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Fiat Money is the Problem, Bitcoin is the Solution | Joe Bryan (Saving in Bitcoin Ep. 5)
01:02:08
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- [00:00]
Joe Brian
The way I think about Bitcoin is the amount of Bitcoin that I own is, I have a share in all future human economic activity forever. Bitcoin is your, is the apex savings vehicle. In the limit of when the whole world has become bitcoinized, Bitcoin is the only money and currency it took. This is, this is everything. This is the store value. This is the medium of exchange. It's the, the representation of all the economic energy of everybody. And when you're in that scenario, the money itself is becoming more valuable over time through the efforts of the free market. I mean, come back to the perfect money. In a free market, everyone's working in their own self interest, but it benefits everybody else because the prices fall and the quality goes up and the quality of life for everybody increases. This is, this is where we should be, but it's ultimately where we're going to go With Bitcoin, that process just takes a very long time, but we're just, we're incredibly, incredibly early.
- [01:05]
Walker
Welcome to Saving in Bitcoin, your financial freedom blueprint on the Bitcoin podcast, powered by Fold. The best place to buy, earn and save in Bitcoin. I'm your host Walker, and in this six episode limited series, I'm talking to some of the best minds in bitcoin to walk you through the basics of why our money is broken, how Bitcoin fixes it, and how you can use Bitcoin as your personal financial freedom blueprint. Let's get started. Greetings and salutations and welcome back. Today I'm joined by Joe Brian. Joe spent a decade at investment banks before a career as an entrepreneur. Now he spends his time building and supporting bitcoin businesses and he created what I consider to be the most impactful bitcoin video of the year, perhaps ever, called what's the Problem? It will be linked in the show notes. I highly recommend you go and watch it after this. So, Joe, welcome. Thank you so much for joining.
- [02:12]
Joe Brian
Well, thank you for having me back, Corker. It's great to be here.
- [02:17]
Walker
Great to have you back and looking forward to hopefully many more of these conversations in the years to come as bitcoin becomes more and more ubiquitous in people's lives. But the point of this series is really to give people an introduction to bitcoin, why Bitcoin matters, but also to identify why they need Bitcoin in the first place. What's broken in our current system? What's the Problem? Which happens to be the name of your excellent video. So you're a perfect person to talk to about this. So I want to start there because a lot of people realize the system is broken. Something's broken, they can feel it, something's not right. They just don't understand why it's broken or how it broke and what's the root cause of this. A lot of other things get blamed that are really just downstream effects of the problem. They're not the problem itself. So if we can start out with what is the problem?
- [03:10]
Joe Brian
The problem is that the money is not separated from the state, and so the money is flexible. And to sort of quote the video, a big red button exists, a metaphorical abstraction of the financial system. But a big red button exists that can be pressed at any point in time to change the money. And normally that's just by creating more of it for free for the person who has access to the big red button. But it could also be other aspects, like changing the level of control that some central parties have over someone's ability to use the money, as well as other aspects as well. So it's the lack of independence of the money from the government brackets, the central banks.
- [04:04]
Walker
I think people have this sense that, like, especially if you're, you know, in the younger generations that, well, how can you even have money that's separate? You know, this, this is just the way it's always been, right? I mean, what do you say to people who just say, I mean, like, well, what's, what's the alternative? What if the central banks and the governments aren't in control of this? Who's going to control it? Doesn't that just lead to chaos and everything else? You know, how can you not have somebody in control?
- [04:34]
Joe Brian
Well, I think many people now, I mean, myself included up until a few years ago, you don't really question it. You never question money. Because we've been in this system since 1971. And so if you are a productive person today, chances are you've never known anything else because you would have only been a child even if you hadn't retired by now, and you wouldn't have really been aware of the system you're in. So no one's ever known any different. And when you have the money that you use become easy and online and digits on a screen, on notes in your hand, and that's all you've ever known, you then don't really have that intimate connections to what the money is actually supposed to represent. Well, that money's supposed to actually be. But the notes and digits are just a representation Layer of economic value, but linked by. Prior to 1971, just a promise. And since 1971, nothing. Nothing. It's just. It's like having Monopoly money and you just keep score. There's no link to any real world anchor of any form in the background because somebody can print more of it costlessly. And so someone can print more of it costlessly. It doesn't have an anchor anymore to anything in the real world. So you expending your energy in the real world to earn this Monopoly paper, there's just a massive disconnect. It's like why would I work for something that someone else can print for free? That's just, that's just, that's just wrong. That's structurally morally wrong. But unless you question never even comes to the top of your mind. But when stated like that, it's just so obviously wrong that you then hopefully go back and question, well, how did we get here? What is money supposed to be? And by going down that series of questionings, I think you inevitably only end up in one place.
- [06:59]
Walker
What is money supposed to be? I mean, we're kind of fish swimming in water. But when you ask us what water is, I have no idea. That's how we are with money, right? As you said, it's all we've known is this current system where they're. It's not. At least it's all I've known. There's no backing by gold. There's no promise of redemption for gold. There's nothing at all. There's. And they don't even have to print it with a literal money printer anymore. They just a few keystrokes and the money appears. So what's the alternative to that? Can we do better?
