Andreas Antonopoulos (aka Bitcoin Jesus) - Episode 2 - How the unprecedented worldwide crisis in Central Banking system led to the growth of Bitcoin

Full transcript: Andreas Antonopoulos (aka Bitcoin Jesus) on London Real

5:38 This is London Real, I am Brian Rose, my guest today is Andreas Antonopoulos, one of the most well-known and respected figures in the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. You travel the world 365 days per year proselytizing the benefits of the blockchain and have appeared no less than four times on the Joe Rogan Experience. Your latest book, The Internet of Money, explains in detail why Bitcoin matters.

7:02 Andreas, welcome back to London Real. Thank you so much for having me, I had so much fun last time I had to come back. Love having you here, our audience loves you, I think the internet loves you for a good reason because you’re spreading a valuable message. Bitcoin just hit 750. My British pound is dropping in value, going in the toilet.

7:20 What should I do? What is going on with the world? Well, what’s going on with the world is that the the system of central banking is now experiencing a worldwide crisis that’s completely unprecedented. It’s never happened before. You have I think about 25 trillion dollars of bonds that are now negative yield, several interest rates that are negative, dozens of central banks around the world, currency crisis after currency crisis, right?

7:55 And negative interest rates, for people that don’t know, means that you give them money to hold your money, to hold your money, so you pay them interest to hold your money. Yes, the opposite of anything we’ve known in the last few hundred years, or ever really. Yes. In fact, orthodox economics used to say that negative interest rates are impossible and you shouldn’t even approach the zero bound for very long, and yet now you have more than 20 central banks of the zero bound, some and negative interest rates.

8:23 You know, I sometimes start my talks and I say I’m going to talk to you about a radical monetary experiment, and everybody thinks I’m going to talk about Bitcoin, and I say the radical monetary experiment is that more than 20 central banks have their interest rates at negative. This has never happened before, and they’re stuck, they have no way out. So you know, it’s an, it’s a really interesting space because the whole thing about currency is that you don’t need to know how it works unless it stops working, and when it stops working, everybody needs to know how it works because your wealth, your future, of your children, everything now depends on that.

9:04 And so country after country after country, people are learning the hard lesson that currency doesn’t matter until it does, right, because it’s not working anymore. And you were just in Buenos Aires. Obviously Argentina has a long history of sometimes its currency not working, right? Brazil is having a bit of a problem now, of course, you know, the government going through an impeachment, and I heard you also mention, you know, Britain and Brexit and the pound along those in that same sentence when you were talking to Rogan, and it shocked me and then I realized, wait a second, our currency is down, you know, 20 on the year, which for a G7 country is shocking.

9:39 Yes, although it’s not representing the same problems that you see in places like Brazil or Argentina or now also Venezuela, Zimbabwe. Again, these places are suffering in many cases from hyperinflation, and they’re suffering from an overabundance of debt, where it gets to the point where the interest rate payments on the debt are overwhelming for the budget of the country. So it’s not just about repaying the debt, you can’t even make payments in the interest.

10:12 It’s like when your credit card snowball, where the minimum payment on your credit cards is now so big that you’re using a credit card to pay the minimum payments on the other credit cards, and that’s the last spiral. Right, right. Britain isn’t really in that place. I think it’s more of a short-term shock because of the unexpected outcome of the Brexit vote and uncertainty about how the rules will work once Britain is no longer part of the European Union.

10:39 So right, but it makes people who normally wouldn’t even bother understanding what a currency is all about, it’s the pound, it’s always been there, it’s always roughly one and a half to the dollar, you know, but now when they now go try to buy things or they’re wondering why property values are going down or these things are happening, now they have to look at a hard look in the mirror and start asking themselves like, what is a currency, right? And then what is Bitcoin and what are some of these other options? Right, and you know, it’s, as I said, it’s a short-term shock of confidence, not a long-term and almost permanent loss in confidence, which is very hard to recover from once the people no longer believe that the currency will have value tomorrow because it hasn’t, or it’s collapsed in the past.

11:24 Re-establishing that trust is very, very difficult, and you see that in places where that cycle has broken again and again and again. Zimbabwe just started printing its own currency again. For the last seven years or eight years they haven’t had their own currency, they trade in foreign currencies because their own collapsed so dramatically. They printed, you know, hundreds, then thousand Zimbabwe dollar bills, then ten thousand and a hundred thousand, then a million, then 10 million, a billion, 10 billion, a trillion.

11:58 When you’re printing a trillion dollar bill, you know, you have a problem. And then you know you get to the point where, and we’re seeing this in Venezuela now, where prices double while you’re having a beer in the bar and they say, okay, for the next round the price is going to be double, and when people stop counting money and start weighing it instead of counting it. So you see people throwing a stack on. I remember the previous crisis in Zimbabwe, I was watching a BBC documentary, there’s a guy pushing a wheelbarrow full of cash, stacks and stacks and stacks of cash, and they asked them, aren’t you worried they’re going to steal the money that you have in the wheelbarrow?

12:43 He says, no, I’m worried that they’re going to steal the wheelbarrow, which is worth more than the money that’s in it. And they also asked them, why don’t you burn it? And he said, because goat s*** burns better. These are real currency crises that we should kind of be aware of that are happening, right? And this is a recurring theme.

13:02 So in fact, statistically speaking, national currencies have a shelf life of about 30 years before they collapse in value because no government can resist the temptation of financing profligacy through printing, and so they print and print and print and they devalue the currency and inflate it to nothing. They keep printing and keep printing, and eventually you have this sudden collapse in confidence and the currency spikes, the inflation spikes, and the value just drops. Yeah, and we’ve seen this happen in Russia as well, it’s not just you know these small countries that we’ve never heard of, and we’ve seen currency crashes.

13:40 Right, in the country, and it’s happened, you know, you can list the countries where it hasn’t happened, it’s a shorter list than the countries where it has happened. So this is the crisis of central banking, and the problem right now is that it’s not just that, what’s also happening is this competition between nations. So all of these overburdened nations, right, have enormous debt to GDP ratios, they’re over-leveraged and they need to pay off their debt, and in order to do that, the best way to do that is to inflate the currency so that the debt shrinks in terms of its real value because the currency is worth less, which is a way of stealing from savers.

14:20 So essentially you’re attacking the savings of pensioners and other savers in the economy in a shadow tax through inflation to transfer money to the government. The government doesn’t have savings, it has that, so it doesn’t care if the currency is worthless, savers lose the value of their savings. So it’s a wealth transfer, it’s transferring from pensioners really. And this is the crime that’s happening in Greece, my home country, to my parents and in so many other countries.

14:45 So people have saved all their life, see their savings diminish. Now, in order for this to work you have to make your own currency worthless, and this is what the governments are trying to do. The problem is, if you make your currency worth less, other countries that are have a trade relationship with you, essentially you’re exporting the deflation to them, and so they go, oh dear, that’s not good for us, let’s make our currency worth less than the other country, so they start inflating it down, and then you get into this race to the bottom, right?

15:21 So dollar, yuan, dollar, yuan, dollar, yuan, and they’ve been trying to do this. Now the dollar is surging, which is the opposite of what the government wants. Okay, you mentioned, you mentioned Greece, and I think each time I think, you know, you get asked a lot because you have a Greek background, what is the situation there as far as their currency, and where do you see ideas where a cryptocurrency might help or not help in a country like that? It’s a humanitarian disaster is where it is.

15:48 It’s worse this year than it was last year, and it will be worse next year, and it hasn’t been solved. It hasn’t, you know, 98% of the money that was sent to Greece turned around immediately and went to fund Deutsche Bank and the French banks. So the bailout for Greece was really a bailout for the German and French banks because they could not be allowed to fail. And the situation in Greece is dire and it’s continuing to be dire. There’s a lost generation, 18 to 24 year olds who face 60 to 75 percent unemployment.

16:24 Their generation is doomed really, they have no prospects, and the only thing they can do is leave. So this situation is just getting worse and worse and worse, and this has never happened in peacetime in a European country before, this level of crisis, and the rest of Europe doesn’t care. Wow, it’s going to be really fascinating to see how that plays out and how it reverberates across Europe. You know, before we get down in the nitty-gritty, you and I always go down the rabbit hole a bit, can we start off with the people that are tuning in that just don’t know much at all about Bitcoin?

16:56 Yeah. Or all they know are kind of the seedy stories that sometimes get bounced around on the internet, and they don’t really understand what it is, whether it’s old Silk Silk Road stories from years ago or this or that. For people that maybe are hearing this for the first time, how do you explain Bitcoin? So Bitcoin is a currency that exists on the internet, that is created on the internet, that really serves the needs of the internet generation. It does not belong to any government, it’s not controlled by any bank.

17:29 Bitcoin isn’t a company or product or a service, it’s an internet protocol, it’s a method of communication, just like we say the web or email, and that doesn’t belong to anyone, it’s a shared common public good on the internet. Bitcoin is a digital currency and payment system that is a shared good, and it is controlled collectively by the participants in the network. And creating a currency that does not belong to a nation seems weird at first, but then again, you know, we used to have airlines that only existed for one nation and had the flag on the tail, right?

18:11 Flag carriers they called them, and phone companies that were monopolies in one nation and had the flag on them, and now that seems absurd, and I think within 20 years the idea of national currencies as the only option will seem absurd. What Bitcoin is, is a completely global and open system of money that anyone can participate in without asking permission, without registering for an account or showing ID. All they need to do is download an app, just like if you want to participate on the web, all you need to do is download the browser.

18:50 If you want to participate in Bitcoin, all you need to do is download the Bitcoin wallet, and the moment you do so, without registering with anyone or creating an account, you can send and receive Bitcoin. And why would you send or receive Bitcoin? Well, for many people who live in Western advanced nations who have debit cards and tap to pay, it’s not really necessary, but in a broader sense we live in a world that is very fragmented, where money faces borders, very hard borders, strict lines of demarcation between countries and currencies, and you have these national currencies that are badly managed by governments and banks in countries where there is very little difference between a government, a bank and an organized crime syndicate, all three of the same.

