$1 million Bitcoin. When's that going to happen?
My guess is is it's going to be this year.
It's going to be this year. That's a 10X.
Bitcoin has 17X in the past. There is no upper bound to
Bitcoin. People talk about diminishing
returns, right? But if it's a step change, just
like the failure of the the German mark, it's not a gradual
thing and there's no upper bound.
It's just gone. Are they scared of Bitcoin
Samson? I think the IMF is definitely
scared of Bitcoin because they are a Fiat organization.
With Bitcoin, they're irrelevant or they need to adopt Bitcoin.
It's their choice. Either you adapt or you die.
My question too is why is the price still at $97,000 if if we
have all this massive purchasing going on?
Is it like a flush? All right, we're here in the
beautiful El Salvador and the Jan Three headquarters in Casa
Cielo with the legendary one and only Samsung Mao.
How you doing man? Thank you, Nico.
It's great to be here. Good.
Great to be here as well. I just, I kind of want to give a
little bit of the back story how we got this working.
So of course, Plan B Forum was just over the weekend here in El
Salvador for the first time. And I was like, Samson, you
know, you want to come on the show and you just replied with,
do you want to do another volcano?
And I just replied with absolutely, period.
And then we scrambled and we got this together with this
beautiful shot. By the way, for anyone who's
watching this, it's not a green screen, it's an actual volcano.
So it's pretty cool. Don't trust verify.
You can come here. Yeah.
It's absolutely beautiful. So Samson, you know we're here.
The price of Bitcoin at the time of recording is currently
$97,000. I think we're expecting a lot
more of it, honestly. And I think that's something
that you've said on recent interviews that Bitcoin is
massively undervalued. Could you talk a little bit
about that? Yeah.
So I've been predicting 1,000,000 for a while and
hopefully I'll hit some time. But I believe this pullback is
very normal because the altcoin market was overheated.
If you look at XRP Ripple, it was $3.
That's ridiculous. With Bitcoin at 97 or so, Ripple
is still at 260. And then you have Solana and
everything. Everything is overpriced right
now for the altcoins. So I think it's normal.
We come down, they shake off, and then we go back up.
Bitcoin dominance increases again.
But Bitcoin dominance is really intellect measurement, like how
much money is being allocated to altcoins, and that needs to drop
before we can take off again, I believe.
But overall, Bitcoin is undervalued and I think even at
100 KA 100 and 5200, it's still undervalued.
And what's the case for it being undervalued?
Well, there's just so much demand for Bitcoin right now
from MicroStrategy, from the ETFs, from nation states, from
ordinary people buying and Hodling that I don't think
people have fully realized that most of the year supply of mine
Bitcoin is already gone a few times over.
So you have to understand there is ultimate scarcity in Bitcoin
and I believe the understanding of ultimate scarcity is very far
away still. People just can't wrap their
heads around they're only being 21 million.
And when the price drops, people kind of feel confident that I
can get it later. But then Bitcoin rips and then
there is no later. Like imagine being able to buy
Bitcoin at $10,000 a coin again. It's not possible.
And this milestone of 100,000 will be gone again in in time.
And you say that there's, there's a lot of demand, right?
There's the talk of the strategic Bitcoin reserve, which
some news came out that Ripple tried to sabotage it in some
way. It seems like we still have 180
days as a community to kind of fight back on that front.
And of course, MicroStrategy buying Bitcoin, a lot of
companies following in this footsteps of MicroStrategy, like
Metaplanet, like somewhere scientific, and they're all
following the, the MicroStrategy strategy.
And it seems like all their stocks are performing because of
it. El Salvador continues to buy
massive amounts of Bitcoin. My question too is why is the
price still at $97,000 if if we have all this massive purchasing
going on? Is it like a flush?
So there's two things I would say 1 is there are obviously Ogs
or old Hodlers that are going to sell something and you know buy
a house, maybe enjoy life a bit. So there will always be some
coins that are sold outside of the mine supply, but there's
also a roughly 2 million coins that sit on exchange for market
making trading and arbitrage. And those 2 million coins, it's
dropping obviously now it was at more than two million before,
but now it's at, you know, around 2 million.
But that is enough for the coins to drop the market.
And a lot of it has to do with Bitcoin being a 24/7 market as
well. So this drop I believe is
related to the tariff war. You know, American, Canadian,
Mexican, well, we're all going to tariff each other and it's
just panic. So Bitcoin being the only 24/7
liquid market is the only thing that can react immediately.
So sort of like the market sentiment is taken out on
Bitcoin. We're the 1st to move the most
volatile and the biggest move, and then the equities markets
and everything else follows after that when the markets
open. Such an antiquated concept,
right? But that's what it is.
But going back to the point, those 2 million coins is enough
to move the market a little bit. And the impact of those 2
million coins, I believe is becoming less and less
pronounced as we increase hover. So if you break down the scheme
of who impacts Bitcoin price, you have the the hodlers 0
impact, they're just sitting on the coins and in ways you can
look at it, they're coiling up that spring.
Then you have the buyers, the people that are DCA ING either
by day or by month, or you can say micro strategy is also in
the DCA category and Hodling, but they're actively in
acquisition mode, metaplanet. And like you said, then you have
the traders, which is kind of that 2 million coins.
So that is kind of what is driving the market.
And Bitcoin will always be volatile because you have that
slush fund of coins on exchanges, but that is going to
be drained over time. And we do see that and it makes
it more pronounced. The coil up effect from the DCA
Airs and Hobblers. Absolutely.
What do you think about Trump being elected?
I think Trump is the best choice of the current slate of
candidates that we have right now and probably the best option
for America moving forward in this period of time because he's
able to bring together different groups.
Like he brought Elon Musk. You know, you might think he's a
shit coiner and whatnot, but he is the richest man in the world
and influential and capable. He's able to bring RFK group,
the people that are concerned about health and other things
and some activism, environmentalism.
So he's able to kind of bridge together different segments of
population that hasn't really been done before in recent
times. So I think Trump coin, Melania
coin aside, it was the best choice that America could have
made. The other choice was Kamala and
Dark Times more Elizabeth Warren choke .3 point O everything bad
possibly for Bitcoin and you know the crypto industry.
But now we see the tariffs and that's another interesting kind
of worms, but at least you can see that the tariffs are going
to be great for Bitcoin. I think near term people that
are affected by the tariffs, they probably can't see it or
didn't. If they're not into Bitcoin,
they may not be thinking about this, but it's going to drive a
lot of people to look at Bitcoin and protect themselves.
OK. And the, the thing that
interested me in also is the, you said Operation Checkpoint
3.0 and we just went through Operation Choke .2 Point O.
