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Explore the intersection of AI, Bitcoin, and the absurdities of taxation. Join Bondor and Anton as they discuss how disruptive technologies challenge traditional tax systems, highlight the inefficiencies and injustices of current taxation, and propose a future where Bitcoin reforms these paradigms.
Watch this episode on YouTube
Hosts:
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
Bitcoin makes everything better. Join the team and our guests as we unpack how, why, and where we go from here.
♪ Got a good thing coming, and it's all I need ♪
♪ Everything I wanted ♪
All right, here we are.
Welcome back to the show.
We had some technical difficulties there,
which we apologize for,
but it looks like we're good to go now.
So, welcome.
We got Anton Sim and myself.
I'm Bondor.
I've jack of all trades, master of none.
Been around Bitcoin for a while.
Anton, what's your,
you butchered the pronunciation of my name.
I say Anton Sim, but it's all good.
Yeah, I'm a filmmaker, cinematographer, Bitcoiner.
Cool.
So, today we wanted to talk about taxes,
because they are relevant.
We got tax day in America on Monday the 14th.
And yeah, one of the things that really just kind of,
just immediately off the bat is we had,
and we've seen this a lot, obviously,
because of ChatGPT and AI and everything.
The immediate thing about taxes is that,
as you were describing,
there's all these problems and weird things
about the tax code and everything else,
and you just kind of have AI to be like,
oh, well, what does this mean?
What is the situation here?
Oh, okay, here it is.
You don't need any of the absurdity of it.
Okay, so AI.
AI affects taxes.
That's interesting, that's cool.
But how does Bitcoin affect taxes?
How does Bitcoin, like, and we can talk big picture
to granular stuff and to the whole thing.
I mean, we've both got tons and tons of stories about,
you know, I was a trader at some point,
so I was like, oh yeah, my taxes is literally
not hundreds of pages.
I knew traders who had hundreds of pages of PNLs,
but pages of PNL.
And he was like, this is kind of interesting.
We can like, somebody who really wants to do it
could just DDoS the IRS on this stuff.
And it just goes.
So, Anton.
Anton, what's your take here?
Hot take.
My hot take is that taxes are completely unnecessary
and the IRS is 100% unnecessary
and taxes only exist to punish you
and keep you subservient.
And even though we have a graduated income tax,
first of all, nobody should have to pay tax,
but anybody that has an income that's not super high
absolutely shouldn't pay tax
because their taxes don't do anything.
I don't know what the exact stats are,
but I'm pretty sure that the richest 1%
pay the majority of taxes or something like that,
or corporations, businesses that make a profit.
The amount they pay in taxes is so much higher
than what individuals pay.
But if you're an individual,
the pain that you experience every year
paying 25, 30, 40% of your income in income taxes,
money that you could be either putting in the market
or deploying on things that you need,
it's insanely painful.
And on top of that, the other thing about it
is it's incredibly time consuming
because you prepare your taxes yourself.
You're responsible for keeping your own books.
You're responsible for reporting all of your own taxes.
And it's just a gigantic waste of time.
And then you were saying that with AI,
that AI can basically do your taxes for you
or tell you what you owe in tax.
Here's the crazy thing.
If you go to a CPA and you give your CPA your taxes,
he's gonna give you a number that you owe.
If you take your same taxes to another CPA,
you'd think two professionals
are gonna get the same number.
No, almost never.
What do you really owe in taxes
if two professionals can't come up with the same number?
What is the real number?
Yeah, you submit it to the IRS and they're like,
actually, nope, you owe a different number.
Yeah.
Ridiculous.
What's interesting about AI though
is AI is so objective that if you take your books
and perfectly input it into the AI,
the AI can tell you how to do your taxes
if taxes are completely unfair
and shouldn't exist in the first place.
But let's just say for this conversation
that somehow they are fair and they actually do something.
If you put that same documentation into AI,
it's objectively going to tell you the truth.
It's gonna tell you what you actually owe.
And that's where we are now.
That's the world that we're existing in now.
So on our side, it's great
because you have this time-saving thing,
the AI that can essentially do your bookkeeping for you.
On the more negative side,
the IRS also has the same capability
of knowing exactly how much they can extort from you in taxes.
So it goes both ways, unfortunately.
The thing that specifically related to Bitcoin,
the thing that really has me going,
it's like, yes, this is it,
is the idea that
all of our modern economy
is kind of predicated on our nation-state system
where, oh, this nation has these borders
and under these borders, you have these rules
and you have to pay these taxes
and you have to participate in this particular version
of society and reality and there's that, right?
So with Bitcoin, and most of that's just predicated
on the fact that fiat exists
and it exists in the way that it exists.
So if you have a currency that is only defendable
if everybody uses it at the threat of violence,
if you only ever use it at the threat of violence,
well, then you're gonna have great taxes
because everyone's, they already know that,
like, okay, well, the only reason this has money
or has value anyway, the only reason it works
is because, well, we have aircraft carriers,
so what are we gonna do about it?
But the second, the game theory
and the system of money itself changes, i.e. Bitcoin,
it becomes more, well, it doesn't matter
how many aircraft carriers you have,
you're never gonna be able to shut down Bitcoin
and you're never gonna be able to,
because it's information, you're never gonna be able
to stop somebody from using Bitcoin
or transferring Bitcoin to anywhere in the world
and so you have this incredible,
there's no exit tax, if you will, right?
