#138 Full Bansko Nomad Fest Presentation w/ Aleks Svetski - BITCOIN FOR DUMMIES - Ben Wehrman Podcast

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Great turnout for this. Thank you guys.

(00:02):
Yes. Welcome everyone.
We're talking about Bitcoin today.
Thank you for coming.
So, as is tradition for having Bitcoin talks, we've got to ask who has heard of Bitcoin?
First of all, raise of hands.
Pretty much everybody.
I would hope so.
Who is holding Bitcoin?
Holding or using Bitcoin?
About half.
That's pretty awesome actually.
That's really good.

(00:23):
So, we're going to be crash coursing through a bunch of stuff today because there's so many different angles we can take this conversation.
We're going to start with a broad overview of why Bitcoin matters, how it fits into the world money landscape.
Because that's what people are starting to ask questions about.
It's been around for over 15 years now.
It's sticking around.
So people want to know where does this actually fit into society at large?

(00:45):
And then we're going to move it into how you can use it as a traveler to make your traveling life much better.
And we've got some personal examples of how we both use it a lot and how you can too.
So to give.
Let me add one more thing.
Go ahead.
we're also gonna do and I don't see it on your little list here but we should
also do a short explanation of like why Bitcoin and not shitcoin so there's like

(01:06):
basically in the world of money there's Bitcoin and then everything else is
shitcoin that includes the Bulgarian lever you US dollars euros all crypto
fucking everything so we'll explain why the distinction there yep yep so taking
it all the way back to just looking at what money is in the world so if you go
way back in history people used to use this thing called barter which is when

(01:29):
someone has 10 chickens and another person creates houses it's hard for them
to exchange value with each other because those are such different measures of
the value that they're creating so money became this tool in the middle where if
I have 10 chickens I can use money as that intermediary that makes those
people able to trade so you don't have to have 5,000 chickens equal to that

(01:51):
house to sell or one brick for a chicken yes the other way around yeah so all the people in a
community can specialize on what they want to do and they don't have to trade that thing for what
they want the money is the perfect tool so anyone that's ever told you that money itself is evil is
wrong it's just a tool that helps people exchange with each other so there's been so many different

(02:11):
types of money throughout history and i highly recommend the book for anyone looking to look at
just how they've all evolved over time is called the bitcoin standard it goes through how we used
to use rocks and seashells and things like this but these quickly ran into problems because they
could be games outside countries and nationalities could bring a bunch of they could be better at

(02:34):
creating or finding rocks and they would come in glass beads is another popular one is a classic
one so let me give you an example like this um shells there's an excellent essay by a guy called
Nick Szabo, who's like one of the greatest polymaths of our generation.
And it's called Shelling Out.
If you get a chance, definitely read that.
Nick Szabo, Shelling Out.
His surname is S-Z-A-B-O.

(02:56):
And in there he talks about how there was a period of time when shells were used as money.
And shells were very rare in places that weren't close to the coast, right?
So what humans did was they would find these rare artifacts and they would shave them down
into particular shapes and they would use them as the tool, which is money, in order

(03:18):
to make trade possible.
And then the example I always use to people is like, imagine you spent your whole life
saving up, working to save up a bunch of shells and then you went to retire on the beach and
all of a sudden shells everywhere.
So it's no longer scarce.
Like inflation would kill your money, right?
So you had all different sorts of monies throughout the world.

(03:39):
So you had like commodity money.
things like salt the word salary comes from salt but imagine if you spend your whole life saving up
all this salt and then you know your kid accidentally poured the water on it then all your money is
gone right so money requires a set of attributes in order to make it a good money and what happened
over the centuries is human beings found better and better and better objects to use as money

(04:03):
the ultimate object let's see if anyone has this trivia history here what became money all around
the world it lasted for thousands of years gold exactly why does anyone can anyone tell me why
scares it is one element what else it is pretty yeah

(04:24):
divisible somewhat divisible yep it's very durable as well right so like gold is gold wherever but in
my opinion the most important thing is gold is one of the only and probably i think it's the only
maybe there's two inert metals which means gold doesn't react with anything so you will find gold
in its raw pure form in africa in asia down in the ocean anywhere so you've got this unit this

(04:48):
magical metal that is the same everywhere it is portable it is durable it is scarce it is
recognizable it is homogenous throughout gold doesn't react with anything so you've got this
perfect unit that slowly by slowly not by decree it wasn't told to anyone it was just adopted
bottom up as money and if you think about how this happened in the beginning maybe a nugget of gold

(05:12):
couldn't have even bought you a single chicken it's like you know let's say you found gold for
the first time everyone's still using seashells and glass beads and you've got to buy a chicken
you're like can i have six chickens for and you know the guys like okay that'll be six shells
please give him some goals what the is that what's gold it's gonna be the future of money
and you're like well can i eat it no can i drink it no can i wear it no get the out of here

(05:32):
give me my shells and that's how it would have happened in the beginning but over time more and
more and more people started seeing this valuable unit or this unit this useful unit I should say
and imbuing value on it so over thousands of years the world converged all around that gold was money
so that was sort of the progression yeah and it's a long process because it just started out as

(05:55):
people walking around seeing these pretty little yellow rocks and thinking that's cool I'm going
collect that and just hold it. And then once enough people started holding it, they started
thinking, we could actually exchange this thing as a form of money. And then they started,
economy started building around that. And we use this analogy in Bitcoin as well,
because right now most people view it as this like weird, cool internet thing. Like, sure,
maybe I'll get some. It's kind of interesting. But in the future, it will become the main means

(06:19):
of commerce if everything develops the way that we see it will. So going from gold to Bitcoin is
a good step here. So all that understanding of why gold matters, why it has these, especially
scarcity, these really good characteristics, you start to realize that all of these different
monies we talked about have the similar problems from their physicality. The visibility is one of

(06:43):
the things that we talked about that's very good, but the verifiability is an issue. So you can't
always tell if someone mixes some weaker metals inside that. You can't really tell if you're just
go to the store to buy something. They don't want to have like a whole verification process.
It's clunky. It's heavy. It's extremely expensive to transport around the world. So since we have a
global economy now, it's really tough to make that work. And so the physicality is starting to become

(07:08):
a detriment as we go into the digital future. And so what seems to make the most sense that
Bitcoiners have come to realize is that we need a digital form of gold that can mimic these same
characteristics that have worked extremely well for thousands of years, that have historically
proven to work very well but it works in the digital realm and so this is what

(07:28):
Bitcoin is really doing is take it scarce as only 21 million coins total and
maybe you can dive into details of why that's definitely gonna happen because
it breaks people's brains to think that oh it's digital everyone can copy it
someone will make a new one but that's not so much the case so a good way to
think about it is this and around the turn of the last century or a little bit

(07:50):
before the the speed and the complexity of global economies started increasing at a really
exponential rate and gold wasn't suitable for the speed of commerce at that point also you did
mention divisibility earlier but as a as an economy increases in complexity and as it increases in

(08:11):
wealth the same amount of gold buys more and more and more goods so you get to the point where
what are you going to do like buy a coffee with gold you have to like shave a little bit of
gold off the side it doesn't work so what we figured out was hey let's take a piece of paper
and create a promissory note which is a claim on an amount of gold and that was a good idea in

