Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Brandon Quittem
Date this lecture was recorded: July 13, 2020.
Today’s podcast features Brandon Quittem whose essay, “Bitcoin is the Mycelium of Money” provided us with a launching pad for a lively discussion about ways in which the world’s financial system may experience turbulence brought about by cryptocurrency. In addition to talking about the basics of digital money, we also discussed blockchain technology, psychedelics, and Bitcoin.
Brandon Quittem Website
Bitcoin is the Mycelium of Money by Brandon Quittem
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
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salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And, well, I’ve been hearing that some of our fellow salonners are wondering why there haven’t been more podcasts from the salon lately.
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Well, the truth is that, well, just like everybody else on the planet right now, I’m not really sure what direction we should be heading in. So, like a lot of us, I’m kind of taking a wait-and-see approach,
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and only producing a few podcasts that may be of some practical benefit right now.
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But, don’t worry, I’m going to keep the same old format that I’ve used for over 15 years now,
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and there’s still going to be some new Terrence McKenna talks every once in a while,
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so that’ll remain the same.
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However, the world as a whole is never going to return to the state we were in just last year.
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Like it or not, we are all being challenged to figure out how we want to reorganize this little planet.
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As for staying in touch with our fellow salonners, I’ve been doing what I can.
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Well, at least for the first three months of the lockdowns, I hosted four live salons every week.
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And lately I’ve modified that schedule a bit by only hosting two live salons a week, one on Monday and one on Thursday.
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I’ve been hosting that live Monday night salon now for over three years, and they take at 6 30 p.m on San Diego time. Well
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after the pandemic began I also began hosting live salons every Thursday. The Monday salons take
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place at 6 30 p.m San Diego time and the Thursday salons take place at 6 30 p.m London time which
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is 10 30 in the morning in San Diego. That way some of our European salonners
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can join us and from time to time I’ll also be hosting a live salon in a time zone that’s better
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suited to our friends down under and in Asia. As you know, I’ve been hosting these live salons for
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my supporters on Patreon for the past three years and thanks to these wonderful salonners, I’ve been
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able to eliminate those month-long pledge drivesners, I’ve been able to eliminate those
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month-long pledge drives, and also I’ve been able to publish my new books directly into the public
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domain and make them available for free. So I owe a lot to my Patreon supporters. Now when the
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pandemic arrived, well, a lot of people lost their jobs, and I wanted to continue supporting my
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Patreon followers and others who aren’t in a position to really support anything right now.
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And to fix this problem, we set up a server on Discord, which is the communication platform used by a lot of gamers.
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And on Mondays and Thursdays, I post the links to the live salons there.
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So already there are over 500 fellow salonners interacting each day on Discord,
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on the Psychedelic Salon Discord server, and the conversations are really fascinating.
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This is completely free service, by the way. You don’t even need a credit card to join,
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and it’s a great place to find the others, find the links to the live salons, and well,
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I hope to see you there, because right now,
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that’s where a lot of us are congregating. Now, to join us on Discord, just go to psychedelicsalon.com,
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and on the home page, you’re going to find a link that’ll take you to our Discord server.
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That’s all there is to it. Now, in addition to the live salons, I’ve been also joining the live podcast recordings being made by my old friend, the Dope Fiend.
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Our old-timers here in the salon are going to fondly remember him and his dope cast.
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Well, every Sunday a new Dope Fiend quarantine program is posted, and for it, the Dope Fiend is joined by various characters that you might remember from several years ago. A wide-ranging roundtable, very stony chat about things like
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whether cannabis protects stoners from the worst of the coronavirus
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and where the U.S. and U.K. stand right now in terms of the pandemic.
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And then, of course, there’s a Karen update.
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It’s a really fun and interesting group of stoners that you can tune in and listen to
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when you don’t want to talk alone some night.
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Now, at long last, let’s get on with today’s program, which is a recording of a live salon that was held this past Monday, July 13th.
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And if you think that this introduction has been long, well, you’ve got another one coming.
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When I open the live salon and bring in Brandon Quinton, as it turns out is also a longtime fellow salonner and by
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the way Brandon is going to be back for another live salon with us in a few
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weeks so if there are some questions you have about cryptocurrency that aren’t
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answered here today you can join our live salon and ask them yourself.
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And now here’s yet another long introduction to Brandon Quinton and his ideas about what Bitcoin and mycelium have in common.
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There’s so many different things we can talk about tonight.
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And once I open it up to questions, you know, people are, if I open it up right now,
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we’d be jumping all over the place. And I’ve read some of your work, Brandon, and listened to your,
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one of your podcasts. And so I have a fairly good idea of where you’re coming from. And
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since here, we’re kind of preaching to the choir when we talk about psychedelics as you know i mean you’re a slaughter so uh i i think we can get to it i really want to get to your your concepts because your concept of
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mycelium and bitcoin is just spot on i think uh but what i thought we’d do is because i want to
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podcast this discussion and uh you know right now everybody is is uh you know wondering what’s next but of course nobody
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knows what’s next and i want to leave that part of the discussion to the end and i thought we’d
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start out talking about bitcoin because you know most people who everybody’s heard of bitcoin but
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a lot of people i’m not really sure what about how do you buy it and stuff like that. And then I’d like to go into the importance of blockchain and how the decentralization is so important.
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Following that, some of the other cryptocurrencies.
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You know, I know Bitcoin is the mother of all cryptocurrencies, in my opinion, actually.
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But, you know, I’d like to talk about Ether and some of the others.
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And then the banks and governments are coming out with their own cryptocurrencies and as our, you know,
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investment bankers and all. And then if we still have any energy left, maybe we can speculate some
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about what we think might be coming after this pandemic. But I think that right now, you know, there’s, it’s kind of not worth
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much time to speculate about what’s next. Because, you know, here in California, we’re still shutting
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down a second time and stuff like that. And, and, you know, there’s all kinds of scenarios about
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what can happen, what next. And, and as far as a governmental political situation, I can see anything from going back to just where we were with nation states and to a new world with it is. But some cryptocurrency, I think, is going to be much more important than people realize today.
00:07:52 ►
And with that, why don’t I let you go from there and I’ll kind of ask some questions.
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We’ll open it up and go from there, Brandon.
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But I really appreciate your time.
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And let me just preface this with the fact that what really excited me about your background is that you spent a lot of time you know researching this
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looking into this and investigating it but uh you know i started uh mining bitcoin when it was in
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the pennies uh and then i gave up and you know but i’ve been with bitcoin since the beginning
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and i haven’t you know i still am i’m a firm believer in the long term viability of cryptocurrency and possibly Bitcoin.
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So let me just kind of preface it saying what excited me about the fact is that, you know, I had kind of had the feeling that, you know, I got involved so early on and then it got so complex and, and I just couldn’t keep up with it all.
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I just let it all go by the board, and I thought, well, I missed the wave, and then I hear you come
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in and say, you know, it’s only the last few years. You’ve gotten deep into it, and so you give a lot
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of hope to all of us that I think that nobody has missed the wave yet. I think it’s still building
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possibly, and with that long preface, I’ll let you do some talking.
00:09:06 ►
Thank you, Lorenzo. Yeah, first off, it’s really, really an honor to be here. I’ve been listening
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to the salon for about a decade now, back when there were almost no other podcasts on the topic.
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And so there was many comedowns where I would throw on an old Terrence McKenna talk and
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soothe myself to fall asleep or something like that.
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So it’s pretty cool to be here. Really appreciate it.
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And I got addressed right off the bat regarding timing.
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Pretty much everyone who arrives at Bitcoin feels that they arrived late.
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And so it doesn’t matter if it was this year, five years ago or 10 years ago.
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Everyone has that same feeling. And it’s kind of a little ego thing.
