$1 million Bitcoin Samson when's that going to happen my guess is is it's going to be this year it's going to be this year that's a 10x Bitcoin has 17x in the past there is no upper bound to bitcoin people talk about diminishing returns right but if it's a step change just like the failure of the the German Mark it's not a gradual thing and there's no upper bound it's just gone are they scared of Bitcoin Samson I Think the IMF is definitely scared of Bitcoin because they are a Fiat organization with Bitcoin they irrelevant
or they need to adopt Bitcoin it's their choice either you adapt or you die my question to is why is the price still at $97,000 if if we have all this massive purchasing going on is it like a [Music] flush all right we're here in the beautiful El Salvador in the Jan 3 Headquarters in casao with the legendary one only Samsung Ma how you doing man thank you Nico it's great to be here dude great to be here as well I just I kind of want to give a a little bit of the backstory how
we got this working so of course Plan B Forum was just over the weekend uh here in elsb for the first time and I was like Samson you know you want to come on the show and you just replied with do you want to do in a volcano and I just replied with Absolutely period and then we scrambled and we got this together with this beautiful shot by the way for anyone who's watching this it's not a green screen it's an actual volcano so it's pretty cool don't trust verify you can come here yeah it's
absolutely beautiful so uh Samson you you know we're here the price of Bitcoin at the at the time of recording is currently $97,000 I think people were expecting a lot more of it honestly and I think That's something that you've said on recent interviews that Bitcoin is massively undervalued could you talk a little bit about that yeah so I've been predicting 1 million for a while and hopefully I'll hit sometime but I believe this pullback is very normal because the altcoin market was overheated if you look at uh xrp Ripple it was $3 that's ridiculous
with Bitcoin at 97 or so Ripple is still at 260 and then you have salana and Everything everything is overpriced right now for the altcoins so I think it's normal we come down they shake off and then we go back up Bitcoin dominance increases again but Bitcoin dominance is really um intellect measurement like how much money is being allocated to altcoins and that needs to drop before we can take off again I believe but overall Bitcoin is undervalued and I think even at 100K 150 200 it's still undervalued and what's the case for it Being
undervalued well there's just uh so much demand for Bitcoin right now from micro strategy from the ETFs from Nation States from Ordinary People buying and hodling that I don't think people have fully realized that most of the Year supply of mined Bitcoin is already gone a few times over so you have to understand there is Ultimate scarcity in Bitcoin and I believe the understanding of ultimate scarcity is very far away still people just can't Wrap their heads around their only being 21 million and when the price drops people kind of feel confident that I can
get it later but then Bitcoin rips and then there is no later like imagine being able to buy Bitcoin at $10,000 a coin again it's not possible and this Milestone of 100,000 will be gone again in in time and you say that there's there's a lot of Demand right there's the talk of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve which some news came out that Ripple tried to sabotage it and some way it seems like we still have 180 days as a community to kind of fight back on that front and of course a micr strategy buying Bitcoin
a lot of companies following in the footsteps of micro strategy like metap Planet like suar scientific and they're all following the the micro strategy strategy and it seems like all their stocks are performing because of it El savador continues to buy massive amounts of Bitcoin my Question to you is why is the price still at $97,000 if if we have all this massive purchasing going on is it like a flush so there's two things I would say one is there are obviously ogs or old hodlers that are going to sell something and you know buy
a house maybe enjoy life a bit so there will always be some coins that are sold outside of the M Supply but there's also roughly 2 million coins that sit on exchange for Market making trading and Arbitrage and Those 2 million coins it's dropping obviously that it was at more than 2 million before but now it's at you know around 2 million but that is enough for the coins to drop the market and a lot of it has to do with Bitcoin being a 24/7 Market as well so this drop I believe is related to
the ter War you know American Canadian Mexican well we're all going to tarff each other and it's just Panic so Bitcoin being the only 24/7 liquid Market is the only Thing that can react immediately so it sort of like the market sentiment is taken out on bitcoin where the first to move the most volatile and the biggest move and then the equities markets and everything else follows after that when the markets open such an Antiquated concept right but that's what it is but going back to the point those 2 million coins is enough to move
the market a little bit and the impact of those 2 million coins I believe is becoming less And less pronounced as we increase hodlers so if you break down the scheme of who impacts bitcoin price you have the hodlers zero impact they're just sitting on the coins and in ways you can look at it they're coiling up that spring then you have the buyers the people that are DCA either like by day or by month or you can say micro strategies also in the DCA category and hodling but they're actively in acquisition mode and metap
planet and Like you said then you have the Traders which is kind of that 2 million coins so that is kind of what is driving the market and Bitcoin will always be volatile because you have that slush fund of coins on exchanges but that is going to be drained over time and we do see that and it makes it more pronounce the coil up effect from the DCA and the hodlers absolutely what do you think about Trump being Elected I think Trump is the best choice of the current slate of candidates that we have right
now and probably the best option for America moving forward in this period of time cuz he's able to bring together different groups like he brought Elon Musk you know you might think he's a [ __ ] coiner and whatnot but he is the richest man in the world and influential and capable he's able to bring um RFK group the people that are concerned about health and other things And some activism environmentalism so he was able to kind of bridge together different segments of the population that hasn't really been done before in recent times so I
think Trump coin Millennia coin aside it was the best choice that America could have made the other choice was Kamala and dark times uh more Elizabeth Warren choke point 3.0 everything bad possibly for Bitcoin and you know the crypto industry but now we see the tariffs and that's uh another They interesting can of worms but at least you can see that the tariffs are going to be great for Bitcoin I think near-term people that are affected by the tariffs they probably can't see it or they're if they're not into Bitcoin they may not be thinking
about this but it's going to drive a lot of people to look at Bitcoin and protect themselves okay and the the thing that interested me also is the you said operation choke point 3.0 and we just went through Operation choke point 2.0 and a lot of the things that that they were doing they were trying to Aus skate it they weren't being transparent about it do you believe that it was a malicious attack on bitcoin and the Bitcoin industry to at least slow down the adoption of it in the United States definitely it was it
