Crypto? More like Crap-to! Why Bitcoin is king of blockchains - Ep 016

Delve into the captivating world of Bitcoin as Anton, JD, and Bondor discuss why Bitcoin reigns supreme over all other cryptocurrencies. Explore the history, technology, and economic principles that make Bitcoin the true and only cryptocurrency.

 

Watch this episode on YouTube

 

Hosts:

JD - @CypherpunkCine on 𝕏
Bondor - @gildedpleb on 𝕏
Anton Seim - @antonseim on 𝕏

 

 

Sponsors:

Unknown Certainty - The Bitcoin Ad Company
IndeeHub - Reshape the Business of Storytelling - @indeehub on 𝕏

What is Better By Bitcoin?

Bitcoin makes everything better. Join the team and our guests as we unpack how, why, and where we go from here.

Hey friend, listen. I know the world is scary right now. Corruption, war, inflation, demographics,

degeneracy, disease, unrest, hatred, and despair. We didn't come here to tell you how it is,

but that it's going to get way better.

We got a good day coming, and it's all I need. Everything that I wanted, just wait and see.

Better by Bitcoin.

So good, man.

So good.

So good.

Well done, y'all.

Great work, Bondor.

This is Better by Bitcoin. I'm Anton Syme, here with JD and Bondor. We have a new intro.

So dope. Thank you guys for making that.

And today, we're going to be talking about why Bitcoin is the only real cryptocurrency.

It's the king of all the cryptocurrencies.

And we're just going to discuss why every altcoin, what we refer to also as shitcoins.

I'm somebody, I don't really love cussing, talking in an uncouth manner.

But I'm so disgusted by altcoins that I will call them shitcoins all day long because that's what they are.

And we're here also to celebrate Ethereum basically going to zero.

It's not, I mean, right now it has value.

I believe it is on its way down to essentially zero.

And that's what we're going to discuss today.

So what do you guys think about this topic?

Bondor, let me go first.

I know you're about to defer to me, too.

I'll tee it up to you with a question, though, because you have more of a technical angle on this.

And also, you have a Wall Street background.

So can you kind of break down the Wall Street angle on this?

And if you were to look at Bitcoin and Ethereum as stocks or commodities or whatever it is,

how would you kind of try to describe this like a trad5 person?

And why is Ethereum going to zero?

I mean, from an insider's Wall Street view, I think the theory would be that it's not going to zero.

Because we can control it.

It's central.

We can issue.

Why wouldn't we?

Why wouldn't Vitalik go and visit Putin and get cozy with that?

The whole thing makes so much sense from a legacy perspective.

But also, it's a cryptocurrency that you can just print more of.

And we don't actually have to create more value here or patch security problems or basically do anything.

It's just, oh, whatever.

We can just paper over our problems with more Ethereum that we can just print out of.

It's just it makes tons of sense for the insiders to just love it.

The problem is that none of the insiders understand the fundamental nature of a cryptocurrency and what the actual value is and why it's why it has any purpose at all.

And why Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that actually has the fulfillment of any of that purpose.

So, man, the Wall Street guys, they got to love Ethereum.

That's why we got to put it on all the exchanges and the ETFs and whatever.

And like, of course, you guys are going to get wrecked.

Like, thank God, because you misunderstand the whole purpose of it.

And the whole purpose of cryptocurrency at large, which is another thing.

As long as we're riffing, the idea of cryptocurrency, there is no cryptocurrency.

It's just Bitcoin.

There is no category like they invented a new category called cryptocurrency.

And then they place Bitcoin in that category along with everything else.

But really, everything else is just a total scam.

And so there is no category.

It's like Bitcoin is cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency is Bitcoin.

And when you try and expand the category, you're just inviting scam in, inviting fraud, inviting all this other stuff that's just terrible.

And here we are.

Thank God it's finally coming out.

Like, finally, we're seeing.

Like, I remember back when I was trading.

This is years ago.

I remember trading ETH, the ETH BTC pair and going short on ETH and, like, getting wrecked because it kept going higher.

And I was like, you got like there's no possible way that this has any value, like zero.

You know, I was mistaken because I was playing the long game on the trade with a short exposure.

And that's not, you know, mismatch on time frame.

So, of course, I got wrecked.

But, man, it's just so great to see it collapse.

Finally.

It's so good.

