Welcome to the Bitcoin Boomers podcast. This is the inaugural version and we have my friend and maybe one of the most mysterious, interesting people I've ever met, George Bodine as our guest today.
So we've got Gary Leland and Larry Lapard also joining us.
And for those of you who are not familiar with George, George is kind of, remember that commercial with the most interesting man in the world?
Well, this is the real life version of that. A former fighter pilot, Top Gun graduate, a man who lost a plane once, fabulous artist.
and more importantly for today's conversation,
a real ardent true blue Bitcoiner
or true orange Bitcoiner, probably.
So welcome, George.
Thanks for joining us.
Thank you.
Yeah, I am a hardcore Bitcoin maxi.
I'm cast in steel
and I've got balls the size of watermelons.
That's making it hard to drive your car.
I'll tell you right now,
a stick shift's a bitch.
But I, yeah, you know,
it sounds like I was trying to be the most interesting man,
but obviously there's more to that story. I just,
lots of times when you're young,
you don't know what the hell you want to do in life. And I ended up, I mean,
I did everything working underground, working in the oil fields,
all kinds of crap. You know, the thing that I learned from that,
if I took that lesson from all those years, all that hard work I did,
I mean, when I was working underground, I'd put in 60, 60,
70 hours underground working down in a mine as deep as a mile down in the oil
fields. One time I put in a hundred and I think it was like 105 or 108 hours in a one week work
week. And you know what? No matter how hard I worked, if I saved every damn dime that I made
in those periods back in the 70s and 80s, looking today, if I weren't an ardent Bitcoin hardcore
maxi, then basically everything I had saved would have been robbed by the time I was sitting here
talking to you guys. So, you know, Bitcoin is the life wrap. It is the escape hatch. It is the
savior to your generating wealth that you can carry on in time. Time is stretched out for me now. I
don't worry about jack shit. I really don't care what the hell is going on. The only thing I worry
about are my kids, grandkids. I do worry about fellow Bitcoiners. I think some Bitcoiners are
going to get royally screwed going forward, but that's a separate subject. So yeah, Bitcoin's
given me a lot and I am a hardcore maxi. You know what I love George is uh and I I not it not to the
level you did but you know my first job out of uh actually during college to earn money in college
I worked in a steel mill and yeah um you know when you go do that kind of work I think everybody
should at some point in their life do that kind of work that it could be for a year or you know
something like that. But I think go get your hands dirty, play with heavy equipment,
sweat your balls off, like do that sort of thing. I think it's because, you know, Bitcoin is about
proof of work. And I think you don't really appreciate work if you're a if you're a desk
jockey, you're just kind of sitting there, you know, but but I'm sure that learned. There was a
lot of life lessons in that, you know, same thing in the military. You know, that's kind of a
different take on the same thing. Yep. Well put, Bob. I couldn't agree more. Dig some dishes,
get dirty, understand the value of money. But more importantly, even if you've never worked
in a job like that, if you just understand the concept of what money is and what fiat money is,
if you just understand that you cannot outrun these pricks, no matter how hard you save,
no matter how hard you work, you can put those hundred hours in and the oil field save half your
salary again today i mean you couldn't outrun them and you could not be guaranteed that it go
in the next 10 years you're not going to see everything that you've saved be devalued and
debased and i think that's one of the reasons why gold's ripping hey larry how you doing i'm good
thanks nice to be back as you guys know i've had some technical difficulties here hey it's nice to
hear you know larry you're you're i mean i think larry's whole book uh the big print which uh
everybody should read chronicles that especially the first part of the book you know through the
lens of his life and I think one of the things like happened to me too a short short story was
my my grandfather I think had an eighth grade education um when I was uh when I was a young boy
was the oldest grandchild and he would he would ask me to come over on weekends and you know help
me sweep the garage out wash the car you know whatever and always flip me a couple dollars
at the end, you know, and he would say to me, I want you to save this because you're going to be
the first person from our family to go to college. And so I did. And I had, I used to have one of
those savings books. I'm sure you guys used to have a savings book too, you know, and go there
and you'd see that you made 4% or 6% or whatever, you know, the number was, and it would be exciting.
but I realized years later that because I had done that with the money I had actually not kept
up with inflation and by the time I used it when I was in college 10 12 15 years later
a whole bunch of what in reality was my grandfather's sweat and blood had been robbed
and you know it's funny too because I also remember in 1971 I would have been seven then
that when we went off the gold standard,
he cussed up a storm about Nixon and that whole thing.
It's one of my earliest, most vivid memories.
And now it kind of comes full circle.
And he was a smart man.
He had it figured out even back then
as a guy with a limited education.
I've done almost the same thing for my grandkids, Bob.
I bought cold car cues for all four of them.
And now they only get presents as Bitcoin
and they can't touch it till they're 31.
They know that ahead of time.
All right.
And so, and it was kind of interesting.
We gave my oldest grandson,
who's like in sixth grade, I think,
$5 and a card for, I don't know what it was for.
We'd given him a present
and Kathy threw five bucks and a card
and we went to see him and he opened his card.
He said, well, thanks grandma and granddad.
And he goes, granddad,
can you buy some Bitcoin with us?
And handed me the $5.
So I felt pretty good about that.
I mean, you know, absolutely.
That's awesome.
I'll tell you, that's a great story, because, again, it's all relating back to what we're discussing right now.
And in fact, you know, Larry, it'd be good if you weighed in since you just got here.
I would love to hear your take on what I was saying, which is that basically you can't outrun these people.
I mean, it's impossible to outrun the printer.
And I think we're seeing that now, don't you think?
I really do.
And yeah, so the, you know, the, it's interesting to me because I'm writing my quarterly report for the third quarter ended September 30th.
And as I write it, you know, I study kind of what happened during the quarter and what's really appears to be going on now.
And I, we, I don't think we've ever really seen anything like this in our lifetime is that the entire world is waking up to what we've known for some time.
And that is that fiat is doomed.
And, you know, we were a very vocal but small minority, and we've had a lot of setbacks for the past 20 years, but we kept the faith and, you know, built momentum over time.
And, you know, you've now got J.P. Morgan and Mohamed El-Ariane and all kinds of other elites out there saying, you know, there's a monetary debasement trade that's taking place.
And it's kind of like, yeah, no shit.
Welcome to the club, guys.
Some of us even wrote books about it.
And the price behavior of gold in the last year has really just been nothing short of stunning.
I think it's almost the best year ever.
It might surpass it soon.
The only other time when there was a better year was the climax that occurred in 79, 1980 before Volcker.
Gold in the 70s, as most of you know, went from $35 an ounce to $800 an ounce over the decade of the 70s.
It was 22x.
And the 35 was suppressed.
I mean, that was artificially low because it was actually trading it higher than that in private transactions.
But, you know, so what happened is that people lost more and more faith in fiat currency during that time frame as well because of what you described, Bob.
You know, your grandfather being pissed off.
I know mine was, too, about what Nixon did.
Everybody knew it was a crime to go off the gold standard, but they did it anyway.
Of course, he said it was going to be temporary, which is like, you know, so many other politicians.
You know, I mean, we know politicians are lying when their lips are moving, right?
And so, you know, so you've got gold up, you know, more than any other year other than that 79, 80 period.
And who knows, it could surpass that.
because I think what's going on is the world is becoming aware of the issue,
which is that they can never stop printing money.
Mathematically, they have to keep printing money because a credit-based system,
a Keynesian-modeled credit-based system,
requires ever-increasing amounts of money printing to keep the system from collapsing.
The alternative is massive deflation.
They had that in the 20s and 29 to 30-something,
and so Ben Bernanke vowed to never let that happen again.
And he had a technology called a printing press and he intended to use it in the same way that Neil Kashkari has said, you know, there's an infinite amount of cash at the Federal Reserve, which I find hilarious.
And so, you know, this is how Gresham's law kicks in.
This is how hyperinflations occur.
I'm not hyperinflation is not my base case.
It's a tail case, but it's it is it's a possible.
I actually think we're going to more likely have just a very high rate of inflation, varying high rates of inflation between, you know, three and 20 percent over the next five to 10 years.