was a kind of covert operation to throttle Bitcoin and crypto adoption and it's really just to protect the existing system right Protect the FED protect the dollar in a certain way protect the banking system in a certain way and all the incumbents right and you see that with uh you know closure of some of the banks for absolutely no reason I think signature right it was just closed for no reason whatsoever and if you guys had elected kamla you would have you know 3.0 another version of joke point and without the new checks and balances
that department of government efficiency is Trying to introduce it sucks that he named it after do yeah take the goodwi of that it was a massive troll what do you think about Ross being freed I think that's the most important thing so I had a wish list uh for Trump I had some predictions and a wish list I think if he just uh frees Ross and stops attacking Bitcoin like stops the attack on bitcoin Bitcoin hodling I think that's enough a strategic Bitcoin Reserve it's good for The government it doesn't really do much for the
people except for a mass education program for the people like okay the government has it now I should have it but outside of that it doesn't really do anything for your average person in the us directly so one of the arguments is that it would be used to pay down the debt it could be used to you know uh get the country out of debt have this reserve for the country and it' be beneficial like at least that's How it's being pitched you're saying that that would be beneficial for the US government but that wouldn't
necessarily be beneficial for us individuals paying off the debt would be beneficial for us individuals but if they used it for that yes if they used it but you don't know what they will use that's a big and you don't know what the composition will be at either of the well because it's not a strategic Bitcoin Reserve now it's a digital asset Reserve which is Broad and Diverse and inclusive but we don't know yet what's going to be in there and hopefully it'll be just Bitcoin but there are obviously altcoin projects lobbying to be included
like Ripple yeah absolutely so what's really interesting about Al Salvador is how much it's been focused solely on bitcoin uh it's like it's resisted that uh how come I think president bul is a bitcoiner trump is not a bitcoiner he spoke at what was it nille conference but he's not a Bitcoiner he's done a lot of other crypto related projects and I don't think he fully understands Bitcoin and you can kind of pick that level of understanding out from his speech if you compare his speech to uh rfk's Speech it's a world of difference so
he's more crypto right and that's probably why the US is not as Bitcoin maximalist as El Salvador is so we'll see how things go over time but there are a lot of lobbying groups in the US obviously too Exchanges that are trying to push them towards you know crypto and if it diversifies the reserve that's probably why so recently the IMF and El Salvador reached an agreement so that El Salvador would receive a loan and I think a lot of people are seeking Clarity in terms of is Bitcoin still legal tender in the country yeah
so it's uh confusing and I would say the breakdown is this it's a a glass of water it's kind of at the halfway mark you can look at it as half Full are half empty so the Bitcoin law has been softened or you can say neutered a bit they've amended it to comply with the IMF agreement almost to the letter so everything they said in IMF agreement they've amended it but I think the key thing is the Amendments leave the door kind of open it's ambiguous so it there is still a Bitcoin law but Bitcoin
is no longer a currency and is legal tender but it is now voluntary so what does That mean exactly it means Bitcoin is legal tender there's no capital gains tax still okay there's another line in there that says you can use Bitcoin the government can't now so there is this Bitcoin law Bitcoin is legal tender but what is a legal tender without enforcement not that there was before it it it always has been voluntary so you can look at it both ways like some people are reacting very strongly saying you know they capitulated they bent
the Knee to the IMF and you know because sold us out and they're very disillusioned and then you have the promoters of El Salvador and uh Buel and they're saying yeah we won we're going to take the money and buy Bitcoin with IMF money but I think the truth is somewhere in the middle there was a compromise there was adaptation the law itself is weakened but Bitcoin still has a standing here in El Salvador so you take the good with the bad I think it makes sense in the long run B is not the president
of Bitcoin he's the president of El Salvador I mean he has to do what he thinks is the right thing for this country and if he thinks the right thing for the country is to secure the IMF loan which will lead to other loans then that's the way they should go there's a couple things that are quite interesting to me so it's still legal tender but it's voluntary and El Salvador is still continuously Continuingly buying it almost on a daily basis yeah so I mean sounds like a pretty good compromise and then if you're coming
at it from a bitcoiners perspective you would want Bitcoin to be adopted from the bottom up you wouldn't want a top down yeah type of thing and what really sticks out to me and and I remember I I asked uh Mrs MGA the uh Ambassador uh to uh the United States from Al salador and I asked her the same thing about capital gains and I think That's the part that sticks out yeah because as long as there's no tax implications from you using Bitcoin as money then what does it matter if it doesn't have what
does it matter if it has the official stamp of legal tender if people are just still using it to transact yeah so there are things that we can do so gen 3 we work on nation state bco ad option there are interesting interesting paths for us to use Bitcoin as legal tender as a Currency we can go to other countries that have lost recognizing foreign currencies like Guatemala and we can say you know Mr President just accept it it's a foreign currency they have there's precedent already for recognizing and using foreign currencies in different countries
so that's an angle that is interesting for Bitcoin and for Gen 3 to push but we can live without that or we can get another country to make it a currency and follow That angle again but I think the top down is beneficial still because launching Cho uh making these announcements promoting Bitcoin and Co education initiatives that is top down but is sort of an endorsement and a blessing and a lot of people they look towards the government obviously not us but they look towards the government for approval before they do something and it is
something it is worth something and uh Do you before I ask you about Jan 3 do you believe that this was a setback for nation state adoption it's to be seen okay it's to be seen it's not really a setback for nation state adoption I believe nation state adoption has already taken off so once El Salvador made the move we started going forth um you know I started gen 3 I brought on a lot of amazing people to the team and we put together this network of people going out and engaging we've met with uh
