Bitcoin Won't Be Money Until 2080 | Cory Klippsten | BIS #219

0:01 Corey, a warm welcome back to the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Nice to have you here. It's great to see you. It must be summer. My hair is too long and I'm doing a show with you. Yeah, and my beard is too long. So that's also a dead giveaway, I guess. It is absolutely summer. Yeah, I should say this is the summer edition of the Bitcoin Infinity Show. There you go. You do look like you're in front of some sort of Bitcoin altar of sorts, a shrine to Satoshi perhaps with the candles on the sides. Yeah, you could call it that. some kind of cupboard. Anyway, it's been a while since you were last on. So could you give us an update on what's going on at Swan, please? Yeah, great, great place to start. I would say we're recording here on Friday, July 24. And we kicked something off earlier this week on Tuesday, the 21st, that we are calling 50 Days for Freedom. And basically, it's 50 days where we bring the best that we have to offer, educating people about Bitcoin, spurring a new wave of Bitcoin adoption, killing the bears, putting the bear to rest. And my part for doing this was writing, I guess, the third mission statement of SWAN or kind of an update. And so if you think of them as, as is normal, when you get deeper into a company, deeper into an effort, deeper into a topic, when you write something, the next book you write ends up being a superset of the subjects

1:32 and topics that you covered in the first one. And then this is the third one. So I see them kind of stepping up. It was 10 million Bitcoiners, the intransigent minority back in 2020. And then I think in 22 or 23, I wrote The Race to Avoid the War, which was included all the themes and concepts of the first one, but took it up a level. And then I think this one, The Battle for Monetary independence really takes it up another level from there. And basically what the article is about is a bit of a comparison between the founders of America, of the United States of America, 250 years ago in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence and how the work of their generation was achieving political independence and how I see parallels between that and the work of our generation now, which is global, not just in the US, but our humanities work of this generation is to achieve monetary independence. And that is what we are working to do through Bitcoin. So the catchy phrase, you know, 50 days for freedom, people doing lots of different things for those 50 days, we restarted Cafe Bitcoin on Spaces. So I'm hosting that every weekday at 3pm UK time, uh 10 a.m eastern 7 a.m pacific uh 5 a.m hawaii if we had somebody in from hawaii yesterday and i was like go back to sleep jeez um and so that is interesting i'd say the you know putting our money where our mouth is the first thing that we did actually was we rolled out um we cut our fee

3:07 in half our buy fee so it's uh 50 bips 0.50 percent on all buys at swan for the summer which is by far the least expensive way to buy Bitcoin into self-custody in the United States. It's cheaper than Coinbase, cheaper than any other major source that you can find for retail, which is pretty cool. As always, we promote and educate the heck out of self-custody and we put our money where our mouth is there. We pay the network fees on withdrawals as we always have since inception going back to 2020. So it's just an amazing way to stack some coin in the bear. And, you know, I stand behind it with two feet and we're here to help people set up self-custody.

3:51 We're here for collaborative custody with Swan Vault, you know, just really aggressively on the mission to educate and help people take advantage of, you know, what just feels like a generational buying opportunity where there are a hundred narratives from the last year that should make Bitcoin go to the moon. And it just seems like it's all going to come around sometime this fall or early next year or whatever. And like, you just really want to be stacking this summer. So I'll leave it there. The last thing I would say is my Twitter DMs are often hard to keep up with. And amazingly, the easiest way to get in touch with me if you want some Bitcoin resources or help with swan or whatever is my email because nobody emails anymore so just hit me literally cory at swan.com and you can even misspell it and add an e if you want to but it's c-o-r-y at swan.com so that's the end of my uh swan shill period and uh let's get into it thank you uh yeah just to double click on something i'm unaware of the kyc situation in in the u.s like so how much kyc are you forced to do on your on your customers it's not as bad as the eu but it's still considerable i mean they know who you are if you're buying bitcoin through a you know a a normal company that has an address and a website you're kyc'd yeah that's it's a problem everywhere so what i

5:22 would say is like you know the best you can the best you can do is like minimize you can do a few things. So you can take the absolute minimum. And if like some of your partners claim that they need something, fight back and minimize what you collect. Another very important thing that we've done from inception, which is not what most crypto companies and a lot of wallet companies and hardware device companies did is, is segregate your marketing database from your customer database. Cause the last thing, I mean, everybody has a huge marketing list that doesn't mean shit. There's not, you know, if you have 500,000 emails or something like we do, then, you know, it doesn't mean much that somebody is on a marketing list to get a Bitcoin newsletter.

6:04 What you want to make sure is that you segregate transaction data from your marketing database and keep those separate. So what we've always done is there's we know nothing about you in our database and there's no honeypot and nothing you can steal because you know who somebody is. You can't ever tie that to their transaction data and like how much they bought. And nobody on our team, other than like the actual rep going through seven levels of like login and, you know, OAuth and physical device proof and OTP and all that kind of stuff can ever see, can look up the information about somebody like in Salesforce that's tied to their transaction data. So that's just extremely well guarded throughout the company.

6:45 so you have to do smart things like that and just make sure that like if there is a breach of you know a marketing vendor or something like that that it doesn't affect that and then you can also attack it the way that you know um just doing as much as you can to encourage privacy once the coins are in your possession like on chain and so what we did is you know gosh four years ago gg actually when he worked here uh took the lead on building um a trustless x pub extraction tool where you can uh so basically feed in an xpub prove that we never see the xpub but we can extract a thousand addresses from it and every one of your withdrawals goes to a new address so no address for you is pretty good privacy yeah i mean uh a best practice for all bitcoin companies i think is to to avoid creating honeypots in in general because honeypots are way more dangerous than people think they are i heard of this i i always miss miss tell this story but a a dutch guy told me about uh his village during world war ii where they they had had a a voluntary like collecting of of uh like like a population count or a voluntary population count where you uh wrote down your name your address and your religious affiliation and then all of that was stored like usually in the church of each town, if I remember correctly here.