And a lot of the things that they were doing, they're trying
to obfuscate it and weren't being transparent about it.
Do you believe that it was a malicious attack on Bitcoin in
the Bitcoin industry to at least slow down the adoption of it in
the United States? Definitely it was.
It was a kind of covert operation to throttle Bitcoin
and crypto adoption. And it's really just to protect
the existing system, right? Protect the Fed, protect the
dollar in a certain way, protect the banking system in a certain
way and all the incumbents, right?
And you see that with, you know, closure of some of the banks for
absolutely no reason. And I think signature, right?
It was just closed for no reason whatsoever.
And if you guys had elected Kamala, you would have, you
know, 3 point O another version of choke point and without the
new checks and balances that Department of Government
efficiency is trying to introduce.
It sucks that he named it after dosh.
Yeah, take the good with of that.
It was a massive troll. What do you think about Ross
being freed? I think that's the most
important thing. So I had a wish list for Trump.
I had some predictions and A wish list.
I think if he just frees Ross and stops attacking Bitcoin,
like stops the attack on Bitcoin, Bitcoin Hodling, I
think that's enough. The strategic Bitcoin Reserve,
it's good for the government. It doesn't really do much for
the people except for a mass education program for the
people. Like OK, the government has it
now I should have it. But outside of that, it doesn't
really do anything for your average person in the US
directly. So one of the arguments is that
it would be used to pay down the debt.
It'd be used to, you know, get the country out of debt, have
this reserve for the country, and it'd be beneficial.
Like, at least that's how it's being pitched.
You're saying that that would be beneficial for the US
government, but that wouldn't necessarily be beneficial for US
individuals. Paying off the debt would be
beneficial for US individuals, but.
If they used it for that. Yes, if they used it, but you
don't know what they will use. That's what we gave.
And you don't know what the composition will be yet either
of the well, because it's not a strategic Bitcoin reserve now.
It's a digital asset reserve which is broad and diverse and
inclusive. But we don't know yet what's
going to be in there. And hopefully it'll be just
Bitcoin, but there are obviously altcoin projects lobbying to be
included, like Ripple. Yeah, absolutely.
So what's really interesting about El Salvador is how much
it's been focused solely on Bitcoin.
It's like it's resisted that. How come?
I think President Buchelli is a Bitcoiner.
Trump is not a Bitcoiner. He spoke at, what was it,
Nashville conference, but he's not a Bitcoiner.
He's done a lot of other crypto related projects and I don't
think he fully understands Bitcoin and you can kind of pick
that level of understanding out from his speech.
If you compare his speech to RFK speech, it's a world of
difference. So he's more crypto, right?
And that's probably why the US is not as Bitcoin maximalist as
El Salvador is. So we'll see how things go over
time. But there are a lot of lobbying
groups in the US obviously, too, exchanges that are trying to
push him towards, you know, crypto.
And if it diversifies the reserve, that's probably why.
So recently the IMF and El Salvador reached an agreement so
that El Salvador would receive a loan.
And I think a lot of people are seeking clarity in terms of is
Bitcoin still legal tender in the country?
Yeah. So it's confusing and I would
say the breakdown is this, it's a a glass of water.
It's kind of at the halfway mark.
You can look at it as half full or half empty.
So the Bitcoin law has been softened or you can say neutered
a bit. They've amended it to comply
with the IMF agreement almost to the letter.
So everything they said in IMF agreement, they've amended it.
But I think the key thing is the amendments leave the door kind
of open. It's ambiguous.
So it there is still a Bitcoin law, but Bitcoin is no longer a
currency and it is legal tender, but it is now voluntary.
So what does that mean exactly? It means Bitcoin is legal
tender. There's no capital gains tax
still. OK, there's another line in
there that says you can use Bitcoin.
The government can't now. So there is this Bitcoin law.
Bitcoin is legal tender, but what is a legal tender without
enforcement? Not that there was before it.
It it always has been voluntary. So you can look at it both ways.
Like some people are reacting very strongly and saying, you
know, they capitulated. They bent the knee to the IMF
and, you know, because they sold us out and they're very
disillusioned. And then you have the promoters
of El Salvador and Buckelly, and they're saying, yeah, we won.
We're going to take the money and buy Bitcoin with IMF money.
But I think the truth is somewhere in the middle, there
was a compromise, there was adaptation.
The law itself is weakened, but Bitcoin still has a standing
here in El Salvador. So you take the good with the
bad, and I think it makes sense in the long run.
But Kelly is not the president of Bitcoin.
He's the president of El Salvador.
I mean, he has to do what he thinks is the right thing for
this country. And if he thinks the right thing
for the country is to secure the IMF loan, which will lead to
other loans, then that's the way they should go.
There's a couple things that are quite interesting to me.
So it's still legal tender, but it's voluntary and El Salvador
is still continuously buying it almost on a daily basis.
Yeah, so I mean, sounds like a pretty good compromise.
And then if you're coming at it from a Bitcoiners perspective,
you would want Bitcoin to be adopted from the bottom up.
You wouldn't want a top down type of thing.
And what really sticks out to me, and I remember I, I asked
Mrs. Majorga, the ambassador to the United States from El
Salvador, and I asked for the same thing about capital gains.
And I think that's the part that sticks out.
Yeah. Because as long as there's no
tax implications from you using Bitcoin as money, then what does
it matter if it doesn't have? What does it matter if it has
the official stamp of legal tender if people are just still
using it to transact? Yeah.
So there are things that we can do.
So Gentry, we work on nation state Bitcoin adoption.
There are interesting, interesting paths for us to use
Bitcoin as legal tender as a currency.
We can go to other countries that have laws recognizing
foreign currencies like Guatemala, and we can say, you
know, Mr. President, just accept it.
It's a foreign currency. They have.
There's precedent already for recognizing and using foreign
currencies in different countries.
So that's an angle that is interesting for Bitcoin and for
Jan 3 to push. But we can live without that.
Or we can get another country to make it a currency and follow
that angle again. But I think the top down is
beneficial still because launching TiVo, making these
announcements, promoting Bitcoin and Bitcoin education
initiatives, that is top down but is sort of an endorsement
and a blessing. And a lot of people, they look
towards the government, obviously not us, but they look
towards the government for approval before they do
something and it is something it is worth something.
And do you, before I ask you about Jan 3, do you believe that
this was a set back for nation state adoption?
It's to be seen, OK? It's to be seen.
It's not really a set back for a nation state adoption.
I believe nation state adoption has already taken off.
So once El Salvador made the move, we started going forth.
