351: Roger Ver on Personal Freedom and Bitcoin

Roger Ver is an early investor in Bitcoin and Bitcoin-related startups. He has been known as "Bitcoin Jesus" for his promotion of Bitcoin. In this conversation, we talked about Roger's background, the early days of Bitcoin, why the world needs a decentralized digital currency, what drove Roger to support Bitcoin Cash, how he has allocated his portfolio, and what it would take to change his mind. =============================== Did you know only 1% of day traders actually turn a profit? So why are so many of us mistaking picking stocks for serious investing? You can’t control the markets, but you can control your risks. So how do billionaire investors control their risk? They invest in blue-chip art. If that sounds unusual to you, you’re not alone. But the ultra-wealthy have been investing in art for centuries. And since 2000, art has outperformed the S&P by an incredible 180%. Just a few years ago, a single work sold for $450 million! Imagine... Being able to invest in the very same paintings as millionaires and billionaires, at a fraction of the cost. Masterworks.io is an exclusive platform that makes it as easy as trading stocks online. And the best part is: you don’t need to know anything about art. Their experts will create a custom portfolio to meet your investment needs. With Masterworks.io you don’t have to choose between big risks and big returns. Sign up today, select PODCAST and you can skip the 70,000 waitlist to get first dibs. Just go to www.masterworks.io and select PODCAST. Hurry, this offer expires =============================== The BTSE exchange allows you to trade confidently. They are the leader in futures, which means they are pioneering Futures 2.0. With BTSE, you can trade next-level futures: freely choose and combine your margin and settlement assets and trade with up to 100x leverage. You can also sign up for a BTSE Elite membership that gives you unbeatable discounts and bonuses across the BTSE Exchange, OTC platform, and more. Go to BTSE.com/pomp to get a 10% discount on your BTSE Elite membership. =============================== LVL is a mobile banking app that provides an integrated Bitcoin and traditional bank account experience for a flat $9 monthly fee. They have no trading commission like Coinbase and no hidden spread like Robinhood. Your cash is held in a private, FDIC-insured checking account and you can buy and sell Bitcoin as many times as you want and only pay the monthly $9 flat fee. Legendary Bitcoiners Jimmy Song and Willy Woo are already advisors and we liked it so much that we invested in the company. This is a no brainer and it will save you an incredible amount of money, so go sign up at lvl.co/pomp or use promo code "pomp". =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 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://www.pompletter.com

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

• 0:00Anthony 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. Let's kick this thing off. Roger Ver is an early investor in Bitcoin and Bitcoin-related startups. He has been known as Bitcoin Jesus for his promotion of Bitcoin from the early days. In this conversation, we talked about Roger's background, the early days of Bitcoin, why the world needs a decentralized digital currency, what drove Roger to support Bitcoin Cash, how he has allocated his portfolio, and what it would take him to change his mind. I really enjoyed this conversation with Roger, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  The first is Masterworks. Did you know that only 1% of day traders actually turn a profit? So why are so many of us mistakenly picking stocks for serious investing? You can't control the market, but you can control your risk. As to how do billionaire investors control their risk? They invest in blue-chip art. If that sounds unusual to you, you're not alone. But the ultra-wealthy have been investing in art for centuries. And since 2000, art has outperformed the S&P by an incredible 180%. Just a few years ago, a single work sold for $450 million. So imagine being able to invest in the very same paintings as millionaires and billionaires at a fraction of the cost. That's what Masterworks does. They're an exclusive platform that makes it as easy as trading stocks online. And the best part is, you don't need to know very much about art.

• 1:30Anthony Pompliano?

  They have a team of experts that will help you create a customized portfolio to meet your investment needs. With Masterworks, not only can you own fractional shares of art, but you don't have to choose between big risks and big returns. You can sign up today, go to their website, masterworks.io, select Podcast, and you'll skip their 70,000-person waitlist to get first dibs. So go to masterworks.io, select Podcast, and you can skip the 70,000-person waitlist. Pretty no-brainer. Our next sponsor is Level. Level is an awesome new company. I loved it so much that we invested. Levels, spelled L V L, it's a mobile banking app that provides an integrated Bitcoin

• 2:13Anthony Pompliano?

  and traditional bank account experience for a flat $9 monthly fee. If you trade or buy $500 or more of Bitcoin on a monthly basis, you're paying too much in fees at the big exchanges. Level created a program where you pay a flat $9 monthly fee and you can trade as much as you want, and you only pay that $9 monthly fee. So if you're buying or trading more than $500 of Bitcoin a month, you should go use Level. They save you money on fees. Flat $9 monthly fee, and you can trade as much as you want. Stop paying tons of fees to really large exchanges. Go check out Level. L V L dot C O slash P O M P. L V L dot C O slash P O M P.

• 2:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Flat $9 monthly fee, trade as much Bitcoin as you want, and only pay the $9. Our last sponsor is Bitsy. The Bitsy exchange allows you to trade confidently. They're the leader in futures. They're basically pioneering something called Futures 2.0. With Bitsy, you can trade next level futures where you freely choose and combine your margin and settlement assets and trade with up to 100x leverage. So this is something that's more risky, but it's the futures market. You can also sign up for a Bitsy Elite Membership that gives you unbeatable discounts and bonuses across the Bitsy Exchange, their O T C platform, and much more. So if you want to trade futures, go check out the Bitsy Exchange.

• 3:41Anthony Pompliano?

  It's for B T S E, Bitsy. Go to Bitsy dot com slash P O M P. B T S E dot com slash P O M P, and you'll get a 10% discount on a Bitsy Elite Membership. So B T S E dot com slash P O M P, you'll get 10% discount. Go trade futures on Bitsy. All right, that's it for the sponsors for today. Let's get into this episode with Roger. I hope you guys enjoy this.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 4:31Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, we should be, we should get started here as people kind of trickle in. But maybe let's just start with your background and kind of where you grew up, what you did before you'd ever heard of Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies or anything.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I was born and raised in Silicon Valley. Didn't seem like any sort of a special place to me because I was, I was born there, but I was around computers my whole life. I ran one of the more popular bulletin board systems in Silicon Valley. For those of us that are old enough to remember what a BBS was, for those that are old enough to remember before the internet, people ran little local bulletin board systems on their computers where everybody in your local town would connect to, and you could only have one person connected at a time per phone line that the BBS had. And, but you had a lot more of a sense of community on these BBSs than you have on the internet now because with the internet, anyone can be from anywhere, whereas on BBSs, you knew that most of the people were from your own little local town.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Anyhow, I was kind of coming of age right when the dot com bubble was bursting and all these businesses were going bankrupt and they were having going out of business sales where you could buy, you know, their, their computer parts for pennies on the dollar. I wanted a hard drive for my own computer and I went to one of these auctions and they were selling nine gigabytes of the hard drives for a hundred dollars each. And this was when eBay was just getting started. This is probably 1998 or so. And I saw that these same hard drives that were a hundred dollars each at the going out of business sale were almost $400 each on eBay. So I took all of the money that I had saved up, which is about $1,400 I'd earned mostly from changing oil at a Jiffy Loop type place as a teenager, and then bought all those hard drives and then I resold them on eBay. And this is before PayPal and I remember.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  People literally had to go to the post office, get a postal money order, and then ship the postal money order in the mail with a stamp, not email. And you'd wait for the postal money order to show up. And then you'd have to go to the bank and deposit it in the bank. There were none of these, you know, there was no iPhone. You couldn't just take a picture of the check and deposit it. It was a giant headache and I started selling these computer parts all over the world because I figured out I could make a lot more money doing that. Then, you know, going to college and getting a job at some, you know, big company. Uh, and so been around computers my whole life and uh, started a company called Memory Dealers, selling computer memory mainly from these companies that were running a business or updating their systems. And we were selling this memory all over the world. And a lot of people won't realize this, but before,

• 6:58Speaker 02

  right now, if anybody has a stolen credit card, one of the top things people try and do with a stolen credit card is buy cryptocurrency. But back then, the top thing that people were trying to do with stolen credit cards would buy computer memory. And so we were selling computer memory and every single day we had people with stolen credit cards trying to trick us into selling our computer memory to them with these stolen credit cards. So I understood firsthand what a giant headache it was dealing with online payments on the internet and payment fraud and chargebacks and all this nonsense. And then, you know, years later, when Bitcoin came along, I was like, wow, this solves every single online payment problem, uh, that people. I remember when PayPal first came along too. Actually, I was one of PayPal's biggest, you know, uh, you know, affiliate marketers there, getting everybody to sign up for PayPal. They were paying you, you know, five dollars a person that would sign up.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  And I got hundreds, if not thousands of people to sign up for PayPal there. And then for those that are all left to remember eGold, it was the same thing when eGold came along. I was a giant fan of eGold. And I sold my computer memory for eGold. People paid me with eGold. For those that don't know, eGold was this awesome platform that allowed you to buy and sell things on the internet, but pay in X number of dollars worth of gold. And the gold physically stayed put in, you know, different vaults, but you would just transfer the ownership of the gold around online. And that was really starting to get traction and really picking up steam. Until the US government came in and stole all the gold. And I didn't, you know, I was real young. I didn't have a huge amount of gold. I had a few thousand dollars worth. Um, but that was gone. And so because some people on the platform use some of the, you know, eGold payment services

• 8:24Speaker 02

  for some bad things, the government stole everybody's gold and then tossed the founder of it in jail. And so that made me realize like as wonderful as gold is as money, is if you're having to store it in somebody else's vault and trust them with it. You're kind of at their mercy. And so I lost all my gold and so did every other gold customer. And then maybe if you jump through a million hoops and filled out a bunch of forms for the lawyers, maybe, maybe a decade later, you might have gotten some of your money back. But I never, you know, followed up on that just because it was too much work. It's a war of attrition there. But been involved in tech and payments for, you know, decades. I'm one of the older people in the cryptocurrency space. So that's a little bit about me, although we left out one of the more interesting facts, maybe in my life. So I wasn't born a libertarian, but I started studying these

• 9:09Speaker 02

  economics books as a young man. And the more economics I studied, the more I realized, wow, government intervening in the economy is just retarding the world's rate of economic growth and preventing the world from being as prosperous and wealthy as it otherwise would have been. And it became really, really clear as I studied this, I thought, wow, if everybody realized this, they would want the government to intervene in the economy a whole lot less. So the world can be at a better place. So maybe saying I made a mistake is a little bit too strong of a word, but I took an interesting course in life and I ran for California State Assembly as a libertarian. And my campaign platform was that I would repeal as many laws as I possibly could. I would repeal as many taxes as I possibly could. And even if I were to be elected, I said I wouldn't accept any salary whatsoever, because my potential salary would come from taxpayers. And maybe

• 9:54Speaker 02

  those taxpayers wouldn't want to pay my salary. So I don't think that it would be legitimate for the government to force people to pay my salary if they don't want to. So I said, even if I was elected, I wouldn't accept a salary. And then in my campaign, I got to debate the Republican and Democratic candidates, and I called the ATF and FBI, a bunch of jackbooted thugs and murderers, and referenced all these children that they murdered in a church in Waco, Texas. And yeah, the parents were, you know, religious nuts. But even if the parents are religious nuts, you don't burn to death all their kids in a church. And for those that aren't old enough to remember, in like 1994 or something like that, there was this, you know, church group in Waco, Texas, and the United States federal government literally burnt to death, I think it was like something like 30 kids were less than 12 years old that were in the building, and about 100

• 10:37Speaker 02

  people total. So absolute, you know, black eye in American history there. And anyhow, the ATF and FBI don't like it when you call them jackbooted thugs and murderers. I wound up being the only person in the entire country to be prosecuted for selling these firecrackers on eBay. I was buying them initially from Cabela's Sporting Goods catalog and then reselling them on eBay. So buying from one website, selling on another. Uh, I didn't know I needed any sort of permit or license. The company I was buying them from, I asked them specifically, do I need a license to sell? They said, no, they're legal in all fifty states uh for agricultural use only. So I put right there in the ads of, you know, these are for agriculture use only. Of course, everybody that knew that was buying the knew that like, yeah, use them for agriculture. But they also work just like a firecracker and you know, people like firecrackers. And this is back when eBay had a guns and ammo section.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  Anyhow, really long story to a shorter story. I wound up doing ten months in federal prison for selling these firecrackers on eBay. And even while I was in prison, the company that was uh manufacturing them, the company I was buying them from, were were still selling the exact same product with no license uh while I was in prison for doing the exact same thing. So it left a really, really bad taste in my mouth for uh uh, you know, American law enforcement. Cause I've been brought up being told, oh, in America, yeah, freedom of speech. You can say whatever you want and you're allowed to do that. And turns out uh maybe you have a little bit more freedom of speech in America than, you know, North Korea or or other places, but not that much. And look what they're doing to Julian Assange now or Edward Snowden for telling the taxpayers what the government was doing with their tax money. It's just a crazy, crazy world.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  And uh anyhow, the day I was allowed to leave the country after my uh ten month federal prison sentence, uh I left the United States, haven't lived in the United States ever since. Renounced my US Citizenship Act in twenty fourteen and uh, yeah, that brings us, I guess, to where we are today, so.

• 12:19Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's back up for a second, right? Ju- just so people have a understanding of timeline. Uh, you grew up in Silicon Valley. At what point uh did you actually run? What what was the year that you ran for uh political seat?

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the election was November of two, the year two thousand.

• 12:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and then uh when were you um arrested or or tried on the uh on the federal charges?

• 12:40Speaker 02

  My, I forget the exact date of when everything started. My prison sentence started in 2002, and I got out in 2003, and it took some time for everything to, you know, wind through the gears of injustice there.

• 12:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Okay. And then in terms of that, there's a, you get out of prison in 2003, obviously you've got this kind of sour taste in your mouth with the government, law enforcement, kind of everything you just articulated. Bitcoin doesn't come around till 2008, 2009. What are you doing in the five-year kind of window between getting out of prison and Bitcoin never being released into the world?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we should probably talk about some of the books that I read during that time that really influenced me. So like, one of those books was Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I'm sure lots of people are familiar with Neal Stephenson, one of the best science fiction authors around. And in this book, basically, there are all these people that are using this. It's been more than a decade since I read the book, almost two decades probably. But I think it was called Cyber Cash in the book, and basically it was this peer-to-peer electronic cash that people were using on the internet to buy and sell things. And mainly in the book, they were using it to pay for secret data centers where people could host their, you know, data beyond the reach of governments to be able to control or censor or shut down these websites and that sort of thing. And it was really, really interesting. And then another book was Future Imperfect by David Friedman,

• 13:59Speaker 02

  in which it talks all about public key cryptography and how it works. And he's a physicist by training, but he's, I guess, a teacher's law by profession. And so the example he gave was once anonymous peer-to-peer digital cash comes around, he was gonna, he was talking about how people could practice law without a license on the internet and using digital signatures that you could prove that you're dealing with the same person over and over. And so he basically described something like the Silk Road, but for lawyers to give legal advice rather than drug dealers to sell drugs. But it was just so incredibly fascinating how this stuff is going to become possible once, and all the pieces of the puzzle were in place, except for the anonymous peer-to-peer electronic cash.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  And, and so I was, you know, basically just kind of waiting in my life for the peer-to-peer anonymous digital cash to come into existence. And then when I heard about Bitcoin, Boom, there it was, this thing I'd been waiting for. But to answer your question, in the interim, I've been focusing on my business. So Memory Dealers grew up to, you know, have million, multiple millions of dollars in sales. Every single year, we employed, you know, dozens of people around the world, had, you know, thousands of happy customers all around the world. Everybody from NASA to the Bureau of Prisons were our customers for our parts.

• 15:10Anthony Pompliano?

  What were you selling? What is Memory Dealers?

• 15:13Speaker 02

  So initially, we were selling memory, computer memory. And then later on, we actually wound up focusing a lot more on fiber optic transceivers. And so we worked with a number of contract manufacturers and we started selling Agile Star branded optical transceivers. And if you go on eBay today, you'll still see a whole bunch of our used parts being sold all over the world. So it was really fun to see. Just, that's one of the things I love the most about business, is you get to meet people, you get to meet people all over the world, and you get to have friends all over the world that you deal with over and over. So mainly, we started selling optical transceivers for like the, the, the rest of that time, even though the name of the company was still Memory Dealers. We still sold memory, but the main product were these optical transceivers. And so I had enough capital and money from that. So when Bitcoin came along, boom, I knew this is going to change everything. So first step was to buy a bunch of Bitcoin.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Next step was to start investing and helping build up all the businesses that would enable Bitcoin to be useful for people in their actual lives to buy and sell things on the internet. And everybody loves to talk about, you know, I'm going to buy a Lambo and move by sick crypto games. Well, I had a Lamborghini before Bitcoin. In fact, I had two before Bitcoin had ever even been invented ever. And then the one that I had, once Bitcoin came along, I sold it so I could buy more Bitcoins. I went the reverse route in that.

• 16:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So the way that I want to kind of do this conversation, and for those listening, Roger and I see eye to eye on a lot of problems in the world. And, you know, I think we both believe in a digital currency future. We've got definite, you know, different points of view or perspectives in some aspects of how that gets implemented. But what I really want to talk about first is what are those problems in the world? Then the early days of Bitcoin and kind of Roger's work there and kind of a lot of the insights and stories and effort that many people may not be aware of just because they weren't around.

• 16:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Attention at that point. And then at the end of the conversation, we're going to get into Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash, a little bit of a technical conversation and kind of what the future looks like. So let's start with, I think, the things that 99% we were joking before, like 99% of people watching this and listening to this are going to all shake their head. Yes, yes, yes. Which is the problems in the in the legacy finance world and kind of the non Bitcoin or crypto world. Just talk to me a little bit about like, what were those issues that you had identified before you ever saw Bitcoin? And then what are the things that you knew could be fixed with a digital currency if it was implemented the correct way?