8:19 Sorry to the guy because I'm always mistelling this story. But when the Nazis came, they took all these papers and they looked up where all the Jews were and they could track them down. In this particular town this guy ancestor burned down the building that the honeypot was in And they had like 40 more Holocaust survivors or something in that town because they couldn get the information So like honeypots are scary when you think about what they really are. If some malicious actor wants to get you, I mean, the wrench attacks in France here, we shouldn't talk about them too much, I think, because it's such a dumb thing, but a government institution leaking one thing and Bitcoin hardware wallet manufacturers leaking another thing. And the criminal can put two and two together and start attacking people.

9:14 And it's pretty awful. Yeah. Look, I actually addressed this on Cafe Bitcoin yesterday, but because it's in the interest of certain people and certain companies, not necessarily nefarious people want to get the word out and you know there is a lot of fear mongering around these things as far as i can tell and i've asked journalists about this and i've tried to find the source material it appears that there's been one time so far that a government official in france actually sold somebody's information only once the rest was basically people that were loud about their crypto holdings and were easy to find on social media yeah but regardless uh agree but Be careful.

9:58 Look, operational security and personal security has been a problem for wealthy people forever. It always has been. Don't expect that it will be any different just because you hold Bitcoin, especially if you're doxed. So I think that it's incumbent upon people like us to protect our families by either being weapons carriers, as many of us are in the States and having weapons in our home. But, you know, choose to live in doorman buildings, choose to live in communities with gated security, or just don't ever have your address on the Internet, you know, and put it in a trust of some kind that's not tied to your name.

10:40 You know, you actually have to take some measures to not be stupid, just like rich people always have. Yeah, I don't know if I fit into that category. I lost all my Bitcoins in a boating accident, as you know. But, yeah, it's true also that everyone sells FUD. Like, if you think deep about it, there's not a single product in the world that isn't FUD for something. Like, if I buy a bottle of water, the water bottle salesman sells FUD to me that I will be thirsty if I don't buy the bottle of water. Like, everything is on some level FUD.

11:22 Well, you're you're getting it's half the story. There's our our lizard brain, the amygdala, the oldest part of our brain only recognizes two emotions, just fear and greed. Greed being basically mostly the urge to reproduce. And obviously, fear is don't die, which then, of course, helps you reproduce if you don't die. Right. So, you know, I think that most products do actually fall into one or the other where you're selling greed or you're selling fear. Yeah. Or you're selling anxiety removal or the removal of fear. Yeah, or the removal of uneasiness, as the Austrians described it as, like, every human action is based on the removal of uneasiness.

12:07 And that is, in a way, fear from a certain perspective. Another thing I want to double click on is when it comes to privacy and stuff. I find it quite vulgar that chain analytics and so on claims that they can prove that someone owns a Bitcoin. But I don't see it that way at all because, I mean, you can't really own a Bitcoin. All you can do is act as if you did because it is all information all the way down. All you're doing, all that makes you able to use it rather than someone else is that you're the keeper of a secret.

12:48 and anyone else who has access to the same secret can use that Bitcoin as money as much as you can. So how the hell do you prove a negative? How do you prove that someone else doesn't own the secret, that you're the sole owner of this secret? And the truth is you can't. So the way I see it, all of these chain anal companies, as I like to call them, they're all play pretend companies. They're all claiming to know something that they cannot possibly know. What are your thoughts around that? There's a few functions going on there. I mean, one, there's a degree of probabilistic certainty when they're going after like a money launderer or whatever, and they can be like relatively sure they kind of have the guy or the group or whatever.

13:38 And I think there have been lots of instances where, you know, analysis of activity on chain, probably more shitcoin chains than Bitcoin has been successful in leading to freezes and reversals and all the kinds of things you can do with decentralized, decentralized and name only type chains. So that does happen. It's also true that all of these crypto companies and crypto infrastructure, you know, crypto exchanges, etc. needed to prove to government that they were doing something and they needed some way to CYA, you know, cover your ass, as they say here over in the States. And, you know, chain analysis and other companies like that. What's the other big one? Elliptic, I think. I think that's the name of it.

14:23 yeah rings the bell yeah anyway for sure chain analysis and i forget the name of the other ones but um you know they're essentially selling that cya just like a management consultant sells cya for a ceo or a board you know they're just saying like yes we checked the box and we did our diligence now three letter agencies and five eyes you know stay out of my business hmm yeah so well both sides basically have it's a weird incentive almost like government spending because both chain analysis and the companies that buy their services have the incentive to pretend that it's good they're not a natural buyer they're not actually evaluating the service that chain analysis provides to see if it's any good because they're not the consumer of the information. In fact, they have the opposite incentive. A crypto exchange offshore or onshore or whatever would rather that more people trade. And they obviously historically haven't cared who those people are. And, you know, Binance and Fobi and OKEx and all these companies, you know, they do a lot more Bitfinex, like they do a lot more volume if they allow money launderers and criminals to use their exchange for money laundering or wash trading or, you know, whatever it is that they're trying to do. I mean, the entire Asian crypto complex function primarily is money laundering to get capital out of China. That's the main reason for it to exist, which is why there's all this money for, you know, Binance projects and labs and like propping up

15:57 that entire ecosystem is just to keep enough liquidity in the casino so that people can bring cash in and take chips out with it apparently having delivered some kind of economic activity and it just washes the profits yeah back to your article um can you can you go a bit a bit deeper into that it's about uh an ancestor of yours here yeah so look i mean obviously i do the parallel between the work of our generation being monetary independence to the founders of america but the the conceit the the theme that runs through it is i told the story with the help of quotes from my grandfather's war journal. So Philip Clipston was in the Navy in World War II.

