Farbood Nivi, Co-Founder & CEO, Coinmine: The Future of Consumer Mining

Farbood Nivi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Coinmine. In this conversation, Farbood and Anthony Pompliano discuss cryptocurrency mining, privacy, freedom, building consumer products, and and why the team built a new feature called Bitcoin mode. -----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. -----If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

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

• 0:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Farbudd Neevi is the co-founder and CEO of Coinmine. In this conversation, we discuss cryptocurrency mining, privacy, freedom, building consumer products, and why the team built a new feature called Bitcoin Mode. I really enjoyed this conversation. It appears lots of people had fun on the livestream, and I hope you enjoy it as well. Before we kick off this podcast, first a word from our sponsor BlockFi. As many of you know, crypto investors store their digital assets on exchanges or in cold storage for long-term safekeeping. However, this strategy doesn't help them grow their investment holdings or build overall wealth. With the new BlockFi interest account, users can now securely

• 0:58Anthony Pompliano?

  store their Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest, paid monthly in cryptocurrency. 6% is an absurdly high rate. It's the best rate in the industry. I highly suggest you go check out blockfi.com/pomp. Again, that's blockfi.com/pomp to sign up and start earning crypto today. 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.

• 1:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Bang, bang. Alright guys, I'm here. I've got Farb with me. We've got a ton to go over. We're going to talk about Coinmine. He's got some announcements to make, and we've also got the livestream going with people tuned in from what looks like all over the world. So it should be a lot of fun. Thank you for coming and doing this.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, man.

• 2:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, background. Who the hell are you?

• 2:08Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I'm still trying to figure it out. So, founder, CEO of CoinMine these days. We started CoinMine a little over a year ago. Actually, you were one of the very first checks into CoinMine.

• 2:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know why, but I believe.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  We're still trying to figure it out. In fact, a buddy of ours, Brian Nordgaard, puts it the right way. He's all about pre-cap table investing. So, cutting entrepreneurs' checks before there's even a cap table. And that was actually you. I think you were one of the first two or three checks into the company. So, we started CoinMine last year. We've got it hiding over here.

• 2:49Anthony Pompliano?

  We have. For those who are just listening, we've got a CoinMine sitting here that I actually have in the office mining every day.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Right now, it's mining grin, but in a few minutes here, it may be mining something else.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  So, basically, CoinMine, you know, it looks like an Xbox. It's a plug-in crypto device. It'll mine. It'll be a Bitcoin lightning node soon here. We've got some cool things we're announcing today that'll tell you even more about what it does.

• 3:16Anthony Pompliano?

  So, when we first talked and you said that you were gonna go build this, I think the exact pitch was it is a consumer-focused miner

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:26Anthony Pompliano?

  that you pull out of the box, you plug in the wall.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:29Anthony Pompliano?

  It looks pretty. It's nearly silent.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:33Anthony Pompliano?

  And it pulls less power than a Playstation from the wall.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And

• 3:36Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 3:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I said, "That sounds amazing. Let's do it."

• 3:40Speaker 01

  That was a year ago, and right now, it's sitting in your office.

• 3:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, let's talk about, let's talk about the product first, and then we'll talk about kind of what some of the implications are for the world, because I think that's some of the stuff that I got really excited about.

• 3:55Anthony Pompliano?

  What's inside the box, right? So, the box looks pretty clean, and you can stick it, literally, I've had it in my kitchen for a couple of days right before I brought it to the office. But what's inside of it from a technical standpoint?

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Uh, insides are, it's basically like a really GPU intensive desktop computer.

• 4:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Right? Uh, it's kind of like a Playstation.

• 4:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Or an Xbox. They're, they're basic on the sort of generalized computer side, but they have like a hardcore GPU in them.

• 4:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Uh, so that's what our device does. Uh, and since it's like that, and since we built the operating system ourselves, it's called MineOS. Um, we can do anything we want with the device.

• 4:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Uh, so it can be a Bitcoin Lightning node, it can simultaneously mine Ethereum. Uh, it can be a couple of other things that I'll, that I'll share a little bit later in the show. Uh, so it's basically a computer that we can do anything with.

• 4:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So I'm pulling up right now as well, the, uh, mobile app that comes with it because part of this is, so when I, when I got the CoinMine, I pulled it out of the box. The box is awesome. Uh, we'll, we'll get the box in here, um, because it's pretty cool in terms of a design perspective. Um, but the, uh, mobile app is super slick. It's really, really simple to, uh, and, and it may be hard for people at home to, uh, to see, but essentially the mobile app allows you to see what you've mined, uh, and what you're currently mining, right? So like how much you've mined, it, um, it denominates everything in satoshis, which I love. Uh, and then it allows you to switch back and forth. And today,

• 5:28Anthony Pompliano?

  uh, you can mine Ethereum, Monero, Zcash, or Grin, all using the same device, uh, switch back and forth. But let's just get the announcement out of the way.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Um.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Should we do it?

• 5:38Anthony Pompliano?

  You have shipped these all over the world. You've been able to, uh, allow individuals to mine from their home very quickly, uh, for separate cryptocurrencies, but today we are announcing a fifth cryptocurrency, which is?

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Well, you know, we keep our communication lines pretty open with our customers, right? So you can DM us, you can tweet us, you can chat with us on our website, you can email us. Paul will probably share my phone number after this, after this, and people will start calling me. Uh, and we hear one request over and over and over again. It's our, it's our number one request. And in fact, we might as well bring that box out because it's, it's plastered all over the front of the box. Uh, so today we're announcing the launch of Bitcoin on CoinMine.

• 6:25Anthony Pompliano?

  So

• 6:26Speaker 01

  And in fact, you're gonna be the one to do it.

• 6:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, so a couple of things here real quick. One is, the box that the CoinMine comes in, for those that do not have one yet, and you should go get one, which is, where can they go get them?

• 6:39Speaker 01

  CoinMine.com, and because of this launch, we're actually, we cut the price by a hundred bucks for the weekend.

• 6:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, nice, alright, so you can actually go buy one for a hundred dollars off. And what the box is on the front, it's really, really pretty, but in gold letters, it says...

• 7:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I just dropped the livestream video. This may be the most fun that we have. Alright, so what it says is, the times 03, January 2009, Chancellor on the brink of second bailouts for banks. Which I think that everyone who is in the crypto or Bitcoin community knows is the message, originally with the Bitcoin blockchain. And it really just speaks to, why are we all here, right? And so, as part of that, what the CoinMine now can do is not only mine Ethereum, Zcash, Grin, and Monero, but it can mine Bitcoin, right?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  It's not actually gonna technically mine Bitcoin, it's gonna make you Bitcoin.

• 7:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain how it works.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I will, and this is actually, I don't think I ever told you this story, but this is you. You're the one that gave me the idea, so, right now this thing-

• 7:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Probably one of my ridiculous tweets.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  This thing, this is actually, you said this when, the first time we met in LA, at the whatever LA conference. So this thing will make you about 20 bucks a month of Bitcoin right now. And the way it does that is by algorithmically mining whatever protocol converts to Bitcoin at the best rate. It auto converts it and just gives you Bitcoin in your wallet for you. So, the reason I say it came from you is because something you say over and over again is that crypto and Bitcoin and all this stuff is essentially just the automation of the financial world.

• 8:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep, absolutely.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  And I, when you said that at the conference, in my head, I was like- If everything's just automated and it's all programmatic, we can just do everything in the background. So as a person, you open the app, you tap on Bitcoin, like we should probably launch it here.

• 8:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, so as we're on the podcast live, I am about to message in the company Slack to... Can we talk about who's on the other end of this?

