Full transcript: Dan Held on London Real
2:34 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dan Held, the entrepreneur, cryptocurrency influencer and Bitcoin evangelist.
2:52 You are the director of growth marketing at Kraken, one of the world’s largest and oldest Bitcoin exchanges, which acquired your company interchanged two years ago. You were an original member of the 2013 crypto meetup group in San Francisco, which included the founders of Kraken, Coinbase and Litecoin, and you helped build some of the earliest and most popular crypto products, including ChangeTip and XeroBlock. Earlier this year you predicted that Bitcoin could go to one million dollars, and you believe it will be the precursor to the extinction of gold.
3:21 You’ve described hyperbitcoinization as the long overdue moment when the whole world will finally come to see Bitcoin’s value. Dan, welcome to London Real.
3:30 Dan Held: Thanks for having me.
3:31 Brian Rose: Hey, it’s great to have you here. I can’t wait to dive into all things Bitcoin and DeFi.
3:36 You’ve watched it basically go from nothing to potentially a million dollars a coin. I want to talk about that journey. Just a real quick background on me. I started my career at 22 years old on Wall Street trading fixed income derivatives at a company called Bankers Trust. They hired me straight out of MIT because I had an engineering degree.
3:52 So I spent 15 years in the banking industry in New York, Chicago and London in the credit derivatives market, so I’ve seen all the nonsense that goes on there. The last 10 years I’ve been broadcasting on YouTube and it’s all been about kind of democratizing information for the people. Last year we got in trouble with all of the major technology platforms for freedom of speech violations when I thought we were just having conversations, but I literally got banned and deleted from YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, PayPal, which all of those things for those conversations.
4:23 But you know, we really thought that the freedom was really important. Earlier this year I spent six months running to be the next Mayor of London, because I thought, you know what, I can make another video and complain, or I could try to do something about it. So we went hard to try to really make those changes on a grassroots level. But on May 8th I got told the results, and it’s not what we thought. And so, to be honest, Dan, I took a look at DeFi and I thought, wow, these kids aren’t playing around with all of this, this incredible protocol.
4:50 And we, for the last six months, have just been talking about crypto assets, DeFi blockchain. I created an academy called the D5 Academy. I’ve graduated over 500 students, and we’ve had kind of the who’s who here talking about these things. And so I can’t wait to talk to you about these concepts for the record. Max Keiser was in my studio in 2013 screaming about Bitcoin.
5:11 I didn’t listen. I had Andreas Antonopoulos here in 2015, 2017 and 2019 talking about the future of money before the word DeFi even existed. Again, I didn’t listen. Now I’m listening, and I’m trying to get the message out there to everybody. And so, Dan, so excited to have you here.
5:27 And also, get maybe your thoughts on some of those freedom issues, because on your YouTube channel, which is incredible, you talk a lot about this. And I heard you also say, I think you said, that the dollar was one of the greatest scams of all time. And I’m wondering if you can tell me what you meant by that, and maybe through the lens of freedom and then ultimately Bitcoin.
5:47 Dan Held: Yeah, absolutely. To give you a little bit of background as to why I got into Bitcoin is, I was going, and I was studying finance in undergrad during the 2008 financial crisis.
5:56 So when this crisis occurred, I realized that my textbooks were wrong, the professors were wrong and everyone on TV that I trusted was wrong. And in that moment I realized that we needed something different. We needed to replace trust in the financial system. And, come, you know, three, four years later I discovered Bitcoin, and Bitcoin to me was that holy grail financial instrument that removed trust from the financial system, to where I didn’t have to trust in bureaucrats or politicians or policy makers.
6:24 I could trust in mathematics and physics, and that’s what Bitcoin really represents. It represents a trustless system, a system where trust isn’t required. And why is that important? You know, fundamentally, like, my core beliefs are more libertarian-leaning, so more around freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of movement, freedom, freedom of finance. And so for me, Bitcoin, a permissionless system where it can’t be censored and can’t be seized very easily, that is a system that is based on freedom, similar to some of your content struggles, where you could, might get banned from a platform like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook.
7:00 Bitcoin was built to make sure that doesn’t happen again with money. So never could you be censored because of your political beliefs, and I think that’s a fundamental human right, freedom, and all aspects of freedom are fundamental to us existing, and for me I think financial freedom is the most important. Who cares if you have freedom of speech if you can’t make money or you can’t spend money? And so Bitcoin enables that at a fundamental level, and I think even more beautiful about Bitcoin is that Bitcoin takes people who weren’t formally libertarian-leaning or freedom oriented, and it nudges them in that direction, because once they start to believe in Bitcoin they start to challenge their other assumptions over why the government controls certain aspects over their body and other aspects of their money.
7:43 And so Bitcoin is sort of the gateway drug, the orange pill if you will, to a new sort of thinking where more people become a little bit more freedom-minded, which means to me a little bit more libertarian. But I know a lot of people don’t like to be labeled.
7:56 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s a fantastic intro. You know, it’s funny, Dan, last year when we kind of outright fought for freedom of speech, people could kind of understand what I was talking about, like, hey, I just want to have a conversation, and I want you to have the right to listen to it or not and make your own decision.
8:11 And when I showed people that that wasn’t being allowed on certain tech platforms, people said, yeah, that makes sense. And then when I was running to be a Mayor, I was on the street one day and I was surrounded by ten police officers and five police vans and they actually banned me from campaigning that day, because they said I was breaking lockdown protocols, even though I was in the middle of the street talking to my phone. And when we fought back against that, it went viral, and everyone said, that makes sense, that shouldn’t be right either.
8:36 But you know, Dan, when you talk about financial freedom, I do think it’s one of those last human rights that’s being violated on a daily basis that we don’t acknowledge. But when it comes to people’s money, it’s almost like we’ve been in this Medici banking system for 500 years and we don’t even know how it controls us. And I think it was Terence McKenna who once said, “I don’t know who discovered water, but it certainly wasn’t a fish.” And I feel like we’re sometimes fish in the water of a banking system and we don’t even realize how much it controls us.
9:05 Yeah. We see when OnlyFans has to change policy because of a bank, and change back. You can start to see glimpses of the power of the financial structure, but do you still find it hard to convince people that this is a big problem and perhaps, like you said, the most important freedom of them all?
9:21 Dan Held: Absolutely. It’s, you know, when you, that’s why I call it orange pilling, because it does take you, you know, someone from a state of sort of accepting of whatever the financial system is, and it moves them to a new level of consciousness of realizing and waking up to what the world is.
9:37 And so a lot of people like to be asleep. It’s not, do you really want to challenge the underpinnings of the entire economy? Like, do you want to wake up and challenge your assumptions of God and money, and you know, money is one of those components that is, I would say, similar to like challenging someone’s beliefs in God. Like, money is inherent with the state. The state is a set of, like, government that controls various things that you do.
