435 Podcast: Southern Utah
Explore the heartbeat of Southern Utah with the 435 Podcast, your go-to source for all things local in Washington County. Stay ahead of the curve with our in-depth coverage, expert analysis, and captivating interviews. Whether you're a resident or visitor, our podcast is your key to unlocking the latest happenings and trends in St. George and the surrounding areas. Tune in now to stay informed and connected with our thriving community!
435 Podcast: Southern Utah
Bitcoin as the Future of Money?
Michael Saylor transformed his company by converting $400 million in cash to Bitcoin, becoming the largest individual Bitcoin holder and pioneering the concept of a corporate Bitcoin treasury. His journey demonstrates how Bitcoin has evolved from a dismissed "internet money" to a legitimate store of value and potential foundation for our AI-driven future.
• Michael Saylor initially dismissed Bitcoin in 2013 but later faced a "mega problem" with $400 million in cash losing value during COVID
• MicroStrategy moved to a Bitcoin standard, now owns over 500,000 Bitcoin, and saw their stock rise from $11 to over $400
• Understanding Bitcoin's scarcity: 21 million total with most already mined and distributed before institutions got involved
• The "block size wars" debate between peer-to-peer transactions and store of value functions continues to shape Bitcoin's development
• Bitcoin eliminates the violence incentive in money - you can't physically take someone's Bitcoin if they don't reveal their key
If you're interested in learning more about Bitcoin, check out Utah Tech University's community education Bitcoin classes or start with resources like the book "The Bitcoin Standard" by Saifedean Ammous or Michael Saylor's website hope.com.
Link: https://www.hope.com/
Guest Aaron Olsen to LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondolsen/
Link to the Visual Capitalist webpage: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/
Looking for a Real Estate expert? Find us here!
https://realestate435.kw.com/
www.wealth435.com
https://linktr.ee/wealth435
#southernutah #southernutah #realestate #financialmarket #investing #stgeorgeutah #bitcoin #bitcoinnews
[00:00:00] Intro.
[00:00:54] Michael Saylor's $400M Bitcoin Decision.
[00:07:16] Understanding Scale: Million vs Trillion Seconds.
[00:15:03] Bitcoin as a Treasury Strategy.
[00:26:25] The Block Size Wars: Store of Value vs Peer-to-Peer.
[00:38:48] Lost Bitcoin and Asset Ownership.
[00:52:48] The Future of Streaming Money and AI.
Michael Saylor says I have this mega problem. I have 450, $400 million cash and it's melting away like an ice cube. What am I going to do with it? So he looks at gold, he looks at land, he looks at bonds, he looks at stocks and he just sees issue after issue after issue after issue from the blue form media studios.
Speaker 2:this is the 435 podcast the pulse of southern utah. If you're looking for a nice cup of coffee and you're in downtown st george fs coffee co, that's where you're going to want to stop. It's right there on the corner of tabernacle main street, downtown st george. So if you got bicycle, ride it on down there and grab a drip coffee and tell them the 435 guys sent you. I listened to the interview we had last time and I cut you off a bunch. I was like man, I should have just let him talk more. I really felt like I was-.
Speaker 1:This is a podcast. We're supposed to talk, we're supposed to interact, so cut me off as much as you want.
Speaker 3:Well, I felt like we could have kept talking for two more hours last time. Yeah, oh yeah, we talked for two and a half hours last time.
Speaker 1:Have you ever go back and listen to yourself? Yeah, I went back and listened to that podcast. I was like what the hell were you doing? What were you saying? You look like a goof. These people are I'm sure they're like listening, like who the hell is this guy? Like he lives around us so we should be scared. Yeah, it was kind of eyeopening and I've done maybe 10, 10 podcasts in my lifetime and this last one I was just like you know, get over yourself. You're old, you're starting to turn gray, you're going to lose your hair.
Speaker 2:You're not as strong as you want to be and, yeah, you're sunsetting, and sometimes we say stuff or don't ask a question that seems so obvious in retrospect like, oh, I should have said that afterward. Like we did a podcast a couple weeks ago about real estate and finance and just like what's the state of the market? Yeah, and we were talking about tariffs, but we we caveated it with, neither of us were experts in tariffs and a statement was made and it was just been like this constant stream of comments about how we don't know anything and how it's like, uh, this is why freedom, freedom of speech this is the worst part about freedom of speech is that everyone has a podcast I'm like, oh my gosh, yeah, if you're not an expert on it, you shouldn't be talking about it the keyboard warriors that jump in right and start start chiming in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, look like this is how I learn is talking. I've always thought that you know, if you're not good at articulating something, then you don't understand the concept very well. And these really put you front and center, like, hey, we're going to record this, we're going to put you down on record and you're going to say what you're going to say, and so I'm just going to caveat this right now with like nothing I say is financial advice in any way to anyone, so don't ever reach out to me and accuse me of saying something that has been construed as financial advice.
Speaker 3:Well, it's funny because like it's not. How do you become an expert on something Like, if you're not allowed to talk about it, how are you ever gonna be an expert on something?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think also there's so many podcasts out there that are trying to hit this mass audience. This is so unique to just Southern Utah. This is like I just want locals to be able to hear from other locals. It's a cool idea.
Speaker 1:I like that.
Speaker 2:Understand the world from where our view is. Not everything's going to be perfect. We're going to make mistakes. I'm the first one to admit we're going to make mistakes and we're going to correct them as much as we can. But I like the comments that come in. It's like, oh, you look at that wrong. I'm like, oh, actually, that was helpful now. Now I understand it better and it'll challenge my thinking.
Speaker 1:So embrace the comments. Good, bad, ugly, you embrace them.
Speaker 2:You just let them fly, and so we were talking a little bit about, uh, michael saylor, right, yeah, and so explain to me maybe a little bit of history with Saylor and Bitcoin and how you know he's created this basic treasury with Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so Michael Saylor is a very fascinating individual. He wrote a book called the Mobile Wave in the 1990s. He was a business entrepreneur in the late like like 99-2000 dot-com boom era. He had a very, very successful business. His book called the Mobile Wave, predicted the advancement of our mobile phones and how they would basically take over our lives and he did it so far in advance and other people. Very fascinating book, but that's not what made him famous. So what made him an interesting chap is what you're alluding to, um, michael Saylor. Later on in his lifetime. Actually, there's a cool tweet tweet, I don't know, we could look it up real quick, but he comments opines for the first time about Bitcoin. Uh, pretty early on, I think it's in 2013. And he basically says hey, bitcoin's going to go the same way as online gambling. It's just a bunch of degenerates. It's a worthless currency, it's not going to be, it's not going to do anything.
Speaker 3:Yeah, um, we really this one says Bitcoin days are numbered, numbered. It seems like just a matter of time before it suffers the same fate as online gambling.
Speaker 1:December 18th 2013, 2013 nailed it so thank you so much for looking up. This is the context is super important and sometimes you know talking and looking things up, so I appreciate you doing that. So, yeah, he he's on. He's on twitter at the time and he's tweeting and you know people. The people looked at him as a CEO and 51% owner of his company called Micro Strategies. He's a billionaire. Looked at him as, oh, he was a billionaire back then. Oh yeah, okay, oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Looked at him as this fascinating individual that you know predicted the mobile wave and was really forward thinking, and so they have asked him on, uh, about currency and libertarians. Different people would say, hey, what do you think? And that was his response yeah, fast forward, uh, fast forward to 2016,. I believe, um, no, excuse me, fast forward to COVID. That's interesting. That's actually when it happened. Interesting, that that's actually when it happened. So kovat comes along. This is 2021 and um, micro or michael saylor, he, he describes it as. I have a mega, mega problem. I have 400 million dollars in cash, free cash, in a bank account and it's sitting there. The government has taken away the ability to have my workers continue to work. All my clients Cisco, google, microsoft he had this cash was sitting there and he recognized the fact that they were going to print something, something to the tune of 40% of all cash that's ever been printed. They did it in one year after COVID.
Speaker 2:It's like $4 trillion in one year.
Speaker 1:It's stupid amount of money, you guys. You guys have no idea. A trillion is really hard for people to conceive. One of the coolest things to do is look how long a billion seconds is, a million seconds is, and look how long a trillion seconds is. Go ahead and look at the differences between that. Why don't you Google that while I keep going?