And and of course, if you're holding bonds or dollars without any kind of protection, you know, you're going to you're going to see all your savings stolen from you, basically, by the government.
So that's what gold is signaling to me.
And I have to say, even I am surprised by how relentless the bid for this stuff has been.
But, you know, it again goes to the size of the relative markets.
I mean, you know, there's $900 trillion of fiat related assets.
If you include real estate, maybe $450 if you don't.
And, you know, the entire gold market now is, I don't know, $25, maybe it might be up to $30 trillion.
I've done the math with these new higher numbers.
But the point is, it's quite small. And so, you know, if some of that 450 of financial assets that aren't necessarily inflation protected wants the financial assets that are, you know, they only really have two choices, gold and Bitcoin.
And, of course, Bitcoin is even smaller, right?
Bitcoin's, you know, only $2 trillion of total market cap, probably less than that because some coins have been lost.
And so effectively, you know, Bitcoin is going to steal share from gold and they're both going to steal share from all these other fiat financial instruments.
And to me, it's really just begun.
And as a fund manager, it creates kind of an interesting problem because it's not very often I look at a lot of stocks and they're up 100 to 300 percent.
I don't want to sell them.
But that's because, you know, it's I mean, nobody and I say this in my letter.
I mean, this is a sovereign debt crisis and nobody alive has seen one because the last one occurred after World War One, you know, when Germany and Poland and a lot of other countries hyperinflated.
France had high inflation. You know, Britain abandoned the gold standard.
And and, you know, we had 100 percent inflation in the United States.
It's the last and largest bout of inflation.
We've had really a bunch of inflations in the U.S.
The Civil War was one.
World War I was another.
And then the 70s was another.
Well, actually, post-World War II with financial repression was another.
And then the 70s was the biggest one prior to this.
And, you know, we're in it.
And these cycles don't end.
They don't end.
You know, it's not as though they're going to be able to put all this back in the can and everything's going to be fine.
And, you know, I'm now finding myself thinking, OK, where's gold going?
I mean, obviously, I didn't think it would make $4,000 this year.
It has, you know, $5,000, $10,000.
I mean, and there's a lot in my letter about that as well.
I mean, if we were actually to go back and remark gold, if we had 100% gold coverage of all the fiat currency that's been created,
very similar to the way we were back in the 70s or in the 60s before we got on this big inflationary game,
to make the math work, to cover every dollar outstanding with an ounce of gold,
gold would have to be over $90,000 an ounce.
And it's at $4,000 right now.
That's how much fiat currency we've created.
Now, I'm not suggesting that's where we're going.
I'm not suggesting we could return to a gold standard without 100% coverage.
There have been a number of successful gold standards have been run with 20% to 40% coverage.
But, you know, at some point, as my book talks about,
you know inflation is going to become the biggest problem in this country and um we either let it
continue to build in which case we're all the way to full weimar hyperinflation or hopefully you know
we'll have some politicians who are smart enough to realize that the problem is the unsound money
and we'll do a one-time reset uh and return the dollar to either being backed by gold or bitcoin
or some combination of the two um so larry would that have to be voted in by congress to do that
Yeah, that's a great question, Gary. And so let's talk about that. Right. So if you read the Constitution, you know, Article one, Section eight, originally Congress had control of money, monetary fares, and they specified only gold and silver could be money.
Of course, you know, quickly with the Constitution has become kind of a dead letter in so many different respects.
But and, you know, not there not long after the drafting of the Constitution, you know, they and they were on the gold standard.
They immediately kind of broke the gold standard by letting the banks suspend specie payments, which means that you couldn't.
And when you're on the gold standard, in theory, if you have a dollar tied to gold, you know, or twenty dollars tied to my grandfather could take twenty dollars down to the bank in 1915, give it to them.
and they'd give him a one ounce gold coin.
Or he could take a one ounce gold coin down there and they'd give him 20 bucks.
So that's a real gold standard.
That's gold exchangeability.
You know, the dollar will buy you gold, gold will buy you the dollar.
But throughout history, that got broken.
It got broken in the War of 1812.
It got broken in 1865 when we printed greenbacks.
You know, it kind of effectively got broken after the Fed was created.
You know, Roosevelt broke it again in the 30s when he confiscated the gold.
And then really only international people could own gold.
So, you know, Americans were banned from holding gold post 1933, unless it was a collectible.
Of course, many people did.
And it wasn't until 74 when Jim Blanchard, you know, flew a plane over the Ford inauguration and got the gold standard, made it legal again for Americans to own gold.
But that's anyway, the long story short, also, Gary, on that point is that notice in 65, 1865, you know, Lincoln and his Treasury Secretary Seward established greenbacks.
They just did it without asking Congress. And it got tested. But, you know, the Supreme Court held it up as legal.
In 1913, the Federal Reserve, that actually got approved by Congress. So they ran that one through the system.
But in 33, Roosevelt just said, you know what, we're grabbing all the gold and we're going to revalue it.
So he did it without any congressional approval. And in 71, Nixon did it without any congressional approval.
So there's a long precedent of executive action to even though in theory the money ought to be controlled by Congress,
there's a precedent of executive action to take control of the monetary system.
So, you know, and you've heard you've heard Treasury Secretary Bessent say, you know, we need another Bretton Woods and I want to be there when it happens.
So, you know, it's clearly been thought about and talked about.
I mean, Bessent gets it. Moran gets it. Trump gets it.
Well, I was saying Congress would never get that accomplished.
No, you're right. There's that. And but they all get it.
And, you know, I think they understand how pressing an issue it is.
And it would be incredibly bold move.
But, you know, he breaks a lot of glass.
I mean, he might do it.
And particularly if we have runaway inflation at the time and people, everyone's screaming about it.
So we'll just have to see.
I mean, it's, you know, it's my book.
I mean, I wrote a speech that the president could give in my book.
You know, and there's a way to do this without hurting too many people.
I mean, it's impossible to do it without some people getting hurt.
Bondholders are going to get hurt, full stop.
No way to prevent that.
You know, the money is not money good, so to speak.
But, you know, once we reset, we have a very bright future.
So this isn't, you know, four boomers also being doomers.
This is just us saying, hey, look, we've seen how this shit works.
We've studied history.
We know the issues.
You can't ignore them.
You got to solve them.
And then once you do, things will be good again.
Because if we return to a sound money standard, things will recover very quickly.
There have been a lot of countries that have had hyperinflations that have actually, once they're over and they return to sound money, they actually get better fast.
And so we could be that country.
But sadly, you know, to get us to the point where an executive takes, you know, a president takes that action, I don't think he could do it today.
I don't think he has the support.
I don't think people realize the problem is big enough, et cetera.
I think we're going to have to go much further down the inflation road where everybody is hurting even more than they are today, sadly, before we get political action to fix it.
There's a little rabbit hole that might be interesting here, and that's when you read the Constitution, what you'll see is that the founding fathers were not only trying to separate church and state, but they were trying to separate money from state.
Yes.
and I'll read real quickly, you know, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 5. It says,
Congress shall have the power to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin,
and to fix the standard of weights and measures. So now you have to read that in the context of
the time. And if you read the context of the time, and I've done this, by the way, if you go back
to a dictionary from that period of time. The word to coin does not mean to create money.
It means to authenticate money. So the role of the government was to say, yes, this particular coin
has been stamped, coined as authentic. It doesn't mean to create it. And unfortunately,
we've let this thing, there's a whole history behind that in Supreme Court cases that I think
were rigged to change that interpretation to give this power to the government. But the forefathers,
in my opinion, were very clear that they should not be in charge of money, you know, that the
government should not be in charge of money. They also said that only gold and silver coin could be,
could be tendered.
Why wouldn't anyone, when
they took us off the gold standard, why wouldn't
anyone sue
or take that to the Supreme Court or whatever?
Oh, they did. In the Constitution, it has
to. And Nixon says, no, you don't
have to. I know better.
And then... Oh, they did. Every one
of these monetary missteps was
challenged, Gary, along the way.
I mean, there were sound money people fighting back.
