#121 Paul Tarantino - How Central Banking Destroys Society, and Bitcoin Fixes It - Ben Wehrman Podcast

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
you start to realize that these things are draining your energy, right?

(00:07):
We spend so much time, an unfortunate amount of time in our lives here on Earth,
trying to acquire this money by expending our time, our energy, our resources,
giving up valuable time with our family, giving up pursuing dreams or passions,

(00:27):
things that might improve us as a human being, right? But we're instead out here trying to gather
this money because we're trying to store that effort and energy into something, into some,
like a battery so that we can get to this point where then we can pursue our passions,
our dreams, spend time with our family, retire, enjoy life here in this incredible experience,

(00:52):
But if while you're doing that, other entities are sucking the energy out of that battery without your permission, without your knowledge, that begins to show you how valuable I think Bitcoin is compared to storing that energy in something like fiat currency.

(01:14):
hello everybody thank you so much for coming by for another episode of the podcast we are on
a great streak of bitcoin or guests recently we're back to the roots of the show which is great it's
i've been all over the place over the last hundred episodes but we're getting back to
bitcoin baby this is the most important thing out there and today we have paul tarantino who is the

(01:38):
ceo at byte federal which is the seventh largest bitcoin atm operator and manufacturer in the world
He's also a Bitcoin speaker, educator, and investor.
Paul, thank you for being here, sir.
Appreciate you.
My pleasure, Ben.
Thanks for having me.
So as I was mentioning before we started recording, I found you by listening to your episode with Cedric Youngelman, who runs the Bitcoin Matrix podcast, another Floridian Bitcoiner you guys know.

(02:04):
And it was a great episode you guys did.
And I really thought you had a great grasp on how to explain big Bitcoin concepts in terms that newer folks will understand.
I never get tired of doing the beginner level episodes here because I really think that zero to one for people is the most important place we can be spending our time creating the most value for people.

(02:25):
So why don't we just start by getting a bit of your background?
I know it started with 25 years in finance.
So could you give us a walkthrough on where you came from and how you found Bitcoin?
Yeah, sure.
I started doing a bunch of little small businesses and then decided during the dot-com boom that I was going to become a financial advisor.

(02:48):
And so I went down that career path and it was a lot of fun.
Started with Payne Weber, which then we were bought by UBS.
And I had a nice little stint there with some older guys that have been doing portfolio management for individual clients.
So that was cool because we were fee-only and fiduciary-based, which back then was like cutting edge.

(03:13):
So I got into that very early on, and I liked that a lot more than just selling products.
Then I left after 9-11 and went back into private business and had my own companies, restaurants, and other things that I got into.
and then got back into the business again and did stent at Northwestern Mutual investment management

(03:38):
for a couple insurance partners. And then from there, Wells Fargo, and then landed at
Canandaigua National Trust Company and managed the trust company there. Oh, gosh, I think it was like
13 years I spent there. That's where I found Bitcoin. And I quickly became the Bitcoin water

(04:00):
cooler guy and drove everybody nuts in the company. He tried to take this 140-year-old
trust company into the future. And it was a lot of headbutting. It just didn't work.
And at the time, I was developing sort of like this, speaking at local events and local meetups
and teaching people about Bitcoin because I was just passionate about it. I just absolutely knew

(04:24):
this was the future of finance. And in doing so and becoming more and more public, it became
evident that my tenure at Canandaigua was coming to an end. So I went to work with Byte Federal
and another investment management firm in town that was more open-minded. And so this is where

(04:45):
I'm at today. Fantastic. So I think you've seen better than just about anybody that that old
system and the old fiat system is still going out there and we see these people coming on twitter
and firing hot takes about how bitcoin is a ponzi scheme and how it's not going to wear
what was your general pitch to these people when you were by the water cooler trying to explain to

(05:11):
them that bitcoin is going to be the future like how do you summarize that to these people who
spent so much time in the old paradigm that's a great question so if if you approach it
it with the Jeff Booth perspectives or a James Lavish perspective. I used a lot of data from

(05:38):
Lynn Alden and Luke Groman, where you start talking about macroeconomics. And the typical
investment management firm doesn't really function on macro. And so to them, it's like they've been
hearing about the debt bubble for 30, 40 years, and it's never come to fruition. And so it's just

(05:58):
beyond their scope of factoring into portfolio management. So if you start trying to frame it
as digital gold, when they already hate gold, it didn't really work. So it's funny. And so you
almost have to frame it. I even hate to admit this, but you have to frame it in the term,

(06:22):
of all the crypto stuff. And then they start to grok it. You start to explain it from settlement,
T plus three goes to T plus one. And then you start to explain it from, you used to have a
stock certificate. Now you're going to have a digital stock certificate that you can own in
your own wallet that you can have custody of. So we don't need third-party custodians. We don't
need transfer agents. When you start to explain it from that perspective, their minds kind of get

(06:46):
blown and then they open up to it and then they go down the crypto rabbit hole. And this is what
every Wall Street firm is doing right now is going down the crypto rabbit hole.
And they think that that innovation is amazing.
I think they're all going to discover what we all have discovered, that that is a dead
end.
That's just like a level one to level two innovation where Bitcoin is a zero to one

(07:11):
innovation.
It's a massive shift in the way we will all save our money and the way money will function.
But these guys have spent a lifetime making great salaries, doing work that they are very proud of, where they didn't really have to understand money.

(07:32):
And so when you try to tell them that everything is changing, money is changing, and that the way that all financial systems work will be judged by how it performs against Bitcoin, their entire framework is shattered and they just shut down.
So unfortunately, I think a lot of the Trojan horse for Wall Street is crypto.

(07:55):
But I believe as the system begins to break, as the debt bubble becomes the elephant in the room that they can no longer avoid,
that they will then quickly grok Bitcoin and move there because it's the only digital asset that is real money,
The only digital asset that can preserve their wealth, the only digital asset without counterparty risk. And then all those things will start to add value to them.

(08:22):
But, you know, for my initial pitch to them to try and get them to understand it, they all gravitated towards these sort of crypto metrics and efficiency metrics that we know in the long run are kind of irrelevant to our, say, immediate to midterm outlook for how we preserve our wealth going forward.

(08:46):
yeah 100 and just for those watching i just pulled up a meme over here that i think really
shows this well which is a perception versus the reality when it comes to these three different
financial ideas the fiat crypto and bitcoin and for those listening basically it's just a venn

(09:10):
diagram it shows most people when they hear like crypto and bitcoin they think that they are part
of the same category and that fiat is a different category but in reality bitcoin is the thing that
it's it's its own category and crypto and fiat are really similar because like there's a bazillion
coins everyone can print them for themselves and it's just you got money printers everywhere you

(09:33):
basically just replace the central banking board with a board of nerds and they're it's still
controlled so crypto is not the way so for anyone wondering right now if they should go down this
crypto rabbit hole like paul said not recommended i spent like three years doing that and we all
waste a lot of time and what's so fascinating about it is that it's the crypto pull is just

(09:56):
immune to age experience or how rich you are like everyone goes chasing that shiny object
object that's right i think they're going to find the next bitcoin that's funny that's what i call it
too the shiny object yeah the shiny thing and it's um i mean don't i don't want to tell people
like i don't like telling people you know they're stupid or you're not doing the right thing or don't

(10:20):
make these mistakes because i for what i learned from mistakes that's that's the way i learned so
if i screw something up if i especially if i lose money then i try to like oh i probably don't want
to do that again. And I lost a lot of money in crypto early on. And you have to go through these
sort of learning phases. How have you learned people that can learn from other people's
experiences? Good for you. You guys are probably doing a lot better than I'm doing. But it's just

(10:46):
the way that some people learn and experience leaves a mark. The scars add up.
yeah absolutely and some people lose money doing it but myself i didn't really even lose any money
i just lost a lot of time and energy that we can have back that i could have been reading the

(11:06):
bitcoin standard instead of a bunch of crypto youtube channels but hey everyone goes through
the learning journey that's that's why i created this podcast i hopefully expedite it for some
people why you do what you do as well awesome so everyone has their own journey and uh cool now
Now that we have the hook out on a few different types of audiences here, I'm sure we've got
some super rich successful people listening as well as people who are just trying to learn about Bitcoin So let start from the beginning here with the foundational principles people need to start looking at this money thing

(11:39):
and actually grokking money itself.
And you mentioned how it's so interesting
how people who work in finance even don't understand money,
which is the thing that they're literally working with.
But people just don't think about what is this thing actually?
What part does it play in society?
Why do we need to think about it?
So how would you describe, I guess, the question I know Robert Breedlove loves to start with?

