WBD173 Audio Transcription

Tuur Demeester on The Bitcoin Reformation

Interview date: Thursday 22nd November 2019

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Tuur Demeester from Adamant Capital. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, I talk to Tuur Demeester; macro investor, analyst, business cycle expert and founding partner at Adamant Capital. We discuss his recent article The Bitcoin Reformation, Bitcoin financial services and distrust in the current banking system.

“It’s binary, either you believe it’s going to a million or you believe it’s going to die.”

— Tuur Demeester

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: So I want to move out here and ...

Tuur Demeester: What?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well-

Tuur Demeester: To Austin or where?

Peter McCormack: To the States, I want to move to the States.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah!

Peter McCormack: I originally always wanted LA because I like it in LA, but I don't think it's great for the kids. Then I thought New York's better for work, especially... I don't know if you know I've got a second show now called Defiance?

Tuur Demeester: Well, I know you're killing it with the Bitcoin show.

Peter McCormack: Well, that's going well, but I've got this other show Defiance, and that's ... So New York, there's an interview you can do every day.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: But again, I'm like, "Do I want to live here with my kids?" But I'm now actually thinking about Austin.

Tuur Demeester: Well, so consider that 75% of the Texas population lives in the Texas Triangle, which is within a three-hour drive of here. That's like 20 million people. So if you look at it that way, it's kind of, you're in a metro area. Lots of people live here.

Peter McCormack: Well, what I've got to think of is, you know I like to do my interviews in person?

Tuur Demeester: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: We've only done one remote. This is ... Is this your fourth one?

Tuur Demeester: Third. One remote and one live in San Francisco.

Peter McCormack: Yes, your third one then. But I prefer them in person. So actually, interestingly, the one we did remotely is my third biggest show.

Tuur Demeester: Oh wow!

Peter McCormack: The Bitcoin Heavy Accumulation, that one blew up. But you know I prefer them in person. The way it works now is if I'm based in the UK, I come out for two ... Yeah, I'm going to be here for two and a half weeks. I'm going to record 30 interviews over these two weeks, which is gruelling, but then I'm set up for a month.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: And my kids stay with their mum. But if I come out here and my son will come with me, it's just kind of like, all right, I can interview you and I can interview Bitstein and Jimmy. There's maybe 10 people here.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah, not very many.

Peter McCormack: But am I still going to have to travel? Can I get people to come in? Will I end up doing more remote? But in the end, it's kind of like, some places I could go in and out within a day, but lifestyle-wise, it feels like Austin is the place to be.

Tuur Demeester: I think so. Yeah, I love Austin. I think it's ... I mean, first of all, it's growing so fast. Also, there's this kind of really entrepreneurial culture here and it's 100 and what is it now? 150 years ago there were 40,000 people in the entire state of Texas.

So pretty much everyone was an immigrant at some point coming in here. And you can really feel that. There's really kind of this ... People, they have the guts to think big and they're just building a lot of cool stuff. And it's diversified as well. If you look at all the different industries that are present in Texas and then here in Austin, there's UT, UT Austin, the University.

Peter McCormack: No state tax.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: That's the thing that's drawing me in. But the other thing is also, I feel like Austin is becoming... Like there's no real home of Bitcoin, like it's everywhere, but I feel like there's a real density building around here, like a real density of Bitcoiners.

Tuur Demeester: I mean not that influencers are everything, but I had a look at the ... What is it now? The hive.one top 100 Bitcoin influencers?

Peter McCormack: Yep.

Tuur Demeester: And to my knowledge six of them now live in Austin, and that's double of that of two years ago.

Peter McCormack: Where are you on that list? You're like top 10, aren't you?

Tuur Demeester: Yeah, somewhere in there. I mean, the-

Peter McCormack: Shut up, you know where you are!

Tuur Demeester: One list, because there's so many lists.

Peter McCormack: Come on.

Tuur Demeester: But I like hive.one because it's kind of, it's based on who follows each other. So it's like the Google PageRank idea. So if some other influencers follow you, then you go up in the ranking. So I do like that approach.

Peter McCormack: I dread the email every week because I'm a bit of a lunatic and a bit confrontational. Every week the email that comes in that tells you who's followed you and who's unfollowed you, it's always like, "Fuck, who've I pissed off this week?" I kind of like sometimes I just delete it because I don't want to know.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah, yeah.

Peter McCormack: And then sometimes I open it with a squint and I'm like, "Ah shit. I've pissed off this person this week. They've unfollowed me." I've had some, yeah, brutal unfollows.

Tuur Demeester: Have you ever like repaired ties, like somebody who blocked you that you then like ...

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've interviewed, I think on three occasions now I've interview people who I'm blocked by.

Tuur Demeester: Oh, that's awesome.

Peter McCormack: So Erik Voorhees, the first time I interviewed him I was blocked by him, and I didn't know why, and he didn't know why. We did the interview and I said to him, "Oh, yeah, by the way, I'm blocked." He's like, "Really?" And I was like, "Yeah. I don't know why." So we went and searched Twitter and it was back, I was very, very new and it was during S2X and I just said something outrageous.

Tuur Demeester: Mm-hmm.

Peter McCormack: And I was really outrageous. I apologized and he unblocked me. I consider us friends and friends in the world of Bitcoin. If I'd want to do an interview, he will do it. But there's a few more. I've blocked a bunch of people as well. But I'm the kind of person who will block and have people block me. You're not because you're not a confrontational person.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah, my block list probably runs in the hundreds now, but I've been on Twitter for 10 years so you kind of just ...

Peter McCormack: Wow.

Tuur Demeester: I'm pretty quick to block, but then if people ask like, "Hey, a friend of mine, he's blocked. Would you mind unblocking?" I usually just go ahead and do it.

Peter McCormack: I've done a mass unblock at once and that was a terrible idea. I did it and said, "Look, let's start afresh, blah, blah, blah." Same people, straight in the hip.

Tuur Demeester: Oh yeah, yeah.

Peter McCormack: "You're a moron. You're an idiot." So anyway, look, great to get you back on. Always great to get you back on. I know it's good for downloads so it's always great to get you back on. That last show did really well. Like I said, it's my third biggest show, and the two shows are bigger was an Andreas one that blew up and a very old one, but it did really well, people loved that show. And you were right! Straight after that Bitcoin went up to like $14,000. You got it right. How do you see it all now? Are we going to get another accumulation period?

