So the big question is this, how do investors like us get access to the ideas, information, and most importantly, the right people that give us the tools and information we need to make conformed and educated decisions to have success. That is the question, and this podcast will give us the answers. This is Mark Moss, your host. Let's get this started here. Everyone, Welcome to another episode of the Market Disruptors podcast. Today I am joined by Nathaniel Whitmore.
He's the author of Long Read Sunday and The Crypto Daily three on three, both on Twitter. I've been following for a long time and you should check it out anyway. I'm happy to have you, Nathaniel. Welcome, Thank you, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, so I'm happy to talk to you as well. We've you know, I've been following your stuff for for a year. You put out really good curated information um on Twitter.
But why don't you tell everybody who you are, kind of what your background is and and how you got here what you're doing? Yes, sure, so that I was kind of joked. There's like two parts to the how I got into crypto story. The first is kind of the obvious one at first glancewers that I spent about a decade in Silicon Valley. Uh, kind of bouncing back
and forth between venture capital roles and operator roles. UM one of those as I was helping a company, I advised a company that went through UM why I combinated at the same classes coin Base. That company was sort of a helps fortune five hundreds understand new technologies through educational videos, consulting partnerships, etcetera. And like they were making videos about bitcoin for Coca Cola, kind of private videos
ordered by Coca Cola and like. So so that's kind of the the easy or clear part in some ways. But then before that, actually my whole kind of background of where I came from was much more focused on
social impact and kind of global social change. So, uh, right after a university, I basically stuck around my university for a few years to design programs to send kids all over the world who wanted to make an impact and kind of partner with local organizations and figure out how to do that and uh, and a lot of what that the goal of that program was is to
show just how hard it is. Right, there's a huge amount of energy that comes especially from young people who want to go out and make a difference, but then get to wherever it is that they want to go or they want to have an impact, and find that there's just huge structural problems. Uh that um that you know, at best, they're going to kind of nibble around the edges of the problems and it's not bad, but it's
not necessarily what they're going for. And so it's interesting, Like it actually took me leaving Silicon Valley so my wife and I live in the Hudson Valley now, um and breaking kind of away from from Silicon Valley to almost like re contextualized bitcoin and crypto in general, but particularly Bitcoin outside of the Hayman's narrative which had dominated it from you know, when we were in it with coin Base and when we're making those videos for Coca Cola.
Like if you look at uh in Silicon Valley in particular, bitcoin is just one of a lot of different kind of like fast mobile money type things, right, Like it was this cool thing that you could use to order coffee at Cooper Cafe and Palo Alto when you were pitching a VC, Like literally that's that's what it was. For for for me kind of being in it and now admittedly it wasn't my main focus, and I was pretty um tunnel visioned on the company that I was
working on that time. But when I left and got out of it and I started to actually have space to to dig back into it, it turns out that for me, at least, it's it related much more to that first set of things that I had done before Silicon Valley that were about large scale global structural change, and that's kind of what pulled me all the way back in. So for the last few years, I've been kind of all in on on bitcoin and crypto, UM and UH, and that manifests in a couple of different ways.
As you said, I do the Long Read Sunday, which is kind of a curation of the week's top tweets UM. I recently started a thing called Crypto Daily three at three, which is a kind of livestream video that also turns into a podcast. It was three minutes on three topics each that I'm seeing a lot of conversation about UM, and then kind of behind the scenes, I'm also consulting and helping companies figure out what their narratives are in the context of the market and producing content around that.
So it's a lot of sucking in a huge amount of information, trying to make sense of it all, and then spinning it back out in a lot of different ways. Yeah. Cool, it's uh, it's it's been been really helpful for sure
for a lot of people, including myself. So it's interesting how you you had kind of the social impact piece before going to Silicon Valley and and Silicon Valley I guess brought you into bitcoin, but it was it was a job, and like you said, you went from the payment the payment space to then seeing the actual change that bitcoin um can can do. I think that's part of going down the rabbit hole. I think, right, we all kind of find that a different way, but you
had that background. That's really cool. Um, do you think that's normal for most people like to kind of come in for the money aspect, which is kind of more like the surface, shallow surface area that then they kind of get sucked into seeing the overall change. I think you have. I think a lot of it was based on how you find out, who you find out from,
you know, what your own context is. But I do think and I think there's actually a relevant point that, um, you know, for for as much as we can kind of like rip on the crypto industry for you know, just the massive almost like casino style games of some of these you know, uh coin offerings in seventeen early
and all these things. There are a lot of people who found their way in exactly to your point, through like being excited about the market opportunity, being excited about kind of a generational uh, you know, financial opportunity, and who found that there was much more to it than that, and in fact, maybe what made it such a generational financial opportunity was actually broader than just you know, what the asset was going to be valued on day to day.