19:40 The governments are organized crime syndicates. Zimbabwe maybe, and dozens of countries are like that. And so what happens when they have a crisis is they take the entire population hostage with them. They shut down the borders, you, they create currency controls, you can’t withdraw money from the ATMs, you can’t exchange money for another currency, you go with the ship and sink down with it. And what’s interesting is that Bitcoin is one of those things that actually offers a safe haven in that particular situation, but it also allows people who have never had a bank account to connect to a global financial system simply by downloading an application on a very, very simple smartphone or even using text messaging.

20:26 And there’s more than four billion people who are in that situation, so the vast majority of the human population have not no banking, but very limited banking facilities, a single currency with strict conditions on what they can import and export, and Bitcoin bypasses all of that. It gives everybody a currency that is open and global, and so that creates some very interesting conditions in the world. It allows us to create a kind of unified financial system that exists outside of the mandates of government, that is completely private and is very empowering for individuals.

21:07 And so where’s the hell out of governments and banks it scares the hell out of governments that find it peculiar to have people in control of their own money, at which point you should really ask yourself what kind of government is that, that doesn’t believe in freedom of association, freedom of expression, freedom of commerce. That’s more of an indictment of that kind of government than it is of Bitcoin. If your government is afraid of Bitcoin, you should ask yourself, what kind of government do I have?

21:38 Most liberal governments are not afraid of Bitcoin, they see it as an opportunity for growth and jobs, and they call the industry fintech, you know, the cornerstone of technology, and in fact they should see it that way. Fintech, yeah. This is one of the things that can compete with banks, and banks really need competition, right? They’re way too comfortable with their power and established systems. Right, so we’re in probably the global financial center for banking, second or maybe the same as New York City, but we have a lot of international currency trades here in London, we’re pretty much in the center of fintech because we’re in shortage, which is where technology always started here because the cheap rents.

22:15 So I’ve interviewed countless fintech CEOs in here that are trying to disrupt the pension market, disrupt. I’ve had TransferWise in here, they’re CEOs trying to disrupt currency exchanges in banks by going peer-to-peer. But the funny thing is that a lot of them stay away from Bitcoin. Yes. And at the same time, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, sometimes the banks dip in a little bit, and as I know you said before, they’ll say, oh yeah, well we don’t want to talk about the Bitcoin, but we want to talk about the blockchain.

22:45 And they kind of, I don’t know, maybe choose and pick based on politics or, you know, marketing or I don’t know. What am I seeing flush out in those movements and those ideas? Well, I think it’s important to realize that because Bitcoin is not owned or controlled by anyone, it’s it’s not very appealing necessarily to companies that want to carve out an issue in the market and control it. They have to take a much bigger leap of faith, it’s a decentralized, very disruptive technology that flies in the face of every regulatory system that exists, and so at the moment that’s a bit outside of the comfort level of most businesses, which is fine by me because to the audience that I think we should care about, which is the vast unbanked in the world, the people who suffer under hyperinflated currencies, you know, optimizing the shopping experience or the yields on their pensions is the least of their concerns.

23:49 Right, I mean I live in the Western world, so now I have all these choices when it comes to banking, things I can invest in, services, and so for me Bitcoin isn’t as necessary as some of these other four billion people that might not be able to even hold a currency that doesn’t inflate by hundreds of percent overnight. Absolutely, and you have the freedom to trade in any currency you want, to trade on any stock exchange in the world you want, and you can do that any time of the day or night you want, and your government is not confiscating your bank accounts, is not setting limits on your ATM withdrawals. But you know that may change, it wouldn’t be completely out of the realm of possibility that you have a currency crisis even in the UK.

24:32 We don’t know. Yeah, we don’t know. And it’s interesting because as an American citizen here, I have some dollar balances and no one wants to touch them here. Yes, because of how hardcore the U.S. tax system is, in the IRS, when it comes to cracking down on world citizens.

24:47 So it doesn’t even matter that I’ve filed my taxes every year since I was 12 years old, is that they don’t even want to touch it, they’re like, American dollars, no thanks. So I’m actually discriminated based on my currency and my citizenship over here now. You know, it’s a small version of it, but it’s a small example that these currencies aren’t as fungible as you think they are. Aren’t, you know, right, so there’s two aspects to a currency. There is markets and then there’s politics, and the problem with national currencies is when politics overrides markets, and that’s what your experience in a small way is, is geopolitical considerations overriding market realities, and when that happens, usually that’s reflected in the price of the currency, it’s reflected in the flexibility and liquidity the currency has.

25:35 And so one of the interesting things about Bitcoin is that it is completely neutral to geopolitics, it doesn’t care, it does not, it’s not owned by a nation, and so it has none of the considerations of geopolitics. The, that becomes more and more important the more geopolitics start affecting markets, right? So if you have, you know, a resurgence of the Cold War, if you have a currency crisis within an economic area like the euro, then having a safe haven, having an exit opportunity is important.

26:10 It’s also important to realize that Bitcoin isn’t intended to or designed to, or even, I think anybody who’s in Bitcoin thinks this will happen, it’s not intended to replace national currencies, it’s intended to break monopolies. It’s intended to, it gives people the option, and it’s a completely voluntary system, it gives people the option to have an alternative. So I think of it a bit like exchanging money as a tourist, right? So if you’re living in Britain and you want to visit France, you go to France and you change some of your pounds into euros, great.

26:48 If you do that often, maybe you keep some of the euros between trips so you can have them for next time when you arrive at the airport, and if you go live in France for a while, maybe you start earning euros directly and you don’t exchange as much. Well, I visit the internet as a tourist, so on the internet I exchange my dollars into Bitcoin because that’s the currency I can use to do online shopping in many ways on the internet, very effectively, very securely, very fast. So to me, when I visit the internet, the currency of the internet is Bitcoin.

27:24 Now after a while I moved to the internet, and I started earning on the internet, and at that point Bitcoin became the currency I earned in, and now when I come to the UK, I’m a tourist here, I convert my Bitcoin into pounds in order to spend it here, and but I’m still earning in Bitcoin. So if you think of the internet as a foreign country, okay, where some of us are permanent residents, right, then you start understanding how Bitcoin can be a currency of choice for an internet generation. Okay, and you try to invoice people in Bitcoin, you try to get paid in Bitcoin, and when you can, you try to spend in Bitcoin.

28:00 That’s correct, yes, and I actually charge more if you pay me in a national currency, so there’s a 20% premium if you try to pay me by wire transfer, and the reason is very simple because every time I get paid by wire transfer, I have troubles, I have difficulties, the bank loses the wires, they get the wrong information, they send it to the wrong account, it’s in the wrong currency, and it takes weeks and it takes several phone calls, and when I get paid in Bitcoin, it’s instantaneous or near instantaneous, within 10 or 10 to 30 minutes the funds are cleared in my account, ready to spend, day or night, 24/7,365. And that’s astonishing, the fact that I can invoice someone and it can be the middle of the night on Saturday there and they can pay me in 15 minutes, done.

28:48 So because of that experience, I started charging a premium. At first I said 10 and they found it easier to pay me the extra 10 instead of paying me in Bitcoin, something like that won’t do, so I raised it, and now sometimes it motivates some of my clients to do the hard work to figure out how to get Bitcoin and pay me that way. It’s a great way to encourage them to do that as well. So I was in a fintech event about six months ago here in London and I was interviewing Peter Smith, the CEO of Blockchain, on the stage.

29:14 Yes. And I know you guys have shared a statement before. Yeah, a few times. And he says that he made a statement of, my mom is never going to use Bitcoin, and I was wondering if you agree with something like that, or do you think we should educate our moms and these people that are obviously not the 4 billion people you’re talking about but some of these other people in these G7 countries, what it is. Do you think, I guess I’m asking you, is my mom ever going to use Bitcoin?

29:42 Well, I have an interesting perspective on that. My mom is using Bitcoin. My mom is using Bitcoin to save her pension from the rapacious appetite of an out-of-control great government that tried to confiscate 20 percent of her deposits, and I spent a year begging her to move her money out of the Greek banks because I predicted they were going to collapse, and she did, and she did, and I helped her put it into Bitcoin, and then shortly after that they put currency controls, withdrawal controls, provenance checks, super taxes, extra taxes, emergency taxes, and started taking haircuts off the tops of people’s bank accounts.

30:27 They’ll say, you know, if you’re really rich, if you have more than 50,000 euros, we’ll take a haircut. Well, my mom has her retirement in cash because the only retirement she has is from selling her parents’ property, and if she hadn’t taken it out, she would have lost 20% of her retirement at an age where she’s disabled, she can no longer but go back into the workforce, she no longer has the ability to, especially given the workforce situation in Greece. What are you going to do to that person?

30:57 What are you going to say to that person, live 20% less, man, because the Greek government needs to bail out Deutsche Bank? No. So my mom does use Bitcoin because she has to, and so that’s the difference in perspective between, I’m really glad that Peter’s mom lives in a country where she has the luxury to not need Bitcoin because there are billions of people out there who do not have that luxury, and they’re really the people I think we’re paying attention to in the Bitcoin space.

31:30 You mentioned Deutsche Bank. When we see a lot of these used to be global banks, you know, I mean when I was in banking, Deutsche Bank was, you know, the creme de la creme, you know, the highest, one of the highest credit rating banks, one of the biggest institutions, the JP Morgan of Europe really. When you see these scandals keep hitting these banks, you know, the HSBCs, we’ve seen it all before, what do you make of all that? You know, banking changed, especially after the 70s, right?

31:58 It turned into this casino game. The Wolf of Wall Street, Gordon Gekko, you know, look at the movies that have come out about that, which give the common man an understanding of what’s happening in banking. I worked within banks for many years as a consultant, and so I saw it firsthand: arrogance, narcissism, sociopathy, complete disregard for the rules, complete disregard for common decency. It’s not just a matter of being corrupt, it’s a matter of being so corrupt that you are willing to sell your own customers junk that you know is junk while shorting that junk through the other trading desk, and rig the interest rates and rig the precious metals and rig the markets one after the other.

