Bitcoin vs Gold: The Great Debate with Michael Saylor and Frank Giustra

hello everyone i am daniela cambone and welcome to the great bitcoin versus gold debate on stansberry research featuring michael saylor and frank giustra i'm honored to be moderating this historic event in the bitcoin corner we have michael saylor he is the ceo of microstrategy and has become the flag bearer for the community after making a bold move and becoming the first ceo of a publicly listed company to convert a part of his company's cash reserves into the cryptocurrency he has publicly said that his mission with this debate is to convince his opponent frank giustra to sell his gold and buy bitcoin on the gold side we have frank giustra early in his career frank transformed yorkton securities into a global powerhouse of mining finance and was behind the creation of some of the world's leading mining companies frank is considered by many to be a modern renaissance man having founded lions gate entertainment modern farmer dominica fiore and a long list of other ventures today he dedicates most of his time to his philanthropic work he most recently launched the million gardens movement alongside kimball musk frank has publicly stated he was coming into this debate with an open mind but wanted to challenge michael on statements he has made on gold and bitcoin today michael and frank will be battling it out in perhaps the most important debate ever to be held on this subject of gold versus bitcoin cyber hornets argue that bitcoin represents a powerful digital network that will thrive a quasi technology stock without profits or co but with near perfect security and distribution gold bugs on the other hand say gold is the ultimate and timeless store of value that it is an asset that the financial system will turn to time and time again whenever there's a storm but i'll leave it to the debaters to battle this out i'm gonna go over the format and the ground rules now this debate will cover six topics along with an open and a closing statement from each debater they will each have five minutes per topic except for the close where they will have six minutes each once they have made their points in the five minutes the other side will have a one minute rebuttal i will be acting as moderator and hence there will be no follow-up questions from me but we will be moving on to the next topic all right well welcome frank giustra joins us from los angeles and we have michael saylor in miami gentlemen i have eagerly been awaiting this day so welcome welcome frank and welcome michael thank you great to be here thanks for having us awesome so as i stated at in the opening uh we're going to start with opening statements you'll have five minutes each year we decided ahead of the debate and michael will kick things off for us uh this will be five minutes of uninterrupted time uh please consider it your blank canvas in a sense to set um the statements you'd like to make during this debate michael please kick things off for us here thanks danielle so the debate is uh bitcoin versus gold i think that all gold holders and all bitcoin holders agree on sound money principles and the real debate is which is the best monetary system in order to pursue the ideals of sound money so i think we start with some basic ideas first of all human civilization rises through channeling energy we invented fire that's capturing chemical energy uh then we build our cities next to rivers we're capturing water and we're channeling gravitational energy the aqueducts were critical to the roman civilization when we compress air in a canister we're channeling uh pressure uh electric systems and batteries are channeling energy lasers or channeling photons if we want to better the human condition we need to be able to capture store and channel that energy money is energy money's a store of value and it's also a technology allows us to trade that energy over time and space so if we look at the history of money we've gone from commodity money to coinage of those commodities to notes represented by that money to fiat currency and now we have cryptography as a basis of money now what's the sometimes gold gold advocates say the gold is the ideal money well really the ideal money if if god came down and god waved his or her hand and created the ideal money it would be based upon luca pacioli's modern accounting principles of double entry accounting and if you had godlike power and you could implement a double entry ledger like patrolling introduced in 1494 and you could perhaps you could define 21 million units that are infinitely subdividable trillions and trillions of times each you could maintain that in magic space and then you could settle everybody's trades instantly everywhere on earth everywhere in the universe in a fair and equitable fashion that would be a good money we could call that god coin and god coin is like perfect instant transactions never losing any information well the next best thing that we've invented is as humans is bitcoin so bitcoin's the most efficient monetary system we've yet to implement successfully it's 21 quadrillion satoshis 350 000 transactions a day it cost about 10 basis points of the monetary network to clear those transactions and to secure the network and it stores the value and provides security to everybody on the network effectively for free after those transaction fees bitcoin's the most disruptive force in the century in 12 years it grew to 12 to 1 trillion dollars in in monetary value that beats google facebook amazon apple and the like that's the market sending us a message it's the next chapter in the mobile wave we digitized our photos we digitized our videos now we're going to digitize our money and our currency and assets are going to flow to billions of people money is collapsing we've got a massive inflation problem we're losing one percent of our value and currencies every single month humanity without an effective strong money is like a type 1 diabetic without insulin you can't store energy you can't create fat you're going to starve to death without delivering effective money to the human race everybody's going to either economically freeze or starve to death violence and misery are going to follow gold's not a solution it's not practical to distribute gold in small quantities to 5 billion people bitcoin is a solution it is spreading at more than 200 percent a year uh we're adding 3 million users a week it's accelerating if i wanted to give knowledge music and money to the world in the 19th century you did it with books pianos and gold they're now antiques for the elite in the 21st century you're going to use the internet platform in bitcoin and you're going to provide ibooks and google and youtube you're going to provide apple music and amazon music and spotify to everybody and you're gonna provide bitcoin as an asset for everybody uh gold used to be the best solution it isn't anymore the time has come to pass the torch from gold to bitcoin bitcoins humanity's first effective engineered monetary system it's as profound as our rail networks our road networks our electrical networks our telephone networks and the internet uh bitcoin can and will deliver the virtues of strong money the gold idealists have long hoped for michael thank you for your opening statements now we'll go to frank giustra uh with your opening remarks please five minutes daniella interrupted time thank you thank you and and and michael thanks for for agreeing to this debate um uh and congratulations on your bitcoin position that's you've done very well and i'm looking forward to exploring the facts okay so as i've said a number of times recently um i don't have a problem with bitcoin um i think it's here to stay in some form or some value for some purpose i'm not sure what that purpose is yet i do have quite a few issues with the way you and others have made certain claims about bitcoin and i want to point out the risks that exist but but are never addressed and i want to defend some of the um statements that you've made about gold uh and in doing all that i'm hoping to draw a distinction between what bitcoin is what it isn't what maybe it aspires to be understanding that distinction is very important because you need to assess that distinction to assess its risk profile and therefore where it fits in any given portfolio i think our viewers deserve to know that risk and they need to know how that distinction happens between gold and and and and bitcoin um you know i don't think bitcoin is a safe haven asset yet um i don't think i think there's a very good chance it never will be i think it may aspire to be but aspiring to be something doesn't make it so and you know sometimes i dance around the living room in my uh underwear but doesn't make me madonna so um as far as your claims on gold i'm not really sure what you're trying to achieve by disparaging gold i mean i do have a theory and you're welcome to correct me if you think i'm wrong but i think um you're trying to create a narrative for a higher price for bitcoin and in order to do that you need to convince everyone out there that gold is worthless and all of that value that currency currently resides in gold will be all transferred all 12 trillion dollars of it will be transferred to bitcoin um and that in that way you can justify a 500 000 bitcoin price or a million dollar bitcoin price um otherwise why would anybody buddy pay sixty thousand dollars today uh without that target in mind i can't see any other way where you can make the kind of claims that you're making about where the price where bitcoin is going i think it's a really clever approach and i take my hat off to you you've been very effective and and in many ways i think it's sad because i think bitcoin believers and gold believers agree on 90 of everything and we fall apart on this 10 last 10 percent of which one is better and i think it's all part and parcel of this binary attitude that exists in you know the discourse in americans in america today you know you're either on one side or the other there's no middle ground um but i see it as a strategy of um your strategy where the stakes are kind of do or die um sort of a game of thrones per se but the truth is we're only in the first season and there are a lot of risks that lie ahead of us and the question you have to ask is will you still be alive in season eight and uh i just don't think you are presenting the risks that face bitcoin in order to get there and survive um you you'd like to pretend those risks don't exist and you gloss over them because i think you're in a race to win and and i think that's kind of sad but pretending that bitcoin is a risk-free asset is just i think naive because if you fail to subsume the entire value of gold what are you left with you're left with hoping that a greater fool is going to come in and pay a higher price i think the threats are real and i think the biggest threats are going to come from government and central banks history has shown the governments go to extreme lengths to protect their monopoly on currency and they will not to tolerate a global decentralized currency it's just not going to happen and especially if we have say a dollar crisis which i think we can all assume is coming somewhere down the road uh and your claims that bitcoin is untouchable unstoppable are simply not true uh and by the way you don't have to kill bitcoin with a death blow you can severely damage or kill it with multiple cuts so you've been very effective pretending that there aren't risks and i think i'm going to spend the rest most of this conversation just pointing out where the risk is where the risks exist and i just think telling your viewers that bitcoin is going to double every six months is i i find i get i have a lot of trouble with that so whatever the outcome is on this this is on you but perhaps you'll change my mind and so let's get on to it all right let's get on with it fantastic opening remarks um from you both thank you for that now let's get into the meat of it we're going to start with our first topic it is asset comparisons um michael i'll begin with you we'll kick things off here it's been said that in an ideal store of value will have these eight attributes it's durable portable fungible verifiable divisible scarce it has an established history and it's censorship resistance so my question to you is when you're doing an asset comparison of bitcoin versus gold how do you make the case for bitcoin as the better asset you'll have five minutes of uninterrupted time and frank will have a one-minute rebuttal okay if we think about the elements that drive uh humanity forward if we think of it from an engineer's point of view you've got stone you've got iron you've got concrete you've got steel you've got aluminum you've got silicon you can't build a computer without silicon you can't build a skyscraper without steel you're not going to survive if you don't pick the right element crypto is the steel of the 21st century financial economy an engineer would say you have to choose wisely there's a right answer there's a wrong answer so gold is element 79 it's an ideal ornamental metal it's indestructible malleable it's attractive we love these things it makes great jewelry it makes a great ornament it's just not a perfect monetary asset because you can inflate gold you can confiscate gold it's immobile it's not easily divisible and you can counterfeit it uh it shows up in uh in the economy in a heterogeneous fashion lots of different types of gold coins lots of different types of gold bars lots of different types of gold jewelry and the paper gold itself is is sometimes trading at a hundred to one versus the underlying physical gold and there's no trusted protocol to guarantee the integrity or the synchronicity between paper gold and actual gold if we compare that to bitcoin uh bitcoin is not just an asset it's a network and it's protocol people would say it's the world's first global self-settled real-time clearing bearer instrument it is all those things you mentioned it's decentralized permissionless global immutable scarce auditable instantly transferable not seasonable highly divisible mostly everything that gold can't do the asset itself secure easily divisible is deflationary people might lose some bitcoin they're never going to add more than 21 million you can transfer it around the planet it's transparent everybody running a node you can authenticate it instantly from a hundred dollar smartphone um that's that's uh makes it the perfected monetary asset of the human race we've never actually had an asset that clean it's synthetic gold without the defects of