And can you kind of unpack one of the points that I think you might know a little bit on that that bond or brought up of like, why is it even possible to say that Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency?

Like what what does that even mean?

This category of one, because I feel there's a lot of folks who might not fully grasp this.

The probably the main thing to know that.

If unless you've spent a lot of time thinking about Bitcoin, you may not know is that it took a very, very long time to develop Bitcoin.

I'm talking 30 years or something like that.

People, I think, who don't know a lot about Bitcoin.

I mean, obviously, they sort of know what Bitcoin is, but they haven't spent a ton of time thinking about it.

They think, you know, the white paper was released somewhere around 2008.

Somebody was probably thinking about it, maybe like around 2005, coded it up, tried out a few things, put it on this list of a bunch of nerds who emailed back and forth with each other.

And then it just kind of launched.

It just kind of snowballed and became what it became.

It just was this random occurrence.

That's not at all what happened.

You had essentially computer programmers.

And I'm not even going back as far as cryptography goes.

Like, you could go all the way back to what's the guy that cracked the Enigma machine?

Turning. Was that Alan Turing?

Yeah.

So during that time period, people were already doing experiments in cryptography and in using computers and things like that.

In the 70s, 80s, people already were making the framework for what would become cryptocurrency.

And the 70s, the Diffel-Hyman, I don't know how to pronounce the last name, but the public-private key exchange was like, that's a fundamental principle, a building block principle of Bitcoin.

And that was the 70s.

If there was any discussion of a online money prior to that, it was never going to work until that invention happened.

And then there's other inventions along the lines.

Sorry to interrupt.

No, no.

Thank you for interrupting, because you guys probably know more about the technical details of this than I do.

You can go back even before that.

There have been tons and tons of non-governmental currencies that have been tried.

I mean, you could talk about like putt-putt golf.

You go and buy tokens and you pay for video games with the tokens.

There have been tokenized monies throughout history.

All of them failed to actually be used as money.

And then you have…

Is that just me?

You lost my audio.

I got him.

That's just me.

Okay.

So, you even had cryptocurrencies that were made that Satoshi references in the white paper.

You have like Adam Back's Hash Cash.

You had Wadeye's B-Money.

Nick Szabo had done a framework for BitGold, although that was like 1998.

And I don't think it ever was coded up.

So, and then you also had…

Do you know the other ones?

There was like E-Gold.

There was E-Cash, yeah.

E-Cash, but there was also…

Common Cash, yeah.

But there was a gold one that actually got shut down.

And the person who created it actually got prosecuted for it.

So, there's even a history of the founders of these things basically doing jail time for creating them.

So, that would be why Satoshi used a pseudonymous name and didn't reveal his identity very smartly.

So, Satoshi solved one thing, which was the Byzantine generals problem.

I don't know.

Bondor, do you want to…

You don't have to, but do you want to say what that is?

Yeah.

So, the Byzantine generals problem is basically if you are a bunch of generals, like let's say you have five different generals,

and you're all attacking the same fort, like in Byzantine, 100 or 1,000 years ago, right?

Or however, 1,500 years ago.

If you're all attacking the same fort, you're five generals, the objective is that you…

Or the problem states, in so many words, you only are guaranteed success if you all attack at the same time.

But if one person defects, well, then everybody else is going to lose except for the one person.

It's kind of a game theory kind of problem, right?

And so, what you need to do is you need to ensure that all of the generals are communicating correctly,

and they all have the right information, they all know the right attack time.

Like if they attack at different times, well, they're going to fail because it's not a uniform attack, etc.

And yeah, Satoshi solved this problem.

And he solved this problem via the proof-of-work mechanism, the invention of proof-of-work.

And what that, you know, the long and short of that is that, hey, because we're relying on energy inputs that we can verify via cryptographic hashing,

therefore, we can know with certainty that this chain is the longest, and that means it has the most energy input,

that means it was the hardest one to get, that means it's the most reliable, and therefore, we can have consensus.

All the Byzantine generals, they all can agree on this outcome is the correct outcome, or this state is the correct state,

and therefore, we can move forward with the plan of pursuing the next state, right?

So that's kind of the long and short of it.

JJ, did you have anything to add? I was going to keep going.

Yeah, I have. I was trying to find—I've got the full text somewhere, and that's what I'm looking off.

