The governing council
decided the following: First - We will continue to
conduct net asset purchases under the pandemic emergency
purchase program with a total envelope of €1,800 billion, until at least
the end of March 22 and in any case
until the governing council judges that the coronavirus crisis
phase is over. Morning Joe,
you have the European Central Bank doing what economists
thought they were going to do. They added to their pandemic emergency
purchase fund by €500 billion. By my count, that takes
it up to 1.85 trillion total. It is an absolutely historic, both in terms of the
speed of FED purchases and of course, the magnitude. Here's a chart that shows what's happened since
March, the last three weeks have seen this huge ramp up in a ways
that you've never seen before. And let's look at what's changed here since the FED last night,
we got to $1.9 trillion in relief enacted by Congress,
signed by the president. Senate Democrats have just released the
text of their $3.5 trillion budget resolution. Can you characterize everything
that the FED has done this past week as essentially flooding the system
with money? Yes, exactly. And there's no end to your ability
to do that. There is no end to our ability
to do that. Simply flooded the system with money. Yes, we did. That's another way to think about it. We did. Where does it come from,
do you just print it? We print it digitally. So we, you know, we as a central bank,
we have the ability to create money digitally. And we do that by buying
treasury bills or bonds or other government
guaranteed securities and that actually increases
the money supply. We do believe that inflation numbers
in 21, which we will see rising. I can't find any period in history where monetary and fiscal policy
were this out of step with the economic circumstances,
not one. In six ways last spring. We did more QE,
more purchasing of treasuries than we did the entire time in a
9 year period from 2009 to 2018. And if we ever get into inflationary
psychology, like for instance, we did when I was in my twenties back in the seventies,
if we ever get that again. And if you ever got retail
actually nervous about inflation, then the one thing that leads
inflation, which is commodity prices, or it's the easiest tautology
there is, those things can literally scream double
or triple with no problem whatsoever. And valuations for both interest
rates and stocks are at, if you combine the two,
they're so overvalued, they're at 100 year highs. I don't know what you mean. I am so afraid of democracy getting the idea that you can just
print money to solve all problems. And eventually I know that will fail. The end, if you print too much,
you end up in something like Venezuela. It's mathematics. The fiat currency is now
the error term that solves the growth in the numerator,
which is your total global debt versus the denominator,
which is total global GDP. And we have reached a point
of no return where the numerator is going to outstrip the
growth of the denominator under any plausible scenario,
which means you need to print money to solve that debt. We've all heard of our economic cycles and
how according to most modern economy books, it is normal to have a period
of very quick growth and expansion, followed by a period of contraction
and economical crisis, as described in 1946 by Arthur F. Burns,
former counselor to the president of the United States, and Wesley C.
Mitchell, the American economist. Business cycles are a type
of fluctuation found in the aggregate economic activity
of nations. A cycle consists of expansions
occurring at about the same time in many economic activities, followed
by similarly general recessions. This sequence of changes is recurrent,
but not periodic. History, though, shows us that
before the 20th century, financial crisis arrived
because of external events. The most popular being war. There had been only
one financial crisis not attributable to external events,
and this was the panic of 1825, where around 70 banks went bankrupt
due to risky investments. And because of this man,
Gregor McGregor, that had pulled big investments into colonizing the country,
that didn't exist - Poyais. If we look at history, what turns out,
when we find out is the fact that this cycle really started
about 100 years ago, and there's an important factor
to that. It's the fact that in the year
in 1914, every big nation in the world just started leaving the gold
standard. Now, the gold standard is the fact
that all of the money that a central bank has, controls
or produces is only based on the amount of gold
that they hold and the price of gold. Therefore, the amount of money supply available
is relative to the gold that is held. This was dropped. And this is what led to a lot of
financing for the first World War and even following
the second World War, because governments
realize that they have this huge power that is, get rid of the gold standard
and we can just print money as much as we want. And in fact, this happens many times
in history and was often the reason why governments, countries
or civilizations were simply dropping. The Roman Empire is a
great example of that. From the moment we dropped
this gold standard, so around the year of 1914,
the UK the first country to do that. This is the moment
where we started seeing these short term and long term cycles,
particularly the short term cycles. We are now over 100 years
after leaving the gold standard, and it is a fairly accepted fact
that our economy works in cycles, based on a period of inflation,
followed by a period of deflation. The fact this only started
100 years ago should tell you
that our monetary system has flaws all while being the reason for the
unmatched growth we had as a species in the 20th century. This inflation is due to our reliance
on debt and credit. According to modern monetary
theory, debt is the driver of economic growth,
not productivity. Ray Dalio explains this
well in his video - How The Economic Machine Works. Over time we learn and that accumulated
knowledge raises our living standards, we call this productivity growth. Those who are inventive and hard
working raise their productivity and their living standards faster than
those who are complacent and lazy. But that isn't necessarily true
over the short run. Productivity matters
most in the long run, but credit matters
most in the short run. This is because productivity growth
doesn't fluctuate much, so it's not a big driver of economic
swings. Debt is, because it allows us
to consume more than we produce when we acquire it, and it forces us to consume
less than we produce when we have to pay it back. And as stated by Dylan
LeClair in his great article - The Conclusion of the Long Term
Debt Cycle and the Rise of Bitcoin. Although productivity
is the most important aspect of any economic system
over the long term, not productivity with the forces of debt are the main driving forces
in volatile economic swings. Coming back to the cycles, Ray Dalio
describes the long term and the short term debt cycle and how they relate
to human productivity. Debt swings occur in two big cycles. One takes about five to eight years and
the other takes about 75 to 100 years. While most people feel the swings,
they typically don't see them as cycles
because they see them too up close. Day by day, week by week. The short term debt
cycle can be observed by looking at different metrics,
including the debt to income ratios and interest rates
set by the central bank. Yes, the central bank essentially sets
the rules that allow our economy to expand into unreasonable debt and
later decides when it can break down. This is the so-called
boom and bust cycle. The most recent ones being the global
financial crisis of 2008 and the dot com bubble
of the year 2000. The long term debt cycle is made
of multiple short term cycles. While our economy goes up and down
during each of these cycles, it does bring growth in the long run. And with each cycle, our economy
continues accumulating debt indefinitely because we prefer
borrowing than repaying debt. There reaches a moment when there is
more debt to pay than income. Historically, this is when the long
term debt cycle shifts, people stop spending and
start repaying debt. And instead of growing, we go down. We see recessions,
increase government support, devaluation of currencies,
social unrest and so on. There comes a time when our economy
has sufficiently de-leveraged and the economy starts growing again following the short term debt
cycle again. During these de-leveraging events, three strategies are adopted
by central banks. First - Lower the interest rates. Interest rates are set by central
banks and they set the rules as to what is the
cost of borrowing money. If they lower it,
then it's cheaper to borrow money. Therefore, people will be
