The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last ten years, the sharpest Satoshi's, the best Bitcoin's, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We'd like to welcome our panelists, Victoria Jones from Satoshi's page. Hello, good evening, everybody. And I'm Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network, moving on to issue one, the price of Bitcoin. The price of Bitcoin is $101,000 and $430. It's $1 for 986 Satoshi's with a high of 101,840 and a low of 99,226. BlackRock says that 2% Bitcoin allocation is a reasonable range. The asset manager runs the world's largest Bitcoin ETF and the cryptocurrency has surged since the election victory. Victoria Jones, what do you think about BlackRock, the famous investment company, suddenly changing its tune and saying that you should not only invest in Bitcoin, but that almost everyone should allocate 2% to Bitcoin. Yes, well, I mean, obviously BlackRock is one of the most foremost financial companies in the world as it exists at the moment and in order to operate like that, obviously, they hire a high number of financial advisors and economists who use a lot of mathematical models in order to figure out what the best investments are. And along with many other things that they invest in, including the article mentions the magnificent seven. Apparently, there are a group of technology stocks that now form part of that portfolio, which include Microsoft and NVIDIA. Apparently, they now include Bitcoin in that grouping as well. However, I think they've said that more than a 2% allocation starts to introduce more risks because Bitcoin is still volatile, as we all know, it is vulnerable to big sell-offs. We've seen that regularly with Bitcoin's history. And so, given their perspective, and the fact that currently a lot of people rely on them to be responsible for their assets, using all the mathematical models that they use, that seems to be a reasonable calculation for them. So, yes, I mean, quite a win for the Bitcoiners, especially given that we've been mocked for 15 years, BlackRock now considers Bitcoin one of their foremost investments and even 2% is quite telling, you know, what a turnaround given where we started. So, yeah, very interesting. That is what it says. It says you should allocate 2% of your portfolio to Bitcoin the same amount that they say to the magnificent seven technology stocks in a standard 6040 portfolio. So, 6040 2% Bitcoin. And I do agree, Victoria, it's another huge victory lap for Bitcoiners who were right about this the whole time. They were right. When I got here, they were right before I got here, the Cypher punks, the libertarians, all the weirdos, all the people at all the conferences were all right. The price of Bitcoin did nothing but go up. And now, even the financial managers who mocked us for years, the same one I saw on Mandrake on Twitter, he's very famous for his Bitcoin Baklava that he made for people. And he says his financial advisor told him not to sell his 401k, not to buy into Bitcoin and I heard the same thing. I heard for years how you take these big penalties. I find out later that the penalty was like 5% was like 10%. And the amount I could have made in Bitcoin hundreds of percent, thousands of percent instead I held lousy stocks forever. And he could have been the same and many others because the financial advisors did say don't buy Bitcoin. They said don't buy Bitcoin over and over again. And we all said it's just like the internet. It's just like the radio. It's just like every new technology we go through the same cycle. People say oh, the internet is only used by criminals and thieves. They said the exact same thing about Bitcoin. And this is within a lifetime. This is not many generations. People could still remember when the internet was for criminals and thieves. And we were there saying hey, they're saying that Bitcoin is for criminals and thieves. Just like the internet. But you could buy some. You could profit from it. You couldn't buy early pieces of the internet. I wasn't there on the search box saying wow, this is incredible. How can I get some? And people did. They bought the dot coms and they went up and they went down and then they came right back. Facebook, everything else, even eBay, some of the original dot com stocks still survive today. And again, why? Because the internet is great. When the internet takes something on, it makes it better. The internet is doing that right now with chat, CBT and image creation, audio creation, text creation, thoughts, all kinds of things are happening right now. It's the same process as MP3, the same process as getting people online and the same process as getting people into Bitcoin. And we told you this over and over and over again. But now BlackRock says it. So maybe you'll listen. Does you think that's it, Victoria? Everyone's in now. All of our friends that were before, they're like, you told us about Bitcoin at, you know, $1,000 or $100. But now that it's $101,000 and BlackRock, this massive investment firm, like you said, with all the quants and the math and the accounting degrees and the charts that don't have little things you can click on, they tell you it's okay. You can buy Bitcoin now. So are our friends all going to join, Victoria? I think some people are still going to take some persuading, unfortunately. And, you know, even though, even though it's used by criminals and thieves, there are also other cryptocurrencies that are used by criminals and thieves. And obviously we're not as effusive about whether or not people should adopt those things. So I think it's important to point out to people that there is a difference with Bitcoin. But of course, it requires quite a significant amount of education and for people to understand the difference. You know, on the face of it, you could make the argument that if anyone says that it's for criminals and thieves, then it's probably the thing should buy because clearly it's going to go up massively. But obviously that's not true in every case. You know, there is a difference with Bitcoin, the way it's been designed, the collaborations that operate behind the scenes in order to get it working are all very important. And it's the difference is understanding those differences and subtleties. And I published a book in 2020 to explain it to you all if anyone's still struggling. If you've got any newbies in the house, so yeah, you know, it does require, it does require some understanding. You need to understand what is different to everything else, you know, just because it's a stock or it's a cryptocurrency, doesn't mean it's the best thing you can buy. There are particular reasons why Bitcoin is the thing you want to be invested in. Well, and it's great right now. We have all these new experts on Wall Street on CNBC, all the TV. And they're mainly telling you about Bitcoin, the price. They'll tell you how it was worth less before and it's worth more now. And maybe they'll even say something like they bought it in the before times. They're the smart one. But none of them talk about, like you say, the reasons to buy Bitcoin, the reasons to use