Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets and today I want to talk about Bitcoin.

This past week I have just been in Miami attending the Bitcoin 2022 conference, perhaps the largest Bitcoin conference in the world at the moment. And it was indeed quite large, to give you a context of scale. The organizers of the conference said that they had 25,000 attendees. What I found most impressive was simply visiting the exhibit hall.

And I've been to a lot of conferences over the years. I find conferences a very efficient way to come up to speed quickly on a topic. And so I'll routinely attend a conference that I'm trying to get a lay of the land. And what I find useful is certainly the speakers, yes, listening to the talks and getting an idea of the ideas that are presented at a conference I find very useful.

Also the people, yes, some of the people you meet at a conference are often leaders in an industry and it can be a great chance to meet some of the creme de la creme of an organization. But I find the exhibit halls often quite useful. And especially more when I was younger, I would go to an exhibit hall and I would routinely just simply visit every booth.

Here are people who have paid money to get their message in front of you. And if you simply go from booth to booth and ask them about their product, about their service, you can quickly grasp an overview of an industry based upon hearing what people are presenting and then asking them about their competitors and letting them educate you on their particular business.

Well most of the time you need a few hours to cover an expo hall. There are some exceptions. You might have a huge consumer electronics show or something like that where it's huge. But in this case I found the expo hall so big I didn't even get through a third of it myself.

It was huge in terms of the number of exhibitors. And that's one of the things that I'll talk about today because I was extraordinarily impressed with how entrepreneurs have been systematically solving the various problems that exist with Bitcoin. And that really has increased my confidence in the offering. So let's talk first about Bitcoin and I'll tell you what my takeaways were from the conference.

Long time listeners of Radical Personal Finance know that I was not early on the Bitcoin bandwagon. And I regret that. I should have been early. And there's a whole episode of Radical Personal Finance wherein I apologize to you for not advising you to buy Bitcoin and I explain some of the reasons why I think I was not early.

And while that has continued to bother me that I wasn't an early adopter of Bitcoin, what's done is done and all I can do is press forward and try to get an idea of what to do today. And so as I've looked at Bitcoin and studied it and tried to think about its integration in the modern life, I have been personally most interested in the ideological aspects of Bitcoin.

Big surprise, I know, that Joshua Sheets would be interested in the ideology of something. But hey, that's the truth. There's some people get involved in Bitcoin just because they want to make a quick buck hopefully or they want to trade it or something like that. But I care about the ideology because I care about freedom.

I care about personal sovereignty. I care about liberty on a global basis. And I see that freedom in the monetary system is one of the foundations of really excellent global freedom. And I think that there should be a system where people can freely compete with one another and where currencies can compete with one another in the free market.

That's my belief. I think that competition is one of the most ethical systems. Excellent non-coercive competition is one of the most ethical systems that's out there for allowing good ideas to bubble up to the surface and allowing for us to advance forward as a human race, continuing to live in an increasingly prosperous and increasingly free and increasingly righteous society.

And so at every level, I want to be one who supports freedom. And monetary freedom is an important component of that. I think for me, what started me on that bandwagon was when I was in college, I read, I think it was Perkins, right, who wrote the book, The Confessions of an Economic Hitman.

And it just opened my eyes to the evil done by my own native country, the United States of America, and how the United States of America has manipulated the world in a really horrific coercive faction just using the monetary supply, not to say nothing of the actual involvement in war and violence, which of course is abundant, but simply using the monetary supply, using loans, using systems of economic coercion and control.

And I consider it to be really, really awful and something that should change. The challenge has been that there often hasn't been a great alternative. People have wanted alternatives for quite a while. If you look around the world and you study history, you see that a fundamental component of history is monetary crises, monetary failures.

And many nations, those monetary failures are quite obvious, whether it's right now the Russian ruble, right now the Venezuelan bolivar, and over the last decade, the Venezuelan monetary system. Or you could go back and you could see the Zimbabwe hyperinflation. You could go to the hyperinflation in Mexico in the 1980s.

You could look at the, what, three crises, two, two, three, four crises in Argentina over the last decades. And you could see how these monetary crises again and again and again affect the history. And some of the countries that we're from, they're harder to see, right? In the United States, we've had four or five significant monetary crises, totally new currencies or just simply adjustments of the currencies.

But these weren't as big of a deal in our nation, in the United States, as they were in some other places, while they're still a big deal. And so you look at history and you realize that throughout history, monetary crisis has been a major component of what has happened in a country.

And that monetary crisis has often led to good things, bad things. It's a mixed bag, right? As history always is. And so you look for an alternative. And when I was younger, I was convinced that there should be competition in the realm of currencies, that there should be free and easy competition, that you should be able to use any currency that you want to and currencies should compete with one another.

There's no reason why the government, which has a monopoly on violence, should also have a monopoly on money creation. It doesn't make any sense. And those two things, when they go together, lead to very bad results. And so why not have competition? When you look at it and you realize the trend in the United States, the growth of government, you realize that politicians control the money supply and politicians control tax dollars, leads to massive levels of control over society.

And a lot of really dumb things are being done. Sometimes they're just dumb. Sometimes they're evil. I guess, to be fair, maybe sometimes they're good. But a lot of dumb things are done over time because politicians can create the money. And we're heading towards a significant crisis in the United States and in most countries of the world that have built a welfare state.

