04 - The Bitcoin Overture

Transcript

hello welcome to intimate discourse my name is jason

this episode the bitcoin overture was recorded in toronto april 17th 2022.

thanks for listening hello everybody um welcome to intimate

discourse uh my name is jason and i'm here with dimitri

and uh um today yeah today we're gonna mostly be talking about bitcoin uh and um

in its various i'm not really sure where uh our conversation is going to go um

well i guess we want to touch on you know what it is and uh it's hard to gauge whether

this is something that we want to um have any sort of assumption of like

prerequisites uh to listen to and i think it's best if we just kind of go in like you know people listening to this

might and probably will already know a lot of this but um we're just going to do a bit of an overview and then move from there

and um just sort of see where the conversation takes us so thanks for joining us and um how are

you doing today sir me fantastic yeah yeah you sound fantastic thank you yeah and look fantastic i can

be honest um so uh yeah i'm not sure where do you

want to start here i think um like should we go into the what is bitcoin

like you know everyone's obviously heard of it and uh well um [Music]

yeah we could start with the what is bitcoin and then how about perhaps convince me why i should really care

okay yeah so we're coming at it from a couple of different perspectives like you um

you've i you know i think you've known him about it for a while but you haven't really done much research or and you don't own

any bitcoin probably um and uh the yeah i've been i would say i've been

really into bitcoin since 2017 um which is when there was a big you know bull market thing i was actually into it

just before then incredibly i didn't profit from it i almost had to um you know uh go out of

my way not to make any money out of it and just some poor decisions uh led me to

not not make anything out of it um but uh yeah i'd heard about it before then um but i never really you know i

never minded or anything like there was like um you know i i knew people who would mind

like you know the seti or not mine but they would use they would run programs to search for

you know extraterrestrial life or crunch prime numbers for like you know nasa or whoever it is but use their

computing power for that but i don't i don't think i even knew anybody who mined bitcoin and um well if i did maybe

our our mutual friend from university might have yeah i don't know why i didn't get into it because i heard about

it early um i love technology always been into technology i love digital uh banking i use it all the time

uh yeah i even use primarily tangerine which here in canada is canada's only direct

banking like they have no physical locations and i feel totally secure with that and you know even before they were

backed by scotiabank you know when they were just from the netherlands i believe yeah i've been using this in the 90s to

be quite honest yeah and i just for something about bitcoin was sort of this wall mental wall

like what is this how come there's no physical representation whatsoever yeah

like a building that if i have a problem i can walk into and say please help me

yeah i think that might have been the hurdle that just uh you know because money's hard to come by so you

definitely want to take a chance and of course risk and reward the more risk the more reward but

for this for some reason and i was living abroad too for about a decade i didn't have time to really research this

thoroughly and by the time i got around to it it kind of felt like the boat had passed

yeah it felt in 2017 funny enough when i first started getting into it and i um a

friend of mine sort of well we both sort of mutually got into ethereum at the same time and ethereum was like trading at 11 at that point and um i i started i

was i looked at bitcoin and i was like oh it was like 500 bucks or something i was like there's no i mean i've lost i've

missed the boat on that one like in terms of investment um so i started i was like you know what i'm going to wait

i'm going to do this right and not like take out a loan or anything i'll just save money and i'll start putting money into ethereum and then started going up

and going up and finally was like you know 37.42 i'm like i basically missed the boat on this now too um so i'm like

you know what though i had that you know i just had like fomo so i was just like i started buying it i had quite a bit of

ethereum at one point and um and then it started going up and um um walking into

the absolute tragedy of what happened throughout my life in that year but it was i suffice to say i i did have a lot

of ethereum and i even got into bitcoin and then it just the um i started getting a little too clever with my

trading and clever i'm using ironically uh and and it just i just um i lost uh

you know i lost everything that i put into it um and uh and that's not just me trying to be coy and having uh good

opsec i'm just i i legitimately just you know i didn't lose everything but but most of what i had you know i still look

back and it just pains me and the only solace i get out of that is i there's a lot of other people i know that

um well you know from forums and stuff like that that also did the same thing and i think that that's just really what

trading in general is can i ask a personal question did you go negative or just close to negative

i well i went negative i mean i i did you know put money in that never came back like for sure well

not a little bit i just yeah that's a lot yeah sometimes i just you know education costs money to university

these days so i'm like well it's a semester of school i learned something yeah you know that's why i used to say that to uh you know my friend when we

were training or just constantly lose and i would always say i'm learning something

something something to put into the old uh learning book and it was like you know joke about it being so like this

mighty tome that was so thick because uh it just accumulated so many losses but anyway

that's really one side of it the whole trading thing is like i i think you know i mean certainly that's i could

talk about that all day because it i still i find it interesting and it's uh it's fun to do i i think i've learned a

lot as a trader i mean i don't obviously i don't do it professionally but i do like on the side i like to trade a little bit but it's much smaller amounts

now and but i but it's a separate thing from really what bitcoin is it should never

um i think it is a profound um shift in how

society can deal with um value and uh i think that that's really the critical thing not to mention

the technologies that are emerging from it um like the whole idea the blockchain like the this

monumentally genius idea of um having decentralized consensus which is um

you know there's certain ideas that come along that are just transforming to society and it's like how did nobody ever think of this before and uh well

bitcoin is one of them um and uh yeah uh you you can you can see how um

how we'll benefit as a society from it and we can see how

i i mean i think it's incredibly important in terms of almost as people taking back uh financial ownership from

um you know governments that have been i think fairly careless with um with money um

i'm not to the same extent that i was in 2017 but fairly careless with uh the people's

money to the point where we have you know outrageous debt uh sort of across the board and um i think this is i think

this is sort of a chance to um if it's done right and and bitcoin is

sort of rolled out properly i i don't i wouldn't say it's inevitable but i do think that

if we if we play our cards right this could be a really solid financial um basis uh for the future of would it

would it remind you of in human evolution of times like where we were

you know pre-agricultural phase where we were hunters and gatherers and now you're

just mining mining and gatherers let's say uh bitcoin and keeping it instant to

yourself with no institutions and it's as secure as you can look after

it or something like that yeah like i think it's i think it really autonomous humanity i think that we've

gotten so used to the government taking care of us um in many aspects of our life that it's a strange thing for a lot

of people and i think it's maybe a bit of a barrier at this point anyway um because the onus really is on you

like it really is the fact that you're you know as somebody who buys bitcoin you're you've got to take care of that

bitcoin like you have to make sure that you store it securely you're responsible for that security and i mean you know it

can be intimidating when you start out like um you just have to sort of you have to know what you're doing to some extent i mean you could you still sort

of proxy it like you can save it um you know in an etf or you can save it in some way there's still some oversight

but it's um like sort of vicariously but you can't if you want to actually own bitcoin you have to really take your own

you have to have your own keys basically so why don't we start with what is bitcoin exactly yeah yeah i can start to like

punch at this back a little bit when i figure what's going on here because again i'm fascinated

i love technology i really can't believe why i'm not involved with this

at all i've never even downloaded an app to look into it or whatever and something in my instinct says this

is the future i'm not quite sure if it's this iteration of it but um

i think i represent a large portion of humanity who's really curious but just hasn't made that step to put their first

dollar in there right right and yeah and it is um um yeah

it's difficult to it's a bit of a barrier it's it's technologically complicated but it's it

can be i always think of it like you can sort of get out of it whatever you want if you just want to own some bitcoin it's

easy to buy bitcoin um you know you can go to buy it through coinbase or whatever i think there's some canadian

you know there's various exchanges that you can actually you know just basically deposit

money then you get some bitcoin in return and then you can store that on a wallet there are how to's on wallets all

of which i can explain but just to but you can you can also get a little more into it so you're actually

doing what you should do with bitcoin which is kind of owning it yourself protecting it yourself and uh and also

i'll sort of step through a bit of the how to i have a lot of questions i can think of to sort of um

conceptualize it would be to thinking of instead of thinking about bitcoin as a

thing think of the fact that you would have an account and the account can be like your home address so say you have one home

you live in that one home the question would be how much bitcoin do you have in that home um

the home in this sense is sort of an address so like a home address you can have if you if i want to if you wanted

to buy something from me uh sorry if i wanted to buy something from you and um you have some service or

whatever that i'm buying from you and you say okay that's uh you know x number of bitcoin

and uh usually these days it's a fraction because one bitcoin is a lot of money so it's like i mean if i'm buying

like you know lamborghinis from you or something you're like oh it's two bitcoin um but it's uh

so i would um then send that to your address so i would just it's like as if i were to

mail a letter to your home and that letter the fact that you have that at your home that's your bitcoin so you

have that much in in bitcoin now the rest of the world that is in the

bitcoin network knows that that's your bitcoin and they know it because it's associated with your home address so as

long as you have that address um as long as you're living in that home

that's your bitcoin but they can't tell who i am personally or what i purchased

they can't they they're they can't in in a uh practical sense but they they could uh sort of infer it if you were to you

know if if you're um so they so you have an address and that's where your bitcoin is and you

could say that if it's a house you have the keys to that house you're the only one that has the keys to that house so

as long as you keep the keys safe you'll always have that bitcoin now if you want to

send that bitcoin to somebody else um you know in terms of anonymity which which is what you're getting at is um

you could say well uh if you sent one bitcoin to um

you know if every morning you bought uh a coffee at tim hortons with bitcoin then and it was at a certain location

and if somebody was trying to infer who owned that house like that address they could say

okay he probably lives around here because this person always goes there and also they bought that same address

bought uh something else somewhere else they're triangulating yeah so you can eventually kind of deduce who owns it if

you're if you really wanted to and i think that's how like governments might be able to track it however the beauty of it is there are i wouldn't say an

infinite but there's a lot of addresses that you could potentially do so you could have your home address and be like okay well i have this much money here i

have this much bitcoin here and uh but i want to have a second house that i use

just for like purchases um you know just when i'm buying weapons or something

uh so you have a second that with that second address then you can just do those unmanned starbucks on the man's ak-47 right right you can so you can use

different houses or different addresses for different um things so so it becomes versatile that's when i say like it can

sort of be what you want it to be like the more you learn about it the more you kind of learn all the things that are possible uh

within wouldn't it be to the advantage to be almost like a vpn where you just have no idea use scrambles yeah you know so you

could do that um but the thing is is that address is still going to be associated so like if you were just buying things online and you wanted to

hide like you know your ip address or whatever you could actually vpn somewhere buy whatever with bitcoin

but that address so this is the thing with bitcoin which is kind of remarkable there's no

privacy in the sense of um like i can all like anybody that's anybody that

examines it that looks on like a an explorer can always see every transaction it's a transparent ledger

not only not only is it um like not only is that like that's a feature like the fact that it's

transparent is why it works because like um part of the blockchain is that you're

able to um see every transaction like you have this is incredible so it's actually really

private but completely transparent it's private because nobody knows which address so let me let me back up just a

little bit just so it's um i'll just talk about addressing and so let me talk a little bit about private uh and public

key cryptography so and i'm gonna do this real simple it it took me a long time like i work sort of in

this industry a little bit so like but i so i knew i knew about it but i for to

intuitively understand it has always been something that i couldn't wrap my head around and then i there was uh this

youtuber um who did this video and kind of analogized it with color

and it was the thing that kind of clicked it made it click with me but so i'll sort of try to explain this quickly so the idea of

public and private key so the problem with the internet is like how do you get for banking like how do you how do you

securely log into a bank site right you go to your https colon whatever and you

know how do you make that communication private because you're you don't know like if you're transmitting information to

somebody else you have to have some way to agree upon like a secret code or something so it's encrypted right like you have to have encryption of some kind

um you know back in the old days they used to have like the caesar cipher where they would like um you know you would

have a message like caesar would send to his generals like a message and it would be like the words you know you would spell a

sentence like let's let's invade like i don't know pompey today or whatever i

guess you wouldn't some other let's invade gaul today and uh let's cross the rubicon today

and uh we're gonna we're gonna cross the rubicon at 5 p.m or whenever it happened and um but all every letter would be

shifted five spaces over so him and the general would have to have agreed beforehand that okay

i'm going to send you this letter whatever the message is it's going to be sort of encrypted

so you won't be able to actually read it the only the key to it though is if you shift every character over five letters

then you'll get the message and it'll make sense to you so as long as they know that key as long as they both know that it's five then they can figure out

what the message is so encryption you know obviously has you know changed a lot since uh caesar's time but the

principles are sort of the same you still need to have some way of transmitting a secret key to the other person so that

the other person knows what this what the um yeah you know what the key is like so the question becomes how do you

how do you do that over the public internet and the answer is there's something called

asynchronous encryption and what you have with that is this public private

key system whereby you have

a public key every every key pair has a public and a private key the public key is something that you offer so if um if

i'm going to log on to your website i know what your public key is because it's public to everyone you're the only

one who knows what the private key is and on my side i have a private key and i have a public

