I’m going to go ahead and do that. Remember the Brady Bunch? Back before our money was broken, you could have one parent working while supporting a family with six kids and a live-in maid. Oh yeah, and a dog, Tiger. What happened? I have directed Secretary Connolly to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets. So President Nixon in 71, August 15, 1971, took the dollar off the gold standard so we could print more money, so we could steal your wealth.
And the reason that he decoupled gold from currency was to pay for the Vietnam War. The dollar will dramatically lose purchasing power. The more they print, the more it gets diluted. And with Bitcoin, you just can’t do that. And so people who understand the concept of money supply being the driver of inflation, then they’ll understand why Bitcoin is superior.
So a single politician with the ability to print money can turn employees against employers, can turn the customers against the vendors. They can turn every industry against every other industry. They have people rioting in the streets. And typically the people don’t realize that it’s the government that’s created the distress.
And they blame the shopkeeper or the policeman or the person in the streets for causing their problems. And so you have unnecessary violence. You have human tragedy. Businesses collapse. Families collapse. You have human tragedy. Businesses collapse. Families collapse. People lose their lives. And it’s all because the economy is, in essence, collapsing because the energy is being drained out of the currency.
There has been so much damage caused by broken money over the last 50 years, and more and more people are feeling left behind. If you work for a living, you’re paid a salary, you’re kind of a slave. That’s a harsh word. It makes us uncomfortable. But it’s true in the sense that you’re given a certain amount of money for your time and effort.
Therefore, you don’t have time for creativity and innovation because you’re just doing your job, just punching your ticket. Well, part of that is because your money that you’re paid gets less valuable every day. We’ve been sold a bill of goods that inflation is good for us. That’s nonsense.
Why should the devaluation of my hard-earned money be good for me? That doesn’t make any sense at all. Who it’s good for is the people at the tippy top. How in the world are they gonna get ahead if they’re operating on this system that doesn’t preserve their energy and their work and their time? So it seems like we’re all getting rug pulled. I have a sneaky feeling it’s inflation that’s taking advantage of us But what exactly is inflation? There are two kinds of inflation there’s inflation due to Unfortunate acts of God force majeure so if the monetary system is being run perfectly, and if there’s a tornado or a hurricane, and there’s a temporary shortage of goods and services, then prices will go up. And so that is physical inflation. But there’s another form of inflation, which is monetary inflation, and this is much more common. And this is generally the source of 98% of inflation in the world, the vast majority of it.
And that’s when all of the goods and services and assets in a society are priced in a currency that is in and of itself inflationary. So if I price things in the dollar and I double the supply of dollars, the supply of houses doesn’t increase, but the supply of dollars does increase, therefore the prices will probably double over time.
Typically, especially if you’re going through a hyperinflation, wages do not keep up. They do not keep up. And so inflation eats into purchasing power. You can’t buy enough to feed your family. The average income in this country is now $5,000 less than the average cost of living. The cost of basic human needs, food, shelter, and transportation is now $5,000 more than the average person makes, which means if you’re in that category, which is most Americans, you now cannot make ends meet.
Here in the United States, they target 2% inflation. They’re literally saying, we want to steal about 2% of your purchasing power every year. And then we have years like this where the inflation rate is 7% or 8% or 9% higher than normal. That means they’re just stealing our purchasing power even that much faster.
So there’s no honest unit of account for them. It’s just a credit-based system. They’re just making different numbers on their spreadsheets and they say, you know what, we’re going to create this much more credit this year. We’re gonna destroy this much more purchasing power. And it’s the citizens of the country that pay for that.
We’re paying for our government to make irresponsible decisions. So yes, I think that’s very immoral. At this point, it’s getting very difficult for people to catch up. We’re seeing more people working multiple jobs just to make ends meet. We see more dual income households.
There’s less households where you just have one person that works and one person that stays home and runs the household and the family. Now everybody’s working. So let me get this straight. We take our God-given talents and work really hard and our money buys us less and less every year? I don’t like the sound of that. So how does government create money? We print it digitally.
So we, you know, we as a central bank, we have the ability to create money digitally. We also print actual currency and we distribute that to the Federal Reserve Banks. The current financial system was built for the elite. It was built to ensure that those that control institutions and have a vast amount of money can make even more profit at the expense of regular citizens that are from the working class.
The current financial system was designed to promote the wealth of a minority, which is why that minority tries everything possible to discourage people from using Bitcoin, because they know they will end up losing that privilege they have been carrying for centuries. because they know they will end up losing that privilege they have been carrying for centuries.
So we can’t trust money to tell us accurately how much value we create. So it’s not hard to see how we go from this to a world where a lot of people just don’t even know how much they are worth to the world. And that makes it easier for the bullies of the world to step in and say, you know what, we’ll tell you how much you’re worth.
A person who gives themselves to honest labor and gives an honest day’s work deserves a wage that will allow them to sustain their lifestyle at a basic standard. And if that’s not happening, then we have a problem in terms of the way our economic structure works. And there are a lot of people who work multiple jobs in order to meet that standard.
And that is probably an indication that we have a problem. It’s not good stewardship to put myself in a position where I acquire so much debt that I can’t sustain my living. And we have people who are doing that all the time and we have people who in some ways promote the idea that you can live this way. The incentives exist for the Fed to provide extremely cheap credit to banks and for them to market up a little bit because profitable for them and then to offer that credit pretty cheaply and essentially create debt slaves or indentured servants
out of every American and anyone else around the world that they can lend to that is plugged into the Western banking system. That’s just the incentives of the system that we have today. So was our monetary system designed to siphon away wealth from the working class? If we go back to medieval times, and perhaps a bit earlier, we can see how money emerged.
What happened is that every local sovereign nation state or city state tended to issue its own currency. And two things impacted the reliability, the durability and the effectiveness of that currency. One was whether the issuer of the currency, whether it was a nobleman or a king, or whether it was a constituted government, whether they could, to use the phrase from Isaiah, to resist the temptation to dilute the currency.
And it is a huge temptation. There’s no question about it. I like to use a silver dollar as an example. So when this dollar was created, right, it was worth a dollar. As a matter of fact, for a while, you could take a US silver dollar note and exchange it for a dollar, right? So this used to be a dollar.
Today, I just checked and it takes $38, paper dollars, Federal Reserve note dollars, to buy $1 of silver. That gives you an idea of the destruction of the purchasing power. And that’s why we’re seeing today in the post-lockdown world, all the central banks around the world printed tons and tons of money.
And that just doesn’t make any sense. And so people say, well, why are housing prices going crazy? And why are food prices going crazy? Well, oh, it’s inflation. It’s actually not really inflation. Inflation is when there’s excess demand for limited supply, so the price rises. This is currency devaluation.
So weights and measures were the way in which you’d say, if I got a pound of something, I’ll give you a pound of this, or the equivalent. And there’s a real warning in the scriptures, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, especially in the Mosaic law, and then later in the book of Isaiah, the book of Proverbs, that talk about things like, and they use a lot of metaphors, like diluting the wine with water.
I mean, how is that for an image of inflationary policy where you inflate the amount of money in the economy because you have control of the printing presses? Unfortunately, as governments abandon all morality with respect to preserving the value of the currency for which they exercise control and responsibility, it’s increasingly impossible to count on that kind of stability.
