WBD308 Audio Transcription
The Path to a Bitcoin Standard with Dan Held
Interview date: Sunday 7th February
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Dan Held. 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 Dan Held, the Director of Business Development at Kraken. We discuss the implications of a Bitcoin Standard, onboarding, adoption, decentralisation and layer one ossification.
“Once people place their trust in storing value in Bitcoin, why would they ever go back to a fiat currency?”
— Dan Held
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: Yo, Dan, how are you doing, man?
Dan Held: Doing well; excited for today.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, man, part 3 of 3. Do you know what I was thinking today; we could have done 5 parts, 10 parts, whatever man. There are so many topics that we could have covered, and that's because your emails --
Dan Held: It's a perpetual story.
Peter McCormack: Well, maybe in a couple of months, we'll do another three. But, it's these emails you've been sending out, dude. I get one and each one I'm like, "That could be a show". There was one you sent out, let me dig it out. There was one you sent out today or yesterday and I was like, "I want to cover that". I think it was like the death of altcoins or something?
Dan Held: Yes, the Great Filter event.
Peter McCormack: Yes.
Dan Held: So, yeah, with each email, what's kind of cool is if you are a paid subscriber, you get to vote on the next topic. So, I've had a couple of different ideas I want to write about; this is my newsletter, The Held Report. I've got a couple of different ideas, and you can subscribe to this at Substack; so google danheld.substack.
But, at the end, if you're a paid subscriber, you get to vote on it, which is really cool because then my audience tells me what they want to hear about. But, yeah, the last one was on the Great Filter event; will there be a moment when a lot of altcoins die? And, I hypothesise -- and the Great Filter event, by the way, comes from the Fermi paradox.
The Fermi paradox is, we look across the sky, we see all these stars, all these galaxies; why don't we see a bunch of Star Wars-esque space ships cruising around? And, the idea is that there's a great filter event in which most great civilisations don't pass through. With crypto assets -- and, we don't know if our human civilisation has passed that event or is in front of us, which is a pretty scary idea. But, with crypto, we do know the event is in front of us, and that is attacks by states. That is the Great Filter event; that is the event when decentralisation is not a spectrum, it's binary.
If your protocol is doing anything of value of storing tons of value, transacting tons of value; that threatens the sanctity of the state; that threatens the power of the state; and, the state will eventually attack it. And so, only state-level resistance is the only meaningful decentralisation, is my sort of belief, and that is the Great Filter event is, will your crypto survive state-level attacks? I think very few have those properties.
Peter McCormack: Do you know what; in about a year, you're going to be able to collect all these up and put them in a book. It will be, Bitcoin Love Letters, by Dan Held!
Dan Held: Yeah, it's definitely a love letter, I think, after eight years of being in this space and talking about Bitcoin. I've probably taken the word "Bitcoin" and used it every possible way in a sentence.
Peter McCormack: Well, dude, listen, we've done two shows; great feedback, especially the first one, The Supercycle; amazing feedback on that, so I really appreciate you giving me time to do that.
Today is a really important subject that I wanted to cover with you. It isn't directly from one of your letters; it actually was sparked by something that Nic Carter said to me when I did the interview with Frances Coppola. I'll have to dig it out, but he talked about the fact that Bitcoin might only ever be a reserve asset, and we still might have sovereign currencies, and that's really triggered my mind; because, a lot of the time, people talk a Bitcoin standard or hyperbitcoinisation, and then people kind of hypothesise that Bitcoin will be the currency that we use. And, I'm still not myself 100% convinced on that.
But, either way, I think a Bitcoin standard, it doesn't matter whether we're using Bitcoin as a currency or local currencies; it's whether Bitcoin is your reserve asset. And so, this path to a Bitcoin standard, I think is a really important topic. So, I've got a bunch of questions for you, because I know what I'm thinking, but I want to see what Dan's thinking!
Dan Held: Cool. Let's dive into hyperbitcoinisation.
Peter McCormack: Okay. I think, before we start on that, just for me and for the audience, if you had to put a flag in the ground, where would you say we are in the Bitcoin story?
Dan Held: So, Bitcoin's trajectory as a money -- and, by the way, there's no historical account of how gold became a money. This is 4,000-plus years old, and there are maybe a couple of clay tablets with some information about it; but at that time, I don't think anyone was writing or waxing poetically as to how gold came into existence. So, we're piecing this together with a tiny bit of historical context, but mainly current understanding of how money works, is how we think through the adoption of Bitcoin.
Murad, who kind of hasn't been in the Bitcoin space for a while now, he kind of faded away, Murad had a great chart showing the adoption of a new asset, of a new money, which is it goes through several stages of growth, right; like just how you're a baby, then you're a young child, then you're a young adult. Bitcoin has a similar cycle, and it starts with being a collectible, being something that people just collect for fun or novelty, which then eventually turns into a store of value. And, we are in that stage now where Bitcoin is being widely accepted as a store of value.
This stage is necessary before we go into the medium of exchange, unit of account, final eras, which most people think of money as, because government money is primarily used as a medium of exchange, unit of account. That final era, you have to hold it in order to want to transact with it. So, it's necessary that you believe in it enough to store value in it before it turns into this common daily method. So, that's where the medium of exchange folks were very early with their concept, which was damaging to Bitcoin, damaging to the narrative; that's why we had that civil war. They didn't understand that that stage comes much later. It is not that it will never happen; it comes much later.
Now, Bitcoin's success metric of being a successful new reserve asset, it does not need to ever enter the medium of exchange, unit of account eras. That would just be its completion of a full maturation of becoming a world reserve currency, a world asset that's used by everyone. It very much will achieve that; even if it doesn't, it will still achieve a very high level of success, even if it just stays in the store of value era.
A great example of this is gold. I live in San Francisco, the quintessential Gold Rush city of the world; the former Gold Rush city; you could argue that tech is the new Gold Rush and so it never stopped being a Gold Rush city. But with that, I am unable anywhere in this city to spend my gold on something, and there are no merchants that have priced their items in gold. But, gold is still worth $10 trillion, so it doesn't necessarily matter.
I consider it more a cherry on top, or an absolute domination if Bitcoin hits medium of exchange and unit of account era because, if it hits that, then it's totally destroyed any government money; and, that means Bitcoin has wildly exceeded all of our expectations where literally no one trusts government fiat anymore and it's all just Bitcoin. I think that's like the perfect outcome of all of this experiment, this Bitcoin inception and creation; and, adoption, as the ultimate success metric, is totally replacing fiat. It will still be very successful if it's just a world reserve currency, like gold, and it's only used in that function.
