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This is a motley crew we got here, gentlemen.

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This is I'm very excited for this conversation.

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We've been going back and forth an email for a week.

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George, I've been following you on Twitter for over a decade now at this point and followed your journey through Bitfury.

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You're about to release a book telling the story of Bitfury.

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We have Bill Tai joining us as well because he went along on that journey with you.

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And it's a story of resilience and building, like we were just saying before, we hit record and we're early to Bitcoin.

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We believe, I truly believe that we're right.

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And despite that, we've had to build with many doubters in the background and many obstacles to overcome,

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considering we're trying to scale this distributed network and the infrastructure around it.

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So I think, George, if you're comfortable to start it off, I actually want to start with Bill because we were chatting before you hopped on about the story about how we got connected with you.

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I think, Bill, considering your storied career in investing and spotting many startups in the early days, before we get into Bitfury, the story of Bitfury specifically, let's back up and talk about your journey to Bitcoin.

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I know you just told me it over the course of about five minutes, but I think it would be very valuable for the audience to hear as well.

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Yeah, so to give a little background, my original training is in silicon chip design.

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I came out to the Valley in the 80s when Silicon Valley was forming and joined a startup led by the CEO of Fairchild.

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That startup was called LSI Logic.

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Among my teammates was Jensen Wang.

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He was an applications engineer, and I was a technical marketing guy.

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I went on to help the government of Taiwan start Taiwan Semiconductor.

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I got a weird little badge, A001, in that project before it was incorporated.

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That went on to become a trillion-dollar giant.

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Moved into venture capital around 1991 and started off funding silicon chips and then

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comm equipment and then internet networks and then later applications on that and some

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machine learning stuff.

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But along the way in year 2000, a couple of friends of mine and I set out to build a peer-to-peer file storage system that was called iFrog, spelled E-Y-E-F-R-O-G.com.

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There's still a little site up.

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That technology evolved to become the functional equivalent of iCloud for Nokia, who bought the company.

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It was launched with all their web phones in 2006.

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And one other vector was Philip Rosedale, who had started Second Life, and I were contemplating how to increase engagement in Second Life.

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And I took the avatar name and still have the avatar, Alan Greenspan Gollum.

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And Philip launched the Linen Dollar and created a dashboard that would measure GDP and economic activity.

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We had universal basic income all running 2003, 4, 5.

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So when the Bitcoin white paper came out and was sent to me, I just lit up.

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And by 2010, I was tweeting a little bit about it and then eventually ran into some folks that became part of the founding team of Bitfury, including George.

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That's how I got involved.

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and then george turning to you and somebody who's found bitcoin early uh why don't we talk a little

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bit about your early journey and how you decided to you know how you land on the idea of bitfury

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and decided infrastructure is what you wanted to focus on yeah i mean the the story is crazy

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because I grew up in a Soviet Union family of doctors.

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And at age 15, I saw all their life savings basically evaporate.

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All the Sberbank holdings in rubles was gone.

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And that left a profound sort of an impact on me.

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So you kind of grow and go in life through these experiences.

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And I think that was the first major experience to appreciate not to trust central governments.

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And things happen for a reason.

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And somehow I ended up in Ukraine doing agriculture investing.

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And while I was doing it, there was this fellow, his name is Marat, who is one of our dear friends.

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He kept pestering me about Bitcoin and Val and Bitfury.

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And I'm like, what is this?

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And then when I started, at some point, if you remember the Cyprus banking crisis happened.

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And that was, I don't know how big it was in US, but in Europe, that was massive because

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many of my friends had accounts there.

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And all of a sudden, there's this big issue.

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And I started digging in and I started exploring.

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I started reading about Bitcoin and Han Academy was one of the first sources.

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And I started kind of diving into it.

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And I'm like, oh, my God, even if 10% of this is going to come to fruition, this is just going to be massive.

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So, you know, life is all about seeing the signs and connecting the dots, you know.

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And I think, you know, for me, it was kind of serendipitous that my first call was to my, you know, business school network on the West Coast.

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And one of the first people that I got connected was Wences Vesaris of Zappo.

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And, you know, I had the conversations with Wences and, you know, I just connected to him.

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Here's a guy from Argentina we never met, but I connected with him on so many levels that the past that we had, the history we had, was so profound and so conducive to the concept of Bitcoin.

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And when I kind of connected all these dots, I realized that, OK, this can be something really big and maybe it's a sign to go after it.

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I mean, 21 million Bitcoins.

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I'm born on 21st.

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My nickname as a kid was Buka.

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Bitcoin, so B was a very important thing in my life.

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So I don't know.

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It was just on a very kind of astrological or God feel.

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It felt that this was the sign from above.

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And that's when it all happened.

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And plus, you know, when you meet Val for the first time, these piercing blue eyes are like a laser.

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And I mean, something about those blue eyes and that energy that sort of that kind of gave me another sign, you know, to trust that person and to trust the process.

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And, you know, the rest is history.

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It's funny you mentioned USSR and Wentz's experience growing up in Argentina.

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because actually right around when you start building Bitfury, that's when I'm really beginning

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to lean into Bitcoin. And what pushed me over the edge was I was working at a managed futures fund

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at the time. We indexed commodity trading advisors into a fund of funds. It was a great learning

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experience. But my chief investment officer at that firm, his name was Dmitry Alexeev,

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and he had immigrated to the United States from Russia in the 90s. And I'll never forget one

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Monday morning portfolio management meeting we had. It was right around QE2, Operation Twist,

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when the Fed was engaging in those market stimulus and policy programs. And I'll never forget,

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it was just me and him in the room. He turned around, he was like, Marty,

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the United States is turning into the Soviets Russia I ran away from. And at the time I was

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studying Bitcoin and learning about distributed systems and the corruption of central authorities

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and just systems generally.

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And I think that really pushed me over to edge.

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Be like, okay, maybe I should look further into this Bitcoin thing.

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So that was me in 2013, end of 2013.

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But you're already a bit ahead of me, beginning to build a company in the space.

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And I think it's hard for people today to really put themselves in the shoes of a founder

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in the Bitcoin space 12 years ago.

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What was it like?

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What was the environment like during this period?

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Bitcoin's five years old at this point. Yeah, maybe I'll let Bill kind of lay the foundation

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for because he was really instrumental. Bill is probably one of the most humble person I've met

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and person that can seize the waves ahead of many. And I mean, we'll get to it all our kind of

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escapades and discussions with all the venture capitalists in Silicon Valley that could have

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invested in Bitfury and ended up with hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins on a balance.

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But I mean, he connected the dots in 2010.

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And he was one of the people involved with the Stanford Bitcoin Club, kind of shepherding

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the guys like Vitalik.

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So I'll let Bill to kind of lay ground for that and I'll chime in.

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Yeah. So, you know, obviously, the Bitcoin space at the time was full of all these weird, interesting, eccentric, mostly very technical people.

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And it reminded me a lot of coming out to Silicon Valley in 1983.

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So if you think about the valley at that time, it was kind of a land of agriculture and misfits.

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So when I first came out, I lived in a little apartment at the back of a cherry orchard.

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It was very agrarian here.

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So all the companies that you know of today that came out of Silicon Valley, they didn't exist.

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This is the era of Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild, and startups, relatively speaking, like Intel and National and AMD and our company, LSI Logic, that was a couple years old.

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And a lot of the people that came to the Valley at that time were people that had training in things like semiconductor physics because nothing else existed.

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And so people would come out here to find community and find other people that they could actually talk to about stuff they were interested in.

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And back at that era, there was this little group at the Homebrew Computer Club that had these attendees that nobody knew at the time.

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But they were basically kids, like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Paul Allen would come to show pieces of wood with parts on them and build community and get feedback on products.

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And so when the Bitcoin space started to emerge, it was like a flashback back to that era.

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And I started – I could just tell that there was – because of the network element around this technology that there was going to be something that came out of this.

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And so I started hunting around in 2010 for other people that I could talk to about all this stuff and eventually ran into a young man named Danny Yang who had started the Stanford Bitcoin meetup groups.

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and just like the Homebrew Computer Club, he'd borrow rooms and people would show up and guys

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like Wences or Adam Back or Antonopoulos or all those people would come. Vitalik came when he was

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still with BTC Magazine trying to raise money for Namecoin at the time and people would come and

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show their projects. I remember seeing the founders of BitGo and Zappo and all these

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companies would come to just express their vision and talk about what they wanted to see happen.

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And at the same time, I was hunting for companies to fund. And I was looking and I don't remember

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the timing of these things, but I remember looking at teams like Butterfly Labs. And

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there are three or four companies that were trying to migrate the horsepower of Bitcoin mining

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from what had been software on regular desktops and laptops to groups using GPUs

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to then groups programming FPGAs and a handful of people trying to do ASICs.

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But the market was not big enough.

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So for silicon companies, unless you have a very high volume market,

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you're not going to make money on your chips.

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And so there were teams that had come out of Intel and Sun Microsystems and other places

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like that that had traditional tooling and very expensive design methodology to produce these big,

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honking, expensive ASICs. But the fixed cost was very high for those and the volume wasn't there.

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So the approach was just not right. And I kept looking and looking. And the business models

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were crazy then because never before would you have people that could take massive pre-orders for

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silicon that didn't exist and equipment that didn't exist and then take that money and design

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things. So they were all on the hook if they couldn't deliver. And many of them hit the wall

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because they couldn't deliver and they went bankrupt. But so in that journey, like meeting

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with all these companies, I end up meeting this young man named Nico Poonin, who was heating his

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apartment in Finland with machines. And he had met over the internet, uh, uh, George and Val and

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some other people that would end up forming Bitfury. And, uh, uh, I, I met him through,

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um, some trips on Necker Island, you know, cause I, I, uh, had always been trying to build

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community with my kiteboarding crew. I, some people know I, I took some time off after I had

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a bunch of companies go public and I became a sponsored athlete in kiteboarding. So I would

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throw these kite trips off of Richard Branson's Island. And I convinced Nico to come out because

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there was a friend of his named Antti Pananin that was part of our crew. And I was talking to

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him about Bitcoin, Bitcoin. I got to find something in Bitcoin. He says, I know this kid.

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And so Nico came out and told me what he working on And I got to know him over several a couple of years because he would tell me about what he was working on And we were looking at applications and things

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And he told me about these guys he was working with.