more inclined to borrow this money This leads to the spiral of
just wanting to borrow more and more and more
because it's just easier to borrow. And right now, if you look
at the numbers the central bank, central banks all over the world
have been doing this for years now because we work on a standard
that is mostly based on the US dollar. What matters is what the U.S. central bank does,
and if they lower interest rates, then everyone else will also
lower their interest rates. This increases the value of assets
and makes it easier to get credits. This is the first strategy used. Today, these interest rates
have already dropped drastically for the main economies
and have turned negative in many. If interest rates drop to zero, then there is no logical
financial incentive to lend money. It can continue
for a while until it doesn't. Second - There's quantitative easing,
also called money printing. What this guy was talking about,
it allows the central bank to buy debt
securities and financial assets. It places cash in the hands of
investors but doesn't help citizens, asset prices skyrocket,
usually creating inflation, which makes asset holders
that tend to be the wealthy, richer and the poor, poorer
as their savings lose value. This is the case today,
with real estate skyrocketing globally and other raw materials
skyrocketing too. Third - And last, is increased welfare spending or other instruments,
such as stimulus payments. If there is any kind of crisis,
well the people that bought their house, they're not going to try
and do any more financial schemes
and things that would allow them to to protect their investment because they just don't
have the knowledge or the skills and even the instruments
to be able to do that. So they're the ones that lose the most
right because investment banks
think they know what's coming, they know how to deal with it
and they'll get out of it. But this creates basically a gap
between the rich and the poor. And this is a lot due to money
printing because this money gets distributed into the economy, but it doesn't get distributed
into the hands of people. It gets paid to banks,
it gets paid to investors, and it just gives them
another business. And it gives them more cash
to be able to take on more positions and themselves invest in to many different
assets, whether it's the stock exchange, it can be gold, anything. The poorer people don't have these
options and they don't have this money directly attributed to them. So it means that like, while all of this is happening
and people are getting rich, others are getting poorer because the savings that they have in
the bank are losing value because of this money printing
and because of that, what governments need to do is
they need to help their citizens more. Because of course,
no one wants the wealth gap. I mean, it's not because you're,
you know, part of this elite, let's say, that is in a better
position financially, that you want the poor people
to be in a bad situation like everyone has to be elevated
in society and these people need to be helped directly through
financing, whatever form it takes. And in fact,
if you look at the numbers, it's since the crisis of 1929, which was
the first big financial crisis after getting off the gold standard
that I was mentioning at the beginning that this welfare spending
has increased so much. And now in France, for example,
there's about 30% of GDP that goes to welfare spending. France is quite famous for that. It has one of the best
medical systems, but it also goes with how you support
people that are unemployed. Different stimulus payments help for
home allowances and this kind of thing, that is, of course, good for people
that need it, but is only necessary because of these actions
that are taken beforehand. More recently, we know social spending has increased
due to the COVID crisis, so we can only presume that the chart
now looks more like this. We are seeing another measure
increasing quickly - the monetary supply. Monetary supply is the total
amount of one currency that is currently available
in the economy. The more government creates new money,
the more the supply increases. This money supply is directly correlated
to the devaluation of our currencies. Many like to inverse these charts
in order to show this devaluation. Because the more currency is produced,
the less it is scarce. Therefore,
the more it loses value. We have all heard stories
from our elders saying, money had a different
value back then and I've seen archive images
illustrating this. Like this McDonald's menu from 1972
that had a Big Mac for $0.65. The increase in money supply is the
reason why this happens. In 2020 alone, the money supply
has had a big jump. This is the money that was printed in
order to finance the war against COVID. And in the U.S.
since the beginning of 2020, we have seen an increase of over 30%
in the amount of U.S. dollars in circulation. Although this isn't felt instantly
in the economy, the long term effects will be felt by the population
that have zero allocation in assets such as real estate, stocks and so on. The long term consequences
of this are very white. To illustrate, take technology by definition, technology
should drop in price because it becomes more efficient
and easier to produce. Yet, due to inflation,
prices are not going down, essentially making it harder
to develop new technologies. Governments use many reasons, including climate change,
as an excuse to print trillions. But down the road, this printing can lead
to adverse results because of the effects
this new monetary supply can have on the development
of the right technologies that could help us transition to a
more renewable energy consuming world. But the central banks
will have a different message. This is in order to avoid the spread
of panic concerning the financial markets
and their currencies, which could lead people to rush
to banks to withdraw their money. This obviously would be unsustainable
for the economy. A nation in which faith in a currency
is lost will see recessions and will take decades to recover. Instead, central banks
use the consumer price index, also called the CPI. The CPI is a flawed
indicator, yet is the most commonly accepted indicator to measure
inflation and its effects on prices. The CPI follows the price of a basket of products
that are consumed by people. This, in essence, is the way an
indicator like this one should work. But the CPI is flawed
because of the way this basket of products is selected. It is selected
based on what people choose to buy. So every year, new products will be
added to this basket while others will be removed. But what they choose to buy depends
on the price of the product. If inflation goes up,
people will change their basket of products in order to accommodate
for the price increase. This essentially
makes it a new basket of products. The CPI will not track the price
of the previous basket of products. It will track the price
of the new basket of products after the consumer decision has been made
in response to price increases. Saifedean Ammous illustrates this
properly in the Fiat standard. Imagine you earn $10 a day and spend
them all on eating a delicious rib-eye steak that gives you all the nutrients
you need for the day. In this simple consumer
basket of goods, the CPI is $10. Now imagine one day
hyperinflation strikes the economy, and the price of your rib-eye
increases to $100 while your daily wage remains $10. What happens to the price
of your basket of goods? It cannot rise tenfold because you
cannot afford the $100 rib-eye Instead, you make do
with the chemical shitstorm that is a soy burger for $10. The CPI magically showed zero
inflation. Remember that governments
will never show us the true inflation numbers,
and they will not attribute it to the increase in our monetary supply
because of their management. If people actually understood this,
they would never be re-elected. We've talked about debt so much,
it is time to look at these numbers, too. We can see the sharp increase of the global
debt even in just the most recent years. To add more context, here is what this debt represents
as share of global GDP. 356%. We have 3.5 times more debt
than actual created value. Now, this debt bubble could be stopped
or at least be slowed down if the central banks were to increase
interest rates, making it more expensive to borrow. Giving a breather
to the entire system. But today it's likely too late. The U.S. central bank (the FED)
attempted this in 2018 because they believe the economy
looked to have recovered from the global
financial crisis of 2007. Ten years have now passed since
the depths of the financial crisis, a painful part of our history
that cost many Americans their jobs, their homes
and for some, their hopes and dreams. In addition to holding interest rates
