Wealth, Money, & New Christendom: Bitcoin with Jordan Bush

press .

In turn , he found a way to streamline the printing process so that the production of books was relatively inexpensive , thus making publication of revolutionary ideas and the riches of ancient knowledge available to the masses . European literacy as a result doubled every century following the introduction of large-scale printing .

Ironically , gutenberg didn't live long enough to see the massive impact of his printing press . The greatest accomplishment in his life was the first print run of the Latin Bible . It took him roughly three years to print 200 copies of the Bible , which seems slow by today's standards , but was truly revolutionary in the age of painstakingly hand-copied manuscripts .

Because of extremely low literacy rates , however , there wasn't exactly a booming consumer base to purchase Gutenberg's products . As a result , he died penniless and his presses were impounded by creditors .

Those who remained in the printing business fled to Venice , italy , which was the central shipping city of the Mediterranean during the 15th century , the first major item to come out of the printing press wasn't giant volumes like the Bible , but four-page news pamphlets that were spread by ship around the civilized world .

Since very few people could read , townspeople would gather in local pubs to hear paid readers recount the news of the day . Before people started reading the great works of antiquity , the printing press helped spark the phenomenon we now take for granted in the form of worldwide news .

In time , a higher premium would be put on literacy as more and more people became interested in and gained access to the written word .

The Italian Renaissance began a century before the Gutenberg press , but by the time the press had made its way to Italy in the early 16th century , there was a renewed demand for reprinting the classic works of intellectual titans like Caesar , cicero , seneca , aristotle and Plato .

Before the press , wealthy patrons sent expensive expeditions across the Alps to isolated monasteries in search of priceless manuscripts . Others were sent into the heart of the Ottoman Empire to learn ancient Greek and Arabic in order to translate and copy rare texts into Latin .

The retrieval of ancient literature took place before the press , but it was the press that sped up this process and made it much more affordable . Prior to the advent of the printing press .

The largest library was found in Paris , which housed roughly 300 manuscripts an incredibly small stable of content compared to the kind of libraries that would arise after the press had done its work . In the 1490s , before Gutenberg's press had been employed , a written work by Cicero would cost a month's salary for a schoolteacher .

At first , small towns would start building libraries . Later , books became available for individuals at much cheaper prices . While the press didn't start the Renaissance , it certainly helped multiply its far-reaching impact around the civilized world .

The real impact of the printing press came after Martin Luther nailed his now-famous 95 Theses to a church door in Wittenberg on October 31 , 1517 . Just 17 days after he posted his writings , presses in London began reproducing them In turn . Luther's message spread far and wide in a relatively short period of time .

Luther , for his part , became the first best-selling author in human history . Later , his translation of the New Testament into the German tongue sold 5,000 copies in just two weeks . From 1518 to 1525 , Luther's writings accounted for a third of all books sold in Germany , while his German Bible went through more than 430 editions .

It's hard to estimate the total impact , some centuries later , of Gutenberg's invention .

Among other things , the press fueled the scientific revolution and the Protestant Reformation , causing Luther to say Francis Bacon , who developed the scientific method , said in 1620 that the three inventions that forever changed the world were gunpowder , the nautical compass and the printing press .

Beyond the obvious fruits of the press , it also helped give a voice to what would have been considered fringe voices . As one historian wrote , whenever a new information technology comes along , and this includes the printing press , among the very first groups to be loud in it are the people who were silenced in the earlier system , which means radical voices .

End quote . Because it takes effort to perfect new technology , it is often the biggest risk-takers who become early adopters . As a result , the printing press brought major efforts to censor new content . Likewise , the increasing democratization of knowledge in the Enlightenment era led to the development of public opinion and its power to topple the ruling elite .

Writing in pre-revolution France , louis-sebastien Mercier declared A great and momentous revolution in our ideas has taken place within the last 30 years . Public opinion has now become a preponderant power in Europe , one that cannot be resisted .

One may hope that Enlightenment ideas will bring about the greatest good on earth and that tyrants of all kinds will tremble before the universal cry that echoes everywhere , awakening Europe from its slumbers" For good and many times . Evil technologies like the printing press fundamentally led to transfers of power .

In any historical context , this inevitably means the elites , those who control the wheels of power , are often most likely to resist granting voices to radicals and dissidents . This same instinct was on display when , during the 2016 and 2020 elections .

Same instinct was on display when , during the 2016 and 2020 elections , social media conglomerates and federal agencies conspired to keep certain articles , voices and posts from seeing the light of day . Dissenting voices were effectively crushed , sued or shadow banned .

Similar societal disruptions have taken place in the advent of the internet , social media and podcasting platforms . It becomes increasingly true that it is harder for a small group of individuals to control information or ideas .

As we found with New Christendom Press , it is far easier than it was centuries ago to platform ideas that go against the regime narratives of the day . You don't have to be on Fox News or MSNBC to get your message out .

When used for good , technological tools like inexpensive podcasts and social media platforms can be used , as we have aimed to use them to resource classical literature in the same way printers did during the Renaissance and Reformation .

In many ways , we at New Christendom Press are doing the same work of resourcement as we rediscover things like the reformed view of marriage , household and patriarchy . Another disruptive and more recent technological innovation is Bitcoin .

Although the concept of cryptocurrency has been around for decades , the launch of Bitcoin in 2009 made this revolutionary technology a reality . In some ways , bitcoin and the printing press solved similar problems by decentralizing information and finance . The printing press solved the issue of a centralized written word that was largely unavailable to the people .

Bitcoin works in the form of a decentralized system called blockchain . In the United States , the Federal Reserve is the central banking system . One entity controls all monetary flow . Bitcoin , however , is decentralized and is not controlled by one entity . Could Bitcoin be a technological advancement , like the printing press that changes the world ?

In the next few episodes of the King's Hall podcast , we're going to do some deep dive interviews on Bitcoin , tradfi , gold , silver and , finally , on real estate . We've selected key voices to address different ways to store and generate wealth . Why are we talking about money ?

Well , as our friend and pastor Joel Webbins said at the recent New Christendom Press Conference in Ogden , utah , you can't rebuild Christendom without and as he said repeatedly cash . In order to build a Christendom , you've got to first figure out how to build , store and transfer wealth to coming generations .

In truth , christian pietist movements in America have done a disservice to the church in thinking about money . It is our goal in this brief series to revive an interest and skill in the core principles of wealth building . In turn , we hope you'll be inspired to invest and build in a borough near you .

The King's Hall podcast exists to make self-ruled men who rule well win the world .

You know we were taught poverty is the next thing closest to godliness and we should pursue that . And now here we are saying actually , if you want to build Christendom , you need to think about wealth from a biblical perspective .

So , Brian , I want to ask you first , just why is this conversation that we'll have in a couple of interviews , why is it so important ?

You have to know how to not be mastered by money , how not to worship money , money sort of being the distillation and representation of things , because money is just a vehicle . I can get things with money . Of course you have to not be mastered by it , but you have to know how to build wealth .

Work hard , not spend more than you earn , invest well , leave an inheritance , not just to your children but to your children's children , of human life . Then we are going to have to be a people who are shrewd and cunning and innocent and wise and all of these other things .

When it comes to handling money and I mean I just remember to your point about sort of the narrative that has been ascendant about money has very much been in evangelicalism , towards the one side of that , like hey , don't be mastered by money , to the point of almost a poverty theology and in some cases , like in David Platt , sort of radical ideas to the point

of crippling a generation in their wealth building and in their positive use of wealth .

But we've had celebrity pastors who did make a lot of money in their years doing good things , writing books , stuff like that gave it all away . And then the question is what do you give to your children ? Yeah , Oops , Oops , I gave it all away to , even if it was foreign missions .

We do have a biblical responsibility to pass on an inheritance , Dan , to our sons .

If I was a farmer , I mean there's a trade automatically built into my kids , there's an inheritance inherently in my job , in my task , if you're a blacksmith or whatever trade you have , and so you just do the best with what you have .

In this time , because we're such a globalized economy , what has happened is , if you do not build something like institutions , businesses , property , something real , something tangible for your children and for your children's children , what are you leaving them with ? You're leaving them without a root .

They're going to be like a tumbleweed is essentially what has to happen , because they're going to have to move somewhere that is more economically advantageous , and so then you have a lack of rootedness and a lack of unity across generations .

And then you multiply that across churches , because you have churches where the children leave and communities where the children leave and they don't actually do that generational work of continuing the vision and the mission of their fathers in building in their local communities , and so , a lot of ways , by not having any wealth to transfer onto your generations , you're

forcing them to have to go out into the world and try to make it on their own somewhere else , and it's really doing a disservice to the people I've been storing this word up for a long time to use for myself , because I feel like it's such a big brain world , but I feel like the transience , brian , is what leads to the deracination of generations and people

.

But one of the other things that is even more central to like this episode in this series is that Alfred had to change monetary policy . Yeah , he had to have a sound currency . They had to have sound currencies . So in today's pietist movement that sounds very like unspiritual and unsexy to talk about .

Well , let's actually talk about you know how our coins are minted , standardizing the money ? So again , just talk to that . Monetary policy Isn't like . You know . We shouldn't be saying of this conversation well , where did they talk about the gospel in there ?

There was no control at all , and so when Alfred determined that , hey , we need to have some sort of national currency , they melted down the existing silver coins and in some cases it would take up to five coins to make one true silver coin because it had been so diluted over time . And and what happened when you actually have real money ?

Then in a , in a , in a region ? Well , merchants came to do business because they knew that the currency that they were getting was worth something . I don't know if you guys are familiar with our current inflation , but that's actually really problematic when you have this radical printing .

There's some interesting information on like bricks and different gold backed and different commodities that they're using to back currency . But what that really did for Alfred and for his kingdom was that it brought a lot of wealth by just standardizing and making real money .

And so that's really part of the conversation that we're talking about today is using just weights and measures , because God despises unjust weights and measures , yeah , and so the question we have to ask is is Bitcoin a just weight and measure ?

And so I think that still has yet to be determined , but in this interview with Jordan , I think we get a lot of good information about that . So I didn't answer your question because I don't remember what you asked .

trying to introduce to you over the next weeks some very practical , competing in some senses , complimentary in other senses ideas of how to actually stick the landing on not just thinking about some of these things , but literally doing them . We want it to be practical , so why don't you tell us a little bit about this series ?

