← The "What is Money?" Show
The "What is Money?" Show
WiM006 - The Saylor Series | Episode 6 | Digital Gold: Harder, Smarter, Stronger, and Faster
01:23:48
Michael Saylor joins me to discuss anthropology, energy, and technology from first principles as we build the intellectual foundation necessary to truly grasp the historic significance of Bitcoin.
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- [00:03]
Michael Saylor
Technologies that are dominating today, they're dominating because they're able to deliver force faster, harder, stronger, smarter. So if we ask the question, what is money? Money is the highest form of energy that human beings can chann. Bitcoin is channeling human ingenuity into making it better. And every commodity is channeling human energy into making it worse. The lowbrow or the historic colloquial term is hodl, right? Hold on for dear life and just hodl or save, whatever. And the highbrow term would be adopt as a Treasury reserve asset.
- [01:06]
Robert Breedlove
Hey guys.
- [01:07]
Unknown
So as you learned by watching the what is Money Show, Bitcoin is the single most important asset you can own.
- [01:14]
Robert Breedlove
In the world today.
- [01:15]
Unknown
And so this begs the question, which I'm often asked, how does one build their Bitcoin position? And the strategy really is simple. I suggest first you decide on an initial portfolio percentage allocation and a target portfolio percentage allocation. Go ahead and establish the initial position with a one time buy and then start dollar cost averaging towards your target portfolio percentage. And you can also complement this by buying bitcoin price dips to further increase that position and reduce your cost basis. And finally I suggest to everyone to take custody of their Bitcoin to move all of their Bitcoin into self sovereign custody. Because again, Bitcoin left on an exchange is not bitcoin, it's Bitcoin iou. And for those of you living in the US there's no better choice than Swan Bitcoin to do all of the above. So Swan lets you set up automatic recurring buys for Bitcoin, also lets you facilitate one time buys for buying price dips. And finally they let you set up automatic recurring withdrawals into cold storage, which.
- [02:19]
Is a really big deal.
- [02:20]
And all of this they provide at the lowest fees in the business, approximately 0.99% per year for weekly buys of $50 or more, which is about 60, I'm sorry, 70 to 80% less than Coinbase by comparison. And the best part, Swann is a bitcoin focused education first company. They publish great content on their Swan Signal live podcast. They publish a lot of content in their newsletter and website. And their team is just the absolute best dream team of Bitcoin, I would say.
- [02:54]
Check out their roster.
- [02:55]
It's growing every day, but it's a.
- [02:57]
Super impressive group of individuals.
- [02:59]
And so with that I would highly recommend you check out swan bitcoin.com breedlove. You get $10 in free Bitcoin for signing up and it lets you stack sats with Myself and the rest of the Swan team as we continue the fight to restore freedom, truth and virtue in the world through Bitcoin.
- [03:21]
Alright, thanks. Alright, guys, welcome back to episode six of the Saylor series here on the what Is Money show. So today we're going to be talking about how Bitcoin is harder, smarter, faster and stronger than than any form of money in existence. Specifically, we'll be drawing a lot of analogies to gold, which bitcoin, as we've discussed, is disruptive too. And we're going to look at this through a number of angles. And a lot of this is building on things we touched on early on in the series, like specifically getting into Stone Age technologies and how actually the use of tools and the harnessing of energy is what lets man be harder, faster, stronger, smarter than any other animal on the planet. So in fact, these characteristics define the utility of both innovation and evolution. So the tool that best exhibits them tends to out compete in the marketplace. So that we're sort of drawing back to some lessons we laid earlier. So again, this is episode six. If you haven't checked out episodes one through yet, I suggest that you do, because it all sort of culminates into what we're getting into now. So we're going to look at this through a number of angles. One is custody, how bitcoin custody is very unique. We're also going to get into the specter of quantum computing. There's a lot of people out there that like to think quantum computing is some kind of big threat to Bitcoin. So we'll dismantle that one. We're also going to get into the hardware and software updates of a technology like Bitcoin versus Gold and Fiat. We're also going to look at the programmable aspects of Bitcoin and how that makes it unique. We're also going to look at the defensibility of Bitcoin and how it's actually one of the most defensible assets, if not the most defensible asset in the history of mankind. And then we're also going to look at how, as monetary energy, as Saylor likes to call it, Bitcoin lets us place capital more quickly and more intelligently than any other money would fall in terms of generating yield. So we'll get into some discussion around that as well. And then finally we'll get into Bitcoin as being the first truly digital native money. It is pure information, it's massless, it can be moved at the speed of light. And this enables a plethora of high frequency and microtransactions that were simply not possible with any other monetary technology historically. And then finally, we'll sort of look at how all these elements are combined to give Bitcoin users and holders more optionality than any other money in history. And at the end of the day, that's what money is, right? It's an instrument for freedom. So with that, I'm excited to dive into this one. We're digging deeper into bitcoin theory. And yeah, with that, let's get into it.
- [06:25]
Michael Saylor
We talked about bitcoin as money, but sometimes money has a lot of elements as store of value, medium, exchange, unit of measure. And it can be simplifying and clarifying if we just focus on bitcoin as an asset. So bitcoin is digital gold. And if we use that metaphor, some people look at it in a very constrained sense, and some people look at it more broadly. But when I say bitcoin is digital gold, it's harder, smarter, stronger and faster than traditional gold. There's a lot of depth behind it, and I don't know that it's fully appreciated. Let's just start with harder. We talked a bit about how bitcoin is harder because it's 21 million cap and its stock to flow is exponentially going to infinity. And that's the easy part of harder, because you're exactly comparing it to gold. And if gold is a stock to flow of 50 and Bitcoin is a stock to flow of infinity, then it's harder. But there's another element of harder that we don't talk about much, and it's really Nicholas Taleb's antifragile harder. Bitcoin is an antifragile element. I've used the metaphor cyber hornets, but I think people think it's a cute metaphor. But I'm not really think it's a cute metaphor. What I'm meaning is it's literally a swarm of cyber hornets that keep getting more powerful that you can't kill, that are going to get smarter and stronger and faster, and they're going to eat you if you try to stop them. And that's really hard. People don't think about it like that. But I give an example or another metaphor from history, the Great Wall of China. So the Great Wall of China was a defense, and it was a. It's a material defense. It's like a bunch of stones stacked up and it's very expensive to create it. And it was meant to keep the Mongols out. And it's a fragile defense because it's literally a static stone structure. And it didn't keep the Mongols out. Eventually they found a weak point in one of the gates, cracked through, and then they slaughtered all the Chinese. Defeated, the empire, took over. Now how is that similar to what Alexander the Great's father said? I think Philip of Macedon, he's attributed this quote. No citadel is impenetrable as long as it has a road wide enough for me to fit a donkey up it with a pot of gold on its back.
- [09:39]
Robert Breedlove
Interesting.
