Is Crypto Over? A Debate!
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This is Honestly. Cryptocurrency is going to be a great democratizing force for the world because it's going to level the playing field and allow anybody with a cell phone to access financial services. This is going to transform how we think about a real global economy.

Over the past decade, the world of cryptocurrency went from being this fringy sideshow that most people didn't know anything about directly into the mainstream of American life. A message from Cash App and the CEO of Hot Girl Enterprise, Megan Thee Stallion. Hey hotties, let's talk about Bitcoin. It's the new digital currency that's been getting a lot of hype. If you watched the Super Bowl this year, it was hard not to notice that crypto had fully arrived.

"History is filled with almosts. With those who almost adventured, who almost achieved, but ultimately, for them it proved to be too much." There were lots of ads, but maybe the most clever was this ad for FTX featuring Larry David. "I call it the wheel."

"I don't think so." "What does it do?" "It rules." In it, he played this recurring character throughout history. "Behold! It's a fork! I got ten forks right here, baby!" A naysayer throughout the ages who laughed at the absurdity of the wheel or the light bulb. "Edison, can I be honest with you?" "It stinks."

or putting a man on the moon. Nobody's gone on the moon, ever! Why not? It's too far! It's far! It's really far! And then, in our current era, crypto. Like I was saying, it's FTX. It's a safe and easy way to get into crypto. Eh, I don't think so. And I'm never wrong about this stuff. Never. ♪

Over the past several years, and especially the past several months, especially as the threat of inflation has become the horrible reality of inflation, lots of people have been buying cryptocurrency. A growing number of people in the United States are investing in cryptocurrency. To many, it seemed fun and exciting,

But then, over the past several weeks, the crypto markets, like other markets, have been crashing. Crypto, obviously, right now getting crushed. Investors getting jolted by volatility rippling through the crypto world. Tonight, a massive sell-off of cryptocurrency, erasing more than $200 billion from the entire market in a single day. Bitcoin is down more than 50% from the high. Some coins have completely imploded,

Some crypto banks have shut their digital doors, refusing to give customers access to their money. And crypto companies, including Coinbase, are laying off workers. There's talk, as someone put it, of a crypto winter. So for today, a debate. Is crypto really the thing that its most prominent advocates say that it is? And is this blip just a normal hiccup in an otherwise exciting, transformational technological advancement?

Or was crypto always more hype than reality? And now that truth is finally coming out. Here to debate are Anthony Pompliano, also known as Pomp, and Michael Green. Pomp is an entrepreneur, an investor, and a former lead at Facebook. He's also the host of the Pomp podcast and the writer of a crypto newsletter called Off the Chain, which is read by hundreds of thousands of investors. Pomp, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me.

Michael Green has been an investor for more than 30 years. He recently joined Simplify, where he's introducing new innovations in ETFs. He's previously, among other jobs, been at Teal Macro, where he managed the personal capital of Peter Teal, and Canyon Capital Investors, a $23 billion multi-strategy hedge fund based in Los Angeles. Mike, thanks so much for being here. It's a pleasure to be here, Barry.

Mike and Pomp have debated before. Listening to them has helped me understand, more than lots of other pieces I've read, what is happening in this exciting but strange and often confusing new technological space. We're going to get a little wonky at times, but I think for anyone curious about what to make of Bitcoin and crypto more generally right now, you're going to find this really valuable and interesting. Stay with us.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Okay, Pomp and Mike, thank you both for being willing to sit down and debate here today. So before we get into all the ways you guys disagree, and there's a lot of them,

I want us to get on the same page about what we're actually talking about when we talk about crypto. Pomp, let's start with you. What is a cryptocurrency and why is it potentially so exciting? Yeah, I think that there's an important point to start with. And Mike and I actually may agree here, which is I think that there is Bitcoin and then there are crypto assets. And the reason why I separate those two things is

is because many of the crypto assets are trying to be replacements for commodities or equities, sometimes even bond-like structures. And so I think that you can replace some of these legacy things with these crypto assets or interchange them.

When it comes to Bitcoin, Bitcoin specifically is trying to be a digital currency. And at the end of the day, Bitcoin's success will ultimately be measured on whether it is able to fulfill kind of the mission of becoming a digital currency. But I think that that's probably at a high level the way to think about Bitcoin and then also its separation or difference from many of the other crypto assets that may be trying to accomplish some other goal. So in short, it's digital money.

Yeah, I think that's what the ultimate goal is. And we'll get into some kind of how you sequentially get there. But definitely that is the purpose of Bitcoin and what it ultimately hopes to achieve. Mike, how do you define what cryptocurrency is? So as Pomp alluded, I actually think we largely agree on this underlying dynamic that there is a distinction between Bitcoin and what is broadly referred to as the crypto universe.

Bitcoin was originated as a peer-to-peer, meaning direct transfer payment system. The objective being to allow transfers to occur on the internet without the use of a banking system, which is how all of our other transactions occur, right? So the Visa network is actually a network of banks that facilitates payments between bank accounts.

Bitcoin was designed with the objective of being able to do that online in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis with the very simple objective, hey, let's take the role of banks out of this transfer system. So that is distinct and different. And I have unique complaints and concerns about Bitcoin and what I believe is the misunderstanding of currency that underpins the Bitcoin system.

The second dynamic, crypto, more broadly, POMP referred to them as securities or as equities, et cetera. I think that's an accurate description. These are what I would describe as digitally native securities. And so most people think about an equity or a bond as something that you buy in your online brokerage account.

What you're actually buying and selling there are paper certificates, right? And they are paper certificates that are stored in various repositories around the world, depending on the exchange you're trading in. And I think that's one of the things that's so interesting about this is that you can simultaneously believe in the underlying dynamic that absolutely it makes sense we're moving to a digitally native world.

that has all sorts of interesting possibilities around it, and at the same time believe that the crypto world as it is being presented today is rife with fraud, desperately needs regulation, and is largely the province of hucksters.

