#912 Udi Wertheimer On Toxic Bitcoin Maximalism

Udi Wertheimer is a independent developer and consultant. He also runs one of my favorite Twitter accounts. In this conversation, we discuss his thoughts on the The Bitcoin Conference, Bitcoin mining, U. S. vs. Non-U. S. regulation, toxicity in the Bitcoin community, and what Udi is excited about in the Bitcoin industry. ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= The Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. Go to https://www.eightsleep.com/Pomp to check out the Pod Pro Cover and save $150 at checkout. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, and the UK. ======================= The world's 2nd largest crypto exchange, OKEx, has dropped the "E" to become OKX, reflecting its evolution from a traditional crypto exchange to a comprehensive, cross-platform crypto services provider. With OKX's decentralized platform and Web3 wallet, MetaX, you have full custody over your crypto. Explore DeFi, NFTs and play-to-earning gaming with the world's most powerful crypto exchange. Visit OKX.com to learn more. =======================

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. Udi Wertheimer is an independent developer and consultant. He also runs one of my favorite Twitter accounts. In this conversation, Udi and I talk about everything from toxicity in the Bitcoin community to Bitcoin mining, regulation, US vs. non-US states, and what he's excited about moving forward for the Bitcoin industry. I really enjoyed this conversation with Udi, and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I first want to talk about our sponsors. First up is LMAX Digital, the number one institutional crypto exchange. They offer clients the deepest pool of crypto liquidity on the planet, underscored by 100% uptime

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:54Anthony Pompliano?

  your crypto. Connect MetaX in your browser or within the OKX app to explore DeFi, NFTs, and play to earning gaming, the world's most powerful crypto exchange. Whether you're just learning about crypto, you're a seasoned DeFi DJ, an NFT enthusiast, or a pro trader, you're all invited to a better future. Go check it out today and let me know what you think. All right, let's get into this episode. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 3:19Speaker 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.

• 3:43Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, friends. I had no clue where this conversation's about to go, but we have the infamous Udi here with us. How are you, sir?

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Hey, what's up? The Udiverse, right here.

• 3:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Ah, we just entered the Udiverse! What'd you think of the Bitcoin conference?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  You know, the thing I loved about it the most was that it gave this opportunity for the, you know, a bunch of the people who were around for a very long time, kind of built the values of the original kind of...

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Structure of this whole thing and put them on stage in front of, you know, 30,000 people who, who, who are the community that they helped build. It was, I think it was really awesome. It was like, nice to see that interaction between the old and the new. I loved it.

• 4:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I, I, um, I also think it was very thoughtful in terms of, uh, there were some very commercial aspects. So all the businesses, the expo center, their frigging fake volcano, right? Um, the, the kind of sports center or game day style, uh, desk, you know, doing commentary, like all that type of stuff, uh, seems super, super commercial. But at the same time, I know Matt Odell and a bunch of folks put together like three days of an open source, uh, stage. And, uh, to me spoke much more to kind of the, uh, the cypher punk movement and a lot of that. And so, uh, there's not very many conferences that I think could kind of take those two themes, which literally seem at the opposite ends of the extreme.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And put them into one conference, have 30,000 people show up and everyone walk away being like, man, that was pretty cool.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. It was awesome. I think it did a great job showing like both parts, you know, like both sides of this. So that was awesome.

• 5:14Anthony Pompliano?

  What are you most interested in or paying attention to right now in, uh, in kind of the Bitcoin world? Is there something that you're like, hey, this isn't getting enough attention or something you think is maybe more important than people realize?

• 5:25Speaker 02

  I think that, um, uh, well, how do I say this without pissing off people? Or should I say it in a way that will piss off people? I'm not sure. There's, there's, we have over time, like kind of puts ourselves in this corner where, um, we refuse to look at anything going on in, in the larger like crypto ecosystem, I feel like, and, and paint it as, as immoral. But really I think that the very interesting thing coming up is, is the usage of Bitcoin on other chains. Um, I think it, there's a lot of potential for growth over there. So, you know, a lot of stuff like, um, you know, various DeFi protocols, lending, borrowing, stable coins, all of this stuff. Originally they used to

• 6:09Speaker 02

  use ETH as, as the asset that backs everything just because of, you know, convenience and the way that things were built on Ethereum. But I think that these days, people use so many other chains like Solana, Terra, Avalanche, Binance Chain, there are a ton of them. And it makes a lot of sense for Bitcoin to be the collateral for those because it's a neutral asset, unlike ETH, which is very aligned with the Ethereum ecosystem. So I think that's a very interesting direction for Bitcoin going forward.

• 6:40Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things that you're talking about, so there's kind of two different things here, right? One is like the mentality and the open-mindedness. I saw Alex Leishman from River. He had a great thread where he basically said, you know, real talk, there's a new last few years wave of Bitcoin Maximalism marketing types who lack deep technical knowledge and simply autistically screech at every non-Bitcoin project. You know, well, hot take to get started on the thread. And then he said, "Articulately criticizing scammy projects is commendable. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending that nothing but Bitcoin is interesting or disruptive is very low IQ. The maximalist marketers basically take the ICO playbook and apply it to Bitcoin maximalism. If you dig deep enough, you'll realize that a number of these guys used to be ICO scammers. Go figure.

• 7:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoin is changing the world and conservatism is a feature of Bitcoin, not a bug. However, a dangerous ignorance and dogma is creeping into the Bitcoin space from a small number of loud people who have certainly done very little to contribute to Bitcoin. The core devs and wealthy OG Bitcoiners are almost always way more humble and open-minded than the new maximalist marketer types who are grifting noobs. Think for yourself and resist falling prey to dogma. This is the Bitcoin way." And immediately, you know, it was almost like a bat signal. If you're somebody who he was talking about and he tweets that, like, what do you immediately do? You jump in the comments and say a bunch of dumb stuff, right?

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 8:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's like, oh, okay, thank you so much for raising your hand and explaining it. And so I think his main point, although there's nuance to the whole thing, is just like the open-mindedness is really, really important because one of the things that I think is going to send this like toxic Bitcoin Maximalism, you know, kind of corner, which by the way, 87% of Bitcoiners own Bitcoin plus another asset.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 8:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Which is a stat that nobody wants to talk about.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:31Anthony Pompliano?

  But your mind's gonna be a mental petzel if all of a sudden Lightning Labs and Roast Beef put out Taro, which is a new protocol that is going to allow for the issuance of stablecoins and other tokens on top of Bitcoin.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 8:46Anthony Pompliano?

