#585 Aleks Svetski on Bitcoin as Sovereign Money

Aleks Svetski is the cofounder and CEO of Amber, a mobile company focused on making exposure to Bitcoin and the new wave of digital assets as simple, low risk, and automated as possible. In this conversation, we discuss emerging nations embracing bitcoin, ETH is state sponsored attack on bitcoin, bitcoin as sovereign money, node level decision making, and Amber’s progress. ======================= Revolut is a finance app in the US and UK, that say they're the simplest way to access crypto. Sign up today at Revolut.com/pomp and make 3 card transactions to get $15, which you can exchange for any tokens Revolut supports. As usual, when you move your money from fiat to crypto your capital is at risk. See T&C's for details. Revolut is a financial technology company. Banking services provided by Metropolitan Commercial Bank, Member FDIC. Cryptocurrency services provided directly by Paxos Trust Company, LLC. ======================= Cosmos is building the Internet of Blockchains, marking a new era of interoperability, scalability, and usability. The free flow of assets and data between blockchains with bridges to Ethereum and Bitcoin will unleash the potential of DeFi, NFTs, and much more. Dive into Cosmos at cosmos.network/pomp ======================= OKEx is a world-leading cryptocurrency spot and derivatives exchange that offers some of the most diverse and sophisticated trading products and crypto finance tools on the market. Trusted by millions of users globally, we believe that cryptocurrency will reshape our money and society, enabling more financial inclusion with alternative tools and methods for wealth creation.

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. Alex Svetski is the co-founder and CEO of Amber, a mobile company focused on making exposure to Bitcoin and the new wave of digital assets as simple, low-risk, and automated as possible. In this conversation, we discuss emerging nations embracing Bitcoin, Ethereum as a state-sponsored attack on Bitcoin, Bitcoin as sovereign money, node-level decision-making, and Amber's progress to date. I really enjoyed this conversation with Alex, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Revolut. Let's go back to the basics for a second. I've partnered

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  with Revolut, a finance app in the United States and the UK, that say they're the simplest way to access crypto. They're putting their money where their mouth is. You can sign up and make three card transactions and get 15 bucks. That's right, $15. What can you do with the $15? You can exchange for Bitcoin or any of the other tokens Revolut supports. Yep, they are crypto-enabled. These guys have made it easier to get some skin in the game. As usual, when you move your money from fiat to crypto, your capital is at risk. Sign up now through revolut.com/pomp to get a $15 reward and put them to the test. Revolut.com/pomp to get 15 bucks and you can let me know what you think. Next up is Cosmos. Cosmos is building the internet of blockchains, marking a new era

• 1:32Anthony Pompliano?

  of interoperability, scalability, and usability. The free flow of assets and data between blockchains with bridges to Ethereum and Bitcoin will unleash the potential of DeFi, NFTs, and much more. You can dive into Cosmos at cosmos.network/pomp. Again, cosmos.network/pomp. The internet of blockchains, marking a new era of interoperability, scalability, and usability. Cosmos.network/pomp.

• 2:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Last but not least are my friends over at OKX. Crypto moves fast and many crypto-focused companies can't keep up. Crypto exchanges that cut through the noise are the ones that give you access wherever you are in the world to the cutting-edge projects emerging in this new asset class. If you're looking for an industry leader that gives you access to a huge variety of crypto assets, tools, and services, I'd recommend OKX. As we all know, Bitcoin and other crypto prices can be volatile. If you're riding these price waves isn't your thing, OKX also lets you earn passive income with your crypto. Earn is OKX's portal to crypto earning opportunities, giving you easy access to DeFi earning protocols without the network fees, as well as other lending and saving opportunities

• 2:42Anthony Pompliano?

  where you can earn up to 15% APY on your crypto. Check out the latest high-yield crypto earning options on OKX Earn. You can open an account today at OKEX.com/pomp. Again, OKEX.com/pomp. All right, let's get into this episode with Alex. I hope you guys enjoyed this one.

• 3:04Speaker 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.

• 3:27Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Alex here with me. What's going on, man? What's up, man? How are you? No voice left, so I don't know how I'm gonna do this. We're talking shortly after a pretty big news of El Salvador. About a four-day period went from announcing that they were going to create Bitcoin as legal tender within El Salvador, or accepted as legal tender. Then they basically put forward a bill, they voted on it, they passed it, it's now legal tender. The president jumps on Twitter Spaces. He's talking about all kinds of stuff, answering questions like super candid, seemed like a pretty like open book.

• 4:11Anthony Pompliano?

  At some point, mining comes up. He's like, ah, well, we have this like volcano, uh, volcanic energy that is 100% renewable, 100% clean, zero emission, uh, and basically free. Maybe we could use that for mining. 24 hours later, he's literally already drilled the well and like, seems like he's off to the races. What the hell is going on in El Salvador?

• 4:29Speaker 02

  This is, I mean, El Salvador and Bitcoin, it's like the, the, this space moves so fast. It's like two weeks ago, the Pope was like, we can't use Bitcoin. Like two weeks later, we've got a country putting some Bitcoin, like, talk me through, like, from what I understood, it's, they're going to, so they've made it legal tender. People who don't want to hold Bitcoin, they can actually sell it back to the government. So the government's going to hold the Bitcoin and give them fiat. Is that right?

• 4:56Anthony Pompliano?

  So, uh, in El Salvador, and again, this is a overgeneralization, but there's basically two banks that you're going to hear about. You're going to hear about the central bank, right? Or, or kind of the, the state balance sheet, the reserves, because they technically don't have, they don't have their own currency. Uh, so there's like a, a reserve assets of the government. Then there's this development bank that is owned by the government. The development bank, uh, looks more and feels more like a regular bank that you would see in the United States, but it's owned by the government. At that development bank, so not the reserves of, of the government, but at the development bank, they are basically creating a $150 million fund. Uh, they keep referring to it, it's like a trust fund. Uh, and the purpose of that is they will

• 5:38Anthony Pompliano?

  seed it with dollars, so 150 US dollars. Uh, they then create a mandate that any merchant must accept Bitcoin, not exclusively. So somebody shows up with dollars, you have to accept the dollars. Somebody shows up with Bitcoin, you have to take the Bitcoin. Now, this is very similar to the, in the United States, if somebody shows up with dollars, you have to accept it, right? It's a mandated thing. Um, it is not necessarily a mandate if somebody shows up with a different type of currency, depending where you are, what the currency is, all that stuff. But in El Salvador now, dollars and Bitcoin will be mandated to be accepted by the merchants. Some merchants want dollars. Some merchants want the Bitcoin. So the merchants that want the Bitcoin, they'll accept it and they'll hold the Bitcoin. The merchants that want dollars will accept Bitcoin if somebody wants to pay them in Bitcoin.

• 6:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And then the government says, turn around and you sell us the Bitcoin and we'll give you dollars. So, so we'll give you choice as to what you hold, but you have to at least accept it for, for payments. And so what that 150 million US dollars is there for is basically that is the liquidity pool, if you will. That will be used to purchase from the merchants. Once it is purchased, the government will hold the Bitcoin in the trust fund or in the development fund. So 150 US dollars is actually going to get converted to 150 US equivalent of Bitcoin, depending on prices, whatever. And what's interesting is the government's basically market making. And so they are going to maybe make a little bit of money, lose a little bit of money over and over and over again.