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, we can. And if you want to follow along, you can actually just download the Coinmine app on iOS or Android, and in a second here, you're going to see a BTC wallet appear there. It's not there this second, but Palm's going to make it happen. We have the button presser of button pressers. Our very first engineer, actually, is a Navy guy. He used to sit on aircraft carriers, and one of his jobs was... And they literally called him this: "The Button Presser."

• 9:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and what was he doing on the aircraft carrier?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Well, just in case someone tells him to, he has to press a button that launches a nuclear missile into the air.

• 9:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Crazy.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Job he's never had to do once in his life, but that was his job. So we got the button presser of button pressers, getting ready to press this button. And if anything is as powerful as a nuclear weapon, it's probably Bitcoin.

• 9:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So I'm about to message in the Slack, and they're going to turn this thing live. And of course, I can't just say, "Turn it live." I have to do it in my own style.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  That's right. I'm going to make sure, I'm going to watch the app myself, because this is going to happen.

• 10:06Anthony Pompliano?

  So I just said, "Long Bitcoin, short the bankers, press it live." Let's see this thing go, and then I'm going to actually turn the Coinmine that we have sitting here on the table, and I'm going to make it start mining Bitcoin once the feature is live.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  This thing is cooler than me to look at, so I'm going to put it right in front of me. Let's see what the team says.

• 10:32Anthony Pompliano?

  While we are...

• 10:33Speaker 01

  They said, "Done."

• 10:36Speaker 01

  So give your app an open and uh

• 10:38Anthony Pompliano?

  I have it. I now have, see that orange one right there says Bitcoin.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  So uh you just go onto your little miner card on the front. Tap on that, switch currencies, Bitcoin.

• 10:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Press and hold to confirm, switching to Bitcoin. Bam, status, mining Bitcoin.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  And?

• 11:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Now we are mining Bitcoin on the coin mine. Literally, sitting here.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  See if this thing gives its little tweet.

• 11:12Anthony Pompliano?

  In the time that you heard us say that we were gonna launch the product.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Uh, there you go. You're mining Bitcoin now.

• 11:19Anthony Pompliano?

  The product just got launched.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  And we got Bitcoins orange.

• 11:23Anthony Pompliano?

  And I was able to go into a mobile app and switch from mining grin to mining Bitcoin, all in less than what, forty-five seconds, sixty seconds? So, it's a, it's a pretty cool product um on the coin mine side. Uh, what I wanna spend time talking about is the ramifications for something like this um in the world, right? And one of the things early on that um got me really excited was this idea of like a freedom machine, right? And the, the quote-unquote "freedom machine" is the idea of people all around the world have uh a job and they contribute some sort of labor and they get paid for that labor.

• 12:05Anthony Pompliano?

  What the wealthy or the elite are able to do is they're able to use financial resources to gather assets that work for them, right? And, and obviously, um, you know, th- there's uh, there's plenty of people who have kind of um really explained that well. But what a coin mine does is, or any mining device, for many of these people around the world, by simply plugging into their electricity and connecting to the internet, this computer, this specialized computer, it provides an additional revenue source or an income stream for them, right? And so you can imagine if you're living in a place where, you know, the average monthly salary is fifty dollars or, or ten dollars or whatever it is, if you can get your hands on

• 12:45Anthony Pompliano?

  A coin mine, an S9, you know, something, plug it in the wall, connect it to the network. All of a sudden, you now have a pretty serious incremental increase in your income, right? And so, walk me through how you guys are thinking about, you know, this as a computing platform and how it can actually improve or impact the world.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, love, love to talk about that stuff because that's what got us fired up about this in the first place. No matter where you are in the world, a Bitcoin is worth a Bitcoin, right? So, the awesome thing about that is, for somebody in the United States, maybe $20 a month of Bitcoin isn't life-changing. It will be when Bitcoin 10X's and that's actually, you know, 10 times that. But for a lot of people in the world, $20 a month of Bitcoin is a ton of Bitcoin. So, in terms of Freedom Machine, this is what, this is what you're going to be able to do with your, with your coin mine. So, it's creating satoshis for you now. In a couple of months, we're going to launch the Bitcoin Lightning node that's already on the device. The device is already synced to the blockchain, the software is almost completely finished.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  We'll do an over-the-air update, just like we did to launch Bitcoin mode. And you'll start automatically being able to put your Bitcoin into your Lightning node. And your Lightning node will help you grow the Lightning network, which will just help grow Bitcoin's success. And that's when we're really talking about freedom, right? Because now, if you have your own Lightning node, you can send and receive Bitcoin with anybody in the world for free instantly. Other people can route their Bitcoin payments through you, you can earn fees on it. Another thing that we're hoping to add to it is a BTC Pay Server. So, you literally become your own bank. You could run this in your little coffee shop and accept crypto, any type of crypto payment. It's completely decentralized, there's no central authority when you're dealing with that. You're just like literally running your own bank.

• 14:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Because what you essentially could do, so when you get a coin mine, you pull it out of a box right now, right? Before today, you could pick one of four cryptocurrencies to mine, right? Now it's going well. Now what you can basically do is you can say, okay, I want to end up with Bitcoin. And the CoinMine will algorithmically mine whatever is most profitable, convert it to Bitcoin, and deposit Bitcoin into your wallet. And then what you're basically saying is, the next two kind of features that you'll launch are taking that Bitcoin and being able to contribute it to a Lightning node that's actually in the device, right? And then the BTC Pay Server stuff. So really what you're talking about is almost a all-in-one, single box that you purchase,

• 15:16Anthony Pompliano?

  you pull it out of the box, and when you plug it in, you now have like a command center for a whole bunch of different functionality in the crypto world. Now, the part to me that's really interesting is, if you look at Tesla, for example, one of the things that they've done that other car companies just, one, didn't know how to do, or two, refused to do, was this over-the-air updates, right? So if you think of Tesla as a software company, that they have a piece of hardware, you're driving it, but at any point, they can push these updates, right? Kind of software updates.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Same model.

• 15:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Same exact model for CoinMine, right? So the box that I have today, it continues to get better and better over time because you're just pushing these software updates without me having to do anything.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. We have another huge one coming in a couple of weeks that's gonna make the whole thing way more efficient, take less energy, all these things. So yeah, that's exactly right. We do over-the-air updates, they happen at nighttime, you don't have to do anything, you wake up the next morning, your CoinMine is more efficient. A week ago, or a couple of weeks ago, we launched Grin as one of the tokens, something like almost forty percent of CoinMine switched over to Grin. Grin's price tripled in the time that we launched it. We also shipped some updates that made it quieter, that reduced its energy. So that's one of the cool things, by controlling the whole stack, by having the operating system, we can pretty much do anything with it, which is why we can launch a Bitcoin Lightning node, launch a BTC Pay Server.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  And then one of the other cool things that we're gonna start doing is offering services within the app, for more things that you can do with your Bitcoin, for example. So our plan is to start with Cred, which is offering, you know, up in close to ten percent interest on your Bitcoin right now. So you'll be able to open the app and say, hey, I want to put some of my Bitcoin in with cred and earn some interest on that. That can just happen completely automatically. You can put some in your Lightning node, you can put some in this service. We're talking to other folks as well, Compound Finance, BlockFi, to figure out ways that people can essentially... And those different services have different interest rates and different, you know, pros and cons to each of them. And that's kind of part of this whole, you know, decentralized finance world.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  I'll actually tell you, if you haven't tried this, I really, really recommend it. I saw the decentralized finance future last week.

• 17:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  It's, anybody can do it. It's super easy and it'll pretty much blow your mind. So you probably have a Coinbase wallet with some Ethereum in it. Download the MetaMask extension on Chrome.