It's just, I mean, there is still, of course,
because the law enforcement, the long arm of the law
reaches across borders, but people will go
through the legal ways to get out of it
and all the incentives change.
Oh, you're muted, I think.
Don't tell the IRS that there's no exit tax.
They absolutely think that there's an exit tax,
but the reality as a Bitcoiner,
especially if you have non-KYC Bitcoin,
is there's no exit tax for you if you just do it.
I'm not recommending that anybody do that.
I'm not saying, eh, I kind of am recommending
that you do that.
I'm not saying break the law.
I'm just saying you kind of can't help it.
If you came upon your Bitcoin in some way
that there's no record of you having it,
which is very easy to do, let's say you paid cash for it
or somebody gave it to you as a gift or whatever
and it went from a hardware wallet to a hardware wallet,
there's no record that you have that Bitcoin.
So if you go to another country
with an incredible amount of wealth,
could be a million dollars, could be a billion dollars,
and you spend it in that country,
that country may put a sales tax or a value-added tax
on the thing that you buy,
but it's up to you to report that to the United States
if you're a United States citizen
that you took money to some other country.
But the reality is that doesn't really exist anymore.
It only exists if you voluntarily decide to do that.
Yeah.
And the consequences of that are that nation-states
are gonna have a harder and harder time enforcing tax code.
People are going to recognize this
and there's gonna be a fork in the road
where the lawmakers essentially have to say,
do we wanna double down on the violence
to collect the taxes or do we wanna double down
on being attractive to attract more taxes?
And I mean, the violence is that it's just a no-win game
for everybody, right?
And everybody knows it's a no-win game for everybody.
So, okay, sure, there's gonna be some countries that do that
but really almost everybody's gonna push on,
oh, we just need to be more attractive.
And the consequences there are that all the tax codes,
like we are at the apex, the highest tax,
I don't know what the technical,
percent is gonna be, but in your bones, you're like,
hmm, isn't it interesting that our founding fathers
like literally shut down and like they rebelled against,
they rebelled against a kingdom
for the purpose of paying whatever it was, a minuscule tax.
Like 3%, it was essentially a 3% tariff.
Yeah, and we are sitting here paying 40% taxes
in some cases on our income.
It's like, bro, that's more
than an order of magnitude difference.
Okay, so like, what are we talking about here?
Like, this is potentially, we are potentially
in the most taxed regime in human history.
Like, I just wouldn't be surprised if that's the case.
I haven't done the research, you could ask AI,
but for real, it's like, wow, this is crazy, okay?
And now that exists because all of our money
and all of our systems and everything
are essentially just predicated on violence.
And when you're predicated on violence,
well, you can just push on the lever
and everyone essentially has to comply
because like, what are you gonna do?
The money is printed and it's all about control.
And if you don't have the control,
then you can't print the money
because it doesn't have any value in the whole thing, right?
Okay, so then Bitcoin reduces the tax code.
It reduces just because of the incentives.
Maybe it doesn't do it directly, right?
But it does it, the world economy changes
as people realize there's better money,
all of these systems change
and the whole thing gets affected.
Now, what happens next, Anton?
What happens next with Bitcoin making taxes better
under that paradigm, under that framework?
Well, taxes have not been necessary
because the government can just print infinite money.
They can just create money out of thin air.
And so not only are you paying taxes,
you're also getting a secret tax, which is inflation.
When that is not a thing anymore,
and I was gonna say this too,
you were saying that we're the most heavily taxed
that anybody in history ever has been.
It's pretty much true.
And I think that the highest tax for us,
we live in California,
is if you make over a certain amount of money,
you're getting taxed about 50%
because we have a 13% state income tax.
We also have sales tax.
Los Angeles just voted to increase the sales tax
to close to 11%.
And you're also paying property tax,
both on the actual property if you own a house
and business property,
which I pay every single year on cameras that I have financed.
In the past, there has been a flat tax,
which is something that we don't have.
So now you're penalized if you make a good income.
Whereas in the past,
you weren't allowed to be a citizen, essentially,
unless you paid the flat tax.
I don't even know what happened.
You didn't pay the flat tax,
you probably went to jail or got tortured.
And so it essentially incentivized people
to go out and make money so they could pay the flat tax.
Now, people are being incentivized not to make money.
People are being incentivized to go into poverty
to where they will get social programs.
They're being incentivized into socialism
to where you have a split in society.
The people who make insane wealth
are the people who don't make any wealth
and never gonna make any wealth
and just wanna be given a little bit of free stuff.
And those are the most subjugated people
that could ever exist.
So with Bitcoin, all of that goes away.
It's called the welfare cliff.
It's crazy, yeah.
Yeah, so Bitcoin makes all of that go away.
And when there is a Bitcoin standard,
governments are going to have to earn revenue.
People can pay voluntarily.
They can live where they want to live, pay taxes.
And government has to be really, really responsible
about how they spend those funds
because people are going to be incredibly demanding
of how that money's spent.
Because right now you pay taxes,
you don't get anything for your taxes.
Those taxes go to crony politicians
who then essentially just extort the money,
launder it somehow through their friends,
and then get paid.
And that's how politicians end up
with $100 million net worths.
And the real money, the revenue
that the government is running off of
is fake printed money that's causing inflation.
With Bitcoin, the fake printed money goes away,
the inflation goes away,
and you really have to be careful
about how you spend your money
because it's a finite amount of money that you're spending.
