It's weird that all you can know about someone is their moral foundations profile and you can predict their political ideology or vice versa to some, you know, non-zero degree.
And we wanted to know last year when we asked these questions, like, where are Bitcoiners?
Are they more like conservatives in the way they their ultimate core values or are they more like liberals?
And we found last year and this year, the answer was like neither.
Bitcoiners have their own distinctive moral foundations profile, which I called it moral maximalism, because they just seem to be higher almost everywhere.
If you are listening to this right now, remember, you are still early.
and head to bitcoinpodcast.net for everything else.
Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk.
Troy, welcome back.
It's good to see you again.
We were just together in DC,
which was, I got to say, quite an experience.
I'd never done anything like that
going to talking to my elected officials.
It was illuminating.
let's say. Yeah. Um, it was a great event and I was super pleased that we coordinated a pleb,
uh, descent on Capitol Hill. What did you, what did you learn in talking to the reps or staffers?
Well, so I, on the, and I say this in the kindest way possible, um, uh, because we met with some
like really, uh, really nice people on the staffer side of things. I'll get to the reps in a second,
but I I'm just I was kind of blown away by like the uh the age of the staffers like it is skews
except like seems like fresh out of college on and like there's nothing wrong with that right like
a you know age is just a number right but it's it was kind of interesting because it's like we have
these decrepit like octogenarian politicians and then all their staffers are like a quarter of their
age and they're like and I'm just like I just started thinking about that dynamic and like how
absurd that is that like, this is how stuff gets done in our country. And then I was like, well,
I guess like, no wonder not that much gets done of like, you know, substance. But okay, I was on,
let's, let's start with the positives. On the plus side, I was very pleasantly surprised that
some of the staffers were so open to asking questions, like really wanted to know, like,
we tried to emphasize, you know, like, we're, this is the Bitcoin policy institute. We're not
here to talk about crypto. Crypto is this bad thing that's over here and you should ignore these
scammers. They would then ask like, okay, I really don't understand the difference. Like, can you,
can you explain that to me? And genuinely asking like, that's wonderful. That was great to see that.
That was not the case for all of them, but that was the case for some. And to those it's like,
hats off to you. You at least are willing to learn. You asked great questions.
On the negative side, I noticed that the totalitarian temptation is very strong.
Like some of the other staffers would ask things like, well, you know, the classic lines, what about
money laundering and making sure this isn't used for illicit finance, just like the buzzwords,
right? And you try to give them a reasonable answer about this. Like, well, actually,
most money is laundered the vast, vast majority through the US dollar. And Bitcoin's a really bad
way to do it because it's a transparent public ledger. Anyone can audit at any time. And then
you just still see them push and push more. So that was a little disappointing, but I suppose
somewhat not unexpected. The most I would say disappointing. You had some tweet about,
was it Dick Durbin? Did you talk to Dick Durbin? I talked to Dick Durbin. Yeah. So my-
That was something. That was something. From the great state of Illinois. And that was supremely
disappointing because I went in there like, I know his past position on Bitcoin, that he's been very
negative. I went in there in good faith because that's how I wanted to approach it. And I asked
him. I said, Senator Durbin, has your position on Bitcoin changed at all since in the depths of the
bear market 2022, he co-authored a letter with Elizabeth Warren, basically reprimanding Fidelity
for daring to offer their clients Bitcoin exposure in any way. And the price was like $20,000 at that
point. So he was protecting his constituents from 5X plus upside. Thank God for him. But I didn't
say it that way. I just said it actually, I said it, I said it very respectful, respectfully.
And he just, first of all, goes off and starts talking about crypto ATM scams. And then like
says a bunch of other random stuff and brings it and brings up FTX. And I'm like, well, first of
all, you took money from Sam Bankman free, but okay, we won't get into that. Again, didn't say
this to him. I was being far too nice, very uncharacteristic of me. And then he, he like
takes his finger and starts raising his voice and he points like points at my face. And he's like,
you need to clean up your act. You got to clean up your act. I'm like, like it's Sam Bankman freed
and people running scams are my fault. Like I'm literally just here talking about Bitcoin.
We had a few other people with us. We all tried very respectfully again to be like,
respectfully, Senator, this is a totally different from what we're talking about here.
He wasn't having it. And then he was like, I'm not talking about any more Bitcoin.
And we're like, okay, okay, sit right back.
But yeah, long story short, that was illuminating again.
But he's also like 83 years old.
So he's going to be out of office pretty soon.
So, hey.
He might be out of more than his office.
But your point at the beginning about staffers, I mean, first of all, my experience with staffers has been,
pretty positive.
They are really young.
They are ambitious.
They want to do stuff.
They want to, I mean, they're climbers.
They're strivers.
You don't get to be a staffer
unless you are a promising, ambitious,
talented young person.
But of course, they're also very sensitive
to the political wins and perception.
and, you know, kind of, they're immature.
They're immature.
So it is weird when you realize
that people like Dick Durbin don't have a clue.
In part, it's not their fault.
The brain is just not working very well at 83.
I mean, it's kind of amazing he can hold a conversation,
let alone grasp the difference between FTX
FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried and ATM crypto scams and Bitcoin.
Like, of course, that distinction is going to be lost on him.
He can barely, you know, remember and cognize.
It's doing pretty well.
Like if he's your grandpa, you're like, grandpa's doing great.
He's doing really well.
He's sharp.
Goes to work every day.
Yeah, yeah.
But that's like, you should retire.
You should be retired at 83 from one of the most important jobs in the world.
So, yeah, you're right. You got this weird combination of basically super ambitious kids who you wouldn't really want running things, but they are very gifted just because of their maturity level.
And then people who don't have a clue and the people really, really making the shot, calling the shots are the staffers, I think, more and more.
You know, it's like they really write. They write things. They do keep track of the details.
They are the ones who are. And that's a scary moment where you're like, OK, the kids are actually governing, you know, and then they did.
And then the old the olds, they just bring them out there to to grandstand, basically, and and get reelected.
And well, in the case of Joe Biden, it was literally weakened at Bernie's.
Like that was the extreme case of it where the people governing were invisible and unelected and the person there.
So that's like the extreme case.
But when you have I can't remember what the average age is in Congress, but as old as it is, I don't know what it is, 75 or something.
Yeah.
Something insane like that.
69, 75.
That's like average.
the average is not too far off from lifespan numbers.
It's really not very, very different from average lifespan.
There we are with the average rep.
Like, yeah, yeah, it's not an ideal situation.
Maybe partly why the Biden thing didn't shock people
as it should have was because like,
but look around Congress, like there's a lot of that.
So now it's, is it relevant to Bitcoin?
Hell yes, because age is the biggest demographic factor that correlates with Bitcoin attitudes and ownership.
So you, yeah, Dick Durbin's attitudes are not unusual for an 83 year old.
I'm just going to very quickly go to it.
I'm going to share.
That was a perfect segue, Troy.
I was like, you really nailed it on that one.
can I share this
screen here
go for it let's dive right in
I'm going to share this window just really
quickly before we even get into the thing
yeah yeah
okay 83 we've got a little
blip there but you know that's probably just sampling
data I mean look at the curve
you're in that kind of like
I don't know
3%
to
5%
ownership max in that age. So, you know, 95, 97% of people in that age range, males and women over
80, we didn't have any owners. Yeah. That's just...
Digenarian dudes representing as Bitcoiners, I guess.
Yeah. But Dick Durbin is in that vast space of white. Our graph there on the right side only goes
up to 50%, right? So you have to picture that, like, if you want to picture the full
bar pie chart, they call it, that would go to 100, that even 80 plus males, that is just a tiny,
tiny percentage of people who own Bitcoin in that age range.
Man, I mean, it is so just for context for everyone, you put out a fantastic study here.
And just to back up a little bit, this is the second time you've done a study like this.
But this one is Understanding Bitcoin Adoption in the United States, Politics, Demographics, and Sentiment.
You also did this study, it was about a year ago, right?
Oh, and I think, Troy, I might have lost you.
Hold on.
Sorry, I'm back.
You're good.
We got you back in.
Okay, so, yeah, long story short, you put together this great study.
And I'll just I'll share the just the cover image here, just so folks can see it if they're if they're watching the show. But this is the second time you've done a study like this. And it's understanding Bitcoin adoption in the United States politics, demographic and sentiment, you surveyed like 3300 or something like that different individuals, it was like a very official, like survey survey that was done. This isn't just like picking, you know, a random dude off the street. This is like you guys used Qualtrics. And like this was this is how surveys are done.