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You know, you usually hear
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about it a few years prior before you end up buying some. And so we sort of anchor our minds
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to a previous time or previous price. We sort of hide ourselves about when we get in. So totally
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normal. Don’t let that stop you. If we look globally, it’s only about 1% of the world who
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owns any Bitcoin at this point and it’s only about 150
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billion dollar market cap which is roughly 50 times smaller than gold and so if bitcoin is going
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to continue which it’s my belief it will there’s a long way to go and so i would call it more like a
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you know a precocious fifth grader in its development and it’s going to go through
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puberty soon so it’ll start to get a little more
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feisty as the world starts to unravel. At least that’s my belief. Yeah, so I guess in order to
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discuss Bitcoin, I think it’s really important to talk about money for a minute. And money is a
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concept that is surprisingly slippery and hard to understand. Most people spend their whole life and
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they don’t really have a good concept of what it is. And there’s a lot of stigmas attached. And I think it’s important to start there. So, you know,
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I know it has a bad reputation, but money is simply just a tool. And it’s a tool that we all
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use every day. And so I think it’s important that we understand what it is. And fundamentally,
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it started off to solve, it was, you know was used, it emerged through our ancient ancestors to solve a certain number of problems.
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The main problem is the double coincidence of wants.
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And all that really means is two people want to trade.
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I’ve got chickens, you’ve got cows.
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And how do we trade five chickens for a cow or what’s the trade there? And so what happened was we emerged on different
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things, different mediums that represent value that we all just sort of agree on.
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And these started as things like shells or beads or giant rye stones. And eventually humanity
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converged on gold as sort of the universal money for the planet. It emerged in all these different separate places.
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And the reason why we selected gold is because it had the best monetary properties,
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things like portability, durability, and most important, a few others,
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but most important is scarcity.
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And so there’s only a finite supply of gold,
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and the gold supply, the total supply above ground increases by about 2% each year.
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So a relatively scarce amount of gold.
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And that’s important because then you can anchor value to that scarce asset.
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And so for about 5,000 years, we’ve used gold.
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And then in the early 1900s, the U.S. government right around World War I time, we decided to just leave the
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tether to gold and we created what’s the U.S. dollar, what we now know as fiat currency,
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which simply means by decree. And so that’s a totally different thing. And in 1971, we actually
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left our tether to gold. And so we removed the gold standard. You could say it’s
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not backed by anything, which is very useful to the US government and any political will that
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they might have, because you can print unlimited money. You can fund perpetual war. You can bail
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out your buddies. And that whole process, it hurts the little guy. We’re essentially borrowing from tomorrow. And it’s a whole
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process of extracting from the little guy and then distributing that wealth to the top.
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And it’s very easy to see this. If you look at charts starting in 1971, when we left the gold
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standard, you can see human productivity skyrockets. So the average person can do the
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work of 10 or 20 or 50 back then. However, our wages,
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our real wages, what our wages give us in terms of purchasing power has actually declined.
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And so we’re producing more and we’re earning less. But where is that value being created?
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Because it’s very clear that humanity is producing way more things, way more value.
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And that value is being eaten up by financial intermediaries, things like banks and corporations. And that leaves the little guy with less and less each year. And we’re seeing a massive amount of social unrest now. And it’s my belief that the foundation to social unrest is based on economics.
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are by and large, extremely rational. So if they have opportunities, they’re going to do the right thing, they’re going to get a normal job, etc. But if there are no opportunities, you know,
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people start to feel a little bit pessimistic, which leads to unraveling of the social fabric.
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And that’s kind of where I think we are today. And now let’s talk about Bitcoin for a second.
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So Satoshi Nakamoto, which is a pseudonymous creator, released a white paper in 2008 describing Bitcoin.
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Early 2009 released it.
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So some anonymous person or persons released the software.
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And it was right after the global financial crisis.
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And the creator of Bitcoin or creators, they understood this monetary history.
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They understood why gold was good money.
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And Bitcoin was designed as a new form of money that has the scarcity element of gold.
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There are only 21 million Bitcoins that will ever be created.
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And it’s also interesting and better than gold because you can teleport it around the world.
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So think of it like this new element that we discovered,
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that you can break into a million tiny little pieces.
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Each Bitcoin can be broken into hundreds of millions of pieces.
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And you can transport it pretty much instantly around the world. So you sort of take what works and you approve it.
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And money is actually a foundational element to society.
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It creates this membrane that allows us to cooperate better.
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And a term I like to use is social scalability,
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which was coined by Nick Szabo.
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And it essentially means humans’ ability to cooperate flexibly over large numbers across
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space and time. So how good are we as a species, global species, to cooperate? And things that
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increase social scalability would be things like property rights or stable rule of law,
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Social scalability would be things like property rights or stable rule of law, communication tools, the Internet, and also money.
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And so money is this foundational thing that if we improve our monetary system, everyone is better off because of that.
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And, you know, going from the Bible, which I’m not religious, but this quote is great.
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If you build a house on sand, it’s not going to last very long.
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But if you build a house on granite, it will last a thousand years. And Bitcoin is that granite. It is that foundational
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layer to humanity for a monetary system for humanity. And so that’s kind of like the high
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level of why it matters. And we can get into some sort of nitty gritty stuff about Bitcoin. Like
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it’s actually free and open source software
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that anyone can run. The users who participate control the network, completely decentralized.
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It’s very hard to co-op. So no government can come in and insert its political will and make
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changes to the system. And that’s really important for our future because right now we have a highly
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politicized money that’s working against us and most people are not aware. It also fundamentally solved digital scarcity,
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which is kind of a trippy concept where most people think about a digital file. Let’s say I
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send you an MP3 and then you just copy paste and email it off to your friend. And that one file
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is copied to an infinity on the internet.
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However, what Satoshi created was digital scarcity, meaning if I own one Bitcoin and I send it to you,
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you know with 100% certainty that I no longer have access to it.
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And that’s a several decade long problem that was trying to be solved.
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And sort of the ethos of Bitcoin is also
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important. It’s open, it’s borderless, it’s neutral, it’s censorship resistant, and a few
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other properties like that. It’s maintained by the smartest developers on our planet.
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And it’s very hard to stop. And so you can think about Napster versus BitTorrent as an example.
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stop. And so you can think about Napster versus BitTorrent as an example. So Napster was a centralized company that offers file storage. And as soon as it got big enough, the government shut
00:17:51 ►
it down because the music studio said, hey, they’re stealing our music. And since Napster
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was run by a company, the government calls Napster and shuts it down. Then a few years later,
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BitTorrent was sort of evolved out of that problem.
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And BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer software that essentially exists everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
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There’s no one to call.
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There’s no one to shut down.
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And BitTorrent exists today.
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And the government, there’s nothing really that they can do about it.
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And Bitcoin is sort of the BitTorrent of money in the same way that it’s hard to take down.
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Pretty much impossible.
00:18:26 ►
Brandon, let me kind of jump in for just a minute to ask you if this metaphor works.
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Because I’ve had a lot of people ask me about Bitcoin.
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They’re used to having a silver dollar in their pocket or something.
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How do I get a Bitcoin?
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What do I do with it?
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How does all this
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move around? What is it about? And of course, we forget that the dollar is just money that we’ve
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agreed on the value and the value is changing all the time. And Bitcoin is no different. It’s a
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bunch of people who’ve agreed that, that these little bits on your computer are worth something.
00:19:01 ►
And, you know, somebody will send you a piece of luggage if
00:19:05 ►
you send them a few bits on your computer. And it’s just it’s a monetary system people agreed on.
00:19:11 ►
So here’s the way I’ve tried to describe it, because people are confused about a public key
00:19:16 ►
and a private key. And, you know, what does all this mean? And so and then we’ll get to the
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blockchain, which to me is the key, of course, to everything because it’s decentralized.
