#973 Brad Mills On The Case For Bitcoin Maximalism

Brad Mills is an investor and host of the "Magic Internet Money" podcast. In this conversation we talk about the state of Bitcoin Maximalism by debate the pros and cons of the current message that maximalists send to the broader Crypto community. ======================= This episode is sponsored by my favorite place to buy, trade, and stake crypto, Okcoin. They're the fastest growing US based exchange, serving over 190 countries globally with the easy onboarding and low fees. If you haven't tried them out yet, you should. They're on a mission to make learning about and buying crypto easier than ever, and they're all about bringing more financial literacy to everyone, something we can always use more of. From being the only exchange to integrate Lightning to contributing over $1M for Bitcoin core devs, they're doing incredible work to further the bitcoin ecosystem and they offer lots of other vetted utility assets from gaming to defi. With Okcoin, I feel confident that the future really will be ok. To get started, go to http://okcoin.com/pomp for some free bitcoin when you sign up. ======================= Fundrise is the largest direct-to-investor real estate investment platform out there, giving you the opportunity to achieve upside of an asset class previously reserved for institutions and high net worth individuals. That’s right, Fundrise is making high-end private market real estate investing accessible to everyone via an easy-to-use, automated platform. See for yourself how over 190,000 investors have built a better portfolio with private real estate. It takes just a few minutes to get started with as little as $10. Go to http://Fundrise.com/Pomp today and, for a limited time, get $10 when you place your first investment. That’s Fundrise.com/Pomp ======================= Crypto is all about giving the power back to the people and our sponsor, Pipe, is doing that in a big way. Pipe is the world’s first trading platform that allows you to trade recurring revenue streams for up-front capital. And with Pipe’s new API, companies with recurring revenue can build seamless, embedded financing options into their platforms. One of the most interesting uses for Pipe’s new API right now is Compass Mining’s “Mine Now, Pay Later” which powers payment plans on bitcoin mining hardware so more miners can start or scale with a smaller up-front investment. Whether you’re looking for mining hardware or scaling any business with recurring revenue, check out Pipe to access growth capital with: No loans. No dilution. No restrictive covenants or warrants. Just growth on your terms And right now, Pomp Podcast listeners can access tens of thousands of dollars even millions fee-free for 12 months. Whether you are a bitcoin mining company looking to enable financing for your customers or a SaaS, DTC, or any business that has recurring revenue, sign up at http://pipe.com/pomp to start trading today.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Brad Mills is an entrepreneur, investor, and a podcast host. In this conversation, we talk about the case for Bitcoin maximalism, the difference between investor, gambler, and trader, and a barbell strategy for Bitcoin investing. I really enjoyed this conversation with Brad, and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode though, I first want to talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by OKCoin. They are my favorite place to buy, trade, and stake crypto. They're the fastest growing US-based exchange, serving over 190 countries globally, with the easy onboarding and low fees. If you haven't tried them out yet,

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

  you should. They're on a mission to make learning about and buying crypto easier than ever, and they're all about bringing more financial literacy to everyone, something we can always use more of. From being the only exchange to integrate Lightning, to contributing over $1 million for Bitcoin core developers, they're doing incredible work to further the Bitcoin ecosystem, and they offer lots of other vetted utility assets, from gaming to DeFi. With OKCoin, I feel confident that the future really will be OK. To get started, go to okcoin.com/pomp for some free Bitcoin when you sign up. Again, if you want free Bitcoin, go to okcoin.com/pomp today. Today's episode is brought to you by Fundrise. You all know I believe that the best investors

• 1:26Anthony Pompliano?

  both understand and seek out extreme asymmetry. Fundrise is here to help you do just that. It's the largest direct-to-investor real estate investment platform out there, giving you the opportunity to achieve upside of an asset class previously reserved for institutions and high net worth individuals. That's right, Fundrise is making high-end, private market real estate investing accessible to everyone via an easy-to-use automated platform. Its 1 million users already know that the investment with Fundrise is capable of producing strong appreciation returns and income generation while helping to stabilize a diversified portfolio. That's more important now than ever in our inflationary environment. See for yourself how over 190,000 other investors have built a better portfolio with private real estate. It takes just a few minutes to get started with as little