16:45 Being a guy of German descent, he was sent to the Pacific Theater, as was pretty typical for the time. They weren't sending him to Europe. So actually, both of my grandfathers fought in the Pacific. And so yeah, he embarked from the USS Yorktown V2. So the first one got sunk in Midway in 43 and then early 44, a carrier that was already under construction got named the USS Yorktown to honor the first one. And he was on it from departing out of Bremerton near Seattle and the whole way through all the way through the end of the war and taking the taking the surrender of the emperor in Japan and you know shooting down kamikazes and the whole thing His role as you can imagine it's kind of in the blood over here, was communications. So he was a radar man and he was the guy, you know, spreading the message from the admiral on the deck and making sure everybody else could get the information. He was a good writer. He was well-spoken. He was also older than a lot of the other guys.

17:43 He was like, he had his 34th birthday on the Yorktown. And so he just has amazing stories. And he wrote in the journal every day. Thank God about 15, 20 years ago, a cousin of mine for her master's thesis actually transcribed the whole thing. So you didn't have to try to read his handwriting, water stained, et cetera. and yeah so she got it all into into word form and a pdf and a published little you know book or whatever and so yeah it was just really interesting to spend some time with him and get the contemporaneous rundown and she also annotated it all the way through and mapped what was in his journals to news articles from the time so that you could kind of see it exactly what was actually happening in the broader war and in the local battles alongside his journal.

18:37 So it's a really neat historical artifact. It's a cool family heirloom and piece of content that we have. And it was really, you know, it was just kind of a deep experience mapping it through and seeing the parallels. And, you know, my favorite story from it, and that has been since I ever first read it, It was, he tells a story of a day where some kamikazes and planes were coming in and they shot down 13 planes that day or something like that. And everybody was like scrambling and like hit the deck. And, you know, he's up on the deck overlooking everything next to the admiral who's calling the shots.

19:19 And everybody's freaking the fuck out except for the admiral. And the admiral is just like chilling there, just watching, you know, probably at 55 BPM. you know beats per minute on his heart and seeing seeing the admiral chill made my grandfather you know stop ducking and he just went up and was like okay i guess that's that's how you do it and he just went up and stood next to him and talked to him and you know took the orders distributed the orders and it was you know just the calm under fire of one person was was so uh attractive and and just something you could obviously get behind and follow. And, uh, you know, that's, that's a great goal, uh, for leaders everywhere is to be that person that others can kind of look to and be like, Oh wow, they're calm in the storm. Um, so anyway, I just, I like that analogy for this moment in time where there's a lot of noise around Bitcoin. There's a lot of FUD, uh, there's a lot of people profiting, um, you know, whether it's bullshit quantum FUD to raise altcoin funds last fall on the back of quantum penny stock frauds, et cetera.

20:27 You know, there's just so many different things out there. Again, as there always are in bear markets and just coming out with a big push, a big coordinated push for positivity, education, adoption, stack the dip, you know, all the way through by the whole curve. I just think it's a really nice moment in time because if we enjoy this together and we've actually done this work together and built some moments and some memories, it just makes the eventual, you know, bull market that is inevitable. It'll just make it so much more fun. Like I just, I think we have an opportunity to give the classes of like, you know, 2020, 21 and class of like 24, 25, the type of experience that a lot of us had, you know, if you were there for the bull market of 17 or 13, you know, this could actually be a really, really fun one. It could surprise to the upside because I think both of the last two were suppressed for different reasons. But, you know, I don't think we've had the ripping bull run that I expect we'll see at some point, whether it's this cycle or a future cycle, like there will be one that just gets kind of really fun and out of hand and will be a lot more enjoyable than, you know, having to share the bull market with crypto stammers in 21. And then, And, you know, 25 was just kind of like a institutional lettuce hands bowl market that never really got that exciting and retail didn't participate that much.

21:54 And there just was kind of like it just didn't involve a lot of real adoption of, you know, self-custody freedom money to the degree that we had seen in years previous. So, you know, the motivation for all of this for from my part was kind of where you let off the show, which was it just seems like there are a lot of very recent accelerations on freedom encroachment in different jurisdictions. and it all kind of kicked off in a big, big way, like five or six weeks ago, where there was just this one week where I was actually here in London, happened to be here for a few days.

22:37 And it was that Monday that they passed the social media ban for under 16s, which of course means that everybody else has to tie their ID to their social networks. A couple of days later, there was a VPN ban that passed in Utah. A day after that, I think they turned on age verification for paid plans on Anthropic and ChatGPT, which of course means that, you know, your kids can't use it, which means you have to put in your own ID to be able to use it. Right. You know, and then it's just every week there was something else. You know, there was just dramatic acceleration in the pace of the rollout of CBDCs in the EU.

23:17 I think the newer drafts of the Clarity Act are just like even more egregious and make it even more plain that the existing crypto stable coins are CBDCs. Like in every way, shape and form, that's exactly what they are. You know, they're confiscatable, reversible, etc. And they're going to be tracked six ways from Sunday. And it looks like they're going to be subject to the travel rule. And we'll see if they actually get exceptions here, there or whatever. But it's very likely that, you know, your information will travel with the payments on these blockchains and you'll always kind of be tied to when you when you used to have it, that kind of thing. So, you know, a lot of the things that I just thought were going to happen in the 2030s, if we continued on a bad path, really started happening in a huge way in 2026.