Speaker 1:So Michael Saylor says I have this mega problem. I have $450, $400 million cash, cash, and it's melting away like an ice cube. What am I going to do with it? So he looks at gold, he looks at land, he looks at bonds, he looks at stocks and he just sees issue after issue after issue after issue. Well, if I put it over here, I've got this risk that I can't evict people if I, if they don't pay their rent. And if I put it over here, well, quantitative easing took the interest rates to zero Last time. I'm a cow. Am I expected to make any money off of bonds when they don't make money themselves? They're worthless, yeah, and they will be with more time and more printing. How am I supposed to make money in the stock market during this environment?
Speaker 2:If you remember cruise lines, airlines every lines might as well be online gambling exploded right going the way of the online gambling is like stock market would have been on online gambling at that point right magnificent seven. Those seven stocks basically floated the entire market for all through covet you're just crazy.
Speaker 1:You're exactly right. Covet. Covet during that time is nuts right. People on cmbc was like the world's ending it's over you you're stuck in a coffin for the rest of your life.
Speaker 1:Lock her down, you know. So he's looking I can't do stocks, like what am I going to do? Put it in the land. I'll just go buy some land, you know he's looking at. Okay, well, what's to stop a hostile government like our own here locally to come in and say, hey, there's not enough money anymore, we're just going to raise taxes on the land because they can't, and that's what they've done before in the past. So what are you going to do there? You can't stop that.
Speaker 1:So ultimately he looks at all these assets. He's like, what are we going to do? And he remembers Bitcoin. And one of his buddies in Miami starts to what we call orange pill. Him, which is talk to you know the whole red pill, orange or red pill, blue pill in the matrix. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a meme in Bitcoin sphere it's the orange pill, which is the third option, and anyway. So his buddy starts to talk to him about Bitcoin and he realizes, comes to conclusion being an MIT graduate engineer in aeronautic, he's a rocket scientist Actually comes to the conclusion that Bitcoin is, in engineered money, the most ethical money on earth decentralized, permissionless, all the different properties that make it superior to gold and because of that, he makes the decision with his board.
Speaker 1:He brings his board together and it's fascinating podcasts about him talking about, through this process, how he had to get his board and convince them that this is what, this is the best case. Yeah, this is where we should go. So he educates his board of directors. The board of directors offer a buyback option for any stockholder that currently has it, I believe. Uh, don't hate me for this, michael, if you heard this, michael if you hear this, please, please definitely, please definitely message us Michael Saylor, please.
Speaker 1:If I recall right, he gave them a 20% premium on the stock buyback purchase if they didn't want to go with a Bitcoin direction. Some people took it, Some people didn't take it and ultimately they decide, with the board, to go on to a Bitcoin standard and they did an initial purchase of $400 million in Bitcoin. Why is this significant? It's significant because it was the first time since the inception of Bitcoin we had anybody at that level publicly traded company CEO, well-known billionaire, willing to put down substantial money. Not only that, willing to put down substantial money, Not only that willing to talk about Bitcoin in a way that was educated, understood the principles behind it and explained very well, reasoned very well with CNBC, Fox Business and openly why this is important.
Speaker 1:Since that point, Michael Saylor, accumulating his initial purchases 400 million, now owns a little over 500,000 Bitcoin. Wow, which out of 21 million Bitcoin is a substantial. He is the single largest owner of Bitcoin on earth today and, granted, he started accumulating or hodling around 2021 with this company. That's crazy. He personally owns Bitcoin himself, not just his company, and it's important to say that he is a majority owner in his company, which allowed him to do some things, even as a publicly traded company allowed him to make these decisions without the influence of his stockholders in a way that would shut him down from doing that. So there were some special circumstances in which he was able to do it, but now he is considered literally the mega Chad of Bitcoin, the mega Chad.
Speaker 1:There is no. He's the ultimate warrior.
Speaker 2:So there's, you were talking about having him stop buying as much as he has. Kind of this is one of the thoughts with that limited supply is that you can now. One guy owns let's say, let's call it, you know 5% of all the Bitcoins that are out there. He can independently move the value of Bitcoin up or down. Right, you were talking about how he moved it just today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean when we say move it right, we can all move Bitcoin it just today. Yeah, I mean when we say move it right, we can all move bitcoin. If I, if I placed a, if I placed a large order, make it a certain time frame with low volume at extreme leverage. Right. With enough money, you can move almost any asset and that's what how financial markets work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think jp morgan owns like 40 of all the silver. Like this the like the hard asset silver on the planet. Like JP Morgan Chase owns silver in vaults like 40% of it, so they can independently move the entire market.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and with leverage you can do anything. Right? Let's say I have $100,000 to invest in some of these markets. Again, bitcoin is traded actively on the world market. It can be traded at 50X. It can be traded at 100x in some of these places. So if you have a million dollars, you can trade at 100x. You're trading $100 million in Bitcoin. You can move the market. Now that all being said, the market of Bitcoin today, versus the market back then, is substantially different. The market of the Bitcoin today is an $80 billion a day, 24 hour market. That's a lot of liquidity. That's a deep think. Think of a stream that's only a few inches deep and then think of a stream that's really deep in the power, even though it moves slow there is a lot.
Speaker 3:Well, maybe now's a good time to break down. Uh, 1 million seconds is 11.5 days well, why don't you ask?
Speaker 1:I want to hear your guesses. See, that's the funnest.
Speaker 2:Go ahead and ask I think I've heard this before A trillion seconds is like 1,623 years or something like that. Okay, let's go to a billion.
Speaker 1:So one million is what? 11 and a half days, 11 and a half days.
Speaker 3:One million seconds. A billion seconds Is like7 years Way off. Trillion seconds, 31,709 years Again way off 31,000 years is a trillion seconds.
Speaker 1:Just that number right there 31,000 years. You can't even fathom that. So the jump is billion is at 32 years, which is a lifetime, I mean a third of a lifetime. And then you go to 30. What was it? 31 000, 31 000 years so do you?
Speaker 2:yeah, conceptually it's people, and I've said this last time on the last podcast. I don't think people can comprehend what a trillion is. They can't understand like, what, how much money is this actually going out? And then when you, when you stack them right, it's like 15 city, new York blocks that are like 30 stories high.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the visual Google, the visual Visual Capitalist. If you go to visualcapitalistcom, go look at that. Yeah, you can see. You stack the dollars. It goes way past the moon if you just stacked paper Just hundreds, but yeah, it's insane to think about.
Speaker 2:And so when we're talking about this balloon, the, the us debt is 34.6 trillion dollars, going up a trillion dollars every hundred days and we're on the verge of going up every like 90 days is going up to a trillion in debt. That we're just the interest on the debt two trillion dollar deficit. Right, so each year two trillion guaranteed and our gdp is only like 25 trillion a year 27 trillion.
Speaker 2:We are broke we're broke, and so when we see the stock market shift the way that it has today, you could see this flight to good. Money drives out bad. We talked about this on the last time. We talked about it. Right, it's good, money will drive out bad, and so, as these transitions happen, you know, I think there's some patriotism attached to this dollar and I wonder how long is it going to take is it going to take like a massive crash for people to be like, oh, I'll go use this bitcoin instead of the dollar, because? Do you think there's something to that? Is that I want to use a dollar and I believe in the dollar because I believe in the country? Do you think there's an attachment to that that?
Speaker 1:yeah, I do, I think, but before we talk about the politics of it, there's just a free market principle, like fundamentally, if there's a great author by the name of Seyfriedin Anonymous, he did the Bitcoin standard and also principles of economics and the fiat standard three books, incredible author. If you look in his books you learn about money and the most sellable good, the most sellable, the most sellable, the thing that you can sell the easiest, emerges as money. So and government doesn't create money, doesn't? You know it does in our lifetimes in terms of this is the dollar. This is what it does, but before governments existed, money is emergent. It comes out of a society's simple need for bartering goods and it emerges organically from that need to barter Creature from Jekyll Island talks a little bit about that, exactly right.
Speaker 1:The creature talks about. It talks about and that's important, because we can go from salt to seashells, to spices, to furs, to rocks, to certain jewelry, to tulips, to, you know, gold, a gold coin coinage. We could go to land. There's all these different things that people barter with.