32:48 And why? Because they know they will get away with just a slap on the wrist and a fine, and they just incorporate the cost of the fine into their cost of doing business and then leverage up and do it bigger next time because they get bonuses to force them, to push them into taking riskier and riskier and riskier behavior. So you know, that’s a simple truth, right? Even you see, like in recently we saw Wells Fargo, they discovered the scandal that went back 10 years where the bank was having signing up its own customers for credit cards they didn’t want because the salespeople were under pressure, they fired people who didn’t meet their quotas, they drove them into these corrupt, fraudulent practices, they opened up millions of fraudulent accounts.

33:39 The CEO walked away with 200 million dollars in bonuses and salaries during the 10-year period because of driving up the stock price. They’re not going to go to jail. They actually fired 5,000 of the lowest paid employees in their bank to scapegoat them, and meanwhile the head of the department walked away with another 150 million dollar bonus, I think. And so the bottom line is the regulatory system in banks is broken, it’s completely captured by the banks themselves and it doesn’t serve in any way as consumer protection.

34:15 And this culture is broken, and the issue isn’t just that they’re defrauding customers, the issue isn’t just that they’re gambling, the bigger issue is that the entire financial system is now an extremely fragile, interconnected edifice that is wrapped with corruption. The whole system is just completely full of corruption and it’s at a point where it threatens the stability of the world economy, right? So encouraging these kinds of behaviors or failing to discourage them has led to a system that is now a threat to the global economy.

35:03 Okay, and Bitcoin isn’t going to save us, right? It’s not ready, it’s not advanced enough. We’ve got a much bigger problem than any solution we have right now. Right, and when Trump now takes his Secretary of the Treasury, ex-Goldman Sachs of course, what do you think of that? Well, I mean, is anybody surprised?

35:29 I don’t know if anybody actually bought that ridiculous platform of anti-establishment establishment, drain the swamp. I mean, come on, is a billionaire is going to be anti-establishment? Let’s be serious, of course he picked Goldman Sachs to run Treasury. House and Hillary would have done the same, right? So nothing changes.

35:51 This is, as I’ve said many, many times, the election choices facing Americans were a choice between blue Goldman Sachs and red Goldman Sachs. You can choose the color, but Goldman Sachs is still going to be in charge, and if you think your vote is going to make a difference, you’re a fool. There are two ways to express power in this world: voice and exit, as my friend Balaji Srinivasan says, and when voice is no longer sufficient, and sometimes even when it is, exit is a more powerful expression, and exit means get your money out of the system, get yourself out of the system, and reduce your exposure to the ridiculous system as much as you can.

36:35 Bitcoin is a means to switch from expressing power through voice to exit, and I think that’s a really powerful way to do it. Now, does working at Goldman Sachs once in your career make you now not suitable to be Secretary of Treasurer, just to play devil’s advocate here? I mean, does it mean that, you know, some of the smartest people in banking shouldn’t be in that position to know what’s up? But it’s not just once, these are consummate careerist bankers who have been in and out of the system at several different stages.

37:06 He wasn’t just a Goldman Sachs banker, you look at the previous parts of the resume, and who are you going to get to drain the swamp? The swamp dwellers? They’re not going to do the job, right? And keep in mind, this isn’t a matter of evil people doing evil things, this is a matter of systemic corruption, because the system itself is geared towards corrupting those who participate, and corrupts them in very subtle ways. They start believing certain assumptions, right, what’s good for Wall Street is good for the broader economy, that without these ways of doing things we wouldn’t be successful or we wouldn’t produce growth or whatever.

37:51 So this, it’s not as if bankers are evil, most of the people who work at banks are really nice people, they’re really smart people, and I’ve worked with many of them and they’re really nice, but if you put them in a system that encourages the worst of human behavior, and that’s how you get the bonuses and that’s how you keep your job, people gradually start rationalizing and they rationalize and rationalize, rationalize and become part of the system, and you know, know better than senior executives or managing directors at Goldman Sachs, I mean they can’t see the forest for the trees, right? Yeah, it’s been indoctrinated. I know, I grew up in that culture since I was 21, 22, you know, I went to Wall Street, I got handed the phone, and for the next six months I got shown how it was done.

38:37 Part of that included, we try to, you know, rip as much money out of every trade as possible, right, or try to do, and, you know, that is the mentality of Wall Street and maybe any other capitalist system, but there it just can get really out of hand really quickly, and risk-taking as well. I mean, banks started off as institutions to hold deposits, right, and in the 70s, like you said, in 80s, they morphed into these casinos. Well, it was the Glass-Steagall Act that was repealed by Bill Clinton.

39:04 Yeah, and that was the beginning of the end. Yeah, and that made it even worse, but before that, you know, people were taking these balance sheets and just putting these huge bets because that just seemed to be the convenient place to do it at the time. Oh, this is the bank has all these bonds, well, let’s quadruple up and see what happens next. And you know, when I was there you got paid an annual bonus on how much you made. Now if you lost a lot of money you might get sacked and then you’d go work for Bear Stearns, and then if you made a lot of money you would get a chunk of it, and so it’s in your interest to take a lot of risk, right?

39:32 And so that’s, like you said, the way people grow. It’s systemic corruption, it’s corruption through the system, through a system of perverse incentives, and no one is impervious to that. It’s not a matter of individual failing of morality, it’s that the system is geared towards producing these outcomes, and as long as you don’t change the set of incentives and organizational structure, these are the outcomes that will be produced, and the regulators are part of the same system that produces these outcomes, and nothing changed.

39:59 You know, the Great Depression of 2008 is still ongoing, and if you want to check with the new Secretary of the Treasury, you know, the first question they should ask them is, how’s the economy going? And if they say the economy is growing and improving every day, they are completely out of touch with what’s really happening in people’s lives, because the people who elected Trump would say the economy is a complete mess. Right, why? Because there’s two economies, there’s two economies, there’s the economy that the hedge funds live in, because these aren’t even banks anymore, they’re hedge funds, and then this is the economy that everyday people live in, in all of the Midwestern states that elected Donald Trump or that screamed for Brexit or that are gonna maybe elect Marine Le Pen in France or, you know, these are people who are still suffering eight years later with enormous increases.

40:54 They look at the papers, and the paper says we have no inflation, the inflation rate is low. Really? If you exclude food, energy and health care and the cost of rent, are you kidding me? So if you exclude, you know, living, breathing, getting sick and living somewhere and eating, sure, there’s no inflation for real people. That’s 80% of their paycheck, and that’s been increasing at double digits.

41:19 So you know, this discrepancy between this bubble that the hedge funds live in and the real world is enormous. Let’s talk about Bitcoin. Ninja, let’s go set up the history of Bitcoin. I think is important to know kind of where we are now because we can learn a little bit about it. Walk us through a brief history of Bitcoin.

41:40 I think it’s 750 today, it’s had a nice run this year. Tell us why that matters, and second of all, I want to quote you one time, I think you said this at a Wired Money conference, maybe this year, last year, where you said Bitcoin, it’s not slow jazz, it’s punk rock, deal with it, as in it’s something that is, I guess, maybe emerging and new that we’re not as familiar, or maybe you can explain exactly what you meant by that. Well, that was a reference to the banks that are trying to sort of smooth rough edges off Bitcoin and repackage it as the blockchain.

42:14 So you know, Bitcoin is open, borderless, neutral, censorship resistance, international money that is not subject to banks and governments, and what the banks want is they take one component of that, which is the blockchain technology, and they say, great, can we take this and turn it into a system that is not open, not borderless, not global, not neutral, not censorship resistant, and completely controlled by banks? No, you can’t. And what you want to do is bring in the creative g, it’s like when they try to do innovation, right?

42:47 They bring in the creative genius and they say, we love your ideas, we love how independent and creative you are, now cut off the ponytail, shave, take off the leather jacket, put on a suit, sit in front of our board and compromise until you’re an empty shell, and then they ask, why is innovation failing within our company? Why? Because you kill it the moment it walks through the door. And this is the same thing with Bitcoin. They want Bitcoin for all of the things except for all of the things that it is, right?

43:16 They want blockchain as long as it doesn’t do any of the things that the Bitcoin blockchain does, which is empower individuals to get free of the control of banks. And so it’s ironic, and that’s was the essence of my message. Now in terms of the price and the history of Bitcoin, I think it’s really important to not focus on the price itself. The price is important in that it determines the amount of liquidity, the amount of economic activity and investment.

43:47 Sure, absolutely, and we see, I see a very clear correlation, every time the price goes up, I sell books, I sell conference engagements, I get more hits on YouTube, all my metrics go up, right? So in some ways I get kind of whiplashed back and forth because of the price, but the really interesting history of Bitcoin is in the development of the technology. As a technology, Bitcoin has been going through this growth phase very similar to where the internet was in the early 90s.

44:22 So the core technology maturing, getting more and more robust, getting more and more secure, every attack strengthening the system, recovering from attacks and then getting stronger and more immune to the next attack, and that cycle repeating over eight years. You know, something astonishing is happening here. You have a global currency that is not only worth 12 billion dollars in total market now, but has been creating economic activity every 10 minutes, which is the heartbeat of Bitcoin, the blockchain.

44:58 Every 10 minutes it has been beating for eight years non-stop, has not gone down ever in eight years, has not been stopped in eight years, and just continues this relentless beat forward. At the same time, the technology itself is evolving so fast. There was recently a developer conference in Milan and the number of just groundbreaking, disruptive, revolutionary ideas that were presented for the first time, these won’t actually reach the end users of Bitcoin for about two years.

45:38 We’re now seeing the things that were invented in 2014 are just now hitting the market. Okay, and the new stuff is impressive, and it’s every three months I am just blown away by some idea that is completely out of this world. Now we’re seeing some of the scalability, the early scalability issues being addressed. So if you think of Bitcoin as a network technology, right, it’s in a process of permanently failing to scale, just like the internet. So the internet was not quite fast enough to do everybody’s email, and then it was, and as soon as it was, people started sending attachments to each other, and then it was like, oh, groaning under the pressure, it can’t do all of the attachments, then it can.

