Jason.

These are all part of that original Cypherpunk mailing list.

And one of the things that came out of it

is the Cypherpunk Manifesto.

And it was sort of like a clarification of the values

that this group held and among them were privacy.

The ability to transact with each other

and in the Cypherpunk Manifesto paper

is this clear call for some sort of electronic money.

- They recognize that cryptography could be used

to create a money builds on the internet

that could be peer-to-peer.

It could be more private and it could be less prone

to capture by a small number of people.

And the attempts had been made many times over the decades,

but there was one problem that persisted.

- They all had the same flag.

They all were centralized.

There wasn't a single point of failure.

There was a place that somebody can go and regulate.

There was a way in which the government could

interfere with it just by going to one organization doing.

- All of those attempts had failed

because they did not solve computational problem.

A computer science problem called

the Byzantine general's problem.

And essentially, this is a problem of collaboration

or a way to achieve consensus across a network

without a central points of failure.

And this problem was solved by Satoshi

in Bitcoin using a couple of inventions

that were created by Adam Back

and others called proof of work.

And then combined with a peer to peer networking system

that was created,

made most popular by let's say BitTorrents and Bram Cohen.

- And it really wasn't until 2008,

when Satoshi Nakamoto dropped the Bitcoin white paper

to the same email list and said, Hey, you know what?

Here's a system that I think

like corrects the flaw of all these other things.

The genesis of it really comes on October 31st, 2008

on a cryptography website where Satoshi Nakamoto

published a white paper describing the Bitcoin core protocol

and the idea behind it.

It then evolved and sort of became an open source project.

And it is what we have today.

- It was created by someone named Satoshi Nakamoto.

Now nobody knows who's the Satoshi Nakamoto really is

in real life.

That was a pseudo name he used as his name.

- He's synonymous, we don't really know,

or anonymous actually, we don't actually know who he is.

All we have is the proof of his work.

He built Bitcoin on the back of a lot of other projects,

which were kind of similar,

which wanted to be what Bitcoin eventually became.

But they weren't decentralized enough,

which ended up being the key

and one of the problems he was able to solve.

- But we don't really know.

The more important thing there is that

it doesn't really matter who Satoshi is.

The thing is the system already exists.

It is decentralized and the person of Satoshi,

wow, we should be grateful for the contribution.

Doesn't have any particular influence over everything.

The ethic of Bitcoin and the culture of Bitcoin has evolved

to the point where it really does put a very strong emphasis

on the decentralization and keeping the rules as they are.

Satoshi is not gonna change that.

- But it was created by him.

Has gone out into the wild world of the internet.

And to this day is still going and growing,

and gaining more use and more value every year.

Now, Satoshi Nakamoto owns the first million Bitcoin

of the 21 million Bitcoin that's been created.

- But if we assume for a second

that the million coins belongs to Satoshi do one day move.

They are spent in terms of the Bitcoin transactions.

And that just means there's more coins on the market,

which will have a momentary decline in the price.

But the notion that that presents an existential threat

that somehow this will undermine the network.

It's just not the case.

When you look at the world and you look at billions

of people on the planet, and then you think about,

okay, active circulation of Bitcoin by some estimates,

there's two to three million on all the exchanges.

So I think I read a statistic

it's about 15 million millionaires in the world.

So if half of those millionaire woke up tomorrow

and said, I wanna buy a Bitcoin.

It's not possible. It's not a Bitcoin in circulation.

The price would, it wouldn't just be high.

It'd be like insurmountable.

You'd have to pay know over a million,

two million, three million, whatever it is of Bitcoin

because no one would part with them

if the demand were that high.

So even his million coins, if they entered the market,

I bet they'd be gobbled up in a year or so minimum.

- I don't think it's likely.

I think they haven't been sold in 12 years.

Satoshi has, I don't know,

a 100 billion dollars, 30 billion dollar,

something like that worth of Bitcoin.

And obviously the temptation

to sell some of that would be great.

I think the keys to those coins have been burned,

meaning they're gone forever.

They've been intentionally destroyed.

And Satoshi understands the importance

of not moving those coins.

And probably if it's still alive

has other coins that were there masked

through the intervening years as mining became more popular

and more de-centralized could have easily been continuing

to mine at that point.

So if Satoshi is around,

I'm sure he, she, they have plenty of Bitcoin.

- I think there's degrees of centralization,

and degrees of decentralization.

So you have to look at it as a spectrum.

There's no such thing where you're just gonna hit

this the decentralized, this is centralized.

- Having something be centralized means it's prone

to capture by a small number of people.

A government could come in and say,

shut down those servers, AWS.

We're making a law or a policy that's instituted

by the SEC or something like that.

Shut down those servers and or we're gonna find you

or punish you in some way or another.

- By a centralized system you typically have servers.

Let's just say Google.

And Google is a good example, 'cause it's a big company

and it has lots of computers.

So in some ways it physically seems to centralize.

They have computers all around the world but they own.

But it has a centralized governance.