(12:03):
Sure. So, you know, I won't take the Robert Breedlove like technical aspects and get into unit of account and store of value and, you know, all these other things.
I'll just start with what I think money is how we save our time and our energy.
And when you frame it in that perspective, then when you apply that to inflation, interest rates, taxation, you start to realize that these things are draining your energy.

(12:39):
right you spend we spend so much time an unfortunate amount of time in our lives here
on earth trying to acquire this money by expending our time our energy our resources
giving up valuable time with our family giving up pursuing dreams or passions

(13:01):
things that might improve us as a human being right but we're instead out here trying to gather
this money because we're trying to store that effort and energy into something, into a battery
so that we can get to this point where then we can pursue our passions, our dreams, spend time
with our family, retire, enjoy life here in this incredible experience. But if while you're doing

(13:28):
that, other entities are sucking the energy out of that battery without your permission,
without your knowledge, that begins to show you how valuable I think Bitcoin is compared to storing
that energy in something like fiat currency. So I like to think of it in those terms, right?

(13:52):
And to me, it's sort of like unfortunate that we have to play this game. But if we have to play
this game, if that's where, at least where we are right now, um, as, as a, as a race, as a species,
then we have to do everything we can to store that in a battery that's going to get bigger over time.

(14:14):
Because if that battery is growing and every charge you put into it, then you get a 10 X charge
out of it. That's going to build, uh, the, the sort of the foundation for you to build that
valuable life and those valuable experiences, pass that on to your family members, pass it on
to your children, create this whole new way to be human. And so I guess, you know, without getting

(14:42):
into the technical terms of what is money, that is, I think, something everybody could relate to,
whether you're in finance or not. Yeah, absolutely. And this is why
the book I mentioned earlier, The Bitcoin Standard by Safedina Moose is so loved by the
Bitcoin community is because it does such a good job walking through the history of these different

(15:03):
sorts of money that people have had and how just the quality of the money in the sense that it fits
these certain characteristics, which we can dive into, changes the prosperity of the society.
And if the money is really hard, like gold, where it's, you know, it's difficult to produce more,
it has a very stable supply it's you know fungible divisible it fits all these criteria

(15:26):
then it creates a more prosperous society more happy people more productive people
it creates flourishing civilizations whereas when you have a money that is easily debased
or can be you know manipulated and you know we he goes through different examples of like you know
when it was seashells and stones and glass beads all of these were taken advantage of by other

(15:50):
civilizations that came in and just flooded the market with a bunch of beads that they could make
more cheaply elsewhere and basically just took all their real stuff and then they were just you know
left with nothing and there's all this there's a whole spectrum of ways that the money can be used
for good or for evil and it really comes down to how hard that money is how sound the money is
and gold is sort of our uh our benchmark for one that worked really well for thousands of years and

(16:16):
we we still see remnants to this day of this beautiful civilization that once existed like
we still look at the pyramids like how did they make that and all this architecture all over the
world like european architecture like it's so beautiful like how are how are these people like
able to do this and i i believe it's a big part of it because they had sound money that really
inspired them and gave them a more you know long-term outlook on the world because they

(16:38):
weren't you know stressed out about having to do a you know a payment plan for domino's pizza and
Like all these crazy things that we see now in the world because everyone's broke.
You know, I do love the way Saifedean describes also this sort of privilege of investing or you shouldn't have to invest.

(17:01):
You know, he talks about that is that you should just be able to earn the money and save it in a vehicle that grows and outpaces inflation on your behalf.
So many people are taught and trained and indoctrinated into making their money and investing it in the market through their retirement accounts, etc.

(17:21):
That they miss this simple fact that if we look at the S&P 500 over, say, the last 70, 80, 90, 100 years, you're going to get something like an average return of, we'll just round it, 9%.
9%, right? But if you look at the inflation of money supply, and I think Safedine in his book

(17:45):
did this calculation. I'm sure it's been updated to a higher number. If you look at the inflation
of the money supply running somewhere around, say, 7%, then the S&P 500 is netting you to 2% gain
growth over that time period. But then you're paying an investment manager 1%, best case scenario,

(18:07):
You take fees out of the funds and ETFs and whatever else you have in that portfolio is managing.
Maybe there's another half of a percent in there.
And then you throw taxes on top of that.
At best, when you look at real purchasing power by just passively investing in the S&P 500, you may do better or worse in any given year.

(18:32):
But over your lifetime, you're probably just breaking even in purchasing power.
So to be able to have a resource like Bitcoin where you can take those savings, invest it in something that is far superior, far outpacing inflation, where you're not worried about what is the price this week or this month or this day.

(18:52):
You're worried about is this outpacing inflation and growing my purchasing power over time.
I can't think of a better way to make money passively than to just save in Bitcoin.
And that is, I think so many people just don't look at that simple fact.

(19:15):
And instead, they're focused on, oh, my God, it was up 20%, down 20%.
Yeah, you made 100% this year, but last year was down 80%.
they're missing the point of just smoothing out that volatility and looking at the long-term
growth trajectory of this asset and what that means for their life, right? So, and so many people

(19:39):
today that know my background, friends, family, you know, will ask me financial advice and I'll say,
and they'll be, do you think I should do an IRA, my 401k? Should I do this? Should I do that? I
said, I think you should just save in Bitcoin and never sell it. And just that simple,
advice is so hard for them to grok because they're just so sure it has to be more complicated than

(20:03):
that. And it's so difficult sometimes for people to do the simple thing. And giving them a simple
thing to do, to execute on, it just seems like an impossible task because it makes no sense when
they're told that the world is complex. So you have to be super smart to do this, that to get
ahead, you have to have all these angles. You have to have tax strategies. You have to have all this

(20:26):
stuff going on. The best tax strategy is never sell. The best saving strategy is dollar cost
average. And the best asset to do that with is Bitcoin. So those three simple steps get you
to a whole different future than if you're trying to play all these other games.
And you get to live your life along the way, which is a huge. Yeah, that's nice.