You know, I started Jan 3. I brought on a lot of amazing
people to the team and we put together this network of people
going out and engaging. We've met with the president,
Madera. He said, you know, I'm going to
make Madera, you know, a place for Bitcoin.
We met with presence in many countries around the world.
We've met with regulators, politicians and even central
banks. And the tide, I believe, has
turned. We now have some central banks
reaching out to us. Someone passed them our e-mail
and we got an e-mail a few months back saying we would like
to discuss hyperbicronization. No way.
Yes. And then the emails are, you
know, from the central bank. We said, yeah, we're happy to
talk. We we know who introduced us.
But then they sent a meeting invite, and the meeting invite
was hyperbicronization. Was it like a Google Meet?
Yes. So it was just on on the
calendar, Google Calendar hyperbicronization and you're
meeting with the central bank. Yes, that OK.
All right. So we're, we're definitely
heading in the, in the right direction.
Before I ask you about the IMF and what what their motivation
would be to do something like this with El Salvador or to ask
El Salvador to compromise what what is Gen. 3?
Gen. 3 is a company, we do a lot of things.
Our mission is to accelerate Bitcoin adoption or hyper
bitcoinization and basically anything that falls into this
mission we will pursue. So one of the first things we
did was launch the Aqua wallet, a non custodial Bitcoin in layer
2 and stablecoin wallet, because we see an opportunity to onboard
the 400 million or so Tether USDT users into Bitcoin.
They're already using Tether and the sad thing is they're using
Tether in altcoin wallet. So they're getting pushed, you
know, NFTS and staking and defy and gambling and there is no
Bitcoin wallet that's out there in a meaningful way showcasing
Bitcoin layer 2IN Tether, just a really simple offering.
And that was our mission to kind of onboard those people into
Bitcoin and give a Bitcoin wallet that has a lot of
utility. So that's one of the aspects of
the business. We have Gentry Financial, we
offer some financial products and services.
One of them is at OTC. So we we've been running that
for about a year now. And the goal is that we have a
track record. And when the next country says I
want to buy $10 billion of Bitcoin, we can say, well, we'll
help you with that. And then we have the nation
state push, which is just a lot of us in our free time, which is
not that much. Plus a network of volunteers
around the world that try to get us meetings with presidents and
finance ministers, ministers of economy, all of these to push
for Bitcoin adoption around the world at the top down level.
So we kind of do both. We work on top down and
grassroots. I love that.
So just focused on hyper bitcoinization.
I want to ask you about the Aqua wallet because I think a lot of
bitcoiners expected that in the developing world you're going to
see massive adoption of Bitcoin as people sought non sovereign
alternatives because their local Fiat currencies were so
terrible. But I think what we saw instead,
what the market is telling us is we've we're seeing this massive
adoption of, of, of stablecoins, specifically stablecoin Tether,
like the the dollar stablecoin. I think it's quite interesting.
I think a lot of Bitcoiners didn't expect that.
But you know, being from Latin America myself originally, I
think for a lot of people, it's hard to understand that they're
just trying to get by, right? They don't have the luxury of
being able to save. So just having a currency that
that is stable, that they can earn in is a massive upgrade to,
you know, where they could have been before.
Yeah, I think it comes down to Alex Gladstein's book title.
You know, check your financial privilege.
Absolutely. A lot of people, a lot of
Bitcoiners, especially really hardcore Maximus, so like
Bitcoin and nothing else. But you have the luxury as a a
Bitcoiner in the West to buy Bitcoin.
A lot of people are earning, just trying to earn a living and
get by. They may not have a bank
account. They can't get a bank account
because they don't have an address and they're excluded.
The the financial system is A2 tier system.
People can get in and people cannot get in.
That's it. And it's engineered that way and
they will always be that way. The only thing that can break
that system is Bitcoin. So the reason why people are
seeking Tether and stable coins is because they need access to
that system. They don't yet understand
Bitcoin, but they do want the dollar to hedge, right?
So if you're a merchant and you're selling stuff and your
suppliers want dollars or Argentinian pesos and you have
Bitcoin. There is volatility in Bitcoin
both ways, and we can't ignore the fact that some guy taking
Bitcoin can lose a significant amount of money.
Just by taking Bitcoin and not hedging because that's not their
savings. It's not yet really savings.
As long as there is volatility. It's savings for people that for
people that can weather volatility, people that can't,
they need a stable unit. And you know, bitcoins like to
say, well, stable coins are not stable because the Fiat money is
devaluing. But compared to the Argentinian
peso, the dollar is gold, right? Or compared to the Bolivar, it's
gold. And I think we just have to
ignore people that criticize that and focus on onboarding
these 400 million people to liquid Tether and Bitcoin.
Well, it's a stepping stone. It is.
And then there there's another part.
The it's an interesting phenomenon too, because like as
bitcoiners, shouldn't we be free market Maxis, right?
And the market is telling us, right, that developing world
massively in Latin America, they're really interested in
getting a dollar rather than, you know, but Bitcoin, I think
it's an educational thing. I think it's a survival thing.
I think it's like the principle, like the hierarchy of needs,
right? Like you, you just need to be
able to survive. And then you start thinking.
And I think it's a Trojan horse because it gives people
essentially the ability to custody dollars in their mind on
a digital wallet without having to go through a bank account.
And then eventually they're going to come to the conclusion
that all of us have had in the West, which is like the dollar
is a scam too. And all roads lead to to
Bitcoin. Now you said that Jan 3 focuses
on hyper bitcoinization. What is that?
Hyper bitcoinization is the point at which we no longer
convert Bitcoin into Fiat. There's only Bitcoin left, so
it's the end state really. And you could say it's
hyperinflation of the dollar, really, right.
When the dollar hyperinflates, then no one's going to want the
dollar. They will just want Bitcoin.
So yeah, it's the greatest demonetization event in human
history. Basically all Fiat will die all
at the same time very rapidly and everyone just wants Bitcoin
and transacts in Bitcoin. Really, it's just so you don't
see a world where the dollar and Bitcoin can coexist.
I don't see it, but a lot of Bitcoiners do see it.
I think Sailor is one of those, like if you look at his Bitcoin
24 model, right, he actually tapers off the model after a
number of years to kind of slow the death of Bitcoin, slow the
death of Fiat. So Bitcoin growth tapers off.
But I think monetary systems, especially when you're dealing
with 100 X improvement over the old system and even over gold,
is not a gradual taper. It's just a flip of the switch.
Everyone's just going to switch to this new thing.
I don't see that happening in Bitcoin.