So the CEO of Google or the chief engineer,

whoever, I don't know how their hierarchy works.

But the big shots at Google have the authority

and the ability to completely control any of those computers

and turn them off or a government can order them to do that.

- Centralize is what you have now

with the U.S banking system, or the world banking system

I guess, as far as that goes.

You have banks that control your money.

You put them in there, they control them.

They send them out for you.

If they don't wanna give you your money,

you can't get it back.

I mean, basically that's hard to believe.

But it happens in other countries.

In Greece, for instance, they took a part

of everybody's money.

Just took it out of the bank accounts

because they needed more money,

they were going the country was going bankrupt.

They just took it out of everybody's wallet.

Everybody's bank account.

- With Bitcoin there is no center.

There is no central party.

- Ideally everybody around the world,

individual people are running the software.

There is no central server.

Nobody is in charge and through all of the individuals

that are running the software, that becomes a network.

And without somehow stopping every single one of them,

you cannot stop it.

- There's no main office. There's no president of Bitcoin.

There's no boss.

There's nowhere for the government to go and say,

give us all those Bitcoins, there just isn't.

- They make it the Bitcoin network where almost anybody

with relative only minimal computing power

can run a full node, which is a full copy of the blockchain.

They can validate all their transactions.

They can actually verify

that the Bitcoin they hold is there's.

- Right now we have about 12,000 publicly visible nodes

that are all verifying the network independently

all over the world.

And there's guesses that there's

about a 100,000 nodes in total.

The rest of those being not visible to the network.

Either operating on tor

or they're not broadcasting their IP to the network.

And so there's maybe a 100,000 Bitcoin nodes out there

verifying the network.

And again, those nodes,

those computers that are verifying the transactions

on the network can be run on very cheap hardware

with low bandwidth.

And that's important to kind of push Bitcoin far up

that de-centralization spectrum compared to everything else.

- Bitcoin is the only coin in my view that matters

mostly because of the fact of how it came about.

There was no pre-mine, it was an open source project.

Anybody could have joined the network.

Anybody could have gone up and submitted an improvement

to the protocol.

And the way it came about it had sort

of this immaculate conception where to recreate

that you'd have to recreate the unique conditions

of that moment.

And I don't think it's really possible.

- Like many networks on computer networks

that are born on the internet,

social networks, for instance, they gain a certain momentum,

a certain share of the network.

And one of the main pillars of Bitcoin maximalism

is that network effects

or network protocols tend toward one.

And meaning, you have TCP IP,

which runs the internet essentially.

And then you have other protocols built on top of it.

Once there's sort of this mass consensus about,

or this mass usage, I guess of those protocols,

no one wants to go and use another protocol system.

'Cause this is where everyone is.

- The other reason, I think it's kind of a unique asset

that is not gonna be matched

is because unlike a piece of software,

a protocol typically has a very long lifespan.

If it is the dominant protocol as evidenced

by the network effect and people joining into the network,

it can continue to improve.

So if there's another coin that emerges,

or some other protocol that has characteristics or qualities

that you want in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin over its course in history

has actually implemented it into the protocol.

It's actually added things to it.

For example, things like segregated witness.

Recently this year, we're putting in a taproot.

These things actually improve the Bitcoin core protocol,

and think of it as like an upgrade.

- Because of the technology and the idea

that the Byzantine general problem has been solved.

It'll also mean that you're not gonna have double spins

of this digital assets,

because digital assets are easy to copy.

So if they're easy to copy and that means you need

to have a technology and an invention,

which is the proof of work that is in Bitcoin.

- It is the only coin

that has an incorruptible monetary supply.

And it's the only coin

that has the sufficient decentralization

to maintain that incorruptible money supply.

The every other alt coin is centralized essentially.

- And that's a big difference

is that you either have a controller or you don't.

You're either self sovereign over your money

or you don't.

(soft music)

- Our current monetary system is assessed pool of theft,

cronyism and corruption.

And I talk about this a lot in my book,

"Thank God for Bitcoin."

But basically it's a system that steals from everybody.

And this is a part of how central banking works.

Essentially, it was originally created like back

in the 1600s back in England,

the whole central bank, monetary system as a way

for the government to spend money if it didn't have.

- Bitcoin is better than our current monetary system,

because Bitcoin, unlike the U.S dollar can't be increased,

you can't make any more Bitcoin than 21 million.

Now with the U.S dollar, I don't think there's anyone

on this planet who doesn't realize we're printing

that as fast as we can.

And actually it's not even being printed.

They're just adding numbers to a computer.

- Bitcoin is better than our current monetary system

because it's incorruptible.

The monetary supply cannot be changed.

And because that is the case, we can rely as economic actors

on a consistent monetary supply essentially forever.

So we can make economic decisions with confidence

that the value of Bitcoin will either be roughly the same

or even more than it is right now.

- Our economy as I mentioned,

is built on driving compensation.

So what we see happening right now in our economic system

is that the federal reserve

and other central banks across the world,

they have to print,

they have to print to keep consumption levels high.