The welfare state in the United States is completely underfunded. It's bankrupt now. It's just going to take time for that bankruptcy to express itself to where it's obvious to people. I've done several shows on that. If you haven't listened to those, go back in the annals of Radical Personal Finance, search for the ticking time bomb that no one wants to discuss, which is a deep dive analysis that I did on the financial system in the United States and the welfare state.

And I showed how, and this was prior to the pandemic, I showed how unless massive changes happened very quickly, it was impossible that there would be any change whatsoever. And then just as was predicted, no massive changes happened of any kind except in the worst direction, where borrowed even more money, building even more government programs, etc.

And so this is bankruptcy of the United States government. Bankruptcy of the welfare systems is inevitable, as I see it, in coming in the future. And the monetary system is going to be a component of that. So I've been interested in free market alternatives. And I've looked for free market alternatives.

When you want to get out of the Federal Reserve Note system or you want to get out of the fractional banking system, you have a number of alternatives. One alternative, of course, is to go into international banking and to simply choose different countries in which to bank. And I've been a strong and loud proponent of that because I believe it solves many of the problems that people are concerned with.

The reasons why they want alternatives can usually be most easily solved by simply accessing the international banking system. In one sense, I think that accessing the international banking system is simply a validation of the concept of competition over currency competition, banking competition, etc. Countries are in competition with one another.

And you can choose to go to the countries that treat you best and give you the best options and simply choose to bank there. For many people around the world, that means going to the United States and banking in the United States. Many wonderful benefits for that. For some U.S.

Americans, it means going to other places and banking in other places. The challenge is that most of the leading banking jurisdictions of the world run on the same basic principle of fractional reserve banking, fiat monetary standards, as does the United States. And so while there are many good reasons to participate in those countries' banking systems, if you're trying to create something fundamentally new, that hasn't worked as well as many people of hope, because there's very rarely been a country around the world that has said, "We're on a gold standard," for example.

Some countries have hinted at it even recently. Countries have made announcements of it. Countries will do that. But in general, you know that a gold standard in and of itself is just a statement that a country makes, and the country can revoke that really at any time, just like the United States did.

And so it's a convenient thing to bring clients and customers to your country for a time if people are looking for a gold standard, and then it's convenient to revoke that in time. So you say, "What can be another solution?" Well, maybe I could exit the fractional banking system entirely.

I remember years ago I first came across the concept of some people who were trying to start an old-fashioned silver bank, and I thought, "That's really interesting. You could bank in silver." The way it would work is they basically created a repository. You would make contributions to that bank in the form of fiat money.

They would purchase silver, and your account was measured in ounces of silver that you owned, and then you would simply pay a custodianship fee to the bank for managing the silver. In some cases, they would give you a debit card, and you would actually be able to spend your silver on your debit card.

And I thought, "That's a great idea." The problem is it's an old technology that doesn't really work so well in the modern age because so much of what we do is digital, and while you can appreciate the fact that I might have silver deposits held at this old bank, and that's great, you look around and you say, "Is this really what's necessary?

And is silver really the right solution? This seems really unwieldy. Wouldn't it be great to have a digital solution to this?" And since the dawn of the Internet, when people realized the power of the Internet, having some form of reliable digital money or digital gold has been a basic component of what people have wanted to make the Internet work more effectively.

There have been many efforts made. eGold, digital gold has been promoted by various people. But Bitcoin has broken through in a powerful way all of the other competitive ideas with some really ingenious thinking, a really ingenious way of developing a new system. And so the question has been, "Well, is it real?

Can it work? Will it work? What's the future?" I think most thoughtful observers have recognized that there could be a wide range of outcomes. And many people would say you could go either to zero or it can go to the moon. There's a wide range of potential outcomes available in Bitcoin.

Since we don't know the future, we don't know which outcome will happen. It's not certain. We all have our guesses. We all have our opinions, but we don't know which outcome will happen. I think that now the outcomes are starting to narrow, meaning that I don't think myself that there's much case at all that Bitcoin will go to zero, for example, and be totally worthless.

We see – in fact, this is one of the reasons why I wanted to go to the Bitcoin conference because since the initial success of Bitcoin, we've seen thousands and thousands of new cryptocurrencies created, many of them saying that we're going to compete with Bitcoin. We've seen some wacky stuff happen where people have said, "Hey, this thing doesn't exist anyway.

It's just a meme. It's just a joke. It's just a mathematical formula. So let's go ahead and create new jokes." And then those jokes become popular, a la Dogecoin, etc. And people look at it and say, "Well, what's the future? What does the future hold?" And I think that even over the last year, there's been some significant stress testing of Bitcoin specifically being banned multiple times by many countries, right?

China banned it multiple times. You see the Canadian government trying to ban Bitcoin transactions coming hard after Bitcoin custodians with the trucker convoy protest. Right now, I think the use of Bitcoin in Russia and in and out of Russia is a really interesting stress test to watch. New legislation in the European Union over cold wallets, even just this last week, is really important to watch.

And so we're seeing a stress testing happen significantly, but we're seeing Bitcoin work in many, many ways. And so as the years go forward and as more and more of these stress tests happen and as there's more and more development, we see that Bitcoin is showing itself increasingly resilient.

I want to talk for a moment about some metaphors that I use. I'm going to give you my takeaways from the conference and why going to the conference impressed me so much. I believe that it's possible to have, in many cases, a superior solution to a problem that simply doesn't take on, that doesn't work because there's not widespread adoption.