monetary gold now the network itself it's global it's open anybody can run a security node or a validating node on the network it's empowering to billions and billions of people it's it's vital because it's being continuously upgraded in the software layer and the hardware layer and it's viral it's spreading at a rapid rate companies countries individuals are adopting this and that makes it as nicholas celeb would say anti-fragile uh it just keeps getting better um the protocol is the third element of the asset which makes bitcoin superior and what's special about that is it's a protocol for synchronizing financial applications with integrity to the underlying bitcoin asset it's been adopted by built into square it was built into uh and uh and why what does that mean well that means that bitcoin applications there bitcoin is harder it's smarter it's faster and it's stronger than the gold that came before it harder meaning gold has a half-life of 30 years you make 2 more every year bitcoin has a half-life of forever it's it's effectively immortal and it's organically evolving it's only going to be better in 100 years than it is now it's smarter because the applications running on bitcoin are driven by modern software and modern modern cpus and modern servers they keep getting smarter and faster with moore's law you can make a 100 million calculations a second around the world across hundreds of thousands of different servers on bitcoin applications you can't do that with gold it's faster you can do billions of transactions at the speed of light on these applications you can run them 24 7 365. it's stronger you can channel high frequency energy i could flash 10 000 loans for three days each across a hundred jurisdictions between ten thousand different companies and fetch them back with laser-like precision so in short bitcoin it's more than just a monetary network it's a trust network allowing millions of applications to serve billions of people and it's going to accelerate global commerce in the 21st century and it's critical for allowing for safe and efficient operations in cyberspace that's why the asset is superior to gold thank you michael uh frank you'll now have a one minute rebuttal to that yeah yeah thank you michael you know it is a great technology and i'll give you that uh and i'm not going to argue the technology and how innovative it is and and all the things that you say that it does um but so far it's completely unproven that this is going to be effective as a a payment method it's far too slow it's too volatile and it has no history so i don't think that uh i don't see a way where it's going to be a method of payment so the ability to transfer bitcoin around the world at the speed of light as you like to talk about is you know what's the point if it's if the only thing you have to hang your head on is store of value what you say about gold and paper gold and physical gold is is true i prefer physical gold i i stay away from the gold etfs for many many reasons uh i like my goal to have no counter party risks much like bitcoin doesn't um so um as far as it's you claiming that it's secure i i will debate you on that i don't think it's as secure as you like to make it believe especially if it becomes a threat thank you frank i will toss the question now to you frank same topic asset comparison when you're doing the asset comparisons of gold versus bitcoin make the case of why you think gold wins here and under which conditions it performs better than bitcoin okay so listen i'll give the you know one minute commercial here that everybody's heard before gold is eternal and it's almost indestructible the gold that you may be wearing in your jewelry today might have been a piece of jewelry two thousand years ago it has been deeply woven into the uh cultural fabric around the world and into the global monetary system and if you believe you're about to dislodge gold in places like india and china which are the world's largest buyers of gold and where it's deeply ingrained in the culture i think you don't know a lot about india and china so in terms of its status as money listen i'm sure if the us could roll back the clock um they they would probably do away with gold because the u.s relies on its status as a having the premier reserve currency and it abuses that status to achieve its goals by you know again printing lots and lots of money i can't see how bitcoin is going to be recognized by as money in every country in the world in the way that gold is its stability as a store of value is vital to managing the central bank reserve currencies and it's viewed as protections against other fiat currencies central banks own 33 000 tons of gold which is 20 of all the gold ever mined and they're furiously buying it year after year after year uh and there's a reason for it and i can't say the same for bitcoin uh it's not owned by any of the central banks it's extremely unlikely it ever will be um and i think bitcoin makes a much easier target than gold if it becomes a threat um and the central banks are never going to destroy gold to be akin to shooting themselves in the foot bitcoin they have no allegiance to so they can go after that in spades um and gold you know one of the other misconceptions and i think where people get mixed up with the bitcoin uh comparison is that gold is not designed to moonshot through the roof like some tech darling it's designed as a store value against inflation the devaluation of currencies and sharp equity downturns it's been tested time and time again throughout history bitcoin has never been tested especially in a financial crisis because bitcoin was introduced after the 2008 crisis in the meantime gold has doubled since then gold benefits in times of crisis and in certain times of economic expansion because of its dual purpose of use in jewelry and industry if god forbid there were ever a war i would prefer to have my money stored in gold which is going to be safe from cyber attacks on both the internet and the power grids now to be fair and i think also that any time that there's a currency crisis and this is what i'm afraid of people will always flee to gold it happens every every time so but to be fair i think it's it's good to point out that central banks do try and manipulate in my opinion they try and manipulate and manage the gold price because the gold price is in a sense the canary in the coal mine as to a nation's fiscal health so any spike in the gold price yeah the central banks will try and manage that but they're never going to try and kill its value because again they'd be shooting themselves in the foot they don't it's a necessary evil um the us alone 77 of its reserves foreign reserves are in gold that's four percent of all the gold in the world um and china is only declared three percent but again they're the largest producers of gold in the world and the largest importers of gold in the world world and they're accumulating at a very rapid rate and no one really believes that what they've declared is truly what they own they come out every couple of years and surprise the market with increased reserves in gold but it here's the thing it's in its respect with the u.s dollar that i've a real problem with michael's approach to promoting bitcoin because he tries to have it both ways on the one hand he is panicking people and to buy buying bitcoin bitcoin as a protection against this incredible m2 money growth which he calculates at 20 a year and going forever 22 20 a year um if he's right and i don't disagree that that's the direction the dollar is going in terms of money growth that would have inc creates severe problems for the us dollar it would obviously devalue the dollar over time because you would bring in a lot of inflation and so on the other hand he claims that bitcoin is not a threat to the us dollar and i think in that sense he's talking out of both sides of his mouth and i can only assume that his the reason is he doesn't want to draw the ire or the attention of the us government because it's easier to go after gold the authorities are never going to come to gold's defense and actually in a way he may be doing them a favor by disparaging gold but again he can't have it both ways you can't make that claim that bitcoin is going to go to the moon and subsume all the value of every us asset class and not be a threat to the us dollar and i think he's probably a bit late because now it's squarely on the radar of a lot of the makers a lot of the pundits and they're talking about the threat to the us dollar by bitcoin um and it's going to be monetary very closely uh as the asset value goes goes up in price um you know bitcoin advocates what's frank okay i'm sorry okay so listen there's a lot to be said about the way that bitcoin is being uh pitched as a decentralized currency um but it's idealistic to think that that government's going to allow that kind of anarchy you know i'm a lover of history and and and politics i'm actually very deeply immersed in geopolitics and i come from the machiavellian school of thought when it comes to politics and power and i'm a realist and and you may want things to be a certain way but you have to see the ways things truly are and anarchism has never worked throughout history thank you and you just have to look okay i i've got so much more to say you'll get into it but i gotta give i gotta give michael because you said a lot of big statements there and i have to give michael uh his one minute rebuttal so michael please well frank says um bitcoin is not an effective payment network uh but method but the point really is paypal and square and venmo are providing billion transaction instant speed of light throughput on top of bitcoin's network and so the payments are going to come from the application layer the layer 2 or the lightning network uh frank says it's not as secure as i think well i think crypto keys are holding the keys to uh to a cryptocurrency is the highest property right that the human race has ever invented to date we can't have stronger property rights than holding a hundred million dollars with password keys in your head or multi-signature keys uh everything else is a weaker property right um i i think that the way the world's gonna end up everybody's going to have a selection of currencies in their mobile wallet and assets in their mobile wallet and they're going to be the top 10 currencies the dollar will be the king currency and they're going to use it as a medium of exchange and instant payment on the network and then they'll be strong assets the strongest will be bitcoin people will have other assets and bitcoin doesn't have to be a currency to be successful the world and as long as there are successful countries they will maintain their currency i think the losers will be the weak assets and the weak currencies and this is not a currency war with bitcoin this is an asset war and that's why considering whether i want to put my money in gold or bitcoin is appropriate thank you michael we're going to move on to the second topic now which is risk factors frank i'll begin with you in december jp morgan published a report pointing to the grayscale bitcoin trust which saw inflows of almost 2 billion compared with outflows of 7 billion for etfs backed by gold this was for the period of october to december of 2020. jp morgan predicts the trend will continue with gold suffering at the hands of bitcoin my question to you is this if jp's morgan's calculations are correct it suggests that bitcoin only accounts for point 18 percent of family office assets compared with 3.8 percent for gold etf so tilting the needle from gold to bitcoin would involve the transfer of billions of dollars how do you make a case against this risk well okay and that's easy and you have five minutes first of all i i they're not going to have to talk fast here but um i i think i don't ever listen to what wall street anybody on wall street has to say about things they're more often wrong than they are right but assuming the bitcoin is going to continue to be accumulated at the rate that it was and measuring that over a period of a few months you might as well be throwing darts that's just not that's just making that kind of assumption doesn't make any sense but i think assessing and quantifying risk is the biggest issue facing bitcoin i've said that earlier and it's one thing that michael likes to sidestep or gloss over he doesn't feel it's necessary to worry about those risks brushing them off as black swan events that will never happen but these risks are real and they're predictable they're not unpredictable and it should be taken into account um before buying bitcoin and again i don't think that it should prevent people from buying bitcoin but they need to give some waiting to that risk and as i said the biggest risk is going to come from central bank and governments when and if bitcoin becomes large or popular enough to be perceived as a threat to currency and um and especially the us dollar and they will go work very hard and this has been proven throughout history to try and squash that opportunity or severely damage it governments need to control their currency they need to have that monopoly and i i just don't see because they need to manage both their fiscal and monetary policy and in order to do that they have to control their currency so for whether you like it or not that's the way it is and i think that they also need to control taxation and that's both taxation that's direct and indirect and taxation by inflation which is their current preferred method means that they can monetize all this tremendous amount of debt that they're producing um and you the consumer are paying the tax through inflation does he actually believe does michael and here's the question does he actually believe that the government is going to stand by and allow bitcoin to subsume all the value of gold and maybe the and he's also suggested the entire value of the bond market i just don't know in what universe he thinks that governments will allow that to happen i i think it's sheer insanity just aft you have to ask yourself this every time you look at you know this sort of a movement is what happens when the interests of the powerful with the law on their side are pitted against anarchists and in this case the anarchists are the bitcoin i just don't see how they're gonna let that happen and again they don't need to deal bitcoin or death flow they can do it with multiple cuts and what that might not take bitcoin out but it will sure change its investment proposition and therefore its performance and the attacks can come in any form okay and i think the easiest is