The Breakdown of the Fiat World Order | Parker Lewis

34:39It's like, well, two people who live in a vacuum who are sycophants might think, oh, that might need to happen when anybody else sitting outside would be like, certainly that would be worse off. Everybody would be worse off if that happened. um but someone in the cia or you know some deep state thing might be like yeah this is this is we got a war game this in this way it's going to go and like you know iran nuts off um but it's like it's still more it's more disorder and it is disorder maybe in their minds with a hope of of then creating order from it but it's like again if you don't solve the like trade is the basis of cooperation it does not sit above you know somebody wanting to build an empire and have you know need to acquire oil like again like i'm not naive in that respect but if you have the basis for to trade somebody for oil rather than take their country over um that's going to leave everybody in a better place if you don't really have a basis to effectively coordinate trade, you're more likely to have an order that's dictated by a large war being won and then whoever is controlling the military that won dictating order to everybody else.

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37:52So whether you're worried about inheritance planning, wrench attacks, natural disasters, or just your own silly mistakes, you're protected by AnchorWatch. Rates for fully insured custody start as low as 0.55 % and are available for individual and commercial customers located in the US. Speak to AnchorWatch for a quote and for more details about your security options and coverage. Visit anchorwatch.com today. That is anchorwatch.com. Ray Dalio is obviously insanely influential. It's not like this is completely a novel take. People have been saying this for a long time. It's just he's someone that a lot of people listen to.

38:25And do you think gold absolutely ripping over the last sort of 18 months has been the market saying that a reordering is like on the horizon? I don't think, I mean, I don't, I personally don't think so. Like again, it would be easy to say yes.

38:44because all of these things are happening at the same time while the price of gold is rising. But for the last five years or three to five years, Russia's been accumulating gold. China's been accumulating gold.

39:08in 2022 no I guess four years ago I don't know exactly when Russia was caught off but that war started around this time in 2022 and Russia didn't spontaneously collapse they figured out a way to trade around it the dollar also didn't spontaneously collapse when Russia was able to to navigate off of it. And so I think that it's more of a symptom of the currency being on the brink of, like when I say being on the brink of failure, it's like, I'm not saying it's going to collapse next month. I'm saying it's heading down that path. And when buying gold and silver has reached the retail fervor that it has, that's like, it has Weimar Germany vibes because everyone is speculators in financial assets and derivatives.

40:14The distinguishment, because you can say, well, hey, that's the same thing as Bitcoin. It's like, the way that I look at it is, there's a difference between speculating in gold or dollars, or sorry, in gold and silver to get more dollars, to get more ruble or to get more yen as an inflation hedge, versus actually identifying the one thing that can practically be a solution. And I'm not closing out that there are certain people, I believe that Peter Schiff is somebody who looks at gold and says, we're going back to a gold standard. But there's also, and he won't admit this, that the vast majority of people that are trading in gold are trading to get more dollars.

40:54Now, an example that's not a geopolitical foe of anyone, or at least not today really, or I wouldn't describe it this way at all, but Tether was somebody. They bought physical gold. So they apparently weren't just trading in it to get more dollars. They actually wanted to hold the reserves. I would just say that gold rising or people turning to Bitcoin gold commodity monies with the thought process that currencies are being debased is about the currency, and it's less about the collapse of the world order because the world order, and I kind of hate the term, but it's just like the financial system is dollarized.

41:41And the dollar and the US economy, but the dollar economy globally, the cross-border trade, dwarfs any other system.

41:53in in the event of an actual dollar collapse things like gold and bitcoin for a period of time will be sold every credit asset will be sold every equity will be sold because there will actually be a run on dollars because there's so much dollar debt that exists and eventually the dollar will hyperinflate and everyone will migrate over to Bitcoin and sell their gold. But I would explain it less. Basically, maybe Ray Dalio making this comment at the same time that there's fear of going to war with Iran and heightened tension between Europe and Russia and the US and China and then gold going up. To me, it feels like a fool by randomness thing where you could pick any one of those things out and say, this is going up because of that.

42:45And at the underlying side, it's like, well, the dollar is devaluing because there's more dollar deposits. Even though the Fed isn't creating more base money at the moment, there's more and more dollar deposits, more and more Euro deposits, more and more Yen deposits. And it's the currency stupid. And then maybe the fracturing of the global order and the global trade systems and partnerships that existed breaking down might be underlying about the currency losing its value. So I'm not saying it's not related to that. It's just that it's coinciding at a time that's easy to stick it to. And it's like, but you could have said that two years ago.