(08:31):
principle and for a long time what happened was you would have these issued notes from a vault
or a bank the original term of the bank was a place to store gold and get certificates issued
against it but as always happens with such things someone realized well wait a minute no one's
checking out how much gold I have. So let me just issue a few more certificates. And then we started

(08:53):
creating what's called monetary inflation. Now, you know, there's been fights back and forth with
economists for a long time about this. But what ended up happening if we fast forward to 1971
was the US, which was the last great power on the gold standard, said, look, fuck it, what do we need
gold for? No one's going to come into Fort Knox anyway. Let's just take it off the gold standard.
And the backing of the dollar will be petroleum and the war machine, right? So that sort of

(09:19):
happened and for the last 50 years we've been in that paradigm which is a pure fiat money not
anchored to anything physical or scarce in real world just like pure fiat yeah remember that
vocabulary word fiat that is fiat currency is that word that signifies this money that can be just
endlessly printed by governments and every single country on earth now has its own funny monopoly

(09:41):
money that you have to go as and this is a little sneak peek of later as a traveler we know we have
to go to the ATM and just throw out a bunch of fees
so we can get this latest government's piece of paper.
When you start thinking about
why do we even have to do that in the first place?
We have all these rent seekers just taking money from us
for doing these actions, exchanges also,
you have to exchange your money.
It's just not very efficient.

(10:02):
And there really isn't any reason why we shouldn't
just have one single money that works everywhere
around the world and has the same
monetary standard everywhere.
So this is where it starts to get into,
okay, so Bitcoin really does fit into this future.
really relevant for nomads as well but before we get too far into that i think we should talk about
the crypto thing because even earlier a couple days ago when people were thrown to pitches out

(10:24):
at the stage a couple people talked about their web3 projects and blockchain crypto projects
and him and i both would agree that this is not really the way forward bitcoin really is the
solution that people are looking for it it solves the biggest problem and there is no second bet so
do you want to dive further let me let me put it like this bitcoin is the innovation not blockchain
not crypto none of that sort of stuff right so the problem bitcoin specifically solves is getting

(10:51):
the the strength the weight the gravity of something like gold so you've got the scarcity
you've got the um single unit the verifiability all that sort of stuff but with the speed of fiat
and particularly digital fiat so gold is sorry bitcoin is like gold that can be sent across the
internet that's like the big innovation and the thing about something like this is it can be only

(11:16):
created once you can only get digital scarcity once um digital scarcity prior to gold never existed
digital information in the past was i have an mp3 i can copy the mp3 by sending it to you right
with bitcoin there is and i not going to get into the technicals here there if you guys want to read we can suggest some books and stuff like that but Bitcoin was the first innovation to take a digital unit and turn it into something scarce which cannot be copied which cannot be double spent That once in a generation or once in a

(11:46):
millennia event happened once at the end of 2008 or technically January 3rd 2009 when the first
genesis block was mined and since then Bitcoin has been a single chain with a single set of rules
and single ledger that has moved forward step by step by step by step every single block every
single 10 minutes without going down ever and every single block that goes past bitcoin gathers

(12:11):
more strength more economic mass more trust more um more economic gravity right all of the other
cryptos are basically attempts at recreating fiat money so if you look at um how if you're a central
bank. It's the ultimate job, honestly. Like we're all in the wrong business here. We should all be

(12:31):
in central banking. But basically, you don't have to produce anything. You don't have to create
anything. You don't have to do shit. You don't have to make any value, nothing. You just push a
button and print a bunch of money. And all of a sudden you've got money. The problem is for the
rest of us, the amount of money that we worked for is now diluted. Oh, sorry, the value of the
money that we work for is now diluted because there's more units for the same amount of value

(12:55):
in an economy right so the ultimate game is to say how the fuck can I be a central bank and this
is what the crypto nodes figured out they're like wait a minute what if I can spin up my own coin
and issue it to the market create a beautiful marketing narrative around it spend a bunch of
money on marketing and sell it to people as the next bitcoin so then a bunch of people go and buy

(13:16):
it they put their economic energy into this network and then all of a sudden you've got
the proliferation of shit coins which is why there's like i don't know what 50 000 shit coins
now two way to count god knows exactly and everyone could do one of them shit coins every
single one of them shit coins bitcoin specifically and you know we this is the funny thing like
sometimes people like oh do you work for bitcoin bitcoin is a protocol no one works for bitcoin

(13:37):
um we have nothing to gain in fact i would prefer it you know i've been talking about bitcoin for
for a decade now and i would prefer that nobody touches it so that i can have more
But here I am being an idiot, explaining it to everyone.
I have nothing to gain by you guys buying Bitcoin.
But every shitcoiner has something to gain by you buying their shitcoins.
It's a very different incentive.

(13:58):
It's a very different mode of operation.
And when it comes to Bitcoin, you've got this thing which is,
it happened in almost like an immaculate conception, right?
It was released to a mailing list to a bunch of nerds who then tried it out.
they spread it a little bit further and it went under the radar for about five six seven years

(14:21):
everybody ignored it they was like oh what is this stupidity right like no one cares
but throughout that time it increased in economic gravity economic mass more mining more nodes more
decentralization more people using it more wallets more infrastructure more everything
to the point where it was impossible to shut down now like to shut down bitcoin you'd have to turn
off honestly you'd have to probably blow up the whole earth that's the only way bitcoin stops even

(14:43):
Even if you shut down the internet in like all of Europe, Bitcoin still goes on everywhere
else.
You'd have to shut down the internet in the whole fucking world, but when you turn it
back on, Bitcoin just switches back on.
Things worse than a cockroach.
It doesn't go away.
So like the thing is not going to leave.
So what people do now is they go and create these new shit coins.

(15:04):
They brand it under whatever.
But the problem is it's issued by someone.
It's issued by a person, a foundation, a group, a company, whatever, which means you
You don't have the same guarantees as Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the one thing that can't be shut down.
Every other crypto, I mean, the US government tomorrow can go to the Ethereum foundation
and say, change the rules, please.
Double the supply.
And they have changed the rules.

(15:25):
They have changed the rules.
Many, many times.
Every single crypto.
I mean, Solana is another one.
They're like, every time, oh, we found a bug.
They stopped the fucking chain.
It's like, wait a minute.
Where was the censorship resistance?
You know, so this is the case with everything else.
Everything else, I put it in the bucket of fiat.
The only two things that are really not fiat is gold and Bitcoin.
The challenge with gold though, as we said, it's physical.

(15:47):
So it can't compete with Bitcoin.
I believe long term gold will always have an allure because gold I think is special.
Like it comes from the center of the stars, right?
And it's like exploded out.
It's all throughout the universe and galaxy.
I think it'll be, it'll always hold a special part in sort of human society.
But in terms of money, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing can compete with Bitcoin.
It is the thing and it's going to continue gaining mass.

(16:10):
Like for every year that passes, Bitcoin gains another trillion dollars, for example, in economic mass.
Anything that's going to start new, it's too late.
There's no way to beat it technically, socially, economically speaking.
It's done.
The cat is out of the bag and that's it.
This is why Bitcoin owns it.
And another thing to mention on that tangent of where gold's place is in the world, when Bitcoiners and gold bugs are arguing over which,

(16:36):
which one's better as a form of money, which one should be the next global reserve currency.
Gold is used for a lot of other stuff like jewelry, as we know, and wiring for mechanical stuff and
lots of other things. So the gold people will say, oh, it's used for so many things. So that
gives it more value. The problem is that's not helping it be a money. It's actually inserting
noise into its monetary function where Bitcoin is only money. So it's going to be much more

(17:02):
clear, much more efficient and be a much better economic signal for everyone within the economy.
And I just want to throw a couple more things in there just to wrap up that crypto conversation
To arm you with things that you're for sure going to hear from crypto people when they're going to say their coin is better
The most common one is that it's faster. You can transact super super fast
And for that I would just question you what is the actual problem we're trying to solve here?

