what's up guys bang bang I've got an awesome episode for you today I'm joined by Phil Rosen the co-founder and editor-in chief of opening bell daily in this conversation we dedicate the entire thing to bitcoin we talk about why Bitcoin is the best performing asset so far in 2024 what's going on with so much volatility is that a good thing or a bad thing how do people think about Bitcoin as a savings account rather than a checking or an investment account what would happen if Bitcoin is successful what could the impact be socially around the
world why is it such a powerful idea and then we get into who is Satoshi Nakamoto there's a recent HBO documentary that pontificates whether it is Peter Todd and we get into why it's important that Peter Satoshi our opinions none of it matters I think you guys will really really like this episode Phil does a fantastic job as always so here's my latest conversation with Phil Rosen all right Phil what's the first question you got so Bitcoin is the top performing asset right now and it's returned about 50% this year and that's more than double
the S&P 500 that sounds pretty good a headline but I do think that it's worth noting it's been pretty much flat since March Bitcoin I think it was at 70k in March and now it's actually lower than that by a little bit how do you reconcile it being the top performing asset but also it hasn't made any progress for most of the Year I'll give the critics even a better argument which is it's actually down over the last three years right it hit an all-time high of 69,000 back in 2021 now it's trading in the
low 60s um and so I think that Bitcoin really is is a volatile asset that that's you know a key piece to this um it's obviously sensitive when it comes to monetary policy uh fiscal policy and so we saw a tightening Bitcoin dropped from 69,000 down to I think 177,000 as a significant drop in price most people and most asset classes would sell the asset say I'm done with this thing and move on that's not what happened with bitcoiners so if you look today um you know Bitcoin has fully recovered back it hit a new
all-time high in the low 70,000 uh and it's kind of gone side was as you mentioned since March or so now one of the things that people usually don't remember about Bitcoin is in these foure uh Cycles in the having year there are two things that tend to be true doesn't mean it's always going to be true in the future but so far historically has happened the having occurs there's kind of a runup into that uh event occurring uh what we saw earlier this year was not only did we get the runup because of the
having but we also had the ETF approvals and so there was a repricing of Bitcoin by about a 50% increase going into those uh that having so ETFs get approved in January price goes up having occurs and then there's kind of this like disillusionment for the next you know month or so where everyone was so excited about the having they realize doesn't really do anything and so there's kind of a a sell-off now the sell-off wasn't really that bad but throughout the summer we have what I call the sideway summer and usually in having years
if you go back to 2020 that's exactly what happened kind of Bitcoin you know recovered from the quick drop in March with the having in May and we pretty much went sideways all summer long and so if you go back and you look Michael sailor and micro strategy were buying Bitcoin at around the same price as when the having actually occurred called you know 8500 to $10,000 somewhere in that range and so if we look at what happened in 2020 we then got into uh the end of Q3 beginning of Q4 and really it wasn't
until the end of October November December we then went from call it you know $8 to $10,000 up to around $30,000 to end the year and then that continued into q1 of 2021 where we went from 30,000 all the way up to 64,000 in March and so we had a 600% price increase from the end of Q3 until March of 2021 now there was a big sell-off we then went sideways for a while and then there was recovery to hit the new all-time high of 69,000 at the end of 2021 why is that important I
think that we are following a similar trajectory in terms of trend I don't know about severity so we had the having earlier this year we went sideways we're now getting towards the beginning of Q4 and so towards the end of October beginning of November I do expect price to start to increase it also will coincide with more rate cuts and also it will coincide with the election and so there's kind of a couple of different factors that are coming together that I think will push bitcoin's price higher now how long will that last are we
going to go from November to March again maybe is it going to be a 600% increase that seems unlikely to me and so maybe it's something like hey it is going to be kind of a six-month you know kind of upwards movement in price but over that six months maybe we double in price or we have a 50% increase in price or maybe it's 150% I don't know what the exact severity is going to be but I do feel like a lot of bitcoin's price movement is much more tied to timing of the year of