But there is a great—the thing that people always miss about Bitcoin is it's a series of a bunch of inventions from a lot of people,

and the first discovery slash ideation of this was actually Henry Ford, and I talked about this in a previous one.

But December 4th, 1921, in his article in the New York Times, which was at the time called the New York Tribune,

but the article was titled, Ford Would Replace Gold with Energy Currency and Stop Wars,

and it was this whole idea of tying value, which if you really boil money down, that's all it is.

It's a store of value. That's why everybody says in the Bitcoin community, if you see this,

this is S, capital S, lowercase o-v, store of value, and then M-O-E, medium of exchange.

Bitcoin is first going to be a store of value. Money, all it is, is a store of your value.

Why do you invest in the stock market? For value. Number, go up, N-G-U.

Because you want to be able to do more later because your value is being eroded by this thing called inflation, right?

So all that to say, this problem and this moment we live in right now with Bitcoin being the kingmaker of crypto,

because it's the only real legitimate blockchain, thank you, camera, it's the only real legitimate blockchain,

was part of this series of events that was actually kicked off by Henry Ford in December of 1921,

when he posited this idea of a peaceful planet with currency tied to energy.

And so it's really, really interesting to kind of go about Henry Ford's original discovery slash idea,

which was an energy currency finally coming to fruition 100 years, it's actually less than that.

It was like 85 years later, 80 years later, because it was 2009 when it, right, 2009 when it came to fruition.

So, you know, 80, yeah, 88 years later, 80 years later, maybe Satoshi had the idea,

or the group of Satoshi had the idea in 2001, like after 9-11, who knows.

But let's assume it was 80 years later, finally coming to fruition through Bitcoin.

And so it's really, really interesting.

It's just like, you know, these dominoes of just different, you know, kingmakers in their own right of these different,

you know, whether you'd be a manufacturing giant like Ford, or a technical titan,

like Adam Back and some of these other guys who just had like a lot of, you know, technical know-how,

and then also just, you know, people who know how to do electrical.

So I'm ranting, but it's very, very interesting to see how when people don't understand all that went into the discovery

and the invention and the creation of Bitcoin, it's very easy to get duped by the scam coins.

And so you really need to understand what cryptocurrency means.

Is crypto, cryptography, currency, money, there is only one of those, period, and it's Bitcoin.

One of the things that boggles my mind, and I just kind of stumbled down this rabbit hole recently,

which is the idea of proof of stake.

So Ethereum transitioned to proof of stake as a, we're going to be environmentally conscious about not wasting energy and everything.

Now, and I didn't know this until recently, but when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.

So Satoshi's consensus mechanism, proof of work, Nakamoto consensus,

which I just described in the Byzantine generals bit on how everybody can agree.

That is a, that is a incredible invention or really a discovery because it's bridging the economic,

like hard consumption of energy, a physical, something that exists in physical reality.

And it's bridging it with cryptographic certainty, something that exists entirely in the realm of information.

There is no other bridge like that, where you can't have the information unless the energy input is enough to produce that information.

Like this is a, this is a revolutionary discovery.

Okay.

Now, early on in the, in one of the Bitcoin talk forums, I don't know the guy's name anymore,

but he basically postulated, well, it's just so much energy wasted.

Why don't, instead of relying on the energy, why don't we rely on the amount of currency you have, which is proof of stake?

Okay, cool.

The next issued currency is going to be distributed to whoever owns the amount of currency that, that they're like supposed to own.

Right.

Okay.

Well, you have 10 and you have 90, so you get 0.1 and you get 0.9.

It's kind of the proof of stake model.

Now, proof of stake is not a consensus mechanism.

So, wait a second.

So, oh, we're going to use proof of stake to determine who gets which currency.

In Bitcoin, it's, hey, whoever wins the block, they get the block reward and they get the fees from that block.

But with proof of stake, it's just a totally different thing.

It's like, wait a second.

This is now, it doesn't have, well, it just solves who gets what.

It doesn't solve the consensus thing, which is solved via the proof of work mechanism.

So, then they have to go and either reuse other consensus mechanisms on top of the other one,

or they have to invent new consensus mechanisms, which Anton, your all-time favorite, which is the Hedera hashcash.

They invented a new, just roll your eyes.

Me too.

They invented a totally new consensus mechanism.

Elegant mathematics.

