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In this episode of Better Buy Bitcoin, we delve into personal journeys into Bitcoin, celebrate Bitcoin's all-time high price, and share unique and humorous experiences from the early days of Bitcoin. From shady Mt. Gox dealings to the roller-coaster price fluctuations, join hosts JD, Bondor, and Anton Seim for anecdotes and insights that highlight the evolution of Bitcoin investment culture.
Watch this episode on YouTube
Hosts:
JD - @CypherpunkCine on π
Bondor - @gildedpleb on π
Anton Seim - @antonseim on π
Sponsors:
Unknown Certainty - The Bitcoin
Ad Company
IndeeHub - Reshape the Business of
Storytelling - @indeehub on π
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.
What's up and welcome to Better Buy Bitcoin.
Today as we record this, it's July 11th and it's an all-time high for the price of Bitcoin.
It's, I don't even know what the price is, somewhere around between $115,000 and $120,000.
And also yesterday, the day before, it was the first time that the price of Bitcoin has
gone over $100,000 in Euros.
So and today we're going to be telling stories of the all-time high.
I think we titled the episode, stories of getting high.
Well, we've all been getting high, being high.
Or stories of being high.
Or stories of getting high, I don't know.
You never know.
I don't know what your guys' stories are.
Yeah, so I guess I can kick it off just talking about my journey into Bitcoin.
I'm joined by Ondor and JD, Gilded Pleb, and Cypherpunk Cinema.
Cypherpunk Cine, yes.
That's the handle.
I'm in the car.
I apologize for the terrible framing and everything, but hopefully the audio is...
The audio is way better than last episode.
Oh, so good.
Solid.
Solid.
I'm currently looking at a Mercedes that looks like it did not have a good time meeting a
big rig.
Well, that's unfortunate.
But it looks like nobody got hurt, so that's fine.
Anyways, continue.
Sorry.
That's all good.
Yeah, so all of our stories are a little different of how we got into Bitcoin, when we got into
Bitcoin.
I know Ondor got in as far as when he actually started acquiring Bitcoin, started interacting
with exchanging fiat bucks for Bitcoin way earlier than me.
Years earlier than me.
Wow.
I took a look in the other day.
I think we're actually in at the same time, for real.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I first was into Bitcoin probably 2012, 2013.
I was watching a lot of Max Keiser.
And I was just looking the other day.
I had a Facebook post about Bitcoin in 2013.
And multiple times I told other people that Bitcoin was the future.
And still, I didn't buy any for years because I just didn't know how to acquire it.
I was listening to this podcast called the, I think it's called Coin Sitter This podcast.
This comedian put it together.
And that was in 2014.
And he would always say, just get some Bitcoin, just get some Bitcoin.
And at the time, you only had a few options.
First it was Mt. Gox.
And that ended up failing.
So I'm kind of glad that I didn't get in.
Because maybe I would have stayed out had I done that.
Ondor, did you ever buy Bitcoin on Mt. Gox?
Nope.
Like, that was the same thing.
Like, how, how do you get it?
Oh, through Mt. Gox.
Why would I ever do that?
That is like the most shady thing.
I have to transfer money to Japan to buy Bitcoin.
No, I'm not going to do that.
Do you know what Mt. Gox was?
Yeah.
The Magic of the Gathering.
The Gathering Online.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Which, I could have my Mythlore, yeah, I could have my Mythlore wrong on this, but I'm pretty
sure the guy who presently runs Kraken, like, he made that website.
He made Magic of the Gathering exchange and then sold it to Carples.
Now, I could have, you know, I could have my Mythology wrong on that, but then sold
to Carples, Carples turned it into a Bitcoin exchange.
So that is a great time.
I could be totally off on that, but yeah.
People getting into Bitcoin now don't know much of the lore, so it's probably worth telling
people a little bit.
There was also, there was a thing called Bitcoin faucets.
People who had a lot of Bitcoin in the beginning literally had websites where you just clicked
a button and it would give you, you know, five Bitcoins.
Some of them were more.
Some of them were like 25 Bitcoin just for clicking a button, because they just wanted
to distribute it to a bunch of people.
And that's part of how Bitcoin got its value, by it getting bigger.
I remember watching a YouTube video, I can't remember what year this was, but super early
days, right?
I remember watching a YouTube video of a guy doing the faucet, like, okay guys, here's
how you do the whole faucet thing, like, you like go to this webpage and you got to have
your wallet open.
He just goes through the whole process, right?
And he's like, and this is how, like, so now I've got a whole Bitcoin in my wallet, right?
It's just like, oh my God, dude, like you cannot find these videos again, ever again,
because they've all been deleted, right?
Bro, you're just completely doxxed a hundred thousand dollars, right?
Yeah, there's a surprising amount of people who, early days, got a bunch of Bitcoin and
they have so much value that they're just like, I need to disappear.
People do not need to know that I have this.
That's pretty great.
There were also Casascius coins, remember those?
You could buy a physical coin that had a little peel-off sticker on it that held, I think
that some of the Casascius coins held 25 BTC, if I remember correctly.
No, there was a guy who had a hundred the other day, I thought he just, like, transferred
from that.
Yeah, there's probably more than 25, yeah.
Probably a thousand, actually.
Yeah, Coinbase got started earlier than I thought.