(17:24):
Is it really that hard to slap a credit card on the table and it's like an instant payment?
So speed isn't really the problem here. The real problem is we don't have a form of money that holds this value over time.
The fiat currency that we hold now is always losing value as the governments print it.
We sort of glazed over that earlier, but the more that these governments print the money and increase the money supply, everyone's value is going down.

(17:49):
So when you go to McDonald's, for example, and look at how the dollar menu is now with a $10 menu, everything's more expensive.
It's not that a Big Mac got 10 times more valuable.
It's that your money got 10 times less valuable.
It's degrading over time.
So that is the true problem we need to solve.
Yes, question.
Isn't that the sense of money and the way
that it's not deflationary because it's not gaining value

(18:10):
if I want to hold Bitcoin and not want to spend it?
So the deflation versus the inflation conversation is great.
Do you want to maybe cover that a little bit?
I want to do a question and answer.
I want to do a Q&A at the end.
So hold that question.
I'll write that down.
Because it's a very good question.
The inflationary versus deflationary.
Keep going. I want to ask if anyone has like some questions about crypto Bitcoin.

(18:30):
Sure. I think we're good there. Do you want to do a little break for questions?
So I want to hold that question for later because that's a bigger economic question.
Does anyone have any question on the on the crypto Bitcoin or evolution of money or anything like that?
So Bitcoin, I would argue, is the most sustainable form of money.
So if you think about how fiat money functions, in order for me to go down the road now and pay my credit card,

(18:55):
with my credit card just to get a coffee right what needs to exist well you need payment terminals
those payment terminals need to be plugged into a payment network the payment network is run by
businesses all around the world to consume energy so you have this whole infrastructure of payment
terminals payment networks then you need the banks which are also a bunch of wasteful infrastructure

(19:17):
then from the banks you've got the central banks which are even more wasteful infrastructure all
All the workers that have to drive into work, all the plastic cups in the little coffee machine, everything there.
You need the military industrial complex around that to guarantee that the banks are going to do the right thing.
And then you multiply that by every single country in the world.
The amount of money, the amount of resources we waste just to have this stupid fiat fucking system is extraordinary.

(19:39):
Bitcoin takes energy and converts it directly into money.
It's the shortest pathway possible, which is you do compute in order to participate in the game of validation for Bitcoin blocks.
and it is literally directly energy into money. It is the most sustainable possible mechanism
for a global unit of account. That is incorruptible. Like it is, I would say probably, probably

(20:05):
a million times, maybe a billion times more efficient than the fiat system in terms of
efficiency. And it's also infinitely scalable because you can take that 21 million coins
and you can apply it to 7 billion people or 100 billion people. It doesn't matter. It's
fixed costs whereas with the fiat system it's not even a comparison i really i'm super glad you asked
that because that was my personal obstacle for a long time and why i started out having a huge

(20:31):
coin phase because i i read the the nonsense that bitcoin's bad for the environment buy this
crypto coin it's way more efficient has these pretty pictures on the website like you said
they're really good marketers so i fell into that for a few years and it took me a while to really
go down the rabbit hole of learning what money is, sound money. And like he said, the fact that
the fiat system, when you really actually try to quantify it, it just boggles your mind how much

(20:54):
energy that uses, way more than Bitcoin ever will. And it's not going toward a good end goal. It's
also creating all of this, I would argue, the majority of the misery we see in the world as
people are just getting poorer all the time. So you have to even try to think about how does that
affect the environment all these people just having no ability to think about

(21:14):
the future because they can barely feed themselves yeah let me you know I'm
gonna tie it into this question let's talk about inflation deflation now
because this is yeah exactly so one of the biggest issues in the world today is
blind consumerism right and so you've got blind consumers and you've got blind
gambling right everyone is a fucking trader and options and this and that
right everyone thinks they're cool now but all of that is a function of the

(21:35):
fact that money cannot retain its value we said earlier the Big Mac example
Does anyone know how much a Big Mac cost when they first came out?
$0.35.
That was Big Macs in 19...
What was it?
Like 55 or whatever it was.
Has a Big Mac gotten 20 times harder to create?

(21:56):
No.
So it's like probably 20 times easier.
Technically, a Big Mac should cost 5 cents.
But because the value of the money is deflated,
we are conditioned to do two things.
Spend and...
people would call it investing but I don't call it investing it's fucking
gambling so trading people get moved that's why you have so many apps like
Robinhood and betting apps and all this sort of stuff the biggest movement in

(22:18):
fintech is all of those kind of applications so to bring this back to
inflation versus deflation the point of money the very most important function of
money is to be able to save the product of your labor so that in the future you
can transact and get what you need later because if you could get everything that
you needed right now you wouldn't need money right so you would just like make

(22:41):
some water take a chicken and swap it right now but maybe I don't need the
chicken now maybe I need the chicken next week so I need some mechanism to
store the product of my labor in order to transact later so money's primary
function is to store value in order to exchange it later and then to measure
all other goods and services so therefore if you have an inflationary
money you lose the capacity to do that because the value that you're storing

(23:04):
erodes over time Economists modern economists will say hey well what about if it deflates then people will not spend So I always challenge people like this So if you got some money that may be slowly going up in value over time and you need some food what are you going to do

(23:26):
Not spend? Of course you're going to fucking eat. You'll still eat.
What Bitcoin does, what a deflationary money does, is it makes you think twice before you spend.
we said earlier consumerism is one of the biggest chances in the world today
we are buying shit we don't need well guess what when your money when your
savings is slowly increasing in value over time you think twice about what

(23:48):
you're gonna buy it because you look at your thing and I know I do that myself
I'm like okay do I really need to go and spend extra on this thing like my wife
now she wants a juicer okay which juice are we gonna get and it was like this
whole range okay well let's get the mid-range and get that one right because
is you start to think a little bit more
because your money is not being inflated away.

(24:08):
So it starts to change the economic direction
of all of civilization.
So my argument would be deflationary money
is the ultimate money.
In fact, I wouldn't even say deflationary money,
I would say fixed supply money.
That's what you want.
And then the deflation and the inflation
will actually depend on the productivity
because what will happen is if human productivity falls,

(24:29):
the money will actually be inflationary.
Because the amount of money that you have is fixed.
And if the productivity falls,
then you will need more units of money
to buy the same amount of goods.
But if productivity increases,
you need less units of money
to buy the same amount of goods.
So all of a sudden,
you almost have an ETF on human productivity.