Everything's so expensive and I'm the question is what do I do ? What do I do with my money ? I don't know . It's really unclear , right ?

But really I set out with this series to try to figure out what should I personally do with my money . What does a wise man do ?

Well , he has a multitude of counselors , and so that's why I approached all of these men that are very successful in their own interests and in their own investment categories to ask them what they thought about cash sitting in the bank . What should I do with it ?

And so I hope it's really beneficial for everybody , because this was more selfishly for me , but I thought it would be helpful for everyone .

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He's hosting a conference and so he's been in Bitcoin for a long time . Really interesting Talks about how Bitcoin .

He got into it really through missions and things like that because of how easy it is to transfer Not to go on too big of a side tangent , but one of the issues that I've run into in business in the past is moving money around , which sounds really kind of silly to us when you're talking about like Venmo or something like that .

Like it's pretty instantaneous . You know , but if you're , if you're moving like $60,000 , it actually is really inconvenient and takes a long time and be can be quite expensive to move money , Whereas Bitcoin takes , you know , 10 minutes and is just a very , very small fee . And it's all on the blockchain , which Jordan will talk about .

So we talk about Bitcoin and its value proposition and some of the risks , and then the next interview that will come out in two weeks will be with Jace Reineveld , and he owns Alpine Gold here in Ogden , utah , where they do bullion , gold , silver and other metals and they also do some really interesting things with gold backs , which he talks about in the

interview . And then he also has some interesting leasing programs for gold where you can actually get interest on your gold paid in gold , which is really interesting value proposition , because gold and Bitcoin are not productive assets , meaning the only way you can actually make money on them is to not own them anymore .

Anyway , so we talked to Jace about gold and about the banking system , which I think is really really valuable . After that , I talked to Tim Six , who is a member of our church Air Force pilot . He owns a lot of real estate single family rentals , duplexes , things like that . He has under 50 doors somewhere around that .

So he's been in this for a little bit . He also has interest in gold and in Bitcoin and this guy's got the Midas touch . It just seems like everything he touches turns to gold . He said when he was 16 , you'll have to listen to the interview . He tells his whole life story . It's really interesting .

When he was 16 , he had something like 50 K in the bank from a side business that he had opened while he was in high school . He would like buy .

One of the things that I've learned and this is probably obvious to everyone but if you want to be good at something , just go seek someone out that is actually successful in the thing you're interested in and then just be around them , because , I'll tell you what , talking to these guys and some of the guys in a church that are successful business owners and

have been successful at investing , they think differently than I do , and so it's really helpful to be around these guys and to see the world through their eyes .

And then , lastly , I talked to Joe Garracy , who's a big supporter of all that we do at New Christendom Press with backwards planning , financial , and he's going to be talking about traditional markets , traditional finance , which we call TradFi , and so he's going to be talking about investing in businesses through the stock market and things like that , and so that's

the scope of the entire series , and I've found it to be tremendously helpful and very , very interesting .

If you're not doing this , you're literally the dumbest person on planet earth . I think this is helpful because it gives you kind of a broad lens to kind of start honing in on maybe some different areas where you might want to , you know , start building wealth . So there's multiple options . It's not like necessarily one right ?

You should talk to people with skin in the game . Yeah , it is actually a key principle , really interesting , eric .

Yeah , like it isn't my money , the money in my bank account is managed so that I can exercise wisdom and pass it on to my generations .

And when you talk to a lot of these leading voices that led this sort of radical basically poverty theology in the Christian church they're all rich what they said and what they did were not the same thing . They said one thing and then they bought multiple million dollar plus house . A million dollar house today is not as impressive as it was in 2008 .

But even back then , multiple million dollar houses and in expensive areas , kids are going to private schools , like they're doing lots of things . That what they're . They're telling you kind of like hey , shane Claiborne crossed with David Platt and what they're doing is trad fi , typical 401k , build wealth , real estate , real estate . They're doing other things .

All of the information was public and so they figured out that they're paying these guys in some cases , massive amounts of money to shill their certain coins .

And the thing is this happens all of the time , right , and so it's very dangerous to get a lot of your information , financial education from just Twitter and YouTube from the internet , because you can't actually see how these people live .

That's why it's so helpful to have people locally that we know that I can actually just go up and ask , as I see like their , their family is is great , they're well , well managed household , that they are very charitable . I know if they tie , they're not . I mean , I'm the executive pastor , I see the financial like .

I can see all of these data points to say this guy is really successful in all areas of life . I want to learn from this guy versus some anon on Twitter who's you know he's got some garbage coin , you know , crypto thing or the next , whatever it is precious metals overinflated novelty coin .

So it is really important to have people in the flesh that you can learn from .

Do you think it you know we are posing this question , obviously in the cold open do you think it could be big as a printing press if it were to work ? Defy could be a huge thing . I've heard people like I think it's michael saylor , uh , who's on ?

Patrick , pat david , you know he's the , you know the bitcoin stan and and there's one side that's super , super rosy . It's going to change the world forever .

I'm kind of with Patrick , but David , in that interview he was like I think you're underestimating the government's ability to manipulate currency and we know there's , dan , as you mentioned , there's different forms of manipulation . So , with all that information out there , how disruptive do you think Bitcoin could be as a technology ?

You just Google centralized bank and it's going to come up with the federal reserve . There is one entity that controls all of the money , whereas in blockchain and Bitcoin is the application that is not actually controlled by any one entity .

So it's not like you go onto one of the crypto exchanges and you buy Bitcoin and then news comes out that says they're printing 30% more Bitcoin or there's 30% more to mine , whatever know , whatever , whatever it is .

That can't happen in a centralized way , and so it's very , very difficult to control , and that's why , when we were talking about this episode and we're like what story would we want to tell , I was like the printing press actually makes a lot of sense , because in the past , only the elites , the , you know , the very , very wealthy , could actually attain any sort

of information that was written , and so they had a monopoly on information and ideas ? Yes , yes , exactly , and so what this technology is is disruptive to monetary policy , and that's why , if you followed Bitcoin for any length of time , there have been a lot of lawsuits .

There's been a lot of issues with ETFs and things like that getting approved , and only recently that's happened because BlackRock got involved , which adds another wrinkle of issue into Bitcoin , I think .

But anyway , you'll have to do a little bit more research , and Jordan talks about it a lot in the interview , but I think the technology underlying this is really , really disruptive . There's some other cryptocurrencies that I'm more familiar with in some ways that can transfer funds instantaneously and costs fractions of a penny . It's faster than Visa .

So , as far as application for technology , it's really useful , and the thing that the government hates about it is that they can't control it . They can't control it and so , just like when the printing press became popular , they could not control the flow of information anymore , and even on social media , you see people trying to do that .

And you get new technologies and you get new platforms or , yeah , new platforms new men that come out and say , no , we're not going to do that . And you get new technologies and you get new platforms . Or new platforms , new men that come out and say , no , we're not going to do that .

And so you see how even that is a constant battle today , and I think you'll see the same thing with Bitcoin , decentralized finance , blockchain technology . I think it's highly disruptive , whether it's Bitcoin or not . Time will tell .

It just is the case that , no matter how much power they have , there comes a point when the US dollar is going to fail , either by being fundamentally transformed into something else still under government control there's things like that transformed into something else still under government control there's things like that .

But we also shouldn't underestimate the challenge of what the government is trying to do for them .

So one of the cases for Bitcoin and I'm sure Jordan talks about this is just that one of the driving forces in adoption of something like Bitcoin is a growing lack of faith of something like Bitcoin , is a growing lack of faith in fiat currency , in trad fi and fiat currency , and that's accelerating massively .

And then Uber comes along and just completely disrupts the entire industry , because somebody thought about the same thing with cigarettes and with vape and with Copenhagen versus Zen , and people are trying to get around these government regulations , and creative men that are economically motivated seem to always find a way .

I think it's kind of funny with New Christendom Press , I think even 15 years ago a lot of the technologies we utilize today to make New Christendom possible didn't exist , or even something like Buzzsprout like today . That's the podcast hosting platform we use . The number of features it has today versus five years ago is drastically different .

The amount that AI can do for certain parts of businesses . And then , if you go 20 years ago , it wasn't having a podcast . If you wanted the spoken word to be out there , you had to have a radio show and you had to pay a radio station . So you're talking like tens of thousands of dollars to be able to do something like that .

Really expensive editing equipment , all that it seems like . Correct me if I'm wrong . The opportunity is again . It's for the fringe quote , unquote radical compared to the regime or the mainline today . Do you guys think that that's true ?

I believe oh man , this is quoting off the top of my head , so it could be completely wrong but I want to say that it's almost 30% of the US population owns cryptocurrency in some form today . Yeah , and that's also accelerating because of the ETF .

So if you have money in the stock market , a brokerage account , a 401k , something like that , and you can self-select your stocks , you can actually buy Bitcoin through a proxy , which is an ETF . So Fidelity or BlackRock , who has Bitcoin ? So anyway , it's .

The acceleration of adoption is often compared to usage of the internet , and so that was very slow in the beginning and then it ramped up . Obviously , like everybody has the internet now . I remember going into Haiti at one point and I'm looking around and people are like they're starving and they have cell phones . You know , it's just a .

It's a different world we live in . They're starving and they have cell phones . It's a different world we live in . And so I think something like this is really for early adopters that understand the problem , which is like you talked about , fiat currency . That's a problem .

It is a problem that we have to address and these guys that are looking at Bitcoin see a possible answer to that problem . Whether it will be wholesale adopted or not , time will tell , but I do think that's the case .

So we moved to Uruguay , the capital city of Montevideo , and ended up planning a church . We went there to minister primarily to very secular Uruguayans and within just a few weeks , months , we quickly started ministering to religious Venezuelans who had fled their country and moved to Uruguay . It was largely men who were again just trying to .

Basically the government had hyperinflated their currency , made it worthless , and so they moved to try to get a job and send money home and eventually bring their families , you know , over to Uruguay or to the other countries to which they went , if not be able to , if they weren't going to be able to return home .

So , as we were just trying to help these people , you know , pick up the pieces of their lives again , I just curious , curious philosophy major me , just wanted to know , like , where , why is this happening ? You know what ? Like what's going on ? And uh , and so , just over the course of a few years .