And in that light, we think in terms of whether Bitcoin is an investment vehicle or whether it is an exchange vehicle, or maybe we have to look at it as both. There’s no actual mechanical difference at all between you and I putting together a dollar printing machine and spinning up some counterfeit $100 bills and trying to go out and take those into the world and trade them for goods and services.
There’s no difference in you and I doing that and what the Federal Reserve does by the trillion. It is one of the core contributors to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The particularly egregious thing about fiat currency is that it can cover up theft in the name of policymaking, whereas electronic currencies based on algorithms can’t do that.
If you think of the average citizen, it is very hard to plan your life if I don’t know what the central bank is going to do next month, let alone a year from now, five years or 10 years from now. I use the example of baby boomers, right? Baby boomers, when we were young, we thought $500,000 would be a perfectly good amount of money to retire on.
And now, suddenly, it looks like $500,000 is nowhere near what you really should have to retire on. Well, the reason for that is the systemic, systematic destruction of the purchasing power of those dollars. So that makes all baby boomers and all citizens more dependent on government. And that’s very good for government.
So not only are people unable to retire, they can’t even get their life started. God’s will is for us to be fruitful and to multiply. And one decision or one factor that impact many people’s decision to have children is their finances. And the state of our economy has really devastated particularly young people’s savings.
And I have a ton of friends who have decided not to have children or not to have more children because they feel like they can’t afford it. children or not to have more children because they feel like they can’t afford it. So I do think inflation can impact some people’s decision on if they want to have children or not.
And I think that’s a really sad thing. I have experienced this in my life. I have put off having a family. I’ve wondered if I’ll ever be able to afford a home. More and more people in my generation are living at home with their parents and drowning in student loan debt. Millennials like me are losing hope that the future is one they’ll be able to afford.
For the first time, we have a generation that is worse off than the ones who came before. None of it feels fair because it isn’t. The system is rigged against us. We live in a system where we are forced to use a certain currency, in our case, let’s say the US dollar. We didn’t choose to use the US dollar.
We didn’t have a vote about whether we were gonna use the US dollar. We’re forced to use the US dollar. And that US dollar is controlled by political organizations that make political decisions to benefit themselves at the cost of others. Decades of policies that were probably well-intentioned have led to the worst levels of income inequality and wealth concentration we’ve seen since the 1920s.
And at this point, we have politicians who just throw blame and they come in and say, I’ll fix it. But unfortunately, they can’t fix it because in order to keep the system going, they have to keep printing money. And the more they keep printing money, the more the wealth concentration grows and the more unfair and unequal the system becomes.
Okay, so clearly there’s a problem and it feels like there’s no way out, but is there? If broken money is the cause, how can we fix it? More and more people say the solution is Bitcoin. My perspective is that Bitcoin does fix everything. And Bitcoin is about community. It feels healthy. It feels like it’s doing something good for society.
It’s something that’s non-political. It is not tied to any one group or another. It’s not tied to the Republicans. It’s not tied to the Democrats. It’s not tied to the libertarians. It’s open for everyone. And it’s free for everyone. Anyone can be a part of the Bitcoin economy. It’s like a good church.
A good church says, anyone, come on in. Come be a part of the Bitcoin economy. It’s like a good church. A good church says, anyone, come on in. Come be a part of our community. Be a part of our family. Bitcoin is that. So we can only trust systems that cannot be discriminatory. And Bitcoin is powerful in a way that is money that does not discriminate based on race, based on gender, ethnicity, or even geographic location.
A person holding Bitcoin in Togo today will have the same value as a person holding the same quantity of Bitcoin in the United States. I’m not techie, I’m really horrible with technology, but once I understood what blockchain was, blockchain is integrity. Bitcoin is based upon integrity. That’s why I call it people’s money.
The government cannot make it. Bitcoin is not this centralized control of the economy. Bitcoin is built by the people for the people. If you consider how many steps it takes for a merchant to sell a good to a consumer. In the traditional world today, it takes nine steps. And what the Bitcoin network does is take seven of those steps away.
It’s peer to peer. Those steps, by the way, are dominated by toll takers. They’re taking fees. And so up to 3%, sometimes more, of the transaction, which actually can be saved by both the merchant and the consumer. One of my favorite aspects of Bitcoin is the limited supply of 21 million. I think that having something that can’t be changed makes it so powerful and it makes people appreciate just like their time is limited, their own personal wealth is limited.
When they see that the Bitcoin amount is limited to $21 million, it really makes them understand the difference between Bitcoin and every other currency, all fiat currencies, which don’t have this limit. So that key is what makes Bitcoin special. Bitcoin is a digital bearer instrument. You can think of a bearer instrument as he who holds it, owns it.
So if I am walking and I find a $10 bill on the ground and I pick it up, who owns it? I do because I’m now holding it. If I give it to you, now who owns it? You own it because you’re holding it. That’s a bear instrument. She who holds it owns it. How do we make this happen in a digital world? Well, it wasn’t possible before Bitcoin because Bitcoin solves what’s called the double spend problem.
Think about it when you take a picture on your phone and you send a picture to your friend. You still have that picture on your phone and then on your friend’s phone, they have a copy of that picture. If I want to send money to my friend peer to peer in a digital way, it’s really important that when I send it, it leaves my device and it’s only on their device.
Otherwise, you have what’s called a double spend, and that’s where you can double spend the same piece of currency over and over again. That doesn’t work for money. So Bitcoin solved that decades-old computer science dilemma called the double spend problem, and that allows for the peer-to-peer transfer of money in a digital form for the first time ever what bitcoin does is it gives you back that ability to be your own bank to custody your own funds to spend money but the way we do with dollar bills now but in a digital virtual way, that’s really powerful.
So to recap, there are only 21 million Bitcoin and the network gives you total control over your money. And now some of the most successful entrepreneurs are into Bitcoin. If you look at what gold is, let’s start there. Nobody carries around a gold bar, but some people just feel more comfortable holding gold than they do cash.
But the reality is nobody actually owns gold, right? They don’t physically own it. Some people have coins, but that’s, you know, an exception. And so gold itself is actually just a digital transaction that’s stored on a ledger somewhere. It just happens to be on a fiat ledger where it’s a traditional database held wherever you’re buying the gold, a bank, an investment bank, whatever it may be.
There are a lot of vertically integrated organizations that control your access and the distribution and your ability to use traditional gold ownership. Bitcoin is very similar in a lot of respects, only the ownership of that is stored in a wallet, which, you know, if you have your own wallet, is stored on the Bitcoin blockchain.
For example, dollars aren’t a great store of value because we have to trust that the government won’t print more. With gold, no one controls the production of gold. So we know that its issuance is not controlled by any one party and it requires work. Gold is a proof of work sort of asset where you have to dig it out of the ground.
And Bitcoin has some of these same characteristics. Bitcoin as a store of value, it’s great because you can carry it in your own wallet. You can cold carry it, which is a huge advantage. You can be anywhere in the world and there’s an ability to transfer it or use it. That’s a huge advantage. You can transfer it to others or buy it from others in seconds. That’s a huge advantage.