(24:51):
The more productive we are,
the rate of our productivity,
of our collective productivity,
let's say our productivity is increasing
three or four percent a year the money value of the money will increase three or four percent a
year if we slow down our productivity the the money's purchasing power will fall by three or
four percent or whatever it is does that make sense it makes sense but right now you you're saying it's

(25:12):
if you have a slow the inflation like slow value gain it's not slow right now i mean the jumps right
now are crazy that's a problem why it's not accepted correct very good very good so um gold
took 5 000 years bitcoin's gonna take 100 years so we're still in the first generation of bitcoin
we're still in the speculative phase people are still trying to figure out what the this is

(25:34):
there's like how many people here just in this room getting a sense of like what money is
imagine 99.9 of the world has no clue which means you're ahead of everybody else if
you understand what this thing is let's use the gold analogy from earlier you are literally buying
bitcoin now is literally finding gold on the ground it's literally what it is you're picking
it up while everybody is still using chickens and seashells for barter right that's literally what

(25:59):
buying bitcoin is now and in the same way as gold maybe in the beginning you're maybe you had a whole
rock of gold and you couldn't buy a single chicken with it but if you could have lived for a thousand
or two thousand years and held that that gold rock could have bought you a kingdom same as bitcoin
now you know a bitcoin right now buys you i mean it would have been great if we were talking about
about this five years ago, I could have said,

(26:20):
Bitcoin buys you like a trolley full of groceries.
Now, one Bitcoin will buy you half the shop, right?
So this purchase power will keep increasing.
So while Bitcoin is maturing, it's gonna be very violent,
up, down, all of that, because the price of Bitcoin
is a function not of Bitcoin's attributes,
but of human psychology and people's understanding

(26:42):
of what this thing called Bitcoin is.
That's literally what the price is.
So over time, over the next 20, 30, 40 years,
As Bitcoin enters our DNA, as it enters our psychology, as it enters our mass consciousness, it becomes money and this stabilizes.
So it's just purely a matter of time.
And an example of that violent volatility he's talking about, if anyone wants to look up a chart, look up the Weimar Germany gold value.

(27:07):
Back when Weimar was going through a crazy hyperinflation event where the money was just getting printed into nothingness, the gold value didn't go straight up.
It was all over the place.
It was spiking up super far, down super far, because people are trying to figure out what's going on.
Like, where am I going to hold my value?
But the people that held their gold through all of that were massively rewarded.
The end of the chart is just a straight line up gold value as the paper went to zero.

(27:31):
And we have all of these different fiat currencies around the world today.
And hopefully by now kind of understand that they're all trending to zero.
And you'll hear different people argue like, oh, should I have dollars?
Should I hold euros? Should I hold this?
because they're all jockeying to be the least shitty of the pieces of paper, basically.
Of the shitcoins.
But they're all going to zero, just at different speeds.

(27:52):
So an important point as well to remind folks that a lot of people don't understand is that
you won't be able to trade your little goofy pieces of paper for Bitcoin forever,
because soon people aren't going to take those anymore.
They're going to say, why would I take this piece of paper when I can have the soundest money humans have ever created?
I would rather have Bitcoin.
So you have to work for it.
So you're not going to be able to just trade it for much longer on the exchanges.

(28:15):
Who knows when that'll be, but it's going to happen.
Probably another 10, 15, 20 years.
You have an opportunity.
This is the golden opportunity right now.
People don't understand what Bitcoin is, and they're willing to sell it to you for toilet paper money.
That's the age that we're in.
At some point, you are not going to get it for anything.
You will have to, as you said, work for it.

(28:36):
So I used to tell people when they laughed at me, like Bitcoin $1,000.
dollars I was like okay well you'll be cleaning my toilet toilet one day for a
thousand sets you know thousand sets today is worth like what is it worth a
dollar like one dollar a dollar back then a thousand sets was worth like a
cent right so like the this is almost an inevitability like this is the way the

(28:57):
world is training unless an asteroid comes and blows us up then we don't
have to worry about it but in that case you US dollars and your fair money is
not gonna help either so it's like take your pick it's same with the whole
apocalypse argument people say oh the whole world blows up but the internet goes down then how's your
bitcoin going to do well it would also take out the entire fiat system that we're on if the internet
goes down you better have lead and chickens you know you need some eggs and you need to

(29:19):
shoot people and try and steal your eggs yeah exactly you have a quick question uh um yeah so
so you're gently but maybe you already covered it what's the difference between like bitcoin and all
the other coins like it's been like the more valuable we did talk about that we can sort of
just review it do you want to give like a one census review basically bitcoin is an immaculately

(29:40):
concepted scarce digital unit right so you can only have digital scarcity once because the very
fact that you can copy something defeats the purpose of digital scarcity right so there's
21 million bitcoin that's all there is there was an anonymous founder it got released into the
market it cannot be shut down now it's done every single other crypto is an attempt to print money

(30:02):
out of thin air because they realized that they can do what central banks do which is create zero
value but print money so every other coin is a coin for the reason that it is owned by someone
controlled by someone issued by someone bitcoin is programmatically issued we know how much it's
going to be now uh how many bitcoin is now all the way through to 2140 when the last bitcoin is

(30:22):
mined so it is like the thing everything else is like an attempt to print money out of thin air
and i can't be repeated too many times so thank you for bringing it up because some people need
to hear it a bazillion times like I did back when I was going through that.
That's a good question here.
So what do you think you would take to make Bitcoin go up the mainstream?
Time. Time. Time and all of us dying basically.

(30:44):
No and I mean that in a like it sounds harsh but basically we are one foot in the old world,
one foot in the new world. Think about our kids, people who were born after Bitcoin was around.
So 2010 onwards. Exactly. They're going to understand Bitcoin completely differently and
And then their kids are going to understand Bitcoin completely differently.
So we're in the speculatory generation because we are still measuring Bitcoin against the existing world.

(31:06):
The next generation is going to grow up with this Bitcoin thing.
By the time they're 20 and by the time they start working in capital allocators, they'll be like,
the fuck you use plastic things? What's wrong with you?
They'll look at it very differently.
And then when their kids grow up and they're born 20 years, 30 years after Bitcoin came around,
they will not understand a world in which paper money exists.

(31:27):
What's the ability perspective with all the debt that governments have?
How will that be managed this week?
There's going to be a lot of volatility, a lot of blow-ups, a lot of shit, a lot of noise, a lot of everything.
It's going to be a chaotic period.
I call it the interregnum.
So I published the book last year called The Bushido of Bitcoin.
And in there I talk about interregnum means period between the kings.
So you've got the US dollar has been king for the last 50 years.

(31:51):
Bitcoin is the new king on the block.
But the period between kings is going to be extremely messy.
because you've got two different economic paradigms, two different philosophical paradigms.
It's also in the most chaos exists the most opportunity.
And that's exactly what the position is now.
We have the opportunity to buy something that in the future you will just not be able to buy for any kind of other money.

(32:12):
So it's like we are early in this.
And a lot of people are like, oh, yeah, Bitcoin's $100,000.
It's too much for me to buy.
No, no, no.
Think of the units.
Maybe we should actually mention this as well, right?
I was going to mention one more thing.
Okay.
We'll mention units in a second.
as a tangent to that, when we're trying to figure out what's this transition going to look like,
how is society going to go through this transition? What I would recommend is just to get

(32:33):
plugged into the Bitcoin community and start meeting people in it. Because you see at an
individual level, it's changing people's lives completely. It's giving them a much longer
time horizon because they're starting to realize, wow, I suddenly have this money and suddenly I
feel like I actually own something and I'm holding something that's not going down in value over time.

(32:55):
I don't have to gamble on stocks just to stay alive and feed myself.
And all the housing market, don't even get me started on the housing market.
This is another relevant one for us travelers.
You're trying to pay for accommodation places.
The reason why things are so expensive in real estate in general is because the big money out there knows that the fiat currency is going down in value over time.