The president of Madera he said you know I'm going to make Madera you know a place for Bitcoin uh we met with presidents in many countries around the world we've met with regular ators politicians and even central banks and the tide I believe has turned we now have some central banks reaching out to us someone passed them our email and we got an email a few months back saying we would like to discuss hyperbitcoinization no way yes and then Uh the emails are you know from the central bank we said yeah we're happy to talk
we we know who introduced us but then they sent a meeting invite and the meeting invite was hyper poniz was it like a Google meet yes so was just on on the calendar guu calendar H verbalization and you're meeting with the Central Bank yes that okay all right so we're definitely heading in the in the right direction uh before I ask you about the IMF and what what their Motivation would be to do something like this with Els salador or to ask Els salador to compromise what what is Gen 3 Gen 3 is a company
we do a lot of things our mission is to accelerate Bitcoin adoption or hyperbitcoinization and and basically anything that falls into this Mission we we will pursue so one of the first things we did was launch the aqua wallet a non-custodial Bitcoin and layer 2 and stable coin wallet because we see an opportunity to on board the 400 Million or so tether usdt users into Bitcoin they're already using tether and the sad thing is they're using tether in altcoin wallet so they're getting pushed you know nfts and staking and Defi and gambling and there is
no Bitcoin wallet out there in a meaningful way showcasing Bitcoin layer 2 and tether just a really simple offering and that was our mission to kind of onboard those people into Bitcoin and give uh a Bitcoin wallet that has a lot of utility so that's one Of the aspects of the business we have janry Financial we offer some Financial products and services um one of them is an OTC so we we've been running that for about a year now and the goal is that we have a track record and when the next country says I
want to buy 101 billion of Bitcoin we can say we'll help you with that and then we have the nation state push which is just um a lot of us in our free time which is not that much plus a network of volunteers around the World that try to get us meetings with um presidents and uh Finance ministers Ministers of economy all of these to push for Bitcoin adoption around the world at the top down level so we kind of do both we work on top down and Grassroots I love that so just focused on
hyperbitcoinization I want to ask you about the aqua wallet because I think a lot of bitcoiners expected that in the developing world you're going to see massive adoption of Bitcoin as people Sought non-sovereign Alternatives because their local Fiat currencies were so terrible but I think what we saw instead what the market is telling us is we we're seeing this massive adoption of of stable coins specifically stable coin tether like uh the the dollar stable coin yeah um I think it's quite interesting I think a lot of bitcoiners didn't expect that but you know being from
Latin America myself originally I think for a lot of people It's hard to understand that they're just trying to get by yeah right they don't have the luxury of being able to save yeah so just having a currency that is stable that they can earn in is a massive upgrade to uh you know where they could have been before yeah I think it comes down to uh Alex glad sein's book title you know check your financial privilege a lot of people a lot of bitcoiners especially really hardcore Maximus are like Bitcoin and nothing Else but
you have the luxury as a A bitcoiner in the west to buy Bitcoin a lot of people are earning just trying to earn a living and get by they may not have a bank account they can't get a bank account because they don't have an address and they're excluded the the financial system is a two-tier system people can get in and people cannot get in that's it and it's engineered that way and it will always be that way the only thing that can break that system is Bitcoin so the reason why people are seeking tether
and uh stable coins is because they need access to that system they don't yet understand Bitcoin but they do want the dollar to hedge right so if you're a merchant and you're selling stuff and your suppliers want dollars or you know Argentinian Pesos and you have Bitcoin you know there is vol ility in Bitcoin both ways and we can't ignore the fact that you know uh some guy taking Bitcoin can lose a Significant amount of money just by taking Bitcoin and not hedging because that's not their savings it's not yet really savings as long as
there is volatility it's savings for people that for people that can weather volatility people that can't they need a stable unit and you know Bitcoin is like to say well stable coins are not stable because the Fiat money is devaluing but compared to the Argentinian PES so the dollar is gold right or compared to the bivar it's Gold and I think we just have to ignore people that criticize that and focus on onboarding these 400 million people to liquid tether and Bitcoin well it's a stepping stone it is and then there there's another part the
it's an interesting phenomenon too because like as bitcoiners shouldn't we be free market Maxis right and the market is telling us right that the veling World massively in Latin America they're really interested in getting a dollar Rather than you know uh Bitcoin I think it's an educational thing I think it's a survival thing I think it's like the principle like the hierarchy of needs right like you you just need to be able to survive and then you start thinking and I think it's a trojan horse because it gives people essentially the ability to custody dollars
in their mind on a digital wallet without having to go through a bank account and then eventually they're going to to the Conclusion that all of us have had in the west which is like the dollar is a scam too yeah and all roads lead to Bitcoin now you said that Jan 3 focuses on hyperbitcoinization what is that hyperbitcoinization is the point at which we no longer convert Bitcoin into Fiat there's only Bitcoin left so it's the end State really and you could say it's hyperinflation of the dollar really right when a dollar hyper inflates
then no one's going to want the dollar they Will just want Bitcoin so yeah it's the greatest demonetization event in human history basically all Fiat will die all at the same time very rapidly and everyone just wants Bitcoin and transacts in Bitcoin really it's just so you don't see a world where the dollar and and Bitcoin can coexist I don't see it but a lot of bitcoiners do see it I think sailor is one of those like if you look at his um Bitcoin 24 model right he actually tapers off the model after a Number
of years to kind of slow the death of Bitcoin it's still the death of Fiat so Bitcoin growth tapers off but I think monetary systems especially when you're dealing with a 100x improvement over the old system and even over gold it's not a gradual taper it's just a flip of the switch everyone's just going to switch to this new thing I don't see that happening in Bitcoin and we didn't even see that happen with the the devaluation of German mark it wasn't That it slowly tapered off and there was one Baker in this Village over
there that was still taking the mark you know 5 years later because you know you that Network effect of that money dies so maybe some people have it in a drawer but no one's actually going to exchange anything for the the mark and I mean that that's going to be a pretty big impact on the world right that's why we're working on getting Bitcoin option out there as fast as we can to Soften the fall okay like the foundation series right you can't stop the fall but we can soften the fall and and and it's