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And he said, yeah, we were always ahead.

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We were a little bit ahead in GPUs and everyone caught up.

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We taught each other how to program FPGAs and everyone caught up.

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And now we need to design a silicon chip.

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And I was like, you can't do that.

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What?

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you have no training. Like, who are these guys? He goes, well, there's this brilliant mathematician

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and he's, he's got this design for a chip. And I was like, no, I said, this is, this is something

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that takes decades of training and millions of dollars of tooling. And unless you've done this

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a couple of times before, it's just going to fail Nico. There's no way you guys can do this.

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and then eventually he was just so um so convincing uh in his belief i agreed to meet all the other

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guys and then i started to dig in around the silicon chip and i would and because i had a

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background in designing silicon chips i was astounded i looked at you know generally what

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they were doing i was like wow this is a totally different approach because the the original bit

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Fury chip wasn't this pure like million gate honking digital high speed processor on advanced

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process. It was a mixed signal implementation that did a lot of things in a very common sense way

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that you wouldn't have thought of if you were stuck in the old regime of licensing synopsis

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and cadence and working with big heavy fabs and paying millions of dollars for standard

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methodology. So I think because they had to be creative, they were. And I thought this could

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actually work. And it was such a game changer in terms of cost structure and the ability to make it

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in a fab that was not 10 nanometer at the time, because the first Bitfury chips were at 55 nanometer,

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and 28 nanometer. And they were highly productive and able to be used in what I would consider

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dirty electricity environments where the electricity was not stable and you could stack them.

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So if you had different voltages, it didn't matter. So you could basically a very flexible

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approach that could be run pretty much anywhere and at much lower cost. So I thought, I think this

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could actually work. And so that it took about a year. I don't know if it's a year or six months,

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but we eventually gathered up all this capital from my circle of friends to fund that chip and

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away we went and it worked. George, what was your perspective on the Bitcoin mining industry?

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I mean, obviously we're talking heavily about the hardware, but what was it like from what I

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understand wild west days we mentioned cpu to gpu fpga i think those machines hit the market for like

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six months and then we quickly went to asics as the price of bitcoin went up as hash rate rose

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difficulty rose it became more competitive how what was the state of bitcoin mining at that point

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and how did it evolve yeah i mean um i joined bitfury when the whole ecosystem was at one

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One petahash.

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Okay.

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That's where we all started.

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And at that time, one of the part of joining BitFury and backing them was to meet these guys.

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You know, I was in Ukraine.

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You know, we had this venture which eventually got sort of bought out by Cargill.

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And I wanted to meet these guys.

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And when I met these guys, I mean, they were talking astrophysics.

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You know, these guys were so freaking brilliant.

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They were speaking, I could understand maybe 5% what they were talking about.

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But I knew they were probably the most smartest people I've met.

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And, you know, I thought going all through all these Ivy League institutions and stuff,

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you know, I've seen it all.

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They were just brilliant.

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They were just sharp.

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And I just realized, you know, at the end of the day, you know, I'm betting on the highest IQ there is.

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I mean, Ukraine was famous in the Soviet Union for a few things.

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And one of the few things was computer science, mathematics, physics.

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And I mean, frankly, you can see that on the battlefield.

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I mean, that's what's holding Ukraine up, you know, that sort of a brainpower.

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And that raw brain power was just so amazing.

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And at that time already, Bill, Val has already met with Nico over Skype.

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You know, they were doing dealings and Bitfury was the old.

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But Bitfury at that time was extremely angry because Butterfly Labs promised people the first ASIC, which failed.

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And that derailed the Bitfury trajectory.

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So Bitfury came with an advertising.

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Bitfury back then was a tiger.

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I don't know if you remember.

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The logo was a tiger.

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And it's actually funny when we hired a million dollar PR agency later on in 2017, 18, after all the PR and work, they rebranded Tiger into a Calibri.

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And Val is like, what the fuck?

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They brought us from a Tiger to a Calibri.

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But that's another story.

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I guess Calibri is move fast.

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But the advertising of Bitfury was tiger chewing on a butterfly and the blood spitting down.

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That was the ad of Bitfury.

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Because they were so pissed that those guys lied to the market and they derailed Bitfury that X Val, the other Val, he just went in, locked himself in, and he worked extra hard to design that full custom chip.

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So when I was joining, that was basically happening and the 55 nanometer was out there.

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And Marty, I don't know if you remember, there was something called G-Hash IO, which was basically Bitfury chips.

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And, you know, sometimes, you know, there was a big freaking issue because G-Hash IO was like 60% of the market.

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You know, and here we go talk about decentralization.

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I'm like, guys, hello, you guys realize that this is like, but like, yeah, that was one of the early issues.

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So when I came, there was all of this thing happening.

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So you have this battle with Butterfly Labs.

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You have this one petahash.

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You have Cypress.

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You have full custom design.

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You have Bobby Lee on BTC China.

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That was a big China.

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sort of a thing happening back then. So I'm like joining it. And then you have this Maidan

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revolution in Ukraine, where there is this overthrow of the government. So we're kind of

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going at night to stand with the protesters during the day. We're sort of working. So it was just one

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clusterfuck of things. And I was like, oh my God, this is really creative disruption.

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Something big is going to come out.

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And then, you know, people send you angels.

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And Bill was one of those angels.

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You know, when we connected and we spoke, we realized that, okay, this is the guider of ours that will translate this raw intelligence power.

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We'll kind of digest in his language and we'll bring it out to the investors.

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and uh you know god knows we tried i mean we we probably i don't know like 80 100 vcs in silicon

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valley we came out power packed with our new chip you know 60 market share beautiful slides

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unfortunately val the cto the the you know the brilliant designer he was in a

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helicopter in a helicopter or a, you know, bicycle helmet. So he wasn't very presentable.

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He was in a stealth mode. Motorcycle. Excellent. Let me interject. Motorcycle.

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One of the issues, you know, I sent, I sent the deck, for example, to some friends that I had

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worked with for 20 years at Sequoia and they take me seriously, at least the older generation that

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knew me. And they looked at the deck and one of the guys is like, who, who's this dude in the

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motorcycle helmet, you know, and I hadn't looked in detail at the deck and Mr. X refused to have

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his identity known. So all we had for the CTO was a picture of a guy in a motorcycle helmet.

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So it looked like, you know, our CTO is Daft Punk or something like that. And no name, no identity,

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just this is the guy that's our CTO and he's committed to the project.

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but no one can know who he is.

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And my friend was like, are you serious, dude?

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Like, who's the dude in the motorcycle helmet?

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I said, he doesn't want his identity revealed

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after I checked with the team.

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But anyway, so that was one of the hurdles

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to raising institutional money for Bitfury back in the day.

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That is incredible.

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Truly cypherpunk, too.

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Yeah, I mean, we thought that, you know,

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let the results speak for itself.

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And, you know, X at that time, you know, he was, he just didn't want to reveal himself, you know.

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And, you know, obviously for a guy that was early on and, you know, Bitcoiners back then in a way were persecuted.

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And, you know, Bitfury mined and Bitfury sort of OGs mined a lot of Bitcoins back then.

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I mean, we would have days we would be mining 2000 Bitcoins every day.

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So for whatever reason, he just wanted to be in a stealth mode.

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Unfortunately, we miscalculated that X didn't go to Stanford or MIT or he wasn't brought up in a boarding school.

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But that's how the majority of the lemmings on Silicon Valley operate.

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He wasn't one of the boys.

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And it didn't matter that he designed this brilliant ship that kind of screwed everybody.

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But, you know, it probably should have maybe was not OK for him to be wearing the motorcycle helmet.

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But things happen for a reason.

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We're happy.

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Well, there's a few things really to pick up here for anybody listening in who's relatively new to Bitcoin.

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And just to put things in context, like one petahash of hash rate on the network is two orders of magnitude lower.

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We're currently sitting at 1.1 Zeta hash, which is 1,000 X a hash.

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We just crossed a Zeta hash earlier this year, not too long ago, and it's already added another 10%.

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I checked this morning.

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It's at 1.11 Zeta hash, which is insane when you think of the orders of magnitude.

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And George, to your point about G hash, I remember that event very well.

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It got 55% to 60% of the network hash rate as a pool.

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And you had people freaking out.

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I mean, this is public. Peter Todd famously sold half his Bitcoin because he thought that there was too much centralization at the mining pool layer.

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But it was an incredibly important lesson at the time. It was extremely scary.

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But now we're looking at, I believe, nine years. I think that happened in 2015 or 2016, nine, 10 years later.

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were able to look back and point at that and say, this was actually incredible that this happened at

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this point in time because the free market of miners reacted to seeing what happened to G-Hash

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getting that much hash rate. And they moved off the pool, proving that you could quickly route

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around any centralization pressure at the mining. I think that was Bitcoin moving some of their

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machines outside so it didn't look like there was 50%. Well, G-Hash wound up being a victim of its

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own success. People got so freaked out that it aggregated so much hash rate because they ran a

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good pool that ultimately it had to wind down the business, I believe, 18 months after that event.

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But these are just really diving into not only the early days of a company, of a startup,

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but the early days of an industry that's budding. And Bill, I think, what are some parallels in

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other industries that you've worked in over the last few decades that you noticed around this time

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in Bitcoin? Because it was, I mean, that time in Bitcoin, particularly post 2014, 2015, 2016,

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I vividly remember I was adamantly obsessed with it, extremely obsessed with it, focusing on it

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every day. And the summer of 2015, July 2015, people were worried that Bitcoin was going to die.

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It was hovering around $200, $180 after having been at $1,200.

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And there wasn't a lot of attention on the space.

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Yeah.

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So, you know, it reminded me a little bit.

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It's not really a super close analogy because honestly, there was nothing in the world like the Bitcoin ecosystem ever, ever that I can think of.

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But it was a little bit like the beginning of the DRAM business.

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And if you think about commodity memory, the economic structure of the industry was very similar.

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So if you go back to like the early 80s, and everybody probably that invests knows Micron technology, ticker MU.

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But I remember in 1983, I think it was, Micron went public because all of a sudden there were all these things that used DRAM.

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And because you had a fixed cost in your factory and marginal costs was really low because you're really just using molten sand in the wafers, the unfinished wafers, the costs were low.