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Ten dollars go to fundrise.com slash pomp today and for a limited time you'll get ten dollars when you place your first investment again that's fundrise.com slash pomp go check it out and when you make your first investment they'll give you ten dollars on top of it fundrise.com slash pomp today's episode is brought to you by pipe crypto is all about giving the power back to the people and our sponsor pipe is doing that in a big way pipe is the world's first trading platform that allows you to trade recurring revenue streams for upfront capital and with pipes new api companies with recurring revenue can build seamless embedded financing options into their platforms one of the most interesting uses for pipes new api right now is compass minings mine now pay later which powers payment plans on bitcoin

• 2:55Anthony Pompliano?

  mining hardware so more miners can start or scale with a smaller upfront investment whether you're looking for mining hardware or scaling any business with recurring revenue checkout pipe to access growth capital with no loans no dilution no restrictive covenants or warrants just growth on your terms and right now pomp podcast listeners can access tens of thousands of dollars even millions fee free for 12 months whether you are a bitcoin mining company looking to enable financing for your customers or a saas dtc or any business that has recurring revenue sign up at pipe.com slash pomp again pipe.com slash pomp to start trading today

• 3:36Speaker 01

  anthony pompliano runs pomp investments all views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of pomp investments you should not treat any opinion expressed by pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy but only as an expression of his personal opinion this podcast is for informational purposes only

• 3:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Brad what's going on buddy

• 4:00Speaker 02

  hey man how's it going

• 4:02Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm doing fantastic how are you

• 4:03Speaker 02

  I'm doing good I've been preparing mentally preparing my anus for this dip for a long time

• 4:12Anthony Pompliano?

  What a way to start. All right, let's start first. I want to talk to you. The most important thing I want to talk to you about is the case for Bitcoin maximalism. And I think you've got some very interesting thoughts here in terms of kind of how to argue as to why people should be Bitcoin Maximalism. So you've got the floor. What would be your case for why people should be Bitcoin Maximalism?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, man. Well, you know, it's just a conversation that keeps happening on online, right? Like altcoiners typically are critical of Bitcoin maximalists because Bitcoin maximalists are very critical of altcoiners. And whether it's the chicken or the egg, it just keeps going back and forth. And then the new narrative that I'm hearing a lot is that, oh, well, Bitcoin maxis are just anti-capitalist. And I kind of find that is a lazy way of thinking about it because it just, it's the same as the term Bitcoin maxi, really. Like when you use the term Bitcoin maxi, it's just giving yourself permission to just not think deeply about the subject. Just write off the, you know, the criticisms and the arguments that are coming from Bitcoiners about all this stuff in crypto.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  And just write it off as a Bitcoin maxi. And it was hilarious when we started seeing people like Mark Cuban doing that last year. I don't know what we, what did you think about when you saw someone like Mark Cuban? Using the term Bitcoin maxi, did you think like, where are we in this cycle?

• 5:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, hold on a second. Let's clarify for a second. So there's people online who are making the argument that Bitcoin maximus are against capitalism. Explain that more. Like, what is that argument?

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, you know, I've heard this a few times, actually, and it's because Bitcoiners typically are super critical of the altcoin stuff.

• 5:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  And it started probably, I heard this maybe a year and a half ago. It was kind of like, you know, Bitcoin, Bitcoiners don't like capitalism. Because as the DeFi thing started to kick up, I mean, you know, we got to go back a little bit more to the last cycle and the ICO boom. The ICO boom was 2017, when the same sort of thing happened where a lot of Silicon Valley funds started to deploy capital into ICOs. Which at the time, the story was, well, this is disrupting. Capital, we're figuring out new ways to fund startups, crypto startups. And then that was the whole fat protocol thesis and MV equals PQ stuff was coming out from the, the think boys in Silicon Valley.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  And I was even susceptible to that at the time because I'm kind of a FOMO sapien as well. I, I, I kind of came into Bitcoin in 2011 because of people like Peter Schiff, who were exposing all the fraud that was happening on Wall Street and the problems with money itself. And I was an entrepreneur, so I was hustling and grinding. I was like building apps and trying to, you know, hustle my way to growth hacking a startup and, you know, I kind of relate with that culture of people that are attracted to folks like Gary Vee, Mark Cuban and, and other people like that who are kind of like examples for wantrepreneurs, as Noah Kagan likes to call them.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  And so I put myself in that mindset of like an entrepreneur that's a capitalist, a FOMO sapien, sort of like hustling, trying to do what I can to get that bag. And then also like learning about sound money and learning about historical trends with money and what happens with the macro markets historically and understanding what sound money really is and going down the path of libertarianism and all of that stuff, kind of like combining those two things where I'm like an entrepreneur capitalist mindset with also sound money mind, mindset, learning about that. And then I realized Bitcoin was that perfect sort of like marriage of entrepreneurship, open source, technology and sound money.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  And so I kind of dove into Bitcoin and started making businesses for Bitcoin back in 2011. I was starting like job sites and all that stuff. Honestly, I was doing all that shit way too early. I lost a bunch of money trying to make like startups for Bitcoin in 2011 and 12. And, uh, you know, spent all this money on domain names and all that crap. But then in 2014, it was like the altcoin boom happened and I was in that mindset of like, okay, if you miss Bitcoin, because now Bitcoin's at 500 bucks, you can go and check out this, there's Litecoin, it's like faster than Bitcoin. And there's Peercoin, it's a peer, it's a proof of stake network instead of a proof of network, a proof of work network.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  And all of those, all of those iterations, the early iterations of Bitcoin, like forks and, you know, there were stuff like Next, which was like its own consensus protocol. I mean, we had that massive bubble in 2014 and I, I was a Bitcoiner, but also susceptible to that idea that, well, if, you know, you can have uh, money on a blockchain, why wouldn't you be able to have other types of money on a blockchain and other things on a blockchain like?