24:05 Like it's just been a big acceleration of a lot of this privacy erosion and freedom erosion. and I just think it's really it's important to get back to basics it's you know enough with the ETFs enough with the leverage Bitcoin equities like enough enough enough a derivative a derivative with like eight extra risks can't be digital money fucking Bitcoin is digital money that's the whole point you know like let's just get back to basics and make sure the new class of people that come in and the last class that kind of missed out on good Bitcoin education actually understands what this is actually about.

24:46 You know, I mean, I'm just it's just disappointing. Like you get you get still it's like stupid old narratives just won't die. Like blockchain, not Bitcoin is back. You had Novigratz on a podcast yesterday talking about how money is a shared belief and that the Bitcoin community is a bunch of people that trust each other. And that's why he trusts it. And it's like, do you not understand? like you really don't understand what this is about after all these years you're just a lucky idiot you know these trad fi guys just never fucking get it and uh you know to be super clear bitcoin is a a rational understanding that benefits from a network effect of lots and lots of individuals actually learning and understanding that it's the best monetary technology that we've ever had. That's why it works. The whole point is don't fucking trust. Verify Bitcoin is for enemies. It just blows my mind that these people still get on CNBC and talk dumb shit. That's so fiat. That's so proof of stake. That's exactly what that's all about is having to trust everybody.

25:50 And if we all get together once a year and take limo rides in Koreatown and go to the right whorehouses in the Philippines on Philippines on the crypto circuit then the network will keep running right That one way of putting it for sure And not to forget the privacy encroachment, the chat control thing in the EU. They voted for it six times. Oh my God. Yeah, that was the one I would risk. Yeah, sorry. During the World Cup, they sneakily voted about it again. But they reversed the vote so that they had to have a majority against not implemented.

26:32 And not a majority of the people present. The majority of everybody. And they did it the week before summer vacation when most people are gone already. So even then, of the people present, it was wildly in favor of not having chat control. but it wasn't a majority of all EU MPs because there weren't enough people in the damn room. No. So, no, it's like, I personally don't even believe that democratic, it's necessarily a good thing because, you know, the people are retarded, but, and other things, but if you're going to have a democratic vote, at least have one instead of just pretending that you're having one. And the EU is so beyond anything else than a cabal at this point. It's just ridiculous.

27:27 By the way, one more inch on the beard and a turban and you probably could get away with Osho for Halloween. Oh, yeah. Or a fess, maybe? Maybe. There you go. That works. He's the famous guru that has the name of the people. The people are retired. Anyway, pretty fun. Classic, absolute classic. Yeah, so what other tools, other than Bitcoin, are you excited about for fighting these Panopticon bullshit things that are coming earlier than we thought? Um, well, I think because it's, so it's probably, it's probably software tools and it's probably because it's so easy to vibe code simple tools for personal use. I think that ends up being the way that anybody who's interested in freedom and privacy can basically fight back. So immediately with the Utah VPN ban, a bunch of people just vibe coded, like really simple, you know, one megabyte type apps to just create their own vpns and that's because a lot of these vpn sellers are going to become honeypots too and they're going to be forced to open their databases so i just think that in particular is one one area of software that i think will become very decentralized and where people that actually care about this they won't you know unfortunately for

28:59 podcasters everywhere. It'll be an industry whose sponsorship budget probably shrinks over time because I just think they're going to end up under the thumb of the governments. They're not going to just allow MOLVAD and NordVPN and these different ones to kind of just do whatever they want. They may already be cutting deals. Anyway, I wish those companies well and they've been awesome. So I hope they don't submit and that they figure out ways to stay in business and keep going. But we're not screwed because it's really easy to code something for yourself now and share it with friends yeah i mean but but banning vpns it's such a it's such a misunderstanding of how the internet works like it's like banning encryption like to to anyone who knows anything about anything it's just absurd that these things are even attempted uh again they're just gonna they're gonna stop most people from using it, not the tech savvy people or the people that really have a use for it. And so as usual, you know, people that have a real motivation to circumvent something or to hide something or whatever, they'll figure it out anyway. And you just end up surveilling everyone.

30:10 And that usually ends up being in service of taxation and eventually, you know, social credit scores and deciding what you're allowed to spend your money on, et cetera, et cetera. yeah it's a perpetual machine and but but also like it feels like we're the we're the athletes who are taking the drugs that they haven't banned yet you know the steroids and stuff that they haven't figured out yet it's like the race between uh between whoever is trying to stop someone and maybe that analogy is a bit bad because you probably shouldn't be on steroids but but you know what i mean right yeah well in the unlikely event that anyone in your audience doesn't uh read a lot of kind of poli sci and political history uh or just dystopian sci-fi uh one of the classic ways to exert authoritarian you know sort of reach over a society or a population is just to make sure that everyone is breaking a law so that you all so everyone always knows that the state can come for them at some time and so the goal of a truly authoritarian society or leadership i guess is to create enough regulations where normal things that people have to do to survive or to feed their family or to conduct commerce puts you in violation of something always yeah and that's exactly what happened to like i had a friend who passed away a couple of years ago

31:44 who used to work for like the empire he used to work for the financial crime division of the police in sweden and uh i asked him at one point what what percentage of the population that are committing any type of economic crime like if you just look at how many people are breaking rules without knowing that they're breaking them. And he thought for a while and he said, everyone. There's not a single person that is not committing a crime. So he's already here, at least in Scandinavia. But I suspect that every single country in the EU is the same. Well, I mean, that's really what accounting firms are for when you deal with the IRS tax code in the US. It's that somebody signs off on it and accepts some liability. What you're really doing is saying like, hey, if there's something messed up, I didn't do it. The accountant did. That's what I pay for.