going to radically change the world and before I I get to that like what are the implications of essentially Fiat ending because it's going to be essentially uh complete a change in the balance of power between the state and the individual and I think there's very very deep implications there but what do you think were the motivations behind the IMF asking for those uh concessions from El salador are they scared of Bitcoin Samson I think the IMF is definitely scared of Bitcoin because they are a Fiat Organization for those of people that don't know they
have their own shitcoin it's called the SDR SDR strategic drawing rights which means they can just kind of print their own money out of th air too but with Bitcoin they're irrelevant or they need to adopt Bitcoin it's their choice either you adapt or you die but I think there's another dark ER angle here which is they're basically a lone shark their job is to lend money in perpetuity to countries like Al Salvador and you know developing places around the world and this kind of puts them out of a job so I think they had
to fight for that or they wanted to save face because remember they made a big stink about all the Bitcoin adoption in El Salvador that you Know you're going to fail you're going to it's dangerous and whatnot and when they're wrong and they're in correct and the the metrics prove them incorrect vastly incorrect I think they need something to save face so maybe they insisted on these concessions just so they can say yes we got something yeah it it definitely felt that way it definitely felt that way because it was like haha we won but
if you it's what you said with the analogy Of the the the the glass right it really depends on how you look at it but the most important aspects there's no capital gains implications yeah you could still use it as money they're still buying it as Reserve so did they really win right it's like it's like an Optics it was for the Optics more than the substance yeah from my perspective and as you said it doesn't really matter because that's kind of government top down and option is icing on the cake the Real important part
is the Grassroots adoption and I think that still needs work too we should not be lying to ourselves and say yeah it's perfect already we've got you know educational initiatives and we're good here there's still a lot of people here in El Salvador that have no idea and we still have a lot of work to do guys I want to tell you about our sponsor Bitcoin well.com it's the best place to build your automatic self- custody Bitcoin Stack what makes Bitcoin well different is that it's a completely non-custodial platform which means as soon as you
buy Bitcoin on bitcoin well and the funds clear they go straight to your self- custody Bitcoin wallet address enable your Independence today with the fastest and safest way to buy Bitcoin and Canada and the United States head over to bitcoin.com to get started so I I want to talk about the end of Fiat and this is a fascinating subject you know I Think every bitcoiner has read the book The sovereign individual by now at least a couple times uh in the book essentially makes the case that information Technologies were essentially going to take away the
importance away from nation states and from governments and one of the biggest funding mechanisms of government of the state is is their ability to print money out of th a once that ability goes away what is the role of government in Society hopefully is reduced massively the whole way that government works right now is very flawed and I think about this a lot because I work on a game set in the future so I'm trying to think how does government work in the future and there's there are differing schools of thought you know some people
some bitcoiners think uh Anarchy and you know it's just free-for-all I think you still need some structure in place because there will be bad people that do Bad things and you need to be able to deal with that somehow and I think there will still be a need for relationships with other groups like diplomacy so I think there is some role for government very scaled back very administrative not prescriptive in many ways and based off of some sort of foundational codex of laws that's far simplified and mirroring a bit of Bitcoin so consensus-based rules where
to do something you need a Super majority to consent to it so there is no war no emergency act you know no martial law able to be done without active consent of people so that's probably somewhere we go but definitely Bitcoin will change that relationship because they can't print money they can't take your money so they have to they just shrink naturally and and I think this is a good thing because most of the problems we have today is the government is trying to do everything it Starts out slowly but as you give people free
stuff they want more free stuff and it just spirals out of control where you have some of those things uncovered by the department of government efficiency which is the treasury was just paying bills indiscriminately to uh terrorists too so it just becomes a big machine that lives off of its own bureaucracy 100% And it's self funded it has a self-funding mechanism and unlike Private Business uh there's no feedback Like if you know you run gen 3 a certain way or if I run simply Bitcoin a certain way we will go out of business there is
no feedback whatsoever with government and what what you're saying what Doge has been uncovering has been ridiculous and then you're just like what do you mean you sent $50 million to that like what what is this and they don't care but there's no there's no feedback mechanism incentivizing them to care the feedback mechanism is elections so you Get feedback every four years and you know people have very short attention spans and memories so you know they forget and then you reelect them again that's why Trudeau was elected twice yeah so it's kind kind of sad
but Bitcoin gives me hope that it will break this system so Bitcoin fixes this it fixes this it's a popularity contest to see who controls the money printer yeah so what what have been some of the difficulties that you have run into Running gen 3 uh rolling out the aqua wallet really uh pushing forward uh you know Bitcoin adoption worldwide what are some of the things that have happened since you launched gen3 that you would have never expected to run into so let's let's see the aqua side the biggest challenge for us is we're trying
to build it non-custodial because I don't think you can make a custodial wallet that can scale to Planet scale and most importantly on board the billions of People that cannot access the financial system so it has to be on custodial if you're trying to get licenses everywhere until there's a massive sea change and everything is deregulated it's just too slow costly and burdensome to do that so if you want to build it noncustodial you have a new set of challenges which is delivering a venmo like experience without having custody and that's actually very hard to
do and it slowed us down but I think we're almost there So we do a lot of interesting cryptography and tricks in there to make the the swap system and everything seamless so it's like PayPal or venmo you're it works it just works but it's all non-custodial so if a transaction a swap fails it just Auto refunds back to your wallet and that took us a lot of time to get right um we're trying to implement things like U lightning address but non-custodial too so there's a lot of thinking that we have to put Into