Yeah, and you don't get into the absurdities of,
oh, well, because there's inflation,
that means all these people are losing their jobs
and can't afford housing.
And then, well, because we have so many homeless people,
we need to now put together all these homeless programs.
But because all the money's broken anyway,
and all those people, it's all just a grift anyway,
and they're printing money
and they're just giving the billions of the money
to the homeless,
the people who are leading the NGOs
and other non-profits for bettering the homeless.
And really, what they're doing is just channeling
the printed money into their private bank accounts
and no homeless people are getting homes,
nobody's getting jobs,
and it's just systemic corruption from the top down.
I'm like, oh, well, of course taxes are gonna,
like taxes are just a part of the whole thing.
I just read a, I'm gonna have to find it,
but it's a quote from St. Augustine
from his City of God,
and it's awesome, it's exactly this.
Without justice, what else is a kingdom but a huge robbery?
Oh, if you can print money,
then you don't have a just money, it's just robbery.
The whole thing is just robbery.
All taxes are essentially what you were saying earlier,
robbery, what are we doing here, right?
Like this is all absurd.
Yeah, yeah, you know, where we live,
there is a, essentially we used to have
crazy, crazy homeless encampments.
Two things about that.
One. Still do, yeah.
Still do, two things about that.
Number one, homelessness in California is incentivized
because so much money is given to fight homelessness
that it's created these organizations
around fighting homelessness.
The more homelessness there is, the more money they get,
and that money goes to a top group of people
who run these programs.
And so, if homelessness went away,
those people lose their incredibly high income.
They want homelessness, they want more homelessness,
the more homelessness, the more money.
Another thing that happened in our neighborhood,
they built what they call tiny home villages,
which are a bunch of tough sheds.
They took a parking lot that used to be used
for kids' little league games on a Saturday,
you'd have all the families come and park there.
That doesn't even exist anymore.
So now they took the parking lot,
they put a ton of tough sheds,
they moved most of the homeless encampment
into these tough sheds,
although now there's a homeless encampment
and the tough shed encampment.
I know there are people that sleep on my street outside
who refuse to go sleep in the tough sheds
because they just wanna do drugs all day long
or they have too serious of a mental illness
exacerbated by the drug use,
and so they can't even be there.
So now you have both the homeless encampments
and you have the homeless tiny home village.
But here's the thing about the tiny home village.
Those tiny home villages,
there was a no-bid contract awarded to private individuals
to build that tiny home encampment.
Who got that contract?
I can tell you who got the contract,
the friend of the city council member.
And then that friend, what do they do?
They give that city council member
a couple of flights on a private jet,
a vacation home, maybe a chalet in Switzerland
or a house on a beach in the south of France,
or just cash in a red envelope,
which is Jose Huizar, I think,
is the old city council member
that used to be over northeast Los Angeles,
literally went to federal prison
for getting red envelopes of cash
for giving essentially deals to Chinese developers.
And he was the same city council member
that was over that area.
So every once in a while,
they do make an example out of somebody,
but there is a homeless industrial-
Is he the guy who okayed the development
of the Skyrise Tower?
Like the three Skyrises downtown
and one of them is just, it's just graffiti,
all like floor 40 to floor whatever 20 is just graffiti.
It's crazy.
You guys got to see it if you haven't.
That's nuts.
I wanted to share my screen
to read this tweet of Matt Walsh about the income tax,
but I don't, I've never done it in this software.
So I'm a little nervous to do it
because I don't want to like dox my whole computer screen.
Should I just try it?
Yeah, give it a shot, man.
What if I do image file?
Oh, sweet.
I can load the image file.
Yeah, image file.
There you go.
All right, let me just do that real quick.
That's a good way to do it.
First, I'm going to have to save it.
You know what?
I'm just going to read it.
Forget it.
I'm just going to read it.
So Matt Walsh just tweeted today.
He said, getting rid of the income tax
isn't just about money.
It's about freedom.
The IRS has access to everything.
They can take as much of your money
as they want whenever they want.
If you don't pay up, they'll take your property.
They can throw you in prison.
The Bill of Rights basically doesn't apply to them.
So how can we call ourself a free country
when an unelected agency can confiscate your income
and destroy your life?
And then he goes on.
So I'll tell you one thing that Bitcoin does.
Bitcoin makes them not be able to take your money.
They cannot confiscate your wealth.
They can come and find you and have a warrant
for your arrest and throw you in prison,
but they can't just take your money.
Whereas right now, if your money's in Wells Fargo
or Bank of America or Chase.
It's not your money.
The IRS can literally just take your income.
They can also garnish your wages
so that when you get paid,
the taxes go to them immediately
so that you're working like a slave to the IRS.
And there's a lot of people
that are going through that right now.
And why?
Their taxes aren't being used for anything.
It's strictly a punishment.
Their taxes are being just misappropriated
to pay for somebody's random endeavor of,
oh yeah, well, we're gonna fund this homeless encampment,
but really we're just giving kickbacks
to our construction friends.
It's mental.
Yeah, it's corruption on the local level
all the way up to the federal level.
It's just-
Well, it's on the federal level with the Fed
going all the way down to the local.
It's, oh, I wanna get into politics.
I'm gonna be a community leader.
And like, no, no, no, the way that you play this game
is that you grease some palms
or whatever the thing is, right?
And then that's how you make it to the next level.