So I do think that there's a closer, there's a more there's more value to people coming in because they
want the money than in a lot of spaces, you know. Uh. And I think that there's a lot of a there's a conversion process that to a lot of people where whatever they thought it was coming in, even if they were just excited about the money, they found a lot more even if they stay excited about the money, right, Yeah, for sure, I uh, you know, I say that the reason why bitcoin is hard for most people to understand is because you know, there's so much maybe six seven
different disciplines that you have to get and which is why there's kind of that rabbit hole you kind of learned about each one. But I love the fact that you know, I think five six, seven years ago, people weren't really interested in money, people weren't interested in economics. Nobody used the word feat, nobody would throw around the words Austrian economics, right, and so now today it's creating all this awareness and like you said, it sucks people in on the money. Um, it's kind of the old
bait and switch put in a good way. Uh. So I like that now. I mean you mentioned how you mentioned how you saw you know, in Silicon Valley and and it was kind of all about the payments. Um. I think even recently we still here, we we were hearing more about the payments. But that's kind of shifting. And I know you talk a lot about like narrative and narrative marking, So UM, tell me kind of where you think that narrative started to switch, uh, and kind of where it's at right now. So you have a
you have a couple of things. There's there's almost like the silicon value question, which I actually think is interesting because of its kind of role and prominence in the tech world and the amount of money flowing through it. But then there's also just the more general question of when that payment's narrative shifted. Um, so maybe let's actually
talk about the payments narrative first. I mean, I think it's been a for for I think there's a lot of people out there who would argue that they were always kind of telling the digital goal of the store value story, the you know, even now the something that we can get into, which is I think I think we're shifting again from those things to something that's much more of a kind of generational hedge against the fundamental paradigm shift in the economic system, which is like a
superstore value, you know. But so I think there's a lot of folks who that narrative has always been there for some people. I think that, um, there was a ton of money spent on on kind of marketing the idea of it as a payment channel, uh, you know, and and honestly like well intentioned right like Square was accepting you know, Square merchants were making it. You're able to uh to accept bitcoin that wasn't a wasn't because they you know, didn't care about the other narrative or whatever.
Just it made sense of their business. They were excited about the cooin. I think obviously now everyone kind of knows how long Jack Dorsey has been thinking about it, watching it, understanding it. But when you have a major company like that who is enabling that to be the way that most people interact with it, that's what they're going to hear about it. That's what we're gonna think
about it. And also coincides at the time of kind of the rise of Venmo, the rise of other type of mobile money solutions UM and the idea of just being easier, like everything was being convenient, you know, or becoming more convenient in in a totally different way. And so it did kind of fit inside that, at least very quickly. UM. I think over the last few years that's obviously shifted. UM. I think it was really reinforced.
You know. One of the things that was interesting about the I c O boom was that it allowed bitcoin to define itself oppositionally, or maybe a better way to put it is for bitcoiners to define itself as different in some way and I think that wasn't just about kind of a fair launch model or anything like that. It was more about what the goals of the system were.
And you saw, like if you look at the beginning of eighteen maybe even bridging back into the Silicon Valley side of this question, you saw kind of the emergence of a recognition that we were kind of having two different conversations at once. There was the money crypto and the tech crypto side, and um, you know, there there's something to make the argument that they're incompatible or and
there's something who only care about one or the other. Um, I think there's also a lot of people who can see that they kind of they just have different ambitions and different aims. And so if you kind of take the Silicon Valley side, what the way that they're looking or I don't want to say, I don't want to pay it with such a broad breast strokes, because obviously there's a ton of people in Silicon Valley who are
passionate and kind of deep money decliners as well. But um, Silicon Valley is really interested in the paradigm shift from uh, these companies which are supposed to disintermate the disinder mediate the Internet and instead became the most powerful gatekeepers that we've ever seen, right, Like Amazon is basically the most powerful gatekeeper we've ever seen from a retail perspective around
the world. I mean, it makes the Walmart that encouraged antitrust, you know, kind of rumblings in the nineties and earlier two thousands look ridiculous by comparison, um and uh, and you kind of see that across other domains and disciplines as well. I Mean, a lot of the conversation about Facebook that's really unresolved as it relates to how big and how powerful it is that we've never seen anything that's that has this many users, this much data that
it has access to. We don't have any precedent for how it's supposed to behave or what it's supposed to do. And so Silicon Valley, I think is is really interested in kind of the decentralized technology alternatives to those types of things, because that's what Silicon Valley does is it creates technolo aologies that respond to the problems of today's systems and tries to do them in a different way that's faster, better, cheaper, more efficient, whatever, so, but only