the having schedule Etc than it is to um oh my God you know it went sideways uh we need a net new buyer to come in it's just we continue to see this pattern over and over again and there's probably something about the having takes about 6 months or so to kind of work itself out so that people start to feel that uh change incoming Supply and so if you have the same demand the supply drops by 50% it works itself out then bam here you go you've got something that seems to be more scarce
in terms of that incoming daily Supply and that ultimately leads to the price uh repricing of the asset you know kind of at the end of that year and into uh beginning of the next year so something you mentioned um right away was how volatile of an asset Bitcoin is and I think your explanation makes a lot of sense but one thing that is difficult to reconcile is how I think 65% of holders have not moved their Bitcoin in the last 12 months so my question is why then is it such a volatile asset if
more than half the people are not even touching or moving their Bitcoin yeah what's a great question the reason why it's volatile is because 65% of people haven't moved their asset in the last 12 months so if you think of just use a company forget Bitcoin for a second if you use a public company there's a a famous example of this uh there was a cannabis stock called tillay and I don't remember all of the exact Det details but basically they took this company public it was one of the first cannabis companies to go public
I think it it went public in Canada and what they did was they floated a very small percent of the equity so the founders and the U executive team said hey we believe in the company we we want to go public we want people to be able to buy the stock but we're going to hold a bunch of it ourselves we're not going to float that stock and so I can't remember if it was 2% or 5% but it was a very small percent so call that you know 90 plus% of the stock is being
held IL liquid because people that hold aren't going to sell it and so there's just a little bit people can buy well there was this massive demand it's one of the first cannabis stocks so all these people come in and they want to buy it and so you can think of let's just say that they had a hundred shares right for the hypothetical example but only five were available for trading because the 95 were being held now everyone's trying to buy one of these five shares and so the share price skyrockets and so I think
that that stock went up something like a th% in like a couple of months and so in that example you're saying to yourself oh my God this stock went up 1,000% whatever it's just Market structure because if they took the other 95% of the stock and they put it into the market it wouldn't have gone up 1,000% it was just that there was a mismatch of demand for the available shares so if you bring that example to bitcoin 65% of Bitcoin is not available it's being held by long-term holders they're not willing to sell it
in the market and so even though there's more than 19 million Bitcoin in circulation there's really only 35% of Bitcoin that is available for trading and so as you get this increase in demand or decrease in demand it is exasperated or kind of exaggerated because you have such a small float compared to actually all 19 plus million Bitcoin that are kind of in circulation and so the reason why that becomes important is as price goes up you will see that number Trend down it actually hits 70% uh I think earlier this year and it's come
down a little bit maybe in December of 2023 so seven out of every 10 Bitcoin in C did not move in the trailing 12 months that's a insane number only three out of 10 are available for trading now as price has moved up we've gone from 70 down to 65% so it's still pretty healthy but by the end of the bull market that number will go from 65 probably down closer to like 55 or 50% and so what people are doing is as price Rises you can think of it as it's a daily bid for
their Bitcoin so right now somebody is saying I'll buy your Bitcoin for $63,000 70% 6 5% of people say I'm not selling but all of a sudden if somebody says I'll pay you 80,000 one more person than probably right now will say you know what 80,000 I'll sell you the Bitcoin then 990,000 100,000 110 120 130 150,000 there's some portion of the people who are not willing to sell at 63 that are going to be willing to sell at 100,000 or 150,000 and so that number will start to kind of Trail down what's fascinating to
me is still more than 50% of all Bitcoin in circulation has not moved in 2 years so the one year numbers impressive because during that time period what we saw is bitcoin's price has gone up substantially but over the 2-year time frame bitcoin's price has tripled so we went from you know kind of sub 20,000 to over 60,000 in a two-year time frame yet one out of every two Bitcoin has not moved now some portion of those are lost we don't know how much I don't think it's as high as a number as some people
think it is but some portion for sure is lost but one out of every two Bitcoin has not moved in 2 years even though the price has tripled those are long-term holders those are people who are saying it's going higher right they're expressing their view in the market because they're not willing to sell at these prices and so that is a huge reason why I think some of the best investors in the world like the Paul tutor Joneses the Stanley D Millers Etc are so excited about Bitcoin is because they realize these people are nuts