(20:49):
yeah that's nice right and you get to live your life and not have to be a financial advisor for
yourself and like an investor a part-time investor because this is what we see now is that you know
people are being instructed like oh you can't just be a doctor or an engineer or an artist you you
have to also learn how to play the stock market and you know like you said all these different

(21:13):
strategies for different things it's just so complicated and the majority of people do not
want to waste their energy learning all that stuff it's intentionally made complicated this
fiat system oh absolutely what people are figuring out in every single tax season that goes by is
another slap in the face for people like realizing this whole thing kind of just seems like it's

(21:33):
screwing me absolutely it's not fun to do it's stealing my wealth and you know they're starting
to just find more people online talking about this crazy bitcoin thing that just seemed to be making
more sense. Yeah. Once you, once you under, uh, once you understand Bitcoin, um, you start to
question a lot of things. You start to question the structures. Well, why have I been told to

(22:00):
stuff money into 401k for so long, which is going to have taxation on the way out, which is going to
restrict my cash flow on the way up or the way through life? Why am I told to do all this stuff?
Who's it really benefiting if I'm investing it in the S&P 500 and the fund managers and the

(22:25):
Wall Street banks and the portfolio managers that I used to be? And everybody along the way
is getting a piece. What is this system really set up and who's it set up to benefit, right?
As opposed to if I take self-custody of Bitcoin that I'm buying for myself, the fees are very low.

(22:47):
The results are very, very good.
And if I never sell it, I don't have taxation.
That's a whole other conversation about how to extract a lifestyle out of not selling your Bitcoin.
But let build the Bitcoin balance sheet first before you worry about that right And I kind of an example of that myself I living in Costa rica right now and a lot of places here except bitcoin like a lot of shops the raw milk at the market the

(23:15):
the beef down the hill from me cool i go in there and i pay it with bitcoin with zaps i earned on
nostr which is like this whole other you know side of this thing that more and more bitcoins are
coming on and like this is basically a social media where you can earn bitcoin for posting so
I use that wallet to go buy my beef every week or two.
So, you know, this, this future is being built and there are places in the world where you

(23:38):
can still do it right now.
And it's the amount of places where it's happening is going to continue growing.
So the earlier you can be, the better.
Yeah, absolutely.
And one last thing I wanted to touch on that you mentioned is how saving in Bitcoin is
the ultimate passive income.
And I think this is a really good thing to think about because I, for one, when I was
going through, you know, when was this?

(23:59):
I was probably like 23 or something,
like right after college,
starting to think about, you know,
how am I going to hustle?
How am I going to,
I don't want to work this stupid job.
Like I quickly figured out
that working in an office just sucked
and I want to figure out,
like, how do I build a business?
How do I make passive income?
This is a very alluring phrase
for people who just want to be freed from the system.
And I do wish I would have just known

(24:20):
about Bitcoin back then,
because I agree with you.
This is the ultimate passive income,
but it's just,
it comes in the form of
you're purchasing power increasing passively not so much like you're just gaining extra ones and
zeros on a bank account but like you're you're building your ability to purchase real things in
the real world that's right and that's what bitcoin does when you look at the graph and how

(24:43):
it just gains value over time compared to the fiat system has been since day one and people
need to stop looking at the volatility of it getting scared off from the day-to-day changes
because I would say that volatility is, you know, you have to look at the denominator of the volatility when it's priced in dollars.
Like you're looking at the Bitcoin chart and it says, you know, $84,000 or whatever.

(25:05):
That fiat that is measured in is also extremely volatile, but it's volatile to the downside.
So it's making the whole thing crazy.
You don't have a stable measuring stick.
And I would say that Bitcoin is actually much more stable than fiat.
That's right.
Yeah, it's simply just people are so used to pricing things in dollars.
And you could price the dollar in Bitcoin, and it's a horrific chart.

(25:27):
I mean, you just reverse the code going into your charting software.
It tells you everything you need to know.
Like you hear the meme, a Bitcoin is still worth a Bitcoin.
And it always will be because there's only 21 million of them.
And whether you want to price that in Turkish lira or US dollars or rubles, it doesn't matter.

(25:52):
Because if that's the unit of account, then everything else is volatile against it.
So this whole idea that Bitcoin is volatile, it's volatile relative to whatever you're pricing it in.
And Bitcoin is make, let's put it this way, everything is going down in value against Bitcoin.
Right. So as a top performing asset in the world, that that's the asset that you want to save it.

(26:19):
Yep. Simple as that. 100 percent agree.
We provide a lot of context for this next question, but I'd like to just put it out plainly here to see how you answer this here is us Bitcoiners.
And we already have in this conversation, we like to use this word fiat and just throw it everywhere.
fiat, fiat, fiat. And what is your explanation for what this word actually means in the financial

(26:44):
sense? What is the landscape of the current fiat system we are in?
What does fiat mean in the financial sense? This is basically government mandated money,
which means it only has value because the government states it has value.
You only use it essentially because you're forced to use it at the point of a gun,

(27:04):
at the point of a government mandate.
So fiat in those terms,
if you took all of the force,
military and otherwise that is behind it away
would have no value
because it would be just worth the money,
the paper it's printed on.

(27:27):
And so I think that's what you're getting at,
but I'm happy to go any direction you want to on that.
Yeah, for sure. And I guess maybe we could start coloring in what it looks like and how it's built, because you talked about how people are starting to realize that this system just doesn't seem like it's made to benefit the people.

(27:48):
Sure.
So what are the different players in the fiat system? Like we could talk about the banks and the Wall Street and how it all sort of functions to create this inflation and where we can talk about inflation after that.
Okay. So in the simple terms, we used to have, in our country, in the United States of America, there's a whole other question about the United States.

(28:16):
But in the United States of America, the Republic, the original Republic, we had mechanisms by which we created our own money.
It wasn't until a later date, and there were many fits and starts to this, but it wasn't until 1913 until we got the central bank that we have today, which is the Federal Reserve.

(28:38):
But it's not our bank.
The government doesn't control it.
The government doesn't own it.
It's a private bank, right?
And they own banks all over the world.
There's central banks all over the world.
So our money is not issued by our government. It's issued by a private entity that's outside of our government. So that should raise sort of a red flag and a big question mark initially.

(29:07):
They have no reserves.
That's right.
So when we get the Federal Reserve note, which is what's written on top of that paper, that Federal Reserve note is debt issued to – like our government will issue debt.
And the Federal Reserve will give us those Federal Reserve notes, which are claims.

(29:32):
And then we're using those to trade.
so all of our money is a debt to that central bank
now when
let's just use 1929 as an example
right because we first got the central bank in 1913

(29:55):
and from 1913 to 1929 we had
an incredible bull market
We all know from being Bitcoiners that liquidity drives asset prices up.
So a bunch of new money came into the system under the central bank.
Asset prices went up.

(30:16):
And then once that liquidity was pulled or prevented from adding more liquidity,
meaning when we got less debt coming to us out of the Federal Reserve,
the market collapsed.
Today, when that happens, we go back to the Federal Reserve and we say, can we have more money, please?

(30:38):
And so far, they've said, sure.
And they give us more money and they drive the asset prices back up.
In 1929, for whatever reason, I wasn't there.
But for whatever reason, liquidity was not provided.
And we all know that we went into a Great Depression.
when that liquidity, when more money is not given, when the balance on your credit card is not

(31:06):
extended and the interest rate on your credit card is not reduced, eventually what happens is
you have to pay the debt. And in that case, in 1920, the creditor said,
you can't pay the debt? Okay, well, we want some things in exchange.
coming out of that we got a massive war we got the irs we got social security we get all this

(31:36):
buildup of wall street and all these structures that feed money into the banking system
and i don't think it's any coincidence that that crash happened to get more leverage and control
over the United States.
So this, when you start to see the central bank as a control structure,

(32:02):
a way for a private banking entity to get control of a country
and to basically become like the mafia, right?
To get in between, to become, just be the middleman that just takes a fee,
gets a percentage of everything you make

(32:23):
in exchange for not punishing you,
which they call protection,
but not punishing you,
now you start to look at the Federal Reserve differently.
So ignore what Jerome Powell says
and ignore the interest rates,

(32:43):
ignore all that.
It's all rhetoric and it's all theater.
At the end of the day,
They control our money.
And through that mechanism, they can control us.
And through that mechanism, now we pay taxes to pay the debt, to pay off the central bank.