  So are we now gonna say NFTs are good only if they're on Bitcoin? Altcoins are good only if they're on top of Bitcoin?

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, stablecoins are good only if they're on top of Bitcoin? Or, as I know some of these folks, they will say Lightning Labs is stupid, uh, Roast Beef is stupid, uh, you know, Saferdean is stupid, right? They'll go through kind of the whole thing and they'll just take every single person in the Bitcoin community and they'll say, "These guys are all morons and, uh, and they don't know what they're talking about."

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we'll definitely have both, we'll definitely have both. And we always have had both, but I think the clash is going to become more and more pronounced and visible to people. Uh, yeah, it's, it's, obviously it's silly, like, right? If you want an NFT, I think most people don't care if their JPEG is on Solana or Ethereum or Bitcoin or whatever. Like, it's just, you care about the JPEG and the community around it, you definitely don't care about the technicals. And if you're gonna say that JPEGs are only good if they happen to be on Bitcoin, then it's, I think it clearly doesn't make sense. And I think, yeah, I think you're right, that narrative is gonna collapse because the more visibility there is on this thing, it's gonna be more clear to people that it's untrue. And you know, you, you, you said on the thread, there was, um, this note about, you know, the OGs and the original builders were much more humble.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  And I think it's true, you know, like, when I talk to people who aren't necessarily very prominent on Twitter, but, you know, have been building with Bitcoin for many years, uh, they almost always own other assets, like, almost, you know, it's, it's, it's almost obvious because, you know, they find it interesting and they do, they just can't talk about it because there's this small group of people who will ostracize if you dare talking about owning other stuff.

• 10:22Anthony Pompliano?

  There's an individual, I'm not gonna say who they are, very, very well-known in the Bitcoin community, very well-respected. Uh, I had dinner with them one time and they said, uh, "You're free, you're lucky, you're free."

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:35Anthony Pompliano?

  And I said, "What do you mean?" And they basically were, were making the point that, like, nobody thinks... That you don't have intellectual curiosity. Nobody thinks that you're not open minded. Nobody thinks that you don't look at this other stuff. They're like, for me, I have to do it in secret. I do privately.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:51Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm not allowed to. If I do it, I'll get absolutely, you know, torched.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:55Anthony Pompliano?

  But they're like, but you already ripped the Band-Aid off.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 10:58Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think that that's, it goes back to this idea that the silent, or I'm sorry, the loud minority, they do not have the long-term support, right? And ultimately, what ends up happening is, again, I think tarot is going to be the camel that, or the thing that breaks the camel's back, right? In the sense of, if there are now altcoins atop of lightning, are they good or bad?

• 11:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a tough question. That's a tough question. Yeah, that's the, that's the thing. We like, you know, people are so, talk so much about free markets and capitalism, but they end up being very much in favor of central planning. Sometimes it seems like, you know, at least the toxic Bitcoin Maximalism side of things.

• 11:36Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your take on real Bitcoiners? Is there like, is there a definition of a real Bitcoin?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, you know, that's actually really interesting. I went to an Avalanche conference in Barcelona a couple of weeks ago.

• 11:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Shame.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Shame.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  It was even worse, even dared to speak at the conference.

• 11:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Shame.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  I know, I know. And, you know, you see people who were, who were, there was, before I went on, my talk was about Bitcoin, right? And before I went on, the Avalanche team made this announcement about how they're going to make it easier to bridge Bitcoin on Avalanche. And I noticed that was the first time that the entire audience applauded. Because it turns out that all of those crypto people are, you know, most of them are very much Bitcoiners. They own Bitcoin, maybe even as the main, you know, main part of their portfolio. That's, that's very common in the crypto scene. And, you know, it's, it's only really the small group of Bitcoin maximalists who think, or, you know, you can be a Bitcoin Maximalism if you want, but the toxic Bitcoin maximalists who think that.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  Crypto people hate Bitcoin. It's absolutely not true. And I would say that a Bitcoiner is, you know, it's a very simple definition. It's someone who owns Bitcoin, you know? That's it's very simple. There's still many, many people in the world who don't own Bitcoin and we need to get to them. But there are, what, 100 million, 150 million Bitcoin holder in the world? So, you know, they, a lot of them are pretty fine with using other chains. Most of them are.

• 13:02Anthony Pompliano?

  87% of them, according to the Grayscale Bitcoin Investor Study.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And then how do you think about something like Do Kwon with Terra and backing their stablecoin UST with Bitcoin? Like, to me, right? What I'd look at that and I say, we're watching a stablecoin adopt the Bitcoin standard. And if they end up doing this correctly, it will create the playbook for central banks, stablecoins, et cetera, to then all go be able to do the same thing. Very similar to how Michael Saylor created the playbook for public companies to put Bitcoin on their balance sheet. It seems like that is not a 100% accepted viewpoint or framework by, by maybe this this loud minority.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And that that was, you know, so surprising to me because when I first heard about, you know, Do Kwon first made these claims about how he's going to acquire some Bitcoin or LFG is going to acquire some Bitcoins and, and they were very big claims. And I was really surprised how very few people in the Bitcoin space were talking about this because it looked like this is, you know, this is very big news. This guy is gonna end up with more Bitcoins than Sailor, potentially. So, you know, I started talking to people and I realized that the reason they don't talk about it is because they don't, you know, they don't know anything about it, literally nothing about how something like UST works, but they have a very clear opinion about how it's a scam and immoral and a terrible thing.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  So they literally don't know anything about it, anything. They don't know what it is. They don't know how it works. They don't know what keeps the peg if it does. There are many risks about UST, by the way, but they don't know what to explain them. So I thought, okay, this will be interesting conversation to have, to talk to Do Kwon, you know, have spaces about it, but.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Do it in a very basic way so that Bitcoiners could catch up, get up to speed. And we had the spaces, I think a lot of people tuned in. And, you know, I tried to be neutral. I tried to be like, yeah, you know, what you're doing is obviously risky. It might not work. People might have exposure to the stablecoin and end up, you know, losing money. Or maybe it does work. But the one thing that I find very interesting in it is that Bitcoin is a very, very good fit in that use case. Whether it works out or not, Bitcoin is a very good fit in there. And we suddenly have a new way to use Bitcoin. That's awesome. And definitely, I think that more people will try to do the same thing. And, you know, I get that people say, you know, U S T is maybe risky.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  Maybe it will not work out and people need to be careful. I agree with that. But it seems like, the thing that strikes me really odd is, we seem to be okay with, you know, a dictator adopting Bitcoin for his country. We seem to be okay with Russia using Bitcoin to evade sanctions. We seem to be okay with people buying heroin and ODing and dying using Bitcoin. We're fine with all of those things. They're great. But if someone dares to start a stablecoin, then that's, that's an attack on freedom. And that doesn't make any sense to me. I think, you know, I'm, I'm not here to judge the way that people use Bitcoin. I don't understand everything about the world. I don't know what's going to be a good way to use it or not. I think people should use it however they want.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  And if a new use case arises and people find a new way to use Bitcoin in a massive way like this, you know, like acquiring three to 10 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin, that's obviously good. That's obviously good. I hope it works out and if it doesn't, we learned something, you know?