Uh , you know , just as we're ministering , we're just kind of getting more pieces of the puzzle and then also just looking around at Uruguay and seeing a lot of the same , a lot of the similar dynamics that just weren't as far advanced as things were in Venezuela , and so , no matter that we were there and living , we just started to see man , like there's all

kinds of these same things that are affecting Venezuela as like the end stage of these things that are affecting people here in Uruguay .

So one of the symptoms was things that we just saw was very few churches were able to pay their pastors a full-time salary or anything approaching a full-time salary , so they're working an additional one or two jobs in addition to being pastors just in order to make ends meet .

Another thing was that very few churches were able to own their own buildings and just every year that went by , rent would increase by law in Uruguay , 9% . Wait , by law , yeah , by law . They passed a law to keep pace , basically , with dollar inflation .

Wow , because , again , they wanted homeowners to be able to , or property owners to be able to keep the value . So we just saw stuff like that and you're just like man . How do you even , how do you just not get destroyed by inflation over time ? How do you even remotely get ahead ?

And in our experience and this is , I mean , praise the Lord that this is the case the organizations or the churches that were able to survive and thrive , they had a couple different characteristics , and one of those two characteristics was that they had outside largely American support .

So we ended up we partnered with a church that was sent by Alistair Begg's church in Ohio . And so we ended up merging our Reformed Baptist church plant with them and , again , praise the Lord , Like they had their .

That church was willing I was just sold a bunch of books so they were willing to invest heavily in what they were doing there , and so , like , praise the Lord .

The reality , though , is that , for the vast majority of these small churches that are being planted , or the churches that had been planted 20 , 30 , 40 years ago , is that if they don't have , they're not able to denominate their life in something that's keeping pace with the currency devaluation and inflation that they're feeling . You're , you're .

It's very difficult to get , to get ahead and to just and to not fall even more behind with every year that goes by .

So I ended up , ended up doing that , and , um , let's see , after about four years of ministering , I I just basically , with our , our small retirement account that we had through our missions organization , I just was trying to figure out what to invest in . I was not some big investment guru .

The one basic thing that I knew was that you're supposed to buy low and sell high , and so I said , okay , that makes sense . Let's take a look around at the world , and the thing that I saw was that everything was at all-time highs ever . So you're looking at real estate's all time highs . You're looking at stocks are all time highs .

I mean it just was crazy . What year was this ? Roughly , this was 2019 . Okay , All right , Early 2019 . Yeah , so I just I just was sitting there thinking , well , what do you do ? What are you supposed to invest in when , when everything's at all time highs ? And so I started looking into a bunch of stuff and ended up doing some stock investment .

We had a tax advantaged account that we were able to do some stuff with that . But then one of the things that I just started getting into just started was interesting to me was Bitcoin .

I had bought like $100 worth of Bitcoin in 2017 , as it was going from $1,000 in early 2017 to 20,000 at the end of the year , and I just again , but didn't understand any of the dynamics involved . I just thought this thing is moving , I better get some .

And then I mean I think I bought a hundred bucks at 13,000 and then it quickly went up and then it quickly dumped and I just was like what is going on ? I don't understand this at all . And it was basically shortly , about two months later that my role in our church shifted dramatically .

I went from the very content number two the very content leading music , doing discipleship to just due to the fact that our teammates the guy who was the head pastor basically had a family crisis and they had to go back to the fact that our teammates are , you know , the guy who was the head pastor basically had like a family crisis and they had to go back

to the States and so basically overnight I became the main pastor . Wow , and so anything , any thoughts of Bitcoin , any thoughts of all that stuff just totally went out the window as we were just trying to survive . So , by God's grace , we ministered for another , another year .

We were expecting you know , these , these largely new believing uh you know people to who are dealing with this gringo who speaks Spanish , but nowhere near as well as they do . There's , there's a few other church options . We were like man , surely people are going to are going to leave and go find something that's easier to listen to and easier to deal with .

And they just didn't leave , and so we just kept ministering , and so that was just huge to see the Lord work . And then it was again . Yeah , that was that was early 2018 .

And then by 2019 , I had a little bit more bandwidth to think about such things and and then again Bitcoin went from I think it bottomed at like 3000 and it was back at 9000 in early 2019 . And so I just said , ok , wait a second . Like I was a philosophy major , I need to understand some of like why , what this is , why it's happening .

And so I just went on this , you know a little bit of a rabbit hole , went down the rabbit hole to try to understand , like what is this ? Why does it exist ? You know what ? What are some of the dynamics at play ? The more that I read and the more that I studied it , I just was like man , this thing is so interesting . It involves .

It's at the intersection of all these different disciplines of like history and economics and just technology , and the thing that was most interesting to me was religion , or just morality .

And so , just to think about like Bitcoin it it was created in 2009 , in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis , because of the fact that the government had been able to to create money out of thin air and then bail out all of these banking entities that have been profitably gambling using other people's money , and so just the fact that that was even able

to to happen was something that bothered the you know , the founder of of Bitcoin , to the point that he created this alternative and this potential parallel system that people can use to basically have a money that can't be devalued the way that fiat currencies can , and so , again , this was something that , as I started to understand that it really just hit me that

this is the exact problem that our Venezuelan brothers and sisters are dealing with . This is the exact problem , that it really just hit me that this is the exact problem that our Venezuelan brothers and sisters are dealing with .

This is the exact problem that , again to a lesser degree in terms of the advancing of it , our Uruguayan brothers and sisters are dealing with , and the thing that blew my mind was the fact that every currency in Latin America and many in Africa and all over the places , all over the world , their currencies had failed three to four times since 1971 , when the

world went off of a gold standard . Wow , they went away from their currencies being backed by something scarce , right .

And so as I again was just trying to process those things , I just saw man like this this is a big deal , and there's moral , there's moral principles here that are that I'm not hearing anybody talk about , that just seem to be really obvious to me as I was going through these things .

And so , basically , again one of these things , it really clicked one day I was doing sermon prep . It was in the book of Galatians and it was Galatians 6 , I believe . The apostle Paul says that God is not mocked , for what a man sows , that will he also reap .

And so I was sitting there , I was , I had my , I had my uh , james B Jordan uh , out , you know , he's one of my , one of my sermon helps . I had , you know , uh , through new uh house for my name , a Peter Lightheart .

I had some other stuff , you know , I had my resources out here and I was like trying to think about how do I , how do you rephrase that idea ? Like what , what is , what is that saying ? And so , as I started to think about , well , what are some other examples of this , I started to think , okay , well , like marriage , there's like a in marriage .

God says you get married and then you enjoy the fruits of marriage , which is sex and children . The apostle Paul talks to the Thessalonians and says if one isn't willing to work , then neither should he eat . And so Paul is saying there should be a sowing and reaping within eating food . And the logic there is .

The reason why you eat is to replenish your energy that you've done pouring yourself out through work . And so if you're not willing to work , then you don't need your energy replenished . And if you do that for long enough , what's the logic ? If you're not willing to eat , or if you're not willing to work , then you should die .

This is so I'm sitting there thinking about , just like okay , there's more and more examples of this sowing and reaping thing . This isn't just some isolated thought . This is foundational to the way that God made the world , and the one , the biggest one , that hit me was the logic of salvation . We're not Muslims who believe that God can just forgive sins .

He didn't Jesus . They don't believe that Jesus needed to come . God could just forgive sins . Allah can just forgive sins , but the Christian God , he can't just forgive sins . He can't over , you know , just completely overlook , overlook , sin he has to it'd be , unjust . There has to be a cost to it , and so what ?

The sin that's been sown has to be reaped somehow . And so I just started to see this everywhere , and then the the , the turn to Bitcoin . That hit me was like , okay , so basically no understanding how fiat currency works . Fiat currency is basically money that denies sowing and reaping .

It basically is money that that allows governments and central banks to say we're going to reap where we haven't sown , we're going to create value out of thin air and we're going to , in so doing , we're going to act as gods . Fiat currency allows governments and central bankers to functionally operate as gods in the world .

And so , again , I'm sitting here thinking about these things and I start thinking about Psalm 2 , okay , you know why ? And it talks about the nations of the earth , the kings of the earth . They set themselves against the Lord and his anointed , and what do they say ? Let us cast his chains away from us .

We don't want something that's going to bind us from being able to do whatever we want . And it just hit me like this is literally what fiat currency is .

Fiat currency enables governments to try to throw off this chains of sowing and reaping that God has made to govern the world and there's all kinds of negative downstream consequences from it , and so that that's kind of that was kind of the a big part of the of the process of kind of seeing the value of of Bitcoin from the perspective of a missionary and pastor

.

Um , near the end of that time , uh , I had been reading , you know , a bunch of a bunch of diabolical Presbyterians , and uh , and just got to the point where some of the arguments they were making I just became , I was like man , I think they're right , and uh , and so again , there's there's more factors in this .

There's a number of the things we hadn't taken a furlough in almost seven years . We just needed to come back to the States .

I wanted just some time to to , you know , regather ourselves , and , and then these theological things were also there , and so , as we were working through these things , just basically , hey , let's go back to the States , we'll regroup , we'll pray , we'll work through , just kind of reassess things and see if we're going to come back here in this capacity or maybe

some other capacity . And so I guess , right prior to this , so I had taken part in this book club during COVID in 2020 , with some other Christians who were into Bitcoin . We read a couple of books . One of them was called the Ethics of Money Production by a Roman Catholic Austrian economist named Jorg Guido Holzmann . Can't recommend that book highly enough .

Every pastor ought to read that book . We read that one , and then we also read another book called Honest Money by Gary North . That's basically like the ninth grade reading level version of the Ethics of Money Production .

Bitcoiners are the one who says , yes , we're friends with gold , guys , cause we , they're totally right about like everything , all the principles . They're totally right . We just see , gold is good , but Bitcoin is is every bit of good , as good as gold , and it has a couple of strengths that that gold doesn't have , so we can get into that later .

But , yeah , so this book is fantastic , we actually .

So we end up long story short , we end up reading those two books and then deciding , hey , we would love to basically take a lot of these principles , but rather than the payoff being what those are , which is we need to go back to gold , we want to go forward and we want to go forward into Bitcoin , and basically just say , hey , we think this actually makes

sense , as crazy as it sounds . My last little tidbit on the Gary North thing when we wrote the book , we wrote a book called Thank God for Bitcoin and when we published it , we reached out to Gary North , who I think he went to be with the Lord about a year , a year and a half ago .