if they can pull a profit from it. Well, there's a whole different conversation about what extense of looking value has been interested in pulling a profit or or been interested in a tenure game to let retail care about whether it pulls a profit once it goes public. Yeah, so that the maybe we can get into that. But
that's a whole different conversation. But I think that as it relates to bitcoin during during this boom, as everything was about tokenizing everything, tokenizing the world, decentralizing everything, Bitcoin and bitcoiner has got to say really strongly and really firmly, like, that's not what we're here for. We're here to change the money system, and decentralization is actually for us about
censorship resistance. Uh, you know, the permissionless nature of this asset um, the fact that it's not going to change you know, it's money supply, and it's it's monetary policies, and then it's a it's a bulwark against kind of the rampant money printing that we're seeing. And so I feel like actually, in some ways, the breakout success, at least in the short term, of this other category of assets gave bitcoin a chance to really define itself as
something different. And I think that if you look at what the story that was being told behind the scenes as people were recruiting institutions and new people to come in during the bear market. During they were talking about about bitcoin and its role as a as a hedge,
not about tokenized assets. Yeah, so you know that. It's it's interesting because you know, we're talking about narrative marketing and so you had, like you said, uh, Square for example, coming out and talking about bitcoin as a payment mechanisms. We had companies that were promoting it hoping that people would use it and then they would be able to gain market share and make a profit or whatever they're doing.
We'll talk about making profit, but um bitcoin is a decentralized company that nobody runs, and there's nobody there, and there's nobody there to push a narrative, right, There's nobody there to um say what it's supposed to be or tell people about it. So really it seems like maybe it comes down to the community, people like you or me, who are putting out content to try and help push that narrative. So do you think that's why there's kind
of that difference. Yeah, I mean bitcoin is a very unique phenomenon in I mean in history from a lot of different vectors. But I think that the one dimension of that is that it's a company less force, right, and that that we've never seen anything like that. Um, there is no bitcoin marketing department, there is no bitcoin
pr department. What it has kind of it's kind of like a it's kind of like a decentralized narrative, a decentralized force right where I'm talking about bitcoin and what it means to me, but you're talking about bitcoin of what it means to you, yep. And And that's I think why the narrative battles around bitcoin can be so fever pitch is that there's no one who uh, there's
no one that comes back to that. There's there's individual voices authority based on who happens to follow them, right, But it really is the kind of like a large group, and so it's a very messy kind of social consensus process.
But I mean, you know, this is kind of represented in forks, but I think it's the My instinct is that the longer that uh, you know, bitcoin itself continues to get to to differentiate and kind of the further the forks fall by the wayside in terms of where they fit in the market, the more you'll see within the big tent of bitcoin, even different interpretations of what bitcoin are, what why it matters, what it means, You will see, you know, you'll probably see battles over things
like rehypothecation and what are and aren't you know, financial products that we're okay with on top of bitcoin, even though again no one gets it aside, and that's kind of the beauty of it. So you know, it's definitely it's a particular type of narrative battleground around bitcoin. Um and I think that that's you know, only going to
increase over time. So it seems like maybe in the beginning we had the squares and whatnot talking about it as a payment source and may and and the companies that can build products around it to to make money are going to going to invest money to push whatever narrative they want. Um And now it looks like almost it's the Wall Street taking over that narrative. Right We have E Trade, TD, merrit Trade, Fidelity, on and on and
on New York Stock Exchange. Now they're all picking up and so now uh, they're gonna probably try to push that bitcoin is a financial instrument narrative. Yeah, well it's interesting. So so they definitely are right. They want bitcoin to be a financial instrument. They wanted to be, um you know, set up in ways that they can uh sell, right, and and they're the particular narratives around it, I think will be a little bit based on what it is
they're trying to sell. Are they selling a custody solution or they selling futures product, um, you know, all of those things will shape the particular uh you know way
that they frame it. However, I think one of the things that's really interesting is that there is a convergence of a narrative from the bitcoin community alongside the kind of Wall Street big financial institution narrative, which is this idea of bitcoin as a non correlated asset, right as a hedge against um, what's expected to be kind of a rise of money printing, right uh and modern monetary
theory and all these sort of things. Um. There they are now the kind of again painting with a broad brush. Financial institutions are are kind of framing it in that way to their clients, to their customers, and even if it's just internally so far as how they think about it, and um, that's really interesting to see and I think very powerful. Uh that that's the way the narrative is kind of shifting in terms of what bitcoin represents to
that larger financial world. Interesting. So you think the when you talk about the bitcoin community, I mean we're really just talking about the the developers and the people in the space, you know, Twitter, the Bitcoin Maximus and whatnot.