(33:06):
And that entire structure was delivered or put upon us because we gave up control of our own sovereign money and we handed it over to the central bank.
The reason why we handed it over is because they had influence and bribery and ability to convince politicians to put the structure in place back then.

(33:31):
They still work to keep that in place today, right?
I mean, Ron Paul has been ranting against eliminating the Fed for years.
Many Bitcoiners see that.
And once you understand that this is like the bully in the room that's taking your lunch money, you should be asking, like, why do we even need them?

(33:55):
Right?
Then Bitcoin comes along as a way to replace the central bank.
Right?
This is what Bitcoin was created to do, to eliminate the central bank.
indoctrinated people will think well if we get rid of the central bank then we'll just
we won't even be able to bail ourselves out of financial crisis we won't be able to bail

(34:19):
ourselves out of the business cycle we also would not have introduced the tremendous amount
of leverage to drive asset prices to unsustainable levels that drive business growth in an
unsustainable fashion that incentivize malinvestment right So by eliminating the central bank we get rid of all these factors that are allowing players big players mostly the central bank the entities that own the central bank to manipulate our markets

(34:52):
And by manipulating our markets, they can convince us to do things that are not in our interest.
They might be in our immediate, like solve this immediate pain point, but they're not in our best interest long term.
And they've used that against us now for over 100 years.
And we're back to this sort of peak decision point again.

(35:16):
And it's many Bitcoiners' great hope that when we get to that decision point, we don't have to go back to the central bank well, that we can migrate to a Bitcoin system.
And migrating to that Bitcoin system eliminates the need for the central bank.
So this is a big point of contention for a lot of people, especially in Wall Street, because they're sort of aligned with the central bank to a certain extent because it keeps their mousetrap operating.

(35:53):
But we're hopeful that we can get Bitcoin to a size, scope and scale globally.
That's really the end goal is to eliminate the central bank.
Beautiful. Yeah. And I completely agree. And I would even add to that when we're just looking at the current state of things and the power that these bankers have to control everyone. So we pay taxes, which is a lot already. It's like a huge amount. When you look at the amount of taxes we used to just revolt and go to war for way back in the day, it's like a minuscule amount of what it is now. People are so pacified to it. They don't even know what these numbers mean anymore. So they just deal with it.

(36:34):
So not only are we paying huge taxes, we're also having the money that we hold that isn't taxed inflated away because they are just printing money and diluting our purchasing power.
And so it's all disintegrating in front of our eyes.
And you mentioned how when you look at the actual chart of the value of the dollar, it's just tanking like a rock.
It's been doing this ever since they started printing money.

(36:55):
And this is why when people go to the store or McDonald's is a classic example.
They used to have the dollar menu where things cost a dollar.
And now, what is it like the $8 menu or something?
It's just going up and up.
And I just tell people this isn't because a McDonald's burger got eight times more valuable.
Definitely not.
If anything, it's gotten worse because of the inflation is affected by chains.

(37:19):
But it's more expensive because your actual dollars are now worth eight times less.
They've lost that much value.
And this is why we're living in what we're told is supposed to be the richest country
in the history of the world and things should be great, but everyone's broke. Everyone's struggling
to pay rent and feed themselves. And all the quality of all of our goods and services is all

(37:42):
going down and people can't figure out why. And folks are finally starting to put the piece
together that really comes down to the money itself having these problems. And those in control
that have control of this, it's a pretty deep problem because not only do the bankers,
Are they doing these things, but they also have unlimited money to influence the media and the educational system and the entertainment industry and the centralized big tech social media algorithms.

(38:09):
All of these things are very well designed to keep people from figuring out that this is the truth and this is what's actually causing all their problems because they are incentivized to keep the game going.
That's right. And so it becomes really difficult for people going through this, this normal track that most people do of going to school, you know, watching Netflix, watching TV shows, because all these things are controlled by the same entities that want us to be confused about this.

(38:38):
And I still remember my college economics classes is completely Keynesian speak.
Everything is like, oh, we need the central banks because it smooths out the booms and bust cycles.
We need to have some control when really just eliminating the central planning completely would fix so many of the problems.
And how would you explain that, how just central planning in itself is not a good idea for any financial system?

(39:04):
And what happens when we eliminate that?
because I know a lot of people will be scared of this idea.
It seems, you know, they've been convinced that this is like providing some safety
and some, you know, some guardrails that are good for us.
Like, what would you say to that?
Well, okay.
There's a few things there.
One thing that came to mind is a simple analogy that I used to use for my clients

(39:26):
that were when I was trying to explain inflation
and I was trying to explain why things were getting more expensive.
and what I would do is I'd talk about a weights and measure scale.
And on one side of the scale is all the goods and services, resources,
you name it, that we want or need.

(39:48):
And the other side of the scale is all the fiat money in the world
because it's not just the U.S. central bank, right?
China, Japan, European Union, you name it, right?
There's dozens of central banks.
but all the money that they're creating sits on this side of the scale and all the goods and
services we need to survive sit on this side of the scale. We're not a part of this. We're just

(40:13):
down here on the ground. We have to keep coming up here and trying to buy our little bits of goods
and services. So if central banks create more money, this side of the scale gets heavier and
all these goods and services get more expensive for us, right? And that is out of reach for the

(40:35):
everyday person because this much money gets printed and created doesn't mean you got it,
right? This stuff just got more expensive because it's all priced in this pile over here,
Right. So when this happens that fast, like we saw during COVID, this is just the complete expansion of the of the base money, the amount of money in the system that the fiat, the fiat that's being created and driving that out of reach.

(41:05):
So that's that's number one, a real simple way to kind of visualize why we're not able to participate in this.
And it's it had nothing to do with us at all.
that's also a way to impoverish people, right?
Like, do you not think that central banks know that?

(41:27):
If I can explain that on a weight to measure analogy,
like they'll use a lot of acronyms and big words and all this stuff.
We have mandates and we're trying to stabilize prices.
It's all garbage.
It's all garbage.
They know exactly what the outcome is going to be.
They know poor people will get poorer. Rich people will get richer. People that own assets, right? Their assets will go up in price. People that own the commodities, their commodities will go up in price. People that produce, their goods will go up in price, right?

(41:57):
So for the everyday person, this becomes a major pain point that they have very few tools up until Bitcoin to combat or fight against it.
And now I forgot the other half of your question.
So bring me back on target.

(42:19):
Oh, I love the direction you're going.
You can just freestyle this.
What was it?
I can't even remember now.
All right.
I got more new questions.
There's too many questions.
No, I know.
Yeah, so, all right.
So that's how, you know, that's sort of a basic way of how I explain inflation.
And then, you know, when you're trying to combat inflation as an individual, prior to Bitcoin, you had gold.

(42:44):
I don't probably, there's probably 10 million Bitcoin podcasts telling you that why Bitcoin is better than gold.
So I won't go into that.
But, you know, Bitcoin is really the tool now to save yourself from that dilemma.
Right.
I would add to that, that you should be thinking, at least in my opinion, about assets or resources that you can secure for you and your family that are outside of money.