Peter McCormack: The interesting thing on these kinds of life cycle stages for Bitcoin is that, it is also quite personal as well because, you know, we're talking about as a store of value. It's a store of value for me, it's a store of value for you. Actually, on certain occasions, it's a medium of exchange for me, because it solves problems for me that I have with using the fiat rails. So occasionally, I'm using it as a medium of exchange.
We know crypto traders use Bitcoin as a unit of account and quite interestingly, there are a lot of bitcoiners who use Bitcoin as a unit of account, because they're trying to measure the value of something and how it depreciates. So, I've started to notice some people do it. I can't, because I can't reprice in Bitcoin, because I look at that and go, "Oh, shit", and I'm trying to do the maths in my head! But, I appreciate the idea of starting to use Bitcoin as your unit of account, especially with the way the price moves.
So, it is quite individual, but I think what you're talking about is where it's mass acceptance as a medium of exchange?
Dan Held: Yeah, I'm talking about a level where, the medium of exchange folks never understood the folks like the bcashers, who tried to champion for this too early. I'm like, "Look, I don't go to my fucking store and see stuff priced in euros or pounds or anything else". And the same with you; you don't see stuff priced in dollars in your local grocery store out in the UK. We just don't see that, because there's a network effect to that money being commonly accepted as a medium of exchange and mentally representative of the unit of account; the idea of, "Oh, that unit number is what I calibrate all my thinking with".
Bitcoin, especially during its more volatile periods in its younger stages, like where we are now, and due to the lack of adoption -- which lack of adoption, by the way; Bitcoin has been wildly successful, just isn't used by 40% or 60% of the population. When it reaches those stages of like 60% of the population storing their value in Bitcoin, trusting it, and now them all asking merchants and businesses all now want to accept it and use it, it's a network effect thing because they all want to accumulate Bitcoin or use it for that purpose, and Bitcoin's volatility has started to decrease.
Also, at this stage, I would say that Bitcoin's maximum upside is getting close to asymptotic. Bitcoin has hit a $10 trillion to $100 trillion market cap. There might be some room for growth, but we all have to remember that while Bitcoin is exciting and new and fun and in that wild growth period and people would consider very speculative; if Bitcoin succeeds as this Gold 2.0, it will be known as something very boring.
When we're old, our kids are going to be like, "Dad, mum, I don't give a shit about Bitcoin. It's boring, it's the most boring investment I can hold. It only appreciates 2% a year or something". That's going to be Bitcoin when we're old. It is this Gold 2.0; it is the least risky asset you can hold, which means that other investments, again, this is decades away from now; if Bitcoin succeeds wildly, other assets would be perceived as a much higher risk-return profile, and that's where I think people -- at those sorts of stages, it very much switches into that unit of account, medium of exchange, I would say very quickly.
Peter McCormack: It's funny you should say that. Our mutual friend, Jeremy Welch, once said to me, he likes Bitcoin to be boring. He's happy when Bitcoin's being boring, and I agree with that! Okay, so that's fair. Actually, just another point on that; do you ever worry we will get to the point -- Bitcoin, you've talked to me before about like Satoshi building this feedback loop, this kind of marketing hype look, and it's a Number Go Up thing, right?
We're getting it again now, we'll likely get it for the next cycle; but, do you ever worry we might get to the point where, because you aren't going to get those 10X, 20X cycles, it might be like 2% over four years or something, at that point the shine comes off it and there's a risk of people scaling out of Bitcoin and saying, "This is done". The speculators are like, "Hmm…". Do you worry about that?
Dan Held: I don't think so, because the utility of Bitcoin is it's hard to seize nature and immutable properties; that's the inherent properties it has. And, it incentivises early participants in the network, or early hodlers, by that price appreciation. But, even if price appreciation doesn't occur, you still have those underlying properties of Bitcoin, which I think are very, very valuable. And as we've seen institutional folks mention, they perceive that as why they hold Bitcoin. They're like, "Yeah, the upside's great", but Michael Saylor and others are like, "I'm just trying to get my money out of fiat".
We see these $18 trillion of negatively yielding sovereign debt; I mean that's insane. So these sorts of numbers, Bitcoin is a lifeboat; you're hopping into a lifeboat. And it's like, "Oh well, maybe the lifeboat I get in, maybe if I get in early I'll get a better seat"; you're still in the lifeboat, you're still utilising Bitcoin's core properties. So, yeah, that's a good question; will people continue to buy Bitcoin as its potential price appreciation decreases? I think, yes, it has an underlying utility of hard to seize and immutable.
Peter McCormack: All right, before we get into the specifics of what a Bitcoin standard means, again just in terms of the life cycle, I just want to cover a couple of bits and say, okay, where do we think we are specifically? So, for example, on the technical side of Bitcoin, in the development of the protocol, where do you think we are with that? Do you think we're at quite an advanced position; do you think we're quite early? I have mixed feelings, but yourself?
Dan Held: I'd say on the technical side, we're at very late stages on Layer 1. I think there's a big movement for ossification; ossification needing more things turning in concrete and static on the base layer, and all innovation happening above that. For the base financial system layer, you need that core stable, unchanging or very slow-changing network. You don't want to be swapping out the engines on a rocket ship mid-launch. You want everything to be locked in, ready to go.
With Bitcoin, I see the rate of change probably slowing over time and eventually, I think most people would like it eventually to become either static, or we look at very, very long-term threats, like multi-decade threats. Quantum computing is not a threat to Bitcoin; we could see it decades out, and we could modify the protocol to be quantum-resistant, but that would be an example of something maybe we'd debate about for ten years and then implement; so, extremely slow moving.
So, maybe the protocol never reaches ossification state, but it reaches glacial, like very slow-moving. I think this is great too, because then it reduces the amount of attack factors. You could always try to insert a new piece of code, even though it goes through a massive amount to review, it's all transparent, there is still a tiny, tiny possibility that some flaw could be introduced; whereas, Bitcoin has worked super well so far. So, changes will need to be made over time; I expect that rate of change to decrease.
Peter McCormack: Okay. Right, next thing is with regards to decentralisation, because that's obviously one of the most important foundational properties of Bitcoin, and decentralisation is across multiple different factors. I actually spoke today to the guy who runs F2Pool, because of the FUD this week about them dumping coins and shorting the market, which is absolute bullshit. But I was also, while I was on the phone to him, I was like, "Just tell me a little bit about the state of decentralisation in mining", because he's still got the people coming in and saying, "It's all in China", etc.
He said, "We've never been in a better position. Bitcoin has never been more decentralised". He said, "We've got mining pools" and he said, "We've got miners plugging into [his] mining pools", he said, "from all over the world. It isn't just China; it's America, etc". But, decentralisation is a whole bunch of things. But, in terms of decentralisation, where do you think we're at with that?
Dan Held: Yeah, on the miners' side, or…?