And you can transfer it as a method of payment in a lot of respects. And that’s a huge advantage. Those advantages are legit and offer people good reason to use it. And, you know, if you’re a speculator or you’re using it purely as a store of value, it’s easy to trade, store, buy and sell. The reason Bitcoin is better than gold is that it’s more transferable Than gold, you know If you try to move a billion dollars worth of gold You need like an army to move that and it’s very expensive If you need to move a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin, you could hit a couple keys hit send in 10 minutes
It’s transferred at the speed of light to anywhere in the world. So it’s more portable than gold. It’s more divisible than gold. So you could divide Bitcoin by up to eight decimal points. So the smallest unit is called a Satoshi. So it’s more divisible.
If you try to divide a bar of gold or a gold coin, you go pay for Starbucks, you can’t do it. So more divisible, more portable, and it’s more verifiable than gold. It’s hard to verify gold. Bitcoin is easy to verify. You just type the key into a blockchain explorer, you could verify that you’re Bitcoin. So to get this straight, Bitcoin is a digital asset that moves through the Internet without a third party like a bank or credit card company approving the transaction.
All right, let’s go a little deeper. You’ve probably heard of the word blockchain. So what is a blockchain? Blockchain just refers to a ledger. Blockchain just refers to a ledger. So the Bitcoin blockchain is a digital ledger of transactions where all the computers on the network have to agree to add a block to that ledger.
So it’s a chain, essentially of blocks, that each contain a list of transactions on the Bitcoin network. And the whole community, essentially the whole network, verifies that those transactions are accurate. The idea of a digital ledger will make more sense if we get a clearer picture of how ledgers work.
The ledger is nothing new. It can be traced back to the 11th century and was popularized in Florence, Italy during the Renaissance in the 14th and 15th centuries. It’s simply the way we’ve been keeping track of who owns what for about a thousand years now. For example, when you deposit money in your bank account, you have a credit on the right side of the ledger.
The bank has a debit on the left side of the ledger because they owe you that deposit when you want to withdraw it. Easy enough. It gets a bit more complicated when you want to buy something with the money in your bank account. Now the bank and the store have to reconcile your bank account with the store’s bank account to move the money because they each have their own ledgers.
And your ledger has to reconcile with their ledger, which can take a few days or up to 30 days as with credit cards. Now multiply this times billions of people moving their money to buy things every day. And remember the banks on both sides take a fee. All these transaction fees add up to trillions of dollars each year.
That comes out of your pocket and the store’s pockets. The beauty of Bitcoin is that it’s one universal ledger that’s updated and distributed around the world every 10 minutes. Best of all, it requires no middleman like a bank, which gives you complete control of your money. So now that digital ledgers make sense, you might be wondering how you keep your Bitcoin safe on the blockchain.
The way that I would describe storing your Bitcoin on a blockchain is like a locker system. So at your high school, you had a locker and your locker had both a public address. So my locker was C-19 and I can give that address to everybody. Hey, go put this envelope in my locker, C-19. That’s my public address.
But only I have the key, the private key to open that locker and move stuff from one to another. So securing my Bitcoin or cryptocurrency would be the same thing where you have this blockchain, which is like this digital locker system. And there’s a public address and everybody could know that address and anybody could deposit into that address.
But only I have my key to unlock that. And where you’re storing your keys, there’s typically some secret phrase that you need to keep in a safe place, which is what’s used to create your secret key. The way most people store this is in what’s called a mnemonic phrase. And you’ve probably seen this where it’s either a 12 or a 24 word phrase typically.
And each of those words comes from a specific word list. And when you stack those words together, 24 words is the number most people use, which corresponds about to the number of atoms in the known universe. And so we’re storing a tremendous amount of randomness there that makes it computationally impossible to break into.
And that’s the piece you need to keep safe. Okay, that was a lot to throw at you, so let’s try to keep simpl. OK, that was a lot to throw at you. So let’s try to keep simplifying it. Bitcoin might seem complicated. At the same time, I’d argue it’s way less complicated, actually, if you look underneath the hood to figure out how banks settle transactions.
And but most of the people don’t care, right? In traditional finance, you hit the button, it goes somewhere and it just ends up in my wallet. And nobody asks how it got ultimately from point A to point B. Bitcoin is new and I get that people have more questions ultimately about it. But over time, I feel like the trust in kind of the Bitcoin blockchain, as well as the longevity of the technology and how the software has been up and running for so many years, people stop asking the question.
It’ll become very normal. To sum this up, let’s just hear a simple definition of Bitcoin. So what is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a piece of software that allows two parties to exchange value over the internet in a transparent and trustless fashion, as easy as sending an email. So we’re free to send Bitcoin through the internet as money without permission from any government or bank.
But you might be wondering what the difference is between Bitcoin and the CBDCs you’ve been hearing about. What a CBDC is, is central bank digital currency. Now, what it is, is they’re trying to take, and when I say they, I mean central banks and the government are trying to take the concept of fiat currency and digitize it into a digital dollar.
Now the challenge with this is that allowing the state to create these central bank digital currencies, it is creating a mechanism by which the government can surveil every single transaction that an individual makes. And not only can they surveil these transactions, it allows them to turn off your bank account if you start doing something that they disagree with.
This is an extremely slippery slope that if we allow the government to go down this path, it has the potential to enslave humanity in the long term. And I think it’s something that we need to carefully review, because if we go down a CBDC path, allowing the government this level of control, it’s unprecedented, which is why we should avoid this at all costs and stick to a hard money standard like Bitcoin.
The central bank literally would be in position to cancel any transaction it would be permissioned not permissionless and it’s one thing you know for mastercard for example to know how much they paid to walmart last year but it’s another thing for them to tell the world how much you paid at walmart last year and it’s a whole different level of creepy for them to say exactly what did you buy at Walmart last year? And I think people kind of broadly get that sense of privacy.
That’s what’s at stake here. I think the future of money really is one of the most important policy debates we’re having today. And when you think about where people could go with kind of an Orwellian surveillance state money system like a central bank digital currency. It really is a good versus evil.
And in Bitcoin in this case is on the good. The countries that are clinging to a CBDC are trying to control their people. And those are weak governments. Weak leaders are the ones who try to control everybody. The strongest leaders are the ones who trust people and set them free. The problem I have with CBDCs is they’re Marxists.
And what I mean is central bank. Marxism is central banking system. So that’s why I support Bitcoin, because Bitcoin, I saw the strength coming from the people, not the government. I think the CBDCs, wherever they are, are a threat to freedom. Absolutely. You’re seeing CBDCs in China right now, where the populace are trying to go into a store, and they’re scanning a QR code.
And they’re seeing in their wallet that it’s an invalid purchase, because maybe they’re from a region that’s 100 miles away, or they’re going to a pharmacy pharmacy and they don’t want that person to have access to that type of drug or medical treatment. With a CBDC comes the programmability and control of the government saying, you’re allowed to do this or you’re not allowed to do that.
And we’ve already seen it rolled out in China, and it looks a little scary. So when you’re doing that compare and contrast between a CBDC and Bitcoin, it’s all about who’s controlling the actual ledger. One’s actually decentralized, the other one is not. It’s completely controlled by the government.
Now that you know the difference between Bitcoin and a CBDC, let’s play a little game. Hey, everyone. Time for one of my favorite games, CBDC versus Bitcoin. Here’s how we play. Let’s play wallet is frozen. Come on, this one’s a no-brainer. CBDC or Bitcoin? That’s right, CBDC. Next, British electrician protests being denied a pint of lager at local pub for exceeding his alcohol limit for the week.