(43:17):
like how could I feed myself if food got too expensive?
That also starts to align you with higher quality food, right?
Like you're going and buying local beef.
But how can I do that?
When you start to really go down that rabbit hole

(43:37):
about how humans have fed themselves efficiently for years, right?
It becomes a carnivore diet because you can't extract enough energy from a plant-based diet.
I tried.
It wasn't real good.
And you don't have the time and energy to produce enough on a small farm to just live off that.

(44:01):
You'll burn more energy growing the food than you'll actually consume.
So letting the animals convert solar energy into energy that you can absorb becomes the primary solution.
So that means having land, having fertile land or land that you can improve.
Land becomes valuable.
Everything sort of Bitcoin just realigns you back to like scarce resources.

(44:27):
And what's most important for your health and your abundance, your success.
And I don't know, for whatever reason, right, Bitcoin fixes money, but it realigns you to all these other values that.
I think you start to realize that are just as important.

(44:50):
So I know I didn't probably answer the question, but we'll eventually get back to it.
That was great.
No, I love it.
This is a free-flowing conversation.
Sometimes my questions just go all over the place too, because there's so many places
I want to go.
We just flow it.
I love it.
Cool.
Yeah.
And one of the things that you mentioned there was how when you are on a fiat money standard where, you know, certain tiny elite can print it and everyone else just has to deal with it, how their money is being debased constantly.

(45:20):
This causes a reality where the poor people get poor and the rich people get richer, but only like a minuscule percentage of even the rich people.
There are millionaires and billionaires who are suffering right now because it really is just like the central bankers at the absolute hippy top who are benefiting massively.
And so I was just talking with another guy, Eric V. Stacks, who I know that you know as well.

(45:44):
And I brought up this idea of late-stage capitalism, which is this term that people use right now where they look at everything as falling apart.
Things are going crazy, homeless people all over the streets.
It's like things just seem to be falling apart.
And this is the most, I think it's the most common blame
that is pointed is, oh, it's capitalism in late stages.

(46:06):
But what Eric and I talked about, and I recommend people
go listen to that episode first, I think I'll order these
in that way, is he quoted Robert Breedlove, another Florent
who basically talks about how if you have a central bank, you are already 50% communist
because the central bank is controlling the money, which is half of every single financial

(46:30):
transaction. So you're starting at 50% and almost everywhere is more than 50%. So just the idea that
we're even in a capitalistic system right now, I believe is incorrect because I totally agree with
that. Would you agree as well? Yeah. Yeah. And I think a way to think about this is that as we get
this massive wealth divide where you've got, say, the top 1% owning 90% of the wealth,

(46:56):
everybody underneath that is slowly moving more and more. A larger and larger percent of the
population is moving to where they can't make ends meet. And this is when you start to hear
billionaires and trillionaires talk about UBI, which is in and of itself a communist ideology.

(47:19):
So why did these extreme capitalists that rose to the top of industry all of a sudden become
communist? Their mentality shifted because they're trying to save their own hide.
Because in late stage capitalism, inevitably you get to the point where the people revolt.

(47:39):
A revolt is violent, and usually the majority wins and redistributes the wealth.
If you want to avoid having your wealth redistributed, you either go away and hide,
or you try and come up with social programs to appease the masses.

(48:04):
So I think it's inevitable that late stage capitalism leads to communism ideologies or communist ideologies. And that sort of is just sort of the natural historical cycle that we've seen take place over and over and over again in societies.

(48:24):
which is why I think it's so important that the everyday person stacks Bitcoin.
Right. Yeah. It's like, it's great.
We're all getting rich because we have a Bitcoin ETF and,
and the government's going to build an SBR, yada, yada, yada.
Wall Street's getting it now.

(48:45):
Number go up is not necessarily the solution.
That could lead to a massive divide between haves and have-nots and not solve this problem.
The more that Bitcoin can stay decentralized and distributed and the more we can get everyday people acquiring their own stack, however small or big that might be,

(49:10):
the more we move towards replacing that central bank,
the more we move away from the need for a universal basic income
because we can trade with each other.
We can do peer-to-peer transactions.
This is what, if they could get this ideology,

(49:31):
maybe some of them are, I know some of them get it, right?
Because you can hear some of the language.
Some of these very, very wealthy people get it.
Um, but, but many others are just trying to save their own skin and it's completely a selfish game.
Um, and so I think that, that, you know, historically you would say late stage capitalism ends in a communist revolt, redistribution of assets and capital.

(49:58):
And, um, hopefully we can avoid that.
Interesting.
I agree with a lot of that, but I disagree a little bit with this idea that late-stage capitalism leads to communism.
I don't think we've ever even had capitalism before.
I would call it more late-stage central banking because we've always had these banks around.

(50:20):
And maybe you could look back at when we had gold.
It's like it was pretty capitalist, but that lasted for 5,000 years and we didn't have any collapsing.
It worked really well.
So what would you think about that?
I mean, we did have an era in the United States before the central bank that we have now where we had free banking, right?

(50:40):
Where every individual bank was creating its own currency and it was backed by gold, but they were trading notes that were the bank's currency.
And then you would judge, right?
Like, just like today, like, do we think Tether's reserves are better than USDC's reserves or Dye's?
We're like, what's the better stable coin, right?

(51:01):
So it was kind of like that type of functionality and that you would judge and vet each individual bank and you would decide which bank you trusted and which bank you wanted to work with.
And you would use their money, which is backed by gold.
And in these free banking eras, everybody took the risk that they were comfortable taking. It was a much freer, more of a libertarian approach to conducting transactions. And we were very prosperous during that era.

(51:38):
Um, so I think we've had little stints of, you know, like good money where society has prospered and done well.
Um, but it always runs up against this sort of limitation of the speed of business outpaces the, the, the, the pace of money.

(52:02):
And then we come up with these solutions and centralization always tends to be the solution.
And the centralization leads to points where people can inject themselves and take advantage of other people.
So I think when you look at Bitcoin, a lot of people look at it and say, well, this is a way we can eliminate centralization.

(52:24):
This is a way that we can re-decentralize money and again, make it peer-to-peer.
And if you wanted to convert that to a stablecoin, just like in the free banking era, decide which centralized entity you trust most.
And there you're taking your own risk and you're in charge of your own life.

(52:46):
With great freedom comes great responsibility is the way I've always looked at it.
And you're not going to be 100% perfect.
Risk is just a part of life.
and uh but i do think that leads to a more prosperous uh society awesome cool so so we

(53:07):
definitely do have like a lot of overlap there and just an agreement on that but it basically
just comes down to you know if you don't have like a really good sound form of money it will
eventually be sort of deteriorated taken advantage of to where you then go back toward like the
communism side. Sure. Well, we're getting early warning signs of that right now in Bitcoin.

(53:32):
When we start to think about a strategic Bitcoin reserve, we start to think about an ETF and other
Wall Street firms holding mass amounts of Bitcoin. You could make the case that we're in the earliest
innings of centralizing Bitcoin, right? But simultaneously, we're working on Lightning

(53:53):
network and Fedimance and the Cashew protocol and others that if they could be properly decentralized,
we could skirt or counteract that centralizing force.
I think this is the one good thing that you do see people go through with this whole crypto

(54:17):
ideology is that they think they can decentralize everything.
um i you know i don't think everything could be decentralized but it's not a good it's it's not a
bad practice you know as long as you're not scamming people and trying to take advantage of
people by by uh using decentralization is is your marketing pitch as opposed to a real product

(54:38):
um so you know i think i think if we can decentralize identity verification if we can
to decentralize money, obviously. We can decentralize ownership of a lot more assets.
Social media on Nostra is another offer.
Social media, exactly. A great example. So there is these two forces are running simultaneously,

(55:01):
but Bitcoin is the center of that spoke. It's the center of that wheel that has driven all of this.
And yes, a lot of this stuff on the periphery, especially in crypto land, is a bunch of garbage. It's all marketing and no product. But at the end of the day, if we keep on this course and we keep innovating, if we can use AI in a decentralized manner, if we can use manufacturing in a decentralized manner, and if we can use money in a decentralized manner, we could build a society that at least runs in parallel to the world.

