 All right, guys, and welcome back to another episode of Ameer Approved. This one's a little bit different than in the studio today. A couple of reasons. We also have a crazy ice storm here in Southern Ontario. That's interesting, but I've got my good friend Brad on here, and I know Brad for a long time. He's a serial entrepreneur, tech entrepreneur, early investor in bitcoin within the crypto space. And he's been pretty hands-on within the blockchain bitcoin crypto space for the last couple of years. And last time I had him on, it was about almost two years ago. We did a deep dive. I think it was 2017 during the craziness of the ICO bubble or whatever hell you want to call it mania. And so we want to kind of catch up, do round two, and see his perspective of what he sees in space, what's happening in his, let me say predictions about outlook of where we're heading within the next 18 months. So Brad, man, welcome back. Thank you very much, sir. And if I end up releasing this also on my podcast, then welcome to everybody on Magic Internet Money, who's also listening to this. We're on Ameer's podcast, Ameer Approved. So what's been going on, man? What's been keeping you busy, or what have you seen lately within space? Well, obviously since the last time that we spoke about it, there's been a lot of capitulation in altcoins and in ICOs. The market kind of proved itself that altcoins don't really have the same decentralized properties and hard money properties as Bitcoin at the moment. And so therefore they've kind of bled continually against Bitcoin. I can't think of many. There's probably a couple outliers that maybe they had some significant news or something like that that they didn't bleed to Bitcoin, but most of them have bled to Bitcoin. And the majority of the ICOs have just completely failed. They have no liquidity. It's not like a shocker. It's not like you're going to see this coming. You know what though? Like looking back, because there was a lot of, like we were all in the bubble and didn't think that it was going to come down this far. I know like all the investors I was talking to, we all thought that it was an altcoin bubble. It was a Bitcoin. We even thought Bitcoin was in a bubble, but I didn't think that ICOs were going to be as destroyed as they ended up getting. So that was a bit of a shocker to me and to a lot of people that they completely got destroyed the way that they've been destroyed. And it's mostly because there's just a lack of liquidity. So you can't get out. Wow. Also the regulators came down and started clamping on everybody. Yeah. The regulators, that's another conversation because the regulators haven't yet, I feel overstepped. I feel like what the regulators have been doing has been logical. You know, it's not like they're saying let's ban cryptocurrencies. It seems like their SEC and CFTC and FinCEN and all the financial regulators are just kind of getting all the low hanging fruit, like all the frauds, the ones that were real like Ponzi scams or high yield investment programs or real like they had fake people listed on their website as the CEO or they spent all their money on jets and caviar and real fraud like financial Ponzi and embezzlement. You know what I mean? That seems to be what they've been going after. And as far as the ICOs, they've been finding a lot of projects for the majority of the projects that the SEC has looked at. They find them around $200,000 and EOS was the exception where they raised $4 billion and they got fined $20 million. But then the SEC just says, okay, here's your fine. You did an illegal securities offering. You can continue once you refund investors, make them whole. You can continue your business, but you have to abide by securities regulations and you continue as a security, not as a coin in the most. But that wasn't the case for EOS. Now EOS, they declined to make the judgment call, it seems, if EOS is a security and there's a bit of debate in this space right now. Did they didn't say it was a security? So does that mean it's not a security? And they didn't even say if ETH was a security or not yet, really. Like there's contradictory opinions back and forth. The only one they so far that, oh, you know what? I think they have said that ETH is not a security now. But I think the point up to for contention is whether or not it was a security during the crowd sale. Yeah. Is that the way you took it? Yeah. I'm not paying close attention. I've been pretty hands-off in the space for the last eight months. Okay. Yeah. Well, if you're off the grid for eight months and you're like, what's the latest in crypto now? Every couple of months, there's a capitulative event that happens that altcoins bleed more against Bitcoin. And then all the influencers start saying, alt season soon, buy those altcoins. They're a good discount right now. And then they go up like 50% or something on weak volume. And then they get wrecked again. And then the influencers will say, it's got to be alt season again soon. So it's like Enron went down and down and down. And people were just doubling up to try to dollar cost average in. Nobody expected Enron was just going to actually go to zero. And the logical choice, if you're doing trend following strategy or risk management, is to not get in until a clear trend has been established. So obviously now is not a clear trend. The clear trend is down. So for all the crypto, Twitter influencers telling people to buy altcoins now, it's a super risky time to buy them because it's been a year and a half of just continual downtrend. Yeah, but even like when I look at this, you look at a couple of things. You look at majority of them, let's say if they've been raised on ETH, so they're not layer one, they're not a protocol. They're like layer two. And you look at the fundamental principles of any startup. And any smart people in the back of the day, if they did their due diligence on Enron and went in and looked at their books and talked to the people, they would see holes. You mentioned people to follow trends. Well, those people are just following sentiment online. They're not really doing their due diligence of going internally. And so if you looked at the ICOs, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out there's no fundamental economic reasons for this token to crude value. Number two is there's no business models attached to this layer two. And number three, there's way too many unknowns. And number four, the industry is very young. It's naive. There's the Bitcoin industry. And then there's the ICO industry and those two separate things. So it's like, for me, the writing was all on the wall. There's only one way for this to go. Well, okay, I agree with you there. But I also think that that mindset is coming from what we already know and the way things operate in the traditional financial system. And obviously the regulators are there to keep the status quo and to keep people enslaved and to keep people poor so that the accredited investor rules are there to make so poor people buy lottery tickets not equity. I agree. I think it's a horrible rule. And like altcoins, if the regulators weren't so heavy-handed and stifled all this innovation that was happening in the ICO space, I believe that maybe the fat protocol thesis theory of value accruing to a token rather than to the equity could have proven out. But it's been clear that the financial regulators are not wanting that to happen. They don't want to lose control of that. And they've got a power grip on the plebs right now. And cryptocurrency was challenging that. And ICOs for the most part were shitcoin failing companies just trying to raise money and push their runways further by raising money from unsophisticated crypto investors. But there was a significant amount of really cool projects building cool stuff. And I do think that there was a thesis there that was legitimate to say that value could have accrued to crypto tokens, whether it's a layer two like an ETH ICO ERC 20 or a lightning network token or a liquid network token or whatever it is. But that's a whole other paradigm shift. And it appears that because of the regulations that are in place right now and the way that they've been threatening to arrest the US developers or whatever if they don't comply with all the rules and enforcing the FATF travel rule with like the KYC requirements for every transaction. It's really scary for developers over here to want to take that risk. So most of them have just been trying to comply. And even though the value could have accrued to the token, it's not accruing to the token because of the regulators, I think. Yeah, but there's also the fundamental principles of businesses. The reason why Bitcoin does so well is the economic, I would say the economic mechanism within Bitcoin, the narrative. So there's science. For sure. Computer science, economic science. And then there's narrative. You need those two to match together. You can't have one with the other. Pure tech alone doesn't win the narrative of human minds. Number two, you look at layer two, if it's a token, it's like, okay, how are you creating value from this token? What's the economic principles of this token? Who's controlling the code of this token? How are you driving revenue with this token? If this isn't in place, regardless of if it's regulatory approved or not, it's not going to accrue in value. A good example and a kudos for them for leaving the way would be Blockstack. They went ahead, fully regulated, audited. I think it's like Reg D, Reg A, one of those regulatory paths they took in the US and their token is tanking. Now, the reason could be multiple two reasons. What's their business model? What's their issuance of the token? Why would I want to buy this token? I'm not having equity in this token. I don't have really voting rights in this token. We haven't seen a justified business model yet. So it's like, okay, what gives it value? Well, it's one thing. I don't know much about that one. Can you tell me what that one is? I mean, I know they listed on CoinList and that's like Navaliravikant's subsidiary of AngelList, but I don't know what Blockstack is. It's another platform creating apps on top of it. So it's basically a platform creating apps. For example, you look at any other business, like you look at one of my favorite performing stocks is Shopify. It's pretty black and white how they make money. I mean, I can see how they make money. I understand the business model. So it's very simple. You can sit down with anybody for two hours and explain to them, like, how does this company produce revenue? What's the margin of this revenue? What's the profit? They can show the EBITDA. Cool, I get it. But show me that within a token, regardless if it's a layer