Which is it? CBDC or Bitcoin? Well, of course it’s a CBDC. All right, last one. Are you ready? Can I get a drum roll, please? After Chinese invasion, Taiwanese citizens escape with their savings in their head. Border guards are unable to confiscate their wealth. You tell me, CBDC or Bitcoin? That’s right, Bitcoin for the win.
Thanks for joining us today, folks. Natalie, back to you. Hopefully by now you’re feeling more assured. So let’s get back to the idea that Bitcoin fixes everything and look at exactly what it can fix. I think that there’s a moral case being made for Bitcoin in that it is for the end consumer, for the citizen. It is the stable form that cannot be stolen or corrupted or manipulated or inflated.
And so for an individual, that is a great thing. It doesn’t necessarily benefit certain governments who want the ability to wipe out with the stroke of a pen or the muzzle of a gun the bank accounts of its citizens. So politicians promise you that they will make your houses more valuable, that you can use them as ATM and extract value from them, that you’d have cheap borrowing and cheap leased cars and cheap mobile phones, and you’ll just be wasteful and keep consuming, borrowing, spending, consuming.
This is not sustainable. It’s not sustainable for human harmony. It’s not sustainable for the planet. It leads to a joyless market society that measures GDP and exchange value over experiential value. And experiential value is much more valuable to human beings. We don’t measure our literacy rates, our suicide rates, our divorce rates, our happiness, our pollution within the GDP metric.
We only measure exchange value. So as long as people, politicians keep saying, oh, GDP is going up, therefore we’re all doing great, that’s a massive problem for human society, and it’s not sustainable for our planet. So I think it’s extremely important that we consider a sound form of money as a fundamental change for our financial and monetary system, because that will put us back on an even keel.
So how does all this get us back to the Brady Bunch days? You know, where a family can actually live off one income and have a balanced life? Bitcoin can make life affordable again and allow us to plan for our future. If money actually held its value, imagine the freedom we would have. I think store value is a really interesting concept that ultimately people are trying to figure out where can I put my economic value that I’ve gotten in exchange for the work that I’ve done.
And I don’t just want it to not go away. Maybe actually it should increase in value over time. And I think something like Bitcoin continues to perform over the last 15 years as the best store of value on the planet. People view Fed monetary easing as printing money. And if you’re printing money, it’s going to create inflation. and therefore, sound money tends to grow in value.
Just in case you haven’t heard of sound money, let’s take a moment to learn what that term really means. What is sound money? The term sound money originated back when we used gold coins as currency. Oftentimes, as a way to create more money, kings and queens would mix in common, cheaper metals with gold.
That way, they could create a coin that looked like it was pure gold, but really, it was diluted. And that allowed them to create more coins with the same amount of gold. So instead of 10 ounces of gold being able to create 10 coins, now they could use that 10 ounces of gold mixed with junk metals and create 14 coins.
It was a very sneaky theft of the people’s money. The public got wise to this scam and found a simple but clever way to test if their coins were pure. If they dropped them, a pure gold coin would make a different sound than a diluted one. Today, when we refer to sound money, we mean money that cannot be diluted.
Bitcoin is the soundest form of money humans have ever created because no matter how hard anyone tries, you can’t dilute Bitcoin by creating more of it. There will only ever be 21 million for all of human history. So because Bitcoin can’t be printed out of thin air, it gives us money we can trust. And what’s more, it’s inclusive and open to everyone around the world.
You know, if you are one of the 50% of the planet who does not have a bank account, you are shut off from the global economy. You can’t go shopping on the internet if you don’t have access to a credit card or some form of digital payment. So there’s a huge amount of people around the world that are frozen out of the financial system and the ability to improve their life circumstances.
Bitcoin, it is designed ultimately to replace both the monetary system and the financial system. It is a math-based system where at its core it is trying to remove politics from money. The beautiful part about that is that anyone anywhere in the world can use Bitcoin at any time for any reason. No one can censor them. No one can stop them.
No one can tell them that their use of money is wrong or not allowed. No one is going to change the rules on them halfway through. And everyone operates by the same rules. It doesn’t matter if you’re a billionaire. It doesn’t matter if you’re a president. It doesn’t matter who you are.
You have the exact same rights within the Bitcoin system that the person who makes one dollar a day has. Do I believe that it can help people rise up out of poverty and give them opportunity to do business where they weren’t able to before. Yes, I do, and it’s certainly been the case around the world where people have gotten access to a financial system that they didn’t have access to before.
For example, talk about financial inclusion, for instance. The current financial system excludes a large amount of people from being able to access financial services. If you looked at a continent like Africa, one of the reasons they can’t crawl out of poverty is because the currencies in every country in Africa, they’re either broken completely, completely defective, or they’re impaired, and they’re continually siphoning economic energy from the working class and from the businesses in those economies into the hands of the politicians that control the corrupt currencies.
You in essence don’t really have any hope of accumulating wealth if you’re paid in a defective currency and the currency is continually collapsing. Not only does Bitcoin allow people to be their own bank, it is the only form of money that gives us digital property rights. Bitcoin is very transformative because it gives us a new set of building blocks.
We don’t know all the things that we can build with those building blocks, but what we do know is that it solved maybe the oldest problem in humanity, which is how do I secure my property in a way that can’t be stolen? The ability of a person to have full rights to the money that he has earned, that he has brought into being, without interference of any more powerful entity, whether it is a band or a gang or a government or anything else that could use force against him, that’s a huge advantage and a huge asset.
Coming from the former Soviet Union, my parents brought my family over in 1989. I was seven years old, along with my sister. And we left the Soviet Union because many people know it was a very oppressive regime. Things were scarce, goods were scarce, people weren’t really free to do what they wanted, information was very strictly controlled.
So what I found out is that when we left, the government was able to exchange about $100 per person. For my family of four, that meant we left with $400 in our pockets, and that’s all we could take with us. Otherwise, our option was to exchange these Soviet rubles on the street, which basically had no value.
Had we had Bitcoin back in the Soviet Union in 1989, we could have actually taken our hard work and everything that we had done with us. You know, that value that we earned. value that we earned. You know, if you show up at the airport with all of your money in any other nation state, they either arrest you, they send you home, or more likely they take your money and send you home.
Right? Try to walk through an airport in most countries with a million dollars of gold in your backpack and see how far you get. You can’t even walk through with more than 10,000 of anything. Governments have captured the capital of their citizens, and if they can force you to use the currency while they’ve got the capital captured, they can simply seize as much of your capital as they wish by debasing the currency more aggressively.
Bitcoin reverses that balance of power because now for the first time you could actually store your capital in a hardware wallet or in a set of private keys and you don’t have to move it physically through the airport or on a ship. You can actually move it through cyberspace with 12 words. You can send all the digital capital in the country over a WhatsApp message.
words, you could send all the digital capital in the country over a WhatsApp message. You know, there’s a famous phrase, you know, an armed society is a polite society. When the citizens are disarmed and the government’s the only entity with the guns, then one person can simply steal all the property.
And when 95% of the citizens are starving to death, that’s not a problem as long as 1% of the people have the guns and you feed the 1% with the guns, you can still control the country. And that’s what happened in many nations, in North Korea, in Cuba, in Zimbabwe, etc. Bitcoin economically arms everybody. Like for the first time in history, you can fight back. You actually can store your economic energy and protect it with cryptography in a 300 exahash wall of encrypted energy.