they're going to hold the Bitcoin they're going to make it a much less liquid Supply and therefore increases in demand like an ETF are going to Skyrocket the price now what's fascinating to me is the ETFs are also a net new buyer of Bitcoin and they're holding it yes there is a Redemption feature so they can have to sell Bitcoin from time to time but what we see so far in the data is they are usually a net buyer not a net seller and so as Bitcoin goes into those funds it usually doesn't come back
out and so if that continues to happen as well they're just pulling Supply out of circulation they're holding it in their funds and that should continue to lead to higher and higher prices over time and more volatility so you said something there you said uh Wall Street sort of buying in because they realize how nuts the holders are how long-term committed these holders are do you think that undermines the value of Bitcoin if it's just maybe big buyers on Wall Street want to come in because you have this Grassroots investing investing movement where people will
hold Bitcoin forever no matter what one of my theories in markets is that money wants to find courage and this is very counterintuitive most people think that money wants to find where is it safest where is it going to be uh kind of cared for best where I can't lose it that's not what happens usually what happens is that investors are Risk Takers they want to find risk but the best place to take risk is when you take risk in a crow out and so what they see is that the bitcoiners are Maniacs they're like
these guys buy this thing and it doesn't matter if it goes up hundreds of percent if it drops 90% they just hold and so when you have a massive group of people remember we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bitcoin not moving regardless of where the price goes as an investor who wants to seek and capture risk because the risk you take is the return you earn then you want to go find places like this where you are alongside shoulder-to-shoulder other maniacs and so I think that's where people kind of get it
confused they think that wall Street's going to run away from this asset Wall Street likes volatility because volatility means there's potential return Wall Street likes risk because the more risk they take the more of a return they can capture Wall Street likes The Maniacs because every person on Wall Street is a closet Maniac they're just trying to do it inside of an institution with risk management Etc and so Bitcoin was almost purpose built for resonating on Wall Street it's just that in the early days a lot of those financial institutions couldn't adopt the asset but
now they look at this data and they say you're telling me if this asset drops 80 to 90% these guys don't sell they just buy more sign me up how do I buy some of that and I know this because literally Stanley duck Miller and Paul tutor Jones have gone on CNBC and explicitly said that after the 2018 crash they called each other and they had a conversation and they said something like did you know that you know 70% of the people who held Bitcoin at 20,000 are still holding it at 3500 they said I
got to get me some of that let me go find The Maniacs let me invest alongside them that's how they got into Bitcoin and obviously that worked out very well for them what do you think happened to the argument in the last couple years that a lot of traditional Finance folks would say well with a stock you can buy a real asset in the real economy and you're contributing to Something in the real world but Bitcoin doesn't really have those characteristics but that has really faded out of the narrative why do you think that is
I think people are realizing with the rise of AI that the single most valuable commodity in the world is computing power and I've said for a long time that people think it's oil or they think it's something else it's computing power and so Bitcoin is the strongest computer network in the world and so when people say Bitcoin is not backed by anything it is backed by something it's backed by the strongest computer network in the world how valuable do you think that is in today's day and age it's pretty damn valuable it's worth more than
a trillion dollars for for sure right and so I think that when people start to understand this currency is backed by a commodity the commodity is the most valuable commodity in the world they are starting to realize wait a second maybe I should get some and so if you start to look at uh kind of that argument you then say to yourself well how much bigger and stronger is the Bitcoin network if you take all of the computing power of Amazon's AWS Google cloud and Microsoft Azure and comb B it Bitcoin is multiples bigger than
those three Computing networks combined and so it's hard to Fathom just how big the computer network is how strong it is how decentralized it is how resilient it is and so not only is it a valuable commodity it's also the greatest form think about if I said to you a bunch of people around the world came together and they created something that's never been created in human history before they created the strongest computer network ever invented by humans and I said to you what would somebody be willing to pay for that and you told me
