MI Rewind: Bitcoin First and Fidelity Digital Assets w/ Chris Kuiper & Jack Neureuter

23:31Like you would just be reinventing the wheel. Once you see Bitcoin, you can't unsee it. You can't make a better one, right? If people are already with Bitcoin, it was the first mover. It's the most decentralized. It's the most secure. We think this one is going to have the dominant network effects. And if you think network effects are strong for things like Facebook, which has half the globe on its networks, where do you see the network effects for money because the incentive is so much higher to choose the right monetary network. You are literally going to lose money if you don't choose the right one.

24:01And so we don't see anything usurping that because, again, if you want money, are you going to choose one that's the most decentralized or secure or are you going to choose something else? Now, like you said, that's why we see it in a league of its own. We think you have to start with Bitcoin in its own bucket in that way. Now, other things, of course, have come along. They've copied the code and they changed it. And that's fine. We're not disparaging those things in the paper. We're simply pointing out that once you do that, whether you want to realize it or not, you're making a trade-off. So if you're going to say, oh, this is better than Bitcoin because it's more scalable, it's faster, it's got more programmability.

24:36That may be true, but then you've sacrificed something else, usually in the realm of decentralization or security. And again, those are the things you want for money. So we think Bitcoin fulfills the role of money. These other things can fulfill other use cases. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Even Einstein had blind spots. That's why modern science is built on the idea of peer review. Investing may be more art than science, but that doesn't make peer feedback any less valuable. The tricky thing is finding qualified people who are interested and willing to help vet your investment ideas.

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27:29To begin getting smarter about investing, just visit theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. And for a limited time, you can use code stocks15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. All right, back to the show. You're really hitting hard on the network effect piece. And I think that's really important. The idea is that each new incremental user adds value to the network and makes it more valuable for all of the existing users. And Chris, you mentioned Facebook's network effect and how monetary network effects are much stronger.

28:11It's interesting to think about how some people are able to add a lot more value to the network than others. For example, when Tesla bought$1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin, that added a heck of a lot more incremental value to the network than, say, some smaller businesses or even most individuals. Whereas Facebook adds users one by one, and each new user isn't all that different than any other user. And that helps illustrate the difference between a monetary network and most other network effects. You also mentioned that Bitcoin is decentralized. And you hear that word tossed around all the time in the space.

28:49And I think your common person might be like, so what is decentralized? So I want to ask you why the decentralization piece is so important for digital assets, And why is Bitcoin considered to be more decentralized than all the other cryptocurrencies? Yeah, I think decentralization is at the heart of Bitcoin's value proposition. It's a whole idea here is that instead of me sending payments to Chris or Clay with a centralized intermediary in the middle, I want to be able to do it without a centralized intermediary in the middle that can change the rules, that can censor those payments and stop them from happening for whatever reason.

29:26And so trust and decentralization are inherently sort of linked at the hip, we almost think of. And Chris just sort of referenced some of the trade-offs that we see where centralization becomes a trade-off versus scalability and speed of your base layer. And a lot of this has to do with the size of blocks and the amount of history that is contained within Bitcoin or any software protocol's history. And so with Bitcoin, the idea is let's keep the base layer very simple. Let's just make this network have 21 million coins, uncentrable peer-to-peer payments, and that's it. And let's keep the block sizes at one megabyte, which is what it originated at.

30:08Whereas we see, and we referenced this in the paper, is the block size wars really highlights the Bitcoin community or the free market, emphasizing that decentralization matters. Because the block size wars was all about this idea of, okay, Bitcoin's too slow, because if we have one megabyte blocks, we can only get four to five transactions across per second, if you sort of back out the math. Let's make those blocks bigger, because then we can fit more transactions in, the transaction fees will be lower. And therefore, everybody wins, because now we can compete with Visa, and we're a faster network.

30:39But what that myth is, and what sort of the entire block size wars was all about, was you saw two communities, one rallied around speed and scalability of this payment network. And the other one rallied around decentralization and sort of these core value propositions associated with Bitcoin today, which stems out of decentralization. And ultimately, the free market decides which would win. And if we look at market caps today, from the time of Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash hard forking, which was the ultimate outcome, is that Bitcoin and decentralization matters on the base layer. And then sort of what that ultimately leads to is that Bitcoin kicks its scalability problem up to this idea of we can solve it in layers.