- [09:40]
Michael Saylor
And what he meant was it doesn't matter how strong your defenses are if I can bribe the gatekeeper, right? And you know, the third example we have in modern history is the Maginot Line where the French built this impenetrable defense against the Germans. And the Germans simply went around it through Belgium by cheating, right? They hacked it, they just ducked it. And you know, if you, if you think about the lessons of military history, you know, one of the lessons is the best defense is a good offense. And another, another way to look at it is that if you want a good defense, you need an active defense, a moving defense, right? If you're a boxer in a ring and someone wants to hit you, your best defense is you move quicker than them and you hit faster and harder than them while they're getting ready to hit you. And so they can't, right?
- [10:49]
Robert Breedlove
So it has to be adaptive, right? The defense has to respond to the nature of the offense.
- [10:55]
Michael Saylor
Continually, continually continuous adaptation, absorption of your enemies capabilities and reaction. You play them back at them. And so when we think about gold, right? I've affectionately deemed gold a dumb rock. It's a rock. It's not intelligent, it's not a life force. A coral reef is a life form. All forms of life they're living, right? They're adaptive. If you kill the weak element, the ones you didn't kill get stronger, right? With regard to Bitcoin, it's composed of a number of elements. There's software, the software is running on hardware, the hardware is running in facilities that are, that are plugged into the firmament of some domain. There are people that are operating that software, that are writing that software, that are operating those facilities that are building that hardware. And those people are also acting in the political domain and the economic domain, right? There are people in the Bitcoin ecosystem that are improving the square wallet, they're improving the binance exchange, they're improving the back end server exchanges, they're improving the front end client software, they're Improving the hardware, wallets, they're improving the bitcoin core software. They're improving the asics that the miners are running. There are people negotiating with governments everywhere on earth to get better electricity. There are people that are negotiating with politicians to get better regulatory treatment. There are people that are marketing bitcoin and they're educators yourself on YouTube. There are people on twitter. There are communicators, there are analysts that are creating analytical functions that are being used to drive and channel the network. They're all moving, they're all evolving. There are strong exchanges getting stronger. There are weak exchanges getting weaker. Right? We see that all around us. There are countries where bitcoin mining is flourishing. There are countries where bitcoin mining is under attack. Gold is a dumb rock. It is sitting on the floor. Gold is not going to move itself. Gold is not going to feel pain. It's not going to feel pity. It's not going to feel inspiration. It's just going to lie there and wait. And bitcoin is a different thing. So the anti fragility of bitcoin comes from the fact that everybody in the ecosystem feels the same pain in the same way. If bitcoin's price goes down, every bitcoin holder feels it. If bitcoin is hacked and goes to zero, every bitcoiner loses their life's energy. We are a hive creature, all integrated with one another. And when there is that pain, it spreads very quickly through the entire ecosystem. The information flows rapidly. So if we consider threats to bitcoin, a lot of people, they always whine, I hear this whine, well, what about the quantum computer? What about the quantum computer? You know, and I want to say, yeah, and what if an asteroid hits the earth and kills us all? Or what about pocket thermonuclear pencil that blows up the entire universe? And what if your enemy gets it before you get it? You know, I mean, there's a lot of silly notions of that. What if someone has the impossibly powerful weapon and they're evil and they decide to use it on you? You could look at it that way, but I think a more constructive way to look at it is if someone comes up with a computer that runs twice as fast as the current computers. The most profitable use of the computer is bitcoin mining. If someone comes up with something which mines that generates Shaw256 crypto hashes faster than the current generation of bitcoin mining equipment, the most lucrative thing you can do with it is plug it into the network and Start to contribute more hash rate. And so who do you think is going to notice first when that thing happens? If someone comes up with a better piece of, well, what happens when they get so powerful they can break SHA256? Well, dudes, we're just going to go to SHA512 and we're going to go to the next thing, 1024. And anybody that ever studied bit studied computer science knows we start with 16, go to 32, go to 64, go to 128, 256, 512, 1024 and so on and so forth. And the numbers get pretty freaking big. And then when they get done with that, they flip to the next protocol. The next protocol. So who do you think is going to figure that out? The people that have $500 billion of risk to figure it out? Or someone that's got no money at all, but thinks that they might just want to solve the problem just so they can crack the world? Right? And it's like, yeah, maybe, but I mean, it's just as likely that some dude's going to come up with a revolver that shoots like photon bullets and they're going to crash the United States government because they're the first dude with a photon bullet revolver. It's interesting idea. I'm a lot more persuaded that the Pentagon, with their hundreds of billions of dollars is going to come up with the Bhutan or the laser rifle or the whatever. So the entire network channeling innovation, you come up with better hardware, it's going to go into the miners. You come up what? You come with better client software, it's going to go into the wallets. You come up with a better software or way to write software. Don't you think people in the bitcoin core community are going to use that way to write better software? And if it's like too dangerous, the community is going to slow it down. And otherwise, if there's a political threat, everybody that's adopted bitcoin as a Treasury reserve asset has a vested interest in dealing with the political threat. And if they can't deal with it, if you are a creature with two arms and I wrap a tourniquet around one of your arm and I choke off the blood flow, the arm dies. Use the other arm. When you're an octopus, you got eight. When you're a hydra, you got a million. So the entire creature is just going to move to a place where there is oxygen, where it can live. And if it can fight, it'll fight. And if it can't fight, it will morph itself into a different domain. And unless you figure out a way to kill it everywhere at the same time, utterly down to the last node, you're probably not going to kill it. And it seems to me that nobody's really got a vested interest doing that. And if they did, it's just not clear. You know, pick one government, One government attacks it, it becomes more useful to every other government. Can't agree on anything ever and could agree on anything ever. They still can't do it. Right?
- [18:56]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah. I think I love the quote from Philip of Macedon about the road being wide enough for a donkey with a pot of gold. That relates to me, to the famous quote from Charlie Munger. Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. I think that is one of the key aspects of Bitcoin is that even if you have this breakthrough quantum computing, whatever it is, you are still incentivized to contribute that innovation to the network. That is the most lucrative, most energy efficient strategy possible, even in that breakthrough environment. And it just seems to be like, to your point about cryptography, it's always been a cat and mouse game, right? It's always been kind of the defense, someone trying to crack it, then the defense adapts. To your point, it's a dynamic defense and that's why it's ongoing, that's why it's still relevant. And when you look at it through that lens, the most brilliant aspect of bitcoin is that incentive schema, frankly. You're always incentivized to contribute to its longevity, which seems to make it antifragile.