And if you wanna look at an example of this,

look at what happened after the COVID crash,

you saw unprecedented money printing.

The wheels just came off in terms of 20% of the circulation

of the U.S dollars were reprinted last year.

That's a statistics that's regularly cited.

And it shows that the only way they can keep the ship afloat

is nonstop money printing.

And they're facing these strong headwinds of deflation.

So you have sort of a new paradigm

where technology is making things cheaper,

and faster and more, more productive,

but you've got money printing that sort of

is trying to keep the old paradigm afloat.

- You know with Bitcoin you know what the rules are.

And that's what it comes down to.

You know the game that you're playing.

In the current system, it could change it before years.

Who knows what the rules will be,

who knows your savings will be worth anything.

Why should I work my ass off to put money into a system

that not only will they have a control over

and, debatably almost probably no influence over.

But it doesn't really have my interests in mind anyway.

- Some of the poorest and most vulnerable people

in the world are being stolen

from every time the money expand.

And it is expanding very quickly.

In the U.S the M2 money supply,

which is one measure of all the money that exists.

At the beginning of the coronavirus crisis in March

or February of 2020, it was somewhere around 15.5 trillion.

And about 18 months later it's about 20 trillion.

So it's expanded by 30%.

And historically it's gone up by about 7%.

So we have statistics going way back to 1959.

It was around 289 billion back in 1959.

It's about 20 trillion now.

If you annualize that, that ends up being about 7%.

So it's expanded in war time, peace time, crisis,

or whatever at about 7% all through its life.

So that that's how much you have to outrun.

And that's how much value is being stolen

from each dollar holder every year about 7%.

And much more so in say the last 18 months.

It's a crazy kind of like a statistic

that a lot of people don't really get,

or understand or have any clue about.

But really all of this money is being stolen

from the most poorest and most vulnerable people

in the world on a continuous basis.

- And rather than try to keep the old paradigm afloat

and fight against these headwinds of technology.

In my view, the stronger approach

is to adopt a deflationary currency, deflationary money,

which is what Bitcoin is

that embraces the technological growth

and technological deflationary forces.

I think in that economic system,

you'd see productivity rewarded,

you'd see a positive social behavior rewarded.

You'd encourage saving rather than reckless spending.

Right now as most consumers know,

they are attempted nonstop with every gimmick in the world

to get them to part ways and spend their money.

And in many ways it's actually smart to spend your money,

because if you have Fiat dollars,

if you have cash, it is eroding day by day,

it's becoming worth less.

And anybody who's going to the grocery store now

knows buy groceries one month, the next gross next month,

the groceries are actually worth more expensive.

So it's encouraging you to part ways with your dollars.

It's encouraging you to spend.

It's also encouraging you

to take out a tremendous amount of debt.

- And Bitcoin skips all of that.

Bitcoin itself allows you,

it's a cliche that we hear out there, be your own bank.

But it's actually has meaningful.

It's it's really, it really is what it says.

You are your own bank, you're all your own banking system.

You are your own visa and your own MasterCard.

You are the entire thing.

And nobody can get between you

and the other guy who you want to do business with

when you're using Bitcoin.

- So as economic actors, we can be confidence

in making decisions about businesses

and purchases, et cetera, economic decisions

that the supply will be consistent over time.

So we can project into the future

if we're building a business and thinking 20 years ahead,

or building some large structure,

a cathedral, for instance.

That would take 40, 50 years to build.

We can be confident that one Bitcoin

will equal one Bitcoin 40 or 50 years from now.

Which allows us to make these longterm decisions.

That's why Bitcoin has always talk about long-term thinking,

and that fundamental change in being able to rely

on the monetary supply and be able to think long-term

versus thinking quarter to quarter,

or trying to get rid of my dollars now,

because I know they're going to be worth less

in a couple of years and making these short-term decisions.

You build a fundamentally stronger,

maybe even some argue, morally more sound economy

and society.

- I think that in the long run,

we will have a better society

that has more prosocial behavior if you fix the money.

There's the old adage money is the root of all evil.

And if you fix the money, you fix everything.

- Bitcoin fixes the money, and our money is broken.

And that means a lot.

It has such down like massive downstream ramification.

- So when you get into Bitcoin, it'll fix your finances.

Because the thing is,

is that when you start to accumulate Bitcoin

and understand it for what it is,

you'll probably not spend as much money on frivolous things.

Things that don't really add value.

- In the Bitcoin community you'll often see

people talk about, there's a meme, Bitcoin fixes this.

And the idea is that Bitcoin fixes everything right.

I hesitate to drop, such like hyperbole.

Because you know our absolutes.

But I do agree that there are massive downstream effects

for society and for individuals,

and therefore for the world as a whole,

for humanity as a whole, if we can fix the money,

I think it's a basic pillar of civilization.

It's been that way from the beginning.

It's solve the problem barter, which is I've gotta have

something you want at the same time.

You have something I want in order for that to work.

So money is what really binds us all together

in an economic sense, and in a social sense really too.