(33:17):
So they want to protect their wealth.
They'll put it anywhere but the money.
So when you think about how crazy that is they will hold their money and anything but the actual money itself
So they're shoving it into the stock market, which is why it's just going up forever
And it looks ridiculous why they're shoving it all into real estate and you so you have Blackrock buying up whole cities of neighborhoods
The whole game is trade fake money for real things. Exactly. That's it

(33:40):
so you have an opportunity to trade fake money for real Bitcoin real money and
This opportunity would be around. I mean, you know for a while still but like it is
we're in the most retarded generation in women history and the luckiest as well simultaneously
the most chaotic and the most opportunistic like both of those the world is fundamentally going to

(34:01):
change with this i mean think about it we were the last generation before the internet like
there will never be a generation again that understands like the idea of not having one
of these things glued to you right like so so the world is completely fundamentally changing
And with that, you know, Bitcoin kind of like opens up a door to something extremely new.
Quick question here and then we're going to go to the next part.

(34:21):
Yep.
I've followed Bitcoin for a while.
Two years ago now, I can't remember exactly what that was about, but is there a chance
of that happening?
Yeah, the Bitcoin always forks.
There's always people trying to change the rules.
So what Bitcoin is, people think it's a technology.
It's not.
Bitcoin is a social consensus.
Think of it like a digital constitution.
When one person in that constitution or a couple people say, you know what?

(34:43):
We don like the fact that there 21 million Bitcoin let do 42 million Bitcoin What happens is they self themselves off the network So the network just keeps going 21 million Bitcoin doesn change And then they create a fork and they have a new
set of rules. So Bitcoin Cash was the one in 2017. They wanted to do something different,
but they forked themselves off. And in the beginning, there was a whole hoorah about it.

(35:06):
But now you look at it, Bitcoin Cash, when it forked off, it was about $500. It went up to like
$5,000 and now it's back at like $300.
And since then Bitcoin was $3,000 now it's $100,000.
So the market has chosen, which is this is the only compatible chain all the way back to the Genesis block.
It wasn't like $7,000.
Exactly. So the beauty of Bitcoin, this is something that fries people's brains,

(35:30):
is the beauty of Bitcoin is that any one of you can change Bitcoin.
But when you change it, it becomes your version of Bitcoin.
So you are actually forked off the network.
So I can go in there and I can say, look, I'm Alex Svetsky and I'm going to create Bitcoin Svetsky's version.
Come with me.
And if a couple of you are stupid enough to follow me, we will go on our own network and we will become poor, basically.

(35:52):
And while Bitcoin will just continue, it's a digital constitution.
Its security is in its openness.
And this is really hard even for technical people to understand because in the technical world,
So I've got a programming history.
In the technical world, you build walls around your software.
So you don't let people in.
So no one can see it.
No one can change it.

(36:13):
Bitcoin flips the script, which is it's completely open source.
It's completely open.
Anyone can run it.
Anyone can change it.
But when you change it, you're out of consensus.
And you're no longer part of the Bitcoin network.
You are part of whatever network you just created.
And that right there is the most powerful.
That's why no government can change it.
No bank can change it.
Nobody can change it.
because the consensus is amongst the participants who are already on it,

(36:34):
and we've passed the critical mass.
It's done. The cat is out of the bag.
It is good to think adversarially, too.
So the attackers that would want to subvert it or take over it somehow,
when you really just do the math, and I'll just keep it super basic,
it doesn't matter if every government in the world somehow decides to work together and do this,
which would never happen.
But if they did, first of all, everyone would see that,

(36:54):
so they would be able to act accordingly.
They could create a new consensus if they wanted to.
But it's just going to be so expensive to try to do that when it would be more profitable for each of these actors in the system to just work with it and get more Bitcoin that way.
So we're past the point of no return on it just being really stupid to try to fight it.

(37:15):
All right, let's get into the last bit and then we can do some more questions.
Do you want to talk about travelers or do you want to just go to the...
Let's do a quick one on travelers. You can do that and then we'll download some apps and we'll send some Bitcoin around to everyone, okay?
Yeah, so I gave a little bit of a primer earlier about the traveler connection for us nomads, why this matters for us.
And I can just give my own personal story from two days ago.

(37:38):
Going downtown, trying to get some burger patties to eat.
I try to pay for Bitcoin.
I always ask places, can I buy Bitcoin or can I buy this with Bitcoin?
And a lot of places don't.
So some places say you only can get cash.
So I was at a shop earlier.
They said I can only get cash.
Great.
So I have to go.
I told her, okay, I'll come back.
I'm just used to this by now.

(37:58):
So many places I go to, I can't buy stuff with Bitcoin.
I had to run, find an ATM, get the cash out, lose money on fees, come back, deal with the change, have this dirty money in my pocket.
When you do this in so many different countries, it just becomes so annoying, as we all know.
This is just an extra chore for us as we're going around traveling.
It would just be so much easier if everyone accepted the same thing everywhere you went.

(38:23):
and you also earn the same thing from your work and the value that you created for the world,
it was all in one system.
There is no case that can be made for why it's better to have all these different sorts of money.
And this is another thing that the crypto people will say like,
oh, there will be a bunch of different types of money you can use in the future.
That would suck.
It would be just like the same problem we're talking about where,

(38:45):
oh, do you have this coin? Do you have this coin? Do you have this? No.
It's better if everything is standardized onto one money.
So we use what we're going to talk about later, which is sneak peek at this app called Satlantis
Which helps you find the Bitcoin merchants in the area
So I went outside land just found out this place called the house up the road has exactly what I wanted
I went up there. I said screw the other people that don't accept Bitcoin

(39:06):
They accept Bitcoin and not only do they accept it
But they're actually super into it if you go there that they have the Bitcoin price written on a whiteboard every day and the owner
Super into it and you just go there eat your food pull out your wallet boom paid for and gone
And so it's just so much easier and everywhere we go and everywhere I travel
we're looking at more and more of these places adopting this thing you just have

(39:26):
to find which merchants are ahead of the game a little bit at this point but in a
few years it's just gonna be everywhere and there are certain places that have
more of it for example as in Uvita Costa Rica if anyone goes to Costa Rica
there's a huge Bitcoin base there El Salvador is a lot of people have heard a
huge Bitcoin place there's Prospera this this sovereign community in Honduras

(39:47):
It's fully Bitcoin standard.
These small countries are starting to really go all in on it because they have less to lose.
It's a little bit harder to find that in the big developer countries, but it's still popping up in certain places like Austin, Texas in the U.S., for example.
Really big Bitcoin place.
Tons of Bitcoiners there pushing the local merchants to get on board, and it's really skyrocketing.
But this is just going to get easier and easier to find places to accept Bitcoin, easier to use this as your monetary standard everywhere you go.