You know, the most powerful argument that I've heard from crypto enthusiasts is that a new digital currency, whether it's Bitcoin or something else, can eliminate middlemen and also, and this is the key part, can make people freer, both in the U.S. and abroad, and can make people freer in unfree places where the government is collapsing, where there's hyperinflation in a place, let's say, like Venezuela, where

So, Pomp, can you give us some specific real-world examples that take this out of the theoretical and make that argument real? Yeah. So there's a whole bunch of them. Maybe what I'll do is I'll separate out into two different buckets. The first one is if you look at the problem globally of the current central bank-based monetary system –

there is a variable monetary policy. And that variable monetary policy simply means that given market conditions, they choose to change their mind or change their strategy in response. And so over the last two years is a pretty good example where we have seen the Federal Reserve

aggressively pursue loose monetary policies, including dropping interest rates to 0%, and alongside elected officials pursuing incredible quantitative easing, fiscal policy, etc. Over the last eight months in the United States, they basically have reversed course, and they have decided to now pursue higher interest rates and quantitative tightening. And so if you look at just over a two-year period, it's very hard to plan a business or to plan an investment portfolio. You

You essentially are incentivized to be more short-term oriented because you have to navigate various market cycles, not because the market itself is changing, but because the central bank is deciding to change their strategy.

And so I think that Bitcoin having a programmatic monetary policy has a very specific value proposition. If you simply want to say to yourself, I want a neutral monetary policy that is not politicized, that will not change based on market conditions, then Bitcoin ends up being attractive and it allows you to plan your business or your investment program.

And if you were to look over the last decade, Bitcoin's monetary policy is the only monetary policy that has done what it said it was going to do and also has remained unchanged through good times, bad times, geopolitical uncertainty, etc.,

So that's the first bucket. The second bucket comes down to this idea of resistance to seizure, resistance to censorship. And I think that they're probably the single most important recent case is if you look at the Russia-Ukraine crisis. If you were a Ukrainian citizen and one day you woke up and Russia had invaded your country and you wanted to take economic value with you,

Depending on where you had stored your economic value previously, you may or may not have been able to do that. So if your economic value was in physical real estate, it was really hard to drive out of your country with that real estate. You had to leave it behind. If your economic value was exclusively in businesses or other types of very hard-to-move assets, you could not simply leave with those assets.

But if your monetary value was stored in a digital currency like Bitcoin, you could leave the country and at any point access it via the blockchain.

And so I think that is from an inability for someone to seize it in your journey, someone to seize it at the border. At any point, Bitcoin ends up having that seizure resistance. From a censorship resistance standpoint, we saw the Ukrainian government literally put out a wallet address online and say anyone who wants to help send money.

More than $100 million was raised in Bitcoin and other crypto assets, which is more money than some countries gave to Ukraine. And so in that situation, you end up getting in a world where there is no middleman between an average citizen anywhere in the world with an internet connection and the Ukrainian government's wallet. And so it becomes this very unique way to have them actually access monetary value.

Okay. So Mike, I'm saying two things as I hear it. One, Bitcoin fundamentally is more reliable than the dollar, especially in terms of future planning, because it doesn't rely on the fickleness of Fed policy and the whims of people in the White House and on Capitol Hill. Second,

This technology or this new currency allows people under a regime like Putin's to hang on to their assets, but also allows people in a country like Ukraine to gain access to the monetary system. Can you respond to both of those points? Sure. Part of the issue is the idea that that facilitates planning.

presumes that the only volatility that exists in monetary systems is a function of the release schedule, effectively the supply of it by a central bank or by a government. And that's totally absurd because the underlying system actually has to consider all the uncertainty of everybody else that is involved in the process.

So I may choose to plan, and there's that famous line, man plans, God laughs. So I may choose to plan, but if somebody else has chosen to lever themselves up and take a large significant bet on future appreciation in the Bitcoin network, when they encounter challenges, Bitcoin prices can collapse, which is exactly what we're seeing right now. So it doesn't facilitate planning in any form other than taking one of the parties and

And not really even the most important party, because as important as the Fed is, their actions are ultimately dwarfed by the behavior of all the other participants in the system of the dollar. Same thing happens in the Bitcoin world. The second component is that what Pomp is highlighting is an incredible edge case. So he's saying, isn't this wonderful? It allows you to escape.

And that's really not a very effective monetary policy, a system that encourages people to escape. I understand that it appeals to a libertarian fantasy, that it appeals to people who are, you know, viewing themselves as not trusting their government. But the simple reality is you couldn't leave the Ukraine in many situations, right? Ukraine has a population of 44 million people. A tiny fraction of them were able to pick up and go.

That's always going to be the case. And so to decide that you're going to build a monetary policy around that extreme edge case

is ultimately quite unproductive to the general functioning of an economic system. Pum, do you want to respond to that? Yeah, the first thing I would say is, in Mike's first example, you know, this highlights a fundamental difference that we have both in understanding of economic systems, but also in Bitcoin, is that in the legacy financial system, you not only have to, you know, prepare for and evaluate other market participants, as Mike pointed out, but

But you also have to underwrite what is the difference in Fed policy? What is the difference in monetary policy? In the Bitcoin system, you do not have to do that. Even though price, which frankly is the exchange price that people are willing to trade Bitcoin for dollars, has crashed…

What we have seen is that the Bitcoin monetary policy has not changed. It is completely immune and ignorant of any changes to demand, either positive or negative for Bitcoin. It is completely immune and ignorant to any sort of macroeconomic changes. The monetary policy, not the price, but the monetary policy remains constant.

And ultimately, as we mentioned in the beginning, Bitcoin's aspiration is to continue to gain adoption and become a truly digital currency. One of the arguments, if I was in Mike's seat, that I would make is that today it serves as a store of value in the eyes of many holders. It serves as a medium of exchange in probably a smaller subset, but still a relatively large number of people.

But the part where it has not yet quite reached its full potential is as a unit of account. But if and when, and I believe it will be when, Bitcoin does do that, what you will see is exactly what you see in the US dollar system. The average citizen does not think of the dollar as volatile.

It's simply because they get paid in dollars. They save in dollars. They buy assets in dollars. Well, we think of it as volatile right now, but yes, generally not. Well, in terms of the actual dollar, what people think of is they think the price of goods may be volatile. The price of gasoline has gone up. The price of a loaf of bread has gone up. But they don't think of the dollar as a actual moving number. Mm-hmm.

And so what ends up happening is that as more and more people who tend to be younger continue into positions of power and influence and entrepreneurship and running organizations, what you are going to see is that you're going to get this kind of sandwich adoption. Young people are going to rise into these positions at the same time that you now are seeing nation states talk about neutral monetary policy or neutral monetary networks.

And what they ultimately are talking about is there are 12 people at the FOMC that determine the cost of capital and determine the monetary policy for billions of people around the world. That is a system that will not continue to operate successfully for billions of people around the world. And so an entire new generation believes and trusts algorithms over humans.