43:29Right. Imagine the same thing. like China's actively buying gold and Russia's actively buying gold. Well, why wasn't the price going up? Right? Like, was the world order not fracturing then? So it's like, yes, gold's going up in value. Yes, the order in the world is fracturing. But it's also just the currency is losing its value. It was like, is gold going? Like, you could basically, you could have said the same when the stock market went up because they printed money. You know, is this a sign of the world order falling apart? No one wants to be in cash. They want equities. And so I just, I think it's easy to point it to that.

44:19And the more logical thing is just people are trying to get out of the dollar, you know, and a lot of them are doing it for reasons that they're struggling to get by and they need to speculate in something to try to stay ahead. And then in others, yeah, China and Russia are diversifying away from the dollar because they don't want to be tied to the dollar hegemony. And that also is rational. But there's something at a higher order that's dictating the fracture. Yeah, that makes sense. I've got a question for you that is pretty much impossible to answered, but I'm going to ask it anyway. You say that the dollar fiat is failing, which I totally agree with, but it's a process, not an event, I think.

45:08It's not going to fail tomorrow. Well, it will be an event, but it's not going to fail tomorrow. Okay. But the reason I say it's a process is because you could probably say the dollar started failing in 2008. You could probably pick a load of different dates, but that might be one that you could pick. How long do you think it can last? I don't know. Markets stay... Markets can remain irrational for longer than you can stay solvent. Personally, it's hard for me to believe that it goes on for another 10 years. Part of the way that I get there is thinking about Bitcoin and Bitcoin adoption.

45:51But also, So maybe one thing that I look at is Venezuela, like an example that I use. That a lot of times people want to talk about Venezuela hyperinflated because of sanctions. And that's just like totally farcical. Venezuela hyperinflated because of money printing. the sanctions that actually started cutting off Venezuela's abilities to sell oil was in, I believe, 2019 or 2020. GM, as a company, GM, the auto manufacturer that's based in the United States, they had operations in Venezuela. and they, in 2013, I believe they wrote down their Venezuelan boulevards because if you think about GM's operations, GM had auto manufacturing in the country of Venezuela.

46:51They weren't just exporting cars from the United States to Venezuela. They were importing parts and building GM vehicles in Venezuela and they were holding boulevards. to be able to, they were accepting boulevards as cash for cars. They were paying out boulevards. And then they had FX reserves because they were having to convert boulevards to dollars to buy parts from their largely U.S.-based manufacturers. Well, they wrote down, I think they first marked down their Venezuelan boulevards in 2013 by like 10 % or 20%. And then the next year, and I might have it off by one year. It might be like 14 was the first year and 15 was the next year or 13 was the first year and 14 was next.

47:41In the second year, they wrote it down 100%, 99%. And then if you Google, when did hyperinflation start in Venezuela, it will say like 2016 or 2017. So multiple years before, GM wrote down all of their boulevards and literally had to leave the country because they couldn't continue to manufacture cars. They shut down their operations. And over that period of time, before Venezuela actually entered hyperinflation, their currency had devalued by 50%. against a dollar over like three or four years. And a lot of things that you need to, at least in the United States, that you need to purchase, particularly food, have over the last four to five years, lost 40 to, you know, things are more than 50 % more expensive.

48:48And so it's like, there are parallels in that. Now, I don't necessarily think that, you know, Three years from there, there's going to be hyperinflation. But if you're looking at data points of what types of things happen, looking at the stock market, an index like the Dow, and seeing it have this hockey stick, these incredibly mature companies. These aren't startup tech companies that have huge ramps in cash flow, but seeing their valuations start to mimic what might have been happening in Weimar Germany, as an example. It's like the writings on that wall. And then when I think forward to like, because it will be an event, like there will be a moment when confidence is lost in the currency.

49:34And that is likely at a point where the currency starts to get sufficiently volatile that it causes a bunch of businesses to go out of business, which then disrupts supply chains, which then causes things like food on the grocery shelves to start to become sparse. and so if you think about that as one side of the currency problems independent and then you say here bitcoin is yeah it's traded down but between you know 1.34 trillion to 2 trillion in value and we go out 10 10 years of a world becoming more disordered and people trying to figure out well, what's the end game here? What's the answer?