the Bitcoin network and they are technological reasons. There are certain problems you have to first acknowledge with the current system. If you want to send money through the current system, you have to use a third party. This holds you back whether you know it or not. This stops your ability to send money to anybody anywhere for any reason. Bitcoin enables that ability. Bitcoin grants you that ability, not the Bitcoin that Michael sailor has held up, not the Bitcoin that Coinbase has held up, but the actual real Bitcoin that you use in the wild, that you send to your wallet, that you send to your private wallet, that you write down your words for, that Bitcoin can go anywhere, can be sent anywhere. This is just one of the amazing features of Bitcoin that are not discussed every day on the financial network. They're not like this thing. It goes anywhere. It beats inflation. It's locked at 21 million units. It is really strong. It's hard to break. If you hold the words, if you hold the key, it's your key. It's your words. You can take them over a border. You can hide them in your backpack. There's all kinds of ways to hold and use this Bitcoin that they don't talk about every day on the financial networks. Jim Kramer never sits down. He says, tell me about the blockchain. How does that work? How do these addresses work? How do QR codes work? They don't even talk about how QR codes work. That's just a thing where they encode a string of numbers or letters or a webpage into that thing with all the symbols. They decode that somehow. I don't even know into the words, into the letters, which you think would be one of the first things they talk about Bitcoin. They'd get the people on the thing, pull out their cell phones, be like, hey, let's send some Bitcoin back and forth to each other right here on the air. Then they'd say, when we sent that Bitcoin, was there a central party that it went to, like a bank or a board where someone like the FBI could come in and say, freeze those assets? Can we change the code for this Bitcoin? Is it really easy? Maybe there's a handful of developers that all work in one room that we can go get that could change that code? No, no, there isn't. You can't change the code. You can't change the blockchain. You can't change the way that the 10 minute average blocks work. You can't change any of these things. That's why it's different than other cryptos. I know the brave, fearless leader, the new one. He's going to be so great and he's got this world-liberty financial. I've heard they're investing in something called AAVE and ETH, and maybe a variety of other altcoins. This again shows that they don't get it. They speak at your conference. They take your money. They take your donations. They take your words and they come out saying, crypto is really interesting. I like cryptography too. It's a fun, like, Kleenex, Klinx, Band-Aid, catch all for the industry. I don't think it actually means what it means. But yes, Bitcoin is different. Bitcoin is the backbone of this industry because of the problems it solves in the way that it solves them. Not because the price went up. Not because it's worth 101,000. It went up because of the way it solves the problems. They never even talk about it. They never want to talk about the Byzantine general's problem. Basically, if you have many generals on a field and they're giving an order to attack or to retreat, which general can you trust? Maybe that general wants you to fail so that he can take over the army. You can't trust him, but if you had a voting system similar to Bitcoin mining where you could all put it together, you could solve the Byzantine general's problem. It's a lot more complicated than that. But they don't talk about this in the media yet every day. They talk about Bitcoin and they have new and new experts on. They just say things like, I knew about it back when it was this price. Now it's going to be this price. Then they bring the finance guy on. The finance guy says, it's digital gold. You never use it for anything. It goes up in price forever. If you don't use it for anything, why does it go up in price forever? If it's super useful because as the properties that I've been talking about and we've talked about on this network for years and years, that's why it's going up forever. That's why it's different than ETH or AVA or I don't know any of these things. Go ahead Victoria, I talked a lot. No, I mean, you're absolutely right. Of course, there's a lot of gaslighting going on at the moment with people saying that it's digital gold and you don't need to spend it. It becomes redundant if it's just digital gold. We've had gold. Gold was great. Well, we had it because we had nothing better. But of course, the big problem with gold is that you need a third party in order to store it and actually already pointed out the beauty of Bitcoin is you don't need a third party. Actually, that gives you huge advantages and huge flexibility that you haven't had before and also the fact that it's decentralized. All of these features are being eliminated from the conversation as it's now being adopted by these big players and being discussed by these big media companies. I think it's a classic case of if you can't beat them, join them. It's like, well, okay, we told them for years that the government would ban it or it would amount to nothing. Well, clearly, it hasn't mattered to something and it turns out that it's put impossible for the governments to ban it. So what we need to do is to find a way to undermine it instead. And of course, you know, a really important part of a decentralized network is that it's narrative is really important. And which is why it's really important that we have shows like this where we keep reminding people that actually there are bigger reasons why Bitcoin is important. A lot of these media companies are leaving these really important features out of the conversation. And I think it's really important that we're here to kind of bring them back in again because you're absolutely right. You know, just having it stored in the stock market as digital gold, you know, divorces it from the reason why it's valuable in the first place. And you know, the reason why it's valuable in the first place is what is ultimately going to disrupt the system, which takes us on a whole new trajectory. And those things are much less frequently talked about in the media because quite frankly, it's scary to all of those people because it completely disrupts their world. But of course, they end up in this situation where they're all comforting each other with the fact that if we can just keep Bitcoin in this little box, then everything will be okay. And of course, we're so powerful. All of these little people couldn't possibly adopt it in the same way that we could in order to disrupt what we do. And so they're kidding themselves. You know, they have been so powerful for so long. It's almost just kind of like, well, we've managed to manage, we've been managed to take over everything else. So surely we'll, we'll manage to take over this thing. And it's just like, like to see you dry. Well, it's, it's the same