(55:40):
the centralized system that you could opt into.
So this is sort of like how, I guess,
a better explanation of how I foresee Bitcoin
solving this inevitable cycle back towards redistribution of wealth.
When we were talking about late capitalism leading to communism late capitalism leading to redistribution of wealth through violence and authoritative leaders

(56:17):
Bitcoin is building an alternative path that if you can opt into that and help build it and help support it, could be a way to escape all of that.
And so that, I think, is what I'm really hopeful for when we talk about Bitcoin.
And honestly, that's been kind of like a disappointing thing for me in this cycle is so much hurrah around number go up and government adoption, which is great.

(56:49):
It's great to be regulatory compliant and not have the fear of your business being shut down or being debanked and all these things as we transition.
But at the same time, we can't lose focus. We can't be so excited that the government's talking about putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet that we lose sight of the real goal of Bitcoin, which is to decentralize finance, to decentralize our identity, to make us more sovereign and protect us from the state.

(57:22):
So I'm hopeful that we get back on that track in the next cycle.
Yeah, I mean, I'm very hopeful because I think that it's just the ultimate Trojan horse and the governments that do show support for it in certain ways, like the U.S. sure seems like it is right now.
I don't view it as like, oh, they're falling in love with Bitcoin, but they're bending the knee to Bitcoin.

(57:45):
They know that Bitcoin is going to win. And, you know, these different states are realizing, like, we can't really fight this thing anymore.
And China has tried to notoriously a bazillion times, like in the teens, they've tried to ban Bitcoin mining.
It just keeps blowing up in their face. So I view it as nothing but positive that governments are being forced to come in.
And it's just motivating. You're still young. You're still young. You're so true. You're so hopeful.

(58:10):
No, I'm just kidding.
Yeah, motivating more, like even younger people.
Like I'm trying to bring more Gen Z folks on to talk about, you know, this is why, you know, your generation can benefit so much from this.
This is how you get the revenge on the boomers who have like 50 different houses.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
It's just providing a lot of hope for people.
And I would actually like to go back to something that you said, like, and you're correct, 10 million people have talked about Bitcoin versus gold and how these are different.

(58:38):
But I would like to touch on this because we sort of discussed how gold eventually did loops.
It did a really good job for 5,000 years or so, however many years it is.
And it eventually was subverted because it just became too difficult to transact freely among people.
People were diluting the metals with other cheaper metals.

(59:01):
It just became too clunky.
And that opened the door to claim checks and using paper to trade that was backed by gold.
And then the government said, oh, let's just use the paper and forget about the gold.
And so things just started to slowly deteriorate from its soundness that it originally had that made it last for so long.
And here comes Bitcoin.

(59:21):
So could Bitcoin be the thing that takes all the good aspects of gold and improves upon it and actually becomes even better than gold?
What would you say to that?
Oh, I think it already is way better than gold.
I mean, it is the best money, period.
The thing that I think you need to realize about everything you described with gold is that the central banks never stopped owning gold.

(59:52):
They always know it's real money.
They don't want you owning gold.
They don't want you having real money, right?
And so to the extent that they were able to brainwash a whole multiple generations of money managers against this barbarous relic that had no value, while simultaneously they stacked their vaults with gold.

(01:00:22):
it's only become uh even a part of the investment management conversation
recently because people are awakening to the fact that we are in a problem with the debt
um and and they're awakening the fact that like wow we're running out of

(01:00:46):
gold physical gold on exchanges like where where's it going right so this this waking up this
realization that, wait, I don't have this thing that's all of a sudden in demand,
is bringing gold back into clear focus for a lot of people.
The people that I've talked to that have asked me this question,

(01:01:06):
they sort of distrust Bitcoin because of the technical aspects.
Once I explain to them that they have self-custody, that they don't have to leave it on an exchange,
that is divisible into 100 millions,
that they can store it in their brain,

(01:01:27):
they don't have to bury it in the backyard,
that is verifiable,
that it's beyond any jurisdiction.
Once they understand all these factors about Bitcoin
that make it so much better than gold,
then they go, how do I get it?
So this reemergence of gold because of chaos, because of war, and because of the debt bubble is making people think about Bitcoin.

(01:02:01):
So all in all, I think that's a win.
And it gives us an opportunity to highlight why Bitcoin as gold is a huge upgrade.
and then you get into you've now you've breached the store of value but then you can get into unit
of account and medium of exchange right and i start telling them like you and i get in a position

(01:02:23):
where there's a lot of conflict a lot of issue here we can't get goods and services we can trade
with each other you have a wallet i have a wallet we can do it with paper and we can trade our coins
with each other and we can pay for things with the peer-to-peer we can't do that and i said what am
I going to do? I'm going to chip away some rough portion of a gold coin that I have and pay you

(01:02:46):
with that. And then you have to melt it down. This just doesn't make any sense. But with Bitcoin,
we can do this instantaneously, automatically, verifiably with nobody getting in between.
And all of a sudden, these are the prepper people that I've talked to that have been gold, gold,
gold gold gold and bullets bullets bullets bullets and then i explained that to them they're

(01:03:10):
like oh holy smokes like this is a this is a tool for me now like the prepper tool the financial
tool for the prepper and it's um then they get it right and then they realize how much better
bitcoin is than gold and you at least move them off center where they want to have that as well
so yeah it's I mean there's there's no doubt about it so I wouldn't even be surprised if

(01:03:35):
central banks own Bitcoin I mean that that I don't see why they they wouldn't
they were never going to tell you
they'll tell you once they've got as much as they want but they're never going to tell you ahead of
time and that brings up another interesting question too is this is a very common thing

(01:03:58):
i hear from people who are let's be honest like trying to find reasons to not like bitcoin
is they hear that some you know bad entity x like a classic one's blackrock they have a bunch of
bitcoin and they hear blackrock is oh we know blackrock is bad they do all these terrible things
they own bitcoin so i don't want to have bitcoin because like that would help blackrock and so what

(01:04:21):
What would your response be to that?
The fact that some of these people that we don't like, these entities that are a big part of the problem, are stacking Bitcoin as well.
Yeah.
I simply say, why do you think they changed their tune?
Because they hated Bitcoin for years.
They had nothing good to say about it.
But all of a sudden, they've changed their tune.

(01:04:41):
Why do you think that is?
And then we get into the debt discussion, right?
And do you think that maybe BlackRock's trying to make sure they have something on their balance sheet that would bail them out should other assets collapse?
If inflation rips and the average person is not able to afford to invest because they're too busy trying to buy cereal,

(01:05:10):
do you think that they would like to have a portion of their customers owning something that rebuilds the future economy?
Like, so I just, I asked those kinds of questions back to them to get them to think beyond like, like sort of like, like if you have this powerful enemy that's doing something to protect its own hide, you might want to look at what they're doing.