key as well it's the same same you know thing on my side like i know what the private key is but nobody else

does you have to keep the private key private the beauty of private and public key

cryptography is that those two keys are always linked so that for example if i want to send you a message

i would sign the message with my private key send it to you and you would be able to decrypt it with

my public key but you could never send me a message that used my private key

like you could never sort of pretend to be me you would have to have the private key which i would have so intuitively to

grasp that is is kind of difficult like it's it's uh based on numbers and they use like um

um uh modular arithmetic like it's like you know taking the modulus of something or

whatever but um the bottom line is it's um [Music] those two

the private and the public key are linked and so this is critical for like security on the internet and and in

bitcoin um and i you know i won't go down that like you know it's a whole rabbit hole but that's the principle is

that as long as you have you have a private key that is just yours and a public key that can be to everyone and

you can sign anything with that private key that says this is mine and everybody can verify that by saying

it must be his because the public key matches how does this apply to bitcoin uh this public private key cryptography

um it's the same principle like you have your home address and everybody knows your home address like you want i want

to send you some bitcoin i know what that is that's your public key um and if you but if you want to send

bitcoin to somebody you have to use the key like the key to your house we'll call it that's your private key and you have to sign it with

that and that you're then able to um use that to to

make your tren basically people can verify that that is sent by you and you alone and that's why

you're able to transfer the bitcoin nobody else can so it all relies on public uh public private key

cryptography and uh that trick was really leveraged by like satoshi nakamoto uh to to develop the

first white paper for bitcoin or the white paper for bitcoin has anyone really breached this sort of

no that's not a shake of sorts yet so yeah like so there are more

um aspects to it all but um yeah i mean if anyone ever did break this

cryptography like it would be um the end of modern like technology so i

mean there are um uh using so like um yeah like everything

uses it online now like every you know https anything is is using the same underpinnings of this

yeah so it's no less secure than what we're already doing no less secure than we're already doing and the reason that this all works is

because the numbers that are being used to make these to develop these uh key pairs are so large that um

like you know it's been compared to i don't know the exact amount but it's like around like the number of atoms in

the universe is the number of key pairs there can be so you can always say like you could sit here and be like okay i'm gonna keep

because you can guess these keys right like it can be like i want to just sit there on my computer and keep guessing

just say like use a private key and keep checking to see if there's like any any bitcoin stored in this account and you

can keep doing it but it's like um at least with our computing power now like infeasible that

you would ever find anything statistically so like you you could technically have all the oxygen in the room just congregate

into one corner and you just choked to death right it's just so infeasible that it wouldn't happen that's awesome

yeah so like um yeah it's pretty i mean it's a pretty revolutionary idea

and it's it's beautiful like i mean uh and and you know i'll tell you more

about the proof of work and stuff like that like it's it's the way it was designed to

achieve this decentralized consensus and um you know i don't know if i should go

there next or if you uh no no you're explaining what it is but like okay that's the encryption sort of

safety net at least one up probably have many many elements to it but so

do these bitcoins like reside on my phone or in my wallet or in some server

somewhere or like how do they actually where do they live right yeah good question like it and you

know because there's always stories of people trying to rob a bitcoin atm where are they robbing them from yeah yeah um

so there's yeah there's no physical coin and um i i just so it's just a

decentralized ledger really is what it is so what did it the what the i'm going to

take even further step back and just just use the term blockchain so what the blockchain is in general is a series of

transactions so like you have your home address i have my home address you send some bitcoin to me

that's recorded as a transaction in one block on the blockchain there's usually a bunch of transactions like recorded in

the blockchain in each block um and then once that's complete

um another block goes below it and that block will use the hash

of the block ahead of it along with a couple of other things so it's so or

sorry that's how it that's how the second block can kind of prove that the first block existed so

um but all this data just just really step back really simple so

these are transactions that are being made between devices globally but that must take up

some like hard drive space or something are there hard drives of this and like one day do we have to add more storage

capacity because i can't imagine if these are all micro transactions being recorded somewhere eventually as small

as they are individually they will run out of space like who who's updating the uh

storage capacities of this sort of thing yeah so a network another round yeah another good question like so the

every the the things that make bitcoin run are nodes and it's a node is just like you

know i would have a computer and i would run a bitcoin node and the the simplest kind of this is the um

sort of a full node which would be you know i boot up my computer i'd run this you know the

whatever bitcoin core program and it would download the entire blockchain from other nodes that has have this

stored and you're right it does take up hard drive space and i don't know what it's at now it would download every single

transaction ever made um and uh onto your hard drive so so it does get big

and you have to on your own hard drive you would have stored every transaction that's been made globally or personally

globally so i mean there's different incarnations of this like you can have a light version of that like there's a

light client that doesn't necessarily do all of that but if you want the full the full thing the full client like

it would be it would have all of them so you can always properly reference and is this then what you kind of call like your transparent ledger is that the

ledger of sorts that you're downloading that's the ledger yeah and that's all it is so like so for example if i wanted to check your

address and see how much bitcoin you have i would go literally well i wouldn't but the program would go

through every single transaction add up all the outputs um well it add up everything

that all the bitcoin you had coming to you and it would subtract everything that you had already sent and that number the

final number is how much bitcoin you have in debits yeah and it's just this is completely accurate you wouldn't know

that unless i gave you my bitcoin number well i wouldn't right like i wouldn't know when i when i say you i don't mean

you i mean like your address right but your address is public so if i if i so you live attached to my name just some

random series correct yeah how many numbers are in that number uh your address is usually an abstraction from

what the actual public key is but it's but whatever the case it's like yeah you're talking about like 256 characters

or something like that um probably less you know i'm not uh i can't remember exactly but it's

usually the it's usually like a you know zero i guess my my lame question is my

key if i have it even if it's 256 characters written down or gets stolen off my hard drive can somebody do any

damage to me because they have my my key so if you so

the best way to think of this so like i said it's in your address is sort of a bit of an abstraction but you can just

think of it like your public key so when you think of that public private key thing so if they have your public key

they can't do anything because that's your public key is yeah open uh if they have your private key yeah they they can just take your

that's it's whoever owns the keys owns you have to keep your private key safe

correct that's why when you like a lot of these crypto exchanges like you hear about them being uh like quadriga was

one in canada where i don't know if you know this story like the guy um what's his name there's actually a

netflix documentary on him now we and i used to this is where i used to put my deposit in my bitcoin when i was changing canadian dollars to bitcoin um

yeah quadruga and it was uh god i can't remember the guy's name but he um yeah

he like so apparently he was it was one guy running the exchange he had access to all the private keys on the exchange

so when i deposit money like just like you know 100 bucks or whatever to get bitcoin um

i get you know bitcoin back on the exchange in my account but i don't control the keys to that because it's not like a private

like i'm just yeah going through him so but apparently the guy like was

after the 2017 bull run like there was a big 2018 was a big bear market and he just he was gambling with all these

people's different bitcoin and until the point where he finally well a lot of people are theorizing he faked his own

death but he went to india and died at like 35 or whatever he was of uh crohn's

disease and um but there's a baby i know it's quite a story because it's

like your private keys were kept in their right company let's say yeah if someone

can physically break into your house or something and steal your key are you in danger then so like you can have there's

different ways to store your keys so you have um like hard wallets or um like cold storage which can be

uh you know like ledger is one company that makes them and what it is is like you just get this thing looks like a

little usb stick i actually should have brought one because it's um i i meant to but i didn't but like it just looks like

a usb stick and the keys are on the stick now so if you have the stick there's still a

passcode that you have to enter to do that and there's a seed which will be a

series of words that can reconstitute that if you lose it but the bottom line is um as long as you hold as long as you

keep that safe and keep your seed words safe um that's you know you'll keep your your keys so

this really is up to you it is and this is where the problem comes because i think for bitcoin to be

really mainstream uh there needs to be a little more like it

um i don't think that the public is ready for that kind of financial responsibility you know like to lose to

lose like you know a hundred thousand dollars in crypto is a big loss uh for a

lot of people and like um i mean they can make you they can grab you and you know torture you like

in some 80s movie and make you spit up the password for anything and yeah yeah you know that kind of thing there's ways

to mitigate that as well with what is um you know called because you don't know necessarily like

um you know you could you could do that and i could say like well i don't have any money on there and they'd be like okay

look here here's my account and you it's like you would have the hidden account that would have the small amount of money and then you would have your

secret account which they wouldn't be able to know so it's there's there are sort of ways to mitigate that as well but yeah

i think more a more dangerous thing is that people would just forget what their seed was or they

would write it down and lose the paper or like so it's um it becomes like you really have to take it seriously like i

don't think we're used to taking something microchips implanted in our bodies and that part of our memory that keeps that

gets deleted yeah yeah well that's the thing right right master comes in and you start thinking

about um it's kind of like what we were saying about the kova thing with the how the you know you see the syringe and

here vaccine is like well vaccines are you know fine they've been doing it for years but it's like a completely different thing like it's like you see

this thing it looks like a usb stick it's like you know if i lose a big deal what i'll still get reimbursed from somewhere but it's like no although

that's that's it like if you lose that you're uh you're done for so it's um it's a big responsibility so it is

yeah it is talking about you know the personal responsibility it's like the top

and i think that's what's so great about it is like you know really we you take you know you kind of can almost make an

alignment between um you know a lot of stuff like jordan peterson talks about and like a lot of this kind of

i almost want to say like a new movement toward people being more uh responsible for themselves um almost

like this spartan kind of uh outlook that is emerging that's why i went back to hunter gatherer like you're

on your own yeah there's no there's no uh governmental infrastructure around you no roads no

pathways no roman roads you know you're just on your own in the woods with your usb stick yeah and i i mean that sounds

lovely and for people that i that are really big um sort of libertarian minded i think that

that sounds like a utopia but i don't think that mainstream

i don't think the mainstream is ready for that i don't think that we've been conditioned to that and i think it's almost gonna take generations before

um that becomes uh something that everybody's doing on a daily basis this could become so

important to your your um financial well-being obviously in which it you know in turn is your life

and then people will be asking greatly like oh i need this microchip implanted into me then with the usb code to this

yeah i don't want to you know i want it on my person wherever i go all the time because this is my life this is the

money for my kids my mortgage everything else sure please interesting put it in my arm i don't want to lose this right

yeah that's another way i guess if they don't get you the one way they'll get you the other one it's like you know we'll get the libertarians

i don't like the microchip but i think i'm liking this one yeah yeah you know why it's funny i've never even thought about that before but that's a good

point well it's super important to you so you want it on your person you don't want to keep where did i leave it i told my wife this my code that i got dementia

i remember my numbers and all the other things that could break down along the way one time i um i

forgot the password to something like i don't know if you have like i i keep a lot of my stuff in encrypted files but

it's like um and it's just so i've been doing it for years but like one time i forgot i could not think of the password

to something and it was it was like a true crypt they used to have truecrypt i don't think they make it anymore but

like um it was like you you just you wouldn't be able to there was no hacking it like it was like

either i would if i it was all and i always knew it if i forgot the password this would be like lost so and i had so

many things on there like pictures and everything and i was like i couldn't remember the password and i was like it was

like probably i don't think i've ever felt worse in my life than than that moment because it

was like i knew it was so important to me the stuff that it was on your hand at that moment yeah i mean i yeah i would have done

anything at that moment i was like i can't lose this stuff like i you know and um so sometimes yeah it's like uh

it like the importance level does hit like there's no there's no um um there's

nobody you can run to right so that's one of the problems with bitcoin is uh is that um

it's like you know it's the problem but it's also a feature so yeah okay so yeah i'm really starting to

understand better now what what is bitcoin on a on a cryptic you know encryption sort of

level but also like what does this practically mean and how i'm going to live my life with this currency

so it's all up to me i need to store that usb stick have the things memorized

you know um probably written down in some little paper somewhere that's just hidden in the house or several little

papers that i'll string together and you know creates a code you know yeah yeah you can have your own little

like spin on how you're storing those too like so it yeah and the amount of personal

responsibility so in its in current iteration it really isn't for everybody

yeah i don't think so i mean i know like i think some bitcoin maximalists will say that

it is and you know it's really just a question of weeding out the people that excuse me so people who truly want to

take responsibility for their own you know we don't let someone drink in the states until they're 21 or you know drive a car you know 16. there's got to

be some sort of uh you know you got to get your tested for your um your driver's driving abilities after the age

of 80 all the time because you don't know if you can still do it like there's going to be like some cognitive you know like um capabilities

on you that you have to look after this yeah but there's no regulation around it so it really is just like do you think

you can handle this power or not yeah it's it's yeah it's pretty great um but yeah pretty scary like uh and who knows

you know because now of course we have the um um the government issued you know they they're starting to make

these um central bank um i for i forget the accuracy a central bank digital currency

yeah cbdc okay yeah good um so yeah and a lot of these uh governments are

starting to make these so this is going to be the competition and you know while certainly bitcoin is something

that i would uh regard as a much preferable it's you know i never really got into the whole

decentralized consensus what's involved with that but like um there's much more benefit uh to bitcoin

as a as a currency or as a store of value as opposed to a government-issued one not to mention the surveillance and

um everything else that can be done with the government-issued ones for sure but that being said you do have the convenience of the government issued

ones you know they can you know write you a you know you want to get your curb check or whatever or your um you know

your basic income they can just send it to your wallet like just done like that um some checks and balances a physical

location somewhere you can launch your grievance if something happens exactly yeah there's a lot of recourse and everything like that but um and with

bitcoin right now you don't really have that like i imagine bitcoin insurance funds and things like that will probably

become you know more more prominent do they do they actually can you buy insurance like you know

where to lose your bitcoin i got it's all right i got life insurance and bitcoin insurance up to how much did you get your insurance for bitcoin i'm doing