50:21Then I don't see how with two more full halvings in Bitcoin and just this natural survival instinct of people. Because at the end of Dalio's piece, he was basically like, hey, the world's going to shit. You might want to think about not being in bonds. It's like, maybe think about gold. But as people follow the rabbit hole of the cause and effect, they'll realize that gold has the same problem. All of this started with gold and Bretton Woods. And even if you went back to gold coins, one, it's incredibly inefficient, but two, it's coined in some country's currency that people are having to trade back and forth.

51:07And so they all will figure out Bitcoin. And again, not a doomerism. I don't want it to happen. I'm just looking out and saying, hey, if Bitcoin adoption increased by 10 times over the next 10 years, which I view to be conservative, then it becomes clearly the second largest currency system in the world. and once it becomes clearly the second largest currency system in the world it's like you don't even need to become the biggest people will like the writing will be on the wall enough of a consensus will happen that somewhere in that point of that session from like being larger than the euro and clearly being larger than gold which i don't really think about gold currency system um that everyone there'll be a there'll be a a rapid monetization of Bitcoin that happens out of that time.

51:58I don't try to exactly when it happens. To me, it doesn't happen in 20 years. Great. That would be phenomenal. I'm just explaining the cause and effect of where and why it's going that way so that the way I think about it is surviving all seasons, all weathers. If you know where it's going and why and why it might not go back to something like gold and why all these problems that exist today started with gold. Like, you really think that all these problems, if you can't think about, well, why did we get to the dollar as it is when it started with gold, then how are you not connecting? Well, if you just tried to go back to ground zero and start it over, it's like, what would you do differently?

52:50And isn't this the logical place that it ends? Anyways, right? And if that's the case, then you can't go back to gold. You have to go to something that actually solves the problem that caused the fiat system to emerge, to solve gaps in settlement, security of gold, the difficulty of transporting gold, which is part of the difficulty of settling gold. if you're thinking about the US trading with China and imagine you had to actually settle physical gold every time a ship moved across you could do that but the gold's sitting in one place it's sitting on one shore and you might say well we'll put it in Europe because we don't trust each other but then it's sitting in Europe it's sitting on someone's shores and moving in a vault because moving it physically between countries is too costly.

53:57And then what is that? If it's sitting in a vault, you might not need to have a fiat denomination on top of it, but you essentially have a fiat financial system built on top to do all the zeros and ones. And you're like, nope, we're not going back to that. We're going to the thing where, hey, if the US is trading with China, you can send Bitcoin. Anybody who's trading can send Bitcoin. They can secure it. And their country, when they're ready to buy something from us or somebody else, they send it there. They're securing. You solve the problem of how gold is secured. Not only how gold is secured, how trade is settled.

54:37You have a greater basis of trade. Not to say it's all kumbaya. we're not living in utopia but there you have a better shot better basis of trade you're not likely to bomb your trade park or you're less likely to yeah so the actionable advice that Ray Dalio gives in the piece is sell debt buy gold and clearly gold is not the only option we think bitcoin is a better option but for the gold bugs like the Peter Schiff of the world he's obviously clueless on bitcoin but he's a smart guy I quite like a lot of his other takes Why don't you think they put enough weight on the sort of currency side of things and they don't see that if you go back to a gold standard, you kind of just de facto create fiat again?

55:21I don't know. I don't know. I mean, in Peter Schiff's case, I think that it's because, like, I don't know the guy. He seems like a decently fine human being. but when you've been so right about the problems and you've misdiagnosed the solution that your bias and just like overcoming the negative psychology of of it like the rational person would say it's a sunk cost fallacy right but um in his case which i don't think that is the case of the majority of people, which is why Bitcoin wins, is because he has a bias that's built around his own personality. He's got businesses built around it. It is not easy to exit a position and accumulate Bitcoin or let me just finish that thought, accumulate Bitcoin and then tell the entire world, hey, I was wrong about gold.

56:35Now, Larry Lepard is someone who's like going from the gold world and basically like, I still think you should own gold, but I think that Bitcoin is going to win. And, you know, in his mind, he doesn't necessarily say Bitcoin is going to win and gold is going to be a loser. I think that that, you know, the logical conclusion, not saying that, you know, Larry agrees or disagrees. But there's a difference between that, which I think is, is, is the rational world versus someone like Peter Schiff, who's, not just been somebody who's advocated for gold, but has banks and businesses and everything tied to that end game happening.