• 17:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Or Brave. Send a little bit of Ethereum from your Coinbase wallet to your MetaMask. You can just use the camera in there and send 10 bucks. Then just navigate to compound.finance. You don't have to make an account with compound.finance. You literally click on the Ethereum page on that website and you hit supply. You then put 10 bucks of Ethereum in there and you're earning interest on that Ethereum. You never created an account with Compound Finance. Nobody in the world can stop what you just did. Compound Finance can't stop it. You put a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain and now you're earning interest on that Ethereum and nobody in the world can stop it. And it was just some taps and an app. It's like so close to being totally consumer-friendly.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Felt like, you know, late 90s internet where you're still doing a little bit, you know, like Napster and LimeWire where it's like, yeah, maybe my mom can't quite do it yet, but it didn't take me more than five minutes to figure it out.

• 18:34Anthony Pompliano?

  So the, the part that you're describing that really fascinates me is this idea of like decentralizing the financial system, but also taking what have previously been highly complex mechanisms or, or transactions and boiling them down to clicks, right? And I think about this a lot in the sense of what you just described essentially is an asset-backed loan.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 19:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Is essentially one thing. Another is an interest-bearing account.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 19:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? All these, all these different features that you're describing. In the traditional financial world, those are products.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 19:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? In, in terms of if you go to Bank of America or JP Morgan or wherever, then you say, I would like to get a, a asset-backed loan. Good luck, right?

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:22Anthony Pompliano?

  It's gonna take a lot of time.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Good luck.

• 19:24Anthony Pompliano?

  You gotta turn over a lot of your information, right?

• 19:25Speaker 01

  And it'll probably be a no.

• 19:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it'll probably be a no, and it won't really be that attractive

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:29Anthony Pompliano?

  from an economic standpoint.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  And your credit will just take a hit because they did a credit inquiry on you, and now you just have worse credit and no money.

• 19:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, exactly. And so I think that what we're starting to see is in the decentralized finance world, where all of these products from legacy banking institutions are now getting boiled down to a couple of clicks on a website, right? And so obviously, there's a lot of value being created there. That's in the Western world.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 19:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? The part to me that becomes even more interesting is when you bring this to areas of the world where they don't have access to asset-backed loans. They don't have access to interest-bearing accounts, right? They don't actually have access to traditional banks and kind of infrastructure. What we're now talking about with Coinmine is you buy a single box, you plug it in the wall, you connect it to the internet, and you have access to banking services and certain income-generating activities that previously were unavailable to you.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 20:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so the liquidity or that, you know, kind of that newfound freedom and power, it's not even that you or I know what people are gonna do with it, right? It's almost like you're just giving them tools, and then they're going to do amazing creative things with it that will surprise probably both of us.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  I mean, Bitcoin is the, Bitcoin is the coin, right? And a lot of people don't talk about this, but I think maybe the reason it will become the winner is it's really rare when something solves the problems for poor people and rich people.

• 21:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  And Bitcoin does this. And so if you're poor, the little amount of money that you have is already, is just being debased with every second. It's getting less and less and less. You don't have much to begin with.

• 21:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  And you don't have very many options to do things with whatever, you know, money you do have in terms of accessing financial instruments that rich people can. If you're a rich person, you have literal problems like, oh, I'm trying to move thirty million dollars from this account in this country to this account in this country. And I talk to people who are doing this in the traditional finance. World and it's actually an enormous pain in the butt. Most people who aren't, you know, busily moving tens of millions of dollars around the world don't realize this. But it can take weeks, it can take hundreds of thousands of dollars. It can take six different people who need to go to a bank and write a wet signature and notarize something. Um, and what earlier this year, somebody sent like forty five million dollars of Bitcoin or something for like four dollars in ten minutes.

• 21:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Uh, so Bitcoin solves the problem for rich people, Bitcoin solves the problem for poor people. Uh, and then when you start adding, uh, things like lightning and you're really taking Bitcoin and putting it on an infrastructure that makes it, you know, even more scalable, more liquid, more accessible to people. Uh, you, you essentially end up, like you said, with a completely decentralized finance world where everyone has access to the exact same financial instruments and the same deal that Warren Buffett gets you get.

• 22:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm. And, and part of this too is, um, there's the infrastructure and products that are built around Bitcoin and then there's Bitcoin itself. Right. And so what you just described is, uh, sending Bitcoin back and forth on the, on the blockchain. Um, but also Bitcoin as an asset, forget the transaction, just as an asset without inflation, without the ability for somebody to manipulate the currency, right? You know, right now, look, we're, we're in the middle of, uh, trade wars being played out on Twitter, right? We've got everyone from the ECB to the Federal Reserve, they're all, um, manipulating the economy, right? They're manipulating the currencies and, uh, you know, I, I've tweeted recently and I said, uh,

• 23:04Anthony Pompliano?

  remember the word stimulus is just a marketing term for we are going to manipulate the economy or we are going to manipulate the currency. Right. Now, there are certain arguments that I think have validity in terms of why somebody would want to do that. But I think in the grand scheme of things, the ability for, uh, humans to manipulate something that other people's wealth is based on becomes a really, really scary thing. And we've seen that play out.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't give somebody that power and then ask them not to do it. It's just, it's just literally impossible, you know. Uh, I like to say, uh, you can have, software can be an open source protocol, but people can't be an open source protocol. People are closed, they hide information from each other, they play information asymmetry games with each other, uh, and they use that to their advantage and to someone else's disadvantage. Uh, open source protocols, open blockchains like Bitcoin can't do that. Uh, so it's just a level playing field by default. I actually think that, um, governments are going to love not having to be in charge of the monetary world anymore. It's gonna happen eventually.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  It's certainly, there's plenty of advantages being able to print money whenever you want. Uh, but it's, it's sort of like being a, you know, uh, a former crack addict and you just have crack everywhere in your house all the time and you can't get it out. I mean, that's essentially what the government is. They, they are addicted to spending money and then you're simultaneously giving that same group the ability to print as much money as it wants to and then asking them, please don't do that. It's just insane. It's just not how human incentive structures work. You give someone the ability to spend as much money as they want and print as much money as they want, they'll do both. Uh, so Bitcoin actually makes it better for governments. They don't have to, uh, they can behave properly and, and get away with it.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Instead of listening to their constituents say like, print more money and give it to us. Uh, they can just be like, well, you know, the world is running on Bitcoin and these are the rules, so this is how much money we have to spend. This is why so many people who are pro Bitcoin wanna see the government shrink because in their head is like, I, I think, you know, people said like, has there ever been a single year where the government has shrunk? And I don't, the answer was like, no.

• 25:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And part of, you know, what I think has brought a lot of this to the forefront around Bitcoin specifically is, um, Libra. So Facebook's new cryptocurrency, right? And, uh, I wanna talk about this for a second because, um, it is fascinating to me that, uh, we've only heard, as far as I am aware, in the United States, we've heard one... lawmaker call for the banning of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, right? Brad Sherman in California. But for the most part, I think lawmakers are aware of it, right? Government officials are aware of it, but they really don't mess with it, right? In terms of, hey, it's not a security, it's this currency and commodity. So like, let's just kind of leave it there. The Bitcoiners are going to do their thing, right?

• 25:59Anthony Pompliano?

  But but there's no kind of visceral reaction yet to Bitcoin. When Libra was announced, you immediately saw the, you know, I think it was the deputy finance minister in France freak out. Then you saw a German official on the European Parliament. Then you had in the US, Maxine Waters has kind of taken it the farthest, calling for a halt of the development. And yesterday she gave an interview on CNBC that just blew my mind. She said, they can't run to Switzerland and compete with the dollar. And what it made me think about is.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, they can.

