We're sunsetting PodQuest on 2025-07-28. Thank you for your support!
Export Podcast Subscriptions
cover of episode Why Your Money Isn’t Yours (& How Bitcoin Can Fix That) | Robert Breedlove | Align Podcast #549

Why Your Money Isn’t Yours (& How Bitcoin Can Fix That) | Robert Breedlove | Align Podcast #549

2025/6/26
logo of podcast Align Podcast

Align Podcast

AI Deep Dive AI Chapters Transcript
People
R
Robert Breedlove
Topics
Robert Breedlove: 货币不仅仅是一种日常使用的工具,更是一种深刻的技术和认知工具,类似于语言,影响着我们的思考方式。法定货币体系存在根本性的缺陷,政府可以无限印钞,导致通货膨胀,实际上是从人民手中窃取财富。比特币作为一种去中心化的数字货币,具有固定的供应量,可以有效地对抗通货膨胀,保护个人财富。因此,我建议人们应该学习比特币和货币的本质,将一部分资产配置到比特币中,以实现财务自由和个人主权。

Deep Dive

Chapters
This chapter explores the fundamental question of what constitutes money, examining its multifaceted nature as a language of value, a medium of exchange, and its historical evolution. It also touches upon the implications of fiat currencies and their detachment from precious metals.
  • Money as a language of value and human action
  • Fiat currencies are not redeemable for precious metals
  • Historical context of currency's redeemability for gold and silver

Shownotes Transcript

Translations:
中文

What is money? That's a very deep question, actually. You would think, too, that it would be something... The answer would be simple because it's something we use every day. It's like the most ubiquitous and important technology that humans have. And it's also kind of a perceptual apparatus, sort of like language, like we think through language.

But we rarely stop to think about language, like about the nature of language, which is also a very complicated area. One of the definitions of money is that it's the language of value or the language of human action or the language of power. And so there is this language like quality to money. And it is something that we think through. So when we negotiate a deal, when we price our goods and services, when we...

We engage in any economic planning whatsoever. We're thinking through money as really a metaphor, right? It's a metaphor for the goods and services that it can be used to buy, right? But we can simplify instead of thinking about the world in terms of goods and services, right? Like how many chairs...

Tables and all these things can I afford you can just think of think of it in monetary terms So it's like thinking about the whole world of goods and services in one common language which is money like so you're using the metaphor of mathematics to describe the world of exchange and goods and services what is relevant for a common layperson like myself to know

to be able to live a better life and maybe live a wealthier life, to understand about things like the Federal Reserve

And you are a big fan of the book. What is it? The Jekyll Island? Creature from Jekyll Island. Creature from Jekyll Island. There it is right there, actually. How is that relevant for the common folk to understand kind of deep complex things like that, the gold standard and all of that stuff? Yeah, I mean, well, why is it important? If you're a user of dollars, right, if you have dollars...

when i say dollars it could really substitute any any fiat currency in here because and a fiat currency is basically all the government issued money worldwide today are fiat currencies meaning they're not redeemable for monetary metal

And so the genesis of a fiat currency is that at one point in time, the US dollar and fiat currencies were redeemable for metals. So it was an IOU or debt instrument to real money, which is gold and or silver, that people used to make gold more transactable because it's actually risky and difficult to carry around a bunch of physical gold.

uh easy to seize hard you know difficult to divide and so we needed something that was lighter and more transactable and that's what the the purpose of currency is but when currency is divorced for money as we have with fiat currency it's not redeemable for it any longer governments can basically print it ad infinitum they can print it without limit uh historically if it was redeemable for gold and people thought that the currency was being printed too much

They could call, they could cast a vote of no confidence by going to the bank and redeeming their paper for real money, for gold. And so that was like a check and or balance put on the government printing of money. But when you separate it from gold and make it non-redeemable, then the paper can just be printed forever. And the key thing to realize, I mean, look, it's a big rabbit hole. What is, you know, the sequence is thus, right? What is Bitcoin? Right.

Bitcoin is money. Okay, what is money? And when you get into that, there's a lot of different answers. There's a whole history about it. It touches a lot of different domains of human affairs. But you asked what the layperson really needs to know. I think this very short description has resonated with a lot of people because it kind of compresses a lot of the learnings you'll get down this what is money or what is Bitcoin rabbit hole into very few words. And that would be that inflation...

Is legal counterfeiting. And counterfeiting is criminal inflation. So...

You may remember like George Floyd was arrested for a counterfeit $20 bill, something like that, right? And so the police were, that's a crime, right? It's a crime if a civilian engages in the counterfeiting of US dollars. Yeah, he's going to destabilize the whole financial system. Well, yeah, so you're going to compromise the supply integrity of the money or the currency rather. So it's not going to, if someone can just print it, it's not going to hold value or purchasing power to be more technically accurate into the future, right? Yeah.

So there's a reason there are laws against counterfeiting. However, there is one legally authorized organization that can counterfeit as much currency as they want. And that is in the US is the Federal Reserve. And the Federal Reserve is the central bank of the United States. Every country in the world today has its own central bank. So these are currency counterfeiting cartels. They are used to extract purchasing power from people holding savings in a bank account.

without any political due process. You know, people don't vote for these guys. We have no participation or voice in how much money they will print, when they will print it. We don't know how much money is in circulation. We don't know how they decide. We don't know when they will decide. We don't know who benefits from the money printing. The shareholders of the Federal Reserve are undisclosed. It's not a government organization. It's not accountable to the public in any way, shape or form. It's a private institution.

takes a six percent annual dividend for just printing money it's doing something that's non-productive for society they get paid a dividend for stealing from you and there's debt on that money that's printed as well that's debt's infused born by borrowing yeah so here's how or interest on it rather here's how this is not dead it is debt basically currency isn't but it's dead with interest

Correct. So fiat currency. What does that mean and why is that relevant? This is the oxymoron of fiat currency. So as I said earlier, currency comes into existence as a debt instrument, right? So the dollar is an IOU for gold. So when someone, the custodian holds gold in reserve, they issue this paper derivative on top of it. Or like you go to the gold depositor, you put your real money on deposit with the bank, your gold, they give you bank notes, right? Or currency.

That currency is a debt instrument. It says the bank owes you this gold, right? So now I can go into the marketplace and I can trade this piece of paper with other people. And as long as that promise is maintained and the bank makes good on it, that they will, anyone that takes that paper to the bank will get gold. That's a gold-backed currency. That system works. But when we stop, we stop making currency redeemable for gold, you've got a fraudulent system. And so...

That's why governments can get away with the endless money printing is because people have no way to cast this vote of no confidence and say This is a scam

So, I'm sorry, what was the second part? The people that are running the Federal Reserve are like nameless, faithless. Oh, I'm sorry, it was the debt thing. Let me complete that. And then I want to get back to the Federal Reserve. Well, this is part and parcel to the Federal Reserve. So the currency is intended to be this debt instrument, right? Currency is redeemable for gold. However, when you remove what it's redeemable for, then it's just a debt instrument that can't be...

It can't be converted. You basically can't get what it lays claim to it's just a story It becomes a confidence game at that point. Yeah, and so Here's how the current system works The fiat currency system is the US government issues this shit coin called the US Treasury bonds Which is just the government borrowing money right now Who do they borrow money from they borrow money currency more specifically from this private institution called the Federal Reserve and

The U.S. government can make as many U.S. treasury bond shit coins as they want, right? It's a single node database and they can create as many as they want. They borrow dollars from the Federal Reserve that can also create as many U.S. dollar shit coins as they want. It's a single node database and it's not redeemable for gold. So U.S. government issues treasuries ad infinitum to borrow U.S. dollars ad infinitum.