And then grease some more palms, make it to the next level,
grease some more palms,
you get a little bit more dirty, right?
Go to a little Epstein parties, make it to the next level,
get a little bit more power.
It's like the whole system is so broken.
It's unbelievable.
And the fact that it's broken should really,
like you should understand how broken it is.
Yeah.
The next thing you should do is start looking for solutions.
And there is only one solution and that's Bitcoin.
And here we are, like Bitcoin exists because it exists.
You can one, exit the system of insane slavery
and corruption, which is just huge robbery.
Like the whole system of America
is essentially just robbery.
And then start building your own system on top of that.
Not on top of it, instead of it.
Just go for it, do it.
Yeah, there's an escape that exists right now.
So if hearing that makes you mad,
there's something that you can do about it now.
10 years ago, it was going on.
Lots of people knew about it
and there was nothing they could do.
People were buying gold.
And I heard gold described by a coin shop owner
as a quiet asset.
There have been a lot of people,
there have been a lot of demographics or ethnicities
or people from certain countries
who have always culturally liked to have gold
and kind of like hide it and just have it.
And they're wealthy and nobody knows that they're wealthy.
And now there is something,
but the problem with that is,
and this has happened historically.
Let's say you have a whole bunch of gold
or a whole bunch of silver or something like that.
And all of a sudden things get really bad wherever you are.
There's like a fascist government
that wants to take everything from you.
And you're gonna go with your gold,
you're gonna get robbed.
It's all gonna be taken from you.
Now you have a thing
that you can literally store in your own head.
You can remember 12 words.
You can fly to another country with nothing on your body
and you can type those into a phone
and all of your wealth is restored to you.
That exists.
Exists today, presently.
It exists.
And the world changed
and most people have no idea that the world changed.
They don't know yet.
So last night at the Bitcoin meetup we attend here in LA,
the conversation went into a creature from Jekyll Island.
You've read this one, yeah?
He and Edward Griffin.
Yeah.
So ultimately his solution,
he goes, he understands the problem,
which to his credit,
he does a great job understanding the problem, right?
But his solution is just to be a gold bug
and do literally,
and then one of the things about that book
that just kind of bothered me,
I thought it was a fantastic read.
Very entertaining.
Some people will read that and be like,
oh my gosh, it's the end of the world.
How can this be so crazy and evil or whatever?
For me as a Bitcoiner I'm like,
this is great.
This is just pure entertainment.
I love it because I have hope that,
and I have substantiated hope that all of it's just,
like the whole system that was built is all corrupt
and it's all gonna collapse
and I have a path to seeing that happen.
Now, there's a few things in that book that bother me.
One, he advocates for gold as a solution.
Just no, no, no.
We have to have one-to-one gold-backed money.
That's the only solution kind of like what we gotta do.
I'm sure there's more nuance to it,
so I'm probably butchering his exact stance on it.
But you look at any cursory history of money,
it's predicated on,
the only reason we can have fiat
is because we have banks storing things that are valuable.
If you don't have the banks storing things
that are valuable first,
no one's gonna get on board with the violence
because no one's gonna believe that the fiat is real.
They're just gonna be like, no, there's nothing there.
There's nothing to, there's no,
there's no trade.
There's like, yeah, you have to make sure
that the violence exists to,
like the aircraft carriers exist to enforce
that fiat is gonna be there,
but you also need a trade.
You need to be able to trade fiat for things.
Okay.
When you're advocating for gold,
you're just advocating for banks all over again
because you need, like you can't just have gold
like sitting around or like,
oh yeah, I'm gonna go buy things with gold.
It's like ridiculous.
You ultimately are advocating for,
well, we're gonna have to store the gold somewhere
and they're gonna issue us notes that are backed by gold
and then eventually, well, it's just too cumbersome
to audit the gold, so we're just gonna have,
we're just gonna, I don't know how many notes
we're gonna be out there and then it's like,
well, that's just fiat all over again.
So whenever you're advocating for gold,
you're ultimately advocating for fiat
and it's mind boggling that people do this to themselves.
I personally like gold.
I like silver.
I think the metals are cool.
I think as elements, they have unique qualities.
If you bury gold in the ground
and it's found 10,000 years from now,
it looks identical to when it was buried
because it doesn't tarnish at all.
You can stretch gold thinner than almost any substance.
The astronauts in the glass of their helmets
had gold in the glass because you could stretch it so thin,
it worked as like a UV protection
and on and on.
Silver is the best heat conductor,
one of the best electricity conductors.
I think it has a lot of industrial purposes.
Gold and silver are cool,
but if you've ever owned gold and silver,
let's say that you have a 0.999 gold coin
or you have a numismatic,
meaning one that was made in 1920 by the US Mint
and is worth $5 or $10 or whatever it was worth at that time
and you go to a coin shop,
you have to haggle over the price of what that gold's worth
because it's not just the ounce of gold,
it's what quality is it in.
Oh, it's scratched, it's bent,
it's one shop offers you a certain amount of money
with a little bit of a premium,
one shop offers another one.
You have the danger of walking from your car to the shop
or some unscrupulous shop run by the mob.
You have to deal with things like that.
With Bitcoin, there's none of that.
You can interact with people that you don't know
and the Bitcoin transaction either goes through
or it doesn't.
It's either validated or it isn't.
So it takes, I still like gold and silver.
I love that it exists.
It's not gonna go anywhere.