- And so that's how it begins to fix things,

it begins to fix your mentality.

It also puts you into a position of low time preference,

which means it creates more patients in you

because you're willing to wait.

You're not willing to have to get it right now.

It actually increases your delayed gratification.

Some of these virtues that we have in the world,

that people will look up to like patients,

and those kinds of things.

It's like Bitcoin actually fixes that

when you finally understand.

Any parent can tell you what's better for our kids character

is making them save and then get their toy later

instead of get their toy now,

and then you have to pay me back like

that doesn't improve character at all.

In fact, that usually, and genders, bitterness,

and resentment, which obviously anyone

with a lot of student loans

for useless degree knows very, very well.

It fixes society because ultimately

when you do have more saving,

and low time preference behavior,

what you get our people that are creating,

goods and services so that they can save

or so that they can make more money and so on.

And that builds up civilization.

Consuming things now that breaks down civilization.

- I like the idea that this is kind of the birth

of a new asset class, the birth of the foundation

of the new economy, we're not there yet.

But you have to have the mindset of someone

in the 90s thinking what the internet would be in 2021.

I'm in 2021, I'm thinking of what the global economy

will look like in 2035.

And I think Bitcoin is at its core.

- I think that's ultimately what Bitcoin fixes.

It gets us back on the right track.

I think that it depends on the approach taken

by policymakers.

I think there's an amazing potential for Bitcoin

to be integrated fully into the economy,

and monetary system in a very peaceful and positive way.

The question is, is there going to be people

with vest interests who don't want to make that transition,

who will fight every step of the way,

not in a violent way, but just through policies

that make it more difficult to transact in Bitcoin,

and difficult to store Bitcoin and make it more cumbersome?

I personally don't think that's gonna happen.

My view is that I think people will turn

to Bitcoin organically as the population understands

the problems with Fiat money

that we're experiencing in the world.

And I think that ultimately Bitcoin has the potential

to remake our monetary system for the better.

- I almost feel like the U.S dollar

is doomed whether Bitcoin is around or not.

I don't think Bitcoin will kill the U.S dollar.

I think the U.S dollar is killing itself.

Fine whether Bitcoin is here or not.

(soft music)

Bitcoin is both a peer to peer currency,

and it's a store of value.

The reason that we're not seeing it used as much

as a currency right now, though,

is because of the fact is how fast it's rising in value.

- The vast majority, I think of individuals using Bitcoin

and part of the Bitcoin network are using it

as a store of value.

Early days, there were many people

that were using it much more often

for peer-to-peer transactions.

And I think we returned to that after awhile.

But in my view, in the history of an asset like this

Bitcoin needs to first establish itself as a very reliable,

very trusted store of value with wide adoption.

- So the idea is, is that price

and value are two different things.

I think people don't get it all the time.

But I truthfully believe they don't.

When I say it, they don't get it, but they get it

in practice.

Because if they go to the store,

they easily will say, this is too expensive.

Or man, that's cheap. Let me buy more.

Which basically lets you know

that if you can use the word expensive or cheap,

that means the value of whatever it is you're purchasing

is not equivalent to the actual price.

And there are some times when the value

is exactly equal to the price and that's where you buy it.

- I have a friend who bought a pair of sunglasses.

Oh eight years ago.

Now those sunglasses were worth $60,000

in Bitcoin if you take the amount of Bitcoin he paid

for those sunglasses.

So do you wanna spend a 100 dollars of Bitcoin today

when in 10 years it could be worth a $100,000,

or do you wanna spend your Fiat money,

which 10 years from now will be worth half.

So it is both.

It's just, people do not wanna spend their Bitcoin right now

as a currency.

- With Bitcoin it's much easier

and it's a much more superior store of value asset.

And it has a major advantage over other players

in the market.

So it's for that reason that I think a lot of people use it

as a store of value

because there really aren't that many alternatives.

- Bitcoin is a great store of value

because there are 21 million.

That's all they'll ever be is 21 million.

As I said earlier, there's 21 million Bitcoin.

Actually with gold, most people use gold for a store value,

but how much gold is there? Nobody knows.

Nobody has an idea how much gold is there?

How much gold is there left in the world?

Nobody knows.

I mean, we haven't even started mining the bottom

of the ocean yet.

And 75% of this planet is water.

Now they're saying asteroids will be coming

by that have gold in them.

So Bitcoin is a better store of value than gold

because we know how many there'll be now

in a 1,000 years from now, 21 million.

- You also wanna see in a store of value,

the ability I think to make it divisible.

Every Bitcoin is divisible to the millionth.

And you think of it like,

okay, gold, there's only a finite amount of gold

in the world.

We don't know how much, but there is a finite amount.

Bitcoin we know there is gonna be only 21 million

that's in the code.

But if you have a gold bar in my hand,

obviously that's a bare asset, I have the gold bar.

But if I want to chip off a little bit of the gold,

that becomes very cumbersome having to do that,

have to like divide it and make sure

you're only segmenting a certain amount.