- [07:37]
Joe Brian
The alternative if you are using something as a representation of your, of your economic contribution in whatever way that is like the value you deliver to somebody else or someone delivers to you and the money you're exchanging there is meant to be a representation of that so that you can expend your economic, your personal economic energy in exchange for something that you can retain, then spend in the future at any point should you wish to, but not be forced to. At the moment we're forced to spend it because it's an economic battery that's constantly declining. I do a day's work today and that might buy X amount equipped to X amount of purchasing power. But then in a year's time that's 10% smaller. And the year after it's 10% smaller. It doesn't retain the economic energy I put into, into earning the money in the first place. It's like a leaky, it's like a leaky battery. And so when you end up in that scenario, your decision making changes, your decision making is impacted because your ability to think about storing that economic energy for some future use for saving it gets undermined because I can't put it, I can't just leave it there for 10 years because it'd be worth half the amount. And so what do I do? I bring forward my spending, which means that I end up spending money on things that I wouldn't have ordinarily spent money on. Or I speculate with it because I'm forced to speculate with it to try and recoup the amount that's being stolen from me through inflation. And so your decision making just gets corrupted at the most, at the most fundamental level because there's this background level of structural theft of everybody's purchasing power, which is really just everybody's time and energy is being siphoned away by the money printer.
- [09:56]
Walker
I want to ask if I can, because I think people may hear you say that something's being stolen, right? And they may say, well, that's maybe a little hyperbolic. Like, that's a little dramatic. You know, is it really, is it really theft? Can you kind of, can you clear that up? Why, you know, why is inflation theft? I thought inflation was just prices at the grocery store going up. Isn't that just inevitable? That's what we've been told, right? It's just prices always go up. That's how it works. Stop earning dirty fiat rewards. Stack sats on everyday spending with the 2% bitcoin rewards credit card by fold. Unlimited Bitcoin back on a platform purpose built for savings. Head to the link in the show notes to get started. Buy Bitcoin, earn Bitcoin, get paid in Bitcoin. Make fold your personal finance hub for spending dollars and stacking sats.
- [10:49]
Joe Brian
Prices shouldn't be going up, prices should be going down. And if you watch the video, within a minute, two minutes, you'll understand why this is structurally the case. And I know you've had Jeff on already, and Jeff wrote a wonderful book called the Price of Tomorrow. And if people haven't read it, they should, they should read it, but within 60 seconds, effectively, if you've got a, if you've got perfect money in a free market where the perfect money cannot be printed for someone for free and it's effectively capped in supply, then that perfect money with free market and human Action causes prices to fall and quality to go up. And this, and this is really obvious example. If there's just the two of us, and I was, I say there was 100 of us and you know, we're trapped on our island and doing fishing, you're cutting down trees then? Because I'm specialized in doing that. Initially when we first landed on the island, I was cutting down trees as well, and you were doing the fishing. But I'm better at fishing, you're better at cutting down the trees. So now we specialize, which means we can produce twice the amount in half the time. And so we can supply the needs of everyone from a goods perspective in less time or we can over supply and the price goes down. And so by doing that, it increases the purchasing power of the free money we now have to use to exchange these products with each other in the free market. Because I can't build a house out of fish, I need some firewood, I need some building materials. But because there's a hundred of us, I'm not the only fisherman, you're not the only woodcutter. And the more time we spend on each of these processes, the better we get, the more innovative, the more efficient we get and the quality of the output is higher. And we're competing with everybody else in a free market. And so what naturally happens over time is that prices continue to go down and quality continues to go up because everybody is buying, making a purchasing assessment on the combination of the two. And if you start raising your prices and reducing your quality, you're going to sell less and you're going to go bust, right? You're not going to make sales. And so this is just what happens in a free market with perfect money, which is totally the opposite of what we see today. For us, we never see prices go down, prices just continue to go up. But that is theft on two counts really, because it's stealing the productivity gains that we should be seeing in our little example. We should be seeing prices going down. So the fact that we're not. Even if, even if prices were staying flat, something is wrong because we're not benefiting from the natural deflationary impact of technological innovation and human ingenuity, then that purchasing power is being stolen. But the fact that prices are going up means that if the inflation is 2%, the theft is probably 5%. It's not 2% because the productivity should be accruing to the money. The money should becoming more valuable and lifting the quality of life for everybody. Everyone who has savings should be seeing their economic battery expanding over time. It buys more tomorrow than it does today, which allows you to save it, then stops you having to spend it or speculate with it to try and retain your purchasing power because it does it naturally. That's the real state of the world when you don't have a central bank. But when you have a central bank that can print money for free and expand the balance sheet, it steals the purchasing power from everybody. And so you get, you get this mysterious inflation, which hopefully they never tell you what the real cause is. It's always this or it's that. But it's a natural consequence of just printing more money. And we can spend a couple of minutes drilling into why that's the case, if that's helpful.