• 16:35Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your general approach to like, so this idea of like, I'm not here to judge how people use it. Is there a way somebody could use Bitcoin where you would see like, oh, I wish that they wouldn't do that?

• 16:45Speaker 02

  You know, I think, look, you know, there are things that I think people would agree that they are universally evil, right? And I hope that people don't use Bitcoin that way. But really, the, the, the truth is...

• 16:59Speaker 02

  That's why we like Bitcoin. People can use it however they want. No one's gonna ask us. You know, one of the interesting things I found out when I had discussions with people about this use case of Terra and people told me like, "Well, we shouldn't support this." And I was like, "Look, they're not asking us. They're gonna do it." You know, "They're not asking us if we're supporting this, if we think it's a good idea." They're going to do it. They are doing it. And it really mostly makes us look like fools, I think, if we sit there on our little couches and say, "No, this is not a good way to use Bitcoin. We're against it. We're setting ourselves up for failure, right? Because we know that Bitcoin can be used however people want to use it."

• 17:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It's fascinating to kind of think through this, right? Because I would make the argument that what Michael Saylor is doing is he's basically issuing assets to acquire more Bitcoin. And I obviously think that it's incredibly innovative. I think that he is a pioneer. I tend to think that he will go down as one of the best capital allocators on Wall Street over the last 20, 30 years. And doesn't come without risk, right? Especially now when there's some slight leverage in there and a whole bunch of different things. But so far, so good. I think that he's done a great job articulating his ideas publicly, explaining, "Hey, we have a cash-flowing business," and also a treasury strategy and kind of how

• 18:22Anthony Pompliano?

  he thinks as a public company CEO, who's just been around a long time, right? And understands not only strategically what to do, but also how to communicate those ideas. I think it's a key piece to it. If you then go and you take a look at many private companies, they're doing very similar things. So I would argue that many of these private companies that are issuing some sort of equity to investors and then using that investor's money to go buy Bitcoin on their balance sheet, right? They also are issuing an asset to go and to buy it. And I hear the argument that the public sector has certain rules and requirements and transparency and reporting regulations, et cetera. The private markets have some of that, but nowhere

• 19:05Anthony Pompliano?

  near what it would take to operate as a public company. And then you have somebody like Do Kwon, which he personally isn't doing it right. It's the the the foundation. But again, they've issued an asset and they are going ahead and they're acquiring it. And when when you think about that, it's a very nuanced weird argument to make of, oh, if you issue one type of asset, it's okay. But if you issue another type of asset, it's not okay.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think actually, if I was to switch around and say, hey, you know what? I'm going to be a critic of it. I don't think making a moral argument is the right argument to make.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I think your point about the right argument to make would be that it's a risk argument.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And so this like appeasement or or attempt to kind of make this moral argument, I think actually just sounds stupid.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 19:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Because there is no morality in the issuance of assets. Ultimately, what happens is it's a risk. And you can now make an argument of, are they disclosing all of the risks? Are they not? Do we actually understand, meaning the the non terror community? Do we understand what the risks are? Do they understand what the risks are? All that stuff, I think, is fair debate. But to me, that's more science and math

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:25Anthony Pompliano?

  uh, type argument where it's valuable, right? Either it's true or it's not. When you kind of do this like fluff, oh, we're gonna make this moral argument. I tend to think that you move to moral arguments when you don't have the ability to make valuable arguments.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 20:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And

• 20:43Speaker 02

  And then it becomes a religious debate.

• 20:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct. And the reason why people want to participate in the religious debate is because they never can be proven wrong.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 20:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so then you can yell and scream all day long and you basically get to then claim moral superiority on somebody, which just is ridiculous.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. It is. It is. You know, and by the way, I in that spaces that I did with Do Kwon, you know, I asked him, you know, a bunch of the hard questions. It wasn't very original. I knew the hard questions because many other people asked them before. But, you know, he was very, very honest and very open about everything. He said, yeah. You know, the, you know, one thing that attracts people to U S T today is the 20% or close to 20% interest rate that they get. And, you know, he was very open about it like, yeah, you know, it's, it's obviously not, um, not scalable and it's, it's not going to stay 20% forever. It's going to drop down. And there's definitely a question of what happens when it goes down and, and how it happens. And it's obviously very open on, on the risks for the U S T de-pegging

• 21:44Speaker 02

  from the dollar. All of those things are, you know, they're very, very open about them. And then, yeah, you have to evaluate if you, if you okay with that risk or not. And every person can make that decision on their own. Uh, I myself do not really have any exposure to U S T, to be honest, but, um, you know, people can choose what they want. So, you know, it's, um, it, it seems like a very easy, very easy decision to make. Not sure why there's even this need to, you know, if you don't want it, don't buy it, move on. Like, why, why do you even want to talk about it? If this is, if you think that this is not a, a good risk to take.

• 22:19Anthony Pompliano?

  The, the other thing that I find very troubling is, uh, the inability or, uh, lack of desire of, uh, conversation. So this whole idea of, uh, you know, somebody says, hey, I'm going to use Bitcoin in some way and immediately getting screamed at scammer fraud, you know, all the nonsense, right? And nobody stops to say, well, how does it work? Right? What exactly, why are you making that decision? Right? Uh, and you may, if you have that conversation, come to the conclusion that you, that you believe it is a scam, that it is a fraud, that it is whatever. But coming to that conclusion without actually talking to the person doing it is like all time laugh out loud

• 23:02Anthony Pompliano?

  funny to me, right? And I can say this as somebody who, when I saw him do it, I messaged him, I did a call, I learned about it, I wrote a whole thing, said, hey, is this accurate? Then got feedback from people, then did a podcast episode with them and said, listen, explain this to me. And I got to the end and I said to you, similar to your point, there's risks here, just like there's risks in all of this. But I think that this is a net positive and will pioneer a new potential use cases, Bitcoin as collateral, right? For stable coins. Now, maybe I'm wrong. That's fine. Right? I'm very clear that I didn't go buy Luna or, or do any of this stuff. I don't own U S T or any of that stuff. But it's interesting. I'm watching it. I'm paying attention.