a trillion dollars I'd laugh at you and so I think that's what people are starting to realize is this is going to be worth a lot more how much when it's all Up For Debate but a trillion dollars for a price tag of the strongest computer network in the world is probably too low and I think that's where you're starting to see a lot of people say okay you know what maybe it is backed by something maybe there is something here that is uh kind of driving you know the value not just the price and
it took the explosion of AI the return of data centers and computational power and all of that stuff to then convince people wait a second this is a computer network this is Data Centers all around the world this is something that I can just go and buy uh you know kind of in the open market uh and so maybe I should get some the thing about AI data centers and AI computer networks they're powering you know in theory tools that we can use in our everyday life and make work easier and uh you know all
these different tools we have but the computer network for Bitcoin I hear what you're saying but I also don't know what the application is other than creating these tokens or assets that the price is expected to go up yeah it's a great question I think that bitcoin's computational network is doing the single most important computational uh work in human history which is it is protecting economic value there is nothing else in the world that protects economic value like this and so in a world that is littered with central banks and governments who have spending problems
who have National debts that are exploding that are devaluing their currency who are punishing 50 plus per of their populations and pushing them into poverty and they're eating away at your economic value they are essentially stealing from you it's a silent tax it's a silent theft but if you think about the McDonald's worker who's been getting paid $12.50 an hour since 2012 they think they're still getting paid $12.50 an hour they're getting paid less and less every single year don't even worry about the last decade just go since 2020 the purchasing power of the US
dollar is down more than 25% depending on which estimate you look at so that means that for every dollar that you had in 2020 today you can buy 75 cents worth of goods and services they stole 25% of your purchasing power how do you protect yourself Bitcoin is not the only solution you can buy real estate you can buy gold you can buy a lot of different assets but Bitcoin is the best at doing it over a long period of time so far now it's an early experiment it's only 15 years old still got a
lot of time to go Gold's thousands of years old real estate obviously very old as well uh but Bitcoin is probably one of the most promising ones as well because if it continues to get repriced by the world as the best asset to protect economic value one of the things that I think Finance people uh are have a harder time kind of wrapping their head around compared to maybe the tech people is what are the implications of this and so if I said to you if the root cause of poverty around the world is the
fact that there are billions of people who earn economic value every day they leave it in cash whatever their local currency is and their government devalues that currency and so they fall further and further behind they can't get ahead the wealth inequality Gap widens and these people get punished but there's a solution they simply can save that economic value in a different currency that currency can't be devalued it can't be created out of thin air it's not controlled by anyone and it's going to protect their economic value and their purchasing power all of a sudden
it's not very hard to see a world where maybe this one asset could actually lift people out of poverty could actually have this Global impact that would change the lives of billions of people now there's a lot that has to happen between here and there but I think that's part of the promise of Bitcoin and why so many people are excited about it is they say to themselves wait a second is this a root solution to a problem that has been around for centuries you can go all the way back to Ancient Rome or anywhere
else and people were devaluing these currencies they were constantly trying to figure out how do we steal value silently from the people to enrich ourselves Bitcoin is an asset that you can treat as a savings account you simply continue to save in it and you don't have to worry about what is it going to happen over the next week month year Etc now one of the things that people look at that and they say wait a second but it's volatile on a day-to-day basis yes but in the same way that one Bitcoin is worth one
Bitcoin if you go back and look one of the best examples of this in 2016 the median home in America cost 664 Bitcoin today it costs six Bitcoin so what ends up happening is in dollar terms we actually saw about a 50% increase it was like $250 $300,000 now it's over 400,000 right I think whatever it is about 40 50% increase in terms for the median home between 2016 and 2024 so 8 years 50% increase in that home how many people's wages went up 50% or more probably not as many in Bitcoin terms there was