- [15:04]
Walker
I think so, yeah.
- [15:06]
Joe Brian
So when I'll use the central bank and the government is sort of interchangeably here because I realize this is like an introductory episode. You've got all that excitement to come, come of our understanding, the network of the central bank. But all intents and purposes, central banks are mandated by the government and support the government. And so no currency, no government is ever going to go bust. They're just going to end up printing more of their own currency to pay the bills that they have to pay in nominal terms. And so when the government prints more money, that money enters the economy, has to enter the economy to those connected directly or indirectly to the government. And so what you tend to see is, whereas in a free market, the only reason prices would change would be demand and supply based. When the government prints this extra money and starts spending it into the economy on goods and services, etc. It looks like demand. And so the prices start going up, but it's not extra demand, it's just extra money. But now you see greater levels of profitability of those areas of the economy connected to the government, which is then a signal to everyone else in the market. All the entrepreneurs are productive capital, productive people. Hang on, there's a demand supply imbalance over there and I can go and compete there for that profitability. And so they get sucked away from the other areas of the economy that they're currently competing for, making them less efficient. To go and compete for this extra free money that looks like demand from the government. So they're compromising the effectiveness of the economy and reducing the effectiveness of the economy materially. What then happens is the funds that have gone first into the pockets of the people connected to the government have then gone two ways. One, those businesses spend with other businesses and gradually business A expensive business, B, expensive business, C and gradually this extra money ripples out across the economy, driving a level of price increase of all the goods and services. Gradually, all the inputs like the human cost, the raw material, they all start to increase, which impacts every single business. I'll come back to that in a sec. The second is that those connected to the first ring see extra profitability. They now have extra money relative to they would have had before. And then they invest that. This is the Cantillon effect. So they get the money sooner and they often get the money on better financing terms because they're closer to the government. It's not only they get more of it, they get more of it at cheaper rates, which means investing in assets and buying property or acquiring businesses. And these sort of things just becomes a much easier economic calculation. There's less downside and more upside, especially if they know the money's being printed because then they have extra, very clear in their mind which way the asset price is going. And so the asset prices start going, start going up. So we'll come back to the asset prices. But then for the, for the businesses, every business is now faced with a choice. Like even the businesses very far from the money printer that don't even know this is happening because it's done behind the curtain. They start to see all their input costs going up. But now you need to charge a certain amount, you need to make a certain amount of profit if you're an entrepreneur to justify running a business. Otherwise you just wouldn't run the business. And so you need to reinstall your profit margin in some way. So you've got, you've got a couple of choices. The first is you pass on the price increase completely to the customer and say, well, my input costs have gone up, so I'll just sell you the same product, same size, same quality, it's just now 10% more expensive. But the customer gets hurt. So the consumer is worse off there. Their affordability has been hit because of the money printer. The second way is, well, I'm not going to pass on the price increase. I'll just shrink the product. And maybe the consumer won't know, but it still impacts the consumer because they get less for the same amount. They just have to buy more of it. And so it still hurts their affordability. But the third way is for businesses to say, well, I'm not going to change the price, I'm not going to change the size, I'm going to compromise on the quality. And they do this, you know, you Find that products start breaking sooner. If they break soon, you got to buy them again sooner still. Inflation, it's just not in the size or the price. It's the, it's the frequency with which you need to buy something or it's the quality that impacts you in other ways. So you know, the quality of the food starts to deteriorate, so you go to ever cheaper ingredients, which then starts to bring health issues into the population like obesity and these sorts of things. That's just inflation. That's personal inflation. That's like inflation morphed into something else. It's just the money printer. You're being compromised by the money printer. And so there's these three levels of consumer inflation. One is the very visible price increase. Second is the sort of semi hidden, we just shrink the product. And the third is we're going to compromise other things about you because of the money printer. Those are the three. There's like visible, semi visible and hidden. And then you have the asset inflation which drives the asset prices higher, drives the stock market higher, drives the, the cost of housing. All the things that are in more limited supply than the money because the money's being printed faster than the things, then these things are coming into existence. And so for people who are trying to save, you're getting squeezed from a cost of living perspective because your affordability is hit. Your health is being undermined in lots of different ways because of the compromise of the products and services you're using from a quality perspective at the same time as you're struggling to buy the assets because the assets are going up. And it's like, how do you, how, how can you win? You can't win. You can't win. Like your, your income is lagging behind the rate of the asset growth and someone's constantly trying to pull you back by undermining your health as well. And so it's just a terrible position to be in. Absolutely terrible. But this is just the money printer. This is the money printer. When you give somebody the ability to print for free what you have to work for, it will be used and it will be used and it'll be used and it'll be used until they've consumed all the purchasing power of everything you've worked for over time.
- [22:31]
Walker
It's a dark picture. Once you start to go down the trap.
- [22:34]
Joe Brian
I'm sorry.