• 7:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I have no clue how sophisticated this is. This is going to be technology or it's literally going to be like, you know, bring your Bitcoin, you know, type thing. It's like, there's details that still need to kind of be flushed out here. But Strike is one of the companies that is providing a bunch of technology. Blockchain is another. And so Strike's got some pretty sophisticated ways to do conversions via an API and stuff like that. So I actually think it'll be pretty well done. And the whole idea is just like now the government says, hey, we're going to make Bitcoin legal tender. You as a merchant have to accept it just like you have to accept dollars. And we'll help you de-risk. We'll give you free choice in the backend. Let's go.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Well, that piece there, the, the ability for a merchant to just swap it and the government being able to backstop that, that's really interesting. So, so that, that means that they're not only enabling the, you know, the merchant side of it, but you know, the government's actually going to put Bitcoin on their own balance sheet.

• 8:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And the way they're, and the way that they're doing it is like,

• 8:06Anthony Pompliano?

  it's unique because technically they can say that they're not putting it on their balance sheet yet. If you make it legal tender though. My guess is that that is the intention is that they will put it actually on the balance sheet as well, but then they have this like trust fund. And so like, is the trust fund the balance sheet? Like technically, no, but indirectly, yes. Right. In that, well, it was money off the balance sheet that went into the trust fund and therefore the government controls it, whatever. But I think that just like overarching, a nation state is adopting Bitcoin.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. And we can debate how sequentially, should they do XYZ, whatever, but like it's legal tender, they're going to be buying Bitcoin from people with dollars. And then now they're talking about mining.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:49Anthony Pompliano?

  What else do you want from a nation state?

• 8:51Speaker 02

  It's, well, this is like, I've, I've always thought, and I mean, all of us have been thinking for a long time is like, how does this play out? And like, it's literally playing out in front of us. Like, and the thing is, none of us could have guessed in what order, like you said, what sequence, what pattern, what method, what mechanism would be used to do this. So, so I actually, I didn't say anything on the day when, you know, Jack announced it. I was like, yeah, okay, I just want to see what it actually means. But then after the call, you know, after I dug into a little bit, I was like, fuck, this is actually, this is actually good. So this is.

• 9:24Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think the ramifications are? Like with either other countries, individuals, corporations?

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Man, it, I've been saying this for ages. A couple of years ago, one, probably even, maybe longer than a couple, like five or six years ago, it was a risk not to be associated, sorry, to be associated with Bitcoin, right? It was a risk to have some Bitcoin. Now it's, you know, quick, more and more rapidly becoming a risk not to have an association with Bitcoin. And that, that, that game theory change, or that, that incentive change can like, create like a spiral effect, or like a really rapid move, like the pendulum will swing to the other end. It's kind of what happening sort of here in America with the masks thing, right? So it's like Miami came out and said, all right, you know, we're not doing that. And

• 10:13Speaker 02

  now all of a sudden, Texas came out and, you know, someone else and someone else. So, so the pendulum swings back very quickly. And that kind of momentum, if you're, if you're positioned right for it, like there, there is huge opportunity in that momentum. And that's sort of where this is it. So it'll be, it'll be really interesting to see, like, I mean, we saw the laser eyes already with a bunch of different people. So, so, you know, we don't know what that means yet, but.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  I mean, I would hate to be the IMF and central banks right now.

• 10:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, I actually don't even know if it's necessarily combative yet. Maybe it gets there, but here's a perfect example. So we explicitly asked on the Twitter Spaces, there was a convening of heads of state. There was the head of El Salvador. There was Nick Carter, who is head of the Twitterverse. There was me, Jack Dorsey, and a bunch of other people who are the heads of the interwebs. And so we brought all these heads of state together on the diplomatic call. Kidding. And when we were all on this Twitter Spaces call, I can't remember if it was me, Alex Gladstein, Nick, whoever asked him, somebody explicitly said, hey, have you heard from the IMF or from the United States or governments or whatever?

• 11:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And there was kind of like a offhand, yeah, I heard about it. Hold on a second, I'm like doing something. And then other questions got asked and it almost like didn't get answered. So people started just DMing me nonstop and they were like, hey, get an answer for that. So I said, look, you know, apologies for having to ask twice, but like, what did they say? And the response that the president gave was very interesting. It was kind of nonchalant, like, oh, we're gonna have a meeting, like, I don't think it's a big deal. He was like, actually, this is good for the United States. This is good for some of these places. And so immediately it's like, well, how? And one of the things he said that I thought was fascinating was he said, listen, the United States, one of the biggest problems the United States has with El Salvador is that a bunch of our citizens keep going there and illegal immigrating, right?

• 12:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And if so, we have a bunch of illegal immigration to the United States and you want to stop that, the best thing we can do is make our country a place that you want to stay, that there's opportunity, that there's wealth generation, that there's safety, all this stuff. And this is a great way to do it. And so that was a really, really fascinating thing to kind of unpack, where you start to say, listen, a country that is in the developing world, that many people, you know, cite the murder rate or the lack of economic growth, or, you know, whatever the thing is, now says, we've found a way to be more prosperous, to be more safe, to be kind of more beneficial for our citizens, and they're gonna stay here. And by the way, we're gonna solve one of your problems. Pretty interesting way to kind of frame it, right?

• 12:52Speaker 02

  I mean, that's framing, dude. We like, the thing is, the IMF and central banks don't care about that problem. They don't care about solving that problem. Like, you know, if we've seen anything in the last 18 to 24 months, like, their business model is one of, you know, extracting wealth from others. Like, so central banks exist not to produce anything, but to extract. So, you know, Bitcoin is an assault on that kind of a system. Like, you know, it exists.

• 13:25Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a peaceful protest.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  It's a peaceful protest, but it's still an assault on that system. Like, it rips away, like, it rug pulls the raison d'etre for a central planning.

• 13:36Anthony Pompliano?

  See, I don't, I don't think that it actually is combative, though. Like, that's part of why I like Bitcoin, is it doesn't do anything to the existing system. The existing system can continue to exist. For example, the existing system over the last 12 months has done a fantastic job of doing what they do best, implementing their power, doing all this stuff. Bitcoin has still succeeded, and Bitcoin is a beneficiary of it. But there's no kind of combativeness to it. Like, Bitcoin can actually win, and there'll still be coexistence with the legacy system. Now, the legacy system, as we all, I think, agree, is going to lose users. But like, take Yahoo, for example, right? Yahoo was the pinnacle of the internet.

• 14:20Anthony Pompliano?

  It was the front page of the internet for a long time. Today, if you see a Yahoo email address, or somebody's like, oh, Yahoo's my homepage, there's like a certain framing there, right? Of like, it's a certain type of person, usually a little bit older, all this kind of stuff. And it's a generalization, that's not always true. But even though younger people have all moved on to other websites, other things, other email addresses, whatever.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  There's still a remnant.

