BIT BUY BIT PODCAST EP02 K.Brown Bitcoin living?

Welcome to Bit by Bit's second episode. If you're joining us now after listening to episode one, then thank you for bearing with us, and thank you for joining us again. If you're new to the show, I'd suggest you go back and listen to episode one, as things will make a lot more sense after that.

Joining us today for the second time is our guest, Kerem. We sat down a few days after recording the first show. I forgot to press the record button at the beginning, so the first five or ten minutes is missing.

But don't worry, you should be able to jump in just fine. What should we talk about? What were you saying, Bitcoin as a living organism? The more I explain it, the more I think, what can kill it and who controls it and how does it work?

And basically, no one controls it. It's something that's come from nothing. And now, no matter what anyone does, it just, every ten minutes, another block comes out. Everyone reaches consensus.

There's all these different nodes that all communicate with each other. And it just does its thing. Everything that's happening politically, everything that's happening the rest of the world, it just gets on, it does its thing uninterrupted, and it's been uninterrupted since the day it was born.

In terms of being alive, I think, there's a specific category that we teach at school, which is Mrs. Grenne, if you remember. I do weirdly, sort of vaguely, but I can't remember what it is.

So, movement, respiration, sensitivity, growth, reproduction, excretion, nutrition. Now, some of those are explicitly linked to biological things. So, it doesn't need to respire. It doesn't need what it does, because it needs energy.

It moves, for sure. Bitcoin moves around the world. It's sensitive. It definitely grows, I suppose, in a way, it reproduces. It creates more and more nodes, and it spits out more of itself.

But it comes to a point where it stops. Producing itself. We'll stop producing more Bitcoin at a certain point. Yeah, the mining ends. What date is that? 2140, roughly. It can vary slightly, because of the adjustments, but roughly, it'll be that.

Growth, reproduction, excretion. Does it produce any waste? It uses energy to secure itself. Nutrition. And actually, it's more waste than that, because miners tend to become obsolete after, like, six months to a year.

The actual machines that people use, just because of technology, is advancing very, very quickly. So, that all becomes useless. A lot of businesses are born because of it, and only because of it, and then they end up dying as it changes, or they miscalculate.

So, I suppose there is an argument for that. Yeah. I don't know. I think, in terms of, like, if we were going to draw a parallel to something, it seems more like it's like the weather, you know?

Like, it just goes on regardless of what we do. I don't know. Yeah, I know what you mean, actually. Sometimes it blows in our favor, and sometimes not so much. Yeah. It was just a weird thought I had.

Not that it really matters if it's living or not, but it's sort of... Sometimes it does feel like... Sometimes it does feel like that. Maybe we could get to a point where, like, the blockchain is almost like an autonomous creature in a way that it would do things.

You know, the blockchain technology being automated, and things just happening on time, on point. That would be cool. It's going to be a weird world, but it's only as good as the information we put in.

You know, with the blockchain, it will record truth or record what you put on there. But if you put on something that's not true, then it just records a lie. That and that's the problem with a lot of these other blockchains, because it's only as good as the information put in.

The only reason we can find out if information is good or not is because of the specific way that Bitcoin's been set up, that we can very, very cheaply and very, very easily work out if someone's lying.

But actually to produce the lie is really expensive. Oh, really? Yeah. Because to produce the lie, you must have a lot of hashing powers. To find a lie cheap to produce a lie expensive. I'll be honest.

I don't understand the mathematics behind it. The basics of Bitcoin. Like it's this kind of, there's a puzzle that you have to solve. Yeah. And like everyone on the network is trying to solve it, and then someone will solve it first, and they'll send out that signal and go, "I think this is the solution and everyone will vote,

and everyone will be consensus on that solution, and then everyone will be done." Kind of, yeah. That's what I've read. But I'm kind of like some of those high level physics ideas where I'm spouting something off.

I'm repeating something, but I don't understand it. I kind of know what those words mean, and it means something to me, but it doesn't mean as much as it could. I think the reason for that is, even someone like me who's obsessive, I live, eat, sleep, breathe this stuff, all day, every day, seven days a week,

from the day pretty much that I started learning about it, there's not been one day that I, not even when I'm like sick as a dog in bed, I'll still be learning about this stuff, and I still don't understand that.

It is true. You know a freakish amount about Bitcoin. Maybe compared to the average person, but honestly, there's a lot I don't understand. And is that just the technical aspect, though? Yeah, because this is why I think there's a lot of analogies, and this is why I don't think anyone fully understands it,

because I think there's some cryptographic geeks. I mean, I was in... They didn't understand that bit. And I saw the queue for people to go into the new Pokemon Center. There were people in that queue who knew everything there was to know...

About Pokemon. About... Cryptomon. Cryptomon. But yeah, you know, like the super geeky people, there are super geeky people that do genuinely understand the speak code. Yes. And they legit understand...

They understand that aspect, but this is the... Maybe then they don't understand. So someone who's a computer scientist, who's of a very, very high level, will be able to read the code and understand the code.