We reached out to him and basically asked him hey , you know , would you , would you read this and , you know , maybe consider writing a foreword or something he wanted nothing to do with us . And so people ask us all the time like hey , you know you mentioned Gary North in your book . Is he a Bitcoiner ? And I always say he is , oh man , so but yeah .

So we ended up . Long story short . We ended up writing the book . The book came out in January of 2021 , and we had the immense privilege .

We had zero , zero expectations for the book being interesting to people other than ourselves , but we had the extraordinary privilege of getting to experience every Protestant's dream , which was the book and God's providence came out the same week as a book by the Pope and we were outselling the Pope . We said take that Bishop of Rome .

Again , it's an intro book . We only talk about Bitcoin in the last two chapters of the book . Um , largely it's . It's a conversation about the ethics of money production and why Christians ought to care about that .

Probably a former high school classmate of theirs is reaching out on Facebook to try to give them a referral code to some , you know , bitcoin exchange or something , and so a lot of people's perception of Bitcoin because of the source is geared a certain way , right ? They're like I don't know if this is a speculative thing , this is all you know .

They're looking at it through a very specific lens and what we want to do is kind of reframe how to think about Bitcoin and look at it not through , again , the circumstantial eyes of these things , but we want to look at it both through a biblical lens and then through just a looking at theological history lens .

Let's try to orient ourselves and orient basically , the way that the world is currently operating for Christian ministry all over the world . And so , long story short , we ended up Thank God , for Bitcoin was formed after the book was written . I had come back to the States . This is what I was trying to get to .

We came back from the States at the end of 2021 . I was looking for a job to do in the meantime because , again , we had been funded missionaries . Once we realized we weren't going to go back , we wanted to get that money back to people who are going to the field as soon as possible and so , in hindsight , we probably did that a little bit too quickly .

The Lord knows he was very kind , but like we just basically like , hey , we want that to happen , and so I just started praying and looking for a job . One of the other authors of Thank God for Bitcoin asked if I would be willing to put together like a one day conference in Miami the day before the biggest Bitcoin conference in the world .

So me and another guy put that together , had just crazy things happen . Like Tim Tebow shows up to this thing and we're like what is going on ? We had some other like Senate candidates who were Christians . I can't remember his name . He's from the state of Illinois . He was probably the strongest Christian politician candidate I've ever heard of in my life .

This guy was way , way overt about being a Christian and loving the Lord and , you know , obeying Christ and lots of stuff .

So ended up doing that and in the aftermath of that conference , some of the other authors , who were all either Bitcoiners from early on , buying Bitcoin at under $10 a coin , or entrepreneurs who were independently wealthy , just basically saw the conference and saw just , and we had a bunch of people there and they just basically said , hey , jordan , you're looking

for a job . If you want to do this full time while you're trying to figure out where you're at theologically , you're trying to get all these things sorted . If you want to do this full time to help Christians understand and look at Bitcoin and see the value proposition , we're willing to fund it .

And so they gave us a couple of years of runway of funding to be able to just to do that full time . So , yeah , so we do the conference . This will be our third straight year that we've done that . Uh , it's going to be in Nashville this year . We , we , basically we follow around the biggest Bitcoin conference there .

We , wherever they go , we go , cause we basically figure , hey , we can , we can save on on money bringing in speakers , at least on the Bitcoin side of things . We'll just kind of catch them while they're already here . Yeah , basically . So their conference is in Nashville this year .

And then we just said , hey , nashville's a great town for Christians , there's tons of churches there , so let's do that and we'll see how it goes . So , yeah , we've got CR Wiley , we've got Michael Foster , glenn Sunshine , dr Ben Merkel . We've got a bunch of other tangential folks . We've got John Moody . John Moody is big in the regenerative agriculture movement .

We've got Nate Fisher , who's one of the founders of American Reformer and New Founding . Yeah , just got a bunch of guys . Got a few others as well .

So the goal is again just to bring together Christians , and so , basically , the conference is going to be day one is a Christian economics conference , like how should Christians think about money , economics , investing these issues , how do we look at these issues ? And then day two is much more based on what we learned in day one and based on these principles .

Here's what Bitcoin is and here's the crazy ways in which Bitcoin is being used by Christians all over the world for the glory of God and the good of people everywhere . So that's kind of what we're doing and , yeah , we'd love to have you .

So what I would like to ask you is just a couple of basic questions about Bitcoin because , like you said , people see it maybe on social media , they see something on cable news , they see scare tactics from Jim Cramer Correct , you know , on investing , when they're investing and so I think there's a lot of mystery around Bitcoin . I mean , there is anyway .

I mean , this mysterious Satoshi guy , you know , started Bitcoin Exactly . But I think it would be really helpful , Just like what are the basics ? Why is it better ? Why is it not fiat ? Is there a cap ? You know at what point does it go deflationary ? Does it go deflationary , yeah , and how ? What is blockchain ? You know ?

Some of those basics I think would be really helpful .

I've met some of the like the most OG Bitcoiners that exist , guys who were literally who Satoshi was in contact from the beginning , who he's asking about this project . So I've talked with some of them , I've seen them , seen interviews with them , and I can't prove this .

I think some of them have an idea of who he is , but none of them will own up to it publicly .

So , again , he's this person who decided not to make his identity known , and I think I don't think I need to make this case to you , but there's lots of people who increasingly , especially within Christendom , are understanding the value proposition of being pseudonymous , if not completely anonymous , and so I think there's very good reasons for doing that .

But he decided to take that route and so , even though he's not known , there are many people who have been involved since the very beginning and who've made very important changes , like to Bitcoin , or they've been heavy influences on the direction of the project since the beginning .

Those guys are known and are still around , and so , yeah , it was created , like I mentioned , in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis , to be a money that couldn't be devalued by any government or central bank , and so it operates in a decentralized way , in just a way that there is no one person who's in control of it or one small group of people who's

in control of it , and so this functions basically , by . To understand some of this , it sounds weird because most I would say 99% of people do not understand our own , the regular banking system , and so when you start talking about Bitcoin , it seems like this foreign world .

But in reality , if you understand how regular banking works , it's very similar and , at its most basic level , a bank just maintains a ledger . A bank maintains a ledger of deposits and debits , money in and money out , and so , with normal banks , the way that they work is you have to trust that they are maintaining true balances in all the accounts .

There's a ton of trust involved . You can't verify . We can't go to Wells Fargo and say , hey , show me , open up your books , wells Fargo , to us . We want to be able to verify all the transactions . We want to be able to see how these things are going down . They're never going to do that With Bitcoin .

Bitcoin is created to be an open ledger where you can , where anyone who wants to can run what's called a node and can run their own copy of the Bitcoin ledger .

They can run their own copy of the software and see every single transaction that's ever taken place on the Bitcoin ledger , and so anyone who wants to do this can run their own copy and verify for themselves that the transactions that they're going to be taking part in , that the people actually have the Bitcoin that they say that they do .

So if I'm going to receive someone's Bitcoin in payment for a good or services that I have , I can verify using my own node , my own copy of the ledger , that they do in fact have the goods , they do in fact have the money that they say they're going to have , and you get settlement across the world using the internet it's digital final settlement within a

matter of minutes rather than a matter of hours , if not days . If anyone has tried to send a wire or something like that , you know you imagine it sounds crazy , but if you're a business person , you've tried to do this . You've had to send a wire . Still today send a wire . You have to wait days in order for that thing to finally clear .

Easy , you're just like okay , because , again , blockchain . The only way in which blockchain has been demonstrated to actually provide the value that it says it's going to provide is with money , is with Bitcoin itself , and there's all kinds of reasons for that , just due to the way that it works . But basically , a blockchain , what it is is .

You have these entities that are called Bitcoin miners or Bitcoin hashers . They're these entities that are running the Bitcoin software . They're playing by Bitcoin's rules . In order to do that , they need these very high powered computers . These computers are this sounds weird , but there's a very weird sense in which they're like priest-like .

They're priestly , and why on earth ? How on earth do you get there ? The way you get there is because , in the same way that priests are set apart to the Lord , they're not given to all these other things . They're given to the Lord that they only focus on what he wants to do . A Bitcoin mining computer can't you can't like surf the web .

On a Bitcoin mining computer , it's literally designed to do one thing , and that's mine Bitcoin . And so what they do is they ? Basically , they are out there , they're , they're trying to this is a very crude way of putting it , but basically solve for this very difficult math problem .

They're sitting there trying to guess this number that will unlock the ability for them to be the ones who receive this block reward or a block subsidy that's an amount of Bitcoin .

And so if they're the one who solved the problem and are able to do that , at the same time as that's happening , they're listening for all of the transactions that are happening every 10 minutes .

And if they're the one who mines the block , they then take all these transactions that have happened in the last 10 minutes , they pack them into this block and they announce to the world , to all these people who are running a copy of the Bitcoin ledger .

They basically say , hey , this is the next block and so you should continue the chain of blocks that have been happening with this block , and so they lock it on there and then you know the nodes all latch on and say , ok , we agree , there's like an overlap period where , if there's some funny business going on , you can . You can kind of discern that .

But basically that's that once that block gets locked on , then you just continue on the next block , and so every 10 minutes there's a new block of Bitcoin that's mined , a new set of transactions that are included in that block , and so what that does is it basically ensures that it's extraordinarily energy intensive to try to undo blocks that have been certified ,

basically are announced through that process . In order to undo them , you have to exert tons and tons of energy and you have to actually buy Bitcoin . You have to invest a ton of energy and money in order to try to undo the transactions that have been announced and put together .

Correct ? And what are mine ? What is the inflation rate right now ?

There are over 60 million millionaires in the world right now , and so you're like , well , how's this going to work if there's only 21 million Bitcoin and there's 60 million millionaires Like how's that going to work ?

The way that's going to work is basically because each one of those Bitcoin , each one of those one Bitcoin , can be divided up into a hundred million fragments that are called Satoshis . They get called several different things . Sats for short is the name . So you can . You don't have to buy a whole Bitcoin .