a 99% reduction in the price of the median home in America priced in Bitcoin Bitcoin literally made housing more affordable and so when you think of it in those terms what it does is it requires you to break the mold of thinking in dollars and now think in terms of Bitcoin and so if you hold dollars everything around you gets more expensive over time your coffee gets more expensive your house gets more expensive the clothes that you buy uh when you go out for a night to a Yankee game or what everything gets more expensive
when you hold Bitcoin over the long run everything gets less expensive over time your purchasing power increases at a faster rate than the rate of inflation and therefore literally every single good around you gets less and less expensive and so that is something that we haven't had before and I think that's really what is driving so so many people to say wait a second this Bitcoin thing if it works this thing could really really be special um and so far so good but you know let's wait another 50 years and then we'll decide you know
was it successful or not the housing comparison is crazy the 99% reduction that is something I I've never heard before I mean it makes sense you know um obviously bitcoin's price has gone up a lot another way to think about this is today's episode is brought to you by Gemini Gemini is a fantastic platform how do I know cuz I've used it for years these guys get it they right now have a special offer where they are offering all eligible new users the opportunity to earn $100 in Bitcoin that's right 100 big ones they're going
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a thousand bucks let's just use a thousand you could have bought $66,000 worth of bitcoin and held it for eight years your $66,000 would now buy you a US median home eight years later Y and so you think about that if you had take that same $6,000 and put it in cash you might not be able to buy the door for the house in today's terms right like who knows and so I think once people start to realize this idea of protecting the purchasing power and everything getting cheaper around you it completely shifts your view
of how to think about where am I putting my economic value stocks obviously do very well there's things like gold and real estate they do well as well but something like Bitcoin this idea of it being a uh asset that not only protects but grows your purchasing power over time it's something we really haven't seen before and I think that's where bitcoiners have done a lot of work in terms of trying to educate people on why is this different so would you say a good approach or um you know for investors that want to get
involved in Bitcoin is it just dollar cost averaging like you would Su a stock I really think of this as a checking account and a savings account and um you know in the traditional system you put dollars in your savings account you try not to touch them then you have your checking account and you got an investment account I think that a lot of people use that framework to understand I get paid you know my W2 uh salary taxes get taken out have my after tax dollars where do I put my money I need living
expenses in my checking account I have a savings account because I like to have an emergency savings fund and and a little bit of extra cash and then I've got an investment account i' like to go buy stocks or Commodities or real estate or or whatever to me what is going to happen and what is already happening is that people are going to realize I get paid my salary they take the taxes out I have after after tax dollars I'm going to put some money in cash into my checking account so I can pay my
living expenses I'm going to put money into my digital savings account which is Bitcoin it's going to do a fantastic job of protecting my purchasing power and increasing it over time and then I also you know what I want intellectual stimulation I want to make some Investments as well I don't expect people to put 100% of their savings uh and investing in Bitcoin I actually think of it as it's just the savings account buy some sit it in there you're good you still want dollars we live in a dollar economy in the United States right
you go buy your coffee you're dumb if you're using Bitcoin to buy coffee in the middle of Manhattan because you're going going to get taxed and you're losing out on the future appreciation of that dollar or uh excuse me of that Bitcoin the dollar is going to lose value over time so you should spend the thing that's going to lose value and you should save the thing that's going to gain value and so then you look at the investment account well people are going to go buy stocks they want diversification they want safety going back
to the conversation about the Wall Street folks they want risk the average American doesn't want to go seek risk the average American wants to know hey if I work hard I spend less than I make am I going to have enough money to be able to live the life I want to live and you know what if I can use my investment account to make a little bit of extra money that'd be fantastic but I don't have time to stay uh in tune with what's going on CNBC Bloomberg Fox Business read 10ks go on Twitter