Tuur Demeester: Yeah, so back then the report was called Bitcoin in heavy accumulations and the idea was that the long-term holders are just holding on and meanwhile we have a new generation of investors who's piling in and that's what I meant, like there was significant buying coming in. Now I think the market got ahead of itself, people thought like, "oh, this is easy. This is like 2017 again. Let's just jump on board and go for another ride." And then yeah, of course we did go to $14,000, but I think it was a bit too much too fast. So this period now, there's a famous analyst called Wyckoff. He has this model of how-

Peter McCormack:Yeah, I've seen that-

Tuur Demeester: ... markets develop. So he talks about accumulation, which is at the bottom, but then the next phase is re-accumulation. So you get a rally and then the market needs a breather. They're going to need to catch its breath and it kind of needs to shake off some more weak ends until finally you can go higher. Because that's how you go higher if all the weak ends are gone, then there's nobody really left to sell the asset and then it just has to go up.

So I think this is the phase now where from that point where we went to $14,000 all the way until now is all part of the re-accumulation. We're way above the bottom of $3,000, and I don't think we're going back there. I think if anything, maybe like a $5,000, we could touch that briefly, but in hindsight I think it's all going to be part of this just wide band that we're trading in a range and this is all a setup to just go into new all-time highs again, but it's going to take some time.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've seen some of the people that do mess in, "Oh, we're going to go back to $3,000." And I was like, "I didn't see it." But, if we went to $5,000, even at $5,000, we're up on the year! We're up from the $3,000. As long as it's... Because my time horizon's changed too. My time horizon now is like multi-year, possibly multi-decade. I don't sell Bitcoin ever anymore. I'm not emotional about the price moves anymore, because as long as new bases keep establishing themselves, I feel quite comfortable.

Tuur Demeester: Right! Well, and that's also the secret of having appropriate size. If you're not reliant on Bitcoin for your income for example, then you can be a lot more relaxed about it. If it's not your pension right away, then you can be more relaxed about it. But I was thinking, just the past week I was like, "man, this market, it's been 10 years, but it's still so volatile!" We went from $9,000 to now $7,500 in what, a month again?

Peter McCormack: Yep!

Tuur Demeester: And it's not totally peanuts anymore. It's a $150 billion asset. So it definitely is scary and I think part of the volatility is just that people still have trouble wrapping their head around, like, how do I know if ... And it's binary. Either you believe it's going to a million or you believe it's going to die. You can't really say, "Oh, it's just, in 20 years from now, it'll still be bubbling at around $5,000." You can't say that.

Peter McCormack: It's not going to happen. All right, well listen, we're here to talk about your latest piece of writing, the Bitcoin ... Interestingly, I keep reading it as the Bitcoin Reformation, but I also when I originally read it, I saw the Bitcoin re-formation. I was like, "Is it reformation, is that like a term, or is it the re-formation?" Like what is it?

Tuur Demeester: Well, honestly you catch me ... Like I read a lot in English, but sometimes I honestly don't know what to ... I guess it would be reformation in the sense that it's really a well-established way to describe this historic period. I didn't mean it literally. I didn't mean like Bitcoin is going to be reformed. Although, I mean originally that's what that was. The 16th century is when a lot of very old institutions radically got reformed. And ...

Peter McCormack: I think it's your best piece of writing by the way.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah, I think too.

Peter McCormack: It's my favorite thing you've done.

Tuur Demeester: I think it's the best I've done, especially in terms of tying together stuff that I'm passionate about, because there's only so much you can do with price analysis. It's always a bit sad if I put a lot of effort into a piece of writing that I know is going to stop being relevant two years down the road. Like Bitcoin and heavy accumulation, that's kind of gone now.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Tuur Demeester: Of course, I can kind of like wave it around, but five years from now, nobody's going to remember me.

Peter McCormack: It's a proper essay.

Tuur Demeester: So it's nice to put something together that I think, hope is going to be relevant 10 or 20 years from now still.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, like if you're right, people will refer back to this, but it's a proper essay and my assumption is that a good deal of work went into this. I'd love to ask how many times you edited it and reviewed it because I'm imagining a few times. I read it for a second time this morning, just in prep. I think it's fantastic! How long did it take you?

Tuur Demeester: Well, it's hard to tell because part of the process was just, I thought I was taking a break from Bitcoin. I was just doing reading and I've been, always been fascinated by the differences in culture between Flanders where I grew up in Holland, the Netherlands, because there's the same language but if you cross the border you see everything changes, like the houses are different, the people, the culture is different.

 There's some research actually that confirms that the difference, the cultural difference between Flanders and Holland, that gap is the widest of any community that shares the same language and border pretty much anywhere in the world. So that was kind of like, I've always wanted to know like why is that, we're so close. So I started reading about the history and then gradually it just became clear to me like, "Oh, oh, oh!"

 What happened I think, the short of it is that the Rhine River is one of these major arteries in Europe. It starts in Switzerland and then it goes all the way to the Antwerp and the Netherlands now, that's where it ends. Historically in the Middle Ages it was this amazing trading route, a lot of wealth and people moved always. So it's almost natural.

 It was almost like it had to happen that some bubble of prosperity had to develop at the end of that river. So that's what happened slowly in the 15th century Bruges, which is where I grew up, became very prosperous and then Antwerp in the 16th century. All of those are very close to the end of the ... How do you call it? The mound? Maybe that's what it is, where the river goes into the ocean.

Peter McCormack: Oh, the mouth?

Tuur Demeester:The mouth of the river! So that was kind of inevitable. Then with that, there was this constant flux of new immigrants coming in. If you wanted to go to England, if you wanted to go elsewhere, you kind of had to go to the coast, say that you're from France somewhere and you wanted to... Then you often would take the Rhine River to get there.

There was this kind of natural melting pot environment and that's why in the 15th century in Bruges there was a Medici branch, the Italian bankers and they decided to have a branch in Bruges and then in London. So it was one of the major trading hubs. So with that, it became like a place where radical ideas really found a friendly audience. So gradually people who were critical of the church and they're like, "Hey, what is this? We have to pay these enormous fees to make sure that we get into heaven? What's that all about?"

And kind of not being anti-theistic, like you're not anti-religious, but you're saying that the way this institution is handling it is not kosher. Anyway, I guess the short of it is what I discovered is there was this growing rebellion in the heart of the Netherlands at the time which is was one nation, there wasn't really a separation much, it was really more on the Flander side. If you looked at the amount of people that lived in what is now the Netherlands was maybe only a quarter of what lived, people that lived in what is now Belgium and the reason is that there were so many floods.