low to support the recovery, we have also taken many steps
to make the financial system safer. I'm confident
that the system today is stronger and in a far better position
to support the financial needs of households and businesses
through good times and bad. They decided to increase these
interest rates, and because of that, the entire market dropped in the space
of a couple of weeks, and NASDAQ and the S&P 500 dropped over 20% in
just a couple of weeks. Only because the markets were reacting to these
actions that were done by the central bank. The DOW is moving back towards
the lows of the day. All 30 DOW stocks are now in the red, and the DOW's gains for the
year are gone, a distant memory. The S&P 500 has fallen
into correction. That's a drop of 10%
or more from recent highs. All sectors and this is key,
are in the red at this moment, and the NASDAQ is now
at a seven month low. Look at the CNN Business
Fear and Greed Index. I know you don't want to see it,
we got to give it to you. It measures volatility,
momentum and demand for safe havens. It's pointing to extreme fear. So as soon as it started dropping,
the central bank came publicly and said, OK,
we're going to stop this. We're going to go back to normal
level of interest rates. And from that moment
on, by the end, in 2019, they started again
offering these interest rates and they lowered them
from all the way 2.5% to 0.25%, according to a lot of finance books
and what people study at university; the scenario we're in today
with negative interest rates is impossible, right? So what happens then? It's hard to say, no one really knows. We'll have to find out because anyway,
central banks have no other option. The only thing they
can do is print more money. In reality, the only thing
that the central banks can do is print more money and cover for all this debt
that is never being paid back. They will work with governments
to continue increasing taxes, welfare spending
and de-valuating currency. This isn't to say that these people
are ill intended. They use the tools
that are available to them and have simply reached the point
where their backs are against the wall and they're forced to
abuse these tools. And they're looking for solutions to take
the entire economy out of this situation. Although these solutions are not
necessarily in the best interests of citizens and their
personal freedom. It isn't without reason that the World
Economic Forums initiative is called the Great Reset, the name that
inspired this documentary. Part of their plan is the creation of
central bank digital currencies - CBDCs. This would allow central banks
to have a new monetary system that they can detach
from the current one, allowing people to transition
into this new debt free system and slowly de-leveraging and dropping
the debt from the previous one without adding
risk to their currencies. So central bank
digital currency is coming alive. It's not going to happen today. I think they have a twelve month
experimental period, but they want to go through
before they actually launch for good. The status of it is we're working
hard on it right now. But let me tell you what it is,
really. We're going to address digital payments broadly. So that means stablecoins,
it means it means crypto assets, it means a CBDC. That whole group of issues and payment mechanisms,
which we think are really at a critical point. Would you say that the corona crisis
has even revealed more the need to have a digital central
bank currency or currencies? Well, yes, I think the corona crisis has
accelerated very much technical change and use of digital innovations
across the board. I mean, it's not only in
financial transactions, but in e-commerce
and the show business. I mean, there are so many examples
that, you know, but, it is a fact. Pretty much all central banks
are thinking about this. In the last few weeks of 2020,
the People's Bank of China rolled out a pilot program
in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou. They had to download an app and
have it on the phone. In a macro way, you have a sense of
how money flows through the economy. On a micro scale,
and this is something that many in the West would
probably not be comfortable with and many in China
frankly, would not be comfortable with is that it would allow authorities to be able to track
precisely how you or my neighbor or the person down the street
is spending the money on. They're spending the money on buying
things they shouldn't be buying. Whatever,
however you define that. Are they gambling with their money? Are they doing this
or that with the money? They say it's
just to replace physical cash, but of course, this could just be
the first step. Adoption will come for these CBDC's. In fact, it will be forced adoption. The government will start supporting citizens
in need by only giving them stimulus payments through a wallet controlled
directly by the central bank. The central bank
will essentially be able to eliminate commercial banks
that are currently the middleman between the central bank
and the citizens. For governments,
it will simplify many things. If they decide
to change interest rates, they will be able to act on it
directly rather than wait the several months needed
for commercial banks to implement this in their systems. They will also be able to control
directly the interest rates based on a person's
profile or a business's profile, and will be able to set expiry dates
on people's money, forcing them to spend
and not allowing them to save. Raoul Pal describes this well. You see, central banks want to be able
to give people money directly. Direct monetization. They can't do that right now. Right now,
they print money, goes into the banking system,
the banks hoarde it because we're going through a credit
crunch. It's also a way for them to kickstart
universal basic income because the central bank
can underpin the poorer parts of society
by giving them money directly. It doesn't go on the government
balance sheet. Now, central banks now believe
they're omnipotent, that they can continue
to expand balance sheets forever. MMT seems to be the prevalent thought, and this is just an extension of this. This is kind of Keynesianism
gone mad. Central banks can also change entirely the structure of how money and
monetary policy works and fiscal policy because they can give it
to different people in different ways. So they can credit the restauranteur,
but then penalize with negative interest rates. The Baby Boomer Saver
because they want to release their money back into the economy. They can give students a positive
interest rate to help them save. They can change everything. This is the rise of behavioral
economics and incentive systems. So governments essentially using
big data can find who they need to stimulate
at any time and adjust accordingly. They can do it dynamically. This is a structural, massive shift
to everything we understand about economics,
particularly macro-economics. Nobody's prepared for this. None of us know what this means. It means and it will be sold on
a lot of good things. And I think there's a lot
of good things that come from this. I think it is an elegant solution
to some of our problems. But elegant solutions in governments
and central banks lead to unintended consequences. The issue is here,
is to have this new system, you're going to give up your freedom. You are going to have every transaction
you've ever done and ever will do recorded, There is no cash, there is no way
of tipping the gardener unless it goes by cash. It means that they can tax you
at every transaction level. Now that's great. We could get rid of the IRS and all of the tax collection agencies
because it could be done directly. That's good. But again, you've lost your freedom to
transact in anonymity that cash gives you. These are a central bank digital currencies,
as I said, they're not, they're not an invention from
governments and central banks. In fact, they're inspired by other digital
currencies like bitcoin being the original one. And other altcoins
that have been created after that. In reality,
they're more similar to other altcoins such as Ethereum or others
that simply allow the addition of programing that allows you
to add functionality to them, whereas bitcoin is only there
for these monetary transfers. Bitcoin is a payment network, right? Where this is... think of it
as a log of transactions, a transaction that I can do to you. The Bitcoin network
will take some information. So my address, your address, the amount of bitcoin
that I'm sending to you. And with this information it's
going to create a hash. It just goes through a simple
hashing algorithm that makes the code
out of this information. And this is added to this log. Whatever amounts that happen within these ten minutes,
it basically is considered a block and there would be miners,
