The Portable Revolution

Every passage, on the record.

1. 00:00Claim

   Every transaction is a competition for the best money, and if there is a better money in the system, Bitcoin will naturally eat the entire world's money supply because as soon as it launched, better in every aspect, its fate was written.

2. 00:00Analogy

   Like Agent Smith in the matrix, Bitcoin will naturally eat the entire world's money supply, it will just Pac-man the entire thing and there's nothing you can do about it.

3. 00:00Reference

   Like Agent Smith in the matrix.

4. 00:00Reference

   It will just Pac-man the entire thing.

5. 00:00Event

   Today is July of the 29th, and it is a Thursday, and the price is hovering somewhere around 40,000 US dollars.

6. 01:30Claim · condensed

   Bitcoin is the most portable form of money the world has ever known; up until this point money was physical or a digital representation of fiat, but Bitcoin is squarely existent in the digital world.

7. 02:04Claim · condensed

   Removing the physicality of money, and removing all of the un-money things about money, gets you the ultimate monetary premium.

8. 02:04Quote

   You can store your entire life savings in your head in 24 words. Go on 12 if you're crazy, right?

9. 02:44Idea

   Taking all of your life's energy that you have built up, that you have accrued to that point, all the work that you have done, all the time that you have spent, all the energy that you have put in; you can contain all of that energy, you can take it all with you in your head in 24 words.

10. 02:44Analogy

    Imagine what you can do with the idea of moving across borders with nothing but words in your head, taking all of your life's energy that you have accrued to that point.

11. 04:27Prediction

    If you were to fast forward 10 years from now, I know that I'm going to be correct, for the things we've talked about on this podcast.

12. 05:10Claim · condensed

    Accumulating savings means having calls on other people's energy in the future; when you save, you're betting on human innovation and on people's ability to adapt to whatever the future throws at them.

13. 06:33Claim

    Bitcoin is positivity: you have to unlock energy and trade that energy to get access to the system, so you can't be cheated out of access to it.

14. 07:10Analogy

    These are the stories that will get talked about around the fire three or four generations from now, that grandpa did this and this is why the world is a better place, this is why we have access to this energy.

15. 08:15Claim · condensed

    Bitcoin doesn't stop: developers keep making the system better, which is different from gold, which is always gold and has always operated the same way.

16. 08:15Claim · condensed

    Trying to bring gold up to speed with technology is exactly what produces the fiat system: since gold can't subdivide efficiently past a certain point, people put claims on the gold instead, first on paper and then digitally, which requires trusting whoever holds the gold and issues the claims.

17. 09:15Claim · condensed

    Any subtle advantage in one form of money, no matter how slight, compounds into an enormous benefit once you factor in the size of the whole human network using it; if everyone centralizes on one money you get a monopoly on that money, which prices more goods and services in the same unit and removes the friction of currency conversion.

18. 10:55Analogy · condensed

    Gold can be moved, made smaller or bigger, aggregated or divided; it's scarce enough that a small amount can represent large value, which is why carrying your life savings a thousand years ago in a little satchel of gold nuggets wasn't beyond the realm of possibility.

19. 10:55Reference

    It's not like one of those big giant stones people throw over the board on some ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, passing around these giant rai stones, whatever they were called.

20. 11:51Claim · condensed

    In large quantities gold becomes very hard to move: it's heavy, it has a very particular, easily recognizable physical form, and moving a large amount draws attention and attracts bad actors.

21. 12:22Claim · condensed

    Gold is a bearer asset that is physical and uniform, so when it's stolen and melted down with other gold it's hard to prove it was yours; there's no one to complain to and get another claim on it, which is why monopolies developed over time to protect gold.

22. 13:14Claim · condensed

    Because gold isn't portable at scale, storing it becomes very expensive and it becomes a honeypot for powerful actors; you have to trust the people guarding it and trust that they have the ability to keep out anyone who wants to take it, and competing nations target gold reserves first because removing a country's energy reserves cripples it.

23. 14:35Claim · condensed

    Every unit of energy spent moving, securing or storing gold is energy not spent unlocking more energy: you're consuming rather than producing, and you're lowering the entropy of the surrounding environment.

24. 14:35Idea

    Every energy amount or dollar directed at security is one that isn't directed at unlocking more energy.

25. 16:05Claim · condensed

    Gold by nature leads to centralization, and centralization is extremely fragile because it requires trust.

26. 16:05Quote

    It doesn't exist in the physical world. You can't get much more portable than that.

27. 16:05Claim · condensed

    Bitcoin can be transferred around the world instantly, at almost no cost, any time of day, with full finality, and no other asset can match that; it has no mass and no physical weight, so moving a dollar's worth costs the same as moving a billion.

28. 17:20Analogy · condensed

    Imagine a small island nation on capital controls where gold is used for everything and you're a millionaire there; good luck trying to move a million dollars worth of gold out of the country, you'd need armed guards or you'd have to carry an obviously heavy, obviously gold amount through an airport.

29. 18:14Claim · condensed

    With gold, capital controls are simple to enforce: a large amount is impossible to hide, and even carrying a smaller amount on your person is visibly obvious and easy to stop and search.

30. 19:45Claim · condensed

    Banks don't hold the monopoly on violence, governments do; the servers holding the digits that represent your fiat bank balance can be seized by the government at any time, and the banks are just willing participants in that system.

31. 20:16Analogy · condensed

    You might think you're safe because fiat is digital and you can use PayPal or Venmo, but just imagine all of those services shut off, because they are pay-to-play services.