00:19:26 ►
There’s nobody keeping track of all the Bitcoins.
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It’s everybody keeping track.
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It’s public.
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It’s a public ledger.
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And the reason it can work is because everybody is checking everybody else all the time and agreeing that it works.
00:19:41 ►
So here’s the way I kind of try to tell my friends, and it’s probably really too elementary and doesn’t work right.
00:19:49 ►
But I say, you know, the Bitcoin blockchain is like a big bank of safe deposit box.
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You walk into a bank and there’s a safe deposit room.
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You go in the room and here are the safe deposit boxes.
00:20:00 ►
If I want, you know, when I used to work for my dad in his dime store,
00:20:04 ►
and we’d close the
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store at night, get all the cash and deposits in a bank bag, we’d walk down to the bank and put it
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in a slot, so it would be in our deposit that night. Well, here’s this big wall of bank deposit
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slots, and how do you know where to get it? Well, it’s your public key, and I give you my public key,
00:20:22 ►
and you walk to this wall of deposit box you find mine and you
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slip some money in for me now there’s only one key that opens that if the bank doesn’t have a key
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in the case of bitcoin the only key is your private key and it’s on your computer or it’s in
00:20:38 ►
your phone or wherever you keep it but your bitcoin you know program is actually a key to this box that people put money in for you.
00:20:47 ►
And you can go into your box and take money out and put in somebody else’s box, too.
00:20:50 ►
But that’s kind of how I describe it.
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It’s very simplistic, but it’s the only way I can kind of get it across to people.
00:20:57 ►
And I know there’s holes in that story, but take it from there.
00:21:02 ►
No, I actually think that’s more advanced than you think. I wasn’t even going
00:21:06 ►
to bring up public key, private key cryptography, because sometimes that gets a little too advanced.
00:21:11 ►
But I think the analogy is fair. Another easy analogy is it’s like a Google Sheets. It’s a
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spreadsheet that everyone can write to, but no one can just change the rules on or um everyone’s house has an address that’s our public
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key so you can say i live at you know 1928 but i’m the only one who has a physical key to open
00:21:34 ►
my door right same kind of idea um but yeah it’s important to note that bitcoin is shared by all
00:21:41 ►
these different computers we each have a computer that runs the software, if you choose.
00:21:46 ►
No one’s required to do this.
00:21:48 ►
But then that ledger is copied over millions of computers around the world.
00:21:52 ►
And so let’s say there was a nuclear bomb in North America and all of North America is wiped out.
00:21:58 ►
Okay, we lose all the North American computers, but there’s millions more spread all around the world.
00:22:04 ►
And the ledger, which just says who owns what, that will persist.
00:22:08 ►
Sean, do you have a question?
00:22:10 ►
You want to go?
00:22:10 ►
Let me unmute you here.
00:22:12 ►
Yeah, hopefully it’s relevant.
00:22:14 ►
I’m very uneducated with this.
00:22:18 ►
What I heard you say was there’s a limited amount of Bitcoin.
00:22:29 ►
That sounds like eventually it could be diluted is that relevant um i don’t think i don’t see what do you mean by diluted
00:22:35 ►
well if you have a million of something and then a million people break it down to a dollar.
00:22:51 ►
Does it still have, or whatever, does it still have value?
00:22:52 ►
Does that make sense?
00:22:56 ►
So if you have one, it’s worth a hundred. And then you split that 100 up into a million pieces because are you understanding my yeah i think i can answer that
00:23:10 ►
and and in a so there’s 21 bitcoin 21 million total bitcoins that’s all they’ll ever be created
00:23:16 ►
each bitcoin can be broken down into 100 million different fundamental units and those are called
00:23:23 ►
satoshis and you can think of that
00:23:25 ►
like a dollar and cents. So one Bitcoin is like a dollar and you break a dollar into 100 pennies,
00:23:31 ►
you can break one Bitcoin into 100 million Satoshis. But if you look at the price,
00:23:36 ►
so right now, if you wanted to go buy one Bitcoin, it’s like $9,000, something like that.
00:23:42 ►
But if you wanted to buy one Satoshi, so one 100 millionth of a Bitcoin, you know, you divide 9,000, something like that. But if you wanted to buy one Satoshi, so one 100 millionth of a
00:23:47 ►
Bitcoin, you know, you divide 9,000 by 100 million, which I’m not sure what that is very less than a
00:23:53 ►
penny, obviously. Does that make sense? The price is constantly changing, Sean, in that, you know,
00:24:01 ►
in the early days, somebody bought a pizza for the equivalent of like $2 million today,
00:24:06 ►
because it wasn’t worth very much back then, because people didn’t agree it was worth much.
00:24:12 ►
And right now, it’s worth about 20,000 at one time.
00:24:18 ►
Back in the early days of Bitcoin, you know, this is back in 2009, or 10, or something like that,
00:24:26 ►
of Bitcoin, you know, this is back in 2009 or 10 or something like that. I bought four Bitcoin at $300 a piece. And I have been donated one and a half Bitcoin. So I have five and a half
00:24:36 ►
Bitcoins that I have holding, one half for myself, and one for each of my five grandchildren.
00:24:43 ►
And, you know, I would have had to spend them by
00:24:45 ►
now if it wasn’t for Patreon, because, you know, I would have had to live on that money. And
00:24:51 ►
fortunately, you know, my $300 investment went up to 9,000. So it worked out pretty well for me. But
00:24:57 ►
hopefully, I can hold on to those. And I’ll never have to spend them. And I can give one to each of
00:25:02 ►
my grandchildren 20 years from now, I think it’ll be worth a lot of money then.
00:25:06 ►
Or I have missed the window and given it to them now.
00:25:10 ►
But, you know, roll the dice, right?
00:25:13 ►
I think that’s an important point.
00:25:16 ►
Thank you.
00:25:19 ►
Yeah, you bet, Sean.
00:25:20 ►
What I was going to say is I think that’s an important point.
00:25:23 ►
A logical question is let’s just assume you’re interested in Bitcoin and you want to acquire some or you don’t.
00:25:28 ►
And you want to know how would I approach that as an investment?
00:25:32 ►
So where Bitcoin is now is it’s sort of being discovered.
00:25:36 ►
The whole world is waking up to this new parallel financial system.
00:25:40 ►
And so, OK, it’s worth nine thousand dollars today.
00:25:43 ►
That sounds like a lot, but it’s really not. All the Bitcoins combined is still 50 times smaller than what gold is worth. So it’s a tiny, tiny, tiny asset. And since there’s only a fixed supply, there can only be 21 million. If more people in the future decide that they want to hold some Bitcoin, the price can only go up.
00:26:05 ►
to Bitcoin, the price can only go up. And so the rational approach to Bitcoin today,
00:26:09 ►
might as well just get the investment side out of the way, is to put a very small percentage of your net worth into Bitcoin and money you don’t need today, you don’t need next year,
00:26:15 ►
and just put it away. Don’t think about it for a while. That’s called hodling or holding in
00:26:20 ►
the Bitcoin community, but terms don’t matter. But Lorenzo, you’re a hodler.
00:26:23 ►
or holding in the Bitcoin community, but terms don’t matter.
00:26:24 ►
But Lorenzo, you’re a hodler.
00:26:33 ►
You might want to mention, too, how Bitcoin is created,
00:26:37 ►
that they’re not 21 million in effect available right now,
00:26:39 ►
and they’re being created as we speak.
00:26:42 ►
And you might want to bring up mining and how that works.
00:26:43 ►
Yeah, yeah. It sounds like you want to go a little bit more technical than I was thinking.