We trust them to tell us where to go when we use Google Maps. We trust them with the information that we receive when we Google things. We trust them to tell us what to listen to in terms of recommendations. Everything in our life is algorithmically based. And now what they are saying is, why is it that two minutes before the FOMC press conference, nobody knows what they're going to do? There's trillions of dollars being wagered

on what the cost of capital is going to be. That is an insane idea. And Bitcoin is the only monetary policy that does not have that mechanism involved. Just to respond here to what Pomp is saying, I've been thinking recently about how the dollar can be the currency of the future when it feels so volatile and susceptible to excessive spending, to Fed policy.

And if you stand back, at least in this moment, and maybe you'll disagree, Mike, and you look at the state of our currency, it feels anything but secure. And it's constantly being diluted by elected leaders who are printing more and more money. So with people seeing what's happening, seeing the price of goods go up, you know, as an Uber driver told me the other day, crying when he fills up his gas tank, and in general, people sort of untethering from...

institutions and losing their faith in those institutions, it's kind of easy to look at that picture and say, there has to be a better way. And maybe Bitcoin and crypto is it. So I think that's one of the challenges, right, of the skeptical position is that it's presented as defending the existing system and saying it's perfect. It's not by any stretch of the imagination. But I would highlight very clearly that your concern about filling up a gas tank is

If you had been paid in Bitcoin over the past year, that gas price would be dramatically higher today in Bitcoin terms than it would be in dollar terms. For that matter, the U.S. dollar has appreciated broadly against almost every other currency on the planet over the past several months and actually over the past two years. So what you're experiencing in terms of volatility and uncertainty is something that's being broadly held around the world. It's not unique to the United States, nor is it unique to the dollar.

The second component is, while I agree with actually POM's concern that the 12 unelected officials are choosing to largely set the price of the dollar or set the price of money,

Part of the reason why they're doing that is actually to try to smooth those dynamics. They're not behaving in a truly capricious fashion. They don't come in and say, hey, it's Tuesday, let's hike interest rates. And then it's Wednesday, let's cut interest rates. They're actually working to try to modulate the system, both providing additional liquidity when things have to change. Right.

So when an event like COVID occurs, whether you disagree with the underlying policy or not, once you've decided to shut down the economy, you do have to figure out a way to get money to people.

Under a Bitcoin system, that money wouldn't exist. We'd simply see prices of everything collapse. Those who were in business providing that would find themselves with inventory that was suddenly worthless and they'd go out of business to an extraordinary degree, far greater than what we saw. That type of disruption is what the Federal Reserve is trying to counter.

Are they perfect at their jobs or are they even close to being good at their jobs is debatable. But it is a system designed to try to smooth. And that's what you hear them refer to when they say our objective is price stability. They don't want you to have to think about the dollar. That's what they're talking about. And by and large, what Pomp is highlighting is that they've largely succeeded over the past generation. Now, whether that continues to be true going forward, absolutely up for debate. And the overactive market

dynamics of both fiscal policy and monetary policy, the two being separate animals, is certainly something that we can talk about and that I offer plenty of criticisms for as well.

But there's no indication that Bitcoin would have in any way solved that problem over the last two years. Okay, Mike, when you encounter a crypto enthusiast in the wild or on the screen right now with Pomp, in the simplest terms, what are the top two or three things that they believe that you think are just woefully incorrect?

What's the heart of it? Yeah, so I think that there's two separate components that I would highlight. One is that they think some variant of if we simply have an algorithm that solves for the release of money. In other words, if we do this on a fixed release schedule so that there is an ultimately fixed quantity, that it solves so many problems.

And unfortunately, because I've spent so much of my career in financial markets, I can tell you with individual evidence the number of times I've seen algorithms blow up. For example, the global financial crisis, the dynamics around the housing blow up was actually tied to choices that were made in the algorithmic pricing of MBS securities.

That was a mistake. The blow up in Volmageddon, the pricing of the XIV inverse ETF, the choice of how that was presented to the public was an algorithmic error. Many of the mistakes that you see in financial markets are precisely a function of an algorithm that was presumed to be correct.

And no less dependent upon the foibles of individuals than the Federal Reserve policy, because ultimately somebody chose that release schedule and chose to incorporate it. There was no attempt to optimize it. There was no attempt to say, hey, this is actually the correct release schedule. It just happens to be a fixed release schedule. In monetary policy, there's something referred to as the Taylor rule.

which is a relatively arbitrary attempt to do exactly what Pomp is describing, algorithmically respond to the forces of inflation, etc. It simply does not work. It is way too complex and dynamic of a system to rely on algorithms. And I think that's actually one of the things that is most frustrating and frightening, is when you listen to what Pomp is saying, he's saying, trust the algorithm. Why would you do that? How is that a possible improvement?

Pomp, are you saying trust the algorithm? I think there's two components to Mike's argument that I disagree with. The first is over the last two years, the U.S. dollar has appreciated against every currency other than Bitcoin. The difference between somebody who has 100 percent of their economic value stored in the dollar for somebody who had 100 percent of their economic value stored in Bitcoin is that the dollar based person, their entire life got exponentially more expensive.

I'm sorry, before we move on, I just I actually do have to interject. When you say exponentially, I don't think you know what that word actually means, because inflation has not been exponential in nature. We have not seen a base 10 or a base five increase. We've seen roughly a 20 percent increase in the cost of most of the goods that we're purchasing. Inflation in the United States right now is probably 20 percent. And that's just over the last 12 months.

and it continues to accelerate. What are you basing that on? I'm sorry, Anthony. When you say inflation is 20%, are you saying that the government is simply just lying to us? The government says it's what, around 8% or 9%? They say it's around 8.6%. Do you believe that number? Yes. Okay. Well, I have very simple ways to show you that that number is not correct. We can start with the fact that shelter at the moment is somewhere between 5% or 6% over the last couple of months.

the average cost of real estate in America is up 20%. The average cost of rent in the United States is up 15% over the last 12 months. And so I understand that they are substituting, they are manipulating the data, but there is not a single person who runs a business or who goes to the grocery store or who lives in this country that actually believes inflation is 8.6%. But guys, whether it's 8.6% or 15% or 16%,

How does that affect the question of whether or not the person who's invested in dollars would be better off than the person invested in Bitcoin? Well, what ends up happening here is that the person who has all of their money in dollars, their entire life got more expensive. You can argue how expensive it got, but it got more expensive. The cost of goods and services around them went up. But that same person, if they had 100% of their wealth in Bitcoin, their entire life got cheaper.