57:15And there are going to be fewer of those people. One example I would give is when the whole world was going on the gold standard, China went on the silver standard. And so it's like, people can choose wrong. And then they can have, you can look at it two ways. They can have their wealth expropriated from them, or they can have their purchasing power declined. There's a quote in the Bitcoin standard. I think it's something along the lines of, you can't insulate or protect yourself from somebody else using a harder currency than yours. and that's what we're dealing with with Bitcoin and gold and I'm not just talking about the supply cap it's the other properties that make it a superior settlement rail faster settlement like ability to assay if somebody looks if anybody picks up gold in Bitcoin and looks at them both and be like shit it's going to be one of these two and they bottom up, they end up at Bitcoin.

58:31That was me. And where I first had to understand why gold was money and why it had emerged. And then I was looking at Bitcoins through the same lens and you're A versus B and you stack them up and it becomes fairly clear fairly easily. And there's part of that that Safe Dean Amoose had a debate with Peter Schiff in El Salvador recently. and he talks about a number of those differences and I just think that the rational mind ends up there and someone has to choose how they're going to store each unit of value and you can do it in both but everyone is incentivized to maximize their purchasing power going forward so I think it's like not having the ability to see it in Peter Schiff's case because he's so wed He was so right about the problems, and now he's so wed to what he was forecasting to be the solution.

59:33You can be wrong. China was wrong about going on the silver standard, and now they're buying gold. That's the other side of this. They're wrong again. And that might be why they, if you were forecasting that there's a superpower that rises and that the U.S. is declining and China is going to be the new superpower, It's like maybe they're making the wrong currency bet and maybe that is the weakness of their whole strategy. It's almost like if you had to compare like a Peter Schiff gold bug to some fiat maxi person, it's almost more frustrating to be Peter Schiff in that situation where if we're right, Schiff has been 90 % right for decades and then just got the last hurdle, just tripped at the last hurdle and didn't move to Bitcoin.

1:00:21Like they might end up buying Bitcoin at the same price. why do you think Bitcoin like if everything we're saying here is true which I believe it to be why do you think Bitcoin is still trading like a tech stock and we're at like$67 ,000 now like that seems deeply deeply undervalued is this just like an information asymmetry between us and the rest of the world? It's not that I would say that if you look at Bitcoin and you say hey all these things are true well they were true when Bitcoin was$8 ,000 and crashed to$4 ,000 they were true when Bitcoin was$69 ,000 and crashed to$16 ,000. They were true at$122 ,000 and they're still true today at$66 ,000 or wherever it is.

1:01:06And so I think that the explanation for that is like price is the scoreboard, right? But Bitcoin is volatile because it's difficult to understand. And I would liken this very much to when I gave a talk a few years ago about why Bitcoin is not a hedge. And I gave a recent talk in the same venue. Is that the one that went viral on the Unchained YouTube? It was the huge views. Yeah, that was an awesome talk. And I gave that talk of explaining, hey, there's inflation happening and Bitcoin's coming down. Isn't this contradictory? It's like, no, it's perfectly explained.

1:01:52And the same thing is true now. I gave a presentation at the same venue two months ago.

1:02:03I wish I could have done it right now with Bitcoin at 66. Because it's the same thing. It's like, hey, the world is becoming increasingly disordered. and you're saying that Bitcoin is supposed to be the answer to that, but it's going down, it should be going up. It's like, well, you have to understand Bitcoin. You have to understand that and then have the world event happen and then buy it, right? And if you don't know, like in the explanation of inflation, like if you don't know that Bitcoin is the solution for inflation and why, like the long-term one, not in the next five days or 10 days, but why it actually permanently solves the problem of money printing.

1:02:50And then you're going to the grocery store and shit's getting real bad for you. And you're living paycheck to paycheck and you're constantly stressed about it. You're not putting those two and two together, right? Same thing with this. world's on fire, one large war at risk after another. Well, if you don't see the connection to Bitcoin, then how do you put those things together? And that's what's happening at the highest level. But at a micro level, people are. People right now are buying Bitcoin and having the light bulb go off. Because four years ago, they heard somebody talking about, for the first time, about Rush getting cut off of Swift and Bitcoin's the answer to that.