9:59 So for someone to wake up and challenge their assumptions over, like, why does this couple hundred year old entity have control over me, and then also how is, like, what is money, and then the meta sort of thoughts about, like, what money represents, and that money is just a belief system. This is a lot to take in. A lot of people don’t want to wake up on their Tuesday and go, you know, I’m ready to challenge all my existing belief systems. So I totally get that it takes people a long time to get orange pilled, and for me it’s sort of a calling of mine, and why I produce so much content of it.
10:29 It took me years, right? It wasn’t like a snap sort of moment. I was mentally prepped and ready for the message to be received back in 2012 but not a lot of other people had that same mindset that I did. So for me I feel like when I create content, I’m making that ladder a little bit shorter, letting people spend less time, and that, you know, it took me years to really fully understand Bitcoin, really get a good grasp around it. And by the way, I’m still learning on a day-to-day basis about various things about Bitcoin.
10:57 So certainly it’s a very difficult journey, because, yeah, one, people don’t want to wake up and challenge their assumptions, and two, Bitcoin isn’t just like technology. It’s not like a new weather app. It’s not a new social network. It has vast overlaying architecture, of, you know, you have to think about, like, governance, public private key cryptography, economics, game theory, physics. Even with Bitcoin’s proof of work mechanism, these are all intertwined together.
11:25 So the people to get at first were a little bit more of a polymath type folks who could can easily switch between disciplines and I’m not going to say I’m, but look, I’m not, you know. It doesn’t take a high IQ to understand Bitcoin. So don’t feel, you know, don’t feel threatened if you’re listening to this and you’re like, oh man, that sounds really complicated. It’s just more of, there’s nuance to it. You can understand Bitcoin at a very high level, and then the further and you dig, you realize there’s all of these really interesting concepts that are pillars to why Bitcoin exists and why Bitcoin was created the way it was created.
11:57 Brian Rose: I like how you said you’re still learning. I had Lyn Alden here about a week and a half ago, and she’s quite smart, and she said, Brian, I’ve accepted that I’ll never fully understand Bitcoin, and I just thought, was everybody exhaled when we said that? And I told my students all that I said, you’re never going to fully understand it, so don’t try or beat yourself up, because it’s highly complicated stuff. I’m about 21 hours in, into funny enough, Gary Gensler’s class taught at the MIT Sloan School in 2018 about crypto, back before he was the head of the CFTC and before he was ahead of the SEC.
12:29 It’s quite interesting to see that agnostic person, but you know, he goes deep on cryptography and hashing and all this stuff, and you realize how much you don’t know. But also you don’t need to know like you said, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand that Bitcoin is special and it needs our attention. You know, one question I had for you, Dan, is that I’ve had people coming on my show for many years talking about what’s wrong with the monetary system and the dollar.
12:56 I’ve had people like Jim Rickards come on and talk about the printing of money. Robert Kiyosaki’s been on talking about that stuff. Max Keiser, but honestly, until we had this Bitcoin instrument to show people, it felt like a lot of times it was the skies falling, and what do we do? And when I had Jeff Booth on our show a couple weeks ago, he said, well, Brian, price everything in the future in terms of Bitcoin, and it’s deflationary. You price everything in the future in dollars, and it’s inflationary, and it’s like you can start to really see grasps of this reality, and I don’t know.
13:27 I’ve found that this Bitcoin instrument is really helpful in maybe understanding that paradigm a little bit more. Do you find that the case?
13:35 Dan Held: Yeah, what’s kind of funny about Bitcoin is that Bitcoin is actually easier to understand monetary policy wise than your existing fiat currency. For those listening, fiat currency represents, like, government money. So you know, what’s the monetary policy of the dollar?
13:50 I don’t know. I mean, there’s sort of like inflation targets, kind of, but then they move those goal posts, and there’s all sorts of changing objectives of the Fed. And what’s Bitcoin? Bitcoin has a 21 million unit hard cap. There will only be 21 million Bitcoin ever to exist, and that’s all you need to know.
14:07 It’s a beautifully simple system, and in fact, the more I read about Bitcoin, the more I understood the breakthrough and monetary policy, the more beautiful it became.
14:18 Brian Rose: So why 21 million, and why was it fixed? You know, why not have a perpetual 1 percent inflation, 2 percent inflation rate?
14:25 Dan Held: So what’s cool about the 21 million hard cap? So 21 million, the number itself doesn’t matter that much.
14:32 It could be 100 million. It could be 2 million. It doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that it’s fixed. Satoshi created a breakthrough in monetary policy, because with the fixed money there are two things that come out of that.
14:44 One, there’s no political attack vector to go squabble about what the inflation rate should be. So if there was an inflation rate, there would be a perpetual back and forth political battle between different factions in the Bitcoin community about deciding what inflation rate would be proper. The problem is choosing an appropriate rate of inflation is impossible based on mathematics. There’s no way to parse, analyze, ingest all of this information about the economy to properly set the right inflation target.
15:14 Instead if you fix it, the economy moves around this fixed monetary policy. You don’t need an inflation rate, and so that one reduces the attack vectors, and two, enables Bitcoin to be this pure measuring stick of the economy. So if we look at, for example, the kilogram or meter. Those don’t change. You know, if those changed, you would be impossible to measure distance and impossible to measure weight.
15:37 Well, with our money, money is a measurement system where it measures the outcomes of entrepreneurial endeavors and what it costs to pay for things, and wonder what, you know, what I’m willing to accept as payment. So having that fixed quantity makes the economy extremely precise and measurable. Whereas we’ve never had that before, where we’re all constantly factoring in inflation, which is impossible to calculate accurately. And so with Bitcoin we finally have that unit of measurement that is perfect, which makes Bitcoin for the economy an incredibly precise instrument.
16:08 So, you know, I think there’s some incredible beauty around Bitcoin’s 21 million hard cap that a lot of people don’t appreciate. They go, oh, a fixed amount, that’s interesting. No, that’s actually the breakthrough, and the fact that the Bitcoin community will never increase that amount, you know, and that’s getting a little bit nuanced here about how, like, the social dynamic works with these protocols. But I think that’s the beauty behind Bitcoin is that 21 million hard cap.
16:33 That monetary policy is totally different than everything including gold. So for the gold bugs watching this, how much gold exists currently? I don’t know. We can guess. And then how much gold will exist?
16:46 We don’t know. We can guess. But with Bitcoin we know exactly how many Bitcoin exist today. We know how many Bitcoin they’ll be in total, and that precision in that monetary policy builds trust, and it builds trust in a way that gold can never have.
17:02 Brian Rose: Yeah, and it’s really never happened in human history, because every monetary system ends up becoming inflated, because people print more, because they usually make emotional decisions that are subjective, in the times sometimes subject to political waves.