And no mayor or governor or country can seize that from you, no matter how much weaponry they have. And what happens then? If I can’t take it from you by a force, I have to negotiate with you. And that means instead of just losing everything, I’m going to try to sweet talk you or negotiate you into giving me half.
And we call that tax. We want to get people out of poverty. We need to give them property rights. We need to give them savings that is theirs. We need to give them a way to build wealth, to build businesses and to keep that wealth and to pass it on to their children so they can build more wealth. And that is what Bitcoin provides.
Bitcoin enables digital property rights for the first time because it’s the world’s first digital bear instrument. It allows people to have not only ownership, but control. But what also is essential to a free society is economic freedom. If you don’t have the choice of how you spend or save your money, you don’t live in a free society.
Before cryptocurrency, you needed a bank to allow you to build something and put it on the internet. But now we have money native to the internet, which allows the whole world to participate in a global economy. Ultimately, Bitcoin is a means to fight tyranny, to fight corruption. When you take control of the monetary system out of the hands of a few and make it available to everybody, it is a safer system.
Bitcoin provides a way for the abundance gained from technology to be broadly distributed to society that is aligned with the best in humanity rather than the worst in humanity. Bitcoin is value that everyone can recognize. And already 100 million people recognize that value. There was this moment I was sitting there and I put Bitcoin on a ledger and I looked at the ledger and I thought, this is my money.
My money’s here. It’s not sitting out there in some bank waiting for some bank run to run it out of business or allowing some banker to make a fortune off my money. It’s right here. I know where my money is. I think that gives power to the individual.
I think that gives power to the individual. I think that gives power to the people. This is why people find so much hope in Bitcoin. It gives us back control over our time, our energy and our lives. So I think the most transformative aspect of Bitcoin is really almost a social economic experiment. You know, can all the users of a money be in control of the monetary system, right? Or do we need a handful of elected people to tell us what the monetary policy should be? If a majority of the users of Bitcoin and the people running it decide to change the monetary policy, they can. Bitcoin solved
decentralization and security. And it was the. Bitcoin solved decentralization and security. And it was the first time that decentralization and security has ever been solved. And for anyone that’s gotten into Bitcoin, reading the Bitcoin white paper is usually the inflection point where it’s a nine-page, really easily understood document that lays out what’s now the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem.
The fundamental idea that we can have a financial system where individuals are really in control of their money. You don’t have to have all of the intermediaries that were problematic in the 2008 financial collapse. When I saw that as an engineer, I thought, wow, this is one of the most empowering things that I could imagine.
The most important thing is the way it reorganizes human behavior right because for basically thousands of years you know most things happen in a trusted way you had to trust somebody in order to conduct a transaction you had to trust somebody in order to store your wealth and now you don’t you can use Bitcoin and you don’t actually have to trust anyone you just have to trust the algorithm. You have to trust the software code.
You have to trust the rules of the system. And so Bitcoin is this very transparent system based on code and based on rules. It doesn’t require you to trust a bank, doesn’t require you to trust the government, doesn’t require you to trust your neighbor even. You can use it to do business with an enemy. You can use it to do business with a friend.
I think the fact that no one can control or manipulate Bitcoin and that everyone has to play by the same set of rules and there’s no rulers, I think that makes it inherently very moral. There’s no one who gets a special unfair advantage in Bitcoin and that’s different than the current system we have today where whosoever’s closest to the money printer basically disproportionately benefits from it.
And so I think Bitcoin can make the world a better place by making it a more fair and inclusive system, and will help fix some of the division, polarization, and the wealth concentration we see today. There is so much Bitcoin can heal. It can even prevent those in power from being able to take our money or silence us.
The first thing that happens when you go against the government that is a dictatorship, they will take away access to your money. And it doesn’t even have to be a dictatorship. Justin Trudeau in Canada works to use banks to cut off money for truckers. They were protesting COVID restrictions that were put on them in Canada. and they were using the banks to do this.
This was actually considered illegal in Canada, but nevertheless, Trudeau did it. Banks complied with it, and they started choking off the protest by restricting the money. The government taking people who had committed no crime, who were not charged with a crime, who were, of course, never convicted of a crime, who are not charged with a crime, who are, of course, never convicted of a crime, and punishing them for criticizing government policies and punishing them in a way that was almost worse than imprisonment. Because if you can’t get at your bank account, you can’t feed
your children, you can’t buy gasoline, you can’t pay the mortgage on your house. Because if the government has the capacity to starve you to death, to keep you from getting work, to keep you from shelter, then it has license essentially for any atrocity.
And at that point, I began looking more seriously at Bitcoin as a currency that could be used to escape the government surveillance systems. When working in Moscow, when our bank accounts were blocked by the regime, we were able to continue our activities thanks to Bitcoin savings. Basically, Bitcoin gave us freedom of action and freedom of speech at that time. The US government has the discretionary ability to effectively turn off the savings of whole nations at a time.
That’s what they did with Afghanistan, for better or for worse, after the Taliban took over. That’s what they did with Russia in February of this year. Again, for better or for worse. You might say, well, these are the strategic objectives of the United States. That’s fine. But what they are doing is confiscating the savings of entire nations and it’s just a fundamentally unfair dynamic right you are blending political objectives with people’s savings and that leads to misery in my opinion governments can at any time decide they don’t like you or me or somebody else and sanction
if we called sanctions what they are, right, financial sanctions, starving children, you’re basically cutting off supplies of goods and services to a population, we probably wouldn’t like it as much. But when we call them economic sanctions, whether it’s Venezuelans or Russians or anybody else, governments almost glamorize it because they’re like, well, we know better.
We know what’s best. But censoring someone because they have different views or different lifestyle or different perspective on how the world should interact, it’s not really our job. So PayPal came out with that policy where they said, if you say anything online we don’t like, misinformation, which of course, as we found out for the last two years, what was labeled misinformation actually came true.
But if you do misinformation, they can pull 2,500 out of your account. It’s not your money. Of course, they got massive amounts of backlash and they came out and said, whoa, that was a mistake. That was a mistake. And what we’re seeing in Canada, what we’re seeing with PayPal, what we’re seeing with the banks is that your money that you think is your money is not your money. And at any time, they can decide to censor you or block it if they want.
And at the end of the day, if we don’t have the ability to determine our own future for ourself, for our family on a monetary basis, we don’t actually have any real control of anything in our own lives. Bitcoin puts you back in the driver’s seat of your life, which is why so many people see it as the ultimate force for good.
I absolutely believe that Bitcoin already is making the world a better place and will continue to do so in the coming years. There’s been plenty of examples of currency collapse just in the last 13 years since Bitcoin has existed. And we get these every single year.
So they’re having major, even middle income nations where the currency has effectively failed. And Bitcoin has been a life raft for those people. When the war in Ukraine broke out, I had friends there on the ground trying to help some folks that were stuck in bomb shelters, delivering food and water. And they asked us to help them monetarily, try to help them buy more supplies.
On a Saturday night, the only way to get money into Ukraine was Bitcoin. There’s no other technology that can cross borders outside of banking hours. So we were actually able to use Bitcoin to send it over there and get local currency to people on the ground and to affect humanitarian aid. And I was really blown away because Bitcoin was the only thing that could solve that problem and in times of war all philosophical resistance to things like Bitcoin goes out the window because it doesn’t matter.