46:22 So people start doing phone calls over the internet and then it starts groaning again, and this process of constantly failing because as soon as there’s more capacity people say, go wow, hey, now we can do HD video, we couldn’t do HD video before, now we can do 3D video, now we can do 3D HD holographic video, whatever. There’s always a new application, and so the applications always expand to fill the available capacity, and then it starts groaning again for a while, and people optimize it and improve it, okay, and expand the scale. Bitcoin has been going through that same growth.

46:57 What were some of these moments in Bitcoin where it kind of got through that growth spurt? We’re actually living through one of those right now. Is this the size of the, is this the size of the block? Yes, the block size. Block size, yeah.

47:07 It’s been a big debate ongoing now for two years as to how to scale Bitcoin to the next level, and during that debate what has come out is this burst of innovation and some of the solutions are really astonishing. For people that don’t understand that concept of the block size, can you explain it? Well, this is just a matter of how much capacity there is for transactions within the core network itself, right? And so there are some fundamental engineering decisions like, for example, do you make the capacity of the core network itself bigger, or do you build a layer on top of it and that increases the capacity outside of the core network, or do you do both?

47:50 And so we’re now in the process of seeing what happens when you do both. There’s a second layer technology called the Lightning Network, which is fascinating, which can expand the scale of the underlying system by a factor of about a thousand or more just in its first iteration, and then we’re also seeing the underlying network being expanded by a factor of two, and both of those technologies are being deployed right now. I think we’re gonna, you know, and of course this is not something you can solve permanently, right?

48:20 As soon as you solve it and create more capacity, the range of applications that you can do with this platform expands and then you’ve got a problem again, right? Much like the emergence of the internet, as you’re expecting. So the trick is to fail but fail gracefully over a period of 25 years and then you win, which is what we managed to do so far with Bitcoin and with the internet. Yeah, right, it’s the same process. So now over eight years, and now some of the solutions that are coming out are just astonishing.

48:48 Okay, who is Satoshi Nakamoto and does it even matter? It does not matter, we have no idea. So Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym used by the inventor of Bitcoin. It’s important for people who are not, who don’t understand Bitcoin, to grasp this basic concept, which is that Satoshi Nakamoto doesn’t control Bitcoin, nobody does. What they invented is a method of coordinating computers around the world that is based on mathematics and that is open source, which means that the code that runs the system is visible to all and is collaboratively developed, and so everyone can inspect the code and understand how it works, and there’s no hidden lever, there’s no secret button, there’s no man behind the curtain or woman behind the curtain.

49:39 The system just is, it’s a system of mathematics, and so the analogy I often use is our life depends on Euclidean geometry, right? We have no idea who Euclid is, we have no idea if Euclid really was one person or if it was a collaboration between a couple of schools of philosophy or a couple of mathematicians. There’s no historical record to know if Euclid was a man, a woman or a group of people, or if he was a good guy or an a**hole, and Euclidean geometry works regardless, right?

50:12 And so Bitcoin works regardless of who Satoshi Nakamoto is or if Satoshi Nakamoto is a man, a woman, a group of people, a good person or a bad person, does not matter. Okay. Bitcoin, should we talk about Bitcoin or we should we also be talking about other cryptocurrencies? I think last time you were here there were other things in the mix, you know, there were Dogecoin and these other ones, also you know there was the whole Ethereum incident that happened.

50:36 Can you just talk on that, and is Bitcoin really the gold standard, is that, should we put all of our weight behind that and really get that in the public domain before we start worrying about other cryptocurrencies? I think it’s a mistake to look at cryptocurrencies as a zero-sum game where one has to dominate over the others, and I think that kind of reflects the attitude we have with national currencies, where it is a zero-sum game and they compete on that level. Cryptocurrencies evolve in multiple directions and some of them specialize for some functions and some of them specialize for other functions, and when they specialize in one area they automatically de-specialize in another, that’s part of the trade-offs.

51:18 So in my opinion, Ethereum and Bitcoin, Ethereum is another system, specializes in doing very flexible smart contracts, which are used to establish a sort of digital form of law or complex financial instruments that are executable on the blockchain. By doing that though, it has a very different rate of development, a very different security model, and it has to make some trade-offs, so it’s not that good at some of the things that Bitcoin is good at and vice versa. I don’t really see them as competitors.

51:55 I’m writing a book about Bitcoin now, due out next year, called Mastering, sorry, a book about Ethereum called Mastering Ethereum to complement the Mastering Bitcoin book I did. I spend most of my time in Bitcoin, it is absolutely the most secure, robust and largest system there, but it’s not at the exclusion of other systems. There’s a big ecosystem with hundreds and hundreds of alternatives based on sometimes the same recipe as Bitcoin, sometimes differentiated in different ways, and I find them all interesting, I study all of those different systems and each one has unique characteristics.

52:39 Okay, did Ethereum have a security problem, did they get hacked, did some things go wrong? Yes. Yes, yes, and yes. Ethereum itself, no, some of the things running on top of Ethereum. So just like Bitcoin, it’s not the Bitcoin that gets hacked, it’s the ecosystem around it that gets hacked.

52:56 In the case of Ethereum it was a specific contract called the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, which was running on Ethereum, the DAO. that got funded a bit too exuberantly when the technology wasn’t mature enough, and one of the things about these currencies is that their security problems come attached to a honey pot of money, right? And so you know, sometimes companies have security bounties, they’ll say, we’ll give someone ten thousand dollars if they find a bug in our software, right, for competitions to encourage experimentation.

53:32 Digital currencies are a bounty themselves, and so they encourage people to attack them, and as they get attacked there may be some losses, but they get better at security. So the DAO created a slightly too large honey pot for the maturity of the system at the time, and it got attacked, and that caused kind of a wave of disruption in Ethereum that still persists to this day, and it’s caused a number of adjustments to the software. Okay, but that’s part of the growing pains, you know.

54:05 I think it’s naive to assume that these things get crushed by problems. They, their process of maturing, the process of maturing this kind of digital evolving system involves stumbling, getting up and getting better, right? And if you think back on the early days of the internet, there were times when a denial of service attack could take down Google for a few hours. Now Google doesn’t go down ever, just as an example. Is that because they don’t get attacked?

54:38 No, it’s because they’ve been getting attacked non-stop since 1997 and they just get better and better and better at defending and being resilient, and the same thing applies to these systems. Okay, low points of Bitcoin in the history was, what, Silk Road association, Mt. Gox going down. Can you just talk about both of those things and how how they’re probably not going to be repeated again, or could they be? They could and they will. So first of all, there’s this issue of black markets, right, and what is a black market?

55:18 Black market is what the people who run the white markets call anything they don’t control. It’s the broad term, it’s the market that isn’t taxed and it’s also the market where people go to get things that they can’t get elsewhere, which usually means things that are illegal in some jurisdiction, but not every jurisdiction is the same, and not what’s illegal in one place is not illegal in some other places, right? There are plenty of things that are legal here that are not illegal in France or Holland or America, and vice versa.

55:49 And so black markets happen and they’ve always happened. In fact, if you look at the statistics, I believe the vast, the majority, more than 60% of the world economy is in black markets, the minority is in what they call white markets. And the reason people go to black markets, and I think it’s important to emphasize this, is not because of a moral failure, you know, the propaganda is that bad people who are immoral go to trade on black markets. The truth is black markets don’t represent moral failure, they represent market failure.

56:31 The reason people go to black markets, which are more expensive, more risky and have both risk of loss and in some cases risk of violence, is because the white market has failed to serve their needs, whatever those needs are. And so if you take a step back and stop making a moral judgment and look at it objectively and say, why do black markets exist? Black markets exist because there is demand for something that the market is not supplying. And I think the classic example was like Russia back in the day to buy dollars, right?

57:03 You know, this is backing maybe back in the 90s when it was really closed, you know, you’re not a bad person for wanting to buy dollars, but it’s obviously the market, the white market is not giving you that option when you’re there, so now you have to go somewhere else to do it where you get an off-market exchange rate and you deal, right? And what type of black market you have in your environment is a representation of how privileged you are in your white markets. So if the black market serves primarily for recreational luxury goods and, you know, to deal with the vices of society, that means you live in a society where most of your needs are met by secure above surface markets, right?

57:43 In Venezuela the black market is for food, right, and that’s because there is no market for food that’s working. So again, I think it’s important to take a step back and not make moral judgments. So why do people use black markets? Because white markets fail. Will there always be black markets?

58:01 Of course. And Silk Road shut down, 20 others popped up in its place. And will people use Bitcoin to trade on black markets? Yes, of course they will. Why?

58:12 Because it’s a very good form of money, it’s a very effective form of money. And people use technology to commit crimes, they use the internet to commit crimes, they use telephones to commit crimes, the first automobiles were driven by gangsters running away from banks, the first shoes were probably worn by someone who clubbed someone else over the head and stole their stuff and needed to run away fast. Criminals use technology because they operate at the highest rate of risk and profit, and so their ability to leverage competitive edge through technology gives them the best return, right?

58:51 And so their early adopters of technology always have been, always will be. Now I don’t want to be flippant, but the fact that criminals use the technology is really an endorsement for that technology. It means it’s better than the other technologies that are out there because they’re testing that technology in an environment where things are very difficult and very risky, and so if it succeeds, that’s an endorsement. The technology itself is neutral.

59:16 People can use Bitcoin to buy food. In fact, in Venezuela right now they are mining Bitcoin to order food from Amazon Pantry. I’m not joking. In a country under currency embargo, they’re using Bitcoin to buy food from Amazon and have it smuggled across the border. So good people will use money to do good things, bad people will use money to do bad things, and that has always been the case, it will always be the case.