thing they've done with other disruptive technologies, like the printing press, radio, television, internet, even. They similar it down till it's just one idea. Radio is a place where professional people can broadcast over the professionally controlled airwaves. Television the same thing, professional people broadcasting over the airwaves. No amateurs, no intervention, no normal people. And they're thinking they can do that to Bitcoin. They're thinking they can reduce the entire book to the front cover. And you'll say, if I read the front cover digital gold, that will make me rich. And I think that's why people have such a hard time telling the difference between Bitcoin and the altcoins. They're like, Bitcoin is just one of the many coins. It's kind of like a human being thing where humans have evolved so much and through our use of technology, I and I think many other people might argue, humans are kind of out of the food chain. The altcoins are the food chain. Bitcoin is the human. It's outside of that system. And the reason is not just because it's digital gold, not just because Michael Sailor can hold it in his wallet forever and keep buying more of it with his infinite money scheme. That's not what makes it valuable and that's not what's going to make it go up forever. Now, people are really confused. They're like, Bitcoin is $100,000. They think that this is a high point or that this is the end of Bitcoin growth. Whereas if we look at it from the beginning under the original investment thesis, the original, why am I interested in Bitcoin? Why is this an interesting technology in the same way the internet or BBSs or modems or anything else? Was an interesting technology? It's what it allows you to do. Bitcoin allows you to really break out of the financial system in a way that I don't think they're comfortable talking about because why would you want to break out of the financial system? Nothing could go wrong. But we hear all the time about people have their account shut down. People who have trouble with PayPal. People who have bad credit reports, things like this where they have reasons to get out of the financial system or they make unpopular art or they make religious parodies. They have reasons why their payments keep getting shut down. Not everyone has this, but if you do a little thought experiment, you think, well, what if my art or what if my thing that I do becomes unpopular? Suddenly, there's a crusade against landscapers. You would want to have this kind of money so you could still get paid. You could still do your work. This money that is agnostic. And it's that agnostic property that gives it so much power, not so much digital gold or that you can store it. Because if you do another thought experiment and you think, okay, what if we just put Microsoft in charge with Bitcoin? Sailor's thing still works. He's just holding piles and piles of it. He needs to move it every once in a while. He's going to move it between Bank A and Bank B. Microsoft's never going to have a problem with that. Now, Microsoft might not even care if you're moving it from Bank A to Bank B or to Bank A to cause to some kind of cause out there, but the government will care eventually. The finance people will care. They're going to want to step in and approve those transactions, at which point digital gold goes on for Michael Sailor, but this agnostic transaction, this transaction that doesn't care goes away. And that's one of the things that's why Bitcoin established this network with the blockchain, with the miners, with all of this complexity, is to protect that ability to transact. And no one talks about this on TV. And I'm sick of it. So there you go. You guys can watch it here, but nowhere else. We're going to move on to the next topic, Victoria. Will the price of Bitcoin be higher or lower this time next week? Well, you know, we're reaching that classic time of year where the American bankers all want their bonuses. So yeah, they call it the Santa Claus rally. So I'm quite sure with all the ETF involvement, you know, we're going to be on a continued upward trajectory for the rest of next week. So yeah, I'll say higher. It is a fantastic time, much like Schrodinger's cat. We have a cat in a box. We don't know if the cat's alive or dead, but January 20th, they're going to open the box. And we start to find out the condition of the cat. So yeah, I think we go up till then, no problem. After you start looking at that cat, though, I don't know. Let's ask the Magikapal. Will the price of Bitcoin be higher this time next week? Says don't count on it. The ball is bearish. Moving on to issue two, issue two rolling blackouts, plague Iran and some suspect Bitcoin mining may have a role in the outages. They're having trouble creating power in Iran. They have many power areas where it's subsidized or free power. People are allegedly taking advantage of this subsidized or free power to mine Bitcoin. Even though they've turned their air conditioners off and they've turned their heaters on, they're not seeing the usual drop in power usage that one sees around that time. Because the theory is people are mining Bitcoin, making free endless money in the middle of Iran. Thomas Hunt, what do you think about Bitcoin Rhiners in Iran? Well, first, I think it goes back to what we were saying on the last topic. What the people of Iran are looking for is not digital gold manufactured by Microsoft, held and evolved by micro strategy. They're looking for money that they can use, money that they can save outside of the government. The big feature for them is that when the government looks at the roles of Bitcoin, it's not like the same way that they look at the roles of the bank accounts. If the government in Tehran doesn't like what you're doing and we're talking about a very religiously controlled government that has specific issues, if you're out there advocating something they don't like, they could shut down your bank account. Conversely, if you had Bitcoin and you're doing something they don't like, they can't shut down your monetary source as easily. They have to probably seize you. In the same way as this, people receiving free power or subsidized power are of course going to be drawn to Bitcoin. This is the goose that legs golden eggs. You have to imagine that every free cheap or subsidized power source in the future will have Bitcoin hooked up to it. Whether it's your office and the guy's mining it underneath the table or it's a geothermal mine or a stream that just keeps running and running, extra power there being wasted. Somebody's going to come along. Maybe they own it. Maybe they don't own it. They're going to try to exploit it to use it to mine Bitcoin because it's the goose that laid the golden egg and it never stops laying them. So people are going to keep doing this. Victoria Jones, what do you think about potential Bitcoin mining in Iran, which of course is illegal? Well, I think everything around Charles is illegal. I mean, they're not even allowed to use the Swift system at the moment. Is that still in play? I can't remember. So obviously, Bitcoin is really appealing to the people