It doesn't mean that they understand the economic side of it. And it doesn't mean that they understand what the social impact is going to be. And it doesn't mean that they understand the mathematics.

And it doesn't mean that they understanding all the other parts that go into this. So for this thing to survive and to thrive, geopolitics plays into it quite a lot. And there's lots of other parts that you have to understand.

So where I understand the economic side of it, I understand that the social side of it quite well, because I can see why this is going to become more useful to more people, and then therefore why it's going to become more of a used asset.

And then that means that because of that, the price is going to go up. So I understand that side pretty well. When it comes to the computer science side, although I've been teaching myself code and I've got a very, very basic standard with it, I can't dig into all the code and fully understand it, because I'm not a computer scientist.

So we have to kind of create these stories and these ways to explain it to people, because to say no one understands it fully is probably wrong, but there's maybe there's 20 people in the world who can understand all aspects of it really, really well.

Well, here's my thing. I understand it well enough to ask a specific question. And I think that's important is, you know, when we vote on this, like your computer is connected to the blockchain network, and you're a minor, and then you're voting on the algorithm,

is there is that this is my, you know, this is for you to take away and go away and try and research? Is that one specific algorithm for that 10-minute block? Or are there a whole bunch of different problems that get voted on?

Because surely in one 10-minute block, there must be millions of transactions. They're sort of, they're stuffed in. So you can do, I think at the moment we can do, it's somewhere between like four and seven transactions per second on the Bitcoin network.

Oh, see, maybe I'm misunderstanding something then, because I often do the, when I do transactions, I wait for them to go free. And it says, you know, that will happen within 10 minutes. It will take 10 minutes, one block.

So those blocks on average 10 minutes is on average, though. It's not exactly. Yeah, okay, so this is about 10 minutes. So I press send and that money just kind of goes pending for 10, 15, maybe even up to 20 minutes.

Yeah. But I still don't get the confirmation until it's, you know, txt. And then I can see the actual full-on confirmation number, which I can then see. Yeah, and so you've done that and you've got one confirmation.

The more confirmations you have, the more secure it is, the harder it is to change it. The more it is in the past. Yeah, so the further it is in the past and the more transactions that have been built on top of it, you think of it like a chain.

So you've had the first piece of a chain and then now there's another piece that's links and now there's another piece by about six confirmations. So would you make like, so you press send, but then you wait six confirmations for, you know it's there?

No, not that you know it's there, just that you know that nobody has taken control of the network. Because the miners, if they wanted to cause serious problems and they wanted to somehow take, I mean, when I'm saying this, it's not like an easy thing to do.

I'm talking, this would have to be governments colluding to do this sort of stuff. But what they could do is put fake transactions in or transactions that double spend basically. So if you want to be really secure, you'd wait six confirmations or more.

But this is something where I'm talking about moving, this is like, you know, interbank settlement or huge, huge, huge money, you just wait because well, what's an hour? I don't understand what you mean by wait because you, well surely once you send it, it's sent,

but you're just waiting, when you say waiting, you just say the longer after that money has been sent, the more secure that transaction is, but surely it's gone wallet to wallet. It's not, so when you're sending a transaction, you're not sending a physical coin to.

We should, yeah, point, there's a lot of weird noises in the background, but the washing machine's just finished, it's spin cycle. And it probably makes some bleeps. Two dogs, one is snoring away, the other.

She's having a lovely sleep. He's picking up his chew toys and dancing around with it. So you can hear him dancing down on the car with his chew scratching away there. Lost my train of thought. So it's just about whether the, because it's a digital transaction and there is always a risk of some kind of hacking or collusion,

the longer, the more confirmations that have been built on top of it, the more secure it is. Yeah, so like, I send you a Bitcoin transaction now. And what's really happening is I'm transferring my ownership over to you. And if you think of it like an Excel spreadsheet, I'm just saying,

okay, this is 100 million satoshis. I'm sending that over to you to make sure that I'm not double spending it and to make sure that I actually have ownership of it. All the nodes on the network must agree. So they'll say, well, the state of the blockchain or, you know, the state of things

was that I had ownership of it. They're confirming that I had ownership of it, because otherwise, I shouldn't be able to send it to you. And they're then confirming that you now have ownership of it and that that transaction is valid. And the miners, they are confirming that this is correct. So

if you're, if I'm sending you 50 quid or something like that, I'll just send it. I'm not like, it's fine. Yeah. You know, the likelihood of someone actually rewriting anything anyway is so small, because it's so expensive to do it. And as soon as they do it, all the other nodes on the network

are going to work out that they've done it anyway. And then they just will say, well, no, we don't accept. So that's why it to this day. So in that case, if someone someone in the future somehow manages to violate the block, the block, all those transactions would be rejected. And anyone's

coin that they tried to send wouldn't have been sent. Would the money come back or would the money just be the likelihood of it happening? I get that. Yeah. It's this claimer. This is like, but this, you know, I mean, maybe about hundreds of millions of pounds or billions of pounds to rewrite one

transaction. And then once you've rewritten it, you would have to continuously build on the chain that is not truthful and continue to expend energy forever. And there's so many other people on the network who will also say that it's not not correct. No, and then they won't go through. So James Bond

style story. Yeah. You've got a villain who creates the first quantum computer that has the kind of hacking power, like processing power to action. Well, then we're done. We're finished. So that's that I've seen that on maybe science magazines. I think it was new scientists, like, will quantum

computing kill Bitcoin? Well, that's quite a big question. Like, if tomorrow there's a quantum computer that can do what people are saying they will be able to do, which is crack all encryption.