and understand what's going on there what's the latest greatest investment strategy what's the FED going to do right well oh my God China liquidity is increasing that must mean that there's going to be this knock on effect to the U oh the election's coming what are the two c they don't think like that most Americans just say to themselves you know what I want to take some of my money I'm going put in the S&P 500 Warren Buffett told me bet against America I'm just going to let this thing compound and so they're still going
to do that but if Bitcoin can service that savings account that alone would be a pretty uh I think kind of Epic Innovation and uh advancement for a lot of people's personal finances that is such good analy the uh savings and checkings that's well it it also goes into the crypto world where people are like is Bitcoin going to be the only asset and what I say is you know traditional uh Finance industry you have a checking in the savings account if Bitcoin is a savings account stable coins are your checking account people want to
spend fiat currency that is going to be worth less in the future it's still a dollar yeah it's in this digital form but it's just a dollar and so you still want to spend the dollar you want to save the Bitcoin and so this whole idea of like spend your Bitcoin to me is insane I never want to spend Bitcoin why would you ever want to spend your Bitcoin right and so yeah sure maybe we get to a point at some point in the future where all Fiat currencies have died everything's priced in Bitcoin it's
like hyper Bitcoin is and then you spend your Bitcoin because there is no future appreciation of Bitcoin it's just one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin that's not the world we live in today is that going to happen I have no clue all I know is today that the Bitcoin that you hold it's going to be worth way more in the future if you spend it it's l it's like an idiot tax right you are literally doing something that is stupid don't do it especially in the United States where it's not only about future value then you
get taxed and so it's just checking in savings your new digital savings account is this Bitcoin thing whatever percent of your net worth you would normally put in your savings account well put a little bit of it in Bitcoin have an investment account have a checking account right just use Timeless investing principles but rather than have your quotequote savings sit in an asset dollars in a savings account that pays you 3% or whatever they're paying these days on a savings account at a bank uh in a currency that is going to be devalued at 25%
over four years maybe you should try a different currency yeah that seem when you break it down like that it does seem fairly no-brainer um something that I read in your newsletter actually uh one of the guests you had on the podcast this week said when bitcoin's price goes up its volatility also goes up which I believe is opposite to most stocks maybe take out Nvidia um but higher prices generally mean less volatility and I think if people saw the Bitcoin re or behavior that would be a deterrence um what do you say to that
it's volatile in dollar terms it's not volatile in Bitcoin terms um but I think that uh you need volatility to capture return like everyone thinks of volatility and they say volatility equals bad I look at it at from an investor seat and I say volatility equals good because there's a lot of assets that are not very volatile why do I not buy the S&P 500 for me personally because it's not volatile enough there's not enough upside return it's compounding at let's say 8% % a year when you put in the real inflation rate the real
return is maybe 5 or 6% okay that's fine but I could have got that in treasuries last year and so what I'm looking for as a 36-year-old who is trying to compound Capital over time and build wealth is I need things that are volatile and so I'm seeking out that risk I'm seeking out looking for these Financial assets that have more volatility now I have to be comfortable with stomaching the volatility cuz volatility Works in both directions we like volatility when we're long and asset and it goes up yeah it's amazing we're smart we're Geniuses
but when we're holding an asset and it goes down and it's volatile to the downside now all of a sudden like oh the Market's wrong right but no volatility Works in both directions and so if it is volatile that usually means it goes up and down quite a bit which Bitcoin obviously does so if I had told you in 2010 hey here's 10,000 Bitcoin you're going to hold this it's going to go up thousands of percent it's going to drop 90% it's going to go up hundreds of percent it's going to drop 90% it's going
to go up 100 % it's going to drop 90% how many people can hold through all that very few people right and so volatility is something that people seek when trying to create value but also it is something that is incredibly hard for humans to go ahead and kind of stomach it's why that Fidelity study where the people who had the best performing portfolios either died or forgot their password because it didn't matter what the volatility was they weren't looking right and so that is one of the reasons why like just buy the S&P works