And we didn't even see that happen with the, the devaluation
of the German mark. It wasn't that it's slowly
tapered off and there was 1 Baker in this village over there
that was still taking the mark, you know, five years later
because, you know, you're that network effect of that money
dies. So maybe some people have it in
a drawer, but no one's actually going to exchange anything for
the the Mark I. Mean that that's going to be a
pretty big impact on the world. Right.
That's why we're working on getting Bitcoin option out there
as fast as we can to soften the fall, OK, It's like the
foundation series, right? You can't stop the fall,
although we can soften the fall. And, and, and, and it's going to
radically change the world. And before I I get to that, like
what are the implications of essentially Fiat ending?
Because it's going to be essentially complete a change in
the balance of power between the state and the individual.
And I think there's very, very deep implications there.
But what do you think were the motivations behind the IMF
asking for those concessions from El Salvador?
Are they scared of Bitcoin Samson?
I think the IMF is definitely scared of Bitcoin because they
are a Fiat organization. For those of people that don't
know, they have their own shit coin.
It's called the SDR, the SDR Strategic Drawing Rights, which
means they can just kind of print their own money out of
thin air too. But with Bitcoin, they're
irrelevant or they need to adopt Bitcoin.
It's their choice. Either you adapt or you die.
But I think there's another darker angle here, which is
they're basically a loan shark. Their job is to lend money in
perpetuity to countries like El Salvador and, you know,
developing places around the world.
And this kind of puts them out of a job.
So I think they had to fight for that or they wanted to save face
because remember, they made a big stink about all the Bitcoin
adoption in El Salvador that you know, you're going to fail,
you're going to, it's dangerous and whatnot.
And when they're wrong and they're incorrect and the the
metrics prove them incorrect, vastly incorrect, I think they
need something to save face. So maybe they insisted on these
concessions just so they can say, yes, we got something.
Yeah, it, it definitely felt that way.
It definitely felt that way because it was like, ha, ha, we
won. But if you, it's what you said
with the analogy of the, the, the glass, right?
It really depends on how you look at it.
But the most important aspects, there's no capital gains
implications. You could still use it as money.
They're still buying it as reserve.
So did they really win? Right.
It it's like it, it's like an optics.
It was for the optics more than the substance.
Yeah, from my perspective. And as you said, it doesn't
really matter because that's kind of government top down
adoption is icing on a cake. The real important part is the
grassroots adoption. And I think that still needs
work, too. We should not be lying to
ourselves and say, yeah, it's perfect already.
We've got, you know, educational initiatives and we're good here.
There's still a lot of people here in El Salvador that have no
idea, and we still have a lot of work to do.
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get started. So I I want to talk about the
end of Fiat, and this is a fascinating subject.
You know, I think every Bitcoiner has read the book The
Sovereign Individual by now at least a couple times in the book
essentially makes the case that information technologies were
essentially going to take away the importance away from nation
States and from governments. And one of the biggest funding
mechanisms of government of the state is their ability to print
money out of thin air. Once that ability goes away,
what is the role of government in society?
Hopefully it's reduced massively.
It the whole way that government works right now is very flawed.
And I think about this a lot because I work on a game set in
the future. So I'm trying to think how does
government work in the future? And there's there are differing
schools of thought. You know, some people, some
Bitcoiners think anarchy and you know, it's just free for all.
I think you still need some structure in place because there
will be bad people that do bad things and you need to be able
to deal with that somehow. And I think there will still be
a need for relationships with other groups like diplomacy.
So I think there is some role for government very scaled back,
very administrative, not prescriptive in many ways, and
based off of some sort of foundational codex of laws
that's far simplified and mirroring a bit of Bitcoin.
So consensus based rules where to do something, you need a
super majority to consent to it. So there is no war, no emergency
act, you know, no martial law, able to be done without active
consent of people. So that's probably somewhere we
go. But definitely Bitcoin will
change that relationship because they can't print money, they
can't take your money, so they have to.
They just shrink naturally. And I think this is a good thing
because most of the problems we have today is the government is
trying to do everything. It starts out slowly, but as you
give people free stuff, they want more free stuff and it just
spirals out of control where you have some of those things
uncovered by the Department of Government efficiency, which is
the Treasury was just paying bills indiscriminately to
terrorists too. So it just becomes a big machine
that lives off of its own bureaucracy. 100% and it's self
funded, it has a self funding mechanism.
And unlike private business, there's no feedback like if you
know you run Gen. 3 a certain way or if I run simply Bitcoin a
certain way, we will go out of business.
There is no feedback whatsoever with government and what we were
saying, what Doge has been uncovering has been ridiculous.
And then you're just like, what do you mean you sent $50 million
to that? Like, what do you, what is this?
And they don't care. But there's no there's no
feedback mechanism incentivizing them to care.
The feedback mechanism is elections, so you get feedback
every four years and you know, people have very short attention
spans and memories. So, you know, they forget and
then you re elect them again. That's why Trudeau was elected
twice. Yeah.
So it's kind of sad, but Bitcoin gives me hope that it will break
the system. So Bitcoin fixes this.
It fixes this. It's a popularity contest to see
who controls the money printer. Yeah.
So what have been some of the difficulties that you have run
into running Gen. 3, rolling out the Aqua wallet, really pushing
forward, you know, Bitcoin adoption worldwide?
What are some of the things that have happened since you launched
Jan 3 that you would have never expected to run into?
So let's let's see the Aqua side.
The biggest challenge for us is we're trying to build it non
custodially because I don't think you can make a custodial
wallet that can scale to planet scale and most importantly on
board the billions of people that cannot access the financial
system. So it has to be non custodial if
you're trying to get licenses everywhere until there's a
massive sea change and everything is deregulated.
It's just too slow, costly and burdensome to do that.
So if you want to build it in a custodial, you have a new set of
challenges, which is delivering a Venmo like experience without
having custody. And that's actually very hard to
do. And it slowed us down, but I
think we're almost there. So we do a lot of interesting
cryptography and tricks in there to make the the swap system and
everything seamless. So it's like PayPal or Venmo
here. It works, it just works.
But it's all non custodial. So if a transaction, a swap
fails, it just auto refunds back to your wallet.
And that took us a lot of time to get right.
We're trying to implement things like a lightning address, but
non custodially too. So there's a lot of thinking
that we have to put into how we do these things, but that that
was the biggest challenge for us.
And also we got a massive influx of users, which we didn't expect
and that kind of made it more challenging to bring on more
support people. And it's slow down dev as well.
On the nation state side, I would say the challenge was we
had the FTX fraud and blow up that slowed us down a bit.
There was a number of countries we had meetings planned with.
And because of that, Bitcoin seemed to be, you know, the
pariah again. And they didn't want anything to
do with us or Jan 3 or Bitcoin, even though it's FTX.