• 23:43Anthony Pompliano?

  But the people who don't go have the conversation, I literally have more information than they do.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah, exactly. They're telling you you're wrong, but they don't know what you're talking about because they didn't.

• 23:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Not only can they not, they just don't have the same information, right? And so like, I really respect people who go and say to somebody, hey, what you're doing, I don't understand. I'd like to learn more about it. And they go and they understand it. And then they turn around and then they say, okay, you know what? I don't think this is going to work. Yeah, fine. Well, the market is going to decide whether it works or not, right? And if people want to take the risk and have the ability to allocate their capital that way, that's their free choice.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 24:20Anthony Pompliano?

  But the whole idea of like shaming people for how they invest their money is the most anti Bitcoin thing I've ever heard. By the way, if you don't agree, rather than complaining, which is what politicians would do, if you are actually emotionally, psychologically invested in trying to see Bitcoin do all these great things that we all think it could do.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Then build the alternative, right?

• 24:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, build the alternative or educate these people.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 24:46Anthony Pompliano?

  But don't do it, don't shame them, right? Instead say, hey, have you thought about this point? Have you thought about this risk, et cetera? And that's not what I think is happening right now, right?

• 24:56Speaker 02

  No, no, it's not. No, I think people just don't, you know, they don't understand what it is. You know, I think one of the common arguments that I get from people is that,

• 25:06Speaker 02

  you know, something like QST and the many other, you know, digital assets are bad because they break security laws. And there are two things that really bother me with that. One is, I don't understand how the, you know, how the Bitcoin mindset went from being, you know, free market and building things that, that are supposed to improve the structure of the market right now to just saying, well, it's illegal, so we're not going to touch it. That's, I don't understand how that happened because that doesn't used to be the case. But also, you know, I understand, you know, I'm not, so I'm not American. I'm here visiting the studio, but I don't live here. And, and, yeah, yeah, it's awesome. It's been an awesome week. And you know, the, the.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  The security laws in the US, I understand if some Americans like them, I don't care about them. I'm not an American, you know, I don't, I couldn't care less. So I think, you know, if, if.

• 26:02Anthony Pompliano?

  So, by the way, so are like 7.2 billion people around the world, they also aren't American and don't give a shit about American securities law.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly, exactly. So, you know, most of the world doesn't care about the US security laws. So if, you know, if Americans want to stay in that kind of regime, then that's fine. I don't like, maybe it's the right thing to do. I don't know. I don't, it's none of my business. But I think for everyone else, it's very obvious, they're not going to avoid some investments just because the US security law is incompatible with them. That's, I don't care.

• 26:32Anthony Pompliano?

  As an American, I really care about securities law. But the other 7.2 billion people around the world, they don't care, right? To your point.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And of course, I mean, you know, if, if those, you know, if those other currencies and other assets and whatever get, get in trouble because of US security laws, then of course that has implications for international people too. But I think long term, going forward, I don't care.

• 26:59Anthony Pompliano?

  So how do you guys think the maxi scenario plays out in the future, right? It's because in my mind, you know, maybe it's five or 10%, but most of Bitcoiners aren't really that kind of toxic maxis, right? They, whether they own other stuff or they don't, they don't shame people, they don't do these things. So do you guys think that? By the way, that just self-corrects? Toxic is just another word for asshole. Yeah. Like, I think that I'm now officially rebranding toxic maximalist as just, no, you're being an asshole. Yeah, you're an asshole. You can be a kind maximalist, you can be a rational maximalist, you can do all that type of stuff.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:32Anthony Pompliano?

  But wearing the badge of like, I'm an asshole, in every other context in the world, whether it's your personal relationships, business, investing, anything else, is not a sustainable, good idea. Yeah. Yeah. Cause there's plenty of Bitcoin maxis that are just quiet about it, right? That just only own Bitcoin or whatever it is and don't say anything.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Or they just say, I believe that you should only, you should only own Bitcoin.

• 27:52Anthony Pompliano?

  But they're not an asshole about it.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  I think it works for me. But they don't bully people for having other interests, you know?

• 27:57Anthony Pompliano?

  So is this just self-correct over time, where we, we get to a world where you're basically looked down upon even more and more and more until it self-corrects and we don't have anyone like that? Cancel culture ends when the cancelers get canceled.

• 28:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's, that's the path that we're heading on here is that you now are at 87% of Bitcoiners own something else. It used to be 100% of Bitcoiners only own Bitcoin. There was nothing else to own, really. Right? And now it's all the way to 87%. Eventually, I think that the, the toxicity is going to become a smaller and smaller percentage.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Because what you're doing is you're expanding the total pie. And more and more people that come in, they're not going to have the appetite for that type of mentality where you jump on the internet and yell and scream and go crazy all day long. Like, it, it's just not the way to operate in life. And I would actually argue that it's anti-Bitcoin. Right? From an ethos standpoint. Bitcoin is all about anyone from anywhere in the world can use this system. It's apolitical. It's accepting of everyone, regardless of who you are, where you come from, what your education level is, what language you speak, how you grew up, any of that stuff. But then there's this little, small group of people who actually end up taking the completely different approach. If you do not agree with every single thing that I agree with and do exactly what I say for you to do, I'm going to shame you.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah. There's this hilarious video from the Bitcoin conference. There was a bunch of people on stage and they were trying to talk about other currencies, probably in a bad way. So they asked, they kind of asked the, the audience to raise their hands if any of them own ETH. And the expectation from the, the panel, it seemed like, was that, you know, no one will raise their hands, everyone will shrivel into their chairs, even if they do own ETH, they will not say anything about it. And almost the entire audience is raising their hands proudly and the panel was, you know, kind of shocked about it. And, and, and I think, so I think it's already happening. I think it's already like, people are not as ashamed as they used to be to talk about those things. And I think, I think, you know, the, the cancels are already on, well on their way

• 29:57Speaker 02

  to getting canceled, I think.