59:46 Exchanges will get hacked, individuals will get hacked, and there will be money losses again. That’s not Bitcoin though, you know, so it’s important to look behind the hype. The media loves to sensationalize these stories and paint Bitcoin as something that is weird and deviant and alternative, but it isn’t. And if you look back, you’ll see they said the same exact things about the internet. Right, in the beginning, in the first few years, they said that the internet was a den of thieves, pornographers and terrorists, and then it goes mainstream and now, you know, what do most people use the internet for?

1:00:32 Posting cat videos. So eventually as Bitcoin goes mainstream, what will people use it for? Probably to buy cat videos on the internet. Very well said, really enjoying listening to you there. Talk to me about privacy, security, surveillance, and when it comes to what that’s going to be like for money in the future.

1:00:55 You know, these days if you want to open up an account in a bank there’s a lot of checks that happen. You know, back when I was in banking they were all constantly know your client, what is it, you know, K-I-C-I, KYC, KYC, know your client, that was a big deal, right? And again, I’m now being discriminated as an American and like they don’t even want to touch my money for certain purposes, let alone trying to find out who’s doing what. What is the future of, you know, the privacy of our own money going to look like and why should we be thinking of that right now?

1:01:23 We’re sitting at a historical crossroads where the future of money is going to be digital. We’re seeing a concerted effort around the world to ban cash, to reduce the availability, the value and the liquidity of cash everywhere in the world. We just saw India demonetize the top two value notes they have. Spain is passing a law to make it illegal to make any transaction more than a thousand euros in cash. The probably the 500 euro, 100 euro notes are going to disappear eventually.

1:01:57 You’re seeing this process of demonetization, of removing cash from the economy in order to funnel it all into banking systems that are under constant control and surveillance. This is a very dangerous future, and that’s usually because they want the taxation or they want the legislation, they see either they see that money used by corrupt parties or they just use that as an excuse to control it. The biggest criminals in the world have banking licenses of their own, they don’t need to money launder, they own HSBC and that money launders for them.

1:02:29 You know, the biggest money launderers in the world are the banks, obviously, because that’s where the money is. The easiest way to money launder is if you have a banking license, so of course the biggest money launderers have banking licenses. These are excuses. What they want to do of course is, they say taxation and corruption, but in fact this actually increases corruption. So removing cash from an economy and putting everybody under surveillance doesn’t mean the criminals can’t use money anymore, of course they can, they will continue to do that, they will always have means of doing it, just means that everybody else is under surveillance.

1:03:05 So you end up surveilling the innocent, and what does that give you? That gives you political control. This is a very dangerous road we’re going down. We’ve never had in the history of humanity the ability to monitor everybody’s economic activity all the time, and to give that power to governments without question is extremely dangerous. It won’t result in reducing terrorism, but it will turn several governments into terrorists themselves.

1:03:33 It won’t reduce crime, but it will turn governments into criminals. It won’t reduce corruption, but it will increase corruption of banks, and it will put people at the mercy of a system in which at a flick of a binary switch you can become a non-person. went to the wrong website, attended the wrong protests, associated with the wrong political party, expressed support for the wrong idea, off you go, you no longer exist. You can’t buy food, you can’t buy anything, you can’t earn anything, and all of your money disappeared because we don’t give you a bank account.

1:04:07 No, you turn off the bank account. Oh, okay, why not? And you don’t give you a bank account, right? So and since you can’t use cash for anything, then you basically are a non-citizen, you are a non-person, and what this will end up doing is it will end up putting the burden again on the most powerless in our society, right, the poor, those who don’t have ID, undocumented immigrants, victims of human trafficking, refugees. These people are going to be suffering the burden to create this bourgeois illusion of safety and give massive powers to governments that certainly haven’t earned the trust to have these kinds of powers.

1:04:48 That’s scenario A. Scenario B is a world in which we have a fully connected economy using a form of currency that is neutral, transparent, global and open, belonging to everyone, requiring no qualification to enter or access the system and not under the control of any government or bank. That’s what Bitcoin offers. And so you can make that choice once they flip the switch on you, or you can start now and you can change the trajectory of this world by opting out from a system of totalitarian surveillance.

1:05:21 There is no reason why we should have, accept or believe in totalitarian surveillance of finance by governments. They will not use this to protect us. And maybe here in the UK or in the U.S. you have kind of the privilege of believing in the illusion that your government is going to protect you if you give them those powers. The UK just handed the UK government the most draconian surveillance powers in the history of the modern world with this Snoop’s Charter, right, and with barely any dissent whatsoever.

1:06:01 So no dissent was heard. Now, well, no dissent is possible now, try, see what happens. And this is a very dangerous path to go under, and people in countries that have already experienced totalitarian regimes know this, right? They know they can’t trust government, so they’re a little more wary than some of the others. Absolutely.

1:06:25 Okay. Absolutely, and you can never eradicate cash completely, what you can do is you can criminalize ordinary behavior, and if everybody’s a criminal then the power of government becomes absolute if you can throw anyone into jail any time you want, then government has enormous power, everyone’s a criminal. Now let me play devil’s advocate. If I’m a terrorist organization, for now it’s technically difficult for me to transfer massive amounts of cash. No, it’s not.

1:06:54 Okay, but it’s harder with these rules in place right now. No, it’s not. No, it’s not harder, it’s not harder at all. We have no evidence practically speaking that this really impedes the flow of money. Criminals can deal in large amounts of cash, they can transport oil, you know, most of the terrorist organizations are funded for oil that our allies pay for with billions of dollars in U.S. dollars that we gave them, so it’s a joke to say that terrorists are financed through money laundering associations with banks.

1:07:33 You know, the money laundering doesn’t, anti-money laundering rules don’t stop terrorists from getting financing. That’s or drug dealers, absolutely not, and eradicating cash isn’t going to change that, they’re simply going to shift into other forms of payment, and also the door is now open, digital currencies of all varieties, many far, far more anonymous and stealthy than Bitcoin exist. And so stealthier than Bitcoin? Absolutely, much, much stealthier than Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies.

1:08:05 Yeah, and Bitcoin isn’t particularly stealthy. Okay, the point is because it’s got the open blockchain that you can watch large transactions going through. Yes, criminals will have privacy. The question is whether the rest of us will, and so that is the thing criminals will use, these systems, criminal you will bypass the rules, criminals will bribe and corrupt the visuals and they will bypass the rules, they will deal in gold or Rolex’s or cars. In fact, at some point in the height of the crack epidemic they tried to ban cash in Baltimore in the United States and criminals switched to using Tide detergent as cash: fungible, transportable, brand, unforgeable and useful, just crates of Tide, move it around different houses.

1:08:56 There will always be criminal activity, that’s part of society. Changing the way money works only ends up punishing the innocent. And so criminals will always have privacy. Brian, do you want to also have privacy or do you want only criminals to have privacy and only criminal governments to have privacy? That’s the real question.

1:09:14 So what we should be doing is not to know your customer rules, what we should be doing is know your banker rules, KYB, and know your government, KYG. Guess what? They’re funding the war criminals, they’re funding the terrorists, they’re paying the arms dealers, and they’re doing it using the banking system that they’re supposedly doing oversight on. It’s amazing to me that we’re looking at Tor browsers and we’re looking at, you know, crypto emails and yet people don’t even think about their spending habits, which are, right, would you say more about you than your browsing habits, right?

1:09:46 And yet all that information is in these banks or these credit card companies that we don’t even think twice of where, and I would argue that those can predict your future behavior by a factor of 10 to your browsing habits or something, very you know, where you put your money says a lot about you, and so that information should be something you take very, very seriously. Most people do not assume they need privacy, and the reason they do not assume they need privacy is because they haven’t been persecuted because of their financial activity yet. If you go to some of the countries where they have been, they know that’s not something to really feel safe about.

1:10:22 In most modern developed nations today we accept the notion that state and church should remain separate. Why? Because hundreds of thousands of people died through religious persecution when state and church were joined at the hip. You won’t really accept the notion that I take for granted and many people who are in our space take for granted that state and money should be separate, and the only way to learn that lesson is until people are persecuted for the financial activity, because if you give the power of government over the church or if you give the power of government over money, they will use it, and in countries where the government is criminal they will use it to oppress people.

1:11:11 And so having self-expression, the power of assembly, association, expression through commerce in your financial activities and separating state and money should be a no-brainer. It’s not yet. I hope we don’t have to learn that lesson the hard way. How is this going to play out in the next 10 or 20 years? You know, how is it the hard way going to happen, do you think?

1:11:37 I mean, I’m sure you can think of scenarios where you hope this doesn’t happen, but like you said it’s going to have to be a lesson we’re going to probably have to learn the hard way, because I have people on here all the time, I have Andy Michonne talking about privacy, I had Cory Doctorow over here the other day talking about intellectual property and the fact that we don’t even think that we don’t even own our IP anymore, right? And everyone’s just, they let it go off their back because it doesn’t immediately threaten them. Right, it’s like smoking the one cigarette, you don’t think about that you’re gonna get lung cancer in 30 years.

1:12:06 How are we going to learn this lesson? Well, I hope play out, I hope we don’t learn it the hard way, but you know, ask a Greek, ask a Cypriot, ask an Argentinian, ask of Venezuela and ask a Brazilian, they’ve learned the lesson the hard way, sometimes many, many times over a single generation. Sinclair Lewis said, wrote a fantastic book called It Can’t Happen Here about the rise of fascism in developed countries. We’re now seeing it all across Europe and in my opinion in the United States.

1:12:37 That is a potent lesson for people. These are the tools of government, and when you give these tools to government you have to assume, what happens if you have a bad election? We just had one in the U.S., in my opinion. In fact, either way the outcome would have put the hands and tools of government in the hands of an authoritarian leader, Trump, Clinton, same thing, and now we have an authoritarian leader who has drone power, torture power, surveillance power.

1:13:05 What happens if you have a similar bad election in the UK where the surveillance powers are 10 times stronger? What happens when France goes down that road? It’ll be ironic if in the 21st century Germany saves the rest of the world from fascism. And you know, we’re seeing this, totalitarian systems are expanding, and it’s largely the result of economic distress. Economically distressed populations look for a scapegoat and believe in populist extremist rhetoric, and gradually the bonds that hold society together, the institutions that keep us civilized and keep us free, start corrupting and eroding and collapsing.