Okay, whatever.

But the thing is, all of this is a technical regression.

It is a, it is, oh, we invented a car.

For the first time, we invented a car.

And instead of using the engine in the car, we're going to pull it with horses.

That's what we're going to do.

That's what every shitcoin is.

It's literally a car being pulled by horses.

It's the stupidest fucking thing out there.

Pardon my French.

To be fair, it worked really well in Back to the Future 3.

I'm just saying.

Marty McFly got home.

Yes, they used the train, but it worked.

So, I mean, why can't I put a monkey JPEG on the front in graffiti and sell it to you for a million bucks?

Bieber might buy it.

Yeah, I mean, at some point, like, the only real, like, upside to a lot of that is, is like, well, we have to have, we're building civilization.

It has to be backwards compatible, which is to say, we just expect that all of our cars are going to fail.

And so we need to have they need to have hitches on every car so that we can attach a horse to them.

If the car fails, it's like, yeah, that's just not a that's just not human progress.

At some point, it's just you're just wasting everyone's time and effort.

You know, cars can go 60 miles an hour.

The car analogy is really good because for 100 years, cars have been basically the same thing.

They've just gotten they've iterated better and better and better and better.

But once the car was discovered, everybody realized that they had this new technology.

They could build an infrastructure, the roads around the car.

They could make different sizes of cars.

They could slowly get the engines better, slowly get the suspensions better.

They could get it to where now cars are automated, can drive themselves.

Electric cars can go super fast, but it's still a car.

It's like, yeah, you can put a jet engine on the back of the car, but then the jet engine is you can use it one time.

It just blasts. It might explode. It can't turn.

You know, you could put propellers on it, turn it into an airplane.

It might fall out of the sky. One of them might break off.

It's super loud. It might cut somebody's head off.

It just, you know, eventually maybe we'll get to a point where there's another type of car that adds like levitation or something.

But eventually you have to get there.

With these cryptocurrencies, they took Bitcoin, this incredible new creation discovery,

and then they just copied it and just added like made the Homer Simpson mobile out of this thing and just made garbage.

And there's this there's this debate.

And maybe you guys can weigh on this if whether Bitcoin was discovered or whether it was created.

And it was created because it is all of these technologies layered on each other and layered on each other, layered on each other.

And, yeah, Satoshi did discover a solution to the Byzantine generals problem and code it himself,

working off of the iterations of these other cryptocurrencies that eventually became the cryptocurrency.

And now that we have discovered the cryptocurrency, which is essentially like discovering the automobile,

now we can build the infrastructure around it and very, very slowly iterate it.

But it never becomes something else. It still is the discovery of the cryptocurrency.

Yeah, it's interesting that analogy of like the like car and taking it in there, like the bastardization of it,

because that's literally what Dogecoin is like.

Dogecoin literally was somebody copied the Bitcoin blockchain, changed the supply.

So they took the supply cap off and that's literally Doge.

And so the the irony of this whole thing is it's.

You know, it's kind of like all those videos you see of these Indian guys who are really, really crafty.

But it's like, hey, we wanted to buy a Ferrari, but we couldn't afford a Ferrari.

So we took our, you know, yacht, whatever our geo prism or, you know, what the Tata.

We took our Tata and we just basically did a carbon fiber mold.

And we made a carbon fiber mold that we threw on top of a Tata.

And it's like, it looks great, you know, but under the hood, it's it's still a Tata.

Like it literally cost you four hundred dollars and it blows over when the wind blows.

So it's the whole cargo cult, like cargo cult thing, which I can never say.

But. People in like sub-Saharan Africa during some war saw airplanes flying overhead and helicopters dropping supplies and all this stuff.

Like so the colloquial story goes and. They had no idea how helicopters worked.

They were just like, yo, the way we're going to get the supplies is if we build a helicopter.

And so they like build the cargo. We want the cargo.

This is so it's like a cult for the cargo.

And what the cult does is they build a helicopter out of like sticks and twigs and cardboard and whatever other things they can scrounge together.

And of course, it doesn't have a motor. It doesn't obey the laws of physics.

It doesn't have any like just it just kind of vaguely looks like a helicopter.

And they're like, well, we got it. Like we got the helicopter.

So where's our cargo? And it's like. That's shit coins.