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. So one example of that, that I think probably just about everybody listening to this will instinctually just feel isn't right is is inflation, right? When the government prints money, it's basically stealing from everybody else that's using that money at the same time. And everybody kind of feels and knows that, but it's actually even more insidious than that. I remember as a young man, I was reading a Milton Friedman's book, I think it was Free to Choose. And in that book, he talked about a concept called bracket creep. And I I wasn't familiar with that at all, but it really made me think, oh, that's why government is incentivized even more so to inflate the currency. And so everybody knows if the government prints money, they can then spend it on, you know, their military staff or, you know, or maybe schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, like they can spend on everything.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  And everybody is kind of aware of that. But it's much, much sneakier than that. So in America and most countries in the world, there's an income tax. And the income tax is graduated. The more money you earn, the the higher rate you're going to pay in taxes. So if you earn $100,000, you're going to pay a higher rate than somebody that's earning $50,000. And it goes on and up, up and up. And so earning $100,000 today isn't anywhere near as much money as earning $100,000 back in the 1980s was. So what the government is incentivized to do with inflation is year after year, if you have, you know, your spending power is decreased by a couple of percentage points, before you know it, earning $100,000 isn't that big amount of money. But if you go from earning $50,000 to $100,000 over, you know, 10 years, now suddenly you're in a much, much higher tax bracket.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  But you're not actually earning any more money, but you're having to pay a higher percentage of what you're earning to the government. So governments are incentivized through inflation to bump people into higher tax brackets so the governments can have a higher percentage of people's money. And I didn't even realize that that was the case until I was reading about this from Milton Friedman. And so that's something that I think a lot of people, when they hear about that, think, oh, that's a sneaky way to raise people's taxes, not just through the inflation, you know, undermining their buying power, but using inflation to bump people into higher tax bracket rates. So that's a really sneaky way that governments all over the world are able to take more people's money. And Bitcoin can help put a stop to that, or any hard money where there's a limited supply can help put a stop to that. If you have something with a limited supply, governments can't inflate it anymore. They

• 19:50Speaker 02

  can't bump you into a higher tax bracket without you actually having, be able to earn more money each year.

• 19:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And so there's obviously the inflation problem. I think, again, every single person listening to this will say, yes, that makes a ton of sense. There's this element of censorship or surveillance. Maybe talk a little bit about how the traditional financial system has issues that many people might not think are a big deal because they feel like, oh, if I'm not doing anything wrong, then, you know, why do I care? But obviously, we've seen in other countries, whether it's in the Hong Kong situation or elsewhere, where that centralized control and surveillance and, you know, issues that can stem from that. So kind of what are your thoughts there? What had you thought of and paid attention to before you saw Bitcoin?

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, everything seems fine until it's not. And so I saw firsthand with a lot of these, and eGold was that great example of it. They literally stole all the customers' gold because some of the people were using it for payments that the government didn't like. So everything in life is just fine until it's not. And that's why, you know, it pays to be prepared because everything's fine. You know, I'm here in the Caribbean, everything's fine. But if a major hurricane comes, it's not going to be fine. So I need to prepare now and have some extra food and water and things available in case there is some, you know, major, major disaster. And the same is true, you know, in the different monetary systems around the world. So I was born in 1979. So within my lifetime,

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Uh, the US dollar was worth at one point less than the Zimbabwe dollar, right? One Zimbabwe dollar used to equal more than one US dollar. And now today, you know, it's a couple trillion Zimbabwe dollars probably for one US dollar. And that's an example of how things overnight can change. I'm sure that, you know, the Germans in the Weimar Republic weren't expecting their currency just go to absolutely nothing. You have to carry around wheelbarrows of it. Don't think it can't happen to you. And that's why it's so important to be prepared to have something that's there and is is safe. And so traditionally, that's been hard money like gold and silver. But more recently, it's now gold, silver and cryptocurrency because there's this other option. And all over the world, people used to use gold and silver as money.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  And then later they started using banknotes for it. And then governments managed to successfully basically sever the tie between gold and silver and the banknotes. Now the banknotes, you know, aren't tied to gold or silver anymore. But now we have this wonderful thing in the form of cryptocurrency. And as long as we don't allow whatever things out there in the world to sever the cryptocurrency asset itself from whatever IOUs or whatever ways people are using it, we won't have the same problem that we had when the gold, you know, the dollar went off the gold standard or when, you know, Roosevelt literally told everybody, private citizens, you're no longer allowed to own gold, turn in your gold, we're going to take it all. Like if if everybody's using custodial solutions for cryptocurrency stuff, the government can do the exact same thing. So it's important to have cryptocurrencies available where people can hold and use

• 22:46Speaker 02

  and being in control of it themselves and not just trust it with some, you know, central custodian like they used to do with gold and then have the gold IOUs. And before you knew it, the dollar and the gold were separated.

• 22:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you talked earlier about kind of your experience with e-gold. And for those that didn't hear it, it was basically gold sitting in a vault. And then rather than paper claims on the gold, sort of a gold-backed dollar, it was basically electronic claims from overgeneralized description. And you could trade around those electronic claims on that gold that sat in a centralized vault. That system fell apart because there was centralized control and the government stepped in and ultimately confiscated, arrested people, et cetera. What was your relationship, if any, with kind of traditional gold? It's not the e-gold, but did you ever hold regular gold, buy gold, interested in it at all?

• 23:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, my, my parents, actually, my mother had a purse in her closet was filled with a whole bunch of pre nineteen, I don't nineteen sixty-seven, like two silver dollars and quarters or whatever the year was that they stopped actually being made of silver. And she had a whole bunch of those and I, I thought that that was really interesting as a kid. But actually, more recently, when I first got involved in Bitcoin, I helped set up the Silicon Valley Bitcoin meetup and then the Tokyo Bitcoin meetup and there was a real interesting guy that showed up to the Tokyo Bitcoin meetup, this is back in two thousand and eleven. And, uh, I don't have one in front of me, but everybody's familiar with a penny from the US, right? Everyone knows what a penny looks like. In Japan, there's a one yen coin that's worth about a penny today.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  And it's, it's, it's made of, it feels like it's a piece of plastic coated in aluminum or something. It feels even cheaper than a penny, if that's possible. And, and for the most part, you know, they have the, you know, leave one, take one type jars around like it's, it's worth, it's a penny, so it's not much. But what this guy did, he showed up to the Bitcoin meetup and he had a US silver dollar from, you know, nineteen whatever. And he had a one yen Japanese coin for right before World War Two. And today, a one yen coin is worth one penny and it's, it's really, it's, it's hard to overstate how chintzy a little tiny cheap piece of a, of, I, I think it might actually be plastic inside, to be honest. Looks like it's plastic coated in aluminum foil. It's a really

• 24:52Speaker 02

  cheapy little thing. But he brought a one yen coin for right before World War Two. And back then, a one yen coin was one ounce of silver. So he had a US silver dollar, which was one ounce of silver. And a one yen coin, which was one ounce of silver. And, and right now, the exchange rate for, you know, dollars to yen, one US dollar is around a hundred and ten yen. And so a one ounce silver coin is around twenty dollars. A one yen coin today, right? You didn't have to have, what, twenty thousand of them there to, to be, but what it means is that one dollar used to equal one yen. And for someone who's been living in Japan for a long time, the current exchange rate's over a hundred to one, but it used to be one to one. That was a real eye opener for me. So what it means, and the US government, we know, has inflated the currency a huge amount since World War Two, just

• 25:37Speaker 02

  huge amount. The Japanese government inflated the currency even More is what it meant. And then he also had the one yen paper notes, the paper bills. And he showed me this. He explained to me that, you know, during the war, people that saved the one yen silver coins after the war, they still had some assets. The people that saved the one yen paper notes had nothing after the war. They had absolutely nothing. They were wiped out. And so that's why it's so important to, if you're trying to store wealth, you have to store it in an actual asset, not an IOU representation of that asset. So, uh, it was a fantastic example, uh, I think of just how destructive governments inflating the currency can be and how destructive to, to the world's economy,

• 26:18Speaker 02

  but to individual lives of the people that are living in the world. And this is from somebody that, you know, his family had lived to that and he had these examples. And that's why he was so interested in Bitcoin, uh, early on. And I thought that was a really powerful example, uh, and, and it had a big impact on me.

• 26:33Anthony Pompliano?

  So I want to start talking about Bitcoin now, but before we do that, uh, everyone who's watching on the live stream, please hit the like button, that thumbs up so that more people on YouTube can watch this and we, and we can kind of share this information. Roger, you were, uh, very early in Bitcoin and I think early in two different things. So one was timing, right? In terms of, uh, my understanding is about 2011, uh, when you really kind of made a big move into Bitcoin. But two, also early in conviction, meaning that you didn't just say, oh, this is an interesting thing. Let me put, you know, $20 in and see what happens. You made a pretty substantial shift in, in, in your, uh, wealth and, and kind of your portfolio, if you will, at the time. Talk first about like, when was the first time that you came across Bitcoin?

• 27:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you read the white paper? Did somebody tell you about it? And what was your reaction?

• 27:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. So like everybody, the first time I heard about it, I didn't pay as much attention as I would have liked to. So, um, I was listening to a libertarian radio show called Free Talk Live out of New Hampshire. And they mentioned it in reference to the Silk Road and I was, you know, eating breakfast at the time and I just kind of, you know, Googled it real quickly. And the price of Bitcoin at that point, there wasn't really a price. The price was like somewhere between one and 10 cents. And there wasn't an actual price. It was just kind of a range, like whatever someone's willing to pay for it in that ballpark. Is what the price was and I yeah, I only spent maybe five minutes looking at it. I thought, oh, this is kind of interesting, but too bad. Nobody's using it. I didn't dig in deep and I didn't fully understand how it's this decentralized system and can't be shut down or controlled. And then

• 28:02Speaker 02

  uh, that was late in 2010 and then early in 2011, I heard about it again, and then I Googled it again. And that's when I figured out, I put all the pieces together. Oh, there's a limited supply. Oh, it's a distributed network. Nobody can shut it down like this. This, this is amazing. And that's when uh, I literally got so excited about Bitcoin that uh, I, I, I I'm not exaggerating here. I, I'm someone who needs my full night of sleep every night, but I was planning to go to work that morning when I, when I read about it. I didn't go to work. I stayed home all day reading about it. I stayed up all night that night, reading about it into the next day until maybe four P M. The next day. And then went to sleep for only maybe half an hour and woke up again and had to read more about it.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  And stayed up all night again the next night until maybe 10 A M. The next morning and then went only went to sleep for, you know, maybe 45 minutes. And that went on for about a week of me only sleeping about, you know, an hour a night. And then after about a week of hardly sleeping at all, didn't leave my house once that entire time, only microwaved some food and just focused, you know, on reading everything I could find on the internet about Bitcoin. Uh, I got really, really, really sick from lack of sleep. Then I literally had to call my friend and say, I lost my voice too, even though I wasn't talking to anybody. I was only reading. I called and said, help me. I, I need you to take me to the hospital and she was nice enough to come and drive to my house and uh, and pick me up and drive me to the hospital and they gave me some kind of sedative and

• 29:22Speaker 02

  I passed out for, I don't know, maybe 18 hours straight or something like that. And then I woke up and it's been all Bitcoin, uh, all day, every day for the last decade. And the guy that actually drove me to the hospital that day, uh, he now owns uh, one of the, the main Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum accepting restaurants in Silicon Valley. So if you like Korean barbecue, you can head on over to Korean Spring Barbecue right there in Santa Clara. It's fantastic food. And you can pay for it in cryptocurrency as well. And uh, you can tell them you heard the story about the time you drove me to the hospital in 2011 because I was so excited about Bitcoin.

• 29:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, that's a great story. Um, and, and so when you're sitting and reading for that week and, and you're kind of diving into all the information. What's your reaction? Like, why are you so excited about the information that you're consumed?

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I've always been interested in people having control over their own lives, being able to do what they want with their own money and their own career and their own jobs, their own buying and selling of things. And we've had the internet for a long time where people were able to share information for the most part unrestricted. And there's platforms where people can buy and sell things and advertise their things. But the payments, that was always the missing piece of the puzzle, right? If PayPal closes your account, you can't use it anymore. Bank of America closes your account, you can't use it anymore. If you get on the, you know, OFAC blacklist, you can't do anything anymore. And now suddenly we had censorship resistant money that people could use to buy and sell things. It's like, I never bought or sold a single thing on the Silk Road. But philosophically, it was one of the most interesting things that had ever happened in my entire lifetime.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  And I was, I spent a huge amount of time reading their forums and looking at all over the website and keeping track of the different stuff that people were starting to buy and sell. And that's what kicked off the entire Bitcoin and cryptocurrency ecosystem where people buying and selling things on the Silk Road using Bitcoins for payments. And back, everybody today knows that Bitcoins aren't anonymous and aren't, are very easily traceable by law enforcement. But back then, everybody thought that Bitcoin was basically anonymous. In fact, like, most of the time, it was even advertised as anonymous. I don't even think they were really particularly using the word pseudo anonymous. Like, it wasn't until much later, people realized just how public the transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain are. But back then, everybody thought that it was basically anonymous.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  So people were just, you know, going wild, buying and selling things on these different dark net markets. It was just such an interesting, interesting thing to watch happen. And that's what kicked off Bitcoin and gave it its initial price. And that's what made it grow and grow and grow. And there's such an interesting, and so my, my fear at that point, when people were only using Bitcoin to buy and sell, you know, cocaine or marijuana or different things on these things as well, governments don't like that. Governments can demonize that. So my goal was to get people to use Bitcoin in commerce for things that aren't illegal. And so I had a long background in e-commerce, buying and selling things. So I set up this website called bitcoinstore.com, which was the very first mainstream website selling products that people would actually be interested in. Because before, I was selling fiber optic transceivers. Not too many people are interested.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  We advertise, I put up a billboard in Silicon Valley in 2011 saying, "We accept Bitcoin for, you know, fiber optic transceivers. Get your, you know, X2s and Zenpacs and SFP pluses from us." Nobody even knows what those are unless you're really deep in that industry. But so what I did is I got, I made contracts with Ingram Micro and Tech Data, which are the first and the third largest consumer electronics distributors in the entire United States. And I listed their entire line cards for sale for Bitcoin. And we only accepted Bitcoin, and this is back when the price of Bitcoin was like, you know, 12 bucks each or something like that. And so now there are more than half a million consumer electronics products that you could buy for Bitcoin. And we listed them all at our cost. So actually, our prices for the most part, on most products, probably 80% of the products, our prices were cheaper than Amazon.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  So that was a really big deal. So you could buy all these things more than, you know, any computer, phone, any computer gadget you would want, which is what all crypto people are interested in. You could buy them for Bitcoin at prices cheaper than Amazon. And so now suddenly, we were getting attention from Fox News and CNN and the Wall Street Journal and everybody, because we were selling millions of dollars worth of these parts. And we, I was on there in social media, you know, tagging Amazon and tagging Newegg and tagging Tiger Direct saying, hey, look at all this stuff we're selling for Bitcoin. You guys are missing out on all these sales. You guys should be accepting Bitcoin too. And that's what really helped drive off this worldwide adoption of Bitcoin being used in commerce. And once Bitcoin was used in normal commerce, where you had the Microsofts and the Expedia's and the Newegg's accepting Bitcoin, it was then much, much harder for the politicians to demonize Bitcoin.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a currency only for drug dealers and money launderers. You could say, no, that's a currency for people to book their next vacation on, you know, Expedia. Or that's a currency for people to buy their new, you know, home, home computer system on Newegg, right? Or Tiger Director, all these things. So it made it much, much, much harder for governments to demonize Bitcoin or try and shut it down. So everyone loves talking about censorship resistance of Bitcoin. I think one of the things that really helps with the censorship resistance is mass adoption. The more people you have using it, the more difficult it is to censor. And there's a great quote from Mike Hearn, another early Bitcoiner. He said, even outlaws can't use an outlaw currency. And so if the currency is only used for illegal things, then you can't use it anymore.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  If you want to use a currency for illegal things, it has to be legal, useful for legal things as well, just like the US dollar. You can use it to buy cocaine. You can use it to buy dog food. And if it wasn't usable for legal things, nobody would be able to use the US dollar to buy illegal things either. It has to be for both, or it'll be for neither.

• 34:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you kind of wrapped your head around this and you're like, wow, this is really impressive. I think that there's a big, big future for this. I'm going to intentionally make a move into Bitcoin. Was your first inclination to buy a bunch of Bitcoin to set up the story you just described, where you would just accept it for parts? Like, what were the, what was like the first thing that you actually did? Once you kind of had made the decision, okay, like this is the future and I want to go and be a part of that?

• 35:12Speaker 02

  It was all of those things in parallel, but I remember one kind of additional turning point. I was talking on the phone to a friend of mine, telling him, and this, I just made my first Bitcoin purchase and I was just getting excited, you know, into all this. And it was, you know, a big purchase, but I was telling him all about Bitcoin and he was not convinced. And he told me very sarcastically at the end of our, you know, maybe 45 minute long phone call, where I'm telling him all about Bitcoins, he says, Roger, if you really think Bitcoin's so great, why don't you buy more of it? And, you know, he said it in a real snarky way. When he said that to me on the phone, I told him, you're right. And so I went out the next day and I bought even more Bitcoin. So I should thank him for doing that. But to answer your question, it was all those things, right?