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But because of the shortage, the prices would move like 500 or 1,000 percent because people are trying to ship these computers that are $20,000.

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And if you can't ship them because you're missing a dollar memory chip, you'll pay $25 for that memory chip.

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So DRAM would go through these insane cycles where you'd have these companies that were literally like printing money one year, and then all of a sudden, five fabs would come up in Japan.

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And then the prices would crash, and the whole industry was losing money because if you've got a big factory going with fixed costs, you don't want to turn it off.

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So you sell below cost just to keep the lines running And so you had these massive swings where companies looked like they were going out of business all the time And then a few would go out of business

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the production capacity would shrink, prices would go up, and all of a sudden the survivors

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would be printing money again. And this could happen within like 18 months to two and a half

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years. And so the price cycles were very similar because a very similar but distributed cost

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structure of high fixed costs. You buy all these machines, you spend millions and millions of

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dollars putting up this building and sucking electricity, and you just don't want to turn it

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off. But sometimes you have to, you know, if it fell below the marginal cost of electricity. So

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you would see chunks of capacity come on and then too much capacity and off, you know, so just

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incredibly, insanely hard to navigate the wild swings. But Bitfury, you know, lived through

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many of those cycles because we, I can't remember how many of those cycles we had, but

325
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at least three, you know, but they were life or death cycles, just insanely difficult. And the

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other issue was this is an industry, it was weird because it was an industry that was effectively

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printing money, but a different kind of money. And you needed fiat capital to make this alternative

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money. So I still remember the first official board meeting we had where we're in a room in

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a building in Embarcadero Center, I think it was in San Francisco. And we're trying to get capital

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to fund servers and more silicon orders.

331
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And here we are producing, and I don't remember the number,

332
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but it was that era where it was maybe 1,000 Bitcoins a day.

333
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We're just putting out all this Bitcoin, but it was illiquid.

334
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And so our CFO runs into the room and he says, I have a buyer.

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I think I can get a million dollars of cash.

336
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And I think Bitcoin was maybe $200 or $300.

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He goes, I've got somebody that will buy some.

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And it was so exciting because we had a million dollars of cash that was badly needed.

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So it was basically hundreds of days in a row like that where we were constantly out of fiat cash to keep the engine going to print other cash that we all believed would get to $100,000 a coin, even in that era.

340
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I think we had this calculus of take all the gold in the world, take 10% of that, divide by 21 million units.

341
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It's going to be around $100,000.

342
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So we're like one day, one day, one day, but it's at 200 now.

343
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So how do we get to that 100,000?

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And we just had to keep raising money to keep going.

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And George, what was it like during that period, 2015, 2016, working in a company?

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Yeah, 16 got a little bit better.

347
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Things started moving sort of towards 600, 700.

348
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I mean, that was kind of 2014, 15, when it kind of dropped and stayed.

349
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You remember that's when Bitfinex, you had Mt. Gox.

350
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You had Bitfinex Hack.

351
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And things dropped to 170.

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you know i remember they uh come up to like 220 and he just stated 220 220 250 210 250 and it was

353
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just painful it was like a grind and it was just like 18 months of a grind and grind and grind and

354
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you know at that time we we had our major data centers in iceland and in georgia you know it's

355
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three cents and we were not switching them off because the technology was superb and the cost

356
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of electricity was low so we're like you know we gotta grind it out and at that time it was also

357
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very obvious that you gotta you gotta start educating people and you gotta start orange

358
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peeling, sort of the Congress and the decision makers.

359
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And we spend a lot of time and effort and energy going to Washington, D.C., going to

360
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Brussels, you know, meeting with all these congressmen, senators, various committees,

361
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you know, setting up the sort of task forces with law enforcements that would kind of feed

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into that establishment.

363
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And there was a lot of education being done back then.

364
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So it was a lot of building.

365
00:35:12,605 --> 00:35:15,165
I mean, I don't know how much time I was looking the other day, Bill.

366
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I was just like, I was in Washington, D.C.

367
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probably every other month with Jim Newsom,

368
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who was the former chairman of Commodity Future Trade Commission.

369
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He was instrumental in terms of educating,

370
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as well as Jason Weinstein, the former head of DOJ Cybercrime.

371
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and we needed those stalwarts to go and push.

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So it was 214, 215 was really, really tough.

373
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I mean, people talk about the bear markets

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of subsequently when the price dropped to 4,000

375
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or the price dropped to, I don't know, 50,000

376
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or now it's kind of at 100,000 people are complaining,

377
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but we were at 200, you know?

378
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And good thing was that it just wiped out a lot of, you know, a lot of Cointeras, KNCs of the world and basically positioned us to for the next chapter.

379
00:36:12,185 --> 00:36:28,185
Yeah. And I often say, because having been in the mining industry, personally founding a company that was doing flare gas mitigation in the Bakken using Bitcoin mining and now 1031 investing in mining infrastructure companies.

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00:36:28,185 --> 00:36:33,645
mining is the most ruthlessly competitive market potentially ever in the world because you have

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these machines that can print money as long as you have electricity the a6 now at this point are

382
00:36:40,725 --> 00:36:46,965
somewhat commoditized they do one thing one thing only they produce hash cash shot 256 hashes that

383
00:36:46,965 --> 00:36:53,465
potentially could help you find a block to win some bitcoin and you don't know exactly who your

384
00:36:53,465 --> 00:37:00,945
competition is at any given point in time. And you just have to pull up your pants, take the plunge

385
00:37:00,945 --> 00:37:05,405
and hope that you're executing better than your competition, that you don't really have a good

386
00:37:05,405 --> 00:37:13,465
sense of who exactly it is. Yeah, absolutely. I sent you a link by the way by email, Marty,

387
00:37:13,585 --> 00:37:19,205
that has some market share stats that I had saved from 2015. And I don't know if you want to share

388
00:37:19,205 --> 00:37:23,885
them now or just use them later when you edit the podcast but pretty cool that i still have those

389
00:37:23,885 --> 00:37:30,825
i can pull these up now yeah i have those saved up as well yeah and there was some that i wish

390
00:37:30,825 --> 00:37:37,325
i could bitcoin yeah i know i have them somewhere but i can't find them right now but they i had a

391
00:37:37,325 --> 00:37:44,145
share picture that had bitfury and g hash separately and together they were way over 50

392
00:37:44,145 --> 00:37:51,105
percent and it uh yeah so these are oh sorry i sent the wrong that's i sent the wrong thing

393
00:37:51,105 --> 00:37:57,065
i should have checked before i put it out oh boy okay keep going and i'm gonna i'm gonna resend it

394
00:37:57,065 --> 00:38:02,985
but the point the point of bringing this up is i think it's incredibly impressive that you were

395
00:38:02,985 --> 00:38:11,405
able to not only survive through that era of bitcoin but continue to compete ultimately to

396
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the point of doing deals with Cypher, Putty, and successfully making sure that Bitfury was a

397
00:38:19,925 --> 00:38:25,945
success at the end of the day. And again, the most ruthlessly competitive market in the world.

398
00:38:27,285 --> 00:38:33,665
You know, what I loved about it, it's the industry where it's complete self-reliance.

399
00:38:34,205 --> 00:38:41,105
And it's an industry that has a zero tolerance for bullshit. You know, this is where you basically

400
00:38:41,105 --> 00:38:45,785
they have to perform and there are specs and you need to deploy.

401
00:38:46,685 --> 00:38:51,425
And, you know, there is one equation in terms of sort of efficiency of a chip.

402
00:38:51,425 --> 00:38:56,685
And another equation is in terms of, you know, the power cost.

403
00:38:56,925 --> 00:39:03,425
And listen, I mean, we have teams that have scoured every part of the world.

404
00:39:03,425 --> 00:39:19,825
We've done anything from geothermal to nat gas to hydro to flare gas, anywhere from Mongolia to Tajikistan to Trinidad, Tobago to Paraguay to Canada, US.

405
00:39:20,465 --> 00:39:25,045
And you're always hunting for this optimal sort of a setup.

406
00:39:26,005 --> 00:39:27,485
And that's the beauty of it.

407
00:39:27,485 --> 00:39:39,745
At the end of the day, what we have seen that Bitfury and the trajectory of mining is gravitating towards ruthlessly towards the most efficient sort of energy setup.

408
00:39:41,025 --> 00:39:43,065
And you cannot bullshit.

409
00:39:43,465 --> 00:39:53,945
You are really kind of tied to this basic parameters that you need to take into consideration.

410
00:39:53,945 --> 00:40:03,985
So having built sort of a thousand megawatts and having built into the system, now the game is very different, right?

411
00:40:04,005 --> 00:40:07,145
It has been sort of institutionalized where you need a lot of capital.

412
00:40:07,925 --> 00:40:10,885
But that's the beauty of this adventure, right?

413
00:40:10,905 --> 00:40:15,585
You basically were able to bootstrap this protocol by private capital.

414
00:40:15,585 --> 00:40:24,825
And yeah, right here, you know, Bill shows one of the early shots of the pool distribution.

415
00:40:25,285 --> 00:40:26,805
21 Inc. Remember that computer?

416
00:40:27,465 --> 00:40:29,305
It's hilarious they even made the chart.

417
00:40:29,645 --> 00:40:29,965
21.

418
00:40:30,305 --> 00:40:36,365
They raised a lot of capital to get to that little share.

419
00:40:38,145 --> 00:40:44,065
That was my most expensive Bitcoin lesson was buying one of those 21 machines back in the day.

420
00:40:44,065 --> 00:40:51,345
this is great uh heads off to uh balaji and the guys that did their best but at the end of the day

421
00:40:51,345 --> 00:40:58,825
you know you talk about the ruthless ruthlessness you really needed to push down and uh optimize the

422
00:40:58,825 --> 00:41:05,525
chip and optimize the setup and uh you know it's difficult when you're at five cents when you're

423
00:41:05,525 --> 00:41:11,165
you know your competitors are set up at two and a half three cents you know and where you need uh

424
00:41:11,165 --> 00:41:15,465
you know, a couple of months to set up where your competition can set it up in three weeks, you know.

425
00:41:16,105 --> 00:41:19,805
So, yeah, that's a beauty.

426
00:41:19,965 --> 00:41:26,905
That's why, you know, at Hopkins, I started this, I'm a big fan of Austrian School of Economics and Individual Empowerment.