• 26:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, one, they can. You may not want them to, right? And because the participants in the association are regulated and they want to be good standing companies in these environments, they are likely to, they are more likely to cave to political pressure, right? So the government will have some kind of influence here and some kind of regulation. But the part that blew my mind was the competition of money, right? Governments for a long, long time have done everything possible to keep a monopoly on money, right? And so in the US, the US dollar, they do not want anything to compete with that dollar. They've done a great job of it.

• 27:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, what you're seeing is it's kind of like the internet versus the internet, right? Whereas the the US government is just an internet. It's an internal, they look internal to themselves and they control the US dollar.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 27:38Anthony Pompliano?

  People outside of the US use it. But it but is it a very centralized intranet?

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have access to our intranet, basically.

• 27:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And so now all of a sudden, what we're seeing when it comes to money is, take Libra, which is a step towards Bitcoin. Libra saying, wait, we want more of an internet-like ability, right? We're gonna go get a geographically diverse group of corporations around the world to come together and we're going to govern a new type of currency that we are going to incentivize people to use, right? So it's more of an internet-type approach.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 28:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoin is the ultimate internet approach, right? Where it is fully decentralized, it is uncontrolled, no one can stop it, etc. We know from history, the internet beats the intranet approach.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? They're scared.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Yep. Totally scared. I mean, actually, I'm not sure if they're scared. I'm not sure if they're, I'm not sure if they understand it enough to be scared. If they really understood it, I think they probably would be scared. Um, or they would just give in now, capitulate immediately. Uh, I don't think they truly understand it. And this, this goes to all the hardcore sovereign individual stuff that, I know we've, we've talked about a ton of times. And sovereign individuality applies to like actual individuals, uh, but it also applies to organizations. So what you're seeing Facebook do is essentially assert its sovereign individuality. Um, and if you've read the sovereign individual, if you haven't, I highly recommend it. It predicts everything that's going on today. They literally predicted cryptocurrency in 1998, down to almost a T describing how it's going to work,

• 29:10Speaker 01

  how it's all gonna be based on cryptography. Um, the reason, you know, people are vying for economic dominance is because economic dominance gives you military dominance. Uh, the world structures itself based around the economics of violence of that time. Uh, and so we live in a world of mega nation states because the economics of violence accrue to mega nation states. The bigger your tax base is, the more money you can have, the bigger the military you have, the more you control the world because violence controls the world. Uh, what Bitcoin and cryptography say essentially is we can replace violence with security. Uh, no amount of violence can solve a math problem. Every nuclear bomb in the world can be exploded and you cannot factor a large prime number from doing that. Uh, so.

• 29:56Anthony Pompliano?

  I always talk about Bitcoin as a nonviolent weapon of the people.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 29:59Anthony Pompliano?

  That when it falls in the hands of the opponent, or the wrong hands, it can't be used back against the people.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 30:07Anthony Pompliano?

  If you think of a gun, if somebody has a gun and they're shooting at somebody, and then all of a sudden that other person grabs the gun, they can turn and shoot back at the original person, right? With Bitcoin, it is a way for individuals to quote-unquote "fight back" or provide resistance, right? To some of the things that we all know Bitcoin is currently doing. But if all of a sudden, governments started buying up Bitcoin, it actually would not hurt Bitcoin, it would help Bitcoin.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah. I mean, Bitcoin is open source. Open source, I think, started a long time ago, but sort of full-heartedly in the 70s and 80s. And there was a famous open-source lawyer who said this about open source. Because in the 70s and 80s, all the Fortune 500 companies made fun of open source. They're like, "We're so-and-so company, we write our own software." Now, they all run on open source. And what this guy said, which was really prescient, was basically, "Open source is a practical revolution." That's why it wins. The reason all these Fortune 500 companies laughed at it and then started using it is because it's a practical revolution. And I say the same thing about Bitcoin. Bitcoin's not a violent revolution, thankfully.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Bitcoin is not a populist revolution, it doesn't need everyone to fill the streets and protest for it. Bitcoin's a practical revolution. The reason it's going to win is it's just practically better than the alternative. I tweeted the survey a few weeks ago, and it was basically like, "You have to put all of your money into USD or Bitcoin today, and you can't touch any of it for 20 years, which one do you pick?" 75% of people picked Bitcoin.

• 31:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  I mean, that's the only question you have to ask. People, it's just a practical revolution. It's going to win because it's just better than the alternative. Libra's trying to do the same thing.

• 31:56Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's better... Mathematically, you can actually prove that it is better.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  And you can't crack it. You can't, there's not, you know, the US government couldn't attack the, you know, the blockchain. You could do a cartel of different groups that attack the Bitcoin blockchain, but there's a really strong incentive not to do that because you'll have to burn millions or tens of millions of dollars in an attempt to attack it. And even if it works, all you're going to end up doing is essentially completely devaluing this thing that you spent tens of millions of dollars trying to attack. And just attacking it doesn't even really guarantee that the chain is going to end up on your, you know, version that you tried to mess with, right? So there's, there's a strong negative incentive for even people to cartelize, I don't know if that's a word, to attack Bitcoin.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  So that's, that's its, you know, most important feature, it's security. Everything, or rather I say, everything, everything comes down to trust, right? People talk about it being a trustless system. I like how Balaji Srinivasan puts it. Crypto and Bitcoin are not necessarily about trusting no one, it's about having choice around who you trust. So now, everyone has to, you know, and someone else said this, and I love it too, is like, if Bitcoin only gets everyone to change their behavior, it still wins. If Bitcoin gets every government to adopt a model that is literally exactly the same as Bitcoin, Bitcoin wins. In fact, I basically call every other crypto just a version of Bitcoin, right? It might have some bell or whistle that somebody thinks is important to try to add

• 33:30Speaker 01

  to Bitcoin, they're all versions of Bitcoin. And because all of this is just automating the financial world, everything can resolve back to Bitcoin. And if there's a reason to do that, it's because its computational network is the most secured, it's most difficult to, it's got the most computation behind it. So I think Bitcoin wins because it's a practical revolution. I think Libra is actually trying to do something similar and, and address like a different issue. Obviously, it's more centralized than Bitcoin, but they want something like a hundred different organizations to be a part of it. It's probably more decentralized than, than the US government's monetary policy, where like three people get to decide how the whole world's economy trends.

• 34:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Look, I, I continue to say that...

• 34:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I think Libra specifically, the currency, is a net positive for crypto as an industry and also for Bitcoin. I wrote this thing this past week called the token density theory, which essentially, it's like the restaurant intersection problem, right? So when you have one restaurant at the intersection and all of a sudden a competitor moves in across the street, everyone's like, oh man, they're gonna steal business from the first company, right? Actually, both of them go up, right?

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, you get more people coming to that area.

• 34:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Then you add a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth restaurant to that intersection.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  It becomes a food court.

• 34:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep, the density of it all of a sudden then drives everyone's foot traffic up. Same thing in the token world, right? So each legitimate token that gets introduced and is desirable to some portion of the population actually strengthens the crypto industry, right? And so everyone benefits from that. And it brings me to this idea of there's two options, right? I don't think that one has to replace the other as much as it is. Right now, we're just faced with two options. You can participate in an inflationary, human-led financial system, right? Or you can participate in a deflationary, algorithm-led financial system.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Now you have that choice.

• 35:27Anthony Pompliano?