Speaker 2:It's the most sellable thing that is actually considered the money and in that market, because every market is going to be different, right? So it's like the market in one area of the country. It's going to look different than another area of the country, but it's the most sellable good in that market.
Speaker 1:Right. So when we talk about, like you know, what is it going to take for these people to like, change or consider that fundamentally, when they need to sell something or barter, like I'm, I'm selling my dollars to McDonald's. When they give me a burger, right Right, they're selling me a Big Mac, I'm selling my dollars to them. People don't think that way, but that's what's happening here, right? So when there's a fundamental need, a baseline for any person to do business, they will do it regardless. Like, if I have to take this iPhone 16 and I have to go down to Maverick right now and I have to get a tank of gas, do you think I could find someone to trade this for a couple of tanks? Or yeah, probably tanks. Or yeah, probably.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is a pretty this, this is pretty, uh, whatever. Uh, um, it's valued universally. It's something that, uh, somebody would desire. There's utility there. So so the point is is I can take this? I can say, hey, this could use this as a part or as almost almost a currency. It's almost that much, it's almost universally used, that much in our society today, that you could almost buy whatever you want with iPhones.
Speaker 2:You really could.
Speaker 1:So it just depends what you want to do. Are you trading this or that? Now, when it comes to the patriotism part, yeah, like, we care about our country, our people, our communities. We care about 435. We care about our St George community. We care about our St George community. If it came down to like you can use this evil currency and get kickbacks from the federal government, but you have to do all these conditions or it means we band together, the three of us, the 30 of us, the 300 of us, the 3000 of us decide no, we're going to do this different. We're not going to use that currency because we don't feel like it's ethical, we don't feel it's right. I think there's some fundamental principles in in just moral that you could argue from a political, moral or fundamental free market principle to like I'm going to make a change and this is why I'm doing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so then? So how do you? I guess, let's, let's talk about Roger Ver. So you had Michael Saylor and he's he's, you know led this charge, this charge. Let's, let's go back to saylor for a second. He's leveraging and collecting bitcoin. You were talking about it being a treasury. Can you? Can you explain? Oh yeah, yeah, we kind of didn't get into that, so yeah, so what?
Speaker 1:what michael saylor did? After making his initial purchase of 400 million in bitcoin, he decided to move on to what is called a bitcoin standard. What? What he decided for his company was we are no longer going to denominate or report our profit and loss or balance sheets. We're no longer going to do that in US dollars. We are going to do that in Bitcoin. And so he basically converted all of his assets his cash, free cash assets and he converted into Bitcoin. So on their balance sheet, they denominate everything that they have in Bitcoin terms, and so that's fundamentally the idea behind a Bitcoin treasury is, instead of a treasury like the city of St George has a treasury or a company has their own treasurer, the city of St George has a treasury or a company has their own treasurer. Instead of using dollars, they just simply didn't or pesos, or yuan or any currency, they decide, hey, we want to use Bitcoin for it. And he moved that way pretty quickly. Since that, his business exploded in terms of value.
Speaker 1:He's a micro strategy stock. If we took a look at it In fact, we should take a look at it real quick, so I don't misquote it, but it's MSTR. So if we went to stocks here and I haven't looked at it recently, but we go, mstr is the ticker and if we take a look at that, you got to turn off airplane mode when you're in a podcast, okay. So here we go. So MSTR, when they started buying Bitcoin, when we said it was what 2021, let's say here yeah, uh, I mean, the camera can't see it, but if we take a look at it 20 stock, 25 stock, 30 stock um, when he or his initial purchase it went from 11 up to a hundred dollars in a matter of three months, four months wow, 10x with bitcoin, because bitcoin was 10xing at that time too.
Speaker 1:Not quite 10xing, but it was substantially going up Since then. I don't know if you can see there, but I mean we peaked out here recently for him $430.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's unbelievable and that but that's. Is that because when it's traded on the stock market, is that the value of the company? Or they're looking at it from a standpoint Is he buying back his own stock stock which is driving the price up, like what is causing that stock to go up? Is it just a belief in the company doing well or is it just because that it's holding? You know?
Speaker 3:holding in bitcoin stock price is a reflection of future performance yeah, partially.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so well it it's. It's what somebody's valuing that piece of the company. So you have a, you have a company, and then you have certain amount of stocks, maybe 100, it could be 200 thousands, right? So you take the company's value and you divide it by the number of stocks it has. Um, there's preferred stock, there's regular common stock, right. So you break up that pie. The price of the stock is what?
Speaker 1:When someone looks at that piece of the pie, the piece of the value of that company say you and I wanted to do a deal on MSTR stock here, we would basically argue by saying I have mine for sale for $390. And you come in and say, oh, for three, I don't know, 385. And we do that on an exchange at the nasdaq or we do that at the dow industrial right and we agree on price and stock changes hands and that's how we come to a conclusion of what the value of that piece of company is. Now, how somebody or how people value the company can differ drastically. That's kind of like what you were saying. How much money are they going to make? Yeah, generally speaking, yeah, it's the market, like what you were saying. How much money are they going to make? Yeah, generally speaking, yeah, the market. Like how much of the market do they own? What does their future look like? You know those types of things?
Speaker 1:So, with MSTR, with MicroStrategies, with Michael Saylor's company $11, that's how much it was worth. He had $400 million in the bank. He had this very successful intelligence, data intelligence company and that he was you know, google, apple, facebook. Some of the major IT people were his major clients and he was making cash. But it wasn't until he said we're going to now start saving our money, we're going to our balance sheet. Our cash, our savings, is going to be in Bitcoin. That people started to notice that and say wait a second, this guy over here, billionaire, smart guy, buying $400 million in Bitcoin and from now on, anytime he gets cash, he's going to buy more Well, this is Bitcoin on steroids. Now on, anytime he gets cash, he's going to buy more Well, this is Bitcoin on steroids. So what? They looked at it and said I can buy Bitcoin or I can buy a Bitcoin, plus Michael Saylor's company, his employees, his customers, his-, his performance, his revenue, yeah, his future performance.
Speaker 2:And then it's going to go up with the value of Bitcoin on top of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and mix that in with another aspect too is, like people you know we, some of you probably have a 401k, maybe some of you don't, but the when you work with a company of this 401k individual IRA and a lot of times those are directed or the cash in those accounts is designated to only be invested in, like stocks or gold or specific investments, you couldn't take that out without a penalty from the US government to just go buy Bitcoin, right. So what that did was open a conduit for 401k money, which is pretty substantial, like there's a lot of money out there in retirement savings. You and me have, you know, 60, 70, a hundred who knows how much money in this account. Now, if I bought micro strategies, I've just purchased Bitcoin.
Speaker 2:So have other businesses done this? Have there been, you know, any other big names or any other big companies that have done this?
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a lot of big names Like you have. You have strike, you have a Tesla. Put some on their balance sheet. There's. There's not that many big names that have gone full in only Bitcoin. Yeah, okay, but there are several cash app, paypal, who bought substantial portions of Bitcoin, all the major banks, blackrock, right, they're buying this, they're buying Bitcoin and they're putting it on the balance sheet now, and that's what's happening right now. You're seeing institutional adoption. Michael Saylor really was the conduit that opened up companies to start saying wait, there's a new asset class, I don't have to this basket of assets, I can get this now and that's it. Just changed everything.
Speaker 2:Using it as a store of value, which which is interesting because this kind of dovetails into the roger ver conversation is that, um, bitcoin as a as a store of value versus a peer-to-peer transaction?
Speaker 2:Only right, it's.
Speaker 2:It's meant to be used where I I you know, I want that shirt, right, and I give you Bitcoin for the shirt and then we exchange it.
Speaker 2:That way, there's been this shift and Roger Furr's argument is around 2017, the conversation went away from it being a peer-to-peer transaction set up to a store of value and how the block sizes don't allow, because it's too expensive, to do individual peer-to-peer, and how there should be a shift in the block size and without getting too technical into the, the exact way that it works and the nodes and all those different things, not getting too lost into that, this idea of the store of value, what's your stance on?