If it solves your problem you’re going to use it and that’s what makes me really excited about it because there are so many problems in the world and those people really need the Bitcoin. We decided to collect some donations in Bitcoin and Bitcoin was kind of a plan B for us. The very concept of Bitcoin is tightly connected to the concept of financial freedom for everyone in the world and give understanding that Bitcoin is a significant tool in a fight against global evil.
You know, when people go to protest, whether it’s in Uzbekistan, in Russia, or Belarus, or Ukraine, or somewhere, it’s important that you know that you have financial tool, which cannot be turned off in the moment when you need it, when you need to be able to fight for your freedoms. And shouldn’t be naive thinking that someone in your country would not abuse the power.
One day it could happen. You have to be prepared. Where you see Bitcoin expanding really fast is actually nations that need it the most. You see why El Salvador is a natural is because they’re most punished. They’re furthest away from the monopoly system of money today. It’s the nations that have always seen either hyperinflation or dictators.
And what you’re seeing is those populations race into this open monetary protocol and nobody can stop them. It is freedom. These are places where the government has failed in some sense. And so a lot of critics think, oh, well, you know, Bitcoin is just something that, you know, rich Westerners like and it’s a tool to gamble with.
But really, the on the ground adoption is happening in places where people actually need it. And I think that’s an extremely telling early data point. And so like if you live in Nigeria, Nigeria has among the highest Bitcoin adoption rates in the world, like more than 30% of people use it. It’s actually a very useful tool to do peer to peer transactions.
Bitcoin, when you look at its alternative as a money where you don’t have to trust anyone and you can move it across countries, you can send it to your family. I’ve heard tons of stories from Argentinians and how they use Bitcoin to get around capital controls, to get around, to get around government restricts the ability to move dollars in and out of the country.
And Bitcoin is this fantastic alternative for that. My country is ruled by the oldest military regime in Africa, same government in power for 57 years. And this is a brutal, rogue military regime that puts us under unimaginable amount of abuse and pain and control. Activists and dissidents arrested, killed, their bodies dumped in the sea.
Countless of activists are jailed and have been in prison for years with no trial. Many others have disappeared, their families have never seen their body, and thousands others have fled the country, living in exile like myself. I see Bitcoin as a tool of political, social, and economic liberation. The reason why is because the ideology behind Bitcoin in itself is judged toward giving monetary agency back to people, to citizens.
No longer having people depend on banks and governments to control their money and determine its worth. We are also in a situation where as citizens of our nation, our money is worth absolutely nothing outside of our borders. So when I see Bitcoin, I see it as a tool that can allow us to put an end to this continuous colonial system that has maintained our countries and our people in bondage.
The goal of my activism is to eventually get to a point our system that has maintained our countries and our people in bondage. The goal of my activism is to eventually get to a point where my people can live freely and in dignity. And that cannot be attained without financial freedom. The Digital Sun Fund, which is my nonprofit organization, what we do is trying to empower young women and children in developing countries like Afghanistan.
But there was an issue about that there was an inability to pay these women because many of these women didn’t have a bank account and we have to actually send the money to their male relatives bank account and many of these women sometimes say that they never receive the money because once the money goes in the hands of the men and relatives they prefer to not give the money to the woman and why it’s like that because in a conservative communities men’s summons are trying to control the lives of the women.
And obviously, the first thing is that they don’t want that the women have the financial freedom. So we heard about Bitcoin. And we thought, wow, we can use Bitcoin and send to the women directly. And they can have control of their own finance. That was interesting. And we deployed a Bitcoin wallet within our system.
We created a user-friendly platform that was very easy for them to find where their wallet is, how much money they’re making and what they can do with this money. Bitcoin has helped us bypass the physical and social barriers. If you have cell phones and smartphones and you have access to internet, you can have your bank with you everywhere.
And that’s why I think that the magic of the Bitcoin is. The Jews of Eastern Europe, when the Nazis arrived, the Jews of Spain before that, Jews of Arab countries in the late 40s and early 50s. Jews were thrown out of Syria in huge numbers, thrown out of Egypt in huge numbers, with nothing, literally with nothing.
Gosh, if they could have taken their digital wallets with them, what a beautiful thing that would have been. and what a beautiful thing that would have been. I think Bitcoin is as much an ideology as it is a technology, but because it’s an ethical ideology, there are many people that feel very spiritual about it and others that view it as a religion.
If you worship truth, if you worship integrity, if you worship conservation of energy and balance in the universe, then Bitcoin is your religion. Bitcoin is ethical, but it’s also peaceful. It’s not a currency that worships violence. From a political standpoint, you have politicians on both sides, Republican, Democrat, it doesn’t matter, that are aggressively trying to vote resources, financial resources, into their local jurisdictions in order to support this war machine that’s happening.
And that’s the game of fiat currency, where nobody is pegged in operating off the same rules, the same rule set, which is supplied by Bitcoin. It supplies this global rule set that nobody can manipulate, cheat, or take advantage of over the expense of other players in the global game. And that’s why Bitcoin is so different.
And that’s why Bitcoin solves this massive problem that has been wrought throughout history between humanity and violence. Fiat money is used to fund wars. We’ve spent $8 trillion on unregime change wars over the past 20 years. And all of those wars made America less safe and less secure and less rich.
There was almost no debate about those wars beforehand. What did we get for those wars? Iraq is now worse off than we found it. We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. We killed between 670,000 and a million Iraqis. Iraq is now this, instead of a nation, it’s an incoherent battle between Shia and Sunni death squads.
We created ISIS in the spillover war into Syria, and we drove 2 million refugees into Europe Europe and we destabilized every democracy in Europe. That process ended up with Brexit, with breaking up the European Union. The riots that we’re now seeing in France are a direct result of that surge of immigration that was driven by our wars. So the taxpayer would never agree to fund those wars in advance.
wars. So the taxpayer would never agree to fund those wars in advance. And the government doesn’t want it. Politicians don’t want to go to the taxpayer and ask that permission. It was much easier for them to just declare the wars and then finance them by printing more money. But ultimately, the people who pay for that money are the middle class, and they pay through the mechanism of inflation.
class and they pay through the mechanism of inflation. So when the governments print money, it has the ability to fund the military industrial complex and create tremendous reckless spending. So when you look at wars throughout history, that’s a very, very profitable thing and central banks can print money to fund both sides of the war.
As a person who was flying attack helicopters in combat, there was almost every single flight I went on, somebody that was being shot at, injured, killed. Providing that support for people on the ground was an extremely humbling experience to just see how destructive human beings can be towards each other.
When you go far enough upstream as to what’s driving this behavior, why is this even happening? I personally arrived that it’s the money that’s causing this to happen. And there’s probably nothing more important for me and my life than trying to make sure people can understand that there’s there’s a better way to can understand that there’s a better way to conduct exchange and there’s a better way to get along with each other than to have a trusted ledger that nobody can manipulate or change.
We need to make war and fear less profitable. That’s the real layer two solution that we need on top of Bitcoin. It’s us, not code on a blockchain, but a human society that makes nonviolence and kindness more profitable than exploitation and greed. Why is nobody in the U.S.
concerned that we’ve been in these wars for as long as we have? Why isn’t anybody asking about the cost of this? Just not even human life, but like the financial cost. And the reason why is because it was always paid through debasement. They didn’t know they were paying for it because the bill was pushed way out into the future through the depreciation of the currency itself. And so it just didn’t seem like there was a cost. And so it’s not just the U.S. that pays for their armed conflicts this way.