Fed buys government debt gives them dollars and then the government gets to spend that money So this first of all, that's a that's a circle jerk right there, right? There's nothing no value has been created whatsoever. I love this shifted paper around The Fed has now purchased this government debt that is

At interest, right? So it will pay an interest rate to the Federal Reserve. There's even an interest rate when the Fed creates the money initially. I believe there's also an interest rate assessed on that. So they're getting, it's born out of borrowing, basically. This is why it's an oxymoron. It's not money. Money is that which extinguishes debt. This is another good definition. But when you have a money that's based on pure debt, you can never extinguish debt with debt.

So you get this oxymoronic situation where Fed has pumped dollars into the government in exchange for government bonds. The government can now use those dollars to buy real goods and services that other people work to create. And this is the asymmetry, is that if you can create money without performing any useful work,

and money can be used to acquire anything that work produces, goods and services, then you can use that newly printed money to steal from people that cannot produce, that cannot print money. This is called the...

What do they call this? Being an influencer. Making money without creating useful work. Gresham's Law. No, no, Gresham's Law is the other one. This is the Cantillon effect. Generation X. Generation Y. Millennial. The punchline here is that those who get the newly printed money first benefit at the expense of those who get it later. So the government who gets it first first and then all the politically connected few get it next and it circulates outward until the very bottom of that

The people that get it last are the people, the poor, pensioners, people living on fixed income. So all of these people that really depend on the dollar to hold its value across time are the ones being victimized by this scam. So it's literally a mechanism for transferring wealth from the poor to the rich. Which makes sense why there's like a pressure, kind of like an oscillatory pressure towards things like

socialism or communism or something like that. I think I could see a point where it's like, this is getting to be too much. The 1% of the 1% of the 1% is getting too much power. We need to redistribute.

Yes, but that's the insanity because it is a wealth redistribution scheme already as I just described Yeah, and then people the victims of that scheme are like something is wrong But they're completely ignorant as to how money works or how this like it's not that calm I mean, maybe it's a little complicated, but I try to make it simple. Yeah And so they start calling for further wealth redistribution as if that we're going to fix it But that is putting gas on the fire. What you need to do is eliminate the wealth redistribution and

Hmm if you give and this is the same way same thing as saying making private property really strong stop stealing from people and that's how you incentivize productivity and that's how you incentivize trade and cooperation, but when you when you have legalized plunder in place people are

especially the poor, they're just getting squeezed all the time. And that foments social revolt, right? People get mad. And then politicians can play on that with rhetoric and say, oh yeah, we need socialism. We need communism. We need this.

But that's just literally putting gas on the fire. We're trying to fix a wealth redistribution scheme by implementing a wealth redistribution scheme. What you need to do is stop all the fucking wealth redistribution schemes. - How can a person protect the value of the money that they're holding in their wallet or their bank account?

Yeah. So, and, and, and you've already shared, but also like, why does that matter? And you've mentioned inflation is a way of, you know, it's, it's reducing your buying power. So it's reducing, like you have the same dollar in your wallet or your bank account, but suddenly it appears to be the same, but it buys less. So it's a slow way of squeezing out the value of the money that you have. Yes. How can a person start to reposition their perspective and,

And their bank accounts and their investment portfolio no matter how much money a person has Mm-hmm to be able to protect the value of their money. Yeah, so what people have done historically again just out of like economic rationale is to Not hold your long-term savings in fiat currency because it's buying power or purchasing power is declining as it is printed or counterfeited over time alright, so people

Being smart, they sell their dollars and they buy land or they buy equities or they buy bonds oftentimes too. But the bond scam has kind of run out. You're trying to shift your purchasing power out of something that can be printed forever into something that cannot be printed forever. So typically equities, real estate, commodities, etc.,

That's the old school way of doing it. Gold, a lot of people, you know, gold's been around for 5,000 plus years. It's still a real money. It holds purchasing power effectively over time because no one knows how to print gold. So you could hold physical gold. That's another tried and true time-tested strategy. Do you think gold has more longevity than Bitcoin? No. Really? When you say longevity, you mean into the future? Yeah.

No, I don't. Oh, well, I mean, what time scale are you talking about here? I don't know. 200 years. If the earth gets obliterated, well, I guess the gold atoms will still live and Bitcoin won't be here. But so long as we move into a future that is characterized by electricity, internet, then yeah, Bitcoin's dominant in that world. But if we go into some dystopian world where we don't have electricity or internet, then you're more likely to see gold dominant. And so...

Sorry, I threw you off. Yeah, where were we going before that? Oh, I don't know. I totally, I ruined the whole podcast. We should stop everything. Oh, I think we're talking about how people can protect their buying power. Yeah, protect your buying power. Let's define it first. I mean, so everyone knows what a price is, right? A price is how, a price is a good in terms of money, right? This steak costs $20, right?

purchasing power buying powers is the inverse of that ratio. So it's like how many steaks does my $20 buy me? Okay, so if you have $20 in the year 2019 That'll probably buy you. I don't know two pounds of ribeye something like that. You have $20 in the year 2025 Will probably buy you two thirds of a pound everybody. Yeah, something like that, right? So your buying power has gone down significantly same $20

but the amount of goods and services it can obtain for you in the real world has declined. So to protect yourself from that, you need to put purchasing power in something that can't be, that requires work to produce basically. That's what protects gold from having its purchasing power decline. It's the same principle that protects Bitcoin. It's the same principle that protects really all commodities.

Even equities right the companies are doing real work work issuing real products and services into the marketplace And they there's an incentive not to over issue those shares So you need to park your purchasing power on something that can't be printed would be the short answer so Trump recently obviously was elected he recently signed a bunch of executive really call them executive orders they called relation to crypto I want to get into some like current event related things but I

Crypto or Bitcoin which from your perspective eventually it'll just be Bitcoin. That's a crypto just to kind of disappear I'm putting me putting words in your mouth so I'm gonna correct me after I shut up and

Well, what do you think of the direction of things with Trump and the people that he's putting into power and the executive order that he placed was or signed was disappointing to a lot of people a lot of like bit coiners it says things like it's Digital assets. Yeah, it's like proposed possible. Maybe digital assets. It's not quite as Drawn line in the stand everybody's gonna get rich on Bitcoin, you know next Tuesday. What do you think about that?

i'll take a moment and share about a convenient way to optimize your sleep did you know there is one phase of sleep that almost everyone fails to get enough of and this one phase of sleep is responsible for most of your body's daily rejuvenation repair controlling hunger and weight loss hormones boosting energy and a lot more now i am talking about

deep sleep. And if you don't get enough, you'll probably struggle with cravings, slow metabolism, premature aging, and even some other crummy conditions. So now you might be asking why are people not getting enough of this incredibly important phase of sleep? A big reason is magnesium deficiency.

Because over 80% of the population is deficient in magnesium. And magnesium increases GABA, which encourages relaxation on a cellular level, which is critical for your sleep. Magnesium also plays a key role in regulating your body's stress response system. Those with magnesium deficiency usually have a higher level of stress, which negatively impacts sleep as well.

Now, before you go out and buy a magnesium supplement, it's important to understand that most products out there only have one to two forms of magnesium. When the reality is your body needs all seven forms of this essential sleep mineral. That's why I recommend Magnesium Breakthrough. Magnesium Breakthrough contains all seven forms of magnesium designed to help you calm your mind and to help you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed. The deep sleep benefits are very noticeable.

For an exclusive offer, go to buyoptimizers.com slash align and use promo code align10 during checkout to save 10% off on your order. That's buyoptimizers.com slash align, B-I-O-P-T-I-M-I-Z-E-R-S dot com slash align. Use code align10 for discount at checkout.