  It does not surprise me or you, I think, that there is a very, very controversial split between people as to which one they participate in. And it happens to be people who are younger, right? Who are a little bit more open-minded, a little bit more globalist, who are more familiar with technology, grew up with smartphones in their hand. They're slowly choosing to participate in the deflationary, algorithmic financial system. That's going to accelerate over time, right? It's just a macro trend that I don't think anyone's gonna stop.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  I agree. I mean, I think, if I was gonna make a prediction, I think at some point Libra, either Bitcoin becomes one of the reserve currencies that's backing Libra or Bitcoin becomes a global currency.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  That, you know, seven billion people use, maybe a billion and a half or so unbanked people start using Facebook, and it still resolves back to the Bitcoin blockchain. Facebook and those hundred consortiums cannot build a computation network as big and powerful as Bitcoins, because it costs like insane amounts of money to fund the Bitcoin network, and they're not going to pour that money into that amount of computation. So I think even in a world where a billion and a half people are using Libra, I think Bitcoin is still the currency that you resolve back to.

• 36:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, it's the global reserve currency in the algorithm.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  And it's all programmatic, so it's not like, it's not a pain for people to resolve back to the Bitcoin blockchain. Just like developer in a couple of weeks and it's done. It's not like for the rest of eternity, people are shuffling bags of money all over the world.

• 37:07Anthony Pompliano?

  So I want to talk about one more thing around Facebook and Libra, and then we'll go back to the CoinMind products. There's some people who are sending in questions.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  But the... They just want to know if you're going to run for president.

• 37:17Anthony Pompliano?

  They all constantly just write in and say, "Pomp for president," which cracks me up. But, so one of the things around Facebook and Libra is, I actually don't think that the currency is the most important thing out of everything they announced. To me, it is Calibra, which is the wallet, right? And I have this theory that that wallet has a digital identity, right? So Facebook has your identity on the internet. It's had your identity on the internet for a long time.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Whether you're on Facebook or not, they have your identity.

• 37:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and also they used it as single sign-on, you know, all this stuff, right? So it was your, it was your identity on the internet for a long time in a various number of use cases. By giving everyone a digital wallet, and that wallet, again, all, you know, and this is a very kind of watered-down version of the truth, but the digital wallet just supports computer files, right? You can put computer files in there, and those computer files can represent... Data?

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 38:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, whatever.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  It's all data.

• 38:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And and the reason why it's important is imagine if you have one central product where you hold all of your financial assets, stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, but then you also hold your quote-unquote data, your healthcare data, your health, uh, your, um, all of like your internet data that you create, any sort of content you produce, all of that's held in one single location, because it's all valuable.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Some of it is financial assets, some of it is something that you can permission and sell and and give to people.

• 38:47Anthony Pompliano?

  If they are successful in giving this digital wallet and they add support for not only other cryptocurrencies, but but kind of all financial assets and all sorts of data, Facebook will have created a product that becomes your new digital identity.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Because it is the single location where you do all of your transactions from, right?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And so to me, um, there's a parallel here where what you're essentially giving folks with CoinMine is you're giving them a bank in a box.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? To some degree.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:15Anthony Pompliano?

  What Facebook's doing with the digital wallet is they're giving them an identity.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Or or a software-based bank.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:22Anthony Pompliano?

  In in, uh, in this wallet, you're giving them a physical bank in in a box. Um, let's switch gears and talk a little bit about, uh, ROI, because there's a bunch of people writing in about ROI.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Okay, great.

• 39:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, so a couple of things. One, describe how you think about ROI and the framework you use in terms of like, when does this become valuable?

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And and who are the types of people who should look at buying CoinMine?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think, uh, you know, powering crypto networks from home or anything but like super large scale industrial operations, right? So you have you have three groups of people. You have the people doing it at home and a very small scale. Then you have people who are doing it like these like mini farms. Maybe they got like a couple hundred GPUs and, you know, a couple dozen ASICs or something. And then you have these massive industrial setups, right?

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Regardless of which one you do, you have basically a few options. You can go full DIY, where you build the computer, you install all the software, you just do everything yourself. You can sort of go semi DIY, where you buy these pre-built mining rigs on eBay and Etsy, and so the hardware is kind of put together, but you've got to handle the software, install the operating systems, and just keep things updated indefinitely. And then you have plug and play, where you spend absolutely zero time whatsoever, you only spend money. And the way we think about it is, one way or another, you have to spend time or money. In fact, we actually talk about them the same way, you spend both of them. So, if you don't...

• 40:49Speaker 01

  There's lots of great resources for full DIY and semi DIY stuff, so like Hashrate is a good site, Crypto Christopher Walken, Not So Fast, these guys are all awesome resources for people who want to go full DIY or semi DIY. There was never any option for people who wanted plug and play, for people who would rather spend their money than their time. So if you think about the amount of time that it takes to build a device like a coin mine, and even if you're working at $20 an hour, I don't think you can build a device for less than the coin mine costs you to buy, because you spend zero time on the coin mine. So if you're an Uber driver, you may be better off going and just doing another eight-hour

• 41:32Speaker 01

  shift and making some money and buying a coin mine if you don't want to learn how to build a computer, build the computer, maintain the computer, update the software, when lightning comes out, now you're like, "Oh, so now I need some more hardware to build myself a lightning node, and I've got to start doing all this lightning software development." You can totally do that, it's all open source, you can learn to do it, it just takes time. So for some people, they'd rather spend money than time, and we think, we want more people providing hash power to crypto. There's great resources for full DIY and semi DIY, and now there's a plug and play option as well. So the ROI, you just have to make sure you're taking your time into consideration when you're sort of calculating the ROI, because I don't think you can actually make something cheaper than a coin mine.

• 42:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and so I think there's two pieces here. One is if you want to participate in mining,

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, and contributing hash power to or hash rate to the to the network. Buying a coin mine is the fastest way to get set up.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, no time needed.

• 42:29Anthony Pompliano?

  You go to a website, you put in your payment information, you receive it, you pull it out of the box, literally less than five minutes, you're up and running, right?

• 42:37Speaker 01

  And you never have to update the software, you don't have to add new protocols, you don't have to add a Bitcoin Lightning Node, a BTC Pay Server, all this stuff.

• 42:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And then the other piece of this is, you know, I I have all these different frameworks that I think of coin mining and the other is it's an accumulation machine.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, where over time, you are dollar cost averaging into

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Your electricity, literally, yeah.

• 42:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Or whatever, you're literally converting your electricity into Bitcoin or or one of the other tokens. And what you're able to do is you're able to run this for a very, very long time.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, and so I think a lot of people, when they start doing calculations, what they look at it and they say is, okay, I'm gonna, uh, let's say twenty bucks a month, right, that you're mining. So I'm gonna mine twenty bucks a month, I pay X dollars, like, how long is it gonna take?

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:22Anthony Pompliano?