Coinbase, I think, first started as a website in, like, 2015.
No, it was earlier than that.
It was earlier than that?
Yeah, I think it was.
I think it was, yeah.
It was, like, 2012?
It's, like, really, yeah, it was, like, really early.
But, I mean, it was, like, a Y Combinator, like, nobody's heard of this thing until,
you know, they exited the, you know, incubator.
So, yeah.
There was a video that I watched, I remember, I hadn't even thought about Bitcoin for a
while.
I was thinking about Bitcoin, some time went by, and then I saw a YouTube video, this was
probably 2016, and this guy at a conference walks up to a Bitcoin ATM, and he puts $600
into the ATM to buy one Bitcoin.
And he's like, I cannot believe I just spent $600 on a piece of paper, like, what am I
going to do with this?
What was I thinking?
And now that $600 is worth $117,000.
Yep.
$117,000.
Ridiculous.
Well, I was going to talk about when I first actually got into Bitcoin.
It took me two weeks for Coinbase to recognize my driver's license.
And I thought it was so strange that I had to take a picture of my own face and, like,
a picture holding up my driver's license.
It just felt like something I would, you know, share with a scammer and get my identity stolen
or something.
And for some reason, it wasn't able to read my driver's license.
This is a really low resolution picture that it took of it.
I had to do it over and over and over again.
I remember the price of Bitcoin went from somewhere around $900 to $1,000 before I could
even get Coinbase to accept me to be able to buy any Bitcoin.
The price was $1,000 at the time.
So it's gone up 100x since that happened.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I remember...
So I got in around the peak of the, what, the 2014 bubble.
So I was just, you know, basically just rode down to the bottom.
And for me, like, one of the biggest memories I had...
Because it was just...
I'm, like, looking at the chart right now.
I'm trying to figure out how long it was.
That was...
So from November of 2000, December 2013 to December of 2015.
So two years of just straight down channel, right?
For me, it was like researching and figuring out.
I was like, wait a second.
This is...
All the dots line up.
Everything connects.
This is going to go way higher.
And for two years, it was just going straight down, right?
Everyone dismissed it.
Like, this is the whole thing.
And this is important for you to hear, JD, because you're a newbie.
Your story sounds oddly familiar, but mine is more recent.
All downhill the whole time, right?
For me, I will never forget.
And I, like, watched it religiously.
Was learning how to trade.
Was trading, like, just doing all the things, right?
For me, it was, like, everything was validated.
The whole thesis was like, this is real.
This is going to happen.
Everything about it was real at that point.
When it...
There was just a small, like, bubble that, like, went up to 500.
Touched 500 and crashed back down.
I was like, it went up to 500.
This thing is real.
It's going to go up way higher than 500.
And then, like, for me, like, that was...
I'll never forget.
I was, like, sitting at my computer, like, watching the whole thing.
Just like, there's nothing else in the world that mattered.
It just goes, boop.
And then I was just like, I was done.
I was like, this is it.
I'm in.
At that time, Bondo, were you doing trading and, like, technical analysis and that sort of thing?
I feel like you were trading options or something.
Super degen.
No, I hadn't gotten into options yet.
I was doing just straight degen trading.
So, shitcoining, as it's known.
I never went through that.
Maybe I'm just not wired to gamble.
Like, I never played poker or anything like that.
So, I never did any kind of trading at all.
It's always just been straight dollar-cost average for me.
Yeah.
Trading is probably the best.
Trading...
You can only do trading if you do it as a full-time job.
Like, and even at that, some people can't do it.
Like, for me, I basically just...
I made enough money to, like, support myself for a couple years.
Like, that...
And it's like, I can't...
I'm super thankful that, like, I was able to do that.
Right?
Like, literally just enough money to support myself for a few years.
Like, that's it.
Which is good.
It's way better than getting wiped out, liquidated all the time,
like so many traders actually do.
But I'm certainly not, you know, the upper echelons of traders
who can actually, like, make substantial amounts of money trading.
That is, like...
It's a total misnomer that people can just do that.
It's so rare.
It seems like to me that most good traders
are setting stop losses for themselves so they can't get wiped out.
And they're incrementally making a little bit of money.
And probably, on average, a really good trader trading all the time,
trading as a full-time job, sitting in front of a computer,
just watching charts, is making $200 a day.
Somewhere around there.
They're making just enough to live off of.
But they can't take any huge swings,
because if you're doing it that way and setting stop losses,
you can't take huge swings.
So every once in a while, you're going to have a trade go really well.
But most of your trades are just going to be little bitty profit.
And you've got to pay capital gains on all that trading as well.
Trading is just all problematic.
I would just avoid.
Like, even with that, like, no.
It's really not...
Like, you think, like, oh, the stop-loss strategy, that'll work.
But then you realize that the whole market is designed
to just hunt for stop-losses,
so that people just always lose money on their stops.
So then you don't put in your stops anymore,
and then you actually start making money.
But then there's the next thing.
It's like, oh, well, my targets.
Then they'll, like, they'll never actually hit your targets, right?
It's like, you'll have a good idea for a good trade,
but it'll never actually execute the exit of the trade,
and then you'll just lose money.
It just goes on and on.
The second you understand that the market...
Like, Wall Street is just the largest legalized casino in the world.
And by the way, Wall Street is the house.