so computers that are connected to the network
to verify these transactions. So they're just going to be there
really to confirm that I do have this bitcoin, and yes,
I can send it to you. And then after that, I no longer have this bitcoin
and you have the bitcoin. So very simple kind of work. But all of these computers
are connected to the network and they're in competition
fighting for who confirms the block because whoever confirms the block
and verifies these transactions will be rewarded in bitcoin from two sources, There will be a transaction
cost; simply, if I send your bitcoin,
then I pay a certain fee, to the network, this fee will
be redistributed to miners. And also, right now there is an emission of new bitcoin. Today it's at 6.25 bitcoins per block. And if I as a miner,
I'm able to confirm this block, I will receive 6.25 bitcoins. It won't happen every time
because there is a big competition of miners. 6.25 bitcoin per block every ten minutes. That's quite a bit, especially if you
think of the price of bitcoin today. Bitcoin is built in a way there is an entire
incentive scheme that has been thought out by the creator of bitcoin that goes
all the way to the year 2140 or so, which is that the amount of bitcoins that are produced will be divided
every four years by two. So if I'm a miner today,
I make 6.25 bitcoin per block that I confirm; four years from now
after the next halving, it'll be half that - so, 3.12 bitcoin. This is an incentive for people
to be as efficient as possible when running their bitcoin
mining business, and also an incentive for the price
to stay above a certain certain level. Because miners simply will either run
out of business if the price is too low or will decide not to sell bitcoin
because he's not covering for his operating expenses. In the bitcoin protocol,
changes can be made in two ways. There's a simple way
called a hard fork, where someone essentially
makes a copy of bitcoin, makes changes to the protocol
and releases it to the world. Miners need to connect
to this new network and choose to use this new network
over the original Bitcoin network. This was done by projects
such as Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision. They were trying to solve
what the founders thought to be problems
in the bitcoin network. But there was an a scaling attempt to allow bitcoin
to continue to be money for the world. And it was called
the SegWit2x agreement, where SegWit, which is if you're deep into crypto,
you already know what that is, if not, don't worry about it. And the block size
were going to be upgraded from one megabyte to two megabytes,
which would, if you do both those things
you're going to get more than double as many transactions
available on the Bitcoin network. If you do just the 1 megabyte to
2 megabyte, you double. At SegWit t's a little bit
more on top of that anyhow. For whatever reason, the SegWit portion of that agreement
was activated first. When that 2 megabyte upgrade
eventually was aborted, I had to look around the world
and say, OK, well, if I want a tool that can enable every human
being on the planet to be able to send and receive any amount of money with
any other human being on the planet, bitcoin can't do that. It's not going to do that
with one megabyte blocks. It's impossible
for bitcoin to do that. So there's a whole bunch
of other cryptocurrencies other. Which one do I think
is the most likely to bring the most economic freedom
to the most people around the world
in the shortest amount of time? And I looked at all
the different cryptocurrencies out there, and Bitcoin Cash was the one
that was at the top of my list. Since their launch, these projects have failed
compared to bitcoin losing value
against the first cryptocurrency because the people that are positioned
in bitcoin didn't want to transition. This reluctance was mostly due
to one reason - decentralization. Decentralization in bitcoin is the fact
that no one controls the network. It is an open, secure network, controlled and improved
by every participant. In projects like Bitcoin Cash,
the number of participants being much lower than in bitcoin
lowered the security. Bitcoin satoshi vision is a great example,
as it was the victim of a 51% attack in 2021. A miners performance
is based on the amount of computational power they have, and this is usually referred
to as hash rate or hashing power. The mining power is distributed over
different nodes across the world, which means it is
not in the hands of a single entity. At least it is not supposed to be. But what happens when the hashrate
is no longer distributed well enough? What happens if one single entity is able to
obtain more than 50% of the hashing power? One possible consequence of
that is what we call a 51% attack. Also known as a majority attack, a 51% attack is a potential attack
on a blockchain network where a single entity or organization
is able to control the majority of the hash rate, potentially
causing a network disruption. In such a scenario, the attacker
would have enough mining power to intentionally exclude or modify
the ordering of transactions. They could also reverse transactions
they made while being in control, leading to a double spending problem. A successful majority
attack could also allow the attacker to prevent some or all transactions
from being confirmed or to prevent miners from mining, resulting in
what is known as mining monopoly. The second method to make changes
is called a soft fork. In a soft fork, changes are made to
the protocol and need to be accepted by the majority of miners. To do so, miners simply decide
whether they want to upgrade to the new protocol
and update their machines, and eventually,
if approved by the majority of miners at a predetermined block number,
the changes will be made official. And this is how miners
will verify blocks from that point on. Unlike many other protocols,
every change that is made to the bitcoin network
needs to be backwards compatible. This means that
if someone holds bitcoin, their bitcoin will still
be valid after the changes. Other networks may be
easier to change, but won't be backwards compatible
and will often require holders of the coin to transfer their coins to platforms
that will accept the changes before a certain date
or risk losing everything. There will be a maximum and this is hardcoded,
a maximum of 21 million bitcoin produced by the year 2140, and there will never be more of it. So we can't afford to lose some bitcoin
simply based on a bug fix, functionality implementation,
it's just something that cannot work. Therefore, every change
has to be backwards compatible, and this makes it
so much more difficult to change as opposed to other projects
that don't care much because they have a management team
that is there that will decide what new vision
they have for this coin and will make updates regardless
of what the community thinks, because they think it's what's
in the best interest of the community. The fact bitcoin is so difficult to
change is one of the reasons that make it
a great asset for the long run. Buyers know what they're buying,
and they know that the assets will remain the same. No other assets in the world
provides this level of security. Other cryptocurrencies
have been created, but were created by a group of people
that still control the network and will make changes
to profit themselves. Ethereum, for example,
the second biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, is still controlled
by the same team that created it. These people control the network
and promote the network in order to bring in-experienced
and non-technical investors that don't understand
what a lack of decentralization means for the future of cryptocurrencies. The Ethereum network aims
to change the way the protocol works. These changes
will allow miners to mine only if they have logged
32 ether beforehand. Anyone can mine bitcoin,
but to mine etherium you will soon need to be part of the few in the world
that can afford to buy 32 ether. This will make Ethereum just as good
a currency as a fiat currency because the decisions of the few
will impact the masses. Think of bitcoin, the asset
and the network as the layer one, the other layers
that are being built around it, they're called layer two's
and also layer three's. But the the fastest growing layer
to for bitcoin is called the Lightning Network and it's a different payment system that to use it, basically,
I need to take some of my bitcoin and, you know, actually put it on
to the Lightning Network and I need to open channels. If I open a tunnel
with you, for example, it means I can transfer money to you. And the fact that I have
this channel open with you means that I have access to the
channels that you have open yourself. And it scales very quickly in the sense that
if we both use the Lightning Network and we have a channel open