(01:05:35):
Right.
If you're playing that football team that beats you every year, your high school team, they just crush you every year.
You might want to figure out what kind of plays they run.
Right This is that kind of simple question Yeah and I take a little bit different angle on that where you know

(01:05:56):
for the people who are kind of like emotionally looking at this,
like I don't like what BlackRock does. I don't believe in what they're doing.
So I don't want them to benefit from this.
What I would say is we have this famous phrase in Bitcoin,
which is Bitcoin is for enemies. You know, it's an open protocol.
Everyone can buy it, including your worst enemy can buy this thing too.
and there's trade-offs for that.

(01:06:17):
But I would still say this is a huge win,
even if they stack all the rest of the Bitcoins exists.
And I would agree with the folks who say
that I don't like what BlackRock does.
They have a lot of evil things that they do.
However, the difference with Bitcoin is
they now have a cap to the amount of spending they can do
and the amount of power they can exert

(01:06:37):
because Bitcoin is finite, it's scarce.
And the amount of Bitcoin that you have
doesn't change your ability to change the rules.
This is a very big point that people need to understand
the difference between proof of stake and proof of work.
Maybe we could touch on that as well,
which is this fiat financial system is proof of stake,
which means the more money you have,

(01:06:59):
the bigger the stake you have in this financial system,
the more power you have to change and manipulate the rules,
to buy out the politicians, to change the regulations
so you can stomp out the smaller competition,
and it gives you the ability to manipulate the game.
And Bitcoin, on the other hand, it's hard-coded to have these rules that you cannot change.

(01:07:21):
So even when your worst enemy buys it and makes some gains on Bitcoin, they are limited.
They have responsibility forced on them for the first time ever.
When they spend that money, they can't just go tap their buddy's shoulder in Congress and get a bunch of money printed for them.
And BlackRock is basically the fourth, fifth arm of government at this point.

(01:07:41):
They have so many deep connections.
But that entire octopus structure, we see the picture of the octopus sort of covering everything, the central banking system.
The whole thing gets disarmed once the money can't be printed anymore by anybody and distributed around at the whim of the richest among society.
So is there anything you would add to that?

(01:08:02):
Yeah.
I mean, number one, you don't have to buy the ETF, right?
So yes, if they own Bitcoin on behalf of their shareholders, on behalf of ETF shareholders, you don't have to buy the ETF.
So take it into self-custody.
Number two, yeah, so Bitcoin right now is decentralized enough that BlackRock cannot change the protocol.

(01:08:37):
That doesn't mean that down the road, and when I say down the road, I mean generations is what I'm thinking, right?
generations down the road where our sons and daughters forget the value of decentralization
because Bitcoin's built this incredible society, this golden era of Bitcoin.

(01:09:03):
And they forget the value of decentralization.
They just take it for granted.
And it's just so much easier.
And I don't have any risk letting a bank or BlackRock custody my coin.
So I'll just let them do it.
is just so much easier for me.
That's the slippery slope where all of a sudden
we could get to a position where it's very easy

(01:09:25):
for a centralized entity to propose changes to the protocol.
And if we had a narrow field of miners,
we could get those, you know, and node runners,
they could, you know, agree to run that protocol
and they can make changes.

(01:09:46):
Right now, I think that's impossible.
But that's a risk that we have to be aware of for generations down the road.
And I've had some discussions with some other people in the community about that down the road,
we could see if that risk is becoming eminent, that we actually do a sovereign fork of Bitcoin.

(01:10:08):
uh so if blackrock wanted to make changes and got them through there's there's no reason why a group
of to say maximalist or or freedom loving bitcoiners however you want to whatever term
you want to use couldn't introduce a fork that a bitcoin that is more private that is more sovereign

(01:10:31):
that's completely peer-to-peer and opt out.
Now, you would have coins in both systems, right?
You'd have coins in the centralized system,
and you'd have coins in the decentralized system.
And that battle might come someday.
But the thing to remember is that the protocol is built

(01:10:52):
to manage those kind of risks,
to give us solutions to those kind of risks.
And that's the beauty of Bitcoin,
is that it's rigid enough that it can't be changed on a whim,
but it's flexible enough that if things got really bad,
there's a way to make a change if the majority of people want to do it.

(01:11:16):
If you don't understand what I'm talking about, read about the fork wars in 2018 and 19
and what took place with Bcash.
Now, what forked off was not successful, but it's a model for what can happen to Bitcoin if it became completely centralized.

(01:11:41):
I don't think we're going that way.
I don't think we're going to have to deal with that for many, many generations.
But it's good to know for your own sort of, you know, when you're trying to evaluate the risks of Bitcoin and get comfortable, right?
I had to get comfortable with all those things.
I was only in Bitcoin for about a year, a year and a half or something when the fork wars happened and I was panicked.

(01:12:04):
I had no idea what the hell was going to happen and what this meant for Bitcoin.
And it held me back from buying as much as I should have because I was concerned.
So running those risk scenarios and trying to understand how that works is going to give you more confidence in Bitcoin and you're going to be able to invest more and feel good about it.

(01:12:26):
Yeah, and a good book I'd throw out there for people to read is called The Block Size Wars, which walks through that whole saga.
I was not around at that point.
I was still going to my fiat finance classes in college when that was happening, not paying attention.
Yeah, that was hairy.
I was early enough that I didn't really know what to think of it.

(01:12:48):
Yeah, and this is something important for people to think about too, when you inevitably are going to beat yourself up for not buying sooner, not buying more sooner, which everybody does.
This is like a psychology test.
Like, are you able to forgive your past self and just forget about the sunk cost?
There were real questions back at this time.

(01:13:08):
Like, is Bitcoin going to survive this?
You know, people didn't know.
Like, the smartest people even were asking questions.
And so, you know, you can't beat yourself up for not being in earlier because it was a lot more crazy and unsure back then.
Yeah.
And this is the term that I like people.
What is it even?
It's like risk adjusted potential or something.

(01:13:28):
Yeah, risk adjusted returns.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So where right now the risk has dropped substantially.
Yeah.
And so it's honestly a much smarter bet to make now than it was even way back in the early days, which people are jealous of.
Yeah.
Yeah, and risk and return are correlated.
So if you had the clarity of vision back in the early days

(01:13:51):
and you took on a lot of risk because you were fully aware of the unknowns,
you were rewarded very handsomely.
Today, your reward won't be as big, but you have a much higher probability of success.
Absolutely.
That's why people should just continue getting into it,
Getting the toes in there, getting the toes in the water, start DCAing dollar cost average with your paycheck.

(01:14:14):
Yeah, that's a good point because we're talking about these things, but when you put it in perspective to traditional returns in the S&P 500, it's still a joke.
Like when you look at what Bitcoin can deliver, even on a risk adjusted basis now, right, compared to if you bought in 2014.

(01:14:38):
uh the nothing even touches it so what are you waiting for buy when you can not when you think
you should yeah 100 and just and just make it part of your routine and this is why i really
agree with the people like i don't even have a strong stance on whether people should be doing
the lump sum and just you know just heave a whole bunch in there as soon as they can or

(01:15:02):
they should do like all dollar cost averaging of just like a steady weekly amount i would just say
get off zero yeah get off zero for sure i have a friend who uh i think back in 2017 she started
dcaing 30 25 or 30 a day you know and um cost of a meal right and uh i think her stack is well

(01:15:26):
over a million dollars now yeah just set it on autopilot and she went and lived her life but people don feel like you missed the boat when you hear these stories because what we doing right now and what actions you make right now will make you those stories in 10 years
from now yeah as we as we you know continue to go through this rabbit hole learn more about how

(01:15:48):
big of a deal this is yeah and there's no reason why why very early innings yeah there's no reason
why you shouldn't set up a dca let it run with whatever you're comfortable at whether it's five
a day or $100 a day, whatever it is, and let that run and then smash buy dips when you can.
100%. I think this is a great final transition we could make into just getting stupidly bullish

(01:16:15):
here about the future just to make sure people really know that we're still super early.
So, Paul, why don't we talk about how early are we in Bitcoin? What is this idea of hyper
Bitcoinization that people keep talking about? And what do you see coming in the near future,
say five, 10 years or so? Okay. Well, I guess I'll start pessimistic and then get optimistic.