how we do the these things but that that was the biggest challenge for us and also we got a massive influx of users which we didn't expect and that kind of made it more challenging to we we to bring on more support people and it slowed down Dev as well on the nation state side I would say the challenge was we had the FTX fraud and blowup that slowed us down a bit there was a number of countries we had meetings planned with and because of that Bitcoin seemed To be uh you know the Pariah
again and they didn't want anything to do with us or Jan Jan 3 or Bitcoin even though it's FTX and it's because they use ftt as collateral but now that we're back it's much easier and especially with the talk of the uh strategic Reserve in the US that changes things a lot so the ETFs changed the conversation that made it easier the Trump edman coming into power and formulating this path to a reserve has made it easier yet again for us so Tail wins now that's good I mean it's it's very interesting to hear about
the difficulties that you're running into with aqua um I'm glad to hear that it's non-custodial how did you pull that off because I feel like n non-custodial lightning at the moment is an absolute nightmare yeah so we we actually use a trick um we're using liquid as the base layer okay and we're using bolts to do swaps to lightning so oh interesting it's not really a lightning wallet and a Lot of Hardcore bitcoiners were saying that's not a lightning wallet we never said it was a lightning wallet but does it matter if it does the
same thing well to some people it matters so your choice is right now a custodial wallet where maybe you kyc maybe you didn't but if you didn't kyc then you actually have limits and you have risk of you know losing your funds somehow um if it's a non-car wallet like Phoenix or whatever you actually have to do a lot more and There are cost like opening up a channel rebalancing those are all touching the main chain right so people think um it's cheap they they say well I'm using Phoenix and I can pay one set
but you actually paid you know four bucks or eight bucks when it was expensive to open the channel at that time but if you have liquid this as this stable middle layer and liquid's been around for8 years now very reliable Rock Solid block stream we launched that when I was there It's a a touch point so like it's like a a midst step so you don't have to go back to the main chain and you can go back up to lightning it's a stable repository for your Bitcoin which also has confidential transactions by the way
so it gives you even better privacy I believe the the Phoenix guy said you know right now because we're the LSP and whatever we it's not using Phoenix doesn't give you better privacy than using wallet Satoshi or anything else They can see everything but with aqua you have liquid with confidential transactions and we do swaps with bolts so it's probably the most private way to use lightning right now other than running everything yourself why do you guys uh decide to use Liquid I think liquid is a great technology and it is it was always needed
because it's a way to scale Bitcoin with side chains so liquid is anchored to bitcoin there can only be potentially 21 million coins in Liquid because you have to Peg them into the liquid network but it gives you that confidentiality of confidential transactions and you can unblind transactions if you need to unblind it but this is actually a very important thing not just for lightning privacy but for stable coin privacy too so my friend Rosel was telling me it's actually dangerous to use stable coins in Latin America the current ones like Tron and on ethereum
and Tron because those are Account based systems liquid is utxo base it's a fork of Bitcoin so it's 99% the same code battle tested as Bitcoin but with the confidentiality when I send you tether on liquid you can't see how much tether I have whereas if you're using Tron you send me that you know let's say my cousin's a gangster he'll say like yeah who's that guy and how much Tron does how much tether does he have and then he goes and robs you or tells someone else to go rob you and That's that's a
real danger I think that has not really been fully crystallized in people's understanding yet but I think they will understand but above that liquid transactions are super cheap now they're about three cents uh there was a big upgrade to the network as part of um project tsunami to make everything faster and cheaper and now Bitcoin is probably the liquid is probably the cheapest way to transact stable coins in Lam in the most reliable fashion Interesting and and uh I didn't know that very very interesting so what what do you think happens to the price of
Bitcoin if the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve thing does go through in the United States it looks like it's going to happen on the state level uh before the federal level well as Adam back says that's the path to 1 million $1 million Bitcoin Samson when's that gonna happen my guess is is it it's going to be this year it's going to be this year you look At all the factors we're facing you have uh that's a 10x Bitcoin has 17x in the past there is no there is no upper bound to bitcoin so there there are
people talk about diminishing returns right but if it's a step change just like the failure of the the German Mark it's not a gradual thing and there's no upper bound it's just gone and you use a new thing now right it's like yeah we don't use horses for transportation anymore you know we came here on a car on Airplanes and whatnot so we used to use the new thing and Bitcoin is that new thing because it's a hundred if not a thousand times better than anything else we've used as money in human history but back
to the point what do we have we have Micro strategy buying nonstop we have ETFs which are a doorway to Legacy Fiat money if you go back to all the previous bull runs where we get bogg down is the exchanges because that's the touch point right that's how you convert Fiat into Bitcoin and if you remember back in the old bull runs it was like kraken's uh backlog for KY seeing people was 3 months long coinbase same thing it's that's the bottleneck because to comply as an exchange you have to kyc everyone and you don't
keep a thousand person kyc team right you have to keep a team that you can feed and you can't scale it up that quickly so that's kind of where it tapers off but with the ETFs there is no Bottleneck anymore central banks can buy ETFs so any demand for Bitcoin can now be satiated without any problem whatsoever and that is really big that's why I actually thought 2024 was going to be the year we hit 1 million because I don't think people fully understand how big that is central banks can buy ETFs there is no
barrier for Fiat money entering Bitcoin but I think this year we'll hit it since we missed last year But you have Micro strategy you have ETF you have the removal of the barrier you have nation states and what else there's just so much going on like real adoption of Bitcoin so I just can't see it not hitting 1 million this year and the other thing is uh you see a lot of people predicting prices right they like to be cautious and realistic and say yeah it can get to 150 it can get to 200 it
can get to 250 Because I think they want to sound reasonable nobody wants to be the crazy guy saying it's going to 10x like me they want to be you know I'm I'm I'm a serious person with realistic projections but Bitcoin is not a realistic thing it's a zero sum game either you're GNA use Bitcoin or you're going to starve so it's all or none and when you get to different levels like when you get to 100K when you get to 100K it's different right When you get to 200 200k the world again looks very