And it's because they use FTT is collateral.
But now that we're back, it's much easier.
And especially with the talk of the strategic reserve in the US,
that changes things a lot. So the ETFs changed the
conversation. That made it easier.
The Trump admin coming into power and formulating this path
to a reserve has made it easier yet again for us.
So tailwinds now. That's good.
I mean, it's, it's very interesting to hear about the
difficulties that you're running into with Aqua.
I'm glad to hear that it's non custodial.
How did you pull that off? Because I feel like non
custodial lightning at the moment is an.
Absolute nightmare. Yeah.
So we we actually use a trick. We're using liquid as the base
layer OK, and we're using bolts to do swaps to lightning, so.
Interesting. It's not really a Lightning
wallet and a lot of hardcore bitcoins were saying that's not
a Lightning wallet. We never said it was a
Lightning. Wallet.
But does it matter if it does the same thing?
Well, to some people it matters. So your choice is right now a
custodial wallet where maybe you KYC, maybe you didn't.
But if you didn't KYC, then you actually have limits and you
have risk of, you know, losing your funds somehow.
If it's a non custodial wallet like Phoenix or whatever, you
actually have to do a lot more and there are cost like opening
up a channel, rebalancing. Those are all touching the main
chain, right? So people think it's cheap.
They they say, well, I'm using Phoenix and I can pay one SAT,
but you actually paid, you know, 4 bucks or 8 bucks when it was
expensive to open the channel at that time.
But if you have liquid, this as this stable middle layer and
liquid's been around for 8-9 years now, very reliable rock
solid block stream. We launched that when I was
there. It's a a touch point.
So like it's like a a mid step. So you don't have to go back to
the main chain and you can go back up to lightning.
It's a stable repository for your Bitcoin, which also has
confidential transactions, by the way.
So it gives you even better privacy.
I believe the, the Phoenix guy said, you know, right now
because we're the LSP and whatever we it's not using
Phoenix doesn't give you better privacy than using wallet
Satoshi or anything else. They can see everything.
But with Aqua, you have liquid with confidential transactions
and we do swaps with bolts. So it's probably the most
private way to use Lightning right now, other than running
everything yourself. Why do you guys decide to?
Use Liquid. I think Liquid is a great
technology and it is. It was always needed because
it's a way to scale Bitcoin with side chains.
So Liquid it's anchored to Bitcoin.
There can only be potentially 21 million coins in Liquid because
you have to peg them into the Liquid network.
But it gives you that confidentiality of confidential
transactions and you can unblind transactions if you need to
unblind it. But this is actually a very
important thing, not just for lightning privacy, but for
stable coin privacy too. So my friend Russell was telling
me it's actually dangerous to use stable coins in Latin
America. The current ones like Tron and
Etherium and Tron because those are account based systems.
Liquid is UTXO base. It's a fork of Bitcoin.
So it's 99% the same code battle tested as Bitcoin, but with the
confidentiality. When I send you Tether on
Liquid, you can't see how much Tether I have.
Whereas if you're using Tron, you send me that.
You know, let's say my cousin's a gangster.
He'll say like, yeah, who's that guy?
And how much Tron does, how much Tether does he have?
And then he goes and robs you or tells someone else to go rob
you. And that's a real danger.
I think that has not really been fully crystallized in people's
understanding yet, but I think they will understand.
But above that, liquid transactions are super cheap
now. They're about 3 cents.
There was a big upgrade to the network as part of a project
tsunami to make everything faster and cheaper, and now
Bitcoin is probably the liquid is probably the cheapest way to
transact stable coins in Latam in the most reliable fashion.
Interesting. And, and I didn't know that.
Very, very interesting. So what, what do you think
happens to the price of Bitcoin if the strategic Bitcoin reserve
thing does go through in the United States?
It looks like it's going to happen on the state level before
the federal level. Well.
As Adam Back says, that's the path to 1,000,000. $1 million
Bitcoin Samson? When's that going to happen?
My guess is is it's going to be this year.
It's going to be this year. You look at all the factors
we're facing, you have. That's a 10X.
Bitcoin has 17X in the past. There is no, there is no upper
bound to Bitcoin. So there there are people talk
about diminishing returns, right?
But if it's a step change, just like the failure of the the
German mark, it's not a gradual thing and there's no upper
bound. It's just gone and you use a new
thing now, right? It's like, yeah, we don't use
horses for transportation anymore.
You know, we came here on a car, on airplanes and whatnot, so
used to use a new thing and Bitcoin is that new thing
because it's 100 if not 1000 times better than anything else
we've used as money in human history.
But back to the point, what do we have?
We have MicroStrategy buying non-stop.
We have ETFs which are a doorway to legacy Fiat money.
If you go back to all the previous bull runs, where we get
bogged down is the exchanges because that's the touch point
right. That's how you convert Fiat into
Bitcoin. And if you remember back in the
old bull runs, it was like Krakens backlog for KYC ING
people was three months long. Coinbase same thing.
It's that's the bottleneck because to comply as an
exchange, you have to KYC everyone and you don't keep 1000
person KYC team, right. You have to keep a team that you
can feed and you can't scale it up that quickly.
So that's kind of where it tapers off.
But with the ETFs, there is no bottleneck anymore.
Central banks can buy ETFs. So any demand for Bitcoin can
now be satiated without any problem whatsoever.
And that is really big. That's why I actually thought
2024 was going to be the year we hit 1,000,000 because I don't
think people fully understand how big that is.
Central banks can buy ETFs. There is no barrier for Fiat
money entering Bitcoin. But I think this year will hit
it since we missed last year. But you have micro strategy, you
have ETFs, you have the removal of the barrier, you have nation
States and what else. There's just so much going on,
like real adoption of Bitcoin. So I just can't see it not
hitting one million this year. And the other thing is you see a
lot of people predicting prices, right?
They like to be cautious and realistic and say, yeah, it can
get to 150, it can get to 200, it can get to 250.
Because I think they want to sound reasonable.
Nobody wants to be the crazy guy saying it's got a 10X like me.
They want to be, you know, I'm, I'm a, I'm a serious person with
realistic projections, but Bitcoin is not a realistic
thing. It's a 0 sum game.
Either you're going to use Bitcoin or you're going to
starve. So it's all or none.
And when you get to different levels, like when you get to
100K, when you get to 100K, it's different, right?
When you get to 200 K, the world again looks very, very
different. Just just close your eyes and
imagine what does the world look like when Bitcoin is at 500 K?
That's you're reaching half of gold's market cap at that point.