 It's all below sea level and so you can't really build a big city, and they hadn't figured out how to build these dykes yet. So there was this prosperity and rebellion and basically the Spanish, they had the largest empire on Earth because they had discovered the New World. They were almost literally mining all the people there, the colonialism and getting lots of precious metals and also, they had this kind of vision of grandeur.

 They ordained by God to rule Europe and so they really were very expansionist and they started pushing to conquer the Netherlands. What happened is that they only got as far as Antwerp. So they basically were able to dominate and suppress whoever was in Flanders, but they never were able to conquer what is now the Netherlands.

Peter McCormack: Right.

Tuur Demeester: And I think that really had a massive impact on the culture, where the intellectuals and the merchants who had something to lose, they just moved up to Amsterdam and kind of who was left behind became an impoverished area. If you look at the wages for example in the 17th century were 30% lower in Flanders versus Holland, just because the Spanish were there, they were levying taxes, there were censorship. So that to me has a lot of personal kind of attachment to this whole story because I feel like, "oh finally I'm getting some answers as to why people are so different in Flanders versus Holland."

Peter McCormack: And what's going on there! One of the interesting things about when I was reading it this morning, which I didn't notice the first time I read it, and perhaps it's because I wasn't reading it in prep for an interview. I think it was Meltem who shared it, I read it and I was like, "Oh, that was cool."

I kind of skim read it because it was a long piece. I actually sat this time and read it again for a second time and the way I looked at it, away from the parallels of history, just in terms of Bitcoin itself, I kind of feel like if we look at the debates around Bitcoin at the moment, they're almost... Like if you look at it through the lens of a camera, people are discussing price and how people spending it, quite basic rudimentary things.

It's almost like you've looked at it with this wide lens. You're seeing the wider changes in culture and society and you're seeing how Bitcoin is relevant and can impact that and then you've drawn the parallels to history. So I kind of saw it this like, Tuur is this... We're all seeing the world of Bitcoin in this very small lens and you're all looking through the wide lens.

Tuur Demeester: Well, I mean, the whole ... We'll see if I'm right, but that's what I've always attempted with Bitcoin, is like that this just is so different, it's so different from anything that I had ever seen before. So how can I better understand it? So I've always looked for are there any analogies that make sense. Early on a lot of people suggested like, "Oh, it's like the early days of the internet" and that, I do think that makes sense. Then I did an exercise where I looked at the nascent petroleum industry in the US in the 19th century.

But all those, and I did several more of those exercises, but they always seemed a little too small to really convey what the meaning of all this could be and I feel like I was just lucky and I stumbled upon this, where especially the notion that technology is an accelerant for forces that are already there, especially if you then also have a defensive component to your technology where what were in the Netherlands of the 17th century that was water and people started controlling this force of water.

Of course, they were building ships, but then also first they would build dykes around certain areas where they had their farms and their lands. But then if you have dykes, that means you can control it. You can basically break the dyke and let a whole area flood and they used that strategically to fend off this ... I mean, this is an amazing story if you think of it. There's this small bunch of rebels who fended off the largest empire in the world for 80 years, right?

That's how long the 80 years war lasted, it's almost unprecedented. The reason why they could do it is that yes, they were prosperous, and yes, they had all kinds of innovative technologies, but they had in their favor this incredibly defensive force of water. They had a giant fleet, they could go to England if they wanted to as a refuge and the Spanish were just not ... They didn't bring their Armada over, they didn't build harbors.

The Spanish had an army that walked across land all the way to Holland and a lot of these soldiers just died in the mud, they were flooded away. So yeah, the comparison with today is like, "well, wait a minute? Today we have cryptography which is this incredibly powerful technology that allows people to defend themselves", because I think that the battlefield so to speak is virtual now, or it's digital, it's a digital struggle.

The question is how do we... It's one thing to have all this fun innovation of like, "yeah Bitcoin!" Or "we do our own currency", or this and that, but what if the going gets tough? What if we really get traction with this and governments don't like it? Well then, there has to be a defensive component and I do think that's there, and that's cryptography in general.

Peter McCormack: Well I've got the quote here, let's go back a step. The reason it's relevant is because you identified a number of things. You identified the fact that it's Bitcoin encryption with the internet Millennials. You identified them and the Millennials do not trust the institutions. I'm guessing the Millennials don't trust institutions because, well a number of reasons.

We've had a lot of bad press, we've had bad governments, we've had poor monetary policy, we have Millennials who are taking college degrees and struggling to get jobs, and then also struggling to get on the housing ladder and this kind of hatred has come towards the boomers, right? But you identified that Millennials don't trust financial institutions. I'll take the quote because it was really... That's why I wrote it down.

You've got, "in the 21st century, the defensive technological suite available for people to question the economic status quo is cryptography, which can enable privacy and protection from asset seizure." In some ways, privacy is more important because it's more relevant to you, because I've never suffered asset seizure beyond the libertarian view that all tax is theft. So obviously via tax, I have assets seizure by some people. Are you referring here more towards asset seizure whereby in times of economic crisis, they literally pilfer the bank accounts like what happened in Greece and Cyprus?

Tuur Demeester: Yeah, that's one example. Then also if you look at the Protestant Reformation, for example what happened with the Jews and the Protestants in Spain for example. They were given an ultimatum and it was basically like either you get... I think it was like either three or five years. I think they were given three years' time to leave and they had to pay an exit tax.

So not only did you have to leave, but then you also had to pay 30% of all your assets, that you just had to give. Then of course back then, it was how do you even trust some guy across the border to keep your asset ... to keep your money for you. Then of course, if you walk away from, if all the wealthy people of a certain area are forced to do the same thing, well, how much money you're going to get for your farm that you're abandoning? Probably not very much. So in a way, your farm is then also seized.

So yeah, if I think about the future, it is just like having some way that reduces the cost of mobility is important and that means not only cheap airline tickets, but it's especially if you want to take your capital with you, how do you do that cheaply? I think encryption, Bitcoin, things like that is ... I think it's basically the new offshore banking.

Peter McCormack: Well, if you forget volatility because that is still kind of the scary component.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: If the day you wanted to leave your country and move abroad and take your assets with you and put it in Bitcoin and it was at $14,000, and then three weeks later it's dropped to $9,000, that is kind of terrible, right? But let's forget that component for now. Let's just imagine we have a ...