32:40 You know, because they mess up something on my taxes every year. You know, like the best accounting firms, they're always going to mess something. Maybe not every year, but they screw up, but it's not my fault and they signed off on it. Otherwise, it's on me. Right? Sorry? I pay them to accept liability when the IRS comes calling for something. Yeah. My friend Dave Bradley calls that lubrication companies. And I love that term. I love this so much I put it in the inverse of clown world. There's a section there about like real companies or the government. And the in-betweens are private companies that act as lubrication companies. Because what they're really selling is lubrication for when the giant government dildo inevitably comes to rape you at one point.

33:29 So it goes down a little easier. That's dark. That's dark. We could say like a tougher pill to swallow, but you can have it your way if you want as well. But yeah, I mean, that is a wide swath of just what we call professional services. Exactly. It's consulting, banking, legal, accounting, that is professional services, largely is about accepting liability. You need somebody to blame. You need somebody to blame. Like, you know, IBM fucks up. They need to be able to blame the McKinsey guys. Yeah. And these people don't provide humanity with anything of actual value. It's just this blame game thing so that the money ends up somewhere rather than somewhere else.

34:12 I think you know me well enough by now that I will say it's nuanced in that there are things in the pro column and in the con column. You know, there is there is expertise in those fields of accounting, banking, law and consulting that you don't have at these companies. And so there there certainly is upside, but it is sparse. It's kind of few and far between. And it may be something like, you know, 20 percent real value. bad and like 80% cover your ass. Yeah, I'm not saying they're not valuable in the world we're living in. But if in a world without aggression, they wouldn't exist, like because you wouldn't need them.

34:56 There would be no taxes to pay. There would be no accounting needed, except for what you wanted to do yourself. No, you would, because you would still have capital markets and you would have laws and torts and all those kinds of things, right? Yeah, but in a different way. I think this sub-cavern of the rabbit hole is for another discussion, I think. There's like the libertarian in me waking up here. Nothing wrong with that, man. Look, what we call libertarians today are just like some combination of traditional conservatives and classical liberals. I'd call those LARP-baterians, but anyway.

35:42 Yeah, where are we in the conversation here? What other areas do we want to go? Yeah, you mentioned the founding fathers and the parallels to Bitcoin. This is also from your article there. One thing that fascinates me about them is how damn young they were. Like the average age of the founding fathers is like 23 or something. It's like ridiculously low. They range from like 19 to 27 or something like that. So, and maybe there's some type of similarity there, given that like the early Bitcoiners were in there. Well, not as young maybe, but we're all a decade older now, I guess.

36:25 but most people were in their late 20s or early 30s when they started this whole thing. So are there any other parallels there between the founding fathers and the founders of Bitcoin? I probably more look at it as like, you know, proximity or distance to the center of the empire. and I think a lot of people that were attracted to Bitcoin early were kind of on the edges of empire and spotting its cracks and it wasn't working for them in various ways and so they were kind of on the lookout for something interesting and new and different, especially the ones that got interested in Bitcoin for economic reasons, like reasons of economic history and economic theory and kind of saw it as something that could be that future global reserve currency and global money, etc.

37:21 So in that respect, I kind of look at the founders as being on the edges of the British Empire and the British Empire wasn't really working for them anymore. You know, like the reason that George Washington got involved in the war is because he was a massive land speculator over the edges of the empire into Indian territory and was flipping land plots over there. And then the British said, oh, nevermind. We're not going to support that. We're not going to defend that. You're on your own. So he basically was going to lose everything anyway. So his back was kind of against the wall. And I kind of see that with a lot of people who lost everything anyway, speculating on houses in Phoenix or hotel developments in Mexico or whatever during the GFC and kind of the property bubble.

38:15 And, you know, a lot of people were just like, this shit was all on shaky foundations. It wasn't just the dot-com bubble. That was bullshit. It was actually an everything bubble and it was all bullshit. And we're on a foundation of sand and this empire doesn't serve me anymore. So let me, sitting on the edges of empire, start to have a look at something new. That's actually, right, the edges of empire. It's a good article title. I never thought of this before. Edges of Empire, yeah. Copyright, Cory and Newt. Original art, first mention, anyway.

38:56 I think it was Saylor had this story structure in his head, like this way to look at history that people moved further and further west to move away from taxes, basically, and to move into more and more freedom. And that ends in California. And California is not a bastion of freedom nowadays. So there's nowhere else to, there's no more West to go to. So you have to go to the internet and you have to go to Bitcoin. Like that's where you find freedom. I kind of like that picture. Yeah, it is a real shame. It was always go West, young man, go West, make your fortune. You know, you fuck up in Philly, you can go to St. Louis, you fuck up in St. Louis, you go to Denver, you know, and end up in San Francisco or something. And, you know, unfortunately, California just got so, so fat and used to having so much excess. It just atrophied in all the things that made it special.

39:54 you know it still remains so far worth the sunshine tax as you know it's my home and you know there's it is special to be in southern california it's the only warm dry coastline in the most powerful nation in the history of the planet so you know there's a reason 50 million fucking people live there uh and it probably has capacity for double that so i don't i don't think it's going anywhere, but it also is like headed off a cliff for the first real state economic crisis. We've never had a state properly go bankrupt before, but you know, these, these civil servants do no fault of their own. It's just like people band together and try to get extra pay for them and their kind. And they've done it extremely well for so many decades that you have, you know, lots of cops get a pension after 20 years in one place and a pension after 20 years in another city. And they double up on the pensions after working from like 20 to 60. And they're pulling in like a million bucks a year from taxpayers. You know, you got like a lot of firemen making three, 400 grand a year, you know, stuff like that. Like, it's really difficult to make that kind of money in the private sector. And you can't fire people. Teachers are basically unfireable after one or two years. And there's nobody of quality watching them and evaluating them in those first couple of years. And so you just kind of, you just have the Senate care forever, as long as you can get in and just get a government job of almost any kind.