one, layer two, I don't see and in the reason why we're very, very early in the space, we just have like, I've only seen one or two interesting convoluted new Web3 business models, which they're interesting. Mind you, they might take off in the future, but we're so fucking early. It's hard for me to fundamentally say this is a new type of revenue source that tokens can kind of implement. It's hard because it's a fundamental shift in thinking. We've only known markets where the value is from having the quote unquote voting rights or shareholder rights of owning equity in the business. But really, when you think about it, I had a podcast episode with a friend of mine, Greg Thompson, who was one of the earliest Facebook developers and he made the whole Ville craze. He brought this up to me and it was an interesting thought exercise. It's like, if you own Apple shares and Apple shares don't pay dividends and you don't really vote in Apple's shareholder meetings, then really what is owning Apple shares? It's just owning a share in this company that you can sell to someone else at a higher value later. You don't get any dividends or anything from owning an Apple share except for that you hope you can sell it to someone later for more expensive. Yeah. The shares are an IOU. It's a promissory no-however. But it's not like you don't own anything. Those shares aren't backed by Apple's cash in the bank or anything, really? No. When your public market price is not correlated to money in the bank, who can see it with certain weed stocks in Canada, they're minus EBITDA. We're talking about negative 30 million EBITDA. The burn rate is ridiculous. So yes, you don't correlate that. However, you can correlate cash flow projections. You can correlate what type of business models are you creating. There's at least some projections that you can make. Like Apple, you can see how they make money. Like when I look at a token. Yeah, but you don't get any of that revenue. As a share, I have owning Apple shares. You don't get dividends. So you're not participating in any of the profits. The only thing you're getting... No, but you can participate in dividend stocks. You can go to these... I don't think Apple does dividends. No, Apple doesn't do, but there's a million other stocks that give you dividends. Right. There are. But that's what I'm saying. Like with cryptocurrencies and ICOs, I mean, I don't think honestly that there's that much difference between owning Apple stock and owning block stack tokens. Yes and no. The only major difference in my mind, I still don't see a fundamental business model. I don't honestly see a business model owning stock in Apple either, though, when you think about it. Like you don't get dividends from it. You don't get it. You just... But Apple has a business model. Apple has a business model. Yeah, but it's another project that... And the reason why this is important, man, is the fact that Apple at any given time, and they do it all the time, you can do buybacks if you're on stock. Yeah. Apple... So that's one. They don't do dividends, but they have started recently doing buybacks, which they never did really before. But I think it was Ray Dalio or one of those huge investors that got into Apple stock and started pushing them to do buybacks. And I mean, that just really underscores the fact that the whole stock market and all these tech companies and the fang stocks and everything, it's just a big Ponzi. Because when you look at the buyback thing, these guys get money from the government through pension funds to do buybacks of their stock, which pumps the stock price higher and puts more money in the hands of the executives of the company. So the money comes from quantitative easing. As far as I understand it, I'm trying to understand this. The money comes from quantitative easing and then it goes into the stocks and then via pension funds and then goes to stock buybacks and pumps the price on the stock market. So I mean, that just feels messed up. It doesn't feel like there's a business model there either. Well, the business model of a stock is very different than the internal, let's say in quotations, the business model of the company itself. My issues with tokens is it's not per se the token itself. That's not the issue. Let's say the computer. It's a value. I get what you're saying. From a buyer investor, how are you extracting value? Where is the revenue coming from? I guess I'm just trying to creatively thinking here, make the argument that it's just because we say it is. That's the way the stock market works right now for most companies. Just because we say it's valuable, it's valuable, just like money. Just because we say it is, it boils down to that rather than like, oh, they have good earnings and all that because for most stocks, you don't actually participate in that. You're just playing the casino, the stock market casino to try to sell it later for a higher value. Well, remember, when it goes public onto retail investors, majority of the value has been extracted already from the private rounds. Right. The accredited investors. That's not us. No, whoever got into it, right? Most listeners of the podcast here are not the accredited investors that got all those 20x, 100x returns on them. Yeah, but even if they work, I'm a big proponent of eliminating that law. Everyone should invest. Still, then the next question, which is the most important question is then deal flow. So even if it was open, how does a regular person get access to a deal like that? They don't. I think there was, what was that law that was passed? There was a crowdfunding law that Jobs Act is two years ago in Ontario. Yeah. But still, it's 25, listen, it's a good step forward. So the idea is that there would be a site like Kickstarter or something where you could go on and set up buying a product, you buy stock and start up. No good company goes there. No, not now, but I mean, that would be cool if that's the way it did work. I think what would be cooler if you're looking at the trends right now is companies in the last 10 years aren't IPO-ing. It's been overinflated with pre-evaluations, especially with the advent of, oh, what is the Japanese guy's, his fund, Softbank. And so you see a diminishing numbers for IPOs. And so a lot of companies are doing RTOs here in Canada. It's a little bit easier. But what would help everybody more is going public quicker. So not even necessarily hitting DTSS or NASDAQs or maybe hitting some of these other micro-exchanges or smaller exchanges where if you are within two years of your startup, you have some, let's say, progress and you're making good revenue. You're not profitable yet, but you're making good revenue. How can we go public quicker and do a sideways offering as opposed to a set price offering where it's price discovery? Well, that's a more fair way to do it, right? Well, you can do price discovery right now. 99% of people don't want to do it. But the insiders, though, don't want to give up those juicy 100,000X returns. That's how they continue to make ridiculous monies because they get to keep all those returns themselves when they keep it private longer and then they go public at like a $4 billion valuation. They get a massive return on their investment when the public just gets a negative 20, 30% or maybe a 1X or 2X or something like that if they're lucky. 2X is good, man, doubling up your money. Not as good as 1,000X, though. No, but remember, for the insiders. For all the wins that they had, they have a lot of losses. So they have the luxury. That's true. And the deal flow, man, and the deal flow. People really underestimate the deal flow. Like you and I can make the most open-ended laws here in Ontario saying everyone can invest and tokens are available, yada, yada, yada. But once again, you'll see a congregation or aggregation of the power laws be that deal flow will fall into the hands of the few. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. And like I believe in free markets. And I'm not say I don't think that there should be like a police task force that's just there to stop VCs from making unicorn bets and getting unicorn returns. But I do think it's totally messed up. And I feel like the laws are stacked against the average person right now. And the regulations on cryptocurrencies are also stacked against the average person and kind of there to sort of prop up the status quo and the power structure for central banks and elites like the 0.1% of the world that are just getting richer and richer and richer. Because cryptocurrencies are a threat to that. And you know. Yes and no. You don't want to have totally free and open trade that average people can bypass your fiat currency when governments all over the world are trying to eliminate cash and surveil everybody's transactions and get more data on what everybody's doing. If you have anonymous transactions with cryptocurrencies and stuff, it's a total threat to what they're trying to accomplish right now. Yeah, but I think we're so far off from people even using cryptocurrencies. We still haven't solved the fundamental problem of the original Bitcoin white paper, which is peer to peer cash. So right now the narrative is Bitcoin is digital gold, which I don't agree for that narrative. It's the dumbest narrative I've ever heard. For me, the narrative is censorship resistant. Without the censorship resistant, it's useless in my mind. And so censorship resistant is the value prop, the fundamental value prop of Bitcoin. And digital gold, how can you call something digital gold when it's jumping up and down in value like this? I would never tell a regular person to put their money into that. Well, digital gold, I think, makes sense because it's a store of value. A store of value, I think also makes sense if you're thinking on longer time frames. I mean, it's not like anybody who's going out there and saying, put all of your wealth in Bitcoin, it's a stable store of value. That's totally bullshit. Remember, even if it's a store of value, without the censorship resistant aspect, it's pointless. Exactly. And that's why I think Bitcoin is really the only one that's long term worth putting money into. That's not just speculation. And that's kind of what the market has proven out with all these altcoins and ICOs kind of capitulating against Bitcoin continually. And the markets are continuing to bleed into Bitcoin. Even though Bitcoin has gone down, at the beginning of the year, it was $3,500 or something U.S. To me, the price of Bitcoin is fucking insane from the last five years. People forget how how much value has accrued in five years. It's crazy. Yeah, it is nuts. It's been a crazy couple of years, that's for sure. Two and a half, three years ago, the price of Bitcoin was $500. My