So you're thinking that the maximalists are are continued to push their narrative of really the store of value and that it is again hedge against the money printing, and you think Wall Street may pick that up and help kind of run that run that marketing torch a little bit. I think that they are picking that up. I think there's there's two pieces of it that they're picking up. So if you look so um Ral Paul, who started Real Vision, uh he used to be kind of a
macro equities trader. Um has been on to two podcasts
this week discussing this. So one was Stefan Lavere is obviously a bitcoin focused podcast, and they were talking about kind of this, uh, this idea of a generational turning in terms of um, in terms of where where we are in the financial cycle and kind of the you know, equities being at their their kind of highest price ever, and what's likely to happen in the bond markets and how you know, as things shift, as there's kind of uh no more debt to be had, you know, things
are going to change, and all of a sudden, boomers are going to find uh, their their you know, equities worth so much less than than they were planning on. Right, And then you have all these millennials who are looking at you know, the most expensive equities ever, the most expensive real estate ever. And why wouldn't you take a kind of asymmetric bet on something like bitcoin and cryptocurrencies? Um?
So you have, on the one hand, just that it as a pure, uh pure market play type, which is is kind of the not necessarily the narrative that bitcoiners are pushing. But it's something that gets to this other point was why is this a generational hedge? Um? Why
is it such a non correlated asset? It's it comes back to this idea of something that is digitally scarce, right, and that is kind of uh, you know, knowably provably scarce, and all of a sudden when you start having that conversation, it really paints itself in opposition to uh, two policies that we see, you know, both both happening, but also
that are seemed to becoming more in vogue. And so you kind of have this convergence of on the one hand, uh, just a generation who's like, well, I can't buy these things to to create and preserve wealth in the long run because there's got they've got nowhere to go but down Now. The other their hand, they're like, well, there's this other thing that seems like it might be a good bet or a good hedge, but why And it comes back to again a lot of the core ideas
of um scarcity that that have people so excited. So I think it's this really interesting thing that's happening where it's not that just all of a sudden people are all Austrians who really care about scarcity and sound money. It's that in the context of what else is in the market and these larger market forces, it's it's painting itself in a much more appealing light, right Yeah, I think, yeah, definitely, not everybody wants to paint themselves as Austrian or even
cares to know what that means. But I think, like I think sound money might have skipped a generation or two right where. I think if you went back in the early nineteen hundreds, I mean, people were still really tuned into gold. Um, as the US got off of gold and kind of went into the paper, maybe that was lost a little bit and and uh, and there's
a couple of generations don't really care about it. And now kind of like maybe you see an African continent where they skipped landline phones and went straight to mobile phones. Maybe this generation skipping the gold sound money going straight to a bitcoin sound money, um and not really knowing why. Maybe that's interesting. Now, Um, what about other narratives in the marketplace? So obviously that's bitcoin, but now we have crypto currency, right, so, um, what do you see about crypto?
About the crypto narrative? I mean, do you think it seems to be kind of spinning off of the bitcoin narrative and now it's all these other things big blockchain, not bitcoin sort of. So I think that it's pretty undeniable to me that even if you're really excited about all of the different assets, um, the conversation that has
jumped mainstream is specifically about bitcoin. Uh, it really much more than general crypto assets, with the exception of liber and stable coins, which maybe we'll come back to in a minute. Um, but that's there. You know, they've been three hearings, two in the Senate, one in Congress over the last two weeks, basically two and a half weeks, and the word ethereum hasn't come up. No one's mentioned eos, you know, no one's gotten into the industry and um.
And I think that that doesn't That just reflects uh, partially what they're hearing about it, and partially kind of where again that this is. It's it's in the context of this larger financial system questions and this growing concern about what the future of the financial system looks like and where money fits in and all these things, right, And so basically they want to have the money, uh,
the money crypto conversation, not the technology crypto conversation. So I don't think that that's actually a knock on anything else. It's more just shows the comparative maturity of the bitcoin narrative and the demand and the interest from kind of the larger mainstream financial and political world to understand how it might fit now. I guess they don't care if if supply chain management figures out a better way to run their computer system on blockchain, right, that doesn't affect.
In fact, one of the things that happened at the hearing this week with the the Senate Banking Committee, So two weeks ago we had two hearings that were about Libra specifically UM. This week we had a hearing that was theoretically about cryptocurrency regulation writ large. Turns out it was still about Libra UM and Libra is really the thing that's got them uh concerned and paying attention, but it was theoretically about kind of cryptocurrency regulation in general.