And this is one of the problems that faces Bitcoin, which I think it's overcoming, but it's one of the problems that it faces Bitcoin. A currency is valuable to the extent that it is universally desired and acceptable. When you think about what money is and you try to clarify and define what money is, my favorite definition is simply that money is the most marketable commodity in existence.

It's the thing that everybody wants. That's what money is. You could have various forms of money. You can have conch shells used as money. You can have beads used as money. You can have gold and silver coins used as money. You could have US dollars or euros or Canadian dollars or Deutschmarks or francs or any number of things used as money.

You can have money that's used in certain places. I thought it was fascinating watching the various video game forms of money that were used as currency and traded in Venezuela over the last year because people were looking for something. They said, "Hey, I can trade this digital currency, this currency that exists only inside this certain game." It's no different than trading credits for iTunes or Warcraft credits or all the stuff that's needed in the digital world.

Money can really be anything, but in order for it to be money, it needs to be desired and accepted by people as being universally valuable. That's why a US dollar can be so useful. You can go almost anywhere in the world and people know the value of the US dollar because it's so large.

That same currency that is valuable in one country may not be valuable in another country. If I brought to you a Colombian peso and you're living in Canada, it's going to be more difficult for me to convince you to accept that Colombian peso than it is a US dollar.

It's going to be far easier if I just simply have a Canadian dollar. Money is useful and valuable to the extent that it's desired and that it is usable by many people. Do people want it? Now, just because something is technically superior or better doesn't necessarily mean that people will want it.

As I was at the conference, I was thinking of examples of this and I thought maybe a good example to consider this is a language example. I do think there are some good parallels between languages as we understand them today and currencies as we understand them today and what will happen in the coming years.

Here's a question for you to consider. What is the most important language for you to speak and for you to teach your children today? The answer is obviously English. English is the most widely spoken in the world, not by native speakers of course, but as a second language. It is the international lingua franca, the international language of exchange, the language that is used by virtually all educated international people if they don't as their common language.

Even in countries that don't use English as a language, as an official language, you'll have people use English as their lingua franca even if it's not an official language. Here I'm thinking of a place like Switzerland, right, where there are four official languages, German, French, Italian, and Romance. And yet if a German-speaking Swiss goes to a French-speaking region of Switzerland, there's a good chance that they'll use English to interact with one another because the German-speaking Swiss and the French-speaking Swiss are taught English in school and that will be a comfortable lingua franca that perhaps doesn't have the baggage of their German and Swiss arguments and culture, etc.

The same thing happens all over the world. If a Japanese businessman goes to Hong Kong to meet with a German businessman, they're going to be doing business in English even though one is from Japan, one is from Germany, and they're meeting in Hong Kong. They're going to be doing business in English.

And so all thoughtful, educated, thinking elites around the world make sure that their children speak English well. They educate their children in English, they hire tutors, they make sure that they teach their children English because that is the language of the future. Now, of course, there can be local lingua francas as there always has been throughout history but today English is the dominant player.

But English is not the world's best language by any stretch of the imagination. English may not be as bad as many people allege it to be. English can be pretty easy to learn in many contexts, but English has its own intricacies, its difficulties, its things that make it hard to figure out and hard for people to learn.

And so over the years people have invented other languages, languages that are designed to be easy to learn and easy to use. My favorite of these, or at least the one I know the most about, is a language called Esperanto. Esperanto is a brand new language that was developed and it was designed to be easy.

It had no native speakers, it was a completely made up language, made up in the late 19th century, and it was invented to be a universal second language for international communication. It was supposed to be similar to many natural languages, they call it naturalistic. And it pulls a lot from European languages, but its grammar is created to be very easy to learn, very simple, very consistent, etc.

And today Esperanto has a wide group of users. Estimates are that today there's something like 100,000 people that speak Esperanto. All of these 100,000 people have been attracted to the concept of a superior language and they've learned Esperanto and they get together with other people around the world and they speak Esperanto with those other people.

And yet here we are, more than a century after the language was invented, and you have virtually no one who speaks or uses the language, and you have virtually no practical application of this language. 100,000 people, when compared to a global population, is a laughably small number of people.

And Esperanto enthusiasts are quite often quite passionate. They're quite passionate about their subject, it's great. And yet, point remains that I personally have virtually no interest in learning Esperanto. I would rather spend my time learning a language that is spoken more broadly in a natural setting because I think it's more useful than speaking this artificially constructed but superior language called Esperanto.

And so when I think about that, I see a lot of parallels between Esperanto and Bitcoin. Let's pretend for a moment that Bitcoin is a superior solution. Let's pretend that the basic concept of Bitcoin is a better solution. And I would say in some ways, I'll use the word undeniably, it's a strong word, but in some ways it undeniably is, at least from my perspective.

Words like Esperanto is, in some ways, undeniably better than English, or better than Spanish, or better than Chinese. It's just undeniably better. It's created to be better. But that doesn't, just because something is created to be better, doesn't mean that it's going to gain widespread use, that it's going to gain widespread adoption.

And even if I came to you and I said, you're in Canada, and I said, "Look, my Swiss franc is undeniably better than your Canadian dollar," you would look at it and say, "But I want the Canadian dollar because that's what's used around me." Just like if I came to you and I said, "You should educate your children in Esperanto because it's undeniably better than English," you would say, "Yeah, Joshua, we're going to teach our children English because that's the language that is used." And so I see the same challenge facing Bitcoin or any other competing currency, is that you have to gain adoption.

And in order for something to function as money, it has to be widely adopted. It has to be picked up and it has to be wanted by other people. So in order for that to work, I think you have to say there has to be various problems that are met.