1:13:47 There’s ways to stop that, and part of these ways to stop that is to trust our neighbor more than our government, is to have hope for humanity and be optimistic instead of succumbing to kind of the base instincts of scapegoating and demonizing those who are different from us, and money is certainly one aspect of that, it’s a fundamental aspect of social cohesion. It’s a language of expressing value to each other and it’s a tool that has always been in the hands of individuals, and if you give that to government they will use that power for evil. This isn’t funny how we’re talking about a cryptocurrency technology that’s about money, and if we go down that rabbit hole far enough, we end up saying it’s about you and me and how we relate to each other as people, and if we want to get somewhere as a human race, we need to figure this out.

1:14:57 So it’s not about tech and it’s not about cash. No, it’s not, it’s about human rights. It’s absolutely about human rights, because what most people don’t realize is that money plays a fundamental role, just like language and culture, in allowing human organization to scale beyond a band of 100 people or so and to create cohesion in societies that are larger. Without trade, social cohesion falls apart very quickly. Without money, you know, the bonds that tie together and make an economy function, a large city like London, these things start collapsing very quickly, and you see in failed states, very quickly after the failure of currency you have the failure of social institutions and things devolve very, very fast after that.

1:15:43 So money is this invisible technology, just like language, just like culture, that keeps society able to function at the larger scale of organization without violence. If you take away these tools or if you give control over them to a small number of people, bad things happen, and we should assert our ability to have freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion and freedom of commerce, because from those freedoms you get free association, freedom of assembly, freedom of political expression. If you don’t have freedom over commerce, the, you can’t have freedom of expression an association.

1:16:22 Right, if the government can watch everything you do, if they can watch every time you spend money, their ability to control your behavior is enormous, and maybe this government won’t, can you guarantee for the next 10 elections that you won’t accidentally elect one that does exploit that power? And that’s why you don’t necessarily trust governments with powers that you’re not sure they can’t use against the population. You travel the world. Yes. 365 days a year.

1:16:55 Now you just spent a month in Argentina, you’re here for five days and you’re somewhere else, you’re somewhere else, you’re on your ears on the ground, you know, you’re talking to all these people in all these countries, you know, about Bitcoin, about cryptocurrencies. What do you see, what do you hear that I don’t see, you know, that a lot of people in these urban cities listening to mainstream media, what do we not know about how people feel about taking control, you know, of their finances, of their privacy, and are you optimistic or are you not? I’m optimistic because through traveling a lot I see the world from a perspective that is post-national, that is not about nationality, and to me nationalism is one of the most corruptive, poisonous forces in this world.

1:17:45 At a very fundamental level, when I go to different countries and I talk to different people, they speak different languages, they have different cultures, different religions, but they’re all motivated by exactly the same things. They care about family, connection, their children, safety, financial security, the ability to offer education, shelter, clean water, food to their children and to their family, to support each other, they believe in community and connection with other people. These are universal values, and so you know, the things we have in common, a desire for freedom, a desire for safety, are the same all around the world, and you know, the more you travel, the more you see the world, the more you realize that those are the things that keep us united.

1:18:38 We are one human culture. I’ve become even more anti-nationalist now that I travel a lot than I’ve ever been before, and it’s just a way of dividing us really, right, artificial lines that you can’t see from space that divide people for no other reason than to allow control, because they serve those who are in power to make them more powerful and more comfortable and more rich. But in the end there’s no difference between a Greek attack or a Syrian or Brit, right?

1:19:23 And so to me these arbitrary divisions are toxic. I don’t consider myself a citizen of any nation, I carry a passport, three actually, because I have to, but I don’t pledge allegiance to any nation. I, you know, I see myself as someone who is part of a human family, and there’s a lot of people who believe that, but that’s also privilege, that’s also because I have safety and freedom of travel and financial security and the ability to do this, right? And it’s when you lose those things that these divisions become sharper, right, when you lose your safety and your freedom and your financial security, then you start looking at your neighbor next door who looks different from you or who speaks a different language or belongs to a different religion suspiciously, and you know, it’s really disappointing to see, you know, 2016 has been a shocking year in terms of seeing the rise of these extremist movements all around the world.

1:20:37 Tell me more about you. Is it true that when you first learned about Bitcoin you didn’t eat for four months? I lost about 20, 26 pounds in four months, yes. This is in 2012. This was in 2000, yeah, 2012.

1:20:52 Okay, and it seems like you and Bitcoin, you know, you’re like peanut butter and jelly, you were always meant to be together. Yeah. You found it when you found that technology in 2012, is that something that happened, you just dove completely into it? Yes, and it wasn’t the first time I did that, it was the sixth time I did that. My first computer when I was 10, I disappeared for six months, my first PC, my first modem, my first access to the internet, my first website.

1:21:21 Each one of those was experiences, was experienced by me as kind of this moment of insight that just blew my mind, and I went with it. That’s part of being a geek, I get overly enthusiastic by technology and obsessed by technology, and so I did a deep dive every single time. The only difference is when I was 10 and I went to everyone I knew and I said, these computers are going to change our world, nobody believes me because I was 10. Now I make a career out of doing that and at least some people do believe me.

1:21:54 And you got so obsessed back in 2012 that you just wanted to know more about it until you learned all about Bitcoin and the blockchain. I didn’t learn all about Bitcoin and the blockchain, I’m still learning. There is no end to this rabbit hole, the deeper I go the more I see, the more I see the deeper I go, and I’m now in my fifth year and I’m still learning every single day, I learn something new. And you are a unique character in this space because first of all, like I say, hands down you are the best person to talk to about Bitcoin because you understand it, and as you know better than anyone else you can relate it in real terms with real consequences to other people.

1:22:36 You’ve just done it in the last hour. I’m no, I know people are watching and they’re like, oh, I get it, finally I get it. But you’ve made this choice to like almost live this life where you’re traveling the world to just talk about this technology, and like I know in the past you had some commercial ventures, but you kind of, it seems, have pushed a lot of those to the side, and now you are this kind of this guy that is just out there to just talk to the world about what’s happening here.

1:23:02 It’s an interesting existence, you have to admit, it’s a wonderful existence. I am so blessed. I have the ability to do what I love and people actually pay me to do it, and I am almost ashamed to call it a job because a job should be hard, and it’s certainly exhausting at times, but I love every single minute about it. I get to do what I love, which I would do whether I get paid or not, and people still, now after the first two years, occasionally pay me.

1:23:36 It’s a wonderful existence and I feel so lucky. I meet so many amazing people around the world, but you got to realize that you know, what I do is because I have skills in the area of communication, is by no means, you know, the most important thing in Bitcoin. I’m the explainer of Bitcoin, that’s my role, that’s the role I chose to have, is try to bring it to as many people as possible, which means that I have a very high profile, people know who I am through my videos and things like that, and they often mistake the fact that I am known to also meaning that I’m somehow important in Bitcoin.

1:24:20 You are important. I, yes, but I get to be the spokesperson and I get to kind of bask under the light of publicity, but there are thousands of really, really hard working, brilliant people in Bitcoin who nobody has ever heard of. I have because I pay attention to what they do, who are truly brilliant, unselfish contributors who work often as volunteers without pay and who build fantastical things, and I get to talk about their work, so don’t mistake the fact that I talk about it with the fact that somebody else did that work, right?

1:25:02 Okay, I’ll give you that, but you’re being very humble here, so let’s not mistake the fact that you could take all of this knowledge and try to build a company and try to exploit all that knowledge and try to make a lot of money on Bitcoin, and you’ve specifically made the choice not to, but in fact I almost look at you as selflessly giving to the world by going and talking about this technology, because no, you know, you could be making 10x the money you make right now if you wanted to. I it’s, a lot of people you’ll find in Bitcoin are not driven by money. It’s really ironic that we work in a space and some of the most important contributors in this space are not driven by money, they’re driven by personal fulfillment.

1:25:41 They have the luxury of being able to do work that is self-actualizing and empowering and emotionally worthwhile but is not really that profitable. In fact, if you see someone who’s making a ton of money in Bitcoin, they probably compromised quite a few principles to get there. The bottom line is that I love doing this, and so to me this isn’t really a choice. It’s not, like I said, it’s not like I gave up making money to do this, I simply choose to do what I really love doing the most, and I get paid to do it, so I’m perfectly happy.

1:26:26 Last time you were here you wouldn’t tell me what city you lived in in America, right, because it was too dangerous for you to mention that. Yes, because of the space you’re in, there is some types of people I think that want to try to get you or come at you, and I had this conversation with Peter Smith off stage, the CEO of Blockchain, and he’s like, Brian, I don’t say anything about where I live to anybody because people come after me, and I’m like, well who? And he’s like, I don’t even know.

1:26:53 That they do come after you in this space, even though it’s not like he’s trying to do something bad for the space, he’s probably trying to do something good for this space, as are you. But why is it dangerous, or why do you have to be very careful about the information you give out there? You know, I mean there’s probably one eight, one out of every thousand people is a sociopath, that’s the bottom line, and if you do something that is high profile enough in a space that draws a lot of attention, especially a space that is related to money, and people see that and think, maybe think that I have a lot of money or Peter has a lot of money, which is usually not the case, but also people get very passionate about these topics, and sometimes with that, if you combine that with someone who has some mental issues, it can be dangerous.

1:27:40 The good news is I don’t have to, I don’t have to be vague about where I live anymore, I can tell everybody I live at Airbnb full-time, where, everywhere, right? And so yeah, and a lot of these people are probably great hackers as well, so they can probably find out information and do things as opposed to say other fans. Yeah, it’s fantastic, they will find out where I live and a week later I won’t live there anymore, so too late, bye-bye, right? So it’s just part of the job and you roll with it.