I mean, Bitcoin is the least of all this is exactly. Yeah. It is the least of our worries because, you know, it's codes, nuclear weapons, every single bank, every single bit of data, every messaging app, every email, airport security, nuclear launch code, like everything's done. So it doesn't mean it's

not possible. And the people who are probable, it's not probable. At some point, it will happen. But we're already aware that this is something that's going to come at some point. And they're already building. They're already making it so that we could have quantum safe. Wow. Really? That's

already in development. It's been in development for a couple of years now, because the people who developing on top of this, they're at the bleeding edge. They are the top cryptographers.

They're big snoring. Mathematicians have a little tap, so she moves, like, try and just adjust her position, move her head, tip her around a bit. Yeah, I mean, so they're aware, it wouldn't necessarily be an issue, but it's not something to take to. It's the same sort of thing. Both of these things,

someone taking control of the network, very, very, very hard, very unlikely, and it's not in their incentive to do it. So the only person who would do it would be, in my opinion, anyway, be colluding governments who want to shut it down. Well, like Lex Luthor.

Or Lex Luthor. But they've got to be really, really deep pockets. Elon Musk. Elon Musk. Maybe someone with that sort of wealth could conceive of it, but then they've got to buy all the equipment.

So they've got to actually get their hands on mining equipment. And they've got to do it repeatedly. They can't just do it once. No, they've got to continuously just throw money in and continue to lose money forever. And they've got to buy the equipment, which is very expensive, and it's hard

to get hold of. So if someone suddenly comes on the market and says, Oh, well, I want enough power to take 51% of this network, it's going to be very obvious for people that like, Oh, who's this big buyer? That's one thing. And secondly, if they did manage to hack it, or not hack it, if they

managed to rewrite history and continue to do that, we just fork the chain. And we'd all just run on a different chain. Oh, wow. It's like a timeline. So back to the future too. Yeah. Yeah. So you see, you would just say, well, hard fork it, we will, we will now have

our version of Bitcoin, you continue to run that chain, which will just run into the ground because they'll eventually run out of money and no one was going to be using it anyway. And we just carry on with the previous state. So all they've achieved, all they will have achieved is spend billions of

dollars by a load of equipment, which is now useless, because you can't use it to do anything else. It's application specific. All you can do is just mine Bitcoin. And now there's no Bitcoin because you've just changed over to Monero or something like that as well. That's another

yeah, exactly option. And so the way that it's set up, if they just bought the equipment and just mined properly and did the job properly as they're supposed to and actually made the network stronger, they'd earn money rather than lose money. So the incentives are set up in such a way that

you're always better off playing by the rules. Yeah, you can swim upstream, but it's going to be a lot harder. You bet swimming, big fish swimming downstream. Yeah, exactly. So that's why, I mean, it doesn't bother me too much. It doesn't anything as possible. We could get hit by a meteor tomorrow.

Yeah. That's actually more likely, as far as I sit, that's more likely. And then we're all dead and Bitcoin doesn't matter anyway. So anything is possible. So many things that are much more, I mean, let's be honest, the financial system that we have in place with fiat money is much

more vulnerable to interfering by rogue governments. They're much more likely to be able to fiddle with our fiat money. They already have. Yeah. There are ideas. Yeah. We see double dip recessions and financial crashes are much, much easier to engineer than they would be

from what you're saying to disrupt the Bitcoin network. The only way that I see is if the institutions, the big institutions come in and they re-hypophicate. And if people are stupid enough to allow that to happen, we could be in trouble. So like, currently in the financial system,

what we have now is you'll have, say, bank or whoever it is, they have gold and they have that in a vault. What they'll then do is use that as collateral to lend money, but they don't just lend it once. They lend it 10 times. So like Bitcoin is an asset and everything else is debt. So it's

something that they would, if they were to take control of it and how everyone leaves their money on Coinbase or everyone leaves their money with these institutions, unless you have control of your private key, you can't guarantee that you own that Bitcoin. If you allow someone else control

of it and they just loan on top and loan on top and loan on top and then someone else

talking about that will be quick then. Dog is trying to fear with the network. He's taking down the network. That's it. I actually hadn't even thought of that. What if George gets involved and he somehow manages to take this thing down?

He's just trying to get to his bed and he takes down the entire Bitcoin network. Billions and billions of dollars. Just wanting to go sleep. I mean, it's an interesting, like, it's interesting that people are actually thinking about these things, hypothesizing them and then trying to come up with solutions beforehand,

which is something that's not really happening with fiat money anyway. So it, despite all that whole conversation, it still sounds safer. It's in Bitcoin. For me anyway, I think it's so much safer.