And when I came away from the Bitcoin conference thinking, was that I am now profoundly convinced that Bitcoin does have a future and it can have a very, very strong future. It can have a very, very strong future. And it can have a very, very strong future as something, as a global currency, maybe a global reserve currency, maybe just a global currency, maybe just a useful thing.

I'm not convinced that it's going to sweep away everything else that would violate my fundamental belief in the concept of competition. But I think it would, based upon this example I've given you with Esperanto, learning Esperanto could indeed have tremendous benefit. But English is still the king for now.

And if you learned English and Esperanto, there would still be value in other local languages. I'm not sure that there will be one international standard in the future. We had an interesting conversation with a couple of listeners on Twitter about that. And I'm thinking more about that. Maybe I'll come to change my mind.

But for today, I am confident in saying that Bitcoin can have a future as a strong global currency, a strong global storehouse of value, and that is also useful as a medium of exchange. So let me give you some reasons why. Number one, Bitcoin is already working as a storehouse of value.

It is already working as a storehouse of value. Now that statement I think can be hard to accept for many people, given the significant daily, weekly, monthly fluctuations of Bitcoin. As I record this, it looks like the Bitcoin to US dollar ratio is 40,703 US dollars fiat to each and every Bitcoin.

And you see that there are significant fluctuations up and down. This used to bother me a lot more than it does today. And in fact, if you would go back and find earlier recordings of Radical Personal Finance, you would hear me make statements like, "These fluctuations have to smooth out in order for Bitcoin to gain more widespread acceptance." I have since come to see it differently, that perhaps these fluctuations have been what is necessary for Bitcoin to actually bridge the divide, to actually gain interest.

I used to say and criticize Bitcoin and say that the only reason people are getting into Bitcoin is because they want Bitcoin to go up. They want Bitcoin to go to the moon. They want 100,000 US dollar Bitcoin. They want million dollar US dollar Bitcoin. But what I see happening is I see a lot of people gaining exposure to Bitcoin because they want it to go up.

That doesn't necessarily mean that's a bad thing. And so here would be an example. Back to the language question. If I look at my children, let's say that I grow up in Mexico, and I look at my children and I say, "It's obvious that in order to be successful on an international basis and to be leaders in a company or to be leaders in an industry or in an art or something like that, my children need to speak excellent English." The fact that I make sure that my children learn English for economic reasons, that's not a less...

Some people would say, "Well, I want my children to learn English so they can enjoy the arts, so they can learn and gain from this vast treasure trove of beautiful English language literature." That's a valid reason to learn English. It's also a valid reason to learn English because I want my children to get good international jobs and get rich.

Both of those are valid reasons to learn English. The reason doesn't matter. What matters is the result. The result is that they learn English. And so one person who learns English because they want access to the beautiful treasure trove of amazing English literature, that person may also wind up having a career that's advanced and earning more money because of the knowledge of English language.

And the other person who just learns English in order to get a better job might find themselves... That person might find himself or herself enjoying English literature as a pastime and really finding a passion for English literature of some kind. And so I see the same thing happening with Bitcoin.

This is what I didn't see years ago. I thought, "Well, people have to get into Bitcoin because they want to use it as a medium of exchange, but there's a bunch of people getting into Bitcoin because they just want the money to go up. They want it to go more valuable than they're going to sell out." The point remains that people are getting into Bitcoin.

And for every person that buys more Bitcoin, then that's creating a stronger and stronger infrastructure. And so when I first bought Bitcoin, I bought Bitcoin because I was interested in observing the market. And then I was thinking, "Hey, maybe I can make some money on it." Then I found myself using the Bitcoin more.

I found myself using it to buy and to sell and to exchange with other people. And I realized it doesn't really matter the reason that I'm buying Bitcoin. It only matters that I'm buying Bitcoin. It doesn't matter why your neighbor is buying Bitcoin. It only matters that your neighbor is buying Bitcoin.

And in the same way that a person who learns English for some romantic language reason can also find themselves getting a better job, the same thing applies to Bitcoin. Your neighbor who buys Bitcoin to make a bunch of money might also find Bitcoin being useful in trading on a daily basis.

Your neighbor who buys Bitcoin to trade on a daily basis might find it useful that it goes up and down and up and down and up probably over the long term. And so Bitcoin is already working as a storehouse of value. And as you look at the world get more intense, you look at the situation right now of inflation in many Western currencies, you look at uncertainty, you look at increasing monetary controls, etc., that Bitcoin is now gaining an increased value in most people's minds.

So many people at the conference, of course, and I myself am included in this, I look at Bitcoin as being more valuable than US dollars because I look at it over the next 10 years and I say, "Look at the direction these systems are going. Look at the trajectory of these systems." And I would compare this back to the language metaphor, which might be imperfect, but I think is useful.

I look at this and I say, "I can appreciate multiple languages while also being very clear on the fact that one language is on the uptrend and another language is on the downtrend." And so maybe a good example of US dollars to Bitcoin might be something like Spanish to English.

Right? Spanish is not a dying language. It's not a little tribal language from some tribe that's disappeared and done. That's a powerful language. But yet still, if I speak Spanish, I want to also speak English because the best opportunity is to have the both of them. And that's maybe an imperfect metaphor, but it's worth thinking about.

So Bitcoin can have a future and it is already working as a storehouse of value. It is already working as a medium of exchange right now, albeit on a relatively limited basis compared to the world's transactions. And so this is, again, another problem that I have faced in the past.

