#1514 Nik Bhatia | Buying Bitcoin Makes Your Life 99% Cheaper

Nik Bhatia is the Founder of the Bitcoin Layer, and the author of a brand new book called “Bitcoin Age.” In this conversation we talk about bitcoin, it’s relationship between the dollar and other traditional assets, why self-custody is protected under the first amendment, what the US government should be doing with bitcoin, how they plan on helping the middle class, and what Nik thinks the future looks like. =======================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/=======================Reed Smith is a dynamic international law firm dedicated to helping clients move their businesses forward. With an inclusive culture and innovative mindset, Reed Smith delivers smarter, more creative legal services that drive better outcomes for their clients. Their deep industry knowledge, long-standing relationships and collaborative structure make them the go-to partner for complex disputes, transactions, and regulatory matters. Learn more at www.reedsmith.com=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on guys? We've got a great conversation with Nick Bhatia. He's the founder of the Bitcoin Layer and the author of a brand new book called Bitcoin Age. This conversation covers a lot, including why self custody is protected by First Amendment. We also talk about what's going on with Bitcoin and why prices continue to go down denominated in

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoin, but prices in dollars continue to skyrocket. And then we talk about the current administration, what they're doing with the Bitcoin Reserve, how they're going after the middle class, and what Nik thinks is going to happen in the future when it comes to Bitcoin and the United States of America. I always enjoy talking to Nick. He's a professor. He's incredibly smart. They do great research and they've got lots of anecdotal data. And so whenever I talk to Nick, I learn something and this conversation is no different. Here's my latest conversation with Nick Bhatia.

• 1:15Speaker 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.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Are you looking for a simple way to earn Bitcoin rewards every single day? At Simple Mining, we help people mine Bitcoin, even if you're brand new. We're a vertically integrated Bitcoin mining company based in Cedar Falls, Iowa, offering a premium white glove hosting service that helps you maximize your mining profitability. With over 500 clients worldwide, we manage over 15,000 machines across our sites. Our facilities are staffed seven days a week and we fix most onsite issues in under 48 hours. In fact, we can repair more than 2,000 hash ports each month in our dedicated repair center, ensuring your miners run smoothly. Want to see it firsthand? Tour our mining sites, either in person or online, anytime. Plus, for your first year of mining, we cover all repairs. No questions asked. We bill you for the exact time your miners are running, and you can pause whenever you want. Need to buy or sell?

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Our exclusive miner marketplace gives you the freedom to trade on your schedule. You'll even have a custom dashboard to track your miner stats in real time. And if you're thinking about running your operation like a business, our tax team can guide you through the depreciation advantages. Ready to grow your Bitcoin stack? Visit simplemining.io.

• 2:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Reed Smith. Their practice of law has the power to drive progress, to move businesses forward, and support them in achieving their goals. By seizing opportunities and overcoming obstacles, Reed Smith is focused on outcomes. I personally use them as my law firm, and I think that they are fantastic. They know that your time is valuable and that your matters are important. Their deep industry knowledge, longstanding relationships, and collaborative structure make them the go-to partner for complex disputes, transactions, and regulatory matters. Reed Smith delivers purposeful, highly engaged client service that drives progress for your business. Go to reedsmith.com to learn more about the best lawyers in the game. reedsmith.com. Go check them out today. Nick, I thought a great place to start the conversation is, you have this framework that you use,

• 3:25Anthony Pompliano?

  that all prices go up when denominated in dollars, and all prices go down forever, whenever you denominate in Bitcoin. Explain what's going on here, both in dollars and Bitcoin.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  Yes, well, we'll start with dollars. The dollar system is a credit money system, and it's designed to expand. The reason it's designed to expand actually starts with the idea that technology is a deflationary force on the economy. The example I give early in the book is that it takes several hundred hours to build a house with hammer, nails, and a screwdriver, and screws. But once you introduce a power drill, and once you introduce a nail gun, you have automatically saved hundreds of hours in labor.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  That should theoretically drive the cost down of building a house. And that process of technology being applied to economic processes and lowering the cost is pervasive in our economy and it does work to help people really drive down their cost of living. However, when prices contract or when prices go down broadly in the economy, that jeopardizes banks' ability to profit by lending. Because if prices go down, debt burdens become harder to overcome.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  Basically, if you have less income and a fixed interest payment, that interest payment becomes less and less achievable if your prices are going down, that you're basically your income's going down. Therefore, the banking system and our global economy has this built-in expansion for the banks to benefit the banks so that banks don't experience defaulting customers and they can continue to grow their balance sheets and profit off of lending forever. And so, we have these six steps towards establishing credit system dominance from 1913 to 1975,