Tuur Demeester: You can even subvert it, right? You can sell. If you have it in gold, you can sell your gold for Bitcoin and then once you're established in your country of destination, you re-buy the gold.

Peter McCormack: But even that journey and that process of re-establishing yourself, you still have the...

Tuur Demeester: Some exposure.

Peter McCormack: ... risk of volatility. Yeah, but that might be the risk worth taking. And it can work the other way. You could get there and we could have a rally and you'll be rich. But it's more the idea that you have that tool now that you didn't have before. But I don't think it's just Millennials, I think it expands beyond Millennials. I think there's plenty of people who feel disenfranchised with the current economic system and the economic status quo.

I think there's a lot of people, I certainly know from the UK, we're in the midst of an election and we have a conservative center, with some policies center leaning, some policies very far-right leaning, Conservative Party coming up now against a very left-wing, almost extreme left-wing Labour Party now, and there are a lot of people disappointed with the economic status quo. So whilst I identify and agree with the Millennials, I think it expands a bit beyond that.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah. I mean the reason why I've gone back and forth, like should I pick the Millennials? I could also just have said, "oh the Bitcoiners", right? They were going to be the ones and it is if you extrapolate. If you project that Bitcoin is going to be a million dollars and you look at how many people today own how many Bitcoin roughly speaking, it's not crazy to say that in 20 years from now, 30% to 50% of ... I need to look up the exact calculation I did, but I think it was around at least 30% of the world's billionaires 20 years from now could be Bitcoiners.

That's basically a pretty radical shift! But then again, if you think about it, already 50% of today's billionaires have made their money through investing in technology. That's also kind of already a generational shift because the younger people were just more ready to invest in an early stage. That's kind of where I'm thinking why does it make sense to pick Millennials.

To some extent their trust in the status quo has been shaken. By definition the Millennial generation, they were consciously aware of the 9/11 attacks, which I don't mean it from a conspiracy angle, but just kind of there's kind of a shift in terms of like, "well, things that we took for granted, is everything so safe anymore?"

Then of course, they're very aware as young adults of the 2008 crisis. Of course, a lot of other people saw that too, the older generations, but I think especially the Millennials are kind of digital natives. I grew up streaming BitTorrent movies from my dorm room. My parents never were able to. They're like the cassette and radio generation!

Peter McCormack:I'll throw another one in there. A more recent example, it's a bit of a segue, but I think the Epstein situation has created a bigger distrust in the system that there is potentially a deep state at work and I think that's thrown another spanner in the world, because that was something that seems so obvious under our noses, that either it was somebody allowed to kill themselves who shouldn't, he should have been monitored or somebody killed him. But that's another thing that I think certainly for me threw in another distrust of the system.

Tuur Demeester: Also even before that, if you think about like, how did he die and things like that. But it's also kind of like how much rot is there that we weren't aware of previously? We had the church scandals, but the church is kind of economically speaking is like way down the ranks. We had church scandals starting from the late '90s, these paedophilia scandals.

But now it seems like we're moving up where it's like, "Oh my god! Is the rot everywhere?" So I agree, I do think that that kind of contributes to this notion that don't trust everything that you've been told. Maybe there's people that kind of like the priests. Priests are a good example because they always, they talk a good deal about ethics and this and that. So if a person like that is then incredibly accused of abuse, then that really shakes your trust in that whole affair or what they're about.

Peter McCormack:       Yeah. Well, it puts us in that position now where I think people are questioned money a bit more. I just think it wasn't something. I was talking about this with Bitstein. It's like, I wasn't taught it at school and I only became aware of thinking about money, to the extent where I consider it the way I said, I consider with Bitcoin, and like its value now, its future value, the consideration for inflation etc. Two years ago ... I'm 41 now, so at 39 I started considering this, maybe 38. I think a lot more people are thinking about money now and thinking about, "whoa, how does this work? Are we going to just continue to get fucked by the system?"

Tuur Demeester: Right! And that's my point in the Bitcoin Reformation report is that people in the 16th century went through a similar process where all the sudden there was this crazy guy in Germany who had this pamphlet, the 95 theses, and he was questioning the Catholic Church and because of the printing press, you could produce books and pamphlets at an extremely low cost. The price of books dropped from a year's wage to the price of a chicken over a century.

So because of that technological progress, all the sudden these ideas of this one fringe person in Germany were spread on thousands and thousands of copies across Europe, and this guy was making fun of the Pope. He was genuinely engaging in extreme satire and things like that. So yeah, all the sudden whether you agreed or disagreed with him, all the sudden people were talking about the legitimacy of the Catholic Church.

So I think similarly, of course Satoshi is nowhere near as ... I'm not saying at all that he's like a Martin Luther. He's nowhere near as political and blasphemous and whatever. But just kind of like by suggesting, letting this little balloon float that, "Oh, maybe we can have our own digital currency that's private."

All the sudden everybody's questioning the legitimacy of these central banks. Like do we even need you? And then there's this reaction from them where they're like, "whoa! We're going to do our own digital currency and we don't really know what it's going to look like. We don't even know if it makes sense," but you know. And that's-

Peter McCormack: Well digital currencies are the big thing man!

Tuur Demeester: And that's the counter-reformation which is exactly what the Catholic Church did back then. They had a response, because they kind of want to prove their relevance and you kind of see them. You kind of hear their head crack about like, "oh," trying to come up with something to show that they're still relevant and important and that their monopoly is justified.

I think that's how I see China being friendly towards blockchain and all these like Libra and these private currency initiatives. It's like that similarly in the Protestant Reformation, all of a sudden, yes there was Luther, the radical Lutheranism, but there were a lot of Catholicism-lite where like all the sudden you had these like kind of softer spin-offs. So it's kind of amusing to take a step back and imagine like, "Oh wow, this is really kind of a societal shift. This giant iceberg might be like turning upside down slowly."

So yeah, I agree. I mean, all the sudden people are ... It's not even we're allowed to question money all of a sudden, but it's like now it's conceivable. Like, "Oh yeah. There's this counter example of Bitcoin!" So all the sudden we have something real to talk about.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to tell you now what my favorite part of the article was. "The one intuitive parallel, the very essence of rebellion," that was the thing where I was like ... Because I read it and I was like, "I love this." I just got to that, but I was like, "ah now this is more like a movement.