• 14:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yahoo's one of the largest finance websites, for example, in the world. Yahoo Finance is massive, right? And so, I think that's similar to what we're watching here, which is like, there's a generational shift, for sure. There's going to be some of the older generations also that transition. Bitcoin will succeed, but I don't think it's like, 10 years from now, there's no fiat and it's all Bitcoin.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Not 10 years, but on a longer, on a longer time.

• 15:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Guys, what do you think the timeline is?

• 15:14Speaker 02

  I think

• 15:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Two hundred years?

• 15:16Speaker 02

  No, hell no. No, I think it's like three or four decades.

• 15:20Anthony Pompliano?

  So thirty to forty years from now, you think that the entire fiat system's gone?

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Uh, more or less, yeah. I, I, cause he, he, here's what happens. It precipitates on the way out. So, so it starts to fall faster and faster and faster. Because what you get is revert, like you get

• 15:35Anthony Pompliano?

  If there was a demise.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Reverse collapse, basically, right? So, so not reverse collapse. You get like, you get a collapse. As you get hyperinflation and hyperinflation is a confidence thing. It doesn't matter how much money you've printed. It actually is a complete confidence thing. So when the thing starts to fall apart and the confidence is lost, that's when the whole thing starts to completely collapse. So. Um, where, well, like, the, the way this is gonna play out is this decade is gonna be messy as fuck. Um, so there, there'll be, there'll be points at which, like, I think the next three or four or five years socially is gonna get even worse. Like, you know, there'll be more restrictions. There'll be more stupidities. There'll be, you know, desperation on the part of banks and central banks and all this sort of stuff to try and fix things that they've broken and in the process break them even more.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  Um, you know, we'll sort of hit some sort of trough period and then at the same time, like, I, I call it, um, I'm gonna swear now, but pockets of brilliance in a sea of shit, basically. So, so there's, there'll be all sorts of crap going on, but the pockets of brilliance will be represented by kind of things like that are going in El Salvador, et cetera. Now, the reason I say this is because there is only one way for large nation states or central banks to exist, and that is to blanket tax or to print money. In the absence of those two tools, they actually can't fund themselves. A, a government, a, a nation state level government or a central bank is a bankrupt institution.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  And what Bitcoin does is that it, it eliminates the capacity for a bankrupt institution to exist because you can't tax Bitcoin forcefully. Like what you need to do is you need to provide a service uh, in order to get someone's Bitcoin. Um, or you need to, well, sorry, that's the only way. Or you need to beat them over the head with a club and take their private key, but you know, if you hit them too hard, they're not gonna remember it. So. It's like it it changes the dynamics of how societies should function. I call it moving from an overlord subject relationship, which is the relationship we have with governments and central banks today, moving to a customer and service provider relationship. But through necessity, that means jurisdictions are going to have to get smaller.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  They cannot remain large because you can't, you cannot economically, you cannot feasibly economically run a large region profitably. So, so in the absence of being able to print money and keep yourself in business fraudulently by borrowing from the future, by leeching from people and by taxing, you're screwed. You have to provide a service and you can't do that at scale. Like it has to happen at a small scale. That's why, you know, a lot of people talk about I F F I A and Bitcoin will coexist. They will not like for a while they will, but when, when the thing starts falling off, like it, it'll be like, you know, Bitcoin's this black hole and you know, we're getting closer and the fiat system is getting closer and closer to the black hole. But once it hits the event horizon, it's gonna.

• 18:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think it's just different times we're talking about, right? I'm talking about 10 years from now. You're talking about 40, 50 years from now.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  I'm talking, yeah, a couple more decades. So I think this decade is where we get close to the thing. Next decade is probably where we start to reach the event horizon somewhere in there and like 2040 onwards. Like you, you don't have fiat anymore. There's absolutely no need for it.

• 18:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So if we think about this whole idea of coexistence for some period of time, I think what El Salvador is super interesting. But what should other countries do? Just do they immediately run and take the playbook from El Salvador? And basically implement it in their countries or is there different ways to do it?

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. Take, take the fucking playbook and do whatever variant you need. Like this is, so this is where the, the small countries that have been traditionally like backwards or, you know, broke or broken. Um, so, so my parents come from Macedonia. Um, I, I was there last year and like, I, you know, whenever people sit here and talk about like, oh, you know, communism is great. I'm like, just, just, just go to Eastern Europe for a bit and like go specifically to Macedonia, like where there's no soul left in the country. Like everyone's, like all the youth has left, anyone with a brain has left, anyone with ambition has left. It's like sort of left like a husk of a nation and. And like it's it's it's broken. Nothing works. Everyone's defeated and you know it's dead.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  But those places potentially have an opportunity to do something.

• 19:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's just the developing world or those that are broken nations. They have the opportunity to leapfrog the current uh kind of leaders. It's exactly what we see technologies, the innovator's dilemma and the powers that be. Uh they're sitting cushy. And so the upstarts, the challengers, they're the ones who have the opportunity.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  Exactly. And but they they have also the extra opportunity that they're small, so they have less space to manage and less shit to deal with. I mean, some places have a lot of crap to deal with, like, you know, with, you know, a completely broken infrastructure. But the smaller you are, the quicker you can actually evolve into what jurisdictions are going to look like in the new world. Like they're not going to look like what they look like today.

• 20:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there something about a smaller country also just has less bureaucracy? And there's usually kind of more centralized power in the country and therefore uh they're they can move quicker. Like El Salvador went four days from announcement to it's legal tender.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Look, that that absolutely helps. The the thing is, some countries don't have smaller bureaucracy. Like so so so maybe in El Salvador, it's it's interesting because he's got, you know, he's got some strength there. Um whereas like in a dumb ass country like Macedonia, you actually have more bureaucracy than America for like one million people. It's ridiculous. So so so so that kind of depends. But yeah, definitely having

• 21:06Speaker 02

  having a director or having, you know, dictator, whatever the word is, like having someone to to lead that and and and point. That of course is gonna help.

• 21:15Anthony Pompliano?

  What's fascinating to me is with the El Salvadorian uh or with the Salvadorian uh situation is uh everyone's like, oh, he's a dictator. He's this. He's whatever.

• 21:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm not an expert in Salvadorian politics. Don't want to be. Uh uh but I've never seen a dictator hold a vote and 25% of the Congress vote against them.

• 21:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Like they just get killed, right? Like, you know what I mean? Like, like, and again, dictators all around the world, bad people, the whole nine yards. But to me, it's just, I think there's a lot of politicalization of this in El Salvador. So therefore,

• 21:56Anthony Pompliano?

  people outside will never understand it. When you move to some of these other countries like Macedonia, for example, I don't, I couldn't tell you who the leader is. I couldn't tell you what the political structure is. I couldn't tell you what the process is. I couldn't tell you if I literally couldn't even tell you, is it communist? Is it democratic? Is it whatever? Again, that's just because I think most people are worried about where they live. Right? And so if we're going to play this game of every time a country says, hey, we're interested in technology, we're interested in Bitcoin, or we're interested in, you know, kind of a new path forward. And then we all try to scramble to become experts on those political environments. I think we're gonna have a really hard time. And so instead, if you simply just say, listen, it doesn't matter if it's a democratic leader

• 22:34Anthony Pompliano?

  or a dictator, if they adopt this as money within their country, it prevents them from being able to do what we see other dictators do with fiat systems. Right?