of Iran for this reason. It means that people who live outside of Iran, if they have family outside of Iran, using something like Bitcoin is a great way for them to put money into and out of the country. Capital controls is often been a thing throughout history. And so the US by banning Iran has really forced them into a situation where they've had to be innovative and they've forced them into a situation where this is a really appealing thing. I thought the article was interesting. It sounds like they've now got groups of raiding police officers that will break into properties and try and find where these miners are. And it's almost like Bitcoin's a new marijuana. It's the one thing you're not allowed to grow or produce by yourself. And we all know what happened now in the US. They're starting to make it legal because it's just impossible to keep it down and same with prohibition when they tried to ban alcohol. There's only so long that you can manage this kind of thing. So yeah, it's an interesting dynamic that's being played out. This is often the case when you are too draconian and make laws that allow, that refuse to allow people to move because human beings are inherently creative and they will always find another way around the situation if you back them in a corner. And so yeah, I think it's interesting watching what's going on with Iran's population. Clearly, I'm sorry that they're having problems with their power issues, but given that that's the pressure point no doubt they'll come up with another innovative solution to solve that in the fullness of time. So if they can't shut down the Bitcoin mining, they need to find another way to make more power. And aren't they meant to be oil producers? I mean, surely. Maybe they need to mind the oil so that they can... And they're also hot country, you know? It's just like put in the solar panels and start mining Bitcoin, you know, there are always ways around these things. I did think it reminded me very much, Victoria, of the marijuana and the war on drugs in the United States. They were talking about how the miners will frequently set up multiple apartments, putting only a few mining machines in each apartment, so not to be caught. And they talked about the way that they catch them by using the heat sensing technology. If an apartment is too hot, it might have a bunch of computers in it that are mining Bitcoin. Previously, it would be lamps growing marijuana illegally indoors. The same thing for just trying to shut it down. Anywhere there's this free power, anywhere there's this power, it's going to be there. And it is all about government control and really kind of government overreach. There's a certain point where you just can't push the draconian policies even further. I mean, even if you have secret police, even if you have religious laws and other things that Iran has that are different from these country and other countries like it, they can still have that. And we have that here in the US as well. If you want to take your cash out of your account, if it's over 3,000, they won't let it have it. If it's over $10,000, they make you fill out a form. If you want to take out two withdrawals in a day, they make you fill out a second form. And I told a friend of mine this recently, he was a young guy and he was like, why would they do that? It's your money. And of course, I agree instinctively. Of course, it's my money. I put it into the bank. Why shouldn't I be able to take it out without drawing forms and informing the government or whatever. But it's not about my money. It's about presumably allegedly. It's about drug cartels money. There was drug cartel money in our system. Therefore, all good Americans who just want to fix up a house or whatever, they have to fill out these forms. They have to presumably be attacked by the IRS for fixing up a house because once upon a time, there was drug cartel money in the system and they were taking it out in piles of cash and using it for violence and drugs. And other bad things that we wanted out of our system. That's why we put these controls on. It's just unfortunate because these controls affect everyone. Everyone in the system is affected now by these cash controls. Just like in Iran, they're trying to say, you can't have computers in your house. You can't have these little hot little mining computers. And what they're really going to end up doing is driving it. So every citizen of Iran has one of these little hot mining computers in their house, especially if they're getting subsidized power, especially if they're getting free power. And of course, the classic quote that this everyone reminded of here is from the original Star Wars, where Princess Leia says, the more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. And it really is a great analogy. Think about the evil dictatorship trying to squeeze all the people and all the people just slipping out and more problems and more chaos and more butterflies. And that's why I think they're going to have a hard time cracking down on Bitcoin mining in Iran. And everywhere else, I think we'll see the same article, Bitcoin mining in China, Bitcoin mining in Cuba, Russia, whatever regime doesn't want it in the same way that we talked about how the US and even the financial people can't get rid of it and are trying to join it now, the same is going to happen with mining. They're going to have to get over this and it's going to have to be more responsible Bitcoin mining and turn your Bitcoin mines off during these special hours. And we're having a huge crisis here. Turn your Bitcoin mines off so we can run the hospital for a week. And stuff like this, people have to voluntarily turn off their miners if they're feeling civic-minded. Other people like the ones who don't recycle will be like, I just run my miners all the time. I don't care about the hospital or the streetlights. But if you think about it, if we really do have the goose that lays golden eggs, why wouldn't you mind it all the time? Especially if you're getting subsidized power or you're in a poor country that doesn't have a lot of opportunity and you can get opportunity by running a computer in your house with a little technology. So let's keep moving. Check out worldcryptonetwork.com where we've got the Bitcoin group, the Bitcoin group and more Bitcoin group episodes. We've got 4,063 videos you can check out for free at worldcryptonetwork.com. Moving on to issue 3, Microsoft, shareholders vote against company investing in Bitcoin, Microsoft's Board of Directors oppose the Bitcoin proposal calling it unnecessary. As we all know, micro strategy and their stock have done nothing but go up becoming the most profitable company in all of America and perhaps even all of American history, asking the question, why don't other companies do what micro strategy is doing? The shareholders of Microsoft who have an open proposal policy where they can propose things to the company did just that. The same thing is happening now at Amazon.com where their shareholders are suggesting perhaps they should hold Bitcoin. Of course, it's just as easy for said shareholders to sell all