original thought is within Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper of peer-to-peer digital cash. We haven't solved that yet. Well, I think that censorship resistance is the most important property of what Bitcoin was. Bitcoin was created by cypherpunks and cypherpunks were on the cypherpunks mailing list trying to create cryptography that could allow you to have privacy and encrypt your information, encrypt your data, encrypt money. So I think that it has been solved. I think peer-to-peer Bitcoin is peer-to-peer cash. Not necessarily, because if the narrative is store of value or digital gold, even myself, there's multiple narratives. I don't want to spend it. No, but that's because Bitcoin's meme, it has more value mimetically as a moon coin, as you can get rich off Bitcoin. You can talk about privacy and decentralization and censorship resistance and free speech money, but people just don't give a shit in this culture anymore about free speech and privacy at the moment. Look at what's going on with Julian Assange. Everybody's turned against Julian Assange because of the celebrities and the left on social media have all turned WikiLeaks into this evil scapegoat for Russiagate. The Russians gave Julian Assange the emails, Hillary's emails, so therefore free speech and he's not a journalist and free speech isn't worth protecting anymore and really that's not even been proven and Julian Assange and WikiLeaks say Russia wasn't the source, but people on the left sort of adopted this narrative that it's, you know, now that WikiLeaks is not fashionable to like, they don't protect the mission behind free speech and privacy, whereas before when WikiLeaks released all the information that showed the war crimes that the U.S. military was committing in the Middle East and like released the footage of the the military murdering those journalists and those children from the gunships, like the left was all over that and they were like, you know, WikiLeaks is awesome, WikiLeaks is journalism, Julian Assange is a hero, but now it's like, oh, Russiagate, oh, Julian Assange, Putin, bad, Trump, bad, let's not talk about this anymore. So like privacy is a fair weather friend for people. I don't think it has that strong value. It's like if there's a small minority of us that really do actually care about protecting free speech and privacy. Well, it goes back to self-interest if people don't feel the need for it, they won't respect it. This is why you see people, for example, Dao in Hong Kong, who are flying the American flag, singing the national American anthem on the streets and demanding free speech, demanding privacy, demanding sovereignty. It all depends, like if you're not, if you feel, let's put in quotations, safe within the area that you're living for you. It's not, I want to say necessity, but consciously, it's not something that you find out. Yes, not on your mind every day. No. So I don't think for Bitcoin, you know, the peer-to-peer cash, the title of the white paper, I mean, the Bitcoin cash people like to put too much weight on Satoshi's words and Satoshi's like titles and all that stuff. And the Bitcoin maximalists put too much word, too much emphasis on digital gold and all that stuff. But it shows that the digital gold narrative, the store value narrative has been winning. And I mean, Bitcoin is represented really like you can break it down into Bitcoin as representative of store value, digital gold, censorship resistant. And Bitcoin cash and lots of other coins are more representative of low fee cheap peer-to-peer payments. And I mean, if you look at who's searching for what on Google, people aren't searching for Ethereum, people aren't searching for Bitcoin cash or Dash or cryptocurrency even. They're searching for Bitcoin. And Libra. I haven't compared the Libra searches. Libra's higher. Libra's second in line after Bitcoin. Well, I mean, that just kind of shows me that's a kind of a trailing indicator. Obviously, it doesn't it doesn't lead the price. Maybe it does. I don't know. But it moves with the price, whether it causes price increases or not. It's just an important thing to look at. And I think people respond more to Bitcoin as an alternative form of money that's not having to trust a bank because millennials don't trust banks as much as Gen X and boomers and the silent generation. And Gen Z is coming up digitally native as well as millennials. So it's like, they already don't trust banks. Bitcoin is an alternative to that. It is censorship resistant. It's the most censorship resistant cryptocurrency that there is. And whether or not you want to say it's a digital gold or it's a peer-to-peer cash, people are just going to naturally want to respond more like the average person to, oh, I can get rich on this. It's just the way people are wired. So that's why it's a stronger narrative, I think, is like people say digital gold, you know, this is going to go up. The two biggest narratives is the Bitcoin and Dogecoin. Dogecoin. Bro, that's the that's King meme right there. Dogecoin was really strong. That was really fun times when Dogecoin was a strong. But it goes to show you that code doesn't really matter. Like when's the last time the GitHub has been updated for that? Oh yeah, they haven't updated anything I think since like 2014. There you go. So meme is much more powerful than science. Yeah, but Dogecoin is like, you know, it's it's still not really going to go anywhere. It's just a meme. It's just a joke. It's for the it's for the cryptocurrency. Like what do you want to call them? The devil's advocates or like the people that just were in it for the fun and for the lulls. Yeah. Have you been paying attention to any of the stuff happening in theory? I'm like, die in the open financial stuff they're doing? Not enough. I've been paying attention to it. But to me, it all comes back to like, if it's money, then Bitcoin is the one that I think is going to win. And die is just like, why would I want to use die when I can use dollars or Bitcoin or another stablecoin like tether or Libra when it comes out? Yeah, well, die has a lot of use cases in like Latin America. Well, that's what people say. But I don't I haven't really seen the data on that. I don't think someone's done a data is all anecdotal. Yes, I mean, like people say that Roger Ver is getting tons of adoption in Japan for Bitcoin cash, too. And then you'll post pictures of him like, you know, at an airport with a Bitcoin cash, except that he or sticker or whatever. And then you like, go look at the Google searches in Japan, and it's like, nothing. There's no searches for Bitcoin cash in Japan. And they're not releasing any numbers. The only thing we see on these, these things is increasing transactions, but like kind of like them a medic thing there, is it, is it a more strong impulse for you to want to get behind something that is cost nothing to use or can potentially change your life in financial, in a ways. I think it's like, obvious that people are going to want to earn more money or like make more money or have more value or protect their value against a fiat collapse or inflation. Well, this is why people like, like, like die in Latin America, they don't want their local currency. Mind you, they love Bitcoin to use it there. But with die, you know, first time ever, they have the option of entering some form of financial market where they can lend out die or lend out ETH and earn maybe 6% to 10% on different markets and never had that option before. See, I don't. You can't even do that with Bitcoin right now. Well, you can use Bitcoin with any of these lenders and earn yourself some interest. Yeah, but you're exposed to the volatility. A centralized lender. And if I'm in like Argentina, I don't have access to that. Yeah, but how many people are actually using this stuff? I mean, I hear that there's a use case, but I don't see the evidence. I think within this text, you can substitute die for something else. But the whole idea that the fact that you can, there's a prebuilt infrastructure within the DeFi space on Ethereum, maybe they'll expand onto Bitcoin and other platforms in the future. But the fact that I can seamlessly accept die right now on my phone and I can then put that towards like Compound or some other, let's call it, you know, decentralized platform and earn some interest seamlessly from my app or from my wallet. That's pretty impressive. So it's not centralized. You don't have to give Custody, Custody, I mean, to any, no, any app or anything like that. There are, there are some options, but there are some decentralized ones to earn the interest. Yeah. So what, is it different than proof of stake? Really? Like, no, they're just arbitraging or you're giving them value and they're arbitraging it on the back end and you can take it out whenever you want. You're the ones that own the keys. So it's like a savings account, stablecoin backed by Ethereum. In a nutshell, yeah. So what happens like when Ethereum goes down? Well, dies, die has handled 86% drop plus already. So. So, but somebody's got to lose though, right? Lose what? Like, because isn't die, because there's maker and then die. Two different things. But aren't they the same thing? Same platform, makers for voting and governance dies just as stablecoin. Not, not privy to maker, but privy to the Yeah. Now it's actually more complicated, which I haven't dug into it whatsoever. They, they're eliminating, they call a sigh. Well, I think it's because the name die is pretty stupid. Well, it's still, it's, it's still die, but now it's multi collateral die. So they have different. Yeah. It's a good branding thing to get away from die. Like who wants to put their money into die? Honey, I'm going to go get some die. Yeah. Let's take all of our savings and buy die. With it. So they're changing it to sigh. But so the way that I kind of like briefly understand this is it's a stablecoin that's backed by Ethereum. It's a programmatic stablecoin backed by the Ethereum. Well, you got to lock your Ethereum up. No, you know, I can go, I can get paid and die. I don't need to lock up nothing. You can send me die right now. You can buy die off any platform. Okay. So I can just go to an exchange buy die coins. Yes. And somebody's backing it with Ethereum, but not me. The maker platform is backing it. Yeah. Okay. So you're just, so the maker side of it is the people that are, I guess, doing quant stuff to sort of bet on the price of Ethereum to make money from die? It's so confusing. Well, the maker is accruing value with their token. And there's like a burn. I haven't dug too deep into it, but you can, like, let's put it this way. Let's eliminate die from this conversation and talk about just the option. So you in Latin America or