With the Bitcoin I can give you a 0.000001 Satoshi exactly.

Finite amount I could send to you.

Can't really do that for that's just too clunky.

I also think the fact that it's unconfiscatable

is makes it the apex predator as Michael Saylor would say

of store value.

And what I mean by that is all assets in existence.

Whether it's gold, whether it's real estate,

whether it's stocks, bonds,

collectibles, they can be confiscated.

You can walk into somebody's house and they have gold buried

in their basement, I can go take it.

If you secure your Bitcoin

and you hold your own private keys,

which is how the networks are designed to be used.

No one can take your Bitcoin.

It's not possible for them to confiscate your Bitcoin.

They can take your person.

They could actually put you in jail,

but they of course can not force you

to transfer over the Bitcoin.

As long as you've safeguarded your private key,

it is unconfiscatable, and that's really a game changer.

That's different from any asset that we've seen

in human history.

There's really been nothing like it.

- Bitcoin is currently already being scaled out

for use around the world as a currency.

As I said, the problem is not a lot of people want

to spend their Bitcoin right now.

I think it's gonna take a long time to do that.

And when I say a long time,

I mean half a decade before it gets there.

I think you need to get people comfortable

with how the network operates.

I think you need to establish it as a store of value first.

A recognized store of value.

And you think the price needs to get much higher.

You need to be well north

of a $10 trillion market right now.

We're still not at a trillion.

Once it gets up to those levels,

I think there's gonna be enough support in the network

and enough development by companies and entrepreneurs

that are trying to fund development on layer two

and layer three solutions for it to scale.

- So the big one that everyone knows about

is lightning network and that's what's used in El Dante

and El Salvador.

You can use lightning to go buy fruit from a fruit stand guy

or get surfing lessons, or something like that.

There's all sorts of ways in which that can work.

But that's not the only layer to that needs to exist.

There are perfectly fine,

like second layers that can be run by companies.

It will be centralized obviously.

There motivation for a lot

of these companies to provide that.

- The only analogy I can think of is like the internet.

In 1995, the internet existed, there were chat rooms.

People would go online and they'd be able

to send emails to one another.

Basic functions of the internet.

But in 1995, there was no way you could stream

a live video every night.

There's no way you could watch Netflix

on the internet every single night

and have high definition video.

Bitcoin is kind of how I see like that.

Now we have an early phase

where there's early adopters, innovators,

people in the space that are trying

to drive adoption, generally getting people

to buy into the network.

And once you get sort of a peak threshold

where you sort of cross a chasm into broader adoption,

then you're gonna have a lot more institutional money,

a lot more developers, a lot more brain power on the network

that can help at scale.

(soft music)

- Bitcoin mining is pretty simple.

It's really just using computers

to confirm transactions on the blockchain.

- And it's important to point out

that this is done according to a very strict set of rules

that has been laid out since the very beginning.

This doesn't change. And nobody's in charge of this process.

- And blocks are just come around every about 10 minutes,

they're added to the chain.

So we have a thing called the blockchain.

And it basically earns the right to create

that block of transactions.

So it's a competition between all of these computers

that are running, basically solving a hashing algorithm.

If they happen on the magic number

that solves this hashing algorithm,

first they win the right to add the block.

- Bitcoin miners are essentially securing the chain.

Nodes are the real backbone of the network.

And I think of miners is kind of slaves to the nodes.

The nodes are distributing transactions,

validating transactions,

and miners are supporting that validation.

- Now, why would they be incentivized to do this?

They get a block reward,

and this is how new Bitcoin is added to into the system.

And every four years,

the number of Bitcoin that the miners win

in each block is cut in half.

And so we're at about 18 and a half million Bitcoin

that's been issued so far.

And 6.25 Bitcoin per block happening now

that cuts in half every four years moving on

into the future when in about 2140,

the last little bit of Bitcoin

will be released into the system.

- Until it's zero.

At that point, there'll be exactly

or actually not actually exactly it's tiny bit less

than 21 million Bitcoin ever made.

It can never make more than that

because this amount is known.

We are all have agreed on these rules.

And I say, all of us collectively, the entire network,

these are the rules of the network that nobody can change.

They're only ever be 21 million.

Once all the coins have been mined,

there are a lot of kind of hypothetical.

None of us can read the future, of course,

but whatever's gonna happen isn't actually gonna happen

when all the coins are mined, probably.

We're gonna get to a point in the next 30 years.

So maybe 40 years where pretty much all the coins are mined.

What we were talking.

You'll only be receiving a tiny fraction

of a Bitcoin every 10 minutes.

So you might as well say that all the coins

are mined at that point, but maybe not.

I mean, maybe the Bitcoin are so valuable by that point,

millions of dollars each that that tiny portion

becomes a very meaningful amount even then.

- When all the coins are theoretically mined,

I think the network is gonna look a little bit different.

I think it's gonna have the same core elements.

I think it's gonna have the same supply,

but I do think that the vast majority

of transactions are gonna be driven

by layer two, three maybe even four solutions.