their stock and buy Bitcoin. Victoria Jones, what do you think about the Microsoft shareholders saying no to Bitcoin? Yeah, I think again, it's another example of people very much still stuck in old ways of thinking. I don't blame them completely because what Bitcoin will eventually do, not only will it disrupt the financial system which will disrupt government and politics, but it will also disrupt the way companies operate. There's an article that I wrote on my website called Bitcoin and the Joint Stock Company, which talks about the history of how joint companies will set up. Actually, it was the operation of big companies that actually led to the development of banks. It wasn't the other way around. The entire banking system very much evolved out of the development of big companies. If you disrupt the banking system, inevitably you're going to disrupt how companies work. I mean, companies work because they have some kind of legal structure behind them, which allows them to operate as a separate legal entity. The thing is if you're disrupting governments and you're disrupting politics, you're also disrupting how the legal system works. With a decentralized money system, it completely re-writes the entire way in which society operates. Fortunately, it's not a change that's going to happen overnight. It's the kind of thing that's going to happen over the fullness of time. These people who are standing with the old technology, either they're kidding themselves, that the world's just going to continue the way it is and the government's going to get a handle on this because government has an incentive to. As a result, they're not willing to look into the technology and they've got no idea how this technology has the potential to disrupt how they operate. So they're standing there with their blinkers on, hoping that everything's going to be okay. But inevitably, things are going to change. A lot of these companies would be... They're not reading the tea leaves, really. I mean, you can criticize Michael Saylor as much as you like, but you can't discount the fact that he has figured out to a certain extent how this technology works. Some of the things he says makes me wonder sometimes to what extent he really understands it. But there's no doubt that, you know, MicroStrategy has done extraordinarily well by investing in Bitcoin. And it's almost like people are a little bit incredulous. They're standing back and going, where he's just lucky. And it's just like, no. There's a bit more to it than that. And actually, you'd be wise to take notice. And even if you're not going to go all in like he has, even a little bit might be a good strategy, especially if everyone else is standing back and going, I'm not sure about this. So, yeah, I think they're a little bit foolish. And even if they were being guided by BlackRock, who said, you know, 2% is a good allocation, you know, that would be a sensible thing to do. You know, if you haven't got any, at least 2% would seem like a sensible thing to do. But, you know, people will make their own decisions and then kick themselves later. It's like a couple of shows ago where you said, there was one CEO said, I now feel a bit silly. It's like going to be a whole load of a shareholder's gang. I now feel a bit silly. It's just like, well, we tried to tell you. It is a quite an interesting situation with the sea change of this magnitude. The tide is going out and the waves are coming back in. And what they're saying right now is, we don't want to be part of that wave. And part of me agrees with them. Let me talk about the shareholders. Let me talk about Microsoft. Microsoft is a software company, mainly, a lot of complexity. But they're a software company. They make software to make money. They've decided the most efficient way for them to make money is by making this software. They've been doing it for a long time. They have a lot of deals, a lot of ups and a lot of downs. But at their core, that's what they're about. Now, in reality, what we've talked about on this show, and we talk about the show, every week and all these other shows, Bitcoin is the investment. Bitcoin is the thing. There's that classic chart crossing the chasm, the different groups of investing people that we're in. And we're moving into one of the new groups. But there's still a giant chasm out there. There's still a ton more people to get into Bitcoin who haven't heard about it yet. And Microsoft and their shareholders could front-run them by doing this. Now, I think eventually there's going to have to be laws saying how much percent of the company these companies can invest in Bitcoin. Because otherwise, they're all going to be like microstrategy. Microsoft is going to stop making software and start holding Bitcoin and make more money doing it. Tesla had this problem recently, where they'd invested their money and they were making more money holding Bitcoin than making cars. Which brings up the point, why are we making these cars? Why are we making this software? We're making it to make money. And if you wanted to make more money, you would just hold more Bitcoin. We've shown this over a decade now. Even BlackRock says 2% is all right. And they're just going to go up from there. So I do think they're trying to protect Microsoft, but their protectionism will cause its destruction if there are other companies out there like microstrategy who are holding more Bitcoin than them. And if what we've said is true many times that Bitcoin is the number one investment. So it's really an interesting thing. I'd say I'd said last week, it's like a monkeys paw to go even more complicated. I'll talk about infinite just. Infinite just is a book about it. It's about addiction. There's three different groups. There's the tennis players, the young tennis academy. They're addicted to tennis. There's the drug and rehabilitation center. They're addicted to drugs. And then there's the French wheelchair assassins. They're addicted to revenge. But at its core, it's all about addiction. And that's what Bitcoin is for these companies. It's a thing that they can't stop buying. It's a thing that they can't stop using once they get into it. If Microsoft says, hey, let's just hold 10% of Bitcoin on our balance sheets. Every year they're going to have to increase that number. They're going to spend less time making software, more time holding Bitcoin. It eats and destroys the core of what they do in the same way if the United States government or other governments begin holding Bitcoin. They're going to want to keep holding Bitcoin. They're going to want to expand their reserves. That's why this idea of the Bitcoin reserve is so dangerous for the United States, the country that runs the dollar. If you don't like the dollar, introduce a digital version of it. If you don't like the dollar or the inflationary, and that's introduce a digital version where you can't control the inflation on the dollar, reform the instrument that you control. Don't take the other instrument, the Trojan horse, inside of your walls, and expect to suddenly control it. And that seems to be what they believe. If we buy enough of