17:18 And you know, I have a longtime guest here on the show named Jocko Willink, U.S. Navy SEAL, and he’s got an expression, which is discipline equals freedom, and it’s a beautiful phrase, and it basically means that if you stay disciplined for your workout every day, to do what you say you’re going to do, etc., you actually end up having all these wonderful freedoms. And I’d say the same is true about monetary policy. If you really kept the discipline, you would have the freedom of a money supply that really works.
17:44 And yet we violate our disciplines. We skip the workout, we have the bad food, we let it go when times are hard, and then we wake up one day and we realize we don’t have the freedom because we don’t even have a currency that means something. And that’s actually the first time I’ve ever applied Jocko to Bitcoin, but I think it might work. I had a question for you, because you’ve talked about cycles in Bitcoin where we go back and we look, you know, every four years you can see it doing certain things, and yet now I’ve heard you talk about that, now we’re in something called a super cycle.
18:13 And I talked a little bit with Ben Cowen about this, who’s really good at kind of analyzing a lot of technicals, and maybe you can tell people why this is important to even look at the cyclical nature, but then also maybe to evaluate how things have changed a lot maybe in the last 12 to 18 months.
18:30 Dan Held: For sure, yeah. So Bitcoin’s supply schedule, so we know that there will be 21 million Bitcoin, and those 21 million Bitcoin are printed over a very long duration Now the issuance schedule of Bitcoin is an exponentially declining curve.
18:43 So what that means is that it has a decay function that approximates 21 million over a very long time. Majority of Bitcoin are printed early on. So Bitcoin, the number of Bitcoin that have been minted already, around 80 percent of the total supply, which I think is around 18 point something million Bitcoin. So Bitcoin are printed along a predictable supply curve, so everyone can go see how many Bitcoin are printed per block, which is approximately every 10 minutes, and then they can look at certain events called halvings.
19:14 So halvings are where the issuance schedule of Bitcoin drops in half. So these halvings occur in a staggered function until Bitcoin reaches zero issuance. So what that means is, for example, these during these halving events, the newly limited Bitcoin, the number of new limited Bitcoins in each block drop in half and these halvings occur every four years, so there’s a hypothesis that these halving events create Bitcoin’s bull and bear market cycles, and we’ve seen that true over the last three, and so I’ve been in the space since 2012, and I saw one in 2013, 2017, and currently.
19:52 So the hypothesis holds true, and I think it has some good fundamental reasons why. When a halving occurs, the newly created Bitcoin issuance drops in half. Every marketplace is a supply and demand network. If the supply gets cut in half, demand stays the same, demand outstrips supply, the price starts to creep up higher. And as Satoshi hinted before, Bitcoin had a price.
20:14 So Satoshi wrote this back in 2010 which was incredible that he thought about this. Satoshi said, as the price increases, more people become aware of it, and by an expectation the price might go higher. He’s describing FOMO. And he goes, that alone may spark Bitcoin into existence. And so I think that Satoshi planned these halving events to be these supply shock events that, while everyone can see it, people still don’t have to, you know, people don’t still accurately estimate how much it might influence the protocol.
20:43 There’s also a bit of reflexivity here, of as the price goes higher, more people buy it, and then the cycle perpetuates. So over 2013, 2017 and 2021 we’ve seen that come true. The halving events occurred, by the way, in 2016 and 2020, so with these halvings we see a corresponding boom come about a year and a half later, and so there’s a normal sort of cyclical top and bottom that a lot of chartists look at, right? So people who believe in TA and analyze Bitcoin’s price movements look at this bounded range of outcomes and they go, okay, well, if it follows the previous patterns we should, in this curve Bitcoin’s max price in this cycle should hit a hundred to three hundred thousand.
21:28 That’s actually a pretty good rounded estimate between all the strategists and analysts. So I hypothesized what if Bitcoin doesn’t follow its normal cycle? What if Bitcoin breaks the mold from its previous cycles? And I actually came up with this theory back in 2019 when people were pretty bearish on Bitcoin. That was, you know, close to the bottom of the bear market, and my hypothesis was what if the world has an event where people start to question the nature of the reality, where they question the nature of their money.
21:59 Bitcoin had largely been had grown post-2008 in a big booming bull market. There wasn’t any event where people woke up and go, whoa, do I need to trust my government today? COVID brought that about. So in 2020 COVID was this huge shock to the system where people started to become orange pilled as they saw their government’s policies against COVID be very ineffective, as they saw their government’s policies, monetary policies of money printer go brrr, be just really egregious, and this orange pill, a huge new wave of people into Bitcoin, including a lot of institutional money and that’s what I hypothesized.
22:34 Is, you know, what would Bitcoin’s market cycles look like post-institutional money, post-sovereign wealth money, post Bitcoin going mainstream? It’d be hard to believe that Bitcoin follows the exact same pattern that it did before. So the super cycle theory says, what if it’s different? Will there be a longer, bigger, more intense bull run, or we could see maybe a normal bull run and less of a bear market, or something, maybe sideways where there’s kind of a long perpetual bull.
23:01 Basically, will the cycle be different? Is the super cycle theory, or this could be one of the final cycles, you know, where we see the whole world wake up to Bitcoin surge into it, and Bitcoin goes from, you know, 50,000 to 500,000 or a million, really rapidly in a way that we haven’t seen before because people go, okay, yeah, Bitcoin was built for this moment, I get it now. We can’t, you know, you can’t pre, you can’t create those moments for Bitcoin where people get orange pilled.
23:30 There are a certain number of individuals who lose faith in their existing financial system and they come over, over time. But what if there’s a mass event where in mass 100 million people in the United States wake up and go, okay, I’m moving my money into Bitcoin.
23:43 Brian Rose: Yeah, I still feel like sometimes when I’m looking at coinmarketcap.com that I might rub my eyes and open up them again and it’d all be like 3x or 5x, and I’ve watched financial markets for 30 years, and I’ve asked myself this many times.
23:55 Could that happen and I’m like, of course it could happen, because, you know, it’s this paradigm shift, this adoption of technology. It’s not like, you know, the price of soybeans, et cetera. Now there still are market dynamics and supply and demand issues and all that stuff, and I’m not predicting that will happen overnight, but it’s not inconceivable for that something like that to happen. And you mentioned institutional money. I mean, Michael Saylor was on this program and said specifically CEO of MicroStrategy.
24:18 What’s he got, seven billion dollars of Bitcoin? It was that event, and the monetary policy that followed that made him ask a very sober question, which is am I acting the interest of my shareholders by holding my treasury in dollars, or should it be in something else? And he went to look at property and gold, and he came up with Bitcoin, and you know, he really had the leadership to go all in on that, and it’s been an incredible example of that. You mentioned institutions in sovereign wealth funds.
24:44 We’re still waiting to see kind of clear evidence of that, but I guess they keep things kind of quiet. Are you seeing anything there? And then finally, I want to get your answer as what will this super cycle look like?