- [20:04]
Michael Saylor
To your point, the one thing in the bitcoin ethos is they hate gatekeepers. So gatekeepers are very powerful metaphor. The reason that the Great wall of China fell was because there were gates and there were gatekeepers. And the prosperity of 100 million people can be destroyed by corrupting the one on the gate, right? As soon as the one gatekeeper opens the gate, the hundred thousand person army comes through. And herein you see the problem with hiding behind a wall or hiding behind a wall with a gate in it. Much better idea would be I have my own hundred thousand person army and when that army comes, I stand against them, right? And that's what the Romans knew. The Romans never sat and cowered behind a gate. They knew. And anybody in a war knows you have to go and leave the citadel and you have to direct, actively fight the army that would kill you. Because if they manage to surround you and isolate you, no Amount of defense is going to hold them back. They will find a way through. And that's the story of history. Gatekeepers are your weakness. There's no gatekeepers in Bitcoin, and there's no gatekeepers in a decentralized proof of work network that is energy intensive. That's one of the problems I think of like proof of stake network every time someone tries to come up with a quote, unquote more efficient way to do it. Well, if you're going to secure a trillion dollar network with a billion dollars of stuff staked, the problem with that is that all I need is another billion dollars, right, to bribe that person or half a billion. Half a billion bribes, half that network, and then I topple the entire trillion and I get it, all right? And so when you have anything where I'm playing games where I'm trying to use a small amount of energy or small, and money is energy, right? A small amount of money, a small amount of energy. If you're trying to use a small amount of energy to secure a large amount of energy, you created a gatekeeper. And so you need to flip the pyramid. And that's why there's no shortcuts here. There's no such thing as a free lunch. And it doesn't terribly bother me that Bitcoin channels a lot of energy through encryption facilities. A miner is an encryption facility. It's generating SHA256 hashes. And you have to get, and you're going to have to get through that, you know, hash wall. And the only way you get through it is you're going to have to buy yourself 51% of all that equipment on earth. And then you're going to have to harness 51% of all the energy. And then you're going to have to attack and it still may not work.
- [23:05]
Robert Breedlove
And you're still incentivized to honesty even if you're executing 51% attack.
- [23:10]
Michael Saylor
The joke, of course, is if you really could buy 51% of the encryption equipment and harness 51% of the energy, you could have 51% of the block rewards and 51% of the transaction fees. And the value of owning half of the transaction fees is higher. When the things were $10 trillion and the transaction fees are 1%, there's going to be $100 billion a year worth of transaction fees. So it's $51 billion a year. If you cap that at times 20, it's a trillion dollars just to go along with the program. So someone gonna have to have $100 trillion and be really mad in order to want to spend a trillion to destroy other people. It just doesn't make any sense. Plus, you're not gonna get to attack the thing without a counterattack. Right? Because at the point that you have 100 million people that all have all of their life's energy, all of their hopes, their aspirations, and all of their economic security and physical security invested in the network, they're probably not going to roll over and let you do it. It's pretty hard for one evil genius by themself to plot a trillion dollar war on a cyber network. How are you going to gather the software, the hardware, the monetary energy, and the political support by yourself? And if you're not by yourself, I'm reminded of the phrase three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. So when I think about Bitcoin, I think it's harder. But it's harder because it's a evolving herd creature, evolving swarm creature, and it's evolving as fast as it can. And it feels pain. And as Nicholas Taleb says, an antifragile. Pain's a good thing. You can tell the difference between people that get it and people that don't get it. There's a group of people in life that run from pain, and they're attempting to anesthetize themselves and always isolate themselves from pain. And there's a group of people that run toward pain, or at least they embrace pain. Pain's a good thing. The more pain you feel, the faster your reflex is. Put your hand on a hot stove. It moves quickly. You have reflexes. Right. So that system is learning. And pain is one of our number one information signals, maybe the most important information signal in order to provide a living organism with vitality.
- [26:09]
Robert Breedlove
That's right, yeah. Taleb says that stressors and pain are indistinguishable from information at the organic level. That is. The only way that an organic system learns is by exposure to something that is resistive or conflictive to it. And even at a genetic level, when a virus invades a host organism and destroys its cells, there's always a few cells that survive. And those cells that survive actually take some of the DNA from the virus that wiped out 99% of their cellular comrades and incorporates that DNA into its own, such that it is resistant now to that virus. So it's happening at an informational level. Even deep in biology. This isn't just something that happens kind of at the physical layer here. It happens really. It's quintessential to life, I guess, is the point I'm getting at.
- [27:09]
Michael Saylor
And I agree. And I think that if it's not a living thing, it can't be hard, it can't be hardest. Right? People think gold is the hardest thing because it's a rock, but it really isn't the hardest thing. The hardest thing is like the Mongolian horde, if you're in its way, when the horde of 100,000 comes at you and they're terrorizing blood curdling with their missiles and. And if you read the history of Genghis Khan, they would ride across the plain, they find a city. The city is surrounded by a moat. They would go upriver and divert the river. They would divert the river, choke the city, starve them of water for three days, and they'd ride underneath the gates in the riverbed. It's just horrifying. Blood curdling, living, horrid creature. And you want to attack it. It's moving, right? You could go to it, retreat, they stop, they turn around, they throw you off balance, they murder you. Right? That's what happens when you're dealing with living creatures. Go into a hornet's nest, attack the hornets with your revolver, See what happens. Yeah, it's the most horrifying thing, right? You have thousand hornets. You seen these videos of 20 hornets taking apart 20,000 bees?
- [28:39]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, I saw that on Twitter recently.
- [28:43]
Michael Saylor
And that's. And there are all examples of that. There's bacterial examples, there are cancer examples, and, you know, there's single celled organism examples, there's invertebrate examples. Right. It's when something is a decentralized organic creature that is rapidly evolving and adapting, it becomes excessively antifragile, because every time you kill it or kill an element of it, the elements you don't kill get that much stronger.
- [29:15]
Robert Breedlove
Right. I was going to say one other thing. I'm reminded of a quote when you're talking about the possibility of Bitcoin being disrupted or attacked from the outside, that you are attacking the life energy of the Holders, right? As money is energy. And there's a Sun Tzu quote from the Art of War, and it said, I'll paraphrase, but basically, you never want to attack an enemy whose back is against the wall, right? They have nothing to lose, therefore, they will come at you with everything they've got. It's almost just an unstoppable force. And it seems to me that's what you're facing when you face Bitcoin. You're facing this swarm intelligence of individual Self interested but collectively organized life force that's defending their own life energy. So it seems just really hard to attack that. Almost as if you're attacking the honey and the wasp nest, right? They're going to come at you with everything they've got.