• 9:05Anthony Pompliano?

  So what?

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Putting medical records.

• 9:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Let me ask you this question, when you start to think about this, this ultimately gets to, I think the second point that's important here, which is, there's a difference between holders, investors and uh, kind of traders and gamblers, right? Talk to me a little bit how you see these different groups of individuals and like, what is the, the psychological difference? And then what is the difference of how they express that psychological um, kind of perspective in the market?

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, from my own personal understanding of this, it's been honestly like a 10-year journey from getting into Bitcoin in 2011, getting, going down the shitcoin rabbit hole and the altcoin logic in 2014 and kind of, I mean, I participated in that Maxcoin ICO, I remember Max Keiser launched his own coin back then. Well, it was actually, I think Kobe launched it for Max and Max didn't premine it or anything, it was just experimenting. But I was like, oh, cool, a Maxcoin, I'm gonna try that out and, you know, trade it for Bitcoin. So there was definitely this like anti-altcoin narrative back then, because you do have, what, what ends up happening is that the people that get into Bitcoin and really go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole,

• 10:12Speaker 02

  they're typically um, activists, financial activists or Bitcoin capitalists or um, philosophers. And they really kind of trend towards like sound money and Austrian economics and, and things like that. But then on the crypto side of things, usually it's like, typically it's entrepreneurial people, people with a trading mindset, like they just wanna um, make a 10x or they, they're professional traders, they have a real trader's mindset and they're trying to actually just stack more Bitcoin. Or in the case of the recent bubbles, stack more fiat, most of the time now, there's a lot more traders just trying to stack fiat. So you do have this clash that there's, that there's this part in the middle where you can be a Bitcoin Maximalism,

• 10:56Speaker 02

  acknowledge that there's an opportunity to trade shitcoins and make more Bitcoin, but not go down the ethical risk curve and start promoting shitcoin logic and creating bag holders for projects that you know are gonna end up failing. So I think most of the Bitcoiners in the end that have learned all these lessons, they realize that the majority of people are not equipped to be crypto traders because typically, the only way that you're gonna make money and beat the gains of Bitcoin over the long term is if you're lucky and you got like a sheeb or something like that and you pulled your chips off the table and exited the casino before you threw it back into like zombie sheeb or something stupid like that and just lost it all, or Terra Luna. If you're, if you're lucky, you can beat Bitcoin, but you know, obviously the odds of that are pretty low.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  If you're a professional trader, if you've actually honed your craft of trading and you have strict risk management rules and you're not just like making emotional bets, like YOLOing in on things and then not taking your stop losses when they get hit because you feel like it's gonna come back. If you're not one of those people that can emotionlessly execute your trades, you should just not start because you actually turn yourself into a gambler. And most people are trading crypto and NFTs and stuff, not really realizing that they're actually degenerate gamblers. And that, it's just you're not in the casino pulling slot machines and playing back rat or whatever. You're just like buying the next mint or trying to trade the next meme coin or get the next DeFi thing and you convince yourself that you're an investor and you start doing

• 12:25Speaker 02

  analysis on this stuff, when really in the end, it's, you know, we can see what happens with these cycles.