• 5:43Speaker 03

  outlined in the book, that explains why whenever prices even somewhat threaten to contract, the whole system is built to get them to expand again. So that's really the dollar side of the equation.

• 5:58Anthony Pompliano?

  What about the Bitcoin side? So if prices are constantly going up in dollars, you said that prices go down forever in Bitcoin?

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Yes, so, and that is of course over a long time horizon, right? When we start to measure over a trailing three to four-year time horizon, that is when you start to see that Bitcoin is creating a situation in which prices are going down, denominated in Bitcoin. And the reason that this happens, it comes down to, of course... Bitcoin scarcity, that there are only 21 million coins to ever exist. And the introduction of new coins now is less than 1% a year. Whereas the dollar is growing at at least 7% a year. That's just the data that we can see. Uh, it's likely growing much more quickly than that.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  Due to the shadow banking system such as Eurodollars, repo, money market funds and Forex swaps. Uh, all those arrangements. Therefore, the Bitcoin ecosystem is designed to keep a scarce supply. This is, you know, one of the most well-publicized features of Bitcoin. So this is not some brand new tale that we're telling here in the book. Rather that we have to understand because Bitcoin is locked in to the scarcity. And that locking in process is only due to its decentralization, right?

• 7:28Speaker 03

  Because if there was somebody in charge, we might never know if the supply will actually follow that schedule. So a decentralization plus the design of Bitcoin, which features this 21 million supply cap. It is empirically causing prices to go down to get forever. So it's not something that we can just say, oh, Bitcoin is scarce, 21 million. Therefore, prices go down together forever. It is an empirical observation based off of about 15 years of trailing price data. And for us to expect that to continue is based on these fundamentals hanging around.

• 8:12Anthony Pompliano?

  One of my favorite stats is that in 2016, uh, the median US home was about $280,000, give or take. Uh, today it's 430,000, but priced in Bitcoin. Uh, over the last eight years, we've gone from in 2016, uh, about 664 Bitcoin to now you only need about six. And so that drop of 99% in the price of a home is a very different story than, uh, the unaffordable. You know, home situation that we have, uh, rolling across America when priced in dollars. And I think that really kind of shows exactly what you're talking about here. Right?

• 8:46Speaker 03

  And that's why we opened the book with this understanding that. Prices, you know, in dollar terms, the, uh, an average house has gone from 25 grand to above 400 grand, as you say. Incomes have gone from nine to 80. So actually, the average price of a home has gone up to five times the income versus two and a half. That by itself punishes people. But then you add in this idea that the price of a home denominated Bitcoin has gone from, you know, from 500 Bitcoin to less than five Bitcoin, you know, for the time horizon that I took in

• 9:29Speaker 03

  the book. That is a powerful image for people to understand that Bitcoin is empowering, right? It's not just an alternative form of money or a new asset class, that it can really empower people if they simply recognize the dichotomy between Bitcoin and the credit system. Now, this is an important point. People already fundamentally understand they can't just leave money in the bank because it burns over time. It basically disintegrates. So they're forced into real estate, they're forced into stocks. But people understand that already. It's, they feel

• 10:12Speaker 03

  that, that they have to invest in order to outpace inflation. So we acknowledge that early on in the book, that you're forced into this risky investment adventure, that you're not, that shouldn't be where you're spending your time. You should be spending time trying to be as productive as you can and add that production to the economy, therefore benefiting yourself through income. But if you're not able to protect that income and you have to go out and chase risky investments, not that the S and P 500 is a bad way to invest, but it does expose people to risk and it does get them out of money into an investment, whereas Bitcoin is just another

• 10:55Speaker 03

  form of money. It can be thought of an investment, but it definitely can be thought of as just purely

• 11:04Anthony Pompliano?