But to say it's impossible to take it down is just a bit of a stupid thing to say. As much as really in my head, I do think it's very unlikely. I'll never say impossible because anything's possible. And I think it's just not probable, but that's my biggest fear is that

institutions come in. People can't be bothered to hold their own private keys. They can't be bothered to run their own full nodes and they just trust. The whole reason this is Bill is to not trust third parties. To take it or decentralize it. It's decentralized. It centralizes

Bitcoin. I fear that's the biggest attack that you like, even if they centralize it, I mean, we've talked about this a long time ago, the idea that in order to be able to centralize it, they would have to be providing a service that people are willing to sacrifice some of their assets

for, which is a choice. Like lending platforms is probably going to be a big one. Yeah. But like, at the moment, the Bitcoin interface is clunky. Not great. You know, whereas fiat money, like ordering stuff online with real fiat money, I don't want to use the word real. But it's not

easy to use Bitcoin to purchase things. It is complicated and difficult. As soon as someone solves that problem, I don't think people will have an issue giving away some of their coin for it. And if they solve it and then they make it centralize as well, I mean, credit and power

to them because they're providing people with a banking service that people want. But then they they still don't own it. It depends. If they have the private key, then they own it. They own someone's individual Bitcoin, but they don't own the network. No, no. And like people, if they want

to not be lazy, can still run their own. Yeah. And there's a lot of really, really smart people building software and building applications to make this easier for people and to make it so that you'd have to be really lazy and really stupid to not hold your own private keys.

But there are really lazy and really stupid people. So if we're going to assume that this becomes mainstream, then we have to assume that there's going to be people who are going to misuse and not understand because by the time this goes mainstream, it's not going to be people who are

really security conscious, who have issues with the financial system, who don't trust third parties, it's going to be normal people. Like the people who involve now, really, we're sort of a fringe, strange group who have really strong principles, most of them anyway,

understand why this is so important because of freedom of speech and all the rest of it. But when it goes mainstream, people aren't going to really remember why it's here and if enough of them, she's so loud. The smallest dog as well. She's a small snout. She can come up with me here

if she wants. I'm blessed, George, for sleeping next to her every night. She snores like a monster.

Yeah, she's not a 10 pound dog, like nothing. It snores like a 180 pound man. Yeah, well, I mean, it's one of those things though, it's people are willing to give up certain things for convenience. You know, like we always talk about privacy, it's something that

people sacrifice now. You either get services like Google for free, but as you give away part of your data in penance for that, or you hit something with a paywall, like Netflix, where you could do petty, but they don't collect your data and use it against. They do collect your data though.

They don't sell it to other people. Well, you don't know that. This is the thing. And even if they don't sell it, they must store it. And if they must store it, it will get hacked. You just look at like Equifax and all these enormous companies who get hacked at Facebook

the other day, it was something like 150 or 180 million users got their data hacked. Like a couple of months ago from Facebook, you know, this is a technology company, and they're getting hacked. And even if they're not getting hacked, they're selling your data

anyway. And the reason for that is when the internet first came about, because it's new, no one's, you know, no one's used to this stuff. If you ever tried to get someone to pay for something on the internet, they wouldn't do it. For a few reasons, one, they're not used to it.

Two, they were scared because everyone was scared that because credit cards, yeah, and credit cards aren't built to be used on the internet. It's not secure. Really what my account's been hacked multiple times and mind, endlessly. And it always seems to be through phones. Like the bank will tell me, oh, it's,

you know, this guy with someone with an iPhone in London. You know, is that you? No. Yeah, I don't know how they get my. The thing is, you've got the internet, and then you've got 1970s banking technology, just sort of plonked on top. And all this information has to be collected. And then it's put into this like siloed. And you have these

huge attack services where people can just go, Oh, I can attack these servers or I can attack where they store this data. And I can have millions of credit card details. And because we have to have know your customer and anti money laundering and all this sort of stuff,

they've got your identification, where you live, what you do is your job, what your credit card details, what should, you know, all the rest of your banking stuff age, you know, every single bit of information that they could possibly want that a hacker would be their dream is just stored

and millions of them. So it is constantly getting hacked. And then we spend billions on security to try and prevent this from happening. But we don't spend it at the banks. Well, the yeah, but we do spend it because they spend the money. And because they've spent the money,

someone has to pay for charges. They charge us. So, or they give us worse service or, you know, whatever it is, cost, there's always a cost to the customer, because they can't just swallow all of it. Because we never had a secure payment method, these paywalls, a it's clunky. That's why

everyone, that's why I use Amazon all the time. I can't be bothered to go on a different website. I don't know if it's real or fake. I don't know if they're actually going to send the products.

Then I've got to enter all my credit and debit card details in, put in my address and it takes like five minutes. But you still trust Amazon to store your card details? No, I don't trust them.

