Parker A. Lewis (42:43)
Let me, yeah, let me explain this because I also, I have this law. I lay out logic and the piece and you can find it@ graduallythensuddenly XYZ. It's also on Twitter, Twitter article ntftc. Ntftc. Thank you for helping syndicate as the media empire in the room, but I'll walk through all of logic, but I'll start at this point because it's where we were, which is you can't store the same value in two different currencies at once. You can store different value in different currencies and you can choose what percentage of your value you store in one versus the other, but you have to choose which you're storing value in. And that, that is the, there's no fundamental way around those. Like when you're, when, when you get paid either for your good or service directly, or if your employee gets your paycheck, you have to decide, say you get $5,000 a month, you have to decide, do I want to save 1,000 of that in Bitcoin, 2,500 in Bitcoin, 5,000 in Bitcoin, and then you have to decide what you want to do with the rest of it. But you can't store the $5,000 in Bitcoin and fiat currency at the same time. And this idea of having kind of a fiat currency sitting on top of of bitcoin, even in that world, you have to choose because there is something fundamentally different. Even if you're using a custodian, it would be fundamentally different if you were to deposit $5,000 into the Bitcoin exchange and have a liability of this exchange, like a deposit that's denominated in dollars versus having a contract and a liability that's denominated in bitcoin. If you deposited $5,000 into the crypto Bitcoin exchange and it was a $5,000 denominated liability, that is fundamentally different than you have exs from a contractual perspective. And so like if you think about the history of gold, gold was convertible to dollars. You would put your gold in the bank and the bank would give you $20. The gold, the gold in the bank was the banks. You now had the dollars. And there was a contract that said you could convert those dollars back to 1 ounce of gold. That contract was later broken in 1934 when the government devalued the dollar to 35 to 1. But it's this distinction of if you're trying to like, you know, have this idea that you're going to save in Bitcoin and spend your dollars. Well, the first thing is as an example, right now with the etf, you don't actually have Bitcoin. You have stock or some security in an exchange traded fund that has a claim on Bitcoin. But your asset is the claim on Bitcoin, not the Bitcoin itself. And even though ibit's working on being able to allow you to take Bitcoin in kind, it's drawing this distinction that if you had this fiat currency sitting on top of Bitcoin, you could either live in a world where you actually own the Bitcoin directly and it's titled to you, or you could have a fiat currency that's convertible, or you could just hold a fiat currency that's free floating. But in any of those cases, you, you have to decide what percentage of the value you're saving in Bitcoin and what percentage you're saving in dollars. And Bitcoin, kind of like working back from the beginning of the logic. It's the Bitcoin has a credibly enforced fixed supply. It represents money that can't be printed. It's only credibly enforced because it operates entirely decentralized and not decentralization theater. Decentralization is not trivial. Bitcoin as a function of that decentralization is as at the network level is resistant to all forms of censorship. That's what allows it to be global and permissionless. And it's what allows the Bitcoin network to credibly enforce its fixed supply without the need of trust. The basis of Bitcoin storing value is it's fixed supply. But again, it's fixed supply is only credible because it's resistant to censorship. That's what allows you to permissionly, if you want to, to be able to plug directly into Bitcoin and transmit the currency without going through some outside system. And everyone in the world is incentivized to hold a form of money that can't be printed versus one that can. So if you think that you're just going to store your value and spend your dollars, that reality itself is predicated on you making a decision of storing a certain percentage of your wealth in one versus a certain percentage in the other, even just for that moment where you want to convert into it, to send it, it was predicated on somebody else holding the dollars. And that's where it gets to well, everyone will be in the future is today. But just by the reality of it, very few people still understand Bitcoin. But in a world where everyone understands Bitcoin, who are all these dollar holders? Everyone, every time they're getting paid and taking dollars as currency, are having to decide what percentage stays in that versus not and what might be converted to Bitcoin. And in the end, everyone to a person is incentivized to hold Bitcoin and everyone is incentivized to hold a maximum amount of Bitcoin such that the only reason in that world where Bitcoin adoption grows and there's more people, if there's two, two Bitcoin holders on each side of a transaction that are willing to transact in Bitcoin directly for goods and services, the only reason why another currency system would need to sit on top of would be because Bitcoin wasn't capable of facilitating the exchange on a direct basis, which it is capable of technically facilitating. That which then comes back to, well, if everyone's maximally incentivized to hold Bitcoin and it's capable of sending and transmitting currency transactions and processing for final settlement without a third party, the only reason to add a third party, a fiat currency, into that equation would be unsolving the problem of why you originally opted into the form of money that can't be printed. And from a practical standpoint, the only reason for that to exist again would be to ban the transactional use, to police and exert control over who has access. And the other thing that I mentioned, I'll pause, that was a long rant, but nothing about Bitcoin from a regulatory perspective. From a fundamental economic perspective, being money and being currency prevents, say, the U.S. government from regulating its financial system. Those two statements are not incongruent. And that's one of the reasons why it's like, hey, just recognize that, treat it as currency. And it doesn't prevent you from regulating J.P. morgan the way you want to regulate J.P. morgan. It's a U.S. company that services U.S. individuals, and if they're interacting with Bitcoin, you want to regulate how an individual interacts with a financial institution or what obligations a financial institution has, that's fair game. But that sits at a different level than the regulatory treatment of Bitcoin itself. Yeah.