This is like something I want to be part of." Like when the history books are written and if Bitcoin does change society in a better way, if it does improve money, if it does fix things as Michael Goldstein would say, I want to be on the right side of this! I want to be on the side of the rebellion. Then when you tell me Bitcoin is a rebellion, I'm like, "fuck, I really want to be part of this."

Tuur Demeester: Well I would say to each his own. What I was after mainly is I didn't mean it as like a rallying cry but mainly to be like, at least to give people a framework that allows them to better make a choice or a decision. Was it like the battle cries? Is that what you mean or the ...

Peter McCormack: Yeah so you listed the three things under... I'm taking parts out, but you're like, "it's the very essence of rebellion, don't trust, verify. HODL, not your keys, not your Bitcoin." It's the things that go with it. It's almost like Bitcoin is the rebellion, but these are the rallying cries and part of that. Yeah, I love that.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah because to me, maybe it looks a bit frivolous to see like is that really part of the research to look at these memes and stuff like that, but you have to remember that the Protestant Reformation was a populist movement. It was a popular movement, a lot of people weren't theologians! It was really kind of carried by the people. So it makes sense that in a way this complex movement was summarized in very pithy statements.

So at the time it was like for example sola fide and also sola scriptura. So sola fide meant you don't need a priest to get into heaven, faith alone is enough. God can see beyond the priest, he can stare right into your brain and so as long as you're pure on the inside and you're faithful, you're going to get to heaven. It's like a way to say, "You don't have to trust the middleman. You can just talk straight to God." Like only faith is enough. The other one was sola scriptura, which meant only scripture.

All these theological interpretations, and they were making fun at the time of the scholastics who had these complicated interpretations of the Bible and trying to marry it with Aristotle. They said like which I don't think it was a great thing but it just happened. They said, "to hell with all that. We're going to translate the Bible into German, into Dutch, into English, and then you can engage with the Word of God directly."

So you don't need the middleman, this monopolist provider of religious services, which was the Catholic Church. So that's where I see the parallel today. All these slogans in Bitcoin that is like fides numero. It's like faith in numbers, we don't trust the bank, you don't need to trust the bank, we put our faith, like the Winklevoss say, we put our faith in a system of mathematics. Or like, don't trust, verify! That's exactly what it says, don't trust the middleman. Run your own full node and you are empowered. So that kind of spirit I feel very strongly is parallel to what happened back then.

Peter McCormack: All right, now I'm going to pick out the thing that was the surprise to me, the part of it that was a surprise because I want to get to the ... I want to get to the practical parts of this, like the reality. Actually, I just want to get to the conclusions because that's the really interesting part. It's the way you... It's almost like your predictions that I think are super interesting, but the one thing that stood out to me and I didn't see coming was the part on IEOs. Do you see that as IEOs on Bitcoin or do you still see the continuation of alt coins?

Tuur Demeester: An IEO is Initial Exchange Offering. It's basically an exchange that issues a token to help them finance something. Usually they have some kind of trouble and they need to raise more cash as a buffer or for whatever reason. Maybe they want to expand their services and they don't want to dilute their equity. They don't want to just sell shares in the company.

So they're like, "Here's this token." The way it works, it's almost like an annuity. It's like kind of a basic life insurance contract where you invest a lump sum and then the way an annuity works is that then you get a kind of fixed income over time until the lender pays you back the initial investments. In theory, it could go on forever. But of course, you're not paid dividends on these IEOs. What they do is, they promise on a monthly basis, a quarterly basis go into the market, buy back a certain amount of tokens and burn them.

Therefore, making the token more scarce and therefore transferring value to the investors. To me that's a similar idea where you get to share in the profitability of the exchanges and the parallel that I'm seeing there is that, in a way it doesn't have anything to do with Bitcoin, it's just you're issuing a security and then these people, they get financial benefit from it. It's way more feasible to do that than to say, "we're going to just borrow Bitcoin from the public," because of course, who knows how Bitcoin can go, which is exactly how annuities work.

The idea is that this is why annuities were so popular in a deflationary world because straight out debt was dangerous. If I owe 100 gold coins and there's gradual deflation, then I can basically dig myself a hole that I can't get out of. But if I have an annuity contract where I get a fixed amount of money and then what I owe is expressed as a percentage of my revenue, well then that's predictable, right? If the grain prices go down or whatever, I'm still keeping that same percentage of revenue.

That's kind of a model that works in a deflationary world. The parallel that I see is these annuities were very popular and issued by villages in Holland especially who were besieged by the Spanish. They had to build up their dykes, they had to raise their walls, they had to build defenses, they had to sometimes hire mercenaries from England etc. Maybe some of your ancestors...

Peter McCormack: Maybe!

Tuur Demeester: Helped us out, who knows! The investors, of course, sometimes one of these villages lost and then were wiped out. But in the long run, it was actually very profitable and mutually beneficial agreement and that's kind of where I think there was some argument to be made that these offshore exchanges, especially like Bitfinex, if anything, they're embattled. Whether you agree with how they run their business or not, they are kind of under threat by all kinds of authorities, they have lots of things to deal with.

So I think it makes economic sense for them to issue these tokens and I don't see any scenario where this would stop happening, all right? It's just a clear win-win situation where there's historical precedent. Of course, there's people that want Bitfinex to keep running because maybe they built their business model on it etc, just like back then, the citizens who lived in those places were invested in the city not being sacked and their houses being burned.

Peter McCormack: Wow, okay. So you see it, like you say IEOs and the proliferation, but do you see this being used as a tool by any kind of company?

Tuur Demeester: Sure! Why not? But I guess I would have to think about it more. I think it especially makes sense for a company that has a revenue stream that's substantial and at the same time is facing some existential risk, where all the sudden, "there's the Spanish army. Oh, my god, they're only two weeks away.

 We need money now." That's when you ... Because it is a significant cost to commit to paying part of the revenue to these outside investors that that can hurt, so you'd only maybe do it if you're really under threat. I'm sure Bitfinex, if they had unlimited capital, they would maybe raise it in another way. If there were VCs up the wazoo, they would! But it's because they're so embattled that they kind of resort to this particular type of contract I think.

Peter McCormack: All right, so let's get into the conclusions. I'm going to encourage everyone to read it because, and I think they should read it before they listen to the interview. If we have three hours, I would dive into a history lesson with you because it's just, it's so fascinating. But the conclusions are the practical ... is the practical output of this.