• 22:48Speaker 02

  That comes back to what we said earlier. Bitcoin naturally subverts fiat. Like Bitcoin actually, the whole Bitcoin invention is a subversion and a, a, um, a forking of the road from the fiat path that we're on. Like, I think it's so important that, you know, the whole aliens thing and, you know, the great filter, right? I think if there is any other societies that, you know, hadn't made it through the great filter, they blew themselves up by either dropping a nuke on themselves, getting whacked by an asteroid, or through destroying their society through fiat. Like, because I think fiat was, is a necessary progression that all human species

• 23:30Speaker 02

  have to go through, like all homo sapien, all sentient species. Like, we, we naturally, like, money is the thing that permeates all of existence, right? You cannot do what you do, I cannot do what I do. And we can't, you know, collaborate and interact without some sort of, Mechanism to exchange human action, right? That that's effectively what money is. So money's money will exist from the from the beginning of time until the end of time, so long as the sentient species exists. The only thing that changes is the object that we use uh for money. Now, we have come to the point now where we had to go through salt, seashells, cattle, blah, blah, blah, you know, gold, paperback gold, you know, the Fiat abomination and all of that. But when you when you look at it

• 24:13Speaker 02

  on a longer timescale, like me and Francis Polio are talking about this. It's like, when we look back on this, if we make it through the great filter now, like if we actually can measure human action effectively, and if we can restructure the system such that um positive actions uh spiral upwards and negative actions actually correct, right? So at the moment, we cover up negative acts. So if you do something dumb, it just gets socialized to everyone else, right? So it's it that actually rots the system. But you know, on a Bitcoin standard, you know, you can actually move upwards, you can move downwards, which is really important, and downward motion gets corrected very quickly, and upward motion spirals. So in that kind of a thing, we have the opportunity, as I said, to to

• 24:56Speaker 02

  sort of uh progress society. Now, on a on a long enough timescale, like we'll look back on this thousands of years from now, and we'll say, all right, the the um the inventions that made uh homo sapiens or humans in whatever capacity we're gonna be in, like a intergalactic species, was fire, Bitcoin, teleportation, like honestly, internet, electricity, all this other stuff was invented for Bitcoin.

• 25:24Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, that sounds nuts, right?

• 25:25Speaker 02

  I know it does.

• 25:26Anthony Pompliano?

  All right.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  That's how big all that's how big Bitcoin's gonna be for all of those things, like.

• 25:30Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the biggest critique of that view?

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Uh, my own personal critique?

• 25:36Anthony Pompliano?

  No, like, if if you had to think of the critics, what would they say is like, why you're wrong?

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Uh, Bitcoin's slow. Like, I I think the only critique would come from someone who doesn't believe money is this important.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  Everything stops without money. You you can't like you don't have the capacity to do anything.

• 25:55Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think about like the inflation and all of the recent announcements like so we're recording this uh the consumer goods prices just got announced five percent increase uh it's the most since the global financial crisis um if you look at all sorts of other metrics you know through uh May I think in the start of twenty twenty one inflation is at like two point seven percent uh and likely to continue to go higher like does all of that just feed into this is that a response to Bitcoin is Bitcoin just a beneficiary of what they were already gonna do?

• 26:29Speaker 02

  That's all breadcrumbs that fell off the side of the table like Bitcoin has such a larger impact like all of these things is we're just playing games we're a bunch of like again when you spread out the time scale like Fiat is a hundred and fifty two hundred year experiment on a far far far far far longer time time span and all we're doing is we're we're we're placating ourselves so so I wrote a recent article um so I'm taking Jordan Peterson's twelve rules for life um and then I'm writing about Bitcoin through the lens of each rule so I'm up to chapter two now or I'm the chapter three but chapter two was about Bitcoin chaos and order and and in there I talk about how uh you know you've got the study of matter and the study of what matters

• 27:13Speaker 02

  so the study of matter is like empirical sciences physics etc and the study of what matters is things like philosophy economics trade offs you know psychology etc now what we've tried to do is because the study of matter has been so effective um over the last couple hundred years particularly with the with the um formalization of the study of matter and and sciences you know with the Renaissance we have now tried to take that process and apply it to everything else so we've tried to deconstruct economics which is not a study of matter like economics is the study of individual human beings who make actions that are different at every single moment in time like you you cannot replicate

• 27:51Speaker 02

  an economic uh period like we can't take what happened last week and do it again this week like we can't press the rewind button so trying to Distill something like economics into an empirical study is completely mindless. So doing all these things like measuring CPI and like trying to like figure all this stuff out. It's all vanity metrics, like none of it actually really matters. And then on top of that, they go around and they're like, okay, well with CPI, let's just take this out. Let's take this out. Let's take this out. And it's a, it's a fake metric designed to, to make the, to, to give the model some semblance of sense like that. So they're trying to fit reality to the model instead of the model to reality.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  It's the opposite way around. And so, so we're literally like, we're driving a car with a fake dashboard, with a fake speedometer, with a fake everything. And we think it's okay because like, you know, the, the dashboard says we're driving, you know, sixty miles an hour. But in reality, there's a fucking wall there and we're driving two hundred miles an hour right into a wall. But we feel good about it.

• 28:56Anthony Pompliano?

  What about all the other cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin?

• 29:00Speaker 02

  I would say at best, their, um, their attempts by people who have no idea why Bitcoin exists. Um, so, so Bitcoin is a system of rules, not rulers, right? So, so these guys are like, oh, so Bitcoin is about sending money to each other for free. No, that's not what it is. But so, so they go and, you know, roll their own version of it. Um, and they become their own rulers of their own money. So, so at best, it's like naive and stupid. At worst, I think it's a state level attack um on Bitcoin. So, so this is an interesting attack vector and Brad Love and I were talking about this um a couple of months back about

• 29:39Speaker 02

  the state and central banks and governments and all that sort of stuff, like, you know, grouped in into that sort of sphere. Will continue to realize that they can't do anything about Bitcoin. Like they'll throw FUD, they'll throw like, oh, the FBI hacked it, you know, like the, the energy is going to boil the oceans. Like every year it's boiling the oceans.

• 29:56Anthony Pompliano?

  My favorite is Senator Warren.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  What did Susan Warren say recently?

• 30:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yesterday, she had some real good ones.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Please tell me at least one.

• 30:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, basically Bitcoin consumes more energy than some countries and therefore we need to, you know, basically regulate it, control it, get rid of it, whatever nonsense she was saying.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  We should ban clothes dryers because that actually consumes more energy than Bitcoin, but anyway.

• 30:19Anthony Pompliano?

  My favorite is Christmas lights.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Yes, Christmas lights. Thank you.

• 30:23Anthony Pompliano?