427
00:41:26,905 --> 00:41:35,445
So this was real pure kind of focusing on effort and ruthless execution that really mattered at the end of the day.

428
00:41:35,445 --> 00:41:53,565
Well, to that point, having been in the industry then when it was relatively unknown where it was going, very hard to raise capital, and now seeing where the mining industry is today where chips, I mean, Bitmain, I believe they're marketing a two nanometer chip now.

429
00:41:54,465 --> 00:41:59,745
Bitcoin mining is quickly becoming an integral part of energy systems.

430
00:41:59,745 --> 00:42:06,665
I just moved from Austin, Texas back to my hometown of Philadelphia, but I was in Texas for four years.

431
00:42:06,805 --> 00:42:14,005
And it's very apparent that ERCOT is leaning into Bitcoin mining operations, particularly to help with demand response.

432
00:42:14,545 --> 00:42:19,825
You mentioned one of the early Bitfury co-founders heating a house in Finland.

433
00:42:20,465 --> 00:42:27,365
I believe Finland, many cities in Finland are actually heating multiple houses with Bitcoin mining operations now.

434
00:42:27,365 --> 00:42:48,525
It's completely gone from this fringe industry with a bunch of crazy people really trying to tinker and try to find any energy they can, convince any capital allocator they can to back them what they're doing, to what I would deem to be a foregone conclusion that Bitcoin mining is going to be an integral part of energy systems moving forward.

435
00:42:49,285 --> 00:42:55,425
And when you were working at Bitfury a decade ago, did you ever imagine it would get to this point?

436
00:42:55,425 --> 00:42:59,145
Absolutely, we did. I think, yeah.

437
00:42:59,505 --> 00:43:00,925
We did, for sure, yes.

438
00:43:00,925 --> 00:43:11,785
We were sitting with that wind farm company in Amsterdam. Do you remember that? And talking to them about how we could use Bitcoin mining machines as an alternative to batteries.

439
00:43:12,325 --> 00:43:26,885
So there were some grid operators that would offer – because electrical grids, they're like – think of a water system where you've got a big water tower and you've got water in this tower.

440
00:43:26,885 --> 00:43:32,925
if you're putting a lot of water in and there's no offtake, eventually the water tower will explode.

441
00:43:33,425 --> 00:43:38,505
So grids are the same way. You get too much voltage, they pop. So people would actually

442
00:43:38,505 --> 00:43:44,825
offer to pay Bitfury, in some cases, one and a half cents a kilowatt hour to run the machines

443
00:43:44,825 --> 00:43:50,985
at night when the wind farms had too much energy. And it wasn't efficient use because they weren't

444
00:43:50,985 --> 00:43:58,485
on 24 by 7. So we never did that. But we were in talks with huge wind farm offshore and onshore

445
00:43:58,485 --> 00:44:05,025
to provide effectively an alternative to a battery where we would just burn energy for them. And the

446
00:44:05,025 --> 00:44:09,925
electricity effectively was stored in Bitcoins. And then if you wanted electricity later, you could

447
00:44:09,925 --> 00:44:14,305
sell the Bitcoins and buy electricity. So it's totally interesting concept,

448
00:44:14,305 --> 00:44:18,065
an alternative to bloom energy with Bitcoin mining machines.

449
00:44:18,065 --> 00:44:30,285
yeah absolutely i mean if you look back in 2016 17 we sort of came to conclusion that okay air

450
00:44:30,285 --> 00:44:40,045
cooled mining uh you know is is okay but there is a next level in terms of efficiency and enter

451
00:44:40,045 --> 00:44:47,925
immersion cooling so in 2016 we opened the world's first and largest immersion cooling two-phase

452
00:44:47,925 --> 00:44:54,325
Immersion Cooling Data Center, 40 megawatts with 3M Novex solution, completely recycling and

453
00:44:54,325 --> 00:45:06,045
PUF 1.02 at that time. So we were looking at Bitcoin mining as in a way like a Ferrari in

454
00:45:06,045 --> 00:45:11,585
race car driving, where you kind of take all these innovations, whether it's a low voltage,

455
00:45:11,785 --> 00:45:16,345
whether it's the designs of systems, whether it's immersion cooling and kind of implementing.

456
00:45:16,345 --> 00:45:39,518
So part of the puzzle was always you know listen at the end of the day there a lot of wasted energy You know there just a lot of lot of wasted energy You have these planners sort of build out a certain projection of demand or you have this kind of inefficiency in terms of tax credits which is in ERCOT in Texas

457
00:45:39,998 --> 00:45:45,957
And there's just a lot of stranded energy because the transmission lines are there or the demand is not there.

458
00:45:45,957 --> 00:46:00,738
So why have this wasted energy where you can plug in the mining at the source and you can be sort of making digital coin and making your returns?

459
00:46:01,097 --> 00:46:09,837
And to many in 2017, 18, that was like, wow, it was a novel idea, but we saw that this would be the future.

460
00:46:09,837 --> 00:46:22,857
And come now, you're looking at Bitcoin miners going in for these stranded energy, whether it's wind farms or whether it is flare gas that going in and placing it behind the meter.

461
00:46:23,538 --> 00:46:32,157
And the beauty of Bitcoin mining is this is not like an aluminum plant or a banking data center where you have to run 100%.

462
00:46:32,157 --> 00:46:32,877
It's OK.

463
00:46:33,018 --> 00:46:36,898
You can turn it off and give that power to the grid for the peak.

464
00:46:36,898 --> 00:46:39,977
And it's a perfect rebalancer.

465
00:46:40,377 --> 00:46:44,117
You know, that's why I'm going to Texas, actually, a couple of weeks of meeting with Governor Abbott.

466
00:46:44,357 --> 00:46:45,758
You know, the guy is a visionary.

467
00:46:45,957 --> 00:46:58,637
He realized that this can be a fantastic way to bring in a lot of business to the state of Texas, as well as help ERCOT with, you know, its big demands during the winter and summer.

468
00:46:58,637 --> 00:47:01,877
And, you know, that's what you want.

469
00:47:01,877 --> 00:47:12,438
You kind of want to put this with these visionaries that understand that because when they connect the dots, there can be a lot of positive development for their constituents.

470
00:47:14,097 --> 00:47:22,258
I think we're only scratching the surface of how far we can integrate Bitcoin and energy systems.

471
00:47:22,258 --> 00:47:28,998
Obviously now, ERCOT and many other parts of the country, TVA, has Bitcoins participating in demand response.

472
00:47:29,418 --> 00:47:33,538
And that's really a Bitcoin buyer of last resort, right?

473
00:47:33,577 --> 00:47:36,758
Where it's like, OK, we have this energy, we need somebody to soak it up.

474
00:47:37,518 --> 00:47:44,077
What I think is relatively untapped and needs to be explored more is Bitcoin miners as a buyer of first resort.

475
00:47:44,077 --> 00:47:58,317
And particularly with the climate and the environment today, where all the focus is on AI and the energy that's going to be needed to service LLMs and agentic frameworks in inference and understandably so.

476
00:47:58,657 --> 00:48:05,057
But you need to expand capacity and generation significantly to make sure that that future can manifest.

477
00:48:05,057 --> 00:48:13,297
And I think what is unexplored is going up, spinning up capacity and generation somewhere.

478
00:48:13,617 --> 00:48:16,297
But you have this time dilation problem of you can build the generation.

479
00:48:16,518 --> 00:48:20,998
But how do you build the transmission lines to get it to the places it needs to go ultimately?

480
00:48:21,518 --> 00:48:29,057
And if you have a generation asset sitting there with no revenue for 18 to 24 months, it's hard to justify economically.

481
00:48:29,057 --> 00:48:33,438
economically but now with bitcoin mining to your point george you just put it behind the meter

482
00:48:33,438 --> 00:48:37,238
and that's your buyer first resort where it's like okay you build out the transmission

483
00:48:37,238 --> 00:48:41,317
and we'll have the miners provide you revenue while you're doing that and that's something

484
00:48:41,317 --> 00:48:46,998
i i think it's relatively unexplored at this point but we'll be growing trend forward

485
00:48:46,998 --> 00:48:55,137
it's exactly what we are doing with the bitfury spinoff hut so a hut eight uh corp is now an

486
00:48:55,137 --> 00:48:59,238
energy infrastructure company. And we took our machines and dropped them down into a sub

487
00:48:59,238 --> 00:49:04,857
subsidiary with the Trump family, and that's American Bitcoin. But we now have optioned out,

488
00:49:04,898 --> 00:49:09,778
I forgot the exact number now, but I think we have optioned out 13 gigawatts of electricity.

489
00:49:10,157 --> 00:49:14,877
And we basically, as you said, we light it up as we open it with Bitcoin mining,

490
00:49:14,877 --> 00:49:19,718
and then we build data centers and try to transition them over to AI. And Cypher's

491
00:49:19,718 --> 00:49:24,657
doing similar things, but directly going right into the AI hyperscaler field.

492
00:49:25,137 --> 00:49:33,218
Well, building on this, do you think the participants in the AI industry understand this?

493
00:49:33,337 --> 00:49:35,377
Obviously, they understand the need for power.

494
00:49:35,557 --> 00:49:40,137
Do you think there's a disconnect between the recognition of Bitcoin as a –

495
00:49:40,137 --> 00:49:43,797
Bitcoin miners are a friend that can help them get what they ultimately need?

496
00:49:43,797 --> 00:49:45,117
They're beginning to because of the shortage.

497
00:49:45,117 --> 00:49:53,857
And I think what's happening – OK, so I think the perspective is similar to how Bitfury entered the ASIC world,

498
00:49:53,857 --> 00:50:00,498
where there was a traditional way of doing silicon that was bulletproof and extraordinarily expensive.

499
00:50:01,177 --> 00:50:05,038
And Bitfury came with a creative solution that worked at a far lower cost.

500
00:50:05,797 --> 00:50:09,398
And so the Bitcoin mining guys, because it's so hyper-competitive, as you said,

501
00:50:09,457 --> 00:50:15,218
it was a very scrappy industry where a lot of the early Bitcoin mining operations,

502
00:50:15,398 --> 00:50:20,457
like if you look at the ones in China, like dirt floors, a bunch of tin walls,

503
00:50:20,457 --> 00:50:24,238
You know, just like wires hung everywhere, just really low cost.