Yes. And, and you guys found you found some very interesting things. Last time we talked, which was a little under a year ago. I think things have shifted a little bit. Some things have stayed the same, but there are some new insights. So like, maybe we can we can just kind of start with like, at a, at a high level, like what's the what we're kind of like the boom, you know, the what were the pull quotes here? What were the you know, the really big key takeaways? And then I want to like, I want to dive into a bunch of these in way
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Yeah, well, yeah, thanks for the description of the survey. Yeah, it was the largest comprehensive survey of Bitcoin ownership and attitudes that's been done when we did it last year, and then we did it again.
there have been some more surveys recently
that we're really looking forward
to seeing
or just saw Signal
the polling company that presented
with me at the Bitcoin conference
or the summit in DC
they did a sample of like
a thousand people I think their sample wasn't quite as
good as ours but their questions were great
there's
the Reynolds Foundation
is working together with Cornell
and Sarah Kreps
to do a global study of 25 countries.
On average, they got 1,000 in each country.
It got like 2,000 in America, in the U.S.,
but on some other countries, they got like 500.
That one is going to be a much bigger study than this one
and global and should show us all kinds of cool things.
But we wanted to do our study again to see what had changed.
Basically, like you said, a lot happened in a year.
Bitcoin's price when we did our first survey was about $41,000.
It was $85,000 in March when we collected this data over the month of March.
So more than doubled.
Of course, we got tons of ETFs.
We got Bitcoin treasury companies.
We got the election of Donald Trump.
We got the announcement of a strategic Bitcoin reserve.
actually the announcement of a strategic crypto reserve happened at the beginning of our study
just before our study and then during the study they they came with that really nice executive
order which clarified the difference between bitcoin and crypto and their role in the reserves
thank god for that thank god for that but we couldn't really do that because we were already
collecting data we couldn't really capture that but we wanted to see how all of this stuff
had changed Bitcoin attitudes and ownership.
And in terms of top lines,
we didn't really have a single top line.
Last year, we had a single one.
It was just like, hey, last year,
what we found was Bitcoin isn't political.
I mean, it's deeply political,
but not political in the sense of owning Bitcoin
was not predictive of having a certain political ideology
and vice versa.
Having a certain political ideology didn't really tell you whether or not you own Bitcoin. We found the distribution of Bitcoin owners and the American public at large on political ideology was almost indistinguishable last year.
both mostly moderate with little wing tips of conservatives and and liberals but that's what
ownership looked like too and that was hugely shocking given how political the podcaster space
is and the uh twitter space is and dc is and also the new york times is and given given the entire
discourse is is heavily political we were just like scratching our heads like how is it that
Bitcoin ownership just kind of looks like America.
But that was the top line last year.
This year, we didn't know whether that would be shattered or would continue.
That was the real number one curiosity for me.
Also, whether Bitcoin adoption would grow, whether sentiment towards Bitcoin would increase or decrease.
We saw a slight shift to the right in both ownership and in sentiment.
uh maybe i can share a screen for some of these absolutely uh let me do let's start with politics
yeah um one uh one one quick note also just on total number of americans if i'm remembering
correctly in terms of percentages from your last study it was like was it what was it one in seven
something like or was it uh or seven percent which one was it uh for owner exposure to bitcoin in
some way okay what last year this is tricky i wish i had a simple answer for you here last year we
asked us we asked a question which was uh do you own bitcoin really nice simple question we also
asked have you ever owned bitcoin and then for the people who said they had but they don't own
it presently we asked them like why they sold but um last year a lot of people in response to our
survey said uh you know you're missing a lot of kinds of ownership because a lot of people don't
own bitcoin but their spouse does let's say their partner and they jointly own it but they wouldn't
say they own it on a um on a survey it might also be that somebody owns ibit but they're not counting
that or they might own microstrategy that they don't consider that to be owning bitcoin uh
or they're stacking it through a business or something.
So we decided to ask the do you own Bitcoin question again,
but also ask do you own it on an exchange?
Do you own it in self-custody?
Do you own it on an ETF?
Do you own a retirement account jointly with a partner and so on?
And then we added up, non-exclusive, check all that apply.
And then we added up the group that selected at least one kind of ownership.
And so that's a new metric we didn't have last year.
We can't compare it.
Last year, we found one in seven people own Bitcoin, about 13% to the straightforward question, do you own Bitcoin?
This year, we found a statistically indistinguishable number, 12.5% to that same question.
No statistically significant difference between those two numbers.
But on the expanded question of ownership, we got 18.6%, which is between 1 in 5 and 1 in 6.
So we were missing people, basically, who owning through these other methods.
And that might have grown too.
We just don't know because the ETFs grew tremendously.
The treasury companies grew tremendously and so on.
But yeah, as far as we can see, Bitcoin just held steady on the do you own question.
And there's one more complication in that we wanted to clarify Bitcoin from crypto in our survey.
And a lot of people last year said, ah, your one in seven is too high because people are just answering, yes, I own Bitcoin.
It's called Solana. I have it on Phantom.
And so they're probably right, too. Good criticism.
We did say Bitcoin in a preliminary remark at the beginning of the survey.
Like we're not interested in any other cryptocurrencies, just Bitcoin.
But this year, when we said, do you own Bitcoin?
We actually put that disclaimer right into that question.
So bearing in mind that we are not interested in any other cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin, do you own Bitcoin?
And we got 12.5% of people that said yes on that question.
And so who knows how many shit corners we filtered out there that we didn't quite filter out last year because they forgot the instructions from the beginning of the survey.
So it's really impossible for us to make claims about ownership across time.
Unfortunately, yeah, this is a long way of saying we don't have apples to apples.
we have a top line but not a dynamic measure on ownership because we got clearer about ownership
this year and i think the top line is something like uh yeah 12 and a half percent americans say
they own bitcoin but when you consider the various ways of getting exposure to bitcoin
indirectly through a a retirement account or an etf or a treasury company or an on exchange even
we got a much broader number, 18.6.
That's 48 million adults in the U.S.
Like I said in the report, there are 50 million Catholics in the U.S.
That basically puts Bitcoin owners on a par with Catholics
in terms of their political size and constituency.
And of that group, 11 million people claim to hold Bitcoin in self-custody.
uh which is you know elizabeth warren shadowy super coder kind of material and there's 11
million of us that's uh 4.21 of the u.s population or uh also 24 of bitcoiners so roughly a quarter
of bitcoiners claim to hold bitcoin in self-custody uh which is freaking cool and that's awesome
That number we thought can't be true because it just seemed too high to us.
But I did some research on hardware wallet sales.
Ledger claims $8 million cumulative sales.
Trezor, $2 million.
That's not enough even if you throw in all the other hardware wallets.
Probably, like I have a lot of hardware wallets.
I'm guessing a lot of us Bitcoiners do.
You know, probably at like three hardware wallets per Bitcoin owner.
And that's worldwide.
That doesn't add up to 11 million Americans.
But when I looked up the downloads for crypto wallets that can hold Bitcoin with keys, it was more than enough.
Trust Wallet alone has 200 million downloads of their app.
And Trust Wallet has Bitcoin on it.
You can hold Bitcoin on it, of course.
typical crypto wallets can hold Bitcoin. So I don't know what the ratio is of American,
you know, current users to their cumulative downloads, but that's one wallet. We also have
Coinbase wallet, Robinhood wallet, you know, any number of other mycelium wallet I used to use,
like back in the day, whatever. There are all of these phone wallets where people are holding
their own keys i think this is crypto and how it the blessing and the curse that it gave to us over
the last cycle um crypto got a lot of people to download wallets for their phones so they could
do defy and so they could um have nfts and stuff like that and then as those things like die you
People get the biggest cryptocurrency that there is, which is Bitcoin.
And then they have it on self-custody because they already have a wallet.
And they already are familiar with using a wallet themselves and signing their own transactions.
So, I mean, this is one of those cases where we do owe something positive to crypto.
The negative side we'll talk about later in terms of perceptions of Bitcoin.
and well you already ran into it and you know dick durbin's office but yeah that's wild i i
apologize for for derailing a little bit what you were going to go into on like the political
breakdown so like go into that next but i wanted to set the stage with that because i think like
that's just wild to me that it's uh we're still very early but like it there is a big chunk of
people that this is actually a meaningful like they own bitcoin or they're exposed to bitcoin
in some way. The self-custody one alone, I was just like, heck yeah. That's amazing to see. I hope
that number continues to grow, but it's not bad for right now. It's not bad at all.
I think, yeah, are we still early? A lot of the comments on when I posted this on Twitter were
about that. People saying, well, what this shows is that we're not early. I think we are early
in terms of total allocation to Bitcoin.
I think we are early in terms of self-custody,
but we are, I mean,
I mean, on-chain activity is like nothing.
And so, and that's another reason
to question my data on self-custody, really.
This is how many people think they self-custody.
But if you look at wallets
that have a non-trivial amount of Bitcoin on them,
it's not a lot.