The second you realize that,
you realize that there's no reason to trade.
There's not.
There's no reason to trade.
The only reason you have to have money in the market
is tax deferment, period.
There's literally no other reason to buy stocks
or anything else like that.
Unless you just have, like, an affinity for Mickey Mouse
or some other stuff.
But there's literally no other reason to buy any stocks
in any way, shape, or form
outside of, you know, you just want to invest in a person.
Like, because you're not going to beat inflation.
You're not going to beat anything else.
And so it's just stupid.
It's just legalized gambling.
And because there are talking heads on the news
all the time talking about it,
people have been lulled into this, you know,
false sense of, this is a legit thing,
because just people don't shut the hell up about it.
When in actuality, it's just literally a casino
that just happens to be, you know,
the house is the Fed, and the Fed is the government.
So, I'm, like, looking at the price history
and I'm remembering, like, being in Los Angeles
in 2016, 17, watching, like,
or being in Los Angeles 2017,
watching the price climb up from 1,000 to 20,000,
the 2017 bubble.
Anton, I want to hear your stories on this,
but for me personally, I explicitly remember,
like, sitting in a bus, like, on my way to a film set,
like, with my buddy who's the director,
I guess it probably depends on what shoot we were on,
but he is a director.
And I was sitting there, like,
bro, you got to get on Bitcoin.
And he bought, he, like, signed up for,
like, on the bus, signed up for Coinbase,
put in 50 bucks and bought 50 bucks of Bitcoin.
And I'll just never, I'll never forget,
like, just sitting on the bus, like,
because I didn't have a car or,
I had one car at that point, I don't know what it was.
But I love buses, I just take buses,
or I used to before COVID.
But, yeah, just watching the price on the bus,
like, that is a quintessential Bitcoin memory for me.
I don't know if I've ever heard anybody say I love buses.
I love buses, dude, they're great.
What kind of buses?
I used to work, I mean, I literally wrote software
for a company that, like...
Are you talking about the Citi bus?
Yeah, Citi bus.
You like the Citi bus?
Yeah.
I thought everybody hated the bus.
I like trains.
Like, trains feel very safe.
Oh, yeah, trains are awesome.
Buses feel like punishment.
It depends.
It certainly depends on the city or the bus.
L.A.'s buses are terrible, obviously,
but, like, buses can be really great.
When you were living in Korea,
did you ever ride a bus there?
All the time.
Did they have, like, not Citi buses,
but, like, traveling around buses?
Yeah, charter buses for everything, yeah.
Did they have flight attendants on the buses?
I don't think so.
We were in the country, we were not, like,
in high-class bus zones.
I did a bus in Vietnam once,
and they had, like...
Imagine what your imagination of, like,
1950s, 1960s airline stewardesses are,
but they had those on the bus in Vietnam.
Like, super luxury bus, girl in, like, a crisp outfit
with a little hat, like, serving drinks.
It was amazing.
The buses were like that at the end of the bus.
What year were you saying?
I imagine hell is just a Greyhound with no AC
that never lets anybody off.
It just keeps adding people to the bus.
And the driver is always screaming at you
to sit in your seat, but there's too many people.
And they won't go anywhere
until everybody has a seatbelt,
but there's none that have seatbelts.
That is what I imagine hell is actually like.
And the guy next to you is most likely a serial killer
and maybe has...
These days, yeah.
...his suitcase.
That or just has a really bad BF.
Yes.
Or both, probably.
So that was 2017.
Okay.
So, Anton, what do you remember about the 2017 bubble?
Man, that was a wild year.
Yeah, I remember Naval talking...
I think it was that episode that he did
with Tim Ferriss and Nick Szabo.
I want to say it was in 2017.
He talks about it being in a bubble.
I looked up the date the other day
and the price was like $8,000 or $9,000 at that point.
So he was saying Bitcoin was in a bubble
at $8,000 or $9,000.
And I remember...
I want to say that I finally was able to buy
in May or something.
So almost halfway through the year.
That was when the price was at $1,000.
And it ended the year in December at $19,000.
So it went up 20x in only six months
or something like that.
And it crashed right afterwards.
And I want to say that China had banned Bitcoin mining,
which was sort of what people thought led to the crash.
And it crashed from late December to mid-January
from like $19,300 as an all-time high
to about $3,800.
And then it stayed in a certain range after that.
I remember my conviction had gotten so strong.
Andreas Antonopoulos was kind of the guy at the time.
He had come out with the Internet of Money
based on all the talks that he had done
between 2015 and 2017.
I want to say that he went on Rogan around 2016.
And I had become so convinced in the fundamentals
and I had just lost a bunch of money in a scam as well.
I lost 0.27 Bitcoin in the scam,
which is now about $32,000, $33,000 worth of Bitcoin.
And I was like, I'm going to keep dollar-cost averaging in.
The price fell to $3,800.
I'm like, this is a miracle.
It was getting too expensive.
Now I can buy some.
And I remember when the price that year
went from like $3,800 to $12,000.
So Naval was saying it was in a bubble at $8,000, $9,000.
And it went to $12,000 a year later or so.
That was higher than what he was saying was in a bubble.
People were acting like Bitcoin had crashed irreversibly.
Yeah.
Such a great insight.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
So then we got...
It was up 10x since that time period.
So then we got 2018.
It was all down here.
And then...