- [22:35]
Walker
No, it's okay. Because I think it's so important for people to understand. And one thing I want to expand on a little bit there, if you would, is the asset inflation side of this. Because people, if you're a homeowner or if you own, you know, stocks, you see asset prices going up, you say, well, that's a good thing. I like it. I feel more wealthy. I'm winning this economic game. You know, the boomer who bought their house for a handful of raspberries back in 1970, now that house is worth $3 million. And they're like, I'm a genius. Every stock that. The idea that, you know, well, stocks just keep going up forever. So just, you know, buy the s and P500 and you'll, you'll be great and you'll retire a millionaire. What are people missing about asset inflation? Because they don't, I feel like most people don't tend to think of that as inflation. They just think of that as, oh, this is good, you know, the value of the things that I own is going up. What are they missing with that?
- [23:34]
Joe Brian
They're missing the, the value of the things they own is going up when measured in the thing that is being printed. So if I, if I double the amount of money overnight in the economy, all the prices should be double. And so when you, when you normalize the stock market performance, all the housing, the cost of housing by the amount of dollars in existence, they haven't changed. They haven't changed. If you're printing 8 to 10% extra dollars every year and the stock market's going up, surprise, surprise, 8 to 10% every year, it's just because they're printing more dollars. You're measuring it in the thing that is more plentiful. You're not becoming richer. The number on a piece of paper is going up, but the value of that, when you convert it into something else that can't be printed, remains unchanged. So when you price these things in, I mean, even in gold, I mean, gold goes up 1 to 2% a year, and so the supply doubles every 30, 40 years. They haven't outperformed those things. They haven't outperformed the things you can't print for free. And so it is, it is just the way that you keep score. It's like your internal unit of account. So if your internal unit of account is fiat currency is the dollar, you feel like you're getting rich. But if you think about your wealth in the percentage of the pie I own, it's going down for most people, even if the number itself is going up. It's because, let's say you have some savings and you earn 5% on those savings in some way. Now, whatever they save in whatever asset class, and you're making 5% a year, you think I'm getting wealthier. But if they're printing it at 10% a year, you're getting poorer. You think you're getting wealthier because the number's going up, but the proportion of the overall wealth it represents is going down. And so you are becoming poorer. Whereas if you, if your internal unit of account, if the way you keep score is in something that cannot be printed, then you realize, you realize this for what it is, is that you lose money. If you're speculating with it, and I am sort of dancing around it, but if your unit of account is Bitcoin, if your unit of account is Bitcoin that cannot be printed for free, there is a fixed supply of it forever. And instead of, and I'll link it back to savings, to savings here again, we all know that we can't keep cash in the bank as a long term store of value. If you put $10,000 in the bank now and come back to in 10 years time, even with interest, you've lost money. You've lost purchasing power because the rate of inflation outstrips your interest rate. Even the level of inflation, we're told, is correct, rather than the actual rate of money printing. But either way, the real purchasing power that has in 10 years time is materially lower. So you know you can't save it. So you speculate with it. You buy an asset, which puts fuel on the fire of the reason asset prices are going up in the first place for everybody else as well. So it drives speculation, it drives debt, it drives leverage, all of these things. So you buy a house, you buy the stock market, and it goes up 8 to 10% a year. Then you normalize it by the rate of dollars and you realize it hasn't changed at all. But if your internal unit of account was Bitcoin, you realize you've just lost a load of money. By having my wealth stored in anything other than Bitcoin, I am losing money because my house now is worth much less than it was five years ago when measured in bitcoin. So if your internal unit of account is Bitcoin, the natural conclusion is, well, I shouldn't own that house. Why would I save my money in a house when I could just keep the money? When the house causes the amount of money I have to go down, you just wouldn't. You just keep the, you just keep the money. And so what happens over time is that bitcoin ends up demonetizing everything. So it's the flip side of what we just talked about, where the money printer drives the inflation of the assets. That's because you're thinking about them in dollars, but you've got the leverage and you've got speculation in there as well. So the real value of the homes and things is as a utility, not as a speculative store of value. They've become a store of value because the money's corrupted. And so they're far more valuable in dollars than they should be because a house is a liability. It's not. It's not an asset. But then when you think about when you switch to Bitcoin, you're like, well, absolutely, they're a liability. I don't want the house. I don't want that extra house. I'll sell that and just keep it in bitcoin because I'm losing money by having it in the house. So what happens? You sell the house and house prices come back down. And that premium for the house prices and other speculative proxy stores of value, which are better than fiat currency, they gradually go get eroded again until they return to just being the utility value. Because no one buys them to store vats, to store their wealth, because it doesn't store their wealth when considered in Bitcoin. And so bitcoin just gradually just consumes the monetized, the monetization premium that you see all in all these proxy asset classes purely as a result of the money prints being there. And so Bitcoin is your. Is the apex savings vehicle in the limit, in the limit of when the whole world has become bitcoinized. Bitcoin is the only money and currency. It's the thing that everybody's internal unit of account will be the things we will use for our savings and also medium of exchange for global value transfer instantly. That is the, you know, the global free market that Jeff Booth talks about. And in that scenario, we are. We're on the satoshi side of the island in the video. So this is, this is everything. This is the store value. This is the medium of exchange. It's the, the representation of all the economic energy of everybody. And when you're in that scenario, the money itself is becoming more valuable over time through the efforts of the free market. I mean, go back to the perfect money. In a free market, everyone's working in their own self interest, but it benefits everybody else because the prices fall and the quality goes up and the quality of life for everybody increases. This is where we should be. But it's ultimately where we're going to go with bitcoin, that process just takes a very long time. But we're just, we're incredibly early. Incredibly early.