504
00:50:24,718 --> 00:50:34,177
And then you have the AI wave that came from a more traditional compute data center, bulletproof, raised floors before the racks became too heavy.

505
00:50:34,477 --> 00:50:41,357
But, you know, like at a raised floor, mega air conditioning, lots of redundancy, beautiful cabling everywhere.

506
00:50:41,918 --> 00:50:48,597
So you have these two extremes, just like the Bitfury chip versus ASIC from, you know, Sun and Intel type people.

507
00:50:48,597 --> 00:50:59,837
And so I think over time, the mining centers have gotten a little bit better on the infrastructure and the hyperscalers stayed where they were.

508
00:50:59,837 --> 00:51:18,538
But I think now that there's no more space at all in the big, big AI data centers and the cost of building to, in some cases, specifications for 300 to 500 kilowatts per rack, which are mind – it's mind-blowing to me.

509
00:51:18,538 --> 00:51:32,398
But the Bitcoin miners were delivering much higher energy density with much lower cost in buildings that had maybe some air conditioning, but maybe not.

510
00:51:32,718 --> 00:51:35,457
And Bitfury had these insanely creative solutions.

511
00:51:35,657 --> 00:51:37,777
If you've ever seen a block box, do you know what those are?

512
00:51:39,357 --> 00:51:41,117
So it's containers, right?

513
00:51:41,117 --> 00:51:48,438
So Bitfury leased to buy an island in Finland that used to be a steel factory.

514
00:51:48,538 --> 00:51:56,198
built out a data center and then found out that it was like a toxic waste site, like a Superfund site.

515
00:51:56,477 --> 00:51:59,438
So they're like, shit, now we got to deconstruct all this stuff.

516
00:52:00,097 --> 00:52:02,998
And Val and George didn't want to be in that position ever again.

517
00:52:02,998 --> 00:52:08,357
So they came up with the idea of containerizing units, so mini data centers.

518
00:52:08,538 --> 00:52:13,218
Yeah, we call them energy hunters, one megawatt energy hunters.

519
00:52:14,218 --> 00:52:24,977
So after that, they could literally just get a truck or fly it on a plane, drive it to a site, maybe in Alberta, Canada in a remote area, have a transformer in, plug it in and go.

520
00:52:24,977 --> 00:52:42,538
So the data center operators now, because they cannot get the lead time to build a tier one data center for AI, could be three to five years or more now because all the space, if they could find the land and the power and the telco in the same place.

521
00:52:42,538 --> 00:52:51,898
So a lot of Bitcoin miners have come up with strategies that get you up there but not to the full extent of the cost of the tier one.

522
00:52:51,898 --> 00:53:00,297
So there's new terms like tier 2.5 or tier whatever it is that maybe you take out a little redundancy.

523
00:53:00,597 --> 00:53:05,018
Maybe you don't have air conditioning, but you can run these things.

524
00:53:05,018 --> 00:53:18,758
And so all of the hyperscalers, they're talking to all the Bitcoin, the professional Bitcoin miners like Cypher and Hutt and Iris Energy to complete the deployments that they need.

525
00:53:18,758 --> 00:53:26,117
yeah i mean right right now you have this kind of scramble for the last mile

526
00:53:26,117 --> 00:53:35,218
no matter how amazing your nvidia chips are or no matter how amazing your foundational model is

527
00:53:35,218 --> 00:53:42,777
at the end of the day you need to go and deploy and what we're finding right now those companies

528
00:53:42,777 --> 00:53:45,957
that have come to the game early

529
00:53:45,957 --> 00:53:47,898
and they have secured the energy

530
00:53:47,898 --> 00:53:49,677
and they have energized power,

531
00:53:50,898 --> 00:53:54,418
this is right now, I mean, gold.

532
00:53:54,418 --> 00:53:58,698
I mean, this is right now unbelievably valuable.

533
00:53:59,777 --> 00:54:03,477
And, you know, I had lunch with Tyler, CEO of Cypher,

534
00:54:03,477 --> 00:54:05,058
a couple of weeks ago in New York.

535
00:54:05,797 --> 00:54:09,357
The demand from all these sort of a big shot hyperscalers

536
00:54:09,357 --> 00:54:10,558
is unbelievable.

537
00:54:10,558 --> 00:54:23,418
I mean, he has people coming up basically with, you know, metering positions, kind of like metering how many, you know, acres they have because they need to deploy.

538
00:54:23,558 --> 00:54:28,218
The race to AGI is on and you don't want to be lost.

539
00:54:28,297 --> 00:54:35,377
That's why Zock and all these guys are spending tens of billions of dollars because you just cannot get this wrong.

540
00:54:35,377 --> 00:54:43,157
and uh you know companies like cypher companies like hot companies like iron that have secure

541
00:54:43,157 --> 00:54:50,998
these positions uh you know i think they have extremely valuable asset that they have and uh

542
00:54:50,998 --> 00:54:55,738
you know this is going to shine it really is profound what uh what's going to happen next 12

543
00:54:55,738 --> 00:55:04,677
to 18 months and it was um watching what xai did what elon did in memphis with the build out of that

544
00:55:04,677 --> 00:55:09,938
site in the short amount of time it was funny watching me doing an elon if you're listening i

545
00:55:09,938 --> 00:55:14,577
know you listen to the show uh it was funny how they built the site because they they acted like

546
00:55:14,577 --> 00:55:18,718
a bitcoin miner would they didn't have enough capacity on the substation to pull front so they

547
00:55:18,718 --> 00:55:26,857
they daisy chained a bunch of gen sets and they're pulling power um from those to to run uh the gpus

548
00:55:26,857 --> 00:55:32,297
but then inside they have these tesla ball batteries which obviously you're gonna dog food

549
00:55:32,297 --> 00:55:37,617
your own product if you're elon musk but however it's like if you have excess capacity pulling off

550
00:55:37,617 --> 00:55:44,297
from there maybe you should use bitcoin miners and you can you can see a scenario where you have

551
00:55:44,297 --> 00:55:50,918
bitcoin miners as this sort of load manager that that makes it more profitable than just storing

552
00:55:50,918 --> 00:55:58,277
it in a tesla wall battery i don't think they're able to sell that wall battery electricity back

553
00:55:58,277 --> 00:56:03,837
to market. So it's sort of a sunk cost at the end of the day. But I have been looking at this

554
00:56:03,837 --> 00:56:09,918
sort of convergence of AI and Bitcoin in the physical world. And it just intuitively makes

555
00:56:09,918 --> 00:56:14,918
sense to me that there is going to be some sort of symbiosis between the two functions moving forward.

556
00:56:19,277 --> 00:56:24,477
With that, I mean, we're brushing up on an hour. I want to be respectful of your time and we have to

557
00:56:24,477 --> 00:56:35,677
talk about the book. We can go on. I'm in Abu Dhabi. I have Gabriel Zayed and our friend

558
00:56:35,677 --> 00:56:43,398
Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Ali and folks I'm going to be meeting later on. These are the OGs that

559
00:56:43,398 --> 00:56:49,297
have been with us for many, many years, but I'd love to continue. Yeah.

560
00:56:49,777 --> 00:56:54,258
Well, let's get to the book and then you win. Why did you decide to write it?

561
00:56:54,477 --> 00:57:01,317
oh listen writing the book was always kind of internal bit theory joke you know like

562
00:57:01,317 --> 00:57:08,957
one day we're gonna write a book this the stories are so unbelievable you know from

563
00:57:08,957 --> 00:57:16,477
you know this crazy uh kind of uh russian oligarchs you know and thank god you know

564
00:57:16,477 --> 00:57:22,117
they they wanted to come in and invest in bit theory but thank god nothing happened in there

565
00:57:22,117 --> 00:57:31,637
And, you know, we had hacks and we had, you know, the encounters with Alejandro Castro in Cuba.

566
00:57:32,137 --> 00:57:41,337
And, you know, we had these encounters with, you know, various shady personalities and we had encounters with angels.

567
00:57:41,337 --> 00:57:44,977
So it's just it's a story of Bitcoin itself.

568
00:57:45,218 --> 00:57:50,117
You know, it's a story of a Mowgli growing up in a jungle.

569
00:57:50,117 --> 00:57:56,898
you know, when the Mowgli was very little and, you know, they had, you know, the Bagheera and

570
00:57:56,898 --> 00:58:02,337
the bear protect, you know, and the Mowgli has grown up. It was like that, you know, and

571
00:58:02,337 --> 00:58:11,938
there's so many parallels, Bitfury growing and Bitfury, you know, had probably two moments where

572
00:58:11,938 --> 00:58:17,337
it could have been just thrown under a bus and, you know, we just, we would have been to

573
00:58:17,337 --> 00:58:20,357
oblivion it was just like it would have been gone

574
00:58:20,357 --> 00:58:23,738
but it was just like a lot about

575
00:58:23,738 --> 00:58:26,558
what you learn about people

576
00:58:26,558 --> 00:58:29,538
and what you learn about yourself

577
00:58:29,538 --> 00:58:32,817
you know it's a journey where you

578
00:58:32,817 --> 00:58:37,018
kind of what doesn't kill you make you stronger

579
00:58:37,018 --> 00:58:39,538
you kind of live all this kind of Rumi and

580
00:58:39,538 --> 00:58:42,438
you know James Allen and you know all

581
00:58:42,438 --> 00:58:44,297
all these sort of Nietzsche all these

582
00:58:44,297 --> 00:58:48,938
or shop and are all these guys that have lived, you kind of live through it.

583
00:58:49,097 --> 00:58:50,518
It's really the journey.

584
00:58:51,718 --> 00:58:58,117
And it has been such an awesome journey and it has been such an awesome privilege to have

585
00:58:58,117 --> 00:59:01,157
guys like Bill join us in the journey.

586
00:59:01,758 --> 00:59:04,097
And you just learn a lot about people.

587
00:59:04,238 --> 00:59:08,657
You learn a lot about life and you learn a lot more importantly about yourself.

588
00:59:08,657 --> 00:59:14,398
what you can do, what price you're willing to pay to keep going.

589
00:59:14,617 --> 00:59:17,077
You know, when everything inside of you says, you know,

590
00:59:17,518 --> 00:59:20,258
okay, you know, this is not working out.