One of the issues when you look at alternative forms of banking that don't involve the fractional reserve system, i.e. silver banking, one of the problems you face with precious metals collections is the people who buy and own precious metals often don't want to spend them. And because they don't want to spend them, they don't wind up going around and thus the whole idea of banking in that currency or banking in gold and silver often doesn't work.

And so they're so valuable, there are people perceive them to be so valuable that they often don't spend them. They don't want to part with them. And this is a problem, right? People are gold bugs or silver bugs. They have this basically this dogmatic idea that, well, this is just the ultimate thing of value and nothing else has value.

And I think that's a mistake. I think that when you buy gold coins, you should be ready to sell gold coins. When you buy silver coins, you should be able to sell, ready to sell them. And when you buy Bitcoin, you should be ready to sell it. And so in order to do that, you need to use it as a medium of exchange.

Now the limiting factor for Bitcoin has been very significantly the fact that you always had to get into Bitcoin from fiat and get out of Bitcoin from fiat. And I think this is a powerful argument against Bitcoin. People say it's not really a currency because you can't buy and sell in that currency.

That is changing. Maybe it was that way 10 years ago, but that is changing. And I think today you see that more and more people are happy to accept Bitcoin directly, to hold Bitcoin and to spend Bitcoin. And I think in the years to come, I see that trend increasing significantly.

The big news last year was that El Salvador passed a legal tender law stating that people should accept Bitcoin for transactions. And so today you can go to El Salvador and you can spend your Bitcoin directly, making instant transfers to purchase goods and services in local stores. I see that continuing over the last few days.

There have been major announcements of these efforts. There was Lugano, Switzerland, I think, passed a legal tender law for Lugano for Bitcoin. The governor, I'm not sure which title to use, but the governor of Madeira, the little Portuguese set of islands out near the Azores in the sea, they are moving forward with broad Bitcoin incentives in Madeira.

Honduras has been threatening to pass a legal tender law. Mexico is making noise of trying to figure out how to integrate Bitcoin. And I think that this trend is probably going to continue. And in my opinion, I think it will continue. I think there's powerful reasons for a country to move towards Bitcoin adoption.

And there are many people who are working to encourage nation state adoption of Bitcoin as an official currency and as something that is useful. When you realize the incredible stranglehold that many countries have on their finances due to the fact that big countries like the United States that control the US dollar can control and affect their financial situation, you can see how attractive it is to a country to be decoupled from that form of imperialism by a large international country.

I won't go deeper into that. Countries have made various decisions. Some cases they've pegged their currency to the dollar. Some cases they've used dollars to get the benefits of the dollar. But it becomes a point of control when a country is beholden to the dollar. And so having access to a globalized system that's not controlled by a nation state can be a major competitive advantage for a country.

And that may be something that continues to develop in the coming years in the Bitcoin space, which would be very exciting. It would be exciting to see small countries able to compete on a global basis by having access to a large currency, if Bitcoin indeed becomes a large currency, but yet having a large currency that's not controllable by or controlled by or controllable by a big international imperial power and where they don't become basically a colony of that country by jumping onto that country's currency.

That would be cool because it's a major disadvantage for a country to have its own currency that's not internationally strong. It can subject them to major difficulties on the global basis, but it can be an advantage if they could have access to an internationally stable system that wasn't based upon imperialism like the US dollar or like some other large country currencies.

Back to the fact that Bitcoin is already working as a medium of exchange. It does work. And I have bought and sold various things directly for Bitcoin, many of those things. And today it's already working. And so the solutions that are already out there, there are at least eight, I didn't count perfectly, but there are at least eight different custodians of Bitcoin who are now offering a debit card directly for your Bitcoin reserves that allow you to buy and sell locally and have the money drawn from your Bitcoin balance.

With that plus the integration in the digital world, things like Apple Pay, Google Pay, et cetera, bringing those debit cards into those systems means that you can today effectively bank in Bitcoin even if Bitcoin itself is not accepted. And I used to think that this was going to be a big problem, but in my travels around the world over the last couple of years, I don't see why it is a problem anymore.

I do most of my banking in US dollars. But when I travel the world, the fact that I do my banking in US dollars doesn't really matter to me on a global basis about spending dollars. I just simply go and I buy the stuff that I need and then I click the button on my watch and use Apple Pay or I swipe a US credit card.

And behind the scenes, the credit card company settles the whole system and my US dollars go and pay my foreign currency. And I don't really care what the foreign currency is or even what the local price is. And that's an amazing feature of the modern world. Why do I say I don't even care what the local price is?

Pretty much everywhere in the world you go, the prices are set by the free market system. And so the free market system is setting the price. You can go into virtually any store in the world, at least a store that includes prices, not some local bazaar where haggling is a major component, but you can go into any grocery store all around the world and you can be confident that the prices you're getting on your goods and items there is simply the market price.

It's what it costs there, factoring in, paying for the transportation, paying for the purchase of the raw materials, paying for the manufacturing, paying for keeping the lights on the store, et cetera, and a little bit of profit for everyone in between. And you're going to get a fair just price there.

And then the international competition for foreign exchange rates is what's setting the exchange rate between your local currency and the US dollar. And so the whole system is extremely efficient. It's extremely fair. And you could just walk into any store in the world, pay with your Apple Pay or Google Pay and be on your way.