31:22And so we're seeing solutions that are emerging, like the Lightning Network, where we can have micropayments that are economically feasible and still rely on the security of base layer settlements if and when we need it. But ultimately, scalability is the tradeoff that you make to make Bitcoin more decentralized, because then its blocks are smaller. Therefore, its amount of history is smaller. Therefore, every individual can run the software if they want to, and the network becomes more decentralized, as well as secure. Because when you start making tradeoffs for larger block sizes, then you reduce transaction fees, which reduces the mining incentive and lowers the overall security.

32:02So security and decentralization really sit on one side and speed and scalability sit on the other. And Bitcoin, out of all digital assets, really makes the biggest tradeoff towards that decentralization and security. And then all of these other emergent digital assets are starting to make different tradeoffs towards scalability, complexity, and speed on their base layer. But it does come at a direct cost of some level of centralization or security. When you guys mentioned that there aren't really any legitimate competitors, or it's going to be very difficult for another monetary good to overtake Bitcoin to the network effects, they might look at the list of coins and look at something like Ethereum, where the market cap is actually somewhat comparable to Bitcoin.

32:45Is Ethereum or any of the other larger market cap coins actually legitimate competitors to Bitcoin? Or how do you think about that? Yeah, it's a tricky question because as Jack said, the free market or anyone who's participating in this marketplace is voting with their dollars on what they think is the right mix or balance of these things, right? So with Jack's example of the block size wars and the forks that came off of it, we have in the paper a chart showing Bitcoin towers by magnitudes of 100 or more over these forks. So clearly people voted with their dollars in terms of market cap and said, I want Bitcoin, not Bitcoin cash to store my value, right?

33:25And so that makes sense. Now, to your point, it's a good question, because there are a lot of people, especially in the DeFi space who say, well, I transact in Ether all the time, the native token of the Ethereum network, and I have to use Ether for all these things, and I'm always converting back to Ether. To me, Ether is the base money. Ether is money to me. And like we're saying, if we're saying out of one side of our mouth, for the free market and people are going to choose whatever works for them. But on the other hand, we're saying, we think Bitcoin is going to win this game. What's it going to be?

33:57And so we have to be intellectually honest. We don't know exactly how that's going to play out. But from what we've seen so far, with Bitcoin being the first, most decentralized, most secure, and then everything coming after it, Ethereum founders are known. They have a very influential group of developers and names and people behind it. that's fine, but they're certainly more centralized than Bitcoin, right? And so when it comes down to it, again, what are people going to choose? And so while we can't predict or know exactly, I would put my money on that when it comes to that base layer, the true monetary good, you want the simpler, quote, dumber network to handle these transactions and for it to be ultimately secure, unconfiscatable, permissionless, censorship resistant.

34:46This is clearly nobody else's liability. This is a bare asset that you can hold. I mean, it's the ultimate pristine collateral, as some people like to say, right? And we're seeing that play out today. So that's kind of the reasons why we think Bitcoin's network effect will grow as a monetary good. These other things can grow for other use cases. But again, it's a good point. We don't entirely know. Jack, I don't know if you had other thoughts on kind of poking holes in the theory was saying, well, I use Ether. To me, Ether is money. Yeah. I think when we look at these other digital assets, the investment risk return profile is completely different.

35:22Because if we're making the assertion that Bitcoin is really trying to fulfill this role as a monetary good that allows for it to function as a store value asset and a medium of exchange, well, what do all of these other digital asset networks enable? Because you could theoretically do both, but I think we would argue in many ways, particularly the store value aspect, is inferior to these other networks, because Bitcoin had that zero to one moment and created it. And so I almost start to build like these use cases for other digital assets appear to be competing with like Bitcoin's ability to scale itself.

35:56And so Bitcoin scaling technology, as well as like companies and infrastructure that are being built around Bitcoin are sort of the competition for these other digital assets that are trying to fill other use cases, like other sparring and lending platforms and different things that could be created using this technology is being created within this DeFi ecosystem and on these other layer one platforms, whether or not these have long-term terminal value. I think a lot of that has to do with, can Bitcoin scale itself and can all of that infrastructure be built around Bitcoin? Or do these other networks maybe use Bitcoin as a collateral in some sense, or this monetary good, right?