591
00:59:20,337 --> 00:59:20,957
This is over.

592
00:59:21,137 --> 00:59:27,477
And you just like get up, you know, you fall front on your face

593
00:59:27,477 --> 00:59:30,998
and you get up and you keep pushing and pushing and pushing.

594
00:59:31,277 --> 00:59:33,558
And, you know, just like 12 years.

595
00:59:33,558 --> 00:59:37,637
I mean, 12 years in a Chinese sort of astrology.

596
00:59:37,637 --> 00:59:55,398
It's a full cycle, you know, and I thought maybe it's a time to kind of put it down, you know, to discourage or maybe encourage the future generation of tech entrepreneurs that, you know, the big entrepreneur is not that glamorous, you know.

597
00:59:55,398 --> 00:59:56,837
There are a lot of sacrifices.

598
00:59:57,177 --> 00:59:59,758
There's a lot of price to pay.

599
00:59:59,998 --> 01:00:16,418
But if you're willing to go through the hell and keep going and calling you and you are convicted with the right idea and you're surrounded with the band of brothers, then it's a journey worth taking.

600
01:00:16,877 --> 01:00:20,337
So, yeah, I just came out that, you know, it's time to do this.

601
01:00:20,498 --> 01:00:21,477
And that's what happened.

602
01:00:21,477 --> 01:00:35,877
You know, I'll chime in with one additional angle to that, which is, you know, having lived through a whole bunch of tech cycle waves where in what George described, you have this vision of how things are supposed to be.

603
01:00:35,904 --> 01:00:41,284
but they're not there yet. So you commit yourself to that and you work on it. And, you know,

604
01:00:41,304 --> 01:00:46,184
eventually there's this like, wow, like the markets are adopting it. There's a sense of

605
01:00:46,184 --> 01:00:53,204
validation and like, oh, I was actually right when for maybe a decade, I doubted myself.

606
01:00:53,744 --> 01:00:59,524
In the case of Bitfury and the Bitcoin industry in general, as opposed to regular tech,

607
01:00:59,524 --> 01:01:09,564
regular tech did not have the world's regulators pounding on you. And that was something I totally

608
01:01:09,564 --> 01:01:17,244
did not expect. Because I think in the early, early days of, I can't remember the exact year,

609
01:01:17,344 --> 01:01:24,764
but I think even in maybe 2011, 2012, there were actually apps in the iPhone app store

610
01:01:24,764 --> 01:01:29,884
where you could buy and sell and send Bitcoin to each other.

611
01:01:31,004 --> 01:01:33,804
And then 2013, Operation Chokepoint happened.

612
01:01:34,804 --> 01:01:42,404
And it was so unnerving to me as a regular venture dude building my companies.

613
01:01:42,404 --> 01:01:48,724
And all of a sudden, I have companies trying to hit the payroll, pay payroll button,

614
01:01:48,944 --> 01:01:50,544
and the bank account's frozen.

615
01:01:51,024 --> 01:01:52,344
And I'm like, what?

616
01:01:52,344 --> 01:01:57,384
And we were having to do things that I just could never have expected.

617
01:01:57,384 --> 01:02:04,764
I had one company where we were choked and told we had to move our funds.

618
01:02:05,324 --> 01:02:17,044
And then we created a new company name and opened an account at a different bank and then moved the money over and kind of hid everything that we were involved in crypto.

619
01:02:17,204 --> 01:02:22,244
It was like nothing public that we're working on anything crypto because how are we ever going to make payroll?

620
01:02:22,344 --> 01:02:38,804
And with Bitfury, I think because it had such a big presence, big share in the industry, powerful company, it got the heat of regulators too.

621
01:02:39,344 --> 01:02:46,964
And we had to really deal with that in a totally different way, which is why George and I started what became the Necker Blockchain Summit.

622
01:02:47,524 --> 01:02:51,784
Because I remember that era, Mt. Gox had gone down.

623
01:02:51,784 --> 01:02:56,804
And then there was all this – like when I first started working on this with these guys, it was all about this technology.

624
01:02:57,224 --> 01:02:57,784
It was cool.

625
01:02:57,904 --> 01:02:58,604
It was interesting.

626
01:02:58,764 --> 01:02:59,684
It was revolutionary.

627
01:03:00,064 --> 01:03:01,664
It would ease payments.

628
01:03:01,844 --> 01:03:05,324
There's so many great things about it, but everybody was threatened.

629
01:03:05,984 --> 01:03:13,444
And then all these criminals started coming into the business because they thought it was a place for hacking when they didn't realize that everything you do was traceable completely.

630
01:03:13,444 --> 01:03:43,424
And so we started this thing with Sir Richard Branson called the Necker Blockchain Summit as a vehicle to have a sort of a multidimensional homebrew computer club, which was the entity I described later with the young kids that would create the computer business, where we would invite the former chairman of the CFTC and the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve and a US attorney general and the person that caught the federal agents.

631
01:03:43,444 --> 01:03:50,164
blackmailing Ross Ulbricht, just really interesting people, some of the original Bitcoin developers,

632
01:03:50,484 --> 01:03:58,724
regulators to create this, coalesce all of these people to try to chart the future for the industry.

633
01:03:58,724 --> 01:04:06,664
And I'll tell you that the relationships that we formed there, unbelievable and ongoing. And all

634
01:04:06,664 --> 01:04:11,924
the people that George mentioned were people that came, like Gabriel Abed, who became obviously a

635
01:04:11,924 --> 01:04:19,524
very well-known person in the space. He was a young kid raising money for a multi-currency

636
01:04:19,524 --> 01:04:26,084
network to unite the Caribbean nations. And he formed this little company through our blockchain

637
01:04:26,084 --> 01:04:31,424
summit. He met folks and he raised his money and then eventually became the ambassador to the UAE

638
01:04:31,424 --> 01:04:40,444
for Barbados. But there's a dozen or maybe tens of stories of people that went on to form their

639
01:04:40,444 --> 01:04:48,324
careers around the network that we formed in these early, early days with this high-powered

640
01:04:48,324 --> 01:04:54,624
group at Necro. And it's like when George said he joined Bitfury because the IQs were so high,

641
01:04:54,764 --> 01:04:58,904
he just knew, right? That's half of life is picking who you're going to hang with.

642
01:04:59,564 --> 01:05:07,004
And I think we had the benefit and the luxury of bringing together some of the most important

643
01:05:07,004 --> 01:05:14,524
world players in all of the industries related to governance and monetary systems and technology

644
01:05:14,524 --> 01:05:19,324
in this little cluster that is and was the Necker Blockchain Summit?

645
01:05:20,744 --> 01:05:23,944
Yeah, I mean, I would even not call it Necker Blockchain.

646
01:05:24,184 --> 01:05:28,324
I mean, it really should have been called the Necker Orange Pilling Summit.

647
01:05:31,404 --> 01:05:33,004
That's what it was, you know.

648
01:05:33,004 --> 01:05:43,224
And every time, you know, we went on and to Japan or Tokyo or Mongolia or, you know, Cuba, it was really at the end of the day.

649
01:05:43,764 --> 01:05:46,824
If nothing came out, it was all about orange filling.

650
01:05:47,924 --> 01:05:56,524
And, you know, this whole thing, like, you know, Val and I kind of getting this call to, hey, where are you guys at?

651
01:05:56,524 --> 01:06:02,224
from a good friend of mine whose ex McKinsey partner come to Davos,

652
01:06:02,304 --> 01:06:04,044
and we decided to go to Davos.

653
01:06:04,224 --> 01:06:10,144
I mean, this is like 2015, 16, when Davos was completely off the radar.

654
01:06:10,424 --> 01:06:13,024
But we went there with one mission.

655
01:06:13,364 --> 01:06:15,344
We are going to be the Trojan horse.

656
01:06:15,804 --> 01:06:17,644
We're going to infiltrate the establishment.

657
01:06:18,504 --> 01:06:19,144
And guess what?

658
01:06:19,184 --> 01:06:22,184
Not many people know, but all these Bitcoin signs around Davos,

659
01:06:22,184 --> 01:06:25,164
it was sponsored by us every time.

660
01:06:25,164 --> 01:06:29,904
And Jamie Dinan was walking around and there were orange Bitcoin signs.

661
01:06:31,304 --> 01:06:33,644
Our clandestine operation, you know.

662
01:06:34,104 --> 01:06:45,242
Yeah and we were sitting there orange pilling prime ministers orange pilling the leaders you know talking about Bitcoin and why this would be the future and yeah we started out and then setting up this whole

663
01:06:45,242 --> 01:06:52,421
you know blockchain central you know back then you know blockchain was okay you know because uh

664
01:06:52,421 --> 01:06:58,622
you know that that was cool having a blockchain so you know we kind of trojan horse the bitcoin

665
01:06:58,622 --> 01:07:04,222
under blockchain and we're like blockchain summit you know blockchain event we even in

666
01:07:04,222 --> 01:07:11,521
Davos, it was called Blockchain Central. And, you know, with Matt Sorum of Guns and Roses,

667
01:07:11,761 --> 01:07:17,662
like blasting in the middle of the night, but it was our Trojan horse into the establishment

668
01:07:17,662 --> 01:07:25,222
of taking Bitcoin under the disguise of the blockchain and, you know, putting in. And that

669
01:07:25,222 --> 01:07:31,521
was fun. You know, now I see Jack Muller's, God bless the young generation carrying the torch.

670
01:07:31,521 --> 01:07:35,802
and you need thousands of Jack Mallers of this world.

671
01:07:36,061 --> 01:07:41,381
But 2015, 16, we were those Trojan horses

672
01:07:41,381 --> 01:07:42,582
that were sitting this,

673
01:07:43,182 --> 01:07:47,802
and I know, Matt, you were also one of the early Trojan horses

674
01:07:47,802 --> 01:07:52,941
putting the fires and the orange filling around the world.

675
01:07:53,082 --> 01:07:54,101
But that's the beauty.

676
01:07:54,182 --> 01:07:57,082
That's the beauty of the decentralized movement.

677
01:07:57,321 --> 01:07:58,541
That's the beauty of this.

678
01:07:58,541 --> 01:08:09,142
If you look at any technology or any shift anywhere in humanity, it was always a small committed group of individuals.