- [30:17]
Michael Saylor
Gatekeepers are like centralized. They're like centralized banks or centralized regulators. Those are gatekeepers and political financial systems. And gatekeepers on the wall of China or on a wall are literally gatekeepers. And the result is one person has the power to destroy the lives of a million by opening the gate. Because Bitcoin doesn't have a gate. There's no gatekeeper. Therefore there's no asymmetric payoff. It's not economically feasible to break through. Now another big advantage in anti fragility of Bitcoin is this idea that I can run my own node, I can take my own keys off the network. I can choose to trust them with a custodian, or I can choose to take ownership of them myself. And I can choose, for example, to put a million dollars with a custodian that's going to run a bank or maybe lend it out or give me yield on it or protect it. But then at the point that I lose confidence in them, I can shift all those assets to another trustee or I can take physical possession of them myself. And because you have lots of different entities, individuals and corporations choosing to do different things at all times, even though someone might entrust their keys to a bank, the security of the entire system is being protected by the someone that doesn't. The diversity with which people choose to engage and support the network actually makes it more antifragile. The potential, for example, if I know that you are going to take possession of your keys and then if you set up an organization that's custodians that will hold my keys and charge me 10 basis points, then if another organization charges me 50 basis points, I would just say to them, I'm going to shift it to 10 basis points. The competition drives their rate down. Or I move to 10 basis points. If I hear that your exchange or your custodian is not secure, or it might not be secure, or if I heard that there's a new multisig protocol that's more secure and I ask you and you don't support it, I move my keys or I move my assets to the next exchange, the next wallet, the next technique, that means that you cannot afford to ignore me because you don't have a monopoly, right? You don't have a regular. There's no regulator saying I have to leave my keys with the Breedlob Trust in order to get a tax deduction or in order to qualify for a 501, 413, 509, you know, et cetera, IRA this or that. As you start to have pure competition, you get this ferocious evolution in all aspects of the ecosystem. And we saw it with miners, for example. They started with CPUs and they flipped to GPUs and then they went to ASICS and like every three years there's another generation. And the thing that really destroys the quantum computing argument is if anything, Bitcoin has proven that people that believe in the Bitcoin network are going to pursue the highest performance special purpose client and server hardware before everybody else in the world. If you look at the state of the art with Bitcoin wallets, they're more secure than any other mobile client device. And if you look at the state of the art of Bitcoin ASIC miners, they're higher performance than AWS or any device you'll find on a public cloud. And that's because bitcoiners have skin in the game. Right? Again, back to one of Nicholas Taleb's books. It's like everybody that writes the software, runs the software, uses the software. Everybody has skin in the game. If you've got a business, it's going to be obliterated if you fall behind as a miner, you can't make any money as a wallet, you can't sell anything as a crypto bank exchange. You know, look how fast the money moves out of, you know, one exchange to another this week, right? Everybody has skin in the game. Nobody can ignore the pain. There is no agents or agency. Bias is very hard to come by. And, and you can expect every year, forever, it's going to get harder. Now back to this issue of Apple and Amazon, Apple's most valuable company on earth, because they can ship a software update to a billion people for a nickel. That's pretty powerful. Well, with Bitcoin you can rewrite the software that runs the nodes to make it smarter, right? You can rewrite the software, the firmware that works on the mining devices. And so the hardware cycle, what's the upgrade cycle on hardware? Two years, maybe like one, two, three years in that range. What's the upgrade cycle on software? Well, it depends on whether it's the node or it depends on whether it's the client software. One year, two years, three years. In the greater scheme of things, it doesn't have to be super fast. You Just have to compare it to the number of hardware and software upgrade cycles on gold.
- [36:06]
Unknown
Zero.
- [36:08]
Michael Saylor
In 5,000 years. Yeah, in 5 billion years. Right. Gold is pretty much 5 billion years. God made it and left it that way. And there's a lesson to be learned from that. But the point is, it's not upgrading, it's not going to move. And if it doesn't move, invariably when human beings, you know, come in conflict with mountains, we move the mountains, right? Like we move the rivers. We, you know, we chop up the granite. You ever, you know, go look at a citadel, it's literally moved a mountain. You have to might, you might have to move it two tons at a time. Look at the pyramids.
- [36:53]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [36:54]
Michael Saylor
5,000 years ago, someone figured out how to move a mountain of rock. And that's 5,000, 4,000 years ago. You know, are you gonna bet against a hundred thousand humans, you know, with their channeling, gravity, channeling water, channeling whatever, or are you gonna bet on the mountain? And the answer is you're gonna bet on the human beings, right? And when you roll forward and you look at human beings versus animals, it's the same thing, right? Us versus elements, elephants, us versus lions, us versus nature. Anything living, generally, we figure out how to beat it because we channel energy better. So now we're talking about, what are we competing with here? Well, if we're competing with gold, it just seems like no contest whatsoever. Let's talk about smarter, stronger and faster. Because harder is relevant to money. But smarter, stronger and faster is the source of all tech value in the past 20 years, maybe in the past 2,000 years, by the way, but let's talk about smarter. Well, if bitcoin is programmable money, it's a pure energy token and I can move it around, that means I can write software on the client and I can write software on the server that will actually move the money. That means you can hold keys to 100 bitcoin and then you can write software that will prove that you're credit worthy, that you own the keys to 100 bitcoin. Then you can actually use it to register and certify transaction or information or title channeled into that. I can write a piece of software that will, what do I want? What if a million people wanted to borrow money pledging bitcoin? And what if another million people wanted to loan out money and generate interest? And what if I write a program where everybody on one side says, I'll pay 3% interest or 4 or 5 or 8 or 2 or 1 and everybody on the other side says, I'll make a loan assuming you have collateral coverage of 4 to 1 in Bitcoin and I can market to market every hour. You're offering me terms, you're offering the loan, I'm offering to borrow. We create a piece of software. It runs every day, every minute, every second. Robert, what if you had 10 Bitcoin and I scanned everybody, 100 million people. What if I scanned them today and I found someone want to pay you 8% interest with a loan to value of 10% and you can market to market every minute. Good deal. Maybe, maybe. Good deal. Maybe you don't want to loan it, but if you did, what if I went through all 100 million of them and I found someone that needed the money real badly and would pay you 27%? Interesting. Smart. Smart. What if I actually ran the algorithm every hour? What if I ran the algorithm every second? What if I, you know, what if I just. By the way, what if someone wants to borrow the money for a year and they'll pay you, they'll pay you 10% and what if they want to borrow it for 30 years and they'll pay you 15%. What if they want to borrow it for one year and they'll pay you 5%. What if they want to borrow it overnight and they'll pay you X percentage? You could generate the yield curve with a piece of software and then that software will connect all of the lenders with all of the borrowers on a server. It could be a centralized server. The logic doesn't have to be decentralized. In fact, a centralized server runs a billion times faster than a proof of work network. So it's likely that the logic will be smart. And that's an idea. I mean, another idea is put the intelligence on your iPhone and be able to talk to your iPhone. And when I talk to my iPhone, I can tell it to chop my money into 37 pieces and send it off. Send my money to my daughter and let her spend it on ice cream, but not on Uber rides because I don't want her running off with her boyfriend somewhere or something, right? So I can condition the money using all manner of software and I can turn on servers that will move my money around while I'm sleeping and I can turn on clients that will handle my money. And of course, if I walked into a gold, I walked into your bedroom and I picked up a gold bar and I walked out with it, the bar is not going to complain. It's a dumb rock on the Other hand, if I took your Bitcoin and I wrapped your multi factor authentication around it and your retina scan and your voice scan, I could geofence it and I could say, well, nobody can move a mobile device with this Bitcoin key outside of 100 meters of where Robert lives. You could do all sorts of magical crazy things with software that you can't do in mechanics, machines. So gold is in essence mechanical and bitcoin is virtual. And of course it's tokenized. And that means it can get as smart as the computer can get smart. And eventually the computers can talk to other computers and that opens up all sorts of applications like credit ratings, authenticity, insurance. Maybe I want to buy insurance for you, but I want you to pledge the full value of my house and I want to know that you have the proof of the reserves to pay off the insurance. You could create very interesting pieces of software with less risk or more transparency and more speed. We know it doesn't work with gold, it doesn't work with tokenized gold because you've got the counterparty risk and you don't know whether the tokens actually are backed by real gold. It doesn't really work with other tokenized assets because stocks, bonds, they move too slow and there's no API between the bonds and the tokens. And if there was an API, you end up with regulatory compliance issues and you're not delivering the physical instrument ever. That's just not likely to happen.