  We're gonna cancel Christmas.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, we should definitely cancel Christmas because it uses up too much energy.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  So, so they'll throw everything at it, but they can't beat it. They can't stop it. So I think the best angle of attack, like if I was a government, I would go in and I would start supporting something like an Ethereum or something like a Kedano or something like a whatever, like one of these other shitcoins. And all you have to do at that stage, so Bitcoin is enforced at the level of the individual. The node operator enforces the rules of Bitcoin. Now, I enforce those rules of Bitcoin for myself and I do it voluntarily and I come into consensus with everybody else who's enforcing the same rules. That's what makes Bitcoin so powerful, whereas with all of these other networks,

• 31:12Speaker 02

  it's not enforced at the level individual. There's a foundation, there's a group, there's an institution, there's a, you know, there's a coalition, there's a governance structure that decides how this thing runs. Now, if I was the government, I would be becoming friendly with the Joe Lubens and the Vitalics of the world.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  Give them as much free rein to sort of hoodwink everyone into this idea of decentralization and, you know, competing with Bitcoin. Proof of stake is like the perfect, like proof of stake is central banking.

• 31:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  That's what it is. So, you know, these guys are gonna move over to that and then whoever runs the largest chunk of stake calls the shots. And if I was a government, I'd come in and say, alright, well, this is how we're gonna run things. Now, we're gonna issue the IMF dollar on Ethereum or whatever.

• 32:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's, there's two different things. One, they could just spend a bunch of fiat and become the largest. You know, staker, right? Uh, or they could nationalize it.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Or they just, they don't even, they can do it behind the scenes, man. Like, you know, if, if, if I'm someone who's been trying to pull the strings at the IMF or at the central bank, or whatever these, you know, three-letter soup organizations are, I'll just go to dinner with Vitalik and say, this is how it's gonna happen.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  Doesn't matter what you say. And, you know, you'll, you'll start to see a back.

• 32:35Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think his reaction would be? I, I don't know Vitalik, so.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 32:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that, I want to caveat this with, uh, it's obviously, he's very intelligent. I mean, like, scary intelligent.

• 32:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And I'm going to always put, for people I don't know, like, I assume that they're doing what they believe is like the best thing. So like a good actor, um, and if they do something that is misplaced, like, don't assign malice where ignorance could be the explanation, right? So from that lens, like, just game theory it out. Somebody from the existing system comes and sits down with, I don't know, five of the largest Ethereum holders and says, we want you to do acts. Like, what do they do?

• 33:22Anthony Pompliano?

  What could they do?

• 33:24Speaker 02

  What can they do? They can't do shit.

• 33:26Anthony Pompliano?

  In terms of they can't change the system, or they can't say no?

• 33:30Speaker 02

  They can't say no. That, that, they, they can't say no. That, that's the problem. Like, I mean, we, we all know what happens to people who disagree with, you know, these large-scale organizations. Like, I mean, you know, you, you've got people with a lot more balls than, um, Vitalik and all of that, that have, you know, had their countries blown up, taken over, blah, blah, blah.

• 33:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I was literally just gonna ask you, do you think that it's more risky from a nation-state vantage point, uh, to be the heads of a country that tries to get off the dollar? Or to be, uh, somebody who, not, not just Ethereum, but just one of these things that the government decides, hey, we're gonna try to leverage this for our benefit, and you don't want to do it?

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Ooh, um.

• 34:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I still think it's worse to be the nation state head.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  Probably, yeah, probably. It's probably more dangerous to be the nation state head, but yeah, but here's the thing like, you know, you, you mentioned before, you know, Vitalik is smart. Everyone thought Elizabeth Holmes was really highly intelligent and, and I mean,

• 34:33Anthony Pompliano?

  to an extent she was.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are no, exactly. So, so like, I actually think Vitalik is, um, is not so smart. I think he's highly naive. I think he's, um, he's like,

• 34:44Anthony Pompliano?

  You don't think he's smart at all?

• 34:45Speaker 02

  No, not really. Cause I mean, cause, cause I understand what he talks about. Dude, I understand what he talks about and he just talks in fucking circles. Like, that's the thing. Like, he, he actually doesn't make sense.

• 34:57Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you, okay, so here's an interesting question. Uh, we may disagree on this. What, what do you disagree with him on? Or what do you think he's wrong on?

• 35:05Speaker 02

  His first principles. So like, you know,

• 35:07Anthony Pompliano?

  What does that mean?

• 35:08Speaker 02

  So the, the first principles, he, he doesn't take a first principles approach to building things.

• 35:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  So like, you know, as an example, um, he is still of the opinion that, uh, and from the beginning, like, you know, he, he got sort of laughed at when, uh, his suggestions about Bitcoin, you know, we should do smart contracts on the base layer, blah, blah, blah. So, so he's, he's a bit of a, he's a naive kid who thinks that Bitcoin and money is just some sort of toy that we can play with. Um, and because he couldn't get his way in Bitcoin, um, because all these suggestions were stupid, he went off and built his own toy. Um, and because he's intelligent enough to sound intelligent and because he looks the part, you know, a lot of people buy into the Kool-Aid idea, like, you know, they sort of take the Kool-Aid and they're like, oh, you know, he's the boy genius, blah, blah, blah.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  And, you know, you ask someone, uh, to explain what Vitalik's actually talking about in a podcast, they'll be like, I don't know, but it sounds smart. Um, so I'll listen to him. So, so, so it's like, people don't actually. Know what the fuck he's talking about half the time. And when you actually listen to the things he says, like, half of the things are contradictory. Like, half of his statements about-

• 36:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, give me an example.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Well, his thing about proof of work, like, he thinks proof of work is inefficient. Proof of work is the most efficient mechanism for doing anything in life. I mean, if you're an artist, what are you doing? Proof of work. If you go to the gym, what are you doing? Proof of work. Like, proof of work permeates all of existence. Proof of stake is a human-created aberration in which a group of people want to have an advantage over another group of people. Like, that's a first principles approach to proof of work. Whereas he's trying to take some high-level, abstracted view of, let's tweak some variables up the top here, and we can create a game-theoretically-sound system. That doesn't matter. Like, what he's missing is the actual first principles of why proof of work actually functions.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  So, to me, that tells me, he actually doesn't get it. So, he's completely missed the point.

• 37:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it possible that he understands that, but thinks that the bigger benefit is the trade-off between getting efficient, like, energy consumption? Let's say that was his thing, right? He wanted to get more efficient energy consumption, and he was willing to trade off the decentralization or the proof-of-work value, all that stuff.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Because it's not more efficient in terms of energy. It's not, proof of stake is actually inefficient.

• 37:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, explain.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  So, okay, let's think about the greatest example of proof of stake at the moment.

• 37:42Anthony Pompliano?