legislation um and simply banning uh bitcoin making a contraband or making it illegal for uh ex bitcoin exchanges to accept fiat for bitcoin would wipe out all the institutional buying most sophisticated investors and drive bitcoin underground um and it would certainly take a lot of the air out of the bitcoin price uh if if it were banned and the fbi requested records from the exchanges they would give them up all exchanges are tied to all points of connections and exchanges are tied to the us dollar system so it's very difficult to escape tracing or or monitoring and who's going to take the risk if there's prison time uh is the penalty to leave a trace on their computer i just don't see why anybody would take that risk so there's that's one approach the other one is more direct you know they can hack and i know that they can certainly do sustained hacking on the on and off ramps into in into bitcoin trading uh and if if you think about it if if the u.s defense network can be hacked with backdoor secret back doors built into the hardware who's to say can't happen with with bitcoin and i think again you have to take those risks into consideration uh that they're real and they exist now i've heard the argument and this is how the argument comes back from all the bitcoin people is that oh yeah there's a handful of senators that are bitcoin friendly and are going to provide cover for the bitcoin investors and you know that's going to matter just as much as those handful of politicians that are pushing proposing legislation to make gold and silver money in order to avoid tax that's never going to happen either so i just i just don't i don't get it how they're going to let this let let this happen and they will always usually excuse the government that is that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the future so i don't think that you're going to get the kind of protection that that that you're hoping for and governance governments will use any excuse knowing that the real reason is going to be to protect their monopoly on currency and keep their ability to execute monetary and fiscal policy but they'll use other excuses if they want to go after bitcoin crime consumer protection the environment you know they can say you know you know bitcoin produces more co2 emissions than in a billion cars um uh money laundering and the catch-all phrase national security and if they can use national security to renegotiate bilateral trade ideals don't think don't think that they can't use it if bitcoin becomes a threat to the currency central banks again i go by the golden rule they own the gold they make the rule they have seven trillion dollars worth of gold they're not about to allow some other asset class to to be a store value to subs to subsume that that that value it's just not going to happen um thank you frank wrapping comments please okay well i just think that um i have other points with respect to countries central banks creating their own digital currencies they're all everybody's looking into china is the most advanced and they're not going to want the competition and if bitcoin gets big enough they will go after it and eliminate it and that's just the way the world works thank you frank uh michael you will now have a one minute rebuttal to that central banks don't own a bitcoin as soon as one country starts to buy bitcoin for their central bank the price is going to rip first point second um us dollar is going to be the big winner from the spread of bitcoin five billion people are going to have a mobile wallet on their phone they're going to have a currency layer running on lightning rails or running on a compliant payment rate we'll have the us dollar might have the euro the big losers are going to be the bottom 50 countries they're going to lose their currency privileges all the collapsing economies in africa south america and asia they won't keep their currencies people will will switch over to the dollar bitcoin is critical to us technology supremacy and the us dollar supremacy and one day five billion people will use the us dollar as a currency i don't think the government's going to fight it i think the government's going to embrace it and will the government stand by and let bitcoin grab gold's uh capital share and part of the bond market well they allowed the the growth of the vanguard 500 the s p 500 and etfs and bond mutual funds and gold etfs i think that as long as the assets sit and regulated banks and custodians they won't have a problem with insurance companies and investors investing in bitcoin rather than an s p 500 index fund finally uh will will there be a political pushback well there's two to three million people a week that are buying into bitcoin around the world coinbase added a million a week in the first quarter just on their platform bitcoin's the most popular investment asset in the history of the world it's the most popular asset in the world it's spreading like wildfire by the end of this year more than half of the us voters are going to own it i think it'll be politically popular thank you michael and you'll get a chance to speak uh more about this because i'm sticking to this topic here under our risks in your question paypal co-founder peter thiel has said that bitcoin could be used as a financial weapon against the us and that it threatens uh you know fiat money but it especially threatens the us dollar so you know if it is a real threat why isn't it conceivable why couldn't we see the fed and other central banks stop bitcoin you have five minutes to continue uh your point i think peel theo's comments were misinterpreted what he was saying is it's going to be the base layer for the 21st century fentech economy the lieutenant governor of the china central bank just embraced it as an asset not as a currency and said in under proper regulatory regimes would be appropriate for an investor to own bitcoin so i think the sentiment is evolving amongst uh leading politicians risk factors here's my thought about risk factors gold invites violence alexander con you know gallivant around the world to seize gold liby tells the story of one thousand roman sieges in order to steal the gold caesar sacked gaul to take their gold kublai khan sees the gold pizarra sees gold from the incas cortez sees gold from the aztecs charles the first seized the gold from all the british nobles depression seized gold from the french in 1871 and world war one everybody sees the gold linen seized gold from the church in 1922 roosevelt seized everybody's gold in 1933 stalin seized the goal of the spaniards in 36 churchill took everybody's gold in 1940 at the onset of the war at bretton woods the united states seized the world's gold and then you know took it hostage and then nixon killed all the hostages in 1971. gold's always getting ceased the problem is you can't secure gold the cost to secure it goes up with the number of nodes or caches of gold the value of the gold in the cash it's regulated you have to secure it with guns people steal concrete carbon it doesn't scale if you want to stress test it you ask yourself the question when i give this thing to 5 billion people how much is going to cost me so gold transportation costs don't scale because the more transactions the more the value the transactions the more jurisdictions you know brings more cost and more regulation and you need guns people vehicles and carbon is too expensive for most transactions gold audit won't scale because the more nodes the more transactions the more value the more cost and the regulators get involved is very people intensive it's infrequent slow it's unreliable it's a risk factor gold security transport and audit are regulated by every nodal jurisdiction they're corruptible they're uncompetitive they're antiquated they're elitist they're ineffective and they're out of reach for 99.9 of the population the gold applications what we call paper gold they have they don't have any technical protocol with integrity so they're all corrupted by hypothecation regulation and inflation bitcoin security transport and audit are pretty effectively free they're effective they're unregulated they're egalitarian everybody has the same rights a person with 100 of bitcoin has the same security as someone with a billion dollars a bitcoin there's competition to continually improve the services they're decentralized the security nodes are decentralized and they're protecting the interest of the holders from local violence local regulation and local corruption is the bitcoin miner in iceland or the north pole or siberia or china protecting the interest of somebody in manhattan or ontario and it's a beautiful thing gold's physicality and indestructible nature they invite malefactors to kill you and take your property bitcoin safely stores your property in cyberspace where it can't be seized by force and that encourages peaceful negotiations rather than coercion thank you ver thank you michael uh frank you will now have a one minute rebuttal for that yeah you're right you know there have been a lot of wars a lot of blood and treasury spent on protecting gold over the century and that's why you know it's you're making my case that gold has real value uh people have fought very hard for it and they're not about to give it up easily and so i'm not sure that that that makes sense um and again i prefer physical gold you keep coming back to the paper gold i agree in some ways about paper gold so i but i don't think those issues apply to physical gold um the cost to secure it but listen again you're you're not accepting the fact that as bitcoin if it achieves the value of gold as you're suggesting it's a sitting duck it's sitting out in the open and can be easily attacked i would rather have my money in the safety of my gold in a safety deposit box than out in the open where once it's a threat to the currency and you can't deny that it's not going to be a threat when you you know you said the u.s dollar is going to benefit from this i don't know how you can possibly say that when you're talking about 20 money growth every year now and forever that's how you destroy a currency the u.s dollar is not going to benefit from this and bitcoin is not if bitcoin pretends that it's going to provide the solution they will kill it it's that simple thank you frank thank you for your rebuttal we will move on to our next topic now which is historical performance michael i'll begin with you bitcoin is appreciating at 200 a year and you have said we cannot expect it to expand any faster so one of bitcoin's biggest strength is clearly its price performance but could it also not present its biggest risk the higher bitcoin gets the more fear of missing out trade catches fire if this risk-taking behavior continues isn't it causing a risk in and of itself since the price may be based purely on speculation you have five minutes on this topic well i think bitcoin's uh getting much less risky and i'm going to start with a review of the history here in the last one year bitcoin's up 693 percent versus 4.66 for gold its sharp ratios 4.7 versus 0.43 for for gold over five years a dollar invested in gold would yield a dollar 33 a dollar invested in bitcoin gives you 132 dollars for a bitcoin if you actually chose gold instead of bitcoin you lost 99 of your wealth it's devastating over a decade bitcoin's running about 190 percent on average every year versus 1.65 percent for gold and again the sharp ratios 4x as much let's take a century well people know that uh gold was twenty dollars a ounce and now it's seventeen hundred dollars an ounce and so you could say well it's like up almost like factor of eighty or ninety but when you actually risk adjust it you realize there's nobody that actually got that return over the course of the century 95 of the gold was confiscated in the last hundred years so maybe theoretically the united states government might have got that gain but everybody in russia china every country in europe everybody in south america and asia they all lost their gold so if you do a risk-adjusted calculation you find that you invest a dollar it should be worth a hundred dollars but you lost it not all of it ninety-five percent of the time you got five bucks and so the real risk adjusted return over a century is 1.5 percent per year it's not any better than the last decade is devastating over a millennium gold you know 2 000 years ago gold was like 80 percent of money goal was money and then it slid from 80 percent to 40 percent you know and in the middle ages by the time we got 1940 it's 40 and then 30 and then 20 and today the the monetary value of gold is maybe 5 trillion half of the gold supply and and the total store of value in the economy is 250 trillion so you divide 5 trillion and 250 trillion and gold is 2 of all money over that time period you know it came with thousands if not millions of massacres and seizures people talk about bitcoin being volatile but in the year where bitcoin went up 693 percent in 12 months here are the maximum drawdowns if you look at the at the end of day closing price on binance 13 10 14 11 17 11 25 that was the worst on 2 2 126 21 16 and 12 so in fact in order to get a max drawdown at 25 to get a 693 advance is pretty historic performance bitcoin liquidity has increased by a factor of three well by a factor of 10 versus normal days over the past six months you know we had 6.9 billion trade on binance two days ago or a day ago so you're talking about 10 billion dollars a day in the spot market gold peaked august 10th around the time that microstrategy announced that we bought 250 million worth of bitcoin and i came to this with a completely objective clean slate i said i got to buy gold or i got to buy bitcoin but my my my conclusion was if bitcoin works gold probably won't and if gold works bitcoin won't so what's the difference well if i chosen gold i would be minus four billion dollars today over eight months versus bitcoin it's a four billion dollar choice one is right one is wrong as as everybody says gold has a long history of manipulation by governments banks and miners jim rickards the new case of gold he says the paper market could easily be 100 times the size of the physical market quote there's no doubt we're seeing price suppression through the paper market rigging futures is child's play i respect his comment bitcoin's first decade was marked by legendary volatility there's no doubt but the assets matured the network has spread it's entering its second decade it's like lebron james at age 19. the best player is always the most volatile player if you look forward what you see is an extraordinary asset on an extraordinary