Peter McCormack: Just everything. I mean, what are the important things with Bitcoin decentralisation? It's nodes, it's miners, it's developers?
Dan Held: Yeah, I would say broadly bucketed, you have social, political and economic sort of bucketing for decentralisation, and that's what I wrote about in my last article, around the surviving state level resistance. Those are the three broad buckets of decentralisation that I created. I mean, these are totally subjective; you could come up with whatever sort of slicing you want.
On the political front, you've got leadership. Bitcoin has superb decentralisation on the leadership front. We do not have a Vitalik, we do not have a singular leader whose absence or death or some other circumstance, or coersion could hurt the protocol; we don't have that, which is phenomenal. Bitcoin, I think, stands out as a protocol that has no definitive leader, and I think that's great. Also, there's no premine, which increases decentralisation.
On the miner front, you're right. Mining pools do not represent geographies, so people go, "Oh, there are mining pools based in China". I'm like, "Great. The mining pool is, but not the miners". So, when it comes to geographical location of the miners, it's hard to know where they are, but we know that increasingly, North America and Europe are spinning up more and more mining efforts.
There are a couple of different ways to remove mining pools from the ecosystem to where there are decentralised mining pools, so I think Stratum is something that can be worked on there. I've not dug in too deeply on this. I know the Slush folks are really thinking about it. So I think that's cool. I don't think mining pools are that big of a deal in terms of decentralisation risk, but having those be removed is an increasing degree of decentralisation.
Also, running nodes. I think the Bitcoin community has been very, very vocal about how they want nodes, and in terms of efficiency of on-chain data has enabled nodes to be cheap and accessible almost anywhere in the world; I think that's awesome. Personally, I'm a huge fan of using the Blockstream satellite connection. I'm also a huge fan of ideas of using like ham radio to transmit blocks, or to transmit transactions. I mean, that's some nuclear-grade shit; that's pretty cool!
Peter McCormack: You Cypherpunk!
Dan Held: There's actually a whole level I'd like to take to this. Maybe in the next bull run era, I could advocate for it, in terms of me getting a couple of companies to do it.
ICBM facilities across the United States had a very, very unique communication method. If World War III is happening and there are nuclear bombs being detonated all across the world, all satellite communication, all landline communication ceases to be really functional. So, they created something called a very stable low frequency communication methodology that uses the earth's core, where you can propagate data through the earth's core.
Peter McCormack: I love it!
Dan Held: It has a device about the size of my desk here. It's a metal sphere. And most stations will receive only, but the sending stations weren't that big. So, we could build these stations probably for under like $10 million to propagate Bitcoin blocks through the earth's core, which would survive even in nuclear apocalypse! So, that's a level I'd love to get Bitcoin to, is that sort of level where we have so many levels of communicating Bitcoin blocks, where it's not just on the internet; it's on these other layers that can be really, really resilient.
So, Bitcoin works that way because the block size is so small; we can do stuff like that. Low throughput, low data storage requirements; it's pretty amazing, especially as Moore's Law, when it comes to data throughput -- or, Moore's Law is more around processor speed. But, if you apply that to data throughput and hard drive space, it will be cheaper and cheaper to run a Bitcoin node in the future, so it will increasingly become cheap. I think that's really cool for decentralisation.
You also have the economic component. So over time, the block reward, which is used to incentivise miners to order transactions properly, the block reward over time, the newly minted Bitcoins, plus the transaction fees that will compensate the miners in the block reward; over time, the newly minted coins drop, as we all know, through the halving cycles and transaction fees are expected to compensate, or to replace the subsidy over time.
This is occurring both in Bitcoin and Ethereum, but no other cryptocurrency. So, we can use this as an objective metric to look at, will these survive state-level attacks when -- because, these other protocols don't have real usage; people aren't paying transaction fees to move value on these chains, and Bitcoin and Ethereum are the only two that have a crude enough value, in terms of the transaction are relatively price-inelastic.
So, I think those all point to Bitcoin being an incredible -- Bitcoin's long-term trajectory is looking good for decentralisation on both, like I mentioned, the political and the economic layers. And some of the technology, I guess, could be lumped under some of the social aspect. And then you have the hodlers.
You need, in an intolerant minority, to protect the values and the monetary policy behind Bitcoin, and also be the buyer of last resort during these Bitcoin bear markets. We had 12 March 2020, Bitcoin dipped to $3,800. It didn't go to zero because we all bought it. If you didn't have a hardcore, resilient group of hodlers, the price would go to zero.
So, the amount of content in this space that reinforces this Bitcoin belief has never been better. There are more and people all across the world, there are more and more exchanges, we can buy and sell Bitcoin in more and more ways to do that, which builds a more resilient social cohesiveness, which is the network effect amongst the hodlers and the believers. But also, on the economic front, now you have more bidders of last resort, you have more value being able to be piped in and fiat to buy Bitcoin.
So Bitcoin, I think, has never been in a better spot in terms of decentralisation across a wide variety of different metrics. And then, I think these all point very positively towards the future.
Peter McCormack: Nice. Okay, the last thing I want to talk about on this, and then we get into it is, where do you think we are at the stages of acceptance; and again, there are a few levels to this? There's regulatory, which I don't see as a threat; I just see it as more something that can just get in the way. It's just like an annoyance, right; it's just something that's interfering. I don't see any situation, certainly in Europe or North America, where we see any bans. I just see it's an annoyance.
Then, acceptance within retail; and then, acceptance within institutions. Well no, actually, let's throw in nation states on top of that. There's regulatory, retail, institution and nation states. And by the way, my personal level is I'm seeing stuff starting to flip now, and the institutions obviously flipping, but that might bring more retail back in. But, anyway, where do you see we are on all these four factors?
Dan Held: I'll start with the last and work back to the first. So, on the institutional side, we have seen a resounding narrative across all institutions across the world; Bitcoin is a store of value. That is the narrative; that is well-known by all of the top minds in finance, and that is an incredible achievement. They control the money in the world. Governments merely lean in and try to take some of that money
But this is about the global understanding in people who move value across the world; this is their understanding of Bitcoin; a phenomenal achievement. I mean, we were considered lunatics a couple of years ago. And now, if we're all going to be, "Oh, yeah, Bitcoins' totally like a Gold 2.0", this is huge.
On the retail side, they're just now coming into the market. They weren't here in the early part of this cycle; it was mainly institutional driven, and now we're seeing retail start to pile in. I think this is obvious with Dogecoin.
Peter McCormack: Aarghh!
Dan Held: I know, right!
Peter McCormack: Oh God, dude, for fuck's sake.
Dan Held: Yeah, I know.
Peter McCormack: Thanks, Elon!