• 29:58Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think about how Ethereum fits in cryptocurrencies in the world?

• 30:03Speaker 02

  I've never been an Ethereum fan, and I'm not an Ethereum fan now. I think, you know, I think that the interesting thing about Ethereum, I think it kind of chooses all of the bad trade-offs and puts them in run place. So it's kind of like... You know, Bitcoin focuses on being very reliable and decentralized and neutral. And Ethereum tries to adopt some of that, also adds some, you know, centralization. Of course, we know that ETH is an asset that has changed a lot over the years and will continue to change over the years. So it feels to me, they inherit Bitcoin's inflexibility and slowness to adapt, which for Bitcoin is a good thing. But Ethereum has to compete against all of those other smart contract platforms that

• 30:47Speaker 02

  are very fast, not just fast technically in the way they work, but also fast to adopt, fast to change. And Ethereum can't do that. Like every, we're still waiting for Ethereum 2.0 for like three, four years and they're always fighting the, you know, the war of two years ago. So I think it's just a bad set of trade-offs. I much prefer something like Solana, Avalanche, BNB Chain, a bunch of others, because they can adapt very quickly to the way the market changes. They don't pretend to be decentralized, so they don't have to, you know, do everything slowly. So I think it's better. I think that, I think most people, you know, most people, when they want to buy an NFT,

• 31:29Speaker 02

  they want to take a loan or whatever, they don't care if the infrastructure is semi-decentralized or not, they just want it to work, so.

• 31:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And it goes back to this idea that like, most things in the world don't need to be decentralized.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:42Anthony Pompliano?

  If you really think about, I think every Bitcoiner, whether you're on one extreme of the end or the other, agrees that proof of work provides for decentralization and secures the network. And there's a very specific reason why Bitcoin needs to be decentralized as it gains global adoption. And it's important that we keep it decentralized. Many of these other use cases for technology, right, whether you call it a blockchain, a database, whatever, they're actually not pursuing the highest degree of security, you know, as like the ultimate goal in terms of decentralization. They're pursuing performance. And I always use Amazon as the example. Like imagine if Jeff Bezos is like, "I'm gonna build the most efficient company in the world, and I'm gonna do it decentralized."

• 32:23Anthony Pompliano?

  No, that's not how it works. What do you do? You build a super centralized hierarchical structured business that literally spends all of its time from a command and control centrally planned, drive efficiency.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 32:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And they get immense performance out of that.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 32:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And so ultimately, many of these other things are going to end up being centralized, regardless of how you cut it, because they need the performance. That's how they're going to compete. And it just feels like those two things are so different that when we compare Bitcoin versus whatever, it's like trying to say, like, should I buy oil or Amazon stock? Like, sure, they're both assets you could buy, but like, it's not Amazon versus Shopify, it's Amazon versus oil, right? That didn't really make that much sense.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Yep, yep, yeah, I think, yeah, exactly. They just, you know, if you want to build a business, this isn't, this isn't the world's decentralized infrastructure. This is a business, you know? And if you want to build a business, it needs to be efficient. It needs to be efficient technically and also efficient as a business in a way that, you know, like Ethereum just takes, it's very difficult to lead it, right? So, so as a, if you were to try to, to see Ethereum as a business, it would be, you would probably say that it's a very inefficient business, I think. So, yeah, that's the way I think about those things. And, you know, we're all like, we're all fine with, you know, I took an Uber to get here, right? I think a lot of people are okay with it.

• 33:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Shame!

• 33:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, you know? Because for some reason, like, what am I supposed to hate things now that are subsidized by VCs? Like, why? I don't know, if it works, I don't care, I just want to get here. I don't, I don't make a statement about how VC economy works. I just want to get to the studio.

• 34:01Anthony Pompliano?

  We're gonna actually, this entire episode, what we're gonna do is we're just gonna rebrand things. So, if you say you're toxic, that means you're an asshole, right?

• 34:07Speaker 02

  I like ass coiners.

• 34:10Anthony Pompliano?

  If, if you hate VCs, we're now gonna call them risk capital, right? Because guess what? If you want to do something, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna go to your parents, to your friend down the street, the bank? None of them are gonna give you money to do this. The entire job of the venture capital industry is to risk capital on shit that shouldn't work, but if it does, it'll be really valuable.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 34:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And so this whole idea of like, quote, quote, "VCs are bad." Sure, there's bad people in every industry. By the way, have you seen Wall Street? Right? Like, there's a lot of bad people there. But guess what? If you want to buy a stock, you're paying Wall Street to help you do that.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 34:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so this whole thing just ends up being this weird, weird situation where it's like... Maybe we don't need all the extremes in life. Like, we would be better off just saying, hey, we probably need some risk capital, especially really, really early on, from people who that's their job is to do this and they have the ability to underwrite risk, they have the ability to allocate lots of capital, etc. But we probably don't want them to do everything.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So we actually, maybe we do want some of individuals to participate. Maybe we want some corporations to participate. Maybe we want some users to participate, whatever. But like, saying that we want zero of anything, of any of those groups, is bad. And I think the knock against venture capital historically probably was, not their fault, but more regulation in the United States, is that the average person was at zero. So the average person couldn't invest in these deals and venture capitalists could. Rather than say like, oh no, those people are bad. I think what we should say is like, let's open it up so that everyone can participate.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And, you know, whether people liked it or not, a lot of the ICO stuff was trying to do that, right? It was deemed, I think rightfully so, given the way that it was and what the rules were, unregulated, right? And so obviously, that's pretty much been pushed outside of the United States and gone elsewhere. But I think that this whole mentality of like zero sum ends up being a really bad way to view the world, right? It's like, can we actually have a more of an abundance mindset and say, hey, if they can participate, rather than say, no, we don't like them, just say, how do we get everyone to be able to participate?

• 36:17Speaker 02

  Right, right, yep.

• 36:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And to me, that feels like it's a much more sustainable thing and also a less, um, kind of conflict, controversy driven, like, this is the boogeyman and we need somebody to yell and scream about.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, there was some, in the Bitcoin history, there was a lot of these ethos of, you know, we kind of needed an enemy and Bitcoin was a way to fight against maybe the government, maybe Wall Street and...