But firstly, I like the fact you brought in the Eric Weinstein quote, the fit ideas, the unfit ideas, because it's very true, bad ideas do win. But fit ideas do beat unfit ideas, I thought that was great. But I very much love this paper you wrote and again, I'm going to quote you, "meanwhile, the Bitcoin ecosystem is maturing in all aspects of its economy, in particular in deposit banking, insurance, lending and derivatives, and early forms of life insurance.

If this process persists, Bitcoin's layer protocol suite could become a global powerhouse and potential alternative to the IMFs." That was a really powerful quote for me to read because what it made me do is sit back and go, "do you know what? I need to always stop thinking about price and look at the growth of the ecosystem, look at the growth of companies!" Look at the place we are now recording this. This kind of company like Unchained, BlockFi, those kind of companies, there is a real shadow financial system being built with Bitcoin.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah. I agree.

Peter McCormack: But I think I'm going back to the point here of looking through the standard lens and then the wide lens. The standard lens you can look at Bitcoin and go, "the price is down, it's dying, it's not being used for transactions." Whereas, I see Tuur, you're looking at the wide lens and you're seeing the growth of the ecosystem and the build-up of services in Bitcoin that makes this a real shadow economic financial system.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah, it's almost like if you imagine 16th century Protestant merchants, just imagine that they're one company and that you can invest in them, how volatile would that have been, to invest in that. All the sudden there's this giant army, they're sending 100,000 soldiers a year! But at the same time you see that the ships that they built are the best in the entire world. They finally cracked the technology that allows them to explore uncharted territories and make it back safely, which is you had to push navigational technology a little further to do that.

So that's a massive breakthrough and if you looked at the fundamentals, you could tell where it was going to go. These guys were going to just kill it and they did. Eventually that's kind of what I'm so excited about too, is part of, one of the discoveries at least for me, all historians know this, but New York City was founded by the Dutch, incredibly. It was just a trading hub, and the idea of religious tolerance wasn't from kind of... It wasn't from some ideological zeal, it was just pragmatism.

It was just like, "if we want to make this thing work, we're going to have to be tolerant. So Jews are welcome and everybody's welcome. As long as you don't kill each other, we're happy to have you." On the island of Manhattan there was a priest who went there and he was horrified. He called it Babel because even though there were only 500 people living on the island of Manhattan, there were 18 different languages spoken.

He thought it was just horrifying. Everybody should of course speak Latin which is or whatever or Greek or some kind of divine language. So if you could have bought an ETF backed by badass Protestant rebels and not just rebels, but really merchants, I would have gone long, all day long.

It would have been super volatile, but there was this amazing strength from it for and it was decentralized. That was part of the weakness of the Spanish for example. Yes, they were a powerhouse, but it was very centralized and Spanish merchants suffered by it. They had to pay high taxes, there are all kind of rules that made it hard for them, that the Dutch did not have any problems with. So to me yeah, I do try to look beyond the day to day volatility and kind of try to see the big picture.

Peter McCormack: And when you're looking at the big picture, are there any key parts that you think are missing within the Bitcoin ecosystem?

Tuur Demeester: No I think everything is being worked. Of course, nothing's perfect and so there's always areas where things can improve. We need better deposit insurance, we need better deposit security, we need more robust multi-sig solutions. That's kind of still early on, but some very promising things are in the pipeline. I think that we probably need just more information.

 We need to be able to have more transparency of the exchanges and better auditability of institutions, because Bitcoin is highly auditable as a technology but it doesn't always translate to the companies that are built on Bitcoin. I think we need also more clarity, as there's a lot of alchemy out there. There's real science happening but then there's also all these quacks that are saying, "I've invented perpetual motion and time travel," and I think a lot of the alt coins are kind of like that. But that gets sorted out with time, we just need time.

Peter McCormack: Do you see Bitcoin eventually destroying and taking out fiat money or do you see it as something that will always sit alongside it?

Tuur Demeester: My best guess right now would be that it is going to be similar to how things evolved with religion where the Catholic Church never disappeared. As far as I know, there's still a billion Catholics around, but the political strength and clout and power of the Catholic Church has very significantly diminished in favor of much more secular ways of doing things.

It's not like some other religion monopolized everything, it's religious tolerance, that's what happened. Translating that to Bitcoin, it would mean that it's not that the Church of Bitcoin is going to take over the Church of the Federal Reserve, it's more that there's going to be financial tolerance. Whatever country bets on financial tolerance is going to win, which means that they allow for Bitcoin to be used as a money etc.

Peter McCormack: Well like you said, Bitcoin tolerance versus intolerance will become a major political fault line.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: It's quite interesting. Again, then you saw that, that actually made me think of the David Marcus testimony in Congress, because I was like...

Tuur Demeester: The PayPal CFO? Who is now in Libra?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because there were clearly people in Congress who understood Bitcoin, very supportive, even though they know the implications for government and politics, and there were those who were clearly maybe not scared, but intolerant, maybe scared or maybe think it's stupid or worried about losing control. But you got to see that over a two five-hour sessions of whatever or three-hour sessions over two days. You actually got to see how politicians would think about this.

Tuur Demeester: Very, very polarizing! I mean really it's like people are so... And that's also again why I chose the Millennials because if anything, they're less invested. If you're like 55 years old and you've been in finance, in a way you almost by definition are very invested in all these relationships that have to do with that monopoly. So it's a lot harder to just flip sides and be like, "oh I'm now really excited about," or also you're going to have a mentality of live-and-let-live because maybe your banker friends are going to be kind of shunning you after that.

Peter McCormack: Well I just had Nelson on, who's the OTC guy from Kraken, who was an ex-Wall Street guy, Bear Stearns, JPMorgan I think, but he was saying, "Look, when you've get to like 50, 55, why are you going to risk your retirement which is 5, 10 years away by recommending this new, volatile, crazy asset? There's no point. There's absolutely no point taking those risk. Stick with the status quo. Take your retirement. Go and live your life out." I had never even thought about it like that. I was like, "Why the fuck are these people not..."