100 grand really i don't know if that is a thing yet but i think if it isn't uh it's i don't think it's

not really that big but i believe it would will evolve to be because you have to hedge right like you

can't have all your eggs in one uh i think the insurance might it's a very i've never even heard of such a concept

for this but i think it would because if it's as safe as you know as you're saying with the digital currency why not then it's

really uh i don't want to say a safe bet but it's something insurance companies are going to want to get involved with

yeah okay for a certain premium we know we can cover our losses because it's really unlikely anyone's going to lose their own personal key and money and

whatnot yeah but then you have to depend on like when an insurance company would have to i mean it's such a new thing i

think foreign purpose and you got to prove your luck yeah exactly it would get it would get messy

wow and there's such a new field that i don't think that i mean still new you know it's it's really it's only a little

over 10 what is it like 12 or 13. it really is like raw technology just launched out there you know

the technological part has been obviously thought through but how do we live with this technological part

you know from all around you know how to get it stored keep it insure it spend it

everyone's still grappling with it like um states uh and people even people that

have been in the field for a while are still trying to figure things out and like i mean the whole um the word the

concern about how i mean the proof of work algorithm uh

in bitcoin i think maybe i should i mean there's a lot there's a lot to be said about how much uh greenhouse gases

this produces right there's some big criticism of bitcoin um and a lot of people are trying to figure out

solutions around that so it's it's constantly evolving and it's just very fat moving very fast

but i think i should maybe quickly explain the the proof of work algorithm because what makes it so

um [Music] it's what makes the whole thing work like uh

the idea of um so this whole idea of a blockchain which is a technology that's now being used you know in all kinds of

things and you know just think of it like um it's almost like um a notary remember like no notary publix well they

still exist but i know blockchain is being used on like different uh competitors to youtube like

rumble and odyssey yeah your videos will never be taken down because they're in the blockchain right right so it's like

a permanent record like the more blocks that exist on top of so if you think of literally like a

chain of blocks um it's better to think of it vertically actually because you think of the ones on the bottom

actually there's a really good analogy i don't want to sort of steal somebody's analogy it's like um

anthopolis is a speaks about bitcoin he's written books about bitcoin and everything but like he

describes it as a glacier and like you know at the very top of the glacier you might have a winter or whatever so like

you might get a little bit of rain you might get like some snow and it might add to the glacier it might take away you might get it completely wiped away

um but it like the surface layer anything could happen but the further you go down the glacier the more permanent that stuff is

right like so you get like you know and at the very bottom you can even look at the the ice like in really old glaciers

and be like oh so this is what happened in like 2000 bc or whatever um it's sort of like they're not 2000 bc i don't know

whenever ice ages happen it's like my geological time is all off but um

but it's the same thing with the blockchains like the ones that are the very early blocks are you know immutable like you can't you

can't change them and in fact even like it's usually like six blocks so every ten minutes roughly there's a new block

that's added to the bitcoin blockchain um other blockchains may differ um but

with the bitcoin blockchain it's every 10 minutes so that means that every 10 minutes some

some bitcoin miner and this is running special software to mine bitcoin

um it has solved a computational puzzle has proven to the world that it has

solved this puzzle and their block which means all the transactions that they've

included in there is the official next block that goes into the blockchain

so you know there's other like so that means that all the nodes all these bitcoin nodes in this

decentralized network have all agreed that this block is going to be the next one this guy solved the puzzle because

it takes a lot of computing power to solve that puzzle um but it doesn't take very much

computing power to verify that the puzzle is correct uh uses like um hashing technology so like

um or hashing algorithms so and this would be a single individual doing this

so what usually happens like in theory that would be what it would be it is actually one b well it is one it

is one computer that is solving that problem that only one thing can solve the problem but um what happens is these

these people join what are called mining pools so they all it's all statistics right so eventually

like it's really hard if it was just me sitting here on my laptop like in theory i could run you know a mining program on

my laptop and keep mining away and there's like maybe a one in like

uh i don't know i can't think of a really big number like google tillian like i don't know like

just a really really slim microscopic uh chance that i would ever

uh actually be the guy who next built the block so if you have but you're if you're in a pool and you're running

specialized equipment you know you use asic mining chips and stuff like that but like if you

um are part of a pool the pool as a group maybe there's like i don't know

you know a thousand miners in a pool for example um whenever any of them uh solves it it

just kind of goes to the pool fund and then roughly you know every once in a while you'll be getting this small

they sort of average out how often they're um they're going to achieve the bitcoin

reward which is you know every time the block is this stuff's getting away from me i know i know i i it's hard it's hard

because there's so much to it and i'm uh let's just say let's just say this proof-of-work algorithm that that

happens among the miners we said every 10 minutes every 10 minutes a new block is added to the blockchain

but oh added but these are people that have started from years ago trying to solve that one block nope every 10

minutes a new puzzle is presented so it's it's a it's a puzzle each time and

it creates this puzzle to be presented the puzzle is all it is is it it gets into the weeds right so it's

hard to like so like this puzzle is um it's a hash of so a hash is you take a

bunch of information so say you want to say you had a book and you wanted to you're like how can i

represent this book uh to be a 256 bit number like i just want it to be

256 bits so you there's an algorithm that will do that and it'll be like this will always

be for this book this will always represent this book in 256 stages so for each

object or collection of things there will always be a 256 bit

representation of that and it's always the same um but if you change one word or one

letter or one punctuation point in that it's a completely different 256 so that's hashing yeah so

that is um that's what's happening here with this puzzle is you're basically

you have your you have your um information uh that you want to add and you have your book or whatever and

you're just changing one thing each time and what your the goal is is to get the first eight or seven or six digits of

that hash to be zero zero zero zero zero zero so it's really hard to do because

it's very hard this randomly to come up with that many zeros in a row but you have so many people doing it so quickly

that like eventually it in on average it's always 10 minutes that's the amount of time way too

complicated for me all right yeah i know i'm saying it and i hear that does this computation this riddle come

out from some centralized source so it's satoshi they're going check this

one out i said it on his an olympus he died and he just set off in perpetuity

some sort of like star trek like computer that every 10 minutes is kicking out yeah it's like that thing in lost where you have to reset it yeah

like like let's stay away from the numbers and the number of numbers yeah the number of the

numbers of the numbers and just like the simple concepts so a riddle comes out a digital riddle yeah

and it gets solved every 10 minutes yeah so maybe riddle isn't the best thing because it's always the same thing it's

like i get the metaphor though yeah so within the protocol itself is built we

will you know for example every at the beginning of every new block

somebody has to figure out a number that has seven zeros ahead of it so everybody just keeps hashing

things until somebody finds that number so the reason they can make that be 10

minutes um on average because you know there's always new miners coming in or miners

dropping is that there it's called a difficulty adjustment so that will change from time to time but you can just think of it

that 10 minutes 10 minutes is the base that's built into the code so it's always trying to aim for that

um but again where is that where's that riddle is it just is there some centralized software kicking this off or

is it the combination of everybody's computers well it's built into the code so it's always saying like i i i forget

exactly what it is but it's saying we want you to try hashing the last block for example

uh plus this uh new information hash this and when you hit seven zeros

you know in a row but is there a centralized software that's doing this okay

so like let's say everyone just stops mining tomorrow is there still a like individually is there still a central

computer that's saying well if you want to mine please join onto my network this is my bbs and i'm mr bitcoin so there's

clients the the reference client is bitcoin core okay so this is a thing that's maintained by

developers there's you can you can have your own clients that are based on this and these are like backups when you say

developers because there's different people like one went down there's another developer yeah oh yeah there's

there's a lot of people uh developing it um and i think that's what distinguishes it from other like crypto is that there's

the sort of the best developers uh in the world in crypto are developing stuff with bitcoin uh bitcoin core but like

there's other um uh you know you can have another client that's based on this and but the

the only thing that's important is that it's based on the bitcoin protocol so it's like bitcoin core is sort of the reference

for the bitcoin protocol okay so yeah and you know i like i'm not an expert either like i'm not a developer

i'm just so this i could be off on some of this stuff but that's basically it's just the more we talk about it the more

intangible it becomes and i guess i'm looking for the tangible yeah i knew this was going to be hard i

you know and i i don't i tend to almost it's where people lose it it's like just show me a main computer or a main guy

like when you say satoshi you're like okay there's a guy and then you say multiple universities there's a

university that's running this computer and if that goes down then another university is running a computer but

that's kind of what it is right like there are it's that's the idea is that it's decentralized so you don't have one

person or one server you have a bunch of people running the nodes so if somebody shot an epc electronic pulse cannon on

earth would it all just go down on earth yes i know i can get the concept like you'd

have to like 50 of the machines or something like that and then okay it all crumbles down or something like

that well i mean as long as you had some machines that have had a copy of the blockchain but i mean what that would do to the currency because you know part of

the faith in bitcoin is because there are so many you know copies that are running this and the blockchain has gone

built for so long now like um you know if you if you literally took out you know if only three people had copies of

it i think people you know the currency itself would go down so this is the interesting thing so like what if like what is going to go full like sci-fi

like let's say the the sun shoots off some solar flare something of that nature something

extraterrestrial happens yeah and cuts the uh the power to the earth for 24 hours the

whole globe does do people is there these are backed on people's hard driving keys so that up it goes running again well they have

ups's jim i guess but yeah but for how long you

know yeah um no that's true there are uh like i mean

it's kind of like anything though right in your hands you've got currency it's backed by the government so as long as there's a standing government of humans

something can get back up running again but these if they're just so they really i guess they are like gold because they're just existing on um

uh computer hard drives around the world so they're as tangible as

well i mean what percentage of our money that we use on a daily basis today is actually digital versus cash

probably overwhelmingly digital yeah and the global currency supplies um yeah in theory you could uh you know

if you wiped out i mean while in theory you could think you don't even really need technology um

i mean you could well you do need technology to make this effective but like your your um bitcoin

address you can just you can sort of develop it out of thin air you don't need technology to do it

and if you still as long as you have the private key which you can memorize if you want you can memorize the seed to

the private key or even if you're a you know mathematical prodigy you can maybe memorize the whole key but like

or you can write it down on a physical pen and paper so you can always sort of reference that

and that can be you know but if there's no you know if everything else has been destroyed by an emp like

you know globally then then it sort of i guess doesn't matter like you can still say like yeah but this is my address and

it'll be like well we can't even run the software so like i'm good for you like

um but i mean that's sort of getting into i mean you could also i mean it's a much more likely thing would be like

well what if uh you know people just lost faith in the us dollar because there's no you know like i mean yeah yeah

yeah i guess i guess we sort of have bigger problems i think yeah like for sure um yeah i guess i'm just

i'm starting to understand as you're explaining it the uh the uh

the brick and mortar um backup systems of this sort of what

seems to be very intangible system you know what and i feel like i'm doing it such a disservice because i don't feel

like i'm explaining it concisely because the truth is you really don't need to know

much about it like hardware wallets are becoming more intuitive and you don't need really that much expertise you just

have to sort of become second nature after a while yeah yeah and i think that it's uh you know i you don't necessarily

need to know why it works right like concerns my father will look at my iphone and see me tap you know uh to buy

a sandwich somewhere and just think that's magic okay right like nothing passed from your hand to their hand to

get the money what happens if you lose your phone like that's how he's gonna approach it in a very intangible concept for sure yeah

and that's how i'm approaching this a little bit like whoa i feel like the grandpa here like how do i get wrap my

hands around this currency that i can't touch or feel yeah like um well there are also

um you know a lot of these things are best visualized like uh there's good youtube videos that would explain it but it is

again you don't like i find it interesting and i do think that if you really want to understand why it's

important that it's you know um technically understanding it is gonna do

you a lot of good um but you don't have to like you can also just understand that it's like you know if

you take it if you take my word for it that private public key cryptography is you know uncrackable and you know as

long as you have your keys your private keys you're fine then you don't really need to worry about um

sort of the nuts and bolts um yeah i just think you know what would get this off the ground

if uh some company government whatever came around just simply said here's the app

here's your first fraction of a coin you now have one

well that's sort of what el salvador did right like um because it would feel more real at that moment you know yeah