Dan Held: He's a jokester, man, he likes to joke around but unfortunately, that means a lot of people's money too. So, yeah, it's just crazy to see these Dogecoin metrics across the board for exchanges as well. I mean, Kraken ranks number one for the keyword, Buy Dogecoin. So, yeah, there's a lot of interest.
But, retail eventually, they want to find a schelling point for this pent-up frustration that they have with the existing system. We saw this with r/wallstreetbets with their huge, you know, trying to squeeze the short-sellers of AMC and other companies. This feeling won't go away. This feeling has been simmering since the 2008 Financial Crisis, and it will probably reach a boiling point here in the next year or two.
Bitcoin is perfectly positioned to be the schelling point, the rallying cry, behind this revolution, and it's a very easy revolution to participate in. You just buy Bitcoin and hodl it. You don't have to paint a flag and run around on the street, you don't have to do voluntary work; you just buy Bitcoin and that's your vote; that's your vote against the system.
So, on the retail level, I think eventually they'll land on that narrative. I think they'll eventually find that they'll stop trying to speculate on random shitcoins and they'll go, you know, Bitcoin is the revolution here; especially as more and more pedigreed folks pile into it as it gains momentum. That seems to make sense to me.
On the regulatory side, Bitcoin is already -- and this is what's so funny. People are like, "Bitcoin needs to be regulated". I'm like, "Dude, Bitcoin is one of the most regulated assets in the world. You've got the CFTC, SEC, IRS, FinCEN; they all weigh in on Bitcoin, including a bunch of other alphabet soup agencies I can't even remember off the top of my head. So, Bitcoin is already -- and, that's just in the US alone.
Bitcoin is very regulated. They've all very much weighed in and given opinions over the last five years that have been pretty concrete. Bitcoin's understanding by these regulatory agencies is, I'd say, very clear. Now, FinCEN might want to include more restrictive sort of data; they want to collect more data around transactions. This is common with US cash; dollars. So, they're not exactly extending this. They tried to push it to a level that was beyond the requirements for cash, and Coin Center and folks pushed, I think successfully, against that.
Peter McCormack: Big shout out to Coin Center, Neeraj and Jerry, Peter Van Valkenburgh. Please make donations. Sorry to just jump this in, but just donate to these fuckers. And I think right now, Grayscale are matching donations, so I'll just give them a shout out. Well done, guys.
Dan Held: Yeah, I mean Kraken's a big support of Coin Center. Jesse was one of the biggest donors back in the day. I know you have as well. You know, you've done some great work there. They do phenomenal work. They were really successful in pushing back against that.
So, I think on the regulatory front, we'll always see encroachment by regulators to want to kind of control Bitcoin. Bitcoin inherently on chain is uncontrollable, so they can only guard the on and off ramps. But, you can't stop economic activity happening on chain. So Bitcoin, no matter how restrictive the regulatory environment, won't be affected by that. It's already well understood by regulators.
Now, these other crypto assets, like DeFi and Ethereum, I would say are very much unknown by these regulators in terms of having a concrete answer as to what it may be. They've sort of given directional guidance, but I can see a lot of that switching as well in the future. That's where, with FinCEN requiring identifiable information for coins being withdrawn from exchanges, that actually impacted DeFi a lot more than Bitcoin.
So, I think that TLDR, Bitcoin is highly regulated. I don't see -- regulators will try to encroach on our freedoms with it; I don't see it as a huge deal. It's a constant battle that we'll have to fight.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. But, we are in a good position, like you say. Bitcoin is perfectly positioned. I was chatting to Raoul Pal the other day and I was like, I wonder when we get to the point where, you know, that kind of Bloomberg terminal and you see the name, Bitcoin, and you don't think, "Oh, it's that weird other thing"; it just becomes another asset like everything else.
Whilst we're some way from that, because I think a lot of people still don't understand it, at the same time, from what you said, look how well we're positioned. The distribution of nodes is really impressive; the decentralisation of mining is actually very impressive; the decentralisation of hodling is really interesting. When you go and look at the liquidity within -- who is it where you can actually see the buying? Local Bitcoins; you go and see. Every fucking market; what is it, like 200 markets now? It's pretty impressive where we are.
When people talk about, "If Bitcoin makes it…", in some ways it already has made it. It's established now, it's part of the consciousness, it's part of the financial systems. Obviously, we hope it continues to grow, but it's kind of mind-blowing when you think; probably more so for you, because you were here a lot earlier than me, during the times when you were like, "This could collapse; this could fail"?
Dan Held: Yeah. I mean, people don't understand. Bitcoin was worth $10 at the time because people only thought it was worth $10. The whole world thought it was that price. If the world had felt differently about the valuation in Bitcoin, then the price would have been different. That was what the world thought was their appropriate risk reward for holding Bitcoin; it's worth $10.
A lot of people go, "I would have bought as much as I could back then". I'm like, "You definitely wouldn't have. You either wouldn't have; you would have bought it --".
Peter McCormack: No you wouldn't, because no one else did!
Dan Held: Yeah, no one else did either! Yeah, the price is representative of the world's perception of it, and it's been wild to see Bitcoin survive these huge, monumental challenges like Mt Gox collapsing, Silk Road going under, transaction malleability. People don't even remember what that is from 2014. And then, you also had the big Bcash hard fork war. That was pretty scary; it was brother against brother, to use the old term, brother against brother; like a true civil war of one side against the other and it was a bitter battle.
We even saw the Ethereum people lean into that, like Vitalik Buterin. He leaned in on the Bcash side to undermine confidence and try to destroy Bitcoin. That's why he said, "Congratulations on this. Seriously". Everyone was fighting to try to kill Bitcoin in that moment and it survived. And, after going through that, I think we're in such an incredible spot right now.
I mean, when we covered this in our first episode, The Bitcoin Supercycle, it's part of the narrative, right? We don't have competing narratives; there's no Bcash competing narrative; there's no ETH and ICO competing narrative; it's basically just Bitcoin. Sure, there's a small DeFi narrative, but I would say it's very minor and it's too technical to really be understood by mainstream audience.
When these DeFi protocols all raised their hands the last couple of weeks and go, "Come over to DeFi; CeFi isn't working for you", how many of them saw a bump up in users from all the people fleeing Robinhood; almost none. That was their rallying cry, that was their moment and, yeah, sure there was a surge in volume just in trading in general, but that happened across centralised crypto exchanges. I don't think we saw a huge change in DeFi usage because people were fleeing these oppressive centralised services.
So, Bitcoin's narrative right now, and especially with COVID in the background, is just so clear and so easy to see.
Peter McCormack: And, dude, it's at $38,000 quite happily. I mean, I don't think it's ever going under $10,000 ever again. There's a good chance it doesn't go under $20,000?