You know, some of them were killed
like Garfield and others. But
you know, every one of these steps was challenged and the politics of the day and the politics of
the court. I mean, just like today's court is political. All those other courts were political
as well. And, you know, this I mean, it was it goes back to the necessary and proper clause.
Right. I mean, that's the one that's they've used that they've driven a truck through that one.
You know, it's well, we got to do it to keep the system going. It's necessary and proper,
even though it's clearly in direct violation of what's written in the Constitution.
So, you know, it's a sad feature of the system as we now have it.
I mean, hopefully, if and when we get to this reset point, you know, we could tighten up some of the language on some of these things.
Well, it sounds like they could do anything with that clause.
Well, you got that right.
Lawyers will tell you that's correct.
And they have.
I mean, you know, it's not just in the money.
It's a lot of other areas where they've overstepped.
You know, it's funny, Bob, you you pointed out you talked about your grandfather in 1971 while he was watching Nixon.
And you know I I a little bit older than you and I actually do remember that speech And the funny thing is whenever I think about it I always think of it as in black and white Although I sure like Gary mentioned off air I probably had a color television by then
But nonetheless, I, you know, talking about the fact that, you know, whether that was legal or whether it was challenged,
I remember very specifically that Nixon at the time and in the speech, my my take as a young man was that we were being attacked,
that this was almost a national defense issue.
He even framed it as speculators outside the system
that were attacking the U.S. dollar.
So surprisingly enough, there were people that felt aligned with this narrative.
Of course, what happened afterwards, and I mean, I lived through that period,
is within the next 10 years, my world went to shit.
And I was a young man, I was working.
And I mean, when I say went to shit, I mean, my life really changed significantly from 1971 on.
And if you look at charts, if you just look at the wealth disparity that we see in this country right now, you trace it back.
Often 1971 is the defining pivotal point for many of the charts that all of us follow to try and maintain some idea of where America is as a nation.
And it definitely was a defining moment. And I wish I'd been more aware at that time, as many people, just what a screw job this was going to be for the American people.
I think that's interesting. I had kind of forgotten, George, I'm glad you brought it up, that in Nixon's speech, he kind of called on patriotism.
And I think if you look at the Patriot Act as another example, this massive invasion of privacy and government overreach, it's almost as though when politicians start to call on patriotism, it's when you should become very, very suspicious.
Trying to prey on your loyalty to make you disloyal or unpatriotic if you oppose it is quite a trick.
Yeah, we've seen that repeatedly. And I mean, as being a former military member, I wrapped myself in a flag many a time and I followed blindly many times the guidelines and the mantras of both the government and even social movements.
And, you know, looking back in the past, you know, I'm I'm almost embarrassed by how gullible I was regarding some of those narratives.
I feel the same exact way. I agree with you 100 percent.
Yeah. You know, Gary, and you mentioned, you know, in fact, you just touched on it too, Bob.
You know, we are at the cusp of a revolution. I mean, we are going to see over the next three to
five years an incredible revolution. Gary was talking about how he follows AI and is interested
in what's going on in the field. I'm doing the same thing. I just, you know, people are blowing
smoke up our ass right now when they say that AI is not going to impact jobs going forward.
You know, you look at me right now, anything that's between this headset, between my ears, any cognitive function that's going on that relies on analytics, forecasts, algorithmic determination, all of that is going to be at risk for replacement by AI.
And soon. Right now, we're about one to two years from general AI.
Within three to five years, we're going to have super intelligence.
And that is going to be a game changer.
You mentioned earlier off air, I think, too, Bob, talking about insurance contracts.
You know, the insurance industry hasn't seen anything yet.
They don't know what's coming.
And but but getting back to what, you know, Gary and he might want to touch on this, too.
You know, I feel like we've got about a three to five year window and then our world is going to change so significantly.
And it is going to be built around both AI and digital money.
But in particular, AI is going to become, at least if you look at the vision of Peter Thiel and Palantir, or if you look at the vision of Sam Altman and World Vision, it's going to be a world that could become a velvet prison very quickly for us.
And I think of Bitcoin as the escape valve to that.
So I'd be kind of curious, since you're following AI, Gary, what do you think about that yourself?
Well, most of my following on AI is studying how it's going to help health, you know, because I'm 70.
So, you know, when you start getting older, you start getting concerned, you want to live.
And now that Bitcoin is coming along and I'm in the position I am and I'm enjoying life as much as I am, I really want to live a long time.
But I think that AI is going to affect jobs, for instance.
I think we're going to start lose like over the next three to four years, probably 1% of the jobs every year.
But then I think holy hell happens.
And then all of a sudden we're losing 5%.
I mean, holy hell's happened.
And are they going to have to come up with this minimum payment to people so they don't burn down the country?
I mean, what are we going to do?
This is going to go nuts and it's going to go nuts quickly.
And people are not prepared for this.
Yeah, there's, you know, AI.
I spend a lot of time on AI now as well.
And I think there are two fundamental problems.
By the way, there's massive opportunity too.
But, you know, the two fundamental problems are society will transition, jobs will obsolete
at rates that have never been seen before.
And that will create discord.
You know, Marx kind of wrote his whole premise or a lot of his premise about how capitalism
creates and technology creates these disruptions and the displacement. And the other side of it is
what's called containment, which is how do you keep AI from taking over? Which is, it's a long
topic, a whole different thing, but a very scary one as well. But to kind of keep it on our topic,
Like, George, I think in parallel with that, if we have a fiat system controlled by a small group of men and or AI, we have a huge problem.
If we have Bitcoin and sound money, we have a chance because those things, regardless of how much intelligence sits on the other side, can't be disrupted, can't be abused.
And so there's, I think when the Bitcoin thing started in 2009, this wasn't part of the vision, but I think it's become an important thing to justify and even fight harder for Bitcoin. Like it's our hope against this thing.
I'd say it's the single most important thing that we can fight for right now, because what you just said is is my vision, which is a dystopian digital world built on A.I. and surveillance that is coming to us or to a theater near you and that the escape valve is Bitcoin.
It's got to be digital money. Now, you know, I think that Larry, he's one of the few people that understand or can somehow mix the two worlds together and stay on track, gold and Bitcoin.
But let's face it, in this digital world with agentic AI agents acting on their own, we are going to need digital money.
Bitcoin is so fucking important right now. We cannot let it fail.
And there are some things going on right now that make me very concerned about Bitcoin.
I want to see Bitcoin succeed.
You often say you want to see it succeed for a thousand years.
Well, I'm with you.
It is the hope.
You know, I'd be interested to get Larry's takes on that.
I mean, the idea of how you balance, how do you somehow bridge that world between gold and Bitcoin?
And, you know, what's going to how is this going to play out?
Yeah. So I think Bitcoin is going to continue to steal share from gold. I think it's going to massively outperform gold as it has in the past. You know, it's obviously more volatile because it's still in the adoption phase, but that's also why, you know, there's an opportunity.
And I think ultimately gold will be demonetized just the way silver was demonetized by gold.
And that's because gold had a better stock to flow ratio than silver.
And the countries that bet on silver, you know, China and India suffered for that bet,
whereas, you know, England and the U.S. and others bet on the gold standard and benefited as a result.
I think the same will be true.
You know, if the U.S. wanted to strategically be smart and we do do a monetary reset,
we should reset to Bitcoin, not gold, because gold is analog sound money. It's yesterday's
sound money and Bitcoin is the future of sound money. But I wanted to talk a little, just jump
on something that Bob said and you guys all said about the AI thing. And this point's been made by
many others. This isn't an original thought, but I think it's important to emphasize it.
The more, you know, the Keynesian, and this is Jeff Booth, who's really the originator of this
idea. The Keynesian system is built on credit growth, credit expansion. Money is effectively
debt, and so you need more debt to have more money, and you just got to keep that growth taking place.
And in reality, the Austrian model shows you that deflation is not a bad thing, it's a good thing,
and that technology is extremely deflationary, as Bob has known and worked through his entire life on.
And and and AI just accelerates that.
And so, you know, if we think about AI eliminating jobs and it no doubt will, we don't know what scale will, you know, all those people whose jobs are eliminated, you know, they have mortgages, they have car loans, they have payments to make.