It's fast, easy, and simple. And so why can't Bitcoin play a role in that? It is already possible with a system of debit cards and I think will be increasingly possible in the future. Then direct Bitcoin for Bitcoin transactions are increasingly doable. Today, if someone offers to pay me with Bitcoin, I am more highly incentivized to accept Bitcoin than the US dollar because I believe that there's a stronger future for Bitcoin than for the current iteration of the US dollar.

And we'll get to that belief in a moment as to why that is. Similarly, if someone offers to pay me with a gold coin instead of a US dollar, I'm more incentivized to offer a discount, to take something from someone to do provide extra service, et cetera, if someone pays me with something other than a US dollar.

I still do need to have enough dollars to pay my expenses and my bills. But I find routinely that these kinds of offers are more attractive to me and I can make my offers attractive to other people. And as Bitcoin adoption has grown around the world, I think this will be increasingly valuable, especially when we get to the efficiency of doing direct Bitcoin for Bitcoin transactions.

Let's say that you were selling a house today and somebody came to you and made you an offer to make a direct Bitcoin transaction for your house. Would you not at least consider it, even if you own no Bitcoin today? Maybe five years ago, the percentage of people who would have considered it would be quite much lower than today.

But today, there are a lot of people who would consider it and who would perhaps consider it on a higher level than simply dollar for dollar transactions. So it is already working as a medium of exchange. And I think it can continue to work as a medium of exchange.

Next point, one thing that was clearly evident at this conference that I attended is that Bitcoin has a passionate group of entrepreneurs who are solving the problems with Bitcoin and offering new solutions. If you look at the Lightning Network that was developed over the last couple of years, if you look at new systems of simply handling transactions, there are so many entrepreneurs that are creating solutions to allow Bitcoin use to be more widespread.

And there are entrepreneurs and companies that are integrating Bitcoin more and more into their daily affairs. And so our world has moved into an electronic system. There are benefits, many benefits of that. There are also disadvantages of that. But what you see is that for the disadvantages of an electronic system, some of those disadvantages can be minimized by using a Bitcoin standard instead of a dollar standard.

And so entrepreneurs have been solving that. Five years ago, it may have been hard to believe that electronic transactions would be the norm, 10 years ago perhaps. 10 years ago, it may have been hard to believe because we used cash a lot more. We were so accustomed to physical cards.

But now, at least in my travels and many places around the world, it's just simply considered standard procedure to have a point of service terminal that is electronic and that doesn't even require any kind of physical card. It's going to be a digital payment from a mobile device. And so Bitcoin can compete in that space very, very effectively as more and more people choose to buy with Bitcoin and more and more vendors choose to sell with Bitcoin.

And so there's no technical reason that I can see why Bitcoin can't be used more and more as a system of exchange. Even some of the behind the scenes problems dealing with currency conversions to local currencies for tax reporting, etc. for merchants. I talked with a number of vendors at the conference who were working on solving that and creating new bookkeeping systems, etc.

to make that automated and simple and easy to stay in compliance with your local tax authorities while still accepting Bitcoin, doing business in Bitcoin, etc. I've already spoken about the fact that Bitcoin has increasing global attention. Right now, that global attention is primarily limited to small, innovative places that don't have a lot of other natural resources to work with.

But these experiments that are playing out are important experiments and will drive the future to see what happens in years to come in terms of the global adoption. One thing that was clearly evident at the conference is that Bitcoin, and is evident for many just cursory examination of the market space, Bitcoin has many of the smartest people in the world deeply invested into it.

It seems to me, I can't remember what the opposite of a brain drain is, but basically the opposite of a brain drain, a brain collection, a brain vacuum where people are coming to it. It feels very much like that's what's happening right now in Bitcoin and in the cryptocurrency industry writ large.

You have some of the biggest, smartest people with the most success who are actively targeting it. And right now, if I'm giving career advice to anybody who's smart and educated, I am saying go to the Bitcoin industry or the cryptocurrency industry broadly and see if you can find a problem that needs solving and solve it.

Because it feels very much like we're on the cusp of a transition in the world, in a monetary transition which has been one of the few areas that have been the slowest to respond to the technological revolution that we've all lived in. If you think about many of the areas of life, whether it's communication was completely disrupted by internet connectivity.

If you look at marketing, it's been completely disrupted by internet connectivity. Telecommunication has been deeply disrupted by internet connectivity, even just much faster with the pandemic. But money has been one of the slower areas to be disrupted. It has been significantly disrupted in terms of international transfer payments with PayPal, etc.

It has been disrupted with merchant terminal systems of Stripe, etc. But the actual basic components of money has been slow to be disrupted. But it feels like we're on the cusp of a change and it feels like all the smart people are rushing to that industry to try to solve problems and make a fortune.

And I think that's a smart move. I have a number of clients that I work with on an ongoing basis. I walked out of the Bitcoin conference and I called one of my clients who is very smart and involved in different things and I said, "I would be working very hard if I were you to figure out how can you be around this industry?" Because when there's a growth industry, a raising tide raises all boats.

That's the basic concept. It's that when you're in an industry where there's growth, you have an opportunity, even if you're middle of the pack, you have an opportunity to experience the growth of that industry. And it feels to me, I think that Bitcoin is right on that point where you don't even need – as an entrepreneur, you don't even need a new and innovative product.

You simply need a good product that solves a problem where there are other competitors who can come in and you can work in that space as well. Think about this in terms of – what example to use? You can go to any industry. I guess the point is simply that any industry, whether it's everything from cars to computers to cash registers, it might be great to be the early prime mover in an industry.