just like i got one i don't know how did i get this one can i use it now yeah i want more how do i do this you know

until you have that one first step it just seems like that that wall is big for the average person that hump yeah to

get over you need it's like you need the financial incentive to want to learn about it and just to see it show up like

you know it's like i don't know when your first email landed 25 years ago wow someone just actually wrote me from the

other side of the world and lands on my screen how did that happen right the um uh

they actually have so when a new so for example like when a new crypto sort of

drops like somebody's like i you know and there's so much so many scams out there like i you know um and i think

there are some viable like you know a lot of people who are you know it's called bitcoin

maximalist people who just sort of think bitcoin is the one thing and everything else is called a coin

um but it's i think there are some good ideas out there i think ethereum is a good idea like i don't i don't know

enough about it technically but like the idea of smart contracts and um uh like

there are interesting things that you can do like you read some of these white papers and it's like oh that seems like a good idea like decentralized storage

like decentral like there's a lot of things that make sense that would you can see how it would evolve into a

practical you know a big a big um a new way of doing something right i think i'm

understanding what bitcoin is better yeah yeah so so anyway but i was

a lot of times the the incentive to use these new coins they'll do what's called an airdrop and it's like as long as you're on for example the if you have

any ethereum you will then get so if you have two ethereum you'll then have two of this new coin as well so you're like

okay i've got two ethereum and i just got suddenly got this two new coin which maybe has no value right now but it

makes the it generally makes the value go up and you're like like you just said like okay what can i do with this new

thing and it incentivizes you to sort of learn more about it yeah even because like even on a

computer screen it feels more tangible than just talking about it yeah because you guys like this is mine

i actually have this for sure maybe i should have brought in i mean it's not a visual podcast either so it wouldn't

really benefit our listeners but like you know to see you know you put in your ledger and you see how much you have and

you see it syncing with a blockchain and everything you're like oh okay cool like that's something's happening the wheels are turning yeah

cool those humans were very dependent on like something physical like it's hard you start getting uh yeah otherwise it's

just words in the sky like what what's going on here yeah yeah divine timing of sorts as we're as i'm

grappling with the whole intangibility and uh you know what is a bitcoin and i

can't touch it feel it seal it but if i maybe see it on the screen or if everybody got one free token of a

fraction of one they'd be like oh okay i'm really excited about this it's i got something on the screen

i get many things on my screens like emails or i watch do my online online banking

or you know take a picture of my check and it gets deposited so it takes the tangible and turns it into something intangible almost yeah you know you can

get it out afterwards i just sort of had the reverse happen as we're chatting here and i run a store and i just had an

uh an online order come in for things that we sell in the store from a person i've never seen before you know

it just um i know the money will be put into my account which i never i've never met the person never touched their

money it goes into my account but then off goes the physical product that they bought you know will be delivered to

some some destination that i'll never go to in person yeah like it's quite something how things just move around

you and they sort of oscillate from tangibility to intangibility that you just and there's a certain concept

inevitably everything has to become tangible because you need you know materials to stay alive whether it's to

buy a house you have a car have food buy put clothes on your back but so much of it just sort of seems to exist in the

um you know it's a very 90s word like cyberspace right well and isn't that something that's um you

know it's almost like it's relatively new and i think with you know the advance of technology we

have um you know just talking about the world of money it's we're further and further

abstracted from what is sort of what a dollar was like in our grandparents day and age right like and you know you can

put in inflation and everything like that but it's also you're just moving stuff around now like

you're tapping your card you're moving things like and you know in terms of bank reserves and how much physical gold

they have and how much physical who backs this who backs them what percentage they they need to keep in

reserves so they you know to prevent um uh like i think that um

uh bitcoin is in some sense even more abstract in the

in in how it uh in you know sort of like the intangibility of it because there is

no physical anything but it sort of uh in some senses it is

more tangible because there is a a math there is math that backs it up

it's backed up by math and it's backed up by certainty and a protocol that is a finite thing like whereas something like

you know the us dollar is something that is um can become um well certainly manipulated

by you know central banks stuff like that but it also just even the um vicissitudes of uh

uh of society and uh you know even gold you can you know

there can be you know you can find um yeah there's a downside to finite there's a downside to tangible in a

sense because it's a in a limited number of resources or something but then would could you not get hyperinflation in this world

so bitcoin there's only a finite amount of um bitcoin that's available right so like

uh there's only 21 million coins that will ever be you know minted and who decided that satoshi all right

um so when this is some grand algorithm like there will be 20 bitcoin 20 million bitcoins 21

million well 21 million it's roughly around there 21 million but

what it is is the protocol was designed as such that every four years roughly it's after 200

i think it's 210 000 blocks okay that's i i could have that way off but i've someh how that number is um sticking out

in my mind but um after a certain number of blocks which roughly is four years

the reward the mining reward that miners get for mining for solving that proof-of-work puzzle um halves so right

now at the very beginning it was you would get 50 bitcoins if you solved the puzzle okay and then as that was in 2009

and then um then it halved to 25 then it have to 12.5

now it's at um 7.25 okay so um yeah so it's gone less

and it'll continue to go less until the year 2140 which is then it'll be like i think it's like the smallest value of

bitcoin and how does that affect the end user though it doesn't affect the end user necessarily directly it's just that the

miners get this as a reward so it incentivizes people to mine and the people who are taking the chances now in setting up you know banks of computers

in their basements and everything they get the greatest reward yeah so they they because they're getting it before

it halves and halves and halves and halves and house right they're getting more they're making like stuck splitting but in reverse almost well the value of

bitcoin has also gone up since then so like you know 50 bitcoins at the beginning you know i mean if you sold

them right away it wasn't worth as much as what you would get now if you sold 7.25 bitcoin but like

um i think it's sort of by design like the as bitcoin bitcoin does rise in value

with each having so it's um there's a real interesting dynamic that goes on here because like in terms of

like but somebody's figure it's trying to cut you off you get two techniques somebody's figured it out they like the

system they're like this is good this is sustainable

the algorithms and it gives you the best crypto people are work are working on this sort of the developers yeah the developers

and just not to get too technical like this this whole back end of it

is legit like people are like this is a really good foundation mathematical foundation on

how to create wealth yeah i like it's i mean it's one of the

best things you can do in any um kind of uh really security i.t security kind of

thing is you sort of publish something and you have people try to break that thing right like if bitcoin was insecure uh

you know and there have been little blips yeah it's battle tested like um and you have you know the smartest people in the

world are trying to um break it you know because it's financially to their benefit to try to

do so uh there's different ways that you can try to engineer something and something called a 51 attack but like

um which would involve like more than 50 of all the miners in the world trying to

launch an attack on the bitcoin network so you sometimes you can get into there was a concern a few years ago when china

really had a lot of bitcoin miners and they've since you know banned bitcoin mining um where the concern was well wait a

minute if they keep getting more and more power the chinese government can start going into these places and saying okay let's

launch some attack and attack the bitcoin network but part of its durability is it's um

the decentralized nature of it and the fact that this is so um

uh you have different countries participating different people different types of people

and uh yeah it's what makes it strong and yeah it's been

you know over a decade now what was china's reason to get rid of it i mean it's hard to tell a lot of people

at the time thought they wanted to buy uh cheap bitcoin because every time they

did something like ban bitcoin because there was a few little they would ban it then they unbanned it then they banned it again so it's it's you're writing it

out yeah well i think people thought that they were trying to manipulate the market so they the price would crash when they would ban it so maybe the

government would go in and buy a bunch and then it would go up again ban it again but the last time they banned it didn't quite crash as much so it's like

the market adjusted and now a lot of the good miners have just moved out of

china because it's a big business can somebody can somebody corner the market on

bitcoin like a nation state in theory yeah yeah you could i mean the u.s now is starting to get more miners which

in way in many ways is good because it's at least a free country but it's also you want it to be

decentralized yeah that's where you like almost like it becomes you know re-re-centralized of sorts because if

you just capture the market you know yeah and that's why we launched your 51 attack which obviously one country or or

a collection of countries i don't know it's interesting is this sucking real currency out of the market because

you're taking your you know canadian dollar your australian uk pound the american dollar and putting

it into some digital currency so it doesn't actually exist your physical money doesn't exist in the

physical world anymore well like is there less canadian and american money in the world now as a

result of pick bitcoin because people have put it into there no because you would i mean you're just transferring it

so if you wanted to buy bitcoin you would go to an exchange and change your canada canadian dollars like energy

i'm just being you know really like again just the you know just devil's advocate here but let's imagine i'm just

imagining what if bitcoin was um utilized in the sense that it's sucking out um you know real currency out of the

countries and then somebody crashes bitcoin well

i know you're going to say from a technical point it's really unlikely because it's decentralized and who has a single power to crash anything

well it's not like a 51 attack and you know and again i'm just wary of getting too much into the details because it it

just gets you know i hear myself talking and it's like nobody's listening to this but like um

it's not like a sure thing if you have a 51 attack doesn't mean you're necessarily going to be able to recreate the blockchain and

all those transactions that happened a long time ago are still safe like it would just take an overwhelming amount of computing

power to be able to if you think about the blockchain as a sort of standing like a tower or something like the ones in the bottom or

glacier i guess you could borrow that analogy again um the ones on the bottom are uh real real safe like just

computationally speaking like you would need like um the computational power to reverse all

those transactions would be uh astronomical but um but yeah 51 attack

for the for the newer transactions you would be able to sort of possibly make a big payment to somebody and then reverse

the payment um those kinds of things become more plausible with that kind of yeah i'm really understanding better now what

what bitcoin is yeah see i can see you know making the intangible tangible here so and part of

the worry or part of the interesting thing is you know as you know you talked about taking you

know money out of the system and like i think that's part of the goal you know bitcoin is nowhere near that point but like

uh you have you know the us dollar for example like um everything for the last

uh i mean at least i think since world war ii or whenever it's it's you know things have sort of been

denominated uh in u.s dollars i think there's a point where they

um the government the us government said to saudi arabia we want to start like buying

you know if you use u.s dollars as your reserve currency um you know we're going to buy

a lot of your oil and it's you know became known as sort of the petrodollar and like that has always been it's been

the backing for so long now of you know what why most countries will buy us dollar reserve so there's always a

demand on the us dollar but as you see more people transitioning to bitcoin and

like i said like i said we're nowhere near this point yet but it's like you can see whether

people start losing faith um you know for example like you have the situation in russia where you have

you know russia invades ukraine um and there's all these financial kind of

threats i made against russia and some are carried out we're gonna cut you off from swift we're going to

seize your foreign assets and you start to see countries maybe become a little less like russia

had um some u.s reserve dollar you know us dollars in reserve um

uh i don't think they're gonna have us dollars in reserve anymore you know what i mean like i don't think i think that countries they see they see the behavior

of like the us when they start seizing these kinds of assets and i'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing i'm just saying like

you know if you're a country and you want to have faith in something that can't be taken

from you maybe you buy gold or maybe you buy um

you know oil or you have a commodity like russia has you know a lot of oil but you want to have something that is

uh that you can sell uh like for you know you you can't have the same amount of

faith that you would have in the us dollar as you would before because if they're just gonna you know seize assets it's like well you can see i guess to my

point is if bitcoin's gonna go down one day you're gonna have all these warning signs you know just like any markets

should i get out of the us dollar should i get out of the stock market should i sell this yeah it's gonna be rumblings it's not just gonna happen overnight

just like anything else we deal with yeah like there can be some pretty wild fluctuations in uh in bitcoin uh but but

it's because it's so new so like yeah i'm talking when it's all you know yeah right right yeah yeah it'll become more

stable as more people adopted and as the years go by uh but

but right now it's uh you know you sort of see these transitions almost like um geopolitically where like uh the

the well el salvador is um sort of um bitcoin is you know almost the

equivalent of their national currency at this point so like um [Music] you see big moves like that or like the

the seizing of russian assets and um it really becomes this thing or even the

thing here with the canadian truckers convoy seizing um you know gofundme accounts and saying

you know well you can't do this because it's uh you're supporting terrorism or whatever the pretext was

just on that note but they they did seize people's cryptocurrency through that was there

anything like that at all i know bank accounts like actual bank accounts got frozen but were there actually

like was did anything happen in the crypto realm yeah so they they like the government issued uh sort

of a an addict to the bank to say go after these things and crypto was among

those so it's harder to after crypto or they went to like these little exchanges that are around well if you go to say go fund

me i don't know if gofundme if you can um you know donate in crypto i think you can and so

it's like you can go after that and you can free freeze that but it's like again if you're if you're a trucker and i'm

sending money to you directly and i have a bitcoin address and you have a bitcoin address they can't freeze that like that's got you but if you're going

through an intermediary so nobody's personal cryptocurrency wallets got frozen during this

um i don't know if that's 100 true because well they can't they can't freeze the

wallet unless the wallet is uh somewhere that they can um you know like you said before if they