24:56 Dan Held: Yeah, so we’re now on the sovereign wealth side. We’ve seen a little bit there, more of, like, barely any action, basically El Salvador.
25:03 But on the institutional side, we’re seeing almost every legendary investor in the investor in the world come into this space. You know, Paul Tudor Jones, Ray Dalio, I mean, these are legendary macro folks. Druckenmiller. You’ve got basically huge swaths of the existing hedge fund, you know, I would say, like, thought leadership going Bitcoin is gold 2.0, which is wild because that’s what I believed in 2012. So to see it come this far has been extremely validating because, yeah, you got to realize back in 2012 we were considered lunatics.
25:38 I mean, people thought we were nuts, to be honest. They were like, okay, so you have a money that’s not created by a government. Basically people felt Bitcoin was magic internet money, and I wake up 10 years later and you’ve got the most influential hedge fund macro traders in the world saying, yeah, Bitcoin’s gold 2.0, pretty cool.
25:55 Brian Rose: Yeah, while we’re here, can we can you speak on that? I mean, those early crypto meetups, I’m guessing in San Francisco you know, a lot of people wanted to be in the big tech plays and they didn’t necessarily want to take a gamble on this thing that it’s hard for us to believe now, but was really out there back then.
26:12 Dan Held: It was a very risky career move. I didn’t have a career in tech at that time. Like Bitcoin was my career starter in tech. but there weren’t a lot of, like, a players in the space because of the reputational risk, and this is in Silicon Valley, supposedly the most open-minded place in the world, and this is in San Francisco. Bitcoin was widely perceived as, like, drug money for terrorists.
26:35 You know, so like for example, if I go on dates and I talk about Bitcoin, they’d be like, so do you sell drugs or something? And that was the 2013 perception in San Francisco. This is the tech capital of the world, right? So outside of that, you know, the perception was even worse. So if you wanted to build a career it was kind of, okay, that’s pretty out there, wild west sort of idea.
26:57 And there weren’t a lot of jobs either. I mean, it was the space was tiny back then. I mean you could fit all the executives of all the companies in the space into a big dining room. Let’s put it that way. So there wasn’t like a ton of career growth.
27:09 There wasn’t like a ton of learning you could have, and so a lot of people just built their own tools, and that’s how I got into a tech career. I built XeroBlock, which is the most popular mobile app for the space back in 2013. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, other than being obsessed with building a product that I wanted to use. Turns out that’s how you build great products, being obsessed with solving a problem. That’s a problem that I was solving a lot of other people had too.
27:34 The problem was they couldn’t get the real-time price of Bitcoin on their phone. Well, Bitcoin fluctuates a lot, and people want to see the price, and they want to check it all the time, and so that’s why I built XeroBlock, and there are some other factors as well, but that early Bitcoin meetup group, back in January 2013, only had like a dozen people show up. I mean, this was in the basement in San Francisco. This was in the basement of a former crack house.
27:57 I’m not even kidding. It’s called 20 Mission. 20 Mission was a reclaimed crack house that someone turned into a hacker house, so you had like 50 rooms up on the second story with a central courtyard and shared kitchens and bathrooms, so kind of like an adult dormitory and so these are all kind of like tech hacker types. Downstairs is where they had the meetup, and it was a rough looking place, and they had a cooler full of PBRs, which for those who aren’t familiar with PBRs, PBRs are a very cheap beer.
28:26 And so that was the early Bitcoin scene in San Francisco. But everyone at that time, and it is a very special sort of moment, you know, because Bitcoin is only worth around ten dollars. People either just loved Bitcoin or they loved building products on Bitcoin, and so that was a very special moment of, like, everyone is building or tinkering on something, whether they were tinkering on Bitcoin or they were building new software or tools. It was pretty exciting.
28:49 I mean, and this included Brian and Fred from Coinbase. They’d show up to these meetups, and I remember when they hired Olaf, and they brought him in you know, Charlie Lee from Litecoin. Um, Jed McCaleb from Ripple, Stellar, and then you had Jared Kenneth from Trade Hill and the owner of 20 Mission, and also Jesse Powell, the CEO of Kraken. Like these were all the people in that early meetup, that’s where I met all these people, and I’m I jokingly say I’m the only non-billionaire of the group.
29:16 So it was kind of wild being there, and then March 2013 price went from ten dollars to 260. Boom, 100 people were there, and that was, you know, I remember VCs. Lightspeed Venture Capital was out there, and they were handing out business cards, and I was like, whoa, this is, like, actually happening. You gotta remember this is three months into my San Francisco experience and tech experience, right? So it was sort of a rocket ship moment for me of learning how, you know, new exciting narratives in Silicon Valley ebb and flow, and how something can go from being obscure to in the limelight, you know, being a hot thing, but it was a thrilling experience in early ’13, because it was very hobbyist, and it first finally got into, like, mainstream press in 2013, where it became something more real and tangible for people.
30:02 Brian Rose: Yeah, wow, that’s really tangible, the way you kind of described that, and appreciate the memory lane, because you know, you see this differently because you’ve seen it evolve. So when you talk about the super cycle or what to expect for the next few years, it definitely means something, because you’ve kind of seen the birth and the growing up of this instrument. And just to finish on my final question, I mean, I know there’s a lot of open-ended things that could happen on this super cycle, but what do you think is going to happen?
30:29 Dan Held: Yeah, it’s a good question. I, you know, it’s I think all of the pieces are in place. If this was a if this was like a chess board, all of the pieces are in place for a super cycle to exist. I don’t think it’s a super likely scenario. I brought it up because people, no one was talking about it.
30:49 Everyone expected this cycle to be normal, so I brought it up as a low probability but possible event. I think all the chess pieces are in place for something like that happening. I could see some sort of systemic shock to the system kind of reinforcing that, and as well as, long as Bitcoin’s price goes up, and people see it going up, then that creates reflexivity where people buy an expectation of it going higher, and what happens when the world’s financial system, including hedge funds, institutional money all sorts of institutional money and sovereign wealth money FOMO into Bitcoin.
31:21 You know, Bitcoin’s price doesn’t follow a normal cycle then. So does that happen now, does it happen later? I think it’s a low probability that that happens in the next six months, but it’s possible. I would say the most likely outcome is Bitcoin follows its normal cycle. The peak hits between 100 and 300,000 based on all of the other TA and analysis in the space of looking at historical prices and extrapolating them going forward.
31:45 Um, you know, again, I’m not recommending that this is going to happen. I’m just saying that, out of a probabilistic event, this is what the space is saying as a whole. So most people in the space would say between 100 and 300 thousand for the peak, and then super cycle would be something above, like I’d say half a million at the peak, you know, something like that occurring, or a very flat or distorted market cycle. So I’d say that the likelihood that it’s a normal cycle is probably closer, like, 80 super cycles probably like a 20 probability.