  So when people are saving in Bitcoin, do you expect kind of in this Bitcoin age, which is the title of the book that you recently wrote, is the idea that people will save in Bitcoin and they'll have no other investments? Is it Bitcoin is like a digital savings account, but you're still going to have a checking and a brokerage account? How do you look at Bitcoin's relationship in this new world to, you know, maybe more traditional assets, whether they're stocks, bonds, real estate, you know, et cetera?

• 11:29Speaker 03

  Yes, so that's a great question. Bitcoin, we have to look at it empirically. What has it become for people? So if you talk to people out there that are invested in Bitcoin, they're invested in Bitcoin, they own it, they also own stocks, they also own real estate. And they're assessing their portfolio allocation at all times, thinking, oh, how much more can I invest in Bitcoin or is this the appropriate amount? So, you know, for every individual person, it's going to be different. But I do believe that Bitcoin serves as this digital savings account that can fit in the current allocations to stocks or to real estate or to other cash instruments into Bitcoin.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  So this is a highly specific situation, but I had a conversation with a friend recently. He's an attorney and he's around my age, so someone who has lots of income ahead of him in his life. And he's dabbled in Bitcoin over the years, but not to the point where it's really reaching any material portion of his allocation. And we're talking about the book and he's asking about the release and he takes me seriously. So he sees me coming out with a second book about Bitcoin. He's thinking, okay, it's now the time to ask, Nick, how much should I be putting in Bitcoin of my portfolio? And I gave him, you know, my, I gave him my conservative approach and I'll tell you what I told him.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  I said, if, I didn't even ask him what his allocation was. I said, you're a young person that's making income. I'm assuming your portfolio is about 90% stocks, 10% cash. That's my assumption. He owns a home. He doesn't have another real estate investment. Okay. I said of that 90 10 I think you should be 25% in Bitcoin 5% in cash and 70% in equities. That's the first step. So the the idea was for me to tell him, hey, you don't need to be thinking about 2% to 5%. That is way too low for someone your age. You need to be thinking way more than that.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  So take your 10% cash allocation. I'm assuming you don't need most of it because you earn more than you spend every month. So split that and put half of it in Bitcoin right now. So that's now already 5% of your portfolio in Bitcoin. And then take that 90% stock and put 20% of that in Bitcoin. So take that from 90 down to 70. Boom, you have a 25% allocation. Now, that was me giving my friend a one to one advice on, hey, this is how you should be thinking about it. I didn't really even ask him his allocation at the time because I didn't think that that was relevant.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  What he wanted to hear me say was a number that was either less than 5, around 10, 25, or 50, or 100. That's what he was trying to get out of me. And so I'm not going to just race in and be and then he asked me also, should I be, you know, basically going all in on that now, or should I be dollar cost averaging? You know, and I explained to him that that average strategy is a good mentality because it's the right way to think about Bitcoin. Where if you are going to take your paycheck, spend what you spend and then put some of it away every month. Some of that put away needs to be in Bitcoin. I mean, just from a mental approach.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  So I I hope that I answered your question, you know, to some degree, but I'm happy to, you know, go into the follow up.

• 15:12Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it makes a lot of sense. And, you know, another piece of this is, I think about in the Western world, this idea of yield. Although your savings account pays nearly zero, you know, every once in a while, everyone's got the the statement that comes from the bank or the the check, no matter how much money you have. You get like, you know, point 003% or whatever the stupid number is. And you're like, all right, well, that's basically zero. Like, that doesn't matter. And there's things like money market funds or treasuries that may pay, you know, a couple of percent. But for many people, I would argue billions of people globally, the concept of yield is foreign to them. They never put money in a bank. They don't know what yield is. They don't even know that they should look for that. And so something like Bitcoin has this like savings technology, which I think a lot of Bitcoiners really

• 15:57Anthony Pompliano?

  understand and see, it begs the question, like, will there be yield? And we know that there has been a lot of attempts at this. Some of them have worked, some of them have not worked. But this idea of yield, going back to your kind of credit-based system. Well, credit works in two ways. Somebody's getting extended credit and somebody is being the extender of the credit. And the only reason why somebody would be extending credit is because they're getting paid some sort of yield or return on that money. And so is the Bitcoin system so 180-degree difference where we should expect to have no yield? And, you know, the kind of lending of Bitcoin and things like that is very unlikely to happen?