(01:16:40):
I see a lot of people thinking like we're going to hit a million dollars this year.
I don't think that's realistic. It takes a lot of time for all this bullish rhetoric to move through policy into policy and get things in place where things get done, where we actually get significant sovereign purchases, right, or treasury purchases or whatever.

(01:17:08):
but that being said i i'm fairly optimistic that by the next cycle we're at a million
so i would look at that as even more bullish because it gives you more time to acquire more
bitcoin between now and then right the worst thing that could happen to interrupt real quick
when you say cycle you mean having cycle like yes yeah the next four-year cycle um and and i'm not

(01:17:32):
even necessarily sure that that we're going to have like the traditional four-year cycle anymore
Right. I've always I always keep that in mind. But I think the cycles could get shorter and more compressed, meaning down down drafts would be smaller. Up cycles would be shorter as we get more institutional holders.

(01:17:53):
they'll be more rebalancing. And so I don't know whether it's this cycle or next. I don't know
when we get a big enough holding that it actually starts to act that way. But I do think that that's
the trend it's going to follow is it's going to become less volatile moving forward. But to the

(01:18:15):
extent that if your vision aligns with mine, that you see a million dollars coming in the next cycle,
that's incredibly bullish for anybody starting today because you're accumulating 10x below
where it's going. And a 10x return in absolutely anything is unbelievable.

(01:18:38):
So that's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
So I think it's a good thing that you can see that all this groundwork is being laid
for large institutional purchases, for treasury purchases, for other sovereigns to start purchasing,
states to start purchasing.
You see all this groundwork being laid right in front of your eyes right now.

(01:19:01):
Don't expect that to mean that the price is going to a million tomorrow.
but that should not like don't wait for the FOMO is what I'm saying like start stacking now
with the longer term foam knowing that that longer term FOMO is coming and you should be looking at
any dip any disappointment that we're not hitting a million today as an opportunity for you this is

(01:19:25):
this is an incredibly exciting time to be buying.
And it's like the table has been set.
Now you're just sitting there waiting for the meal, right?
So start accumulating as much as possible.
Start feasting.
It's time, man.

(01:19:46):
It's time for people to realize they've been hearing about Bitcoin
for years and years and years.
It's not going away.
It's not a bubble like they keep trying to say.
It would not be around this long, continuing to go up if these big risks that we're told were really amazing.
I think another important thing I want to add, people get scared of the number.

(01:20:06):
They get scared of $80,000, $100,000 Bitcoin.
They think it's beyond them or it's too late.
A 10x return on whatever you can afford to invest is amazing.
It's 10x more money than you had before.
right so don't get hung up on the price of bitcoin um people got hung up on the price of

(01:20:31):
berkshire hathaway like like and it kept going up like you just the price is irrelevant it's well
how much can of it can you buy and you will reap the rewards of that in proportion so uh don't go
out running around oh well you know ripples 50 cents or like ripples 50 cents because it's a piece

(01:20:52):
garbage. That's why it's 50 cents. Is the Mercedes worth $150,000 a lot better than the Kia worth
$15,000? I think so. You're buying quality and you have the luxury of being able to buy fractions

(01:21:12):
of that quality because you're getting the same quality and that's what you need to invest in.
And that fraction that you get, and this is a big mindset shift for people, that fraction of a Bitcoin you get, say, 0.01 Bitcoin, that's your first buy.
That is a fixed percentage of the overall supply cap forever.

(01:21:32):
Yeah.
That can't be taken away from you.
And this is something that no fiat stackers will ever understand because the supply is just going up forever for them.
They're just getting, you know, rebased forever.
It's a great point.
And people don't think about this at all, but you buy shares of any stock in the S&P 500 and it goes up 30%, 40%.

(01:21:54):
What does that company do?
They start selling shares into the market to raise capital.
And they dilute you.
That cannot be done with Bitcoin, right?
They're not going to create more shares and sell them into the market and dilute you.
So your 1.01, whatever that percentage is that you have is yours forever, and nobody can take it away.

(01:22:20):
Only you can get rid of it.
And so that's incredibly valuable.
And it's only going to be harder and harder and harder to get 0.01% Bitcoin.
Absolutely.
And I think that the best way to wrap this up is just don't hold dilutable assets.
Hold the things that can be diluted that will protect your purchasing power because you deserve to have an awesome life, an awesome future,

(01:22:47):
and not have to fiddle around with trading stocks all the time just to be able to save the money you've already earned through your craft.
And this is what Bitcoin brings to us.
And speaking of Bitcoin, all this bullishness is making me hungry, Paul.
I'm going to go buy some beef down the street with Bitcoin.
Shout out to Segura's Market, which is here in Costa Rica.
You can buy pretty much everything with Bitcoin here,

(01:23:08):
which is just a matter of time before we see that continuing to spread out.
And I know that there are sources people can use to find places
where they can actually start buying things with Bitcoin.
And I know lots of people here where I'm currently living
who are just fully Bitcoin standard already
because they're in a place where people accept it.
So they don't hold any fiat anymore.

(01:23:28):
This is doable.
That's awesome.
We have a Bitcoin POS system that we implemented in, I think we have like 45 customers that are in beta with it right now.
But we did the first gas transaction on the Lightning Network here in Florida.
We also have some growers or beef producers here in Florida that accept Bitcoin.

(01:23:51):
and yeah, definitely hit up BTC Maps
and start looking at find people near you
that will accept it.
I always do, like we've always talked about
where all this whole show was talking about saving
and growing your stack.
But I also keep a little stack outside in a hot wallet
where it's just flowing, right?

(01:24:14):
Bitcoin coming in, Bitcoin going out
to support the community
and help develop peer-to-peer.
I think that's important to do
to keep your wallet separate,
have your cold stack and cold storage,
hold your own keys and have your hot wallet
so you can stoke your fellow Bitcoiners
by paying them in Bitcoin.
It's an awesome feeling.

(01:24:36):
Beautiful. 100% agree.
Paul Tarantino, where can people follow you
and learn more about what you're doing at Byte Federal
and how that can help them?
Yeah, you can visit our website, ByteFederal.com.
You can find me, you can find ByFederal on X.
You can find me on X, Paul S. Tarantino.
There might be an underscore in there somewhere.

(01:24:56):
You'll see laser eyes and this face.
And we'll put some stuff in the comments where you can see our wallet and other things.
Beautiful.
Yeah, I'll put all the links to that in the show notes so people can go find it.
Thank you so much for coming by today.
I really appreciate you going through all this with me.
I think this is a great refresher episode,
really bringing us back to the foundation of why we're doing this.

(01:25:17):
So appreciate you so much.
And I'm looking forward to keeping in touch.
Thanks, Ben.
Likewise.

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#121 Paul Tarantino - How Central Banking Destroys Society, and Bitcoin Fixes It

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}#121 Paul Tarantino - How Central Banking Destroys Society, and Bitcoin Fixes It