1:28:10 Yeah, I mean I had to get used to managing my privacy and managing my security in a very different way than I did before, but it’s totally worth the opportunity to do something that I feel is really important and it’s extremely fulfilling, so I just look at it as part of the job. Okay, so no more email accounts getting hacked and credit cards getting hacked and strange, I mean, you know, sent to your home nowadays, everybody has to do security and I used to work in the security space so I’ve always taken that approach with my life. Everybody needs to do that now, you have to become security savvy.

1:28:50 It’s part of living in an interconnected world. Okay, a lot of people watching you know are taking things more seriously the way you talk about their money, their own privacy, because I think that’s a really big deal. What should they do? You know, say a lot of people watching us are in the G7 or the G20, they’re probably in a situation where they have options when it comes to where they can put their money. Should they go ahead and get a Bitcoin wallet and at least understand how this technology works and starts trading?

1:29:16 What are the next steps they can take to just get a little more freedom, to open their mind a little bit to understand more? Well, just because we had this really very serious conversation about very serious issues of geopolitics in the future doesn’t mean that Bitcoin is very serious. I mean at the same time it’s a lot of fun, it’s a really exciting technology, it’s a really exciting space. Like, remember what it was like when you first got on the internet, you’re like, oh my god, I can talk to all these people all around the world, how much fun is that?

1:29:48 Yes, it was empowering for dissidents in China to be able to voice their opinion, but it was also fun, right? So think of it, Bitcoin, that way. It’s a technology that opens doors for you, it opens the world up to you, and it’s a really fun technology, especially if you like technology, seeing what the future of money is going to bring and getting that glimpse early, participating in this vibrant community that’s full of innovation and creativity and really, really smart people playing around with these technologies so you can see how they work.

1:30:23 I mean, do it just for the fun, and I always make sure to tell people, do not invest your life savings in Bitcoin. It’s extremely volatile, right, it’s an experimental technology, it’s at its early stages, it can move a lot. Can you explain why it’s volatile? Because a lot of people don’t have a concept of why or what even volatility means. So volatility means that you buy a Bitcoin, you spend, you know, maybe you buy a tenth of a Bitcoin, you spend 75 dollars equivalent today, and tomorrow morning it’s worth 65 and you’re like, what the hell happened, where did my 10 go?

1:30:59 And then the day after it’s worth 78 and then it’s down to 60 and then it’s up to 80 and you’re like, what the hell is going on? That’s what volatility means. Now it’s getting less volatile with time. Volatility is a function of how big the economy is. Think of it as two seagoing vessels, right, and you’ve got the US dollar and that’s like the Titanic, it’s bloody enormous, you know, there’s way Titanic sank.

1:31:23 Yeah, well, that a reference, that’s not a coincidence. Okay, so it’s a big boat, it’s a giant cruise ship, right? And so what happens when waves bash against the cruise ship, it barely moves, right, because it’s displacing 800,000 tons of water, and then next to it you’ve got this Bitcoin and it’s like a little inflatable speedboat, right, like a Zodiac, and every time it hits a wave it bounces, and that’s simply a matter of size. As it gets bigger, and we’ve seen that over the last eight years, the moves go in a narrow, narrower range and it gets more and more solid, right, but it still gets pushed around quite a lot.

1:32:06 12 billion dollars sounds like a lot of money, but in terms of national currencies it’s smaller than a Caribbean nation, and because it has global reach but not yet global size, it gets pushed around a lot. So don’t think of Bitcoin as an investment in terms of funds, maybe you want to diversify a bit, put a bit in to try and see how it goes, but certainly don’t invest even a significant amount of money into this technology unless you know exactly what you’re doing. Very few people do.

1:32:40 Unless you understand how Bitcoin works, you should not be investing large amounts of money in it. That doesn’t mean you can’t go out and buy half a Bitcoin, a Bitcoin, two, three Bitcoin, whatever, and try the technology. A lot of times people think that it’s expensive, but you can buy a hundredth of a Bitcoin and then it’s seven dollars, right? And you can do that from a Bitcoin ATM, which is like a cash machine, you put maybe a five quid note into it and it spits out Bitcoin onto your phone.

1:33:12 Yeah, they got one at Old Street station right here. There you go. So you can experience the technology with very little risk, and these days the iPhone now has an app where you can put a wallet on there that didn’t exist a couple of years ago, there’s dozens of wallets, go ahead and carry that currency around on your phone and, right, use it as you wish with people that will accept it. It’s sometimes difficult to get in because people don’t know how to navigate, like if you want to get on the web you have to download a browser, which browser do you download?

1:33:38 Most of them are good, right, as long as you don’t download Internet Explorer, right, then you’re okay. So your friends will advise you against that, so it’s useful to have a friend. Most cities have a big Bitcoin community, so I would say, for example, if you have an iPhone, a really nice wallet to download is Bread Wallet, or you can try a wallet called Copay. If you have an Android, I would recommend a wallet called Mycelium, which means mushroom in Latin, or Copay again, which is cross-platform and does multi-signature technology.

1:34:11 These are wallets that are reliable, sturdy, well-built and quite secure. I use both or all three of those myself. I’m not endorsing the specific product, I don’t build it, I don’t have any financial relationship with any of these companies, but maybe that saves someone from making a bad choice. You’ve got to realize that on the app stores there are some rogue wallets that are lurking, so if you just search Bitcoin wallet you might end up with something that’s dangerous.

1:34:41 If you try one of these choices, in fact download several. If you pay Bitcoin to yourself, the system doesn’t know the difference between me sending money to you and me sending money to my other wallet on the same phone, so you can have two or three wallets, you can put five quid in at the ATM, get some money and then bounce it around and test all the wallets for yourself to see how they work. Right, and there’s no transaction costs. There is a transaction cost actually, and the transaction cost has been rising lately because of congestion on the network, it sort of sorts out which transactions people really want to do from junk transactions, if you like.

1:35:16 Okay, the transaction cost is somewhere between 10 and 15 cents per transaction regardless of the amount you’re changing, you’re transmitting. Okay, and that’s slowly going up because it’s more congested. Yes, and as we find solutions to the congestion problem or those get activated on the network, they’re probably going to drop again, but they’re dynamically calculated depending on how busy the network is. Okay, tell me about you, what’s your biggest challenge that’s on your horizon, like for the next year, what’s the kind of thing that’s on your mind?

1:35:49 Well, I mean, I think my biggest challenge is finding stability and centering myself and being productive, right? So I travel a lot, I don’t have many of the kind of traditional forms of grounding, like if I, I don’t have a home, so I have to find my stability no matter where I am. I have to find somewhere to work out and get some fitness, get my blood pumping. I have to be able to focus on my work every day and not be distracted by Twitter and Reddit and a thousand trolls screaming at me.

1:36:31 I have to tune out the news, you know, never watch news or a TV because mostly it’s sensational drivel and depressing, and focus on the things that are important to me, and that’s often difficult, right? And so I have, like everybody else, I have my coping strategies, and mine are a bit different than most people. You know, if you have a safe space that you call your home, you go there. I don’t have that, so I have to internalize that and take it with me.

1:37:05 How did you make that decision to walk away from the home? One of our other guests that comes on, Steve Maxwell, he made that decision a few years ago and now, like you, he carries on his back less than he weighs, right? But that’s a hard thing to walk away from. Yes, you know, as a human we’re taught that the home is that place of safety where we relax. It’s an illusion.

1:37:27 Creating safety through stuff is an illusion, and it’s a very deliberately manufactured illusion to support a consumerist economy, but at the same time it’s a very powerful illusion that you become accustomed to and you stop judging or challenging that assumption. I made this decision very simply. I traveled first, I traveled 20 weeks a year, then I traveled 25, then 30, then 35, and at some point I realized that I arrive home, I unpack, I stock up the fridge, clean the house for two days, empty the fridge, repack, clean the house again and leave, and I suddenly, it dawned on me, my home is a storage locker, a very expensive storage locker with an ensuite bathroom and kitchen.

1:38:14 But what the hell am I doing? It’s storing stuff that I never use. I never go on the road with my two suitcases and say, I wish I had that thing I left at home. Never. I never miss the stuff that I leave behind until eventually it’s been sitting there for a year, I’ve been renting the space to hold it, and I don’t need it, and then you go through this wrenching process of divesting yourself of these belongings and you want to hold on, but then you logically think about it and say, when did I last use this?

1:38:46 When did this last give me joy? Has more than a year gone? Go away, go away, go away, go away, until you’re down to what do I actually need, and it’s so liberating and it’s also so refreshing, it changes your perspective on life. I know exactly how many pairs of socks I have, most people have no idea. I know exactly how many shirts I have.

1:39:06 Why? Because I only have six, simple as that. If I want to buy a pair of socks, I throw away a pair of socks. If I want to buy a T-shirt, I throw away a T-shirt. Why?

1:39:16 Because I’m at my weight limit, there’s no room in the suitcase. That’s it, my life is a first in first out queue, right, nothing comes in all this thing goes out, and that keeps you extremely centered, and so it’s liberating, it’s so liberating, not having things, not having things somewhere else that are in storage, and switching life from ownership of stuff to experience and human relationships, and it’s, you don’t need the stuff, it isn’t secure, in fact it anchors you and makes you more vulnerable to a crisis, it makes you more vulnerable. I have much more freedom and much more security now, because I can get up and leave anytime I want and everything I need I have with me.

1:40:08 The things you own end up owning you, right, and you don’t realize how true that is until you stop owning things, and then you feel this weight lifted from you, and it’s just so much fun. Do you, when you see something like Venezuela, because I was thinking about what keeps you up at night, and you’re seeing people there that are starving, you know, they can’t get these basic goods, and it’s not because they don’t exist, it’s because it’s in this crazy system of mismanagement where the government’s put these controls here, they’ve overspent their oil wealth, and you know it technically is an abundant nation on the surface.