1:03:46And now they see this piece from Ray Dalio talking about a world becoming disordered. And they're like, yeah, he's right, but it's not gold, it's Bitcoin. And they're putting their chips on the table. and then Bitcoin will bottom at a higher place than it did before because more people will figure it out. And so, um, and that doesn't mean for some technical reason that Bitcoin, you know, I'm not saying that it already has bottomed. Um, I'm just saying that the trend of that higher highs, higher lows, doesn't matter if, you know, in 2022 that it went through its prior high it then went far through its higher highs.

1:04:28And that's a function of more people figuring it out. But two things can be true at the same time. More people are figuring it out. That's creating higher levels of equilibrium and higher highs. Very few people actually understand what's going on. You know what the evidence of it is? There is 700 ,000 Bitcoin that's sitting in strategy. and there's 700 ,000 Bitcoin that are sitting in IBIT, if you actually understood what was going on, and I'm not saying an investment in strategy or an investment in IBIT is a bad thing. The companies themselves are not bad. Nothing bad with them. But if you're not self-custaining Bitcoin or if you don't realize, say IBIT, you could just have your Bitcoin at Coinbase.

1:05:20you have less counterparty risk than you do if it's sitting in IBIT you took the convenience of buying it probably because you're trading it those two vehicles IBIT more than strategy are indicators of lack of knowledge they're good products, they're good companies but you could have your Bitcoin in River you could have your bitcoin and unchained you could have your bitcoin in a cold card you could have your bitcoin and strike you'd be better off right um and they're you know everything's good for bitcoin though but i'm just saying there's a lot of people that bought bitcoin and from my vantage point hosting meetups and going to conferences and talking to people that are interested people reaching out, we never had a wave of adoption.

1:06:16Like there was never a fervor of individuals that were rushing in that were like chasing price. Like that didn't happen. So to think that like, you know, cycles, like cycles are not dead. Human psychology is the same. It's just fooled by randomness. my explanation for this where prices are is reportedly according to Galaxy they helped somebody sell 80 ,000 Bitcoin and that was the local top and if you have a bunch of people that have bought the ETF

1:06:51that don't have a lot of knowledge, primary knowledge about Bitcoin, about the real reason to own it or speculate in, they sell it it starts to go down it's easy to buy Bitcoin when it's going up because when it goes up psychologically, it reinforces it, you made a good decision. But if you're still sitting there with limited knowledge and it starts to go down, your first instinct is like buy a little bit more. And then when it goes down further, you start to panic and then you sell. We saw the example of the Wisconsin state pension. They bought Bitcoin when it was like about 60 ,000 and they bought 10 basis points.

1:07:26Michael Saylor has this great quote, which is, if you understand Bitcoin, there's no chance that you only own 1%. okay well the wisconsin state pension bought a tenth of that okay and then when it went up to 100 they sold it they they rebalanced their portfolios like they and they bought ibit did they actually ever understand bitcoin you know like i myself i was championing hey you know wisconsin state pension buys bitcoin it's great they they didn't understand it you know But then you have other markers that are very positive ones like Steak and Shake. They get it. I don't know where they hold their Bitcoin.

1:08:13They don't really care. They don't own IDET, at least not to my knowledge. But I also know just the fact that they're accepting it as money. They're not converting what they receive. They're buying Bitcoin on a primary basis. They're working with Fold to have a bonus for employees. They're leaning full in to Bitcoin, and they're attributing their leaning into Bitcoin to their same source growing far faster than any of their peers. It's not the only thing that's driving it, but they themselves are directing it. You can look at it and say, those people figured it out sometime in the last four years.

1:08:47And they probably own a lot less Bitcoin than when the Wisconsin State Pension bought it. I think they bought like$160 million. They had more Bitcoin than Steak and Shake. Steak and Shake gets it, and they're just going to stay humble and stack sats. And more and more people that exist like Steak and Shake, and I'm not talking about businesses adopting as payments. I'm talking about people really getting it. Those are stacking. And Bitcoin will find floors at a ratio relative to the number of people that actually get it. And then it's still going to be volatile because the way I would describe it is no more than one in 100 people know what's going on.