Dan Held: Yeah, I don't think we go under $20,000 ever again. I mean, that's pretty clear to me. $30,000 seemed to be the floor that we held and $20,000 seems impossibly low. I mean, again, it's interesting to see these mental cycles occur where, once we go past a certain price, now everyone's expectations are, "I will buy it if it goes below here", and those create the floors. It's fascinating to see this play out.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it is. I mean, for someone like me who did their first full cycle, I was, "Will it ever come back? I mean, this bear market's been so long, maybe it won't. Maybe I should sell my Bitcoin, go and buy a farm, forget about this shit?" Yeah, here we are, right?! Keep going!
Dan Held: When you feel like selling, that's the time to hodl like that. Going through these bear markets, the 2015 one was particularly brutal. There's great content that you were putting out during the bottom of this bear to rally the troops, and same with me. I'm putting out social content to rally people where I'm like, "Hey, y'all, I've been here before, we're going to get through it, Dan Held!" Dan Held's been here before!
I even tweeted in 2015 when Bitcoin hit $200, I tweeted, "Hodl", at the bottom of that. I've always believed in Bitcoin and that's all you have to do. At that peak moment of despair is the moment when you need to hodl the hardest and then you recover through these cycles.
Peter McCormack: True, but it still must feel very different now than the other ones. You must be like, "Holy shit!" Well, we can wax cynical about that for ages. I want to talk to you about Bitcoin standard.
Okay, just a quick thing before we get into that, there will be people who are listening who will have heard of a gold standard, might not know exactly what it is; just a brief intro of what the gold standard was and ultimately, why it failed?
Dan Held: Yeah, great question. So, the gold standard was, gold was the reserve asset held by all of these different governments. The central banks held gold as a way to back their currency with gold. So, the government was restrained in their spending capabilities; they would only be able to spend so much gold, and there's this tie to gold as the reserve asset to sort of, the money supply may fluctuate around that, but ultimately it's backed by gold. In fact, older dollar bills have, "This is backed by gold" essentially printed on the dollar bill; so, you can find that.
So, this gold standard was this decentralised way to control governments from overspending and from manipulating their money. Governments, due to wartime issues, wartime pressures, due to other pressures as well, like economic pressures, and I'm just going to kind of broadly apply this, because I feel like I don't want to stay too US-centric; due to wartime, economic and other pressures, they moved off of the gold standard.
So, fiat, the currency that we have today, is completely divorced from any sort of underlying reserve currency asset that's not controlled by a government. Gold was wonderful, because it was minted from the earth. No one can control that supply, no one can print more of it just at will by adding a zero on a database. You had to do the proof of work to mine the gold, and that all kept these governments in check; and now, that check and balance has been removed.
Bitcoin restores that check and balance by Bitcoin having that 21 million hard cap that is not changeable. It totally revamps the dynamic of what governments are capable of doing. If in the future -- and this is why I see a quasi-state where fiat currency exists with Bitcoin; but, I don't really see a long-term state of that occurring, where Bitcoin only becomes the reserve asset, and dollars and pounds are still used. That doesn't make any sense to me, given that Bitcoin has different properties than gold.
Gold wasn't transportable. It's not digitally native and it also wasn't very divisible or verifiable; whereas, Bitcoin has all three of those characteristics that make it more advantageous than gold. Also, the knowable supply is pretty phenomenal for calibration of unit of account; whereas, gold, no one actually knows how much gold there is. We can estimate it, but we don't know.
So, Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, unit of account, potential currency in the future, has that capability very much baked in. That's where I see it totally owning the narrative of being the money, because once people place their trust in storing value in Bitcoin, why would they ever go back to a fiat currency? Even if the governments forced them to, people also forget, governments are comprised of people. The people that work in the government are people that are holding Bitcoin; and the people that they govern are holding Bitcoin; and eventually the government will change their tune if all the people don't want to use their currency anymore.
Peter McCormack: So, the interesting thing on a Bitcoin standard is, when I say what I'm going to say now, you might go, "Well yeah, Pete, you should have known that straightaway", but it just hadn't really crossed my mind. But, I realised this year, I'm living on a Bitcoin standard, right. I realised I'd made that transition, but it hadn't really crossed my mind.
I was kind of in my mind, I was thinking a Bitcoin standard is when maybe a country adopts Bitcoin as a standard. But then I realised, no, because Bitcoin is decentralised, right? Anyone can adopt a gold standard, but that doesn't make any sense. I've adopted a Bitcoin standard. Anything which isn't cash flow for personal and business is now in Bitcoin, and that's just the way I operate.
Michael Saylor's doing it. I was chatting today with Cory Klippsten from SwanBitcoin. I said to him, "The most interesting thing that Michael Saylor's done to me recently isn't the two big purchases; it's these two incremental $10 million purchases of like 150 Bitcoin, whatever the number was". I was like, "Yeah, because you're on a Bitcoin standard, so you don't want to hold fiat".
I guess a full Bitcoin standard, I'd be going one step further where I'd be -- people still pay me in dollars and stuff, and I'd be like, "No, I only want to be paid in Bitcoin". But, I kind of realised I've got to that point, I'm on a Bitcoin standard. There's a bunch of other people on a Bitcoin standard, and it's just kind of organically happening.
Dan Held: Totally. It's a multi-decade thing. There's not going to be a flip of a switch and everyone goes to the Bitcoin standard; these are humans after all. The Bitcoin network is code that organises humans together, but it can't change human behaviour in a second. Money is an incredibly intricate topic that people have just been kind of born into where they're like, "Oh, my government prints money, and that's what money is". They have got to challenge their assumptions of government and money in order to understand Bitcoin.
So, it wasn't like this was going to be a binary process where things flip off; it's the early believers like ourselves, who get into Bitcoin, start to store value in it, prophesise it and talk about it, which you create content, I create content; we're doing that together right now. This, in turn, brings in more believers.
Bitcoin's price going up is the number one user acquisition channel. This is like, my background is in growth marketing; this is how I think through things. Number one user acquisition channel, Number Go Up; price goes up, people hear more about it, they get interested in it, they FOMO in to buy it. Then they find our content and their hodler mindset gets even harder and with more resolve. So, this takes decades and actually generations.
This will be a thing where the boomers die out over time, and it doesn't really matter that we convert that cohort into Bitcoin, because they are passing on their wealth to the younger generations; and, the younger generations are generating all this wealth to where it's only the younger cohorts that truly matter.
It's great if the boomers get in, but I think Steve Jobs actually had a quote around this when someone was complaining about keyboards back in the 1990s. In the 1980s or 1990s, someone was complaining about Apple keyboards, and Steve was, "Well, the people that don't like it are going to die out" and he was right. He was like, "Well sure, I can't build technology for people who are unwilling to change" and as Satoshi said, "I don't have time to convince you, sorry".