(40:13):
It's just going to save you a lot of brainpower from having to
You know figure out the ATMs everywhere you go in these different languages and going to banks and when I was in Mexico
I couldn't even get a place to accept my debit card
So I just had to get convince my friends in my hostel to get a Bitcoin wallet
So they could pay for me in fiat. I could pay them back in Bitcoin
It's all so complicated doesn't have to be that way and not to mention the money you're losing from all those fees that these

(40:37):
Remember, remember which is are just sucking out of you. Remember what Jesus did? He flipped the table of
of the money changers.
The money changers are the worst,
because all they want to do is like,
snipe you for fees.
They want to be greedy fuckers who want to just take you.
So, Bitcoin does away with all of that.
Crypto, fiat, all of it.
Alright, so everyone, who has,

(40:57):
so we're gonna do now a little workshop part.
Who has a Bitcoin wallet?
Okay.
Who has a Lightning wallet?
Ooh.
Okay, alright.
So, we're gonna set up,
we're gonna get everyone to set up a Lightning wallet,
And then we're going to do something cool because I'm sure there's people here from every single different country.
And we're going to show you an example of we're going to send some money to this gentleman here first.

(41:19):
And we're going to send the money all the way through to everyone along.
And you're going to see like you'll keep a little bit of it and just send like a piece on it.
We call it like a lightning torch.
And you'll see how money can literally travel across the world.
You don't need anyone's identity.
You don't need their fucking bank account details.
Nothing.
Just scan their phone and we'll do this.
So we're going to download two different apps. Um,

(41:43):
maybe we'll download three apps. Okay. Um, first download, um,
wallet of Satoshi. If you're American, you won't be able to use this. Um,
but if you're not American, um, definitely download wallet Satoshi.
It's the best lightning wallet out there.
Americans do Primal. Yeah. If you're American do Primal,
Primal, just Primal. Yes.

(42:03):
P R I M A L and the logo is a little pink wave. Yep.
and then the third one downloads Atlantis okay so on Atlantis we're
gonna show you where you can find Bitcoin merchants on primal that's a
wallet that is built on Nostra which is gonna interoperate with Atlantis and

(42:24):
then wallet of Satoshi is in my opinion the best lighting wallet in the world
I'll give everyone a second.
Let's do some questions.
So where are my money now?
Because these obviously didn't make it to the blockchain
because it's just 10 minutes.

(42:45):
Who's holding my sets?
Very good question.
So we mentioned earlier Bitcoin and Lightning, right?
So Bitcoin, every single 10 minutes,
syncs up with all of the validators around the world, which we know as miners, and all of the
transactions that are in what's called a memory pool get locked into a block, and that block gets

(43:06):
chained to the prior block. That's where the word blockchain comes from, right? So when people say
Bitcoin is slow, they're talking about the time it takes for all of those transactions to get locked
into a block. This happens every 10 minutes, right? This mechanism is not useful for day-to-day

(43:29):
payments, right? If you're buying a coffee for $5, why does every single Bitcoin computer in the
world, every single validator need to know about that transaction? It's completely fucking irrelevant,
particularly at scale. So what Bitcoin engineers and all these other people figured out was they
said alright Bitcoin can function a bit like a settlement network instead of a

(43:49):
transactional network so lightning network is the most prominent second
layer on Bitcoin and the way it works is a little bit like a tab at a bar so
imagine you go to a bar and instead of paying the bill every single time you get
a drink you go and you just like put it on your tab put on your tab put on your
tab and at the end of the night you just make one payment so the lightning

(44:09):
network functions a little bit like that it's an abstracted layer where money is
moved around and then at whatever intervals depending on whoever is
operating the lightning channels because the lightning channel is like a free
market of operators they will maybe once a week once a month once a day
whatever they will aggregate all their different channels and they will settle

(44:31):
one transaction onto the actual Bitcoin blockchain so the question is who is
holding that money at the moment the the wallet you guys downloaded Primal or
Wallet of Satoshi they are what's called custodial lightning wallets meaning that those companies manage the nodes and are managing your money
That is different to
Self custody in your Bitcoin where it's yours. So they almost function a little bit like banks, but they can't fake lightning

(44:58):
because
Lightning is a it's a protocol. It's not a ledger that they store internally, right?
So you still get the protection of Bitcoin, but you get someone to manage it for you
the the upside is that it's super simple we can send money to everyone get everyone set up
immediately the downside is that the company is managing those lightning channels could go bust

(45:21):
could disappear could steal your money right so on lightning on the lightning network you never
hold more than you're willing to use like I hold two thousand dollars on my lightning network so
you can think of it on my lightning wallet sorry so you can think of it as like cash like you
wouldn't take your life savings and walk around with a wallet in your phone right
like you don't do that so your life savings you store them on chain on the

(45:43):
actual Bitcoin network you don't touch that shit that's your savings if you
need to transact you can move Bitcoin from the main chain to a lightning
address and then you use that for spending or what I do is my book that I
published I accept Bitcoin payments for it so every time I sell a book it all
goes into my transactional wallet, my lightning wallet, and I use that for just general transactions.

(46:06):
Or if I'm playing poker with the guys or whatever, we all put some money in on lightning,
and every time I beat them, I have a little bit more lightning, and we do that.
But to your point, this is not on the base chain.
The base chain is a settlement layer.
You do not want to bloat the settlement layer with payments.
You can abstract payments on subsequent layers or on abstracted layers.

(46:28):
do everyday transactions for that anyway,
which, because it costs a lot of fees.
It's expensive to do that.
It's much cheaper to do on Lightning and slower.
Let's try not to make this too complicated.
Shoot.
So you guys have asked us to download three apps, right?
Yes.
What are the key differences?
The key differences.
Great question.

(46:48):
So the wallet of Satoshi is purely a Lightning wallet.
It's a custodial Lightning wallet.
All you can do with it is payments.
So receive and send Bitcoin Lightning, right?
So Atlantis is like a nomad app so it's a bit like a social network and you can find
so there's a merchant tab on there and if you go into the filter you can see
places that accept Bitcoin so then you can see a whole network of places we've

(47:10):
got like probably 5,000 places around the globe in all sorts of different
cities that accept Bitcoin so you can see that the Bitcoin economy is growing
there's a bunch of other things you can do on Atlantis you can post content you
can host events like later on we're gonna be hosting a game of nomad charades
so you can RSVP to the event on Satlantis so if you actually find my
account Svetsky you'll see that I'm hosting the event you can one click RSVP

(47:34):
so it's kind of like a nomad app so meetup.com meets Instagram meets Google
places right so you've got all of that so it's a really cool app it does not
have payments yet the payments will be ready in about two months so then you
have a lightning wallet inside the app as well primal is kind of in the middle
so primal is a social app a bit like Twitter it is built on what's called the

(47:55):
Nostra network which is what Atlantis is built on as well so your one account on
Atlantis and Primal is the same which is beautiful so you can move your your
audience is the same across both but Primal doesn't have like venues and
events and all that sort of stuff it's just the content platform but Primal also
has a wallet so Primal is like a social wallet while the Satoshi is just the

(48:17):
wallet and Atlantis is a social network for nomads and something I want to
mentioned here if anyone is looking for wants to learn more about all this stuff
it's a lot of information we're throwing at you really quickly come find me
after this is over I will hook you up with books podcasts videos all great
all kinds of great content where you can really sit down focus on it with dinner
sometime and just like internalize all this stuff we're going really quick with

(48:40):
everything so don't feel bad if you're a little bit swimming in the years of shit
like yeah more questions
That's a very good question.
Yeah, it's a very good question.
So a lot of Bitcoiners don't.
Why would you pay somebody in Bitcoin when now is the time to collect?