And, you know, and they're not going to have incomes now, you know, and we can say, oh, that's all unfair.
And you can go into the whole Luddite argument of, well, yeah, but AI makes the world more efficient.
And it does. That's a good thing. But the point is that it conflicts with a credit based system.
And if we think that AI and productivity enhancement is getting continually sped up, then it's only going to drive the death of fiat to a more rapid death.
I guess it's going to happen more quickly. So I think it's important to kind of connect those two dots, you know, as we look at it.
But, you know, gold and Bitcoin, I mean, look, George, back to the reset issue.
And I know a lot of people want to hear me talk about this.
I mean, it's China's betting on gold.
I mean, there's no doubt about that.
India, you know, they're probably betting on gold.
I don't think they really get it.
I think Russia is actually hedging their bet and probably mining Bitcoin.
And, you know, this is probably a 30 to 40 year fight before gold is gone.
And it's just jewelry and Bitcoin is money everywhere.
But I think the trend in that time frame, I mean, you know, Bitcoin price in gold is going to go up and to the right forever.
It is because it's sounder and it's also got the technological advantage of being, you know, easier and cheaper to store and move and verify.
I mean, so you kind of look at all those things and it just wins.
It does.
And it's very hard for a lot of my fellow gold bugs to hear.
And it doesn't mean gold's going away tomorrow.
I mean, in this particular episode of monetary debasement, the one that we're in right now, that's going to, you know, I think is leading to, I think, I think what, by the way, I think what's going on, the gold market smells the big print that's coming.
You know, I mean, Stephen Moran is talking about, you know, dropping rates, 200 basis points.
Trump's talking about dropping 300 basis points.
Think about what that would do.
You know, if mortgage rates came down three or 4%, the housing market would boom.
Credit growth would explode.
And, you know, and we'd have more massive inflation.
And I think gold is going to protect you against that.
But Bitcoin is going to do even better.
It's going to provide real alpha over and above gold.
Hey, I have another question about AI real quick before we move on.
This is something my wife says all the time.
And I've had several boomers say this to me.
And so I just wanted to cover this real quick.
They seem to, because they're not understanding Bitcoin, seem to have a feeling that AI is going to hack Bitcoin because it's so smart.
Have you had someone say that to you yet, or am I the only one?
I have.
Let me take that one, because I've asked a lot of people about that.
I was just at BTC in D.C., where I actually had a good sit-down with Presta Pisch, who is an engineer and who spent a lot of time digging really deep into this.
And there's some measure of how well quantum computers are performing, and he described to me just how complicated the whole thing was.
And, you know, I mean, I'm not even sure what this measure is.
He had a term for it, a technical term.
Bob, maybe you'll know it. But he said that, you know, we would have to be at kind of the 25,000, you know, units per second or units per whatever to have, you know, SHA-256 be it.
Talking about the qubits.
Maybe that was it.
Qubits is what he's discussing.
And he said recently they were bragging or they thought maybe they'd gone from like four to six to eight. Does that sound right, Bob?
I mean, they're talking about some, some have claimed, I think, 130 or something like that.
But not really stable, frankly.
The issue is the issue with qubits and the issue with AI or actually now we've drifted over to the idea that quantum computing.
The problem is that you have to have millions of those qubits.
And not only do you have to have millions of qubits, you have to have them in something called cohesion.
That's difficult to achieve.
And, you know, I'm not saying that AI isn't going to, you know, to Gary's point.
I think it's a valid point.
And I'm sure, Gary, that, you know, it's a difficult question to answer because how do you talk about a future that we can't really see?
And especially if AI is involved in crafting that future.
Well, I just say that they're going to go after the banking system first.
Well, that's exactly right.
Well, they will. They will. And, you know, I can say it's a long, long rabbit hole.
There is a there is a group that I've been on the outskirts, ancillary.
I've been I've interfaced with them as a group with something called BIP 360.
which is a group looking to create quantum resistance for Bitcoin.
And there are a whole bunch of implications though
about what you do with money supply and property rights.
And it's actually not that difficult to solve technically,
but we have to sort out some issues like do we lock up Satoshi's coins?
A simple version is like, do we violate Satoshi's property rights and lock them up?
Because we can't make them quantum resistant without doing something.
So it's a very messy thing.
I don't lose any sleep about it.
There's plenty of people that are thinking about it.
Bitcoin will have a solution well ahead of the threat.
And we need to be.
And my recommendation is, you know, as a community that we solve the problem, you know, five to ten years in front of when we actually face it, because there is a possibility that somebody makes an advance well ahead of it.
But, and I don't.
Bob, could Satoshi's coins be put back on the blockchain, extending the time period for mining?
Yes, that's one of the proposals.
I'm not in favor of that one, but that is one of – here's the options just real quickly.
We can leave them where they are and just say, hey, Satoshi, if you're out there or whoever has the keys, you better move them.
That's option one.
Option two is we move them for him or make them unspendable.
That's another one.
We could reissue them by changing the subsidy and extending that past 2140 or increase the rate over the next 100 years.
or we could create it so that blocks only allow a small number of, let's say, even one.
Like each block could only move one of those coins per block.
So it would slow down the rate at which they could be attacked.
So as we sit here today, those are the ideas on the table.
I didn't even know it was being discussed.
So thanks for bringing that up.
Yeah, there's several people. Like I said, I'm involved in the group. I've been in a handful of meetings. I'm talking to on a regular basis behind the scenes with one of the key developers. And, you know, it's like I said, interestingly, it's not really a huge technical issue.
Although I will say one other thing.
We'll probably save it for another deeper dive on a different show.
But quantum-resistant addresses are much bigger than the addresses we have today.
So the script and the – and so what it means is that block space will get even tighter.
So as soon as we move to it, it effectively means we have maybe a half to a quarter of the block space that we currently have.
When we go to quantum resistant addresses, to do that, do you have a hard fork?
Or can you do it as a software?
You don't have to have a hard fork.
Okay.
You don't have to have a hard fork if what you just said was, you're not going to do anything with Satoshi's coins.
You're going to leave them be.
Probably if you said I had to make a decision today, that would be my recommendation.
Right.
Just let him be there.
And if he's out there and wants to move him, we'll give him two years warning, something like that, like move him before this date or this block height.
But it's a very tricky issue.
But I don't think I'm in favor of reissuing them because I think that essentially is fucking with the $21 million.
What would the rest of us do, though, Bob?
Would we just have to move our coins to a new quantum-resistant address?
Is that how we would do it?
In simple terms, yes.
Yeah.
And it may be that they're safe already, depending on what you have.
They may already be safe.
So the addresses wouldn't just automatically convert.
You'd actually have to do some work.
No, you'd have to take an action.
Then there'd be a lot of questions that were left on the old system.
And, Bob, based on your understanding of where we are in the quantum development cycle
and what they're trying to do and the stability and all this qubit stuff,
how long before this really becomes a serious issue?
How many years are we talking?
I think as a community, we should have a solution in the five to seven year time frame and decide what we're going to do.
If I was betting, I would bet I'll be dead before the problem actually occurs.
I want to weigh in on this because this is something that I'm following.
And I think that your time frame of five to seven years is spot on.
that's exactly what I'm thinking
is that we need to have something in place
within that time period
and the second thing I'm going to mention is
I really strongly agree
with what you said regarding Satoshi's coins
if we start going in there
and dicking around with the network
and actually dicking around with the protocol
not the software implementation
if we move away from either a policy change
or a software, an upgrade
then that's a really big deal.
And I don't think that you're going to find consensus to Gary's question.
I don't think you're going to find consensus within the community to do that anymore.
And as far as Satoshi's coins in the past, you know, if you've lost your coins,
if you have made tremendous headwork errors, you have lost those coins.
And, you know, for me personally, just having studied this, for me, I'm aligned in that direction.
And I, you know, I hope that more people within the community will start taking the time, even if it's just to say, you know, George, you're full of shit.
I still hope that people will start looking at this because it is an issue at some point going forward.
And, you know, basically having looked at quantum computing, you know, it's that what is that story?
It's the greatest invention that you'll see in the next five years, and they've been saying it for the last half a decade or for half a century.