this Bitcoin, we will control it. We will tame it to our uses in the same way that we've tamed all these other technologies. And it's just not there anymore. You have to do a lot of research. You have to look at open source. You have to look at the way the software is made. You have to look at the way the mining works, the way that the transactions are set out, all these different things. They didn't design it like that for no reason. We didn't build this fighter plane with all this G forces and all the lasers and all the things. For no reason, they built it to solve this problem. And when people act like it's just digital gold, and the US government could just hold it, even though the US government is the one that makes the dollar. That's their product. That's their thing. When the dollar is up and strong, they are strong. If they say, we're not so sure about this dollar, you should maybe hold 10% of something that is not the dollar. They're saying that their product is weak and they're advertised to everyone else in the same way. If you look at companies and you say, Micro strategy, this company that let's say for our argument purposes is 100% Bitcoin. And Microsoft is zero Bitcoin. And Micro strategy made more money than Microsoft. That means that Microsoft is broken. And the money that they're spending on software is a waste. And Tesla is broken. And the money they're spending on cars is a waste. Because if they wanted to optimize their company, in the same way that Sailor has optimized Micro strategy, and maybe he just got lucky, maybe he doesn't know that he's optimizing. But yes, they can't compete unless they do this. And once they start doing it, they can't stop doing it. So it really is, like the poet said, and Victoria was saying, things fall apart. The center cannot hold. The old way of doing business where Microsoft doesn't hold Bitcoin and they don't think of this as a possibility is over because Michael Sailor is holding it. In the same way for every country that is not the US, every company that is not the US, every person that is not the United States, like El Salvador, for example, holding a Bitcoin reserve will make you stronger. It's a bet against the dollar, the dollar, the thing that the US controls. Victoria, do we have more on this issue? Now I think you've pretty much covered it. So yeah, I mean, it is a little bit crazy, but at the same time, it's kind of inevitable. So now that Bitcoin has been invented, it's, the dollar is on its way out. And so what choice do they have? I mean, if they just stand on the seashore, like King, can you, saying, I'll be able to stop the waves just by saying no, it's just like, there's a new technology in town, guys. You know, the dollar's demise is inevitable once Bitcoin is invented. It's not about the fact that they invented it, sure, they did, but if you've got a better competitor, it's gonna take over eventually. So if you just stand there saying, well, we've always been the King, we can't afford to adopt this new technology. Eventually, the technology takes over and everyone else who invests it, you're just putting yourself in a position where you're gonna be the last country standing. So I don't think they have much of a choice. I understand, I do understand your argument about the fact that it is kind of madness, but they don't have a choice anymore because the dollar's dead. There's nothing they can do about it. Well, and the point where they could have destroyed Bitcoin, the point where they could have stopped this from happening was the last 10 years. The whole point that I think Andrea Santinopoulos Adam Beck, Trace Mayer, all these people myself, everyone, the reason that we put all in and we did all this work is because the way that Bitcoin could have failed was if no one talked about it. If no one studied it, if no one broke it, if no one tried to improve it, if no one used it for something, and I'm not talking about digital gold, the clever idea that Michael Saylor had said, hey, you could buy a lot of this stuff and hold on to it and do nothing. Yeah, we all thought of that too, but we thought you know it'd be a lot more efficient, giving it to people, telling them about it, spreading in the word, as a currency, as a Swiss army knife, a financial Swiss army knife that does all these things, and telling them the truth of how complicated it is and how exciting it could be, rather than just saying, if you hold on to a lot of this, you'll be rich. Well, who cares if you're rich, if you live in a poor society? I want society be rich. I want people to do better. And that's what new inventions are supposed to do. They make people live longer, make them live better lives. In this way, if you look at what inflation has been doing to people over the last 100, 200 years, it eats away your savings. It eats away at the value of your house. It makes it so that the only things that are valuable are massive stock investments, cash investments, and even though even those that eats away at as well, this new currency Bitcoin will solve that problem. It won't allow governments to print money to make endless wars and things as well. That's more complicated. But at its core, I think this tool that increases everything for all mankind raises all boats, is different than just digital gold, held by one person. And I think we're going to see more of that in the future. I think it's unavoidable. I think we're in an early stage where they're saying, hey, just show them the cover. Don't tell them what's inside. They'll never look inside. They'll never bother reading. They'll never bother watching videos that aren't on CNBC. And they'll say, Jim Kramer has got to figure it out. Scaramucci's in there. Mark Cuban, Michael Saylor, all these people that don't understand Bitcoin as a complex source. How many taxi cab drivers is Michael Saylor giving Bitcoin out to? It seems to me like he just told all his financial buddies and they said, yeah, let's all buy it. Let's hold it on our company balance sheets, make our companies more valuable, kind of destroy the whole incentive for doing or building anything, which is funny. I saw Andrew Tate. I think he's a pro male guy or something. I don't agree with what he says. But even he started to get it. He was like, what's the point of making Nike shoes if you could just hold Bitcoin and make more money? Even if you have the factories and the formulas and the secrets and the marketing and all the work that Nike's done, we're going to talk about Amazon as well. The most efficient company in the world, monitoring their people down to the millisecond, sharpening everything faster deliveries, faster shipping, all these things, they would make more money if they held Bitcoin. It's horrifying. Like it destroys capitalism and it destroys incentive, all the things that we do to impress people, to go to the moon, Tesla, SpaceX, all this nonsense, just hold Bitcoin, wait five years, and you make more money. Victor, you're muted, but go ahead. They even say that about Bitcoin mining that you better off actually holding the Bitcoin than doing the Bitcoin mining. But clearly it's not stopping Iran from