His pitch to Bitcoiners was, hey, you know, vote for me and we're going to create this strategic Bitcoin reserve, which was going to be a large treasury holding of Bitcoin by the U.S. government. I should probably just

everything that I say, I'm very anti-state, very anti-government. I don't think, I don't believe politicians, right? Any further than I can throw them. Actually, maybe that's a bad one to use. - You can probably, yeah. - 'Cause I'm probably throwing them pretty far. I don't trust them, basically. I don't believe, I think politics causes problems and technology solves problems, basically. So when people get, they start believing that their favorite politician is gonna fix A, B, and C, like I just, I think they're being misled.

So I never put a lot of faith into this. There were a lot of Bitcoiners that are super excited and thinking Trump is like a closet Bitcoin maxi and he's going to save the world and blah, blah, blah. Sure enough, after a few days in office, the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve...

has become a strategic shit coin Reserve so they're looking to put a lot of other shit coins on the US balance sheet a lot of this has to do with and when you say shit coin you're just referring to any non-bitcoin crypto asset really any form of money that's not physical gold or Bitcoin is a shit coin because someone else can print it or produce it and steal from you owning property is a shit coin

Well, those aren't money. That's not money. So real estate is real estate. That's land. So no other forms of money besides holding physical gold or holding Bitcoin

is a shitcoin. And that basically means you have counterparty risk. There's a liability. Someone else can print it. Someone else can change the rules. Someone else can deauthorize it. This includes all fiat currencies, right? They can be censored, frozen, turned off, printed, surveyed. Same is true for all shitcoin crypto assets. Same is true for all shitcoin monetary metals that aren't gold. Because gold's already out-competed them over 5,000 years. And so that's it. Yeah, it's a pretty...

black or white viewpoint. But I think the history really proves it out. And so the strategic Bitcoin reserve became the strategic shitcoin reserve. And I think that's what people are upset about is that, oh, this politician said he was going to do a thing and he did the opposite. But again, this is just a good reminder of how things actually work in DC, that it's a lobbying community. So

XRP is the one that's really been...

really been driving a lot of this apparently. XRP is a centralized shitcoin that was launched in the early days and they've been trying to present themselves as if they will be the rails on which central bank digital currencies will be built in the future. So it's supposed to be more like a state-friendly crypto coin. And so they've created this entire bot army online and they've just been

pretending that there are people interested in it. So when people are on Twitter trying to learn about crypto, there are hundreds of thousands of these bots, you know, "Oh, I'm an XRP holder, I'm in the XRP army, you know, XRP is going to the moon, blah, blah, blah, blah." And then also because XRP has a low unit price, it's in like, it's sub $1, maybe it's in the dollar range, I'm not sure now. But you know, Bitcoin is trading at over $100,000. People don't understand that that actually doesn't matter. That's just called unit bias.

You could divide Bitcoin, actually Bitcoin is divisible into 100 million subunits called sats. Each one of those is worth way less than a penny. But because of the way it's priced, people get confused by the optics basically. So when they think they're buying XRP that's under or around a dollar, that they've got a better chance of this thing going to 100,000 than Bitcoin does of going to 10 million, something like that. And so

XRP and their bot army is like it's one big psychological operation preying on people's ignorance about the difference between centralization versus decentralization preying on people's ignorance about the nature and history of money.

And really just using these bots to memetically engineer people. People think these bots are real people. Like, oh, I saw a bunch of guys talking about XRP online. And I read all these articles that said it's going to be the next big thing. It's the next Bitcoin. I guess I'll buy it. And so XRP has just been dumping like $500 million a quarter onto these stupid fucking retail investors forever. It's the only way they've ever made money is they created the shit coin out of thin air.

90% of the supply was distributed to the initial founders and they've just been selling it pumping it and selling it it's a perpetual pump and dump scheme and So they've accumulated a shitload of money along the way now What do they do when Trump comes in office? They they allocate a lot of those proceeds into the lobbying mechanism So they go beat down Trump's door. Hey, it's not the Bitcoin you need in the the reserve It's this it's our shit coin XRP and they'll start disparaging Bitcoin and and

talking about the reasons why it's not decentralized or whatever it may be. The reality is they're taking those stolen proceeds and using them to –

massage the political process and steer what was intended to be the strategic Bitcoin Reserve that actually would be geopolitically significant for the US and they're steering it towards something that lines the pockets of these scammers. What do you foresee is the future of the potentiality of something like the Bitcoin Reserve? And would that be something that would be supportive for the country and for people? And if so, why?

Again, I'll preface my comments with, I don't, there's a great, I just don't believe in the state at all. There's a great song by the police and I think it's called We Are Spirits in a Material World. The opening lyrics are, there is no political solution to our troubled evolution. Have no faith in constitution. There is no bloodless revolution.

I hope I've got those lyrics correct. But basically, as I said earlier, politics creates problems. Technology solves problems. So when you say, would it be good for the United States? Holding Bitcoin is good for any market actor whatsoever. An individual, a business, or a nation state. Because you are going to increase your purchasing power over time. You can think about it in a world where everyone...

Is trying to print money...

and now can print money through the advent of crypto, anyone can create their own shitcoin in 15 minutes on the Ethereum blockchain right now. Anyone in the world, there's no barriers to entry whatsoever. And then if you're a good hype man and you put up the right website and the right white paper and get a bunch of people to believe you, well, you can pump a coin and then you can dump it on them. So in that world, the money that nobody can print will win. It's the one that will continue to accumulate purchasing power over time as all these scams play themselves out.

so again that's physical gold and that's bitcoin so if anyone puts that on their balance sheet they will benefit um i i i'm the wrong guy to talk to about this because i think a lot of people confuse patriotism like it's one thing to be in favor of your country it's another thing to be in favor of the fiat political state machine the state the state organization that actually preys on its citizens

It's not serving its citizens at all. And all the federal government centralized three-letter agencies, you put them all in that bucket. They're all bullshit. They don't serve people whatsoever. They're funded by money printing. They're nonproductive. They're basically zombie companies stood up by taxpayer dollars. And so it is good for a nation state to hold Bitcoin in reserve, but I don't think it's good for – it's not going to benefit citizens.

What do you think citizens will benefit by holding Bitcoin themselves? What do you think if you were advising a friend that was asking you for help with like financial advice or investment advice? And you know, obviously this is not investment advice or whatever. Would you give some kind of like portfolio percentage allocation of what you think would be wise? And also what are your thoughts about the stock market right now? And

tech stocks and all that stuff it seems like it's a lot of hype and it's also very like strong potential hype

But then from my limited understanding of things, looking at the price earnings ratio or index, it's like what their companies are actually producing or earning doesn't really match this really massive inflated value. And so it seems like things are really based off of this big inflated story. And as long as the story keeps going, people will make money. But I wonder if that has the potential of having an even more disastrous, perilous drop once the story maybe suddenly disappears. Yeah, well...

It's less than a story. It's less so a story than it is a direct consequence of money printing. So again, when you're printing money, the money does not hold its value across time. So what do people do? They don't hold money as savings. They hold anything else. And again, one of those buckets is equities, public equities. So since you've compromised the store of value function in currency, you

it leaks out into these other asset classes. And so people start using equities as a savings tool. That increase that puts a conditional demand on the equities, so their price goes up. It's higher than it would otherwise be because it's being partially monetized. There's a monetary premium getting imputed to these equities. That means the P, the price goes up while the earnings stay roughly the same.

the price to earnings ratio, right? How much, what are you paying for what multiple of earnings over time goes up? So that's why we have unprecedented PE ratios across the board. Now that's not, it's not the entire picture because there's also, you know, the most successful and valuable businesses are like the Fang Sox,

They also have different valuation models because they're like network effect businesses. So they tend to have higher, they tend to be stickier, they tend to be harder to disrupt. And so they tend to have higher PE ratios than say traditional manufacturing businesses, for instance. So there's part that going on, but there's also this big part of

money being debased forces people to use other things as savings technology. So the PE ratios are through the roof. As far as financial advice, I can give this financial advice without the

the asterisk, study Bitcoin. Study the nature of money. This is how you will actually benefit yourself because you'll learn about how these scams operate and you'll hopefully be able to unplug yourself from them. As far as giving people specific portfolio allocation percentages, I don't do that, but I could tell you how I think about it. I already alluded to this earlier, but when it comes to the cash, first of all, there's an old

saying, this is like, I think from an old Jewish text, you should seek to hold a third of your wealth in cash, a third of your wealth in real estate or land, and a third of your wealth in business, like your business, ideally. So... You would just change the cash to Bitcoin? Well...