network that solves the problem better than gold can solve the problem that's why i think it's the right choice and there's consequence to making the wrong one michael uh thank you for that some incredible statements being made here uh frank you'll have a one-minute rebuttal now all right well i i've real trouble with the way you calculate um what is happening at any given time between bitcoin and gold and i've heard you say this before you know last year uh gold showed that it didn't perform uh versus bitcoin listen if i chose one year periods in bitcoin over the last four years it would look a lot worse so you cannot define what the value of gold is based on six months or a year of trading you have to look at over much longer time period that's number one number two i have real trouble with how you calculate your 190 percent compounded annual growth on on bitcoin i'll get into that later but again i i think it's a it's a always a function of garbage in and garbage out and how you calculate your returns um maybe gold isn't used as money today but it certainly uses a store of value and it's never failed on that and again i will get into that in a moment um in in your claim that listen you made all these billions on on bitcoin versus gold over a one year period you have to understand that what dynamics drove the bitcoin price up and why gold did not go up and i think that that's again i will get into that in a moment but uh that in itself does not tell you or demonstrate that bitcoin is a store of value thank you frank and you will have time to expand here uh because it's your turn now for your question in august of 2020 we've said it gold made new highs of 2075 dollars per ounce gold was up 36 for the year the m2 money supply continued its unstoppable right up and the dollar kept falling with the stimulus measures the trillions dollars of debt and the fed doing more easing gold didn't continue on the path of higher highs instead here we are and having corrected chiroka 12 percent year-to-date so the most common reason i hear is that bitcoin has now replaced it as the asset of choice economists have even said that gold without bitcoin without competition from bitcoin pardon would increase in value by 13 each year for the next decade so the question is this did gold's 3 000 year reign as the ultimate currency officially end in august of 2020 frank well the short answer is no absolutely not um and listen you have to understand what gold is and this is and again there are a lot of misconceptions about what the utility of gold is for investors and first we need to clarify one big misconception it's not the gold price that you need to be looking at you need to be looking at how it's measured against certain currencies at certain points in history and let me give you an example because it makes a huge difference in into the reason why you need to own gold so let's take the argentine peso which michael loves to use as a means of demonstrating which what what happens to currencies when they get into trouble when they're mismanaged much like what the us dollar is experiencing today the argentine peso gold in argentine peso terms has gone up 28 fold in the last 10 years take a more recent example the turkish lira which is experiencing its own currency crisis at the moment it's gone up four-fold in the period gold measured in lyric terms has gone up four-fold in a period of four years that's how you measure the true value of gold also you need to understand what happens during periods of high inflation that's when gold performs really well the last time we experienced that here in north america was in the 1970s and when gold went from 35 dollars to 850 that's 25 fold because we had high inflation now we haven't seen in this current cycle high cpi inflation yet all of the inflation has gone into assets and that's why we have all of these acid bubbles happening which one could claim bitcoin as an acid bubble um and uh and so you really have to understand that part of it because it that's when it's going to become evident uh now just a little fun fact traditionally and when we talk about what happened with gold last year when gold that has a big down dip central banks and jewelers come in and and buy on the downtip and they buy big and we saw this recently uh with both the jewelry buyers out of india buying record amounts this last month and with the central banks declaring that on the down dip they continue to buy at a furious pays now contrast that with bitcoin and so when you talk about performance with respect to bitcoin it's not an appropriate term bitcoin has not been around long enough to to be able to determine its utility as a store of value and i don't buy the argument that a mean a mere 10 years of history is going to be enough to indicate what the future performs is going to be it's just silly it's never been properly tested um so is bitcoin impacting the price of gold i think partially yes i think and i think i have a good friend of mine who's an economist who recently did a regression analysis on attributing what factors affected gold and why gold turned down it was about 40 was attributed to higher bond yields uh 36 percent was uh to a higher us dollar which was temporary and 24 was uh attributed to bitcoin so bitcoin is having an impact and i and i can't deny but i actually think this is more of a north american perspective than it is a global perspective in turn in terms of this rush into bitcoin um it's worth noting that the us dollar is still benefiting from its reserve premier reserve currency status um but as the world starts to fragment the glo the global monetary system starts to fragment and you have countries like china russia and iran all looking to decouple from the u.s dollar for a whole number of reasons um as that fragmentation takes place and less unless trading is done with u.s dollars the dollar will come under pressure and especially with this money growth that we're talking about now most americans will only know see that when it happens to the us dollar they will only see the value of gold when it's measured against u.s dollars americans have a very funny way of seeing everything in us dollar terms on the volatility side i mean you know people have very short memories sure bitcoin has done very well the last couple of years but if you take points throughout the last 10 years it's had stomach churning roller coaster ride and that's and there's no reason why that won't continue and so i can't see why anybody would invest in bitcoin if the objective was to preserve value now on a personal note michael i think you're fighting the wrong fight gold is the least of your worries you need to keep your eye on central banks and governments because they're going to be the ones that you need to look out for and um i know that jerome powell has been dismissing bitcoin as he dismisses gold as both speculation vehicles and he's doing the same thing that every other one of his predecessors did disparages gold now it's bitcoin um while they're in office you know alan greenspan was a gold bug before that a go back after but during his time as chairman of the fed he was disparaging gold and they do that because it is a threat and especially if he becomes too popular um so i think investors really really need to ask themselves if they're looking to store value which one's better gold or bitcoin thank you i'm choosing gold unless you have some way to change my mind i still choose gold thank you frank for that michael uh one minute response please you know you can't achieve the gold performance as an individual due to the seizure risk gold bugs for a decade have been viewing cpi and waiting for cpi inflation and they haven't got it the inflation came over the last 10 years and it came to the assets not to the consumer goods because of technology and other dynamics all the monies flowing into stocks bonds and other assets it's not flowing into gold so gold doesn't turn out to be a monetary inflation hedge uh gold is better in a collapsing currency but locals can't easily get it and they can't easily use it like bitcoin bitcoins the egalitarian solution with more utility you can put it on a fifty dollar android phone and you can buy it with plus or minus one percent markup finally among central bankers is a growing consensus the bitcoins a digital asset not a digital currency that's been articulated by the chinese central bank by the u.s by jerome powell at the federal reserve by christina lagarde at the eu central bank and it's it has the merit of being true it is a digital asset you don't buy it to use as a medium in exchange you buy it to hold for long periods of time thank you michael we're going to move on to our next topic now which is supply dynamics frank michael has said that as the price of gold goes higher so does the incentive to mine and prospect it which leads to increased supply he has also said quote ultimately you have to find something which you can't print more of that doesn't have its fundamental underpinnings tied to a fiat currency and the only thing i can find right now is bitcoin so while gold can be labeled scarce how do you defend the fact that in theory it does not have a ceiling to supply you have five minutes frank all right well um from listening to michael in the past uh when he talks about gold supply it's it's it's clear to me that he doesn't have a real understanding of the gold mining industry um just before i talk about supply let me just clarify on demand so about 50 of gold demand comes from jewelry mostly from india where it has deep cultural ties about 20 25 comes from central banks and they've been buying furiously over the last 10 years and the other 20 25 percent comes from from investment these numbers fluctuate a bit but they've been pretty steady over the years so that's the demand side on the supply side i think michael has made some very erroneous assumptions about gold and gold production i've spent my entire adult life financing gold uh development and exploration around the world and i can tell you even when you find it it's not easy to mine the average period between discovery and production is 10 to 20 years and sometimes longer and the grades are getting lower and lower and it's becoming very expensive and time consuming to find find these deposits no world-class discovery has been made in the last 30 years all the gold discovered in the last 10 years is less than half of the amount of gold that was discovered in just one year in 1990 when gold was under 400 an ounce the gold mining industry is facing an existential crisis when it comes to its reserves they're depleting and they can't replace them over the last eight years the reserves held by major mining companies have dropped 40 percent over the last eight years and uh as i said the grades are getting lower which means you have to move a lot more debt which raises the cost exponentially so i there is one big problem and the truth about mind supply that's going to really help michael here because i i i don't think he really understands how price does and doesn't affect gold in 1971 when gold was 35 dollars an ounce the global production of gold by mining companies was 1500 tons scroll forward 50 years gold's gone up 50 fold six thousand percent that number has only doubled to 3 000 tons a year which averages out to one and a half percent uh growth per year which is about the same you see in terms of population growth now comparing it to bitcoin yes but michaels our bitcoin supply is capped but there's still a supply of three to four percent inflation a year which is obviously declining uh over a period of time but i see a lot of risks in bitcoin before you reach that zero inflation rate so i see both gold and bitcoin have inflation rates and supply and you can argue that both supplies are declining so i asked michael as the gold price continues to go up where is all this extra gold going to come from i've heard you talk about asteroids i've heard you talk about some new alchemy process and uh if you seriously believe that bring it on but i suggest you don't go there because i i just that that just doesn't make any sense the fact of the matter is that for both bitcoin and gold it's not the newly mined supply that you need to be concerned with it's the existing stock and the question you need to ask is whether it sticks as the price goes up and i've got a lot to say about that um so you got to stop saying that there's an infinite supply of gold if the gold price goes up it's just simply not true frank giustra thank you for that michael uh you'll have one minute to uh rebuttal that i would say that this conflict of interest between people that make their living in the gold mining business versus people to make their make their living or or pen their hopes on gold holding they're they're actually naturally enemies and so frank's uh life as a gold miner i think colors his view of gold um newmont mining and barrick gold are the two largest gold miners in the world i could find i read both their annual reports to get ready for this newmont mined or sold 5.8 million ounces last year and they reported 94.2 million ounces in reserves almost you know 18 to 1 18 years worth of reserves and barrick mined 4.76 million ounces and reported 68 million ounces in reserves you know that they found 10 15 20 years worth of reserves they don't have an interest in reporting more but they don't seem like they're anywhere close to running out thank you michael and now we'll go to your supply question with a total limit of 21 million issuable coins the rate of increase in available bitcoins is not keeping pace with the number of people keen to buy them so the price of a bitcoin keeps increasing because its price increases people feel reluctant to use them as currency by spending them so with bitcoin supply constrained and falling short of demand do the supply-side dynamics prevent bitcoin from functioning as a currency yeah so my view here is is bitcoin's the ideal architecture to be a currency and gold isn't i started my career modeling commodities and the history of commodities is as the price goes up the demand decreases the supply increases gold is a commodity bitcoin is a scarcity as the price goes up the supply is constant historically all commodity businesses they need a cartel to be stable john d rockefeller farm to cartel opecus cartel the debeer diamonds cartel is the same if you look at you know just about everything in the world you have to have some kind of restraint of trade if you can't get it legally through patents or technically through some special sauce then you have to get it another way to make the price go up