1:09:33How could something not be crazy volatile if only one out of 100 people get it? And one out of 100 is high. It's less than one in 100. Fewer than one in 100 companies in S &P 500 own Bitcoin in a direct way, at least if they own shares in BlackRock. I'm not talking about the IDA. If they own shares in some company that owns Bitcoin, that's not exposure. Tesla owns Bitcoin. Square. Block. Yeah, Block owns Bitcoin. I don't think there's another S &P 500 company. If five companies owning Bitcoin would be 1%, right? Yeah. then we're not there. But also, if people just check their local, their company that they work for, their family members, people don't get it.

1:10:38So it's just fine. People just have to learn. If it were easy to see Bitcoin, more people would see it. And to Safe's point of the price being the ultimate arbiter is Bitcoin goes up over time because more people do. More people figure it out. And that's all that matters. It's just like, as so long as more people are figuring it out, not less, then Bitcoin goes up over time. If it ever started going down for long periods of time and consistently hitting lower lows and not making higher highs, that would be a signal that people who had previously figured it out thought that there was something broken about it.

1:11:25And what we're seeing today, nothing is signaling that. There's a lot of negative energy in the world of Bitcoin, but it's like more people are figuring it out, not less, bottom line. Yeah. One of the anecdotal pieces of evidence that people are starting to take this more seriously, not necessarily understand it, but at least take it more seriously is like every time we've had a price crash in the past, like people who know what I do, when you tell them or when they ask you about the price, there's almost like a smirk in there. You know, they kind of want to say the Ponzi is going to zero. But this time, the interesting is like I go to a boxing gym pretty much every day and people ask me about Bitcoin, ask me about the price and things like that.

1:12:05And this time, the reaction has been very different. It's been maybe now's a good time to look into it. Maybe now's a good time to buy. And I think that skepticism around Bitcoin generally is going away. Yeah, there are still obviously people that want to dunk like, I don't know the guy, but Keith McCullough and Bloomberg Talking Heads and Peter Schiff. It's going to zero. There are fewer of them each time because most people look at it and be like, I'm not going to do that again. I got embarrassed the last time that I did that. the majority of even the Bitcoin haters are getting wise to Bitcoin's rise and fall.

1:12:46But to the point, I'm experiencing the same thing. I'm not yet experiencing just person after person being like, how do I do this? But when I'm talking to people, despite the fact of Bitcoin being here, it's like, how do I get set up? not like ribbing. Of course, it's not zero. But an example, to give another piece of the psychology, I went and bought groceries at the local grocer that got enabled by Square here in Austin. And I paid with Bitcoin. And the person working behind the counter was like, oh, that's cool. That's the first time I've been here when someone's bought in Bitcoin. She knew that they accepted it.

1:13:33But she made a comment along the lines of like, I just feel like I missed it. I'm too late. And I'm sitting there just buying groceries and I don't want to turn into a full orange pill on the spot. I was like, look, we're super early. And I gave her my literal 30 seconds. I was like, the whole idea is that they keep printing more dollars. That's why food is getting more expensive. and the whole idea around Bitcoin is that it can't be printed. There's a lot of noise. I work on Bitcoin, but just Bitcoin, that level of conversation, I was like, you didn't miss it. You should go online and read something about it.

1:14:18But she was interested. It wasn't the price is crashing and is it going to zero? It was like, here at$68 ,000, I feel like I missed it, which is also a natural side of the psychology. And then over time, people just get over that, but it's usually not like the people that are, that are activating right now are the people that had the inclination the last time, but didn't then were probably reinforced when it went down to 16 ,000. But then when it went up to 125, they were like, shit, I made a mistake. And now as it's coming down, they're like, okay, like, I don't need to make the same mistake.

1:14:59And that's just what happens. That's a combination of human psychology and following signal being price. Yeah, the thing that I always say when people ask me if they've missed it is like, I thought I'd missed it in 2016, 2017. And that's going to continue to happen. Just lastly, on this point of like, you brought up before that Bitcoin being used as money as being a really important part of this. Why do you think that is? Because there's a lot of people out there that think of Bitcoin as just a store of value and don't necessarily see it as the medium of exchange. And obviously, store of value is going to come first and has come first.

1:15:33But why is moving to being an actual currency so important?

1:15:41So the incentives of it will dictate that it will be used as currency. imagine there's a hundred people and imagine one of them is saving in Bitcoin using my no more than one in a hundred people understand Bitcoin and I recognize that more than one percent have some exposure to Bitcoin at this point it's not as high as people quoted when they say 40 % of Americans own Bitcoin it's probably something like somewhere between 3 % and 5 % have some material exposure to it, but the percentage of people that actually understand, like Harvard sold some Bitcoin and bought more Ethereum. They own Bitcoin, they don't get it, right?