- [31:56]
Walker
I want to, I want to touch on that a little bit because I think especially for younger people, we talk about asset prices, you know, and you mentioned, yeah, like, houses are great for living in, but they're terrible investments if you price them. In bitcoin, some people have multiple houses, you know, that they just purely, they live in one, they own the others for investment purposes. A lot of people that are, you know, my age, you know, younger, are looking at this, the housing market and saying, I'm, I'm never going to be able to even afford one house, you know, let alone enough to have an investment property house. Yeah. And I think they feel this dream of owning a home slipping further and further away. And the reason it's slipping further and further away is because the rate of new money creation is also accelerating. Right. We've printed, no matter what country you're in, just during the past five years, your government central bank has probably printed more money than in the past 75 years combined. Just in the past few years. This is crazy. And so it's this acceleration, acceleration. And you mentioned also, you know, okay, we're still early to bitcoin. But I think people look at bitcoin now and they, you know, maybe they just heard about it now. Maybe they heard about it years ago when it was a couple hundred, a couple thousand dollars. It's now a lot more than that. It's got a big kind of scary price tag attached to it. Of course, you can buy fractions of a bitcoin. You can buy a few satoshis, you can buy, you know, a dollar worth of bitcoin. But still you look at this and you say, come on, I must have missed the boat like this. You know, what is this can't just go up forever. Maybe there's some other meme coin or some other speculative investment that I can look into because I've missed bitcoin. What do you say to those people? How do you convince them that we're still early when they see that big price shock of how high bitcoin has gone?
- [33:55]
Joe Brian
Well, I think, I think that's a human, a human reaction. If the price was per satoshi, it would still feel like a bargain. And One Bitcoin is 100 million Satoshis. So you can get almost a thousand satoshis for a dollar on price like that sounds super cheap. And so it's just human frame of reference and price anchors. But I would say, I'd say a couple of things. The first, the way I think about bitcoin is the amount of bitcoin that I own is I have a share in all future human economic activity forever. And I have that share physically, I have that share. I'm the only one who can control that share. It's actually mine. It's the only thing in the world that you can actually own. It's like buying a share in a company you might own a small share of Amazon or Apple or strategy. It's just a share enforced by promises. You don't actually own it. There's nothing you can actually own that nobody can take off you other than bitcoin. And so framed like that is absolutely still a bargain because the penetration of the, the total value of all the bitcoin that exists is circa $2 trillion. And the total asset base globally is a thousand trillion dollars. So it's 0.2%, 0.2% of everything that currently exists. And so by buying bitcoin, I'm owning a share of everything forever that I can secure my family's future on. I can look after my children, my grandchildren, you know, I can help the other people I care about, I can build, build more businesses. I can help drive future value of that by accelerating our move to a global free market. And it's, it's, Bitcoin is going to allow us to unlock a human renaissance, that sort of level of civilizational change, but it's really just not obvious. It's not obvious because it's 0.2%. Most people still think it's worthless. And so we are incredibly early, absolutely incredibly early. And the second part of your question was around meme coins or something like this. And it comes back to what we talked about before and that people, people don't have a clear sense as to what money is or what money should represent because we've been disassociated from it, from this paper layer we've been using for the last 50 odd years. The money is meant to represent your economic energy, your economic contribution, the value you bring to somebody else, which you exchange for money so that you can then use that money in the future to pay someone else for their contribution. Right? That's meaningful to you. Fiat has broken that, has broken that link. But before Fiat, we had the gold standard. And on the gold standard, your Fiat, your paper was convertible to gold underneath. Now, most people wouldn't have an issue with gold being considered valuable or gold being considered money. But gold has been money in the past, but it's just compromised because it's not particularly, it's not particularly useful as money. It's hard to carry around. It's not very divisible. You can't really verify whether it's real gold or whether it's tungsten or something like that very easily. And you can't send it over the Internet. And you know, you don't want to get attacked with a wrench if you're carrying a big bag of gold. You know, there are lots of things that compromise the ability of gold to be used as money, but most people wouldn't question that. It could be or would be perfectly fine too, from a value perspective. And I think the link that people realize in their minds, but perhaps haven't articulated is why do I think gold is valuable? And I think gold is valuable because a, it's been valuable for a long time, fair enough. But more, more so deeper than that is that gold is hard to produce. It has these characteristics which are, which make it a reasonable money, like a compromised money. But ultimately it's really hard to produce. You can't just magic it. You can't just print more gold. You've got to go and actually mine the gold. The gold exists, it's under the surface and there's a lot of it. And it's infinite in the universe. But in above the ground, the way you produce it is by expending a load of energy to produce it or to mine it. And that's what makes it valuable. The combination of the energy expended and its limited supply. Now, once people realize. Well, yes, almost like. Yeah, of