wherever you are, you can accept the value. We'll call it token A. Right. And now I can actually send that token out. Maybe I can earn 6% interest in this like decentralized savings account. I could then stake it in a proof of stake network and maybe earn 7% over there. All for my wallet. Yeah. But the proof of stake, the percentage return is not native to die though. That's the centralized part. No, but you have multiple options. So just your wallet, like think about the whole ecosystem as a whole. You have access to proof of stakes systems if you want to interest. So you're going to have access to lending if you want to lend. But that's got to be centralized though. That part has to be centralized because it's not part of the protocol. As far as I understand, you don't get an interest because someone has to take that die and loan it out and make a profit and then give a percentage back to you. No, there's stuff like Uniswap where it's a shared value gain from everybody and it's completely decentralized on a smart contract. Nobody owns it. No one runs it. So how do they get percentages? Like where's the percent coming from? It's like a bonding curve. So depending on how many people have tokens staked on there and they've changed it. So like I said, I've been keeping up. I just know preliminary. But it's like a bonding curve. You have all these different tokens on there and there's like a global transaction fee. And whenever your token is matched with somebody, it's pressure, right? Bicell pressure, whatever it's matched like a swap. Let's say, because this isn't Fiat. This is just a token token. So it's a swap. Anytime your token is matched with the Bicell engine, that small percentage you take of the total network. So you're doing like a decentralized exchange kind of? Yeah. And then you can do the same thing to have this for like for loans as well. But the loans. No, sorry. Not loan savings, savings, not loans. The savings. It's kind of like what BlockFi does, where you give them Bitcoin or whatever, and then they loan it out and make. Yeah. The thing with BlockFi or even like with BlockFi and decentralized, I still have to go through a heavy duty KYC and some of my banks might be blacklisted. Let's say if I live in Argentina, I actually don't have the regulatory approval to even use it. Right. So I'm walked out. Right. And you're trusting that these third parties are not going to get scammed or lose your money or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Which has not been a good idea long term in the Bitcoin space. The whole idea of the open financial. And Bitcoin probably can do this in the future, but it's a fact of like it's literally a peer to peer financial system. The way that it always just confused me so much, it's like so much, so many things to this that. Oh, we're so early in this land. Like it struck me as it was only like a quant toy for a long time, but you're saying that there's usage in Latin America by people who aren't like tech savvy? Yeah. Even right now during the, I wasn't there, but a guy went on, he was at DEF CON in Japan and he shared the story, how he lives off a dye and ether for the whole year. Like that's how he lives and breeds. Interesting. Yeah. And he's from our, yeah, but Buenos Aires, yeah. Yeah. No fiat. It's like I get paid and die. I don't want my local currency. Dye stable. I use it. He lends it out or puts in savings account. He's like, I don't have any savings on here. I don't have banks. I don't trust in my inflation. Like, why would I use anything? I would not use anything locally. Well, I mean like that kind of, that's interesting. And it, I play devil's advocate on both sides of this, right? So I feel like some, there are some use cases where ICOs and cryptocurrencies aside from Bitcoin are valuable and have, you know, the regulator shouldn't be up in the business of every single project threatening to throw the developers in jail if they don't have the right license and whatnot. But, you know, like die if there's a real use case for it. And if people are actually getting value from it and they can't use Bitcoin for that at the moment, then whatever, like, that's good, I guess. That's not the saying, that's not saying they're not using Bitcoin or holding Bitcoin. That's a whole different conversation. Yeah. I don't know if they're doing it or not, but obviously, like. The fact that people are creating systems right now where you, right from your crypto wallet, you can then join, you can lend it or you can stake it or you can do what it like delegated stake and earn interest or gain some type of protocol transaction fees. That's pretty remarkable in my mind. I think these are like very, very rudimentary, super early protocols that we're just going to take a decade to mature. But it's a fascinating model. It is. Yeah, it is. But to me, it's like the market's kind of been showing us that that stuff's not been that valuable because all the proof of stake coins that have been launched have gone down in value quite a bit. Yeah. I don't even think this has to do a value of token. The fact that this tech is possible and you can substitute it from just hypothetically, let's say Bitcoin now creates a system like this, where you have an open financial variation. Let's call it DeFi with Bitcoin. Extract the token value. People aren't looking for token accruciation. What they're looking for is a fact that they can then join these new open. I don't like to call it decentralized finance because it's not that binary but I call it more open financial. The fact that people now have accessibility to open financial products that they never had before. Like if I was living down there, I didn't have access to all these other products. We have access to North America or Europe. Yeah, I guess that's kind of like what some of these companies are doing by tokenizing stocks on Bitcoin so that if you don't have enough money to own a full Apple share, you can get like a fraction of an Apple share and it's actually like on Bitcoin. Yeah. But we'll see how that works out. I'm not a super hater on that stuff. I just don't think people are actually using it as much as it's mostly being used by already like really wealthy people. Well, mind you, usually with most technologies is the people that have the luxury both from A to financial core. Yeah. It's all tech. This isn't just privy to the blockchains. Yeah, I know, but I also don't think it's like a strong enough use case for the average person. I think most people want, like you said, you don't think they want value accrual. I think they do. That's why I got into Bitcoin. I was like, dang, this thing's going to make me rich. I'm going to get some of this shit and start binding it. But they buy Bitcoin, but remember they need cash, man. Like people don't have disposable income. So let's say 10% goes towards Bitcoin of their salary. 90%, let's say out of the 90%, 70%, or even 80% goes towards just living expenses on a month-to-month basis. That's left with 10%. That for 10% now can join an open financial platform. So maybe that 10%, let's say it's 50 bucks or they can now, that 50 bucks can earn 5%. That 50 bucks can earn something. One, you don't have the option with Bitcoin right now to do that. No, you don't. But Bitcoin... So this isn't like one, this isn't Bitcoin versus them. And these are two different things. Well, it kind of is though. It kind of is because Bitcoin potentially can represent a significant increase of the value that you put into it in a wealth transfer event that's once in a lifetime. Yeah, but no one's saying don't buy Bitcoin. Same thing like stocks. Imagine you said just buy one stock or buy one commodity or buy one asset class. Yeah. No, no, I get you. But that seems to be the way it's going though, right? Like it's no one's saying that. But actually there are some people saying that. Like that most all coiners are like pushing a narrative of like Bitcoin is no good because this. And you know, we're better than Bitcoin because this and you know, Bitcoin cash is the worst perpetrator of them all with like actually trying to fool people into thinking that it's actually Bitcoin and that Bitcoin is broken and controlled by the lizard people and all that stuff. But if you just look at like human nature, I think people tend to only want to use like one money. And if these things are being presented as money, the one that they're likely to use, I think, is the one that is going to potentially get them a bigger return from, you know, from being 1% of your wealth to 100% of your wealth, you know, the kind of significant gain you can get like a life changing type of gain. Otherwise, you will start to buy a bunch of different projects and coins and quickly realize that you're not a trader and you're just losing money. And all that interest that you're getting from the proof of stake coins or the die return or whatever is actually worth less and less and less compared to have you just been holding Bitcoin and it went up 10X or 20X. Like that 20, 30, 40, 50% that you earned actually was a negative 70, 80% because you didn't just buy Bitcoin and hold that. This isn't about is Bitcoin better or not? Like I think Bitcoin is Bitcoin. The fact that you have a network effect, like when you have open financial system, and right now it's primarily on Ethereum, let's say it builds on Bitcoin within the next five years, this network effect is the interesting aspect of it. The fact that you have all these derivative open financial products, some of them have zero tokens, some of them are just protocols, like with no token whatsoever, just pure tech play that plugs in other people's tokens. And so this is the fascinating thing is the open financial tech play as opposed to the token accrucian play. Yeah, but the tech needs users and the users are like already, we already have data on what people are using and what people are doing. I think if you were to make an investment thesis on Ethereum, it's that these new DeFi things, if they succeed, it will lock up a significant supply of the Ethereum, and that will be like upward pressure on the price because you'll have all this 800 million's already locked up. Yeah, so you got all this supply locked up so that it's just like the ICO boom, what happened there was all these... But it's no different than hodlers of Bitcoin. It's similar, yes, it's similar, and that's why I said if you were to make an investment thesis on it, it's that the more supply that gets locked up, the less cell pressure there is, the supply shock kind of contributes to a price rise, same as the Bitcoin happening, but that needs users and that needs a lot of usage, and I just don't see that data showing that people are going to use it. And I naturally don't think that people