And one of the things that was actually interesting is that there were some who, like some of the folks who are more I guess you would say, maybe positively
inclined towards this. We're kind of trying to lead the witnesses who are speaking to to the Senate Banking Committee to to show what what other use cases for blockchain their were outside of money, because they didn't want the entire technology to be just assumed to be going after to trying to recreate money in some ways, which is more politically contentious than to your point, changing the way that supply chains run. Um. So yeah, so again it's
there's there's this this kind of larger thing. And I point out that because I think it has such a it's going to shape a lot of our discourse within the crypto industry about what matters and what we're paying attention on. But I don't think it diminishes all the other kind of narratives that are flowing through. Um. They're just a little bit more still a battle for how we who are in the industry are interested and uh and what sort of bridges into the larger mainstream world
we're looking at. Right, So yeah, what's interesting about this is again, right, there's so many different areas to focus on, and one is kind of philosophy maybe if you will,
or or economics and money. They all kind of converge, and it's like what is money, right if you really want to dig into it, And so you talk about all these other like cryptocurrencies and maybe they're like utility token, so it's a token that I'm able to use on that system, But that's all money, right, Like it's all about value and how I store value, how I use value, how I trade transfer value? And if I just you know, airline reward points or talking reward points, that's all that's
all money, it's value um. And so they want to separate that from money and like blanket like cryptocurrencies, But how can they stop somebody from creating value, creating a coupon and allowing you to use that coupon on a system that's a cryptocurrency. And so I kind of envisioned this this world where money as we know it just changes and they can contry to try to control the dollar, but money becomes uh you know, decentralizing. Everyone creates it, transfers,
it uses it. So they can try to separate that narrative, but at some point it seems like they it keeps
coming back together. Do you think, Yeah, sure, I think I think that the point that you're making, which is right on, is that you're seeing a little bit of a separation at least kind of linguistically or conceptually of value and money, right And a lot of what I think the folks, uh you know, who are like maybe in the ethereum community or thinking about things like non fungible tokens and all these things is they're they're trying
to make value programmable. They're trying to make a value primitive for applications where it's really easy to move this little bucket of value over this this place and back again. Um and to have that be kind of programmatically determined or happen automatically if some set of conditions are met. And you know, we're used to thinking about the only way that we kind of denominate that is through money, right, It's like, well, value is uh is represented uh in
you know, dollars or cents or whatever it is. Um And and really cryptocurrencies for a lot of these ecosystems represent just a different kind of unit of account for the value that's being distributed through these communities. UM. I think the thing is that's That's one thing I think that's good is that we're starting that I think is a good separation is the aspiration of different programmable values and what they are, what their implications are. UM. I
think you're starting to see a lot of experiments. Uh. You know, the kind of air in some ways of some of the like tokenized the world type things is more specific micro communities that are having a go at how value might move between users of their their products, uh in in different ways. So you have you know a lot of activity around games with non fungible tokens where there's kind of true digital ownership, but theoretically true
digital ownership of assets. UM. You have uh, you know, some communities like Scent that are trying to see if they can create different value primitives that incentivized content creation, content sharing, information sharing in different ways. UM. I think those things have such a huge way to go to uh to prove that there's um, well, one that the architecture of the systems is right. The two that it's
like they have two challenges in some ways. One is you know, is is the it is kind of the way that we allow users to exchange value enough of a hook to get them here to actually spend time in this community versus all their other options. And then to what's the right unit account? Should it be ethereum, should it be you know, our native token? Should it just be bitcoin? Should it be USD Yeah? I think but I think we I think we already kind of
have a working framework. So for example, I took my kids to Dave and Busters, and I have to pay money to play the games and I have to put money in the machine and I get credits on a card, but then we don't use all credits, and I leave and like, I'm not going back to David Busters maybe ever. And now I have all these credits on this card. Those are to those could be tokens, and like why couldn't I trade those tokens for your airline reward points?