It's like a descending triangle.
And then it just completely fell off a cliff,
shit the bed in November of 2018.
It went from $6,000 to $3,000.
50% dip in one month.
Yeah.
Very nice.
Very good.
Man, fewer dollar-cost averaging.
I think because I got in at $1,000,
even when the price fell from $6,000 to $3,000,
psychologically to me, I'm like, I've still made 300%.
Even though I hadn't really,
because I've been dollar-cost averaging the whole time.
Yeah.
So people now are in a very different state of mind.
If you bought in at $63,000 in 2020,
and then it was $63,000 in 2025,
I think this year it's been lower than that.
You might have felt like you lost money over the last five years.
So it gets a little bit harder psychologically
to dollar-cost average at these prices.
Yeah.
I think the thing, though, for, you know,
and I would, because I'm sorry,
like my internet is going in and out while I'm driving.
So hopefully it's not bad for everybody else.
But, you know, for me,
because I'm new and for anybody else who's new
and just kind of starting to look at this,
you know, the thought of getting to one Bitcoin
is kind of like the goal, right?
Like that's the goal for me, right?
Is get to one.
And the way to kind of think about that, though,
is actually dollar-cost averaging.
Because if you think about it,
if you don't have any money, right?
There are only 21 million Bitcoin
and there's like 65 million millionaires.
And so it's just really, you know,
something to not get discouraged about
if you're just like, oh, man, like I can't afford a Bitcoin.
It's like, well, yeah, you probably can't afford a Bitcoin right now.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
And it also doesn't mean you shouldn't, you know,
try to rebase your whole life.
Because I think, you know, stories from the high end,
I guess for me is like I started aping in, you know,
debating this last cycle.
And, you know, this is the first time it's going up
and I was losing money the whole way down.
But I was still buying because I had,
I just like you, Steve, I had a lot of bond.
I had a lot of conviction and understanding.
And the whole point we were talking about
before the show, it's like people think
that you're getting richer every day with Bitcoin.
But it's no, you're actually staying the same.
Like the whole thing about Bitcoin is you're,
and why people say get to one, it's because the denominator,
like Bitcoin is the denominator of your life.
And that just basically means your wealth isn't evaporating.
Like you get to choose, oh, if I'm going to add value
to somebody else's life, cool.
I'm going to add Bitcoin to my treasury,
to my account, to my wallet or whatever it is.
And I think that's some things, you know,
people miss a lot of times.
Like, oh, like you made so much money
or you're making money in Bitcoin or whatever it is.
It's like, no, actually, I'm just not losing money.
And I think that's a different like thought process.
My wealth has a floor, right?
Whereas with fiat money, there is no floor
because they can print infinite money,
which means the floor is infinitely below you.
And so I think that's one thing too,
just to kind of say, as you guys keep going through this,
if somebody's watching, like, don't get discouraged
because, you know, that's the goal.
Just get to one because there are not enough for everyone.
And even then, like, as you start denominating
your life in it, your wealth has a floor,
which is a cool thing.
Yeah, I mean, and then also, like,
just be cognizant of like what money is for, right?
Like, what's the money for, right?
Looking back, back looking at the chart,
I remember, so the rally from the bottom of January 2019
at 3,000 up to the top of June 2019 at 13,000.
That entire time, I was, like, not, like, stacking.
I was, like, back at school learning how to program
because I was like, okay, like, I took, like,
I saw, I was like, okay, DGN trading is just DGN trading.
Like, there's no, it's ridiculous.
And at that point, like, the whole meme,
learn to code was like a meme.
And I was like, yeah, I'll do that.
That sounds good.
That's great.
So I went and learned to code.
It's like, what's the money there for?
Yeah, spend down some Bitcoin to, like, improve myself,
to improve my ability to make money,
improve my ability to add value to the world.
Like, that's totally, it's like, this is the whole point, right?
Anton, do you remember anything in the 2019, 2020, 2021 era?
Yeah, I probably talked about it before this podcast
that I read the book, The Richest Man in Babylon.
And one of the key concepts in that book
is just to essentially give 10% of your money away,
take 10% and invest it.
And I had been looking around for years already
trying to find what do you invest in?
Like, what is the best thing?
The best thing I could find was essentially rental real estate.
And my own finances weren't good enough.
I was living in Los Angeles.
The houses were so expensive.
I didn't qualify to buy rental real estate.
You have to put 20% down to buy a property
that you're going to go rent out to a tenant.
And so the next best thing I could find was Bitcoin.
And you could buy as little, you could buy $5 of Bitcoin on Coinbase.
And so I just made this decision to myself around 2017
that I was going to dollar cost average.
My meager little amount that I could put into Bitcoin.
And so during that time period, I was dollar cost averaging.
And you can look at this in Google search results.
In 2017, the amount that people were searching for Bitcoin,
I want to say is higher than now.
So people were really, really interested in it.
And I remember during that time period in 2019,
it was essentially a bull market.
But nobody was talking about it.
Everybody thought it was dead.
There used to be memes.
There was a meme website that was like all the instances
where the media has said that Bitcoin had died.
And so some of the best times to be stacking,
nobody was conscious of it and was stacking.
So yeah, my memory of that time period was just,
I was just utterly convicted.
And also, I was conscious of the fact that in the bear markets,
people build stuff.