- Bitcoin is cash. - Or real money. - Actually, Bitcoin is cash. The word cash comes from the French word, casse, which means money box. And so it meant a unit of monetary metal. It doesn't mean paper. We've just extracted that word, but that's not where it comes from. - Interesting. - Government paper is not cash. It's counterfeit currency. It's fake scam shitcoin currency. Cash is physical gold or Bitcoin. So,

I look at it like that. Yeah, so I hold Bitcoin as my cash position. There's real estate. And then actually, because my business is also in Bitcoin, I have a lot of Bitcoin in my businesses. So I kind of double dip on the cash thing and have a large double digit percentage of my net worth in Bitcoin as a result. When I look at the cash allocation specifically, I take those two worlds that I mentioned earlier, there's two future pathways possible.

One in which the world continues to have internet, electricity, artificial intelligence. A more dystopian view where we don't have internet, electricity, or artificial intelligence. Now in that dystopian world, I think things like bullets and food and physical gold are going to be really important, right? Trucks, cars.

know-how, community, like you're going to be Mad Max survival mode. Probably also a trade, like some way, some skill. I think that that's going to be like the big comeback, what already is. Like I had a plumber come to my place recently and it was like, I think $2,500 when it was all said and done. Yeah.

"Oh, the clog is deeper than we thought. We got to get the whatever." I'm just like, "I don't know any of this shit that you're saying, but..." - Can't check them. - Yes. - Yeah. - I guess I got to do that. - Yeah, I think those skills will come back almost in either view of these realities because of artificial intelligence largely. But yeah, so the dystopian world's a possibility. That's where physical gold would be the dominant money. And in the more optimistic view of the future where we have the electricity, internet and artificial intelligence,

In my view Bitcoin would be dominant in that future. So what I do for the cash position of my portfolio is I say, okay, what percentage probability do I assign to the technology enabled vision of the future versus the technology disabled vision of the future? And for me, it's a very high percentage that I think we continue this march into the digital age. I don't see electricity, internet or AI going anywhere. But

Could have a solar flare event. Could have global war. Could have, you know, pick your black swan disaster that does lead us into this dystopian view. So say I say I weighed it 95% digital age, 5%.

Non-digital age. Yeah. Well, then that's how I would allocate my cash position I'd have 95% Bitcoin and 5% gold and I also I use dollars inside of the businesses for working capital But I don't hold dollars long term for the reasons we've already discussed if you had to predict the world's next great black swan event What would the time frame be and what would it be? What's my definition? That's not possible. I

Black Swan is an unknown unknown. I know so you cannot even know like if I were to say it I wouldn't be a black swan It'd be a gray swan. All right. Well, let's now you can you can you can hypothesize about what domain it could come from Yeah, what I mean, do you so is the riskiest I mean? Cosmological events are obviously a big deal

And they talk about not seeing them coming, right? If there's a cosmic storm or a supernova or something nearby and that creates some electromagnetic disturbance on the planet or solar weather, solar flares, these things also can create disturbances. The ongoing march of technology. Technology can totally...

change on a dime, right? Like, even Bitcoin depends on elliptic curve cryptography right now, if that were suddenly to be broken, first of all, it would break the entire commercial internet, in addition to Bitcoin. And people would have to figure out another form of cryptography that was resistant to that breakthrough. There's also geopolitical risk, obviously, war, plagues, things like this, but I couldn't tell you.

when they're coming or if they're coming because they're black swans what do you think about what are your thoughts are you extremely bullish with AI and tech right now is that something that you are in like the short term next six months like that's I think kind of something that I'm selfishly interested in is like what do I do with a little bit of tulips that I have saved up to optimize my

My glass beads. What's the reference of the glass beads, the African story? Yeah, well, so glass beads were used by, this is in 16th century Africa. They were used as money for a long time. And then Europeans came in, they saw that Africans were using these glass beads as money.

And the reason the glass beads worked as money in Africa is because glassmaking technology was primitive. So these beads were basically scarce, right? There was a, there's a proof of work necessary to produce them. Europeans realize, oh, wow, they're actually trading goods and services for these glass beads and glassmaking technology back in Europe is much more sophisticated. So they can produce these beads in very large quantities.

They can counterfeit them basically. So what do Europeans do? They start producing these beads, counterfeiting them in very large quantities. In Europe, they would pack ship hulls full of them. They would ship them into Africa and they would use it to buy their local goods and services. So they're buying goods and services that take sweat equity to produce. They're buying it for these beads that take very little sweat equity to produce. So that shows you

how important proof of work is to the stability of money because what happened over time is these glass beads basically hyperinflated it was done over a long period of time though so maybe not wouldn't call it a hyperinflation but it went away as money and it allowed a giant transfer of wealth from African nations into European coffers and so these later came to be called slave beads actually because after these Africans were impoverished

Some African tribes started selling other Africans into slavery, into European ships, and it led to the transatlantic slave trade. There were 14.5 million Africans shipped through the Middle Passage from Africa to Europe and to North America as slaves. I think 2 million of them died in transit. So it's a pretty bleak tale, but highlighting the consequences of slavery

of monetary inflation right it impoverishes people and can even lead to slavery so is that something and i can just get like go you know away from any questions around like equities and such but do you pay attention to things in the realm of ai and agi yeah i do i do i'm very i'm not an expert by any stretch and i'm very interested in it i'm actually taking the show

Towards AI towards decentralized health like we've talked a lot about philosophy nature and history of money and Bitcoin But now we're doing a kind of a mild pivot into some of these other domains because I do think they're very Relevant very interesting to me personally, so I'm trying to learn more I don't know my intuition would say that to the extent Artificial intelligence is made open source is the extent to which it will be a net benefit for the world It will be good and the extent to which open

artificial intelligence becomes closed source, like the dominant AI is closed source and that we can't investigate the source code, modify it, change it, et cetera, that it will be a net negative because then you'll have a group of people that control it and can use it to manipulate people, socially engineer people, et cetera. Whereas if it's open source, those things are much less likely to happen. You can't hide these...

You can't hide such malicious measures in the code when everyone can see it. I want to ask something that I wonder the relevance or value of Bitcoin going through the mining process is solving this very complex equation. I'm not smart enough to understand why that matters to anyone.

Yeah, it matters because people don't want to hold the money that other people can counterfeit. So if you don't have this game of proof of work energy expenditure, which again, this is the same principle that

Holds gold supply integrity intact right the fact that you have to expend energy to go and discover gold dig it out of the ground refine it all of these things give gold a cost to produce if there was no cost to produce gold as As there is with fiat currency. There's basically no cost what would happen?

people would just print a fuck ton of gold, right? And anyone holding gold, their savings would go to zero. Their buying power would go down very rapidly. So it's the cost of production or what we call the proof of work in Bitcoin

That protects the supply integrity of the savings technology or the money. And that's what allows it to preserve purchasing power across time. Is their actual value in that equation being solved because it infuses complexity into the system of Bitcoin? So it's hard to counterfeit? Or is it just... Well, it's impossible to counterfeit. Why is it impossible to counterfeit?