• 16:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Or do you think there's some middle ground where it's like, hey, we have this kind of decentralized, you know, digital sound money? But we will take components of yield and lending and things like that from the traditional world and we'll kind of fit it into a new Bitcoin system?

• 16:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great question. Let me explain it by setting up the example I give in the book, which is that I believe the Bitcoin system and the dollar credit system continue to coexist as they do today. So that is my working thesis in the book, and I do believe these two systems will continue to exist side by side. The reason I believe this is think about the credit system and what it offers to society. Imagine that you have a young couple that is earning well, has good jobs and, but doesn't have any savings. They want to buy a house today. They don't have the money to buy the house today, but they have the income that

• 17:32Speaker 03

  makes a bank believe they will one day be paid back principal plus interest from this young, hardworking couple. Now, the couple that wants to go and buy a house, if they wanted to buy the house in Bitcoin, they would need somebody who currently has Bitcoin.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  To lend them that Bitcoin,

• 17:59Speaker 03

  so that they can purchase the house in Bitcoin. Now, now they have a debt to the lender, Bitcoin denominated, and over time, they will have to earn money, convert it into Bitcoin or earn Bitcoin, and pay back the lender by sending the lender principal and interest payments over time. Now, in that example, the couple would only be able to buy a house if there was a Bitcoin holder willing to part ways with his or her Bitcoin at that moment, right? For the agreed upon interest over that time, right? Now, in the current dollar system, if that couple goes to a bank and shows them their income,

• 18:42Speaker 03

  the bank is able to create new money out of thin air, right? This is the credit creation process where credit comes into existence via a lending process. So the bank creates a loan. It's an asset to the bank because they get paid back in the future. And they create a deposit, a brand-new money line item that is the liability of the bank, but now it's the asset of this couple. And this couple has a new asset, which is a deposit at a bank, and can now spend that deposit on a house. So from thin air, the bank creates money for the purchase of the house. The couple gets a house, and they have debt against that house.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  But the money came from nowhere.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  Now, that money might, that money that, that let, that, sorry, that loan that was created might end up in a mortgage-backed security. And that mortgage-backed security might be financed from existing capital or new capital. That's not the point. The point is that the loan itself came from thin air based off of future income of that couple because of the banking system and the way it's designed. That that is allowed, and that is how money comes into being. So, do we expect a bank and a young, hard-working couple to find a middle ground to create money for that home purchase

• 20:15Speaker 03

  in five years, 10 years, 15 years' time? I do. I do expect that whole process to continue.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  So now let me answer your question about is there yield in Bitcoin? There can be if you are parting ways with your Bitcoin. Where you send your Bitcoin out and to a borrower, whether it's a peer-to-peer loan, or through some platform, or through a structured vehicle, or through a fund even.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  That you put your Bitcoin in a fund, the fund lends to people, the people go out and make and invest that money, they make more money than they invested, or that they spent on their initial investment, that's how they generate income enough to repay principal plus interest, and then everybody is happy as long as that loan went to a productive purpose. So Bitcoin yield can exist in that process, which you have to, you know, basically send your Bitcoin out. It's basically the same concept as investing in a debt fund. If you have capital, you wire that money out to the fund, the money is gone, all you

• 21:31Speaker 03

  have is a promise, right? You have a share in the fund, and you have some future dividend stream or income stream. It's the same concept of existing capital being invested into funds, I believe that, and there are, it's not even speculation, there are Bitcoin-denominated venture capital funds, and other sorts of funds that are developing where the benchmark itself is the original Bitcoin investment, not the dollar hurdle. So in that way, there can be yield on Bitcoin, but we have to identify what it is, right? It's, it's giving your investment into a counterparty and basically having full exposure.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  There's no insurance in the Bitcoin invest, you know, industry of investing Bitcoin into funds, uh, yet, and I'm not even speculating that that's something that needs to be implemented, but people need to understand the risk of every investment. Bitcoin by itself as a savings vehicle will not have that yield without sent, without exposing yourself to risk.