And that ultimately is a very key thing. If you could go back to January 1st of 2020 before the pandemic and you had to pick store your wealth in dollars or Bitcoin,

You would have chose Bitcoin because everything around you got cheaper. Bitcoin is up 300% in dollar terms. The dollar has crashed against Bitcoin since the start of the pandemic. The second thing that Mike mentioned is this idea that somehow an algorithm is going to respond to economic data. And this is a mental framework that, in my opinion, is very pervasive in the legacy financial system.

But it's ultimately bankrupt when you start to think about how the Bitcoin algorithm works. The Bitcoin algorithm does not care what inflation is. It does not care what economic productivity is. It does not care about geopolitics. It does not care about domestic politics. It does not care about anything. It is not a complex algorithm as the mortgage-backed securities or some of the other things that Mike mentioned. It does not respond to anything.

And that's the key difference, is that if the Bitcoin algorithm was to say, we are going to ingest all of these economic data points and try to predict what the cost of money should be in the future, I would actually agree with Mike. I would say that that is too complex. Humans cannot do that well, and neither could some complex algorithm.

Instead, what the Bitcoin algorithm is saying is that we do not care what the world is doing. We simply are going to continue to have a single monetary policy that does not change regardless of what happens in the world.

And therefore, what this does is it diabolically opposes two systems. One system, the monetary policy, constantly is in reaction to the economic environment. The second one is that the world has to end up changing, evolving to the monetary policy. And if I, as an individual, want to store my economic value, I do not want a variable monetary policy.

I simply want a monetary policy that I know what it's going to be 10 years from now, where I don't have to wait for a man to walk up to a lectern and literally at a press conference reveal the cost of money five minutes. I want certainty in a world of undisciplined monetary and fiscal policy. That's why I want Bitcoin.

Okay, Mike, you manage a lot of people's money. You've said many, many times that when Pomp has said to you, you know, people should at least hedge with 1% of their assets in crypto or Bitcoin. And you've said, absolutely not. Why would you do that? It's going to be worth 0%. What do you say to Pomp's argument that the person who at the beginning of the pandemic would have invested all of their assets in Bitcoin would actually be better off than the person who's in dollars?

Well, I think, unfortunately, what Pomp is describing is that a speculative asset appreciated, right? If I had chosen to put all of my wealth into Microsoft, I'd also be better off than I would have been had I chosen to hold dollars. If I had chosen to put my money into, you know, Cathie Wood's ARK investment vehicles, I wouldn't be better off, right? So to pick out an asset that has appreciated over that time period...

It doesn't make any sense to me, right? You can always pick in hindsight. And this is one of the favorite tools of those who are pitching Bitcoin. And if you remember in the initial debate, my whole point was price doesn't actually tell you the answer, right? The same analysis if done from November of 2021, a person who invested 100%, which is what Pomp just said,

would be infinitely worse off. And actually, the reason that I entered into the initial debate with Pomp, et cetera, was not because I object to somebody choosing to put a 1% allocation into Bitcoin, but instead they're being guided to put 100% and being told they'd be much better off if they did that. I said that everything around them got cheaper.

I didn't say that they should go and do that. What I said was everything around them got cheaper, first of all. Second of all is that while you may claim that Bitcoin is a speculative asset, the US dollar as a speculative asset crashed against the only monetary policy that did not change. What monetary policy has been more reliable than Bitcoin's monetary policy over the last decade?

Again, I am not actually advocating for it, but there's not a meaningful difference in terms of the dynamics of the monetary policy of a Bitcoin and the monetary policy of any type of product that has a fixed release schedule. So we've not seen a significant change in the output, dramatically significant change in the output of oil. We haven't seen a dramatically significant change in the output of gold.

Right. So underlying all of those is the relative is a relative similarity in terms of a fixed supply or relatively fixed supply release schedule. So it really doesn't matter. I mean, the shares of Microsoft have actually shrunk over the past two years. Right. That's an even better release schedule than Bitcoin. Mike, one of the things that you and other critics have pointed out is that there is an aspect to the whole crypto space that is fundamentally self-serving to the early adopters.

You argue that one of the reasons that people who've gotten in early have gotten so rich off of these things isn't because the cryptocurrencies have some inherent value or they've proven super useful in the world, but simply as more and more people have gotten into the market, the assets go up in value. But that that rising value doesn't really reflect anything except the fact that more people are getting in. Can you break that down a little bit more for me?

Sure. So the underlying feature that we're referring to has two components to it, right? One is that Bitcoin has a truly fixed release schedule, meaning ultimately there will only be 21 million Bitcoin. Ever? Ever, right? Roughly 19 million of those have already been mined and created. And so that leaves the remaining fraction of the world to fight over, give or take, 2 million Bitcoin that will be released over the next roughly 120 years through 2140 is the release schedule.

Right. That's a degree of wealth concentration that is radically higher than anywhere else in the world, any monetary system in the world. Right. And so part of what has transpired over the last two years is as investment funds have flowed in, attracted by both a combination of rising price, which is infinitely attractive to somebody who's speculating on assets. Right. We all want to have things that go up in price. Right.

But as that money has come in, you've actually perversely seen the release schedule or the effective release schedule changed because things like miners, many publicly traded miners or individuals like Michael Saylor at MicroStrategy have chosen to purchase and effectively withhold from the market a sizable fraction of the Bitcoin itself. Now, again, remember, Bitcoin was created as a peer-to-peer payment network.

The objective was that this would serve as a tool that facilitated transactions between end users. And unfortunately, the statistics on that suggest that there's been no progress whatsoever in terms of adoption from that standpoint. We have roughly $400 million of retail transactions and transactions, effectively you walking into a subway and buying a sandwich, that occur on the Bitcoin network in any given month. That number is unchanged from two years ago.

What the primary use of Bitcoin has been is as a speculative vehicle. And remember, when people withhold, when they hodl, right, that means that the next person that's buying in has to, by definition, drive the price up. And that's been the objective of the space, right? It attracts capital. It attracts interest. But it ultimately proves devastating for those who are chasing, you know, driven by a traditional, you know, brainstem response of, oh, my gosh, I could get left behind.

Pump, what do you say to that? I'm actually surprised Mike is making this argument because the data like emphatically refutes this argument. Last year, the Bitcoin on-chain transaction volume, not on exchanges, not, you know, kind of off of the blockchain, but actually on the blockchain, did more annual transaction volume than MasterCard.