have a gun to you your face and they say well you have to give us the keys to this wall they can do they can do that i guess when you buy this crypto you're

going through a company right a lot of times they put pressure on that company yeah that they can do so if

you're buying through coinbase a company in the u.s so you can buy crypto there and a lot of people will just buy it and

they'll just store it on coinbase like in their wallet so they can the government can go to coinbase and say

you know because when you when you register for these for at coinbase for example or any of these exchanges you have to give like

you know your id and like your address and everything like that so in that sense you can be linked to your account

um so then you know you do something that the government doesn't like they can say okay you have um you know dimitri's uh

um account here like we want to freeze that account then for sure they can do that

um what they can't do is uh if you have your own private keys and you don't store the your crypto on the

exchange and you store it in your own wallet then um know what's in your wallet

uh or whatever then then they can't go after that or i mean they can try but they would have to

do that thing that we were talking about at the very beginning of the show where it's like they would have to sort of figure out you know they'd have to have

like a detective trying to figure out how to learn yeah and even then they would they would

have to still physically find out who you are go in say what are your keys like that kind of thing but the easiest

way for the government's manpower point of view is if you do it through coinbase and coinbase knows who you are

you're you're going to get frozen that they can do yeah and that is a convenient way for people to store their crypto so a lot of people do that yeah

and at the certain point you say what percentage of crypto goes through those types of exchanges rather than just doing it like you said one on one yeah

yeah a lot yeah i think that makes it a lot more again a lot more real in a negative sense because uh

part of the intangibility is like catch me if you can kind of vibe right yeah yeah but then when you hear about these

uh people like on the black market doing stuff they were definitely doing it just one on one they're not going through

so you're thinking about like silk road and like the cause that was the original sort of well you hear about arms dealers

trailer yeah back and forth they must be just doing it crypto wallet the crypto wallet with nothing in between the two

peoples yeah i mean i don't know what they what they do but what if they did yeah yeah

that would be the the smarter way to do it um you could uh

like well silk road used to be i i don't know what they have now but silk road was sort of the forerunner and um

another really fascinating story uh of ross ulbricht the founder of silk road who's now in prison for life but um

he had that silk road where you could buy guns drugs you know this is the original one you could hire a hitman

through it and bitcoin was sort of the the currency to do it which is why you get such a bad rap or like uh you know

um like well you must be a criminal if you're using bitcoin like that's not as common anymore but people used to say

that kind of thing but anything in its infancy is always going to attract fringe elements before the internet

first came out you know musically like you're on the internet you must like techno music and it goes like all these like

stereotypes yeah all the time you know yeah yeah yeah obviously it becomes you know everything's on the internet to

corporations you know so yeah yeah and then it kind of gets homogenized but

yeah there are still uh i'm you know there's certainly there's black markets and that kind of thing and i'm sure you

could uh like it is much easier to send um

you know bitcoin anonymously and protect yourself that way you know if you wanted to then it would be to send you know a

bank tran a bank wire like what what's enticing yeah that's enticing to me like if i want to send money to a relative or

someone just rent like what if i just want to do a kind act of charity and i see someone i don't know i don't

know um working in a restaurant on youtube and i'm like who's that person they look like they're working really hard i want

to send them personally 100 bucks yeah and then somehow in their youtube description like well here's my crypto address or something and like dude and

you're not going to go through any you know uh money exchange where you got to pay a percentage on the money like my

money to you done yeah you know like just global financial altruism right and

that's um that's uh that's one of the benefits of it is

with that or like remittance where it's like you know you get a lot of people in third world nations and in they don't

want to spend you know however much it costs to send a bank wire to you know canada or the u.s or wherever um or i

guess it would be maybe the other way around or you know you're sending money you know overseas like you send bitcoin

and it really doesn't cost anything it's very little anyway yeah um and one of the things like ukrainians you know

russia's invading you what do you do like if you have your money in you know um

the uh well i don't think ukraine i'm not sure what the currency is in ukraine it's not the ruble i know that's uh no

they must have their own dollar yeah yeah so but i'm i'm sure the currency crashed i mean the i know the rupaul

crash when the they invaded so it's like if you're ukrainian or russian like don't you want some sort of store of value and don't you want to get it out

of the country right like if you have but with a bunch of gold yeah you want that or is it just create runs on the banks because people have a much more

viable and easier option to get their money out of the market well yeah i think that i mean

that the benefit of bitcoin in that sense is for the people to be able to

get their their value out or like not even get it out just like well just you know they have their key on them or

whatever so they just like leave with it but uh you know if you have to go to a bank and withdraw this rapidly inflating

currency that's a problem because you've got big lineups and there's you know soldiers starting to storm your town or

if you're you know if you have gold okay that's great like if you ever get back you know here but you can't like are you

gonna wait in the bank and wait for them to bring out a bunch of gold and load it up your car like it can really become anarchy though like i can see that

because like i was living in greece when the country went bankrupt and just shortly after we left they did make a a

limit on how much cash people were allowed to withdraw from the bank on a weekly amount and i think because it was something

it was very low by north american standards like maybe like 150 a week or something and that was it your money was

stuck in the bank you could not access it or pull it out in cash you could spend on your visa and then you know

could pay it off with the money that's inside your account because you were afraid of a bank run and literally people would go and take their cash

which would be euro dollars and uh euros and just take it home and put underneath the beds so now if they

had a crypto version of that that would have precipitated the cr the economic crisis to go even deeper and

further in greece on a national level because people would have had no faith in the euro

within greece's con like we'll say not euro they had faith in europe that's why they want them right but they want to get them out and they got to get them

out somehow and if you can't physically walk in and get your euro you're going to then transfer it into something that you can right right and yeah there's a

lot to think about here watching you know relatives wait in lineups around buildings to pull out

euros from greek banks showed how little faith they had in the system

but how much faith they had in the actual hard currency so they were willing to wait in 40

celsius to grab physical dollars in euros and get them out um

and so that that that is tangible to somebody that's very real and if they had the capability of

transferring those digitally into um some sort of cryptocurrency perhaps that

would have felt just as real but that would then precipitated the economic collapse of the country further because

it would be considered a run in the banks so there's a lot that can go here so

yeah go ahead well you know i'm just going to say that that's true actually but you all it's almost like you have to

think of it you it's you can't think of it necessarily hypothetically right because like it wouldn't be the case now because not

enough people own bitcoin for it to be like it's why these things i think have to happen gradually and it's almost like

it's you know in some strange way built into the protocol like i don't think there'd be a tidal wave if they start getting

rumblings uh after the pandemic in canada that people like i don't know if i can trust the canadian dollar let's

get it out into and then you know you see ads on tv all the time now buy gold never been a

better time buy silver coins yeah i think there's always mitigating uh circumstances that kind of uh even

these things out uh like yeah i you know you're right in the sense that i think

it would have if bitcoin was a viable option and people were you know all willing to buy it then yeah you could

get a bunch of people just um uh not well in many ways though wouldn't

they just be taking the money out buying bitcoin and then um they would still have the same

limitation though the government's still imposing the same limits i can see myself arguing in my head because in to one degree like

i still haven't been convinced whether i need bitcoin or not some sort of digital currency and so then i look at it well

am i am i harming the world somehow by investing in such a thing and then what does harm mean

so if a large percentage of the canadian economy went into cryptocurrency

and the banking sector in canada and then by exchange extension the canadian

government had less resources financially to work with would i be particip participating

in the almost economic decline of the country i'm in well if people started transacting in

bitcoin like the government i mean a new system rises yeah like again i think it happens gradually so

there would be taxes put into place there would be people you know like it's you would still have to declare things

on your income tax right it might still be purchasing things in bitcoin theoretically so the local economy

shouldn't really change in theory yeah i mean you might argue that it's more difficult to trace so people could not pay their taxes as much or something

like that but i you know i think there's probably solutions for that but and if somebody just on a technical if has

there been transactions in canada do people walk into stores and buy something on bitcoin

there are some places that accept bitcoin as payment uh mostly online but i mean that's where everything seems to be moving anyway uh in innisville and

richmond hill here in canada uh you can actually pay your property taxes in bitcoin so bitcoin can be taxed

so therefore the government would stay you know in place they would not collapse as a result of

the whole currency going underground and anonymous of sorts right so like as tax laws are

like it's like you have to declare your income and it's considered income so if you if you were if you have a store and you have people

paying and bitcoin doesn't even declare the bitcoin like i don't know you might ask like well what is because the value

fluctuates so much where you know do you declare it as canadian dollars like do you do the translation if so

what date do you do that i don't know but um but yeah you're in a foreign country and you're transacting anywhere

you go and then the specific laws based on the taxation of said country yeah like there's nothing i mean you know

it's a different thing but it's the same laws would apply um and there's an

apparatus to deal with it like you just ha they just have to make some changes uh you know but but i do think it's

important to make those changes and i think that it's you know governments it would behoove governments to to take a good look at this and to sort

of adapt accordingly so they don't have get into a situation where you know there's um

you know they they wake up one morning it's like 80 percent of the country has bitcoin or something like i think they need

to you know they start developing things now so they can adapt to what's happening and

my next question the next point will be then why do why do the governments want to create their own digital currency as opposed to just

you know making bitcoin be the de facto cryptocurrency of the nation and we don't need a

centralized version of the same thing well i think like um it's so much easier to control

um well number one i think governments want to have and i think you know

society in general is used to having like a central bank like some way that

you know you can kind of tweak inflation you can tweak like i mean just to take devil's advocate

position if you know the government suddenly made bitcoin a national currency and then you know or you know china bans bitcoin again or whatever and

plummets the currency like i mean it would be devastating so many people's savings and everything like that like

you need something stable um that's why i think the kind of gradual um acclimatization is really the way

to to do these uh these changes um so what we're looking at here is i

think a tremendous fragmentation of the global economic system and in a currency

level there'll be different types of cryptos and different uh for every one of those you're going to

get another one at least for another 180 for each country that exists on earth of their own national cryptocurrency plus

their hard cash yeah like all the visa and paypal's and everything else

i think we can you know so like you know i think cash will be gone soon um for

better or for worse um i think there will be um cbdcs which i think most countries will

have i think there will be a version of that and then i think there will be bitcoin and maybe some other cryptos

that will be um independent and almost analogous to like gold because it'll be like a store

of value it'll be something independent something you can own something that's like trans translates across borders

easily and something that isn't uh you know monitored and like or something that isn't as

[Music] controlled by the government so it really is like i like your gold analogy in the whole mining so getting getting a

bitcoin today it's kind of like you know the wild wild west when you went out and panhandled very much so early on yeah

what can i do with this can i but not actually but it's a storage of wealth yeah it's the best exact world to go

forward that will have increasing value most likely yeah and yeah

especially for a speculator um it is sort of wild westy like it's uh you know

because right now we're at a very low you know people talk of there's this phrase called hyper bitcoinization and

it's this idea of um it's almost like you get this um

uh this momentum which just becomes um unstoppable at some point and then you

have you know everything starts getting denominated in bitcoin which makes the value rise so much that it gets these

astronomical levels like right now it's trading at about uh like 40 000 or something like that us

dollars and there's talk of this thing i mean i i did the math very roughly

um and the let's see here yeah so like

current aggregated global wealth of everything like everybody's you know gdp

combined all the countries gdp combined is like 418 trillion dollars so

on a now this doesn't include you know a lot of abstract cons this isn't like a accurate figure like a lot of people say

it's a lot more than that but if we just use this figure um if you want to take that figure and

just assume that everybody was buying things in bitcoin so this just became just bitcoin um and you divide it by 21

million which is how many bitcoin are ever going to be produced then you're looking at uh 20 million dollars for one

bitcoin that's how much that price would translate it was one to one so like even if you think that that would be maybe bitcoin

would be 120th of global aggregate wealth then it's you know that you're still looking at one million dollars of bitcoin so like um right now

it's at forty thousand dollars you know there's certainly better investments at this point like you could make um in

terms of like um making more money uh or having more like

bitcoin right now is fairly expensive you know like our you know you can buy as small as you

want so it's not like you just buy one bitcoin you can buy you know slices what did they call them

slices well satoshi they're called satoshi's like the smallest amount is one satoshi and then there's like

millibit or i don't know it's it's they need to they need that's another thing they kind of need to um

you know there's there's people who say like well why why do we why don't we start calling things like you know

one billion satoshi so it's like it makes it a little more this is part of the achievables

like okay i i like it i bought a bitcoin where do i spend it they don't spend the bitcoin you spend a

you're looking for the word you know like what do i call that a token a wallet hard wallet a satoshi yeah like

so this is really cumbersome you know the fractions of the bitcoin are called you know the satoshi is just the

smallest one so you could say you know a thousand satoshi's or whatever but it's i like the sound of it yeah it's a nice

rules off the tongue but uh i think we'll go back to satoshi so do you want to hear my uh theory on this whole