• 22:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Basically, what you're saying is the return you get paid should be for the risk that you take, right? Like, that's how every investment works. And so the question you have to ask yourself is, the risk that you're taking on here, are you being fairly compensated for it? And I think that a lot of people would argue, you know, if you're getting paid 1%, no, right? But there's probably some number where some portion of the population says, yes, that's worth it. And the number may be different for different types of counterparties or different types of people who, you know, are willing to do this stuff. But I think that your kind of word of caution may be in the calling out of risk is important. Another area that people are very interested in right now is the United States government. They have obviously established the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The first pro Bitcoin president

• 23:18Anthony Pompliano?

  now sits in the Oval Office. And one of the chapters of your book talks about kind of the United States of Bitcoin, and this idea of the United States being a major player here. Explain a little bit what your thoughts are, both in terms of what you think the US should be doing, and how you think some of the recent current events either push us closer or further away from that view of the world.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think that Bitcoin has achieved a global network effect that is very strong and irreversible. That process of Bitcoin becoming a global network happened, I would argue, independently of a United States embrace. However, in the book, I outline five key policy steps over the life of Bitcoin from the United States government that have added to the size of the Bitcoin network, just in the terms of people, Americans, and world citizens also, looking at the regulatory framework of how the United States treats

• 24:23Speaker 03

  Bitcoin. Each favorable step increases the capability of the network because it increases the number of people that are willing to participate. And that is basically this idea that, okay, the first adopters, you know, they don't need permission. They didn't want permission. They didn't even believe that the US would necessarily embrace it. They just believed in the tech. They were cypherpunks.

• 24:53Speaker 03

  But after the first set of users, and then we got the Silk Road saga, right? And we had the Mt. Gox hack. There were, there was a time in the network that Bitcoin benefited from favorable US policy moves. And so that is the environment we're in. Bitcoin doesn't have legitimacy because of a strategic Bitcoin reserve or a Bitcoin president. It has legitimacy because of the number of people using it. But the US coming on board, not just under President Trump, but long before that, has been material.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  So, you know, the, the first step was when the, you know, way back in 2013, when FinCEN basically acknowledged that Bitcoin itself was a decentralized virtual asset and a commodity, not a credit, and that people that owned Bitcoin or even mined Bitcoin were basically acting as self proprietors and not as money service businesses. This was huge. This was instrumental. It basically said that Bitcoin, we view it as some sort of First Amendment technology, which did get confirmed more and more over time.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  And the precedent for that was set back in the 90s during the crypto war, which is something that I also explain in the book. And the fifth step was the strategic Bitcoin reserve under a new, really a new political regime in the country that understood Bitcoin's arrival and that we are in a Bitcoin age here. So I think that Bitcoin being purchased and stored by sovereign governments is a natural evolution of a money that is becoming a global reserve asset. It just, it's so natural. We've been talking about this for years, that Bitcoin is on its way

• 26:59Speaker 03

  to becoming a global reserve currency or a global reserve asset or a digital gold. That is what is happening in front of our eyes. It is driven by the electorate. And that is something that I think is important to point out to people. I believe you have been doing that as well. That this is not some decision from above. That this is the will of the electorate, what we saw during 2024. The American people said, this is what we would like to happen to this specific technology here. And I'm very happy what we have seen since, you know, the debate really got heated in 2024.

• 27:40Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things that I see in governments is they own lots of gold. And no one's ever like, oh, this country owns too much gold, whether it's the United States or anyone internationally. There's no company that owns too much gold. But gold also is not a truly finite supply asset. It is a scarce asset. It is hard to dig up. It is hard to, you know, come across more of it. You can't create more of it, but every day it seems like people are finding deposits or asteroids or, you know, name your place where there's going to be plenty of gold. But again, nobody worries about a company or a country having too much. Bitcoin is a artificially scarce asset with a finite supply. And we now have a company that's publicly traded that has over 500,000 Bitcoin.