1:16:31But let's just assume that one out of 100 people understands Bitcoin and the 99 others are fiat, right? How do you have a trading economy with only one out of 100 understanding Bitcoin? Even if you put it to 8 billion people and go down to 80 million, which that's where I say there's not 80 million people in the world that really understand Bitcoin. But even though that's across the world, then what is the likelihood of a business and somebody understanding Bitcoin in the same place? And the one that understands it is a business and they've invested in infrastructure and you come to their store.

1:17:23It's just the density is the biggest uphill battle. People first understanding why Bitcoin stores value, starting to store value, having some Bitcoin in a wallet. they show up to a business, oh, they accept Bitcoin, let me try this. But go out to a world where 100 % of people have figured out why Bitcoin stores value. Well, who is holding the bag of the fiat currency? If 100 out of 100 all have figured out Bitcoin, let's not say 100, but say 90%, or 80%, then the overlaps of like, oh, you're a person that runs a business that understands Bitcoin, you're an individual, by and large, every individual that's walking through your store also understands Bitcoin and has Bitcoin.

1:18:06What would be the reason for if they wanted Bitcoin to force somebody to pay them in fiat to then convert it into Bitcoin? It's just the incentives of like, hey, everyone's storing value in Bitcoin is that nobody else is holding currencies that are shitty and lose their value. And then it's like, well, just give me, in return for my goods and services, just give me that money that's easily exchangeable over the internet. Thank you. Now, why it's so important that it evolves that way is because if it didn't, if 100 out of 100 people were holding Bitcoin, but they weren't transacting in it, the only rational explanation for that is because by some fiat decree, someone said you can't do it.

1:18:52It's illegal. Now, there's also a reason why a banning of transactions with Bitcoin would fail because of a global geopolitical prisoner's dilemma. Somebody like El Salvador is a great example of it where it's like if one defects, which there's a maximum incentive to defect from some sort of concerted effort to prevent Bitcoin from being used as payments, that the only reason why it wouldn't is because Bitcoin was too centralized to be able to prevent some sort of legal decree preventing it from being successful. And if it was, it's not just that that is a problem. It's that if Bitcoin was too centralized to allow for what otherwise should have happened by the natural economic incentives, then some outside force is setting the rules in some form or fashion.

1:19:53and if that's the case, then could the United States government say, oh, we're going to, you know, you miners run this software that says they're going to be 22 million and then it becomes a fiat currency. So like the natural incentives will dictate it. And I do agree, like you first have to understand why Bitcoin will store value to own any Bitcoin at all. It's by and large in most, at least developed world places, easiest just to buy a little Bitcoin with fiat. Once you figure that out, You start to figure out, oh, no, I need to have even more of this. Beyond there, if you're a business owner, you say, yep, open me up.

1:20:32Just start paying me in this if you have it, please. And that's just a process, right? That's a process of adoption. But as an end state, if it doesn't get to the point where people are actively just paying businesses is because of centralization. And centralization is the greatest long-term risk to Bitcoin, if it weren't to continue to get more decentralized. But naturally, again, as more people buy it, as more large competing interests, as more ends where I'm sympathetic to you. I watched your interview with Michael Saylor. By the way, there won't be a lot of Bitcoin treasury companies. they'll congregate for fundamental reasons, because if they are trading, but that's a side, just saying.

1:21:23But in the case of like, even though I say you're probably lower on the education scale if you're owning Ibit, I think Ibit existing is good for Bitcoin, right? You could look at the People's Bank of China and be like, people think of China bad. But if they bought Bitcoin, good for Bitcoin. That's the way the world's going. Every government's going to own Bitcoin. The larger the players are that are involved, the larger the competing interests, the greater the... You could look at that and say, Bitcoin's becoming more centralized because 600 ,000 or 700 ,000 Bitcoin are in IBIT. But if you try to get 2 million prices higher, more people are figuring it out.