course, of course that's true. Okay, well, I've got something great for you. Right. Bitcoin is the apex energy money. Gold is just really inefficient energy money. You spend a lot of energy getting out the ground, which is a sort of proxy for your economic energy. And then people are willing to swap whatever they've produced for gold which has been brought into existence because you expended your energy. They're one and the same thing, but it was just really inefficient. Bitcoin is the, is the end state. Bitcoin is pure energy money. You have to do work to bring it into existence. And it's through a global free market process. Everybody globally can compete to produce the bitcoin. They can't control the way, the rate at which it's produced and it's fixed over time. But everyone can compete. There is proof of work to bring the money into existence on a free market process. Absolutely. That makes it valuable. It makes it a ton more valuable than gold. It's not inefficient money. It's not hard money with soft edges that, you know, if the price goes up, they can go and dig more out the ground. It's 100% efficient energy money with a fixed supply forever. And you can send it over the Internet and nobody can stop you sending or receiving it. And no one can prove you own it or don't own it. You can carry it in your head. I mean, it's apex money. There's nothing. There's nothing after it. There's nothing after it. So if you're, if you've convinced yourself that gold has value, you're going to love Bitcoin. Once you connect the dots and you frame that against a backdrop of being at 0.2% of all assets globally, and by owning it, you own a future share in all human economic activity forever. Like, it's a pretty compelling case. And you then balance that against, well, I can work for something someone else prints for free and I'll keep it in a bank account and maybe I'm allowed to use it. Maybe they allow me to send it to that person over there. Maybe. Or maybe not, or maybe they'll let me take it out the bank, or maybe not with. And that's a melting ice cube and it's going to go to zero purchasing power unless I speculate with it, unless I spend it and it's making me unhealthy and it's making me poorer because of all the secondary effects and all of these things. Or I can opt out and I can own the thing they can't print. I can own the thing that everybody's going to connect the dots to eventually. There's just no contest.
- [43:09]
Walker
I love the way that you framed that because I think this, for anybody who's spent even just a small amount of time starting to look at bitcoin, it maybe isn't initially self evident because it's something that's totally new. We've never had something like this that is Internet native money, but also has the proof of work that something like gold does. We've never had that before. So of course it would be difficult to understand. Of course it would be hard to wrap your mind around. Of course, your initial reaction might be, this is too good to be true. This is a scam. You know, this is a Ponzi scheme. It's whatever, you know, nasty label you want to throw on it that's been thrown on it by the legacy media or by bankers or by politicians. You can see how that would be someone's reaction. But that's why I think it's so important for people. And again, I want to encourage them. If you've made it this far in the video, also go and watch Joe's video. What's the problem? It'll be linked in the show notes. Because going that step deeper is I think, what it takes. Because once bitcoin clicks, once you realize, oh, this is the real deal, oh, this is something we've never seen before. Oh, we are so incredibly early. 0.2% of global wealth and realistically, probably about the same number of global people that own it. We're still below 1%, both in its total share of wealth and in its share of human adoption. That is insanely early. You may feel like you've missed the boat, but you haven't. The boat's sitting right there waiting for you. You just have to get in.
- [44:55]
Joe Brian
Absolutely. I think it's helpful for people to have sort of anchors of similar things they've seen in the past and it's off used example in bitcoin. But the Internet and bitcoin, you can think about them as similar technological adoption curves and think about the ease of the upcoming ubiquitous nature of the Internet now and the ease with which we can use the Internet. There's almost no barriers now. Everybody, everywhere, child, babies, three to 100-year-old people can safely use the Internet and it's really user friendly and everyone has access more or less in the west and obviously differs in various places. It wasn't like that in the 90s. In the 90s you needed a computer science degree to get online. It was almost impossible. If someone had said to you then, oh, you know, in 25 years, 30 years time, grandma over there is going to be on her iPad all evening. You'd be like, no, that's not going to happen. But, you know, it's technological adoption curves are slow moving. They're slow moving, but they get there eventually. Just everybody uses them and they're slow moving. From a combination of awareness, understanding and usability. You need all of those really to be able to fulfill the adoption curve. But bitcoin is still very early. It's only 16 years in. It's like the Internet in the 90s at the level of, you know, bitcoin does scores amazingly well when you think about awareness that most people have heard of Bitcoin, which is Incredible. The fact that, you know, there's no. It's not a company, there's no marketing department, there's a CEO, there's nothing. This is just an optional network for everybody. And the fact that most people have heard of it is astounding. The level of understanding is very low, and the level of usability is also very low. Right now, we haven't reached the grandma on the iPad stage, but we will. We will get there. We will get. It presents some challenges, but you can see them as challenges or you can see them as opportunities. You know, it's like telling someone about bitcoin now is about telling someone about the Internet in the 90s when you know where it's going to be in 2025. The takeaway should be, actually, I really need to learn about that.