• 28:24Anthony Pompliano?

  There are talks of the US government wanting to buy over a million Bitcoin. There are a ton of countries around the world that own tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin. Some of them are well known and publicized. Some of them may be more private. Can an entity, whether it's a company or a country, own too much Bitcoin? Like, is there a point where they cross the threshold? And we go from that's great, they're Bitcoiners, they're trying to acquire as much as possible, just like me? To, oh, wait a second, maybe we don't want that country to own that much of the of the network or of the coins.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  I can only speak as an American. And what I can see is that in other countries, not the United States, that work to acquire Bitcoin, whether the people of those nations have the ability to.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  Basically, present a referendum on that process? I am, I, I don't know, right? My point is that outside of the US, if people are upset about their leaders making certain decisions, I'm not the best person to make a judge of whether or not that opinion will be surfaced and expressed by the leaders. What I do know is that in the United States, if there's something in which the people view that it's gone too far, they will vote those people out that run on an agenda of we have gone too far. And so it's a, you know, it's an oversimplification.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  But if there is a strategic point at which people view that you're, you're losing the plot, you're going too far down this and you're maybe ignoring the plight of, you know, the citizens to the, or you're doing this to the detriment of citizens. People will want to express that as well. And, you know, with elections every couple of years in the US, I do believe that people will have that ability to express themselves.

• 30:29Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the ideas of expression is obviously protected in the First Amendment. You've previously argued that self custody is a First Amendment issue. Can you explain a little bit as to how you think about this kind of very unique aspect of Bitcoin? Being something that may already fit within the confines of the amendments of the United States?

• 30:48Speaker 03

  Yes, so in the, in the process of handling Bitcoin, you are dealing with numbers that can be simply written down or words that take the, or numbers that take the form of words, I should say, with private seeds. And so Bitcoin itself is a computer code based phenomenon. And in the 1999 case Bernstein versus the United States government, the State Department tried to make a student.

• 31:28Speaker 03

  Force his own classmates that are foreign citizens to register with the government under the premise that they will be handling weaponry, if, you know, in terms of cryptography, right? And/or handling national secrets. And so Bernstein ended up winning his case in, under three consecutive federal rulings, that the ability to use cryptography is the same thing, and this is the court's words, "The same thing as a mathematician or an economist

• 32:09Speaker 03

  that used mathematical models to prove his point." And that falls under the First Amendment. And so if you are to write down words, and those words are associated with your wealth or your money or your capital, then that action of writing down those words is technically a First Amendment exercise, making the custody of Bitcoin a speech process. And that is so unique, right? When you own a gold coin and you put it in your pocket, there is no speech

• 32:51Speaker 03

  there. There's no speech happening. There's property law, and Bitcoin does fall into property law, but it also falls under speech. And it's something that is only the case because Bitcoin is computer code, right? Bitcoin is a, is a software protocol, and it's also what we call the unit within the software protocol. But if you read the early literature about Bitcoin and even Satoshi Nakamoto's writings, he called them coins. He didn't call it Bitcoin. He just called them coins, because he knew that there's Bitcoin, which is the software that he's designed, and then inside the software, there are these coins. Now, we call it Bitcoin

• 33:34Speaker 03

  now, but you should just think of it as Bitcoins and Bitcoin and coins, right? And the coins themselves are...

• 33:43Speaker 03

  Associated with speech.

• 33:46Anthony Pompliano?