That is what they're doing. Like they they've failed to understand so much of the underlying technology,

the underlying history, the underlying like all the principles and all the economics and all the game theory and all like the deep mathematics of all of it.

They've just basically clobbered together these insane solutions to problems that don't exist for the purpose of essentially just scamming people.

There's a great fluffy, fluffy pony quote, which is.

I'm going to butcher it, but it's. There are so many scammers out there who don't yet know they are scammers.

And that, for me, is just all of shit coins. They just don't know they're scammers yet.

The irony is that he's running a shit coin, but or he was I think he I think he stepped away from the step away from it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting.

The you know, the amount of it's the whole like ignorance versus malice type of thing.

You know, I try as much as I can to ascribe ignorance or, you know.

Assume it's it's ignorance on a lot of these scammer parts, but the more I hear a lot of them talk, I definitely think it's malice.

And I think it's really, really interesting. Like Roger Ver is an interesting example.

And again, this is hearsay, but I've heard it from people who are there.

But it's just the, you know, pushing Bitcoin cash, BCH.

By the way, if it says Bitcoin in it, that doesn't mean it's Bitcoin.

There's Bitcoin cash. That's not Bitcoin.

You know, there's all these other like litecoin, which says it's like a Bitcoin thing.

These are not like Bitcoin is BTC and that's it.

If it has any other extra letters or not enough letters, that's not Bitcoin.

So if you're ever buying anything and you're looking at Bitcoin, this is not financial advice.

Do your own research. But there is only one Bitcoin and it's BTC as at the current moment in time as of this recording.

So just make sure you're not buying like Bitcoin cash or any of those other things, because those are actually not Bitcoin there.

They were things that were created by other people who were intending and hell bent on getting your Bitcoin.

So they created something that they could dump on top of you and trick you into buying not Bitcoin.

Hashtag Ethereum for you to then just give them your Bitcoin.

Because if you knew if, you know, it's the whole thing of like the scoundrel or the Ponzi, right?

You know, people say Bitcoin's a Ponzi. It's like, well, if you really want to look at a Ponzi, let's look at New York real estate.

Or let's look at the U.S. dollar. Let's look at any currency ever.

The whole definition of a Ponzi is a lot of people believe in something, but the truth is not the truth.

That's the whole point of a Ponzi. Like the Ponzi is somebody knows they're lying.

That's a Ponzi. And the difference with Bitcoin is it's the first time ever where everyone knows it's true.

Or where everyone knows that, wait, I know if he's lying because I can just look.

I can just read the code and like look at the transactions and like I can know.

Yeah, that's the that's the that's the pieces you can know.

So it's it's it's everyone knows the truth. And that's the difference.

Everyone who is Bitcoin or every Bitcoin is in on it from a perspective of like, hey, I can check Bondo's work.

I can check Anton's work. I can check, you know, Fidelity's work or anybody else's work,

because at the end of the day, if they're trying to send me Bitcoin or I'm trying to send them Bitcoin, it can be verified.

Whereas previously, I'm going to send it into the black box.

That is JPMorgan Chase. And then JPMorgan Chase is going to send it into the black box.

That is Swift. And then Swift is going to do some funny stuff and maybe go through the IMF and some like six other people.

At the end of the day, my one hundred dollars is now five dollars.

But everybody's happy except for the people on the other end of that exchange.

Except for my mom, who I tried to send the money to.

Yeah. Yeah.

One easy way to avoid a lot of pain is to not deal with any company that lists altcoins.

And sadly, there are some companies that were once good that are no longer.

I love Jameson Lopp. I've gotten so much good information from him.

As soon as Casa started helping people custody Ethereum, I was like, I don't know.

I love Andreas Antonopoulos. As soon as he wrote a book on Ethereum, I was kind of like, oh, I don't know.

So there's just a few companies, you know, I can list a few like Cash App only will allow you to purchase Bitcoin.

They do let you purchase micro shares of stocks, which obviously are not the same thing.

You have, what's another one? I was going to say Bull Bitcoin, but that's out of Canada.

So if you're in the US, you can't have access to it.

Did Bull start doing ETH?

No, no, no, no. I'm saying they're all Bitcoin only.

No, Bitcoin only.

Like Rivers Bitcoin only too, right?

Rivers Bitcoin only. Bitcoin Wells Bitcoin only.

They're US based. They're Canada based, but now they're doing US stuff too.