But you, you allow them to. Well, I have to at the moment. Because they provide your convenient service. Yeah, they're pretty good. Generally, my stuff arrived. Generally, it works. I don't have to reenter my credit card details all the rest of it. They do have some good security. Like if you

change device and go to buy, they're like, well, you just need to reenter your card details just for safety and security. So they are, there are aspects of security on there. Because of the, the ease of use and all the rest of it, that's what we use. But imagine if, imagine if you just

opened your browser, you see something you want to buy, press buy, and it's done. That's the integration that Bitcoin can provide. It already is, you know, with lightning network, these things are being used and they work now and it is instant. The user interface is still clunky and there's

still this weird sort of, you've got to buy the Bitcoin, then you've got to convert that onto a lightning channel. I think that's my, my initial point is like, if someone, you know, what was the word you use? Re-hypothecation. Re-hypothecation. That's a weird word because I get the re-hypothesis.

But then, I don't know why we've given it to the apothecary at the end of that, that name. Well, it's, that's a different thing. I mean, that is, that's where they're, they're lending on top of lending on top of lending. Oh, okay. This is where the house of cards is. It's like,

everyone knows someone else. If, if it becomes, if someone is centralized, and I, and I was saying, the only way that people will allow it to be centralized is if, by centralizing, they provide them with a better service. You know, like Amazon, Amazon is a centralized shopping network where

we use, we hate supermarkets because they kill independent stores, independent retailers are dead because of supermarkets and Amazon is the ultimate supermarket. It's the online supermarket of everything, but we allow it and we all participate because they provide such a good service. And that,

that's the potential with Bitcoin and re-hypothesis. Well, not, not with them. I mean, that's a different thing. So Amazon, if Amazon said, oh, we're, we're going to take Bitcoin payments, if they decided that they would store all of that Bitcoin and keep all of that Bitcoin, and then they decided that

they would lend it out to people, and then those people would lend it to someone else, and those people would lend it to someone else, and those people would lend it to someone else, and no one bothered to keep their private keys, and no one had control of their own coins, then it would be a

problem. It's very, very easy. Well, that'd be a problem, though. Say you take an asset, that asset is a cup of coffee. You have, you own that cup of coffee. That's an asset. But then if you say to someone, I'm going to lend you half a cup of coffee, and then you tell 100 other people,

I'm going to lend you half a cup of coffee, half a cup of coffee, half a cup of coffee. But surely it's breaking the double spend issue, because you're not using Bitcoin. You're not, you're not actually using it on the network. This is off chain now. So this is just a promise.

You're going back to a certificate. Oh, right. Okay. So this is basically treating Bitcoin as the backing for fiat money. I see my where I think Bitcoin is going to go is it will eventually just be massive, like interbank settlement rather than gold, because it's expensive to transfer,

like this is really cheap, really easy, really secure, get, you can guarantee that it's real. If you, you know, if you do things properly anyway. So what I'm saying is that the only issue that I can see is like we had with gold, the gold standard would have been fine. And even

backing the, the notes with gold would have been fine. But it's because we got to a point where we had much more certificates for the gold than we had actually gold. If they'd have actually done things properly and just said, well, we've got X amount of gold, which means we can have X amount,

that's it. And that's done. But this is, this is where the attack services, as far as I can see it, is if we are stupid enough to repeat history and allow them to take full control of vast sum of the new gold, which is Bitcoin, then they're just going to do what they did before.

They're not going to grow the banks and the financial institutions. So so what we need to do is not, this whole thing has come about because we can't trust them because over and over and over and over again, we get fucked. If enough people will use the network as it's supposed to be used,

I can't see a problem. But if everyone allows banks to keep control of things, even if we did this, even if we said, okay, you can hold a large sum of Bitcoin, you're a bank, you'll provide a service where it's really easy to use. And I can send money to my friends in a really easy

user interface. And no one else is bothered to build one. And I can, I can loan, I can use my Bitcoin is collateral, and I can take a loan out to buy a car or do whatever, if that's what someone wants to do, which I'd never advise. But if that is what someone wants to do, then it's fine, as long

as the bank says, okay, well, we'll have it so that you can check on the network, you can check that we actually have control of that Bitcoin, and that you have say a multi signature account where you can draw that money and they can't send it without your permission, then they can't

lend on top of lending on top of lending, they have to actually do what they've said they're going to do. And that's easy enough to build. The whole point is that people, if it can be done for free without people taking a cut or people taking taking you for someone profit, then I think people

will start working around it. There'll be a few people that will fall for these kind of things. It's fine if it's a few. But yeah, I don't think it'll be an issue with it like the whole, you know, someone also the it sounds like the Bitcoin network, the people that are actually

involved in developing and maintaining and sustaining this and keeping it future proof will work on ways of actually making this. They are already and it's getting better by the day. It really, really is. It's so impressive. Every day that I'm reading something, I'm amazed. Things are

accelerating. So I mean, definitely it can be built and definitely it can be built safely. It's just a case of not being too complacent and remembering what the core values of this thing are and remembering why it's here and that remembering it's for the people is the whole point of this.