• 12:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Can I make a suggestion? I actually think that there's a way to talk about this that most people haven't used yet, but would register, which is Bitcoin incentivizes timeless investing principles. So things like buy great assets and hold them forever, right? Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger. Our favorite holding time is forever. Right? Again, same group of guys, being able to go and buy assets for cheaper than what they actually are worth, right? All these things that are kind of these timeless investing principles, Bitcoin, and I think most of the Bitcoin community, most of the information that's out there, etc., is just repackaging these timeless investing principles for kind

• 13:13Anthony Pompliano?

  of the modern age and a new asset. But in some way, if you were to take many of the lessons and use Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger as kind of the quintessential example, if you were to take most of the principles that they share with people and then just overlay it on to Bitcoin, then that's essentially what the Bitcoin community says, right? They call it buy great assets, hold them forever. The Bitcoin community calls it hodl. But like, those are the same two things, right? Now, what I think is also to your point is that there are other assets that incentivize different strategies. And those different strategies are things around the day trading, the gambling, kind of whatever nomenclature you want to use. But if you look and you see people who have built true wealth, almost

• 13:55Anthony Pompliano?

  always, almost always, it's through holding great assets for very, very long periods of time and not interrupting compounding. And what I mean by that is you can look at real estate. I think it's something like 90% of people who are considered wealthy built it in real estate. They own property, right? And so if you think of Bitcoin as digital property, there's a lot of similarities there of buy something, hold it for a long period of time. The second thing is if you take something like a network of Amazon as an example, that compounds and compounds and compounds, Bitcoin's compounded at 150% annually for over a decade, right? That compound annual growth rate, etc. And so when you start to look at this, I think that by using the new nomenclature, it fits kind

• 14:40Anthony Pompliano?

  of the social media conversation, and it's fun and all this stuff. But at the end of the day, it's highly convincing to say to people, if you take the Thomas Investing Principles as a filter and you overlay it on this entire industry, there's really one asset that seems to stick out in terms of fitting or checking as many of those boxes as possible. Now, some of these other assets may or may not check one or two of the boxes or whatever, but timeless investing principles have you use that analysis, it arrives at Bitcoin. And ultimately, that's what I think the Bitcoin community talks about a lot, is timeless investing principles. They just don't use those, that language. Is that a fair categorization?

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say that's sort of true. I mean, Bitcoiners say like, you know, the meme of the last two years has been Bitcoin is saving and Bitcoin is a savings technology. And for sure, like that that shift from investing in Bitcoin is saving and Bitcoin is making its making its impact. At least that's how I've been trying to present Bitcoin to people as not a way to trade, because if you if you present it as a investment, right? Then people that don't have the nuanced understanding of the difference between investing and trading will easily get sucked down that rabbit hole of like, well, if it's an investment and I guess I can invest in this, then I should trade it and I should

• 15:58Speaker 02

  sell it when it's high and buy it when it's low and then end up getting wrecked. But majority of people are gonna not be able to beat Mr. Market. As we see with like when the bubble pops, like most people are holding the bag. And the other thing, Pom, too, that I think most Bitcoiners turn really like kind of hardened against crypto narratives is because those memes of Bitcoin have been weaponized by people who are kind of like grifting and kind of like charlatans in in the wider financial space that are moving into crypto and promoting the logic that Bitcoiners use and then just using it to promote DeFi coins or their NFT launch or whatever it is.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  And I've been in so many clubhouse rooms and Twitter spaces where I hear people like, you know, like a Bitcoiner will be on stage like Lamar, Big Mar or like myself or whoever, like discussing this specific thing about how Bitcoin is a savings technology and you should like think about it as a long-term savings vehicle and analyze it from the from the first principles of like, why did Bitcoin get created? What is important in having a decentralized network and asset like Bitcoin? You go through the government resistance aspects of it, the long-term credible monetary policy and how nothing else fits that bill and

• 17:13Speaker 02

  And then the and then the guys will go like, yeah, no, I totally hodl. Actually, I just took a I just took a loan on my on my board ape and I bought some ape coin with it and I'm gonna hodl that thing for the next 10 years. So yeah, I'm doing that. I'm doing long term investing. So it's like, oh, my God, the the level of misinformation and and lack of understanding of of the base core principles of like, why Bitcoin was created, why it's valuable, what happens in these cycles. People are just pumped up with all these really, in my opinion, like irresponsible narratives from, you know, big influential people like Ralph Paul from Real Vision and Cuban and people like that.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Like, I think you've done a really good job, actually, of navigating this bull market because you have a Bitcoin message and you're an entrepreneur and you're you're you're an educator, you're a capitalist. So like, I think of all the like, you know, of all the people in this bubble that, you know, went down the path of, say, like a bit boy or something like that. I have a lot of respect for the way that you handled this because you didn't you you didn't seem to like go out on that reputation risk curve like like Real Vision did, where they decided to start like interviewing BSV and Ripple. And like promoting all this DeFi stuff and really like they're a very influential node in why Ethereum and DeFi was so successful this year because