- [43:41]
Robert Breedlove
Sorry, just one thing. If it seems to me the general theme is we're betting on dynamism over the static state, right? Like the reason human beings can overcome the mountain is because we have time and dynamism on our side. And the mountain static, it's not responding.
- [44:01]
Michael Saylor
Nitroglycerin and dynamite, literally, we can blow through the mountain by unchaining chemical energy.
- [44:07]
Robert Breedlove
And the mountain is not mounting a defense of any kind. It's not adapting, it's not changing today to change domains a little bit. The US treasury is considered the risk free rate in the world, being that it bears low to no interest, but assumably has no risk of default or the lowest risk of default, as you see us moving into more of a bitcoin denominated world. There have been talks of a risk free rate for bitcoin developing on the lightning network, such that you would fund these lightning channels in time locked contracts that the market would determine anywhere from a minute to 30 years and it would bear some interest rate. Do you think that's the direction the risk free Rate goes, Is that how we develop a bitcoin yield curve or how do you see that evolving?
- [45:06]
Michael Saylor
I think on a chain like lightning, above the base chain, it'll either be. But you could do it with a centralized or a decentralized solution. Right. So lightning is one solution, but you could do it on any exchange too, if they chose to do it right. There's a lot of ways to solve the problem. The key, the key idea is to create a free market yield curve. Rational people of their own volition would never willingly loan you for 30 years for 1.4% interest. There is no person that would think that's a good idea to do it in a free market. You would expect that you would see 30 year rates, would definitely be north of 10 year rates and north of one year rates, but you would see things like 3%, 4% short term, 5, 6%, 10 year, 8%, long term rates by risk free rates. And that's what they used to be. When Volcker finished his work and he kind of like reset everything for a while, the conventional wisdom back in the 80s was the long term risk free rate was about 7 or 8% and then the risk premium was 4% and so the cost of capital was about 12% on making an investment. And that's how they came at it. And the interest rates typically mirror that and you could get a Savings account for 5%, 4%, 5%. And so it's like anywhere from 4 to 8% on the yield curve. It's only state intervention that will deflect it below that. Right. We could talk about that when we get to interest, but that's my thinking on that. With regard to, to Bitcoin as an asset, we talked about why it's harder and why it's smarter because you can program it, but it's also stronger. And the stronger is an important thing. Strong is about channeling energy with force and acceleration. I walk into the ring, we're going to fight. If I punch slowly, I could be strong, but if I'm slow, I don't win. The fighters that win have explosive force, right? Like if I, you could be stronger than me, but if I can strike you before you strike me, I can knock you out, right? And so it's all about how explosively you can channel that energy. And that's what an arrow is or a sling or a bullet. It's, you know, it's not the guy that's the biggest, strongest, fastest, the wins, it's the guy that, that puts a bullet in your head. First that wins. We know that in military combat, if we think about stronger in the context of money, it's all about channeling monetary energy with force and acceleration. So that means on a Saturday afternoon, from a standing start, if you have $10 million, can you figure out where to put the $10 million to generate the most yield? I need software. If I had 10 million in gold, I can't do anything with it on Saturday afternoon. On the other hand, If I have $10 million of Bitcoin and I wrap it with a server, and if the server scans through 1000 institutional counterparties and then I find the bid, then I could chop my 10 million in Bitcoin into 10 pieces. I could send a million to Tokyo, a million to Beijing, a million to Berlin, a million to London. I could leave some of it outstanding for a one week loan, some for a one month loan, some for a one year loan. If the circumstances change, right? If you're pledging some other kind of collateral and I'm marking it to market and it changes, I can snatch back my assets. And so the ability to channel the energy, move it where I need to, move it intelligently fast. What if I'm, you know, what if I make you a loan of a million dollars at 12% interest on Saturday, and then you come back to me four minutes later and you want another million and you'll pay me 12% more. And what if I like your credit? Well, I mean, in the, in the virtual world, in the bitcoin world, I can just send another million. What if you come back and say, okay, I'll take 10 million and give you 14%? I just need it for three days, three hours. That's force, right? You can't do that with gold. Ever. And if I had a bond or Apple stock or something like that on a Saturday, it's not moving. But realistically, I'm giving you an extreme example, right? Because it's kind of magical. Your computer server is making you money by scanning the networks on a Saturday afternoon. But I don't have to be that extreme. For example, if you actually have $100 million of Apple stock sitting with the wirehouse, a big bank, pick up the phone and tell them you found someone that's willing to give you 3% interest on the Apple stock, they would laugh at you. Ha ha. Well, we don't give interest on that. Like, well, could you just loan it out to this other party that's willing to give me? Ha ha. No. When's the last time you got interest on your Stock assets from the bank or the trustee that's holding the stock, by the way. Never. They don't do it.
- [51:10]
Robert Breedlove
No.