- Transactions will be batched into single transactions.

That'll happen on the blockchain.

And second and third layer networks will have

100s, 1,000s, millions, maybe of transactions

that happen back and forth on this second network.

And when they want to settle companies,

bigger companies or banks or something like that,

nations were ready to settle all of these transactions,

both run that on the blockchain

and it'll be finally settled.

So it's akin to the way that the economy works now.

The payments are a separate layer.

Then the settlement final settlement.

Interbank settlement can take a very long time

in the current system and it's extremely expensive.

So as Bitcoins usage grows,

it'll still be way more efficient

to have final settlements and democratized for that matter

because anyone can still do it,

even though it might be expensive.

Then this current system is at all far more efficient.

So I'm not worried. I want the fees to go up.

We want fee market to develop

so that we can transition safely away

from this blocked subsidy or block reward

that miners are getting this

essentially free Bitcoin awarded to them

to issue into the network.

And I have every competence in the world

that that will happen and we're seeing it happen.

And it's not gonna be a problem.

Bitcoin security will be fine

on a fee-based incentive model.

- Bitcoin does take a decent amount of energy.

No one can deny that.

The question I think is,

is it an appropriate level of energy?

And I think to understand Bitcoin's role

in the energy space, what you need to do

is you need to understand energy

and how energy works generally.

- So Bitcoin mining uses electricity,

and there is a narrative out there

that it uses way too much electricity.

It's gonna boil the oceans.

There was a Newsweek headline several years ago

that said by 2020 Bitcoin network

will use all the electricity in the world

because of the trajectory that it's on.

This is nonsense.

- You've gotta realize miners who are mining Bitcoin

first of all, they wanna make as much as they can.

They're using as inexpensive of energy as they can,

which means they're using renewables,

water, solar, whatever they can get.

They're trying to get the best price

to make the biggest profit they can.

- We have miners who voluntarily publish their energy usage.

And the mining network is mining

the miners are in this extremely fierce competition

for one thing.

Because there's two inputs into their business.

One is your capital, your cost for infrastructure

and for the computers, et cetera.

The other one is cost for the energy.

And the cost for the computers.

And the infrastructure are relatively the same.

There's not a lot to be gained over your competitors

in in that market right in that way.

Where you gain and where you profit

is finding the lowest cost energy.

So that means moving out to the edges of the energy grid,

finding stranded energy that's otherwise not being used

because there's too much being produced.

Maybe at peak times you build

your energy grid infrastructure for peak usage.

In the summer, on the hottest day in Texas,

you've got AC for everybody, for instance.

Same thing in a winter where you need heating.

And so you overbuild that infrastructure,

and there's a lot of wasted and stranded energy on the grid.

- This is where the real part

of it not being expensive comes in.

If we switch over this economy someday

to more of a Bitcoin cryptocurrency economy.

Think of the money that saved by banks, hauling around money

and big armored cars.

All the people that have to drive to work at the bank.

All the people who work at the bank and build a building

and electricity used in the bank.

More energy by far is used in the banking system

than will ever be used in the Bitcoin system.

So every time Bitcoin makes a headway

into the banking world,

less electricity has been used by the banking world,

and Bitcoin is not replacing electricity,

or energy at the rate it was being used

by the banking system.

- The biggest reason really,

the biggest reason why anybody has ever complained

about Bitcoins, energy use,

it's just because they don't value it.

They value their closed rights

they don't complain about it.

They don't understand the value Bitcoin so they do it

wouldn't matter if you got Bitcoin down to $10,000

a year of energy cost,

it's gonna be people that say it's $10,000

you're wasting year on Bitcoin mine,

because they just don't understand the value Bitcoin.

- China just banned cryptocurrency.

This may be the third time they've done it

since it was created.

And mining machines started moving out of town

and oh, tons of fear, uncertainty, and doubt was created

by the people who want you to sell on your Bitcoin.

But until they banned Bitcoin,

the fear, uncertainty and doubt,

or the FUD that was going out was

that Bitcoin control too much of the mining power.

And it was bad for the world

because Bitcoin was being controlled by China.

So now other Bitcoin miners move out of China

and is bad still, but actually it's fantastic.

It's fantastic in two ways.

Number one, it shows that the country banned Bitcoin

and within weeks miners were moving all their Bitcoin miners

to other countries.

That's how portable it is

showing no one country can shut down bitcoin.

Bitcoin is gonna continue.

So how quickly it was shut down,

but it moved to other countries.

The great thing number two is

many of those mining companies moved their mining machines

to the United.

- And Bitcoin, obviously doesn't care about borders

and moves very swiftly internationally

with a few clicks of a button.

So I think the Chinese government doesn't like that.

Chinese government doesn't like what they can't control.

So attacking mining was perhaps a way

to try to keep capital in China,

which they're very focused on.

(soft music)

The thing about Bitcoin is that

Bitcoin solved the double spend problem.

And the way I think about that is Bitcoin is not copyable.