You know, that will demonetize gold if it doesn't get
demonetized earlier. Because there's talk of, you
know, the US selling gold to buy Bitcoin to fund their reserves
because that would take out their enemies who have been
accumulating gold for the last decade, right?
But disregard that Bitcoin is sitting at 500 K.
We are the second largest asset now behind gold.
It's a very different landscape. And at that point, do you think
most people would still want to sell their Bitcoin to get Fiat,
or would most people now insist on being paid in Bitcoin?
I think it's the latter. So from there, you just two X,
yeah. And then you're #1.
And you know, it's, it's interesting because right, so I
come from the, the bullish school of thought too, but my,
my thought process is a little bit different.
This cycle reminds me of 2017 and 2017.
We went from $1000 in January to the end of 2017.
We went to 20K. No one had any idea it was going
to happen in January. In fact, in January the price
stayed at $1000. 2020 one happened, and I believe 2021 was
artificially cut short because of the China mining ban, because
of FTX, because of Celsius. And I think people have
forgotten what a true Bitcoin bull market feels like.
And I'm getting the same type of kind of consensus understanding,
which is 150K200K Bitcoin. You and I both know that when
everybody on X or Twitter is calling for the same price
predictions, Bitcoin does the exact effing opposite.
So either we're going to underperform, which I doubt, or
we're going to overperform, which no one is expecting more
than 200,000, more than 300,000. That's my thought process at
kind of getting to, I don't know if it's a million, but half a
million. I wouldn't be surprised at all
if we hit it this year. I think it's, it's just, I don't
know what to call it. It's like a a precipice effect,
you know, like you're standing on the edge of the Cliff.
People are scared because, yeah, we can fall a lot from 100K.
And that's why you kind of like hover at that area for a while
because it's scary looking down. Like what if we go to 70 and you
remember when we had a little dip, everyone is saying, oh,
we're going to go back to 70. Yeah.
But when things solidify, then you kind of go up and everyone
that was panicking and looking down, looking off that
precipice, they've been left behind already.
And because the supply is so limited right now and the demand
is so high, it's just going to shoot up and you're going to see
that kind of 2017 face melting shock and awe raise, rise in
Bitcoin price. Absolutely.
And I think, I think the reason that I would, it's because no
one's seeing it. Everyone has again, this general
consensus of the price. No one is really, no one's
really expecting it. And Bitcoin tends to do the
things that everyone least expects, especially if this
strategic Bitcoin reserve thing comes to fruition.
Like I think it's going to happen, you know, over the price
is just going to 2X or 3X overnight because it's
essentially a rubber stamp of approval by the most powerful
government on the face of the planet.
Now my question to you is what happens when central banks that
have the ability to essentially create money out of nothing
start using that ability to buy something that has absolute
scarcity, scarcity like Bitcoin? Omega candles.
LA is coming out of a volcano. Perhaps.
Perhaps so, yeah. But what happens?
What breaks? I think they can go for a while
and print because the world seems to take time, takes time
to adjust. If you look back at the low
lockdowns and the pandemic or pandemic, when they shut
everything down, the prices didn't jump.
It took two to three years, right, for kind of the normal
person to understand or even anybody in the supply chain
understand what's fully happened.
And then you saw the inflation come.
So all the money printing, the shutdown of economies, it didn't
really kick in until two years later, almost, right?
And I think it's the same. Everything takes time for the
world to adjust to. They haven't really fully
adjusted or understood the impact of the ETFs and central
banks being able to gain exposure to the ETFs.
We also forgot to talk about the Czech Republic bank, central
bank. They've approved buying now too.
So what you're talking about Nico's, it's like up on the
cusp. But yeah, they can probably
print and buy for some time because the ordinary man in the
street is not going to fully understand what's going on.
The pot is boiling too slowly for them to realize.
If they would have understood the impact, you know, they would
have probably bought Bitcoin already just from try to hedge
against inflation alone, yeah. Do you think?
Cycles are dead. I don't really believe in
cycles. I think if you flip a coin four
times and then you flip it four times and you get the same
pattern, it's a coincidence. Go.
Each flip is independent. And there are a lot of arguments
of why we have cycles, such as it's tied to the halving or it's
tied to elections. But again, I believe in phase
transition step changes, you just go to Bitcoin and when you
go to Bitcoin, there's no cycle. And This is why the power law
guys hate me because they expect it's going to progress in a
meaningful way. Whereas my prediction with the
mega candles and everything is it.
What is an Omega candle? And a mega candle is 100,100.
$1000 candle handle. On a day.
And you think that's going to happen sooner rather than later?
It's already happening in other trading pairs.
That's right, Egyptian pound Turkish lira to Bitcoin.
They already have Omega candles. OK, this is very fitting talking
about Omega candles in front of an Omega volcano.
So I'm assuming that you don't believe in diminishing.
Returns. I don't believe in diminishing
returns. OK.
What's the diminishing returns on air travel from boat travel?
You know, we just have air travel.
You take boats for leisure now? Yeah, yeah.
You don't use it for transportation.
So you've said in interviews in the past that the US dollar is
gonna rebase or debase, rebase, rebase.
I've never heard that term. What does that mean?
The US dollar is gonna rebase to Bitcoin.
It's sort of part of that transition to a new money.
It's an attempt to shore up and strengthen a currency.
So you can either do that with gold or anything, but you can
also do that with Bitcoin. So you can kind of say, you
know, we're going to peg the dollar to Bitcoin now and the
debt is convertible, redeemable from Bitcoin, so one SAT per
dollar. One SAP is that $10 million
Bitcoin. 100 million. Oh my God, is the network ready
for that? Is the network ready for a 10X?
Like the amount of people that are going to come on board?
Is the is the main chain able to handle that?
I think so. I think people have kind of
overlooked side chains because they're looking for a more
shiny, interesting things, more complex things that sound cool.
But side chains are relatively simple, very reliable, and are
proven to be a way that we can scale Bitcoin with just what we
have now. Zero change to consensus rules.
No need to ask devs for permission or to have a civil
war or do anything. You just spin up your side
chain. And we have Liquid, which has
been running for, you know, getting close to a decade now.
And Liquid is not decentralized. It's a run by federation.
We can make the blocks bigger, we can ramp it up.
We can scale it up, make it more robust.
You can have other Liquid federations and that is the way
that right now today we can scale Bitcoin to meet the needs.
So, you know, Aqua uses liquid now, but let's say liquid is
packed in full, you know, maybe there's another liquid.
Maybe El Salvador has a side chain, maybe the Czech Republic
has side chain. We can support all of these and
we can perform atomic swaps between different side chains.
So I don't see any issue with scaling Bitcoin.