So we have a long way to go on self but also what does early mean Yeah it could mean the total value of the asset It could mean incorporation into our lives and economy that we buy things with it That not happening very much If you look at the data right it could it could mean it could mean a lot of things
And I think on one of those dimensions, like having some Bitcoin, you're not early.
Like, you know what I mean?
You have $20 of Bitcoin on Coinbase.
Like, OK, a lot of people do.
Like 48 million American adults do.
You're not that early anymore.
Beyond that, you're still early.
That's, I think, a very important distinction in terms of allocation size, let's say.
You know, percentage of like individual percentage of net worth is another one to look at.
But okay, let's get into the political side of this a little bit.
What can you tell us about that?
What was the same from the last time you looked at this?
And then what has changed over the last year plus or so?
Well, we were still struck here.
Here you're looking at on the left-hand side of this chart,
the breakdown of owners versus non-owners of Bitcoin left to right.
and you see among non-owners, it's mostly moderate,
slightly right-shifted in our sample, barely.
And you look at owners, and it's also mostly moderate
and slightly right-shifted.
If we look at this chart and we didn't have last year,
we'd be like, wow, Bitcoin isn't political.
That would be our lesson.
But when you look at the dynamic from last year
where they were exactly the same to this year,
you do see gains among conservatives,
you know, 4.2% gain among conservatives.
And you have a similar amount of losses among liberals
and somewhat liberals.
So you see the shift in ownership.
It's slight, but it's there.
So yeah, that's a more nuanced message.
It's like, where are we politically?
On the whole, we're like where we were last year.
but liberals own are less percentage of owners this year than they were last year and conservatives
are more a percentage of owners than they were last year and uh we also asked four different
questions on political orientation one was a 10 point scale one was a uh a scale that also
included libertarians and moderates and others um and and another was a different kind of measure
they all showed this rightward shift.
So I think even though this one was sort of like
on the borderline of statistical significance,
some of the others were much more significant.
So I think overall ownership shifted to the right.
Libertarians also own more this year than last year.
And Libertarians are 5% of all Bitcoin owners
and like 2.5% of the general population,
something like that.
It's hard to find the general background percentage
because definitions differ.
But yeah, you're twice as likely to own Bitcoin or to be a libertarian as a Bitcoin owner than as a non-Bitcoin owner.
But it's just a tiny amount of the total population.
But yeah, everything shifted a little bit right, but it's still fairly moderate.
it. And I think that right shift also, you know, in my mind that that makes sense, right? Given,
given the discourse, like that, there are people who like, I know people personally,
like in my like, you know, normie friend world, who like, would not touch Bitcoin until they heard
that Trump was like all about Bitcoin now. And they're like, well, I guess I'll get a little bit.
And I was like, you know, I'm telling you guys for years. And now that and this is what but it's
like, okay, that's what tips the needle for some people. I'm sure it tipped the needle. I don't
know. I'm curious if it, if it, you know, did that actually induce a number of people to be like,
I'm going to get rid of all my Bitcoin because I hate Donald Trump. Or is it just that more
conservative people ended up buying Bitcoin because of Donald Trump? Like people aren't
necessary. I mean, there's, I guess that's tough to know, like exactly, but I mean, do you have any
perception of that? I think they both happened and I don't have solid support from that, from the
data but i do have this dropping among liberals right and where moderates hold steady so it's like
it's not just that the percentage increased on the conservative side and then just dropped
uniformly across the rest of the spectrum it especially dropped for liberals uh somewhat
liberal, very liberal, and liberal. And so I think both happened. Although, when we go to sentiment,
which is how people feel about Bitcoin overall, you get much bigger drops on the left.
And you don't really get a rise on the right, you just get a non falling. And so the left
seriously dislikes Bitcoin now. They didn't used to dislike Bitcoin.
uh you know so so that that uh that changed and i think there's a gap between uh sentiment and
ownership i think your standard liberal that had bitcoin did not sell their bitcoin but they just
dislike it more and you know what i mean like so their attitudes are like it's it's it's been the
best performing asset you know in a generation and when you hold that maybe you don't talk about
it but do you sell it probably not because it's made you uh you know it's made you money so yeah
uh if we go to sentiment here i'll just scoot down this is sentiment there's a composite score
of 16 different questions about how you feel about bitcoin how much you know about it how
much you trust it how useful you find it whether you think it's moral and look at these drops
on the left
this is on a
seven point scale
liberals dropped
.7 last year
very liberals
they were slightly below
neutral on it
just slightly below neutral
they dropped almost a full point
that's on a seven point scale
that's a Likert scale
that's from strongly disagree
to
somewhat disagree, neutral, and all the way to strongly agree on some positive statement about
Bitcoin. And so they're going from basically neutral to slightly disagree with any positive
statement about Bitcoin. And yeah, and you see conservatives and very conservatives kind of
holding steady overall sentiment dropped last year on bitcoin and you know this is i think
kind of shocking um yeah because bitcoin's price doubled and it is an asset because it won on like
it won in in almost every way that the protocol could could win uh the regulatory front um
on the adoption front.
But people feel less positively about it this year
than they did last year, non-owners.
What I show on the right is that owners of Bitcoin
are more positive this year by a half point
than they were last year.
The people who are in are getting even more in.
It's a kind of polarization of attitudes
along gendered lines.
Women dropped much more than men
and along political orientation lines.
And those two things are sort of blending because the Democratic Party is becoming increasingly female and the Republican Party increasingly male.
So Bitcoin is hyper male.
We skipped that slide, but it's, you know, you're twice as likely to own Bitcoin as a man than a woman.
And it's aligning with the male dominated political ideology and females are becoming more critical of it.
Yeah, so I think the kind of orange branding of Bitcoin has taken a toll on the political enemies of Donald Trump.
I think Bitcoin's brand is extremely strong.
It's one of the strongest brands in the world.
That's why we have absorbed all of crypto in our brand.
We are like the Kleenex of Bitcoin or the Kodak, where it just becomes a name for the whole genre.
but Donald Trump's brand is one of the only brands that's stronger.
And we have, the Trump brand is unbelievable.
His negatives are insanely high and his positives.
And we have kind of both from both these brands,
the Bitcoin brand and the Trump brand,
we've had a fusion attempt to make a fusion,
like the David Bailey gambit to invite Trump to the conference,
to raise money for Trump.
which was a brilliant, brilliant play, led to a wildly successful conference and all of the policy stuff that we wanted at least being discussed.
And the worst of the policy that would have been implemented under an Elizabeth Warren presidency avoided.
Yeah, horrible to think about that potential future, right?
But as much of a win as that was, that's him trying to cement. He had to cement the Bitcoin brand to the Trump brand to do it. And Trump also being the crypto president, the Bitcoin president, like he's branding himself with Bitcoin.
And, you know, in the mind of most people, there just isn't room to distinguish these things. And so your feelings about one just kind of fuse over to the other.
And so, you know, while there's a tremendous upside to Bitcoin's price and to its prospects and international game theory and everything that we are experiencing, there is this like thing where people who people are extremely negative on Donald Trump are more wary of Bitcoin than they were a year ago, despite all of its successes.
Maybe because of its successes, they find it suspicious.
And we saw that in the data.
And you wouldn't really see that in price.
And you wouldn't really see that in other metrics.
I mean, maybe you see it on chain.
It's kind of a ghost town in the mempool.
You know what I mean?
There are these little markers like, where's retail?
Where's retail?
Institutional adoption is insane.
But we don't see the FOMO.
We don't see Google searches.
We don't see Bitcoin Twitter going nuts.
Right. And people are kind of like, where where's the wave of adoptees coming in? And I think this data indicates like at least part of the story for where where they are. Some of them are scared off by the politics and association with that that character and Trump coin and all of the self serving grift that they you know what I mean? They make the same mistake Dick Durbin made.
I literally had staffers bring up Trump coin to me, like as one of the first things they'll be like, well, we don't really, you know, you're talking about Bitcoin, they'll be like, well, we, we, you know, I, you know, you're not a supporter of Trump coin, are you? And we're like, no, no, we, everyone who's a Bitcoiner thinks that was a, an absurd grift, and absolutely just ridiculous. And we'll disavow that and say that is shit coining.
and like you know i didn't think i'd be you know talking to staffers about shit coining but like
then there you are but like that was the first thing that came to mind for them when you brought
up bitcoin was well we hate trump and trump launched trump coin and that's crypto which
is bitcoin also right and it's just it's all jumbled together for a lot of people and like
one of my biggest takeaways was like wow the educational work that bpi is doing is so damn
important really important otherwise you have people who think trump coin is the same as bitcoin
who are writing laws. And you can say like, oh, I don't have to do what the government tells me.