So basically, I think it's a long ways off, but we have to be prepared.
George, speaking of consensus that you're doing, that kind of makes me think of core versus knots.
Oh, fuck.
And I am not a person that's an expert on this, but I know that that's all I hear.
Are you just trying to launch Jethro?
Launch the alert Jethro?
Well, like I said, I see it all the time.
And I'm not like a super technical guy.
So it took me a while to even figure out what in the hell was going on.
So one of my biggest complaints right now about this discussion and about CORE in particular of all the things I going to say about CORE that are negative this is one of the biggest issues
These dipshits have created so much ill will within this community.
They have caused so much division within this community.
They have burned bridges behind them permanently.
You know, you're looking right now, you're staring at your screen,
you're looking at somebody that's giving money to these people.
They'll never get another dime from me as long as I live.
So people like me, you remember what we said at the beginning of the show, a hardcore Bitcoin
maxi cast in steel with balls the size of watermelons.
You're never going to get another dime from me, people.
But more importantly, they have burned so many bridges here that this discussion we're
having is really important.
And, you know, there are other things that are really important.
Covenant, CTV, all kinds of things that we need to discuss regarding core developers and implementations, not just policy change, but kind of like what Bob's discussing.
This could be a like a soft fork or just an upgrade, a software upgrade of the implementation, the software implementation.
Well, guess what? You're going to have a hard time convincing me that you know what the hell you're doing now.
so and you know they're operating behind a veil basically it is a veil of
obscuration secrecy whatever the fuck you want to call it i'll tell you something if the you guys
when you're done here you want to have a fun little experiment go into your computer and type
into i use ai all the time use uh chat gpt and grok and then type in the same question
what are the five core maintainers names with commit access what are their names what is their
age what is their education don't even do anything hard like how much do they make a year
just see what happens when you come back with your answers so the biggest issue for me right now is
the fact that you know these things that we're discussing that are important i think they're
going to get end up being delayed in implementation or that we're going to have a lot of bad will
that we're going to have to overcome to have these conversations.
No, like you, George, I have found myself thrust into this battle.
I don't know what we call it.
I've actually been using the word schism.
It reminds me a lot of, you know, who's the Pope?
Like the Catholic Church.
That's a nice way to put it.
Breaking into it.
The word I've been using is the schism.
But I think a lot of times this is portrayed as core versus knots.
And I think what you've just said, George, is right.
I don't view it that way.
It is not core versus knots.
This is a rejection of the process and communication style of core.
And, you know, I will say I don't want to violate confidences.
I started to get really involved in this going back into the spring period.
And we could see this was starting to happen.
It was starting to ripple.
And I, as a guy, those who don't know me, I'm formerly the chief technical officer at Gateway.
I am no longer a coder.
I used to be, though.
I used to have quite a bit of coding skills.
was essentially told that while I was happy,
they were happy to allow me to be on like the dev mailing lists
and those sort of things.
Essentially, my voice didn't matter,
that my opinion didn't matter,
that whether I acknowledged or it's called act or knack,
like when a proposal is coming up, people can act or knack,
that mine was irrelevant.
I saw others get muted in the same manner. And instead of being public about it, I kind of went behind the scenes and I tried to reach out. I went to some developer conferences. I offered to take some core devs to lunch.
this goes back even into the early summer period and said hey i'm going to be at this conference
i'll be in the same city as you i'd love to talk with you um was ghosted um went to one of the
heads of the organizations spent three hours with him by the way very uh actually i'll call i'll say
i think he's okay with me saying it michael schmidt who's the head of brink um right he has been very
good, by the way. And my hat's off to Michael because he has been open. He and I spent three
hours actually in Vegas going through this. And the topic was not whether op return is right or
not or fighting spam or like those sort of things. But how does the process work?
How do we communicate? Who are the stakeholders? Who gets a vote? How do you reach consensus?
and in summary I don't want to dwell too long on it I think what has happened is there has been a
failure by core to understand that the community has evolved and it reminds me of my very early
days in the personal computer in the early days of the personal computer when it was a small market
all geeker geeks and hackers and we were developing new products we interfaced with these other people
that had a certain mindset and a certain behavior.
And our actions as product developers
affected only a small group of people.
Well, now we're at a point where we're,
if you look at the S curve
or the adoption curve of technology,
we're kind of on the fringes of the majority.
And we have institutional mindsets.
We have nation state mindsets.
We have corporate mindsets
that don't align necessarily with the philosophical approaches of some of these other folks.
But their opinions are still valid.
Bitcoin is for everybody.
And I have not seen an openness to engage and actively, at a minimum, actively listen.
And that's very frustrating.
And I think probably the number one danger point for Bitcoin as a community.
You know, Gary, Gary, look at what the hell you've done.
You got me so pissed off I had to take my jacket off.
That was my goal.
Just count on me.
I got hot in the studio here.
I want to be known as the troublemaker.
You are.
So, well, hey, George, kind of backing up a little bit, you know,
when we look at where we are with Bitcoin,
what's kind of happening with society,
I think Larry kind of said some things.
I'll just expand on it a second.
I think when the money printer starts working, when AI causes the job displacement, when
Trump comes in or whomever comes in, they start reducing interest rates, we start seeing
these extreme actions to try to save the economy.
That's kind of what I'm getting at.
There's going to be all these extreme actions.
One of the things that I think will happen is you'll see the socialism side rebel quickly.
Like Gary even mentioned universal basic income.
And for those who haven't, I recommend two books.
Go read Atlas Shrugged.
It's quite a read.
But also, more modern times, Mandibles.
A Mandibles is a great book.
Absolutely.
But they both kind of talk about how when chaos occurs, the masses tend to say, government saves me.
And it's the exact wrong reaction.
It should be the opposite reaction.
And what worries me is when there are people in my life, and George, for those who don't know, George and I are friends.
We've known each other for several years now.
And, you know, when you see family members or people that you're close to that don't get it, that are falling for the other side and maybe even angry at you thinking you are the problem or you are the enemy, that can be a difficult thing.
And I know you and I, George, we've talked about this somewhat, but I think some people would love to hear how you feel about this.
This is a really important issue. I mean, I'm glad that we've pivoted the conversation to this because how we left that, Gary and I, when we were talking about AI and both for health and what I think will be the replacement of many jobs, any white collar job, any job that requires algorithmic decision making, anything that has a decision tree in it, anything that requires an analytic take on data, anything that you can imagine, creative content, these things, it is going to be disruptive.
and somebody's already touched on the fact that, yeah, it's going to be a difficult period.
And Larry talks about secular inflation. Inflation in different segments are probably going to be
very high in this upcoming three to five years. But the good news is, on the other side,
if you make it, if you understand what sound, hard money is, if you realize that you need
something the government can't print, on the other side, you are going to be set. You are going to
have probably the only thing that will preserve your wealth, either gold or Bitcoin.
Obviously, I'm a hardcore Bitcoin maxi, but you need something that can save you to the
other side.
And I do think I will tell you right now.
Let me ask you guys something.
Can any one of you name one central bank in the entire planet that wants to see Bitcoin
succeed?
No.
Well, OK, Gary, you got one?
No, no, I definitely don't.
All right.
So now why don't you find one cantillion nipple sucker like a politician?
Why don't you find one of them and ask them if they want to see Bitcoin succeed?
Their whole world is built out on basically being close to the money source.
And if Larry's right and the big prince coming, there are going to be a lot of people that are going to be getting as close to that.
big printer as they can get. You know, the Spanish had probably the world's first reserve currency.
And you know what the people did that were in positions of power, both religious and government
employees? They got as close as they could to the gold galleon that was arriving on a periodic basis
from the new world. These people aren't going to want to see Bitcoin succeed. And it is up to you
to understand that you are stacking for your family.
You are stacking for the world.
You are stacking for a better day on the other side of that
when we do have deflationary pressures to build a new world.
Well, George, do you ever worry about in this new world you're talking about,
there's not going to be near as many people with as much money as there is now,
or when we rephrase it, people who didn't have a lot of money before
are now going to have a ton of money.
and so are those people really going to have to like worry about protecting themselves
really hardcore does that make any sense what i'm saying let me ask you let's let's put it this way
and let's see if i got this right so in my world if if ai is success successful in creating enormous
bounty and wealth for our country for our citizens for the world imagine fusion energy
So the world will change so significantly that whatever I say right now isn't going to make a bit of sense in that world.