It’s every fiat-based nation state that pays for their armed conflict this way. If you move to a Bitcoin standard, all of a sudden you can’t debase the cost of conflict away. And Bitcoin, you know, conversely, is the currency of peace. If you actually have to go to a population and ask permission to wage war, in most cases, they’re not going to give you that permission.
You know, it’s interesting when a government gets into trouble and they have to pay for a war, or they have to pay for a pandemic, or they have to pay for some cataclysmic event, they tend to print money. And because you’re gonna have these governments printing all this money, then the money is worth less.
Well, what if it were all Bitcoin? Not only would that government not have the ability to print the money for the war, you might not even have the war. So many people see a world where Bitcoin reduces war, makes it unaffordable, and incentivizes us all to love and serve one another. I believe that Bitcoin is just money.
And in the Bible, there are many examples of what just money is and what unjust money is. Without a doubt, government fiat currency is not just money. It steals from the poor and gives it to the rich. It creates more income inequality. I think God hates the current system that government fiat creates.
That elite group of people makes decisions based on their own portfolios, based on their own set of priorities or those of their friends and colleagues who mean a lot to them. They’re not really making up more money. They’re just taking it, very often through inflationary policies, from those who have earned it.
It becomes a system of great injustice and even theft. The United States government has been printing money like crazy. It’s the dream solution. It’s a way of stealing money without being caught. And, you know, spending other people’s money is fun. That’s all there is to it. It’s one of the best reasons to go into politics. You get to spend other people’s money.
And most voters are not aware that as prices go up, reflecting profound inflation, that this is the doings of an immoral government that is literally stealing the bread off your table. So inflation is theft. It steals from us right under our noses. And sadly, the way people keep up with inflation is to max out their credit cards and take on more and more debt, which only creates bigger problems.
We have interest levels today in our time that far outrun inflation oftentimes. And I think that does raise some ethical questions for us about how we handle our money in the modern world and how we charge people who pursue credit, that kind of thing. Because they end up paying a lot just to make up the credit aspect of what they’ve done as opposed to the money that they’ve been provided for in a loan.
So in Islam, the practice of lending at interest is forbidden. And specifically, the word that is at interest is forbidden. And specifically the word that is used is riba. Riba literally means surplus or excess. And it means any excess on money. So any form of money creation is forbidden. Riba is interest, it’s usury, it’s money creation.
So when we talk about sound money in Islam, we’re really talking about a form of money that cannot be created from nothing and therefore requires proof of work. Now, one of the problems with fiat money is that it doesn’t require proof of work. Well, that’s interesting.
Let’s see what other religions have to say about Bitcoin and its ethics. Many people question what is the role of technology in Judaism. This is a tradition and a law which goes back thousands of years, so what could it possibly have to say about these modern inventions and technologies? The fact is that everything that God creates in this world is all for the purpose of making the world a better place and serving him better.
So all of these technologies, whether it’s phone, internet, video, all of these things, Bitcoin, can be used and should be used for the better service of God. India was this fabulously wealthy industrial power and a spiritual innovator at the same time. And it’s largely because its economics had somewhere in its foundation the idea that the ultimate goal is the pursuit of moksha, this true freedom. And we can get back to that.
So if Bitcoin helps us to get back to a new kind of capitalism that fosters both material well-being and spiritual freedom, it’ll be great. But that kind of new capitalism won’t really be that new. It’s more like a return to our old habits. So it sounds like Bitcoin can bring out the best in us. Let’s explore these religious teachings more deeply.
more deeply. When it comes to Judaism being compared to a blockchain, there are so many points that we can look at. Besides the word chain itself, the transmission of Torah and Judaism through the generations is called the Heshtaushalut, a chain of descent from rabbi to rabbi and generation to generation.
So what every individual can do is study Torah. They become their own full node. They can validate all of the laws and all of the customs and traditions. And then as new situations arise, rabbis have to deal with how does the Torah have a perspective on these new technologies, on these new questions.
That’s where proof of work comes in. The rabbis are the most educated and experienced in analyzing and studying the Torah. So they prove their work through their study and through their writings, which can then be verified by every member of the tribe. All they have to do is look into the Torah and validate that what the rabbis are saying fits in with the Torah values and Torah teachings.
Particularly as a Jewish person, who the Jewish people have been dispersed across the entire world and have had to move from country to country, I can appreciate a money that you can take with you and own and use for your purposes without it being interfered by third parties.
Bitcoin is just another step in the technological development of how we can serve God better. Buddhism itself is a decentralized system. In fact, it’s the only faith that I know of where the founder himself said, don’t trust anything I say on faith. You have to validate it yourself. So what validation in Buddhism means is that you have to critically analyze anything that the Buddha himself said.
So in a way, as a Buddhist, What validation in Buddhism means is that you have to critically analyze anything that the Buddha himself said. So in a way, as a Buddhist, you’re a kind of block validator where you yourself have to relive the Buddhist algorithm. Buddhism is really like an algorithm, a set of rules that the Buddha said, if you follow these you will be happy and you will create a kind, benevolent and fair society.
And so that I find very parallel to the way that blockchain works, because you wanted to create a system that benefits all beings, not just some select subset. Those things I think are very aligned with this idea of decentralization. So yeah, I think Buddhism is a decentralized religion. religion.
If you have centralized planning, that is fewer people who are making the decisions about the economy as a whole, you have less information. If you have a decentralized economy, what you have are more people, more inputs, more kind of connection to the reality of what’s happening than you would have if you have a small politburo, a group of policy advisors who are making these decisions very often influenced by their own particular interests.
So when we ask what the Bible says about money, the key thing is that money itself is not evil. Sometimes you hear people say money is evil. It’s not. It’s a means by which we manage our relationships and barter with one another with different skills and abilities that we have. What the Bible says is the love of money that is evil, that it is when it moves us towards greed, when it moves us towards covetousness, when it moves us towards avarice, when it feeds our pride, those kinds of things.
That’s when money becomes a problem. And actually, it isn’t money that’s the problem. It’s how we deal with money that is the problem. Now, in Vedic economics in ancient times, the ruler, who was often elected, by the way, even 2,000, 3,000 years ago, was judged on a concept called yoga kshema, which means an overall material and spiritual well-being of the citizens, particularly the weakest in society.
Monetary profit was considered just a byproduct. So fiddling with the money supply, though it might do some temporary good, means that we are ignoring a lot of the key metrics of what makes life worth living. One reason we print this money is to get people to go out and shop with it, or to take on debt at low interest rates so they can go out and shop with that.
Now, I don’t know of any religion or philosophy that says that the goal of human life is to consume to the point of death. So in a real sense, we are incentivizing something that goes against our basic morality. And I’m not sure how long we can continue to do that. The truth is, what we really are is divine beings who have taken human form in a material world that we manifest together for a meaningful purpose to be happy and free.
That’s the truth. And that’s the foundation of Vedic economics. And Bitcoin has a chance to help us to see ourselves that way. There are sources of scripture in Islam, which are the Quran, which is believed to be the word of God, and the Hadith, which are the collection of the sayings and actions of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.