00:26:47 ►
I think everybody here is really interested.
00:26:50 ►
And after that, would you follow up about how somebody goes about buying some Bitcoin today?
00:26:55 ►
What’s a couple of ways to do it?
00:26:57 ►
Yeah, good idea.
00:26:58 ►
So the mining process is it’s actually modeled after gold.
00:27:03 ►
And so that’s where the term comes from. But really,
00:27:07 ►
what’s happening is there are people who run computer networks that are mining. And what
00:27:13 ►
those computer networks are doing is they’re playing the accountant and the security of the
00:27:18 ►
system. And we don’t need to get into the nitty gritty of how that occurs. But they essentially
00:27:22 ►
buy these specialized computers, they connect them to the network and what they’re doing is they’re keeping track of all the
00:27:29 ►
transactions so i send one bitcoin to lorenzo the miners collect all those transactions and then
00:27:35 ►
every 10 minutes they add that group of transactions to the ledger and in uh in a trade essentially
00:27:42 ►
what they’re earning the miners are are earning, they earn newly created
00:27:45 ►
Bitcoin in exchange for the work that they’re doing for the network. And the supply of Bitcoin,
00:27:51 ►
there’s right now about 18 million, a little over 18 million that are in circulation. And every 10
00:27:57 ►
minutes, a little chunk of new Bitcoins are created that go to the miners, and then they
00:28:02 ►
get distributed out through whoever wants to purchase them and is that sufficient on mining would you say cool and in terms of acquiring bitcoin um
00:28:12 ►
that’s very based on your jurisdiction so i don’t know where everyone’s located here it looks like
00:28:17 ►
people are in uh more than one country and so look up your local your local area to see what
00:28:23 ►
makes the most sense for you but i’ll speak to a couple in the United States.
00:28:27 ►
And I’m just full disclosure, I’m biased.
00:28:30 ►
I work for a company called Swan Bitcoin.
00:28:32 ►
I use the product.
00:28:33 ►
I think it’s a great product.
00:28:34 ►
But I’ll bring up a couple different options.
00:28:37 ►
Most people, I assume, are familiar with Cash App, which is an app on your phone.
00:28:42 ►
It’s owned by Square, which has the little terminals you can
00:28:46 ►
swipe a card at, like at your farmer’s market or something. And it’s also owned by Twitter. So
00:28:50 ►
that’s a very large, you know, Fortune 100 company. And they have an app called Cash App.
00:28:55 ►
And you just, you know, log in on your phone, connect your bank account, and you can just
00:28:59 ►
quickly buy as much Bitcoin as you want. I guess they cut you off at 10,000 a week, but most people won’t
00:29:05 ►
be spending that much. And so you can just get an app and you can buy 100
00:29:10 ►
worth, you can buy whatever you want, whenever you want. And I would say that’s probably the
00:29:14 ►
easy answer for most people. Now I’ll contrast that with Swan where I work. And what Swan does
00:29:21 ►
is it’s an automated plan. And so you would connect your bank account similar to Cash App and you would say, I want to buy 100 a month or whatever you want.
00:29:33 ►
And you just set up that plan, hit go, and then it just automatically pulls from your bank account based on the plan you set up.
00:29:41 ►
And both are good options.
00:29:42 ►
I like Swan because you can sort of take the emotional side out sort of
00:29:46 ►
set it and forget it um cash app is also a great option and so that those are the two that i’d
00:29:51 ►
recommend in the u.s and if you’re not in the u.s feel free to dm me and i’ll get you some good
00:29:56 ►
options for that i notice even in grocery stores here in southern california there are machines
00:30:02 ►
where you can go and buy Bitcoin.
00:30:11 ►
There are. Yeah, there’s Bitcoin ATMs where you swipe a card or you insert dollars and then you can acquire some Bitcoin that way. The one benefit of those is some of those let you do it anonymously.
00:30:18 ►
So you insert cash and they don’t know who’s buying it. That’s nice for privacy’s sake. But most of those services
00:30:26 ►
offer very high fees. So you might pay 5%, 10% fees, where cash apps around 2%, swans around 1%.
00:30:35 ►
And so if that matters to you, you can kind of think about the fee structure that you’d like to
00:30:39 ►
do. Does anyone else have any sort of general questions about bitcoin if not i would love to
00:30:46 ►
move on to exploring bitcoin through the lens of mycology which is a lot of the work i’ve done
00:30:51 ►
i’ve got a quick one if you don’t mind me asking yeah go ahead yeah so um recently there was the
00:30:57 ►
halving period and i don’t i sort of understand what that is and like what it does but i was just
00:31:02 ►
curious as like what that’s gonna how that’s gonna
00:31:05 ►
impact an investor potentially yeah good good question so remember when we talked about mining
00:31:11 ►
and how every 10 minutes new bitcoins are introduced in the supply they’re minted and
00:31:18 ►
every four years the issuance rate so the amount of new Bitcoins that are created every 10 minutes, decreases by half. So the first four year period, 50 new Bitcoins were created every 10 minutes.
00:31:31 ►
Then the next four years, so years four to eight, 25 new Bitcoins were created each every 10 minutes.
00:31:37 ►
And then it went to 12.5. And on about May, early May this year, it went down to 6.25 bitcoins per 10 minutes.
00:31:47 ►
And so if you think about that on a chart, the new supply is increased very sharply at first.
00:31:53 ►
And now it’s starting to level off.
00:31:55 ►
And so what’s interesting now is the inflation rate.
00:31:59 ►
So the newly minted bitcoins per year is around 2%, which is the same as gold.
00:32:06 ►
So right now, the inflation rate of gold and Bitcoin is roughly the same.
00:32:09 ►
In four more years, the inflation rate of Bitcoin will be around 1%,
00:32:13 ►
which is about half as much as gold.
00:32:16 ►
And how to approach that from an investor standpoint is,
00:32:20 ►
as time goes on, there’s fewer and fewer new Bitcoins being issued.
00:32:27 ►
is, as time goes on, there’s fewer and fewer new Bitcoins being issued. And so that total supply is continuing to be constrained and constrained. And if the supply is tight, and there’s more demand,
00:32:34 ►
then the price will typically go up. And we can go into some mechanics on how this affects miners,
00:32:40 ►
but I don’t think it would be a good use of our time with a general audience.
00:32:45 ►
It’s quite, quite nuanced and it’s not terribly important.
00:32:50 ►
And, and I spent a lot of time studying it and reading about it and I’m still confused. So
00:32:55 ►
I think you’re right. We should move on. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I think that’s a good point.
00:33:02 ►
You know, I, I’ve been full time in this space.
00:33:05 ►
I get pretty obsessive about things and I fall down the rabbit hole hard.
00:33:10 ►
And it’s been three years of nonstop learning.
00:33:12 ►
And I still learn every day, every week.
00:33:15 ►
I’m humbled by new conversations.
00:33:17 ►
And so it is a very slippery thing to understand fully, right?
00:33:22 ►
It can be something simple.
00:33:23 ►
It’s a fixed supply asset.
00:33:24 ►
It’s a new monetary system. You should own a little in case it catches on, right? It can be something simple. It’s a fixed supply asset. It’s a new monetary system.
00:33:25 ►
You should own a little in case it catches on, right? It can be that simple. But if you’re
00:33:30 ►
intellectually curious, there’s a lot of little rabbit holes to go down. And yeah, that’s kind
00:33:37 ►
of how Bitcoin is. And so one way that I find that’s useful to understand it is to compare it to the natural world. And I’m an amateur mycologist,
00:33:46 ►
just a foraging mushroom nerd. And I came across a nice analogy that’s been well received. And lots
00:33:53 ►
of people have said, you know, I didn’t understand what Bitcoin was and this helped. And so I’ll try
00:33:57 ►
to break down a little bit more about what my perspective is here. And before I do, I think
00:34:04 ►
it’s important to note that
00:34:05 ►
Terrence McKenna actually originally compared our computer internet to mycelium. And mycelium is the
00:34:12 ►
sort of the underground root structure of a fungus. And it is a one cell walled underground
00:34:20 ►
internet, you can say. And it connects all the trees and plants together.