32. 21:46Claim · condensed

    Bitcoin can't be seen on a person and can't be physically seized; even if you personally can't get out of a country, your Bitcoin can, and the same keys can hold a dollar or a billion dollars.

33. 21:46Quote

    Ask those people how valuable a super portable form of money would be, and the obvious answer is at least 99% of whatever just got confiscated.

34. 21:46Analogy

    Sometimes it crosses your mind lying in bed at night: wait a second, if everybody tries to get their money out of the bank at once, we're all fucked, no one's gonna be able to get it out, this is incompletely shuts down, we're screwed.

35. 21:46Claim · condensed

    So much energy is wasted just in the thinking that goes into trusting the bank and the government to give you access to your own energy whenever you want it, let alone the energy spent actually operating inside that trust system.

36. 21:46Claim · condensed

    If bad things are on the horizon it can take weeks or months to reposition into other assets like real estate, gold or equities, but Bitcoin moves near instantaneously, at the speed of light.

37. 22:52Claim · condensed

    Bitcoin has flipped the table on traditional money models: SHA-256 encryption means defense is near free and offense is highly costly, which goes against the entire history of money and its security costs, and shifts the role that monopolies on violence play.

38. 22:52Claim · condensed

    The easier it becomes for individuals to withdraw their energy from a system, the more attitudes and behavior in government must change, because you can't push people as hard if you know they can leave.

39. 23:38Claim · condensed

    Taxes don't pay for government services, since paying for services actually happens through inflation; taxes are a form of money deletion, erasing money from the system, so taxation is really about limiting the government's opportunity to steal from people, not funding anything.

40. 23:38Prediction · condensed

    Once people know there's a limit to how much energy they'll tolerate being taken, and that they can instantaneously remove all of their energy from the system, governments are going to become significantly nicer.

41. 24:49Claim · condensed

    Most people think Bitcoin's portability means total chaos because no one will want to pay taxes, but people will want to pay for a nice place to live, because building a nice place takes a lot of unique people organizing together, and that organization is worth paying into.

42. 24:49Prediction · condensed

    Governments will start smiling because they will want citizens' energy, and they will need to leverage that energy to create an ecosystem that draws in even more energy.

43. 25:24Reference

    You're gonna see more and more little tiny countries, just like the sovereign individual predicted, the book, the sovereign individual predicts these little tiny citadels of protection.

44. 25:24Prediction · condensed

    There will be more and more small citadel-like jurisdictions where energy can be drawn in and protected, and people pay into the system to be protected and to live somewhere nice, echoing what The Sovereign Individual predicted.

45. 25:24Claim · condensed

    The more any one person unlocks energy, the more it benefits everyone in the system, because there's more energy in the system for everyone; the goal shifts from pure consumption to building the best environment for unlocking more energy, which is a change in time preference.

46. 26:16Claim · condensed

    People will start voting with their energy: if someone doesn't like what they see and their Bitcoin can move, they can move with it, since a person can move with all of their energy on a whim, secured the whole time by the most secure network in the world.

47. 26:47Quote

    SHA-256 is your army of armed guards and reinforced volts, right in your head.

48. 27:20Claim · condensed

    Bitcoin eliminates almost all of the security costs involved with any other form of money, and its portability forces governments to act in their citizens' best interest; those are two enormous draws on wasted energy that Bitcoin removes.

49. 27:20Claim · condensed

    Bitcoin holders have ultimate optionality that was once limited by the physical world: it eliminates third-party trust so you can hold your entire wealth in 24 words with no company or government needed to tell you it's safe, and it greatly suppresses the chance of confiscation because it can be transferred in seconds, which renders any attack planned in advance useless.

50. 28:12Analogy · condensed

    Imagine what would have to happen to enforce a ban: as soon as they come to Bob's house and take his hardware wallet, even if Bob gives up the password, word spreads quickly to the rest of the community, and control of the Bitcoin is so easy to ship out, even if Bob himself can't physically leave.

51. 28:12Claim

    Bitcoin is the perfect collateral, pristine in the sense that there is no counterparty risk or credit risk on it.

52. 28:12Event

    Bitcoin collateral only accounts for 0.15% of the total collateral market as of July 2021.

53. 29:40Claim · condensed

    Bitcoin doesn't exist in the physical world, it is weightless and takes up no space, and it can be held and exchanged entirely on a smartphone; that's what ultimate portability looks like for actual day-to-day trade.

54. 29:40Claim

    Money is technology, and Bitcoin is the best technology that has ever existed for money, the best system for money that we know of right now.

55. 30:21Prediction

    Bitcoin will eventually come to dominate, there is no doubt about it; the real question is how inaccurate the pricing system is right now.

56. 30:21Prediction · condensed

    Gold's market cap being only about ten times Bitcoin's right now is nothing, once you consider how much more energy will be unlocked across the world going forward as technology becomes increasingly efficient and the rate of change keeps expanding exponentially.

57. 31:12Claim · condensed

    The world needs more portable money, not less: there are more goods and services coming into the marketplace, not fewer, and money needs to move without regard to business hours, trading hours or when a market happens to be open.

58. 31:12Prediction

    Bitcoin is significantly mispriced, by a lot.

59. 31:12Quote

    Buy more Bitcoin, buy more for your kids and your kids kids, and they will thank you, because this opportunity, this emergence of a new monetary good, has only come along twice in the history of man, so please act accordingly.