679
01:08:10,461 --> 01:08:15,782
That's always the case because those are the ones that are always making the change.

680
01:08:16,282 --> 01:08:27,221
If you have this concentration, you know, you can take a magnifying glass and you can point at something, but you take a sun and you put under magnifying glass, it can burn freaking anything.

681
01:08:27,221 --> 01:08:33,801
and that that is the power of this movement that is the power of these grassroots movements

682
01:08:33,801 --> 01:08:40,242
and that's uh i've been privileged part of it and i've been privileged to share with you guys

683
01:08:40,242 --> 01:08:47,801
this movement and i think we're on to something great and uh here's to that here's to that i only

684
01:08:47,801 --> 01:08:53,582
have a water but no it's funny you bring up jack and you mentioned that it's not glamorous

685
01:08:53,582 --> 01:09:00,861
and it's funny because I think the public, the broader public has this view of people who go on

686
01:09:00,861 --> 01:09:07,881
to build successful companies as being glamorous and maybe the end state is glamorous to a certain

687
01:09:07,881 --> 01:09:13,361
extent but getting to that point is certainly not glamorous and you mentioned Jack Mahler's

688
01:09:13,361 --> 01:09:19,021
it's just funny thinking of his journey with Strike funnily enough and right before COVID in

689
01:09:19,021 --> 01:09:21,901
2019, he hit me and Matt Odell up.

690
01:09:22,282 --> 01:09:24,742
He was like, hey, I want to come on the podcast and announce something.

691
01:09:24,861 --> 01:09:25,181
I'm like, okay.

692
01:09:25,261 --> 01:09:30,681
And he announced the launch of Strike the Company from my apartment in Brooklyn on the podcast,

693
01:09:30,881 --> 01:09:31,922
this little studio apartment.

694
01:09:33,242 --> 01:09:38,282
And it's been really cool to watch his journey progress from that point where he's like,

695
01:09:38,301 --> 01:09:42,861
hey, I'm thinking of launching this company, Strike, and announcing it on this podcast

696
01:09:42,861 --> 01:09:44,561
to where they've gone today.

697
01:09:44,561 --> 01:09:48,981
And we've been, it's been extremely fortunate to be along with us.

698
01:09:49,021 --> 01:09:54,221
that journey with him from the 1031 perspective, being the largest investor. And he is

699
01:09:54,221 --> 01:09:59,361
an incredibly inspiring person to your point, George, it just takes these

700
01:09:59,361 --> 01:10:06,042
motivated, convicted, and somewhat crazy people to go do it. And the journey is not glamorous,

701
01:10:06,042 --> 01:10:11,002
I can promise you. The studio apartment we recorded that podcast in was not glamorous

702
01:10:11,002 --> 01:10:16,441
at all. It was like a 500 square foot little box, but it came from that box and Jack

703
01:10:16,441 --> 01:10:19,141
is now crushing it at strike.

704
01:10:19,221 --> 01:10:23,702
And I think this is a good segue to the last question.

705
01:10:23,901 --> 01:10:26,162
You alluded to it a bit there, George,

706
01:10:26,181 --> 01:10:27,481
but where do you think we're going from here?

707
01:10:28,641 --> 01:10:30,282
Has Bitcoin made it yet?

708
01:10:35,462 --> 01:10:37,101
Has Bitcoin made it?

709
01:10:37,101 --> 01:10:44,141
I think Bitcoin has created tremendous wealth

710
01:10:44,141 --> 01:10:48,861
for people that were early believers.

711
01:10:50,082 --> 01:10:52,441
And I think from the DNA basis,

712
01:10:52,662 --> 01:10:56,401
those people are committed to do good things

713
01:10:56,401 --> 01:10:57,782
and better the humanity.

714
01:10:58,721 --> 01:11:01,721
And this generational transfer of wealth

715
01:11:01,721 --> 01:11:05,901
of this, once again, small committed group of people

716
01:11:05,901 --> 01:11:09,721
that really wants to make a positive impact,

717
01:11:10,101 --> 01:11:11,742
that has an awesome power.

718
01:11:11,742 --> 01:11:22,462
And I think the story of Bitcoin builders is just starting up.

719
01:11:22,462 --> 01:11:41,122
I think there's just going to be a lot of positive impact and generation in terms of, you know, curing the world's biggest problems, addressing the social injustices, making just life of humans better.

720
01:11:41,122 --> 01:12:02,962
And I think we're just early on. And things happen for a reason. And Bitcoin came to this world for a reason. To take our humanity to the next level of consciousness. And it's not going to be easy. There's going to be challenges. But I think the outlook is extremely positive.

721
01:12:02,962 --> 01:12:11,382
And I think as a humanity, we are moving in the right direction and Bitcoiners will play a major role in that.

722
01:12:14,202 --> 01:12:16,582
Bill, would you say Bitcoin has made it?

723
01:12:16,782 --> 01:12:18,441
What do you see moving forward for Bitcoin?

724
01:12:20,082 --> 01:12:26,662
You know, so you have to break that up into little pieces because there's so many elements to that question.

725
01:12:27,401 --> 01:12:30,181
Technology, societally, monetarily.

726
01:12:30,181 --> 01:12:52,199
So I think from a technology perspective the acceptance now of the underlying technology which is what drew me in the first place peer blockchains that undeniably taking root There so many ecosystems of

727
01:12:52,199 --> 01:12:59,239
products and services getting built on that underlying technology because it's just a simply

728
01:12:59,239 --> 01:13:07,799
more efficient and transparent way to handle a database. And so I think that coupled with the

729
01:13:07,799 --> 01:13:16,099
advent of AI that will work with databases and the automation of workflows and different things

730
01:13:16,099 --> 01:13:22,939
that can sit on a granular distributed database, that confluence of blockchain AI is going to

731
01:13:22,939 --> 01:13:30,759
revolutionize a lot of things that people do every day. So I think that's on its way. And it's

732
01:13:30,759 --> 01:13:36,979
really just a flame that's about to really, really go over the next couple of years. I think from a

733
01:13:36,979 --> 01:13:47,819
monetary perspective, it does seem like it's gaining acceptance as an alternative to

734
01:13:47,819 --> 01:13:56,739
things like gold. I think it doesn't have the, I guess, the, I don't know if you've got the older

735
01:13:56,739 --> 01:14:03,879
crowd or the old institutional crowd. There's still, I think, a mixed opinion you see about

736
01:14:03,879 --> 01:14:10,539
that. There's still a lot of gold bugs. Some of the people that would have been gold bugs in a

737
01:14:10,539 --> 01:14:16,639
modern era, I think the younger people too. Younger people, they want low friction and

738
01:14:16,639 --> 01:14:23,519
easily, like low friction, easy to move. It's like everything's easy, right? So I think

739
01:14:23,519 --> 01:14:31,619
the thought of buying gold bars and storing them in some place with high fees, nobody that's below

740
01:14:31,619 --> 01:14:37,559
a certain age will ever consider that. And things like Bitcoin are so natural. So I think as we go

741
01:14:37,559 --> 01:14:43,879
through this generational change, I think as the older people age out and the younger people take

742
01:14:43,879 --> 01:14:47,459
their place, I think there's going to be growing acceptance. And you're starting to see in the

743
01:14:47,459 --> 01:14:56,039
institutional world, folks like whether it's Warren Buffett or Nassim Tlaib used to say,

744
01:14:56,039 --> 01:15:14,219
They're digital tulips or whatever. There were so many negative things. But folks that were regular institutional fund managers like a Ray Dalio, for example, who I had the pleasure in 2016 of having dinner with to try to explain to him what is Bitcoin.

745
01:15:14,219 --> 01:15:23,839
I mean, you know, he used to, like Warren Buffett, just poo-poo the idea of even things like gold because they were not productive assets.

746
01:15:24,299 --> 01:15:28,479
But now Ray's out there saying you should have a certain percentage in gold.

747
01:15:29,219 --> 01:15:34,819
You know, and I don't I actually don't know what his opinion is on Bitcoin, but I think he he doesn't poo-poo it anymore.

748
01:15:35,539 --> 01:15:39,619
You know, so I think a lot of the institutional managers now are saying, you know what?

749
01:15:40,199 --> 01:15:42,939
Technology has been around for 15 years.

750
01:15:42,939 --> 01:15:53,359
It looks very solid and it's a real alternative because, you know, in the end, money and value is what people think it is.

751
01:15:54,239 --> 01:15:58,919
You know, so why is a dollar worth a dollar relative to another currency?

752
01:15:59,579 --> 01:16:00,039
What is it?

753
01:16:00,079 --> 01:16:01,339
You know, it's all just belief.

754
01:16:02,079 --> 01:16:11,599
And so I think Bitcoin's technology is an underlying fortress that can actually be trusted.

755
01:16:11,599 --> 01:16:24,879
And I think the longer it's around and the more people that get onto it, the more it's accepted because if other people are using it, you want to transact or store or what have you.

756
01:16:24,999 --> 01:16:27,119
So I think it's here to stay.

757
01:16:27,379 --> 01:16:32,619
Whether I call that success or not, it's going to be gradual.

758
01:16:32,799 --> 01:16:34,299
I think it's going to continue to unfold.

759
01:16:34,299 --> 01:16:42,059
um i don't i'm not really into price predictions but i think it hit the price target that i had

760
01:16:42,059 --> 01:16:50,539
10 or 15 years ago of the 100k a while back and um i think relative to what i was thinking then

761
01:16:50,539 --> 01:16:57,539
one of the things that's happened is that the if i take the metric of all gold 10 percent

762
01:16:57,539 --> 01:17:04,179
divide by 21 million, I think what's happened is the dollar has devalued relative to gold.

763
01:17:04,819 --> 01:17:12,699
So gold is probably twice or three times. I don't know what fraction or multiple it is today versus

764
01:17:12,699 --> 01:17:18,519
10 years ago, but it's gone up a lot. And so I think my number should have naturally adjusted

765
01:17:18,519 --> 01:17:27,279
to probably around 250. So I think it will get to 250. I don't know when. And then I think

766
01:17:27,279 --> 01:17:34,379
based on the rate of the accumulation of the U.S. deficit, the growth of the U.S. deficit,

767
01:17:34,559 --> 01:17:41,459
which is mind-blowing to me. I don't see why it doesn't just keep going up. So would I be

768
01:17:41,459 --> 01:17:46,619
surprised if it's a million dollars a coin someday? Absolutely not. It will get there.