00:34:31 ►
It trades resources. It sends information bidirectionally. It is an underground brain,
00:34:37 ►
an underground internet, a wood wide web that all of our forests and all of our ecosystems are tied to. And we’re just barely starting to study fungi and starting to understand them now, which is criminal in my perspective. Fungi
00:34:47 ►
are the building blocks of our planet. They’re the grand molecular dissemblers. They recycle all the
00:34:52 ►
organic matter that hits the ground. And we’re starting to insert chemicals into the mycelium,
00:34:58 ►
radioactive chemicals, and we can watch the trading. There’s actually a market underground 24-7 that’s trading resources. Now
00:35:07 ►
plants, what they do is they collect photons with their little solar panel leaves and they inhale
00:35:14 ►
carbon dioxide. So they’re collecting carbon and they’re collecting energy and photons. They mash
00:35:19 ►
them together and create sugars and that’s food. And then they do is they they sell the food sell the sugars
00:35:26 ►
down to the mushrooms and the mushrooms are little miners they got their little tentacles and they’re
00:35:31 ►
exploring underground and they’re also the best chemists on our planet so they create custom
00:35:36 ►
enzymes to externally digest their environment and they’re mining important minerals that the
00:35:43 ►
plants find valuable things like nitrogen potassium
00:35:45 ►
and other different chemicals like that and so yeah the mushrooms mine the minerals they trade
00:35:52 ►
them to the plants the plants in turn trade the the sugars down to the mushrooms and so that’s
00:35:58 ►
kind of how our ecology is set up and if you think back about 500 million years ago, there were no land plants, there were no
00:36:06 ►
land animals, all life was in the oceans and instead we had this barren rocky wasteland of a
00:36:12 ►
planet until some fateful partnership occurred which was the mycelium, the fungus, and different
00:36:19 ►
types of plants, what we believe to be right now is some sort of algae. And the fungus and the algae came
00:36:26 ►
together and they formed a symbiosis on land. The fungus is digesting the rocks and the algae is
00:36:33 ►
producing sugars. And so they teamed up and over hundreds of millions of years, they converted this
00:36:39 ►
barren, rocky volcanic wasteland into the Garden of Eden that we have now.
00:36:49 ►
And that’s why we have topsoils, because of this process and this symbiosis.
00:36:54 ►
So that’s just a quick little nerd out on mycelium and mushrooms.
00:37:00 ►
Let’s start to compare that a little bit to how Bitcoin is tied into that. Let me just add one more footnote to that, and that is that the mycelium is what
00:37:08 ►
supports the forest. Without the mycelium, there’d be no forest. And I think that may be an interesting
00:37:14 ►
metaphor going forward with Bitcoin and whatever new economy comes up. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s a
00:37:21 ►
really important point. There would be no forest without it and it’s also important
00:37:25 ►
to realize that if we go back to um early evolutionary theory that the idea was i forgot
00:37:34 ►
the exact phrase darwin phrase but it’s like with two thing claw that was sort of the the analogy
00:37:39 ►
and essentially means that all organisms are competing and we we, our assumption of how biological life was,
00:37:46 ►
was everyone’s competing for resources and it’s this cutthroat thing. And that’s true in some
00:37:51 ►
small instances, but what we’re learning now about ecology is everything’s connected and it’s much
00:37:56 ►
more symbiotic than we once realized. And it’s kind of funny thinking about humans who we have
00:38:02 ►
this hubris and some point we realized we could
00:38:05 ►
manipulate our environment and we thought we were gods and we thought we could leave our ecology
00:38:10 ►
and just you know monocrop things and all this nonsense and we’re going to look back one day and
00:38:15 ►
look i can’t believe we did this to our planet can’t believe we did this to our food can’t we
00:38:19 ►
do this to our medicine and i also think bitcoin will be one of those things where we can’t believe we live without Bitcoin. So let’s get into some comparisons here. So if you think about the
00:38:31 ►
intelligence network that mycelium is, right, that underground root structure sends information,
00:38:37 ►
that network archetype is not only found in mycelium. That is a strategy employed by many
00:38:44 ►
other things in nature. So that
00:38:45 ►
network archetype is found if you zoom way out and look at the galaxy, that’s how dark matter
00:38:51 ►
and dark energy is formed in that network. Neurons in our brain form the same type of network.
00:38:57 ►
Our computer internet forms that network. Bitcoin forms that network. And so when we see this
00:39:02 ►
strategy, this biological strategy appearing
00:39:05 ►
throughout the, throughout the planet, throughout the universe, what does that tell us? That tells
00:39:10 ►
us that it’s a strong, a good strategy, a strategy that works, right? Nature doesn’t make mistakes.
00:39:17 ►
So any, any strategies we see now that are being employed are there because they work.
00:39:22 ►
And so when we look at Bitcoin through this lens, it’s also a
00:39:25 ►
decentralized intelligence network. And to me, that makes Bitcoin seem a bit more robust, like
00:39:32 ►
it’s on to something, like it’s truth. And so that gives me confidence for the future.
00:39:38 ►
And another interesting thing with both Bitcoin and mycelium is a phrase called anti-fragile, which is from Nassim Taleb,
00:39:45 ►
a wonderful thinker and author, kind of an angry person on Twitter, but a very, very sharp mind.
00:39:52 ►
And I’ll describe what anti-fragile means. So if you think about that network underground,
00:39:59 ►
the mycelium, and there’s an invader, some bacteria or another fungus that’s attacking the fungus we’re
00:40:06 ►
sort of using in first person here. What happens is the mycelial network sends information to the
00:40:11 ►
little mushroom scientists. They create a new custom enzyme and they ship that enzyme over to
00:40:17 ►
where the person, the other fungus is attacking them and it handles the predator. And through that process, it builds a chemical library
00:40:26 ►
of molecules that it uses to defend itself. And you could say that that’s learning because over
00:40:31 ►
time, these mycelial mats develop an increased library, which it can then use to sustain itself
00:40:38 ►
long-term. And Bitcoin displays the same characteristics. Let’s say there’s a bug in
00:40:44 ►
the software or someone’s attacking the network in some way.
00:40:48 ►
Information travels throughout the Bitcoin network.
00:40:50 ►
Eventually, it arrives at a developer, mushroom scientist.
00:40:54 ►
The developer creates some new software code, patches the network, creates a custom enzyme,
00:41:00 ►
and then it distributes itself throughout the network.
00:41:02 ►
And now that previous vulnerability is now patched. The whole network learns and now the system is stronger. And that’s what Bitcoin is. That’s what mycelium is, this anti-fragility. When there is chaos, it actually becomes stronger.
00:41:26 ►
to other things like our fiat-based monetary system. If you look at 08, 09, or what’s happening right now, if we have a mortgage crisis and the banks fail, what happens? The whole system
00:41:31 ►
explodes. And then the central banks have to bail it out, which is essentially robbing from the
00:41:36 ►
little guy and the system repeats. More inequality afterwards. Whereas in a Bitcoin system,
00:41:42 ►
the system can handle the shock. Everyone redistributes resources where it needs to be, and we grow from there.
00:41:49 ►
And I think that’s really important when looking at this long term, because many people think, well, what if Bitcoin gets so big the government wants to shut it down?
00:41:57 ►
Well, remember, it’s distributed. It’s on everyone’s computers. You can’t shut it down.