between the two of us, then you have access to all of
my contacts and you can pay them. And I have access to all of yours
and can pay them. Payments that I do will go through the channels
of maybe multiple people in order to reach its destination. And this allows for payments
to actually be instant. Instant settlement. This doesn't exist in finance
until now. And they're free
or almost free in most cases just because of how the network
is built and only once. I would bring this money
out of the Lightning Network and back into the Bitcoin
Main Network is a transaction actually done
inside of this main network, which means that you can do a lot more transactions,
much faster and cheaper, but still having bitcoin
as the settlement layer that will confirm
that all of this happened basically. The adverse environmental impacts
of the computing activity used to mint many of these digital currencies
in the first place. Bitcoin consumes
more energy than entire countries and it is projected to consume
as much energy as all the data centers
in the whole world this year! One bitcoin transaction. A single purchase, sale or transfer uses the same amount of electricity
as the typical U.S. household uses in more than a month. Bitcoin's main layer it's described
as being very energy consuming, and it is a fact that at its highest
in May 2021, the bitcoin network was using as much energy as what
the entire country of Sweden uses. Although this seems like a lot,
we need to break down with this energy is where it comes from and
how this trend is evolving, including where the big miners are transferring to in order to lower
their cost and environmental impact. first of all,
it is important to understand how a miner business is set up. These miners are businesses. The more important ones today, being international companies
listed on stock exchanges, setting up a mining business requires
the purchase of hardware. The computers needed to tap into
the bitcoin network and start mining, as well as real estate to store
all of the miners. Wherever miners are around the world,
the prices for these two elements will often be similar. Of course,
better deals can be negotiated. But given the price of electrical
components and supply chain costs, this isn't where miners will often
gain an edge over their competition. What matters most to miners is energy. The third factor in this is the most important
one is the energy that they spend in order
to make their mining rigs turn. The prices vary between countries, they vary between the region and they vary
on the source of energy that they choose. The cheapest source is right now, always renewable
energies or nuclear, but nuclear is a bit killed by governments. So these companies, by default,
they have to direct themselves and push for the development
of these more renewable energies because it will cost
them cheaper in the long term. Cheap energy can be found
from two sources; green energy and wasted energy. The energy we produce is
always in excess. We never consume 100% of the energy
produced by power plants because it would put communities
at risk of having blackouts. In the US, it is estimated that 5-6% of the
energy produced is lost when it is in transit, which is around 211 terawatt hours. This amounts alone is close to double what Bitcoin was consuming at its
all time high. Nowadays, governments are pushing
for the adoption of solar and wind power and decide to crack down on nuclear. Unfortunately, although on paper this sounds
positive, there are adverse effects to this. With our current technologies,
the energy produced cannot be stocked. Therefore, the energy from solar
and wind can only be produced
when it is sunny or windy. This makes it very unreliable
and requires backup power plants to be present and active on a daily basis
to cover for this lack of energy. This really is an adverse effect
because Germany, for example, the biggest adopter of solar
and wind in Europe, is now back to producing
the same amount of CO2 levels as it was producing 20 years ago. Green policies around the world
have stopped the adoption of nuclear power plants
and have indirectly forced the world to consume more natural gas
than it used to. Natural gas comes
with its own set of problems, just like other energy sources. Natural gas is produced more than that
is consumed, which leads to flaring. Flaring is simply the excess gas that
is extracted that needs to be burned. It is a standard and a necessary habit
in the industry. In 2019 alone,
it is estimated that 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas
was flared in the world. This is the same amount as Japan
and Korea imported that same year, all gone, in the air, producing
approximately 300 million tons of CO2, the same as the total
annual emissions of Italy. In order to lower their cost and energy,
miners are directly connecting to these sources of energy
that until now were inaccessible. Because bitcoin miners
can be placed anywhere in the world without the need
of being close to communities, they are already tapping
directly into this energy because of the attractive prices
they can negotiate with the producers using energy
that would otherwise be flared or would be lost due to transit. They also have access to more distant
natural sources of energy
that cannot be used by communities. This is the case of hydropower plants, geothermal energy and even new ideas
that are being studied, like getting energy from volcanoes. The more time passes
and the more these businesses grow, the more likely they will transition
to these sources of energy in order to increase their profits. Other businesses are working on
innovating our energy production to service miners, allowing them
to have clean and cheap energy. The long term positive effects
the adoption of bitcoin could have on our energy production
is largely underestimated and even silenced by governments
and other mainstream medias. They may use this as an argument,
but it is so little if you compare it to what energy is actually used
around the world, and if you compare it also to
the energy used by our traditional financial services, banks
and so on, they use way more energy because each of them need to create
their own settlement infrastructure separately, of course,
because they don't share this information with anyone. Whereas bitcoin is just one place
where all of this happens, in an uncontrolled and so on. So it's a little bit of energy
consumed for huge impact in terms of financial freedom and freedom
in general, actually. Bitcoin was created by a person
or a group of people under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. They wrote the white paper,
built the network, released it and exchanged in discussions on many
forums before one day disappearing. A genius, unknown person put ogether technologies
and encryption protocols in a new way, forming the ultimate currency,
and then did the most noble and important step of all -
disappeared. After creating it,
talking about it publicly on forums, promoting the idea,
discussing it, making improvements, setting up the original miners,
there is just a point in time when the community
also started to take over it; that this person, Satoshi Nakamoto,
just disappeared, stopped answering on any kind of forums,
stopped writing anything and even since that point,
the creation of bitcoin never touched the bitcoin that were on these
original wallet addresses that were created by him. So completely let it go
to the community because the whole point of it
was to get rid of the control of our current
financial monetary system and let it be opened to the people. So bitcoin is said to have been
created by the people for the people. Because of that, because it's controlled
by a community, not by a central authority. Anyone can participate
in improving the network, whether it is through translations,
code reviews or by building applications
that add functionality to bitcoin. But only the bitcoin core team
can actually make changes to the bitcoin network. And I think a huge part of
governance in the bitcoin ecosystem are the bitcoin core developers. Now before I met them and I've had the pleasure
and the honor of of meeting many of them. You know,
that was a part of this ecosystem I didn't understand, but actually
getting to sit down and talk to them; If I have a learning curve need,
it certainly is on the technology side. But in terms of talking to them
about economics, economic theory, failed monetary regimes historically,
they know economic history, many of them,
better than anyone I've ever met. So that gives me
a great degree of confidence that, you know, they do believe
that they're on a noble mission. They could be paid a lot more
than they're being paid right now if they worked at Google or Facebook or some of these other areas.