so well or just you know dollar average into Bitcoin works so well is like don't look at the price just every week or every two weeks buy your set amount of Bitcoin just keep buying don't worry if it's up down whatever you're fine don't look at the price on a day-to-day basis just hold it have this you know uh kind of plan my plan with the Bitcoin is I'm just going to give it to my grandkids right and so if I'm just going to give the money in Bitcoin to my grandkids psychologically there's nothing you
can tell me that is going to uh change my mind to sell because because I'm just saying to myself well this my grandkids who aren't even alive yet I'm giving it to them and so now the price goes to 200,000 goes to 10,000 it's just whatever if it goes to zero sorry kids like you're not getting anything right if it goes to millions of dollars Grandpa's a genius congratulations anything in between just this what you're going to get and so that psychological change for me really allowed me to stop looking at the price stop worrying
about am I selling am I buying where's the price going to go it's just cool calm collected mentally now let go to my grandkids let's see what happens so something I want to ask you before we uh get off the Pod here HBO released this documentary and um they claimed to reveal who Satoshi was the inventor of Bitcoin they said it was a guy named Peter Tod I watched the documentary I was not that convinced that it was this guy Peter Todd what do you make of this HBO's in the entertainment business baby and uh
I'm sure I didn't watch the documentary um you know I just can read Twitter for five minutes and uh the internet sloo quickly had all the clips up and uh uh were explaining you know what they got right what they didn't get right Etc um I don't know who Satoshi is I don't think it's Peter Todd Peter Todd says it's not him um I think that if somebody had uncovered Satoshi I don't think they would make a movie about it I think they'd be breaking news I think that it would be kind of a a
Smoking Gun it'd be on CNN and CNBC and Bloomberg and those places not in an HBO documentary that took you know months and months and months to edit and cut um I also think that uh people want to know who Satoshi is for uh all the wrong reasons one of the things that would be most interesting to me and I've thought about this is if I had the chance to interview Satoshi what would I ask and I think one of the first things would just be like why did you create it why did you walk
away and why did you not tell anyone and I think if you ask those three questions you could learn 80 90% of everything you need to know about Satoshi because why did Satoshi create Bitcoin we'll tell you a lot about their view of the world where they thought was going on in the world in their late 2000s how they looked at things like the global financial crisis how they thought about technology and its impact in society right there's all these things that that kind of are around why did this person create this thing imagine if
the answer was just like I was just screwing around in you know my dorm room and created this thing and it seemed to work right that'd be a way different answer than some profound philosophical view as to why Bitcoin was important so I think that's a great one why did you walk away was it at a fear one of the things that people will talk about is Satoshi walked away around a time where somebody had said they started to talk to governments and intelligence agencies about this and I think it was a presentation that was
given to she disappeared was it fear was it always the plan was there some sort of self-sacrifice saying hey look I know that this is important but I need to disappear for it to be successful be fascinating to understand that and then thinking about um why Satoshi made so many of the decisions in terms of how it got launched created uh holding the coins made the first 50 unsp you know all these like different uh details will tell you a lot about how they thought about the actual technology and whether it was intentional or not
for it to be successful so I don't think I'll ever get that chance but um it's an interesting thought exercise uh I will say that um a very wellknown uh investor one time told me that he thinks he knows who Satoshi is and so I was very surprised that this person had a theory and I said you know who do you think it is and he said well I think it's one of 200 people and I said uh that's a lot of people like how did you narrow it down to these 200 people and uh
this individual was uh um involved in digital payments ear in the early 2000s late 1990s and he said well there was a uh conference that happened I think in Antigua and uh at that conference uh there was about 200 people and it was everyone who was interested in digital money or digital payments Etc and cryptography and like all these details that ended up uh in uh in Bitcoin and he says the odds that that person who created bitcoin was not on that beach at that conference very low and so he's like I think it was
one of the 200 people that were there which pretty fascinating way to think about you know who was satos did they come out of the blue and nobody knew who they were or were they hiding in plain sight for years and it was somebody who was actually very involved in uh kind of the cipher Punk movement digital payments you know digital currencies Etc I have no clue but it's fun to think about so one of the pieces to the theory in the HBO documentary for uh Peter Todd is that he was I think a college