36:38Where Bitcoin is the sort of ultimate monetary good and these other things are sort of moving around or tethered to it in some form or fashion. I think that's how we're sort of looking at the rest of the digital asset space. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Hey, it's Sean O'Malley, just popping in with a quick message. If you like this podcast, well, I've got great news for you. We've got a handful of other shows for you to explore, from learning about Bitcoin to embracing a richer, wiser, happier lifestyle. Just go into your podcast app and type in We Study Billionaires to find our collection of shows.

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40:13All right, back to the show. Now, one pushback I get all the time is that Bitcoin has no value and it's not backed by anything. What would your response be to something like this? Yeah, my first response when anyone suddenly gives me that question is, what do you being backed by. I haven't seen a good thorough study on this, but I've seen enough YouTube videos. And so maybe take this with a grain of salt of, I don't know how many people that did this to get the result they wanted, but it's a video of someone asking people what the US dollar is backed by. And a surprising number of people say gold.

40:50They still think the US dollar is backed by gold. It's not that crazy because for much of its history, it was. You could convert your paper dollars, your US dollars to an amount of gold. There was a fixed peg,$20.67 cents per ounce of gold. And then of course, they revalued that. And we've incrementally gotten away from that. And people also know we have all this gold in Fort Knox, we have gold on the central bank balance sheet. So there's still this intuitive sense that it's backed by in terms of you could convert it. But of course, we know that's not true. So first of all, what's the US dollar backed by?

41:24It's backed by nothing. I mean, some people say it's backed by the government, our military, the ability to get taxes from people. But I think that kind of puts the cart before the horse, right? Because you can just look at other countries. Let's look at Turkey in the last few months here, whose currency has dropped by 50 % or more, or they're experiencing inflation of 50 % officially, maybe 100 % by unofficial measures. They're an industrialized country. They're a G20 country. They have a military. They have the ability to collect taxes. They have a government, but their currency clearly is not backed very well by these things.

41:59And so people say Bitcoin isn't backed by anything. It's true in the physical sense that you can't trade it at a fixed exchange rate for something else. There's not a reserve from the Bitcoin corporation sitting somewhere that you could swap it for something, right? But what is backing it is the network, The massive amount of computing power that's powering this network, that's verifying and processing the transactions, that's securing the network, all of the nodes, the verifying nodes are backing this network. And so what you're putting your faith and trust in is this code. And the code is open source.

42:36It's verifiable. And we can see the incentives that give us the assurance that the Bitcoin is genuine. It's not fraudulent. It's not created fraudulently out of thin air. It can't be double spent. And that there's that really hard cap of 21 million. That's the key, right? That's what you're putting your trust in because that's what makes it scarce. That's what gives it value. That's what gives it the ability to potentially be a store of value. And so the question is, would you rather have a money backed by something that doesn't have one single ruler or one single board, like a Federal Reserve Board of Governors, a dozen people that are sitting behind it making decisions?

43:15Would you rather put your trust in that or would you rather put your trust in a currency where you can see the rules, you can see the pre-programmed monetary schedule, and you can see all the incentives that give you the confidence that this is what's going to continue in the future, that these rules are not going to be changed? So I guess that would be my response to that. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of what Jack mentioned before, where people just kind of have this inertia where people have always used the US dollar. So why would we need something else? Why would we need to trust something else?

43:48All these questions come up. I'd like to ask, what are some of the things happening in the Bitcoin space that you guys are studying or keeping your eye on that makes you optimistic or gets you pretty excited about what's happening? I think there's a ton of things to be optimistic about when you're looking at Bitcoin. I look out across from an investment perspective, the investment landscape, And I see tons of things that were tailwinds for certain asset classes that have now become headwinds. But when I look at Bitcoin and the digital asset ecosystem, I see tons of tailwinds. From that sort of an investment lens is like, there's a ton of opportunity here.

44:26And I think the innovators and the things that are being built around these ecosystems is what's most interesting to me anyway. So Lightning is an obvious one, which we sort of mentioned, but one of the things that Lightning then enables is sort of limitless in many ways, where if you have a payment network that is completely open source, it costs effectively nothing and has no counterparty risk because both parties can settle back to the base layer chain, you get effectively the full settlement assurances associated with Bitcoin using the Lightning network. There's so many possibilities where we always say this phrase of digital gold.