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Buy some Bitcoin and then build all the software tools to make it useful for people to use Bitcoin in their daily lives for absolutely everything.

• 36:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And when we talk about buying a lot, are you thinking of it in terms of a lot of dollars? A lot of your net worth? Like, how did you think about kind of the risk reward? So it sounds like intellectually convinced that this is something that solves an issue that I've been paying attention to. I'm very intellectually curious about this. I'm intrigued by this type of solution. I'm kind of convinced enough that it has legs that I'm willing to put my own capital at risk. But did you have kind of it as like an investment idea? Was it like, let me go convert all of my fiat currency into Bitcoin, you know, on day one? Like, just how did you think about what risk you were willing to take at that point? Given that, you know, most people would have argued like, there was a very, very high chance, I don't know, 99% chance it was going to fail, right?

• 36:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And it kind of wouldn't be, it wouldn't actually become what it has become.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  Yes, I put just about all of my liquid net worth at that time into Bitcoin and Bitcoin startups and just plowed every, every last bit of everything into that time, energy and money that I could. So, and one of the very first, in fact, the first investment I made was into a company called BitInstant, which allowed anybody at any Walgreens or 7-Eleven or Walmart to walk in with a handful of cash. And within an hour or two, they'd have Bitcoins right there in their wallet. And so it made it really, really easy for people to buy their Bitcoins and then they could go and do what they want. And there was this, you know, wave of, you know, merchant adoption and people that were getting more and more excited about using it for payments. Because anybody that had been involved in e-commerce, like, payments are a problem. Another interesting example of that, and I still remember this to this very day, it's been, this is pre-Bitcoin.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  Maybe this is 15 years ago, but I got an email from a guy. And I, to this day, I feel sad for the guy. He emailed me and his email started out, he says, "I am in Nigeria and I know you don't believe me, but I honestly want to buy some of your optical transceivers or computer memory." I forget what parts he wanted, but, and because, you know, for better or worse, Nigeria has such a horrible online reputation, like almost all the credit card fraud and stuff is coming out of Nigeria. So, what this guy did, he sent me the email and he said, "I'm going to pay you everything in advance. Buy wire transfer, once you receive the payment, you can wait a couple more days and make sure the wire doesn't get reversed. And then you can send me the parts that I'm ordering." And I, and it turned out his order was totally legitimate.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  We got the wire, everything was fine, we sent him the parts and I think he ordered a couple more times after that. But I thought, what an absolute headache for that poor guy, being in Nigeria. And anytime he wants to buy anything from somebody, he literally has to send them an email saying, "I'm in Nigeria and I know you don't believe me, but here's what I want." So imagine if that guy, he's probably a giant Bitcoin, you know, cryptocurrency fan today, because now he can use it for all the payments and he can contact these people outside Nigeria and say, "Hey, I want to buy something from you, I'm going to pay you in advance from cryptocurrency. My shipping address is in Nigeria, but I'm paying you in advance for cryptocurrency, so you don't have anything to worry about." And people would say, "Sure, no problem, it's not even an issue." Whereas back then, even for a wire transfer, you're going to be skeptical, because they have these elaborate other, you know, schemes that they do with, you know, tricking people to send fake wire transfers to the wrong person and whatnot.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  So anyhow, cryptocurrencies just solve so many problems for online payments. And that's, that's what started the whole thing. The Silk Road is what got this entire ecosystem started, without any doubt.

• 39:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And so many people who are early, you know, one, didn't have a capital base like you had, obviously. But two, when they started to buy Bitcoin or acquire Bitcoin through earning or mining, or whatever their their method was. And let's say that they started doing that five cents, 10 cents, a dollar, five dollars. When all of a sudden it's hitting 20, 25 dollars, if you were getting Bitcoin at, you know, five or 10 cents. It looks like, wow, my, in US dollar terms, you know, I just made an absolute killing financially. Why not sell? Why not kind of walk away in terms of seeing the US dollar value of? How many Bitcoin you had going up so much and so aggressively over the coming, you know, two, three, four, five years? Why not at some point just take the profits and go do something else?

• 40:01Speaker 02

  Because, well, and you could go do something else, but I can't think of anything that's more interesting. That I could have an impact on than cryptocurrencies and peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world. I, AI is probably going to be more interesting, but other than investing in AI startups. I'm not going to have, you know, a much of a direct impact there, whereas cryptocurrency and peer-to-peer cash world, I can have a big. Not only can I have, I have had a big impact on that adoption in the world and especially back then. I remember very clearly when Bitcoin hit $30 for the first time in June of 2011. The user experience, like it wasn't as refined, but the transactions were literally basically instant. Not basically free, they were free for just about all transactions all time. If you hadn't moved your Bitcoins more than, you know, within the last, I forget how many blocks.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  The transaction was completely free, it's in zero satoshis, totally free. So the transactions were totally free, basically instant and irreversible. That was amazing and the supply was limited. Why would I want to sell those for a bunch of dollars that you're guaranteed the US dollar is going to go down in value over time? You're not guaranteed the cryptocurrency is going to go up, but you are guaranteed the dollar is going to go down. And at that point, it's for sure Bitcoin looked like it had this amazing, amazing, amazing future in front of it. Because the user experience was so incredibly good. There's no way you're going to get me to sell any of those back into dollars. That would be a, that would be ridiculous. And, and I know I'm not a professional trader. I've just been a long-term value holder. I look at the things that are going to be the most useful to the most number of people around the world. I'm going to hold that for the long term because the long-term price trend of those things are going to be up.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  The things that aren't useful to people, well, I, maybe I'll sell those, so.

• 41:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and so at some point, you go from what I'll consider just one person who's buying Bitcoin, investing in companies, to you end up getting the title of Bitcoin Jesus, right? And that was, I think, a combination of the work that you had done in investing in companies, kind of the amount of time and energy you had spent going and telling people about Bitcoin and trying to convince them that this was the future. Tell us the story of like, what was the first time you ever heard that as a description for yourself or a name for yourself? Kind of what was your reaction when somebody started to call you Bitcoin Jesus?

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, two questions. So the first time I heard about it or heard someone refer to me, I think, was I was at like a, there was another startup that I invested in, cryptocurrency startup, and there was like a barbecue with like the founders and some of the other investors. And it was this, you know, beautiful lake house up in Washington State, and a bunch of high school kids from the neighboring house had come over and they were, you know, maybe 15, 20 high school kids or something. And I was telling all these kids about Bitcoin and setting up wallets for them and giving them all some Bitcoin on their wallets. And they were all really excited because, you know, young people, digital currency, yeah, this makes sense. Why would I, why would I use, you know, anything other than, you know, online stuff? And so they were all really excited about it. And I was telling them about, you know, you can use BitInstant to go out and buy more,

• 42:58Speaker 02

  you know, Bitcoin at the 7-Eleven tomorrow. And all these kids were saying, yeah, I'm gonna go out and buy more. This is great. Like, you know, these kids maybe were too young to open a bank account or get a credit card. So this was finally a payment method they can use. And then one of the other adults kind of walked up and, you know, I was surrounded by all these kids and setting them up on their phones and sending them some Bitcoin. One of the adults said, Roger, it's like you're, it's like you're a Bitcoin Jesus and you have all your disciples around you because all these kids were there, you know, real excited about it too. And I guess somehow along the way, it just kind of more and more people started calling me that. But I never called myself that. I didn't choose that name for myself. I'm an atheist and if you look at what happened to the original Jesus, he was murdered by the government of his day. So things didn't turn out too well for the original Jesus.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  I hope not to meet the same fate there. But it was basically impossible from, you know, 2011 until...

• 43:50Speaker 02

  And still to this day, for the most part, it's mostly impossible unless I'm in a real public setting that's not crypto I want to be left on. But for sure, up until probably 2015 or 16, it was impossible to meet me and not hear about Bitcoin. And if you would allow me, I would set you up with a wallet and send you some. It was impossible to meet me through that point. And it wasn't until the fees on Bitcoin started to become a problem and the blocks became full, that it was a little bit harder for me to start to continue giving Bitcoin to anybody I met. But that's, that's maybe that'll be part two of our conversation.

• 44:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, what was the thing that drove you to do that? Right, because I think that that is, it takes a certain type of personality. It takes a certain type of life experience and a certain type of person to not only say, hey, this is something that I personally am interested in, want to do, but I'm actually going to go. And every person I meet, I'm going to tell them about it. I'm going to give them a wallet. I'm going to send them some Bitcoin. Like, what drove you to do that? Or why do you think you had the inclination to do that versus, you know, the hundreds or thousands of other people who were into Bitcoin at the time, but they weren't doing it?

• 44:50Speaker 02

  I think it was every single thing that I was interested in life is pushed forward by people adopting Bitcoin, or cryptocurrency now, in actual, you know, day to day life in commerce. And so those things, if I had to, you know, name off some of them, it's like, I'm incredibly interested in the singularity, right? When computers exceed human intelligence, wow, what an exciting, exciting world we're going to be in there. And so the best way to speed, or one of the ways to speed up the advent of, you know, superhuman intelligences is through more economic growth, right? The faster the economy grows, the more resources there are to devote to this sort of things, the faster we're going to get there. So, and cryptocurrency helps enable that because it enables more economic freedom. More economic freedom leads to more economic growth.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  More economic growth leads to, you know, a faster advent of the superhuman intelligences. The same thing with life extension technologies, right? I don't want to die. If you die, that's the most boring thing that can possibly happen to you, right? Because if you're dead, you can't have interesting conversations like this or do anything at all about anything. So I want anybody who wants to be able to, to be able to live forever. The best way to do that is through more economic growth. So you can have more research scientists and more, you know, capital be devoted to figuring out a way for people to be able to live forever. So you can enjoy wonderful times with your friends and family and people on the internet, interesting conversations for as long as you want to. And at any point, if you decide you're bored of life, it's easy to end it if that's what you want to do, right? So like, that's another thing that I want people to be able to do, to be able to live forever if they want to.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  So, superhuman intelligence, you know, living forever, and then just...

• 46:19Speaker 02

  More economic freedom lifts everybody out of poverty. You look around the world like I'm, I'm having this absolutely amazing life, right? I can go anywhere I want, do whatever I want, you know, eat whatever I want, live wherever I want. I'm fortunate, I'm incredibly fortunate to do that, right? But there's other people that are having really, really hard times in life, right? There's people, I was lucky enough to have been born in Silicon Valley. What if I had been born in some other part of the world, right? It would have been much more difficult. And other people think, oh, what if you were born in some other part of the US? No, I'm talking about what if you were born in some, you know, poverty stricken, third world country? I would have had a really, really, really hard time. Well, the best thing we can do for these countries around the world or these places around the world that are poverty stricken is bring them more economic freedom.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  If you look at the different countries around the world, the ones with the lowest standard of living are the ones with the least amount of economic freedom. And because they have less economic freedom, they have less economic growth. So it's so clear for those that are old enough to remember, you can look at East and West Germany, right? In West Germany, they had a whole lot more economic freedom and they were producing, you know, Porsches and Mercedes and BMWs and people had a, you know, very high standard of living. In East Germany, you had way less economic freedom. The government controlled everything and about the only thing they were able to produce in East Germany was a great big giant wall to prevent people from to being, from being able to escape because things were so horrible there. Or today, you know, you can look at North Korea and South Korea. South Korea is wonderful. They have a lot of economic freedom there compared to North Korea where they have hardly any economic freedom.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  It's clear which one of those two Koreas you would rather live in. And so anywhere around the world, you look at the places, the places with the most economic freedom have the most economic growth and the most economic growth leads to the highest standard of living. So if we want to help people all over the world is by bringing more, the tools that enable more economic freedom around the world. And so like, you know, the Singapore's and the Hong Kong's until recently have been fantastic, you know, beacons around the world of those sorts of things. So let's bring more economic freedom to the world, the places around the world that don't have it. And I don't think the most effective way to do that is to beg politicians. Oh, can you please, you know, lower tariffs and lower taxes and lower restrictions on business? I think the best way to do that is to build the censorship resistant tools that enable people to engage in commerce, to buy and sell whatever it is that they want.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  So long as it's peaceful with anybody else anywhere in the world and not need permission from the bureaucrats, not need permission from the politicians. Have the ability to either say no directly or just have it be completely hidden from the politicians and the regulators and the bureaucrats. That, you know, maybe they raised some chickens and they sold them to their neighbor or they, you know, they made something on the internet or designed a website. And sent or received a payment for it like, let's build the tools that enable people to engage in free trade around the world. And not need permission from uh these politicians around the world. That's how we make the world a better place for everybody. And if we can make the world a better place for everybody else out there. That makes the world a better place for me too, because this is the same world that I'm living in. So Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  That's the best thing that I could possibly do to make the lives of everybody in the entire planet better and mine all at the same time. So I'm as motivated as I possibly could be. To bring peer to peer electronic cash that's censorship resistant where anybody can buy and sell whatever they want. For the entire world. And that's why here I am. I've been in the space almost 10 years full time. And uh I'm still excited about it. Every single day I've been working on this for almost a decade now. And I think I'm going to continue going for another decade here as well. Uh what could possibly be more exciting about this? So that that's my rant as to why I'm so excited about this, but uh. I hope the rest of you that are listening to this like, this is the most exciting technology that we have available to make the world a better place for everybody.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  And it's here right now today. Don't waste any more time, right? We're all getting older day by day. Let's hurry up and bring this to the world.

• 49:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Before we start talking about um kind of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and the differences there. Uh my last question about the early days of Bitcoin is, how would you describe the Bitcoin community, right? It was obviously small. Um there was kind of loose coordination and and um, you know, some conferences and things like that, but like, how would you, having seen from 2011 to maybe 2015, 16, like. How did that evolve over time? And how would you talk about that that community that was being built around this asset?

• 50:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, in the early days, it was really, really, really a wonderful, wonderful community. I remember just being so excited to just wake up every day and say, and look online, see what new cool things did people build for people to be able to use Bitcoin for? And, you know, metaphorically speaking, it just felt like everybody was holding hands and singing kumbaya all day, every day about Bitcoin, because all of us were on, you know, this, this team of bringing peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world that was going to enable more economic freedom for the world and tear down, you know, government barriers to people engaging in trade and making the world a better place. Like, that's the thing that I think a lot of people in cryptocurrency will already appreciate, but a lot of people don't understand, anytime anybody buys or sells anything with anybody,

• 51:07Speaker 02

  both people are better off after the trade. When you buy a new TV, it's because the person that sold you the TV values the money you gave them more than they value the TV, and it's because you value the TV more than the money you gave them. So after the trade, both people have something that they value more than before the trade, otherwise the trade wouldn't have taken place. So the more trade we can enable in the world, the better off everybody's going to be. So we need to build the tools, cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency tools, to enable people to be able to trade with each other, because that's how you make everybody better off all over the world. And I bought some, you know, fantastic little nuts earlier today. I value the nuts more than I value the money I paid for them. The person that sold me the nuts values the money more than the nuts. Both of us are now wealthier after I, you know, bought these nuts from them. So we need to build the tools where people can do this without needing permission from, from anybody, anywhere.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  And, uh, and that's been the goal for me, and that was absolutely, without any doubt, the goal of the early Bitcoin community was building the tools for people to be able to buy and sell anything with anyone, anywhere in the world, and not need permission. And, you know, the payments were supposed to be fast, cheap, and reliable, and that's what it was, all the way up until maybe 2015-ish, that really started to change.

• 52:14Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So we're going to have a conversation about Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Uh, I want to kind of put a couple of caveats for those that are listening. Roger and I, again, 99.9% of what we just talked about, uh, we agree on in terms of the problems in the...

• 52:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Solution is not just a kind of a inflation type thing. There's multiple impact that can happen from this becoming globally adopted. What I don't want to have is people to think that Roger and I are here to argue over all kinds of different things. I think that Roger and I have a view of the world where the question is, how do we get there? Right? It's kind of like we agree on all the problems and I think we agree actually on like the finish line, if you will, or the goal that everyone is working towards. The difference of opinion is what is the path to pursue? And I think Roger would agree with this and I'll give you a chance here to agree or disagree

• 53:23Anthony Pompliano?

  in a second, but I'm of the belief that like experimentation and innovation and all of these things should be encouraged, even when you disagree with the way that somebody's going to do something, right? And there's plenty of people who may not like that, but I generally think that there's ideas that come from those you agree with and those that you don't agree with. And so, understanding both the way that you think and also the way that other people think is really important. So that's kind of the goal here is to talk through it. Now, with that said, as we can see in the live chat through Twitter previously, there's tons of people who have tons of opinions here. And so, we're going to try to do our best to navigate this in kind of the most intelligent

• 54:04Anthony Pompliano?

  way and stay out of what I'll call all of the troll type content. Although, yes, you guys make us all laugh. Roger and I were joking about it before we started. You know, the memes, the jokes, like we get it, but we are going to try to kind of keep this as high value of a conversation as possible. So with that all said, Roger, talk to us about you go from 2011 to, you know, 15, 16 into 17 and you are one of, if not the most recognized supporters of Bitcoin. And at some point, you start to change your mind in terms of is Bitcoin the solution that can solve these problems?

• 54:43Anthony Pompliano?