It's the best time to build stuff.
In fact, I wish we would have been doing our podcast
during the bear market.
Oh my gosh, such a smart idea.
Whatever.
All right, JD.
We're all mildly regarded.
We're all mildly regarded.
We're now entering the zone where you come into play.
What are some of your first Bitcoin stories?
Yeah, it's weird.
I'm still new here.
Pretty soon, I'm not going to be able to say I'm new here.
But I think the biggest story I have is just,
what I love about Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the same thing as politics used to be for me.
Like I used to be very much about like,
oh, if I could talk about this particular topic,
if I could talk about this particular political topic
or whatever it was with somebody,
I knew I could get really quickly have a shorthand
and become fast friends with someone.
Bitcoin is that thing for me now.
It's like if somebody truly is a Bitcoiner
and understands that ethos,
it is such a good filter for good people
because you cannot be a Bitcoin maximalist
and not have some mildly redeeming trace.
I'm not going to say everybody who's a Bitcoin maximalist is perfect,
but I'm going to say like on the whole,
the Bitcoin, Bitcoin maximalist community
has been the most awesome community people to be with
because they engage, they care,
they want to actually like pay attention to stuff.
And so to answer your question, like the story.
It's the, it's the, I think the biggest,
the biggest thing is everything in life is about story.
Everything's about story.
And so I think what is so great about the Bitcoin community
and what's been so great for me to kind of see
is the whole time I started buying,
because, you know, I started buying at,
you know, like the last all-time high before this
and then just started riding it down
and I literally aped in because like, oh, I missed it.
Like the second I saw it, I saw it and I aped in
and I wish I had DCA'd versus aped in.
But again, like it is what it is.
But I aped in, but like my conviction and my resolve only got stronger.
I have way less Bitcoin than I would have
if I had been smart and DCA'd.
So I don't think you missed the bus actually if you DCA, by the way.
But the, I do think you should DCA a larger chunk
than, you know, the smallest amount you can think of
because I do think we're about to have a parabolic move.
Especially if you see the M2 chart and you believe,
I ascribe a little bit to the M2 theory.
But the, I know.
But I think, now I'm rambling.
So let me land the plane really fast
without having a proper story with a conflict.
I was very conflicted because I aped in.
I aped in and I was like sick to my stomach
because I just had family members like,
what the hell did you do? You're dumb.
You know, all that other stuff.
And I kept telling myself, like, dude, what the hell did I do? I'm dumb.
But the Bitcoin community was so powerful.
And I found Bitcoin Twitter and I found, you know,
and then Nostr eventually.
And just the amount of big brain people
who can kind of like get in there
and give you a lot of crap, rightfully so.
Because you do feel like a complete regard
when you are doing anything and everything involving Bitcoin.
But just how, you know, as Hal Finney was saying,
it's like, it might just be good to get some if it catches on.
Like, just how much they have looked at every single angle of this
really continued to further my resolve and my conviction.
And no matter what anybody told me, they're like, oh, you're wrong.
I was like, I know you can think I'm wrong and you might be right.
But in the same way that I think believing in God
is better than not believing in God, it's like,
I feel like the alternative is way worse than, you know, if I'm wrong.
Like if I'm right, the alternative is way worse to not have any Bitcoin
than for me to have lost a little bit of fiat on this bet.
Well, you call it fiat, I call it pedobucks.
Yeah, cookbooks.
Pedobucks.
Pedo cookbooks.
Speaking of, there is rumor that Jerome Powell
Speaking of Jerome Powell.
He's about to resign.
I literally just saw that as I was leaving work today
and I was like, this is wild.
And I think honestly, if that does happen next week,
I think Dr. Jeff's analysis of 440 is probably
because that's his bullish outlandish case is 440 by December.
I think we get there.
I think if Jerome Powell goes out and then we get that,
if we get the 300 point cut that Besant and Trump are calling for,
like if Besant becomes the next Fed chair
and he does a 300 bit cut, I think we're over.
I think we hit 200 by, you know, September.
Maybe that's literally what the price action is all about right now.
Just the, oh, this insider's being like, bro, rates are going down.
Bitcoin's going way up.
So that's it.
I think, well, dude, you saw what they did on Bloomberg, right?
Bloomberg terminals have just changed.
Like, I think you're actually right.
And honestly, I think you're right.
I think somebody knows Jerome's going out.
I didn't think about this until the second,
but Carl Menger posted his Bloomberg terminal
and they have changed, or I don't know if it was even,
but he's the one who posted it.
But Bloomberg earlier this week on like Wednesday
just went from doing Bitcoin as $100,000 to 0.1M.
And so it's 0.11M now, or 7M now.
So, and for those who don't know, like it's point millions.
So, you know, it's $100,000 and 0.118 currently.
And that means they anticipate this zero turning
into a one or a two or a 10 or a 15.
I mean, that could also-
You know, $100 million, Bitcoin is at parity with gold.
It could also, like the unit bias there
could just be baked into the code algorithm
and how the numbers are displayed.
But it might not.
It could just be baked in, but at the same time,
like, I don't know.
There's gotta be something on the backend
that would make it do that, right?
Like, you're right, but it's like,
what triggered it because-
On the backend, it's just a-
What triggered it?
It's a huge, well, as a software developer,
I can tell you, they,
for every like front end display of numbers,
you'll have like four or five digits
that make sense to display, right?