Tuur Demeester: Career risk.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, career risk. :Why are they not just introducing Bitcoin?" But that's why it's like almost potentially as a generational shift.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah, I'm reminded of Thomas Kuhn with his "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" where he also says that a new paradigm is introduced into science by usually by some young guys, some rogue scientists, and they propose it, and then for a long time it's kind of ignored until an entire generation retires and then the new generation can finally kind of acknowledge the paradigm shift and part of that, is just career risk. If you're 50 years old and you're going to endorse this radical new theory that puts everything upside down, maybe your colleagues are not going to like that so much.

Peter McCormack: So the next thing you put, which again is kind of funny because of where we're sat recording this, but you said, "Bitcoin's primary drivers will be saving, lending, and underwriting." Talk me through that. By the way, can you talk through underwriting because I don't fully understand it myself.

Tuur Demeester: Well the idea is that Bitcoin is on the way to become the ultimate reserve asset, which means it's highly liquid and it retains its value, and it even grows in value over time, that's the perfect... If you want to invest in someone, you want to give them some money and you want them to put up some collateral, well then I would say Bitcoin is almost the ideal collateral because it can be liquidated in a day. So you can get your money back. Even if this guy's business endeavour totally fails, it's backed by Bitcoin, therefore you can get your money back.

So I think it's really on the way to become the ultimate collateral. Actually in the report, I make this analogy with the VOC, which was the East India Company, the world's first IPO happened in 1609 when they founded this VOC company. So there were stock certificates and these stock certificates were in this very big enterprise that was generating lots and lots of cash and they kept growing, and they became used as collateral for all kinds of activities in the Dutch economy and it was just that, it was responsible for dropping the interest rates by 30%!

Just because there was liquid collateral available, all the sudden if I lent you money, you could put up some VOC shares as collateral, and then I felt all the sudden a lot more comfortable to lend you money. So there's a lot more capital available all the sudden. That's kind of what I wanted to point out, is that these very basic functions that sometimes we even ignore and the fog of smart contracts and all these buzzwords from 2017, these very basic functions can actually be extremely powerful, just using it as a collateral to underwrite all kinds of thing. You can use it to underwrite insurance as well.

Peter McCormack: But one of the interesting things as well I've noticed, because I've worked with BlockFi, they're a sponsor and I know the guys here at Unchained very well. One of the interesting things is when you refer to saving and lending, they kind of tend to shift depending whether they're in a bear market. So in the bear market, the lending was quite big, people wanted to borrow money because they needed access to cash and as we came out of a bear market and the market started to grow, they're saving, because people didn't want to give away their Bitcoin. So it's almost like it follows the ebb and flow of the market.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah exactly! There's also some tax arbitrage there, because you might not want to sell your Bitcoin at a certain date. You might want to wait until on date X, but then you need cash now. So this is kind of what wealthy people always do. That was always a mystery to me! If you're a billionaire, why do you have any debt? But there's something, the strategic debt where you say, "let's incur some debt now and then we can defer taxes to the next year," or something like that.

Peter McCormack: All right, so the next thing was interesting as well because you said collaborative custody to become an industry standard, and I just thought, "bank."

Tuur Demeester: Well there's always going to be third party custodians. The question is how are things organized and who do you have to trust. The Coinbase model is just you send your Bitcoin to Coinbase, they hold all the private keys and that's it. So if they go bust or if they have kind of an internal problem where somebody gets access to those keys, you're done for. But the idea with collaborative custody is that you involve multiple parties so that the risk of collusion becomes smaller. Especially if you think about multiple companies, because of course like Coinbase, it's not like one guy holds all the keys.

They do have internally some kind of system, but that's a black box. We don't have access to that and we don't know exactly how that happens. Whereas if you as an individual can then set up a multi-sig wallet solution where very specifically designated companies are responsible for parts of the process, then all of a sudden it becomes a lot more transparent, and then you can just come up with all kinds of smart contracts really.

I know people throw it around all the time, but this is actually a real smart contract that's useful where for example you can build in some kind of claw back idea where or you can have an emergency button that you can push if something happens that you don't like and then the funds are bumped to some address that you still control. Or if you for example, don't do anything with the key for a long time, maybe automatically the control is reverted to you.

The reason why I'm trying to emphasize this in the report is that it was based on what I saw happened with the Bank of Amsterdam, which was the most reputable gold bank, the just full reserve bank in Europe at the time and they had a very complicated security protocol. It was so well regarded that people were willing to pay an [Inaudible] for funds that were held at that bank, which basically meant one ounce of gold held at the bank, you would be willing to pay more than one ounce of gold for that asset and the reason was that it was very secure.

So you would pay for security, but also because then you could use it as collateral, there's basically services built on top of it. You could buy VOC services with it, things like that. So just kind of seeing that, for example, they had... I think they had four separate CFAs who were looking at the books, they had four separate levels of controls built in. So the idea was, "we're under siege here, we don't know who to trust. We have droves of new immigrants coming in, we're very prosperous but how do we do this right?" It's just like, "well, you would divide the labor." So that's the idea behind collaborative custody. Logically speaking there must be some significant appeal for that going forward.

Peter McCormack: Okay, you covered this, you talked about offshore banking may transform into Bitcoin banking.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah I think so. I mean, Obama said it, Bitcoin is like a bank in your pocket or an offshore bank in your pocket. If you look at traditional offshore banking, it's kind of under threat and it is because they are reliant on the IMFs, the international monetary and financial system.

So if they want to keep that connection, they have to abide by these international rules which is the equivalent of that what Rome says matters. It's like the Pope says "X, Y, or Z, we're a Catholic country, I have to abide by it." It doesn't matter if you're... A Swiss bank is going to have to open up their database to some kind of FBI. It doesn't matter if it's US or another one if that's what the rules say.

So I think that better privacy is available in the Bitcoin sphere and it will grow, and that just makes sense to me that gradually... And this is not, without even going into the moral question, because there's obviously lots of controversy about offshore banking, but I think it's clear that economically there's always going to be significant demand for moving funds offshore and the reason why you want to do that privately is well-established. If you're for example a Brazilian entrepreneur, you have the risk of asset seizure in your own country because there's not really a lot of rule of law, so that's a reason to move your funds offshore.

But then, if your privacy is compromised, and some database leaks that you have $10 million sitting in a Swiss bank, all the sudden your family is a lot more at risk for example kidnapping risk or things like that. Anyway, again, I just want to say that I think it's here to stay, offshore banking, and right now, because of all these transparency and KYC rules, AML/KYC rules, if offshore banking becomes entirely transparent, well that's kind of missing the point. That's part of the reason why it existed in the first place. So then, entrepreneurial banks are going to venture into different territory, for example Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: All right, we got two left I want to cover, conscious of time. Okay, Bitcoin to mature quickly with bonds, annuity, loans, insurance. I didn't get insurance before, but you talked about that last time I spoke to you. You talked about insurance?