32:14 Again, these are very rounded numbers, but basically what I’m saying is that, you know, super cycle, we’d see something that, where Bitcoin goes above half a million. Really starts to exhibit some behaviors that are out of scope for this current cycle. But most probably we’re going to hit something between 100 and 300,000 based on previous cycles.
32:32 Brian Rose: Yeah, and I really appreciate you saying that, and I’ve pretty much asked almost every guest we’ve had on, and almost exactly they’ve all predicted, you know, a 10x improvement of Bitcoin over the next five to seven years.
32:43 Nobody says 100x, nobody says 2x. It’s just interesting to see all of the different minds, from influencers to people that run big funds, uh, to people even involved in, you know, the non-Bitcoin space, are still all kind of saying similar things. Also, the sovereign wealth is hard to overestimate. I mean, we haven’t seen, I don’t think, the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds jump in with all the oil money, and when, you know, there’s a lot of money there.
33:10 So besides all the other institutions, which are important, you know, dipping their toe in, the market will probably really feel it. I mentioned some of the other crypto assets, and I want to get your thoughts on something like Ethereum as compared to Bitcoin, and I want to get just all your thoughts around this. I was at a conference here in London, and Mike Novogratz at Galaxy Digital was supposed to be there, but they beamed him in at the last minute, and he said to the audience, he said, look, Bitcoin is the digital asset play.
33:37 It’s there, it won. It’s digital gold. We see that and we value that. And again, just to say, of all the guests I’ve had on, even the ones with layer one solutions, a lot of them say I still keep 25-30 of my portfolio in Bitcoin. Almost all of them still say that they still see it as a really important asset.
33:53 Mike went on to say that Ethereum is the other place. He said they’re, they’re digital tech plays, and look at them as a technology company. What has the associate risk with that? Tech right now with DeFi, most of the volume, and of course gas fees, are with the Ethereum chain, and we see kind of a layer one, layer one wars happening kind of right now in the last six months with the Solana’s and the AVAX’s, and the Algorands, and the Cardano’s, many of whom we’ve had on the show kind of fighting for that.
34:22 How do you see this playing out? How do you view Ethereum? It’s obviously not the perfect vehicle like Bitcoin because of their more flexible monetary policy, but how do you view it, and is also part of the long-term ecosystem?
34:34 Dan Held: Yeah, great question. I don’t really view them as competitive, so I largely agree with Novogratz, and that Bitcoin is this pure digital gold that there isn’t really another competitor to it.
34:44 Like I mentioned before, Bitcoin’s monetary policy, now there’s a bunch of other cool innovations with it, but the monetary policy is the breakthrough financial instrument here. And so you know, when we look at other protocols, if they’ve changed their monetary policy frequently, which Ethereum has, that kind of takes it out of the running for being a sound money, a gold 2.0 type instrument. So Bitcoin, I think stands unparalleled, unchallenged in that digital gold asset class.
35:11 Certainly there are contenders, but I think that Bitcoin stands out single-handedly, you know, kind of by itself, when it comes to these other protocols that, we could call like smart contract platforms, DeFi, or kind of like world computer, you know, these sort of all are largely bucketed under some of the more popular protocols, like you mentioned, Ethereum, Solana, AVAX and Cardano. So I think that these are very much like, Novogratz said, these are more like technology companies, where, you know, at a fundamental level, Bitcoiners and the Bitcoin protocol have preserved decentralization to enable it to be the best sound money in the world. And some of these protocols have traded off decentralization on various different levels.
35:55 So you can trade off decentralization on the protocol level, on the social contract level, on X, Y or Z, and so most of these protocols, what they do is they trade off decentralization to enable more functionality, so higher throughput or more expressiveness. And this isn’t necessarily a bad or good thing. Bitcoiners just hypothesize that when governments attack these protocols, that they want Bitcoin to survive. These other protocols are basically taking the bet that event is a low likely event, and we have enough decentralization.
36:26 We won’t know until that event happens. Is the TLDR. But these protocols, on the kind of more smart contract platform DeFi arena, these all compete for various expressiveness, various throughput, and I think that there’s a really interesting war developing between Ethereum and Solana where Solana takes Ethereum and is willing to trade off even more decentralization for more expressiveness and more throughput, and arguably it has a better user experience Solana transactions confirm extremely fast.
36:59 It’s very low fees, and what do a lot of the traders in DeFi want? That’s what they want. They don’t necessarily care about decentralization as much, and so it’ll be an interesting dynamic to look at all these smart contract platforms on a spectrum of less decentralized to more decentralized. And typically more decentralized means higher fees. So to see which protocols people, you know, kind of flock to will be very interesting.
37:22 Solana, I think, is probably the breakout winner here, because with Solana I think they found a very sweet spot in trading off decentralization for throughput versus Ethereum, which is kind of in a weird spot between both. It’s between Solana and Bitcoin, so it’s trying to be sound money, but it’s not sound money, and it’s trying to be this ultimate smart contract platform. And it’s a good step in that direction, but unfortunately it has a lot of, you know, it has throughput issues, it has cost issues, and so there’s a lot of nuances too, where I know that the more advanced listeners to the show might talk about, like, oh, well, there’s security spend considerations, and these fees aren’t necessarily a bad thing.
38:00 Yeah, I know. I’m just talking about more of the consumer experience of trading or using DeFi protocols and how they perceive the experience, so I’m, I’m not, I’m not delving into the security model intricacies here.
38:12 Brian Rose: Yeah, and, like, the big elephant in the room that probably needs a compliment is the free market, right? What we’ve seen is Solana roll up in the last six months and become, you know, third or fourth largest market cap, because they provided a better, more efficient, cheaper service to the market, whereas back in the day when I worked at Bankers Trust there was maybe only six other banks globally that would have been able to price the product I was going to sell you.
38:37 And now anybody can come in with a new protocol and, you know, potentially solve a problem. I would agree with you they seem to have solved a problem the market really needed. Ethereum’s tried to solve that while the plane’s in flight. The jury’s still out whether they ever will go to proof of stake, and I had Justin Sun on Friday that said I don’t even think they should go to proof of stake. Just keep doing what they do, which is proof of work for Ethereum, and let the rest of us work on the proof-of-stake mechanisms, because we don’t know if it’s going to work.
39:04 What if Ethereum breaks? We don’t need that now. Of course, you know, Justin’s talking in his own book a little bit with his Tron network, but I see the point he’s making with that. And so by no means you are necessarily a maximalist, right, Dan, because you’re willing to kind of talk about and acknowledge that these other protocols have places in this ecosystem?
39:24 Dan Held: Yeah, I would consider myself more of a Bitcoin moderate.