  You just got real excited, so I'm excited now.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  All right, let's go. So, proof of stake represents the way the world functions at the moment, right? Like, he who has decides, and decides for everyone else, not just for himself, right? So, what that creates through necessity is layers of bureaucracy. The biggest damage we do to the environment as a species is not the use of fossil fuels. Like, fossil fuels is actually a direct extraction of energy from, you know, something that existed beforehand, and use of that energy. So, things like- I'm gonna go on a slight tangent here and then I'll come back in. Things like, you know, renewable energies and solar panels and wind and all this other stuff. And this is a whole different rabbit hole, but they're actually

• 38:26Speaker 02

  less energy efficient than fossil fuels. And they do more damage to the environment because the amount of energy consumption that's required to build these things is never actually paid back, you know, when you count up maintenance, when you count up all the other things. And the fact that they're subsidized through the taxation or creation of money. What that actually means is money represents human resources. It represents natural and human resources combined. So when you're actually leeching money from one thing to subsidize something else, you're the actual real environmental cost of that is a lot higher than what you think it is on paper. So all of this sort of renewable energy stuff is all like one big mess because it actually is not helping us.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Like if we put all of that energy, time and effort into making the extraction of fossil fuels more efficient. I'm gonna do a podcast next week with Alex Epstein. We, we would have like cars would be more efficient. Power plants would be more efficient, like all of the things that we take for granted today in an energy rich society would be way more efficient. But coming back to, so energy use, so energy use is correlated with, and you know, it I think is extremely causal with like

• 39:43Speaker 02

  human prosperity, right? Like, you know, the, the, the more we do. The better we do the more energy we consume. So

• 39:51Speaker 02

  that's not where the problem is. The problem is, is all in all the wastage. So when you think about what is required to maintain a system which is built on proof of state. So government, central banking, all this other stuff. The layers of bureaucracy, the waste, like, you know, for the US to function, you need the military industrial complex. You need the whole banking system, you need Wall Street. Think about all the buildings, the, the unnecessary people that are hired. All of the crap that goes in there, like. You know, with governments as well, like, I mean, the masks thing is a perfect example. Thirty billion disposable masks get dumped every month. All because of a moronic mandate, like, all of these misallocations of resources.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  All of that stuff, basically, we're probably, like, if I had to just take a number out of my ass, like, sixty, seventy, eighty percent of the energy we use is wasted on stupidity. So the biggest impact Bitcoin's gonna have is because it eliminates the wastage, we will actually become a far more efficient society. Consumption goes down, like, we blindly consume shit that we don't need because the incentive is to spend. Like, you know, GDP, gross domestic product, is not a measure of production, it's a measure of consumption. It's, it's, everything's fucking ass backwards. So tying that to proof of stake is that that kind of a system

• 41:16Speaker 02

  trends towards bureaucracy, it trends towards waste because it's not tethered to proof of work. So proof of work drives efficiency because it's tied or it's tethered to the second law of thermodynamics. That's actually what creates efficiency. When you create these abstractions, you move away from reality and you don't know what you're doing. And you waste, and waste is actually what destroys the environment, destroys resources, destroys energy, wastes energy, et cetera.

• 41:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So is it fair to say you think proof of stake, if I had to categorize your argument, it is, one, those who are rich get to call the shots, which is a direct kind of comparison or evolution from what we already have. And then, two, is proof of work drives a level of efficiency because less percentage of the energy that is consumed is used for wasteful purposes versus proof of stake would end up being high waste regardless of the total energy consumption.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Correct. Proof of stake will turn to waste, it'll trend that way. In the beginning, it may not, you know, in the beginning, I mean, you know, proof of stake, you know, the stake is represented by an amount of capital. Now, capital-

• 42:26Anthony Pompliano?

  When do you think they're actually gonna do the update?

• 42:28Speaker 02

  I actually heard there's some more delays now. So it's like now it's twenty twenty four, apparently.

• 42:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 42:33Speaker 02

  They have to build a scaffolding that sort of sits below. So then you need to stake a bunch of ETH or some shit like that on um on the scaffolding. And then you can't take that off. So that so it's like it's stuck there. Until you know, that's sort of ready. And then they have to merge everything across. Dude, ain't gonna happen for another couple of years.

• 42:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Does it ever happen?

• 42:55Speaker 02

  Probably not. And who really cares?

• 42:58Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it happens. I agree with you, though, that it takes a longer time.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  I mean, at this point, like the whole, the whole thing we're trying to do here with Bitcoin is we're trying to transform the world from one in which any authority has the capacity to decide for somebody else. Like, I don't want some bureaucrat who's never met me to decide what I should do with my money, with my life, with my decisions, or any of that sort of stuff. So Bitcoin ushers in a world of sovereign individualism. That doesn't mean every man for himself. Like, this is something we need to sort of like clarify, because whenever people hear this, it's like, so what? Everyone's gonna live in their own cardboard box or in their own bunker and like sort of war. That's not what happens. Human beings like, do you have friends? Of course you do. I mean, I hope.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  I have friends. Like, what do friends do? Do we, are we forced to have friends? No, like, we we find people that we align with, that we have similar values with. And we create these communities. They're emergent, they're bottom up. And and so Bitcoin enables a world in which we can actually do that voluntarily and by our own volition, as opposed to being forced into these, you know, group identity politics and all this sort of shit, you know, by morons who think they know better for everybody else because they don't have any discipline in their own lives. So it's like that, you know, like a politician or a bureaucrat or a central banker or someone who like, doesn't have any capacity to have control in their own life. So they want to control everyone else's life.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  And all we're seeing with crypto and all this stuff is just a replication of that, but just in a digital form. Like, I don't, we don't need a group of nerds to replace a group of bankers. Like, you know, they're the same thing. It's just, one's just the younger version of it.

• 44:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think I've ever heard anyone say replacing the bankers with the nerds. But proof of stake for sure, whoever has the most gets it. What about the critique of that that says, well, that just means you have more skin in the game. And therefore, because you have skin in the game, you actually protect the network.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  I guess that is a critique.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  So you've got more skin in the game and you protect the network. That, in a way, I agree with, right? Because like I've actually said this, me and Gladstein were discussing this about voting. I was like, you know, if you don't pay taxes, you should not get a vote, basically. And what that actually trends towards is voting just actually being an economic decision. So you abolish voting altogether and the only voting that anyone partakes in is what you buy. Like your purchase is your vote. So, you know, you you vote for the car you want to buy by, you know, buying it. But, um, you know, in this sense, the problem we've got with it

• 45:52Speaker 02

  is that, yes, you've got more skin in the game and, you know, yes, you should have the right to make the decision. But money, how the money functions should not be anyone's decision. It should be enforced at the level of the individual. And it like, you know, there's a joke, which is, you know, God gave humanity money and he fucked up. Like, I'm paraphrasing. It's something different, but that's kind of what it is, right? So like money should be outside of all of our hands. No matter who's got the biggest, the lowest stake, like the rules of money should sit completely outside of anybody's hands.

• 46:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And so is that gold would fit in there?

• 46:32Speaker 02

  Gold kind of fits in there exactly because it's a metal. We can't change the chemical properties of the metal. So it exists as that. Gold just has physical properties that make it prone to being held in large quantities by.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  Certain authorities.

• 46:48Anthony Pompliano?