Speaker 2:If, if we look at it as a store of value instead of looking at it as a, is a tool to actually facilitate transactions, right to actually purchase things, is that, is that allowing institutions to come in like like a micro strategies or other institutions, to where they can buy up so much so so big of a portion of it, to where now it still ends up. It's not fully decentralized because, let's call it, you know, 20 individuals own 60% of the Bitcoins in circulation and now they can manipulate the market no different than what kind of the Fed does today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, it's super loaded conversation here in many fronts. The first thing that you have to understand about Bitcoin is its issuance schedule from day one. So in day one, a miner every 10 minutes could earn 50 Bitcoin. So in day one, a miner every 10 minutes could earn 50 Bitcoin. Okay, for the first four years, okay. So if you looked at the total amount of Bitcoin, there was 21 million available, all right, during the first four years. Half of all of that Bitcoin, which is what 10.5 million Bitcoin were mined in that first four years, okay, and they call it the halving, right? Okay, yeah, this four-year cycle is called the halving.
Speaker 1:At the four-year mark, what ends up happening? At a certain block height on the blockchain, the script changes and it says okay, the block reward is no longer going to be 50. Every 10 minutes, a miner now can earn 25 or one half of what it used to. Okay, so now for the next four years, half of the remaining amount was mined. So we had 21 million. We went to 10.5 in the first four years. In the next eight years, we went that next. 10.5 got cut in half. So 5.25 million. You double the amount of time, right? So in eight years, you have over 15 million Bitcoin already distributed.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I want you to think about that in terms of like, I'm worried about its centralization. Like what if these companies get the Bitcoin first because they have the money to buy it, but in reality come 12 years? Here we are now 15 years in Bitcoin. Right, we've done three, four of these cycles. We're to the point now where a miner only earns 3.125 Bitcoin every 10 minutes, only for the whole world. So the new Bitcoin available for purchase, new Bitcoin, 3.125 every 10 minutes, I think it's 450 a day, okay, for the whole world. So when you look at that you look at the first 4, 8, 12 years you start to realize that 17, 18 million coins were already purchased by common, everyday people. Yeah, lots of random people, lots of random people, uh, and they were already distributed. Meaning meaning, if you were into bitcoin, you understood it, took the time to learn about it, you probably mined it, you probably traded it, you probably bought it, you accumulated it, and so there is this kind of I don't want to say straw man argument, because it's a valid argument. We don't want it to be centralized by anybody in any real way, but this idea that when 18 or 19 million has already been distributed that BlackRock or the US government or someone's going to come in and buy up a big share, like right now.
Speaker 1:The United States government Trump administration's announced his SBR Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. He wants to buy 1 million coins Okay, yeah. Reserve he wants to buy 1 million coins Okay, yeah. So out of that amount that's already been issued, the only way he can get it or the country can get it as if they buy it they have to buy it from someone.
Speaker 1:So in the process of these big corporations coming in and buying, they're pushing the price up every day and as price continues to go up over time and it will continue, it's the best performing asset in the last 15 years, bar none, full stop. No one, nothing, beats it. They are going to have to purchase it from these people, but when price goes up, they don't like to sell, they like to hodl. So price even goes even higher and that's what creates these incredible price articulations, these spikes, because people are like, hey, I'm not selling, I'm never selling, and so there's this constant drumbeat of hodlers or people that hold on for dear life to their Bitcoin and they just hold and continue to buy each paycheck and this idea that these big organizations are going to come in and buy enough to be able to take over.
Speaker 1:You know, let's say, they want to buy 10% of the Bitcoin issuance. In order to do that, you are going to be able to take over. You know, buy a, let's say, they want to buy 10% of the Bitcoin issuance. In order to do that, you are going to take price to the moon and it will run out of money before that happens. So there's one aspect of that and it's important to talk through that. Now. The other thing is you said, hey, what do you think peer to peer or do you think store value? And I just like to go into the hypothetical and say, like if God was to come down or whoever, this limitless power person, and say I'm going to make perfect money. And we just ask ourselves what does that look like? And my answer to that question is the store of value and the peer to peer aspect of being able to trade it with anybody at any time with no problem. That's what we want to have together. We want our cash to be a store of value.
Speaker 2:I don't want my cash inflated to oblivion like it is now Just disintegrating in front of our eyes.
Speaker 1:So this argument was used quite a bit because Satoshi Nakamoto, the original creator of Bitcoin in 2009,. The title says a peer-to-peer cashless monetary system, or, yeah, that's like the subheader of the bitcoin white paper. So he definitely wanted it to be peer-to-peer in terms of the creator, but it doesn't mean that he didn't want it as a store of value either, and he'd reference as a store of value anyway inside the paper as well. So that's often used throughout the years during, like the block size wars of. There was a period when we were arguing how you can adjust the size of the blocks and include more transactions in each 10 minute block. Excuse me, or you can or we can keep them small and we can just keep it where it's at, and Roger Ver was on the side of us. He would like larger blocks because if we had larger blocks, then anybody can get in there with low transaction fees. Um, because the block could hold way more transactions, right. But on the flip side of that, if you did that and you made the block size larger, one of the fundamental components of Bitcoin is that every transaction from day one.
Speaker 1:In 2009, when Satoshi Nakamoto started, each block has every single transaction in it from day one. So the idea of Bitcoin is that you can audit all of the Bitcoin, how it changed wallets and how it moved from the beginning of time till now. That's how, every 10 minutes, we can know for a surety that there's not 21 million in one Bitcoin. We know there's 21 million, we know here are the wallets and we can see the pieces. No one can change this. But by changing the block size and saying we want to make it much larger, what would the result or the net effect of that would be? This ledger that I talked about, this literal ledger of transactions from day one, would be so much larger that, in order to verify the ledger, I could no longer fit that blockchain, the literal blockchain, on a device like this. That was.
Speaker 2:My question is what that infrastructure would even look like but I think roger ver talks about was like why would you even need? Why? Why? Why does it matter? If it would fit? I mean, wouldn't it just go back to there's going to be larger institutions that that uh, consolidate and and what's it called when they uh, when they basically audit the chain, it's like a the turnover, where it goes through every single one I can't remember what the name of the like process is called when they there's there's like chain.
Speaker 1:You're not talking about chain analysis, like looking at the chain no, it's just.
Speaker 2:It's the validation of the chain.
Speaker 1:Oh hash, hashing the transactions into a block, yeah, into a block.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's saying there there's no real reason for you or me to do it right, because there's other, there's other institutions mainly miners, uh that are going to go and do that on their own. There's there's no real reason why you and me need to see the history of all the transactions ever, because the chain is going to operate that way, one way or another yeah, no, that's.
Speaker 1:It's a great question, and this gets gets you thinking about the fundamentals of bitcoin and its decentralized nature. The reason why you want to be able to audit whether you're a miner or you're a node or you're an individual the reason why you want to audit is to make sure that the blockchain hasn't changed. So when the block gets larger and the amount of terabytes it takes to have the whole chain together gets so large that the common person or anybody for that matter you have to have server banks. Imagine a hundred years from now. Imagine how many transactions we're talking about here. You would have to have a server farm full of hardware to be able to do that.
Speaker 1:So the bigger threat during the block size wars was thinking in terms of what if these organ, what if? What if it gets so large? In order to to buy a device large enough to carry the blockchain, you're spending $1,500. What's how, how, what? What's the net effect of that? And that is that there'll be a whole lot less nodes, meaning people that validate the blockchain, and there'll be a whole lot less miners, because you need this capital, actual infrastructure, to be able to run it.
Speaker 2:So therefore, but as we get closer to that 21 million not to cut you off, but as we get closer that we're going we're the infrastructure is going to shift because as we get closer to 21, we're going to get to 21 million.
Speaker 1:It's like 2035 or something like that 2035 99 of all bitcoin will be mined, so those, those miners that are using the computing power to mine.
Speaker 2:There would be a shift over into the infrastructure to where those would be the individuals that would be computing, doing that computing power. Right, there'd be. That'd be part of the infrastructure that was created during the whole process, right? So?
Speaker 1:you're right, bitcoin can change and it changes a lot. There's this idea that Bitcoin never changes. There's actually called, you know, there's Bitcoin protocol or a bit. They're called BIPs Bitcoin improvement protocols, and these are developers, people that all contribute to the Bitcoin, the Bitcoin script.