student when he coded this super program and uh that would assume that this one guy as a 19 20-year-old was you know the smartest guy ever maybe to incorporate all these details and have so much foresight and uh I thought it was pretty funny multiple times in the documentary he was like yeah I am Satoshi as if like he he would say that in a joke but then he would also be like that's exactly what Satoshi would say to throw you off the scent and uh so he was B like messing with the uh with
the camera he it was like uh it was like okay what would a spy say in this situation they would admit to being a spy because of course they're not a spy but then really it's like there's layers and layers and layers they are a spy so I think the documentary was really playing into that I don't I wasn't convinced really I don't think it was this guy do you think the young the young person is a uh is is probably more likely than not again you know who knows um one of the arguments would
be hey you have to be a very seasoned programmer to be able to understand all these details Etc I think more importantly is not so much uh being a seasoned programmer obviously you have to be have be skilled to do something like this um but I do think that it takes young people to be radically uh kind of thinking outside the box um and so uh just like there's a calcification of your mind as you get older and you can try your best to fight it but you know again I'm 36 and already I talk
to people who are in their early 20s and I'm like oh man I really got to like this is something I need to work at is to make sure that I don't get set in my ways um and so something as simple as if you see the same idea try it over and over and over again you begin to convince yourself like that idea doesn't work but there may be something that changes in the world and then all of a sudden the idea works and so if you're the person who kept saying it's the idea
that doesn't work and you didn't realize that this change happened so for example I think that um if I remember correctly I think it was Adam backed maybe it was howy U but I think it was Adam backed uh there was like a reusable proof of work that was created in like 2004 or something well if all the digital currency uh attempts that happened in the 80s 90s early 2000s didn't have access to reusable proof of work and they didn't work and then by the time you saw somebody trying it in 2008 2009 then you're
like ah this doesn't work like we've they've tried you know 20 times well maybe one of the big breakthroughs was well now we have reusable proof of work and so one of the things venture capital is like to ask Founders which is now kind of become uh just like a uh intellectual you know uh contest intellectual Olympics is uh why now why should this company exist now and so Uber as the quintessential example like why did Uber work in 2009 but it might not have worked in 2002 well it's because the iPhone was created and
the iPhone had GPS in it and so now the writer and the driver both had GPS and so you could find each other with very granular detail which corner are you on and so the second that you now have to not call and say hey can somebody come pick me up on the corner of whatever instead you have GPS in both the rider on the driver's phone you now can connect people and it unlocks this huge use case for something like uber and so the answer to why now with Uber was literally there's GPS in
the iPhone and so with Bitcoin why now a huge part was well there was proof of work there there's all these different things um but it probably took a younger person in my mind right to kind of think of hey how do I put all these things together and try to solve um you know what what had been a time Timeless computer science problem of the devil spent well uh pom on that note thank you so much for having me thank you so much we'll do it again what's up guys I hope you're enjoying this
episode but I got a quick message for you I just released my very first book it's called how to live an extraordinary life in this book there are 65 life lessons that I've picked up over the years these lessons will teach you about money investing relationships work health happiness and much more in this book I wrote letters to each one of my children and I tried to share those life lessons with them if you pick up this book there's three things that I can promise you the first is that it is very concise the audio
book is only 3 hours you can listen to it on a long drive on a rainy afternoon the second thing is that you're going to learn something it's worth the price of admission just for the lessons themselves and then the third thing is it will make you think more deeply about your life and how you try to live it so go pick up how to live an extraordinary life today it's a quick read it's very impactful it's very concise and it would mean the world to me for the support go check it out today on
Amazon Barnes & Noble or wherever you buy your books hard cover audiobook it all works thank you so much for the support and I'd love to hear what you think about the new book