That's why I have Bitcoins. Give my middle finger to the government. And it's like,
well, that's true. But they're still the guys with guns who can come and take away your stuff
and incarcerate you. So do you want them to write favorable laws protecting your right
to use Bitcoin? You don't need them to do that. You can still use Bitcoin, but you'd rather have
them like i'd rather have a lot of senator lummases than elizabeth warrens in government for example
absolutely very very simple heuristic there you know yep uh i think two two points there one is
uh for those from those staffers perspective it's like well wasn't wasn't melania coin launched like
during the crypto dinner uh i think i think it was yeah yeah i wasn't at this crypto dinner so i was
watching on online uh as melania coin got launched i'm pretty sure it was like while the dinner was
taking place which is just insane also like what are we doing here this is like it was one of those
things where it was like so surreal that you're like no come like no way i know yes but if you
look at the crypto dinner i mean it's all prominent bitcoiners and it's bit it's bitcoiners who
donate heavily to elect the guy and so it's really hard for a democratic staffer to look at that and
then say oh but you are opposed to that but there you are at the dinner and he just announced it and
you know luckily i wasn't there so you know i was right right luckily right i know uh i do a lot of
people at the dinner i luckily wasn't there too but it's just like that's the danger of
I hate to go political here, but that's the danger of getting in bed with an amoral, self-enriching politician.
You are stuck.
Once you start playing that game of politics, like you start supporting a politician,
then when they do shit that you don't like, it kind of blows back on you.
And you can distance yourself from it, but you're partly responsible for them being in office.
And so you kind of just kind of take that.
And there are brilliant strategists who made that decision and know what they did and live with it.
But man, it sucks.
I want to have a conversation with the Trump family and say, look, you guys, you have a chance at history, like ultimately in life.
I know you have a corporation and you have a family business and your wealth and whatever.
but almost nobody gets a chance to go down as Lincoln,
you know, Washington, like you got that chance.
You can, your legacy can go down for your entire family line.
Like we led America into a period of peace and prosperity and greatness.
and uh and and you would forfeit that for uh a chance to you know enrich yourself
on a on a crypto token like like it it's it's just so it's not it's not even a question of ethics
it's a question of self-interest like do you do you understand what the stakes are here
and how much more important this is even to you and what what you ultimately care about in the long
run, you're jeopardizing it. You're jeopardizing it all. You're jeopardizing your legacy,
the ability of all of your legislation to succeed. Democrats don't want to support
common sense legislation because it has some symbolic association with this grifting.
That came up with even the stablecoin legislation, and it's going to be there with
market structure, the Democrats who are already on board, and I don't even care about that
stablecoin legislation stuff, but these people were already on board.
They were already bought and paid for by the political lobbyists.
Once the Trump grifting got too hard to stomach and he's giving audiences to whatever, shakes
who are lots of Trump coin,
they withdrew their support
and had to be won back.
Yeah, you're jeopardizing your agenda
and your chance to get done
what you need to get done.
So it's hard for me to believe
that it happened for that reason.
Like who in that family,
that power system
is making these kinds of calls?
Like, you know,
the rest of us have to like
scrape for money and do things that are not necessarily, we're not necessarily proud of
to make a buck because we need money to survive. But you don't, buddy. You got like, you got a
golden opportunity here. I don't know. It's a shame. It's incredibly high time preference behavior
is what it ultimately comes down to. That's right. That's it. Like insanely so though,
for the position that you are in when you have the luxury of being low time preference. But then
again, it's like, how low time preference can you be when you're his age? Also, that's like,
that's a function of age. Like you, like realistically you're, I mean, maybe Trump
lives to be 150. I doubt it. Um, like he's probably going to have a slightly above average
lifespan. Good for him. I hope he is healthy long into his, his even later years, but like
as a function of your age, you're necessarily more high time preference. Like, but, but then again,
you're also like very wealthy. So like you have the ability to be low time preference. And if you
care about your kids and your grandkids, which exactly like that, I was going to say you're a
father now, you're a father now. And I feel like that generalization is just not true for people
who, who have kids, especially, I can't speak for the people who don't, but my parents, they've
gotten more, um, more low time preference as they've aged. And I feel the same way. It's like,
I care more about my kids and my legacy now than when I was a teenager. I didn't care about my 30
year old self. Right. I feel like I feel like you're right in theory, but in practice, for me,
it's gone the opposite way. 100% agree. And like, I felt like I didn't entirely like I thought I was
a low time preference person because Bitcoin made me so enlightened prior to having our first child
our son and then he came along and i'm like oh no i was like i mean i was kind of like mid-time
preference but like now i'm like what happens like long after i'm gone because he'll still be here
and his kids will still be here and like it it's real then but maybe that's not as important for
some uh i i don't know i i won't i won't speculate on that but it was just insanely insanely shocking
to see uh and it's like imagine the vibe if that hadn't happened like i you wouldn't you wouldn't
have to have conversations with staffers when you're trying to talk about bitcoin and how great
it is for americans and the people of the world you wouldn't have to first address trump coin and
melania exactly wouldn't that be nice but i guess that's in an alternate reality we're in a different
place but uh for for this time timeline we're not that's right i think this is partly you were
saying how important the bitcoin policy institute is and and and related educational efforts and and
all of us really uh when it comes time to educate our our representatives um you know we live in the
world that we're given like uh uh i didn't vote for trump uh but i shudder to think about what
would have happened under a harris regime uh not just to bitcoin but in many other respects
um you know none of those options really appealed to me you know uh but if if harris had been elected
i would be advocating likewise with trump i've got i've got a different set of problems uh
instead of like how do we keep you from making this illegal we've got how do we keep you from
grifting on top of it. You know, it's just like, pick your poison. But I'm glad you guys came in
and did some of that. I mean, I think it's, you know, it's a reminder when you meet people in DC
that we really do have a representative democracy, despite the fact that, you know, yes, it is
sullied with money. But there are people ultimately who make each decision.
They're just people. There's people behind every decision. And those people are the representatives and the staffers. And you can talk to those people as people. You have that right and that access as a citizen.
um and and once you see that happening and you realize how little they know and that many of us
in bitcoin like actually know a lot more then you realize like okay this is a good system we we can
close this gap and we kind of have the duty to do it as as citizens to let our voices be heard
make our presence felt in dc we are represented by them they serve us it's back to the declaration
and stuff you know it's a government for the people we're the people you know whatever i know
there's a lot of whatever anarchists in bitcoin but it's not a terrible system at least we're not
just outside the castle you know shouting at the walls we can actually talk to people and um yeah
yeah it you know trump whatever you make of him uh he listened he actually heard that voice
uh harris did not and that was a big part of the election it could be sufficient to have swung the
election in his direction it's just listening to bitcoiners and crypto people i you know there's uh
the guy that i co-presented with in dc uh brent duchanan did a poll of about 800 or maybe it was
a thousand people uh and and he his data shows that bitcoin owners uh were more likely to vote
and it was a very important issue for them and they swung hard for trump
uh they were all over the political map but they they swung hard for trump in that election more
so than other republican candidates and you know his his kind of one of his takeaways from that
which i think is very good was that if democrats don't learn to listen to that same constituency
they're going to lose even more center left males.
Younger center left males could cost them the next election.
Kind of advice to Republicans is like,
take more of what you already took from young Hispanic males,
young black males.
Just leave the Democratic Party isolated with just college educated women.
You know what I mean?
So, yeah, anyway.
no it's well and do you want to do you want to uh i want to get back to uh to your study as well
but do you want to go through that the slide you showed me before from sure yeah i can do that
that one's super fascinating i think let me let me share this uh and highly highly recommend anyone
who uh uh did not catch my feverish live tweeting stream of the bitcoin policy summit uh go and
watch some of those live streamed talks that are up there on youtube uh even if you did read my
feverish live tweet stream uh it was just a lot of signal there and remember that like the people
that are up on stage are again addressing a room of people who may think that trump coin is the same
thing as bitcoin and so like their message is is really important yeah okay let's let's yeah okay
here we go. This is the one that I wanted to share. Bitcoin barriers, barriers to Bitcoin
adoption. The question is, what are your main, what is, what are the main reasons you don't own
Bitcoin? Select all that apply. Too risky is number one at 45 and a half percent. Don't trust it is 43%.
Don't understand it. 37%. Not enough money to invest. 27%. Regulatory uncertainty, 25%.
25%. No need. I think this is like, I don't have a need for it. 23.5%. Don't know where or how to
purchase it was 15%. Too political was 14.7%. And that may be showing up in our ownership data.