It's just, we have this other thing
that is a pure form of money that's unconfiscatable,
that isn't corruptible and it's incredibly fungible,
incredibly fungible.
You can break it down to eight digits
past the decimal point and I think there's ways
to make it even more divisible than that
if the value goes up,
although you'd know more about that than I would.
And it's just better, it's a better form of money.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
Gold has its place in the history of money
because you can't fake it.
I mean, you can fake it but you can verify it.
You know, there's a whole problem set to do that
but because of that reality,
that means that there is a limited supply
and you can only mine so much
and because of that, it has limited inflation
and therefore, it becomes a really great store of value,
right, in most of human history,
like converged on gold for that reason alone.
There is, it's very hard to just print more gold.
In fact, it's borderline impossible,
especially with the existing stock, right?
Like the inflation on the gold is never gonna be
above 2% unless we figure out how to mine asteroids.
So gold is not without its qualities
but the problem there is that if there's a better money
that has better qualities,
you're gonna have a situation
where there's a differentiation between these two monies
and somebody is going to capitalize on that differentiation
and the capitalist here, oh, how do you capitalize on it?
Well, when the nation goes totally fascist
and we gotta get out of here,
the guy who's gonna try and cross the border with gold
is not gonna exit the country with gold.
The guy who tries to cross the border with Bitcoin
is going to exit the country with Bitcoin
and that is a differentiating factor about this money
and the consequences there are,
bro, stop, just stop it with the gold.
Like you can invest in gold,
like you can use it for trading and futures and all of that.
Like you can be super into gold and figure it out,
like how to make your living off of gold
and just go for it, do it,
but it's not a better money, right?
And that's what just irks me so much
about like the Creature from Jekyll Island crowd,
like all the old gold bugs, like the boomer gold bugs
and it's like, oh my goodness,
how do you guys get yourself into this predicament?
Like, is it willful ignorance?
Is it just like, oh, you're so invested
that like it's just, it's so impossible
to move that amount of gold
because it's, you know, whatever,
but yeah, it's a whole thing.
Yeah, you and I know so many Bitcoiners
and this thing happens when you meet Bitcoiners.
We don't all believe all the same things,
but there are these common threads.
There's a common morality.
There's like common hopes that we all have,
a common sort of philosophy, a way that we see the world.
And so in the current moment, the boomers,
the people who think Bitcoin's a scam
or think that it's for criminals or something,
they just don't share that philosophy.
That is going to change as Bitcoin just becomes
more and more mainstream, used for more different things.
Those people are going to come around to Bitcoin.
There are tons and tons of videos
that you can watch right now
of people getting pulled over by the police
with large amounts of cash in their cars
and the cops confiscate it.
They're like, why do you have $80,000?
Somebody says, yeah, somebody would be like,
oh, I was going to buy a car.
And they're like, well, we think you might be a drug dealer
so we're going to keep your money.
Or tons of videos of people flying
with $40, $60 worth of silver coins through TSA.
TSA finds it and like, why do you have these silver coins?
And they go through this whole hassle.
So even now, if you try to fly to another country,
you might have your gold or silver confiscated.
Or this is the most ridiculous thing.
20 years ago, you couldn't fly with $10,000
to another country without declaring it.
Now, the amount, I believe, is the exact same
and $10,000 is worth a whole lot less value.
It's not even a big deal if you fly.
But you can fly with a million dollars right now
on an app on your phone with Bitcoin on it
or in a hardware wallet or storing the keys in your head.
And it's completely voluntary up to you
whether or not, nobody would ever do this,
whether or not you want to declare it.
I've flown with all the Bitcoin that I have,
everywhere in the world that I've ever gone.
I've never had to declare it anywhere.
And I've also gone to foreign countries
and used Bitcoin to buy things in those countries.
And when you do that, you're not paying
a capital gains tax on your Bitcoin
if it's not in some third-party exchange
that's reporting and sending a 1099 to the IRS.
If you have Bitcoin on a hardware wallet
and you go to Costa Rica right now,
I was just watching a video that Francis Poulant,
I don't know how to pronounce his last name.
It's French.
Yeah, it's French.
He was French-Canadian.
He was buying all kinds of stuff.
He was buying amazing cuts of beef and raw milk.
And he's transacting in Bitcoin over the Lightning Network
in a foreign country as a Canadian.
You think he's paying capital gains tax to Canada
on that Bitcoin?
Not a chance.
Maybe.
Watch, you're gonna be stopped at the border
next time you travel.
Thanks, AI.
Thanks, FBI guy.
Yeah.
NSA is recording this entire podcast
and just transcribing it in AI
and putting out a warrant for my arrest right now.
Yeah.
But don't worry,
because they won't be funded much longer anyway.
So, great.
Are you paying your taxes this year?
Of course.
I'm not like...
One, like you mentioned earlier,
the incentives to make crazy amounts of money
are just so broken.
So it's like, why bother?
So we essentially just live with totally within our means.
And it's like, when you live totally within your means
and you have, you know,
your particular tax situation of,
that's just every day we buy groceries,
we're not buying luxury cars,
we're not doing crazy things,
we're not getting insane amounts of debt or whatever.
It's like, oh, okay.
Our taxes are gonna be pretty low
because we're adults being responsible.
So yeah, pay your taxes.
It's not worth it for me.
Not worth it for me to fight it.
I'm not paying my taxes this year.