• 18:38Speaker 02

  they like to talk about network effects and, you know, Bitcoin has significant Lindy effect and network effects and all the other things, all the other pillars of value that hold up that Parthenon of what Bitcoin is, why Bitcoin is valuable. Sure, like you said, some other cryptocurrency, some other some DeFi coins or whatever. They may actually have a very strong pillar in one area like network effects, like maybe there's a lot of developers or maybe it's more private than Bitcoin. Or, you know, maybe there's, you know, like Travis Kling was saying recently that the the ETH 2.0 proof of sake move is a super strong narrative. So it has like Lindy effect on the narrative, but like all the other pillars need to kind of, nothing else equals Bitcoin and all those different pillars of value.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  And it's really difficult for someone to to understand why Bitcoin really has value. And if you can't disconnect the technology narratives from the investment narratives. Then you get what we happened, what we saw happen in 2021, where a lot of people see that they can make tons of money by going out on their reputational risk curve, selling all kinds of like, really like, high, overvalued, grifty projects and taking money from shitcoins and, you know, like, just promoting this bad logic out there. And that, that, that's what I think causes Bitcoin maximalists to get so toxic, you know what I mean? Like, i- i- it's very difficult to get this education out there as well, because it, it does separate into echo chambers. You get echo chambers of Bitcoiners who just are so tired of it

• 20:04Speaker 02

  all and just call everything a shitcoin, and they don't want to bother engaging, typically, because it's just like, tireless having these conversations with people, and people don't like to listen if they're just coming in for the FOMO of it. But then you also get, on the other side, these, these people promoting the idea that Bitcoin maxies are just toxic, and so they don't engage with the logic that Bitcoiners are trying to, you know, explain. So it's just like, two, two camps of, not bad people, like, there's not, it's not like everybody over in crypto, like, I'm sure that there's like, 2 million people that came into crypto in 2021 to, to buy Shiba Inu and Safe Moon. Like, you can see on the blockchain, there was like, 2 million addresses on Safe Moon. So, I'm sure most of those people are just like me in 2011. I was just excited by the technology, and

• 20:49Speaker 02

  I wasn't understanding, really, if I was a gambler, or a trader, or an investor. I didn't really understand sound money. I, I just saw that Bitcoin was exciting, and I could turn on the computer and mine it with my, you know, mine it with my graphics card on my gaming computer, and I learned eventually. But, you know, I didn't have people telling me to value this stuff because of community and all this other garbage. So that's why Bitcoiners are so, I think, adversarial towards the DeFi stuff, and the Ethereum flippanting narratives, and the ultrasound money memes that are coming out of the crypto camps. Because, dude, it's like, this is a battle for money, in the end. We are in

• 21:31Speaker 02

  a war for Bitcoin's eventual survival as a proof, a global reserve asset, a global reserve currency. Not the, but, some people like this think it's gonna be the only money. That would be interesting. But I, I just think that, like, the people that currently control the financial system, Wall Street, central bankers, etc.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  They have a vested interest in seeing the competitors to Bitcoin that they can co-opt, that they can control, rise above Bitcoin. And you can see the proof of work attacks are coming strong and heavy from A16Z and Ripple and Ethereum Foundation and all these crypto companies that are using the ESG narratives and attacking Bitcoin through the proof of work thing and trying to FUD Bitcoin. I mean, it really is a battle for the future of Bitcoin at the highest levels. I'm sure 99% of the people that came into crypto don't think that deeply about it and they're just like, "Yeah, I'm just trying to flip some meme coins and buy some JPEGs, make some money." But, you know, I think it's just worthwhile having more of

• 22:39Speaker 02

  these conversations and debating it in respectful ways and trying to highlight like the follies of some of the logic that's getting pushed out there.