Because you have to expend real world energy to compete against other miners trying to solve this same puzzle. And there's only one winner every 10 minutes. And so you can't. And that winner is rewarded newly issued Bitcoin. So you can't.

counterfeit it because that's the only way to obtain it is you got to play the game by this by these rules and you have to have real cost of energy you have to have real there's a real input cost to producing a Bitcoin just like there's a real input cost of producing a unit of gold just like there is no real input cost to producing a US dollar could I start earning some Bitcoin by getting like a ti-83 calculator and just

like banging out some equations? - No. - Like I need to get, what is like the, I know people that have Bitcoin mining computers. - Yeah. - Like what is that? I don't understand what that is. - Yeah, so it's evolved over time, but today they use, it's what's called an ASIC, A-S-I-C. It's an application specific integrated circuit. So it's a one trick pony. It's a piece of machinery about the size of a shoe box typically. These are typically in data center type environments, just racked and stacked.

and they're all just creating hashes, which are basically like guesses to solving the mining puzzle. So you can think about it like a global lottery system in a way that

These mining machines are converting electricity into lottery tickets basically and that lottery resolves itself every 10 minutes But it's also it's not what people would say. Oh, it sounds ridiculous and wasteful But it's not exactly the energy that's going in to the mining process is actually securing the network and

So the larger and more valuable the network is, the more secure it becomes by virtue of expending larger amounts of energy. So the rough analogy you could use here is like imagine you had a safe, a steel safe with a combination lock on it. And the more money you put into that safe, the thicker the walls would become, the more complex the lock would be to cracking. It would become more safe as you stored more money in it.

That's basically what proof of work mining does for the Bitcoin network. The larger it becomes, the more valuable it becomes, the more secure it becomes. And as it becomes more secure, it creates even more demand for Bitcoin as a store of value asset. So more people buy it. The price goes up. It makes mining more profitable. More miners come into the game. Network gets bigger and more secure. Bigger and more secure leads to more demand for it as money. And you have this flywheel effect. Yeah.

And this is what we call Bitcoin number go up technology. Basically, it has this, it's this vortex of positive incentives that no one knows how to escape. So all you can do is play by the rules of the game. It's just like the laws of physics, right? We don't know how to break the laws of physics. So what do we do? We all abide by the laws of physics and we do the best we can to compete within the confines of its rules. The brilliance of Bitcoin is that it somehow imported the integrity of the laws of physics.

into the monetary domain. So we have a fixed and unbreakable rule set in the social domain of money by rooting it into the physical domain through energy expenditure. So it's like, this is why it's mind bending, right? It's like a bridge between the physical and the digital worlds. And so I think

this is why we're struggling to like get our heads around how big and significant of an innovation this is what was bitcoin when it was created satoshi is satoshi the guy's name if it is a guy or a girl or yeah or whatever yeah so it seems like the way you're describing it crypto or the production of a bitcoin it's like an anti-fragile system it's like it gets stronger with stress it's probably the most effective

Form of anti-fragility we've ever seen so what was the origination like the like the like the the eukaryotic cell version of cryptocurrency when Satoshi is in his mom's Upstairs, you know, whatever bedroom got the sock on the door Just Fixing the money

Yeah, so it starts out as just an open source software project that Satoshi released into a chat room of cypherpunks. And cypherpunks are this group of people that have a legacy in trying to create decentralized digital tools that empower individual freedom. And so that's how it was released. You know, you could even say that it was a centralized project to start and that it was centralized in the mind of Satoshi.

he then put it into the world people started running the software you know how finney was one of the first to run bitcoin he has an infamous tweet that said running bitcoin and other people just started to mine it and basically start playing the game and as the game starts being played it's putting upward pressure on demand for the asset and that flywheel effect takes hold that i just described over time mining has become more complex the hash rate

For Bitcoin, which is again how much energy and capital expenditures being allocated and securing the network via mining has absolutely exploded You know, it's gone from it's in like the seven. I don't want to say the 700 exahash range So it's like orders of magnitude Larger and more secure than any other computing network in the history of the human race today and it's also continuing to grow very fast and

So that's basically the path that it went down. You know, it was just an idea. He, he formalized the idea on the white paper. He released it to these people, you know, there got some feedback. Then he releases the Genesis block in 2009, I believe. And then

Bitcoin the you know, you often hear it called the blockchain Satoshi actually referred to it as a time chain The Genesis block was the first block starts in 2009 and then people start competing to solve these blocks of transactions over time and that's the mining game and yeah, less and less Bitcoin is rewarded via the mining game every four years and

So miners that are receiving this Bitcoin for solving the puzzle are natural sellers because they're spending energy to compete to solve the blocks. Then when they're rewarded Bitcoin, they need to sell that Bitcoin to pay their power bills, right? But the amount of Bitcoin these people are winning every four years is cut in half. And so when you cut selling in half, sell pressure in half, and you hold demand constant, price goes up. And so every four years we see these

Giant spikes in the Bitcoin price roughly 18 months after the having and then it will draw down 70 80 90 percent it'll trade flat for three years and you have another having and another big spike and

And that's been the cycle up until this point and it's unclear when or if that cycle is ever gonna break down. How would you steel man a gold maximalist if that is a term like Peter Schiff who's also been on the podcast? Yeah, well, I debated him a couple of months ago on the show. What would be his steel man argument?

I mean, he really just repeatedly says Bitcoin's nothing. Bitcoin's not money. Bitcoin, where is it? I can't touch it. That's one of their steel man cases. Which for most layman people, probably if they were to reflect on Bitcoin enough, that probably would be their ultimate perspective of like, I don't actually know what it is for a lot of people. It is a speculative thing. Like, what do you think the percentage of people... The word speculative is another word that he uses a lot. Yeah.

What do you think the percentage of people investing in Bitcoin presently or crypto in general are not there just gambling? Like the rate of people that are like you where you're like, I believe in this. I'll be with this for the rest of my life. Yeah. Compared to the people like I'm hoping to it's going to double in price and then I'm going to get out. I'm going to keep my money. I'm going to put that in equities or buy a house or something else. I really couldn't. I mean, I have no clue. I don't know what percentage of people have deep conviction versus don't.

There are problems with the word speculation because all human action is speculative everything speculative waking up is speculative wait breathing All you know is that you can control your effort and your attitude All right, there's about the only two things in reality you can control and you can aim at creating certain outcomes That's what human action is right? We have I have a I'm in position a and

Want to be in position B. I decide what means are gonna get me from A to B and I try to employ them however our actions often deviate from the outcomes we aim at because the futures unknowable, right so Everything's speculative. All right. So when you start saying Oh Bitcoin is speculative I think they're saying trying to say something like gold's been around for 5,000 years it's more likely it will be around for another 5,000 years versus bitcoins been around for 15 years and

it's less likely it will be around in 5 000 years which that's not an unreasonable it's not a reason but it's not that relevant to most people that are only going to live for another 60 years well it's not unreasonable um but it's also why there's so much upside potential on bitcoin because there's you know it's the overton window takes time to shift so there's a lot of people that are still kind of in the in the dark so to speak about the nature and history of money

Again, why gold became money, I think, is one of the most useful stories to understand Bitcoin. You have to understand the problem before you can understand the solution. And so I can go down that rabbit hole real quick. People basically seek money that does five things. They want money to be divisible, which means you can divide it or recombine it to transact at different scales. You want money to be durable, which means you want it to persist over time.