that they've chosen. But they've chosen, you know,
this sense of purpose for a noble goal, and they have incredibly strong
technology backgrounds. So as well as a good understanding of economic history,
especially monetary history, and it gives me a great deal
of comfort as I think about the governance
of the ecosystem, much, much more so than I think we would find
in other financial ecosystems. Gold was considered always the
what is called hard money. In fact, the word hard money comes from
the fact that gold is physical and hard. Just like sound money comes from
the fact that you have gold. There sounds right. So it was always considered
the hardest money. Now, bitcoin follows the same rules,
but they are strictly enforced by the protocol, which makes it a better form of gold. So not only a better form of money,
but a better form of gold. Gold has been controlled
by governments. I've mentioned this at the beginning when it comes to removing
the gold standard, but gold also then
and during the second World War, for example, in the UK, people were
not allowed to hold gold personally. The same happened
in the US in the seventies. You had to sell your gold
to the government because the government needed
to increase its reserves. This has happened historically
and if any bad situation were to happen like it has
happened in the past; the same thing would happen. I mean, we're here today in Poland. Whatever purchase of gold
you do in Poland, your personal information
has to be given to the government saying how much gold you own,
so that they know where they can come. knock at your door, if ever they just
need to increase their gold reserves and don't have the cash to buy
it themselves, it's so much easier to confiscate it. In the past seven years there have been an average
of one international monetary crisis every year. Now who gains from these crises? Not the working man, not the investor,
not the real producers of wealth. The gainers are the
international money speculators because they drive on crises
they hope to create. In recent weeks,
the speculators have been waging an all out war on the American dollar. The strength of a nation's
currency is based on the strength of that nation's economy,
and the American economy is by far the strongest in the world. Accordingly, I have directed
the secretary of the Treasury to take the action necessary to defend
the dollar against the speculators. I have directed Secretary
Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar
into gold or other reserve assets, except in amounts and conditions
determined to be in the interest of monetary stability and in the best
interest of the United States. Bretton Woods
established an arrangement whereby supposedly from 1945
and the end of the war onward, all currencies were convertible to the dollar
and the dollar to gold. At that time gold reserves were
the final mechanism for settling balance of payments deficits, but
Bretton Woods forestall this process by permitting the sole reserve
currency, the main reserve currency, to be considered as official reserves
for foreign central banks. Such that they could settle all their
deficits in dollars as opposed to gold. That's the fundamental difference
between the classical gold standard and what is called
the gold exchange standard, which Bretton Woods
enshrined in law and in treaty. In 1971, both Britain and several
other countries decided to in-cash their huge accumulations of dollar reserves
under the Bretton Woods system for gold. And of course, President Nixon,
in his own way decided to trump them. George says as long as we
do not have convertibility, he says the Europeans can't
do all that much to us. They can't, because he says
when we have convertibility, then they had a right to lecture us
about what we ought to do. But without convertibility,
that is not the case. If these countries had the
right to claim gold, to redeem in our dollar reserves. It would put the United States
in a position of insolvency. We just shouldn't
get all that excited about the fact that they worry about
our budget, is that your view? - That's exactly right. They can't do one cock-eyed thing. and they'll say,
"Oh, we've got to maintain our relations" We've asked them to hold dollars. And I said, no,
we didn't ask them to hold dollars. They've held dollars. It's been in their interest
to hold dollars. And I said to hell with them,
I'm not worried about them, I'm worried about us. 1960s was filled with financial crises that involve the dollar,
but the total collapse came in 1971. He issued an executive order
on August 15th, 1971, and said,
I'm sorry, we're not paying our debts. We're certainly not paying
our debts in gold. To our friends abroad,
including the many responsible members of the international banking community
who are dedicated to the stability and the flow of trade. I give this to assure,
the United States has always been and will continue to be a forward-looking
and trustworthy trading partner. In full cooperation with the International
Monetary Fund and those who trade with us. We will press for the necessary
reforms to set up an urgently needed new International Monetary system. To this day, gold can only be traded
on the markets during weekdays because some people have decided this. With bitcoin,
no one can make such decisions. Individual exchanges could, but would
be losing against their competition. Governments have no way of knowing
whether people own any. It is the safest way to hold wealth
that is native to the internet. Therefore, it is available
always, everywhere. No assets in history has ever
been this easy to acquire. Allowing anyone with an internet
connection to tap into the network anonymously and be able to access their assets the same way, regardless
of their geographic location, again anonymously. This is scary to governments. They understand that if people
step away from fiat currencies, new debt, that is necessary
to generate inflation and to de-valuate currency's won't be created
following the same rules. This puts their and their elite
friends entire status quo at risk. That's why they're afraid of it, and
that's why they try to kill it. In fact, in China just this year,
they banned any bitcoin mining, and they closed any
kind of exchange. which is, if you think as a
totalitarian government is a great strategy,
if you think of freedom for evil, it is not,
and they're not the only ones. This year, also
the UK has been attacking hard. They've spent a lot of bitcoin
ads on busses or on the subway. Just all of these ads
that were promoting bitcoin have been straight off
bans by the government. They have put pressure
on commercial banks as well to block transfers from UK citizens,
UK bank accounts to crypto exchanges so that they cannot basically leave
the British pounds and buy bitcoin instead. And so not only are they scared,
but they're actually taking action to later implement their own
central bank digital currencies. If you don't have bitcoin,
they give you this alternative. Well, you go for this alternative.