You can buy a dollar's worth of Bitcoin , which at this point , would be , you know , 1500 sats or something like that . So you , you can . There's plenty of Bitcoin to go around for everybody who wants to buy Bitcoin to buy it , because you have people who are getting in and getting in at different times .

If Bitcoin went to a million dollars tomorrow , I would again just given the nature I'm a millennial I'm a millennial I would sell some Bitcoin and buy a house , so there'd be at least my Bitcoin , some of my Bitcoin , would be on the table for that to happen .

But again , there's people who bought into Bitcoin at a dollar per Bitcoin who , again , for the first time some of them this happened like two months ago when Bitcoin hit 70,000 again some of these the oldest Bitcoin that we know about . We can trace some of these wallets . Some of them sold their Bitcoins for the first time . So everybody has a price .

Everybody has a price at which they're willing to sell some Bitcoin .

They were Bitcoin that was mined when Bitcoin was , you know , sub a dollar , and so people were it used to be . Back in the day , you could get onto a website and there were websites that did what were called um shoot . They're not fountains , what are they called these , basically ?

Where you could go on there and anybody could just click a button and they would give you five Bitcoin and you could go back there as many times as you want to and just get more and more Bitcoin .

About three to 4 million are lost forever . So you're looking at , you know , 17 to 18 million that are that are still around .

You ask is Bitcoin ? What is Bitcoin ? The question that immediately is flying to the back of my head is well , by what standard ? Am I going to answer this question ? What is the standard by which we're going to determine what money is ? And I think that this is the question . Again , we live in a day of definitional crises on every level , right ?

Nobody knows what anything is , because we've rejected a standard , an objective standard by which to be able to discern objective truth . And so I think , you know , we're in a day in which what is a man , what is a woman , what is marriage , what is government , what is you know ?

And what is money is one of these questions that doesn't get anywhere near the publicity of those other things , but it ought to , because it affects all of those other things . And so the question is again what is the basis by which we know what money is . You know , we can just say , hey , this is what I think it is , or largely .

What happens is people will pit certain aspects of what some people will call money against other aspects , and to my mind , it's very similar to what some of the greatest heresies throughout the history of the church . They happen when people try to pit attributes of God against themselves , and so I think that , with Bitcoin , here's an example of this .

This happens with Bitcoin or with money more broadly , so there's people who will say what is money ? And they'll go money is a medium of exchange . And it's like great , yeah , you're right , money is a medium of exchange . And there's other people go , but it's also a store of value . And there's some people who go no , no , no , it's not a store of value .

And then again , as soon as you hear that , you need to say to yourself well , by what standard ? He's saying it ? Like it's obvious , but why is it obvious to him ?

And so this is one of these really good questions that we're going to be answering at the conference and talking about is wait a second , what is the objective standard by which anybody can say this is or isn't money ? And , as it turns out , jesus has a lot to say about this .

But again , this is one of the things where clearly I would agree with We'll skip the drama , we'll skip the , as much as it pains me , the former philosophy major , to not give the reason behind If we just want to get down to brass tacks . Money obviously is a medium of exchange . Right , like we wouldn't . That's kind of .

One of the big points of it is that you give it in exchange for other goods or services . But the question is , historically , a lot of people will say , all right , there's three main properties of money One is a medium of exchange , store of value and then a unit of account .

Those are the broadly throughout history , people agree that those are the three things involved . The question is what is the relationship between those three things ? What is the relationship between them and how does it happen ?

And so we are this is my perspective of this is that we are so accustomed to living in a world which is a historically non-normative world , where money is created fiatly , it's created by governments , it's money gets its value from governments declaring that it has value .

We're so accustomed to living in and swimming through those waters , that kind of a world that we can't imagine another world . But if you look at history , you know thankfully , as Christians , christians are , people are we are respecters of history . We want to , we want to learn .

We don't think we're living in some you know a utopia now where , like everything's better today than it was years ago . We don't think we're living in some you know utopia now . We're like everything's better today than it was years ago . We don't think that way , and the Proverbs would say that's foolishness , to actually think that way .

You know , why aren't the former days so much better ? The Proverbs basically say that's . You don't even know what you're talking about . That's foolishness . And so , as Christians , we look back . History is gold and silver , these precious metals , and I'm sure we have all of our gold and silver bugs who are listening saying amen .

This is why we are where we are . What's your excuse ? Why don't you see the writing on the wall ? Now the question is . The question that the Bitcoiners would ask back is well , why was gold and silver used as money ? And the reason is because there's a number of properties that it has that make it good money , and again there's .

We could go through a whole bunch of this stuff too . But one of these things is it's . It's scarce , right ? Why isn't ? Sand uses money ? Okay , it's plenty plentiful . We could use it as a good medium of exchange , but it's not scarce .

So you could again , to borrow our framework about sowing and reaping you could go out and do no work and get sand and then go trade it for valuable things . That wouldn't be good . According to God's saying , he made the world to operate according to principles of sowing and reaping . That wouldn't be good . You could get resources without doing any work .

Again , there's a bunch of these different things that you could look at . Again . Why Bitcoin over gold and silver ? Okay , gold and silver is great . It's scarce . You have to . It has a production cost . If you're going to have gold or silver money , you have to pay guys to go dig it up out of the ground .

You have to pay for the tools that they're using to do that . You have to pay for the refining process . So , with all of these things , there's real work , real labor , real energy being expended and there's a real product at the end of the day , that is the product of real energy and value . Now , what does that have to do with Bitcoin ?

Bitcoin seems so ephemeral and digital . And you know how is that not just not just more fiat currency ? The reason it's not is because of the same things we talked about . There's only two ways to get Bitcoin . The two ways are either to mine it yourself , which requires expenditure of real world resources . You have to have the computers .

You have to have the computers , you have to pay for the energy to power those computers , you have to pay people to maintain those computers , and then you have to you know there's a whole bunch of other things you have to pay for the buildings where they house the miners .

There's all kinds of real world inputs that go into mining Bitcoin or you have to either buy or be given some Bitcoin by somebody who's already done that process . So either buy or be given some Bitcoin by somebody who's already done that process . So it's a perfectly .

It's just like gold mining in that in that sense , there's real world inputs and real world outputs . So that that would be . That would be one thing you mentioned . What was the other question you had , like a bunch , but some of the pushback you get from ?

Yeah , it seems to me like people treat Bitcoin more as a speculative asset . You know , kind of like gold bugs are not treating gold as money , even though it fits the definition , but they're treating it kind of like an insurance policy . Sure , so that's what I was curious about .

And , as far as you know , if it's classified as somewhat of a speculative asset at this time , then how has it performed versus other assets ? Why wouldn't I take something like gold , that is a known entity , versus something like Bitcoin or something like real estate or even the stock market ?

So that's kind of where I'm going with the questions is is it money , is it a speculative asset ? It could be both . Gold is both , and so how is it performed ?

It was chosen as money because of its properties , by the free market . It had properties that people wanted and valued , and so people chose it , and then governments . What happened over time was governments put theirs like part of what . The reason you have the famous passage with Jesus , with whose likeness and inscription .

Part of the reason why that happened was it was basically government stepping in and saying , hey , we certify that this gold and silver is X percentage gold and silver , it's actually the real thing , it's not fake , and so it was basically a certification mechanism .

But now we have this thing where all of the value of that for money comes from the fact that a government declares from on high that it's actually got value .

It's immoral for governments to force on their citizenry , to basically force them to do something that is outside of , to basically try to assume authority that they don't have and try to force their people to do something that doesn't that they . Basically .

That is something other than what they would normally do under under normal circumstances , or that they should want to do under normal circumstances . Uh , because , again , this is this is where the great commandment comes in . This is another thing that this , this is this comes to bear here . Because what is the great commandment ?

Love the Lord , your God , with all your heart , soul , mind and strength , and love your neighbor as yourself . Okay , is it loving for me to give my neighbor , in exchange for a good or service , that he worked hard ? He's expending real world , time , energy , all these things .

Is it loving for me to give him a piece of paper that , literally , just it doesn't have any , any value other than one that is assigned to it by a government ? That's not very loving ?

If that thing could get burned up tomorrow , it could be gone tomorrow , and so again , this is not loving , especially when that same government can go and create infinitely more of those same currency units within the span of a day , especially within a digital world .

40% of all the dollars that have ever existed were created when he airdropped money to folks , and so I mean it's just staggering the amount of money that was created out of thin air , at the drop of a hat .

It's not fully mature money , okay , but it's money Now . This is where this gets funny , because , okay , so let's say here's the thing , because what you said is there's people who don't treat it as money , right , and so this is where people get messed up . Here's a question for you Is Jesus Lord ? He's Lord , yes , he's Lord , right , but wait a second .

There's plenty of people who aren't treating Jesus as Lord . Does that change the fact that he is Lord ? No , it doesn't . Did you just Jesus juke me ? I just Jesus juked you . That's right , we just Jesus juked , all right . So here's another example of this Again . That might seem extreme .

It's like the maybe , the more apt , maybe this will cause people not to freak out as much . Like , okay , is a baby a human ? Of course the baby's a human , but wait a second . God says . God says in in a Genesis , uh , genesis one . What is it ? What is the requirements of being a human ? What does God tell people to do ?

Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth . Okay , so a baby can't do that . A baby can't , is he ? Is it any less of a human ? No , he's just a human . He's immature , he's not able to do everything he's going to do . But it's not some sort of like inherent weakness on the part of the baby . He's still a human . He just hasn't reached maturity yet .

Unit of account at this point is a function of maturity . Like there's no , there's nobody other than El Salvador who ruined my perfect metaphor . Outside of El Salvador , every single Bitcoin transaction has been a voluntary transaction .

And so it's one of these things where , around the world , people are adopting Bitcoin because they value it , and part of the maturity issue is that you also have mandatory units , you know , paper units that you have to take as money in exchange for goods and services from the government , and so the government doesn't really seem to like Bitcoin very much , yep ,

although Trump has been really customizing his platform to be pro-cryptocurrency because he sees that it's probably a bigger issue than people realize . What is it ? 30 million people in the United States own some sort of cryptocurrency , yep , which is quite a bit , and so , um , I you know it .

It is really interesting because gold is money , you know , there's even you can get us gold dollars , correct , but uh , going to the bank and saying I'm buying a house title company or whatever , that is very difficult , right . Same same thing with bitcoin , you know . And so we , we are handic thing . Same thing with Bitcoin , you know .