  It's so funny that if I told you to create a, an arcade game, if I told you to create a digital money, all these different things, there's pretty much two things that immediately come to mind for most people. The idea of dollars, right? And you can see Monopoly has, you know, kind of monopoly dollars, but also coins. Pretty much every digital representation of economic value has been in some sort of coin, whether it's a gold coin or, you know, other version of a coin. And so for Satoshi to kind of revert back to the simplistic and very easy to understand idea of a coin in the digital realm is, is pretty cool, I think.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And the, and the story of Satoshi and his predecessors is something that I had the most, it was the most fun process of writing this book is, you know, understanding the stories of the 1970s and 1980s pioneers within public key cryptography. And even before that, with the founding of the internet, these are people that we owe Bitcoin to because they, they laid the foundation, networked computers, public key cryptography.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  This is Bitcoin's story. Bitcoin derives from these pioneers in the seventies.

• 35:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I think there's also things like, I forget who wrote the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, right? And there's a lot of work that was done and what I'll call like, what eventually became part of the Bitcoin ethos. But the software iterations, the developments, the breakthroughs, the milestones were combined with frankly, attempts at digital money. There's everything from the cyber caches and the big golds and, you know, all these different kind of variations that did not work. But while we were doing the technical work, we were also kind of coalescing or cementing these ethos that now show up in Bitcoin. And it's pretty cool. Like, you know, you think about, what is a well-rounded person?

• 35:58Anthony Pompliano?

  They understand a little bit about a lot of different industries or a lot of different disciplines, right? They've read, they're well-read. They've spoken to lots of people. Like that well-roundedness makes somebody a lot of times interesting and valuable and a productive, you know, participant in different systems. Bitcoin, in a weird way, is the most well-rounded digital money that's ever been created, right? It was able to put together the building blocks, the security, kind of all of these components, including the ethos. And, you know, I almost think of it like a dial pad lock. You get the right combination and bam, here we go. You know, door opens and Bitcoin has done pretty well since then. One other thing I want to talk about

• 36:42Anthony Pompliano?

  is current events. We've obviously seen Trump come into office and it feels like he may be the first president in a long time that is explicitly focused on helping the working class. And I think that surprises a lot of people because Republicans historically have been trying to push through tax cuts for the rich and, you know, do these different things. But is there some lesson in there or analogy or maybe a correlation we should take from the fact that the first Bitcoin president is also the first president in a long time that seems to be very focused on how do I make sure that we help the working class and I don't care if

• 37:23Anthony Pompliano?

  the stock market goes down in the short term and I don't care about, you know, what the geopolitical fallout may be, but I need to have this kind of America-first approach to help the people of this country. How do you look at that? Are those two of the same things or are they maybe two separate things and people are trying to make them one thing?

• 37:43Speaker 03

  So there is a connection there, okay? On the Bitcoin side, Bitcoin is part of the Trump playbook, right? And so he came into office riding a wave of momentum from different segments of society that wanted representation. One of those segments was Bitcoin that pointed out to the Trump, "Look how this industry has been singled out." And really prosecuted against. And so that needs to be something that is brought to your attention. And we need your leadership to show the country, all the regulatory bodies, that people that are engaging in this type of activity are not harming anybody.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  Let them cook, basically. And so that is, that's one part of it. Now, I'll bring your attention to Vice President Vance's speech last week at the Andreessen Horowitz event. He basically is outlining where globalization went wrong, that there were two major assumptions of globalization that basically the Chinese manufacturers wouldn't be able to catch us in terms of the value add chain, right? Now we see, you know, if you've seen a video of, you know, the Chinese EVs over there and what they're producing for the cost, you can see

• 39:14Speaker 03

  that China has leapfrogged the United States in certain technologies, right? So it's not the case that China wouldn't keep up with us in the value add chain, they would just stay down there. And the other, you know, has to do really with what you're talking about, which is how it has affected people here in this country, right? The worker, the manufacturing and all of that stuff that he's trying to, you know, make as part of his agenda to make America great again. So I think that instead of thinking about the make America great again agenda, simply diagnosing the mistakes of the globalization agenda is the core.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  It's the leading value in the approach of what some of the solutions are. It's that we made assumptions that were wrong and we cannot go down that route and continue to go down that route. And I'll bring in someone else from the administration. So when Besen was being interviewed last week, I believe it was last week, somebody asked him, what, how do you respond to the fact that people's prices are going to go up with tariffs? He said, we are focused on the long-term health of the American person, not his or her ability to buy Chinese goods at a cheap price today.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  That is not their vision of success for the country. And so you can either run on the fact that we're going to embrace globalization and lower your prices for Chinese goods and that will make you better off, or we are going to take a different approach that doesn't necessarily lower your price for Chinese goods. You might think that that hurts you today, but we believe it benefits the country on the long term.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  So Bitcoin and their, their post-globalization agenda are related in that they both understand that the path that we've been on is wrong. Conflating them more than that, I'm not sure. I'd have to probably think about that more, but what I see is an understanding of the problem. And that is crucial. It's fundamental because then it makes your, you just, Besen is so impressive. I agree.