41:26 And, you know, obviously the pension, CalSTRS, CalPERS, like they just can't keep up with inflation and just the ballooning, you know, cohort of pensioners that's just draining the state. Not to mention all the hilarious projects and, you know, 50 billion spent on high-speed rail that has yet to lay a mile of track and this, that, and the other. It's just constant, right? And meanwhile, we have a senator who's the best trader in the history of the country in Nancy Pelosi. Trump is catching up with her quickly, but she definitely has the best track record of any trader in the country over the last couple of decades. And I don't know if anybody could possibly be more loathsome on camera and just talking than Newsom.

42:12 and like how is this guy a governor i don't i don't get it i don't know why people would vote for somebody like that he's obviously a bad guy anyway no but there's there's nothing projects are everywhere i mean all the windmills in germany and here in sweden they tried to build a a first of all a battery factory that was heavily government subsidized they never constructed a single battery before they went bankrupt There was another project trying to make green steel which is a steel plant running on batteries They would require as much electricity as Finland, all in the name of saving the planet.

42:54 And that project is going to shit too, of course. So in your view, is there a fourth turning thing going on here? Is this inevitable in democracies? Is this inevitable given that we have inflation? Is that why so many resources are misallocated politically? What are your thoughts around that? Look, there are so many things tied into that question, and it's a 100-hour topic. Let me break apart a few pieces that I read and think and talk about a lot. So one is I am not a subscriber to the dollar is going to hyperinflate away quickly at some point.

43:37 And that will go like Waymar Republic style. I don't see that happening. I see the dollar's monetary network effect actually strengthening right now because the USA, for better or worse, just an amoral observation, is flexing its muscles more basically militarily and politically. and kind of jamming it down the throats of the rest of the world. And they're doing it to survive because if you have lots of dollars, then you have to buy lots of treasuries. And we need people to buy lots of treasuries because otherwise the whole Western system will collapse under debt payments. So you have to be able to roll over the treasury debt, which just keeps on expanding.

44:20 We're 39.5 trillion, two orders of magnitude larger than what I just said. for the first time in a long time since World War II, we've eclipsed the comparison of national debt versus GDP. And this should be a time of relative peace and prosperity, given all the technological advancements, and that we don't necessarily have to be at war in the places that we've chosen to be at war. So it's disappointing and it's scary. But again, I do see the rest of this century being more of an American century than the 20th century. I think that was a misnomer to call that the American century. It was kind of just the beginning of what should be, you know, in total, something like a 150 to 200 year run, mostly because it's just the cleanest shirt and the dirty laundry and there's nobody there to come in and step in and take its place.

45:15 uh it's you know the only the only other player on the board is china and they're just facing demographic collapse and you know lots of problems that that will come so i just uh i just don't see it i don't think people trust a centrally managed currency like like the yuan that's kind of just owned and controlled by a uniparty and you know again they they don't let things out and they don't let the markets open. And if they do, the CCP loses control and then China shrinks back to something more like its normal borders. It's at the largest extent that it's ever been historically with all the territory that it currently has. And it's really hard to keep all these disparate groups together, kind of have to have like boots on necks to make it happen. And that's why they have social credit and capital controls and all these different things. And that's why they except at uniparty it's just for peace um so yeah i just think that we'll have kind of in these monetary networks i'm not talking about purchasing power but these monetary networks of uh the dollar gold is still on the table because so many people still like it and believe in it because of its 5 000 year history as a store of value and and then bitcoin and bitcoin is much much smaller in its network effect. And it's much, much smaller in its market cap, obviously. So I think of the three, it's the fastest horse in the race, but we don't know how long that's going to take.

46:46 And I've talked often about believing that Bitcoin is a technological revolution in the framework of Carlotta Perez, who argues with me on Twitter because she doesn't like Bitcoin because She lives in Silicon Valley and they don't understand it there. But it is. And it's the sixth technological revolution. And these things take like 50 to 80 years. And I think because it faces such a strong incumbent in the dollar plus another incumbent that actually sees the same problems and has a lot of adoption in gold, I see it taking toward the higher end. So 70 to 80 years. So, you know, from 2009, you know, we're looking at 2080 to 2090 before you have full install of Bitcoin across all three functions of money.

47:29 And that's kind of my framework and how I see it. You know, it's three S curves with like a 20 plus year lag between them. We're barely at the inflection point coming off the flat part of store of value. We have to charge up the S curve. The top of that S curve will be like one to two million dollars a coin. and then it'll kind of have kind of steady just above GDP growth or something you know on average after that there will still be speculative manias and crashes and stuff but they'll be muted compared to what we've seen and you know sometime in 2035 to 2050 you'll see the medium of exchange s curve really start to take off and start up the steep part and then sometime another 15 20 years after that you'll see us kind of charging up the s curve for unit of account hmm that's just a similar view to what i have but i i i'd phrase it a bit differently like i think uh the dichotomy between store of value medium exchange is uh is false to begin with uh and it's also a product of uh you know gold being money and then fiat being money because gold was a good store value but a crappy medium of exchange and fiat is the other way around it's a good medium of exchange but a crappy store of value for obvious reasons but uh in reality i think that the two were never separated uh i view it as medium of exchange over space and time so a four-dimensional medium of exchange so because store of value is really just trading with your future self uh so the the point of that framing is that you can't have one without the other

49:04 in the long run you need both uh and uh that's why that's why one of the reasons why bitcoin is so big i i do you think you're there's there's a reason that i phrase it clearly we agree and it and it currently technologically serves all three functions of money it's actually it's actually my unit of account for for at least wealth you know i even you know like lots of us like even if i own other assets, I still have a spreadsheet denominating it all in Bitcoin. And that's what I really care about and what I track. You know, I use the word widely used very deliberately, because it's not widely used as a medium of exchange. And it's not widely used as a unit of account, even though it can serve those functions, and already does in some cases, it's not widely used. It's not a widely used store of value yet either, even though it already functions as a store of value for some of us. Yeah, I absolutely agree. When I think about adoption, I think the closest analogy I can come up with is language in Europe. Because after the fall of the Berlin Wall, just a couple of years after, I was traveling around a bit in Europe, and no one spoke English except in the UK. So if you went to East Germany, for instance, not a word of English from anyone.