  When did that start and kind of where did you start to diverge in terms of wait a second? This may not be going the way that I think it should go, or this may not be the actual solution that we need.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, there were a couple of steps in that process, but I remember one of the the bigger epiphanies, I guess, in that process there was I was hosting a Bitcoin meetup in Silicon Valley. It was at the Korean barbecue restaurant there again. And, you know, probably about 100 people showed up that night. There were a bunch of people there and that you everybody was paying. And this is before Bitcoin Cash, or I think this might even have been before Ethereum existed as well. This is, you know, pretty early days. Everybody was there was excited. They were paying with their their blockchain dot info wallet. I think was the main mobile wallet back then that everybody was using. Anyhow, they're paying for their meal in Bitcoin. The owner of the store was super happy to be accepting Bitcoin for all the payments. It was a really fun time. And so like 100 people showed up there.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  And of the 100 people that were there, 97 were in favor of, hey, yeah, this is great. I'm going to pay for my meal on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is going to be money for the world. Everyone pretty soon is going to be using Bitcoin to buy and sell and pay for everything with everybody. But there were three Bitcoin core developers that showed up there that evening. And it was Luke Junior, Eric Lombrozo, and Brian Bishop were their names. And they literally spent the entire evening there arguing with the other 97 people. There were only three of them that had that opinion that evening. And there were about 100 people there. They spent the entire evening telling people that they should not be using Bitcoin to pay for their dinner. They should be using credit cards. And they spent the entire evening there arguing with people that Bitcoin is not good for payments. And people shouldn't be using Bitcoin to pay for things.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  People should be using credit cards. And I remember another early Bitcoin guy who loves his privacy. So I won't tell his name, but he'll know who he is when he hears this.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  He asked him, it was like, what if I'm someone living in Venezuela? And I need to pay somebody or I need to pay for something in Venezuela. And there's, you know, sanctions, so I can't do, you know, whatever. And he's like, well, you should use a credit card. And then he said, well, what if my credit card is blocked? And then, you know, I think it was Luke Junior or one of these those three guys said like, well, you should have a backup credit card. And it just seems so bizarre to me that these guys came to a Bitcoin meetup and spent the entire evening arguing with people that they shouldn't have paid used Bitcoin to pay for their meal. And they shouldn't be using Bitcoin for payments. They should be using credit cards instead. And that was kind of. We're like, I thought, wow, there's a a new group of people in Bitcoin that don't think Bitcoin should be used as money and on which should in Bitcoin being usable to buy or sell things and they want people to use credit cards instead.

• 57:20Anthony Pompliano?

  So hold on a second. I want to go slow here just so we can kind of really get into the the details. Uh, I wasn't there, right? Obviously, you you're recounting an experience that um I I wasn't there for and and.

• 57:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do you think that was their opinion? Or or why were they talking about that? And obviously, you're not them, right? So there's going to be some speculation, but but what do you think was driving that um conversation or that point of view?

• 57:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's a there's a great clip, I think, that's on YouTube. People can search like Roger Ver, Luke Junior Bitcoin opinions or something like that. And so, you know, there's this girl in Japan uh who asked me, why are you interested in Bitcoin? Or and I said, because this is like the one of the most amazing technologies ever. Like, we summed up in the in the first, you know, half hour of our chat here. And then she asked Luke Junior the exact same question. Why are you interested in Bitcoin? And this is what you Luke Junior is one of the guys that was there telling people you should use credit cards, not Bitcoin. Uh, and he pauses for I it's a really long awkward pause, maybe, you know, twenty full seconds, and it's a long pause. And then finally, the answer he comes up with is that it's interesting technology.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  And like, yeah, okay, Bitcoins and blockchains, it's interesting technology, but the reason it's interesting technology is because it enables more economic freedom for the entire world, which enables more economic growth, which enables all the wonderful things that people want to have in the world. And Luke just thinks it's interesting technology. And Luke was somebody who literally believed in Bitcoin so little that he hardly held on to any at all. He had to have a fundraiser recently to pay for a DSL line for his house, whereas anybody, you know, I believed in it so much, I put, you know, almost every, you know, almost all of my liquid net worth I put right into Bitcoin. And I think that that's another kind of interesting.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  Thing out there is that so many of the people that before Bitcoin had split were in favor of not using Bitcoin for payments and just using credit cards for everything. They hardly held any Bitcoin at all. There was a really interesting voting website where people could sign with their Bitcoins at an address and vote on different topics and like, it was like ninety-seven percent or ninety-eight percent of the Bitcoins that voted. It was this huge amount of Bitcoins, hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins. It was lots of Bitcoins. Hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins had voted and they were almost all in favor of, you know, Bitcoin being able to scale on-chain for it to become money for the world. And yet that's not what wound up happening eventually. So.

• 59:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so we have the kind of the first, you know, incident, I guess, where you hear people talking about not using Bitcoin as cash and kind of having a different perspective. Where, how do we get from that to eventually having a fork? And the more detail and kind of, you know, timeline-based you can go, so people understand. Because frankly, whether people remember this or not, there wasn't that many people that are in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency today. They weren't around then. So they kind of didn't get to live through this like you did. And so maybe walk us through, you know, you leave that dinner, what are the next events that transpire that that kind of continue to push you further and further into,

• 1:00:27Anthony Pompliano?

  wait a second, this may not be the solution that that you wanted.

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there was another kind of turning point as well that I remember. So there's this thing that Bitcoin has that Bitcoin Cash doesn't have. It's called Replace By Fee or RBF for short. And Bitcoin, that's that's new to Bitcoin. I think, I think that was probably implemented in two thousand and fifteen or so. So. And what that does is it made it all the time in the early days, that once I sent you Bitcoin, that's the end of the transaction. There's no way for me to get that Bitcoin back. Once I broadcast the network, the network rule was called first seen, first saved, which meant the transaction that the network sees first, that's the one that's going in the block. And even if it sees a different transaction later with a much higher fee, it ignores that one because it didn't see it first. And so Peter Todd and a number of other. Core developers really pushed to have this thing called replaced by fee implemented,

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  which made it so that if I send you some Bitcoin, and let's say I pay, you know, a one cent fee, I can then, any point up until when the transaction is included in the next block, I can then, instead of that Bitcoin going to you, I can send it back to me or send it to some other person to do whatever with it and pay a two cent fee or a two dollar fee or whatever fee that's more than the amount that I sent it to you initially with, which makes Bitcoin much, much, much less useful for people to buy and sell things in much less useful commerce.

• 1:01:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Hold on, before we get into kind of the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, come back to as you are kind of becoming convinced that, hey, there might have to be something else. Were there other moments that you remember that kind of drove you to think that? Or was this kind of, you had that one initial dinner and then, you know, over time, you just slowly become convinced that there needs to be another solution?

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  No, this is one of the moments. So because when this RBF was happening, there was no Bitcoin Cash. Ethereum wasn't, I don't know if it even launched yet or not, right? And so there was a big argument within the Bitcoin community though. People were arguing like, hey, please don't do this. This makes, you know, Bitcoin less useful for commerce. So Eric Voorhees wrote a fantastic essay, like an open letter to Peter Todd, asking him, you know, I know you're a really smart guy. You're a good, you know, cryptographer and, you know, brilliant mind, I think is what the word that Eric used. He said, but this, please understand that this severely damages the use case. So Eric had started a website or bought a website called Satoshi Dice. In like 2012, it got integrated into the blockchain at Info Wallet.

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  And if you can look on the blockchain history, that's when Bitcoin transactions really went through the roof because everybody was busy playing Satoshi Dice. Because you would send in your hundred bucks. If you won, you would get back 200 bucks instantly worth of Bitcoin. And it was just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, on chain instantly, just like that. It was a really magical experience where people all over the world were busy playing this. And RBF not only ruined that, but it ruined, you know, businesses like Bitpay trying to accept payments and all sorts of businesses all over the world. It made it much more difficult to accept Bitcoin for payments. So myself and Eric and a whole bunch of other People were saying, hey, we need to be really, really careful about doing anything that makes Bitcoin less useful in commerce.

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  Because the entire goal at that point for at least myself and a big majority of the Bitcoin community was get as many people using Bitcoin in commerce as quickly as we possibly could. So the regulators wouldn't have time to realize, oh, wait, the dollar might lose its, you know, world reserve currency status. Everybody might start using, you know, free market money rather than our, you know, uh, you know, pieces of paper that we can print as many as we want it for any time. And so by integrating that, lots of people were upset within the Bitcoin community, but there was still just one Bitcoin and things were still moving ahead. And then the other big turning point to answer your question there that really made me worry about the future of Bitcoin was the fees were getting higher and higher.

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  Like, you know, at first the fees were zero and then the fee started being a penny and then two pennies and then, you know, a nickel and then a dime and then, you know, 20 cents and they were creeping higher and higher. And there were some sort of an interview or some online comment somewhere and I figured exactly where it was, but it really made me think, oh my God, this is a big problem. And I think it was Adam Back when I realized that he wanted the fees to be high and they were excited for the fees to be high. And that's when I realized, oh my God, if they intentionally make the fees on Bitcoin high, nobody's going to use it. Because anybody that studies economics, when you'll know that when something costs more, people use less of it. If your, if your electricity costs more per kilowatt hour, you're going to use less electricity than if it costs less.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  If Bitcoin transactions are more expensive to make, people are going to make fewer Bitcoin transactions. And that was the real big turning point.

• 1:04:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Why, when you say that you thought that they wanted to make the fees high, why exactly did you think that?

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  Uh, they started openly saying it. Uh, there's, maybe this is news to you, maybe you didn't realize it, but you can actually see quotes from people like Adam Back, the founder of Blockstream, where he says he can't wait for, for, you know, the fees to get up to a hundred dollars per Bitcoin transaction. Or, you know, maybe even get up to, hopefully they can even get up to a thousand dollars someday. And then Greg Maxwell, one of the founders of Blockstream and the CTO there, there's a, a email from the mailing list there where he's talking about, you know, hooray, pop the champagne, the Bitcoin fees are over fifty dollars a transaction. This is, you know, this is a great fit step for Bitcoin. I'm, I'm summarizing a little bit, but he literally said, you know, pop the champagne. This is such a big success for Bitcoin and for people like myself that have been accepting payments from people all over the world in Bitcoin. And then

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  More times than I can count, I had to pay more, you know, thousands of dollars in fees for a single Bitcoin transaction. Then you'll see all some of these people that, you know, disagree with me, they say, oh, Roger's lying about that. I'm not lying, you can see the transactions, there's like hundreds of thousands of transactions in which people paid more than fifty dollars. I didn't have the data in front of me, but I think it may even been, I think there were like more than thirty thousand transactions in which people had to pay more than a thousand dollars in fees to send a single Bitcoin transaction. And I remember one of the convoluted arguments.

• 1:06:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Roger, so let's back up for a second. Again, I don't know what quotes those are, right? So I can't kind of agree or disagree on it. So we'll just leave that as it is. Let's maybe for people to understand, when you're talking about fees and transactions and all this stuff, walk people through the design of Bitcoin and where you think that the design is flawed. Right, so I think this is one of the key pieces that eventually led to Bitcoin Cash and some technical changes that happened. But in terms of how Bitcoin works, when you're talking about the high fees, where did the high fees come from?

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  So the high fees came from having an artificially imposed limit on the amount of block space that the miners are allowed to produce on the Bitcoin blockchain. So the blocks on Bitcoin are limited to about one megabyte. There's a little bit extra because of SegWit, so in the ballpark of one megabyte, one point two megabytes. And so inside that one megabyte, you can fit about two thousand five hundred transactions every ten minutes. If more than two thousand five hundred people want to make a transaction every ten minutes on Bitcoin, only the two thousand five hundred people that pay the most money in fees will be the transactions that are included in the block. So everybody has to bid against everybody else. So if you're, if there's five thousand people that want to make a transaction, only the top two thousand five hundred that paid the most will be included in the next block.

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  And then the other two thousand five hundred will have to wait until a future block. And there's this thing called the mempool, which is basically the queue of transactions that are waiting to be included in the next block. And only the top two thousand five hundred transactions approximately are included in each block. So at the end of two thousand seventeen, when everybody was trying to use Bitcoin and people were trying to move. In and out of the exchanges and things were really busy on the Bitcoin network. The average fee for the transaction got to be over fifty dollars for a single transaction. And the average confirmation time to be included in a block wound up being more than two weeks. Right? So that's absolute disaster for anybody that's trying to use Bitcoin for payments. Fifty dollars on average per transaction and more than two weeks on average for confirmation time.

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  And remember, in that two week period, you could potentially reverse the payment using this replace by fee stuff that had been added into Bitcoin as well. It was an absolute disaster.

• 1:08:29Anthony Pompliano?

  So you just described Bitcoin's design. At some point, you and a bunch of other people decide, hey, we can create a technical version that is similar. But different that we think has advantages to it. Walk us through what, forget how it's designed for a second. How did that come about? Right? Is that you make a phone call to somebody and then all of a sudden, you know, people start calling each other and say, hey, this is a good idea. Does somebody call you? But like, just walk me through kind of operationally. How does the idea come together to fork Bitcoin and create something else?

• 1:09:05Speaker 02

  It's actually the reverse of that. So the plan from Bitcoin from its inception all the way up until later. Was that the blocks would just get as big as they needed to be in order to accommodate the transaction. So it was people like the Bitcoin core developers and the block stream guys and those guys. They're the ones who got together and said, hey, I have an idea on how we can make Bitcoin better than what it was originally. And the ideas they came up with to make it better was this replace by fee thing that I talked, told you about. And by limiting the block size, they thought that by limiting the amount of transactions that the Bitcoin network could could handle. That would make Bitcoin better. And people like myself and everybody else disagreed and we wanted to go on the original path. For Bitcoin, which was to allow as many transactions on chain as possible.

• 1:09:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so part of this, and I think why I wanted to do this is. I think you and I both have the ability to state our opinion and then also flip around the table and say, hey, the people who disagree with me believe X because of Y, right? The people who wanted to limit the block size, what is their argument as to why that is a good thing to do, right? So understand that you disagree with it, but what is it their argument in terms of why they believe that to be a good thing?

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  Sure. So their argument as to why they think that's a good thing is because if you allow the blocks to get bigger and bigger, it will require a more expensive computer to run a full node where you have the entire blockchain there. And if you keep the block small, you'll be able to run a full node on a much smaller, cheaper computer, potentially on a home internet connection or even a Raspberry Pi. And so in their view of the world, that's a really, really good thing because more people all around the world will be able to run full nodes. And if you have more full nodes around the world, it'll be harder for governments to shut down all of those full nodes. I agree with that. But I think that they didn't, if I can give the other side of the, the, the point of view there. The other side of that is if you get everybody around the world using Bitcoin for commerce, you'll have, you know, companies like Walmart and Amazon and Tiger Direct and everybody else that's using it.

• 1:10:57Speaker 02

  You'll have all sorts of businesses that have an economic need to run a full node. And I don't, and even today, almost nobody's running a full node. There's, you know, maybe a couple of tens of thousands of full nodes in the world, if that on the Bitcoin network. And there's tens of millions of users. So it's a very small percent are using them. And so my point of view is if you want to give Bitcoin more censorship resistance, you need to get as many people around the world using Bitcoin in commerce, in their daily lives as possible. Whereas the other side of the, the, the view here is that we need as many people on the network running full nodes as possible. But we don't care about what the total number of people using the network as a whole is.

• 1:11:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  Those are the kind of the two worldviews on, on each side there.

• 1:11:35Anthony Pompliano?

  For the purpose of this conversation, I'm going to generalize those two arguments as security and convenience. Right. And I know that those aren't necessarily dead on descriptions, but basically one is the decentralization of the network based on the full nodes ends up being a security related argument that says, hey, decentralization is really, really important. The other argument is that you can have the convenience. So fast.

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  If I can add a little bit, I, I think the other side of the argument is that actually by having more people use it in commerce, that adds additional security. So I think that they're both security arguments. The small block is a security argument, but the big block side is also a security argument that you get more security by more adoption.

• 1:12:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so fair in terms of you're getting security from two different areas, right? One is more of a deterrent and one is the computer science type of security. So now let's talk in terms of when the small block, big block debate goes on, obviously very, very contentious, literally to the point where, you know, I call it the multifaceted intellectual war played out. There was everything from the memes on the internet to like some very ugly debates, both publicly and privately. And ultimately it came down to the market trying to decide what to do, right? And so maybe describe kind of how the market, how that process works?

• 1:12:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And then ultimately the beginning of Bitcoin Cash and kind of how that played out or became into reality.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the online discussion about Bitcoin scaling, you know, started brewing, maybe it started to heat up in 2015, I would say. And then by 2016 and 2017, it was starting to really get heated. And for the most part, I was just watching. And so like in my heart and with my economics background, like I know when you have a production quota, which is what I view the block size limit is, it's just externally imposed production quota that leads to inefficient outcomes there. So, but I was for the most part keeping quiet and just watching because I thought maybe there's some really, you know, good other argument as to why the block should be kept small. And I wanted to see and understand that and then evaluate both sides and then decide. So I was pretty much silent in regards to the debate. And then what actually made me decide to start speaking up

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  was when I watched the small block side of the debate openly start to censor and delete the posts and try and silence the people that were on the big block side of the debate. And when I saw there are two camps, one side is supporting free and open discussion. The other side is doing everything they can to silence the other side's opinions from being heard. Well, that was everything I needed to know about which side has a stronger argument. And that's when I decided to start speaking up myself.

• 1:14:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so I've heard you say this before. Explain where you saw that happening. And again, there's a lot of people who are listening to this who just, they weren't around then, right? So they don't know kind of how the debate was playing out. I can say it's all I'm blue in the face that like it was heated and controversial and played out in every nook and cranny on the internet behind closed doors. Like it was a real deal, but kind of what were the things that you were seeing that led you to say, hey, wait, there's, your belief was that there was censorship going on?