Every Bitcoin is unique, one of a kind.

It'd be like, if you had a rare,

unique babe Ruth baseball card,

or 21 million babe Ruth baseball cards that ever existed.

You wouldn't say that that because it's printed on paper

is not valuable, it has value.

Everybody would say, oh, I'll pay you 1,000s of dollars.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars for that rare card.

Bitcoin is kind of the same.

It's a digital good that is unique.

One of a kind backed by code backed

by the computing network.

- People say the Bitcoin's backed by nothing.

And usually it's people my age,

they have a real hard time understanding E-currency

or Bitcoin.

But Bitcoin is backed by something,

it's backed by the blockchains,

is backed by the largest computer network on the planet.

Unlike our money now,

which has been taken off the gold standard back

in the early '70s.

- It is perfect money. It is pure monetary value.

It has no intrinsic value because it doesn't need it.

People found Bitcoin interesting as a collectible

because it was pure money.

So maybe it's intrinsic value then

if you wanna put it that way, I guess,

is that it's pure money.

I mean, it's a 100% intrinsically money.

- I mean, there are people to this day still believe

that you can take a dollar bill,

go to the federal reserve and redeem it for gold.

That's not the case.

Like the dollar is literally backed by nothing

but the full faith and credit,

which is basically saying you put your faith

in the United States government because of its military

and economic might that it can settle its debts.

That's really what the dollar is.

- All value is subjective.

And there is no intrinsic value to anything.

There is only subjective value

that human beings subscribed to it.

And there is definitely value to Bitcoin

because people find it useful,

especially for transferring value all over the place,

or as something to appear modern,

or more hip or something like that.

There's all sorts of ways

in which you can ascribe subjective value

to something like Bitcoin.

And it doesn't even have to be monetary.

It could be, Hey, like I just think this is kind of cool.

- The Bitcoin has value because the network primarily

that's driving adoption and that is driving people entering

into it believe it has value.

And that subjective belief combined

with all the objective factors that we've talked

about the finite amount of them,

the network, the decentralization.

That has value

that those characteristics I think are critical.

I think people say Bitcoin is for criminals again,

because that's a popular narrative

that has been driven purposefully

by those who don't wanna see Bitcoin succeed.

There's no doubt that some people

on the Bitcoin network use it for illicit purposes.

There's also no doubt that the vast majority

of listed activity in the world is funded using the dollar.

- Criminals, definitely do use Bitcoin.

Ransomware, dark net, markets and so on.

But criminals also use cash.

Like they use whatever.

The big thing is that everyone

is soul sovereign over their own coins.

You can't prevent market transactions

from happening no matter what the monetary regime is.

- But I think overall I'm balanced.

The vast majority of vast majority of the network

is not doing anything besides trying

to store value, transacting Bitcoin in lawful ways.

And I think that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense

to use Bitcoin for elicit purposes

because of the fact that it is an open ledger.

It's not anonymous. It's actually very traceable.

You could see where every single Bitcoin moves.

And if you were a criminal and you are trying

to commit a crime,

why would you use Bitcoin to commit the crime

when you could use the dollar?

And it is far more anonymous

than the Bitcoin open source ledger.

- So that whole foot about criminals

is crazy because the majority of transactions

that happened in his world still happen with U.S dollars.

They'll happen with the Euro.

(upbeat music)

- I don't think the U.S government will ever ban Bitcoin

because I don't think the U.S government can ban Bitcoin.

First of all, you've gotta realize Bitcoin

is a worldwide phenomenon.

- That's about from last study, I saw 42 million people,

I think in the United States have Bitcoin.

So as a politician, why would you go against

that many of constituents?

- Bitcoin as it's constituted is merely computer code.

It's merely communication being sent over the internet.

If there's no criminal activity or nefarious activity,

I don't think a ban would be constitutional.

I think it would be protected by the freedom of speech.

- A government cannot stop Bitcoin completely.

It cannot kill the network.

It's beyond that at this point.

It's too big. It's too broad.

And it would take an a coordinated efforts of

a 100 plus countries or whatever around the world

to fight the Bitcoin networks simultaneously,

which is never gonna happen.

- In terms of people, we got India

and China who both have banned Bitcoin,

and nothing happened.

People still use Bitcoin in China.

People still use Bitcoin in India.

They also tried to stop it in Nigeria.

Now they've turned around and now they're embracing it

because their people use it.

And they're talking about all the wonderful things

that it's enabling the youth to do through their own merits,

through their own efforts.

Now that they have this tool of freedom.

This real money, they no longer tied down

by whatever arbitrary restrictions and bureaucracy

that the government wants for their system.

- Eventually I believe that the demand to use it,

that's this consensus will form around Bitcoin

is the best money globally.

And so people start using in such a broad sense

that every country in the world will be like

okay, we have to use Bitcoin

or we're gonna be completely behind.

- You have actually seen the government

in the United States, at least embrace Bitcoin.