And so when you look at that, there's plenty of people who will say, well, what are people using it for? Why is that happening? But when you put it into kind of context, people are using Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, regardless of whether you want to make a moral argument or some sort of other argument as to, oh, it doesn't count if they didn't spend the money at Starbucks. They're obviously using it as a medium of exchange. The second thing I would say is that the U.S. dollar system

has to be evaluated in comparison to Bitcoin in two ways. Who holds the wealth today? And what is the generational trend? And what ends up happening is that the US dollar system is more heavily concentrated, meaning that the top 1% or 0.1% hold more assets of wealth than the top 1% or 0.1% of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

The second thing is that the US dollar system and the legacy financial market is becoming more and more concentrated in the top 1% or the top 0.1%. So you actually have the richer getting richer, and they're taking more of the assets.

In the Bitcoin system, you have the exact opposite, is that it's actually becoming more distributed. And so now what we have seen is that the US dollar system or the legacy system is already more concentrated than the Bitcoin system. And the trend is that it is getting more concentrated over time.

Versus a Bitcoin system that is trending the opposite direction. It's becoming more distributed. If Bitcoiners were getting rich, then they would go and they would sell the Bitcoin, right? That would be the idea is to get more dollars. What you see is that actually people are adopting Bitcoin and they're holding it because what they realize is that Bitcoin is also the only currency in the world that they can't devalue.

Every other fiat currency in the world, regardless of how quickly or slowly they do it, has to be devalued in order to service the debt that has been taken on by these countries.

And Bitcoin ends up being resistant to that problem. Well, one critique that I've read from Mike before along these lines, and maybe I'll speak for myself here, is when you go on somewhere like Twitter, there is a tremendous amount of froth and conversation and excitement stoked by people who, if you are a random person sort of stumbling into a network that uses a particular kind of emojis or whatever, you

you might not know that those people actually stand to benefit to a huge degree when other people buy into Bitcoin. I didn't know that when I started seeing those people having conversations, and I'm pretty sophisticated.

I think what Mike is maybe criticizing is that there's like a level of maybe unwitting predation that can happen in the world of crypto. But the point is that the same thing is we're comparing currencies here. And so Mike does not disclose when he talks about the US dollar system that he owns dollars. And if he is going to criticize the Bitcoin community, then we turn the criticism right back. And the second thing is that the running joke is how do you know somebody owns Bitcoin? They'll tell you.

That's all they talk about is Bitcoin. And so naturally what ends up occurring here is that there are these – it's like grasping at water. Many of these critiques, they sound ridiculous when you simply flip them back and hold up a mirror to the legacy financial system.

And so if we're going to debate whether people are disclosing their ownership of Bitcoin or not, fine. But that ultimately gets away from the real reason why we're here, which is that Bitcoin continues to be the only monetary policy that does not change. It continues to be globally adopted. And the craziest part about it is that people in the Western world, while we're debating about price or about various metrics and our fancy on-chain dashboards, etc.,

countries that they need it most, that's where true adoption is happening. Nigeria is the second highest adoption of Bitcoin. On top of that, we now have senators who are putting forth legislation and saying, we need this here. We have governors who are saying, we want our state to be the capital of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Okay, after a short break, does the recent crypto crash spell the end of Pomp's optimism? Has the market actually made Mike's point for him? Or is this something different, more like the dot-com boom and bust? More with that after the break. Stay with us.

Let's talk about what's going on in the crypto world right now over the past few months and especially the past few weeks. Basically, as far as I can tell, it's been kind of a bloodbath and it seems to be getting worse. Some coins have completely failed. Bitcoin is down over 50%. This massive crypto platform called Celsius essentially shut down to the point where they said to people, sorry, you just can't withdraw your money right now.

And this doesn't seem to just be a dip in the language of the Bitcoin world. Coinbase just laid off 18% of their full-time employees as they prepare for a crypto winter. Pomp, obviously, you are a hardcore Bitcoin maximalist, an enthusiast of crypto.

What have these past few months been like for you? What are you hearing in your world? And has any of this thrown cold water on your worldview? So in an explanation of what's happened, I actually think Mike and I may agree here, but we'll see. I think that we are basically in a drawn out liquidity crisis across financial markets. So, of course, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are caught in that. But so are stocks and bonds and real estate commodities as well, for the most part.

And really, it's because the Federal Reserve decided to change course. They need to get inflation under control. They've started to raise interest rates and conduct quantitative tightening. And naturally, in good times, if Bitcoin in dollar terms goes up the most, you would expect it in bad times to go down the most as well. And I think that we've seen that compared to stocks, bonds, real estate, etc.,

In terms of the actual companies in the space, I think there's two things to remember. The first is that a lot of these companies are early stage to growth stage type companies. And so they are trying to build things from scratch. It's a difficult task. Some of them will be wildly successful. Others of them will never get off the ground and everything in between. And so I think we're seeing some of that play out across the industry. And

As those companies that end up building something of value and size, there are good and bad times. And so at the same time that Coinbase and other companies in the space are having to lay off 10 to 20 percent of their employee base, I think we're seeing this in other companies outside of the crypto industry as well.

And so it is important to note that the crypto industry is going through this, but I think it is much more kind of indicative of the macro environment than it is something that is exclusively crypto related. But Pump, when you say that this is happening because of inflation and the bear market and the stock market and broader global economic situation, isn't the huge draw of this space supposed to be that it is not susceptible to

to the movements of the stock market or the price of the dollar? Like, doesn't this drop not refute sort of a primary argument you've been making about why you should put your money into crypto instead of into index funds or saving accounts or the dollar?

What we have to do is if you zoom out from what I would consider a normal inflation environment, which was kind of before the pandemic to today, Bitcoin has drastically outperformed stocks, bonds, real estate, commodities, etc. It's up 300% since January 1st of 2020. And so when you look at that, I think that there is a strong argument that Bitcoin has actually done its job in

in that environment. I think that you have to be able to separate out kind of the non-correlation of Bitcoin over long periods of time with the short-term rises in correlation in these liquidity crisis type moments. And a great historical example is gold during the 2008 financial crisis, where it went down about 30% over the summer of 2008. The government stepped in, created stimulus, and then it rallied and hit an all-time high in 2011.

And so I think that's kind of what we're seeing play out here. I'm not sure how much of that Mike agrees with, but I think that there's probably more common ground there than just on the Bitcoin debate itself. Mike, what do you say to what Pomp is arguing? So first of all, I think that there is, again, an area of commonality, right? Speculative assets fall in periods of liquidity crises.

And that is exactly what we're seeing. Pomp referred to it as it's the thing that went up most. Therefore, you should expect it to be the thing that goes down the most, right? Which is the exact opposite of a protection of wealth. If anything, he's highlighting the dynamics exactly why you would want to have the dollar as the vehicle of your savings, because in a time of crisis, it appreciates under the current system. Now, whether Bitcoin proves to be a good asset coming out of that once ultimately the Federal Reserve responds...