very different just just close your eyes and imagine what does the world look like when Bitcoin is at 500k that's uh we reaching half of Gold's market cap at that point you know that will demonetize gold if it doesn't get demonetized earlier because there's talk of um you know the US selling gold to buy Bitcoin to fund their reserves cuz that would take out their enemies who have been accumulating Gold for the last decade right but disregard that Bitcoin is sitting at 500k we are the second largest asset now behind gold it's a very different
landscape and at that point do you think most people would still want to sell their Bitcoin to get Fiat or would most people now insist on being paid in Bitcoin I think it's the latter so from there you're just 2x yeah and then you're number one it and you know it's it's interesting because I so I come from the the bullish school of thought too but my my thought process is a little bit different this cycle reminds me of 2017 and 2017 we went from $1,000 in January to the end of 2017 we went to
20K yeah no one had any idea yeah it was going to happen in January in fact in January the price stayed at a 2021 happened and I believe 2021 was artificially cut short because of the China mining band because of FTX because Of Celsius yeah and I think people have forgotten what a true Bitcoin bull market feels like yeah and I'm getting the same type of kind of consensus understanding which is 150k 200k Bitcoin you and I both know that when everybody on X or Twitter is calling for the same price predictions Bitcoin does the
exact effing opposite so either we're going to underperform which I doubt or we're going to overperform which no one is expecting Yeah more than 200,000 more than 300,000 that's my thought process at kind of getting to I don't know if it's a million but half a million I wouldn't be surprised at all if we hit it this year I think it's it's just I don't know what to call it it's like a a precipice effect you know like you're standing on the edge of the cliff people are because yeah we can fall a lot from
100K and that's why you kind of like hover at that area for a while because it's scary Looking down like what if we go to 70 and you remember when we had a little dip everyone was saying oh we're going to back to 70 yeah but when things solidify then you kind of go up and everyone that was panicking and looking down looking off that precipice they've been left behind already and because the supply is so limited right now and the demand is so high it's just going to shoot up and you're going to see
that kind of 2017 face melting shock and awe Raise rise in bitcoin price absolutely and I think I think uh the reason that I would it's because no one's seeing it everyone has again this General consensus of the price no one is really uh no one's really expecting it and Bitcoin tends to do the things that everyone least expects especially if this strategic Bitcoin Reserve thing uh comes through to fruition like I think it's going to happen you know over the price is just going to 2x or 3x Overnight because it's essentially a rubber stamp
of approval by the most powerful government on the face of the planet now my question to you is what happens when central banks that have the ability to essentially create money out of nothing start using that ability to buy something that has absolute scarc scarcity like Bitcoin Omega candles la is coming out of a volcano Perhaps Perhaps so yeah but what happens what breaks I think they can go for a while And print because the world seems to take time takes time to adjust if you look back at the the lockdowns and the pandemic or
planemic when they shut everything down the prices didn't jump it took two to three years right for kind of the normal person to understand or even anybody in the supply chain to understand what's fully happened and then you saw the inflation come so all the money printing the shutdown of economies it didn't really kick in until Two years later almost right and I think it's the same everything takes time for the world to adjust to they haven't really fully adjusted or understood the impact to the ETFs and central banks being able to gain exposure to
the ETFs we also forgot to talk about the Czech Republic Bank Central Bank they've approved buying now too so what you're talking about Nico is it's like on the cusp but yeah they can probably print and buy For some time because the ordinary man in the street is not going to fully understand what's going on the pot is boiling too slowly for them to realize if they would have understood the impact you know they would have probably bought Bitcoin already just from trying to hedge against inflation alone yeah do you think Cycles are dead I
don't really believe in Cycles I think if you flip a coin four times and then you flip it four times and you get The same pattern it's a coincidence each flip is independent and there are a lot of arguments of why we have Cycles such as it's tied to the having or it's tied to elections but again I believe in Phase transition step changes you just go to bitcoin and when you go to bitcoin there's no cycle and this is why the power law guys hate me because they expect it's going to progress in a
meaningful way whereas my prediction With Omega candles and everything is it what is an Omega candle an Omega candle is a $100,000 $100,000 candle on a day and you think that's going to happen sooner rather than later it's already happening in other trading pairs oh that's right Egyptian pound Turkish lero to bitcoin they already have omega candles okay this is very fitting talking about Omega candles in front of an Omega volcano yes um so I'm a assuming that you don't believe in Diminishing returns I don't believe in di diminishing returns okay what's the diminishing returns
on air travel from boat travel you know we just have air travel you take boats for leisure now yeah yeah you don't use it for transportation so uh you've said in interviews in the past that the US dollar is going to rebase or debase rebase rebase I've never heard that term what does that mean the US dollar is going to rebase to bitcoin it's sort of Part of that transition to a new money um it's an attempt to shore up and strengthen a currency so you can either do that with gold or anything but you
can also do that with Bitcoin so you can kind of say you know we're going to Peg the dollar to Bitcoin now and the debt is convertible redeemable from Bitcoin so one sat per dollar one sat per is that $10 million do Bitcoin 100 million [Laughter] oh my God is the network ready for that Is the network ready for a 10x like the amount of people that are going to come on board is the is the main chain able to handle that I think so um I think people have kind of Overlook side chains because
they're looking for more shiny interesting things more complex things that sound cool but side chains are relatively simple very reliable and are proven to be a way way that we can scale Bitcoin with just what we have now zero change to consensus rules no need to ask Devs per permission or to have a civil war or do anything you just spin up your side chain and we have liquid which has been running for you know getting close to a decade now and liquid is not decentralized it's a run by a federation we can make the
blocks bigger we can ramp it up we can scale it up make it more robust you can have other liquid federations and that is a way that right now today we can scale Bitcoin to meet the needs so you know Aqua uses liquid Now but let's say liquid is packed and full you know maybe there's another liquid maybe Al Salvador has a side chain maybe the Czech Republic has side chain we can support all of these and we can perform Atomic swaps between different side chains so I don't see any issue with scaling Bitcoin the