• 22:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So let me ask a couple of questions, because I actually think that there's a lot of very good intentions that are misplaced in some of these conversations. Take, let's look at the A16Z crypto, State of Crypto Report. They wrote, I don't know, 50-page report, whatever the thing was. It was lengthy and it was obviously, took a lot of time, a lot of effort. They really did a lot, right? And I saw a bunch of Bitcoin maximalists yelling and screaming that it didn't mention Bitcoin. But, those same people will say, "But Bitcoin's not crypto." Right? Crypto and Bitcoin are two different things. It's Bitcoin and then everything else. And so, I

• 23:29Anthony Pompliano?

  guess part of it is, I don't know what the answer is. It's kind of this weird thing. What do you think people should do? Should we encourage and ask people to embrace Bitcoin in those types of analysis? Or is it better to actually have them separated? Like, what is, I guess, like, the Bitcoin Maximalism perspective on, should Bitcoin be included in a State of Crypto Report? Or, if it is something different, then it shouldn't be in the State of Crypto because it's not crypto?

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Well, I think the incentives there are clear. Like, A16Z has been pumping billions of dollars into propping up these DeFi narratives and NFT companies and NFT launches and stuff. So that they can't actually make as much money like they did. Like, like A16Z and the Shillikoin Valley VC apparatus that owns Web 2, Web 2.0 already owns Web 3. So, I mean, it's just disingenuous for them to push this Web 3 top-down meme on everybody that like, you know, Web 1 is read, Web 2 is read, write, Web 3 is read, write, own. Really, it's Web 3 is you are the exit liquidity for their premine, because they've already premined everything, and it's the same people that have installed the surveillance technology that is the-

• 24:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Hold on, hold on, hold on a second, though. This is again, like, this is one of these things that-

• 24:48Speaker 02

  I'm getting off topic.

• 24:49Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Right? And again, I want to learn. So you tell me, if A16Z or any other investor gives a founder money and they get something in return, right? They're sophisticated people. They know they're taking risk. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't work, whatever. What is the difference between that versus when an investor gives money for equity? And then, at some point in time, they sell it in the public market to retail? Now, again, take away for, take away the difference, if there's misleading marketing, if there's fraud, if there's lies,

• 25:28Anthony Pompliano?

  like, all that stuff, right? So let's just say, for example, that they were going to use the benefit of the doubt that they're both the exact same thing. I don't think that focusing on, oh, investors gave people money early as risk capital, and then quote-unquote, they're dumping on retail, is any better than all of the Bitcoin companies. Because A16Z, let's keep using them as the example, they invested in Coinbase, which probably, as any equity-based company, Coinbase has probably done more for Bitcoin adoption globally than any other company, just on sheer numbers. They've got, you know, 80 million or 70 million users, and early on, they filled the hole of Mt. Gox got hacked, and Coinbase was the ability for people to do it. Now, that doesn't mean that people can disagree with what they've done now, all that stuff, right?

• 26:13Anthony Pompliano?

  But early on, for sure, they had a material impact. A16Z just invested, I believe, in David Marcus's new Lightning Network startup, right? So it's not that they are anti Bitcoin, at least from my perspective. I've never talked to them about this. But from my perspective, they're just saying, hey, we're taking a bet on the whole space. And they're just plowing tons and tons of money into it. It's like, how do you think about that? Is it, we want people to only invest in Bitcoin things and anything else is bad? Or is it as long as they're supporting Bitcoin? So for example, Lightning Network being integrated into FTX. When Sam Bankman Fried recently said some comments about Bitcoin, a bunch of Bitcoiners freaked out and they're like, integrate Lightning, integrate Lightning. Is it so much that, oh, if you have other tokens, it's bad?

• 26:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Or is it, no, it's only bad if you don't support the Lightning Network? Right? Like, there's like, there's this balance. And I don't know if there's a clear answer. Like, it's a, it's a complex issue.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Well, the way I look at it, like, I think that it's, I look at it like on a spectrum. I like to look at things as like net positive or net negative, or just like,

• 27:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that's fair.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  You know, so Andreessen Horowitz has significantly amplified the network effects of cryptocurrencies that are actively attacking Bitcoin's proof of work. So I think what Andreessen Horowitz does for the space is extremely net negative. I also think that it's unethical to,

• 27:39Speaker 02

  what they're doing is really just trying to make billions of dollars off of technology narratives that are overvalued and blown out. And I think that like, what they do in the traditional markets is also unethical. And it's, you know, it's not, this isn't a defense of like the SEC or calling for the SEC like to cheer the regulations or anything like that. Because I also think a lot of what happens in the traditional markets is extremely unethical. And that's why I got into Bitcoin in the first place. And a lot of Bitcoiners are against like that Silicon Valley insider, you know, dump it on the public at thousand X valuations and restrict access to retail from getting those early, you know, early gains. I think a lot of that is unethical as well and unfair.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  But the way that they've chosen to go and build this thing out is to redo the same thing that they did with Web 2, which is get all these like early tech companies, early internet companies, premine the equity, if you want to use that term, and then eventually dump it all on retail and build up the network effects.