We won't know, right? We'll discover that afterwards. And it may be the best performing. It may not be the best performing. It may actually go nowhere. One of the really critical things that is frustrating about this type of dialogue is if we look at the behavior of Bitcoin and the experience of the average Bitcoiner, right? The network in total is now in negative holdings, right? Or a negative value. It is people have paid more for the Bitcoin than it is currently trading for on average.

Now, that's an extraordinary thing when you consider that there's people who bought Bitcoin for fractions of a penny. They're effectively sitting on giant paper gains, and the average experience is negative. That's really not a very good store value. You certainly were not made better if you chose to allocate 100% of your assets to Bitcoin or any other crypto in the last two years. To what Mike is saying, Pop, if you were someone who watched the Super Bowl and you were like, OK, I'm going to give this crypto thing a shot, right?

Right now, you've got to be pretty pissed off or depressed because that money has lost more than half of its value. And if you're one of those people, I think the big question you're asking yourself is, was I hoodwinked? Pump, what do you say to that disappointed or angry investor right now?

Yeah, look, I think that it's very similar. Kind of if you take the mirror and you put it back against the legacy system, since the start of the pandemic, the dollar is negative, and Bitcoin is positive. And so

And so from that standpoint, I think we all agree. In terms of the kind of more shorter term basis, Mike is correct that Bitcoin today, which is something that changed over the last couple of days, is trading below its on-chain cost basis. It's about $22,000 or so when I looked this morning, and the on-chain cost base is about $23,500.

These moments happen about every four years, and they usually mark somewhere near the bottom of these bear markets or price action.

Now, the thing that I will say is that what we can see on chain is that the average Bitcoiner does not just simply take a slug of money, buy Bitcoin and walk away and hope that it goes up. Instead, what actually ends up happening and what is the common knowledge and kind of information shared in the Bitcoin community is to dollar cost average and to simply as you get paid your paycheck to take whatever percentage and continue to acquire Bitcoin. And

And the reason is because Mike's critiques of Bitcoin are not of Bitcoin itself. In most cases, it is of the dollar exchange value of Bitcoin.

But the Bitcoiner mentality is whether I was buying gold and simply holding the gold. If I was buying real estate and holding the real estate, I am buying Bitcoin and I'm holding the Bitcoin. Now, can the price of the real estate that I hold be up or down on any one day? Sure. Same with gold. Same with Bitcoin.

But over a long period of time, things like real estate or Bitcoin end up appreciating against a dollar that constantly has to be devalued. And so when you go ahead and you look, what we have seen in past market cycles, this dynamic that Mike is describing, has happened over and over and over again.

And, again, if I was sitting in Mike's seat, the critique I would have is that actually the reason why price goes up and then comes down is because in a way, Bitcoin becomes overheated. There is some sort of price crash. Some portion of people are churned out. But there is always a net gain of new holders who end up holding that asset for very, very long periods of time.

And what is very unique about Bitcoin is that Bitcoin is actually ushering in a new era in America and globally. It's an era of financial education.

And Bitcoin has done more to financially educate people in the United States than probably any other asset, any other organization, because it's forcing people to understand simple ideas like what is money, but also understand how does the Federal Reserve work? How does inflation work? And in today's day and age, it's pretty important.

So when you say a new era, I think about an older era that I think is actually analogous to this one. I think one way of seeing what's happening in crypto right now is to compare it to the dot-com collapse back in the late 90s, early 2000s. Millions and millions of people invested in these dot-com companies only to see their wealth wiped out spectacularly. But it's not like that bursting of that bubble was the end of the internet.

The particular bets people made obviously might not have panned out, but the internet did indeed, as futurists promised, become the technology of the future, one that we now take for granted. I wonder if you guys think something like that is happening right now.

So hopefully I made clear and alluded to this at the start that in any affinity fraud, there is an element of truth, right? The dollar is collapsing. Over the past 100 years, it's lost 97% of its value. Well, that's somewhat true, although today we can buy things that we couldn't buy 100 years ago.

And our purchasing basket is really not very focused on things like food and fuel as they would have been 100 years ago. Although when those rear their head and we see these types of increases, we're suddenly made aware that, hey, we're pushed back towards subsistence, right? And that stresses everybody out.

I don't think there's any question that we are moving towards digitally native securities, that we're moving away from those stock certificates and bond certificates. And there's a number of fascinating innovations that can occur once we start to do that. I think that there are institutional barriers that prevent that from occurring. But one of them, I think, is the type of silly speculation around something like Bitcoin.

And the simple reality is that Bitcoin is eminently replaceable. Any government could choose to offer an equivalent to Bitcoin. It can use the exact same release schedule. It could use a slightly different release schedule. Those types of innovations are almost certain to occur. They're what we refer to as central bank digital currencies. Now, the degree of control, privacy, et cetera, that any one individual country chooses to incorporate in their particular product

That is ultimately up to them. And it's one of the things that I'm working very hard with elected representatives and others who are involved in the space to try to make sure that the US chooses a digital currency process that preserves the features of privacy and anonymity for small scale transactions that allow us to function as an economy that looks largely like what we've experienced, just with greater utility and convenience. But there's no reason that Bitcoin has to be that.

So you're saying many of the cryptocurrencies that are out there right now are kind of like the equivalent to Beanie Babies. I'm sure you guys remember people buying Princess Diana for like $50,000. But that doesn't mean that the possibility of there being native digital currencies isn't real and isn't something that is going to happen and change the way that we think about money. Is that right, Mike? Yeah.

100%. The thing that was so attractive to me when I first learned about this technology was the idea that it could make an end run around a tyrannical government. But I feel like in the past year, we've seen the limitations of that promise. I think about the truckers in Toronto who weren't just barred from their traditional banks but couldn't access their cryptocurrency. As much as

Bitcoin or crypto enthusiasts want to believe in this version of the future, hard power still matters. And sometimes I feel like the world of crypto feels like it seems they seem to believe that we live in a world where borders and material reality and the powers of government and armies don't really matter. Pomp, what do you say to that?

So I would say a couple of things. The first being Mike's comment earlier about a government being able to replicate this. I think while you could replicate the finite supply or the release schedule, the thing that you can't replicate is the neutrality and the decentralization, the fact that no one controls it and no one is able to change it unilaterally. So I think features can be replicated, but a large portion of the value proposition is that neutrality and decentralization.

which ultimately, Barry, gets at, I think, your point here. And if you actually were to look at the Bitcoin ecosystem, I think what you'll find is that there is a divergence of infrastructure. Some of it is centralized and some of it is decentralized.