Speaker 1:Bitcoin can change in the future, meaning we could say, once, 99% of its mind or once, you know, I don't know the last Bitcoin's mind in 2148, they could say, yeah, at this point we're going to change the block size so large that we could do we could handle 200, 300,000 transactions a second. Yeah, because that's what really this? We didn't explain that for the audience, but what this really comes down to is there's only so many transactions worldwide that can fit in any given block. Yeah. So roger veer was saying and it's a good argument he's like hey, if it's peer-to-peer, we need to be able to buy a coffee, good, bubble gum, we need to be able to do every transaction. The visa network does 200 000 transactions a second.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, that's a private company, that's their servers, right, well, bitcoin doesn't come anywhere close to that. Like nowhere, nowhere close. So his argument is just like let's make the blocks larger, we can fit a lot more transactions in right and therefore it will remain more peer-to-peer and you won't be paying because that's. Another component of this is that when the blocks start to fill up with transactions, we're all competing to be able to have our transaction processed or confirmed. Yeah, and that means paying a transaction fee. Once the block fills up in size, then whoever pays the highest transaction fee gets in the block. Everybody else just sits waiting for their opportunity.
Speaker 2:Which, in his argument hijacking Bitcoin, is a book that it's really dense, it's really technical, and that's why I wanted to talk to you about it, because I'm like man, it's like you gotta have.
Speaker 2:You gotta speak a whole nother language, and I think most people are still in that camps Like I don't understand crypto because it's like speaking a whole nother language, right. And so so he was saying how businesses weren't able to use it as a peer to peer transaction and use it for selling services or goods, because those transaction fees got so expensive and that there were chargebacks, right, by the time, you know the waiting for the, the, the node to be logged, the transaction fee would jump and then the cost of actually sending that gift, that, uh, that product or service would end up being more expensive, and then the business was either having to recoup that money or just charge that person more money than what they already agreed upon because of the, the difference in time, right, and we're talking seconds, yeah, right. And so it was really difficult to actually make it a peer-to-peer transaction because the block size wasn't big enough, yeah, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's where the advent of all these other cryptocurrencies kind of come from, because his fork is basically Bitcoin Cash.
Speaker 2:Yes, so it's basically purely off the Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper. Yeah, the original ethos of Bitcoin, yeah, and then he just increased the block size. This is essentially how bitcoin cash operates, and so you have these different protocols, these software developments on on how they work, but that's where these forks come in, right?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah, that's. That's where a fork can come in, and which is, basically I'm going to take the original bitcoin blockchain up until this point, I'm going to make an exact copy and then I'm going to start my chain from that point forward, so it's backwards compatible. Look, roger Ver has the great arguments and he's Bitcoin Jesus. That's literally his nickname because he was known to give away one. I mean, I was at conferences with him in San Francisco pretty early on. I remember him giving out a tenth of a Bitcoin to almost anybody that went up and asked. I remember him giving out a tenth of a Bitcoin to almost anybody that went up and asked. He ran what is called a Bitcoin faucet or contributed to the faucets on the internet, which were literal places. You could go there and just like press a button, it would turn this little faucet on and a Bitcoin would come out and you could like literally download it. Nice, full Bitcoins. Full Bitcoins, yeah, right, like five, you could download up to five. So so, look, the guy did so much as a, as evangelist for, for the movement, and, and he has a a etched in stone, um, like place in history, absolutely, yeah, we all have respect for him, no question. On on.
Speaker 1:On the flip side, there was this block size war that we're talking about between the kind of small blockers and the large blockers. This went on for quite a bit, yeah, and both sides were heavily trenched. There was a lot of movement back and forth with influence. At the end of the day, it shook out like this and you know whether or not Roger Ver is going to be proven to be right in the future or not, or the other, the opposite side, I think really, at that time, with the people involved, they did shake it out, and you know his book does go into some things like hey, this, this was corrupted, this, like the way they went about, it was kind of sneaky, or this. And and the other side says the same thing about him, there's people that say he's a CIA agent. They were trying to co-opt it, like, like, like. So both sides are entrenched in this.
Speaker 1:What I would just simply say right now, with the new technologies that we have, server sizes are getting monstrous. Meaning the block size, it's not as big as thread as it used to be, and moore's law continues to play out. Technology improves, yep, we'll have bigger hard drives, we'll have new forms to uh, you know crystals and different things to actually save data and bits on. So I think the future could include a change to that. On the flip side of that, too, we have these second layer solutions, whether it's Lightning or whether it's another. You know Solana, xrp, some of these other types of coins. It's really simple you trade your Bitcoin for one of those other coins Bitcoin Cash even and you can go use the network. So Dogecoin's a copy of Bitcoin. Litecoin is a copy of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash is the original block size or a larger block size, but everything else is the same. That's the chain, so it's almost one of those things. That's like what's gonna play out. What is the free market going to decide is the most sellable good.
Speaker 2:And right now it seems like Bitcoin has the. The first isn't always the best right. We've seen that time and time again, especially with new technologies. But at the same time that institutional adoption, with Bitcoin taking just such a far and ahead lead of all these other crypto options, it seems like Bitcoin's far and away the leaders. The adoption is going to be there, yeah.
Speaker 1:You say the first isn't always the best. I got thinking about this. It's like like the first time the will was used or invented, was there a better will? I've seen some iterations where the will goes sideways and like some weird looking wills. Right, yeah, but or fire.
Speaker 2:Fire is the first. I don't know a nuke, that's a little bit better of a fire.
Speaker 1:So so what I'm saying? What I'm saying, there is like there are some things that once it does that thing you it's the best. I don't. You don't need to diversify it, you know you don't need. Like, am I going to go buy three, three iPhones, just just to make sure that if one goes down, the other one's going to work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or well, the first iphone compared to the newest iphone isn't the best iphone, right? And so it's the evolution of the technology, um, or uh, the use of. I mean, just, we could use gold as an example, is it? You know gold was used, but it it wasn't the best, because the description of how to move, how do you move? You know a $3,000 worth of gold? Well, it's easy now because it's a fit in your pocket, but a million dollars worth of gold, it's harder, right, but is that the best form of that currency? Fair, there's been newer versions of that technology, monetary technology that's come about, and this is this goes into like a it's a software conversation, right? It's like which piece of software is best built and best utilized to do this in an efficient way and that gets the most adoption? Right, and that's the competition I think that's or store of value.
Speaker 1:You know, if you look at Bitcoin as a store of value, if you can think of a way to improve Bitcoin, go for it. Right, I mean, show it. There's over 22,000 cryptocurrencies past Bitcoin. After Bitcoin's vault, bitcoin can still continues to be the one that demands the monetary premium of the world. True, in this asset, so like by far too. And you know what. Bitcoin doesn't care. The protocol doesn't care. There's no owner, there's no person controlling that, that it's decentralized in a way that that the script itself doesn't care. If a better one comes along, what's going to happen when that does is money will move. When there's a better airplane, you're going to get off the train, you're going to get on the airplane. There's a better means of transportation, there's a better way of doing something. Absolutely going to happen. But right now, as we see, right now, the first one still is the best option for store of value in the first 15 years of this nascent technology.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure I think so too. You know this might sound crazy, but I hate real estate agents and after being with myself for the last 10 years, I know the good ones from the bad ones. If you're thinking about buying, selling or investing in real estate here in Southern Utah, we want you to interview us for the job. Go to realestate435.com and give us a call. We promise you're going to love us, because you were talking about how city governments already kind of diversify their money into a bunch of different asset classes, right?
Speaker 1:Yes, Cities are kind of actually constrained to what they can use tax dollars for. It's generally bonds or cash deposits, Um um some, so agency bonds.
Speaker 3:And that has to be changed at the state level if they want to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's, it's a constitutionally mandated like. You just can't take and be risky. If I'm going to tax you and take your, you take your money and put it in an account mandated like. You just can't take and be risky. If I'm going to tax you and take your, you take your money and put in an account, I can't just go take risk with it in a way like fiduciary, as the fiduciary of the city's taxpaying dollars. You got to have that ready so we can use it on capital projects, uh, you know whatever we need. So so it's really limited what you can do.