You have no choice. The reason they want to ban bitcoin is because they know
the power that it has, and they know that it would take
this power away from governments. As long as governments control
the money, they can make decisions that citizens don't agree with
or don't realize will have an impact on them,
whether it direct or indirect. As long as governments control the money,
they can continue their monopoly on violence. Bitcoin was created twelve years ago
after the global financial crisis as a solution
to the financial problems that exist in our economy
and to eliminate entirely the abuse people can
have on our monetary system. Saifedean Ammous says it - It's important to understand that the fiat system
was not a carefully, consciously or deliberately designed financial
operating system like bitcoin. Rather, it evolved through
a complex process of compromise between political constraints
and experience. Bitcoin is a real asset,
and it is here to stay. And its maximum cap of
21 million makes it this scarcest asset on Earth and ultimately
the most attractive asset. Listen to all the money managers
that praise it. If we're right and companies continue
to diversify their cash into something like bitcoin
and institutions, institutional investors
start allocating 5% of their funds. We believe that the price will be
ten fold of where it is today. So instead of 45,000, over 500,000. I think it's an asset that should
be in every investor's portfolio The number one thing that I would
recommend to people is have some defensive things in there. I personally think bitcoin
is a long term game. I have a certain amount of money
in bitcoin. It's a small percentage of that
which I have it in gold, which is a relatively small percentage of what I have
in my other asset classes and so on. And I think that that has the merit. I like bitcoin
as a portfolio diversifier. Everyone always asked me -
What should I do with my portfolio? My employees say, I say, OK, listen,
the only thing that I know for certain is I want to have 5% in gold,
5% in bitcoin, 5% in cash, 5% in commodities
at this point in time. I don't know what I want to do
with the other 80%. I do own some of it,
it's gone up a lot since I bought it. Obviously, the tone of this asset
class is changing. Well, I think it's worth
considering all the alternatives to cash and all the alternatives
to some of the financial assets . And so bitcoin has,
is a possibility. We had 26% more dollars in circulation
than over the past 244 years. If you put the whole stimulus in,
which it will happen, that's another 16%
more dollar formation. So you've got a 40% increase
in dollar volume that's going to show up in
asset prices. I started my professional career in 1981 The peso was at 20:1,
today we are at 20,000:1 Don't tell me about it And this is here in Mexico
but if we do it in Venezuela or in Argentina or Zimbabwe,
numbers loose all proportions So, the fraud of fiat is an
inherent thing to the system And we are seeing it happen
right now in the USA. The monetary emission is gone to the moon,
you understand? The US dollar as hard money is a joke When facts change, I change. I mean, you know, I'm an investor. The environment is changing. And what really turned me was moves
made by regulators in Switzerland, where I'm an investor. France, Germany, England
and then Canada opened up. They now have seven different
financial instruments trading on their exchanges
that holds crypto as the underlying, which is a complete
reversal of what's occurred. If you really understand
bitcoin, you'll recognize why places like Morgan
Stanley are coming into the space. It's a scarce asset, and as we were talking about
last time, I was on the show that supply demand imbalance,
plus the intractability ability of the blockchain is going to make that asset
very attractive in a world printing money like this. It's an amazing accomplishment to have
brought it from where that programing occurred to where it is
and take the test of time. They've done this unbelievable
marketing job, it's been around 13 years and particularly younger millennials,
look at it the way I've always looked at gold. I like bitcoin, right? Bitcon is math and math has been around
for thousands of years, and two plus two is going to equal four
and it will for the next 2000 years. So I like the idea of investing
in something that's reliable, consistent, honest and 100% certain. For me, the finite of Bitcoin,
the 21 million Is the key to the whole topic. That's why I was saying this
about Ethereum because as long as they don't have
a finite amount of emission, I don't trust them. They can emit more and
your asset depreciates. So bitcoin has appealed to me because
it's a way for me to invest in certainty. There's regions in Switzerland where
you can pay for your taxes in bitcoin. There's just this,
all of this adoption and acceptance that is happening around the world
now, even by governments, which just changes the rules
and makes it more and more robust, the community makes it alive regardless of political,
geopolitical and so on situations. The fact that governments
are themselves allowing the use of this
in whatever form or way confirms it. Great ideas are beautiful
and have great power. But like most beautiful things,
they can also be more fragile than we think. When I was a kid,
we thought about the future and we were divided
by it's possibility. We couldn't wait for it to happen
and be part of its creation. But now ask almost anyone
what they think about the future, and they will say something
along the lines of nuclear war, climate catastrophe,
hunger, pestilence, the death of life. We didn't took care of the beautiful
idea that we create our own future, that we, as humanity can do
almost anything that we imagine. Our ingenuity.
What separates us from other species. In El Salvador, we are trying to rescue
this idea and start the design of a country for the future using the best
ingredients that makes us who we are. While using sensibility to find the best examples of ideas
from history and around the world. I believe bitcoin
could be one of these ideas. That is why next week
I will send to Congress a bill that will make bitcoin a legal tender
in El Salvador. In the short term, this will
generate jobs and help provide financial inclusion to thousands
outside the formal economy. Lawmakers in El Salvador
broke into applause after voting to approve of bitcoin
as legal tender on Wednesday, making the Central American country the first in the world to fully adopt
the cryptocurrency. Bitcoiners around the world, the time has come. We are ready. This is an important
step for our country, a step for technology,
a step into the future to bring us financial inclusion,
investment, tourism, innovation and economic development
to our country. Buchele has even more ambitious plans
for bitcoin, saying later on Wednesday
that he wanted to use renewable energy from the country's volcanoes
to offer bitcoin mining facilities, which generate new units
of the cryptocurrency and instructed state owned geothermal energy firm
LaGeo to come up with a plan to make it happen. The objective seems to be making
using bitcoin as a actual medium of payment, medium of exchange,
much more frictionless in the country, eliminating all capital gains taxes,
which is, you know, of course, a big impediment to actually using
this thing as a currency, you know, potentially
in service of making, you know, bitcoin based remittances cheaper
and less fractional, for instance. So that seems to be sort of the main
thrust of the law. What can we extrapolate then, as far as what the future holds
beyond El Salvador here? Do you think we'll see other,
I guess, legitimate countries like El Salvador embrace this
and other larger countries? We know that bitcoin cryptocurrency
stablecoins have very high penetration in places
like Colombia and Argentina. You know, Latin America is certainly
no stranger to sovereign defaults or, you know, periods of high
inflation or monetary repression. So we see high penetration there. There's certainly
a class of policymakers that see an opportunity to gain favor
by signaling their affinity. And, you know, we'll see what happens. But this is the first. El Salvador is the first non
pariah state to really legitimize and legalize bitcoin usage
in sort of its intended way. So, you know, it seems like a big sea
change, frankly. Banks as opposed to governments,
banks are businesses, they sure have their own
personal interest at hand, but they will adapt to