That might account for some of that shift. Environmental concerns was 6.1% and unsure was 4%.
percent um i i was just really struck like hey we should just tackle these from the big ones you
know like too risky don't trust it don't understand it uh we can't do anything about not enough money
those first three though too risky don't trust it don't understand it those are all similar vibes
really right that's just like because if you do understand it you know it's not too risky if you
don't trust it, you don't understand it. Like that all comes down to a lack of understanding,
right? Because once you do, you're like, oh no, this is not too risky. It's, it's not owning it
that is risky. And like, it is, you know, don't trust verify. Like I don't, I don't have to trust
it in the same way that I have to trust other things, but like I can trust it because I don't
have to trust anyone. So like that, again, that just comes back to education though. And that's
why I say like, okay, that's, that's an earliness sentiment right there, that it's just people still
haven't wrapped their heads around what the heck this thing is. And you also, you know, yeah,
there's more educational resources than ever before. But like, people are busy just trying to,
you know, stay on that fiat hamster wheel and not get thrown off. And like, it's, you know,
you feel for people because like you want more people to understand it but you got to be able to take the time and have the take the initiative to go out there there and actually learn about it So you don say it too risky or I don trust it
Yeah, we actually asked these questions about trust and risk in our survey too and understanding and knowledge.
We asked four questions on knowledge, four questions on trust.
and um and we found them to be super correlated with each other and super correlated with bitcoin
ownership they were much more correlated than anything else like anything in demographics or
politics uh and our conclusion you know last year and it holds true for this year is bitcoiners are
just people who know about bitcoin you know that's what characterizes bitcoin ownership more than
anything else. It's just people who know about Bitcoin. So you're exactly right. And I think
we get caught up in debates, like the environmental concern debate. You know, that's been a major
focus of mine for the last four years. And it's 6.1% of people, only 6.1% of people list that as
one of the main reasons, not even the main reason, but just one of when you can select
all that apply. That means 94% of people didn't consider it to be one of the reasons they're not
buying Bitcoin. And yet that has like dominated the discourse. I don't know, man, we got to focus
on the education side. And it's hard. I mean, you know, it's hard. We have a ton of resources, yes.
but people don't have a lot of time and uh bitcoin is a bloody hard thing to explain
it isn't quite like anything else uh there's a book that i just started reading on anti
anti-memesis or anti-memetic ideas uh you know me memetic ideas are ones that easily catch on
and spread like on social media, like, you know, cat GIFs or memes.
But anti-mimetic ideas are ones that in some ways resist spreading or they're hard to spread
despite being oftentimes like really good ideas.
And I think Bitcoin is an anti-mimetic idea, which is, I know, weird to square with the
fact that our entire community is the most memetic community on the internet we are the kings of memes
but the underlying thing is not a meme and it is not meme it is not directly
capturable in something as simple as a meme we've got like a thousand memes for it but none of them
are quite right none of them are perfect you know and and so you can there's there's something really
hard to grok about the Bitcoin idea. It takes time. And I think what you see there is something like
the lack of time and effort that people are willing to put in to understand it. They're
busy. They don't need it that much. They've got privilege. And where you have to understand it,
you learn it, you get it, you see its value. But if you don't have to, it remains this
abstract idea and you know you know the whole set of questions that we have about it what
what backs it and why can't i just copy it and oh my god you know the whole list of things can't
we use it for crime like uh uh those things just keep coming at us and and people don't have a core
idea of what it is it's an asset it's a network what is that exactly um it yeah who controls it
who made it like those basic things is it digital gold well kind of yes but kind of not
um and and and so yeah yeah i think we have an enormous educational uh task in front of
ourselves and like this this chart is awesome it's like how we cross the chasm of adoption
we got it we got to get people to understand it and when they understand it they'll see that it's
not too risky and they'll come to trust it or as you put it realize you don't even need to trust it
it's trustworthy it's reliable uh yeah we asked one of our questions on trust i've got to say this
uh was just do you trust the bitcoin blockchain to be accurate an accurate record
and we thought like this this is almost like a test of bitcoin literacy like you should say
you know strongly agree like everybody should say strongly agree there shouldn't be any disagreement
about this one actually the answers to this question about trust were right in line with
question the other questions about trust which is like do you trust it to hold value over time
like that kind of you know do you do trust it do you think it's you can trust it with your saving
people had the same answer to that as do you trust the accuracy of the chain which tells me
they do not understand it at all.
It's just all lumped into one for them.
It's all lumped into one.
Yeah.
Trust.
Bitcoin is a volatile asset.
If you need money a year from now
and you know you need it,
Bitcoin, you may not want to park
all that savings in Bitcoin
during that period of time.
You need a house in a year.
And I think Bitcoiners would say that.
But...
None of us Bitcoiners are going to say that the blockchain contains falsehoods about what has transpired on the chain.
It's like the most accurate source of information in the world.
So the most trustworthy in the world.
So, yeah, anyway, that tells you where people are at and what our real challenge is.
I guess you're a Bitcoin educator, so this puts you at the tip of the spear.
Yeah. I mean, at least that means there's plenty more podcasting to do. So that's a good thing.
You know, there's no shortage. We need more Bitcoin podcasts out there to counteract this.
I mean, if you're going to take 40 hours in a week, there has to be a lot of content out there
to provide that 40 hours. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. So another thing I wanted to get into in your
report was this uh this idea that you guys i think i mean i think it's a term basically that
you've coined uh as a result of the what you saw in bitcoiners which is moral maximalism yeah yeah
can you can you talk about that a little bit because i thought that was fascinating let me
share this uh yeah well we uh this is andy perkins uh idea and andy is uh
the head of the marketing department at Washington State University and the co-author of this report,
he designed a survey that we use to collect the data.
And Andy uses this framework of moral foundations in some of his other academic work.
And it's the creation of Jonathan Haidt and some other social theorists about how we can understand
and explain some of our moral disagreements and public policy disagreements
through thinking about what our deepest moral and cultural values are.
So each one of these dimensions of this radar plot here
is a measure of one of the foundations of moral reasoning,
uh care cultural liberty economic liberty purity authoritarianism authoritarianism doesn't mean a
political thing it means like respect for authority how important is it to respect your parents how
important is to respect your political leaders and obey them and stuff like that loyalty
proportionality or kind of fairness is another name for that one equality
uh and each one of these dimensions you get a battery of questions like i don't remember what
it's four four questions i think for each one maybe five or six that ask you a variety of
questions of how important is it to you know pay people equally for the same kind of work
maybe for proportionality and then you would have a seven point scale um you know not not very
important, very important. Or yeah, strongly disagree to strongly agree. And where you rank
on this dimension is an average of those questions on proportionality. And likewise for all of the
others. So what you get here is like a profile of which things you care about most in moral
reasoning. And the reason this framework is interesting is because liberals and conservatives
Democrats and Republicans
differ in their moral
profiles sort of robustly
Republicans
are higher in like respect
for authority and they're higher
in purity and they're higher
in economic and cultural liberty
than liberals
and
similar to liberals
in the other dimensions and some
liberals are slightly higher
but
But that means there's some there there. It's not just statistical noise. But it's weird that all you can know about someone is their moral foundations profile and you can predict their political ideology or vice versa to some non-zero degree.
And we wanted to know last year when we asked these questions, like, where are Bitcoiners? Are they more like conservatives in the way they their ultimate core values? Or are they more like liberals? And we found last year and this year, the answer was like, neither.
Bitcoiners have their own distinctive moral foundations profile, which I called it moral maximalism, because they just seem to be higher almost everywhere.
Like on cultural liberty, cultural and economic liberty were distinguished by economic liberty was like about property.
Basically, I have a right to do what I want with my own property.
cultural liberty is like i kind of have the right to do with my life whatever i want to do unless
somebody else would be harmed by it on cultural liberty bitcoiners were higher than everybody
on economic liberty sort of between liberals and conservatives i was surprised by that actually
we had the same result last year same exact result last year on purity bitcoiners were higher
on care bitcoiners just kind of matched conservatives on equality bitcoins were the
highest proportionality bitcoins were uh matching uh conservatives uh loyalty just barely below
conservatives well well above liberals authority below conservatives but well above liberals so it
just seemed like they were either right next to the maximum or at the maximum across the board
um like they this isn't to say they're more moral than other people some people misunderstood the
phrase moral maxima is like they're really good people it's more like they they just tended to
agree with the importance of some moral value like the importance of equality or the importance
of care the importance of fairness and importance of loyalty when asked you know how important is
this they were like it's more important than other than other people and also this this profile just
matched last year's like almost precisely which is like cool there's a bitcoiner type um that's
there's a bitcoiner type of of a set of values and and ways of thinking deeply about
about morality that correlates with Bitcoin ownership.
This, this, I would say like once, once I saw this, I was like, yeah, yeah, this tracks
like Bitcoin or I forget what exactly you said in DC, but it's basically like Bitcoin,
Bitcoiners care about everything like a lot, like just, there's a lot of it, a lot of passion
there, which is like, you know, that, that makes sense.