45:03And that's kind of cute to make the analogy between a traditional investor trying to understand the space. And it's important to have something to tether to. I think everybody thinks of the gold part. And you think of there's only 21 million, but you understand digital to the point of, okay, it's not a gold brick, it's computer software. But what you lose is this thing of Netflix isn't just digital movies or digital blockbuster. Like Netflix's ability to stream movies and shows 24-7, 365, instantly, almost anywhere across the globe, as long as you have an internet connection. And oh, by the way, over time, they built algorithms that say, you watch these three shows, you would like this show and that movie.

45:46And they know who I am. And when you take something physical and make it digital, I think it gets lost that the network effect, usability, user experience, all are magnitudes better. And so Bitcoin's total addressable market and what it'll be able to do as a result of all this technology that is just starting to get built on top of it is sort of unthinkable. And so to just take gold as a total addressable market, I think is sort of completely incorrect. if you can sort of back out, was doing some interesting analysis of looking at like Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, these types of businesses that were physical, and now they're digital.

46:25And if you back out sort of the physical assets associated with those businesses, and look at, okay, what is the value there at full maturity versus Blockbuster at its height versus Netflix today, and the multiple of how much bigger that business is relative to the total economy is double digit multiple. And so to just say that Bitcoin is only going to enable the store value asset that can allow me to send you value, I think is naive. But I think that we're only whatever, five, six years into a lot of the technology being built on top of Bitcoin, where I think the next two or three years, we're going to get a lot more answers and a lot more tools that we can actually point to and say, that is what is going to be made possible.

47:06And you're going to be able to do with Bitcoin. We just don't have those answers yet. So it's hard for a lot of people to see. But those types of things, discrete log contracts and a lot of things that now, Taproot making multi-sig effectively the same as single signature in terms of block space enables a lot of cool things to be built. It's just going to take a couple of years for those entrepreneurs to build those tools. Yeah, Jack, I like that analogy with the blockbuster Netflix, or even I just remind people, you mentioned Uber. It's like Uber invent new hardware, right? It just took all these existing things and put them together into a completely new business model.

47:45And so that's one of the things I find really exciting too. Clay, for example, podcasting, right? We're seeing just the edges of the ability to stream money in real time, like streaming sats to someone you're listening to, right? What does that do to the existing business model of podcasting or other things that rely on traditional advertising? I mean, there's unknown unknowns, right? We don't know what these new things will enable, but just getting a little glimpse of some of these things makes me very assured that there will be some brand new technologies and business models out there that we can't even see yet.

48:19And it's like, the more out on the fringe you go, the more like interesting and exciting it is, but the less answers you have, we see like discrete log contracts, which is like, you know, this idea that we could have sort of a derivative that uses Bitcoin as a settlement layer in some sense, what if you could hold stable value that was backed by Bitcoin using a discrete log contract, and now all of a sudden, you have a savings account in Bitcoin, but you have this ability to have sort of a checking account or stable US dollar stable value or whatever you want to peg to using Bitcoin as the underlying collateral for both of those.

48:54Both of those things, that enables so much value accrual to the base layer of Bitcoin, as well as reduction in trust, because a lot of the stable coins that exist today are centralized. And what if we could use the most decentralized digital asset as the underpinning for that? That stuff is starting to be made possible. And I think stuff that we're excited about and all of that value accrues to base layer holders over time. Yeah, I agree that we are potentially just scratching the surface on what Bitcoin is potentially becoming. I think a lot of people might have trouble wrapping their head around how big the total addressable market is for this just one asset.

49:32Could you talk about why Bitcoin is an attractive option to diversify a portfolio in the current market specifically, five or so years ago, a lot of people might say things were a lot more stable in terms of the economic environment. So maybe you could discuss some of the things we're seeing today specifically. I mean, I think we've lived... And like Clay, you mentioned both of us were in high school in whatever, early 2010. And a lot of people look at that and say, well, that's a disadvantage. You don't have that much experience. I think in some sense, like I think, you know, both of you know, Morgan Housel is reading his book, The Psychology of Money, which, you know, he's an incredible writer and really thought provoking about like finance is only 10, 20 % math and 80, 90 % behavior.

50:19And he has this interesting quote of like, your life experience is only, you know, 0.0001 % of the observable history of the universe. But, you know, it makes up 80 % of how you view the world. And it feels like in some sense, the past 40 years of investing have had a couple of embedded assumptions within them where like a 60-40 portfolio and owning a house has been the way to go. And like, let's extrapolate that into the future. But when you look at the trends that have sort of caused that to be really successful, they're almost like trends that can't persist forever. A few of the big ones to me that stand out is like, just look at interest rates, right?