otherwise price doesn't go up if we build a dynamic model of gold it works like this the price goes up the miners increase output jewelry demand decreases scrap and jewelry get recycled at increased rates bankers and finance here sell more gold derivatives short and they're more aggressive about it investors fund more mining development and mining expansion miners come online capacity comes online miners sell more gold eventually the price goes high enough the government stops buying gold they start selling gold or they short the gold the price comes down that's the problem with having 90 kilotons worth of gold as jewelry and and so many tons of gold sitting in central banks it's a damping feature when the price goes up by a factor of 20 everybody on earth is trying to make the price come down and they have a lot of tools to do it especially because there's no click link or tight link between paper gold and physical gold if you look at the dynamic model of bitcoin uh the demand goes up the price goes up mining stocks go up miners stop selling bitcoin miners start buying bitcoin with equity and debt which keeps going up investors buy bitcoin companies buy bitcoin with equity and debt like my company which borrowed 1.7 billion dollars at nearly zero interest to buy bitcoin banks can't short the bitcoin governments don't have the reserves to sell to short the bitcoin the government has less motive and less capability to manipulate the price down because they don't have it they can't sell it short the banks the mutual funds the insurance companies integrate and they market the bitcoin big tech eventually apple google and facebook integrate and they market the bitcoin and investors buy the bitcoin then they get more investors to buy the bitcoin the bitcoin price goes up the investors the companies and the countries buy the bitcoin gold mining requires a hundred billion dollars a year in fossil fuels labor chemicals and environmental damage and the never-ending struggle to inflate the gold supply and undermine the price it's providing zero security transport or audit service and that would cost tens of billions more i've watched a hundred interviews by david lynn and i feel bad for him he keeps waiting for gold price to go up and he says on 3 15 of this year he says uh in a rhetorical question musing what if miners stopped mining gold and he knows the answer which is if the miners stopped mining gold gold would be a good investment and every gold investor knows this bitcoin mining requires 2 billion a year in electricity 2 billion a year in hardware to provide full security transport and audit service for the entire network worldwide it scales to hundreds of trillions of dollars of assets and annual transfers it'll support billions of users billions of nodes 100 million transactions a year and it provides the base layer for tens of billions of instant transactions per day on the application layer i.e bitcoin mining is a good use of energy gold mining is a destructive use of energy if you're a gold holder versus a bitcoin holder thank you michael uh frank you'll have uh one minute okay so again michael you're ignoring what i just told you in my last segment that the fact is that history has shown that even when the gold price goes up 50-fold over 50 years we've only seen a double in the amount of gold mines so you keep ignoring that but that's just a fact certainly there are uh as with any commodity including bitcoin there's always going to be supply when the price moves up and you know this concept that a higher price just drives in more buying works to a point it sounds to me more like a bubble environment than what it's been uh suggested it should be as a store of value so i just i'm still not buying that you're going to have obviously jewelry scrap sold into rising prices but the as i said earlier the jewelry jewelry demand has been steady year after year after year it represents 50 percent of the demand for for for for gold um and now listen you can't you know if you're going to attack gold on environment and energy i mean you can't even go there i mean the amount of energy consumption that bitcoin uses today is the entire population of nigeria 90 million people it's estimated soon it's going to be the entire energy consumption of japan and as far as the environment i mean most of that hash rate is coming out of china where there's a lot of coal including it's got hydro but a lot of coal and and there are co2 emissions that are getting dangerously high and are going to be looked at by the environmentalists so i you know i don't think you want to go compare environmental damage between gold and bitcoins i think you're going to lose that battle thank you frank we are going to move on to our next topic of discussion which is ownership structure michael there's a common perception that when it comes to bitcoin ownership there are some primary risks you've already you we've already brought up some before but someone could get access to your private key and take your bitcoins you could lose your private key um you know and that basically cryptocurrency is a technology based which leaves this investment open to cyber attacks so if you are speaking to your friend your best friend how would you present the risk of bitcoin ownership yeah i think when we look at the ownership structure bitcoin versus gold what you have is a dichotomy uh gold owners tend to be a bit cynical more conventional less technical more traditional they rely upon metrics like cpi and conventional sovereign interest rates they tend to be diversified they're traders sometimes they're speculators bitcoin holders generally are maximalist and they're and they're believers in the technology as a force of progress to elevate the entire civilization and it's not a speculation it's not a trade they're not hedging um i'm going to give some quotes jim rickards in the new case of gold quote gold's an attractive part of portfolio still it's always prudent to diversify i've consistently recommended a modest allocation 10 percent of your investable assets my advice to investors is simply to get gold but not too much uh frank you said what i do best is create and build mining companies ten percent of your portfolio should be in gold gold won't keep going up forever and rotate out of gold following the panic by he said that on stansberry december 2020 and then the famous peter schiff said quote i don't own much gold i own more gold stocks at salt vegas 2019 and a lot of gold companies don't even have gold they're exploration companies trying to find it their speculations newmont mining 11 billion dollars in revenue has 5.5 billion in cash ebitda of 5.7 billion last year paid a massive dividend 1.45 they actually mine gold at 750 to 1 000 an ounce they've returned 2.7 billion to their shareholders they paid and four million in taxes they're dividing it out forty to sixty percent of the free cash flow above twelve hundred dollars an ounce they have effectively zero net debt and yet they borrowed a billion 985 million dollars at 225 basis points last year they could borrow 5 to 10 billion more what does this mean it means they're mining gold as fast as they can so that they can buy cash they don't even think it's worth they they could buy 10 billion dollars of gold for two and a half percent interest they don't think the gold is going up they think the gold is going back to 1200. barrick gold the same story they paid uh 1.3 billion dollars in tax last year at a 27 rate they're over mining the gold they're returning capital to their shoulders as fast as possible 750 million this year massive dividends these gold miners don't believe in gold they don't have any gold on their balance sheet they could borrow 20 billion dollars at 3 interest and buy gold if they believed in it they don't believe in it by talk about hating gold they could actually cut their sales of gold back and eliminate all their taxes that's two billion dollars in tax those two companies paid they could take it to zero not only did they overmind the gold sell the gold drive the price of the gold down they also paid off in one case 12 billion dollars of debt barrick did over the past 10 years they won't borrow money and they're actually double taxing the gold by paying the dividend they first pay the income tax rate and then they force their shoulders take the dividend rate and the message is we don't actually believe gold is money we don't know what is money we'll let our shareholders figure it out after we basically drive the price of gold down and pay 50 60 tax to dividend the money back it makes no sense gold miners are maximizing the gold supply to the detriment of everybody in the gold industry on the other hand i ran some polls 75 percent of bitcoiners intend to recruit three more people to bitcoin's cause this year 43 are going to recruit 11 or more 84 percent would rather mortgage their home to buy bitcoin right not gold miners but the bitcoiners do 51 of bitcoiners believe that have more than 51 of their allocation to bitcoin and the equivalent is 84 percent of people that answer my gold poll have 10 or less in gold and they only half of them answered so the when you look at ownership structure you have bitcoin maximalist the view bitcoin is money they're optimistic they're all in they think the numbers going up they think freedom is going up they believe in the bitcoin standard it's viral they have laser eyes it's technology there's a master plan make the world a better place through technology they're more passionate than any of the gold bugs any other investor group i've ever seen gold holders on the other side of the equation uh they're a bit skeptical they've been burned they're a bit cynical and even the advocates aren't really willing to commit more than 10 of their portfolio and it leaves you with the last question which is if you're only going to invest 10 of your portfolio on gold what are you going to invest the other 90 percent in michael saylor thank you for that and uh unfortunately mark bristow was not here because i would have loved to hear his his rebuttal but frank you'll have a minute here okay well first of all uh in terms of the portfolio allocation and again this is where michael is confusing what a store of value safe haven asset what its purpose is and this is how we're going to differentiate between what gold is and what bitcoin is and he's made a very strong case for for why i think you should own gold yes only own 10 to 20 percent of your portfolio in gold it's your hedge it's your insurance it has the inverse correlation with other asset classes and it's how you store your wealth what michael is describing is a speculation you know the buyers coming in just simply because the price is going up okay and the idea that you would put all of your money into bitcoin because there are no other proper asset classes to invest in is simply ludicrous that's asking for trouble that's you know that's how people get wiped out as far as gold mining companies yes they're in they're not in the business of owning gold and uh several companies did try it in the past shareholders because it's a public company want to see earnings and then it's up to the shareholder to take his profit from the mining companies or his dividends and invest it in gold if they so choose that's an individual decision um the way you just described how bitcoiners are recruiting new recruits three pre i can't remember what you said three per year three per month this sounds to me like a pyramid scheme it's just it it it gives me all the reasons why i don't want to own bitcoin okay and as far as freedom is concerned and that their freedom is going up this is just fantasy it's it's it you we don't live in a world where anarchy will be allowed and so they can have all these idealistic ambitions it's just not going to work in the real world thank you frank you'll have more time to elaborate on this because i am asking you the question now you've already alluded to some of it but what is it truly about the ownership structure of bitcoin that makes it hard for you to accept compared to gold five minutes yeah yeah it's hard for me to determine whether the bitcoin market is a real market or not um it's or whether it's truly representative of a real market and we have the so-called whales and their level of ownership i think is a big factor in the price trajectory of bitcoin um last i heard and correct me if i'm wrong these numbers might have changed a bit but the last i heard two percent of owners own ninety five percent of all the value of bitcoin one thousand individuals control forty percent of the market let me repeat that two percent of the bitcoin owners own 95 of the value that to me is reminiscent of a penny stock promotion where you have a group of people coming in early buying large large positions in a tightly held deal and then getting out there and promoting the daylights out of it with wild claims about what it can do and about creating riches and i just think that that is a very very dangerous thing tightly held deals are easy to manipulate that's just a fact are we to believe that bitcoin is the only asset class that is not manipulated every other asset class is and that's why we have regulators bitcoin doesn't have regulators that's why it's potentially very attractive to manipulators and there are many ways to manipulate a tightly held d painting the tape and up ticking are common methods but we'll never know and it should be a concern to us that the price of bitcoin has been manipulated that's number one okay um as far as the recent buyers i think it's important to take a closer look we need to differentiate between wall street hedge funds and the traditional longer term institutional buyers okay and let me start with wall street which bitcoin folks are touting as an important step in the validation of bitcoin i don't take much comfort the wall street jumps into anything they will jump on anything that is going to make them money and whatever the flavor of the month is whether it's mortgage-backed securities tech stocks backs emerging markets and when things blow up as they sometimes do they just move on to the next thing if you look at jamie dimon of jp morgan he hates bitcoin can't stand it but it certainly allows this firm to find business angles to make money out of it because business is business hedge funds and this is where people get really confused and i hear names like gun latch druckenmiller paul tudor jones as all being bitcoin buyers and therefore lending credibility to bitcoin um you have to understand what a hedge fund is designed to do which is very different than traditional institutions