Right totally? So we have like we're used to the system where we gain reward points, we we we gain credits, what token whatever? They could be tokens, but like why does that value have to stay locked in that silo and why couldn't it be transferred? And so all the sudden, Dave and Busters decide, well, hey we're gonna make them a token. Um, but now that's illegal. Uh sorry, it's a cryptocurrency, it's money. It's illegal. But it's like it's
the same thing. Yeah, well that's I actually think it was a mistake to run away from the like souped up airline miles narrative in some ways for these tokens like it so that the reason that people rejected that narrative that they tried to in some ways is that it it may be diminished the total upside that people were imagining as they were buying tokens and kind of
like pre launch of anything. However, I don't think it's a bad thing to have, I mean exactly, to your point, creating liquidity and secondary markets around an ecosystems currency is a really nice economic value add type activity. And to your point too, we're we are used to having to convert whatever the dominant currency is into this little ecosystems currency for the sake of our experience there, whether it's
David Busters or I mean, how Starbucks. I don't know if it's still true, but a couple of years ago there was more like Starbucks is basically the biggest mobile money provider by a lot, over Apple, over PayPal, over Venmo. You know, from from an actual like how much was on American accounts um than than anyone else Starbucks card Starbucks exactly, Like and it's that's just Starbucks has shown that there's a market there. I it blows me away
that Amazon hasn't done this yet. The average Americans spent something like seven a month on Amazon literally, Like it's crazy how high it is. Maybe that's the average prime member.
I'm not sure, I don't, don't call me on that, but it's an it's an enormous amount of money, right, Like why not just leave if you're if you had a ten percent discount on Amazon Bucks and you knew on average, Amazon just showed you what the average you spent was, you know, in any given month, and they made it desperately easy to just convert it at any time, Like I feel like people would leave it there. So all of these things, I think, to your point, are
there there. They feel almost like totally inevitable, you know, with the exception of if there's if there's a regulatory barrier put up that that that eliminates them. But they're not the same. They're not what bitcoin is trying to do. And that's fine, you know they're they're not what bitcoin is trying to do, but they kind of they I think they all work together. So I believe in a in bitcoin becoming a store of value, becoming an exchange,
moving on to becoming a unit of account um. And I think you asked kind of earlier like what are they all pegg too? And I think we have to. I think I think I think in a hundred years, history books will be written about this period that we're living in right now and it will be this transitional period, and people go, what the heck were they thinking? Like they had this free floating value. There was no peg, right, there was no unit of measurement, standard unit of measurement.
So uh, like, you know, we have an inch, we have a degree of fahrenheit, right, we have a meter a weight, but we don't have a standard unit of measure for value. And I think we'll have to get back to that, and I think bitcoin sits there eventually. Yeah, I mean, and that's that that is the central the set of folks who are in Congress in the Senate who have played out the endgame scenario of these things.
That's their fears that that's becomes bitcoin instead of the US dollar, although actually they're much more scared that it's libra um, that that it becomes libra not the U. S dollar. Um. It's been interesting to watch just how much the size and scope of the power, the size and scope of the audience that Facebook has is the difference. Like it was really fascinating to watch a couple of weeks ago when uh so even before when I'm uh fed shared er on Powell was testifying, not about Libra
or anything specifically, but he was asked about it. He was asked about bitcoin, and he said, you know, did someone asked him? I think it was Brad Sherman, who's the Farnia congressman who has been kind of the most antagonistic Um. Yeah, he uh, I think he was the one who asked Chairman Powell, you know, could you see a world in which bitcoin replaced the US dollar? What would that mean? And he basically said, you can conceive of theoretically scenarios in which uh, there are multi you know,
multiple currencies, and we've seen that before. However, you know, in his estimation, that's not really how people were thinking about it. They were thinking about it more as a digital store values of digital gold, um and uh. And and interestingly, it seems to have been the case that those folks really picked up on that and they kind of went within They're like, okay, at least from now, and this could change in a minute. Like the thing that we have to be worried about with bitcoin isn't
that it replaces our financial system. It's it's easy as it relates to terrorism and and uh, you know, money laundering and things like that. But with this Libra thing, Uh, Libra is a different story because you know, there's no founder even of of bitcoin, there's no there's no committee that looks like a central reserve. Libra is a different story. Libra has uh an antagonist, It has an arch villain that we already know that we already don't like that we already do on trust and and it also has
two billion people. It has a built in biggest country in the world, you know, by a lot of people. Um, that's much more scary. So you know, Libra is basically trying to say that it's it's also not aspiring to to be kind of a you know, a global reserve currency, and people are like bs, like, you can't not when you're so big. They've put themselves into a very difficult situation because uh, he says uh. They say, well, how
do we know you're not gonna still use information? Oh well, we're decentralized, but how are you going to comply with us laws? Oh well, we're gonna control all that, Like, so we're controlled enough to you know, we we're we're centralized enough to give you all the control you one, but we're decentralized enough to you don't have to worry about us, and like they're caught in between this two the two uh, these two places that are difficult. But I want to jump back into the narrative for a minute,
and let's talk about the government narrative. Right, So, as you just mentioned, you said that really the narrative they're pushing is this terrorism, drug dealing, illicit activities, um, and so maybe it's a narrative warfare maybe almost right. So bitcoin is like, hey, and Brad Sherman actually a year ago kind of got this right where he's like, hey, people see this as a way to undermine the US dollar and take away the power. And so I guess the two narratives are, yes, bitcoin is a way to