- [51:10]
Michael Saylor
Okay, so let's go through the thought experiment. You have $100 million in cash. You put it in a savings account back in 1980, it gives you 5% interest. You have $100 million and you put it into Apple stock and they give you a dividend. Okay, good. Now the bank loans your Apple stock to someone that's going to short the Apple stock. They short it, they sell it for $100 million. They take their cash, they put it into something yielding 5% interest, they keep the 5%. What do you get? Nothing. Your asset got rehypothecated or hypothecated, you didn't get paid. And yet if you had $100 million in a market basket of stocks, why shouldn't you get a yield on it? The reason you don't get a yield on it is because conventional financial industry doesn't have an incentive to do it, nor need to do it. They just so they don't. And what causes people to do that is competition. Sometimes by the way, it needs competition across regulatory domains. Because if I can get all the regulators in my country to agree that we won't do this, then we're all colluding. That's a collusion and a regulatory capture. When you have a cross domain asset, it's less likely you'd have regulatory capture. Ultimately the strength of Bitcoin comes from the fact that an individual can self custody. And so if the individual can custody and they can do it in any of 200 different regulatory jurisdictions, they can find the jurisdiction where they will have the strongest money, where they can generate the most yield and they can move to that jurisdiction. Whereas you know, you're not going to be able to convince that mega ball bracket bank to move to that jurisdiction and give you the most favorable terms because they have no interest in that. So that's what stronger is all about. And then faster, faster, faster comes back to the idea that we've dematerialized the gold. And because we've dematerialized the gold there's no mass. And if E equals MC squared and the M goes to zero, then we get the C squared with very little E or we get the C, we can actually get to the speed of light because we have no mass. And that, you know, when we think about $100 million of gold. Back to my 3,000 pound idea or 3,000 pound metaphor, that's $250,000 every time you go around the earth. So what if I want to sit it around the earth every week? That's probably what if I want to sit around the earth every day? What if I want to sit around the earth every hour? Even do it, the amount of energy that you consume is just prohibitive. And so faster means that I can send it at the speed of light. And if I can send it at the speed of light, then there's all sorts of high frequency transactions and microtransactions. That makes sense now that never made sense before. How about a world where one rich person makes loans to 10,000 middle class people every week? That's inconceivable with gold. That's not possible with stocks or bonds because of all the. Sometimes it's regulatory compliance issues, or it might be systems issues. But it is possible to imagine with Bitcoin someone will just create the ebay of social finance. What about one rich person that wants to lend money to 10 institutions? What about 10 institutions that want to work with each other? Ultimately, the things that make something slow, it might be massive, like physical mass, like the weight of gold that makes it might be impedance. And the impedance might be a systems impedance. Like it's Friday afternoon and I cannot move money between 4pm on Friday and 9.30am on Monday. That's a systems, it's not a law, it's just a custom. And if it's on Thanksgiving or Christmas, then that doesn't count either. And then there's compliance. There is a law, right? There might be a regulation in a city, a state or a country that keeps the energy from moving. There might be a system that keeps the energy from moving. Or there just might be laws of conservation of mass that keeps the energy from moving. And so by moving out of that domain into the cyber domain, you get speed, which is somewhere in the order of 1,000 to a billion times faster. You put all those together, something that's just continually getting, it's getting smarter every year, right? I mean we've all seen like on Google, right? The computers beat humans on chess playing. The computers are beating us all on everything. The algorithms just keep getting smarter. Wouldn't you like an algorithm that figured out how to make you money while you're sleeping? Because I would program trading, right? The manifestation is program trading right? Now the issue is consumers don't have the power of program trading algorithms to protect their financial interest when their monetary energy is denominated in traditional assets because they can't plug their assets into that new system.
- [57:12]
Unknown
Alright guys, so that was episode six with Michael Saylor here in the Saylor series. And wow, what can I say? We're just addressing bitcoin from every side and putting it in the context of technological development on the whole. Right. As an essential, as all technologies develop. Essentially we're really putting bitcoin in that context. So again, if you haven't seen the earlier episodes, please go check them out because a lot of this is harkening back to that. And I mean, I hope you're enjoying it. I think it's just getting so good. So a sailor goes into, you know, bitcoin is. It's a better tool because it's harder, smarter, stronger and faster than gold. And gold historically is the best monetary technology the world has ever had. And we can look at this a number of ways. The one very obvious instance that's most often discussed in bitcoin is that bitcoin is the hardest money that there's ever been. Meaning it has the highest stock to flow ratio, or said differently, the lowest inflation rate. That one's obvious. We've touched on that one a lot. But another way to look at it is that bitcoin's also the hardest money that's ever existed because it's the most adaptive to entropy. It's the most anti fragile money we've ever had, if not the only anti fragile money we've ever had. And Saylor gives a great example when he talks about a fragile versus an anti fragile defense with the Great Wall of China. So the Great Wall of China was a static defense. It had a single point of failure. And you know, despite all the effort that went into building and securing that perimeter, the Mongols were able to compromise one of the gates and that's all it took. Right. The rest of the wall didn't matter so long as it could be compromised at a single point. And I think this is very interesting because it's pointing to the fact that gatekeepers and gates are weaknesses, right? They are single points of failure in a standard static defense like that. And I really like the quote. I forget who said it, but he said that I think it was Philip of Macedonia perhaps, or Macedonia, that no citadel is impenetrable. If I can fit a donkey with a pot of gold, a road leading to it. Meaning that the defense itself doesn't necessarily matter if there's a gate or a gatekeeper, because you can bribe the gatekeeper. This is another way that bitcoin is out competing the legacy system, because the legacy system is built on gatekeepers, right? That's what central banks are, that's what governments are. They're all just gatekeepers for these flows of economic vitality or monetary energy. And they're all siphoning a tax or transaction fee with every movement. But Bitcoin as we know it doesn't have any gatekeepers. And in fact, bitcoiners are actively engaging with gatekeepers in the legacy system every day to negotiate better deals with regulators, energy producers, users, businesses in the space, etc. So, so I think this is a really important point, that gatekeepers are a weakness and Bitcoin suffers no gatekeepers. That is its breakthrough. It's the first fully disintermediated money we can just transact peer to peer. So that may sound kind of like a nerdy abstraction, but it's really fundamentally important in terms of defending your monetary energy. And then the other great. The point too, that going into the anti fragility aspect is that the best defense is an adaptive defense, right? One that responds to the nature of the threat and the character of the aggressor in ways that let it adapt, basically. Right. And respond to changing circumstances. And I think this is very interesting with Bitcoin because the more the market cap grows, right, the more monetary energy is stored on its network, the more incentivized all network participants are to defend it. To defend the 21 million hard cap, for instance, or to defend, you know, fungibility or privacy at higher layers. And to figure things out on behalf of Bitcoin because it's again, everyone's fate. Everyone's fate in Bitcoin is intertwined and everyone's pointed the same direction. And I think this is discounted, heavily discounted on the price, in my opinion. Bitcoiners are by nature very adversarial thinkers. But what we don't often consider in the network design is we look at sort of worst case scenarios all the time, but we fail to account for how highly motivated Bitcoiners actually are to defend the network and to defend the ecosystem. And I would argue that even in the market price of Bitcoin, this is highly discounted, you know, and well, Bitcoin on