So, it's sort of true too with Bitcoin. We should try to strive to make as many people understand Bitcoin as possible. Certain age cohorts, especially younger, you know, if we look at Kraken data, if we look at my personal brand data, it's very much what you'd expect; millennial type folks are interested in Bitcoin. This is good. Millennials are the largest age cohort in the workforce. Millennials are going through the stages of accumulating wealth; Bitcoin gives them that opportunity.
So, as the baby boomers pass on and pass on that wealth, that wealth will accrue to Bitcoin over time. If the boomers don't do it themselves, their younger offspring will take that wealth and put it into Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: It's really interesting, because there have been a few interviews I've done this year that have really, really multiplied my conviction; a couple of really stand-out ones. There was a really interesting one I did with Nik Bhatia about his book, Layered Money, where I kind of came to a realisation about the Lightning Network, where I'd been mildly critical of the Lightning Network in a sense that I've just got no need for this, because Bitcoin's a store of value; I don't need this.
What I realised is, it doesn't fucking matter. What's happening now with the Lightning Network, it's got years, maybe decades, to get itself to a point where we are on a Bitcoin standard, like an actual Bitcoin standard, and perhaps it is a currency and you need it. And then, it's going to be in place, it's going to be robust, and I was like, "Holy shit". It never crossed my mind, because I'm just naïve like that, but that was a big changer for me.
There was a really big change. I did a show with Brandon Quittem about The Fourth Turning, but realistically needing that lifeboat, like absolutely needing that lifeboat. And then, I did the 1971 show with the guys from -- Ben Prentice and Heavily Armed Clown, where we talked a lot about history and what the fuck actually happened in 1971. And, all those shows have given me massive amounts of conviction.
But, it was just so weird, Dan, to realise, "Shit, I'm on a Bitcoin standard" without knowing it. And the realisation was, I'd rather get paid in Bitcoin. I turned round to one of my sponsors and said, "Look, you pay the year upfront; I'll give you 10% if it's in Bitcoin", and they did and I'm already on profit on that. I'm doing my own speculative attack against the pound. I don't want to spend my Bitcoin. I'm kind of pricing some things in Bitcoin and, God, people are going to get bored of this, because I've said this in every interview since. But, I interviewed Jaime from Hut 8 and we had these agreements.
The other thing about Bitcoin is, it isn't just I'm buying it and hoping for it to go up; I don't want to sell it; I only want to leverage it. If I need money in the future -- for example, Dan, I want to buy a new house at some point, right, but I'm not going to sell my Bitcoin to buy a new house; I might leverage it if I need to, for whatever reason, and if I have to sell my Bitcoin, I'm not fucking doing it. And I just came to this realisation, "Shit, I'm on a Bitcoin standard".
Dan Held: Both you and I have borrowed dollars or pounds against our Bitcoin as collateral. This is a speculative attack, as Pierre Rochard originally hypothesised a year ago. He was like, "What's going to happen in the future is people will just never go back to dollars; they'll just borrow this asset that is losing value against the asset that is gaining value, and it will slowly suction away all the fiat into Bitcoin", and he's right.
I don't ever want to sell Bitcoin if I don't have to. I only have one life to live though, so I'm going to try everything I can not to sell the Bitcoin. I want to lend it, or borrow against it, which you and I have both done and we've talked about extensively on other podcasts, especially the first one, The Bitcoin Supercycle. I ideally never want to spend my Bitcoin, ever. That's where, if you do margin properly, if you borrow against your Bitcoin as collateral, and once those rates go down to something a little bit more serviceable, I think the 11% now is too fricking high; once it's down to 1% or 2%, then you just borrow against your Bitcoin forever.
Imagine if you have a very low loan-to-value ratio, so like 10% of your collateral's value is what you borrow against. You're never going to get margin called with Bitcoin on that, especially in this next cycle where I don't think we see as intensive a bear market. You could maybe bump that up to you borrow 20% worth of the value of your Bitcoin you have as collateral. Even at the peak of the bull run, you still should be fine in the max drawdown.
Once that happens and the debt is very serviceable, like at 1% annual interest rate, then that's why the Supercycle, that's why I was so excited to talk to you about that on our first episode. The reason why we could have a Supercycle is, there is no way to exit your Bitcoin position and then pass bull runs without having to sell it on spot. Instead, you can borrow against it or lend it, which reduces sell-side pressure as the price climbs.
So, we keep absorbing and buying the supply; the supply decreases in terms of available people willing to sell; and so, these bull runs could be incredibly intense because, what happens when no bitcoiners want to sell; they just borrow against their Bitcoin. That just sucks up the supply like that.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. It is quite incredible to live through it and go through those realisations. The other point really with Jamie, and again it came up with Cory today, he was saying the same; he said, "Look, the loan rates are too high at 10%, 11%. Once this market matures, there's more liquidity, it gets under 3%, maybe 2%, it will be a lot more interesting".
Dan Held: Yeah, I mean the rate should be close to zero. For someone holding dollars, your annual interest rate that you earn in a savings account is like 15 BPS and the savings account, those are like money market funds -- the savings account money market, you're lending your dollars out to other people. The lending to Bitcoin hodlers, which is a pristine piece of collateral and an over-collaterlised collateral, if you gave the lenders of dollars 30 BPS, they would consider that good.
So, Bitcoin, the borrow rate should get down to 1%; it should be super low.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Well, the other thing Cory was talking about is that we don't want to sell our Bitcoin because we know what a great asset it is, what a pristine asset it is, right? And we know that people like BlockFi get it, right? But, there isn't this kind of wider acceptance, wider realisation yet. He said, once that starts to happen, once the institutions, the banking institutions, maybe even central banks; once everyone else starts to realise that, then he said the market will change. But right now, it's just us within this community who realise that.
I don't want to sell this shit. Look, I try and end each month with more than the previous month. I think this might be the first month I don't for a while, because I did my donation to Coin Center, and I'm doing one to Brink, right, and I gave my producer a bonus. I've spent a little bit of Bitcoin. I'm probably going to look back and go, "Fucking hell!", but it is what it is. But generally speaking, I don't want to. I'm on that kind of Bitcoin standard.
The next step for me, Dan, and I've been trying to figure out if I can do this, because I can't get a bank account for my business. Even the bank that I've been with as a personal customer for 25 years won't give me a business account. I cannot get a business account. And I'm kind of thinking, can I run this business on Bitcoin?
I don't think I can, but do you know, I think I can do if I had something like Strike or Bottlepay, where I can have a combination of Bitcoin or fiat together, like pounds in the same app, and I can move between the two; that's a large part of my problem solved. All I've got to figure out then is, can I do payments to them? But, I am definitely considering that next step to go into Bitcoin only. Now, look, that's going to be tricky in a bear market, but I am thinking about it.