• 42:00Speaker 03

  I mean, talk about someone with a concrete vision of how the American middle class has been screwed. I haven't heard somebody speak like that in some time at the policy level. So I'm very excited and I know the president has a lot of good people around him. We at the Bitcoin Layer have had Steve Myron on, who has now started to get into the public spotlight. It took him a while to, you know, let Besant and let Nick kind of lead the way on narrative. But now Myron is also out there.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  Go check out his paper that he wrote last year on rearranging global trade. This is all the same and go read Vance's speech as well. These are what the new American agenda is about. It is, I don't know, Pomp, if it's going to fix anything. I hope it does. I don't know if it's going to, but what I do know is that they have diagnosed the problem, unlike leadership has in this country for my lifetime.

• 43:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I completely agree. And I think that there's a lot of people who they know the plan that we were on or the path that we were on, it's not going to work. And so we got to try something different. And whether the new thing works or not is almost irrelevant compared to the first step was we got to do something different. We got to recognize that there's a different path to go on. And so, you know, I think that every American is hoping that we end up in a better spot. And there's some who think it'll work and some who don't think it'll work. And, you know, the beauty is that we're going to find out.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Think about the basics of just Besant hammering the table on lower oil prices. That is such a clear signal to the middle class. We want your gas price to be lower, full stop, because that can make your whole experience with productivity better. You can be more productive with cheaper gasoline. And we are going to try to accomplish that for you by introducing more supply to the market. I mean, it's really raw economics 101 that they're going for as opposed to this, you know, let's make oil the bad thing, which, you know, we tried it. Like you said, we tried that. So it's, we're going to try something different.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  And things like, you know, trying to get the oil price down, increase energy production.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  It is a signal that what they're trying to do is targeting the middle class.

• 44:42Anthony Pompliano?

  I completely agree. Before I let you go, you wrote this book Bitcoin Age. Tell us just a quick kind of 30 seconds as somebody reads it, what do you hope that they take away?

• 44:53Speaker 03

  Yes, with Bitcoin Age, I really attempt to give people my story of why Bitcoin is so special and why it's another 100-year technology. Bitcoin is the most important innovation in money since banking itself and the most technologically important innovation since the Internet. So it's something that needs to be taken very seriously. And it needs a great, rich history to fully explain where it comes from. So Bitcoin Age presents to you a history of banking, the Internet, and cryptography to give you the proper context for Bitcoin. It explains to you how Bitcoin works in easy-to-understand language.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  And it also explains why Bitcoin and the dollar system will continue to coexist and the role that Bitcoin plays for people in helping them, helping them. That's what this book is about. I want to help people see Bitcoin for what it is. And hopefully, they can make the decision for themselves that they should be participating in this network.

• 45:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Obviously, people can just Google Bitcoin Age and your name, and they should be able to find it at every place that books are sold. But also, you've got Bitcoin Layer. Maybe just tell us where people can go find out there and listen to a lot of the information that you're putting out.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  Yes, so thebitcoinlayer.com is the home of everything that we're doing right now. We have a great channel and audio podcast form if you guys are interested in that. We produce excellent quantitative research for our TBL pros. You guys can find all of that information and the link to my new book and my first book, Layered Money, all on our website at thebitcoinlayer.com.

• 46:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. Nick, you're always excellent. I always learn something every time we talk, so I really appreciate taking the time to do this. And we'll definitely do this again in the future.

• 46:47Speaker 03

  Cheers. Thanks a lot. Appreciate you.