00:42:01 ►
And if you attack it, the system learns and it gets stronger.
00:42:04 ►
So there is some sort of intelligence built into the system. Let me, and this isn’t meant to be
00:42:12 ►
criticism and all, but let me kind of expand a little bit on your idea, and that is to add a word
00:42:20 ►
in your description. You know, as a lawyer, I worry about words. So I’m thinking that the mycelium
00:42:27 ►
comparison is the Bitcoin blockchain is like mycelium. And it’s the same thing as what you’re
00:42:36 ►
saying, but it’s a little more specific in that it’s the technical structure of how Bitcoin works. And it’s not just Bitcoin that works like my CEM,
00:42:46 ►
most cryptocurrencies. And the reason I feel blockchain technology is so important
00:42:52 ►
is people don’t realize this. Right now, IBM is probably the leading developer of blockchain
00:42:57 ►
technology, but blockchain technology is being adopted by businesses and banks and governments
00:43:03 ►
all over the world because it gets rid of that trusted third party.
00:43:08 ►
You don’t need somebody keeping track of your ledger or your bank account or anything else.
00:43:13 ►
And so I’m just saying that it’s not just Bitcoin that’s kind of going to upset a lot of things.
00:43:21 ►
It’s the blockchain technology itself that gets rid of the third party.
00:43:24 ►
Now, when it comes to money, which is the thing that makes the world go around,
00:43:29 ►
you know, that’s what runs everything. The Bitcoin blockchain really is, I think, crucial in what’s
00:43:35 ►
going on. Although I think we can also talk about the Ethereum blockchain that you can program
00:43:41 ►
things into it too. So I don’t know if you want to get into all
00:43:45 ►
of that, but we’ll let you go where you want to from there. But these are things that kind of
00:43:49 ►
run through my head right now. Yeah, yeah, that’s a good topic to bring up. A lot of people have,
00:43:55 ►
if you’re exposed to Bitcoin, you’ve probably been exposed to other cryptocurrencies or other
00:43:59 ►
attempted uses for a blockchain. And I actually have a different perspective here. So when I
00:44:06 ►
initially bumped into Bitcoin, I quickly dove into Ethereum and was looking at all these incredible
00:44:12 ►
potential use cases for a blockchain. And since doing extensive research, I sort of systematically
00:44:19 ►
eliminated most other use cases relative to what we have out there today. And the main reason why is
00:44:26 ►
Bitcoin is most famously known for the blockchain, but it’s actually not just one technology.
00:44:34 ►
Satoshi stitched together roughly five different technologies, all of which had already existed in
00:44:39 ►
the past, and he just bolted them on together in a unique way. And the unique way that they’re bolted on is what creates the properties of being able to eliminate a middleman and censorship resistance and decentralization.
00:45:05 ►
over time but there’s also a peer-to-peer network which is all the computers together sending transactions that gossip with each other and and information travels it also has public key
00:45:12 ►
and private key cryptography which we mentioned and it also has the proof of work function which
00:45:17 ►
i don’t think we have time to go into in depth now but that’s that’s probably the most fundamentally
00:45:23 ►
that’s the biggest breakthrough in in bitcoin and all the whole industry is proof of work.
00:45:29 ►
And yeah, I don’t think we should spend too much time on it.
00:45:33 ►
That’s where it gets really complex. But you’re right. That’s the cornerstone of it all.
00:45:38 ►
That’s right. That’s right. In terms of the other networks, Ethereum, what IBM’s doing, etc.
00:46:05 ►
In terms of the other networks, Ethereum, what IBM’s doing, etc. My perspective here is what they’re doing is they’re saying, okay, Bitcoin offers XYZ properties, opento-peer layer and all these other things. And those other things in constellation is what produces the properties.
00:46:11 ►
And so I think we’re going to look back in 10 years and say, we sort of had this little hype
00:46:17 ►
bubble around what Bitcoin offers and blockchains can’t do actually everything we thought they could
00:46:22 ►
do. Now, long, long term, there will be some really interesting things coming out of this.
00:46:28 ►
But I think right now we’re trying to figure out what those things are.
00:46:31 ►
And I don’t think anything other than Bitcoin right now and to a lesser extent, Ethereum,
00:46:35 ►
I just don’t think anything’s really going to last long term.
00:46:40 ►
I really appreciate you pointing this out because, you know know I just kind of read the headlines and I
00:46:46 ►
dipped my toes in it and all and some of it makes sense but what you’re saying right now is really
00:46:52 ►
making a lot more sense to me so and it’s giving me a lot better understanding of bitcoin and why
00:46:57 ►
it is sort of the cornerstone of all this definitely I’m really happy to hear that it’s
00:47:02 ►
not an easy road to you know first be enamored
00:47:06 ►
with all the potential use cases and then start to realize one by one oh no it doesn’t do what
00:47:11 ►
i think it does that was a struggle i actually bought urls for the psychedelic dow a distributed
00:47:19 ►
autonomous organization and i was going to turn the psychedelic salon over to a Dow, you know, and, and, but then like you say, the,
00:47:28 ►
the deeper I got into it, the less practical it seemed.
00:47:31 ►
One day,
00:47:33 ►
one day someone here on this call will carry your legacy forward and
00:47:37 ►
psychedelic salon will be an autonomous organization. I do believe that.
00:47:42 ►
I just don’t think we’re anywhere near that yet. Okay, I think
00:47:48 ►
if we’re going to try to keep it to an hour, I would love to tie it back to the psychedelic
00:47:53 ►
community, because there’s a tremendous amount of overlap between Bitcoiners and the blockchain
00:47:57 ►
community in general and the community here. Here’s what, let’s do it, Brandon. Let’s keep
00:48:02 ►
this to an hour, and we’re going to follow through through what you’re saying right now and then i’d like to have you come back in a week or so as
00:48:08 ►
people you know i’ll get the podcast out people get thinking about these things when people come
00:48:12 ►
back for more questions if that’s okay with you i would be honored good okay take it away
00:48:18 ►
awesome awesome so i just have a couple bullets here i’d love to run through and then if anyone
00:48:23 ►
has questions on this i’d also like to make it interactive.
00:48:25 ►
So I’m going to try to just riff through this in five or 10 minutes and leave some time for questions.
00:48:30 ►
So the first thing is the word psychedelic, depending on what definition you look at,
00:48:36 ►
my favorite definition is psyche and delos, which is mind manifest.
00:48:42 ►
And if you look at that, Bitcoin is a psychedelic. And what I mean by that
00:48:47 ►
is money, whatever you have in your mind, you can manifest what you want in the world. So money,
00:48:55 ►
I want to buy a car. It’s a pretty bad example, but I can manifest a car by spending my money.
00:49:01 ►
So I think just right off the bat, the definition is kind of funny. Now, Bitcoin’s history is also very tied to the psychedelic community, starting with the Silk Road.
00:49:10 ►
So in Bitcoin’s early history, I’m sure many people are familiar with this. There were dark
00:49:15 ►
net markets, most famously the Silk Road, where individuals can buy and sell various illicit drugs,
00:49:23 ►
some other things. And Bitcoin was used as the money on that system.
00:49:27 ►
It became wildly popular. People had quality control over their substances, peer reviews.
00:49:32 ►
There’s actually a very healthy market that produced violence. It was very good for the
00:49:37 ►
community. And so there’s that early tie there. And what we all know here is that there’s a
00:49:43 ►
cognitive, there’s an attack on our
00:49:46 ►
cognitive liberty. We’re told that we cannot have certain plants, fungi, etc., molecules. And so we
00:49:53 ►
don’t have cognitive liberty. I’m sure everyone on the call can agree that’s important. I can’t
00:49:59 ►
imagine a government regulating what I do in my own home with my own consciousness. And so cognitive liberty is
00:50:05 ►
important. And on the money side, we need monetary liberty. And that means individuals are free to
00:50:11 ►
choose what they consider money, how they trade it, who they trade it with. And many people in
00:50:17 ►
the Bitcoin community want to build parallel society. They don’t necessarily agree with the
00:50:21 ►
way culture is trending. And so the psychedelic commune of the 60s, they’re coming up in a new iteration now.