39:27 I’m, I look, I really love Bitcoin, like the more I understood and read into it, there’s so much fascination with, like, how it got started. It’s sort of like immaculate conception. It’s perfect monetary policy. It’s hard to get excited about other stuff, because I’ve put Bitcoin on a pedestal, and I compare a lot of other things to it, but I’m certainly open-minded when it comes to other things, and I’ve definitely explored a lot of the DeFi ecosystem, included like lending, borrowing functions in a decentralized manner.
39:53 AMMs, automated market making protocols, and how those work. I also looked at, like, governance tokens and how those mechanisms work, so I’d say I’m more in NFTs as well. I’d say I’m a more open-minded Bitcoiner. I still find Bitcoin the most interesting thing in this space, but I certainly don’t think it’s a bad thing if people want to go play around with whatever else they’d like. That’s totally cool.
40:14 You know, for me I think it’s ultimately you know, this is all about being able to do what you want. So yeah, I would call myself more of a Bitcoin moderate.
40:22 Brian Rose: Yeah, I appreciate you saying that, because you know, I like people that are open-minded to some of those breakthroughs in the market, and the DeFi summer of 2020 that really got my eye, when I saw the massive borrowing and lending, the governance, the token incentives to trade on the platforms, I went back to my days on Wall Street where I would call down to a broker to transact.
40:42 No one ever said, hey, Brian, how would you also like to own part of the company if you do business with us? I’d like, what are you talking about? You know, how would you like to do this in a decentralized, non-name give up fashion? Like, those options didn’t even exist, and I used to call down to the Chicago Board of Trade, where there literally were 300 locals that paid a million dollars to provide liquidity. Now I’m looking at a protocol that does that via tokens.
41:03 I mean, again, I was kind of hooked by some of the innovation involved. So I appreciate you being the moderate. I do want to shout out Max Keiser for stop being a maximalist, Max, and come on my show. He refuses to, because I say the word DeFi, and, uh, you know, even Michael Saylor admitted that there’s a real place for stablecoins and digital currencies on top of digital property. So I appreciate you having that conversation at least.
41:26 And it’s going to be interesting to see. We’re all going to benefit from this innovation going forward, and whether some of it kicks over to Lightning Network, who knows? But this is all upside, I think, because we’re almost, we’re building technology, aren’t we? And so yeah, it’s nice to see these people compete.
41:42 Dan Held: Yeah, it’s, you know, with, you know, blockchain tech, it’s always very interesting to see sort of the trade-offs people make, because it’s not like regular software where you can just optimize for throughput and expressiveness without any other considerations.
41:56 With decentralized tech you’ve got to think through sort of wartime scenarios. How do these protocols work if they’re being attacked or challenged? And so, you know, I would, I would say, like, it’s extremely exciting to see a lot of these innovations, right? A lot of these offer novel incentivization mechanisms. That, you know, Bitcoin itself has an incentivization mechanism, which is the supply issuance less and less Bitcoin are being issued, and there’s more and more demand for it, and Satoshi hypothesized that that might meme Bitcoin into existence, where people have FOMO, and they buy an expectation of there being less and less Bitcoin in the future.
42:31 So Bitcoin itself has novel incentivization mechanisms built in. So do a lot of these other protocols. One word of caution that I would have. There’s, it’s extremely interesting and extremely cool, you know, there are structural issues that I think are kind of like under addressed in the space, where for example a huge portion of DeFi smart contracts in the Ethereum ecosystem are basically backed by USDC and USDT, which are two centralized stablecoins. These stablecoins can be seized, frozen, or moved under a centralized control.
43:04 So because of the expressiveness of these protocols, a smart contract based on those two centralized stablecoins, there’s other smart contracts based on that smart contract, and the composability, where there’s smart contracts on smart contracts. So there is a risk here in terms of the centralized stablecoins being used as collateral at the heart of some of these ecosystems, where these and other things, I think, are very you know, very centralized sort of risk structures. That doesn’t invalidate all the really exciting things going on in this space, but I think folks should be aware that there are, you know, these aren’t perfectly decentralized.
43:42 There’s a lot of, like, semi-centralized structures that are embedded in there, and we don’t really know what that represents risk-wise.
43:48 Brian Rose: Yeah, no, really well said. I always tell my students, just because it says USD doesn’t mean it’s a dollar. You know, it doesn’t, you know, it might behave like a dollar, but it’s very different than the dollar you hold in your pocket or in your bank account in the U.S., and just be aware of that. There’s risk, and there’s return on the back of it.
44:04 I think that’s a good point. You make it. It could be a weak link that sometimes gets overlooked, and there’s massive volumes going through in those stablecoins. I want to ask you quickly about your thoughts on the media, you know, this concept of, you know, fear, uncertainty, and doubt in this market, and even some of the messaging we get from regulators. You know, I mentioned Gary Gensler, who I’ve been doing a serious character study on, again, I’m about 21 hours into his lecture, and I hate to say it, Dan, he’s really growing on me, because he’s quite a smart guy.
44:32 He really has a lot of interesting things to say, but that’s before he put his SEC hat on and started calling the stablecoins the poker chips of the Wild West, which is very uncharacteristic of someone smart like Gary, but it also goes to show me that he’s basically a politician now, and he has a blunt instrument to move a large population. He’s got an underfunded organization, and maybe this is what he sees as the best thing to do. So I’m, I’m recognizing that.
44:55 How do you look at media? One of my early guests on the show was Tim Ferriss, and in his book, The Four-Hour Workweek, he talked about an information diet, where he said, I only check my email once a day, information diet, and I have my students start with an information diet, and I said, turn it all off. Most of it’s nonsense, and most of it’s trying to get you to make an emotional decision and transact when you shouldn’t be transacting. I mean, I don’t want to say that, you know, because you work at Kraken, but I do say a lot of the news is trying to get that.
45:22 What do you see when it comes to media, and how should people behave to that?
45:27 Dan Held: Great question. For me it was a really eye-opening experience getting into Bitcoin in 2012, and then in 2013 when all the mainstream press started to cover it, they wrote blatantly objectively wrong things, like that Bitcoin could have more than 21 million printed or that Bitcoin was fundamentally flawed, and I developed relationships at Wired, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, and realized how all media is created in mainstream press and realized the kind of joke of it all.
45:55 Like, essentially it’s reporters. So these individuals are good at writing. They’re good at building stories. They are not experts in the field. They have no idea what’s going on.
46:05 They have a very minimal understanding of how these things work, and this isn’t just Bitcoin. This is everything: taxes, oil, Middle East conflicts, European conflicts. All of these are interpreted through a lens of a good writer, but not a good expert. What they do is they talk to different sources, which I was a source, and a source isn’t like a secretive or bad thing. It’s just they talk to people that they know are industry experts.
46:31 And so what I noticed happens is that these articles would either be really tainted based on the journalist’s perspective, or you could tell when a source had overly exerted their influence, where you’re like, I’m pretty sure I know who you talk to, because you didn’t have this opinion, because you’re not an expert, and somehow this very expert opinion came through in your piece. So I realized that journalism is basically kind of a joke when it comes to quality and objectiveness. It’s very emotional.