hedge against the US dollar. But the government is saying we understand that Trump says that the US dollar stronger has ever been talking out of the side of his mouth. But the narrative they're pushing the warfare is terrorism drugs right, yeah, I mean mean warfare is the substance of politics, right, that is what uh politicians do. It's can you have the catchiest way to to to tear something to reduce something into a thing that you either want or you
don't want, right. I mean, Reagan's welfare queens was like one of the most powerful destructive political memes of all time. And you can go through every like it's totally regardless of administration and political party. Um, memes are I mean, that's what That's what the whole thing is because digging into substances so hard, nuances so hard, and memes are kind of best when they reduce nuance. And uh, and
right now there's definitely a political battle. I mean in some ways, Facebook is kind of almost providing this body shield for the rest of the crypto industry in some ways, you know, it could quickly turn and all of a sudden, all the fire that's Levit did it gets Levit did everything, uh, level that everything else. Um, So it's not necessarily a
good thing, but yeah, it's it's total meme warfare. And you've got you've got the the there's kind of a the antagonistic memes right now are um, you know, it's it's criminal money. Uh. The antagonistic memes are it's trying to dethrone the U. S. Dollar that they haven't figured out a way to say that that sounds credible and that well, they also can't they can't even tell each other that. Like you can see, like Brad Sherman's there,
a couple others are there. It's almost inconceivable too. I think most of these elected officials that there could be a world in which a thing created by an anonymous founder, run by a network of volunteers, you know, that doesn't have any formal company structure could actually provide a global threat. You know, they just don't buy it. That's why that's why they kind of threat to the US dollar meme has shifted over to Facebook and too, liber so aggressively
because they can maybe imagine that more. They can imagine that, you know, if if if there's a run on currency, you know, in this basket of currencies, that it sucks dollars you know, out of the US dollar system. So um, yeah, it's it's fascinating. So like how we fight back. The
community fights back against those two memes. So for example, the narrative they're pushing, the meme they're pushing is that it's it's finances terrorism or it's for drugs drug dealers, right, And it's like, well, I think as you start to find out about free money, maybe you start leaning more towards uh libertarian type views and maybe you go, well, why does anybody tell me what I can and can't put it in my body? Why are drugs even illegal?
Why don't we just end the violence overnight, make them legal, spend a fraction of the money in in education and training and rehab, and call it a day, right, Like this war on drugs doesn't work a trillion dollars down the tubes, and so maybe that narrative just bees destroyed overnight, like who care? Why are why are drugs? Wire drug dealers even a problem? And then the next narrative terrorism
will terrorism? I mean, who's the US supplies terrorism? US supplies the weapons, the US shift pallets of money in the middle of the night to I ran, US bombs every day. That causes people to want to come bomb US, and they could just in terrorism if they wanted. So the two narratives are pushing are really caused by the US, not the people, and those should just those shouldn't even
be conversations. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I think those that's kind of a non a nuanced, non nuanced type of meme that like I would love, man, if we could go to those conversations and have those I would I would happily put like my little bitcoin hat on the shelf just for a second so we could have those conversations. But that's the that's the battle line almost right, that's the that's the US fighting back. The bitcoiners are saying, hey, we need to sound money, but the US is saying,
will it's drugs and terrorism. So like that's kind of the battle line. I think that there's there's a I mean, it can be if you choose to fight that. I think that when it comes to those two particular issues, they're good answers. Uh, they're good answers within the existing UM political framework, right, Like even if those are you know, we would aspire to have those things changed, which I'm
I'm all for UM. You still have you know, one, people don't really understand that bitcoin is anonymous but not private, right, so you have that at least until you know, coin joints and things become totally normalized, we have a window at least where people, once they learned, they're like, oh, actually that this is you know, law enforcement who sophisticated doesn't necessarily act to view this as a as a total negative. There's you know, it's more trackable in some
ways than cashed um too. You have uh, you know, crypto companies are and bitcoin companies are already regulated, right you have k y C and a m L and all the exchanges who choose to participate in in the US. Like, so it's interesting right there. I think that they're one of the narratives right now. Are One of the things that I'm watching is kind of the d Americanization of crypto. Is companies like Circle move their operations from you know, Boston to Bermuda um and Finance, you know, pulls out
or kind of blocks people. Geo blocks users starting in September to give a much more kind of newtered version um. The interesting thing is, yeah, the interesting thing is that, uh a lot of those exchanges, at least the ones that are based in the US, kind of made of lee. Their issue isn't compliance with m L and k y C. They just kind of know that that's the law of
the land and you're not getting around that. Maybe there was a period where could do that, but if you want to do that, you're going somewhere else or you're doing a decentralized exchange or something you're looking at a
fundamentally different model. The reason that circle pulled out of of you know, of the US, or at least mostly had more to do with the fact that they don't know if the I R S, the c f TC or you know, UH, the SEC is going to come after them on the basis of what a crypto acid is because it's not determined, right, you have different definitions by every different group. So I think that the terrorists and money financing narrative is it's almost lazy on the
part of governments. It's the easiest to kind of get rid of UM. I will say that I think that that just being like but also maybe the most powerful because it's fear. It's fearmongering, right, so people are wanting to give up freedom for safety. Yeah, I think I just maybe this is being overly optimistic, But I just don't think that that's I don't think that's the really the thing that they can hang their hat on. I mean, maybe like the thing that's the most scary about it.