And there are two very famous Hadith, one regarding price fixing and the other regarding monopolies. The price fixing Hadith goes something like the following. A group of people came to the prophet and said to him, would you fix the prices of commodities in the marketplace? And he considered this and he said no, because he didn’t want to cause an injustice against the people.
He said that God is the one who fixes the price in the market. So this thing, I think, is very important because it tells us that a free market economy is one that is fundamentally a just economy. I think Bitcoin is the most Islamic form of money ever invented. And therefore, you know, also the most Abrahamic form of money invented because actually the three great monotheistic faiths share many characteristics in terms of justice and equality and fairness and dealing with one’s fellow man.
So I think that Bitcoin has those characteristics to be not just the most Islamic form of money, but the most Jewish and the most Christian form of money as well. And I think therefore it’s a very, very powerful concept and one which can completely overturn our understanding of the last hundred years of economic history.
In a Bitcoin world, people would work together and be free and happy. If fixing our money could help us achieve that, imagine the kind of future we could build. I like to kind of think about how the story of Bitcoin is still being written. The story, the chapter one started over a decade ago, and here we are, and we have no idea what kind of the final chapter of the book ultimately looks like.
If you think about Bitcoin taking over the world, right? The Bitcoinization of the world, and you play that out to its last element, what could that last stage be from a potential perspective? And that is a world in which there is no other currency.
All of the governments have dropped the dollar and the yen and the euros and all there is in the world is Bitcoin. And it is the standard payments mechanism for anything. A few steps before that is going to be central banks around the world adopting Bitcoin as a reserve currency. I’d actually expect that to happen. At the same time, when I started in this space, I thought this might take out centuries.
Every single year, I feel like my time frame gets shorter and shorter and shorter. I think if the world went on a Bitcoin standard, I think what we’d see would be less wars. We’d see government size drastically reduced because the ability to tax your citizens becomes much harder. So if Bitcoin is successful and the world starts to use it, we see the role of government start to shrink quite a bit and their ability to extract value from their citizens and their ability to wage war is also dropped too.
And a optimistic government should look at Bitcoin and understand that this is a movement that’s not going to stop. You can’t really ban it. And if you do, it doesn’t mean that every other country will either. So it’s better to get on the train, see this coming, versus try to fight it and try to fight against it.
It’s sort of like an inevitable sort of change. The things that are happening now are things that we were only dreaming of when we were on our PCs in computer class in 1985. This is not just an advancement in technology or an advancement in computing or an advancement of a monetary system. In my opinion, Bitcoin represents an evolution of consciousness beyond anything we’ve seen in thousands of years.
We’re moving towards a digital future and we are moving towards a future that’s going to require a disintermediation between governments, banks and centralized control. And Bitcoin grants us this power through an open network that anybody around the world can participate in. It’s extremely powerful.
And if people adopt it, in time, we will see how we will put the power back in the individual’s hands and disintermediate those at the top that are trying to control the human race. There isn’t yet a Bitcoin tangible economy, but that may change. And in fact, I think on some level, it’s already beginning to change.
So it’s obviously something that I think everybody should watch with great interest. I think it would be a great mistake to ignore the Bitcoin economy. I’m excited for the future of Bitcoin because we’re just really beginning to understand all of it and the uses for it and the advantages of it. In a Bitcoin operating world, it’ll just be a completely shifted dynamic.
So it will be more that people can save up and then invest into a certain business. And so in a short way of putting it, it’s like saying we’re going to live in a more equity-based system as opposed to debt. Whereas right now, it’s all about cheap debt. Cheap credit is how the thing expands.
Whereas in the future, it will be more equity and savings-based. You know, I’m a person who really believes that everyone should have the right to health care, the right to a home, the right to food, and so on. All the basics. We should all have our share of the Earth’s bounty. And no political or financial system we’ve come up with has yet solved that problem for humanity, although we’re getting a little bit closer.
So the idea of putting it into collectively agreed algorithms that no individual can change is very, very powerful. So these things are happening all over the world. What I see in the next 10 years is that Bitcoin is flourishing. Bitcoin is solving problems for people in the places where they have the problems.
That could be currency problems, that could be energy problems, that could be being able to escape from your country. And that growth is something we see every day. It’s not shrinking just like the internet just keeps growing, right? Lots of people ask how long will it take for the world to be on a Bitcoin standard? Will there ever be a time where Bitcoin is the world reserve asset and the world reserve currency? I think that that’s inevitable.
I do think that’s coming at some point, but I think we’re still kind of a long ways away from that. And so maybe five, 10 years from now, I think lots of the world’s government fiat currencies are going to dissolve and that purchasing power is going to be transferred into either the US dollar, possibly the Chinese yuan, and certainly Bitcoin.
And the world will be a more just, a more honest, and certainly Bitcoin in the world will be a more just, a more honest, and just a better place to live. We consider a sound form of money as a fundamental change for our financial and monetary system, because that will put us back on an even keel. That will actually put us closer to those values that were once espoused 2,000 years ago by the Abrahamic faiths.
One of the other areas that I just really like about Bitcoin is this idea that I mentioned earlier, where it’s a very unifying technology for us, considering where, just considering how divisive the whole country is, the whole world. But especially in the United States, we’re at each other’s throats, and we don’t agree on anything.
But now, all of a sudden, Bitcoin comes in, and you have Republicans and Democrats and conservatives and libertarians because they agree on Bitcoin and they agree on Bitcoin because it reflects their values back at them and they believe that it’s the right path for us to move forward. So all of a sudden now you have this base layer unifying technology that can really start to help us have conversations because the worst thing that we can do is get into our echo chambers and not talk to the opposite side anymore.
Now you have Bitcoin helping to unify these groups and put them in the same room and have conversations. And I think that’s where progress can be made. Our money should reflect actual value creation and not be sort of given to us by a government that’s just trying to manipulate the money supply to get us to shop when they want and go into debt when they want.
As long as we’re manipulated like that, we’re not truly free. That’s what we need as a change. And Bitcoin gives us a basis. It gives us a tool for creating that kind of society and that kind of economy. We’re at a very transitional time in history. If you look back through the long lens of history, what we see is a repeating cycle of freedom, oppression, revolution, freedom, oppression, revolution, freedom, oppression.
And it just goes through all of history. And I think we’re at a point in history where that cycle could finally break. And I think it could break to one or the other side. And it’s going to happen in the next decade or two. And it’s going to be up to us to decide which way it breaks.
And I think the cycle breaks and either one, it breaks to where through CBDCs and social credit score system like they have in China, through indoctrination through schools and social media. They can indoctrinate us. They can censor us. They can lock us down, keep us isolated, and potentially prevent any revolution from ever happening again. The other option is that understanding that the source of all their power comes from the ability to print money.
The money printer is their power. And if we can defeat the money printer, and they’d have no more ability to print endless amounts of money, then their entire system falls apart. And Bitcoin is that tool that allows us to beat the money printer, defeat their system. that allows us to beat the money printer, defeat their system, and if we move to a monetary system that nobody can control, that system never builds up again.
We defeat the money printer, they never get the money printer going again, and we have a life with no revolution cycles of just pure freedom for humanity from there. I see that we do have a choice to make. I always lean into hope and the good in all of us. We should not steal. We should not wage war. We should have a form of money we can trust so we can build a world of prosperity and abundance for future generations to live together in peace and harmony.
Bitcoin embodies that hope, purity, and truth.