46:57 Writers that basically inject their bias into every article. They also do a very poor job of research. And by the way, again, those publications I mentioned before are typically widely respected, right? And so it’s unfortunately tainted my perspective of media in general, where I’d rather watch an influencer, someone who has skin in the game, someone who’s willing to go question things, someone who’s not going to insert, or they might insert their bias, but at least they call it out.
47:25 Whereas a lot of journalists hold themselves in this supposed higher moral sort of compass structure, where they’re like, oh, I’m a journalist, so therefore I’m neutral. I’m like, I’m the expert in the field, and what you wrote is objectively wrong. So yeah, so for me, you know, my perception of media has been very tainted. And also knowing that if I know crypto and I know Bitcoin well, everything else they’re writing is probably equally as bad. So mainstream press, I think, you, I do agree about the information diet.
47:54 If you’re just reading headlines, if you’re just reading mainstream press, you’re probably getting an extremely distorted view of the market. You’re probably best going to industry insiders, either like following them on social media or subscribing to, like, their newsletter. Or you could go, you know, build sort of your own level of different sort of, like, life sort of framework to evaluate different pieces of information. So I’m kind of creating your own sort of source of truth from various things, where you look at, I’m going to read through the headline and look at political motivations.
48:28 Like, why would someone do this? As Charlie Munger puts it, he’s like, everyone responds to incentives. You know, there isn’t, there isn’t this overarching, like, grandiose narrative that these journalists paint. You can just look at incentives and you can figure out the story. So, you know, I think using some of these kind of, like, core life philosophies and like pillars of, like, parsing the world and understanding it, it’s probably better spent building those than it is reading news, and then, you know, going to the industry insiders, going as close as you can to the source of truth, looking at motivations, looking at agendas, and using that to evaluate information.
49:04 I think is the best way going forward versus if you’re feeling emotional, they’ve probably got you already, because the title, the article content, is meant to generate clicks, which is meant to generate revenue and eyeballs. And so if you’re feeling emotional, that means that they’ve probably gotten you, and what you should try to do is remove that emotion from the equation. Go, what can I look at that’s as fact-based as possible? What data can I see and isolate, kind of, the core nugget of truth there?
49:32 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s something that, look, no one’s perfect at it. I still struggle with that too, because we’re all human. And they’re good at it. They’re very good. They’ve spent hundreds of years doing this.
49:41 Yeah. So, and they have algorithms that test it. They even A/B test headlines. I don’t know if people know that. So you know, people, they’ve gotten very, very good at it.
49:49 Dan Held: So you know, I still struggle with this too, and I still click on headlines and I still read these stupid articles, but you can still approach it with, like, having that core understanding and just constantly challenging it’s not a fun way to live, too. I understand that. Constantly challenging assumptions and constantly challenging narratives is a very high-friction sort of experience in life, versus just, like, letting the emotion flow through you. But if you do want to get to, if you don’t want to get down to the objective truth, if you do want to understand the real world you have to go against the grain, and you have to kind of remove that emotion from how you evaluate information.
50:22 Brian Rose: Yeah, really well said. If you want to feel media bias, Dan, try running to be the next Mayor of London, right? With my American accent. I’m telling you, the nonsense that was printed about me la this year. Oh my gosh, we got the headlines up on our wall here.
50:34 But yeah, it, if I had any faith left in the media which I didn’t after 10 years on YouTube, it all went out the window there, because it was just all nonsense, emotion, clickbait stuff. So, and it could have been further from the truth. Now I turned off all the news sources, and whenever I do read an article, I’m like, oh, that’s what you’re trying to do, but I usually don’t associate it with any amount of truth. And for this crypto and DeFi industry, I tell my students the same thing you said.
51:02 I said, you know, you could listen to Michael Saylor’s interview on repeat over the course of the week and probably get a better information source than reading every headline on CoinDesk. You could listen to Raoul Pal, or Dan Morehead of Pantera Capital, or Emin Gün Sirer on Avax. I mean, I’ve got the best seat in the house here. I’ve got two hours twice a week with these people who not only are talking about their own platform, but they’ve been in the space like you a lot of times, and they put great things in perspective.
51:29 And so I think learn from the source. Learn from long-form content, where you can understand nuanced points of view. You know, I’ve been deep into this now for six months, and it’s still taking time for this to work its way down into my brain and DNA. So yeah, I think it’s fantastic advice. Better that than some forum troll or some, you know, faceless account on Twitter, you know, or some media source.
51:54 Again, I take a look at them, but I just try to see, you know, what are the monkeys talking about today? And then I’m like, okay, cool, let’s get back to reality. I want to finish on Kraken because you guys are doing some amazing work over there. I did get a little insider information. I had Dan Tapiero at 10T Holdings on here a couple weeks ago, and he was bigging you guys up big time, and he was just saying, you know, you guys are doing great things.
52:13 He said you’re going to make 1.7 billion this year. I don’t know if that’s public yet, but he said it’s just going to be a great year for you guys. Talk to me about, you know, what’s your job like as, you know, growth marketing? A job I think Ryan Holiday used to have was a fellow Texan there we’ve had on the show. What does the world look like to you from a centralized exchange?
52:33 Challenges for the future and just final thoughts?
52:35 Dan Held: Yeah, so Kraken, I think, is in a great spot in the space. It’s a really, really solid company that’s been around almost 10 years. I’ve known Jesse for almost nine years at that time. We’ve got an incredible amount of products in the pipeline.
52:47 I’m really excited to see what we’ve got coming out. Obviously I can’t comment on revenue numbers, as that’s confidential, but Dan’s a good friend of mine. Really, you know, really appreciate a lot of his thoughts in the space. When it comes to, like, what I’m most excited about, I think, you know, Kraken is one of those companies that’s kind of core to the ethos of the space. We are, like Jesse Powell has said, no to regulators.
53:09 You know, he’s all we also adhere to all the regulators, all the regulatory requirements necessary, but, for example, in certain states we’ve said no, we don’t want to comply with this, and we won’t do business in that state. So Jesse has principles, and I really respect that a lot. He’s a principled man, and he approaches business that way. So I think the core ethos of the company is very, like, very core to, like, the properties of Bitcoin and crypto being decentralized and, you know, being very libertarian, which a lot of newer companies may not have that value.
53:38 And as Bitcoin goes mainstream, less and less companies will have that value. So I think Bitcoin is, or Kraken is, kind of like OG, kind of like OG ethos. So I really like that. As an OG myself, I like that corn. You know, Jesse feels very open about everyone speaking their mind.