And it may mean that, you know, you talked about you touched on UBI, Gary.
Well, let me ask you this.
Imagine a world that we're talking about where people are struggling financially.
There are massive job layoffs.
what person in this planet, what person within the country's border, the U.S., is going to
raise their hand and refuse to be given a UBI handout from the government?
How many people? Nobody, nobody. Exactly. How many people refused their
STEMI checks? So all I'm saying is that the world that we see in front of us is really disruptive.
And I think that in Larry's book, you know, I think he really covers that idea that you have to protect yourself going forward, especially at the latter part of the book.
I'd be interested to get your comment on that, Larry.
I think that's right. I mean, it's, you know, there will be this could be the largest transfer of wealth that has ever occurred in the history of humankind.
If fiat currency dies the death that we think it might die.
it could also get arrested some somewhere between here and that point if the politicians wake up
and start behaving more responsibly and it's you know i always whenever i'm in any investment
thesis i always think of what could go wrong what could go right what could go wrong and
and lynn has said you know nothing stops that this train and i kind of agree with her and
certainly if you observe the behavior of the u.s federal government up until this point
there is absolutely no indication that they intend to stop this train.
But, you know, that doesn't mean that with worse conditions and massive inflation,
things can't change.
And, you know, and it's not an unstoppable train.
I mean, it might seem unstoppable, but, you know,
the biggest piece of stopping it would be to balance the budget.
And, you know, that would require an immediate 40% cut
to all Social Security benefits and the defense budget,
which right now is the third rail of politics because our voting block is big enough that no politician will touch that.
But sadly, our voting block is going to age out and die.
Maybe.
Yeah, some of us.
We're hoping a long ways out.
Some of us.
Some of us, right.
And the millennials and the X and all the other generations are going to have more votes.
And they're going to say, you know, why are we paying these old guys?
Why are we paying for their hips and knees and all this other shit?
Yeah, they built the world we live in.
But guess what?
they're getting too good a deal. It is a pretty good deal, Eric. Yeah, well, certainly the Medicare
side. I mean, it's funny, there's a bifurcation there, though. I mean, yes, I turned 65, and I was
kind of shocked at how cheap my health care costs got. But just before that occurred with Obamacare,
I mean, a family of five, I was paying almost $38,000 a year with a $10,000 deductible.
So, you know, now that was for a good plan, no doubt, Blue Cross.
But, you know, $48,000 a year for medical care?
Come on.
That's crazy.
And I think it's just because the system is broken and, you know, they're forced to give, to charge the government and the Medicare recipients a lower number.
And so they turn around and they just nail the private people, you know, with a very high number.
So it's just another thing in our system that fiat has broken.
All the incentives are wrong.
you know all the administrators get too much money etc etc so um yeah i don't know i got off
track george what was the question again well how bad is it gonna i'm a boomer yeah i had i had a
brain fart you know what i'm gonna tell you so i think i think that covers a lot of the things we're
discussing in the sense that you've got to find a way to protect yourself going forward and and it
is things that the government cannot print if you can just understand and i i just you know i
personally i can't stress enough to those people out there that are listening if you ever have any
doubts about what you hold if you don't understand bitcoin you need to open up the books you just get
in the damn books and start studying i love both those books gary that you recommended i've read
both of those i'm reading the funny thing is i'm actually reading atlas shrugged again i started i
I was out elk hunting.
Yeah, that was me, actually, George.
Yeah, I was elk hunting.
And I was in the tent, and I had the Kindle, and I thought, you know, I'm going to start this book.
It's a great book, man.
It is phenomenal.
I just reread it, too.
That's one of the things.
I made a commitment about a year and a half ago.
I said, I'm going to go back, and I'm going to reread all the seminal books.
1984, Fahrenheit 451, Atlas Shrugged.
And, and, but I'm going to read them as a 60 some year old guy, not as a, because we read them as youth. And I think it's great that we read them when we're young, but it's really difficult, I think, to grasp what's being said. But now, now you reread those, I would encourage everybody to do that. Or if you're an audiobook person, listen to the audiobooks, whatever. But go, go get those again, because they, they are so good.
and if you
take your years of wisdom
and life experience
and apply it to
what's happening in those books you'll see they were
spot on, they're so good
George I would just add, I think there's an important
point we should make here because it's easier
to see this at our age than it is when you're young
this stuff is going to keep going
up forever and
these assets, gold and
bitcoin but primarily bitcoin represent
lifeboats and
the fiat currency system represents the titanic i've said it in many podcasts i strongly believe
it that you know we got these lifeboats we paid lower prices we were lucky we were smart whatever
we got but you know what if you're on that titanic you don't give a shit what price you pay you want
the goddamn lifeboat and so you know it's it's extremely important i'm experiencing in the crew
that i talk to a lot of price bias price fixing and bias where they say oh yeah you're right gosh
I should have listened to a couple of years ago. I didn't, but man,
it's at 125. How am I going to pay that? I just can't pay that. And I said,
yeah, but I said,
you're going to be saying the same thing in 10 years when it's at a million.
And in 10 years it will be at a million. It'll probably be more than a million.
And so people said that at 20, Larry.
Well, that's right. And they said, I mean,
I felt it at 400 when Max was telling me to buy it at two and I didn't listen.
So unit bias, it's a real big problem. And so, you know, I would just say,
I mean, I know in my case, as I creep toward a retirement, so to speak, or being less involved and not working as much, you know, I just don't want to get in the position my father was in, which is he retired and he had money.
But by the time he passed, it had really gotten whittled away by inflation.
It just wasn't nearly, you know, what he had earned.
And, you know, the beautiful thing about owning a Bitcoin stack or owning a gold stack is you just know it's going to keep up with inflation.
And if you follow the old rule, which is the old annuity rule that you eat maybe between 3% and 4% of your principal every year to live off of, if you can get a stack that's big enough where 3% or 4% will cover your living expenses, and you sell 3% to pay your living expenses, then the other 97% goes up 10% or 20%, you can't run out of money.
I mean, almost by definition, you can't run out of money, whereas by the time my father passed, he was pretty close to running out of money.
And so, you know, I think it's a really important idea for people to understand.
Younger people, maybe less so because they've got a lot of years of earnings power in front of them.
But I wrote the book in large part because I really wanted to try and help people, the average person in America and particularly boomers, who I think, you know, they were trained for 40 years to buy the dip.
And it worked in the stock market.
And God bless them.
And it's a good thing that it did work.
But the rules of the game changed with COVID and with that big print.
I mean, they sent out money directly via checks.
They gave away tons of money to businesses.
Folks, they're going to do that again.
And when the rules change, you've got to take account of that.
And that means you've absolutely positively got to be in these assets.
I mean, smart guys like Ray Dalio have said 15% or 20% in gold and Bitcoin.
Jeff Gundlach, a bond guy, probably the best bond manager in the entire frigging country.
is recommended with 25% allocation to gold.
Paul Tudor said, I mean, the list goes on and on and on
of very, very smart investment managers realizing,
oh my God, this monetary debasement trade is a thing.
And for those who think you're too late, you're not.
You missed the first or second inning, no doubt.
We're not buying gold at 300 or 1,000 or 2,000
better than paying four.
But my belief is it's going to 10 and perhaps 20 on gold.
And my belief on Bitcoin is it's going to a million and ultimately five million.
And so, you know, if you pay $125 for it, I think in a few years you'll be very glad you did.
Hey, Bob, I want to ask something real quick going back to something earlier, if that's OK with everybody.
I'm just curious, do you have any thoughts on or concerned about the upgrade to Core on Friday?
Yes, I do. Yeah, I will not run it. I will not run it.
OK, I was just curious. So are a lot of people not running it?
That you know?
I'm not right.
Yeah, well, about – I'd say 20% of the market already moved to nots.