doing that right now because they've got other reasons for it. But yeah, you're right. I think we're in a period of time where the most efficient thing to do is just figure out how to invest your money. I mean, it was classic. This is exactly what was happening to France just before the French Revolution, when they were producing assignats. The only way for them to get ahead was to make various investments in the French stock market. And this was one of the reasons why the peasants of France and the peasants of France ended up so poor. And ultimately, the revolution is what you had. But of course, the only real solution they had after they chopped off the heads of the French government was some kind of other kind of monetary policy. And whenever you have these dysfunctional systems, it results in a dysfunctional society. It's almost like you kind of get moments of peace before then you get moments of chaos and everything settles down now with the new system. So Bitcoin gives us a whole new recipe for that. And in a way that we haven't had before, and although we've got this period of time where holding Bitcoin is probably the most valuable thing you can do, eventually once it gets to the stage where Bitcoin is pretty much adopted, it will then get to the stage where people have to invest in their skills again because the only way to create more Bitcoin by the time that all of the Bitcoin have been mined by the Bitcoin miners, the only way to actually create more Bitcoin is to provide a good service. So of course, the last Bitcoin is due to be mined in something like 2040. So I'm predicting an economic boom from 2040 because that'll be the only way to earn Bitcoin again. And by then, all of the governments will have gone. All of the legal systems will have gone. All the companies will have gone. The world will look completely different. So is it 2140? I can't remember. Yeah. Yeah, I kind of wish it was 2140. We'd have a shot at seeing it, but no 2140. I don't think maybe we'll have some life extension technology but we'll be exciting when they mined the last Bitcoin. But like you were saying where the incentive to hold Bitcoin is so great that even Bitcoin miners should be second guessing what they're doing. And that could lead to a situation where no one mined nines Bitcoin and the network stops working. And all of those things, which again would increase the incentives and make people want to mine. But I do think the only people who should be mining Bitcoin similar to the Iranian example are people with cheap power with an option where they have maybe the geothermal power where it's coming in. You can't control it all like the excess gas that they have to vent. You could run that through a system. They have these streams and waterways that run all the time. But your batteries are full. When your batteries are full, you switch over to Bitcoin mining. That could continue the network and will continue to provide incentives. But look already we're talking about globally. Where is the cheap power? That's who you're competing with if you want to plug in a Bitcoin miner. And if you're just in the normal first world country and all that and you're toaster, you probably don't have the cheap power. And if you can't spot the mark at the table in the first hour, the mark is probably you. But let's move on to the last issue today. Bitcoin ATM operator thinks that hackers accessed personal data for 58,000 users. It is very likely that the GitHub GitLab repositories contained sensitive credentials to bite federal's databases. The auditors wrote in a report. And as we all know, Bitcoin ATMs are one of the safest and cleanest ways for people to get Bitcoin. So if you're out there working really hard trying to buy Bitcoin anonymously, you might be using a Bitcoin ATM. But in recently, they've been forced to use no-your-customer requirements, keeping track of all their customers, which leads to this problem where the database gets hacked. And now you have this list of presumably wealthy people that has just been leaked to these hackers. Victoria, what do you think about the Bitcoin ATMs being forced to keep this data and then the natural other solution where this data is naturally hacked because there's nothing to say that the Bitcoin ATM operators are the ones who should be keeping this data. They're not a fortress of data. They're Bitcoin ATM operators. Yeah, well, of course, the whole no-your-customer legislation is designed to keep tabs on all of those hackers and criminals who are clearly the only people who are using Bitcoin, or at least to give them the heads up on who might be that way inclined, which seems a little bit unfair, because of course a lot of us are buying it for very different reasons. But again, it's an attempt at control. And of course, this is where a lot of the dangers of centralized digital currencies come from because of course the whole idea behind it centralized digital currency is that they'll be able to track who's using them. So yeah, that's all part of the strategy. And again, it's a beauty of Bitcoin. Bitcoin can be used without any of this tracking. The only reason why they're able to track people's data for tool is because they're using these companies to try and put labels on different parts of Bitcoin somewhere in the system. So yes, Bitcoin isn't completely anonymous. It's pseudo-anonymous. As soon as they've got any kind of KYC data on any Bitcoin that you've used, they're going to be able to track your transactions and track some of your movements. And so this is all part of the problem of what we're fighting. And at the moment, you've got big data software companies, like ironically, micro-strategy, whose job it is to farm data and process it for businesses who might be interested. Data is big, big business. And especially data associated with money, which is what Bitcoin can be connected to. So yeah, KYC legislation is very dangerous for humanity. Governments may well argue that they need to do it in order to keep us safe, but there's a much, much bigger issue here. And of course, the fact that the data here has been hacked is a demonstration of that problem, which is above and beyond the problems that I've just described. Yeah, I mean, any kind of all of these companies that are having to collect this data, and of course, they're asking more and more. Even in the article, they said that the company had been hacked. One of their solutions was to us, their customers, for even more data, and argued that because they'd changed their passwords on where they kept the data, that now everything was OK, which just completely overlooks exactly what the problems are. So yeah, I mean, people are right. You know, absolutely should be concerned about this. There are a number of ways in which the fact that this is even happening is concerning. But I'm hoping that gradually over time, as Bitcoin becomes more and more adopted, this is going to limit the ability of governments, certainly, to make use of that data. But it's still going to be a vulnerability, while big businesses like Michael Straszy own a lot of Bitcoin, they've got a lot of resources to process