balance is relatively highly discounted because it's just so misunderstood. But I would say even those that understand Bitcoin fell to account for this properly. And so again, it's all of these highly motivated network potential participants all engaging with other market participants in the broader market, making better deals, right? And feeding capital into Bitcoin. And in that way, everyone sort of ends up on bitcoin's payroll in a way, right? Like once you become a holder, you have these huge incentives to defend the network, to evangelize, to educate, to build businesses in the space. So it's just a radical vortex of incentives that bootstrap and protect itself. And that's why so many people called bitcoin a living thing. And to Saylor's point, to be truly hard and antifragile, the system needs to be alive, it needs to be adaptive, it needs to respond spontaneously to changes in the environment. And for an anti fragile organism, by definition, when you kill any part of the antifragile organism, even if you kill 99% of it, but you don't destroy all of it, then whatever pain you inflicted on that animal, like it's going to generate a response to that and it's going to come back stronger. So that's what antifragility is, it's the ability to become hardened through hostility. Right? We see these, see this in most organisms. But you know, Brandon Quiddam's wrote a lot about this on computer, comparing mycelium to Bitcoin and that it's this decentralized network archetype that's learning at the edges, right, by having conflicts with different adversarial characters and yet incorporating those learnings into the whole of the organism. And bitcoin is very similar. So in the sphere of money, Bitcoin is the first and only antifragile money we ever had. And if you guys, if you haven't read Taleb's book by the way by that title, Antifragile, one of the best books I've ever read, I've read it twice. It's really hard to stop something that's anti fragile. Antifragile things or organisms or organizations or tools, they dominate the world, right? Because we live in a universe pervaded by entropy. Uncertainty is always unfolding in real time. The things that can adapt best to that uncertainty and learn from it the most quickly become dominant, right? That's just a principle of the universe. So it's a lot to chew on and a lot to get your head around. But when you come to see bitcoin in that light, I think it makes a very compelling case for him. And you know, that's again, it's bitcoin, this antifragile beast, going up against gold, something that doesn't feel pain, inspiration, motivation, it's just an inorganic commodity and also going up against fiat currency, which is probably the most fragile institution in history. The one certainty we know about fiat currency is that it collapses time and time again. So really interesting stuff there, really interesting topics with Saylor. And then we got into another aspect of Bitcoin's hardness and that is it has this diversity of custodianship and custody schemas that we've never before seen with any other asset. And again, this is because Bitcoin is just pure information, right? So the switching costs for custodianship are very low. And that threat of self custody, to Saylor's point, it always forces custodians to behave honestly and to deliver custodial services that are very high quality at a very low price. So it's a very frictionless, it's very frictionless to move your capital from one custodian to another. So it keeps everyone honest and competitive, right? It imposes this free market paradigm. And just thought that was super interesting. And the way I've described that before too is, you know, there's the five properties of money. Bitcoin's optimized or perfected portability because it's pure operation. So it's just information, it can be moved at the speed of light. And because it's just information, it can be moved at the speed of light and it's massless. You can code it into so many different hard to find custody schemes. You know, there's people that have put their private keys into a song or written it into a public article that only they know how to decode. So it's just, it's radically new and interesting in terms of how you can safeguard this asset. And then we got into a bit of how this specter of quantum computing is one of the most popular ways to discredit Bitcoin. Everyone says, oh, when quantum computing breaks through, Bitcoin's over with. First of all, it's totally ignorant of the fact that if quantum computing did actually occur, it would break all of the commercial Internet as we know it. Right? Everything that's protected under cryptography would be rendered useless, essentially. So there are massive incentives even outside of Bitcoin to develop quantum resistant encryption in response to a quantum computing breakthrough. But the other point Saylor makes is that bitcoiners, they live at the vanguard of this space and they have again, north of $300 billion of market cap to protect and they are interacting with these client server hardware implementations on a daily basis, right? Like especially in the mining network. So they're going to be the first to see or smell or detect this type of breakthrough coming through and they'll be the first to adapt. So we left off talking about Bitcoin's hardware and software update cycles and how they compare to other forms of money. And with Bitcoin, the hardware refresh cycle for mining hardware specifically tends to be around one to three years. And it's sometimes a little more extended closer mapping to that four year halving cycle. But that's as more producers enter the space producing ASICs, that cycle is subject to change. But the point is that the hardware securing the bitcoin network is always being refreshed, whether it's one or say, four years. And then the software cycles for Bitcoin vary as well, depending on whether it's node software or mining software. That tends to take place within the scope of a year. But regardless, when you compare this to gold, gold is a dumb, shiny rock. It undergoes zero hardware or software Updates in its 5,000 year year use as money. You know, Bitcoin is so much faster in that respect that it just, again, it's constantly adapting to new circumstances at a rate which gold could never hope to do as gold. Again, it doesn't, it's not hardware. Software does not adapt at all. And that harkens back to the example Saylor gave. It's like, what. Which one are you going to choose to bet on? Are you going to bet on the mountain, the static mountain? Or are you going to bet on the humans that encounter that mountain? The humans that can adapt develop new tools and ways and innovations of moving the mountain or destroying the mountain. And we're back to this static defense versus an active offense. If the defense is unable to dynamically adapt to the nature of the aggressor, then it's always going to lose. So when humans encounter that mountain with this swarm intelligence of ingenuity, we're figuring out how to drill holes into the rock, plant dynamite in there, blow it up, clear it out, build a road through it. So that again, I'm just pointing to where it's better to place your chips, whether it's on the static defense of something like gold or the dynamic defense of something like Bitcoin. And then we got into how money, specifically bitcoin versus gold and fiat is much smarter, stronger and faster. And these aspects, as we touched on early in the series, they're actually the source of all innovational and evolutional value. Right? Again, the reason mankind dominates the world is because, because he's able to coordinate his efforts with others and harness energy and tools in a way that makes him smarter, faster, stronger than all other creatures in the world. And that's what we're doing with innovation, right? We're not physically becoming faster, stronger, smarter, stronger, faster necessarily, although we do become smarter clearly, but our collective efforts are becoming smarter, stronger, faster is the point there. And this reminds me of that quote Saylor brought up earlier in the series that as far as he can tell, mankind is the only animal that plays with fire. Right? Again. So we figured out we've able to self reflect on the nature of the natural universe and figured out how to harness its gifts and allocate them towards our ends. And that makes us very, very unique. This gets into Mises a bit where Mises is one of the fathers of Austrian economics. He wrote a great book called Human Action. And in Human Action he describes the science of praxeology, which is actually the study of purpose driven behavior. And it's man always takes action with means towards ends. So everything is a means or an ends to man, but things themselves are not means. This table is just a materialist item in the universe, but it becomes means when I allocate my purpose into resting my computer on this table, for instance. So we have this very special gift again of kind of projecting our intellect into the universe and then actually channeling energy through it. That makes us just radically different than all other animals. So to get back to money in terms of how Bitcoin is smarter, first of all it's programmable, right? So you could imagine the example we gave was being able to write some automated software