they're designed to look for momentum and higher and take higher risks for higher returns if the price starts to underperform they move on to other things right now bitcoin is giving them momentum in spades so they're all over it but if it were to start underperforming they're they're in the business of moving out of that and finding something else and they're certainly not buying into michael's buy and hold forever that's just not the way they operate as far as the institutions um and i think you know another good example of that is that you know it's very similar to how say warren buffett who was a gold hater for a long long time bought a large position in barrick gold and all the gold guys got all excited about it here and he's a believer he's a believer sure he bought it and then he turned around and sold it when he had made a profit and i'd see bitcoin with respect to hedge funds as being the exact same scenario traditional institutions my good friend larry fink just came out and he manages blackrock the largest money manager in the world nine trillion dollars under management came out with last week and said he doesn't see any real institutional buying in bitcoin yet what worries me are the millions of robin hook robin hood type buyers that are investing and looking to get rich quick because when they pile into bitcoin if something were to go wrong they're the ones that usually are left holding the bag because they're not sophisticated they don't know how to assess risk so i just think that you really have to understand who the buyers are to determine what validation is being assigned to bitcoin thank you frank uh one minute for you michael um you know people think bitcoins are speculation if they don't understand how the technology works but once you understand the technology is superior it's not a speculation as for a pyramid scheme you know like objecting to something because everybody else thinks it's a good idea it doesn't seem you know appropriate technology spreads virally because it is a better idea uber what's up iphone youtube netflix they all spread virally people tell their friends because it's a good idea uh as for the two percent of the owners and i've seen the value i don't think that's true that's probably based upon looking at wallets on the blockchain most of the accounts are concentrated in custodial wallets controlled by the exchanges so for example binance has 56 million accounts it's probably got just a handful of wallets that are reflecting those 56 million accounts so no i don't think there's there's any truth to the idea that the value is concentrated with two percent of the owners i think that's just uh a misconception um worrying about the millions of people that are buying bitcoin uh i think it ignores the observation that everything else they could buy is riskier and so if you dissuade them from buying bitcoin you're encouraging them to do something which is riskier there's no zero you know there's no simple answer here it's a zero-sum game you either buy the thing that's less risky or buy the thing that's more risky they got to do something thank you michael we're going to move on to our final topic before our closing statements now it is market forces frank michael said that if god designed gold with no imperfections he would have designed bitcoin that it is thermodynamically perfectly sound money he even said in an interview with me quote there will be a lot of pushback and it will be natural but it's not going to change the inevitable the world needs a digital monetary network it's a two three four trillion dollar problem and you're not going to be able to stop it so how do you respond to this market force frank that seems inevitable well i think you might be right that they had god designed it it might have been bitcoin but i i think you know that it doesn't look like he did much like god did not design a world of eternal peace no competition between nation states uh no lust for power no greed and we're all sitting around the campfire holding hands singing kumbaya that's not the world we live in we live in a very real world of competition and this i think this is where gold plays a very important role um in balancing you know balancing that competition i think again in assessing the market forces there are two areas that michael continues to use to make his case first is how he calculates his compounded annual growth rates and the second is what i think is is lack of understanding of correlations between asset classes and how that reflects upon bitcoin as a store of value okay first let's let's deal with a compound or annual growth what i've heard from him over and over again is in all the interviews he he claims that bitcoin has 196 percent annual compounded growth and then he frames it that that is going to be achievable each and every year going forward uh until bitcoin reaches a million or i've even heard five million from him um using statements like it's gonna double every six months that's a gross oversimplification and dangerous if you rely on it to make your investment decisions calculating compounded annual growth is very sensitive to your entry starting points and ending points in the period that you're measuring it's garbage in garbage out and to arrive at his 196 number he starts at a dollar per bitcoin a dollar in 2011 takes it all the way to 60 thousand dollars and which includes the fact that most of that return was front end loaded into that into the early years from a dollar and up and i have several problems with that approach when bitcoin was a dollar it was not a real investment it was a novelty it was a liquid it was tightly held i'm not sure where you would start the measurement but it's certainly not a dollar i think it's in the several thousands of dollars maybe you can look at when bitcoin crashed in 2017 settled around seven thousand dollars um and that's when the real market started and certainly i think the real investors have only come in in the last couple of years um but i i think that uh if you really uh allow me just give you a couple of examples uh because what he does again is and i've seen it a lot when i'm being pitched by wealth managers if i were trying to pitch you on buying gold i would say to you well listen if you bought gold in 1971 at 35 dollars an ounce and you held it 50 years it would have gone up five fifty fold that's six thousand percent which is works out to about eight percent a year of compounded annual growth which is slightly better than the s p in that same period it's pretty good right if i wanted to underscore the extreme i would say to you hey listen if you bought gold in 1971 and you held it for nine years which is roughly the amount of time we were measuring in bitcoin you would have had a 42 compounded annual growth and i think that that's where you know you have to always be aware garbage in garbage out now again as i said earlier he keeps pointing to last year golden perform and that's a certainty that it's not you know it's not going to survive as a store of value but and like i said you can pick any one of the last number of years for bitcoin and i can paint you a much worse picture um so so that's the one part of it the other part of it is how he characterizes store of value or safe haven asset with respect to what it correlates with bitcoin that is and what it doesn't correlate with and i think that it's really important to understand that to know again where bitcoin fits in a portfolio gold has had a pretty consistent negative correlation with equities and the us dollar that's a given and that's what's given it's it's safe haven value um and it's an important portfolio diversifier in the event of sharp equity downturns by way of example and this is where i will demonstrate how the correlation works in march of 2020 when the markets crashed covet hit markets crashed gold went down 8 percent initially in that month and then recovered to break even it did much much better in emerging markets because there was a flight to liquidity which usually has a temporary lifting of of of the us dollar if i look at bitcoin in that same month it went down 40 percent peak to trough ending the month down 25 um bitcoin only really took off in october of 2020 when it looked like the economy was about to recover so it was risk on gold under the other hand did really well in the spring and summer of 2020 when the markets had crashed qe had begun and it was risk off and that's i think is the very big difference that you have to pay attention to um if you like myself believe that equities are in a bubble then i think there's a lot of built-in downside with bitcoin at the moment because it really does behave like a growth stock i think we have to wait and see if there's a major market correction and when gold establishes its inverse correlation with bitcoin that to me will be the evidence uh that it is a store of value and we have never seen bitcoin tested in a financial crisis so that again us dollar crisis financial credits any crisis that's where you'll see the true test to bitcoin as a store of value the real the other test is inflation gold performs really well in pairs of high inflation and i know michael is suggesting that we're not going to see high inflation in the cpi and i think he is dead wrong you only have to watch the commodity prices going up in price food prices going up in price inflation will hit the cpi there's no doubt about that um but if you look at the 1970s for instance which is the last time we experienced high inflation gold went up thank you 25 fold over a period of nine years thank you frank i'm gonna have to give michael his one minute rebuttal here um yeah frank says i i'm claiming that bitcoin will go up 195 a year that's not true i've never given any precise estimates for future growth rates i don't know i have no crystal ball i just think it will perform better than the alternatives based upon the laws of physics and the technology dynamics with regard to time frames you don't need the 10-year time frame i think the one and five-year time frame analysis for bitcoin are also definitive and um is bitcoin a store of value i mean it's people keep saying it isn't it seems pretty obvious that something that keeps going up in price and up in value is a better store of value than something which is stably not going up thank you michael i will get to your your comments now regards to market forces my question for you is this the macroeconomic setup for hard currency is setting up to be excellent we have abandoned almost any monetary or financial rectitude and the fed has ruled in favor of inflation and hitting the print button on the money machine so the question is this with the easy money policy make the case of why you'd rather be in bitcoin than gold yeah i look at the market forces and as i look forward bitcoins creating a global markets in energy and money and in finance that operate across all borders and jurisdictions 24 7 365 and they're open to everyone to participate and we look at the global energy market if you take the latest generation of s19 grade bitcoin miners you can generate one exahash with 30 megawatts of power at the current prices that means that energy is is worth 45 to 50 cents a kilowatt hour sold to the bitcoin energy grid that compares to 13 cents kilowatt hour for typical residential use or 11 cents kilowatt hour for typical commercial use you can use that to drive down the cost of electricity everywhere on earth you can rescue stranded energy everywhere on earth you can commercialize renewable energy anywhere on earth and you can actually create safe clean income in the developing world wherever you find an energy source selling the energy at 45 cents an hour kilowatt hour which is more than you would get in manhattan it's a pretty extraordinary thing it's never happened before in history um billions are flowing into this mining sector and i think that uh the billions are flowing in the sector are going to create uh an incredible global renaissance and disruption in the energy business to the good of the world um the global money market uh bitcoin's crediting global money market uh you can actually trade on exchanges in singapore or hong kong and for a while the contango gets to 40 that means 40 is the risk-free overnight rate on bitcoin money compared to a risk-free overnight rate of like 20 basis points and more regulated markets the derivatives market the yield curve development they're all going to explode on the open exchanges from you know the innovators at ftx and binance and and every other exchange on the world they can all plug into the open bitcoin network there are rules but there are no rulers um even though you might not be able to capture this 40 percent contango in alabama as a hodler you could just buy the bitcoin and wait and then hundreds of billions of dollars of capital will find an exchange run by an appropriate entrepreneur offering the right sort of derivatives in order to build out that yield curve and drive asset appreciation that's a benefit to everybody on the network you know if you own a billion dollars worth of real estate in california nothing that happens in singapore is going to cause your asset to appreciate and if you own assets that are highly regulated on certain stock exchanges in certain countries then no innovation in other countries is going to drive up the value of your asset uh this global money market's uh exploding spot liquidity has gone from a billion a day to 10 billion a day over the course of the last six months the future drop and interest is exploding and uh it's truly disruptive the third major market is global finance market and this is bitcoin-backed payments credit insurance and and funds big tech is entering this space paypal venmo square robin hood uh finance companies fidelity morgan stanley all the major banks the ones that were skeptical a year or two years ago aren't so skeptical anymore the significance is any finance insurance or mutual fund company can 10x the value of their traditional offering by injecting bitcoin into it and then any big tech company can become a bank um how explosive is this well i think we'll see 150 new holders this year i think you'll see 500 billion dollars of assets flow under the network this year paypal square and coinbase alone have a 500 billion dollar market cap and if you look at their market cap over the last 12 months they're all exploding morgan stanley goldman sachs jpmorgan citigroup fidelity facebook apple amazon google microsoft these are major drivers contrast that to the gold market forces the gold industry continues to market the myth the gold is money while engaging in