(49:01):
And there's a massive argument in the Bitcoin space about this all the time.
You've got the people who are what we call store of value maximalists.
They're like, don't spend Bitcoin under any circumstance.
If your fucking family's dying, they need to eat.
Screw them, let them die.
You know, save your Bitcoin.
They're extremely on that.
there's other people who are like look bitcoin is a payments mechanism and a lot of these people

(49:23):
were around like when silk rotors around they're buying drugs online and all this sort of stuff
they're like use it as payments it's fantastic my answer to this and i've been on both sides of the
spectrum my answer to this is that like money needs to be able to be used both for store value
and for medium exchange i will use it when i need minimal friction for payments so for example like

(49:45):
last night we're playing poker it was way easier for me than going to the atm getting fucking level
all this sort of stuff. I just do that. If I can go to a merchant and I don't have to bother
tapping a card, whatever, I'll pay with Bitcoin. It's like these aren't massive payments, right?
What I will also try and do though is I'll try and make sure like, well, let me explain it this
way. I earn all of my salary in Bitcoin, 100%. So I only accept Bitcoin. I will not degrade myself

(50:11):
to accept toilet paper money for the work that I do, right? So that's how I view it. So I accept
all of it in Bitcoin, which means to eat, to pay rent, to do something, I will have to
spend Bitcoin anyway.
So then I will reward the merchants who accept Bitcoin and I'll take my business there.
So you can do both basically.
You don't, it doesn't have to be one or the other.
And you do it in whatever capacity you're comfortable with, right?

(50:37):
If you're in savings mode and you don't want to spend, just save it.
But if you need to spend it, spend it.
And there is an element for me personally, just a feeling really good helping support the local merchants that are ahead of the curve and are taking that first step into Bitcoin land because it's a scary, spooky place for so many people out there.
So I love it. It feels good to give a tiny little piece of my Bitcoin to people that are on the front running curve of this.

(51:03):
And all you have to do to just replace that by going to earn more Bitcoin, you know, just motivation to go earn more money.
Eventually this is the only money we're gonna be using.
So it's just a matter of where you want to be
in terms of holding it extremely hard, like you said,
only spending your fiat places which is totally cool as well Or if you just want to be completely on the bitcoin standard you can do that too like the main main thing to remember is you want to keep as much as possible but it really easy to use it has all these great uh functions that make it super

(51:31):
uh good for just saving time and energy in your life so you find your own balance eventually the
last thing i'll quickly say to this and i'll take your question is um there is a i don't want to use
the word altruistic but there is an element of this is like we want to build communities that are
off the fiat standard right we want to build circular economies that are independent because

(51:52):
i don't know if everyone remembers like what happened in canada with the trucker protests
and everything people got their bank accounts and all this sort of stuff shut down right
so like you want to be in a position where you've got some resilience from that so what i've done
for example where i live in brazil is i found my butcher that accepts bitcoin i found the masseuse
that accepts Bitcoin this this this the only thing I'm not paying in Bitcoin is

(52:13):
my my rent because the landlord refuses but what I did was I found someone
local who's willing to pay the rent for me in reals and I just send them Bitcoin
which means I'm entirely on a Bitcoin standard I'm like I'm independent of the
banking system I don't need to worry about the banking system there I didn't
worry about anything I don't need to move money internationally and then get
asked like I used to have a wise account and I was trying to buy a property

(52:35):
there and it was a fucking nightmare because they kept asking me where's the
money from where's the money from where's the money from and i ended up getting shut down because i
told him to go fuck off so now what i do is like i ended up buying the property by sending someone
locally get coin and he paid the rails directly to the property developer for me so this like
it's very useful to be able to set yourself up set yourself up in such a way that is resilient

(52:58):
and independent of the system and as the world gets more and more weird like this will become
an asset your community your network becomes an asset which is again to tie back to sat
Atlantis, Atlantis will be a place where you can find other people with similar values.
We're thinking about being on a Bitcoin standard where you can find merchants that are accepting
all of this sort of stuff comes together in that app.

(53:19):
Excellent question.
And if you are like a big picture, save the world type, like I know a lot of us nomad
folks are, you're getting us closer to that future where you don't have to deal with all
this inflation and you don't have to in the world at large.
Well, you're you're moving the whole world away from fiat, basically, and all those problems
we talked about.
You're helping like the more that you participate in those economies that are on Bitcoin, help the merchants that are on Bitcoin and spread the word just through education and everything else.

(53:47):
You're making that transition quicker so we can get to a better world with all the beauties of deflationary money where things will start getting cheaper again.
We can afford houses again. Travel will get cheaper. The airlines will get better because we didn't talk about the whole airlines thing.
That's a whole different conversation that is very much a part of the fiat system, but it will just help get the world to a better place the more you use Bitcoin, basically.

(54:10):
Question here.
Do both of you have 100% of what you would have had in debt?
100%?
I'm close to 100%.
Okay.
So all of your savings.
And then what about stocks?
Are you still keeping it?
Only Bitcoin.
Couldn't give a shit about stocks.
Couldn't give a shit about any of it.
Because like we were-
I used to complexify my life, so I traded for 10 years.
I've traded everything from options, warrants, commodities, pork butts, you fucking name it.

(54:33):
I've traded everything, everything, everything.
And when I simplified my life and just went all Bitcoin, I don't care.
And the beauty of Bitcoin is that it outperforms everything anyway.
Particularly now, like over the next 20 years, Bitcoin will outperform everything.
Like that is your hurdle rate.
So if you, like the correct rate, so you don't look at, I learned this lesson the hard way
when I was doing shitcoining in 2017.

(54:53):
I started off the year with, it was about 20 Bitcoin at the time.
So you don't even want, like 20 Bitcoin at the time was worth like, what was it?
Yeah, 20 grand, something like that.
Or maybe it was 15 Bitcoin, something like that.
It was a trading account.
I set up like 15, $20,000, something like that.
And I started trading the whole year.
I was trading this shit coin, that shit coin, all this sort of stuff on Bittrex.

(55:15):
And by the end of the year, I had made about 40%.
I had like 25 or $30,000.
But I had one and a half Bitcoin.
Right?
So that was the big dawning on me.
Because at the end of 2017, remember, it was 20K for one Bitcoin.
So I fucking spent so much time trading like a moron and I had less Bitcoin
But I had more dollars and it dawned on me. I was like wait a minute. The hurdle rate is not dollars

(55:37):
I'm not trying to make more dollars. I'm trying to make more Bitcoin
So the way I measure my wealth personally is do I have more Bitcoin today than I had yesterday if I do?
Good if I don't it's a bad thing and I just like eliminated everything else one by one by one by one and
All I hold is one simple thing. Nobody can touch it. Nobody can take it. I can use it anywhere
I can move it for payments

(55:57):
or i can keep it for savings simplified everything okay it's important to remember too just when
you're comparing it to the stock market remember how i was talking about earlier how all the big
money in the world right now is shoving their money everywhere but the money so they're shoving
into the real estate and the stock market that over inflating it a lot so the the prices we see in the stock market in the real estate isn real It not real It not the real value It just because all these managers are throwing their money into it

(56:24):
Once they have a better alternative for savings, which is Bitcoin,
which for the real estate folks out there, call your friends,
hey, do you really like cleaning toilets all the time,
dealing with the property managers,
or do you really just want to store your wealth?
They want to store their wealth.
So Bitcoin is a better alternative for them.
All those people will take their money out of those things,
Put it into Bitcoin so those things will eventually go reprice very good reprice aggressively