There you go.
No, I mean, I will always just pay the taxes
because it's better to just pay the money
they're extorting you for
rather than face the penalty of possibly going to jail.
But I am going to put as much money into Bitcoin
to never be put into fiat so they can never have it again.
And when you do that,
you're extracting the value out of the fiat forever,
which feels great.
Now, I will say,
when I say I'm not paying my taxes this year,
we had those fires in Los Angeles.
And so for whatever reason, for Los Angeles County,
you can file an extension
and you don't have to pay the taxes until October 15th.
And the reason that I'm doing that
is because the chances are so incredibly high
that if I don't take those taxes that I owe,
which is tens of thousands of dollars,
and I might instead take it and put it into Bitcoin
and hold it for a few more months,
the potential of that value increasing by a huge amount
is incredibly high.
Bitcoiners are doing this, by the way.
In fact, one of the guys who I follow on Twitter,
he's just publicly posting this.
He didn't pay his taxes,
but he went through the deferred,
like, okay, I'm gonna do a tax extension
and all that stuff.
So he didn't pay his taxes.
This says he owes $10,000 in taxes.
Doesn't pay it and instead just invests it in Bitcoin.
And I don't know what the IRS charges on the taxes owed,
but it's probably less than Bitcoin expected CAGR, right?
So he's just like,
well, I'm just gonna arbitrage the difference on that.
And he's winning.
And it's like, bro, this is ridiculous.
It's like, that's the kind of thing where it's like,
mm, this is, Bitcoin really does change the incentives here.
Like, if everybody just jumps on that train of,
wait a second, what if I just defer this indefinitely?
I could just defer this indefinitely
and then invest the balance in Bitcoin and I'm good to go.
I mean, this account is,
he's also one of the guys who's like,
oh yeah, I just take out as many credit card debts
as I possibly can and refinance
to the lowest interest rate possible
and then put it all in Bitcoin.
And then he publishes the chart differences
and it's like, oh yeah,
well, of course Bitcoin is just like everything.
I'm like way above on all of my payments.
Even if I like never pay this off,
I'm like still way far and above.
I mean, if you never pay it off
and you expect a power law distribution for Bitcoin,
you're gonna get wrecked in the longterm.
But at some point you should pay it off, point is.
But in the short term, you can make way more
just because the CAGR is so different than your APR.
Like it's just, this is ridiculous.
It's like, it's fundamentally breaks these systems
that are predicated on fiat just losing money, right?
It's crazy.
It's risky and neither you or I can predict the future.
So I'm not gonna recommend that anybody does that.
Do not recommend.
I can tell you matter of fact though,
in the amount of time that I've been a Bitcoiner,
had I put all of my bills on credit cards,
only paid the credit card minimums
and invested absolutely as much money
into Bitcoin as I possibly could,
I would have made millions of dollars.
And my bills, my credit card bills,
even with interest wouldn't come anywhere close to that.
And so at some point I could just pay that debt off
very easily by selling a little bit of Bitcoin
and paying on capital gains on the appreciation
of the Bitcoin that I sold,
zeroing out all my debt and continued to do it.
That's not to say we won't have a two-year bear market.
And if you had just started that
and went into a two-year bear market,
you could literally go bankrupt.
I mean, that's like the, I think it's a Mark Twain quote,
you know, how'd you go broke slowly then suddenly.
That could happen to you, but also gradually and suddenly.
The same thing can be said about how is a fiat
going to hyper inflate gradually then suddenly.
We're in a, there's a push and pull,
a seesaw, I don't know, you know,
which is going to happen first, I don't know.
I can't, like we can't predict the future,
but I can just say I have very strong conviction
that over the longer term, over a two-year,
five-year, 10-year time period,
the value of Bitcoin is just going to keep going up
and up and up because inflation's not going to stop.
And Bitcoin just gets more and more and more scarce
over time, it's programmed into Bitcoin.
Yeah, the, one of the thoughts that pops into my head
as you're explaining that, there's a,
one of the problems with going down that,
the path of, oh, I'll just take out debt
and I'll owe the IRS money and I'll just 100%,
like as max out everything I can
and just do minimum payments, et cetera.
Like, okay, cool, if you make a lot of money, right?
And then you don't have a lot of other expenses
that like you don't have responsibilities
and like you have, because the risk here is that,
well, what if you get fired?
And then all of a sudden you have to pay
and Bitcoin's down, right?
Like, oh, you have to pay $10,000 of interest
on your credit card bills that month
because you're in over $100,000 of debt
or I guess it'd be probably less than that.
But, and Bitcoin's down that month.
And so you're just wrecked.
Like, you're a wiped out margin called.
I mean, you can do it where you're smart about it,
but the fundamental thing, like,
so you don't get margin called
and there's ways to go about that, which is cool.
But I think there's a lower layer to that.
And the lower layer to that is like,
your time is not your own.
You are in debt.
You are a like slave, essentially,
a debt slave to paying this off.
You are responsible.
You are like, you have to do this thing.
Now, hey, it's essentially collateralized debt.
So you can kind of like sell the Bitcoin
to immediately pay off the debt, potentially,
maybe if you wait long enough.
But man, it's just, for me, it's like, no, no, no.
The debt is debt is debt.
The debt is debt.
Like, you are in, you are a debt slave to the debt.
Your time is not your own.
You have something literally around your neck
pulling you down, right?
Constantly, if you're in debt.