Dan Held: Yeah, that's a really cool way to think through it. My newsletter that I just launched is starting to throw off a little bit of revenue, and I appreciate all the subscribers; thank you so much. It's so cool to see, like, I've been talking about Bitcoin for years and the newsletter's really my intimate content where I give people my first glimpse at what I'm thinking. And, just to see people support me is honestly a really cool feeling. I don't even know how to describe it; it's awesome. So, thank you all, whoever's subscribed so far; thank you so much, it's really incredible.
And, I'm looking at this fiat and I'm like, "Well, I should set up my bank account and create an account at Kraken and then immediately go buy Bitcoin with these dollars that I'm being paid". And, I want to create a little business out of this, where I go spend some of this money on paying content creators. For example, I work with a guy named Sven to create my black and white gifs. But I want to take this to another level on YouTube and that's where some of this money's going towards.
So, I'm trying to think through, "Okay, maybe I could buy Bitcoin with it and then I borrow dollars against it to go spend on these YouTube videos". So, I'm going through the same mental process as well where I'm like, "How do I keep it all in Bitcoin? I've got this dirty fiat currency converted to Bitcoin, but I don't want to miss out on the Bitcoin bull run, so maybe I can borrow against it to go build all this cool content that I want to go make?" So, yeah, I'm going down the same rabbit hole.
Peter McCormack: Well listen, I've got two more questions and then we're going to wrap up. So, what do you think are the main hurdles for us to achieving a broad Bitcoin standard? There is a Bitcoin standard now, because there are people operating it; you, to some extent; me, to some extent; some companies. I mean, someone like BitMEX is operating a Bitcoin standard, because they operate with Bitcoin, right; that's their unit of account; they run their business. I've interviewed at least two people who basically live on Bitcoin and travel the world and they only transfer a bit to dirty fiat when they need to and they get paid in Bitcoin.
But, a broad kind of -- you know what I mean by that; a broad acceptance, a broad Bitcoin standard, almost to the point where you might even have an island or a country somewhere where it is the currency. What do you think are the main hurdles to getting us there?
Dan Held: I mean, adoption. Adoption is the number one hurdle. More people buying it, more people hodling it, more people believing in it; that's what it takes for Bitcoin to be adopted. The more and more people get into it, it's a network effect thing; so that is the number one thing. And, the barrier to that is education; I think there was a huge lack of education before where people are like, "Go read the whitepaper". I'm like, "No, don't go read the fucking whitepaper. It's super technical and jargon-y!"
Peter McCormack: The first couple of paragraphs are okay!
Dan Held: Yeah, it's like really technical. People are like, "First thing you should go do is read the whitepaper"; I'm like, "No, what are you talking about?!" 90% of people are going to be, "This is way over my head, I don't get it, I'm confused and now I'm not going to look into it". I send them to Vijay Boyapati's The Bullish Case for Bitcoin; that is my number one place to send people to go. I'm like, "This is the place where you start".
You know what's funny though is that I'm actually starting to dig into this a little bit more, and I haven't put any effort towards this. But I think a course on how to learn about Bitcoin, A to Z simple, is the way forward here; because right now, what I do is I send them to Vijay Boyapati's article, I send them to a YouTube video, and I've got three podcasts, which is a What Bitcoin Did Podcast and a few others. So, that's my go to, here's your starter pack for how to learn about Bitcoin. But, it should be like a course.
Peter McCormack: It's not enough.
Dan Held: Yeah, totally. So, I see a really big gap in the market and I'd like to spend some more time building something like that too, which I think would be really cool.
Peter McCormack: Well I'm with you because I know what you're thinking. You're like, "I send you to that, but how do they even navigate that". Vijay's article is great, but there's a lot… Again, I refer to my interview with Corey earlier. We were talking about Clubhouse, and I was also chatting to Brekkie about this recently, because I was in this room with him the other day and I was like, this is a real wakeup to how people who know nothing about Bitcoin think, or who know a tiny little bit.
Dan Held: Totally.
Peter McCormack: Sometimes we forget this, right? Sometimes we forget. It's really not surprising why some people get dragged into shitcoins, because how are you meant to know the difference between Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, day one. How are you meant to know if you're not an Austrian economist, or a libertarian; if you're just a normal dude? So, that's a big challenge.
But, it's a real eye-opener, some of the questions, because when they first get involved it's like, "Well, basically it's a Gold 2.0 and you buy it at an exchange and then you have to manage your security and you use these things called addresses, but you need to back up your seed"; there's a lock of fucking shit! And, that was a real eye-opener to me.
So, what you're saying, Dan, it's like, what people need is their hand held. Lesson 1, this; lesson 2, that. There's a massive demand for that.
Dan Held: Totally. And I think of it as kind of a Black Scholes model of different pathways to learn about Bitcoin. It's like, do you remember the books, the Choose Your Own Adventure book; remember when you were younger, did you ever read one of those books where you could choose your own path in the book?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I remember, yeah. And it would say, "Go to page 68"?
Dan Held: Yeah, "Do you open the door or not open the door; go to page 12 or go to page 68". And, that's what I think we need.
Peter McCormack: I remember that shit.
Dan Held: So, I'm a growth marketer so I think about these things where we optimise Kraken's landing pages to optimise for conversion. Someone visits Kraken.com; we want to echo why Kraken's valuable to them, which increases the amount of folks who sign up.
The same thing applies to Bitcoin. So, it's pretty fun, because I love to think through these problems that we're solving at Kraken and solve these problems for Bitcoin as well, where what if we could build this journey where we go and we test this with data? This is what I'd ultimately love to do. This would be the ultimate conversion kit for Bitcoin is, we go test out.
It's like, "I feel more socialist", or, "I feel more libertarian", and then it's like, "Cool, click this button". And then we go down to convert you as a socialist or convert you as a libertarian. We could even do it by age, we could do it by what channel you're coming from, like Twitter, Facebook; there's different demographic data there. It could be super advanced, so that's my dream, is coming up with something like that where it's like the ultimate conversion kit for Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: The ultimate conversion kit.
Dan Held: Yeah. So, that's my dream. I'm so busy at Kraken in just putting that regular content that I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to do that. But, if I had no job, that's probably what I would build.
Peter McCormack: Do you know, I talked to Meltem about this once, about this idea, and you could do something like that, but they have levels of the education. But, as they complete levels, you give them some sats, "You've earned some sats". And, if you complete it, then you can take your sats off, because you will have learnt how to manage your addresses, you will have learnt how to manage your hardware device; you would have gone through what it all means and we pay you in sats. I don't know who pays for it, but perhaps a sponsor of some kind. But, dude, if you do something like that and you need some help, I'm your man.