If we used bananas as money, that would not be good because bananas rot, for instance. So it needs to endure over time. Money needs to be portable, which means it needs to be movable across space. Otherwise, you can't transact with people in other places. Money needs to be recognizable. So people need to be able to verify the authenticity of it. This is actually where we get the term sound money.

that if you drop a gold coin from a certain height, it makes a very specific sound and that provides a useful heuristic for determining the authenticity of the gold, making sure it's not lead-plated gold, for instance. And then finally, money needs to be, basically have an inflexible supply. We often use the term scarcity here, but that term trips people up.

Because money can be used to acquire any good and service the market can generate there's a huge incentive to try and produce more of it because to produce more money is to produce your access to any Good or service in the marketplace. So you need something that's costly to produce as I described earlier So, you know you need proof of work basically built into the money So of all the things we've tried across history monetary metals were the best at satisfying

divisibility, durability, portability, recognizability, scarcity. Of all the monetary metals, gold was the most scarce. It had the least flexible supply. So no matter how hard we tried to mine it, its supply increased the most slowly over time, which means people that store their purchasing power in gold were the most successful over time. So gold holders out-competed all other forms of money. Problem with gold is that it's not very portable. Sorry, portable.

Portable, you know, it's heavy. It's a physical metal. You can't move it across space very easily There's a lot of risk involved if someone seizes it, you know, you want to move you want to move a billion dollars of Bitcoin you need to know 12 words and Go across the border. You want to move a billion dollars of gold across the border? You need a military you need tanks. You need helicopters. You need agreements. You need permissions. You need approvals like it's Whole different ballgame, right?

So all of these things are really useful for understanding the problem that Bitcoin solves. So gold's not portable. We need to abstract it into a banknote, basically put all the gold in a vault and issue a paper derivative on top of it called a banknote. That solves the portability problem for gold, right? We can now move this paper note that's as good as gold around the world. No problem. We can transact with each other very easily.

So long as we can take the paper to the vault, to the bank and redeem it for real gold. And the only reason, the only like inherent value, well, maybe not the only, you'll probably not be happy if I said that, but the Peter Schiff perspective would be like,

Yes, of course Nothing is very portable. This is probably I'm like speaking the computer ship is speaking through me right now and I would and I would say to that the only thing that probably is inherently like deeply intrinsically like core level valuable about something like Bitcoin is that it's a system that that that you can trust and

Well, it gets a little trickier than that. Because it is just a story. Gold is a story. Cash is a story. Bitcoin is a story. If collectively, suddenly, Bitcoin is not hot anymore, then it will go dormant. And maybe it will come back again or maybe it won't. But it's kind of based around agreements and stories. At this point, it has enough institutional adoption that it might be hard for that to happen in a really big way. Yeah. Soft agree that, yes, money is...

an agreement among people. People also often also call it a belief system, right? You could also call it a social construct. Again, like language, these words only work because you and I agree to the meaning of each word. If we didn't have at least approximate agreement as to the meaning of each word, we couldn't communicate, right? The same is true for money. If people, if I trade goods and services for money,

My expectation is that in the future at some other place, other people will trade me their goods and services for that money. If that agreement is ever broken, well, then the money doesn't work. So the issue I have with that when we call it a story is that people then tend to think it's just totally subjective and we can make anything money, right? Like any bananas, books, books.

Whatever, it doesn't matter. We just, we get to decide. That's not how it works. That is not how it works at all. There is a, it sounds subjective, right? Like people can just choose whatever they want to believe is money, but there's also an objective side to it. And that these are the properties of money that I'm describing. It's like, sure, people can choose whatever they want, but people always choose the best tool for the job or the tool that best suits their individual self-interest, right?

And so all those properties of money that I laid out, specifically scarcity, right? You don't want to hold the money that someone else can print. That's against your own self-interest because that person can rob you. So what do people do is they zero in on the money that's most difficult to print or produce, which is another way of saying the money that has the lowest inflation rate. So historically, gold has about a 2% annual inflation rate. Another way of saying that is it has a very high stock-to-flow ratio, which is the inverse.

So the reciprocal of the inflation rate of a 2% inflation rate, the stock to flow ratio of 50, one divided by 0.02. The inflation rate of Bitcoin is basically 0%. Now people say, what do you mean? There's new Bitcoin issued every 10 minutes. And it's like, that's true. But what's different is that we know the total supply of Bitcoin. So we know like there will never, there will never be more than 21 million. And we know what the supply will be approximately in,

every day between now and the end of time. So there's this perfect information component that we don't have with any other form of money. And objectively, again, back to the story of gold. So it's like, all right, we choose gold as money, but it's not good. Here's another definition of money. Money is a device for moving value or purchasing power. Purchasing power is the technical term, but a lot of people use value. Like you've been using value today, right?

So we'll go with value, but let's just know that purchasing power is the technical term. Money is a device for moving value across space and time. So in gold, we had a really good device for moving value across time, right? You can't print it, so it holds its value across time. However, it's a physical metal, it's cumbersome, it's clunky, it's risky to move across space. You need armies and boats and security and all the things that I mentioned. So what do we do? We create gold-backed currency.

that paper derivative or the electronic representation of that paper derivative, which we mostly use now, online banking and whatnot, that's really easy to move across space. However, it doesn't hold value across time because you have to now trust humans that issue the paper to never issue more paper than they have gold in reserve.

If they overissue the paper, then they've issued more liabilities or more promises than they can possibly fulfill. They don't have enough gold to keep their promises. So this is why gold-backed currency always ends up as a zero-backed currency, which is a fiat currency, and why it always ultimately ends in hyperinflation. So my position would be that

and you could distill all this down into gold is a great device for moving value across time but not space currency is a great device for moving value across space because it's very transactable but not time because people will print it and hyperinflate it right so you can't hold value in it over time so what do we need we need some combination of the principles of gold

and the principles of digital communication, right, that we can move these things very easily across space, preferably at the speed of light. And that's basically what Bitcoin is, right? It's as if it's like the internet and gold had a baby. And that's what Bitcoin is. So you have the fixed supply, although Bitcoin takes it to the next level. It's like an actual fixed supply. It's not an inflexible supply. It's a perfectly inflexible supply.

in a native digital token. So it's just an informational token. There's no physical substrate to it. And this is where a guy like Peter is like, "Oh, where's my Bitcoin? I can't touch it. I can't see it. I can't smell it. It's not real." That's a feature, not a bug. You don't want physical money because physical money means you have to safeguard it and it's expensive. And all the problems that come with gold that cause us to create a paper currency, we circumvent with Bitcoin.

so Bitcoin if money is a device removing value across space and time Bitcoin perfectly moves value across time because it's a perfectly fixed supply right no one can print it you know the supply what it is what it will be forever and it's optimized for moving value across space because it's in formation it literally can move at the speed of light and you can't get much faster than that so Bitcoin is like

the discovery of pure money in a way. We've never had a pure money, something that's perfect money. I hesitate to use the word perfect, but it's the closest thing to perfect money we've ever had. Everything prior to Bitcoin is just an approximation. You're going to hate this very immature question, but if you had to predict what the peak of this present crypto bull run will be and what the bottom of the

Next one. Drop off will be what would your range of the peak if you just had to guess and we'll see how this ages in, you know, three years or four years or whatever. Yeah. Okay. And also, is there enough institutional adoption at this point in government adoption and potentially country adoption that the drop off might be, you know, a lot less?

And why are drop-offs even necessary? Well, I always say this. Sorry, that was a lot of questions. I always say this at first, right? Those who live by the crystal ball are bound to eat glass. So when I make a prediction like this, it's a total hypothesis, right? I'm basically looking at what's happened in past price cycles and extrapolating forward. That doesn't mean this is what's going to happen. So don't hold me to it, basically. But if you're saying, make a prediction for me. Yeah, you've got to make a prediction. I think it's Bitcoin. So...