I don't know.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of debt.
I don't think that, I don't think it's,
Chesterton has a fantastic quote on it.
I'm not even gonna try and butcher it.
But when you own,
debt, somebody owns your life.
They can take your life from you, right?
Think about it like, oh, well,
the collateral for your debt is your life.
It is your ability to make money.
It's your ability to pay for the debt.
So it makes sense, logically,
this is the Chesterton point,
that I should be able to take your finger
or that I should be able to take your hand
because you owe me your life
and your finger is part of your life.
So I'm taking your finger, right?
That's like, that's the philosophical high level.
And it's like, oh, that's just mafia.
Yeah, well, that's what debt is.
That's just, that's the whole premise of debt.
It is extremely not good.
And here we are waltzing around our modern,
modern economy, oh, so advanced.
It's just debt and it's just slavery
and it's just oppression of all sorts of layers
and systems and it's crazy.
Anyway, that's my diatribe.
Our entire society, our entire culture is based on debt.
The money that we use is debt.
The dollar is debt.
And we have a huge national debt.
And what do we do?
They just, they, I'm saying we,
they say, ah, well, we can just print the money
anytime we can pay the national debt.
So it doesn't even exist.
Psychologically, it feels terrible to be in debt.
And that's why I wouldn't recommend that strategy.
And the other thing, and you've witnessed this,
is what happens usually with Bitcoiners
is they don't go into debt.
They don't take on massive credit card debt
because when you do that,
even if you are only paying minimums on credit cards,
you still have to pay those every single month.
Whereas if your credit card bill is zeroed out,
you don't have to pay anything to anybody.
If you don't have a car payment,
you don't have to pay anything to anybody.
And then if you go out and work hard and earn an income,
it's up to your discretion how much you want to invest.
You own your life, yeah.
Yeah, and so Bitcoin is often,
the effect that it has on most people
is it makes them more responsible.
They wanna work harder, they wanna earn more money.
They don't wanna buy the newest car and finance it.
They don't just spend frivolously
on things like clothes and super nice meals.
Bitcoiners tend to take on a little bit more
of an ascetic life, a little more humble,
a little more austere.
And then they take the extra income that they're earning
and invest it more in Bitcoin with a longer term,
lower time preference frame of mind.
And then psychologically,
you actually have savings that's growing
kind of in the way that theoretically money would grow
if there was no inflation on your money
and you could put it in a bank account
and trust the bank to pay you interest
on that money that compounds.
Now, you are the bank if you own Bitcoin
and your money is compounding
as the value of Bitcoin grows over time
and nobody can ever take it away from you
and you can take it anywhere you want.
So it gives you freedom and it gives you sovereignty
over your own money, over your own mind,
over your own life.
Which basically nobody has in a fiat world.
Nobody has any sovereignty over their life or mind.
From the day you're born, all your schooling,
all your work life, and apart from the few exceptions
who go on to, oh, I'm gonna think for myself
and be an entrepreneur and blah, blah, blah,
very few people enter that path
because the vast majority of us are just trained
from birth to be subjugated by this system.
Do what the system says, like just 100% bought in,
don't think about it, just be an NPC,
march, do your orders, take your, I don't know,
eat your food, watch your movies, and that's your life.
And it's like, man, we were made for so much more than this.
But we can't do that because we're in debt.
So it's like, bro, this is crazy.
Yeah, so basically what I'm saying is being a Bitcoiner
makes you better.
You become better by Bitcoin.
So you're better by Bitcoin.
Yeah.
You become better.
You get better, you get way better with Bitcoin, indeed.
You do, everything gets better with Bitcoin.
I know, and I don't know, you wanna leave it at that?
I mean, that's the whole point, so.
Yeah, we're probably gonna leave it at that.
How long are we gonna go for, 47 minutes?
We're gonna talk about AI.
I guess I could say one more thing.
I did, I put my bookkeeping this year into Grok,
and Grok walked me through how to make a perfect spreadsheet
for my CPA with perfect formulas.
Grok checked the formulas over and over and over again.
You gave me an incredible suggestion
to when I give Grok instructions,
rather than just saying, okay, tell me what you think,
at the end, writing, ask me questions before you begin.
And then the AI refines, it refines everything.
So you don't have to go through the editing steps.
It refines it before it ever does the computations.
And a job that normally takes me two weeks,
which is insane, because my time is incredibly valuable,
so I'm wasting it to pay taxes normally.
This entire thing took me three hours.
I gave it to my accountant, and he was blown away.
He didn't understand, because I don't have a bookkeeper.
Now I do, AI is now your bookkeeper, pretty amazing.
Yeah, it's incredible.
And the IRS has the same tool on the other side, blah, blah.
What is the, it's the, this is a tweet that came out,
I'm gonna butcher it again, but this is a tweet
that came out right when AI was like really,
like right at the forefront of it,
when people were like getting their minds blown
about what it could do at this point in the game.
And the tweet is something along the lines of,
we're gonna be able to use AI to write people emails
about tactfully and where we're headed
and all this other blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera.
And then the people receiving these extra long,
very nicely worded emails are gonna use AI
to read the emails to condense it down
so like, bro, just send me the text message
that says, no, I'm not gonna do that.
Or like, it's like, what are we doing here, right?
Like, and to go back to this, it's like,
every AI transaction, a lot of people don't realize this,
is a crazy amount of energy.