• 36:47Speaker 02

  And I think, especially if you've been around since then, then you know that we won. Like, we, from being an internet-based joke, we turned into a force that no one can ignore. We won, and we don't need to, we don't need to pretend to fight people anymore. You know, like, everyone knows that Bitcoin is a very significant thing. It's not going away. It's going to continue to change the world. Everyone agrees. We don't need that, you know, that fake enemy to, to, to bring new people in. What we need now is to find why, you know, the next 100 million, the next 500 million, the next billion people will get into Bitcoin and just give them what they need and what they want in order to onboard. We don't need to, to scare, to scare them about the boogeyman because it's not, it's

• 37:31Speaker 02

  not, it's not the case anymore. We already made the world better.

• 37:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Let me ask this question because I want to provide as fair of a debate as we can. What do you agree with, this small, loud minority? What do you agree with that they say?

• 37:50Speaker 02

  So I think, that's a great question. I think, and you know, I considered myself part of that group for a long time. And I think that the focus on keeping Bitcoin this neutral thing that isn't owned by anyone and encouraging things like self-custody where it's possible and where it's, and where it's useful to users, it's not, it not always is, but where it is, encouraging it, encouraging this idea of self-sovereignty. I think that's, I think that's great, and that's important for Bitcoin's future too. There needs to be a certain group of people who are very focused on that, and we don't want them to disappear.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  However, we also need to, to understand that for most people in the world, they're not here for ideology. They're going to use Bitcoin because it solves a problem for them, not because they're ideological about it. And so, so having the ideologues onboard is great. But we have to understand that they're not going to be the majority. They're not going to be the ones who pushed this forward from now on because we're just at a different scale now than we used to be.

• 39:00Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about regulation and Bitcoin mining, what are your thoughts there? It seems like maybe Bitcoin mining with the whole ESG stuff, Peter Thiel obviously took a pretty big swing at it at the conference, saying that ESG is equivalent to CCP, which we were talking earlier, is like a great meme. What's your general sense about mining, ESG, and then the regulation that may or may not come?

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so again, I'm not American. It's none of my business to intervene in, you know, in American policy decisions. I do think that generally speaking, it would be a mistake for any country to try to ban Bitcoin mining. And I think we've seen that with, you know, with the attempts in China and the attempts in Europe, they're either unsuccessful or they just hurt the economy, you know? So I think that, I think, yeah, I think it's a mistake. And if, you know, if the way to go is with cleaner energy, I'm obviously supportive of that. And I think that there are a bunch of experiments in this area and maybe they, you know, maybe they succeed.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  But I don't think that banning it is going to help anyone. It's just going to hurt the countries which choose to do it.

• 40:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I agree. What other questions you guys got?

• 40:16Speaker 03

  If the US decided not to accept Bitcoin or kind of adopt it in the manner that other countries are doing it, what is the reaction like? Do other countries just get so far ahead that the US can't keep up? Or how does that demographic work?

• 40:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, you know, I wouldn't imagine that the US is going to be the first or among the first to do those things anyway, right? It's probably going to be way, way down the line and we're going to see other smaller jurisdictions experiment with it first, you know, like we already are and it's probably going to continue for quite a while. And that's fine. I think, you know, Bitcoin might not immediately solve the same problems for Americans as it can for other countries. So it's fine if the US isn't the first one to do it. But yeah, down the line, I think you'll see, you know, in all fields of life, people become more mobile and they're willing to move to the places they're going to get the best benefits and that fit, you know, the best way to what

• 41:15Speaker 02

  they need and want to do. So yeah, you're just gonna see people move over and businesses move over to, to the countries who are more supportive, in this case for Bitcoin.

• 41:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe, what do you got? Yeah, that, I mean, that was my question too, around what kind of what, how this plays out. I guess I'll move to the ETF. What do you think happens with the ETF? That's a good one.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  Oh, man. I don't know. I don't know. It's so unfair, it feels like, right? Like, why do we have the silly futures ETFs and we don't have a SPOT ETF? I don't know.

• 41:45Anthony Pompliano?

  It's protection.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, let the SPAC goes public.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, it's all about protections. Yeah. I, I mean, I don't know. Again, I don't look, as a non-American, I don't like, I can buy a bunch of other ETFs, you know? I don't have to buy the American one. I don't know. I don't know why it is. Obviously, like, people who are, you know, who are invested in something like, you know, like the Grayskull Fund, that's, that's, that's the real problem. It seems silly. It seems silly to me. But I just, I can, all I can say is I hope it gets resolved. I don't know.

• 42:19Anthony Pompliano?

  When, we've got a couple of charts. You will be able to see them from where you're sitting, but just trust me that I tell you what they say. They're on the correlation. There's really just one. It's the correlation between Bitcoin and the NASDAQ. And on this chart, there's a guy, Lawrence McDonald, who says, since 2020, Bitcoin tied at the hip with the NASDAQ 100 index. Forty day correlation between the two reached a record in recent days. And then he uses a quote from a Bloomberg article that says, increase in the correlation further erodes the argument that Bitcoin works well as a diversifier, one that's been held up by proponents as a key to its appeal. And so when you start thinking about Bitcoin today, one of the things that's interesting in this chart,

• 43:01Anthony Pompliano?

  which you can't see, is that it basically, the correlation is positive and negative. He's going green, red, green, red, green, red, right? And really, it ends up showing that it was non-correlated. But pretty much since, let's see, what is the date here? Pretty much since, I don't know, two years ago, year and a half ago, whatever, it's all green. It's positively correlated, right? Since 2020. And in a significant, significant way to now it's at an all-time high.

• 43:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that because the economic environment changed? Is that because there's more like Wall Street institution people and this is a risk asset to them? And they treat that just like their tech stock? Like, why do you think that's happening?