• 1:14:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there, so now there's a lot of different platforms. You have Crypto Twitter, and there's a bunch of different subreddits, and there's more stuff in the ecosystem now than there used to be. But back then, there was our Bitcoin on Reddit, and that had more traffic for people learning about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency than probably every single other website in the world combined. That's how big of a deal our Bitcoin was. And then the second place thing was this other website called BitcoinTalk.org. And so both of those definitely had more people, new people coming to crypto and learning about it than every single other website, you know, every CoinDesk and CoinTelegraph, and you know, there wasn't any Bitcoin.com, I don't think quite yet at this point. There was, there was more of that, you know, people learning on those

• 1:15:30Speaker 02

  websites than everywhere else combined. And then all of a sudden, what happened overnight, the main moderator of our Bitcoin was this guy named Thamos, that we don't really, we're not really sure what his real name is. There were a bunch of moderators that people knew. So there was like a, you know, one example of this is Jason King, who had been running like a homeless outreach thing called Sean's Outpost down in Florida. And people were donating Bitcoins to him, and he was using the Bitcoins to buy food and, you know, clothes and helping homeless people in Florida. It was fantastic. And he was one of the moderators, and he's an early, early Bitcoiner since maybe, you know, 2011 or something as well. And everybody knew and liked him, and everybody knew and liked the other moderators there. And there was a, people disagreed, but that's part of the fun part about internet forums. People can type back and forth and state their opinions. And then all of a sudden overnight, Thamos removed all the moderators

• 1:16:13Speaker 02

  that people knew and liked and respected, and put in a bunch of new moderators that nobody knew who they were. They were all using fake names. Nobody knows who these people were. And then anybody that even tried to post any sort of opinion in favor of Bitcoin being able to scale on chain, they would have their post deleted and their account banned from being able to post there. And they did the same thing on BitcoinTalk.org. So you had the two biggest websites that had more people learning about Bitcoin and discussing this than every other website combined, suddenly silencing anybody from being able to state an opinion that wasn't in lockstep with this guy Thamos in the small block position, which was clearly at that time the minority position. And then Right after the censorship started there, the new moderation policy or whatever they tried to disguise,

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  disguise it as, the one of the posts there was like, hey, we need to bring back free speech and we need to allow the discussion. It was the most uploaded post ever and they called for Thamos to step down as the moderator. It had more upvotes, I think, than any other post ever to this very day on our Bitcoin. And everybody was saying, yeah, we want free speech. And then what did they do? They deleted that post as well and censored that one as well. So it was just a really just shocking thing for me where Bitcoin was supposed to be censorship resistant money for the world. And now suddenly the Bitcoin community is engaging in massive censorship within about even talking about Bitcoin. It was absolutely heartbreaking for me to see that happen.

• 1:17:31Anthony Pompliano?

  So again, I wasn't there, right? I can't confirm or deny, as in most things that are controversial. There's your side and then there's people who would yell and scream and say all kinds of other stuff. But I think it's important for people to hear your perspective as to what happened in that situation. And so coming out of that, you and a number of other people decide, okay, there's going to be limited block size moving forward. Talk a little bit about how that process ends up determining, you know, because there's kind of like the internet debate. And then there's ultimately, people have to make a decision. Are there going to be big blocks or small blocks? And like, how does that happen, right? Some people may think that like you go to a place and actually vote with a piece of paper.

• 1:18:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Obviously, that's not how this works. So describe the process of how that decision kind of gets cemented? And then what the ramifications of that were.

• 1:18:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there was lots of negotiating between the big block and small block camp, so to speak. And so like initially, and I forget what bit number it was now, but like there was a plan to like double the block size every 18 months or something all the way up to, I think it was two or eight gigabyte blocks in the future. And then like the small blockers, no, no, that's way too big. And so then like there was some other, you know, plan with the lower cap closer in the future. And then like the one of the first like major, major proposals that actually started to get some traction was to just, I think, a one time increase to 20 megabytes. But the small blocker said, no, that's way too big. And then the next compromise was, okay, we'll do eight megabytes.

• 1:19:03Speaker 02

  And then they said, no, no, that's too big. And then the next compromise was, okay, we'll go to four, eight megabytes over the next like five years or something like that. And they said, no, no, no, that's too big. And then the final compromise was, okay, we'll go to two megabytes. And then even the two megabyte compromise, there's this thing called the SegWit 2X agreement or New York agreement where there's supposed to be segregated witness and two megabyte block size. And for whatever reason, and I wasn't there in person when the agreement was made, I think that everybody should have agreed to do both at the same time. But for whatever reason, they agreed that SegWit would happen first and then the two megabytes would happen second, like a couple of months later. And so what happened, everybody agreed to that, you had ninety plus percent of the hash rate, all the businesses signed off. The SegWit

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  part happened smooth, everything was fine. And then the two megabyte, as soon as SegWit happened, there was this giant uproar from a bunch of people on the internet saying, don't do two megabytes. You know, you had people posting photos and all, you know, holding axes with bandanas around their faces and just all this, you know, crazy me more's on the internet. And then eventually the me more's were so wild and crazy that the the two megabyte part didn't happen. And so at some point before that, though, and I had nothing to do with this, probably, and there's plenty of lies about me on the internet, but the probably the biggest lie is that I created Bitcoin Cash. The truth that matters, I had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of Bitcoin Cash. I hardly even knew that it had been created at all, to be honest. I had zero to do with

• 1:20:27Speaker 02

  the creation. And I don't even think I was aware, like when the genesis block of the Bitcoin Cash split had happened, I, I, I think I found out maybe a couple of weeks later, and I was kind of keeping an eye on it on the side. And then it wasn't until the two megabyte part failed with the SegWit 2X agreement, which was months after, after Bitcoin Cash had already existed. That's when I said, well, it doesn't look like Bitcoin's going to scale to be money for the world with the one megabyte block size. The next best looking opportunity to bring more economic freedom to the world and all the wonderful things that enables looks to me to be Bitcoin Cash. So that's when I focused my time and effort on Bitcoin Cash. But I had zero to do with the creation of Bitcoin Cash.

• 1:21:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so for, again, I'm going to try to dumb down a lot of what you just said for for folks is basically the argument ended up being there was the Bitcoin Cash community that for all the technical reasons that Roger described, believed that you could solve scaling on a layer one technology move forward.

• 1:21:27Anthony Pompliano?

  The legacy Bitcoin, if you will, or what is called Bitcoin today, is a belief that there is layer one, layer two, and onwards, and scaling can be done on other layers. Now, again, I'm heavily overgeneralizing this because I want to kind of not get into a super technical things I think will lose a lot of people.

• 1:21:48Speaker 02

  And if I can clarify one small thing, so both the small blockers, they believe that you can scale with layers on top of Bitcoin. The big blockers also believe that you can scale with layers on top of Bitcoin, but they don't believe in strangling the base layer. Whereas the small blockers want to limit the base layer and only have layers on top. The big blockers want to do both.

• 1:22:08Anthony Pompliano?

  So to kind of zoom out even further before we go into this next part is basically what you have is, when you look at Bitcoin, there is a belief that having the block size constrained allows anyone to run a full node. And then you're going to get scalability through layers on top. When you look at Bitcoin Cash, there is the ability to have an expansive block size that may or may not lead to only people with access to expensive computers being able to run the nodes. But you can have scalability through layers as well. So that's kind of where we are at the moment.

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  And if I can add one additional interesting fact related to that, too. If you go back to and look at the Internet Archive and look at bitcoin.org from 2011 or 2012 or 2013 and look at the FAQ over there. They literally go over all the math with what the current internet speeds are in the world and the current CPU speeds are and a hard drive costs. And they explain, they give you the math on the bitcoin.org website from 2011, 12 or 13 as to how Bitcoin on-chain through bigger blocks could scale to be money for the entire world. So if you look at that Bitcoin Cash, much more closely resembles what was on the Bitcoin website in 2011 than the current version of what everyone's calling Bitcoin, which I think is an important thing for people to realize. Because I think a lot of people maybe thought that the plan had always been to limit the base layer

• 1:23:32Speaker 02

  and then only have layers on top. And it's also worth pointing out that companies that did that, the Lightning Labs and the Blockstreams, the products that those companies are selling. Only have a market if you limit the the the base layer. If you don't limit the base layer.

• 1:23:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Hold on, hold on, we're gonna get to all.

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  Kind of is what I'm saying.

• 1:23:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, we're gonna get to all this. So, um, one of the things that people watching may be like, wait a second, Roger, you're one of the most well-known people in the space. Um, this fork of Bitcoin Cash happens. How could you not have known or how could no one have told you about it? Um, talk a little bit about, uh, because I think that this is probably one of the areas where, um, you know, I don't know the answer, right? And frankly, you're probably one of the only people who knows the answer. Um, if I think of like the devil's advocate was sitting here talking to you, what they would say is, Roger helped create this and and he created all this stuff and and you know, yada, yada, whatever. Your argument is like, look, I didn't even know I wasn't involved. Help people kind of understand like,

• 1:24:35Anthony Pompliano?

  how is that possible? And then also, um, at what point did you come across Bitcoin Cash? And start to realize, wait a second, this is worth spending more time on, right? Because there's almost this element of like, it sounds like there was issues with Bitcoin that or or things that were happening that you disagreed with. And so that then sent you looking somewhere else. So kind of talk just through that transition for you, um, and and kind of how did that occur? And and what was the information you were consuming at the time or or thinking through?

• 1:25:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think a lot of people today don't realize it, but early on, nobody cared about altcoins at all, like altcoins were just like totally off the radar. Bitcoin had, you know, ninety plus percent market share. Nobody cared about any altcoin for anything at all. It wasn't even and even on my radar, like I hardly cared at all. Like, I I should have taken, uh, taken part in the Ethereum IPO, but I didn't. I I wait, I waited until it was still like, you know, seven or eight bucks, which still did all right for me. But, uh, should have bought it at at the IPO, but you know, you win some, you lose some. But nobody cared about any of this at all until Bitcoin's user experience started to degrade because of things like replaced by fee and the high fees that were caused, being caused by the block starting to fill up.

• 1:25:46Speaker 02

  And that's when people started to look at altcoins and they started to look at things, you know, like Dash and Monero and. Zcash and there started to be this, you know, whole wave of people like, hey, I can start an altcoin that can improve on some of the problems that Bitcoin is having. So mainly, you know, privacy fees, you know, transaction reliability, these sorts of things. But before that, nobody cared about it at all. And so people, and so Bitcoin had ninety plus percent market share. Uh, and it wasn't until the user experience of Bitcoin started to degrade, that people started divesting some of their money that used to be in Bitcoin. Into altcoins, my, myself included. So that's why I bought some Ethereum. That's why I bought some Monero. That's why I bought some Dash, because the future roadmap for Bitcoin wasn't looking bright in terms of having a good user experience.

• 1:26:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so are you making the argument, and I'm trying to understand and make sure that, that I kind of understand your thought process. Are you making the argument that people started to divest from Bitcoin into things like Ethereum because they thought Ethereum could be a Bitcoin replacement? Or was it something else driving them being interested in Ethereum or other altcoins?

• 1:26:47Speaker 02

  Uh, I think mainly the first one. So even, even Vitalik, the creator of Ethereum. He would have built it probably all on Bitcoin, but he looked at Bitcoin. And the block size and opera turn wars, which is a little bit, there's, you know, whole other videos on that. But basically there were people were already starting to argue about. Should we restrict the block size on Bitcoin? And Vitalik saw the restrictions starting to happen on Bitcoins. They said, well, I guess I won't build Ethereum on Bitcoin. I'll build it on, on my own chain. And so another people like, everybody knows about the ICO boom. All that happened on Ethereum. All of that would have happened on Bitcoin if it wasn't for the Bitcoin core developers. Limiting the size of the opera turn data. And so for people that's getting a little bit techie, but to describe that. All these tokens that are on Ethereum, everyone knows, you know, Ethereum ERC twenty tokens.

• 1:27:31Speaker 02

  All of that was starting to happen on top of Bitcoin. There are these things called colored coins and a group of guys called Counterparty, and they had a protocol doing tokens. On top of Bitcoin. And then it was really started to take off and lots of stuff was starting to happen. And then the Bitcoin core developers. Chopped and reduced the amount of space of data that people could put in the opera turn of Bitcoin, which basically just gutted. This entire token ecosystem that was starting to bloom on top of Bitcoin. And so all this entire ICO stuff would have happened on top of Bitcoin had not been for, for that, what I think was a mistake of, on Bitcoin's part.

• 1:28:03Anthony Pompliano?

  So that decision, let's go back to flip around the table. What is their argument as to why they did that? And why was it a good thing?

• 1:28:10Speaker 02

  It was the exact same argument there. They said they want people to be able to run a full node on a really cheap computer on a really horrible internet connection. And in, you know, rural, rural South Dakota, you know, take, take your place, take, take your place.

• 1:28:22Anthony Pompliano?

  As people are going to see, this ends up being one of the key points of difference of opinion that drives all kinds of different decisions is, is running a full node individually at the lowest level in terms of cost and, and infrastructure. A necessity or something that could be kind of a nice to have, right? So that repeats itself over and over and over again, over the years. When we go to Bitcoin Cash, you decided, hey, I'm going to take some percent of the, the money and wealth that I have, and I'm going to put it into Bitcoin Cash and start to migrate that way. Talk a little bit about the decision you made. Kind of how did you come up with?

• 1:29:05Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think you sold all of your Bitcoin, but you sold some of it and kind of why some not all. And then percentage wise, how did you think about that?

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I'm, I'm, I'm not a good trader. I'm not good at timing the market. I'm a long-term value investor. I, I look at the things that I think are going to be useful long-term. But the main reason that happened is because I, up to that point, I've been telling every single person I meet, if I get in a taxi, I'm going to tell the taxi driver about Bitcoin. And I'm going to give him some Bitcoin for free, right? And like anybody, everyone, in fact, lots of, some of the taxi drivers just pay me everything in Bitcoin. Like it was really interesting because I could tell people, yeah, this money you can send or receive with anyone, anywhere in the world instantly, basically for free. No one can freeze your account. Nobody can block it. Nobody can control it in any way. And it's so fast, super easy and reliable to use. And when the blocks became full, that pitch wasn't there. I would now have to tell people, hey, there's this thing called Bitcoin.

• 1:29:57Speaker 02

  You can pay, sometimes it's $10, sometimes it's a dollar, sometimes it's $50 in fees. Sometimes the transactions go through kind of fast. Sometimes it takes two weeks on average. Sometimes they can be reversed. How can I, how can I be excited about that, right? I couldn't be excited about that. So I need, if I wanted to have anything to do with cryptocurrency anymore, I'd need to be able to tell somebody about a cryptocurrency that's actually exciting and interesting and useful to people. And Bitcoin Cash had it with its fast, cheap, reliable transactions, even if you, you know, couldn't potentially run it on a Raspberry Pi on a crappy internet connection somewhere.

• 1:30:31Anthony Pompliano?

  So let me ask, there's two pieces here that I think are important. So obviously Bitcoin at some point was similar to Bitcoin Cash in terms of when you say fast, cheap, all these things. And there was much less people using it then, than at the point where you're saying it was slower, it had higher fees, whatever, on the layer one. One, were you ever worried that Bitcoin Cash would run into the same thing? There was very few people using in the beginning, but over a number of years, if it became popular, there would be issues. And the second piece of this is, I actually go backwards to kind of analyze this. And the way that I think about it is, gold was money for thousands of years. It's not very portable, it's not very divisible.

• 1:31:15Anthony Pompliano?

  It actually sucks as a medium of exchange in terms of, you know, if you've got to shave off gold or kind of do anything like that. In order to improve that, people built paper claims on the gold, right? It's kind of a dollar backed by the gold. Eventually they built electronic money, credit, and kind of all these layers up on top of that gold. Now, as we already discussed and kind of agree on, maybe removing the gold from the dollar was not the smartest decision and led to all these issues. But history's kind of repeated itself where, over a long period of time, people would push a currency to become more efficient, more usable, et cetera. Is this a situation where you thought, okay, understand the argument of there's going to be future layers on top of Bitcoin,

• 1:31:59Anthony Pompliano?

  and that could make it more usable, but I don't agree that that is the right solution? Or was it a thing where, hey, that might work, but timing is important? And so we need to be able to do this now, but that's going to take too long to actually build out? Like, was it a, that's not possible? Or was it, that's not ready today? And therefore, that's why I'm, I need to go somewhere else?

• 1:32:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so definitely the second part there. So like, I hope Lightning works, but it's not usable today. And in fact, if anything, it seems like Ethereum is winding up being Bitcoin's layer two scaling solution. Like, there's way there, I think, several times more Bitcoin is wrapped on Ethereum than there are, you know, total liquidity in the Lightning network. But to go back to about gold.

• 1:32:42Anthony Pompliano?

  But just, I just want to make sure that I got this. So it wasn't, hey, layer two, layer three, layer four on a Bitcoin can't work. It's just, I don't see.

• 1:32:50Speaker 02

  They're not ready. They weren't ready. They're still not ready.

• 1:32:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so basically, it was a, it was a timing thing, not a possibility thing, right? Which I think is.

• 1:32:57Speaker 02

  Timing thing. We need to rush because the politicians are going to do everything they can to keep the dollar as the world's reserve currency. They don't want some, you know, non-government controlled currency to become the world's, you know, reserve currency that everybody's using in commerce is both the medium of exchange and a store value. They want that to be the dollar, or they want it to be whatever's controlled by the government. And so if we move quickly to get a mass adoption, it'll be too late for governments to stop it. But now we're already starting to see that. The number one, you know, cryptocurrency is, is Tether at this point.