It not core versus nots but I think concern over core has caused 20 of the market to move to knots or thereabouts I think you see the most people just not upgrade
I think you'll have – there might be 10% or so that are ardent core supporters,
and they'll probably upgrade.
But, yeah, there's no need to upgrade.
I'll put it that way.
Like, I, there's nothing happening in that, that, that I have any concern about.
And I, and I think it's a net negative.
And so my recommendation is hold tight.
And there's, there's a lot of us that are the same, you know, Samson Mao, Jimmy Song,
Jeff Booth, or we're all in the same camp.
George is in the camp with us.
There's, there's a whole bunch of us that are, Nick Zabel has even come out of the woodwork
in support of that strategy.
And by the way,
Knott's is a great implementation.
And as a miner,
a guy who runs mining companies,
it is better than Core for what I do.
But it may or may not be better
if you're running version 25
or something without a Core on a node.
My recommendation is just keep doing that.
I want to weigh in on this
before you go, Gary,
because I have concerns
And I mentioned this earlier. And, you know, Bob doesn't maybe have the same level of concern that I do, but I do have concerns. And he's already aware of the example that I'm going to bring up right now, which is that BSV, Satoshi's vision, which is basically a failed fork of Bitcoin cash, which is a failed fork of Bitcoin.
You know, they did the exact same thing that they're going to do tomorrow on Friday.
That is core releasing or upping the off return limit from 80 or 83 bytes, depending on how you view it, to 100,000 bytes.
What the hell do you think happened to BSV within a very short period of time?
I'm sure Bob can tell you.
They ended up with images on there that are just shit.
Just picture something to happen to some little kid and then imagine that on your nodes, RAM or disk temporarily.
Although not always temporarily.
Every time you verify, if you're an archival node, if you're a full node and you verify the data, you know what?
that's on there for fucking forever.
And so I do have concerns about it.
Well, how could, you know, with as big as the Bitcoin cash versus Bitcoin
and all that hell was, how could they not foresee what could happen?
I mean, that confuses me.
Before I let Bob step in, I want to say something, which is,
how did I start this podcast?
I said, I've lost faith.
I've lost trust.
you know i don't and again i've already told you as an example just get on there and start
doing some research into the actual core maintainers the five of them and you will
find some things that are disconcerting and you'll also find that much of it is a very obscure
i would put forward that i that we are dealing with developers
who are playing fafo fuck around and find out and that they're doing it with the most
important monetary invention in the history of mankind. And it is something that not just has to
last for a thousand years, but I mean it when I say I think it is the lifeline over the next three
to five years for us to escape the digital world that's being built for us. So it's pretty damn
important. And I again, I just feel that we're dealing with people that don't know how to either
run a business, a board, consensus, transparency, build a network. I could go down the rabbit hole
and give more here, but that's probably enough. I have concerns, real concerns about that change
tomorrow. Yeah. Well, I want to be clear too. If I came off as somehow in support of it or
I do have concerns about the type of spam that George is talking about.
I think spam in general is bad.
I think they are giving up too early.
They're basically saying there's no hope.
We can't fight it.
And I think that that's a pussy move.
Like it just – I'm sorry.
I probably shouldn't say that.
But it's a terrible move.
I'll say it.
That's the way George has been saying.
Yeah.
Yeah, but it's a terrible move.
But here's the thing.
Nobody has to run it.
They can release it, but nobody has to run it.
And so now I think that we'll see pretty quickly 10% or so of the market do it because it has become a schism.
And I think much like there are people that wear MAGA hats to signal their political affiliation or people that still walk around wearing masks.
By the way, Larry, I was at the University of Michigan football game this weekend.
Had a great time.
But I saw a guy standing there outside, double masked at the Michigan game.
And I thought, well, is he really doing this because he's afraid of getting COVID?
Or is he trying to send a social signal?
And I defer to the latter.
So anyway, I think there's a signaling that will occur.
I think there's a great chance that the community rebellion will ultimately cause a reversal of this.
And in version 31 or whatever a subsequent version is that maybe we'll see it pulled back.
I think we'll see knots continue to increase in adoption as a result.
I think we'll see a lot of people stop.
You know, I mentioned not that not that all of us are always right, but I mentioned all these names.
a sailor by the way sailor isn't necessarily in support of knots but he's been very adamant that
like we don't we don't need change like i want to enter i want to interrupt you there for a minute
you know months ago months ago i stood on a just stood up and raised my hand in that in a small
conference maybe a hundred people there and i there was to talk about bitcoin treasury companies
But I made sailor. I asked him to weigh in on this. And I even mentioned knots versus core.
And if you don't have it, if you have a chance, you should probably listen to his response, because in my mind, it's very clear that, again, this FAFO principle is not the way to go with Bitcoin protocol.
I mean, or the software implementations to run a node, I don't think have any place.
And I'm sorry to interrupt you there, but people need to know that he's weighed in on this.
And it's worth a listen to.
So if you want to put some crap on the blockchain, some spam, you need to take advantage of it right away.
That's what you're saying.
Well, I hope not.
And it'll be very interesting to see what happens if a block is produced with that stuff.
Hopefully what will happen as well as we will, at a minimum, like here, you know, this is a whole other rabbit hole, but there's a great deal of pool centralization right now, right?
And it's another issue within Bitcoin.
But here's one way in which it might help, that we really don't have that many different people creating templates right now.
And so we only need about six to 10 organizations to make the right stance about not necessarily spam, but about, you know, child porn or the type of things that George is referring to, maybe showing up on the blockchain.
So hopefully they will all make sound decisions, even if they want to put dancing cats or alligator smoking cigars or whatever on the chain.
I hate it, but it doesn't really do the type of long term damage.
Let me just ask Larry a question here. So, Larry, you just got you just got back from D.C.
and you were there and you were talking with senators and different people involved in the
space. And so how are you going to deal with that if you're you go to a meeting and let's say it's
the same type of a scenario and there are headlines out there discussing what I'm discussing.
Bitcoin carries whatever image you want to put in your mind on there or malware or I don't know,
a bad video or something like that. I mean,
how long have we been sitting here fighting FUD for the last, you know,
decade of, of nonsense and we've overcome much of it. Yeah. So, I mean,
how do you, you know, how is that going to go?
I'm completely with you, George. I mean, I just, I think, you know,
our argument will be, well, nobody sees it and it's pretty harmless, but,
but it's, but that's not entirely a justifiable argument. I mean,
it is there and it'll be there forever and people can go see it.
So I'm pretty much with you that it strikes me from I'm not a technical guy and I have not dug as deep as either you or Bob or maybe Gary as well have onto this issue.
I actually kind of look at it more just as a social matter.
I know that I'm appalled at the way that some of the core developers have treated the community.
I mean, I think that, you know, they have an enormous trust that they hold to, as you say, not FAFO and to do things carefully, you know, with this incredibly important invention that Satoshi gifted us.
So, you know, the notion that they're misbehaving on that, I think they should be called out on it.
And, you know, we could, I mean, hopefully we can maybe change core developers or, you know, shun the bad ones and the good ones will rise to the surface.
I don't know, Bob, has any core developer ever really been called on the carpet for bad behavior?
Because it strikes me that...
Sure, sure. Back in the early days, sure. Yeah, they have.
But it is a little bit of an interesting process.
And it's very insular.
Outside candidates aren't really welcome.
you know the king is anointed
or the kings are anointed from within
is there any schism within though
are there some core developers who kind of look at some of their cohorts
and go gosh that's not right
I think so
but they're reluctant to maybe be critical
and you know there's a difference between
core contributors and maintainers
and people that have merge keys and like, like, and, um, you know, they,
that, that there's, I hate stereotyping, but I am an engineer myself, but I think,
you know, a lot of engineers don't like controversy. They, you know, so, so sometimes
some of the quiet ones may not like what's happening, but they may want to not be
confrontational with their cohorts.
I mean, that's, I think, a very difficult thing for some of them to do.
And then those like Luke, who is a very controversial figure, definitely get pushed aside.
Like, you know, Luke has, you know, I think even some of the people who hate him would
say, well, you know, Luke Dasher saved Bitcoin twice.