  But the thing that many folks who are not involved in the mining business, uh, or haven't previously been miners, uh, forget is the price appreciation of the asset.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, and so if you look at just this year, if you had plugged a coin mine in at the beginning of the year, when Bitcoin was around thirty-five, thirty-seven hundred dollars, and you had been mining, right, all of a sudden, you've almost three X the value of what you mined.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 43:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, and so that twenty dollars in the first month actually is sixty dollars.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, and so that continues over uh, over a period of time. Um, and I think when you start thinking of it that way and understand a coin mine's gonna run for years, right? You're just gonna leave it there converting your electricity into into crypto, um, it it becomes really, really attractive.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 44:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And then on top of that, when you put in all of the services you wrap around it, right, again, it's just that bank in a box that you're able to participate in the algorithmic uh, financial system with a sim- one single purchase.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, we just cut all the time out of the situation. So there's no labor cost from your perspective. You're just sort of paying for parts and everything else is going to be taken care of for you. And you get all those things in one foul swoop. I mean, for, you know, I've been building computers since I was a kid. We started CoinMine because we started just building our own crypto miners at home. And then we were like, hey, why don't we make one that anybody can use? And, you know, Lightning wasn't even a thing when we started building them. And even for myself, I'm thinking if I was still just doing this at home when Lightning came out, I'd be like, man, now I gotta go build a whole, I really want this Lightning thing. Now I gotta go build that and maintain my miner. And that just means fewer people will do it.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  We think that when we flip the Bitcoin Lightning node on later this year, we think we can come close to maybe doubling the size of the Lightning network in terms of active channels with funds in them. Because again, your CoinMine will just automatically be funding your Lightning channel. And, you know, we'll have thousands and thousands of these out there. And right now, I think there's about 4,000, 5,000 active Lightning channels. So our goal is to massively try and grow, help the Lightning network grow and make Bitcoin more successful however we can.

• 45:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Somebody just said, "Pomp, sharpen your look, your voice, your communication, and your skills. Then in 10 years, run for president." So basically, Pomp just-

• 45:44Speaker 01

  That was Roger Stone, I think.

• 45:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Improve your life. Improve everything in your life.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Paul, if you were a better person, you could be the president of the United States. Did you know that?

• 45:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Jesus, what a way to start a Friday morning.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  That was Roger Stone, I'm pretty sure. He's trying to get you elected if he doesn't end up in jail here.

• 46:04Anthony Pompliano?

  So going back to CoinMine, the thing that is interesting to me, you just described, you can mine Bitcoin and then you can contribute right to your Lightning node, right? But you don't have to do it. It's going to automatically do it. Basically, in a very user-friendly way, you'll be able to go into the mobile app. You'll just make a couple of taps on the screen. And then the CoinMine will take care of everything in the background, right? I like to call it like "automagically," right? It just feels like, how the hell did this box that I have sitting in my room actually do that? Do you feel like that's part of what's missing in crypto, right? In terms of adoption? It's just like the user experience and that auto magically

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:45Anthony Pompliano?

  type user experiences?

• 46:46Speaker 01

  I mean, it's catching up. It's like, it's like all technologies. When, when the internet started, you had to be a software developer and you had to know how to use a command line to, to send an email from somebody to somebody in the 1970s. Now it's just a tap in an app. Every type of technology, especially digital computer technology, follows that curve. It starts off where people are like laughing at it and being like, this is a joke. You think anybody's ever going to use this? And then a few years later, it's just an app and people forgot that that was ever, ever a thing. People used to, the New York Times used to trash the internet in the 90s and said, and literally the reporters of the New York Times, the most respected publication in the world, said it would never be bigger than the fax machine.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  And if you, and if you just looked at it at that time, I could see how you said that. Maybe it wasn't as good as the fax machine in 1992, but if you assume it's going to get better, then you should be able to sort of watch that curve and be like, oh wow, this is going to blow everything out of the water. I, I think Bitcoin and crypto are basically on the same curve. It's like the late 90s in crypto. And in five, 10 years, the whole world is just going to be running on these things. That's the main thing that's missing is just ease of use. If you haven't seen the new Lightning Labs, Lightning Wallet, I think they just launched it like yesterday or the day before. It's super slick.

• 48:04Anthony Pompliano?

  It's got a couple thousand downloads already.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  It's super, super slick, super easy to use. It's like a consumer experience, basically. So we're, we're inching towards there and, you know, CoinMine, I think Casa did a great job of making something that was a lightning node that was pretty easy for people to use. A little bit of router work, but you know, like I said, it was like late 90s. We're trying to, you know, get it into the iPhone era of ease of use.

• 48:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and so what do you think moving forward? Like what's the most ambitious thing you could see CoinMine doing? Right, like when you look out 10, 20 years, what's kind of the goal or dream?

• 48:41Speaker 01

  If you really want to go there, so, I mean, complete sovereign individuality, a completely decentralized internet, a completely decentralized monetary system, and a couple of hundred microsatellites flying around the world with, you know, like GoTennas in here. So now you have a mesh network of computers that are even powered by satellites, and you have a completely sovereign information and money system.

• 49:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's all because what you're essentially doing, right, if I let the cat out of the bag in terms of my dream for the company is, it's a Trojan horse to build a decentralized network of nodes.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 49:25Anthony Pompliano?

  With software.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 49:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Because every single person who buy it is a coin miner, is providing one node to a network that is connected through software. And so today it is for mining, you know, eventually it will be a Lightning node, all of these things. But there's a lot you can do when you have, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people around the world who have this computer inside of their home, and they're converting their electricity to computing power.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Yep, and they can build a mesh network with each other, so ISPs can't stop them from sharing information. You have some low orbit satellites going, so even, you know, the cops can't show up and stop what you're doing because there's hundreds of satellites flying around maintaining all this data. You can already do that, I think with Blockstream, they already have a satellite that's pumping out Bitcoin Lightning data. So all that stuff is coming, and, you know, that's sort of our vision of Coin miner in the future, is a coin miner in every home, a mesh network around the world, satellites flying around, and completely decentralizing information and money.

• 50:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Odds that Bitcoin can become the global reserve currency.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  What's that, odds?

• 50:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Odds. It's probability.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Seventy-five percent according to the Twitter poll that I did. And I actually buy that. Yeah, I mean, I really think, I was actually really surprised, I had a couple other people run that survey too, who don't have as much of a crypto following as I did. They, they had fifty fifty. People with tens of thousands of just normal people followers. Most of them, I don't even think really understand Bitcoin. And still, they were saying fifty fifty, people put Bitcoin next to the US dollar. Imagine asking this question five years ago. I mean, if you asked it ten years ago, the answer would literally be like, I don't know what Bitcoin is. Ten years later, it's like, oh yeah, the US dollar, the, the biggest currency in the world for the past, whatever, how many decades?

• 51:17Speaker 01

  This thing that's done on a computer that was released by some anonymous person? Yeah, I'd say they're equal to each other, or maybe Bitcoin's actually a little bit better. That's just a crazy, crazy thing that's in the general zeitgeist. I mean, a lot of people who buy coin mines are not crypto people. But half the people who buy them are sort of crypto people. Half of them, this is like their first step into crypto.

• 51:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  And when we, when they email, I mean, as I said, we get lots of emails being like, when are you adding Bitcoin? How can I mine Bitcoin? Does it mine Bitcoin? Can you add Bitcoin? And we ask them, you know, like, why they're interested? And they all literally say the same thing. I know that crypto is the future.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  To a T, they all say that. I know that it's the future, and I want to get involved. That's it.

• 52:06Anthony Pompliano?

  I talk to a lot of investors, obviously, on a daily basis. And when I talk to individuals outside of the finance world, right? So these are doctors, lawyers, kind of all, all kinds of, you know, wealthy individuals, who, many of them aren't technologically savvy, right? They, they are, I think they're curious, but, but not necessarily skilled or savvy. I get a very similar, you know, talk track from them. They say, look, it's very obvious to me that this is going to be important in the future. This is going to be something that is not going to go away, right? And I always wonder if those people have better optics into the future potential of certain technologies like money, than the people who actually work in the industry, like traditional finance folks,

• 52:51Anthony Pompliano?

  who are so ingrained in the weeds and, and they feel like, you know, every single one percent movement up or down is seismic and, and, you know, can, is changing the world. But if you walk out of that hardcore finance community and realize, nobody knows if gold or S and P or whatever went up 1% or down 1% today, right?