Speaker 1:So right now, bitcoin is not one of those things that's available for all the you know all these cash funds, but state pension funds have applied to allocate one to 3% of their funds into Bitcoin. They apply with a state, yeah, they, basically they. I don't know the nuanced processes or procedures that they have to go through to get approval Um, the, but, uh, the state pension fund in Utah, uh, is going through that process right now. But the state pension fund in Utah is going through that process right now, with the state legislature basically getting a law passed that gets that asset class available for investment.
Speaker 2:Even in a small level, but it's baby steps. We're still taking baby steps.
Speaker 1:Yeah, super baby steps, for sure. And like pension funds, state funds, even Fortune 500 companies like Michael Saylor's like the amount of money that they actually are sitting on is spectacular. Like I think Apple has almost a trillion dollars worth of cash. You look at Berkshire Hathaway. You look at the state funds and these pension funds they're giant funds. Social Security Administration state funds and these pension funds they're giant funds. Social security administration, like so when they want to make an allocation into a new asset class which, by the way, we haven't had a new asset class for a very long time Right, like we've had stock bond, we had this limited basket. Yeah, All of a sudden, here comes Bitcoin along and says I'm different.
Speaker 2:Well, it was like index funds right, Like index funds was really that was kind of like the last one, really, etfs etfs, you, you nailed it.
Speaker 1:Etfs has been kind of last like, okay, I can, I can have exposure to gold, but I don't necessarily need to buy the physical stuff, right so that was.
Speaker 3:I think vanguard invented the etf right like in the mid 90s or early 90s, yeah those and those were pretty, those were amazing.
Speaker 1:Those are great opportunity for the average person to get exposure to new assets, whether it was metals's a, it's a software ability.
Speaker 2:It's a technology advancement that's allowing us to diversify these assets, which is interesting. I didn't really think of it as far as asset classes like a new asset class like is there going to be another one? Like we keep finding new ones is there going to be another one for the longest?
Speaker 1:time everybody dismissed it like oh, this internet money, play money like you know, uh, presidents and and and influencers. Michael saylor yeah, like we have the saying in bitcoin. That's like a person's ready to buy bitcoin when they're ready to admit that they're wrong about bitcoin.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, and, and and I.
Speaker 1:I'd like to go in this if we can. This has been my mission for the last, I'd say, since about 2017. I'm trying to get people to understand what this stuff is, and so they can at least know and make an educated decision when it comes to buying some or being involved or not. And what I would just like to say is is I'm trying to get people to understand the future. We started talking about AI in the very beginning of this.
Speaker 1:Don't know if it's going to make the podcast, but AI is taking over everything. I mean, I have a car out front right now, a Tesla that communicates with um, with parking stalls, with chargers. You know it can buy its own things right, attached to my card, but it can buy its own things. Well, the future is AI, machines and artificial intelligence purchasing things and doing its own business. Okay, yeah, ai is not going to come to Aaron Olson and say, hey, will you help me out and open a bank account with Wells Fargo so I can do some business with this sovereign fund over here, because I need to send them some premium for what I just purchased an insurance, insurance premiums. Ai is not going to wait for me or humanity with a social security number and to create in this old, archaic, 19th century system, to do business. To do business, all AI needs is an open monetary protocol that is completely diversified, permissionless and open, and they will buy their own Bitcoin, they will open their own wallets and they will do their own business. So if the world is trending increasingly digital, if it's moving to this timeframe in the future where the things in our lives will do business with each other, then it will need a way to do that without humans or without the bank accounts attached to them, and the good example would be like Tesla insurance.
Speaker 1:Right now, if you own a Tesla, you can buy insurance from their company. Well, tesla knows how fast I drive on a Monday on the way to work. It knows how much weight is in my car right now, if there's three people in the car or five people in the car. It knows if my car's parked currently on the charger or not. So imagine now if my car purchased my insurance for me I'm talking about my driver's insurance, right? Imagine if it I only purchased the amount of insurance I need for what the car is doing. The car is sitting in my garage. I'm not going to hurt anybody with the car in my garage, so why am I paying an increased premium during that timeframe that it's sitting in my garage? I didn't even think about this.
Speaker 2:Daily, weekly, hourly Seconds, seconds.
Speaker 3:Secondly, Secondly so what did you?
Speaker 2:throw Starlink on top of it and then they're all communicating together. Or in other words, you you.
Speaker 3:You get your, your cars. You go on a cruise for two weeks your car sitting. You're not paying a dime for insurance while a car sitting. But you come home, you get in your car, throw your kids in the back and then the insurance starts rolling a little bit.
Speaker 1:It's streaming money Dude, and then the insurance starts rolling a little bit.
Speaker 2:It's streaming money, dude, crazy. Well, you take it to like houses, right, like home insurance, health insurance, right, like I'm wearing a whoop strap right now and it's, you know, monitoring my VO2 max and how much I'm sleeping, and you know. Well, yeah, like insurance premiums, my, my.
Speaker 3:How healthy I am, yeah, but like how healthy you are. But like you know, a normal insurance premium is paying X number of dollars. Call it five grand a year to never go to the doctor.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Correct yeah, so with this right, if machines have the capability to use a protocol that's not controlled by a board, by a license or by a government, now the machine, or an era where this is just the way we've always done it, so we're just going to do it this.
Speaker 2:We're just going to keep doing this.
Speaker 1:Social security numbers the machines can act on themselves, they can act by themselves, and this will enable streaming money right now. Um, there's podcasts that I listened to in the Bitcoin space that, literally, when I listened to them, I have um Satoshi's, which is the smallest unit of Bitcoin. It's one 100 millionth of a Bitcoin, less than a cent. But as I listen to every second, I listen to Satoshi stream, to that content creator, if I listen if I listen 10 minutes, so many Satoshi's come out of my wallet as I listen.
Speaker 1:So now, when I'm buying music, let's say, from the app store, and I only listened to Taylor Swift's first 50 seconds of her 1979 song, or whatever, I don't even know what it is.
Speaker 1:Right, Sounds like you know the song I have. I have three daughters. Okay, the point is is I only have to buy for the amount of seconds I use the songs. I only have to buy insurance for the amount of time that I'm driving at a hundred miles an hour and I'm going to pay a premium for that. So now you get this ability to equitably pay for what you're really getting and, without dispute, like it really. It really comes down to that. So so, coming back to this, the future is programmable money. The future is stream streamable money, and Bitcoin enabled this.
Speaker 1:It was the invention of Satoshi Nakamoto in the 2009 white paper that allows this to happen. And because this is happening, I plead with anybody in southern Utah, I don't care how old or how young you are. I beg of you to learn about this new asset class, to learn about this new technology, and you teach a class at Utah Tech. I do. I do actually teach a class, and thanks for the plug here. Utah Tech University has community education classes. Great program. You pay almost nothing. A lot of the classes are 15, 50.
Speaker 2:A couple of Satoshis, a couple of Satoshis, a couple of Satoshis.
Speaker 1:Eight weeks of class. But, yes, I teach a Bitcoin 101. I teach a Bitcoin 201 class advanced and technicals of Bitcoin and in those classes, I'm just going to tell you right now, I've had as small as 20 people in the class, as many as 90 in the class, all age ranges, all age ranges. In fact, I'm going to tell you right now, the community education class is skew older, right, most of the people that attend there are 55 and older, for sure, but I will tell you this definitively Um 99% of the class by the end of that, that course, they are buying Bitcoin because they finally fundamentally understand how this is going to change the world. And it blows my mind, people that you would never believe would sell their gold or sell their bonds or their stock are buying substantial portions of Bitcoin right here in our community, like four, five Bitcoin at a time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's trading at like 85 grand right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's not a joke. The first classes I ever taught Bitcoin was 20,000. And by the end of that class was in the 40s. A lot of times we start way low and by the time we're at the end right. This class actually, we started low. We started in the 70s, 58 or something. Actually, at one point went all the way up to 109. We're back down to 80. So we've kind of gotten this whole like this emotional thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've been through it so many times. I've been through it. You know, I bought it and sold it. And I bought it and I sold it. And even the first guy who, who, who, really like pushed me to do it, um, he was like, just buy it and hold it and I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it, I couldn't just hold it, I should have just held it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my license plate says hodling, and the reason is because I've learned that lesson too. I have less Bitcoin than I ever had in my life and it's because I sold it, thinking in fiat terms, thinking like, oh, I got more dollars, now I'm going to go out and spend it, and that I learned the lesson. And because, man, if I would have kept on to it, I would be able to do so much more in my life with everything, not just for me, but to give to people to do things. So I would encourage anybody in the reach of this audience to even if you're not taking my class, you don't have to take my class. But the point is, if you want to learn, start with the Bitcoin standard, or start with the bullish case of Bitcoin two fabulous books or go to Michael Saylor's website that he's devoted to Bitcoin, which is hopecom.