But it's also another just good reminder that this is like, yes, money is inherently
political because it's money, but money is not partisan. And Bitcoin is like, of course,
Bitcoin's inherently political because again, it's money, but it's not partisan and neither are its
owners. And like, this is like, that's what I think is so fascinating about these studies that
you guys do. And I'm so glad you, you do them. I hope they continue because it just very clearly
shows that it's like, you can put whatever label you want, whether you're pro or anti or whatever,
and you can slap whatever label you want on Bitcoin, but Bitcoin doesn't care.
And it turns out that the people who own Bitcoin don't fit your label either.
Like they're, you know, often right in the middle of what you expect.
They're, you know, so except when it comes to this moral maximalism
where they care about everything a ton, which is just, yeah, amazing.
Amazing.
It does kind of fit, right?
It's like, yeah, there's a, yeah, I think Bitcoiners,
it's hard to make any you know any generalization generalizations about all of us but
we're doing something new and different right we are early we are early we are the early ones
and and who steps out into this new domain um first you know kind of like asking who comes to
america it's not a random sample of europeans that we end up with in the in the u.s the settlers
Like we end up with adventurers.
We end up with people who are dissatisfied with the system.
We end up with the people who are dreamers and want to build some more ideal, safer, better future for their families, for themselves.
So like that's something like that, I'm guessing, is showing up in this moral foundation profile.
you know it's like people who see the system and say it's not fair and fuck that i'm out
those people gonna rank higher on fairness right um you know or certainly cultural liberty people
are stomping on my liberty i'm gonna opt out those people are you you survey all those people
you're gonna see they rank cultural liberty higher right so i i yeah i feel like something
like the the the earliness of bitcoin owners right now is reflected in this i don't know if
this profile will dissipate and we'll just go to like average over the average population
of moral profile like over over time my my guess is that we do like over time we just
this thing just becomes noise but right now we have we have a type yeah yeah
I mean, it's cool to see, and it is interesting to think, like, as Bitcoin becomes more ubiquitous, what does the profile of a, quote, Bitcoiner look like anymore?
Exactly.
The waters will be muddied, necessarily, because you're just, you know, it just looks like all of us.
But, like, and right, like, that's the interesting thing.
Like, right now, it still kind of looks like all of us.
That's one of the takeaways from this, right? Is it still looks like Bitcoiners look like America? Is it fair to say?
Absolutely. And I think that saddens a lot of people. The waters have already been muddied. They've been very much muddied.
I was part of a lot of Internet communities that went through this period of growth where they were special at first.
and then it just became people like shit posting
and the quality deteriorated
and you couldn't count on members to know anything
or do anything other than just go for cheap laughs.
And every time I mourn the death of that community
and I feel like that's just part of what it is to be adopted.
You can remain niche and you can stay cool,
but then you will always remain niche.
So do you want people to adopt or not?
And yeah, I think going back to ownership where we started, it's going to be impossible to measure exposure to Bitcoin because it's going to be almost 100%.
You know, if MicroStrategy gets into S&P 500, that broadens, like everybody's going to get a little.
Wisconsin has in their retirement fund, every Wisconsin state employee retiree has some exposure to Bitcoin.
And then treasuries keep adding Bitcoin to the balance sheet.
I mean, it's going to be like stocks.
If the country has, I mean, U.S. does have some Bitcoin.
I mean, really, actually, all the U.S. citizens all have exposure to Bitcoin through the holdings of the government in some extended sense.
But if those holdings grow, then that exposure will also grow.
So it's like the point of studying Bitcoiners might over time just disappear.
The questions of how many people own it, what do they like?
I mean, hopefully all this is just like nobody studies cell phone owners now.
like what do they like what's the profile of a mobile phone user like dumb survey nobody would
do it and and and that will be that will be bitcoin and and then people will say ah i remember
when being a bitcoiner was cool uh well it's never cool outside of our circles but it was like cool
within our circles remember when it was uncool uh you know it was just right it'd just be boring um
yeah i wanted to do one last thing um walker uh just we already made this point that trust
in bitcoin knowing about bitcoin belief in its utility belief in its morality
are more predictive of bitcoin ownership than anything else we asked four questions for each
of these they were highly correlated with each other highly correlated with bitcoin ownership
like so far and away above everything else even that age chart like i compared these against age
these against gender and even these against age and gender combined so you have these categories
of like old and female young and male these attitudes are more predictive than being young
in mail, let's say.
So really, this is what Bitcoin adoption is about.
These attitudes towards Bitcoin,
not, as I say in the report,
it's a matter,
it's not a matter of who you are.
It's a matter of what you know
and believe about Bitcoin
that predicts whether you own Bitcoin.
And so, yeah,
that puts the ball in our court
as Bitcoin educators to get it done
and also gives us hope that it can be done.
Since Bitcoin isn't some niche political identity,
it's certainly not young white males or something.
Whites are less likely to own than non-whites in our survey.
It's not like you're fighting identity in order to adopt Bitcoin.
You're fighting ignorance.
And that seems doable.
Whereas you're not going to talk someone out of their religion
or their, you know, their gender, you could talk them out of their ignorance.
I mean, that's a very good thing, right?
Like, it really does just come down to education.
I mean, and it's wild to see that, like, just how similar this is across the board.
Like, that's, I mean, it's pretty darn clear.
like there's really there's no uh i i don't think there's a a good way to like to argue against that
like the more you know the more likely you are to hold it is essentially like what that boils down to
right yeah yeah i mean exactly and we don't know which of these comes first and we don't know like
and i should include yeah ownership is orange there right so it could be and probably is true
that when you give people some Bitcoin or they buy a little,
then they start to trust it.
Then they learn about it.
Then they see its utility.
Then they think it's good.
And it can also go the other way.
You learn about Bitcoin.
You begin to trust it once you know about it.
You begin to see its utility.
You begin to see its morality.
And then you buy it.
We don't know which way those causal errors are going.
We can't measure that with our tools.
i'm pretty sure it goes both ways uh uh those faucets in the early days um created a lot of
bitcoiners and they probably created a lot of fervent bitcoiners and uh we should probably
bear that in mind too when we're educating about bitcoin you know it's great when you
when you are orange pilling someone just to give them some bitcoin like it's a classic move here
here's 20 bucks worth of bitcoin uh play around with it send it to people try different wallets
whatever just have fun with it play with your bitcoin uh it actually is a strategy uh for me
anyway it's a technology play with it um you know watch it watch the price chart honestly you know
for some people that i've just told about bitcoin they just watch the price chart and that was
enough to get them to
begin to trust it because
years pass and
they come
to see that the
pronouncements of its death are
greatly exaggerated.
Just watch it over time.
I think it
goes in all directions, but the correlation
is ridiculous, ridiculously
tight.
That does make me think that if we
educate people
we can achieve broad adoption.
And then I would say the counter signal to this in the report,
the counter signal to this is this trend of a trend in sentiment,
especially where you see the brand identity calcifying as political, right?
And you see people losing people on the left and losing women,
which we already have fewer of.
And so I think there's a kind of bright spot in the report.
which is like hey we're basically americans who know about bitcoin um and then there's a warning
there's a red flag uh canary in the coal mine kind of thing which is like this is a worrisome
trend here we have a technology that is rapidly growing in value and rapidly growing in institutional
integration, government adoption, but it's shifting, it's polarizing in its perception.
And frankly, why is it neutral, negative across the board, except for owners?
Why aren't we positive?
That is in itself not cool.
People are like, how do you feel about Bitcoin?
And this is in the signal poll as well.
They just ask a simple question like, your impressions of Bitcoin, positive, negative, neutral.
It hovers around neutral, but it's slightly negative.
Like, why?
I don't think it was like that for, I don't think it was like that 15 years into mobile phones.
Although, you know, people did hate lots of things about mobile phones or the internet.
But I don't think we just sat there at neutral sentiment and kind of went down while the technology was exploding.
So I think there's also a warning signal here.
Do you think that's perhaps a unique function of Bitcoin as money, given that if you don't own something and you see its value going way up,
like you kind of root for it to fail a little bit because you don't want to have been the guy who sat on the sidelines and kept watching it.
you don't want to be the Peter Schiff, you know, like, so you, it's,
it's like sunk cost bias where you just, you double down, you double down.
You're like, Nope, it's bad. And the higher it goes, you're like,
I hate it even more now. Do you think that's part of it? And like,
and that's something that's different than like mobile phones or the internet
or whatever, because like, they're not money.
Yeah. It's very true. Yeah.