activities to elevate the u.s dollar is money and they're mining in an expensive dirty dangerous fashion they're using 20 times as much energy as the bitcoin mark mining network and manufacturing marketing and selling yellow yellow metal is expensive the next trillion dollars that's spent on gold mining is going to make gold less valuable whereas in the year 2035 99 of the bitcoin is done bitcoin mining is over uh the miners are effectively going to be buying bitcoin the stock flow goes to infinity the stock to flow goes negative and all of the money spent on bitcoin mining is to secure the network provide billions of people with a better store of value to improve energy efficiency to make the world a cleaner better more efficient place so the market force i think clearly favors bitcoin michael saylor thank you for the comments frank one minute rebuttal please yeah first of all i have real trouble with you denying uh your ongoing uh claims that that bitcoin has performed has an annual compound a growth rate of 196 percent and you use that to extrapolate its future performance you have said it time and time again i will actually tweet your words right back at you after this is done because that is absolutely not true um i think your idealistic view of the world is really just so off the mark we live in a very we live in a world which where the world order is fragmented and it's getting worse and worse you're not going to get this global cooperation to get behind bitcoin and with all of the energy assumptions that you're making it's just not going to happen that's not the real world we're living in and and again i will go back if you look at how the governments and central banks will perceive a high bitcoin price it's going to be a threat they will see it as a flight of capital and they will deal with it the same way that you've seen uh current capital controls in countries like pre-war germany pre-thatcher britain where you could only export 2500 pounds a year greece into 2015 south africa in 2003 when governments see a threat to their currency because there's a flight to something to get out of that currency they will go after it and i think you continue to ignore that risk thank you frank thank you frank we're going to get to our closing remarks now there will be no rebuttals again this is a blank canvas to drive your points home here we have six minutes each michael bring it home gold investors share the same macroeconomic view as bitcoin investors but i think they tend to lack one key insight money is technology and bitcoin's superior monetary technology with powerful network effect i've watched hundreds of interviews of gold advocates and they almost never addressed the technology issue i found a reference by mike maloney 10 years ago but for the most part they're they're not thinking about technology diversification makes no sense when there's a correct answer to an engineering problem you would never diversify the metal in an aircraft wing or the answer to a math problem or the shape of a ship's hull or the oxygen content in a scuba tank when the cabin depressurizes you don't place an oxygen mask on 10 of your family um money is a winner take all competition there is an answer choosing the wrong answer has dire consequences if we contrast the golden knight with the bitcoin dragon the golden knight's got a 30-year life it's plotting stupid heavy predictable and stagnant up against the bitcoin dragon the dragon is immortal teleporting dematerializing hyper-intelligent rapidly evolving moves at the speed of light which one of these two is going to win the fight goldbugs say put 10 percent of phys into physical gold to protect against the bank crash what about the other 90 they're not really providing a solution they're suggesting a hedge bitcoin is the solution um mike maloney he says quote the greatest wall transfer in history is therefore the greatest opportunity in the history of mankind well yeah if you actually pick the winner in the well transfer if you pick the loser then you miss out it would be a shame to actually know this is coming and then miss out the gold standard fails because gold doesn't provide it doesn't sufficiently empower people to control their own property governments and banks can tax or confiscate those rights the gold industry can inflate away that property gold coins were too inflexible in the 16th century they don't represent a solution in the 21st century in 1914 at the beginning of world war one the gold standard was thrown overboard within two weekends that's lips from gold wars the genoa conference in 1922 and bretton woods in 1944 show the world will at best create a foe gold standard than corrupt it if we have gold standards we are going to get scammed again quote michael maloney bitcoin addresses this issue by shifting power into the hands of individuals via cryptography and implementing a decentralized security protocol via proof of work and therefore it's protecting money from taxation inflation and confiscation billions of individuals can take control of their money via mobile technology and trade with each other at the speed of light via currency of their choice hayek said i don't believe we'll ever have good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government that is we can't take them violently out of the hands of government all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that can't stop bitcoin's a money virus nobody's ever defended anything successfully there is only attack and attack and attack some more that's patent gold is defense bitcoin is an offense it's spreading at 200 percent a year it's going to be the 250 million people by this year next stop is a billion next stop is everybody the network is worth 25 trillion a year to solve the strong money problem the protocol is already recruited finance coinbase fidelity paypal microstrategy tesla we heard venmo joined next will come apple google facebook and microsoft bitcoin's an economic imperative it's a technical imperative it's a moral imperative economically there's 250 trillion dollars of currency derivatives that are debasing at least 10 percent a year that's a 25 trillion a year problem every investor needs to store value to survive the currency flood technically this is the greatest mobile application uh this will be the greatest mobile application uh mobile wallets holding digital currency and digital assets is going to allow five billion people to trade with each other and protect their life force bitcoin is the protocol that synchronizes a hundred thousand financial applications in cyberspace it'll be the king maker and it's going to tip the balance of power in favor of whichever big tech company firmly and firm embraces it the most it's a moral imperative it's the best hope the human race has for life liberty and property for the 8 billion people struggling under the weight of excessive regulation corrupt politicians and collapsing currencies and dangerous physical environments it is an instrument of economic empowerment it can be delivered to everybody so if you believe in sound money life liberty property and the pursuit of happiness it's time to abandon gold and move on to bitcoin this century we've digitally transformed messages books photos videos meetings newspapers payments and relationships now it's time to transform money bitcoin is hope for a better world michael saylor thank you for your closing remarks uh this is uh your time now frank your final six minutes to make your case for gold over bitcoin all right well i think i've made my case already as to what bitcoin is and bitcoin isn't with respect to gold okay um i pointed out the risks that michael never seems to want to acknowledge so now at least people can look into that a little bit more carefully um the idea that rewards come without risk in this world is is you can't gloss over that stuff and yeah and i would just want people to understand the risk of what they're getting into um so you can't keep on selling this as a guaranteed winning lottery ticket and and as a cure-all for all the world's ills you know some utopian fantasy that you're selling here this isn't snake oil and you should stop selling it in that fashion i know that bitcoin followers a lot of them not not all of them are real idealists um and michael is promising you that that world will be delivered to you i just don't see it that's not the world we live in we live in a very very competitive ugly world and i just don't see he's going to achieve that sort of global utopian vision that bitcoin is going to answer the problems to everything in this world the idea that bitcoin can go up by a factor of 10 times consume all the value of gold and then consume all the value of bonds 3 400 trillion dollars i i just don't see what world that could possibly happen in uh it's just in in michael's world all you own is bitcoin that's the only asset class you own and i that's not that's not the way that you're going it's just never going to happen in in in the real world it's sheer fantasy um and i think that maybe the way you're promoting it you know if you only promoted like 10 20 growth you wouldn't get all of this massive speculation that's going into bitcoin which i think is very very dangerous but i guess it's easier to promise a 20 bag or 100 bagger but the higher it goes the more outrageous your claims have to become about what bitcoin is and and and to me that's very reminiscent of a lot of the research reports i used to read during the dot-com bubble back in 1997 to 99 where they were they had to justify the price and and to justify the price of some of these crazy assets they had to make some outrageous assumptions and this is what i'm seeing here in in bitcoin now i i don't want to get personal here but i just find your style of promotion as misleading and filled with hype okay and the one thing that caught my attention and the reason that the catalyst to why i wanted this debate is when i heard you say time and time again that people should buy bitcoin hold it forever and if they need any cash they should borrow against their car their house their businesses that is such a reckless and irresponsible thing to suggest um i will bet that 90 of your 700 000 twitter followers are not millionaires never mind billionaires like yourself and we have if these guys are levered up and we have an 80 correction or a 50 correction in bitcoin that lasts a few years you're going to wipe out a lot of small investors and that should really concern you i also don't like the style in which social media is being used to bully critics um using slogans and and campaign the camp the gimmicks and slogans like the laser eyes and cyber hornets and have fun staying poor all this stuff to me it smells like a cult it's cult behavior uh it's not serious and i think if you had more confidence in the value of bitcoin you wouldn't have to use that kind of language um so here's the bottom line where i'm at with bitcoin i think that we live in very uncertain times i don't think any one of us has experienced an investment climate like the one we're seeing today not certainly not in many many generations and i unlike you don't have a crystal ball i don't have that benefit so what i like to do is diversify you never put your eggs in one basket that is about the dumbest investment advice anybody could give so my suggestion to investors is diversified portfolio skewed toward hard assets because i think that's the environment and that includes real estate gold art and bitcoin if you like okay um so buy bitcoin knock yourself out it's probably going to go higher i've said that before but the best strategy might be if you're going to buy bitcoin hedge it with gold because that is gold's purpose so if when and if the markets crash and they will crash again because we are in a bible environment you want to you be doing your michael you're doing your your followers a disservice by telling them to sell their gold sure go ahead and tell them to buy bitcoin and if they want to believe everything you're saying about go for it but to sell their gold is the worst thing they could be doing because they will need it as a portfolio diversifier because it's inversely correlated with what i think bitcoin is and what equities are so i'm just asking you to stop with all the hyperbole i mean you're selling this utopian fantasy that is going to probably hurt a lot of people and i just honestly believe buy bitcoin fine but you have to own gold as your insurance and i rest my case wow i have definitely felt the heat in this debate thank you both so much for your your remarks here and if i can just um add something uh you know regardless of whichever side you're on i'm sure we can all come to the consensus this was an incredible debate perhaps the best ever to be held on the topic of gold versus bitcoin and i am honored to have moderated it and thank you for choosing stansberry research as the platform and if i can just speak uh for myself and for the audience for the folks back home i just want to say this you are both titans in your respective fields you have nothing to prove you are both billionaires and you are both very busy and you did not have to do this debate so i thank you for taking the time to educate us thank you it was it was a lot of fun and i think we both got our points across so michael thank you for agreeing to do this and danielle you're always as usual the greatest host on the planet thank you thank you frank thank you danielle thanks for hosting i appreciate it tremendously i guess my question is because i know michael had tweeted that he was looking to convince frank and i said it at the start uh to buy some some some bitcoin transferring some of his his gold for bitcoin frank did he convince you on this not yet not yet i i think that um maybe there might be a time if bitcoin corrects which i think has had an incredible run it's due for a correction uh and it might be a very big correction yeah i might buy some because i think it would go higher and i'll speculate to to have a position in bitcoin but as a store of value absolutely not not yet frank nice to meet you if you buy bitcoin i'll buy a case of your olive oil [Laughter] you've done your research i'm sure we can all meet at a beautiful cocktail lounge or bar one day in the future and continue this discussion and we could all be friends so i'm going to keep cheerfully after frank thank you bo thank you so much and thank you for watching the great gold versus bitcoin debate here on stansberry research i am honored to have uh moderated this incredible debate that will go down in history i am sure thank you for watching i'm daniela camboni