50:57Interest rates price themselves into every single asset because they're sort of your baseline opportunity costs. I could own fixed income, this risk-free asset, or I could own this risky asset discounted at a rate that bakes that in. Interest rates from 1981 were over 15%, and today they're sub 2 % on the 10-year. And that was nearly a linear line straight down. And that's a tailwind for all assets. Thinking of traditional assets, stocks, bonds, and real estate, that's a tailwind for all three of those. Then we think of being US-centric and the US dollar sitting at the heart of the financial system, but reserve currencies change and monetary systems change.

51:36And if this time isn't different, well, the structure of the financial system and the monetary system likely will change at some point. That doesn't mean the world has to end. It just means that there will be winners and losers when things sort of shake themselves up. And then I think the last sort of related and important one is over the past 40 years, the system has never really deleveraged. We've had big moments of deleveraging, but every single time policymakers have stepped in, both monetary, central banks globally, as well as increasingly fiscal policymakers, politicians spending money into the system of deficit spending.

52:12And both of those working hand in hand, where in 1987, you see a little bit of monetary intervention, post-2000, a little bit of monetary intervention. 2008, you see quantitative easing on the monetary side, but you also see a little bit of fiscal spending with the TARP deal. And then 2020, what do you get? You get both monetary and fiscal working hand in hand. And it's because the system never really deleveraged. The leverage just sort of moved around the system. And now it's sitting on global sovereign balance sheet. And you have to start asking the question of what does that lead to? Can you just do the same thing you did for the last 40 years?

52:45And I think that if you look at probabilities, which is investing, is the probability skewed towards the answer is no, you can't do what you did the last 40 years. And yes, the world is probably going to change to some degree. So what do those probabilities look like? I think what we see is large sovereign debt loads. Historically, we've seen the solution there traditionally for large sovereigns is to run negative real interest rates, let inflation run a little bit hot and peg your interest rates down below that inflation rate. And so you sort of naturally peel down the leverage in the system by debasing your currency.

53:19And so what assets look interesting? What assets maybe don't look as interesting? Well, I think fixed income cash maybe looks a little bit less interesting in that type of an environment. And I think traditionally real estate is interesting or precious metals. And then we start to think about digital scarcity and an emerging digital scarcity or an emerging monetary good in the digital space. Maybe Bitcoin makes some sense in a portfolio in that type of an environment. I think that's the case that we're making. Yeah. And also just going back to what we touched on earlier about decentralization, why it's important.

53:52People are finding out a lot of their assets are also someone else's liabilities, right? And so what are the true assets that are left standing that are not someone else's liabilities? A lot of people think just cash, a great asset, because it's theirs. Especially think of a cash in your billfold. It's like, I have this dollar, I own it, I'm holding it in my hand. But that's actually a liability on the Federal Reserve's balance sheet, right? Cash in circulation is classified as a liability for them. And so as Jack was saying, what do we expect the playbook to be? We've seen it time and time again.

54:28You have negative interest rates, you debase the currency. And of course, the ideal is always to do this in, quote, the responsible way or trying to juggle this, kind of like the Fed likes to use lots of analogies of a balloon, not too much to pop it, not too little to deflate it. But in reality, markets are much more chaotic than that, right? And driven by human emotions. And also, I would just disagree with that kind of underpinning of the analogy anyway. But just to get back to my original point, I think we're going to have a rude awakening when people realize what are actually liability-free assets and what are not.

55:04Fantastic points. I think from my perspective, the real rate of return being so widely negative on cash and fixed income gives such a strong incentive for people to at least consider Bitcoin. You look at some of these public companies, even Apple has$200 billion in cash, Berkshire Hathaway and many of these other companies. And you're seeing it already from the private company perspective that don't have as many hoops to jump through. So Chris and Jack, thank you so much for coming onto the show. I really, really appreciate you guys taking the time to share what you guys are working on and your research.

55:39Before we close out the episode, where can the audience go to connect with you and learn more about Fidelity Digital Assets? Yeah. Thank you, Clay. It's been our pleasure. You can go to fidelitydigitalassets.com and you can also check out our Twitter at Digital Assets. Awesome. Thank you so much, guys. Thanks, Clay. you. All right. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please go ahead and follow us on your favorite podcast app so you can get these episodes delivered automatically. If you've been enjoying the podcast, we would really appreciate it if you left us a rating or review on the podcast app you're on.

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