• 1:33:23Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, let's stay focused, hold on. So, as this is happening, you decide, okay, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin, you take what percent of the Bitcoin that you had at that point and move it over into Bitcoin Cash?

• 1:33:38Speaker 02

  Uh, I, I don't remember. Uh, I, and, and prior to that, it was a significant percentage, no double digit percentage, right? But even before that, I had been concerned about Bitcoin scaling. So that's why I bought a bunch of Ethereum. I bought a bunch of Dash. I bought a bunch of Monero. I bought a bunch of Zcash and Zcoin and on and on and on. And I diversified into the cryptocurrencies that I thought would give people the best user experience. Uh, and so it wasn't only Bitcoin Cash.

• 1:34:03Anthony Pompliano?

  The, the other thing that I think is important here, uh, if anyone is not aware of this, Roger's not talking about like a million dollars worth of Bitcoin at the time, right? In 2015, 16 and 17, uh, I, I believe you had hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin. Uh, and the decisions that you're making here are involving, you know, tens of millions of dollars, if not more, in terms of when you're deciding to move out of Bitcoin into something else, right?

• 1:34:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:34:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Okay. And so when you go ahead and you move some portion, you know, double-digit percentage, whatever that ends up being into Bitcoin Cash, you're also simultaneously doing that with other tokens. What is kind of the early days of Roger Ver with Bitcoin Cash look like, right? And from the outsider's perspective, it almost looks like you kind of did exactly what you had been doing with Bitcoin, right? You kind of ran around the world telling people about electronic payments and kind of all those things. Now it was you were using Bitcoin Cash rather than Bitcoin as the thing that you would send them or the wallet you'd give them or whatever. Is that fair to say?

• 1:35:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was a little bit more work to be done because when this split happened or when there was the one single Bitcoin and then you had Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin.

• 1:35:19Speaker 02

  Bitcoin Cash had all the characteristics that made Bitcoin popular to begin with, but the thing that everybody's calling Bitcoin today had all the infrastructure, even though it didn't have the good user experience. So on the Bitcoin Cash side, even though it had the good user experience, we had to rebuild all the infrastructure that was lacking because we lost it all at the time of the split. So that's still an ongoing process to this very day and it's still a catch-up game.

• 1:35:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so we'll get to all that in a few minutes here. But as this was occurring, it's a little weird, I think, right? Because you were Bitcoin Jesus, right? Like literally you had spent years and years of your life and very effectively promoting Bitcoin, talking about it, pushing it. And what a lot of people may not realize is you'd also made tons of investments in the space, not just in Bitcoin, but in all sorts of infrastructure. And so one of those things is Bitcoin.com. You had a bunch of other things that you had spent time on. And so as you start to transition, how did you think about all of that infrastructure, right? Was it something where in your head you said, hey, look, I've got to go now, get all of the investments that I've made there to kind of switch over and use Bitcoin Cash?

• 1:36:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Was it something where, look, I don't think I'm going to be able to do that. So actually what I want them to do is kind of coexist and support both. But like, what was the thought process, given that you still had these financial interests and a bunch of infrastructure? And you also had exposure to Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoins, you'd sell all the Bitcoin, right? So how did you kind of think about those two things and how they would intersect with the equity investments, the infrastructure investments that you had made?

• 1:36:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think each individual, you know, even when I invest in a company, I'm not the owner, the big owner of the company, right? The CEO gets to decide what they're going to do and what they're going to focus on. And I think at the end of the day, the businesses are going to focus on the things that are the most useful to their users or their customers. And so anybody that, you know, that's listening to this, if you haven't, if you're on the fence, or you don't know, or if you haven't tried using Bitcoin Cash, try using it, try using Ethereum, try using Ripple, try using everything, and then use whatever's the most useful to you in your own life. You don't have to be like some tribal guy and like, there's some comic where they ask, oh, do you believe in the Trinity? Oh, yes. Do you believe in the resurrection? They're, yes, yes, yes. And they get to like some really remote, you know, detail of like, you know, way down a religion like, oh, my God, heretic, and they're going to fight. And it's just like, I feel like that's a lot of it.

• 1:37:36Speaker 02

  Same sort of stupidity in the cryptocurrency space. I think all of us are trying to build, or at least most of us are trying to build the tools to empower individuals to have more control over their own lives. If you're excited about that, Bitcoin Cash adds to that. Bitcoin adds to that. Ripple adds that. All of these add to that. So the more tools that people have in the world to have more control over their own lives, that's a good thing. Don't hate on them. Go and go and cheer for them.

• 1:38:00Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So here's the part that I think, before I'd ever met you, talked to you, anything was the most confusing, was exactly the same that you just said, which is, you're still a fan of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and many, many other things, right? And so help people understand and unpack that a little bit, right? Where somebody who was so convicted on Bitcoin, obviously now is a big proponent of Bitcoin Cash, and there's plenty of people who agree, disagree, whatever. What I always tell people is like, look, there's points of view in the world. The market will ultimately determine whoever is right on this stuff. But what I find fascinating, and it's very rare in the world, frankly, is somebody who

• 1:38:42Anthony Pompliano?

  can have a belief in something, right? So for you, Bitcoin Cash, and you're still able to intelligently talk about and have some level of conviction in Bitcoin, obviously, where you still hold Bitcoin, and these other things. And so just unpack that, because I think when people see that, that's just a confusing thing, right? Of like, why still have Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash? And like, how do you think about having exposure to both?

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so any good investor has a diverse portfolio. And it's like I've seen that, you know, a couple of these Bitcoin max was saying, why don't you sell all your Bitcoins? Like, well, I still have some dollars too, right? I still have gold, I still have silver, I still have other, you know, stocks like have a diverse portfolio. Like selling, putting all of your net worth into one thing, that's, that's a, that's bad investment advice. So, but in regards to the Bitcoin, why Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash? Well, if you look at Bitcoin, it has this amazing network effect, you know, tens of millions of users around the world. The biggest market cap, the most liquidity, uh, and this, you know, worldwide name recognition where people all over the world. If you go to the guy in the street, have you heard about Bitcoin? They'll say yes. If you go to the guy in the street and say, have you heard of Ethereum? They're probably going to say no, right?

• 1:39:52Speaker 02

  And, uh, and so Bitcoin has this amazing network effect, but it also has this horrible user experience. If you try and use it for payments, the payments are slow, expensive and unreliable. And so then you look at Bitcoin Cash, if you go up to somebody in the street and say, have you heard of Bitcoin Cash? They'll say, well, is that different than Bitcoin? Like they won't, they won't be sure. Uh, and so, and it has less liquidity, a lower market cap, less name recognition. But it has this amazing user experience with lightning fast transactions that are a fraction of a penny and are irreversible and work, you know, go through reliably all the time. And now you can make tokens on top of Bitcoin Cash as well, like 30 seconds. And you can send on chain dividend payments to the token holders. The tokens act like anonymous bear shares that are able to receive dividend payments.

• 1:40:37Speaker 02

  Like, I think a lot of people don't realize how big of a deal the token ecosystem on Bitcoin Cash is. You have Tether is now on top of Bitcoin Cash with an S O P token. Like, there's a lot happening.

• 1:40:46Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, hold on. So this is one of the key, I think, differences of opinion. And this isn't something that I think people will find religious in nature, like in terms of emotional. This is played out over and over and over again for decades in technology, right? What you just described is, um, the difference between, uh, market forces and technology, right? And so, and I'm going to go backwards again to go forwards, which is if you go back to V H S versus Betamax, right? There's a lot of people who'd argue Betamax was the better technology. V H S got adopted and even though it was inferior technology, it ended up being the winner. Because of all the reasons why people have studied and there was adoption. Now, if you fast forward that to this Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, I'm going to say that, um, regardless of your or my opinion

• 1:41:30Anthony Pompliano?

  is in terms of what ends up winning, I think that the two arguments can be categorized as.

• 1:41:36Anthony Pompliano?

  You would argue that Bitcoin Cash has superior technology, which leads to that better user experience in your opinion. And ultimately, that will drive adoption, which will lead to the market determining Bitcoin Cash wins. I think that there's another argument, which is you can debate what technology is superior or not superior. But the network effect of money and the belief system of money and the adoption that Bitcoin already has will continue to carry it to be the winner. And then that adoption buys you the time to backfill and build the technology necessary to make it this global scalable thing. Would you agree or disagree with the categorization of those two arguments?

• 1:42:13Speaker 02

  I think very, very well put, fantastically well put. And that's why I hold Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash today, because you should have some of both. If you don't know which is going to win out from those two paths.

• 1:42:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So what I would say to that, right? And I think that this is kind of, and part of why I wanted to do this again was that we can kind of very intelligently identify like a point of disagreement, right? Your, your perspective is, hey, I've diversified exposure to Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin. Either one wins, you win, right? I think that I go the opposite direction, which is history has shown that the adoption ends up being the winning strategy, right? Is there a possibility that I am incorrect? There's a possibility that both of us are incorrect and digital currency doesn't end up being successful, right? What I think though is when I look at the probability of if you gave me the choice to invest in technology or in the market adoption, right?

• 1:43:09Anthony Pompliano?

  As an investor, even outside of digital currencies, I'll always choose the market adoption, right? That's just how I think about this stuff, how, how I've always thought about it. And so I think for people who are watching this, one of the key elements to the disagreement and all this stuff is that exactly, right? Is, does the technology buy time for the market adoption? Or is the market adoption by time for building the technology? So the second thing that I want to talk about is as you move past that point, then we get to this world of the, the infrastructure itself, right? And, and I think that when you look at the computing power, talk about how you Think about the importance of the computing power actually running these networks. How you see Bitcoin Cash today versus Bitcoin?

• 1:43:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And if there is a world where Bitcoin Cash ended up being successful in the future, how would that transition occur? Or maybe you would even argue it doesn't need to occur. Like, just talk a little bit about the actual computing networks and the differences there today and kind of how you would see that playing out in the future.

• 1:44:11Speaker 02

  I don't know if I fully understand the question, but I kind of view it like, for those that are old enough to remember MySpace before Facebook, MySpace was incredibly popular. It had a huge network effect. And then MySpace started having the equivalent of, you know, slow, unreliable, expensive in terms of time. You had to wait transactions, transactions being page loads on the site. So when the true, when the user experience on MySpace became slow, expensive and unreliable, there was a mass migration to Facebook. And I think we could see the exact same thing happen with everybody that's trying to use Bitcoin for anything commerce related. You could see a mass migration.

• 1:44:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So let me comment on that, which is, and I have a unfair advantage over you because I worked at Facebook and we obviously spent way too much time obsessed with why did MySpace fail? The one thing that I would

• 1:44:58Speaker 02

  Give me your insight, please.

• 1:44:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, the one difference between MySpace and Facebook, and I think Zuck would be the first one to admit that like, I don't know if they necessarily knew what they were doing when they created the news feed itself. But with MySpace, it was a directory of people. So you could go and you could go to people's different pages and all this stuff. The thing that Facebook did that actually locked people into the network was the news feed. Now you just went to the news feed and everyone's content got put there. And so it was less of Roger, go navigate all of your friends' pages and check to see what they're up to. And it was more of now Facebook has this like integrated experience. And so I've heard people argue, doesn't matter for this conversation. You know, MySpace didn't have network effect because you saw the navigate to all the different pages.

• 1:45:41Anthony Pompliano?

  They just had a lot of users and Facebook really got the network effect and they ended up winning. Neither here nor there for this. What I think though that I hear you saying and confirm for me is today Bitcoin has a network effect naturally money's super viral product right in whatever form it is and it's got the market share it's got the the kind of name recognition whatever but I think your argument is you can break a network effect if the product itself never meets expectations and people will eventually migrate somewhere else and you feel like there's some percentage chance that happens is that is that a fair characterization?

• 1:46:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's a pretty darn good percentage chance that that happens and the user experience for payments on Bitcoin is so bad today.

• 1:46:23Anthony Pompliano?

  What number would you put on it like what like are we talking over under 50%?

• 1:46:27Speaker 02

  It's probably somewhere in the ballpark of 50% would be my guess and so David Freeman's an economist I really like and he always says look at the actions people take rather than the words they say so if you look at the actions that I've taken like my BTC versus BCH portfolio position it's somewhere in the ballpark of 50 50 in terms of you know dollar value so my actions to lead me to even if I my word I'm telling you what my with my words what my actions have been I think it's somewhere in the ballpark of 50 50 between those two but then I also have nice positions in Ethereum and Ripple and Dash and you know on and on and on so because I don't think we know what the the winner is guaranteed to be in the end.

• 1:47:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so and I want to be as respectful of your time but I know that you've kind of committed to let's have the the full conversation here. One of the things that I want to I want to play a game right and I read through all these Twitter threads and as I told you I took out every single troll and meme and all this stuff and frankly they were coming at me as much as you right so kind of kind of we were in the same boat of under attack by the meme lords but but what I pulled out was a bunch of questions that I would consider the the negative view of Roger or the negative view of Bitcoin Cash and what I want to do is I want to ask you the questions and then allow you just to respond right and kind of it's not for me to make a

• 1:47:47Anthony Pompliano?

  judgment in many cases it's more of I want people to be able to ask the questions that they have you respond and then people can decide you know how they how they feel from this. The first one we already addressed which was like why do you still own Bitcoin right I think that kind of you clearly articulated that. The second one is

• 1:48:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Why is Bitcoin cash usage so low? And part of that also being, why are Bitcoin blocks consistently bigger than Bitcoin cash? So kind of, I think those two things are related. Talk through kind of how you look at that and explain it? And then kind of what you think about that moving forward?

• 1:48:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's two questions there. So why are Bitcoin cash blocks smaller than Bitcoin blocks? Because there's more transactions happening on Bitcoin every day than on Bitcoin cash so far. But in terms of why are so few people using Bitcoin cash? That's not true at all. Bitcoin cash, depending on the day, is the second or third most transacted in chain in terms of the number of dollars being moved in the native token on chain. So it's Bitcoin is number one. And then depending on the day, it's Bitcoin cash or Ethereum. Sometimes Bitcoin cash has even more value moved on it than Ethereum does. So like, that's a really, really big deal. So Bitcoin cash is widely used around the world. And when you go to bitcoin.com, there's lots of tools to help people use Bitcoin cash because it really, really works.

• 1:49:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so, and again, this goes under the, like, the part that I like about this conversation is there's a couple of key themes. I'm sure you can keep revisiting them through all these different, these questions. That goes under the market adoption is in the favor of Bitcoin today. Your belief is you think it'll switch to Bitcoin cash. There's obviously a bunch of people who think it'll stay with Bitcoin, right? The next question is, do you run a Bitcoin node still at all?

• 1:49:31Speaker 02

  I have a BTC and a BCH node that I can boot up from time to time and sync with the network. I don't leave it on all the time, but I do have those nodes, yeah.

• 1:49:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Another question was, how many Bitcoin cash nodes are yours?

• 1:49:49Speaker 02

  So myself personally, I have the one that I can boot up and sync from time to time. Bitcoin.com business, it probably has a few. I'd have to ask the different tech guys how many we have. But I would guess with the mining pool and everything else, between 10 and 20 maybe around the world would be my guess.

• 1:50:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Another question was, let's see here. What are the metrics that you use to evaluate the success of Bitcoin or Bitcoin cash? Like, what are the things that you think are most important in terms of determining whether something is working?

• 1:50:24Speaker 02

  Fantastic question. So, uh, objective values would be like how much commerce is happening on chain? How much money is being moved on chain? How many transactions? What's the average value of those transactions?

• 1:50:36Speaker 02

  The more emotional answer to that is like, how empowering is this tool for more people around the world to have more control over their own lives? And that, that one, it's a bit harder to, to put a concrete number on or an objective standard. But, uh, if you look at people in third world countries, they're not going to be able to figure out how to set up a light node. They're not going to be able to figure out how to use any of these layer two stuff. They're either going to use Bitcoin Cash on chain or a custodial Bitcoin solution where they're just, you know, there's someone else has their private keys and at their mercy of having their account frozen. It's, it's going to be one of, one of those two choices.

• 1:51:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Uh, in terms of Bitcoin Cash, when you think about that might, that future migration, right? So market is winning in terms of, or market has adopted Bitcoin. That's where the, the name recognition is, all that stuff. Frankly, a lot of that is due to the early work that you had, right? In terms of going out and, and really talking about this and, and spending so much time and educating people and driving adoption. What would it take on the Bitcoin Cash side for you to say, look, I'm 50 50 right now? Like, actually, this isn't going to work. And, you know, give up, it has like a negative connotation to it, but basically just come to the, the realization or, or identify,

• 1:51:50Anthony Pompliano?

  hey, Bitcoin Cash is, is not going to be the solution because it's not a tech then market thing. Okay. The market's going to be the, the most important thing. And then, you know, uh, walk away from Bitcoin Cash, I guess. So people ask in all kinds of different ways, but that's essentially what they're asking.

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Bitcoin would have to start being more usable as peer-to-peer electronic cash, enabling more economic freedom around the world than, than Bitcoin Cash. And it's not even close at the moment, but maybe that'll change in the future.

• 1:52:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and I think that if I had somebody here, like if I had two technical people, one from Bitcoin Cash and one from Bitcoin, the two arguments would be, again, layer one scalability with the potential to add layers two and above on Bitcoin Cash. On the Bitcoin side, it's layer one, constrained block sizes, scalability comes from layer two, etc. As you said, you're unhappy with kind of the layer two examples today, but that's the opportunity.