• 53:12Speaker 01

  They're not paying attention, but they're all paying attention to Bitcoin. That's 100% right.

• 53:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So it's pretty, uh, pretty interesting. Before I wrap up, I always do rapid fire questions.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 53:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Most important company in crypto other than CoinMine?

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Most important company in crypto other than CoinMine? Uh, it's not a company, it's Bitcoin.

• 53:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Great answer. Uh, what do you think is your most controversial thought in Bitcoin or crypto?

• 53:41Speaker 01

  My most controversial thought? That's a really good one. Uh, I don't, I think there's gonna be a lot of cryptocurrencies. And in fact, I don't know cryptocurrency is even the correct term for all of them. Uh, I think there are going to be a lot of token operated networks. I think everything is going to end up resolving back to Bitcoin probably, or something so similar to Bitcoin, it's essentially Bitcoin. Um, but I don't see us going to a world where there's only one single sort of cryptographically protected decentralized open source blockchain protocol that people can use.

• 54:16Anthony Pompliano?

  What, uh, before we keep going with the rapid fire questions, I'm getting berated on the live stream for discount codes.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  We knocked a hundred dollars off the price for the whole weekend.

• 54:26Anthony Pompliano?

  What, so just go to CoinMine.com?

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Go to CoinMine.com. It's, it's 6.99 instead of the usual 7.99.

• 54:33Anthony Pompliano?

  6.99, a hundred bucks. What, what percentage is that?

• 54:37Speaker 01

  That's a good question.

• 54:38Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a big number, I'm not a math guy.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Riley? 13%. 13%.

• 54:42Anthony Pompliano?

  13% off.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 54:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Thank me later.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Thanks.

• 54:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Jason Williams, what up? At J Williams, F S T M E D, 6.99.

• 54:55Anthony Pompliano?

  People are now saying blink if you think I'm sexy.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Quantum, I don't think is a threat. As much as people like to talk about quantum computing completely negating all cryptography, it's, it's just not really the case. Sorry.

• 55:11Anthony Pompliano?

  You guys on the live stream can go ahead and add in, send in your questions now and we'll answer some of them as soon as we stop the recording for the podcast. What do you, what's the one regulation you would change or improve if you could?

• 55:23Speaker 01

  The one regulation?

• 55:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  You know it, you can name it, you and I go on about it. I mean, it's the most, you can take all the cash you have and light it on fire, you can put, I think that's probably actually illegal to do technically, but you can do basically the same thing and go put it all on, you know, on, you know, on black at the roulette wheel, or you can go buy lottery tickets with all the money you have in the world, but you cannot give one red cent to a company and invest in it unless you're already rich.

• 55:49Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  That is the most un-American thing humanly imaginable. And you can, you can couch it in as much of, you know, we're protecting people as possible, but then why can I put my entire net worth into a lottery, but I can't put it into an early-stage company? I mean, one of the things that crypto, crypto is crazy and bitcoin is, bitcoin did so many things at once, people can't get their heads wrapped around it. And one of the things that it did is essentially create a new type of fundraising model. And so these companies, they get into a situation where like, in a lot of situations, they're actually just doing their cryptocurrency so that they can fundraise, but then they have to kind of talk about it as though it's actually going to be a currency, but that's not really how they were using it, they were using it to fundraise for their protocol, for their

• 56:33Speaker 01

  project, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It should be, they basically had to do that because these security laws exist, because they can't go on Twitter and say, "Hey, I'm starting a project and you can invest in it and you can send me a dollar to do it." That's all illegal to do. And so people have kind of like worked around it with crypto, and it's because that's the worst regulation imaginable. We could unleash an unbelievable amount of like economic entrepreneurship and innovation if everyone was allowed to invest in whatever they wanted to. Freedom.

• 57:05Anthony Pompliano?

  We, we're gonna get them changed.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:07Anthony Pompliano?

  They're gonna get changed.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 57:08Anthony Pompliano?

  SEC Commissioner came out recently and said they're looking at it. I don't know if that means it'll get changed soon, but there, there, there's just no way that it can, uh, it can stay.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, my brother and Naval and Angel List ha- actually did, did a lot to already move the needle on, on this with the Jobs Act and, and, and making it so that things like Republic can exist and, and stuff like that. So it's happening.

• 57:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think so. Uh, most important book you've ever read?

• 57:32Speaker 01

  Uh, Sovereign Individual or the Dow of Poo?

• 57:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Who, who wrote the Sovereign Individual?

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Sovereign Individual is written by two guys, Sir, Sir Something Something and, uh, James Dale Davidson, I, I think. Uh, they actually wrote Blood in the Street, I think in the eighties or nineties, and then they wrote, uh, Sovereign Individual in nineteen ninety-eight. Uh, they predicted cryptocurrency, uh, they predicted, you know, what the microprocessor has done to the world. They essentially predicted, uh, you know, Facebook and all these, uh, you know, new sovereign organizations that exist. Uh, sadly, they predicted Osama bin Laden three years before nine eleven.

• 58:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Crazy. I actually haven't read it. I need to read it.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  It's, your, your mind will be split open forever.

• 58:13Anthony Pompliano?

  You're like the nine-hundredth person who's told me to read it, so this weekend, that, that's when I'm just gonna sit there and read it.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's a must-read.

• 58:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Gotta do it. Alright, uh, aliens?

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Aliens.

• 58:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Believer, non-believer?

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Um, it would be really sad if aliens didn't exist in, in the world, man. That would be the saddest thing in the world, and it would be even sadder if they didn't have pets.

• 58:35Anthony Pompliano?

  So you think they have pets?

• 58:37Speaker 01

  They definitely have pets.

• 58:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't see a world where they can't have pets. They might not look like dogs and cats and stuff, but they gotta have pets.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, of, of course. I mean, if they're social, they have pets.

• 58:48Anthony Pompliano?

  That's where this all started.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 58:50Anthony Pompliano?

  It is. It literally started with, uh, do aliens have pets? And, uh, pe- people were blown away. They'd never thought about that before.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  It's a great question.

• 58:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like, to, to me, it's, it might be one of the most important questions of, uh, our entire life.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  We're, except for what's the current price of Bitcoin?

• 59:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I'm, I'm looking at the price of Bitcoin now because people are, uh, going crazy in the live stream, and Bitcoin is at ninety-nine hundred dollars at the moment. And, uh, does not seem to, uh, to wanna stop until it hits ten K.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Are aliens mining Bitcoin? That's a good question, too.

• 59:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Actually, you know what? Uh, I, I know whoever said that was, uh, was joking around, but, um... I read something recently about the scarcity of gold and it basically was talking about gold and other precious metals, how much of it is available in asteroids? And the idea that there, don't hold me exactly this, but if I remember correctly, it's there's more gold on some of these asteroids than all of the gold we've ever produced on Earth. And so, gold actually isn't as scarce as we think it is, was basically the argument?

• 59:55Speaker 01

  I can get into this.

• 59:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, alright, go.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  Gold is actually universally scarce.

• 1:00:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  So, to make gold, the most insane amount of work has to happen. Gold is actually proof of work. So, this is what has to happen to get gold. Two stars have to supernova. So, they, two stars have to live for billions of years and they have to be so massive that when they die, they supernova.

• 1:00:22Anthony Pompliano?

  What is that?

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  Supernova is when a star starts dying and all of its mass starts slowly collapsing on the center and there's so much mass that when it kind of all hits together, it explodes back out. Sometimes when supernovas happen, you get left with what's called a neutron star. Okay? And a neutron star is a star that's made only out of neutrons. There are no protons or electrons in this matter at all. It's so dense that a tablespoon of a neutron star weighs about the same as like a million cars. And then, these two neutron stars have to crash into each other in space and they'll make gold. That's the only way gold gets made.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Two supernovas, then two neutron stars, and they somehow find each other, smash into each other, and that's the only way you get gold in the universe. It's universally rare and requires an insane amount of work to make it.