All right, man, final question of our three-part series, which I know we're going to do another three-part at some point. This is absolute gold dust so firstly, I appreciate all your time on this, Dan, and I know the audience does. But what about, what are the implications of a Bitcoin standard? Are there any unintended consequences, unavoidable consequences?
For example, what's the implication on government and governance; do we risk going through a period -- could a Bitcoin standard lead us to an economic glut, because we're moving from cheap, fiat-based -- as Saifedean would say, "Fiat-based goods" to a change in time preference, so the things we're building and making, our productivity's different. Hopefully you understand the question!
Dan Held: I do. So, with any great change, there will be fear, uncertainty, doubt; what we call FUD. There will inevitably be folks who are on the wrong side of the trade, who invest inappropriately or did not embrace the change. Bitcoin can't help them. This is an inevitable thing with any new technological advance, any new advancement in power; people will be positively and negatively impacted. It is just what life is; it is just what will happen.
Bitcoin will be, as a peer-neutral money, it doesn't choose any favourites. It's purely whoever believed in it first, and who chose to store value in it, and folks who chose to understand it. I don't think there was much of an advantage given to earlier folks, given that it was pretty hard to grok and understand back then.
So I think Bitcoin is one of the most fair starts to embrace a new wave of power and change, right. Normally it was like, "Oh, you're on the losing side of the war". Either you got shot, or you decided to embrace it. With Bitcoin, it's a voluntary adoption of it; you can come in whenever you like. There's no forced nature to it. But, if you choose poorly, you're going to be on the wrong side of history, and you're going to see your purchasing power decline.
Bitcoin can't help that and that's not a bad thing that Bitcoin did; it's just its change is occurring and people who choose not to embrace it, have fun staying poor, is I think the best way to put it!
Peter McCormack: Udi would be proud!
Dan Held: Yeah. So I think, in that regard, Bitcoin's a neutral technology, it has no internal bias; it will only impact folks who choose not to believe in it, which is fine. It's a bit of a Roko's Basilisk, which I'm not sure if you understand the terminology?
Peter McCormack: No, I don't know that.
Dan Held: It's a game theory sort of -- not really a game theory, it's more of a kind of fun, mental thing to think through of, if someone built a machine, like if an AI was built, and you did not embrace it, you would be punished by it. So, you might as well choose to help fund to build the AI, because if you don't fund it, it will hurt you.
Bitcoin, in a way, is kind of like that. If you choose not to believe in it or embrace it, it's a bit like, you're going to lose out. So, in terms of the game theoretic decision-making, you obviously invest in it because, if you don't invest in it, you're so negatively impacted by its outcome that you should definitely choose the optionality of investing in it. So, Bitcoin is kind of like that. It has a lot of negativity for folks who don't buy into it, because your purchasing power declines while everyone else's goes up.
I think, from a government level, there's going to be a lot of criticism. People will choose to say that Bitcoin created this nasty economic environment, but in reality it was the government. Bitcoin merely highlights and exposes the flaws of poor central banking policy and poor government policy. People will look at these wealthier bitcoiners and point to them and go, "This is unfair, this isn't cool, and I expect bailouts from my government". And, because they're used to getting bailed out, they're financially dependent on the government.
So, the last gasps and grasps from the existing financial system will be to try to say, "Bitcoin is unfair. Look at all these people suffering; we want to remedy the situation", when in reality it's like, "No, I just saw the future before you did and chose to invest in it and risk my money and I'm being rewarded for it". So, we'll see a lot of people cry out and say Bitcoin is not fair, especially as it starts to switch over.
Then people will, during crisis, they'll turn to their government again to print money and no one will trust the government anymore; the money won't be worth anything. So, people will point to Bitcoin as creating suffering, "Oh, Bitcoin is allowing suffering to happen because we can't print more of it". That doesn't make any sense. I mean, Bitcoin is a neutral technology; it merely is just an algorithm. This is just a piece of maths. There's no such thing as suffering or not suffering; it's just you choose to embrace it or not.
So, people will be -- their mindset has been moulded by fiat and they're going to expect fiat outcomes, and Bitcoin is just this cold piece of code that is just, "I don't care how you feel". So they're going to feel -- that's going to be an adjustment and certainly they'll blame Bitcoin for their own mistakes. I mean, Bitcoin did not cause these mistakes; these mistakes were caused by the people and their government. But, people will choose to try to blame Bitcoin for their own mistakes.
Peter McCormack: Cold piece of hard reality, man. Well listen, Dan, love you, brother. Thank you for doing this.
Dan Held: Yeah, man, had a blast.
Peter McCormack: Three cracking shows. Like I say, we could have done 20 of them, dude. Well listen, look, tell people where to sign up to your email. I'm going to put it in the show notes. I signed up. Dan didn't give me a free copy; I paid because it's fucking awesome and you should order it, but Dan, tell them where to find it, dude?
Dan Held: Yeah, well I've got to pay Peter back with a beer; that was the arrangement that we made. I'll pay him back with a beer to be a loyal subscriber. But, yeah, it's danheld.substack.com or just Google search Dan Held Substack. It's a weekly newsletter that comes out for paid subscribers. It comes out once a month for free subscribers.
It's basically my weekly thoughts on Bitcoin, distilling down topics like Bitcoin versus Ethereum, which will be an upcoming topic, which a lot of people have been asking about. I've got one on, Can Governments Kill Bitcoin; the recent WallStreetBets, the rise of that and the rise of that rebellious nature, how that impacts Bitcoin.
So, it's kind of a direct brain feed from me to your inbox and I have a lot of fun writing it. On Twitter, I have to write content that will trend based on Twitter's algorithm. Do I always want to tweet a one-liner tweet that's pumpy: not really, but that's what Twitter likes, that's what my audience likes. But in this, I'm able to just write whatever I feel. I don't even have an editor, so it's just me sitting down and writing. So, it's really fun for me. It's actually my most fun writing I've ever done.
My older, longer-form articles, they were so intense that it took -- Nic Carter would review them and a dozen other bitcoiners, and this is just much more pure. So, it's a lot of fun. If you just want my frank thoughts on Bitcoin, it's a great place to get them. And, appreciate everyone who's already subscribed. Again, really can't say enough about how good that makes me feel; it's just a really cool experience to be this plugged in.
So, yeah Pete, thanks for having me, this has been a blast and, yeah, thanks to everyone else.
Peter McCormack: Well, dude, you have an open invite to my podcast, you know that. Keep doing what you're doing. I am a smarter, better human for knowing you. I appreciate everything you do and fuck, man, I hope I can get over soon and see you, but it is what it is. Peace out, love you, take care, dude.
Dan Held: Cheers, bro.