(56:52):
Not zero
The best answer to this yeah, the best answer to this is
You should do it at the percent you're comfortable with right so when I first started I wasn't a hundred percent
So treat it like you would a certain stock.
Yeah, exactly.
The more you get comfortable with it, the more you will feel like, okay, I'm 100% comfortable

(57:15):
with Bitcoin.
I'll be 100% in it.
I'm 80% comfortable.
And you will find that the more research you do, the bigger that percentage becomes as
you learn more and more, get more and more comfortable with it.
So yeah.
There we go.
There's a question over here, sir.
put your put your leg over and sit kind of sideways so yeah they're definitely moving into

(57:43):
bitcoin we're seeing this is one of the big news happenings right now in the last couple of years
is the big money is starting to figure it out they're saying okay we do need bitcoin so we see
all these giant etfs coming out like you talked about yeah like the blackrock etf and all the big
dogs are finally starting to get okay we need to have some bitcoin exposure here but it's still
very early they're just nibbling at it so far because they have a lot to lose they make a lot

(58:07):
of money in this fiat system where there's money printers that they can they can scratch their back
and lobby for them and everything so they're only barely starting to get in there which is good
opportunity for all the the peasants where we have much more agility we can just buy a bunch of it
right now we don't have to wait for them to figure it out we can front run them but eventually
everyone's going to be using bitcoin we have this saying bitcoin is for enemies because even all

(58:30):
those giant banker entities that we hate are eventually going to be forced into it too so
don't get fooled by the the headlines they're saying like oh like blackrock has bitcoin so it's
like bitcoin is bad now because blackrock is bad eventually everyone will be on etf yeah they're
doing etfs because i mean one of the beauties of bitcoin because of the way it is structured the
nature of bitcoin is that it's much easier to custody as an individual not as an entity because

(58:54):
it's the private key that implies ownership so if an entity holds Bitcoin
somebody holds the private key and if that somebody decides to take the Bitcoin
run the entity holds it no longer right so it's like Bitcoin isn't really
designed for large-scale entities it's more designed for people

(59:15):
Yeah, of course.
What about how you split your key to own it yourself?
It is.
It is.
So what kind of solution do you have?
You can be anywhere on the spectrum, right?
So like for example, I, if for my wife, I have some Bitcoin with her, for her, with a custodian
called OnRamp and they have a bunch of protocols that are necessary in order for her to extract

(59:41):
the money if something happens to me, if I die or something like that.
What if something happens to a underground?
It's a risk, exactly.
You need to sort of balance these risks, right?
So custody has been a problem from the beginning of time.
Like when you have a bearer instrument like gold, how do you custody gold?
You dig it up, you put in a vault, this, that, right?
So all of these solutions will come up over time to kind of serve the needs of different people.

(01:00:06):
So you've got kind of custody solutions on one side of the spectrum.
You have extreme solutions on the other side of the spectrum, which is you could be like,
There's a thing called multi signature in Bitcoin, which you can take a key and you can split it into parts and you could require two of the three keys in order to sign a transaction or four of the five or nine of the 12, whatever.

(01:00:29):
You can create a schema and you get very complex with these things.
So larger entities do stuff like this, right?
So you can create some complexity and you can increase the security of those keys being found.
Like for example me, I have my keys split up and I have it in three different countries.
For me to move my Bitcoin, I have to fly it to three different countries and to unlock

(01:00:50):
my cold storage in order to move it.
So my cold storage, I never touch it.
I spread it between two people, my mom and someone else and deleted it from my Telegram.
So I have to ask these two and if I tired they can combine it But in practical terms what I will do is I transfer to the exchange to make a very big trade and then I transfer it back to the cold storage from time to time

(01:01:18):
But yeah, I'm still looking for that balance as you say and because I have to do it quite often for my needs.
So if I do it too complicated...
Yeah, the friction level has to change depending on your needs, right?
And you may have different modes of custody.
It's all trade-offs.

(01:01:38):
Trade-offs from convenience to ultimate security.
You figure out where we work best in the middle.
I want both.
Yeah.
Yeah.

(01:02:05):
What kind of trader? What do you mean?
Normal trading in English.
Option.
For example, I have two questions in one.
One is, if I have normal money and I want to buy Bitcoin,
how can I not say the system that I'm buying Bitcoin in a country?
Because I want to store some.
So I want to store that money and that.
You come and ask me, for example.

(01:02:27):
So you find someone who is in need of dollars or cash,
and you do a direct trade, peer to peer.
I don't want to say to anybody this.

(01:03:03):
and it'd be completely exactly exactly you can go both ways so there's many mechanisms to buy
bitcoin privately in the old days no not through the bank like you could do cash so you could meet
with someone you could do it that way so again it depends on the level of privacy so similar to
custody there's a spectrum exactly the first time i bought bitcoin in like 2015 2016 i had a brown

(01:03:27):
paper bag full of cash that i met some guy at a cafe i didn't know if he was going to stab me i
I didn't know if I was going to stab him.
Like, it was this whole, like, sketchy.
I remember we were both, like, looking at each other, like, who is this guy?
We both sat down.
You know, he's like, where's the money?
I'm like, in the bag.
I'm like, where's the Bitcoin?
He's like, on the computer.
I'll send it to you.
I was like, okay.
He sent it to me.
I gave him the bag.
It was like this sketchy-ass show.

(01:03:48):
And we walked out later, and we're both, like, looking around, waiting to get tackled.
So it's like, but it was completely private.
No one ever knew I bought that.
So, like, you know, and I bought Bitcoin on an exchange.
and on exchange it's associated to my name unfortunately so you got to do you got to do
both you can also clean your coins if they've been on exchange you can go through a coin join
software which mixes your coins up with a bunch of other people um you know it depends on the

(01:04:13):
advanced level you can follow the direction of my money yeah you can do chain analysis like this
the system can follow my money go there also if after from a crypto wallet i make them disappear
maybe i'm trading with some good money in an account of crypto then maybe i make money with

(01:04:35):
trading with this and then i take back in my account that money so it would like just like
but then these three thousand there become more and but if i bring them to a good wallet
they can see this movement of course they can yeah of course you can see that movement so then
no because the because no no no because the exchange if you signed up to the exchange the

(01:04:58):
exchange will have your details because they kyc'd you so they got your name everything and
that relationship between that wallet and the exchange is visible on the public blockchain and
then they can infer that you own this wallet you could say well that wasn't me someone took my
account and stole my money.
During that declaration they can say because it's already happened to me and they say,

(01:05:22):
oh yes, I put in another wallet and I lost it.
You can say that, of course, yeah, exactly.
So you've got some level of plausible deniability, yes.
Also then they cannot know because, oh, I promise to write the code or give money to
some friends.
Exactly, yes, yes.
You can easily say that.
But it's like...

(01:05:43):
Thanks for coming, appreciate it.
Yeah, all they can do is they can assert that you own that wallet. They can't prove that you own the wallet.
Yeah, but they can assert that which is in many countries strong enough.
Let's do as people are leaving if they want more help or more resources like I mentioned earlier just tap me on the shoulder.

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#138 Full Bansko Nomad Fest Presentation w/ Aleks Svetski - BITCOIN FOR DUMMIES

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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;}#138 Full Bansko Nomad Fest Presentation w/ Aleks Svetski - BITCOIN FOR DUMMIES