Speaker 2:Hopecom. That's the thing about this Bitcoin. It's also and this has taken us on another tangent which is talking about the blockchain, which is a completely separate, because you talk about the stream of money and I wanted to jump there before, but I'm glad you got to talk about the class, because you know, talking about money is a difficult thing. We're going to make mistakes. You know, people, it's a complex set of financial the market, right, the financial market is so complex and a lot of people just think it's either so over their head that they just don't even deal with it and they just go to work and they just make their money and they save their money. But Bitcoin is this we're in this revolution of a new asset class and you have Trump making laws on it and you have a reserve, you know a federal reserve that's stocking up on Bitcoin and maybe they'll get rid of all the gold in Fort Knox and turn it into Bitcoin. Who knows? You know who knows exactly how this is all going to.
Speaker 2:You know, filter out, but the blockchain thing is, I think, is a subset of the technology that is really going to impact our lives on the digital, in the digital world.
Speaker 2:Right, going back to this insurance and how, when we can verify ourselves in the digital world as an individual. I have an, you know, we have social security number right now, but we we all can have our own individual crypto number is what? What my thought is is that anything that we do on that digital space doesn't have to have personal information, but it can follow me along and I can have this identity, this digital identity that is validated, because I think of like Twitter and Facebook and I see these views even on the podcast, whether I look at YouTube and I have this number of views and this reach and I'm like how many of those are robots, how many of those are just like made up, but we don't we, we haven't committed to this. Why can't we just validate our individual selves into the digital space on a block blockchain type thing? Have you? Have you thought about that at all, or am I? Am I You're thinking?
Speaker 1:great because it already exists. Just, most people don't know it exists. So, for example, the social media version of this is called Nostr N-O-S-T-R. Okay. Okay, there's several different clients or apps that you can. You can access the Nostr protocol, but what the Nostr team did was take Bitcoin and said, instead of sending Bitcoin, what if we just sent tweets or posts or podcasts? And when we send it, how do you know it came from that person? Well, they're going to sign it, just like they sign a Bitcoin transaction. So they have the same, basically the same infrastructure that allows somebody to hold their own keys and when a message comes out purported from that person, they can sign it with their own keys and you can see and validate that that person that person does own that message yeah, so one of the things we we talk about in the real estate space is like um chain of title and title oh, yeah, right yeah have you heard or involved in anything?
Speaker 2:because to me it seems so obvious, yeah, that that, like all of these physical assets, like if, if I'm the county recorder, I, in my mind, if I, if I was the one in charge, I'm like we're going to take every single parcel, every single structure, every piece of dirt in the county and I'm going to issue, and you could put it on ethereum, right, you could put it on that chain, because it's specifically made for contractual, like large purchases. It's not meant for peer-to-peer stuff. Ethereum is specifically designed for, you know, selling businesses, selling large assets, every parcel, every little square inch of land into onto, onto the chain, and each one of them is issued out individual identifications and then now you have this digital record of it and it's not, yeah, because we've got all of these we've got.
Speaker 3:There's a bunch of title companies. They all have, you know, um physical locations. You know there's a ton of paper that's printed like at a closing, a real estate closing yeah right, and it's like you could eliminate all of that. You can eliminate all of it all of it, not that I'm advocating for eliminating people's jobs.
Speaker 1:Right, but you're not it's the nature of the beast, but technology is going to do it, regardless whether it's that or something else. So, yes, uh, india announced this week that they're putting all, all their land on the avalanche blockchain interesting I didn't even see that you can read about it.
Speaker 1:Um, I just pulled it up here again is one week ago. Uh, there's a lot. Of this is India. This is India. People, we can do this, it's going to happen. Yeah, there's already a parcel number with Washington County, right, yeah, it's that. You know that SL number. What is it? It's like, I think, of desert color, like desert color, if you, if you're in Aub, auburn hills, of desert color. It's like something like dch sg dash sah for auburn hills, dash the phase number, which is seven dash the lot, the lot number 703 exactly, and that's the convention that the county uses for these parcel numbers.
Speaker 1:Right, so we have the number, we have the serial number, yeah right, we created it, we can validate that now. Instead of 21 million pieces, you have however many parcel numbers. Right Now, when you want to do a transaction, you have a wallet you open up and we're transferring from your wallet to mine and we can see it on the blockchain.
Speaker 3:And if I'm buying your house right.
Speaker 2:Or a piece of land whatever.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a piece of land, whatever it is. One of the purposes of title insurance is to protect me from any liens or encumbrances that you may have. A claim to it, a claim on your property. But instead of going through this whole process of title searching, it's point click. Oh hey, you have a $2,500 tax lien on your property and this is the member.
Speaker 2:but that's where the lawsuits come in and the insurance is supposed to help you, protect you from lawsuits. Is that this title company is now going to say I'm going to make sure this is free and clear title. But if somebody else comes in later on and says, no, no, this is actually my ancestors land and I wasn't given the opportunity to take it, or whatever. But how often does that even happen?
Speaker 1:I don't, I don't think Back East, quite a bit Back, yeah, take it or whatever. But how often does that even happen? I don't. I don't back east quite a bit back. Okay, when they're when, when you have a actual land history of deeds, deed movement yeah, there's actually quite a bit of that that occurs. But I always chuckle with, you know, in the frontier west out here, where we're building fresh lots and it's like I'm gonna pay title insurance to double check that. You know this went from sitla over to uh, yeah, yeah, you know, like SITLA to Aaron.
Speaker 2:I mean even in Utah. Even in Utah there's two policies. If you get a loan on a property, two policies are issued, one to the buyer and one to the lender. They cover the exact same thing. I don't even understand why they do it. It's just about the money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean the lien side of it is where you could make an argument like yes.
Speaker 2:As a lender, I want protection on that. But why is the seller paying for title insurance to the buyer? It doesn't make sense. And the buyer is buying title insurance to the lender. It's going to change.
Speaker 1:It's going to happen. They're going to validate all the property ownership at a certain time, upload them to a blockchain and then that blockchain right there will be maintained by either the county or the city or the state or even a nation. The thing that I would say is, like you know, india using avalanche as blockchain. There are certain technologies or side chains or cryptocurrencies that are tokens that they can use this on, but then it comes back down to the immutable nature of Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:The reason why Bitcoin continues to be a store of value is because it is the hardest one to change.
Speaker 1:That's the hardest, like to co-opt 51% or more of all the miners in the nodes to make a change on the block. Or, you know, audit or not, audit the block, but change the block, the actual ledger itself, right, in order to do that, you would have to change all these validators and in 10 minutes you'd have to make the change and you have to have all of them make that change At the exact same time. So when you start thinking about a government holding something like the land records, you have to wonder okay, well, who has the access to make the change? Okay, this, this actually what you know who can make a change to the block. Oh, interesting, yeah. So that's where you start evaluating. If you're going to put a hundred million, $200 million in a protocol up in cyberspace and call it digital gold Michael Saylor's here's 400 million or here's billions of dollars, right, if you're going to do that, you want to make sure that no one can make a change to that, whereas now.
Speaker 3:I mean, I've even seen with my own eyes. Uh, either you know typos or whatever on county records and to get that changed it's just one person goes into the system and changes it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just theoretically, somebody at the county recorder's office could just go in and put my name on your title of your house and then I would own it without theoretically without naming any banks right, we know one recently that had all of its uh, basically its customer service representatives opening up, or its tellers opening up, accounts and loans in the customer's name without them knowing. You go to Lowe's or Home Depot and you go buy a gift card and you give it to your daughter or your son and they go in to use it and they're like I'm sorry, sir, there's just nothing on here. What are you going to do? Argue with Lowe's and their record and their ledger, or are you going to independently validate it with your own node, your own decentralized node?