Your point of the centralized entities being able to be shut down or pressured or kind of regulated, 100% agree with. And I think that we are in some situations seeing the downsides of that. But you're trading off kind of security and decentralization with the convenience of a user interface that people are used to and they're able to easily go ahead and be onboarded.

At the same time, I think that there are a number of platforms, they tend to be open source software, that are decentralized, that are resistant to that.

And so if you look at, you know, whether it's the Canadian truckers or other situations, there are some services that are used which do not fulfill kind of that full decentralization, high security and insulation from a nation state attack. And naturally, what happens to those in those situations is exactly what you would expect. The nation state does matter. The military does matter. Right. But right. But not to sound like too much of a stoner here, but like, why does why is the dollar the dollar?

The dollar is the dollar because America is the world's superpower and because we have the largest standing army in the world and nuclear weapons to back it up. What is the Bitcoin equivalent of that?

It's that there is no country behind it. It's fully neutral. And the single thing that I think people need to understand about security of Bitcoin is that in the legacy analog world, military offensive power led to the ability to control the global reserve currency. I came to your country. I invaded. I took over. I now am able to implement the global reserve currency. That's what the United States did. That's what every global currency before them did.

In the digital world, the most powerful organization is actually the one with the best defense, not offense. And Bitcoin is the single most secure computer network in the world. It is backed by the most valuable commodity in the world, which is the computing power.

And so ultimately, the thing that we are transitioning between is this analog-based world to this digital world. I agree with Mike. Heading towards digital securities, et cetera, there will have to be regulation. There's social securities, all that type of stuff. But when it comes to a currency that is not backed by a country, the only thing that allows Bitcoin to continue to survive is that it is the single most secure computer network in the world. And no nation state, no individual actor, no corporation can hack it.

And I believe that that will only continue to expand and accelerate, and it'll continue to be that strongest computer network in the world. Mike, when you wrote for Common Sense recently, you pointed out the sort of sudden desire on the part of some people in the crypto world for fiat currency government agencies to help out the crypto world. I think it was where you were writing about Kraken, you know, and you basically said there are no atheists in foxholes. Say more about that. I'd love for you to respond to what Pomp was just arguing.

Yeah, I mean, we're already seeing that, right? We're seeing basically cries for regulation and bailouts, etc., right? So, look, there are no atheists in foxholes. We all know that. The dynamics of everything that Pomp is referring to is...

true in the most limited sense in the word, right? Which is, yes, the Bitcoin network is the single most secure computer network, but there's only one of it, right? And it actually is remarkably fragile for a very simple reason.

The Bitcoin algorithm has a very particular computing component to it, right? All of the computers that currently mine Bitcoin employ what are called ASICs, application-specific integrated circuits that are designed to do a particular type of math problem, an elliptical math problem, effectively solving points along a curve. It's totally random in its underlying construction, right? That are designed for that. When you mentioned earlier Beanie Babies,

That Beanie Baby craziness gave way to what's called a positive bubble.

It encouraged investment in things like eBay, which emerged as a trading network for Beanie Babies, but it was a general purpose technology. The dot-com cycle gave rise to general purpose telecommunications infrastructure investments that allow us to broadly have broadband, internet, and all the computing power that we have today. Most of the fiber that was laid, that exists around the world, was actually laid in that time period from roughly 1996 to give or take 2001. We've seen very little investment since that point.

So the problem with the Bitcoin dynamic is that if we actually were to choose not to go with the particular Bitcoin math, that network is actually totally useless. So it is secure, but it's remarkably fragile. I want to stay on the question of sort of material reality for a minute, okay? Because there's a kind of utopianism that I see in the world of crypto enthusiasts that seems to deny that reality, right?

There, you know, Balaji Sreenivasan, one of the biggest boosters of this technology, brilliant guy, put it this way in 2015. The future, he wrote, is nationalists versus technologists. You have your elections and we have our search engines. Vote how you want. We will move where we like. In other words, it's kind of like the land versus the cloud.

But here's the thing. You cannot escape land. You cannot escape the fact that we live in nation states and we're not floating in goo like people in the Matrix. And politics and where you live, where you have the luck or the curse to be born really matters. And I don't see the crypto world grappling with that reality.

I agree with you that where you live matters and all of that. But what you're finding is that there are politicians who are starting to understand this and they're putting a flag on the ground and they're saying, you are welcome here. We want to incentivize this investment. You see this with certain states. I think it's like Kentucky offering tax incentives for people who come mine Bitcoin there. You see the state of Texas saying they want to be the capital of Bitcoin. You see the city of Miami saying they want to be

a large player. You see the state of New York or New York City, at least the mayor saying that they want to be the capital. You see El Salvador putting a flag on the ground. And so I think, you know, every technology ends up being a little bit different, but naturally you get politicians and geographies. Some people are early to the game. Some people are late to the game and incentives matter. And so I think that, you know, the world in general, not just in Bitcoin and crypto, but in general has been reminded leadership matters.

And I think that now we're going to find that where you end up living is going to matter as well. There's a part of me that's really rooting for Bitcoin or something like it. I think a lot of people in this space are really brilliant and audacious and bold. And I'm an optimist. I think that our future can be different and better than our past. But...

In many ways, I kind of see the bet for crypto as a bet against America because it's kind of saying the dollar's dead or at the very least we can't rely on the dollar. And we're imagining a world in a way what's implicit in this is that America is in decline. The dollar is in decline and we have to find a kind of lifeboat.

I'd love for you each to respond to that idea. Mike, do you think that a bet for crypto is in a way an implicit bet against America? Well, unfortunately, as you quoted from Balaji's 2015, right, that was part of the article that I had written for you and highlighted. And that is actually the core of my concern, because what we've created is

is a system that is unfortunately a byproduct of the inability to escape, right? The unique feature of the new world, as we refer to North America or even Australia, you know, et cetera, was that it opened up geographies that allowed people to escape from tyrannical governments. Roughly a third of the adult male population left Scandinavia.

Australia has an extraordinarily large population of Greek immigrants precisely because they were escaping the civil war in Greece and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Those types of migrations are incredibly difficult in a world in which we've effectively run out of land.

And so what we have, unfortunately, is a world in which the exit voice doesn't exist in geography. And what my good friend Josh Wolfe refers to as meat space, that physical body, that physical embodiment, is something that the vast majority of people need to have. What true elitists like Balaji and to a certain extent Pomp have is a belief that they should be able to just pick up and leave.