question is how you want to scale it because if you're going for or oxy then you're a big blocker and you say we need gigamegs we need terabyte siiz blocks good luck But if you're going to be pragmatic use the technology that we have now and meet the demand we can do all of that already and so it's Bitcoin is able to scale but it has to scale on Layer Two yes gotcha and the technology needs to be built out I think you're solving that with the aqua and the the fancy Tech in the side
and again as a user you don't really care what's happening in the backgrounds like the vast majority of people don't really care vast majority of people Really care is does it work yeah so I mean stable coins again are another interesting example A lot of people down there don't care they're using binance right to transact stable coins send it to my binance account um they're using ethereum Tron they're not ethereum Maxis or Tron fans they just want the the dollar to to save some money yeah right and they will move they're moving from ethereum they
move from ethereum to Tron because ethereum stable coin Transactions were at $8 or something like that right Tron was a you know sub dollar but still around that and now Tron is at $2 and now they're moving to other things too so there's no loyalty it's these are just transport rails to people they just care about being able to move money yeah they and that's the vast majority of people and I think I think bitcoiners forget that on X is that you know the vast majority of people are really looking at the utility Aspect of
it yeah um what would you say to someone that feels they're late to Bitcoin now that it's at $100,000 that's a good question like I like to say we're early but still yeah I think we're still early I mean until we see Bitcoin does it have 100x in it yeah yeah well I mean how much more to go to Dollar set parody yeah right but here's thought exercise next time you're stopped at an intersection at a red light watch people crossing on the Crosswalk and ask yourself how many of them know about Bitcoin probably not
many of them right and you can test this like go to a restaurant and say can I pay in Bitcoin and you know watch them laugh at you and then you can understand exactly how early you are yeah where are we on the eser still uh early adopter still early adopter early adopter gotcha what advice would you give to your younger self if You knew you know you got into Bitcoin where Bitcoin was not as certain I got into Bitcoin class of 2016 I remember the the block the you know the the the Block Wars
it was not fun uh now we know that Jihan and that want to be specific with the names but let's just say that they were artificially making the hash rate go higher uh and there were some doing they were doing some interesting things with exchanges uh to the volume and there was a lot of uncertainy at That point you questioned yourself as a bitcoiner said is this Bitcoin cash thing like are they right you know like now we know after the fact why I knew you knew now we know after the fact yeah but but
it's because I got into Bitcoin through mining but I would say if you're looking at that if you're an observer you don't know right you're looking at that you're like oh my God like is this is this a switch so what I'm trying to say is you got in way earlier right um Things were a lot more uncertain back then did you always know what advice would you give to your younger self is it just going to be like I wish I bought more yeah of course that's the that's the wish everyone has let's scratch
that one out uh what other advice would you give you on yourself for Bitcoin specifically Bitcoin entrepreneurship whatever I think just focus and and think about things that's the advice I would give and could you elaborate a Little bit about what why you would give yourself that advice because I I think most people don't think deeply about topics and if you really analyze a lot of things I think you can reason out through first principles thinking what is the right answer like who's right in the block size War you have to really step back and
objectively look at the motivations and incentives of everyone so I think that's the biggest thing to think like if I was really young and I Had to tell myself something just think more about everything analyze everything what motivated you to start gen 3 I want to accelerate Bitcoin adoption so if Bitcoin adoption if hyperbitcoinization is this demonetization event there's a lot of preparation that has to go into onboarding Humanity to bitcoin and the wallet obviously is a major touch point right most people are going to they're not going to get a node they're just Going
to download a wallet and in an app store so you need to have that solid and ready to onboard people but engaging with governments getting them ready so that they don't in in in the time of failing currencies they don't accidentally adopt ethereum or something as a sound money so it's preparation work so that people understand Bitcoin know how to handle Bitcoin and are ready because the it's going to be messy and we've seen this in recent history India Had a demonetization event in 2016 where they just pulled some notes out of circulation and that
was a big mess and people died because hospitals would not accept the bills that's crazy people were lining up at the banks and dying of exposure to heat you know these things are not orderly so I think given that I'm so bullish I think it's going to go very rapidly we should be out there engaging and educating and trying to onboard people ahead of time getting Parallel systems in place where you have your fiat currency and you have Bitcoin because that's the softest way being able to move in and back to your other question why
at which point are we not early when you cannot buy Bitcoin with Fiat that is late interesting are Central Bank digital currencies still a threat I don't think they were ever really a threat um because people don't want to use them every country that's rolled out a cbdc has sort of failed Even in China which you would think yeah they could pull it off because you can't use vpns this great firewall and whatnot but no one's using uh barely anyone is using the cbdc and then uh Nigeria had the enira it was a total failure
total failure yeah and they had to actually clamp down and limit ATM withdrawals to force people to use what they initially marketed as a convenience tool and you know to help you to keep you safe but if it's so good and so safe why do you need To beat people over their head to use it yeah there should be no need for coercion but you do because people may not understand Bitcoin but they're not stupid they're not going to use something where they can't get out they're not going to check into the roach motel all
right well some do but those are we call them [ __ ] coiners but um generally people know this is inferior monetary technology they may not be able to quantify it and describe It but they know inside yeah and what's really interesting what you said about the coercive aspect right like cbdcs Fiat they do require a form of coercion for people to use uh I think the reason bitcoin's going win ultimately is it's it's incentives it just comes down to incentives B Bitcoin incentivizes people for for them to use it there is no coercion uh