• 1:52:48Speaker 02

  Like everything, it'll get better over time, but it's question is how much time? And so on that front, I would love to recommend, I think you'd be a fantastic host for that with an open mind and respectful demeanor. Peter Reisen, the chief scientist of Bitcoin Unlimited, I'm sure would love to participate and he'd be the big block advocate there. And I think it would be fantastic, you could get Elizabeth Stark of Lightning Labs and they can both discuss the pros and cons of Lightning Network or Adam Back, the founder of Blockstream. I think either Elizabeth or Adam would be a fantastic person to have a discussion with Peter Reisen on layer two solutions. Peter Reisen wrote some really interesting essays about why he's not bullish on Lightning Network in the short term. And I think that would be incredibly interesting. I know I'd love to watch that discussion.

• 1:53:32Speaker 02

  But from what I've heard so far, the Adam Back and Elizabeth Stark don't seem to be willing to have that conversation, which to me makes me wonder, are their arguments not that strong if they're not willing to have that conversation? But for any of them that wind up hearing this, or if you know those people, ask them to do it, because I think all of us all over the world would be able to learn a lot from watching and listening to that conversation.

• 1:53:51Anthony Pompliano?

  So another question is, how do you think through, again, the market cap, the number of payments, transactions, all that stuff? Why do you think people are still using Bitcoin even with the issues that you've described, right? So if the issues are that big of a deal and you're basically, you think there's a 50% chance that people will end up leaving Bitcoin, moving to Bitcoin Cash, what's keeping them there? Is it just a network effect type thing or is there other things that you kind of rationalize in your head as to why they're staying there? And really what I think this question is getting at is like, I had Ross Gerber come on, who's a big Tesla bull, right?

• 1:54:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And I asked him, I said, well, what did the bears believe that you were able to recognize, but you just disagree?

• 1:54:39Speaker 02

  What was Ross's answer to that on Tesla? Because Tesla's been on a wild ride.

• 1:54:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, so he's been right, right? And he actually had a pretty good answer in terms of how he walked through exactly the work he did to get convicted. He went to dinner with kind of the Tesla bears and, you know, did all the work. And then he was just like, I just think they're wrong on. And he had a couple of things, you know, in terms of what those things were. I think this question is getting at why are people staying with Bitcoin if there's still all the technical issues that you've described?

• 1:55:07Speaker 02

  Yes, I think the answer to that question is that you can look at it in terms of market cap. So Bitcoin cash's market cap is somewhere in the ballpark of $5 billion. And Bitcoin's market cap is, you know, somewhere close to $200 billion or some much bigger number. So you have, you know, $200 billion versus capital of capital versus $5 billion worth of capital. The people with a $5 billion in Bitcoin cash are motivated to see Bitcoin cash succeed. But you have almost $200 billion worth of capital in Bitcoin that are motivated to see Bitcoin succeed. So that's a, that's a, that's a lot of capital out there that it's in favor of, you know, seeing Bitcoin succeed. But if people start seeing the writing on the wall of things like, you know, Bitcoin not being usable in commerce. And I don't have the data in front of me, but I think the average transaction size on Bitcoin at the moment is something like $1,500.

• 1:55:50Speaker 02

  If you're somebody that needs, you know, cheap, fast, reliable payments and you live in a, you know, a low income country, Bitcoin's not very useful to you. As of yesterday, the average fee on the Bitcoin network to get included in the next one is $5, right? $5, that's a lot of money to people in a lot of first world countries. The average fee to be included in the Bitcoin cash block is less than a penny. That's fine for anybody anywhere in the world. So I think.

• 1:56:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Part of, part of this, right? And I'll paraphrase the quote, but it's Yogi Berra says, "Oh, nobody ever goes to that restaurant because it's too crowded." Right? Or too crowded, you know, whatever it is, right? And I think like ultimately like that's kind of what this whole debate gets to is the reason why some of these issues come up is because everyone's using it, right? And everyone being still a small group of just cryptocurrency enthusiasts, whatever. But it sounds like that's the thing that in order for Bitcoin cash to succeed would have to change. Is that fair?

• 1:56:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, you'll need more, more people using things, but it is true when a restaurant's too crowded. People go to other restaurants that would have originally gone to that or first restaurant. And I think that's exactly what happened with Bitcoin is it could have accommodated a whole lot more people like. Honestly, I, I think the, the market, uh, the, the price of Bitcoin today could have easily already been a hundred thousand dollars per single Bitcoin. If it didn't run into the scaling disaster that drove away, you know, businesses like Microsoft stopped accepting Bitcoin. Dell Computer stopped accepting Bitcoin. Bitcoin Jesus stopped promoting Bitcoin and that's how big of a deal this scaling problem was with Bitcoins.

• 1:57:26Anthony Pompliano?

  So, so there would be some people who would be willing to admit, and I don't know what percentage of Bitcoin would, would say this, which would say, uh, the scaling debate, the, the final result ended up in a place where they were, didn't agree with it. Right? So for whatever reason, they thought that there should be bigger blocks, blah, blah, whatever. But they still believe that Bitcoin will succeed in spite of those decisions. So it was a thing where, hey, we were on this trajectory, we made some decisions. Uh, they would argue that, uh, we made a detour, but like, we're eventually still going to end up at the same place. Maybe we just took a detour on the way. I think the argument that you would have, and, and correct me if I'm wrong, is, uh, hey, those decisions ended up being much more than a detour. And therefore I chose to, to basically get in another car, right?

• 1:58:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, what do you say to the people who just think it's like a detour type deal? But ultimately Bitcoin will still be successful, whether you agree with those decisions or not?

• 1:58:18Speaker 02

  The people that think it's just, just a delay, uh, they very well may be right. Uh, I, I don't know if it, I don't know if getting in there another, and I didn't get, you know, I have one foot in the Bitcoin cash car and one foot in the Bitcoin car and one in Ethereum and everywhere else. But, uh, the, the frustrating part though is no matter what, whether, whether, you know, it's going to be a different car that gets to the finish line or the Bitcoin car just gets there later. Whichever car gets to the finish line first is going to get there later than it otherwise would have. And that's the most frustrating part to me. Like we could have had this amazing peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world sooner. Uh, instead it's going to wind up being later than it otherwise would have been if we hadn't run into that scaling, uh, war within Bitcoin. That's the most frustrating part for me.

• 1:58:56Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. One of the questions that I absolutely loved, and I always saw one person ask it, which I wish that more people would ask it, is when I talk to you, I see all the people with all the, they've got all the controversy, they say all this kind of stuff. It feels to me like you still have half your heart with Bitcoin and half your heart with Bitcoin Cash, but ultimately, your heart is in electronic payments and kind of this, this finish line that we keep talking about where there's a world in the future that will be much better than the world we're in today. And so, would it be fair to say that if Bitcoin Cash was not successful, you would gladly kind of jump back on the Bitcoin bandwagon and start pushing that forward? Or maybe you found something else that you thought would ultimately get that,

• 1:59:41Anthony Pompliano?

  but you were kind of tied to the mission of getting to that future world? And you're trying to figure out what is the best vehicle to get there?

• 1:59:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I'll be the biggest cheerleader I possibly can for whichever tool I think is going to be the one that gets us the fastest to that future in which people have control over their own money and don't need permission from, you know, banks or politicians to do what they want with their own funds.

• 2:00:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Even if it was Bitcoin?

• 2:00:03Speaker 02

  If it's Bitcoin, yeah. Bitcoin, Ripple, Dash, even if it was the US dollar somehow, I'd start cheering the US dollar if I thought that was the one.

• 2:00:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Come on, don't be crazy now. So I guess then that leads to the question of like, what are the things that you would look at? It's kind of a, I've been asked a bunch of times, right? Like, what are the things that I would identify as would make Bitcoin fail? Right? And I've got a whole list of everything from self-inflicted wounds of, you know, introducing bugs during the software process to all kinds of things I would look at. What are the things for you that when you look at Bitcoin Cash, either would have to happen for you to say, okay, you know, it didn't work? Or two, are the metrics where, whether it was liquidity or market cap or something, you would basically say, oh, you know what, maybe I actually need to hedge more into something else?

• 2:00:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, great, great question.

• 2:00:55Speaker 02

  I think the thing that would make me feel the most frustrated with Bitcoin Cash is if it stopped being usable as cash. If it no longer had fast, cheap, reliable payments. Or something else that came along that had fast, cheap, reliable payments. And an as big or even bigger network effect. Because the network effect is a really, really big deal. I don't know if they're bots or if they're real people, but every anytime I go on Twitter, I see a bunch of people tweeting me. They go, what about Nano? What about Nano? It's, you know, and the honest truth is I don't know about Nano because I haven't really come across its network effect. Other than a bunch of people on Twitter tweeting about it. But, you know, maybe I'll spend an afternoon reading into Nano. But as far as I know, you know, you can't really pay it with Nano at many websites. And I know very little about Nano, but like the thing about Bitcoin Cash that's so awesome.

• 2:01:40Speaker 02

  Is it has just as many, if not more places that you can pay with it online and offline than Bitcoin. In fact, I think almost for sure, there's more physical merchants where you can pay with Bitcoin Cash than there is that you can pay with Bitcoin. And that's, that's a real big deal. And it's a sign of the network effect, so.

• 2:01:56Anthony Pompliano?

  So if you see the Nano tweeters, wait till they start DMing you because they're absolutely insane. And I definitely think that a lot of them are bots. One of the things that I just wrote down was probably the most used word other than Bitcoin Jesus to talk about you in the threads was just scam. Right? And I think when people hear that, you know, it's easy to kind of get the mob out and everyone gets their pitchforks and just, you know, who are we yelling at today? Right? Type thing, especially in today's society. And so what I tried to do was like, why? Right? And I asked a bunch of people, why? And they came up with a whole bunch of different things. And so I just kind of want to walk through a couple of these. In fact, they just let you respond, right?

• 2:02:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Which in the first one was Bitcoin.com as a URL promotes Bitcoin Cash. So why not use BitcoinCash.com or something else? How do you think about the use of Bitcoin.com? And then having Bitcoin Cash and promoting it on there?

• 2:02:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so bitcoin.com is my domain name and I can promote whatever I want on it. I could turn it into a site to promote the Federal Reserve if I really wanted to. It's my domain name. If you don't like it, you can make me an offer for the whole domain name. I can sell you the whole thing and the whole business. You can pay me in Bitcoin cash for it and then you can do whatever you want with it to anybody out there that doesn't like what we're doing with it currently. So that doesn't make it

• 2:03:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Now you know I have to ask, what price would you sell it at?

• 2:03:19Speaker 02

  I think 22 million Bitcoin cash would get it.

• 2:03:22Anthony Pompliano?

  22 million Bitcoin cash?

• 2:03:24Speaker 02

  There's only 21 million ever, so.

• 2:03:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, got it. And so I guess what people would say is like, you're absolutely right, right? In terms of you're able to do whatever you want. And I love the example of like you can promote the Federal Reserve on bitcoin.com and knock yourself out.

• 2:03:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you feel like it's misleading to promote something other than Bitcoin on there? Or how do you, like, I guess if you went to a board meeting, right, for bitcoin.com and you were sitting there and you were talking about like, hey, here's why we make certain decisions? Like, what is the logic behind the decision? Not can you do it? Of course, you can do a lot of things, right? But like, what is the logic and kind of how do you think about the advantage for bitcoin.com in doing?

• 2:04:10Speaker 02

  So I guess two, two points there. So if we were to be promoting BTC on bitcoin.com, we'd be promoting an inferior product that gives people a bad user experience. And every day, we still get user support requests. Hey, why didn't my transaction go through? Hey, you guys are ripping me off. I had to pay $5 to send my Bitcoin. I thought Bitcoin was supposed to be, you know, free or cheap to send. And like every day we get people doing that. And so, and even if you look at it historically, if we were promoting BTC, that's not the Bitcoin described in the white paper. That's not the Bitcoin described on bitcoin.org in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013. Like the thing that everybody's calling Bitcoin today, it has the Bitcoin name and it has the Bitcoin network effect, but it doesn't have the characteristics that made Bitcoin popular to begin with. And it doesn't have the,

• 2:04:53Speaker 02

  you know, Bitcoin cash has far more. It has all of that except for the most proof of work on the longest chain, but it has the fast, cheap, reliable payments. If you read the white paper, it's clearly talking about something that more closely resembles Bitcoin cash than Bitcoin. So I feel like if we were to promote BTC only on Bitcoin, we'd be doing the entire world a disservice. Like I think Bitcoin cash can bring more economic freedom to the world faster than Bitcoin can today.

• 2:05:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And you guys right now do Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash on bitcoin.com?

• 2:05:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and in fact, like, our entire goal on bitcoin.com is to make as clear as possible the differences between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, because we want everybody to know and understand the differences, because we think if people understand the differences, we think they'll prefer Bitcoin Cash, just like myself. I understand the differences, I prefer Bitcoin Cash. And I think that's part of, maybe that was the reason that, you know, our Bitcoin and Bitcoin Talk.org had to engage in so much censorship. They were worried that if people were able to hear both sides of the arguments, they would prefer the big block side of the argument. And that's why they had to engage in the censorship.

• 2:05:54Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, hold on, hold on. So, on bitcoin.com, you're comfortable in terms of, or, do you think people try to buy BTC and end up buying BCH or vice versa? Like, do you think that people get confused?

• 2:06:08Speaker 02

  I, I think very, very few people, if any, get confused. So, no, I don't think there's a problem, because we put it very, very clearly, right there, so people can see. And we have entire articles describing the entire history and the differences between both. So, anybody that spends the time to even, you know, do a little bit of research into the topic can understand that BTC and BCH are two different coins with two different characteristics. And I don't think anybody's being fooled or tricked into, you know, buying one on accident instead of the other. If anything, I think if people buy BTC thinking it's the Bitcoin described in the white paper, they're being fooled.

• 2:06:40Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So, another thing I saw was somebody tweeted a chart, and I apologize that I forget, it was either BTC over BCH or BCH over BTC, but basically it was showing that the price appreciation of Bitcoin drastically outweighs the price movement of Bitcoin Cash. And so, basically, you know, you said earlier, like, you're not a trader, right? And I'm in the same boat as you, I'm not a trader. But over what is now months, if not, you know, years, the Bitcoin price has performed differently than the Bitcoin Cash price. And so, how do you think about those price movements? And do you worry at all about that as a signal?

• 2:07:20Speaker 02

  I, I think that, that a part of that's because I'm such a horrible trader, right? Right after the split, I'm like... Didn't do any dollar cost averaging from one end to the other. It's like, hey, let's move quickly and let's move a lot. And so at one point, the price of Bitcoin Cash was, you know, about half a Bitcoin. So that means for any Bitcoins I sold at that point, I got two for one. Whereas the current ratio is like forty or fifty to one between Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin. So, you know, any Bitcoin core people that sold their B cash at that point, you know, you're welcome. You got a good deal on it. But I remember in 2012, the entire Bitcoin ecosystem was feeling really discouraged. Bitcoin in 2011 got it for thirty dollars and people felt like, you know, we're on the moon. This is fantastic. And the price went from thirty dollars down to a dollar and some change over the next year and a half.

• 2:08:05Speaker 02

  And there were a lot of people think, oh, I should get out before this goes to zero. And no, not me. I was building and promoting and building and investing. It's the same. It's the same phase in Bitcoin Cash right now. All the infrastructure is really starting to get there. I'm still building. I'm still investing. I, you know, we have our $250 million Bitcoin Cash ecosystem fund. I've deployed about 15 million of that so far. We're deploying a couple of million every month here. It's a really big deal. We're building out this ecosystem before you know. And the overall number of people using cryptocurrency around the world is still small, right? So bitcoin.com, we're not trying to reach existing crypto people. We're trying to build the tools for to bring the rest of the entire world into using crypto. And Bitcoin Cash is in a really good position to be the onboard ramp for all those people around the world because it's fast, cheap and reliable. That's what people want.

• 2:08:48Speaker 02

  They don't want to, you know, have to calculate manually what the fee ratio needs to be and what the block time is going to be. They just want something that works. But if we can build something that works, that's non-custodial where bitcoin.com can't freeze their accounts. And if we get subpoenaed, we don't have any information about what people have going on. We can provide privacy in the wallet. So it's fast, cheap, reliable and private and easy to use. Boom. That's going to be a winning combination for the world. And I don't see Bitcoin having that. It just has this name recognition and bigger market cap at the moment.

• 2:09:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So I promised people, if we did this live, I would try to take some of their questions. And two of the things you just said, people just went nuts with. So first is, and feel free to not answer if you want, but people want to know how much value you lost by being at Bitcoin Cash versus Bitcoin with the, with the funds that you diverted.

• 2:09:34Speaker 02

  A lot, right? So like a bit, you know, at the high point, I think Bitcoin Cash was two to one. And now it's what 40 or 50 to one. So I didn't sell all of my Bitcoin into Bitcoin Cash at two to one. But even if I sold, even if I sold 10, right, that's still a big chunk of money, right? And it was definitely more than 10. So a lot.

• 2:09:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And then the second thing is, uh, the second you said B Cash, everyone just went nuts. Uh, so talk a little bit about B Cash versus Bitcoin Cash and kind of like, um, why the preference of one over the other and kind of explain that.