I think there's a lot of really, really good.

Now, now there is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd say, you know, I don't have enough context to say this because I'm new here.

But, you know, five years ago, there wasn't, you know, I think it's always interesting, though, the thought of.

Like, I remember the first time I ever heard of Bitcoin and I don't remember the year.

I think I'm pretty confident I was in graduate school, which would be like 20.

You know, a while ago, and the irony of the whole thing was I just remember it was an article.

I think it was in Time magazine.

They're talking about how Bitcoin was changing like Nigeria or something like that.

And I was like, ha, that's funny.

Those, you know, Nigeria for the worst.

Tim, they go there again and again, you know, China coming in and scamming them out of the resources and all this other stuff.

And then what's really cool is we're seeing the largest peaceful transfer of work, transfer of wealth ever.

And it's going to be really, really interesting, though, when, you know, because I was in a space this morning listening to some people talk about this.

There's going to become a moment where it's no longer peaceful.

And you do need to be prepared for that.

Yeah, like if you suddenly become very, very let's let's say let's just do a hypothetical.

Let's say that over the course of the next 12 months, Bitcoin goes from one hundred thousand to two hundred fifty thousand to a million.

It starts like the stock market crashes while Bitcoin is simultaneously going up.

And you've been talking about Bitcoin to your friends and family.

Your friends and family are probably going to get pretty jealous.

They're going to tell people, oh, I've got this friend who's been super into Bitcoin.

That person probably has like a full Bitcoin or two Bitcoin or ten Bitcoin or whatever.

And all of a sudden people know that you have a higher net worth.

There are speaking of Jameson Lopp on his Web site.

He has a whole list of real what you could call five dollar wrench attacks, which basically means that somebody in the real world hit you over the head with something and said, you know, give me your seed words, give me your hardware wallet, give me whatever.

And it's nobody knows.

Nobody knows what's going to happen.

We're all fairly confident that the value of Bitcoin, the price of Bitcoin is going to go up astronomically and that anybody holding any amount of Bitcoin is essentially going to be wealthy.

And there are so many people out there who don't believe that Bitcoin is anything that's not a scam.

And so those people don't hold any Bitcoin.

And so at a certain point, all the skeptics are going to see their wealth evaporating and they're going to see people who were formerly not wealthy suddenly becoming wealthy and just human nature being what it is.

There's going to be a lot of jealousy and a lot of anger.

And so if you're going to be a bit corner and you really believe that you're about to see your wealth increase, well, it's like wealth isn't a zero sum game.

But there is a reality that some people are going to be hurt and some people are going to get super wealthy and just human nature being what it is, jealousy being what it is.

There's going to be real world consequences that we're going to we need to be prepared to face, essentially.

Yeah. And I think that's actually one of the things that's honestly the most challenging in a situation like this.

Right. We're all putting our faces out there. We're, you know, on unnamed to a degree.

Right. And then Nim is if you're just completely anonymous. Right.

And the value of that, in my mind, is candidly, I want the world to be a better place for my kids.

And I don't want to be sitting on the sidelines. I don't want to be, you know, for me personally, I want to make anything and everything I touch a better place.

And I know, you know, some of us have hard outs today. So I want to transition quickly into, you know.

All right. So, you know, everything is kind of good and terrible to a degree.

And I would say on the on the altcoin front, everything is terrible.

There's really no positive in it. But, you know, Bonder, do you have any hot takes of like, all right, if there was a silver lining in the altcoin, you know, universe, what is it?

Silver lining in the altcoin universe. I mean, we were talking about a little bit earlier.

I think it's the the guy who touches the stove. Right. Versus the guy who doesn't touch the stove.

Both of the guys learn the lesson that the stove is hot. But one guy has to touch the stove now.

Now. Touching the stove is going to cause some, you know, some damage, right?

Like there's so many people who have lost so much money trading altcoins.

It is a it is a just pick any like pick any story.

There's so many stories. People not just money to like their entire lives.

They've lost their marriages. They've lost their like unbelievable damage trading altcoins.

Like, are they going to be able to recover? Are they going to be able to learn the lesson?

Oh, yeah. I was just fiat gambling and I completely missed it.

But I mean, are they going to like, I don't know, hopefully that hopefully a lot of them learn the lesson.