are going to want to use an algorithmic stablecoin versus Bitcoin, which has a much easier to understand the thesis behind it. Digital gold makes sense to people when they hear about that. So that's why I don't own much ETH other than to just use it. I'll say if you're forgetting that Bitcoin has been around eight years before anything else. Yeah, and ETH is like... Only three years now coming up. ETH has been following similar pattern of Bitcoin in its history. I'm not here as an ETH head, I actually have zero loyalty to anything. I'm just looking at this from an objective standpoint. Yeah, and I'm not one of those people that are like, oh, ETH is a scam. I don't own any because I don't find it that interesting in terms of a... I feel like if you're looking at cryptocurrency to get a return on your investment and you're looking for exposure to this new asset class, then just own Bitcoin because it's going to have a much higher chance of succeeding as a global money than any other cryptocurrency because it's the most decentralized and censorship resistance in the end is, like you said, the most important part of why cryptocurrencies have value. And Ethereum has proven itself to be more centralized because of the Dow hack where code was law until code wasn't law anymore and they intervened and refunded everybody. But since then, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing because there's a big huge segment of people that want to be rescued and want bailouts. Look at the global financial system. It's worth lots of money and people don't care about decentralization there. So I'm not saying ETH is not a good value proposition to invest in if you know what you're doing and if you know how to analyze this stuff. And if you do think that Maker Die is going to be used by people in Latin and stuff and has an interesting use case, then ETH will probably go up. It has an interesting use case. Like I said, I don't have any bags whatsoever. I have zero skin in the game when it comes to this. What excites me is the underlining opportunities or new initiatives that people are building is exciting. Yeah, I agree with you there, man. Like I think it is an interesting concept to have an algorithmic stable coin that is not centralized and that anybody can participate in that rewards you some kind of interest like an interest bearing account. It's better than Tether because Tether is centralized. You mentioned narratives just wait till Libre launches. If they launch, everyone's going to go on that thing. Well, yeah, I think that's why I'm not as strong as a Die fan because in the end, I feel like it comes back to Libre is going to eat everybody's lunch. Libre is going to be the only stable coin that matters. And Libre is going to then introduce people to cryptocurrency because they're going to search what is cryptocurrency. And then Bitcoin is going to be the one everybody sees, not Die because they already have Libre and not ETH because ETH is more like whatever the narrative is at the year. I have no idea what the narrative of ETH is right now. Open Finance, DeFi is the current one. But it's also money. There's a real strong growing trend of Ethereum analysts and funds and all that stuff now that they're trying to push ETH's money and they're competing with Bitcoin as digital gold. They're trying to push that. And to be fair, who's to say what is digital gold? If a million people use ETH as money, then ETH is money. I can't say ETH is not money. If people are using it as money, even though I'm more on the maximalist side, we just have to wait and see how it all shakes out. But I got my bets on Bitcoin. Yeah, listen, like I said, Bitcoin to me is a censorship resistant. The only thing I care about is every 10 minutes a block is mined and it's censorship resistant. Anything else to me is irrelevant. Yeah, and those Maker Die guys, it's not an Ethereum-specific project. They can switch it to Bitcoin. Well, they just switched to multi-collateral. Their plan is to eventually get Bitcoin, yeah. Yeah, so it's like the same as the ICO boom. It was like all these projects launching on Ethereum. Well, this is going to give Ethereum value because look at all the uplift we're going to get from this. And it did while all this ETH was locked up in these token treasuries until they all started selling and then they didn't have any loyalty to Ethereum. And there was more downward price pressure on Ethereum than there was on Bitcoin because more people had Ethereum to sell and they were building their own projects. Some of them were competitive. Like EOS had billions of dollars worth of Ethereum that they were selling. Listen, there's a lot of competitive projects in 2020. You know, you have, and it's very, it's interesting because they're more geared towards niches. So very specific platforms as opposed to the... Transactions per second is the latest and greatest. Anything you're paying attention to that or that you're looking at, like that Block Geeks is training people for? Still organically, man. We approach everything through organic interest. Like who comes to you to ask for stuff? Yeah, so... Who do you see now is like the most asked for training program? Well, the enterprise has their own stuff. So enterprise has like private Ethereum stuff, hyperledger stuff, Coda a little bit. Yeah, that's... What about like Algorand? Are they, are they, you see much demand for that? I spoke with them not organically, not at least in North America or Western Europe. We also track traffic for keywords and sentiment. So yeah, you know all about that stuff. You're like an SEO guru. Well, majority of our traffic, we have about 600 to 800,000 visits a month organic. We control about, I don't know, 150,000 keywords. So we look at the organic interest and primarily from both developers, regulatory bodies. It's still the mind shares Ethereum, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Yeah. What about Hashgraph? You seen any uptick there? Not organically. No, not yet. NEO? No, not organically. None of the Chinese projects getting any? It's one thing we talk with them. They have really cool tech and they have cool people, but I'm just talking purely from organic aspect. Right. No ripple. No. So it's mostly ETH. Listen, we have to give them, we have to give them a couple of years, right? So ETH has about three year heads that are in them. And next year you have all these big competitors. You have Cosmos launched a couple of months ago. And then next year you have supposedly, you know, Falcoine and Polkadot. Right. You mentioned Hashgraph and then, you know, Definity or whatever. There's so many, I can't even keep count, but let's say you have at least five major players. Radix. Radix, huge treasury coming online. So it's going to be interesting when you have probably more than 15 platforms that have a treasury of over 50 to 100 million dollars that have destroyed. Yeah. Yeah, that's the other thing that's like, a lot of these projects have big, huge treasuries and they're all competing against each other for similar niches of developer mind share. Yes. Enterprise and like DApps and stuff. Both. Public and enterprise, yeah. And it's like, it reminds me of the Bcash community, the RBTC community, when they forked off, it was mostly Bitcoiners arguing with BCH people who were the big blockers. And then when BSV forked BCH, it then became mostly majority of BSV and BCH fighting each other, which was like, Bitcoiners got to outsource their trolling to the other communities, because they just started to cannibalize each other. And it still goes on now. You go to RBTC and there's like, it used to be that all the downvoted comments were from Bitcoiners. Now it's all mostly from BSV people. So do you think maybe that because of all these big transactions per second enterprise blockchain projects coming online in the same time in the next 12 months, do you think it's maybe going to like, is there going to be an outlier, do you think? Like one that does really well or are they all going to be like eating each other's lunch? So far from the enterprise, because just of mind share, it has been hyper ledger and Ethereum, private chains, but they're hyper ledger is Bitcoin, is Ethereum, right? Is it private Ethereum or no? No, it's different, but they have the same EVM now. So you can, it's interoperable, they can use it together. But you have interesting projects coming up that are very focused on enterprise. But for me, I'm sure there's a lot of interesting Fortune 500 companies out there building on other platforms, but I don't hear about it. It's not public. Do you think that any of these big projects that have these huge treasuries are going to be viable investments for an average person or for the sort of like an interested crypto person? A way too complicated for the average person. Yeah. Way too complicated. Even if Bitcoin is complicated for the average person, like just getting a wallet and teaching them about a seed phrase and keeping that safe is complicated. Enough might as well talking about proof of stake and all this other stuff. It's like it's not for the average person. It's like when Coinbase started giving people 0x, like to learn about the 0x protocol and get some ZRX tokens, like what the hell? Like people on Coinbase don't need to know what ZRX is to get those tokens. No, we're not even close to at least in North America. Maybe Asia, Korea is a little bit different, but we're not even close to penetrating the mind share of crypto. It has nothing to do with the narrative. It's kind of actually kind of does, but it's just the ease of use isn't here. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like yeah, the use, the eyeballs are not there. And even if they are, it's still, there's so much out there. There's so, there's too much for people to choose. There's too many options. There's too many coins for the small amount of traders and small amount of users. Remember, we are a market cap, obviously you see in Coin market cap, what's that? Like 260, 270. Oh, it's way less. You're talking about total or Bitcoin? Total. Total is like 220 right now, but yeah. And I don't know if that's the accurate figures. Let's say you know. Probably like 150. Yeah, bro. The fuck is that? Yeah, it's not very high. Apple is bigger than all of that. Apple's a trillion or something, isn't it? Yeah, 10x that. Yeah. So, you know, we have a long way to go. Yeah. And like for me, we're still, we're still building the pipes of the industry. It's like key management's not here. Identity from different chains isn't here. So the interoperability, stupid word, I fucking hate it, but, you know, ease of use, I should call it. It's not here. You know what I mean? Like you, listen, you can't expect people to remember their seed phrases or if they lose. There has to be some mechanism of getting it. You know, or there has to be. And I think the whole, listen, like at the end of the day, we're just really early within the infrastructure. Even Bitcoin's early. Like Bitcoin has still a long way to go to build up its infrastructure. For that thing you said, I think it's important for mass adoption that people don't lose their coins and they have a way to access their coins. But there's two, there's two arguments for that that I've heard because I think about that too. One is the Trace Mayor side. And Trace Mayor says some people just don't deserve sovereignty. You know, if they don't want to take their own sovereignty. No, but there should be options. But there should be options like A, if you educate yourself and you're willing to take responsibility, yes, you can take sovereignty by writing down your seed phrase or putting in, you know, you have it somewhere safe. You understand it. Yeah, but it's like to his point though, it's not as complicated as it's... Like people figured out how to use the internet. People figured out how to like... If you're talking about mass adoption and crypto, this is why Libra will kick ass because it's literally built into Facebook and I click a button and I have it. And I think like because it's centralized, right? But if you, you're not going to be getting returns on your Libra coins, you're going to be just using... No, my whole point, like this is saying in marketing, teach them what they want, you know, give them what they want, teach them what they need, right? So foot in the door. And so you first have to... The least barrier to resistant or like, what is the minimum barrier to get into people? You know, you want someone to go, you know, invest in an exchange in Canada and it's... We're heavily regulated, you know. It's getting more difficult. You know, Canada seems to be like, fuck when our exchange is retarded, you have like now the next one that just got fucked up. Einstein. Einstein and once again, in British Columbia. And so it's like heavily KYC. Listen, I get their point of view. So if you want to go and exchange in Canada, KYC, the AML, it's a tedious process to go on. Very tedious process. Yeah. Now, if we want 100 million people then through the space, that's my avatar is my brother. He's tech savvy. He's young. He's digitally native. He's a world traveler. He doesn't give a fuck about, you know, the store value bullshit. He just cares about in, out, what have been. But if we can get him in the door quick and easy, then he sees the power that this has or the options or the ease of use, that is kind of the jujitsu trick that you pull on people. Then the kind of... They go down Alice in Wonderland's rabbit hole. Yeah. Where they... Oh, wait a second. I can control my own Bitcoin. Oh, cool. You have this DeFi stuff over here. You know what I mean? Like if the bear to entry is this side at the beginning where you have to educate people of seed phrases and all this stuff, it's like you're going to adopt a very few people that are the curious ones who want to learn. The majority of people aren't that. Yeah. No, I agree. It's like the majority of people aren't as interested in learning about how to use a new technology like that unless it's really beneficial for them. Exactly. And like if you want sovereignty, you'll figure it out because it's not that hard. And there's some pretty good onboarding methods right now for hardware wallets and different exchanges and software wallets. Like Rise wallet is a good one for... Like the Rise card. I like to intro people to Bitcoin with that now. But sovereignty, that's what Bitcoin is for. It's for financial sovereignty, own your own assets, no middleman, no financial censorship. And if that's not important to you, which for the majority of people in the world, it's not right now, then we're not going to have a mass adoption event happen because we have easy money right now. Like our money works right now. So the other side of the argument is like what you said, exchanges. If exchanges can act as like the on ramp for a mass adoption via centralized holding your keys and like if you lose your password, you just call the exchange up or email them, whatever they give you, you don't lose your coins. You don't have sovereignty there because you're KYC'ing yourself and they have your coins. But you have access to cryptocurrency, you're in, you're kind of learning. So it's like the jujitsu trick, like you said, to getting people into cryptocurrency and then hopefully they get educated and find Bitcoin. But I think that Bitcoin doesn't need mass adoption to succeed as a global reserve currency because you only need the wealthiest of people to start looking at Bitcoin as a hedge against their... But we do need the collapsed money. We do need the price to stay above a certain threshold for the miners to be economically incentivized to keep on mining. I don't know, man. I think the minor capitulation narrative just isn't real. So let's say Bitcoin goes to 500 bucks. Well, Bitcoin at 500 bucks, all bets are off. For sure, people are going to stop mining. See? Well, no. Yeah. For sure. But the difficulty will then adjust back down eventually and miners will come back on. But I'm thinking like... I thought you meant like 5,000 or something like that. No, I'm saying hypothetically, like some Black Swan event, I'm not too sure. I'm like, let's say it does do a big Swan dive to 500 bucks. There's going to be... It's going to be a lot of people shutting off their miners, for sure. Oh, yeah. They don't have the capital flow to hold off until the mining difficulty changes. And depending on when the price swings back up. Yeah. For sure. If it's a big giant price drop, then it wouldn't be too good for hash power. But as we saw during 2017 to 2019, if you look at the hash power rate, it went like this. It's like hockey stick while the price was going like this. So... Well, hash power and price have nothing to do with each other. I don't know. I think they kind of are related. It's not like they... They're not like... You can't predict the price with the hash power, but I think it's very good fundamentally that the hash power grew 10x while the price went down 90% or 80% or whatever it was. It's all speculation still. It's not based... The fundamental narrative for people is the fact that 21 million is the cap. You have halving. So when coming in May, I think the reward becomes 6 bitcoin, right? 12 to 6. Right? 12 and a half now, 6.125. So 6.125 will be in spring time. Or 6.25, I guess, whatever. And as long as there's blocks every 10 minutes. So there is... You can see the light at the end of the tunnel. You know what's going to happen. You know the issuance, you know the block reward. Cool. But still it's speculation. Yeah, but some of the people are like activists. I think some people are... They really are some of the miners. They've really invested a lot of significant portion of money into mining. Yeah, it's sunk cost bias. It's sunk cost by no different than Ether, man. Billions of dollars poured in is heavy duty sunk cost bias. Sunk cost bias, confirmation bias. For the price? For anything. If I sunk in 10 million dollars of miner, depending on what type of human being you are, people wire differently. It's very hard to negate sunk cost bias. It's very difficult. It's one of the most powerful biases. Couple that with confirmation bias is you're going to keep on sinking more money. And your faith is so great within this. Both you have faith, but then you have economic incentive. I just sunk 10 million fucking dollars. I mean, it's a good sign when I see a large huge... Just this week, there was $150 million mine opened up in the US. I feel like that's a good fundamental thing because as I see more sophisticated and wealthier people waking up to the potential for a catastrophic economic meltdown or even a deflationary spiral where the Fed maybe tries to stave off an inflationary spiral by removing base money from the supply, which they've been doing. These people are waking up and Ray Dalio a couple of weeks ago put out that post that everyone started sharing that the world has gone crazy and basically talking about how socialism is... Now, socialist movement is happening now in the US and it's being spurred by the cantillion effect that's happening where the wealth distribution is going wider and wider and wider or the wealth inequality where the wealth distribution is going to the top and their CEOs are doing buybacks for themselves with this fake money that they quantitatively... They got quantitatively eased from the government and instead of investing in the economy, they're just trying to get a return on it. So they're looking for returns, they're looking for returns and what they end up doing is putting the money to work in startups like trying to get higher multiples when they go public so they can make more money and get a return because interest rates are so low now that they're not going to put it in bonds. Yeah, it's free money and they're not going to put it in bonds because they're not going to get much of a return from a bond so they're going to try to invest somewhere else and regular people are not going up and their wages aren't going up and their buying power is going down while the rich are getting more money and more access and so Ray Dalio says he thinks that there's going to be a class war basically where taxes are going to be tried to be raised up Bernie Sanders and some of the Democrats are talking about 70% tax and wealth taxes and higher state taxes and all this stuff and so Ray Dalio thinks that because of this class war that's going to happen rich people are going to try to leave and go to more friendly or jurisdictions where it's not that it's like a better tax jurisdiction it's like where the people aren't going to be fighting because he really does think that the way that this is going there's going to be class wars like physical violence and I mean as people start to realize that the economy is totally messed up and it's all an illusion they're going to turn to other assets and real estate and hiding your money in offshore accounts and going to more friendly or tax jurisdictions and art are some of them and bitcoin is now becoming one of them mining bitcoin so when I see somebody investing $150 million in bitcoin mining I see that as somebody that's got a lot of money that is waking up to what's going on really in this sort of cycle of the economy that we're in right now and they're looking at bitcoin as the solution not really any other altcoin any other cryptocurrency so that kind of gives me more validation to feel like okay holding bitcoin is probably the best solution because even if we