53:53 Jesse doesn’t necessarily agree with everything I have to say, but he agrees with my right to say it, and so I think that I have a lot of respect for that, even more so than someone who would agree with me. Yeah, so, and Jesse’s also very, you know, very open with how he feels, and he really, you know, has a culture within Kraken, so I admire that a lot. Also, I think Kraken moved a little slower back in the day, and so we’re starting to really see the pace of things pick up internally in terms of what we’re shipping in terms of the products that we have, and so there’s so many exciting things in the pipeline that I wish I could talk about, but I can’t, that I think will be really, really cool in 2022 to CS GO launch.
54:31 And on the growth marketing side, so my role is user acquisition. I acquire new customers for Kraken. And so for me, you know, there was a ton of, a ton of, I think, foundational work to be done in terms of us getting that program built out, and getting different things turned on, and really happy with our progress over the last year and a half doing that, really excited about our ability to unlock more acquisition efforts. So, you know, I, my background, I’m just kind of like work-wise my first product, XeroBlock, for example, we ranked number two in the App Store for the keyword Bitcoin.
55:04 That wasn’t coincidence. I figured out how the Apple App Store algorithm worked and was able to get it to rank number two for the keyword Bitcoin, which made us extremely successful. That’s an example of some, like, more growth marketing skill sets that I like to weave into Kraken in terms of, like, how we look at organic and paid acquisition. For a growth marketer, I’m a little bit more on the, you know, I’ve got a little bit more organic experience than most.
55:29 But essentially, you know, we’re trying to acquire more customers on behalf of Kraken. It’s been a really awesome experience building that team out and really building out a solid foundation over there, so I’m really excited about Kraken. I think we’ve got a ton of stuff in the pipeline. I wish I could talk about it, but I’m sure the comms team would kill me if I did. So, yeah, really excited about what we’re doing.
55:51 I think you’re going to be, I think, impressed with what Kraken comes out with in 2022.
55:55 Brian Rose: That’s fantastic. I really appreciate those values. You know, I mean, man, we, we almost got taken off the map last year. Almost lost our whole business and our whole YouTube channel.
56:03 It was like 9,000 videos, my whole life, and it was like being held by a thread and threatened in front of us. It was a real time to find out what you stand for. And I remember had someone ask me like, what, how did you find the courage to fight back? I actually didn’t. It just made me so angry.
56:18 It was my reaction one second after they took it down to say no, that’s not right, you know. So sometimes just fighting, fighting for, you know, what you value, is really important, and I really appreciate the stance that you take on freedom, and you know, like you said, the way that Kraken works as well. I think that that’ll build you, you know, a real brand in the long term that’s really going to stand out, and like you said, some of the newer companies maybe are not doing that or don’t have that history, and that foresight.
56:43 I think it’s really important, and yeah, the future looks bright with what you’re doing at Kraken. Again, Dan Tapiero, really fascinating guy. Fantastic what he’s doing there. I was really impressed and a lot of great things to say about you guys. And the growth marketing, man, that’s a whole nother world.
56:58 But it’s so important, because, Dan, you know, Dan, the work that you do could literally, you know, change the game. You know, if you do it right, then we get, you know, Bitcoin adopted. We get these protocols woven in. If you do it wrong, you know, maybe the battle gets lost. So, you know, it’s not just about bucks.
57:15 It’s really about maybe the future of humanity, as Jeff Booth would say. So I love the vibe.
57:20 Dan Held: Yeah, that’s how I believe. You know, that’s what I believe, and that’s how I feel about Bitcoin. It’s that, you know, with Kraken and my personal brand, it’s both about getting new people into Bitcoin and so that’s a really cool experience for me, of being able to play a big part in that.
57:35 I mean, look, we all, we all play a part in Bitcoin’s marketing machine. There is no central marketing team. Each one of us represents Bitcoin and Bitcoin’s narrative, and so I just feel, you know, extremely happy about my ability to help bring in more people and help make it easier to understand. I definitely stand on the shoulders of giants, you know, like Andreas Antonopoulos and those before me. You know, I think my value that I brought to the space, and the reason why I’ve gained in popularity, is because I break down things in a simple manner.
58:02 Bitcoin is incredibly complex. There’s a lot of pieces. There’s a lot of narrative compression that has to occur before people can understand it, and a lot of people before me were very technical, and I was one of the first kind of non-technical people, slash marketers, to really talk about Bitcoin in a way that’s a little bit more simplistic. So yeah, it feels incredible. I hope, you know, years from now I can look back on this, and basically how I approach my experience is I can look back on this and be proud of the work that I did.
58:29 Brian Rose: It’s so important what you’re doing, and we really appreciate your voice here, Dan. I have an expression that I say, it takes a village, you know, that’s that old African proverb it takes a village to raise a child, and I think it takes a village of people like you to educate someone in the, you know, crypto asset space, and not everybody can get the message from Michael Saylor or Raoul Pal or from Morehead or from you or from Novogratz. They all sometimes need the right voice at the right time with the right emotion to make that click.
58:55 So I’m trying to create that village and move it forward. So really appreciate what you contribute. If people want to contact you and find out more about Kraken, what’s the best way, and then just any final thoughts? We’ll wrap this up.
59:06 Dan Held: Yeah, so if you’re on YouTube, so if you’re watching this on YouTube, it’s Dan Held on YouTube.
59:10 I’ve got a YouTube channel where I talk through various kind of more in-depth Bitcoin topics, so if you want to know more about Bitcoin, follow me there or subscribe to me there. If you like written form, if you want to go a little bit more written form instead of visual, or instead of, like, a video, I’ve got my newsletter called The Held Report, and you can subscribe to that as a free subscriber or paid one if you want to get it every single week. And then finally, if you’re on Twitter, follow me on Twitter.
59:33 I’m at Dan Held, so Twitter is kind of where I’m predominantly at. I’ve got half a million followers over there, so if you’re really into kind of shorter, quippier takes, that’s where you’re going to kind of find those, and then, you know, like I mentioned before, YouTube and my newsletter, the longer-form content. If you’re interested in buying Bitcoin or crypto for the first time, check out Kraken. So go to kraken.com. Yes, that’s Kraken, kind of like the sea monster.
59:53 That’s how you spell it. And so, yeah, kraken.com if you want to sign up and buy crypto for the first time. And yeah, you know, really appreciate you having me on, Brian. This was a phenomenal time talking about Bitcoin. I think those questions were really good.
1:00:06 You know, I’ve done tons of these interviews, and this was a lot of fun, going in depth as to, like, why I believe in Bitcoin stuff. So thanks for having me.
1:00:13 Brian Rose: No, my pleasure. Thanks, Dan. Let’s do this again, maybe in London next time.
1:00:17 We’ll get you here in the leather chair, and appreciate everything you do. Follow this man on those channels. Support our fellow YouTuber as well. And yeah, all the best with the work at Kraken. You guys doing some great stuff.
1:00:26 So if you want to stay with me a second here, I’ll just say goodbye, everybody. Thank you so much. We’ll see you next time on London Real. Take care, bye.