satoshi nakamoto yeah it hit me okay so satoshi nakamoto the um

um person or entity who created bitcoin uh you know started out you know nobody knows who he is and it's this big

mystery and he owns like a lot of bitcoin so that's also something where people are like interesting

um but uh so he created the wrote the white paper and worked on the protocol for the first couple years then

he kind of disappeared there's a lot of theories about who he is or who he was and um uh

you know there's you know there's been movies made of it and everything like that um i have a theory that

that you know that this was something um

this is the us government created satoshi nakamoto and they did this to start a financial

system as a hedge against waning u.s power

so they were really thinking ahead and they thought we have to do something that is going to

um you know if people stop storing us dollar reserves because at this point this is in 2009 right the banks have

failed like they had the big bank bailouts in 2008. it did all sort of kick off right after that so yeah yeah

yeah the timing is suspicious so satoshi's first um the very first um block was mined by satoshi well it's

called the genesis block is the first one ever and everything is based on that block um

it's uh you're allowed to put messages in the block so his first message was to show

what day it was and i forget that it was january something in 2009 and the headline of the it said his message was

the times um second bailout for government bank or second bailout for the banks was the

headline of the paper that he put in to the message which is kind of like a tongue-in-cheek like look at this

shitty system that we have um and uh so i can't help but think that this is

like well i mean ingenious and such foresight if this is actually the us government

but it's like you know you have to think that they're the the dollar is kind of waning um you know people are talking

about decarbonizing you know so the maybe the maybe um

oil won't be so um such a wanted commodity in the future like

almost as a hedge so they're like why don't we create something well based on pure math it's in in theory it's completely

decentralized so you can like anybody can do it china was mining bitcoin everything like that but then you know

you as bitcoin becomes more prominent you realize that satoshi nakamoto mined a

lot of bitcoin in the beginning so there's like you know you have i don't know how many he would

have he would actually have but you can look these things up in his addresses the ones that are known to belong to him

or any of the early bitcoin adopters for that matter and if you kind of aggregate all that that's a lot of money like so now that

bitcoin rises in value you have a little bit of a reserve built up for the us

just in case like it's kind of like thinking like if something else is going to take over the us dollars let's make sure we control that it's like it's like

coke like let's buy pepsi because they're the competition like then we own both either way could also like what are

your thoughts then on like china not using it did they think they're on to this game and they don't want to play ball or maybe yeah maybe we'll create

our own version of it then and just take off you know yeah maybe maybe they will uh and maybe that's was part of it like

i always thought it was just to manipulate the market so they could buy cheaper bitcoin but since they didn't unban it yet then maybe maybe that was

their russia stance on this um i don't know how much i think russia probably has

some reserves and they allow it and stuff like that yeah yeah as far as i know yeah yeah the chinese angle is interesting

yeah it's um but it's interesting the whole satoshi nakamoto like lore is pretty uh it's pretty fascinating yeah

whenever you can't like uh understand where something comes from there's you know they found saddam hussein and a pit

and you know gaddafi in a water drainage pipe like i just can't believe they can't find somebody in the

on this day and on the earth yeah it's hard to well that's the other thing so it's like you start thinking

like okay well they how can they not you know with all the resources like this is a bit it's not like bitcoin is like trading at a

hundred dollars anymore right it's enough money that like you know major financial institutions are involved when a plane goes down you tell me they

really can't find it they can you know if i see galaxies on the other side you know this light that is hitting the

earth is from three million years ago when the star blew up and you can't find i just have a hard time believing with

the resources we have on earth today that when something is like what are those stones that are in the states that look like the tablets that have all the

words written on them what do they call them and they say you know what the population of the earth is supposed to be in the states yeah there's not what

that is called emerald stones they kind of look like three or four stonehedge type

tablets that were mysteriously found one morning somewhere in the states on a nice grassy

plain and on them just like moses with the ten commandments has like the the charting of what they want the world to

be okay so something like you know the world population must be at this we must have a green sustainable

uh these are the languages and whatnot and i believe on the several there's several stones and

on each side of the stone has the uh the new commandments let's say in a different language

so you'll have greek latin hebrew english with the same things written down fair enough

nobody knows who put them there okay but when a structure has been found

and and we don't know who put it there why isn't it taken down you can't even build a shed in your

backyard without having all kinds of variance laws and everything else and you can just install stones well i i've never heard of this before where where

was this uh built or i will i can look it up okay

yeah so the they're called the georgia guide stones and they're made from granite

apparently they were erected in 1980 in albert county georgia united states

a set of 10 guidelines is inscribed on the structure in eight modern languages

and a shorter message is described at the top of the structure in four ancient language scripts

when when did they pop up 1980 and so my my point is um on um

you know there's a my point is like you can't even get something built in your backyard without going through the government yet these

things can stand around so there's there's some weird stuff that goes on in the earth like these are giant stones

well i mean yeah like there's there's weird stuff that goes on

i think that uh you know something like that is probably you know somebody just put them up one day

sure but then why didn't somebody take them down well is there where were they put up like in the middle of nowhere in a grassy field

yeah i don't know maybe it's kind of like a tourist attraction now or something it could be but then they have

to be legalized they got to be something you know there's weight they can fall on somebody somebody might be sued

you know maybe i mean yeah like uh i think there's a lot well again i can't

wait till we do our conspiracy theory uh episode but like um i think there's a lot of things that we just don't know

about that happen that are behind the scenes like i think this whole satoshi nakamoto thing um

i feel like it's unlikely that this was one guy who created this

and started you know sort of putting this out into the world and uh nobody knows who he is like um

you know i think hal finney is sort of the leading contender uh who is a cryptographer that lived in

the same you know he you know he's sort of in the space it was all these like um cypherpunks that

in that era that were doing these kinds of things but they all sort of knew each other and it was like um

i mean this guy kind of came out of nowhere and he created this thing uh and it was beautiful and brilliant like i just

don't think that you like i that kind of thing is usually done by um

like those kinds of people are usually picked up by you know government agencies to to

develop things like this right so like um i mean that's not a good enough reason but i just think that you know it

would make it would be a very smart thing to do by the us government if it happened that way

um and then you get you know the silence afterwards and like um just a lot of the

a lot of things that happened after regarding satoshi like

you you just start thinking like well if it was just some guy who did it it just seems like we would know who he is

by now well you do have to wonder too like like just the timing of things because you know there used to be a big thing

like the american government should we and we have to vote in congress whether we can spend more money and go over uh

how many trillion all right yeah and it was such a big thing and you know every couple years

here we go again are we gonna raise the debt ceiling anymore or not i don't know and i you know especially with the

pandemic and stuff it's like all that there is no more ceiling people are spending like there is a new system

coming and let's forget in to the point us being in canada when you have the prime minister

saying well the debt will just take care of itself the budget yeah the budget will just take care of itself you know and then in turn the debt that goes

along with the massive you know uh spending that they were doing it doesn't really seem like anyone is

really concerned about you know maintaining the integrity of the financial systems we already have in

place yeah and you have to ask yourself why i think so there's i have this whole theory called um

it's almost like i don't really have a name for it but the god it's like the god um

you put you put god into the equation maybe this is a bigger topic because i happen to believe in god and and it's

sort of a divine plan and everything like that and um you know i don't claim to know it

or you know whether it's a static thing or whatever whatever but i do think that there's there's a god

and i sort of when i look at things like you know nuclear proliferation or

you know why we haven't all destroyed each other by now i think it's kind of the god effect it's like you know it's

almost like the anthropic principle where it's like if somebody you know the anthropic principle is kind of like if

you um the reason that our society there's a very it's it's implausible

that humans would ever have kind of come out of nowhere right so it's like and and the anthropic principle says

um [Music] yes but even if it's so improbable that it wouldn't only happen once in a you

know bazillion you know whatever you want to call it years or something we're still the one that's in that year

so it seems like statistically would be improbable but we wouldn't be around to observe it if it wasn't

you know what i mean so it's kind of obviously meta but it's like um in a way it's kind of like that it's

like we haven't blown ourselves up and you know you could say well it's like it's never been in our best interest but

there's been a lot of cataclysms that sort of should have happened like we haven't been hit by an asteroid in a while you know what i mean like there's a lot of things that i feel like should

have wiped us out and i feel like it's probably be you know probably but i i

think i think that it it makes sense as a theory that it's just god just hasn't allowed it yet and

i i know that sounds i know that sounds loopy but it's like um when i when i apply things uh when i

apply that to um various um subjects i i it

things sort of make sense and coalesce so this is a i mean this is obviously i guess a bigger conversation but it's uh

um you know um jesus won't allow crypto to go down right well no but it's like it's it's a

little bit like that in the sense that um there seems to be uh

you know when you see things like the cuban missile crisis not kind of um evolving into a full-scale war or you

see like there's people working behind the scenes is what i'm saying and i think the people that we see on a day-to-day basis like the joe bidens or

the justin trudeau is like pure figureheads at this point like uh and you know the real smart people are

the ones that are working like you know wherever like on the black ops teams or is deep in the defense department

wherever string pandemic of the coronavirus you're like where where are your rambos when you need them working behind the scenes but here we are we did

go through a huge two-year shutdown almost and when you think of things like if they're if their contingency planning

is so far ahead that they're doing things like developing bitcoin and playing it off like it's a

decentralized network and it's like technically it is but let's just start contr bringing the mining here and we

already have all these reserves then it's kind of more like genius like that's a genius way to do that now i

don't maybe i get them too much credit but you start wondering about other things how things have played out in the world

and why you know people like you said like don't sort of seem so concerned like why you know we don't have any

manufacturing in north america or very little anymore so like is there a concern in that and intellectual property going away and it's kind of

like i don't know it's like when it really comes down to it i think that the governments of the world are kind of like

i think the really smart people are like are already thinking like 20 years ahead yeah unfortunately we never get to see

who these people are and have some faith in it true yeah we look at our leaders as you mentioned you're like i don't know

yeah like this doesn't see yeah yeah yeah yeah show me show me these geniuses behind

the scenes you know yeah maybe it's maybe it's just wishful thinking but um and uh you know i guess if it's not or

maybe it's attention just like everyone's got just too much uh at stake and so there's no you know you know a

team of top 10 people in each country but literally just thousands of people like toyota doesn't want something bad

to happen so their best people are working on it and ibm doesn't want something bad to happen to the world so there's best people yeah maybe you

wonder like yeah you know like how many of these companies just private companies don't like are i don't want world war three to happen because it's

bad for business so they're actually you know involved way more than we would think of like russia and ukraine not

getting to something bigger yeah maybe and i mean there's a certain argument where it's like okay before world war three it's like really nobody

wants it to happen like you know so it's kind of like maybe that's just it's all um

um sort of uh blustering and like you know like maybe maybe putin is like you know

i'm sure he doesn't want moscow to go up in smoke you know what i mean so it's like you know well really

just comes back to mutually sure destruction but like i don't know it never when you're hearing the the stories about this like

there's a real brinksmanship that goes on so you're kind of like it seems like you know it's like one day he's gonna

wake up and be like you know what you know same with kim jong-un you know like he just seems like he's like you know a

bad hair day away from you know nuking you know tokyo so he really wanted him gone he

would be gone that's yeah that's the other thing right so you start thinking of like all those years i mean the the bush administration

what a wasted time that was but like uh bush jr obviously but like um you know

all the time going after iraq when you know why not take out north korea and i i don't know but um

yeah that's a whole rabbit hole i'm sure you know so let's uh i guess pull it

back it does get a little bit uh you know i do love a good conspiracy but uh and i do think that we

we should have uh you know a good episode or two on that um and uh

you know explore the various um and multitude of conspiracies that potentially exist but uh yeah but as far

as bitcoin like i don't know who you know who knows uh the satoshi nakamoto um you know the origin

may be um fairly um no not irrelevant but it doesn't

necessarily matter in the sense that uh you know this is a thing that has taken on a life of its own now um major you

know financial institutions are you know building bitcoin into their

portfolios um it's being offered to clients you can buy a house in bitcoin in some

places you know a country nations are adopting it right it is interesting just because now whether

there's nobody to blame and nobody to celebrate for this system it just is yeah well you

can celebrate the early adopters i guess uh and there's a lot of you know um sort of sad stories about people who are

mining bitcoin back in you know this is what makes me not feel too bad about my my uh experiences in 2017

uh because you know there's people who well there's a story of the the one guy who

had mined something like 10 000 bitcoin then he but he threw his hard drive away and he offered millions of dollars for

the town to dig it back up after it went up there's about the pizza guy oh yeah then the pizza store yeah yeah

oh yeah but there's so many anybody who is mining bitcoin in those days has probably um you know had a few uh

attempts at their own life at this point unless they have managed to huddle it for that long but um yeah

so it just permeates and becomes part of our financial landscape we don't know who started it it's a very strange thing

it's almost like human history where did we come from you know we've lost this uh sort of thing maybe maybe that's how

these things get created things just yeah somebody's pushing things from behind the scenes well and it does have