don't get the mass adoption cycle that we really would be great we don't need it because if we have more and more sophisticated wealthier people start to turn to bitcoin I mean it's going to make the price go up yeah you're just looking at risk to reward ratio if you are right the already the asymmetrical returns for bitcoin is it depending on where you got in is it's hard to beat that ever historically right or even like some people got in ETH at like five cents five cents man so so yeah there's definitely possibility I don't know if we're gonna see another one of those types of returns in a cryptocurrency I don't think that we'll ever see something like 2017 again no but I do think that bitcoin couldn't still go up to a million dollars per BTC and can go up 100x from here really I do yeah within 10 million dollars a million dollars of bitcoin well that's what I'm saying man like a million dollars of bitcoin in in 10 years say most of the bitcoins are issued by then we got like 20.5 million bitcoins out that's that's only that's only 20 20.5 trillion dollars yeah gold right now is 7 8 trillion dollar market cap the total amount of money in the world is like between 16 70 trillion dollars real estate is like 120 trillion dollars or something debt the total debt in the world is 250 trillion this week it just hit 250 trillion insane what do we want money to do we want money to mars are we indebted to mars that's that's max kaiser said on the kaiser report the other day he's like you know if we if the aliens came and tried to buy earth what are the both they're not gonna want our money no we're over leveraged we have too much debt so it's crazy I don't know a million dollars of bitcoin to me like if if that's bitcoin succeeding as a real global reserve currency it doesn't seem so far fetched because it's only 20 trillion dollars like the US national debt right now is 23 trillion dollars and we're talking 10 years in the future I mean it's possible but I don't think it's like a guaranteed thing I think the chance of bitcoin failing is the same as the chance of bitcoin succeeding to a million dollars per bitcoin they're both really like they're both really high you know low chances of that actually happening but they're both possible anyway cool man anything else um what else could we even talk about talked about socialism yeah what do you think about canada here do you think we're in because this is something I've been I've been talking to some facebook friends recently you know I've been getting a little bit interested in capitalism versus socialism because of the way that I see people think we're in a capitalist society right now but we're not really in a capitalist society the most of us are in a capitalist society but the top 0.1 percent are in this counterfeit capitalism society where they actually control the money they make money from nothing they get free money all the time that's not capitalism that's totally not capitalism and that's the source of most of the problems but most people don't understand that that that's the problem they just get mad at corporations so they just think oh corporations are their problem when really it's not corporations it's this fraudulent money system that we have sure so there's a real move towards socialism and pro-socialism happening in the U.S and here in canada too so what do you think about capitalism versus socialism in canada do you think that we're in a socialist society here do you think we're more of like a capitalist democracy with social programs or do you think we're like kind of half socialist half capitalist democracy we're a social democracy for the most part you know there's I don't know if there's any pure capitalist system out there it's a blend it's it's not binary if we're going to definition of true socialism is state-owned companies they own all the like Yugoslavia was where my parents are from was pure socialism like my dad had as a business when tito came in when the Yugoslavian government was there they came in and took a piece of my dad's company and my dad left so it's state-owned like the state owns the resources and the state will divvy out the resources like that's like classic example of social or classic definition of socialism what we have is a social democracy it's a blend of everything now it's very simple it's like absolute power corrupts absolutely all so regardless of if it's a communist system socialist system or social democracy people on top eventually get corrupt and you know backdoor deals etc you're never going to stop that that's human behavior you mentioned something earlier about people leaving because they see just a safer place to go somewhere we call it you know whether it's physical safety so that's economic migrant or whether it's attack safety so that's capital flight it's very simple when you put when you start squeezing the lemon and all the juices out you're gonna you're gonna be well that's not good analogy keep going i like it listen if our if the trends continue for higher higher taxes more regulation there's gonna be a honeymoon effect at the beginning where there is where people see the instant gratification dopamine high where they get handouts then eventually the handouts run now because for a true social system to exist first has to be capitalist because the value has to be accrued if there's value isn't there you can't really be a socialist system can't just start off socialist right socialism takes doesn't give right it's not like they produce value to take value and then they distribute it out um wait say just say that again socialism always comes from capitalism without capitalism socialism cannot exist okay and another thing i guess unless because you recently turned me on to mmt modern monetary theory oh god that's the worst thing i've ever seen or read and according to a modern monetary theory you don't need capitalism for the socialism i mean they they just rebrand everything as you know like the national debt becomes the national savings it's like it's not $23 trillion of debt it's $23 trillion of savings that sounds much better so i agree with you but what's gonna happen this naturally happens throughout human civilization you know you have a pendulum of good times good it's great it's great you know then cyclical uh you will have first capital flight people that can afford to leave leave right then you're gonna have economic flights economic migrants that have skills or let's say some some some affluent money not like super rich but at least they can pay to leave the country they'll leave then you have talent immigrants or that will leave everything you call a talent flight eventually people will leave to greener pastures this happens time and time again this is why we rule the world we're we're nomadic people so this is why you see the united states right now people are leaving california why taxes are higher yeah i've been noticing some like most of my successful entrepreneur friends that live in california have been leaving for texas and florida or florida well you know no income tax cheap property tax cheaper it's cheaper to live like it's really cheaper and so people will just leave that's it yugoslavia before the war a lot of people left you know i think something like 70 of the population left wow that's huge gone and this is going to happen anywhere regardless of its candidate like if you keep on squeezing people will leave so like you said when you think about socialism versus capitalism the real true definition of socialism is state-owned so when i'm thinking about socialism when i'm having conversations on facebook with some friends or whatever i'm thinking about like venezuela and like countries like that not canada and sweden countries like that so is that like a am i just missing something here or has there been a trend lately to kind of like ease in socialism or have i just not been paying attention that were that i live in a socialist country or what you live in a country that has socialistic programs right you can still build a business you still own 100 equity within your business yeah that's capitalism to me with social programs that's the way i think about it when i think socialism i think the definition of socialism of like where the state owns the industries and controls the company isn't i always tell people this in a capitalist society you can be a socialist there's nothing stopping brad in a mirror to create a co-op that everybody has shares in nothing you can do it right now in a socialist country yeah that's good in a socialist country you and i cannot create a capitalist self-proprietary enterprise we cannot buy law that makes sense so like but do you do you think about this stuff because lately i've been thinking about it and even more so now that the um you know the repo market stuff's been happening and there's three trillion dollars actually has been printed since like mid-september three trillion that's like that's like dot com uh 2008 levels of of bailouts so and then redalia with his article and then the movement towards pro socialism and the monetary a modern monetary theory stuff that's been propping up lately like how do you think this plays out what do you think about it much it's gonna play out by getting really worse than people can get fed up and it becomes good it's cyclical i don't think so you can avoid it but what we have do you think that they can stop a depression like event they can postpone it by doing what at this point i don't know i think that i think this is why they want to do mmt unlimited printing i haven't quantitative easing is like that that there's no such thing as that yeah there's no such thing as that so the the the progressive or left-leaning people will say modern monetary theory just removes the state's monopoly on money and gives the people a better quality of life but the problem like a lot of these lefties don't understand without the united states military their dollar is useless and not only that but like when i think about it my moral and conscious side of me is like yeah that makes a lot of sense like there's homeless people there's children starving in america yeah money doesn't money money doesn't solve homelessness money doesn't solve mental crisis is it's rare the money solves a problem that binary right you know that has to be like education and other programs and if i if i built top-line condo in in san francisco or los angeles where the homeless crisis is right now and i put them there those condos would be a crack house yeah but i do sympathize with some of the thoughts there that for people who are really struggling and maybe it's not their fault and they're struggling and they would get like an extra 500 bucks a month from a ubi or something like that using modern monetary