But even he, when he expresses his opinions, because he is,
he is the opposite. He is, he is very direct. You know, he will, he will, you know, not a lot of
political correctness and, you know, Luke's a friend. I love him. I'm a, I'm part of his company,
but, you know, not a lot of political correctness and he doesn't mean it personally. He say, well,
you're a liar, you know, instead of saying, well, maybe you're wrong. He'll say, well,
you're a liar. So, but, but, um, and some people can't handle that. Right. And, you know, so, um,
So I think that's part of this issue, but a lot of it comes down to maturity.
What are the maturity levels of these people?
Where are the maturity levels of the organization and the processes and the communication methods and all that?
That, I believe, is fundamental.
You could see someone step down after this, Bob.
I mean, you know, Gavin and Dreesen stepped down because of, you know, how people attacked him and thought of what he did.
Yeah.
You know, Gary, I'll tell you, I'm not seeing that personally.
When I look at core developers or I look at the three stooges that are their spokespeople that are always out there online defending them and attacking Luke, I really don't see that sense of humility.
I mean, I don't know about you guys, but look at us.
We're all older.
I mean, we've all screwed things up in life.
Big time.
Exactly.
Big time.
So have I.
We all have made mistakes, endless mistakes.
And guess what?
I'll bet there isn't one of us here on this panel right now that can't raise his hands and say, hey, I fucked up.
Absolutely.
I'm sorry.
You know what?
I made a mistake.
But you won't see that with these young kids.
Young kids don't know how to say they're sorry, first of all.
So it has nothing to do with the fact that they're core developers.
They just don't know how to say that.
Now, wait a minute, Gary.
I don't want to drift down the road you're going.
Yeah.
Not all that generation's bad.
Just some of them.
Exactly.
The next thing you know, we'll be going, those damn kids.
I take it back.
Like, I'm off of that.
We'll be on a grass lawn going,
And their rap music and, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, those damn rappers.
The minute we do that,
they're right to come back at us
and call us, you know, dinosaur boomers.
They do it anyway.
They should.
Yeah, you can't even get on the system here.
Yeah, exactly.
We got you.
We got you finally.
I had a hard time logging on.
It was, you know.
We got you.
This technology shit, it's very confusing.
All right. So what else do you guys want to talk about?
Hey, I want to know something about art.
Who's your favorite artist?
Oh, that's easy. John Singer Sargent.
I knew that.
He's an 18th, 100th, 19th century painter, long dead, deceased, gifted.
He painted in the old style, meaning very traditional.
But at the same time, he was aggressive and he boldly went places where no man has gone before.
He was a great artist.
Well, good enough. That's a good answer.
Yeah, and those, you know, George is very modest, and, you know, his art is very important.
Got a great gallery in Sarasota.
Maybe you have other spots, too, but in Sarasota.
If you're in Sarasota, what's the name of the gallery there, George?
It's Palm Avenue Fine Art.
If you're in there, stop by.
You can just type my name in the Internet.
You'll see the work that I produce and stuff, and I don't like to talk a bunch about my work.
I mentioned this earlier and, you know, I'm going to say something, which is that basically in my world, how I see this playing out is I do see us going through a really difficult time, like Larry was discussing, as far as inflation, pressures, prints, governments.
But I still am hopeful. I think within three to five years, we're going to see a tremendous cornucopia of debasement or deflation, I should say, meaning that things are going to get cheaper.
And if AI pans out and we don't kill ourselves, then you know what?
We're going to have a great, bright orange future in front of us.
And each one of us, hopefully, will still be around.
Or like Gary, I'm kind of interested in what you were discussing earlier.
I'm going to start pursuing a little bit more of the health aspects of AI.
You know what?
Maybe we'll be around for a while.
We'll get to enjoy this.
And if we do, each one of us sitting here right now is going to have to come up with
something they want to do in life when they've got a lot of extra free time, just like young
people today need to.
got to do something creative i don't care if it's woodworking make some pottery go out there
design buildings use uh use your hands do something you know there are a lot of ways to
be an artist i was looking through your art george i thought that there was going to be like a hidden
bitcoin symbol somewhere that you had to really hunt for but you go there it is i found it we're
mining bitcoin right now while we're talking back there on that painting there's a little satoshi
over his, what was that, your right shoulder, George.
That's a BitX.
Yeah.
It's mining.
And George, yeah.
Up close looks like this, by the way.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, there's...
I have that in the brains.
What's that little brains one?
Oh, yeah, they have a mini miner, I think they call it.
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah, everybody should run one.
But George has done Bitcoin art.
Well, you can see that one.
He did two paintings.
um god bestows bitcoin larry larry actually owns those paintings he owns two paintings they're big
and they're uh kind of like mixed media and they document a very certain period in bitcoin's
history back up until around 2022 and we were going through some really big crisis then so all
that's on those panels and according accordingly there's also two images one is god bestows bitcoin
to Adam and beside it is God bestows Bitcoin to Eve. And in fact, Bob's got the only print in the
world that I'm ever going to make of that with Larry's permission to. And then Larry owns the
paintings there with a Bitcoin museum down there in Nashville right now. So you also forgot to
mention that Bob's beautiful wife was the model. Exactly. I often don't, you know, I don't usually
talk about that. I did not know that. It's an old habit because I don't usually talk about models.
I learned that as a young man when I was an artist working with a lot of nudes and stuff.
I can see why Bob got a print of that then. Yeah, it's beautiful. It hangs in our living room.
It's beautiful. And she, Lola, George also did one of Lola from our trip to Prague
last year that's not Bitcoin related.
So we've got two of George's pieces in our house
and we're very proud of it.
I don't usually do commissions,
but sometimes for friends, I'll do that.
I actually, and I don't usually sell my own work,
but occasionally if somebody wants to buy it for Bitcoin,
because none of the galleries that I'm in,
they don't use Bitcoin.
Isn't that amazing?
Think about it, guys.
In today's world, nobody's using Bitcoin like that.
It's ridiculous.
Yeah, it's amazing running the conference.
You know, our first conference nine years ago, someone paid $10,000 in Bitcoin to be the sponsor.
It was $7,000, you know, so I got a Bitcoin and a half.
So now, you know, and I never sold any Bitcoin.
So I was like going now I go, wow, that was a good damn conference.
Yeah.
There was only like 50 people there.
Wow.
That's neat.
That's great, Gary.
Good story.
Well, George, where can people find you?
Like I said, just type my name in the internet, George Bodine.
You'll see who I am.
And I'm only on one social media platform.
That's X.
And I have a blue checkmark next to my name.
If you don't see that, somebody contacts you.
I never reach out to people.
I don't need any money in life.
I don't want anything in life.
I don't want any clicks, followers.
I don't need jacks yet.
I'm all set.
I'm happy.
The only reason I'm doing this kind of stuff is, in fact,
two of the people on this panel are Bob and Larry kind of talked me into maybe coming out a little
more and I'm glad I did and hopefully it's a positive experience for people and it helps them
in their conviction and courage to carry Bitcoin forward. Well I can say it's been a pleasure
meeting you I'm glad they talked you into it and I'm glad you accepted because this has been a great
conversation and I but I could tell from watching previous interviews of you this morning trying to
get some background information. I said, oh, I'm going to enjoy this. That's good. Anyway,
you can find me. Well, thank you, George. You know, being our guinea pig, being our first guest,
you know, was a little bit of a risk. Fantastic. Do you have that prize for him that
we all pitched in and gave you the Bitcoin to buy him? I won a prize.
We all sent him Bitcoin to buy it. You got it?
I won a major award.
Well, you're welcome.
And we'll do this again sometime.
And everybody, I don't want to make people upset if you heard me ranting and raving here.
It's just because I think this is an important issue.
Bitcoin is money.
Remember that.
Bitcoin is money.
It's not some fucking art gallery full of JPEGs, pixelated dicks, or cats.
Bitcoin is money.
And you were worried about what you said, Bob.
Whatever.
I don't care.
We know that.
I haven't known you long, but I do know that.
Thank you so much for your contribution.
It was really great to have you on this.
You're welcome.
You guys have a great day, okay?
Sounds good.
Bye.
Thank you.
Well, that was good, guys.
I had a good time.