And unfortunately, that leaves the rest of us without dedicated and involved leadership. That's no different than if you were looking at Europe in the 19th century or the 18th century and saying, oh, my gosh, somebody married somebody and now I've got new kings.

Right? Like, it's just not a good system. We actually need people to commit to what we have today and say, we're going to try to do better. And among those, the wealthiest and those who have benefited most from the current system should be committing the most. And unfortunately, they're stepping out on us.

Now, Pomp, obviously the people in the world of Bitcoin and crypto would say this is nonsense, right? There's nothing more elite than the world of American hedge funds and so on and so forth. What we're doing is we're giving poor people, minorities, people who have never been in markets, the opportunity to get incredibly wealthy. So what say you to Mike's accusation that in a way the Bitcoinists are the new elite and they're kind of betting on...

They're basically building the currency equivalent of a bunker in New Zealand and saying, peace out, America. Whatever's going to happen is going to happen to you, but we're protecting ourselves and our tribe. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty comical. I mean, I'll give you a great example. I literally was an infantry sergeant that went to war with an American flag on my shoulder. And

And there's no country I love more than America. And that's exactly why Bitcoin will end up being adopted here in America. That's why you see American businesses building American infrastructure for Bitcoin. And I think that the part that gets lost in this argument from the critics is that they actually don't build anything.

What they end up doing is they trade numbers on the screen. They trade money. And what ends up being true is that they are highly detached from the reality of an average American. If you look, 10% of the hash rate, which is the computing power that secures the Bitcoin network, is in the state of Texas alone. And ultimately, what we are finding is that from a job creation standpoint, the Bitcoin and crypto industry has created more jobs than almost any other sector in the American economy over the last five years.

tax receipts coming from this industry. In the American infrastructure bill, the politicians said, where can we go get more tax revenue? And they've tried to add more taxation to this industry.

And so what you end up finding is that Bitcoin is the most American technology that exists in this world. And when I say that, it sounds bombastic. But if you think about it, Bitcoin is software. Software is free speech. Bitcoin allows anyone in the world access. You do not need a bank account. You do not need a banker. You do not need any gatekeeper. It's a peer-to-peer system that allows you to participate in a financial system that is completely immune.

to the whims of any individual or any organization. And what ends up being the real facts is that the most marginalized groups in America are adopting this technology at a faster pace than they have adopted the legacy financial system. If you look at a percentage basis, people are blown away. The African-American community and many others, very, very high penetrations of this technology because ultimately,

Bitcoin brings the same ethos that America was built on.

to those individuals. And it allows them to have personal property rights. It allows them to have free speech. And what we are going to watch is that there is a complete revolution in America to bring back many of those same ideas, but to do it here in America. And America is the leader in Bitcoin and will remain the leader in Bitcoin. And so this fantasy that the critics have that people are leaving America

is nonsense because every single data point on economic growth, investment, et cetera, shows that America is still the leader. And I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. No matter what you believe about the future of crypto markets, people around the country are really, really struggling financially right now to pay their bills, to fill their gas tank, to buy baby formula.

And they're looking for help and they're looking for advice. You are both in the world of managing dollars, managing cryptocurrency. What do you advise people listening right now who are struggling and wonder what are two or three things that they should be doing in this moment? Pomp, let's start with you.

I think my biggest thing, unfortunately, is to educate yourself. It's probably the single biggest gap that I recognize across good and bad times is that we don't do a great job of financial education in this country. And so I think that's the first thing that people should do.

The second thing I actually think is if you are in a bad financial position, usually the single best thing that you can do after you educate yourself is to try to get the highest earning potential possible. So it's usually easier, for example, to go make an extra $500 a month than it is to cut $500 of expenses or generate $500 from an investment. And so I think that getting yourself in a good position there ends up being pretty important.

And then the last thing I think is really understanding what your time horizon from an investment standpoint is. And, you know, I don't advocate for people to put actually very high percentages of their assets. And if you think about it, whether you are holding Bitcoin, you're holding real estate, commodities or stocks.

everything will eventually go up over a long enough period of time if they are priced in dollars because the dollar is guaranteed to be devalued or the United States will default on its debt. And so I think the big message is do not try to save your way to financial security. Savers are losers in today's financial environment and you have to be an investor. Where you invest, that's up to you in terms of your risk profile because you have to be an investor, not a saver. So I mean –

There's so many components there. First of all, of course, Pomp leads with the always intelligent, you should educate yourself, right? You should make sure that you understand what you're doing. And I always encourage people to invest in themselves, whether that is in financial education, individual education, finding jobs that you are capable of excelling at and participating in, finding and establishing a spending pattern and saving pattern that makes sense for you individually.

Those are pretty much tautologies within our space, right? The question of what is the possible relevance of crypto, I would then highlight

Find a way to educate yourself and to look beyond the excitement of buying into something new that is going to save you. Pomp highlights the participation of disadvantaged groups and minorities. Unfortunately, those are the same groups that also have the highest utilization of lottery tickets. So this is not actually anything other than an attempt to escape, to dream a little dream.

Now, Pomp benefits and others in the crypto space who are already there benefit from your money flowing into the space to buy the assets that they have already accumulated. When I go a step further is that when you start talking about these dynamics and you start talking about who is ultimately benefiting from it, recognize that nobody is your friend in this process. Nobody is your friend in this process.

So those who are out there trying to educate you, whether it's me in securities markets or whether it's Pomp in crypto, treat all of it with an element of skepticism. But that, unfortunately, is part of the problem. We have become so inured as a society to anyone trying to help you that we have to treat everything with skepticism.

And when I look at a system like Bitcoin, when I look at a system that is designed to effectively encourage people to step out and to not participate, it's not helping that process of healing. It's really uncomfortable to realize that we have elements of the system we have in place and we're going to have to deal with it. The solution, unfortunately, is deal with it.

Pom, Mike, thank you so much for your time, for bringing your expertise, your passion, and your willingness to have a good faith debate with one another. Really appreciate it. Thank you for joining us. Of course. Mike, we may not agree, but it's always fun, my friend. Talk soon, everyone. Bye.

Thanks for listening. Please send your debate suggestions our way. We want to hear from you, whether it's a subject that you're trying to wrap your head around or a guest that you just think is a superb debater. Send them our way at tips at honestlypod.com. And as always, we'd love for you to share this with other people you think would like it. But more than that, we hope that you take this as inspiration to go out and have an honest conversation or a debate yourself about crypto or anything else. We'll see you next time.

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