And then anything beyond that,
if you want to display $100,000,
the exact price of Bitcoin,
well, that's six digits.
So you want to concat it, which is to say-
What were they doing?
Sorry, I misspoke.
That's correct.
So it was three with a K
and now they just moved the decimal.
So it's like, what?
I was like, because you could do 500K.
That's still, you know,
but I guess if you're going to show a report to a-
In my mind,
it sounds like somebody at Bloomberg
was talking with somebody
at one of the other financial institutions,
i.e. a bank,
let's say JP Morgan, for instance.
And they're like,
hey, when we're going to boardrooms
and we're trying to sell BlackRock's iBit,
we can't sell billions of dollars of iBit
if they see 100,000, you know,
if they see a K here,
they need to see an M.
So they need to be seeing M's
if we're trying to get them to spend M's
or spend these.
Like for a product like a Bloomberg terminal,
like you know that they have all of the,
all of that dialed in.
They can just-
Yeah, they're the house.
They're the house.
Bloomberg is part of the house.
There's a software stack.
Anyways, now we've gone off track.
Yeah, so for looking back
at the price history of Bitcoin,
we have the-
Do you remember,
so there's, you know,
the double hump between April 2021
and November of 2021.
That was all FTX, right?
And then the subsequent crash
was when FTX was just liquidated.
Yeah, I think right after the all-time high
around like 63,000,
which would have been 2020 or 2021.
I want to say one thing about this.
I really have a-
Thank you, Sam.
If you had not fucked everything up for everyone,
I would not have as much Bitcoin as I have.
Thank you for totally stopping the previous rise
because I am way closer
to getting to, you know,
where I'm trying to go because of you.
So thank you, Sam.
I do hope you rot in hell, but thank you.
I definitely have the opposite,
or not the opposite,
but like way more in the-
I'm way more in the like rot in hell camp.
Like you've wasted so many people's time and effort.
I do feel bad that you scammed people,
so I got to say-
Absolute waste to all of civilization, right?
Anton, do you remember anything
from the double hump era?
Yeah.
I mean, altcoins pumped like crazy
during that time period.
And somehow things like crypto.com still exist.
And people in general don't know the difference
between Bitcoin and 10,000 other complete scams
that should not exist and do nothing.
And that is literally every single thing
that you call crypto is a complete scam.
The only one that needs to exist is Bitcoin.
And somehow, I was just looking at this
because we were making jokes about XRP,
which is Ripple.
I thought XRP was in the toilet.
I didn't know that it went up 400% in a year.
And Bitcoin's only up, what, 150% or something like that?
So technically, if you bought XRP a year ago
and sold it today, you made more money
than if you had bought Bitcoin.
XRP is a scam.
They're all scams.
It completely is a fiction that should not exist.
And it will have an 85% to a 98% correction
at some point.
So during that time period,
you had people like Larry David doing commercials for FTX.
What's the football player?
Ridiculous.
Matt Damon did too.
Matt Damon.
And that was, we can say now,
that was a complete scam put together by a bunch of people.
Fraudulent.
Completely fraudulent scam.
Technical, criminal fraud.
And all of these other altcoins are the same thing.
They just haven't collapsed yet, and they will.
So as frustrating as that time period was,
we're still in it.
It's still going on.
Yep.
Well, I mean, yeah, I definitely remember.
For me, I think that that period was the most brain dead
in terms of all the shitcoins.
It was a constant barrage of like,
yo, are you exposed to Sol?
Are you in the ETH?
What's the latest?
How do I do the DeFi?
I've got this thing locked up.
Just on repeat, right?
Just unbelievable on repeat.
It's like, bro, how many times can I tell you?
You guys are exposing a crazy amount of money
to people who are going to steal it from you.
Literally.
So many stories of people being like, oh, go on.
Talking to a shitcoiner today.
Yeah, no, same thing.
But it's like the lack of awareness around it.
It's like, oh, but I'm going to make...
It's like, oh, but I'm making money.
And it's like, until you're not.
And I think that's the thing.
Everybody's like, I'm making money.
And I think the irony of the whole making money thing is
everything is making you money except for Bitcoin.
And the unpacking of that is like,
if you really want to think through this,
Bitcoin is the only thing that is hoovering up value.
Everything else is just printing it.
And until you fully grasp that,
that's the thing that made me grasp it.
And be like, ah, that's the correct thing to do.
Also, fun thing.
If you want to go talk to Grok.
I talked to Grok for like an hour the other day
about crypto and kind of went through the whole rabbit hole.
But I was asking Grok.
And I was like, if you were to take your guardrails off
as much as you can and go through it,
which of the cryptos is the best crypto for you as an AI?
And in the future that's coming,
that you know as an AI that's trying to be built,
what is the crypto that we should be using?
Like, oh, Bitcoin.
The only reason, too, is because of what I just said.
Is Bitcoin, as an AI,
it is the only verifiably distributed
and unfutzable ledger.
And as an AI, if I want to pay another AI
to do something for me
and have it transmit value over the internet instantaneously
and be able to verify that, you know,
the thing that I'm paying it for, you know,
is being paid for in something that's actually a value,
Bitcoin is the only way we can do that.
Like, if there's this, like,
Bitcoin is the only thing that is protecting your money.