that actually created a market for Bitcoin lending and borrowing, right? And this is a super interesting aspect because it actually has the possibility of facilitating a yield curve for Bitcoin, yield curve simply means a market based, typically market based time series that shows you the rate of return you can get on capital by lending it out. And so, you know, anywhere from say one to 30 years, in the case of US treasuries, that is the last element Bitcoin lacks to become a truly preferable global store value. That's the one thing that U.S. treasuries and other government bonds currently have over Bitcoin is that they have a built in yield. And I'm very, I had some talks with people at Lightning Labs about this. I actually think that could be the route through which this, the route this goes. And that if we can develop these time locked lightning smart contracts where people are actually putting Bitcoin into a time locked channel to facilitate Lightning network liquidity and then the markets matching that demand for Bitcoin borrow With an interest rate yield, right? Maybe they're getting a piece of the transaction fees for the routing fees through lightning network that could become that set of time, that set of time series set of smart contracts could become the Bitcoin yield curve that actually leads Bitcoin to becoming this long contemplated pristine collateral, right? Which is which U.S. treasury serves the purpose of today. And in fact this actually points to something about hard money, another way to think about hard money actually if you're holding gold on a gold standard, or you're holding Bitcoin on a bitcoin standard, that money tends to appreciate roughly approximate to the aggregate productivity growth in the world. So because again it's holding its scarcity, so so as goods and services become relatively more abundant, that money holding demand constant would fetch more goods and services, right? So if the global GDP is growing at 3% per year, we would expect that on a hard money standard, the hard money itself would grow at about 3% per year. So this is really interesting because that makes hard money on a hard money standard similar to a non cash counterparty investment in an index fund invested in global equities, right? It's like whatever business is doing whatever in the world to create more goods and services, this hard money that I'm holding with no counterparty risk, I'm my own, it's a bearer asset. So I'm holding it, I'm custodian it, I'm not subject to default risk with anyone else. It actually acts as a passive index investment in all of those global equities, creating more good and services. That's another way to think about it I thought was really interesting. So another way bitcoin is smarter is that it's more defensible, right? So with your gold you can put it in a vault, you can secure it with armed guards, put it in a fortress, whatever. But Bitcoin is unique in that it can be wrapped in technology layers of security. So you can wrap it in two fa, face, id, biometrics, geofencing, all of these unique software enabled security schemes are only possible with something like Bitcoin. And with gold, again it's just not possible because gold will always suffer from the Oracle problem. You'll always need to ultimately trust the custodian of the gold at the end of that chain of security features. Whereas Bitcoin can actually be directly integrated with the software security features. So then looking at Bitcoin, it's stronger money. And to clarify, we don't mean strong like Bitcoin can bench press a lot of Weight, we mean, it's channeling energy with force and acceleration. So forcefully channeling energy. And that's what like a gun is, right? A gun is one of the strongest offensive technologies because it can propel a bullet with more force and acceleration than a sling or a bow. So gun is preferred. But in the realm of money, it's all about channeling your monetary energy with force and acceleration into the right place and the right time to generate yield.
- [77:47]
Michael Saylor
Right?
- [77:48]
Unknown
Like we were talking about earlier with the lending market. And this is yet another way Bitcoin is superior to inferior stores of value like gold or equities. Because with equities, your custodian is going to hold it. They may be lending it to short sellers, they may be lending your stock to short sellers and generating yield for themselves, but as an industry standard, they do not share that yield with you at all. They also do other weird things like rehypothecation and naked short selling and all types of fraud that are just industry norm today. But with bitcoin, since you can have such a high degree of mobility and visibility, you actually could demand that your custodian lend it to short sellers or do different things, put it in different buckets of risk to create yield for yourself as you see fit. And that's just something you don't have the option to do with gold or equities. And again, because bitcoin is so mobile, it's this cross domain asset you can, you can settle with finality anywhere near instantly. It's highly resistant to custodial collusion and regulatory capture, where the reason you don't get yield on your equities right now, whereas the bank does, is because they've colluded and made that an industry practice. So bitcoin, by being this near instant means of final settlement, it's collapsing the event of trade with the event of settlement. And it is between those events in traditional finance where all corruption and systemic risk accumulate, right? Because you can execute a trade, but you don't have to settle, say T +3 or T +5 depending on the asset. And between those times, a lot of games are played on Wall Street. And in the broader financial landscape, Bitcoin closes that window, right? Trade and settlement are now effectively the same thing. You can Demand Final Settlement 24, 7 from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world. So it just again speaks to Bitcoin's incorruptible character. And then finally getting to how Bitcoin's faster, as Saylor describes it, we've essentially dematerialized gold. So we've taken the monetary properties of gold, but we've transitioned them into a tool that's fully dematerialized, purely informational. And when you look at that through the Einsteinian equation lens of E equals mt squared, we've taken M to zero, right? It's massless. So what we're left with is this massless money that can be moved at the speed of light. And that's just radically new and interesting. And as we talked about earlier, it's also related to the super aspects, right? Because it's pure information, you can do a lot of unique things with it that just aren't possible with any other asset. And so this dematerialization of money, it enables a plethora of high frequency and microtransactions that were simply not possible in the past. And it's the other thing is that again, all of these gatekeepers in traditional finance are the ones taking the vigilant on market participants. But in Bitcoin we have this economic network, right? It's bigger than even money. It's a global economic network that has almost no gatekeeping, essentially, if you're just transacting peer to peer, and therefore has much lower transaction and taxation cost, which means there's just less frictions to free trade overall. So this thing is just moving capital. It's all about moving capital much more quickly and with much less friction and impedance. So all this means for market participants, for Bitcoin holders, is they have more optionality, they're going to benefit from more aggregate wealth creation. And the wealth that they do create through this enhanced free trade, they can actually store it in a medium and preserve that wealth in essentially a theft proof form, are highly resistant to confiscation form. So all of these things just make Bitcoin much faster, much more securable. And you know, when you compare that to something like Fiat, you just can't move that off business hours, holidays in between countries unless you're suffering high fees. There's kyc, AML delays, there's just all of these frictions to doing business. Whereas Bitcoin, you can just send it to anyone from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world at any time of day. And that is just a radical enhancement to the speed or velocity aspects of money. And that in a nutshell, you know, Bitcoin being smarter, stronger, faster and harder than any other money in history is why it is freedom money. It is a freedom form of value communication, a language of value, if you will, that cannot be muted or manipulated. I heard a guy I talked with today actually called it a super language object, which I think is interesting. We've collapsed a lot of things into speech in the digital age, right? If you think, say, the 3D printing of firearms, we would say that's a second amendment right, the right to bear arms in the U.S. but we've now collapsed that into the first amendment because code is speech. And bitcoin, interestingly enough, has collapsed money into speech. So something really big is going on here, and bitcoin is at the center of it. And I hope this episode helped show you some of that, and I'm excited for the next one. This is episode six. We've got three left, and we'll see you here next time.