a bit of that religious theme when you hear you know the first block that was created is called the genesis block like it you know so it takes on a bit of that

that you know satoshi nakamoto like is this uh sort of almost mystical figure at this point technology an island it's

like right right you know um but um but yeah it is something that uh

has has come into our our world now and it's something that um

we need to um i think embrace at least in part and i think it's important i think that it's

like you know one of the arguments you'll get about bitcoin is like like you know well it's not based on anything they just pluck it out of nowhere and

it's like that's not really true like it it's um you know it's built into the protocol

like it's built into the protocol that a certain amount of bitcoin will be mined if fairly regularly uh up to a certain

point it's finite it's built that's all built into the protocol um the rules are built into the protocol

what are the rules of the financial system i would turn it around and say you know like what are the rules on when you can print money they used to have the debt ceiling they don't have it

anymore obviously 2008 showed a lot of the rules don't do much to prevent exactly catastrophic you know

downturns yeah so i think that you know overall this is something i mean you could certainly make the argument whether you

know this is maybe this isn't the solution the world needs but i think it's i think

i think it's um potentially one of them do you think this coaxes the average person along because like i don't know

about bitcoin but if td bank would just come out with one then i could see myself using that

and so then a certain percentage of the digital currency globally is going to be decentralized but they're not really

worried about that they're just using that as a yeah it's interesting like just as an early adopter get the message out there

and uh i don't wanna say bait and switch but then they'll present the legitimate digital currency afterwards

which everybody will run to because that would be perceived as more legitimate or at least sold that way yeah i mean i guess if you wanted to be cynical you

could think that the us government created bitcoin um

and for that purpose it's like this will get people on board something initially and then we'll change to the uh cbdc's

where we'll have more authoritarian control we can start issuing you know basic income it comes off as so freedom

and autonomous and you know personal freedoms and like you said it's a bait and switch and you switch over to the controlled version yeah i mean that's

it's that's sad to think if that's the way things are going but you know because it really is two different

things and it's a really and unfortunately my faith in uh humanity is not such that i believe

that they'll always make the best choice so like i you know have this sort of 90 rule and it's like i think that 90 of

the people mostly just follow what they're told and um i think it's unfortunate because i think

that that scenario you just described this whole bait and switch is very possible and maybe even likely like and

there's a big difference between a decentralized um currency like bitcoin and you know

something a central bank would offer just that's digital well have you heard some of the theories like when you have

the centralized uh digital currency central bank digital currency cbtc's

cbdc's uh they're also programmable and you can have attributes attached

like expiration dates you have these coins and you must use them let's say tax credit but you must use it within six

months or so and then it forces consumption into the economy and whatnot or

you tap your phone or your risk to whatever to pay with it but if you've had too much uh red meat this week you

simply will get a discount on a green salad and try to nudge you that way for person you know right psychological

nudging sort of yeah you can really do a lot of deep psychological stuff with this yeah and i think that that's uh

i mean it's it's like nightmarish to think of that but you know it

it it's like you don't it's like death by a thousand cuts you know you don't notice the first few or you don't notice um you

know in the same way that i think bitcoin is gradually being adopted um

the opposite might also be true in the sense that we might be um

becoming a little more susceptible to sort of being okay with having our lives controlled in that way

i think it's a big danger we're told it's individual you know personal autonomy decentralized to the point

where there's arms deals going on when the whole reality is it may turn

into a government centralized uh more of a voucher rather than actual

cash because you can only spend it on things the government has programmed it to be spent on yeah you know um you

could just really switch it so the complete opposite may be true of what bitcoin is being sold to us right now

well so i want to just make clear that we're talking about these are two different things though like bitcoin is one thing and then you have the cbdc's

and then you have but what you're saying in terms of a psychological shift in you know

acceptance acceptance of something like a bitcoin and then just be like well this is basically bitcoin what we're

offering but it's a lot easier and you're insured and you don't have to worry about like finding a wallet in

fact we'll just send you some but we'll give you some free like here's your 100 of um you know canada coin or whatever

like that we'll send to you and you can um spend it on whatever you want but gets people on board that you may hear like

you know it's sort of like i know digital currency is the future but i just want the legit one

you know what would that be the one that's talked about the most advertised the most right right government spokespeople are on tv

endorsing it and telling you and sending your credits there and somehow then you're not scared of the world of

digital currency in general but if you're going to be part of that world you're going to want the one that

is endorsed by the country that you live in sort of thing yeah strange so you

know i guess you've asked me uh you asked me earlier you know what what is the benefit in bitcoin right like what's

the what's the sort of value added what would be the benefit now and what would be my benefit long term

why why do i need this in my life now so um

i would say that you know i i first of all um i'm not

like i i think i take a more balanced view of this i do think i i i think bitcoin is beautiful in a in a technical

way and i think it's beautiful in a almost utopian i guess i am not going to say i do sound

a little biased but like um i think that i think it is a beautiful in its in in its essence that it's based

on math that it's based on um cryptography and that it's pure ownership like you're responsible

for it you're the the there's um agency in a person the person has agency over themselves and their financial future

uh as opposed to the alternatives the alternatives now and the sort of ghastly alternatives of the cbdc's going forward

and not that i don't think there would be boosters for that as well but there's a big difference between bitcoin and some sort of central bank issued

digital currency um i think bitcoin is all about freedom if you're comfortable if you want to be

um if you want to have the ability to spend money on whatever you want whenever you want not be restricted

as to when you can spend it or how you can spend it um not to be have your spending tracked not to have um

you know the government be able to shut off your your money um like these are all pros for bitcoin yeah

it sounds like george washington would have loved exactly exactly yeah so i mean you know

those are the pros and you can say that what are the cons like there are some cons there's um

uh like we didn't get into it much but there is an environmental concern sort of associated with it because of how

much fossil fuels are burned um during the mining process that can be solved with nuclear

fusion yeah there's solutions that are being like one of the things is um there are there are some sort of

clever ways around this and the the in stabilizing power grids and

like using renewable energy as kind of that's you know the fact that bitcoin

mine is such a stable for uh force and can be easily switched on and switched off there's a certain

benefit that has for power grids to sort of bank on that and then it it gives a little more time

for renewable energies to have to find a market

you know and um it allows those those sort of renewable markets to grow as well so

that's i think important for you know i don't i don't know i'm not entirely convinced that it's like

necessarily going to offset the damage of all the mining but you also have to think about like how much damage is

being done you know uh printing dollar bills you know like the whole

living yeah yeah and i don't like you don't remember yeah exactly this is there's the percentage of bitcoin mining

in terms of total energy consumption in the world is pretty minuscule so it's not like it's like you know we're not talking about like

um right now something that is such a huge uh such a huge problem and i think that

by the time it would become a bigger problem uh there'll be solutions in place to solve that like you know

renewable energy sources and such which it's sort of helping to finance um

so the other thing i would say is that you know it is that you know the very thing that is the feature which is the freedom um

the in the financial responsibility it could be a bug in many for many people like if you

you know um like certainly right now if you don't have the um

like you know it takes a little effort to to get a digital wallet to like you know use it i mean it's not certainly not a

herculean effort but it is something that you have to kind of invest into and if you're the kind of person who

just doesn't you know have a lot of um a time for this or you just you know maybe you're the kind of person who got

the the vaccine without thinking you're like oh that's what you're supposed to do i got other things to take care of maybe you don't want to think about that

maybe you just want to like get your um you know have your bank account be able to tap on something and that's a

different way to live i mean you and like there's a convenience to that and there's a i mean

i think the problem with that is it's just this inherent trust in uh authority which i i find troublesome

but like you see a lot of the measures i might think i think so people are looking to

outsource their responsibility to it and if bitcoin is really taking on personal responsibility yeah it might

it's a different type of person yeah that would be attracted to bitcoin and a different type of person

that'd be attracted to a cbdc yeah i think i think it would be and unfortunately the way i look at the

world now i think it'd be more likely to be like that 90 10 split and i think 10 maybe

would but you know what i i would also argue that there are now um

financial packages that can kind of include like if you know a bitcoin etf for example you you so you don't have to

you can still be exposed to bitcoin yeah and you're you're still awesome smoke it but i invest in it right right well

because then you're protected like you know you're at least protected under financial rules because it's a regulation regulated industry so you're

not going to lose your bitcoin but like um and you're insured so that might be something that some people would do but

yeah overall i think that it comes down to a question of what level of responsibility you're comfortable with

and what how much faith you have in the government to make decisions um that are going to be

tier to your benefit in the gridded future people the 90 who live in

cities and the 10 percent of undesirables who decide to go live in the woods and they're the ones on bitcoin right yeah well with our usb

sticks hidden behind rocks there's a lot of like carved into the rocks uh there's a lot of um x marks the

spot yeah there there's a lot of um there's sort of a persona almost of uh the sort of average

bitcoin maximalist which is very like you know i'm almost hesitate to say that because it almost um it gives a um

a bad impression uh but it's you know it's just very like you know kind of like very independent very um sort of

rugged you know loves guns loves bitcoin like lives in the woods you know hunts

his own food these are all attributes around independence yeah and personal and personal responsibility and to the max as you

were saying right hmm yeah it's an it's an interesting uh milieu and um i think that the uh

um yeah i think a certain type of person would definitely be attracted to it but the question is like i don't know what the average person would be like i so

these are these are sort of the pros and the cons like i do i think in terms of just investment if you're just like i want to make some money yeah i think

it's like it's proven to be an asset that goes up there's big you know institutions that are buying it

there's big there's companies that are starting to put it on their bank on their balance sheet so yeah i think it's

i think i definitely think it's a good investment um but you know uh long term we'll have to see because i'm

not sure i'm the more i'm sitting here thinking about it like the 90 the people who are deferring to

authority and like you said the early vaxxers if you want to call them and they uh

um i don't want you to get too deep too but you know um government will solve everything everyone's a victim please uh

where's my structure to help support me that that's that's the trend and um if

that represents the larger part of the economy then that's going to be where the growth is going to be in digital currency

yeah so maybe maybe the big run right now to get things up and going is a bitcoin but

maybe 15 20 years from now you'll see a lot more parody between that and the centralized version

or or the pendulum may just totally swing they are you know maybe and maybe already has you

know globally i think a lot of people have realized they can't really trust the news for the most part certain age

demographics you know and therefore that means not trusting centralized authority figures including then extending to the

government and whatnot and maybe willing to go more community-based and rogue per se yeah i

know you you know me let's do business right kind of thing let's make lots of money yeah

um yeah i think it's an interest such a interesting time to be alive like

whatever you might want to say about it like we're certainly facing some problems but you know there were

arguably tougher problems you know earlier on i think we're facing different problems now but i think the

bitcoin fits you know it's sort of like um a new player has entered the game you

know in terms of you want to just look at the whole broad spectrum of um

um sort of geopolitical financial um

um players like it's it's something that is completely different um it is a it's

almost like a wild card i and for me it's like you won't have a piece of the wild card that's that's the way i look at it and i

do think it's i do think you know in in terms of a philosophical you know i think philosophically i i

like supporting it you know i i think it's important oh yeah you have to you know vote with your dollar sort of thing

the more you're talking and the more i'm dwelling on this i understand on a deeper level from the

technical side to the philosophical side that we're at now this is a underlying technology and a

means to do commerce that will not be disappearing at any time in the future

i i don't think it will be i mean it can certainly be devalued like um we talked

about the emps uh you know you can always have something disastrous happen where you

know we don't have the internet anymore and then the whole bitcoin network comes to a stop because there's no real backup

network that i know of like um darpanes yeah but you could like use to be you know to take your side like you could

have cash under the bed but it doesn't mean anyone accepts cash in the future either yeah anything can happen right

you know oh that might have some sort of virus on it i'm just not touching it it's a hedge like it like like anything

else like you want to have redundancy built in and um yeah i think it's um it's also a hedge

that you can make a lot of money off of so it's um because of the so how much are you interested in this

as a stock investment and how much are you interested in as an actual form of currency

i think almost more than both of those i would say as a store of value i think that

we're heading into some unchartered territory in terms of geopolitically is that incredible you're

saying a store of value on the most untested perhaps right right yeah and what is it about our legacy systems yeah

exactly it it i think belies a real sense of distrust and and i feel that

distrust because you know you can see it and you can it's a distrust in the value of the dollar because of how much money

is being printed it's a distrust in our government's ability or you know um ability to um

you know handle our put their hands into our pockets and uh you know seize our assets

if they if they want to and it's a distrust frankly in society like i think there's a like for me i i look at what

happened during covid and i just think there were a lot of people

that were real quick to to take the government side of

uh what they were presenting and not question it whether whether some of it was right whether it meant you know whether it was

based on truth or not like some of the there was just this unquestioning acquiescence when you say trust the

science the science it's really saying trust authority right right yeah because because people

aren't distinguishing like trust the science should be trust the scientific method it's not it's not a it's not an institution it's not a thing it's about