- [47:40]
Walker
It's true. I mean, thanks to the Internet, you have all these amazing ways to learn about bitcoin, to access bitcoin. Hopefully this series is one of those ways. Hopefully, if you've stumbled across this episode or any of the other ones, this has been something that's encouraged you to go deeper. Because we can't give you all the answers in. In one hour. Right. But I think maybe where I'd like to kind of just start not wrapping up, but just kind of to go to, like, shift to a little bit of kind of practical moves for people, because I think they wonder, like, where do I start? I don't. You know, especially if you're a younger person, you probably don't have a lot of savings built up because, again, the system isn't designed for you to save. But, I mean, what do you. What do you tell people when they say, okay, you know, how, like, how do I actually get started? Do I need to put everything I have into this? What. What are my options? Even if, like, this is. This is still kind of scary. Maybe I've saved up a little bit of money, but, like, how do I do this in the, you know, the least scary way? What's the best way to actually start for people?
- [48:37]
Joe Brian
Yeah, well, bitcoin is always said, do your own, do your own research. You know, don't trust anybody.
- [48:44]
Walker
Yep.
- [48:45]
Joe Brian
Do all. Just do your own, do your own research, learn, watch videos, consume content. These things are all free. They're all free, accessible to everybody. And conviction builds slowly over time. You know, you'll find every day that goes by, you think about it a little bit more, you understand it a little bit more, you have a higher level of conviction that through your own thought process, through your own critical thinking approach, you're closer and closer to thinking, yes, this is, this is what I need to be saving in long term. That doesn't happen overnight. And it's probably going to take years to get to the point where, you know, probably took years to get to where you are now in terms of mental things. Certainly did for me. And so the way that I would think about buying or owning bitcoin now is very different from a few years ago. And your, your level of exposure and risk needs to match your level of conviction because you need to know why. You need to know why you own it. And you know, I say quite a lot that I'm happy now when the price goes down when measured in dollars, which is going to sound really strange to people who are listening, who still, you know, haven't gone through that, through that journey is because of the fact that by owning bitcoin I own a future share of everything forever. And I'm going to be buying it forever. And so the price could challenge buy more of it. And there's thousands, tens, hundreds of thousands of people like me and like you there. But that's when you know, that's when you know you've become a bitcoiner by, by that change. Because if you're still thinking about owning bitcoin because someday you might be able to sell it and get more dollar then it hasn't really clicked as to why you're saving in bitcoin. It's because there'll be some point in the future where you don't have to sell the bitcoin. You can and people do and you know, everybody does. Because the whole point of bitcoin is to, is to have that much longer term time preference where you can provide for your family, you can upgrade your life, you can, can do the things that fiat money does not allow you to do in whatever way makes sense for you. And so, you know, we still live in the real world and you want to sell some occasionally to pay off the mortgage or send the child, send your child to college or do something, something right. We. No one's saying never sell it. I'm saying there'll be a point in time where you don't have to. My view, bitcoin is going to consume everything and you only get to that level of conviction over time. And so when you're thinking about how do I get started? Don't buy it, don't go all in like you said. Should you go all in? Absolutely not. Because you don't know why you own it, if it goes up, you'll probably sell it and get more dollars out. And you backed away, you start, you got more dollars, you still got the same problem, they're still going to zero. Or if it falls, you'll panic and you'll sell it. I'm never touching that again. And it's the one thing that can help you. And so when I say to people, just start, start very slowly. I mean you can, it's a thousand thousand satoshis for a dollar pretty much. Even if you buy, you know, whatever makes sense for you, like a dollar a week or a dollar a day, a dollar a month or dollar every 10 minutes, it doesn't really matter. Just gets, just get started with something and then just having a little bit, you'll take more of an interest in it. You'll start to learn a bit more. Hopefully at some point you'll have, you'll probably be buying it on an exchange. At some point you think, well I now I want to learn about how I take ownership of this, how I take self custody of this. So it's something I truly own. Rather than having an exchange look after it for me as if it was just dollars in a bank. Because that's, that's just a promise that you have Bitcoin, that's not, you don't actually have bitcoin. You only actually have bitcoin when you take ownership yourself. But getting to that point takes a bit of time and it's a bit of knowledge. And because we're in the 90s in the Internet, you know, no one has the iPad yet, so there's a bit of friction involved. But it's a very empowering experience to go through it and it helps really cement in your own mind why bitcoin is so powerful. Because just having, just having a fixed cap is not enough. You've got, you got to be able to own it and you've got to be able to be free to use it. And no one, no one can stop using bitcoin. No one at all.