And UH is the the extent to which UM, the extent to which elected officials are willing to talk about UH talk about the possibility of things like major terrorist attacks, UM in in the context of giving them permission to do things like band bitcoin or do things like uh like force encryption. So it's a little bit different, but I think it's worth noting and something I'm paying attention to.
So Attorney General William Barr has been talking a lot recently about backdoor encryption basically and forcing applications like what's app to have you know, law enforcement backdoors um instead of you know that basically destroys end to end encryption and uh. And he gave a whole speech about it.
I think it was last week maybe at n y U. The whole thing is like thirty minutes on just this topic and he basically the way that he concluded was and by the way, you know, we can have this conversation now, but as soon as uh, as soon as there's a terrorist attack that was land on WhatsApp, like we're gonna just do this anyways, and that's going to be our justification. You didn't say it in quite that brazen terms, but basically, so you know it is uh
that's the part that scares me. Could also be done word of mouth, and maybe we could ban that too, Yeah, Bannon, Yeah, it's been in communication channels hard. I mean, but this is gonna be this balance between security and privacy is is the I think the biggest, most important kind of like mega trend of the next I mean, it's gonna society is going to be shaped by the push and pull between these forces, you know, over the next five
or ten years, for the next fifty years. But it's uh, you know, it's it's it's been going on for hundreds of years, right, So I think the quote is maybe not known in the origin. Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson said that those willing to give up freedom for safety deserve neither. So like it's been a couple hundred years that people have been willing to trade off their freedom or their liberty for safety. Uh. Well, this is why, I mean, the the framers of the Constitution, the Bill
of Rights, knew that this was a challenge. They knew that the first thing to go in situations of tyranny was basically, your rights go out the window for under the idea of protection. That's why they enenthrined so many of these rights, uh, you know, in in in the in the Bill and the Constitution, so I think, um, yeah,
it's it's not new. What's new is obviously it's you know, the the changes in technology are so different and create such a different type of surveillance opportunity that it's kind of a it's not just a shift in magnitude, it's a shifting kind of where the where the conversation is now. Yeah. Yeah, in cryptocurrency or cryptography is our weapon to fight back against that tea, hopefully if it doesn't get taken out.
Oh man, so much good, so much good stuff. We could keep going on and on and on, but I know we're already past our time, so uh, we'll have to wrap it up at that point and maybe somewhere down the down the road we'll get back on again. But thanks so much for taking the time. Um. I guess uh. I normally ask where people can follow you. They should definitely be following you on Twitter. Uh what should people be looking at if they want to keep up with you? Yeah, that's Twitter is the best place
at n LW. It links out to everything that you could want to find. Um. To reiterate, I guess I do uh. A weekly newsletter that's kind of weekly newsletter and direct to Twitter kind of newsletter long read Sunday that's kind of a curation of all the best essays and threads I've seen. And then every day at three pm I'll do a live stream of three topics three minutes, just the conversation that I'm seeing that day. It turns
into a podcast that gets distributed by email. But basically if you go to Twitter at n LW you can find all of this there. Yeah, good stuff. All right, thanks so much for the conversation. We'll talk soon. Thanks Mark. Hey, if you like this episode of the Market Disruptors Podcast, please help us take this to the top of the podcast charts. Just please do me a favor and rate, review and subscribe. Taking fifteen seconds to just leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us reach
more people and disrupt more markets. I really appreciate you listening, and I'll see you next time on the Market Instructors Podcast. M