Something I heard in DC that was just really disturbing and I heard it through
other people too um was that some of the democratic opposition to bitcoin was not based in any of the
concerns that we talked about earlier like crime and sanctions evasion but was just because it would
give a win to people who hold it and the trump family has a lot of it and right now one of the
quotes that i heard was just um we can't afford to give them a win right now like we'll get past
this and like eventually we'll be able to
we'll
work something out but right now we just can't give
them a win
and yeah
that's depressing
to think our representatives
are making decisions
on behalf of the American people
that are
suboptimal because they don't want to give
their political opponent a win
the fuck
that's not the job that's not your job
like do your job
your job is to serve the American people Maybe do a little soul searching too Like okay like this could give you a win too nobody has a monopoly on this open protocol you don like you only hurting yourself by being
against it like it's just so frustrating where it's like you're cutting yourself and your
constituents off from this incredibly net beneficial thing and instead treating this like
it's some negative sum political game or zero sum political game like this is bitcoin's a positive
sum game like this rising tide lifts all these boats but you're you're treating it like every
other political football that you've grown accustomed to throwing back and forth i guess
is what it comes down to it's like you know bitcoin's hard to understand that it's something
new and it's right now people are just treating it like it's just one of their other talking points
one of their other red blue coca-cola pepsi cola battles and it's just that's a serious miscalculation
serious miscalculation it will hurt to whoever does this miscalculation is going to be
tremendously hurt by it for a long time uh i think what you're raising is like a bigger problem than
the resistance to bitcoin you know when you realize that political decisions are made that
it's kind of like where we started with the staffers like wait decisions are being made by
octogenarians and 24 year old staffers like that's a little frightening but this is another one like
wait the simple heuristic of like that guy would benefit therefore bad that guy likes it therefore
bad that simple heuristic is decisive i mean i understand it as a heuristic if you got to make
a snap judgment and you don't have any time or any other information on a complex subject
and you know that a guy that you generally dislike likes it then you might say okay that's a bad idea
but that's not you you you have a staff you you you have the ability to investigate things
and you know donald trump likes a lot of great things um you you you don't you know what i mean
that like uh he likes a lot of great things indisputably things that we wouldn't even
consider you know he's in favor of in favor of the internet i'm sure uh it wouldn't make you
not in favor of the internet that he's in favor of it it's such an incredibly lazy way to make up
your mind about something but it's it's even more than laziness it's um it's not just laziness
because there's not lazy people it it's tribal religious warfare and the not wanting to give him
a win is well we're engaged in a battle of good and evil good versus evil and we we must win
it's an existential risk.
If we don't, we need to save democracy, blah, blah, right?
It gets swept into this huge spiritual battle.
And that's dangerous.
Democracy can't work in a winner-take-all,
close-minded way of zero-sum thinking.
Democracy requires compromise.
It requires compromise.
accepting ideas from your greatest enemy when they serve your constituents.
Like if, if, if it's just rotating,
if democracy is just rotating oppression of your enemies by authoritarian
parties, then what's the point? You know, we're Iraq. Like that's, you know,
you just,
you just want to be in the ethnic majority so that you can just oppress the
ethnic minority right and then if you're the ethnic minority it's like we need to have kids
fast enough to overcome the that's not democracy that's not democracy and it feels like this is
just one of those issues where the hyper polarization and tribalism in this issue is an
indicator that our leadership is not functioning uh in a in accordance with the principles on which
democracy can work. And that's like a deeper concern than Bitcoin in the short run.
Well, let me ask you a question off topic of the report. But I mean, generally, what are your
thoughts on like a legitimate third party contender? Like with Elon or with the American
HODL Eric Kaysen ticket that's been floated around in the orange party? Where are you at with that?
Um, my political science friends think it's an absolute non-starter.
And, um, because our system is built to maintain and support two-party rule, and we would have,
need to have a different system like you do in other countries in order to support a viable
third party.
That's their studied judgment, uh, as, as experts in the, in the field.
my gut and my heart says they're wrong.
My gut says there does come a point
where people feel ill-served.
It's almost like the dollar system.
You know, Bitcoin is unlikely.
No expert would have predicted it.
But we levered up so hard on our ability to print money
that we just took that as an axiom
and then we leveraged on it
to exploit the ability to print money
to such an extent that we basically
are taking down the entire system of money.
Just like we levered up on,
was it Ben Bernanke's claim
that the housing market never falls
over a certain period of time?
We levered up on that to such an extent
that we made it fall.
And we do this with all certainties. And I feel like in America, the two party, the party system, Democrats, Republicans, the two party system is such an axiom that we lever up on it and abuse it to such a degree that we might destabilize that system and open the path for a third party.
As unlikely as it is statistically and structurally with everything against it, my poli sci friends would say, just look at the number of seats that are up for grabs in the midterms right now that look up for grabs.
It's just a handful of seats.
Everything else is like locked and loaded.
It's decided already.
So, you know, how do you go from a system where the goods are all divvied up and the electorate is all fully, you know, the districts are already gerrymandered perfectly to maintain, to basically shove all of the contestable regions into a very small number of districts?
how do you how do you how do you break into that system where incumbents are just a lock i mean
how do we get these old politicians how is it that the average age is 70 or whatever it's it's
because people don't leave but why don't people leave well because their constituents re-elect them
but why are they re-elected because the party system and the gerrymandering is so effective
so the same reason why congress is old is also why a third party is unlikely um but i yeah my gut my
The gut is like, yeah, that's the structure, but the structure, everything right now is unstable.
These big structures that we've taken for granted, it's a risk allocation thing.
We perceive the structures as not risky, as stable.
We have a hard time perceiving a risk to the structure, to the system.
But if Bitcoin teaches you anything, it teaches you to look for those kinds of holistic risks.
You can see Bitcoin as a hedge on that systemic risk for the dollar system.
And so you start to see it.
The third party is kind of like in the same slot as Bitcoin politically.
I mean, I welcome it.
First of all, it'd be wonderful to open up the discourse and get some new slate of candidates.
I mean, Kaysen and Hoddle would be wildly entertaining.
They've got my vote.
I'd love to see it.
So the one thing I don't think we touched on yet, which was another interesting part of the report, and I want to be conscious of your time here, but if we can maybe just touch on it briefly, is the question about if we should.
let's say divest a little bit of our gold holdings and have Bitcoin instead.
Can we talk about that one a little bit?
Because I thought that one was quite interesting.
Yeah.
I think the upshot of this really is also,
it's the same as the main upshot, which is that education is key.
If you just ask people like,
hey, should we adopt a strategic crypto reserve?
This is their answer.
Most people are like, what? Neutral? Some people are like, hell no. And then there's a few people who are into it. But it's neutral to negative. That sounds like a crazy newfangled idea. People don't like it in general.
uh we also asked like should we diversify our bitcoin holdings into or our gold holdings into
bitcoin and people had similar result in the binary question should we do this or not it's
because it's like a newfangled thing should we develop a strategic bitcoin reserve in which we
convert some of our gold to bitcoin um people are hesitant about that um but when we we gave
them a question with a slider which said the united states government is considering uh converting
some of its gold into bitcoin if you were advising the u.s government uh we didn't say they they were
going to do it we said they were considering doing it if you were advising them how much
uh the gold would you advise them to convert to bitcoin and the slider could go in one percent
increments between 0 and 100.
And for the record, the slider was set at 50.
But if you didn't touch the slider at all,
there was no record placed at all.
We just discounted you completely.
And there were like 300 something people who didn't touch it.
And so we just didn't count them.
We had 3,538 respondents total,
and we just went with whatever our 3,200 for this question.
That meant that you had to grab the slider and put it somewhere.
And the number of people that put it on a 50% was,
oh, you can see right here in the chart,
41 to 50% was not really an outlier.
And 50% itself wasn't especially high.
People tended to put it on like 10% increments,
like just because of the way the mind works, right?
Oh, 20%, 30%.
But what was interesting is, having said all that about how we gathered the data, 80% or 79 point something percent of people put that slider off zero and allocated some gold to Bitcoin.
And the median allocation was 10%.
the mean allocation was just over 20 percent because you know 10 is towards the low end of
the spectrum so you had those like maxis out there like 100 you know so um that would throw
off the mean because there's so much higher than 10 but the median was 10 um which would be like
we have an 800 billion dollars worth of gold that's 80 billion dollars worth of bitcoin which
is a uh lot of bitcoin actually yeah that's a tremendous that's a tremendous amount of bitcoin
um uh so and and then yes we found that i ran this against every other variable in the data
set basically to look at how you know young people did it how women did it how liberals did it how
conservatives did it how people who felt well with bitcoin did how people who own bitcoin did it
And it all went according to how you would expect.
Old people much less likely to allocate than young people.
I mean, look at this median conversion rate.