• 28:40Anthony Pompliano?

  But isn't that, isn't that what every single equity-based Bitcoin company is doing as well?

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Well, that is, I mean, there is definitely some Bitcoin companies that are, you know, like raising at higher valuations than they should be doing.

• 28:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, no, just every, by the way, I actually, I disagree with you that equity-based investment is like unethical or bad, right?

• 29:02Speaker 02

  I don't think it is. No, I just think it's in this market where the money is broken and the Federal Reserve is kind of manipulating things to inflate equity bubbles, keep interest rates low. I think that there's this, this real problem that we're starting to see it deflate, but I think we're still way overvalued in the traditional markets as well. But I think it's ethical to build a business and like, for instance, there's, there's some stuff in DeFi that I think actually makes sense that can have some kind of fundamental value that will eventually fall towards a similar type of valuation models, like a PE ratio.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  But like, we're at record high PE ratios in stock market, in the stock market, and we're at like obscene, well, we were at P obscene PE ratios in crypto because a lot of this stuff was being propped up by tier one crypto funds and venture capital funds that were just investing in all this stuff, pre-mining it and then putting in the liquidity and LARPing governance and all this stuff and LARPing the technology narratives and then dumping it on, on DeFi exchanges and dumping it on Coinbase.

• 30:12Anthony Pompliano?

  So here's part of where I think that you and I definitely agree is, and I've been saying this for a very long time. My goal, way back to 2017, 2018, all the ICOs, all that stuff. I said, hey, I'm not investing in it. I think this is going to end up being unregistered securities. We saw multiple examples where regulators went after those things. And so maybe they change the rules in the future, maybe they don't, right? I'm not a regulator. I don't know what they're going to do. I don't know how that's going to play out. But as of right now, we've seen the SEC chairman say that he believes most of these are unregistered securities, etc. Let, let the market figure that out. I don't think you or my opinion is going to dictate where it ends up. I think that is a much stronger argument than the.

• 30:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Argument around, oh, anybody who invests in the equity of a company ends up being unethical if they invest in their private market and then they quote, quote, dump on retail after it goes public. Right. Cause I think that part of it ends up being if you, I, or anybody else wants to start a company today, right? And says, hey, I need capital for it. A startup, the whole point of it is that the venture capital industry is the risk capital. You can't go to your parents or your friends and get the money. You can't go to the bank and get the money. So you have to go to somebody if you want to start the business.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  There's rules though, like there's, there's rules and it's the, the amount of fraud and, and unregistered broker dealer type of activity that's happening in crypto in the last year is insane. Like pretty much 99% of it.

• 31:42Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I don't disagree with that, right? But that's a separate issue. What I'm, what I'm basically getting at is I think that what we need to actually do is rather than attack people on its face. We're much better off saying to a large venture capital fund, even these exchanges, right? It's kind of like with the FTX thing, rather than attack FTX and say, you're all scammers, everything's bad, whatever. Instead, what do we do? Hey, integrate lightning, help push Bitcoin forward.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Sure. But that, but that's happening in like, for sure. Like we should focus on that. That's what I'm doing personally. I've invested in like 20 different Bitcoin startups over the last year and a half. And I actually.

• 32:16Anthony Pompliano?