Tuur Demeester: Like life insurance? Yeah I think Bitcoin is just a natural asset to be used as the basis for a life insurance industry. If you look internationally, life insurance has become less and less relevant and banking has grown more and more relevant, and in financial terms as well. In the 1930s, the life insurance industry was bigger in the US than the banking industry in the US. If you walk around in Chicago and all these older cities, you see these buildings and they say like mutual trust, this and that.

Those were life insurance companies, you can still see it. The reason why it lost its relevance in the economy is that a life insurance contract is expressed in the money. If I have a million-dollar life insurance contract, that's great if we live in a deflationary world. If the money increases in value, then I'm happy with a million dollars down the road. But, if the money erodes in value and that million dollars could maybe only be enough to buy a bicycle 20 years down the road, then that's a lot less interesting.

So there's a lot of research that backs up that idea that in an inflationary environment life insurance has got a decline. So because Bitcoin is so deflationary, my logical argument is that it could herald a new era of life insurance and it's brilliant if you think of it. You can basically invest a little bit of money now to kind of keep your family safe in case you, for some reason, stop being an income provider. If you die, then your family is at least taken care of. I would love to see a resurgence of life insurance.

Peter McCormack:Okay, we're going to finish off with my favorite one. I actually texted this to Balaji this morning, because it made me think of him as well. We covered the IEOs, it was; Bitcoin savers could accelerate a revolution in the history of thought and I pondered on it for a while. I was like, "hmm, what exactly are you getting at?" Because this doesn't fit with all the others. All the others are kind of part of monetary policy and e-commerce, but this is like almost like... Let me show you what I took from this, and tell me if I'm wrong. But this is almost like a shift in the way people think about money, production, consumerism.

Tuur Demeester: Well, I think it's well spotted, that it's different from the others, and I kind of snuck it in there. The very basic analysis that I'm suggesting is just that there's a new economic class who has different values, different ideas and who's going to have a lot of money. So they are basically able to sponsor whoever they want and chances are that's not going to 100% overlap whatever is the status quo today. I mean, we're already seeing it.

A lot of Millennials are kind of jaded thinking about universities. I don't know if Bitcoiners do become the new billionaires, if they're going to pour their wealth into Harvard endowments and things like that. So then it's like, well, where are they going to put their money, and charitable money, and things like that?

So it's possible that we will see these new educational institutions, that we'll see authors being sponsored to do certain things or radical... I mean, already to some extent the dot-com entrepreneurs, the dot-com billionaires, they have sponsored things that kind of fall outside of the status quo. I think Mark Zuckerberg has this idea of eradicating aging and all these things. Then there's Jeff Bezos who's like, "let's go to space," and they build stuff like that.

Peter McCormack: It's just the billionaires! The billionaires usually want to do one of three things; they want to go to space, they would never want to die and they want a bunker in case World War III kicks off.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah, but that's not always been the case. There was a time when billionaires would just build libraries. Let's bring knowledge to the people, or they would sponsor the church or things like that.

Peter McCormack: So your point was where the money gets directed?

Tuur Demeester: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Okay, because I was thinking about it more and this is a shift. This could cause a generational shift in the way we think about money and society, like the world could change.

Tuur Demeester: Yeah, I think that's going to happen. So it goes to the Eric Weinstein's point, which is then like, "well yes, these radical and crazy ideas, they are around and these radical thinkers, but right now they're kind of scraping to get by. They're like the Sophists, they're kind of ignored. But if you have an entire economic class that is favourable to their ideas, all the sudden they could gain a lot more prominence."

That's usually when the history books get written, if they really... Kind of like, if you look at the city of Leiden which is where a lot of the Protestants refugees went to in Holland. They started a university that became the intellectual heart of the Netherlands and then they had a big impact. All these thinkers there, they then kind of taught, they were educating the youth and that's kind of where the history of thought gets written in my mind.

Peter McCormack: Well listen, again, I'm going to say it's a really fantastic piece. It's without doubt my favorite and I think I've read everything you've written. I've certainly read everything on Medium, and I've read everything that you've published I think.

Tuur Demeester: Wow, I'm flattered!

Peter McCormack: Well if I'm meant to be interviewing you! But I do, I love it. I have a feeling not as many people read this as much as "Bitcoin is in heavy accumulation" because that gets to the incentives, the accumulation. But I'm going to encourage everyone to read this before they... I'm going to just say, if you haven't read it, don't fucking listen to this interview. But you've put the pressure on now for yourself because your next scripture, I expect to be of equally high standard.

Tuur Demeester: Maybe it needs to be a book then, right?

Peter McCormack: Maybe! Yeah, I think you've got a book in you dude.

Tuur Demeester: I would say that this is the one to read with a glass of wine. It really was a labor of love. I really enjoyed diving into this and I love trying to make it come to life. So I included a lot of illustrations and paintings and things like that.

Peter McCormack: Do you know where you're going next though? Do you know what your next thing's going to be?

Tuur Demeester: No, I never really do know.

Peter McCormack: You've put the pressure on, if it's a book, it's going to be Tuur's Bitcoin bible!

Tuur Demeester: Honestly, the stuff that I write, I just write for myself, and if I'm proud of it, that's enough and then I'm happy. Then if it's not that popular, so be it!

Peter McCormack: Well this one framed a lot for me, it gave me a lot more perspective. It also reminded me of the kind of low time preference, that this is all playing out as we need it too, stop thinking about price, stop thinking about... Just everything is falling into place. Truly, it's fucking fantastic piece.

So I will be saying everyone they've got to read it! Well listen, we've got to our time, I appreciate your time as ever. It's always good for me to have you on the show because it always gets me tens of thousands of downloads. I love talking to you and just for people who don't know you, and everyone does, but if anyone who doesn't, tell them where they can find you and follow you, and more specifically find this. I will share it in the show notes.

Tuur Demeester: I would you say google my name. The first link is my Twitter account, and I've stickied the report onto my profile. So you just go to my profile. It'll be the top tweet that has the link.

Peter McCormack: There we go. All right, man. Well, listen, always a pleasure. Thank you for coming on.

Tuur Demeester: Likewise, thank you!