• 43:41Speaker 02

  I think that's it's precisely because of the institutionalization of Bitcoin and the acceptance of Bitcoin as an asset that's appealing for institutions since exactly around that time of mid 2020.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  And, you know, there was this, maybe it was a kind of the sailor in microstrategic things and maybe it was a bunch of other things. But eventually there was this green light for a bunch of institutions to just jump in and get on board. And that means, you know, when they need to cover other positions, they're probably going to need to cover Bitcoin too. And the other way around, when they're going risk on, then they're probably going to acquire more Bitcoin. And you know, when I think this is, I think this is an anomaly. I don't think it's going to stay that way. And I think, you know, when I think it's going to change is when more and more crypto protocols adopt Bitcoin and start using it. So what we need is more, you know, other sources of big money that come in and see Bitcoin as something that's useful for them, not just the Wall Street institutions,

• 44:42Speaker 02

  but also maybe, you know, the crypto protocols from the rest of the world. And I think that could balance things a lot and maybe bring us back to being a decorrelated assets, which I'm sure will happen eventually because there are a bunch of people who will realize that Bitcoin is useful for them other than just, you know, financial institutions. But it'll take time and, but that's definitely one of the reasons why I think, you know, if someone, again, other than matters if we do or do not support something like Terra acquiring Bitcoin. It doesn't matter, they're going to do it anyway. But it's why I think it's positive. Either way, whatever happens, I think it's positive that we have this completely entirely different field

• 45:24Speaker 02

  who is very much more aligned with our values than, than, you know, Wall Street institutions are, gets more Bitcoin, holds Bitcoin for the long term. I think that's awesome for us.

• 45:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The idea of financialization of Bitcoin, I think, in my opinion, is inevitable just because as it grows in size, it provides the same benefit to a Wall Street hedge fund, a bank, as it does an individual, a public company, whatever.

• 45:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you worry that there's like significant downsides to the financialization? Like, are there things that you're like, man, it is inevitable, but we gotta be really, really careful or pay a lot of attention to this aspect of the financialization of Bitcoin?

• 46:03Speaker 02

  I mean, for a while, things can be a bit rocky, but I wouldn't be worried long term. And when I'm thinking about Bitcoin, I'm always thinking long term. So I wouldn't be, you know, I wouldn't be worried about it. I think they happened to be somewhat early in adopting it, maybe. And maybe some other things will be later, you know, like nation states, like crypto protocol that I talked about, like there's a bunch of different interests that can find use in Bitcoin. So the institutions were first, that's fine. They're not going to be the last, so I'm not really worried about it, you know?

• 46:38Anthony Pompliano?

  When you guys think, Joe, John, of your friends, how many of them have majority of their investments in Bitcoin versus, or like maybe just crypto in general, right? Versus they still have stocks, bonds, gold, real estate, whatever? I mean, it depends. There's certainly like a distinction between people who are heavy into the space and people who aren't. Well, the people who aren't, like spending majority of their time looking at digital assets, whether it's Bitcoin or something else, they still have, most of them at least have other things too. I would say though, that as the price is appreciated, it's become a bigger portion, not only from like a notional dollar amount of, hey, this is how much I invested and it's up, but they're starting to allocate more money to it also. So they're not rebalancing and also allocating more to it? Yeah. John, what about you?

• 47:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think people who are in the space, they definitely own it. They probably have a majority of their net worth in it because they understand the asymmetric of it. They're younger, they have all the things that I talk about, why I have majority of it. But then people who aren't in the space, no, I don't think they're really investing into crypto, right? They just don't know about it. They're speculative. They're just like, I don't know. I've seen it gone up. I've seen it draw down 50%. So a lot of them don't, but I've definitely had more and more conversations over the last year about people getting involved.

• 47:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I think most Bitcoiners overestimate, like vastly overestimate how many people even know what the hell Bitcoin is.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 47:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Like in the United States. I don't think most people, like the average American knows that the government even prints money. No.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  That's probably true.

• 48:02Anthony Pompliano?

  If everyone knew that, there wouldn't be 45% of Americans that had no investable assets. And that's my point. It's not a knock against Bitcoin, it's a knock against financial education in general. So I think that if they don't know the baseline kind of stuff that you need to own investable assets, that you know, the role that inflation plays in your overall net worth and wages and all that kind of stuff, then how are they supposed to understand what Bitcoin is and what it does for you? Now, let me ask you this question. If you went and you asked every single Bitcoiner at the Bitcoin conference to describe, I don't know, we could pick three elements of Bitcoin, describe how proof of work works, describe how nodes work, and describe how Bitcoin as an investment theoretically would work. What percentage of people do you think would have a high degree of proficiency?

• 48:45Speaker 03

  At the conference, which is a

• 48:46Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a subjective term, but yeah, I think that maybe I'm giving too much credit here, but I would think that the majority of people would at least be able to understand it enough to articulate kind of the overall process. So you think over 50%? Yeah, but to your point, I think that there is certainly a portion of people, I don't know if it's 1%, 5%, 10%, 25% or whatever, that are simply interested in Bitcoin because they like the community, they like the memes, they made some money on it, right? And once you make money and it's gone up, you start to get more interested. So there's certainly an aspect of that, but I think if you're going to a conference, right? I think that that number is probably higher than you would just see online, but I don't know. So I agree at the conference is higher. My point in saying that is it used to be 100%. Oh, yeah. Right?

• 49:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Because when it was, when there was no kind of user experience, user interfaces that made it super simple, you had to be technical, most people understood it, a lot of people actually did a lot of work before they ever even bought Bitcoin, they went and understood how does the system work, they looked at it from more of a computer science perspective, whatever. So actually, that percentage is going down. And it will continue. Of course it's going to continue to go down. But that's the point is that one of the other aspects of the entire community is that in order to get mainstream adoption, you have to understand that everyone's not going to be the same. Yeah. Right? Like, that's why it's considered mainstream and you were an early adopter. It's like, literally, they are different than you. Yeah. They do not spend their time on Twitter and Reddit and, you know, YouTube or whatever, finding out about the next Alternative currency. That's not what they do.

• 50:14Anthony Pompliano?

  What they end up doing is there's going to be a whole portion of people who literally their financial advisor tells them like, "Hey, we're going to put 2% in Bitcoin." And they say, "Why?" They go, "'Cause it's good if inflation happens." And they say, "Okay," and they move on with their day and they don't even think about it. And so I just think that understanding the changing nature of the industry and ecosystem is really key to understanding Bitcoin over the next five years, because you can't simply just look back and say, "It was completely non-correlated. It's going to stay non-correlated forever." Well, obviously, that's not true for the last two years, right? And then if you look and you say, "Okay, well, who holds it?" I don't think the same people who hold it today held it three, four years ago. And so as all these things change, like, you gotta get comfortable with the change.