  You're ballin'.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Well, I, I actually like I, I'm a, I'm a Bitcoin capitalist. Like, you know, like I will invest in shitcoin ICOs and get in the pre mine of some stupid shitcoin. With the intent of taking it and like investing the gains, if I don't wreck myself in a Bitcoin startup that ends up building out this thesis that, you know, what we're all trying to do here is provide a fair base layer of money for, you know, for, for the two billion people in the world that live under financial oppression. Or live under capital controls. So back in July, 2020, like actually around the same time that you put out the CryptoPunks blog post. I also saw what you saw and I started buying CryptoPunks because I was like, this bubble is going to go crazy.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  And rather than just getting triggered by it. On Twitter all the time, which I ended up doing anyway, but like rather than just getting extremely triggered and not being able to stop it. I just saw the amount of activity that was happening in those same degenerate VC circles that were pumping the ICO bubble. I saw it all coming back to life and I saw this new vector of NFTs is going to be the next big bubble. And all these like insiders were starting to buy up the NFT stuff and start doing yield farming and all these other Ponzi scheme. Ponzi nomics mechanics. So I was like, you know what? I'm gonna, I've got, I still have some network in the, in the crypto scene because I worked at a crypto fund in the ICO bubble and I, and we invested in like 70 ICOs. So like I saw how the sausage was made in the last bubble.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  And I, and then I realized like going through that plus the block size wars as a Bitcoiner, as a Bitcoin Maximalism, if you want to call me that. Like I have those two personalities. If you want to say like I'm a FOMO sapien and a Bitcoin Maximalism. And I've, I've saw the sausage get made. I saw how unethical everything was happening over there. And I'm like, this is just nonsense. And it was frustrating to see that the Bitcoin venture capital space wasn't getting as much FOMO as the, the shitcoin stuff. Because you can make like a hundred X if you get into, or a thousand X, if you get into the pre seed of a, of like a, an FTX backed. Protocol or DeFi coin or whatever. So of course there's all this incentive for people like, um.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Andreessen Horowitz to go build these 50 page things because they got to create exit liquidity. They got to build it up. And build it faster than the regulators can regulate it. So that's actually what ended up happening. They, they put so much money and energy and time and resources into building up this stuff that the regulators just got overwhelmed. And now it's like the bubble is cracked, the NFT bubbles popped. And I think now we're finally starting to see people start to pay attention to what's happening on Lightning Network and start to allocate like, like, um. What David Marcus is doing and potentially FTX and stuff. They're now starting to finally pay attention to Lightning Network and Bitcoin. They're coming back to Bitcoin. And I'm actually seeing a lot more competition in the Bitcoin venture capital rounds now.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Where a year and a half ago, two years ago, I was the only one sometimes deploying into the seed round of a Lightning startup or whatever. They're raising like, you know, a hundred thousand dollars or $50,000 or something on like a one, one, two million dollar valuation.

• 35:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Call me when that happens. Call me when that happens. People raising a million dollar valuation, call me.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  I got, I got one actually that's going at four million valuation that I'm, that I'm investing and it's not too bad actually. It's four million's the new one million.

• 35:43Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, we gotta go, but where can we send people to find you on the internet?

• 35:47Speaker 02

  You know, I'd love to keep having conversations with people. I know a lot of influential people watch your show. I mean, I, I love just having long form debates about this because what you just said was interesting and it's tough to defend against that logic. I'd like to hone my skills a little more. Um, what you said actually is, it is a challenge because if you, if you try to have this libertarian mindset and also a free markets perspective and, and balance that with the understanding that Bitcoin is an open source technology, then it's really difficult to find the, the like part in the middle where you can be critical of what's happening in DeFi and crypto and also continue supporting your, your, your

• 36:28Speaker 02

  like hatred of the SEC and the, and the, and the central bankers and stuff. I, I feel like it's like longer conversations, more nuanced conversations that, that you get to that meat and people need to hear critical Bitcoiners like myself and others, I think, explain their logic and get to that point because otherwise we're just gonna get a whole bunch of more shit like Luna. And I mean, there's a lot of overvalued stuff still in crypto that people are drinking the Kool-Aid on. They really do believe in these community narratives and utility narratives and stuff. And I really think we just should have a lot more conversations. So, you know, if anybody wants to reach out to me, I'm Brad Mills Can on Twitter. Uh, I got the Magic Internet Money Podcast. And, um, you know, if you've got a show or something like that, or if you want me to talk to a, a private

• 37:13Speaker 02

  group, if you've got some high net worth individuals, you run a mastermind group or something like that, you know, whatever, I'm always happy to have these long conversations about Bitcoin versus crypto because in the end it comes back to the idea that Bitcoin was created for and it was to create this government resistant, human resistant base layer of sound money, a peer-to-peer cash network that we could use to have a more fair way to transmit and communicate value. And it wasn't about making a shitload of money. It wasn't about like pre-mines or anything like that. Um, so yeah, man, I, I'd love to keep having these conversations that anybody can feel free to reach out to me. I'm usually on Clubhouse as well. If you go into the Cafe Bitcoin rooms on Clubhouse,

• 37:54Speaker 02

  there's, there's like a hundred or so Bitcoiners just 24/7 hanging out and they're shooting the shit, talking about this stuff. So if anybody wants to come in and kind of like...

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Ask some questions to some Bitcoiners like, hey, what do you think of this project? You know, what do you think of my logic on valuing this stuff? Whatever. We're always having these conversations, so come hang out with us.

• 38:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. I appreciate it, my friend. We'll definitely have you back again in the future. And until then, have fun on the internet.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Thanks, man.

• 38:21Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Sounds good. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.