in the in the equation and to me when I really learned that lesson Samson was when the China mining band Happened yeah and the hash rate dropped 50% within 9 months the hash rate recovered decentralizing the process went all over the world Texas Kazakhstan and there was no Bitcoin CEO essentially whipping people to plug in those miners it was just the Bitcoin Network incentivizing people entrepreneurs miners to plug those machines back in yeah so it was pretty crazy it was pretty crazy fun times yeah I mean it it kind of it was Kind of a
bummer because it cut 2021 short like I I really believe I know there's all these other theories but you look at the hash rate and you look at the price drop it's like it's obvious that that's what it was well FTX cut the last one short too yeah that's why I think we should be at 200 right now yeah everything under 200 is you know it's a joke so uh what are the things that worry about worry you about Bitcoin the most I think Bitcoin is pretty solid Right now I don't really have too many
worries if I had to pick one it would be sometime in the future we might have something like a blocksize war or a Civil War uh and it might be from the traditional fin system like the Legacy Finance system CU if you look at the Black Rock ETF filing they actually say in there we get to choose which chain is Bitcoin if there is a split which is incorrect and if they amend that I'll feel better but until they do I think That's a risk hanging over our heads there's a chance that even if that
doesn't happen that Bitcoin can split into two you have uh institutional Bitcoin and free Bitcoin institutional Bitcoin is just locked up in ETF in custodians and it's not allowed to leave and we see Little Snips and glimpses into the future of that right in the UK you can only transfer from one exchange to another exchange right little bits of uh you know Orwellian garbage here and there but that could really happen you just have free Bitcoin which is transacted in in Argentina El Salvador and everywhere else and then everything else is locked up in the
system and it can't escape what can we do as a community to avoid that scenario there may be no way to avoid it but you can protect yourself by keeping your Bitcoin yourself anything that's in the system or connected to the system you have to understand there is Some risk to it there and you may not be able to take it out of that system that leads me to my next question which is the idea of self- custody I think I've been doing this nine years and I have this very uh you know uh ideological
view on self- custody it's like not your keys not your cheese but in actuality I'm I'm the Uncle Jim of my family and my extended family um and even though I've showed them a thousand times how to do it uh for whatever reason writing Down 12 to 24 words is like rocket science um so and then in my experience to use your analogy of earlier on regards to people walking across the street you know the idea of not having a 1 1800 number to call uh is radical it's uh it's it's uncomfortable and now that
leads me to like my conclusion that I've come to with self- custody is have we underestimated human nature as bitcoiners I don't think so we're just Going back to the way it was when everyone was using gold who's the one800 number there's no one800 number we've just been coddled and you know domesticated into the fat system that we think it's normal to be able to have someone help you you know the reality is you have to take care of your money yourself someone else can't take care of it for you or you you think they
can but they're going to steal it slowly if not immediately so you have to take your Assets into your own hands your destiny is your own and I think we've done that in the past with gold we can do it again we can ReDiscover yeah it's just going to take a lot of work I think it's going to be a generational thing uh a lot of education required I don't think so I think you get very fast education like everyone burned in Celsius and FTX do you think those guys learned oh they they learned very
quickly yeah I remember uh earlier on this year my Sister lost her seed phrase and uh I think she definitely learned how to take self- custody in that situation um so we were at uh we were at your red carpet event yesterday um for the HBO documentary money electric uh how did that feel man the red carpet event the red carpet event you being in a feature film uh the documentary as a whole it was fun I would say I think Peter had fun too uh is he Satoshi no he's not the red carpet Event
was fun we thought you know we knew we we're close with the HBO guys and we said you know you didn't have a a live showing or screen anywhere do you want us to help you do one in El Salvador where a lot of the film was filmed actually in El Salvador so we thought it was very poetic that we we bring it here we have a theater we've got a red carpet and we have you know Adam Peter myself and a lot of other people a lot of bitcoiners go and see The movie together
it's like this thing you can't really do that often in your life but go watch the movie with your friends that are in the movie when you got into the industry and you know when you first bought Bitcoin could you ever have imagined what is happening today no no no I think it's uh everything's happened faster and in a much more spectacular way than I imagined that's why I'm really bullish because I'm kind of bullish and then my Expectations are beat and I try to reset them and then they are beat yet again but everything's
happening so much faster like the China ban was a nation state attack then you have a Salvador and nation state adoption the timeline is definitely way faster right it's 16 years and being in it you kind of uh you kind of lose your perspective but if you step back a bit and you try to look at it from afar it's like that's a blink of an eye yeah the the rapid Pace at which We have grown as u a community as an asset class and as a technology for money it's just unbelievable absolutely it's it's
been a hell of a roller coaster ride I don't think i' would want to work anywhere else I'm sure you feel exactly the same way final question what excites you the most about Bitcoin for the next 5 to 10 years watching hyperbitcoinization unfold I think it's 5 to 10 years 5 to 10 years 5 to 10 years I don't think fat can hold out That long so I mentioned all the the Tailwinds that we have this is happening at the same time the Fiat system is facing headwinds right $36 trillion do in debt in the
US every other country is massively in debt with a really crazy debt GDP ratio the Fiat currencies are failing Canadian dollar I don't know if you're watching it but it's going like it's trading like a shitcoin as with a lot of other Fiat currencies the yen is dying right last year there there were So many Bank of Japan interventions to push it from 160 down to 150ish and it's back now how much more Firepower do they have and at what point does that stop working completely in the UK last year the pound almost reached parody
with the dollar which is crazy the government bonds were in crisis the bank of England had to intervene and maybe people are not paying attention now cuz there's so much other stuff going on but the government Bonds in the UK the guilts there are again in crisis so if you look at everything the entire macroeconomic landscape you can see that 1 million is actually really conservative for this year yeah a 10x is just pretty conservative that's a per that's a perfect way to end it Samson it's been an honor we're here at the Jan 3
headquarters in El Salvador filming in front of a volcano that ain't a green screen Samson thank you so much thank You appreciate it thank you ni that was dope volcano energy bro El Salvador Freedom country it was a lot of fun [Music]