• 50:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, it's, um, uh, special forces, uh, in the US military, they think a lot about like comfort and chaos, right? Like, if you can be comfortable in chaos, then you're always in a state of control, because you can, uh, adapt and you can be adaptable to the changing environment. Well, just think about the, how the communication has changed, right? If you look back, there's like old message boards of people communicating about Bitcoin. It's like the same 10 people and they're like, "Oh shit, it went from 8 cents to 6 cents, like 6 cents to 10 cents." And they're all, you know, communicating back and forth. And now we have, uh, Odell Beckham Jr. taking his salary in Bitcoin and they're announcing it. It's getting, literally one tweet is getting 50 million, 100 million plus impressions. And all these people are learning about it, maybe for the first time or hearing about it more. He owns an NFT. He's not a real Bitcoiner.

• 51:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, really shameful. Shame. Yeah, shame.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  He must own a house, too. He's a terrible Bitcoiner. He's a terrible Bitcoiner.

• 51:48Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but I do think that that's, I think that was one of my big takeaways from the conference also was just, uh, there's a lot of people who didn't know what Bitcoin was two, three years ago. Awesome. The types of folks are changing, right? When I saw, or I think we're talking about it before you got here, when I saw, uh, the Apple App Store search ads team was there. There's a 0% chance they were there in 2016. Yeah. Right? And economic development teams from out of state flying there, trying to convince companies to move like it's different. Yeah. And that's not good or bad. I don't think, right? It, it, it's probably both. You've just got to be comfortable that the world is going to change underneath our feet. Yep.

• 52:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And it actually, the people who have the rigid mindset and they're not willing to understand that. Well, it's funny because. Odds are low that they're going to be successful. Bitcoiners obviously want the price to appreciate and more people to adopt it. One Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin, dude. But you get my point. Not real Bitcoin. And how do you onboard, to your point earlier, hundreds of millions or billions of people without kind of doing this mainstream education and trying to get more people involved? And every time that you're toxic or you say, uh, this industry or this, this other crypto or whatever it is is shut out, you can't look at this, you can't do this, you're shutting off potential people that you would potentially onboard into the system. So it's kind of like this, this thing where you're only hurting yourself in the end. Everyone wants to know, uh, why you have sunglasses on inside. And somebody just said.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  The lights were so bright.

• 53:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Somebody said, he will burn their faces off if he makes them off his laser eyes.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  It's like the X-Men thing.

• 53:18Anthony Pompliano?

  I was just looking at your Twitter and I love your pinned tweet. It says, whenever you're not sure what to say, just say metaverse.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. I lost the golden opportunity to say it now was the answer for the sunglasses question.

• 53:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm actually in the metaverse.

• 53:35Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Last question, and then we gotta go is, uh, when you think about everything that's transpiring around this, is there, uh, a word of caution that you have around any of the industry that you're like, man, I really don't think people understand the risks associated with X? And there's a lot of talk of scams and, and all this stuff. There's obviously a lot of risk in a lot of things. Like what is the area where you're like, you know, if people pay attention to one thing, uh, they're probably mispricing risk where?

• 54:05Speaker 02

  I think, you know, one of the, this is like a very long conversation, but one of the things that, um, kind of scare me the most, especially with the kind of smaller coins that are usually not in the top 10 or top 20, and they're not even listed on exchanges and they're only available in these automated market makers like Uniswap.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  They give you this number, and I'm not gonna get into too many details, but they give you this number, which is like the current price, but it's really, it's the current price of the marginal coin that you can sell right now. It's not the price of all of these coins you might want to sell, and of course, not all of the coins that other people hold. A lot of times, you end up, you know, you, people look at their Blockfolio app or what have you, and they see this number, and they say, "Oh, I'm now worth such and such because I own such and such coins." But in reality, this whole thing has maybe a liquidity of one or two million dollars, and, which is nothing. So, you know, I would say it's important for people to understand, especially if they're dabbling

• 55:06Speaker 02

  in these smaller coins, that it's really a game of musical chairs, and to really try to understand the dynamics of how they work, because otherwise, they might have a very skewed perception of what their portfolio actually is, which, which can be dangerous.

• 55:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. You guys agree?

• 55:22Speaker 03

  I completely agree.

• 55:24Anthony Pompliano?

  You're like, "Oh, yes." That was like a wide-eyed, just, "Yes."

• 55:28Speaker 03

  Well, we were talking about the, was it the Squid Game coin or whatever, where the, or no, the Shiba, the guy made the trade where he had billions of dollars worth of one of these meme coins, but he couldn't liquidate his money out, right? So, it was essentially, it wasn't worthless, because he could get something out, but he wasn't getting out the eight billion dollars or whatever.

• 55:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, this is true in the public markets.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is.

• 55:48Anthony Pompliano?

  It happens a lot of different places, but definitely, it's on, everything that happens in finance is on steroids in the Bitcoin crypto.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think small retail investors usually aren't used to seeing it, because they don't have the, you know, the, the, the big enough portfolio to move a market like Apple, right? But when you go into a very small market like the Squid Game coin, then yeah, you might, you know, with your few thousand dollars, you might actually crash the market. So, so yeah. So, that's, I think, people need to understand those dynamics, and many times, they don't.

• 56:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I tend to think that you're more right than wrong. I appreciate your courage and conviction of saying what you believe. It's interesting that you have to do it in the face of people who want to shame you, so.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for having me.

• 56:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Keep the shades on, the haters can't see.

• 56:34Speaker 02

  I will, I will.

• 56:35Speaker 03

  They don't know who I am.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  I could be anyone. I could be anyone.

• 56:39Anthony Pompliano?

  He's a job comedian. Job's a comedian on Twitter.

• 56:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Anytime you say anything bad or wrong, you're like, "I'm a comedian."

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just a joke. You just didn't get it.

• 56:52Anthony Pompliano?

  If you actually think about it, comedians are the last protected species on the internet. Is Tim Dillon, he can say anything on the internet.

• 57:01Speaker 02

  Well, Chris Rock just got slapped, so maybe it's changing.

• 57:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but he got slapped in person. See, the key is to be a keyboard comedian. As long as you say it on the internet, no one's gonna slap you. But like Tim Dillon, literally sometimes he tweets things and I'm like, "Man, that is laugh out loud funny." Woo, people are gonna be mad.

• 57:19Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm like, "Yeah, he did. That was a good one." And I know he's typing it up laughing to himself. I'm sure he had the same thought when he had said. Yeah. He's like, "That's funny." All right, my friend. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  Thanks a lot.

• 57:31Anthony Pompliano?

  We'll definitely have to do this again when you don't come back to America after you got shamed out of the...

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Yes, of course.

• 57:38Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, buddy. See ya.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 57:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Appreciate it, Udi. 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.