1:22:12IBIT has now opened up the ability to take Bitcoin in kind rather than just have, not everyone can show up to BlackRock and do that. But Morgan Stanley can or anybody that's a, whatever they call, certain kind of participants can. There's a natural inclination to take direct ownership over it. And the more large interests that come in, the more decentralized it gets. It's like if IBIT comes in, well, Vanguard is going to have to get involved. If the United States government gets involved, then China is going to get involved. Russia is going to get involved. And more competing interests, harder it is to change Bitcoin.

1:22:57And so that's why it's like the path, the risk of centralization, but everything about the incentives, even with large participants involved, drives decentralization. The larger the Bitcoin gets, the more decentralized it gets. The more companies that emerge to build wallets, the more companies emerge to build custody infrastructure, the more companies emerge to work on payments. It all flows, like everything is downstream from adoption of that. That thing clicking that is Bitcoin is actually money, might trade like a tech stock, but it's money, it's volatile because people don't really understand it yet and they're figuring out their way.

1:23:38And while price is the ultimate arbiter, I also do think on the payment side, someone like Square turning on Bitcoin payments is huge for everybody working on Bitcoin payments because it also will be an education for a lot of people that might not have heard about ZapRite, but who our product's better for, it creates an opportunity for us. But it also reinforces the store of value because some people are sitting there saying like but you can't use bitcoin for anything and then when they see that square is incorporating it for payments they're like ah light bulb off like i i'm not i am but some you know explaining somebody else's psychology like i might not be going and paying for these eggs and bitcoin but somebody can like somebody's paying this coffee shop for Bitcoin, it's possible.

1:24:28And that that's the end game. And understanding that that is the end game, seeing that Bitcoin is being used as money will unlock Bitcoin as money for more people, in my mind, that will go down. For a period of time, they're still going to need to read a book, listen to podcasts, and then connect it to someone like Square doing this, turning on payments. but there's just only so many people that are going to be able to opt into Bitcoin without seeing that. That seeing it actually used as money is the closing of the mental loop of what this thing actually is. For certain people, they will be able to read a book and say, ah, I can see the path forward of why everyone adopts this and why in the future everyone's going to accept it as money.

1:25:15Others need to see it happen and then everything else they heard about Bitcoin fall into place. And for some people, it might be that. Other people, it might be Russia and Swift. Other people, it might be Ray Dalio's rapid disorder. And then it's like, well, what's the next domino to fall in the geopolitical landscape? Maybe somebody else merges and actually buys Bitcoin. You know, so I think it all compounds, but it's like, you know, and it is ordered with like store value and payments. The payments is the end game and payments being developed right now also accelerates people's ability to look at Bitcoin and connect it to money and start buying it and then later be spending.

1:26:11I love it, man. I can hear the family in the background. We've got some wholesome kid noises going on. I'll let you get back to them. But before we close out, where can you send anyone, Mike, to find out more about your book or is that probably anything you're doing? Yeah, so if somebody's not, you know, if Bitcoin is not yet clicking, but maybe this opened up some avenues to understand, like definitely read my book, go to, so it's only on the same route. It's the best looking Bitcoin book. You killed it on the cover. Thanks. I spent a lot of time. The artist, Proof of Paint, on Twitter or on X.

1:26:52If you need a piece of Bitcoin art, go check him out. He's amazing. But yeah, if Bitcoin's just starting to click, go read a book. Go find a reliable place to buy Bitcoin and start SAC and Sats. But if you already understand Bitcoin, then I highly encourage you, if you run a business or are a key person in a business, to make the push to open it up as a form of payment. People can look us up at zaprite.com, Z-A-P-R-I-T-E, all one word, Zaprite. If we're not the right solution for you, we'll put you in the direction of the people who are. We're all on the same path, working on the same mission.

1:27:39So check us out at zaprite.com. And then also news on the book. I'm about the audio book is in the process of being released. So it's been submitted to the different platforms. I was sitting on that for a good dip in price. Just really, I was dragging my ass. But that's now final. I read it myself. Marty read the foreword. Will Cole read the intro and outro. So I'm excited to finally get that out. So there's a lot of people these days that apparently don't read books anymore, but will listen to audio. And so in short order, it should be both available on safe site, but then across platforms as well.

1:28:20The audio book. Awesome. As someone who runs a company using Zapri, it is the best solution. Also, we've been using it for the tickets on the cheat code. and it's so much easier than doing it the ad hoc way that we did it before. Check out Zapfite. Awesome. Thank you, Parker. This has been great. Appreciate you, Danny.