Everything else is printing away.
Bitcoin right now has 64% dominance.
Yeah, that's awesome.
There are 100,000 cryptos,
and the majority of them,
if they're operating at all,
are running off of a single computer.
Unbelievable.
Just AWS.
It's not even one computer.
It's many computers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's just, it's literally just one computer.
It's not even one computer.
It's many computers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's just, it's literally just one computer.
It's many computers.
It's literally just AWS, right?
It's running in the cloud.
Absurd.
There, yeah, there's nothing that is going to,
it's funny because I don't even want to say,
I don't want to say out loud
there's nothing that's going to catch up with Bitcoin,
because they are nothing.
Correct.
They're not a real, they're not a thing.
So there is nothing to even catch up with Bitcoin.
It's only Bitcoin.
Wow.
Bitcoin is going to a million dollars.
I don't know when.
I can't say when that's going to happen,
but this is the thing that's very hard logically
to wrap your mind around.
Bitcoin could go to $100,000
and the value of what Bitcoin buys you
could possibly not change
because the US dollar could be devalued so much
that a million dollars buys you
what $100,000 buys you now.
Because dollars are infinite.
They're always being printed.
They will always be printed forever.
Bitcoin's not only only 21 million.
It not only has a certain schedule
of how it will be distributed,
which is cut in half by the halving every four years,
and will essentially in like 2140, I think,
there will be no more to be mined.
But not only that,
a lot of Bitcoin is locked up
or has been lost by wallets
that have been deleted
or seed words that have been lost.
So the number is actually decreasing.
Dollars inflate forever.
Bitcoin literally decreases
and cannot ever be increased.
So I think this is fascinating.
Looking at the dominance chart
that you just mentioned.
So prior to 2017,
like January of 2017,
Bitcoin dominance was just at 90%,
like basically just a flat 90%.
January 2017,
the ICOs start coming on the market.
People realize they can just print money
and like sell it
and make millions and millions of dollars, right?
Bitcoin dominance is just like craters, right?
As these ICOs,
because nobody knows that they're scams, right?
Everyone's just thinking
they're just going to make the most amount of money
they've ever seen in their lives.
So just craters.
And then it's for four years,
it's just up and down
and like, you know,
there's no pattern or signal.
And then here's the thing,
for everybody out there who doubts about it,
as humanity has started to digest,
like the collective consciousness
now knows that ICOs are a scam,
that shit coins exist,
that you're going to lose your money,
that, hey, yeah,
I know a guy, yeah,
he put 20,000 bucks into FTX
and lost all of it
because he said he trusted SPF, right?
And you're just like,
that doesn't work anymore.
You can't do that
and people not laugh at you, right?
We know that these are scams now.
Everybody knows.
Everybody knows that everybody knows, right?
The standard game theory thing.
Okay.
So for the last four years,
we have exited,
like we basically were in this crazy zone
and now Bitcoin dominance
has exited the crazy zone.
Everyone knows that everyone knows.
Clear delineation
and it's just from that point forward,
it's just a steady regaining dominance.
Regaining dominance from 40 to now 64%.
And that's just good.
That's like just going straight up, right?
Straight line.
It's going to keep going straight up
because everyone knows
that it's all just a game.
There might be like this chart,
to be honest with this chart,
would have to now adjust for the new shit coin,
which is just the treasury companies,
which is just the new shit coin, right?
But dominance chart doesn't do that.
So we'll see.
The other thing that's going up is hash power.
Yeah.
A thing that doesn't really get talked about
because most people don't really know what it is.
And to be honest,
I don't fully understand it.
I think it's just that essentially
the amount of people in the world
who are competing to get some of the remaining Bitcoin,
they put more and more energy into the network
and the hash power goes up.
So Bitcoin is literally physically growing
as time goes on.
And as it grows,
the more hash power that has,
the more the network is strengthened.
I mean,
I remember when we were getting into Bitcoin,
or I was getting into Bitcoin,
this was like 2017.
There was still talk about the possibility
that Bitcoin could fail.
It could be shut down.
If the US,
which was basically the biggest market for Bitcoin,
were to just outlaw it or ban it,
it was possible that Bitcoin could die at that point
because people would have no,
there'd be no reason to put the physical resources
of buying ASICs or the energy into mining it.
And essentially the network would just die.
And nobody talks about that anymore.
It's not,
it's just not a thing anymore.
It's so big.
It's so distributed across the entire planet
that the only thing that could make it die
is like an all out nuclear apocalypse
if everybody started bombing each other.
Yeah.
And then we got some way bigger problems
than whether or not Bitcoin survives.
Exactly.
Yeah.
The total hash rate graph is fascinating.
I mean,
it's just,
just,
I don't know,
like just straight up into the rate.
Yep.
Up into the right,
which is the same place that the price is going.
Right guys?
Yeah.
Is it?
Not financial advice.
Yeah.
The thing about the hash rate that's,
that's fascinating,
of course,
is that like it's indicative of actual physical hardware
that it continues to go up into the right on a log scale.
So this is exponential
and or logarithmic log log growth
or power log growth,
right?
Which is to say people are,
they went from hashing on their computers,
like to just give you an idea
of how big of a thing Bitcoin is.
They went from just running a software
on their random laptop
to running a software on their ASIC miners
to like ASIC miners that are like not efficient,
right?