50:27 And West Germany wasn't that much better. I mean, I guess they were unified at that point. But France horrible Southern Europe of course horrible And it took like a generation for that to shift and like the the kids growing up now they they are fluent in english at least in northern europe there's some lag in in like spain and italy and uh and uh some of the eastern european countries but but it's it's picking up fast and i see bitcoin sort of uh uh bitcoin adoption following a similar curve. It's probably a generation will have to pass. Like the old farts like us, or specifically like me, there's a handful of us that has picked up on this and know how to speak the language, so to speak.

51:22 But I think a lot of us will have to die off too before we see a real adoption. The kids growing up with it though, And the kids growing up with apps that have a sat infrastructure in place will just think that banking is horribly backwards and cumbersome. So I think there's something to that. And given that these 70, 80 years is a pretty good guess. It takes a while for things like this to actually catch on. And I view it more as a social innovation than a technological one in this sense. Yeah, look, usage forms, habits, and just being aware that it exists and exposing people to doing a Bitcoin transaction is really cool.

52:11 I take little victory laps every time I see it happen somewhere, just an indication that somebody's understood it a little better than they used to. Like my wife recently trying to send wires internationally. And at some point she was like, can we send Bitcoin? And I was like, yes, nice. You understand. Like, that would be very fast and we'd be done and move on with our lives and not have to chase these fuckers at these dumb banks with their banker hours. No, and they just seem to get more and more horrible the more time that passes. Like, Spanish banks are, it's a complete nightmare. There's these desks with piles of paper everywhere and lines out on the street and stuff.

52:56 Like, it's so backward. and it could be so and once you see it it's of course impossible to unsee uh so um yeah i just uh oh my god engaging with these banks it's just brutal i only use small banks now like with with no teller window like i just i i need people that are responsive when you email them where you actually email humans yeah i just community banks are the way to go i'm just not into the big behemoth banks. I don't want to ask for permission. I want to be able to go and like talk to somebody that lives in my community. No, I'm required to have Spanish bank accounts to a certain extent, but I use them as little as possible.

53:40 I want as little money in the, only keep in fiat what you're willing to lose. Yes, I agree, which is, I always say I don't sleep well in fiat. No, I also agree with this, that the US can be the quote unquote greatest country on earth if having the most money is being the greatest for another century. I mean, just the last decade, the GDP of the US has doubled in comparison to Europe. The head start is already so big and I don't see the dollar going away anytime soon.

54:21 unfortunately all the other fiat currencies died before the dollar uh and i do not believe that the uh but in the in the real long run like a couple of generations from now there is no way that the dollar and bitcoin can coexist like uh it's it's just a matter of time but it's probably not within our lifetimes that's that's how i see it yeah it's it's probably tough to see well i don't know I mean, it depends on what your measure is. You know, when gold was above 5K for a little bit, there was more gold in central bank reserves than treasuries around the world.

55:03 It's back under a little bit now, but, you know, it could easily go back and be above treasury balances, you know, in a couple of years. It might not take that long. And so in that respect, you know, it'll be a moving target. will probably be at, you know, 60 trillion by then or something like that, but of treasury debt, but that's $3 million a coin. You know, that's very achievable by, you know, end of the next decade or something like that. So, yeah, I don't know. It may not be all that far off. It'll still be around for a lot longer, though. It's just too easy to print money and give it to your friends yeah i heard somewhere that the uh that fake dollars uh for some time was columbia's third biggest uh export uh good like after cocaine and coffee and they just get like a really good counterfeit bill yeah that's pretty interesting i know the uh the north koreans had a spectacular particular super bill like a really good fake hundred that uh evidently had been getting spent all over asia and it was like a good source of revenue for them i just read that story last week yeah and there was some uh but that was a euros i think i believe fake euros uh uh which like plot twist all euros are fake but but of course uh counterfeiting is

56:37 only for the privileged yeah well good man well so look i i appreciate you having me on uh i definitely want to you know really i'm spending a lot of my my own time uh you know now and beyond really getting back on that mission of bitcoin adoption and spreading educational resources and trying to get people up to speed about actually owning real on-chain bitcoin and seeing that as the bulwark against this encroachment of tyrannical impulses and impingements on freedoms. I mean, it really does feel like we are ahead of schedule on that.

57:21 And we need to start running a little faster in that race to avoid the war framework. You know, we need to win the race to avoid that war where Bitcoin and Bitcoiners kind of have to go dark and fight it out, you know, in the black market, basically. And it's probably like hard to be a Bitcoiner for 20 years or 30 years or something like that. It would be a lot easier if we just did this via peaceful revolution, you know, and it just kind of kept on taking root and that we could see it rise enough that we kind of flip society. Right. And in the U.S., which is where I think society actually needs to be flipped precisely because the U.S. and in specific, the State Department is really the only entity that could actually coordinate a really dark period for Bitcoiners globally.