The question is how you want to scale it, because if you're
going for orthodoxy, then you're a big blocker.
And you say we need giga megs, we need TB size blocks, Good
luck. But if you're going to be
pragmatic, use the technology that we have now and meet the
demand, we can do all of that already.
So it's Bitcoin is able to scale, but it has to scale on
layer 2. Yes.
Gotcha. And the technology needs to be
built out. I think you're solving that with
the Aqua and the the fancy tech in the side.
And again, as a user, you don't really care what's happening in
the background. Like the vast majority of people
don't really care. The vast majority of people
really care is does it work? Yeah.
So I mean, stable coins again are another interesting example.
A lot of people down there don't care.
They're using Binance, right? To transact stable coins send
this to my Binance account, They're using Ethereum Tron.
They're not Ethereum Maxis or Tron fans.
They just want the the dollar to save some money.
Yeah, right. And they will move, they're
moving from Ethereum. They move from Ethereum to Tron
because Ethereum stable coin transactions were $8 or
something like that, right? Tron was a, you know, sub
dollar, but still around that. And now Tron is at $2.00 and now
they're moving to other things too.
So there's no loyalty. It's these are just transport
rails to people. They just care about being able
to move money. Yeah.
And, and that's the vast majority of people.
And I think, I think Bitcoiners forget that on X is that, you
know, the vast majority of people are, are really looking
at the utility aspect of it. Yeah.
What would you say to someone that feels they're late to
Bitcoin now that it's at $100,000?
That's a good question. Like I like to say, we're early.
But still. Yeah, I think we're still early,
I mean until we see Bitcoin. Does they have 100 X in it?
Yeah, well, I mean, how much more to go to dollar set parity?
Yeah, right. But here's that exercise.
Next time you're stopped at an intersection at a red light,
watch people crossing on the crosswalk and ask yourself how
many of them know about Bitcoin? Probably not many of them,
right? And you can test this, like, go
to a restaurant and say, can I pay in Bitcoin, You know, watch
them laugh at you, and then you can understand exactly how early
you are. Yeah.
Where are we on the S curve? Still early adopter, still
early. Adopter.
Early adopter. Gotcha.
What advice would you give to your younger self if you knew,
you know, you got into Bitcoin where Bitcoin was not as
certain? I got into Bitcoin class of
2016. I remember the, the block, the,
you know, the, the, the block wars.
It was not fun. Now we know that Jihan and want
to be specific with the names, but let's just say that they
were artificially making the hash rate go higher and there
are some doing they were doing some interesting things with
exchanges to the volume and there was a lot of uncertainty
at that point. You, you questioned yourself as
a Bitcoiner and said, is this Bitcoin cash thing?
Like are they right? You know, like now we know after
the fact. Well, I knew you knew.
Now we know after the fact, yeah, but but it's because I got
into Bitcoin through mining. But I would say if you're
looking at that, if you're an observer, you you don't know,
right? You're looking at that.
You're like, Oh my God, like is this, is this a switch?
So what I'm trying to say is you got in way earlier, right?
Things were a lot more uncertain back then.
Did you always know? What advice would you give to
your younger self? Is it just going to be like, I
wish I bought more? Yeah.
Of course, that's the that's the wish everyone had.
OK, let's. Scratch that one out.
What other advice would you give your younger self for Bitcoin?
Specifically, Bitcoin, entrepreneurship, Whatever.
I think just focus and and think about things.
That's the advice I would give. And could you elaborate a little
bit about what why you would give yourself that advice?
Because I, I think most people don't think deeply about topics
and if you really analyse a lot of things, I think you can
reason out through first principles thinking what is the
right answer? Like who's right in the block
size for you have to really step back and objectively look at the
motivations and incentives of everyone.
So I think that's the biggest thing to think, like if I was
really young and I had to tell myself something, just think
more about everything, analyse everything.
What motivated you to start Gen. 3?
I want to accelerate Bitcoin adoption.
So if Bitcoin adoption, if hyper bitcoinization is this
demonetization event, there's a lot of preparation that has to
go into onboarding humanity to Bitcoin.
And the wallet obviously is a major touch point, right?
The most people are going to, they're not going to get a node,
they're just going to download a wallet and in an App Store.
So you need to have that solid and ready to onboard people, but
engaging with governments, getting them ready so that they
don't in, in, in the time of failing currencies, they don't
accidentally adopt Ethereum or something as a sound money.
So it's preparation work so that people understand Bitcoin, know
how to handle Bitcoin and are ready because the it's going to
be messy. And we've seen this in recent
history. India had a demonetization event
in 2016 where they just pulled some notes out of circulation
and that was a big mess and people died because hospitals
would not accept the bills. That's.
Crazy. People were lining up at the
banks and dying of exposure to heat.
You know, these things are not orderly.
So I think given that I'm so bullish that I think it's going
to go very rapidly. We should be out there engaging
and educating and trying to onboard people ahead of time,
getting parallel systems in place where you have your Fiat
currency and you have Bitcoin, because that's the softest way
being able to move in. And back to your other question,
why at which point are we not early?
When you cannot buy Bitcoin with Fiat, that means late.
Interesting Are central bank digital currency still threat?
I don't think they were ever really a threat because people
don't want to use them. Every country that's rolled out
a CBDC has sort of failed even in China, which you would they
could pull it off because you can't use VPN, this great
firewall and whatnot. But no ones using barely anyone
is using the CBDC. And then Nigeria had the E
naira. There was a total failure.
Total failure. Yeah.
And they had to actually clamp down and limit ATM withdrawals
to force people to use what they initially marketed as a
convenience tool and milk to help you, to keep you safe.
But if it's so good and so safe, why do you need to beat people
over the head to use it? Yeah, there should be no need
for coercion. But you do.
Because people may not understand Bitcoin, but they're
not stupid. They're not going to use
something where they can't get out.
They're not going to check into the Roche Motel, right?
Well, some do, but those are. We call them shit corners, but
generally people know this is inferior monetary technology.
They may not be able to quantify it and describe it, but they
know inside. Yeah.
And what's really interesting, what you said about the coercive
aspect, right, Like CBDC's Fiat, they do require a form of
coercion for people to use. I think the reason Bitcoin's
going to win ultimately is it's, it's incentives.
It's just comes down to incentives.
Bitcoin incentivizes people for for them to use it.
There is no coercion in in the equation.
And to me, when I really learned that lesson, Samson, was when
the China mining ban happened and the hash rate dropped 50%.
Within nine months, the hash rate recovered, decentralizing
the process went all over the world, Texas, Kazakhstan.