It might be. But it's also excellent to be company number three, company number five, company number eight that's creating something that's solving a problem for consumers in that industry. Because one company cannot solve all the problems. One company can't meet all the needs. And so there's plenty of room for competition.

And so I think there's tons of room for competition right now in the Bitcoin industry. And the fact that many of the smartest people in the world are deeply invested into it is an important component to pay attention to. There are very smart people who are critics. But that number of smart people who are critics is a lot smaller today than it was a number of years ago.

And I find it difficult to understand the arguments to believe the critics more than I find it difficult to believe the proponents myself. And so we'll see. We'll see what happens. We don't know yet. We'll see. When you get a whole bunch of smart people focusing on a problem and then working on solutions, you're probably going to get better solutions.

Here I think of the classic book by Jim Collins called Good to Great. One of the points that he made in that book, excellent management book for building great companies was this. One of his chapters was get the right people on the bus, then figure out where the bus is going.

And he said, if you're a company, if you can get a bunch of the right people on the bus, then you can figure out what direction to take the bus. Don't say the bus is going here. First get the people. And to me, that's what it felt like being at the Bitcoin conference is that all the right people are on the bus.

So now let's figure out where the bus is going. And maybe the bus goes where we thought it was going to go five years ago. Maybe it doesn't. But you can't have that many smart people on the bus working on problems and then not have the bus go somewhere good, which leads me to my next point.

One of the things that deeply impressed me at the Bitcoin conference was how ideological the enthusiasts were. And I mean that in the sense that if you talk about people wanting free control and sovereignty over their money, they were there at the Bitcoin conference. That was why it was.

Yes, I think everyone who was there wants to get rich. Who among us doesn't? I think we would all love it if Bitcoin went to a million dollars, everyone who owns Bitcoin. But I didn't come away with thinking that everyone was focused on the concept of making a million bucks.

I came away with the impression, listening to speakers and talking to people, I came away with the impression that everyone was focused on the concept of building a free currency that's not dependent on government intervention. And when you have a bunch of people that are committed passionately to an ideology, then I think you can really move the needle in that direction.

The examples I thought of, I think you could go to an older example like the United States of America. The founding of the United States of America was created by a set of committed ideologues. You had, at its very core, you had the pilgrims going over to the United States for religious freedom.

It's why there's more religious freedom in the United States than virtually any country in the world. And that religious freedom has not subsided over time because it was built into the culture, this sense of, "I am going to be free to worship God as I want." And even though there have been massive erosions in religious liberty, at its core, that strong respect of religious liberty is so fundamental to the American experience and the American concept that it can't be gotten away from, no matter what.

And so that's kind of how it feels, is that the people... But the people who did it, they sacrificed their lives, their fortunes, and everything for that concept. So you started with religious liberty, then political liberty, as the ethos of the founding of the country is, "We're going to sacrifice everything for this sense of political liberty." And that, again, drove a stake into the heart of the American culture that continues to this day, a deep sense of liberty being the highest thing.

You look at the global experience of the last two years, and the proof of that is stark in terms of how different the US-American experience of liberty was over the last two years versus the Australian experience or the Canadian experience. It's obvious, but it goes back to the very beginning.

And so you have a committed set of ideologues. Those committed, small group of committed ideologues can make a cultural difference that endures for a significant amount of time. And at the conference, all I could hear was the ideology coming through, the ideology of personal sovereignty, freedom from government coercion, from government control, not building an inflationary system that benefits a few, but rather giving people an honest monetary system.

And that ideology really, really impressed me. It was so obvious, and it came through so loud and clear, that I couldn't walk away and think that there was anything except, "Hey, here are the right people on the bus, a lot of them for the right reasons. This bus is going to go somewhere." And I think very well, Bitcoin may become the first peaceful monetary system in existence.

I was struck by watching the international opprobrium of Russians and the Russian currency over the past months, and thinking about how that applies to Bitcoin. If you look at it right now, holding rubles for most people, given the immoral actions of the Russian government, has become a deeply difficult thing to do from an ethical standard.

We think about blood diamonds or blood money or something like that. That's kind of how it feels, the concept of holding rubles. It feels like, "I'm supporting this regime that's invading its neighbors, and I don't feel good about this." Well, I have a similar feeling about the US dollar, and I think that many thoughtful people who examine the facts would come to a similar feeling.

The problem is, it's hard to promote an alternative. Even though I have concerns about the US dollar and the behavior of the US government, etc., it's a mixed bag, and it's not all bad, it's not all good. It's a real mixed bag. You look at it, it's not super motivating to find an alternative.

Then you look at the alternatives, and many of the alternatives are hard to do. They're hard to integrate. But if you could come up with an easy alternative that didn't have all that baggage, if you could create a system that allowed people to hold value and to exchange with their neighbors, and that system of exchange didn't have all the baggage of a nation-state actor, then I think in time that's going to be attractive.

You heard that attractiveness loud and clear through so many attendees of the Bitcoin conference. It was so loud and clear that I think it probably will continue. As it becomes easier and easier to buy Bitcoin, to own Bitcoin, to hold Bitcoin, to trade in Bitcoin, to sell Bitcoin, etc., I think you're going to see broader adoption of it.

And I think that I'll wrap up this commentary with this. Maybe the price appreciation was necessary. Maybe the price appreciation is still necessary. That's the thing that bothered me for years, is I thought, "How can this be money if it's so unstable?" It's just going up. But when I got to the Bitcoin conference and I saw the people there who are undoubtedly there for a combination of make a bunch of money and also support this ideologically, maybe the price appreciation is not a negative factor.