- [54:05]
Walker
I think that's great advice for how to start because again the only wrong amount of bitcoin to have is zero. Right? You just want to, the very first step is just getting off zero. And like you said, you can buy a dollar, you can dollar cost average. You know, set up just an automatic, there's plenty of different ways to do that. Set up an Automatic buy of $1 at whatever interval feels good and that's a start. And then over time you'll start to see the value of that grow in measuring in those fickle dollar terms. But you'll see it grow and you'll study more and you realize, okay, now I'm starting to understand what I own. Because I think that you're absolutely right, that one of the big mistakes people will make is jumping in when there's a lot of hype. They see the number, the number going up, they don't want to miss out. They think, oh, I've got to put it all in right now or I'm going to miss the boat. Not realizing how early we are, how volatile bitcoin can be. And then they either sell on the upside, feel like a genius, but then just are back in dollars with the same problem, or it, quote, crashes down a little bit. They sell, oh, you know, this bitcoin, what a scam. And then they ignore it for another four years until they look back and see, oh, my gosh, if I would have just held it, wow, I'd be doing a lot better right now. And so I think that's excellent advice for people. Start slow, start small, and match your conviction. I think that's, you're going to be the most comfortable doing it and you're going to be the most. It's going to be the most sustainable way for you to actually save. Not just, this isn't a speculative investment. This isn't a tech stock. This is you trying to save money. And we're bad at that because the system doesn't encourage us to do it. Bitcoin does, but it requires a bit of a mentality shift.
- [55:55]
Joe Brian
And bitcoin is volatile, but that is a good thing. That is a good thing. And you just trust your own gut. Bitcoin should allow you to sleep better at night, not worse. So if you're worrying about it, then you have too much. And so just pay attention to the way that you feel about it. But, but bitcoin is volatile, but that is good. And this is a really important thing for people to think about because people have been preconditioned and whole society has been preconditioned to try and remove all risk from everything. But there are good risks and there are bad risks. There is good volatility and bad volatility. The most bitcoin can go down is 100%. It sounds pretty bad, but the most it can go up is forever. And this is why it's important to know why you own it. Because the dollars are absolutely going to zero. It's just going to take longer. It'll take longer. And if you think about that, the asymmetry. When you own bitcoin, it has to be there. It has to have this skewed volatility to the upside, because otherwise, how. How could something go from being just an email to being worth representing the entire value of the world? You can't go from A to B unless it's volatile. If it wasn't volatile, it wouldn't be worth owning. But it's a. It's not how we're sort of not how we're wired in modern. In modern society.
- [58:02]
Walker
Yeah, it's true. It requires a bit of a mentality shift, but I think once you get there, you start to realize the bitcoin's not the risky thing. The risky thing is everything except bitcoin. All these other things are risk. Bitcoin's the one thing you can know that you can have some faith in because it's actually predictable in a very unpredictable world. And I think that's what is so, so powerful about it. And I love that about it. Should let you sleep better, not sleep worse. And I think that's absolutely true. Now I only lose sleep because I think I wish I had some more bitcoin.
- [58:38]
Joe Brian
It works. It works both ways.
- [58:40]
Walker
Yeah, definitely. Well, well, Joe, I want to wrap up here, but before we do, and for anyone again who wants to check out your work, I'll. I'll link all of your links in the show notes. So head down there, watch Joe's video. What's the problem? It's absolutely outstanding. Follow him on. On X and on Noster and check out. He's got a ton of material available for you too, if you get. Go deep down the rabbit hole and you want to start helping to educate others, but is there anything else you want to leave people with? Is there anything else maybe, you know, you wish somebody had told you earlier on or any. Anything else you want to leave folks with before we close out?
- [59:19]
Joe Brian
The important thing is just to get started. Just get off zero because you started the ball roll. Don't underestimate the power of just owning something, even a small amount of it, even if it's a dollar, because now you're invested. Now you have a reason. You have a reason to watch that podcast like you're over the hardest bit of going from 0 to 1. So just get started and then see where it goes.
- [59:59]
Walker
I think that's extremely sound advice. So, yeah, if you're listening to this, get started, if you've made it through this video, Joe's video is a great place to go next to go deeper down the rabbit hole and understand it in a different way. Joe, anywhere else you want to send folks, it's sats versus fiat.com.
- [60:26]
Joe Brian
And we have so many languages available now. What's the problem is you can find it@satsversefiat.com you can also just Google it. Now it's on the first page of Google, which is crazy, amazing generic words, but there's a massive amount of resources in lots of different languages. If you want to after seeing the video, get the slides and share them with others or share share a video or translation with friends and family around the world. Chances are we've got your language and so just, you know, check the YouTube subtitles or see the the extra videos in native languages on YouTube as well and get in touch if you have any questions.
- [61:13]
Walker
Fantastic. Well, Joe, thank you so much. This was excellent. I hope this encouraged people to get off zero and to just take that first step. But thanks so much for sharing your time.
- [61:23]
Joe Brian
Oh, it's a pleasure. Thank you for having me. And thank you for the people at home for watching. I hope they find it helpful.
- [61:30]
Walker
I'm sure very many will. Cheers.
- [61:32]
Joe Brian
All right, thanks.
- [61:40]
Walker
Thank you for watching Saving in Bitcoin, your financial freedom blueprint on the Bitcoin podcast. Bitcoin is a return to savings, real savings built on sound money. Make fold your personal finance hub and take control of your financial freedom. Buy, earn and save in Bitcoin all in one place.