Speaker 2:So so I guess there's, there's, it's more complicated, it's not as simple as that. And so then then it says your own individual, like Noster, your own individual, um identity. Key right Is decentralizing, that is, who has control over what, what that protocol actually looks like?
Speaker 1:So when you start a Nostra account or a I'm not going to say X or Facebook, but the equivalent okay, it's a social media platform similar to Facebook. If you go to Nostra right now and you start an account, you get. You get some key words like Bitcoin, you have 13,. You know 12 words or whatever 24 words. If you have higher security point is you got 12 words. That's your key and you hold that to yourself. That's the encryption key to the message. When you post the message, you sign it with that encryption key and then they then everybody in the world knows like this person was the person that said that it was. He's the only person with that key. So it's an interesting thing because now we can start signing what we say, because the future is we're not going to be able to tell, yeah, that this was talking to you, your daughter or a bot, exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it. The the ability for AI to pose as somebody else is gotten infinitely better just in three years.
Speaker 2:And it's so good and we're just so early on. It's still. It's still going to just continue to get better, and so we need we need some kind of backstop to prove who we are in that digital space, and so it'll be interesting to see how that follows through. One question I had this takes us back, but what happens to? First, four years, 10.5 million Bitcoins are issued out, and you got the guy I don't know if it was Roger Ver. You said the faucet they're issuing out what happens to all those Bitcoins that they just go into oblivion. They're gone Like nobody's like. Oh yeah, I think I got one of those one time. There's a piece of paper running around here somewhere. I'm so glad you brought this up. What happens with?
Speaker 1:that. That was another part of your question that I wanted to weave in there, and that is we all talk in terms of 21 million Bitcoin, but in reality, right now it's about 16.8 million available circulating coins. Where's the difference? The difference is we know there's been several hundreds of thousands of millions of coins lost in what you're just talking about. They've never moved on the blockchain, because you can see when a coin moves from one wallet to another. They've never, ever moved. We know that people have lost it. The famous one is the guy in London or over there in Britain somewhere that threw away his hard drive. Yeah, yeah, I was just thinking about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know how many, I don't think it. Yeah, yeah, I was just thinking about that. Yeah, I don't know how many, I don't think it was a lot of money 70,000.
Speaker 2:Bitcoin. I can't remember what it is. It's it's at this point. It's a legend almost.
Speaker 1:And he's like in the. He's literally in the the dump, like searching through the dump. To do is find it. I know it's here. Here's the proof, I can show you this. And he found people to spend millions of dollars to go, bag by bag, slowly through all the trash in this landfill. Yeah, he's still looking, still looking.
Speaker 2:So what happens? So with? With that, that's just gone, it's just, it's just.
Speaker 1:It's going to shorten the supply. So, essentially, for all those that listening and trying to understand Bitcoin terminology and learning about it, there's always 21 million Bitcoin. What has been lost is the ability to sign the transaction for to move that Bitcoin out of one wallet to another. So we still see all 21 million. They're still there, but what's been lost is that person's ability, who previously controlled it, to be able to sign a transaction because they've lost their password. Got it, okay, okay, okay.
Speaker 1:So when you think about it, now we're going to get really exciting, because this is what I'm most empowered with Bitcoin Is that. It's really the words that you come up with, those 12 words. That's your Bitcoin. And now you start crossing that over with the free speech. And now when they start saying, how can you tax speech? Like literally, the Bitcoin are still up there. I never take possession physically of any Bitcoin. I'm. I have 12 words and these 12 words allow me to basically move in the ether and cyberspace, move from one wallet to another certain amount of bitcoin, but it's words that do that interesting. So now you're starting to see it like, literally, 12 words controls my net worth, wow it's pretty heavy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm gonna have to digest that one. I need another energy drink. It's a caffeine flow. I'll let you digest on this.
Speaker 1:Right now, probably both of your net worth is controlled by one of any big bank.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's what I was thinking.
Speaker 1:That was what was going through my head and you blindly let it happen and you're okay with it.
Speaker 2:And if you're going back to our last we could just call it called the federal reserve, I mean technically last time we talked we were speaking about the the Creature of Jekyll Island, the book, yeah, and that's ultimately.
Speaker 1:We've allowed these institutions to hold your money, to rehypothecate it, to basically duplicate it by lending it out. You give me money as I'm their bank, I take your money, money, and then I give it to someone else in form of a loan. But if we all went back to bank and said where's our money at Right, we learned that there's not enough money to cover that Right. So right now it's like it's heavy to to think that 12 words may be years with net worth. But it's even heavier for me to think that some 20 year old somethingold, something is sitting right now, has full access to these computer ledger of a certain bank and could make an entry, could make a change or get seized by government or anything, yeah, just debank them, Just be like oh yeah, sorry At any given time.
Speaker 3:Well, and then that even goes back a little bit deeper to what you said earlier about the government taxing land. Right, if I pay my house off, all my cars, I don't have any debt. But I fail to pay my property taxes, the government can come and take my property 100% correct, so you never own.
Speaker 2:But their argument is that they owned it first.
Speaker 1:That's their argument. If we really fundamentally look at ownership, think about it. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Possession is only it's limited by your ability to protect. Yeah, confiscation of that thing, that said thing, so. So, like a jaguar, kills something and drags it up the tree and then the next, you know the next predators come in and I, you know, or something says I want a piece of this, you, you're. You only own something as long as you control the full control, custody of that asset.
Speaker 1:So when we start thinking about who controls the dollar and how they can get it back from you, or if you don't pay taxes, what happens? Well, if you don't pay taxes, what happens? Is you eventually go to jail? And if you sue, if you don't pay taxes, what happens? Well, if you don't pay taxes, what happens? You go to jail. Is you eventually go to jail? And if you sue, if you say I'm not going to go to jail, I'm going to get in this bulldozer and catch me if I can, then comes the violence part, the killdozer Right. And the crazy thing about it is is like that's another aspect of Bitcoin that removes the violence incentive. I can no longer go to a country or to a person with a gun and say give me your money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you said this on the last one. This was such a. This is a powerful analogy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Pick up your goods, your physical money and walk away with it, because if you shoot me with my Bitcoin, my 12 words die in my head and nobody else has them per se. Yeah, they can't get them.
Speaker 1:So they've lost the incentive in my head and nobody else has them per se. They can't get them, so they've lost the incentive to go in there with force or with violence to do that. So when we're thinking about our future and a peaceful society in which this theft thing happens or doesn't happen, getting closer to that ethical money where the individual, no matter how small, can take full custody and fully protect against anybody else the value of their saved energy, it's extremely powerful idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that really is man. That's a good one to end on, honestly, I think. I think that's that drives we can't do much better than that. We can't do much better than that. I think. I think I encourage, just like Aaron was talking about, take your class. I think I'm going to sign up for your class. When's the next?
Speaker 1:class. We'd love, love to have you. It hasn't been announced yet. I think if, if, if they don't announce a summer class, it'll be fall, it's for sure. Fall fall semester It'll be. It'll be there, utah tech, utah community education, bitcoin one-on-one and you'll you out to me. Outside of that, you know, I'll get you the information on the podcast. We can put it in the notes of the podcast and then that way too, I also offer and help people at any level that they want to get exposed or new, because I'm interested in R435.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm interested in our community of real people, real stores, real individuals doing business in Bitcoin, of real people, real stores, real individuals doing business in Bitcoin, understanding it and knowing like, hey, this is something that's functionally where we're headed on the world stage. But the faster we adopt this in the community, I think the smoother the transition is going to go.
Speaker 1:I want peer to peer, like Roger Ver, right now between us, I'm going to buy a monster from you or whatever. Like when I go out to my lunch with my buddies that are Bitcoiners one person buys, everybody else puts lightning payment Bitcoin back to the one person. There you go. The point is is here, locally, we can have an alternative currency, just in case? Just in case.
Speaker 2:Sweet Thanks for coming on, man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks for having me. I really appreciate both of you.
Speaker 2:Hope you enjoyed this episode, everybody. This episode everybody. We'll see you out there. Thanks, Sweet. That was awesome. Thanks for listening in. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe. Make sure you're following us on all the social media websites. We love your support. We love the dialogue. We want to continue that going. Find us at realestate435.com.
Speaker 3:We'd love to help you find a house here in town or help you get wherever you're going.