So as long as we stick to that, we don't allow ourselves to be taking advantage of would be fine. Would you agree that maybe the banks will be too slow anyway? Not the banks, but the financial institutions generally will be too slow to act and by the time that they do, they'll be too far

behind to actually. I think so. I think the banks are going to be smarter and quicker to move than the governments. They're the ones where I think they've missed the boat. If they'd have swooped in in the first couple of years, they'd have been able to shut this thing down. The government.

Yeah, but they were too slow and like too arrogant and they still don't understand it. They understand lots of things, governments. But I mean, they really don't understand this. And let's be honest, most people don't. Young people don't. My experience of talking to people

is it's quite a middle aged thing. Older people definitely don't understand it. Younger people definitely don't understand it. It's people in that sort of late 20s, 30s, early 40s that are going to even be aware of it. And maybe they've got some stored in it. Maybe they tried some short term

trading in it to try and make some money. Very few people are using it as a currency though. No, because there's not particularly good currency really. If we're completely honest, the only way use of it as a currency is for things that you probably wouldn't want to use fiat money for because there'd be a track trace. I mean, let's

put it this way. I know one shop where I can use Bitcoin. So that's it. I know one physical location where I can purchase. I don't know any online retailer that I use where I can use Bitcoin. I can't use it on Amazon or eBay or any other like if you go on a store that has an

online department, none of them offer Bitcoin transactions. Because it doesn't really make sense for them too. And it doesn't really make sense for the person who's spending it to spend it either.

Because with any money, it has to evolve. This is something that's only been around for 10 years. It was worth nothing. No one used it and still no one understands it. So it has to go through these stages. And at the moment, it's acting more of a store of value. Really? Yeah, I think that's

what most people are using it for. Well, number one speculation. Yeah. Number two store of value. There are some people who are using it as a currency, but they tend to be in countries where their current monetary system is failing them badly. So somewhere where they've got massive

inflation or hyperinflation, what we've got in England about what's going on. Like, is it Argentina where there's is Bitcoin doing well in Argentina? Fair amount of Argentinian people use it and Venezuela and people like that. But it tends to be those people who understand it tend to get out.

Because they tend to be the computer scientist or people who understand this stuff tend to once they understand it, get out. So you have a brain drain, they'll go over to America or UK or wherever it is. And the people who are stuck in the country, who their money's being devalued so much,

they don't necessarily know how to use it. You do have a few of them, but it's still really not used very much because you do have these fluctuations. To us, if something moves, drops by 50% in a few months, that's massive. That would be seriously scary for us to use.

For countries like that, they do that in a day anyway. It doesn't matter. To them, Bitcoin is the stable currency. And so for them is brilliant. But for us, because we're used to something that's pretty good, like on the face of it, the foundations are terrible. Other foundations of our financial

system are woeful. But at the level that we see it, we wake up tomorrow and basically a price of milk is going to be roughly the same amount and petrol is going to be roughly the same amount.

We don't see a huge amount of fluctuations. So why use Bitcoin right now when firstly, tax implications of using it are an absolute nightmare, purposefully. So you'd have to report every time you buy it, every time you sell it, if you buy your petrol with it, then the

cost of it's gone up. You've got to report that with your tax. So that makes it unusable. And also, if you do understand it, you know that this is going for all or nothing. This is going for global reserve currency or nothing really. That's where we're going. So why would you

use it to buy something when you're thinking, well, this is probably going to be 100x from here. So that's why it's not really used as money, most sort of first world countries. And it's only once it gets stable that it's going to be used. And it's only going to be stable when it's

much bigger than it is now, because we are $150 billion, like the whole Bitcoin, we're like, what economy would that be equivalent? It would be in like the bottom seven or eight countries.

Like it's going to be some country, central Africa, or like, yeah, something a small country. I can't actually remember. I have I have looked today. I think it's like seventh from the bottom or something like that. So it's small. Yeah, it's really small. So and that's why we see these huge

fluctuations, because it doesn't take a lot to move these markets up or down. And until we get to, well, if you just look at, so say gold, gold was the base money. Now we've gone to a point where, like there's much more money than there is gold, like a lot more. So gold, the value of all gold

in the world or the market cap of all gold is like, it's roughly eight trillion. Roughly. Yeah, roughly eight trillion. And we've got $250 trillion of debt currently in the world. But there's eight trillion value of gold, but we're only 150 billion. So if we want to just match the market cap of gold,

we I'd have to do the math on it. But it's we'd be at like 500,000 Bitcoin or roughly that sort of money if we just take gold. So my prediction is that we'll take gold and we'll also take just logically, we'll take all other offshore money. So I don't know if you've seen the Panama papers.

No, so it's a documentary that basically goes into the Panama papers and goes into some of the money that is kept offshore. HSBC was very much at the heart of it. Those guys, the biggest money launderers in the world is absolutely disgusting. The things that they do.