58:09 Otherwise, if it's fine in the U.S., everybody can escape to the U.S. and different U.S.-linked territories and be OK, even if their local government and jurisdiction ends up sucking and being tyrannical. will be all right. But we do need that 10 million Bitcoiners that own an amount that's meaningful to them, that's willing to write their legislator, that's willing to go to a meetup, that's willing to kind of fight for Bitcoin And run a node And run a node That that 3 of a society that intransigent minority that can flip society and basically inoculate Bitcoin and Bitcoiners from ever having to fight that war And it would be better for humans if we don't have to fight that war.

58:51 We have to prepare for it. And that's what privacy tech and good OPSEC and all that is all about. and we have to prepare for that because that actually looking unassailable and looking like the castle walls of the Bitcoiners are so dense and so tall and so strong makes the other side not willing to start that war and we want to keep it like that so invest in defense now invest in you know invest our time and our effort and our energy toward building up our defenses which mostly comes from just getting more people into Bitcoin in the right ways. Yeah, and we wanted to play out the way, like IP telephony, for instance, was banned all across the world for a few years before all the phone companies just had to give up because it's obviously better for everyone.

59:49 And like so many internet things play out this way because when something is, obvious enough then the resistance to it is futile and bitcoin uh still requires you to like public private key cryptography is is still a hurdle for people uh to get over so um to do bitcoin properly is is still a hurdle for some people uh i think it's a matter of time though and uh i think it's glaringly obvious that it's better if you know a bitcoiner if you hang out with a Bitcoiner and with other Bitcoiners and you just see how easy everything is and you travel a lot, then it's so, as you said, it's obvious to our wives, it's obvious to everyone around us that this thing is just better.

1:00:40 Yeah, I agree. Yeah, yes. Anything we haven't talked about yet that you want to bring up? a good one uh we created swan rbx and launched it it's coming up on i think it's three weeks now um so it's the real bitcoin exchange this lets you trade out of a bitcoin etf and into real on-chain Bitcoin without a cap gains tax event. So this is like the main nasty thing left in the US is that a lot of people are stuck in GBTC, the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. And because they bought that instrument when Bitcoin was in the three and four digits, you know, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years ago, they very cynically have their users trapped at 1.5% fees per year, which is like 6x over ibit and 10x over morgan stanley for their etf fees so get the hell out of that paper bitcoin get into real bitcoin swan can help we do it for you uh it is complex it's like a 24-step transaction to be able to do it right and legally uh not financial advice check with your advisor blah blah blah but we've been doing a ton of this and uh it is a really really smart thing to do to get out of that you don't need to do it for retirement accounts if you still have dbtc in a retirement account just immediately get out of that and roll over your your retirement

1:02:11 account into real bitcoin um because you don't pay tax in an ira anyway but uh if you have uh like you know um a trading account or something or an investment account that's non-retirement uh get in touch and again i just i i can't say enough and it's been awesome the last i started about 10 days ago just giving out my email address on shows i did it on safe i got like four or five emails from people uh i did it on freaking kitco you know the gold show uh two two gold bugs emailed me from kitco uh so yeah i'm giving out my email address on the internet hit me up uh cory at swan dot com if you want to talk about anything uh or want our help uh for us folks um you know happy to help yeah and anywhere else on the internet you want to send my listeners uh most of my listeners are Americans, by the way.

1:03:02 So speaking to the right audience. Hey, it's right there in the bottom. There, Corey Swan on Twitter. The Swan handle, SWAN on Twitter is probably pretty good. I'm also occasionally posting on the Boomer Network, LinkedIn. Not a lot of Bitcoiners on there, but you got to be everywhere. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Cafe Bitcoin is back. Today is day four of 50. for this 50 days for freedom. So I'm hosting every day that I can. I've done every day this week. And it's 3 p.m. UK time, 10 a.m. Eastern, 7 a.m. Pacific. We roll for 90 minutes on Cafe Bitcoin, live on X.

1:03:45 So I hope you join us, by the way, whether it's today or next week or something. You and Luke and all the European homies should start getting on. Yeah, it's a rollicking good time. We chop it up. Yeah, it's a long time since I joined Café Swan session, I should do that I'm going to the US here pretty soon, so we'll see when I get the time to hop on but I enjoyed those that I've participated in, I remember when Tomer was Tomer was in charge of those maybe, I don't remember if he was in charge, but he was He was certainly on every day Yeah, we had a lot of good back and forths there.

1:04:29 Yeah, and we'll see each other in Helsinki. At CTC Hell in the end of September. Use Call Infinity for 10% off and all of that. Okay. Come to Helsinki and meet me and Corey. We'll have a fireside chat there, I believe. And some other things too, maybe a panel or two. It's going to be great. We'll make sure you have a good time in Finland. I had I actually had breakfast today with Susie Violet Ward, the Forbes reporter, Bitcoin here in London, who I know is speaking or hosting some sessions up there in Helsinki as well.

1:05:11 Yeah, it's going to be fun. It'll be my first European Bitcoin conference ever. Other than hosting Bitcoin Istanbul a few years back. That was fun. The Bridget Jones of Bitcoin. Susie is great. there you go i love it uh yes with that i wish you all the best and um uh great to chat with you uh refreshing to that's no this is this is the uh the infinity heart oh yeah yeah there we go infinity show there you go i like that and then there's a swan which is like this and then you make a swan oh yeah yeah yeah yeah uh yeah i have it in my surname so right with you that's true refreshing to not talk about BIP110 for once also we got 67 minutes into the show before you said it and now we're saying goodbye so well done sir good luck and we'll talk soon this has been the Bitcoin Infinity show like, subscribe, brush your teeth and see you next time adios amigos Thank you.