Recently there was this issue over the infrastructure bill

and the infrastructure bill was imposing

new reporting requirements on brokers of digital assets.

And what we saw, which I think surprised many

is we saw at least five different senators,

even more potentially that came forward

and said, we need to fix this

to protect the innovation that's being found in Bitcoin,

and the larger crypto space.

We think that this is the future.

We think this creates jobs and we wanna change the bill

so that language doesn't impose harsh restrictions

and potentially have a chilling effect on this technology.

That's the senators like people in charge of our government,

some of our elected representatives,

they fought to help Bitcoin.

That completely runs counter to the narrative

that the government is out to ban Bitcoin.

(upbeat music)

- Risk and reward are two sides of the same coin.

If you want reward, you need to take some risk.

If you want reward without risk,

which is what central banks try to do all the time

by de-risking assets.

- There's so much volatility because it's a brand new asset

that the world is coming in and out of right coming into.

But I think it's going to slow down as we get closer

to the hyper big colonization.

Because when you're not trading for dollars anymore,

you can't really be volatile.

- I don't think it stops anytime soon.

That's the short answer.

Over time, once Bitcoin becomes the dominant store of value

and the dominant money in the world,

I think then the volatility may tamper down.

But volatility is healthy.

Suppressing volatility is not.

- Bitcoin is volatile.

And a lot of people are concerned with the volatility,

but that's the reason a lot of people will buy Bitcoin

because it's volatile.

You wouldn't be buying Bitcoin

or you wouldn't see the amount of people buying Bitcoin

if it didn't rise, like it's rising.

And it can't rise without volatility.

If it just sat still and never moved,

well, people wouldn't be going

I gotta get some Bitcoin is going crazy.

That'd be maybe putting it in gold or something else.

- One of the frequent things that I'll hear

from somebody is.

Well, you know, Bitcoin, it could crash 50% tomorrow

or in sure and that's absolutely true.

If Bitcoin were to go down 50% tomorrow,

none of us would think, wow, this is crazy.

Why would Bitcoin do this?

Those of us who've been around a while anyway,

we kind of know that's what it does sometimes.

But that said, you look at the trend it's clear.

It's very clear.

Bitcoin certainly is volatile, but it's that it goes up,

it's volatile to the upside.

- If you want larger returns,

then you're gonna have to deal with more volatility.

You don't get a steadily climbing asset

and like such an asset just doesn't exist.

Like that's what people would like,

because that means that would mean

that they're getting richer without taking any of the risks.

But that's part of the whole thing

is you need that volatility

in order to get that return basically.

- Nobody could say that Bitcoin hasn't performed well.

In fact, I think by most measurements,

it's the best performing asset there is

in the time that it's been that's existed.

- Once Bitcoin gets to a certain price point

as to whether that price point is $500,000 per Bitcoin

or a million dollars per Bitcoin, I don't know.

But once it gets to a certain price point,

the amount of movement that it'll have, like it does now

will cease to happen as often.

There'll be movement, but not like there is now.

- Bitcoin's not gonna get to 500,000,

or million dollars a coin without being extremely volatile.

That's just the way it is.

(upbeat music)

- So I think in 10 years,

and Bitcoin will be used all around the world.

I think it will have at least a couple of billion users.

I think it will mimic the adoption of the internet itself.

It is a network that has network effects built on top

of technology that has network effects.

- I expect a lot more people to own Bitcoin

and I expect a lot more sort of like battles

that Bitcoin will have gone through against governments,

or hedge funds.

- Truthfully believe there are certain moments in history

that television,

when you start learning and telephone,

like those types of moments, the internet.

Not even just the internet, but the worldwide web browsers.

Like when you start looking

at these transformative technologies,

like as they continue to give us more and more democracy.

Like the internet democratized information.

The telephone democratized communication.

When you start seeing these things

that start to change the way we live and empower us.

I think more people will learn about it,

and they will find out about it.

And they will begin to understand

like this is freedom for me.

And when they get to that point, what's gonna happen?

They're gonna take their value out of other things

that don't give them freedom,

and they're gonna trade them for the hardest sound or money.

- The longterm case for Bitcoin is really simple.

There's only 21 million or a fixed supply,

and increasing demand.

And the only release valve fares price.

So I expect price to go up as a result.

- Where do I see Bitcoin in 10 years?

I see Bitcoin is more established,

more people using it

than maybe 10% of the world's population.

- I think in 10 years,

we enter into the equivalent of the mid 2000s

when it comes to internet adoption.

The advent of smartphones, there's some data that shows

that the users currently on the Bitcoin network

is sort of mid 1990s, late 1990s levels.

And I think we're right at the tipping point

where we have broad-based massive adoption

in the next five years.

I think in 10 years,

you're gonna see every major financial institution

that takes take Bitcoin.

- But Bitcoin in 10 years in my opinion,

is gonna be the strongest commodity ever created

on the planet.

- In 10 years or so, we'll be well on our way toward

that path.

And I think 20, 30 years from now,

I think Bitcoin will be the dominant global money.

(soft music)