  So the whole idea of sound money, it's outside the system, you can't create more of it. And therefore that makes it that quote unquote sound money. It's just that Bitcoin's a digital version, gold's a physical version.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  Correct, but Bitcoin actually, so remember before I was saying money is this thing that permeates all of existence. So money is like a meta idea or a meta energy or information at its very like purest form. Bitcoin makes money information again. So you know Bitcoins like slogan should be make money great again, like that's sort of the the thing. So it puts it out of reach of all of us. So none of us can play God with anybody else. So so again, like the idea of having extra skin in the game to call the shots makes sense. But not for the the the mechanism via which human action is measured, right? And that's money, like that's the most important thing.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  Once we've got that out of the way, we can do everything else. Like we move into a world of, and this is, you know, maybe another unpopular opinion is like, we don't need decentralization. Decentralization has one reason to exist, and that is for censorship resistance. And we need censorship resistance on money. All the other stuff, we can compete our way into better products and services. And so I think the future that Bitcoin gives us is not a future of all these decentralized products and decentralized finance, all this other crap. That that's all noise in the short term. In the long term, what will happen is we will have competing companies, competing ideas, competing entrepreneurs, all this sort of stuff.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Competing their way to better products and services because they can't get a, they can't get regulatory arbitrage. They can't grow big and then socialize their losses when they fuck up. They can't get excess capital that the little guys can't get because they're close enough to the monetary spigot. So all of that stuff gets removed and we actually live in a world where we get this dynamic equal, sorry, this dynamic inequality. So we'll still have the 80 20 going, like we'll still have larger companies and smaller companies. But we'll actually be competing in a way that is not unfair today. Like if I want to create a Twitter competitor. Twitter gets access to public money, to 401k money, to like all this money. There is not a chance in hell I could ever compete with them.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  But in a world in which all of that funny money doesn't exist, where we have to compete on merit, I could compete with a Twitter. So, so, so we start to actually, we don't level out the playing field, but we create an 80/20 instead of a 99.9, 0.01. And that's like, we, we live in a world of unnatural inequality today, whereas Bitcoin will sort of bring in natural inequality and it'll be dynamic as opposed to static.

• 49:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk about Amber and what you guys are doing lately.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  All right, so Amber is still only in Australia. So things suppose, surprise, surprise, take longer to, um, to do. But the app is really stable in Australia. It is the best way to buy Bitcoin in Oz. We actually introduced Amber Black. So this is the bomb. So you can, you just pay membership fee and you can buy and sell as much Bitcoin as you want. There's no fees. But more importantly, you get like a series of cool features. So you can like auto withdraw to your cold storage. And then my favorite button is the auto buy the dip. So you can, um, you can set an if this, then that function. So like if Bitcoin falls X percent in 24 hours, buy me this much Bitcoin. So that's like the best button ever.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  So you can like, you can stack on normal DCA. And like while you're sleeping, if the price of Bitcoin dips, you know, you can extra stack. So that's, that's where the product is at the moment. Next step for us is in the next couple of weeks, we're going to be rolling out the beta for the US. So, you know, if anyone wants to try it out, DM us. I think the, the handle is at the amber app with the T H E at the front. So the amber app, but DM us or follow us or whatever. And, um, and we'll get you going on the, on the beta. So we'll, when we land in the US, it's only going to be Amber Basic. So Amber Black won't come straight away. We just got to get, you know, grease up all the, uh, all the gears and stuff and make sure it's all functioning. So we'll do that.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  Very shortly thereafter, we're going to look at introducing a, um, an Amber debit card. So the, the whole point will be to save your Bitcoin, spend your fiat, right? And so, so we'll link that up.

• 51:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Good strategy.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Like that's what everyone should do. Like the, my whole goal is actually to build mini Michael Saylor's inside the app. So that way you build up like. I always say this when people say, so what's different to Amber than like a than a Coinbase? I'm like, well Coinbase wants you to trade. Like they they literally want you, it's a shitcoin casino, that's what I call it. And Amber, like what we want you to do is build enduring wealth in the form of Bitcoin. And you know, everything is designed for you to accumulate Bitcoin. So it's a Bitcoin accumulation app, it's not a trading app. And when you do that, hey, you might have some fiat in there, you know, you you might have topped up your account. You know, I I want people to use it as a bank account, but also as their, you know, Bitcoin savings account. And then, you know, we're gonna integrate Lightning and Layer One Bitcoin wallet in there.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  So that way you can actually interact with the Bitcoin world. And you'll, you know, with your debit card and then depending on which jurisdiction, you'll you'll have a functional fiat account in there. So you can receive your pay, you can send money. So so that way you're connected to both worlds and it'll act as this bridge over time. And then we'll link the um, the Bitcoin account with the fiat account through being able to borrow fiat against your Bitcoin. So in that sense, you've got like a constant credit line inside the app where you never have to sell your Bitcoin. If you need some fiat emergency, borrow 500 bucks against your Bitcoin. You know, it locks it up in there in a multi-sig, you know, we won't really hypothecate, we won't do any of that. And then that way you can spend.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  So so that way you've actually got like a Bitcoin bank in your pocket that talks to both worlds. So you know, if you're in El Salvador and you need to buy something, use Lightning. If you're in America or in Australia, use your debit card. Like you you you'll have the options and you can take Amber with you anyway. So that's sort of the plan, but in the short term, next step, US, and then we'll look at other places.

• 52:56Anthony Pompliano?

  And this is pretty much all retail, right? If you're an if you're an individual, this is for you.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  Hundred percent, hundred percent.

• 53:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What has been the biggest surprise over the last 12 months in terms of building it?

• 53:06Speaker 02

  Hmm, biggest surprise, the biggest surprise or biggest challenge?

• 53:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Both.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  Okay, biggest challenge has been getting good devs, man, like, you know, good product people. So so so what's hard in in the Bitcoin space is you you get one of two things. You know, you get people who are like hardcore Bitcoiners really, really, really, really get Bitcoin, but they haven't had the experience in like sort of building tech, right? Or building a tech company. So so you know, you you sort of got one side lacking. Then on the other side, you get like people who had loads of experience building product, building tech, doing all that stuff. But they don't get Bitcoin. So, so like trying to find the unicorn that gets both, that's, that's, that's a real challenge. And, you know, we're, we're on the hunt for, for people.

• 53:46Anthony Pompliano?

  For the best. For the best.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  Exactly. We're on the hunt for the best. Like, we, we need, we need Bitcoin product unicorns. So, so that's sort of, uh, that piece. Surprise wise, I mean, I don't know. I think I haven't been, actually, probably one thing is just like the, the level of stupidity of some of the legacy financial institutions that we like deal with back in Australia. Like, I, I won't name any names here, but like one of the partners we were working with has an upper limit on volume. I was like, I'm trying to give you more money. I'm literally trying to give you more customers and you charge me per customer. So I'm like literally trying to give you, and they're like, sorry, we can't accept it. I was like, what kind of an industry like operates like that?

• 54:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do they do that? It's like a fraud prevention or something?

• 54:33Speaker 02

  Some risk thing, but like we, we actually have less of a default rate than a gym. So like, like, but, but we're in a higher risk category. So it's like, it just, this is again, like a ramification of the fiat world. Instead of, uh, you know, the market deciding, you know, which is, you know, the market says that we're a safer product than your gym down around the corner. The regulator says that we're a much higher risk and therefore should not be allowed to direct debit more than a certain amount. It's, it's complete madness. So that's a surprise.

• 55:05Anthony Pompliano?

  It's fascinating to me how, uh, backwards it seems sometimes.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  Dude, it's, it's.