The price tends to peak roughly 18 months after the halving. The last halving was May 2024. So we should see a price peak around November, December 2025. I think that number, based on how much it moves up from its prior all-time high price to its new all-time high price, it's probably around the $300,000 mark per Bitcoin. That's by the end of 2025. Now, historically, again, you get these giant run-ups. You know, you get this like FOMO

Upward up up into the right hockey stick pattern post having then you asked why does it draw down so much? It draws down so much because it gets over bought so much right people buy this thing so freaking much and then People want to get out once that buying well, it's these are market dynamics. It's all psychological psychology when the buyers get exhausted There's also levered buying right so people are taking out loans to buy or you know, it gets amplified basically the the wave reaches its peak and

And then the wave breaks and the wave will draw down 60, 70, 80%. And that wave drawing down is just people taking profits. Well, it's not taking profits necessarily. I mean, it's people obviously selling Bitcoin for fiat currency or goods and services, right? Like if someone's been holding Bitcoin since it was $1,000 and all of a sudden it's $300,000, maybe they want to sell it and buy a house or a boat or whatever the thing is. So there's some of that. Um,

But this is just how markets work basically. It's like you get an over extension of buying and there's also leverage built into that buying. And then whenever that wave breaks, it's a psychological wave. Like markets are psychological engines. So you're just basically seeing the collective psychology of humans play out. Whenever that wave breaks, you'll get... You'll create a fear cascade. Well, sellers, they start to sell. But then at some point, people that were levered into it, if you get liquidated...

Well, then your position gets liquidated. So that has to sell more Bitcoin to cover your loan. And so you get amplified gains and then you get amplified losses on the way down. And then people see it dropping. And then some people get scared. They have low conviction. It's going to go into half tomorrow. And then everybody gets out. Everybody else gets out. And then it gets oversold. It'll draw down 80%. So it goes from 300K down to 60K. Then it's massively oversold. Yeah.

And at that point, it'll start to trade kind of up and slow into the right for three years until we get to the next halving. Then it'll start cranking up again. And then boom, another wave. And you feel like if this were a basketball game or if there was four quarters, where do you think we are in the in the quote unquote like bull run phase of this bull run? Yeah. Well, again, May being 2024 was the halving. Yeah.

plus 18 months so that's going to be again that's going to be november december 2025.

we're recording this in january 2025 so we're about one third ish of the way in to this bull cycle it should peak end of 2025 and then it should draw down probably 80 if the pattern repeats if it repeats there's a possibility that it won't right again markets are psychological engines if the narrative shifts if people realize wait this pattern has played out many times before

And this is what Bitcoin is. And I really just need to front run future price moves like this. So I'm just going to stack it and hold it. If that psychology starts to take hold, well, then it'll just go up. But this is why markets are indispensable. It's like we can't know what everyone else is thinking. So we have to sort it out in the marketplace.

Markets are really interesting because it's a lot of empathy and psychology and attunement to the zeitgeist. It's like attunement to humanity. It's actually like a really feminine, beautiful, intuitive thing being involved in markets. I'm not really smart with markets, but I enjoy people. And that's an aspect of observing the real estate market or equities or crypto or whatever of

this exact thing. It's like it's getting into the psychology of humanity. Yes. Like you're surfing the psychology of humanity. Exactly. It's very interesting. Yeah, it is very interesting. And then, you know, there's quantitative ways to look at it, like looking at the charts and looking at, you know, what's happened in the past. And you'll see people doing technical analysis and all these things.

Find that to be less useful. I think what's more useful is looking at you know being a value investor looking at the qualitative fundamentals that are driving these price movements and driving these psychological Waves in the marketplace and that's why you know, I'm so big on studying the nature and history of money That's the financial advice I give people is like you need to understand the same qualitatively To understand why it's making these moves quantitatively interesting and then the

Your suggestion to a friend would be to just dollar cost average into Bitcoin only, never sell, and only sell when you need to buy a car or a house or something of the sort. Is that wrong or right? So again, I don't like...

I above all freedom, right? That's my number one highest value. I'm not here to tell you what you should do. Like, you know, your situation better than anyone. The thing that I say you should do is study, right? That's the only like actual financial advice I'll give you unqualified. So you should study Bitcoin and study the nature and history of money. It can't hurt you. Basically, it's only going to improve your situation.

That being said, that is the strategy that I employ. I think you just are a net buyer over time. So your dollar cost average daily, weekly, monthly, whatever your frequency is. You can then complement that with opportunistic buying. So if the Bitcoin price dips, I happen to have irregular cash flows in my businesses. So sometimes I've got a lot of cash coming in. Sometimes I don't. If I have a lot of cash coming in and there's a dip in the price, then I'll opportunistically buy more.

Then my holding period is targeted just forever, you know, like I will sell it if I want to sell it That's what money is right if you have a thing you want to buy well then go buy it. That's the whole point but Knowing that Bitcoin is a two trillion dollar asset competing to be a 250 trillion dollar asset I'd have to be pretty stupid to sell my Bitcoin, you know when it's got 125 X upside potential so I try to just stack just saying in Bitcoin stay humble stack stats and

That's basically what I try to do is just stack sats, earn more than I spend, stack the excess and try to hold it forever. What happens when and if what is the peak value of Bitcoin from your perspective for your prediction? And what would it take for it to reach that peak value?

And then so first, like, what is that that number as far as like predictive number? And maybe mathematically there could be some actually like established number of like this is what it could could go to. And then if that were to happen, if Bitcoin is selling at $10 million a coin, does that just benefit the early adopters? And then everyone else is squeezed out and it becomes irrelevant for everyone else. So this is a.

Interesting answer. The peak price point of Bitcoin is the hyperinflation of the US dollar. Right. So you wouldn't price Bitcoin in dollars anymore. You would price everything else, all goods and services, in terms of satoshis or sats, which are the subunits of Bitcoin. Each Bitcoin is divisible into 100 million satoshis or sats. So...

As the US dollar is hyper inflating, Bitcoin will be priced at, you know, one, two, three, five, 10, 50, 20, $100 million per Bitcoin. But you have to understand that

the purchasing power of each dollar during that hyperinflation is going to be falling precipitously. What's the definition of hyperinflation? It's like over 10% or something? 50% loss in purchasing power per month. And the average is like two and a half or three per year right now? Well, it depends on what currency you're looking at. If you look at the US dollar pre-pandemic, it was 7% per year. 7%.

supply expansion per year. Now, if you're talking about the actual price in goods and services, you got to get more specific, like which goods and services are you talking about? This is why inflation actually is impossible to quantify. The inflation metric the government issues is total bullshit, means nothing. You can't quantify inflation, just like you can't quantify beauty, right? It's what things do you want to buy?

Sell versus what things do I want to buy and sell we all have our own inflation coefficient based on our preferences There is no universal number that applies to everyone the best proxy for that is How much what percentage did you increase the money supply if there were a hundred trillion dollars or a hundred billion dollars in? Circulation at the beginning of the year and there's 110 at the end of the year Well, then we increase the money supply 10% We would expect that general price levels should go up about 10% as a result of that But that's not the case. So

as bitcoin's us dollar price is going up and the us dollars buying power is declining right us dollar is going into a hyperinflation at some point it just won't make sense anymore to price things or bitcoin in dollars and that's going to be a very confusing time for people because we've grown very accustomed to thinking in terms of dollars and we think that oh it's

We are the geopolitical superpower. You know, the dollars are strength and we've never seen it hyperinflate. And again, this could be 10 years from now, it could be 50 years from now. I don't know. But in that time... You think that's inevitable? Every fiat currency in the history of the human race has ended either in hyperinflation or the country has been conquered by another country. So I think that the pursuit of individual self-interest culminates in hyperinflation.