And the fines that they get are less than less than the money they've earned. So what sort of precedent is that? It's like, it's like me getting a parking ticket, which is less than the parking that I would have paid anyway. So I'm just going to go, will I just do that every single day of the

week? Sure. And that's what that's what happens to the banks. So my point of saying this was the the estimation of this offshore money, which is, you know, came in islands and wherever else, and it's held in shell companies, and then they just get a front man to be the front of the shell

company and they pay no tax. And this is what all the politicians and all the bankers and you know, upper echelons of society do. And it's normal. But that's about 9 trillion estimated. So if you, if you just think yourself, well, they're going to have to pay to have solicitors draw up all these

contracts to make a shell company to make sure that they still putting trust in these, in these lawyers and everyone else to do their job properly so that the tax can't ever be taken from them.

They have to spend a lot of money to protect their money. With Bitcoin, you can do it basically for free and it's much more secure and no one can control it other than you. So if you just say, well, we take gold and we take all the dark money, which is hidden offshore, well, suddenly,

we're at a million a coin with no other money. If no one else gets involved, we just take those two. It's a million a coin. And when we're at a million a coin, it will be much more stable, because when someone jumps in with another hundred billion, well, it's not really going to move

the market. If that happened today, it would seriously move the market in a way that we want it to go to the upside. But still, it's not very good as a currency. So I don't see it being a currency until the hundred billion in value just bought a hundred billion Bitcoin.

You couldn't today. There's not enough liquidity. And most people who know about the stuff are not selling theirs either. And there's just not enough on the market. So if they tried to, though, and they just bought as much as they possibly can, I mean, we would see a huge rally.

Massive. So I don't really see it being a currency until we're at least a million a coin. So you think it's still early days? I think this is so early. It's like, this would be like investing in Apple or Amazon or one of those before they've even started.

So a lot of people go, oh, there's Bitcoin millionaires. People who have earned their money on it, but that time's been in gone. But you don't agree with that. That time is just beginning. The California Gold Rush hasn't actually happened on Bitcoin yet. We've had early days, prehistoric Egyptian gold,

Tutankhamun. There are people that have found a shed load of gold and made some money on it. But we still haven't hit those peak times of gold. I don't think we're anywhere near. In my head, a million is actually fairly conservative.

Put for one coin. For one coin is fairly conservative because it is a better base currency than gold. So even just we take that out half a million a coin. And a million a coin that makes it a penny a Satoshi. Because 100 million Satoshi is in a coin. And it's 100.

Yeah, which then make it quite easy because it'd be like, you know? Yeah, it would work. I mean, yeah, because at the moment, I was trying to explain to my friends the other day, today, actually. And I was like, just talk about Millie, because they're

like 0.005. So it's five and a half Millie coins. Millie, not a million, but a thousandth is in millennial. A millimeter is a thousandth for a meter and a millie coin. So I mean, I've seen that on certain like marketplaces where you can set it to Millie Bitcoin, like lowercase MBTC.

And that for me is great, because I tend to think that one millie is about a fiber. I mean, it's been between two and seven pounds. Yeah, but roughly. Yeah, it's like a fiber. So, yeah, Millie Bitcoin. But yeah, the idea of it being a Satoshi, a penny is would be amazing.

And that's the lower end of where I think it's going. Like, to me, it's taking all or nothing, either somehow this fails from some of the, you know, some of the ways that we discussed earlier, which is not impossible, but I think improbable, or slowly but surely everyone on this planet

realizes that it's a better base money. It's more efficient. It's verifiable. You know, it's all the product, all the properties that I could sit here and bang on about forever. It's a better base money. And for people who don't want to pay tax, these, these people who are weaseling their

money away in offshore bank accounts, who are the same people who are standing up and saying how much they want to help change the world and how they're going to give their money to charity and all the rest of it. They're saying one thing, but actually they're shipping all this money offshore.

For those people, a half decent engineer for an hour's work could set things up better than they're paying. I imagine hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to do. Oh, okay. So I get you. So what you're saying is take celebrity ex, you know, Duane the sock.

Johnson. Didn't he's the highest earning actor in the world last year? I think I heard. Deservedly so. The man is a fucking genius. He's the new Arnold. He's the new Arnold. He's a monster of a man. Yeah.

I like seeing him with, what's his name? It's a really, really short comedian. They have a good place. Kevin Hart. Kevin Hart. Yeah. It's so funny seeing those two together. Well, they clearly have a really good relationship. They're really good friends. There's loads of

videos of them just sticking around on YouTube. Yeah, that's funny. But so let's say Duane Rock Johnson and he's got lots of money stored in offshore account. You think it would be better for him to, instead of storing that money in cash in the Cayman Islands, he would be better off

storing it in Bitcoin on a special USB key that he's got somewhere. And that would not only be good for him, because his money would deflate. So it'd be worth more in the future, where his cash would be worth less due to inflation. It would also help pump up the network,

because he would, that store of value means that the network is bigger and worth more. And does it drive up scarcity if more people are storing it? And is that better? Well, it doesn't drive, I mean, the scarcity's fixed. No, but like, no, but there's, you said

earlier, there's a certain amount of liquidity in the network. Like people have to either mining coins or people are selling their stored coins. And you said, how much nine trillion in offshore assets? Roughly. That's what they estimate. So it would be impossible for all those nine trillion