And there was no Bitcoin CEO essentially whipping people to
plug in those miners. It was just the Bitcoin network
incentivizing people, entrepreneurs, miners to plug
those machines back in. Yeah.
So it was pretty crazy. It was pretty crazy.
It's always fun times. Yeah, I mean, it, it kind of, it
was kind of a bummer because it cut 2021 short.
Like I, I really believe that. I know there's all these other
theories, but you look at the hash rate and you look at the
price drop, it's like it's obvious that that's what it was.
Well. FTX cut the last one short, too.
Yeah, that's why I think we should be at 200 right now.
Yeah. Everything under 200 is, you
know, cherish. It's a joke.
So what are the things that worry about worry you about
Bitcoin the most? I think Bitcoin is pretty solid
right now. I don't really have too many
worries. If I had to pick one, it would
be sometime in the future. We might have something like a
block size war or a civil war. And it might be from the
traditional finance system like the legacy finance system.
Because if you look at the BlackRock ETF filing, they
actually say in there we get to choose which chain is Bitcoin,
if there is a split, which is incorrect.
And if they amend that, I'll feel better.
But until they do, I think that's a risk hanging over our
heads. There's a chance that even if
that doesn't happen, that Bitcoin can split into two.
You have institutional Bitcoin and free Bitcoin.
Institutional Bitcoin is just locked up in ETFs, in
custodians, and it's not allowed to leave.
And we see little snips and glimpses in the future of that,
right? In the UK you can only transfer
from one exchange to another exchange, right?
Little bits of, you know, Orwellian garbage here and
there, but that could really happen.
You just have free Bitcoin, which is transacted in in
Argentina, El Salvador and everywhere else.
And then everything else is locked up in a system and it
can't escape. What can we do as a community to
avoid that scenario? There may be no way to avoid it,
but you can protect yourself by keeping your Bitcoin yourself.
Anything that's in the system or connected to the system, you
have to understand there is some risk to it there and you may not
be able to take it out of that system.
That leads me to my next question, which is the idea of
self custody. I think I've been doing this in
nine years and I have this very, you know, ideological view on
self custody. It's like not your keys, not
your cheese. But in actuality, I'm, I'm the
Uncle Jim of my family and my extended family.
And even though I've showed them 1000 times how to do it, for
whatever reason, writing down 12 to 24 words is like rocket
science. So, and then in my experience,
to use your analogy of earlier on regards to people walking
across the street, you know, the idea of not having a 1800 number
to call is radical. It's, it's, it's uncomfortable.
And now that leads me to like my conclusion that I've come to
with self custody is. Have we underestimated human
nature as Bitcoiners? I don't think so.
We're just going back to the way it was when everyone was using
gold. Who's the 1800 number?
There's no one 800 number. We've just been coddled and, you
know, domesticated into the Fiat system that we think it's normal
to be able to have someone help you.
You know, the reality is you have to take care of your money
yourself. Someone else can't take care of
it for you or you. You think they can, but they're
going to steal it slowly, if not immediately.
So you have to take your assets into your own hands.
Your destiny is your own. And I think we've done that in
the past with gold. We can do it again.
We can rediscover. Yeah, it's just going to take a
lot of work. I think it's going to be a
generational thing, a lot of education required.
I don't think so. I think you get very fast
education. Like everyone burned in Celsius
and FTX. Do you think those guys learned?
Oh, they, they learned very quickly.
I remember earlier on this year my sister lost her seed phrase
and I think she definitely learned how to take self custody
in that situation. So we were at a we were at your
red carpet event yesterday for the HBO documentary Money
Electric. How did that feel, man?
The red carpet event. The red.
Carpet event, You being in a feature film.
The documentary as a whole. It was fun I would say.
I think Peter had fun too. Is he Satoshi?
No, he's the red carpet event was fun.
We thought, you know, we knew we, we're close with the HBO
guys and we said, you know, you didn't have a, a live showing or
screening anywhere. Do you want us to help you do
one in El Salvador where a lot of the film was filmed actually
in El Salvador. So we thought it was very poetic
that we, we bring it here. We have a theater, we've got a
red carpet and we have, you know, Adam, Peter, myself and a
lot of other people, a lot of bitcoiners go and see the movie
together. It's like this thing.
You can't really do that often in your life, but go watch the
movie with your friends that are in the movie.
When you got into the industry and you know when you first
bought Bitcoin, could you ever have imagined what is happening
today? No, no, no.
I think it's everything's happened faster and in a much
more spectacular way than I imagined.
That's why I'm really bullish because I'm kind of bullish and
then my expectations are beat and I try to reset them and then
they are beat yet again. But everything is happening so
much faster. Like the China ban was a nation
state attack. Then you have a Salvador and
nation state adoption. The timeline is definitely way
faster, right? It's 16 years.
And being in it, you kind of you kind of lose your perspective.
But if you step back a bit and you try to look at it from afar,
it's like that's the blink of an eye.
Yeah, the the rapid pace at which we have grown as a
community, as an asset class and as a technology for money, it's
just unbelievable. Absolutely, It's it's been a
hell of a roller coaster ride. I don't think I'd want to work
anywhere else. I'm sure you feel exactly the
same way. Final question, what excites you
the most about Bitcoin for the next 5 to 10 years?
Watching hyper bitcoinization unfold, I think it's 5 to 10
years. Five to 10 years.
Five to 10 years, I don't think Fiat can hold out that long.
So I mentioned all the tailwinds that we have.
This is happening at the same time the Fiat system is facing
headwinds, right, $36 trillion in debt in the US Every other
country is massively in debt with a really crazy debt to GDP
ratio. The Fiat currencies are failing.
Canadian dollar. I don't know if you're watching
it, but it's going like it's trading like a shit coin.
As with a lot of other Fiat currencies, the yen is dying,
right? Last year there there were so
many Bank of Japan interventions to push it from 160 down to
1:50-ish and it's back now. How much more firepower do they
have and at what point does that stop working completely in the
UK? Last year, the pound almost
reached parity with a dollar, which is crazy.
The government bonds were in crisis.
The Bank of England had to intervene.
And maybe people are not paying attention now because there's so
much other stuff going on. But the government bonds in the
UK, the gilts there are again in crisis.
So if you look at everything, the entire macroeconomic
landscape, you can see that 1,000,000 is actually really
conservative for this year. Yeah, a 10X is.
Pretty conservative. That's a that's a perfect way to
end it, Samson. It's been an honor.
We're here at the Jan Three headquarters and El Salvador
filming in front of a real volcano.
That ain't a green screen. Samson, thank you so much.
Thank you. Appreciate that that.
Was dope volcano energy bro El Salvador freedom country it.
Was a lot of fun.