that data, which will not only make Michael Sala's business valuable just because they own the Bitcoin, but it gives him a lot of resources to mine all the data from the Bitcoin as well, which he definitely doesn't talk about. I don't see many other people talking about either. So yeah, this has huge implications, really. Well, and I really feel bad for the company here. If you have the skills to run a Bitcoin ATM company, you have a lot of logistical skills, dealing with safe deposit trucks, having the money going in and out, managing the money, managing the systems, not getting ripped off. There's a lot of fun ways. I'm sure people try to rip you off, and not just stealing the ATMs physically, but having physical security problems as well. And then they say on top of that, you have to be great at managing people's personal data, incredibly valuable personal data of customers who might be trying to avoid the system who are using these ATMs and stacking, perhaps hundreds or, well, dozens of Bitcoins. Lots of money could be coming out of these ATMs, so it's an even bigger target, but that doesn't mean that your core competency of dealing with the trucks and the money in the systems and the physical ATMs, that doesn't include data storage. That's not to say that you're like Microsoft, or you're the encryption master, or that you're gonna have the best employees that they wouldn't want to steal this data either. The fact that this data's been leaked and stolen, doesn't mean to say that there wasn't an employee in there anyway, saying anybody with X number above, I steal, or I send to the mob, or I send to somebody to steal. As these numbers get larger and larger, these companies become bigger and bigger honeypots, enforced, they have to be honeypots. The government is requiring them to be these honeypots, where they could just say flush your logs. The requirements are that you don't hold logs. The requirements is that you show us how you delete your logs every day, and you don't have this important financial data. That's obviously the opposite of the advertising model. The advertising model is every piece of information we get on you, we keep. Then we link multiple databases together so that information becomes even more valuable. People can't even imagine how valuable it would be. Oh, you're reading this book, and you live in this neighborhood, and you go to this store and you eat this ice cream. We know everything about you now. They can't see how you could do that. And we've seen this before with complex systems where you lean in and you say, oh, we're just gonna change one thing. Mao Se-Dung said, hey, let's just take out the sparrows. Everybody's out in the field banging pots and pans together, killing the sparrows, the crops die. The same thing in our country right now, they're gonna say, hey, let's raise the tariffs. Let's get rid of all the people who work in the farms and all the small jobs. The food is gonna go down. The prices for everything is gonna go up, and people are gonna be hurt by this. And we're in this state now. We don't know that's gonna happen. In the same thing with these systems, you say, okay, let's track down the criminals. They're using the ATMs, make the ATM companies keep all this data to try to stop the criminals. But really what you've made is the criminals dream. This database that you can get of all the rich people that use this ATM and where they live and all their data. And like Victoria said, the solution to this is more data. So maybe next time, they'll be pictures and siblings and what your dog's name and everything you got because the solution is still just more data which makes a bigger honey pot, a bigger target for hackers. And these companies are still not any better at securing digital data. Their job is ATMs. Their jobs is moving them around. And all this kind of thing, it's not the supply and demand. They have a lot of things on their mind. And none of them are securing data. They don't get any more money, any more fees from keeping your data safe. In fact, keeping your data unsafe probably saves them money. The cheaper employees they use, the cheaper servers, less encryption, faster servers, all these kind of things. So there's an incentive not to keep your data safe. And I think it's gonna keep going and I think they need to wake up from this because it's that interesting thing of unintended consequences. I understand what they're trying to do. They're trying to punish the criminals, but they've ended up making a database full of good people. And when that's gets stolen by, again, same criminals, all the good people are unsafe. So this actually makes normal people unsafe. And we have to give a shout out to our friend Martine a while ago, he made all these great social media images of, let's say, beautiful models using Bitcoin ATMs. So this is a general bytes ATM, but I don't think this is anything to do with general bytes as a company or their ATMs, but they use all of his pictures. Isn't that clever? Everyone else should think about doing that just like the Bitcoin keychain guy. He made a bunch of images of his keychain. And now most of the articles out there have Bitcoin keychain in them. So, but we're running out of time. Victoria, do you have a prediction or a story of the week? Go ahead. I don't have a prediction. My story of the week is kind of the same as the last time I was on my latest newsletter, Bitcoin and taxation is available for free on my website. When the next one comes out, it will be behind a paywall. So if you haven't read it yet, make a point of going over to read that or you can see various links to it on my Twitter feed, Satoshi's page. So yeah, that's the main thing. Obviously, Christmas is coming up. So lots of preparations, lots of distractions in preparation for that. But hopefully there'll be more developments in the new year. Well, that sounds great. And everyone can check that out at Satoshi's page.com. And I don't have much of a story of the week either. I don't know, I'm still reading Remdi. It's really long. I keep going through it digitally. It keeps coming. People have suggested I read the wall trilogy. It's apparently the film or the movies or the TV show, whatever they are these days, Apple TV show. Silo is based on that. So that sounds like a good one. I might check that out as well. And as Victoria said, it's almost Christmas season. Hopefully in about six days, I'm going to be joining PubKey. If they can figure out how to do it over Zoom, because I'm not going to fly to New York. But yeah, hopefully I'll join PubKey with Peter Rizzo and Dan and NYC and we'll talk about Bitcoin holidays. I'll keep you guys updated on that. I'll put it on Twitter and try to put some links out before or after or during the event. That's about it. Everybody's sure to give us a comment down below. Say hello in the comments. Hi to everyone in the chat. I hope you guys enjoyed the show. We'll try to keep this going. It is hard in the holidays. A lot of people have schedules and events and things they have to go to. So it's hard to keep the show going. But we'll try. And thanks for joining us. Until next time.