The Promise Of Bitcoin As A Protocol For Prosperity

What distinguishes this digital capital?

Look, when we saw digital photos transform,

a lot of people didn't get the fact

that Kodak was going to go replace by Instagram and Facebook,

but they get digital photos.

Digital capital is what happens when your long-term store

of value goes from a building or goes from a portfolio

of stocks to a digital asset like Bitcoin.

Bitcoin represents the digital transformation

of hundreds of trillions of dollars of capital in the world.

No one expected to see it, so they don't quite get

what it's going to be, except for the fact

it's worth all the money in the world.

So let's just talk about that because you do have,

you have a couple of slides showing assets

around the world first.

Okay, let's start with this from, again,

geared toward Microsoft, but some critics will say

when you talk about digital capital being economically

technically superior, no tax, I mean,

that doesn't mean it can't be taxed in certain jurisdictions

at some point, no torts.

Legal issues are going to come up, no regulator.

I mean, these are great points,

but are they forever points?

The point is I got $100 million in New York City

and I buy a building, I got to worry about someone slipping

and falling on the sidewalk and a property tax,

but if I can snap my fingers and teleport the building

to Zambia Central Africa or to Monaco,

all of a sudden it's a teleportable building.

And of course, if I don't have any tenants in the building,

I don't got to worry about them defaulting.

So digital capital is the ability to move the money

at the speed of light anywhere on earth

and program it on a computer.

There's a lot of people that are going to want that

rather than having, you know, pick a country in Africa

where you want to invest your life savings and building.

Right, forever.

Let's say Angola.

Right, and what happens to the government fails?

You lose everything.

Exactly.

But if you could put the building in your pocket

and go to the place where you like the government,

maybe you get to keep your money.

Great.

Let's talk about how it's going to grow.

So in your presentation, you have this slight choice.

The first one, right now Bitcoin is $2 trillion.

You're saying a 21 years, $280 trillion.

How do we get there?

What I'm saying is the wealth in the entire world

is growing because of innovation, because of technology,

but also because of inflation.

And people are thinking to sell their central African real estate

to buy Bitcoin or sell their Siberian natural gas

to buy Bitcoin or sell their Argentine currency to buy Bitcoin.

So as people migrate their capital into this global monetary asset,

that asset class is going to grow faster than the rest of them.

And equity faster than gold, faster than real estate.

But also, did I read somewhere that you're saying

that each Bitcoin would be worth the equivalent of $13 million?

Yeah, well, when you crank in the growth rate,

which for me, the base case is 29% a year on average

or 21 years, that gets you from where we are today

to $13 million of coin in the year 2045.

All right, so we've talked about the financial parts of this.

You and I have had great conversations

in the past about the humanitarian part of this, right?

And I want to talk about that.

You just mentioned Africa, for instance,

Bitcoin's philosophy and political promise.

This is an article from 2022.

It's not just a decentralized peer-to-peer

like trying to cash system.

It's more, right?

This is what this article is saying.

And it's going to have an impact on economies,

philosophy, politics, human rights, and society.

That is huge to live up to.

Bitcoin is a protocol for prosperity, fire, electricity,

steel, English, mathematics.

You would give them to the world.

Bitcoin is an economic protocol.

Once you master Bitcoin, you can figure out how to save your wealth,

how to economically prosper.

It works for a country, a company, a family, an individual.

Nobody owns it.

It's a utilitarian, egalitarian entitlement,

just a good for the world.

That's why I'm so enthusiastic about it.

And particularly underdeveloped nations, right?

I mean, this is what we're really talking about.

A way for them to catch up.

I mean, right now, if you're underdeveloped nation

and you want to try to catch it,

you're at the whims or the mercy of the IMF or the World Bank.

Because who's quite frankly, they have rates sometimes

that are like, that makes them mafia blush, right?

I mean, to me, you're always going to be underdeveloped nation.

Do you have to go to the World Bank to borrow money?

If you're a type one diabetic, you can eat continuously

and you'll starve to death

because you cannot store organic energy.

If you don't have a capital asset like Bitcoin,

I can send billions or tens of billions of dollars to Africa.

You can make billions.

The money will just drain out of your capital structure

because you're storing it in a currency,

which is collapsing faster than you can actually generate it.

Well, countries, well,

large industrialized countries allow this to live up to its promise.

It's one thing to say it's a $2 trillion asset.

It's another to say,

hey, eventually this will replace Fiat currency,

which a lot of folks believe it will.

I think you've got to keep in mind money bifurcates

into currency, the medium exchange of which the dollar

is the world reserve currency,

and capital, the store of value,

of which right now real estate and equity portfolios

aren't the world reserve capital.

Bitcoin is emerging to compete with equity and real estate

as world reserve capital.

But those Africans, they can't buy real estate in the US.

They can't buy equity in the New York Stock Exchange.

It's global capital.

And once you understand that,

you realize that every nation that respects property rights

has got to support Bitcoin.

If you go communist,

follow on socialist, North Korea, Cuba,

they're going to expropriate your property,

but any place where people respect property rights

and they give you chance for capitalism and freedom,

they're going to allow you to Bitcoin.

And the competitor really is,

the Vanguard 500 is going to get demonetized a little bit,

and then instead of buying a real estate portfolio,

and a third apartment, you buy some Bitcoin.

And I don't think that's threatening to anybody.