And so we , we are handicapped in a way by the government , you know , because we have to use these , these , uh , you know federal reserve notes .

So , like this is another part , part of the people , people's concern over , oh well , bitcoin it's not really money , because you can't , you can't spend it everywhere . Part of that's just ignorance on their part , because you can actually spend Bitcoin a lot more than people are aware that you can .

So it's like some of this is it's just a lack of awareness of the world we actually live in . But there's an increasing number of people , like luxury car dealerships are increasingly accepting Bitcoin for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for , you know , for selling Lamborghinis and all these different things .

So you're talking about again you're talking about it's an immaturity problem , but Bitcoin has been growing exponentially for 15 years . Every year that goes by , there's exponentially more users than there were the year before , and that's going to continue to happen because of the different pressures that are at play . Again , this is more difficult .

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I have brothers and sisters , people I love , who live in places where their currency is . They've experienced a hundred percent day over day inflation . They go in the morning and the prices are one thing .

They go in the afternoon , the prices have doubled , and so that is an increasing number of countries around the world , and so necessarily , they're looking for something , anything to protect themselves from losing the purchasing power that quickly , and so increasingly non-technical people are willing to do the work to understand Bitcoin because they have .

They don't have an alternative .

So talk to me about Bitcoin as a safe haven , because that's a really good example for South American countries and other countries that have experienced rapid inflation .

That's really what you're getting Again in terms of the inflation . Who knows what's going to happen on a daily basis ? But you're basically moving off into a parallel system that's not directly connected . There's a lot of people who hear that and they're like well , no , you still have to move back into dollars .

It's like you do not , you do not have to move back into dollars . Increasingly , they're increasing numbers of options for people who live on Bitcoin . I have friends who live on Bitcoin .

This is something that's going to be more and more regular .

Some of it , though , is just technological issues , so one of the things that we found , there's a sweet woman . She's just a wonderful woman . Her name is Suleyma . She was part of our church in Uruguay . She told me one day um , this was ? She told me he's like jordan . I tried to .

I just sent some money back to venezuela , and I said , oh no , he's like how much did you pay ? How much did you have to pay ? She sent , I think , 200 or 250 dollars , and paid 80 dollars in of a fee to send it home . Oh , my word . And so I just was like no , I was like , come on . So now , why is that ? Okay , is it ? These greedy banks ?

Get put on our Elizabeth Warren hat , right ? Is this ? Is this what's going on ? These , just these greedy people ? No , no , it's a technological issue . Okay , you have , in their case , you have , western union , who's operating in Uruguay and also operating in Venezuela .

Now , venezuela is a very dangerous place to be , okay , and so they're taking extraordinary risk to be in Venezuela , to operate a business in Venezuela . So what they're doing to compensate for that risk is they're charging higher fees . So I don't begrudge Western Union . They're doing like in order for their business to make sense .

They're doing what they have to do . So this is not some sort of we're not going to belittle the business owners . No , I refuse Like . So what we need to do is we need to come up with a technical solution that can solve for the problems that exist .

So if we disintermediate this product , you know , if we can disintermediate , which is exactly what Bitcoin does now we're no longer we're not dealing with the same kind of restraints as you are with Western union .

The other restraint that they have is when she sent that money home , one of her family members had to physically go to that physical Western Union location . Now imagine again you're in a country that's in shambles , right ? And here's this honeypot If people go here- .

So we had people , a lot of people again , in our church who were fleeing Venezuela . They had to walk across the border . They didn't have enough money to fly out . The flight prices went crazy . So if they're walking across the border , same dynamic . There's people who know there's people leaving and walking across the border with all their valuables .

They're waiting to rob you . There's soldiers on the border who are willing to basically take advantage of their position and basically force you to pay them money to get out . And so if you have a physical currency or a physical store of value , in their situations it's actually the tangibleness , the physicality of it actually becomes a liability .

Yeah , and so having a money that is non-tangible , especially one where I can memorize or tattoo on my body or whatever I can memorize a 12-word seed phrase I can cross any border in the world , get to where I'm going , plug in those 12 words and I've got access to my money again .

That's an incredibly valuable thing for millions of people around the world right now .

And when you have somebody buy a $65,000 vehicle , you know I've got to go out and buy this car from a wholesaler or from an auction or whatever .

They give me a check from the bank , a cashier's check right , which is taken out of their account immediately when they write the check , and my bank would hold it for up to 10 business days , and so the speed of money was incredibly slow and it cost me actually quite a bit of money in my business .

Correct , yeah , by doing that , whereas with Bitcoin , all Jordan has to do is provide me his wallet and I could have Bitcoin sent to him in the next five minutes .

And so again , we have . This is another example . If we're going to get into missions we have I have friends who are they're missionaries missionary in Lebanon and he , his mission organization , because of , because of the terrorism stuff that's going on in Lebanon . It's close to a lot of these terrorism things .

They're cut off from the SWIFT system , they're cut off from the , from the US banking system , and so his organization , the United States , can't send him dollars . He works there in Christian ministry . How is he going to get money ?

Okay , so the current options for him and many other missionaries around the world they've had one primary option and that's called donking in money . This is what it's called . So what they do is they smuggle in money , like there's people who like whether it's , you know , on planes .

Again , you're , it's not smuggling , sounds like horrible , but you can bring up to a certain amount of money on a plane legally and not be an issue . So that's one thing .

There are people , though , there are organizations that are doing different things , that are funding , you know , printing of Bibles and all kinds of stuff , who are smuggling it across borders , and so we I've spoken with different mission organization leaders and heads who are looking for solutions to this problem , because here's the dynamic , here's , here's the dynamic ,

here's the reality that they have come to , in some cases , accept and deal with . So we talked to one guy and he said this is what we do we send in , let's say , we send $100,000 . What we do is we send it to this person and then they physically move it 100 miles and they get it to this person and they take 10% for being , for doing that .

Then you get to the second person . The second person , he'll take 10% to move it another X amount of distance . Oh my word , he's like in in our daily process we have four guys , or our not daily , but our normal , regular process . We have four guys who each take 10% in . 60% of the money gets to where it's going to go .

Okay , now again , these are these , each one of those four . Are they being just greedy guys ? No , they're not being greedy . They're risking their lives , they're risking prison time . They're risking because , again , if they get found out , nobody government doesn't know why they have that money .

They know that they're using it for the kingdom of God , for fund missionaries and all this kind of stuff , but if they get found , it can be seriously . So they're taking risk to do it and it's also at the cost of 40% of the money that could otherwise be going to the kingdom of God . And so Bitcoin disintermediates and bypasses all of this .

So this missionary we know in Lebanon gets paid by his organization in Bitcoin . He then goes to a peer-to-peer community of people in Lebanon who , again , are all dealing with hyperinflation , are all dealing with this thing and who are always looking .

There's always a handful of people who are looking for scarce resources , and so they'll buy bitcoin with the local currency . He plans everything out so he can get the money and go the same day to the grocery store , so that it doesn't lose the buying power , and that's how it works . And so this is is happening all over the world .

I've talked to a number of organizations that are trying to move money around different places around the world . You could even use we're in Ukraine ? Okay , let's use this one , okay . Oh , russia , cut off from the SWIFT system . Okay , those bad Russians ?

Okay , there's no provision on the Great Commission that says go into all the world and make disciples unless your country puts sanctions on them Nope . So how are we going to get money to the church planters that are in Russia ? Well , we're going to use Bitcoin . That's going to require them to learn a little bit . That's fine , they'll solve it .

They're big boys , they'll solve that . But you can find liquidity . You can find ruble liquidity on the ground in Russia to exchange your Bitcoin for , and so Bitcoin is coming in seeing a problem and serving as a tangible solution or real world solution for these kind of things .

The last thing and again this is more US based in terms of just everybody's daily existence would be something would be censorship , resistance . I can't claim all the credit for this , but I certainly believe that the Lord answers prayer .

So when the Canadian trucker thing happened , I literally had been praying for something like that to happen , because , I'm like Lord , I really see this happening around the world .

It would be great if people here in the States had some way like , if they could experience something that would demonstrate the value of Bitcoin in the shortcomings of the existence system and basically see like , hey , this is actually a big deal .

And so when that happened , I had the privilege to interview BJ Dichter , who was the spokesperson for the Canadian trucker protest , and basically they had millions of dollars that were given to them . The Canadian government declared them enemies of the state , cut them off from all the access to all of the fiat money that was given .

The only money that they were able to access was $900,000 in Bitcoin that was given and custodied correctly and given to them one at a time by a few guys who were Bitcoiners within that movement . So I had this conversation with Doug Wilson . Doug Wilson came on our podcast .

I talked to him and I said Pastor Doug , I literally have been thinking about you in this specific issue for forever . You're sitting here . You're somebody who's not a wilting daisy , brian Sauvé , not a wilting daisy , you guys . Go out there .

You're going to preach the whole counsel of God's word , okay , and you're going to preach a sermon that says something insane like a boy can't cut off his penis and become a girl , and you could be girl , and you could be . You could be debanked for that . I mean how I mean ? That's just , that's the world we live in .

So , again , long , you know , over the longterm here the courts have been a bastion of sanity for the most part . But that requires months , if not years . And so if you were to be cut off from your bank account tomorrow , how would you pay your staff ? How would you pay your missionaries ? How would you do these things ?

I'm sure you'd have people who would rally , but what is your assurance that those people aren't going to then be targeted ? Because that's what happened with the Canadian trucker folks .

Yep , we live in negative world now and Bitcoin is money for negative world , Like Bitcoin is money for a world in which we , we don't have the same level of trust , we don't have the same level of you know of , of ability to rely on , on banks and all these things that we could once , when we lived in a world that was , you know , had a far greater fear

of God .

I can't remember the exact company's details , but yeah , he was getting denied by banks and so , um , manipulating Bitcoin like that is , uh , quite honestly , an impossibility at this point . Maybe in some future date , but who knows ?

But again , this is what I say to people is I would rather have , let's say , if you take 20% , 20% of your church reserves or whatever and you put it on Bitcoin , okay , I would rather have 100% access to money that could lose 20% of its value on a given day than 0% access to something that is , maybe that is , only 6% or 7% , because that's the inflation

rate , the stated inflation rate . I'd rather have than have zero access to something that is , on paper , more stable , right Like that . That's just kind of that ought to be intuitive , but it's difficult because we didn't grow up in a world like this , Like we live in clown world .