a process and uh i think that people forgot that and you know and i

don't necessarily trust that they won't forget it again so i think that bitcoin represents

um a hedge against uh society in some ways we're saying

like look everything else can get all screwed up but i'll always have this and so will the people that think like me

unless we go total thermal nuclear no more electricity on earth yeah but again then we have bigger problems than it's like

yeah no currency is going to see yeah how to how to figure out how to hunt squirrel in a sewer right like you know bars of gold we're always back to the

gold yeah well gold is sort of you got to store it still and you know protect it it's not gonna be an easy yeah i i

don't think to be honest like a lot of there's this whole debate between gold versus bitcoin like there's sort of players on each side and i don't think

it necessarily has to be mutually exclusive right like you've got like gold's been around forever like you

can't say that this bitcoin's a new gold and gold's just gonna drop in value i mean it has an intrinsic value and it always has and because of its

immutability i think it always will so um you know i think bitcoin is a more

modern alternative and you can move bitcoin a lot quicker than you can gold like obviously yeah you can

i think it's a lot more malleable whereas i think gold is pretty fixed but it's uh you know gold gold has its uses

like i would you know if i if i had vast stores of wealth i would be buying gold too you know but um

yeah yeah it's hard to shave a bar down and go get yourself a hamburger it's a very cumbersome means yeah yeah

it's it's like and it probably wouldn't be accepted let's face it let's go back to harvey's how foolish of them

uh yeah so to your point it is more it's uh neither um an investment tool or like a practical

spending tool that you're looking at it's a storage of wealth tool yeah bitcoin like you would a piece of gold

yeah well you have to think too if you look at um that figure i gave you earlier where it's like you know even if

one twentieth of total global wealth becomes bitcoin at some point in the future you're still looking at one million dollars of bitcoin right now

we're at 40 000. so in terms of that and i mean that is sort of the low end on

term in terms of you know if you're talking about bitcoin really taking over some reserve

uh being the reserve currency and so is that 120th like a huge amount maybe well it's a lot it's a lot more than it

is now but it's also um you know you're thinking of that like i mean the you know right now the u.s dollar is uh you

know i actually have no idea what but but i don't know if that's over 50 or not but i would think so just because

there's so much a lot of countries have i would say most countries the vast majority of countries even um have us

dollars in their reserve uh because it's you know that's the global currency right yeah yeah

yeah that's interesting digital currencies here i think as i talked to you more it's here to stay

it's a it's a mechanism whether it's going to end up 100 centralized decentralized a mixture of

both yeah i just and and again i like not to sort of drawn on about it but i do hope

that there's a distinction made by people to realize that just because a currency is digital doesn't necessarily

mean it's decentralized and like it's the decentralization that is the the thing about

uh yeah they'll never sell it as centralized they'll sell it as a more protective more secure

yeah you'll give it a cdic sort of acronym that says you're a certain amount of insurance on it you know yeah

they'll say like look all of the five big canadian banks are running these nodes or and that's so it's in that

sense it's decentralized but it's you know it's like well but you control the you know there's there's some

understanding amongst that cobble of uh owners so anyway but you know what again i could see the other side saying

what about uh i think bitcoin right now is fairly decentralized but you never know you

could see mining companies you know kind of coming together and forming little like unions and so do you think

governments then at the end do you think they fear bitcoin i don't think that

i i think that it's on their radar i don't think that they fear it i think that it's um not big enough for them to

fear and i think that they think that if it ever gets big enough they can control it and they might be right i don't know

yeah it's incredible the power they have they can just write the rules as they're going write the rules and write the

money yeah and with the with the centralized version then have an infinite or a set

number would it work the same do you think like or would we get into the same sort of federal reserve

issues yeah i think we'd be see the exact same thing we see now with uh central like with reserve banks

like they did probably banking and everything like that yeah they didn't pose some arbitrary debt ceiling and then they'd raise it like um i think it

would be the same thing [Music] i think it would be a lot more convenient for a lot of people and i

think that that has an appeal to it that can't be underestimated like i think that the idea that you would

get your you know your you almost wouldn't have to worry about tax doing your taxes because it would

all be pre-done and like done immediately you'd get a new check you'd like look you'd open your phone you'd be like oh i just got a i have an extra 200

uh social credit scores here that i can type into digital id yeah like you know the government says i don't

need to get vaccinated but i don't even have to show them anything they just add a little bit of tax to my t4 slip yeah

we'll pretty soon we'll be lucky enough we won't have to have any independent thought at all we can just all strap in and watch netflix all day yeah so

convenient what a life yeah um i'm gonna be strapped in the metaverse we've got to do a metaverse episode 100 uh this is

but this is the metaverse this is this one part of the metaverse i think you start getting into that whole uh cbdc

thing in the social credit store and that starts to get real black mirror and real like um

you can see that getting into it really comes you know i hate to

always bring this up but it comes back to the matrix and it like really comes back to being like um

i can just see a society evolving where we're just blobs of flesh that we're strapped in

we're just you know playing out our our lives in quotes like in some simulated

reality and well if you sell it is like it's safer no one really gets for sure

there's no virus exchange between people's you know yeah yeah you will feel like it's just as

real as anything else it is reality if your mind perceives it to be yeah and question for you though

is that even a bad thing like when you think about it if it really is simulating reality isn't that

just good enough to be reality like what your mind doesn't know the difference

so and it is safer you know what i mean like maybe this is like it's like paying for a prostitute like yes you get what

you want um but it wasn't real because you didn't earn it this one maybe that is the value in the

struggle right and that can never i guess you can program in struggle i'm sure you can

yeah you've got video games of different you know difficulty levels and whatnot yeah you could well i mean part of it

could be you have to achieve a certain thing i mean i know i know what you mean i'm playing devil's advocate to some degree but it's like you i can certainly

see the argument to be like um uh it's like um cipher is it cypher in

the matrix a guy who's eating the steak and he's like i know it's yeah he's like eating this this delicious steak and he's like i know

it's fake but i put this in here i put this in my mouth and it's uh and it tastes like heaven or something

and it's like yeah it's like um but you still want to believe that some part of you will think

this isn't real and you'll doubt it i think i think you know you've changed my mind actually if you if you perceive it

with all your senses to be real it becomes real

well just uh zuckerberg we just have a new recruit here yeah no if you i just you know i

know i'm honest maybe because i'm hungry but you know the whole steak thing if it feels completely legit fills you

tingles in all the right places in your mouth the smells you know how is it not real to you

yeah exactly and you're also safe because you're protected in whatever physical structure they have

you're um achieving you're experiencing a lot of things you would never experience in life you're traveling you're meeting people that

exist or don't exist in reality yeah so like if you really if you really think about

it i mean it sounds like a dystopia but maybe it's a utopia heaven on earth yeah and maybe it's the

only way to achieve heaven on earth right like um you know how many people well think

of the average you know i don't maybe this is a whole other episode but um i

think about the average you know think of jeff bezos you guys got a pretty good life like you know pretty incredible

life like going up you know i just watched that netflix uh elon musk going back to space or

whatever good documentary it's just just kind of came out and um um i find elon musk is like the the

poster child for somebody who has just an incredible life like i can just assume like he just wakes up and he's like what am i gonna do or say today and

it's just like changes the world um but like that's one person out of like

billions like the average person is never going to achieve anything close to that so doesn't it make more sense

for them to not achieve it in this world but maybe they're the elon musk in some alternate

reality right like um that they're sort of the masters of you know never mind most of the people don't exist like do

you interact with like other people who are truly other people or just like computer programs because if they're

truly other people everybody wants to be the king of the castle sort of thing right right everybody's elon musk in this

place but guess what maybe maybe they have this uh this algorithm they have like they they say you can do whatever

you want we're going to mix in a random amount of real people and fake people

and you won't know which ones they are anyway so you can always tell yourself like this this woman i'm married to is

the real deal like she's obviously a real person and you know at some point it just blend bleeds in like it doesn't

matter at some point we're we're [Laughter]

are we though or are we about to be this is destiny yes well it's just it's a it's like watching a

one of those disaster movies and a tsunami is coming at the size of the empire state building slowly rolling

towards you the wave and it will it will obliterate everything that's in in front

of you it might create a new world but you can't stop it i'll tell you something else that i

i i almost think that this is inevitable like i almost think that this is um

i just had a hair on my glasses there um i almost think that glitch in the matrix

yeah exactly um it almost seems like it's inevitable and i try to think of ways that uh it wouldn't be and i don't

even know whether it would be a good thing or a bad thing that's what's really crazy

all i know is buy facebook stock yeah

i'm a caveman sometimes and i i you know obviously i like nice things like a good life i like to achieve

um to a point there's a fine line between ambition and greed and getting that balance just harmoniously correct

is a something that is easy for some people difficult for others but i think it's a good thing overall to find that balance

but um this world that is coming has none of that naturally

maybe we can program some of that in to it if we choose to uh who are the programmers and who you

know what options do we have to choose from you know what if i were to advocate for the other side what am i advocating for

less technology more of an agricultural life like yeah it's interesting like the amish i'd like to see some stats do they

live longer have less heart attacks yeah well what's their happiness level right did they handle coronavirus you know and

stuff like that um i mean bringing it back to that i heard that they actually just met it head-on like well some

people are going to die we'll try our best but you know if we're still going to pass the wine around at communion and

drink from it like we always did and c'est la vie yeah and i think they took their hits early on but overall their society their structure survived you

know right and with their principles intact as well and with yeah and the world they re-emerge into is the world they uh you know

entered coronavirus as right so they don't come out of it to transform to some build back better the new normal

the yeah the new normal for them is you know the 1600s and they're very happy with that

some balance has to be struck between the two worlds of which of course currencies and the

way we do money has always been transforming you know it's funny you go back and read ancient greek plays and

even from you know about for a classic high classical period golden age like 400 bc

um forget which one it was maybe elektra but they were even debating what is money

what does this do i have this coin and i get this thing for it what and there's a whole

several pages on it i forget the character's name and i just found it so contemporary and so urban

like they were literally debating from the moment money was created what is money well that's the greeks for

it and what should i be doing with this and you know i it's not a piece of kleenex to blow my nose you know it's not a spear to go hunt an animal it's

some um a metaphorical thing i hold in my hand

that's could also be my ring it could be a necklace this little coin has a value yeah like it's quite it was quite a

thing and here we are two and a half thousand years later basically um debating

the digital and far more intangible variation of that

so the more things change and where they stay the same yeah and well i think the only reason we're even getting to that

debate again is because the custodians of money

for lack of a better word are we're irresponsible with it and we it's it isn't really what it used to be so

it's um and it's taking on properties as we've seen you know time and again in the us

especially um well and in other countries i just know the us better but like um you

you know something you know the rules of the game are rigged like you have companies that

should fail that just get saved with taxpayers money and you start thinking well if the game is rigged then

you know what is the point of this um you know what is the point in my my piece on the game on the game board it's

like there's there's uh you know something that's when the debate i think arises again and you're

like okay well let's go back to basics what are we trying to do here store value and

and because it doesn't seem to be working the way that they're doing it [Music]

yeah it's complicated and it's complicated um well i thank you this was interesting i

i understand it from a a couple of different viewpoints now um

i'm not scared of it i was hesitant of it before we started talking i'm not scared of it now but

it's a it's a work in progress yeah yeah globally yeah our children will be we'll be you

know working in this world you know it'll be the norm you know

yeah yeah it's it's really interesting um it's really interesting to see where we're going uh it's a it's a fascinating

time to be alive like we're right on the brink of a lot of different things and uh you know money is no different

um so yeah what we'll do is we'll put like maybe some links in the notes uh because there are some good if

you want to learn more of the technical aspects of bitcoin there's there are good videos out there and there's i would definitely recommend to read the

satoshi nakamoto white paper which is i think you can find still at bitcoin.org i don't know but i'll

find out and put it in the notes but um yeah there's a lot of great information on this out there and um i

think it's if you're interested um go forth and uh and seek knowledge

what do you got to lose hey uh you know actually i wanted to say this one one last thing um there's a great well you

know it's an adage so but i you see it when you're logging into like um

it's like a linux root if you want to sudo to something and give it's like giving administrator

access or whatever uh it's a pseudo command it's like there always comes up as the adage with great

power comes great responsibility and i think that's a lot of what bitcoin is too i think that um sort of translated

into the the bitcoin ethos where it's um you know you can do a lot with it the

the world can be yours but you you have to be responsible and and personal

responsibility yeah own the responsibility um yeah so on that unless do you have anything else you want to add no no no

it's great if it's personal responsibility you're just going to think but it's it'd be nice if it could be like personal responsibility with

like asterisks if you get big trouble we'll help you out yeah yeah some something in between man yeah

that's true but it might be that we can't have it both ways or you know maybe uh maybe there'll be some other

solution that comes along that will let us do that but okay that's for another day yep okay

and uh goodnight and thank you for listening take care