These are median conversion rates by age for each of these groups.
between 26 and 30 they're like putting one third of the gold reserves almost into bitcoin whereas
at 80 you're at like five percent um still not that low but we also looked at men versus women
and we found uh we found i didn't have this in the report basically uh men allocate a lot more
than women, except as you get older, men were at like, the older men were at 0% allocation,
and the older women were off zero.
Interesting.
Yeah.
And it was really, you know, across all the age groups, women were really reluctant to
go to zero, whereas old men would just go to zero.
And I think it's because of risk aversion.
I think with this framing, allocating everything to gold and not even 1% to Bitcoin is risky. And men are less risk averse. And so, you know, the women would be more risk averse and just allocate a few percent to Bitcoin.
Whereas the men were like, no, fuck it.
They're like, it's Peter Schiff.
We had the Peter Schiff group is the old men who want 0% in Bitcoin.
Old women, they're a little bit more cautious.
And in this setting, caution pushes you in favor of some allocation.
And if you think about sort of like, we're thinking about converting some of our Bitcoin
reserves to gold reserves to Bitcoin, should we do it?
That binary, people are probably filling in an allocation in their mind.
Like, how much are they going to put there?
Is it going to be 25%, 50%?
Like, I don't know.
That sounds scary, right?
But if you give them a slider and say, you get to put the percentage, should it be zero
or more?
Suddenly, 80% of people are like, well, it shouldn't be zero.
Even risk-averse people.
So I think the big lesson for this is we need to educate people on what we would be doing
exactly, but also frame the question in a way that answers questions for them.
frame the question in a way that allows them to see how small the allocation could be.
I wonder if you just asked the question, should we convert 10% of our gold to Bitcoin?
What your answer would be, or 5% rather than should we create a Bitcoin reserve that this
newfangled thing, right?
It's very, very, very frame dependent.
uh that's what we say in the report uh we just think this issue is very frame dependent and it's
early people don't know that much about it they don't understand what it would be so we have to
educate well framed it's a well-framed question here though like because that does make it make
sense no it's just like it's you're it's getting your foot in the door right like you're just
dipping your toes in a little like you know just a little just just maybe just a little bit of
bitcoin you know just a few billion like what you know it's not a big deal well trey this was
fascinating. Is there anything we did not get a chance to touch on that you wanted to make sure
we did? Have we done a pretty good job covering this? I appreciate your time because this was
amazing to get this deep dive from you. Yeah, I appreciate the chance to talk about it. I really
had fun with this data set and I'm not done with it. It's a large data set and I'm not a data
scientist.
I'm not a statistician. My training is
in the humanities.
It's in philosophy.
But it's really
fun to have data.
And I'm also lucky to have Andy as a
co-author and
somebody who actually does know how to handle data.
So I could throw my crazy
ideas by him and he could tell me why
I was making statistical
nonsense.
Yeah, so I want to give a shout out to Andy.
Really appreciate his help.
and to the other people who are doing data collection.
I think that what this whole thing shows us
is the hidden parts of Bitcoin ownership.
We hear from the media.
We hear from politicians.
We hear from each other on social media.
We hear from podcasters.
But we don't hear from the typical Bitcoin owner
because they don't feel that strongly about it.
They don't know that much.
about it necessarily.
They don't feel the need to talk.
They're not as ideological.
They just stay quiet.
And that is most Bitcoin owners.
I was thinking about it.
Okay, we got 48 million people
with exposure to Bitcoin in America.
How many people were at the Bitcoin conference in Vegas?
What was it?
Do you know?
30, maybe a little over 30.
30,000. Okay. So 30 times that is 1 million. That's one 30th of 1 million. Now we got to multiply that by 50. Right. So that's, what is that? One out of 1,500 Bitcoiners is there? Something like that?
So just your math on that one. That's just guessing. I'm not good at mental math, but something like one out of every 1500 Bitcoiners is there. So it's like, and that's a very non-random sample. Something that people attacked on this is like, how can you generalize about 48 million people on the basis of 3,538? And I'm like, well, what do you think we do with all of our opinions about Bitcoin? We generalize on the basis of Twitter. How big do you think Bitcoin Twitter is?
I mean, I don't know. I have 60,000 followers. Big Bitcoin or bigger accounts have a couple hundred thousand. Maybe we have 500,000 Bitcoin on Twitter, Bitcoin Twitter at maximum.
How many more bots?
Exactly. How many Bitcoin owners do we have active on Twitter, in Bitcoin Twitter? What does a good post get about Bitcoin? How many likes does it get or views?
I don't know. I mean, a good, a really good one might be, it might climb to 500,000 views,
like a really banger post on Bitcoin Twitter. Okay. 500,000 out of 50 million. You're still at
1% of the population of Bitcoin owners is you're generalizing. You're generalizing on that. And
those are the people who maybe viewed a tweet. The ones who talk in the comments on that banger
tweet, you might have 50 people at most would be an amazing, amazing thread of participation.
So now you're generalizing on those 50 and you're thinking those attitudes represent
the 50 million. And they don't. So we're all generalizing about the Bitcoin community,
who's in it
on the basis of very, very
small sample sizes. All of us.
The question is whether they're
representative or not, whether they're random or not.
And
that's the value in this
stuff, and I'm really looking forward to seeing
Sarah Kreps
and Ella Hoff, too, who's also
working on that.
Ella and Sarah's project,
the Signal project, and I know there
are others underway, too, because
it's just showing us stuff we don't know.
I'm really excited to see that as well. I just heard about that just before we got on here. So that looks amazing. That's one of the things I would love to know how America really stacks up versus other countries. We have some guesses. There's some assumptions we can make. But to really get in there with an actual study is going to be fascinating. So I cannot wait to see that.
And have you talked to, have you had the river people on, like Sam Wilder's recent report on America?
I have not.
I've got to have those guys on.
Yeah.
It's overdue.
Because they have an awesome report.
And they presented right before us, as you know, at the summit, Alex Leishman.
But their take is like America dominates Bitcoin in many respects.
And, you know, weirdly, I think that's true, but there are also other respects in which we are kind of at the tail end, you know, in terms of it.
Yeah. In terms of economic value, number of businesses started incorporating it, treasury balance sheets, whatever, there's retirement funds incorporating it.
We're at the front end of the financial side of Bitcoin and maybe even also a lot of the technical side, too.
but in terms of who needs it and who uses it i think we're way behind a lot of other places so
uh i did we didn't talk about the the race data in my thing but hispanics showed
were the largest the highest percentage of owners in my in my uh study and people are asking why
that is and it's like i think a lot of people have family members or know people who use bitcoin
like use it for real for something other than uh speculation uh but like to avoid inflation or for
remittance or they've had to use it because their money is crap and and and and so i think that
informs the ownership in the u.s of that subpopulation right so yeah i i think i think
if you have uh sam on or someone from river for that that that's an awesome report too that they
that they wrote on a kind of american dominance in bitcoin and then you have
sarah uh creps on uh and and ella to to talk about the um the yeah the ways in which bitcoin
is more advanced in other places that would be an amazing amazing combo you're lying you're lining
up my schedule for me. I love it. I love it. Well, where can people go to a booker? Yeah,
no, that works for me. Um, where, where, what's the website? Uh, there's, you also have a, an X
account too, for the project. I'll make sure to link everything in the show notes. What's a,
but if you want to just let people know. Yeah. The website is Nakamoto project.org
and you can follow me on Twitter at, at the Trocro. And I don't have the Twitter handle for our, um,
our x account offhand but it's like nakamoto project but um i think with no e so if you just
if you search nakamoto project we'll pop up on on x so far we don't have any imposters we're not that
big this this org is a we are a 501c3 organization uh if you want more reports um give us money
we're kind of out of money from from having spent money on these last two reports uh we i didn't take
any money. I didn't pay myself anything. I did it. I did it all for free. Uh, Andy didn't take any
money. He did it all for free. We paid our illustrator, our graphics designer. Uh, we paid
some overhead. We had to pay for the actual survey. Um, we had to pay to, uh, to the professional
firm to get it done, to get a large sample that's representative of the United States.
It's not cheap. So yeah, I will, I will plug us too. We're 501 C3 pending.
Well, I am going to go ahead and send all of the sats received on zap.stream during this to you guys.
It may not be much, but so far we've got 5,317 sats from the good people of NoSport.
So that's at least something.
And I double-checked just so that we could tell people on X, it's Nakamoto and then P-R-O-J-C-T.
That's it.
But yeah, well, Troy, really, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you for putting together this study as well.
I'm already looking forward to the next one.
But yeah, in the meantime, I'm looking forward to what other insights you can glean out of this data.
Thanks so much.
And thanks for hearing me out.
You're welcome anytime.
Always happy to platform a philosophy professor whenever I can.
Cool.
There are many of us.
There are many of us, as you know.
It's an amazing thing.
The vibes are high.
And let's wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of The Bitcoin Podcast.
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