I guess it's been a few months now ETF approvals and now BlackRock is buying a lot of Bitcoin , correct ? So what are your thoughts on that ? I know there are some Bitcoin guys that really hate it and some that embrace the adoption by BlackRock . I'm just curious what your thoughts are .

God , the fact that Bitcoin is this good thing that can be corrupted by bad people is not an indictment on Bitcoin , like and so . But well , do you think ?

I'd rather them hold the Bitcoin than than BlackRock . The good news , though , is that BlackRock because they're not convicted , like they're not , in Bitcoin , because they actually have , like , researched it and like they believe in the Bitcoin and they want the world that Bitcoin's , they want the world that Bitcoin is bringing about .

So I think , again , there's going to become times where , let's say , they go up , let's say , bitcoin's price in dollar terms goes up 60% they're going to sell some . They have the fiduciary responsibility . They're going to sell some , and so then there's going to be Bitcoin back on the market for normal people to buy .

Again , it's not great , and , at the same time , again , the difference between Bitcoin and some of these other coins is there's no Bitcoin foundation . There's no small group of people who can decide overnight to create way more Bitcoin or to vote to give power to any entity . We actually experienced this same test , like stress tested this idea in 2017 .

In 2017 , there was this debate within the Bitcoin world over whether or not Bitcoin's blocks should increase in size . If you increase the size , you can fit more transactions , and then that's . It allows Bitcoin to be used for more more immediately as a on the base layer , as a as a medium of exchange .

So there were people who thought this is a good thing to do . There were other people who thought , who realized man , if we do that , we're going to sacrifice other things , we're going to sacrifice something that's not going to be ideal .

And so basically , what it turned out to be was that there were large entities , big businesses , big mining companies , who all wanted to go to big blocks because it would be advantageous for them in fiat profit world in the short-term future . All of the little guys who are all sitting there running their own copies of the node .

They all basically said we're not doing that , and in real time , you saw these mega companies get defeated . So Goliath lost to David . It was the coolest thing . And so basically , that's the dynamic is anyone who runs .

If you run a node , you have voting power over which of these , over the future of what you're going to what you want Bitcoin to look like , and so , again , these are geographically distributed , these are people all over the world and all kinds of different countries , including countries that are enemies , and so , again , it's this really interesting thing of you know

, basically Bitcoin is being preserved by the fact that there's no one entity or country that's controlling it and can basically , you know , basically force it to do what they want it to do .

So I got I won't name the country , but I got put in a . It's like a communication group with a few hundred other people in a in a certain country that is difficult to to move money around in . So I'm in this group . There's a few hundred people in there , and within this group , there's people at any given time , selling anything you can think of .

Like there's people selling Amazon gift cards in there . There's people selling , you know a bunch of other cryptocurrencies Tron , ethereum , you know just whatever Doge , probably , you know . Like all of these things they're in , they're willing to sell everything .

And so , as I look at that , and if there's some missionary who , for some reason , has Doge and he's like , hey , I want to sell Doge and get money into this country , I'm not going to be like , hey , man , you should really be using Bitcoin . Like , I'm not going to do that .

Like because , again , what's the Bitcoin is a means to an end , and so remembering what that end is is really important , at the same time as a as a structural thing . If I'm looking at which of the currencies is actually able to stand up to a government , it's actually able to stand up and is strong enough to withstand a government attacking it .

It's only Bitcoin , and that's been demonstrated over and over again . China's banned Bitcoin seven times seven or eight times in the last 15 years , and the fact that they had to do it seven means they had to relent on it . Yeah , the CCP is one of the largest holders of Ethereum .

So , like they , they like governments , authoritarian governments , like these other cryptocurrencies , because they have a guy who they can put their thumb on and make him do what they want . Again , even if they're not going to take him out , because that wouldn't be advantageous , they can still threaten him .

They can still do all kinds of different things if they wanted to in order to make him do what they wanted to do . So that's the difference in terms of what I see . Bitcoin is literally . It's actually decentralized . It's actually able to not have one person or small group of people who are able to manipulate it .

There's other currencies can't say that , and so , for the long-term , the big picture , though , we actually want to have censorship resistant money . Bitcoin is the only thing that fits that bill , and so I'm not willing to . You know , with especially , you have people who are just getting into these things .

They're trying to make heads or tails of all these different currencies . I'm not going to sit there and I have zero willingness to basically , hey , throw a little bit into this and maybe it'll go . You know , maybe it'll go crazy . Even if you're just looking at it from an investment standpoint , it can be seductive to look at the returns . You know it's .

It's it's intuitive to try to think , all right , I'm going to buy , I'm going to buy Ripple . Okay , ripple is so cheap right now . If all it takes is you know a bunch more people to buy a bunch of it and then it'll go up a lot . Like that's intuitive . It's just it doesn't work that way .

And , and the other thing that you have to look at is people a that what they . What you need to do is look at those other cryptocurrencies denominated in Bitcoin . Yes , so what you're looking at is what is the opportunity cost of ? You know what you would have had if you would have bought Bitcoin rather than this thing .

And in every single case , all of those currencies it looks like going downhill , like all of them are losing value . They've they've peaked in their value in Bitcoin terms and so , even as a , as a long-term thing , like it , it doesn't make sense if you , if you're using that as a , as a barometer .

I have Faraday bags , like you store your electronic stuff in them and they keep it from being fried by , you know , emps . Again , if , if there's a , if there's a solar flare that fly , that fries every single electronic thing that we have , we're going to have a whole lot bigger problems than just Bitcoin .

You know , you've got to have , yeah , our entire medical system . Medical system is , all you know , digitalized now , uh , all of our elections all of this . yeah , Food , like everything we're going to be in in a bad way , um , if that happens .

But in terms of other other risks you mentioned , uh , like an EMP , yeah , here's , here's the , the pushback against the NDP . Unless you have like a total world , you have like nuclear war where everybody gets destroyed , right , guess what We'll be with Jesus . We won't be worried about money .

Quantum computing is nowhere near as like set in stone as people think it's going to be . Right . Like it's nowhere near Like . I've talked to people . We looked into this whole thing . So that's just one thing . It's nowhere right now . The standard that's used is the SHA-256 algorithm for cryptography . There's again in the works .

I want to say they've already come up with a couple of them , but basically they're just basically even more so even if you did have a quantum computer , it's still basically the Bitcoin could resist it . So all it is it's a matter of doing that and then implementing them .

These are all possible , feasibly done things that if we see these things on the horizon , they become more of a priority . People start doing it . It's just nowhere near like the . Yeah , like this is going to happen tomorrow , and then the first thing they're going to do is attack Bitcoin Like that's .

The other thing is there's other things that you could attack if you had that ability , and Bitcoin wouldn't necessarily be the first one .

Yes , but this was a concern for me in the future is to make Bitcoin essentially illegal , and it's it's very difficult to have on ramps and off ramps in Bitcoin without going through one of the major exchanges , and so that was one of my larger concerns .

But I don't think that's probably as much of a risk now , like I said , because BlackRock it does have its benefits . You know they have an interest in keeping it around .

One of the things that there's been talk about doing is outlawing private ownership of Bitcoin .

It's literally code on a , on a page or on a computer and so , literally , like Bitcoin , is protected by freedom of speech . This was actually cryptography itself was under attack in the I believe it was in the eighties . They wanted to outlaw cryptography because they were trying to argue this is a weapon of war . It went before the Supreme court .

The Supreme court , the lawyers who were defending the guys who wanted to allow cryptography , just basically printed out the cryptography and said , hey , this is the cryptography , it's just text , yeah . And so when they realize that they're like , oh okay , yeah , you win . And so Bitcoin is , it's literally it's the same thing . It's zeros and ones .

All of this is it's it's code on a piece of paper . You literally can't outlaw it , it's just . It may be totally absurd , you know to to try to do that .

So you can see how that could create some tension and some angst amongst Bitcoin holders , or even potential Bitcoin holders .

What Bitcoin does is it prioritizes finding the cheapest energy on earth and being able to monetize it exactly where it is , and so what you have is some of the a lot of Bitcoin mining and a lot of the energy that's going into mining . Bitcoin is not energy that could be used for other things .

This is not normal guys within city limits who are doing this stuff . What you have is you have , for instance , one of the biggest Bitcoin mines was in interior China . There's this giant hydroelectric dam that's too far away from any of the population centers for them to efficiently transport the energy itself to those places to be able to use by the people .

So what they do is they hook a generator up to the hydroelectric dam , they plug in a few shipping containers worth of Bitcoin miners to that generator and they're mining , using the power of this hydroelectric dam to mine Bitcoin , and then they send the Bitcoin to the city and they sell the Bitcoin , and then they have this thing They've turned wasted energy into

money . It's incredible , and so that's happening . That's happening in in rural places all over the world . It's happening . It's also happening in places around the United States where they have stranded smaller stranded oil and natural gas wells . So you have places where they have these energy sources , where they used to have , you know , the .

They calculate how much supply is left and it's not enough anymore to continue to like feed into the big pipelines that are that are feeding cities . So right now they're just kind of being wasted . They're just sitting there doing nothing .

Or even in the case of the , the , the energy sources that are being used , they get to points throughout the year , based on demand , where they run out of , they run out of room , where they run out of storage space , and so literally what they have to do . So they have tankers where they you know they fill those up . They have these other tanker trucks .

They fill those up , but there's points every year where they run out of space , and so what they do ? The solution right now is literally to light like a Molotov cocktail and they throw it up there and they just burn off this oil and natural gas . They just burn it off in the atmosphere .

They're wasting this , this energy source because they don't have anything else to do with it . Our favorite , greenpeace , and all these other you know green folks . They're not too authoritative about that . They're saying you know , oh , look at the emissions you're causing .

So what Bitcoin enables you to do is they cap those wells when they run out , when they run out of supply , they cap those wells , they hook up a generator , they hook up the Bitcoin mining computers to the generator and they start mining Bitcoin with this stranded energy that's just being wasted .