A lot of them see that like what the only thing that they were doing was just ignoring the long, the low time preference, long term perspective of of that Bitcoin teaches you.

And that the the low time preference, long term perspective that fiat robs from you.

Right. And you just take the fiat world and you apply it to Bitcoin.

The first thing you do is go shit going because, oh, I can look at all these trading pairs like I can just make so much money.

Oh, this one's going to we've got a community here and like, oh, OK.

But like, man, that's it's it's so much of it is just a scam.

I mean, all of it's a scam, but like the upside is that you understand scams way better that you can speak to them with authority.

And hey, you were there. Me personally, I've been hacked three times.

Like, OK, I know not to do that. Right.

I mean, I had a whole shit coin phrase just like everybody else.

Like, yeah, got hacked. So it's like, OK, I know I know where this ends.

I know where this goes. I've touched the stove.

I want to be out there making sure that people don't touch the stove. Right.

So like, man, is it what's the what's the good that comes out of it?

Hopefully people learn. Hopefully people get better, get wiser, get stronger.

Right. Are able to defend themselves more, are able to to spot the, you know, as as that goes, as we're entering the age of discernment.

If you don't have that skill, if you haven't refined that skill, you're going to have a bad time and that that's just going to continue.

So, yeah, that that that's like the only thing comes to mind.

But it's like this big if can can that come about?

It depends. Depends on the person. Depends on how much, you know, how wise they are, how how much fortitude they have.

So, yeah, that's a tough question. What's your take on it?

I think the you know, I have an old boss who said the the way, you know, an idea is great is if it can make its way all the way through the idiot forest and still be great.

And the the the normy versus the idiot forest.

Right. And Bitcoin is that idea.

You know, this this Henry Ford and we'll post on the better by Bitcoin handle the full text to the article.

But, you know, the Ford would replace gold with energy currency and stop wars like the idea of an energy currency that can stop wars and actually bring peace has made its way through the idiot forest.

And it is now in the world. And as you know, Bitcoin mechanic would say there is software that everybody complains about and software nobody uses.

And we're now at this place where we have this idea that everybody is starting to use because everybody is complaining about it.

And it's great. You know, Fiat was the first version of this, right?

Everybody complained about the Fed, but nobody noticed all of it. And now we have a new thing to complain about.

And I'm hoping very quickly we get to that point that Fiat is that software, that that old programming that nobody uses anymore.

And I think that's what's going to be the good to come out of this is, you know, we're going to very quickly start to see because all of these Ponzi's and Altcoin verse, I think people are going to be able to very quickly make this corollary between.

Oh, wait, all of those are Ponzi's. All of these things are the Fed.

These are the same thing. It's literally that meme from the office. So it's how do we how do we just continue to to further that and make more and more people get that understanding really, really quickly?

I think that's what's really, you know, the silver lining in my mind. What about you?

Yeah, what Bondo was saying about touching the stove, it teaches you a lesson. And Bitcoin, if it wasn't Bitcoin, it would have been a Ponzi scheme and it would have collapsed.

So Bitcoin is kind of like the Ponzi scheme that never collapse because it's not a Ponzi scheme. And every single shit coin is a Ponzi scheme.

Every single cryptocurrency is a Ponzi scheme that will eventually go to zero. I don't know a single Bitcoin or who has never touched one of these things has never thought because it's just human nature.

We think, oh, I got in whatever year I got in 2017. I got in 2021. I got in 2023. I'm too late. What's the next Bitcoin going to be? Because we all want to chase a quick buck.

You end up going for that thing. Then you you see the value of Bitcoin just well, just going up incrementally, going up, going up, going up.

And then that other thing you try to invest in, you either completely get scammed or it just starts to go down in value in when compared to Bitcoin.

And you're like, if I would have just done my research, been a little patient, I could see my the value of what I invested going up.

And at a certain point, it just humbles you. You go back into Bitcoin and you you're just like, I'm going to leave this value here until I absolutely need it.

And I will see the value increase because this thing just is scarce. There's nobody controlling it. It's not a company. It's really it really is decentralized.

And personally, I couldn't have learned that if I wouldn't have. I mean, my the thing that I did, I mean, I did a few bad things, but one of the worst things that I did was I invested in cloud mining and I actually put Bitcoin.

I used Bitcoin to pay for hash rate in the cloud because I did the math and I was like, oh, I could get more Bitcoin over a year or whatever it was.