what their customers need. They're adapting now, actually. They realize that they need to be able
to offer some new financial services that will be around crypto because they're going to be left
behind completely because a guy like me, a person like you,
just won't need their services anymore, because all of this already exists in a completely decentralized
and un-controlled way. According to crypto firm NYDIG,
hundreds of U.S. banks are asking for bitcoin planning to allow customers to buy,
hold and sell the digital currency through their existing accounts
as soon as this year. For more details, let's bring in CNBC.com
banking reporter Hugh Son. Hugh, what had to happen
behind the scenes in order for people to be able to access
bitcoin in their banks? Hey Kelly, nice to be with you. So there's a company
called FIS, and so FIS is one of these
back end providers to banks they actually have about 300 million checking accounts through
their thousands of bank clients. And so they're a tech vendor
that serves a bunch of banks. And then there's also a crypto, a
bitcoin custody company called NYDIG. And they're ones that companies like
sort of a Galaxy, so, NYDIG has a deal with Morgan Stanley, for instance,
to offer institutional funds to their wealthy clients,
so you have some decent players joining some established tech
vendors, you know, FIS is a $95 billion company,
market cap. And they basically said, you know, we're going to make it easy
for people to actually own bitcoin. It is, after all, a financial asset
and they want, they've done studies
that said, basically, if people have the ability
to own bitcoin through their existing financial relationships,
through the portal that they deal with their other money, you know,
their fiat money, if they're able to do that,
you're going to have greater adoption. So basically,
what they're going to have is as they turn this on,
you're going to have access to the clients, the customers of these community
and regional banks that sign on for this; They're going to be able to go
there via their bank app and actually look inside their bank
app and see crypto right next to their other deposits
and their savings. Well, we want to be in the middle
of any movement of funds, and we don't try to decide what's
going to take off or not take off and we don't pick winners and losers. We just get ready to enable
whatever could possibly happen. And I think crypto is an exciting
trend. There's crypto currencies,
which are kind of the digital gold. Think of bitcoin and there what
we're trying to do is create utility, which first of all,
making sure that our visa cards are used to be
able to purchase bitcoin. And then when somebody wants
to convert their bitcoin into a fiat currency, to use a visa credential, to go shop at our
70 million merchants around the world, so we're trying to create
that utility. So we're working
with 35 of the biggest crypto wallets around the world, making sure that these various
digital currencies can be converted into a fiat currency,
and that money can then be spent from a visa card in a wallet, again at any one of our 70 million
merchants around around the world. We're at a point where markets
are at all time highs. Any kind of ratio is screaming
that we're at the top of our cycle. We have companies that are
failing even know starting in China. And what happens is that all of this
money will have to exit the financial market, where there's huge
amounts of money now, way more money digitally in these assets than exists in the pockets of every single person
in the world, right. So this money, what tends to happen
when there is a, you know, top in the market and the
market is going to drop, of course, there's a loss of value. So all of these investors, they need
to get their money out, right? They always do that
because they don't want to lose money. Their job and their mandate towards
their clients is to bring profits, not losses. So they're going to get their money
out of the of the financial markets. This, of course, will lead to
an even sharper drop but this is standard,
it happens at every cycle. Now what tends to happen,
though, is that most investors at that point will get into bonds,
which are government obligations, and these have interest rates
that are paid by the governments. But these interest rates follow the interest rates that are set
by the central bank, right? So nowadays, a lot of these bonds
are negative yielding, which means that if me as an investor,
I want to have a certain return per year, even call it 1%, today
if I buy a bond, a European bond, I will not have that because it's had
a negative interest rate. So in fact, it costs me to buy this
bond, which until now was a secure position for my money, but would
at least bring me some returns. Now, even this fact
isn't there, right? So in a scenario
where the money is pulled out, it cannot go to bonds
because it is not logical for it to be there
because there's just this trust that is gone from this value
that governments used to be able to hold in the long term. With this being gone, this money,
where is it going to go? Right? It can go into gold, but gold
we've just seen, can be controlled by government,
has been controlled by government and in the past ten years hasn't increased in price,
it's at the same price as ten years ago. So, sure some money will go
into gold because it's a typical kind of protection asset
and money will transfer into gold. But there is this
entire new financial market that is being built at the same time
that is led by bitcoin. But all of these
other cryptocurrencies as well. Bitcoin is the first time ever
in history of finance, That an asset reaches
this level of valuation so quickly. On top of that, it is the technology that is the most quickly
adopted in the world. So before that,
it was the internet that was adopted. Just, I mean, we've never seen
anything adopted so fast in terms of adoption
of technological progress. Right now, the world of bitcoin
and cryptocurrencies is accelerating at a faster rate than the internet,
which I think makes sense because it speaks to so many people,
particularly younger generations and rather than the people that are in
power that are of older generations. And so this market of bitcoin
and cryptocurrencies and I want to really emphasize
bitcoin here because bitcoin is the safe one
that has all of these applications that are being built
by other cryptocurrencies now also built on the bitcoin network,
meaning that for all of these funds that have serious money and long term
objectives, buying bitcoin is one of the best traits
that they can have. And given the volatility that it has
and the hedging options that they can have represents a
lower risk for them than the traditional assets
that they're used to. So this is why I think
and I'm not the only one in thinking so, bitcoin will be the black hole
that will swallow a big part of all of this money that will be
escaping the traditional markets because there will just be no more
value there. No other assets like
this one has ever existed before, that marries our technological
progress with our financial systems. It is time for people
to have a currency that is as open
and anonymous as the internet. With bitcoin,
the control of money is taken away from governments
and given back to the people. This removes huge power
from governments and their leaders that have had countless issues
with corruption, abuse of power or limiting our freedom. We've seen that our financial system
needs a reset. And the only solution governments
have is to print trillions more. De-valuating our currencies
in the process. Along the way,
they will continue to make people more dependent on governments
because welfare spending has to increase to cover
their irresponsible money management. This provides governments with
a snowball effect loop of inflation, leading to a poorer population,
leading to more welfare spending, leading to increased government
control. Bitcoin is the way out
of their control system that favors
only the wealthy and the elite. It is also the first time
due to incentives these people have for bitcoin
to never succeed as a currency, that average people can front run them
and grow their personal wealth
first before these people that consider themselves
the elite have a chance to do so. Bitcoin is slowly
taking over the world and will absorb a large amount of the money currently
stuck in our legacy financial system. Do you really want
to be left behind with them?