And now that oil and natural gas company is more green than it was before . So again , we don't believe in any of this stuff . But , like , even for the people who do , they're looking at Bitcoin and they're like this is the stuff this actually makes us . For the people who do they're looking at Bitcoin and they're like this is the stuff this actually makes us .

This gets Elizabeth Warren . This is saving the world .

Every time I was on we talked to Chase Davis about this too it's like every time you hear renewable energy , what you need to hear in your mind is unreliable energy . Every time you hear renewable , you need to hear unreliable , and so what they have is they've invested so heavily . I don't know .

You hear renewable , you need to hear unreliable , and so what they have is they've invested so heavily . I don't know why , texas , you disappoint me , but they've invested so heavily in these , in these energy sources , that there comes points of the year where the wind doesn't blow .

There comes points of the year where it's not hot or , conversely , it's too hot or it's too windy , because there's a situation in which it gets too hot and too windy , and then those neither of the one of those things work .

So what you have is you have Bitcoin mining companies who've created these massive centers and they sign these purchase agreements with these electric companies . And so what they do is they say , hey , we're going to use , because we have X amount of Bitcoin miners , we know to like the smallest degree how much energy we're going to be able to use 24-7 , 365 .

And so then what we'll do is we'll use that and then if you have shortages , if you as the city or whatever has shortages , we'll power down all of our Bitcoin miners and we'll send all of the energy back to the grid to be used by normal people .

And so , literally the last two years , this has saved the Texas energy system from dealing with extensive blackouts , because they've been able to sign these agreements and make money in the short term . They've had a more stable demand , they've been able to soften those supply demand peaks , and then Bitcoin's been able to kind of come in there .

And again , bitcoin is one of the only industries where they can do a cold shutdown of of their of their computers . Um , if you have like server farms , like Amazon web servers , something like that , they can't just power down and then power it back on . It's . It's way more involved than that and they just can't do it .

So Bitcoin provides a service that literally nothing else can provide and actually provides other , you know , um , you know other real benefit to , to the United States and increasingly to places around the world .

We're not crazy about that , but like they've , they've made it legal tender . However , we feel about legal tender . We're not crazy about that , but like they've , they've made it legal tender .

So now you've what you've started is this geopolitical , like race , arms race of like wait a second , they're literally their country's turning around because they have a political , a guy , you know , a candidate , who's basically willing to stand up and basically say this is wrong , this is insane , these crime we're going to , we're not going to allow it .

But then they're also able to say no to and basically get away from the loans . Basically , it's payday loans that are offered them on a national level by the IMF and the World Bank . It is one of those two entities are two of the most corrupt entities on the entire earth .

They basically they prey on these small nations by giving them loans and getting them into debt that they know they'll never be able to repay , and so Bitcoin is one of the things that's enabling something like El Salvador to basically get away from those loans , enabling them to .

Basically we're generating our own money that's increasingly going up in value over time , and so there's going to be other countries that take note . Nobody wants to be the first , but they're going to take note of what's happening and the success that El Salvador is experiencing .

The success that individual states like Texas are having with their energy sources , plugging them into Bitcoin and being able to monetize these things is people are taking notice and there's more and more countries around the world that are that are beginning to do the same .

I think Bitcoin is a key part of that . Yep , we talked about gold a little bit . I think gold has its place . You know what about real estate ? Or even traditional finance ? What do you ? What do you think about that ?

I mean , the problem is , when money stops being money , then something has to fill that vacuum .

It's like any kind of , if there's any kind of dereliction of duty or something , there's a vacuum that's created and somebody or something has to fill that vacuum and everybody , like both the thing itself , suffer and people who are interacting with that , with that entity who's the space filler , suffer .

So imagine like you have , like a father who , you know , abandons his family . Ok , so now the wife has to become the breadwinner , she has to go , start making money , and then that's less time and stuff that she has to give to her family and so . So basically you have , everybody suffers when , when things aren't being what they're supposed to do .

Money is supposed to be , among other things , is supposed to be , a store of value We've had for 100 years , and really been like 50 , definitely , but even then it was getting worse before that .

We have money that stopped being a store of value and so other things had to rush in and become stores of value , and one of the biggest things to do that has been stocks and real estate . And so you have companies and real estate that is maintaining .

It's got what's called a monetary premium where , like normally , you would look at a company , you look at its P&E , profit and earnings . You basically would look at like , what kind of business is it doing ? And that would be the information that you need to do in order to decide whether or not you're going to buy this asset .

But now , because stocks have become a store of value and you have real estate that has , in very many places , become a store of value , they're speculative investment vehicles .

People are buying two and three homes , not because they're actually going to live with them , but because they're trying to find someplace where they can put their money that's getting devalued very quickly , trying to find a place where they can put it where it's's going to it's going to get a good return . You know , you , that's .

That's kind of the thing that I see is the problem with , at this moment , investing in those things is because they're , the prices of them are are escalated because you're paying that premium , and so you know you're looking at a situation which you know you have baby boomers who are getting ready to retire . They've largely bought up .

One of their biggest investment vehicles is real estate , is stocks . They're banking on being able to sell those stocks and sell those homes for more than they paid for them .

In many cases , they won't be able to retire or their ability to retire is significantly hampered by those things , by those limitations , and so that's the only thing that I would say about looking at real estate stocks , all those things , is we can't act like buying a stock today is like it was buying a stock 30 years ago . It's just not so .

There's definitely situations in stocks in which you'd say , hey , hop in . That's a perfect time to buy into that or this real estate property . If you find one , you scoop one up for cheap , or you have a family situation , then absolutely go do that . But it's a thing to be aware of is you know Bitcoin , like Bitcoin is one tool in the tool belt .

I think it's a very timely tool , especially for younger people Like it's something that , again , if you can , younger people can tolerate more of the the day-to-day volatility , day-to-day risk , if it's if you're looking at it like your long-term , long-term savings .

But absolutely I foresee and again , this is not me there's other smart people who are in the Bitcoin space , who are value investors , who were into value investing long before they were into Bitcoin , who say one of the greatest effects of Bitcoin continuing to succeed is going to be because it's going to be that you're going to draw down some of this monetary

premium and you're going to be able to invest sanely in companies again because you're actually going to be investing in the company itself and not just paying in , not paying that monetary premium included .

Again , I just look at Bitcoin is one tool in the tool belt . It's a timely thing . It's here , like I , I look for a company . Thank God for Bitcoin . I think we should thank God for Bitcoin that we have something that is , you know , able to , that's able to mitigate some of the specific threats and specific things that we have facing us right now .

But again , all of these , it's a matter of balance . It's a matter of there's no right answer . There's no one size fits all thing . Again , it's just taking into account the different trade-offs that exist in each of those investment categories .

I don't mean that and like I'm not a moral relativist , but in terms of the value of these things , it is relative depending on where you are , is relative depending on where you are . So , if you're an American , like you're going to be experiencing inflation , the inflation of asset prices , inflation of goods , because the money's able to be created .

The amount of money that they're having to create just to maintain keeping up with the interest on the debt , the amount of money that they're printing , I can't . What is this specific thing we're now printing ? Oh man , printing money to pay the interest on the debt .

Yes , it's like something insane , like that , like this year , as of this year it will pass the defense budget , or something crazy . But yeah , that's just the reality is , you know , just taking . All I'm asking is like people to think , like , think about the trade-offs of the different things that you're holding and like Bitcoin does have trade-offs .

Bitcoin is technical a little bit when you first get in , different things that you're holding and , like Bitcoin , does have trade-offs . Bitcoin is technical a little bit when you first get in . It requires some time to understand . But again , everything has trade-offs . Real estate land has trade-offs . You can get eminent domain .

Government can just come in and decide , just take your land and just say , hey , we're going to give you this amount of . So there's no such thing . There's no such thing as an asset for which you don't need to , where you're protected from anything wrong , where you don't need to trust God . All of these things are under the sovereignty of God .

All of these things are underneath the reality that , hey , god loves us . We live in his world . There's been people who've lived through atrocious things . We could be counted among them and if so , then the Lord will . You know , we'll have to trust him and he'll prove himself faithful with us again . Um , but I think that that's how I would see .

Somebody asked me like , what , what did you if you were to ? They said , if you were to talk to a church that had , you know , $250,000 sitting in a bank , you know what would be the percentage that you would tell them to put into Bitcoin .

And I said I'm not touching that with a 10 foot pole , uh , but what I said was I said to them was it would be non-zero , it just wouldn't be zero . I wouldn't let it be zero Bitcoin , yeah , and that that doesn't make sense in a world we live in right now .

So that that's that's a something to to think about . If you , if you are a Bitcoin guy and you want to give to your church and they're open to it , that might be a good way to insulate the church budget , you know , if things go crazy and and and to also support missionaries and things like that , fund schools .

You know all this stuff , so that might be something to consider .

So , like , if you're , if you're into Bitcoin and you , you again , you see this thing you're like , hey , this is valuable . Then like , hey , yeah , go talk to your pastor and be willing to like either handhold or again , just hold it and like tithe in Bitcoin . Like you do the work , like you you do this , like this is it's , it's hard .

Yeah , pastors are doing really important work and they don't necessarily have time to sit down and become Bitcoin experts .

People just ask , they want to know questions , they ask questions , and I've had the unfortunate thing to be sitting down with a couple of people from church where we had we went to this there's two families that went to the same meal like two Sundays in a row , and so I felt horrible because one of these guys had already heard the whole Bitcoin spiel .

He like didn't want to talk about it and I'm like , oh man , I should just , I should just schedule a time to go out with this guy because he was the new guy was all into it . He's asking questions , but it's just one of the things . So yeah , don't be insufferable , don't be just talking about all the time .

It's not designed to be super heady , it's just really designed to be an intro on the topic . And then I've got a couple other books that are in the works . We've got a kid's book called the Orange Umbrella .

It's basically again like the non-annoying intro to Bitcoin , like we don't even mention the word Bitcoin , but it just kind of tells the story , tells the story of money in a fun way . Yeah , you can go find there .

And then , as far as the conference , if you go to tgfbcom slash conference , you can find tickets and more information between you know from all the speakers . And yeah , just the . It's going to be , like I said , july 24th and 25 25th at Rocket Town in Nashville . We'd love to see you .

I'll do a promo code , I'll do a King's Hall or something like that Promo code and we'll give you like 20% .