00:50:28 ►
And in order to pull that off, you do need to separate from the matrix as much as possible.
00:50:33 ►
And one way that can help that is with a money that people can use peer to peer rather than relying on the system.
00:50:40 ►
Because if the system says, Lorenzo, I don’t like your commune, they just turn your money off. And that’s not good. And so we’re being oppressed with our money in the same way that
00:50:49 ►
we’re being pressed with our cognitive liberty. And there’s a funny meme in the Bitcoin community
00:50:54 ►
where building the citadel, which is essentially a Bitcoin commune. And so there’s a tremendous
00:51:00 ►
amount of overlap there in a funny way.
00:51:05 ►
Let’s see.
00:51:07 ►
I also polled on my Twitter feed.
00:51:11 ►
I said, hey, Bitcoiners, what do you think about psychedelics?
00:51:15 ►
518 people submitted the poll. And 78% of Bitcoiners, according to my Twitter feed, said that they support psychedelics.
00:51:21 ►
And subjectively, I’ve had hundreds of people reach out to me.
00:51:24 ►
I’ve been doing some Bitcoin-focused podcasts on the subject. And what we’re finding is that Bitcoiners are very
00:51:30 ►
supportive of this. In general, Bitcoiners are curious, self-starter, autodidacts, a little bit
00:51:36 ►
of a rebel, open-minded, many of the same characteristics that I find in the psychedelic
00:51:41 ►
community. Both communities are somewhat on the fringe. They both carry somewhat of a stigma. And, you know, it also, they both also lead to
00:51:50 ►
personal transformation, which I know sounds crazy when you first get introduced to Bitcoin,
00:51:55 ►
but it is sort of like a true north. It is this fundamental thing that we can rebuild society on.
00:52:00 ►
It is the granite. It is the operating layer that we need to increase our species,
00:52:06 ►
our chance of survival, increase our ability to cooperate. And so it leads to tremendous
00:52:12 ►
spiritual awakenings. Again, I know how crazy that sounds with Bitcoin. And it also leads to
00:52:18 ►
tremendous evangelism. I’m sure many of us can relate. The first time you really had a deep
00:52:24 ►
psychedelic experience, you wanted to tell everyone. And, you know, it’s probably best that you don’t in your raving state coming down. But Bitcoin is the same thing. Once you see the light, you want to evangelize. And so I think they both speak to deep fundamental truths that rational, open-minded people will come to love.
00:52:43 ►
that rational, open-minded people will come to love.
00:52:46 ►
Let’s see.
00:52:48 ►
Yeah, I think that’s maybe one more.
00:52:49 ►
Dissolving boundaries.
00:52:52 ►
So that’s, I think that was popularized by Terrence.
00:52:55 ►
And psychedelics obviously dissolve boundaries between self and other, between head and heart,
00:52:59 ►
between culture and your own concept of an ego, et cetera.
00:53:03 ►
And Bitcoin does the same.
00:53:04 ►
So right now we’re sort of isolated in these silos.
00:53:07 ►
Maybe you live in a country and you can’t trade with Iran
00:53:10 ►
because the big bad US government says,
00:53:13 ►
don’t trade with Iran and they don’t let you.
00:53:15 ►
And with Bitcoin, you can trade freely with Iran.
00:53:17 ►
So we’re dissolving geographic boundaries.
00:53:20 ►
We’re dissolving boundaries that banks put on people.
00:53:23 ►
So if you’re a woman in the Middle East,
00:53:25 ►
you cannot open a bank account.
00:53:26 ►
You might be in the worst situation in your home and there’s absolutely
00:53:30 ►
nothing you can do.
00:53:31 ►
However,
00:53:31 ►
with a smartphone access to the internet,
00:53:34 ►
you can control your own money with Bitcoin.
00:53:36 ►
You might be able to use that to save some money and get out of your
00:53:38 ►
personal situation.
00:53:40 ►
And so there’s all being boundaries there.
00:53:42 ►
Again,
00:53:43 ►
it also enables people all around the world to contribute in one global economy. So again, think of a developing country, they’re locked into their local currency, maybe it’s Argentina, Venezuela, Cyprus, Greece, all these examples right now, Turkey is experiencing inflation.
00:54:04 ►
is experiencing inflation. These places, the individuals that live in those countries are forced to use the money supply that their country uses. And if that country mismanages the money
00:54:10 ►
supply on purpose or on accident, the people that live there are forced to pay the consequences of
00:54:16 ►
that. And so what we can do with blockchain, with Bitcoin, with these other options is we can allow
00:54:22 ►
those people in developing countries to use the money that they control so
00:54:26 ►
they’re not tied to the fate of their local currency. And that’s really important if we
00:54:31 ►
want to unlock human capital. Think of all the Maya Angelos, the Thomas Edison’s, you know,
00:54:37 ►
the great inventors of the future that are stuck in Venezuela right now and they can’t get out of
00:54:43 ►
it because of the financial system there.
00:54:50 ►
And so Bitcoin frees humanity, it unlocks human capital, and it dissolves all the boundaries that are being put on us that really only serve the governments and political structures that support
00:54:56 ►
them. And so that’s a great, great wrap up there. And one of the examples that I think is so important to realize that if here in Southern California, there are a lot of migrant workers and most of them get paid.
00:55:14 ►
They get a check. They go to a check cashing company.
00:55:16 ►
They pay that company 20 percent of their paycheck so that then they can wire it down to their friends.
00:55:21 ►
They have to pay a wire fee to send it down to their family.
00:55:23 ►
they can wire it down to their friends and they have to pay a wire fee to send it down to their family. If they were paid in Bitcoin, they would get their paycheck on their phone and instantly
00:55:31 ►
they could send it to their family for less than a dollar fee and their family could go to any of
00:55:37 ►
10,000 stores in Mexico alone that accept Bitcoin. Now, I know the fees go up and down, and that’s one of the problems right now.
00:55:45 ►
But whatever the fee is today in Bitcoin, it’s significantly less than a paycheck cashing
00:55:51 ►
operation that then charges you to wire transfer money. So there are ways to do it. And then
00:55:57 ►
another thing I think is no longer going to be very important, I guess. But if my grandkids were traveling around, you know,
00:56:06 ►
the world, like I did, out on a wing and a prayer there, if I could send them Bitcoin to their phone,
00:56:13 ►
if they were in trouble, they could call me and within minutes, I could have some cash to them.
00:56:18 ►
That’s a great comfort, you know, now, with the pandemic, there’s not going to be a lot of that
00:56:24 ►
traveling going on. But, you know, things are going to change. And like, now, with the pandemic, there’s not going to be a lot of that traveling going on.
00:56:25 ►
But, you know, things are going to change. And like you said, I really believe and I believe
00:56:30 ►
this long before the pandemic, I believe that that before I die, Bitcoin is going to be one
00:56:36 ►
of the foundational currencies of Bitcoin or a cryptocurrency. I’m not going to say Bitcoin,
00:56:41 ►
but I think Bitcoin has such a head start, it’s probably the one that’s going to be there. But, you know, if nothing else, I suggest people should
00:56:50 ►
just get 100 worth of Bitcoin,
00:56:56 ►
you’re going to pay attention to it. You know, one of the first things I do every day is check
00:57:02 ►
the price of Bitcoin and I don’t intend to sell it. You know, I’m going to give it to my grandkids. I just hope it’s worth something when I give it to them.