They're just the first ASIC miner
to like the next generation,
the next generation,
the next generation
to you can't really even run an ASIC miner
or like a GPU miner.
Like you can't even really run these things
at your home anymore
because the cost of electricity and blah,
blah, blah
to like,
okay, well,
we're going to do it in a warehouse.
We're going to do it close to a power plant like,
right?
And that has just continued to grow
at a power law rate.
Even to today.
So like,
they're still adding crazy amounts
of hash power to this thing.
And,
you know,
the first ASIC came out,
I don't know when that,
do you remember when that was?
It's got to be like,
it's got to be like 13 or 14,
something like that.
Yeah,
it was early on.
I think it was 2013.
Yeah,
okay.
First ASIC comes out,
right?
2013.
Total hash rate,
and these,
these numbers are going to be meaningless
to anybody who doesn't know
what the F they mean,
but I'm not going to try and explain it either.
Let's say total hash rate was 10 terahashes
before they came out.
In short order,
it went to a thousand,
then a hundred thousand,
then
by the peak in 2017,
it was at 10 million.
And today,
it's just crossing over a billion,
right?
We went from
a thousand
to a billion.
Like,
that is a lot of order of magnitudes.
And you,
nobody can process orders of magnitude.
Jumping from one to ten
is an order of magnitude.
Jumping from one to a hundred,
that's two orders of magnitude.
You really,
you're,
the human mind isn't set up to,
to process like that,
right?
You really,
actually have to see the difference between one
and a thousand.
You can't just look at the numbers.
The difference between
one and a billion,
like actual,
like here's one item
and here's a billion items,
it's incomprehensibly large.
It's crazy.
Yeah,
it's crazy to think also,
you don't even know where
these miners are
or these mining facilities are.
You don't know what countries that they're in.
And the only thing I could even compare it to
is like,
and I don't even understand how this works,
but something like Visa.
They need their own,
you know,
towers full of servers
to run that thing.
But that's one company
that controls it all.
Bitcoin is just distributed
all over the globe.
All these people competing
against each other
and we don't know who they are
and it doesn't matter.
We don't have to know who they are.
And you could have an entire country
ban Bitcoin tomorrow
and shut down
and it completely,
it doesn't affect the market at all
because it is decentralized
and distributed
so,
so thoroughly
that none of that affects it anymore.
There's just such a beauty to that.
I don't even know what to relate it to.
Like,
what in our lifetime
can we even relate it to?
It's,
it's new.
I think,
well,
I think the thing you can relate it to
is ideas, right?
And I think
a perfect example
would be Tiananmen Square,
right?
When Tiananmen Square happened,
the Chinese,
the CCP
squashed all images
and everything of it
and they basically
tried to hide it.
And it's the same thing with
you know,
the Cambodian genocide
and all these different genocides
that have happened
all over the world
is
when you hide something,
when you hide an idea,
it makes the idea stickier.
And so,
I think actually the best thing
for Bitcoin
would be for more countries
to ban it
and outlaw it
because it just,
I mean,
a perfect example
is MetaPlanet.
MetaPlanet
is doing so well
and kudos to
Dylan Leclerc
and that team over there
because
Bitcoin has a 55% tax
in Japan
but you can buy
MetaPlanet
which is a stock
that is putting
Bitcoin
on their books
at a clip
that nobody else
can touch
in Japan
that
it's just creating
an asymmetric
trade
because
people want
to,
you know,
only spend 20%
versus 55%
because they're stifling
this idea,
they're stifling
the innovation.
And so,
you know,
I think
when people try
to put a lid
on it,
you know,
I'm actually excited
for more people
to be hostile
to Bitcoin
because it's just
good for Bitcoin.
Yeah,
I agree on the
Streisand effect.
That's exactly
what it is.
Yeah,
the more people
hate it,
the more people
want to figure out
what it is.
Yep.
Yeah,
guys,
I think that
takes us through
the stories
of times past.
Anton,
is there any
other final words
you got?
I'm just,
I'm getting sunburned
so bad
that my brain
is getting roasted
right now.
But,
this was a fun one.
It's fun,
especially,
it's a Friday
and it's a little
freewheeling,
just telling some stories.
So,
yeah,
don't be afraid.
Don't be afraid
to buy Bitcoin
at the all-time high.
It's always a good time.
It's a great time.
Because it's just
going to be cheaper
and cheaper
and cheaper after that,
you know?
Right.
JD,
last thoughts.
You
understand
Bitcoin
at the price
you deserve.
Because
everybody says you get
Bitcoin,
but I want to change
the word get
to understand.
Because I don't think
you can have Bitcoin,
but until you
understand Bitcoin,
you actually don't
have Bitcoin.
If you have
Bitcoin,
but you don't
really understand it,
you have an asset.
You don't have Bitcoin.
You have a stock.
And so I think
you understand Bitcoin
at the price you deserve.
And that price
is whatever price
you decide to dive in
and actually learn about it.
Yeah.
I think for me,
final word is just
don't underestimate Bitcoin.
It is so much bigger
and so much more powerful
than your
preconceived notions
about it.
Even my own.
It's just,
it's crazy.
Absolute bonkers.
All right.
With that,
out of here, guys.
Peace.
Have a good one.
Drive safe, JD.
Bye.