Just like the pursuit of individual self-interest culminates in Bitcoin becoming the dominant money. But when you say, what is the price of that? It's like, well, it's not priced in dollars anymore. Well, what about, let's say, by 2035 or something like that? Some of the predictions are very high from what I've seen. I gave you my end of year price prediction. I think it's probably as useful of a number as I could possibly give you. When you get out, and I put out price predictions previously, by the way. I said that

By the year 2035, Bitcoin would be worth $12.5 million US. However, in that world, the dollar would have lost so much buying power that that would be equivalent to like a $1 million Bitcoin today in terms of what that $1 million can buy you. It'll take $12.5 million in 2035 to buy what a million would buy you today. And how does that not just turn into another like...

a new iteration of the 1% getting more powerful and all the power just goes to the early adopters and the people that own. Now no one is possibly going to own a Bitcoin because you have to be hyper wealthy to own a Bitcoin. Yeah, you don't need to own a Bitcoin. And actually, the other thing to realize is that you don't actually care what quantity of money you own. You care about what it can purchase you. You care about the purchasing power, the buying power. You wouldn't mind having just $1 in your bank account.

if the purchasing power of $1 was, I don't know, a mansion, a yacht, a boat, all the things that you want, right? You actually wouldn't care if it's $1, $1,000, if it's $10,000. It's all about the buying power. So how it works with Bitcoin is that, yes, early adopters are benefiting by anticipating future adoption. So it's a battle of credibility.

Or it's like which of these technologies is giving me the most credible assurances that it will work in my interest over time. And so people are picking the best horse in the race essentially. And so people that are choosing Bitcoin have studied nature and history of money. I'm not saying all of them have, but people that have developed a deep conviction, you've studied the nature and history of money. You've looked at the five properties of money. You know why gold became money. You know why currency was introduced. You know why currency fails.

and then you understand how Bitcoin solves all those problems. So you're like, oh, okay, that solves that problem for me now as a savings technology and as a non-counterparty currency.

I'm now by holding Bitcoin as a savings technology, I'm not only serving my own self-interest, but I'm also anticipating that other people are going to figure this out at some point. And they're going to need to buy this in the future. Whether that's people trying to escape a hyperinflationary environment, like the poor, or could be a billionaire trying to get out of a wealth redistribution scheme that his local socialist government is putting into place. And so you're basically anticipating that there's going to be more demand for this thing in the future. And then that

contributes to your growth and purchasing power. But it's not, and this is another Peter Schiff argument, he'll say, "Oh, those early adopters are benefiting at the expense of these later adopters." Like that's not true in the fucking slightest. You're benefiting by adopting a technology early that others aren't figuring out until later. If I adopt electricity early, and my house is illuminated, and I've got all, you know, my refrigerator running, and I've got a nice TV, and you're sitting in your house with a fucking campfire,

Okay, you later adopting electricity does not mean I benefited at your expense. It means that you're going to pay more for the electricity because it's becoming wider, it's become more demanded.

electricity might be a bad example because we've decreased the price of it so much over time but you adopting electricity later than me does not mean i benefited at your expense at all i just got to enjoy the benefits earlier the same is true with bitcoin right like if i adopt it now well i'm going to get more purchasing power growth over time because i've held it longer but i've also taken more risk right there's all the risk of well will bitcoin get wiped out by black swan will it get regulated well

you know in the early days it was like will the government even allow it to happen now it's like at a point where governments can't do anything about it yeah and so risk and reward they're two sides of the same coin there's no

There's no injustice here whatsoever. And anyone trying to say that there is an injustice is just full of shit like Peter Schiff. Is there anything else that would be relevant for me to, I mean, there's other things, but we have another conversation to record. So I don't have time for that. Is there anything else that you believe would be relevant for people listening to understand any of the questions that I should ask you?

Well, I mean, what's relevant? Mainly geared towards creating financial stability within themselves because like we were talking about before, like to be, feel financially stable within yourself and financially free is a major aspect in overall health because if you're stressed out about where your next dollar is going to come from or you're going to pay rent, then, you know, your physiology will have a corresponding effect. Yeah, that's a great point. So like to truly own,

Yourself and your future, you need to have sound money, basically. And again, sound money I would describe as either physical gold. And when I say physical, I mean like gold in your hands, not a certificate that someone owes you some gold one day. That would be a promise to gold. It's like an ETF.

No ETFs, no ETFs, no gold on deposit with a bank, no custodians like bars or coins or chunks of gold in your house in a safe or buried. Or Bitcoin in self-custody and or. That gives you sovereignty over your purchasing power, over your labor life force. You go and expend your labor in the market to earn money. You want to hold that in something that no one can depreciate at will.

And so when you get that level of ownership over yourself, it's very liberating. It's extremely liberating. You can really start to do what grandma always told you, which is just earn more than you spend and save. But in this case, savings actually works, really works. It works for you. In the terms of Bitcoin, it's been doing like 200% compounded annual growth for the past 10 years. So if you dollar cost averaged...

I think it was $30 a day in Bitcoin for the last four years. Your total investment would be around $88,000 and your total current market price would be over a million. All right, so that's $30 a day for four years, total invested $88,000, current market price over a million. So you will have 12x your purchasing power.

four years That's savings that works right if you do that in dollars. Well, you're down. They're literally down now You can do it in gold. You probably flat right slight increase in gold gold gold price has gone up a little bit over the past four years So what does that do for you psychologically? I mean when you can liberate yourself from having to be so concerned financially about where your next dollars coming from and it it it

In economics, we call this lowering your time preference, or we could also say is extending your time horizon, right? Like, I don't need to sweat what's going to happen over the next few weeks or next few years, I can kick back and think about bigger things. What do I want to do? What do I want to invest in? Who? How do I want to lead my life? What, you know, what legacy do I want to create? The lowering of your time preference or the broadening of your time horizon is like,

almost the same thing as increasing your morality or your civility, right? That you start to think about the broader implications of your actions across time. And so the message I would like to get to people is like, stop thinking about Bitcoin as this abstract tool and think about it more as like a life philosophy and a network in which you, a culture, if you will, that you can plug into and

and you can actually update your own cultural programming. It's amazing how much your orientation to the world will change when you have...

purchasing power that works for you over time, that allows you to have this longer time horizon. For me, the experience is like liberating me psychologically, it's liberated my life. You know, I used to own like a bunch of different public equities and always kind of caught up in the news cycles trying to figure out what they're doing and should I buy here, sell here? And you're like, there's also this entropy in my mind about it all the time. And when I finally got into Bitcoin, it's like, sell all that shit.

Just stack stats over time and then do whatever you're interested in doing. I can study and talk to who I want to talk to. I can study what I want to study. I can live my life how I want to lead my life. That's a lot more than just changing your financial philosophy. For me, it's changed my life philosophy. And for many other people, they've had similar experiences like...

the general trend tends to be away from things that are unhealthy and short-termists towards things that are more healthy and long-termists so like people tend to stop drinking they tend to start eating healthier they tend to start starting families they tend to start going to church etc etc so there's this personal transformation element that comes with plugging yourself into bitcoin as a live philosophy

Thank you so much. Thank you, man. I really appreciate getting to, these are all questions that I've been actually really excited to ask. I appreciate you taking the time to, to get into all of it. If people want to go deeper into your world, what's a good place for people to go? Yeah. Thank you for asking great questions. Um, you can find me at what is money podcast.com, um, or Twitter is at breed love 22.

Instagram's at breedlove underscore 22. Sweet. Thank you, brother. Thank you, man. I appreciate you. Thank you all for tuning in. That's it. That's all. We'll see you next week.