Channel: Stansberry Research

Views: 588,365

Rating: 4.9156256 out of 5

Keywords: Stansberry Research, Stansberry, Best Stocks to Buy, Best Investing Strategy, How to Beat the Market, Best Investing Tips, Invest, Investing, Investor, Individual Investor, Best Stock Market Secrets, Investment Research, Wall Street, Stocks, Best Stocks 2021, Best Gold Stocks, How to Buy Gold, How to Invest in Bitcoin, Best Cryptocurrencies, Best Strategies to Beat the Market, Daniela Cambone, Frank Giustra, Michael Saylor

Id: coHC_9ApBdg

Length: 116min 42sec (7002 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/senec155]

Stop Michael, he's already dead!

[u/skutterbrain]

Cant believe Frank requested that public roasting

[u/SlayerX711]

I think Saylor prepped too much?!

[u/Ntati]

"Buy Bitcoin" - Frank Giustra 2021

[u/hateschoolfml]

I cannot believe Giustra bought forth such elementary points in the sense that, they’ve already been discussed and talked about for years now.

Thanks for making me that much more bullish tho Frank lol.

[u/No-Gold-2754]

Frank Giustra was completely unprepared for this debate. I didn't really know much about this guy, but I have no respect for him at this point. His points have been beaten to death for a decade now. Easily disproven from puddle deep google searches. It's like he took every damn cliche "Issue" that bitcoin has and that was his argument.

He points out that Bitcoin miners produce more pollution than gold mining. And is so certain of himself he says it would be ludicrous to suggest it doesn't. From a google search, you learn that bitcoin mining produces 36.9 million tons of carbon a year, currently.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-worries-about-its-massive-carbon-footprint.html

And gold mining? Just the literal mining. Not transporting it, storing it, feeding guards, etc.

Gold miners are among the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases in the mining sector, although critics generally point to coal miners and iron ore miners. ... The World Gold Council estimates the sector emitted 32,689 tons of CO2 equivalent per tons of gold produced in 2018, up 12% from the 2017 total.

All you have to do to find that answer is type this into google.

Carbon footprint of gold mining

How many tons of gold are mined a year? Let's google search it.

How much gold is mined each year?

Between all of the gold sources in the world, current estimates suggest that roughly 2,500 to 3,000 tons of new gold is mined each year. At present, experts believe that the total amount of above ground gold in the world stands at just over 190,000 tons.

So if we multiply 32,689x2500, we get, 81,722,500 tons of carbon produced just from mining gold, and that's the low end. Compared to 36,900,000 tons of carbon produced from bitcoin.

I mean this is the easiest thing to do in the world. With Bitcoin, you can actually convert everything to renewable if you wanted. You can't do that with gold, gold mining just rapes the earth.

Bitcoin is not a major polluter, it never will be. I just can't stand this argument anymore. It's so easy to disprove.

[u/New_Schedule_209]

He need some milk

[u/Colliwobbles]

Michaels closing remarks were legendary

[u/Potential_Reach]

Frank didn't do his homework in understanding the technology behind bitcoin. There are so many other crypto currency, but only one is as secured and as hard money asset as bitcoin.