00:57:08 ►
And so the longer I stay alive, the more value it is for them.
00:57:12 ►
You know, it’s the only thing they’re going to get from me other than a lot of hot air.
00:57:17 ►
Important point. So a couple of things quick.
00:57:19 ►
You mentioned a 20 percent fee just to transfer your own money to your own family.
00:57:25 ►
Number one, that’s insane.
00:57:27 ►
But if you think about that, 20%, that’s one day of your five-day work week that you’re
00:57:32 ►
just giving to the company to transfer your money across the border.
00:57:36 ►
That is systematic theft.
00:57:38 ►
That is time theft.
00:57:39 ►
That requires you to work 20% longer in your career in order to retire.
00:57:44 ►
So your time is being stolen there,
00:57:46 ►
which deeply upsets me. Just had to mention that one. I’ve seen a couple of comments here,
00:57:53 ►
a couple of important comments here. What happens if we get hit by a solar flare?
00:57:58 ►
So this is a fun question. Number one, if a solar flare happens, theoretically,
00:58:03 ►
all the computers break, right?
00:58:05 ►
That would be the risk.
00:58:06 ►
And what’s interesting about Bitcoin is the community is so hardcore that Bitcoin is totally
00:58:13 ►
fine.
00:58:13 ►
And let me give you a couple examples.
00:58:15 ►
Why there are people today right now who take, who download the Bitcoin blockchain every
00:58:20 ►
10 minutes, a new block of transactions comes in. They download it into physical storage,
00:58:25 ►
which is writing on paper or some other medium. And then it’s locked in a Faraday cage,
00:58:31 ►
which essentially protects against any type of solar flares. And so if the whole world,
00:58:38 ►
internet communications, all the bank accounts, they all wipe out because of a solar flare,
00:58:43 ►
the Bitcoin network will survive. The ledger will survive. It would take time to reboot and we’d have to rediscover computer
00:58:49 ►
science and hopefully we have books to do that. But the ledger itself, who owns what? That’s not
00:58:54 ►
going anywhere. There’s a fun question. We have just a couple minutes left. Does anyone else have
00:59:00 ►
questions? I’d love to address stuff that you guys have you know live here today go ahead andrew
00:59:06 ►
yeah you mentioned you know the way in which uh being able to trend to send money without
00:59:12 ►
fees is disruptive are there other ways that you can think of specific ways that people can use
00:59:19 ►
bitcoin disruptively um that may not be obvious like to your average person who was in school doing this stuff?
00:59:27 ►
Yeah, yeah. I love that question. I view Bitcoin as a political protest. And anytime you’re buying
00:59:33 ►
Bitcoin, you’re also selling dollars or euros or yen. And so where you put your capital,
00:59:39 ►
where you put your stored work, your stored time, where you store that in money is a political act.
00:59:47 ►
And so you can put dollars in the bank account or you can put Bitcoin in your savings account.
00:59:51 ►
And one of them takes away from the state and the other one supports the state.
00:59:55 ►
And so at a very fundamental level, buying Bitcoin is a vote for a alternative monetary system.
01:00:02 ►
Now, other ways you could say, you know, there are lots of illegal
01:00:06 ►
things you can do with Bitcoin. Bitcoin supports black markets and gray markets. Theoretically,
01:00:13 ►
it’s much harder for a state to enforce unlawful search and seizure or abuse of property rights.
01:00:21 ►
And so if the government says, we don’t like what you’re doing, they can just steal your money. And it happens all the time. And so Bitcoin is not, it’s censorship resistant
01:00:31 ►
or unconfiscatable, which is a made up word, but it works. And so no one can take your money
01:00:37 ►
because the password to your money you can memorize in your head. If you think back of
01:00:42 ►
Nazi Germany, there were Jews fleeing various parts of Europe,
01:00:47 ►
and they were trying to sew gold into their clothes in order to cross borders because it
01:00:53 ►
was being confiscated. If we had Bitcoin then, those people would convert all their wealth into
01:00:58 ►
Bitcoin, memorize 12 words as a password, walk across the border, look, I have no money,
01:01:04 ►
and grab the first phone
01:01:06 ►
when you get across and all your money’s there. And so it’s a very empowering technology. It’s
01:01:10 ►
a tool for the people. It fights back against the state. We can also talk about how fiat money
01:01:17 ►
is able to fund endless wars or any political wills that there might be and how Bitcoin sort of
01:01:23 ►
slowly erodes power away from the state.
01:01:27 ►
And if we do have another one of these, which I hope we do, we can get into some implications of what a future world is where Bitcoin is the monetary standard.
01:01:35 ►
Or it’s big enough to sort of push back against oppressive states, which at a very Bitcoin doesn’t have to be the world’s money to be wildly successful and good for humanity.
01:01:45 ►
It can be an asset like gold
01:01:47 ►
that protects people when they need it most.
01:01:51 ►
Hopefully that answered your question, Andrew.
01:01:53 ►
I’ll tell you what,
01:01:55 ►
this brings us to a really good place to stop for tonight,
01:01:58 ►
but I have so many more things I’d like to talk about.
01:02:01 ►
This has been quite fascinating.
01:02:03 ►
I think we’ll wait for two or three weeks
01:02:04 ►
and I’ll put a podcast out with what we talked about tonight. And we’ll see what other
01:02:09 ►
questions come up. You know, I want to talk about, you know, people think that’s complete privacy on
01:02:14 ►
Bitcoin that is not really that private, you know, so there’s things like that people need to know
01:02:18 ►
about. And then, you know, I really think that until 2020 rolled around, Bitcoin was something that I really knew was going to happen.
01:02:28 ►
But now in this year, I think it’s critical.
01:02:31 ►
I think people getting involved in Bitcoin today are going to have a big head start on what’s going to happen 10 years from now.
01:02:39 ►
So I’ll put this out in a podcast and get the information out to people.
01:02:44 ►
And then in a few weeks, we’ll get together again.
01:02:46 ►
And I already have a bunch of questions.
01:02:48 ►
I’m sure everybody else will.
01:02:50 ►
So, Brandon, I really appreciate you being here tonight.
01:02:54 ►
I know everybody else does.
01:02:55 ►
And I also appreciate all the time you put into researching this because I got lazy and gave up.
01:03:03 ►
Well, listen, everybody.
01:03:09 ►
lazy and gave up on it. Well, listen, everybody, actually, on Thursday morning at 1030 Pacific Time, which is 630 at night in England, we’ll have another salon here, and I’m sure that we’ll
01:03:14 ►
be picking up on some of this discussion, but I want to save a bunch of it until we get Brandon
01:03:18 ►
back. So until next week, everybody, keep the old faith and stay high.
01:03:24 ►
Until next week, everybody, keep the old faith and stay high.
01:03:29 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:03:33 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:03:38 ►
And if you’re like me, you probably have some questions.
01:03:42 ►
For example, in the chat that took place while Brandon was talking,
01:03:48 ►
questions came up about the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining, as well as the possibility of Bitcoin becoming a digital version of gold.
01:03:52 ►
One of the questions that I plan on raising next time he’s here
01:03:55 ►
is whether people who aren’t in a position to make any investments
01:03:59 ►
right now, whether they should maybe still think about buying a
01:04:03 ►
small amount of Bitcoin anyway,
01:04:05 ►
just to become familiar with how it works. Well, my guess is that it isn’t only for maybe a few
01:04:13 ►
deep web drug purchases that you’re going to need to have a little cryptocurrency on hand in the
01:04:19 ►
years ahead. There may be other reasons for it. But for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:04:27 ►
Namaste, my friends.