And so I put point to seven Bitcoin, which I mean, that's like twenty five thousand dollars today into this cloud mining.

And the the contract almost immediately got canceled when the market crashed and I lost all of that value.

There's no getting it back. And I realize I could have just held on to that that point to seven Bitcoin and I didn't have to do anything.

And you don't learn those lessons until you until your own jealousy makes you make a mistake.

And then it teaches you how to do something like value investing, how to be patient.

And I'm really thankful for Bitcoin for that, because Bitcoin essentially taught me how to be an investor.

And I'm almost thankful that these scams exist because.

In life, when something like that happens to you, when when a bad thing happens to you that you are naive enough to do, especially when you can humble yourself and take the blame for your own mistake, you learn a lesson.

You really can't learn any other way. And. Yeah, it's a hard lesson to learn, but it's one that pretty much all of us have to learn.

And the good news is that once you learn the lesson, Bitcoin still exists and there's there's you just can go buy Bitcoin and just exist and you can participate in this new Bitcoin economy.

This new infrastructure that is being built and it's not going anywhere, it's only growing.

And so you got you have nothing to lose. Yeah, I'm optimistic that we can get to a place here in California where.

You know, I'm going to call it the current administration and regardless of party, by the way, I do not consider my I consider myself a crypto anarchist.

That's a story for another thing. But the the reason for that is, I think cryptography, which is where crypto comes from, is the and specifically Bitcoin.

But the the need of a hard money to underlay everything is the only way we get to get out of this mess that we are in.

And hopefully in California we can continue to see the fact that, you know, Gavin Newsom has been promising since 1999, I believe, a high speed rail system every year.

Billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars are poured into this thing.

And the only people who seemingly are getting rich off of it are other politicians. That's weird.

Or people connected to politicians. That's weird. That goes away on a Bitcoin standard.

And immediately people start to realize, oh, excuse me, I just touched the hot stove and lost X amount of Bitcoin that can never be gotten back.

And by the way, it's finite. So they're not just going to print more of it.

And so, you know, Bitcoin in my mind is that wake up call.

It's the canary in the coal mine that's going to help people realize, you know, we've been sitting on the stove, not just touching it, sitting on it here in California.

And hopefully very soon our pants catch on fire and we can right the ship and actually turn this place into the best place in the world.

Because I do think California can be, you know, right up there with the southern shores of Italy or Singapore.

I love both of those places. A little too humid in Singapore, but yeah.

Yeah. Singapore is great as a society, but there's very few places on Earth that have the landscape, the climate, the geography.

The soil that California has and this infrastructure that got built during a heyday.

And yeah, it almost makes me want to welcome people or encourage people who have a similar mindset to move to California.

It would be a sacrifice to do it now because the cost of living is so high, but it is thoroughly good here.

Yeah. So, well, cool. Any last thoughts? I'm I think I'm I'm good for the day, but I appreciate everybody tuning in.

Yeah, I agree. I have so much more to say on this subject. I mean, I could ramble on and on and on.

I was thinking just now that that point to seven Bitcoin that I lost.

I want to say the name of the scam, but at the same time, there's still so much embarrassment.

I don't want to give them anything that I'm not going to say it, but it cost me seven hundred dollars.

That's what I paid for that Bitcoin. It would now be worth twenty five thousand dollars.

And it's my own fault that that got lost. And I still think about it to this day.

I mean, I don't know about you, but I will literally go into my email and search for the word Bitcoin to try and figure out when was I thinking about this thing?

And I can find emails from 2010, 2011 where it just got mentioned to me. What was I doing? Why was I investing everything into it now?

So I just want to tell people that it is absolutely not too late to learn about Bitcoin.

It's not that hard to learn how it functions in the general context.

It's definitely not too late to start if you want to start investing your own money or dollar cost averaging in just setting up different systems and different accounts with platforms and things like that.

It is so far from being too late and just learn about Bitcoin and it will make your life better.

Yep. You're going to have two options with Bitcoin.

You can learn about it because you want to or you can learn about it because you have to, because there will be a point where that's the case.

Thank you, everybody, for chiming in this week. And we'll see you. See you later.

Thanks for tuning in to Better Buy Bitcoin. Bitcoin makes everything better.

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Not financial advice, mathematical certainty.