• 1:01:17Anthony Pompliano?

  But, more can get created when there's two supernovas.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's the only way gold has ever been created in the entire universe.

• 1:01:24Anthony Pompliano?

  That definition of a supernova just got me pumped for a Friday. I don't even, I don't even know, yeah, I don't even know what I just read.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  That's pretty dramatic for Wikipedia too, so you know, you know that's legit.

• 1:01:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:01:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Folks are asking about the drop gold campaign. What, uh, what do you think about this from grayscale, basically convincing all of the gold investors to drop gold and buy Bitcoin instead?

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  I mean, have gold, have Bitcoin, but have more Bitcoin than gold.

• 1:01:55Anthony Pompliano?

  It's pretty good.

• 1:01:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it is. Bitcoin is the scarcer asset.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:02:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What um, what one question do you have for me to finish this up before we take some questions from the live stream?

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Do you uh, do you think aliens have pets?

• 1:02:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh yeah, no doubt about it. I'm actually uh.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  How long have you thought this?

• 1:02:16Anthony Pompliano?

  So, alright, I've never admitted this on the podcast or on any of these live streams, but uh, I actually believe that we have likely come in contact with some form of true spaceship or uh, alien life. My guess is if I had to put probability, we're over 50% probability, we came in contact. We think there's something weird, but we don't know what it is yet. So like, like we're not cognizant of the fact we came in contact. We know that we experienced something that was weird, but just haven't yet identified, oh wait, that was an alien, or oh wait, that was a spaceship type thing, right?

• 1:02:58Anthony Pompliano?

  So that's, that's one. The second thing is, I would put the probability at, I don't know,

• 1:03:05Anthony Pompliano?

  25, 30% that we've actually come in, like uh, unilaterally come in contact where like we've identified that there is some life form somewhere, there was some, you know, whatever, they didn't see us, but we see them um, type situation. Uh, and it is held in all of these classified documents.

• 1:03:27Anthony Pompliano?

  And I'm not talking about like, oh, we have a telescope that like, saw a bunch of slimy, you know, oval headed like aliens.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  That's cool.

• 1:03:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Building like an anthill, you know, like an ant dynasty type thing. I'm talking more about um,

• 1:03:43Anthony Pompliano?

  we now, like, we're seeing things up from a scientific standpoint, like, oh wait, does Mars actually have water on it?

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does.

• 1:03:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Oh wait, is that a climate, you know, does that planet have a climate that mimics Earth's?

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So, so we're, we're getting closer and closer publicly knowing some of this stuff. My guess is that there is likely to be a belief or an understanding in kind of the, the, you know, kind of most closed door communities.

• 1:04:15Anthony Pompliano?

  That there's some sort of life elsewhere. Then the question becomes is it sentient or not, right? And that's the part I probably have less confidence in. But just the the ability for life to exist somewhere else.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I I'm probably at like a, you know, a a pretty material number probability.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  What's the number?

• 1:04:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Just life at all?

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  Life at all.

• 1:04:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Then we know about it?

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  No, just that it.

• 1:04:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, that it's ninety nine point nine percent.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  What about that we know about it?

• 1:04:46Anthony Pompliano?

  That we know about it? Over fifty.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  Yeah?

• 1:04:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Do you think life on Earth started on Earth?

• 1:04:54Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you mean? Like, what would be a theory as to how it didn't?

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  That it came, you know, life arrived on an asteroid?

• 1:05:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, that like humans showed up from somewhere else?

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  All life on Earth started with the individual, like a single, so like a like a tardigrade, you know, tardigrades are those like a little microscopic weird looking things? Those things can survive in space.

• 1:05:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  They can literally survive the radiation of space, the vacuum of space, the the cold of space. Um, and then they can come back to life.

• 1:05:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I never thought about this before.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  So do you think life on Earth started on Earth or did it come from somewhere else?

• 1:05:30Anthony Pompliano?

  My guess would be

• 1:05:34Anthony Pompliano?

  that it was a combination. That like like that life is uh both, there were certain, you know, atoms and and uh particles and stuff here on Earth.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  And stuff floating around.

• 1:05:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Like that were that were here on Earth.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And then there's also probably some stuff from off of Earth.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And it all kinda got mixed up together. And somehow you and I are sitting here talking into these stupid microphones, pontificating about how life became, right? But but to me it is um. It's actually the thing that I share with a a lot of like college students probably are like the ones so like all these kids will like DM me on Twitter and stuff right and they're like hey man like I'm trying to figure out what I want to do you know whatever.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  That's cool.

• 1:06:22Anthony Pompliano?

  It it's cool. Uh I probably take it more seriously than I should because I only respond when I feel like I've got something good to say, right?

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  Oh, I think that's the right call.

• 1:06:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but like I don't I don't want to.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Cause they're gonna take what you say seriously and if you're not being serious about it and you're just popping off some random thing and this guy's changing his life based on something you just.

• 1:06:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, like if I was like, oh, you should go a hundred percent into crypto like I don't know who you are, you know, like I have no context, I have no information. Um but the one thing that when I talk to somebody and usually not in the first conversation, but you know, if I talk to somebody two, three times either over email on the phone. Uh I always describe to them this feeling that I've had around um. If you think about something like right now, there's two galaxies colliding, right? And then our galaxy is supposed to collide with another one in four billion years.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, man, we don't matter.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:07:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if we don't matter, make the most of it.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:07:17Anthony Pompliano?

  A- and to me, it's like there's too many people who are trying to optimize for like the things that they think matter when at the end of the day. Uh we matter so little, right? In in the grand scheme of things that I I talking about space and aliens and all this stuff like it just kind of reminds you. It it it's not nearly as serious, right? The the problems that we have um and and so I think that's where like I I just keep going back to if I guess there's probably life elsewhere. Yes, we do not fully understand what is going on. Uh there's over a thousand fucking planets. Like, when did that happen? I I continue to say this, we we had nine.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:58Anthony Pompliano?

  We had nine planets when I was in, you know, elementary school.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And Pluto was one.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  No, you're right. In your lifetime, we basically found another thousand something planets and some M-class planets like Earth, a hundred percent. That's why my motto in life is make noise, cause trouble.

• 1:08:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Make noise cause trouble.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  Because, I mean, I will be quiet and respectful for 99.9% of the entire existence of the universe. I was not alive and for the rest of it, I won't be alive later. So I'm alive for this like really, really brief moment. So, you know, make as much noise and cause as much trouble as you can while you're here.

• 1:08:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  With Satoshi.

• 1:08:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, I appreciate you taking the time to do this podcast. People can go find the CoinMine at coinmine.com.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  Coinmine.com, you can download the app. We'll, um, we're going to be putting some Satoshis in people's Bitcoin wallets in the app, whether or not you have a CoinMine.

• 1:08:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. So go, uh, go, go buy CoinMines, go download the app and then we'll take some questions from the live stream. All right. Appreciate it so much, guys.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:09:02Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to that podcast. Before I let you go, one more word from our sponsor, BlockFi. Their new interest account allows you to securely deposit your Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency. This rate actually compounds, so you receive a 6.2% APY, which is very attractive given the alternatives. So you can actually take your Bitcoin, you can deposit it with BlockFi and get paid an interest rate of 6% in return. Go check out blockfi.com/pomp. Again, blockfi.com/pomp to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today. Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple,

• 1:09:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Spotify and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.