That's why it's not free, right?
It's a crazy amount of energy.
And most of these companies are gonna be,
if they're like, I don't know if they're profitable.
I highly doubt they're profitable.
They're in the stage of the growth stage, right?
So they are going to be,
every single one of these is tons of energy on the inputs
and then tons of energy evaluating the outputs
and the consequences are gonna be,
well, why didn't we just simplify the whole thing
so we didn't have to waste all this energy?
That was another tweet I saw recently.
It was like, Tesla dropped their support of Bitcoin
back in 2019 or 18 or whatever it was,
dropped their support of Bitcoin
because it was bad for the environment
because of the energy consumption that Bitcoin uses.
And now Tesla and every other company in the world
is going so hard on AI that they literally
are building nuclear power plants to support this stuff.
And it's like-
They fired back up Three Mile Island.
Yeah, what's the, guys, like, what the?
They're losing the plot, man.
Yeah, you know what else is interesting about that?
They're making these huge data centers all over the country
and it's essentially just to run,
I don't know what they run on, it's like a GPU or something.
Though, you either could have a huge data center
of ASICs mining Bitcoin
or you could have a huge data center of GPUs processing AI.
And which is gonna be the more profitable thing?
So that'll be an interesting,
I'm sure there are people
that are having that debate right now.
I use NiceHash back in the day
and I remember the guy that said,
he was like, yeah, I'll pay you in Bitcoin,
but you're probably doing data mining
for Russia or something.
It could be really shady stuff.
You don't know how it's being used.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There was one more thing
that I wanted to mention about this
and I completely blanked on it.
So when, like, to,
to really nail at home in terms of the energy consumption,
to scale Grok up, they had to have,
and you can like look up the picture online,
but it's something like,
they had their warehouse for all the,
like the data center, right?
And then they had a huge parking lot
and like the entire warehouse
was essentially surrounded by those,
you see them on film sets all the time,
I forget what they're called,
but like the generator that's on the back of a truck,
it's like a massive generator.
So a warehouse, it's so,
cause they didn't have the power
until the new systems were brought up.
They just, they were just literally,
the whole warehouse is just surrounded
by fuel burning power generators,
creating kilowatts of power for the GPUs.
It's just like, you guys, you just so lost the plot.
It's incredible to me, but whatever.
I remember what I was going to say
and it's, so first thing,
on that same subject, there's a new show coming out.
It's called Long Way Home.
So with Ewan McGregor and Charlie Borman,
they did a show called Long Way Round
back in about 2006, 2007,
where they rode their motorcycles
from England all the way around the world to New York.
You ever seen that show?
Amazing, incredible show.
No, I haven't.
It was a British show.
Then they did another one called Long Way Down,
where they rode from the tip of Scotland
to the bottom of Africa on motorcycles.
So that was season two, it was a few years later.
Then they did one for Apple TV called Long Way Up.
And in this one, they rode from the tip of South America
to the Arctic in North America.
But on this one, they wanted to do it in a,
let's save the environment and ride electric motorcycles
and we'll drive Rivian trucks.
And so it became sort of-
So brave, so brave.
Yeah, I know, so brave.
So it was a promotional piece for Rivian.
It was a promotional piece for Harley Davidson motorcycles.
But the thing was,
there was nowhere to charge the motorcycles.
And so if you look in the footage,
you can actually see,
especially as they're getting on ferries,
they had a gigantic truck with them the entire time
with a huge diesel generator on the back of the truck.
And so they were charging the electric motorcycles secretly
with a diesel generator
because the motorcycles could never make the trip.
And so they just came out with a new season
called Long Way Home.
And in this one, they're exploring Europe
and they're doing it on old vintage motorcycles,
gas guzzling, burning vintage motorcycles.
And it looks really good, but it's just funny.
I feel like they came full circle.
So that was the first thing I want to say.
And then the second thing I want to say was
back on the AI front,
a thing that I really want to do
that I don't feel like enough people are doing yet
is I had to call the court of Southern California
because I got jury duty and I couldn't do it.
And the whole time I was like caller number 97
and it was going to take two hours or something.
And I could so easily just tell some AI
to stay on the phone.
And as soon as they got a human
to just tell them the information that I wanted to convey.
And the amount of time,
like the value that you're wasting
by staying on the phone for two hours,
at this point in time.
Or even better, just heaven forbid,
like they just set up a text system where it's like,
hey, I can't come in.
Right.
I'm going to send you a text.
So you don't have to talk to anybody on the phone.
Oh, what about an app where it's just,
here's your check-in time.
Can you make it?
No, yes, whatever.
It's just ridiculous, the whole thing.
At this point, if you're dealing with dumb inefficiencies,
it's a choice.
You can just choose to opt out of so many things right now.
You can choose to opt out of that
and you can choose to opt out of fiat currency
by just using Bitcoin and understanding Bitcoin.
And it's really not that difficult.
It's not that complicated.
And your life will be made better.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Suffering from inflation is a choice.
100% a choice.
You do not have to suffer from inflation.
Nobody does.
Not a single person on earth does.
And yet, they do.
Because they don't understand
that everything's better by Bitcoin.
Exactly.
All right.
With that, let's sign off.
Anton, thank you for joining on the show today.
And we'll see you next time.
Better by Bitcoin.
Peace.
♪ Got a good thing coming ♪
♪ And it's all I need ♪
♪ Everything I want ♪