Maybe it's a positive factor. And you think about it, I thought a lot over the last years, "Why shouldn't your money increase in value? Why shouldn't it happen?" First, we know that massive fluctuations and instability in the foreign exchange markets are commonplace. They're less that the fluctuations between the big currencies are much smaller than they are on a global basis.

But the fluctuations of the US dollar versus local, the lira, or whatever local currency you want to do, these are significant fluctuations. So fluctuation is not necessarily a bad thing. And why shouldn't your money increase in value? I think that's one of the strangest things that I've only learned by experience.

And I learned it when I first bought gold and I learned it when I first bought Bitcoin. You realize that one of the reasons why I spend so much money in US dollars is I fundamentally believe that those US dollars are eroding in value. And you know they are with inflation and you know that there's no chance that it's going to change.

You don't keep money when you think it's going to erode in value. And this is one of the reasons why inflation is baked into the system at the nation state level because the government wants to incentivize people to spend their money. Because on every-- why? Who knows? There are many good reasons, right?

An economy with lots of economic movement is generally going to be a healthier economy. You could take the conspiratorial side and say the government only gets tax money when money changes hands, which is true. So you want to generate tax money to increase the power of government, you have to have money moving.

Other arguments as well. But it is a kind of a strange scenario when you realize I might actually want to hang on to my money. And you find that when you buy gold, you find that when you buy Bitcoin, you think, you know what? I think my money is going to be worth more in the future than it is today.

So let me just hang on to my money. Even if it's not an investment, let me just hang on to my money. And that feels good. And that's something that fundamentally went against all of my professional training, goes against my professional training. Professional training says you should only hold a small amount of money in cash and you should hold most of your money in investments.

And that makes sense in a fiat system. It makes sense in an inflationary fiat system. But maybe it doesn't make sense. And maybe it shouldn't make sense. You go back to a gold-based system and you realize there was actually incentive for people just to hold money. You could hold gold dollars and you could just hold money.

You didn't have to go and invest it into a company. You didn't have to go and invest it into real estate. You didn't have to worry about getting rid of your money. You could just simply hold it. Why shouldn't we have that kind of system in the future? So in summary, I'm convinced there's tremendous opportunity for Bitcoin from an ideological perspective, which to repeat is my big thing.

And I'm convinced there's tremendous opportunity for Bitcoin from an investment perspective. I'm convinced that there's tremendous opportunity. At this point in time, I have a very hard time seeing the Bitcoin at zero scenarios being plausible, at least in the short term. Who knows? You go out into the long term and it's very hard to be confident in a long-term prediction.

But I have a hard time seeing Bitcoin at zero. And when I look at the utility to me and to my life, especially from an ideological perspective, it makes it a strong, strong case. And when you look at how so many people around the world have, the entrepreneurs have been developing solutions to the problems, I think it's just going to continue.

And its solutions are already really, really good. And I think they're going to get even better. So yeah, I'm in. I'm in. I'm convinced that there's a strong and powerful future. What I don't yet know is I don't yet know how to integrate it properly into good financial planning.

I've been thinking a lot about that. And this is where you get into that argument between a currency and an investment. If you think of Bitcoin as a currency and you were a financial planner, you wouldn't say to somebody, "Well, go put all your money into a currency. You still want people to invest." But Bitcoin is kind of that mixture.

So I don't want to go deeper into that right now. But I've been thinking about some of the financial planning problems considering that. There were a couple of, I wasn't going to go into this, but there are a couple of really innovative solutions that I started to see from the financial perspective at this conference.

There were basically four vendors who were involved in things more related to traditional financial planning. Two of them related to real estate where they were developing some cool things about taking equity from real estate, putting it into Bitcoin. And I thought that was remarkably smart. But they're doing, and then a couple of people working on insurance products.

But the insurance products are not yet, nothing is being done in Bitcoin. And so I think there's going to be a lot of smart finance people over the coming years trying to think, "How can we use what we know now and how can we move it into a new direction?" And that's where we get into the world of smart contracts, DAOs, all kinds of stuff that's kind of more interesting.

But we're definitely at a pivot point and there's change coming. So that was my experience from the Bitcoin conference. If you're interested, Bitcoin 2022, they put all of their sessions on their website. Just go to YouTube. It's all available. You can watch all the conferences, some great speakers. Jack Dorsey was there.

I really enjoyed the talk of Ricardo Salinas. He's a Mexican billionaire. And his comment, he was sharing from his experience of having, living through the Mexican hyperinflation of the 1980s and how his family got screwed again and again. He said that his family holdings are now 60% in Bitcoin.

And of course, many of the other Bitcoin people. But I mean, it was Saylor, Michael Saylor, et cetera, who were there. But all that's available for you on YouTube free. So if you're interested in education, that's there and you can watch those talks and more to come. I guess I should simply promote.

I have a course. One of the things that I saw a need in the marketplace for was a course on how to buy Bitcoin and own it privately and anonymously. And I think this is one of the most valuable things about Bitcoin is that you can own it, you can buy it anonymously, you could own it privately and you can do that on a really effective basis.

And so if you're interested in that, make sure you go and take my course called Bitcoin Privacy Course dot com. How to buy Bitcoin, own it anonymously, et cetera. And done amazing. Got some great solutions there and even better solutions coming in the days to come. Bitcoin Privacy Course dot com.

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