1:41:11 Does that mean, does that upset you, or you’re like, wait a second, we don’t have a system of currency involved where people can make other decisions and find ways around a government that keeps them from doing that? It used to upset me, and at times it does upset me, looking at the state of the world and recognizing that the world is completely f***ed up is can be upsetting, but then at the same time I don’t control things, and dwelling on things I don’t control and the fact that the world at times seems like a horrible place, in a way part of that is confirmation bias. It’s the fact that we only pay attention to the things that are going horribly wrong because they grab our attention, rather than the hundreds of thousands of good stories every day about real people getting better off in their lives and the world progressing in ways that are unnoticed but equally powerful.

1:42:08 I don’t control these things, so I try not to dwell on them. At times I do and it’s upsetting, but I think one of the things to remember is not to fall prey to the all-too-common human illusion of uniqueness, of special circumstances, of privilege, and say, what separates me from a person in Venezuela who is starving? Am I morally superior? Have I made better choices? Have, am I a better person because I’m not in those circumstances?

1:42:46 And remind myself that no, you know, but for a few chance circumstances I could be there, I could be suffering in exactly the same way. We all could, this could happen here, this could happen in any country, it can happen to any person. And so you can look at that and be terrified by it, you can look at it and it can, it can either fill you with dread or it can fill you with compassion, and you can say, well, what can I do to help there, or how can I learn from that lesson and be more vigilant in my life, or at least acknowledge how fortunate I am and say, great, I’m so grateful, I’m so lucky to be able to live the life I do, because most of the time, you know, we’re sitting in there in traffic banging on the steering wheel going, oh my life sucks right now, I’m 10 minutes late, I haven’t had my cup of coffee, you know, whatever, it’s like, your life does not suck.

1:43:59 Andreas, I always ask everyone a couple questions at the end, I’m going to ask you again since I hit you with these last June as well, but things change. If you could make that phone call to the 20 year old Andreas and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell them? It’s gonna be awesome. I mean, I feel so lucky right now. I have no idea what I could possibly tell my 20 year old self to persuade them that what I’m experiencing right now could actually happen, because honestly, as a 20 year old, I wouldn’t believe it.

1:44:36 You know, go back to 20 year old self, I’ve just barely left Greece, you know, and I’m living in London and I’m lonely, and I’m a student, I’m in a foreign country, I’m disoriented, I’m young, I’m immature, my life seems really not so fun, and what I thought was possible then and what has actually happened in my life are just so different, it’s amazing. Well, you’re reaping the rewards of these things you’re doing. You know, you have a real community of people that, like, need you, and you’re out there like giving information to these people, you know, you’re really giving a lot, you add just massive amounts of value in your life and you’re doing that to people on a global scale, you know, through your videos, to all the conferences you go to, and so I think you’re reaping the benefits of living a life that way.

1:45:30 I feel as if I’m in a giant pinball machine and I’ve bounced from pin to pin, or I’m going down a whitewater river on a raft, and so at some point you have to make a distinction between, is it because I was paddling hard or did I just happen to hit that wave? And truly I believe that most of what happens in our life is more about where the river wanted us to go, where random chance and chaos send us, than how hard we’re paddling towards that distant goal, right? And that doesn’t mean that you just lie down, give up and stop paddling.

1:46:14 You still have input into this process, but when you, if you actually do hit that goal, don’t make the mistake of thinking that you’re the one who led you there, right, because we’re all one chance encounter from going in a completely different direction. So you know, sometimes you just like see where things are gonna take you. I don’t think the where I am today is about the choices I made, certainly not entirely about the choices I made. Yeah, it’s a good way of looking at it.

1:46:49 Best advice you’ve ever received, could be something about technology, about speaking, about writing, about anything in your career, but is there something that sticks to your mind of like, yeah, I remember that, what your mom said, anything? I think probably a lot of the business experience and knowledge I have had, which is very much driven by an American mentality to doing business, is that failing is okay, and that if you learn something from failing and fail quickly and fail in a way that doesn’t damage your chances of succeeding forever, then you just start again and try again. And I have failed so much in my life and some of those times I learned something and then I failed a bit less hard the next time or in a different way, or hopefully not in exactly the same way again, although that has happened too, and not being afraid of failure, right, because that’s what most people are afraid of, and so they’re so afraid of failure that they, and I too was so afraid of failure that I didn’t take any chances.

1:48:06 The older I get, the less afraid of failure I am, the more willing I am to take chances, the more willing I am to be vulnerable, to deal with uncertainty, to deal with risk, and to do things that seem crazy at first or out of character, and to really just step out for just a second and do something that I wouldn’t otherwise do. That has served me very, very well. So I wish I could go back to my younger self and say something that could persuade me to be less timid then, right, to be willing to take chances, to be more vulnerable.

1:48:46 Yeah, me too, I’m getting better at it, I’m taking more risk as I get older. Yeah, and the opposite. Yeah, and the other thing that I’ve been, you know, quite fortunate is gradually learning to not give a damn what other people think about me, as much as that’s humanly possible, of course, it’s not always possible, but really not caring about what anybody else thinks about me. Last part of that question, to that 20-year-old that’s watching us from Venezuela or Zimbabwe or China or Buenos Aires where you just came from, probably similar to the 20 year old Andreas that was here in London not sure what to do, want to grow up someday and have an impact on the world like you are, what advice do you give to them?

1:49:28 What are some of the things that they should look on their horizon or things they can do or things to avoid? Well, I mean, if I wanted to be honest, I think the most important thing you can do for your success if you’re in one of those situations is try to be born as a white, upper middle class, educated background if you can. Hit that jackpot, because it’s really kind of hypocritical to go and say to someone who’s born in Venezuela, who’s born in a rural area in China, who’s born in sub-Saharan Africa, and say, you know, try hard, start your own business and you can achieve this success.

1:50:11 That’s b******t. I was born into a comfortable middle class family with two educated parents and I’m a white male, it’s like I already had the trifecta of lottery winnings at birth. I was born to a relatively prosperous country, I was born with dual citizenship, I had lots of options. I don’t really have any advice because everybody faces completely different starting circumstances, and I don’t believe the world is a fair place or that you become whatever you choose or want to be or that it’s a level playing field.

1:50:52 I think a far more of our life is determined by chance, by circumstance. Now having said that, I think transcending the limitations of your beginning and saying, you know, a lot of the things that you take for granted aren’t true, aren’t real, don’t even exist, they’re completely imaginary structures, and taking a step back and saying the world isn’t as you may think it is, the world is far more complex and far more nuanced and a lot of the things that we assume and take for granted are completely fictitious constructs. I don’t know if that’s helpful though, because you know that’s a perspective that’s grown from privilege too.

1:51:42 Yeah, but it is a good perspective to check your assumptions you’re making and check your reality. You know, and while saying that, I’m sure I have a lot of unchecked assumptions as well. Yeah, I hope somebody else points them out, that Airbnb is the savior. Andreas, it’s always a privilege to have you on here. We booked this I think four or five months ago and I’ve been pumped ever since then.

1:52:02 You know, rarely does a single person get associated with a technology, and I know you don’t want to be that guy, but you are in my opinion, and sometimes it takes that person, that human factor, to actually elevate and make us pay attention to that technology, and whether you like it or not you are that guy. So I might call you the king of Bitcoin, but you’re the guy that immediately I talk about when I hear that word Bitcoin, I’m like, you have to get to know this guy, because once you listen to this guy you’ll want to know more about it, you’ll be excited about it, you’ll learn more, and by doing so you’ll learn a lot more about yourself, and it goes around and around, and so I always love having you on here, and what I like about when you come to London Real, the same as last time, we also get a little bit deeper inside of you and you allow us in, so thank you very much for that.

1:52:51 Oh, thank you. And yeah, I just think what you’re doing is really important, and I think you play it down quite a lot, but I think you’re really doing a generous humanitarian effort by going around and speaking about this thing you’re super passionate about when I know for very good reason you could be doing a million other things, so it’s very selfless and I appreciate it and I acknowledge you for doing that stuff. Thank you for saying that. I don’t think it’s self selfless and I would say I’m not the king of Bitcoin, I’m the court jester, I write the limericks and the songs that memorialize the great work that other people are doing and explain it to everyone.

1:53:27 So I’m happy to do that and it’s a very, very rewarding thing as long as I remember that it’s not about me and it’s all about Bitcoin, which is a really important technology for the world. Yeah, and I think that’s why, you know, you seem very centered and you seem like you’re doing things from the heart because things are kind of flowing through you and you’re not making it about you, although I love watching all of your talks, I love watching your videos, and like that time when you’re talking about jazz versus punk rock, when you get on the stage it’s exciting to hear you talk about Bitcoin, and let’s be honest, most talks about fintech can put you to sleep, which is a shame because it’s fascinating stuff, it’s revolutionary, it really affects our lives, but it’s nice to have a guy like you out there that brings it to life.

1:54:09 So it’s great stuff. The new book is The Internet of Money, Volume One, two’s coming, more books are coming, and if you wanna watch all of the videos on Andreas you can find them now because you’re now a fellow YouTuber, so welcome to the club. Yes. How do people find your YouTube channel where they can pretty much watch all your talks, right? Please subscribe to the channel, that would be great.

1:54:28 It’s Andreas Antonopoulos, if you just search for my name or if you search Andreas and Bitcoin you’ll find one of my videos on my channel fairly easily. And I’m also on Twitter, Twitter handle is A-A-N-T-O-N-O-P and that’s also my YouTube handle. Yeah, and you’re quite active on Twitter and you’re always out there, and if you can go watch Andreas talk somewhere publicly, go find him and go travel the world until you beat him. And open invitation, we’d love to see you here in another year, 18 months, to find out where we’re at with Bitcoin.

1:54:59 You know, maybe it’s a ten thousand dollars, maybe it’s not, who cares, but it’ll be very interesting to see the Trump administration, where we see privacy when it comes to our commerce habits, and whether people are becoming more aware, whether there have been a few flagship events that scare people, or whether we’re slowly being dulled into this sense of of lackadaisicalness. I hope not. So, but yeah, we’ll keep talking about this stuff. Absolutely, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it.

1:55:24 My pleasure. As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey, you are on a constant one, but I wish you well on yours and all the best, thank you.