theory and it adds to the national debt but it's now like well but why don't you just create something a Milton Friedman coin which is like an income tax credit or think of it as a as a dollar credit we're like don't even print me money just give me an i o u well that's what they say money is and that's what kind of money is is an i o u no but the money they're printing still goes on the balance sheet this doesn't go in the balance sheet but they say that it'll come back through taxation so it'll be taxable income and some of my whole point of mmt if mmt exists why even tax me in the first place yeah that doesn't make sense to me either why do you why do you why do you need my tax money you have well they say it's they say it's because if you were a proponent of modern monetary theory and ubi they would say that they're using the Keynesian economics model of spending stimulates the economy so you get like a big bulk of money it's very simple if as long as the united states military or specifically their navy is in charge which i don't see any country really challenging the navy of the us even china's like 80 to 90 years out to even remotely being similar to united states army and like the navy their navy is the best in the world and they control all the ports all the you know what the trade yeah on that point i'm reading this book right now stealth war by general robert spaulding and he's talking about the missile batteries that they've built all along the south china sea and all along the uh the silk road or whatever the new silk road and he's talking about how these he's china has they're not able to like compete with the us on an offense but on a defense they can because they've got one billion dollars worth of defensive infrastructure that can destroy 30 billion dollar naval ships so aircraft carriers so the us spends 30 billion on the aircraft carrier and china can destroy it with the one billion dollar missile so it's like an economic suicide to send a naval carrier in to try to stop china from doing something so they kind of have this stalemate situation happening but yeah continue what you were saying like the us dollar you think is backed by the military and as long as the military as long as the united states military is a de facto military of the world the us dollar will remain the hedge yeah but why so in in a situation with mmt why would the military not back the dollar anymore why would that be a problem they would i'm just saying like regardless of which economic theory is like the united states military has to reign de facto without the de facto military none of their policies will work so most of the people in the world you're saying are accepting the us dollar right now because it's backed by nukes intercontinental ballistic missiles as a friend of mine likes to say the us dollars backed by intercontinental ballistic missiles well technically they keep law law in order yeah right so you as the you as a person holding cash and usd or taking bonds or doing trade with us that gives you a piece of mind okay so let's play this out so we're saying like how can they prevent a complete collapse right and because i think about this a lot lately the different scenarios and i see a scenario like tom lee from fundstrat is a is an analyst in this space and also in the traditional space and he says he thinks that we're just entering a new 10-year bull run in the stock market and he thinks we're just going to keep going so i had to start sort of looking at that and say okay well that challenges my my cognitive dissonance there because i thought we're ready to collapse but he's saying we're going to ready to go on a 10-year bull run and max kaiser i was watching the kaiser report and he was saying how not how we're not going to enter an inflationary hyperinflation event like venezuela but more like a deflationary spiral as they try to meddle in the markets and so dollars used to be backed by gold but listen sir kai one thing is for sure if you look at the standard quality of living compared to the 80s in north america we are dwindling down you look at the average north american has roughly four hundred dollars in saving you look at the look at the quality of living they have it's pretty fucking pretty bad for for the output that you put working right yeah like all the numbers technically are going up but when you measure them against inflation and against buying power and and standard of living of the past it's actually going down or it's not going up nearly as fast as the inflation and like the top point one percent or i was bringing up how do you survive in these major cities like getting paid 40 50 oh yeah even here in this little town that i live in like people have like five six hundred thousand dollar houses and they're paying mortgages on that and it's like i don't understand how people are getting by with those kinds of debt loads it just doesn't seem sustainable but then let's say you know there's 23 trillion dollars of debt it's not going to get paid off it's never going to get paid off it doesn't it's no chance and so they're going to have to like Ray Dalio says they can't raise interest rates which is what they should do but they can't because that would mean that the us would have to collect more taxes than the public couldn't sustain right now it's already high taxes if they raise the debt then they have to pay say another one percent they have to pay like another 300 billion dollars in taxes a year something like that it just won't fly so instead of instead of doing what they should do and like getting rid of some of this debt they're just going to print more because they can't tax more and they can't they can't raise interest rates so they're going to keep lowering interest rates they're going to keep printing more money and that's where it's like we kind of maybe already are in a modern monetary theory economy because we're semi we're semi it's just the definitions are different but yeah we're going to semi mmd like the debt's never going to get paid off so never so what what are they going to do they have to i guess just the modern monetary theory is like let's harness this money monopoly and use it for the public good versus bankers and the military and there's no public wars well i mean what they what's perceived as public good like solving the homeless crisis and education and like people that are below the poverty line and elders that are only surviving on 500 bucks a month pension and stuff like give everybody more money i mean if you look at andrew yang's ubi thing it's a thousand bucks a month i think i math it out one time it's like three trillion dollars a year so that would increase the national debt by like you know maybe four or five trillion a year because they also have the other spending they're doing we'll have we'll have another podcast for ubi i have my own thesis on how to execute that properly but how they want to do it so i'm going to end very well so you so you think that the way that they stop an economic collapse whether it's hyperinflation or a deflationary spiral by trying to remove money from the system because they know there's too much money so that they try to maybe remove and do haircuts and whatever and remove money and remove debt you think they'll be able to stop a total collapse and what do you think the uh what do you think that looks like do you think bitcoin goes up in that scenario do you think you should be i think i think bitcoin real estate or real estate's always good the look golden real location location location like real estate was very good in the uh from 2002 to 2008 in alberta but real estate has taken a horrible dive in alberta uh same with british columbia depending on where in british columbia but toronto it's all location like if the location is good you're pretty good um you think having money in your in the canadian banks is safe i think depending on your risk tolerance i think having dry powder is always good i think having a good portfolio of different assets is good um i think i think mobility is good too it's uh i think you know saying don't put your eggs on basket it's uh as rate you mentioned right dalio so he has a weather portfolio right so you have different asset correlation baskets and you look at it whether you know they're hedge funds so they look at a different cycles but regular person can look at maybe by annually and a couple of things to take consideration is like you know short term investments long term medium uh what's the taxation based on these investments these should be my different right so there's different variables you have to put into play when looking at that but for the average person then it's just not being in debt man that's a superpower yeah if you're not in debt you're good you're not in debt right yeah that like maybe that that goes back to what you're saying earlier about the people in latin america like they're not thinking about getting rich they're thinking about just surviving and like getting out of debt and stuff and like protecting against their their fiat currency from going down in value because it's either inflating or whatever so the average person that's in debt up to their neck is i mean what can they do really i mean if you've got a mortgage that's your debt load's really high and then there's a global economic collapse it doesn't seem like there's much hope for the average person that's got a house that's like high the inflation is the valuation of the houses are all inflated and they don't have much you know what would help them though modern monetary theory universal basic income and debt forgiveness get rid of all the student loan debt get rid of all the uh the credit card so what i'm hearing is i need to get into debt as fast as possible exactly max over that i need to max i'll go to debt 10 million dollars that should be part that should be part of your diversification basket strategy go into debt a million dollars and buy bitcoin with it and then when they and then when they forgive all the debt you're golden i think we'll leave it at that man brad if uh people want to get to know you a little bit more and to find out what you're working on what's the best resource uh you can get me on twitter i kind of sound like a grumpy old man on twitter most of the time but been trying to work on that lately uh at brad mills can cool guys if you're listening to this on itunes please leave a review the reviews help us or stitch or any other podcast platforms like spotify and if you're watching this on youtube subscribe to the channel and give it a big thumbs up or a like whatever fancies your boat and leave a comment i'd love to know your feedback and thoughts on this brad once again thank you my friend and i'll talk to you guys soon peace see you