769
01:17:46,619 --> 01:17:51,739
But it's really a question of how fast does the dollar lose its purchasing power?

770
01:17:51,739 --> 01:17:57,919
not so much Bitcoin just climbing up relative to things.

771
01:17:59,579 --> 01:18:00,119
Yeah, correct.

772
01:18:00,299 --> 01:18:03,299
So Bill just answered your question already.

773
01:18:04,079 --> 01:18:06,279
Has fiat failed?

774
01:18:06,619 --> 01:18:08,119
Yes, fiat has failed.

775
01:18:08,779 --> 01:18:11,899
And as a result, has Bitcoin succeeded?

776
01:18:12,139 --> 01:18:12,979
Yes, Bitcoin.

777
01:18:12,979 --> 01:18:17,399
So as I've told people, Bitcoin is going to go to 100,000.

778
01:18:17,519 --> 01:18:18,939
Bitcoin is going to go to a million.

779
01:18:19,339 --> 01:18:21,059
Bitcoin is going to go to 10 million.

780
01:18:21,739 --> 01:18:28,519
Because at the end of the day, this is the one directional bet, and there's going to be gyrations and stuff.

781
01:18:28,799 --> 01:18:41,739
But because the governments, the central banks are printing more money, because the governments are running the deficits globally, I mean, this is inevitable.

782
01:18:41,739 --> 01:18:55,856
At the end of the day you are valuing Bitcoin in fiat and what is devaluing the other side is going to be appreciating So I mean this is just so crystal clear

783
01:18:56,036 --> 01:18:59,117
I mean, I just, you know, it was clear in 2013.

784
01:18:59,117 --> 01:19:00,756
It was clear in 2016.

785
01:19:00,756 --> 01:19:02,556
It was clear in 2021.

786
01:19:02,896 --> 01:19:04,596
It's clear now in 2025.

787
01:19:04,596 --> 01:19:12,596
And we'll get on your podcast in 2035 that's going to be ingrained in a cyberspace.

788
01:19:13,436 --> 01:19:18,036
And we'll be talking with AI robots and agentics and all this talking.

789
01:19:18,297 --> 01:19:22,656
Yeah, this is the trajectory that we followed.

790
01:19:23,256 --> 01:19:23,276
Yeah.

791
01:19:23,596 --> 01:19:24,036
Yeah.

792
01:19:24,096 --> 01:19:30,577
One thing to point out, if you look at – so these stats are never completely accurate because they're really hard to get, of course.

793
01:19:30,577 --> 01:19:36,356
But world GDP is around $110 trillion now.

794
01:19:37,316 --> 01:19:39,856
World debt is around $300 trillion.

795
01:19:41,356 --> 01:19:42,617
$380 trillion.

796
01:19:43,056 --> 01:19:45,697
Last I checked, $380 trillion or something like this.

797
01:19:45,697 --> 01:19:50,316
You'll get different estimates depending on who you ask, but call it $380 because it's in that range.

798
01:19:51,417 --> 01:19:56,756
World GDP seems to be growing around 3% a year.

799
01:19:56,756 --> 01:20:03,957
world debt seems to be growing around 7% to 10% per year every year.

800
01:20:04,516 --> 01:20:05,936
And it's been like that for 20 years.

801
01:20:06,156 --> 01:20:11,377
So you've got these two lines that are diverging that will never intersect.

802
01:20:12,516 --> 01:20:18,556
So at some point – and you look at what's happening, the new prime minister of Japan,

803
01:20:19,556 --> 01:20:22,497
the policy inflate.

804
01:20:23,636 --> 01:20:24,276
Absolutely.

805
01:20:24,276 --> 01:20:36,197
And you as a former hedge fund person, you understand the carry trade, and you understand what it meant to have the world fueled by low interest rates out of Japan for borrowing.

806
01:20:37,056 --> 01:20:40,336
If that gasket blows, what happens?

807
01:20:40,697 --> 01:20:41,417
Unknown, right?

808
01:20:41,516 --> 01:20:43,457
I mean I guess we could predict the outcome.

809
01:20:43,676 --> 01:20:49,457
We don't know when it will blow, but eventually if rates go high enough there, something will blow.

810
01:20:49,457 --> 01:21:07,457
And you look at the state of debt in the collection of banks that are the fabric for the EU and the relative discrepancy in terms of GDP per capita of certain nations versus others where they're basically –

811
01:21:07,457 --> 01:21:08,336
But forget EU, Bill.

812
01:21:08,457 --> 01:21:10,377
I mean you're talking about United States.

813
01:21:10,497 --> 01:21:13,256
United States right now is going to be over a trillion.

814
01:21:13,856 --> 01:21:15,316
Forget EU or Japan.

815
01:21:15,316 --> 01:21:17,997
I mean you're talking of the world's biggest economy.

816
01:21:17,997 --> 01:21:24,176
and over a trillion dollars being paid just to maintain the interest payments.

817
01:21:24,957 --> 01:21:26,516
I mean, this is like ridiculous.

818
01:21:27,056 --> 01:21:30,636
And, you know, when Elon came on a doge, you know, I had some hopes,

819
01:21:31,156 --> 01:21:36,417
but I was like 80% sure that he would be shot down by the establishment.

820
01:21:36,717 --> 01:21:37,816
And that's what happened.

821
01:21:38,436 --> 01:21:43,117
I mean, this is just a train wreck in a slow motion that is happening.

822
01:21:43,297 --> 01:21:47,297
And it's like when this train wreck is happening in existing rails,

823
01:21:47,797 --> 01:21:48,776
Where do you want to be?

824
01:21:48,917 --> 01:21:50,717
You want to be outside of the system.

825
01:21:51,256 --> 01:21:53,016
That is the Bitcoin bet.

826
01:21:53,016 --> 01:22:00,256
When the system is collapsing, as we just like pointing out last two minutes, what is your best bet to be?

827
01:22:00,676 --> 01:22:01,156
Outside.

828
01:22:02,356 --> 01:22:04,676
And that has always been the bet of Bitcoin.

829
01:22:04,997 --> 01:22:06,676
I saw that in Soviet Union.

830
01:22:07,077 --> 01:22:08,976
And now you have it in United States.

831
01:22:09,197 --> 01:22:15,036
United States has been running massive budget efforts, whether it's Democrats or Republicans.

832
01:22:15,856 --> 01:22:16,736
It's all BS.

833
01:22:17,297 --> 01:22:18,396
It really is.

834
01:22:19,096 --> 01:22:21,276
And at some point, there's going to be a reckoning.

835
01:22:21,497 --> 01:22:27,717
I mean, Churchill said, sooner or later, you're going to face the banquet of consequences.

836
01:22:28,396 --> 01:22:29,417
And that's what's happening.

837
01:22:29,976 --> 01:22:32,836
So Bitcoin is your insurance against that.

838
01:22:33,117 --> 01:22:34,997
I mean, it's really simple.

839
01:22:35,917 --> 01:22:40,676
Instead of trusting fallible humans, trust math and distributed systems.

840
01:22:40,676 --> 01:22:41,976
For sure.

841
01:22:42,877 --> 01:22:44,316
It's an idea whose time has come.

842
01:22:44,316 --> 01:22:53,617
Gentlemen, I can't thank you enough for joining me and walking me through your war stories over the last decade plus.

843
01:22:53,617 --> 01:22:59,336
I think anybody, particularly if you're a founder out there listening to this, take these lessons to heart.

844
01:23:00,656 --> 01:23:03,176
And I think it's an incredible story of written.

845
01:23:03,297 --> 01:23:06,936
One thing I don't think you guys, I think you guys are too humble to say this,

846
01:23:06,936 --> 01:23:15,176
but Bitcoin would not be where it is today if it wasn't for individuals like you who took the risk over a decade ago

847
01:23:15,176 --> 01:23:20,297
when Bitcoin was this crazy, funny Internet money that nobody was really taking seriously

848
01:23:20,297 --> 01:23:24,617
and took risk, capital, conviction to get us to this point.

849
01:23:24,756 --> 01:23:33,777
So thank you, gentlemen, for displaying all three of those over a decade ago when Bitcoin was a joke to most people.

850
01:23:36,217 --> 01:23:36,656
Pleasure.

851
01:23:36,936 --> 01:23:41,297
Pleasure, Marty. It's a pleasure to come on your podcast.

852
01:23:41,297 --> 01:23:45,217
I've been following you for many, many years as a Bitcoin OG,

853
01:23:45,457 --> 01:23:52,036
and you've done phenomenal work in terms of educating, in terms of inspiring.

854
01:23:52,777 --> 01:24:02,476
And for this book and for our journey, it only made sense to come for Socor and be on your show.

855
01:24:03,656 --> 01:24:03,756
Awesome.

856
01:24:04,016 --> 01:24:05,777
I agree. Wonderful to be here.

857
01:24:06,096 --> 01:24:06,217
Yeah.

858
01:24:06,936 --> 01:24:07,297
Cheers.

859
01:24:21,117 --> 01:24:21,976
Thank you, George.

860
01:24:24,417 --> 01:24:25,096
Thank you, guys.

861
01:24:25,156 --> 01:24:27,596
Go pick up the book, and then you win.

862
01:24:28,156 --> 01:24:29,316
We'll make sure we link to it.

863
01:24:30,136 --> 01:24:32,876
And I would love to do this again at some point in the future,

864
01:24:32,957 --> 01:24:36,016
maybe not 2035, maybe, hopefully before then.

865
01:24:36,016 --> 01:24:38,697
But this was an incredible conversation.

866
01:24:38,876 --> 01:24:39,396
I hope you too.

867
01:24:40,036 --> 01:24:41,096
George, enjoy your night.

868
01:24:41,376 --> 01:24:42,457
Bill, enjoy your morning.

869
01:24:42,856 --> 01:24:44,896
And this was a pleasure.

870
01:24:48,056 --> 01:24:48,756
Then we win.

871
01:24:48,997 --> 01:24:49,497
We're going to win.

872
01:24:50,016 --> 01:24:50,676
Peace and love, freaks.

873
01:24:51,217 --> 01:24:51,356
Okay.