• 2:10:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. So two, I guess, two points on that. So the first one, so where the origin of the word B Cash came is a bunch of people that didn't like the Bitcoin Cash and big blocks and that fork of Bitcoin. They went out and registered the, you know, B Cash Twitter account and our B Cash on Reddit and, you know, Bcash.com and all these domain names and social media accounts. And then had them all pre-populated and set up with all sorts of negative information about Bitcoin Cash and the big block movement. And then they tried to convince everybody that the name of Bitcoin Cash would be B Cash. So that when people would search for B Cash, they would see all this negative content about it. So it was actually like a social media attack and the people that owned all the B Cash social media names are people who actually hate Bitcoin Cash. So there's no way that Bitcoin Cash could ever actually change its name to B Cash, even though

• 2:10:53Speaker 02

  B Cash isn't a bad name. It's, it is an easier name to say, but if you, if, if all the people that own all the domain names and social media accounts for B Cash hate Bitcoin Cash, there's no way you could ever switch to it. So it was actually part of a social media attack. And then there's the other, you know, semi-world famous photo of me, you know, giving the guy a middle finger at one point. I invite everybody, please watch the entire interview. It's like, it's like an hour long interview. Don't just watch the 40 second clip or whatever it is. And, you know, if you've ever watched Ali G or Borat, that's what was going on. The guy was pushing my buttons for 45 minutes and like, I shouldn't have lost my temper, but after 45 minutes of him pushing my buttons, I lost my temper and snapped. And I shouldn't have done that, but like, that's what happened. And it wasn't because he called it B Cash.

• 2:11:37Speaker 02

  The thing that pushed me over the edge and made me snap was when he accused me of having paid for a whole bunch of sock puppets on the internet. Like may, maybe the nano guys are doing that. I don't have any proof, but I have never, ever, ever paid for anything like that ever. Uh, and in fact, I've discouraged people from ever doing it anytime I've ever heard of anything like that going on. And so when he just stated, as a matter of fact, everybody knows that it's you, Roger, and all the sock puppets you're paying for are the only people that like B cash. Uh, that's what set me over the edge. It wasn't him using the word B cash, it was him accusing me of engaging in, you know, psyops and, you know, the same sort of crazy. Propaganda governments engaging with, you know, their 50 cent armies and all this other crazy stuff. So.

• 2:12:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So two follow ups on that, uh, quick ones. One, uh, do you laugh at the photo now? Like when you see it, is it just kind of like, uh, it's stupid, but at the same time, like it, it's almost, uh, one of these things where I know a lot of people who have become a meme to some degree. They just were like, ah, whatever.

• 2:12:30Speaker 02

  No, I, it's probably my least, uh. I regret that way more than like having, you know, sold firecrackers and gone to prison. Like that's, that's not the person that I am one bit like I'm a passionate person. But I'm not an angry person. I almost never, that's one of the few times in my life that I've lost my temper. Uh, like that, I, that's, that's not who I am at all. And it's really, really disappointing to me when I see that. You know, pretty much anytime I tweet anything, people reply to me on Twitter with that picture. And it's really, uh, it's really sad for me because that's not the person that I am at all.

• 2:13:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that's a, that's a very sober, rational view of it. Um, and the second piece is, uh, see somebody keeps asking, uh, how, how do you handle all the stress of people? Uh, either, you know, again, like I said, like one of the most popular words is scammer, right? And, you know, I don't care who you are as a human, you just gotta be like. This sucks, right? And so like, how do you handle the stress of, um, you know, community backlash or people disagreeing or wanting to argue and kind of all that stuff all the time?

• 2:13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I don't worry about it one bit because I know the truth and the truth is far more important than being popular. And anybody who's been in the ecosystem for a while too, knows the truth as well. So, uh, anybody that's busy calling me a scammer or somebody who's been fooled by, uh, by probably a bunch of sock puppets on the internet. Because don't underestimate the, the, the power of, you know, social media influence. If everybody around you tells you that Santa Claus is real. You believe it. If everybody around you tells you that Roger's a scammer, you're going to believe it without evidence for either one of those things.

• 2:13:54Anthony Pompliano?

  I've got one more question and then I kind of want to summarize our conversation here. But before I do that, if you're watching the live stream, please hit the like button so that more people can watch this. It's super helpful for whatever reason YouTube's algorithm enjoys that. One of the last questions I have for you before we summarize kind of the conversation is Satoshi. You're really early in Bitcoin. How do you think about who Satoshi is? Do you want to know who it is? Do you know who it is? Just talk a little bit about Satoshi.

• 2:14:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, at one point, I was fairly convinced that Craig had some role in that. Whoever or wherever Satoshi is at this point, like, I think he deserves his privacy. If it were to be Craig, I would be, rather than improving my opinion of Craig, which just diminished my opinion of Satoshi substantially.

• 2:14:46Anthony Pompliano?

  So, yeah, whoever, wherever. Fair to say you don't think it's Craig?

• 2:14:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And if he were Satoshi, he could provide that proof at any moment, and he hasn't done it yet. So, no, I don't, I don't think he's Satoshi at this point.

• 2:15:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and then, any ideas of who it could be or speculation on who it is?

• 2:15:08Speaker 02

  Space aliens? I don't know.

• 2:15:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Be careful in 2020, man.

• 2:15:15Speaker 02

  You guys, the people listening to this will like this, or on the early, early days of BitcoinTalk.org, there was a really fun and interesting thread of people discussing one, people, the thread was like, what's your favorite thing about Bitcoin? And people were talking about their favorite things about Bitcoin. And one guy's favorite thing about Bitcoin was that now when we finally make contact with space aliens, we don't have to be embarrassed about the type of money we're using anymore. And I thought that was a pretty interesting point.

• 2:15:42Anthony Pompliano?

  That's awesome. So, last question about Satoshi is just, there's a lot of people who want to speculate and kind of play the games of, you know, who is it? Do you want to know? Or do you think it's actually better that it's an unknown person or group?

• 2:15:55Speaker 02

  There was that other video that came out a month or two ago that made a really interesting, compelling case for Adam Back, having been Satoshi. And it made me, it definitely made me scratch my head a bit and say, hmm.

• 2:16:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, uh, and but do I want to know? No, I I think that's one of the things that's just kind of adds to the lure of all of cryptocurrency in general is that it's created by this mysterious figure. And everybody can imagine Satoshi to being the exact perfect person that they would want him to be. And the fact that we don't know exactly who it is means that nobody's can be mad at that person. So everybody can envision that, oh, Bitcoin was created by Satoshi, who agrees with me on everything. So he was trying to create Bitcoin to be this exact perfect thing that I want it to be. So it's fantastic from a marketing standpoint.

• 2:16:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and and so kind of in summary, I I think that, uh, I want to just, you know, really wrap up where I think, um, we agree and then where we disagree, um, and disagree again has a negative connotation, but but it's really just a market bet, right? Um, and and so as we started the conversation, like, there's a lot of issues in the world, uh, both economically with the monetary system and and those that lead into other aspects of life that are just broken, right? And and there needs to be a solution. I think you would agree with that. Um, and I think you and I are are, uh, dead in line with that being a digital currency, right? And and at some point, we need to have a cryptocurrency become the global version, uh, currency, and that will drive a lot of, uh, impact and improvement across the world.

• 2:17:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Where you get into kind of a difference is you've got Bitcoin, you've got Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash has a very specific view of the world and kind of the two key things I think are one, uh, superior technology in the eyes of the Bitcoin Cash community will ultimately lead to adoption, uh, which will ultimately lead to kind of, quote-unquote, winning. Uh, and a key piece of that is that everyone doesn't need to, uh, run a Bitcoin node, right? Or that's not as important as other aspects. I think in the Bitcoin community, um, kind of this, uh, constant, um, uh, journey to make sure that anyone, anywhere can run a node, uh, has always served as one of the core key tenets. Um, and because it has all of the market adoption, or a lot of market adoption has been the leader there,

• 2:18:09Anthony Pompliano?

  um, both for early work of yours and and many, many other people. Um, regardless of any technical limitations today, uh, that market adoption gives the head start and ultimately will allow, um, Bitcoin to, um, build out what it needs to to kind of serve that function. Did I miss anything in kind of the categorization of where there's a difference? I think we might have lost Roger. Let's see if he comes back here.

• 2:18:43Speaker 02

  Okay, sorry about that.

• 2:18:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, all right. No problem. What was the last thing that you heard?

• 2:18:48Speaker 02

  I think you were talking about the differences between Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin and then.

• 2:18:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So basically what I was saying is Bitcoin Cash believes that in their eyes, the superior technology will lead to market adoption. Market adoption leads to, you know, quote-unquote, winning that race. And one of the key things is that there's a belief that not everyone needs to be able to run a node, or that's not the most important thing. On the Bitcoin side, there's a, you know, very heavy belief that anyone, anywhere should be able to run a Bitcoin node. And regardless of any technical limitations, they will eventually be solved because Bitcoin's market adoption and network effect will buy at the time to build that out in layer two and other technologies. Is that a fair characterization in terms of how you see kind of the two different, really narratives and journeys playing out?

• 2:19:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually, I think that's a pretty, pretty good narrative or pretty good characterization. But hedge your bets, right? You don't have to put all your, your, you know, don't put all your money on one horse here. Have some of each. And especially if you're one of those people, if you're, you know, consider, if you believe in the first argument that Bitcoin, the bigger market cap will overcome the technological limitations that you have currently. If you're not running a full node yourself, maybe that's an indication that maybe the other, the other path is okay as well. And the part that'll be so frustrating for me is if those layer twos never come into use well enough and everybody's having to use custodians. Well, you're just right back to what happened with the gold, it's standard and the dollar. You know, they got separated. Now everybody's at the mercy of the dollar. What if that happens with, you know,

• 2:20:22Speaker 02

  Bitcoin? Everybody starts using custodial solutions. And before you know it, I look at Mt. Gox, they're running fractional reserve for a long, long time. Maybe, you know, maybe for years and years and years. Who's to say, you know, maybe that's going to happen with the Coinbase's or the Zappos or the other, you know, custodial wallets out there in the world. That's a real big problem is if you're using a wallet in which you have custody of the funds yourself, you don't have to worry nearly as much about those other sorts of problems.

• 2:20:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And so would it be fair in saying that ultimately the winner here, and I always tell people like, my personal opinion doesn't matter in the sense of like what quote-unquote wins, right? Or what ends up being the globally adopted thing? Would you agree that it's just going to come down to whatever the market determines?

• 2:21:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the market is never done determining is the other part of it too. Like I see people on Twitter saying, oh, the market has decided. The market's never done deciding, right? iPhone one at one point was the number one thing in the market. Well, it's not anymore, right? And the iPhone 11 is one of the best, the best iPhone in the market today. It's not going to be next year. So the market has never, ever, ever done deciding. And even if Bitcoin Cash were to wind up being the top cryptocurrency, that's not forever, right? Something, and people always used to ask me back in 2011 or 12 or 13, like, well, what if something better than Bitcoin comes along? And I always told them, I hope something better than Bitcoin does come along, because then we all get to use it, right? It's a good thing if something better than Bitcoin Cash comes along. If something better than Bitcoin Cash comes along, we all get to use that too. So the more things that are better than what we have today that come along,

• 2:21:48Speaker 02

  the better the world is, that we want as many better and new things to come along as we possibly can, because that's how the world progresses into a better world.

• 2:21:55Anthony Pompliano?

  So the, the, one of the last things that I want to talk about is, uh, when we get done with this, I'm going to have a million people talk to me. They're going to say, what, what is Roger Vares' view of the world, right? And, uh, one, just thank you for spending the time to, to go through this. I wanted to do it live so that people could, um, kind of ask the questions and really engage. But also, I think my response that would be Roger spent a good number of years of his life promoting Bitcoin. He sees this vision of the future where digital currency ends up creating great things in the world. He made a decision to divest or diversify about 50% of the Bitcoin into Bitcoin Cash. Uh, that hasn't gone so well so far from a financial return perspective.

• 2:22:38Anthony Pompliano?

  But his belief is that, um, at some point in the future, there's going to be a divergence, uh, or, or a loss of interest in Bitcoin, and people will move to Bitcoin Cash. Um, the current market dynamics Roger would, uh, say, show great adoption for Bitcoin. Uh, but there's a, a belief that that will change in the future. If I was to categorize it that way, is anything in there inaccurate? Or do you feel like that's a pretty fair view of the world as to kind of how you see it?

• 2:23:07Speaker 02

  I think I need to hire you to be my new spokesperson here. Such a fantastic.

• 2:23:11Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no, I'm staying on the Bitcoin side. So I see all the people asking, I own no Bitcoin cash, that stuff, but.

• 2:23:16Speaker 02

  Why? Let's ask you, why, why don't, why don't you diversify?

• 2:23:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, it comes back to when I look at.

• 2:23:23Speaker 02

  Peer pressure on Twitter or is it irrational reason?

• 2:23:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Not at all. It's, it's, look, the fact that we're even having this conversation, right? There's a bunch of people who are all upset and, you know, you, you saw the people who get all, all worked up about it. I, I generally think kind of three things are really important, right? So when it comes to non-financial, non, non-technology type stuff, like free speech and lack of censorship, right? I couldn't believe in more in, you know, I was a soldier in the United States Army. I went to Iraq, right? And so I have a very specific kind of experience in life that most people don't have. But in recent light of a lot of the social unrest in the United States, one of the things that has absolutely blown my mind is we're a country that hangs its hat on free speech.

• 2:24:08Anthony Pompliano?

  But it seems every day like we're moving more towards a world where it's encouragement of free speech. If you say the things I agree with.

• 2:24:15Speaker 02

  Cancel culture is such a big problem.

• 2:24:17Anthony Pompliano?

  It, it, that's not free speech, right? And so I, you know, I've aired my grievances about this all over the place and basically said, you know, the, the testing of free speech happens most when somebody is saying something you disagree with. So it was important for me to have this conversation mainly because I thought a lot of people thought that we shouldn't have the conversation, right? And so that was kind of one, one key piece of it. The other thing is I've made, you know, we've invested over a hundred million dollars in early stage companies over the last four years. Back to all kinds of companies, both in kind of the crypto space and a bunch more that are not in the crypto space. And the one thing that I think when I look at objectively, I say, I understand both arguments.

• 2:24:58Anthony Pompliano?

  I personally believe and have a very deep conviction in the idea that the market adoption ends up buying time for the technology to be built versus technology.

• 2:25:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Leading to the market adoption, leading to the winning, right? And so is there a possibility that that's the wrong assessment? Of course, right? You're always possible to be wrong. But the way that I invest, right? Is I basically make an analysis and I'm willing to be very binary in nature, right? So I'm willing to kind of make an assessment. And it's this belief that like the concentration is actually a better strategy for me personally than diversification, right? So it's kind of like the war.

• 2:25:38Speaker 02

  Ethereum or any other coins or only Bitcoin?

• 2:25:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I own nothing else. Yeah. And so again, very rare, I think in a lot of cases, like there's plenty of people who kind of own all this other stuff. But but it's not a Bitcoin versus Bitcoin cash thing. It's literally just a Bitcoin versus everything else thing of like, hey, I've got very deep seated conviction here. And this is where I think I want to spend my time. And I think the other piece of this, and you hinted at this earlier and probably one of the number one questions that I get from institutional investors is ultimately, the competition, the real battle, right? Is I say that the crypto world is going to put forth something to be the global reserve currency. Right now, the market is determined that that thing is Bitcoin.

• 2:26:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's going to have to compete on a monetary policy level with fiat currencies. Whatever the thing ends up being put forward, like that's going to be the really big battle. And so it's funny to me that there's so much divisiveness and fighting and all this kind of stuff in the crypto world. Because I think people forget that the battle between a deflationary asset and inflationary asset, like that's a that's a big deal, right? Like that, that's the walk in the park. And so I think that that coming at some point, I don't know if that's two years away, 10 years away, 20 years away, you know, whenever it is. But but I think that that's the other thing I always kind of keep my eye on the prize a little bit of like, ultimately, that's going to be the thing that determines way more than pretty much any other debate that goes on in the crypto industry.

• 2:27:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, that would be my biggest sadness if what winds up playing out here is that rather than the entire world winding up using a hard money asset with a limited supply, they all just wind up using, you know, digital dollars on the blockchain and the Federal Reserve can print more digital dollars in time they want. It seems like it could possibly head in that direction to me and that that would be really sad. I will have a slightly better improved version of the dollar, but nowhere near as good of a version of money for the world that we could have had if we had played our cards a bit better.

• 2:27:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Listen, thank you so much for doing this. I think that hopefully you got some value out of this and I can already see from people's responses that they got a ton of value out of just understanding. And not only one that worked you did around the early days of Bitcoin, but kind of how you see the world today. Obviously, I think we've got some diversity of opinion, but I'm happy that you and I can have kind of a very rational conversation just about what is happening right now. And so hopefully as as this continues, we'll be able to do it again in the future. Thank you.

• 2:28:07Speaker 02

  If you like Pom's content in his channel, subscribe, share the video on social media, tell a friend, set him up with any cryptocurrency wallet you want, send him a little bit, show him how it works.

• 2:28:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Roger.

• 2:28:17Speaker 02

  Right. We're going to spread the whole world as fast as we can. It doesn't matter which cryptocurrency it is. Use the one you like the most and go out and tell a friend.

• 2:28:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Now Roger's going to get accused of being a pomp shill on Twitter. It's you're not going to be able to win, man.

• 2:28:31Speaker 02

  I'm pumping the pomp. So go out and spread this message here because we want as many people to be aware of the infrastructure and ecosystem as we possibly can. And pomp is one of the best messengers the space has out there. We're not like, I've listened to lots of your interviews and like, when you talk about the problems, I'm nodding my head the whole time. And it's just like, what's the solution to get to the world that we want to be in? And we have slightly different strategies, but the end target seems to be almost identical there. So.

• 2:28:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 2:28:56Speaker 02

  Thank you too. See you next time.