• 55:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And sometimes there's good reason, but also sometimes maybe not.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  The thing is, a lot of the times, the reason that started back here upstream, it was a good brain fart, like, oh, you know, we should do this. The problem is, is when it's mandated as a blanket solution to something, what happens is all regulations end up, uh, being designed such that it's harder for legitimate people to do anything. Because like in order to stop a bad actor with a regulation or a rule. You have to blanket everyone. So you have to basically screw everyone over. But then the bad actor, all they do is just figure out a way around the regulation anyway. So what you've done is you haven't stopped the bad actor. You've actually inhibited all the good actors. That's why regulations don't work. Like, that's why bureaucrats just need to get the fuck out of the way and let us innovate.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  Because the fact that there's more good actors is we'll outcompete them. But we're getting handicapped. The good guys are getting handicapped and the bad guys are just doing what they want to do anyway. So this is why none of that stuff works.

• 56:14Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that the system is messed up and it will get changed.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  I didn't know you thought that.

• 56:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, yeah, it's just that the incentive is to have those in power, keep the system in place. And for those not in power to change it.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  Well, of course, I mean, that's always been the case. I actually just think that this time it's going to be the greatest shift that's ever happened in humanity. Like literally this, if we, if Bitcoin doesn't win, like if Bitcoin doesn't break the state, which I think we've already won, but by the way, but if Bitcoin doesn't, we are going to either blow ourselves up or we're going to become like a big collectivist dystopia in which like, you know, UBI and all this sort of stuff. What it does is it actually rips the soul out of humanity. Like again, Macedonia is a great example is, you know, in order to equalize society, in order to equalize humans, you can't force people upwards, you actually, but you can force them down.

• 57:14Speaker 02

  And that's what happens and you get that through force, but you also get it through the Malayan Descentive of if you work harder than I do, but we get the same thing, what are you going to think? Be like, fuck this guy, I'm going to work less. But then as you work less, then I'm going to be like, man, he's working less and so I'm going to work less. And you get this downward spiral and that's effectively what's happening. So when you like.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  When you look at society, people are gonna start getting free money just to sort of be placated so that they don't go out and riot. But at the same time, you know, you you get this sort of equalization effect that, you know, everyone's the same and we're all equal, all in this together, like, we're fucking not. But, you know, apparently, you know, the state likes to say that we are. So as we do that, we actually kill the spirit of overachievers. We kill the spirit of the twenty percent who do eighty percent of the effort. And in doing so, we hollow out society and we make it weaker. So so like, we're getting weakness through safety instead of getting strength through freedom.

• 58:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  And and that they're two divergent paths. And, you know, Bitcoin is a counter to that. But, you know, if it doesn't win, we we end up in a world in which, like, things get worse and worse and worse and worse, like, we erode the capital that we've spent millennia building, um, people get more and more empty, um, you know, the the whole W E F, you'll have nothing, you'll have no privacy and you'll be happy, you know, like staring into the camera like, I swear I'll be happy. Um, and like, that that's sort of the the the future that we're moving into, which, conspiracy theories aside, like, it doesn't even need a conspiracy theory to.

• 58:52Anthony Pompliano?

  No, they're saying it.

• 58:53Speaker 02

  Like, that that, but even beyond them saying it, like, they actually think it's a good idea, like.

• 58:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, I I I'm a big believer that most people who do dumb things don't think that they're bad people and they don't think that what they're doing is wrong. They're just literally dumb people.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Correct, and and and and the problem is that the dumbest of the dumb are the bureaucrats who are actually deciding where resources should go, how people should operate, what people should think, what they should be taught at school, what they should put in their bodies. Like, I was, there was just the best meme the other day, the the Belgian health minister, you know, like, the one that looks like Jabba the Hutt. And there was this other guy who's like a personal trainer who didn't want to get the vaccine. So one of them has a health passport and the other one doesn't. And like, I was looking at them like, man, like, the so.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  It's just wild, right? And unless, unless Bitcoin wins, we're going to be living this sort of Twilight Zone disaster. And, and that doesn't bode well for the human species. Like, it really doesn't bode well. Like, at some point, we'll wreck ourselves. Like, either the energy grid will fall apart. And what, what a lot of people don't know, and I don't want to get too doomsdayish here, doomsday-ish here. But as we start to like, do this moronic push to like, you know, eliminate fossil fuels and all this sort of stuff. Like, California's already a disaster, right? Like, we're going to break things that were built, that we don't even know why they were built in the first place. And, like, people don't realize how, like, interconnected, especially modern society is and how fragile it is.

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  Like, you break one chunk of the supply chain, things get really, really bad, really, really quickly. Like, food breaks down, energy breaks down, heat breaks down. Like, we saw it in Texas last year, like, really briefly, or if it was early this year or whatever it was. But that's a bad place. Um, and Bitcoin is the only thing, I think, that exists today that really has a chance of counteracting that. And that's where I get annoyed, you know, with all the crypto people and all the blockchain people. Like, we, we've got this thing here that fundamentally changes the base incentives of society. Like, if you remember from Sovereign Individual, like, the whole thesis about, uh, changing the returns on violence, right? We move away, like, by lowering the cost of defense and increasing the cost of attack,

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  you actually change human behavior, you change how society functions. But more importantly, what Bitcoin does is it actually transforms the individual's relationship with three things. With energy, with their own time, which includes, you know, their relationship with their own future, and with natural resources. So what that means is, like, we, we actually start to have a lower time preference and more of a respect for the things that we have, because we actually have wealth, you know, we can save. We, we're more, we're more discerning about the way we spend. And You start to create a better individual. And when you create a better individual, you make the world better. And that's the genesis of the Bitcoin fixes this meme.

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  So that grassroots foundational shift, what that does is it gives us tracks that don't lead off the cliff. Like at the moment, all we're doing with crypto, blockchain, fintech, government, politics, like all this shit is we're fighting over which person is driving the train that's going right off the fucking cliff. Bitcoin says, here's a new track. This one's going to a nice like green pasture, like let's go on this one. And that's what Bitcoiners have realized and we're like, what the fuck are you idiots arguing over the train wreck for? You're literally gonna run off a cliff and you're trying to keep us all on the train. You're not letting us off. Like we are actively exiting and we're jumping on a different train and that's the theory.

• 1:02:33Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that's how it works. Where can we send people to find you on the internet?

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  Well, um, I used to be on at Alex Svetski at Twitter. So we need to find a way to get my ass back on there. But at the moment, I'm Ghost of Svetski on Twitter.

• 1:02:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  But if you, if you search my surname, S V E T S K I, you'll find me on Medium. What else do I do? Oh, actually I've got a podcast apparently called The Wake Up Podcast. So, you know, I've got like lots of broad guests. We go into philosophy, psychology, energy, like we're gonna do carnival, like all sorts of random stuff. So, so there, um, and then check out amber.app, um, to, to keep an eye on what we're doing with, um, with Amber and when we're bringing it to the US and stuff.

• 1:03:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Amber.app and then Ghost of Svetski on Twitter. Hopefully the real one will come back at some point.

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Well, thank you so much for doing this. We'll definitely have to do it again in the future.

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  Absolutely, brother. Thank you.