dollars to suddenly go to Bitcoin, because there isn't nine trillion in liquidity. No, it would be impossible for somebody who had nine trillion dollars today to just say, I want to buy nine trillion today. Because, or it wouldn't be impossible. What would happen is,

because there's not the liquidity on the exchanges, someone would put in a massive buy order, and you get what's called slippage, because there's not the liquidity there, and they're trying to do such a massive order. Anyone who's selling, say there's 500 bitcoins for sale on one of the larger

exchanges at any one time, well, it's just going to eat through that order book straight away. And now there's no one more selling. And now that pushes the price up and anyone else who now wants to sell is going to be selling at a higher price. And so that continues. So they're going to,

with the first bit of money, pay a lower price, then it's going to go higher, then it's going to go higher, then it's going to go higher. And they're basically forcing themselves to pay more money and make everybody else on the network earn more, or not earn more for their coins to be worth more.

Yeah. So if they were smart about it, they'd do it a little bit bit by bit. They'd do a bit by bit. Nice little plug there. My point really is that, say, doing the rock Johnson said, right, I don't, I don't want to keep my money offshore. And he'll say, one of his friends will

say, Oh, you want to speak to my mate? He'll sort you out with an offshore bank account. So Duane goes and does that. And this, he says, right, I've got, I don't know, a couple hundred million. And what I want to do is make sure that no tax, it doesn't get

touched. No one knows I have it. I want it offshore. I don't want to bet anything on it. They say, no problem. All we got to do is just draw up these contracts out of the shell company. We set you up with this bank account, blah, blah, blah. They're going to charge him to do that.

Probably quite a lot of money to do that. And then he has a few issues, which are he's going to have to continue to pay money to them to make sure that it continues to work. And he has counterparty risk, which means that if one of those banks or one of those people, he's trusted either

grasses him up, goes against what they've said. They have liabilities that they can't keep up with and they they end up going under. Then does he get his money back? Because he doesn't really control it. He's giving an IOU to someone else. So the options are right, Duane, do you want to pay

hundreds of thousands of pounds to have something that's fairly secure, but not 100% secure and you're trusting in about 10 different people to store your money and that money's stored in fear, which is going down in value? Or do you store it in Bitcoin? You have complete control of

it. Rather than spending 200,000 pounds on lawyers fees and all the rest of it, you pay 50 pounds. And it's stored in Bitcoin, which over time tends to go up. Now, the weird thing about it is that if people just are logical and they say, well, Bitcoin's better than cold, it's based money,

so we do that. So that's a trillion. Bitcoin's better as an offshore bank account than offshore bank accounts. So there's another nine trillion. Now we're at a million a coin. What happens is, the more people that use it and the more that that value goes up, the more people are going to

join. It's like a snowball effect. And what that means is that because everyone who's using fear money, the money's being, or the liquidity is being sucked away from them, like a black hole, it's all coming over to Bitcoin, they then have to print more money, which means their money devalues

more. And so as Bitcoin becomes more and more valued, fear money becomes less and less valid. Yeah. And what it means is the pegged rate or the rate at some point, say we get to a million pound of coin, okay, but say we get to 10 or 15. So it doesn't really mean anything anymore,

because you'll be like, oh, well, how much is a bit, but how much is a pound? Well, I don't know, it's one 100 millionth of a, do you know what I mean? You're starting to get to a point where they're going to have to print and print and print where their money's worth nothing. And so

you won't even have that. I feel like when you go somewhere like Turkey, when the Lyra, what you call one Lyra is actually like 1000 Lyra. And that's why it interests me so much, because there's all these weird little scenarios where it's like, well, if this happens, then it

means this happens. And if that happens, it means this happens. And the knock on effect of just those two coming across, just us taking those two bits of value, not including property, not including art, not including classic cars, not including any of the other things we store,

value it, it suddenly forces all of these central banks and all these governments to just print to nothing. So like, would it be fair to say, because I think we discussed this in the past that what will happen is Bitcoin will grow. And it will be ignored largely by the mainstream until it is

almost as big as fiat money. Like you say, like the one one, so she becomes one penny. And at that point, there are two cars racing side by side, and Bitcoin will get faster and fiat money will get slower. And eventually, there'll be a clear winner, and it will always be Bitcoin.

I think so. Is it set up to be that way? Because because of the difficulties in the way that fiat money is that it naturally devalues. Well, it doesn't naturally devalue it devalues because central banks. It's pre values every year. Yeah. But it's not natural. It's just the system that

the way the way that it's used. The system has evolved over the last year. So it's been corrected. Yeah, so it is. It will be too cold. Or at least I think it will be like to driving side by side.

And yeah, to me, there is an obvious clear winner for almost everyone on the planet. So yeah, that's why I see it going to at least those values. If you really think about it logically, it's hard to argue it. And people will, and people won't start using this until the value is much

bigger. And it's going to take time. It's going to feel like one day you just wake up and it's just here. And it's obvious. But it's not obvious now. And it probably won't be for another five years, maybe even 10. We should, I mean, we shall see. We shall see. It's all speculative. It's all

guesswork. Cool. Right, man. We did. We just did an hour. That was quite good, actually.